Iran: Armageddon It

I just returned from the bizarro universe in which Kamala Harris was elected President of the United States. Having spent her first year checking off her to-do list by helping first-time homebuyers afford a house and expanding child care, President Harris faced a new crisis when, in her effort to negotiate a new agreement with Iran to prevent further enrichment of uranium, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started bombing Iran, causing the Iranians to suspend talks with the United States.

Secretary of State Susan Rice, addressing reporters at the White House after conferring with President Harris, explained to the press that the Harris administration knew that Israel had been planning this attack and that the President had been concerned how that might affect U.S.-Iranian talks.  Secretary Rice added that the real reason Vice President Walz was sent to Israel was not to go on a goodwill tour but because he was on a mission to go to Jerusalem and convince Netanyahu to back off.  Secretary Rice let the Iranians know what Walz was up to.  She conceded that Walz had been unsuccessful, but she added that she received a communique from the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament assuring her that Iran would not attack U.S. interests in the Middle East and concentrate strictly on defending itself from Israeli attacks.

So you can bet your sweet candy bar that I was dismayed when, back in the real world, I learned that Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that, having been aware that Israel was going to attack Iran, he decided that, rather than try to convince Netanyahu not to go ahead with the attack, it was necessary that the United States attack Iran first before Iran attacked U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Marco Rubio is a diplomat like I'm a jet pilot.

Apparently that was the real reason - a reason that don't even make good nonsense - that Trump started bombing Iran, because I thought it was about causing the Islamic Republic to fall and for the Iranian people to gain their freedom.  But that couldn't have been it, seeing as Trump hates freedom.  More likely, some say, it's because Trump is paranoid about the Ayatollah Khamenei killing him in revenge for the 2020 American assassination of General Qasem Soleimani and so decided that he had to take Khamenei out first, so that's what he did.  But he and Netanyahu are still bombing Iran.

So what is the reason we're bombing Iran?  I think your answer is right here.

But this  war isn't going to stop Americans from demanding transparency on Jeffrey Epstein.

Incidentally, if you're wondering why top brass in the military have followed Trump's illegal orders, it's because in part that no fewer than sixty high-ranking military officers believe that Donald Trump was sent by God to become President of the United States and instigate Armageddon by attacking Iran and bringing about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, in which Christians will be venerated, Jews will be saved, and Muslims . . . well, I assume they'll get food packages for the journey to the fiery caverns below.

In America, anyone can become President.  It's one of the risks we take.  In America, anyone can become a military commander.  That's another one of the risks we take.  I'm only sorry we don't have an educated, highly trained Prussian-style officer class that reads of books of strategy instead of the Book of Revelations.

It's A Miracle!

No one ever thought it would come to this.

Not one person ever believed it was possible.

But today, it happened.

Alysa Liu became the first American woman to win the Olympic gold medal in women's figure skating in 24 years!

And oh, yeah, the former Prince Andrew was arrested in Britain.  He's been charged with doing nasty things and committing various forms of misconduct connected to Jeffrey Epstein.  His arrest is one of several acts of men associated with Epstein and his pedophilia racket.

No one's been arrested in the U.S. yet, although Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, resigned hos post over an association with Epstein, and talent agent Casey Wasserman - the same Casey Wasserman who is running the organizing committee for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics - is in hot water for his Epstein connections.   But as soon as the Brits can get His Former Royal Highness to start singing like Beverly Sills, you can bet your sweet candy bar that he'll be dropping the dope on one Donald J. Trump.

Given that there is ample reason to believe that Trump used the beauty pageants he owned as fronts for grooming young women and girls for Epstein's operations, we haven't heard the last of Trump's crimes.  Fox News viewers who haven't heard the first of it.

In the meantime let's think happy thoughts about Alysa Liu . . ..

Polythene Pam

There have been plenty of unforgettable and unforgivable moments of public spectacle in Washington.  There was Joe McCarthy's meltdown at the 1954 Army-Communist hearings.  There were the 1985 Senate Parents' Music Resources Center hearings on popular music with dirty song lyrics, which was more embarrassing for the senators than for witnesses John Denver, Dee Snider and Frank Zappa.  There was also the infamous 1994 House hearing in which tobacco company executives all testified that nicotine is not addictive.  But nothing - not even the much-deserved humiliation that Zappa delivered to the Senate Commerce Committee - can compare to the spectacle Attorney General Pam Bondi made out of herself when she "testified" on the the subject of the Epstein files before the House Judiciary Committee.

