Author: Crowhill Report

The Senate is supposed to vote soon on whether to call additional witnesses in the impeachment trial. Some Republicans might join the Democrats in calling for witnesses, which creates the possibility of a tie vote.

It’s not clear that Roberts should have the tie-breaking vote. While it’s true that the Vice President usually presides over the Senate and breaks ties, and the chief justice presides over the Senate in this case, it’s not an exact parallel, and legal scholars differ on whether Roberts has the authority to cast a tie-breaking vote.

I predict that if it comes to that, Roberts will assert that he does have the authority, and he will vote to call more witnesses.

IMO, he doesn’t have much of a choice. If he votes to call witnesses, that doesn’t prejudge the outcome, it simply prolongs the trial. If he votes not to call witnesses, that ends things, and would be seen as partisan, which is apparently the monster that lives under John Roberts’ bed. He’s deathly afraid of seeming partisan.

On another impeachment matter, let’s say Democrats somehow get the votes to removed Trump from office. Does that prevent him from running again and getting elected to a second term?

That would be high theater.

I’ve asked Ted Cruz, who’s doing a very interesting podcast on the impeachment saga, but I doubt he’ll answer me.

I heard a great quote this evening.

“We’re not against elites, we just want better elites.”

P&C review Sam Smith’s Strawberry fruit ale, which is wonderfully full of strawberry flavor, and quite delightful.

Then the boys think about some of the odd ideas people have that they don’t seem to have thought through all the way.

They discuss proposals to …

• end red flag laws
• have a nation without borders
• create a non-binary, genderless world
• legalize drugs
• have less policing
• take away guns from law-abiding citizens
• eliminate drive-thrus to stop global warming, and
• stop the use of fossil fuels

… and wonder if these people spent any time thinking through their ideas.

Give a listen here: Have you thought this through?

My general reaction to the impeachment is that Democrats were planning to impeach him before he even took office, and there was enormous pressure from their base to find some way to impeach him. So they did.

There are a lot of disturbing aspects to this story, and one that is very encouraging.

On the disturbing side, I’d list these.

Even though there’s some requirement that the U.S. investigate corruption in the Ukraine, and even though it would be reasonable to withhold aid pending action on that front, the fact that Biden was a potential opponent of Trump in an election makes Trump’s actions troubling. That’s the sort of conflict of interest that you recuse yourself from.

However, if something like that is impeachable, I suspect every president would have been impeached.

Also, I believe Obama (mis)used the power of the presidency to investigate and obstruct Trump, and not enough attention has been paid to that. We’ve been distracted with this Russia nonsense.

The abuse of the FISA court was outrageous, and both that court and the FBI came out of this looking very bad.

It’s disturbing the way Schiff and the Democrats have been getting away with so many bald-faced lies (e.g., misquoting the phone transcript), which brings up the one encouraging thing about this whole fiasco.

The bias of the left-wing media is so transparently obvious now that to doubt or deny it is about on par with doubting the moon landing.

(I realize there isn’t a lot of direct evidence against Obama, but it smells very bad. We know the media covers for him. It’s a pretty solid bed the intelligence agencies were on his side — as is/was much of official Washington. And it’s taken way too long to make public some of the corruption that we pretty much knew about two years ago. Add it all up, and I think it points to Obama. But … I admit my bias. I don’t like or trust the guy.)

Please feel free to share your impeachment-related thoughts in the comments.

I’m a meat eater, and I have no qualms about killing animals to eat them. But I also believe there are several things brewing that will end meat.

The first is cloning.

It won’t be long before someone can grow meat in a lab. I mean genuine meat, not some silly substitute made of quinoa and beets.

This lab-grown meat will be cheaper, and higher quality. It will have exactly the amount of fat you want. It will be tender and tasty, and it won’t be in weird shapes and sizes.

The people selling this meat will ask why in the world an animal should have to suffer to give you meat of lower quality at a higher cost? And, of course, there’s no answer to that.

But the important point is that this cloned meat will transform the veganism debate entirely. It won’t be a question of the morality of eating animals. The cloned stuff will just be better.

I’ll eat it, and I look forward to it.

The second is disease.

You probably know that many of the worst diseases affecting humans come from livestock. There’s talk that this new Chinese monstrosity is from some hideous bat stew, although I’ve also read that it’s from snakes.

However that turns out, the point is that animals raised (or used) for food are a potential source of trouble. Keeping animals at a safe distance will slow the spread of new diseases.

Taking it all together, I simply don’t see a path for modern meat production to continue. The ugly way we treat animals, the potential for disease, and the easy alternative of cloned meat will put an end to it.