US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8630

On September 03 2017 01:02 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

Source
Destroy all the evidence!

At 18, Olivia Katbi was answering the phones and emails in a Republican state senator’s office in Ohio. Then the legislator threw his weight behind a particularly contentious anti-abortion law. “I realised that the party I’m working for is evil. After that I identified as a Democrat but I wasn’t really happy with their policies either,” said Katbi, now 25.

Back then, she couldn’t articulate her reservations about President Barack Obama. There were the drone strikes, and the limitations of his healthcare reforms. But mostly it was a frustrating sense he wasn’t serving her interests so much as those of a monied elite. So in the 2012 presidential election, Katbi voted for Jill Stein, the Green party candidate. But that didn’t change the world.

It was only last year, when Bernie Sanders made his run under the banner of democratic socialism, that it all started to fall into place.

“My politics were to the left of the Democratic party but I didn’t realise there was an entire ideology, an entire movement that was there. It had never occurred to me,” said Katbi. “Bernie was my introduction to the concept of democratic socialism. It’s not like I associated it with the cold war. It was a new concept to me completely. That was the case for a lot of millennials, which is why the movement has grown so much.”

Katbi, who works at an organization helping to settle immigrants and refugees in Portland, Oregon, became “socialist curious”. She joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a rapidly growing big-tent movement that has drawn in former communists and fired up millennials. The DSA is now the largest socialist organization in the US as surging membership, which has quadrupled since the election to around 25,000, has breathed new life into a once dormant group. New branches have sprung up, from Montana to Texas and New York. Earlier this month, hundreds of delegates gathered in Chicago for the only DSA convention in years to attract attention.

Part of its membership veers toward Scandavian-style social democracy of universal healthcare and welfare nets. Others embrace more traditional socialism of large-scale public ownership. But the label has been taken up by other millennials who do not identify with any particular political institution. They come at it through protest movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter, fueled by frustration at the Democratic party’s failure to take seriously the deepening disillusionment with capitalism, income inequality and the corporate capture of the US government.

With that has come debate not only about pay, housing and proposals for universal basic income, but a reappraisal of the role of the government in people’s lives in favor of greater state intervention.

According to recent polling, a majority of Americans adults under the age of 30 now reject capitalism, although that does not translate into automatic support for socialism. For Katbi, though, the path is clear. Six months after the election, she is leaving Sanders behind. “I really don’t like saying that Bernie was my gateway to socialism, just because I feel like I’m more left than him now, and I also think there’s a very bizarre cult of personality around Bernie,” she said.

Ask what socialism is, and Katbi looks to the campaign by the Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in this year’s British election.

“I really liked Labour’s succinct tagline: for the many, not the few. That’s a great summary of what socialism is. It’s democratic control of the society we live in. That includes universal healthcare. Universal education. Public housing. Public control of energy resources. State ownership of banks. That’s what I understand socialism to be when I heard Bernie Sanders introduce it,” she said.

Labour’s manifesto caught the attention of young leftwing activists in the US because, in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign platform, it laid out a clear set of ideas they could identify with. Some in the DSA are also finding common cause with Momentum, the leftwing British grassroots organisation formed in 2015 to back Corbyn which in turn has drawn inspiration from Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain.

“The people I’m friends with who don’t identify as socialist are definitely supportive of certain socialist policies, like single-payer healthcare,” said Katbi. “Everyone has student loan debt and everyone’s rents are exorbitant and everyone’s paying like $300-a-month premiums for Obamacare. It’s common sense for people my age.”

The alarm created at the prospect of millions of people losing their coverage while millions more see their health insurance premiums surge has pushed the new breed of democratic socialists to embrace universal healthcare as the gateway issue to bring large numbers of Americans, including a lot of Trump voters, around to the idea that government regulation can work for them.

Americans who came of age during the cold war saw socialism being characterized as the close cousin of Soviet communism, and state-run healthcare as a first step to the gulags. There are still those attempting to keep the old scare stories alive.

It was the old cold war warriors who helped detoxify socialism for younger Americans when the Tea Party and Fox News painted Obama – a president who recapitalised the banks without saving the homes of families in foreclosure – as a socialist for his relatively modest changes to the healthcare system.

Then came Sanders.

“With the Bernie phenomenon, suddenly you’re able to utter the S-word in public,” said Nick Caleb, 35, a long time leftwing activist who joined the DSA shortly after the election, as membership of its Portland branch surged.

