There were lots of losers with few winners these past weeks in ‘Politics in the USA.’ On everyone’s mind is the two-night display of weird Socialist Democratic policy goals proudly touted to the nation during the first Democratic debate held June 26-27 in Miami, Florida. On the second night, an NBC moderator asked all 10 presidential candidates if they favored extending free healthcare benefits...

Let’s talk about politics and beer. No matter what bar you go into, no matter where it is the subject of ‘Politics in the USA’ pretty much dominates many conversations just like sports and women. These days Pennsylvania bar talk and beyond is all about the popular Yuengling beer and its owner billionaire Dick Yuengling. Last week Mr. Yuengling, 85, took presidential son Eric Trump on a tour of ...

More than likely President Donald Trump backed off striking missile installations in Iran due to the annual G20 Summit  held in Osaka, Japan on June 28-29. The radical Islamic country of Iran shot down an unmanned, unarmed surveillance drone claiming it was flying in Iranian airspace which is in dispute with U.S. military claims that the drone was flying close to Iran but over international waters...

Roadblocks continued this Monday in Costa Rica in different key roads, particularly Route 32 which communicates San José and Limón. The pressure by different sectors forced the resignation of Minister of Education Edgar Mora, one of the demands of the protesting groups. Labor union leaders announced that roadblocks and other forms of protests will maintain throughout this week as they will p...

Transport services, fishermen, students all took the streets this week in Costa Rica to protest against the government. Driving slow enough to cause congestion (tortuguismo) and blocking different key roads, drivers, specifically truckers, representing different transport services were the first to manifest their anger earlier this week against the implementation of the Value Added Tax (VAT) wh...

A Fox News presidential poll asking the question ‘Biden or Trump in 2020?’ shows that former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump in a nationwide head-to-head match up. Really Fox News? This poll has been all over mainstream media and the subject of much discussion because it was on Fox News and not CNN, but CNN is using it right along with everyone else. According to Fox News ...

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has two weeks left as President Donald Trump’s leading spokesperson after her boss announced her resignation late last week on Twitter. In doing so, Sanders and the president met with reporters to further explain her departure having served as press secretary for 1.9 years. “This has been the honor of a lifetime,” Sanders said. “I’ve loved ever...

Who cares what John Dean thinks? The former White House Counsel for President Richard Nixon played a pivotal role in the first and only presidential resignation involving the famed Watergate Scandal of 1973-74. Dean appeared before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Monday June 10th. He was asked to appear by committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) to discuss the similarities between the...

The week of June 6 was a study in contrasts -- The 75th anniversary of the World War II D-Day invasion with President Donald Trump standing with surviving heroes in Normandy, France; First Lady Melania Trump hugging and giving high-fives to the D-Day veterans as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi urges “prison” for the president. Nowhere in mainstream media did anyone bother to mention that pres...

The three-day California Democratic Convention held this past weekend in San Francisco – the capitol of Libby Nation – amounted to a huge waste of time. Some 14 Democrats – all presidential light-weight contenders -- went on and on with all the usual rhetoric of bashing President Donald Trump calling him a “racist, a sexist, a homophobe and a religious bigot,” according to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sand...

Washington Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are so consumed with impeaching President Donald Trump they really cannot see beyond their hate for this rogue president who goes about his presidency his own way – not their way – like no president before him. Mainstream media – especially CNN – are straight out calling President Trump a “criminal” which further fuels the fires of impea...

In his Costa Rica Star column of March, 25, Britt Nelson claimed Special Counsel Robert Mueller had “vindicated” Donald Trump and concluded that there was no “collusion” between members of the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government. I re-read Britt Nelson’s column in the wake of Robert Mueller’s public statements on May, 29, and could only wonder how Mr. Nelson could have come to s...

Just maybe the government of the United States of America has too many secrets. Those that hold the secrets and keep those secrets secret are now on the defensive for their conduct during and after the 2016 national election. Some say these ‘intelligence’ keepers broke laws to keep President Donald Trump out of the White House. “The people who are worried about this are worried about being expo...

