1. It’s Friday, August 18, 2017.

2. It’s the 83rd birthday of Roberto Clemente. A baseball player so revered for his goodness that things are named for him outside Pittsburgh, where he played, and Puerto Rico, his home.

Roberto Clemente is an antidote for what ails the world this week.

Of course, he was a great player, helping the Pirates win two World Series and batting .300 or better just about every year of his career. He is the standard for playing right field well, even 45 years after his death.

But he used his baseball success to help others. Indeed, he died while trying to make sure that aid he had collected to help victims of a Nicaraguan earthquake got to whom it was intended.

One of baseball’s coveted postseason honors is the Roberto Clemente Award, going to a player whose work off the field benefits communities in need.

In a week that has seen Charlottesville and Barcelona, maybe it helps to remember that this is a world that once saw a Roberto Clemente – and hope that there’s others like him.

3. At this moment, social media and the political world are agog with the departure – not clear if it’s a firing or a resignation, but that’s no big deal – of Steve Bannon from the White House.

Will Bannon turn on Trump and launch brickbats from confines of Breitbart? Will Bannon be a mouthpiece for Trump? Who emerges as the new White House power figure?

And my question: Who cares?

In the past week, Trump has defended racists and Nazis after their actions led to the death of a woman in a terrorist attack.

In the past two weeks, he has put this nation at risk of nuclear war with North Korea.

In the past three months, he has embarrassed this country in his trips overseas, tried mightily to strip millions of their health care and attempted to harass an investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia to swing the election his way.

Steve Bannon can spew whatever the hell he wants from Breitbart world headquarters in one of Dante’s circles of hell.

The fact of the matter that this meatball, Trump, remains president. He’s still using the office to enrich himself, still trying to undo any government activity that helps people in need and dividing this nation in ways not seen since the Civil War.

Steve Bannon is out. Great. It’s just too bad he can’t take out the orange trash with him.

Stay focused on Trump and what he’s trying to do to this country. All this White House churn – from Spicer to Scaramucci to Bannon – is a shiny object meant to distract you and everyone else from the real stuff.

1. It’s Thursday, August 17, 2017.

2. It’s the 103rd birthday of Franklin D. Roosevelt Junior, the son of the 32nd President of the United States and Eleanor Roosevelt.

It’s also the 29th anniversary of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt Junior.

I guess there’s a 1-in-365 chance that this sort of thing happens. It’s still a little weird.

3. Republicans are becoming more and more uncomfortable with their Frankenstinian creation in the White House.

This morning’s tweets lamented the damage being done to our urban landscapes by the idea that monuments to traitors are getting taken down. With that, Trump continues his embrace of creatures who his victory empowered to emerge from under their rocks.

4. Despite all this, impeachment seems highly unlikely.

I know that there are people chanting it and hashtagging it and what have you. But Trump was right the first time – if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the idiots who support him and the party officials who have hung on would be unfazed.

And as much as I hate Trump, I don’t think impeachment is a great solution. It might, in fact, make matters worse.

Mike Pence is just about as horrendous a human being as Trump. This is a guy who once wrote a piece that was pro-smoking! This is a guy who looks at “The Handmaid’s Tale” as utopian.

But he’s not going to tweet nonsense at 3 in the morning, so people would be able to sleep through the night again. Thus, he’d put more of a smiling face on the horrid things this administration has tried to do – particularly in matters such as health care and civil rights.

So let’s say the Republicans – who, because of their majorities in the House and Senate, have to be on board for any impeachment to succeed – decide Trump’s longterm impact on the party is to smash it to pieces.

And they think, we can be heroes. Get rid of Trump, and his mid 30s approval ratings, and get Pence, who’s right in line with how we think about the world anyway.

5. If this happens, here is what I want Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to say:

No.

The Republicans cannot get rid of Trump unless they also get rid of Pence.

I mean, let’s face it, there isn’t anyone in the current line of succession that I want to be president. But I’d rather take my chances with President Paul Ryan, the House Speaker being next in line, or even President Orrin Hatch, the president pro tempore of the Senate who’s after Ryan.

