Last week, Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel to take over the investigations of Donald Trump. He claimed that it was “The right thing to do.”
No Merrick, it was the cowardly thing to do, and you were late doing it. Garland has had two years to investigate the Jan 6 insurrection and one year to go after Trump for stealing documents from the White House and keeping these classified items at his playground in Florida. So, after all this time Merrick Garland decides that it’s now politically fair to foist the cases on someone else? I think not. The GOP is already screaming that his cowardly move, which he claims was to take the case out of the political realm was, in itself political. Which just proves you can’t please all the people all the time.
Maybe it’s a good thing Garland got screwed out of the Supreme Court We need judges with guts and smarts. This move seems neither smart nor brave.
It’s understandable that Garland is worried about his prosecution of Trump looking political, but it is even more important that criminal behavior be revealed and punished no matter the prominence of the criminal. It’s the basis of our entire criminal justice system.
****I kind of like Paul Ryan. I rarely agree with him on anything political, but he strikes me as a man who has some sense of moral value, which in the current Republican Party is something of an anomaly. But it is the kind of position we need politicians in both parties to embrace. I think Ryan left active politics because he couldn’t resolve the differences between the positions taken to remain a party force and the positions his conscience told him were right to take. That is happening a lot right now, and it is the single most destructive choice in American politics today. It is the result of raw power becoming a more important aspect of office holding than the need to help the people.
Unfortunately, the recent elections haven’t impacted those positions at all, as can be seen by the announcement by Kevin McCarthy and the incoming Republicans that their slender majority in the House will allow them to begin “witch hunts” on the likes of Hunter Biden.
Of course, the first question that comes to mind is what the fuck does Hunter Biden have to do with our government? It’s not the House Oversite Committee’s job to investigate criminal activity in the private sector. At least there were enough intelligent GOP members in the House during the Carter administration that they didn’t go after Billy Beer. I mean if you want to go after a presidential relative, at least pick one that had something to do with the running of the country. All three of Trump’s brats were ass deep in our government and no one has bothered to indict any of them… yet.
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I’ve watched Mike Pence for a long time now and although I rarely agree with him, I was impressed on Jan 6th by his ability to hold onto his values in the face of power.
It’s fairly apparent that he wants to run for President in 2024 and while I would certainly approve of him as a candidate over the likes of Trump and DeSantis, his obeisance to his religious beliefs even when they clash with reason, must ultimately discredit him. Watching him practically drool over the prospect of Fauci being investigated for trying to tell the truth, in the face of Trump asserting pressure to make him lie, is truly nauseating.
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Watched Karen Bass, the new mayor of Los Angeles, speak about homelessness. This is a huge problem in every city across the country, but LA may have the most serious case. The new mayor talked about all the various causes, and the need for a comprehensive approach but looking at it from where I sit it doesn’t seem like a solvable problem at the city level.
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Having failed to destroy the Ukrainian army, Vladimir Putin is now trying to kill off the civilian population. The problem with that strategy is, it’s not working either. Like Great Britain during WWII, the Ukrainians have risen-up and given the finger to death from the air. Their resolve is ironlike and they are only one short step from returning Russia’s fire. That step is bit complicated as it requires someone to provide them with the long-range missile technology necessary to hit Russian cities near the border.
Russia has used the nuclear threat to delay this from happening, but it becomes more and more clear that Putin doesn’t have the stones to pull it off.
It’s all becoming very reminiscent of when the Soviet Union tried to plant nuclear launch sites in Cuba. Kennedy backed up a couple of nuclear subs and pointed the functional ends at a convoy of Russian ships carrying the nukes, Khrushchev got cold feet and turned his ships around.
Russia has a problem in this game of chicken. Their entire nation is comprised of only a few cities. After that it is simply a rural landscape. Everything happens in those few cities whereas the US has hundreds of cities. In a mutual attack, Russia would be completely destroyed, while the US albeit crippled, would still able to carry on. Putin knows this, and that knowledge is what has already kept him from firing a nuke. He doesn’t care about the damage the nuke would do in the target area; he cares about what the retaliation would do to Russia.
It would seem that the nukes owned by various countries around the world are less of a threat than they are a guarantor of peace, simply because of their potential. Strangely enough they are probably the reason there haven’t been a lot more wars around the globe, considering what a warlike species we humans are. *****
And on the other side of the world there’s the ultimate target, Taiwan. The uninformed whine about a Chinese invasion, but that’s just not going to happen. The Chinese don’t have to invade to take over Taiwan. Taiwan is an island and everything it needs and wants comes to it by sea. The island only has eleven days of supplies on hand. That means after eleven days the lights go out and people start to eat their pets. China knows that and they also know they don’t have to invade to take over Taiwan. The big question for the Taiwanese is whether or not America will come to the rescue.
Taiwan has become very anti-Chinese in the last few years. It comes partially from a younger generation that doesn’t think of itself as Chinese but as Taiwanese. They want nothing to do with China. They have seen the miserable way China kept its word in Hong Kong. They want none of that.
Despite having an army only about 10% the size of China’s, the Taiwanese are willing to fight. The problem is finding the battle. The only chance of war is in the South China Sea around the island if some ship delivering cargo tries to run a Chinese blockade.
Before that happens, it will be Biden’s job to convince Xi that he has enough problems with health, tech, and trade to add anything that has to do with Taiwan.