Japanese Internment, Somalian Patriotism, and Etc.

I. Japanese Internment
Nikiko Massamoto, "My Grandfather's Shovel," Sierran, March/April 2020.
"In 1942, with  no evidence of criminal espionage or proof that the Japanese-American community posed a threat, the US government imprisoned my jiichen [grandfather] and his family without trial in Arizona. The concentration camp was built on the Gila River reservation of the Pima Indians, and that they had been forced onto -- two histories of confinement. "When the removal orders came, Japanese-Americans could take only what they could carry and all other property was sold for dirt cheap. Families hat owned farms were forced to  sell  everything."

II. Somalian Patriotism
Julia Harte, "Minority Report," The Nation, March 16/23, 2020.
"In 2014, the refugee center at Boston Children's Hospital surveyed 120 young people of Somalian descent and found that more than a quarter experienced some kind of contact with police in the past year." Although the Somalian youth were widely feared to be "potential terrorists," only two Somalians were convicted of plotting or committing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil from 1975 to 2015, according to a study by the libertarian Cato Institute.

"As long as marginalized minorities are the targets of counter-extremism programs, their mistrust of the government will persist. And as long as they mistrust the government, the authorities will continue to see in them the potential for violent extremism."

III. The Rape of the Tongass
Michael Brune, "Vandals in the Chapel," Sierran, March/April 2020.
"Every hour, human activities destroy 6,000 acres of rain forest around the globe." "Since 2001, many of the Tongass's old-growth trees have been spared from logging by the federal Roadless Rule, which limits road construction and reconstruction, as well as timber harvesting in national forests. Now, the Trump administration wants to repeal that rule for the Tongass."

"According to the Taxpayers for Common Sense, it costs US Forest Service more money to administer timber sales in the Tongass than the agency receives in revenue from the sales, meaning that we are spending at least $30 million a year to cut  down trees that shouldn't be cut down in the first place."

IV. "Black Book" Jingoism
Hilton Als, "Seeing Things," The New Yorker, February 3, 2020.
" 'The Black Book' was intended, like 'The Bluest Eye,' to combat the 'Black is beautiful'  jingoism of the time, and to show real lives from the ghastly slave ship of the sixteen-hundreds to America in the twentieth-century." "The point is not to soak in some warm bath of nostalgia about the good old days -- there were none! -- but to recognize those qualities of resistance, excellence and integrity that were such a part of our past, and so useful to us and to the generation of blacks now growing up...To create something that might last, that would be witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every PH.D dissertation, and the focal point of all the mindlessness that seems to have joined the smog of California's movie world."

ADDENDUMS:
*New Mexico became the 18th state to approve a red flag law that allows firearms to be temporarily seized.

*According to Chad Boin of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the average tariff on imports from China will be 19.3%, up from about 3% when Trump took office. The first phase of the agreement says nothing about government subsidies to Chinese firms,and the operation of state-owned enterprises.

*Attorney General William Barr is using a process known as "certification," a historically little-used power of the attorney general's office, that allows him to overrule decisions made by the Board of Immigration Appeals and set binding precedent. He is using it as a check on immigration.

*ICE is targeting "sanctuary cities" with increased surveillance.

A Variety of Items Ripped From My Writer's Notebook

#Tana Ganeva, "The Trump Voter Conundrum," The Nation, February 17, 2020.
"Between 5 and 15 percent of the voting electorate, or as many as 9.2 million people (the estimates depend on the data sources,of which there are many), took a similarly puzzling path, voting for Obama in 2012, only to opt for Trump in 2016." "According to one analysis of Obama-Trump voters who voted in the 2008 election,three-quarters opted for the Republicans." "One-third of the white working-class women interviewed, who voted for Trump, said they'd consider voting for someone else this year."

"Enthusiasm for Trump has lagged in areas suffering from economic instability." "Focus groups suggest that one of Trump's biggest weaknesses going into 2020 is his failure to deliver on a truly populist policy." "Democrats could tap into Trump fatigue while  broadcasting the message that  he has failed to deliver on health care, well-paid jobs, or the opioid epidemic. They can expose the faux populism that propelled his campaign as a sham and offer a progressive alternative."

