Today we’re kicking off our celebration of TPM’s 20th Anniversary, “Twenty Years, Twenty Tales”, 20 stories about TPM and its history, with six of those stories dropping today. They range from the technical and serious – how TPM started, the business dynamics of the operations to the giddy, louche and even frivolous, our epic tradition of TPM-ified mixed drinks and staff carousing.

I am particularly excited to see this launch because I get to read the 20 stories. They’re all new to me. I didn’t write any of them, though I was interviewed for two or three of them. My involvement in the whole project was almost entirely limited to answering questions and digging up some documents, photographs and the like. History is seldom best told by those who were part of it. It distorts perspective. So I am doubly blessed not only to have had the good fortune of these last twenty years but to see what my colleagues make of it, see it through their eyes and the eyes of various alums and observers who shared their perspective on what the team has done -how and why and when – going back to 2000.

I hope you enjoy it. I hope it adds to your understanding of the site and its history. I hope, for many of you, it brings back memories. My way of celebrating is to think about the future. I hold close the words of my mentor: websites, like people, not busy being born are busy dying. We have those tumultuous, creative energies – enlivened and energized by a new generation of smart and ambitious TPMers – propelling us forward to a future we will create.

Who could have seen this coming?

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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.