US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2670

On December 17 2015 03:39 Plansix wrote:
Pretty sure the agreement to leave Iraq was signed by Bush and we followed through with our end since they didn't want us there any more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.–Iraq_Status_of_Forces_Agreement

Yep, I'm right. And if we stayed and ANYTHING went wrong or a single American dies, the Republicans would be blaming Obama and Clinton for that. But violating treaties with sovereign nations is something we try to avoid.

On December 17 2015 03:04 KwarK wrote:

The US expressed regret that the incident happened in a non apology. They made restitution because they knew damn well they'd murdered a bunch of Iranians but that's not an apology.

It was a routine passenger airliner going down the US approved safe flight route it always took at the scheduled flight time. It was not doing anything that might have led anyone anywhere to believe that it was anything other than it was. Even the destroyer's Aegis Combat System recorded that rather than diving, as the crew claimed it was, it was rising and that it was squawking throughout on the civilian channels it should have been. The crew all adamantly claimed things that directly contradicted the records of their instruments to the point that the US in 2000 explained the incident as "scenario fulfillment", a mass hysteria resulting in working too long under pressure to the point that training protocols are carried out while ignoring sensory information that contradicts the scenario being fulfilled.

It was a fuckup of colossal proportions. Like imagine if you're a police officer and you volunteer to go to a school to do a talk about your job and you accidentally shoot a bunch of the kids because you thought they might be ISIS. That's how bad those sailors fucked up on their day at work. That police officer would not be getting told "don't worry, these things happen" and getting a medal at the end of the year.

The only appropriate response would have been to hand out court martials like candy. You don't give medals and say "these things happen". The American response to that incident was shameful and arrogant, consisting mostly of "well we're a superpower so basically you just have to eat shit because fuck you".


Edit: The Navy's own inquiry had this to say


Edit2: The wikipedia article would be funny if it wasn't a tragedy
So the Petty Officer who first picked up the plane on radar thought it was a civilian airliner so he started checking it against the records of the flights that would be happening. But it was dark so he didn't see flight 655 on the list.

Seriously?


Also the navy inquiry ruled out the skirmishing with Iranian gunboat explanation.


The navy inquiry basically went with "we checked the actual recordings from the instruments, from other ships and from our intelligence in the area and all of it contradicts the story we got from those dumbasses who decided to shoot down an airliner. We can only conclude that they're fucking morons there was some kind of mass hysteria that caused them to ignore all of the actual information."

New York agreed on Wednesday to overhaul how thousands of state inmates are punished within prison walls, settling a longstanding lawsuit by accepting a range of reforms to how solitary confinement operates.

The agreement, filed in federal court in Manhattan, comes after years of negotiations with the New York Civil Liberties Union, which sued the state over 23-hour confinement for rule violations, arguing the practice was extraordinarily harsh and psychologically damaging.

“Massive culture change is a challenge,” Donna Liberman, the executive director of the NYCLU, told reporters in announcing the agreement. “We need to be monitoring like a hawk and we will be monitoring like a hawk to ensure that the reforms are actually carried out.”

Once approved by a judge, some of the reforms outlined in the $62m, five-year plan should be implemented within three months.

Those include moving 1,100 of the roughly 4,000 prisoners currently serving time in solitary confinement for minor or nonviolent offenses into more secure, therapeutic housing units.

There are almost 60,000 prisoners in New York, housed in 54 prisons throughout the state.

The agreement also requires the state to retrain its 20,000 prison guards on de-escalation and other techniques, caps the number of days to 30 a prisoner will serve for a first-time, nonviolent offense, reduces the number of violations that carry solitary sentences and for the first time imposes a three-month maximum sentence for most rule violations.

The agreement leaves open exceptions for prisoners who commit extreme acts of violence or escape but also provides so-called step-down programs to effectively acclimate prisoners who have been in long-term isolation, even for violent offenses, before they’re released from custody.

On December 17 2015 04:09 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

So you agree that your previous post was wildly inaccurate, yes?