#A national survey published on March 5 by the Pew Research Center showed that 73% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe "self-centered" describes Trump either very or fairly will. Overall, 8 in 10 U.S. adults agree with that assessment. The same group of Republicans and Republican-leaners show 80% agreeing with Trump on many or nearly all of the important issues facing the country; the same percentage of these two groupings approves of his job performance. Only 31% say they like the way Trump conducts himself. Of the same group: 35% say he's prejudiced; 49% say he's even-tempered; 62% say he's morally upstanding;  71% say he's honest, and 89% say he fights for what he believes.

Although polling shows that Trump has sky-high ratings among Republicans on his job performance, substantial chunks rate him much lower when it comes to individual qualities that are associated with desirable presidential behavior. Thus, sightly over one-third say he's prejudiced, and a little under a third don't like the way he conducts himself. Only about half say he is even-tempered, and about 6 in 10 say he's morally upstanding. Although 71% expressing a belief in his honesty is high for one who lies so constantly, it is still a high percentage of those who approve of him,but don't believe he is honest.   

#Anna Case and Angus Deator, "The sickness of our system," TIME, March 2-9, 2020.
"The percentage of national income that is absorbed by health care has grown over the past  half-century, from 5% in 1960 to 18% in 2017, reducing what is available for anything else from 95% to 82% today."

"American doctors get paid almost twice as much as the average doctor in other wealthy countries."

#Eliana Dockterman, "Boy Scouts," TIME, March 2/9, 2020.
"Since the 2019 revelation that 254 children had reported experiencing sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts from 1944 to 2016,the organization has faced a deluge of lawsuits -- so many that their insurance companies have refused to continue making payments, arguing that the Boy Scouts could have reasonably prevented the widespread sexual abuse."

#Bryan Stevenon, "Q & A," TIME, March 2/9, 2020.
"First of all, the First Step Act impacts less than 1% of the people who are incarcerated in this country. It applies only to federal prisons. It's not even a scratch." "We are the most punitive country in the world. It's so important to eliminate mandatory sentences." "Every President has felt the need to move away from any talk of rehabilitation."

#While 30 percent say they own a gun, only 4  percent actually hunt. In a landmark 2016 survey, researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities found that 63 percent of gun owners identified  "protection against people" as their primary reason for packing heat. The percentage of armed American households may be dropping but existing gun owners are buying more and more firearms. Fear seems to be selling more than anything else.

#Amelia Pang, "Field Schemes," Mother Jones, March/April 2020.
"Lax federal control means that exporters can hire organic certifiers that will help them boost profits by  looking the other way." "We import 70 percent of our organic soybeans and 40 percent of our organic corn, which are fed to organic livestock. The Cornveopia Institute, an industry watchdog group, suspects that the USDA, which is supposed to regulate,but also promote US agriculture, is not strictly monitoring these imports -- because if it did, it could undercut the entire organic food chain." "But American officials are taking a less stringent approach. Although the USDA suspended [a license] to certify products from Turkey, the department still allows the company to accredit organic products in Russia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria."

Dissecting Coronavirus, and the Rise of Mental Illness

I.Cutting the Epidemic Prevention Budget
Sarah Abramsky. "Going Viral," The Nation, February 17, 2020.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cut global prevention efforts by 80 percent, radically shrinking its operations in 39 of the 49 countries where it had a presence, including China and Congo, currently in the epicenter of an Ebola outbreak. Last year, President Trump proposed slashing the Department of Health and Human Services' budget by 12 percent and the CDC's by 10 percent.

"As the world stands on the verge of a new epidemic, the United States has 50,000 fewer public heath employees than it  did in 2008."

II. Containing a Crisis
Alice Park and Charlie Campbell, "Containing a crisis," TIME, February 10, 2020.
"Only recently have they [Coronaviruses] become more threatening, causing two deadly global pandemics in the past two decades." "Coronaviruses are not rare. In fact, you might  have one right now. Depending on the year, anywhere from 10% to 20% of the annual burdens of colds can be blamed one of four coronaviruses."

