Peter Murmann

Diary, Politics

Peggy Noonan gives an interesting rationale for why Bolton and Biden should be called as witnesses

24 January 2020

PM: I watched a couple of hours of debate on the first day of the Senate impeachment trial when the two parties fought over the rules. It was interesting to watch the arguments but the senate leader had counted the votes and all amendments to the rules were voted down 53 to 47. Every single Republican senator stayed with the “save our president” coalition. The most interesting questions is whether a few senators after the first 5 days will be willing to call witnesses. Peggy Noonan published the most interesting commentary I have read on the trial in the past couple of days.

Impeachment Needs Witnesses on Both Sides
Forget Democrats and Republicans. The interests of a third party, History, are more important.

Diary, Politics

Small majority for Impeachment

23 January 2020

Movies, Comedy

The perfect secret (Das perfekte Geheimnis)

11 January 2020

Imagine you know absolutely everything about another person, and you can fully predict what the person will think and do in the future. Would this help or hurt a relationship? This extreme form of knowing someone else does no exist but we all have a sense that we know some people much better than others.  Some people we can trust and we can predict with high certainty that they will behave well toward us. Other people, by contrast,  are complete wild cards and their unpredictability in thought and action can terrorize us.

Diary, Politics

Impeachment

20 December 2019

I have two sentiments about impeachment. One the one hand, I am sad that Trump whose actions are clearly worse than what Nixon did and that he will not get removed from office and I pitty Republicans who have to defend actions that are indefensible. But I also acknowledge that congressmen and senators reflect accurately what their masters the voters want. 48 percent want Trump removed and 48 want him to be left in office and face voters judgments next November. Here is a very interesting graphic courtesy of the Walll Street Journal that shows that congressman vote largely reflecting what their constituency wants.

Movies, Drama

Once upon a time in Hollywood

15 December 2019

The attentive reader of my blog will have noticed that I like movies very much. If I had a 2nd chance to start my work life over, I might put all my efforts into becoming a movie critic for a major newspaper. So when a film about Hollywood is made, the city where so much of the history of film has been written, I am obviously curious. Especially, when the director is Quentin Tarantino, who I boycotted for most of my life but warmed up in Django Unchained (here you find my 2012 review).

Never seen before on Breitbart. A story that does not support Donald Trump

5 December 2019

Not sure why Breitbart let a critical voice of Trump onto its platform. Have not seen this before.

Humor, People, The Best

“Can you please wait and impeach me after my 2nd term is over”

3 December 2019

This needs to be filled in the humor category. Breitbart made me laugh…who would have thought. The actual headline was this: