THE MISSISSIPPI WAY: Mississippi District Attorney Scott Colom, a Democrat, yesterday became the first Black person elected to the US Senate since Blanche K. Bruce, a former slave elected in the Civil War reconstruction days of  1874.

  Colom beat the appointed Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by just shy of 4,600 votes, giving Democrats 55 seats.

    After more than a century of lynchings and repression, legal segregation, the civil rights struggles … and murders …  Colom told a crowd of supporters last  night, “God didn’t want us to get it the easy way, he wanted us to get it the Mississippi way.”

CHIPS: Stock in the AI chip giant Nvidia has taken a dive following news that its founder and CEO Jensen Huang has had not one, but two extramarital affairs and is under consideration for removal by the board of directors. 

  One affair was with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy and the second was with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president for health care. The 63-year-old Huang and Powell, 48, are both married to other people. Huang met his wife Lori in 1980 at Oregon State University when he was 17 and she was 19.

  More than the personal embarrassment is Huang’s dalliance with Alice Huang … no relation … a former Chinese television reporter who became a top executive at a Singapore-based data center company that became one of Nvidia’s biggest customers in Southeast Asia. Her company bought more than $4.8 billion worth of chips since June 2024, now raising suspicions that it might have acted a funnel for chips otherwise banned for sale to China.

THE THREATDOWN: President Trump’s top White House lawyer sent a three-page letter to the Democrat in line to lead the House’s primary investigative committee warning that aggressive oversight and investigation of the Trump administration “may cross the line into blatant criminality.” 

  How investigations could be criminal is a mystery … members of Congress have immunity under the “Speech and Debate” clause of the Constitution when it comes to legislative matters.

  But Trump and the Republicans are not chastened by last week’s election results. The President installed Stephen Miller, the reincarnation of Roy Cohn as his chief of staff, and the House Republicans made the combative Jim Jordan their leader.

  White House counsel William Scharf said Congressional investigations are for legislative purposes, not to find criminality. He wrote to California Rep. Robert Garcia of California that “The Administration will not be extorted and will not be cowed by unlawful process motivated by animus, pettiness, hatred, or any other unlawful motive to intimidate, penalize or interfere with the lawful functioning of government.”

PROPER DECORUM: A sentinel with The Old Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington yesterday loudly rebuked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his party for their behavior at the sacred site.

  Hegseth had participated in a wreath laying ceremony. His wife, and senior staff were later laughing and posing for pictures like tourists. As they walked away the guard barked, “All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times.”  Hegseth did not appear to react.

  “The Secretary and the entire Department have always honored—and will always honor—the sacrifices our military men and women have made to keep America safe,” Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement that did not include an apology for or from Hegseth. He said, “While commemorating this solemn day, a soldier correctly and respectfully reminded everyone to maintain decorum.”

THE SOCIAL PRESIDENT: Donald Trump went on a dawn social media rant condemning the Democratic Party and warning that “caravans” of immigrants are forming in South America headed for the southern border.

  “The Democrat Party, lead by one of the most Corrupt and anti-American groups of political leaders and hacks in the history of our Country, and even the World, is doing everything in their power to get away from MASSIVE BLUE STATE CORRUPTION by saying, over and over again, that the Trump Administration is corrupt,” he wrote.

  He also claimed, “With the perceived loss by the Republicans in the Midterms – I WAS NOT ON THE BALLOT- the INVASION of our Country is taking place again. Huge CARAVANS are forming and beginning their illegal march through Mexico.”

THE OBIT PAGE:  Dr. Richard Holmes, who in 1965 quietly became the first Black student in the 87-year history of Mississippi State University, died at age 82. The Associated Press reported at the time that Holmes had “received a quiet, courteous reception” from the white students he encountered during registration.

  This was only three years after some of the most notorious murders in the civil rights era and his years in college were not without racist incidents.

  But Holmes told reporters at the time he entered the university, “I hope that after today, the press, news media and the public will forget that I am here.”

  Holmes went on to serve in the Army and earn a medical degree and became an emergency room doctor.

THE SPIN RACK: Two people were killed yesterday afternoon and 17 injured when a three-story Brooklyn building collapsed into the hole created by construction next door. The NY Fire Department stage a massive search and rescue effort. The collapse sheared off the side of a second building, leaving open rooms exposed. — The once grand 990-foot ocean liner SS United States was sunk yesterday off the coast the  Florida panhandle to become an artificial reef. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Disgraced Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, one of the world’s richest men, is known for wearing black leather jackets. 

  Writer Anand Giridharadas says in The NY Times that; “I’m speaking out on behalf of the leather-jacket community. We are washed-up musicians and we are dads just trying to feel something again and we are people who want others to assume that we own a Ducati Panigale. And we are here to defend the leather jacket’s name and honor.”