It’s not good when Syria and Nicaragua are your new (and only) best friends

Click the links for more information and source material.

The news today is full of speculation that faux-President Donald J. Trump plans to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. This would make the United States one of just three countries worldwide who are not signatories to the historic pact to reduce planet-warming emissions.

The other two are widely recognized for their global leadership, independence and scientific achievement – Syria and Nicaragua. Are you kidding me? The 194 best nations around the world are signed on to this climate change agreement – including Russia and China – and we want to be aligned on the other side of the issue with a war-torn dictatorship like Syria and Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? That would make a great SNL skit if it wasn’t so sadly true.

Trump pledged during his campaign to “cancel” the Paris deal – which, of course, he can’t really do since he has not yet been named King of the Universe, but those in his administration who oppose the agreement have apparently convinced him to abandon our participation in it ― despite few political advantages and harsh economic and diplomatic consequences, according to the Huffington Post.

“Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. cannot officially withdraw until November 2019,” HuffPo reported, “but even an announcement that the country is looking to leave the deal shows that the White House has no plans to meet earlier targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions.”

There is much more to this story and I encourage you to read up on it as the news unfolds. Meanwhile, I want to repeat something I wrote late last year and which is even more significant now.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a scientific body under the auspices of the United Nations, set up in 1988 at the request of more than 120 member governments to provide an objective, scientific view of world climate change and its political and economic impacts. Key word: Scientific.

It is not a basement full of crazy leftist global warming whackadoos trying to scare us all into building windmills, as some would have you believe. You can google it for more information, but for now, just know this:

The IPCC does not carry out its own research but instead relies on thousands of scientists and other experts who volunteer without pay to write and review reports about the state of the environment. Three years ago, the IPCC warned against the dangers of continued reliance on fossil fuels. It stated that if we burn more than 30% of our known fossil fuel reserves, we will cross an environmental “red line” by the year 2040 that will result in more extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels and so on.

If we burn all of our available fossil fuels, the IPCC said, humans will find large parts of the planet uninhabitable outdoors. Did you hear that? Parts of the planet would be UNINHABITABLE OUTDOORS.

When I read that it jolted me out of my chair. The year 2040 is not some unreachable date far out in the future. It's only 23 years from now. I’ll be dead by then in all probability but my children will be roughly my age now and my grandchildren will only be 29, 31, 35 and 46. Trump may be dead then, too, but his own son Barron will only be 34. You’d think he would care about the boy, who might be able to catch fish from the roof of Trump Tower by then if the oceans continue to rise.

The HuffPo points out that the economic effects of leaving the Paris Agreement “would likely be devastating. The U.S. is poised to lose access to fast-growing clean energy markets as Europe, India and China gain major footholds in an industry estimated to be worth $6 trillion by 2030. Countries that tax emissions could now put a tariff on American-made imports, complicating Trump’s plans to reclaim the U.S. mantle as a top manufacturing hub.”

Therefore I can’t imagine what motivates a man like Trump to purposely tear down everything good about this country unless (1) he is still trying to erase Barack Obama from history, or (2) there is money for him in it somehow, so I’m guessing that he has fossil fuel stocks and other investments in coal, oil and gas production that will help carry him financially during his declining years.

And speaking of declining years, I think this will be the year that Trump experiences the full force of covfefe. Turn on your red strobe lights, Mr. Faux President, and let’s get down and boogie.

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More good information here.

The presidency is not a sole proprietorship

I know a guy who ran a small consulting business. He was what they call a “sole proprietor.” In other words, he didn’t have any shareholders and he didn’t answer to a board of directors. It was just him in charge of everything.

He was president, CEO, CFO, COO, director, manager, supervisor and staff. He was the clerical support and the purchasing department, and after hours, he emptied the trash can and cleaned up the office. He replaced light bulbs in the lamps and took care of the computers the best he could, and when the IT work surpassed his level of expertise, he carted them away to get repairs.

If something needed to be done, he did it.

If something needed to be bought, he bought it.

If a bill needed to be paid, he paid it.

If something needed to be changed, he changed it.

He alone decided which jobs to accept and which ones to reject. If he accepted a job, he decided – for the most part – how and when it would get done. If he rejected a job, that was it. Period. If he didn’t want to do it, it didn’t get done. No one was looking over his shoulder and making him do the work. 

