US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7263

On April 05 2017 06:12 xDaunt wrote:

I agree with Russiagate being something where we just have to wait for the FBI to do whatever it's going to do (which is why I've been largely silent on the issue). The Susan Rice thing is a totally different animal. It's very clear now that she unmasked Trump administration personnel in NSA-collected communications. By necessity, it is also clear that in doing so, she circulated some of this information around other agencies, which has allowed for all of the leaks to happen. Worst of all, it looks like this was done for political reasons as opposed to legitimate intelligence reasons. Regardless of whether what she did is technically legal, the idea that Rice and other Obama administration officials -- or any administration for that matter -- can use the American surveillance apparatus for political purposes should be worrying to everyone.

And the optics of Rice's impropriety look terrible. She's already contradicted her statements from last month where she said that she had no idea what Nunes was talking about when he first talked about the unmasking issue. It's her fucking name that's in the logbook of who did it. The only way that she's going to be vindicated is if evidence is unearthed that Trump and his people were engaged in some illegal activity that warranted the unmasking.

Thus, Comey added, these consumers “can ask the collectors to unmask.” But the unmasking authority “resides with those who collected the information.”

On April 05 2017 06:17 zlefin wrote:
I wish there were fewer things happening in politics these days which didn't have terrible optics. there's far too many such things atm.

NEWLY-RELEASED FINANCIAL disclosure documents show that Dr. Scott Gottlieb, President Trump’s nominee to the lead the Food and Drug Administration, has received significant payments from the opioid industry — while attacking attempts to deter the explosion of opioid pill mills.

The FDA has some of the most significant authority in the federal government to oversee manufacturers of prescription painkillers. Gottlieb is set to appear for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee at 10 a.m. tomorrow.

Gottlieb’s disclosure statements, required under federal law, show that since the beginning of 2016 he has received almost $45,000 in speaking fees from firms involved in the manufacture and distribution of opioids.

“Our country is in desperate need of an FDA commissioner who will take on the opioid lobby, not one who has a track record of working for it,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of Opioid Policy Research at Brandeis University, reacting to this information.

Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, the maker of a highly addictive generic oxycodone pill, paid Gottlieb $22,500 for a speech in London last November shortly after the U.S. presidential election. Prosecutors have charged that the firm ignored red flags and supplied as many as 500 million suspicious orders in Florida for its oxycodone product between 2008 and 2012. Mallinckrodt reached a tentative settlement this week, agreeing to pay $35 million while admitting no wrongdoing.

The Healthcare Distributors Alliance, a trade group for the largest opioid wholesale distributors in America, also retained Gottlieb as a speaker last September.

[...]

A 2016 investigation by the Charleston Gazette-Mail found that these three companies supplied unusually large shipments of prescription painkillers in West Virginia, and provided the bulk of 780 million prescription pills sent to pharmacies in the state, a key factor in the fatal overdose epidemic.
Cardinal Health also temporarily lost its license to distribute opioids from its Florida warehouse in 2012 after the Drug Enforcement Administration found that the firm supplied several pharmacies known to act as so-called pill mills that routinely filled inappropriate prescriptions for oxycodone.

Gottlieb swiftly condemned the DEA’s action at the time, writing in the Wall Street Journal that the agency had overstepped its bounds, and that it should lose its authority to police the opioid market.

On April 05 2017 06:22 WolfintheSheep wrote:

The article you yourself posted can't even confirm if Flynn was one of the people that Rice asked to have unmasked. It doesn't even say if her request was granted or denied.

Everything you said here is one large pile of speculation based on the fact that Rice asked for some people unmasked, which as Comey states:

On April 05 2017 06:29 xDaunt wrote:

What exactly are you disputing? We don't yet know whom Rice unmasked. We only know that she unmasked Trump officials. Nunes and Schiff have both seen some of the records verifying this. And if you look at Rice's statements today, she all but admits that she did unmask Trump people.

Undercover officers in the New York police department infiltrated small groups of Black Lives Matter activists and gained access to their text messages, according to newly released NYPD documents obtained by the Guardian.

