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  By The Associated Press - Jan. 06, 2021 05:14 PM EST
  On the one hand, there are the Republican officials, such as Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, who have stood up against President Trump's efforts to keep this reality at bay.
  Two months after a majority of voters rendered a decisive verdict against him, the president is still pretending he didn't lose. At first it was baseless tweets about fraudulent ballots in Detroit and Philadelphia. Next it was demands that Republican-led state legislatures disregard the will of their voters and flip their electors from Mr. Biden to Mr. Trump. Then, on Saturday, the president spent an hour attempting to extort Mr. Raffensperger, whom he threatened with criminal prosecution unless the Georgia official helped "find" 11,780 votes for Mr. Trump — one more than the margin by which he lost the state to Mr. Biden.
  Mr. Trump went on and on about dead people voting and burned or shredded ballots. He unleashed a stream of specific-sounding numbers — 4,502 unregistered voters! 18,325 vacant address voters! — which Mr. Raffensperger, who certified Georgia's vote total in November, after a hand recount of nearly five million ballots, calmly parried. "Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong," he said.
  Thanks to Mr. Raffensperger and his team's decision to record the call, there is no contesting what Mr. Trump was seeking: the disenfranchisement of millions of American voters. "The Trump campaign had ample opportunity to challenge election results, and those efforts failed from lack of evidence," Paul Ryan, a former Republican House speaker, said Sunday in a statement. "The legal process was exhausted, and the results were decisively confirmed."
  For the record, falsifying vote totals, or soliciting someone else to do so, is a crime under both federal and state law. It is without question an impeachable offense. Even though he has only two weeks left in office and the country's focus should be on stopping the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a strong argument that Mr. Trump — perhaps the most lawless and least qualified chief executive in the nation's history — should be not only impeached for a second time but also convicted and disqualified from ever again holding public office.
  The most chilling part of Mr. Trump's call with Mr. Raffensperger was the president's threat of prosecution if Mr. Raffensperger didn't fall in line. "You know what they did, and you're not reporting it," Mr. Trump warned him, in reference to people who had supposedly destroyed ballots. "That's a criminal offense. And you can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer." (Ryan Germany, Mr. Raffensperger's general counsel, was also on the call.)
  The first time, Republicans in Congress were more than happy to let him get away with it — all Senate Republicans but one voted to acquit Mr. Trump of the two articles of impeachment approved by the House of Representatives. Susan Collins of Maine defended her not-guilty vote by claiming that the president had learned "a pretty big lesson." She pointed out that his extortion effort had earned him rebukes from both Democrats and Republicans. "I believe that he will be much more cautious in the future," she said.
  There are lawmakers who understand the grave danger in what their colleagues are doing. Several Republican senators — including Ms. Collins, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mitt Romney of Utah — have urged Congress to "move forward" and certify Mr. Biden's victory. In choosing any other path, warned Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, "Congress would take away the power to choose the president from the people, which would essentially end presidential elections and place that power in the hands of whichever party controls Congress." The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has also urged his colleagues not to object.
  But there are many Americans who believe their claims who are not in on this disingenuous, cynical game — and who believe that their votes for Mr. Trump are the ones being invalidated. That mistrust will have consequences that extend far beyond Wednesday's certification, including the creation of a generational myth of a stolen election, the discrediting of Mr. Biden's presidency from the outset and the passage of stricter voting laws that target Democratic-leaning voters, under the guise of electoral integrity.
  Online: https://nyti.ms/3os5Avi
  A mob riled up by a demagogue storming the seat of government and forcing elected leaders inside to flee is the stuff of the Third World. It is how Mussolini and Hitler got started. It was not part of the American story. Until Donald Trump. Until Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands of Trump thugs took over the U.S. Capitol as Congress was counting the votes of Joe Biden's victory.
  Teach this day of infamy to our children. Teach it so they never forget the depths to which a great democracy can sink when deluded and divided and led by a narcissistic agent of chaos. Teach it so they feel the deep embarrassment, so that they never let it happen again.
  It was Trump who delivered us to this day. He invited the crowds, incited them, fed them a steady diet of lies and seething grievance about how their nation was being robbed in an elaborate plot ripped from a fever dream. Then, when the mobs claimed the Capitol, he went silent, letting them run roughshod over the seat of government.
  Finally speaking for a minute on Twitter hours after the breach, he repeated vicious falsehoods about a rigged and stolen election, then finally told his lemmings "to go home now."
  The president is and always was the insurrectionist in chief.
  Shame on him, and shame on his lawbreaking followers — the very same people who claimed to revere law and order and loathe anarchy have looted the U.S. Capitol, broken down doors and shattered the glass.
