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After aeons trapped in a Beckettian nightmare, Robert Mueller’s report is finally on the Attorney General’s desk. Intriguingly, he waited for the markets to close before doing so, like a true capitalist. So, Cockburn off by a mere two weeks. But what of the indictments? As Bloomberg’s report indicates: ‘Mueller’s decision to issue a final report indicates that he chose not to indict other major figures in his investigation, including members of Trump’s family and the president. However, if he secured any indictments under seal, they could be handed off to other elements of the Justice Department.

Long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang isn’t afraid to take a position on, well, anything. Browse through his campaign website, and you’ll see not just that he believes in universal basic income – the policy proposal for which he’s best known – but also that he wants to mandate the payment of NCAA athletes, to crack down on spam phone calls, and to secure $6 billion to revitalize dying shopping malls. Many of his policy positions are tied to causes with little prominence in the mainstream but a devoted following on the internet, like his recent stance against childhood circumcision, the domain of an online community that refer to themselves as ‘intactivists.

Presidential politics is all about excitement. So maybe it should worry the Democrats that their most exciting 2020 presidential prospects, according to pretty much all early polls, are two white guys pushing 80. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton genuinely excited a Democratic base that wanted to elect the first woman president. Eight years before that, Barack Obama surpassed even Hillary as a source of enthusiasm among Democratic voters. And now? Kamala Harris has been in the race for nearly two months without polling close to Bernie Sanders, who in turn trails only the yet-to-declare Joe Biden. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke have been well behind Harris, and the rest of the field is negligible.

Melania wore white today for St. Patrick’s Day services, but her husband was not in a peaceful mood. He came out swinging today against the shade of John McCain. Already peeved by a rerun of Saturday Night Live that portrayed him with disapprobation, Trump unloaded on his longtime nemesis in no uncertain terms. McCain may have died in August 2018, but to Trump his example apparently remains a living rebuke. So he had to disparage him. McCain’s marks at the Naval Academy were so lousy that he was ‘last in his class,’ according to Trump on — what else? — Twitter.

I had lunch yesterday with a friend from London who brought grim tidings from Albion. Like me, he is an advocate of national sovereignty. He thinks the people of the United Kingdom ought to be allowed to govern themselves. So he, again like me, is an advocate for Brexit. He had no idea what was going to happen with Brexit. Yesterday was a busy day. I also chatted with friends about the crisis at our southern border. All honest people acknowledge that there is a crisis, that thousands upon thousands of people, most without English and without skills, are pouring over the border.

The normally sober Associated Press is reporting the Senate’s vote to overturn Trump’s declaration of emergency in the southern border as ‘a stunning rebuke’ and ‘a remarkable break between Trump and Senate Republicans.’ But it isn’t. The 12 Senate Republicans who joined forces with every Democrat in the vote to annul Trump’s declaration did so for predictable ideological reasons. Libertarian-leaning Republicans such as Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey voted to overturn the emergency on ‘constitutionalist’ grounds, seeing the National Emergencies Act of 1976 as constitutionally dubious or worse and rejecting the mechanism by which it allows the president to appropriate funds.

It was no cakewalk for Vice President Mike Pence. He had showed up in Sea Island, Ga., reckoning that he would schmooze with the wealthy donors to the American Enterprise Institute and answer some prearranged questions from Dick Cheney aka Vice. No dice. Cheney, the wily veteran, took a look at the parvenu occupying his old office and decided to go off script. Where were all the ‘softball’ topics, Pence remarked. Cheney was having none of it. There wasn’t much gratitude for the administration that had finally gotten around to pardoning his former aide I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. Instead, Cheney breathed fire.

Here is the tragedy of the Democratic party in 2019: its partisans are left to hope that personal hatred of Donald Trump will do for them in 2020 what the Iraq War and the Great Recession did in 2006 and 2008. The first time Nancy Pelosi became speaker of House of Representatives, her party was the party of second thoughts about Iraq. The fact that Democrats won control of the Senate with the 2006 election was even more clearly tied to that misbegotten war: the victory of James Webb over George Allen gave Democrats their 51st seat. Webb was a former Republican – a Reagan cabinet official – who switched parties and challenged Allen out of disgust with the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy.

When Ilhan Omar says that there’s too much money in American politics, she’s stating the obvious. That’s why I support her brave campaign against the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, General Electric, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Business Roundtable, the AARP, and Boeing. These are America’s top 10 lobby groups, ranked by total spending over the last 20 years. In 2018, the US Chamber of Commerce spent $94.8 million on lobbying. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spent $21.7 million and surged to Number Eight on the charts. The America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) ranked Number 157, and spent $3.5 million.

Donald Trump really likes to brag about his brains. To listen to him, he has kind of a supercomputer whirring away there beneath the plume of iridescent hair. He can do anything better than anyone else, whether it’s spending a few hours learning about nuclear strategy or winning trade wars. Besides, his uncle taught at MIT, which means that the Trump gene pool couldn’t be more robust: ‘My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.’ For good measure, Trump noted that his ability to win the presidency on his first attempt ‘would qualify as not smart, but genius... and a very stable genius at that!’ Well, well, well. Now it turns out that Trump went to great lengths to suppress his high school transcripts.

Here’s a riddle for you, and if you solve it, the Democrats will nominate you for president: how does one candidate carry both Cambridge, Mass. and Luzerne County, Penn.? Sure, the former’s a cake-walk. Hillary Clinton could stand in the middle of Harvard Square and shoot somebody, and she wouldn’t lose any voters from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts. But the latter, which Obama won in 2012, went to Trump in a whopping 25-point swing. This was the big story in 2016: the defection of blue-collar voters to the Republican party. Now, as the 2020 election draws nigh, Democratic office-holders in ‘Purple America’ are feeling the heat. Speaking to Politico at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, Gov.