Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 13. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

You should probably ignore the recent data from France. They have not been reliably reporting deaths over the past few days.

Here they are, our two furballs enjoying the early morning sun after being released from their nighttime confinement. Soon they will make their way around the house to the front yard jungle, where they will hide away waiting for a bird to fly into their mouths. It’s never happened yet, but hope springs eternal.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 12. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

It's a nice thought, but unfortunately it's only half true.Jan Scheunert/ZUMA

I don’t agree with Ezra Klein that our problem is too little democracy—more about that later, perhaps—but I do agree with this:

Imagine that, four years ago, Donald Trump lost the presidential election by 2.9 million votes, but there was no Electoral College to weight the results in his favor. In January 2017, Hillary Clinton was inaugurated as president, and the Trumpist faction of the GOP was blamed for blowing an election Republicans could have won. The GOP would have been locked out of presidential power for three straight terms, after winning the crucial popular vote only once since 1988. It might have lost the Supreme Court, too.

And so Republicans would likely have done what Democrats did in 1992, after they lost three straight presidential elections: reform their agenda and their messaging, and try to build a broader coalition, one capable of winning power by winning votes. This is the way democracy disciplines political parties: Parties want to win, and to do so, they need to listen to the public. But that’s only true for one of our political parties.

This is what we lost in 2016: a chance for the Republican Party to finally face up to its problems and start moving back toward the center. As Ezra notes, it generally takes at least three consecutive losses before a party is willing to do that, and the GOP win in 2016 reset that clock back to zero. Then 2020 reset it again. At this point, there’s little chance of Republican Party reform happening any time this decade.

This is what the New York office of the FBI bequeathed us. Rarely has so much been owed by so many to so few.

This spider’s name is Joe. Eventually his prey will be caught in his web and have no hope of escape no matter how much he squeals and squirms. We are all hoping that day comes soon.

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

In the LA Times today, Nick Goldberg asks the question on everybody’s mind:

What exactly are we witnessing here? Is this an attempted coup — a real effort by President Trump to cling to power despite the outcome of the election? Or is it a pathetic, doomed-to-fail tantrum by a petulant sore loser who will soon cave under pressure?

It’s neither. The real answer requires us to take seriously what so many of us have been saying all along: Donald Trump is mentally unbalanced. To put it a little more conventionally, he’s such an extreme narcissist that he can’t believe he lost. He literally can’t believe he lost. So his brain makes up stories for him, and the only plausible story in the face of hard numbers is that his enemies cheated. So that’s what he believes. And he’ll believe it forever. There’s no more chance of changing his mind on this than there is of changing the mind of someone in an asylum who believes he’s Jesus Christ.

As usual, though, this leads us back to the real question: Why is nearly the entire Republican Party humoring him on this? Since they aren’t collectively insane, the only answer is that they’re willing to sacrifice the public’s belief in democracy for short-term partisan gain. That isn’t nuts. It’s just despicable.

The pandemic has played hob with all our normal economic indicators, but it’s still worth paying attention to them periodically. The October inflation numbers were released today and showed no change from September. Headline inflation was 1.2 percent compared to the previous year. Core inflation, which omits food and energy, was up slightly more, but still subdued at 1.6 percent compared to the previous year:

The biggest increase was for used cars and trucks, which increased 11.5 percent compared to a year ago. New cars increased only 1.5 percent, in line with overall inflation.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 11. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

On Inauguration Day next year, here’s what the leadership of our country will look like:

• President Joe Biden, age 78
• Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, age 80
• House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, age 55
• Senate [TK] Leader Mitch McConnell, age 78
• Senate [TK] Leader Chuck Schumer, age 70

I don’t want to go all Logan’s Run on you, but it sure does seem as if we could use a little more youthful zest here.

This is the news we’ve all been waiting for:

*It turns out that nothing has really happened yet except the granting of some tax credits. And the flying taxis themselves are still under development. Still! This is the progress we want, not some dumb new app for locating the best avocado toast on your iPhone.