If our president is going crazy over a non-existent "emergency" at our southern border, could it be called "borderline insanity"? We're just asking....

Puns aside, we are now one day away from the longest government shutdown in modern history. And that record will indeed be broken, since Congress has decamped for the weekend and no talks are currently underway. So it'll be at least Monday before anything happens, and probably a whole lot longer.

It's hard to overstate the depths to which Donald Trump has driven America into, with his petulant tantrum over his beloved wall. Consider the following: now even some Democrats are quietly wishing for Trump to declare monarchical powers to resolve a national emergency that simply does not exist. The thinking is that this is the only way Trump has left to declare victory, so the entire country can move on and the Democrats can get the government open for business once again. That's what we're left with -- hoping Trump stomps on the Constitution because it seems to be the only avenue left back to some semblance of sanity. Here's a peek into this thinking from the Washington Post:

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I thought we could all use a break from all the manufactured Trump Shutdown follies today, so instead I am finally giving in and writing the inevitable first (of many) columns on the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race. I've largely restrained myself from doing so up until now, even though I could have started in right after the midterm elections last year. But now a few Democrats are more-officially sticking their toe in the 2020 water, so it seemed like a good time to provide an initial overview.

Such an overview is going to have to be from about 30,000 feet up, though, because at this point that's about how high you have to get to fully view the Democratic field, which is already miles-wide. There are so many Democrats either running, thinking about running, rumored to be running, or declining to run right now that it's hard to even get an accurate count of them all. So we're not going to have much time for candidate-by-candidate analysis, rather just a series of long lists of who currently falls into which category. This field, of course, will narrow (at least somewhat) as time goes on, so we'll have plenty of time later for discussions of "lanes" and frontrunners-versus-underdogs and all the rest of the horserace hoopla, never fear. For now, though, we're just going to provide the initial (very long) list.

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President Donald Trump held a meeting today with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. It was as pointless as the last few meetings between the three, from all accounts. Reportedly, after Pelosi made her case for opening the government but only extending the budget for the Department of Homeland Security for another month -- to give both sides time to have the border wall fight without penalizing all the federal workers -- Trump asked her point-blank whether she would agree to his wall money in 30 days or not. She said "No," and Trump got up and walked out of the meeting. Which is why the word "pointless" is hard to avoid.

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President Trump just got done delivering the first primetime Oval Office speech of his presidency, which was followed by a rebuttal from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The entire experience was an odd one, mostly for the brevity of both speeches, which were planned to be eight minutes each (I did not time them, but they both seemed to fall in that ballpark). So my snap reactions will likewise be abbreviated, meaning this column won't be anywhere near as long as the ones I write after State Of The Union speeches (for instance).

The usual caveat applies -- all direct quotes were hastily jotted down by me, and I could easily have gotten a word or two wrong or out of place, but I do believe I've captured the essence of what was said. Just to be honest, up front. OK, enough of that, let's get to it.

President Trump's speech reactions

Overall impressions were that Trump kind of rushed through his remarks, although he did stay on script for the entire time (I didn't notice any glaring ad-lib moments, in other words). Normally when reading off a TelePrompTer, Trump is much more singsong and his delivery is full of pauses and odd inflections. Tonight these were mostly absent, but they were replaced with the kind of speedy delivery not usually heard from the president. I'm not sure which style works better for him, but the difference from his usual TelePrompTer pace was indeed noticeable. In appearance, Trump seemed rather squinty-eyed, as if the text on the TelePrompTer wasn't big enough for him to easily read.

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There's a saying among government workers that requires a wee bit of bowdlerization for the first paragraph of a family column: "The eagle poops on Fridays." In other words, government paychecks appear at the end of the week. This week, the eagle is metaphorically constipated, and no such "poop" will be forthcoming to hundreds of thousands of government workers. For many of them, this will be the first missed paycheck, while others have already gone a pay period without being paid. The government shutdown is about to get a lot less theoretical and a lot more worrisome for millions, when you take into account their families and the local businesses they support.

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Program Note: Our apologies, but due to circumstances beyond our control, there will be no Friday Talking Points column this week. We've been dealing with some behind-the-scenes technical problems with the site (and with our network access to our ISP), and so did not have time to put together a Friday column. We realize it's already been two weeks without one (due to the year-end awards columns), so we do apologize for the delay.

