Here are my observations and opinions on my selected news of the day.

CONRAD BLACK, a Canadian-born financier, writer and commentator, who is known for his columns in U.S. publications, appearances on our television talk shows, and for his books, of course, always provides readers with his profundity.

His March 25, 2019 piece, “U.S. Was Closer To Coup D’état Than Ever Before,” published in the New York Sun, was a marvelous summary of what those who wanted to bring down the Trump presidency.

“No one nominated by a major political party to the presidency of the United States would have dreamed of cooperating with any foreign power to influence a U.S. presidential election,” Black begins. “The Russian-collusion argument was always an absurd, a practically insane proposition.

“The fact that it enjoyed the currency it did as long as it did illustrates the cognitive incapacity of the Obama-Clinton majority to accept that they were honestly defeated in 2016. Worse than that, while it was just mad partisanship by most Democrats and most of the political press, the collusion fraud was a crime, of extreme gravity, by its perpetrators.”

In typical Black fashion, he eviscerates the bad actors who were involved – Lynch, Yates, Comey, Rosenstein, McCabe and those intelligence liars, Clapper and Brennan. “They flushed the depressing spectacle of the ghost of Watergate, Carl Bernstein, out onto our television screens claiming there was a ‘constitutional crisis’ over the president’s mental fitness to hold office,” he wrote, not wanting to forget the bad actors of the media.

“The president and his family have endured merciless torment by the intellectually corrupt national press and the lawless opposition. His restraint at the end of the story has shown more taste than his enemies would thought him capable of; he is owed an apology.

“The ringleaders in confecting this monstrous aggregation of defamatory lies should be legally punished, with the due process they tried to deny the nation’s leader.

“Attempts to drive a president from office on the basis of betrayal of the country that they knew to be false is as close as the United States has ever been to an attempted coup d’état. It is time for the legal system, which has ground slowly to a just verdict, to do the same to those responsible for this disgraceful episode. This must never happen again; not in America.”

A TOUCHING PHOTO – President Trump, often wrongly criticized for his insensitivity to the disabled, is shown at left touching the face of a warrior who lost both arms, realizing that the feeling of a handshake is lost on him. I received this photo from a friend with the request to pass it on. While attempting to learn more about the circumstance, obviously taken at a rally, I found the same photo, but with no name for the warrior, or where it was taken, but believed it was worth sharing with you.

TO SUPPORT NATO OR NOT – You will recall how the opposition and the media attacked candidate Trump when he questioned the need for NATO, but when he addressed the member countries as president with a message of “pay up” and more funds began to flow, he received little credit. He was criticized for not including in his remarks that he would support Article 5, but when he later confirmed that he would do so, it was a “ho hum.”

Now, we learn in a detailed piece in The Federalist, that Germany’s Angela Merkel is reneging on that country’s 2 percent of GDP obligation to NATO, and is set to decrease it to 1.2 percent by 2023.

“Oddly,” The Federalist piece notes, “(we) have yet to see a single op-ed on how Merkel is wrecking the foundation of Euro-Atlantic peace by importing Russian gas to Europe and calling for a European army to replicate NATO, while simultaneously ruling out spending on NATO.”

However, you be assured that there would be an uproar if President Trump reduced its NATO funding to 1.2 percent.

THE MEDICARE FOR ALL PROMISE – Health insurance is becoming one of the topics to be discussed in the 2020 presidential campaign. While trying to undo ObamaCare, this past week, President Trump declared that the Republican Party “will soon be known as the party of health care.”

While we continue to hear that the Republicans have no health insurance plan, I am sure the president is aware of some interesting features recently discussed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar.

Meanwhile, the Democrat candidates for president have been endorsing the ideas of single-payer health insurance, and touting Medicare for all, with highly skeptical schemes for paying for it.

Citing former President Lyndon Johnson’s belief that Medicare was the “light of hope for elderly Americans, Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, said “Medicare for all proposals threaten to extinguish it.”

“Medicare for all,” she writes in “Medicare for All Means Hope for None,” an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal, “would break a sacred promise and harm seniors’ access to care by forcing a system designed to support them to take on every other American. They deserve a system that helps them get well, not get in line.”

In another Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The Case for Medicare for All,” by Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, boasts a system claiming that “All Americans would be able to get care from their chosen providers without having to pay premiums, deductibles or copayments.”

When Pollin gets to answer the question – How will it be paid for? – he takes readers through a nightmarish list of contributions by businesses, large and small, and a series of tax schemes that make your head swim.

Medicare for all would come with its “moral cost,” says Verma. “The plan would strip coverage from more than 180 million Americans and force them into government insurance.”

                                 May God bless the United States of America.