March 2025

March.
March. March.

In March we began marching.
Baby steps at first.

Small circles with little signs.

March.
March. March.
March. March. March.

"Are you here, too?"
"Isn't it terrible?"
"I wish there was more we could do."

March.
March. March.
March. March. March.
March. March. March. March.

By the time April arrived
We looked around,
Realized that we were strong,
And began planning to get stronger.

March.
March. March.
March. March. March.
March. March. March. March.
March. March. March. March. March.

But it began with baby steps.

March.
March. March.
March. March. March.
March. March. March. March.
March. March. March. March. March. 
March. March. March. March. March. March.
March. March. March. March. March. March. March....

--John Magee

You Like to Think You Could Do Better

You Like to Think You Could Do Better

You like to think you would have done as well,
Maybe even better.

You give thanks that you will never find yourself
In such dark times.

Then your times change, despite your efforts.

So you try to do better,
Or at least as well.

And you come to realize
That all you might be accomplishing
Is to make sure the yellow stars
To be pinned to chests
Are at least as pretty as possible.

You like to think you could do better.

--John Magee

January 2025

January 2025

 

It is January.

It has always been January.

It will always be January.

 

Now is the January of our discontent.

Made wintry by soul devoid.

 

It is January and Los Angeles burns.

It is January and it snows in Pensacola.

 

It is January and the news is flailing.

It is January and the news is failing.

It is January and the news is ailing.

It is January and the news is news no more.

 

Once more unto the ice, dear friends.

We close the month with our frozen dead,

Buried in slush beneath a river of lies.

 

It is January.

It has always been January.

It will always be January.

 

Even when February comes,

It will always be January.

We will always remember January 2025.

 

--John A. Magee

Mood Melancholy - November 2024

 It's been a rough 12 months for me and Monique, full of disease and death and setbacks and sorrow. We are ground down. Tuesday's election results were a perfect capper.

Early on in the Biden Administration -- henceforth known as the Second Weimar Republic -- I remember saying a couple of things. The first was that it drove me crazy that he was having these remarkable policy and legislative achievements, but was utterly unable to communicate those successes to the American people. The second came as they repeatedly failed to deal swiftly and harshly with an armed insurrection and Trump's attempt to overthrow the American government:

"Feckless Democrats and fascist Republicans will be the ruination of us all," I said, donning the mantle of the Cassandra of the early 2020s.

The feckless Democrats have done their part. Now the fascist Republicans have center stage to themselves.

This was the first time I wasn't directly involved in a campaign since the 2000 election shortly after I moved to Michigan. The reasons were mostly entirely unrelated to the election itself, but I hesitate to offer up a post-mortem for Tuesday's Democratic disaster because I hate to be the guy sitting out on the side pointing out what the players did wrong. However, a fair number of people have asked me for my two cents, so here it is:

Several big lies repeated loudly again and again over four years beat out a thousand small truths mumbled incoherently over the same period.

It would be easy to blame Kamala Harris for that, since it was her name on the ballot. But it feels to me as if these results were baked in before she ever took the lead on the ticket. Had she not run a very strong campaign for her hundred days as candidate this could've been an even bigger disaster for the Democrats. Thanks, Kamala. I appreciate the effort.

Joe Biden was a great Senator and a master of the inside game in Washington. But for all that I admire Biden's accomplishments in his first two years, he also failed to communicate those accomplishments effectively. And it constantly felt as if he failed to understand the moment. He kept trying to negotiate with the GOP of forty years ago but never understood that he was getting clobbered in a back alley of the Age of Misinformation.

"We're the American people," he liked to say after some outbreak of general crappiness. "We're better than that."

"No, Joe," I would think wearily. "I've studied a lot of American history and on average we are not better than that. Not unless we are exceptionally well led."

So what next? I don't know. Our best hope for the next few months is the sheer demonstrated incompetence of Trump and his hangers-on and yes-men. But too many of the worst people have been planning the worst things to give me much hope that we'll be as lucky as we were the first time around. 

