Mike Johnson has decided to start an impeachment inquiry against Biden, and he even got enough GOP votes to get it underway. Like everything else the GOP does, it’s based on lies and incompetence. An impeachment without evidence or even a crime really doesn’t look like much. It will be pretty impressive if it works. After all the Democrats couldn’t pull off an impeachment of Trump with a whole plethora of crimes and mountains of evidence.
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60 Minutes did a piece last Sunday on the stolen statuary from the temple ruins of Cambodia. The story featured the late Douglas Latchforn, who is made out to be the villain of the piece because of the way he stole priceless artifacts and sold them to museums and private collectors. But is he a villain or is he a hero responsible for the preservation of many of these treasures that would surely have been destroyed without him.? Absolutely, he made money on their sale, but because of his museum connections, dozens of these public galleries are now enriched by the presence of thousands of works of ancient art that would otherwise be lost to the ages because of the incompetence or malfeasance of the nations from which they have been taken. The great example of this was the Egin Marbles that were obtained between 1801 and 1812 by the Earl of Elgin and moved from the Acropolis in Greece to England, where they have been the subject of controversy ever since. Elgin claims he had permission of the Ottoman government that ruled Greece at the time. The current Greek government might be quoted at a position quite the opposite.
The reality is that no matter who is right Latchford’s moves saved much of the art of Cambodia from being destroyed. In Elgin’s case, the location of the Acropolis is prone to earthquakes which have destroyed much of the area and seems to have often been the site of military activity. In addition, the traffic around the Acropolis has caused terrible deterioration of the existing structures.
I visited Ankor Wat about a decade and a half ago and was mesmerized by both the scope of the ruins and their condition. It’s really a miracle that anything is left, because even though the government Tourist Commission makes a lot of money off them, they do little to maintain them. They are a decaying mess with little or no art left among the collapsing structures. Will anything be left in a decade? Probably not, certainly not the art, of which there is almost nothing now. Looters have destroyed most of what was there and the government instead of using its meager resources to preserve what is left are busy collecting looted pieces they can find around the world, most of which are just heads or sections of the original works.
But it isn’t just looting that is the problem. War and religion are even worse. The Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan were the tallest Buddhas in the world, one as high as 170 meters. They were ordered destroyed by Mullah Mohamad Omar or the Taliban simply because they were not in agreement with his religious interpretation of the Koran. Decisions like this, by this kind of moron, have taken more art from us over the ages than anything else, and there’s not much that can be done about it. Saving what exists in museums, rather than returning it to countries that couldn’t and can’t take care of it is the only way to preserve it for posterity.
One note. I am not, in any way, in this article, referring to art that was stolen from the Jews by the Nazis. This was plain theft , criminal activity, and not in any way preservation. It should and must all be returned.
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The Republicans have made it crystal clear that they are going to use the border crisis to hold up money for the war in Ukraine. They don’t have any logical excuse for this action, just the belief that they can get away with it. They don’t care if Ukraine loses the war to Russia, they only care that they have a gimmick that will make Biden look bad and possibly help Trump win in November. The biggest problem is that they don’t have a solution to the border crisis. The GOP. has never been strong on policy and this bunch of cheap grifters is no exception.
And of course, Greg Abbott down in Texas is the perfect agitator to make the crisis at the border worse. This slipprey asshole keeps sending immigrants by bus and plane to various cities around the country without prior notification, thereby causing a humanitarian crisis at very landing spot. Imagine a busload of immigrants dressed in sandals and tee shirts, for a border crossing in Texas, arriving at 2AM in 12-degree Denver weather, and being unloaded,
in front of a closed government building with no support present and no authority to take charge of the passengers. That’s what happened when the cruel and degenerate Abbott sent busloads of immigrants north without warning the mayors of the arrival cities.
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Ron DeSantis has called the war in Ukraine a territorial dispute. It’s not a territorial dispute, it’s a totalitarian invasion by Russia. A territorial dispute is when some oil baron drills on a piece of property, to which he hasn’t clear title. This was a full out invasion by one country against another, replete with humanitarian violations. It’s understandable that Putin thinks it’s a territorial dispute, but we don’t expect him to share our views on how the world should work.
DeSantis, on the other hand wants to be President of the USA. If he doesn’t understand what an invasion is, we’ll be ass deep in Russian and Chinese troops before he gets a chance to gas up the B52 Strata-bombers.
He may be doing a half decent job running Florida, but all he has to worry about there are spring break riots, a Sargasso tide and Disneyland revolts. The only foreign problems he has, came here half a century ago from Cuba and are now established Republicans. *****
Of all the traitorous and criminal activities that Donald Trump has been accused of since he darkened the American scene, the latest is, without question, the darkest.
New information has been revealed that the disinformation which Russia supplied to help Trump in the 2016 election was to be paid for by Trump by giving the okay to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This was a candidate for the American Presidency, planning to stab his country in the back even before he was elected, in order to get elected.
First, he disparaged NATO. But now we find in the book by Michael Schmidt that he just didn’t know how NATO worked, what it was, or how it could be used to keep the peace.
Then he hinted that Putin’s moves in parts of Ukraine were okay. Trump wanted to be President. He wanted it more than he wanted to protect our country from Russia. That’s called treason folks. A lot of Presidents have been cheap crooks who didn’t always have the best interests of the country as their number one goal, but none so far have been traitors, until Trump.
Even Tricky Dick Nixon who actually organized a gang of burglars to steal information from the Democrats, didn’t have as his goal, the weakening of the democratic process, nor did he give any advantage to any nation competing with the United States. Trump is in a ballpark by himself when it comes to his traitoress behavior as President.