For Sale: 1972 MGB, Needs Work, $1,500 Firm

A friend of mine is looking for a good home for his 1972 MGB. The good news is that it runs and drives. The bad news is that it will need substantial rust repair in the very near future. This will be a project car before it's a good driver again and the low price of $1,500 firm reflects that.

Overview:

• 1972 MGB, runs and drives but needs work.
• One owner since 1995
• Mileage unknown, but only 5,000 miles since engine rebuild in 1997.
• Four-speed transmission (no overdrive).
• Needs rust replacement of rockers, frame rails, plus some repair in  fenders and floor panels.
• Price is $1,500 firm.

Here are the details:

The good:

• Engine rebuilt in 1997. Has double-row timing chain and valve seats hardened for unleaded gasoline. Starts easily.
• Mileage unknown (Speedometer/Odometer was not working when first acquired, though this has since been fixed.)
• Only about 5,000 miles driven since 1995, but no long periods of inactivity in that time.
• Gauges all work.
• Includes tonneau cover, timing light, dwellmeter, original jack, stone guards for the headlights, a tool for balancing the SU carburetors, and a very well used Haynes manual.
• Seat covers and interior in decent shape.

Improvements made since 1995

• Engine rebuild
• New front bumper
• Mallory dual-point distributor
• New starter
• Radiator rebuilt
• Electric fan
• Delco alternator conversion
• New gas tank 8-9 years ago
• New gas tank sending unit, Spring 2017
• New ignition switch, 2015
• New convertible top in late 90s. Still watertight, though the windows have some fogging.
• New trunk lock

The Bad:

• The paint is a classic Earl Scheib "Porsche Red" job over the original red. Looks okay from a distance. Not so great up close.
• The wiring is best described as suspect. At a minimum it could use substantial cleaning of the contacts and fixing/repair of some connections. A fresh start with a new wiring harness may be easiest.
• Windshield wipers need to be hooked up.
• Heater control valve works, though the heater itself is not currently hooked up.
• Tires are 15 years old. They hold air, but not recommended for driving. Spare tire doesn't hold air.
• Passenger window crank works, but it needs a bit of help getting up and down.
• Shocks need rebuild/replacement.
• Brakes work, but pull to the right a bit. Hoses have been replaced within the last 20 years, but the system should be inspected and may need some parts replaced or rebuit.
• There's a bit of oil leaking from engine and rear differential, but not bad.
• The worst item is the rust underneath. There is substantial rust in the rockers and the frame rails and they will need to be replaced. there are also some small spots of rust in the fenders, and at a minimum they will need some patching. Make no mistake. If you buy this B you will need to do some cutting and welding before you have a good, roadworthy car.

Price: $1,500 firm.

Leave a message below if you're interested and we'll sort out contact info. Thanks!

Video: It runs!

Photos:

Exterior:

Engine bay:

Interior:

Trunk, including some of the throw-ins:

And now what we call "the full disclosure photos," showing the rust.

The fenders are generally solid, but there are are a few small bubbles and holes:

Here's the worst of it, the frame rails and rockers. As you can see, they'll need complete replacement:

(What looks like a bend in the frame rail above is just an illusion from the fish-eye from my iPhone lens. Sadly, the rust is real.)

The floor pans look okay at a glance, but given the state of the rockers and rails I wouldn't be surprised if they need some work, too:

Front suspension:

Rear suspension and exhaust:

From the Joy of #IndictmentDay to Dr. Hans Zarkov Shouting a Warning over the Rocket Engines

I know I promised pretty pictures before another Trump post, but it's been a busy month on other fronts and I do have a bit to say on This Week in Trump.

Here, have a pretty picture of a sunset and we'll move on to business:

Special Counsel Bob Mueller rolled out his first indictments on Monday. That was sooner than I expected to see anything. Most of the indictments involved Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates.The charges were unsurprising for anybody who has followed along and included conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy against the United States, being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading Foreign Agent Registration Act statements.

There was also a surprise baked in, the first guilty plea from a campaign adviser named George Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI to cover up the Trump campaign's interactions with Russia during the campaign. It was a plea bargain in exchange for becoming a proactive cooperating witness in the investigation, which many legal experts have interpreted to mean that he's been wearing a wire since his arrest earlier this year.

Now we're getting somewhere.

The information in the indictments and the testimony of former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page before the House Intelligence Committee makes it clear that among other things Attorney General Jeff Sessions perjured himself before Congress when he denied any knowledge of Russian connections to the Trump campaign. Also, Trump campaign co-chair and adviser withdrew his nomination to be the USDA's chief scientist after he was tied to the indictments. The indictments also refer to as-yet unindicted coconspirators.

There's more to come.

The general sense of things is that this was an opening salvo from Mueller, an invitation to cooperate and cop a plea (Papadopoulos) to a relatively light charge, or to continue to lie and face the hammer (Manafort and Gates.) In general, I suspect that's correct.

The response from the White House has been predictable: a storm of diversion and lies, headed by an endless barrage of tweets from Trump that was only slowed by the delightful eleven minutes during which his Twitter account was deactivated by a Twitter employee on his or her last day on the job. (Truly, that was the most joyous event for #Resistance Twitter since the Night of the Covfefe.) In the midst of this week's chaos the US House Republicans unveiled their tax plan, which can best be described as The No Billionaire Left Behind Act of 2017.

Things are accelerating. Things are falling apart.

I'd still rate us as Watergate Defcon Status Two, but I can see Status One from here. I'm not quite sure when we hit Status One. It might be when Mueller starts indicting Trump family members, as now seems inevitable. Or Mueller may even drop a bill of potential impeachment charges with the US House.

If I had to bet on the mechanics I'd bet that Sessions gets forced out for repeatedly perjuring himself. That gives Trump an opportunity to appoint a new Attorney General who doesn't have to recuse himself on the Russian issue. The job interview will consist of one question, "Will you fire Bob Mueller?" The first person willing to answer "Yes" to Trump in private and "No" to the Senate confirmation hearing will get the job and pull the trigger. By then the 2018 midterms will be looming and even the shameless Congressional GOP will have to convene impeachment hearings.

Or with Trump looking increasingly unhinged every day perhaps he does something truly loopy and Pence rounds up a batch of cabinet secretaries to invoke the 25th Amendment. I'd try to come up with scenarios in which Trump voluntarily resigns, but right now he's increasingly desperate to pressure the justice system to lay off, so I don't see him giving up any of the leverage he has as President.

However it happens, this ride is going to get crazier. For the most part I'm just hoping that Trump doesn't drag us into a war somewhere in an attempt to rally the base.

It's bad. It's going to get worse. We're not yet in the end-game. Things are moving quickly, so as Dr. Hans Zarkov put it in Flash Gordon, "FOR GOD'S SAKE! STRAP YOURSELVES DOWN!!!"

The Trump Grind Grinds On; Plus, the Return of Photoblogging on the Ol' Patio Boat.

Just a quick update.