The records, produced in response to a freedom of information lawsuit led by New York law firm Stecklow & Thompson, provide the most detailed picture yet of the sweeping scope of NYPD surveillance during mass protests over the death of Eric Garner in 2014 and 2015. Lawyers said the new documents raised questions about NYPD compliance with city rules.

The documents, mostly emails between undercover officers and other NYPD officials, follow other disclosures that the NYPD regularly filmed Black Lives Matter activists and sent undercover personnel to protests. The NYPD has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment or interview.

Emails show that undercover officers were able to pose as protesters even within small groups, giving them extensive access to details about protesters’ whereabouts and plans. In one email, an official notes that an undercover officer is embedded within a group of seven protesters on their way to Grand Central Station. This intimate access appears to have helped police pass as trusted organizers and extract information about demonstrations. In other emails, officers share the locations of individual protesters at particular times. The NYPD emails also include pictures of organizers’ group text exchanges with information about protests, suggesting that undercover officials were either trusted enough to be allowed to take photos of activists’ phones or were themselves members of a private planning group text.

“That text loop was definitely just for organizers, I don’t know how that got out,” said Elsa Waithe, a Black Lives Matter organizer. “Someone had to have told someone how to get on it, probably trusting someone they had seen a few times in good faith. We clearly compromised ourselves.”

Keegan Stephan, a regular attendee of the Grand Central protests in 2014 and 2015, said information about protesters’ whereabouts was limited to a small group of core organizers at that time. “I feel like the undercover was somebody who was or is very much a part of the group, and has access to information we only give to people we trust,” said Stephan, who has been assisting attorneys with a lawsuit to obtain the documents on behalf of plaintiff James Logue, a protester. “If you’re walking to Grand Central with a handful of people for an action, that’s much more than just showing up to a public demonstration – that sounds like a level of friendship.”

Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD detective sergeant and professor at John Jay College, agreed that it would not be easy for an undercover officer to join a small group of protesters and hear their plans. “It would be pretty amazing that they would be able to get into the core group in such a short window of time,” said Giacalone. “This could have been going on a while before for these people to get so close to the inner circle.”

The NYPD documents also included a handful of pictures and one short video taken at Grand Central Station demonstrations. Most are pictures of crowds milling about or taking part in demonstrations. In one picture of a small group of activists, the NYPD identifies an individual in a brown jacket as the “main protester”. These images of protesters are reminiscent of those taken by undercover transit police, who were also deployed to Black Lives Matter protests in Grand Central Station in 2015.

Giacalone said this type of leadership identification was standard police practice at protests. “If you take out the biggest mouth, everybody just withers away, so you concentrate on the ones you believe are your organizers,” he said. “Once you identify that person, you can run computer checks on them to see if they have a warrant out or any summons failures, then you can drag them in before they go out to speak or rile up the crowd, as long as you have reasonable cause to do so.”

Attorneys say the documents raise legal questions about whether the NYPD was acting in compliance with the department’s intelligence-gathering rules, known as the Handschu Guidelines. The guidelines, which are based on an ongoing decades-old class-action lawsuit, hold that the NYPD can begin formally investigating first amendment activity “when facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that an unlawful act has been, is being, or will be committed” and if the police surveillance plan has been authorized by a committee known as the Handschu Authority. (That committee was exclusively staffed by NYPD officials at the time.) However, according to the guidelines, before launching a formal investigation, the NYPD can also conduct investigative work such as “checking of leads” and “preliminary inquiries” with even lower standards of suspicion.

Michael Price, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said it was difficult to know whether NYPD’s undercover surveillance operations crossed the line, as the documents did not make clear what, if any, stage of investigation the police were in at the time of the operations. But he said the department’s retention of pictures and video raised questions, since police are not allowed to retain information about public events unless it relates to unlawful activity.

On April 05 2017 06:24 Logo wrote:


You could just take some opiods and it won't seem so bad.

