President Donald Trump will propose cutting entitlement programs by $1.7 trillion, including Medicare, in a fiscal 2019 budget that seeks billions of dollars to build a border wall, improve veterans' health care and combat opioid abuse and that is likely to be all but ignored by Congress.

The entitlement cuts over a decade are included in a White House summary of the budget obtained by Bloomberg News. The document says that the budget will propose cutting spending on Medicare, the health program for the elderly and disabled, by $237 billion but doesn't specify other mandatory programs that would face reductions, a category that also includes Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and agricultural subsidies.

The Medicare cut wouldn't affect the program's coverage or benefits, according to the document. The budget will also call for annual 2 percent cuts to non-defense domestic spending beginning "after 2019.'

They've got him surrounded

As Vice President Mike Pence made a fool both of himself and the country he is supposed to be representing at the Olympic Games by refusing to stand for the athletes of any nation other than the US, back at home the Washington Post was reporting on a President Trump who appears to have nothing in common either with Pence or with the White House staff. The piece, entitled "Trump's favorite general: Can Mattis check an impulsive president and still retain his trust?" tells a story that pits a President inclined to challenge the War Party against a Praetorian Guard determined to nullify his electoral mandate to keep out of foreign wars and put "America first":

"Although Trump has given the military broad latitude on the battlefield, he also has raised pointed questions about the wisdom of the wars being fought by the United States. Last year, after a delegation of Iraqi leaders visited him in the Oval Office, Trump jokingly referred to them as 'the most accomplished group of thieves he'd ever met,' according to one former U.S. official."

Truer words were never spoken, but of course this leak is designed to embarrass Trump and put him at odds with those very thieves. Mattis was presumably horrified by this truism, since the General is an even bigger thief, having successfully manipulated Congress into appropriating 15.5 percent more money for the military than Trump asked. The Post piece goes on to detail the President's many heresies:

"He has repeatedly pressed Mattis and McMaster in stark terms to explain why US troops are in Somalia. 'Can't we just pull out?' he has asked, according to US officials.

"Last summer, Trump was weighing plans to send more soldiers to Afghanistan and was contemplating the military's request for more-aggressive measures to target Islamic State affiliates in North Africa. In a meeting with his top national security aides, the president grew frustrated. 'You guys want me to send troops everywhere,' Trump said, according to officials in the Situation Room meeting. 'What's the justification?'"

A UK-based PR company has self-funded its own "research" to accuse Russian-funded media outlets of affecting the outcome of Brexit. The firm 89up uses a combination of typos and selective evidence to make its point.

A few cards on the table about 89up. It's a PR company, the kind which is not exactly without an agenda of its own. It does for example describe itself as the "sole communications agency for Best for Britain." You may recognize the name 'Best for Britain,' because it's the anti-Brexit group that's been in the headlines recently due to the fact it's part funded by arch-meddler, billionaire George Soros.

With text messages between US Justice Department (DOJ) conspirators Peter Strzok and his adulterous main squeeze Lisa Page now revealing that then-President Barack Obama "wants to know everything we're doing," it now appears that the 2016 plot to subvert the rule of law and corrupt the US organs of state security for political purposes reached the very pinnacle of power. To call the United States today a "banana republic" increasingly may be seen as a gratuitous insult to the friendly spider-infested nations to our south.

Still, don't expect to see Barry Hussein Saetoro doing the perp walk anytime soon or even being deported back to Kenya. Don't expect to see orange prison suits on Strzok, Page, former FBI Director James Comey, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others implicated in putting a political thumb on the scales to, first, get Hillary Clinton elected, and then, when that failed, to neuter Donald Trump's presidency with a phony Russiagate probe. Officials' getting "former-ed" is one thing, their getting prosecuted quite another. (Just imagine if a GOP administration had similarly skewed the supposedly non-political law enforcement and intelligence services for partisan reasons. We'd have Watergate on steroids. The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN would be calling for hanging, drawing, and quartering.)

Indeed, it's not even clear the Russiagate investigation itself will be impacted. After all, the narrative may have flipped on one variable - from Trump campaign collusion to Democratic and FBI collusion - but the constant remains the same: Russia. Trump's defenders are as insistent as his detractors that the real culprit is Russia! Russia! Russia!

Sean Hannity of Fox News has been particularly hyperventilative that the entire Steele Dossier lying at the black heart of the mess consists of "phony, fake-news Russian propaganda" and "Russian intelligence lies" from British MI6 (supposedly "former") spymaster Christopher Steele's "Russian sources." Even level-headed observers like Paul Sperry and Patrick Buchanan characterize the file as a "Kremlin-aided smear job" and "Russian dirt [that] Steele was spoon-fed by old comrades in the Kremlin's security apparatus."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley uncovered an unusual email former NatSec Advisor to Barack Obama, Susan Rice sent herself on January 20th 2017-Donald Trump's inauguration day.

Chuck Grassley posted to his official Senate website Monday:

Ambassador Rice appears to have used this email to document a January 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting between President Obama, former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. In particular, Ambassador Rice wrote: "President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities 'by the book'. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book."

Grassley said in a letter to Susan Rice:

"It strikes us as odd that, among your activities in the final moments on the final day of the Obama administration, you would feel the need to send yourself such an unusual email purporting to document a conversation involving President Obama and his interactions with the FBI regarding the Trump/Russia investigation. In addition, despite your claim that President Obama repeatedly told Mr. Comey to proceed 'by the book,' substantial questions have arisen about whether officials at the FBI, as well as at the Justice Department and the State Department, actually did proceed 'by the book.'"

Israel attacking Syrian government forces in Syria is its inherent right to defend its territory and people, says Washington

Initially sold as an initiative to combat terrorism, certain nations have collaborated in various military activities within the sovereign borders of Syria, including the United States, Israel, Turkey, Russia, and others. But even with the defeat of terrorist ISIL forces in Syria this past year, many of these nations are continuing their military activities in the region.

Making headlines recently have been Turkey's assault on the Kurdish YPG forces in Afrin, US airstrikes against reigning Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's forces, and Israel's airstrikes on Syrian targets, and the alleged destruction of a drone that is said to have belonged to Iran.

A couple of decades or more ago when I was still in Washington, otherwise known as the snake pit, I was contacted by a well-financed group that offered me, a Business Week and Scripps Howard News Service columnist with access as a former editor also to the Wall Street Journal, substantial payments to promote agendas that the lobbyists paying the bills wanted promoted.

To the detriment of my net worth, but to the preservation of my reputation, I declined. Shortly thereafter a conservative columnist, a black man if memory serves, was outed for writing newspaper columns for pay for a lobby group.

I often wondered if he was set up in order to get rid of him and whether the enticement I received was intended to shut me down, or whether journalists had become "have pen will travel"? (Have Gun-Will Travel was a highly successful TV Series 1957-1963).

"We will build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways all across our land. And we will do it with American heart, and American hands, and American grit."

President Donald J. Trump

Today, President Donald J. Trump released his legislative goals to rebuild our Nation's crumbling infrastructure. The six principles include:

While American taxpayers were nestled snug in their beds congressional Republicans were plotting to pass the second largest spending increase in a decade.

The Republican-controlled Congress voted to raise caps on spending by $300 billion over the next two years. There are some estimates that suggest the bill will increase government spending by $1.5 trillion.

Shame on us for taking the Republicans at their word. These are the same rapscallions who promised to cut spending and reduce the size of government.

President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law, Vanessa Trump, has been taken to a Manhattan hospital after a suspicious letter that contained an unidentified substance was sent to the apartment where she and husband Donald Trump Jr. live.