I doubt I'm entirely done with campaigning, but I'm not sure if I'll be ready to come back off the sidelines in 2026 or not. As with 2024, it would mostly be for reasons not related to the election itself.

If I was in charge of Democratic Party messaging for the next four years -- and nobody is knocking down my door asking me to take the gig -- I'd pick two or three brutal truths and shout them again and again and again. And again and again and again. And again and again and again. 

Sadly, I belong to a political party that failed to have the stones to deal effectively with the aftermath of an armed insurrection. I doubt genuine messaging discipline will suddenly appear in our bag of skills.

If anybody cares enough to buy me lunch, I'll tell you my nominees for the brutal truths we should be telling again and again and again. But there'll be no lack of terrible things that the Republican Party will do in the next few years. The problem will be picking just two or three. But the real problem is that the Democratic Party never found a truth it couldn't bury under a nuanced 23-point policy statement.

In the meantime there will be plenty of calls to storm the ramparts in protest of whatever's happening. I'll be more inclined to heed them if the elected Democrats still in office look as if they are finally battling on our behalf. For the last four years it has felt as if they were more interested in fundraising off the rising tide of fascism than in actually defeating it. I'm going to need to see something effective out of some of them before they see another dime out of me.

The institutionalists and technocrats have failed us. It's time for a wartime consigliari to take charge.

All in all, not a very cheerful blog post. But it's not a cheerful time. The grey November rains outside  my window match my mood melancholy.

Winter is often a time for rest and recovery. Our new year starts around the winter solstice for good reason. I'm planning some rest and recovery for myself this winter. I wish you all the same.

The Revised Patioboater Guide to the 2024 Presidential Election

Up is down! Down is up! Higgledy Piggledy all around!

Like a lot of folks, I'm relieved that Biden decided to step down after all. I suspect his Presidency is going to age well. He accomplished a ton of things in a short period. 

Since nobody reads this blog anymore this is mostly for myself, but I'd like to go on this bloggy record as predicting a narrow Harris win in November, followed by two months of dirty tricks and lies. I haven't really looked at the Congressional races, but I'd like to think there might be enough momentum to push both houses back to the Dems. We shall see.

I also predict a very bumpy ride for these final six weeks. 

Maybe, just maybe if Harris and the Dems win the GOP will take a look at itself and what is has become and step back from the abyss. I doubt it though. The alternative right-win information environment that a majority of Republicans live in these days is just too toxic. A crushing defeat at the polls might lead the toxicity merchants to step back a bit. But a narrow defeat is likely to just encourage them to double down on toxicity and disinformation. Woe betide us all in 2026, 2028, and beyond.

In any event, good luck Kamala! I'm afraid you're going to need it. 

The Patioboater Guide to the 2024 Presidential Election

Honestly, do any of you need or want any guidance for the 2024 election? Anybody? 

These two guys have been around on the public scene for a long time, so I can't imagine there's anybody left undecided, unless they've been in a coma for the last 20 years.

Okay, here's the quick guide: on the one hand, we have a failed president who led the worst Covid response of any industrialized country, then attempted to overthrow the government when people voted overwhelmingly against him. On the other hand we have a decent guy who has led the best economic recovery from the pandemic among industrialized nations, and who passed a series of very effective economic and environmental bills through a narrowly divided Congress.

Choose wisely.

But for those who sat down with a cup of coffee for this read, here's my longer take on the election...

It has probably not gone unnoticed by many of you that my Facebook page has been a quiet place in recent years, mostly filled with photos of sunsets, dogs, and old British cars. This was a conscious decision to focus my space and time back to its original intent, which was to get nice little glimpses into the lives of my family members and friends. I recommend it for peace of mind. I also made myself a rule that I'm not going onto other people's timelines to rebut whatever crapola they post. Again, I recommend it for peace of mind. I have yet to see anybody win a Facebook argument on that basis.

