Dispatches from Vilnius

Nationally, Trump continues to poll poorly, but if you look at key states like Wisconsin , Michigan and Ohio , Trump surprisingly polls evenly or ahead of Democratic candidates.  Ohio has long been a toss-up state but Michigan and Wisconsin are traditionally Democratic states.  Midwest voters claim to have voted for Democratic candidates in the midterms but say they will return to Trump in 2020. Some said they prefer a split government, so voted for Democrats to check Trump's executive power in the midterms.  If they don't like all the power Trump wields why vote for him in 2020, and instead vote for Republican Congresspersons to balance a potential Democratic president's power? The sad truth is many of these persons don't put a lot of thought into how they vote.  It is mostly a reflexive action driven by an emotional response to a candidate, which is why all those fake ads worked so well in 2016.  Trump has been able to shrug off the scandals that sur...

Defending Charlie's Angels as a #MeToo movie  that men can't handle is not the smartest move.  The early reboots of the popular television series did quite well, largely because they stayed in the same spirit of the original.  The Angels were never meant to be more than fluff, but combining three good comic actresses made it a lot of fun, and a lot of men enjoyed the 2000 version very much.  It didn't hurt having Bill Murray as Bosley either.  This after all was a television series that gave us Farrah Fawcett-Majors , the equivalent of Pamela Anderson in her day. The original Angels came from the mind of Aaron Spelling, who probably imagined himself as Charlie, although he got John Forsythe to play the famous voice.  The premise was quite simple, a bored millionaire decides to create a private detective agency and hires three nubile young women, who aren't going in anywhere in the LAPD, to become his undercover agents.  He has Bosley serve as ...

Gordon Sondland's testimony laid bare the corruption in the Trump White House.  This administration went out of its way to pressure the new Ukrainian president into giving them dirt on a political opponent.  Sondland presented a wide range of e-mails implicating all the major figures in Trump's cabinet, leaving virtually no one unscathed except maybe the clueless Ben Carson. Of course, Sondland is no Mr. Nice Guy.  He played a role in all this backdoor double dealing by meeting with President Zelensky himself and presenting the Trump's administration's demands.  He and his White House contacts used the euphesmistic language one would expect from small-time mafia hoods, as if watching too many episodes of The Sopranos, but Sondland was kind enough to spell it all out for the impeachment panel, much to the chagrin of the Don, who was left stumbling for words on the White House lawn. All in all, it was a black day for Trump and fellow Republicans.  His c...

It was supposed to be a Republican trifecta -- three easy wins in Magaland -- reaffirming that Trump is still strong among the Republican base.  Yesterday, saw a runoff for governor in Louisiana.  Trump wanted this state badly as he had lost Kentucky when Bevin finally conceded defeat earlier this week.  Trump went to the Deep South state not once but twice during the run-off to try to lift the Republican businessman Eddie Rispone across the finish line, only to personally witness yet another defeat .  In the end, the only state Trump could still claim to have a hold over is Mississippi, but even here the Republican barely defeated his Democratic challenger. The media was going to treat these elections as a referendum on Trump no matter what, but the president made it that much easier by making the gubernatorial races all about himself in his pleas to conservative voters to send a message to the country that they still love him. Louisiana is worse than Ken...

We finally got rid of half a dozen candidates who had no business being in the race to begin with, only for two more has-been politicians to announce their candidacies by filing in Alabama and New Hampshire.  I already covered Mayor Bloom , but now we have the former governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick.  Is there something about Elizabeth Warren he doesn't like? If we don't watch out, Hillary may run again.  She certainly appears to be toying with the idea .  At that point, the Democratic primaries would look like The Celebrity Apprentice and it would be hard to take any of this seriously. The DNC needs to step in before it's too late and squash any more late bids.  It's not like Bloomberg or Patrick have a snowball's chance in hell.  Deval's big pitch is that he can successfully run to the center.  Wow!  How's that for inspiring?  Apparently, he thinks Joe is too nostalgic and Liz and Bernie are too hostile.  I guess he t...

Safe to say that this meeting served one purpose and one purpose only -- to deflect attention away from the impeachment hearings that started yesterday.  Unfortunately for Trump, his press conference only served to highlight how he allowed himself to be played by Erdogan. Republican lawmakers are having none of it. The House passed a bill placing sanctions on Turkey for their incursion into Syria by an overwhelming majority.  At least two-thirds of House Republicans signed onto the measure.  The House also voted overwhelmingly to recognize the Armenian genocide , which has long been a sore point with Turkey. Moscow Mitch will probably sit on these bills as he has done so many other House bills.  He claims he doesn't want to antagonize a fellow NATO member, but Turkey has been the black sheep of the NATO family under the double-dealing Erdogan.  He has repeatedly played NATO off Russia, most recently in Syria, where he struck a deal with Putin on th...