He didn’t have any employees, but if the business had needed to hire someone, he’d be the one to do it. The vetting process would go something like this: Do I like this person? Is he or she qualified? Can he or she do what I want done? Will this person get along with me and the other employees (if I had any)? Is the person honest and trustworthy? And not a murderer?

"OK. You’re hired." Nobody else needed to get involved.

If any employee needed to be fired, he’d basically use the same process in reverse: Did he kill somebody? No? Well that’s good. But is he dishonest? And so on. That’s the way it works in a sole proprietorship.

*     *     *

I know of another guy who ran his own business for many years. He was also not accountable to shareholders and did not have to answer to a board of directors. He had some employees and some family members who helped out with the business, but mostly he ran the show by himself.

When he wanted something done, he usually hired contractors and subcontractors to do the actual work and he told them exactly what he wanted it to look like. He decided what to buy, who to pay (or not) and who to hire and fire. He was the president, the CEO, the COO, the director and the manager, just like my friend above (OK, it was me). I don’t think he cleaned the office or changed light bulbs, but in all other ways he pretty much operated as the same one-man show.

Having started out with some free money from his father, this man – through business deals, loans and accumulated debt – built a smaller business into a huge international empire. He did it by developing his own name into a brand that was known worldwide (rightly or wrongly) as a measurement of success. After that, he mainly sat in an office and made deals to put his name on project after project, then signed a bunch of stuff before heading out to play golf.

He’s still trying to operate that way today as President of the United States.

Only now he has a 535-member board of directors known as Congress. He has 330 million shareholders known as the American people. He even has bosses who occasionally tell him the rules he has to follow. There are nine of them and they wear black robes. (Sadly, he doesn't want to hear any of this.)

As president, he isn’t the sole arbiter or what gets done, when and how; what gets bought; who gets hired and fired; who gets paid; and what gets changed. He just thinks he is, and he wants to be. Desperately. But like the old woman says in the Geiko commercial, “That's not how it works! That's not how any of this works!”

I admit that at one time in my past, when I was frustrated with politicians, I said these words out loud: “Maybe we need a businessman to be the President of the United States.” When I said that, however, I assumed three things: 

(1) That said business person would have general knowledge of American and world history,

(2) That he or she would have some clue as to how the U.S. government works, and 

(3) That he or she would be willing to learn from others who have had the job and simply apply their business acumen to actual government service.

The problem with the current president is well documented. He doesn’t know anything about our government and he doesn’t want to learn anything about anything. He thinks he already has a “good brain” and just wants to run the country the way he ran his business, with no interference from anyone. There’s a word for that.

It’s called “dictatorship.”

I'm thinking it's time for someone to activate the board.

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Happy Memorial Day. On this day of all days we should remember the brave men and women who died so the rest of us can live in freedom and not under the thumb of some crazy authoritarian thug. Just sayin.’

I think I’ll start a crime spree now that anything goes

Well, you can scratch Montana from the list of states I want to live in – or even visit, for that matter. I don’t ever want to wake up in a state where a candidate for office can beat up a news reporter, release a statement lying about it, still get endorsed by the faux-president of the United States, win election to Congress and then issue an apology for doing the very thing he said he didn’t do the day before.

It sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Greg Gianforte’s body slam of Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs is further proof that we have now normalized assault as part of our daily routine, a part of doing business in Donald Trump’s America. This comes next on the list of other crimes we have accepted / ignored / normalized / bragged about / forgotten since Trump began running for president.

* Take sexual assault, for example. You can admit that to a TV reporter on an open microphone, prompting several women to come out and say you did it to them, too, and walk away unscathed.

* Fraud? No biggie. Rip off hundreds of unsuspecting “students” at your fake university, deny everything for years and then write a check to make it go away. Easy peasy.

* Rape? This is fixable with two words: Non-disclosure agreement.

* Theft? How about hiring people to work for you and then refusing to pay them? That may not be theft according to the legal definition, but it’s the same as stealing money in my book, so I’m sticking with theft for now.

* Incitement to riot? Did you watch any of Trump’s rallies? Who do you think inspired the Montana massacre?

* Tax evasion?  Don’t know about this one, but I have my suspicions. Would a pathological liar tell the truth on a tax return? You be the judge.

