I had an article all ready to go today, and then I took a quick peek at the news. Which caused me to go back and start all over again. Because James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has just been fired. Obviously, I'm not going to have any in-depth analysis, since this happened less than an hour ago (as I write this).

My snap judgment is my reaction to the stated reason from the Trump White House for Comey's firing: Comey improperly influenced the presidential election by his actions 11 days before people voted. His letter to Congress announcing he was reopening the investigation into Clinton's emails is now, for some unfathomable reason, a firing offense.

My reaction: BWAH HAH hah hah hah hah! Ha! Snicker, snicker....

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Today, arguments were heard by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals over President Donald Trump's revised travel ban on a handful of Muslim countries. Next week, the Ninth Circuit will chime in as well. But we're fast approaching the point where the entire argument becomes irrelevant, to both sides.

Lost in all of the politics surrounding the Muslim travel ban court cases is the fact that this ban was only supposed to be temporary. Even when Donald Trump announced a "complete ban on Muslims" back on the campaign trail, it was pitched as a stop-gap measure which would quickly be lifted after "extreme vetting" was put into place. If you carefully read Trump's statements on the issue (which the Fourth Circuit is currently doing), he almost always presents the travel ban itself as merely a means to an end. This end, specifically, was supposed to arrive 90 days after the travel ban order was signed.

Trump's first executive order on the issue was signed on January 27th. That, if I've counted correctly, was 101 days ago. Eleven days longer than the initial ban was supposed to last, in other words.

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The Republican healthcare reform bill is now officially out of Paul Ryan's hands, at least for the time being. Which means it's time for us to rebrand it here. Up to this point, we've been calling it Ryancare (Ryancare 2.0, for the latest go-round). Democrats have already been calling it Trumpcare, for obvious political reasons. But we have to say, we favor a suggestion we first read in someone's online comment to a healthcare reform article (which we read so long ago that we only remember the idea, and not the originator, sorry). It was probably in the Washington Post, but we couldn't swear to it. Wherever we read it, we got a good laugh out of it and have decided to adopt it as our own.

Instead of using his last name (which he loves), why not use a diminutive version of his first name (which he apparently hates) instead? Add in his last name's initial, and it becomes: "DonTcare." Personally, we feel this perfectly captures the entire Democratic argument, using only eight letters: Donald T's "don't care what's in it, don't care how many of my voters it will screw, as long as Congress passes some bill or another so I can brag about it!" health care plan. DonTcare. Rolls off the tongue, don't it? Well, typing it does take some getting used to -- but without that second capitalization, it'd be a lot harder to read. Trump DonTcare. And while we certainly can't claim credit for coining the term, we do encourage others to use it freely -- it even saves characters in tweets!

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In all the news articles triggered by the House passing the Republican "American Health Care Act" (A.H.C.A.), one quote prominently stood out. From an article written by David Weigel in the Washington Post came this extraordinary quote:

"Congress and the White House have focused their public efforts on platitudes and news conferences, while the substance and the details have remained behind closed doors," Rep. Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), then the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, wrote in a July 2009 op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Those members of Congress who voted for this bill already in their committees did so without knowing what the legislation costs."

Back then, Democrats were in the early part of the process of passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), and Republicans were in a snit because they thought the process was moving too fast.

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Congressional Republicans have now positioned themselves firmly between a rock and a hard place on healthcare reform. This would be highly amusing if it weren't for the seriousness of the subject matter, which could accurately be described as a life-or-death subject for millions. Republicans now have the choice of voting for a bill which is massively unpopular with the public (increasingly so, as a matter of fact), or admitting to their own voting base that they've been flat-out lying about the evils of Obamacare for the past eight years. That's a tough choice, because no matter what route they take, it is bound to cause anger among the voters -- at this point, it's just a question of which particular voters (and how many of them) will be massively disappointed.

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I haven't done one of these three-dot columns in a while (as always, in homage to the late, great columnist Herb Caen), but the flood of news tidbits flowing from the White House is relentless, so I thought it was time to catch up on some of the fresh idiocy coming from the Oval Office.

