US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8052

On July 11 2017 12:50 Plansix wrote:
Are we just running through 2008-2013 bad video game plots? PMCs making a comeback?

On July 11 2017 09:26 Plansix wrote:
I like how GH drops in every once and a while to let us know just how misguided most of us and the country are.

On July 11 2017 12:41 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
not an area I know much about but this seems a bad idea

The proposals Mr. Prince presented, a former American official said, hew closely to the views outlined in his Journal column — in essence, that the private sector can operate “cheaper and better than the military” in Afghanistan.

Nevada's governor has endorsed a state of emergency declared for recreational marijuana regulations, after the state's tax authority declared that many stores are running out of weed.

The Nevada Tax Commission said in a statement it will consider emergency regulations on July 13 to provide a structure for marijuana distribution to retailers. It would allow for liquor wholesalers to get in on the marijuana business.

"Based on reports of adult-use marijuana sales already far exceeding the industry’s expectations at the state’s 47 licensed retail marijuana stores, and the reality that many stores are running out of inventory, the Department must address the lack of distributors immediately," the statement said. "Some establishments report the need for delivery within the next several days."

The distribution issue is at the center of a legal fight between the state and Nevada's liquor industry, which sued to get in on the business. Nevada currently has appealed to the state's supreme court. The tax authority claimed most liquor wholesalers who have applied to distribute marijuana have yet to meet requirements to be licensed.

"The business owners in this industry have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build facilities across the state. They have hired and trained thousands of additional employees to meet the demands of the market. Unless the issue with distributor licensing is resolved quickly, the inability to deliver product to retail stores will result in many of these people losing their jobs and will bring this nascent market to a grinding halt. A halt in this market will lead to a hole in the state’s school budget," the department said in its statement.

Voters approved recreational marijuana in November. Sales began on July 1 and within the first weekend, the Nevada Dispensary Association said sales were around $3 million.

Close to Utah, West Wendover is currently in the process of drafting an ordinance for marijuana sales. Mesquite recently voted to allow recreational sales at its lone dispensary.

On July 11 2017 21:13 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
So has the Trump family not seen the movies Goodfellas and Casino and learned nothing? Who needs enemies when you have this big of a dipshit for a son.

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/884585256589955073

On July 11 2017 23:11 Doodsmack wrote:


And on the same day as the meeting, Trump tweets about Hillary's missing emails. You know these morons were slapping each other's backs in Trump Tower lol.

The Russian lawyer embroiled in controversy over her meeting with Donald Trump Jr. last year denied Tuesday that she's worked for the Russian government.

But Natalia Veselnitskaya, interviewed on NBC's "Today" show, added that Trump Jr. and others at the meeting wanted damaging information about Hillary Clinton "so badly."

Veselnitskaya was asked specifically how the Trump aides that attended the meeting -- including President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort -- had gotten the impression that she had potentially damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

"It's quite possible that maybe they were looking for such information, they wanted it so badly," Veselnitskaya said through a translator.

President Donald Trump has been conspicuously silent about the growing firestorm involving his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is facing more revelations about a meeting he held during the height of the campaign with a Russian lawyer promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Trump has kept a light schedule since returning from the G-20 summit in Germany on Saturday, making no public appearances. He’s been active on Twitter, but his messages have ranged from railing against Democrats to bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles to defending his daughter Ivanka’s role at the G-20. But there have been no tweets about Trump Jr.

And on Monday night, as The New York Times dropped another harmful report about Trump’s eldest son — alleging that he was informed by email that the Clinton information was part of a Russian government effort to help his father — the president’s legal team just reiterated that Trump himself was not a part of it.

“The President was not aware of and did not attend the meeting,” said Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team.

Trump Jr., who has hired New York criminal defense attorney Alan Futerfas as his personal attorney for Russia-related matters, took to Twitter to defend himself on Tuesday morning. "Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story. If this nonsense meeting is all they have after a yr, I understand the desperation!" he wrote.

The president’s own silence is deepening the mystery around the latest twist in the long-running Russia scandal that has proved to be at the least a major distraction for the Trump White House and could pose a significant threat to his overall presidency.

Trump has long denied any collusion with Russia, dismissing such reports as “fake news” and a “hoax.” But the storyline that has engulfed his presidency since before he inherited the Oval Office has only gotten deeper and now puts his son in the center of it, at least for now.

But the president’s allies are keeping distance between this furor and Trump as they forcefully defend his son, whom lawmakers have indicated should be brought in for interviews with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday the president only learned of the meeting “in the last couple of days,” and Futerfas noted in a statement late Monday that “His father knew nothing about it.”

Trump Jr.’s narrative regarding the June 2016 meeting inside Trump Tower has evolved significantly since Saturday, when he said the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya was largely about an adoption program. By Sunday, he had acknowledged that he took the meeting — which was also attended by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort — because he was told Veselnitskaya, whose name he said he wasn’t given before they met, “might have information helpful to the campaign.”

But in an interview Tuesday morning with NBC’s “Today,” Veselnitskaya denied possessing any “damaging or sensitive information” about Clinton, remarking that “it was never my intention to have” such information.

“It’s quite possible that maybe they were longing for such information,” she added. “They wanted it so badly.”

Trump Jr., Futerfas and White House spokespeople have insisted the president’s son didn’t do anything wrong and that no member of the campaign colluded with Russia, a central question among the federal and congressional investigations into the Kremlin’s role in the 2016 campaign.

Music publicist Robert Goldstone set up the meeting on behalf of singer-songwriter Emin Agalarov. Veselnitskaya “had information about purported illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee that she thought Donald Trump Jr. might find helpful,” he told The Associated Press on Monday.

Everybody who’s ever wrestled with the North Korean nuclear problem agrees on one thing: There are no good options for solving it.

