In just about every presidential election, the political punditry tries to frame what happened in it in the easiest possible way, sometimes pinning a win or loss on a certain demographic slice of the electorate (remember "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads"?) and sometimes putting the focus on a single oversimplified issue. One of the big themes in this regard for the last election was the price of eggs. True to form, they even slapped a cutesy label on it: voters were angry about "eggflation."

Which is why we sincerely hope that Donald Trump is asked about it as often as possible -- say, once a week, at a minimum -- now that he is president again. Because for all his promises, eggflation is going to be a very tough problem for him to solve.

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It's been clear for a while that the Republican Party has become completely amoral. Their partisanship has become more important to them than any quaint notions of right or wrong. To them, right versus left is all that matters.

Republicans now refuse to condemn pretty much anything that any other Republican does -- no matter how amoral -- starting at the top with President Donald Trump. The GOP has claimed for decades that they are the "law and order" party, but that all goes out the window when Trump pardons hundreds of people who assaulted police officers. Supporting cops is less important than supporting a fellow Republican. Morals are conveniently set aside whenever necessary.

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I mean that title facetiously, of course, since I have not recently committed any crimes for which I would need any sort of official pardon. But then, neither did Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But before I get to addressing the flurry of pardons issued this week by Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I would like to dismiss one issue that has been raised in the midst of it all (indeed, because it is so easy to dismiss). Some have decided that "pardon reform" is now necessary, to rein in what is essentially an unchecked power of U.S. presidents.

It sounds nice, on the face of it. Put some legal guardrails around the ability of a president to erase any and all federal crimes, prosecuted or not. What guardrails would be necessary or beneficial is an open question, but to me it's not even worth debating. I say this not in defense of any of the pardons issued this week, but because the process to change this so is so hard that actually reforming the presidential ability to pardon would be a near-impossibility.

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Well, that didn't take long. Hours after swearing an oath to uphold and defend the United States Constitution, President Donald Trump issued an executive order which attempted to rewrite one part of that same Constitution. He did so unilaterally, without any action by Congress. Of course, neither Congress nor a U.S. president is actually capable of changing the Constitution's text on their own -- that would require a constitutional amendment ratified by three-fourths of the states' legislatures. But that pesky detail didn't stop Trump from trying.

Trump's order would (if upheld by the courts, which is highly doubtful) end "birthright citizenship" by putting new restrictions on who would be considered an American citizen at birth. This would essentially ignore (or radically change the meaning of, at the very least) part of the Fourteenth Amendment. Here is the text of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, in full:

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Today is a federal holiday to honor the memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. As I sometimes do, I thought today would be a good day to both reflect on King's life and what he stood for, while reading some of his own words.

King did much more than give one memorable "I Have A Dream" speech, but sadly that's what he has been distilled down to in our national collective consciousness. King fought valiantly for what he believed, always using the tool of non-violence to convince others of the rightness of his cause.

Because of his exemplary work, in 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This enraged some in America (J. Edgar Hoover among them), but to King he felt the honor was somewhat undeserved. At the time, he was the youngest recipient of the award ever (he was only 35 years old). In the speech he gave in Oslo accepting the award, he was almost apologetic: "Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize." Because King knew there was a lot more for him to achieve, he felt the award was somewhat premature, at best.

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And so we come to the final Friday Talking Points of President Joe Biden's term in office.

It is perhaps appropriate that the funeral of Jimmy Carter happened in the midst of Biden winding down his final weeks. Because Joe Biden -- another one-term Democratic president like Jimmy -- will likely become more appreciated as time goes by, just as Carter was.

Joe Biden had a pretty spectacular first two years in office, in terms of getting legislation passed. Granted, he had a Democratic Congress to work with and the continuing crisis of a pandemic to spur the politicians to actually act. He used both to get a sweeping agenda passed which will have an impact for years to come. But he had to grapple with two corporate-friendly Democrats in the Senate who held him back from achieving an even-more-historic agenda. If the full "Build Back Better" plan had made it past Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, then Americans would doubtlessly feel a lot differently (and better) about government's role in their economic lives.