As part of that shift, I've been posting a lot less about politics myself. It isn't that I suddenly don't have opinions, thoughts, or insights. But I also grew tired of the inevitable wave of right-wing misinformation and lies that piled up on those posts, which required me to then spend my time moderating and deleting crapola from the worshipers of the Cheeto God. I could spend a long, long blog post opining about the Age of Misinformation. This isn't that post, but it's important to acknowledge the context for this election.

Since there are very few truly undecided voters to be found, this presidential election is going to end up being a turnout election. The convicted felon is going to spew his Big Lie about the 2020 election to get his base fired up. They will be fired up and they will vote, presumably having also been told that the fix is in so they will have to vote in overwhelming numbers. At the same time, he and his allies and a bunch of Russian 'bots will be spewing a firehose of negative disinformation about Biden, mostly by way of getting people to bring it into the open so that dimwitted pundits will opine about it as if it's not utter made up crapola. ("Meanwhile, is President Biden planning to ___[Crapola]___? Some people say yes. Stay tuned after the break and we'll explain...."

The convicted felon also needs to convince people who would sigh and dutifully vote for Biden that it's not worth it and they should either throw away their vote on a 3rd-party candidate or stay home altogether.

On the flip side, Biden has a different problem that also is based in turnout. He wasn't particularly anybody's #1 choice going into 2020, so there's not really a passionate base supporting him personally. Heck, he wasn't my top choice, either. But he's done a much, much better job with a difficult situation than I expected. Not flawless by any means. But if you sit down and evaluate the job he's done fairly, he's done extremely well.

But the polls sure as heck don't show that. There are some genuine reasons, but a lot of it is also the public reaction to the unrelenting drum of negativity that buzzes of our televisions 24/7 nowadays and seeps into the rest of the news sphere. In any case, he needs to convince people who would be inclined to vote for him to actually show up and vote for him. 

He also needs to convince Republicans who won't vote for him but can't stomach another four years of Trump to at least not do the thing that Republicans do in overwhelming numbers: vote for the R on the ballot, regardless of who it is.

So that's what we're going to see in this election: from the GOP and the Russian bots an unrelenting torrent of crapola about how the country is somehow now a hellscape compared to 2020, despite a lot of facts like economic and crime statistics that compare favorably to 2019 before Covid hit, much less 2020. (Does anybody actually remember 2020? Anybody? Because that was *not* a good year!) And from Biden we're going to see some general feel-good marketing reminding people to take a look around because 2024 is mostly pretty good. Plus, there's going to be a lot of targeted campaigning to people who might show up because they support a specific issue or set of issues -- hello, women. And there'll be a fair amount of targeted campaigning to whatever's left of the non-MAGA Republicans asking them to take a very close look at their guy before pulling that lever.

It's going to be a bumpy four-and-a-half months.

If you're looking for something you can do in the midst of all of that to help keep a failed President and convicted felon from somehow getting back into the Oval Office for a revenge tour, here are my suggestions.

1. Vote for Joe Biden.
2. I mean it. Vote for Joe Biden. I don't care what your specific beef with him or the two-party system is. If you care about the future of this country, vote for Joe Biden. You can bring your beefs to me on Wednesday, November 6, and I'll hear you out.
3. Make sure your friends and family members also vote for Joe Biden. No sitting this one out just because we're all tired.
4. If you're looking for more to do, find a local candidate that you like and help with their campaign. In some elections the top of the ticket has coattails that carry the candidates lower on the ballot. My guess is that in this one the top of the Democratic ticket is most likely to benefit from good campaigning and get-out-the-vote campaigns from the rest of the ticket.
5. If you have a few extra bucks to put into this, donate to Joe Biden's campaign. You will probably feel that the money gets spent asking you for more money, but that's okay. Marketing campaigns are expensive, especially when they have to counter a firehose of crapola.
6. If you have a few extra bucks to put into this, donate to other good candidates. They will make a difference in who shows up to vote.