  They call themselves patriots, then they spit on the American character. They say Make America Great Again, then project an image to the world that this great representative republic has fallen into shambles, incapable of a peaceful transfer of power. Trump and these followers, who once took umbrage at being labeled deplorable, are would-be destroyers of democracy.
  Ownership for this deepest disgrace is shared by the House and Senate Republicans who objected to the lawful counting of Biden's electoral college votes; they deliberately encouraged the fantasy of a stolen vote in states that Trump lost. They knew exactly what they were doing.
  The beast they created doesn't respond to reason. Even as those lawmakers were debating their nonsensical objection to Arizona's vote, they were forced to evacuate just like their upright GOP and Democratic colleagues when the mob took over the building, breaching the House and Senate chambers.
  Trump lost on Nov. 3. His supporters lost. And now the nation is a risk of being lost. This most noble experiment in self-government of free people, begun by a ragged band of farmers and merchants in 1776, must not end with mobs and police and VIPs hustled away to undisclosed secure locations.
  To explain how they came up short in state after state after state, the votes counted and recounted and challenges considered and dismissed, Trumpites needed to concoct a grand conspiracy. And so, digging deeper and deeper into the bowels of the internet, they did. The Deep State became the Deep Nation, with sworn enemies in every corner manufacturing votes. Facts connivingly twisted to tell a story. As usual, Democrats were the villains. As usual, Trump was the hero.
  The practiced huckster in the White House knows how this works: Bring out bucket after bucket after bucket of lies, pouring them all out, one after the other. The debunkers and factcheckers will be bamboozled, the furious few will have their false preconceptions confirmed. The lies won't matter, because the parallel reality, the dangerous delusion, will be more powerful.
  A thousand times no. Joe Biden is president-elect of these United States, duly elected by the people of the 50 states, to be sworn in on Jan. 20. He will lead with decency and dignity.
  As for Trump, he should be impeached and removed from office immediately. He should be ousted via the 25th Amendment. But with just days left in his term, neither of those things will come to pass. He must leave the White House on Jan. 20 standing on his own two feet. If he won't, drag him squealing.
  Online: https://bit.ly/3s1qGmo
  Online: https://bit.ly/3onpabN
  Community's actions are key to keeping in-person school
  As hard as local educators and public health officials worked last summer to come up with plans that would allow students to return to classrooms in the 2020-21 school year, there was still plenty of apprehension about how it would go.
  Would the health and safety protocols be followed by students and staff? And even if they were, would they be able to keep COVID-19 from spreading within school buildings?
  The answer turned out to be yes. Students and staff, perhaps motivated by their desire to continue in-person learning as long as possible, followed the guidance. Evidence collected through contact tracing has shown that spread within school buildings was minimal.
  Unfortunately, that hasn't been enough to keep several local school buildings and in some cases, entire school districts, from needing to temporarily shut down facilities and shift to all-remote learning models.
  The culprit wasn't anything that happened behind the doors of school buildings or buses. It was a wave of community spread that's been driven largely by unsafe private social gatherings, starting roughly in October when weather began to turn colder. And it was exacerbated by too many local residents ignoring safety measures while holding gatherings at Halloween, Thanksgiving and, data is beginning to show, Christmas.
  The resulting public health impact has been all too real. The death toll has climbed considerably in the past two months and hospitalizations have skyrocketed from summer levels. That also affects local health care beyond people suffering with the virus; just look at how Auburn Community Hospital had to postpone elective procedures because of the wave of COVID-19 patients needing care.
  Faced with these grave concerns and the need to at least flatten the local COVID-19 curve, public health officials have no choice but to continue scrambling to contact trace and put people in isolation and quarantine. We now have roughly 10% of the county's population unable to leave their homes because of the viral spread.
  And that brings us back to schools. Even if health and safety measures can keep COVID-19 from spreading within school buildings, in-person classes cannot take place if too many staff members or students cannot attend because they are sick with COVID-19 infection caught outside of school, or because they need to quarantine as a result of close contact with someone who has a confirmed case.
  Indeed, that is precisely what has happened, as several Cayuga County-area school districts decided to postpone reopening schools after the holiday day break, and county officials now recommending that districts wait even longer.
  The key to allowing these schools to get back to in-person learning, and making sure they and all districts can continue through the rest of the academic year, has nothing to do with decisions by superintendents and board of education members. Those decisions will make themselves based on the efforts we all make at stopping the spread.
  Keep social circles small and controlled, wear masks, wash hands, stay home when not feeling well, avoid large gatherings. It's not that difficult, but it's been proven to be effective when there's enough of the public willing to do it.