That bleak reality grows ever more apparent as North Korea fires off increasingly sophisticated missiles that could one day carry a nuclear weapon. So the pressing question is: Among all the imperfect options for dealing with North Korea, what strategy holds the best hope?

Few are more qualified to offer an answer than Robert Gates, the most seasoned senior U.S. national-security official of the last half-century. He spent almost 27 years as an intelligence official, including a stint as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, worked in the White House for four presidents of both parties, and was defense secretary for both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.

As it happens, Mr. Gates has a plan, which he explained in an interview. It’s worth listening to at a time when tensions are rising rapidly.

The Gates proposal proceeds from several basic principles. First: There simply is no good pure military option for attacking North Korea. The sheer destruction and danger of an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula take that idea off the table.

Second: “China is still the key no matter how you slice it,” Mr. Gates says. As has been noted by every recent American administration, China is the one country with sufficient leverage over North Korea to make a difference.

But Mr. Gates also says he agrees with President Donald Trump and his aides that it’s time to “disrupt the status quo” by trying a different approach with the Chinese.

Which leads to the third principle: “It seems to me the need is for a comprehensive strategy you would lay out to the Chinese at a very high level, which would basically have both a diplomatic and a military component.” In other words, make a deal with China before you deal with North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un, directly.

Under the Gates approach, the U.S. would make China the following offer: Washington is prepared to recognize the North Korean regime and forswear a policy of regime change, as it did when resolving the Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union; is prepared to sign a peace treaty with North Korea; and would be prepared to consider some changes in the structure of military forces in South Korea.

In return, the U.S. would demand hard limits on the North Korean nuclear and missile program, essentially freezing it in place, enforced by the international community and by China itself.

“I think you cannot get the North to give up their nuclear weapons,” Mr. Gates says. “Kim sees them as vital to survival. But you may be able to get them to keep the delivery systems to very short range.”

In addition, the U.S. would tell China that in any diplomatic solution the North Koreans would have to agree to invasive inspections that could insure a limited nuclear stockpile of no more than a dozen or two dozen nuclear weapons, as well as inspections to ensure they aren’t developing more weapons or further capabilities for delivery.

Crucially, the Chinese would be told that any diplomatic solution is one they would be expected to help enforce.

On the flip side of that offer, Mr. Gates says, the U.S. would present a tougher alternative for China: “If that is not an outcome you can accept, we are going to take steps in Asia you hate.”

Absent such an agreement, the U.S. would “heavily populate Asia with missile defenses.” That would include missile-defense buildups in South Korea, Japan and aboard additional American ships stationed in the Pacific. In addition, the U.S. would declare that it would shoot down “anything we think looks like a launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile” from North Korea.

On July 11 2017 23:54 Danglars wrote:
https://twitter.com/yashar/status/884754467375239168

NYT Brooks outdoes himself with the kind of elitism middle America facepalma at.

Has America hit peak anti-intellectualism?

Aside from the election of Donald Trump, a businessman born into wealth whose only notable expertise is in reality television, there is now more evidence that the right-wing’s long game of denigrating U.S. institutions to reshape political discourse is succeeding. A new Pew Research Center poll released on Monday revealed that there is one U.S. institution perceived through a larger partisan divide than even the media: It’s college.

For the first time, a majority of Republicans think that colleges and universities have a negative impact on the country. Fifty-eight percent say that colleges “are having a negative effect on the way things are going in the country,” according to Pew. In other words, the Wall Street banks are more popular with Republican voters than Stanford, Harvard or the University of Akron.

Just two years ago, a majority of Republicans, 54 percent, rated universities’ effect as positive. As Pew noted, “this shift in opinion has occurred across most demographic and ideological groups within the GOP,” but in particular the poll found that positive views of colleges among Republicans under the age of 50 sunk by 21 percentage points from 2015 to 2017. While Republican views of colleges and universities remained largely the same throughout much of the Obama administration, 65 percent of self-identified conservatives now say that colleges and universities have a negative impact on the country. Positive views of colleges dropped even among Republicans who hold a college or graduate degree, declining by 11 percentage points during the last two years.

Democrats and independents who lean Democrat, on the other hand, continue to hold a positive attitude toward such institutions, with 72 percent saying they approve of higher education.

Republican politicians in recent years have pushed back on the four-year degree, building upon their long-hyped attack on institutes of higher education as bastions of liberal indoctrination.

Last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, held a hearing titled “Free Speech 101: The Assault on the First Amendment on College Campuses.” The Wisconsin State Assembly passed a bill last month allowing college administrators to expel students for “disrupting” college speakers.

It’s likely no coincidence that just as conservatives decry the scourge of “political correctness” on liberal arts campuses, their campaign to undermine the institutions that defend a growing diversity of voices among students and faculty is bearing fruit. Arizona Republicans recently threatened to cut funding by 10 percent from public institutions that offer courses and events that are “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group” or advocate “solidarity” based on ethnicity, race, religion or gender.

Donald Trump’s threats to defund the University of California at Berkeley following a February melee in protest of right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’ scheduled appearance harken back to Ronald Reagan’s 1966 campaign for governor of California, during which he pledged “to clean up the mess at Berkeley” caused by “a small minority of hippies, radicals and filthy speech advocates.” The right has long decried the ivory towers of academia, but now that those ivory towers are increasingly filled with members of marginalized communities, such attacks are beginning to resonate with average Republicans.

Between Election Day last November and April 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has documented at least 330 incidents of bias on university campuses. More than 135 incidents since the start of the 2016 academic school year, the SPLC reports, have involved recruitment efforts by white supremacists.

On July 12 2017 00:17 ticklishmusic wrote:
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789839522140166

that lawyer hired yesterday is probably drinking heavily now.