Since it is a slow news week (pardoning turkeys and whatnot), I thought today would be a good day to bring everyone a site update of sorts. I have started the process of revamping this website, and hope the whole thing will be completed either during the year-end holiday break (very optimistic) or in early 2024 (more realistic). The timeline will depend on how complicated the entire process turns out to be, I should mention.

Also laziness. I have begun vetting website designers but have not contracted with one yet. I am going to try to make this a priority for the upcoming weeks, but then I am a notorious procrastinator so we'll just have to see how that works out. Just to give "full disclosure" on my own shortcomings, as it were.

Anyway, I thought I'd share my overall vision for the update and solicit your feedback. I did all the web design and coding for the site as it stands today, but have only updated it once, so I realize it still is somewhat of a relic from the 2000s. I have decided not to attempt to do the coding this time around, because it is time-consuming (I'd have to get up to date on everything) and complicated. I have saved up for this transition (from your generous donations over the past few years) so I have a budget to have it done professionally this time around. Hopefully, this will help keep it less buggy, at the very least.

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Will we ever get to see Donald Trump debate anyone before the next presidential election? That was my immediate thought upon reading that the Commission on Presidential Debates (C.P.D.) has just announced the schedule for their four planned debates (three presidential, one vice-presidential). I consider this to be rather optimistic for a number of reasons, since at this point the safe bet would either be that any debates which are held won't be run by the C.P.D. -- or that Donald Trump won't show up for any debate (no matter who is running it).

This isn't just speculation, either. Over a year and a half ago, the Republican National Committee voted to boycott any debates held by the C.P.D., calling them "biased." So one political party is already on the record stating they won't participate. That's a big hurdle right there.

Even if the C.P.D. somehow assuages the concerns of the R.N.C. enough for them to reverse this stance, that has to be seen as pretty far-fetched at this point. Especially considering that Donald Trump is the odds-on favorite to walk away with the Republican nomination. Trump, after all, hasn't even shown up for any of the primary debates run directly by the R.N.C., so even if the party bigwigs were somehow to get on board with the C.P.D.'s schedule, there is no guarantee that Trump will show up for any of them.

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Over 20 years ago -- right around when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of our state -- we were fond of shocking people by pointing out: "Politics has become indistinguishable from show business." The entertainment industry and our political system had been slowly merging, ever since the ascension of B-movie actor Ronald Reagan to the White House in the 1980s. But we have to say, we never foresaw the day when politics would become completely replaced by entertainment and entertainment alone. And we seem to be fast approaching that point.

Part of this evolution has been the shift in power away from the party machinery to individual politicians. These days, doing outrageous (but entertaining) things in politics means you get instantly rewarded -- you get invited onto news shows to be even more entertaining while explaining your outrageousness, your name gets known because of all this exposure, people who enjoy your antics begin directly donating to your campaign, and so you acquire money and with it, political power. You will notice that the party apparatus plays zero role in this equation. Which is one big reason the parties are now so toothless to police their own ranks.

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Congress has now successfully punted their budget negotiations into the next calendar year. The most astonishing part of this fact is that they managed to do so two days before the deadline, which (these days) is actually pretty impressive. We didn't go down to the wire with midnight votes, and we didn't have to see the media go through one of their "The government is about to shut down!" frenzies. So that's progress, of a sort.

But the big fight still remains. And from all indications, it's going to be a doozy. I wouldn't even venture odds on the chances of Speaker Mike Johnson being able to hold his leadership position after the dust settles, in fact, since he faces a rather impossible situation with his own caucus. There may just be too many House GOP members who are absolutely divorced from the legislative realities in Washington for Johnson to survive.

Since we just punted the ball to mid-January and the beginning of February (in Johnson's gimmicky "two-step ladder"), it is worth taking a pause to survey where everything stands and what is likely to happen early next year.

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What is one to make of the sudden rise in physical altercations (or threats thereof) in the halls of Congress? Well, you can play it for comedy, that's certainly the first impulse. Or you can adopt a sort of "Tsk, tsk!" tone and go for the moral highroad. Then there is the traditional fallback of the opposition party using it to score political points. But in these uncertain times (to say the least) one might be tempted to fit this into a bigger picture and say it is part and parcel of a dark and very dangerous trend in American politics right now: the normalization and acceptance (by one party) of political violence.

