Ok… let me start off by saying that I apologize if there are one two many “Hamilton” references in today’s brief.

Actually, scratch that. You’re welcome.

I was out running this morning and was thinking of a way to give a  little “extra something” to my first brief and my first time talking about current events in this format in some time. “Hamilton” has kind of dominated my free time for the past few months (and excellent running music if you want to give it a try) so it only seems right to give the first brief a little “Hamilton” flavor.

It’s been a long time. So What’d I miss?

What? You’ve never listened to Hamilton before? Are you human?

It must be nice… it must be nice… to have Vladimir on your side.

Putin must really like all of the coverage he is getting here in the United States. Thanks to Donald Trump, the U.S. relationship with Russia has taken center stage.

You know… kinda like Lafayette and Hamilton but with less of the actual friendship, more of the backstabbing, less of the French… I’m trying to make it work.

Most recently, in what may be the best act of bipartisanship we may see in the next four years, members of the House and Senate have come out and said that there needs to be a thorough investigation into Russian hacking of the election. Many believe that the hacking had a profound impact on the election (which is extremely hard to prove… even if there was proof of hacking.) After the hack of DNC emails, many thought that hacking of the election results is just as likely… because of reasons that people are not very clear on.

I won’t sit here and pretend that I know all of the stuff that is involved with investigating what goes into a possible hack of ballot boxes or ballot machines but I will say that it is worth an investigation but if people are wanting this to have a profound impact on the election.. even to the point where the Clinton camp is saying that the Electoral College should be briefed on this before voting next week… is about as crazy as crazy gets.

That’s not where the Russia stuff ends though.

Trump’s leading candidate for Secretary of State is raising Russian red flags all over the place.

Rex Tillerson is the current CEO of Exxon-Mobil (which pisses people off to begin with) but also has a good relationship with Russia. He even received a friendship award from Russia. I’m serious. That’s about as close to a participation trophy as you can get in politics.

“Hey Tillerson, you’re a good guy!”

“Hey, Putin! Thanks, Man! I appreciate it.”

“Here’s this friendship award just to say ‘thank you for being a friend.'”

That’s the extent of Tillerson’s foreign policy experience. It’s more than Trump’s, to his credit (whatever that may be worth.) The race for State seems to be between Tillerson and Mitt Romney, who lambasted Trump earlier this year during the Primary. During his dinner interview with Trump it spawned the best photo of the year.

What was on the menu that night? Romney’s dignity.

“Dignity is a dish best served cold.” Ok.. Two captions of that photo are enough but I’ll be damned if this isn’t a good representation of Aaron Burr and Hamilton.

Finally, turning back to Russia, it makes sense why so many people are worried about our relationship with Russia. I won’t bore you with all of the details, but Russia has a really sketchy record on a lot of things (invading countries, LGBT rights, media restrictions, killing journalists, etc.) People have a right to be worried about our Russian dealings.

Dear James Comey, what to say to you…

The election 0f 2016 was wrapped up a little over a month ago. Donald Trump won fair and square. I was surprised that I was surprised at the amount of finger pointing that was going on around the Democratic Party in the days (and now month) following the election.

Harry Reid said today that James Comey, head of the FBI, cost Hillary Clinton the election. Reid is not the first person to say this but is (or was) the highest ranking person in Congress to publicly call out Comey.

Don’t remember what happened?  James Comey reopened the case against Hillary Clinton and her private use of an email server when new emails were discovered when investigators were looking at Anthony Weiner’s case (Would it be inappropriate to say “Rise up?” in keeping with the ‘Hamilton’ theme?) The thing that made this a bigger deal than normal was that it was reopened just a few days before people were heading to the polls on Election Day.

Harry Reid is retiring so he really has nothing to lose by coming out and calling out James Comey for this. Does he have a point? Is there a correlation between Comey and the Election results? It’s hard to say. However, the gap between Trump and Clinton was tightening before this news came out so it is hard to pinpoint where it went wrong. Also, when you hardly campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin because you feel like you have it in the bag… don’t be surprised when you lose those states.

I could go on and on about the election because I never had a chance to talk about it in depth… but that ship has sail. I just find it very humorous when the losing side plays the blame game so quickly and denies the facts of what happened.

Hillary should have gone door to door, seem more approachable, seem like people could grab a beer with her. (These Hamilton references are really stretching it, aren’t they?

Hopefully for one last time: deflategate

Yeah.. yeah… I stretched the reference there a little bit there too. That’s about as far as I can take the ‘Hamilton’ reference.

Fox Sports reported yesterday that the New York Giants are going to the NFL with reports that the Pittsburgh Steelers improperly deflated footballs to gain an advantage.

Yep… here we go again.

Let me preface by saying as a Bengals fan, I loved seeing the Steelers involved in a controversy. As a football fan, let me say that ‘deflategate’ needs to die and the NFL needs to focus all of their attention on things that matter. That’s why I bring this up… mainly as a springboard to talk a little bit about what in the hell is wrong with the NFL right now.

• A guy gets a longer suspension for using marijuana than another guy does for beating his girlfriend.
• Many retired football players cannot remember family members

These are the two biggest issues the NFL has right now. When the first ‘deflategate’ controversy came to be, it was all anyone could talk about. I would even go as far as to believe that it was all part of Roger Goodell’s plan: turn the focus away from actual issues and turn it to this thing that will probably yield zero results. We weren’t talking about concussions and we weren’t talking about domestic abuse issues in the NFL (at least not to the magnitude of ‘deflategate.’)

This was the point where I started feeling guilty watching NFL games on Sunday. Now, in the back of my head I will always be thinking about the background issues facing the NFL (albeit the concussion issue hits me harder than most.) The NFL has a lot of problems to figure out and another ‘deflategate’ controversy will do nothing but make the other problems worse.

I can only wish the NFL could teach them how to say goodbye to ‘deflategate.’ (Ok, that’s the last one.)

That ends the brief for today. It’s a definite work in progress. I’m still figuring out a few kinks and getting a definite format down and trying to be, well, brief.

I’ll be back tomorrow, with less Hamilton references (no promises) and more stories and hopefully a better idea of what to do with this idea.