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A lot happened this week. The actor James Earl Jones passed away, presumably now referred to as James Earl Bones. To be fair I recently rewatched Star Wars and his breathing sounded pretty bad even back then.

It was also the 2 year anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth and I was thinking back to that day and how I spent most of it checking my phone, for poor taste jokes from friends. It's funny now with hindsight to realise now that Huw Edwards was also doing the same thing, checking hi ......

England beat Ireland 2-0 in a strange football game, it was a win on Irish soil, with a manager who used to play for Ireland and the goals were both scored by former Irish player. I guess stealing Rice makes a change from when the English stole the potatoes.

Grenfell Tower was back in the news as it seems the maintenance, eventual demolition, and memorial will have cost the government £340m - they must have money to burn! (or is that in poor taste?)

France finally got a Prime Minister in the form of Michelle Barnier who was once described as the Joe Biden of french politics, meaning he'd been in politics for decades with plenty of experience and insight. And now his detractors can even join in, describing him like Joe Biden as a pejorative. Presumably he will now be presiding over the Ukraine situation but it reminds me of a quote from Jacques Chirac who said "As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure" to which Rush Limbaugh responded "As far as France is concerned, you're right." It's like the old joke about how Paris has all those tree-lined boulevards because the Germans like to march in the shade. But now they're cutting them all down because the Arabs like to march in the sun.

Video footage emerged of Angela Rayer, who was seen in Ibiza at a rave. She currently has the same position as Michael Gove's old job, someone who was also seen in Ibiza under similarly strange circumstances. Although I guess that dancing in a nightclub makes a change from dancing on the graves of pensioners.

This week I thought we'd check with the state of the US election, where battleground states like Ohio look set to see more drama than when they filmed the Shawshank redemption there, and just like the end of that film we're all going to have to crawl through some proverbial, to reach the end of it. This week saw 3rd party candidate RF Kennedy drop out of the race and urging his opponents to vote for Trump, and it was certainly very brave of former President Trump to invite a Kennedy to the campaign given that he's already at risk of assassination attempts.

Elsewhere, Kamala Harris was officially crowned the Democratic party's candidate. This is the party that claims to be the only one that wants to save democracy and have done so by 1) Ignoring the primary votes and forcing Biden out 2) Choosing the party candidate without asking the members to vote 3) Launching court cases to prevent RFK running as a 3rd party candidate in swing states 4) Then launching battles to keep him on the ballot now that they realise that him running will benefit them. I'd use that expression about "destroying the village to save the village" but at this point they don't even need to actually destroy anything, as long as they can get CNN to show some stock footage and warn people that Trump might bring nasty working class jobs back to the village.

But this election will largely be decided by a handful of battleground states so how are things playing out there?

- Arizona is a remarkably tight race this time around and one of the few where swapping Biden to Harris played to the Democrats' benefit. You could make some metaphor up about Biden being a cowboy riding into the Arizona sunset, although this was more like some kind of nasty gunfight where a posse of bad actors rode into town and shot the sheriff.
- Elsewhere in the sun, Nevada looks on pace to hand Trump the state by 5%, especially with a policy of eliminating tax on tips and thus telling the IRS that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
- Wisconsin is an interesting one with polling showing that Harris is up 1%, despite, Trump outperforming his 2020 standing, almost as if the polls are dubious at worst.
- Michigan is probably going to remain blue, that's the party colour too, although its also the frigid temperatures this November. On the other hand, it has a huge Muslim population and we're yet to see if Kamala will carefully handle the Israel-Palestine issue, or whether we can expect some gaffe that is undoubtedly as hilarious as it is horrendous and tragic. Possibly something where she think that the West Bank is on Wall Street or that the ruler of Jordan is Michael Jordan.
- Georgia on the other hand will flip red, Trump only lost it by 0.2% last time and every poll since has shown his support growing.
- Pennsylvania is one that might also be out of play. Kamala was expected to pick the state governor for VP but changed her mind at the last minute, a snub that didn't go down well with many. Also add in that it's a state where RFK has more votes that will now go Trump's direction and it will likely be a decision they regret, although it's also worth looking up the allegations that governor Shapiro covered up a murder several years ago and maybe they didn't shoot themselves in the foot. Although to this day Shapiro claims that Ellen Greenberg 20 stab wounds were the result of a suicide that definitely doesn't need re-examining.

This week saw former President Trump take to the stage at the Republican National Convention where he was even introduced by former wrestling star Hulk Hogan, which made a change from last weekend which almost saw an appearance by The Undertaker. This followed a week where the media tried to unpick the mess of that happened at the Trump Rally and the likes of CNN and the BBC realised that Trump is very likely likely to be in the White House for the next 4 years. Of course, for many people he also lives rent-free in their head, all the time, with ludicrous hyperbole being bandied around. If I counted the number of counterbalanced opinions I'd heard on the likes of Radio 4, you could do it on one hand, even if your hand had been horribly injured in an industrial accident

In the meantime conspiracy theorists from both sides have suggested a number of theories about what really happened, from the deep state trying to assassinate him, to Mr Trump staging it all himself. Certainly if it were all a TV show then it would be getting fantastic ratings by now going into the season finale in November. Maybe the final episode would have a plot twist where the Chinese start a war in Africa and Joe Biden demands that someone ask Nelson Mandela to do something, and it's also revealed that he's unable to remember any of the launch codes.

It is remarkable that having looked at the conspiracy evidence, you're left with the horrible realisation that one of two things must be true: either the secret service either planned it all, or they were just remarkably incompetent beyond anything that would be conceivably forgivable. Apparently the snipers nest was never investigated, even when they were repeatedly warned about a weird gunman being up there, because the sloped roof posed a health and safety violation for the agents. After the attack you see the agents struggling to get their guns out of their holsters, many of them were overweight and unfit for the role and there's a lot of talk about them simply being diversity hires and being put on the Trump team, rather than risk having them around the actual President. Perhaps that's true, and if so then I feel sorry for them: being over-promoted into a role they're completely incapable of doing and then being put on public display to be ridiculed when they mess up.

One of the more compelling arguments in favour of a conspiracy would be the money trail, huge amounts of money were placed on short selling the Trump Social shares the day before, almost as if someone knew something was going to happen to him, and then there's the timing of it all: if Trump had been successfully bumped off then with just 2 days to go to the Republican Convetion, senior people in the party could have done a deal behind closed doors and put anyone they wanted on the ticket. There's also an interesting case to be made about the lady with sunglasses who sat behind Trump, filmed it all on an iphone and has not come forward since. Many are claiming it's Janeen DiGuiseppi, assistant director of the FBI and the resemblance is pretty uncanny.

Or perhaps the secret service are just another branch of the government and as such are about as useless as you'd expect. If it takes months to renew a passport or to get the city to aprove a building permit, why would you expect a government team tasked with guarding Trump from assailants to be any more compitant?

This week there was a failed assassination attempt at former President Trump, with some fearing that recently acquitted Alec Baldwin had decided to show up.

If the attempt to permanently remove Trump from the race was all a plot concocted up by someone on the Biden team, then it should come as no surprise that it was a incompetent disaster, I'd barely trust Kamala Harris to take out the recycling, let alone a political opponent

The shooter was supposedly a 20 yo lone gunman although there's a BBC Interview where some supporters explain that they repeatedly told the secret service about a suspicious man on the roof with a rifle but were ignored. In the meantime most legacy news outlets ran with the story about how Trump had collapsed on the stage, as if to compare it to one of Biden's many gaffes. You do have to admire the irony that most people crazy enough to shoot Trump are so avidly against the 2nd amendment that if you tried to organise a conspiracy, you'd likely struggle to find someone with a decent aim these days, maybe that's what happened here. Maybe they should get some red MAGA hats where it stands for "Make Accuracy Great Again"

And talking about good aim, the person who took that photograph of the former President and the Flag, with a fist in the air, is surely a front runner for a Pulitzer prize this year. As to everyone else, a member of the public was killed by the missing shots and the rest Trumps supporters are chanting about how they stand with him, but just possibly not behind him

As to Biden, this week he got president Zelensky mixed up with Vladimir Putin, at a conference that insiders say undid months of political work that might have led to a peace treaty. Until last night I was originally going to draw a cartoon of Biden going on Wheel of fortune and the puzzle category is "President of Ukraine" and he's already got the letters Z,L,N,S,K & Y but takes a failed go at solving the puzzle.

There's an exciting question doing the rounds about who will survive in their job longer: Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak or Gareth Southgate. Certainly in the case of the latter two, a lot of people are wonderring if the England team will even be able to vote in the UK election or use a ballot paper, seeing as they seem unable to ever find the box and when they do they struggle to put a cross into it.

But just like the football, Thursday night saw the repeat of something that also seems to happen every 4 years: a debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is the third such time Trump has been in the debate, and like the TV show Westworld, the best season was probably the best: that was the one where he said that Hilary was lucky not to be in Jail. This year it was switched round with Biden talking about Trump being a convicted felon before losing his train of thought, pausing and appearing to glitch up worse than that Horizon computer system the Post Office bought. My favourite parts of the debate would probably be [1] when the two of them went off on a bizarre rant about which of them had the better golf handicap [2] when it cut to the CNN studio and it was like a wake as all of them realised the true horror of what had just unfolded. It reminded me of that scene in the Simpsons when Homer designs a car and his brother realises he's now bankrupt.

Even for those who have been aware of Biden's failing faculties, the performance was fairly shocking, there was no doubt that he should bow out gracefully. The New York Times and numerous major donors have called for such. But Biden and his handlers have said he's staying on, will keep campaigning, and he's going to visit South Carolina. He'll also be going to other states, like Confused State or Semi Conscious State but jacked up on a cocktail of pick-me-ups.

At this point with hundreds of millions of ballot papers only a month or two from being printed, it's actually fairly difficult from a practical perspective to replace Joe as the candidate, at least without making the new presidential candidate Kamala Harris who is probably the only person other than Hilary Clinton who would be guaranteed to lose to Trump in November. The only other option on the table is using the democratic party's 'behind the scenes' apparatus and skip the convention, disregard the primary votes and put in someone like California Governor Newsom or one of the other suggested upgrades, all of whom are white men, and all at a time when most of the party activists claim that promoting anyone to seniority other than a woman of colour is fascism. Who would I put in though? Well there is a candidate out there and he's been president before but only served one term. That would be Jimmy Carter, and strangely he's probably still just about more popular and certainly less divisive than Trump or Biden. (But maybe also stick a safe pair of hands on the ballot paper as the vice presidential candidate just in case).

This week a jury decided that Donald Trump might be the first criminal to be voted in as president if he wins in November, or at least he would be the first politician to be voted in *after* they got caught. There's lots of examples of people who got away with it but as a basic one Bill Clinton did the exact same thing as Trump when he paid Paula Jones $850,000 to drop a sexual harassment lawsuit and that is of course s the tip an exceedingly large iceberg. I say iceberg, but it's more like an island, that belonged to Jeffrey Epstein. There are also roughly 100 people who worked closely with Bill and Hilary who have since died from a suicide or an accident. I don't want to get too 'tinfoil hat' but 9 of the police officers involved in the Anthony Wiener investigation, all went on to kill themselves afterwards. If we're kicking around other names, remember when Dick Cheney shot someone, or how George Bush's wife killed someone in the 60s? Or

Let's talk about the Trump court case though and why the result will be overturned on appeal
1) The judge overseeing the trial gave money to a pro-Biden political organisation, a plain violation of NY law.
2) The crux of the case comes down to quite an obscure piece of logic, alleging that the falsification of business records was committed "with intent to commit another crime" but refused in court to specify what that crime was. That goes against numerous rules, mainly the one where you have to tell the defence what the accusations are.
3) The Jury supposedly was made up of 12 people who may or may not have voted in the previous election in 2020, yet somehow come to this with an open mind. If you look through the records, one even claimed in the jury selection process that they were a member of the social media site Trump Social, in fact that was part of the claim that the jury was a mix of both sides. I'll personally wager money that at some point in the next 10 years that person accidentally reveals that to have been a lie to get on the jury and winds up facing perjury charges. In America, unlike in the UK, it is completely legal for jury members to discuss the trial and write books about it. One of them will slip up, as sometimes happens, and overturn it as a mistrial.

But I digress, none of this matters of course and nor will it in this case. Trump's poll ratings jumped 6% on the news of the guilty verdict and he raised $39m in one day, while Joe Biden showed up in Philadelphia to a rally attended by less than 100 people, in what is a crucial swing state this November. It's a shame because Biden has a lot of achievements to his name: The standard of living for Ukrainian politicians is up 200% and more women of colour than ever before are getting the chance to pilot the drones that attack children in Yemen and Syria. There was an interesting poll in the newspaper that claimed that young American women don't want to date men who plan to vote for Trump, although unfortunately for them the men that support Biden only want to date other men. Meanwhile there was a case of a grocery store that did a President Trump sales promotion where it rolled back prices to what they were 6 years ago. Given the backdrop of the country, the court case didn't gain the democrats a single vote and in an cruel twist for progressives probably cost them hundreds of thousands of votes as black and minority voters emphasise with the narrative that the justice system was stacked and rigged from the beginning. One thing certain is that Trump will not be going to jail this year, the appeals process will drag on into next year if he isn't elected before then.

Climate change activists threaten to glue themselves to the Grand National racetrack in order to disrupt or prevent the horse race. It does make you wonder if they know where glue comes from.

