I agree with the perspective of the WSJ's Editorial Board

The impeachment inquiry is a sham and a shame. I agree with the Editorial Board of the WSJ that, "what strikes us is the pre-cooked nature of the exercise. This isn’t a search for truth. It’s a set-piece production to promote a foregone conclusion." No one is seeking evidence to determine a verdict; both Ds and Rs are trying to use the current hearings as a platform for presenting their narratives and advancing the prospects for increasing their power in the 2020 elections. Impeachment is a serious job and requires honest and through investigation, not biased presentations and show trials.

A serious effort to determine whether or not Trump is guilty of "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" would look very different than what is occurring in DC. A serious effort would attempt to find out what happened and when.

1. Who did Trump tell to withhold assistance to Ukraine?
2. When did he tell this person or persons and what rational, if any, did he give?
3. When did assistance to Ukraine stop?
4. Who told Ukraine that it stopped and when?
5. Who told Ukraine that resumption of assistance was contingent on their meeting certain conditions?
6. What were the conditions?
7. When did this person or persons tell Ukraine?
8. Who initiated the order for this person or persons to describe the conditions to Ukraine and when? That is, who instructed this person or persons to rely the message to Ukraine? Who instructed that person, etc? 
9. When did assistance resume?
10. Who initiated the order for assistance to resume? That is, who instructed someone to release the assistance? Who instructed that person, etc? 
11. When did the initiator give the order and what rational, if any, did the initiator give?

The answers to these questions provide the evidence that people would need to make a serious determination of whether or not Trump's recent activities regarding Ukraine constitute impeachable offenses. 

Many questions currently being answered are irrelevant to the determination of whether or not Trump's recent activities regarding Ukraine constitute impeachable offenses. Two examples follow.

1. Did Giuliani work behind the scenes to oust an ambassador? I suppose if this ambassador was a roadblock to stopping the assistance it could be relevant.
2. Is cutting off assistance to Ukraine bad policy and contrary to the interest of the USA? Being a terrible President is not an impeachable offense. The Constitution limits a President's term to four years to reduce the damage a terrible President can wreak.

I agree with the WSJ Editorial Board that the current inquiry is setting a bad precedent. 

"In a healthier political culture, Democrats would be using the Ukraine episode as an argument against Mr. Trump’s re-election. How can you trust his foreign-policy judgment in a second term when he won’t have the check of another re-election?

"Instead Democrats have pulled out the constitutional bazooka of impeachment. They are doing so in partisan fashion, contrary to their earlier pledges, and in a political rush to beat the 2020 political calendar. On the evidence and the process to date, they are turning impeachment into a routine political weapon, and future Presidents of both parties will regret it."

Media Coverage of Russian Interference in the 2016 Election

The media's coverage of Russia's interference in the 2016 election is a sham and a shame. I fault the press for not doing more to explain the overlapping goals that the Russians may have had. I also fault the press for not doing more to tell us details about the about number of ads, number in favor of Trump, number against Trump, number neutral, how the intelligence agencies determined the numbers, and how the researchers for the press determined the numbers. 

I see two narratives of the interference, the narrative I think is accurate and the narrative that predominates in the media. My narrative is that the primary goals of the interference Russia was to increase political and social discord in the US and to create mud to throw at us when we claim that their elections are rigged.  The narrative that predominates in the media has three legs. "The Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goal of (1) harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, (2) boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and (3) increasing political and social discord in the United States" (number for items in list added). My preferred narrative focuses the third leg on for two reasons. First, since achieving the first two goals was the best way to achieve the third goal, the third goal is subsumes the first two. Second, the third goal is consistent with more of the ads run by Russia. 

The best way to sow political and social discord is to appeal to marginalized voters, attack presumptive winners, and foment dissent with the process for people who favor marginalized candidates. Ads that disparage H. Clinton, promote Trump, appeal to far right voters. attempt to suppress votes by African Americans are great ways to sow political and social discord. Ads in favor of Jill Stein, the Green party candidate, and Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic nomination, and ads that contradicted ads that people say favored Trump or disparaged H. Clinton can also increase discord by are not consistent with the narrative that the goal of was to harm the campaign of Hillary Clinton and to boost the candidacy of Donald Trump. I have trouble understanding how targeting "users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X" helps elect Trump. Ongoing disinformation efforts seem to me to be more consistent with my narrative that a narrative that includes electing Trump as a goal.

My preferred narrative includes a fourth goal. I think that Russia also wanted to throw mud on our election so that they could reply, "Pot, don't call the kettle black", when we complain that their elections are rigged. All of the ads mentioned above and the release of the email messages from the DNC are consistent with this fourth goal. What better way to create discord and evidence of rigged elections that to release emails from the DNC that disparage groups of voters or demonstrate that the DNC had their thumb on the scale in favor of H. Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. 

I fault the press for not doing more to explain the overlapping goals that the Russians may have had. I recognize that a simple story is easier to sell and that, "Russians wanted Trump to win", is simpler that "Russians wanted to sow discord and ads for Trumps and to marginalized groups is a great way to sow discord". However, selling simple stories is not great journalism. Telling a complex story simply is.

I recognize that my preferred narrative differs from summary from US government intelligence agencies. The agencies speak of sabotage and trying to help Trump win the election, not sowing discord and throwing mud. The report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and "produced by the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the ODNI, asserted that Russia had carried out a massive cyber operation ordered by Russian President Putin with the goal to sabotage the 2016 U.S. elections. The agencies concluded that Putin and the Russian government tried to help Trump win the election by discrediting Hillary Clinton and portraying her negatively relative to Trump, ... The report contained no information about how the data was collected and provided no evidence underlying its conclusions." Moreover, In May 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee stated that, "Our staff concluded that the [intelligence community's] conclusions were accurate and on point. The Russian effort was extensive, sophisticated, and ordered by President Putin himself for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton."

I have three possible responses to the summary from the intelligence agencies. The first response is that they may be correct and I may be wrong. Perhaps electing Trump was the real purpose of the Russian interference rather than a means to the real purpose of sowing discord. The second response is that the overlap between the goals is so substantial that figuring out which one is "correct" is pointless. The third response is that the agencies mis-characterized the interference. Intelligence agencies are not infallible; after all, these folks were sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps impartial observers would see so much evidence of interference that is NOT consistent with an attempt to elect Trump that they would conclude that an attempt to sow discord and to create mud is the best explanation for the actions. The Nation reports that the common narrative exaggerates the sophistication and misstates the apparent goal of the Russian disinformation.

I fault the news media for failing to press the intelligence agencies to learn more about how they reached the summary. The report released by the intelligence agencies did NOT present evidence. Why didn't the news media press them to provide evidence Better yet, why didn't a news agency conduct an independent investigation. News agencies studied intensively the votes in Florida after the 2000 election; why not the Russian ads in the 2016 election? No one knows if the ads ran 99 for Trump to 1 for Clinton or 50 for Trump, 20 for Stein, to 20 for Sanders, to 10 for Clinton. No one knows how they counted ads that prompted a rally to protest police violence against African Americans.

Robert Reich says billionaires should fear "us all"

Saying one group in our country should fear another group is a shame.  I expect the leader of a communist revolution to say that some folks should fear "us", but not a former Secretary of Labor. Our constitution is an attempt "to form a more perfect union" (emphasis added) and put in roadblocks to keep one group ruling without having broader support from other groups. If we think that having the 1% fear the 99% is OK, then we have no reason to think that having the 49% fear the 51% is not. We don't want people to fear government coercion; we want government to bring together all people to solve problems that they can''t solve well through voluntary action and exchange.