Imminent Impeachment Insanity

It would be funny, except...

• Stupid things!’ Alice began in a loud, indignant voice, but she stopped hastily, for the White Rabbit cried out, ‘Silence in the court!’ and the King put on his spectacles and looked anxiously round, to make out who was talking.
  Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their shoulders, that all the jurors were writing down ‘stupid things!’ on their slates, and she could even make out that one of them didn’t know how to spell ‘stupid,’ and that he had to ask his neighbour to tell him.

• ‘A nice muddle their slates’ll be in before the trial’s over!’ thought Alice.

(Chapter 11, Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll)

Impeachment. That’s the process House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is proposing as Congress reconvenes. Call it what you will, the Freedom Caucus at the House of Representatives believes multiple investigations will validate a case for removing the President of the United States.

Ok, Republicans, show us what you’ve got. What’s that? Surely the four committees committed to researching allegations against Joe Biden have found more than noise, (disproven) rumors, innuendo, and nude photos of his son? No?

• Any account concerning this process failing to mention the lack of evidence of wrongdoing by the President or on his behalf is propaganda. 

Biden’s taxes are public, a US attorney has been looking at Biden’s son Hunter for years, and there simply is no documentation of illegality now or in the past by the President. Yes, Joe Biden didn’t throw his son to the curb. Yes, the son engaged in bad and antisocial behaviors. Yes, Biden loves his children more than politics. None of this is grounds for removal.

Not all incomplete reporting is pro-Trump; there’s a good chance a story is being told in hope of fitting the subject into a binary framework. Sometimes we call it both sides-ism. Too many of the suits in executive suites at media conglomerates think the “this or that” style of journalism will draw the most viewers, leading to more advertising sales.

There’s a line where framing the news to provide context goes beyond reporting into making excuses and enabling lies. And it’s being crossed.

Reporter Christiane Amanpour’s reflections on her four decades at CNN make a strong case for truth-telling, as noted in Oliver Darcy’s Reliable Sources:

• "Whether you're covering Donald Trump, whether you're covering the climate crisis, whatever you're covering — you absolutely have to be truthful, which does not mean unobjective. Objective means cover all sides. It does not mean come to the same judgment about all sides." 

• Amanpour, now CNN's chief international anchor, said that she believes there are a number of good journalists who hold U.S. lawmakers' feet to the fire. But she expressed concern that there is "way too much focus on the horse race in politics, as opposed to the policy and context." 

• "I would say if I was a foreign correspondent ... I would cover this in the same way that I would cover ... threats to democracy in any other part of the world," Amanpour said. "And I would make sure that you don't just give a platform to those who survive on hate speech, to those who want to crash down the Constitution and democracy."

The Freedom Caucus’ motivation for this effort has nothing to do with justice or truth. Their ‘impeachment’ is a bald-faced effort to denigrate democracy and extract revenge on behalf of a political figure whose authoritarian goals are plain for all to see.

Heather Cox Richardson’s daily report describes just how wrong the Freedom Caucus’ quest is: 

• The attack on Biden is a transparent attempt to defend former president Trump from his own legal troubles by suggesting that Biden is just as bad. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin today also defended Trump, saying that his prosecutions show that the United States is fundamentally corrupt. His comment made former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) seem to wash her hands of the modern incarnation of her political party. “Putin has now officially endorsed the Putin-wing of the Republican Party,” she wrote. “Putin Republicans & their enablers will end up on the ash heap of history. Patriotic Americans in both parties who believe in the values of liberal democracy will make sure of it.”

• Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) summed up the day: “So let me get this straight: Republicans are threatening to remove their own Speaker, impeach the President, and shut down the government on September 30th—disrupting everyday people’s paychecks and general public operations. For what? I don’t think even they know.”

• The center-right think tank American Action Forum’s vice president for economic policy, Gordon Gray, had an answer. Ever since the debt ceiling fight was resolved, he told Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, “there’s a big chunk of House Republicans who just want to break something. That’s just how some of these folks define governing. It’s how their constituents define success.”

As I have said many times in the past, this nihilism is deliberate. What is happening on a wide range of fronts amounts to a slow-roll coup attempt by those who think an autocracy will bring order (and profits) to the US. From school libraries to medical research to vote counting to personal freedom, institutions are the targets of extremists whose only discernible long term interest is destruction of public trust.

From today’s Los Angeles Times editorial: 

• Under the Constitution, presidents can be impeached and on conviction removed from office for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

• In ramming through an impeachment inquiry on flimsy grounds, McCarthy is demeaning the Constitution as well as his own office.

Over the next couple of years, it is incumbent for those of us who believe in democracy as a foundation for society to not sit quietly by while riled up mobs of reactionaries tear down the better parts of what has been accomplished in recent history. 

It’s an impossible task for a citizen to oppose every subversive act, but it is possible to stand for something and mean it.

As a younger member of my family recently put it: …there is no place for burnout in a burning world.

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Wednesday’s Stuff You Should Read

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Child poverty is a choice Via Popular Information:

• One of the Biden administration’s most prominent proposals to expand the CTC [Child Tax Credit] was in Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which included expanding the CTC for one year. This proposal was blocked, in part, by Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). In December 2021, just weeks before the CTC was set to expire, Manchin announced that he would not be voting for the Build Back Better Act, even after Democrats “shaped much of the current version of the bill around” his demands. With Democrats holding 50 seats in the Senate, Manchin joined a unified Republican Party to sink the bill.

• Manchin released a statement stating that he opposed Build Back Better “largely because of its cost,” stating that his “colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face.” Publicly, Manchin stated that “he has always supported the child tax credit” and opposed Build Back Better for other reasons. But, according to HuffPost, Manchin privately “told his colleagues that he essentially doesn’t trust low-income people to spend government money wisely.” Manchin “told several of his fellow Democrats that he thought parents would waste monthly child tax credit payments on drugs instead of providing for their children.” 

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Here’s what you need to know about new Covid shots Via Politico

• Just read the damn story before some crackpot tells you about their “research.”

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Decongestant used by Sudafed, Benadryl is not effective, FDA advisers find Via the Hill. Just to be clear, the stuff does NOT work because it gets digested before it can get to the bloodstream. Use the stuff you have to show ID to get.

• As the academic journal Science noted in 2022, oral phenylephrine is “extensively metabolized” in the gut and the standard 10 mg dose available over the counter has been shown to have a fairly low bioavailability.

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Lauren Boebert escorted out of “Beetlejuice” musical in Denver after “causing a disturbance” Via the Denver Post (Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice…and you’re outta here!)

• U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert was escorted out of a Sunday night performance of the “Beetlejuice” musical in downtown Denver, accused by venue officials of vaping, singing, recording and “causing a disturbance” during the performance.

• In an incident report shared with The Denver Post on Tuesday afternoon, officials with Denver Arts & Venues wrote that two patrons were asked to leave the city-owned Buell Theatre during the performance of the touring Broadway show. They previously were issued a warning during the intermission regarding behavior that prompted three complaints from other theatergoers, the report says.

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Trump advisers plot aggressive new tax cuts for second White House term Via the Washington Post [Subhead: Although the 2017 GOP tax law proved unpopular, the former president is eyeing deeper cuts to the corporate rate]

• “It would be astonishing for Trump’s team to double down on the most unpopular parts of the tax cuts, which were the corporate tax cuts, by driving it down even further,” said Steve Wamhoff, federal policy director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning group. “We have plenty of data showing most Americans want corporations to pay more in taxes, not less — this was true when Trump and his supporters in Congress enacted the 2017 law, and it’s still true today.”