If Trump is thrown out of office, it will be a trauma, as loathed as he is. Unless Robert Mueller’s case is even stronger than we think, Trump was duly elected under the existing rules. He received a majority of the electoral college votes, if not the popular vote.

Even people who want Trump dumped would be saddened by it.

OK, maybe just some of them. But enough of them to create a vacuum of leadership that his successor will automatically step into.

That’s true even if that successor is Pence. There will be a tendency for the country to unify somewhat behind him as he steers America through this constitutional crisis.

And that would be unfortunate. Because Pence has been a Trump apologist, sucking up to him to get on the ticket when other Republican politicians shunned the idea.

Pence is on board with all of the horrendous Trump policies. And he has been a staunch defender – even in the past week, when Trump pretty much gave his blessing to Nazis and secessionists.

Pence is complicit with everything Trump has done. He should not get to play the role of hero.

The problem for Republicans is that while as much as a majority of them might get to the point when impeachment is a political expedient, not all of them will. Can you imagine a Neanderthal such as Steve King of Iowa or one of those Texas knuckleheads voting for impeachment when Trump is supporting the same crap they always have?

Impeachment would need Democratic votes.

And that’s why Pelosi says no way – not unless we get Pence along with Trump. A President Pence gets a honeymoon in which he gets to pass some of his godawful legislation. And Democrats shouldn’t live with that.

It’s a tough spot. It’s hard to imagine three and a-half more years of this crap every single day.

And yet, as hard as it is to believe, there are worse things. Mike Pence as president is one of them.

I’m no Paul Ryan fan, but I like our chances of survival better. Without a twofer, it should be no go.

1. It’s Wednesday, August 16, 2017.

2. It’s the 176th anniversary of what is considered the most violent demonstration in the history of the White House (if you don’t count the British burning it in 1814).

On August 16, 1841, President John Tyler vetoed Congress’ effort to re-establish the Bank of the United States, a national bank that Andrew Jackson dismantled years before.

Tyler, who succeeded William Henry Harrison four months earlier, in name belonged to the Whig party, which controlled Congress and passed the bank law. But Tyler was kind of a hard-headed jerk, and he really didn’t give a damn what Congress or anyone else thought.

The Whig politicians reacted by marching with supporters from Capitol Hill to the White House. They stormed the ground, burning Tyler in effigy.

In later years, the Whigs made noises about impeaching Tyler, to no avail. But his independence cost him – neither the Whigs nor the Democrats wanted him as their standard bearer in 1844. In 1861, Tyler voted in a special convention for Virginia’s secession from the Union and he was elected to the Confederate House but died before he could take his seat.

Tyler had been a Democrat before the 1840 election, but joined Harrison – a hero at the Battle of Tippecanoe against the Shawnee tribe – on the Whig ticket. The most famous thing about both men is their campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too.”

3. John Tyler might resemble Trump more than any other of Trump’s 43 predecessors – counting Grover Cleveland only once.

He thought that once he became president, he could just run the country. Forget that Congress had other ideas. He managed to piss off both Whigs and Democrats.

But somehow, Tyler staved off impeachment. The Whigs tried, but just couldn’t muster the articles of impeachment needed for a vote in the House.

Republicans are in a different place in 2017.

Unlike the Whigs, who claimed they were double-crossed by Tyler, the Republicans knew what they were getting with Trump. The party leaders backed him once he got the nomination, and were on board with his agenda when he won.

The only reason Obamacare remains on life support is that three Republicans had the integrity to say that what was being done to the American people – ramming through a bill that would take insurance away from millions of them – wasn’t right.

But still, they remain teammates. Democrats can scream all they want – they can’t do anything to Trump.

Even if Robert Mueller finds out that Trump collaborated with the Russians in an attempt to tilt the 2016 election in his favor, Republicans will have to be the ones to see the crime as high enough to warrant action.

So I’m skeptical that, even with yesterday’s sheer debacle of a news conference, even with the condemnation of every politician and other national figure with a shred of decency, even with the outcry on every major TV channel and news organization, that Trump is going anywhere soon.

And even if congressional Republicans have had enough, do you really want Mike Pence in the White House? He’s been complicit with all of this, and all he would do is put a more respectable face on the same crap.

