Three things about impeachment and a bonus

First, history: Impeachment in the Constitution is for high crimes and misdemeanors (which are also crimes). Ex-Pres. Clinton was accused of a crime: lying in court. Trump is not accused of any crime. And Clinton’s impeachment was bipartisan: Five Democrats voted for it. But we expect zero Republicans to vote for it tomorrow.

Second: The second charge is obstructing Congress. Hello? Read the Constitution. There is separation of powers. The president doesn’t work for Congress any more than Congress works for the president. Our government was designed to allow and expect conflicts between branches. If the president should be fired for such conflicts so should be Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer.

Third: Charges about Ukraine disappeared in the past month, but got it going. The first Question about Ukraine: Was there a national need for what Pres. Trump asked for in that call? Yes. Our tax dollars were going to Ukraine and Ukraine was known as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. It is the president's responsibility to try to find about and cause the end of corruption before he sent our tax dollars there.

Bonus: What President Trump is guilty of is defeating Hillary. There was talk of impeachment before he was sworn in!

Bonus 2: Honorable Charles Schumer demands that President’s people testify and promises to do it fairly. The Demos had a chance to show they would be fair. They gave it to Rep. Schiff who held the hearings in a secret room, severely restricted Republican witnesses, prevented witnesses from answering and  held press conferences to release a very selective subset of the testimony (Then  released the rest days later in a form hard to use). We have been shown what to expect.

OK, Congressman Castro, now I will donate

A member of Congress doxxed * donors to his brother's opponent President Trump who are in his district. Joaqin Castro (D, TX) is the congressman; his brother the candidate is Julian Castro.  When he was asked if his disclosure might result in the people he named being harassed he say he didn't mean any harm. Then why did he spend money for a newspaper ad to disclose their names and associated companies and accuse them of being terrible people?

 

OK. I am sending a donation to President Trump's reelection campaign ASAP. Thanks to Castro for getting me going.

 

* Doxxing is posting in public the names and other information of people who had reason to expect privacy. This is semi-doxxing because donor information is public, but Castro intentionally put these people in the spotlight with a cruel accusation.

 

National Review

Jay Inslee tried to get attention this week.

Our Gov. Jay Inslee didn’t tell us his job was part-time. I don’t think it is, but he is part-time. He is regularly at press conferences in California and small events in Iowa and New Hampshire, while spending $4 million of our taxes for security while out of state. He focuses his brave run for president on climate change. He is so successful that in aggregation of polls he is getting 0.6, that is less than 1 per cent! He is behind people you haven’t heard of like Julian Castro and someone named Bullock, tied for #13 with two guys from Colorado and someone named Delaney.

So how can Gov. Jay break out? Play clown? He made a proposal that doesn’t pass the smirk test - to nominate a soccer star to be secretary of state in his imaginary administration, because she has inspired us so much. Wow. How brave of him!
See American Thinker.

But with Gov. Jay’s failure to get to 1.0 (per cent) another candidate is announced who will carry Jay’s platform of climate change. Tom Steyer. People tell me he has less charisma that Kamala Harris. But he can spend $100 million of his oil and coal money on his fantasy run. (Yes. He got rich on coal. Powerline)
See RealClearPolitics.

Reparations not for slavery

To understand the current call for reparations.

Reparations is where people who never owned slaves, whose parents never owned slaves and whose gradparents never owned slaves...

Pay cash to people who never were slaves, whose parents never were slaves and whose grandparents never were slaves...

Furthermore… Some of those who pay had ancestors who fought - some died - in the Civil War to free the slaves….

And some of those who would receive had ancestors who owned slaves. Some of these have white great grandparents who owned slaves; Barack Obama had slave-owning ancestors. (His great…grandfather George Washington Overall owned slaves in Kentucky The Guardian.) And there were free black people who owned slaves. 

It doesn’t make any sense at all to me. What do all those candidates and congresspeople want? And why?

Boz Scaggs - a great star still going

I saw Boz Scaggs live in New York City in 1971 or 72. He was great then and - wow - 47 years later he still is and at age 75 is traveling.

Scott Johnson at Powerline reports on several live performances and recordings and has some video links.

Powerline Blog

America: #56 In Mass Shootings

No. The US is not above all other countries for mass shootings. We are way down the list. The “researcher” who claimed that the US has 31% of the shootings with only 5% of the population conveniently made little use of non-English-language sources. In the NY Post John Lott and Michael Weisser dig in:

Lankford’s claim received coverage in hundreds of news stories all over the world. It still gets regular coverage. Purporting to cover all mass public shootings around the world from 1966 to 2012, Lankford claimed that the United States had 31 percent of public mass shooters despite having less than 5 percent of the population.

But this isn’t nearly correct. The whole episode should provide a cautionary tale of academic malpractice and how evidence is often cherry-picked and not questioned when it fits preconceived ideas.

