Not a photo-essay

 

Because no one’s having any demonstrations anytime soon, can’t add photos of one.

This TPM piece documents a lot of what Trump is doing today and most of it follows a theme of the new Trump team is using wildly improper criteria to attack political opponents. As I was in the Navy for around a decade (PN3, USN, 1991-2001), I’ll comment on the attempt to prosecute military people for the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

After World War II, the Allies held the Nuremberg Tribunals for members of the Nazi Wehrmacht. They established an international law that certain orders were illegal. For the military person to say “I was just following orders” simply isn’t a legitimate excuse. Even if our Commander-in-Chief or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tells a Seaman Recruit or a Private to commit a war crime and the war crime is then committed, the Sailor or Soldier can be prosecuted for having followed an illegal order.

Were any illegal orders given from either President Trump or from President Biden concerning the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan? Right now, Trump’s people are deciding whether or not to create

a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason,

But if no one in the military was given an illegal order, it’s difficult to see how anyone could be prosecuted. If the military simply did as either president instructed them to and none of the orders given were abusive towards civilians or prisoners and if no illegal armaments, such as poison gas, were ordered to be used, it’s difficult to see how any prosecution could proceed.

If the withdrawal from Afghanistan was presidential policy, which I believe it was, then that was not something that military people of any rank had any say over.

Let’s say a Major General (two stars) ordered his division (three brigades) to attack and one of the Colonels (in charge of one of the brigades) decided “Nah, it isn’t the right time to attack, the Major General is wrong,” then the Colonel would quite properly be court-martialed for insubordination. The Colonel can’t claim that “I was given an illegal order” because the action ordered falls under standard, everyday, expected actions.

What Trump’s people are trying to do is to prosecute military people for following the instructions of their Commander-in-Chief, for following legitimate, legal orders.

It’s difficult for me to see any legitimate reason to do this. Unfortunately, this is not the only example of overreach cited in the TPM piece.

Israel/Palestine for the last several years

 

From March 2009 to June 2021, Benjamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister of Israel. His policies can be described as continuing the policies that were in place when he came in, slowly squeezing the Palestinians in general. Gaza in particular has been under siege for 17 years. Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Fatah/Palestinian Authority (PA) took over the West Bank at the same time. Over the years, Gaza has been controlled solidly by Hamas, the West Bank has been increasingly cut up by walls and checkpoints. PA authorities cannot travel through Israeli checkpoints at will. Their travel permits can be revoked by Israel.

Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank entails onerous physical barriers and constraints on movement, demolition of homes and other physical infrastructure, restrictions on political rights and civil liberties, and expanding Jewish settlements that are widely considered to constitute a violation of international law.

For a short time, Netanyahu was replaced by Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. In their coalition government, the United Arab List, with four seats, was able to get Bennett and Lapid’s coalition to majority status (The Knesset is 120 seats, so 61 is the magic number). The driving force behind the coalition though, was “personal animus for the Likud leader (Netanyahu) and the concern at the threat he may pose to Israeli democracy.”

One good thing that happened during Naftali Bennett’s brief tenure was that “budget money that had been approved by the previous government and earmarked for developing the economy and improving the infrastructure of Arab communities inside Israel’s Green Line borders, while combating rampant crime there.” Unfortunately, the Israeli Finance Minister under Netanyahu canceled that money.

Significantly though, the Israel-Palestinian peace process ran into a brick wall under Bennett with his “Six No’s,” which rejected BOTH a two-state solution AND a one-state solution! And of course, Bennet didn’t want to stop Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Settlements there are illegal under international law.

Israel, lacking a constitution, depends for separation of powers on informal arrangements. Netanyahu decided he wanted to remove “the power of the Supreme Court (and lower courts) to cancel government decisions deemed ‘extremely unreasonable.’" The reasonableness rule was summarily tossed out. Up to 200k Israeli citizens have been protesting on a regular basis ever since.

Some nights have turned violent – with police clashes, counter-protests and cars ramming into the crowds. It can feel like the country is unraveling.

Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly anyway.

Israel and Saudi Arabia in talks right now.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) stands with the majority of the fraternal people of Saudi Arabia in its overwhelming condemnation of the normalization efforts between the Saudi dictatorship and apartheid Israel.

