Greetings from Timothy Noah!

Are you concerned but not panicked? That’s how President Joe Biden said yesterday he wants you to feel about omicron. Biden announced that the federal government will, starting in January, buy a half-billion rapid Covid tests to distribute free of charge, create new sites for vaccination and testing, and send 1,000 military medical personnel to help hospitals around the country.

“The key word in Biden’s sentence, of course, is January,” The New Republic’s Walter Shapiro wrote Tuesday night, “long after the holiday season’s current nervousness about travel and reuniting with family.” Biden is not mandating testing or vaccinations on domestic flights. I invite you to be concerned about this glaring lapse in public health policy, but not panicked.

Life expectancy in the United States dipped by 1.8 years in 2020, to 77, which is a bit further, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday, than its initial estimate in July. This was the biggest drop since World War II, which killed about 400,000 Americans. Covid was the third largest cause of death in 2020, after heart disease and cancer. Elizabeth Arias, a demographer at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, calculated the somewhat smaller July mortality estimate and found “the magnitude of the life-expectancy decline was so large that she had to recheck her calculations several times,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

Juries on two coasts are deliberating the cases of Ghislaine Maxwell (accused of participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of minors) and Elizabeth Holmes (accused of corporate fraud in marketing Theranos’s finger-prick blood tests). That invites a game of legal pooh sticks: Which will decide first? The Holmes jury got a head start, but yesterday it asked the judge whether it could take its 39-page instructions home, which suggests it’s not in any particular hurry. (The judge said no.) One potential wild card is whether these juries can arrive at a verdict before one of the jurors is infected by omicron. This is not an ideal time to be cooped up with 11 other people.

We’re 15 days from the Feast of the Epiphany, which will also be the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, wherein supporters of Donald Trump, egged on by Trump himself, tried to prevent the House and Senate from counting electoral ballots because they refused to believe that their candidate lost. The insurgents stormed and vandalized the Capitol. Five people died, including a Capitol police officer. Two people have been cited by Congress for contempt because they refuse to discuss their role in the day’s events before the House select committee investigating January 6, citing dubiously the already highly-dubious legal doctrine of executive privilege. One of these people refused to testify even though he published a book about the events in question. An appalling number of Americans would dispute this simple recitation of the facts.

The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman has an unbelievably depressing piece saying all this was just practice for Trump stealing the 2024 election. I would say his article tilts a few degrees away from “concerned” and dips ever so slightly into “panicked.” If you read Gellman in conjunction with this Page One story in today’s New York Times, you may conclude you should never trust anybody called Phil. Gellman quotes a Phil (last name withheld), a former Coast Guard rescue diver from Kentucky, saying “Nancy Pelosi and her criminal cabal” are “forcing a civil war.” The Times’s Alan Feuer writes about a former Army colonel named Phil Waldron, who owns a bar outside Austin and has been circulating a screwball PowerPoint presentation that says China and Venezuela control U.S. voting machines. George Soros is mixed up in it, too, Feuer says. (No conspiracy theory is complete without a veiled antisemitic reference to Soros.)

Waldron teamed up with Rudolph Giuliani at some court hearings on the 2020 election, and the January 6 committee is eager to interview him because he seems also to have the ear of a lot of other highly placed Republicans who should know better and possibly, secretly do. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, whose worldview might be described as “Phil on steroids,” and who’s also been subpoenaed, sued the January 6 committee yesterday, alleging it violates various privileges, including his Fifth Amendment rights.

On a happier note, today is the ninety-fifth birthday of my mentor in journalism, Charles Peters. Charlie founded The Washington Monthly in 1969 and was its Editor in Chief until 2001. If New Republic editor Michael Tomasky were writing this instead of me, he’d further mention that Charlie hails from West Virginia (Tomasky’s home state) and that Charlie served in West Virginia’s House of Delegates from 1960 to 1962. Happy birthday, Charlie! The Washington Monthly’s Matthew Cooper salutes him here.

At NewRepublic.com, Kate Aronoff writes that the “best-case scenario” at this point is that the reconciliation bill will pass with $55 billion in annual climate funding. The bad news is that it’s unlikely to pass. The worse news is that it isn’t enough for Biden to reach his stated goal of keeping global warming below 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. And David Roth names Mark Zuckerberg TNR’s scoundrel of the year.

Starting tomorrow through the end of the year, TNR Daily will continue to provide links to fresh stories published on our site, but without a written introduction. Enjoy your holidays. Yours in concern but not panic,

—Timothy Noah, staff writer

Every day, our journalists are exposing the right’s assaults on our democracy—and pushing the Democrats to go bold to preserve the republic. Here’s a special offer from The New Republic so you won’t miss their scoops and sharp analysis.

Yesterday’s political question: Of the 20 states with the highest Covid vaccination rates, 19 are blue and one is red. Who’s the red outlier, and where does it rank nationally? You will be surprised.

Answer: The red state is West Virginia. It ranks sixth, with 71.6 percent of adults fully vaccinated, putting it ahead of New York and Maryland. West Virginia started out like gangbusters, then became a Covid disaster, but now ranks toward the top. Vaccine doses administered per 100,000 population, per the CDC tracker, is around 173,000. For comparison, in New York it’s around 170,000, in California 162,000, and in Massachusetts 183,000.

Yesterday’s holiday season/sports question: The longest game in NFL history was played on Christmas Day in 1971. The game went into two overtimes—that is, it ended with 7:20 left on the clock in the sixth quarter, delaying Christmas dinners across America (including at the Tomasky household). What two teams played in this game? (A first-round playoff game, incidentally.) Who was the Hall of Fame placekicker who missed three field goals that day (one of them, in the first overtime, blocked; another sailed wide right with :35 remaining in regulation), causing his team to lose? And who was the non–Hall of Fame kicker who won the game with a 37-yarder?

Answer: Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Miami Dolphins. Chiefs placekicker Jan Stenerud missed those three field goals. And Miami kicker Garo Yepremian, who was a great kicker and—we were surprised to learn—is not in the Hall of Fame. According to his Wiki entry, he suffered a lot of abuse from some xenophobe opponents because he wasn’t born in the United States (he’s from Cyprus).

Today’s political question: Sixty years ago, when Charles Peters was a West Virginia state legislator, both houses were solidly Democratic, with fewer than 10 Republicans in the state Senate and fewer than 20 in the House of Delegates. Today, the situation is reversed; Republicans have a veto-proof majority in both houses. How long have Republicans controlled the West Virginia legislature? Bonus question: Before that date,when had Republicans last controlled one or both houses?

Answer (yes, we’re just giving you the answer today, given the looming Daily vacation): Republicans have held the majority in both houses of West Virginia’s state legislature since 2015. Before 2015, the last time Republicans held both houses was 1930, and the last time Republicans held one of the two houses was 1932. Republicans controlled West Virginia’s state legislature almost every year from 1895 until 1932. Hmmm, what happened in 1932 to change the direction of the political winds in the state?