In the news today: The omicron variant of COVID-19 is looking to be bad news for the unvaccinated—but potentially catastrophic for overworked hospitals. Rethink travel plans, wear masks, and make sure you’ve gotten your booster if it’s time for you to get one.

Fresh off his losses in court over harassing the parents of murdered school children, Alex Jones is now suing the Jan. 6 Committee in hopes of stopping investigators from reviewing records that they say are key to understanding precisely who was involved—and how—in Donald Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election results.

Unsurprisingly, Jones indicated in his lawsuit filed at the U.S.

Leaked audio that was reportedly made on Dec. 16 during a private lunch in New York City reveals that Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania as a Republican, has some, uh, thoughts on trans rights he apparently didn’t feel he could share on his syndicated talk show, The Dr. Oz Show. Oz reportedly defended J.K.

In a shocking and disturbing incident, a teacher at a Washington, D.C., elementary school made third-graders pretend to die in gas chambers and shoot their classmates in disturbing reenactments of the Holocaust, according to The Washington Post. While the teacher has not been identified, an email to the students’ parents from Watkins Elementary School’s principal notes that they were placed on leave last week.

Here’s a suggestion for assignment editors at the large national media outlets who have provided us with an endless stream of stories about Trump voters in rural diners over the past half-decade: Try instead reporting on what it’s become like for non-Trump voters in these rural red areas where the politics of menace and thuggery have taken over—sort of an inverted version of the cliché; the rural Biden voter who can barely show his face at the local café.

In the news today: It’s being reported that the real reason Sen. Joe Manchin is single-handedly destroying the Build Back Better plan is because he doesn’t trust poor people not to use drugs. On the bright side, this means Democrats can—and should—tell him to pound sand. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is in panic mode as he sues New York Attorney General Letitia James for investigating all his grifting.

I have a deep, visceral mistrust for anyone who says God is on their side. When has Providence ever sorted winners and losers like this? Didn’t we learn better from the bloody Crusades? Or centuries of ruinous sectarian violence? Or Tim Tebow’s NFL career?

Of course, these days we’re meant to believe that God is on the side of the vast majority of the people unnecessarily dying of COVID-19—because that’s what they keep claiming.