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Lester Holt
NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt scored the first televised interview with President-elect Joe Biden after he was officially declared the winner over President Donald Trump, and their socially-distanced chat covered a number of substantive topics.
Your humble newsletter correspondent feels compelled to point out that it is profoundly depressing to be naming a journalist our Media Winner of the Day for merely maintaining a modicum of professional composure and asking relevant, serious questions, but that's where we are at this current political moment.
Nonetheless, Holt's interview of the soon-to-be 46th president is worth watching in its entirety, and we've covered a few segments worth highlighting: Biden's pushback on Holt's question if he sought to create a "third Obama term," his views on appointing a Republican or one of his former rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination to his Cabinet, and his thoughts on reopening schools during the pandemic.
Mediaite's Tommy Christopher had a more cynical take on Biden's apparent willingness to add a Trump supporter to his Cabinet, as did a number of Twitter users, but that's a debate that was facilitated by the comments that Holt elicited from Biden.
The people whom Biden picks to serve as his inner circle will have a substantial effect on the policies, direction, and overall success or shortcomings of the next administration, and Holt asked some of the questions Americans needed to be answered by their next president. |
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 | MEDIA LOSER:
Jenna Ellis
We are starting to wonder if Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis is engaged in some sort of Joaquin Phoenix-style I'm Still Here prank to deliberately campaign to win our Media Loser of the Day as often as possible before the end of the year.
"Guests, like fish, start to smell after three days" -- so goes the adage about the tolerable shelf life for houseguests. Ellis' schtick was never funny, and it's definitely far past the tolerable expiration point three weeks after Election Day.
Failing to secure any success at all in the courtroom, Ellis is a lawyer who seeks to litigate her case on Twitter, posting baseless conspiracy theories, delusional assertions that Trump actually won the election in a "landslide," and basic errors that five minutes on Wikipedia could have prevented.
She can't even post silly memes without stomping on a batch of proverbial rakes. Ellis doubled down on a quote she incorrectly attributed to Teddy Roosevelt by tweeting that she posted it because "the ifea [sic] itself is true, whether or not he said it!"
Ellis' pathetic antics are rivaled only by the other members of the legal team that laughably called themselves an "elite strike force." Rudy Giuliani is claiming Trump won Virginia, where the election results were certified showing Biden won by more than 450,000 votes. Sidney Powell might have been tossed under the bus but is still popping up on conservative TV shows, challenging Ellis for the Best Parody Lawyer of the Year.
There is no "Kraken" that will overturn the election results. There was no "landslide," unless you want to use that term for Biden's win in several key states. Every American is entitled to legal representation, and elections must be run fairly and subject to transparent audit and examination, but Ellis' aggressive lunacy isn't advocacy, it's a clown show. |
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"I don't care if I lose half my audience."
Check out Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy's frank and unfiltered talk about the 2020 election and what's next for Trump on the latest episode of The Interview. |
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BREAKING: Trump Pardons Flynn
Everything is fine!
Trump is doing just fine, everyone, don't you worry. The GSA might have finally conceded to the overwhelming weight of reality to allow the Biden transition to officially begin, but our president is committed to protecting the sanctity of our elections and remains steadfast in his insistence that he will not concede the race that he is very, very sure he definitely won in a landslide.
Yep.
Well, that's what the Newsmax audience is telling him, anyway. A whopping 98.9% of their viewers don't think he should concede, in an obviously completely not-scientific in any way whatsoever poll that Trump naturally loved.
Giuliani and whatever members of the legal team are still in the clown car showed up in Pennsylvania Wednesday, for an off-the-rails press conference to complain about the rampant voter fraud they are, like, totally going to show a big ol' pile of evidence any day now, and Trump himself called in on a cell phone that Ellis dutifully held up to a microphone.
Trump declared that he won states he lost, that he expects the election to be "turned around," and offered effusive praise for Giuliani, who at least managed to get through the afternoon without obviously melting like last time (Julia Louis-Dreyfus has a funny take on that escapade here).
The president might like Giuliani's loyalty, but he shouldn't brag about his lawyer's math skills.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, himself no stranger to feisty commentary, had some thoughts about the "sad and tragic" press conference he compared to an "Amway convention."
Perdue cashes in
Georgia Sen. David Perdue -- one of the Republicans defending his seat in the state's January double runoff election -- is finding himself in hot water as new details are coming out about stock trades he's made during the pandemic.
Sayonara Chapelle
Dave Chappelle's eponymous show Chappelle's Show is no longer streaming on Netflix, after he publicly asked them to take it down. Read why here.
"Well-to-do refugees" That was how the original published version of a New York Times article referred to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, drawing swift condemnation on social media for comparing two very privileged people whose future challenges are more in the "uninvited from the Met Gala" category rather than "fleeing drug cartel violence or religious persecution" situation many actual refugees experience. Presidential putting It's well known that Trump loves to spend time on a golf course, especially when it's one that he owns. Will we see the next president spending time on the green?
Olive branch
Actor and activist Alyssa Milano tweeted a message offering an “olive branch” to Trump supporters, and well, it went about as well as you would think.
"No one's trying to cancel Thanksgiving"
That was Coronavirus Task Force member Adm. Brett Giroir's comment about health officials' recommendations for a safe Thanksgiving -- a holiday many are understandably fearing could become a nationwide superspreader event. 6.5.0 |
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| Ivy League Hypocrisy CNN's Brianna Keilar devoted a segment of her show Wednesday to dissecting a tweet by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), pointing out not just the factual fallacies in his attempted argument, but making a broader point about the Republican Party's messaging in recent years.
The kerfuffle kicked off with Rubio tweeting a criticism of the Cabinet picks that Biden has announced so far as "Ivy League" graduates who "will be polite & orderly caretakers of America's decline."
Keilar accurately pointed out the many elite Ivy Leaguers in Trump's inner circle, and conclude with some very good poi ts about "acknowledging reality" about the pandemic and the election.
Watch here. |
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