Caleb said that even before Sanders ran, the Occupy Wall Street movement had prompted a scrutiny of capitalism. “Occupy Wall Street happened and there was a broader debate about what capitalism was, and we started to highlight the pieces of it that were most awful. So there was an articulation of what capitalism was, and then it meant someone had to define what socialism means, and we sort of left that space open,” he said.

At the heart of the ideas flooding into that space is a debate about the role of the state after decades of conservatives painting government as oppressive and a burden keeping good Americans down.

The campaign over healthcare, the anger sparked by the rapaciousness of big banks bailed out by the taxpayer, and a belief that only the state has the strength to reverse deepening inequality is breathing new life into the old idea that the government is there to control capitalism, rather than capitalism controlling the government.

If that takes hold among a wider group of millennials, it will represent a seismic shift in the way many Americans think about the pre-eminent role of the state and capitalism in their lives.

On September 02 2017 10:07 Wulfey_LA wrote:


If you want to argue that "it doesn't make sense that he had enough to exonerate", then you need to put up a relevant standard that shows why Comey was wrong in his judgment as to how to proceed in the investigation. Remember that Comey gets the overwhelming benefit of the doubt here over any accusations due to decades of experience and having an army of agents backing him up.

The easy explanation here is that he handed out the injunctions because he wanted to make damned sure the investigation was right, so he got a final round of interviews right before releasing the memo. Think about the timeline.

1) 9 months of investigations - there were interviews + servers + emails here
2) May 2016 - Comey decides to start writing memo seeing where investigation is going
3) June/July 2016 - final interviews done to double/triple check, immunities handed out to get absolute truth
4) Then Comey releases the memo after interviews don't change anything (remember that factually, they didn't change anything).

On September 02 2017 13:12 micronesia wrote:
Is the point there that other countries are much more likely to extend a helping hand in the USA's time of need when the country's motto isn't "us first, fuck the rest of you"?

Michael Cohen, who served President Trump as a business and personal lawyer over many years, is urging congressional investigators to excuse him from any questioning in the ongoing Russia probe because, he argues, he was wrongly dragged into the affair in a widely-circulated “dossier” prepared by a retired British spy.

“We do not believe that the committee should give credence to or perpetuate any of the dossier’s allegations relating to Mr. Cohen unless the committee can obtain independent and reliable corroboration of those allegations, which we do not believe exists,” according to a letter Cohen’s lawyer sent to the House Intelligence Committee.

Cohen’s name appears repeatedly in the dossier, an unverified opposition research document prepared by former British agent Christopher Steele at the behest of a Washington-based investigative firm. The document cites a “Kremlin insider” as the source for the suggestion that Cohen met in Prague with Russian government representatives last August. Cohen, it alleged, was “heavily engaged in a damage control and damage limitation operation in an attempt to prevent the full details of Trump’s relationship with Russia being exposed.”

The dossier further states that a “Kremlin insider highlights the importance of Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen in covert relationship with Russia,” and adds that Cohen’s father-in-law is a prominent developer in Moscow – a detail that later proved to be false.

Cohen’s attorney sent Congress a six-page rebuttal of the so-called “dossier” highlighting each allegation. Most notably, the letter states that Cohen never traveled to Prague to meet covertly with Russian emissaries and never participated in any secret plan to garner Russian help for the Trump candidacy.

“Mr. Cohen did not participate in discussions of any kind (secret or otherwise) with ‘Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers’ in August or September 2016,” the letter says.

“We have not uncovered a single document that would in any way corroborate the dossier’s allegations regarding Mr. Cohen, nor do we believe that any such document exists,” the letter says, which was signed by Cohen’s attorney, Stephen M. Ryan.

Cohen has, however, acknowledged that he engaged in communication directly with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential campaign about a proposal to build a Trump Tower skyscraper in Moscow. In a separate statement, he told lawmakers that he wrote to the press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin as part of an effort to garner support for the proposed Trump Tower, a project that was ultimately abandoned.

None of the congressional committees involved in the Russia matter have responded to ABC News about Cohen's request to be left out of the probe.

Cohen's letter also calls on Congress to help identify the parties who paid for research into the dossier. That topic has already piqued the interest of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last week, committee investigators met with Glenn Simpson, whose firm Fusion GPS undertook the effort to uncover possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian agents.

