I was thinking last night, and a few weeks ago, how maybe Trump won't be so good for our economy when it comes to international trade for any number of reasons. I thought if there was one mixed blessing about him getting his way in regards to deregulation and letting banks and businesses getting there way, it will give corporations a longer leash to try and work around any problems the government is making and still make those business deals go round. On the other hand, if that doesn't happen and things do get pretty screwed up, maybe it'll create a lot of hard lessons that we can learn from very quickly. For instance, if by some chance NAFTA gets nuked and we lose a lot of trade opportunities with Mexico and Canada, maybe we'll see shifts in how we handle agriculture and manufacturing that will lead to more robust local economies. Or something.

I could see a similar scenario working out with congress. It's starting to look like a lot of the more rational Republicans and Democrats are starting to wise up as to how difficult things could become if they're not careful, so they're starting to hike up their pants and roll up their sleeves and seeing what they can do to get things fixed. Or I might be reading the situation wrong. But if I'm not, this could be the start of the end of hyper-partisanship.

As for North Korea? Man, you're preaching to the choir here. I totally know Rex Tillerson talked out of turn here. China, South Korea, and Japan are all major trading partners with us and their economic happiness and security is in our best interest. South Korea and Japan are major military partners with us, Their national security is in our best interest. Then we have smaller countries from Vietnam to Thailand to the Phillipines to whoever else who's economic and national stability are in our best interest. When you factor that larger world powers like Russia and India aren't all that far away from all of this, regional stability in Asia is really, really important. We probably have contingencies upon contingencies upon contingencies in regards to North Korea, and they're probably under constant review and adjustment as needed. North Korea is like a really big oven, and we have a big ass collection of fire extinguishers right next to us in case anything happens. Rex Tillerson just happen to have broken the first rule of the fire extinguisher club. You don't talk about the fire extinguisher club . . . which is dumb. Someone must have told him about that rule.