III. The Pandemic of Habitat Destruction
Sonia Shah, "The Other Pandemic: Habitat Destruction," The Nation, March 16/23, 2020.
"Since 1940, hundreds of microbial pathogens have emerged, either for the first time or in territory where they had never been detected before. They include HIV, Ebola, and a bevy of new coronavirueses. Sixty percent of them originate in the bodies of animals." "Mosquito-borne disease outbreaks have been similarly linked to the felling of forests, although less because of the loss of habitat than its transformation." "Tick-borne disease first emerged in the United States in 1975; in the past 20 years, seven new tick-borne pathogens have followed."

"For ten years, scientists funded by the US Agency for International Development's Predict program did just that by pinpointing more than 900 viruses." "The Trump administration's deregulation of extractive industries will likely speed up the habitat destruction that brings animal microbes into contact with humans." "In October [last year], the White House decided to end Predict, and, in February proposed cutting funds to the World Health Organization."

IV. Biden's Virus-Killing Plan
Joe Biden's plan to respond to the coronavirus epidemic: ramp up the production of medical supplies in both public and private sectors; have mobile test facilities; deploy military medical personnel and equipment; accelerate training and development of treatments and vaccines.

V. The Coronavirus's Globalization Effect
Ian Bremmer, "The coronavirus's blow to globalization," TIME, March 16-23, 2020.
"In coming years,the coronavirus outbreak may be remembered as a milestone moment on the road toward the end of the first phase of globalization" "The result has been tightened immigration rules,new barriers to  trade and investment, a shortening of  supply chains, a technological decoupling and a new emphasis on country-first policies. Coronavirus has already forced travel restrictions, accusations between governments, and a series of xenophobic attacks in multiple countries. depending on the level of human and economic damage this virus inflicts around the world. Coronavirus may  one day be considered an important turning point for the entire global economy."

VI. Rising Mental Illness
Mandy Oaklander, "When every day is  a mental health day, TIME, February 3, 2020.
"Mental illness is rising in every country in the world. Depression is so common and debilitating that it's one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, and, coupled with  anxiety, costs the global economy about $1 trillion a year in lost productivity (according to the World Health Organization.) Among millennials, who are ages 24 to 39 in 2020, depression is the fastest-growing health condition, the Blue Cross, Blue Shield Association recently found." "A 2019 poll by the American Psychiatric Association found 62% of people who are ages 20 to 37, feel comfortable discussing their mental health at work,compared with about half as many people ages 54 to 72."

VII. "Depression, Anxiety, and Suicide as Leading Causes
Greg Adams, "Shedding new light," TIME, February 3, 2020.
 Greg Adams agrees with  Mandy Oaklander that depression is a leading cause of illness among young people; also, he agrees that anxiety is on the rise. He says that "suicide ranks third as a leading cause of death for 15-to-19-year--olds, and is increasingly becoming a health-equity issue: African American girls in grades nine to twelve were 70% more likely to attempt suicide in [a recent study] in 2017, compared to non-Hispanic white girls of the same age."

ADDENDUMS:
*President Trump blamed Obama for the delay in distributing virus test kits; however, he replied to Fox news anchor, Bret Baier: "Well, I don't blame anybody."

*"We already know some other deadly members of the coronavirus family don't seem to be      seasonal," says Thomas Ballyky, director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

*When President Trump said that health insurance companies have agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments,he lied, as they will only cover testing. not treatment.

     

#Casey Cep, "Rescue Work," The New Yorker, February 3, 2020.
"In the three decades before the Civil War, more than three hundred thousand men,women and children were sold in Richmond, the second-largest  slave market in the United States. "The struggle  over the physical record of slavery and uprising in Richmond is part of a larger, long-overdue national movement to reserve African American history. Of the more than ninety-five thousand        entries on the National Register of Historic Places -- the list of sites deemed worthy of preservation by the federal  government -- only three per cent focus on the experience of black Americans."

"Since its founding,the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), signed in 1966, has identified nearly two million locations worthy of preservation,and has engaged tens of millions of Americans in the work of doing so."

"African Americans constitute less than six per cent of the more than twenty thousand employees of the National Park Service, and they are under-represented in most other careers related to historic preservation, accounting for not quite four per cent of academic archeologists, five per cent of licensed architects and engineers, and less than one per cent of professional preservationists."

