US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7022

On March 03 2017 09:44 Danglars wrote:

Reminding myself that it was between this and Hillary is an incredibly comforting thought. Supreme Court going to be better, cabinet picks pretty good overall. So far, the rolls of the dice have been better than I expected.

On March 03 2017 09:37 Tachion wrote:
I wonder how Ted Cruz would be doing as president right now.

On March 03 2017 09:46 ShoCkeyy wrote:


Not for immigrants, legal citizens that have been affected by this, and the eco system. Good job on that...

On March 03 2017 09:44 ShoCkeyy wrote:


The democrats would of lit the whole gay/cheating on his wife scandal back up.

On March 03 2017 09:55 Danglars wrote:

He's rounding up legal citizens and throwing them in concentration camps without me knowing, isn't he? Legal citizens could also be celebrating his win and continued efforts that affect them. Eco system is this some reference to EPA or climate change? Sometimes I lose track of what I should be outraged about with all these wannabe scandals.

Washington (CNN)-Several US officials told CNN Thursday that the US is now taking action to locate and monitor hundreds of people or "contacts" found as part the intelligence retrieved during the deadly raid last month in Yemen targeting al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Some of these people are believed to be in the West, but not in the United States.

The government is taking action to find and monitor these AQAP-linked individuals because of the threat they may pose to Europe, the officials added.

The fact that officials said they are actively pursuing leads uncovered from the raid indicates that the intelligence was indeed actionable despite some media reports to the contrary.

The terabyte's worth of intelligence gathered from computers and cell phones is now being reviewed at the National Media Exploitation Center outside Washington, which analyzes documents, electronic media, cell phones, video and audio tapes seized on overseas missions.

Defense officials have told CNN that information pertaining to the location of safe havens, explosives manufacturing, training and targets was acquired in the January ground operation.

When Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak traveled to the GOP convention last summer, he met with then Sen. Jeff Sessions, as well as with two other Trump campaign advisers, including oil industry consultant Carter Page.

Page, at the time an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Trump, engaged in a conversation with the ambassador at the same July 20 luncheon in Cleveland where Sessions, now attorney general, and Kislyak chatted, according to J.D. Gordon, a national security adviser to the Trump campaign who was also present at the lunch.

Page declined to comment Thursday about what he and the Russian ambassador discussed, saying it was a private, off-the-record conversation. "Everyone assumes everything is nefarious!" Page said a text message. "Thanks, but no comment."

Contacts between Russian officials and Trump campaign staff are now the subject of investigations by the FBI and congressional committees into Russian interference in the election, and whether Trump campaign representatives played any role in it. On Thursday, Sessions recused himself from investigations into Russian efforts to sway the 2016 election in Trump's favor.

The disclosure that other Trump officials met with Kislyak raise additional questions about White House assertions that the Trump campaign had little or no contact with Russian officials prior to the election.

Page's conversation with Kislyak just days after news reports of Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee is part of a broader pattern of activity by Page that raised U.S. suspicions about his interactions with the Russians, according to a former Obama White House official. At the time of the lunch, Page had just returned from a trip to Moscow.

The official said the Obama administration was gravely concerned in its final days about increasingly apparent ties between Trump associates and Russians, and about what appeared to be promises made by more than one individual to people affiliated with Russian President Vladimir Putin about policy changes that would occur once Trump was sworn in as president. The Obama official declined to discuss specifics but said Page was one of the Trump associates whose activities had drawn the most U.S. attention and concern.

Trump has defended Sessions. White House spokesman Sean Spicer repeated Thursday afternoon that Sessions and other officials have not done anything wrong. "There's no there there," Spicer told reporters.

Gordon, a retired Navy commander, said Page and Kislyak spoke at some length about how to improve relations between the two countries on issues like counterterrorism and energy security. "Carter told him we should have a new chapter of U.S.-Russia relations that build on mutual respect and common goals and that there is no need to keep up this hostility," Gordon said. "He said we should have better relations with Russia."

He added that Kislyek suggested the two countries should share intelligence "so that we don’t have problems like the Tsarnaev brothers," the Chechen-Americans who set off two pressure-cooker bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon, more than a year after Russia tried to warn U.S. officials about one of them.

Page and Sessions were among several people affiliated with the Trump campaign who engaged with Kislyak while in Cleveland, including at the lunch, which was part of a State Department-funded initiative to bring foreign ambassadors to both political conventions, Gordon said. "The Trump campaign advisers were there to interact with the ambassadors, just like [the ambassadors] were interacting with the Democrats in Philadelphia the next week," Gordon said. "That was the whole point of the program."

