One week ago, following news that China had banned coal imports from North Korea in retaliation to Kim Jong Un's latest ballistic missile test, we mused that North Korea's regime appears to be in jeopardy, even though we had no explicit knowledge of tensions inside the top echelons of the country's political system. It now appears that those concerns may have been justified.
Via Howard Kunstler of Kunstler.com,
We need a new civil war like we need a hole in the head. But that’s just it: America has a hole in its head. It’s the place formerly known as The Center. It didn’t hold. It was the place where people of differing views could rely on each other to behave reasonably around a touchstone called the National Interest. That abandoned place is now cordoned off, a Chernobyl of the mind, where figures on each side of the political margin fear to even sojourn, let alone occupy, lest they go radioactive.
After meeting with GOP governors who, as discussed yesterday, appeared to have gotten cold feet about repealing and replacing Obamacare (or repairing and renaming) if it means millions of Americans - and potential voters - losing coverage, not to mention the end of billions in Federal funding for various projects, President Trump reached an important conclusion: Reforming the health care system is extremely difficult and as he admitted, "nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated," as Republicans have been slow to unite around a replacement plan for ObamaCare.
A 70-year-old German sailor caught in the conflict in southern Philippines has been beheaded by ISIL affiliated Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf. A video posted online by the terrorism monitoring group SITE shows the German pensioner being beheaded after a ransom deadline set by his captors expired.
Upon leaving office in 2009, former President George W. Bush pledged to reserve criticism of his successor, despite the fact that Obama, a junior Senator from Chicago, had been openly and extremely critical of his presidency over the preceding couple of years. In fact, when pressed on the issue in an interview with Sean Hannity in 2014, Bush said simply, “I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president undermine a current president...I think it’s bad for the presidency, for that matter.”