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Isn’t that Special [Relationship?]

As is often the case, I must temper my remarks by noting my personal exhaustion: I had a “short finish” (31 miles out of the official length of 40) in yesterday’s BUS Anniversary Run in Queens (Alley Pond Park), followed by today’s NYRR Retro 5-Miler in Central Park to mark the NY Road Runners Club’s 59th anniversary. Seems a big weekend for running club anniversaries. And speaking of things that have been around a while, what can we say about the President’s ongoing feud with London Mayor Sadiq Khan, which resulted in the President pouring salt on the wounds of...

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Trump/Ryan Derangement Derangement Syndrome

Everything I want to say on the subject has been said better by Professor Lemieux concerning what’s wrong with the chattering classes, to wit, God forbid political coverage tell us the actual substance of a policy, such as the abomination that just passed the House of Representatives that purports to repeal the suddenly-popular-package-of-health-insurance-programs-best-known-as-ACA-or-Obamacare. Bottom line to Chris Cillizza (formerly of WaPo, now trading his superficial wares at CNN) is that the Democrats sang the lines from a song by “Steam,” “Na na na na hey hey goodbye” (or whatever they did) upon passage of the bill in the House [btw,...

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The Rosetta Stone

Could this Politico piece linking the Hasidic Jewish group Chabad, Putin’s Russia and Trump amount to a “unified field theory of #Trumprussia”? Certainly, many of the names are there; I believe that, perhaps, a Rosetta “Bayrock” might be a better explanation, as that name has come up before. Obviously, my good friend Donald J. Putin follows the issue more closely than I. Now that it seems, at a superficial level (an extraordinarily superficial level, because it is bullshit), an argument can be made that the gratuitous firing of 59 (why that number?) Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase somehow takes...

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April is the cruelest month

Thus sayeth T.S. Eliot somewhere or other. As you know, it’s the 1st of April, a day for “fooling.” And indeed, in the history of this blog, I have often used the occasion for fun, such as my most-viewed-post-of-all time, this interview with former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld. Using my patented blog-interview format, I also presented interviews with notables such as Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, and just last year, Donald J. Trump. Thing is, we are now in a world where everything goes and nothing matters, the world’s most prolific liars accuse others of spreading “fake news,” the most obvious lies...

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Dog Bites Man

I more or less agree with this quite critical assessment in Slate of last night’s “major scoop” concerning a release of President Donald Trump’s 2005 income tax return by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. I only tuned in as a result of a friend’s text message, and we both watched in rapt anticipation, which turned to disbelief when the first commercial break rolled around without “the big reveal.” At that moment, we both knew not only that there was no there there, but that “the story” was that (IMHO) it was more likely than not that the President himself leaked his own...

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Damning with faint support

“A few hundred, perhaps” pro-Trump supporters evidently showed up at rallies near NYC’s Trump Tower, in Washington and perhaps elsewhere. To be fair, it’s cold out and all. We now pass through day 43 and into day 44 of the clusterfuck known as the Trump Administration, noting that Vegas odds-makers have now concluded that America’s Own Annoying Orange[TM] won’t last a full term, and of course, his polling numbers are at a record low for a President this early in his [it’s always been a his] term, although unsurprisingly strong among Republicans, to whom he has been shamelessly pandering. I...

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Inflection points

Item: The Oroville Dam in California, the nation’s highest, in apparently in imminent danger of collapse after damage to the dam’s main spillway following severe storms earlier this week. A metaphor for other things? Or a cautionary tale for a global-warming-denying-President? Item: Democratic Senator Al Franken tells all who’ll listen that his Republican colleagues in the Senate believe that Republican President Donald J. Trump is mentally unstable. Item: The Grey Lady reports on turmoil at the National Security Council, where the National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, may well have improperly signaled future American policy to a hostile power (that would...

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Today in international incident news

Hey, boys and girls, we’re not even two weeks into the (gak) Trump Administration, and we are so spectacularly dealing with all our old international friends, and our new BFFs over in Russia. In neighborly news… Item: The President evidently berated and threatened the President of Mexico during a phone call, replete with the threat of U.S. troops to combat drug traffickers in cases where the Mexican military couldn’t or wouldn’t, to, as Trump described it, stop “bad hombres.” According to reports, he also demanded Mexico pay for his God damned wall. Item: The President berated the prime minister of...

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Let the games continue

A federal judge right here in Brooklyn (I was just at a rather spirited rally outside the courthouse) just issued a nationwide temporary emergency stay of the “controversial” immigration ban on nationals of seven Muslim majority countries issued by the President earlier in the week. Protests had broken out all over the country over an ill-advised and poorly drafted order intended to implement the Trump campaign promise made to White supremacists at his Nuremberg style rallies to ban all Muslim immigrants. The order, which took effect without notice so that people literally in flight were effected, is deliberately intended to...

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Rest in peace, Mary

Brooklyn born Mary Tyler Moore passed away at 80. Mary played Laura Petrie (of New Rochelle, NY) for much of my early childhood, and then, from the magical era of my age 7-14 years, she was the uber-cool Mary Richards of Minneapolis, a 30-something single working girl (a t.v. news producer; the back story is that she broke up with a man she supported through medical school). For a political blog (that pretty much no one reads) I certainly do spend what seems (to me anyway) an inordinate amount of time on celebrity deaths, I’ll admit that this is that...

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