***note - this began as a comment in the latest Open Thread but quickly grew beyond, so I mad e it a diary entry

There have been many proposed causes for the recent vanishing bees problem. Cell phones, powerlines, mites, fungus, virus, lack of genetic diversity, etc. If I had to guess, the bee scientists and research funding will discover the cause and develop a cure, eventually saving the honeybee. Eventually, the cure will cause a larger problem and our agriculture system will slowly teeter towards collapse leading to the eventual starvation of many around the world. These periodic die-offs and diseases inflicted upon various industrial agricultural products is already resulting in famines around the world. As our population increases and our soils get less fertile and leached with more chemicals, while our foods we grow in them are less nutritious, a prediction of more famines and disease in the future seems hardly a risky or unsubstantiated prediction.

For those who believe in the market as the only predictor, the fact that chemical and pharmaceutical companies are among the most profitable in the world demonstrates that even investors are betting on more health problems in the future and that the market will reward companies that produce more temporary solutions leading to greater long-term problems. A guarantee of long-term profits if there has ever been one.

I'm pretty sure I've diaried on impeachment before (on second thought, I'm sure I did, here), and I recall saying Speaker Pelosi could not, and would not be leading any movement for impeachment if only to avoid the inevitable implication of ambition before all else.  Or something similar.

Well, she's about to get a real sticky wicket to deal with.  As is being reported all over the web, prominently here, the Vermont Senate has voted 16-9 to ask the US House to start impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney.  The vote, without debate, took 15 minutes or so.  The issue now moves to the Vermont House, where the Democratic Speaker has been trying to stymie the issue, so far with some success.  The resolution moved through the Senate, BTW, after a lot of direct, personal pressure from his constitutents upon the Democratic Senate President, who'd been holding up the resolution, too.

For those of you who either forgot or never knew, the Manual of Procedure written by Thomas Jefferson for the Congress does provide for State Legislatures to initiate impeachment proceedings in situations where the Congress is unable, unwilling or not so disposed.  They're following that procedure in the Vermont Legislature;  locals tried it in New Mexico (the matter was shunted off to committee) and in Oregon or Washington (a lot of pressure from Federal-level Dems put that initiative on ice there).

I don't know whether the resolution will pass the Vermont House, and I don't have a vote or a voice in that.  But I have one thing to say, in two parts:

In deciding whether Bush and Cheney should be impeached, any person holding a vote in the matter (and their constitutents seeking to exercise their petition rights, in one direction or the other) has to answer the following questions:

(a) Do you think the conduct of Bush and Cheney in their respective offices has been and is acceptable?

(b) Are you willing to say, as a matter of eternal precedent*, that conduct like Bush's and Cheney's should be considered as surmounting the threshold for acceptable conduct (or, said another way, that their conduct has not found the bottom of what's acceptable)?

As to each of these office-holders, if you answer "Yes" to both questions, then you must vote against impeachment.  If you answer "No" to either (a), (b) or both, then you must vote for impeachment.  

It's that simple.

Oh, and as a matter of (I suppose you'd call it moral philosophy), if you vote/stand against impeachment, you're equally complicit with Bush and Cheney in all they've done - you've ratified their conduct.

Choose wisely.

-

* All precedents are eternal, and don't you forget it.  I've cited obscure cases from 1790-something and 1800-something to good effect in non-constitutional cases, if, as and when the occasion arose.

"The government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman."  ~Justice Anthony M. Kennedy (writing for the majority in Gonzales v. Carhart)

In affirming the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act passed by Congress in 2003 and defining in some measure the role that "the government" may take with "respect" to "the life within the woman," Justices Kennedy, Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas have created a dangerous precedent.  The life within the woman has, in effect, been given equal footing with the life of the woman.  The government may now feel free to implement policies and practices that are ostensibly in the best interests of the unborn child.  The interests and wishes of the woman are no longer of primary importance.  At some point in a pregnancy, the government may interpose itself between a woman and her medical providers and may, as it deems fit, impose its will and authority upon all parties.  Such intrusive intervention may arguably evince "respect for the life within the woman," but it shows no respect for any others.  And it invites abuse.  Where will it all end?

So far, the media has been pretty responsible in avoiding myth-creation in the Virginia murders--they've come a long way since Columbine. But it's been frustrating to watch one major myth continue: that there a profile exists of the typical school shooter. What's worse, the cornerstone of this myth--that the shooters are all loners--is also wrong.