Yeah, I haven't posted on Trump since July. In part because it's been a busy couple of months, but mostly it's because I think we're settled in for the long haul. I doubt there'll be anything truly newsy amidst the noise -- and oh, there's lots of noise! -- until Special Counsel Bob Mueller issues whatever it is that he's going to issue, be it a big report, indictments, etc. For now, Mueller seems settled in for the long haul with a staff full of veteran money-laundering investigators and an arrangement with the New York Attorney General that seems designed to block the potential for Presidential pardons..

In the meantime, just about everything -- personnel shuffles, Congressional squabbles, salacious details -- is just background noise. Trump is an awful, incompetent president. In a way, I guess that's good because his incompetence may keep him from accomplishing a few terrible things. But his awfulness won't seem very good if we do accidentally end up in a nuclear war with North Korea. Mostly I'm just hoping that enough competence still remains at places like the Department of Defense and FEMA to get us through whatever comes up.

So here we are, churning away at Current Watergate Defcon Status: DEFCON 2, like a mega-hurricane circling in the middle of the Atlantic, waiting for a steering current to move us along.

In the meantime, the ol' Patio Boat has been horribly devoid of fun photos of fun places. And there has been some personal fun along the way. Monique and I took a trip to Tobago with my folks. We also hauled a couple of my nieces out to Wyoming to view the eclipse with my brother Mike, his family, and my folks. And there were lots and lots of cool cars everywhere this summer.

I've finally started to organize up a few of the photos, so look for some photoblogging coming soon to the ol' Patio Boat.

In the meantime, here, have a solar eclipse:

Checking in on Trump: yup, still going about how I expected

More of a quick check-in than a real blog post here, but I had a moment to capture a few quick thoughts on how things are proceeding, so here goes. This is just a sample from the last month:

1. Trump reportedly warning special counsel Bob Mueller not to investigate Trump family finances.

2. Trump reportedly researching how to fire special counsel Bob Mueller, who has reportedly expanded his investigation to include Trump family finances.

3. Trump reportedly researching pardons, both for his family and himself.

And let's not forget Don, Jr., tweeting out that email in which he set up a meeting with a Russian attorney for the purpose of getting documents from the Russian government that were supposedly damaging to Clinton as what he was told was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."

Trump, Jr.,'s reply? "I love it."

Then Trump, Jr., set up the meeting, which apparently also involved Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and several genuine Russian spies.

Meanwhile, the US Senate this week is preparing to hold a vote on whether to gut Medicaid to give billionaires marginal tax cuts on investment income. The best estimates from the CBO on what they're planning have 18 to 34 million Americans losing health care insurance altogether, while most of the rest of us see sharply increased costs. The CBO also estimates that significantly upwards of 10,000 Americans will die prematurely as a result of this bill.

The number of hearings they've had on this bill thus far? Zero. In fact, nobody knows what exactly is in the thing that they're supposed to be voting on tomorrow.

This is what dying democracies look like: millions of citizens thrown to the curb solely for the benefit wealthy plutocrats who control the political process. All of it done behind closed doors.

Not very cheery, huh? Well, I never told you this was going to be a joy ride.

Right now it looks to me as if the best bet to restore the full rule of law and general sanity in Washington is Mueller's investigation. God only knows what'll happen if Trump does manage to get him fired somehow. I'd like to think that the Republican Congress finds it spine and starts conducting a genuine investigation -- maybe by just setting up Mueller and his team as their own special investigator. But they're too busy rushing their health-care bill ... or really, their lack-of-health-care bill through in secret to give me much hope that they give a damn about the rule of law.

Current Watergate Defcon Status: DEFCON 2, with the political equivalent of global thermonuclear war edging closer every day.

This is not going well.

Prime Watergate Territory: we're hip-deep in the Big Covfefe

So, not surprisingly it turns out that Trump now wants to fire the Special Counsel Bob Mueller:  Friend Says Trump Is Considering Firing Mueller as Special Counsel (New York Times, June 12, 2017)

Why? Well, this one's easy to answer:

Special counsel is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, officials say (Washington Post, June 14, 2017)

The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said.

The move by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump’s conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said.

Trump had received private assurances from then-FBI Director James B. Comey starting in January that he was not personally under investigation. Officials say that changed shortly after Comey’s firing.


Mueller Seeks to Talk to Intelligence Officials, Hinting at Inquiry of Trump (New York Times, June 15, 2017).

WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel examining Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, has requested interviews with three high-ranking current or former intelligence officials, the latest indication that he will investigate whether President Trump obstructed justice, a person briefed on the investigation said on Wednesday....

A former senior official said Mr. Mueller’s investigation was looking at money laundering by Trump associates. The suspicion is that any cooperation with Russian officials would most likely have been in exchange for some kind of financial payoff, and that there would have been an effort to hide the payments, probably by routing them through offshore banking centers.


Trump's tweeting this morning was entirely predictable:

The bit about investigating money laundering was buried a dozen or so paragraphs deep in that New York Times story, but that's the thing that I always thought would bring down Trump.

And so here we are. I can't imagine the Congressional GOP can continue to stand by if Trump obstructs justice a second time and fires the enormously well respected former head of the FBI Bob Mueller, and presumably Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with him. Of course, I've been flat-out wrong about what the Congressional GOP can stand for.

As you can see from his Tweet's, Trump is still 100% unable to take responsibility for his own actions or learn from his mistakes. It's no surprise. This is Donald Trump as he has always been and will always be: an awful human being. I believe strongly in the infinite power of forgiveness and redemption for everybody, no matter what they've done. But the first step is to acknowledge your own sins and mistakes. Donald Trump has been incapable of this for seventy years. He isn't going to change now.

Trump is now in a trap of his own making. As they say so often and as Trump would've known if he ever read a freaking book, "It's not the crime that gets you. It's the cover-up."

I've been forecasting a long, grinding march to impeachment. But Trump might accelerate his already overdue departure from the White House if he fires Mueller. And he's not smart enough to understand why it's a bad idea, so there's a real chance it could happen.

This seems a good time to introduce the ol' Patio Boat to the Watergate Defcon scale I've tweeted about a few times over on Twitter. (For those who never saw the movie War Games, the Defcon scale is the US defense condition alert scale that goes from five (total peace) to one (global thermonuclear war). Here's what I've come up with for this:

DEFCON 5 - The Obama Presidency
DEFCON 4 - Trump inaugurated. Corruption and crimes obvious and public. Think of that as the Watergate break-in period.
DEFCON 3 - Firing FBI Director James Comey to quash the Russia investigation. Probably around the equivalent of the Saturday Night Massacre.)
DEFCON 2 - Appointment of Special Counsel Bob Mueller. In 1974 we were queuing up the Senate Hearings for this stage.
DEFCON 1 - Impeachment Hearings. Interestingly enough, Nixon himself never made it this far.

We're getting pretty deep into DEFCON 2 and the summer of '17 has only begun. I still think it's likely that we enter a long slog as Mueller builds an iron-clad case. But Trump could continue to escalate things quickly if he chooses to do so. We shall see.

In the meantime, chaos embroils Washington. The Trump disaster is growing worse by the day. So I close with words I never thought I'd utter, "The sooner we swear in Mike Pence as President of the United States, the better."