#Danille Carr, "Docs vs. the AMA," TIME, February 10, 2020.
"Since its rise in the early 20th century,the American Medical Association (AMA) has served as the most powerful umbrella organization for physician advocacy, and lobbying has proved instrumental in defeating every campaign for national health insurance in US history."

"Pressure from within has forced the AMA to withdraw from the Partnership for America's Health Care Future, an industry of insurance and hospital lobbies opposed to single-payer." "The AMA has long framed its opposition to nationalized health care as a defense of the individual freedom afforded by the free market. The irony, of course, is that its founding mission was to limit the depredations of the unregulated market by  halting the 'free trade in doctoring' that characterized the United States until the latter half of the 19th century. It has consistently subjected  health care reform to maintain the profitability of the care physicians provide."

"Private insurers  will ways offload those requiring the most expensive care unto the government payer." "Universal coverage can be achieved only through Medicare for All. The question is not     whether these doctors will succeed in demanding reform but whether the AMA will finally join them."

#Steve Coll, "After Impeachment," The New Yorker,"  February 17 & 24, 2020.
In describing Sen. Mitt Romney' impeachment speech, Steve Coll wrote: "In eloquent remarks, he described the President's conduct as a 'flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security,and our fundamental values.' He went on: 'Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine.' 'By now, any dispassionate reading of the Mueller report, the impeachment investigation, and the accumulating record of journalism can lead to but one conclusion: we have been warned.' "

ADDENDUMS:
*While defending his since-canceled plan to hold this year's G-7 Summit at his Doral, Florida resort, Trump referred to the "phony emoluments clause" in the Constitution.
*Reporter Yanriche asked the question about the disbanded Pandemic Group. Trump answered: "You say me. I didn't do it. You say we did that. I don't know anything about it." He called her question "nasty."

Environmental Matters of Note

#Justin Worland, "Tapped Out," TIME, March 2-9, 2020.
"More that 30 million Americans lived in areas where water systems violated safety rules at the beginning of last year, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency." "In the Navajo Nation where more than 300,000 people reside in a territory that stretches across parts of Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, residents unknowingly drank and played in water that uranium mining had made extremely hazardous." "A striking number of people,including babies,show traces of uranium in their blood. Infections develop in those who dare to shower in it."

"A 2017 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's drinking-water infrastructure a rating of D, and assessed that the U.S. needs to invest $1 trillion in the next 25 years for upgrades."

#Isadur M. Goklany, a long-time Department of Agriculture employee, put misleading climate change language in at least nine reports. Goklany instructed department scientists to add in their reports that rising carbon dioxide levels are beneficial because it "may increase plant water use efficiency," and lengthen the agriculture growing season." The language claiming there's a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming have become known as "Gok's uncertainty language."

#Sam Knight, "Betting the Farm," The New Yorker," February 17 & 24, 2020.
"Between 1990 and 2010, the area of crops treated with pesticides in the United Kingdom increased by fifty per cent." "Researchers studied more than three thousand species and found that sixty per cent were in decline."

"An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand miles of the U.K.'s hedges were destroyed in the second half of the twentieth century." "Between 1967 and 2010, the population of the gray partridge, the country's traditional quarry, fell by ninety-one per cent."

#Chloe Zilliac, Goldman Sachs Says No to Arctic Oil," Sierran, March/April 2020.
"In December, Goldman Sachs became the first US bank to announce it would no longer finance oil projects in the Arctic, citing concerns about how drilling would affect the indigenous peoples of Alaska ad endangered species, and how it would contribute to the climate crisis. The bank's new policy is a milestone in the fight to preserve the 5 million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Congress opened for drilling in 2017."

#Belinda Luscombe, "Forgotten Country." TIME, February 3, 2020.
"More than eight times as much land was burned in Australia, as in the California fires in 2018, but Australia has lost fewer than one-seventh s many homes." "Normally a reliable carbon absorber, the [trees/bush] instead has pumped hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, along with enough smoke to briefly make Australian cities the most polluted in the world."

#"Legal battle over the Endangered Species Act," The Week, August 30, 2019.
"Officials will be barred from protecting habitats of threatened species unless they can 'reasonably determine that the effects of climate change is likely,' phrasing meant to prevent regulators from anticipating the effects of climate change. And for the first time, officials will be allowed to calculate impacts of protecting a species, a move by some business groups."