Bondi gave a combative and fiery - and extremely inappropriate - performance that involved stonewalling and deflecting in a form of what should be called unrighteous indignation.  When ranking Democrat Jerrold Nadler of New York asked her how many Epstein associates her department - you know, the Justice Department? - had prosecuted, she took umbrage and wasted everyone's time with double talk.  When Kentucky congressman Tom Massie, one of the very few Republicans pursuing the Epstein case with forceful diligence, complained about information from among the Epstein files that had been removed from the Justice Department's Web site, Bondi responded that it was reinstated forty minutes after it had been removed; Massie responded by saying that it was reinstated forty minutes after she'd been caught trying to suppress it.

It was really something.  Bondi defended Donald Trump for his "transparency" by having signed the bill requiring the release of the Epstein files and conveniently overlooking the fact that documents have been selectively released and that the names of the perverts preying on little girls have been redacted.  She maintained her arrogance through questioning over one Jared Wise, a former FBI agent now in the employ of the Justice Department as a senior advisor.  He took part in the January 6 insurrection and was later charged for his involvement, only to receive - you guessed it - a presidential pardon from Trump. Bondi also defended Trump from insinuations that he was involved in pedophilia, and she most likely lied under oath by insisting that he had not been identified as a prime suspect.   And when Democrat Jamie Raskin of Maryland pushed on the Epstein issue, Bondi cited irrelevant news about the booming stock market under Trump's economic stewardship and addressed Representative Raskin as "Raskin," without a salutation.  Her hot and heavy stage show, likely the most tasteless display of self-righteousness by a bottle-blonde Italian since Madonna last "performed" in public, was compared by anti-Trump activist and ex-Republican advisor Rick Wilson to a fake orgasm - “"loud, theatrical, sweaty, and meant to trick just one man [Trump] into keeping her around by flattering his ego."    

And watching from her office on television, Kristi Noem is rumored to have said, "I'll have what she's having."

But the worst moment came when Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington State asked the people in the gallery who had been abused by or because of Jeffrey Epstein to stand up and raise a hand if they had not been able to meet with anyone in the Justice Department.  Every Epstein survivor in attendance did so.

And Pam Bondi refused to even acknowledge them.

See why I have no time to comment on the Winter Olympics?  MAGA is flooding the zone with sewage, and this piece of sewage named Pam Bondi is serious stuff. 

Pam Bondi is a woman of great distinction, though not the sort of distinction anyone would care to assume the mantle of.  The best her supporters can say about her is that she acts like a man, as if she has a Y chromosome hidden in her DNA, just like an Uncle Tom Negro like Clarence Thomas might have white blood that makes him act like a nasty Caucasian.  At worst, she makes John Mitchell look like Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. by comparison.  And hopefully, when this regime is over (or should I say "if"?  MAGA may have the supernatural ability to perpetuate its hold on the federal government after Trump is finally gone), she'll join Mitchell as one of the only two Attorneys General to go to jail.

Don't pass go, Pam.  Don't collect your $200 retainer.  

Michael Cohen, Phony

Like Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk before him, Michael Cohen has been giving people two faces for the price of one.

When Cohen testified before Congress in 2019 after pleading guilty to helping Trump, as his fixer, commit all sorts of crimes - like intimidating Trump's mistresses from coming forward about their relationships with Trump and intimidating Trump's detractors to prevent them from speaking out about him (like former Republican operative Cheri Jacobus), he expressed anger and regret for ever having gotten involved with the business mogul.  He described with great passion how his misdeeds cost him so much because he believed in what Trump was doing (whatever that was) and how he felt he had been taken like so many Trump "University" graduates stuck with diplomas that had all the validity of a certificate from Ace Obedience School.  After serving time in prison for his violations of the law, he went full tilt boogie on bashing Trump, going on all sorts of media outlets and doing his own podcast on the MeidasTouch Network.  This not-so-nice Jewish boy became a symbol of a widely-held belief among Roman Catholics, the power of redemption.

Then the roof caved in. 

When investigative reporter Tara Palmeri, digging more deeply into the case of noted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, asked Cohen about his and Trump's connections to the late financier, he got bitterly defensive and lashed out at her as if she had just asked him to pull down his pants.  And Palmeri wasn't the only reporter Cohen blew up at over the Epstein question.  He'd done that with at least three other reporters.  Soon and sure enough, Cohen all but recanted his testimony to New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, saying he had been "coerced" to provide selective information relevant to their cases against Trump. 