* And then there’s colluding with a foreign government to rig an American election? The jury is still out on this one, but in my world if it looks like vodka and tastes like vodka, I’m thinking it’s vodka.

In addition, there are things that may not be crimes but, as my wife so eloquently put it, “are things you’re not supposed to do.” I’d put conflict of interest and nepotism in this basket, along with making a mockery of the Hatch Act which prohibits members of the Executive Branch of government from engaging in certain forms of political activity. Yes, I know, the Hatch Act exempts the president, but his shameless tweeting on behalf of bad actors like Greg Gianforte surely violates any reasonable standard for proper presidential behavior.

I’m sure there are others that I’m forgetting, but I think you can start to see my point. The faux president openly and publicly declared the free and independent news media to be “the enemy of the American people,” and the next thing you know a Republican candidate for Congress is body-slamming a reporter who asked a question he didn’t want to answer. This wannabe MMA fighter now gets to go to Washington where he can help decide whether you and I can have Social Security and health insurance, whether poor children can have food and whether women can have a say in what happens to their bodies.

I saw a photo yesterday of a man wearing a t-shirt which said, on the back, “Rope. Tree. Journalist.” Let that sink in for a minute…

Ready?

Click to enlarge

First, someone had to think up a slogan like that and say to himself, “Yep, I can sell that.” Then someone had to screen print those shirts for distribution, and finally, someone (or a lot of someones for all I know) had to pay money to buy them so they could wear them out in public. I can’t think of a word strong enough to describe the obscenity of that.

Trump once declared that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. I’m sure that’s true. Now, it appears, people who support him wouldn’t be arrested for it, either.

Did I mention The Twilight Zone?

That time when the Saudis gave Ivanka Trump $100 million for her ‘charity’

(Click the links for source information.)

Now that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have donated $100 million to Ivanka Trump’s fund for women entrepreneurs, one has to wonder how long it will take before some of that money finds its way into one of Ivanka’s $450 Turnberry Satchel shoulder bags? After all, that’s the one thing that the Trumps actually do well – relieving other people of their money.

Let me count the ways… but first, a little Trumpocrisy. (That’s hypocrisy in the era of Trump.)

When he was running for office, Trump frequently criticized the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation for accepting donations from foreign governments, even though fact-checkers showed that all of the cash was used for the foundation’s worthy endeavors around the globe. USA Today quoted a June 2016 Facebook posting in which Trump said, “Saudi Arabia and many of the countries that gave vast amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation want women as slaves and to kill gays. Hillary must return all money from such countries!”

Speaks for itself, I think.

Hypocrisy aside, the Trump family has a long history of taking other people’s money and keeping it for themselves. It’s what they’ve always done and what they continue to do from the relative protection of the White House. Let’s look at the family’s track record: 

Four times the Trump organization used funds borrowed from banks to finance casinos and other businesses, only to file for bankruptcy within a couple of years, leaving their creditors to try and recover millions of dollars of debt.

* According to thelawdictionary.org, Trump's Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City was in debt for billions of dollars in 1991 when his corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Court allowed Trump to reorganize his debts and allowed the casino to keep operating.

* In 1992, Trump filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on his Trump Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City. At this time, Trump owed $550 million. As part of the restructuring, Trump was given a lenient repayment plan and was allowed to stay on as CEO.

* Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts filed for bankruptcy in 2004. The corporation had $1.8 billion dollars of debt. Trump reduced his share in the company to 25%, thereby surrendering his control of the corporation. The corporation received lower interest rates and another loan to upgrade the properties.

* And in 2009, Trump Entertainment Resorts filed bankruptcy after missing a large bond interest payment. Trump was not able to agree with his board of directors on a repayment plan so he resigned as chairman of the board and retained only a 10% ownership interest in the corporation.

Even when he managed to keep his businesses afloat, Trump has a history of refusing to pay vendors for work performed on his projects. USA Today reported at least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments and other government filings accusing Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. “Among them are a dishwasher in Florida, a glass company in New Jersey, a carpet company, a plumber, painters, 48 waiters, dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs from coast to coast, real estate brokers who sold his properties and, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others,” the newspaper said.

In addition to the lawsuits, USA Today found more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work since the 1980s. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y., air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm.

