It’s a Deal: Congress has reached agreement on a nearly $900 billion economic stimulus bill that would include $600 checks and an extension of $300 unemployment benefits for 11 weeks.

  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fought to keep a lid on the cost of the bill and Minority Leader Charles Schumer said it’s stingy but it would “give the new president a boost, a head start, as he prepared to right our ailing economy.”

  The stimulus checks would provide $600 per adult and child, $2,400 for a family of four, for example, up to a 2019 household income of $75,000. If the family earned more, the benefit would be reduced.

  Households with an income above $99,000 would get nothing.

  The bill also includes a tax break for corporate meals — the three martini lunch — pushed by President Trump as a way to help the restaurant industry.

The Covid Corner: Europeans countries are beginning to close their doors to travelers from England, who are fleeing under tough lockdown rules. Prime minister Boris Johnson ordered a complete lockdown on London and surrounding areas.

  Johnson is reacting to the spread of a new and more highly contagious variant of the coronavirus.

  Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and a host of other countries have put out the unwelcome sign to the Brits who might be bringing the coronavirus with them. Great Britain is 6^th in the world for infections and deaths.

  Here in the US, another 1,475 Americans died of the virus since yesterday.

  There’ve been some screwups delivering the vaccine. Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer for Operation Warp Speed, apologized after a number of states received shipments of fewer doses of vaccine than planned.

  President Trump has been largely silent about the whole mess in recent days. He tweeted over the weekend, “The entire WORLD is being badly hurt by the China Virus, but if you listen to the Fake News Lamestream Media, and Big Tech, you would think that we are the only one. No, but we are the Country that developed vaccines, and years ahead of schedule!”

  The US is also the country with the most infections and deaths.

  Saturday night, Beck Bennet played Vice President Mike Pence getting one of the first coronavirus vaccines in the country. Speaking as Pence, Bennet said, “I’m sure all Americans are excited to see me, the guy who let Covid spread everywhere, get one of the first vaccines. Before we begin, I just want to reassure the American people that this vaccine is completely safe and harmless. And that’s why President Trump refuses to take it or talk about it.”

Election Extra!: President Trump came in as a surprise and he’s going out as a punchline. He’s still claiming election fraud; “GREATEST ELECTION FRAUD IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY!!!” as he tweeted over the weekend.

  He is also oddly defending Russia from claims by security officials that the homeland of vodka and oil is behind the cyber hack in US government computers. He tweeted, “The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”

  It’s actually Trump’s own security people and the State Department saying it’s Russia. That adds to the mystery of why Trump is so complacent about Russia. Claiming victimhood for himself, he also said, “There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA.”

The Jockey Shorts Hit: CNN reports that Russian opposition politician  Alexey Navalny was poisoned last summer with a nerve agent salted into a pair of his underwear. Navalny nearly died and is still recovering in Germany.

  Navalny learned the details of the failed attempt by posing as a government investigator interrogating one of the FSB hit men over the phone.

  In the recorded call, Navalny said he wanted “a brief understanding from the team members: what went wrong, why was there a complete failure in Tomsk with Navalny?”

  The agent then told Navalny the nerve agent had been put in the crotch of a pair of Navalny’s underwear.

In Alignment: If you look up early this evening you might be able to see Jupiter and Saturn in closer alignment to each other than they have been for nearly 800 years. The pair of planets will show up in the western sky for about an hour after sunset each evening until Christmas, according to astronomers. They’re actually hundreds of millions of miles apart, but they might look like a single point of bright light.

The Bulletin Board: The US Embassy complex in Baghdad was hit in a rocket attack that killed one local resident. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom is going into quarantine after a possible exposure to the coronavirus. — The Kilauea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island has begun to erupt again. 

Guardians of the Galaxy: In the US military we’ve got Marines, Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors, and Coasties. The Pentagon and Trump administration have been slow rolling out a tag members of the new Space Force created a year ago. It’s got 4,000 people already.

  Spacies. Trekkers. Jedi. No, no, and no. 

  They settled on “Guardians.” Members of the Space Force will be referred to as Guardians, which previously has been the title of someone who looked out for the health and welfare of a child

  Space Force said in its announcement that, “Guardians is a name with a long history in space operations, tracing back to the original command motto of Air Force Space command in 1983, ‘Guardians of the High Frontier.’ “

  So they admit it. They’re high.

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