Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Goodbye

This program no longer works, so it is with great regret that I must close for the last time. Stay safe, everyone, and good luck. Thank you for following us. Sincerely, Shadow

Monday, February 08, 2021

https://politicaldig.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/trump-yells-tv.jpg The second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump begins this week as Senate leaders reached an agreement Monday, giving the impeachment managers and Trump's lawyers up to 16 hours each to present their cases and creating the option for a debate and vote to call witnesses -- if the House impeachment managers seek it. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on the Senate floor Monday that the trial rules had been agreed to by Senate Republicans and Democrats, as well as the House managers and Trump's legal team. The Senate will vote on the rules on Tuesday, and the trial will kick off with a four-hour debate on the constitutionality of the proceeding followed by a vote, which is expected to pass with a majority vote. "The structure we have agreed to is eminently fair," Schumer said. "It will allow for the trial to achieve its purpose: truth and accountability." Both Trump's lawyers and the House managers exchanged another round of pretrial legal briefs on Monday ahead of the beginning of the trial, in what amounted to a preview of the arguments that senators will hear on the floor in the coming days. The House managers will begin their presentation at noon ET Wednesday, with up to 16 hours to make their case to the Senate over two days. Then Trump's lawyers will have two days to give their presentation, followed by a session in which senators can ask written questions to both legal teams read by the presiding judge, just like in previous impeachment trials, Schumer said Monday. At the request of the managers, there will be an option to hold a debate and vote on calling witnesses. And at the request of Trump's attorney David Schoen, an observant Jew, there will be no trial proceedings during the Sabbath, after 5 p.m. ET, on Friday through Saturday. Then the trial would reconvene on Sunday afternoon. "We are finalizing a resolution that's been agreed to by all parties -- the House managers, the former President's counsel, Leader McConnell and I -- that will ensure a fair, honest, bipartisan Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump," Schumer said Monday, adding that if the managers want to call witnesses, "There'll be a vote on that -- that's what they requested." The Shabbat break could mean that Trump's team uses less than 16 hours, because the rules allow for eight hours per day over two days, and the trial as currently scheduled would only be in session for five hours on Friday, the first day for Trump's team to present. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday praised the agreement that was reached, saying that it "preserves due process and the rights of both sides." "It will give senators as jurors ample time to review the case and the arguments that each side will present," McConnell said. When the trial begins, the House impeachment managers intend to make their case both to the public and the 100 senators who are jurors for the trial that Trump is responsible for last month's deadly riot at the US Capitol. They've been diligently preparing a presentation for when the trial gets underway Tuesday, relying on the hours of video footage available from January 6 to try to illustrate in visceral detail how the rioters were incited by Trump and his months of lies that the election was stolen from him. While convicting Trump with a two-thirds vote is highly unlikely, the case will serve as the first detailed public accounting of how rioters temporarily halted Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's win, violently attacked police officers and actively sought out then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as they ransacked the Capitol. Trump's legal team plans to argue that Trump did not incite the rioters, and that the trial of a former President is unconstitutional after the House rushed to impeach Trump without giving him the chance to mount any defense. 'Political theater' vs. 'overwhelming' evidence On Monday, Trump's legal team accused Democrats of creating "political theater" as they argued in a pretrial brief that the upcoming Senate impeachment trial was unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president. "This was only ever a selfish attempt by Democratic leadership in the House to prey upon the feelings of horror and confusion that fell upon all Americans across the entire political spectrum upon seeing the destruction at the Capitol on January 6 by a few hundred people," Trump's lawyers wrote Monday. "Instead of acting to heal the nation, or at the very least focusing on prosecuting the lawbreakers who stormed the Capitol, the Speaker of the House and her allies have tried to callously harness the chaos of the moment for their own political gain," the brief added. The 75-page legal brief from Trump's attorneys expands upon their initial response to the House's impeachment last week, in which they argued that the trial was unconstitutional, that Trump didn't incite the rioters and that his speech spreading false conspiracies about widespread election fraud is protected by the First Amendment. Trump's team argued that his declaration on January 6 for his supporters to "fight like hell" was rhetoric being used in a "figurative" sense, and the managers ignored Trump's comments about and the managers ignored Trump's comments about remaining peaceful. "It was not and could not be construed to encourage acts of violence," Trump's lawyers wrote. The House managers responded to Trump's lawyers on Monday in a five-page, pretrial brief that pushed back on the contention that the trial was unconstitutional and Trump's speech did not incite the rioters at the Capitol on January 6. The brief, which was written in response to Trump's filing last week, argued that Trump's reliance on the First Amendment was "utterly baseless" and it was provable Trump lied about election fraud. "President Trump's repeated claims about a 'rigged' and 'stolen' election were false, no matter how many contortions his lawyers undertake to avoid saying so," the House managers wrote. "The evidence of President Trump's conduct is overwhelming. He has no valid excuse or defense for his actions. And his efforts to escape accountability are entirely unavailing," they added. The House managers have one more filing due Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. ET to respond to Monday's brief from Trump's team. During Trump's first impeachment trial, senators were required to sit at their desk during the lengthy arguments, though they didn't always do so. But this year, senators won't be required to remain at their desks due to the Covid-19 pandemic and social distancing. A Senate official familiar with the planning said there will be seats reserved for senators in the public gallery above the chamber and the Senate's "marble room" that's just off the floor, where the trial will be shown on television. Senators will have to be on the Senate floor to vote. 'I think it's very unlikely' On the eve of the trial, there appears to be little uncertainty about the final outcome. Even Republican senators open to voting to convict Trump say they recognize the votes aren't there for a guilty verdict, which would require 17 Republican senators to join every Democrat to vote for conviction. Last month, 45 of the Senate's 50 Republicans voted in favor of a procedural motion to dismiss the trial on constitutional grounds. "I think it's very unlikely, right?" Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania asked on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday. Toomey is one of the Republican senators whom Democrats hope to convince to vote to convict Trump at the conclusion of the trial, after 10 House Republicans voted in favor of impeachment last month. The other key Republican senators who voted with Toomey and the Democrats that the trial was constitutional are: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska. It's unclear if any other Republicans are considering voting to convict Trump. "I don't know of anyone that their mind is not made up ahead of the impeachment trial," Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, said Monday. "The first question on the issue of constitutionality, that drives a lot of it and everything else. I think people are pretty locked down." Democrats' case will rely on video of the rioters themselves on January 6 as well as their comments, laid out in subsequent indictments, of how they were inspired by Trump to attack the Capitol and attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Their case will also focus on Trump's comments, both in the months leading up to the riots where he spread baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud, and on January 6 when he spoke before his followers marched to the Capitol.

