It's that time of year again! That time when I shamelessly ask for your money, to support the site and keep the lights on for the upcoming year....

And, as always, there will be kittens! Adorable fluffy kittens, to mesmerize you and break down your natural resistance to opening your wallet and handing out free money.

It's been a rough year, obviously, and there's not a whole lot to look forward to next year, but I am committed to commenting on the clown show politics has now become in order to try to make some sort of sense of it all for the whole of 2025.

The biggest thing readers will have to look forward to is our upcoming site redesign, which (hopefully) will be underway in January. Our site is indeed woefully out of date, but that will all change for the better very soon now. But this time around, I won't be doing the programming work myself but instead farming it out... which is going to cost money.

So let's move right along to the kittens, shall we?

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

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President Joe Biden, at the end of the Thanksgiving break, decided to pardon his son Hunter. This has led to some very mixed feelings among Democrats and a whole lot of gleeful "I told you so!" responses from Republicans. Both the decision and the ramifications of it are complex, obviously.

At the core of the matter is a father who had the extraordinary power of making his son's legal problems vanish with his signature. Few parents ever have such sweeping powers to affect their child's life in this fashion. And few parents would refrain from using such a power if it was available. If you have children, you have to ask yourself: "If my son or daughter were facing prison time and I could make it all go away, wouldn't I do so in a heartbeat?" That's a very personal thing, obviously. No parent wants to see their child pay such heavy consequences -- but almost no parents ever get such an extraordinary chance to erase such consequences.

Should Joe Biden have pardoned his son? Morally, politically, ethically? That is currently being debated by many. There are conflicting reasons pro and con, as with any such tough decision. Let's run down the ones I have heard today already (in no particular order, pro or con):

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First, a program note. This will be the last column for this week, as I will be taking a break (and heartily wish everyone out there a very happy turkey day tomorrow!). Regular columns will resume on Monday.

Second, a big decision. Like many, I have been pretty depressed about the prospect of four more years of an absolute buffoon leading this country, and I know full well the toll keeping up with it all takes on me (from the first go-'round). So I have been doing some soul searching as I wondered whether it was even worth all that effort (and exhaustion), or whether I should just gracefully retire and just wrap up my blogging efforts for good.

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Since it is Thanksgiving week, I am going to write a positive article today about Donald Trump (well, semi-positive, at any rate...).

Of course, there is indeed a whole universe of negative aspects of having Trump as president again, but even I have to admit that Trump has had a few positive effects on the Republican Party -- mostly by his insistence that they blindly follow him in all things. This has meant the party as a whole has had to largely accept some of Trump's very non-traditional stances on issues (non-traditional for conservatives or Republicans, that is). Trump, unlike many of the ideologues who used to set the party's direction and policy objectives, has the ability to occasionally spot an issue where the GOP's traditional position is so unpopular that it winds up hurting them at the ballot box. Two of these issues in particular stand out. Trump can't truly be said to be "on the right side" of either of these issues, and his objection to the more-extreme positions the Republicans traditionally have taken is rather thin and transactional. But it's better than where the party was headed without Trump, so he at least deserves partial credit for how he's changed the party's orthodoxy. And then finally, Trump has now made one cabinet pick that even plenty of Democrats will likely get behind in the Senate, when it comes time for their confirmation vote.

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Since it's going to be a short holiday week anyway, I though today was a good day to wallow in grammatical pedantry. Because I have a nit to pick with America's media editors. So fair warning to all -- today's column is about nothing more than me being linguistically annoying.

Elon Musk, Donald Trump's "first buddy" (as he calls himself), is going to team up with Vivek Ramaswamy to set up a group to slash government spending. The moniker Musk picked for this group is a misnomer, since it won't actually be a federal "department" of anything, but Musk reverse-engineered the name to boost his favored cryptocurrency anyway, coming up with the "Department Of Government Efficiency," or "DOGE."

That's the way I have been capitalizing it, at any rate. Because I apparently have different standards than everyone else in the editorial world.

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Well, that was quick. As many have amusingly pointed out, the nomination of Matt Gaetz to be Donald Trump's attorney general didn't even last a full Scaramucci. Eight days, from beginning to end, was all it took. It's more than he deserved, really.

There was a whole bunch of tea-leaf-reading after Gaetz announced he was giving up his bid. Was Gaetz really just preparing to run for Florida governor and concocted the whole thing as a convenient way to bury that damning House Ethics Committee report? We have to admit, we do find this one convincing (especially since today Gaetz announced he will not attempt returning to the House). Or was Gaetz a "stalking horse" put out there to be so odiously bad that he distracted from all the other odiously bad cabinet appointees Trump has been announcing? Would senators (of both parties) spend all their energies on Gaetz and then be so exhausted that they let through all the others without much protest? If that were accurate, Gaetz would have stayed in the fracas until the bitter end, though, which he didn't.

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Matt Gaetz announced today that he has withdrawn his name from consideration to be the next attorney general of the United States. It seemed his nomination had a minor problem.

Sorry, but it's almost impossible not to treat the whole sordid story as a joke. Gaetz was a completely laughable candidate from the start, so it's hard not to have a few final laughs as he exits. After all, the nomination of Gaetz didn't even last a full Scaramucci!

Kidding aside, I do have to wonder whether this was the plan all along. From the start, there was speculation that this was all very conveniently timed to allow Gaetz to escape what is reportedly a very damning report from the House Ethics Committee being made public. If Gaetz hadn't been nominated, this report likely would have been released last Friday. Gaetz reportedly has plans to run for Florida governor in 2026, and it would be easier for him to do so if the report stays buried.

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Do Democrats still have a "big tent" party, or have they now morphed to being a "small tent" party by insisting on too many must-pass litmus tests? That is a question Democrats should really be asking themselves now, after suffering a humiliating election defeat. That's the traditional way to put it, but at the risk of using an offensive term, what they really need to decide is whether they're going to allow what might be called "Cafeteria Democrats" to exist peacefully within their party or not.

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The 2024 election is not yet over. Well, the ballots have all been cast -- the act of voting in the election is over -- but we're still waiting for the final results in a handful of districts in the House of Representatives. And right now, it is looking like the election didn't change the makeup of the House one bit. This could slightly change, but only by a small number. That's fairly remarkable in an election where the Republicans gained seats in the Senate and took back the White House.

As of this writing, there are five districts still outstanding -- two in California, one each in Iowa and Ohio, and the at-large Alaska seat. As things stand, Republicans are ahead in three of these races while Democrats lead in the other two. If that winds up being the final result, then the makeup of the House will not have changed by a single seat.

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Although Donald Trump is known for tossing aside any political conventions or traditions he doesn't like, there's one aspect of his transition that seems rather jaw-dropping, although few have commented on it (other than by making jokes). Ultra-cynical observers of American politics have long denounced the wealthy (not to mention corporations) for "buying" politicians. If you've got enough money, then you can easily fund a re-election campaign... or fund a primary challenge if this carrot doesn't work as intended. From that point on, they have certain politicians "in their pocket," and can count on them to vote to support their interests.

This has been rampant in American politics for a very long time, of course. Campaign-finance reforms are occasionally enacted, but there's a saying in Washington: "Money in politics is like rain on a paved road... there will always be cracks that allow it to seep in." And ever since the Supreme Court ruled that money equals free speech in politics, campaign finance laws are notable only for their weakness (or their non-existence). The business of buying politicians has been made easy, which has led to not just a rainfall of people using political donations to buy influence, but an absolute flood.

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