Okay, so that primary Christian magazine, Christianity Today, actually calls for the removal from office of President Trump. North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz explains why Christianity Today is right.
John Scalzi at Whatever has a few thoughts about impeachment. Democrats have been out to get President Trump for a while. So John wonders why Republicans didn’t make it bi-partisan, since Trump is a lawless, heartless, crooked, incompetent President and a malignant human being. Picky, picky.
Max’s Dad conducts a close analysis of the recent 6-page response by my President to Speaker Pelosi, and finds within it a compelling argument that Donald Trump is a mad hatter.
Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson offers uncritical coverage of Republican criticism of Nancy Pelosi. Seems Pelosi is caught in a contradiction, since Democrats say removal of Trump can’t wait, but now she’s going to wait.
Well, my president has been caught trying to fix the 2020 election with an elaborate smear by a foreign government, and still continues trying to fix the 2020 election with a smear by a foreign government, which kind of explains the can’t wait part.
And McConnell says he’s got the fix in, and promises no real consideration of the charges. So Nancy will wait to submit the articles of impeachment until the Senate reveals how they will conduct an actual trial. As opposed to a sham dismissal.
James doesn’t include any of that reasoning, though. An oversight, I imagine.
There’s something exceptionally gratuitous about Senator Graham’s assertion that he isn’t even trying to be a fair juror, rather like Senator Mitch McConnell’s assertion that he is letting the White House call the tune regarding the Senate impeachment trial. They could, after all, just make appropriate serious noises about the respect they have for the Constitution and feign interest in a fair process. We’d still know it was likely a sham on their part, but it would maintain some of the dignity of the office of US Senator, which might even have more than sentimental value. Instead, they are making it genuinely clear that they have no intention of letting little things like facts or propriety interfere with King Trump’s abuse of power.
It may be, simply put, that nuance is no longer something they have any faith that either Trump or their base understand and that even the mildest imposture of taking this seriously would be seen as disloyalty.
What if this family sought refuge in our country today?
Imagine Joseph and Mary separated at the border and Jesus, no older than two, taken from his mother and placed behind the fences of a Border Patrol detention center as more than 5,500 children have been the past three years.
The Supreme Court waited a day so as not to plop this jurisprudential turd on the American table.
Yesterday was the 19th Anniversary of the death of the American democracy (December 12, 2000) in Bush v. Gore, where the prior SCROTUS decided that the VOTE was NOT the basis of American constitutional democracy, but, rather, that George W. Bush would be irreparably harmed if the Florida recount was allowed to proceed.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s long-awaited report on the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation is finally out, and notwithstanding furious efforts from all quarters to claim otherwise, it fails to neatly validate anyone’s favored political narrative. Contra the hopes of Donald Trump’s more ardent admirers, it fails to turn up anything resembling a Deep State cabal within the FBI plotting against the president, or deliberate abuse of surveillance authorities for political ends. Yet it also paints a bleak picture of the Bureau’s vaunted vetting process for warrant applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), documenting a host of material omissions or misrepresentations in the government’s case for wiretapping erstwhile Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, whose privacy was invaded for nearly a year on disturbingly thin grounds. Though it does not describe an investigation motivated by political bias, it is a textbook account of confirmation bias that should raise disturbing questions about the adequacy of the FISA process—and not just in this investigation.
Host David Gura asked Dr. Biden how she feels about her family being placed at the center of the impeachment story by virtue of Trump’s pursuit of political investigations into Hunter and Joe Biden.
Dr. Biden replied that while she expected the campaign to be tough, “we never could have imagined it would turn into Donald Trump would be asking a foreign government to get involved in our elections.”
She said that “Donald Trump has shown us who he is,” and that “I think it just proves that he’s afraid to run against my husband Joe Biden.”
We recently linked to a piece written by Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara. Michael’s article included this:
Society doesn’t “do” anything. “Society” is an abstraction denoting a number of individuals. Only individuals think, learn, work, and trade. The premise behind catchphrases like “paying back to society” is that some people must be forced to hand their money over to the state, so that some politically connected others can use the gun-backed machinery of government to legally force their values on unwilling individuals.
Trey quotes liberally (which is to say accurately) from Mr. LaFerrara’s piece.
From Trey:
Why should I, a construction tradesman, subsidize a professional who works out of the same office day after day? Why does he rate a lower fare at my expense?”
– Old Man with Enfeebled Morals
Here! Here!
As a rail user, why should my tax dollars go to subsidize the building and maintenance of roads?
Why should my taxes pay for firefighters and their equipment when they just go and waste those resources not directly helping me and my own? My house isn’t burning down.
And water, right? I drink nothing but Culligan water and Well Water. Why do I have to pay money toward the public water everyone else uses?
Don’t get me started on the United States Postal Service and the waste of resources they have setting up post offices in the middle of no where towns. I don’t know anyone in those places and I will never go there, so obviously they shouldn’t have postal services AND if they need them, do it themselves like INDIVIDUALS.
Okay, I’m of course being facetious. Reading Grandpa Simpson’s diatribes and broken pretzel logic really gets to me. Society is an abstraction denoting a number of individuals? Right, maybe in the simplest of terms. A society is no different than a gaggle of geese, since a gaggle is just denoting a number of geese. Hey wait, maybe that is an apt comparison… A gaggle of geese band together for their collective good. It’s easier for the gaggle of geese to have and raise baby geese and thrive under the umbrella and watchful eye of a group of like-minded geese rather than just a single goose or a pair of selfish goose parents. Kind of like how a society of people band together to do things for their collective good and succeed far more frequently than a pair of selfish parents… or a selfish, I’ve Got Mine After a Career Working For the Government Grandpa.
