All Caps: President Trump was up late last night threatening Iran on Twitter. “To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”

Trump appeared to be responding to Rouhani’s speech Sunday in which he said any conflict with the US would result in the “mother of all wars.”

We don’t know about the mother of all wars, but in a war of playground threats, Trump is always going to win.

Denial: Former Trump campaign aide carter Page went on CNN yesterday to deny that he was recruited or ever became an agent of the Russian government as outlined in a long FBI application to the FISA court to put him under surveillance.

Page said that it was “ridiculous” and a “complete joke.” He said, “I’ve never been an agent of a foreign power by any stretch of the imagination.”

When host Jake Tapper pointed out that Page once called himself an “informal advisor” to the Kremlin, Page responded: “You know, informal, having some conversations with people. I mean, this is really nothing.” He said, “There was nothing in terms of nefarious behavior.”

Trump was up and raging about it on Twitter this morning. He took the revelation of the FISA application as proof of a conspiracy against him. Yesterday he tweeted, “Looking more & more like the Trump Campaign for President was illegally being spied upon (surveillance) for the political gain of Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC.”

The President looks at it all as an attack on the legitimacy of his election, not a Russian attack on American democracy. Later yesterday he tweeted, “So President Obama knew about Russia before the Election. Why didn’t he do something about it? Why didn’t he tell our campaign? Because it is all a big hoax, that’s why, and he thought Crooked Hillary was going to win!!!”

Oh, Canada: A gunman opened fire on a busy avenue in Toronto’s Greektown, last night, killing a young woman and injuring 13 other people. One little girl is reported to be critically injured. The gunman was killed in an exchange of fire.

Men in White: Israel over the weekend led the evacuation of hundreds of Syrian rescue workers known as “White Helmets” and their families. The White Helmets have spent years pulling victims from the rubble of Syria’s civil war. With the rebellion collapsing, they are in danger from the government. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad sees them as allies of Islamist-led insurgents.

Big Gulp: The plastic straw has become a new focus of environmental debate like the plastic shopping bag before it. Some restaurants and hotels are beginning to abandon plastic straws for the drinks they serve and a few city governments have banned them. Plastic straws have become a big part of plastic pollution in the oceans.

It all stems from an amazing and possibly questionable statistic that Americans use and throw away 500 million straws a day.

The statistic was first used by a 9-year-old boy in Shelburne, Vt. who was working on an environmental science project. He talked to the companies that make straws and came up with the figure.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Milo Cress, who’s now 17, said the number has stuck but admitted that he did not arrive at it in a terribly scientific way. So the number has been under attack by some straw defenders, but he said that misses the point of his original research back when he was in 4^th grade. “Pretty much, no matter what the number is,” Cress said, “as long as we’re throwing away straws when we don’t need to, that number is too high.”

The Trumpster Fire: President Trump’s tormenter Michael Avenatti says the Michael Cohen tape recording of a conversation with Trump about paying off a Playboy model isn’t the only recording. He said on ABC News, “I can tell you that for a fact. There’s multiple tapes.”

He added: “That, ultimately, is going to prove to be a big problem for the president. You know, that old adage, ‘You’ve lived by the sword, you die by the sword,’ is going to be true in this case, because the president knew that his attorney, Michael Cohen, had a predisposition toward taping conversations with people.”

Meanwhile, former White House Press secretary Sean Spier is hawking his book, “The Briefing,” about his short tenure as Trump’s mis-information officer. Erik Wemple write for The Washington Post  that, “ ‘The Briefing’ isn’t a political memoir, nor it is a work of recent history, nor a tell-all, or tell-anything. Rather, it is a bumbling effort at gaslighting Americans into doubting what they have seen with their own eyes as far back as June 2015.”

Spicer’s book is somewhere down in the 900s on the Amazon.com bestseller list.

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