Summertime, and the Trumping is Queasy: or, we are all subjects of The Orb of Covfefe

We've made it to June without having entered into a nuclear exchange with North Korea, so I'd guess this is the point where I have to say that Donald J. Trump has now managed to exceed the low side of my expectations.

Hurrah for no thermonuclear war for the first four-plus months!

On the other hand, this is still going about as well as I expected overall. So you can all mute that applause a bit.

(Still, hurrah for no thermonuclear war yet! Hey, that's a good thing!)

I'm not going to detail the sad list of developments in the last month or so, but I will hit a few highlights to keep things in context before I hit today's topic: what my best-case scenario for a Trump presidency would've been.

A special counsel was appointed for the Russian investigation. At some level, what's there to investigate? We have Trump on national TV saying he fired the head of the FBI because he wouldn't stop investigating the Russian ties of Trump's campaign. There it is: smoking gun, obstruction of justice. Case closed. On the other hand, it's going to take a vast mountain of evidence to drag the GOP Congress off their butts, so have at it, Bob Mueller. There's no shortage of corruption and treason for you to dig through and I suspect we'll need every bit of it to shove the Trump gang out of office quickly.

The House passed their awful and appalling health care bill while the Trump Administration uses all of the regulatory levers at its disposal to destabilize Obamacare and run up policy costs. I'd like to believe that somehow the Senate won't follow the House's suit, but that would require believing that at least three GOP Senators would put the health and well being of Americans ahead of tax cuts for billionaires. So I have little faith that anything but disaster is looming on that front.

And on the international front ... oh my, on the international front. From the trips to Saudi Arabia and Israel to the disastrous summit with our NATO allies to announcing our intention to pulling out of the Paris climate change agreement it has been a month of utter and complete international disgrace.

So, yeah, that's about how I expected this to go. And since you now know that crossing the four-month mark without a nuclear exchange has surpassed my lowest expectation, it's time to talk about what fleetingly reminded me of my a best-case scenario when I woke up nauseous and angry on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016.

The Orb and Covfefe

So how does that get us to Best-Case Trump? Well, in the midst of the Saudi Arabia trip this delightfully weird image hit the wires:

It turns out that this picture was taken as they pressed this illuminated globe to officially open a large anti-terrorism center in Riyadh. But for a while it gave the Internet great fun as everybody riffed on The Orb and its meaning.

My favorite of the subsequent photoshoppings was this:

Yes, that's Saruman on the left. He looks right at home in this picture, doesn't he?

So, the international trip was mostly a disaster on substance, but it at least gave us all a goofy moment of fun.

And again, a couple of nights ago Trump apparently wrestled his phone away from his minders and began a tweet only to ... lose interest? fall asleep? accidentally hit "Tweet" instead of "Cancel"?

Apparently nobody in the White House was willing to wake Trump up and ask him to delete it. So for about six hours "Despite the constant negative press covfefe" stood as the foremost Tweet on Trump's account. And again, the Internet -- especially Twitter -- had a rollicking good time with the non-word "covfefe" and the fact that apparently nobody would or could tell Trump to take it down until 6 am the next morning. I won't even try to capture it all here. Go look up #Covfefe on Twitter for a sampling, and then you can go with the Merriam-Webster Dictionary on this one:

The Orb and Covfefe hubbubs reminded me of that best-case scenario I had briefly envisioned on Nov. 9th after the greatest electoral debacle in history came home to roost. Somehow, I thought that maybe Trump would stumble into some useful advisors who would steer him into the sort of mediocrity that George W. Bush achieved. Yes, there were some awful mistakes and policy decisions along the way. But he managed to bumble along most of the time without the level of public disaster that we see on a daily basis from Trump, and we all at least got a few laughs out of his occasionally brutal syntax and his malapropisms.

So, yeah, that was my upside for Trump: George W. Bush. I didn't really expect Trump to achieve that, since Bush was a slightly more competent businessman, had eight years of experience as a governor, and generally had a good idea of how the U.S. government works. But I held out a tiny bit of hope that maybe Trump would find his way to that.

Of course, a week or two of the transition stripped me of that lofty notion. What has happened thus far has been much, much worse and less competent than the W. standard. Alas.

But at least we've got black humor to help lighten the load.

(And no, I don't want to hear from Internet scolds saying, "How can you laugh about Covfefe when Trump is...." We're adults here on the ol' Patio Boat. We can laugh at an occasional joke without completely forgetting every other problem in the world. The world is a mean ol' place sometimes, and that's why we have humor to help us cope.)

Meanwhile, the march to Trump's inevitable impeachment continues apace. The biggest thing that will move the dial in the short run is the upcoming special election on June 20 in Georgia's 6th U.S. House District, where Democrat Jon Ossoff has a narrow lead in the polls in a district that was gerrymandered to provide a substantial GOP advantage. Republican Tom Price won the district 61.7%-38.3% in November. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are pouring money into this race, which has already become the most expensive US House race ever. If the Republicans lose there, they may need to reassess whether they really want to ride Trump into the midterm elections in 2018.

The thing about a gerrymander is that it's usually accomplished by drawing districts that favor your party by about 55%-45%, enough to provide a substantial advantage that gives you an election day edge and that also discourages good candidates from running against you and financial backers from putting money into a campaign against you. Cutting the margin much closer than that puts you in danger of making your district competitive. Making the margin much larger means that you might not be able to pack an additional district for your party.

But if you've managed to do so badly in office that you've shifted the electorate against you by 15% or so ... well, then you've got a problem. Because you're suddenly vulnerable everywhere. It happens very seldom because it takes a true wave. It takes something completely outside the political norms to make that happen.

It takes a Trump.

(And the all-powerful Orb of Covfefe.)

---

BTW, if you're reading this and you're not following me on Twitter, you can do so at @Patioboater. In the pre-Trump era my Twitter account used to be a pretty quiet place with mostly retweeted space photos, weather photos, and a few other items that cracked me up or interested me. Nowadays it's a lot livelier. So come join my mighty 178 followers.

Hoping for a Quiet Trump Week. A Man Can Hope, Can't He?

The Spicer-speak hit the fan last week. The point of this post, however, is not to talk about last week's news, but to plea for a quiet week this week.

If you care enough to read this post you don't really need me recount the week in detail for you, but here's a quick recap for anybody coming in late. Last week's news started energetically enough with former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifying before a Senate subcommittee on several issues, including former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn's potential ties to Russia. Then it exploded into one of the craziest news weeks I can ever recall after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday. After two days of claiming that Trump had fired Comey because of unhappiness that Comey had acted unfairly to Hillary Clinton in his public statements about the investigation of her email server**, Trump ultimately admitted two days later in an interview that he fired Comey because Trump was unhappy about the continued progress of the investigation into his campaign's ties with Russia.

**Yes, Monique thought I was making this part up when I called her to tell her the news. To quote her exactly she said, "No, really. Why did they claim they did it?" In a week of ludicrous news the notion that anybody would believe that White House whopper still may be the most ludicrous item of all.

