Feeling low? Approval ratings dropping? Then bomb someone!

When reports emerged on April 4 of what seems like a ghastly tragedy in Idlib, Syria, the key questions should have been: What exactly happened? Who were the victims? Who were the perpetrators? What was their motive? Was it a deliberate and targeted attack on the victims or had something gone badly awry? What should be the appropriate response? As with any investigation of deliberate killings, identifying means, opportunity, and motive become paramount. Means and opportunity exist for a wide variety of agents in the region, including the Syrian government and the ISIS-affiliated the rebels fighting against them. That leaves motive as a key discriminant.
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Ivanka Trump is not an ally of liberals

As the Trump administration lurches from one awful policy to another, some are hoping that his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner will serve as some kind of moderating force. It is incredible that we have arrived at this stage of politics, a reversion to a form of medieval fiefdom where people who have no claims to any expertise whatsoever are now in positions of great influence merely because they are family members of the ‘ruler’ and thus have his ear.
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The complicated issue of faculty-student romantic relationships

I have written before about the problematic nature of romantic relationships between college faculty and students. The college campus is a place of great ambiguity when it comes to these kinds of relationships. Since college students are adults who also have more freedom than secondary school students, it lacks the clear boundaries that one finds in secondary schools. Since the college classroom is not a workplace, it lacks some of the rules that have become the norm there.
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Murder in the English village

The 19th season of the British TV series Midsomer Murders has started streaming on Netflix. This is quite an achievement in longevity. I wrote about this long-running show two years ago and it sparked a lot of interesting comments and suggestions for other similar series. Thanks to those, I have watched episodes of Death in Paradise, Inspector Morse, and the first two seasons of the much more superior show (in terms of writing, acting, and plotting) of Broadchurch and am looking forward to the third.
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Context is everything

Democratic congressperson Elijah Cummings has been one of the most vocal critics of Donald Trump. So when, in an interview after meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Trump said to a reporter, “Elijah Cummings was in my office and he said, “You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country” pretty much nobody believed him and put that down to yet another falsehood by this pathological liar.
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On the road to single payer?

After the humiliating debacle in which Paul Ryan and Donald Trump had to pull their health care bill from the floor or see it go down in flames, the talk was that the reform effort was dead, at least for some time, and that Trump and Ryan would reluctantly defer health care actions that hurt the poor and middle class and instead move on to other things dear to their hearts that hurt the poor and middle class, like cutting taxes on the wealthy.
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The wall with Mexico has already caused problems

I wrote a short while ago about how the proposed border wall with Mexico could face problems when it came to the Rio Grande river that forms about 1000 miles of the border that separates Texas and Mexico. Putting the wall on the US side, which is the only realistic option, means ceding the river to Mexico. This is not a purely hypothetical exercise. Back in 2006 when there was an earlier spurt of wall building, it resulted in many Americans, farmers and householders, finding themselves on the Mexican side of the fence, effectively shut out of their own country, and also had land taken from them under the doctrine of eminent domain.
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