1. It’s Wednesday, March 29, 2017.

2. It’s the birthday of English composer William Walton and American businessman Sam Walton. Yes, you can buy a recording of William Walton’s work at Sam Walton’s walmart.com.

It’s also the 122nd birthday of my grandfather, Joseph Loscocco. I think of him all the time and wish he were here to come up with some really good phrases to use against the Trumpian Intrusion.

3. You knew when this idiot was elected president and the Republicans held Congress that there would be days like yesterday.

Trump spent his day crowing about how he’s ending the war on coal. By lifting the restrictions on its use and mining, what he’s really doing is pandering to coal mining companies and people who’ve decided they’d rather work in a mine than figure out something safer to do.

In the process, he’s taking the United States out of a leadership role in combatting climate change, which Trump and morons like him deny exists. Now, the world is in the precarious position of relying on China to save it from a future environmental disaster. To their credit and against expectations, the Chinese seem determined to take this leadership seriously.

Yeah, it’s infuriating – not to mention short-sighted.

And it’s a sign that the Trumpians suffer from memory loss.

Because if you’re their – which, by the way, is my – age, you should remember what it was like to travel to big cities in this country when coal was dominant. How routine it was to smell something in the air and to have your eyes tear and itch as you got closer to the industrial center.

I remember my father driving through a yellow fog of smoke in Gary, Indiana, on our way to Chicago in 1971. You couldn’t see anything except for the open flame of the steel plants that glowed beneath the – to put it benevolently – haze.

Yesterday, Trump bragged that he was putting Americans to work. If his brain was wired normally, he would realize that the future is in developing energy sources that are sustainable – that there are real, good jobs in alternative power and fuel.

Instead, like a lot of older people, he thinks the old ways are the only ways. Positive thinking saved America once, when leaders of both parties – hell, Richard Nixon was a visionary compared to what we have now – got together to solve an obvious problem.

When this orange jackass is gone, will normal intelligence be able to save American again?

4. Then you have what the pillbugs of American politics, the Republicans in Congress, did with your Internet privacy.

The House voted to lift rules that barred Internet service providers from selling your browsing data and app usage. All that stuff is now highly marketable material for whoever you get your online service from.

What’s the advantage to consumers?

Well, you have the usual schpiel about how government regulations inhibit creativity.

But I suspect the creativity will be more along the lines of finding more ways to send you e-mail solicitations you don’t want, bug you with telemarketing calls and otherwise intrude on whatever it is you do.

And now there is a serious question about whether or not what you see online can be seen by people you don’t want to see it.

Yes, there might be prurient reasons why people wouldn’t want that. But there’s also the woman in a dangerous relationship or the guy with a mysterious ailment who’s been searching for ways to get help.

Is it a good idea to let ISPs sell your data who might be able to exploit the vulnerable?

I don’t think so. But Republicans do, because anything they can do to help someone who donated money to them make more money to donate to them, they’ll do.

Pillbugs.