The entire week was filled with a mix of actual news, analysis of news, analysis of news analysis leaks, counter-leaks, Trump tweetstorms, rest-of-the-world tweetstorms, rumor, innuendo, unbelievably good reporting with salacious details, salacious details spun up from thin air, and enough inches of political columnist outrage to wrap around the globe.

It was such a crazy week that I even broke down and lifted the cable news ban, spending much of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings DVRing and surfing the cable news punditry.

Here's what I learned from dipping my toe back into cable news last week:

• Anderson Cooper is very good at summarizing the scope and shape a complex news story in 5-10 minutes. He is also good at one-on-one interviews. He then has a panel of eight idiots who yell at each other for the rest of the 45 or so minutes of each hour of his show, making it unwatchable.
• Rachel Maddow takes a long time to explain anything. But if you do stick around until she finally does get to the point, you find that she's at least given you enough context to understand why that point matters.
• Brian Williams is back on TV. Who knew? (11 pm EDT on MSNBC.)
• Fox News is as dishonest as ever. Interestingly, their dishonesty in the Age of Trump has taken a new form. In their earnest eagerness to serve as the State News Apparatus of the Trump Administration they end up parroting utterly dishonest White House statements, whereas during the Obama Administration they ended up making up utterly dishonest statements about the White House. So that was kinda fun to watch for five minutes or so.
• The DVR and fast forward are your friend if you want to watch cable news. At least you can then zip past the endless hours of pundit-on-pundit filler to get to the genuine news updates and the interviews with people who might actually have something new to say.

I can't say I learned all that much more from cable news than I did from my Twitter feed, but I did appreciate the opportunity to at least see how this story was playing out for the rest of the world. As near as I can tell through the world of information, disinformation, and misinformation this is where the various camps fall right now:

Trump Administration - circular firing squad being assembled in the wake of the media disaster. Since Trump won't find himself to blame I reckon we'll see a lot of staff turnover in the next few weeks.

FBI and the rest of the Intelligence Community - pissed. I'm beginning to believe that if Trump does get taken down the epitaph will read, "Don't f*** with the FBI."

Congressional GOP - nearly all the heads are still buried deeply in the sand. A few are starting to pop their heads up, however. That'll be a trend to keep an eye on. But for now, let's face it. Trump admitted on tape in a televised interview that he fired the head of the FBI to obstruct an investigation the FBI was conducting regarding Trump and his associates. And the collective Congressional GOP response was, "Eh, so what?"

My sense of them remains that nothing changes for them until and unless all of this translates into losing gerrymandered seats. If Democrat Jon Ossoff wins the special election for a US House seat in Georgia on June 20th -- a seat won by the Republican by 20 points in 2016 -- a lot of GOP Congressmen may suddenly rediscover their regard for the rule of law. Right now the polls have him in a dead heat for that seat.

Congressional Dems - a mix of genuine concern, genuine outrage, faux outrage, and unsightly glee. Hey, Congressional Dems, it'd be a bit easier to believe that you are "putting country over party" in this matter if every single damn email you spammed me with last week didn't also contain a fundraising demand.

Twitter - All atwitter.

Me - Freaking exhausted. I'd done a pretty good job through the first few months of the ongoing Trumpiness keeping it all compartmentalized and only letting it intrude on my work day during lunchtime. My ability to do that broke down after Comey got canned. I tried my best to ignore it all, but I simply felt compelled to check in fairly frequently on the decline and fall of Western Democracy. And every time I checked back in on the news, there were genuinely new developments. It was crazy. Plus, aside from Comey and the Russia investigation, there were a lot of other substantial developments and real news that I haven't even mentioned here.

What I really need this week is for the world to not have another crazy news week. I have things to do this week, and I need to be able to focus on them. I can't do that if the news repeats the pace of last week.

Trump is headed off on his first overseas trip on Friday. So maybe he'll spend this week looking at maps of his overseas properties and staying away from Twitter, constitutional crises, and public confessions to obstruction of justice.

I can hope, can't I?

Last week felt like one of the most consequential news weeks I can ever recall. What those consequences will be remain to be seen. Despite the iron-clad pronouncements of clouds of pundits arguing vehemently on my TV last week, only history will tell us if last week was a good week or a bad week for the rule of law.

As I told Monique and a few others last week, I used to think that living through Watergate was probably exciting and maybe even a little fun. I now realize that the only reason I thought that was because I know how it turned out ... with a triumph for the rule of law. In reality, living through this sort of disaster is equal parts frightening and horrifying. I'm hopeful this one will turn out okay, too.

But there are no guarantees. Dark Ages all have starting points.

I'm rooting for the light.

But I'm worried.

Trump at 100 Days: yeah, this is the train wreck I was expecting...

There are lots of detailed overviews of the last 100 days of the ongoing White House dumpster fire and yard sale out there. So I'll make this check-in brief.

What's worse than I expected?

The Russian stuff -- It was obvious that something foul was afoot during the campaign. But there's far more paper trail, money trail, and documented violation of law than I had expected. It looks pretty clear to me that if the GOP-run Congressional oversight committees care to exercise a bit of investigation and oversight, this whole rotten structure is coming down. Which brings me to...

GOP Congressional Partisanship -- I underestimated the willingness of the Republican Congress to sell out our nation and any remaining principals they may have ever had in service of partisan power and their unquenchable thirst for tax breaks for the millionaires and billionaires who bankroll their party. They aren't just bad, uncaring representatives. They are rapidly proving themselves to be bad Americans.

Trump's increasing incoherence -- Read the text of any of the recent interviews. Donald Trump was always an appalling human being, but I don't remember him being nearly this incoherent. His words are convincing me that the whispers of encroaching dementia are correct. I'm not doctor, but that is not a well mind.


What's about what I expected?

Ego and Arrogance -- Donald Trump's infinite insecurity and need for self-aggrandizement.

Greed and Corruption -- The Trump family's venality.

Lies, lies, lies -- The endless lies, both petty and substantial. The word "dishonest" greatly understates the problem.

Assault on democratic values -- The relentless erosion of rules, standards, and enforcement mechanisms to keep our government basically honest and competent. Even if he's impeached tomorrow, this is probably Trump's most damaging legacy to date.


What's not as bad as I expected?

The bright spot of his incompetence and incoherence is that even with single-party Republican rule in Washington he has yet to push through substantial legislative disasters like dismantling the ACA or a half-dozen other looming disasters for most Americans.

I'm not optimistic that happy state of affairs can last all the way until January 2019.


What do I expect going forward?

I'd like to think that Trump doesn't make it to the November 2018 mid-term elections for Congress. But I dunno. Maybe he eventually shuffles in a reasonably competent assortment of White House staff and they right this capsizing ship. If he continues to be a disaster and the Democrats can regain one of the Houses of Congress, then 2019 will be interesting and chock full of investigations.

Of course, by then we'll probably be involved in several large regional wars, so ... well, yeah.

In other words, taken as a whole it's all going about how I expected. That is not a good thing.