And that's about it. I'd advise steering clear of the 24/7 television news industry for the next few months. It's going to be ugly and uninformative. If you need a peaceful place, stop by the ol' Facebook page. I can't promise I won't ever post on politics between now and Tuesday, November 5. But if I do I can promise I'll be using the ol' delete function energetically in the comments. In truth it'll mostly be sunsets, Benny Beagle, and old British cars.

Here. Have a pretty sunset photo. If you read to the bottom you've earned it.

Everything you need to know about what happened in Michigan this week.

 Gallons of (virtual) ink are being spilled by the Michigan political punditry this week to try to explain how the Democratic Party gained control of the governorship, attorney general, secretary of state, and the legislature for the first time in decades, and why they didn't see it coming.

It's not nearly as complicated as they're trying to make it seem.

For the statewide offices, here's what happened:

1.People want to control their own bodies. People like the nice lady who helped them do that over the last six months. They also like her friends who did the same.

2. People like the nice lady who tried to keep them safe from Covid. They also like her friends who did the same.

3. Promise made, promise kept. The damn roads are getting fixed. Michigan was awash in orange barrels and road construction projects this summer. Everybody I talked to about it said essentially the same thing, "It's a pain in the ass, but isn't it great that the roads are getting fixed?"

A ton of work and money went into getting out the message on these points. but a ton of work and money doesn't matter if the message doesn't resonate with people. That message resonated. The only surprise is that political pundits were surprised by that.

As for the legislature, establishing a nonpartisan commission to draw legislative districts worked. After decades of GOP gerrymandering, the partisan results reflected the actual votes that people cast.

Kudos to all my friends in politics who have worked so hard over the years to get us to this point. (A few kudos to me, too, even though I wasn't directly involved in this election that finally put us over the top.)

What do I expect next? More roads getting fixed and more policies that help actual people. If the Democrats now in office deliver on that, they'll have another good year four years from now.

So, here we are: Watergate Defcon Status 1: The Trumpocalypse in Full

I've been meaning to post something on recent events for a couple of weeks, now, but a few things have kept me busy and events quickly keep overtaking any coherent thoughts I try to put down in writing.

We are all now in the center of the Trumpocalypse.

The news cycle has spun out of control, with events piling upon events. To sum up for posterity, the White House tried to quash a whistleblower complaint that Trump was holding up military aid for Ukrainse to force them to manufacture political dirt for him to use on Joe Biden. To prove his innocence, a couple of weeks ago Trump had the White House release a transcript proving ... well, proving that he was holding up military aid for Ukrainse to force them to manufacture political dirt for him to use on Joe Biden.

Very shortly thereafter, the US House finally opened an official "impeachment inquiry."

I'm not even going to try to track down the higgledy piggledy that ensued, except to say that the muck gets deeper and deeper as Trump flails about and the GOP tries to duck and cover and avoid the truth.

The elected officials of the Republican Party have been supporting a deeply corrupt, lawless man as their President. Why? In exchange for tax cuts for their billionaire patrons and crazy-ass right wing judges to appease the Evangelical wing of the party. That's what they care about, and that's what they got.

As near as I can tell, elected Republican officials are all okay with that deal. In 2018 billionaires paid less in overall taxes as a percent of their income than all other income groups. Republican appointed judges are overturning decades and centuries of decided law to benefit their party's financial benefactors. And in the face of overwhelming evidence of corruption and abuse of power, the entire Republican controlled US Senate doesn't make a peep beyond Mitt Romney tweeting that the denials "strain credulity." Give Mitt another few months and he may express "concern" about it all.

In the midst of this chaos, I'll commit a bit of prognostication and punditry:

My best guess is still that Mitch McConnell eventually decides his best chance to keep control of the Senate is to give Trump the boot. If so, the final collapse of this rapidly deteriorating house of cards may be fast, in the form of a discussion with Pelosi and a deal to bring one clean, direct charge swiftly through the House and Senate to remove him, and to leave the rest of the disaster that is GOP control in Washington stand in place. They have an easy charge to prove with Ukraine, and the 20 or so GOP Senators that are up for re-election can go home and pontificate about how they hated to do it, but they believe deeply in the rule of law and Donald Trump had -- inadvertently, they're sure -- overstepped his bounds, and how President Pence is healing this glorious nation of ours, God Bless America.

