US Politics Mega-thread - Page 572

On October 26 2013 08:05 DoubleReed wrote:
The FED is technically supposed to be independent from the federal government.

Don't they have like quarterly hearings where Republicans rant at Bernanke about Austrian Economics? I'd be pretty damn suspicious of whatever audit they're suggesting. Sounds like politicizing the FED.

On October 27 2013 00:19 Thomas Sowell wrote:

You don't think the fed is already politicized? You think any administration wants to own a recession? The fed plays an important role but you don't have to believe in the gold standard to realize they've gone way overboard with low interest rates. At this point the fed isn't softening natural recessions, it is struggling with bubbles of it's own creation.

I don't know how anyone in good conscience can think auditing any government agency is a bad thing. Lumping auditing in with some political group you don't like is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

On October 27 2013 00:13 ticklishmusic wrote:
To be fair I actually kind of like Christie.

I don't even know how who would audit the Fed, like would you get E&Y, Deloitte, PWC or KPMG to do it and put their shiny seals of approval on it or what?

The NSA spying controversy is quickly transforming from a domestic headache for the Obama administration into a global public relations fiasco for the United States government.

After months of public and congressional debate over the National Security Agency’s collection of details on U.S. telephone calls, a series of reports about alleged spying on foreign countries and their leaders has unleashed an angry global reaction that appears likely to swamp the debate about gathering of metadata within American borders.

While prospects for a legislative or judicial curtailment of the U.S. call-tracking program are doubtful, damage from public revelations about NSA’s global surveillance is already evident and seems to be growing.

Citing the snooping disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Brazil’s president canceled a state visit to the U.S. set for this week. Leaders in France and Italy and Germany have lodged heated protests with Washington, with the Germans announcing plans to dispatch a delegation to Washington to discuss the issue. Boeing airplane sales are in jeopardy. And the European Union is threatening to slap restrictions on U.S. technology firms that profit from tens of millions of users on the Continent.

“Europe is talking about this. Some people in Europe are upset and may take steps to block us,” former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said in a telephone interview from Rome on Friday. “The reaction of retail politicians is to mirror the upset of the people who elected them.”

“Confidence between countries and confidence between governments are important and sometime decisive and there’s almost no confidence between the United States of America and Europe” now, former German intelligence chief Hansjörg Geiger said. “I’m quite convinced there will be an impact…. It will be a real impact and not only the [intelligence] services will have some turbulence.”

Some analysts see immediate trouble for U.S.-European arrangements to share information about airline passengers, financial transactions and more.

“The bigger problems are not in Berlin or Paris, but in the future out of Brussels,” said Michael Leiter, former head of the National Counterterrorism Center. “At the EU, I expect them to be very, very resistant to any increase — and to have problems even with maintenance—of some of the information sharing we have now…..All of this complicates those discussions exponentially.”

Leiter said the issues with Germany and France will likely pass, but that U.S. efforts to boost ties with rising powers could be rocky for some time. “It’s much more troublesome for rapidly emerging powers like Brazil,” he said. “They’re critical partners and we don’t have the same long-term, deep national security ties and I think this really does make it hard for us.”

Some analysts say the slow-to-build but intensifying damage overseas was predictable, but not really avoidable because of the legal structure the U.S. uses for vacuuming up communications. While the effectiveness of the controls are debated, collection of intelligence on U.S. soil and about U.S. citizens is regulated by the courts and by intelligence agency policies. Foreigners outside the U.S. are basically considered fair game for American intelligence agencies, with no legal restrictions and few other limits.

The early U.S. discussion “very much emphasized the protection of American rights and interests,” said Juan Zarate, a deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush. “The natural follow-on question is: What about everybody else?”

The impacts could be felt by the U.S in diplomatic circles and if foreign intelligence services rein in their cooperation. Another potential outcome: President Barack Obama may decide to pledge to stop spying on certain targets, like close allies, or for certain purposes, like gaining advantage in diplomatic negotiations.

“The real question is whether the administration here feels constrained not just to review our collection, but to start to constrain it to be able to contain the diplomatic fallout,” said Zarate, author of “Treasury’s War.” “If we’re really going to constrain what we’re doing, that to me is a long-term implication of all of this.”

Indeed, Obama already seems to be moving in that direction.

After fielding angry complaints from German Chancellor Angela Merkel about alleged NSA monitoring of her cell phone, Obama pledged to stop such activity, even as he demurred publicly about whether it had taken place.

“The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters Wednesday.

Geiger said Friday that Merkel seemed genuinely disturbed by the alleged tapping of her phone. “Chancellor Merkel was really upset,” Geiger told POLITICO. “The reaction was absolutely un-normal for her. She’s always very calm.”

Geiger said that before recent reports he would have dismissed as “nonsense” the idea that the U.S. would try to listen to Merkel’s phone.

“You have to divide between friends and enemies,” he said. “This kind of behavior regarding friends is not acceptable.”

Still, some former U.S. officials said they were surprised by Obama’s public pledge to Merkel, since it is likely to generate pressure from other foreign leaders for similar assurances.

French President François Hollande told reporters Friday he’d received a similar assurance from U.S. officials.

”They told us it was in the past and now there’s a will to organize things differently,” Hollande said, according to the Associated Press.

Obama’s pledges, if broadened to other nations or less senior officials, could create complications in situations where the U.S. suspects foreign government officials could be complicit in wrongdoing.

