Viral News: The US has developed a million new cases of Covid-19 in just the past five days. Deaths are rising and hospital beds are near capacity. Yesterday alone, 260 people died of the virus in California. The state has ordered 5,000 new body bags and rented refrigerator trucks to store the bodies.

  Across the country, 3,290 people died yesterday. A total of 310,792 Americans are dead of the coronavirus.

  Yesterday an FDA panel approved the Moderna vaccine for emergency use, adding a second vaccine to the fight.

Final Jeopardy: Congressional negotiators are about to close the deal on a pandemic bailout bill that does not include money for state and local governments running seriously in the red. It’s a problem for President-elect Joe Biden who has promised to do just the opposite and is in danger of having to work with a Republican majority in the senate.

  Most state governments are required by law to have a balanced budget. With tax revenues withered, state and local governments have laid off 1.3 million employees during the pandemic, but Republicans have blocked financial help for them, calling it a bailout for the blue states. That’s a laugh. The blue states like New York every year bail out the poor and tax avoiding states like Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky. But it looks like this is the way it’s going to be.

  For the moment, the bill would include stimulus checks of $600 per person, $1,200 for a couple. The Washington Post reports that President Trump wanted $2,000 per person, but his aides talked him out of going public with that.

Election Extra!: White House Advisor Peter Navarro claims election fraud in a 36-page report he titled “The Immaculate Deception.”

  “The big takeaways for me is there appears to be a coordinated strategy effectively to stuff the ballot box with Biden votes, and at least some evidence of the destruction of Trump ballots,” Navarro said at a press conference. He said of the battleground states, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, that “You can see that the number of votes that are being contested, the arguably illegal votes, dwarf the relatively thin Biden victory margins in five of the six states.” 

  What he seems to say is that it must be a fraud because Biden narrowly won the battleground states, and he doesn’t see how that’s possible.

  Navarro lectured the reporters present saying, “You can’t, as a reporter, at this point responsibly say there’s no evidence. There’s a ton of evidence. There’s a mound of it.”

  The thing is neither he nor anyone else has presented it. They are saying that suspicion and disappointment are the equivalent of proof. 

The Hunter Apocryphal: With almost no new developments, the story about the federal investigation into the business and taxes of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, leads or is the second story on Fox News nearly every day.

  Hunter Biden has been a troubled guy. He’s been plagued by drugs and alcohol. He divorced his wife, with whom he has three children, and dated his brother’s widow. He fathered a fourth child with a woman he didn’t marry, and married his second wife six days after meeting her. 

  He embarrassingly did business with Ukraine while his father was vice president. The younger Biden may have done something wrong, but if he did, it was him, not his father.

  Speaking yesterday on Fox News, South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham called for s special prosecutor to look into the Hunter matter. “We are not going to sweep this under the rug,” Graham said. “My big fear is that the media could give a damn about this investigation and Democrats would gladly sweep it under the rug if they could.” 

  Nonetheless, Joe Biden stood up for his son in an interview last night with Late Show  host Stephen Colbert. The president-elect said, “We have great confidence in our son. I am not concerned about any accusations made against him. It’s used to get to me.”

  “I think it’s kind of foul play,” he continued. “Look, it is what it is. He’s a grown man. He’s the smartest man I know. I mean, in a pure intellectual capacity. As long as he’s good, we’re good.”

The Rich Are Different: Fifty years of tax cuts for the rich in the name of “trickle down” economics has succeeded only in making the rich even richer, according to two British academics.

  The trickle-down theory of cutting taxes so the rich spend more money that trickles down through the economy has been a favorite of Republican politicians in the US. 

  The research paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that tax cuts in 18 countries  over a span 50 years helped only the people whose taxes were cut and did almost nothing to promote jobs or growth.

  Hope said in an interview, “Policy makers shouldn’t worry that raising taxes on the rich to fund the financial costs of the pandemic will harm their economies.” 

Out of Work: Americans filed 935,000 claims for unemployment insurance last week, one of the highest pandemic numbers since April 2, when the Department of Labor reported that 6.6 million people filed during the previous week.  

Real New Jersey: A member of the Lucchese crime family in the Mobster/Garden state has pleaded guilty to beating up the boyfriend of a former cast member of “Real Housewives of New Jersey.”  John Perna said he did the job at the behest of Thomas Manzo, the ex-husband of Dina Manzo. Thomas Manzo awaits trial on charges of commissioning the job.

  This all happened five years ago and Perna married Dina Manzo after the attack. It’s a good thing. She’d would have had a hard time finding a man to date. 

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