The planned signing ceremony in the White House Oval Office of the USA extorting Ukraine to give up its rare earth elements for peace with Russia  exploded into a shouting match among Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy, President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance.   Zelenskyy was kicked out of the White House. What happened?  There will be reports citing White House, media and Russian views, but my take is that this meeting was planned as an ambush for Trump to extract his revenge stemming from his  first impeachment  in 2019.   Further orchestration becomes obvious when  Senator Lindsey Graham ( R-South Carolina ) immediately called on Zelenskyy to resign .  The whole misadventure surely looked like that scene in films you've seen of a schoolyard bully beating up a classmate.  It was terrible to witness. From  Fox News : After the Friday meeting, Zelenskyy wrote on X, "Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank...

New Hampshire primary voting will not end until 8PM ET.   Donald Trump should beat Nikki Haley by double-digits.   The  next contest will be in Nevada , which is rather confusing, and I should stop here, but won't.   Democrats and Republicans couldn't agree on primary or caucus, and this is now a mess. For those citizens choosing the primary system (which means to vote by showing up at a polling place), early voting begins on January 27 and runs through February 2.   Here is the list of who is running .  20 individuals, including Biden and Haley, but no Trump. This I'm not certain, but I think Democrats will only use the above system, while Republicans have the option to do one or both. The matter of who is running does not matter, and candidates had the option of being in the primary or caucus, but only one. And, get this, Republicans can either vote only, or also show up at a caucus, which will occur on Thursday, February 8 between 5PM...

On 6 January 2001 then president Donald Trump clearly attempted to overthrow our Democracy.  The effort was inept, but still criminal.  In hindsight, after   all 10 living former Department of Defense secretaries published in the  Sunday, 3January2021, issue of the Washington Post a public letter , declaring that the U.S. presidential election was over, Trump should have realized that without the Department of Defense, there was no hope for a successful coup. The letter – signed by Dick Cheney, James Mattis, Mark Esper, Leon Panetta, Donald Rumsfeld, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel, Robert Gates, William Perry and Ashton Carter – amounts to a remarkable show of force against Trump’s subversion efforts just days before Congress is set to count Electoral College votes . Watch William Cohen explain on CNN their motivation for this extraordinary action. Okay, that was one Republican effort to destroy our Democracy, although I would argue that the culprit was Donald Trump, not...

Remember the parable of the  Blind Men and an Elephant?   Well, the Republican Party is at a crucial crossroad about where they're headed. First Republican presidential debate?   Read this .   And this . Japan releasing nuclear contaminated wastewater into the Pacific?   Read this .  Dumping of radiated fluids will need to go on for the next forty or so years.  International relationships?  Totally screwed up.  A quote: Bob Richmond of the University of Hawaii (we are in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology), scientific advisor to the Pacific Island states, which like China and most countries are adamantly opposed, analogized that Japan's extensive monitoring plans do not actually mitigate health risks posed by duming the wastewater into the ocean: Its' the same thing as saying, 'I'm going to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, but I'm not worried because I'm gonna get a chest X-ray every year.  That's m...