Trump at the Two Month Mark: "The S***show Won't Be Playing Out for the Full Four Years."

My thanks to my friend Ray Abruzzi for the tweet that gave me today's subtitle. It came in a post that linked to one of the many, many, many news stories filed today after FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign's collusion with Russian hackers during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign.

I'm not sure how that revelation can lead to anything other than a special prosecutor, though I have to admit that I have thus far underestimated the Republican Party's determination to pretend that they can't see the parts of this scandal that played out in plain sight during the 2016 election.

We seem to be plunging quickly into prime Watergate territory despite the best efforts of the US Congress to avoid the inevitable. How it all ends is anybody's guess. About the only thing that has surprised me thus far is the sheer ineptitude of the Trump gang. Although I expected the malevolence and untruthfulness of the Trump Administration, the incompetence has fallen below even my low expectations.

Here's my best guess about what may really will matter as we head down this path:

1. Trump's popularity continues to fall. His approval rating is down to 39% in the Gallup poll and 42.6% in the fivethirtyeight.com compendium of polls. Beyond being unprecedented territory for a newly elected president, some historic lows are not too far from here. This matters because the Congressional GOP will eventually have to decide if their agenda faces a larger threat from internal divisiveness -- which will certainly increase if they impeach Trump -- or from voter fury in the 2018 election. Most Republican voters still back Trump, but that number is falling, too.

Thus far the Republicans in Congress are focused on unity, but that could change quickly as 2018 looms or if GOP agenda items like the repeal of the ACA falter because of the distractions or because of Trump himself. Mike Pence will sign their bills just as happily, if not more happily,. It sounds as if an increasing number of GOP Congressmen are starting to admit off the record that this would be fine with them.

1A. Whatever shreds of credibility Trump used to have seem to be fading away. The true diehards who never raise their heads from the Breitbart/Fox/InfoWars/Limbaugh fever pits may not see it, but the rest of America does. This will be very important in media coverage of this scandal as we progress.

2. New revelations: There's nothing like new news to keep a scandal growing. It seems that new information comes forth nearly every day. As reporters keep digging, they keep turning up evidence that increasingly tie Trump's campaign staff to Russian hackers. This continuing drip, drip, drip of information is what forced the House Intelligence Committee to hold today's hearing. The drip, drip, drip seems likely to continue and to continue to force action.

And at some point the FBI will release the results of their investigation.

3. Concrete evidence that directly ties Trump to the actions of his staff: At this point it seems clear that Trump's campaign staff colluded with Russian hackers, though many of the details are still a bit muddled and hidden. Trump seems unlikely to have issued written orders to collude with the Russians, so it will likely take either testimony or a recorded conversation to provide the smoking gun. Trump's fear of concrete evidence coming out is likely behind is bizarre charges that Obama and/or British Intelligence tapped his wires during the campaign. That accusation feels like the sort of weirdly specific charge issued by a paranoid and guilty mind.

4. Will somebody cut a deal? There's a lot of money changing hands right now to try to secure loyalty. Among the former Trump campaign staffers who haven't been able to get a security clearance for a White House gig it's hard to find one who isn't on a foreign payroll right now. But the FBI is pretty good at finding a wedge. Taking the fall and a long prison term sounds romantic in gangster fiction, but it plays out a lot differently when crony crooks face the option of hard time. Heck, given the rate at which Russian diplomats linked to this scandal seem to be dying premature deaths, the witness protection program may soon start to look pretty good.

So, what next?

Beats me. This is an unstable situation that continues to escalate. But the FBI moves at its own pace, so how quickly it comes to a true head is really hard to predict. Maybe they keep grinding out progress and get to the top eventually. Or maybe the FBI is only able to pin this on a fall guy like Roger Stone, and things ramp down eventually.

The betting odds that Trump gets impeached and removed from keep dropping -- now down to 10/11 at Ladbroke's. The odds seem likely to drop again after today's hearing.

That's worth repeating for emphasis. Two months into his first term a President whose party also controls Congress is now more than a 50-50 bet to be impeached and removed from office in his first term.

There's lots else that we could talk about: the lying, the more lying, the lying about the lies, the abandonment of his promises to working-class Americans about the sort of health-care reform he'd support, the myriad foreign policy blunders. But as I look around at the big picture today, it seems to me that the most astonishing thing is that the legal mechanisms for removing him from office are already in motion, despite the best attempts of the party that controls the White House and the Congress to stop them.

I expected a Trump presidency to be historically bad, but I didn't expect things to go downhill so quickly. Honest to Pete, we're just two months removed from the Inauguration and we're already hip deep in FBI and Congressional investigations.

As I quoted in my subtitle, this disaster can't possibly last four years. It just can't.

Health Care: how did we get here? Where are we going?

If you're wondering who socialized medicine in the United States, it wasn't Barack Obama. It was Ronald Reagan.

In 1986 Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which prohibited hospitals from refusing to admit or dumping uninsured patients who arrived in emergency rooms.

This was a good, humane idea. Some hospitals were literally putting people with heart attacks and stab wounds out by the curb to die.

But it also created a spiral in which an increasing number of the uninsured showed up at emergency rooms for treatment either for minor issues that weren't really emergencies, or for major emergencies that would have been much less costly to treat had they been treated earlier.

Literally leaving people to die at the curb is unpleasant, but it is a good deal cheaper than actually treating them.  And aside from the extra costs of emergency room services, the amounts charged to uninsured patients for treatments is often much larger than the amount charged to insured patients for the exact same treatment. This is because insured patients are covered by contracts with prices negotiated by their insurers. Not surprisingly, bill collections against these uninsured folks for these inflated debts generally resulted in poverty, bankruptcies, and very little actual money collected -- per the well established economic dictum, "You can't squeeze blood from a stone."

It's also worth noting here that "poor" in the health insurance debate doesn't necessarily mean "destitute, homeless, on welfare, etc." Most of the poor in this context were the working poor: people working full- or near-full-time jobs that didn't provide affordable health insurance. The truly destitute often were at least partially covered by Medicaid. The working poor were often left out in the cold.

Still, somebody had to pay the bills. One of the reasons the cost of insurance for the insured rose much faster than inflation was because our health care system had to absorb these additional overhead costs.

There were many other contributors to the rapid rise in health insurance costs before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was adopted in 2010: increasing use of technology, pharmaceutical costs, malpractice lawsuit costs (themselves made worse by the spiraling cost of health care itself), forcing the sick out of the insured pool due to preexisting conditions, etc. But the basic math of covering the poorest people in America in the most expensive way possible is immutable. Eventually, more people become uninsured and the people with insurance have to pay more to cover their costs.

Ultimately, you face three options:

1) Remove emergency-room care. Leave the working poor, the elderly and the truly destitute to die in the streets.

2) Cover those people with some sort of jury-rigged private market and government healthcare approach that balances things like requirements that individuals carry health insurance, financial support for policies that cover the poor, and requirements that insurance companies accept all comers.

3) Expand government insurance like Medicaid and Medicare to cover all of the uninsured. Or perhaps even expand it further to become basic insurance for all Americans.

