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.

Somewhere down on the South Shore

A craft brewery named a beer after Governor Charlie Baker...which an innovatve way to respond to our ongoing "opioid crisis" to say the least.  Bottoms Up Governor....you've got narcotics addiction on the run....

My Big Takeway from

President Trump's farcical and empty threat to "revoke NBC's broadcasting license" is the sheer idiocy of getting into any sort of business partnership with developer Donald J. Trump....NBC put Trump on the map via "The Apprentice" after a disastrous series of bankruptcies and other business fiascos. Hell 90% of his name recognition comes off of that show....and yet here he is, turning on the very corportate entertainment empire that virtually put him in the White House.  Ya just can't do honest business wif dat guy....

I don't know what the Future Holds in Store for

Harvey Weinstein, one hopes that a courtroom can dispence justice with respect to the mounting accusations of grotesque sexual battery against the famed Hollywood Producer.  I just think it's grimly hilarious to note that Donald Trump has a sexual rapsheet that goes on & on to say nothing of taking money & assistance from Vladimir Putin. Weinstein is headed for a courtroom, Trump is in the White House...anyone else sense some irony here?

Personally

I give Doug Jones long odds down in Alabama with respect to stopping Roy Moore's election to the US Senate. That doesn't mean we shouldn't support Doug Jones and make resources available to him as Abraham Lincoln put it back in the day "Those not skinning may hold a leg" so to speak.
But if I was me, running I'd "give em' heaven", "Government as good as all of us" to paraphrase Jimmy Carter...because its for damn sure Jones will never "Out-Hell-n-Damnation" Roy Moore.  Jones can't let the narrative degenerate into "strong and wrong" versus "weak and right" thats the downfall of democrats every time. No...Jones has to transform the race into "crazy and inept" versus "sane and able", he has to make "crazy" (which is "Brand Moore" in a nutshell) into an electoral liability, promise hard work on behalf of all Alabamans (whether they vote for him or not) and fervently assert the desire to remain sane in challenging times. Don't play the apocalypse card at all, it doesn't work down there, affirm always we face our common difficulties but they are no more vexing than the problems we have overcome in the past.
DON'T Get drawn into a debate about Roy Moore's many many imaginary enemies...affirm, assert and remain optimistic about our ability to overcome....and Good Luck Doug Jones!

Common Sense
Common Decency
for the
Common Good
Jones for the U.S. Senate!

I'm still wrapping my mind around

The fact that some mysterious "millionaire" in Nevada can sneak 27 firearms into a Las Vegas Hotel room WITH a comparable supply of ammunition without anyone the wiser...
So much for the airtight security in Las Vegas.
And as usual its being credited as a"lone wolf attack" which is somewhat questionable as we've clearly become a society that actively and passively enables this kinds of mass-annihilation attacks, given all that enabling its a wonder I'm alive to post this blog entry quite frankly.

This is otherwise natural selection at work at least as a metaphor, its a target rich environment, one that enables the acculmulation of annihilatory firepower, that and the element of surprise is all you need to kill dozens upon dozens.  "Lone Wolves" don't need to conspire or ingather others into their plans they've already perfectly adapted to an environment that favors them to an extraordinary degree.
But this is society we are talking about, an artificial creation in every way, we can change that environment and thus the rules any time we like...but why go on? "I grow lyrical" to quote the Late Mencken.