The Corona Crisis is upon us and it remains to be seen just how bad it will become. Indications are that the pandemic will continue to spread straining and stressing healthcare system around the world and here in the United States where just in time supply chains and significant dependence upon Chinese manufacturing create an additional economic danger to our already fragile systems.

It is possible that this may ‘burn out’ quickly and the effect may be less severe than they currently appear but it would not be wise to bet the farm upon such an outcome. People are modifying their behavior this past weekend I was at a small convention and the men in the restroom were more diligent about washing their hands than I can ever remember men behaving so.

For Trump the Corona Crisis represents a threat that cannot be defeated with the three Bs of his usual arsenal, Bullying, Bullshitting, or Blocking.

The virus is immune to taunts, nicknames, and intimidation so he cannot bully his way out of danger.

Trump’s propensity for bullshit works perfectly fine in the arena of politics where preferred reality is accepted over actual reality with regularity but emergency rooms are not spin rooms and no amount of clever language or outright lies will change a single infection to a healthy person. Viral Pneumonia doesn’t care what you told anyone, it will do what it does including spreading and killing.

The Senate Republicans have been Trump’s political protectors, covering up his crimes, blocking investigations, and transforming his guilt into innocence, but against a pandemic they are powerless. They cannot table the matter or refuse to take it and make it disappear by denying it airtime in the news cycle. People are going to get sick, people are going to die, and radio talk show hosts calling it a common cold will do nothing to change that reality.

If this burns out quickly and if the effects on the economy are brief and mild then Trump may escape through luck, but if the gets worse, if it returns stronger in the fall, then his golden ride may finally be over.

No, this is not an argument that the landscape of the general election favors Senator Sanders. If Sanders heads the ticket, I think this election will end up turning on a handful of votes in just a few states, much as the 2016 contest did ad that means it either candidate’s presidency is in the cards. What I want to expound on is why is the ground favorable for Sanders to win the nomination, what has made his candidacy viable at all.

The GOP unintendedly tilled and cultivated the ground for Trump for years before the 2016 election and I think that this was also a factor in the rise of Sanders.

Throughout the two terms of the Obama presidency one clear and consistent theme was that the GOP would do anything and everything to block, hinder, and undermine the Democrats in everything they did and everything they passed. The general thinking at the time, and it still holds true today, is that there is no electoral downside to playing an obstructionist role. That the electorate would only punish a party holding the presidency for failing to achieve things rather than notice the dedicated obstructionism. Electorally this has been proven to be fairly accurate. However, I think there are second order effects at play that many have failed to consider.

One of Joe Biden principal arguments for his election is that he can ‘work with Republicans,’ a plea to return to a sense of bipartisanship where the parties may differ but can set aside their differences to work for the common good. The problem is that there is zero evidence that the GOP is interested in that sort of arraignment and plenty of evidence, see the Obama years, arguing that the GOP be totally obstructionist to any Democratic administration.

Faced with this history and this likely future a common refrain from Democrats is that it is a fool’s errand to give any ground to the GOP on anything. Like Charlie Brown and Lucy, the roles are set and nothing, they believe, is going to change that. Given that starting position it makes logical sense to go with a candidate unwilling to compromise. Sanders of a rational reaction to the GOP obstruction. The thinking goes, they won’t work with us, they won’t respect any compromise, then we should just go for all out and not even bother with half measures.

Should Sanders will the White House, not as unlikely as some believe, the GOP will have played a major factor in

The news has reported that in addition to interfering in the US presidential election in favor of Trump the Russian effort is also working to elevated the chances of Sanders winning the Democratic contest for the nomination.

Trump responded to the reports that the Russians are assisting his re-election by dismissing his Director if National Intelligence and replacing him with an ‘acting’ Director reports out a line that is pleasing to his boss’s ears.

From the Sanders’ camp the reaction has varied from accusation that he information was leaked to damage him ahead of the Nevada contest, and if that was the objective it would seem to have failed, to familiar cries of ‘misinformation!’

It bears remembering that the Russians interfered on Trump behalf during the 2016 Primaries and also did the same for Sanders. Setting aside the question if the Russian government finds Trump easier to manipulate the choice of the candidates that the Russians support if quite consistent with this sort of operation.

The goal is chaos. The goal is conflict, using fractures that already exist in our society and culture to set us at each other’s throat. You cannot achieve that with middle of the road candidates but rather with people from the extremes, ideally with polar opposites set against each other. Which is exactly what Trump vs Sanders creates.

So what do you as a supporter of one of these two men do?

The absolute best thing you can do is be calm, be civil, and treat those on the opposing side with respect and courtesy. This is far from easy. I do not count myself as a Sanders supporter and I consider Trump to be a threat to our system of government. He is corrupt, he undermines and violates the rule of law, he exists only for his own enrichment and aggrandizement but that does mean I have to be nasty, cruel, or insulting to those who do not agree with me. I know conservatives who are willing to risk everything I listed above for their personal political objectives, be that gun, god, or gays. They are wrong in assessing the threat that Trump represents and while I will fight to defeat him in November but his supporters I will not disparage and I will not be a Russian asset in their attack on my country. I implore everyone to b the same. Be for Sanders but treat Trump supporters, Biden Supporters, and everyone else honorably and you will be doing your part in defending our country from Putin’s power play without compromising your principals.