Then they will try like hell to bury every other thing that happened during the Trump administration, while Fox News treats the name Donald Trump like, "New phone. Who 'dis?"

But what do I know? I never thought the Republican Party would ever nominate a sociopath like Trump. Go figure, electing one of the worst human being in America to the Presidency has turned out to be a horrible, corrupt disaster. Who could have possibly see that coming?

If nothing else, we owe Donald Trump thanks for proving that the rot in the Republican Party political structure runs all the way to the core. The GOP is irredeemable. If they were a corporation they would literally change their name and rebrand. Since they all live in the Fox News bubble, I can only assume they'll add another bald eagle to their iconography and ooze on.

At the outset my only hope for the Trump Administration was that we might somehow make it out of this disaster without a nuclear exchange in Korea or the Middle East and without a needless war that would lead to hundreds or thousands of deaths. Despite the deteriorating world condition I thought we might make it. But last night's White House statement that we're abandoning the Kurds has made me lose even that hope.

Not a very cheery blog post. But the world isn't in a very cheery state this morning.


P.S. And then, literally as I was writing it, this gem of a tweet came along from Trump. This is a deeply disturbed mind, cracking under pressure. Things are going to get worse before they get better.

Watergate Defcon Status Two in Perpetuity; or, the mandatory speculative Mueller Report post

And so, no more than ten minutes after I finally publish my first political post on the ol' Patio Boat since Nov. 3, 2017, Bob Mueller hands in his report as Special Counsel and brings his investigation to a close, thus ensuring that nobody will ever read my incredibly long rundown of the 29 or so Democratic Presidential candidates. I reckon that makes this a good time to instead check in on the decline and fall of American democracy with a mind-blowing second blog post in less than a week, this time with a bit of useless speculation about the Mueller Report.

Why the long interregnum since my last political post here? Two reasons really. First, I had a few personal things going on that took my focus away from writing much of anything at all. I may or may not blog about them here some other time, but for a variety of reasons the last year and a half or so left me too tuckered to type.

But the other reason is that we've been through a long, long, long stretch of ... well, much sound and fury, but nothing much that has genuinely advanced the story, such that it is. It isn't that there's been no action at all: there have been plenty of indictments, guilty pleas, convictions, etc. But it's been rather like a long second act in an overstuffed action movie in which you have to wade through an hour of frantic motions and noises on screen before you find out how it's all going to end.

No, I don't yet know how it's all going to end. But we are a good deal closer now than when I last posted about the Trumpocalypse, when Bob Mueller had just delivered his first indictments in the Russian probe. At the time, I thought we were headed inevitably to impeachment. Here's what I thought would happen next:

If I had to bet on the mechanics (that bring us to an impeachment hearing) 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. 
  --Patio Boat Blog, Nov. 3, 2017, From the Joy of #IndictmentDay to Dr. Hans Zarkov Shouting a Warning over the Rocket Engines

I'd say I was right about some stuff, and wrong about some other stuff.

What I got right: Sessions was forced out and replaced by William Barr, an Attorney General whose job application literally consisted of writing a memo to the Justice Department saying that the President couldn't be investigated for obstruction of justice. Barr's most noteworthy action in his previous stint as Attorney General under George H.W. Bush was to approve the pardon of six individuals under investigation for the Iran-Contra Affair, an investigation that potentially threatened to involve Bush as well.

What I got wrong: even as late as November 2017 it seems terribly naive of me to think that the GOP would ever be shamed into investigating or impeaching Donald J. Trump. The Republican Party has chosen to ride into history as the party of Trumpism. That decision has thus far delivered an election defeat in the 2018 mid-terms that returned the US House to Democratic Party control. We shall see what it brings in 2020.

