The best commentary on the Omarosa-versus-Trump saga I've yet heard came from Republican pundit Ana Navarro. Forgive me for paraphrasing (I'm doing this from memory), but last Sunday she pointed out: "Omarosa is entirely the creation of Donald Trump. Trump deserves Omarosa." That pretty much sums it up. A reality-show president is being attacked by a former (three-time!) contestant on his reality show, with all the drama and faux outrage of a scripted encounter on that reality show. The question for most viewers isn't (as the media anguishes over): "Which one do you believe?" but rather: "Whose presentation is more entertaining?" As Navarro pointed out, Trump does indeed deserve Omarosa. Especially seeing as he was the one that hired her -- for the fourth time -- to be an aide in his White House.

Which brings me to a seemingly-unrelated story, that of Michael Avenatti considering a run for the Democratic nomination for president. Avenatti travelled to Iowa recently, and gave a speech to present his case for why he should be the one to take on Donald Trump in 2020. His rationale can be summed up as: "I can beat Trump like a drum -- far better than any other possible Democratic candidate." You've got to admit, that's a fairly convincing argument for him to be making.

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This weekend, decent people -- and by that, I mean people who are not white supremacists -- took back the streets, in both Washington D.C. and Charlottesville, Virginia. One year after the tragic deaths in Charlottesville (one at the hands of the white-supremacists, two from a police helicopter crash), the neo-Nazis were shamed and shouted down successfully. Thus proving the old adage: "the answer for free speech you don't agree with is more free speech." This time, the voice of decency was louder, which is entirely as it should be.

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President Donald Trump, when speaking of his idea to create a "Space Force" branch of the U.S. military, invariably sounds like an adolescent boy raving about his favorite science-fiction film. Perhaps this is why he sent Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Defense James Mattis out this week to announce that the Pentagon will (reluctantly) be going along with Trump's idiocy. Trump even unveiled six prototype logos for the new Space Force, all of which look like they were designed by someone who had just woken up from a coma entered into at some time in the early 1960s.

Smarter minds (which used to include Mattis himself) have repeatedly pointed out that (1) we already have military units dedicated to defending space, and (2) making such units their own branch of the military would do nothing more than introduce a massive and expensive bureaucracy on top of what already exists. Not since Ronald Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" was ridiculed as "Star Wars" has any idea been so thoroughly laughed at in Washington, in fact. But (hopefully) this cockamamie idea will explode on the launch pad, since Congress is the one who would have to actually authorize the creation of a new branch of the military. It's just one more reason to get out in November and vote for Democrats, in other words.

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Representative Devin Nunes, at a rally for a Republican House leader, let slip the real reason Republicans want to hang onto control of the House -- because if the Democrats win, his committee (and others like it) will no longer be under GOP control. Which would mean investigative and governmental oversight committees would return to doing the job they are supposed to be doing -- investigating possible wrongdoing and overseeing the Trump administration to discover exactly what they're up to (and how much of it is actually illegal).

Nunes is right, and he's right to be worried about such a prospect. Because there are two practical things that would happen if Democrats do take back control of the House in November. The House would pass bills that Democrats want to see enacted into law, and they would begin investigating Trump in earnest.

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With fewer than 100 days to go until the midterm elections, several states held primaries last night as well as one very closely-watched special House election in Ohio. The final results are not all in, due to the closeness of the race in Ohio and in the Republican gubernatorial primary in Kansas, but enough results are in to draw some broad conclusions overall.

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As promised, today's column is nothing but photos from my Netroots Nation trip, although most of the pictures below are actually from all the stuff we did before we got there. I mention this up front, in case you're not really interested in another travelogue column. For everyone else, let's dive in.

As I mentioned last week, we found a real gem of a place to stay atop the highest point in Arkansas, Magazine Mountain. Here is this fantastic lodge, from the front.

Here's the view from our window.

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I'm back from Netroots Nation, but I'm not yet fully recovered, so today's column is not going to be a full one but rather just a teaser of sorts. I'm hoping that either later tonight or possibly tomorrow I'll have gotten my act together enough to post some photos from the trip, but at this point can't promise a hard schedule or anything (we're still unpacking...).

But I was struck by one rather minor thing at the conference, so I thought I'd toss it out to my readers for their thoughts, because I've been thinking about it ever since. In the main hall of exhibits, there was a table set up by the Public Policy Polling company (P.P.P.). They had a raffle of sorts where you dropped a business card in a fishbowl in the hopes of winning the prize. I did so, but have yet to be contacted by them, so I'm assuming I didn't win the big prize -- but I found it to be an interesting concept, because their prize was: "you get to ask five questions on our next national poll."

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This is your humble narrator, checking in from the road. Today's column is nothing short of a travelogue, so if that sort of thing doesn't appeal to you, I would suggest you stop reading right now. There will be no political discussion, as I've been doing my best to ignore politics for the past few days while enjoying a drive down the middle of the country. Oh, and today's title is quite literal.

Which is as good a point as any to begin with. Our drive was not carefully planned, we just kind of wandered around. Sometimes this leads to disappointing experiences, and sometimes it leads to quite the opposite. It's a Zen sort of way to vacation, in other words. This time, it worked out wonderfully, as we stumbled across a largely-undiscovered gem.

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The beginning of August, in any normal political year, is when we would usually devote at least one column to trying to predict what the upcoming "silly season" will bring. August may be the dog days for most folks, but in politics it is usually the silliest season of the year. Congress scarpers off to enjoy a month-long vacation, which leaves a vacuum of political news in Washington, which leaves political reporters and commenters desperate for an angle to write about -- any angle at all. This normally leads to focusing on some extraordinarily silly subject matter (to the exclusion of all else), for weeks on end -- hence the season's unofficial name. But these are not normal times, of course, and part of the abnormality that Donald Trump has ushered in is such a vast extension of the silly season that it can now be accurately said to have encompassed the entire calendar year. There is no more silly season anymore, in other words, because it is now silly season all the time. Just check Trump's Twitter feed on any given day, if you require proof.

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Although I intend to take to task two of my favorite targets in this column (the mainstream media and the inside-the-Beltway cocktail-circuit chattering class), my real purpose in writing today is to create a memorandum to myself. Next week I will be attending the Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans, which will be as intense a gathering of lefties as is possible to imagine. This year, obviously, feelings will be running high and the rampant enthusiasm and optimistic expectations for the upcoming midterm elections should be off the charts. A little more than 100 days from now, America will vote -- and midterms are always seen as a referendum on the job the current president is doing. But like all ideological gatherings, Netroots Nation will be an echo chamber or (to be more polite) "speaking with only one voice." And it's important, when joining such a gathering, to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism. I guess what I'm trying to say was best said by that learnèd philosopher Yogi Berra, when he quipped: "It ain't over 'til it's over."

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