Oscar Pistorious looks set to get released early on parole, apparently he's unlikely to jump bail. And physically unable. Roses are red, violets are glorious, never creep up on Oscar Pistorious

There was another high school shooting in the US. Apparently the leading cause of death there in under 16 year olds is guns, although in China it's protesting, so it could be worse

A lot of the protesting being threatened though has been over the upcoming indictment of Donald J Trump, or as he may soon be know, Donal Jail Trump. This is the latest of multiple attempts to charge him with something, anything, no matter how trivial, in order to prevent him running and likely winning an election next year, going by the latest polling and the increasing incompetence of a Biden administration which has been shown to have been up to far worse than Trump was, albeit without police action ever being countenanced. A few years ago, they were going to prove that he was a paid employee of the Russian government and that didn't turn out to be true, although we know how that the Bidden family was, and possibly still is, being paid by the Chinese government. Trump was impeached over allegations of corruption with Ukraine, although there's an actual recording of Biden making identical comments to the Ukrainian government during the Obama era, so they dropped it. Then they wanted to arrest him over holding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and they were *this* close but then it emerged that Biden had been keeping boxes of classified documents at his house in Delaware and had been doing so for over a decade, there's even a family photograph of him in front of his garage with everything clearly stacked up behind him, the way that you or I would keep the Christmas decorations. A lot of his supporters, struggling to defend him, say "at least he's not Trump" but that line is increasingly dubious now, and at least the economy wasn't collapsing on Trump's watch and Eurasia was under control

It remains to be seen whether Trump will comply with any of it of course. The Florida governor actually stated that the state will refuse to cooperate with any federal arrest, one which supposedly doesn't have strong enough evidence to find him guilty. The idea is get him in court, stretch it out and keep him off the campaign trail for as long as possible and with the US legal system and lengthy appeals process, that could be years. On the other hand, there would be zero risk of him being put put in handcuffs if he and Stormy Daniels hadn't been using handcuffs several years ago

And thus ends four years of President Trump, and the Queen moves onto eventually meeting her 13th US President. Unlucky for some, especially if you live in Syria where the last 4 years have been somewhat of a reprieve from the Obama-Biden era. President Trump though. I’ve found it strange and astonishing that many people I know in remote parts of the UK have seemingly spent the past 4 obsessing over him, despite him having as much impact in their day-to-day life as my choice of breakfast today. It’s like a religion for some I guess, the trump thing I mean. As to breakfast I had 2 slices of pizza and a glass of wine because hey it’s the weekend and I don’t think Special K is special enough. While we’re on the subject:
- What do the military have for breakfast? Conflicts.
- What does Covid have for breakfast? Coughy.
- What do scientists eat for breakfast? Special Potassium
- What do programmers eat for breakfast? Just a byte.

Back to the subject, even in the US itself the president rarely actually impacts that many people’s lives and it’s always fun to challenge people who hate Trump to name some policies that cause them to dislike him so much; they’ll probably talk about the cages thing on the Mexican border but that was an Obama-era policy that Joe Biden oversaw. A lot of things seemingly only because bad when it was President Trump doing them. They might mention the covid response to which you can challenge them to what world leader did it better. Their beloved Europe has been about as utterly useless as a a cricket bat made out of glass, although at least the bat is transparent. If they need some hints on good government to copy a Covid strategy from, maybe you can help them: leaving Sweden's approach of doing nothing aside, Israel has been the one country that went down the distance+vaccine route and is presumably the one to copy if that's how you think things should be done: it's great fun telling lefties that they should urge the government to emulate Israel more and that the Israeli state as a beacon of hope in the world.

Anyway I will go through a longish list of Trumps a achievements in a minute but for now this week saw President Biden’s inauguration in scenes that will go down in history as… televised. Didn’t watch it myself, nor did I watch that royal wedding a few years back, because they’re long and dull and actually I did see a bit when I was flicking through the channels and the scrolling news said he was on his way to Arlington National Cemetery and I thought, “wow he didn’t last long”

As to what lays in store during the next 4 years, it’s worth noting that the expression ‘President Joe Biden’ is an anagram of “Join indebted spree” There’s a good reason why bitcoin has tripled since the election and we’re probably going to see the slow collapse of the dollar as Biden's friends run up trillion dollar deficits and everyone scrambles for the exit door as the economic endgame rears its head. And on day one a priority was to pass an executive order saying that schools have to allow guys to compete in girls sports and use the women’s changing room, because of feeling and gender equality. Although maybe it's part of a plan to get more lazy boys to get active, if they're allowed to use the girls shower room afterwards.

Anyway, here’s that list I promised you of some things Trump did in 4 years:

1 Thanks to deregulation the US became a net oil exporter for the first time ever. The US is finally energy independent, something that nobody was able to do ever since Jimmy Carter promised it.
2 No new wars. Mostly because of that oil policy changing things. It will be hilarious in perhaps 30 years to mention how whichever president at the time is the first President since President Trump to not start a war. Trump will literally be winding lefties up for decades to come with that one.
3 Forcing hospitals to provide medical prices to patients upfront so they can shop around.
4 An order that if foreign drug prices are known then the Medicare system isn't allowed to sign contracts where they pay more than that
saving the U.S. an estimated $85 billion in savings over 7 years
5 Forcing Nato members to increase their spending by $400 billion rather than relying on the US to do everything.
6 Got rid of NAFTA
7 He got more Minority votes than any republican in 100 years, showing that the party is far from dying due to demographics
8 Doubled the child tax credit.
9 Eliminated the Obamacare penalty, which saved people thousands of dollars per year.
10 Instituted a Buy American policy within federal agencies to stop the government from buying from overseas competitors.
11 Instituted “Right to Try,” which means that if you're terminally ill you can legally buy potentially lifesaving but as of yet unregulated medicines.
12 Withdrew from Iran nuclear deal.
13 Made the Arab world formally recognise the state of Israel, something that presidents for decades have tried and failed to achieve
14 Withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, thus keeping America safe from that wishy hope nonsense. Biden will sign back up to it of course but he’ll never be able to enforce it now that:
15 The supreme court is stacked against him. It's all well and good signing a climate treaty but how's he supposed to actually do anything to meet the aims of it. Banning people from buying heating oil or forcing air passengers to take part in a rationing system? Well to quote Mr Trump, I’ll see you in court.

Chaos this week in America with videos of a brawl and takeover of the capitol building that were both exciting, yet also slightly dull because normally when you see that sort of stuff happening, someone like Steven Seagal shows up. Or maybe Michael Bay is filming it so for some reason stones and rocks are suddenly flammable because physics in his world makes about as much sense as the concepts like integrity or decency in the world of Washington DC.

As to the violence and bloodshed, the main story for me has been more the fact that supposed Trump-supporting extremists have almost all been identified as hard left activists who were maybe paid to show up and undermine the president's tv reputation further, or perhaps they just like to smash things up and cause trouble. One of them was in Philadelphia a few months ago at a Black Lives Matter protest smashing up the Apple store. Who knows, maybe he thought the senate had some stuff in it worth stealing and to be honest the scenes did also remind me of those clips where you see a crowd running amok inside a Walmart or a maybe walking out of a Target store with a 60" television. Unfortunately the only things for sale in that building were the politicians who'd long since departed. But generally speaking, for all the talk of paid actors and protestors, I'm inclined to think they're more like the sort of England football fans that used to go abroad in order to get into a good fight and smash up the local taverna. The sort of idiots that heard Churchill talking about fighting them on the beaches and took that as an instruction to travel to the world cup and get arrested.

Nonetheless, there seems to be a sense by some the in 2 weeks it will all be over and the country will return to normal, or at least the definition of normal that includes being the sort of place where you can ask for a sandwich and tell the serve to substitute the bread for two pieces of friend chicken. This all seems wildly misplaced optimism on behalf of the left but wasn't it always so? If the election was indeed what they said it was then the best option would be to have an enquiry, answer all the questions, show that the result was beyond doubt and prove to the world the Mr Trump was at the end of the day a somewhat shifty businessman who lost reelection. Instead all lines of question have been shut down, people silenced, livelihoods threatened for daring to ask what in some cases are very legitimate questions. Thing like why are there videos of boxes being brought into the room after the officials and observers had finished up for the day. Why was the count trusted to a company that was donating millions of dollars to one of the two parties involved.

Apparently you're dangerous or racist if you don't accept everything you're told and those lines of question have thus been shut down faster than Jamie Oliver restaurants or branches of K-Mart depending on what side of the pond you want your analogy from. The end result of the censorship and media blackout is that Donald Trump is being actively transformed into not a failure but a martyred man of the people, like some kind of rightwing Bobby Kennedy. The one thing you'd think people would learn by now is that if you want to stop a conspiracy theory the last thing you want to probably do is ban people from mentioning it: that's about as effective as trying to shovel water with a pitchfork. Thus in 20 or even 50 years a solid chunk of the population will still mention that time when the media and the state had no option but to rig an election because it was the only conceivable way they could defeat Donald Trump because he was just too popular to defeat any other way. And personally speaking, I'd probably side with that theory if only because like I said the media have been so suspiciously keen to shut down and ridicule the debate.

The other night I was watching a show on the BBC about recycling and landfill and just like a lot of other BBC programming, it was rubbish. So what has been going on?

There's a series of new lockdowns going on around the world as politicians struggle to prevent new Covid cases or in many cases use the news for self promotion. Looking at my home country of Scotland, the government announced that bars would close for 2 weeks although given that people were warned in advance and may have overdone it, I doubt many people would want to go near a bar for a few days after the ban anyway. And at the end of the day it may all just be to help the SNP avoid any new stories involving Alex Salmond meeting new friends on a night out.

Guitar Virtuoso Eddie Van Halen also died of cancer and as someone with a vast collection of vinyl I guess I was tinged with both sadness as well as the thought to put some albums up on eBay at triple the price. His wife said her "heart and soul have been shattered" before a spiritualist asked her to stop stealing Eddie's lyrics

However, the big story was that it's just a month to go until the US election and there's been new stories coming out left right and centre or as the press would rather express it, far left and far right, no centre. This week saw the vice-Presidential debate which compared to the Trump-Biden fracas was somewhat more civilised. Certainly it was refreshing to see a discussion without interruptions like the classic "stop i can't breath you're standing on my neck" which is all to often the case with arguments recorded. Pence came across a bit more professional but it doesn't really matter because the big news is that the President is alive, covid free and back on the campaign trail. Subsequent debates have been canceled because the President suspects they'll be rigged against him and he's probably right but it's probably irrelevant because he comes from the world of television and we have at least 2 major unknown plottwists between now and election day. It could go either way this time, it really could, and I'm yet to wager money on the result but I will say this much: Donald Trump is so far behind in the polls that it reminds me of the night he won the Presidency.

cartoon: trump doesn't start wars. Result, "get rid of him"

They say that a week is a long time in politics but this last one seems to have been longer than the hold time when you try to contact the council. This week we’re talking about President Trump and one of the biggest October Surprises in election history. Maybe not the biggest, that would go to the Russians in October 1917 when Lenin decided to cancel the idea of an election and just kill people instead, a classic Russian election technique still employed to this day.

Let’s stick to America though, this last week started with an election debate that was described as a dumpster fire in which President Trump and Candidate Biden yelled at each other and over the moderator. To people watching in the UK it made for very strange viewing in so much as the braying and childishness was never interrupted by the speaker of the house shouting “order order!” Nicola Sturgeon also thought it was a disgrace because the SNP weren’t allowed a say in the debate owing to English politicians in the late 1700s, notably George III.

Skip forward a few days and on Friday the President announced that he had contracted Covid19, not to be mistaken for Maria19, which is the twitter handle of a striptease artiste living in a trailer park down the road from Mara Lago. Allegedly, hastag grab her by the cat. Anyway, at this news many on the left instantly jumped to the conclusion that he was actually fine and the whole thing was part of yet another conspiracy theory, presumably one that can be easily answered by investigating whether Robert Mueller spent the weekend putting down a deposit on another beach-house. Nonetheless, the situation did appear to be fairly serious and president apparently spent the weekend surrounded by doctors and on a cocktail of drugs, just like Joe Biden did before the first debate.

I guess we won’t know anything for sure for another week although this has been yet another news story where the supposedly compassionate socially caring types have spent 2 days wishing death and pain for the entire family and friends of someone who disagrees with their political views. The irony being of course that were the President to die then he would become a martyr and a rallying point for the next half a century, a conservative president set for a landslide re-election who was cut down in his prime as a last resort throw of the dice by the deep state conspiracy. As compared of course to if Mr Biden caught Covid, in which case the election should be delayed because it's unfair if the left don't have all the advantages they need in order to lose spectacularly.

Ok, what to talk about this week? I was encouraged by Boris saying that the world needs to unite against a common foe and I initially thought, that it was time to go to war with Germany again, it's been a while after all and it's about the only way that you could get a flight overseas right now, in the back of an Atlas C1. What else? Well there's the recent 'rule of six' law which could very well lead to a murder at the home of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as they frantically try to avoid a visit by the police. If you're wondering why he's called Happy it's because he likely now owns a 3/7 stake in ownership of the mine.

But the big news the last week was the battle over the US Supreme Court, as compared to the 'supreme food court' at my local shopping place which offers half a dozen types of cuisine, most of it friend and all at wildly marked up priced. The last week or so though saw justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pass away meaning that President Trump and the Republican controlled senate will be appointing a new justice and their pick is Amy Barrett. She's a staunch catholic to the extent that you wonder whether or not the pope really is a catholic, in comparison at least. I'd have thought that religion and Washington would go together though, like when they look at the deficit and pray for a miracle, or people are asked to give generously and bundles of money are exchanged. Anyway, her appointment would make the court conservative leaning for the next decade or two. The left or right thing is of course madness though, judicial proceedings should be non-political, but the US has for a few decades has almost purposefully drafting legally dubious laws on the basis that they can sort it out because they're not up for election in 10 months. Nancy Pelosi once famously said Obamacare must be passed to ‘Find Out What Is in It’ in the process almost making a comparison between healthcare and a lottery scratch card. Although I guess in the US both the lottery and healthcare both do end up with someone else getting very rich at your expense.

Of course the largest part of this story is that the court is almost certainly going to decide the result of the presidential election, as it did in the 2000 election which ironically featured involved 2000 lawyers. Alas 2020 will not be so kind with everyone seeing this one as the one of the most pivotal, by which I mean litigious, election ever. Three points of interest that I found in all of this:
1) Obama apparently asked Ginsberg to step down a number of years ago so that he could appoint a new and very young left-leaning judge who could stick around for decades. Apparently she said no because she viewed it as a life job and not a political appointment. Presumably the concept of seriousness and integrity was lost on the President who at the time was talking about the Benghazi incident in the way a 12yo talks about Minecraft.
2) Justice Ginsberg, on the topic of Roe v Wade and abortion, actually stated in 1992 that she though the decision had been a mistep and that she'd rather the ruling had been different, it order for the politicians to sort it out in law and not in a court. No matter what you thought of her politics you have to admire someone telling a bunch of people to do their job instead of passing the buck.
3) The appointment will be by a majority of 1 vote, possibly 2. Normally the Senate needs a 60-40 result to guarantee passing a law, it's why it's so unproductive, it's designed so that only bipartisan laws can be passed. The one case where this isn't the case is in Supreme Court Justices. That change was put in place by Obama and Harry Reid several years ago who forced through a procedural change when they didn't get their own way appointing a controversial judge. The only way therefore that the current situation could be more ironic would be if the new choice of female court justice was Alanis Morissette.

This week I thought we'd talk the upcoming American election although I thought in passing I'd point out how good it is with Corona to see the British 'Dunkirk Spirit' coming out by which of course I mean thousands of trapped Britons trying their damnedest to cross the channel and escape France.

