The TSA has some

elaborate metric cued by everything from travel history, financial transactions to general twitchiness that activates covert surveillance by a team of agents, who sometimes actually fly along with the mark,  undercover....
Its called "The Quiet Skies Program", you wish they could put all this superfluous effort into quieting squawling infants in Coach, they'd get better results maybe...
My Ghod, some spectrumy programmer wrote the code on behalf of a paranoid administrator for an agency with seemingly little to do save shadowing passengers at random!
Its akin to the Arlington PD arresting every tenth person to walks past police headquarters on grounds  that 10% of the population abuses crystal meth!
This is all the earmarks of bureaucratic mission creep from an agency seemingly that doesn't have enough to do....

Bolton versus Putin...

John Bolton wants war with Iran, a notional conflict I am sure he defines as a cakewalk (he is wrong it'll be Iraq x 10 but who listens to me huh?), so of course the President he serves uses Block Capitals to Threaten Tehran on Twitter.
On the other hand, Putin doesn't want war with Iran since he is doing a land office business with said regime so it comes down to which puppeteer controls the Trump_Strings long enough to implement their cherished policy?  My money is on Putin, he has something perfectly appalling on Trump to compel such disgusting groveling behavior from the President  at Helsinki.
The constitution advises impeachment for "high crimes and misdemeanors" but nowhere does it mention the unique circumstance of a US President being him or herself a self destructive menace to national security. I suppose the implied corrective is the 25th Amendment, but Pence et al, don't have the guts to pull the trigger on option otherwise they'd a tossed Trump out somewhere around the time of the "stable genius" kerfluffle.
Which brings us back to Square One, which is pretty much where we always are with Trump, as for war with Iran I doubt it'll come off, so far with all his threats and tirades in chronological order the only persons he's successfully managed to hurt are unarmed parents and children at our southern border. North Korea still has Nukes, China is doing business world wide and Iran will likely abide for better and or worse.

The Boston Sunday Globe's Idea of Voter Suppression...

is to run a big frontpage article exhaustively detailing Governor Charlie "Lumpy" Baker's allegedly liberal record and contrasting it with the paleo-conservatism that characterizes the rest of the GOP.
And it is true, that the legislature has had some success imposing liberal policies on this admin (nowhere near enough IMHO but I digress), but its plainly oblivious that Baker would himself be a far more conservative governor if the legislature didn't bird-dog him.
In other words that may give Baker the pleasing appearance of moderation and liberal impulses but it also means you have to watch him every second.
Just remember Charlie likes his spreadsheets to add up to "privatization" whether or not he can impose said policy or not.
Nope, the Globe ran this piece largely to reconcile moderates, marginal democrats and independents to Baker's presumed apoetheosis in November and to make it that much more difficult for democrats to activate their base.
And all because the Globe continues to collectively delude itself there is a moderate strain of voters in the GOP who can be appealed to, and negotiated with...
And Morrissey Boulevard will go on believing that right up to the moment when they are all arrested and deported to a Labor Camp in the Northeastern Kingdom of Vermont.

"Why Die for Montenegro?"

Or so The President seemed to imply in a recent interview where he literally thought that Montenegro's innate aggressiveness could easily drag NATO into World War III.
Well two things have been on display with Trump for the last week or so, his visceral hatred for NATO (how he'd love to tweet out some provocation that would leave the alliance on the high road to annihilation) and his odd preference for the tyranny of Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump is in some ways the creature of the corrupt falangist intellectuals who are skilled enough to stroke his fragile ego. In the case of his NATO animus Trump is more or less advocating a world of racially homogenous homelands that somehow compete and somehow cooperate with all the innate integrity of New York Real Estate Developers.
Its a crazy idea, courtesy Steve Bannon mostly but it is Trump's entirely utopian alternative to NATO.
As for Putin, well, Trump and his worst and most bloodthirsty supporter like the Russian Dictator because he is exactly the sort of violent homophobic reactionary autocrat THEY wish they could install in the USA.
Another utopian notion, albeit and dark one...but there you have it No NATO and a US Autocrat thats the New Vision to paraphrase William Blake. My only question is, what the hell is it like to have rational opponents?
I think I've forgotten.

