These Great Comedians Will Save You From Trump

[A nod of thanks to noted caliigrapher and funny man Gerald Moscato of Downers Grove, IL, who sent me the entire list of 2016 dead notables from which the following dead comedians are gleaned.)
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The Doomsdays news of 2016 wasn't all in the political campaign.

Having been a comedy writer briefly in my checkered life, I can begin a post about comedians and laughter with the unfunny term "Doomsdays" and go on to write about the most obscene of all Death's tricks: taking away our comedians. (Being 80, I can actually do anything I want.) These deaths are my personal choice of most cursed events of 2016 because they diminshed the laughter in the world at a time we need it most.

And so here they are, those who left us in 2016 with memories of laughter. A final round of applause please for their absolutely last appearance:

FEB.2 – Bob Elliot, Comedian – one-half of the comedy duo of Bob and Ray – age 92.... Bob'n Ray invented what we know as modern comedy. Their improv radio show was a delight for about 20 years, followed by some TV appearances. Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters were their offspring. My husband knew them in the 1950s, and we both adored them. I don't think any of the rest of you know anything about them, do you? So they die a second death, that of oblivion.

FEB.3 – Joe Alaskey, Voice Actor – Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Tweety – age 63. WAIT! That's WRONG! Mel Blanc was the voice of these characters and created their personalities. He was doing Bugs literally before Alaskey was born. Alaskey took over after Mel Blanc died. Now Alaskey's dead. But BUGS BUNNY LIVES ON. (I had a drink with Mel Blanc once...before he died, of course. Never had a drink with Bugs.)

More Doomsdays... more days in 2016 in which laughter left our world. We are going to have to make more laughter somehow, I guess. Here's some more of those who took it with them:

MAR. 8 – Sir George Martin, Producer for the “Beatles” albums, known as “The Fifth Beatle” – age 90. He made them what they were in music and by doing so made their wonderfully funny movies possible. He even got recognition in the Oscars for his musical contribution to "Hard Day's Night". (Of course MTV sprang from it.) Wthout connecting it to his death in 2016, I just decided to watch it yet again the night before New Years Eve. It is still wonderful! ..."Such a clean old man."

JULY 19 — Garry Marshall, Writer/Producer/Actor – created “Happy Days”, “Mork & Mindy”, “Laverne & Shirley” – age 81. "Mork and Mindy" gave us Robin Williams. Anybody who helped give us Robin Williams gets a ringside seat in Heaven.

More of the Doomsdays when comedy died and our defense against insanity got dented:

AUG. 11 – Glenn Yarbrough, Singer – The Limeliters (1959-63) “Baby the Rain Must Fall” – age 86. The LImeliters' album "Through Children's Eyes" is true and gentle comedy. One of the finest albums ever made by anybody, a cult item. ......"My name is Steven!" (The sound on YouTube from their albums is atrocious. You can get the album on CD. You should.)

AUG.19 –Jack Riley, Actor – Elliot Carlin on “The Bob Newhart Show” – age 80. Anybody on "The Bob Newhart Show" gets a first class flight to Heaven. "Mr. Carlin" ate lunch next to us in a Mendocino restaurant, but we never so much as looked at him. Those who give so much to the public deserve their private lives.

The two cruelest Doomsday losses of all came last in the year, one in the time of harvest, the other as the door swung shut on 2016.

AUG. 29 – Gene Wilder, Actor – Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein, Willy Wonka – age 83. Add to that "The Producers", my favorite movie of all movies. I will go on living in spite of him having left our world, but that time ahead without him is the punishment for all my sins.

DEC.31 – William Christopher, American actor, played Father Mulcahy on M*A*S*H –age 84. Yes, he was in "Mash". One need say no more.

Goodbye, dear old friends. You got us through so much. Save a seat for us at the improv show in the theater to come. Help our memory of you to keep us cheerful in the face of what comes on January 20. To be in comedy requires enormous skill and courage. May we be inspired to such courage and skill by your example. We are all going to need anything we can find. 