Ronald Reagan and the US Congress rejected option #1 in 1986 for good reasons. If I need to explain them to you, you probably need to take a deep look inside your dark soul.

It's worth noting that Republicans do have a lot of good reasons to seek a better health care system. Spiraling health care costs are a genuine drag on businesses because of our employer-based insurance system. Those uncontrolled costs also contribute greatly to increased government costs. A better health care system that delivered better (or at least similar) results for less money would be of great benefit to a party that is in favor of business owners and reduced government spending.

Option #2 emerged as the conservative Republican alternative for the emerging health care crisis because #3 -- directly expanding the government safety net -- was at complete odds with a conservative political philosophy. So, creating an alternative based on the private market was kicked around for years.

Then, much to everybody's surprise, Mitt Romney managed to implement exactly that in Massachusetts in 2006 while he was governor. And it sorta worked. It at least made a bad situation better.

After Obama was elected in 2008 he decided to take that Republican approach and expand it to the federal level. This worked in one way, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was passed in 2010 and it has succeeded in greatly expanding coverage and slowing the rate of growth of health-care costs. It didn't do these things as completely or quickly as something like a full expansion of Medicaid and Medicare would have. It was also less completely disruptive to the existing health-care model, and that had genuine benefit for a country still suffering from the Great Recession.

There was, however, an unexpected side-effect. The Republican Party's leadership decided that they would benefit from outright opposition to Obama on all things. The debate over the ACA became the prime battlefield for that proposition. To Obama's credit he managed to secure enough Democratic support for a proposal that originally came from Republicans to overcome the unified opposition of the GOP. The Republicans, however, were right that their opposition would energize their base. That led to their Tea-Party fueled victories in the 2010 elections and the subsequent gerrymanders that established political dominance for them in state legislatures and the US House ever since.

Thus was the frame of the debate for the last six years or seven years set, with Democrats uncomfortably but unanimously supporting what most of them thought was a flawed half-measure and Republicans unanimously blasting the ACA's very existence and claiming they could do better without ever producing a genuine proposal. To compound the problem, many Republican controlled states refused to implement the expanded Medicaid coverage, leaving many Americans needlessly uncovered. In the meantime, some genuine improvements to the ACA that could have been made were ground to dust beneath the tracks of the Washington, DC, gridlock of 2011-2016.

So, why did the GOP never produce a genuine health-care proposal of their own in all that time?

Most likely because the Democrats had already passed their proposal. Obamacare was never anything more than federalized Romneycare. If you thought Mitt Romney looked uncomfortable in 2012 trying to explain how he completely opposed a health care structure that he fathered, that's why.

Which brings us to 2017 with the GOP finally in charge of Congress and the White House. What has Paul Ryan and the GOP produced? A bill that makes the situation that existed in 2009 worse, and that now has the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis to prove it. In exchange for throwing tens of millions of people off health care and greatly increasing insurance costs for most other Americans, it offers up massive tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. As just one note among many items in the report, the CBO does find $3 billion potential deficit reduction for Social Security costs because they estimate that between 17,000 and 29,000 Americans will die needless premature deaths because they will not have access to health care.

I would say this means the GOP's long con on health care policy is finally exposed and this bill is dead, but with Ryan, McConnell, and Trump all on board I wouldn't be in the least surprised if they still try to ram some form of it through. More likely, though, it sputters out somewhere between the House and the Senate, after which the Republican Party continues to loudly blame Democrats for all things related to health care.

We shall see. Darned if I can accurately predict anything politically these days.

What might I like to see for health care in the US? Well, it seems to me that the most useful approach would probably be incremental: maybe an expansion of Medicaid as a bottom-level medical benefit for everybody, dropping the Medicare eligibility age to 60 or 55 to bring healthier folks into that pool, while also providing a higher-level of health care coverage for those who can afford supplemental insurance. It probably doesn't move all the way to a true single-payer system as is seen in other industrialized nations. But somewhere in there might be a recipe for building on what we already have -- keeping some genuine market mechanisms for improving efficiency and quality while not kicking tens of millions of Americans to the side to be bankrupted before dying in the streets.

Of course, that sort of thing would take some level of genuine fact-based policy work and bipartisan cooperation to implement. Those are qualities sadly lacking in Washington, DC, at the moment.

But even that may change one day. And the problem will still be with us for a long time to come.

Yes, Global Warming Is Real and Man-Made: and the Earth doesn't care if you believe that

So, I posted this status update on my Facebook page Wednesday:

It's mid-February in Michigan and I drove to work with my sunroof open. We're expecting a high of 67 degrees. Global warming is the greatest man-made ecological disaster in history, but some of the individual days are quite pleasant if you live in the North but aren't a fan of winter.

Tom Schoenberg, another FB friend of mine expressed the same notion more elegantly, "The weather is absolutely delightful, assuming you don't think about it."

I wasn't really trolling for global-warming deniers on purpose, though it ended up that way. Mostly I was just trying to express the notion that although I've been enjoying the warm weather we've had in Michigan -- which is usually a hopeless, frozen, iceball of grey death this time of year -- my enjoyment is muted a bit by the knowledge that it comes as part of a weather pattern exacerbated by global warming, and that the same weather pattern that brought me a pleasant drive to work has also resulted in a lot of hardships elsewhere.

In retrospect, it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that some of my conservative amigos chose this post to dispute the notion that global warming is real, that it is man-made, and that it might just be related to unprecedented record high temperatures across the US.

But here's the thing. The reality of man-made global warming is not a "belief." It is a fact. And the Earth doesn't care if you believe that or not.

A belief that global warming is not real or caused by human activity has become a bedrock conservative belief, enshrined with "cut taxes" and "cut government." While I think we'd all agree that reduced taxes and smaller government are core beliefs of conservatism, I'd certainly argue that opposition to man-made global warming is no more intrinsic to conservative political philosophy than opposition to gravity, chemical combustion, or the "theory" that the Earth is round and orbits the Sun.**

As the oft-ballyhooed statistic goes, the fact of man-made global warming is supported by 97% of climatologists and nearly 100% of climatologists not funded by the fossil-fuel industry. However, since the fossil-fuel industry also provides a ton of funding for Republican politicians and media, an entire political party has now bought in to the cottage industry of pseudo-science devoted to disputing the reality of man-made global warming. This is part and parcel of the same industry-funded lobbying pattern that has disputed other proven facts to try to avoid or ease anti-pollution regulation: "Nobody knows whether smoking is bad for you." ... "There's no connection between lead in gasoline and lead blood levels in children" ... etc.

There's another factor at work, too. If you conclude that global warming is real and man-made, then lots of individual decisions that you make on a daily basis -- everything from choosing a car to turning on a light bulb -- are complicit in making the Earth a worse place for future generations. That sort of knowledge is really a drag. It's a lot easier on the conscience to just ignore it if you can find a good rationalization for doing so.

The opposition to the reality of man-made global-warming has transcended tactical lobbying. It has become a tribal marker for Republicans. If you say that global warming is real and man-made you are immediately marginalized with the RINO (Republican in name only) tag. Ask Jon Huntsman. The only parallel I can think of is evolution, the mention of which immediately conjures similar debates, though that controversy has its roots in religious beliefs, not a profit motive.

