This can't be the mugshot his many enemies hoped for. Instead of looking cowed, concerned, deflated and defeated, Donald Trump looks strong, defiant, unbowed.

Not for the first time, attempts to denigrate Trump have backfired badly. It has already almost erased from memory the fact that the night before the mugshot was taken, the first televised debate in the Republican primary race for the 2024 presidential election was broadcast from Milwaukee in the swing state of Wisconsin.

During the debate, Trump was 'the elephant not in the room', as Fox News put it, because his presence was never far from the proceedings. Few dared to criticize him for fear of aggravating the Republican base, which still adores him - even more so after that mugshot.

One, Vivek Ramaswamy, said that if he became President he would pardon Trump for any convictions 'on day one'.  He is the glib, arrogant millennial of the Republican field, whose gobby overconfidence blinds him to the fact that often, especially on foreign policy, he has no idea what he's talking about.

When Congress returns next month, it has little alternative but to launch a long-discussed impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. For House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the case for an inquiry came from a most unlikely source: Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The debacle in the Hunter Biden investigation has left most objective legal analysts in disbelief, with one CNN analyst calling it an “unholy mess.”

House Republicans had previously demanded that David Weiss and his team answer questions about the investigation and the plea bargain. And an appearance before a House committee was planned when Garland suddenly preempted that by doing what many of us have demanded for years: He appointed a special counsel.  None other than David Weiss.

Plus, Garland refused to expressly extend the special counsel’s mandate to include influence-peddling allegations involving President Biden. The House has now no choice but to impeach him.

Some truths are so staggering in their ramifications that Americans simply shrug and tune them out as if strangers in a strange land.

Is their current bewilderment because modernist America is unrecognizable —a nonexistent border, downtown homeless juxtaposed to hipster professional elites, DEI racial essentialism, cities reverting to precivilizational wastelands, millions exiting blue states to red, an FBI and DOJ gone rogue, the normalization of violent theft and assault, biologically born men sandbagging women’s sports and their locker room privacy?

We are reaching the point where the once unbelievable has become the banal, as a single generation has done its best to undo the work of a prior 12 generations. Consider the following:

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden—and ultimately Joe Biden himself.

As Vice President, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.

An impeached Trump also was accused of using the power of government to go after his likely 2020 presidential rival by suggesting that Joe Biden and his family were corrupt, and should be investigated by Ukrainian officials for fraud and bribery.

Despite Joe Biden’s denials, Trump was right: there was plenty of evidence to link Ukrainian unwarranted payoffs going into Biden family coffers.

So what is the Congress to do now—un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?

Kyiv, Ukraine. The average age of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s 450-seat parliament, is 41. Only three of the elected representatives are older than 60, while 17 were under 30 at the time of their election.

This means that when Ukraine declared its independence, many of us were essentially children, and some weren’t yet born. What do we remember from Aug. 24, 1991?

I was 6. My memories of that day are of something profoundly significant. People didn’t go to work; they gathered in the city center, on what is now Hrushevsky Street, greeting each other in an atmosphere of incredible joy and uplift.

Now, in the 10th year of Russia’s war against Ukraine and 18 months into its full-scale phase, we are renewing our independence with an unquenchable passion to keep it.

[Few scholars know Chicom China better than Willy Wo-Lap Lam.  There is a lot to think about here – please consider reading it attentively-JW.]

After emerging as China’s “leader for life” and filling top party organs such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and the Politburo with members of his own faction, paramount leader Xi Jinping has been relentlessly buffeted by what he refers to as “high waves and dangerous winds” in his effort to keep the ship of state afloat (Radio Free Asia, May 30).

However, whether the supreme leader and his newly minted Politburo can acquit themselves of handling these challenges remains dubious.

The horrendous rain and flooding of Typhoon Doksuri (杜苏芮) earlier this month (August 2023) that have hit Hebei Province and Beijing itself, which resulted in the displacement of some 1 million people and an undisclosed number of deaths, has again illustrated the questionable governance ability of the Xi Jinping administration.

And Xi—who is General Secretary of the CCP and commander-in-chief—has neither visited the sites of devastation nor spelled out measures to help flood victims re-establish their livelihoods. He has instead gone to the nearby seaside resort of Beidaihe to chair a series of informal policy-making sessions with other Politburo members and top advisors (Australian Broadcasting Corp Chinese, August 10; Radio Free Asia, August 4).

Sounds just like Joe Biden and the horrific fire in Maui, doesn’t it?  The comparisons go far deeper.