But I suspect you will look down in envy at the great material Donald Trump will be handing the living comedians. You can't have it all, fellows. At least you had Nixon. 

As for you out there in the audience, NOTICE please the average age of these deceased people of comedy. Of course we must exclude Joe Alaskey who died at a mere 63. (Well, obviously he had something wrong with him and he was, after all, actually a mere mimic of Mel Blanc.) Excluding the fraudulent Alaskey, these comedy people lived to an average age of 85!

Pretty damn good for a group in which everybody grew up a smoker. ("More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette.) Practiced their craft in the crazy pressure-cooker of show business at its craziest. Ate abominably by today's standards: "Another pastrami on rye and a side of potato salad and a double order of cheese cake for dessert." Were not strangers to hard drinking. Were born in the depths of the Great Depression into (probably) impoverished families who possibly could barely feed them. As youngsters they witnessed the most hideous event in human history: World War II. And the most shocking: the Holocaust. They had every reason to be glum and sickly and die young.

But they didn't. Instead they did what Glenn Yarborough and the LImeliters tell us to do: "Stay on the sunny side, always on the sunny side; Stay on the sunny side of life. You'll feel no pain as You-Know-Who drives us insane, if you stay on the sunny side of life."

The best revenge (and remedy) is to laugh!

A Ghostly Reassurance for America from the 1400s and My Cellar

He came out of nowhere, suddenly appearing in a locked and empty room in my cellar. My family swears that the room was locked and empty until the week before Christmas when one of them opened the door to hide Christmas presents. Only that one family member had a key to the locked room and had always had it. There was nothing in that room until this moment of opening the door to hide presents.

When the door was unlocked, there he was. Or, more accurately, there was his picture, a framed print of a figure from a tomb rubbing, a sombre sandy-gold figure on a black background. He certainly hadn't been hanging in the cellar before. And the neighbor next door who has been in and out of this house since childhood says she never saw his picture on the walls here, never in 55 years.

"Is it a message?", my family member asked after we had determined that there was no humdrum explanation for its appearance.

I had to think about that and do some research.

The answer? That's exactly what it is, a message.

A label on the back of the print explains that this is Sir William Laken of the 1400s in England, a member of the three-man King's Bench of High Justices and a respected attorney throughout a long career. Knowing a bit about the English ways at that time, I realized he wouldn't have been on the King's Bench without also being a politician. Was this a message for me, a lawyer and politician? Something like, "You had better get back to work even if you are 80." 

No, it's not about me.

It's about you. It's about all of us. But it's especially about America, an America currently torn in two by suspicions about the 2016 election, great partisan conflict, racism and other -isms, terrible fear, clashing values, and a recognition that the man about to be sworn in as president did not win the election. He's frightening even members of his own party with his refusal to follow any of the norms of our political life and to honor the obvious fact that Russia is still our enemy, even though just a mischievious minor player on the world stage, but one that is still armed with nuclear weapons and now electronic ones.  

The message from the ghostly picture is about all of this. It's also a message for a world dismayed as it watches America careening on a wild path, threatening to destabilize all kinds of international alliances on which the world has been relying.

In the face of all the dismay and anxiety we are experiencing, the appearance of Sir William Laken brings great reassurance. For one of the most notable aspects of his life is that he lived at the time of the infamous War of the Roses, a rending war of succession that tore England apart for half a century. Laken didn't die in the war as did may of the nobility and upper classes. He died peacefully in his own bed. He managed to be a player in English government and politics but never got chewed up in the machinations of his time.

More relevant for us is that England too survived the War of the Roses. The war did not destroy the country. To the contrary, its ferocity so decimated the upper classes that it broke their medieval hold on the "peasantry", opening the way for a free people able to leave the land and learn new things, opening the way to the rise of a merchant and artisan class, opening the way to the Renaissance. 