"An estimated 99 percent of listed species have avoided elimination, which is the only metric that matters."

Some Outside-Our-Borders Tidbits

#Ian Bremmer, "Trump's Middle East plan..." TIME, February 10, 2020.
"This new deal aims to contain, rather than reduce, Israeli settlements, giving Palestinians a smaller plot of land for their state, about 70% of the West Bank." "To entice the Palestinians, the Trump administration has pledged to  drum up investments of $28 billion over 10 years to support Palestine, with $22 billion of additional funding going to Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon."

"The Trump administration's Israel-Palestinian peace plan tears up the playbook of prior U.S.policy. Rather than fairness, it is built upon the recognition of Israel's power on the ground and shifts in the region's geopolitics."

#Joshua Seifer, "A Tense Relationship," The Nation, February 24, 2020.
"Victory in the Six-Day War, as Amos Oz later recalled, unleashed 'a mood of nationalistic intoxication, of infatuation with the tools of statehood,with the rituals of militarism. Rather than subsiding, this mood became part of the general attitude of a country engaged in perpetual occupation and war.' "

"Cloaking false equivalences and ideology in the language of realism has long been a hallmark of liberal Zionist argument. Liberal Zionists often insist that one cannot condemn Israeli militarism and occupation without an equivalent condemnation of Palestinian separatism and irredentism, and they generally maintain that the two-state solution is the only realistic and desirable outcome for Israel-Palestine." "The emergence of a Jewish state, however, marked the failure of the early Zionist's very proposition; instead of solving the Jewish question once and for all, Israel [enclosed] it in the realm of geopolitics."

"Writing shortly after the 1967 war,[I.F.] Stone lamented the rising militarism and 'Lilliputian nationalism' of Israel's culture,which he believed were at odds with his universalist Jewish leftism."

#Robin Wright, "Consequences," The New Yorker,  January 20, 2020.
The Trump administration's top goal in Iran has been undermined: Iran is much closer to building a nuclear weapon. "For decades, successive presidents have sought to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. By 2013,the regime was within weeks to being able to build a bomb -- the so-called breakout time." "Iran's breakout time has begun to tick down, and 'maximum pressure' from sanctions and isolation hasn't worked."

#"We are historic interlopers. We come and go," Robert Malley, the president of the International Crisis-Group, said. "The notion that we could sustain our forces in an unpredictable struggle in the Middle East --given the politics in this country, and the fact that most Americans don't think this is a  vital interest -- is illusory." "The  United States has figured out how to react to a militia or kill a commander, it still hasn't figured out,creatively or proactively, to deal with the nation of Iran."

#Michael T. Clare, "Twin Threats," TIME, January 27, 2020.
"One particularly worrisome scenario is if extreme drought and abnormal monsoon rains devastated agriculture and unleashed social chaos in Pakistan, potentially creating a opening for radical Islamists aligned with elements of the armed forces to seize some of the country's 150 or so nuclear weapons." "A potential US military incursion in nuclear-armed Pakistan is just one example of a crucial but little-discussed aspect of climate change and nuclear war planning may make those threats to human survival harder to defuse."

"Although Obama initiated the nuclearization of the nuclear triad,the Trump administration has sought funds to proceed with their full-scale production, at an estimated initial installment of $500 billion over 10 years," "Trump's decision to acquire a whole new suite of ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines,and bombers has added  momentum to these efforts."

#Colin Jones, "After the Uprising," The Nation, March 16/23, 2020.
"Today, it is really only in Okinawa that the U.S. military in Japan is contested. American bases take about 15 percent of the island, and although Okinawa accounts for just one-third of 1 percent of Japan's total territory, it houses roughly half of the 50,000 U.S. personnel in the country."

"Under the terms of the treaty, the United States could deploy its forces in Japan to anywhere in Asia without consulting the Japanese government."

#David Petreus and Vance Serchuk,"Don't trust the Taliban's promises," The Week, August 30, 2019.
"If President Trump pulls all U.S. troops from Afghanistan as he says he wants to, the Taliban will seek to overthrow the Afghan government and impose medieval rule."

