So Bob Mueller, the special counsel investigating the Trump administration’s ties to Russians during the election, indicted and arrested two former Trump officials, the biggest naming being one time campaign head Paul Manifort, while revealing another, “smaller” name in this affair, George Papadopoulos, had pled guilty and was cooperating with the special counsel for some time now.

Which makes one wonder if, perhaps, he might have been used by the special counsel since his arrest to record some conversations…

Speculation, for sure, but…

Whew.

Things must be pretty scary for some in the White House… and it has nothing to do with Halloween.

Once again I dip my toe into the subject that raises people’s ire and finds no easy medium.

But, does it seem like after last week (that terrible last week) that we’ve crossed some kind of line with regard to President Donald Trump and his shenanigans?

With the latest clash between Trump and Senator Corker and Trump and Secretary Tillerson, the later who supposedly called his boss a “moron” (or, if you believe some sources, a “f*cking moron”) along with the terribly delayed response to Puerto Rico’s emergency following being hit by a hurricane, and the silly stunt Vice President Pence performed at the Indianapolis football game this past Sunday and one gets the feeling that even many of those invested in Trump are perhaps tiring of his silliness, the incompetence, the general chaos, and starting to sour on him.

Indeed, even the startling, sickening news of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual deviance and eventual ouster from his own company has, ironically, cast the spotlight on something too many have chosen to ignore… and that is Donald Trump’s own history of sexual deviance.

Now I’m not naive.  I know there will always be those who stand behind the Donald.  To them, he can do no wrong.

But I’m curious if the Republican party… at least those who are serious about running the country, have maybe, just maybe had enough and, with Senator Corker speaking out, the proverbial dam has finally developed a leak.

Mr. Corker will remain in office until the midterm elections but now that he’s “unchained” from seeking votes, one wonders what’s next for him, and for the party that rode that tiger to this point.

Will that dam finally break?

Stay tuned.

Apropos of the latest news coming from, among other places, Charlottesville, a personal observation.

I’ve mentioned before that I was born in a communist country which my parents fled from.  I spent my formative early years in a country that could best be described as having a system very close to European Socialism.  I then moved to a country that was a right winger’s wet dream: A country that had almost no taxes and therefore no civil services to speak of, was heavily catholic and outlawed abortion, and was incredibly, depressingly, terrible.

I then moved to and settled into the United States, which I’ve always felt had the best of all worlds.

But when I first moved to the U.S. and was enrolled in a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, I was taken aback when I saw things like this…

This is not, by the way, a photograph I took back then, but it represents the type of things I saw.  Not everywhere, mind you, but enough to wonder why.

For to me, my entire life up until the moment I enrolled in that sophomore year of High School, the Confederacy was always viewed -I thought anyway!- the wrong side of history in the years leading up and after to the Civil War.

They were, after all, fighting for one thing: The ability to keep owning slaves.  That couldn’t be viewed as a good thing to people, right?

So why was it that I was seeing people hanging the Confederate Flag here and there and displaying it on their pickup trucks/cars?

And I wondered, young though I was, how the African American population must feel upon seeing these flags here and there.

Times have changed, thankfully, since then.  I’ve been to Jacksonville very recently and I don’t see these types of displays at all.  Then again, I’m not living there so whatever I’ve seen has been based on sticking around the city a few days at a time.

Later on I came to understood the mythology built around the “lost cause” of the Confederacy.  But this mythology avoided mention of the issue of slavery and, instead, focused on the Civil War being somehow about “state rights”.

It was still bewildering because I impossible to not associate the Confederacy with slavery.

Today, as the “alt-right” and the Nazi’s have much of the nation’s attention, I’m finding it interesting to see the push back.  I suppose the old physics notion of every action having an equal and opposite reaction applies to people as well.

So yesterday some people took aim at a statue commemorating “the boys who wore gray” (the article is by David A. Graham and is found on The Atlantic):

Durham’s Confederate Statue Comes Down

Here’s the full video of the event as it happened:

The backlash to the backlash.

Interesting times.

It’s tempting to say the usual lamentations and pointed criticisms…

But its also mind-boggling to witness the news regarding Charlottesville over the weekend along with the response from our “President” afterwards.

