So I read the famous classified memo.

Less than earth shaking.  It says the FBI flimflammed the FISA court to get a warrant for surveillance of Carter Page, a new name to me.  The FBI showed the Steele document, opposition research paid for by Clinton and the DNC, to the FISA court as evidence that Carter Page needed his phone and email tapped.  The FBI also showed a Yahoo news article based on leaks from Steele, as independent corroboration of the Steele document.   
   Seeing as how the FISA court is a pure rubber stamp, out of thousands of requests for warrants submitted to FISA,  only dozen or so are ever rejected.  So the famous memo identifies one case where the FBI flimflammed the FISA court and obtained a warrent improperly.  Wanna bet the FBI has been doing this all along and of those thousands of warrents issued, many of them are just as bogus as the one obtained on Carter Page? 
   The FISA court is secret.  We don't know who the judges are, where the court meets, we never get to see their transcripts and records.  They can order surveillance on anybody on the flimsiest of evidence, and have been for decades.  It's a rubber stamp.
  We ought to close the entire FISA court thing.  Law enforcement, including the FBI, should have to go to a real court, the kind that tries cases, in order to spy on American citizens.

Was it AmTrak's fault?

Certainly embarrassing to wreck a train full of Congressmen.   The train hit a truck at a grade crossing doing 70  mph.  Killed the truck driver, shook up a lot of Congressmen who were not in their seats.  Train stayed on the track, which is a good thing. 
   I think the fault lies with the truck driver.  The grade crossing was protected, crossbucks, automatic red flashers, and automatic crossing gates.  On TV you could see that the crossing gates were down.  We can assume that the crossing protection gear functioned,  that stuff is pretty reliable and I cannot remember a case where it failed to work.  Still, someone ought to check that, just to be sure. So how did that truck get on the tracks?  Either he got stuck on the tracks before the train arrived, or he was in a hurry and drove around the crossing gates.   So far the newsies have not said anything about that.  And, why did not the people in the truck get out and run when they heard the train coming.  Trains are required to whistle (sound the horn now a days) as they approach grade crossings, two longs, a short and a very long.  Those horns are loud, easily heard over the sound of a truck engine. 

State of the Union

I stayed up and watched it.  Trump mentioned the successes he has had so far,  spoke to and of some impressive people in the visitors gallery, a policeman, a soldier, grieving parents, a 12 year old boy, a Korean freedom fighter,  good people all.  He  announced his DACA policy, infrastructure policy, military funding policy, all good stuff, but nothing I hadn't heard before.   Trump was doing a national pep rally, and doing it well.  He even had me clapping in front of my flat screen TV, and I'm a cynical senior citizen.   The democrats were not into pep rally, they didn't clap or stand and clap hardly at all.   Cold water is what the democrats were into.  Fortunately there were enough Republicans at the show to give Trump a lot of standing ovations and keep the pep rally spirit up. 
    So all full of good patriotic spirit I stayed up and watched young Joe Kennedy give the Democrats reply to Trump's State of the Union.  Boy what a downer that was.  I remember young Joe's grand father RFK, and his grand uncle JFK, and neither of them ever talked like that.   Young Joe just gave a long lament about how terrible everything is, business is making money, taxes are being cut, all sorts of guvmint freebies are going away, one wail after another.  A real glass half empty talk. 

The losers always cry Gerrymander

Gerrymander, the art of drawing voting district lines to favor your own party and disadvantage the opposition party.  After the election, the losing party always blames a gerrymander.  We have to have voting districts, otherwise everyone runs at large.  Which is difficult and expensive, the candidate has to run ads, make campaign appearances, and put up yard signs all over the state, rather than just his own district.   To gerrymander, you arrange the voting districts either to pack the opposition voters into a few districts which you cede to the them, or to dilute the opposition voters among your strong districts, where they never have the numbers to win the district.   Elbridge Gerry, a serious Massachusetts politician, signer of the Declaration of Independence,  was governor of Massachusetts after the Revolution when redistricting created an odd shaped district, long and wiggly and looking like a salamander.  It was dubbed a Gerrymander, and the term has stayed in American politics ever since.
   Trouble is, gerrymandering is hard to define, and thus hard to legislate against.  So far all we have tried is the appointment of a "non partisan" commission to draw district lines.  Such commissions are better than nothing, but not all that effective.
   What we might try is a law that requires districts to be reasonable compact.  Define "reasonable compact" as the longest way across the district may not exceed twice the shortest way across the district.  That would outlaw the long and skinny districts.  

The engineer missed the 30 mph speed limit sign

That's from the Wall St Journal on that train crash in Tacoma Washington this winter.  Reasonable, and easy to do.  And that's the engineer's story.
   My only question is, after spending $180 million on bringing this line into service, why is a dangerous 30 mph curve left in the track?  With $180 million to spend, I'd think they could have straightened that curve out to allow 80 mph running clean thru the whole line. 

I'll wash your mouth out with soap

Common threat to children using bad language.  Or sassing their parents.  Now the children say "I'll eat a Tide Pod"???  
Even on a dare,  I would not eat soap or Tide Pods, no matter what.  I learned that soap tasted awful at a very early age, probably from tasting it accidentally during bath.  
I don't understand the growth of Tide Pod eating among the young.  When I was a kid we knew better.

Why is Washington so disfunctional?

This came up in a discussion with youngest son.  We are still close enough to talk politics even though his politics don't always agree with mine.    To which I said, neither side (party) has enough votes to pass their program.  The Republican majority in the Senate is now down to one since the Alabama election.  The Republican majority in the house is a little bigger, but  the "House Freedom Caucus"  RINO's all, cannot be counted to vote with the party.  In short, the Congress is deadlocked between the two parties, neither has enough votes to vote their program thru and get on with things.
   The only solution is to convince more voters to join one side or the other, and give their side a solid majority.  This is hard.  First off, neither party has made (and published) a clear and simple statement of their views.   Partly because they cannot come together on one view, and partly because of the modern conviction that stating your views just makes you enemies, never friends. Which is why politicians refrain from saying any thing of substance  and talk about motherhood and apple pie. 
   Lacking any thing from the two parties, the voters will listen to respected public figures.  But we don't have many of those any more.  Used to be guys like Walter Cronkite, Jim Lehrer,  and David Brinkley had the respect of the public and were listened to.   Now a days all we have is Dan Rather,  Rachel Maddow, and Opray Winfrey.  Nobody respects them much.  And the entire MSM has destroyed any confidence the public might have held in them.  Nobody believes any politician much.   Public opinion isn't going to change much in the current absence of trusted voices urging change. 
   So, the current deadlock looks like it will continue for a long time.