US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6501

On January 05 2017 06:32 LegalLord wrote:

Well this is an outrage! I'm hopping furious about this abuse of campaign funds!

Hunter, who represents most of Temecula, reimbursed his campaign about $49,000 last year after an independent review he commissioned found expenses described as inappropriate or made in error. These include charges for groceries, fast food and items in connection with a trip to Italy Hunter took with his wife.
Kasper said an upcoming ethics office report on Hunter will contain “findings or implications are significantly misrepresented or even exaggerated.” As an example, he cited an expense related to flying the Hunter children’s pet rabbit.
“(The office) has in their report $600 in campaign expenditures for in cabin rabbit transport fees,” Kasper said. “Since travel is often done on (airline) miles – which is entirely permissible – the credit card connected to the account was charged several times even when his children were flying.”
“This was nothing more than an oversight. In fact, it’s such an obvious example of a mistake being made but (the office) wants to view it through a lens of possible intent. The same goes for many other expenditures.”
“Many of Representative Hunter’s repayments had to do with mistakes under specific circumstances,” Kasper added. “And in other cases there were bona fide campaign activities connected to expenditures that (the office) was not aware of and didn’t account for.”

Republicans are just getting started on their years-long dream of repealing Obamacare, and already, there are fears that things are moving too fast.

Some Republicans are cautioning against repealing the Affordable Care Act too quickly and urging the party take the foot off the accelerator. The reason: there's no plan on how to replace what they roll back. And while GOP lawmakers are eager to please their base with headlines of Obamacare's repeal, they don't want to be blamed for leaving people without health insurance and chaos in the healthcare market.

Sen. John McCain told reporters Tuesday that he supports taking a slower approach to repealing the law, saying he is "always worried about something that took a long time in the making and we've got to concentrate our efforts to making sure that we do it right so that nobody's left out."

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House Speaker and a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, told CNN that a big risk for Republicans is getting blamed for taking away people's health coverage.

On January 05 2017 06:54 Doodsmack wrote:


CNN

The onus is on Republicans to fix not just Obamacare, but healthcare in the US. That is the mantle they've been handed. Will be interesting to see what their replacement is.

On January 05 2017 07:02 LegalLord wrote:
Next time around the Democrats should push universal healthcare rather than an ultimately short-sighted slop of compromise.

On January 05 2017 07:16 Mohdoo wrote:


They didn't have enough democrats supportive of universal healthcare last time, but hopefully we see a somewhat Bernie'esque rebirth so the party can get away from the era of Clinton.

On January 05 2017 07:25 GreenHorizons wrote:


Not if Kwiz/Mag has anything to say about it. I'm telling you, Clinton's running in 2020 if her health holds up.

On January 05 2017 07:25 GreenHorizons wrote:


Not if Kwiz/Mag has anything to say about it. I'm telling you, Clinton's running in 2020 if her health holds up.

IN THE PAST six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.

The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had claimed. In addition to the editor’s note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.

But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper’s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).

After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.
....
But after that story faced a barrage of intense criticism — from Adrian Chen in the New Yorker (“propaganda about Russia propaganda”), Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (“shameful, disgusting”), my own article, and many others — including legal threats from the sites smeared as Russian propaganda outlets by the Post’s “independent researchers” — the Post finally added its lengthy editor’s note distancing itself from the anonymous group that provided the key claims of its story (“The Post … does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings” and “since publication of the Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list”).

What did Baron tell his followers about this editor’s note that gutted the key claims of the story he hyped? Nothing. Not a word. To date, he has been publicly silent about these revisions. Having spread the original claims to tens of thousands of people, if not more, he took no steps to ensure that any of them heard about the major walk back on the article’s most significant, inflammatory claims.

Indeed, in my 10-plus years of writing about politics on an endless number of polarizing issues — including the Snowden reporting — nothing remotely compares to the smear campaign that has been launched as a result of the work I’ve done questioning and challenging claims about Russian hacking and the threat posed by that country generally. This is being engineered not by random, fringe accounts, but by the most prominent Democratic pundits with the largest media followings.

I’ve been transformed, overnight, into an early adherent of alt-right ideology, an avid fan of Breitbart, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, and — needless to say — a Kremlin operative. That’s literally the explicit script they’re now using, often with outright fabrications of what I say (see here for one particularly glaring example).

They, of course, know all of this is false. A primary focus of the last 10 years of my journalism has been a defense of the civil liberties of Muslims. I wrote an entire book on the racism and inequality inherent in the U.S. justice system. My legal career involved numerous representations of victims of racial discrimination. I was one of the first journalists to condemn the misleadingly “neutral” approach to reporting on Trump and to call for more explicit condemnations of his extremism and lies. I was one of the few to defend Jorge Ramos from widespread media attacks when he challenged Trump’s immigration extremism. Along with many others, I tried to warn Democrats that nominating a candidate as unpopular as Hillary Clinton risked a Trump victory. And as someone who is very publicly in a same-sex, inter-racial marriage — with someone just elected to public office as a socialist — I make for a very unlikely alt-right leader, to put that mildly.

