US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7236

On March 31 2017 23:20 KwarK wrote:

It was fairly obviously a joke.

On March 31 2017 15:47 GreenHorizons wrote:


They already have him quoted as talking about how wanting immunity means you did something wrong. And no they don't and likely wouldn't just like all the immunity passed around to Hillary folks didn't mean they were getting anything of value for giving them immunity.

On March 31 2017 22:06 LightSpectra wrote:
Does anybody still think the whole Russian investigation is just a big waste of time? Sounds like every day we're one step closer to getting a smoking gun.

I'm gonna take some sick pleasure in watching some posters here eat their crow if (when?) it happens.

On April 01 2017 00:13 Danglars wrote:

I'm expecting the smoking gun to be a dripping water pistol. As in, "Ha! Trump's gardener talked to a Russian oligarch about how nice it would be if Trump become president instead of that humorless, shrill hag." I put the great likelihood that nothing happened; we just have a mostly incompetant president that's a fan of Putin, and Russian cyber warfare results that might've pissed of a couple Bernie voters and hithertoo blind media-lovers.

In short, half the Democratic Party and mainstream media are just engaging in public group therapy in the wake of their gal losing by constructing a more satisfying story.

On April 01 2017 00:18 KwarK wrote:

But we already have more than that. We already have senior members of the Trump campaign talking to Russian intelligence about how if hypothetically something were to happen to damage the Clinton campaign so Trump won then perhaps Trump could do something about those Russian sanctions.

That's our baseline minimum. That's what definitely happened. This shit about a gardener is already completely failing to understand the severity of what happened here. The smoking gun we're missing is personal involvement from Trump and an actual deal being struck, rather than Russia acting independently because they recognize that their interests are better met by Trump than by Clinton.

Moscow said last month it was in contact with the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, with the stated reason being that Russia was sharing information and cooperating on strategy to fight the local ISIS affiliate there, according to The Wall Street Journal. So far, cooperation apparently doesn't involve cash or guns.

But it understandably has US commanders there spooked.

Gen. John Nicholson, the top American military commander in Afghanistan, has spoken out against Russia's extension of an olive branch to the Taliban as offering "overt" legitimacy to a group intent on toppling the Afghan government.

Russia's "narrative goes something like this: that the Taliban are the ones fighting Islamic State, not the Afghan government," Nicholson said at a Pentagon briefing last month. "So this public legitimacy that Russia lends to the Taliban is not based on fact, but is used as a way to essentially undermine the Afghan government and the NATO efforts and bolster the belligerents."

Surprisingly, even Taliban officials say the excuse of offering help to fight ISIS doesn't add up. Two officials disputed that characterization, including the group's spokesman, who told Reuters that "ISIS is not an issue." In fact, both groups forged a shaky truce in August 2016 to turn their guns away from each other, and instead target US-backed Afghan forces.

"In early 2008, when Russia began supporting us, ISIS didn't exist anywhere in the world," one senior Taliban official told Reuters. "Their sole purpose was to strengthen us against the US and its allies."

The Washington Post ran a profile of Karen Pence, the wife of Vice President Mike Pence, on Wednesday. The piece talks about the closeness of the Pences’ relationship, and cites something Pence told The Hill in 2002: Unless his wife is there, he never eats alone with another woman or attends an event where alcohol is being served. (It’s unclear whether, 15 years later, this remains Pence’s practice.) It’s not in the Post piece, but here’s the original quote from 2002: “‘If there's alcohol being served and people are being loose, I want to have the best-looking brunette in the room standing next to me,’ Pence said.”

Some folks—mostly journalists and entertainers on Twitter—have reacted with surprise, anger, and sarcasm to the Pence family rule. Socially liberal or non-religious people may see Pence’s practice as misogynistic or bizarre. For a lot of conservative religious people, though, this set-up probably sounds normal, or even wise. The dust-up shows how radically notions of gender divide American culture.

Pence is not the first contemporary public figure to set these kinds of boundaries around his marriage. He seems to be following a version of the so-called Billy Graham rule, named for the famous evangelist who established similar guidelines for the pastors working in his ministry. In his autobiography, Graham notes that he and his colleagues worried about the temptations of sexual immorality that come from long days on the road and a lot of time away from family. They resolved to “avoid any situation that would even have the appearance of compromise or suspicion.” From that day on, Graham said, he “did not travel, meet, or eat alone with a woman other than my wife.” It was a way of following Paul’s advice to Timothy in the Bible, Graham wrote: to “flee … youthful lusts.”

