Today is New Year’s Eve, so I wanted to be the first to wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year! I thought I’d also use today to catch up with some news from the past week, and to take a look back at 2018.

First of all, let’s dispense the news you might have missed while enjoying your Christmas break (and no, I will not call it “Winter Break,” as public schools now do — who in their right mind celebrates the coming of winter, other than owners of ski resorts and peddlers of cold remedies?)

The Shutdown

The partial government shutdown continues, and it will be interesting to see how long it will continue past New Year’s Day before anyone notices it. Democrats who think it will only harm Republicans to keep it dragging on should think about whether they really want Americans pondering why so many government employees are considered non-essential when we have a $21 trillion+ national debt.

Of course, the PR arm of the Democratic Party, by which I mean the mainstream media, is running 24/7 negative stories, blaming President Trump for the shutdown and touting polls showing that a majority of Americans want Trump and Congressional Democrats to compromise on funding a border wall — even though the White House reportedly offered to accept $2.5 billion instead of $5 billion, which is sort of the definition of “compromise.”

I wonder how you can possibly compromise with someone like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who channeled his inner Taylor Swift in declaring that they will never, ever, ever fund a border wall?

When Democrats rejected Trump’s $5 billion request, claiming it was too expensive, that was laughable enough, considering that to them, $5 billion in tax money is couch cushion change. It enters the realm of the absurd when they make the same claim about $2.5 billion, which for them is like the “Take a penny” tray at the 7-11 cash register.

As I noted last week, the Democrats’ willingness to shut down the government rather than do anything to secure the border and enforce laws on illegal immigration marks a historic milestone for “The Party of Big Government.” They’ve actually found something more important to them than government: protecting illegal immigration.

Illegal Immigration Stories from the Past Week

That position might be harder to keep defending, considering the news piling up regarding illegal immigration, which includes:

An illegal immigrant with gang affiliations and two previous DWI arrests (yet who was still walking around free in California, of course) was arrested for allegedly killing a sheriff’s deputy in Bakersfield who stopped him on suspicion of drunk driving (incidentally, the deputy was a legal immigrant from Fiji)…

…ICE is releasing hundreds of migrants a day in El Paso. The city is struggling to deal with housing them and with giving medical treatment to those carrying diseases…

And yet another caravan of up to 15,000 migrants is forming in Honduras, although it’s possible they might be planning to stay in Mexico.

A Look Back

And what would New Year’s Eve be without a look back at some high- (and low-) lights of the previous year?

Sen. Rand Paul released his 2018 edition of “The Waste Report,” his annual round-up of the most egregious wastes of taxpayer money. They included $10 million to support tourism in Egypt, $50,000 to teach female entrepreneurs in India how to “vlog,” $200,000 to put on plays in Afghanistan; and from the science grants at the NIH, over $2.4 million to study daydreaming, nearly $76,000 to blow leaf blowers at lizards, and $874,503 to study the sex habits of quails on cocaine. I think the NIH grants are also being handed out by quails on cocaine.

For those with a masochistic bent, News Busters compiled a list of the most hateful media assaults on conservatives. It was a year of such over-the-top leftist hysteria that a columnist who compared the tax cut to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 barely made the top 10.

Blogger David Tomlinson proved Longfellow’s claim that those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad by revisiting a year’s worth of insane “Social Justice Warrior” wokeness from various leftwing media figures, alleged academics and other self-appointed moral superiors. Let’s hope the peak madness on display means the destruction of this trend is very close at hand.

Townhall’s Beth Bauman performed a herculean feat of editing by narrowing down Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Top 7 Political Blunders of the Year (this doesn’t even include her suggestion that Joseph, Mary and the Baby Jesus were refugees instead of people being forced to go to ridiculous lengths to comply with the government’s tax laws, which you’d think she’d support.)

Finally, because I know you could use a laugh or two right now, here’s humorist Dave Barry’s year in review column for 2018. My favorite line: In February, the Chinese space station “plunges back to Earth and, in a worst-case outcome, fails to land on attorney Michael Avenatti, thus enabling him to continue appearing on CNN more often than the Geico gecko.”

Have a happy and safe New Year’s Eve, and I’ll see you in 2019, which I hope will not be a repeat of 2018, which like 2017, was, for way too many people, an endless rehash of 2016!

Originally published at mikehuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.