US Politics Mega-thread - Page 10071

On March 16 2018 11:47 Plansix wrote:

I think so? Or maybe it was his shitty wife that yelled at some tax payer on instagram? It’s like a banquet of shitheels up in the White House and no human has the bandwidth to keep track of which of them is back on their bullshit.

On March 16 2018 08:45 Falling wrote:
You express many words reiterating the problem with the US police force. Granted. Now what has that to do with abolishing the police? (As opposed to bringing it in line with other modern police forces.) I'm not contesting you on the problem. I'm contesting you on your proposed solution, but whenever I ask about your solution, you go back to explaining the problem. That wasn't what I was asking. Granted. The problem exists. Now how does the solution proposed actually solve the problem?


These are all nice words. Very aspirational. But what happens when humans fail? What happens when people don't act justly and love mercy or walk humbly. What happens when they still break the law? Who steps in and how is it different from before? I'm asking the same question because I'm still not receiving an answer. So let's try a different approach: presuppositions.

What is the nature of humans? Do you believe that given the right set of restorative justice practices and given enough years that we can end crime? And I don't mean we just decriminalize everything so there is no law to break, but that given the right societal conditions, do humans to a man (woman and child) have the potential to always do no harm to each other and each others' property?

On March 16 2018 15:25 GreenHorizons wrote:
How do you currently measure the efficacy of police?

On March 16 2018 15:34 Aquanim wrote:

That's a very complicated question for anybody to answer, and probably requires a lot of work.

Have you given an answer to it in this thread? I haven't followed super-closely.

On March 16 2018 15:39 GreenHorizons wrote:


I said they pretty much can't, in no small part because police actively fight keeping the statistics you would need, and face virtually no consequence when found lying constantly in reports. There's more but we can start with that.

On March 16 2018 16:37 Aquanim wrote:

That's not an unreasonable point. However, I think this conversation isn't going to get anywhere unless you define what metrics you think would define an effective police force (or equivalent), or put another way "what is a police force for".

Until you define that and sort out the discrepancies with other people's views on the subject, I am pretty sure that this conversation will continue to be mostly talking at cross purposes.

He said he was a multimillionaire – an international property developer with a plan to fix America’s cities through radical privatization. He felt that Donald Trump’s administration was where he was meant to work.

“It was a natural fit,” Naved Jafry said in an interview. Citing connections across the military, business and academia, he said: “I bring, and draw on, experiences from different areas of knowledge, like a polymath.”

Jafry was contracted to work for Trump’s housing and urban development department (Hud). His government email signature said his title was senior adviser. Jafry said he used his role to advocate for “microcities”, where managers privately set their own laws and taxes away from central government control.

But those plans are now stalled. Jafry, 38, said he had resigned from his position with Hud after the Guardian asked him to explain multiple allegations of fraud as well as exaggerations in his biography.

Jafry, who has also been known by Jafari and Jafri, apologised for inflating his military record but denied making other false claims. He said he resigned because the Guardian’s questions tarnished his reputation inside Hud.

“You and I both know we live in the world of opinion and facts merging together,” he said.

Hud declined to discuss Jafry. The finding may present a new problem for Hud secretary Ben Carson. On Thursday, Sarah Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, said the White House was “looking into” a controversy around a $31,000 furniture set ordered for Carson’s office. After Carson claimed he had no involvement, emails released on Wednesday said he and his wife actually “picked out” the set.

Styling himself as an “entrepreneur and philanthropist”, Jafry said he controlled a multimillion-dollar trust fund built since 1885 by relatives in India. According to court records, however, he struggled to pay rent and bills while engaging in a series of failed takeovers of gas stations and other ventures in Texas over the past decade.

On March 16 2018 10:14 Plansix wrote:

You can’t be compelled to testify against your spouse. It’s a pretty broad protection too.

On March 16 2018 19:38 Gorsameth wrote:

But if she wants to talk she is free to do so no? Which is what was implied at the start of this chain on the news of Jr's divorce.

On March 16 2018 19:42 Acrofales wrote:

Don't think you have to be divorced either. Although I'm sure testifying against your husband is a sign of a pretty rotten marriage

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s use of military aircraft has cost taxpayers nearly $1 million for eight trips, newly released documents show.

That includes a one-week trip to the Middle East in late October, which cost $183,646 for flights on military aircraft. That trip came on top of $811,797.81 in previously reported expenditures for government-funded military aircraft.

Emails and other documents were obtained by watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington through a Freedom of Information Act request. They corroborate information released in October by the Treasury Department’s inspector general about Mnuchin’s plane use.

Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration are facing scrutiny for their use of government-funded flights. EPA chief Scott Pruitt has drawn criticism for flying first class. And former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign last year after facing intense fire over his extensive use of taxpayer-funded charter flights.

“Secretary Mnuchin is one of a host of cabinet secretaries who collectively have incurred millions of dollars of airfare expenses just during the first year of the Trump administration,” CREW said in its report on the documents.

The group said the Treasury chief could schedule calls “when he is not on a short domestic flight“ and could potentially use smaller aircraft.

Treasury released the documents under FOIA until after CREW filed a lawsuit.

On March 16 2018 16:52 GreenHorizons wrote:


I think not being able to measure the efficacy of the police system they say is good enough (with reforms that never come and can't be measured) should have been an immediately apparent problem for them with their position.

If their assertion is that what we have is working better than what I'm suggesting, I agree it's important we establish how they are arriving at that metric. I disagree that it's on me to provide that to them.

Ever since she was a little girl, Fatou Diouf has been braiding hair. And for almost two decades, Fatou has turned that tradition into a vocation by working professionally as a licensed natural hair stylist in Tennessee.