One of the big events lately has been the Jenin raid. It was the most devastating strike on the Jenin refuge amp in about 20 years. Israelis say they need to “clean out” the camp regularly, otherwise terrorists gather there. Several Israelis died in the battle as well. Israelis claimed that terrorists had been living in the camp and used the civilians there as cover after committing raids in the vicinity. The camp also saw fighting back in 2002. But Israel’s response punishes every resident who’s in the vicinity, thereby again, violating international law.

As various folks have pointed out, Is Israel defending a pure and true democracy? Ehh, depends on which ethnic group you’re talking about. Israel practices apartheid, so it’s only democracy if you’re speaking of the Jewish population, not if you’re speaking of Palestinians. 

--------

Christian-Jewish Allies – I meet regularly with this group. We have an active mailing list on everything affecting Palestinians.

Combatants for Peace – Members of this peace group have spoken at FUMCOG a few times.

Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture – Arab arts, including writing, dancing, singing. I attended an outdoor festival with short film clips of theirs a few months ago.

How credible is Seymour Hersh?

 

Okay, had a problem with the reporting of Seymour Hersh. He said that the Navy doesn't have to report covert ops whereas the CIA does. The language from 50 USC 3093 states:

The President may not authorize the conduct of a covert action by departments, agencies, or entities of the United States Government unless the President determines such an action is necessary to support identifiable foreign policy objectives of the United States and is important to the national security of the United States, which determination shall be set forth in a finding that shall meet each of the following conditions:…" (emphasis mine)

In other words, Hersh is wrong on that. At the very least, the "Gang of Eight" would have to be notified. Yes, Congress must be told if ANY branch of the government carries out the kind of operation that Hersh describes.

Hersh tells us what his political view is by suggesting that the war will end when Zelenskyy is tired of causing the deaths of fellow Ukrainians.

Daily Kos has taken a look at Hersh’s claims (the story begins several paragraphs and tweets down). They note that the long-time and highly reliable fact-checking site Snopes has also examined those claims. An OSINT fellow (Open Source INTelligence) pursues Hersh’s claims in detail. Sorry, but I think Hersh has just lost it.

Some rather silly stuff

 

Dinesh D’Souza says some pretty silly stuff here.

Key differences between Trump and Biden storage of classified docs: 1. Mar-a-Lago is secure b/c it’s under Secret Service protection; Biden’s think tank is not

We went over this when it was first discovered that Trump had numerous government documents that he wasn’t authorized to have in his possession and when Trump was visited by con artists and politically-embarrassing racists. The Secret Service is responsible for seeing to the personal safety of Trump and his family members, period. They are not there to take on the function of secretaries or staff members. They aren’t there to make Mar-a-Lago secure against anything but threats to the physical safety of the former president and his family members.

2. Biden Center is heavily subsidized with Chinese government money

Hard to see what the relevance of this talking point is.

3. Trump had the power to declassify; Biden did not

Declassification is a lengthy process that involves checking with the originating agency to see whether or not a document can be safely declassified. It involves crossing out classification markings. It involves going into databases to change the status of a document. None of that was done in the case of the document that were taken to Mar-a-Lago.

Also, Trump’s ability to legitimately review classified documents ended when his presidency ended. He hasn’t had a security clearance since his term ended.

Has Trump been careful with handling classified data? Actually, no. In 2019, there was a Iranian attempt to launch a satellite into space. The launch failed. A picture of the damaged launcher was shown to President Trump. He tweeted out the picture.

Some officials worried that Trump’s decision to release the image compromised a key U.S. spy capability, potentially giving Iran a leg up in concealing its nuclear and missile programs.

The rest of the piece makes it very clear that the intelligence community was very upset with Trump for releasing the classified image without getting the approval of the intelligence agencies.

Funny stuff

So this is kind of hilarious. In his first two Twitter Files, Elon Musk put out what he thought were two really dread, awful scandals. In the first, the Biden campaign asked Twitter if the company could take some posts down because they appeared to violate Twitter policies. Twitter agreed that they violated policy and took them down. Musk was absolutely flabbergasted that no one was impressed that two private entities agreed between themselves to, y’know, “violate the First Amendment.” But no such violation had occurred.

The second case was where the Arizona Secretary of State did the same thing. She pointed out to Twitter that some posts that her political opponent had put up violated Twitter policies. Twitter agreed and removed those posts. As there were no threats of any kind, simply a notification to Twitter, again, there was no story, no violation.

So I was commenting on a similar case, where lawyers weren’t quite sure that a First Amendment violation had occurred, but where they wanted to conduct a “fishing expedition” to make sure.

