A lot of yard work.  Getting it in early this year while the weather’s amenable.

But not in my backyard things happened.

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I don’t watch a lot of Fareed Zakaria.  (I don’t watch much CNN at all, because 20 years of things exactly like this and their famous bothsideism and way too many Trump apologists.)  But I always thought he was a pretty level headed commentator.  He called Trump a bullshitter on the air not long ago.  When I heard that he said on Thursday  “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States”,  I thought he was making fun of it by playing on Van Jones’ absurd post-State of the Union construction.  But he meant it.  Which is just bizarre.  A lot of the positive commentary about the strike has been bizarre evincing an affection for blowing things up real good that is only seemly on SCTV’s Farm Film report.

Brian Williams and his “beautiful” missiles?  Bizarre.

A lot of neo-cons and the like showed that they’ve missed high profile blowing things up. Apparently drone strikes just aren’t enough for them.  It’s not like we haven’t actually been at war, actively involved in hostilities, like forever.

But the cake was taken (and blown up) by Sen. Lindsay Graham.  Sen. Graham was Never Trump until he was Always Trump and now Trump is Reagan.  It’s hyperbole to the extreme, which is the point of hyperbole, I suppose.

“All I can say about this president is he has the instincts of Ronald Reagan in many ways,” Graham told reporters Friday, according to The Washington Examiner. “[Trump’s] an emotional man, but he’s also a very smart man.”

There’s so much absurd about this.  Neither Reagan or Trump are/were smart, that’s just blowing smoke up a bony/skeletal ass to say that.  But also, neither was emotional or compassionate in any real way that most people understand.  Reagan was eager to kill school lunch programs, did nothing about AIDS, used military action to distract from unfavorable stories.  Trump had numerous instances of Assad atrocities, against children, and was unmoved.  He’s still unmoved enough to welcome refugees.  This may not be news, but Lindsay Graham is an idiot.

Jeremy Scahill is bleakly hilarious on this love of a hard, long missile.

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On the Trump investigation front, Glenn Thrush had an article about how Manafort actively lobbied Trump for the job of running his campaign.   He had access to e-mails and letters Manafort sent to Trump, his friends and Ivanka.

“Donald Trump and I had some business in the 1980s but we had no relationship until the Trump campaign called me,” Mr. Manafort, who did not dispute the substance of the documents, wrote in an email forwarded by a spokesman. “A role at the convention was all I was ever interested in; the fact that this role expanded was quite unexpected.”

But it was Mr. Manafort who initiated the process for getting a job on the campaign, the documents show. It began when he sent two succinct memos to Mr. Trump through Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a mutual friend.

Manafort, lobbyist for Putin allies, recruited Trump, hm, interesting.