What we would have written about this week would have heavily relied upon two themes: how Democrats are easily winning the talking point battle over "the Trump Shutdown" (see how easy that was to do?), and secondly, how breathtakingly expansive the Democrats' first House bill turned out to be. This was covered in great detail (complete with a link to the full text of the bill) by HuffPost, so anyone feeling the loss of this week's FTP column should check that out for what would have been our prime source material today. Although the bill overreaches in a few instances (proposes things which will likely require constitutional amendments, like forcing the Supreme Court to come up with ethics rules for itself, for instance), it is a very ambitious bill with a lot of very excellent reforms built into it and deserves a whole lot more media attention than it is likely to get this week. A third issue that I would have also brought up in passing is the new effort by Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee to introduce two very interesting constitutional amendments: one to prevent presidents from pardoning themselves and one to abolish the Electoral College. This is a very interesting tactic for a Democrat to take, and I would have voiced support for his efforts. Of course, now that a Friday column proved to be impossible today, I will likely write about all of these issues at some point next week.

What follows below is the article I was working on yesterday when the connectivity problems started. I finished it up last night, and thought it would be a good consolation article to run today if I wasn't able to finish a FTP column. So although there won't be a Friday column today, here at least is the Thursday column you should have gotten yesterday.

Nancy Pelosi can now correctly be called Speaker of the House Pelosi once again. It's been eight years since that has been true, most of which the Republicans spent proving their own slogan: "Government doesn't work -- elect us and we'll prove it!" The speakerships of both John Boehner and Paul Ryan never really accomplished all that much, other than one massive tax cut for billionaires and Wall Street. Almost the entire time the GOP was in control, their entire legislative agenda was halted in its tracks not by Democrats, but by their own intransigent Tea Party members. With all of that as prologue, Nancy Pelosi won't have to do much to outperform the two intervening House speakers.

But of course, she's not setting the bar that low. Far from it. Pelosi has big challenges ahead and a large "to do" list to take care of. Fortunately, Democrats are a lot more politically cohesive right now than the Republicans have been for the past eight years. Progressives are just not stupid enough to become "the Tea Party of the left," content only to stop all legislation that doesn't pass their ultra-purity test. Pelosi already has the support of her caucus in a way that neither Boehner nor Ryan ever really could plausibly claim.

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My apologies, but I've been having massive upgrade/router/modem/ISP problems all day today, so there will be no new column. Sad to say, tomorrow's column is also at risk of not appearing. I'll do my best, but at this point can't make any promises....

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Happy new year everyone, and welcome back again to our annual promotion of Lake Superior State University's annual "Banished Words List." That's right, it's time to head once again to the now-frigid shores of Gitche Gumee to see what their word mavens have optimistically banished from use, in the hopes of keeping all our conversations less lazy (and annoying). So without further ado, let's just get right to this year's list:

Wheelhouse

In The Books

Wrap My Head Around

Platform

Collusion

-OTUS

Ghosting

Yeet

Litigate

Grapple

Eschew

Crusty

Optics

Legally Drunk

Thought Leader

Importantly

Accoutrements

Most Important Election Of Our Time

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Welcome back to the second part of our year-end awards column! For those who may have missed it, check out Part 1 from last week to see the awards we've already handed out.

But since these columns are always not only monstrously but downright scroll-bar-defyingly long, let's just dive right back into the 2018 McLaughlin awards, shall we?

   Destined For Political Stardom

This one is really, really easy to call. Last year, nobody knew her name. This year, she is the shining focal point of the incoming House Democratic freshman class. In other words, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is already a rising star in the Democratic firmament.

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This is going to be nothing more than a glorified re-run (or "clip show") sort of column, because I've made this argument so many times before in the past, and nothing about the argument has really changed. What has changed (for the better) is that this is just about the best possible time politically to move such an argument to center stage.

I was inspired to write again about this subject again because of a tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

It's completely unacceptable that members of Congress can force a government shutdown on partisan lines & then have Congressional salaries exempt from that decision.

Have some integrity.

In what I think is the first time I've ever used Twitter to directly communicate with an elected official (I'm still pretty passive, Twitter-wise), I responded back to her with a few links to previous columns:

Don't furlough them, STOP the paychecks. "No Budget, No Pay" works great in California! -- https://tinyurl.com/msjbklp

You're right, we need this on the federal level too. Please revive Bruce Braley's "No Budget, No Pay Act" in next Congress... -- https://tinyurl.com/7mj26h9

The more I think about this, the better an idea it sounds. When Congress reconvenes in January, the government is likely to still be partially shut down. The American public is sick and tired of this particular political tactic, and politicians really should be getting leery of it as well, since it has never actually achieved the goals set out by the hostage-takers. As leverage, shutting the government down seems to be pretty useless and self-defeating. The party pushing the shutdown almost always gets the lion's share of the blame from the public, which is exactly how this one is playing out as well. President Donald Trump pretty much assured this would happen when he pre-emptively announced to the cameras that he and he alone would be responsible for shutting the government down, over a week before it happened. The public has followed through, and largely blames Trump and his party for the current mess. As they should.

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