Welcome back to the second part of our year-end awards column! If you missed it, please feel free to check out [Part 1], too.

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Welcome to the first installment of our year-end awards!

We do have to warn readers, right up front, that this is an insanely long article. If you're one of those "tl;dr" types of people, we would strongly advise you to go find a short listicle somewhere else, to read instead. Because this will be a marathon, not a sprint (as always).

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There will be a significant phone call made in Washington today. It may even be happening as I write this. President Joe Biden and Senator Joe Manchin are going to talk directly to each other in an effort to strike some sort of deal on Biden's Build Back Better agenda -- call it a summit of the Joes.

Manchin, of course, is never at a loss for reasons why he still can't bring himself to publicly support the bill being crafted in the Senate. These reasons shift over time and he's always willing to create new ones if previous issues he has raised have already been addressed. Months ago, he called for a "pause" on the whole process, which must translate to: "let's just not do anything for another year or two," since no matter how much time passes he still seems to feel no sense of urgency whatsoever.

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Even though it is still laughably early to make any such future predictions -- especially when it comes to both the economy and politics -- Joe Biden and the Democrats could actually be poised to have a decent shot in next year's midterm elections.

That may sound shocking to some, mostly because pundits are currently predicting doom and gloom for both Biden's presidency and the midterms. But next November is still a long way away, and things change over time. Including current preconceptions.

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Congress seems to be dispensing with all the other high-profile things that were on its calendar for the end of the year, and it's still only the second week in December. This could bode well for the chances of the Build Back Better bill actually passing the Senate on Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's stated timeline ("before Christmas"). Additionally, the bill seems to have acquired two things that will ultimately help both its passage through Congress and its appeal to the public: a deadline and an excellent "poster child" issue.

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I have to begin by apologizing for the trivial nature of today's column. It seems that after posting my annual cute kittens yesterday (to kick off our 2021 Holiday Fundraising Drive) I am now getting in touch with my inner Grinch. Or Scrooge, maybe. Or my inner nitpicky pedant, at the very least.

Because when I read the news this morning, I saw all the media hyperventilation over the arson attack which destroyed what Fox News calls (with capital letters, of course) their "All-American Christmas Tree" outside their New York headquarters. Pretty much every other news organization reported it exactly the same way Fox did -- as the destruction of "a Christmas tree." But this is not correct. It is not true. It is, to coin a phrase, fake news. Because it's pretty easy to tell, when seeing photos or videos of the arson or the aftermath that it is not actually a tree.

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Democrats, as a whole, are pretty bad about messaging. Every so often a brilliant orator breaks this mold (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama) by displaying an ease of communicating with average Americans on a relatable level while still clearly getting their point across. But for the most part, Democratic politicians struggle to master what should be a basic political artform. This problem shows up in an acute way when the subject is the economy. Democrats perpetually shy away from touting economic gains because they fear sounding "out of touch" with the people out there who are still struggling. Republicans, on the other hand, never worry about this at all -- they tout their own successes as a never-before-seen golden age of economic bliss, no matter what is actually going on around kitchen tables across the country. The GOP hammers home this "things are great!" message so effectively that a lot of people start thinking positively about the future even if their own circumstances haven't changed (or have actually gotten worse). Democrats never tap into this inherent optimism because they're always worried that someone somewhere is going to react negatively to hearing some positive news.

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The Supreme Court has put America on notice. Once again, it is about to roll back a basic constitutional right for a major part of the country's population. They did so previously on voting rights when they gutted the Voting Rights Act, and they're about to do so again on the right to an abortion. The clock is now ticking on Roe v. Wade, and time will run out whenever they issue their opinion on the Mississippi case before them, which is expected to happen next June (at the end of their yearly term).

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Nope -- we're definitely not in Kansas anymore. We're not even where we're supposed to be, which is Pennsylvania. We may be in New Jersey; it's not immediately clear (which brings up a rather ironic twist on "There's no place like home," I suppose, since we're not really sure where his home actually is right now...). But today the following news appeared from some fantastical locale or another:

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December is going to be one of those rare months when Congress actually has to get some things done. These days, nothing big happens in Congress without either a hard deadline or an overwhelming sense of political urgency to get something done fast. Both of these will hopefully be in play next month, on different pieces of legislation. And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could do one big thing to increase the urgency on one particular bill.

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