So Donald Trump named Vice President Mike Pence as the overseer for the nation’s battle against the spread of coronavirus.

Are you feeling better now? Didn’t think so – neither am I.

After all, this is a fellow who has a lot of questions about whether climate change is a real thing that needs our attention. So much for science. Sounds like the perfect perfect person to deal with coronavirus, right? Especially given his medical education (none) and experience (almost none).

And, if you happen to contract the coronavirus and are also a partner in a gay marriage, good luck in getting Pence to be very concerned about your condition.

But then, we have a president who believes the virus will just disappear when it turns warm. Two things about that: one, no one, not even real scientists know that for sure, and two, Trump hasn’t been doing a lot to attack the spread between now and then.

Looking back over Trump’s record, he has rather consistently opposed increased funding for international health organizations, which are the front lines, in effect, and has sought to trim allocations for our own health agencies. That’s not exactly what you’d want to hear in the face of a growing threat.

And then, there’s that threat. Trump continually downplays it (it’ll be gone in the spring) while all the health authorities around him warn of just the opposite. Who would you want to believe: accredited and knowledgeable and experienced health officials or a president who has lied nearly 15,000 times in his miserable administration? Yeah, let’s make America great again by denying Trump a second term.

So should we be worried? Yes, but not panicky, unless you’re thinking about a second term for Trump. That’s a malaise that would really cause damage. Until then, just keep washing your hands a lot, drink liquids, stay home when you’re sick, and for God’s sake do everything possible to avoid Mike Pence.

So Rush Limbaugh gets a Presidential Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest civilian award. And it comes from Donald Trump, making this the least meaningful and most shameful presentation yet.

This is — or has been — a truly significant honor. The recipients are people of accomplishment. A very, very short list includes Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, John Glenn, Gen. Omar Bradley, Stephen Hawking, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosalynn Carter…. and dozens more, all meritorious and deserving and decent people, at the least.

Rush Limbaugh has demeaned women of all races, smeared Asian people, praised white supremacists, excused the seriousness of rape, and announced that “If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians.”

Rush Limbaugh is a morally crippled blowhard whose fealty to the cheapest and most offensive thoughts and language ranks him as the very least deserving of a presidential medal. The fact that the award came from the mentally and morally corrupt Donald Trump only confirms the shabbiness of the entire arrangement.

We may now expect one of the next Trump recipients to be Rudy Giuliani. Or perhaps William Barr. After all, sycophants love sycophants.

In the last post I wrote how 2020, even just a few days into the year, sucked. A month later and it sucks even worse.

Thank you Boston Red Sox for that. First the Patriots, then the Sox. What’s next? Well, there is the thought of another term for our morally blighted and administratively corrupt president. But let’s go there for the moment.

No, the Red Sox will do right now. They traded Mookie Betts to the LA Dodgers. Yep, they traded away the second best player in all of Major League Baseball. They traded away potentially the best player the Sox have ever had since Ted Williams. With one swift move they became the cheap Sox who couldn’t care less about their fans and the reputation of the team. With that one move they assured fans they won’t be attempting to get to the playoffs this season. That they post no threat to the Yankees. Or to much of anyone else in MLB who isn’t trying to tank in 2020.

So as not to be totally bleak about this trade, let’s recognize that there is some good news buried in this. Oops, I should mention that the good news is only for the ownership of the Red Sox, who can now manage to squirm under baseball’s luxury tax. And thank goodness for that; they can now save millions of dollars while watching Mookie lead the Dodgers to the World Series.

And one more piece of good news: the Sox won’t have to worry about possibly facing Mookie and the Dodgers in the WS. Not to worry – they’ll be nowhere near the series in 2020.

And yes, there’s another pot at the end of this god-awful rainbow: after the season is over they can always join in the bidding for Mookie and perhaps win him back to the team.

OK, I think I’ve run out of good news. All I can reasonably see is a season filled with Alex Verdugo in right field, a short-staffed pitching crew and the pleasures of watching two young stars, Bogaerts and Devers.

Maybe I’m wrong. I sure wish I was. I sure wish we still had Mookie.

Happy New Year.

Yuck. The Patriots are out of the playoffs. Tom Brady may have played his last game. 2020 sucks.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit overwrought. There are far worse things happening in the real world – looking at you, incompetent liar Donald Trump.

But for the moment, it’s the Patriots front and center. They played poorly for the most part against the Tennessee Titans and deserved to lose their first wild card game in nearly a decade. Congratulations Titans.

As for the anti-Titans, there were a lot of reasons for their defeat. One, they aren’t especially good, particularly when compared to New England teams of the last decade. And Brady had a poor game, missing some throws he should have made and used to make. There was poor coaching; Bill Belichik made at least a couple of decisions that didn’t help his team.

