September 14th, 2024.

Five years ago, on September 15th, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer,

I wrote a Facebook post that started,

many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I'm okay.

I am, indeed, aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon.

I've been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book.

I'm back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire.

It's very hard to know where to start.

So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me today?

I wrote a review of Trump's apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency,

stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates,

stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 re-election.

Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee,

Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California,

had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence,

Joseph McGuire, on Friday, September 13th, telling McGuire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the

Intelligence Community, who had deemed the complaint credible and urgent.

This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee.

But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required,

McGuire had withheld it.

Schiff's letter told McGuire that he'd better handed over.

Schiff speculated that McGuire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest

...