If England could survive the War of the Roses and the two sides make peace, we Americans too can survive the conflicts that now simmer across our country and threaten disruption and even violence. Hopefully our present wobbliness doesn't lead to full collapse and we can instead avoid the fifty years of civil war that England suffered. But come what may, America is going to make it through.

For consider what America has been and can still be:

"I lift my lamp beside the golden door," says The Lady who welcomed all our ancestors to the safe harbor.

"The last best hope of mankind." Ronald Reagan.

"That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Abraham Lincoln.''

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Franklin Roosevelt.

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others." Winston Churchill.

Even more apt: "Americans always do the right thing. But only after they have tried everything else first." Churchill again.

"The torch has passed to a new generation". John Kennedy.

"We shall overcome." Martin Luther King

"Si se puedes." Cesar Chavez. 

"Yes, we can." Barack Obama.

And my sentimental favorite: "God takes care of dogs, drunks and the American people," well-said by that famous commentator Anonymous.

It's good to know that the dogs and the drunks are also going to be okay.

Happy New Year to you from me and Sir William Laken. We give John Kennedy's torch to you. Keep it burning and pass it on.



The Battle of Tewkesbury, 1471. Some day I'll write about why spaghetti and the long bow are important in history.

I Couldn't Resist One Last Laugh at 2016!

I know that I said in my New Years resolution that I was not going to dance to the Daft Donald's tune and focus instead on real politics. But this was too good to pass up. It's from an article pointing out that every era thinks it's the worst of times. Let's have a last laugh at 2016!

"The truth is that people in every age find reason to believe that their best times are behind them, and all that remains is decline and despair — that note of lament Cicero hit in 63 B.C.: “O tempora, o mores!” But far from uttering a generalized moan, the orator was castigating the corruption of his age as expressed in one man, Catiline, the author of a plot to seize power in Rome. The historian Sallust described Catiline as “reckless, cunning, treacherous, capable of any form of pretense or concealment. Covetous of others’ possessions, he was prodigal of his own; he was violent in his passions. He possessed a certain amount of eloquence, but little discretion. His disordered mind ever craved the monstrous, incredible, gigantic.”

Historians can be so judgmental. I’m sure Catiline just wanted to make Rome great again."

You can see the whole article at 2016: Worst. Year. Ever?  

A New Years Resolution in the Time of Trump

Farewell to 2016!

Farewell to Donald Trump and the "experts" analyzing how he "won"!  He didn't win. He lost by three million votes.

As my New Years resolution I am going to be hopeful about America in spite of Trump because he is essentially a triviality. In writing about politics these next four years, that's exactly what I am going to focus on: politics. If you want anti-Trump rants, you'll have to look elsewhere. If something he or the GOP does is truly significant, I'll take a look at it. But none of us has time for his strutting and shenanigans. My focus will be on nuts and bolts, real stuff that matters. In my next blog I'll be tackling how we get rid of the electoral college's anti-democratic grip on the outcome of elections. No more presidencies going to losers like George W. Bush or Donald Trump, please!

In saying goodbye to Donald Trumpand Campaign 2016 there is, however, an important lesson to be learned by all who care about politics. It's important because it has big implications for the future of campaigning in the technological age. Part of the lesson is set forth by Charlie Cook in the National Journal's How Analytical Models Failed Clinton. Cook first explains "analytics" (the definition is not relevant here; you can read it in his article) and then gets to the meat:

"The re­li­ance, or per­haps over­re­li­ance on ana­lyt­ics, may be one of the factors con­trib­ut­ing to Clin­ton’s sur­prise de­feat. The Clin­ton team was so con­fid­ent in its ana­lyt­ic­al mod­els that it op­ted not to con­duct track­ing polls in a num­ber of states dur­ing the last month of the cam­paign. As a con­sequence, de­teri­or­at­ing sup­port in states such as Michigan and Wis­con­sin fell be­low the radar screen, slip­page that that tra­di­tion­al track­ing polls would have cer­tainly caught."

