“And now, the end is near and so I face the final curtain …”

                                                              – My Way, Frank Sinatra

They say everything has a beginning, a middle and an end. We may be witnessing the end of the Trump presidency.

With a number of investigations into Trump’s Russia ties already under way, and a few more likely to come, the new president seems to be circling the wagons and preparing for the final battle.

In an almost predictable move, Trump is deflecting in a way he knows has always worked for him … Obama bashing. No, the latest accusation isn’t as wild as when he claimed Obama was literally the founder of ISIS. But this new one is up there in craziness.

In a series of tweets, Trump is accusing the former president of illegally spying on him during the campaign by wiretapping Trump Tower.

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!

I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

No one knows for sure the source of Trump’s information but there is word that it stems from a recent Breitbart article. But can the National Enquirer be ruled out?

Trump knows the end is near. His seemingly irrational tweet storm is likely intended to keep his loyal supporters rallied around him no matter what information comes to light.

Call it a form of damage control.

While Trump may lose the White House, he does not want to lose those loyal followers who will believe whatever conspiracy theory is being peddled to them.

Trump needs them for his next venture … unless his Twitter access is hampered by prison walls.

Photo | Josh Haner/The New York Times

After Donald Trump’s masterful tour de force in front of a joint session of Congress just two days ago, his Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, is today dominating the news.

Instead of talking about the skillful way Trump was able to read from a teleprompter during his first address to Congress, we are instead discussing Sessions lying to Congress.

News outlets are reporting that Jeff Sessions, during his confirmation hearing, lied to Congress under oath about communications with the Russians. Instead of Trump basking in the afterglow of his prime-time performance, we have Sessions squirming in the aftermath of possible perjury.

Sessions issued a statement denying he lied to Congress. In a tweet late Wednesday, Sessions said, “I never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false.”

Sessions does not deny meeting twice with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential campaign. But he denies those meetings had anything to do with the Trump campaign.

The White House has rejected the latest bombshell to hit the Trump administration, claiming the reports are just an effort to undermine, and deflect from, Trump’s impressive showing before Congress.

“This is the latest attack against the Trump administration by partisan Democrats,” a senior administration official said, according to CNN.

“Sessions met with the ambassador in an official capacity as a member of the Senate armed services committee, which is entirely consistent with his testimony.”

Trump has not personally weighed in on the Sessions controversy, instead taking to Twitter to brag about how much his election victory has improved the economy.

“Since November 8th, Election Day, the Stock Market has posted $3.2 trillion in GAINS and consumer confidence is at t 15 year high. Jobs!”

Unfortunately for the new president, this story is not going away anytime soon. Not only are both Republicans and Democrats asking Sessions to recuse himself from the DOJ’s probe into Russian hacking of the 2016 election, but some Democrats are asking for the Attorney General to resign.

Photo | nbcnews.com

On this President’s Day, it is a good time to look back at our past presidents and see how they stack up against one another.

The newly released 2017 Presidential Historians Survey finds Abe Lincoln once again leading the pack, with James Buchanan, the president preceding Lincoln, scraping the bottom of the barrel.

It is worth noting George W. Bush ranks a dismal 33 while Barack Obama comes in a healthy 12.

Here is the full list:
1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Theodore Roosevelt
5. Dwight D. Eisenhower
6. Harry S. Truman
7. Thomas Jefferson
8. John F. Kennedy
9. Ronald Reagan
10. Lyndon Baines Johnson
11. Woodrow Wilson
12. Barack Obama
13. James Monroe
14. James K. Polk
15. Bill Clinton
16. William McKinley Jr.
17. James Madison
18. Andrew Jackson
19. John Adams
20. George H. W. Bush
21. John Quincy Adams
22. Ulysses S. Grant
23. Grover Cleveland
24. William H. Taft
25. Gerald R. Ford Jr.
26. Jimmy Carter
27. Calvin Coolidge
28. Richard M. Nixon
29. James A. Garfield
30. Benjamin Harrison
31. Zachary Taylor
32. Rutherford B. Hayes
33. George W. Bush
34. Martin Van Buren
35. Chester Arthur
36. Herbert Hoover
37. Millard Fillmore
38. William Henry Harrison
39. John Tyler
40. Warren G. Harding
41. Franklin Pierce
42. Andrew Johnson
43. James Buchanan

With Donald Trump getting off to one of the worst starts in presidential history, there is hope “Old Buck” Buchanan, also known as the “Bachelor President” and “Ten-Cent Jimmy,” may finally escape the cellar.