Then there was Trump University, a scam college that purported to teach average citizens how to strike it rich in the real estate business when, in fact, it was just a marketing ploy to take their hard-earned money. Instead of sharing his secrets of success, Trump made money selling expensive seminars and preying on the naivete of the elderly and uneducated.

Perhaps the most disturbing Trump scam was his use of $20,000 in donations to his supposedly charitable Trump Foundation to buy a six-foot-tall portrait of himself during a fundraiser auction at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. I’d call that narcissism on steroids.

So now a bunch of oil-rich Arabs have figuratively put Ivanka Trump in a room with $100 million of free money. What do you think she’ll do with the cash? And how will we know, since the Trumps like to hide their financials from the public?

Think about it. I mean, after all, Trump is now in a position to use the White House to steal money. He wants to take away Medicaid benefits and Obamacare subsidies from the poor, the elderly and the sick, for example, and that’s only one way he’s robbing the public to help wealthy Americans like himself get even richer. I’ve got to believe that in a short time, that $100 million sitting in Ivanka’s "charitable fund" is going to start calling out his name.

Trump missed a chance to entertain some ‘tremendous’ dictators

“Is Franco still dead?”

That was the running joke in the mid-1970s following the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The former general came to power in 1939 and ruled over Spain as a military dictator for 36 years until he died in 1975 after a prolonged period of time on life support.

He had remained alive, technically, in an extended coma, which prompted the media to ask frequently, “Is Franco still alive?” That inquiry morphed into the running joke after doctors finally pulled his plug.

I mention this only because Franco is one of several former dictators who would undoubtedly have been invited to the Trump White House if he was still alive. Already Trump has expressed his admiration for world renowned tyrants including Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, while entertaining such well-known human rights advocates (wink wink) as Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, Egypt's president Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and China's president Xi Jinping.

Egypt’s El-Sisi, in particular, led a coup that ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. He later won an election that observers said appeared to have been rigged, and is credited with a series of human rights abuses during a government crackdown on Islamists since Morsi’s ouster.

Trump was also set to welcome Philippine strongman and murderer Rodrigo Duterte until he – not Trump – had second thoughts. Duterte has alternately claimed credit for and denied killing hundreds of people during a government crackdown on drugs. It’s not clear whether Duterte will eventually accept Trump’s invitation to visit Washington.

And then there’s today’s guest – Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Since surviving a failed coup attempt last July, Erdoğan has jailed hundreds of political opponents, seized the country’s largest newspaper and tried to rewrite the constitution. He is described as “an elected autocrat, tolerated by the West for maintaining a certain stability” while overseeing a dominant political party that serves only his wishes.

In other words, he’s Donald Trump’s kind of guy.

All of this calls to mind a number of other dictators who surely would have been invited to the White House or Mar-a-Lago if they didn’t have the misfortune of dying before Trump became the authoritarian president of the United States. I’ve compiled a short list:

(1) There was Franco, of course, who committed decades of human rights abuses against the Spanish people, which included the establishment of concentration camps, the use of forced labor and the execution of between 200,000 and 400,000 political and ideological enemies.

(2) The next one who came to mind was Idi Amin Dada of Uganda. After seizing power in 1971, Amin was responsible for persecuting tens of thousands of South Asian immigrants and for the massacre of about 300,000 members of rival African ethnic groups. Who can forget the flamboyant leader who declared himself to be “His Excellency President for Life” and also “Conqueror of the British Empire” or CBE.

(3) Franco also leads directly to Augusto Pinochet of Chile. Like Franco, Pinochet steered clear of genocide but still managed to earn a well-deserved reputation as a vicious tyrant. There were multiple attempts to prosecute him for crimes including murder, torture, tax evasion and corruption that ultimately came to nothing, and he died under house arrest in 2006.

(4) Pol Pot, leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, was considered to be one of the craziest, most murderous dictators who ever existed. To turn Cambodia into a simple agricultural utopia, he oversaw the mass murder of about two million city dwellers, merchants, teachers and other “intellectuals.” He died of a heart attack in 1998.

(5) And no list would be complete without Mao Zedong of China. (That’s China, our new best friend which may or not be a currency manipulator depending on what deal we want done this week.) Mao was one of the most prolific killers of the 20th century. His reign of terror left anywhere from 30 million to 60 million Chinese dead before Mao died in 1976.

