Impeaching Trump

President Gerald Ford once famously said, “An impeachable offense is whatever the House of Representatives says it is.” If I recall correctly, there have been twenty impeachment actions brought by the House of Representatives, most against judges. Results at trial have been mixed, especially regarding Presidents, in part because it requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate to convict. Four of the accused had charges dismissed, in all but one case because the accused had already left office. Eight were convicted, all judges. There has never been a President convicted at an impeachment trial.

Impeachment is meant to remove an official from office to prevent doing further harm. It is not intended to punish, except for removing the official from the Federal payroll. Its use should be rare and judiciously applied; in my opinion, that means with a view to the future so as to prevent further harm and discourage similar acts. All three of the presidential impeachment efforts have resulted in acquittal. The basis in each case seems to be a jockeying for political position or advantage, not prevention of harm.

The first case, Andrew Jackson, was accused of violating the law by dismissing his Secretary of War from office without congressional approval. The constitution appears clear to me about separation of powers, and the law itself violated that principle. Of course, I am not an attorney; neither were most of the men who crafted the constitution.

The second case was Bill Clinton, accused of perjury and abuse of power. At trial, he was acquitted by the Senate, as the partisans in the House who brought the charges knew he would be. Robert Byrd, former member of the Ku Klux Klan a Democratic Senator from West Virginia, gave the speech of his career in announcing his vote to acquit. We would do well to ponder it. Here are some quotes by Senator Robert Byrd:

Mr. Clinton's offenses do, in my judgment, constitute an 'abuse or violation of some public trust.' Reasonable men and women can, of course, differ with my viewpoint.

Should Mr. Clinton be removed from office for these impeachable offenses? This question gives me great pause. The answer is, as it was intended to be by the framers, a difficult calculus. This is without question the most difficult, wrenching and soul-searching vote that I have ever, ever cast in my 46 years in Congress. A vote to convict carries with it an automatic removal of the President from office. It is not a two-step process. Senators can't vote maybe. The only vote that the Senator can cast, under the rules, as written, is a vote either to convict and remove or a vote to acquit.

The American people deeply believe in fairness, and they have come to view the President as having 'been put upon' for politically partisan reasons. They think that the House proceedings were unfair. History, too, will see it that way. The people believe that the Independent Counsel, Mr. Starr, had motivations which went beyond the duties strictly assigned to him.

In the end, the people's perception of this entire matter as being driven by political agendas all around, and the resulting lack of support for the President's removal, tip the scales for allowing this President to serve out the remaining 22 months of his term, as he was elected to do. When the people believe that we who have been entrusted with their proxies, have been motivated mostly or solely by political partisanship on a matter of such momentous import as the removal from office of a twice-elected President, wisdom dictates that we turn away from that dramatic step. To drop the sword of Damocles now, given the bitter political partisanship surrounding this entire matter, would only serve to further undermine a public trust that is too much damaged already. Therefore, I will reluctantly vote to acquit.

The full text of the speech is available here.

The current support by Speaker Pelosi for impeachment of Trump will make the Clinton debacle look like a Sunday church picnic. She is clearly seeking short-term political partisan advantage, by forcing Republicans to vote publicly on whether or not to impeach. That will drive further division in the country. I don’t approve of Trump’s remarks, but do they rise to the level of an impeachable offense? I don’t approve of mob violence as occurred in Congress, but is the best solution to tell half the country you’re now censored, deplatformed, not allowed in public, cancelled, and we’re here to shit on your grave?

The first thing I want to hear from President-elect Biden on Monday morning is that he urges Democrats to cool their jets. If the purpose is to remove Trump from office, that was done in November. If the purpose is anything else, it has no place in America

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Needing More Information About Nashville Bomber

There are details on the Nashville bombing and bomber I can't understand, but that should inform the discussion. The building outside which the van exploded was owned by AT&T, but was unusual. No windows, no signs, no details. There's another such building in New York, just many more stories. It houses the national interface between big telecom and the National Security Agency. It is at least a 50-50 proposition that the Nashville building houses a similar regional interface. Warner, the bomber, was in position to know that. A 5G delusion seems more difficult to believe than a belief than a Big Brother opponent.

Warner lived in Antioch, a community that's a transition between urban Nashville (Davidson County) and more-rural Rutherford County. Nashville may be the most integrated larger city in the country, but it includes a lot of majority-white and -black neighborhoods. Antioch is genuinely integrated and mostly moderate conservative. Warner seemed to get along with his neighbors, something that would not have been the case had he been on either a left or right fringe.

My speculation is a middle-class man gone into pandemic overload taking out his frustration on a symbol of nationwide intrusive government.

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Where We Are on COVID Vaccinations?

[This is Part IV of a four-part series about COVID vaccines, starting with Part I].

We have three vaccines that appear to be effective and safe. To date, the public discourse has been about getting to a vaccine. The results are impressive, brilliant, even Olympic.

The remaining work is not glamorous. The people involved aren’t inventing new science or commanding nature to obey their orders. They have more in common with your neighbors, teacher Debra Smith and carpenter Tony Jones, than with esteemed personalities such as Dr. Debra Birx and Dr. Tony Fauci. There won’t be daily televised briefings about delivering 27 doses to your doctor and 113 to your pharmacy. Success will not be reported; any stumble will be the subject of nightly news for months. But the job will get done in the Western World.