But anyway, the US election is entering the last couple of months of what has been the quietest and most lacklustre presidential election since the era when King George III was in charge and the election consisted of a sketch comedy routine performed by courtiers. The usual feverish wall-to-wall campaigning has been a trudge this year as both candidates stumble forward like drunks at closing time, both assured in their own self-confidence and popularity though one of them will of course have a rude and painful awakening come that morning in November.

Up against Mr Trump is Jo Biden who many have accused of being cognitively impaired following a litany of gaffes, mistakes and an ability to mess up numbers that makes you assume he used to have a private sector job at Enron. There's hours of clips on YouTube if you go browsing, including one where he introduces his sister as his wife, although I don't know the context and perhaps he was trying to play to a crowd in Alabama. The Coronavirus has largely saved his campaign by allowing him to remain silent, out of the public eye and hide behind a facemask when he is on display. Gordon Brown presumably wishes he could have shielded his "smile" behind one back in the day.

In order to combat the stale old white man image in an era of BLM, Biden decided to finally appoint his running mate this week, by which I mean the results of the focus group finally came back and they went with Kamala Harris who ticks a number of boxes including the one where she can talk coherently but more importantly the ethnicity one given that we now live in an era where it's likely a matter of time until someone demands that the piano is redesigned to have an equal number of black keys and white keys. This is a week in fact in which Nasa decided to rename some star systems such as the Eskimo Nebula in case it was offensive to the Inuit, though strangely no mention yet of renaming the planets, the roman god Jupiter has a pretty offensive backstory after all and the whole Roman empire itself was based on slavery. Until the Visigoths held a peaceful protest in the year 410 and accidentally burned it to the ground.

Despite this I find it somewhat bemusing when you look at the facts. Joe Biden carved himself a career in the 80s and 90s by passing legislation now seen as disproportionately harsh on minority groups. But it's ok because Kamala Harris is only half-white although she and grew up in a white neighbourhood and married a white man and was one of the first to be kicked out of the primary race by the public earlier in the year. This is a PR effort somehow worse than the usual election effort, in which a multimillionaire candidate decides to remove their tie and slowly drink half a bottle of Coors Light while chatting to a voter in the Midwest. Sometimes I wonder if US politicians brought in Prohibition simply in order to get out of having to to do that part of the campaign.

Either way, the lack of anything to get excited about in this election is why there's so little action or enthusiasm on the ground, there's no grassroots groundswell and nobody's leafletting or knocking on doors and Covid is nowhere near as responsible for that as the Biden camp would make out. Morale and is always a strange one to tie down though, after all if the people who make motivational posters are so motivated, why are they still working in a poster factory?

I’m posting a day or or two later than usual after Ghislane Maxwell seemingly managed to survive this past weekend in prison, something that indeed surprised many, not least the people who have already likely instructed their lawyer to make her disappear. You know how these things work though, we all know that if there are what look like guard dogs in the prison, they’re probably seeing eye dogs for the legally blind prison staff put in charge of her safety.

Nonetheless, the main legal story this week has been the furore about Roger Stone, the political consultant and lobbyist who had been one of the few people charged with something to come out of the Mueller report. The other people charged? The US taxpayer of course, they were charged tens of millions of dollars to pay for the investigation that ultimately showed the Trump 2016 campaign to have had about as much Russian Influence as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. The narrative woven by those against the President certainly turned out to be no less fictional than those in the Canterbury Tales and you can maybe imagine the Clerk or the Merchant inventing the story if the progressive left hadn’t already left to start a protest movement having heard some of earlier tales. I’m not sure if the Wife of Bath had a twitter account or not, I’m tempted to suggest “no” given that it was the 14th century but then publishers are quite keen to retroactively airbrush and change the past to suit today’s moral and ethical standards so who knows what the latest version contains.

Nonetheless, there remains two questions. Was he guilty and was President Trump wrong for commuting the sentance. The answer to the first part is simple enough: yes, he did lie to congress. He probably thought it was the done thing given the sort of people who worked there on a daily basis. Part two though is more subtle because the prosecution, trial and sentencing were about as fair as that game as the side of the road with the cups and balls where you lose whichever one you pick. The whole grift of prosecuting Roger Stone was more about justifying an investigation that contained less than one of Robert Maxwell’s pension plans. One key factor being that the jury was led by a foreperson who was a semi-professional anti-trump activist and democratic fundraiser. It’s also worth noting that President Trump didn’t actually pardon Stone, he simply commuted the sentence and that’s a subtle but important difference that is lost on the sort of people that think own an electric car because wielding a petrol pump reminds them of a gun. I could also list off the litany of other presidents who commuted sentences in the past, they all do it, an especially corrupt one being Bill Clinton who used his executive authority to get his brother off the hook. I guess it’s an executive power that Prince Andrew really wishes his mother employed.

Two major news stories to come out of America this week leaving president Trump happier than that time that he found a loophole saying he didn't have to hire any of the idiots on that tv show of his.

The first main story was the acquittal in the senate impeachment trial, much as that result was never in any doubt, I've seen romantic comedies with more twists and suspense, joking of course because I don't want those sorts of films. At no point did anyone expect Adam Schiff to turn around like Columbo, say "one more thing" and pull out a surprise cassette recording. There was no sign of Perry Mason with a partly crumpled photograph and Angela Lansbury from Murder She Wrote lives in Maine, not DC. To this day there has been no evidence provided to substantiate any of the claims made by the house democrats. Whilst it is true that no witnesses were called, that is equally in part due to the Democrats not being willing to cut a deal that would also have seen their people called to the stand, not least Jo Biden who went on camera a few years ago to boast about cutting aid to Ukraine in order to get a prosecutor fired, the same thing that President Trump was alleged to have done. The whole thing became politicised when the house insisted on closed door hearings with no public reporting so with partisan lines drawn down the middle any attempt to impeach the president was bound to fall apart faster than one of Prince Andrew's many elaborate excuses.

The second bit story this week was the Iowa Caucus, an event where the crowd of people wanting to run against the president hold a popularity content in Iowa. It's already contentious given that it's not very representative of the US demographics, it's a small rural state and it's lucky that the number of registered voters finally now outnumbers the number of candidates, given that the scores of potential contenders has finally narrowed down to half a dozen. Nonetheless, this year was an unmitigated disaster of epic and hilarious proportions as the smartphone app designed to count votes broke and still nobody knows what the result actually was. All of course claimed a victory and if the Democrats were trying to avoid accusations of political correctness gone mad, the vote resembled one of those primary school nonsense sports events where "everyone" is declared the winner. The person who came out of it best was probably Michael Bloomberg who chose to stay away and focus on the other upcoming poll in South Carolina. Nonetheless it made the party look about as professional and organised as one of those internet videos where people hold a fist-fight to see which of them will be the first to get inside the Wallmart. All part of the comedy of errors I suppose, after all they only have a few months to decide which of them will embarrassingly lose to the President in November

I thought this week we'd turn from Brexit to take a look at the President Trump impeachment story, at least until the new year. On the subject of the new year, one of the people I'm hoping to see recognised in the new year honours list is Jeremy Corbyn for services to the Conservative Party.

Anyway, the impeachment story, or saga, or mess, or as it will probably later be known: that time President Trump's opponents alienated enough people that they all but guaranteed his re-election. It's really a bit like if Keir Starmer had spent too much time on Facebook and later tried to win over the rest of the public by claiming that Boris Johnson flying a union jack constituted a hate crime and demanded he be arrested. How does the American system work though?

Under the US system, if the house of representatives have evidence of serious wrongdoing, then they can pass a motion for an impeachment trial to be held in the senate. Note that these are meant to be serious criminal things, it's only happened a handful of times in several hundred years but of course it's President Trump so if they could then his opponents would probably impeach him for stealing a pen from the doctors office or bumping the side of a vending machine.

And so for 2 years they've been trying to find some evidence but the Russia conspiracy didn't work out so they went for corruption, then bribery, then abuse of power, then obstructing Justice but they annoyingly they still didn't have a shred of evidence, and to make things worse President Trump released all the call transcripts of him and the Ukrainian president showing that everything was above board and no wrongdoing took place. But then the Democrats won a majority so they decided to go with it anyway and they've now told that Senate that they *have* to have that trial, at an unspecified time, in the next few months, as soon as they can find something, anything, to prove that he's guilty of something, other than winning that darned election 3 years ago.

It should be noted that this is also all being pushed by new congressmen who ran on an election pledge this year to impeach the president regardless of "evidence" and the whole thing makes about as much sense as inviting Peter Sutcliffe on as a Question Time guest. Labour's Brexit position made more sense then this impeachment proceeding and yet we're now going to see it steamroller everything in its path with more legal back and forth then if you tripped over a floor mat in a personal injury lawyer's office, "yeah son, let's see who's responsible for that accident now"

Beyond the fresh-faced new politicians, the older Democratic leadership to an extent also forced this through by a need for PR ahead of important fundraising for next year's election but it was astonishing to see the actual debate where both sides stood up in turn with someone announcing the crimes saying they'd vote yes, and the republicans saying they'd vote no because there wasn't any evidence of wrong-doing, just a will to get President Trump removed from office before he can be re-elected. That I think is the real point here: only politicians get to vote on the impeachment and the only way the Democrats can prevent a 2nd term is to keep the general public as far away from the decision making process as humanly possible.

Not sure if you've been to the cinema recently but whether it's the Avengers, Star Wars or Frozen II's upcoming release, sequels are all the rage. Which is why in America, the Democrats are keen to play to their base and make a sequel to the Muller Report with a wildcard and ultimately doomed to fail impeachment procedure. And as with Hobbs & Shaw, the 9th in that film trilogy, both are expected to be really really popular in California, but ultimately lacklustre and largely forgettable elsewhere.

So what is the accusation. Well a few months ago, President Trump had a phone call with the President of Ukraine and afterwards a whistleblower claimed that threats were made, there was corruption involved and that President Trump had exceeded his authority in threatening them. Which sounds a lot like a meeting between the Thomas Cook's board of directors and their bank. The house democrats pushed for a full release of everything. And in the end President Trump surprised many by declassifying the full transcript which reveals nothing took place, no threats were made, no money was promised in exchange for favours and the whole charade was for nothing. Except that it plays to the base and like a poker player that's gone all in they have to play this hand to the end because they've put everything on the line. And unlike the Ukrainian border during Obama's time in office, that's not a line that they're willing to give up on.

A lot of this also is down to the fact that the call mentioned investigating the link between a corrupt Ukrainian official and the son of Joe Biden, currently the leader in the race to face President Trump in 2020. This is someone that even the EU think is too corrupt to remain in office, the investigator that is. And maybe I've lost track of things but the last I heard, the US government was supposed to be on the lookout for Russian or Ukrainian influence in the 2020 election? They did after all just spend 2 years and $40m on the Muller investigation. An investigation that turned out to be about as eye opening as bright sunshine when you're hung over.

While the UK awaits the election results in the Prime Ministerial ballot, the Democrat party in America is also in the process of choosing a leader and the US, as always, is very keen to show that it does things differently, just as it spells things differently, uses different plug sockets and turns up to world wars towards the end of them rather than at the beginning.

This week saw a bombastic 4th of July celebration in Washington DC with stealth bombers, fighter jets, fireworks and a series of a awe-inspiring stories of military daring read out by the President in a speech that carefully straddled the legal definition of "non partisan" in the same way that a book on horoscopes call themselves "non-fiction." Most people know what's going on. Nonetheless, those wishing to face the president next year have to compete with one another to oppose everything he says, good or bad and so most went out to vilify the president for paying tribute to military veterans before going on television to express how they're the one best able to oppose America values and for a party that apparently opposes the 1% they're certainly coming up with policy stances that are only popular with 1% of the population; it makes them look like the sort of person who would visit a casino roulette wheel and bet everything on blue before being corrected, assuming the owners of being white supremacists and calling it a conspiracy run by Fox News.

A British equivalent would be if Jeremy Corbyn had only gone vegan in order to distance himself from bacon sandwich eating Ed Miliband but had then gone further and run on a platform of making non-veganism a criminal offence, oblivious to the fact that even the hardline Saudi police only execute people if they've been buying pork.

Recently there was a debate where most of the candidates raised their hand when asked whether illegal migrants should get access to free healthcare, many want to abolish the border with Mexico entirely, there are those from cities who want to ban cars in rural areas, folks from the sunny deep south but on the left who because they're from Florida think it's a good idea to ban central heating systems in Michigan and Nike were recently forced to remove a shoe from sale because it featured the original US flag, on the grounds of racism despite Betsy Ross, the flag's designer, being one of the founding members of the abolitionist movement.

It is a profoundly odd thing to see a party go so out of its way to alienate the public and choose a more unelectable leader. I mean at least Theresa May went to the effort of lying about being a centrist

This week President Trump visited the UK and then headed over to France for the D-Day commemorations, personally I'd have done it the other way around: stock up with wine at the lower French prices before going to the Queen's party - are you expected to bring a bottle when you show up at the palace? Who knows, maybe he'd already bought a 40oz bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label at Duty Free when he was at the airport.

Back to the news, President Trump flew into London for the first part of his trip where the first order of business was to wind up the protestors by popping into a petrol station with his Cadillac which weighs over 6 tons and goes through petrol at an equivalent rate to an oil refinery that's caught fire, that should certainly have annoyed them. He met with the Queen, unquestionably one of the world's most respected stateswomen, as well as Theresa May, who's unlikely to represent Britain overseas in any capacity again unless she goes on I'm A Celebrity in a couple of years. Nobody really knows what chit-chat went on at the state banquet although given that she's going to be kicked out of her house in a little while from now, perhaps she asked him for property advice, given how that's his field of expertise. President Trump is go good at property, he even became a billionaire by losing money!

After the trip to Buckingham Palace, it was on to the south coast, the English Channel and then France for the 75th anniversary D-Day commemorations. It's good to see everyone paying their respects; this weekend for instance it's the UEFA Nations League, Portugal v Netherlands - in other words, none Germany's big guns! A poignant ceremony in France though, I vividly remember during the 50 year commemorations, watching the elderly WW1 veterans and realising that one day soon they would all be gone and the tens of thousands of WW2 veterans would similarly be reduced to just a handful, and so it has come to be. One day in the far and distant future I'll likely open a Sunday newspaper and read an interview with the last living survivor of the Falklands war, before turning to an Editorial about why Vladimir Putin's brain, kept alive in a in a glass jar, shouldn't be allowed to continue running for president in Russia. Oh well, more on that story in a few decades.

The US trade war escalated this week as President Trump announced a new 5% trade tariff on Mexico. It's 5% on everything coming over the border and that rate is primed to go up faster than Boris Johnson's upcoming legal bill with analysts saying it could quickly ramp to 10%, 20%, 40% maybe. Very much like when I'm making margaritas.