What did Mueller do? Here's the short version: As @danpfeiffer tweeted Friday: "Trump’s campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, foreign policy advisor, fixer, political strategist and national security advisor have been indicted, convicted, or plead guilty of serious crimes." You can add a dozen or so Russian intelligence agents to that tally, too. On Friday Mueller issued his final report to William Barr, who then issued a letter summarizing the report and saying that the President couldn't be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. That letter also included this quote from the report: "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it does not exonerate him.”

Trump then tweeted that he'd been completely exonerated.

Where are we now? That's where we stand, in the midst of a vast media frenzy of speculation about what it all means and what's in the Mueller Report with Trump and the GOP claiming victory while the Democrats demand the release of the report itself. Meanwhile, outside the Mueller investigation literally dozens of investigations of Trump and his associates proceed, some of them in state court where Trump's ability to issue pardons doesn't apply.

What next? Here's what my half-baked crystal ball sees.

• The Mueller Report will come out, either in pieces or as a wholesale leak or as part of a US House investigation. After it gets out to the public, the same people trying to spin the Barr memo will continue the same spin about what is in the report itself, counting on the repeatedly demonstrated amnesia of the news media to help.
• The facts that do come out will be ghastly. We've all become enured to ghastly facts in the 26 months that Trump has been in office.
• My guess that the the Dems in the US House do not open an impeachment hearing, but for the next 22 months we see a half-dozen ongoing hearings into what Mueller found, as well as the rest of the Trump mess of corruption leavened with incompetence. Now that we're more than halfway to the next election, it begins to make more and more sense to let the voters clean this up.
• And oh yes, the voters will need to clean this up in November 2020.

All of which is to say that we're not quite at the end of the looooooooong second act of this three-act tragedy. So hang in there gang. We're going to be hanging out in Watergate Defcon Status Two for the next 22 months, as near as I can tell.

In the meantime, go find Democratic candidates that you like and support them. Bob Mueller couldn't cure this disaster. It'll be up to all of you reading this to cure it with your votes.

The Return of Political Blogging to the ol' Patio Boat Blog; or, who are all these Democratic candidates and can they all fit into Iowa and New Hampshire at once?

A friend of mine asked me to weigh in on the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, and although I had originally planned to skip the long 2019 runup to the 2020 primaries ... like any semi-reformed political pundit all I need is 1/4-ounce of encouragement to hold forth with profound wisdom.

So here's my profound wisdom, in its entirety: Find one or two of these candidates that you like and give them your support, even if it's only a small donation. If you live in a state in which they are campaigning, try to go see a few of them in person. Try to listen to what the candidates are saying, and try very hard to completely ignore the compulsive horse-race calling that the media will flog for the next 20 months. But for God's sake, unless you're actively working on one of these campaigns don't obsess over any of it -- especially the polls -- until we actually reach the year 2020.

This is going to be a long, long, long campaign. Don't burn out before we're even on the track to take a formation lap before the race.

- - - - -

Now here's the rest of the post.

To get ready to write this post I first did a bit of a survey to find both the officially declared and the potential Democratic candidates who seem to be playing footsie with the notion of running. I came up with a list of 29 candidates, in great part assisted by fivethirtyeight.com's "What The Potential 2020 Candidates Are Doing And Saying" series of posts.

For the most part, I like nearly all of these Democratic candidates for one reason or another, even the ones that I had barely or never heard of before now. (That's right, Pete Buttigieg, I'm looking at you.) And a bit to my surprise, when I began to look at them I realized that nearly all of them had already have held office and accomplished things in the political realm. These are not candidates treating President of the United States as an entry-level political job, and for that I am grateful.

True story: I originally thought I had a list of 31 Dem candidates, but I had accidentally listed Jay Inslee three times without recognizing his previous listings on my spreadsheet.

Note to Jay Inslee: you may not yet have quite as much name recognition as you think. And a special Patioboat No-Prize goes to the first sharp reader who can say what Jay Inslee has previously done in politics without resorting to Google.

So, yeah, we're at that stage of the campaign. But eventually time will march on, some will fall by the wayside, some will advance beyond our expectations, and nine or ten months from now we'll have some genuinely meaningful public debates and discussion of the merits of the candidates and what they would do as President.