It's safe to say very few of us would have known anything about Amy Klobuchar if it wasn't for her exchange with Brett Kavanaugh over his drinking habits during his confirmation hearings. Klobuchar dropped that her father is a recovering alcoholic at age 90, but that didn't deter future Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh from blithely dismissing his drinking binges as something everyone did. Since then Klobuchar has become a media favorite, parlaying her newfound fame into a presidential run , which unfortunately hasn't gained much traction.  Frustrated, she has started to lash out at her opponents, namely Pete Buttigieg, who she feels has garnered way too much attention being the mayor of a small city.  She feels a woman with that limited experience wouldn't be taken seriously by the media .  Well, that isn't exactly true as Tulsi Gabbard doesn't have a very deep resume and she is garnering a lot of media attention. Part of the problem is that Amy co...

Goes to Alabama with a Banjo on his Knee The former Mayor of the Big Apple has filed his papers in Alabama, officially throwing his hat in the Democratic primaries.  It comes as a bit of surprise as Mayor Bloom seemed content to sit this race out, but the idea of a wealth tax got under his skin, as it has many other rich so-called Democrats who think Liz Warren has gone too far with her proposed taxes.  Bill Microsoft similarly spoke out against Liz's extreme measures to fund Medicare for All. Bloomberg and Gates are not like other billionaires.  While Bill Microsoft pours billions into fighting tuberculosis in Africa, Mayor Bloom has been a big environmental advocate.  These are genuinely good deeds, but then they didn't reach this stage in life by not climbing over the backs of others.  The irony of Gates' critique is that tech giants like Microsoft have done more to stifle start-ups than any new tax would.  In fact, the current tax codes are...

If Kentucky and Virginia are any indication, all is not well in Trumpland.  Kentuckians voted out one of Trump's staunchest allies, Matt Bevin, in favor of the son, Andy, of former Kentucky governor Steve Beshear.  Bevin won in 2015 thanks to a historically low voter turnout of 19 percent, and immediately went about undoing Beshear's legacy, especially the highly successful health insurance exchanges the Democratic governor had set up in the state. Bevin is a product of the now defunct Tea Party.  He ran against Mitch McConnell in the 2014 Senate primaries, and upset the favored Republican candidate, James Comer, by 83 votes in the 2015 Gubernatorial primaries.  He won the governor's seat with less than 1 million votes cast that November, only because Comer chose not to challenge him in the general election, as there were many bitter feelings after that scorched earth campaign. Comer is asking Bevin to concede if the recanvassing fails to yield any major in...

I saw from a recent clip in Tupelo, Mississippi, that Trump still plays You Can't Always Get What You Want  at his rallies. The Rolling Stones have asked him repeatedly to stop using their song, but in typical Trumpian fashion, he refuses to do so.  It has been his theme song ever since he descended from his escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015. It is hard to square the lyrics with his bloated ego, as the song is really about second choices, not first choices.  Maybe he was never satisfied with his wives?  He lavished praise on Ivana in his book, Art of the Deal , but given his new celebrity status he wanted something more than a second-hand Czech model.  He reportedly chased after numerous celebrities, including Madonna, before settling on Marla Maples, a virtual nobody, in 1989.  Two years later, he ditched Ivana and married Marla.  A few years later, he would trade Marla in for Melania. During this time, Trump found his voice on T...

The smart thing would have been for Republicans to lay low, let the Democrats carry out their impeachment inquiry, and then reject it in the Senate.  There's no way the Dems will be able to muster the 67 votes necessary to carry impeachment through the Senate. Instead, we see the Republicans turning the impeachment inquiry into a three-ring circus.  It seems that a lot of incumbent Republican representatives and senators are worried about getting "primaried," so they are showing their unquestioning support for Trump in the face of the insurmountable evidence brought against him by civil servants in his employ.  The coup de grace may very well be the testimony of John Bolton , who has a big bone to pick with Trump.  What then? It was better for Republicans that the Democrats kept the inquiry behind closed doors.  That way they could make up whatever damn fool lie they liked to the public.  Now, it will all be out in the open for everyone to hear and...