Why can't it be both?

A grand jury brings a bill of indictment and votes on it. What's the difference? Is it the lack of a judge and due process that makes impeachment permanent?

Does that not seem backwards to you?

And it isn't like the Constitution says that impeachment is permanent. Basically, it is CNN who says that. Why exactly should we play along with them?

I give up. Can someone please tell me where Sharpton is hiding in this picture? I was never any good at "Where's Waldo?".

Orwell wrote in 1944 that the definition of the word fascism had been lost.

Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

After being found not guilty at trial, do you remain for the rest of your life, indicted?

They also stole the land from him by insisting that he had to pay the land taxes himself, in person.

Rumor has it that they were stamping 1964 onto coins until something like 1968 or so. If I recall correctly, Congress had to pass a law making it a crime for the mint to stamp any year other than $current_year on a coin.

Don't forget nuclear. Unstable grid makes them trip. Those turbines suck up a lot of energy. If the generator hall is offline for very long, the plant can't deal with the heat, so they have to bring the reactors offline. And if a reactor is stopped on short notice, you generally can't restart it for a few days minimum, until the xenon (etc) has decayed.

In other words, several days of outage were pretty much baked into the cake when the failure cascade reached a certain size.

The typical car alternator can handle about 100 amps. At 12 volts, that is 1200 watts - less than one electrical circuit.

The good news is that should be enough for the essentials. Furnace, some lights, a chest freezer. Or an electric space heater. Or a microwave. Probably not more than one at a time.

The bad news is that no one's house is set up for that. Make sure that you've got extension cords, that your furnace is wired to an outlet (or that you've got a cordset and know how to convert it in an emergency), and an amp meter. Oh, and a way to get the cord from the driveway into the house.

If you've got something else going on, like a heat pump on a 30 amp circuit, you need to invest in a bigger generator. Under normal circumstances, $700 or so will get you a dual fuel gasoline/propane generator that can handle around 7000 watts. Propane stores well. it doesn't go bad, and a clean, well painted tank that is kept out of the elements will hold up very well for years.

Also +1 on the Mr. Buddy propane heater. The one I've got can take little camping sized bottles or use a regulator to hook up to a bigger tank.

"ehp" is exactly what he said. I take it as a cross between "and" and backspace.

But keep in mind he's talking about what other people are saying about him. More to the point, he's talking about January 6th and immediately after, and what was on his mind then.

As a Minnesotan, I thank you. Normally, at this time of year, I'm getting snow by the foot. Thank you for volunteering to take this moisture down south.

Also on the Bee (from last week): In Mail-In Impeachment Vote, Senate Convicts Trump 8275 To 3

"Our holy democracy has spoken," said Senator Chuck Schumer. "Do not ask any questions or you are a blasphemer against the sacred sacredness of our vote. Everyone can go home now!"

Mine is next Saturday. My congressional district convention will be a month later, March 20th.

Since June, I've occasionally loaded up /r/Minneapolis just to see what's going on there. The discussions about this are about as funny as you'd expect.

A few people are pissed that violent crime is up triple digit percentages (carjackings are about 5x more common now than before June). Lots of little commies pissed that the city isn't defunding police. The discussions between those camps occasionally yield gold. For example:

Yes, raping and shooting people definitely are crimes that people commit in order to feed themselves. /s. Nobody is being forced to commit violent crimes. If people are actually hungry, then maybe they should shoplift at cub foods or another grocery store instead of carjacking people.

Part of what hampered Trump in 2017 was that there was no MAGA legislation ready to go. If Hillary had won, the Democrats had tons of Democrat legislation waiting. If ¡JEB! had won, there would have been tons of Neocon legislation waiting.

This is MAGA legislation. Doesn't matter that it won't pass right now. Remember it.

The next election is coming up in 2022. People are thinking right now about starting to run for Congress. If you are involved in your local party, you will meet these people very early in the process - probably before they file any paperwork or make any announcements. Talk to them about this legislation (and other MAGA legislation). See how they react and either support or oppose them depending on their reaction.

I hope my criticism didn't come off as too harsh. Their lawsuit is much better in every way than my lawsuit (I don't have one).

But man, it was a tough read.

What the fuck - did they hire a middle school student to draft their initial complaint? I can overlook a few typos here and there, but this is awful. Even worse, when it gets to the specifics of each state, it devolves into a quagmire of random styles, presumably because the details were copy-pasted in from a variety of different documents.

I'm aware of this history, and I still say "Fuck the 17th"

If it were up to me, I would amend the Constitution to repeal it and also put in quorum rules for the Senate that require 51 votes to pass any law, but repealing a law can still happen with a majority of those present.