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/04/scott-gottlieb-opioid/

On April 05 2017 06:40 zlefin wrote:

much as I dislike this gottlieb fellow, there's some serious issues with the methodology to reach the conclusions the article is reaching toward, as is usual with the rushing to judgment of these things. I'd have preferred a source that did a more thorough, careful, and in-depth analysis.

On April 05 2017 06:54 Logo wrote:


Yeah that would be nice! But they do have links to the primary sources for the two key points of the article:

The disclosure documents indicating the money accepted for speaking events:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3535249-Gottlieb-Scott.html

The article against the DEA's involvement in the Opioid epidemic:

https://www.aei.org/publication/the-deas-war-on-pharmacies-and-pain-patients/

On April 05 2017 05:51 Plansix wrote:
That won’t damage US business relationships abroad at all. Zero chance of that happening. Or hurt tourism. Burner phones are going to be super popular.

On April 05 2017 06:57 zlefin wrote:

I was aware of and noted those, and I read through the primary sources, and it doesn't counter my point at all.

On April 05 2017 06:12 xDaunt wrote:

I agree with Russiagate being something where we just have to wait for the FBI to do whatever it's going to do (which is why I've been largely silent on the issue). The Susan Rice thing is a totally different animal. It's very clear now that she unmasked Trump administration personnel in NSA-collected communications. By necessity, it is also clear that in doing so, she circulated some of this information around other agencies, which has allowed for all of the leaks to happen. Worst of all, it looks like this was done for political reasons as opposed to legitimate intelligence reasons. Regardless of whether what she did is technically legal, the idea that Rice and other Obama administration officials -- or any administration for that matter -- can use the American surveillance apparatus for political purposes should be worrying to everyone.

And the optics of Rice's impropriety look terrible. She's already contradicted her statements from last month where she said that she had no idea what Nunes was talking about when he first talked about the unmasking issue. It's her fucking name that's in the logbook of who did it. The only way that she's going to be vindicated is if evidence is unearthed that Trump and his people were engaged in some illegal activity that warranted the unmasking.

On April 05 2017 06:53 GreenHorizons wrote:
I just watched a commercial urging me to call my senator to support an up or down vote on Gorsuch on MSNBC in WA. That's interesting.

Just days before President Trump is set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the administration has made a move that has some U.S.-China experts scratching their heads. The Commerce Department has quietly put a notice into the Federal Register stating that the U.S. will review a hot-button issue between the two superpowers.

What's in question is a longstanding designation of China as a "Non-Market Economy," or a country that operates outside of the norms of developed nations when it comes to trade.

The U.S. has more power to take action against China because of this so-called N.M.E. Status if it believes that China is, for example, dumping steel into the U.S. at prices that are unnaturally low and that hurt U.S. industry. The U.S. can basically force Chinese companies to pay taxes that effectively raise the price of such products in the U.S. market.

Escaping from this label is something China has sought for more than a decade and that Chinese leaders consider a matter of great national pride.

"From China's perspective, they want to get out from underneath this distinction," says Chad Bown, a senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.

But here's what's puzzling: After all its tough talk about China, why is the Trump administration doing this now?

"I find it very intriguing," Bown says. "It caught me off guard."

He didn't expect the Trump administration to be delving into this issue right before the two leaders meet. Given Trump's anti-China rhetoric during the campaign, experts say it seems unlikely the administration would throw China a giant carrot by allowing it to escape from N.M.E. status.

Bown says the move could be a response to China having recently initiated a dispute through the World Trade Organization challenging its N.M.E. status. So this might be a first step by the Commerce Department in the process of mounting, in effect, a rebuttal — to show that China should continue to be considered a Non-Market Economy.

We've reached out to the Commerce Department and will update this story with any response.

On April 05 2017 07:05 Nevuk wrote:
Washington senators are likely ultraliberal, but the rural parts of the state probably have some voters who would call if urged on the matter.

On April 05 2017 07:12 Plansix wrote:

This is on point. Rural areas in MA are filled with work class centrist democrats. Most of them are not wild about the pending shown in the senate, per my father. I have no doubt that Washington has a pretty reasonable number of centrists too.