This is the Tom Harbin Program.

Well happy week of Christmas today is the shortest day of the year if I'm remembering

correctly.

It might have been yesterday, might have been last night, the longest night of the year,

or it's tonight.

But we're on the winter solstice and for those of us living way up north, and I certainly

noticed this the years that Louise and I lived in New Hampshire and Vermont as well.

Boy, when the sun goes down at 3.30 or 4 in the afternoon, you notice it.

It's just like, whoa, what's going on?

Eddie, how happy winter solstice.

The holiday, you know, this was the day pre-Christianity when the head priest in some village in

Germany would go up on the top of a mountain and light a pine tree on fire to reignite the

sun because the days had been getting shorter and shorter and shorter and then tomorrow

and the next day and the next day as the days get longer and longer, people will say,

oh, he did it again, look at that, you know, keep him in power for another year.

And thus we light Christmas trees, which are actually solstice trees.

But anyway, because, you know, Jesus wasn't lighting trees and things.

I wanted to start out with two stories, one about the stimulus bill and I'll get to that in just a

minute. But the other about COVID and this new variation of COVID that has caused not only Boris

Johnson, the conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom of fellow in arms with Donald

Trump and Mitch McConnell and, you know, basically the Republican Party in the United States and the

UK, right down to the point that Boris Johnson let the virus just rip wild through the British

...