US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7276

On March 07 2017 00:40 LightSpectra wrote:
Anybody want to place some wagers on the following (not mutually exclusive of course) possibilities for the next, eh, 3-6 months?

1. Airstrikes on North Korean missile silos
2. Ground invasion of North Korean soil
3. South Korea/Japan gets nuked
4. North Korea gets nuked

House intelligence chairman Devin Nunes announced Thursday he was temporarily stepping aside from leading the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 elections.

Nunes cited a series of ethics complaints filed against him alleging that he violated terms of discussing classified material following his clandestine meeting at the White House just over two weeks ago.

"I believe it is in the best interests of the House Intelligence Committee and the Congress for me to have Representative Mike Conaway, with assistance from Representatives Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney, temporarily take charge of the Committee's Russia investigation while the House Ethics Committee looks into this matter," Nunes, a California Republican, said in a statement.

On April 06 2017 08:42 Introvert wrote:




This conversation had so much potential! The point, as I have stated and sourced before, is that what the Republicans did, in effect, is not unusual. I care less for the mechanism, I threw that out there as an aside. Taking the conversation this direction is hilarious because we know that even if the GOP had given him a hearing and refused to confirm him people would still be bitching. The complaint about "not even a hearing" is a smokescreen.



You have yet to provide any reason why the denial of the Garland vote is comparable, beyond Plansix's continued posting about escalation. Another fun fact, the Senate hearing as we know it didn't come about until the mid 1900s. Denying a hearing or a vote, while scummy (I'll concede that for the sake of argument), is not a violation of the Constitution. Nor, as I have said now multiple times, is the denial of a presidential appointment in a president's final year. So while this situation is rare, it is not that far removed from previous actions.

Now of course we are treading some new ground, in that these filibusters are being removed at all (both in 2013 and now).

And I still don't see what your solution is. Either party in this situation would nuke this thing.

Avi Berkowitz was an undergrad at Queens College when he met Jared Kushner during a game of pick-up basketball at a Passover celebration in Phoenix, Arizona.

Kushner, then a young real-estate mogul from New Jersey, took a liking to Berkowitz — who, like Kushner, was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in the New York City suburbs.

At the time, neither could have predicted that just a few years later Kushner, senior adviser to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, would be one of the most powerful people in the country and Berkowitz his right-hand man.

Berkowitz, now 28, is in many ways Kushner's protégé, following him to Kushner companies, then to Trump's campaign, and now to the West Wing. Both Ivy League-educated lawyers, the two have matching dispositions and similar worldviews, influenced by their Jewish schooling and deep ties to Israel, according to several of Berkowitz's friends who spoke with Business Insider. Berkowitz reflects a larger trend in a White House staffed by friends and family of the president that prizes loyalty and deprioritizes political experience.

Let me guess. You read about Obama's national security adviser who unmasked the names of Trump associates who were caught up in surveillance and are bewildered that the media is even covering this nothing-burger. It's a diversion from the real story: how the president and his associates collaborated with a Russian influence operation against the U.S. election.

Or perhaps you are sick of hearing about Russia. After all, no one has presented any evidence that President Donald Trump or his team colluded with the Russians. Even James Clapper, President Barack Obama's director of national intelligence, last month acknowledged he saw no such evidence. The Russia story is #fakenews, to borrow a hashtag of the moment. The real story is about the Obama administration's politicization of state surveillance.

Let me suggest that both stories are something-burgers. Depending on where the facts lead, we will know whether Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, was justified in unmasking the names of Trump transition officials or whether the media's obsession with the government's Russia investigation was warranted.

Let's start with the Russia allegations. At this point, even Trump has reluctantly acknowledged that Russia is responsible for the hack of leading Democrats' emails during the election. As the U.S. intelligence community has concluded, those hacks were part of an elaborate operation to discredit the Democratic nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton. This campaign included fake news, Twitter bots that promoted fake stories, hacking, and distributing hacked emails through WikiLeaks.

