Events

Remember the hurricane season of 2005, where we got the 27th named storm at the end of December and it finally dissipated on January 6th? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Tropical Storm Iota, the 30th named storm of 2020: At 400 AM EST (0900 UTC), the center of Tropical Storm Iota was located near latitude 13.5 North, longitude 74.8 West. Iota is moving toward the west-southwest near 5 mph (7 km/h). A westward motion with some increase in forward speed is expected to begin later today and continue...

The New York Times and NBC have called Georgia for Joe Biden and North Carolina for the president, giving Biden 306 Electoral College votes to the president's 232. This is the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has won Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. It also means that in addition to taking over 5 million more popular votes than the president, Biden has won exactly the same number of electoral votes as the president did in 2016. In 68 days, we'll finally have a new president.

Andrew Sullivan recognizes he's hyperventilating, but he has an important point: Secretary of state Pompeo insisted with a smile that there would be a transition to a second Trump term, even as he lectures other countries about respecting election results. He is treating the solemn democratic process as a joke. “We are moving forward here at the White House under the assumption there will be a second Trump term,” echoed White House trade adviser, Peter Navarro, this morning. To put it plainly: this...

Two women have stealthily implemented the proposed name-change of Stephen Douglas Park to Fredrick Douglass Park: This is the first time the vandals have spoken about their crime, which involved adding a very official-looking extra “S” to every park district sign in Douglas Park, a year and a half before Chicago’s Park District actually decided to change the name this September. “It had started to bother me, and I would wonder, ‘Why is this park not named after Frederick Douglass instead of Stephen...

Eight days after the country resoundingly turfed out the president, it seems people still have overactive endocrine systems. I understand; coming down from a stressful experience can take some time. But seriously, we have to take a collective chill. The president will leave office at noon Eastern time on January 20th whether he believes he lost the election or not. Mike Pompeo, Bill Barr, Betsy DeVos, and every other Cabinet-level officer will go as well. I expect, in fact, that Biden will have an...

The forecast for Chicago today predicts a 23°C high will give us not only a new record in itself, but our 7th day above 21°C in a row, a record for November. Yesterday's 24°C also set a record. And then we have a tiny cold front on its way: This afternoon should bring us back to the end of autumn with alacrity: Today. A slight chance of showers between 2pm and 4pm, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms after 4pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 22. Breezy, with a south wind 30 to 35 km/h increasing...

Author John Scalzi posted two missives on his blog over the weekend that sum up a lot of what I'm thinking lately. He concludes the second one: Trump is a virus and he infected our body politic, a body that the GOP spent four decades lowering its immune system so that it could receive just the sort moral and political sickness that Trump personifies. And it worked! We got very sick, and we’re very sick still. But it turns out our antibodies were stronger than suspected. We rallied despite the best...

The Independent's Richard Hall attended Rudy Giuliani's press conference at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. Of course, this turned out to be at the Four Seasons Landscaping Company... It’s hard to explain the confusion I experienced as I sped along the highway out of downtown Philadelphia towards Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Was this one last act of revenge by the president against the lying fake news media while he still had our enrapt attention? Was it a ruse to get all the journalists out of...

Slate has a lovely series of short goodbyes to outgoing administration figures we won't miss, starting with Dahlia Lithwick on Ivanka: If and when you look back at your life, maybe you will realize that this is where it all went wrong: You were superb at the pitchman stuff, and maybe if your creepy dad hadn’t decided to run for president, you could have stayed in that branded plastic world of warehouses and factories and skyscrapers. But transactional justice words pressed through gauzy Instagram...

Both US Senate races in Georgia have gone to mandatory runoffs on January 5th as none of the candidates got more than 50% of the vote. Right now, the most likely outcome is that incumbent David Perdue (R) defeats John Ossoff (D), while Raphael Warnock (D) defeats appointed incumbent Kelly Loeffler (R)—the only sitting senator with a perfect record of voting with the outgoing president. If those races split, as of January 6th the Senate would be 51-49 in favor of the Republican Party, and it would be...