Greetings from Timothy Noah! Are you concerned but not panicked? Thatâs 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. âThe key word in Bidenâs sentence, of course, is January,â The New Republicâs Walter Shapiro wrote Tuesday night, âlong after the holiday seasonâs current nervousness about travel and reuniting with family.â 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 CDCâs National Center for Health Statistics, calculated the somewhat smaller July mortality estimate and found âthe magnitude of the life-expectancy decline was so large that she had to recheck her calculations several times,â according to The Wall Street Journal. Juries on two coasts are deliberating the cases of Ghislaine Maxwell (accused of participating in Jeffrey Epsteinâs sexual abuse of minors) and Elizabeth Holmes (accused of corporate fraud in marketing Theranosâs 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 itâs 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. Weâre 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 dayâs 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 Atlanticâs 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 âconcernedâ and dips ever so slightly into âpanicked.â If you read Gellman in conjunction with this Page One story in todayâs 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 âNancy Pelosi and her criminal cabalâ are âforcing a civil war.â The Timesâs 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 âPhil on steroids,â and whoâs 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, heâd further mention that Charlie hails from West Virginia (Tomaskyâs home state) and that Charlie served in West Virginiaâs House of Delegates from 1960 to 1962. Happy birthday, Charlie! The Washington Monthlyâs Matthew Cooper salutes him here. At NewRepublic.com, Kate Aronoff writes that the âbest-case scenarioâ at this point is that the reconciliation bill will pass with $55 billion in annual climate funding. The bad news is that itâs unlikely to pass. The worse news is that it isnât enough for Biden to reach his stated goal of keeping global warming below 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. And David Roth names Mark Zuckerberg TNRâs 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, âTimothy Noah, staff writer |
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