Gotta love it! The guy just pulls these “laws” or “rules” out of thin air and just defends them as though they’re actual rules!

 

 

 

 

Should we have government control of social media companies?

I haven’t finished reading this interview “Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk Is Transmitting a Message for Putin’”, but it answers the objection of the “tankies” quite well. This tanky doesn’t use the Trumpian term “Deep State,” but she means something quite similar. The US is run by people who want to centralize the media under Washington DC’s control. Elon Musk is a brave, brave hero who dares to resist the Deep State that wants everyone united against Russia.

As Fiona Hill makes clear, Musk is just repeating, word for word, the line that Putin wants him to put out there. Seriously, does anyone believe Musk put any time and effort into studying the relationship between Russia and Crimea? Or is Musk simply responding to Putin appealing to Musk’s ego?

A big problem is that Musk doesn’t really appear to understand how social media platforms work. That’s why he wants to cut 75% of Twitter’s work force! He doesn’t have an appreciation as to how society at large versus a social media platform work, how the First Amendment is insufficient to content regulation online. As Regulatory Review puts it:

As they currently stand, social networks are self-regulated. Because of private content moderation, most social media platforms employ a combination of algorithmic and human action to determine what kinds of content to eject from their sites.

This is clearly not a sustainable state of affairs. As social media sites are not simply “The Press,” but are instead sites where abuses need regulation. Content moderation is something Musk just doesn’t appear to understand.

So yes, it’s good that Musk will continue the Starlink service for Ukraine, but yes, the US needs to seriously look at whether large social media platforms like Twitter can remain unregulated. Musk is currently putting up $44 billion to buy Twitter. There appear to be some foreign investors that are contributing to that.

Thoughts on Supreme Court decision on abortion

 Recently had a lengthy discussion on Twitter about pregnancy choice. The initial entry was all about how much a pregnancy costs. Nothing went particularly wrong with the pregnancy, the baby s fine and the mother is happy. A fellow who claimed to be a neutral centrist but who kept making clearly anti-choice comments, asked a question. I responded. During the course of the conversation, we focused on a particular page taken from Supreme Court Justice Alito's anti-Roe decision. Here are what I regard as the two most critical sentences:

These legitimate interests include respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development. … The protection of maternal health and safety.

To me, these describe the priorities of the Supreme Court majority in this opinion.

As to the 10-year old girl in Ohio who was raped and found herself very close to the mark of when Ohio did not permit abortions, there's no question that Ohio was seeing to it that they were showing “respect for and preservation of prenatal life”. Would her giving birth have proven fatal or very unhealthy? Doubtful.

The "bodily harm" doesnt even apply because a 10 year old can give birth safely to a child. So the answer to my original question is no there is not an exception that would allow this abortion to take place in Ohio.

So this was not a case of unintended consequences or of things going sideways into unforeseen circumstances. Alito and the rest of the Supreme Court majority had only seen ft to account for the girl's “health and safety.” Once that was satisfied, they had no problem with seeing to it that she would be required to give birth. In fact, the National Right to Life organization made it quite clear that:

“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” Bopp said in a phone interview on Thursday.

Is Alito himself troubled at all by the obvious problems with the decision as it's currently formulated? Not so you'd know it. He appeared for a speech and didn't appear to be even slightly troubled by problems with the decision.

So when anti-choicers ask you “Why do people hate us?” Well, there's a good reason for that.

Update: The Biden Administration has put out an instruction that women who are suffering complications and might die without an abortion, must receive abortions, regardless of what local and state laws may say. Texas Republicans object to this. They argue that saving the life of a woman via an abortion might put her at risk of being found guilty under Texas law. 

What’s the status on Critical Race Theory?

 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has a surefire method of detecting when Critical Race Theory (CRT) is being taught. She identifies a course given by the National Children's Museum as containing the 1619 Project, a set of essays that described the contributions to American history made by slaves and by the institution of slavery. So the definition of CRT is pretty elastic, the meaning is broad and vague.

Further definitions are given by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, with them identifying “the civil rights movement, the KKK, the Versailles Treaty, Nazis, NATO/the Cold War, 20th century Africa & Asia…“ as all indicating a suspect agenda. In other words, CRT is what separates a school course on American history from a children’s bed-time story.

A Republican Congressman decides he’s

...against a bill to remove Confederate statues from the Capitol because it's "animated by the Critical Race Theory concepts of structural racism, microaggressions, and a United States based solely on white supremacy."

