2017 June 3^rd

Trump has been knocked about a bit, even accused of getting election help from the Russians. Megyn Kelly, recently escaped from Fox News, begins her new CNN show Sunday and her first interview is with Vladimir Putin. Anything this grand must put out some teaser advertising, some snippets from the main interview. So Megyn Kelly asked Putin, through a translator of course, what he thought of the accusations of Russian hacking into private communication channels in our election.

‘Not us,” Vladimir said, “we did nothing of the sort.” Then he went onto suggest that it might have been “patriotic Russian private citizens.” He claimed that it was impossible to know who had done the hacking, if hacking was done.

What in the world did Megyn Kelly expect him to say? Of course there were no follow up questions. So far this interview is much ado about very little; perhaps there will be more in the full interview but I’m not counting on it.

Somewhat closer to home we had some comments from Nigel Farage. Farage is not the household word here that Putin is but he is famous to the Brits; he is the leader of Britain’s alt-right (Fascist) political movement and was a strong supporter of Trump’s candidacy. It seems that he might be asked to testify at one of the inquiries. He was asked if he would do that; he said that he would but he said a great deal about the American electorate first. He believes that Americans are unwilling to admit that Trump won the election and that all of these Russian investigations are in response to that loss. As a Trump supporter, it makes sense for him to say that. Other Trump supporters have said the same thing.

To the extent that Putin wants to fracture the American electorate, he has been enormously successful. Vice President Pence is speaking in Iowa at a “Roast” for Senator Joni Ernst. Ernst is the junior senator from Iowa where Charles Grassley is the senior senator.

Pence is getting enthusiastic applause from the Iowa republicans in attendance, particularly when he talks about the president withdrawing the country from the Climate Change agreement. Echoing Trump, Pence claims that this agreement is very unfair to the United States. He doesn’t go into any detail about why this agreement with no mechanism for enforcement is unfair. Perhaps Trump/Pence believes it is because it was negotiated under the Obama administration. We all know that the Trump catechism is that nothing worthwhile could have come from the Obama administration.

When Trump told the country about his withdrawal from the Paris Accords he specifically mentioned that it would benefit Youngstown Ohio and Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Not so fast Trump. The mayors of both cities said they their cities were very much in favor of the agreement and that their cities would continue to abide by it regardless of what Trump did nationally.

Pittsburgh is an example of what can be done when a community decides to clean up its environment. When I lived there in the 1950s, you could not sit on a park bench without putting a newspaper on the seat first, the coal soot was that bad. That has all changed thanks to clean air regulations. No one in Pittsburgh wants to go back to the 1950s.