[Headlines from DRJ]

Andrew C. McCarthy @ National Review – The Point of Impeachment:

… the capacity of Congress to oust a lawless president is central to the Framers’ design of our governing system. Because executive power is awesome, and intended to be that way, certain abuses of it can be discouraged only by the credible threat that Congress will remove the president from power — or, if discouragement fails, can be remediated only by the president’s actual removal. That is why Madison believed that the inclusion of impeachment in Congress’s arsenal was “indispensible” to preserving the Constitution’s framework of liberty vouchsafed by divided power.
***
“[H]igh crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitution’s trigger for impeachment, is a term of art for abuses of power that violate the president’s fiduciary obligations to the American people he serves, the constitutional system he takes an oath to preserve, and the laws whose faithful execution is his core duty. High crimes and misdemeanors are not — or at least, not necessarily — the same as “crimes” and “misdemeanors” prosecutable in the courts. Impeachment is a political remedy (i.e., the removal of political authority), not a legal one (i.e., the removal of liberty after criminal indictment and conviction). That is why Hamilton, in Federalist 65, described impeachable offenses as “political” in nature — as “proceed[ing] from the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

UPDATE 6/1/2019: Andrew C. McCarthy today — The Mueller Investigation was always an Impeachment Probe.

— DRJ

[guest post by JVW]

Rep. Jared Polis, Democrat from Boulder County in Colorado, has stirred controversy with comments he made at a House Subcommittee on Higher Education meeting. While in full-blown pander to the campus rape hysteria crowd, Polis let loose with the following regarding students who have been accused of sexual assault:

If there are 10 people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people. We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about them being transferred to another university, for crying out loud.

Polis uses “people” in his revised Blackstone’s Ratio, but one doesn’t have to be a mind reader to understand that he really means “men.” He dismisses the idea that lives could be ruined by suggesting that it would be practical and easy for students to transfer, overlooking the fact that most universities aren’t keen on taking in students with a record of expulsion on their history. Fortunately, he seems to be way ahead of even left-wing sentiment here. The reliably progressive editorial board at the Boulder Daily Camera, his hometown newspaper, has dubbed the nascent Polis Ratio as “a spectacularly bad idea.”

I have worried for some time now that the most ridiculous ideas from the left are initially dismissed, but have a tendency to stick around and gather momentum among the academic, media, and advocacy classes until they suddenly become the latest manifestation of Social Justice. Would anyone want to bet against this idea being adopted in the Democrat Party’s 2024 election platform?

– JVW

(Accepted Wisdom™ is an occasional feature of this site, highlighting contradictory viewpoints held by the elite.)

It is Accepted Wisdom™ that:

If a woman decides to end her pregnancy, no matter how developed the fetus is, and no matter how frivolous the reasoning, that is her choice, dammit. If she decides to kill an 8-month-old fetus because the birth of the child might personally embarrass her, then how dare you criticize her, mister!

And at the same time:

If a family wants a child, and the baby is born but dies 2 hours into his young life — and the family chooses to bring the boy home to introduce the child to the rest of the family, then bwahahahahahaha. Pro-life freak. Let’s all point and laugh!

[posted by Justin Levine]

In case you still haven’t heard the news, global warming (regardless of its cause) does NOT cause an increase in hurricane activity according to the latest published study.

Knutson said Landsea ”makes a very good case,” but “I consider the science still unsettled.”

Even if the global warming doomsayers refuse to accept the study, the fact that they now admit that the science in this area is “unsettled” represents real progress in their thinking. That is certainly a change in tune from what they have been insisting over the past year. 

I guess this means that we don’t have to worry about more hurricanes on Mars either.

[posted by Justin Levine]

More “consensus” alert here and here.

Questions raised by the first link listed above: 

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[posted by Justin Levine]

In case you haven’t come across it already, Professor Richard S. Lindzen’s views are worth a close read. In the current ‘climate’, he should be commended for speaking up.

[posted by Justin Levine] 

Here is an example of a typical lie in the media in order to try and bolster the man-made global warming hysterics out there.

Notice the last sentence of the article –

“Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor who had feuded with Gray over global warming, said Gray has wrongly ‘dug (his) heels in’ even though there is ample evidence that the world is getting hotter.”

The clear implication from this sentence is that Dr. Gray doesn’t believe that the world is “getting hotter” (and therefore, he is a kook who can be dismissed). But that sentence is an out and out lie. Gray has never disputed that the “world is getting hotter”. Instead, (more…)

[posted by Justin Levine] 

I am admittedly confused about one thing: Why is ‘compromise‘ over language necessary when there is supposedly ‘consensus’? That’s ok. Whatever the ultimate outcome is – we can rest assured knowing that it is ‘science’. They just apparently need to meet behind closed doors and warn their people ‘not to divulge details of the negotiations’ in order to determine what the ‘science’ is.  Obviously. Doesn’t seem political at all.

More global warming ‘science’ being reported here.

Hundreds of scientists struggled to find compromise wording Thursday on a landmark report set to declare that climate change is already discernible and could wreak devastation to human settlement and wildlife this century.

Grouped in national delegations, the climate specialists remained huddled in a European Commission conference room late into the night, hammering out the document’s all-important summary for policy makers — a guideline for government action — only hours before its scheduled release Friday morning.

Several sharp disagreements impeded progress, one Western delegate said.

Whereas Europeans sought to include stronger language and hard numbers warning about the dangers of global warming, the United States favored general statements about trends, he said.

“The Europeans want to send a strong signal. The US does not want as much quantification,” he said during a break in the negotiations, which have been underway since Monday.

China and Russia, he continued, have sought to excise some passages from the summary asserting that climate change had already had negative effects around the globe, arguing that the data in the 1,400 word main study is not solid enough to be included in the key policy document.

Now that sounds exactly like the kind of science I learned about in school – free from political considerations and biases…Can’t wait to read this ‘scientific’ report.

As the AP noted in the first link above –

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[posted by Justin Levine] 

I believe that author Michael Crichton is a prophet and the savior of mankind. The Christon has come to dispense with the Goreacle…

Ok, maybe not that. But Crichton is one of the most sensible voices in the global warming debate that I have come across.

I urge everyone to read a recent interview he gave on the issue.

I linked to this Crichton speech in another post in this series, but I didn’t really emphasize it at the time.  Crichton’s “Aliens Cause Global Warming” speech is must reading. I dare say that it is some of the best writing he has ever done. The scientific community should take it to heart.

Just a brief sample of a speech that is solid gold from start to finish – 

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

What does that do, huh? Does that blow your mind?? THAT JUST HAPPENED!

[posted by Justin Levine] 

This series of posts isn’t just to spout off my own personal opinions (after all, who really cares?), but to stimulate a much needed debate. However, one commenter asked me a legitimate question – what exactly do I believe or not believe as a self-proclaimed “skeptic” on the global warming issue.

In a nutshell –

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