Juxtapose

Five Things I Learned From the Mueller Report

The president committed crimes.

The president also committed impeachable offenses.

Sara Kendzior: Impeachment Isn't Optional for Democrats

Sarah Kendzior laid out the case for the impeachment of Trump this morning on AMJoy, as she usually does, that it's not an optional situation for the Democrats. In her opinion, they have no choice in the matter, that the body of evidence is so clear, so obvious by now that that is the only true course of action. It's their Constitutional obligation, their actual job to have impeachment hearings on Trump.

Pelosi Warns Democrats: Stay in the Center or Trump May Contest Election Results

Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not believe President Trump can be removed through impeachment — the only way to do it, she said this week, is to defeat him in 2020 by a margin so “big” he cannot challenge the legitimacy of a Democratic victory.

(I hope she's right. This is a terrible gamble to take.)

That is something she worries about.

“We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that,” Ms. Pelosi said during an interview at the Capitol on Wednesday as she discussed her concern that Mr. Trump would not give up power voluntarily if he lost re-election by a slim margin next year.

Donald Trump Won't Say if He'll Accept Result of Election [2016]

Mr. Trump insisted, without offering evidence, that the general election has been rigged against him, and he twice refused to say that he would accept its result.

“I will look at it at the time,” Mr. Trump said. “I will keep you in suspense.”

For me this statement by itself should have disqualified Mr. Trump from the office of U.S. President. In effect he was saying he would not respect the laws which he would be required to swear to uphold.

“That’s horrifying,” Mrs. Clinton replied. “Let’s be clear about what he is saying and what that means. He is denigrating — he is talking down our democracy. And I am appalled that someone who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that position.”

Climate change: Bill McKibben’s advice for activists - Vox

Climate change: Bill McKibben’s advice for activists - Vox:

Sean Illing
I worry a lot of people have trouble connecting the dots between these food supply disruptions and the political chaos that results from them. For instance, you point out how a 2010 heat wave in Russia, which wrecked their grain harvest, led directly to the Arab Spring. How did that happen and what are similar scenarios that could play out in the near future?

Bill McKibben
That happened because the Arab world is the biggest importer of grain from eastern Europe and when the price went way up for a loaf of bread, the predictable trouble ensued. Probably an even more dire example is what happened in Syria. In the early part of this century, we had the deepest drought ever recorded in the Fertile Crescent. That drove an immense number of Syrian farmers, maybe a million farm families, off their land and into the cities.

And there’s been a lot of academic work to establish that that was one of the key things that triggered the civil war (here and here). Syria was already a brutal and unstable place, unable to cope with this massive influx of people. And so many of those people were spun out into the rest of the world where they utterly discombobulated the politics of Western Europe inside of 18 months.

So we can look at what happened in Syria and Europe and expect much more of that in the century ahead. And I think the low end is 200 million climate refugees and the high end approaches a billion. So take the kind of upheaval that the wave of refugees out of Syria created and multiply it by a couple of hundred and ask yourself how that’s going to impact war and peace, or development, or any of the other things we desperately care about?