US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6595

On January 20 2017 02:39 LegalLord wrote:
My point is that your cliche - "democracy is the worst until everything else is tried" - is altogether an ineffective description of the reality of what effective government looks like. You agree that democracy can take many forms - some don't look like democracies by definition but de facto it would be tough to argue that they are not. And the reverse is true, that there are nominal democracies that aren't democratic.

Nor is it necessarily true that more democracy is always better - sometimes it runs into situations where it really isn't effective. Really, its biggest and most important advantage is that, in a government which is stable, it allows nonviolent succession. If stability doesn't exist, nonviolent succession isn't a possibility anyways, so an undemocratic system may be best.

This is, perhaps, the problem with "nation building" in Iraq - an attempt to overthrow a flawed but stable system with a democracy just made things worse because democracy wasn't appropriate for that situation.

On January 20 2017 02:49 LegalLord wrote:

The cliche example is Japan and Germany after WWII - though "nation building" in war-torn mature great power nations is different from whatever Iraq is.

Though I can't recall "CIA-trained rebels" being followed by a positive result, if we want to talk about terms that have gotten a bad rap for constant failure.

Steven Mnuchin, the hedge fund millionaire Donald Trump has picked to run the US treasury, failed to disclose nearly $100m in assets to Congress, including his role as a director of offshore funds and close to $1m in art owned by his children.

The error was disclosed hours before Mnuchin was grilled by the Senate finance committee on Thursday over his role at a California bank that foreclosed on thousands of vulnerable borrowers, his attitude to tax havens and the future regulation of the US financial system.

On Wednesday night the committee learned Mnuchin had initially failed to disclose he was a director of Dune Capital International, an investment fund incorporated in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven. He also omitted other assets, including $95m in real estate and $906,556 worth of artwork held by his children.

“Mr. Mnuchin has claimed these omissions were due to a misunderstanding of the questionnaire – he does not consider these assets to be ‘investment assets’ and thus did not disclose them, even though the committee directs the nominee to list all real estate assets,” according to documents filed with the committee.

Mnuchin was questioned by the Democratic senator Bob Menendez who asked how he had failed to disclose the assets when he signed a statement listing his holdings on 19 December.

“I have a ton of other questions on policy but first and foremost is truth and veracity, what Americans need in their treasury secretary” said Menedez. “In essence isn’t it true that what you did here is take these companies, put them offshore so you could help your clients, who you were making money from, to avoid US taxation.”

Mnuchin said that was “not true at all”.

“I assure you that these forms were very complicated,” he said. “When I certified those forms I thought it was correct.” Mnuchin said he may have erred in giving the forms in early and should have waited and that his lawyer had assured him he had filled the forms in correctly.

Spy Clouds Hang Over Trump’s Inauguration

Tomorrow Donald J. Trump will become our 45th president, an event heralded by his supporters as a big step towards changing the course of our politics and, per their mantra, making America great again.

...

He weathered last week’s spy-storm, generated by Buzzfeed’s leak of a 35-page dossier of allegations regarding his clandestine ties to the Kremlin, by mocking them in customary Trumpian fashion. In a series of angry tweets, the president-elect denounced the Intelligence Community as the source of that leak—even though it was not—while proclaiming the dossier to be “fake news.” Since he recently compared American spies to Nazis on Twitter, Trump seemingly wants a full-fledged war with the IC from his first day in the Oval Office.

...

To be fair, the dossier, which was compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with extensive experience in Russian matters, does have dodgy aspects. As I explained last week, it’s raw, unfiltered human intelligence from multiple sources with varying levels of access and credibility. Some of the dossier’s claims are quite plausibly true, others are demonstrably false, while much of it is unverifiable and may be Kremlin disinformation. Given the long history of Russian provocation and deception against Western governments, a high degree of skepticism is in order here.

...

It seems that the Prague story is based on a kernel of truth. However, the story which Steele reported seems to be disinformation, notwithstanding the fact that, as I reported when it happened, Czech security really did arrest a prominent Russian hacker in Prague, at the request of the FBI, just a couple weeks before our election. There appears to be a trail that might have led back to Trump in that case, but the Russians are playing their usual spy-games, exposing false trails of inquiry to muddy the waters and confuse investigators.