This is not to suggest that Trump will start killing people any time soon or that he’s in a class with Pol Pot or Mao. He’s not. At least not yet. But a president is known by the company he keeps, and it seems odd to me that in between visits from the leaders of Canada, Mexico, Australia and the United Kingdom, Trump is so willing to wine and dine the likes of Erdoğan and Duterte.

This is especially troubling after the news that Trump likes to share top secret intelligence with Russian spies who get to visit the Oval Office without being burdened by American journalists. I’m sure that Erdoğan and Duterte watch CNN and read the Washington Post, so they are no doubt aware of Trump’s proclivity for bragging about his “great intel.”

Don’t forget that Trump was the first western leader to congratulate Erdoğan on his victory in Turkey. If he plays his cards right and lays on a couple of well-placed compliments and a 40-second handshake, Erdoğan could easily get Trump to give out our nuclear codes, the password for Fort Knox and Melania Trump’s bra size.

Who knows what else might fall out of Trump’s mouth after he tells his visitors how many Electoral College votes he received? After yesterday's revelations, that's an open question and I'm not sure I want the answer.

Breaking news: White House denies Trump’s role in Kennedy assassination

By now you’ve probably heard the Washington Post report that Alternative President Donald J. Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and an ambassador during a White House meeting last week. The article quotes “current and former U.S. officials” who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

Shortly thereafter, Trump trotted out his National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster, to deny that intelligence sources and methods were discussed, or that Trump disclosed any military operations that weren't already publicly known. “I was in the room,” McMaster said. “It didn't happen.”

The problem is, McMaster denied something that wasn’t even reported in the Post (oh look, another shiny object). He might as well have denied that Trump was the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll, or that he sabotaged the Hindenburg, because the newspaper didn’t report those charges, either.

When I first heard this story, the first words out of my mouth were, literally, “For the love of god. How many articles of impeachment do you need?” The other question – now and for the next few news cycles – will be who do you believe, Donald Trump or what he calls the “fake news” Washington Post?

I became a newspaper reporter in 1972 – the same year that five “plumbers” under the direction of Richard M. Nixon were arrested while burglarizing and bugging the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate. The Washington Post first reported the story, was first to recognize its significance and was first with virtually every new angle over the next two years until Nixon was forced to resign on August 8, 1974. They don’t report stories like this without solid sourcing.

Donald J. Trump, on the other hand, is a pathological liar who has invented his own reality and is trying to live inside it. He lies with such ease and frequency that it boggles the mind, and frankly, if he came to my house and told me to my face that he wasn’t on the Grassy Knoll, I’m not sure I’d believe him.

So I’m putting my money on the Post, and that brings me back to the question: How many articles of impeachment do you need?

It’s bad enough that Trump and his children have turned the White House into a profit center to enhance their personal wealth, in violation of anybody’s reasonable standard for conflict of interest, or that the man who mocked Barack Obama for an occasional golf trip spends about 30 percent of his time as president on the links – at our expense.

It’s even worse that Trump openly admitted to obstruction of justice in a TV interview regarding his firing of FBI Director James Comey, supposedly to halt an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election. It’s worse still that Trump followed the firing by making threats against Comey and claiming to have secret tape recordings of his White House meetings, which is very possibly a violation of state and federal wiretapping statutes – wiretapping being something Trump claims to know something about.

Now Trump is accused of sharing classified information with Russia. The irony of that – given the way Trump rode the whole Hillary Clinton email issue during the campaign and right up to this day – is w-a-a-a-y off the charts.

So I ask one last time: How many impeachable offenses do we need before the House of Representatives puts its party aside and takes action for the good of our democracy? How many more before at least 23 Congressmen grow a set of balls and join the Democrats in bringing down this buffoon of a president?

Forty-six testicles it all it will take – and even fewer if some women want to get on board.

Mr. Speaker, it’s time to put the orange back in the crate, to give that hair and those neckties a day off, to pull down the gilded draperies and reunite The Donald with his rental son and his mail-order bride, and to finally park the Trump train back in its garage. C’mon, boys and girls, it's going to be a lot of fun. Who’s with me? 

Come back to the Five and Dime, John Dean, John Dean…

I was 24 years old and well into my third year as a newspaper reporter when Richard M. Nixon resigned as president of the United States. To a young journalist, Watergate was almost orgasmic. It was the most exciting thing that could have happened politically in this country and confirmation that I and my young colleagues had chosen the right profession.

