None of the above

And the worm turns, again.  Shortly after the Singapore Summit our fearless leader was effusive in his praise of Little Kim and denuclearization was all but a done deal.  And yet, it has been recently reported that North Korea is increasing its production of nuclear fuel.  Is this supposed to have been a good deal for the US?  I now understand why Trump is always moaning about fake news; he is living in a fake reality.

And to add more ingredients to the political shit stew, Putin and Trump will be meeting in Helsinki in a couple of weeks and I'm sure they will have a lot to talk about.  There is also an upcoming trip to Great Britain but I don't know if that's part of the Helsinki trip.  The optics of these trips are interesting.  Diplomatically speaking, it seems to me that Trump acts more as a supplicant than an equal or superior.  He thinks he is acting from a position of strength but he isn't, really, not as long as he flips positions so quickly and refutes what he has said days earlier.  I can't imagine any foreign leader trusting him, for any reason.

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It would me nice if folks in Washington would just admit that Russia has played us, doing a much better job of propaganda and manipulation of social media than we have done to them.  In hindsight it is fair to say that our security sucked and their capabilities were vastly underrated.  Okay, let's admit it, fix the flaws, and move one. But it's also likely that intelligence assets of the CIA, NSA, and other alphabet agencies saw all this coming, wrote reports and passed their findings "upstairs" only to find their analyses ignored or forgotten.  The federal bureaucracy is like a bunch of children who don't play nicely with each other, much to our peril.

And we weren't the only victims of Russian shenanigans, the British got hit, too.  I've read that the Russkis had a big part in influencing that Brexit vote which goes a long way in weakening the European Union.  A  fragmented Europe and a befuddled US is exactly the kind of scenario that Putin likes.  He prefers pulling strings, and he is a master puppeteer.

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Since both a split in the Republican Party and the creation of a viable third party are unlikely, I have come up with what may be my stupidest idea yet: the dissolution of both parties.  Both parties suck, in their own way and are equally corrupt and compromised by corporate influence in their own ways.  Split the dough in their coffers among current office holders and then see what kind of parties they can come up with.  Maybe there will be two parties, or maybe ten.  The current Libertarian, Green, and other parties of the fringe persuasion can remain as is.  This half-baked idea needs more work, but what the hell.  It's one way out of this mess and will free us from all the baggage that is associated with being either a Democrat or Republican.