This is apropos of:

Today, the House voted in favor of removing all treasonous confederate statues from our US Capitol. 120 GQP Republicans voted against removing them, thus cementing once again that they are indeed the party of white supremacy terrorism.

President’s response to 2nd impeachment

 

President Trump probably didn’t write out this whole document. My guess is that he ranted and snarled into some sort of recording device, probably banging the table every now and then to really make a point, and then some minions typed it all up and made sure everything was spell-checked and arranged into some coherent order.

A great deal of it re-litigates his first impeachment. Lots of details I take issue with, but this is an especially interesting one.

Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect.

Actually, it wasn’t a transcript that was made available. It was an informal summary. The documents that described the call to Ukraine President Zelensky were not made public. They were instead placed on a super-duper top secret server.

White House lawyers allegedly buried records of the call in a highly classified “super secret” server reserved for information regarding covert operations and other sensitive intelligence actions.

To my knowledge, the documents that were stored there have never been made public. The information that was released on the “perfect” call was 1. not released until after people were tipped off on the call by the whistleblower and 2. the summary was quite enough to caused shock and outrage across the country. I mean, why would someone who made a “perfect” call not wish to share all of the details with the world?

This is a big problem with the whole assertion that the President was innocent. The document asserts that Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t find any evidence, that the whole case against Trump was a matter of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Actually, Mueller found a great deal of Obstruction of Justice. Trump was very energetically hiding whatever he could. Again, not the action one would expect from an innocent man.

More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.

Nothing prevented the Trump Administration from publishing information on their own that would have exonerated them. When the Republican-led Senate refused to allow much in the way of testimony, the Trump Administration could have used a wide variety of forums in which they could have presented their case. It’s hardly the fault of the Democratic Party that Trump refused to do so.

A few claims by the off-going, one-term President:

7 million new jobs; the lowest-ever unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans

Yes, Barack Obama left the economy in good shape at the beginning of 2017.

more than 170 new federal judges and two Supreme Court Justices

Actually, it was three Justices, but this record has far more to do with the energetic Republican Senate. The President was pretty much just a bystander in that process.

the elimination of the individual mandate

Theoretically, this was supposed to cause the collapse of the ACA/Obamacare. The ACA has survived quite nicely, thank you very much.

the first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century

Which had to do with the ACA. Actions taken by the Trump Administration had nothing to do with that decline.

criminal justice reform

This had far more to do with the House and Senate than it did with the President. There’s little indication that he did much more than to sign the final document.

a defeated ISIS caliphate

This happened because the military insisted that the President needed to simply maintain the Obama policy and ISIS would be defeated. Trump did not change the policy and ISIS was eventually defeated.

the replacement of the disastrous NAFTA trade deal with the wonderful USMCA (Mexico and Canada)

Trump made a few minor changes to NAFTA and then proclaimed that the “all-new” policy was a success.

withdrawal from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal

An extremely stupid and unproductive policy that has not produced any positive results. By increasing trade with China, Iran has made up quite a bit of their economic losses.

cancellation of the unfair and costly Paris Climate Accord

Again, an extremely stupid and short-sighted policy that has exacerbated climate change.

recognition of Israel’s capital, opening the American Embassy in Jerusalem

A stupid and short-sighted policy that has infuriated Palestinians and has put peace with them further out of reach.

a colossal reduction in illegal border crossings, the ending of Catch-and-Release, and the building of the Southern Border Wall

What most people will remember about the reduction of immigrants coming to the US from Mexico, Central and South America will be “kids in cages” and the degradation of international laws on asylum. No one will remember any positive impacts. They’ll just remember the horrible cruelty.

Is it true that “[The Democratic Party] simply cannot compete with our record” or is it that the Trump Administration built a very modest and forgettable record that will quickly be overtaken by the incoming Biden Administration?

Side note: The First Lady Melania Trump wrote a piece that had an extremely odd list in it:

Paragraph four: “Most recently, my heart goes out to: Air Force Veteran, Ashli Babbit, Benjamin Philips, Kevin Greeson, Rosanne Boyland, and Capitol Police Officers, Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood. I pray for their families comfort and strength during this difficult time.” Note that the woman who was shot by police as she was part of a violent group attempting to enter a secured area comes first on this list. Interesting choice there.