The US-Mexico tariffs: ostensively it's to do with immigration and paying for a border wall, in reality it's likely got a lot to do with diverting the news from the Chinese trade war which has been getting perilously close to the bit where newsreaders start to discuss inescapable supply chains and it starts to make it look like it may be a worse deal for consumers than that time that Samsung tried selling $2k foldable phones that broke when you folded them. Mexico however, its largest exports to the US are vehicles and machinery, most of which is from US owned companies who outsourced 10-20 years ago, so the emphasis is really on relocating those manufacturing jobs back to the US. Although given how corrupt the system is, it could equally just be that the grain whisky producers want to destroy the tequila market in much the way that they destroyed my memory of last Sunday afternoon.

If I were in charge, I'd avoid all this and get rid of the tax deductiosn companies receive when they outsource. Whatever happens though, a lot of this is being done with zero oversight and perhaps it might work out well in the end but it seems like there's a lot on the line here. It's like writing me a large cheque to come to a party as a balloon modeller, and I've guaranteed I can make animals, but then on the day it turns out that all I know how to make are snakes, balloon snakes. And I've already cashed the cheque and spent the money on a new wall by now and some gin, because that isn't subject to the aforementioned import tariffs.

Sometimes discussions about economics are nuanced and complex, just imagine the difficulty trying of trying to discuss the fishing industry’s net worth or the construction industry’s aggregate demand. Sometimes they say the point of studying PPE (politics philosophy and economics) is that at least when you’re unemployed you’ll be able to discuss in depth the reasons why.

Well the world of economics is back in the news now with President Trump proceeding with a wide range of import tariffs on Chinese products. Friday saw the level of existing tariffs rise from 10 to 25% and Saturday saw the tariffs imposed on all remaining imports, not just those previously announced. For consumers, it will be a bit like when the health inspector forces your Chinese takeaway to close, or at least stop serving seafood, and when it reopens a few weeks later the old owner’s brother has raised the prices. Except in this case the money will go straight to the government and you won’t get any fortune cookies for filing a tax return on a regular basis.

In terms of impact, some manufacturing will return to the US, though other industries with complex logistics chains will have no alternative but to pass on the costs and continue buying from overseas, at least for years to come. A tax rise for all intents and purposes, equivalent to a 10% sales tax by the time the goods are being paid for at the checkout. I say checkout, even with 10% price increases, it's still better than having your online purchases stolen from your doorstep, although if you're trying to get rid of an old mattress or broken television and the council are wanting a week's wages to remove it, why not put it in an amazon box and let the thieves do it for free?

Anyway, the tariffs, they're expected to bring in anywhere from $100-300bn at a time when the budget could do with some balancing. Bizarrely though, those on the left who are calling for higher taxes are the first to criticise these taxes because of course they would, anything the President does must be wrong. In many respects, if President Trump wants to leave a long lasting legacy, then he should make sure that when he leaves office he writes a book demanding action on climate change, gender rights and an open border policy, thus making every last one of them toxic for any left wing politician to advocate for.

It’s been a busy week, asides from Brexit one of the big stories was the announcement that ISIS had finally been defeated, which is similar in concept to when their shoplifters were de-handed on many an occasion.

But the big story of the week was the completion of the Mueller Report which revealed that, drumroll please… Revealed that the past 2 years have been a complete waste of everyone’s time. It makes Theresa May’s 2 years in Brussels seem fairly productive in comparison; at least she achieved the goal of racking up enough airline points that she’ll be able to upgrade to first class long after she’s kicked out of politics.

The lack of any damning conclusions hasn’t exactly gone down terribly well with President Trump’s detractors though, it's been a mix of glass half full, glass half empty and glass being smashed against the wall at the realisation that the president won, not because of a rigged election but because Hilary Clinton was a profoundly unpopular candidate. The conclusion of the report's findings is a bit like when people lobbied for the sequel for To Kill A Mockingbird to be released by Harper Lee’s publishers, and then the academic left went nuts when it turned out that Atticus Finch the lead character from the first book turned out to be quite racist in the second one. This whole investigation has been like the Hitler Diaries nonsense, or when they opened Al Capone's Vault which turned out to have been empty all along.

But here we are, nearly 2 years after Mueller was named to oversee the investigation into obstruction of justice, collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, plus anything else he wanted to really, I wouldn’t be surprised if the report contains a section determining whether the movie From Russia With Love is better than the original Ian Flemming novel? All we know is that President Trump, contrary to popular belief, was not scheming with the Kremlin. He was surrounded by scoundrels and his hangers on were about as trustworthy than a Scottish football coach who assures fans that they’ll win the world cup this time around. For now though, I’d recommend pouring a glass of something and sitting back while the Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 tear themselves apart over the disconnect between the narrative and the facts.

With Theresa May continuing to run down the clock, let's take a look at America where a government shutdown has been going on for several weeks, long enough that even drum soloists have started to look at their watches and question how much longer it has to go.

Normally budget disputes are solved by both sides coming together and agreeing to get the next year funded on the condition that certain additional chunks of money are set aside for wasteful but politically important job creation schemes. Most famously was when Alaska Senator Ted Stevens became very cooperative after persuading congress to set aside an extra $223m to construct a bridge to Gravina Island which was home to 50 Alaska residents.

This time around however, President Trump has demanded $5bn dollars are set aside to build part of the wall with Mexico and the Democrats have said that there's about as much chance of that happening as there is of Disney building a theme park based on the Human Centipede franchise.

Things have descended fairly quickly with the president refusing to allow house speaker Nancy Pelosi to use a military vehicle to travel abroad and adding that she should perhaps fly commercial out of her own pocket, especially galling given that unlike the president she doesn't own a jet of her own, never mind one with her name written down the side in huge lettering in case she forgets where she left it.

For now, things don't appear to be going anywhere and the president has said that the shutdown could last for months or years, like that half-used jar of dill everyone has sitting in the spice rack, years after the Oregano long since went.

I digress. For now the distraction of the moment is talk of a new round of negotiations with North Korea, an autocracy where I imagine the population pray every day for a government shutdown. And who says the Americans don't do irony?

Happy new year, it's 2019. I imagine that if you asked Diane Abbott what 17 plus 1 is she'd reply, 20(or)019. This is also (finally) the year that science fiction film Blade Runner is set in so while we count down to Elon Musk selling us tickets to the off-world colonies, let's maybe take a look at what the next few months have in store down here on earth,

First to America where a new house of representatives have just taken their seats and promised to pass all sorts of crazy laws for the senate to of course veto and vote down a few days later. I was going to make an analogy about the Democrats having a shiny new car but no petrol to put in it, except you could still use a broken car to store stuff inside, this is really more like one of those fake bookshelves you see in a pub. The US government will be like Michael Schummacher's race car in so much as it is not going to be doing or passing anything for a very long time. President Trump has even said as much, pledging to keep the current budget showdown and government shutdown going for months and even years if necessary, probably because the 2020 electioneering is going to kick into gear soon and he'll be busy on the campaign trail because elections in the US last longer than a Rolling Stones farewell tour.

In the UK, we are 80s or so days until Brexit happens. Thereafter Theresa May can finally leave, the Conservatives can break into civil war over the succession and the Labour Party can be relied on to stand to the side, arguing about anti-semitism instead or whether anyone finally figured out what the 'single market' was. The singe market, wasn't that the thing that Lembit Opik used to talk about? I guess the antisemitism thing will be a recurring story later in the year so I won't dwell on it and I'm not saying they're naive but I can imagine Corbyn and Ken Livingstone trying to recognise Jewish Labour MPs by emulating school teachers and handing out congratulatory gold stars, just like primary school teachers in 1930s Germany, before of course blaming a combination of the BBC and Paul Dacre, who I thought actually stood down as editor of the Daily Mail last year

Where will it all end up and where will we be next year? Well I don't know do I, I've not got 2020-vision, geddit?

It's a very exciting couple of days coming up in America. Asides from a National Sandwich Day and National Donut Day fast approaching it's also a massive mid-term election on Tuesday. I looked on Google and apparently Sunday 4th is actually "National Common Sense Day" but rest assured, that will all be forgotten when people on both the right and the left go to the polls to vote in a 2 party system where a brutal combination of districting, voter suppression and an electoral system about as honest as Piers Morgan mean that, in the end, everything will most likely be decided upon the votes of just a handful of people. Which if it sounds familiar is because it is. In the UK it's the same method as how Arlene Foster decides (on a day-to-day basis) whether Theresa May can remain in power or not.

My favourite expression in politics is "The tyranny of the status quo" and for all the talk of blue waves and millennial voters, I really don't think anything major is going to happen. Elections are always decided by swing voters, so really this mid-term comes down to the question of whether anyone's changed what's left of their mind since 2016. If, for instance, you're a Democrat voter, you should reflect back on whether you've used charm and persuasion to convince some Trump voters to switch sides this time around. I imagine that entrenched voters are as likely to switch sides as I am to order a vegetarian roast when I visit a pub. Do not be mistaken, this election will completely be decided by who gets closest to 100% of their core voters to turn out to vote.

The thing is that outside the voter bases, a lot of people really don't really care about the Mexican border or transgender rights in schools, although they do care about potholes and whether their schools have working air conditioning. America might now have an official 3rd party but it does have "don't know don't care" and it's a lot bigger than people - on both sides - are willing to admit. There's probably a lesson for other countries in there too.

I tell you what I don't trust: stairs, because they're always up to something. But talking of not trusting people, President Trump woke up this week to discover that one of his loyal inner circle had anonymously written a column in the New York Times that was the editorial equivalent of Gordon Ramsey going berserk in a badly run kitchen. This came just one day after scathing excerpts were published from yet another anti-Trump book, this one written by Bob Woodward who was of course famous for reporting on the Watergate scandal which also prominently featured a hotel.

So who wrote it this editorial? Suspect number one is vice president Mike Pence, who would inherit the oval office were Mr Trump to be ousted. Pence has in the past repeatedly said that he has no ambitions to run for the presidency in 2020 although at the same time he never formally ruled out making a move for it in 2018.

Also in the lineup are Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo, James Mattis, Dan Coats, Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein and of course Colonel Mustard with the candelabra in the billiard room. Or for a more American translation of that, Sergeant Tabasco with the flashlight in the den. Because right now all anyone can do is make silly guesses; there isn't any evidence to go by other than some analysis of words and sentence structure that makes palm reading look like quantum mechanics and Mystic Meg look like Marie Curie. You may as well have a go at guessing who the next Dr Who will be, except that in this case it's all white men over the age of 50 so no luck there.

Finally two other stories this week: Boris Johnson he's been so keen practice Brexit that he's done a trial run by splitting from his wife, he's apparently drafting up a divorce agreement that gives him full access to the wife, not having to hand over any money ever, and a conditional clause allowing him to share any subsequent girlfriends with Nigel Farage, but definitely not Michael 'Judas' Gove.

Also, car chase film star Burt Reynolds passed away this week. My favourite film of his was that one with the French car factory exploding into flames, oh wait not, that's Burnt Renaults I'm thinking of.

America has given us baseball, jazz and just as importantly (and depressingly) a culture in which top lawyers are treated like Babe Ruth and Louis Armstrong rolled into one and this past week saw more legal drama than a whole series of Perry Mason as the investigation into the 2016 election cracked up a notch.

Paul Manafort, the president's campaign chairman was found guilty on 8 counts consisting of tax fraud, bank fraud, hiding foreign bank accounts, and now faces 240 years in jail. That's a long time to be in prison, though if he uses some sort of magic sorcery to remain alive then all that money he's hidden overseas will np doubt have accrued enough interest for him to return more powerful than ever, no doubt to help participate in an election where one of the candidates is Hilary Clinton's brain in a glass jar, trying for one last shot at the Oval Office.

Joining him in prison will most likely be Michael Cohen, Mr Trump's personal lawyer, who pleaded guilty on Tuesday to eight criminal charges, including tax evasion, bank fraud, campaign finance violations as well as possibly worse of all, having made Stormy Daniels into a media celebrity, like a somehow more downmarket version of Katie Price. I was about to say Kardashian there, which would be somewhat ironic because the Kardashians father was actually the lawyer who defended OJ Simpson in the trial of last century. Anyway, he's hoping for lenient sentencing for being corporative so it might be 60 years, it might be 3 years, same sort of time frame as when you get locked into a bad phone contract.

Other faces now showing up on the news include David Pecker, head of the company that publishes the Trump favourite National Enquirer as well as Allen Weisselberg, The Trump Organization's finance boss, both of whom this week were granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperating with Robert Mueller's office. Presumably the part of the office where Robert himself is sitting. Sitting I'm guessing and wondering to himself where all the Russian hackers are and why it's all just financial crimes. If it is a witch hunt then I guess it's one in which the witches get burnt at the stake for not paying capital gains after turning the lead into gold.

This week saw the loss of music legend Aretha Franklin after her final major hit turned out to be morphine. I imagine that she's up there singing, RESPECT while recently deceased Barry Chuckle follows the line "you know what it means to me" with "means to you" Aretha passed away on the 16th which was also the same date that Elvis died and the same date that Pete Best was kicked out of the Beatles, thus loosing out on a lot of money, but at the same time avoiding having to ever spend time with Yoko Ono. Anyway, a great loss to the world of music and so I decided to listen to some Aretha as I drew the cartoon this week, as did my neighbours next door, partly because they too like her music but mostly because I happen to have an insanely loud stereo system and it would be a great shame not to use it once in a while. Lord help the folks down the road when Jimmy Page passes away.

Anyway, once person who came out to pay their regards was President Trump who commented on the business dealings he'd had with her in the days when he was involved in the entertainment industry. I half expected him to follow it up by trying to reach across the racial divide by saying that some of his favourite vinyl records were black. But by that point people were starting to talk about Paul Manaford's trial so the discussion was quickly shifted to that of the much talked about military parade in Washington DC.

The idea for a parade was apparently inspired by a French one through Paris that the president saw. I'm going to be honest, when I think about military forces marching through the streets of Paris, it's not necessarily French troops that spring to mind but Mr Trump insists that the footage was in colour so let's give him the benefit of the doubt. The current estimated bill is $90m which is lot, but it has been nearly 30 years since the last military parade in DC. Anyway, it's now been postponed for a year, officially due to reasons of cost. Unofficially of course though, 2019 would be a better year for it anyway: the 18-month long US election cycle will be kicking into gear then and the president, unable to rely on a despised opponent this time around, might need a jingoistic crowdpleaser to get the country behind him, especially if he can hand the invoice over for congress to deal with.

Two stories this week and just like spellings of the word Colour, one is from the UK and one from America.

