Once when my son was about 6 or 7 I took him to the circus with some of his friends. The acrobats, clowns, and lion tamer in the center ring enthralled the other kids. Not him. He turned to me and said, “How do you think they make money producing a circus? I think it’s the concessions.” It struck me then that among the people in the world, there are some -- too few, actually -- who are not distracted by spectacles, but, instead, keep their eyes on the bottom line.

That’s how I see the President. His stated goals have always been to make us safe, get the economy booming, enable a job-creation economy, and make life better and safer for all Americans.

As the news is filled with tittle-tattle about the phony baloney Russian collusion story and moronic punditry, the president keeps plowing on with his agenda. American Digest lists 220 things the President has achieved while in office, despite the vitriolic attacks on him and what appears to be a silent coup by the press, bureaucrats, and entrenched officeholders.    

This week, despite Democratic stalling, 78 of his nominees for office were confirmed. So the list should now run to 221 things the President has done to Make America Great Again.

With West Virginia’s Governor Jim Justice having ditched the Democratic Party for the Republican, the Republicans now control 26 state governments. Put another way, 48% of Americans now live in a state where Republicans have complete control. 17% in states with total Dem control. “

The stock market is booming although the NYT twists itself into a pretzel to deny the President’s role in this, per Tom Maguire: 

Just imagine how different the tone of The Resistance would be if the stock market were in hideous retreat, as per Nobel Laureate Krugman's infamous early prediction in response to Trump's election.

But that pesky stock market keeps going up! So the Times explains why, doing their Very Bestest to keep Trump out of it. Spoiler Alert: They nearly succeed.

‘Wall Street, Climbing Sharply, Skips Washington’s ‘Soap Opera’

By Nelson D. Schwartz  Aug 2, 2017

Despite the disorder in Washington — with a revolving door at the White House and roadblocks on Capitol Hill — Wall Street and corporate America are booming.

The disconnect was evident Wednesday, as the Dow Jones industrial average passed the 22,000 mark, a new high. At the same time, blue chips like Apple, Caterpillar and U.S. Steel have all reported strong earnings in recent weeks that surpassed analysts’ forecasts.

“None of the soap opera in Washington matters,” said Frank Sullivan, chief executive of RPM International, a Cleveland-based maker of specialty coatings and sealants like Rust-Oleum. “Nobody in business cares about who talked to who in Russia.”’

[snip]

But a market surge based on political hopes has been replaced by one more firmly grounded in the financial realm.

Besides steady economic growth or less regulation, investors also have been encouraged by the loose reins of central banks like the Federal Reserve, which have helped keep interest rates not far above their historic lows. Inflation, too, remains tame, with price increases in recent months actually falling short of the Fed’s targets.’

[snip]

Well. Presidents often get more credit for the economy than they deserve, but I think Trump deserves some credit for being Trump and a lot of credit for not being Hillary.

As for the Russian nonsense, Edward Jay Epstein, a longtime credible sleuth, explains why the Russians had no particular interest in having Hillary win, but a great deal of interest in degrading our belief in the legitimacy of our elections:

In a report issued on January 6, 2017, entitled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” the U.S. intelligence community concluded, based both on its sources and its analysis of stories on the Russian-controlled network RT, that Putin wanted to hurt Clinton, help Trump, and discredit the American election. These may well have been motives of the Russian president, but the narrowly focused assessment fails to explain, or even take into account, Kislyak’s post-election ensnarement of Kushner, or the discrediting dirt against Trump. If Putin had really wanted to help Trump win the election, why did Russian sources provide damaging dirt to Steele, which could have cost Trump the election? Why did Kislyak provide the FBI with information, via a known tapped line, that could (and did) compromise key members of Trump’s administration?

A wider focus can be found, of all places, in Oliver Stone’s revealing, if fawning, four-hour interview with Putin, in which the Russian dictator makes clear that he views American hegemony, including America’s standing and respect in the international community, as a threat that Russia must counter. One way to undermine America’s standing is to provide disclosures that can be used by its own political factions, and the media, to sow distrust in America’s reliability as a democracy founded on transparency. Putin tells the truth when he says that it doesn’t matter particularly to Russia whether Clinton or Trump won the election: his goal was to install doubt in the legitimacy of the process, regardless of how it turned out.

