Lt. Col. Vindman's awareness of the potential risk he was incurring by reporting the president's misconduct is what makes his own subsequent actions even more compelling. In the future, we may realize it likely rises to the level of heroic.

Nope.  He cares a lot.  And he knows he will be Impeached for tacky, corrupt bribery.  And he knows he is guilty.

Now, it seems, that going farther is too socialistic and it will result in the loss of all that good private insurance. The voters will be scared to consider any changes, say some.  Maybe, just restoration of all the hits ACA has taken from Trump will do. Or maybe, let's think small and be ready to compromise.  A little tinkering is radical enough.

With Medicare for All set forth as an aspirational goal, dipping the American toe in warmer waters in a transitional manner makes sense.  Health care coverage remains a political winner.

Indeed, among factors in the re-election of Governor Edwards, in the red state of Louisiana (Trump was ahead of Secretary Clinton by about 20 points in 2016), was Edwards expansion of Medicaid. Kentucky Gov-elect Beshar plans, in keeping with his campaign, to rescind the Trump work requirements for Medicaid. A major factor in the defeat of Bevin who dismantled Kynect.

"If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning."

― Jules Verne,

"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968, Dir: Sergio Leone) - This is the only film in Henry Fonda's long and distinguished career in which he played the bad guy, and he certainly made the most of his opportunity, establishing himself in the film's opening scene as one of the most cold-blooded and loathsome screen villains in cinema history.

"Woodstock" (1970, Dir: Michael Wadleigh) - This is the quintessential rock'n'roll documentary of the legendary three-day concert festival that took place in upstate New York in August 1969, with memorable live concert footage of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, Country Joe McDonald, Carlos Santana and The Who.

"M*A*S*H" (1970, Dir: Robert Altmann) - This comedy / satire, set in the Korean War, is an exercise in inspired mayhem and is one of the great anti-war films of all time. It is also, as most people know, the cinematic forerunner for one of television's most beloved sitcoms of all time.

"The Music Lovers" (1970, Dir: Ken Russell) - A historical epic about the great Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain), this was one of the first modern films to deal maturely with the subjects of homosexuality and the attendant homophobia of the dominant heterosexual culture. The magnificent Glenda Jackson is splendid as Antonia, Tchaikovsky's spurned wife whose sexual yearning and unrequited love for her oh-so-gay but terribly closeted husband makes you want to first hug her and then tell her, "Honey, you need to get a clue."

"The French Connection" (1971, Dir: William Friedkin) - Actor Gene Hackman scored a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar with his take-no-prisoners portrait of NYPD Detective Popeye Doyle, who is a crusading a$$hole on a mission, and one of the most unlikable good guys I've ever seen onscreen. This low-budget crime thriller, which also won the Oscar Best Picture, has a protracted car chase that simply has to be seen to be believed.

"The Last Picture Show" (1971, Dir: Peter Bogdanovich) - This black-and-white masterpiece follows a group of 1950s-era high school kids in a culturally and economically deprived Texas town where nothing ever changes. It's notable for its breakout performances by young actors Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepherd, and heartrending Oscar-winning turns by veteran actors Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman.

"McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971, Dir: Robert Altmann) - Traditional film critics had trouble with this western starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and were disturbed by the fact that its characters were, as Rex Reed called them, "nothing but ne'er do wells, cheap wh0res and drifters." But speaking as an historian, those were actually the first people to venture into the frontier of the American West in the 19th century. The families and preachers arrived much later.

"Sounder" (1972, Dir: Martin Ritt) - Ritt delivers what is probably one of the most bluntly honest takes about the lives of Southern black families in the Jim Crow era and the fine line that they had to walk in order to just get by. It includes a towering performance by the great Cicely Tyson as a mother who's trying to hold everyone together while her husband's in prison.

"Lady Sings the Blues" (1972, Dir: Sidney J. Furie) - This honest and often painful biography of legendary singer Billie Holliday is a brutal portrait of her ultimately hopeless battle with heroin addiction, which ultimately killed her at age 44. R&B diva Diana Ross absolutely slays as the title character, for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Actress. It's too bad she didn't make more than a handful of films in her career.

"The Way We Were" (1972, Dir: Sydney Pollack) - The sheer star power of 1970s box office titans Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford carries this 1950-era melodrama, in which they play a loving but mismatched married couple whose turbulent relationship eventually runs aground on the sharp rocks of McCarthyist witch hunt politics. Streisand showed some serious dramatic chops here in a non-musical role -- though the producers still insisted that she sing the title song in the closing credits, which of course became a huge hit for her -- and she earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her effort.

"American Graffiti" (1973, Dir: George Lucas) - Before he became enveloped by his own dust cloud that's the "Star Wars" franchise, Lucas directed this low-key and still underrated coming-of-age gem that's set in 1962 Santa Rosa, CA. Suzanne Somers has arguably the best cameo appearance ever in a film, as the blonde in the T-Bird who suddenly becomes the singular obsession of a young Richard Dreyfuss, with other breakout performances by Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Paul LeMat, MacKenzie Phillips, Harrison Ford, Charles Martin Smith and Candy Clark.

"The Exorcist" (1973, Dir: William Friedkin) - Forget that godawful 1978 sequel with a half-soused Richard Burton and every other cheap and schlocky knockoff. 46 years later, the sheer power of "The Exorcist" to shock and haunt viewers renders it the scariest horror movie ever made. And in my opinion, one of the true miscarriages of justice in Academy Award history occurred when voters passed over Friedkin's masterpiece for Best Picture in favor of a good but still-inferior "The Sting."