Cohen didn't find redemption because he converted to Catholicism (for the record, he didn't) or because he suddenly saw the light in a manner reminiscent of the end of a sitcom episode (guest starring Joyce Bulifant).  He found redemption because he was caught.

And this phony redemption allowed Cohen to make lots of money going after Trump like the attack dog people wish Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries were.  He was embraced by a bunch of white bourgeois liberals who should have known better.  And it was all a lie.  He didn't publicly turn against Trump because of conviction.  He publicly turned against Trump because he was convicted.   But playing the wronged Mafia lawyer who's since gone straight is a lucrative business.

Or, rather, it was.  Cohen was fine so long as someone didn't ask him about Jeffrey Epstein, because it's becoming more obvious by the nanosecond that he knows a lot more about Epstein than he's willing to admit, and what he knows likely involves personal dealings with both Epstein and Trump.  By insisting that Letitia James and Alvin Bragg coerced him into giving selectively parsed testimony, Cohen not only revealed himself as an unrepentant grifter (sorry - not sorry), he revealed himself as someone who wanted to get back into Trump's good graces.  And he apparently did.  Trump has pledged to investigate James and Bragg and place them where Cohen used to be - behind bars.

I listened to some of Cohen's podcast rants when I started relying on podcasts for news in place of the bankrupt legacy media, but his schtick wore very thin very quickly, and I stopped listening to him because I was tired of his loud-mouthed Long Island accent.  I stopped listening to him for all the wrong reasons; it never occurred to me that he had knowledge about Jeffrey Epstein that he likely never would have divulged, or that until someone thought to ask him about it, he was safe from having to divulge it and could make bakeries full of dough for as long as no one did.  It never occurred to the Meiselas brothers at MeidasTouch, either, until they dropped Cohen once his statement about James and Bragg came out.  They did not explain why they dropped Cohen.  They didn't need to.

But then, it never occurred to a lot of people, particularly people in the New York or Washington social scenes, that Cohen had privileged information about Epstein he was prepared to take to his grave - something an intelligent primary school student in the north of England could have figured out.

Michael Cohen did, though, ultimately see the error of his ways.  Except that the error was dissociating himself from Trump.      

Illegal and Disgusting

The title is a phrase from comments Donald Trump made about how he filed against the federal government as a private citizen during the Biden interregnum for . . . well, I don't know what he sued for, but never mind, "illegal" and "disgusting" are perfect adjectives for what Trump has done in the past 72 hours.

First, Trump's "Justice" Department "released" the Epstein files this past Friday as the law was supposed to require it to do, but it only released two percent of what is on file but redacted 90 percent of what was released.  So most of it looked like this:

But some material incriminating Trump managed to leak out because Pam Blondie somehow overlooked it, and though it was removed from the "Justice" Department's Web site.  But intuitive anti-Trump groups took screenshots of it anyway.

You probably didn't notice any of that, however, because Trump made a big deal out of this:

John F. Kennedy, unlike his wife, may have found Pablo Casals' music boring, and he may have preferred Dr. No to Jules and Jim, but he appreciated the performing arts enough to advocate for their promotion and their celebration.  Unlike John F. Kennedy, Trump places great importance on  entertainment value more than on artistic value, which is why he gave arts honors to some of the least deserving entertainers in the country, and his idea of an enjoyable show is professional wrestling or a UFC fight, which is planned to take place on the White House lawn sometime in the new year.   

Too bad the ballroom won't be ready by then.  That would be the perfect place to put it.

Once again . . . it's time for the United States to break up into separate countries.  I support the dissolution of the Union.  I am a secessionist. 

They Got Pics

The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released pictures of Epstein and his clients.

Not Brian Epstein with the Beatles, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and Cilla Black.  Jeffrey Epstein with some of the most powerful and/or revered men in the world.

Among the chaps in Epstein's company are, clockwise from top right, Bill Gates, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (whom King Charles III demoted by rescinding his royal titles), Alan Dershowitz, Woody Allen (not really surprising, given Allen's own scandals involving girls and young women, but still saddening), Richard Branson, a guy who looks like Richard Benjamin (but isn't, because if Richard Benjamin had had anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, his wife Paula Prentiss would have left him by now), and Epstein himself.

Oh yeah, and pictures of Bill Clinton too.