The Capitol Police Officers are listed last. This can’t be attributed to her lack of proficiency in English. Raises a question as to who Melania thought were the heroes in the violent invasion and occupation of the Capitol.

To impeach or not

I read this piece

Yes, Trump Is Guilty, But Impeachment Is A Mistake

and scribbled out a few thoughts on it in response. 

1. This will probably achieve nothing.
Agree in that the Senate will probably follow the lead of the 1868 and 1998 impeachments. House will convict, but the 2019 Senate will most likely not remove the President from office.

2. We’re in the middle of an election campaign.
No, we're still over a year out from the 2020 Election Day. Speaker Pelosi is determined to get this done by Thanksgiving.

3. This is not what the country wants to talk about.
As Speaker Pelosi has put it, the President has forced her hand. The law-breaking here is just too severe to do anything less than impeach.

4. Democrats are playing Trump’s game.
No, the White House is in a state of frantic hysteria. This happened because the President has gotten away with so much for so long that he thought himself to be invincible. The word here is "hubris."

Nope. Full speed ahead.

I read a Fox News article

Disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich looks back at the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 and remarks on the differences between then and now.

Some observations about that:

1. Both the President and Congress were highly productive in 1998. This is true. According to the Clerk of the House, there were 547 roll call votes in 1998, but there were 701 roll call votes in 2019. So yes, the Congress of 1998 was busy, but the Congress of 2019 was busier.

2. Many Democrats voted to impeach Clinton. Again, this is true. The Republican Party is much more cohesive and united today then Democrats  were back then. As a blogger has pointed out though, the case that Republicans have made that the President is innocent of the charges against him is awfully threadbare. "And at that point, the president and his party said the impeachment process was unfair because … well, just because."

3.

Now, we are watching the culmination of Pelosi’s two-and-a-half-year impeachment effort – in which the Democrats failed to find anything close to a crime.

Couple of quibbles: Pelosi herself has not been conducting all of the various investigations of the President and Congress did find specific statutes that he violated. There's a reason the Constitution includes the vague term "high Crimes and Misdemeanors." But certainly the President has been investigated for pretty much his entire term.  Gee, I wonder why that is:

Democrats have also charged Trump with obstruction of Congress based on his stonewalling of the House’s impeachment inquiry. The White House has refused to provide documents to congressional investigators and has instructed top advisers and government officials to defy subpoenas and refuse to testify.

It's not like people have examined the evidence and have decided that the President is innocent, it's that We The People have been spending this whole time trying to uncover the evidence.

More presidential overreach - Puerto Rico

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on why the Trump Administration felt free to refuse to spend money that Congress had appropriated for the purpose of arming Ukraine: 

“We do that all the time with foreign policy,” Mulvaney said, adding “Get over it. There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

Well, now it seems that there's yet another Congressional priority that the Trump Administration just doesn't feel like spending money on, Puerto Rico's hurricane damage. Ben Carson, the Secretary for HUD, is the one who's doing the actual withholding of money. His reason is allegedly that Puerto Rico is incapable of managing that money without turning it to corrupt purposes. The people from HUD made it clear to Congress that they had no statutory authority to withhold funds. They just arbitrarily and unilaterally decided to do that.

The blogger cites the case of the $31k dining room table that Secretary Carson wanted for his office and asks, quite reasonably I think, what on earth makes Carson qualified to supervise any other office to spend money in a responsible manner? Why does any Cabinet Secretary need a dining room set to begin with? If he or she wants to entertain lobbyists, citizens, friends or relatives, they have restaurants in the area they can do that at. In 2018, Carson had around $180 million in personal assets. He's perfectly capable of buying his own dining room set and moving it into his office at HUD if he likes. If not, for eating in the office, the regular government supply office can supply perfectly adequate tables.

Again, the Trump Administration is playing fast and loose with the spending of money. If the president can spend or not spend money however he pleases, the separation of powers, the ability of Congress to control spending, becomes meaningless.

BTW, my favorite example of Carson and how he administers HUD is still the "Oreo" incident. He confused the term REO (Real Estate Owned) with the cookie. What the hell is wrong with someone who had been in office for over two years and still didn't know basic terms?!?!?!

Two claims from the President

President:

“The Democrats have gone crazy… they have to be careful because when the shoe’s on the other foot and someday hopefully in the very long distant future, you’ll have a Democrat [sic] president, you’ll have a Republican House and they’ll do the same thing because somebody picked an orange out of the refrigerator and you don’t like it.”

