While Donald Trump gets attention by saying outrageous things, what has largely been unnoticed is that he has rapidly escalated the bombing attacks on targets in Syria with a corresponding increase in the number of civilian casualties. Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept writes about a report from Human Rights Watch about the most recent killings of civilians in two attacks.
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There has been intense interest in what professional football teams would do in the wake of Donald Trump’s tirade against Colin Kaepernick and other players who are protesting police brutality, with some TV stations showing the field during the anthem to see what each team had decided to do. The local team the Cleveland Browns saw saw at least 20 of their players kneel in protest.

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Donald Trump has suddenly started waging a war on sports figures, taking aim at those who have started the practice of kneeling instead of standing for the national anthem before games to draw attention to police brutality. (The question of why the national anthem is played at all before such events is a topic that I discussed earlier and argued that it should be abandoned but that is a digression.) When Donald Trump suddenly goes on a tear against what seems like a randomly selected target, one has to always ask oneself whether this is genuine grievance or whether he is using the issue to distract from some other issue. There have been suggestions that Trump, or at least his advisors, to distract people’s attention from failures or other setbacks. If that is the case here, what could that be?
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In his 80-minute speech last night at the rally in support of Luther Strange in the Alabama US senate primary race, Donald Trump railed at those senators who were balking at supporting the Graham-Cassidy bill, the latest Republican push in their attempt to undermine health care for many Americans. There was one item that stuck out at me, though, and that was when he said:
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In the war of words between Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, we have to declare that Kim (or at least his translator) is the clear winner when it comes to trading insults. While Trump has called Kim ‘rocket man’ and a ‘madman’, the first sounds childish and the second is unoriginal. Kim, on the other hand, called Trump a ‘dotard’ and that had people scrambling for their dictionaries. Liz Posner says that the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “an old person, especially one who has become weak or senile”, meaning someone in his ‘dotage’ I guess.
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Bernie Sanders delivered what was supposed to be a major foreign policy address on Wednesday at Westminster College in Fulton, MO, the location of Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. His speech starts at the 24-minute mark and ends at the 1:19 mark.

The prepared remarks can be read here. First, here are the positive elements.
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There are weird goings on in the state of Alabama. When Jeff Sessions was picked by Donald Trump to be attorney general, his senate seat fell vacant. Governor Robert Bentley picked the state attorney general Luther Strange (whom Trump keeps referring to as ‘big Luther Strange’) to replace him with a special election to be held along with the 2018 elections in November. But then Bentley had to resign in April because of a tawdry sex scandal (of course) and his successor Kay Ivey brought the special election forward to December 12 of this year, with the primary to be held on August 15 and in the event that no candidate got mote than 50% of the vote, a run-off to be held next Tuesday on September 26.
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