Let's first talk about Boris Johnson was embroiled in a row after making comments about women wearing the Burka resembling a postbox, a row possibly inspired by the thought that the next tory leadership election will involve sending out thousands of postal ballots to the party faithful. The comment or joke or hate speech or leadership stump, depending how you view it, attracted support from Mr Bean actor Rowan Atkinson in The Times as well as The Guardian who published the same joke in an opinion piece several years ago, oh wait no, they came out on the side of political correctness this time, rather than feminism. If you want my take on it it's pretty simple to tell the burka and a post box apart: one is for first and second class mail, the other is for second class females across most of the Arab world. There's 200m women out there by the way if anyone wants to take a break from discussing gender pay differences at the BBC to focus on something more substantive.

Next to America though where Donald Trump, satisfied with the progress of his trade war with China decided to expand the scope of his presidential vision by announcing a new Space Force. The move came as a blow to toy manufacturers who've used names like Space Force along with Star Battles or Transformingers to sell knock off 3rd party rubbish to kids down the market. The kind of toy manufacturers who back in the 80s would have sold you a Back To The Future toy that where the DeLorean looked suspiciously like a grey Ford Granada from another toy set. Anyway, back to the Space Force, there's currently a 'choose your favourite logo' website which - this being America - of course leads onto a political donations webpage because frankly the President's 2020 campaign will likely cost more than the actual Space Force will. Alas for most of the fun science fiction imagery, the new branch of the military will most likely be responsible for cataloging boring things like the position of spy satellites and the like. If it does resemble Star Trek in any way, it'll be more like when the fans are arguing about plotholes in intricate detail from their mother's basement. But then I'm more of a Battlestar Gallactica fan myself anyway.

This week started off with a press conference between President Trump and Vladimir Putin in which Mr Trump fully exonerated the Russian president before saying that he in fact meant to say the opposite. Just like when Theresa May claimed that Brexit meant Brexit.

Since then, there's been talk about Vladimir Putin visiting the US, ideas thrown around about exchanging people for "questioning" and right now Sylvester Stallone is finishing up the 8th instalment in the Rocky franchise so maybe he'll make another film where he takes on the Russians again, either in a boxing ring, or like that one in Afghanistan with the mujahideen. There was a lot of horses in that one and Vladimir does like him some horses, I wonder if Sarah Jessica Parker is free?

Curiously, Mr Putin offered up the 12 Russian intelligence agents (who were recently indicted) in exchange for human rights activist Bill Browder who they wish to question. No doubt questions like "does this rag cloth smell like chloroform to you?" Or perhaps it'll be like that time that John Wilkes Booth asked President Lincoln to be quiet during the show.

Bill Browder for those out the know is a human rights advocate who was responsible for the Magnitsky act which froze Russian assets in the US. His lawyer and accountant was killed by the Kremlin for exposing a $230m tax fraud involving Russian officials and his chances of getting a fair trial are slimmer than the malnourished prisoners he'd be living with, were he to end up going overseas.

In the mean time though, all the Trump focus has since moved on, to a story about secret payments to an former Playboy model. The president did also just make some comments about taxing half a trillion dollars worth of Chinese imports, sounds pretty serious, but nowhere near as salacious so, nowadays at least, who cares.

Lots of Theresa May news week. I don't think there's been this much activity at Westminster since that time Cyrill Smith discovered it was possible to clear his internet search history. Over last 7 days, MPs had had a bit of time to read the details of the Brexit paper that Theresa May put out last weekend and was about as popular as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip

David Davis resigned, as did Boris Johnson along with a number of lesser known ministers and it's currently a case of seeing whether enough Conservative backbenchers (or front benchers) will get round to writing letters to the 1922 committee to trigger a no-confidence vote in the Prime Minister. Curiously, the number needed is 48 and 48 BC was when Pompey was assassinated and I'm rather surprised that Boris didn't make a reference to that, classicist that he is. Nonetheless, Theresa's hoping that it's too late for anything other than her plan. I wonder if her and her husband act like that at home? I can imagine them sitting down to see Star Wars but then Mamma Mia starts to play and she points out that they've already paid for the tickets so they may as well just watch the remainder of it, regardless of what his views are on the subject.

Then just when things were starting to settle down, President Trump made his visit to the UK and a whole bunch of people decided to protest, although it was a weekday and if none of them had jobs to go to then I suppose it was something to keep them occupied at least. I just checked and Weatherpoons' share price ended 8p down at the end of trading, tells you a lot really. There was discussions about the trade war escalation with China, there was talk about the US pulling troops out of NATO countries and there was also talk about Stormy Daniels being dragged out of a bar in Ohio after the President's former companion was arrested.

In the end though, very little has changed since this time last week. It's like a sitcom where things happen and everything resets for next week's episode. Except Boris is no longer in a job so I suppose it's much more like President Trump's episodes of The Apprentice.

Wow, summer's here and it is hot out there, call me Sylvia Plath, because it feels like my head's in an oven. But with spring gone it's not just the weather losing it's cool, the internet is all up in arms because Donald Trump is going to be electing a new judge to the US Supreme Court.

Justice Anthony Kennedy is stepping down after several decades on the bench, although at 81 years old who can blame him. When I'm that age the only bench I'd want to be on would be in a nice park somewhere. I say "who can blame him" but apparently the answer is: any self righteous person with a twitter account, a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker and a shade of narcissism, but it's the internet, narcissism goes without saying. Anyway what now, perhaps the judicial system has a method for appointing his successor or there's a formal electoral system honed over centuries of legal development? Not quite, this is much more like the process for electing people to the house of lords or FIFA or the EU commission, namely it's up to the whims and fancy of whoever's currently in office. It's like when the management at work change what type of tea and coffee are going to be in the breakout area. And much like that large box of weird herbal tea in that kitchen, the new supreme court justice is going to be hanging around for decades to come.

With a majority in both the congress and senate, the President can put in pretty much anyone he likes which is either a bad thing or a good thing, depending on your political persuasion, and whilst the president does admittedly have a large knowledge and history of how courtrooms work, it is mostly limited to civil actions like defamation, trademark infringement and bankruptcy proceedings. Therefore we're likely to see someone from a list of party approved names being parachuted in.

The thing with the supreme court though is that they don't actually make the law, all they do is establish what badly written or ambiguous laws mean. If you don't like their interpretation of something, pass a new law or a constitutional amendment to fix it in writing. If you don't have the seats to do that then try to win some more of them. Ultimately, the supreme court is but one part of the US government and if you're on the left and you don't control any of the other parts, you can hardly complain at this stage about not being able to put your ideas put into practice.

Still lots of football going on out there with more passes than Diane Abbott on Mastermind. But elsewhere, this week saw the US involved in what was either described as mass human rights abuses on the Mexican border, or the culmination of decades of mismanagement when it comes to immigration. President Trump was keen to stress that this was actually the continuation of an Obama-era policy which only made the situation more confusing really, what would possess the president to actually embrace one of Obama's policies?

To do some fact-checking though, president Obama did oversea the deportation of over 2m migrants just as he did a lot of other things that people don't like to remember like when he wasn't relaxing quite a few gun laws in between shooting basketball hoops and of course shooting people from the air with drones all across the Middle East. Nonetheless, we live in a social media age and families (illegal migrants or not) locked up in cages don't play terribly well in an election year. Also, it is worth noting that president Trump got elected largely because of his unwillingness to put the dreams and wishes of illegal migrants ahead of those who already live in impoverished parts of the US.

Nonetheless, the United Nations human rights watch stepped up to condemn the US. This of course is the same human rights council that's headed up by Saudi Arabia which always seemed strange: a bit like making Richard Dawkins the pope or asking Gordon Brown to look after your money. Up until now the Saudi's have mostly used their position of power to line their pockets or occasionally put out a press release about Rohingya Muslims being persecuted in Burma. But then they also started criticising Isreal's behaviour in the West bank and now they're bashing the US itself so I guess it's time for Washington to call for fresh elections, by which I mean presumably give the role to the highest bidder, just as long as it's not Russia, or Saudi Arabia again (unless they've learnt their lesson)

The world cup has kicked off, or at least the ball has been kicked, the cup itself remains safely in the cabinet, much like David Davis in spite of his threats to the contrary. The football tournament though, that's being held in Russia over the next couple of weeks. If you're an England fan it's not long to wait until that moment when they fail to win and Gareth Southgate is forced to inevitably resign over his sole responsibility for England failing to be the best team in the entire world, no doubt accompanies by tabloid headlines about the team being Putin their place. Mind you, I keep saying world but the USA aren't in the tournament, nor are the Italians, the Dutch or Chile, China, India. Scotland haven't even qualified for the tournament since France 98, although I guess that at least shows a strong level of consistency, something that many teams, notably England, lack.

Anyway, if football's your thing then all your top footballing stars are there on the telly for you to gaze at. But back to the world of politics, it's not just Luis Suarez who's biting off more than he can chew. Today saw the news that the US is going ahead and imposing tariffs of 25% on Chinese exports accusing Beijing of intellectual copyright theft. In retaliation the Chinese said they'd do likewise with anti-US rate increases of 25%.

For something going down in price though, compare and contrast to the Labour Party's Jezfest music+politics festival this weekend where ticket prices have been slashed by around 70% after people discovered you could apply for free ones if you asked nicely. For once I actually agree with some of the socialists on this one: they're complaining and saying that it's not right for some people to just get given things for free when others have had to work to pay for them.

Anyway, for now I've got some money down on Germany to win the world cup and no money down for the north London socialism festival if either of those things are of interest then enjoy the weekend.

This weekend Canada hosted the G7 conference, a political get-together with a level of expectation and excitement akin to watching the numbers on a microwave ticking down before your substandard dinner. These meetings are supposedly meant to help the worlds biggest economies sort out ideas, which is no doubt why they don't invite China or India to the big economies get-together. To add insult to injury, Germany gets invited twice, once as itself and once as its puppet the EU.

President Trump was first out of the blocks to get on the headlines, raising the question of why Russia wasn't at the summit. That was one of those G7 "thing's you're not supposed to ask" questions, he may as well been asking if a waitress was single or quizzing Theresa May with a series of questions predicated with the expression "never have I ever" with Emmanuel Macron standing by to pour a line of Sambuka shots.

Frankly it's a sound point though, unless you invite Russia to the table, any discussion to do with Asia, the Middle East, Energy or banking is essentially null and void. As worthless mind as all the other platitudes that will no doubt be given out across an expensively laden Canadian banqueting table, all as part of the grand game of distraction from the news back home.

This week Theresa May would have probably travelled to anywhere to escape the mess back at Westminster. There were threatened resignations over her inability to act decisively on Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn even outplayed her at Prime Ministers Questions. I imagine he probably celebrated by buying himself a new hedgerow to drag himself through for next week's back-to-normal disheveled appearance.

Theresa claims or believes that she has enough supporters to get by as is. Except the Flat Earth society claims to have supporters all over the globe and you can probably see a logical contradiction in that one too...

This week I thought I'd do a quick roundup of some of the various news stories from around the world. Like a Chinese buffet of news, except of course with less cat meat.

In America President Trump decided to implement a series of import tariffs on steel and aluminium which may or may not be illegal although I imagine that if it does go to court then the devil will be in the detail and the lawyers will probably spent most of the time arguing about whether the metal is spelled aluminium or aluminum. I said the devil would be in the detail, correction, the devil will be in a suit and be billing his client hundreds per hour.

In Korea, they're edging ever closer to that Peace Summit and I suppose that there's a fear/expectation that if they don't finally sort things out then President Trump might come down on them hard with an iron fist. Even if that iron fist would first have to likely pay a 20% export tariff thanks to the previous story.

Italy has new leadership this week after the Five Star Movement & the League (the winners in Italy’s recent general election) finally succeeded in their second attempt in putting together a coalition deal. To the losers I'd say don't worry, elections in Italy are like London busses. Or perhaps to use a more Italian analogy, they're like young ladies at Silvio Berlesconi's house, specifically there's an inappropriate number of them.

Spain also has a new ruler, there's was a change of leadership after King Felipe ousted the old prime minister following a corruption scandal and put Pedro Sanchez in charge of the country. I saw a picture of them in the newspaper with a caption underneath saying that Mr Sanchez was to the King's left, which kind of goes without saying really, he's a Spanish socialist he's probably to everyone's left.

In the UK the Daily Mail's celebrity sidebar has spilled over onto the news section with dozens of photographs from the Epsom Derby. In amongst the hats and the shoes, there's the Queen, celebrities like Liz Hurley and if you like both the queen AND celebrities, Helen Mirren's there too. I always feel it's a real shame that in spite of all the hats, the Queen never wears her big golden crown hat to the races. Mind you, maybe palace officials hide it in case she gets ideas about handing it over to a bookmaker.

Breaking news as the Korean Peninsula might be prepared to break out into all-out full-scale peace. Recently a book fell on my head and I only had my shelf to blame, but the the blame for the inability to agree to a peace deal for the past 60 years? Well that's long and complicated and largely above the pay grade of our current generation of politicians. Most recently, President Trump has been keen to sort out a peace deal as a grand plot twist to his real life reality tv series. Actually, when it comes to President Trump and Kim Jong Un there's more of a "will they won't they?" thing akin to Ross and Rachael from Friends. A show that was presumably syndicated in Pyongyang under the title "Our Enemies"

Anyway, "what's been going on?" you ask. Well a few weeks back Kim said that he was ready to denuclearize and give peace a chance, then after everyone agreed it emerged that his nuclear site had blown itself up and that was why he was suddenly coming to the table. Then both Mike Pence and John Bolton mentioned Lybia and even people with as little knowledge of the outside world as North Korea are aware that after Lybia gave up its weapons, the Americans organised for Colonel Gaddafi to be executed as part of a populist uprising.

Going back to that tv show analogy, it's a bit like if Trump made jokey references The Walking Dead or if Kim asked President Trump if he enjoyed that House Of Cards episode where Kevin Spacey is shot.

Where are we now then? Well North Korea is no longer a proper threat and they'd quite like to go back to where they were a few years ago, with access to oil and food and medicine. South Korea would probably quite like access to some of the North's slave labour manufacturing and logging production so with any luck the situation will revert to where it was 30 years ago, when America still had a popular screen entertainer as president.

This week the UK saw an assault of royal commemorative plates being launched with Kate giving birth to another child and Prince Charles cracking open a tincture of homeopathic champagne to celebrate. The baby weighed just over 8 pounds making it just slightly heavier than the special commemorative supplement you'll be removing from this week's Sunday paper; I guess it's up to you whether you use it for lighting the barbecue or stash it away in a cupboard as an investment, it could potentially triple in value and be worth more than a fiver in years to come.

