Real nice place you have here

So, we will have to spend a certain amount of time talking about President Trump's meeting with President Zelensky, as it appears that this may lead into an impeachment.  In my mind there are two main questions.

1. Did Joe Biden, then Vice President of the United States, do anything untoward while representing the United States and calling for the resignation of Viktor Shokin serving as Prosecutor General (similar to Attorney General in the USA)?

2. Did President Trump pressure the Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden for political reasons? 

Question number 1 has been investigated thoroughly, and despite the fervent fantasies of our President and his supporters there is lots of evidence that Shokin was corrupt, and little evidence that Biden acted inappropriately. Several other members of the EU were calling for Shokin to resign, given his fairly blatant corruption, which generally manifested in not prosecuting corporate criminal cases brought before him. If Joe Biden were corrupt wouldn't he call for preserving Shokin and pay him off?

Question number 2 depends on the text released by the White House last week. If you choose to interpret the Presidents words as no real threat and as simply wanting to get to the bottom of an issue, than he acted appropriately. You do, of course, have to ignore that the Biden issue had been thoroughly investigated at that point. But setting that aside, and assuming you don't see any threat in withholding earmarked financial support, than yeah, President Trump acted completely honorably. 

And when the mobster says "Real nice place you have here. Hope nothing happens to it." you should just take the compliment.

That may seem a bit naive but it's an blindness the right wing pundits are insisting on. Take Matt Vespa's latest article.

The Trump White House released the transcript of the call and it showed there was no quid pro quo. In fact, it’s one of the most vanilla things from this administration, but the House Democrats decided to get on the impeachment train before even reading the complaint that was declassified and released yesterday morning.

Most of the article is a relatively pathetic attempt to justify Trump by attacking Senator Chris Murphy based on a transcript provided by the Washington Free Beacon - apparently by challenging something that is not in dispute. President Trump had funds he was required to release and he delayed it to put pressure on the Ukraine. Pressure to do what? Well investigate Joe Biden one assumes - since he said that in the call.

Back At It

Haven't done this in a while, so might not be as good as it as I should be. David Harsanyi has written an article about Greta Thunberg - the sixteen year old who spoke out against continuing degradation to our economy. The part I love though comes right near the beginning.

Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg lives in the healthiest, wealthiest, safest and most peaceful era humans have ever known. She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived. In a just world, Thunberg would be at the United Nations thanking capitalist countries for bequeathing her this remarkable inheritance. Instead, she, like millions of other indoctrinated kids her age, act as if they live in a uniquely broken world on the precipice of disaster.

If Climate Scientists are accurate, we may have done damage to our climate that will be difficult to undo - and the ferocity of weather conditions over the past years attests to that. However, I am sure that Harsanyi can point to industry shills who make a good living pretending that the environment is just fine. You have to decide which seems more credible. At the end of the day you can't get something for nothing - as I'm sure Harsanyi would be quick to bring up if we talked about Welfare. We have mortgaged our future with the damage we have done to the environment, and we are like bums who see the bills and set them aside, hoping somehow that things will work out. We can either pay the bills we've incurred by changing our pattern of living, or we can have very rough times as our "remarkable inheritance" is repossessed.