FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 12/30/22.

This tune's getting to be an alicublog New Year's tradition!
Tell me about your favorite NYE songs in comments.

•  Announcing a big year-end treat for those of you haven’t subscribed to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – my entire week-long, five-issue, Year In Review series, The Year In Suck, is FREE and unloosed upon an unsuspecting public. This set includes stories about:

Why the experts predicted a red wave in the 2022 midterms (short version: In their minds it’s always the 1990s).

The ridiculous “People’s Convoy” and what happens to cancelculture crybullying when conservatives try it on regular people;

The GOP’s return to out-and-proud homophobia;

How the mean and dirty ol’ internet was cool for everyone, right and left, until conservatives realized they couldn’t control it; and

The widely-denied but still deathlike stranglehold Trump has on the GOP (and why they can't quit him).

I will add this much on the Trump stranglehold thing and the general theme of Republicans getting weirder every day: There are all kinds of well-known reasons why this is terrible for democracy and all that, but we should also acknowledge that it keeps the Democratic Party from ever getting any better. American politics is pretty corrupt and neither party wants to give its adherents everything (or frankly much of anything) they want – otherwise what would they use for a come-on? “Republicans are nuts” has been a good enough reason to keep sane people voting Democrat since 2018, and thank God a plurality still feels that way, but the dotards who run the works are even less inclined to come across with policies we desperately need because, really, why bother? 

Worse, this lets them use the rightwing judiciary as part of their rope-a-dope, and feint at, for example, immigration and student loan reforms that they can reasonably expect the courts to deny. I know about and approve Biden’s energetic judicial appointment schedule but speaking for myself I don’t have decades to wait for those to bear fruit. Maybe the party could get serious about rightsizing SCOTUS, at least through term limits – with court-packing as an implied threat? Anyway: A less-mad GOP might encourage the Democratic Party to offer shoppers a better deal. Sadly it looks like we’re going to have to wait for them to either try another coup (and, if Merrick Garland is still in, yet another, and then another etc.) or Whig out.  

•  I will also note that I am represented in the annual Jon Swift Roundup, conducted as usual by Batocchio (not his real name!). This is a compendium of some invited bloggers’ favorites among their own posts in 2022. You may know some of these guys – including old-timers like his vorpal sword, Tengrain, Yastreblyansky, The Rude Pundit, driftglass, Self-Styled Siren, and our host; the ones that may be news to you, though, are at least as good, so stretch your horizons! Who knows, in the coming info-dystopia maybe blogs will make a comeback and you’ll already know what the hot ones are.  Happy new year!