These should be heady days for anyone who detests Donald Trump and what he has done to America.  He is caught in a vise of incontrovertible evidence of innumerable high crimes and misdemeanors.  House Democrats are moving expeditiously to file articles of impeachment after carefully building the case that he should be removed from office now because he is a present and continuing threat to our democracy.  So why do I have the feeling that I am Continue Reading...

Lanny Davis and Anthony Scaramucci have an ass-kickingly good idea: The Senate should proceed to an impeachment trial only if at least 20 Republican senators announce beforehand that they are open-minded about whether Donald Trump should be removed from office.  This is not a grandstanding trivial pursuit but a minimum standard of fairness, they write in a Washington Post op-ed column.  Asking for a juror to commit to be open-minded before the Continue Reading...

If you recall the headlines atop my blog posts on impeachment over the last several months -- among them Whatever Happened To That Democratic Blue Wave?,Fuggedabout Trump: The Democratic Circular Firing Squad Goes After Obama, and most recently The Long, Tragicomic Slog Toward Impeachment -- you probably are onto my view that if Donald Trump goes down it will have less to do with House Democrats, whose extraordinary dithering continues apace, Continue Reading...

With an intact gag reflex and so much else on our deeply troubled planet to write about, I have been fighting the urge to wade back into the beyond sordid saga of former Donald Trump fuck buddy and pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, whose escape acts from justice would seem to rival the Great Houdini's until you consider that the legendary illusionist's feats of a century ago were not aided and abetted by a cast of powerful, Continue Reading...

We are not exactly sports fanatics, my love and I.  While I nominally follow the Philadelphia Phillies, at least when they're winning, we don't even have cable TV, so we bypass the 24/7 torrent of the sports industrial complex in a sort of insular bliss at the mountain retreat if you don't count the nightmare than Donald Trump has visited upon us.  But we are joyfully following the U.S. national women's team in the World Cup because it allows us Continue Reading...

The damage inflicted by Trump’s naïveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. - John McCain  Although it is equal parts presumptuous and wishful thinking, I'm going to suggest that the hidden message of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's farewell soliloquy was that he believes Congress should impeach Donald Trump because the damage cited by the president's late nemesis -- yeah, the guy whose naval Continue Reading...

The case against Mariia Butina for being a Russian spy was never strong.   She never worked directly for the Kremlin, knew of no secret codes or safe houses, and didn't engaged in covert activity.  And so the feds ended up charging her with the rather tame offense of failing to register as a foreign agent.  The Siberian-born gun-rights activist, an oxymoron if there ever was one since gun owners in Russia have no rights, made her debut as a bit Continue Reading...

Memo to those who are taking a wait-and-see attitude about how Attorney General William Barr will handle Robert Mueller's final report on the Russia scandal: The waiting is over and what we're seeing has all the the earmarks of a whitewash.    The special counsel's final report not only does not exonerate Trump.  Hiding behind myriad redactions and peeking out between the lines in the copious appendices is some very nasty shit involving Trump as Continue Reading...

In late June of 1973, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the special Senate committee convened to investigate the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building, uttered the immortal words that would assure his place in history: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"  Fast forward 45 years and that again is the raging question following a week of developments that Continue Reading...

The president of the United States is in grave legal peril.  He has run out of lies and luck, and things are only going to get worse for him as missing Russia scandal puzzle pieces get filled in and we inch closer to the full story.   In a day of extraordinarily portentous Russia scandal developments, prosecutors said in legal memorandums pertaining to Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime personal lawyer and fixer, and his former campaign manager Continue Reading...