And of course, pictures of one Donald J. Trump.

The Epstein estate honored subpoenas by the House Democrats to produce such material related to the ongoing investigation into the late financier and pedophile.  Unlike Trump, Epstein's survivors and lawyers actually obey the law.  Out of 95,000 pictures provided to the House Democrats, they released 19.

Isn't nineteen thousand pictures a lot go through, you might ask?   Yes.  But they didn't released nineteen thousand pictures.  They released nineteen pictures.

Clearly, the Democrats don't want to flood the zone, as it were, to embarrass Trump or anyone else caught up in the Epstein scandal.  They want to release photos bit by bit, to make Trump in particular sweat as much as possible.  They need the as-yet unreleased pictures as leverage to get the Epstein files released.

In the meantime, they can laugh at the reaction one picture is likely getting - that of Steve Bannon (yeah, him too!) talking with Woody Allen.  What could be more embarrassing to the maestro of MAGA than to be seen talking with the one American filmmaker who has taken his cinematic cues from the French - and, artistically speaking, has much more in common with Jean Renoir than John Ford? 

Megyn Kelly Is a Sadist

Megyn Kelly was always a jerk, as noted by the pretentious Welsh spelling her parents used for her first name.   But recent comments from the inexplicably popular conservative talk show host reveal that she may have a brain worm far worse than what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dealt with.

Kelly, who recently signed with Sirius XM to launch a show on one of its talk channels, got herself in hot water almost as soon as she began her show, Last month, she created a firestorm of a backlash for comments she made about Jeffrey Epstein, in which she suggested he was technically not a pedophile  because he preferred fifteen-year-old girls over third-graders, and that fifteen-year-old girls are close enough to maturity - "the barely legal type."  No, they're not.  They weren't close enough to maturity in 1980, when Brooke Shields was that age and made those suggestively suggestive Calvin Klein jeans ads, and they're not close enough to maturity now.

And as if that weren't bad enough, Kelly, talking on her show to fellow discredited media personality Mark Halperin, said she wanted to see the alleged drug dealers on the Venezuelan boats that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have been blowing out of the water die slow and painful deaths for a crime they likely  did not commit - namely, running drugs.

"So I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water," Kelly said to Halperin, "whether they're on the boat or in the water, but I'd really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little."

Why do I get the feeling that Kelly knows tortures that were banned during the Spanish Inquisition?

I used to think Kelly was just a mean bitch, but even female Rottweilers are kinder and gentler than this bottle-blonde harridan.  She is happy to defend pedophilia and try to redefine it to make the late Jeffrey Epstein - and, by association - Donald Trump - look like they're being railroaded (well, she is a attorney), and she's also happy to suggest death-camp justice to Spanish-speaking mariners accused of drug running without even a fair trial or adherence to international law in sentencing the guilty parties.  I'm trying to think of a female political commentator on the left who are as mean-spirited and as morally bankrupt as Kelly.  Of course, I can't think of any as morally bankrupt as she is.  Mean-spiritedness?  A couple of ladies on the left, including Jennifer Welch ("We're not fans of the Catholics"), occasionally get close, but once female liberal commentators reach a certain level of viciousness (as when Joy Reid tried to gay-shame Charlie Crist and then denied it despite the evidence), they usually just stay there.  Megyn Kelly, like her spiritual benefactor Donald Trump, moves heaven and earth to get  progressively worse.  If you think this is as bad as Megyn Kelly can get, you don't know Megyn Kelly.

It is for these transgressions of intelligence and taste on her Sirius XM show that many Sirius XM subscribers to cancel their subscriptions in protest, as there are no signs that Kelly's days at Sirius XM are numbered.  That is a brave thing to do, as Sirius XM has no competition in satellite radio, and so-called terrestrial radio is virtually unlistenable.  It is for those reasons - but for the latter reason, especially - that I remain a Sirius XM subscriber despite Kelly's presence on it.  Because I don't listen to political commentary on Sirius XM.  I subscribe strictly for the music channels, and I listen to it in my car more than I do on my laptop.  I consider my car to be my refuge, as I consider music to be a refuge, and so I want to get away from politics when I'm driving.  I listen to my favorite rock Sirius XM channels - which play records going back sixty years - while on the road.  If I still listened to regular FM radio and tried to find a station that still played music made before Jimmy Carter left the White House, I wouldn't have much luck.  And thanks to an oligarchical communications law passed nearly thirty years ago, I'd have to deal with stations owned by politically connected conglomerates such as iHeart Radio, which has done more damage to American radio than payola.