Lankford’s study reported that over the 47 years there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. Lankford hasn’t released his list of shootings or even the number of cases by country or year. We and others, both in academia and the media, have asked Lankford for his list, only to be declined. He has also declined to provide lists of the news sources and languages he used to compile his list of cases.

These omissions are important because Lankford’s entire conclusion would fall apart if he undercounted foreign cases due to lack of news coverage and language barriers.

Lankford cites a 2012 New York Police Department report which he claims is “nearly comprehensive in its coverage of recent decades.” He also says he supplemented the data and followed “the same data collection methodology employed by the NYPD.” But the NYPD report warns that its own researchers “limited [their] Internet searches to English-language sites, creating a strong sampling bias against international incidents,” and thus under-count foreign mass shootings.

Does Lankford’s paper also have that problem?

 Yes. .

Lankford’s data grossly undercount foreign attacks. We found 1,423 attacks outside the United States. Looking at just a third of the time Lankford studied, we still found 15 times as many shooters.

Even when we use coding choices that are most charitable to Lankford, such as excluding any cases of insurgencies or battles over territory, his estimate of the US share of shooters falls from 31 percent to 1.43 percent. It also accounts for 2.1 percent of murders, and 2.88 percent of their attacks. All these are much less than the United States’ 4.6 percent share of the population.

Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.

"Why does the U.S. have a relatively low incidence of mass shootings compared with most other countries? One possible answer is our widespread gun ownership, combined with liberal concealed carry laws. Would-be mass shooters in the U.S. tend to gravitate toward ‘gun-free’ zones like schools, where they know they will have the only weapon. In most public places in the U.S., unlike most other countries, a would-be shooter faces the material possibility that he will not be the only one with a firearm. If we did away with the folly of the ‘gun-free zone,’ our numbers would probably be even better."

(Via.) America: #56 In Mass Shootings | Power Line:

Didn't China sign the Paris Climate Accords?

"As we speak, President Trump is negotiating a trade deal with China. 

I hope that he's reminding China why the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords.  President Trump was right when he said that the agreement had no enforcement mechanism against countries like China.

This is the latest about China and their 'commitment' to environmental concerns:  

Chinese factories are pumping tons of dangerous chemicals into the air despite an international agreement intended to halt the destruction of the ozone layer, a study released on Wednesday said.

Two provinces in China have been cited as a source of a spike in emissions of a globally banned chemical chlorofluorocarbon, according to the study, published in the journal Nature.

‘This is a huge problem,’ a State Department official told the Washington Post. ‘If it’s a problem in another country, we’re also going to be suffering.’

I'm sure that it impacts other countries but does China care?  I don't think so, and that's precisely why the Paris Accords are flawed."

Didn't China sign the Paris Climate Accords?:

Obstruction score card - Bill Clinton 4, President Trump 0

Bill Clinton was investigated by Independent Counsel Ken Starr. Starr reported that he found evidence of eleven cases of obstruction of justice; four of them cited were perjury in court deposition, perjury before grand jury and two cases of interfering with a witness. In the Mueller investigation he did not report any such violation.

Below Bob Barr who was a Representative in 1997 explains the difference:

Bob Barr: Trump shouldn’t be impeached, but Bill Clinton’s impeachment was justified – Here’s why | Fox News:

… The House Judiciary Committee hearings established as well, and also among other offenses, that Clinton ‘corruptly engaged in … a scheme to conceal evidence that had been subpoenaed in a federal civil rights action brought against him.’

Contrast the extensive record of specific acts by President Clinton to corruptly influence ongoing legal proceedings in federal court (the Paula Jones case and the independent counsel grand jury proceedings), with the obstruction currently alleged to have been committed by President Trump.

All allegations of obstruction leveled at Trump arise from something far less legally substantive than the circumstance under which Clinton was impeached. There is no legal proceeding against Trump in which he has been alleged to have corruptly acted; there is only an investigation (of collusion with Russia) by Mueller that found nothing prosecutable against the current president.

Moreover, there are no civil proceedings targeting President Trump in which he is alleged to have corruptly acted, as existed in the 1998 case against President Clinton.

Clinton did far more than lash out at his tormentors, who included Starr. And Clinton’s actions went far beyond indirectly urging his tormentors to stop mistreating him and those in his administration. These allegations are the essence of the obstruction charges House Democrats now seek to advance against Trump.

I realize all this is complicated and may be hard to follow. But the bottom line is this President Clinton interfered in a judicial proceeding against himself, and President Trump did not. For this reason, Clinton deserved to be impeached but Trump does not.

The Founding Fathers deliberately made the impeachment process very difficult. They did not want impeachment used as a tool to enable Congress to easily remove the president over policy and political disagreements.

Congressional Democrats opposed to President Trump have every right to vote against his legislative proposals, to challenge his actions in office with lawsuits, and to work to defeat him in the November 2020 election. But right now they don’t have grounds to impeach him.

Former Rep. Bob Barr was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia from 1995 to 2003. He is now president of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation.