Breaking news from Washington: budgetary disaster has been averted, once again! The government will not partially shut down tomorrow at midnight, as Congress just successfully passed a continuing resolution through both houses which will keep funding the government until at least the first of March. And they even accomplished this feat one day early!

You'll have to forgive me if I'm not impressed. In the first place, they got it done a day early for an entirely self-serving reason: so they wouldn't be trapped in Washington by a giant snowstorm (scheduled to hit tomorrow). It's an open secret that Congress can indeed get things done very quickly when they really want to. However, they only ever really want to when their own free time is at risk, which is rather pathetic when you think about it.

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It's mostly been lost in the fray of yet another government shutdown crisis, but there was actually some good news out of Washington this week. Congress (are you sitting down?) could actually be on the brink of doing something. No, really! And even more surprising: they could be on the brink of doing something good.

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It is shocking (it always is), but here we are on the brink of the 2024 presidential election cycle's official start. The Iowa caucuses will be held Monday. Most of us, thankfully, will have a few more months to go before being faced with the prospect of going to the polls for our state's primary, when (hopefully) the weather will be a lot better than it is predicted to be in the Hawkeye State three days from now. They may be heading to their polls in the midst of a blizzard, with the temperature forecast to be: "Oh CRAP it is cold!" with windchill factors being as low as: "I can't feel my toes... or my face... just leave me here in this snowbank for the wolves to find...."

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The speaker may have changed, but the underlying dynamics of the Republican-led House have not. Kevin McCarthy was ousted -- the first House speaker in American history to lose his job this way -- because he had to work within the reality that having a slim GOP majority in the House simply did not mean that the hardliners in his caucus got to dictate terms to everyone else in Washington. The Democrats hold the Senate and the White House, and they're never going to knuckle under to the MAGA hardliners and just give them everything they want. Now Mike Johnson is in charge and is facing exactly the same demands from exactly the same members of the GOP's "Chaos Caucus," who still refuse to admit any reality outside of their own warped view of how Washington should work. And Johnson may wind up facing the same fate as McCarthy before all of the dust settles.

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Happy new year, everyone! It is indeed a brand new year, and an election year to boot. The presidential election isn't some faraway thing anymore, as the Republican Iowa caucuses are now less than two weeks away. Then it'll be on to New Hampshire and South Carolina and eventually Super Tuesday, which is quite likely the point where Donald Trump will have functionally wrapped up the GOP nomination.

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In 1992, James Carville defined the focus of Bill Clinton's presidential campaign as: "It's the economy, stupid." For better or worse, the American people (led by the American mainstream media) generally give the sitting president either a whole lot of credit or they assign a whole lot of blame for whatever the current state of the economy happens to be. So no matter what else is going on, the fate of President Joe Biden in the upcoming election is going to be tied in a big way to how people feel about the economy.

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Welcome back to the second of our year-end awards columns! And if you missed it last Friday, go check out [Part 1] as well.

As always, we must begin with a warning for all readers. It's long. Really, really long. Horrendously long. Insanely long. It takes a lot of stamina to read all the way to the end. You have been duly warned! But because it is so long, we certainly don't want to add any more here at the start, so let's just dive in, shall we?

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Welcome to the first installment of our year-end awards!

As always, we must begin with a stern warning: this is an incredibly long article. So long you likely won't make it to the end, at least not in one sitting. It is -- as always -- a marathon, not a sprint.

We have tried to credit readers' nominations where we could, but writing the whole column is such a frenzied activity that we may have omitted the citations here and there -- for which we apologize. Reader suggestions make our job putting together this list a whole lot easier, and we are indeed grateful for the people who do take the time to do so (and you still have a chance to make nominations for next week's awards, we would point out).

OK, since it is so long, let's not make it any longer and get right to it. Here are our winners for the awards categories first created on the McLaughlin Group television show, for the year that was.

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President Joe Biden now has an official impeachment inquiry investigating him in the Republican-held House of Representatives. It is the most singular such inquiry in American history, since nobody -- not even the people who have been pushing the idea -- can say precisely what crime Biden has supposedly committed. So for now, they're just investigating him for the crime of (take your pick): being Joe Biden. Or being a Democratic president. Or beating Donald Trump. Or (most likely, given the Republican monomania on the idea) being Hunter Biden's father.

None of these things are actual crimes, it bears pointing out. But that simply doesn't matter to the House. They're merrily on their way to impeaching Biden for one reason and one reason alone: because Donald Trump wanted them to. Trump is still miffed (to put it mildly) that he's the only U.S. president to have been impeached not one time but twice. So, as far as he is concerned, Republicans have a duty to turn the tables and impeach the man who beat him at the polls, to try to weaken him for the presidential rematch that is shaping up for next year.

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Rudy Giuliani is about to find out the exact pricetag for destroying two innocent people's lives. And it could be as high as tens of millions of dollars. A jury may decide that Giuliani owes the people he defamed as much as $47 million -- and that's before they get around to assessing emotional and punitive damages on top of the base award. And this is just the first lawsuit Giuliani faces for his serial lying about the 2020 election. No matter what the jury settles on as a punishment for Giuliani, it may wind up being small potatoes if the voting machine company Dominion wins its own defamation lawsuit against Rudy -- because they're suing him for a cool $1.3 billion.

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