So, the Democrats should be aware that something like Bill Clinton's 1998 impeachment could happen. The Republican Party could undertake a completely partisan impeachment for trivial reasons. Hmm. Okay. Got it.

Why the President doesn't want any of his people testifying at the impeachment hearings:

“I would like them to testify but these are very unfair hearings,” the president insisted. “For the hearings, we don’t get a lawyer, we don’t get any witnesses. We want [Joe] Biden, we want the son, Hunter. Where’s Hunter? We want the son. We want Schiff. We want to interview these people.”

So he'd prefer a lot of distractions as opposed to serious witnesses who would shed light on his actions. Why is this? Unfortunately, starting with President Nixon, but really accelerating with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party has become hyper-partisan. We saw this extreme partisanship during the presidency of Barack Obama, with the Senate Minority, then Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sacrificing national well-being, goals and priorities for purely partisan gains.
The Republican Party under McConnell never showed why the ACA/Obamacre was a bad thing or how it could be improved upon, it just dug in its heels and opposed it, period! During the President's impeachment hearings, we have not seen any members of the President's party crossing the aisle to condemn Trump's actions, even though Democrats have made a very clear case that the crimes he has been charged with are very real, have been amply proven and are very deeply serious.

Response to President's accusations

[Copied and pasted from President's Twitter feed today, 13Nov2019]

“Nancy Pelosi cares more about power than she does about principle. She did not want to go down this road. She realizes this is a huge loser for Democrats.(1) The Founders envisioned the worst people being in politics, yet they couldn’t envision this. You have these people taking... 

...the most powerful tool the legislative branch has, Impeachment, & they’ve turned it into a political cudgel, which is not at all what the Founders intended.(3) When you hear Schiff use all these words like quid pro quo, it is because they can’t specify that Donald Trump broke.. 

....any laws or did anything wrong, and they have to move away from quid pro quo because there was no quid, and there was no quo. Ukraine got it’s money(4) (3 weeks early),(5) and there was no investigation.” (6)

(1) The first sentence contradicts the next two. If Speaker Pelosi cared abut power and if she realizes that impeachment "is a huge loser for Democrats" then that makes zero sense.

(2) Turning impeachment "into a political cudgel" means Democrats are trying to use the threat of impeachment to push the President into doing something he otherwise wouldn't do. Nothing of the kind is happening. As near as I can tell, at worst, Democrats simply want the President out of office, which is precisely what impeachment was for!

(3) Democrats use terms like quid pro quo because that term describes precisely what the President did. Congress had allocated money for Ukraine's defense against Russia. Trump was holding up the aid and he suggested that the money could be released if Ukraine did him a "favor" and provided his re-election campaign with something he could portray as dirt on Joe Biden. It is illegal for the president to interfere with a properly-allocated grant like that. Yes, Trump did do something wrong!

(4) "Ukraine got it’s money"
Yes, they got their money without having first delivered on the bribery that the President extorted out of them, but that had nothing to do with anything the President wanted or planned for or desired.

(5) "(3 weeks early)"? More like several months late! Nothing happened to free up the money until after the whistleblower pointed out that the President was withholding the money that Congress had appropriated.

(6) "there was no investigation.” Eh? Not sure what the President could possibly mean by that as the investigation started with the whistleblower putting out an urgent complaint.

If your only source on information on the impeachment is the President, you're going to end up badly misinformed and confused.

US Democratic vs Nazi platforms

Dinesh D'Souza made a film that Don Jr. saw and clearly, that was Don Jrs. only exposure to the material because he swallowed D'Souza's propaganda wholesale.

"Don Trump Jr. Calls Democratic Party 'The Real Nazis' After Watching D'Souza's Mess"

Okay, so let's look at what the Nazi Party platform of 1920 was:

1. Unification of Greater Germany (Austria + Germany)
2. Land + expansion
3. Anti-Versailles - abrogation of the Treaty.
4. Land and territory - lebensraum.
5. Only a "member of the race" can be a citizen.
6. Anti-semitism - No Jew can be a member of the race.
7. Anti-foreigner - only citizens can live in Germany.
8. No immigration - ref. to Jews fleeing pograms.
9. Everyone must work.
10. Abolition of unearned income - "no rent-slavery".
11. Nationalisation of industry
12. Divison of profits
13. Extension of old age welfare.
14. Land reform
15. Death to all criminals
16. German law, not Roman law (anti- French Rev.)
17. Education to teach "the German Way"
18. Education of gifted children
19. Protection of mother and child by outlawing child labour.
20. Encouraging gymnastics and swimming
21. Formation a national army.
22. Duty of the state to provide for its volk.
23. Duty of individuals to the state 