I would also elevate the 60 vote cloture threshold to the Constitution and forbid the Senate from working on more than one item at a time. For those not familiar with Senate arcana, I'm talking about returning the Hard Filibuster to the Senate permanently, but also making it very costly for the filibusterer (to reduce frivolous uses).

William M. Briggs - Statistician to the Stars!

I read his blog extensively, starting (I think) around 2008. At this point, I have no idea when or why I stopped.

His blog convinced me to read Savage's The Foundations of Statistics, and also convinced me that it was all wrong. Well, not wrong, actually - Savage is maybe the only book on statistics that isn't wrong, mathematically. Spoiler alert: enough calculus to choke a camel.

But statistics, as generally practiced, is philosophically bankrupt - humorously illustrated by the Opening Act of this paper. (Not everyone enjoys math humor. If you do not, and you click the link anyway, don't complain to me.)

To make a very long story short - he thinks we should be focusing on uncertainty instead of probability. Probability and certainty look to be closely related, but for some reason, probability got infected with a mind-virus and now professional mentions of probability involve navel gazing (for amateur practitioners), cranio-rectal insertion (for the skilled) or climbing so high in there that they actually disappear (for the masters).

In more practical terms, probability cannot be a cause of anything. We speak in terms of probability when we don't know the cause. Physics took a similar trajectory from around 1890 through the 1960s (or so) where physics declared "why?" to be meaningless. The difference is that physics, uncoupled from the why questions, ushered in a great era of advancement where we learned to calculate what was going to happen with great precision, even if we didn't (don't) know what any of it means.

Not everyone agrees with Briggs. For the counterpoint, check this negative review of his book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/3319397559/ There are better criticisms out there, but this one is very accessible, even if it is light on details.

You ever see the meme about right memes vs. lefty memes where the lefty meme has a wall of text? That's where you end up if you get pedantic.

"Everything Hitler did, not counting his stint in jail, and really only looking at official acts done after 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act which granted him immense power and authority, was legal"

No one wants to read all that.

The good news is that humans understand that "every" doesn't always mean "every". Virtually no one reading this miss the point that sometimes terrible things are legal and good things are illegal.

In practice, the definition became pretty flexible. At first, they were the wealthy villagers. After a while, it was anyone whose kids weren't dying of starvation.

God called all of us to not be wimps when it comes to spreading the gospel and teaching our children.

Theologocally, I don't think God gives a fuck about the political systems we live under in this world. He can teach us through freedom. He can teach us through oppression.

Jews of that era had a clean hand and a dirty hand. The dirty hand is the one they wiped their asses with. You don't do anything important with your left hand in that society - doing so brings same on you.

You could slap a person of an inferior class, but you could only punch equals. Punching an inferior shows that you consider them your equal.

So, if you get slapped in the face, turn your other cheek forward and give them the choice to either punch you, or slap you with their dirty hand.

Go the extra mile as similar anti-Roman revolutionary undertones. A Roman could conscript any random person and order them to deliver a message, within a reasonable distance. If you go past that distance, an extra mile, you aren't following orders from a superior, but doing a favor for an equal.

Similarly, causing someone to be naked in public brings shame not to the naked person, but to the person who caused it. A Roman could requisition a person's cloak, but not their shirt. Giving him the shirt off your back would cause them shame.

All of these are forms of mockery that could be described as "agree and amplify". If you ever find yourself oppressed by people who care about your opinion of them, they work great. Worked in India against the British. Worked in the Civil Rights era here in the US.

Not recommended as practical advice against people who actively hate you and/or want you dead.

Speech and Debate clause means that only Congress can punish for speech on the floor. In theory there is an ethics office that could look into it.

I've seen no evidence that he is smart. None of his students came forth to gush about how great his lectures were when he was a Constitutional Law Professor. None of his books have been praised for their insight. None of his interviews ever gave a glimpse of some massive hidden intellect.

He got in to nice colleges, I guess, but at the height of affirmative action, so all he really had to do was not be a dribbling moron.

If I had to guess, I'd think he is moderately bright. Maybe 110-115. What some call a "midwit"

He is exactly as Joe Biden described him: clean and reads the teleprompter well

But less literally, "Obama" isn't the man, "Obama" is the people the man fronts for. In that sense, "Obama" is probably very much in control. And his goals are probably very well aligned at this point with the goals of his group, so the mundane day to day stuff is probably all his, and he probably has regular meetings with smart people who help him think up their ideas.