I'll try to avoid my own horse-race prognostications, but in looking over the list that I came up with, the candidates did seem to fall into a few logical albeit arbitrary buckets. So here's what I came up with, including a few comments about one or two of them:

Thank you for not participating….

These are folks mentioned in the media and/or genuinely exploring a candidacy who have publicly declared that they are no longer considering a 2020 campaign.

--Hillary Clinton (D) (Former Sec of State)
--Sherrod Brown (D) (OH Senator)
--Michael Bloomberg (D) (Former NYC Mayor, billionaire)
--Tom Steyer (D) (Billionaire)

I am deeply grateful to Hillary Clinton for giving 2020 a pass. I might've been interested in Sherrod Brown's candidacy, since he's always struck me as a bright guy with his heart in the right place. But I'm perfectly happy to have him sit out and wait to appear again on the short list for potential VP candidates, as he did in 2016.

Next up are people who *are* running for President, the foremost of whom I've split between a bucket that I call the "Top Tier" followed closely by another bucket I call "You've probably heard of...." The dividing line between those two groups is pretty murky and I'm not even sure I've got them right in these current groupings. All I can guarantee is that some of these names will shift among the two groups during 2019 and at least one of the candidates in my lower and large "Also appearing..." bucket will join this gang.


Top Tier

--Joe Biden (D) (Former VP)
--Bernie Sanders (D) (VT Senator)
--Elizabeth Warren (D) (MA Senator)
--Kamala Harris (D) (CA Senator)

I'm going to be on board with Elizabeth Warren's campaign. I very much like everything she has done on behalf of non-billionaire Americans, as a law professor speaking out against unjust financial laws, as the originator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and as a United States Senator from Massachusetts.

In 2016 I was on board with Bernie, though I probably would've gone for Biden if he had run. In 2020, both of them have a distinct whiff of looking backwards towards glory days. Kamala Harris seems to have a lot in her favor as a candidate at the moment. We'll see if she capitalizes on it.

Thus far the Top Tier admission requires that you be a current or former Senator. Governors and US House Reps need not apply. Yet. Somebody will come along before it's over, I'm sure.

You've probably heard of…

--Cory Booker (D) (NJ Senator)

--Kirsten Gillibrand (D) (NY Senator)

--Beto O'Rourke (D) (Former TX US Rep)

--Amy Klobuchar (D) (MN Senator)

--Julian Castro (D) (Former Sec of HUD)

These folks all have some level of national name recognition and fundraising clout. Gillibrand and Beto would be my top two picks as the candidates likely to join the Top Tier by 2020, but realistically any of them could rise or any of them could fall into the sad land of "Also receiving votes but no delegates in Iowa...."

Also appearing…

Here we have another nineteen Democratic Party declared or potential Presidential candidates. Offhand, I'd say that -- improbably enough! -- Pete Buttigieg has the best chance to be the first of this gang to bust into the "You've probably heard of..." tier based on positive early reviews to his early stumping. But who knows what will really happen.

Some of these folks will choose not to run. Others will run briefly or futilely before dropping out, having never cracked the 1% barrier in a primary poll. But at least a few of these folks will evolve into genuinely meaningful candidates who campaign beyond Iowan and New Hampshire into the election, and nearly all of them have a chance to become that candidate.

Okay, Marianne Williamson seems unlikely to advance. And I'm willing to say that Mike Gravel probably won't make it into the Top Tier, since his stated campaign goal isn't "become President of the United States" but "to drive the Overton window of US foreign policy leftward." But hey, stranger things have happened and he has the catchiest twitter tag of all the candidates with #gravelanche. 