Photos | talkingpointsmemo.com

Less than one month since his inauguration, Donald Trump is back on the campaign trail. Yesterday’s rally at the Orlando-Melbourne International Airport in Florida is sure to be the first of many such events.

It seems Trump is giving new meaning to the term “perpetual campaign,” an idea that has been floating around American politics since 1980, when Sidney Blumenthal used it as the title for a book.

As unorthodox as this first reelection rally may be, it is not Trump’s first push towards 2020.

After winning the election in November, Donald Trump took a victory lap by holding a series of rallies in states that delivered him to the White House. And, after all, Florida is a key swing state.

Some political observers are calling Trump’s early start to 2020 “presumptuous.” Shouldn’t one master the art of governing before one begins to campaign for a second tour, many are asking? Some are even pointing out the odds of Trump finishing his first term are slim. There certainly is enough talk of impeachment or forced resignation to warrant some restraint, many are saying.

After Trump’s first 29 days in office, the White House does indeed seem to be in a state of chaos.

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign after misleading the vice president and the American people about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. Trump’s nominee for labor secretary withdrew when it became obvious he would not be confirmed. Federal courts have brought Trump’s immigration executive order to a grinding halt. Isn’t there enough in Washington, many are asking, to keep Trump busy?

As has been the case since first entering the presidential race, Trump is having a problem with “size.” While he described the crowd at yesterday’s Florida rally as “huge,” the local police estimated the crowd at about 9000. This is much less than the estimated 15,000 who appeared at the same venue for a Trump campaign rally in September 2016.

If history is any guide, Trump will get on the media for underreporting the crowd size. He already prepared his loyal followers by telling them the media will not “show the crowd” … even though the pool feed on every cable channel showed the crowd when he arrived.

The fact is the current crowd size was not as big as his last, a sign Trump supporters may be starting to have regrets. Perhaps a good reason to get a jump on 2020?

AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

Huh?

In perhaps the most bizarre presidential press conference in the history of the United States, Donald Trump today took a page from one of his biggest boosters while on the campaign trail … Sarah Palin. Not only did his answers to reporters not make any sense, but they also resembled the “word salads” for which the former half-term governor of Alaska is most famous.

No statement from Trump was more Palinesque than this: “The leaks are absolutely real, the news is fake, because so much of the news is fake.”

Of course Trump was referring to leaks from U.S. intelligence agencies that his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, discussed sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the U.S. before Donald Trump took office.

The leaked news led directly to Flynn offering-up his letter of resignation, almost immediately after the story broke, which Trump accepted.

If the news media was simply reporting the “real” leaked information, how could the story be fake? Better yet, why would Flynn resign his office as soon as the news came out?

Or was Trump saying the leaked information from the intelligence agencies was fake … that there are no secret recordings of Flynn and the Russian ambassador discussing possible easing of sanctions under a Trump administration?

At today’s press conference, Trump was standing by his man, claiming the controversial retired general “did nothing wrong.” The media is to blame for his resignation.

It borders on the surreal that Trump would blame the media for his national security adviser’s downfall when it was he who asked for Flynn’s resignation!

Trump tried to clarify the situation by offering up this pretzel: “You know, he was doing his job. The thing is, he didn’t tell our vice president properly, and then he said he didn’t remember. So either way, it wasn’t very satisfactory to me.”

Huh?

It is obvious Trump is trying to confuse the American people by suspending the rules of logic and speaking in “word salads.” And, of course, blaming everything on the big bad media and all its fake news.

It remains to be seen how this tactic will work, especially for those Trump voters who are not part of his oblivious base.

Photo | abcnews.go.com

It’s only been seven days since Donald Trump was sworn-in as the nation’s 45^th president and it has been one faux pas after another. We’ve gotten “alternative facts,” phantom inaugural crowds, millions of illegal Clinton voters and Trump’s chief strategist and resident nazi, Steve Bannon, had the gall to tell the press to ”shut up.”

One thing’s for sure, Trump embarrassments will continue throughout his days in office. The question is … will he go even one day without embarrassing himself?

The Irish bookmaker, Paddy Power, is offering odds on a number of Trump possibilities. While they haven’t posted a bet on how long Trump’s daily embarrassments will continue, here is their list of Trump bets as of January 20, 2017:

Bookmakers are smart people.

I’m imagining the reason bookies are not allowing the public to bet on whether Trump will go even one day in office without making a fool of himself is they believe it to be a virtual impossibility!

Photo | tipstertables.com

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It is not unusual for new presidents to sign executive orders immediately upon taking office. It is a way for the president to enact polices he and his party have long called for.

