On Tuesday, President Joe Biden held a big White House ceremony to sign the Respect for Marriage Act, passed by bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate. It was a strange event, celebrating the passage of a bill that will make absolutely no change in the practice of marriage in the United States today.

It is sometimes said that the crisis of illegal crossers on the U.S.-Mexico border "can't get any worse." Well, it can. And now it has.

Republican lawmakers will take control of the House of Representatives on Jan. 3. That means that, among many other things, they will take control of the House's investigative committees and subcommittees. GOP leaders have already said they plan to probe the Biden administration's disastrous policy on the U.S.-Mexico border, the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the disastrous failure to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., and more.

With Republican Herschel Walker's loss in the Georgia Senate runoff, the 2022 midterm elections are finally over. The GOP actually took a step backward in the Senate, from the 50 seats the party controls now to 49 in the new Senate that convenes in January. That will be a big boost for Democrats, who had chafed under the difficulties of running a Senate that was evenly divided at 50-50, relying on the vice president's vote to break ties. Now, if Democrats stick together, they can win outright, and even if they lose one of their own, such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), they can still prevail.

New Twitter owner Elon Musk made a lot of news in the conservative world on Friday when he released information about Twitter's infamous suppression of the October 2020 New York Post story about Joe Biden and influence peddling, a story based on evidence from Biden's son Hunter's laptop. The article, published in the last three weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, noted that Hunter Biden was engaged in shady business dealings in Ukraine and reported that one of his Ukrainian associates thanked him for arranging for the associate to meet Hunter's father, then the vice president of the United States. One reasonable inference to draw from the story was that Hunter and Joe Biden worked together to reward the people who were paying Hunter Biden at least $50,000 a month to do nothing in particular.

What is former President Donald Trump thinking? On Saturday, he posted this statement on his social media network Truth Social:

"So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Elections Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!"

For Republicans, the numbers look ominous. Record-setting totals of Georgians have voted early this week in the Dec. 6 runoff election between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker. The turnout appears to include slightly more likely Warnock voters than at the same time in the general election. And overall, the more early voting there is, in the experience of recent election watchers, the better Democrats perform.

You know those people who tell you a devastating recession, or maybe a depression, is on the way or that this or that investment is guaranteed to skyrocket or collapse in the next few months? The ones who confidently predict coming doom or prosperity? Why should you listen to them? After all, who knows what will happen with the economy?

What is sure to be one of the weirder moments of the 2024 presidential campaign has just taken place before the campaign is even fully underway.

Think back five years to the frenzy of news reporting and commentary over what was called Trump-Russia "collusion" — the allegation that the 2016 Trump campaign conspired with Russia to fix the presidential election. Most of the coverage, and especially the commentary, seemed predicated on the belief that collusion did, in fact, take place. But later, in one of history's great never minds, the extensive investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller was unable to establish that Trump-Russia collusion — prosecutors called it conspiracy or coordination — ever occurred at all. The Mueller team spent years investigating an alleged crime and in the end concluded it could not establish that the alleged crime even took place, much less who did it.