It might give people some sense of relief to type #ImpeachTrump in their Twitter feed. But the reality is that impeachment might not be the solution. It will be just as hard to do that as it was to get rid of Tyler in the 1840s.

Which reminds me that there’s one other thing Tyler and Trump have in common.

They’re both traitors.

1. It’s Tuesday, August 15, 2017

2. It’s the 70th anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan.

It’s the 48th anniversary of the opening of the Woodstock music festival in Bethel Woods, New York. And it’s Napoleon Bonaparte’s 248th birthday.

3. Admittedly I’m biased. I worked at CNN for nearly 16 years.

But a lot of people I care a great deal about inhabit the halls of its offices in New York, Atlanta, Washington, London and other places.

So I mean it when I say this:

Cowards tweet pictures like the one that went out on Twitter earlier today.

People who aren’t fit to be in the same room with the people who work at CNN tweet pictures like the one that went out on Twitter earlier today.

Lowlifes whose integrity doesn’t register in comparison to the men and women I know and worked with at CNN tweet pictures like the one that went out on Twitter earlier today.

Scum whose sole contribution to the planet is what they flush down a toilet tweet pictures like the one that went out on Twitter earlier today.

And all of that goes double for Nazi-sympathizing retweeters.

The people I worked with at CNN do and did their jobs with integrity, courage, perseverance and adherence to the highest standards of their profession. They did their jobs without fear or favor, without bias and with fairness as their guiding star.

They’ll own up to a mistake. They’ll stand by their work. And they’ll do it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 or 366 days a year, for more than 37 years.

Their record of accomplishment is difficult to top. It certainly hasn’t been approached by the meatball occupying the Oval Office – who seems more accustomed to bankruptcy than success.

I might not work at CNN any more. But I’m proud to have done so.

If you think a miserable hate train is enough to stop the people of CNN, you’re as stupid as you are wrong.

1. It’s Monday, August 14, 2017.

2. It’s the 82nd anniversary of Social Security.

President Franklin Roosevelt signed the legislation that is now the lifeblood for millions of elderly Americans.

One of the tack-on benefits of having stalled the Trump-Ryan-McConnell effort to gut Americans’ health care is that they haven’t had a chance to act on gutting Americans’ Social Security – or Medicare, for that matter.

That’s going to be trickier. It’s not that they don’t want to – Republicans are on a mission to gut the legacies of every Democratic president from FDR to Obama, and especially those two.

But the older white people who are the core of the GOP support rely a great deal on Social Security and Medicare. And until the Republicans, in their usual serpentine way, figure out how to sell seniors on the idea that taking away those programs makes them more secure, it’s something they might avoid for a while.

3. Trump’s Charlottesville comments pissed off anyone with a brain who heard them.

The fact that he couldn’t condemn Nazis or white supremacists or traitors carrying Confederate flags by name. The fact that he thought that there were “many sides” in the wrong.

That’s all been rehashed the past few days, and there’s really little to add. Like Putin, Nazis and white supremacists seemed to be on Trump’s side in his crusade against Hillary Clinton, so they warrant his protection. It shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But I was curious about something in his rambling, insipid remarks.

What prompted him to talk about children playing?

“What is vital now is the swift restoration of law and order, and the protection of innocent lives. No citizen should ever fear for their safety and security in our society,” Trump said.

“And no child should ever be afraid to go outside and play, or be with their parents, and have a good time.”

What does Trump know about going outside and playing?

Can you imagine little Donnie traipsing through the streets of Jamaica in the 1950s? Would daddy Fred, who might have been arrested at a KKK rally before his son was born, let his son out among the unwashed?

Playing stickball with the other kids and crying because one of the bigger kids struck him out? Spending a day in the neighborhood ring-a-levio “jail”?

Can you imagine that any of Trump kids ever wandered off the gaudy estate to meet up with the neighborhood kids? Donnie Junior shooting hoops in a playground?

Does he think that little waifs wander the streets of Charlottesville on a Saturday afternoon, getting ice cream and spending a quarter on one of those devices that look like a car or horse and rocks around for about a minute.

A 32-year-old woman died because somebody rammed a car into her and other counter-protestors. But instead of condemning the people who sparked this, this idiot is talking about kids as if they would be running through sprinklers and flipping baseball cards if she and everyone else weren’t around.

