People are saying…

 “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” Walter Brennan asked Lauren Bacall in “To Have and Have Not.”  It could happen.  Donald Trump’s campaign to be president of the U.S. is virtually dead.

After his weak first debate with Hillary Clinton, the revelation that he lost $916 million in bad real estate deals in the 1990s, paid zero income tax for several years, and the surfacing of a video tape of Trump boasting about groping women’s genitals, it is virtually impossible for him to win the presidency.  His poll numbers have been hemorrhaging, major Republican Party leaders have called for him to step down.  All of the battleground states that will decide the election – – Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio- – have moved over to Clinton.  Trump’s kamikaze mission over the next four weeks is to inflict as much damage to Clinton’s credibility as possible, and cripple her ability to get anything done during her term in office.

America’s on-again, off-again relationship with Russia is back off again.  Russian President Vladimer Putin’s annexation of Crimea, his support of the brutal Assad regime in Syria, Russian airplane bombing of an aid convoy to the Syrian city of Aleppo, and Russia’s rejection of a nuclear non-proliferation agreement, make it difficult to describe Russia any more as a “frenemy.”  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has called for an investigation of Russian War Crimes.