Joe Biden has been elected POTUS. There’s no doubt that in the fallout of the “pandemic election”, the crest of the blue wave did not occur, with the miscalculated potential for not only Dem Senate control, but a padding of 3-4 seats in the process. Certainly, Biden’s ascent to the presidency was a crucial step, but Senate Dem control is the real legislative prize here, with anything less making it impossible for the President-Elect to have any hope of an agenda of meaning to his party over the next 4 years.

So, what to do? Well, all of this hinges on the two runoff races for Senate in the state of Georgia, where Stacey Abrams, the erstwhile candidate for governor in that state, is being appropriately lauded for her efforts to GOTV to appear to flip the state for Biden. What does she think of the chances of her party pulling this off?

“I want to push back against this anachronistic notion that we can’t win in Georgia,” she said. Abrams said the runoff election has two Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, who will be “working together to make certain voters come back.” She added the races will have more support from the Democratic Party due to the stakes of possibly controlling the Senate.

“This is going to be the determining factor of whether we have access to health care and access to justice in the United States,” she said. “Those are two issues that will make certain people will turn out.”

“We know this is gonna be a hard fight,” she said. “It’s gonna be a competitive fight.”

I’ll take this appellation over Minnesota Nice any day.

Amid swirling litigation around the country and attacks on the integrity of the 2020 vote, nearly all signs point to Minnesota being an oasis of calm during an otherwise chaotic and protracted election. … Nor did a feared cyberattack on the election system come to pass, Simon said. Instead, the coronavirus pandemic and a surge in mail-in voting — more than half of all votes are thought to have been cast absentee — became a top political concern.

Biden plans a torrent of executive orders.

President-elect Joe Biden is planning to quickly sign a series of executive orders after being sworn into office on Jan. 20, immediately forecasting that the country’s politics have shifted and that his presidency will be guided by radically different priorities,” the Washington Post reports.

He will rejoin the Paris climate accords, according to those close to his campaign and commitments he has made in recent months, and he will reverse President Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization. He will repeal the ban on immigration from many Muslim-majority countries, and he will reinstate the program allowing “dreamers,” who were brought to the United States illegally as children, to remain in the country, according to people familiar with his plans

Joe R. Biden defeats Donald J. Trump (an impeached, one-term POTUS) to become the forty-sixth POTUS.

The Biden team is wasting no time in signaling transition.

The [NYT], citing at least six sources familiar with the conversations, said that Biden would likely seek to fill out a potential White House staff before focusing on other posts in a possible Biden administration.

The report comes as multiple states remain uncalled as of Saturday, although the former vice president currently leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada as the number of votes outstanding dwindles.

During an address late Friday, Biden signaled that his team was already considering next steps.

”While we’re waiting for the final results, I want people to know we are not waiting to get the work done,” Biden said while appearing with vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris at a convention center near his home in Wilmington, Del.

Since the daily infection totals have exceeded 100K for the second day in this country, well, of course.

Coronavirus infections could double over the next month as the virus continues to spread across the United States, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch predicted during an online discussion Friday. The US recorded more than 121,000 new Covid-19 cases on Thursday, the highest single-day total since the pandemic began. Cases have also surpassed 100,000 on Friday.

“I think if caseloads double in the next month, I will not be at all surprised. If it goes more than that I would be somewhat surprised but not completely shocked,” Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said during a chat with the Journal of the American Medical Association.

But Lipsitch said he doesn’t like to make predictions because he still believes coronavirus mitigation efforts can work to bring down transmission rates.

“It’s not that I don’t want to make them, it’s that making projections gives the impression that it’s not in our hands, that it’s some kind of hurricane where we can stand there, but we can’t do anything about it,” he said.

His brand of Republicanism wouldn’t be acceptable to his party today.

Former U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad, who served western Hennepin County for nine terms in Congress and earned bipartisan respect for work on mental health and other issues, died on Thursday. Ramstad was 74. He had been suffering from a degenerative disease, according to former Rep. Erik Paulsen, who succeeded Ramstad in Minnesota’s Third Congressional District.

“A lot of folks who run for office today get involved in politics because they’re more about an ideology rather than offering solutions to problems facing their community, the state and the country,” Paulsen said Friday morning. “Jim was about identifying a problem and fixing it.

Paulsen, who got his start in politics with a staff job in Ramstad’s DC office, said he last spoke to Ramstad two weeks ago. He was still living in Wayzata as he did for many years, Paulsen said, and was being cared for by wife, Kathryn Ramstad.

“We didn’t know it would happen this fast,” Paulsen said of the man he called his friend and political mentor. “His nickname was the Rammer. He was always very full of life, vibrant.”