It goes without saying that

Regardless of the President's "walkback" yesterday, Vladimir Putin has been openly and officially encouraged to interfere as much as he likes in US elections, I GUARANTEE YOU the Kremlin will pile in with both feet this fall. The States need to be prepared, I am sure there is a lot of things the Russians didn't do in 2016 that they'll happily enact now thansk to Trump's craven unmanly endorsement in Helsinki.
Putin's goals here are simple stark & profound, destroy the US's international leadership by wrecking the electoral system beyond repair, assisting in keeping outright kleptocrats in power and helpfully reduce the USA to a powerless international blusterer.
Its an ambitious plan, the very dream of Joseph Stalin but Putin seems closer than ever to achieving it, its a well played hand by Putin believe me. All the more astonishing when you consider Russia's meagre GDP and moribund economic/technological development.
The sad thing is, we aren't confronted by overwhelming odds, we are LETTING it all happen to us, it can be stopped and stopped quickly but certain political cadres have to make sacrifices and put the USA's constitution, bill of rights and sovereignty first and foremost.
Its not always "America First", but it is Always, "Freedom First".

Of the President's "Press Conference" in Helsinki

Yesterday I'll only add that Vladimir Putin's smirk of triumph was a mile wide and hundred feet deep, I have to give the Russian despot credit, he presides over a corruption ridden GNP comparable to Italy and yet he has played his hand effortlessly, the man makes the Medici look like a bunch of Teachables.
But as has been said elsewhere, the crisis is upon us, we must get Trump Out of the Oval Office, he is compromising the Nation and selling out our security openly and serenely every hour he is perpetuated along the Potomac.
Sadly, I see little resistance in congress to any of this, part of this is "partisan gridlock" some of it is the proliferation of rotten boroughs which literally insulates dozens of US Representatives from the consequences of....democracy...a lot of it is cowardice, corruption and sheer bad luck.
We MAY get an "accountability moment" this fall, then again we may not....if any of us survive as sovereign citizens until 2020 then I think someone ought to gin up a deliberate and well financed third party challenge to President Trump. Such a project requires a credible candidate who can sell himself as a Reasonable Alternative to Republican Voters. This candidacy is built on a somewhat cynical ploy it'll be withdrawn only IF the GOP declines to renominate Trump...which means we need two credible conservatives with the balls to buck the GOP's cult of incumbency "Bobby Kennedy Style".
I doubt they can...just as I doubt congress as presently constituted can act...but if something doesn't happen soon my own particular concept of self sovereignty comes into play and that may well force an unprecedented confrontation out there, "off screen" and "off script".

"The Kingdom of the Two Wallaces"

You can conceptualize Donald Trump as possibly the USA's Most Successful Third Party Candidate for President. Indeed his whole approach to the 2016 election, his rhetoric, his relationship with the GOP is reminiscent of a spoiler insurrectionist third party candidacy, one that actually won.
Indeed Trump embodies the entirely contradictory political ethos of no less than TWO famous third party presidential aspirants!  The President's foreign policy literally apes Henry Wallace's 1948 Progressive Party Fiasco, right down to opposition to NATO, attacks on the FBI and a mystic naive' belief in the Good Intentions of Stalin's Russia.  Meanwhile Trump's domestic policy is George Wallace's 1968 American Independent Party with all it's racial resentments, authoritarian tropes and white working class warfare intact.
Therefore The President is an incendiary & an insurrectionist, those are the wellsprings of his politics "Third party rebellion" its neither liberal or even conservative in nature, its just that conservatives are at the moment better served by his policies and therefore enable Trump as best they can.
Destruction & Rebellion are a political ideology unto itself, it rarely climbs into power in a democracy, but when it does really nothing but bad things happen.  Sooner or later though, it is ejected from power, but only after a great deal of mindless needless suffering.
Remember that "We Must Be Equal to Our Times".