I’m Melting, I’m Melting: In a press conference that sounded like it was produced by QAnon conspiracy theorists, Rudolph Giuliani and President Trump’s team of election lawyers yesterday claimed that the President won Pennsylvania by hundreds of thousands of votes, China influenced the count, ballots were counted in Germany, and the counting was done with machines invented by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, who’s been dead for seven years.

  The claims were so wild that CNN, which would go live to the opening of an envelope, wouldn’t carry the press conference. 

  Giuliani was once a respected federal prosecutor in New York and the mayor who held the city together after the 9/11 attacks. As he spoke under the heat of television lights, artificial color in his hair drained from his temples in rivulets down both cheeks to his jaw in what will become a lasting image of a man who’s melted his reputation and credibility.

    Giuliani said, “I can prove to you that he won Pennsylvania by 300,000 votes. I can prove to you that he won Michigan by probably 50,000 votes.” But he offers no proof. Fellow Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis said to a reporter, “Your question is fundamentally flawed when you’re asking, ‘where’s the evidence?’”

  Referring to an altered video that’s made the rounds of the internet, Giuliani claimed, “Joe Biden told us a few days before the election that he had the best voter fraud team in the world.” 

  Lawyer Sidney Powell said, “The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes in other computerized coding systems here as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chávez.”

  Dominion, which makes election systems, is a Canadian company. Powell claimed that the Dominion machines would have to have done something that was part of a nationwide conspiracy that slipped the notice of Republican election officials in multiple states. He said the Dominion machines “Can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden.” 

  In a speech recalling Shakespeare’s Glendower claiming “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” Giuliani said, “In the states that we have indicated in red, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, we can more than double the number of votes needed to overturn the election.”

  Harry Hotspur replied to Glendower, “But will they come when you do call for them?”

The President on Line One: President Trump has invited Michigan’s house speaker and senate majority leader to the White House in what appears to be a bold effort to reverse the vote in favor of Joe Biden as that state prepares to certify their vote. The NY Times reports that, “The president has also asked aides what Republican officials he could call in other battleground states in his effort to prevent the certification of results that would formalize his loss to Mr. Biden.” 

  Trump is engaged in an unprecedented effort to overturn the election.  

  Tuesday night Trump personally called Monica Palmer, a Republican member of the Wayne County, Michigan Board of Canvassers who initially voted on Tuesday against certifying the county’s election results, then voted yes, and then tried to retract her vote after Trump’s call.

 Unrelenting in his claims of voter fraud, Trump tweeted yesterday, “An open and shut case of voter fraud. Massive numbers!”

  Nonetheless, Georgia announced the results of its hand recount yesterday, confirming the win by President-elect Joe Biden.

  “What the president’s doing now,” Biden said yesterday, “it’s going to be another incident where he will go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history,”

Viral News: The Centers for Disease Control has posted a dire warning to Americans that they should severely curtail their Thanksgiving dinners to avoid spread of the coronavirus.

  The CDC advises limiting the number of guests, eating outdoors or with the windows open, and even holding a virtual online dinner that would make it still harder to get someone to pass the gravy.

  Among party-killing recommendations from the CDC are bringing your own food and utensils and using condiment packets for things like salad dressing.

  The President’s coronavirus task force yesterday held its first presser in months with Vice President Mike Pence promising a dramatically fast delivery of vaccines once they are approved for use. What he did not say is that he and the Trump administration are not sharing their plans with the incoming Biden administration that will have to carry them out.

  Over the past 24 hours, another 2,016 Americans died of the virus and 189,049 were diagnosed.

The Obit Page: Basketball coach Nancy Darsch, who turned Ohio State into a women’s basketball powerhouse before going with the pros taking the New York Liberty to the WNBA’s first championship game, died in Plymouth, Massachusetts. She was 68 and had Parkinson’s disease.

The Bulletin Board: The World health organization has rejected Remdesivir, an anti-viral drug given to President Trump, as a treatment for Covid-19. — Designer Mossimo Giannulli began his prison sentence yesterday for paying to get his daughters into college in the nationwide college admissions scandal. His wife, actress Lori Laughlin, was already doing her time.

I’m Dyeing: The NY Times ran a feature this morning with hair dressers speculating on what it was running down Rudy Giuliani’s face. The professionals say a good dye job would never do that. It might have been mascara covering Rudy’s gray sideburns.

  But buried in the story was a quote from Chris Krebs, the cybersecurity official just fired by President Trump, who said Giuliani’s press conference was “the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest.”

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