Regarding this assessment by Cook, it's useful in a general way, but it's also doubtful that polls in the last month alone would have allowed the Clinton campaign sufficient time to correct its course. To mount a real campaign in those states, the Clinton campaign should have made an assessment of those states far earlier in 2016, and its failure to do any assessing, early or late, is dumbfounding. In fact, as I shall explain below, the Clinton campaign had six years to see the clear signs that Wisconsin had skidded off the rails. The failure to recognize this and to do timely polling produced idiot decisions by Clinton's campaign in 2016, as Cook notes:

"[T]he Clin­ton cam­paign did not go on the air with tele­vi­sion ads in Wis­con­sin un­til the weeks of Oct. 25 and Nov. 1, spend­ing in the end just $2.6 mil­lion. Su­per PACs back­ing Clin­ton didn’t air ads in Wis­con­sin un­til the last week of the cam­paign. In Michigan, aside from a tiny $16,000 buy by the cam­paign and a party com­mit­tee the week of Oct. 25, the Clin­ton cam­paign and its al­lied groups didn’t con­duct a con­cer­ted ad­vert­ising ef­fort un­til a week be­fore the elec­tion."

Charlie Cook next points out that "the Clin­ton cam­paign spent more money on tele­vi­sion advertising in Ari­zona, Geor­gia, and the Omaha, Neb­raska mar­kets than in Michigan and Wis­con­sin com­bined. It was Michigan and Wis­con­sin, along with Pennsylvania (the Clin­ton cam­paign and al­lied groups did spend $42 mil­lion on tele­vi­sion in the Key­stone State), that ef­fect­ively cost Demo­crats the pres­id­ency."

To be fair, no one watches TV political advertising. But they do notice one thing about it. They notice when it's not there! What a slap in the face to the good ol' Democrats in Wisconsin and Michigan to see months of no advertising while Clinton was wastefully courting the GOP bastions of Arizona and Texas.

And no personal appearances in Wisconsin ans Michigan by the candidate or her top surrogates! The resulting message to the voters of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania?

You...Don't...Matter! 

Oh, sure, Pennsylvania got a big Clinton campaign "show" the night before the election. A star-studded cast rallying for and with Hillary in Philadelphia. All the big-shots. All the reminders of the elitism of the Clintons. A blatant last minute bandaid. (No pun intended,)

As you readers know, I thought Clinton was a poor choice of candidate, one who couldn't win. But when she started advertising in Arizona, I assumed it was on the basis of her campaign's private polling showing she had the election in the bag. It was inconceivable to me that the Clinton campaign had no idea they were in trouble in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. So I ditched my skepticism about Hillary and told everybody—with firm assurance—that she was going to win. I mean, she wouldn't be spending time and money in Arizona if Wisconsin was at risk, right?

Hillary Clinton deceived me. Just as broadly and badly as Bill Clinton deceived people when he lied on television: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Hillary was actually worse than a liar. She was stupid. She didn't know Wisconsin was going away, had left the Democratic ranks years earlier. She didn't know what was in plain sight. She didn't recognize what any Democratic candidate or old pol could and should have recognized.

Wisconsin. Cradle of the Progressive reforms of a century ago, including direct election of US Senators, the referendum, the recall, workers comp, and more. It was home to the dynamic reformist family, the La Follettes, who changed America. At least one descendant is still active in Wisconsin politics."La Follette Moves Closer To Run For Governor") For a hundred years Wisconsin has been consistently liberal. It has been the light of my life!

Then in 2010, far-right GOP candidate Scott Walker took the governorship, immediately stripped the public sector unions of clout, then defeated a referendum on his outrageous new law, successfully defied a recall attempt although no other governor has ever beaten a recall (How Scott Walker won the Wisconsin recall election - CBS News). He then later won re-election. All this in Wisconsin! 

