John Kelly thinks that "compromise" might have averted the Civil War...

deep in a false consciousness of moral equivalence, the President's Chief of Staff claims that fire eaters on all sides would not bargain honestly to keep the Union Together.
That....is post secesh bullshit that die hard rebels used to tell themselves to passives aggressively put the blame on the Yankees for the whole thing.
Let the record show, that Abraham Lincoln repeated offered compromise to the South, read the "Peoria Speech" & his "Cooper's Union Address" for all the details. In brief Lincoln told the south no attempt would be made to interfere with slavery in states where said practice was established, he then went on to affirm that congress had the right to prohibit the spread of slavery in the unincorporated territories and that it was of that expecation that slavery would then be on "the high road to extinction".
Nothing more...and the mere public assertion of this notion was enough to sunder the Union with Southerners utterly bereft of compromise who were intent of conquering all or else leaving the union entirely.
Kelly made no friends with this assertion but it's par for the course for the Trump Regime at this point....

Geez Mueller isn't wasting time is he?

Paul Manafort & Partner both indicted on 12 counts of conspiring against the USA.  You can tell Trump is scared because fear makes him eructate Hillary Clinton's name repeatedly...that and the usual empty threats.
Personally I think the whole thing will come to a head when and if Donald Jr gets indicted, I strongly doubt Donnie has the intestinal fortitude to withstand a thorough interrogation he'll sing like a canary at the first sign on trouble.  Remember these people are all bullies of one type or another, they can't take the heat when push comes to shove.

"Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man"

"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT."

Abraham Lincoln, 1860

Part of the problem in this town is

we are suffused with a sense of provincial inferiority along with a pervasive declinist vibe that emanates from most of our local opinion-makers. And when those emotions are in play its no wonder everyone marks out hard for a shiny noisy solution to all our problems in the form of becoming "Amazon's Second Headquarters"...somehow that is supposed to strengthen us all in some ineffable way such that we can bust our backwater shackles like Hercules.
Never mind the whole Amazon thing is blatant invitation to gentrification, housing shortages and a toxic widening of the income gap....nope it'll make a lot of columnists feel better thats all thats needed....
We have a lot of problems in this state, I'll admit it, but self administering a placebo like Amazon is not gonna cure anything and will likely make all the issues described above ten times worse.
We need to create "transmission belt jobs" from out the working class into the middle class and beyond, if we want a bigger tax base we have to stop robbing the poor, working class & middle class cohorts and grow all those sectors simultaneously.We've got to innovate up and down and laterally as well from the resources we have at hand...just sayin'.

"Panning for Gold in the Charles River"...

The current fandango about luring "Amazon's Second Headquarters" to Boston, pretty much leaves me cold.  I mean, isn't Amazon at the end of the day a company dedicated to transferring the industrial output of the People's Republic of China to waiting customers in an an ever more rapid fashion?  The jobs such a "get" would create would be the usual cubicle gigs with little positive wage pressure being created on the working-class end of the scale to say nothing of redressing the widening income gap in the USA.
It will bless Boston with a pretty skycraper with a nice big sign, the sort of display politicians love along with a giant ass ribbon to cut that'll all come at an as yet untotalled cost in tax breaks and public giveaways.
But thanks to provincial self hatred and irrational declinism, we fall for this nonsense every time, or almost every time, "for every 2024 Summer Olympics there is a GE" I guess is the best and most delicate way to put it.
There are a lot of things wrong with the Commonwealth but acquiring "Amazon's Second Headquarters" will solve almost none of them, other than giving certain columnists and politicians a false sense of elation there is little else on offer here.

Senator Warren endorses Mayor Walsh in

In the Hub's Mayoral race, down at "democrat ground zero in Boston" ergo "Doyle's Pub"...which is only natural Walsh's Spartans got out a big vote for Warren back in 2012. This is a mere quid pro quo and likely cements useful political alliance as well.  It tells me that Warren is being sane and sensible about her reelection race next year, taking nothing for granted even if the GOP is rocking what will likely be a loud disorderly four way primary.

AG Jeff Sessions....

(normally the "Transphobe in chief") is apparently sending a DOJ Lawyer to Iowa to try and make a hate crimes case out of a transgender person's murder.
Now...Occam's Razor suggests this is mere grandstanding from someone who viscerally hates gay people and bad publicity...on the other hand he might be doing all this simply to get himself fired by President Trump.