Donald Trump, so far, is having a very bad week. And it's only Tuesday! Trump has already had numerous bad weeks during his presidency, which is remarkable since there really haven't been all that many weeks of it to date. But he seems determined to set even new lows this week, so let's take a quick look at what he's been up to.

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Barack Obama caused somewhat of a tizzy last week, when it was announced he would be giving a speech to some bastions of Wall Street, for a cool $400,000 speaking fee. Some were simply aghast at the idea, for a couple of different reasons. But there's one way Obama could make most of the criticism disappear (at least that portion coming from the left), and that is by making one simple promise. If Obama pledged to immediately release the transcript of his speech right after he gave it, he could defuse a lot of the angst the idea is causing among progressives. The speech reportedly won't be given until September, so Obama isn't facing an immediate deadline; but the faster he swears he'll release the text of his speech, the better for him politically.

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Tomorrow, in case you hadn't heard, will be Donald Trump's 100th day as president. Grading his performance has been a weeklong event in the media. Rather than our normal Friday format, what follows is our honest evaluation of Trump's first 100 days, which might be summed up as: "Coulda been better, coulda been a lot worse."

The most heartening conclusion for liberals, after 99 days, is that Trump's incompetence is his saving grace. Imagine how much worse things could have been right now if Trump really did have his act together, in other words.

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There's something blatantly obvious to point out about President Donald Trump's recent tax plan, which makes me wonder all the more why others aren't forcefully pointing it out in the media today. Because while it's debatable (and impossible to figure without making assumptions which may or may not be true) how Trump's new tax system would affect his own taxes in terms of deductions and "pass-through income" and all the rest of it; there is one very obvious tax cut Trump would love to see happen, because it would reduce his own taxes by a whopping 81 percent. What's even more puzzling (about the lack of coverage) is that it is perhaps the easiest change he's proposing, in terms of figuring out its impact on Trump's own taxes.

We only have one recent year's data to work with, and we only have the 1040 form, with no accompanying schedules, forms, or explanations. So it's tough to figure how several of Trump's proposals would affect him personally, in anything more than generalized terms. But one Trump proposal is very easy to figure the impact, because it is a breakout number on the 1040 form. On the 2005 Trump form that was leaked last month, this number can be found on Line 45: Alternative Minimum Tax. And it's a doozy, when compared to Trump's overall taxes.

Without taking into account things like penalties and interest, Trump paid an impressive total of $38,435,451 in federal taxes in 2005. Of that total, only $5,310,616 was entered on the line most people figure their taxes on (Line 44). But a whopping $31,261,179 of the total taxes Trump paid was for the Alternative Minimum Tax -- which he is now proposing to abolish. Divide it out, and Trump's Alternative Minimum Tax was 81.3 percent of his total taxes.

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Decades ago, a group of American Nazis wanted to hold a march, complete with swastikas and all the rest of the Nazi regalia. The city they wanted to march in turned their request down. The Nazis fought in court, and they were aided in doing so by the American Civil Liberties Union. That's what an unshakable commitment to the First Amendment means -- defending those with whom you do not agree. Which is why I support Ann Coulter's right to speak at the University of California, Berkeley. I certainly don't agree with a single word that comes out of the woman's mouth, but I have to defend her right to spew her bile in a venue supported by my tax dollars.

The Nazi case was a shocking one for many reasons, and anyone who uses the term "trigger warning" today will be horrified (perhaps this sentence should have been preceded by a trigger warning for those who support trigger warnings?) to learn that the city in Illinois where the Nazis wanted to hold a swastika-bedecked march was not only 40 percent Jewish, but by some estimates one out of every six was either a Holocaust survivor or a family member of a Holocaust survivor. In other words, the Nazis weren't just trying to be as offensive as humanly possible, but they also were hand-picking their venue to maximize how offensive their march would be to the residents. But they still had the right to march, and the Supreme Court ruled they would be allowed to display swastikas, as well.

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