Another Country Heard From

I heard Qatar mentioned on the TV news this evening but, before I finished saying "What the hell is a Qatar?", they had moved on to something else. Since you guys both mentioned it, I figured that it might be important, so I just now looked it up on Wiki.

I seems that Qatar is another one of those oil-rich sheikdoms that exerts way more influence than is justified by its size. Saudi Arabia and some other countries have just broken off diplomatic relations with Qatar because it has allegedly been supporting terrorism lately. Iran blames Trump for it, and they may be right, seeing as Trump just came back from kissing up to the Saudis and pissing off everybody in Europe.

I expected that we would be talking about that Paris Accord thing tonight, so I looked it up over the weekend. My first impression was that the Paris Accord was a bogus deal to start with because the US Senate had never ratified it, but it seems that I had it confused with the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which also was never ratified by the senate. In an effort to avoid a similar embarrassment, they decided to call the Paris thing an "executive agreement" instead of a "treaty", and they got away with it until we got a new executive who un-agreed to it. I thought the executive agreement thing was something that Obama had made up, but further research indicated that it has been done lots of times in the past by the US and other countries whose constitutions require legislative approval for treaties. The courts have generally upheld it, but there also is a thing where congress can nullify an executive agreement, although I don't know if they have ever done it. That's okay, we don't need no stinking congress, we've got Trump!