Now the whole case has been blown wide open again with yesterday’s bombshell McClatchy report that the IC has been looking into possible ties of, as the McClatchy report put it, “a few Americans who were affiliated with Trump’s campaign or his business empire” to individuals “from Russia and other former Soviet nations.” This has supposedly happened at least since the spring, months before Steele shared his dossier with anyone in Washington. In particular, a specially created IC working group, comprised of representatives from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the Departments of Justice and Treasury, looked into clandestine Russian money that may have been sent to finance the Trump campaign.

In other words, the Steele report is hardly more than a cover mechanism for the real IC investigation, which knew everything that was true in that dossier already – and presumably knows what’s not true as well. The IC working group found sufficient information on Trump’s secret ties to Putin to get a Federal court to issue warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which gives them access to phone calls, emails, and bank accounts which may be tainted by connections to foreign spies.

Team Trump refused comment on the McClatchy story. Since the Senate Intelligence Committee will be conducting an investigation into Trump’s Russian links, including subpoena powers and full access to what the IC knows, the president-elect may have a great deal to worry about. The clearest sign of Trump’s concern is that, almost 24 hours after the report appeared, he hasn’t taken to Twitter to denounce or mock it. His uncharacteristic silence indicates serious trouble in the Trump camp.

Neither are the Senate and the IC all that Trump has to worry about. Several European intelligence agencies have watched the new president’s clandestine ties to Putin with interest and alarm. For small countries close to Russia, the prospect of an American president colluding with the Kremlin is terrifying. What they know was hinted at in a tweet by Harri Ohra-aho, in response to an all-caps claim tweeted by Trump: “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” Ohra-aho’s response, which translates as “Lord, give me patience, AND NOW!” is important mainly because the tweeter is a two-star general serving as the chief of Finnish military intelligence.

Plenty of intelligence services know parts of the truth about our 45th president’s potentially unsavory ties to Moscow. Starting tomorrow, Trump will try hard to shut down IC inquiries, but he cannot curtail the Senate investigation and doesn’t have any power to silence worried allies and partners who consider him a threat to their countries.

On January 20 2017 03:52 crms wrote:
What are the chances of trumps appointments being confirmed? So far all the hearings seem to have been mostly disasters. There is absolutely noway Devos could be confirmed, right?

The New York Times faced a backlash Thursday after it’s only source for a negative story on former Texas governor Rick Perry accused them of taking his remarks out of context.

The Times reported Wednesday evening that when Perry accepted Donald Trump‘s nomination for the Secretary of Energy position, he “initially misunderstood” what the job even was.

“Mr. Perry gladly accepted, believing he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry that he had long championed in his home state,” they wrote. “In the days after, Mr. Perry… discovered that he would be no such thing — that in fact, if confirmed by the Senate, he would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal.”

That revelation lead to much mockery of Perry from journalists and his political opponents on Twitter. But others noticed that the sole source for that assertion was a quote from a former Trump transition official that wasn’t quite as strong as the Times‘ claim. “If you asked him on that first day he said yes, he would have said, ‘I want to be an advocate for energy,’” Michael McKenna told them. “If you asked him now, he’d say, ‘I’m serious about the challenges facing the nuclear complex.’ It’s been a learning curve.”

McKenna later told The Daily Caller that his remarks were taken out of context and “of course” Perry knew what the job entailed when he took it. Washington Examiner media critic T. Becket Adams noted that McKenna wasn’t even part of the transition team when Perry was named, and that Perry’s original statement specifically mentioned that he’d oversee the nuclear arsenal.

Franken: “Thank you so much for coming into my office. Did you enjoy meeting me?”

Perry: “I hope you’re as much fun on that dias as you were on your couch.”

On January 20 2017 04:27 LegalLord wrote:

I expect Rubio, McCain, and Graham to huff and puff about Russia, realize Tillerson isn't really a Russian shill, and get on board, a few Democrats to huff and puff about Sessions but fail to convince any Republicans to break rank, while all the others pass without any fanfare.

On January 20 2017 04:57 crms wrote:

That's such a sad state of affairs. Some of these appointments, politics aside, are wildly unfit. :/

On January 20 2017 04:57 crms wrote:

That's such a sad state of affairs. Some of these appointments, politics aside, are wildly unfit. :/

On January 20 2017 04:57 crms wrote:

That's such a sad state of affairs. Some of these appointments, politics aside, are wildly unfit. :/