Welcome to our annual year-end awards! As always, we honor the memory of The McLaughlin show with our categories, and we want to thank the readers who responded to our calls for nominees for them all.

Also as always, it is long. Really, really, insanely long. You have been warned!

And also as always, we'll be back again next Friday for [Part 2].

That's really all we need as an introduction. I mean, it's long enough already! So buckle up boys and girls, here we go....

   Biggest Winner Of 2025

We're going to start off with a very cheerful award, because the Biggest Winner Of 2025 goes to none other than the Democratic Party. I had already picked this out, but I'm going to paste in a nomination sent by reader Kick, because it lists some good details:

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Some of you may have been wondering whether this was even going to happen this year, but here we are, happy to welcome you once again to our year-end begging season (where I shamelessly ask you to send me your hard-earned money to support this site and keep the lights on for the upcoming year).

The reason I held off launching this pledge drive until now is that I was feeling incredibly embarrassed and ashamed of myself because an entire year had gone by (once again) without the website being updated and rebuilt. So our big news: this is now underway! Woo hoo!

Somehow I just couldn't bring myself to ask for more money without finally making good on this long-standing promise, which is why I held off on this announcement until today. Last year, I had actually picked out a web developer and started the process, but he quickly left for foreign shores and "ghosted" me, so it wound up not going anywhere (and leaving me awfully frustrated).

But now I have settled on a new web developer, and the plan is to get a test site up and running before the end of the year. I will then publish a link to this site, so readers can go and try it out, while it is still amorphously under development. This way, you'll have a chance to offer up feedback on what you like, what you hate, or what you want to suggest for additional features.

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I have been very busy all week getting ready for Friday (and a few other things), so I didn't have the time today to write a new article. So I'm re-running an article from early January that was one of the first things I reviewed, when I began looking back over the year that was. It was written a few weeks before Trump took office again, and most of the predictions in it stand the test of time admirably well.

And here's a "watch this space" teaser for everyone -- tomorrow there will be a big announcement here! I'm not going to say what, but I hope everyone will be pleasantly surprised by it, that's all I will say for now. Stay tuned!

Originally published on January 1st, 2025

Donald Trump's "Day One" in office is now less than two weeks away. He promised American voters a lot of action on his first day, but in the past few weeks he seems inordinately focused on some rather odd (one might say: "downright bizarre") goals. He has become a big fan of expanding America in what can only be called imperialistic fashion -- adding Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal to the American map. Today he floated a new idea, this one not a land-grab but instead of a sort of water-grab: he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," for no particular reason (other than to annoy Mexico, one assumes).

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By the time I finish writing this and post it, Donald Trump may have begun speaking to an adoring crowd in Pennsylvania. He is holding a rally there (the first one he's held in quite a while) that will be a de facto kickoff to the Republicans' midterm campaign strategy. Since the party can't run on anything that directly contradicts Trump's positions (because he has such an ideological stranglehold on Republicans), no doubt plenty of GOP politicians will be watching this rally for clues as to what will be acceptable for them to focus on in next year's campaign.

Trump is scheduled to speak about the economy today. Democrats have already seen big successes at the ballot box by running against Trump's economy, and they look exceedingly likely to double down on this strategy throughout all of next year. So Trump will in essence be unveiling the counterargument from the Republican side of the aisle.

Trump's problem is that he's got an incredibly weak hand to play. Which, of course, is all his fault. To extend the metaphor, Trump doesn't just have an incredibly weak hand, he dealt this hand to himself by stacking the deck and choosing which cards he was going to get. So it is impossible to feel sorry for the weak position he's in, since he caused it all to happen. Almost all of it was self-inflicted.

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It's that time of year again! Time to review the past 12 months and hand out awards to those who have earned them.

It's been an eventful year, of course, so many of these categories will have multiple possible winners. Listed below are the categories for the first installment, which will run this Friday. We'll open the nominations up for the second part next week.

And, as always, feel free to interpret the categories however you wish. A lot of these categories could be for a positive thing or a negative thing, depending on how you see it. I've got a lot of work to do this week to review everything from the whole year, so I need all the help I can get. So think back over the whole course of 2025 and let me know who or what you think deserves an award for the following categories:

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America heads into this year's holiday season with a cheerful discussion of whether or not we've committed war crimes. Just another random week in the Donald Trump era, folks! Sorry for being snide, but it's hard to juxtapose the whole "peace on Earth" holiday sentiment with the revelations coming from Washington this week.

America is supposed to be above committing war crimes, of course. We're theoretically supposed to be better than that. In fact, here are a few pertinent quotes about that very subject:

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This article should really be seen as a continuation to yesterday's article, since all it does is add some specifics to the generalized observations I made yesterday. Because both sides in Congress have made some tangible moves in the debate over extending the Obamacare subsidies (which are set to expire on the first of the year). Senate Democrats have presented their plan, which will get a guaranteed floor vote next week, while a centrist group in the House (with enough Republicans to pass a bill if all Democrats supported it) has come up with their own plan. Meanwhile, Republicans in both the House and the Senate are still dithering about what party-line plan they might put forward. So let's run these down, one by one.

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December is going to be a busy month in the political world. The due date to release the Epstein files falls on the 19th. New official figures -- the first in months -- on the economy (jobs and inflation) will be released two weeks from now. But the biggest story all month is going to be whether Congress is going to extend the Obamacare subsidies or not. Right now, it's not looking especially good, but things can change quickly.

A vote is supposed to be held in the Senate next week on a bill of the Democrats' choosing to extend the subsidies. That was the promise given by Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune to end the government shutdown. But so far, it's not looking like enough Republicans will get on board with a simple extension (even one with a few GOP priorities included). Democrats are pretty united on the issue, but Republicans are all over the map. And both sides seem pretty pessimistic about some sort of compromise emerging:

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Today, all eyes in the political world are turning to Tennessee. There's a special election for an open House seat happening today, and it could send shockwaves through Washington no matter who wins the race. If the Democratic candidate wins, it is going to boost Democratic hopes of a "blue wave" election in next year's midterms in a big way, while simultaneously causing deep fear within the Republican Party. If the Republican wins with a small margin of victory, the same thing is going to happen (but in a more subdued way). The only way the election results aren't going to cause a shockwave is if the GOP candidate scores a sweeping victory with at least a double-digit margin.

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The United States of America is once again committing war crimes. In fact, the recent revelation in the Washington Post that there were two survivors of one of the military's missile attacks on small boats, and that a second missile was launched specifically to kill the survivors, was literally a textbook example of a war crime. The entire operation -- killing people who are in international waters who are not at war with the U.S. -- is probably a war crime as well, but with this particular example there is absolutely no doubt. But I for one am not going to hold my breath waiting for any of the people involved to be held to any sort of account for their actions.

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