Today’s edition of quick hits:
* A diplomatic boycott: “The United States will stage a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over concerns about China’s record on human rights, the White House said Monday.”
* The Russia-Ukraine crisis: “President Joe Biden will make clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin that there will be ‘very real costs’ should Russia take military action against Ukraine when the two leaders meet on a video call on Tuesday, a senior administration official said.”
* During a pandemic, lies come with consequences: “Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden. That’s according to a new analysis by NPR that examines how political polarization and misinformation are driving a significant share of the deaths in the pandemic.”
* A classless bid for attention: “Rep. Thomas Massie, R-K.Y., is facing backlash from Democrats after he posted a Christmas photo of his family smiling and posing with an assortment of guns just days after four teenagers were killed in a shooting at a Michigan high school. ‘Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,’ Massie wrote Saturday on Twitter.”
* An awful loss: “Fred Hiatt, a onetime foreign correspondent who in 2000 became The Washington Post’s editorial page editor and greatly expanded the global reach of the newspaper’s opinion writers in the era of 9/11, the election of Barack Obama and the destabilizing presidency of Donald Trump, died Dec. 6 at a hospital in New York City. He was 66.” * On Capitol Hill, Dole will lie in state at the Rotunda and the White House has already ordered flags to fly at half-staff in his honor: “Bob Dole, the longtime lawmaker who overcame life-threatening injuries during World War II to become a shepherd of the Republican Party, died in his sleep Sunday at the age of 98.” See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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