Prince William was very excited to announce the new heir, although later a palace official sat down with him and explained that the doctor had sad new "heir" - not hair "hair" - and that he should just embrace the bald look. Come on William, it doesn't matter how much you try to look like Bobby Charlton, it's still not going to help England get past the World Cup's group stages.

Talking about crazy haircuts though, this week has saw President Trump busy as always. He arranged a visit to the UK scheduled for July, he phoned into Fox & Friends and invited his french pen-pal Emmanual Macron over to play. Those letters presumably go along the line of J'habite dans le White House, chest terrific. Macron actually has pretty respectable hair so Trump made a point of supposedly brushing alleged dandruff from his shoulder during a press conference. Later Melania was sporting a eye-raising white chapeau hat and Kanye West managed to anger 10 million twitter followers after posting a picture of his Make America Great Again Trump baseball cap, It was all rather strange. In the middle of it all, Emmanual Macron made a speech about globalism and Iran although given France's recent track record with the middle east and islamic extremists, he would perhaps be better trying to focus his efforts on gastronomy and convincing President Trump to not add Ketchup to a New York strip steak.

One of the problems with Syria is that we can either let President Assad remain in charge or we can force him out and let ISIS fill the power vacuum. It's like in the Star Wars prequels when Liam Neeson helped destroy that droid army but then he died and Jar-Jar Binks became a senator.

Maybe we could force Assad out and have an election in Syria, and the Russians definitely won't try to rig it with the hundreds of personal they have all over the country. If you've ever been to a carnival and watched a stallholder superglueing coconuts to the stands before opening for for business, that's basically an analogy for how Vladimir Putin would organize a free and fair Syrian election.

Nonetheless, this week saw the US, UK and France begin a bombing campaign, supposedly in retaliation to a chemical weapons attack but largely because there's lots of domestic problems at home and they all need a distraction. In the US former FBI director James Comes has been doing the rounds, with a primetime Sunday interview and presumably and appearance on an episode of Sesame Street brought to you by the letter "P"

In the UK, Theresa May always needs something new to keep people occupied when Brexit threatens to make its way onto the news agenda, and in France there'a a big walkout by the SNCF rail workers so they're distracting from a rail strike with a missile strike.

In reality the whole Syrian fight actually comes down to two rival plans to bring oil and gas into Europe via Syria, one American and one Russian. Unless you're a Momentum supporter in which case it's about Israel because of course ISIS are run by Mossad, Rupert Murdoch is personally in charge of dictating UK military policy and the Rothschilds were responsible for Ed Sheeran.

It had been a while since President Trump fired anyone and that's supposed to be his catchphrase after all so this week he decided to get rid of Rex "Texan Exec" Tillerson. The whole thing has been widely described as "unprecedented" in so much has the former oil executive managed to stay in the role for over a year before being shown the door but the two never got on. That seemed a shame really as with Rex's petrochemical background and Trump's famously shoddy regard for building contractors, the pair could easily have literally gotten on like a house on fire.

I always imagined that Rex saw the whole job as a networking opportunity until oil giant Saudi Aramco finally organised it's New York share listing and offered him a job there but that's all supposedly been delayed until 2019 now so he decided to stop with the niceties. I say "niceties" - he allegedly called the president a "F*****g moron" during a discussion last summer about whether the US should instigate a nuclear war or not. We've all been there I suppose, you're in a brainstorming meeting at work where there's 'no bad ideas' and then someone suggests doubling ICBM capacity and all of a sudden HR gets involved and someone's asked to leave.

Anyway, for now at least it'll likely all blow over when HR McMaster leaves, as is rumored to be happening in the next week or two. I should maybe have added a spoiler alert there but maybe some of the viewers have already read the book anyway and actually no, that's Game of Thrones I'm thinking of there sorry. For now though, Trump has appointed CIA Director Mike Pompeo to the secretary of state job and so the game continues. I'm sure Vladimir Putin will be quaking in his boots, boots that many suspect contain a concealed knife like in that James Bond film.

Finally, talking of people departing there was a bit of unfortunate science news this week as Stephen Hawking passed away. I'd like to imagine that when asked, Jeremy Corbyn would have responded by paying tributes to "The Greatest Mind of our time" before adding "and Diane Abbott will be a great Home Secretary" before admitting to having not read the news that morning.

Big news in the world of diplomacy, bigger than Kim Jong Un's waistline even. It was announced that President Trump and Kim Jong Un are going to be meeting in person. This marks a big shift in diplomacy from both the North Koreans as well as the president who has spent the past year or so conducting international affairs via Twitter with all the dexterity of a drugged horse

The meeting itself could be a set-piece historic event like the Yalta Conference in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt met with Stalin, or that time that Ronald Reagan met with Humphrey Bogart oh actually no wait that was when he was still an actor. Anyway, it's a first date of sorts though so perhaps the president will decline the usual offers from CNN or the BBC and get one of the reality show networks like Bravo to cover the event. If things go badly then it would certainly be better for everyone if it ended up with one of them throwing a glass of wine across the table, as compared to launching an thermonuclear strike.

If we're not comparing Trump to FDR then who? Kennedy dealt with the Cuban Missile Crisis and certainly Mr Trump wants to be perceived as a similarly new modern kind of president like Kennedy: a media savvy change from a presidential style of old. I don't know if Stormy Daniels a new albeit trashier version of Marilyn Monroe although certainly it wouldn't surprise many people if the the CIA turned out to already be looking to hire a "lone gunman"

In more cold-war-style news, the Russians have been busy too: Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapsed last weekend in Salisbury after being exposed to a nerve agent. There's 180 military investigators although obviously at the moment then anyone could be to blame (innocent until proven guilty after all!) which is presumably why the newspapers have to use the term "nerve agent" rather than "Russian agent" but the backstory is that in 2006 the former Russian military security colonel was convicted by the Russian government of passing secrets to MI6 and in 2010 he was then offered asylum in the UK. It sounds very hospitable for the British government really to do that although you have to remember that back then the government were dishing out passports and visas like confetti at a ticker tape parade. Anyway, the government never lies and you can definitely always trust what the spy agencies tell us so I suspect that we won't find out the real truth until things eventually get declassified in 50 years time. For now though, if you're a Russian dissident who's been passing on state secrets then try and stay safe!

Normally when there's a "Russia update" it's means bad news, just ask Napoleon. It's often the one of worst kind of updates you can get, just short of that update that pops up on your computer constantly demanding that you upgrade Adobe Flash.

So to this week's Russia update when Robert Mueller put out a report naming 13 Russians who supposedly set up a troll farm in order to sway the result of the 2016 election. My favourite part of the report was when it talks about the Russians financing the construction of a cage large enough to hold an actress portraying Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform. It makes it sound like an amateur theatre group but they actually had a budget of a million dollars a month and that's more than Trump was spending on hair products at the time. You'd think with that kind of money the Russians could just drive down to Wallmart if they needed to stock up on cages, presumably along with some computers, snacks from the food aisle, energy drinks and of course some humorous political bumper stickers to put on their truck before the drive back to their HQ.

On the other hand, this conspiracy ultimately boils down to a dozen blokes posting bad things on facebook about Hilary Clinton. And it's worth noting that they started in 2014, two years before the election and for a long time they were mostly posting things in favour of Bernie Sanders who at the time was the more obvious "anti-Hilary" candidate in the race. Actually, forget what I said earlier, my favourite part of this whole thing is that the troll farm called itself the Internet Research Agency and they abbreviated that to the "IRA" implying that they were so incompetent that they couldn't use their internet superpowers to figure out that the name was already taken. Or perhaps the conspiracy is just a lot more far-reaching than I've imagined and that the Russians were also responsible for forcing Gerry Adams out of a job and installing Mary Lou McDonald in his place in order to make trouble for the British.

The big story of the past week was the stock market which has been dropping faster than pro-democracy candidates in a Russian election.

The FTSE 100 finished the week down nearly 400 points and the Dow Jones put in 2 historic record-breaking falls before recovering to “only” finish the week 1100 points down and if things get much worse, ExxonMobile will have to start laying off congressmen.

Of course, those people who’ve been holding onto their Carillion shares or their Bitcoins probably think “5% what’s the big deal?” but it’s been 10 years since we last had a market crash and this was but a prelude, it’s like in those old Road Runner cartoons where Wile E Coyote is in the air looking down at the gorge.

So with no stock market rally for President Trump to tweet about, what was the White House's reaction? Well the US tried to bolster markets by agreeing in a somewhat bipartisan manner to blowing the deficit into the stratosphere and passing a budget plan that makes Jeremy Corbyn’s plans for office look parsimonious in comparison. Still not enough? Well let’s have more bread and circuses! President Trump also suggested having a massive military parade and the Winter Olympics just started in Korea. Personally, I always think the Winter Olympics is a missed opportunity really. It would be fun if one year they used the same sports as they do during the regular summer olympics but did them in the snow. Obviously combining archery and ice would be a health and safety nightmare but it would be fun to see the Scandinavians dominating the outdoor swimming events or the Scottish track and field team win a gold medal before passing around a thermos flask of bovril. Oh well, if things go badly with the North Korean situation, we'll end up with a nuclear winter and then the Summer and Winter Olympics will likely look indistinguishable.

This week Washington DC was looking forward to the release of an FBI memo with the sort of anticipation you'd more readily associate with an launch of a new iPhone or a perhaps the release of a video in which Piers Morgan conveys empathy or genuine selflessness.

In the end, there was a story and it is a scandal but in the past few weeks we'd all been promised something so shocking that the public would see the 'deep state' for what it is and demand that the FBI be disbanded. But so far really the only people calling for the dismantling of the FBI are the Zodiac Killer, DB Cooper and a collection of suspicious Italian sounding men from New Jersey who all claim that their inordinate wealth stems from an olive oil importing business.

Back to the memo. The shocking memo itself focussed on the dubiously court-approved wiretapping of Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump election campaign. This was all based on evidence which was knowingly suspect and, in spite of this, the pro-Hilary anti-Trump bias was knowingly allowed and encouraged. But this is more sloppy gamesmanship than a coup d'etat, the powers that be thought they could get away with it because they thought that Hilary Clinton would win anyway and then she'd bestow them with rewards for their loyalty, like more money or more Areas in which to do those alien autopsies. This was political theatre: it wasn't Dallas in Dealey plaza so much as it was Dallas on Saturday evening television.

Of course, I'm saying this with less than 24 hours on the clock; there might be more to come out of this. Or perhaps anything else has already been destroyed many weeks ago, along with the Hilary's email server and the chances of Chelsea Clinton running for president in 2 and a bit years time. Well, one good thing out of three ain't bad I suppose.

Really though whatever the FBI was actually up to was never really the point. The whole purpose of exposing this 'vignette of DC careersmanship at its worst' was to discredit what remains of trust in the institutions. Next week I suppose they're going to leak a memo explaining what the overseas aid gets spent on or what the sausages are made from.

It was the Davos summit this week. That means the great and good of the world... stayed at home and watched the scumbags of the world turn up in Switzerland to talk to one another. There were the usual elected officials like Theresa May President Trump, or Emmanuel Macron. There were also lots of unelected folk there too like Jean-Claude Juncker and George Soros not to mention John McDonnell who stayed at a hotel so expensive that he made Emily Thornberry look like a Cava Socialist.

At the conference itself, there were lots of dubiously, ominously titled discussions like "Shaping the agile governance of technology" which should really have been retitled "Let's clamp down on free speech" On the plus side, all that doublespeak probably gave Phillip Hammond lots of ideas for how to express his ever-ambiguous position on Brexit. I've seen a shooting gallery at a funfair that was more straight than he is.

President Trump of course was there, he decided to use the summit to push his message of "America First" which refers to both his economic strategy as well as the answer to the question "Where did Tony Blair go to reduce his tax bill"

Anyway, to sum up, millions of dollars were spent, thousands of tons worth of carbon was spewed out (if that's the sort of thing that bothers you) and I guess that Europe must now be running dangerously low on canapés, but not much has changed apart from the waistline of a few corporate executives and the bottom line of some local wine merchants. I'm sure a good time was had by all, although a quick search on Google Images will very quickly tell you that the best place to be partying at this year was still probably had by Ed Balls dancing at Mar-a-Lago. Seriously, go look that up. That's a man who until 3 years ago had serious ambitions to be in charge of Britain's nuclear arsenal.

This week I'd initially planned to talk about Theresa May's cabinet reshuffle except that frankly the most visible change was that the various cabinet ministers changed their shirts and ties between day one and day two. The main news this week (of course) was from Washington DC where the president decided to draw attention to himself. Sure presidents love to steal the show, Bill Clinton famously carried a saxophone with him in order to outshine George Bush or Ross Perot should the situation arise, and there was rumours that he brought the saxophone to the Northern Ireland peace process after someone said that he was going there to support the Corrs. Geddit, support the Corrs? (That Irish band)

Ok, so back to President Trump. The Washington Post this week reported that he'd supposedly referred to the 3rd world using a word beginning with 'S' that was (to use the letter S) a synonym for stool, more severe than the word 'suspicious' and a simply silly suggestion to spout to the scribes. As with many of Trump's proclamations though, even if you do agree with his America First policy, he comes across as a hypocrite as quite lot of his staff at Mar A Lago in Florida happen to be migrants from impoverished parts of Latin America; perhaps he'd have had more success if he'd accompanied the gaffe with an announcement that the Trump organization would cease employing migrant labour and start paying $15/hour for long-term US residents. On the other hand, he did suggest that he wanted people from Norway, a fairly left wing place, to move to the US so that's perhaps as close an olive branch towards centrist politics as we're going to get.

Also, one take away is that if you find yourself living in an economically depressed post-industrial part of the UK, or France, Germany or well anywhere north of the Mediterranean then congratulations, according to president Trump, you're not living in a cesspool after all. It turns out that even if your shopping precinct was recently filmed as part of a video montage for a news report about urban decay, just be glad that you're lucky enough to not be beset by the sort of problems they have in Southern Asia with it's sun and its cheap lifestyle and it's 7% annual growth rates.

Anyway, a day later as part of an encore there was an announcement that the president will no longer be visiting London when the new US Embassy opens up in Battersea. In all honesty though and speaking as someone who used to live near Kings Cross, a lot of Londoners would probably agree with his decision to not venture south of the river.

If you're normal then you're probably looking for an excuse to stay inside and delay having to start that big New Year excessive regime you'd planned in detail when you'd had a sherry too many. Well you're in luck because sit down in a big comfy armchair and pour yourself a large glass of something because there's a new 'must read' book out called Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

The name "Fire and Fury" of course makes it of course sound a bit like a new Game Of Thrones novel but this one's actually written by Michael Wolff. In many ways, of course, president Trump's 1st year does seem to be inspired by the George R R Martin fantasy series: sure there's political stuff, the cruelty, corruption, hypocrisy, betrayal, violence and so on but then there's also the wall, climate skepticism, a kingdom in debt, fear of the people across the sea and I guess the Dragons represent either China or perhaps Hilary Clinton if she hadn't had as much work done.