And herein lies the problem with almost everything in our political culture these days: selective bias abetted by paid shills with a profit motive. People choose to believe things based on their allegiance to one side or another in our partisan world, then cherry pick the pile of crapola that Information Age has become for support. Beliefs based on tribal loyalty override beliefs based on a preponderance of the evidence.

And in the middle of it all, truth and facts die.

I don't know how to fix that. I wish I did.

Making reliable information available to people is the very heart of what I do professionally.

For what it's worth, my own certain knowledge that global warming is true and man-made has roots that go much further back than the partisan wars or even my decision to eventually align with the Democratic Party. For me it's probably worked in the opposite direction: repeated denial of global warming by the Republicans is one of the factors that pushed me to become a Democratic voter, then an active Democrat.

I took an Earth science class back in 1987 at Cornell that included a substantial unit on the science of global warming, which was at the time a much less well proven theory. Aside from going through a lot of the basic science of how it works -- looking at absorption spectra, testing results in small-scale samples -- it also served as a good marker for me in terms of the forecasts that existed at the time.

There are lots of complications in climatology: feedback loops, complex air and ocean currents, natural variation, natural trends, the difference between climate and weather. There's lots of room for debate among the details. But as far as man-made global warming goes, from my perspective we've been running a big, giant experiment for the last 30 years. As far as I'm concerned, the results are in.

Theory (1987): Greenhouse gases warm the earth. If you add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the Earth will warm further.

Experiment: Add "x" amount of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, a few others) for 30 years. Measure temperature before and after.

Prediction: Earth warms.

Results (2017): "x" amount of greenhouse gases have been added to the atmosphere. Earth has warmed.

Conclusion #1: Adding greenhouse gases to the Earth's atmosphere warms the Earth.
Conclusion #2: We have no idea what happened. It's inexplicable!

You literally would have to live that experiment then choose Conclusion #2 to believe that global warming is not man-made and caused by increases in greenhouse gases. That is not a rational choice.

But it is tribal. And very human.


**True story: about six months ago I was unable to convince one particular conservative Republican that the Earth is round and orbits the Sun. I don't suffer the delusion that this particular essay will change anybody's mind about global warming, either.

Trump at the Four-Week Mark: It's Getting Worse

As a lot of folks have said around the ol' Interwebs lately, it's even crazier and less competent than I expected, even given that I expected it to be completely crazy and incompetent. I'll list a few items from this week below, then talk a bit about where I think this is going.

Monday night National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigned after it became public knowledge that he had been recorded in conversations with the Russian ambassador about easing sanctions imposed that day by President Obama for Russian hacking. During yesterday's press conference Trump said that Flynn had been right to do that. Just as a reminder, yes, is illegal for private citizens to conduct foreign policy discussions on behalf of the United States.

In response the Republicans in Congress mostly announced their intentions not to investigate anything in regard to Russian influence, penetration, or control of the Trump administration, except maybe to see if they can uncover where the leaks confirming that Flynn violated the law came from.

The Watergate-era phrase "What did the President know, and when did he know it," has become very popular this week.

Also on the Russian front this week Russia launched a cruise missile, had fighter planes buzz a US warship, and positioned a spy ship off our Naval shipyard in Connecticut -- all with no response from the Trump administration.

Reports also surfaced Wednesday that the intelligence community is now withholding information from Trump and his administration in the belief that Trump and/or several members of his administration are compromised, and that sensitive information released to the President of the United States and his top staff will leak to the Russian government.

Yesterday Trump offered the now-open job of National Security Adviser to Rear Admiral Robert Harward. He declined the job, apparently unwilling to take it if he could not install his own team and have control over national security policy. Normally that's the definition of the job of the National Security Advisor. It seems that national security really is being controlled by Trump political adviser Steve Bannon, instead.

As far as I know, nobody has ever turned down the offer to be National Security Adviser, which has until now been considered one of the most important roles in our nation.

Also yesterday, Trump held a truly loopy press conference. I could type all day about it, but let's just pick a few items:

Trump again lied about the size of his electoral victory, calling it "the Biggest Electoral College win since Reagan." (His 304 electoral votes were more than George W. Bush, but less than George H.W. Bush in 1988 or the totals amassed by Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.) When pressed by a reporter about the lie he replied, "Well, I don't know, I was given that information. I was given -- I actually, I've seen that information around."

He chastised a Jewish reporter for asking what his administration intended to do about a series of bomb threats against Jewish community centers and growing anti-Semitism, calling the question "not a fair question" and "very insulting." In asking the question the reporter very clearly stated that he was not accusing the President or his staff of anti-Semitism, he simply wanted to know what the Trump administration planned to do about the growing number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S.

During his opening remarks he said this about protesters opposing the repeal of Obamacare, "they fill up our alleys with people that you wonder how they get there, but they are not the Republican people that our representatives are representing." Yes, the President of the United States stated that Republican Congressional Representatives are in Congress to only represent Republicans.

In fairness to Trump, Congressional Republicans behave as if they only represent pro-Republican donors and lobbyists, so perhaps we'll just classify this statement under Freudian slip.

During the press conference Trump also made several odd statements about nuclear weapons and warfare during replies about Russian influence in his administration that made me truly rue the fact that he's the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger. I'll take solace, however, in this bit, "We're a very powerful nuclear country and so are they. I have been briefed. And I can tell you one thing about a briefing that we're allowed to say because anybody that ever read the most basic book can say it, nuclear holocaust would be like no other."

At least somebody explained to him that a nuclear war would be a bad idea. I am glad he has that bit straight. I like to hope most of us will survive the next three years and eleven months.

Also this week, a Republican Congressman introduced a bill in the House to simply abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. That sounds crazy, but today the GOP Senate confirmed as the new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a man whose mission is to gut the EPA on behalf of the fossil fuels industry.

The Trump administration also continues to push for extreme actions against immigrants, both legal and illegal. They intend to issue a new version of their Muslim-based ban on entering the country in hopes that it will pass muster with the courts this time. This morning the Associated Press broke a story on an internal White House draft memo regarding plans to use up to 100,000 members of the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants for deportation. This would be a shocking advance towards imposing a police state in America. Although the White House refused comment despite repeated requests for comment before the story broke, White House Spokesman Sean Spicer immediately denied that it was true.

Since Sean Spicer has already established that he will lie about anything it's anybody's guess how close the memo is to becoming policy.

A PPP poll released last Friday indicated that Americans were split 46% to 46% on whether Trump should be impeached, an increase of 6% over the results in the Gallup poll released the previous week. Trump's approval rating continues to decline since his inauguration, now hovering at or slightly below 40% in most polls, though the Rasmussen poll of voters, which often leans Republican, still has him above 50%.