But unlike his predecessors, Trump has his own way of handling the signing ceremony. After placing his signature on an order, Trump will display the document for all to see.

Why does he feel the need to do this? My guess is that he is proud of his big, beautiful signature. In a strange way, it might be Trump’s attempt of showing the world John Hancock has nothing on him.

Handwriting experts have already chimed in on the presidential autograph. Politico interviewed an expert who detected in Trump’s writing not grandstanding ignorance but evidence of “bigheadedness, anger, and fear.” “The writer lacks empathy and craves power, prestige, and admiration,” the expert said.

Some non-experts are having fun with Trump’s squiggle, calling it less a sequence of letters than the impressionistic output of some rudimentary machine.

Others have suggested Trump is facilitating Kellyanne Conway’s injunction that we look at what lies within his heart by sharing his EKG results. Or maybe, as Jean Grae on Twitter concludes, these lines are “the sound wave of demons screaming.”

But perhaps Katy Waldman of Slate summed it up best … “this signature is a cry for help.”

Photos | pbs.org, thegrio.com

The political pundits have spoken. And they have not had anything good to say about Donald Trump’s inauguration speech… even some folks at Fox News.

Unlike the inspiring and uplifting speeches of past presidents, Trump spoke of a broken America that needs rebuilding and restoration. He talked of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”

“This American carnage,” said President Trump, “stops right here and stops right now.”

Already some reporters are dubbing his inaugural address “The American Carnage Speech” (as Scott Pelley of “CBS Evening News” called it.)

Perhaps no one summed up Trump’s speech better than legendary newsman Dan Rather.

“His words and tone were angry and defiant,” said the man who covered many inaugurations for CBS News over a long career there. “He is still in campaign mode and nary a whiff of a unifying spirit. There was little or nothing of uplift — the rhetoric of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Reagan. . . . I imagine many more being turned off, even sickened, rather than inspired by what our new President had to say. President Obama looked on with an opaque poker face. One could only imagine what he was thinking.”

Trump did eventually touch on the hope of a brighter future now that he is in the White House.

Echoing one of his favorite themes from the campaign trail, Trump said, “America will start winning again, winning like never before.”

President Trump offered a facile solution to the country’s economic troubles. Said the new president, “We will follow two simple rules: Buy American and hire American.”

This, of course, was an odd thing for him to say as most of his Trump branded merchandise is produced overseas and he has been known to hire immigrants to help his built his high-rises and work in his hotels.

Trump’s 16-minute inaugural speech was one of the shortest addresses in history. In light of its dark, uninspiring tone, that may have been more than enough for the comparatively modest crowd gathered in Washington D.C.

Photo| abcnews.go.com

The message could not have been any clearer. Trump promised voters one of his first acts in office would be to repeal Obamacare. It would be replaced with something “truly great.”

“We’re going to fix health care and make it more affordable and better,” Trump said throughout his presidential campaign.

Now, with only 14 days before Donald J. Trump is sworn in as our nation’s 45^th president, the new congress is wasting no time in bringing out the ax to “do in” the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Funny thing, though, they have nothing to replace it with.

After eight years of demonizing the legislation that brought healthcare coverage to nearly 20 million previously uninsured Americans; after the House voted 62 times to roll back all or part of the law; after so much time to come up with a suitable alternative, the Republicans have nothing ready to go.

The new mantra is now “repeal and delay.” And the delay could last as long as four years!

By repealing Obamacare without simultaneously replacing it, our health care system will be thrown into chaos. The lives of Americans who rely on Obamacare would be put at risk.

Many experts, from both sides of the aisle, are warning that “repeal and delay” would lead to some Americans losing insurance coverage during the delay period — either because premiums spike so high that they are unaffordable, or some areas of the country have no health insurers who want to sell plans.

How this will play out with the many Trump voters who are currently enjoying the benefits of Obamacare (even though they might not realize it) remains to be seen. But it does not promise to be good.

Ironically, before Obamacare was enacted, Republicans falsely warned Americans of the dangers of the new law. There was much talk of “death panels’* determining who would get coverage and who would not. In other words, who would live or die.

We have now finally gotten to the point where the Republican scare tactic of “death panels” has become a reality. Many Americans will lose their healthcare coverage because of Republican congressional action. Many will not get the treatments that could save them, and die.

The “death panels” we heard so much about are today suddenly very real, brought to you by the reckless, seemingly unstoppable action of our Republican Congress.

* PolitiFact.com awarded “death panels” the 2009 Lie of The Year

Photo | catholiclane.com