Let's take each of these in turn. Feel free to support any of them -- they all make a certain amount of sense, and they're not mutually exclusive (you can mix and match). And only time will tell whether this trend accelerates or continues at the school-playground level it's been at this particular week.

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The House of Representatives actually did their job today -- which is surprising enough right there -- but the truly shocking part (to me, at any rate) is that they did so three whole days early! America is facing the possibility of a government shutdown just after midnight Friday, which normally would have resulted in a standoff right up until the last possible minute -- followed by a legislative frenzy to get something on President Joe Biden's desk to avoid the shutdown. That the House passed a bill late on Tuesday seems like progress, at least using the measuring stick of how things normally happen in one of these standoffs.

The vote was 336-95, with 209 Democrats and 127 Republicans voting for it and two Democrats and 93 Republicans voting against it. Although this is very similar to what Speaker Kevin McCarthy did in the last round of "shutdown showdown," it seems for the moment that Speaker Mike Johnson will be able to keep his job afterwards. The hotheads in the GOP seem to be giving Johnson a free pass on how he passed the bill (and what it contains), due mostly to him inheriting the entire situation right at the beginning of his speakership. Or perhaps they just don't want to go through the chaos of trying to pick another speaker right away. For whatever reason, Johnson's job appears safe -- for now, at least.

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Donald Trump is not being coy about what he would do if he became president a second time, and his vision for his second term is downright frightening. He would rule as a strongman or dictator and implement all of the darkest fantasies both he and his even-more-frightening advisors have been having for years. This is not an overblown or hysterical thing to say anymore -- if anything, it is the polite and watered-down version, since I didn't use the words "Nazi" or "Hitler" in describing Trump's dystopian plans.

Think I am overreacting? This past weekend, Trump gave a speech on the subject of Veterans Day. Here's the important part, delivered towards the end:

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There were supposed to be three big political stories this week, but in the end two of them turned out to be duds. Donald Trump testified at his New York fraud trial, but without video or audio recordings of him answering questions under oath, the impact was significantly lessened. The other Republican presidential candidates (the five who qualified, at any rate) met for their third Republican debate, but it mostly turned out to be a snoozefest.

Tuesday night, however, more than lived up to expectations. The off-year elections which were held ended up as a big night for Democrats almost across the board. Put quite simply: abortion rights won. Big time. Everywhere.

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So last night we got the third Republican debate and it wasn't even worth taking notes for. I kept thinking to myself that it was the most pointless exercise in politics around, really. To be fair, with fewer candidates on the stage, they each got plenty of screen time to talk, there were only one or two dustups where people talked over each other (when Vivek Ramaswamy tried to bully Nikki Haley, to no avail), and the subjects they discussed were indeed substantive ones. It was a real presidential debate, in other words -- nowhere near as much of a circus sideshow as the previous two.

But the most notable aspect of it was the sheer meaninglessness of it all. Donald Trump was not on the stage, and he is consistently polling in the high 50s among Republican voters. This means at this point he's got an absolute lock on the Republican nomination, with roughly two months to go before the first caucus or primary is held. Unless one of the candidates from last night catches fire in a big way, it's hard to argue anything other than that it is all but inevitable that Trump will win the nomination. And nothing anybody did last night seemed like it was nearly enough to catch any kind of fire with the GOP base voters.

So instead of a microanalysis of sheer meaninglessness, I decided to write today about the rest of the field, which grew in two significant ways today. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced he would not be running for re-election (which just about guarantees a pickup for the Republicans in the Senate). And Jill Stein announced she would be the Green Party's presidential nominee this time around.

Manchin is not exactly being coy about his plans, either. He is making his bid for the presidential nomination from the "No Labels" effort -- which has tens of millions of dollars behind it and is already getting itself on state ballots in multiple states. Manchin wasted no time in making this pivot, as evidenced by his statement of retirement:

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What was previously merely obvious has now become downright undeniable: the right to have an abortion is the most potent political issue around right now. When women's reproductive rights are on the ballot, it is a winning issue. Every time. This is going to help Democrats and continue to hurt Republicans for as long as women's rights are not universally protected in every state in the Union.

Looking back, it is rather amusing now to remember that right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many political pundits were predicting that the issue would fade so quickly in the public eye that it probably wouldn't even resonate in last year's midterms (held only a few months after the decision was handed down). "Voters have short attention spans," they told each other, "so by November everyone will have forgotten all about it -- or it won't change their vote, at the very least."

They were wrong.

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