THE RELEASE

“In our desire of peace, I announce that tomorrow, and as a first step to open negotiations, Pakistan will be releasing the Indian Air Force officer in our custody,” Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan said earlier today, local time.

The announcement that his country would be releasing a captured Indian pilot as a way to de-escalate the military crisis ! that has pitted nuclear-armed militaries against each other for days was welcomed by numerous international authorities.

A face-saving opening for BOTH countries to head off a plunge into war?

The days before had brought BOTH nations to the brink.

On Tuesday, Indian warplanes dropped bombs inside Pakistan – it’s still NOT clear what they hit – and Pakistan downed at least one Indian fighter jet yesterday.

Equally troubling, tens of thousands of troops have been mobilized !!! on BOTH sides of the border.

The tensions increased this month after a militant in Kashmir rammed a carload of explosives into an Indian convoy, killing at least 40 Indian troops.

Jaish-e-Mohammed, an outlawed group based in Pakistan and active in the Indian-controlled areas of Kashmir, took credit for the attack, prompting India to blame Pakistan.

 

LAND of MISFITS

Mark Randall Meadows (R-NC) and James Daniel Jordan (R-OH), please collect ALL writing material and your personal books, and report immediately to the principal’s office!

Two of the more ignorant and childish members of the Congressional Freedom Caucus, and aging ‘waterboys’ for the inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, were on full display yesterday during the Michael “The Fixer” Cohen hearing on Capitol Hill.

Whenever you have a chance, go back a watch their boorish antics from yesterday [C-Span serves that purpose]…if you missed it.

As the old Lobsterman predicted, the hearing provided Middle School theatrics by some of our most pathetic elected lawmakers.

Republicans did NOT bothered with any complex strategy to undermine Cohen’s testimony, much less to pursue the truth.

Led by ranking minority member, Jimmy Jordan, the committee Republicans painted Cohen as someone who’s already [admittedly!!!] lied to Congress, and thus can’t be trusted on any matter.

For much of the 7-plus hour session, the Repubs made NO effort to rebut Cohen’s specific claims against Trump, while making bold allegations of their own, suggesting that “The Fixer” and congressional Democrats were conspiring against their beloved leader.

What was most interesting to me, throughout, was the fact that NO one, on the Republican side, challenged any of the EVIDENCE shown by Cohen as regarded the sordid behavior of their exalted messiah, Donald John Trump.

It was NOTHING but a one-note melody on Cohen…

Jordan and Meadows are troubled souls, requiring some immediate form of INTERVENTION.

Please join with me…

Come to the water, for you may be saved…

 

 

 

“…have to walk”

At this hour of the morning, NO one really knows.

And, for good reason, I suspect we NEVER will.

During their Hanoi meeting, today, local time, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un apparently sought a “full end to sanctions on his country” in exchange for closing only some nuclear sites.

That was/would NOT be a good deal, and thankfully, Donald John Trump elected to walk  rather than accept any sort of deal that would lift sanctions in their entirety.

Trump was right to walk away from his summit with Kim rather than accept a bad nuclear agreement, but this outcome underscores how badly he was played last year at his first summit with Kim.

For the present, we are only getting the American slant to this developing story.

North Korea and East Asian media has yet to say anything.

Trump is in the process of returning home as I type.

“Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn’t do that,” Trump said, adding, “Sometimes you have to walk.”

ALL I’ll say in closing is when this American president travels around the world to negotiate personally with the dictator of a tiny country NOT once but twice, doesn’t that degrade the status and influence of the United States and enhance the status and influence of the tyrant of such a dangerous and small country? 

Bear in mind, North Korea shares borders with two nuclear superpowers and a thriving South Korea, which is protected by a third nuclear superpower, the United States of America.

CIVILITY and CREDIBILITY…?

