To be fair to Donald Trump it’s too early to know if the FBI and the House Intelligence hearings into Russian interference in our elections will lead to the president himself. But there’s smoke pouring out of White House windows:
Q. Did the Trump campaign participate in Putin’s plot?
Q. What powers does The Vlad exercise over Mr. Trump?
Q. Why do so many Trump guys have Russian connections and why do they give false testimony under oath?
It took years for Watergate to force Nixon out of office. We’re only at month eight of this thing.
PS. Be the first to email me a jpg of this prank outdoor board with GPS embedded and win $100 — $300 awarded to date.
The two-year-old boy and the man entering his thirties each had his quirks. There was no particular reason they should get along so well but it was convenient that they did.
The man and boy’s mother had chemistry, you see.
They met when she was engineering an end to her marriage. Details aren’t important but it is worth noting that when Halloweens fall on Friday nights and the moon is its waning gibbous phase, men and women of reproductive age turn giddy.
During meetings at his apartment, she and the recently divorced man discovered they came from the same corner of society and had eyes on the same things. Even though Elizabeth felt strongly that one child was enough and both to them were still too raw to consider matrimony, they were hungry for something together.
The two-year-old Robby suddenly had two men in his life. A father and a stranger named Cal who had his mother wearing pretty clothes again.
Cal was a man you wanted to be on the floor with. Just when you thought he was a horse (he made real good horse sounds), he would turn himself in a motorcycle and without fail you would end up in a head-on with an 18-wheeler. “Kiss your ass goodbye!” Cal would yell and then throw you on the couch to save you from certain death.
Elizabeth started a full-time job the day Robby turned old enough for daycare. When she went in on weekends Cal would take the boy for the day. A walk to the library maybe, a trip to the zoo, places that served catsup.
Playgrounds in those years had a hard durability about them. Swings were built on iron poles set deep in reinforced concrete. There were swings with safety bars to hold children in place but a design flaw allowed even toddlers to slide the bar up and down.
Cal heard it happen. When he turned Robby was face down on the concrete.
He tried Elizabeth’s office and then her apartment from the payphone in the parking lot. He considered the emergency room but there would be questions.
He managed to get the bleeding boy into Elizabeth’s apartment without being seen and was relieved when the child went to sleep (later as a parent he would know better).
Elizabeth accepted Cal’s explanation of what happened, without question. She told everyone she was responsible for the appearance of her son’s face.
The child had been an unexpected gift in Elizabeth’s young life but he created complications that, not matter how hard she and Cal tried, were impossible to unravel.
Decades later social media poked Cal to look at a jpg of a 43-year-old man. The age, the name and the smile were right. The man had his mother’s face. Cal looked closely at his left cheek and his forehead.
It was apparent that the scars on the boy’s face, along with any memory of Cal, had vanished years before he entered grade school.
Construction of American Pipelines Erasure poem by Chris Green
* * *
The United States, hereby retrofit.
With regard to all iron or steel borders, submit.
* * *
This ‘erasure poem’ is derived from the Presidential Memorandum regarding Construction of the American Pipelines.
It was written by Chris Green, a well-respected poet who frequents our local coffee shop. Poets like Chris are to coffee shops what humus is to homegrown cabbage and tomatoes.
For those who don’t know, that would be most of us, an erasure poem is constructed by snatching key words from a document, arranging them, and erasing the others. The result may intensify the intent of the original, or challenge it.
The photographs helped her make sense of the world she was born into — up to a point.Even when she was very young, the girl liked to spend time with the photos her mother kept. They were organized chronologically in albums.
It made the child feel safe knowing there were people in her life. Most of them smiled for the camera except for a few from the Midwest who hide their teeth. There were several pages showing people holding a newborn she didn’t recognize. You know who it was.
The girl could see that faces changed as people got older, a surprising number of them looked better. She came to realize that there was life before she was born but it hadn’t occurred to her that life would continue when she was gone. That would come later.
The albums were brought out when friends and relatives came to visit. The girl would listen to the who, what, when, where and how. She took exception if someone got something wrong.
The photographs helped the girl make sense of the world she was born into — up to a point.
One day when she and her father were sitting on the couch, going through a shoebox of black-and-white snapshots her grandmother had bequeathed them, the girl turned to him and asked what year it was when the world changed from black-and-white to color.
Were her grandparents were still alive when people stopped being gray? And was it a big deal? And did the kids get a day off from school to celebrate?
If he helps you get elected it’s because he wants you to lift sanctions and turn a blind eye to aggression against Ukraine.
He’ll expect you go on TV with Bill O’Reilly and say that being a killer doesn’t make him a bad guy. (He loved it when you declared our country is murderous in the same way he is.)
If Vladimir Putin helps you get elected, he’ll demand compound interest. And this is one debt you won’t wiggle out of by going bankrupt.
Donald Trump insists that he didn’t have contact with Vladimir Putin. But U.S. intelligence has conclusive evidence of extensive contact between key players in his campaign and Russian intelligence. Trump tax returns could clear things up.
American children are taught a morality tale about a puppet who becomes human after he learns to tell the truth.
Now we seem to be watching that story play out in reserve — but this time the human being turns into a puppet.