So our Mountebank-in-Chief, Donald Trump, has finally fired James Comey. Good riddance. I’ll shed no tears for our vain Inspector Javert. But once again Trump, the Master of the Self-Inflicted Wound, has done the impossible. In a single stroke, he has transformed the almost universally loathed Comey into a sympathetic, if not heroic, figure.

Trump, who once fired people for a living on TV, bungled the termination of the director of the FBI director so badly that he also succeeded in reigniting a scandal that had started to cool to a slow simmer--and, not incidentally, may have committed the impeachable offense of "obstruction of justice," motivated primarily by personal pique. More

What could be more absurd than Drone War King Barack Obama getting an award for courage? The speech that Obama gave after getting the 2017 "Profiles in Courage" prize from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation last Sunday – that’s what. More

It should be abundantly clear to rational observers that, while the U.S. health care system is broken, the Republican House reform proposal – called the “American Health Care Act” (AHCA) – will make matters even worse. The general details of the legislation should now be well known: 1. repeal the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) mandate that Americans purchase health insurance; 2. Eliminate the ACA’s health insurance exchanges and replace individual federal subsidies for those buying on state health care exchanges with health care-related tax credits; 3. Eliminate the tax increase on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year, and couples earning over $250,000, needed to pay for the health insurance exchange subsidies; 4. Empower states to allow insurers to increase their rates, denying health care to individuals with pre-existing conditions; and 5. Allow states to create high-risk pools for individuals seeking insurance who are priced out of traditional insurance markets due to pre-existing conditions. More