Dispatches from Vilnius

It must suck to come back from a three-day state visit to Japan only to face more talk about impeachment, or the "dirty, filthy, disgusting word" as Donald called it .  Like so much that swirls around his head, he doesn't seem to have a grasp of what's going on.  He thinks the Supreme Court can block an impeachment trial, just as he is convinced "Jina" is paying the tariffs directly to the US Treasury.  Worst of all, the biggest takeaway from his state visit is the cover-up of the USS John McCain because staffers didn't want their president to confront his arch-nemesis once again, even if it was an aircraft carrier.  This after wishing Japanese soldiers Happy Memorial Day . All this would be fine if it was a reality show based on the White House, but sadly this is the real thing happening in real time.  Robert Mueller  laid out the Articles of Impeachment at his press conference two days ago.  The ball is squarely in Nancy Pelosi's court, bu...

It's the Asian style to show world leaders respect even when they are dumb as a rock.  Japan's Shinzo Abe or Abe Shinzo  pulled out all the stops to show His Trumpness a great time in his home country.  He even arranged a meeting with the emperor , which Trump crowed about on twitter.  It seems it was a happy time by all, judging from the photo above. Yet, this is the same guy who complained when Obama visited Japan over Memorial Day weekend in 2016 in an effort to mend bridges by visiting Hiroshima, and giving this stirring speech .  No such memorable speech from Trump.  Instead, he indulged himself in golf, sumo wrestling and "hamberders." The long overdue state visit was an attempt to try to get trade talks back on track , discuss North Korea, with Abe throwing in the bonus of acting as the American proxy in talks with Iran to stave off another war.  All of this makes Trump look very presidential, which is what he desperately needs right...

A dark cloud fell on the Rose Garden as His Trumpness lashed out at Lady Pelosi for allowing investigations to proceed against his royal house despite all his best efforts to introduce new legislation.  At stake is a much ballyhooed infrastructure bill that Trump has been offering ever since the 2016 campaign.  Lady Pelosi and Lord Schumer offered to meet him halfway on the bill, but the annoying Duke of Orange was too upset with dear Nancy to even discuss the matter, storming out of the meeting after issuing a diatribe, and heading straight to the Rose Garden where a lectern decked in a "no collusion, no obstruction" banner awaited him to continue his tirade to the press. Safe to say this show was all planned in advance, hoping to achieve maximum effect.  The only problem is that he was unable to stick to the script, spinning wildly out of control and looking like an aggrieved teenager whose mommy found a Playboy magazine under his mattress.  Trump still wasn...

Trump has discovered a new tool - declaring a national emergency anytime he doesn't get what he wants from Congress or his trading partners.  He tried it out on the border wall and most recently declared a national emergency on the tech industry,  banning sales and use of telecom equipment by foreign companies .  This ban is specifically aimed at Chinese-owned Huawei, which he and others have claimed is mining sensitive data through the use of their cellphones. This is largely an attempt to stop Huawei from getting 5G technology from American-owned Qualcomm, which had reached a deal with the Chinese telecommunications company some months back, but was blocked by the FCC.  The Tech Cold War has been heating up since Trump took office.  He tried to first bully China by having Canada arrest the daughter of the Huawei owner for charges brought against her and the company for violating sanctions against Iran.  She has since been released on bail. ...

The Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, made the most of his hour on Fox , taking aim at the president, vice-president and conservative pundits.  He fielded questions from Chris Wallace, who is regarded as one of the toughest guys in the news media to do an interview with.  The Fox news host offered praise for Buttigieg afterward.  Not the president or Fox friends, however, who were almost as peeved Fox would host such a liberal personality as were progressive Democrats who would like to see their candidates boycott Fox, as Liz Warren has done. I'm of two minds on this one.  I see Liz's point.   There's no reason to feed the beast, but then Mayor Pete showed you could take on the beast in its own backyard and win.  It's not like you are going to get the Fox audience votes.  Curiosity is the extent of it.  Nevertheless, it shows a Democratic candidate isn't afraid to go into the lion's den, so to speak, even if these lions are mostly toothless and...

After her showdown with Trump over the government shutdown at the beginning of the year, Nancy Pelosi has been rather quiet.  However, last week she made the interesting comment that Trump "is becoming self-impeachable in terms of some of the things he's doing."  She was referring to his continued attempts to stonewall the House investigative committees who are trying to assess the depths of depravity outlined in Mueller's redacted report. It seems Trump is itching for a fight with Nancy, anxious to make up for the one he lost in January.  He has literally commanded his staff not to submit to the House subpoenas.  This puts House Speaker Pelosi in the uncomfortable position of having to hold the Trump administration in contempt of Congress, something she is anxious to avoid.  Conversely, members of her own party are becoming increasingly anxious that she is not doing anything to hold the Trump administration accountable.  Where's the Nancy that star...

