Christmas Eve from Cuba

It was another rollicking International Christmas Eve at our house.

For the 12th year, we celebrated the food and culture of another region and country. This year it was Cuba.

We choose the country mid-year, and Wife begins planning doing her research. One thing she learned this year was that, for many of the years (30, maybe?) Cuba was under the rule of Castro, Christmas was not celebrated. So finding Cuban Christmas traditions was not easy.

But finding recipes and décor to lend ambiance to the occasion? She came through in spades, as always, and she even found a playlist of Christmas music with a Cuban beat!

Here is a glimpse of the party last night. Merry Christmas to all!

Impeachment

In the early days of this blog, I wrote a fair amount about politics.

Over time, however, the fire in my belly has subsided considerably. I'm still interested in government and politics, but candidates rarely excite me, and never to the point that I put a bumper sticker on my car or a sign in my yard.

I always vote, and I'm an independent voter. I never registered to vote as a Democrat or Republican. As far as I know, in the two states where I have lived (Arkansas and Tennessee), a voter is not required to name a party affiliation when registering.

You could go back and read some early blog entries and conclude I was a staunch conservative, and maybe at the time I was. I have probably voted for more GOP presidential candidates in my time than Democratic.

But today I am strictly independent. In the last presidential election, I voted for the Libertarian candidate. I was not going to vote for Donald Trump and I couldn't bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton.

If I had it to over again, I would vote for Hillary. Not because I am a big fan of hers (I'm certainly not), but because I think she would be a decent president. She's smart. She listens. And she's a good dealmaker, like her husband (thought without his charm, which was a contributing factor in her 2016 loss to Trump).

All of that is an aside to the subject at hand, which is the impeachment of one Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States.

He will now be known as the third U.S. president to be impeached, following Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Neither Johnson nor Clinton were removed from office following a Senate trial.

Richard Nixon would almost certainly have been impeached and removed from office in 1974, but he resigned before it went through. He knew what was coming and he decided to avoid the embarrassment of it.

For students of the U.S. Constitution, it's an interesting process. Impeachment is discussed in three different sections of the Constitution. It is stated in Article 3, Section 4 that a president "shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Article 1, Section 2 gives the House of Representatives "sole power of impeachment" and Article 1, Section 3 gives the U.S. Senate authority to oversee the trial portion of the impeachment process, and to decide whether the president is to be removed from office based on the impeachment article(s) passed by the House. It takes a two-thirds majority vote to do so.

The House has now passed two impeachment articles concerning Trump, and a Senate trial will take place early next year.

Because there are not enough Democrats in the Senate to get a two-thirds majority, and not enough Republicans to join them to vote for a conviction, Trump is almost sure be acquitted just as Johnson and Clinton were.

You see, it's all about politics. The Dems have wanted to impeach Trump since the day he took office (or before, really), just as the Republicans wanted to impeach Clinton from the day he was sworn in in 1993.

With a vague term like "high crimes and misdemeanors," which does not bring with it the evidentiary requirements of a typical criminal proceeding, the Republicans were able to get Clinton when he covered up his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and perjured himself. Similarly, the Dems got the goods on Trump due to his "quid quo pro" conversation with the Ukrainian president and purposely stalling the congressional investigation of same.

But in Clinton's case, there were not enough votes in the Senate for a conviction, just at it will be with Trump.

It's interesting that it took well over 100 years for presidential impeachments proceedings to commence after it first happened to Andrew Johnson. Now it's happened twice in my lifetime.

The Democrats' ploy, in my opinion (because they know the Senate will acquit him), is to shame Trump so much that those swing voters who put him in the White House last time will change their minds and keep him from being elected again.

Based on recent history, however, Trump plans to turn this all back on his accusers, allowing as to how they tried to cripple him and keep him from doing his job, and waste a whole lot of time and money in so doing.

How can you not re-elect me, he'll say in not say many words, when you have Bozos like this wanting to run the country?

Less than one year from now, we'll know if the strategy of the Democrats worked, or Trump succeeded in having the last laugh (on Twitter, no doubt).

Almost done with “the teens”

It only recently occurred to me that we are nearing the end of a decade.

Apparently the decade soon concluding will be known as “the teens,” while the one before that is “the aughts.”

Those are somewhat awkward labels and the decades will be easier to name for the remainder of this century, starting with the 20s.

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Christmas is upon us. Wife and I got the tree up earlier than we usually do, during the week right after Thanksgiving, which I realize these days is considered late.

For the first time in I don’t know how many years, we are not sending Christmas cards. I’m the one who always does them for us, and I usually try to get a family picture taken to include, and I often write a letter.

But this year I released myself. It’s not like I’m any busier or more preoccupied than usual; I simply didn’t get them done.

We tried taking family photos at Thanksgiving and they were not very good, so I decided to punt. There’s a chance we might try again next week and I’ll send New Year’s cards, but I would say the chances are 50-50. I know life will go on, but I really did miss doing the cards this year.

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We are still blessed to have everyone join us for Christmas. We will have our traditional international Christmas Eve celebration on the 24th (this year is Cuba!), and the married ones will spend Christmas Day with in-laws while Wife, Younger Son and I will spend a quiet day and go see a movie.

We will all gather back at our place on the 26th, which has become our day to celebrate Christmas. For the past several years that has worked well for us.

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I’ll be posting my year-end book reviews — non-fiction first, then fiction — soon, if not by the end of the year, shortly thereafter. I’ve read so many good books this year, it’s going to be hard to pick favorites. If I had thought of it sooner, I might have tried to pick favorites from the past decade, or “favorites from the teens.”