Dispatches from Vilnius

When Alan Dershowitz stands before the US Senate and argues, without a trace of irony, that the president was acting in the national interest when he engaged in a pro quid pro with Ukraine, and Republican senators buy it, you know the gig is up.  At this point, the president can do literally anything in the so-called national interest and get away with it. Laurence Tribe argues that accepting an interpretation such as this "puts us on a short path toward dictatorship." It's bad enough we have to listen to reality show lawyers like Dershowitz and Starr, but why aren't Republican senators questioning these incredibly lame arguments?  Even Fox News legal analyst Judge Napolitano considers the whole thing a sham .  John Bolton, who desperately wants to testify for whatever reasons of his own, has now been labeled persona non grata at Fox.  I'm surprised Fox has retained Judge Nap's services, as he has been a vocal critic throughout the impeachment process...

At one time, it was believed that an independent Palestinian state was at the center of peace in the Middle East.  Jimmy Carter deeply regretted not pursuing it when he had Israel and Egypt at the table back in the late 1970s.  This was before Israel greatly encroached on the West Bank, dotting it with settlements that have turned this UN mandated Palestinian territory into Swiss cheese. This is what the West Bank looks like today . There is no integral Palestinian territory left.  Roughly 500,000 Israelis live in these fortified settlements, considering it a badge of honor.  They have no right to be here, based on UN resolutions, but Bibi Netanyahu has made it his mission to annex Palestine piece by piece until there will be virtually nothing left.  Obama did little to curb this development during his eight years in office. Along comes Trump, or one should say his creepy son-in-law Jared, with a so-called peace plan that would allow Israel to fo...

You have to hand it to Greta for getting under everyone's skin .  Her Davos speech had all the big wigs responding, namely Steven Mnuchin who told Greta she needed to get an economics degree before telling the world to divest in oil and gas companies.  The funny part is that his wife later came out on Instagram in support of Greta.  I suppose Steve gave Louise a more private dressing down for contradicting him. We all know that the so-called energy companies are contributing to climate change at an alarming rate.  The US was actually making headway with initiatives in place to become more energy efficient and less reliant on fossil fuels.  Since Trump took office, the government has made an about face, pulling out of the Paris Agreement, promoting fossil fuel industries and most recently gutting the clean water act . It all seems so senseless, but Trump rode into office promoting coal-burning power stations and rolling back carbon emission standards on...

If there is any secret to Trump's success, it is to drag everything down to his level so that he makes you wallow in his own mud.  This is certainly the case with the latest memebers  he has selected for his defense team.  Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr are reality show attorneys, who capitalized on their notoriety on Fox.  I'm surprised he didn't add Jeanine Pirro.  Trump is hoping to make this trial into one big ugly episode of Celebrity Apprentice, where viewers take sides based on their ideological bent, much like the infamous OJ Simpson murder trial and Clinton impeachment trial, which Dershowitz and Starr were part of. This is a far cry from the way Alexander Hamilton saw the Senate trial.  In Article 65 of the Federalist Papers , he saw the Senate as the final authority on the articles of impeachment.  He imagined the upper legislative branch as a House of Lords able to render an impartial verdict on the charges levied by the House of ...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a technicolor re-imagining of 1969.  As such, it is fun to watch but one scene should have been left on the cutting room floor.  The fight between Cliff and Bruce Lee was totally unnecessary and has drawn a lot of unwanted attention to the film. What has pissed off the surviving Lee family and Lee fans in general is Quentin's assertion that Bruce Lee said he could win a fight with Muhammad Ali.  He bases this view on a biography by Linda Lee, Bruce's wife, in which she offered a second-hand account from critics of Lee.  Nevertheless, Quentin is unrepentant in his view, citing Bruce's presumed arrogance. I suppose these kinds of controversy sell tickets, but the film already had so much buzz it would have done just fine without this useless foray.  Like everything else in Quentin's movies, his portrayal of Bruce Lee is drawn from other movies, because when you listen to Bruce in interviews he is anything but arrogant....