The malice of this campaign is exceeded only by its blatant stupidity. Even having to dignify it with a defense is depressing, though once it becomes this widespread, one has little choice.

But this is the climate Democrats have successfully cultivated — where anyone dissenting or even expressing skepticism about their deeply self-serving Russia narrative is the target of coordinated and potent smears; where, as The Nation’s James Carden documented yesterday, skepticism is literally equated with treason. And the converse is equally true: Those who disseminate claims and stories that bolster this narrative — no matter how divorced from reason and evidence they are — receive an array of benefits and rewards.

That the story ends up being completely discredited matters little. The damage is done, and the benefits received. Fake News in the narrow sense of that term is certainly something worth worrying about. But whatever one wants to call this type of behavior from the Post, it is a much greater menace given how far the reach is of the institutions that engage in it.

On January 05 2017 07:31 Thieving Magpie wrote:


I'm fairly certain neither Kwiz nor Me have argued for Clinton to run again. Us asking you for evidence when you make wild claims and accusations doesn't really count as us suggesting Clinton run again.

On January 05 2017 07:31 Mohdoo wrote:


I am 100% certain she will not run. If nothing else, she has no support. She is the reason we lost Wisconsin for the first time since 1992. There were reasonable arguments in favor of Clinton in 2016, even if shaky. She was put to the test and lost. She didn't just lose by not securing Florida. She lost by losing our own states. That matters. She won't run again. I imagine in 2020 we will see someone between Clinton and Bernie who supports single payer, legal marijuana and a New York perspective on higher education. There will be no talk of racism or sexism or any labeling of any kind used as a method of distinguishing. It will be a meme overload of reasons why Socialist policy is effective and better for society.

If she ran, I don't think Kwizach or Thieving Magpie would vote for her. They are free to correct me, but I think they would agree she is just too toxic at this point. Her character is in the gutter.

On January 05 2017 07:32 xDaunt wrote:
Glenn Greenwald is absolutely murdering WashPo and other legacy media outlets on this fake news business:



Source. The article is way too long to post in its entirety here, but it's worth reading given its depth. I particularly like his parting shot at the end:

On January 05 2017 07:50 LegalLord wrote:

Couldn't he just have his DoJ pick do it through the regular channels? Why a special prosecutor?

On January 05 2017 08:00 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Clinton will not run again in 2020, that would require such hubris and stupidity that I don't think even she has.

On January 05 2017 07:38 GreenHorizons wrote:


No, you haven't directly, but you both have defended her wing of the party's positions. I don't remember which, but I vaguely remember one of you making the case that universal healthcare wasn't stopped by Democrats or whatever.

China has hit back at Donald Trump’s claim that Beijing isn’t doing enough to rein in rogue state North Korea, cautioning the U.S. President-elect not to “escalate” an already tense situation on the Korean Peninsula through his liberal use of social media.

On Monday evening, Trump took to Twitter to deny North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s claim that his nation was in the “final stage” of developing a nuclear-armed ballistic missile capable of hitting the U.S. mainland. Trump then followed up with another tweet to say China wasn’t doing enough to temper the young despot’s belligerence.

“China has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won’t help with North Korea. Nice!” read the tweet.

In response, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a press briefing on Tuesday that his government’s efforts were “widely recognized,” and that “we hope all sides will avoid remarks and actions to escalate the situation.”

The Korean Peninsula is the latest source of friction between the incoming Trump Administration and China to be aired via the President-elect’s Twitter account.

Last month, Trump revealed he accepted a congratulatory phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in a breach of almost four decades of diplomatic protocol. Beijing still claims sovereignty over the self-governing island despite its effective split from the mainland in 1949 following China’s civil war.

Trump has also frequently used Twitter to accuse China of underhand trade practices like currency manipulation that he claims have forced American jobs oversees. The real estate mogul has nominated at least two hard-line China trade critics — Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro — to top posts in his Administration.

Regarding North Korea, Trump has a point: China is Pyongyang’s only friendly nation of note and accounts for 90% of its trade. The continued existence of North Korea is of strategic advantage to Beijing if the alternative is a unified Korean Peninsula administered by Seoul that is a staunch U.S. ally.

However, a belligerent, nuclear-armed North Korea isn’t in Beijing’s interests. This raises the temperature in East Asia and prompted South Korea to accept deployment of American THAAD antimissile batteries. Japan may soon follow.