Education Is the Focus, and Picking Up Impeachment Debris

#Kevin Carey, "Invisible lines, TIME, March 2-9, 2020.
"American education remains highly segregated by race and class, perpetuated in part by a patchwork of school districts --invisible lines that carve up the country, carefully separating the rich from the poor. EdBuild calculates that, annually, $23 billion more goes to districts serving at least 75% white students than those with 25% or fewer, even though the total numbers of students are about equal."

##Nelson Luna and Whitney Stephenson, TIME, March 2-9, 2020.
"Nearly 66 years after the U.S.Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in public education unconstitutional, more than half the nation's students still attend largely segregated school districts."

#William C. Bell, TIME, March 2-9, 2020.
"The roughly 437,000 U.S. children in foster care are more likely to drop out of high school, compared with peers who live with family, and children who age out of the system are more likely to face homelessness, unemployment and incarceration."

#Michael K. Honey, "Economic Inequality Through King's Eyes," TIME, March 2-9, 2020.
"Today, nearly 40 million Americans remain poor, and a majority of students in  many schools do not have enough to eat." "One-third of African Americans there (in Memphis) lived in poverty in 2018, the year for which the most recent data is available."

#A Southern Poverty Law Center survey found that only 8% of high school students could identify slavery as the main cause of the Civil War. The organization also produced a 2014 "report card" on state standards and resources for  teaching the civil rights movement; 30 states got a failing grade.

In 2005, Philadelphia became the first major city to require students to take a class in black history to graduate.

#More than 1.5 million U.S. public school students were homeless at some point over the past 3 years, according to data from the National Center for Homeless Education.

                                                                    - - -
Jelani Cobb, "Imbalance of Power," The New Yorker," February 3, 2020.
"At the start of the [Trump impeachment] trial, in eleven roll-call votes, the Republican majority voted down measures to request relevant documents or to hear from new witnesses regarding the Ukraine scheme." "The significance of the votes is twofold: not only did the Senate Republicans co-sign the White House's efforts to turn the impeachment into a show trial: they reduced the power of the legislative branch  to which they themselves belong."

"The GOP that has come to support Trump's inflammatory nativism is failing to consider the demographic trend, and it faces alienating rapidly growing numbers of immigrants and minority voters."

"An acquittal would set a precedent for  subsequent elections and [allow the president to] remain in power nevertheless."

#Steve Coll, "After Impeachment," The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2020.
In describing Sen. Mitt Romney's (R-UT) impeachment speech, Steve Coll wrote: "In eloquent remarks, he described the President's conduct as 'a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security, and our fundamental values.' He went on: 'Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine.' 'By now, any dispassionate reading of the Mueller report, the impeachment investigation,and the accumulating record of journalism can lead to but one conclusion: we have been warned.' "

#Stephanie McCurry, "Political in Nature," The Nation, February 17, 2020.
"The nation's 17th president [Andrew Johnson] rivaled its current one in his penchant for race-baiting and his shockingly coarse expressions and views." "The Republican's determination to impeach and remove Johnson turned an irreconcilable ethical and political difference about the terms of freedom and citizenship in the reunited nation more than it did on any difference in temperament and personality."

"They (congressional Republicans) identified impeachment as the only remedy for a chief executive, who, by repeated violent speech (itemized in Article 10), sought to deny Congress their exercise of its 'rightful authorities and powers' and in the process, through behavior 'peculiarly indecent and  unbecoming in the Chief Magistrate of the United States...brought the high office of the President...into contempt, ridicule and disgrace."

"The real issue was Reconstruction and the succor Johnson had given to rebels still unwilling to create  a free and fair country for black citizens as well as whites." "But as a tool to constrain executive abuse of power,and as a way publicize dissent on matters of policy and principle, it suggests that impeachment itself is the measure of success, however remote the likelihood of conviction."

#Deb Riechmann, Colleen Long and Nancy Benac, "Payback: Trump ousts officials..." The Albuquerque Journal, February 8, 2020.
"Exacting swift punishment against those who crossed him, an emboldened President Donald Trump...ousted the government officials who have delivered damaging testimony against him during the impeachment hearings."