Some of you might remember the old television show This Is Your Life , hosted by Ralph Edwards.  It ran in the US from 1952-61 and was subsequently picked up by other countries, having its longest run in Little Britain.  Well, we have a new version playing out in real time as Lev Parnas and his lawyer post image after image of Lev with Trump, his family members, his top aides and numerous Republicans who all claim they don't know him.  Chris Cuomo ran a five-minute segment  recounting all these meetings with Lev that seemed to slip the minds of so many prominent Republican figures. In Lev's own words, he went from big-time party donor to close Guiliani confidante to Ukraine inside man for the White House.  He implicated virtually everyone in the White House in his interview with Anderson Cooper .  If that weren't enough, he went on the Rachel Maddow Show to go through these contacts once again, making her segment the most-watched news episode on tel...

There has long been this absurd love/hate relationship with our "Mother country."  No where is it more absurd than the way we follow the royal family.  I suppose a lot of Americans were pleased as punch when Harry took an American wife, but they didn't figure all the trouble it would cause the royal family, namely in Meghan's awful estranged father and jealous half-siblings who have desperately tried to cash in on her new royal celebrity. Every tabloid in England and America has given these pathetic individuals space to air their many grievances and tell us how rotten Meghan is at her core for not having taken them into the royal family as well.  Meghan's father Thomas seems to have modeled himself on King Ralph , hoping to find a special place at the royal table only to be rudely rebuffed. It would all be quite funny if it hadn't gone on as long as it has.  Thomas Markle continues to opin in London papers long after he has been asked to cease and des...

As Leonard Cohen might sing , "Now so long, Marianne, it's time we began to laugh, and cry and cry and laugh about it all again."  The improbable presidential run of Ms. Williamson is over, and with it her "politics of love" that never had much of a chance to begin with. For a moment there, it seemed it might just catch on.  David Brooks wrote a glowing account of her in the New York Times, claiming she might just be the one to take down the Dark Lord of Hate himself, but she was never able to gain any traction in a field that had ballooned to over 20 candidates.  Still she hung on, hoping love might be the answer to all the frustration, anger and hatred rising out of the Democratic campaign. Her candidacy exposed just how cynical politics has become.  It's all about positioning and taking advantage of people's hostile emotions, and hoping that you can hold your campaign together long enough to be the last man or woman standing.  In short, a b...

Tom Brady is regarded as the GOAT among quarterbacks by many sportswriters, but if this football season has shown us anything it is that Brady is purely a product of the Belichick system put in place 20 years ago that no other team has been able to replicate.  It is a system that has produced 9 Super Bowl appearances and 6 wins.  Brady often gets the credit, being the quarterback, but Belichick probably could have achieved this incredible milestone with any decent quarterback.  After all, who remembers Phil Simms ?  He guided the New York Giants to a pair of Super Bowl wins under Bill Parcells' system, which Bill Belichick was an integral part of. Belichick came to New England with Bill Parcells.  It was Parcells who turned the Patriots around, leading them to only their second Super Bowl appearance in 1997, where they lost to a resurgent Green Bay Packers led by Brett Favre.  Oddly enough, Parcells quit after that year to coach the New York Jets, t...

Mitch was all ready to get the Senate trial done before the holidays, but in classic Lucy fashion Nancy Pelosi pulled the football out from under him when she chose to delay sending the impeachment articles to the Senate.  McConnell didn't see this coming as it was something he thought only he would do. Nancy can hold off sending the articles of impeachment indefinitely, leaving Trump's fate in limbo for weeks or even months.  Lindsey Graham proclaimed that the president finds this grossly unfair . This despite Trump shutting down government for nearly a month at the start of the year, holding federal workers' pay checks in limbo. Trump's been crying from the beginning, so upset that Nancy would have the audacity to launch an impeachment inquiry despite his effort to cop a plea deal when news first broke of his perfect call.  Since then Republican lawmakers have been circling the wagons, hoping to protect their dear president.  Mitch has vowed to work ...