I even listen to the jazz and classical channels on Sirius XM instead of the local public classical and jazz stations on the FM dial, mainly because the reception of these stations is so bad that I get interference on my receiver; the classical station gets cut out by a rock station from Scranton - over a hundred miles from where I live - that broadcasts on the same frequency.  And sometimes I like to listen to Sirius XM's contemporary jazz (derided by its detractors as "smooth jazz") channel, Watercolors.  I can't listen to the FM contemporary-jazz station in New York because it went off the air seventeen years ago. 

It's all good and fine to stop subscribing to Sirius XM to protest Megyn Kelly's presence on it, but such a boycott is highly impractical when FM and AM radio are particularly awful these days and Sirius XM is the only place to go to listen to the sort of music you can't hear on the FM dial anymore and haven't been able to hear on the AM dial since at least the late 1980s.  My advice to Sirius XM subscribers is simply not to listen to Megyn Kelly's show rather than quit the service.  Sirius XM will likely still get the message that way.  Why do you think 50s on 5 and 60s on 6 were moved from channels 5 and 6 to farther down the dial and renamed "50s Gold and "60s Gold"?  Because Sirius XM found that it could get many more listeners on its channels at the top of the dial if there were more "current" music stations on channels 5 and 6.  And I don't think it was in response to canceled subscriptions.  It's because Sirius XM was responding to what its customers liked more as opposed to what they didn't like as much.   And sticking it out and ignoring Megyn Kelly could possibly be more effective in not just pushing her show down the dial but getting it canceled entirely than just quitting the whole damn company.

Get that sadistic excuse for a human being out of your mind, tune in to Watercolors, and chill out. 

Trump Is a Dead Duck

It happened.

House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson was finally forced to swear in newly elected Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who was the 218th signatory to the discharge petition to release the Epstein files. With that, the House had a vote on the issue, and, to everyone's surprise, the vote to release the Epstein files did not get 218 votes.

It got 427 votes.  Of the eight House members who didn't vote for it, seven of them didn't vote.  The only one who voted no was Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA), about as MAGA as MAGA gets. 

With that overwhelming vote in favor of releasing the files, the Senate consented unanimously to have the files released.  Trump - who suddenly said he wanted the Epstein files released - signed the bill authorizing their release.  He vetoed it not because he has nothing to hide and wants to prove it after being harassed over the files for so long but because the vote in favor of releasing the files was so overwhelming that he didn't want to be humiliated by being overridden.

Now, just about everyone in the media is calling Trump a lame-duck President.  I won't call him that, because to do so would grant that I should call him a President.  But I do agree that he's living on borrowed time, and hopefully, the lease is up soon.  Not on January 20, 2029 or on November 4 2026, but much, much sooner.  Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution allows an entire presidential administration to be removed for . . . treason.

Feeling like a dead duck . . . spitting out pieces of his broken luck . . . 

And what proof could be used to remove the entire Trump regime for treason?  How much time do you have? His dealings with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia are only the latest in a series of blatant examples.

And after we remove the Trump regime - which is going to take awhile, because Attorney General Pam Bondi is going to find every possible way to slow-walk the release of the Epstein files - we can get onto working to bring the United States to an end and break it up into separate countries.

Aqualung, my friend!

The Ballad of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein

The Democrats, it turns put, agreed to re-opening the government at the perfect time. The media have moved on to . . . e-mails from the late Jeffrey Epstein.

I've heard so many minute details about these e-mails to the point where my brain hurts.  So let me boil it down for you:

Epstein had a cozier friendship with Donald Trump than Trump has let on.  And it seems that Trump may have gotten a little too cozy with the underage girls that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sexually abused.  Epstein even mentioned to Maxwell - in 2011 - that Trump had spent hours with one of his own girls in Epstein's own house but said nothing about it afterwards - a dog that "has not barked." Maxwell herself had tried to distance the two men form each other to help Trump, but now to no avail, thanks to these e-mails released.  And Epstein said that he personally found Trump to be more vile and dirty than anyone - even Epstein himself - could possibly imagine.

These are just highlights, and I don't think I can do justice to the details..  So, to get a more substantial understanding of this story, I suggest you watch this Lincoln Square video hosted by Rick Wilson.