The day-long testimony [7-hours plus] before the House Oversight Committee by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, made several devastating revelations about the 45th president:

• Cohen’s claims, if true, add to the evidence that Trump and his campaign had prior knowledge that Russia may have been interfering in the 2016 election and did NOTHING to stop it;
•  Roger Stone was an “active player” as regarded the DNC leaks and the WikiLeaks dump;
• Trump was in direct contact with Stone throughout the ’16 campaign;
• Cohen’s most damaging revelations related to Trump’s personal involvement in a potential criminal conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws and cover up those offenses.

Cohen also produced two documents – copies of two $35,000 checks he received in 2017, one signed by Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, and Donald Trump Jr., the other by Trump himself, having to do with paying off women involved in alleged sexual episodes with The Weave.

Hush $$$ while serving as our current president, aunts and uncles.

These checks are evidence that Trump knowingly made a false statement when he failed to report his liability to Cohen on his personal financial disclosure form in June 2017.

This potential felony was committed, once again, while Donald John Trump was president!!!

PARADE of the TIN SOLDIERS

We’re within an hour or so of “The Fixer” climbing into the ring.

Must TV, aunts and uncles.

Hope each of you has prepared accordingly.

I’ve deviated a little today…going with green tea, cinnamon toast and strawberries over Cheerios in the early going this morning.

The hype is that Michael Dean Cohen, aka The Fixer, plans to tell Congress today that the 45th president is a “con man” and a “cheat” who knew a longtime adviser was communicating with WikiLeaks and who implicitly instructed Cohen to lie about a Trump Tower project in Moscow that was underway during the ’16 presidential campaign.

This projected circus testimony will take place when Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, publicly appears before the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

Will anything change?

Other than amping up the theatrics, on BOTH sides of the aisle!!! 

The public needs, and wants, some corroboration…pure EVIDENCE.

Sadly, way to-o-o many American citizens could care less about this entire mess…

That pathetic, yet guaranteed reaction, highlights an astonishing disintegration of morality in American politics.

The testimony, I predict, will underscore ALL too many of the unsavory themes and stories that have recurred in public reporting about Trump and his band of missed-guided sycophants for the better part of two decades.

Partisan showboating will take center stage.

Fool’s gold, anyone?

AN OATH to WHOM?

“Is your oath of office to Donald Trump or is it to the Constitution of the United States?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked her Republican colleagues in a speech on the floor ahead of the vote yesterday. “You cannot let him undermine your pledge to the Constitution.”

The House voted to overturn ! the current president’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border, with just 13 Republicans joining Democrats to try to block his effort to divert funding to a “vanity” wall without congressional approval.

The resolution of disapproval, which passed 245 to 182, must now be taken up by the Senate, where three Republicans have ALREADY declared their support, only one short of the number needed for Congress to ratify a stinging rebuke of  Trump’s efforts.

How members of Congress, with a clear sense of conscience, could do anything else but disapprove this faux declaration, is beyond any ability I have to understand.

Relinquishing congressional powers to the Executive Branch?!!??!?

NO COUNTRY for OLD MEN

Two old pals walk into a bar…

Half-way across Planet Earth, a couple of vultures renewed their rapacious friendship in Hanoi, Vietnam earlier today, local time.

Summit 2.0.

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and our extortionate Prince of Darkness, Donald John Trump.

The two leaders’ meetings here present a real test of their ability to make tangible headway toward curbing ??? Pyongyang’s nuclear programs, after their first meeting last year in Singapore yielded plenty of bonhomie [if I must say, I love using that phrase] but little concrete progress.

It was just an ice-breaking photo-op!

The two countries appear to be heading into a deliberate and step-by-step negotiation in which “gradual” North Korean moves toward denuclearization could be rewarded with political measures and an easing of economic sanctions [it’s on this point, that the old Lobsterman fears the 45th president will fold like a Woolworth suitcase].

Kim, his family and North Korea have one of the most horrific records on human rights in the course of recorded history.

Does anyone think, or know, if Trump intends to even broach the matter?

Kim wants a sense of security and longevity and this Administration is going to make it happen…with little to NOTHING back from North Korea in return!!!

