We’re ending the year in a befuddling place. The past week I’ve been having déjà vu, rocketing myself back to a simpler, but overall more confusing time — once again rounding out each evening with stupid little Victorian-era strolls around the neighborhood as my one activity for the day, all to maintain my stupid sanity.

The last few weeks have not been promising for the sweetly naive among us who were still holding on to hope for a brighter 2022. And the year as a whole has been a hard one. Kicking off the year with a literal insurrection didn’t do much to forecast optimism. Some of you, understandably, had to step away from the news at points throughout the year. And we don’t blame you! Between the Capitol attack and another impeachment and the GOP embrace of anti-vaxxers and extremists continuing their gradual takeover of Congress and the lingering Big Lie and this deadly COVID spike — it’s all been a lot. (Though, we did have a few bright spots this week!)

But our gallows humor got us through. And if we can’t, at least, release a few dark cackles into the void while the world burns, then we’ve lost our humanity.

The last few weeks have been abnormally bleak and bizarre, even for pandemic times. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) put a bushel over Democrats’ hopes of legislating this year. Kyle Rittenhouse was celebrated as a hero at a conservative youth conference in Arizona. More and more Democrats are bending to the impending-consequences of partisan gerrymandering and retiring ahead of the Midterms. Omicron is very literally everywhere (including inside this writer’s lungs ?).

But today we were struck by a smattering of relatively positive (?) news developments. We’ll take what we can get.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has effectively doomed President Biden’s hopes of passing his most meaningful legislative package this year. Things aren’t looking any better for Democratic efforts on voting rights (also largely Manchin’s fault). While the administration has made significant advances in getting the country vaccinated this year, Omicron has brought pandemic-ending progress to a standstill for now.

But the Biden administration, with the help of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), has quietly made some progress on one major pillar of Biden’s presidency: confirming judges.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson used his recent appearance at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix as a barely-veiled soft pitch for his new “documentary” about Jan. 6, a highly produced mashup that nods toward nearly every conspiracy theory about that day festering in the far-right corners of the internet.

Carlson gave a speech at the conservative youth event, regaling the audience with a colorful anecdote about 26th U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt’s proclivity for going out to the White House lawn to speak with American citizens during his presidency … 120 years ago.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) introduced a resolution today, asking the House to kick Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) off her committee assignments for repeatedly and brazenly attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) with racist and hateful anti-Muslim remarks.

It’s the culmination of weeks of frustration for Omar and fellow progressives, as congressional leadership does next to nothing to discipline the far-right Boebert for making racist jokes about Omar, who is a Muslim, and insinuating that the Minnesota Democrat’s religion somehow makes her a terrorist.

But he’s also not willing to plant a flag in any particular place.

The once-novel divide between various flanks of the Republican Party during the earliest days of the Trump era was a ripe area of fascination for many in the media, as various scandals forced longtime conservatives to speak out — and coin him or herself a Never-Trumper — or as old guard lawmakers flocked to the faux-populist corners of the party’s once-fringe Trumpian movement. Now that divide has reemerged, as establishment Republicans grapple with the future of their party and pundits hand-wring about how far-right the GOP’s ideology and messaging must go in order to win elections in 2022.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) has tried to have it both ways for some time. And he’s still squirming to this day.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) lit a fire under some of his colleagues today, stating in a letter to colleagues his ongoing expectation that the Senate will pass the Biden administration’s sweeping Build Back Better package via reconciliation “before Christmas.”

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) sounded the already scream-worthy alarm this week.

It was a stark warning about something TPM has been covering with our hair-on-fire for some time: that the Jan. 6 attempt to steal an election was the culmination of months of President Trump’s stoking of the Big Lie, and not an isolated incident. What’s more, the attempted heist never ended.

Griswold outlined the various threats to our current democracy — like a slew of new state level restrictive voting laws and ongoing threats of violence against election workers — and observed that the election-stealing crusade is continuing as we speak. Just, perhaps, in slow motion.

Conservatives are trying to get ahead of the impending bad optics that will come with obstructing their way into a government shutdown. And, it appears, they have a plan: Placing the blame squarely on the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate.

A Texas man who has been charged for his alleged participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection was just approved by the state Republican Party to run for a state House seat during the Republican primaries this spring. He is not alone in this endeavor.