When I read diatribes like this, I’m always brought back to an often mischaracterized speech President Obama made. “You didn’t make that” is often lifted out of context to label Obama some sort of socialist/communist. The point and context of the speech was that people don’t create, innovate, manufacture, and/or succeed in a vacuum. Without the security, access to resources, infrastructure, and health of society an individual cannot do anything. That Libertarian’s Governmentless Utopia that is Somalia should be overflowing with gajillionaires, right?
State schools are not a feature of a free society.
– Mr. Went to Public School and Never Learned About what Education Was Like Before Public School
No, a feature of a Free Society… which, hey we’re talking about that abstract concept of society again, but this time it’s important because it’s ‘Free’… anyways, a feature of a Free Society allows a parent to decide if they want to send their kid to the public school. Home Schooling is a thing. Private Schools exist. Unfortunately there’s a whole Haves vs Have Nots situation that Mr. LaFerrara conveniently ignores.
In a just society, parents pay for educating their own minor children.
– Mr. I Hate the Abstract Concept of Society Unless It is Preceded By An Adjective
You know, some would say or argue that our taxes are paying for educating our own minor children…
I pay for the education of the doctor, the engineer, the plumber only indirectly as and when I need a doctor’s or an engineer’s or a plumber’s service, through the fees, salaries, or wages of the doctor, engineer, or plumber, when and as I choose.
– Old Man Who Doesn’t Know How Education Works
Oh, I get it now. Mr. LaFerrara is confused. He thinks paying his Medicare Co-Pay at the Doctor retroactively pays for that person’s medical schooling. Or when he calls 1-800-PLUMBERS, that’s paying for a person’s trade school education.
To justify the moral abomination through collectivist sloganeering—like “paying back to society” or “That is what a society does”—just adds an unhealthy dose of dishonesty to the moral abomination.
– Grandpa Hater of Non-Randian Buzzwords
I doubt he sees the irony in his screeds.
Ryan’s reasoning supports Trey’s logic.
From Ryan:
As usual, an incredibly short-sighted piece, as befits a non-consequentialist. He underestimates not only the benefits that these social features provide, but the extent of the cost/benefit analysis that other people have conducted on them. It can’t all be easily quantified in dollar signs, though, so I can understand why he struggles.
Furthermore, whatever poor arguments or programs he accurately skewers, he does not begin to make a case for abandoning subsidization or taxation altogether in favor of his own system (or lack thereof), nor can he explain why a libertarian system would not inevitably gravitate back toward what we have. Most of us (including Aristotle and the Founding Fathers, whom he claims to admire) have and recognize that we have more values than simply maximizing legal freedom and keeping as much of our present personal property as possible. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise or advocating for something that would utterly fail to promote those other values.
I do not pretend to know exactly how the US would look if it became the libertarian paradise he imagines, but it’s not at all difficult to imagine one in which most of us are only educated as necessary to fulfill our occupational roles, according to what best makes money, or according to what our religious region of the country actually offers in the absence of any secular state mandate. Between that and trying to improve our current system so that it *can* be a better value for its cost, I’ll take the latter any day.
So my president has admitted to siphoning off charity funds to pay business debts and has settled the case brought by the state of New York by paying $2 million dollars to 8 charities. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit looks into the case and asks us to draw the obvious conclusion.
driftglass scripts out a dialogue to illustrate why impeachable offenses that number in some multiple of ten gets reduced to two, and why a lost cause can be worthy of the fight.
The standard, though not universal, response from Senate Republicans who want to dodge discussion about Trump has been that they are potential jurors and therefore shouldn’t comment. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors watches Mitch McConnell vow to coordinate the Impeachment trial with my President. Mitch boasts in advance that no Republican Senator will vote for guilt on anything at all. tengrain reposts a comment: What a country! In America, the jury tampers itself!
Those repetitive low-logic tweets get tiresome quickly enough for most of us to ignore them. But News Corpse journeys through TrumpTwitter Land to analyze a developing pattern of panic and meltdown over impeachment.
Letter published in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, March 26, 2018, page 6 (not available online as of this writing):
It’s called paying back to society
To the letter writer who wants to know why he should have to pay for NJ transit upgrades when he doesn’t use mass transit (“Murphy’s taxes will eat up federal tax cuts,” March 23): All the people who do use mass transit could be in their own cars, which would make everyone’s lives more miserable because of the massive increase in traffic and pollution. And why should you pay school taxes even though you don’t have kids in school? Because the kids in school today will be the health care providers and scientists and engineers, etc., who will be running the world that you live in tomorrow. That is what a society does.
Barbara Egger, Lakewood
This is one of the most devious arguments for forced redistribution of wealth.
Society doesn’t “do” anything. “Society” is an abstraction denoting a number of individuals. Only individuals think, learn, work, and trade. The premise behind catchphrases like “paying back to society” is that some people must be forced to hand their money over to the state, so that some politically connected others can use the gun-backed machinery of government to legally force their values on unwilling individuals.
