Good AND Bad Deeds Going Unpunished

[captainsblog]

I suppose we should get the icky stuff out of the way first. Forty-three Republican Senators voted to acquit the former President of his role in the January 6 insurrection, which three days of testimony and one day of utter arglebargle had proven beyond any reasonable doubt in my mind- and probably in theirs.  I was not following the proceedings except in the car on various rounds yesterday. On the late morning drive, I heard about the vote to allow witnesses, which the original five brave Republicans joined in; that was followed promptly by Murdery Taylor Greene engaging in Twitter-ness intimidation of the one House Republican who could have confirmed What FPT Knew And When Did He Know It, and by the defense team threatening to prolong proceedings for weeks if not months by demanding depositions back in their offices in Philadelphia.

By my dog park run around 4, I turned NPR back on to hear it was all over; the witness demand was removed, the heads were counted, and a seventh new Republican mind was changed.  And then Moscow Mitch got up, with the most excoriating, condemning, and utterly self-serving non-acquittal-acquittal defense one could imagine: Well, golly gee shucks, I would have convicted that BADDDD MANNN in a heartbeat if only he'd still been in office, but due to circumstances totalluh beyond mah controllll....

::screams at radio:: YOU DUPLICITUOUS ASSHAT YOU'RE THE ONE THAT WOULDN'T RECONVENE THE SENATE TO TRY THE BASTARD UNTIL HE WAS OUT OF OFFICE!::

...thuh Constitution does not allow us this remedy so we will leave it to braver prosecutors than mahself to handle the death threats and doxing that will come from their investigations and trials.

Oh go back in your shell and fuck yourself, Turtle.

I've been wondering a lot about one piece of strategy in all this: why Democrats didn't try to hold a vote for a secret ballot? Reports circulated that they'd have easily garnered the needed additional ten votes if Senators could have done so in secrecy.  Not much was said about this before the verdict, and I haven't seen anything about it since, so here's my own spitballing about it:

* Democrats actually give a shit about what the Constitution says, and it's unclear whether such a vote could have been conducted and then kept secret:

Senate rules dictate that all votes must be cast publicly, which is reiterated in the standing rules for the impeachment trial. The Senate could hypothetically take the extraordinary action of changing these rules to make the vote private if they have enough votes to do so. However, an obscure part of the Constitution mandates that any senator can demand a public reading of the yeas and nays. So long as one-fifth of the Senate agrees on the motion, the votes will be made public. Our legal experts find it unlikely that there will be 81 Senators interested in keeping the vote secret.

* Because FPT's core group of Senate crazies would have publicly announced their acquittals, all other Republican Senators would have been presumed guilty of voting guilty and been subjected to the same primarying, censuring and QAnon death threats as if they'd been public all along.

* But my best guess (and that's all it is): Democrats really wanted the public vote. A much larger number of those Republican acquitters will be up for re-election in two years, and the odds of FPT being alive and healthy enough to even try a 2024 run, much less overcome the oppobrium hurled at him even by his acquitters, make it unlikely that he would even be hurt by the one real consequence of conviction- barring him from another run.  Plus, given political extremism, they may not have wanted the precedent in case a case is brought by the crazies against Biden (or Obama or Clinton or, hell, why not Jimmy Carter?) to impeach and try them after THEY left office?

The loser former President and his loserer sons have been strutting their cockfeathers, but I haven't seen even them using the word "exoneration" this time. Because it's not- and even they know it.

----

On a nicer note, it's comforting to be able to report a GOOD deed going unpunished for once.

Last Sunday, our dogwalk group met up as usual. One of the walkers is the oldest among us, her dog now too old as well to make it out and back. I was toting my ubiquitous Sunday Morning cuppa Timmy Joe, and somehow their rewards program came up.  Tim Horton's started one a few years ago, passing out plastic cards with QR codes. As often happens with reward program come-ons, they became so widely used that the company found ways to cut back on the goodies.  First, they changed the rules so it took more visits to get any kind of freebie; then, they stopped passing out the physical cards, going entirely with an app-based version that you could link to an actual card if you still had one.  Most relevant to our friend, though, they changed the redemption system: unless you told it what "point level" you wanted it to kick in a freebie, which varied by the value thereof, it defaulted to "banking" your points in perpetuity.

My card, and app, are set to the second lowest redemption option: a free coffee, which I now get every eight visits (each visit, whether you purchase a single coffee or a feast, gets you ten points, and the coffee kicks in at 80). But Darbi's was set to infinity and beyond. She had over 2,000 points on the thing. A kid at the window even told her she should be using her points to pay less... but he didn't tell her how.

"How" is by telling it on the app. Which she doesn't have, because she still has an oldschoool flip phone.  Or you can do it by registering their website, linking the card and then telling it that way.  Last Sunday, I offered to do this for her. She gave me her card, and then refused to take it back. I never buy much in there anyway, she said, and I'd have never figured it out.

So I registered it, linked to it, and the two Timmys I've had since have been half price since I set this one to the maximum redemption option of a free breakfast sammich (120 points per pop). She still has plenty of pops to go, eh?

I thanked her this morning. Here she is, to my right with Ellen behind the dog, her first time out with us since losing our beloved Jake:



Yes, I forgot the mask- and the phone, so these pictures are hers and Ann's. The other, I asked her to take- of this little Frosty guy that somebody built along the trail, which promptly got peed on:




Some days, you're the snowman, some days you're the plug;)