So forget the fact that, in real 21st century America, parents just don’t send their kids outside to play the way they did when I was little. That, for better or worse, most kids interact in organized settings like playgroups or community programs, with the older ones playing video games and connecting on social media.

Perhaps Trump believes making America great again means going back to those times when parents sent their kids outside at 10 a.m. and didn’t expect to see them until dinner, except maybe for lunch.

But if that’s the case, maybe it would behoove Trump to tell his little Nazi buddies and Confederate sympathizers that America would be great if they stayed off the streets so that kids can play. Maybe urge them to crawl back under the rock with their fellow pillbugs.

Because that scum is out on the streets. And that’s not a fit sight for any child.

My father hated Nazis.

He was a child of World War II, and believed heart and soul in the great cause of ridding the world of them.

I don’t think it had so much to do with the fact his father and uncles fled the Nazis’ allies, Mussolini’s Fascists, leading to the execution of his grandfather.

All right, maybe that was a factor.

I think it was just that Nazis were evil. And he couldn’t stand that.

So when he was a boy, he participated in scrap metal drives that gave away free Brooklyn Dodger tickets – not so much for the tickets, since he was a Yankee fan, as for the fact that he was doing something to beat the Nazis.

He hated the Nazis so much that, as a grown man, he would shout at the Folger’s coffee commercials because he thought – mistakenly – that the actress who played Mrs. Olsen also was a Nazi in a movie made during the war.

“I wouldn’t drink your coffee, you lousy Nazi,” he shouted.

If he were alive, seeing Nazi salutes on TV today would have made him snap out of his living room chair in red-faced anger.

But since he isn’t, I did it for him.

Nazism is vile. Among its satanic tenets are genocide – the too-close-to-being-successful effort to eliminate Judaism from the planet – and terrorism. The elimination of anyone’s right to speak except those who share your disgusting philosophy.

Add Nazis to people waving the ultimate symbol of treason, the Army of Northern Virginia banner widely viewed as the Confederate flag, and you have one side of people who have no concept or respect for this country and all of its 300 million plus people.

That’s the only side Trump needed to condemn today. Not “many sides,” one. Admittedly with several divisions, but still the same crap.

That he can’t is to his shame. That he can’t is a message that these people are just one petitioner among many for the American soul – and that all should be accommodated. Let’s put America first and work it out – that’s basically what Trump said at his golf course.

That’s crap.

There is no accommodating Nazis. There is no accommodating treasonous supporters of slavery. There is no accommodating those who believe being white – and you can add Christian and male, albeit unsaid – makes them superior to any other American.

People voted for Trump to make America great. But today is not a great day for this country. It is a tragedy that the hope of the world is being reduced to a clash of “many sides” by the man sworn to uphold its Constitution.

Speaking for my dad and most of the decent people of the United States, you and the Nazis are both lousy, Trump.

1. It’s Tuesday, August 8, 2017.

2. It’s Dustin Hoffman’s 80th birthday.

It’s the 43rd anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation announcement.

At noon ET, the Trump administration completed 200 days.

3. In yesterday’s post, I said the nearly two-thirds of Americans who don’t support Trump need to take control of the national agenda. The reeling from tweet to tweet has to stop.

So what should be the first cause? What banner should thousands of Americans rally to in an effort to shake off the toxicity of this administration?

My first choice is a little abstract, but still worthwhile.

4. Respect.

The election of Trump has sparked a surge in disrespect. Most of it is directed at people who aren’t white Christians. A lot is targeted at women.

Two recent incidents highlight the poison infiltrating our society, particularly since Nov. 8, 2016.

On Saturday, as people were gathering for prayers, a bomb tore through the Dar Al Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota. Mercifully, and perhaps miraculously, there were no injuries.

There was something else of which there’s been nothing.

A condemnation by the President of the United States.

For some reason, Trump doesn’t see the bombing of the mosque as something as worthy of his comment as a senator’s criticism of him and his war on the nation’s news media.

What happened in Bloomington on Saturday is terrorism. And to go around claiming you’re some sort of scourge on terrorists without taking a strong stand against this kind of crap makes you a hypocrite.