Points 1 through 4, 16 and 21 are specific to Germany's concerns at the time.
Points 5 through 8, 15, 17 and 23 sound just like the Trump Administration today.
9 through 14, 18 to 20 and 22 okay, these sound like items Democrats could agree with. Not so sure about point 11, though. Some nationalization would be good, but lots of Democrats are strong believers in capitalism. 22 is also pretty much straight socialsm. Not really sure either 10 or 12 survived very long then or would survive under Democrats today. Michelle Obama would especially approve of 20.
It's a pretty mixed bag. Certainly Democrats would agree with some of the values expressed, but Don Jr. sounds as though he's citing a very one-sided version and doesn't have enough historical knowledge to really make careful distinctions.

Has the NRA had its day?

FILE - People hold candles during a vigil downtown for the victims of a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, June 13, 2016

Columnist J. Peder Zane in "Frightened children should not be driving national policy on a deeply divisive issue" (Mar 1) asks why we don't have good data on mass shootings. I don’t agree that it's because they're rare. Out of the 10 deadliest shootings since 1966, we’ve had five mass shootings including and since the 2012 Sandy Hook slaughter at an elementary school. No, it's because the 1997 Dickey Amendment specifically prevents federal agencies from taking positions that are favorable to the side that wants to see further restrictions on guns.

Do people who favor safety from uncontrolled guns take a "knee-jerk reaction" and accuse the NRA and their followers of having a "collective guilt" over such shootings? I suppose they do, but the NRA has had many years since the mass shooting at the Columbine High School in 1999 and at Sandy Hook in 2012 to come up with any sort of answers as to how to deal with mass shootings other than to flood the country with still more guns with ever less accountability. The NRA answer has proved to be a very poor one and the Dickey Amendment prevents us from examining the liberal answers to gun safety.

Zane finds the display of raw emotion on a CNN broadcast distasteful, but the NRA has had its day and doesn't want to surrender any control over gun policy, so I'm not sure what else we're supposed to be doing. Zane wants us to focus on homicides in general, but most mass shootings take place using semi-automatic rifles and the national conversation is currently about mass shootings.

Either/or versus both/and

"In the days following the shooting, evidence mounted that the Parkland rampage was not a failure of gun laws but law enforcement." Why can't the conversation be about both? The shooter had access to a weapon that was more suited to a battlefield than it was to any reasonable civilian purpose because the NRA supports civilians having such weapons. Yes, not responding to many calls before the shooting was inexcusable. I don't know the story on that.

Yes, it would have been nice had the law enforcement people on the spot marched bravely into a place where a likely-suicidal gunman was mowing people down as quickly as he could. A piece from NBC News says:

Peterson was the first member of the Broward County Sheriff's Office to report the gunfire, DiRuzzo said. He also gave the local SWAT team keys to the building where the shooting happened, drew diagrams of the campus for them, and helped school administrators access security videos, DiRuzzo said.

This indicates to me that the first responders realized that stopping a heavily-armed shooter with no fear of dying was an extremely dangerous and most likely suicidal move and that an armed and armored SWAT team was far more suitable for the task. Simply having had guns wasn’t sufficient to ensure the lawmen would have survived had they gone in. There are ways to motivate people to rush into certain death on the battlefield, but it’s asking too much to expect regular civilians to do that.

Solutions?

Nobody I know is in favor of a total ban on all guns. We favor things like reducing magazine size to no more than six or ten bullets because, if we do a cost-benefit analysis, it's fun and amusing to have more than that, but mass shooters really like having 30 to 50 bullets that they can fire without reloading. The few seconds it take to change out magazines can be critically important for people on the other end of the barrel to either escape or to rush the shooter. The Chicago Tribune reminds us that: “The man who shot Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011 was subdued after he stopped to reload his pistol, which had a 33-round magazine.” Smaller magazine size could directly and immediately save lives by complicating the jobs of shooters.

Yes, I and many others are in favor of rewriting the Second Amendment so that it more reasonably balances the interests of the NRA and their critics. We’d like to rewrite it so that we balance the interests of the NRA, sports shooters, hunters and those who need guns for self-defense with the interests of those who would like to see an end to mass shootings.

