The 2024 election year will be a year of trials

The political world is consumed with the fighting going on after Hamas's attack on Israel. How could the vaunted Israeli intelligence services have been so surprised? How extensive will Israel's retaliation be? Will the conflict spread?

What is President Joe Biden's biggest liability as he runs for reelection? Republicans could give you a lot of answers, but the most important is the president's age. He's 80 now and would be 82 upon beginning a second term and 86 at the end of it. He looks and sounds every minute of his age. Having such an elderly chief executive is unprecedented in American history.

On Feb. 7, 2022, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a member of the Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. It was about the case of Montez Lee, a Rochester, Minnesota, man sentenced to 10 years in prison for setting a fire that killed a man during the Black Lives Matter riot in Minneapolis.

Let's say you hate Donald Trump and really, really, really don't want him to become president of the United States again. How do you prevent that? Well, most would agree the best way would be to defeat him electorally, either in the Republican primaries or in the 2024 general election.

The first debate of the Republican presidential primaries is now just days away. There is still uncertainty about who will take part — there have been reports that former President Donald Trump, who leads second-place Gov. Ron DeSantis by 40 points, will skip the event. But Trump could always change his mind.

The House Oversight Committee has released a new report on the progress of its investigation into Biden family influence-peddling during the time Joe Biden was vice president of the United States. "Committee staff is releasing payments from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan that occurred during Joe Biden's vice presidency," the report said. "The committee has now identified over $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates."

President Joe Biden has often said the United States will continue military aid to Ukraine "for as long as it takes" to win the war with Russia. On Jan. 25 of this year, for example, Biden said to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, "We're with you for as long as it takes." Last month, Biden said, "Our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken.

In the past few days, we've seen a number of political analysts come to a momentous conclusion. Actually, two momentous conclusions. The first is that it is unlikely anyone can catch former President Donald Trump in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

The government still has not released the original plea agreement between the Justice Department and Hunter Biden, even though it was the subject of three hours of discussion and debate in open court this week. Fortunately, Politico has published a bootleg copy — cellphone photos of a printout of the document — or otherwise, we would not know the lengths to which the DOJ went to accommodate the president's son.

There has been a highly political battle on Capitol Hill — actually, that's the only kind of battle they have on Capitol Hill — over defense policy and spending. The fight has been on two fronts: 1) passage of the yearly National Defense Authorization Act, which sets military spending levels, and 2) a Republican senator's decision to block Senate confirmation of military promotions until the Biden Pentagon changes its policy on abortion.