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Watching President Joe Biden's farewell address from the Oval Office last night was rather bittersweet. For me at least, it all had a flavor of "what might have been." But in the end, Biden's promised bridge to a new generation of leadership really led nowhere.

While campaigning early in 2020, Biden appeared on a stage with three other prominent Democrats, who were at the time "expected to be considered for the vice presidential nomination" -- Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Gretchen Whitmer. Biden said during this campaign event: "Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country." While Biden never actually did explicitly promise to serve only a single term as president, many read his comments to mean exactly that -- Biden would defeat Donald Trump, run a bridging presidency, and then step aside and make way for a younger generation of Democrats to carry the torch forward.

This didn't exactly work out as planned, obviously. As Biden leaves office, the Democratic Party is at this moment almost completely leaderless. There is no one individual the party looks towards as its future. The 2028 presidential primary season is going to be brutal on the Democratic side, as a whole bunch of candidates will vie for the mantle of the party's leadership. Until then, we've got Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, both now only minority leaders in their respective chambers of Congress. Neither one is all that well-known to the public at large, and neither one truly speaks for his whole party. There are a number of state governors who long to be seen as the party's true leader, but none of them has really achieved that status at this point.

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Hearings are now underway in the Senate on Donald Trump's various nominees to fill out his administration, but so far it has all felt like it is leading to a very foregone conclusion. American politics has gotten so tribal that Republicans are now willing to overlook just about anything for one of their own, no matter how deeply disqualifying such things would have been in the past. Trump will quite likely get almost all his picks confirmed, no matter what disturbing things exist in their past.

This is more than a little bit depressing, but it is the end result of the Republican Party being remade into a cult of personality with a very flawed Dear Leader at the top. Since Trump has gotten away with so many things himself, how can Republicans say any of it is disqualifying in his choices for his administration? The Republican Party has become completely amoral -- there is no moral line in the sand they are not willing to cross, these days. At least, that's the way it seems, after watching some of the confirmation hearings. If Trump did it (or worse) then how can GOP senators say it is a disqualification for holding office? That's the only moral yardstick (such as it is) that exists for them, anymore. As a measure of how much things have changed in the GOP, just imagine for a moment what John McCain would have had to say about some of the military and national security nominees Trump has come up with. But mavericks like McCain are (for the most part) either gone or have been cowed into silence by the threat of the MAGA crowds backing a primary challenger.

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The debate over transgender athletes has now moved from the campaign trail to the Republican Congress, as the House of Representatives just passed a sweeping ban on transgender girls and women in sports, after Republicans spent an enormous amount of time and money running on the issue in last year's election. But one very important point in this debate is simply not being heard by most people -- the actual scope of the situation. Here is how the Washington Post started its article today on the bill moving through the House:

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Maybe it's time to bring back the concept of adversaries settling their insults with a good old-fashioned duel? That's the thought I have been having while watching the flurry of playground tantrums and unrestrained bullying spewing forth from the highest ranks of MAGA supporters. Maybe Steve Bannon and Elon Musk should just count off ten paces and take potshots at each other -- they could even make it pay-per-view and make a fortune! Well... whomever was left alive might, at any rate.

I am only being semi-facetious here, since it already seems like American society is trending towards stylized legal violence between antagonists anyway. But even without the pistols at dawn, the infighting has already become epic in nature and we haven't even begun -- since there's still a whole week left before Donald Trump gets sworn in.

The core problem, of course, is that people who both feed into and try to emulate Trump have such enormous egos and are so convinced that they are right in absolutely everything that they chafe when they bump up against another MAGA-influencing blowhard who has staked out some contrary position. Neither side will ever back down, and both sides emulate Trump's "all-out attack, all the time" persona, which could easily lead to trouble in Trumpland in all kinds of unforeseeable ways in the very near future. What we're seeing now is just a preview of this unfolding, most likely.

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