12.30 Ginny and I catch the Bond in Motion exhibit at the Saratoga Auto Museum.
12.30 Barbara Walters dies at 93.
12.29 Pele dies at 86.
12.27 In Dallas, Luka Dončić scored 60 points, 21 rebounds and 10 assists in 47 minutes, leading the Mavs to a 126–121 overtime win. He’s the first player in league history to put up those numbers. The Knicks led by 9 with 30 seconds left,but Dončić tied the game at the buzzer.
12.23 Blizzard in Buffalo drops at least four feet of snow, and kills at least 40.
12.22 Brother Edward Sheehy dies at 76.
12.22 Jennifer Rubin in Washington Post: “When Biden took office, unemployment was at 6.4 percent. The United States had no green energy strategy and had pulled out of the 2016 Paris Accords. It had no infrastructure plan (though plenty of infrastructure weeks!). And it had no cost-containment strategy for prescription drugs. Meanwhile, scores of the country’s richest companies were getting away with not paying a dime in federal taxes. Today’s economy is inarguably better on all of these fronts. Unemployment is at 3.7 percent. The economy has created more than 10 million jobs (including more than 750,000 manufacturing jobs) since Biden became president. The annual federal deficit has also fallen, from $3.1 trillion for fiscal 2020 to $1.4 trillion for fiscal 2022. There is also good news regarding consumer spending, which amounts to about 70 percent of gross domestic product. . . .The elephant in the room is inflation, which remains more than 7 percent compared with the year prior.
12.21 Congress releases Trump’s tax returns. Key findings from the Times:
| YEAR | ADJUSTED | TAX | TAX CR | FINAL TAX |
| 2020 | –$4,795,757 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| 2019 | 4,380,714 | 558,780 | –425,335 | 133,445 |
| 2018 | 24,339,696 | 9,356,232 | –8,356,766 | 999,466 |
| 2017 | –12,916,948 | 7,435,857 | –7,435,107 | 750 |
| 2016 | –32,409,674 | 2,234,725 | –2,233,975 | 750 |
| 2015 | –31,756,435 | 2,127,670 | –1,485,739 | 641,931 |
12.21 The Mets sign Carlos Correa. Mets owner Steve Cohen has signed nine free agents this winter at a cost of $806 million. According to Baseball Prospectus, the Mets’ payroll for 2023 is $384.3 million, which incurs a luxury tax hit of $111.6 million. Cohen will pay more in taxes next season than seven teams are paying in payroll. Tom Verducci in SI: “Cohen will pay more in 2023 luxury taxes than what every club except the Yankees and Dodgers has spent in the 25-year history of the tax. After a $13 million cost toward player benefits, 50% of the collected tax is distributed evenly to the 24 non-tax paying teams. Based on spending patterns of this year, Cohen effectively is writing a $2.31 million check to two dozen of his competitors: $55.5 million in his tax money going to 24 teams. “He looks at millions,” says one rival executive, “the way others look at dollars.”
12.21 President Volodymyr Zelensky visits Washington, addresses Congress. “Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way. . . . The Russians will stand a chance to be free only when they defeat the Kremlin in their minds. Yet, the battle continues and we have to defeat the Kremlin on the battlefield.”
12.21 Franco Harris dies at 72. Lynn Swann: “When [Chuck Noll] drafted Franco Harris, he gave the offense heart, he gave it discipline, he gave it desire, he gave it the ability to win a championship in Pittsburgh.”
12.19 CNN: An iguana caused “a large-scale outage” in Lake Worth Beach, Florida earlier this month – the third iguana-triggered outage in the city this year.
12.19 Mitch McConnell on 1/6: “The entire nation knows who is responsible for that day.’’
12.19 The 1/6 Committee issues its report, recommending the criminal prosecution of Trump.
12.18 Argentina beats France on PKs, after the teams end the game at 3-3. Mbappe scored all three goals for France. Franklin Foer in The Atlantic: “In soccer years, 35 makes the Argentine forward Lionel Messi a veritable geriatric. And this World Cup was his final opus, his version of Beethoven’s 
last string quartets or Monet’s lily ponds. And what makes Argentina’s thrilling triumph something to savor is how this victory was both the culmination of his career and the embodiment of a late style, a performance that carried the melancholic sense of an ending. At the beginning of the tournament, the pundits agreed on a story line. The two defining figures of the era—Messi and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo—had won every prize in the game except for the ultimate one. Qatar represented their final opportunity to fill in the gap, to capture a trophy regarded as essential for staking a claim to the best who ever played. Ronaldo, 37, flailed because he couldn’t adapt to his physical decline. He insisted on playing as if he were 10 years younger. By acting as if he was essential, he became superfluous. And in his final game, a flaccid defeat to Morocco, he came off the bench, contributed little, then left the field in tears—without shaking hands with his opponents or consoling his bereft teammates. It was a pathetic way to exit, befitting a vain career. That’s the counterpoint to Messi’s victory. Without the legs to carry him, Messi economized his movements. Rather than pretending that he was a young man, he played like an older one. He ambled through games, saving himself for the moments that he could assert himself. He showed a remarkable awareness about how he might be able to parcel out his dwindling corporeal self, how he needed to make choices about when to give himself fully.’’
