North Korean leader Kim Jong Un now claims he has a hydrogen bomb. World leaders expressed concern. If someone like Kim can get such a bomb, what’s to stop someone like Donald Trump from getting one, too?
---
Senior U.S. defense officials were skeptical about North Korea’s claims, noting that filling a balloon with water does not technically constitute a hydrogen bomb.
---
Meanwhile, Donald Trump announced last week that he is postponing a trip to Israel until he can lob some insults at other targets to divert attention from his insults against Muslims.
---
Trump would bar Muslims from this country by instructing immigration officials to ask people if they are Muslim. He also would end crime by having police set up checkpoints to ask people if they are honest.
---
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is trying to regain some traction for his campaign by promising to crack down on the fossil fuel industry. It’s a little transparent when really old guys come out in defense of fossils, isn’t it?
---
Sanders would ban energy extraction on federal lands, ban hydraulic fracking for gas and oil and create clean energy jobs through a massive federal program. In other words, he would help Americans learn how to shelter in place.
---
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced last week that women now are eligible to fill every military combat role. That’s fine, but Americans really want to know whether a female protagonist will finally get to carry a light saber in a Star Wars movie.
---
Republican candidate Ben Carson, meanwhile, has gotten caught up in his own version of a pyramid scheme. Carson claims Joseph of the Old Testament built the Egyptian pyramids to store grain. Experts say they were built as burial tombs. Finally, an issue of substance for American voters to consider.
---
Thanks to Gov. Gary Herbert, Rutherford B. Hayes’s political career in Utah is now washed up.
---
Hayes, as the governor noted, once asked foreign nations to stop allowing Mormons to emigrate to Utah. Hayes once was a member of the Whig Party. Come to think of it, that might be a name to consider if Trump decides to form his own third party.