Civil Commotion

The Electors failed to do their plain duty — protect the country from a cheap, blinking-neon demagogue — when they met last December, and it appears unlikely that Congress will do it’s duty, either. We, the People, will have to do it ourselves, then. So argues Michelle Goldberg in her column in today’s New York Times, and she’s right.

It is not necessary that the president commit crimes, though Trump has committed more than the mind can readily recall: The Emoluments Clause, obstruction of justice, offenses against the First Amendment, undermining our elections … on and on. As legal scholar Cass Sunstein points out, taking a 6-month vacation in Madagascar is not a crime, but certainly is impeachable.

The Congress may, and the Founders expected would, remove a president for being an awful president, for being an instrument of harm to the country — no crime required. It won’t happen, though, unless we light a fire under Congress and demand they do their duty and remove him.

I admit it: I love the new CNN advertising campaign, an obvious finger in The Donald’s eye.

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us!

Robert Burns

What do you know? The Environmental Protection Agency has scrubbed its Website free of mentions of climate change.

The Environmental Protection Agency has removed dozens of online resources dedicated to helping local governments address climate change, part of an apparent effort by the agency to play down the threat of global warming.

A new analysis made public on Friday found that an E.P.A. website has been scrubbed of scores of links to materials to help local officials prepare for a world of rising temperatures and more severe storms.

The site, previously the E.P.A.’s “Climate and Energy Resources for State, Local and Tribal Governments” has been renamed “Energy Resources for State, Local and Tribal Governments.” About 15 mentions of the words “climate change” have been removed from the main page alone, the study found.

This wouldn’t be a bad time to re-read 1984.

As Trump’s inauguration bore down, scientists worldwide launched an effort to download climate change data from the EPA’s Website, and made arrangements to store it in Canada — because they believed it would be unsafe in the United States. It’s clear, now, that their worries were well-informed. I hope they succeeded in preserving the data.

I like this one because it points straight at something I’ve said for years: Christianity cannot thrive among the healthy; it needs for people to “know they’re bad.” Churches can’t flourish, and Holy Men can’t prosper, unless they’re surrounded by people who “know they’re bad.”

The only thing I like about John Piper is that you can always rely upon him to set out the bald creepiness of Christian teaching in plain language: the Trinity made a (temporary) blood-sacrifice of one-third of Himself, to a different one-third of Himself, in order to propitiate his wrath at humankind, which was created by Him in His own image.

Pardon me if I think of one of those troubled people who cuts him– or herself.