I can understand Phillip Wenz's concern about diluting the IBRBS' brand.  It already has to go by its abbreviation after admitting Mrs. Clauses in 2016.  Now, there is pressure to drop the RB all together and allow anyone who wants to be a Santa into its international brotherhood .  It takes years to cultivate a real beard as stout as Santa.  This is a full-time vocation, not something you can just put a yak-hair beard on at Christmastime and call yourself Santa.  Yet, there is a lot of pressure for IBRBS to expand to meet the growing ethnic interest in jolly old St. Nick. Apparently, the international brotherhood has formed a pretty strong union and can command higher engagement fees, thus resulting in more interest in its organization.  Mrs. Deanna Golden has been pushing the organization to expand its base ever since it admitted her as a Mrs. Claus.  She books a lot of their engagements, and doesn't see why beardless Santas can't join.  ...

Nancy Pelosi tried to make it a somber occasion by wearing black and urging her Democratic colleagues to not gloat over the impeachment vote, but there was no hiding the glee many felt in seeing His Trumpness reduced to the lowest point in his presidency.  He became only the third president in history to be formally impeached by the House of Representatives. The historic House vote put a damper on the Christmas theme Trump set for his Michigan rally , and he let Democrats know about, living and dead. Trump's wild rallies have become legend.  In this one a protester had to be escorted away, but not without Trump publicly shaming her on the way out.  He thought security was being too politically correct.  For whatever reason he chose to assail John Dingell, who died this past year after serving six decades in Congress.  Of course, he saved his harshest criticism for Ms. Pelosi, urging Americans to voter her "the hell out of office." It all played out as ...

I feel sorry for British voters that their two major parties are represented by the Mad Hatter and the White Rabbit.  At least Scots had the SNP as an alternative, which they overwhelming voted into the British Parliament, setting up what very well could be another secession referendum next year. Boris got what he wanted, a yes vote from the English and Welsh people that Lower Britain should withdraw from the European Union.  The low countries voted Tories in by a yuge percentage.  The largest ever seen since the Thatcher years.  This finally forced Jeremy to step down from his horrible leadership of the Labor Party, which saw his party blow a golden opportunity to regain control of the Parliament. Look who's gloating!   Given how well the Brexit vote worked for him back in 2016, little wonder Trump (a.k.a Mr. Brexit) sees the snap general election as a referendum on his own administration.  He is not alone in this opinion.  Even Mayor Bloom ...

Trump is desperate to roll back the last of the Obama energy efficiency regulations.  He offered a rambling discourse on low-flow toilets and showers, claiming that these regulations often led to no water at all and that some poor persons had to flush their toilets 10-15 times just to get their turds down the trapway.  What's a conscientious conservative to do? This is a continuation of his administration's decision in September to rollback the regulations on energy efficient light bulbs .  Trump claimed "what's saved is not worth it, for the little they save."  Actually, quite a bit is saved.  One LED light bulb alone can save you more than $160 over a conventional incandescent light bulb during a span of 23 years.  Multiply that by the number of light bulbs in your house!   It's not like he or any member of his administration has quantified these decisions.  They are rolling back these regulations purely out of spite, akin to Reagan r...

It's pretty clever to reframe Hoffa's ties to the mob through Frank Sheeran.  Charles Brandt coaxed the "confession" out of The Irishman shortly before his death in 2003, and laid out corroborating evidence in his book, I Heard You Paint Houses , published the following year.  The book has been widely discarded as pulp fiction , and in turn Scorsese has taken some heat for giving weight to Sheeran's account in his epic movie, but then I saw the Netflix original as a geriatric version of Goodfellas. Scorsese relishes in not just one but several conspiracy theories from the 60s and 70s.  According to the Irishman, it was the mafia in Chicago that carried Illinois for Kennedy in 1960; the Bay of Pigs Invasion was a mafia-coordinated effort that didn't get the aerial support promised by Papa Kennedy; and the mob had Jack Kennedy rubbed out when the president no longer answered to their interests, namely getting rid of Castro and letting them have free acces...