Never mind that the pay sucked badly (about $125 a week). If the news media could bring down a president, we really were going to save the world.

So it is that I remember Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, the 18-minute gap, the Saturday Night Massacre and the subsequent Watergate hearings that led Nixon to resign before he could be impeached. Here’s what happened, for those too young (or too old) to remember:

In 1972, an inquiry was launched into a break-in at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in which five Nixon operatives were caught trying to bug the national Democratic headquarters. Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor and former U.S. solicitor general, was chosen as special counsel to investigate the incident. He soon clashed with the White House over Nixon’s refusal to release over 10 hours of secret Oval Office recordings, some of which implicated the president in the break-in.

On Saturday, October 20, 1973, in an unprecedented show of executive power, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson, a Republican, to fire Special Prosecutor Cox, but Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered Richardson’s deputy William Ruckelshaus, also a Republican, to fire Cox, but Ruckelshaus also resigned in protest. The role of attorney general then fell to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who reluctantly complied with Nixon’s request and dismissed Cox.

Less than a half hour later, the White House dispatched FBI agents to close off the offices of the special prosecutor, attorney general and deputy attorney general, putting the exclamation point on what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”

Nixon’s attack on his own Justice Department did not turn out well for him, as we all know. According to various internet sources, more than 50,000 concerned citizens sent telegrams to Washington and 21 members of Congress introduced resolutions calling for Nixon’s impeachment.

I can still hear Senator Sam Ervin chairing the Watergate hearings that followed and see John Dean, Nixon’s lawyer, testifying about the cover-up orchestrated by Nixon and his chief of staff Bob Haldeman. Nixon had sent Dean to Camp David to assemble a report detailing everything Dean knew about the Watergate scandal, but Dean was one of the cover-up's chief participants, so he soon realized he was being fitted for scapegoat horns.

Dean never completed the report, but instead hired an attorney and began spilling the beans to the Watergate Commission. Nixon, meanwhile, reluctantly appointed Leon Jaworski as the new Watergate prosecutor, and after Jaworski eventually secured the release of the Oval Office recordings, Nixon resigned the presidency on August 8, 1974.

Fast-forward to 2017. Donald J. Trump is in the White House and he, members of his cabinet and his top advisers are suspected of collusion with the Russian government to manipulate the results of the 2016 presidential election.

The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has recused himself because of his role in the Trump campaign. A deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, delivers vital information about the Russia probe to the White House lawyers but when she disobeys an illegal order from the president, she is fired. Trump also fires former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was overseeing an investigation into stock trades made by a member of the president’s cabinet.

Is any of this sounding like déjà vu all over again?

And now, FBI Director James Comey has been fired for reasons that don’t make any sense, given the timing of the decision. It’s no coincidence that back in March, Comey testified publicly that the FBI was “investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

Bingo! The FBI wants to know if there was collusion between Trump and the Russians – a story line that Trump claims is “a total hoax.” Must. Fire. Comey.

I’ll admit that at this stage of the investigation, without a special prosecutor, Comey, Bharara and Yates do not translate exactly into Richardson, Ruckelshaus and Cox, but you get the idea. The alternative president gets himself embroiled in a scandal, investigations are launched, facts are uncovered and when investigators start getting close they are fired. As the pundits have already said, there’s a decidedly Nixonian ring to all of this.

Keep in mind, too, that the White House has refused to submit documents to the various legislative committees investigating RussiaGate. (See Archibald Cox above.)

So here’s my take: If you were staging a re-enactment of the Watergate scandal, most of the players are already in place. Even though there is no special counsel on the case, everything else is following the script almost to the letter.

All we need now is someone to be Sam Ervin and convene a legitimate Senate hearing, a John Dean substitute to step up to the plate and tell the whole tale and, of course, 21 members of Congress to introduce impeachment resolutions. Trump will never allow himself to be impeached, so if that happens, he’ll Nixon himself right out of office.

So who’s going to step up and save our democracy? Anyone? Surely someone in this whole mess can put their country first, right? So who’s it going to be?

Like the fella once said, ‘Ain’t that a kick in the head?’

Walking down the street you see a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against a wall. You have basically three choices:

* You can give him some money for food.

* You can ignore him and walk on by.

* You can stop, mock him for being a loser and then kick him in the head.

