The Oxford English Dictionary has announced that their Word Of The Year for this year was "brain rot." Their definition: "Supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. (Also: Something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration)." Hey, we can relate to that concept....

Speaking of rotting brains (a wonderful segue if there ever was one), Donald Trump continues to fill out his administration, nominating more and more sexual predators, total incompetents, billionaires, and complete clowns (those categories are not mutually exclusive, we should point out). A "team of ribalds" for the ages, it seems.

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Before we get to the categories list for our annual year-end awards, I have one quick program note and one quick question.

Tomorrow we will have the last regular Friday Talking Points article of the year. Because the next two Fridays will be turned over to our yearly McLaughlin Awards (parts one and two). And then we'll be taking some time off (and running old columns) during the holidays (although we may pop in now and again with a new column... but no promises...). So we're preparing for next week already by throwing the nominations open for the first part of the awards (see below).

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The 2024 election is finally over. Well... the election itself was over a month ago, of course, but the final results of that election have now been announced. Democrat Adam Gray has now officially beaten incumbent Republican John Duarte in California's 13th House district -- by only 187 votes (out of over 200,000 cast). Republicans, while retaining control of the chamber, actually saw their majority shrink in 2024.

Republicans won the 2022 midterm election with a House majority of 222-213. This meant (assuming everyone was present for the vote) that they could only lose four votes in order to pass strictly party-line bills. Losing five votes across the aisle would have put them at 217, which is one below a simple majority.

Now that the 2024 election is over, Republicans will have a smaller majority in the House of Representatives. On paper, it will be 220-215. Democrats flipped one more seat than Republicans did this election cycle, and earlier they had flipped a district in a special election after the ouster of George Santos. This all means Speaker Mike Johnson (assuming he retains his leadership job) will only be able to lose two votes on any strictly partisan measure.

But for the first few months, it'll be even worse than that for Johnson. Matt Gaetz has already resigned, even though he won re-election to his district. And there are two other GOP House members who will be leaving soon as well -- because Elise Stefanik and Michael Waltz have been nominated for positions in the incoming administration of Donald Trump. Special elections won't be held to replace them for a few months after the new Congress is seated. Which will leave Johnson with only a 217-215 majority.

In the House, ties fail. There is no tie-breaking vote (as there is in the Senate). So Johnson won't be able to lose a single vote for the first two or three months of the year. This could dramatically limit what the incoming House is able to accomplish at the very start of the session.

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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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