A reader and I had a brief (but interesting, I think) conversation about presidential immunity:
Craig: If I had told you five years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court would be considering the assertion that every American was subject to our nation’s criminal statutes except for the most powerful person in the country, you would have told me I was insane.
Reader: But if the president doesn’t have immunity, he can be charged with crimes by his political opponents.
Craig: Perhaps he would do well not to commit crimes like the ones following the 2020 election, resulting in four independent grand juries’ handing down four different indictments containing 91 felony counts.
This concept (“don’t commit crimes“) seems to have worked well for the last 240 years. But then Trump, a career criminal, comes along, tries to overthrow the government, and now we may be looking at a dictatorship.
It’s hard to imagine how our Founding Fathers would have felt about this. They certainly could have made an immunity clause a part of the Constitution. Do you think they simply forgot? Our maybe they didn’t think it wise to install an authoritarian head of state.
Seminal astrophysicist Carl Sagan explains why uncomfortable ideas may be banned in religion, they must not be shunned in science.
This is an important concept in American life today, as conspiracy theorists are convinced that climate change denial cannot be considered in scientific circles.
I happened to bring this up in my interview with Dr. V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution, who has been amassing data on global warming since the 1970s. He laughed, and explained, “If I could prove that human activity was not causing temperatures to rise, I’d be be one of the wealthiest and most famous scientists in world history.”
As suggested at left, a great deal of the hardship that has befallen the U.S. was simply bad luck. Al Gore came within a whisker of victory in 2000, a win that would have forever changed the course of our nation in terms of energy policy, education, healthcare, and international affairs.
If Bernie had become the 2016 nominee, we wouldn’t have had Hillary Clinton telling our country’s most mean-spirited and least-educated people that they were “deplorables,” ushering a criminal sociopath into the White House.
We Came Incredible Close to Averting the Disaster that Is Donald Trump
Social democracies are nations in which the tax base provides everyone with healthcare and education, and where the richest and most powerful people are not free to ruin the environment.
I run into someone from one of these counties a couple of times a month, and I like to ask why their people are consistently at the top of the World Happiness Rankings. The normal response is always some variant of the following:
It’s hard to be happy living in a society that is indifferent to the suffering of others. It’s part of the very nature of human beings to care about one another.
Something else I notice about these places is that very few people are religious. Sweden, e.g., is about 80% atheist.
That means no childish tribalism, no ridiculous dogmas, no worries about eternal damnation, etc.
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Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
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