The Hill article gives more context on how the Pences were thinking about this, at least back in 2002. Pence told the paper he often refused dinner or cocktail invitations from male colleagues, too: “It’s about building a zone around your marriage,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a predatory town, but I think you can inadvertently send the wrong message by being in [certain] situations.”

The 2002 article notes that Pence arrived in Congress a half decade after the 1994 “Republican revolution,” when Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the House. Several congressional marriages, including Gingrich’s, encountered difficulty that year. Pence seemed wary of this. “I’ve lost more elections than I’ve won,” he said. “I’ve seen friends lose their families. I’d rather lose an election.” He even said he gets fingers wagged in his face by concerned Indianans. “Little old ladies come and say, ‘Honey, whatever you need to do, keep your family together,’” he told The Hill.

These comments show that the Pences have a distinctively conservative approach toward family, sex, and gender. This is by no means the way that all Christians, or even all evangelical Christians like the Pences, navigate married life. But traditional religious people from other backgrounds may practice something similar. Many Orthodox Jews follow the laws of yichud, which prohibit unmarried men and women from being alone in a closed room together. Some Muslim men and women also refuse to be together alone if they’re not married. These practices all have different histories and origins, but they’re rooted in the same belief: The sanctity of marriage should be protected, and sexual immorality should be guarded against at all costs.

That idea might seem disorienting to more socially progressive Americans. For one thing, it shows a deep awareness of gender and sexuality: The implication is that temptations to flirt or cheat are present in everyday interactions.

Some journalists on Twitter quickly pointed out that Pence’s rules may function, in practice, to perpetuate professional and political disadvantages against women. If men in power can meet alone with other men but not women, they’ll just keep doing the business of being powerful in an all-male world. And it parallels critiques of the Billy Graham Rule that’ve been leveled within the evangelical community, as well, where it’s also been blamed for subjecting professional relationships to the logic of a sexually permissive society.

Other critics connected these views to Pence’s stance on LGBT issues. When he was governor of Indiana, he presided over a controversial religious-freedom bill that, LGBT advocates claimed, would have allowed business owners to discriminate against them. Pence’s marriage rules implicitly suggest there’s a temptation in being alone with women, but not in being alone with men, which is not the experience of a lot of people, including LGBT Christians.

But it’s also true that these aren’t just rules by, for, and about Mike Pence. This is how he and his wife, together, have chosen to navigate their marriage. That some people are so quick to be angered—and others are totally unsurprised—shows how divided America has become about the fundamental claim embedded in the Pence family rule: that understandings of gender should guide the boundaries around people’s everyday interactions, and protecting a marriage should take precedence over all else, even if the way of doing it seems strange to some, and imposes costs on others.

On April 01 2017 01:10 LightSpectra wrote:
you know what would be funny (not in the ha ha way), if the Democrats wanted a simultaneous investigation into every single one of Trump's wrongdoings but it turns out there's not enough in the budget for all of that, so none of the investigations (Kremlin, Azerbaijan, Trump Foundation, etc.) are able to produce compelling evidence for any individual crime

+ Show Spoiler +

On April 01 2017 01:10 LightSpectra wrote:
you know what would be funny (not in the ha ha way), if the Democrats wanted a simultaneous investigation into every single one of Trump's wrongdoings but it turns out there's not enough in the budget for all of that, so none of the investigations (Kremlin, Azerbaijan, Trump Foundation, etc.) are able to produce compelling evidence for any individual crime

+ Show Spoiler +

On April 01 2017 00:58 Nevuk wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/karen-pence-is-the-vice-presidents-prayer-warrior-gut-check-and-shield/2017/03/28/3d7a26ce-0a01-11e7-8884-96e6a6713f4b_story.html?utm_term=.ab1c54954ee5


This is interesting. And I mean that in purely a neutral sense.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires that a person acting as “an agent of a foreign principal”—including, among other things, an agent of a foreign government—file a disclosure of that relationship with the U.S. Department of Justice. There are exemptions, but none seem to fit Flynn in 2016. The statute specifies that the filing must be made within ten days of beginning to act as an agent of a foreign government. Willful failure to comply with the statute is a felony.

On April 01 2017 01:29 KwarK wrote:
Hillary was a civilian employee whose alleged crime was colossal incompetence with regard to her professional obligations to secure classified information. A lot of comparisons have been made between Hillary and people like Kristian Saucier but they don't really apply. Saying what Hillary did that was wrong was pretty easy but saying what she did that was criminal was less so.

With Flynn it's a completely different situation.
He broke the law.