President Joe Biden will not be attending the coronation of King Charles III tomorrow, which is entirely appropriate (although he is sending First Lady Dr. Jill Biden instead, out of respect). No U.S. president has ever attended a British coronation, and with good reason -- after all, we fought a whole war just so no American would ever have to show any sort of fealty to any King or Queen of England ever again. But even though Biden won't be there, the two men do share one notable similarity: they both waited all their lives -- decades and decades of it -- for the chance to sit at the head of their country. So it's pretty easy to see they do share how long the wait has been for both of them.

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Since I know next to nothing about macroeconomics, I don't feel qualified to comment on today's news that the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates another 0.25 percent. They indicated that this will be the last one for a while, and inflation has already come down dramatically without crumbling the rest of the economy, but the future (as always) is uncertain. That's about the most intelligent commentary I can offer up on the matter.

Instead, let's take a look at how the Republican field of candidates for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination is shaping up. Because it seems certain that the number of candidates actually in the race is going to soon expand.

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It is a rare day when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nikki Haley agree on anything, but both of them are now on the same page on one particular subject -- that Senator Dianne Feinstein needs to resign her Senate seat if she can no longer do the required duties. I share this view, personally, and my opinion is perhaps more relevant than either of theirs, since I am an actual constituent of Feinstein's. California deserves to have two senators that are able to show up and cast votes and represent the most-populous state in the United States Senate. Feinstein hasn't been able to make it to Washington since February, and every week that goes by is another week of delay for many of President Biden's judicial nominees. If Feinstein weren't a crucial vote on the committee responsible for vetting such nominees, perhaps I wouldn't feel as strongly about it, but she is -- and the Republicans have blocked Chuck Schumer from replacing her on that committee. Feinstein has already announced she will not be running for re-election next year, so asking her to step down now isn't as contentious (or as insulting) as it might seem.

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President Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election today, releasing a three-minute video in which he explains why he's running. As the ad makes clear, Biden will be running on one basic concept: freedom. He's in favor of it, and in favor of Americans having more of it. The Republican Party countered with a 30-second ad of their own, in which they present an apocalyptic vision of what a second Biden term would be like. No, that is not hyperbole or an exaggeration. The only other possible word to use is "dystopian." They have outdone themselves in the fearmongering department (where they regularly excel). Since the GOP doesn't have a nominee yet, they are restricted only to offering up criticism of Biden (whether real or, in this case, entirely imagined), perhaps hoping that their eventual nominee will offer up some sort of positive vision of their own (which doesn't exactly seem likely, but hey, it could happen, I suppose). Since Biden is almost certainly going to skate to the Democratic nomination unopposed (or "unopposed by any Democrat the voters would actually nominate," to be technically accurate), this means that for at least the rest of this calendar year, it may stay a contest between: "Freedom," and: "Be afraid, be very afraid!"

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There have been two legal developments this week which might go a long way toward proving that creating a business model out of peddling lies to unsuspecting people is maybe not the best plan of action -- unless, of course, your name happens to be Donald Trump. Trump is the king of all election-denying grifters, and so far nobody's scratched his Teflon coating -- although even Trump may eventually have to face some sort of music for monetizing falsehoods. One of the things the special counsel investigating Trump is reportedly looking into is how Trump made pitches to donors big and small between the 2020 election and January 6th. Trump raised a lot of money promising that it would be used to fight to "Stop The Steal," but he never actually created such a fund. But for the time being at least, Trump has been able to skate away from any consequences for gaslighting his supporters. This is now no longer true for others who jumped on the stolen-election bandwagon. Both Fox News and Mike Lindell are now having to pay for their lies, and this could just be the start of both of them -- and others -- having to cough up to pay for the damage they have done.

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There's a new reality in American politics, and one political party is reaping the benefits of it while the other is trapped in a downward spiral of ever-increasing extremism. Some Republicans are beginning to understand the power of the sleeping giant they have awoken, but there's really no easy way out from the conundrum they have created for themselves. Abortion is going to be a potent political issue for at least the next few elections, and Republicans' only answer so far is to double down, triple down, or quadruple down on forcing the most extreme positions they can come up with on as many of the American people as they possibly can.

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Some news was made over the weekend, as another Republican unofficially threw his hat into the presidential primary ring. This, depending on how you count them, brings the list of serious declared candidates to either three or four. Or you could count the number of people who are definitely running (whether they have announced or not), which would make Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson either the sixth or the seventh candidate in the race. Hutchinson made his pre-announcement announcement this weekend on a Sunday morning television show, which came as a surprise to many -- myself included (mostly because I don't think he has even a prayer of winning the nomination). Many others, hearing the news, reacted with: "Asa who?"

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy just made his opening bid in the high-stakes poker game he wants to play with President Joe Biden over raising the debt ceiling. Biden's position from the start has been that America can't afford playing games with the full faith and credit of the United States on the table, and he has called on McCarthy to play exactly the same game of poker that gets played every year, but with only the usual stakes -- which, at worse, might lead to a temporary government shutdown. Biden wants a clean bill to raise the debt ceiling from Congress and then he will be open to holding negotiations for the annual federal budget (which is an entirely separate matter).

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Although the American news media hasn't paid it a whole lot of attention, Israel now seems to be teetering on the brink of an existential crisis over what form of government it is going to have -- one geared towards democracy and checks and balances, or one headed in a much more authoritarian direction. While international news is routinely given short shrift in America (unless our own troops are somehow involved), what seems striking to me are the parallels between what Benjamin Netanyahu is currently attempting to do and what a second Donald Trump presidential term might look like here.

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On one of the last days of the year 1170, an English king seems to have begun a long tradition of what might now be known as "mobspeak." Like unto a mobster capo who is cautious about saying or ordering his minions to do specific things which he might later be found guilty of, King Henry II -- speaking about a man who was a powerful rival at the time, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket -- uttered the ultimate in "deniability" to his knights. The wording is in doubt, since this all happened a very long time ago, but the most common phrasing known today is: "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" We personally prefer the version that calls him a "meddlesome priest" instead, just for the Scooby Doo vibe, but the only account written by a contemporary of Henry worded it (in Latin): "What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!" This version, we feel -- with only slight modernizations of the language -- could easily have been uttered by Donald Trump. It includes shaming his own followers ("miserable drones and traitors") for being insufficiently loyal and fervent in his defense, a personal playground insult to the object of his wrath ("low-born cleric"), as well as overdramatizing his own victimhood ("treated with such shameful contempt"). The whole statement is downright Trumpian, when you think of it.

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