The fierce debate over screening visa applicants in the wake of the San Bernardino attacks was thrown into question on Wednesday after the head of the FBI said the married couple responsible for the shooting did not, as has been widely reported, make public social media posts supportive of jihad.

FBI director James Comey said there is no evidence to suggest the couple, who killed 14 people in California this month, were part of a terrorist cell and that while they had communicated “a joint commitment to jihad and to martyrdom”, those were private messages rather than open social media postings.

Democrats and Republicans have reacted with outrage in recent days to reports that Tashfeen Malik, 29, openly discussed her support for martyrdom in public social media posts which were overlooked due to a policy in the Department of Homeland Security against immigration officials from routinely inspecting the Facebook and Twitter accounts of visa applicants.

Malik, who was Pakistani, traveled to the US in July last year, two months after acquiring her K-1, or fiancée, visa. She later married Syed Rizwan Farook, 28; though the couple is also thought to have married shortly after meeting in Saudi Arabia in 2013.

On December 17 2015 05:34 Plansix wrote:
The only time I was worried about a defendant coming to find me was when we were dealing with sovereign citizens who didn't want to pay their bills or move out of property they didn't own. And getting any sheriff to serve legal paperwork on them in a nightmare.

On December 17 2015 05:42 KwarK wrote:

Did their corporate entity own the property? And who were you trying to serve, the individual, the person or the corporate entity? Did you check the capitalization of their name, that often provides clues?

On December 17 2015 05:48 Plansix wrote:

They have demanded my death or banishment for attempting to contact them on the land they owned. They also cited the magna carta as proof my client had not power over them. One guy sent in 400 pages “documentation” proving his family line back to before the founding of the US, proving that his family and his rights to all claims predated any laws we were attempting to enforce. One issued a “warrant and legal bounty” out my attorney and me, which he attempted to publish in the local paper and Boston Globe. He then attempted to enjoin them into our case for failing to publish the “legal bounty” and have them banished, shut down or "their printing press ruled his legal property."

So yeah, it was all a nightmare and the sheriffs hated us for making them deal with these people. And all their power comes directly from the internet, because they all use the same legal bullshit.

On December 17 2015 05:56 KwarK wrote:
They sound less hilarious if you have to interact with them. But the youtube videos of them in court are pretty good.

Incidentally my family tree goes back even longer than the history of the US. I can't trace it but I suspect it might even predate the Roman Empire. And the atoms I'm composed of are even older. You may be able to compel me the person to follow your laws but me, the collection of atoms, does not recognize any authority but physics.

Staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee are looking into whether Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) disclosed classified information during the debate, according to the committee chair.

"I'm having my staff look at the transcripts of the debate right now," Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Wednesday, according to The Hill. "Any time you deal with numbers... the question is 'Is that classified or not?' or is there an open source reference to it."

While Rubio and Cruz were debating each other's records on national security and surveillance, Cruz got into some details about what the bulk data program covers.


"What he knows is that the old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists," Cruz said, referring to Rubio. "The new program covers nearly 100 percent. That gives us greater ability to stop acts of terrorism, and he knows that that’s the case."

It's not clear if Cruz, who is unpopular with many of his Senate colleagues, revealed classified information. But in his response to Cruz, Rubio noted that he did not want to say too much about the program.

"Let me be very careful when answering this, because I don’t think national television in front of 15 million people is the place to discuss classified information," Rubio said. "So let me just be very clear. There is nothing that we are allowed to do under this bill that we could not do before."

And Roll Call noted that just after Cruz made that statement, Burr's communications director indicated that the Texas senator said too much.

On December 17 2015 05:54 ticklishmusic wrote:

Why the hell would you cite the Magna Carta...

On December 17 2015 05:56 KwarK wrote:
They sound less hilarious if you have to interact with them. But the youtube videos of them in court are pretty good.

Incidentally my family tree goes back even longer than the history of the US. I can't trace it but I suspect it might even predate the Roman Empire. And the atoms I'm composed of are even older. You may be able to compel me the person to follow your laws but me, the collection of atoms, does not recognize any authority but physics.