My favorite part from the NY Times article:

“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau,” Mr. Trump said in a letter dated Tuesday to Mr. Comey.

Apparently no gratitude for all that Comey did to get Trump elected.

WSJ says Mr. Trump is considering  shaking up his staff because….well probably because they are running a clown show. Preibus has to be wondering what he signed on off- it will be stunning if he makes it to the end of the year. Wait- is that Chris Christie music I hear?

Top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway warns that  microwaves aren’t just a great way to make popcorn and Hot Pockets- the bad guys use them in nefarious ways. Conway went on to say that the monitoring could be done with “microwaves that turn into cameras,” adding: “We know this is a fact of modern life.”

USA Today also brings the revelation that  Conway thinks the accomplishments of the last 50 days have been “very Trumpian”.

For a long time it appeared that Republicans had no plan to replace Obamacare. They actually have a plan- it is just very, very crappy. Unless you are Paul Ryan who apparently is delighted that only 24 million people will lose their insurance, according to the Washington Post.

For the most part, John McCain is an orthodox conservative Reublican and his “maverick” reputation is mostly a myth. It was shocking to see Trump attack McCain’s war record in 2016 with little pushback. 

McCain is speaking about Trump’s bizarre claims about Obama wiretapping Trump. From the Chicago Tribune:

McCain said Trump could “clear this up in a minute” if he were to call “the director of the CIA, director of national intelligence and say, ‘OK, what happened?'”

The president has an obligation to provide evidence that Obama broke the law or retract his claim, the Arizona Republican said.

Alec Baldwin on SNL.

The Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 elections, but of course Al Gore and Hillary Clinton didn’t become President. As national demographics change, there is a theory that an emerging Democratic majority is inevitable.

The map above shows how each county in the country voted in the Presidential election- Trump dominated in the majority of country with Clinton winning the coasts and urban areas. Additionally Republicans have dominated in state legislatures and governorships since 2008.

Shaun King has an interesting article about some of the root causes .

Continued job growth? Yup, absolutely the work of President Donald Trump.  Apparently the job reports are no longer phony. But want to take a guess as to what happens when there is a month with a negative jobs report?  From Vox:

“The issue was the release this morning of a strong jobs report indicating continued growth in the economy, which many Republicans took the opportunity to crow about. Given the frequency with which candidate Trump had questioned the integrity of government economic data (calling them “phony numbers” and “one of the biggest hoaxes in American politics”), the question went, was President Trump confident that today’s report was accurate?

Spicer, with a wry grin on his face, said, “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”

Trump stated in the election that women who have abortions deserve to be punished. Nobody thinks abortions are a good thing, but a majority of Americans consistently support women’s rights to choose what happens to their bodies. Therefore the Republicans are trying to curtail women’s access instead of trying to outlaw abortion outright.

Federal funds to Planned Parenthood are NOT used for abortions, but Emily Bazelton writes about the backdoor attempt to get Planned Parenthood to stop offering them at all. 

“Making women scramble to find abortion services has become an increasingly common tactic by abortion opponents. In the last several years, red state after red state passed laws that wrapped abortion providers in red tape, with the purported goal of protecting women by making the procedure safer but with the real purpose of closing clinics. And that’s what was happening, at least until the Supreme Court struck down a set of restrictions enacted in Texas in 2013. “It is beyond rational belief” that the Texas abortion regulations “could genuinely protect the health of women,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a concurrence.”