In Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise's character must train a team of hotshot pilots to take out a facility in an unnamed country with snow-covered mountains. Were they training for a mission in Switzerland? Hollywood was so wary of having any villains identified in this one that pilots from the generic foreign adversary were literally faceless. Maverick was actually a better film than the original Top Gun —rewatch the original before complaining — but one aspect of the original that far surpassed the sequel was the thrill of seeing Cruise flip the bird to his clearly identified Russian adversaries.

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One of the president's most important responsibilities at the outset of his term is organizing the White House. Unlike most of the federal bureaucracy, the White House consists largely of political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president and (presumably) represent the president's best interests.

Approximately 1,800 people work at the White House complex, but most of them are career officials in departments like the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) or the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, both technically part of the Executive Office of the President. Out of those 1,800, only a few hundred are "White House staffers" of popular imagination, as depicted in shows like The West Wing.

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This year proved to be one of the wilder presidential election years in our nation's history. As I followed the constant ups and downs, I found, as always, that the most soothing balms in tumultuous times are good books. Fortunately, 2024 gave me many choices.

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Jimmy Carter, America's oldest ex-president, has died at 100. Carter was known around the world not just for his one term as president, but for his four decades as a globe-trotting ex-president. His achievements in his one White House term aren't remembered well, overshadowed by his setbacks, the resulting loss of support of the American people, and the rise of Ronald Reagan, who won 44 states in defeating Carter for the presidency in 1980.

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Mitch McConnell is perhaps the most important conservative politician of the post-Reagan era. Both George W. Bush and now Donald Trump have been reelected president as Republicans, but McConnell has wielded power for far longer than eight years in office. McConnell has arguably had more influence on the success and the future of conservatism, particularly in the judiciary, than anyone this century.

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