Time - Person Of The Year

.@GretaThunberg is TIME's 2019 Person of the Year #TIMEPOY https://t.co/YZ7U6Up76v pic.twitter.com/SWALBfeGl6

— TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2019

Rep. Reschenthaler Hearts Trump's War Crime Pardons

This was published today at the Pittsburgh Current:

Representative Guy Reschenthaler (PA-14) recently went on record approving Donald Trump’s decision to pardon three people who are accused or convicted war criminals. The word he used, by the way, was “applaud.” He applauded Trump’s decision.

I stand with the PGNewsguild.

TWO

Breaking News: House Democrats unveiled 2 articles of impeachment against President Trump, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress https://t.co/AuztI1kqoP

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 10, 2019

You can read the articles here.

Letter to Congress from Legal Scholars

Read it here.

The text:

We, the undersigned legal scholars, have concluded that President Trump engaged in impeachable conduct.

We do not reach this conclusion lightly. The Founders did not make impeachment available for disagreements over policy, even profound ones, nor for extreme distaste for the manner in which the President executes his office. Only “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” warrant impeachment. But there is overwhelming evidence that President Trump betrayed his oath of office by seeking to use presidential power to pressure a foreign government to help him distort an American election, for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress. His conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the Founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution.

We take no position on whether the President committed a crime. But conduct need not be criminal to be impeachable. The standard here is constitutional; it does not depend on what Congress has chosen to criminalize.

Impeachment is a remedy for grave abuses of the public trust. The two specific bases for impeachment named in the Constitution — treason and bribery — involve such abuses because they include conduct undertaken not in the “faithful execution” of public office that the Constitution requires, but instead for personal gain (bribery) or to benefit a foreign enemy (treason).

Impeachment is an especially essential remedy for conduct that corrupts elections. The primary check on presidents is political: if a president behaves poorly, voters can punish him or his party at the polls. A president who corrupts the system of elections seeks to place himself beyond the reach of this political check. At the Constitutional Convention, George Mason described impeachable offenses as “attempts to subvert the constitution.” Corrupting elections subverts the process by which the Constitution makes the president democratically accountable. Put simply, if a President cheats in his effort at re-election, trusting the democratic process to serve as a check through that election is no remedy at all. That is what impeachment is for.

Moreover, the Founders were keenly concerned with the possibility of corruption in the president’s relationships with foreign governments. That is why they prohibited the president from accepting anything of value from foreign governments without Congress’s consent. The same concern drove their thinking on impeachment. James Madison noted that Congress must be able to remove the president between elections lest there be no remedy if a president betrayed the public trust in dealings with foreign powers.

In light of these considerations, overwhelming evidence made public to date forces us to conclude that President Trump engaged in impeachable conduct. To mention only a few of those facts: William B. Taylor, who leads the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, testified that President Trump directed the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine in its struggle against Russia — aid that Congress determined to be in the U.S. national security interest — until Ukraine announced investigations that would aid the President’s re-election campaign. Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified that the President made a White House visit for the Ukrainian president conditional on public announcement of those investigations. In a phone call with the Ukrainian president, President Trump asked for a “favor” in the form of a foreign government investigation of a U.S. citizen who is his political rival. President Trump and his Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney made public statements confirming this use of governmental power to solicit investigations that would aid the President’s personal political interests. The President made clear that his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was central to efforts to spur Ukrainian investigations, and Mr. Giuliani confirmed that his efforts were in service of President Trump’s private interests.

Ultimately, whether to impeach the President and remove him from office depends on judgments that the Constitution leaves to Congress. But if the House of Representatives impeached the President for the conduct described here and the Senate voted to remove him, they would be acting well within their constitutional powers. Whether President Trump’s conduct is classified as bribery, as a high crime or misdemeanor, or as both, it is clearly impeachable under our Constitution.

Something to remember next time a Trumper claims that there's no evidence.

Read The Impeachment Inquiry Report

It can be found here.

SECTION I—THE PRESIDENT’S MISCONDUCT

The President Conditioned a White House Meeting and Military Aid to Ukraine on a
Public Announcement of Investigations Beneficial to his Reelection Campaign

SEE? The Zombie-Thanksgiving Story STILL LIVES

Recently,  in The Pittsburgh Current, this appeared:

No, the colony of Pilgrims in what is now Massachusetts was not an example of a failed socialist experiment. I mention that because it’s Thanksgiving week and that means it’s time for that stinky rightwing landfill gas (that the Pilgrims were socialist failures) to burp up into the conversational air that everyone else has to breathe.

I have it on pretty good authority that the verb originally used in this piece was the far more onomatopoetically pleasing "blurp" instead of the still-acceptable but far less interesting "burp."

Copy editors, whatareyagonnado?

Anyway, the current Current piece outlines how the settlement was paid for by some wealthy landowners in England and that the settlers were simply tenant farmers who had to pay the landowners back - hardly socialism, to be honest.

And still, John Stossel over at our favorite conservative paper, the Trib, could not help blurping up the rightwing swampgas:

The Pilgrims were religious, united by faith and a powerful desire to start anew, away from religious persecution in the Old World. Each member of the community professed a desire to labor together, on behalf of the whole settlement.

In other words: socialism.

But when they tried that, the Pilgrims almost starved.

But let's play out Stossel's story anyway. Take a look at how he described how the Pilgrims were "united by faith" and "professed a desire to labor together."

What Stossel states is socialism was an act of faith for the Pilgrims.

Is he really pushing the notion that a secular governor (in this case William Bradford) has the authority to veto faith-based acts even for a private religious community?

Wait, I thought John Stossel was a libertarian.

Oh, and then there's this:

In America today, religious groups practice different rites but usually don’t demand that government ban others’ practices.

Really?

I STAND WITH THE PGNEWSGUILD.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Again, while you CAN get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant, I'm not sure Cinder Calhoun approves:


 
Basted in Blood from Goodly guy on Vimeo.

My Latest Column At The Pittsburgh Current

It's posted.

It begins thusly:

No, the colony of Pilgrims in what is now Massachusetts was not an example of a failed socialist experiment. I mention that because it’s Thanksgiving week and that means it’s time for that stinky rightwing landfill gas (that the Pilgrims were socialist failures) to burp up into the conversational air that everyone else has to breathe.

When I submitted this, the verb was "blurp up" - onomatopoeially superior to "burp up" if you ask me.