Perhaps most importantly, all of the polls show a huge partisan divide. Nearly all Democrats disapprove of Trump's performance. An overwhelming majority of Republicans approve. This split matters because the vast majority of Republicans Congressmen live in safe districts drawn by Republicans or represent red- or red-leaning states in the Senate. They will continue to hold themselves accountable only to Republican voters and not to the majority of Americans as long as Trump's approval ratings continue to remain strong among Republicans. Whether that continues the case probably relies on his ability to keep Fox News and the rest of the right-wing mediasphere on board. So far, they're all on board the Trump train.

I took a survey of the late-night talk show monologues last night, to see if I could get a sense of how this is all playing outside of the immediate news media or my various lefty amigos. I'd say the mood varied from bemused wonderment to appalled concern. It could sour quickly. Or it could hold up. Trump is a never-ending source of fodder for comedy monologue writers.

What next?

My guess is that we'll continue along this chaotic path for a while -- weeks? months? -- muddling along with slowly sinking approval ratings for Trump until we have a genuine crisis, something other than the self-imposed political crises that have enveloped Washington for the last month.

What that crisis will be, I have no idea. Natural disaster? Military conflict? Terrorism attack? Iron-clad evidence of Russian collusion?

Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine.

If the Trump administration handles it well or at least reasonably competently, they will buy themselves a good deal of rope, probably enough to make it to the 2018 midterm elections. If it goes poorly, especially if it seems to have been botched by incompetence -- Bush with Hurricane Katrina, for example -- we may see public opinion shift much more strongly against Trump.

I know my Democratic amigos mostly believe that any crisis will be met with the demonstrated incompetence we've seen to date. But it's also entirely possible that Trump's administration handles a genuine emergency genuinely well, or at least well enough to get some of the news media back on board. These things always have a way of surprising you.

How this all plays out relies a great deal on the GOP Congress. It's already obvious that they don't want to investigate Trump because they're worried about what they will find. They don't want to do anything that will distract from their rush to push through a long list of law and policy changes. If Trump's approval ratings are high enough to carry them through the mid-term elections with continued control of Congress, they'll probably stay hitched to him. If not, they'll jettison him. Pence would be just as willing to sign their bills, but dumping Trump would cause them enormous difficulties with the Republican base. A split in the party is the only thing truly likely to endanger their control of Congress, given their gerrymandered majority and an unfavorable 2018 map for the Democrats in the Senate.

The problem they face is that the longer Trump stays in office the more strongly they will be co-branded with him. If they're forced to try to push him out of office in 2018, he'll probably take them down with him.

My best guess is that we'll have is a race to push as much GOP legislation through Congress as possible. That race will be run against the ticking clock of the 2018 elections and the potential for a complete Trump implosion. From the GOP Congressional perspective their current situation may look like they're trying to push all their hopes and dreams through a corridor that contains two ticking time bombs. We only know how much time remains for one of those bombs. The other could explode tomorrow or not at all.

The 22-1/2 months until the next session of Congress is sworn in is a long time. The Democrats will try to stop the worst of the changes, but they really have very little practical power to stop things right now. And among the changes that are certainly coming we can expect to see changes to voting and election law designed specifically to help Republicans at the polls next November.

Final notion for today: there's a lot of discussion about parallels between the current situation and Watergate, much of it justified. But there are a couple of important differences, too. The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives during Watergate and were willing to investigate to find the truth about what Nixon and his staff had done. The current GOP leadership in Congress seems genuinely afraid to discover what Trump and his staff have done.

More importantly, perhaps, forty-plus years ago we lived in a country that didn't exist in two separate media bubbles. Although there were substantial disagreements on policy solutions and governmental philosophy, there was general agreement on facts and reality. In the year 2017 that is no longer the case. Four weeks into this we're already on the edge of peak Watergate territory. But as a nation we're not there until the Republicans are there, too. That could happen slowly, quickly, or not at all.

Reality has a way of catching up in the long run. But sometimes it's a long, long run.

Strap yourselves in, kids. This is an E-Ticket ride and it's likely to be a long one.

State of Wolverine Lake, 2017

My annual "State of the Village" column came out in our Wolverine Lake winter newsletter in this week's Spinal Column newspaper. 

Here it is for those of you who didn't catch it there:

State of the Village 2017

John Magee, Village President

Welcome to 2017, everybody! Hard though it is to believe, I am now entering my second decade as your Village President. It’s been quite a decade. When I was first elected as Village President we were beset with deep budget problems. A once-healthy fund balance had been nearly exhausted. We were on pace to run out of money altogether in another 18 months.

Turning our finances around despite the continued cuts in state revenue sharing and the real estate collapse didn’t come easily. We made painful staff cuts in the Police Department, the DPW, and our front office. We deferred many needed improvements in our village’s infrastructure. And we asked all of you to pay for your trash pickup because even with those cuts we could no longer cover the cost of trash pickup within the general budget.

I am happy to say that as we enter my 11^th budget cycle as your President the village is in its strongest financial shape ever. We have a strong fund balance and an especially strong bond rating for a municipality of our small size. I would like to take a moment to thank our Village Treasurer Mike Kondek, who came on board during those dark times. His vision, guidance, and long-term planning keeps our financial course clear.

We’ve faced many other challenges, successes, and setbacks together over the last ten years. What I’ve found most amazing on that path has been the commitment of all of my fellow residents to make Wolverine Lake the best place it can be. When I first ran for Council my motto was, “This is a great place to live, and I aim to keep it that way.” The only thing I would change ten years later is to say, “This is a great place to live, and we all aim to make it even better.”

What now as we enter 2017? We expect to continue making Wolverine Lake a better place to live.

Congratulations are due to our new Village Administrator Nathan Burd on a very successful first year in office. Nathan has proven himself to be a strong leader and administrator. I want to thank him for choosing to join us.

Our Police Department is working to become one of the first departments in the area to be a fully certified department through the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police. This certification will assure all of us who live here that our department meets the highest professional standards. This certification should also help us to reduce our insurance costs. Our DPW continues to work around the village to improve our streets, pathways, and parks. Our Water Management Board continues to improve its public outreach efforts and to improve our plans for lake maintenance this summer.

There’s much afoot for our parks this year. We expect to build out Amenia Park on the south side of the village this Spring, making it a true neighborhood asset. We are working on a new master plan for Clara Miller Park. As part of that plan we are working with local soccer and baseball organizations to improve our playing fields. We also expect to improve our playground equipment and to make improvements that will make our park more accessible for all of our village’s children. And we continue to look for ways to keep improving our pathway system. Safer pathways for walkers and bikers makes for a safer village.

I’ve used the words “we” and “our” a lot in this message. This is because it is our village and it takes all of us to make it work. If you’ve ever thought about getting involved – whether it’s through serving on a board or a commission or simply volunteering for a park event – this is the time. Please contact the village office to see how you can be a part of it.

And finally, thank you. I want to thank all of you – residents, employees, volunteers, consultants, and everybody who has attended even one Tiki Night celebration or Tuesday in the Park event – who have made serving as your president for the last ten years such a pleasure. Few people are lucky enough to get such an opportunity, and I’ve tried my best for the last ten years to live up to the standard that all of you set.

Thank you for that.