Let me state at the outset that some of my best friends are Republicans and Independents. This missive is addressed to all of my fellow Americans, but especially to Republicans and Independents. Here’s the deal with the impeachment rumpus, as I see it. The first Americans to be alarmed by our president’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president were not Democrats. They were White House aides, presumably rock solid Republicans all.

We Americans believe in perpetual progress. We want our children and grandchildren to be better off than we are. It is an admirable and long-held trait. So why, one has to ask, are we the people intent upon leaving our descendants a diminished, degraded and dangerous world to inhabit.

He’s a shameless name-caller. If he were an actual third grader, rather than simply acting like one, he’d be in the principal’s office.
He comforts our enemies and afflicts our allies. He can act presidential for about half of a standard coffee break. He takes credit for everything and accepts blame for nothing.

It has been recognized for millennia, since Aesop: you know a man by the company he keeps. Does he hang out with, or hire liars? Does he feel very badly for a convicted felon, a philanderer, and tax cheat? Does he confess to falling in love with arguably the most despicable despot on the planet after their first date? What can be gleaned from the company our president keeps?

Memo to those who are unsure whether global warming is real or affecting you: check your insurance bills. Here in Connecticut homeowners have seen their property/casualty rates increase an average of 35 percent over the past decade — twice the rate of inflation. In Rhode Island the overall increase is 55 percent. If you live close to the shoreline, it’s Katie bar the door.

If “All politics is local,” as the legendary pol Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill averred, the same bromide should apply to journalism. It certainly does in my experience. I started my writing career in 1973 at a content-challenged weekly newspaper in rural New Hampshire. It didn’t have an editor or a reporter. I was hired to be the ad salesman, but spent most of my time writing stories and editing press releases. I wasn’t selling many ads so there was a lot of white space to fill.

What do Americans want? Is it a good five-cent cigar or a chicken in every pot? More cowbell? Hard to say, but what we’re going to get, courtesy of our Bizarro President, is more methane. Whoopee, extra methane! Tell the children and grandchildren. You remember Bizarro Superman from DC Comics. He was the polar opposite of the Man of Steel. Superman was good; his breath was super cold; and his X-ray vision could see through anything but lead. Conversely, his Bizarro mirror image was bad —with hot breath and X-Ray vision that could only see through lead.
President Biazarro, in his administration’s fourth major rollback of environmental regulations this year, is making it easier for oil and gas drillers on federal and tribal land to let methane escape into the warming air we breath.

Colonial Americans celebrated voting because it was new and radical. How do we recapture that enthusiasm for the revolutionary act of voting? We can start by making Election Day fun again, a national holiday that embraces consumerism as well as the commonweal.

In the tornado-like news cycle under President TwitterDee (aka TwitterDum), telling issues have a shorter lifespan than mayflies, one OMG moment is quickly eclipsed by next, ad nauseam, whether it’s about the leader of the free world cozying up to Vlad the Impaler or a porn star. One wonders how many TwitterDee devotees are opposed to mother’s milk. His administration is.

Have we gotten used to the unprecedented and un-presidential antics of President Bluster? Have we grown accustomed to his outrages de jour: his nasty comments about friends and foes alike? His slurring of geopolitical allies, even as he gives a pass to America’s adversaries? Or how about his penchant for telling three whoppers before his first Happy Meal of the day? It’s hard to keep track the antics of this modern Peck’s Bad Boy.

Here in Connecticut, we pay less and less attention to the natural world every year and it shows. State and federal researchers recently gave our coastline a grade of 27, or “fair,” on a scale that designates 50 and above as “good.”  We have fallen behind on our goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preserving open space. More than two-thirds of our rivers are unsafe for swimming. Lobsters have all but disappeared from Long Island Sound, a quarter of whose warming waters now have inadequate oxygen or extreme hypoxia.

It’s official: everything is in play with President Pumpkin Head in the White House. My prediction for the remainder of 2018 is more chaos and more nicknames from (and for) our Name Caller-in-Chief.

It would be difficult to conjure a more arresting rebuke to the current rash of racists and white nationalists —and their enablers in high places— than to remember the life of Les Payne, 76, who died on March 19. Payne, who attended Hartford High School and the University of Connecticut and served his country in Vietnam, rose from challenging circumstances to become a journalist of the highest rank: an investigative reporter, editor and columnist who won one Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for another.

It’s all set, except for every imaginable detail you can think of. President Donald Trump and the “Dear One” will be meeting sometime or other somewhere or other to palaver about TBD.

For the record, “Dear One” refers to Kim Jong Un, the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea —not some participant in, as the song goes, a “third rate romance/low rent rendezvous.”