Yesterday (12/10), I received an email from the Motion Picture Academy informing me that if I didn't pay my dues, I wouldn't be able to vote in the Oscar nominations in a couple of weeks.

I debated for a few minutes.  Dues have inflated since I joined in the eighties and are now a hefty $450 per annum.  Nevertheless, spendthrift that I am, I bit the proverbial bullet and went for it. Call it the inability to break a bad habit. Or an addiction to the non-stop influx of screeners that arrive at my door every December, not that I watch many of them. (I suspect I'm not alone in that.)

But it wasn't just the money that had made me hesitate.  On one level, I wouldn't have re-upped up for $4.50, let alone $450.  I mean -- what was the point of this? Does anybody care who wins the Oscar anymore?  I certainly don't -- and I'm a voter.

Here’s why this year the Oscars will continue on their downward spiral toward life support.

Robert Mueller’s legal team may write a damning report on Trump’s ethics, based mostly on flipping minor former business associates of Trump’s and transient campaign officials by threatening them with long prison sentences.

So far, we know that the U.S. government decided to intervene in a political campaign to help one candidate and to smear the other — under the pretext of Russian “collusion.” That would be Obama’s government helping Hillary to smear The Donald.

And so it hired or made use of spies and informants including Hank Greenberg, Stefan Halper, Felix Sater, and others to contact Trump campaign officials to catch them in supposed collusion traps.

It enlisted the help of foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the British and Australians.

It misled FISA courts into granting warrants to spy on Americans and, post factum, threatened long prisons sentences with those surveilled and interviewed.

Why has Robert Mueller investigated absolutely none of this?

The pattern and purpose of Mueller’s investigation and the endgame is becoming clear, and yes, it’s clearly get the president at all costs.

The team Mueller hired really foretold the story — Andrew Weissmann as the stop-at-nothing pit bull and a group of Democrat lawyers, including some who have represented the Clintons, had the obstruction of justice charge ready to go on day one.

The investigation, I believe, has come up truly empty on its central charge related to the president — collusion with the Russian government. They are now trying to find someone, anyone who had any contact with Julian Assange with the aim of calling that collusion-lite.

But mostly what Mueller’s team is doing is bludgeoning witnesses on unrelated charges to piece together a case against the president. They are shaping that case through the indictments -- and threats of indictments -- that are being used to get guilty pleas to make the president seem like an obstructor or co-conspirator. They are literally creating the crimes.

Let’s review what Mueller and his team are doing:

He came, he saw, he took yet another step towards Making America Great Again.

President Trump scored major successes at the G-20 summit that concluded over last weekend in Argentina (12/01-02).

Specifically, the community of nations agreed in their official communique to “necessary reform” of the World Trade Organization, a top White House priority, recognized the decision of the U.S. to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, and to still utilize “all energy sources and technologies, while protecting the environment.”

In addition, the Chinese promised to up their purchases of U.S.- made goods and to discuss other demands in exchange for postponing an expected hike in tariffs; President Xi also committed to designating the deadly drug Fentanyl as a controlled substance in China, and vowed to help with de-nuclearizing North Korea.

It was an all-round win-win for the president, who needed one.

Young Kim was poised to become the first Korean-American woman elected to Congress.

Her 14-point lead was the lone bright spot on an otherwise dismal night for Orange County Republicans. But, over the past week, Republicans have watched the first-generation immigrant’s lead evaporate. With thousands of provisional ballots left to count, her commanding lead is now underwater. She lost one week after the election.

There’s no evidence of ballot box shenanigans. No need. Democrats know it’s easier to erode voter integrity laws than to stuff ballot boxes.

How does a 14-point Republican lead disappear? Merciless and unsparing, California Democrats have systematically undermined California’s already-weak voter protection laws to guarantee permanent one-party rule. Here’s how, step by step.

Like a long-running TV soap opera, the Boy Scout Show, starring the lugubrious Robert Mueller as the big bully himself, is back.

Off the air for some months as the people who brought you “Senator Spartacus Battles Brett Kavanaugh” and “Midterm Mayhem,” along with a special workshop on “How Democrats Can Manufacture Ballots at the Last Moment to Steal an Election,” the Big Bully Boy Scout is once again entertaining thousands across the fruited plain.

Well, it’s entertaining the media pundits in Washington and New York, anyway.

The producers of this interminable entertainment have learned a thing or two from other soap operas. For one thing, some of your favorite characters who had seemed to be written out of the script have made miraculous recoveries and, word has it, are signed for important parts in the entire season that just got underway.

One thing that several observers have noted is that only one tranche of characters is getting the limelight. Roger Stone suggested as much when he observed, in one of the best lines of the entire series, “John Podesta makes Paul Manafort look like St. Thomas Aquinas. Where is the New York Times?”