This is no coincidence. As we all know, an organized crime syndicate headed by Putin has been running Russia for years. The Russian people know this. The world knows this. And now thanks to this criminal organization, with nukes...just sayin', the U.S. is now being run by a criminal organization not substantively different than the criminals running Russia.

How did we acquiesce to this so easily and find ourselves mired in this situation when we should have already marched on Washington en masse and taken our government back from these criminals? If Russia proves anything, the longer we wait, the more entrenched they become. I think Cohen's warning about the handover of power not going well if Trump loses the 2020 election was a dire warning. I believe him on this point 100% especially if it means Trump will then be indicted upon leaving office.

I think that this summer has to be the summer we take this country out of the hands of the Republicans and their idiot leader. We need march after march on Washington until we once a again have a democracy we can take pride in.

I just went out at lunch today and picked up my taxes from the accountant. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect given that my household income was pretty much the same as last year, my tax deductions and federal withholding amounts were not much different than last year, and my dependents stayed the same.

After all was said and done, I paid an extra $1,000 dollar in taxes on April 15th last year. This year, I will owe an extra $4,000 in federal taxes.

If you haven't done your taxes this year, you can pretty much expect to be in shock at what your middle class tax cut will end up costing you. At least you can take comfort in knowing that millionaires and billionaires can now deduct the cost of their private jets.

Has anyone else here had the same experience? I feel your pain.

...turned around and started talking about the cost of prescriptions and how they keep going up. I thought, "Okay, this guys wants to complain a little and he has the right, he's been around long enough." The next words out of his mouth I maybe should have expected but I was still amazed to hear them just the same.

He said that that crazy woman in New York was going to promise everything to the young people like free medicine, free schooling, free everything just to get votes. I had to ask, but I think that I already knew, what crazy woman he was talking about. He said, "that Ocasio woman". I told him that those things weren't true but that is how Republicans were trying to characterize her policies. In his best Fox News parroting voice he said, "That it was socialism."

He went back to talking about health care and said that we couldn't afford the 9 million dollars for free health care for everyone. I knew what he meant...kind of. So I said, "How is it that places that aren't nearly as rich as this country like Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and pretty much every industrialized country on the planet can afford to provide health care for their citizens and we can't?"

I didn't know an 80 something year old could snap his head back around that fast. I didn't stop. I told him that we could easily provide that same health benefits our European allies provide to their citizens. I told him that the U.S. spends about 34 trillion on health care in 10 years and if we had universal health care, it would actually cost about 2 trillion less over the same period. I just kept whispering facts and statistics over his shoulder as he waited for his turn.

You've never seen a man so grateful to finally reach the head of any line.

My God! I've lived in the Midwest most of my life but I have never seen anything like this. Leaving Des Moines. IA yesterday, going west was impossible, going north was impossible. Fortunately, I was going east and drove out of a weather hell-scape. My son was heading to Minneapolis at 9:00 AM yesterday, and as of 9:00 AM today he isn't even half way home. Several hours stuck on I-35 then a hotel overnight and the roads are still closed for a couple more hours. Visibility yesterday out on the road was 1 foot. We've had plenty of blizzards here but this one was something special. Wow! Hope everyone makes it home safely.

...who would you put in each position right now? Feel free to skip any you wish and add people that may or may not announce a run for the presidency. In other words, what would you ideally like to see the next government look like?

1. President
2. Vice President
3. Secretary of State
4. Secretary of the Treasury
5. Secretary of Defense
6. United States Attorney General
7. Secretary of the Interior
8. Secretary of Agriculture
9. Secretary of Commerce
10. Secretary of Labor
11. Secretary of Health and Human Services
12. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
13. Secretary of Transportation
14. Secretary of Energy
15. Secretary of Education
16. Secretary of Veterans Affairs
17. Secretary of Homeland Security

Here is a helpful list from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/politics/2020-presidential-candidates.html