"A Woman Under the Influence" (1974, Dir: John Cassavetes) - Much like his contemporary Clint Eastwood, Cassavetes was a handsome and popular Hollywood actor who ultimately showed far more interest in being behind the camera as a director than he ever did as a performer in front of it. And like Eastwood, he used his box-office clout to leverage the studios to finance the films that he wanted to make. This searing domestic drama is certainly one of his very best, and was also one of the first major films to tackle the then-taboo subject of mental illness, with moving performances by Gene Rowlands (Cassavetes' real-life wife) and Peter Falk.

"Nashville" (1975, Dir: Robert Altmann) - This is arguably the director's best film in my estimation, a smarmy American parable about the equally smarmy Nashville music scene with a really great ensemble cast. Two of the standout performances were then-recent alumni of the old NBC comedy show "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in," Lily Tomlin (who received an Oscar nomination) and Henry Gibson.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975, Dir: Milos Forman) - This is one of only three films in Academy Award history to win Oscars in all the major categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. The other two are "It Happened One Night" (1934, Dir: Frank Capra) and "Silence of the Lambs" (1991, Dir: Jonathan Demme). The film really belongs to Jack Nicholson's delightfully subversive Randall Patrick McMurphy, but Louise Fletcher's menacing Nurse Mildred Ratched is recognized by AFI as one of the great screen villains in movie history.

"Seven Beauties" (1975, Dir: Lina Wertmüller) - Ms. Wertmüller became the first female director to ever be nominated for an Academy Award in that category with this film, which is set in the Second World War-era Fascist Italy, and it's easy to see why. She first lays bare the inherent fragility of the male ego, and then proceeds to grind it into dust. The great actor Giancarlo Giannini also scored a Best Actor nomination under her confident direction.

"Shampoo" (1975, Dir: Hal Ashby) - I hated this period piece, set in in November 1968, when I first saw it. It simply screams 1960s. But I've since come to appreciate it as a rather scathing take on the self-absorbed frivolity that was Beverly Hills culture during that era. Warren Beatty plays a promiscuous hairdresser who beds his clients without a second thought, until he's compelled to confront the aimlessness of his ultimately empty existence.

"Taxi Driver" (1976, Dir: Martin Scorsese) - Scorsese's homage to the grimy underbelly of 1970s New York City, with a staggering performance by Robert De Niro as the anti-social Travis Bickle, who has to be one of cinema's great lowlife characters.

"All the President's Men" (1976, Dir: Alan J. Pakula) - This political drama about the Washington Post's coverage of the early days of the Watergate scandal is certainly timely, and plays like a very effective crime thriller even though most knowledgeable people already know how the story ends. After 43 years, it still holds up well.

"Annie Hall" (1977, Dir: Woody Allen) - Most romantic comedies tend to be frivolous, frothy and ultimately forgettable. Allen's thinly-veiled semi-autobiographical take on his real-life relationship with Diane Keaton was both  extremely funny and ultimately heartbreaking. Casting his former lover Keaton in the title role was brilliant.

"The Last Waltz" (1978, Dir: Martin Scorsese) - If "Woodstock" is the best rock'n'roll documentary ever made, Scorsese's work in chronicling The Band's November 1976 farewell concert in San Francisco has been hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as the best rock concert film ever made. I don't disagree.

"Apocalypse Now!" (1979, Dir: Francis Ford Coppola) - In my opinion, this is the best war movie ever made, at once visceral, haunting and contemplative in its dark and manic portrait of the madness that was the Vietnam War. "Someday," laments Robert Duvall's crazy Col. Kilgore, "this war's going to end."

I agree about Zhivago. I saw it for the first time a couple of years ago and was underwhelmed. Talk about long...it does not move along like GWTW.

My only real issue with "Who'll Stop the Rain" has nothing to do with the film itself but rather its title, because the film is based on Robert Stone's excellent 1974 novel "Dog Soldiers." When it opened at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the prestigious Palm D'Or prize and was very favorably received by audiences, the film was also titled "Dog Soldiers."

But for some unfathomable reason, United Artists subsequently decided to re-title the production after the Creedence Clearwater Revival song of the same name for the U.S. theatrical release five months later. It was an ill-advised move which many believe may have inadvertently hurt the film both at the box office and with Oscar voters because hardly anybody recognized it as the acclaimed Cannes entry, only under another name.

Then UA further compounded the error internationally, releasing the film in France under the title "Guerriers de L'Enfel" ("Warriors of Hell") and in Spain as "Nieve Que Quema" ("Burning Snow"). In Britain, they marketed the film under its original name "Dog Soldiers," but with a ludicrous movie poster which pairs an artist / cartoonist's rendering of a ridiculously musclebound Nick Nolte (who really looked nothing like that 40 years ago) with the cheesy tag line "Try to rip him off and he'll rip you apart!"

Small wonder then that "Who'll Stop the Rain / Dog Soldiers / Warriors of Hell / Burning Snow" initially struggled to find an audience in movie theatres. This under-appreciated gem of a film finally found its footing with audiences amid the growing popularity of video rentals in the early 1980s. It's also a likely decent case study in marketing mismanagement, one in which United Artists executives tripped over their own d*cks and got in the way of audience eyeballs.

I'm running for president to defeat Donald Trump and rebuild America.

We cannot afford four more years of President Trump's reckless and unethical actions. He represents an existential threat to our country and our values. If he wins another term in office, we may never recover from the damage.

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

I would also note that once upon a time back in July 2015, Rick Perry was much more clear-eyed about the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency:

"He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued. Let no one be mistaken - Donald Trump's candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded."

Throughout 2017 the main struggle of the small staff Obama assembled in the West End was how to deal with what they viewed as a crazy president personally obsessed with Obama. After running against Obama's legacy, and then holding one awkward but collegial meeting in the White House--"He knows absolutely nothing," Obama privately told a visitor about Trump