However, Harman said she believes it would be reasonable for Obama to limit diplomatic spying in order to preserve cooperation with the U.S. internationally on issues like terrorism.

“I commend the president for saying we need to review this…. I think there should be a line,” she said. “It’s important in our interconnected world for leaders of countries to trust each other.”

Harman, now head of the Wilson Center, also stressed that NSA anti-terror surveillance is often used by foreign countries to head off attacks on their soil.

The White House acknowledged this week that the NSA revelations have roiled U.S. ties with partners around the globe, but disputed the seriousness of the setbacks. “We have diplomatic relations and channels that we use in order to discuss these issues that have clearly caused some tension in our relationships with other nations around the world,” Carney said.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/nsa-disclosures-put-united-states-on-defense-98880.html?hp=f2

[...]
Der Spiegel said Merkel's mobile telephone had been listed by the NSA's Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 - marked as "GE Chancellor Merkel" - and was still on the list weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June.

In an SCS document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a "not legally registered spying branch" in the U.S. embassy in Berlin, the exposure of which would lead to "grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government".

From there, NSA and CIA staff were tapping communication in the Berlin's government district with high-tech surveillance.

Quoting a secret document from 2010, Der Spiegel said such branches existed in about 80 locations around the world, including Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague, Geneva and Frankfurt.

The magazine said it was not clear whether the SCS had recorded conversations or just connection data.
[...]

One Republican congressman from a heavily Hispanic district is signing on to a Democrat-led push to advance immigration reform before year's end, the Washington Post reported Saturday.

Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA) told the Post he's the first Republican to co-sponsor with 185 Democrats a plan giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, and he expects "more to come on board."

The plan takes up most of the Senate's bipartisan immigration bill, according to the Post, but includes a House GOP-approved border security bill. Denham told the Post he was sold on the plan when Democrats agreed to include a provision providing a path to citizenship for young immigrants who serve in the military.

Oct 21, 2013

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Sen. Rand Paul last week introduced S.J. Res. 25, a constitutional amendment that would hold government officials to the same standard as the American people. The amendment states that "Congress shall make no law applicable to a citizen of the United States that is not equally applicable to Congress." The amendment also contains two provisions that apply that same principle to the Executive Branch and Judicial Branch of the federal government. The amendment text can be found below:

On October 27 2013 09:50 kmillz wrote:
Whether you like or dislike Sen. Rand Paul, what do you guys think of his proposed Constitutional Amendment?



It really blows my mind that we would even need an amendment for this to be a law. Seems like it would be political suicide for anyone to vote against it, because that could be taken as they think they are above the law.

edit: Source

On October 27 2013 10:17 Velocirapture wrote:


Im pretty sure this is already law without the amendment. Knowing Rand Paul this is an attempt to create legal repercussions for voting on legislation. If a senator can be sued or jailed for an imperfect law then everybody will be too scared to do anything, exactly what he wants.

Some jobs take exceptional responsibility and if we demand perfection then we crush the profession. When a surgeon messes up and kills a patient he is not a murderer, he is human. When a senator messes up and passes a bad law he is not a criminal, he is human. Accountability is important in both professions but repercussions should be professional, not legal.

On October 27 2013 09:50 kmillz wrote:
Whether you like or dislike Sen. Rand Paul, what do you guys think of his proposed Constitutional Amendment?



It really blows my mind that we would even need an amendment for this to be a law. Seems like it would be political suicide for anyone to vote against it, because that could be taken as they think they are above the law.

edit: Source

On October 27 2013 10:44 kmillz wrote:
Does Obamacare apply to the people who wrote it?

On October 27 2013 10:44 kmillz wrote:
Does Obamacare apply to the people who wrote it?

If it does, then how would his law change anything about Obamacare? If not, why shouldn't it?

On October 27 2013 11:04 KwarK wrote:

It would not. But that doesn't mean it's not a cheap shot at Obamacare anyway, it not applying to legislators (even though it does) is still one of the main conservative talking points regarding it.

On October 27 2013 12:00 kmillz wrote:


I'm not trying to be a smartass, but aren't you contradicting yourself in these 2 bold statements? I must be misunderstanding you. I can't tell if you are saying it does apply or it does not, because you said it doesn't and then said (even though it does)

On October 27 2013 12:07 WolfintheSheep wrote:

He's saying it wouldn't change Obamacare at all, but that doesn't mean it's not a political potshot at it.

Less than two weeks removed from 2013's government shutdown, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) was clear about where he stands within the Republican Party on that strategy.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Post published Friday, Alexander offered an inside look into how he worked to help broker a deal to reopen the government, distancing himself from the tea party in the process.

“If all we do is stand around handing each other score cards, we won’t get anything done,” Alexander said. “That’s why, in the current health-care debate, I’m not in the shut-down-the-government crowd. I’m in the take-charge-of-the-government crowd, and get something done.”

As he gears up for his 2014 reelection bid, Alexander is already in a race with tea party overtones. Back in July, he faced protests over his decision to vote for immigration reform, dismissing the jeers with an "I didn't hear anything they said." Later in August, he received a letter from 20 tea party and conservative groups, asking him to retire, while criticizing his "compromise and bipartisanship."

Later that month, Tennessee state Rep. Joe Carr (R) announced that he would challenge the two-term incumbent, and by October, he had the support of several tea party groups.

"Lamar is popular, but there is a disconnect with his popularity to the way he has voted," Carr said in August.