Attacks on mosques, synagogues or churches reek of bigotry and hatred, and are designed to make people fearful.

That’s terrorism, Trump. Not sure why he can’t say that, and put the weight of the most powerful office in the world behind something any decent human on the planet can support. And, in the process, make more Americans feel as though they’re part of the nation’s fabric, instead of outcasts.

But, hey, good luck missing those bunkers on the 15th hole.

5. The second thing is the controversial memo issued by a now former Google engineer tackling the problem of diversity in the tech conglomerate.

In the memo, the engineer starts out fine (other than using the ridiculous Oxford comma). “I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.”

Alas, as the furor attests, there’s a but in here.

It begins on page three of the memo with a section titles “Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap.” He starts talking about inherited traits of men and women.

And then he steps in it. He says things such as women prefer jobs in social and artistic areas, don’t have the biological capability to speak up on their behalf, and tend to be more neurotic – with higher anxiety levels – than men.

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf writes that news organizations are miscovering this memo as an anti-diversity screed. He says by reading it, you understand that the author’s intentions are good.

Sorry, Conor. It’s a stereotype. It’s a lie. And once you reach that point in the memo, it’s like mold on bread – the whole loaf is headed for the garbage.

It really seems long past time we stop judging people by what they look like and instead see what each individual brings to the task at hand.

6. So back to my original point.

A rally to respect all Americans would establish the idea that everyone is part of the American experiment. Regardless of race, sex, religion, gender orientation and ethnicity.

And one more thing – and this part is how you appeal to so-called Trump voters: Geography.

While we all have our preferences about where we live and where we visit, in this country there should be no bias toward people of any locale. The people who feel slighted because they’re Iowans or Mississippians should not feel that way.

A respect rally would be a good starting point to show that opposition to Trump isn’t the only point we share.

And yet, is there any doubt this is something Trump would have a hard time participating? It belies the whole foundation of his presidency.

Besides, there’s an obvious performer for the crowd. Fire up the train for Aretha!

1. It’s Monday, August 7, 2017.

2. On this day in 1942, 75 years ago, both Garrison Keillor and B.J. Thomas were born.

Keillor is the conjurer of “A Prairie Home Companion,” an unlikely cultural icon from the realm of public radio. He’s left the show, but it remains a tribute to what is truly great about America – its wit, its culture and its diversity.

Thomas is the guy who sang “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” It accompanies a scene in which Butch, played by Paul Newman, does tricks on a bicycle to impress Katharine Ross.

There’s no other real context for the song in the movie. But it’s a Bert Bacharach-Hal David work, and this was when they were as hot as any songwriting team other than Lennon and McCartney.

3. The message of “Raindrops” is that bad things happen, but we shouldn’t let them get us down.

That’s an interesting message in August 2017.

For there is no doubt in the minds of about two-thirds of our countrymen that this is a gloomy time in our nation’s history. That’s thanks to the other third, who willed into and still support a huckster in the nation’s highest office.

But it has been hard for the people who oppose Trump to get their act together.

Because of the nature of our electoral system, there haven’t been a lot of ways for people to express their discuss at the ballot box. This is a year of small elections, and people generally don’t like to take out their national frustration on somebody running for town clerk.

4. And you’ve got to hand it to the guy at the center of this. He knows how to keep people off-balance.

There were actually people who thought his 17-day stay at his golf course in New Jersey would lead to some peace and quiet in the land. Ha. As long as there’s Wi-Fi on the facilities and a device to crank up Twitter, he can dictate the day’s agenda in a couple of minutes – then spend the rest of the day playing golf, looking in the mirror or whatever the hell he does with his time.

The noise he creates, the loud complaining and indignation his tweets spark, are his life force.

And every week is the same. There’s some supposed theme for the week that falls by the wayside when Trump tweets something offensive or floats another indecent policy idea – usually early on Monday morning.

Then comes the response – the pundits on the cable news networks, the comedians on the late-night shows, the outraged opponents on Facebook and Twitter.

It’s ridiculous. The guy is calling the shots. He controls the situation.