But back to the book, it's the sort of thing we'd normally expect to have to wait years to read, at least until Sean Spicer had had time to write his memoir and figure out how to email it to his publisher without accidentally including his windows login password. It's pretty damning stuff about the confusion and idiocy occurring 12 months ago when the President first took power and it largely exposes bare the feud between Trump and Steve Bannon over who was in control and whose ideology was responsible for the win. The win that both of them definitely 100% expected and definitely didn't force them to cancel other projects they'd planned for after the defeat, I mean surprise win, I mean the expected win.

In many ways the Trump-Bannon feud is like a bigger brasher version of the UK's Blair-Brown feud except that neither of them appear to have the humility and integrity of Tony Blair nor the affable jovial charm of Gordon Brown. How depressing.

On the other hand, with Game of Thrones you'll have to wait a year for HBO to release the next series, many years possibly for the next print edition to be in bookstores, whereas we live in a 24-hour rolling news world where the latest White House news is but a click of the remote or a flick of the newspaper away. Sometimes, Westminster politics can be very dull, which is probably something to be very grateful for.

It's the end of December and the end of 2017 and it's possibly the end of the line if you're the sort of person who originally became a politician or a tv celebrity to get close to the young female interns. Of course I'm joking, Kevin Spacey got into show business for the young male interns, he's probably looking forward to 2018 because he thinks there's 2000 of them.

Talking about "end of the line" though, one of the stories I'm sure we'll see a lot more about in the future was this week's announcement that Israel is going to name a new subway station after president Trump. Perhaps the president thought that he'd improve his poll ratings amongst minorities by associating himself with an "Underground Railroad". Either way, at least the new station will give the Israelis somewhere to hide when the bombs start dropping. The bombs of course being those ones that everyone from Dwight Eisenhower to Obama and everyone inbetween has been selling to the region. Asking the US to mediate that peace process is like asking a mousetrap producer to intervene in the battle between Tom and Jerry

But for now, finish off that Christmas port and start planning for 2018. We'll have fresh Brexit news all year as well as the same old stale Brexit news, plus loads more Trump news now that Twitter have interceded and increased the character limit on his tweets. Plus the Russia stuff is going to keep on coming with the regularity of dysentery on a cheap cruise ship. The Fifa World Cup is being hosted by Russia this upcoming summer. I suppose most people wouldn't mind Russia rigging elections if they gave all the voters a Rolex watch and a briefcase full of money like they did with that election to decide which country would host the football tournament. As I'm sure Vladimir Putin has no doubt said many times before though, they've got the world by the balls.

Big political moves in Westminster and Alabama this week; two places that don’t often have much in common although if you’re a politician from the West Midlands and fancy a holiday to America, why not spend a week at the Hilton in Birmingham - Birmingham Alabama that is - and try submitting the 1st class airline ticket as an “honest mistake” ?

But first let’s discuss the Brexit vote in Westminster. Essentially the parliament will now get to vote on whether they like Theresa May’s deal or not. It’s like the end of a dinner party when the host asks the guests what they thought of it but still refuses to disclose what type of meat was in that stew. But the powers in Brussels are certainly happy enough to move onto the next stage of the talks. They eat frogs legs and raw chicken though so who knows how the second stage will go.

That vote though, according to the press it was the result of a betrayal by capricious tory rebels akin to something out of a John le Carré novel, and now the Labour Party will get the chance to race in on horseback as saviours at the end of the process to vote down the deal and prevent Brexit. Or at least they would be, had the date not already been placed in law and were the EU not already moved onto planning a more federal post-UK Europe. It’s a fact that in around 18 months the UK will now either drop out with Theresa May’s deal, or the likes of the LibDems and the more metropolitan wing of the Labour Party will win their vote and thus deliver a WTO rules Hard Brexit. And a few days later, event at that stage, the Labour Party will no doubt put out a serious of contradictory statements about the future of the customs union with about as much coherence as a Diane Abbott attempting to read the football scores.

So now to the US. This week saw Roy Moore loose his run for the US senate seat in Alabama and the deeply conservative stage chose their choice of spokesperson from the same party as Hilary and Nancy Pelosi. That’s the kind of End-Of-Days black swan event you might imagine featuring in a montage in a disaster movie. But we live in odd times, Scotland has several Conservative MPs after all. But this was more a condemnation of the system. Moore shouldn’t have been the candidate in the first place but not enough people cared during the primaries to kick him off the ballot and once his name was there, they were stuck with it, like a badly installed bathroom. In all honesty I think in the longer term it was probably a good result for the Republican party. If he’d won, the Democrats would have used him as the mascot for their campaigning next year to destroy what was left of Trump’s powerbase. It’s a bit like how in 1992 the Conservatives won a narrow victory but the resulting 5 years destroyed what was left of the Party’s soul and public credibility. They ultimately paid the price for that win. Perhaps if the likes of Jonathan Aitken had lost their seat in ’92 then things would have been very different in ’97.

Brexit news: don't look now but apparently it's going pretty well, for now at least, supposedly. People talk about politicians being out of touch but I always think that for those ministers involved in the Brexit process, getting stuff to happen must be a good analogy for us regular folks trying to get an old car to scrape through an MOT for one last time.

This past week actually started out looking quite bleak on the Brexit front, I'm sure Theresa May was imagining the upcoming news headlines in the way that I used to look forward to an upcoming Shakespeare essay at school: you know how it is, it's Sunday night and you know it's due on Thursday and you know that your claims on what you know are further away from the mark than when when Michael Bay made Peal Harbour. But for now things seem to be vaguely on track; sure the Remainers in the cabinet are still trying to haggle the EU upwards on the fee side of things but on the other hand, the EU federalists seem to be increasingly keen to get rid of Britain and get on with the task of subjugating the continental Europeans without pesky nationalism getting in the way.

But if we want to look for a real dispute, proper gnashing of teeth and wailing, let's look to the wailing wail itself in Jerusalem. This week President Trump decided to say that Jerusalem was the Israeli capital. That went down about as well as a visit by Martin Shulz to Alene Foster's house. This annoyed a lot of people: the Palestinians, the Arab world and don't forget the regular pub quiz enthusiasts like myself who was relied on the knowledge that Tel Aviv was the capital to earn themselves an extra point or two every few months. Bizarrely I saw some Scottish Nationalists getting angry on the internet about it, you'd think they'd sort out the Edinburgh vs London capital city debate first really. But who knows, one day the Middle East might reach a peaceful settlement and send an envoy to head to Glasgow and sort out the ancient Rangers vs Celtic football conflict.

One of the UK's most popular highstreet stores is Marks & Spencers and if you're a shareholder then you're probably hoping to benefit from the free advertising now offered by the new Royal couple-to-be: Markles and Spencer, also known as Harry and Meghan. I imagine that with those initials, the marketing team at highstreet rival, "H&M" will also be rubbing their hands. The wedding is set for next spring and hopefully won't coincide with the Grand National like when Prince Charles got married. So many questions though, who will design the dress? Will Meghan be able to bypass the immigration bureaucracy in time to get a British Passport? Will James Hewitt use the wedding as a path to obtain himself an American passport?

It's also unclear whether the UK will get a national holiday or time off work for it. Let's cut to the chase, a lot of us are primarily concerned about whether we too will be allowed to act like royalty, spend a weekday doing not very much work and knock back gin at 10 in the morning. Bear in mind folks that next year St Patrick's day falls on a Saturday so it would be nice if the couple could be decent, save the taxpayer a few quid and coordinate some kind of booze fuelled madness sponsored by the good people at Guinness.

The whole thing does also open up the curiously vague possibility though that a future child would be able to make a run for the US presidency and then later potentially inherit the British throne. Open your eyes people: the house of Windsor are in the process of running the longest con in history and the yanks are falling for it hook, line and sinker.

If they are planning on something along those lines they could do worse than ask Michael Flynn how not to go about things. News just in this week was that he's admitted to lying to the FBI about a meeting with the Russians. It's not really news of course, we've known about most of this since back in February and time will tell whether he implicates anyone in anything. I suspect if there was anything going on other than stupidity then a smoking gun would have come to light. I'd would like Trump haters to once and for all clarify where precisely they stand on things though: do they think president is [a] a moronic imbecile incapable of running a bath or [b] a Machiavellian genius scheming with the upper echelons of the KGB. As I said, time will tell.

This week President Trump has been off on a long trip to the Far East in order to bolster trade relationships, come up with a plan about how to deal with North Korea and of course to make a number of barnstorming speeches about how "crooked Hilary Clinton" failed to win any electoral college votes in that part of the world. The last big trip the president made was to Saudi Arabia in order to, amongst other things, finalise a multi-billion dollar weapons contracts and that part of the world has been getting along fine ever since, as long as you ignore facts, the news and passing conjecture, though you could likely say the same about Theresa May's cabinet.

The Saudi kingdom has been "cleaning house" for the past couple of weeks with an ongoing proxy war against Iran that this week led to the resignation of the Lebanese Prime Minister and the seizure of billions of dollars of assets. Numerous high ranking officials have been whisked away by the government in a classic purge from the Jo Stalin playbook. The Jo Stalin playbook of course should not be mistaken for the Jo DiMaggio playbook which strictly limits using a baseball bat to hit baseballs rather than political opponents. The latest purge though is Prince Bandar bin Sultan who is/was Saudi Arabia's most famous arms dealer, former ambassador to the US, and recent head of Saudi intelligence.

Back to Asia though, supposedly the Japanese love Trump, the Chinese love Trump, and don't forget that Trump really loves Trump. In all reality though, the Japanese would love any commander in chief offering them military support for free, and the Chinese will say literally say everything and anything if it means that Trump agrees to drop US opposition to formal recognition of China as a market economy under WTO rules. President Trump is also going to be doing a tour of Vietnam by the way. Oh well, he dodged that one about 50 years ago but better late than never I suppose...

I decided to stay inside and draw today because it’s raining outside but for real rain we have to go to the US because everything is as they say “bigger in Texas” with the possible exceptions of tax rates and tolerance for firearm legislation. This week Hurricane Harvey has been doing far more damage to Houston than North Korea could ever hope to. It’s a real shame that Kim Jong Un didn’t just dress up like Blofeld and put out a videos claiming that he was responsible and that they’d developed a weather machine, he’s already got that Bond villain vibe going on.

But back to the storm, the last Houston that went underwater was Whitney and that ended pretty badly. There’s been 51” of rain and that’s settled to leave more than 8 feet of flooding in some places. As a result there’s been people killed, billions in property damage, a curfew put in place and two reservoirs are close to bursting. More worrying though, President Trump has come close to losing control over the news agenda, I imagine he was set to make a big announcement to rile up the left but even he can’t influence the weather. Or the house republicans either to be honest.

Amusingly I saw an online activist pointing out that Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Harvey were all supposedly 100-year flood events yet they’d all happened within a decade. Uh oh, must be man made climate change. Except that those are 3 completely separate areas, that’s how risk-frequency modelling works, and the previous ‘worst ever’ hurricane in the Houston area was the 1900 storm, about a hundred years ago. Offering up a radically different theory, some folk have claimed that the rain is biblical punishment from above for electing a homosexual mayor. I suppose that if electing LGBT politicians screws with the weather then it would at least explain why Scotland has such awful weather, oh no wait Kezia Dugdale just resigned. I’m visiting Glasgow this weekend so I suppose I better put away that umbrella and pack some shorts.

There was news this past week in America when that old problem of racism managed to escape from its containment cell in Mel Gibson’s house and make it all the way across the country to Virginia with a flashpoint of violence in Charlottesville which is a small university town up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, ironically in one of the few parts of Virginia where there wasn’t even any fighting during the actual US Civil War.

It was always liable to turn violent and then President Trump decided to troll everybody by saying that everyone was to equally to blame and implied that when the KKK make questionable scientific claims, there’s a moral equivalence with the Lying Mainstream Media. The rise of social bubbles and selective internet news doesn’t help either but that’s an age old problem, after all in 1863 it was Abraham Lincoln himself who said “don’t trust quotes you read on the internet”

Sure, protests always attract a violent element, just look at the unspeakable violence you get when mime artists go on parade. And at the same time, most people know the US is a deeply divided country on many subjects, that diversity of opinion works in its favour most of the time. But we also assumed that nowadays the more extreme elements of the white supremacy movement listened to their own advice and “kept themselves to themselves”.

Back in the 1860s the civil war was an actual legitimate war with guns and everything to settle the issue once and for all, and then of course about a century later the US realised they should maybe pass some laws to really clear up the apparent misunderstandings over who’d won. Sometimes we don’t like what’s in the history books, just ask David Cameron about the thing with the pig. But sometimes you should really focus on the bad stuff so you can teach its lessons properly.

So Sean Spicer, press secretary, Trump spokesperson and human pinata to the media masses has been pushed out. The trump administration is a populist one though so the incoming new press secretary is of course a regular working class bloke: it’s hugely wealthy Wall Street financier Anthony Scaramucci! But he’s joining the cabinet - or entourage - as yet another alleged “political outsider” That’s in sense of the word that earning millions of dollars in bonuses and chartering a private jet are “outside” the realms of possibility for most voters.

In other wealth related news, the BBC was forced to disclose how much all it’s top presenters are paid and, lo and behold, turns out that for all the talk of feminism and egalitarianism, the blokes at the have got the lions share of the dosh. As an example, Derek Thompson (star of Casualty) earns £400k compared to cohost Amanda Mealing on £300k, although both earn about 15 times more than an actual front line nurse in a real non-BBC hospital.

Perhaps with hindsight the new Doctor Who was cast as a female in order to reduce the show’s budget, it was only after the list came out after all that the BBC said they’d increase her pay to match Peter Capaldi. If only the decision had been delayed a few months, perhaps they could have hired newly released OJ Simpson. He’s a ‘progressive’ (ethnic minority) actor in need of work and he could have employed those same lighthearted comedy stylings he used in the Naked Gun films to bring in a big US audience. Or alternatively just put him in as Chris Evans’ replacement and get him to test drive an SUV very very slowly up the motorway, that’s the other memorable thing on his CV I suppose…

The talk of a leadership challenge against Theresa May seems to have quietened off a bit, at least for this week, as the government made another move with a big piece of Brexit legislation. In response a senior civil servant tried to get your average lager drinking, white van driving bloke on the street onside by making a Brexit analogy involving a cricket ball and went on to say that Brexit was falling apart like “a chocolate orange” which seemed odd given that if you’re already doing the cricket thing, at least follow through and say things will fall apart like an England test match innings, or use the chocolate metaphor from the start as another meaningless nonsense term to describe the supposed ‘softness’ of the perceived Brexit.