Another longtime investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh in salty language edited out here, claims insider knowledge that Seth Rich downloaded the DNC emails. They were not hacked, but leaked.

He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some juicy emails from the DNC, and you know, by the way all this sh*t about the DNC, um, you know, whether it was hacked or wasn’t hacked, whatever happened, the democrats themselves wrote this sh*t, you know what I mean? All I know is that he (Seth) offered a sample, an extensive sample, you know I’m sure dozens of email and said “I want money”. Then later Wikileaks did get the password, he had a Dropbox, a protected Dropbox, which isn’t hard to do, I mean you don’t have to be a wizard IT, you know, he was certainly not a dumb kid. They got access to the Dropbox. He also, and this is also in the FBI report, he also let people know, with whom he was dealing, and I don’t know how he dealt, I’ll tell you about Wikileaks in a second. I don’t know how he dealt with the Wikileaks and the mechanism but he also, the word was passed according to the NSA report, “I’ve also shared this box with a couple of friends so if anything happens to me it’s not going to solve your problem”. Ok. I don’t know what that means.

[snip]

I have somebody on the inside, you know I’ve been around a long time, and I write a lot of stuff. I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he’s a very high-level guy and he’ll do a favor. You’re just going to have to trust me. I have what they call in my business a long-form journalism, I have a narrative of how that whole [%^&$] thing began, it’s a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation and [*(&]ing the [*(&]ing President, at one point when they, they even started telling the press, they were back briefing the press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, [%^&]ing c Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the GRU, the Russian Military Intelligence Service, who leaked it. I mean all [nonsense]... I worked at the New York Times for [*(&^]ing years, and the trouble with the f[%^&*]ng New York Times is they have smart guys, but they’re totally beholden on sources. If the president or the head of the (???) to actually believe it. I was actually hired at the time to write, to go after the war in Vietnam War in 72 because they were just locked in. So that’s what the Times did. These guys run the [*(&^]ing Times, and Trump’s not wrong. But I mean I wish he would calm down and had a better a better press secretary, I mean you don’t have to be so. Trump’s not wrong to think they all [*(&)]ing lie about him. 

Meanwhile, it turns out that former FBI head James Comey who earlier was caught out leaking to the press official government memos, has been nabbed in wrongdoing again as a FOIA request reveals the FBI, working with the DOJ and certain members of the press, lied and covered up the details of the shocking Loretta Lynch/Bill Clinton tarmac meeting while Hillary was purportedly under investigation by Comey’s FBI for mishandling secret information she’d received as Secretary of State.

Right. Lynch’s DOJ created talking points about the meeting, but they apparently are secret, as they were redacted from all of the emails that contained them. How a FOIA exception could apply to those talking points, which were designed to be shared with reporters, is a mystery. But that is how the Obama administration responded to all FOIA requests on controversial matters: with evasion and obfuscation if not with outright lies. And President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions do not yet, and may not ever, control the Department of Justice.

The Lynch/Clinton meeting became a major news story and even a campaign issue, but not because the Democratic Party press had any appetite for the story. As the DOJ emails show, they didn’t.

Meanwhile, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has brought the grand jury proceedings to Washington D.C. which as  I have already noted, and Professor Alan Dershowitz  agrees, is a highly partisan anti-Republican venue, and he has continued to stack his team with Democratic lawyers most of whom have donated to Hillary, supported the Democrats, and some have even expressed anti-Trump sentiments.

Is he trying to provoke his firing and a crisis? Or is he continuing the game he and James Comey first played on President Bush with the nonsensical Plamegate investigation, which in both cases were ginned up by false reports from left-wing provocateur David Corn?

In the meantime, pay attention to the bottom line. Trump is not losing. The media and the Democratic party they work for are.