Winners and Losers: A Trump administration appointee in the General Services Administration is declining to sign a letter allowing President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to begin work this week while President Trump refuses to concede that he lost the election.

  Little known to most Americans, the GSA, which is the federal government’s buildings and grounds department, releases millions of dollars for a presidential transition team as well as providing office space and equipment.

  The Washington Post reports that GSA Administrator Emily Murphy has not written the required letter and the Trump administration isn’t about to sign one.

  Trump isn’t going out without a fuss and maybe he’s not even planning on going. He tweeted yesterday, “Since when does the Lamestream Media call who our next president will be? We have all learned a lot in the last two weeks!”

  They don’t. They just report the results given by boards of election.

  Former republican House speaker Newt Gingrich told Fox News, “I think that it is a corrupt, stolen election.”

  Among Trump supporters the slogan has changed from “Make America Great Again” to “Stop the Steal.”

  Trump spent a second day playing golf while refusing to concede. Republican leaders seem undecided on whether to rally around the President in his claims of election fraud, or run for their political lives. CNN reports that First Lady Melania Trump has urged the President to admit he’s beaten and former Republican President George W. Bush called Biden to congratulate him on winning the election.

 In what might otherwise be the lead story of the morning, President-elect Biden plans to get to work today appointing a 12-person task force to beat the coronavirus pandemic. Among them is Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general under Barack Obama who was ousted by Trump.

  He and Veep-elect Kamala Harris have four major issues on their radar. A statement on his transition website says, “Our nation is grappling with a pandemic, an economic crisis, powerful calls for racial justice, and the existential threat of climate change.”

  It’s the kind of boring, useful, and competent policy announcement we’ll have to get used to in post-Trump America.

The Long Count: With President Trump promising to paper still-contested states with lawsuits, the counting continues. Joe Biden has won 75.5 million votes, the most of any presidential candidate ever.

 Biden’s lead in Arizona continues to get chipped away, now at 16,985 votes with 98 percent counted. His lead in Georgia is only 10,353, again with 98 percent of the vote processed.

   Biden’s fortress is Pennsylvania, where he leads by a comfortable 43,194, giving him the 20 Electoral College votes that won him the presidency. 

Second Gentleman: You don’t hear much about him, but Kamala Harris has a husband, Doug Emhoff, who is about to become the nation’s first “second gentleman” or whatever handle we end up putting on it.

  The 56-year-old Emhoff has worked for 30 years as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. Previously married with two children, he met Harris on a blind date. Emhoff will also be the first Jewish person married to a president or vice president. Together with his wife, they become the first Jewish-Indian-Mixed race couple in such a position.

Viral News: The coronavirus pandemic took only nine days to jump by nearly a million cases in the US. The country will likely cross the 10 million mark today. This morning, 237,584 Americans are dead of the virus.

  Over the weekend, worldwide cases jumped the 50 million mark with 1.24 million deaths.

Shotgun News: The St. Louis couple infamous for pointing their guns at Black Lives protesters passing their home are suing the United Press photographer who shot the now-iconic image.

  Mark and Patricia McCloskey are both personal injury lawyers and suing is what they know how to do. They claim that UPI photographer Bill Greenblatt was trespassing on their property when he took the shot now as famous the university security officer pepper-spraying student protesters. In the picture Mark McCloskey is wielding an assault rifle and his wife has a pistol.

  The McCloskeys, according to the lawsuit, claim that Greenblatt and UPI, are profiting from “t-shirts, masks, and other items, and licensing use of photographs bearing Plaintiffs’ likenesses, without obtaining Plaintiffs’ consent.” 

Upward Crash: President Trump claimed that if Joe Biden were elected, the stock market will crash. This morning, the first trading day after the election, Biden won, futures on the Dow Jones are up 1,400 points. In fairness, that also comes on promising news about a coronavirus vaccine. 

  This morning Trump jumped on with a tweet shouting, “STOCK MARKET UP BIG, VACCINE COMING SOON. REPORT 90% EFFECTIVE. SUCH GREAT NEWS!”

The Obit Page: Alex Trebek, the host of the television game show “Jeopardy!,” has died at home in Los Angeles of pancreatic cancer at age 80. He had continued recording shows, despite being in great pain, until two weeks ago.

The game is famously played with the contestants given the answer and required to think of the question that matches. “Game show host for 37 years.” Answer, “who is Alex Trebek?”

  The Canadian born Trebek was a quietly smart man with a plain vanilla personality that made him a perfect game show host. He was the structure of the game, but didn’t overshadow it. Trebek hosted the show from his days with curly dark hair and a moustache to a respectable head of gray.

  He was a knowledge nerd who personally went through the show’s 61 clues every day. He was patient with his contestants, but sometimes with a look on his face or a tone in his voice expressed the question, “How could you have missed that.?”

  Trebek was a fixture in American culture. His last show airs on Christmas day.   

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