The proof is in. Washington Democrats know they can’t beat President Donald Trump on Nov. 3, 2020 so instead of joining hands for the American people they have decided it’s all or nothing to take out the president and continue this ugly fight to the end which will blow up in their faces. Last week U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) repeatedly accused President Trump of taking part in...

Three or four years ago, I wrote a column for Gloucester Daily Times here in Massachusetts in which I described the sordid, bipartisan, history of the United States’ involvement in Latin America generally, and Central America specifically. (Central American Triangle) That letter predated Donald Trump’s election and included some pretty harsh criticisms of administrations of both parties. From  ...

The first of 12 nationally televised Democratic presidential debates will be held over two nights on June 26-27 in Miami Beach, Florida to be broadcast by NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo, according to the uspresidentialelectionnews.com website. The two-night format is due to the large number of candidates seeking the presidency during the national election in November 2020. So far 19 candidates have q...

The Constitutional Chamber in Costa Rica (Sala IV) annulled this week 11 salary increases that benefited employees of the state refinery (RECOPE). The benefits were granted to the employees in what is called the “Convención Colectiva” (collective convention), which is an agreement celebrated between one or several worker unions and their employers to regulate the conditions under which the work...

You can only snicker when commenters on The Costa Rica Star state that ‘opinions’ on American politics have no business being carried as newsworthy to those in Tico land. Sorry folks, but what happens in Costa Rica’s biggest trading partner can not only affect the lives of its citizens and residents but it's future wellbeing…BIG time. We will try and make a complex subject simple. People are se...

Political realist U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) may well be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. If President Donald Trump wins a second four-year term the Republican Party may throw their support behind Graham who has more experience of the right kind to be elected president than just about any other United States senator or politician in Washington. At 63-years old Graham has spent ...

Dominating the news this week are two issues the Washington Democrats don’t want to talk about – since Jan. 1 some 508,800 apprehensions of illegal immigrants attempting to enter the United States of America through the southern border with Mexico have been recorded and America’s roaring economy. When it comes to the economy the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Congress continues to spew lies ...

President Donald Trump held his 390th political rally Wednesday afternoon in Panama City, Florida at the Aaron Bessatt Park Amphitheater. This outdoor venue was packed to the gills with raucous and enthusiastic supporters who hung on every word spoken by this president of the United States of America – a political rock star. According to Wikipedia, during 2015-16 presidential candidate Donald T...

My goodness the headlines on the Real Clear Politics website are all over the map of liberalism, conservatism and those independents in the middle of the road. For those that don’t know the RCP website is recognized by political observers everywhere to be the most unbiased objective view of American and world politics. It’s all on there somewhere – all the polls and opinion heads. If people are...

Walls are crumbling around the Washington Democrats as the heat of the flames begins to scorch their protected heroes. Fires of revenge are indeed burning within the halls of the U.S. Congress, the White House, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There is a big dose of reality coming soon live on national TV and smartphones around the world as the Democrats disi...

Former Vice President Joe Biden kicked off his campaign for president Thursday with a boring and uninspired 3-minute social media video that blasted President Donald Trump as a racist – the same old baseless accusations that have been made over and over. He went on to say that Trump if he wins a second term would forever “fundamentally alter” the character of the United States of America. Biden...

Guess who needs to hire defense attorneys -- former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Security James Clapper, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former head of the Democratic National Committee and current U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL), former ...

First Lady of Costa Rica, Claudia Dobles, was named by among the World’s Greatest Leaders by Fortune Magazine, she is the only Latin American in the top 15. “Dobles helped her husband, Carlos Alvarado, win the election in 2018 with a pledge to “decarbonize” Costa Rica by 2050. An architect and urban planner, she’s now in charge of turning that promise into reality—setting deadlines, brokering a...

Simultaneously watching U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s press conference Thursday on CNN and FOX News viewers saw CNN’s news anchors and commentators saying just the opposite of what FOX News’ anchors and commentators were saying about the public release of FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia/Trump collusion report. On CNN it was all about Mueller’s report saying President Donald T...

