Humoring the headlines: March 16, 2018

By Laurie Baron

Laurie Baron

SAN DIEGO−President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen has been working on his taxes and asked his accountant whether money paid to silence a witness against one of his clients qualifies as a business deduction.

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During her Sixty Minutes interview, Secretary of Education Betsy Devos admitted that she had never visited an underperforming school.  On the basis of her answers during the interview, Lesley Stahl concluded that Devos had attended underperforming schools throughout her life.

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President Trump toured the prototypes for his Southern border wall this week.  If these walls could speak, they would have advised the President that they were too expensive, Mexico wouldn’t pay to build them, and they wouldn’t stop people from entering the United States illegally, but they remained silent because it would have been like talking to a wall.

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Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to head the CIA, had overseen the “black site” in Thailand where al-Qaida prisoners were tortured and ordered the destruction of video evidence of the torture sessions prompting some senators to want to use enhanced interrogation techniques for her confirmation hearing.

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Addressing marines stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, President Trump warned that “space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea” and proposed the creation of “a Space Force” that would be the extraterrestrial equivalent of the Air Force, Army and Navy.  Physicists quickly reminded him that a “space force” already exists—it’s called gravity.

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Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com. San Diego Jewish World points out to new readers that this column is satire, and nothing herein should be taken literally