Coming soon to a cable TV "town hall" or a local strip mall or a boat show near you. Check 'em out:

--Pete Buttigieg (D) (South Bend, IN, Mayor)

--John Hickenlooper (D) (Former CO Governor)

--Stacey Abrams (D) (Former GA State Rep)

--Tulsi Gabbard (D) (HI US Rep)

--Terry McAuliffe (D) (Former VA Governor)

--John Delaney (D) (Former MD US Rep)

--Steve Bullock (D) (MT Governor)

--Eric Holder (D) (Former Attorney Gen.)

--Jay Inslee (D) (WA Governor)

--Michael Bennet (D) (CO Senator)

--Bill de Blasio (D) (NYC Mayor)

--Seth Moulton (D) (MA US Rep)

--Tim Ryan (D) (OH US Rep)

--Eric Swalwell (D) (CA US Rep)

--Jeff Merkley  (D) (OR Senator)

--Andrew Yang (D) (Businessman)

--Richard Ojeda  (D) (Former WV State Senator)

--Mike Gravel (D) (Former AK Senator)

--Marianne Williamson (D) (Author)

While I'm at it, I might as well mention the non-Dem buckets:

Independent billionaires we all want to go away

--Howard Schultz (I) (Former Starbucks CEO, billionaire)

As near as I can tell his campaign thus far has literally consisted of saying that he wants people to be more polite to billionaires. Why, Howard? Why?

Republicans who like to talk but ultimately won't have the cojones to challenge Trump

--John Kasich (R) (Former OH Governor)
--Larry Hogan (R) (MD Governor)
--Bill Weld (R) (Former MA Governor)
--Jeff Flake (R) (Former AZ Senator)

In all fairness to his inclusion in this bucket, Kasich is the one guy I can see who might genuinely try to mount a primary challenge to Trump. But I'd have to see some concrete evidence that he's building an organization and campaign very soon to think he means it.

Larry Hogan would have to increase in name recognition to make it to the "Also appearing..." bucket if there was going to be a genuine GOP primary. But we shall see.

Bill Weld was the Libertarian VP candidate in 2016, thus helping to siphon off a few anti-Trump votes from Clinton and ultimately helping to elect Trump. Good thinkin', Bill.

As for Jeff Flake ... oh, if only Jeff Flake had been somewhere the last couple of years where he might've done something meaningful. You know, like the US Senate.

Jeff Flake spent the last two years decrying the decay of Trumpism while voting for every step of the decay time after time after time on the floor of the Senate. He embodies all that has gone truly rotten with the entire Republican Party.

- - - - - - -

So there it is, my profound wisdom in its entirety, plus a whole bunch more words on the state of the 2020 campaign.

Of course, I thought there was no chance in Hell that Donald Trump could ever win a single GOP state primary in 2016, so what do I know?

So long, and thanks for all the fish stocking.

A bit of news from me -- I've decided not to run for another term on the Wolverine Lake Village Council this fall. Twelve years as our Village President has been a good run, but it's time to let somebody else pick up the gavel.

I didn't run for council in the first place to become El Presidente for Life. When I joined our council, our village faced some serious financial challenges. I thought I could help us work our way through them. Thanks to a huge amount of work by a ton of people: staff, boards, volunteers, and my fellow council people, we made it through the hard times and emerged better than ever. There aren't enough thank-yous in all the world to cover everybody who helped us get to this point.

I'm really happy with where the village is right now. The finances are rock solid and the leadership team is strong. It's a good time to bring in some new energy and some new ideas to the council table.

Democracy is participatory. From potholes to police and from fish stocking to financing sewers, you'll find there's a heck of a lot more that goes into making a municipality work than you ever imagined. And you'll find that there are a lot more great people making it work than you ever imagined.

The deadline for filing to run for council is July 24. Nominating petitions and an affidavit of identity must be returned to Commerce Township by 4 pm on that date. You can pick up an information packet and petition at Village Hall or the Commerce Township Clerk’s office.

Have at it folks.


Meanwhile, what's next for me? I have no idea. I'll be around. I'm not disappearing. I tend to get involved in things, so I'm sure something will come along. In the meantime, there might just be a few extra naps and a bit more time on the ol' pontoon boat.

So long, and thanks for all the fish stocking.

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.