Elsewhere, across the Atlantic, there’s been more Russia allegations, this time involving Donald Trump’s eldest son meeting with a lawyer from Moscow. A lawyer who was actually barred from entering the US until Attorney General - and friend of the Clintons - Loretta Lynch personally stepped in to allow him to enter the US in a sign that the top echelon of all the political world there is on a dodginess rating that places it somewhere between a used car salesman on a stag do and a newspaper editor who’s discovered that both his mistress and mortgage payments are late.

And in North Korea, they’ve been very keen to show off their new ICBM. It’s very difficult to get Visa entry into the country but they’ve advised journalists that they should visit the West Coast of America if they want a close up look. Not that I’m questioning their technical skills but I’m guessing it’s so that the journalists can get to Los Angeles in order to board a cruise ship bound for the sea of Japan were the rocket is scheduled to land, several seconds after it takes off.

There was utterly shocking news this week when a politician actually did something he’d promised to when running for office. Nick Clegg said it was madness and that he should have done the exact opposite of what he promised like you’re supposed to. Just look at David Cameron – he promised a referendum to get Britain out of the EU and when he managed to accidentally deliver on Brexit he resigned in shame and left politics.

Agree with Paris or not (and we’ll get to that later) President Trump is entitled to do whatever he wants, largely because President Obama signed up in the first place by making sure that it was clearly defined as an executive decision that didn’t need approval by the congress or senate or anyone else. And Mr Trump has a mandate to sign whatever he wants because he won the electoral college and those who mention the popular vote should maybe fix that by looking to scrap it rather than going on Facebook like a teenager angry at the result of the X-Factor. This is like when people tried to fix Boko Haram by going on Facebook, and sure Nigeria is still signed up to the Paris Treaty but the kidnappings are still a thing and Trump is more of a Twitter person anyway. Seriously though, the electoral collage is a ridiculous and antiquated system, even more so than the US’s insistence on clinging onto chequebooks and thinking that putting Nicolas Cage in a movie will draw in a crowd.

Back to the Paris Accords though, it was a crummy treaty anyway. According to the UN’s own numbers, following through with it would cost $100 trillion and achieve less than 1% of the emissions cuts the UN claims are supposedly needed anyway. That’s before we get to the questions of why CO2 levels were 10 times higher during the last ice age, why temperatures have been rising on Mars where they don’t have any humans producing CO2 or why the US taxpayer should be paying for new power stations in South East Asia, rather than China or India. If you thing climate change is real and man made and fixable then there are far better ways to go about it like putting money into geoengineering or building thorium reactors. At the very least please don’t try to goad President Trump – a man who famously collects towers – by naming your treaty after Paris, the city famous for having one of the best towers there is.

One of the rarely mentioned downsides of Donald Trump becoming president was that he had to give up presenting his Apprentice tv show but this week we discovered that he’s still shouting “You’re fired” albeit from the Oval Office rather than than a tv studio. It was the second time that a president’s sacked an FBI director, the one was Bill Clinton. Fast forward a few years and slick Willy was facing impeachment proceedings and a lot of people would like Trump to be impeached but I really hope things don’t pan out exactly the same because the thought of a new Monika Lewinsky style scandal involving Trump’s “tower” is frankly too gruesome to contemplate.

Comparisons to Richard Nixon and Watergate are also being made which as Trump would be the first to assure us is ludicrous because the Watergate hotel is a dump compared to his luxury 5 star hotel in DC. He’d especially recommend trying the steak when you’re there, honestly, go right now it’s terrific, stop paying attention, nothing to see here. Comparing the two you could also add that Nixon worked with diplomats to create detente and open up China to the West whereas Trump would prefer to reverse that with prohibitive trade tariffs although he would like to copy that wall thing the Chinese have. Say what you will about a huge wall, the Chinese tried it and they don’t have any illegal immigration from Mexico. And domestically speaking Nixon set up the EPA whereas Trump would rather shut it down, along with CNN and the New York Times and any fake news conversation about James Comey

So it’s 5 week to go until the next general election after Theresa May decided take everyone by surprise, very much like a school teacher posting a surprise test on the first day back. If it was a surprise maths test, it really wouldn’t be looking good for a lot of people in the Labour Party although the they do know a lot about “Division” and Dianne Abbott knows about “pi” and, oh dear, Ken Livingston just read the word “Axis” and he’s off on another rant about the war…

Back to the election, it’s likely to be a scene of unmitigated disaster in some constituencies. For a good metaphor, look at those very same Labour constituencies on a Friday night when Weatherspoons closes. The kebab shop represents Labour’s manifesto, in so much as nobody knows what’s in it. That the bloke peeing into a phone box represents most people’s reaction to the establishment. The guy not being let into a nightclub is Tim Farron because neither the bouncer nor the electorate recognise him. The girl getting undressed in a back alley is actually not part of the metaphor, she’s just someone that Boris Johnson bumped into when he was up north campaigning.

Long story short though, we can all look forward to June the 8th as election day, unless you’re the SNP in which case the replay is scheduled for August, November and possibly next January if they can get the high court to back their demands for a rerun.

Last week President Trump decided to try out his new toys by launching a strike at Syria to show Assad that he’s the boss. This week, Syria’s already fixed the holes in the runway, presumably using some kind of secret military technology that is unavailable to the pothole division at my local council. The problem with the Syrian conflict is that it’s essentially the Assad Regime vs ISIS so if you want to do anything, it means you really have to state which of those two sides you support. It’s as if you’re a bouncer backstage in the green room and a fight breaks out between Bill Cosby and Justin Bieber and you think you should probably step in. Except that actually, you’re not a bouncer, you’re a the hot-tempered owner of the largest army in the world and Russia’s piling billions of dollars of military hardware into that fight in a place where the ground is quite literally made of petrol because it’s the Middle East. And that scenario is ludicrous anyway, Bill Cosby can’t get a television gig these days for love nor money.

While this was happening, there yet another 2 terror attacks, in Sweden and Germany. And the US is, as we speak, manoeuvring an aircraft carrier towards North Korea so that should end well. North Korea is of course the place where socialism grows but nothing comes out apart from tales of human misery. Very much like a dinner party at Ed Miliband’s house I suppose.

Where then in all of this is that Beacon – that guiding light – of liberal democracy, the British Parliament? Well, right now it’s on recess for Easter and I’m sure the cabinet are all observing that religious moment of thought by getting stuck into some chocolate and gorging themselves. How very Christian.

Some years budgets can be really exciting with sweeping tax cuts or dramatic gestures but this week it was fairly dull asides from the furore about the tax rise for self employed people.Why self employed people, I asked myself, then I read at article saying that George Osborne is set to earn £650,000 this year and I wondered if Phillip Hammond and Theresa May were setting up an elaborate trap for their predecessors. I’ve not looked at the detail of the budget but I’d be keen to know if there was a special levy on political speeches and ex-cabinet ministers.

It’s largely a storm in a teacup though, a pound or two per week. When I’m not doing these videos, I am actually a self employed person myself and in all honesty, whilst annoying, I half wondered if it’s a price worth paying? After all, every minute of Radio 4 that’s taken up with backbenchers discussing white vans is a minute that’s not being used to discuss Brexit. Every time they wheel out an economist to discuss NI contributions it means a whinging policy adviser will have to stay at home and keep their views on exercise or alcohol to themselves.

In the mean time though it was also International Womens’ Day this week, although from what I saw, most of the supposedly “international” women on the telly were in fact British. Or as Nicola Sturgeon would pronounce it, “English” before adding “treacherous” and demanding a referendum in much the same way that my little boy demands more toast in the mornings…

A lot of people in America think that President Trump is some sort of Manchurian candidate, groomed by the KGB to have a buffoon in Washington so that the world turns to Vladimir Putin for relatively sensible world leadership. You’d think it would be easier for Putin to just buy a new shirt+tie and leave the horses alone? If there’s a grain of truth in it I certainly hope it’s not a grain of Polonium 210, that’s how they do things over there…

Contrast that to the UK where some people think that the Soviet Union loving fanboy Jeremy Corbyn is some kind of secret Conservative plant, groomed in order to keep the Labour party out of power. Certainly as a free market libertarian, I for one was very happy to see the leavers of power handed to his close circle of unelectable overgrown students with their social justice warrior, virtue tilting, privilege checking idiocy.

But that brings us to this week’s bi-election results in Stoke and Copeland, which show that while a stopped clock is right twice per day, Jezz will have to settle for once. It seems that the proletariat in the north of England have looked revolutionary politics in the eye and decided that the National Health Service is ok but that the complete overthrow of capitalism is taking it a bit too far. Still, at least Jeremy Corbyn has his own hair and that’s saying something these days…

This week Kim Jong Un ordered the assassination of his half brother which sort of puts at least some of the Trump hysteria in perspective.Sure, his National Security Advisory had to resign but Trump didn’t murder anyone and I don’t think he even groped anyone. Supposedly there were red flags, apparently with hammers & sickles on them, it’s yet another things for the courts to sort out I suppose.

I still think the whole thing is a deliberate distraction though: get people so fatigued about the ongoing incompetence that nobody will care when Trump sells federal land to himself for $20 per acre or the Kremlin rolls tanks into Scandinavia. I suppose if Machiavelli had had access to Buzzfeed and Facebook, the Renaissance would have similarly turned out very different, although I don’t know if the Sistine Chapel would look better or worse if you added Kittens and Game Of Thrones references.

Meanwhile in the UK… Um, everything’s probably fine now. We used to have problems with social care and the long term sustainability of the health system and there was something to do with Europe, I forget exactly, but given how all anyone’s interested in nowadays is photoshopped pictures of Steve Bannon, I can only assume that all that stuff worked out fine in the end, which is nice.

Speaker of the House, John Bercow, has never been one to be shy away from the press if he can get everyone to see how progressive and ‘right on’ and politically correct and he is. And so this week he decided to let everyone know that he doesn’t like Donald Trump by saying that he wouldn’t be welcome at Westminster. I imagine that a lot of folk would rather John Bercow wasn’t around either, especially his wife when she’s got one of her gentleman friends round.

It’s the hypocrisy that annoys most MPs as well: in the past we’ve welcomed leaders like Robert Mugabe and Vladimir Putin to the UK. We even gave Nicolae Ceausescu a knighthood for crying out loud, and we let famed war criminal Tony Blair walk around Downing street like he owned the place or something.

Elsewhere, Nigel Farage has supposedly “Brexited” from his wife. Say what you will about his politics, at least the guy’s consistent in how he approaches life. Contrast that to Jeremy Corbyn who’d struggle to definitively say what the result of a coin toss was, or to the candidates in the upcoming French election who apparently can’t decide whether they want to be President of France or simply gang leader in a local white collar prison, following indictment and prosecution on grand corruption charges: Vive La France!

Last weekend things got pretty darn serious and President Trump decided to ban people travelling to America from Iran, Somalia and some other countries, essentially because they’re predominantly Muslim places. I suppose you could maybe try to find the positives: perhaps the US will formally recognise Palestine as a country [?] in order so that Trump can then presumably ban Palestinian people from travelling to the US.

Curiously, Saudi Arabia didn’t make the cut. It’s a brutal Islamic theocracy with regular executions and outrageous human rights abuses in the name of strict sharia law, but Trump looked the place up and down, opened up his report card and wrote: Must Try Harder, C-

Curiously, Sudan was on the list but not South Sudan. Trump’s in his 70s mind, perhaps he’s still using Microsoft Encarta and is therefore unaware that the country actually split in two a few years ago.

And talking about places diving up, Brexit passed it’s vote in Westminster this week so we’re a few yards further into the steeplechase that is getting legislation sorted – then figuring out which cabinet minister can make the most money flogging books on the subject. I imagine Theresa May wishes that she too could just whip out a gold sharpie and get the thing over and done with in a weekend with an executive order, like they do in America.

Following a High Court Ruling, Brexit was the main topic of conversation at Westminster this week and the opposition benches are in in a confused mess over the whole thing. Labour MPs have really still not come to terms with last year’s vote. Most of them still haven’t managed to wrap their heads around how the public were stupid enough to vote “Yes” – when they were asked whether Jeremy Corbyn should remain party leader. The Conservative side’s not too much better mind, although at least you can rely on people like Osbourne or Cameron to dramatically change their stance to whatever the new PM wants, as long as there’s an all expenses paid speaking tour thrown in. I reckon Kenneth Clarke might even vote yes to Article 50 if you offered him a grotesquely large slap up dinner and threw in some tickets to see Wynton Marsalis playing at Ronnie Scotts.

However the big news was across the pond with Mr Trump, reiterating that he thinks he can get Mexico to pay for a border wall. If he can pull that off and convince Mexico to drop $20 billion on it that then fair play to the guy but I expect it’s going to be a bit like politely asking the BBC to appoint Jeremy Clarkson as Director General. In the mean time Theresa May’s popped in to say hello at the White House this weekend and I imagine there was a lot to discuss, like why it takes about 4 hours to pass through US border control or why he spends more time on his hair than she does.

And finally in entertainment news, Michael Jackson’s daughter came out this week and claimed her father was murdered. New evidence suggests that the finger of blame should be pointed at “The Boogie”

Last week I finished watching the HBO show “Westworld” and this weekend I started watching the final season of America.

Yes, this weekend, Mr Trump finally became President Trump, and that was really about the end of it. No major crowd trouble, no gunmen, no Miss World flash mob for the new emperor. After signing some papers with a gold felt tip pen and checking that Obama had remembered to redirect his mail, they all had a meal and went home for the most part. I was hoping that maybe Trump would order in Pink Floyd to sing from their seminal album The Wall but apparently Roger Waters and David Gilmour hate each other more than Hilary hates The Donald.

For now, if you want to learn more about what goes on inside the mind of the new President, why not go online and buy one of his many books. According to my Amazon recommendations, those who browsed for his latest book, also browsed for rope and a stool.

In the run up to the election, Hilary thought she was going to piss all over Trump and this week we discovered that she could have probably charged him money for doing that sort of thing. Except then it turned out that it was just a bunch of made up lies. It’s like you can’t trust anything on the internet these days.

There was actually loads of real news, serious news, this week about Trump’s appointees or the like but a fake salacious news story about his private life and the KGB, that’s way more interesting, even if it’s not true. It does make you wonder about that Photograph of Trump and Nigel Farage though, was that really an “elevator” or was it a garishly decked out walk in shower room?

See you next week for inauguration day. Will Putin show up? Will he be riding a horse? Will he acuse Trump of doing things to the horse? Tune in next week and find out!