Political theater has been perversely twisted into legislative policy with men determined to govern women's reproductive rights with the harshest anti-abortion bill to date.  Amazingly, it was signed into law by the woman governor of Alabama.  This shameful act has made it into news all around the world.  In Vilnius, I was asked yesterday at lunch what I thought of this draconian law by one of my women colleagues. With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh last year as Supreme Court Justice, conservatives states are determined to overturn Roe v. Wade.  The startling victory by Democrats in the 2018 midterms spurred them on even more. Not that the feminine uprising had a big impact on Alabama.  Kay Ivey is a female surrogate for male conservative interests, and only four women sit in the state senate.  Two of these women spoke out against the legislation.   Their objections were shot down by the white male conservatives, who passed the bill...

Donald Trump was in my old backyard this past week and the crowd was loving it, as they would a Wrestlemania match .  It was the kind of taunting and absurd boasts we have come to expect, ratcheted up a notch when someone from the crowd shouted, "shoot them," when Trump rhetorically asked how do you stop the migrants?  Our President smiled and quipped, "only in the panhandle you can get away with that statement."  Not really.  You can get away with it most anywhere these days but it was amplified by the media and in turn became the subject of my old high school friends' posts on facebook. It's not often you get a president in this neck of the woods.  It's not like South Florida.  It is a land of pine trees not palm trees, famous for the manufacture of turpentine in the early 19th century.  The panhandle has long been dubbed Lower Alabama and the Redneck Riviera because its history dates back to before the Civil War.  Andrew Jackson establi...

2018 was a turning point for Democrats as we saw a lot of new faces take to the campaign trail.  Rachel Lears follows four women candidates from different corners of the country, who tried to knock out incumbent Democrats who they felt no longer represented their districts.  Alexadria Ocasio-Cortez emerged victorious, where as Cori Bush, Paula Jean Swearengin and Amy Vilela all found out the harsh reality of politics when going up against entrenched incumbents. The main reason AOC succeeded is that she had a lot less territory to canvas and a lazy incumbent who only pitched up at the end of the campaign to attend a debate and a couple of rallies.  Joe Crowley was the epitome of crony politics in the Bronx borough, whose views no longer matched the demographics of the district.  The most difficult thing for AOC was to get her name on the ballot. It's too bad Lears didn't follow Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib, who did win House seats, but it was pretty hard to s...

Not even the Kentucky Derby is safe from His Trumpness's influence.  He tweeted in Sunday that he thought the Derby had gone PC by disqualifying Maximum Security and awarding the race to Country House. Trump has a way of injecting himself into any argument and making it political.  This was the case when Arizona picked Kyler Murray number one in the NFL draft.  Instead of congratulating the top choice, Trump gave his nod to second best Nick Bosa , a controversial defensive end out of Ohio St. who had deleted a great number of tweets supporting the president, as well as his views on Colin Kaepernick and other hot button issues. It seems that Trump wants to make political correctness his top theme again this election cycle, railing against social media for cutting off his favorite white supremacists Alex Jones, Laura Loomer and Milo Yiannopoulos.  He thinks they are all victims of a PC witch hunt and should be restored on twitter, facebook and instagram....

A little off the beaten track, but it was interesting to read the reactions to Caster Semenya being forced to reduce her testosterone level in order to compete in women's events.  Caster is " intersex ," exhibiting high male levels of testosterone that has given her a significant advantage in competitive women's sports.  She has not lost an 800 m race in four years, blowing away the competition. While Caster's high testosterone level may be innate, it is a serious concern.  Back in the 1990s the IOC came down hard on Eastern European athletes who were pumping themselves up with testosterone and anabolic steroids to give them a distinct advantage in all sports.  The East German women swim team became synonymous with these "butch athletes," who cleaned up on the gold medals at the 1976 games.  The IOC had banned performance enhancing drugs in 1967, but it remained hard to regulate well into the 1980s.  It wasn't until the wall came down in 198...

Trump topped the magic number after his rally in Green Bay, where he regaled the audience with whoppers like a doctor and mother conspiring to murder her newborn baby in his grotesque reference to late-term abortions.  Yes, it does boggle the mind but somehow we get used to it.  How do you even begin to sort through 10,000 Lies? The problem is that the media tries to each week, and before the week is done Trump has added another 80 or more whoppers to the list so the process is never-ending.  He is lying a whopping 12 times per day.  He consumes all the media attention.  There is very little room for others to get a word in edgewise as we are finding out with the roughly 20 Democratic candidates running for office.  The only time we do hear about them is when Trump references one or more of them at his rallies. His lies range from the relatively harmless boasts, like claiming he once was named "Man of the Year" in Michigan, to the ones that inspir...