NEVER loose sight of one over-riding fact…Kim wants to keep his military in balance with South Korea. But, he knows the North Korean military can NOT afford modern tanks and guns, due to years and years of nuclear development.

In addition, Kim knows this balance is changing unfavorably for North Korea.

Nuclear weapons are the only way to keep the balance with South Korea.

Kim Jong-un will NEVER give them up…especially to a creature with orange hair, exhibiting an early ’50s comb-over.

CRISIS with NUCLEAR NEIGHBORS

India launched an airstrike on a target within Pakistan earlier today in the most serious escalation in hostilities between the two nuclear-armed neighbors in two decades.

Indian fighter jets crossed the Line of Control, the unofficial border that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan, and hit a target that India said was a training camp used by Jaish-e-Muhammad, a Pakistan-based militant group that is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.

Jaish-e-Muhammad claimed responsibility for an attack on February 14th that killed 40 Indian paramilitary police in Kashmir. The attack was the deadliest in three decades of insurgency against Indian rule, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had vowed to respond.

In the wake of today’s strike, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan called an emergency meeting of top security and government officials.

“India has committed uncalled for aggression to which Pakistan shall respond at the time and place of its choosing,” the group said in a statement released after the meeting.

Obviously, this is just developing…

“THE FIXER” and HIS ATTACK PLAN

Michael Dean Cohen, you’re on…

The favorite son of Western Michigan University Cooley Law School is, and will be, center stage before ALL the strobe lights of Washington, DC – today through Thursday of this week.

“Disgraced felon Michael Cohen is going to prison for lying to Congress and making other false statements.” America’s number one press secretary said earlier this morning.

“Sadly, he will go before Congress this week and we can expect more of the same. It’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies,” the loquacious Sarah Sanders stated.

Words like disgraced…lying…false statements…laughable…and pathetic certainly could, and do, apply to her boss as well, don’t you think?!!?

Lanny Davis, a lawyer and adviser to Cohen, declined to discuss details of Cohen’s testimony, saying only that Cohen “worked very hard on this moment to not only tell the truth, but to back it up with documents.”

Davis said Cohen’s response to questions about his truthfulness will be “I take full responsibility, I lied in the past; now you have to decide if I’m telling the truth.”

Republican allies on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform will aggressively question Cohen’s credibility, trying to paint him as a liar and accusing him of fabricating stories to help his cause.

We’d ALL be well-served to keep in mind that Cohen is anything other than the sleazy snake-oil salesman that he is, just because he’s testifying about a piece of feces we think is worse.

Truth as an act of revenge or as an act of moral catharsis is irrelevant to the old Lobsterman.

So long as he tells the truth and backs it up with Evidence, Evidence, and more Evidence.

Calm the white caps, Michael…calm the white caps!

THE NFL COMBINE

Yep, yep, yep…

It’s a freak show to be sure.

Numbers; measurements; physical exams; the “pee” test; physical speed and agility; power-lifting; background verification [NOT always catching everything!]; and raw intelligence examination(s).

I’m talking about the National Football League (NFL) Scouting Combine.

It’ll be held in Indianapolis, starting this Friday, the 1st, and running through Monday, the 4th.

The purpose is to get a look at this year’s college prospects before the NFL Draft takes place in April.

Before I retired, I NEVER could watch, other than the end-of-the-day recaps/highlights on either ESPN or the NFL Network.

Most folks, after about a couple of hours, on the first day, find it boring and pack it in, waiting to watch the recaps later in the day.

But, I love it.

The four days become sort of a mission for me: taking a full legal pad of notes; listening to team coaching staffs discuss prospects [without revealing too much info from their respective vantage point] with analysts; evaluation of possible free agent signings and trades; and consuming ALL the ‘what ifs’ certain NFL teams might do prior to Draft Night [which is the best part for me].

Truthfully, I love measuring myself against the experts, in judging talent!