We'll start the day with Mike Thompson's piece, which strikes a nice balance between stupid mistletoe jokes and the self-bashing overcorrections of other cartoonists.
Male cartoonists seem to really be struggling with this thing. There's really nothing funny about it, and it's the kind of topic -- most civil rights issues are -- where making jokes tends to suggest, or to signal, that you aren't taking it seriously.
At the other end of the scale, well, first of all, "Baby, I'm not like those other guys" is a line nobody should fall for.
But leaving the obvious suck-ups aside for the moment, cartoons that blame all men simply don't nail the issue. If it's "all men" then there's no cure and no responsibility.
The challenge is to criticize an unfair, imbalanced system without suggesting that "all men" are in some massive, conscious conspiracy.
Rather, it's the way things are and the only thing holding it in place is a lack of will to change.
Or, to put it in contemporary terms, it's not an issue of being male or female. It's an issue of being woke.
Which is Thompson's point: There is some droll humor in the clueless fellow's off-target fears, and there's also a nice touch in that the woman is overhearing him from an assistant's desk.
It would have a great deal less impact if she were in the room, because Thompson not only captures the day-to-day social burden, but also the net effect of sexism on opportunity. She's not an equal; she's an underling.
As for the other guy in the conversation, Thompson does well to depict him as neutral, neither agreeing with nor sneering at the foolish fears.
Too many guys play the role of Jack Lemmon's character in "The Apartment," quietly, perhaps even cynically, going along with the system until it effects them personally, and what makes that movie so uplifting is that, in real life, not everybody has the strength to stand up even then.
As we're going through all the movies and pop tunes that contain regrettable images, maybe we should also bear in mind the ones that don't, and The Apartment would sure be high on the list.
(How a budding mensch counsels someone who just attempted suicide.)
Jeff Koterba does a nice job of summing up the way Republicans have abandoned their traditional opposition to increasing debt.
There have been a raft of cartoons in which disappointed "regular" kids get little or nothing from a GOP Santa who lavishes presents on the rich kids, but Koterba skips the seasonal reference and goes straight to what it means to the next generation.
It's not even "kicking the can down the road," because that's an unwillingness to deal with existing debt. This was a cynical case of borrowing trillions from children, creating new debt in their names but not to their benefit.
And for all the attractiveness of contrasting what rich folks got versus what the rest of us got, this isn't an issue of gifts, large or small, because the budget not only adds to the debt, but what little fiscal balance they put into it came at the expense of that little girl's health and well-being.
Oh, and those on-line courses she is taking are going to begin to pixilate and buffer shortly, thanks to another elephant in the room.
And let's hope her daddy isn't a coal miner, because, first of all, he's being lied to about jobs. And I haven't heard if the last-minute re-write of the last-minute text of the bill everyone voted on without hearings took out the clause that was going to kill what few jobs Dear Leader actually sort-of inspired.
But I do know that, as Dan Wasserman notes, Dear Leader is looking to roll back regulations that help protect coal miners from black lung disease, because they might burden the mine owners.
On the other hand, if her daddy is disabled by black lung, their family got a huge one percent increase this year, boosting their disability payment to a whopping $966.80 a month.
Hope ol' Santa doesn't decide that was a mistake!
Though, as Jimmy Margulies notes, ol' Santa has his own issues to worry about, because Robert Mueller did through the law what Trump's never-heard-of-thems did by subterfuge, and when he said it was a good thing and asked them to keep it up, he didn't say that and how dare you play that tape of him appearing to say that but with someone else's voice clearly dubbed in because it's all fake news.
Which brings us back to things that aren't funny, among which I'd certainly list having a major news network broadcasting propaganda to undermine respect for the government.
Meanwhile, out in the sticks
Regional cartoonist Mike Marland comments on the Granite State government's unwillingness to boost funding for drug programs in the face of a massive opiod crisis here.
While our Congressional deputation is Democratic -- two Senators (both women) and two Representatives (both women) -- our state government is Republican-dominated right up to Gov. Chris Sununu, and if that last name sounds familiar, it should: He's the son of John Sununu who was George HW Bush's Chief-of-Staff and hosted "Crossfire" for several years.
Chris doesn't seem like a such a bad fellow but, as Marland suggests, he and his GOP colleagues seem a bit tight with a nickel even in the face of a major crisis.
This isn't an issue of poor-pitiful-me, but rather an issue of hanging together or hanging separately, because, as much as Mike Marland, or Mike Peterson, may wish the state would cut loose more funding to help, we're not a huge state with massive oil deposits and endless scads of spare cash.
Which is why we have a union and a federal government and, as Dr. Franklin is reported to have said, "A Republic, if you can keep it."