Trump officials have distanced themselves from Page, who left the campaign in late September. The founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, Page spent seven years as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in London, Moscow and New York. His website says he has been involved in more than $25 billion of transactions in the energy and power sector, and that he spent 3 years in Moscow where he was an adviser on key transactions for Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom and other energy-related companies.

After Trump identified Page as one of his foreign policy and energy advisers last March, Page said in a Bloomberg News interview that he had been an investor in, and adviser to, the Gazprom. He also criticized the Obama administration sanctions on Russia imposed because of its annexation of Crimea.

Officially, Page's role was "advising Mr. Trump on energy policy and Russia," according to a campaign release at the time. Throughout the spring and summer, Page sent policy memos to the campaign and kept in contact with Trump’s national security advisory board, including Sessions, Gordon said. "He wanted access to Trump, he wanted his policy memos to be reflected in Trump speeches, he was always calling. And he wanted to go to Russia, which we thought was a bad idea," he added.

On March 03 2017 09:56 Tachion wrote:

Preeeettttty sure infidelity was not a major concern this past election given the results.

Ironically for the republicans, the SCOTUS legalizing gay marriage was probably the best thing to happen to the party in a good while. That was a huge social issue that the democrats no longer have on their side.

An aircraft flying at night drops a flock of unpowered drones. They carry food, medicines and batteries. After delivering their load on the ground, the drones vaporize into thin air within hours.

Disposable drones that can make precise deliveries before vanishing may look like a product of Stark Industries. But the fictional giant of military technology run by Tony "Iron Man" Stark has nothing to do with them. Instead, the development of "disappearing delivery vehicles" is a project by DARPA, the Department of Defense's research and development agency.

DARPA, officially called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is working with several companies in the field of ephemeral materials to achieve a prototype.

The name of the $8 million program is ICARUS (Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems), which alludes to the mythological hero who flew too close to the sun by using wings made of wax and feathers. The program aims to mimic the material transience that is depicted in the myth. In fact, finding a balance between the properties of the material to build disposable drones is the main challenge, says Troy Olsson, ICARUS program manager.

"The material [which disposable drones will be made of] has to be reliable enough to enable the flight," but then be able to vanish after delivering its payload, he says.

Options range from cardboard to polymer-based or glass-based materials. San Francisco firm Otherlab, for example, received a grant of about $1 million from DARPA in 2015 to develop cardboard-made expandable and disposable drones, according to Mikell Taylor, team lead of the project at Otherlab.

All the disposable drones under development as part of ICARUS are, technically, gliders — they don't have motors like traditional drones. They have to be dropped by an aircraft and then take advantage of the wind. An on-board navigation system allows disposable drones to correct their course and land in a precise location.

While the drone is flying, on-board sensors are supposed to measure wind and adjust its path accordingly. "[Disposable drones] fly themselves, which is a difference with commercial drones," which are remotely operated, Olsson notes. Ideally, disposable drones could carry payloads of three to 10 pounds.

The dream result would be a prototype glider that travels from 150 to 200 kilometers [93 to 124 miles] when dropped from 35,000 feet, lands within 10 meters [33 feet] of its target and vanishes within four hours after delivering its load, Olsson says.

Otherlab researchers did some actual testing. Taylor says they used off-the-shelf traditional drones to drop disposable ones from below 400 feet, the maximum altitude drones are allowed to operate under Federal Aviation Administration rules. Later, at an Army facility, researchers were able to drop disposable vehicles from 1,000 feet, she says.

"We bought all the materials we used off the shelves to focus on the airframe design," she says.

DARPA wants the disposable drones to be low-cost — from $250 to a couple of thousand dollars each, including the guidance and navigation system that combined are the size of a tennis ball, according to Olsson.

In the battlefield, applications of disposable drones would range from bringing medicines to injured soldiers to providing any critical supply — food, batteries or electrical components — to helping troops that encounter an unexpected situation. But disposable drones may also come in handy as part of a wide-scale response to earthquakes or other disasters, when people need humanitarian supplies.

"We are competing with parachute dropping, and the precision of landing is the difference," Taylor says. "For disposable drones, the range of landing accuracy is 50 feet. In an emergency situation, you want that precision."

On March 03 2017 12:25 Scarecrow wrote:

It's already been established how inappropriate/incompetent many of the picks are. Either support what you're saying or quit trolling.

I'm also still waiting to hear where you get your news. It'd be good if you could share, as you seem to think many of us are so ill-informed.

On March 03 2017 14:08 ticklishmusic wrote:
https://twitter.com/KarlFrisch/status/837498745499619328

But it was totally in his capacity as a senator!

On March 03 2017 14:13 Introvert wrote:


uh, of course he used campaign funds to attend the RNC.