It's possible that Trump was just an unwitting beneficiary of this foreign meddling. But he and his associates have seemingly gone out of their way to act guilty. Trump seemed to be the last public figure to acknowledge the Russian hacks, even though everyone in his national security cabinet has pinned the blame on Moscow without condition. If he had nothing to hide, why was he clinging to that position? What's more, the Trump team denied having contact with Russians, and then those contacts were disclosed to the press. And Trump has shown no interest in deterring the Russians and other hostile powers from interfering in U.S. politics in the future.

And there are other suspicious facts as well. At this point, it looks like Paul Manafort, who served as Trump's campaign chairman, was an unregistered foreign agent for the pro-Russian government in Ukraine that was ousted in the 2014 popular uprising there. The Associated Press reported last month that Manafort had also been paid by a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, between 2005 and 2009 to help influence U.S. policy on behalf of Russia. Trump fired Manafort in August, after Ukrainian investigators discovered Manafort's name on a ledger listing alleged cash payouts from Ukraine's former ruling party to various cronies as part of an influence-peddling scheme. [...]

That investigation is warranted. But in the meantime, Trump's political opponents have weaponized the allegations of collusion against him. This does not support Trump's claim that Obama illegally wiretapped Trump Tower. But one can see why Trump is worried his predecessor ginned up the surveillance state against him, and also why he hopes to conflate the two issues.

As the New York Times reported on March 1, Obama's aides sought to preserve intelligence on Russia's influence operation and ties to Trump in the final days of his presidency. That included an effort to lower the classification on analysis of this information so it could be distributed more widely within the government and to allies in Congress.

We already know that leaks about Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and his conversations with the Russian ambassador forced his resignation. There were also the reports on Jeff Sessions and his meeting with Russia's ambassador, after Sessions denied any contact with Russian officials.

Tuesday on MSNBC, Rice herself denied leaking anything. But that denial may be less than meets the eye. Rice may not have spoken to any reporters about intelligence she read about Trump and Russia, but did she discuss this with her colleagues? Did any of her colleagues then pass information along to the media?

Even if we take Rice at her word, it's still important to highlight a key point about Rice's interview on Tuesday: She declined to answer questions about whether she sought to unmask Trump transition officials or whether the pace of those requests increased after the election. This week the ranking Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees have said the issue of unmasking will be examined in the broader investigation into Russia and the election.

On April 06 2017 09:28 Philoctetes wrote:
Democrats should just concede and agree that only GOP gets to appoint SC judges from now on. There is nothing in the constitution that says this arrangement cannot be made.

On April 06 2017 23:48 LegalLord wrote:
Honestly with Trump's inner circle, I see no particular clear inclination towards Russia among them. It's what gets the most attention right now, but I just see a more general case of incompetent nitwits who put coin above country. It's just the billionaire hiring talent of Mr. President.

On April 06 2017 23:37 Danglars wrote:
Eli Lake on a tear recently. Not one or the other, but a little bit of both.



Bloomberg

I want answers on both.

On April 06 2017 23:37 Danglars wrote:
Eli Lake on a tear recently. Not one or the other, but a little bit of both.



Bloomberg

I want answers on both.

On April 06 2017 23:55 LegalLord wrote:

Favoritism? All I saw was generic Republican populist bluster ("look how much Putin wins@@@") then a guy who swoons to the slightest compliment from another world leader. And no sense of shame so the leaks were taken without question as a boost for his goals.

Everything else suggests that he has shitty taste in associates.

On April 06 2017 22:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't think anything happens in North Korea. They will keep somewhat successfully holding the rest of the world hostage, because allowing the Kim-dynasty to continue brutally oppressing the North Korean people and giving them some handouts every now and then is a less bad option than any type of attack would be. I really don't know how willing or able China is to control them either - seems extremely hard to gauge or predict with any degree of reliability.

Kinda seems more likely that recent Philippine actions are likely to spur an asian conflict, imo.

On April 06 2017 22:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I don't think anything happens in North Korea. They will keep somewhat successfully holding the rest of the world hostage, because allowing the Kim-dynasty to continue brutally oppressing the North Korean people and giving them some handouts every now and then is a less bad option than any type of attack would be. I really don't know how willing or able China is to control them either - seems extremely hard to gauge or predict with any degree of reliability.

Kinda seems more likely that recent Philippine actions are likely to spur an asian conflict, imo.