Catching up on a bunch of stuff in order to clean the desk drawer out before I head back to Massachusetts for Goodboys Invitational week:

Honest to God, you can’t make this sh*t up. What on earth did this loser expect?

Moose on a golf course. You gotta watch the whole thing. It’s pretty funny.

…of course, I think moose, by and large, are pretty amusing creatures. I still can’t watch the opening credits of the TV show Northern Exposure without laughing. You can see the moose getting pushed out from off-camera.

What it’s like to be hit by lightning. That would scare the bejeezus out of me.

It’s been nine months and no one, and I mean no one, has yet to provide any concrete evidence of any kind of “collusion” between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia or any specific statute that might have been violated in any way by anyone affiliated with Trump’s presidential campaign or administration. As Matthew Walther writes in The Week:

Today we are supposed to mouth along because Don Jr., who is not as dumb as he looks (which is not, I realize, setting the bar very high), tweeted screenshots of his Nigerian-prince-like email exchanges with a poseur who pretended in the loosest possible sense to represent the interests of the Russian government. The emails led to a meeting that went nowhere. Knock me over with a feather.

Walther then compares what the media is telling us to believe about Trump and Russia compared to what has actually been proven when it comes to Hillary Clinton and Russia:

Here was a presidential candidate whose husband, a former president, runs an international pseudo-charity that keeps him on a never-ending series of private jet flights to an equally interminable number of luxury hotels in exotic locales — a gruesome neoliberal shakedown machine with metal tentacles sunk into the bank accounts of shady businessmen and tinpot dictators the whole world round. An infinite number of grasping conflict-of-interest stories could have been written about the Clinton Foundation, and many were. But they didn’t matter nearly as much as TRUMP AND RUSSIA.

The mainstream media continues to run with this Russia / collusion narrative, not because a crime of any kind has been committed – do you not think that if anything illegal had occurred it would have been leaked from a thousand Washington political and media insiders by now? – but because, frankly, they’ve got no alternative. They still haven’t come to grips with the reality that Donald Trump – Donald Trump – beat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, and they honestly don’t know what to do with themselves. Frankly, the CNNs, MSNBCs, and NPRs of the world are reacting like juveniles – they didn’t get their way, and they’re taking their ball and going home. It’s pretty pathetic. The good thing is that most of America sees them for what they are: a bunch of sore losers.

…along those same lines there’s this bit of news from the New York Times. It corresponds exactly to what I heard from my GOP operative guy high in the party’s echelon. We hadn’t communicated since Election Day, but he plays golf (a 10 handicap, so he says) and he called to say how entertaining he’d found my posts involving my golf game to be. He agreed with the advice Matthew gave me and wished me luck at this year’s Goodboys Invitational, which was nice. More importantly, he also told me he’s been hearing similar things involving opposition polling that a blogger called FLEPOREBLOG reported over at The Conservative Treehouse blog:

Earlier this month, a congressional source told me, Democratic strategists looking at a Republican-held swing district that is expected to be in play in next year’s midterm elections were shocked when a private poll they conducted showed that Republican support for Mr. Trump in the district is even stronger now than it was on Election Day.

My GOP guy tells me the Democrats are in far more disarray than the GOP could ever be, and that the biggest mistake the Democrats are making is allowing the mainstream media to overplay their hand as far as the whole Russia collusion thing and unrelenting opposition to President Trump goes. It’s his view that, more than anything, the American people are fair-minded, and that, even if they may not personally like Donald Trump or even agree with everything his administration is doing, they have a sense that he’s being treated unfairly by both Democrats and the mainstream media, and it’s going to hurt them come the 2018 midterms.

My feeling is that there’s no question that a lot can happen between now and the 2018 midterms, but I can guarantee you that President Trump is going to use the 2018 midterms as a referendum on his presidency and will therefore be barnstorming the country on behalf of GOP candidates that support his agenda. And I can also guarantee you that those incumbents who don’t toe the President’s line will find himself (or herself) on the wrong side of things were another Republican to decide to primary them. This president is a heckuva lot more popular with Republicans than the mainstream media will admit to.