Welcome back to the weekly political roundup that is Friday Talking Points! We've been on hiatus for the past two weeks, for our annual two-part year-end awards columns (Part 1 and Part 2, in case anyone missed them). So... anything happen while we were away?

Of course it did! Donald Trump played golf for something like a week and a half straight, bringing his total for the year to 91 days spent at one of his own golf resorts. This prompted an amusing reaction from George W. Bush's former chief strategist, Matthew Dowd: "I have a question for the Trump fan club who applauded every time he said Obama played too much golf. if that was a problem, why is it ok that Trump in less than a year has played more golf than Obama did in eight years as President?" Why, indeed. Why was Barack Obama's golfing a serious media story when pretty much every single president has played golf going back to the real aficionados of the sport (Gerald Ford and Dwight Eisenhower, to name two)? Could there be just one thing different between Barack Obama and all other presidents who played golf before him, hmmm? I wonder what that difference could be -- especially now that Donald Trump, another white man, is getting a free pass on the insane amount of time he spends on the golf course.

What's that you say? Trump's golfing wasn't the big story this week? There was, in fact a Wolff at the door, and nobody's certain yet whether Trump lives in a house built of straw(men) or brick (as in: "thick as a...")?

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While I do realize there are all kinds of things happening in the political world right now -- not least among them the juicy slugfest between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump -- all of that is going to have to wait for another day (which is to say, tomorrow's column). Instead, I feel compelled to again write about the same subject I wrote about yesterday. Because Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems to have cast himself into the role of King Canute, desperately ordering the incoming tide to halt and turn back. This didn't work out so well for Canute, and it is not going to work for Sessions, either.

I'm speaking, of course, of the news today that Sessions has overturned the Obama Justice Department's "live and let live" rules on prosecuting marijuana laws in states which have instituted their own laws, in protest of the irrationality of current federal law on the subject. To be blunt, Sessions is picking a fight he is going to lose. The only real question is how much political blowback he causes before he (and/or Donald Trump) realize what a mistake it is.

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For the third day in a row, marijuana is legally available for both purchase and consumption in California, for purely recreational purposes, to any adult age 21 or older. Also, for the third day in a row: the sky did not fall, the sun still rose in the east, and people are not rioting in the streets. Astonishingly, it turned out to be only an acorn that beaned Chicken Little, and none of the dire hellscapes predicted -- for almost a century -- by the government, the Puritans, and the likes of Nancy Reagan has yet come to pass. It's just another day, in fact, little different from all the tens of thousands of days when marijuana was prohibited.

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Welcome to 2018! As always, we like to start the year off on a irreverent note, examining the tireless work which takes place every year on the shores of Gitchee Gumee, far up north in the Lake Superior State University of Michigan. This time of year, it's like eleventy-zillion below zero up there, so you can understand why they sit around desperately trying to stave off cabin fever by coming up with the "official" banished words list in their ceaseless attempts to get the rest of us to stop using insipid, incorrect, or repetitive terms quite so much. So, tongue placed firmly in cheek, let's take a look at the 2018 list of banished words, without further introduction.

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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 what awards have already been handed out.

Since these columns are always monstrously long, let's just dive right back into the 2017 McLaughlin awards, shall we?

   Destined For Political Stardom

We're going to hand this award out in generic fashion, to "women in politics." As a direct result of both the resistance movement against Trumpism and also of the #MeToo scandals, there is a new and encouraging wave of women entering politics right now. Women are signing up to run for office in huge numbers, at all levels of government. This is likely going to lead to a whole bunch of them getting elected next November. Women voters (especially in the suburbs) are going to be the determining factor in getting women candidates elected, as well.

Back in the 1990s, we had a similar year that was dubbed "The Year Of The Women." My bet is that we're going to see the second "Year Of The Women" in politics in 2018. Maybe they'll call it the "Nevertheless, She Persisted" year, who knows?

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Just a quick reminder to everyone, we're still accepting nominations for the second round of our year-end awards. The column will appear this Friday, so you've got until then to make your suggestions.

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[Program Note: To all our friends in Canada, the United Kingdom, and other places of the British persuasion: Happy Boxing Day! To our Catholic readers: Happy Saint Stephen's Day! To all others: Happy Day-After-Christmas!

