hell in a handbasket

My brother in law died Monday night, why I didn't post yesterday.  He was the nicest guy in the world.  Soft-spoken, invariably nice to everybody.  He hadn't been well for the past year and now he is gone.


It seems like Netanyahu eked out a victory again Well he and the centrist party have tied, I think it is 35/35, but most of the other parties are conservative so he will have an easier time of forming a coalition government.  I don't like these coalition governments that seem to be the result of the parliamentary systems.  Doesn't seem right that a party that had maybe ten percent of the vote can become part of the ruling coalition.

And what has become of Israel's liberals?  Doesn't seem that long ago that there used to peace parties, and now there is none of that.  And the Palestinians have never been weaker.  Their allies are squabbling among themselves, and it looks like their main supporters, the Saudis, are more interested in cozying up to Trump than championing their cause.  The United States used to pretend to be an honest broker urging the Israelis to stop playing cowboys and Indians with the Palestinians and urging some kind of peace talks, but there is none of that pretense anymore, and anybody that speaks up against AIPAC or the state of Israel is branded as anti Semitic and marginalized.

The Mueller report seems to be dead in the water.  We, and the House and Senate will only see what Barr allows us to see.  It will go to the courts but that takes a long time and things get tangled.  I have to wonder why Mueller is being so silent in all this.

And now Trump is going hog-wild, I mean hog-wilder, how do you even measure this, firing everybody who is not totally subservient and even that doesn't always save them.  And how about that Betsy Devos who went ahead with White House's plan for cutting the special olympics, only to be cut down by Trump and then she says meekly well yes, she is now against it. 

And this just in this afternoon, Barr is now announcing that he is going to investigate the investigation the way Trump has been asking for.  He is certainly Trump's footpad.