Viral News: A one-day record of 3,656 Americans died yesterday of the coronavirus as Thanksgiving infections register in the death toll. Christmas get-togethers threaten to spike the numbers even higher in January.

  By comparison, 4,000 Americans died at the vicious Civil War battle of Antietam.

  Healthcare workers are quickly get inoculated with the new vaccine, but it will take months to slow the spread of Covid-19

  The virus has no boundaries. French President Emanuel Macron has tested positive and is in isolation with his wife. He’s now in the company of President Trump, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and President Andrzej Duda of Poland — all of them caught the bug.

  Here in the US, Interior Department Secretary David Bernhardt tested positive.

  Actor Tom Cruise hit the headlines for an expletive-laced tirade about some of the staff on a movie shoot ignoring the coronavirus safety protocols. Britain’s The Sun tabloid posted the audio of Cruise shouting, “I don’t ever want to see it again, ever! And if you don’t do it you’re fired, if I see you do it again you’re fucking gone. And if anyone in this crew does it — that’s it, and you too and you too.”

  Finally, someone said it.

Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz: Congress appears to be getting close to a $900 billion economic relief bill. We’re leery of even mentioning it until it’s done, but the bill being batted around would provide emergency stimulus checks, unemployment payments, rental assistance, help for small businesses, and money for distribution of a vaccine. It appears there’s no money for the states struggling to pay for the consequences of the pandemic. 

Et Tu, Mitch?: President Trump has turned on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for congratulating Joe Biden on winning the election. He tweeted,  “Mitch, 75,000,000 VOTES, a record for a sitting President (by a lot). Too soon to give up. Republican Party must finally learn to fight. People are angry!”

  Trump keeps bragging that he won 75 million votes, which is overblown by nearly 800,000, but who’s counting. What Trump doesn’t say is that Joe Biden won 81.2 million votes, the most of any presidential candidate ever. Yet Trump tweeted his continuing baseless claim that, “Massive FRAUD took place with machines, people voting from out of state, illegals, dead people, no signatures—and so much more!”

One for the Records: Major League Baseball has decided to recognize the old segregate Negro leagues as part of the history of professional ball, integrating their records with the current and former MLB teams. More than 3,400 players from seven leagues that played from 1920 to 1948 will now be included in a big shakeup for the record books.

  “All of us who love baseball have long known that the Negro Leagues produced many of our game’s best players, innovations and triumphs against a backdrop of injustice,” Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, said in a statement.

  Some players, Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson among them, already crossed from the Negro Leagues during their lifetimes. Thirty-five of them became Hal of Famers in the bigs, but now their formerly ignored hitting and scoring records will be merged.

The Giving Tree: Mckenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and ranked as the world’s 18^th richest person with $38 billion in company stock, is in a rush to give away most of her fortune. Scott has given away $4.2 billion, much of it to small colleges and universities, in the past four months. She has given to 384 organizations in that time.

  She’s not giving it to schools like Harvard that could buy out the Bank of England with their endowment. She’s spreading it among lesser-known schools that don’t get enormous gifts. She’s given to historically Black colleges, community and technical colleges, and schools for Native Americans, women, city, and rural students. The schools didn’t apply for the money, Scott’s staff just called and dropped it into their laps.

Winter Wonder: Snow is still falling in the East this morning in one of the biggest winter storms to hit in years. A foot to a foot and a half is common. The deepest appears to be in Endicott, NY near Binghamton and the Pennsylvania border where 40.5 inches fell.

  NY Mayor Bill de Blasio, not known as a fun guy, announced that in-person school is off for the day … Yay!! Snow Day!! … but remote-learning students will have to be in front of their computers. 

The Bulletin Board: The French government, acting under a law requiring gender balance in civil service employment, has fined the city of Paris $110,000 for hiring too many women. The mayor, a woman, hired 11 women to fill 16 top jobs. — Neighbors of President trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort are fighting his plan to move there. They say a clause prohibiting full time residency was part of the neighborhood agreement to allow turning a private estate into a club. — Russian President Vladimir Putin denied today that he was behind the near-fatal nerve agent poisoning of his political opponent, Aleksei Navalny, telling reporters with a laugh that if Russian agents had wanted to kill the man, “they would have probably finished the job.”

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