Exit Left: The 10-year reign of the once-popular Bolivian President Evo Morales ended yesterday after violent street protests over a disputed election convinced him and Vice President Álvaro García Linera to resign.

  Garcia said, “The coup has been consummated.” Morales promised, “The poor, the social movements, will continue in this fight for equality and peace.”

  The first indigenous president in Bolivian history, Morales led the country to economic growth and shrinking inequality. But he stretched the country’s laws to run for a fourth term then insisted he was the legitimate winner despite widespread suspicion of fraud. In the end, even the police and military sided with the protesters.

The Impeachment Trail: One of the Rudy Giuliani associates arrested in the Ukraine scandal is preparing to testify that he delivered the message to Ukraine that the US would stiff the country for $400 million in military aid unless they announced an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Lev Parnas, who’s accused of campaign finance violations in the 2016 Trump campaign, appears to have turned on Trump and his personal lawyer/diplomat Giuliani.

  Parnas is one of two Soviet-born businessmen who worked with Giuliani on his Ukraine efforts outside normal diplomatic channels. 

  A NY Times editorial says that, “The case for weighing the impeachment of President Trump boils down to a few simple points: In an effort to win re-election in 2020, Mr. Trump apparently attempted to extort a foreign government into announcing an investigation of his top political rival. The president did so while also trying to revive a conspiracy theory that casts doubt over whether the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf.”

  Trump and his Republican defenders say he was just fighting corruption in Ukraine. The Times editorial goes on to say, “It’s difficult to imagine Mr. Trump — who just agreed to a $2 millionsettlement for using his own charity as the family A.T.M. — as an anti-corruption crusader. It’s that much harder to buy given that he has not expressed a similar concern with corruption in any other country, including the United States.” 

Job App: Politicians write books when they are running for something and former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has written a book. 

  The title is “With All Due Respect,” a memoir by a woman with just 47 years to remember, presumably some of them as a child. In it, she sends a message of loyalty to President Trump in recalling that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly tried to get her to dodge and subvert the President. She wrote that, “Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country.”

  We should note here that Haley has been mentioned as a possible replacement for Vice President Mike Pence on Trump’s 2020 ticket.   

  It’s been repeatedly reported that there are members of the White House staff who hang on only to prevent Trump from destroying the country, if not the world. Kelly and Tillerson were among them. Haley describes Kelly and Tillerson as having a God complex. “It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said. The president didn’t know what he was doing.” 

  She also dismisses the impeachment effort because, even if Trump tried to withhold $400 million in military aid from Ukraine for a domestic political favor, they eventually got it. Haley, who appears to be unfamiliar with the concept of attempted murder, writes, “So it’s hard for me to understand where the whole impeachment situation is coming from, because what everybody’s up in arms about didn’t happen.”

  Trump-Haley 2020.

European History: Former Fox News Contributor Monica Crowley and current Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for the Treasury Department recently visited the old Berlin Wall built to split East and West Berlin. She posed for a picture in front of the wall and posted it online with the message, “At the Berlin Wall last week. Walls work.”

  This is a posting by a member of the current administration admiring a wall built to isolate the communist world from the free world. People were shot attempting to cross from the East to freedom. And if walls work, why is the Berlin Wall now an historical curiosity where Monica Crowley can pose without getting shot?

The Obit Page: Robert Norris, a rancher who played the chiseled Marlboro Man in 1950s and 60s cigarette commercials died at age 90 in Colorado Springs. 

  Norris appeared in Marlboro ads and commercials for about 10 years in one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time. Always portrayed with a cigarette in hand, he actually didn’t smoke. He gave up the gig because it set a bad example for his children. 

Book Beat: The public library in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho has plenty of books criticizing President Trump and extolling a progressive agenda, they’ve just been hard to find lately. Someone moving ulurking in the stacks has been taking those books and re-shelving them in places where they don’t belong and can’t be found.

  The book hider even left a note for the head librarian in the suggestion box saying, “I am going to continue hiding these books in the most obscure places I can find to keep this propaganda out of the hands of young minds. Your liberal angst gives me great pleasure.”

  At least he knows where the library is.

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