Good Behavior

Saw a few ads for the second season of the TV show “Good Behavior” and saved an episode and finally saw it today. The two main characters Letty Raines (played by Michelle Dockery) and Javier (played by Juan Diego Botto) would clearly, if you asked them, state that they are villains, but that they’re trying to go straight.

Now, the villainy of Rainers and the past she’s trying to get away from is that she’s a shoplifter as well as a con artist. I spent the first few years of the 80s working in a department store in the security division. I just performed back-room support tasks, but listened in as my co-workers told tales of detecting and stopping shoplifters.

So I was interested to see what Raines’ techniques would be. I was mildly disappointed to see that they consisted of just walking into a shop, grabbing items, tossing them into her purse and walking out. She doesn’t have to deal with any surveillance, no tags on the clothing setting off alarms as she tries to leave, nothing. No art, no cleverness, no real challenge or drama to it.

Now, I understand why this is. Criminals really enjoy crime shows. They obviously don’t like seeing fellow criminals getting foiled or being punished, but they do enjoy seeing and learning from the techniques that the fictional criminals use. I also understand that there are probably some retailers underwriting part the advertising for the show and so the writers of the show don’t want to show any techniques that people might then use against their sponsors.

Eh, it’s a bit of a let-down. I’ll probably keep watching the show anyway, but I’ll have to settle for the complete lack of style on one of the villains parts in it.

My LTE to the WaPo

So the Washington Post (WaPo) published "Appeals court says Texas voter-ID law discriminates against minorities." The Philadelphia Inquirer changed the title a bit to "U.S. court orders fixes in Texas voter-ID law." I wrote a Letter To The Editor (LTE) in response, sent it to the Inky and decided that as the piece originally came from the WaPo, I'd send my LTE to them, too. To my surprise, the WaPo go back to me, saying they wanted to publish it. They wanted an assurance though, that the LTE wouldn't be copied to anyone else. I said sure and sent an email off to the Inky, asking them to confirm they weren't going to print it. To my further surprise, they requested to be able to print it! I regretfully told them no. So the WaPo told me that it would be printed in their Sunday (July 24th) edition.
Problem: The LTE is not online. The Horsham Library doesn't carry the WaPo, neither does the Norristown Library. I checked with Temple University and they used to carry it, but not anymore. The Reference Librarian checked more thoroughly than I had, but he couldn't find it online, either. The Abington Library carries the WaPo, but they only have the 17th as of the 26th.
So, I guess it'll be available in Abington next week. When I copy the full wording to my blog, I'll re-run this post. 

Can we speak ill of the dead now?

I presume that the desire to not speak ill of the dead comes with a time limit after which it's perfectly okay. In updating prawnworks, I came across this piece from early this January. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia advocated an absolutely dreadful idea, that government should take the side of religion over non-religion. 

Sorry, but I see a very short, steep and slippery slope between religion vs non-religion and, say, Roman Catholic vs Baptist. People might recall that, back in the old days, being declared a heretic, a non-Christian, someone who was Christian, but believed the wrong things, or was a witch, led to many people being burned at the stake and executed in many other ways.

The torture report

The torture report, well, the redacted summary of the 6,000 page full report anyway, makes clear that the second, subsidiary, justification for torture made during the G.W. Bush Administration is complete poppycock. The first justification concerns morality and is premised on the “ticking time bomb” scenario where a single person can suffer torture now or a lot of people can suffer an exploded bomb within a short time period.

The second justification is one of effectiveness, that torture can quickly and effectively elicit truthful answers in time to prevent terrible things from happening. It's the second justification that's squashed utterly by the report. Even people in the CIA, at the time, could see that the US wasn't obtaining any worthwhile information that couldn't have been obtained just as quickly by using a gentler approach. The Intelligence Committee reviewed 20 claims of torture having prevented a “ticking time bomb” scenario and found them all to be without foundation.

The report demonstrates that the CIA's torture program was out of control and that the CIA frequently lied to superiors and failed to even conduct any sort of internal assessment of whether torture was effective or not. Claims that the program was effective rested on lies and wishful thinking, not on any sort of factual basis.

What does it all mean? A society that tries to become a better society has no use for torture. Torture has a corrupting effect on its practitioners as the report documents. Torture has no benefits to balance or to justify its evil effects, not even if we agree that war in general is justified.