One life was lost when angry, ugly rhetoric gave way to -yes, oh yes– a terrorist act.  Our “President”, so quick to condemn any act, whether terrorist or not, that has even the faintest association with other nationalities or cultures, nonetheless found it near impossible to condemn Neo-Nazis that were marching over the weekend and, specifically, the Neo-Nazi who was responsible for killing Heather Heyer.

It’s… there just aren’t words.

No words at all.

To the family of Ms. Heyer, my sincerest condolences, for what its worth.

There remain a lot of good people out there and it remains my fervent hope that this darkness plaguing us will lift.

Soon, hopefully.

…did anything interesting happen last night?

POLITICS FOLLOW… beware!

Obamacare Repeal Flames Out In The Republican Senate

Incredibly, it was John McCain who wound up being the vote to end this latest round of “repeal and replace”.  The same John McCain who was brought in hastily from surgery (and diagnosis of having brain cancer), to supposedly be the vote to bring this over the hump.

However, yesterday, Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham gave what I thought was a pretty bonkers news conference where they talked about what a farce the “skinny” repeal bill was and how Mr. Graham, in particular, was reluctant to vote for it unless assured it wouldn’t be passed by the House “as is”.

Mr. Graham: If you feel the bill is a farce and don’t want it passed, then don’t vote for it.

Which, in the end, is what Mr. McCain did.

Though very much liberal in much of my ideology, for many years I’ve felt Mr. McCain was a Republican one could at least reason with.  In more recent years, I have to be honest, I felt he was losing it.  The presidential race against Barack Obama saw him nominate Sarah Palin for the VP role, which in my estimation was not only a stupid move but probably played a big part in his eventual loss.

It’s been said “Obamacare” will eventually fail.  I hear this is an exaggeration.  I also hear that many of the states that have the biggest problems in this era of the Affordable Care Act (which is the proper term for Obamacare), have problem because they didn’t want to implement the full extent of the ACA’s provisions.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I experienced Canada’s “socialized” medicine… and it was freaking great.  I’ve experienced some of Europe’s socialized medicine as well, and frankly, it too is great.

I don’t like this Darwinian system we’ve had up until the ACA.  I don’t like the idea of people potentially going broke later in life or as a result of some kind of catastrophic medical need.

There are better ways to go and, sadly, the world outside our borders seems to have embraced this quicker than we have.

Perhaps with this later failure both parties will finally -finally!– get together and form a coalition that actually improves upon the ACA rather than trying to gut it.

Perhaps.

As I’ve stated many –far too-many– times before, I don’t like to dwell on politics.  Those who have read these posts know I’m aghast that Donald Trump is president.

The thing Trump decided to focus on upon being elected was dismantling the Affordable Care Act, ie “Obamacare”.

So far, this hasn’t gone too well.

Though the Republicans were able to get the bill passed through the House of Representatives, they’ve so far had a tougher go in the Senate, though as these things go, this could well change.

Anyway, the new bill was drawn up in secret and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hoped that by being really quick and secretive with the whole thing, he’d get it passed and out of his hair.

Well, it didn’t work, again, at least as of today, and the bill will not be voted on before the July 4 break as was originally planned.

What was most amusing, to me anyway, was the fact that after it was announced the bill would not be voted on, three Senators, all Republicans, felt the heat was sufficiently off them that they could announce in public they didn’t care for the bill.

The article below, by Pete Grieve for CNN, details their announcements:

Senate punts, then 3 new Republicans oppose health care bill

The reason I don’t like to dwell on politics around these parts is because its one of those topics (I suppose religion is the other) where a rational conversation is pretty hard, if not impossible, to have.  You believe what you believe and you’re on this side or that side and, increasingly, the other side is the “enemy” and they lie and they’re unAmerican and etc. etc. etc.

In this case, I have little doubt the Senators mentioned in the article probably had deep reservations about this bill but, because of party dynamics, felt uncomfortable “speaking out” or, at the least, speaking their mind.

I wish they had done this before the heat was effectively off them.

And while I don’t particularly care for the politics of Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, at least they were upfront in voicing opposition to this bill, though the cynic might suspect they did so to try to pull it closer to their ideals (ie, repealing the ACA completely).

Ah well, that’s politics for ya.