Was it really a resignation or was he squeezed out because he wouldn't get on board with Trump's efforts to overturn the election? I'll let you do the math on that one. Trump says Barr resigning, will leave before Christmas. (The timing of this gift is a slap in the face of those who observe Hanukkah.) Barr famously told CBS news that, "History is written by the winners." Just what I need. Another writing assignment. One of the reasons I always hated that line from Barr (and there are many), is that's it's so close to another quote: "The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."

"There is no analogue in recent U.S history to the scale of death brought on by the coronavirus, which now runs unchecked in countless towns, cities and states. It's equivalent to Sept. 11 happening nearly 100 times. One person now dies every 36 seconds from COVID-19." From NPR: How Do We Grieve 300,000 Lives Lost? In households, we grieve the way we always grieve. As a nation, we've taken refuge in our collective political rage, which might be an easier emotional space to occupy than grief. But at some point, we need to take a breath and consider what so many in our communities, our country, and our world have been through over the past year. Maybe 300,000 is as good a place as any.

+ "As of Thursday, coronavirus has killed a higher percentage of Gove County residents than any other county in the United States: One out of every 132 people has died. Their intertwined stories illuminate the toll the pandemic has taken on communities across the country as emotional debates over how to control the infection have unfolded amid mounting losses." USA Today: Deadliest place in America: They shrugged off the pandemic, then their family and friends started dying. Even today, mask-wearing remains controversial in Gove County, and friendships are being strained as authorities struggle to persuade their neighbors to follow basic public health guidelines, such as avoiding large gatherings. President Donald Trump won the county with 88% of the vote in November, and many of the residents, including the farmers who raise up corn and sorghum, are deeply skeptical of government and public health orders, often echoing the language Trump has used about mask-wearing and the pandemic's severity." There's a scene in Rocky where Apollo Creed's trainer admonishes his boxer: "He doesn't know it's supposed to be a show! He thinks it's a damn fight!" That line has been popping into my head all year. On one hand, there's a cynical show in Washington that is only about power and votes. Then there are people who risk life and limb in the name of what's being said and tweeted in that show. And then there's the virus, and the virus doesn't care what you think.

"China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities into hard, manual labour in the vast cotton fields of its western region of Xinjiang ... Based on newly discovered online documents, it provides the first clear picture of the potential scale of forced labor in the picking of a crop that accounts for a fifth of the world's cotton supply and is used widely throughout the global fashion industry." BBC: China's Tainted Cotton. The world's reaction so far? Shirt happens...

"The list of American accomplishments since 2016 is nearly endless." At the end of some remarks about how great Trump has been, Mitch McConnell, at long last, congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the win. Proving that there's still some ironic poetry in the world, McConnell's congratulations came just after Vladimir Putin's.

+ "Once again in America, the rule of law, our Constitution, and the will of the people have prevailed. Our democracy — pushed, tested, threatened — proved to be resilient, true, and strong." So said Joe Biden as the electoral college made his win official. (He's now won this election so many times, I'm getting tired of all the winning.)

+ "In a Tuesday morning tweet, pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood claimed that the president gave Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger 'every chance to get it right. They refuse. They will soon be going to jail.'" You'll never guess who retweeted it.

"Even Mx. Gessen, who initially found the incident "traumatic," said they now feel sympathy for Mr. Toobin. 'I think it's tragic that a guy would get fired for really just doing something really stupid,' they said. 'It is the Zoom equivalent of taking an inappropriately long lunch break, having sex during it and getting stumbled upon.'" The NYT: The Undoing of Jeffrey Toobin. (If even the people who were exposed to the exposure think canning Toobin was going too far, then why can him? Just asking that question scares the hell out of me. So maybe that's the answer...)

"A sense of anger with seemingly contradictory lockdown orders is growing along with virus cases, which are reaching new records across the state. It's a major reversal of fate for the first U.S. state to impose a lockdown in March, a move hailed as a success that kept the state from experiencing a surge of infections and death like what happened in New York." Don't kid yourself. The debate over shelter in place orders is not limited to red states. It's raging in California.

+ There are two reasons that Californians and others are right to be furious. First, the government should be helping to make small business whole during the periods when they're closed. Second, some of the rules aren't based in science and really don't make much sense, which is bad because the people following the rules also follow the science. The Bay Area is more skeptical of COVID-19 lockdowns this time. Why? (It's also dropped to below 60 degrees, so it's not like we can go outside...)

"It was evident that the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the first agencies reported to be breached, were only part of a far larger operation whose sophistication stunned even experts who have been following a quarter-century of Russian hacks on the Pentagon and American civilian agencies." NYT: The Pentagon, intelligence agencies, nuclear labs and Fortune 500 companies use software that was found to have been compromised by Russian hackers.

+ MIT Tech Review: How Russian hackers infiltrated the US government for months without being spotted.

"Crede beat COVID-19 but it came at a significant cost: his big toe on his left foot as well as his right foot and lower leg had to be amputated." Bloomberg: White House Official Recovers From Severe Covid-19. Brutal. Instead of remaining mostly a secret, this could have been a cautionary tale about the danger of the virus. Also, let's hope his boss gave to the GoFundMe campaign.

Curves being flattened and rising up again, massive protests, a vaccine in record time. Quite a year. And one perhaps best understood in charts. 2020 in 20 charts.

He went to the Isle of Man in search of his woman. The 28-year-old bought the vessel and set off on the journey of about 25 miles, which he thought would take 40 minutes. It ended up taking four hours, after which the guy walked an additional 15 miles. Here's a headline that would make no sense before 2020, but makes perfect sense now. Man jailed for breaching Covid-19 laws after crossing Irish Sea on jet ski to visit girlfriend. (Of course, if this were really a 2020 story, the guy would have made the whole journey only to find his girlfriend in bed with another man, and still been sentenced to jail.)

+ "Jeff Jacobson: My mom grew up on the same street as Smokey Robinson in Detroit. So for Chanukah, I wanted to reunite them via Cameo. But the video takes a strange twist." Aside from Adam Sandler's song, this is the greatest Hanukkah thing I've ever seen.