Elected in 1991, Ramstad was reelected eight times before deciding not to run again in 2008. In Congress, he was most known for work on expanding access to treatment for mental health, and was chief sponsor of legislation that opened the door to treatment for millions of Americans suffering from mental illness or chemical addiction.

120 000 daily cases. A new freakin’ daily record.

The US set a grim new Covid-19 record Thursday — following a week marked by high case numbers — surpassing 120,000 infections in a single day. And it was the second day in a row the country reported more than 100,000 infections.

Health experts had warned weeks ago that the nation’s daily cases would reach six digits, but those alarming figures hit sooner than expected. And Covid-19’s death toll could reach 266,000 by the end of November, according to an ensemble forecast published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Thursday saw at least 121,054 new cases nationwide, according to Johns Hopkins University. There were at least 1,187 reported deaths, a near 20% increase from the same day last week.

Nov 5: 121,054
Nov 4: 102,831
Oct 30: 99,321
Nov 3: 91,530
Oct 31: 89,126

Biden pulls ahead in GA. The PA margin narrows (when it goes for Biden, not if). Is something like this really a shock?

Senior White House and Trump campaign officials are complaining bitterly about poor internal communication, blaming colleagues, pondering what jobs they might try to get next year, and lashing out at their new enemy: Fox News.

Aides told Axios they’re dreading the prospect of Fox calling Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, which could make the conservative network the first to give Biden 270 electoral votes.

Said one administration official: When Bush had this issue they tapped arguably the pre-eminent statesman of his generation, James Baker, to spearhead their legal and PR efforts, to great effect. … We rolled out Rudy Giuliani, Corey Lewandowski and Pam Bondi. You can draw your own conclusions.

A possible role of hypercoagulability in COVID-19 patients.

In a paper published in Science earlier this week, researchers provide a glimpse into what may be driving the clots triggered by COVID-19 infection. The group found that a specific set of antibodies known as autoantibodies—which are rogue versions of cells meant to defend the body from pathogens, but instead attack its own cells (in this case the body’s own blood vessel cells)—may be partly responsible for the clotting risk associated with the disease. Among 172 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, they found that half produced these autoantibodies. In addition, when the scientists injected the autoantibodies into lab mice, the animals developed blood clots.

Michigan Dem Senator Gary Peters staved off a pretty intense run from his challenger to keep Michigan’s Democratic representation in the U.S. Senate intact. This was a big relief for Democrats, as the seat was essentially a must-win in the face of stinging losses, which, to put it mildly, were underestimated by Dem overconfidence and misleading polling. Crucial losses in Iowa, Maine, Texas, South Carolina, and even Montana and Kansas were, at least, understood to be very much in play on election night, but slithered from the Democrats’ grasp for a solid flip in power in the Senate. At this point, races in Georgia, which has yet to call a winner in the E.C., are the only hope for Dems in the Senate to even get to a 50-50 tie – and even those races are far from assured.

The United States has exceeded 100K coronavirus cases in a single day … for the first time.

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, urged Americans “to do the right thing” and wear a mask in public to protect themselves and stop the spread of the virus as the country heads into the winter and flu season.

In a written statement, Collins referred to a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine that estimated that if most Americans wear masks, up to 130,000 lives could be saved by March. But if mask-wearing continues at its current rate of roughly 50 percent and social distancing measures are not followed, the study found, the total number of covid-19 deaths could reach more than 1 million by the end of February.

By early Wednesday evening, the United States had logged more than 104,000 new infections, even as hospitalizations and fatalities rose. At least 17 states — including Kansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Montana, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, Nebraska, Minnesota, Indiana and West Virginia — reported record-high numbers of current covid-19 inpatients[…]

Joe Biden has pulled ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin, two crucial states where victories would put on the cusp of the presidency.

Late-reporting Wisconsin vote counts out of Milwaukee more than erased a 100,000-vote lead that President Trump had as of early Wednesday morning. Biden’s lead grew larger with subsequent updates out of Green Bay and Kenosha, leaving him more than 20,000 votes ahead of Trump with little vote left to be counted in the state.

Biden also pulled ahead in Michigan for the first time at around 9 a.m. EST, jumping to a slim 3,700-vote lead and erasing a once-massive Trump lead with late-counting absentee votes. There’s still a lot of votes to be counted in Michigan, but the remaining vote looks heavily Democratic.

If those leads both hold up, and the rest of Biden’s state leads do too, he will have won enough Electoral College votes to become president. And Georgia and Pennsylvania all still have significant numbers of Democratic-heavy mail ballots left to be counted that could put Biden over the top in either one of them as well.

Democracy in action.