So how did this happen. You can go back to the start of the season and injuries to several key players (center David Andrews, fullback James Develin and receiver K’Neal Hary). Of course, injuries happen to all teams, so that can’t be too much of an excuse. Gronk retired and that really hurt, but the plans to replace him were minimal. And Brady turned 42; that’s old in the NFL, and things do happen as you get older.

But the biggest excuse, in my mind, is personal decisions that reflect poorly on the coaching staff and team officials. Their drafts have generally been unproductive (even with the exceptions), even while acknowledging that because they’ve won so many Super Bowls they get the last draft picks.

Worse have been the decisions about trading players they shouldn’t have traded. That’s why there have been so many holes unfilled properly. The offensive line has been a mess this year not just because of injuries but because the team traded or released players who were needed and who helped other teams. This has been a consistent pattern in recent years; this year it truly caught up with the Patriots.

In other words, team management made decisions that led directly to this year’s shortcomings. And they, not Tom Brady, bear the bulk of blame. And Coach Belichik, for all his successes, is the front man for this mis-management. Everyone makes mistakes, but let’s but the blame where it should go in this instance.

The people who run the Patriots didn’t put the players in situations in which they could prosper. Remarkably, in spite of that, the team won 12 games and the AFC East title – again. That’s all to the credit of Brady and his teammates (and maybe a soft season-opening schedule). But unless there’s an overhaul in thinking and acting, this disappointment may be repeated. With or without Tom Brady.

“I don’t know why anyone should be a member of the Republican Party.”

And no, I didn’t say that. Nor did Nancy Pelosi. Or Joe Biden.

Nope, those words were uttered by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. As often was the case, Ike hit it right on the button.

As we head for the impeachment of lying, incompetent, man-child President Don Trump, it’s instructive to remember how frustrated Ike got with recalcitrant, narrow-minded members of his own party back in the ’50s. And descendants of those GOPers are sitting in the congress now, venting their bizarre defenses of Trump in ways reminiscent of the ways Republicans acted against the national interest during Ike’s administration.

The current crop of Republicans are offering up a terrible font of ideas for opposing impeachment. “He didn’t do it,” is often heard in defense of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s leader. The evidence is clearly otherwise. “If he did it, nothing came of it” is another trope. Except that he’s the president, not a grocery bagger. How about asking those Republicans this: If Barack Obama had done precisely what Trump has done, would they be defending his actions?

If any of them should answer “yes,” then we’ve gone back the ’50s and beyond. Beyond all the way to an alternative universe where partisanship doesn’t exist. (Is there such a universe anywhere? And how to we get there?)

To allow — or encourage — the brazen Trump to further his destruction of democratic ideals — the basis of our democracy — may not be a high crime or misdemeanor, but Republicans in the House and the Senate seem well into a head-long flight of permission for him to do just that.

Trump will be impeached by the Houses, for sure. It appears beyond hope the Senate will follow suit. There are no profiles in courage in the Republican Senate.

Ike apparently might understand that.

It’s not a headline that Connecticut’s roads and bridges are crumbling. That’s been going on for years, if not decades. It’s sad and it’s dangerous to ignore, but that’s exactly what’s been happening for those very same years, if not decades.

There’s plenty of blame to go around. Democrats, Republicans, take your pick. Villains abound. But recently, and belatedly, we’ve heard a lot about addressing the problems and fixing them. Regrettably, however, we can’t seem to find agreement on any way to accomplish that.

Democrats have a plan – or plans. Republicans finally came up with their plan. Now, one seems possible, the other some sort of a fantasy. And the fantasy has to do with the fact that the Democrats’ latest plan involves creating some tolls on roads, while the Republican plan involves refusing to consider, discuss or acknowledge tolling as a revenue raiser.

The reason? Republicans say most people in Connecticut oppose any form of tolling. And they may be right. And they also contend that any tolling proposal — Democrats want to place the toll on trucks only — will lead to tolls on cars.

Here’s the response to that notion: most people always oppose anything that might cause them to have to pay more for things. Even if it’s things that matter, that are critical, in fact. And crumbling roads and bridges are critical. Really. It’s human nature to want to pay more for anything. And carrying on about instituting truck tolling automatically leading to car tolling is just ignoring the hard facts of revenue raising.

The Republicans in Connecticut do have a plan. It involves robbing the state’s reserve fund — how bad an idea is that? — and using more bonding to generate funding. Well and good, but the more bonding the state takes on the less there will be for cities and towns around the state, and eventually that will lead to the necessity of higher taxes for everyone. It’s just not a good idea. Where would you stand if faces with tolls or higher property taxes? I think I can guess your answer.