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Passage

 Hourglass by wflead.deviantart.com on @deviantART | Surreal art, Art,  Hourglass

Time can be a gentle thief; you barely feel his passage,

As he trails his finger across your cheek to write the story of your journey

And offer wisdom as his message.

No science can remove his stamp, nor can your travels be erased.

He marches forward with resolve and writes the truth upon your face

And steals away your youthful grace.

Don't leave your destiny to providence; take it firmly in your hands

And mould it with honour and strength, to brave the whims of fate,

And so the test of time withstands.

Fill your days with generosity, make your smile a gift

And time will be a steadfast friend and make your hours of sadness swift

And bring you peaceful resolution and in all ways will  uplift.

Live each experience with joy and passion; make every moment count.

Don't spend them on contrition or regret.

Remember, there is little that love cannot surmount

And though the universe is timeless and your place in it so small,

He does not forget you; he awaits us all

And steals away our days, quietly discreet

Then comes to write that final line upon the balance sheet.

Isolation Activities















 

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Friday, December 11, 2020

Message from Australia

Written by Henry R. Greenfield Nov 1st
 Resident of Australia
Australia just recorded zero cases of CV19 again after a big spike last month in Melbourne? What can the US and the rest of the world learn from this? 

 What a shocker. 
•Masks work, contact tracing works, all residents doing the right thing works and then you don’t you     lose lives, jobs, the economy and you are less miserable. 
•Selective lockdowns work. 
•Closing borders work. By state and not just international. 
•Making all international flights that come in go into 14 day (no exception) hotel monitored quarantine, WORKS! 

After Covid disasters where some people decided they didn’t like quarantine, left isolation and became ‘superspreaders', killing a few hundred people and forcing a complete lockdown for the entire state of Victoria, Australia learned the hard way. If you are going to do something, be serious about it and do it right with no exceptions.
 Is all this difficult? Absolutely. Is it terribly inconvenient? Of course it is. But look at the results. It works, just as it did in Perth, where I live. We talked a good game but we didn’t stick with it and we lost big time so we had to double down and do it right.
 Let’s be clear. Many of us have gone through the quarantine, it is not fun. No one wants to be isolated where you cannot step outside the door of your hotel room for 14 days and you pay $3,000 for the privilege. But it saves lives, it works.

 LIFE IS NOW ALMOST NORMAL IN AUSTRALIA. We can go to church, we have, in most of the country, large gatherings, all the restaurants are open, we play sports and go Christmas shopping. We made our mistakes and we are opening up carefully and slowly. We still are wearing masks where necessary. We test test test and contact trace and wash our hands. 

 HERE IS THE LESSON FOR THE WORLD. It is not just small countries like New Zealand that can beat this virus. As I have written before, it is not a woman thing or a man thing or a young thing or an old thing, it is an everybody thing. If absolutely everyone adheres to the rules and the government takes the pandemic seriously, like I mean really seriously, then CV19 can be stopped in it's tracks.
 It has not been cured, just controlled. Travel is still virtually cut off from the rest of the world. You have to apply to get in and out of Australia. But we have our lives back, we are not dying in hundreds of thousands, 10s’ of thousands or hundreds not even 1 or 2. We are not dying anymore. 

 The answer to the Covid spread in the UK and Europe and other parts of the world, but especially the USA, is that your leadership is taking you down down down. You do not have to be China, you do not have to ‘give up your freedom’. You just have to pay attention and care about protecting others. You cannot play games with other people's lives or say it is over or you are rounding the curve when you have 100,000+ plus cases in one day like yesterday in the USA. You cannot go into denial and say, well they had other symptoms or the people who died were old, or the deaths were not reported fairly or it is all exaggerated. Really, come on! Open your eyes and ears. This is not some weird conspiracy.

 Dear USA and its citizens, the President of the USA could have stopped this. We did it in Australia so any country, of any size, can do it. He is lying to you. You are losing to China. We need you to wake up and get rid of that guy and rejoin the rest of the world. You matter, please understand that. Come on, you can do it. And tell all the ding dongs with the guns that seem to threaten anyone they don't like or anyone they don't understand, to cut it and go home and grow up. Your schtick is getting old, we don’t even laugh about it anymore. 

 Sincerely, The Rest of the World