All of us have to decide for ourselves what’s the right thing to do. Apparently in Congress we have a large number of elected representatives who are polishing up their steel-toed boots today, because a lot of people are in line for a good swift kick.

The House of Representatives is reportedly voting today on a health care bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. How many times have they tried this before? 50? 60? One loses count, but like Bullwinkle always says to Rocky, “This time for sure.”

Remember that the House put together a bill a few weeks ago that was so bad they couldn’t even bring it to the floor, so they went back to the Freedom Caucus, a.k.a. The Tea Party, to draft one that's even worse. The original bill would have kicked 24 million people off the health insurance rolls. This new one is so bad they have to rush it through before the Congressional Budget Office can tell us how many will lose their insurance this go-round.

They’re doing this even after late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel delivered an emotional speech about his infant son who would have died without Obamacare, and whose defective heart is now a pre-existing condition for life. Listen to the reaction he got from our elected representatives:

“Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn't obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else's health care.” – Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.).

And this:

People who “lead good lives” should not have to pay as much for insurance as those who don't. – Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.). 

Apparently Jimmy’s newborn didn’t lead a good enough life while in the womb.

Now I could see someone like Steve Bannon, the white supremacist who drives the White House bus, kicking a black homeless man in the head or devising ways to take health insurance away from black or brown Americans, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard for the rest of these people to know how to do what’s right. I also don’t know how they sleep at night.

You don’t need polls or town hall meetings or caucuses or the news media to tell you that taking health insurance away from the poor, the elderly and the sick who need it the most so that 400 of your closest friends at the top of the income scale can each get hundreds of millions in tax breaks is the wrong thing to do. You only need a conscience or at least a moral compass that doesn’t point directly toward hell. To me, it’s not even a Democrat versus Republican issue; it’s a humanitarian one.

I’m not religious and I don’t go to church, but I was raised a Christian and I attended church regularly through high school. Among the Baptists, my family and my friends, I was imbedded with a sense of right and wrong and a set of morals that I try to apply in my life. It isn't all that hard to do. Remarkably, the congressmen who want to deny health insurance to the most needy Americans are many of the same people who keep hitting us over the head with their fundamentalist Christian beliefs.

The hypocrisy of that paradigm is astonishing.

A few days ago, I wrote in this space that it’s not wrong to want people to be the best they can be … to be honest and decent and live up to our ideals. I said it’s not wrong to want these things; it’s only wrong to be naïve enough to expect them.

I don’t think it’s naïve to expect our political leaders to know right from wrong. The ones who do need to be encouraged to keep up the good work, while the ones who don’t need to be shown the door. It is, however, naïve to think that millions of voters will know how to do what’s right, any more than the people they keep putting into office.

And that’s the real kick in the head.

If we didn’t have any climate, we wouldn’t have climate change

I have come to the conclusion that Donald J. Trump – without telling anybody – has secretly begun starring in a new reality show called “Watch Me Prove I'm Dumber Than a Fifth Grader.” It works like this:

Every morning when he gets up, Trump walks through the corridors to the basement of the White House where he finds Steve Bannon sleeping under his rock. He wakes Steve up and asks him, “Steve, what was the stupidest thing I said yesterday?” Steve tells him.

“Thanks, Steve. I can top that. For today, how about I say, ‘Why was there a Civil War?’”

“That’s good, Mr. President. That’ll keep their minds off Russia for another news cycle.”

I suspect he has a list of them ready to roll out whenever stupidity is required. Here are some examples:

“I have asked my secretary to contact Frederick Douglass and Pavarotti and invite them to dinner at Mar-a-Lago.”

“The environment is fine. We had an environment long before there was an EPA.”

“Our nuclear bombs are getting old. We should drop a few here and there to see if they still work.”

“Maybe black people wanted their own drinking fountains, and they probably liked the view from the back of a bus.”

“Why do we need the climate? If we didn’t have any climate, we wouldn't have climate change.”

“Children should go to school to learn, not to eat.”

“The president needs a Platinum AMEX for things Congress won’t approve. I could just put the wall on my card.”

“We should charge more for food stamps.”

“The Constitution is more of a guideline than a rule. If it was so great, we wouldn't have needed the Bill of Rights.”

“If I had been president in 1939, we’d never have had World War II. I’m sure Hitler and I could have worked that one out.”