It is clear that for Democratic voters the number one priority is defeating Donald Trump in this November’s general election. A great deal of analysis, anxiety, and argument has been devoted to the topic of which candidate has the best odds of achieving that goal. It is naturally a stressful proposition. There are no test runs, no objective measurements that can answer the question ahead of time. There will be one and only one election and the Democratic candidate will either win the required electoral votes or they will fail. People who insist a particular person is the only one that can win the election are engaged at the very least of motivated reasoning, finding the arguments and evidence that produced a desired result versus any sort of analysis that might produce an answer contrary to their already preferred outcome.

The 2016 election turned on less than 100,000 votes in just three states. The Democratic candidate gathered nearly three million more votes from the electorate but only the archaic electoral college decides the victory. If Hillary Clinton with 30 years of political baggage can outperform Trump when he was still principally an unknown, then any of the leading candidates in this cycle can win the White House. Trump has not enlarged his voting coalition and has no grown in the public’s approval. This election may turn on a relative handful of voters in a few key states. It is also possible that the election will not be close, between many people’s distrust of Hillary Clinton and the unwarranted opinion that her victory was a certainty the last elect may have well been lost by the voters who did not bother and who this year may not repeat that error.

I do have an opinion as two which two Democratic candidates are most likely to lose if it is a close election, the two polar opposites, Sanders and Bloomberg.

Sanders as the candidate runs the risk to activating the negative partisanship of Republican voters who are apathetic to Trump but still live in the cold war with its terror of Socialism. Sanders has repeatedly put forth the argument that his candidacy will energize new voters and expand the electorate but so far the numbers do not bear out that point of view. He is doing well but he is not crushing it. There are those who are certain that a Socialist candidate will go down to a crushing defeat, but I think partisanship is a more powerful force and example number one if the Presidency of Trump. Side note: The GOP since the 80s has decried every Democratic candidate and president as a ‘Socialist,’ and now that a self-described one has a real shot at winning the White House their overuse of that attack has blunted that particular sword.

Bloomberg presents the exact opposite danger from Sanders. The Democratic electorate has no taste for billionaires buying the election. With Bloomberg at the head of the ticket there is a very real chance that Democratic enthusiasm will be suppressed with voters staying home or writing in candidates out of protest. If the swing states are close those few voters could, as they did in 2016, by their inaction give the victory to Trump. The unresolved question here is which is the stronger force, the hatred of Trump or Bloomberg.

One of the animating arguments from the Democratic side of this year’s election debates is what to do about college and debt. The cost of a four year or more college education has skyrocketed, and today’s graduates often leave college with the debt equivalent to a home’s mortgage but without the asset of a home. In my view there are two reason why this is not good.

First, these very long-term debts transform high-velocity money into low-velocity. High-velocity money is money that is spent on goods and services while low-velocity is money that primary is used to create more money such as bonds and other financial devices. An economy is comprised of both kinds of money, but it is the high-velocity funds that act as the engine driving economic growth. College graduates at the start of their adult lives are the sort of consumer who buy things that others have made, spending their funds on goods and services that puts money directly into the hands of other who are likely to do the same. However, loaded down with debt their funds get diverted to banks and financial instructions that do use the money but also sock a good deal of it away in interest bearing devices sapping the economic engine of fuel. Making college free rediverts this flow back into the high-velocity economy encouraging growth.

Second, as a nation, as a culture, and as a species we are facing a number of massive challenges. We need better power generation and storage system, we need better access to orbit and beyond, we need better health care treatments and understanding of biology and ecology. We need legions of scientists, technicians, and engineers. Somewhere out there may be the person who has the creativity and the intellect to deal with cancer or other terrible diseases but what if that person or persons is trapped in a segment of society without access to a high-quality education? Not just that person but all of society suffers from their loss. We can’t know ahead of time who may be the brilliant person that with the right education transforms our lives. Our best option for making sure that happens is to increase the number of people who can have those opportunities. Free college, aside from the economic argument I made above, is gambling pennies to win a fortune. I want those breakthroughs; I want those scientists and engineers and artists that inspire because all our lives are made better by them.

Some have argued we should not be subsidizing the college of millionaires by making college free. Well, if giving millionaires kids free college gets me the benefits I outline above well that is worth it in my book but there’s a solution to that as well. Make the free college applicable to state owned universities only. Private schools, all them, this should not apply too. The principal benefits of a school such as Harvard or USC or Yale is the one that greatly favors the individual attending, that is the network of people they become a part of, but the sciences and the knowledge is basically the same. There’s no need to subsidize those school and millionaires can pay full freight to those institutions.

One thing that has become appallingly clear is that without constitutional revisions, and I am not proposing any particular amendments at this time, there will never be a president of the United States removed from office by impeachment.

Three U.S. Presidents have been impeached, Johnson during Reconstruction, Clinton, and Trump. Nixon resigned and avoided his impeachment. This week Senator and former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney made history by becoming the first and only Senator to vote in the guilt phase of an impeachment for the removal of a president of his own party. It didn’t happen for Johnson and it did not happen for Clinton.