So we’re seemingly at a stalemate. Democrats control the state legislature and ought to be able to pass a plan, but there’s not the kind of party cohesion in the Democratic Party that Republicans exhibit in their single-mindedness. So we may go nowhere. And that’s about where we’ll all be able to get to when roads and bridges disintegrate.

There’s no time to waste to get going on this issue. now, please.

There is a cancer in the White House, and that cancer has a name: Donald Trump. It can be fatal if not removed, too, for it is a very serious impediment to the survival of our democracy.

The lying, racist, incompetent president whose cancerous words and actions disgrace everything he touches is resisting the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry. That’s obstruction, and that’s against the law (not that he cares or even knows what it means. His attorneys must have to brief him every day). Trump’s attorneys are arguing that no matter what he does, the president is above the law that affects everyone in this country. He alone is impervious to justice. That this one mysgonistic, narcissistic, fool cannot be brought before the nation as the criminal he is.

That simply won’t hold up in any constitutional argument, and it may take the Supreme Court to resolve that. If so, so be it. In the meantime, Trump continues his assault on common sense, decency and truth. He has abandoned American allies, the Kurds, to the slaughter a dictator-led nation, Turkey, whose president is someone someone who understands precisely what sort of two-faced, spineless dictator-wanna-be guides U.S. policies. Let’s hope and pray Trump fails in this malevolent pursuit that beckons treachery for every ally of this nation.

Of course, none of this reaches Trump. It’s sadly and abundantly clear that he is a man who cannot speak clearly, cannot think clearly, cannot process anything above a fifth grade comprehension level (and can’t write, either, without making repeated childish errors). He is close to if not formally and officially a moron. He lacks business skills, covering his pathetic bully tactics with braggadocio (get someone to translate that for you, Mr. president). He is a man without respect, without knowledge and without any kind of class. And to be blunt about it, the sooner he is gone the better for America and the rest of the world. Let’s get that impeachment rolling.

Our white supremacist President Donald Trump calls Baltimore a rat-infested city because he doesn’t like that Baltimore’s representative in Congress continues to investigate him. And, oh yes, that man — Rep. Elijah Cummings — happens to be a black man. It’s not any stretch to believe that the real rat-infested place right now is the White House, and that it will be just fine once the rat leaves office there.

And we got to hear a defense of Trump’s latest racist remarks from his toady chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who comes from South Carolina. While asserting that Trump’s allegations were true, Mick failed to account for the district in South Carolina he once represented for six years. His hometown, for instance is Lancaster, which is a black majority town where one-fifth of the residents live below the poverty line, where there are acres of sub-standard housing, and where if portions are not rat-infested at least rats are quite familiar with the territory.

Now, does that make Lancaster truly a rat-infested town? No it doesn’t, not at all, and no more so than Baltimore deserves the same label. There are ugly, dirty places in every town no matter who represents those places in Congress or anywhere else. (except in Trump’s hotels, where cleanliness papers over the bigotry of their namesake). There are a lot of dirty towns in states Trump won in 2016. And has he done anything to help them? Well, he does sell those folks hats that call for making America great again. That must make everyone feel really good.

We’ve come to a sorry pass when a white nationalist president gives a speech at the memorial to Abraham Lincoln. And on the birthday of American democracy. A lying, cheating, incompetent chief executive has hijacked the military to satisfy his narcissistic needs while seeing that in one way or another America’s taxpayers will foot the bill for his nefarious antics. What a disgrace he is to all that stands for justice and honesty and dedication to American ideals. May he meet his fate, and soon.

Maybe you missed these feel-good news items….

— A rhinoceros poacher in South Africa died after he was stomped by an elephant and eaten by lions. True.

— A robber-wanna-be held up a store in Washington state and was making off with money when he accidentally shot himself when he got stuck in the door on the way out. Really happened.

— Donald Trump told French firemen fighting the Notre Dame Cathedral fire they should use flying water tankers. Of course he did.

It’s hard to categorize the levels of stupidity shown in these three extremely unrelated instances. But Donald Trump’s feeble-minded ideas are on some heretofore unimagined planet of incompetence. On the leaderboards of lying, hypocrisy and corruption, Trump rides high. And now he claims a title for just plain stupid.

In other news…

Utah just legalized sex before marriage. Wow, talk about the cart pulling the horse.

And Kentucky has just outlawed bestiality. That right – they JUST made having sex with animals illegal. Not sure whether that accounts for Kentucky’s population growth — or its decline.

more to come….