Vladimir Putin and Mitch McConnell had something in common today.

As you know President-Elect Biden won with solid majorities in both the popular vote and the electoral college. But as Dave Wasserman notes this morning, a well-placed 65,009 votes could have given the Presidency to Donald Trump. That’s how you move Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia into Trump’s column. So Trump wins despite Biden getting well over 6 million more votes.

Voting in the first round of our Duke of Dukes bracket is open. Cast your ballot here.

Need some help knowing who to vote for? The Nation’s national affairs correspondent Jeet Heer has some recommendations.

We’ve been monitoring live results, and I can tell you that the Jack Abramoff vs. Dick Cheney and Anthony Weiner vs. Chris Christie match-ups are both nail biters. Pick carefully.

Today we’re watching truly exciting, genuinely joyous images of people receiving the first non-trial study COVID vaccine injections in the United States. President Trump is predictably crowing about it as though he produced it in his study in the living quarters of the White House. Operation Warp Speed – the plan that involved federal financial support to vaccine research and development – is reasonably seen as standard federal government blocking and tackling during a global epidemic. But it is at least fair to say that providing financial back up that allowed vaccine makers to go big on vaccine development is the one area of COVID response Trump didn’t clearly screw up or sabotage.

The Trump administration is setting some pretty lofty expectations for when Americans can actually expect to see widespread distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. During an interview on the “Today Show” Health and Human Services Secretary Alexander Azar used the platform to suggest that the average American can expect to start seeing widespread distribution of the vaccine — meaning they can get vaccinated at their local pharmacy — by late February or early March.

The title here is meant as a provocation. But it’s a provocation because it is literally true and really the only way to accurately describe what happened in Washington, DC this weekend at the ‘Stop the Steal’ protests in the capital. There was a major turnout by the Proud Boys and they vandalized multiple historically black churches in the city. In many cases the attacks were on various ‘Black Lives Matter’ installations on church grounds.

Here’s video of one such incident.

TPM Reader MA flagged something for me last night. Sidney Powell, pardon-play attorney for Mike Flynn and now Trump election steal lawyer, seems to go back a ways in the Trump world. MA notes that she wrote with some frequency in The New York Observer, then owned by Jared Kushner. She even co-bylined one piece on criminal justice reform with Bernard Kerik, a top and perpetual Rudy Giuliani crony in addition to being an ex-con.

Here’s the order …

“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

Tierney Sneed has more.

All 50 states and D.C. have now certified their 2020 election results:

Biden 81,282,376 (51.3%)
Trump 74,222,576 (46.9%)

That's a 2.4 point margin swing against Trump vs. 2016 and a 15.9% increase in votes cast.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 11, 2020

A margin of more than 7 million votes, 4.4%. A 74 vote margin in the electoral college.

It is over and it was not close.

TPM Reader JG thinks we need at least some partial reappraisal of Bill Barr’s tenure running the DOJ …
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