Johnson’s impeachment was a purely political affair and from a historical time that does not reflect modern political processes.

Clinton was impeached for committing perjury while under oath, an obstruction of justice. Granted he was set-up, granted the investigation that had started was about a real estate investment and allegation, ultimately unfounded, of fraud and not about his sexual activities, but when asked directly under oath he had a duty, and a legal and moral obligation to be truthful. A citizen was seeking justice and he obstr5ucted it. I was torn over that impeachment because he was guilty but it was also a political vendetta.

Trump quite clearly, quite blatantly, used the vast powers of the Presidency, endangering lives and the interests of the nations, for his own selfish gain. It was an abuse of power, of his office, and of the public trust. Trump’s actions are the very reason what the impeachment clause exists and yet only a single GOP Senator could find the courage to vote ‘guilty.’

The political pressure, prices, and incentives are now simply too powerful to expect senator to vote contrary to the interests of their party.

The greatest political failing of this nation’s founding father was the naïve assumption that the system would function would forming political parties. (Their greatest moral failing is of course slavery, an absolute evil.) The system is designed for power and ambition to check power and ambition, but it assumes that the combatants would be the branches, congress vs executive and not the organizations occupying those branches. The system was not designed for this and increased incentives and penalties of today’s radically polarized politics renders the federal government ungovernable.

During the 2016 campaign Donald Trump famously boasted that he could ‘shot someone on Fifth Avenue’ and not lose a single supporter. While we have no instances of Presidential attempted murder it would seem that Trump was perfectly on target with that pronouncement it is also a useful metaphor illustrating the absurdity of the GOP’s defense of Donald Trump as he faces near certain impeachment.

Let us suppose that Trump did stand on Fifth Avenue and fired a handgun at an innocent person calmly stating that he was going to kill that person, but being unversed the way of guns, he missed and the round going wildly off target and hitting no one.

The GOP defense of Trump starts out that he never shot at anyone, but that falls quickly as witness after witness come forward swearing to the facts that Trump did indeed shot at someone

The GOP then falls back to a defense built around, ‘well, he didn’t intend to kill,’ but again the witness dispel such arguments using Trump own statements that he was going to kill.

Which brings up to the current and most absurd defense.

“Well, he *missed*, no one was hurt so not only is he perfectly okay we should let him keep the gun!”

I have seen, repeatedly and all the damn place that because the Ukrainians didn’t actually deliver then Trump’s crime just goes *poof* and he should be safe from impeachment. Just as with the hypothetical I laid out, attempting to do a bad thing and with intent but doing it badly does not in any way excuse the bad thing.

We have to take the gun away or he will try to shoot someone else, and we must impeach and remove the president for abusing the powers of his officer for personal political gain. This will not happen because in the GOP mind there is no crime so terrible that it can be punished if that in any manner or form benefits the Democratic Party.

I have no doubts that Trump should be impeached and removed from office. Just on the basis of his action dealing with the new Ukrainian President and Trump attempts to get that man and his administration to start an ‘investigation’ whose purpose was to bolster Trump political fortune is enough.

Arguments defending Trump tend to fall into a few camps.

• There was no ‘Quid pro Quo.’ This defense is untenable. For one thing there is growing evidence of the explicit favor-for-favor exchange and do not forget that when the Ukrainian President brought up the desire to purchase particular weaponry Trump responded with “I want you to do us a favor, though.” But setting aside the favor-for-favor even without any pressure campaign at all requesting a foreign power to take official action to damage a political opponent is an abuse of office, plane and simple.
• Trump Did Nothing Illegal. One defensive argument is centered on the concept that asking a foreign power is help in an election is not in itself illegal. I have seen some counter with this with arcane election regulation, that the assistance itself has a monetary value and getting anything of monetary value from a foreign nation or citizen for electioneering is illegal. This may very well be true on the face of it. Just as lying under oath is a crime even if you are set up with malicious intent the perjury remains illegal. However even is something was legal doesn’t mean it removes it from being an impeachable offence. The President has the power to declassify any information that he wishes, but if he did so with a battle plan so that an enemy could act upon it, while the action itself would be legal it would also be impeachable.
• There was No Investigation. This one really tries to lay out a ‘No harm no foul’ excuse as though this were just a pick-up game of basketball between friendly rivals but this is our highest office and the most powerful position on the planet not amateur athletics. Simply because the Ukrainian President did not actually go the microphone and issue the damaging statement that Hunter Biden was under investigation, which would have cleared the way for an entirely disingenuous propaganda campaign, does not mean the attempts to gain that favor is forgotten. Trump abused his office and the position of president to politically personally profit.

It is an irony that the same people who have repeated conspiracy theories for decades about Senator Edward Kennedy seeking Soviet assistance in 1984 to defeat President Reagan are now utterly fine with foreign assistance as long as it helps them. That the same people who wailed and bemoan Obama’s lackluster response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine have no concerns about a man of their party or their political damaging Ukraine’s ability to defend itself in a shooting war with Russia as long it has damages the Democratic Party of the United States of America.