From what I can tell the May Day protests went OK here in Seattle (4 were arrested), but in our capital city of Olympia the windows of a Starbucks and a bank were smashed.
On the national front, the Monday news reports were filled with Trump administration insanities, old and new. It’s clear President Trump does not know the content of the revised still-just-the-worst Republican health care bill (it does not guarantee insurance for preconditions).
It also appears the President does not know the most basic history of the Civil War. (Says he is the first to ask the question what the reason was. Pretty simple : it was slavery).
President Trump called North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un a ‘smart cookie’ and that he would be ‘honored’ to meet him. Why? WHY ‘honored’? The man is a ruthless psychopathic dictator.
And Trump’s invitation to Philippine president Duterte to visit him was denounced by human rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers for overlooking Duterte’s bloodied hands at human rights abuses. (Human rights groups say that Duterte’s narcotics crackdown has led to more than 7,000 extrajudicial killings). A photo of a billboard advertising Trump Tower Manila that features Ivanka Trump has done the rounds on Twitter as a possible explanation for the invite. A spokesperson for the Trump Organization said the photo is old and that the billboard has been removed (but that does not take away the fact that the completed Trump Tower Manila is about to open).
On the plus side, word from Sunday night is that President Trump signed off on a $1 trillion budget deal with Democrats that will keep the government open until October. Congress still has to vote it into law, but the deal rebuffed his specific demands for funding the border wall, for cutting off funding for sanctuary cities, for scrapping funding for Planned Parenthood, and budget cuts for the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency. So there is that.