US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5639

On October 19 2016 05:21 JinDesu wrote:


Suddenly all support gone from Republican senators.

On October 19 2016 05:15 Buckyman wrote:
I would be a whole lot less sympathetic to the 'rigged election' claims if there weren't a clear pattern of the Clinton campaign skirting various campaign finance laws - coordinating with super-PACs, using paid speeches to raise funding in between hiring a campaign office and letting the FEC know she's running and the state party donation laundering during the primary.

Granted, Trump probably would have found a way to lose a completely fair election, but that's beside the point - the Clinton campaign felt the need to cheat anyway.

On October 19 2016 06:11 Danglars wrote:

You think that's where the support he needs lies? The establishment he actively campaigned against?

On October 19 2016 04:26 Danglars wrote:

There's an investigation now, and multiple records of ethics violations and improprieties that are made public long after the fact. Otherwise, what scrutiny? They ran it for years with aggressive fundraising from foreign governments without backlash for clear conflicts of interest.

Well, that and Hillary's inept handling of coverups and corruption seen in the email scandal. Hubris may still be the death of her.

On October 19 2016 06:23 Slaughter wrote:


Trump advocating for term limits for congress? Finally one thing I can agree with him on.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was imprisoned by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for more than 14 years, was released on Monday, according to the Pentagon.

Slahi returned to his home country of Mauritania. A YouTube video showed him at a family home in Nouakchott, Mauritania, reports the Miami Herald, "thanking God, his government and the Mauritanian people."

In 2005, Slahi wrote a 446-page handwritten account of his imprisonment, titled Guantanamo Diary. When it was published in January 2015, heavily redacted by government censors, the book made Slahi one of the best-known prisoners at Guantanamo. The memoir went on to be a best-seller in the U.S.

In an interview with NPR in January, Hina Shamsi, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, explained how Slahi came to be imprisoned in 2002.

"He wasn't captured on a battlefield," she said. "He voluntarily turned himself over to authorities in his native country of Mauritania for questioning."

Then, Shamsi said, Slahi was "subjected to one of the most brutal torture regimes at Guantanamo."

NPR's David Welna has reported that what Americans did to Slahi during his time in custody was "extraordinary" compared to interrogations of other Guantanamo detainees.

The Obama administration has won an early round in the legal battle over its drive to require local schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to the students' gender identity.

On Tuesday, a federal magistrate in Chicago recommended that a judge reject a preliminary injunction in which a group of students and parents sought to block enforcement of that policy and reverse local policies allowing a transgender girl to use girls' locker rooms at a high school in Palatine, Illinois.

“High school students do not have a constitutional right not to share restrooms or locker rooms with transgender students whose sex assigned at birth is different than theirs,” Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Gilbert wrote in an 82-page report. “In addition, sharing a restroom or locker room with a transgender student does not create a severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive hostile environment under Title IX given the privacy protections [the school district] has put in place in those facilities and the alternative facilities available to students who do not want to share a restroom or locker room with a transgender student.”

Gilbert also said he doubted the plaintiffs’ claim that the Education Department failed to abide by the Administrative Procedure Act when interpreting Title IX to include protections for transgender students.

U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Alonso, who is overseeing the case, is not legally required to follow Gilbert’s recommendations. Further litigation before Alonso is all but certain. However, district court judges usually adopt the preliminary rulings from magistrates.

The Obama administration’s interpretation of existing civil rights laws to provide protections for transgender students has received a mixed reception in the courts.

The Richmond, Va.-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 in April that the administration acted within its authority when it used such reasoning to order a Gloucester County, Virginia, school to accommodate a transgender boy seeking to use the boys’ bathroom. The Supreme Court stayed that ruling temporarily pending a decision by the justices about whether to review the case.

In August, a federal district court judge in Texas issued a nationwide injunction against the administration, blocking Education Department and Labor Department enforcement of civil rights laws to protect transgender individuals. That judge has said he’s considering narrowing or clarifying the scope of his injunction, but he has not yet done so.

On October 19 2016 06:23 LegalLord wrote:
Trump had a much stronger argument for "this election is rigged" when he was winning the primary than when he is losing the general.

On October 19 2016 07:59 LegalLord wrote:
The primary was rigged more so in that there were people who genuinely conspired to remove him from the ticket despite being the front runner. Whether or not you agree that they should have done it, that really could be argued as rigging.