Power Struggle: House Democrats have the Senate Republicans rattled with the threat that they might hold the articles of impeachment until they get a satisfactory trial plan from the Senate. It’s an exercise of power in the face of automatic acquittal for President Trump, but the leadership and the President are playing it as weakness.

  “The prosecutors are getting cold feet in front of the entire country and second-guessing whether they even want to go to trial,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor. “They said impeachment was so urgent that it could not even wait for due process, but now they’re content to sit on their hands. This is comical.”

  Trump tweeted, “Pelosi feels her phony impeachment HOAX is so pathetic she is afraid to present it to the Senate, which can set a date and put this whole SCAM into default if they refuse to show up!”

  McConnell delivered a half-hour speech on the Senate floor in which he railed on about the unfairness and political motivation of the impeachment without acknowledging the underlying facts. Saying there’s no evidence doesn’t mean there isn’t.

  Pelosi responded telling reporters that McConnell’s speech “reminded me that our founders, when they wrote the constitution, they suspected there could be a rogue president. I don’t think they suspected we could have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time”

  With McConnell virtually assuring the President exoneration, the Democrats might be happy to let the sword of impeachment dangle for a while. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 House Democrat, said he was willing to wait “as long as it takes” to transmit the two impeachment articles approved Wednesday night.

  Clyburn told CNN, “Until we can get some assurances from the majority leader that he is going to allow for a fair and impartial trial to take place, we would be crazy to walk in there knowing he has set up a kangaroo court,” 

Lost and Confused: President Trump has deep support among evangelical Christians but Christianity Today, the magazine funded by the late Rev. Billy Graham, has published an editorial calling for Trump to be removed from office.

  The opinion written by outgoing editor Mark Galli says, “We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath.”

  The editorial says, “The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.”

The Moscow Channel: Guess who said the following about the impeachment of Donald Trump: “This is nothing but a continuation of an internal political struggle, with the party that lost the election, the Democratic Party, trying to reach its goal by different means.” 

  Was it Trump? Majority Leader Mitch McConnell? The fire-breathing Georgia Rep. Doug Collins? How about Trump lap dog Lindsey Graham? No, it was Russian President Vladimir Putin in his year-end press conference defending the impeached Trump.

  Repeating the Russian talking points that have been taken up by the Republicans then fed back to the Russians, Putin said, “First they accuse Trump of a collusion with Russia, then it turns out there was no collusion so this cannot be used as a basis for impeachment. Now they’ve come up with the idea he put pressure on Ukraine.”

The Moon, Alice: Boeing’s Starliner space capsule was launched at dawn today from Cape Canaveral on top of an Atlas 5 rocket. The capsule was not manned — it carried a test dummy named Rosie. The capsule is being tested for use as a space taxi to the International Space Station.

The Obit Page: Larry Heinemann, a Vietnam veteran who shocked the literary world winning the National Book Award for his war novel “Paco’s Story” over Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” has died at age 75. 

  “I was not one of those guys who got home and went to their room and shut up,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I know guys who the war’s been eating up for 20 years. Anybody who asked me about it, I told them. I shot my mouth off about everything — the whorehouses, the endless hatred, the ugliness, the real work of the war. It took two to three years of talking to get the story out.”

  His novel was about the war and its aftermath for the sole survivor of a battle. The NY Timesreported about the award ceremony that, “When Mr. Heinemann’s name was announced a brief silence gripped the ballroom, followed by uncertain applause.” The award set off protests about the stiffing of Morrison, America’s most prominent black author at the time.

Water, Water, Everywhere:  Wednesday night in Battle Creek while he was being impeached and trashing a list of his perceived enemies, President  Trump took off on one of his favorite new targets; water saving devices. “Remember the dishwasher?” he asked. “You’d press it, boom! There’d be like an explosion. Five minutes later you open it up, the steam pours out, the dishes — ” he said, getting laughs. “Now you press it 12 times.”

  Impeachment, war, elections, Ukraine and Russia; Trump has a lot to worry about, but he appears to have water on the brain. Just two weeks ago he was going off on toilets. “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once” he said about homes with low-flow commodes. He said other bathroom fixtures have slowed water to a trickle. “You can’t wash your hands practically, there’s so little water comes out of the faucet, and the end result is you leave the faucet on and it takes you much longer to wash your hands, you end up using the same amount of water.” 

  It’s the fault of big government, Trump said Wednesday night. “You turn on the shower, you’re not allowed to have any water anymore.” According to the President, unnamed women are bending his ear about dishwashers. “Women tell me, again,” he said Wednesday, simulating pressing a button, “you know, they give you four drops of water. And there are places where there’s so much water they don’t know what to do with it. So we just came up with a reg on dishwashers.”

  He’ll order that they have to be so easy to use, even he can do it.

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