By John McPhaul President Donald Trump has declared that the United States has an emergency on its southern border. In response to the emergency, one of the president's tactics has been to cut off humanitarian and development assistance to the so-called northern triangle -- Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador -- alleging that the counties have done nothing to with the assistance to stem the ...

Newspaper, TV and radio reporters in cities large and small have used the term NIMBY for as long as anyone in the business can remember. It stands for Not In My Back Yard. It often comes up when local, state or federal governments attempt to locate a new garbage landfill, water/sewer treatment plant, airport runway extensions, new highways and other public works projects. We are all for that mu...

It’s about time to have a strong U.S. Attorney General in William Barr who also served as U.S. Attorney General under former President George W. Bush. This new Republican attorney general has the Democrats scrambling to find ways to obstruct and delay this man who dropped a major bomb on the U.S. Congress, mainstream media and the public. Barr appeared before two congressional oversight committ...

It’s a huge wonder that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s tax returns filed year-after-year by President Donald J. Trump before and during his presidency remain a secret. Since the president legally refuses to release his tax filings you’d think that someone somewhere would figure out how to steal or hack Trump’s personal and business tax returns from deep inside the IRS. Just imagine what wo...

The southern border with Mexico is on fire with a humanitarian crisis never seen before. The U.S. Congress is on fire with more demands to release the un-redacted Mueller report on Russia/Trump campaign collusion and more demands for President Trump’s tax returns before he took office. The Democrats’ pants are on fire over everything Trump. There’s a ton of smoke and mirrors going on now in Was...

Fact is, Trump could probably not find Costa Rica on a map. He isn’t so good with geography, though he has pointed out that there are a lot of shit-hole countries in Africa. The White House refers to Puerto Rico as a country, I suppose because it is surrounded by water, BIG water, ocean water. He is claiming that the US has sent 91 billion dollars for reconstruction (in actuality, only 40 billion)...

If anything derails former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential run it’s this little problem he has with being too touchy, feely and kissy with women. Where is the ‘MeToo’ movement when it comes to Mr. Biden? Hidden away in Biden’s closet are incident after incident of him being “creepy” with women and young girls. News reports say Biden will announce his presidential aspirations someti...

Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. Some historians have argued that there is an element of psychological projection in conspiracism. This projection, according to the argument, is manifested in the fo...

All of a sudden FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller went from good guy to bad guy. His findings in the Trump Campaign/Russia collusion left Washington Democrats dismayed, broken and vowing to carry on Mueller’s Trump/Russia probe despite his findings that leaves President Donald Trump vindicated of any involvement with criminal collusion, conspiracy or obstruction of justice before or after his ele...

Everywhere you look the Washington Democrats – especially the declared presidential candidates -- are making one outlandish statement after another as if they are in some sort of loser contest. Dispirit people say dispirit things. Take for example the latest nonsense coming from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). During a recent town hall meeting in Iowa – sight of the nation’s first presidential ...

What are you, 13 years old? 49 tweets over the weekend ? It’s not just a disgruntle few that are asking these questions. This conduct is erratic and indefensible. The country, the world looks to the president for character and dignity. John McCain, by all measures was a hero. He didn’t hide behind imaginary bone spurs. Sure, he was shot down over Vietnam, and most of us would prefer that it hadn...

Being a political realist these days is the best way to go especially if you are viewing political developments from a foreign country like Costa Rica. Many of us expats are grateful not to be living in the United States of America right now because there’s not much unity to be found back home. Not the left, not the right and not the middle – a realist realizes the reality of President Donald J...

“Restraint of psychiatrists’ comments on political candidates is grounded in APA’s response to an attempt to question Barry Goldwater’s mental health during the 1964 campaign for president”, a quote from the web page of the American Psychiatric Association. Barry Morris Goldwater was a five term senator from Arizona from 1953-1965 and again, 1969-1987. Goldwater was the Republican candidate for t...