There are people who will refuse to be vaccinated. That won’t matter much until we’ve sorted through those who want to be vaccinated. Different people will have different ideas about who should get the first vaccines. PharmDs will follow a practitioner’s orders, or health department edicts. Practitioners are likely to make their own decisions based on individual patients.

There’s great news. The scientists have finally decided to follow the science. Data have always shown that young children aren’t immune to COVID19, they just experience much milder symptoms, rarely need hospitalizations and almost never die. And, children under eight are rarely contagious. Dr. Fauci announced that there was no reason to keep elementary schools closed, and little reason to close middle schools and high schools. Teachers will be at risk from one another, but largely not at all from students. Masks, social distancing and frequent hand-washing should suffice.

This will free up parents to get a sanity break, otherwise known as going to work. Data appear to show that children of elementary school age are being deprived of socializing and developing interpersonal skills, and that all K-12 students are on average falling significantly behind in mathematics and reading. According to a JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Pediatrics study of 135,000 patients, seven percent of K-12 students were infected, and hospitalization rates were about 1.9%, concentrated in children with compromised immune systems. Case fatality rate is near zero.

Yes, a few children get sick and some actually die. That is tragic. So is using those statistics to justify closing down schools, increasing childhood suicidal ideation and driving more people into poverty.

Other good news: The US Army, the world’s best logistics organization, has been planning, building capability and testing distribution throughout the U.S. Several other militaries are likely to be doing the same, including Australia, Japan, the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark and a few others.

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COVID Vaccine – Long pole #2, MDN

The best-case scenario is for a future ATZ vaccine. Another, let’s call it MDN, cannot warm above -20 Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) between manufacturing plant and the syringe. This is usable in almost every part of every First World country, because most refrigerators’ freezers can handle that. So, we can transport it in cold storage, in a refrigerated truck or refrigerated shipping container from the manufacturing plant to the seaport or airport. The refrigeration unit requires power while on its way to the ship or plane, and continuous power on the vessel. None of this can be ordered from Amazon or Ebay.

Speed is important, as is security, as is continuous temperature regulation for MDN. Most pharmaceuticals are shipped via passenger airline flights, but their schedules are severely disrupted. Certainty will require cargo flights or ocean containers for intercontinental shipments. The old stand-by, dry ice, has limited use on aircraft because it is solid carbon dioxide. The solid sublimates directly to gas, which is dangerous to the crew. Individual insulated boxes will require continuous monitoring for temperature and leaks.

MDN is delicate, as it is principally RNA, which falls apart under little provocation. It also is an artificial thing that doesn’t self-replicate. It’s a set of instructions for the body to create a defense against some weakness in the virus, such as a protein spike. That’s a two-step process, because the instruction actually causes the body to create just the protein spike, necessary for the virus to enter a cell, but harmless without the rest of the virus attached. Step two is the body’s immune system recognizing the protein spike as a potential threat and creating specialized cells to block or destroy the spike.

In manufacturing MDN, it can’t be allowed to rise above -20C. The manufacturing has to be done under freezing conditions. The delicate RNA can’t be treated roughly or it falls apart. Think of threading a needle while doing jumping jacks, standing on a hammock in a snowstorm. We know how to do this, and will do it well. The vials have to be filled while still doing jumping jacks and packed into cases of 200 or 1,000 vials. The cases then cannot be opened to the atmosphere for more than one minute at a time, likely once a day.

As soon as the cases leave the manufacturing plant in a refrigerated truck or container, they are at the mercy of strong forces, such as curious export inspectors who just want to take a peek. Or thieves thinking they can steal vaccines that will still be worth something. Or traffic accidents, or malfunctioning cranes, or longshoremen on strike, and the possibilities are limited only by imagination.

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Time for a new party?

This year, once more, I was not pleased with the choices. Absent a viable third party, we were faced with an impossible choice for president: An old white man who had appealed to his party’s darkest fringes and failed the most significant test of his presidency, allowing his ego to overwhelm him; or an old white man who had trouble speaking and remembering where he was, whose party had been taken over by the loons of the left. The electorate chose the forgetful guy, but otherwise turned its back on his party. For the other party, which had neared becoming a cult, it won the larger election but was handed notice that its leader was unacceptable to America.

After the 2016 election, Democrats refused to accept the results. After the 2020 election, Republicans refused to accept the results. The past four years have nearly torn us to shreds. It’s not clear to me that our country can endure another four years just like the last four.

In 2016 I was not pleased with the choices, and voted for the Libertarian candidate. Libertarian is the closest we have to a third party, but it can never win a nationwide election. Its appeal is its downfall. The party celebrates the supremacy of the individual over the group, which yields what most Americans seem to want: social liberalism and fiscal conservatism. The problem comes when departing from core principles to the nuts and bolts of policy. Put ten Libertarians in a room and you’ll get 23 opinions on any policy issue you put forward. And, party discipline is anathema to a group that celebrates the supremacy of the individual over the collective.

To compete, we will need to be a big-tent political party accepting anyone who can subscribe to individual liberty as the basis of our Republic. We are not a collection of group rights, we are a collection of equal, individual citizens. Libertarians can set the principles, but politicians will be needed to run a political party. I think I know where we can find them. [More . . . ]

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