The sky has fallen! The sky has fallen!

By 2014 I had found a political crony in Wisconsin. "What in hell," I asked her, "is going on in your state? What's wrong in Wisconsin?" 

Now tell me this: how come an old lady of almost 80 years like me could spot a big warning in the skies while the hip, techie, well-paid folks of Clinton's campaign (and I love techies) missed it entirely?

They didn't even need no stinkin' polling! It was blatantly obvious something tectonic had shifted in Wisconsin.

They didn't need any polling about Michigan either to spot it as a trouble zone. Why not? Because  Bernie Sanders had beaten Clinton in the Michigan primary! From that moment on, her campaign should have recognized she had a problem in Michigan. Michigan was telling her that people there were angry about jobs, trade pacts, big banks, the status quo, all things that Clinton wore like name badges at a luncheon.

I should have recognized it. (I did at the time Michigan went for Bernie but I got conned by Clinton's confident spending in Arizona in the general.) The media should have recognized the warning signs too . What the media and I were unaware of was that Clinton's people hadn't recognized the signs. Like fools, we trusted they knew what they they were doing. That they were either already taking necessary steps in these states or had inside polling which showed they were safe.

Again, it was inconceivable that they didn't know the political reality of these states. As the musical "The Music Man" so wisely tells us, "You gotta know the territory."

I suggest that a lot of techie wizards had better peel themselves away from both the polls and the analytics and get out in the field and listen to people. Learn the territory. Also know enough American history that when a seismic shift occurs you can recognize it. In short, politicos of today have gotta learn their stinkin' job!

Politics is people. Numbers are important, but behind those numbers there are people. 

Computers are tools. Computers are not a substitute for listening to people and watching how they behave in their voting. Someday when all the older folk have died off and the unemployed blue-collar folks can afford computers, maybe the computers will truly facilitate political communication of a wide enough swath. Just keep in mind that, for now, the greatly heralded communication value of "social media" is pretty much confined to the young and the hip and the hate-mongers and the twittering of Trump. Stand up from your computer now and then, hang out at the checkstand at the supermarket, chat to the guy pumping gas next to you, walk some precincts, visit with the woman who runs the dry cleaners. Take the pulse of the voters. Have respect for the people.

Listen and learn.

And have a wonderful New Year. Be kind to everyone and life will pay you back. 

For auld lang syne, my friends. For auld lang syne!

Don't Listen to Trump? It Will Drive You Crazy!

Don't listen to what Trump says. Ignore the media focus on his blathering. No, he's not restarting a nuclear arms race. By saying he wants to expand our nuclear force, he's just doing a male cockadoodle strut for the benefit of the other boys on the planet and those in his base. Putin, who is not a boy, has said in reply, "No arms race."

Trump's modus operandi—whether deliberate and crafty or the product of neural deficiencies—is to say lots of outrageous things. Lots of it is just blowing smoke. Lots of it is just bald-faced lying. Most of it is to be forgotten when he wakes up the next day. But it works! It keeps you and the media and everybody off stride.

It's an old trick, usually used by battlers who haven't got much else to fight with. My mother taught me (a little girl of seven) how to "box" by just putting up my fists with elbows bent and then flailing away like crazy in a circular motion. The opponent can't get close enough to hit. Well, it worked.  At least in the second grade.

Confuse the enemy. Send a lot of balls zinging all over the place. Run and dodge and slither. "Serpentine, Shell! Serpentine!" as Peter Falk so memorably yelled in "The In-Laws". That's Donald Trump. An Artful Dodger. A blatherer of inexhaustable nonsense.

You'll wear yourself out chasing his spoutings. You'll ruin your holidays. You'll ruin your life.

Instead just watch what he actually does. We'll get him dead to rights on the mistakes he will make in what he does.