 

Epstein Barred

MAGA is disgusted by the memory of financier Jeffrey Epstein.  They know all about the sex trafficking of minors he was involved with, and Attorney General Pam Blondie (her last name isn't really Blondie, and that's not the only thing of hers that isn't really Blondie)  had promised to released the files that include Jeff's client list.  Now Pam Blondie is backtracking, and Trump, who promised to release the files in the 2024 campaign, has been berating reporters for continuing to ask about Jeff, even as he's now trying to prevent Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell from talking.  Except that now Trump insists there are no files on his good buddy Jeff.

But when pressed further on the files, he now insists that the Obama administration concocted them, just like they did with the Steele dossier.  Well, which is it?  Either they exist or they don't.  For the record, they do; some of them have been released, most of the released files being court documents from the Justice Department, from a file on Epstein dating back as far as, uh, 2006.  The big kahuna is a client list of guys that Epstein kept in order to extort favors from them, and Britain's Prince Andrew is rumored to be among the names.  And remember, Prince Andrew might today be King Andrew I of England if his older brother had been killed in a freak accident before he married and had children.  (Wow-wee - pretty scary!)

The list, of course might include and most likely includes one Donald J. Trump, whose administration would be brought down faster than Nixon's if the client list showed him on it.  I'm sort of hoping the list has, in addition to Trump, every heterosexual male in the line of presidential succession and that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, a gay man, resigns in disgust over the scandal, which would leave Pam Blondie first in line and make her President.  Then we could impeach, convict and remove her for obstruction of justice and replace her with someone to be determined.  

Alas, you can't have everything.  And where this administration is concerned, you can't have anything.  Least of all the Epstein files. 

Too Much Of Everything

News is being made faster than I can comment on it, and I am going to try - but not necessarily succeed - in summarizing it here.

Donald Trump must be running scared right now, as the shooter in the El Paso massacre turned out to be a white nationalist who wanted to do his part to rid America of Mexicans.  (Excuse me?  The city's name is "El Paso!")  He's suddenly in favor of background checks for gun purchases, and he's even suggesting that Mitch McConnell is on board with such legislation (in fact, he isn't).  And while this is going on, Jeffrey Epstein has committed suicide, meaning that the criminal case against him for sex trafficking can't continue, though the civil case can, and some of Epstein's victims are now much less afraid to come forward.  Given Epstein's past relationship with Trump, he's probably still concerned about what might come out.  Not that Trump was involved in what Epstein was doing (I'll assume he wasn't), just the fact that he did business with him. (I won't bother with Trump's own theory of Epstein's death, which he tweeted today.)

And meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats and his top deputy Sue Gordon are both on their way out and DNI nominee John Ratliffe has withdrawn his nomination, leaving Trump with an acting DNI who's guaranteed not to offend the boss with any intelligence on Russia that he may come up with.  Trump may as well not decided to send Ratliffe's nomination to the Senate and made him the acting Director of National Intelligence.

And as if that weren't enough, Democratic presidential candidates may risk helping Trump by calling him a white supremacist because that will only get his base even more fired up to vote for him again.  Especially those who feel offended because they're not white supremacists, although, while not every Trump supporter is a white supremacist, most white supremacists are Trump supporters.  Joe Biden took a more cautious route, saying that Trump "encourages" white supremacists even as he's called Trump out for having more in common with George Wallace than with George Washington.  That's a pretty tough tightrope to walk, trying not to anger the Trump base and motivate them to vote while trying to get the Democratic base motivated.  And what a test to see if Biden's gambit works.

And finally . . . if you're going to arrest anyone for illegal immigration, don't arrest the immigrants, arrest the corporate officers that hired them for their companies!

Uppers and Eppers

This past Friday, the Dow Jones average, the NASDAQ, and the Standard & Poor's 500 all hit record highs - but while not indicative of a healthy economy for everyone (it's not the Dow's average that matters, it's yours), Trump can and does point to these numbers for evidence that the economy is sound.  That's enough to convinced overworked and underpaid Americans that there's greater opportunity and social mobility for them than there actually is, and Democrats seem unable to turn anyone on to the truth.  

Meanwhile, the Jeffrey Epstein story - the case involving the onetime Trump pal with having sex with minors - has brought down Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who got Epstein out of a jam back when he was the prosecutor in that case back in 2007.  Further investigation suggests that it might bring down Trump, though that remains to be seen.  I haven't really commented on this story because I think the story has commented on itself.