The Big Lie: Speaking in Philadelphia, President Biden finally confronted the claim by President Trump and many Republican leaders that the election was stolen from the former president. “No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards,” Biden said. “The big lie is just that: A big lie.”

  In an elbow to the mouth of Donald Trump, Biden said, “In America, if you lose you except the results. You follow the Constitution, you try again. You don’t call facts fake and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy.” 

  Trump had been saying even before November that the only way he could lose was if the election was fixed, but the Big Lie was hatched on election night. As critically-important state results were coming in against Trump, former NY mayor and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani advised campaign staffers to “Just say we won.”

  This comes according to the new book out next week, “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” written by Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig, the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporters who also wrote “A Very Stable Genius.”

  Trump is a boon to the book business. Published yesterday were Michael Bender’s “Frankly We Did Win This Election,” and Michael Wolff’s “Landslide” 

  In “I Alone,” Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is reported to have raised his voice in response, telling Giuliani, “We can’t do that. We can’t.” 

  The book goes on to report that after Fox News was first to call the usually-Republican Arizona for Joe Biden, Giuliani pushed the president to ignore that and go into the East Room of the White House to deliver a victory speech. “Just go declare victory right now,” Giuliani told Trump. “You’ve got to go declare victory now.”

  Eventually that night Trump went out and did what he probably would have done anyway. Beaten, he went in front of television cameras and said he won. “This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.”

  Biden said yesterday, “We have to ask, “Are you on the side of truth or lies, fact or fiction, justice, or injustice. Democracy or Autocracy?” That’s what it’s coming down to.

Offline: Just days after President Biden demanded for Russian President Vladimir Putin to shut down ransomware operations attacking American businesses, the biggest ransom hacker mysteriously went offline.

  The group, called REvil, short for “Ransomware evil,” is believed responsible for attacking and shutting down this country’s largest beef producers, and for another hack that froze thousands of businesses around the world, is suddenly gone.

 Biden had said after speaking to Putin, “we expect them to act,” and when asked whether he would take down the group’s servers if Putin did not, Biden simply said, “yes.”

A Shot in the Back: The Tennessee doctor who led the state’s vaccination effort says she was fired for suggesting in a memo that teenagers might be eligible for the Covid vaccine without their parents’ consent.

  Dr. Michelle Fiscus was the vaccination director for the Tennessee Department of Health. 

  As an example of the increasing politicization of the vaccination effort, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, has coined the slogan, “Don’t Fauci My Florida,” a dig at the country’s premier epidemiologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Never mind that Florida now ranks second in the country for new COVID cases and deaths per capita. 

  As a result of such vaccine politics, health authorities are being squeezed out or quitting. Kaiser Health News and The Associated Press found that at least 181 state and local public health leaders in 38 states have resigned, retired, or been fired since April 1st, 2020.

  Fiscus told The NY Times, “It’s just a huge symptom of just how toxic the whole political landscape has become. This virus is apolitical — it doesn’t care who you are or where you live or which president you preferred.” 

The Fires This Time: We have not paid a lot of attention to the wildfires burning in the West, in part because wildfire is part of the weather out there and this happens every year.

  So far this year, as temperatures crawl above 100 degrees and set records, nearly 918,000 acres have burned in 67 large fires across the United States just this month. Over two million acres have burned so far this year and a lot of people have lost their homes.

  Television news loves to cover wildfires because it makes great pictures. We’ll see how this season goes, but to put things in perspective, 4.9 million acres burned in 2015 and 5.8 million in 2011. A lot more needs to burn before this is the worst year ever.

The Spin Rack: Federal prosecutors in New York have charged five foreign agents backed by the Iranian government for their roles in a plot to kidnap an ex-patriot US citizen and journalist critical of the nation’s regime. Journalist and author Masih Alinejad, who fled Iran in 2009, confirmed that she was the target.  — The outspoken professor Cornel West, one of the nation’s foremost Black scholars, announced his resignation from Harvard, accusing the school of “intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths.” His resignation said the “disarray of a scattered curriculum, the disenchantment of talented yet deferential faculty, and the disorientation of precious students loom large” at Harvard. — At least 92 people died by fire in a Covid-19 treatment ward in southern Iraq. Most of the patients were on ventilators and unable to move.  

Bathing Suit Weather: Miami Swim Week made a big splash in the bathing suit business this week with a runway show featuring true-to-life models, including some who were seriously overweight, one in a wheelchair, a nursing mother, and one in a bikini with a baby bump between the top and bottom.  

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