Like commiting the impeachable offense of taking" emoluments", i.e. payment from favor-seeking 
representatives of foreign states who stay at his hotels and from his foreign quasi-governmental  business associates wanting to cut bisiness deals. That emolument stuff is a naughty no-no prohibited by the Constitution. Keep it up, Donald, after January 19 and you are toast! Indeed, some argue he has to divest himself before January 20 of his world-wide business holdings or be in de facto violation of the emolument clause and thus liable automatically for impeachment.

Will this Republican Congress impeach him? It will be fun to watch them squirm around on that one!

Trump's so-called presidency promises to be quite an adventure, with danger and laughs galore. Enjoy the ride. Have some confidence that the good folks and our good institutions will fight him to a standstill no matter if he flails his fists like a seven-year-old.

Now I'll go back to writing the piece I promised on how YOU can get rid of the electoral college's outragous disrailment of our democracy in the future. And after that comes the piece I've planned that's a message of hope for the future, a message grounded in actual numbers.

What a great way to start the New Year, with something real to do to help fix our country and something to hold onto, a promise that good things are on the way.

Now give yourself the Christmas present of ignoring what Trump says. Keep seeing him as the desperate and frightened seven-year-old that he is.

And sometime I'll pass along to you my mother's other lesson in life and politics: "How to walk fast like an FBI agent."

Gosh, I miss her.

Merry Christmas to believers! Happy holidays to those who maybe kinda wish it were all true. May Santa come for both of you!

Russiagate and Trump Impeachment

Article II, Section One, Clause 8:  the oath of office Donald Trump must take on January 20:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."^[1]

Note well this commentary on the oath: "This clause is one of several that employ the oath concept, but it is the only clause that actually specifies the language of an oath for a constitutional officer. While the Oaths Clause in Article VI simply requires the persons specified therein to "be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution," the Presidential Oath Clause requires much more than this general oath of allegiance and fidelity. This clause enjoins the President to swear or affirm that he "will to the best of [his] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." "Essays on Article II: Oath of Office"

Keep in mind how strongly this oath charges the president as to his duty to defend our democracy as embodied in our Constitution.

Now let's look at the strange situation of Donald Trump and this oath he will take.

We begin with this photo of the fiing cabinet that GOP burglars jimmied open when they broke into the Democratic National headquarters in 1972. Next to the filing cabinet is the computer that the Russians hacked into in 2016. Does this picture foreshadow a soon-to-be end of  Donald Trump's presidency? Is Trump headed for impeachment even before he's sworn in?



That sounds comical. Impeachable before he's even president? Nevertheless he is indeed setting the stage for his impeachment even now and may tie the knot just by taking the oath. It is actually the oath that may entrap him because violating the oath is itself an impeachable offense. But first let's look at what you can call "Russiagate" or "Watergate 2", either being appropriate.

I'm not going to recount the details that the media has already covered.  According to both the CIA and the FBI, it's clear that Russia invaded our election with the intention of tipping the election to Donald Trump and did so under Putin's direction. This Putin-directed effort began with hacking the Democratic National Committee's computers just as the Nixon Watergate scandal and Nixon's subsequent impeachment also began with a break-in at the Democratic National headquarters prior to an election.

It doesn't matter whether the Russian break-in did in fact facilitate Trump's win. One can argue it didn't since he actually won the election in four nearly-adjoining Midwestern states that gave him the necessary electoral college majority. That's not the kind of win one would look for as a result of a nationwide smear campaign by the Russians against Hillary Clinton. In fact she beat Trump nationally by aterrific three milllion in the popular vote.

But none of that matters.

Because it doesn't matter whether the Russians succeed in helping Trump or not. What matters is the break-in and interference with our election. That is a hostile act equivalent to an armed attack on our nation. It's even worse than a violent attack, i.e. we recovered from 9-11 but an attack on our most basic component of democracy, our election process, could be an attack from which we never recover. Once people believe that foreigners are manipulating our elections, they may lose faith in our elections. If that happens, this country and its democracy are done for.

