So the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is running a few new campaign slogans up the old flagpole, but so far it doesn't seem like many people are saluting them. It's the D.C.C.C.'s job to get more Democrats elected to the House of Representatives, and part of that job is to help out Democratic candidates with messaging they can use in their campaigns. But what they came up with is pretty insipid -- and I'm even bending over backwards to be polite, at that.

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Here we sit, on the eve of (or, more correctly, the day after) our nation's birthday. I've pointed out in years past that the whole "fourth of July" discrete date is nothing short of a myth. We celebrate a fiction. Our nation's birthday is a lie. One might almost call it "fake news."

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That's a doozy of a subheading, but we felt it was completely appropriate this week. It is a direct quote, from conservative (and "Never Trump") commentator Ana Navarro. During an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Navarro responded to Trump's recent tweetstorm attacking Mika Brzezinski by calling on Republicans to say to Trump (either on television or personally) the following: "Listen, you crazy, lunatic, 70-year-old man-baby, stop it. You are now the president of United States, the commander-in-chief and you need to stop acting like a mean girl because we just won't take it." We've saved her entire rant for the talking points, because it is indeed worth reading in full; but because it was the most forceful pushback on Trump we heard all week, we thought it deserved headline status. Tell us what you really think, Ana!

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When will they ever learn? Once again, Donald Trump has almost completely hijacked the American news media for the day, by viciously attacking two media personalities on Twitter. The rest of the media then obligingly chased after this shiny, shiny object almost to the exclusion of all else. Again. We're all caught in this neverending cycle, it seems.

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Up until now, congressional Democrats have been smart to merely stand on the sidelines and watch Republicans flail on their "repeal and replace Obamacare" efforts. This follows the sound political theory of: "When your opponent is digging his own grave, don't interrupt him." But at some point in the near future, Democrats are going to have to offer up their own better ideas for what to do next on healthcare. There are already many pushing for single-payer or (as Bernie Sanders likes to call it) "Medicare for all." This, however, is quite likely a bridge too far -- even within the Democratic Party. Instead of such a radical change, Democrats would do much better to rally around a more transitional idea that was jettisoned during the drafting of the Obamacare law: the public option.

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Every so often, we have a certain reaction to a bit of political news. We then fully expect at least a few other political commentators to have the same reaction, only to be surprised when it seems that nobody else read things the way we did. This is precisely where we find ourselves over President Donald Trump's recent tweets, where he supposedly put the issue to rest of whether secret audio recordings were ever made in his White House. Everybody seems to be buying his spin, and nobody questioned the obvious loophole he left himself. Because if you read what he wrote and take it at face value (not reading more into it than he actually says), Trump still has not answered the question of whether such tapes exist or not. Not even close.

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President Donald J. Trump turned 71 years old this week. He held a party and invited all his cabinet members, who were all allowed to sing his praises in a manner one reporter summed up as: "honestly this is like a scene from the Third World." The internet, of course, had a field day afterwards. But it's pretty easy to understand why Trump felt the need to hold a public ass-kissing event to celebrate. After all, pretty much all of his other birthday presents were stinkers.

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This is going to be a disappointing column for some, since I'm not really going to get into my thoughts on the testimony Attorney General Jeff Sessions offered up this afternoon to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Before I feel ready to comment on that particular subject, I've got some research into the history of executive privilege to do (and I suspect I am not alone in that, I might add).

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There are three separate court cases which are making news today, so I thought it'd be worthwhile to take a quick look at all of them, to see the potential impact they might have. The three cases are in very different stages of completion. One was just filed in federal court. One got a just got a ruling from the Ninth Circuit of Appeals. And one is about to be ruled on by the Supreme Court. So let's take them one at a time.

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President Donald Trump and former F.B.I. chief James Comey engaged this week in an extended game of "Liar, liar!" Or, more properly: "Liar!" "No, you're a liar!" Yes, it was "Super Bowl" week in Washington, folks!

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