Republicans gotta get something done.

First they have to deal with Obamacare.  Nobody has ever figured out just what Obamacare is doing and what it is gonna cost.  The health insurers are dropping Obamacare as fast as the can after loosing barrels of money.  Right now it looks like Obamacare promises taxpayer funded health insurance for everyone who doesn't have health insurance from their employer or is 65 years old and hence eligible for Medicare.  Nobody has ever published an estimate of what Obamacare is gonna cost.  A reasonable guess is it will cost as much as Medicare.  There are more people without employer health insurance than there are people over 65.  Since they are younger than 65 they ought to be in better health.   Any way you slice it, Obamacare is a black hole down which we toss money.  A lot of money.
  To do tax reform, we have to get a handle on Obamacare costs.  Unless we at least know what the taxpayers have to fund, you cannot do any tax cutting.  And every one agrees that taxes are too damn complicated, too damn high,  and too unfair.  If tax reform doesn't happen, there will be a LOT of unhappy campers for the 2018 by election.  Might be enough for the Republicans to loose control of the house or the Senate, or both.
   It's do or die time for the Republicans.  They have to reform Obamacare.  They have to do tax reform.  If they don't,  they are gonna get clobbered in 2018.  

Do I care about President Trump's tax returns?

No.  Those returns are being audited by the IRS.  For us ordinary taxpayers, there is nothing worse than getting audited.  I dare say it causes Trump less pain and he has tax lawyers to handle it.  But still.  And I think they have audited him every year now.  The IRS, whose bureaucrats are all Democrats, who would love to get something, anything, on Trump.  If there is anything bad, flaky, or off color in Trump's 2016 tax return, the IRS will let us know.  Never fear.
  The newsies would love to get a hold of those returns.  There is always plenty of stuff that can be made to look bad, with just a gentle slanting.  Not enough charitable donations, donations to politically incorrect causes, capital losses, too much alimony or not enough alimony.  Lots of stuff. 
   And talking and demonstrating against Trump's tax returns diverts public attention from serious stuff, like Obamacare reform, tax reform, international trade, real stuff, not fake news. 

Dealing with the NORKs.

The NORKs have an army, stronger than what they had for the Korean War.  South Korea's major city and capital is so close to the NORK border as to be withing artillery range.  The place is run by a pudgy dictator who appears to be a crazy man.  They are building nukes and the ballistic missiles to deliver them.  They are so cold stony broke that they are having trouble feeding their people.  They have little to no international trade, travel, or connections. 
   We want them to drop their nuclear program.  They are dead set on getting nukes for the international respect (outright fear) that a nuclear weapons state commands.  Their nuclear facilities are well dispersed and underground, probably proof against airstrikes. 
    We would like the Chinese to cut off their crucial imports of food and fuel to force them to drop the nuclear program.  The Chinese could do this, they are the only source of supply for the NORKs.  Trouble is, the Chinese don't want to squeeze the NORKs that hard, for fear the regime might collapse.  If or when that happens, enormous attractive political forces will try to pull North and South Korea back together.  A lot of South Koreans still have kin in North Korea who they would insist on saving.  If that happens, South Korea, with an economy so advanced it can export automobiles to North America and make state of the art semiconductors, plus an educated population, will run the show, just like West Germany ran the show when East and West Germany reunited.  The result would be a capitalist, successful, pushy, Korea running right up to the Chinese border at the Yalu river.  The Chinese hate this idea.  Especially as the Koreans are so tight with the Americans. I doubt that the Chinese will push the NORKs very hard, certainly not hard enough to gt them out of the nuke business.
  Maybe we could get the Chinese to repatriate North Korean refugees to South Korea instead of handing them back to the tender mercies of Kim whats-his face Number 3.  Give this a few years to work, and the population loss would hurt the NORKs.  
  So what's left?   We could assassinate Kim whats-his-face  Number 3.  He deserves it, and the NORK regime would probably collapse into chaos as the various survivors and number two men struggle to take over.  And it would probably stop the NORKs from shelling Seoul into rubble.   On the other  hand, collapsing the NORK regime is scary all around.
   We could start up the Korean War again.  Nobody likes this idea. For good reasons.
   We could shoot down, or shoot up, any more NORK missile launches.  There is already newsie speculation that we caused yesterday's launch failure by computer hacking or black magic.  

Watched PBS show "The Great War" last night

Disappointing is the best I can say.  WWI was the greatest catastrophy of the 20th century.  It wrecked Europe.  Before the war, Europe was the center of civilization.  All the great powers were European powers.  The Great Powers had colonized most of the rest of the world and ran it to suit themselves.  Production of coal, iron, steel, steam railroads, steam ships, electric telegraph and telephone, airplanes and airships, electric light, and modern weapons, was all done in Europe.  Scientific advances were all in Europe. 
   WWI wrecked all this.  It destroyed the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Ottoman empire.  And it created Communist Russia, a menace that would last seventy years. 
   The  pity of it, is no one in Europe could explain why their country was at war.  The Americans, led by Wilson, asked the major combatants, the British, the French, and the Germans, what their war aims might be, thinking that if you know what everyone wanted, and you could get them to a table, you might be able to work out a deal.  None of the Europeans has an answer the the question "What are your war aims?"  Either they didn't know, or they feared that they would sound so petty, squabbles over colonies and the like, that revealing them would subject them to ridicule.  Wilson had to create the famous 14 points as a rational, before he could get the US to join the war in 1917. 
   So what did the PBS show talk about?  A lotta footage about US racism, and the anti German feeling whipped up by the  Wilson administration.  Good deal of footage on the  black 15th New York regiment, little to nothing about any other American unit.  You'd think the 15th New York won the war single handedly.  Nothing about war production, the Navy, British and French leaders, or any other topic.   Too bad, Ken Burns showed PBS how to do a war mini series years ago with the Civil War.   Judging by this bit of politically correct anti-American propaganda,  PBS has totally forgotten how to do things right.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer forgets Godwin's Law

Godwin's law is a widely known Internet adage.  "After any discussion goes on long enough, somebody will compare someone or something to Hitler.  And the first to mention Hitler looses the argument"
 Sean Spicer forgot about this the other day when he compared Syria's Basher Assad to Hitler.  The press room has been ragging him about it for days now. 

Words of the Weasel Part 51

Used to be they talked about military action, meaning engaging the enemy on land or sea or air.  Now they talk about "kinetic action" or "kinetic military action"   Kinetic is a word dragged in from physics, where it means "motion"  A moving body carries kinetic energy (1/2 mv**2).  A textbook titled "kinetics" will talk about motion, acceleration, collisions, orbits, and that sort of stuff. 
Dunno why the newsies have taken to adding the word in front of "action".   There is probably some good left leaning reason, but I have no clue as to what it might be. 

Doing my taxes. Adventures with Turbotax

The thing about Turbo Tax is that it is a black box.  You key in all the numbers on your tax forms, and it thinks about it and then issues a dozen totally incomprehensible error messages and asks you to correct them.  After a couple of day of screwing around I got it down to just ONE error message that didn't make any sense. 
   I used to do the taxes by hand and with Excel.  That way I had a fair to middling idea what was going on.  When I started with Turbotax, it saved me about $1000 over doing taxes with Excel.  So I have stuck with it for the last few years.  But I no longer understand what's going on.  You plug your numbers into TurboTax, and it prints your tax form, but I no longer know diddly about it. 

 So I ignored it and pressed on to print the 1040.  I don't like to efile, it makes things too easy for the IRS.  Efiled returns go right into the IRS computers, and their audit software looks things over and decides to zap you.  Send 'em paper and they have to scan it, page by page, and the scanning software often makes mistakes that have to be corrected by hand, slowing things down.  To really slow things down, hand scribe your 1040, that will baffle the scanning software even worse. 
   So,  I took the laptap over to the printer to get some hard copy.  Plugged in the USB cable from the HP D4260 Deskjet.  Clicked on print in Adobe reader.  This opened a weird window that " registered" my printer with HP.  Opening me up to a flood of spam.   But, it would not print.  This used to work back before I upgraded to Win 10 last year.  Far as I can see, Win 10 broke the printer driver[s].  Win none, loose one.
   So,  Lets burn the tax returns to a CD, I always do that anyhow for backup.  Then copy the return onto Trusty Desktop, running XP, and get on with it.  Clicked on VLC media player, which used to burn CD's just fine on laptop.  Damn,  Win 10  broke VLC too.  Then I noticed that Win 10 offered to burn CD's all by itself.  That's new,  XP never did that.  So I put in blank CD and drag and drop the tax returns and some back up data (check books) onto the CD icon, and things happen.  CD drive spins, a green progress bar crawls across the screen,  the drive makes seeking noises.   I hit eject, and Win 10 does the CD close burn.  Groovy, but when I stick the freshly burned CD into Trusty Desktop, it shows up as blank.  I finally have  to copy the tax form to a thumb drive to move them over. 
   Anyhow, if you are doing your taxes on Win 10, you might want to make sure the printer still works before April 15 or 18 rolls around. 
   Thank you Bill Gates.