The Russians have to be called to account. They have to be punished for what they did. If they are not, they may try again or some other nation may try. Or some individual will try, as did a far-right Putin fan in England: How a Putin Fan Pushed Propaganda to Americans. If we don't fight to protect our institutions, we shall lose them.

The "we" who must fight to protect our institutions definitely includes Trump. As soon as he takes the oath of office, he is obliged to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution to the best of his ability. He can't shrug off the Russian attempt because he and his chief of staff believe it to be "ridiculous". Nor can he undercut or countermand any punishment the Congress or President Obama may now set in motion unless he replaces it with one as strong or stronger.

Nor can he relieve Russia of the sanctions already on it for its past bad acts now that we know of their present bad act.

Yet Trump's choice for Secretary of State is opposed to those existing sanctions.

And this may have been Putin's precise motive in trying to tip the scales to get Trump as president. He knew he would get the Exxon Oil president as Secretary of State, a man who has cut big-time oil deals with Putin. A man who is a big friend of Putin's. A man who who will take away nasty sanctions. And how could Putin know ahead of the election that Trump would give him Exxon Oil's Number One Man as Secretary of State? My guess is that he worked that out with Trump ahead of time.

This puts Trump into a very precarious position. At the very least he is in peril of impeachment if he doesn't punish Putin's current bad acts. Or will he follow the path that Putin and Exxon Oil have picked for him, one that would remove present sanctions and thus effectively reward an attack on our country instead of punish it? This smacks of giving aid and comfort to our enemy. And let's not kid ourselves. The Putin/Russian invasion of our election process was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor—a sneak attack most deadly. Russia has declared war on us. We have been dragged into the arena of cyberwar.

There really isn't time for President Obama to do somthing meaningful. His time of power is rapidly running out. He'd only be shaking his fist at Russia from the back of a train that's pulling out of the station.

This break-in will not just disappear in the next few weeks as a concern. (God help us, if it drops off our screen so quickly.) This is going to be on Trump's plate. And rightly so. He will be the one with the power to take action. Further—and by wonderful irony—these invaders are his chums. It's only fitting that he be the one to deal with them. What better way to send the world a message of "Hands off of U.S. elections" than by having the intended beneficiary of the wrong-doing have the humiliation of being the message bearer.

But to make things abundantly clear before our people and the world, there must be a proper investigation. Even the GOP leaders in Congress have called for an investigation. We need to know the extent of this hacking plot. If Trump or his team were in collusion with the Russians, that could be a treasonous criminal offence. A candidate from 2016 might be going to jail after all, and it won't be Hillary Clinton as Trump so outrageously threatened.

And if Trump was not involved in collusion but does not act to punish Russia? As I've said, that would be an impeachable offense, violating as it does the oath he will swear on January 20.

Meantime we have to keep this issue alive. We have to call (not email) our Congressional represenatives and Senators, urging them to investigate this hacking conscientiously. We must make it known that the American people are not about to tolerate an attack by Russia on the fundamentals of our democracy.

If Trump gets impeached over this, I shall rejoice. But what is important is that he be forced to make clear that he does not welcome outside help in elections from those who would gladly destroy us. He has to show the world that he can and will defend the Constitution and therefore they had better not mess with our fundamental institutions.

And now....It's all up to you. And your friends and your family. Make those phone calls. If you don't help save this country, who will?

"What kind of government have you given us, Doctor Franklin?" the woman asked as the founding fathers left the hall where they had promulgated the Constitution. Franklin replied," A republic, madam. If you can keep it."

Can you?

Upcoming: (1)RussiaGate & Trump Impeachment? (2) How YOU Can End Ugly Grip of Electoral College

I hope to get the RussiaGate/Trump Impeachment one done on Saturday. The one on ending the electoral college mess is possibly going up on Monday. No rest for the wicked? This may, however, be one of the most important times ever in American politics.

Here's to think about until Monday: Did you know the electoral college is actually rooted in slavery?