To prolong everyone's post-holiday bliss, we are not going to write a political column today. Instead, please enjoy this repeat column from a few years back. We'll be busy later writing thank-you notes to everyone who gave us presents this year, most definitely including those who have donated to our annual pledge drive (check that thermometer -- we're getting very close to our yearly goal!).

Also, truth be told, we will be playing with our presents. Which is as it should be. Hope everyone's having a very merry holiday season this year and that you got everything you asked Santa for. Peace to all.]

Originally published December 23, 2013

Ho, Ho, Holy Cow -- Santa Gets Fighter Escort On U.S. Military Site (Reuters)

A U.S. military website showing Santa Claus delivering his presents while guarded by warplanes has some children's advocates worried.

In a twist to its tradition of tracking an animated version of Santa Claus' sleigh and reindeer as he flies around the globe on December 24, the military is adding the animated fighter plane escort to give a realistic feel to the popular feature, said a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

"We wanted to let folks know that, hey, this is a NORAD video, and we're the military and this is our mission," said the spokesman, Navy Captain Jeff Davis.

[Note: The above article is real. What follows, however, is not.]

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Sadly, for the first time, we really have to explain our title. It used to be rather self-evident, but then it's been more than a year since The McLaughlin Group went off the air, after the death of host John McLaughlin.

The show was a political chatfest and ran for decades. Regulars such as Clarence Page and Pat Buchanan used to face off every week on all sorts of subjects, but at the end of the year they put on two special awards shows.

Long ago, we decide to write our own suggestions in an homage (which is so much nicer than "in a blatant ripoff of their bit," don't you think?). We've done so for over a decade now (there's a list of links to all of these at the end of this article, for anyone interested in past awards given).

This year, we continue the tradition, because we truly believe the categories that McLaughlin came up with are worth preserving. It forces us to re-examine the entire year, which always leads to tons of stuff we had completely forgotten about. This is a two-part column, which will also run next Friday. Without further ado, let's don our tuxedo and approach the podium for our first award of 2017....

   Biggest Winner Of 2017

We considered taking a global view of this category, in which case we would have given the Biggest Winner Of 2017 to either China (who is winning more and more on the world stage, as America retreats from global politics in a big way), or Angela Merkel (for her rather impressive re-election), or -- the most obvious -- Vladimir Putin. But we decided to look closer to home.

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[Program Note: Welcome back to what has become a mostly-annual column, here. The reason I'm re-running this column today is that I've been feverishly at work getting tomorrow's column together (the first of our year-end awards columns). Check back tomorrow for the awards, and on the shortest day of the year (or was that yesterday -- I haven't checked...), enjoy my solstice column, written many moons ago. Oh, one technical note, I have corrected "Constantine's wife" to "Constantine's mother," because not checking my facts through sheer laziness has always been part of the fun of blogging. Mea culpa to Saint Helena, and all of that.]

Originally Published December 24, 2007

When is Christmas? And why?

These are questions guaranteed to get you funny looks when you pop them, especially in a gathering of wassail-soaked relatives. But if you're tired of hearing the seemingly-eternal "this is what Uncle Fred did when he was twelve" stories, and you're leery of bringing up politics with your kin from Outer Podunk, then it's at least a conversation-starter that's somewhat neutral. Plus, you can reaffirm your nearest-and-dearests' image of you as a latte-sipping fruitcake who moved away from the glory of the heartland and now lives on (say it with an embarrassed whisper) the coast.

OK, I should stop editorializing here. After all, the subject at hand is Christmas.

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President Trump, in his victory celebration over the passage of the Republican tax bill today, said it was a big Christmas present to the American people. More properly, however, it is really a gigantic Christmas present to the Democratic Party, because it provides a ready-made single issue to construct their campaign platform around, for next year's midterm elections. The bill is already wildly unpopular, so Democrats should spend much of the next year reinforcing this already-baked-in perception among the public. There is a window of opportunity to do so, since nobody will really be sure how the new tax system is going to work out for their family until April of 2019 -- months after the midterm elections happen.

The basic theme Democrats should use is unfairness. Republicans are hobbled by the facts, and so far have done an abysmal job of selling their tax cut to the public. Instead, the public is already overwhelmingly convinced this is nothing more than shoveling money at the wealthy and Wall Street, at their expense. They're right, and all Democrats need to do is to agree with the public, essentially. The big lie of "trickle-down" has finally lost its appeal, to put this another way, which Democrats have been saying all along. The opportunity to make this case has never been better, in fact.

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