The most heinous example came on The CBS Evening News, where Wyatt Andrews' piece perpetuating the myth was built around the very study that debunked it. Wyatt began by saying that Cho Seung-Hui "fits almost to a tee, a U.S. Secret Service profile of the typical school shooter."

That's funny. The central idea of the Secret Service study was that no such profile exists--and it says so, explicitly and unequivocally, right in the overview:  "There is no accurate or useful 'profile' of students who engaged in targeted school violence" (which is how they define school shooters--p. 11). How much clearer could they get?

[Cross-posted at ProgressiveHistorians, Daily Kos, MyDD, and My Left Wing.]

For some time, there has been a meme in political discourse indicating that Republicans choose their Presidential candidates based on some notion of whose "turn" it is to win the nomination.  I have found evidence of this meme from both the right (William F. Buckley) and the left (a MyDD commenter).  Given the pervasiveness of this meme, I decided to test the historical evidence behind it by examining Republican presidential nominations from 1960 -- a full twelve years before the first election in which primaries played a deciding role in the delegate count -- through 2004.

According to most versions of this theory, there are three ways that one establishes one's "turn" in line: 1) by being a sitting or former Vice President; 2) by running in a previous year, losing but doing better than expected; or 3) by attaining some sort of formal institutional leadership, i.e., serving as Senate Minority Leader or Speaker of the House.  I aim to show that criterion #1 is both natural and common to both parties, and that criteria #2 and #3 are simply not the hard-and-fast rules they have been made out to be.  In fact, in the past twelve election cycles, there has been only one instance where a Republican presidential primary was decided by anything close to the concept of "turn," and even in that instance the outcome was far from certain until well down the stretch.  Essentially, the Republican presidential "turn" is a myth with no predictive value for the 2008 GOP primary.

The operator of a Pacific Northwest medical marijuana clinic has defied the gag order accompanying a subpoena for records of patients assisted in complying with the pre-requisites of State laws governing access to medical marijuana,  

No link, via email.

There was a report on TPM yesterday, and at Kos, relating to the deletion of RNC emails.  Apparently, they stopped deleting them sometime in early 2005, after being told to.

By Fitz.

But, it seems, Rover continued to delete his own personal emails from the RNC servers after Fitz said to stop.

More ....

TIME reveals now that US and Iranian troops fought a deadly battle at the Iraq-Iran border on September 7, 2006. The Pentagon admitted that a "firefight" happened, but said it did not have any details, which would have to be obtained by the US military in Baghdad. US soldiers who had participated in the battle agreed to confirm if they could remain nameless because the US troops killed at least one Iranian soldier.  So, why is the US military now permitting TIME to interview US soldiers who participated in this battle? And, why is the deadly outcome being revealed 6 months later when "everyone seems to sense the possible consequences of revealing that a clash between U.S. and Iranian forces had turned deadly?"

Last night driving home I heard this report on my local NPR station.  Yea, I'm one of those....

Apparently the Bush43 Administration has taken it's sights to rewriting the Endangered Species Act.  As you can imagine, it isn't a warm and fuzzy rewrite that a progressive, an outdoors person or a sportsman could love.

Is an unsavory fondness for capital punishment behind the Justice Department's purge of U.S. attorneys? Evidence is emerging that suggests Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others took exception to the hesitance of some prosecutors to actively pursue the death penalty in certain cases. As a result, some of those who hesitated soon lost their jobs, as reported by the Los Angeles Times:

And why are they not?

TPM said something  here, today which relates to these questions really well, better than I would have been able to and from which I excerpt:

You'll remember, about a week after the election, I posted a diary with a poll attached.  I discussed whether gasoline prices had been manipulated prior to the election and then polled the audience on where the price of gas would be come the first day of spring.

Today's the day the bet comes due: March 21.  

If you recall, I tank up at an off-brand place which regularly has the lowest prices around.  I thought that gas prices would be more than $2.509 a gallon there today.

I was wrong. And, so was everyone else who took the poll.  But, hey, we were predicting the future.

This morning, driving by, the price was $2.399.

That price has been holding now for about 10 days.  It's up considerably from where it had been right before the election.  In my earlier diary, I noted the price was $1.919 on November 7, making a 48 cent/gallon increase in four months - a hair better than 25%.

Not too shabby if you're an oil company, considering there has been no supply interruption or new debacle affecting oil prices.  I still think the prices were manipulated pre-election.  That the price has not hit the $2.509 I thought is nice, if only because filling up costs me a buck and a half less than it would, if I had won my bet.