Oh, good morning, I guess…

1. Once again: this should be illegal, because it is unconscionable. Recently re-elected Rep. Don Marean, a multiple term Maine state legislator from York County, announced that he was leaving the Republican Party to become an Independent.  In a Friday text message last week, he said that “out of respect." for House Republicans  he would not  comment on the resaon for his decision and would let it “speak for itself.”

It does speak for itself; it tells us that Marean is an unscrupulous, liar who gained election to office fraudulently. Elected officials who betray voters this way have an ethical obligation to resign from office and run again under the party affiliation they will stick to.

2. Keep it up! Please! The freshman Democratic House members, in a single day, managed to strip away the mask of the Democratic Party and expose more of the ugliness beneath than the party veterans deemed wise. Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) refused to be sworn in with her hand on the traditional Bible,  and insisted that a law book be used for the purpose instead. She is a member of the party that has been questioning whether Catholics are fit to be federal judges, and the message that one party is openly hostile to religion is becoming clearer and clearer. The Bible is a moral/ethical document, and accepting it for the purpose of a binding oath should not be a problem for anyone unless they are trying to make a point. Using a law book is no more appropriate or meaningful than using a Harry Potter novel: oaths are declarations of duty, honesty and integrity, not law.

Then, as noted yesterday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan told a crowd of progressive activists  that “we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker.." Gee, I wonder how she got that idea? Surely it wasn’t from the comments and behavior of other Democratic leaders! Politico reports,

“Rank-and-file Democrats, immediately fearful of the damage the comment could cause, unloaded on their new colleague Friday morning. Republicans, they argued, would hold it up as proof that Democrats are playing politics rather than pursuing genuine oversight of the president…”

Yes, that would be because Democrats are playing politics and have been seeking to use impeachment as a way to undo the 2016 election since the beginning of Trump’s term. In various statements, Tlaib has justified impeachment by saying that the President is “unfit” for office, and that actual crimes in office shouldn’t be necessary to justify tossing him out. What defeated party wouldn’t argue that the other party’s victorious President-elect isn’t “fit”? Democrats argues that Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush were unfit. Republicans claimed Clinton and Obama were unfit. The theme of our system is that the voters decide. Once that principle is destroyed by anti-democratic demagogues like Tlaib, and our system is finished. I suspect, however, that this can only be accomplished by stealth and deception.

On the same fateful day, publicity magnet Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY.) called for a top tax rate of 70 percent to pay for her “Green New Deal.” “You’re talking about zero carbon emissions, no use of fossil fuels within 12 years?” CBS correspondent Anderson Cooper asked Ocasio-Cortez  for an upcoming “60 Minutes” segment.

“That is the goal,” the radical socialist answered. “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now….people are going to have to start paying their fair share.”

3. Today’s “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias1” note: [Pointer: Ann Althouse] In a Washington Post article titled “Three dead in national parks as shutdown wears on,”the Post says,

Three days after most of the federal workforce was furloughed on Dec. 21, a 14-year-old girl fell 700 feet to her death at the Horseshoe Bend Overlook, part of the Glen Canyon Recreation Area in Arizona. The following day, Christmas, a man died at Yosemite National Park in California after suffering a head injury in a fall. On Dec. 27, a woman was killed by a falling tree at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the borders of North Carolina and Tennessee…The deaths follow a decision by Trump administration officials to leave the scenic — but sometimes deadly — parks open even as the Interior Department has halted most of its operations. During previous extended shutdowns, the National Park Service barred access to many of its sites across the nation.

This flags how the news media is prepared to take sides in the government shutdown controversy: deceitfully, by concocting fake news. As Althouse writes,

It’s not as if a federal worker would have been there to catch them. What is even the theoretical connection between the shutdown and these fatal falls?…Oh, I see. If only the parks were closed, they wouldn’t have been there at all. This would argue in favor of permanently closing all the national parks because if people go there, they might die. But the real argument, thinly veiled, is that if only the parks were closed (like in past shutdowns), the shutdown would affect a lot of real people who could be shown complaining about their wrecked vacation.

You will recall that this was the Obama approach: choose discretionary targets to close that are calculated to cause the most public pain and generate the most outrage.