Look over here, away from Russia probe
More Trump/Russia ties surface daily.
Just last week, we learned that British spies in late 2015 happened onto what they believed were suspicious "interactions" between figures connected to Donald Trump and known or suspected Russian agents. The information was passed on to our director of the CIA, according to The Guardian.
Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of agencies from Germany, Estonia, Poland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France and Holland also relayed material, sources told Guardian reporters.
Meanwhile, Trump's Russia- and Ukraine-linked former campaign manager Paul Manafort has retroactively registered as a foreign agent - just as Trump's fallen former national security adviser did.
What does Trump do? He says, hey, look over here - we're dropping missiles and bombs like I used to say we shouldn't do. Might our suddenly war-happy president be trying to change the subject?
Speaking of bombs, look at cost
When President Trump had the U.S. Navy launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Syrian air base from where planes flew to drop chemical weapons on Syrian rebels, our wallets took a wallop.
The replacement cost for those missiles is estimated at $110 million, and we didn't get much - discounting message, whatever that message may have been - for our buck: 20 planes were "taken out," according to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and other planes were flying in and out of the slightly damaged air base the next day.
Then last week, the U.S. military dropped it's most powerful nonnuclear bomb on ISIS positions in Afghanistan as a "tactical" move.
The strike in the Nangarhar province near the Pakistan border killed 36 ISIS fighters, CNN reported. ISIS denied any of its fighters were killed or injured. CNN reported that the U.S. military previously estimated ISIS had 600 to 800 active fighters in the area but was unclear whether it had hoped to strike more.
That one bomb, nicknamed the "mother of all bombs" or Moab, cost $16 million. So those 36 militants that we claim to have killed cost us about $450,000 each, according to the Guardian.
Trump termed the Afghanistan bombing "another successful job."
In another action, the U.S.-led coalition in Syria killed 18 of its own allies from the Syrian Democratic Forces in what was described as a misdirected airstrike.
Looking to China for real toughness
We have to have some sympathy - and prayers - for China leaders.
They are apparently already feeling called on to referee between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
But, speaking in Beijing on Friday, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi told reporters the world faces a "precarious situation" in which "one has the feeling that a conflict could break out at any moment."
Yi urged the U.S. and North Korea to step back from the brink of a potentially catastrophic conflict after Pyongyang warned it would not "keep its arms crossed" in the event of a preemptive strike, the Guardian reported.
The weekend has felt a bit like October of 1962 when concerns about the Cuban missile crisis had teachers showing children how to hide under their desks - as if that would help.
This time, the world watched North Korea as speculation mounted over whether Kim Jong Un's regime would carry out a ballistic missile or nuclear test to mark the 105th birth anniversary of his grandfather Kim Il Sung, the nation's founder.
Multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News that the U.S. is prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test. The U.S. positioned two destroyers capable of shooting Tomahawk cruise missiles just 300 miles from the North Korean nuclear test site, and American heavy bombers were positioned in Guam. The Pentagon announced that the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group was being diverted to the area.
The Chinese foreign minister, Wang, told Xinhua, China's official news agency: "We call on all parties to refrain from provoking and threatening each other, whether in words or actions, and not to let the situation get to an irreversible and unmanageable stage. If a war occurs, the result is a situation in which everybody loses and there can be no winner. It is not the one who espouses harsher rhetoric or raises a bigger fist that will win."
Wang for president.
Thanks, China. We mean that.
Let's hope Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un continue to listen.