12.16 According to the Death Penalty Information Center, seven executions were botched this year, 35% of the number carried out.
12.15 Trump debuts the “official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card collection”, a set of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which he is selling for $99 each.
12.14 The Pew Research Center reports that 41% of Americans say they make zero cash purchases in a typical week. That’s up from 29% in 2018 and 24% in 2015. This is especially the case among the highest earners. Roughly six-in-ten adults whose annual household income is $100,000 or more (59%) say they make none of their typical weekly purchases using cash, up sharply from 43% in 2018 and 36% in 2015.”
12.13 Zeeshan Aleem on MSNBC.com: “A massive trove of text exchanges between Mark Meadows and dozens of Republican lawmakers published by Talking Points Memo, show Trump wasn’t a lone actor, but something closer to a nerve center of anti-democratic activity. Republicans didn’t just put up with Trump, but worked proactively with him to try to discredit the election both before and after the Jan. 6 insurrection. This is a damning development for the Republican Party. . . . it’s chilling to see the full scope of many Republicans’ eagerness to dismantle democratic governance. Meadows exchanged texts with at least 34 Republican members of Congress about overturning the election. One of them, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, asked Meadows to “impose Marshall [sic] law” as a last resort for “saving our Republic.” Rep. Brian Babin of Texas “When we lose Trump we lose our Republic. Fight like hell and find a way.”
12.13 Biden signs the Defense of Marriage Act.
12.12 The City of Richmond removes a bronze statue of Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill, the city’s last major icon of the Lost Cause.
12.11 Elon Musk via twitter: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
12.11 Snow
12.10 Marjorie Taylor Greene on 1/6, at an annual gala hosted by the New York Young Republican Club in Manhattan: “I want to tell you something. If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed.”
12.9 Sports Illustrated soccer writer Grand Wahl dies at 48 while covering the Argentina-Netherlands semi-final at the 2022 World Cup.
12.9 France just got the OK from the European Commission to ban domestic flights between destinations that are connected by train rides of less than 2.5 hours.
12.8 Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Rep. Jim Jordan in Axios: “Jim and I talk frequently … we’re similar thinkers.’’
12.8 Brittney Griner released
12.8 Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated: “One player alone cannot deliver a title, not even the richest free agent in history. But ultimately that is how this contract will be judged: by the roster the Yankees build around Judge and, yes, by the luck that turns for or against a team in the unpredictable moments that define postseason history. Powerful as it was, the unprecedented leverage of Judge only goes so far.’’
12.7 Aaron Judge signs with Yankees for $360 million over nine years.
12.7 Volodymyr Zelensky — along with the “Spirit of Ukraine” — is Time magazine’s 2022 Person of the Year.
12.6 Warnock tops Walker in Georgia Seante run off
12.6 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “Win or lose, all of the criticisms of Herschel Walker obscure a larger point: The Republicans have acclimated the American public to ghastly behavior from elected officials and candidates for high office.’’
12.6 The Trump Organization was convicted by a New York jury of conducting a 15-year scheme to defraud state and federal tax authorities and faces up to $1.6 million in fines.
12.5 The Dispatch: In the wee hours of December 5, scientists at a government lab in California fired a whole lot of laser beams at a very small target and hit the ultimate bullseye: fusion ignition. The self-sustaining, energy-gaining fusion reaction is a major step forward in the quest to turn fusion into a clean, plentiful energy source. This has made for a lot of happy researchers. “The pursuit of fusion ignition in the laboratory is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity,” lab director Kim Budil said. “Achieving it is a triumph of science, engineering, and most of all, people.” Scientists have been pursuing the dream of commercial fusion for decades, drawn by the promise of harnessing the power that fuels stars to run the world 
on energy made from cheap, abundant, and non-polluting hydrogen. Cost-effective, reliable carbon-free energy could hugely reduce the threat of climate change, while achieving the promise of energy that’s “too cheap to meter” could improve the lives of more than 10 percent of the world’s population still without power and unleash economic growth and innovation. Last week’s experiment brought researchers closer to that dream.
12.5 Kirstie Alley dies at 71.
12.4 David Bromberg and his Big Band at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.
12.3 Trump on his Big Lie, via Truth Social: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
12.1 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “As I followed [the Oathkeeper] trials, I kept thinking of a scene from the HBO World War II miniseries Band of Brothers. At the end of the European war, an American soldier named Webster is riding in the back of an open truck, watching the defeated German prisoners trudging along the road. In a fit of rage, he begins shouting at them, “What were you thinking? … Dragging our asses halfway around the world, interrupting our lives. For what? You ignorant, servile scum! What the fuck are we doing here?” The scene is also something of a touchstone for my friend Charlie Sykes, who in 2020 discussed how it made him think of the diehards and cultists and election deniers whose delusions would eventually bring them to the Capitol in 2021. During the Oath Keepers’ trial, I found myself wanting to yell at the television like Private Webster: For what? The life of a great democracy was endangered why? I wasn’t doing this because Rhodes and his band were the Axis, but because, like Webster, I found it incredible that we had to interrupt our lives for a movement built on lies and political hallucinations.”