“I never did any other job but hair braiding my whole life,” she said. “I cannot recall a time when I did not know how.”

But in recent years, Tennessee has forced Fatou to pay a staggering $16,000 in fines, simply because she employed workers who did not have a government license to braid hair. Nor is she alone. After examining meeting minutes and disciplinary actions for the Tennessee Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners, the Institute for Justice has identified nearly $100,000 in fines levied against dozens of braiders and more than 30 different natural hair shops and salons since 2009. All of those violations were for unlicensed braiding; none were triggered by any health or sanitation violation.

With a rich heritage dating back thousands of years, natural hair styles—which shun the use of any potentially harsh chemicals—have grown increasingly popular in many African American and immigrant communities. Today, braiders are free to work without a license in almost half the country.

But in Tennessee, only licensed “natural hair stylists” may earn a living by braiding, twisting, wrapping, weaving, extending or locking hair. Obtaining that license can be quite the ordeal. Braiders must complete at least 300 hours of coursework, which often means sacrificing the equivalent of working almost two months full-time. Across the entire state, only 3 schools offer those courses, charging anywhere from $1,500 to $5,000 for tuition.

On March 16 2018 22:54 Aquanim wrote:

It's not on you to provide them with their own metrics, but if you want to convince anybody to change the status quo in the way you want, it is on you to provide your own.

On March 16 2018 22:57 GreenHorizons wrote:...
One I would start with is transparency and they are failing miserably. If they want to argue I'm not convincing that's fine, that's different than not being right.

In Los Angeles, the more the politicians push to solve the city’s festering homelessness crisis, the worse it seems to get.

The city leadership has taken one bold step after another: restructuring the budget to free more than $100m a year in homelessness funding, sponsoring one voter-approved initiative to raise more than $1bn for housing and backing another regional proposal to raise the sales tax and generate an estimated $3.5bn for support services over the next decade. And yet the tent cities continue to proliferate, in rich neighborhoods and poor, by the beach, the airport, the Hollywood Walk of Fame and within view of City Hall itself.

It’s the sorriest urban scene anywhere in America, and the same voters who not so long ago opened their hearts and their wallets to put an end to it are growing increasingly impatient. As the numbers of homeless people continue to rise – the latest figures put the countywide number at 58,000, up more than 20% in a single year – and new encampments spring up on sidewalks, under freeways, and along stretches of river and rail lines, the politicians who not so long ago were earning praise for their courage are facing the beginnings of an angry backlash.

“How many people have we housed?” the Los Angeles Times asked impatiently in a blistering series of editorials late last month. “How many are we on track toward housing? Is Los Angeles setting the national standard for rapid and effective response to a vexing problem? Or are its leaders merely mastering the art of appearances while passing the buck and hoping things turn around? … Who’s in charge here?”

Most infuriating, to the Times and to many others, has been the reluctance of many LA city council members to move forward on supportive-housing projects. More than a year after the money became available, just two of the first 10 sites identified as easiest to build quickly have broken ground, leaving the others hostage to neighborhood groups anxious about having people with addiction and mental health problems move in next door.

The politicians are clearly feeling the heat from the Times series. Two city council members responded by announcing they were pushing ahead with housing projects they’d previously blocked.

It’s not clear, though, whether the politicians entirely deserve the opprobrium, or if it just seems that progress has stalled because the problem continues to grow for reasons beyond their control.

Greg Spiegel, who served as Mayor Eric Garcetti’s homelessness coordinator and now works for a providing legal services to the poor and homeless, sees the crisis as so complex and intractable – the result of decades of national and local housing policies, as well as broader macroeconomic trends – that he called it America’s new Vietnam, and tackling it an act of moral bravery but, perhaps, of political folly.

Despite appearances, recent efforts utilizing existing housing stock have in fact made a big difference. “We saw 14 or 15,000 people permanently housed last year,” Spiegel said. “That’s a lot of people, more than ever before, triple what it was three or four years ago.”

And since a sales-tax boost went into effect, the number of social workers, mental health specialists and others working directly with people on the streets has quadrupled across the county, according to Alisa Orduna, the homelessness coordinator for Santa Monica.

“When you see someone yelling outside a 7-Eleven in your neighborhood, you can have a much higher degree of confidence now that that person is on someone’s radar, which is the first step toward getting them off the street,” she said.

Orduna likened the region’s response to homelessness to the national response to the Aids crisis in the 1980s. The effort entails building a whole new infrastructure from scratch – one that involves churches, private businesses, not-for-profit groups and individual volunteers as well as government agencies.

For example, Methodist churches across South LA, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, are looking for ways to use their land and buildings for housing. A church in Santa Monica recently opened up housing units for homeless college students.

The crisis, however, is galloping ahead of such initiatives. Los Angeles has a 2% vacancy rate, which is causing rents to soar and creating a whole new pool of people who are just one medical emergency or job loss away from becoming homeless themselves.

“We have got to make it easier, less costly and faster to build housing of all types in Los Angeles,” said Michael Lens, a housing policy specialist and professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. Politicians are only part of the problem, he said. He also sees a pervasive attitude, especially among older Angelenos, that this should be a city predominantly of single-family homes and that creating greater urban density is somehow a betrayal of the city’s essence.

On March 16 2018 22:33 Plansix wrote:
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510310/npr-politics-podcast

The NPR politics podcast has hit for this week. Interesting fact: the student activism this week is the largest instance of high school activism in US history. They also get into the dynamics of the democratic party and finding candidates to fit the district.