Trump must love this part of it. If he can’t have the undying love of the American people, he can at least control the background noise of their lives. If there’s a way he can make money from it, that’s even better.
So here’s a thought:

5. It’s time for this country to regain control.

There are things the American people need done. Building infrastructure. Trying to mitigate climate change. Improving the relationships among people of different backgrounds. Making health care universally available and more affordable.

These are real issues. Trump has only addressed two of them, and only in the negative – working with congressional Republicans to gut health care improvements from the Affordable Care Act and putting climate change deniers in charge of protecting us from climate change.

If Trump won’t respond to what Americans really want, Americans need to make their voices louder.

This is especially true of what should be the goal of every American president – bringing the nation’s people together. This whole idea of playing to the base is a preposterous way to govern – and it was true when Democrats do it as well.

It’s a reason Hillary Clinton lost – she only seemed to be campaigning to turn out people on her side. She never tried to reach the people who were undecided or against her.

She did what we’re letting Trump do now. Set the tone. Set the agenda. Establish the narrative.

6. Let’s change it.

Instead of letting Trump wink at police indiscretions, let’s rally for a system that brings police and communities together to prevent violence.

Instead of letting Trump call any state a “drug-infested den,” let’s find solutions that solve the problem, working with law enforcement, embattled communities and, yes, pharmaceutical companies.

Instead of letting Trump gut our health care system, let’s come up with some demands for what we want to see change and ways to implement them.

Instead of letting Trump imply people of different races and religions are less than American, let’s rally for them.

And that’s where the spirit of Garrison Keillor comes in.

He welcomed artists of all stripes to his show, celebrating all forms of music to his national radio audience.

We need that now. We need 400,000 people on the Mall in Washington to celebrate the diversity of this country. We need 500,000 people to support real solutions to the drug problem, not just throwing people in jail or cutting funds for treatment programs. We need 600,000 people on the Mall to show that climate change is a threat.

And we need artists of all stripes, politicians of many persuasions to show that this country is more than a select bunch of yahoos in West Virginia who genuflect at a gold-plated fool’s tweets.

We’re never gonna stop the rain by complaining.

We’re going to stop it by acting on what’s good about this country and changing the narrative. We’re going to stop it by ignoring the daily tweet dump about whatever’s bothering this jackass at the moment and focusing on what we want.

The president is supposed to serve the people, all the people, as different from one another as “A Prairie Home Companion” showed them to be.

Not the other way around.

1. It’s Friday, August 4, 2017.

2. It’s Barack Obama’s 56th birthday. Has any President been as missed six months out of office as this guy?

3. My former CNNMoney colleague Paul La Monica – one of business journalism’s most accomplished tweeters – always offers this thought the day before the monthly jobs report: We all should be rooting for good numbers, no matter what our political persuasion. 

Paul’s absolutely right. All Americans should want their countrymen and women employed – if that’s what they want. Rooting against the employment figures is like rooting against our military – pretty damn close to treasonous.

So despite the fact that I loathe Trump, and realize that he’ll take credit, I’m very pleased with today’s July labor report. A gain of 209,000 jobs, which is not just a plus but a solid one. And a decline in the unemployment rate to 4.3% from 4.4% in June.

4. Two sectors of the economy stick out in this report.

One is that people must be eating out a lot.

Employment in food service and what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “drinking places” – question: Does Jamba Juice count? – rose by a solid 53,000 jobs. In the past year, the industry has added 313,000 jobs.

That’s a curious thing. Are you eating out more? Are you hanging out at bars more?

Everywhere I look, I see restaurants, diners and the like closing. Now this might just be a local phenomenon – for a Burger King closing in New City, New York, a Sonic might be going up in the Washington area.

But people tend to eat out more when they’re feeling prosperous. So that’s a good sign for the economy – although I know some grumpy types that see a boon in this as a sign that a fall is coming. Let’s hope not – at least not any time soon.

The second sector that stands out is health care. An additional 39,000 jobs were added in this industry last month, bringing the one-year total to 327,000.

This seems a sign that whatever we’re doing in health care right now is pretty good for the economy. More people are using health care services, which means more people are working in health care services.

5. So why the hell would anyone want to mess with that?

A drastic change in health care – let’s say, repealing Obamacare – would tamper with what’s become a growing part of the economy.

Not only has Obamacare helped make America healthier, it has helped make America more prosperous – completely contrary to the screaming that the far right did when the law was enacted in 2009.

It must drive Republicans crazy that this law worked. And it just proves that Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain were looking out for the best interests of the party as well as the country when they voted against the so-called skinny repeal measure last week.

6. Which brings us back to Barack Obama.

I’ll bet Trumpsters believe Obama is jealous of today’s numbers. Since Trump took office, slightly more than 1 million jobs have been created.

Obama ain’t jealous. Obama is a big reason those numbers are so good. Jobs have grown for 82 months in a row, a streak that began after the Obama stimulus helped right the economy following the financial crisis.

If anything, today’s jobs number is Obama’s birthday present. It’s gorgeous. And we should all celebrate.

Happy birthday, Mr. President.

1. It’s Thursday, August 3, 2017.

2. It’s the 13th anniversary of the reopening of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. It had been closed since the Sept. 11, 2001 attack that destroyed the World Trade Center.

For nearly three years, people seeking inspiration from the statue had to be content with the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on its side.

Hundreds of people speak the words on Liberty Island every day. They’re part of the power that a visit to the statue – and to the nearby Ellis Island immigration center – engender.

Of course, there are people like Stephen Miller, who are probably more concerned about whether they serve chicken nuggets at the snack bar, and why you have to pay money to take a boat to the island.

4. There are people who will tell you that those of us on the coasts – I’m including my friends in California, Oregon and Washington – really don’t understand the impact immigration has on the American economy.

The real impact is on the heartland, these people will say, where immigrants – many of them here illegally – are taking jobs from American citizens.

This canard has been bouncing around for decades – it’s imagined by narrow-minded people and reinforced by opportunistic (read: Republican) office seekers and their tame media (read: Fox News).

So that’s why you can get crap such as that proposed yesterday by Trump and two other bags of pus who hold seats in the U.S. Senate – Cotton of Arkansas and Perdue of Georgia.

Let’s put it all in perspective.

Immigration is how I’m here. It’s how my wife is here. Because of that, it’s why my kids are here.

There aren’t a whole lot of people I know or I’ve worked with who aren’t here because of immigrants, most of whom couldn’t speak the language when they got off the boat, the truck or the plane. Most of them had no jobs waiting for them, no understanding of what skill sets would be needed in this land.

There are issues with immigration. No one disagrees that it’s better done legally. Those who come in without proper documentation can – in some instances – be used as a bludgeon on the wages of people already here, which is one of the things that sparks the anti-immigrant sentiment.

But to curtail immigration with a so-called “merit-based” system is preposterous. It’s shameful. It’s cowardice.

And it betrays the spirit that brought people here. People who built and defended this country. Who died in World War II and Vietnam and Iraq and on that awful September day in 2001 that closed the Statue of Liberty pedestal for nearly three years.

Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Every American worth a damn knows these words, and knows how they symbolize the greatness of the United States.

Obviously, Trump and every senator or representative who supports this garbage proposal doesn’t fall into the worth a damn category.

And if you live in Iowa or Kentucky or Georgia – or even in New York or Los Angeles – and support this: To hell with you, too.

5. Congratulations to Norman Lear, age 95, who will be among this year’s recipients of the Kennedy Center’s annual honors for achievement in the arts.

It’s well deserved. Lear contributed greatly to American culture with his pioneering sitcoms that looked at social issues: “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “The Jeffersons” and more. He’s also devoted his life to advancing free speech in America.

That doesn’t change my thought that maybe Lear didn’t succeed in changing America as he wished to do. That bigotry prevailed in spite of his incredible efforts against it.

What I also imagine, from what I know about the man, is that he would welcome the discussion and the chance to either agree or vigorously disagree.

I also cheer the fact that he’s probably going to skip the traditional White House reception for the honorees, who also include LL Cool J, Gloria Estefan, Lionel Richie and dancer Carmen de Lavallade.

“I can’t see myself visiting a White House, what (Trump) called a dump, that dumps on the National Endowment for the Arts,” Lear was quoted as saying by The Washington Post.

Proving he ain’t no meathead.