Simpson declined to identify his clients, his lawyer said following the closed-door interview.

On September 03 2017 02:31 Danglars wrote:

I still fail to see why you hand out immunities to crimes if you aren't proceeding to build a case to prosecute for a crime. Why not just prosecute the guilty parties for the crimes if the person on the top isn't guilty of anything? You forgive the small fish to go after the big grouper, not because you've decided that one isn't worth going after in the first place.

On September 03 2017 03:35 WolfintheSheep wrote:

Because they weren't given immunity for crimes?

They were given immunity for anything related to what they were handing over for that part of the investigation. For example, some handed over their email records, computers, etc., some were interviewed.

This isn't television where investigators have infinite resources and a personal judge at their beck and call. Rather than go through the process of getting court orders, subpoenas, drag things through the courts, it's much faster to give immunity deals so that the party in question is willing to hand over everything.

Contradicting Trump, DOJ Admits There Is No Evidence Of Trump Tower Wiretaps.

In a brief filed late on Friday, the Department of Justice confirmed that it has no evidence to support President Donald Trump’s assertions this spring that he was the target of surveillance by the Obama administration while running for office last year.

The motion, filed in response to a lawsuit from the pro-transparency group American Oversight, notes that “both FBI and NSD confirm that they have no records related to wiretaps as described” by Trump.

On September 03 2017 03:42 Danglars wrote:

This is exactly the contention. Chaffetz said "This is beyond explanation. The FBI was handing out immunity agreements like candy. I've lost confidence in this investigation and I question the genuine effort in which it was carried out. Immunity deals should not be a requirement for cooperating with the FBI."

It's immunity from prosecution. If you want to make the distinction of immunity from potential crimes instead of immunities to crimes, I'm with you. But don't try to dismiss it in turns of simply expeditious needs; if there's crimes committed, the justice department should pursue those responsible individuals and not (while in the FBI investigation stage) immunize all involved from potential prosecution. It's nonsense and I suspect you know it.

FBI, Homeland Security warn of more ‘antifa’ attacks
Confidential documents call the anarchists that seek to counter white supremacists ‘domestic terrorists.’

Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.

Since well before the Aug. 12 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly, DHS has been issuing warnings about the growing likelihood of lethal violence between the left-wing anarchists and right-wing white supremacist and nationalist groups.

Previously unreported documents disclose that by April 2016, authorities believed that “anarchist extremists” were the primary instigators of violence at public rallies against a range of targets. They were blamed by authorities for attacks on the police, government and political institutions, along with symbols of “the capitalist system,” racism, social injustice and fascism, according to a confidential 2016 joint intelligence assessment by DHS and the FBI.

After President Donald Trump’s election in November, the antifa activists locked onto another target — his supporters, especially those from white supremacist and nationalist groups suddenly turning out in droves to hail his victory, support crackdowns on immigrants and Muslims and to protest efforts to remove symbols of the Confederacy.

Those reports appear to bolster Trump’s insistence that extremists on the left bore some blame for the clashes in Charlottesville and represent a “problem” nationally. But they also reflect the extent that his own political movement has spurred the violent backlash.

In interviews, law enforcement authorities made clear that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and policies — first as a candidate and then as president — helped to create a situation that has escalated so quickly and extensively that they do not have a handle on it.

On September 03 2017 06:03 Plansix wrote:
Immunity is a common tool to assure testimony and witnesses. There was an article I read a years ago about nations that didn't use immunity deals. There conviction rates were astronomical lower than the US. I'll see if I can find it.

On September 03 2017 06:25 ChristianS wrote:
Wouldn't it be reasonable to grant immunity to people if you don't think you have a case sgsinst them anyway, and just want to know what they know?

On September 03 2017 06:25 ChristianS wrote:

In another universe I could imagine a Kwark pointing out that you're arguing "immunity is a good tool in many cases" and not "immunity is a good tool in this case." Danglars is presumably arguing "immunity was not a good tool in this case," not "immunity is not a good tool in any case."

I don't know the first thing about running an investigation so I have no idea how to judge whether it was justified. My presumption would be that Comey made a reasonable call, considering his track record. The evidence presented to the contrary seems pretty weak; that Coney had drafted a statement of his findings so far before granting immunity to collect more evidence doesn't seem like much; presumably if more damning evidence had been uncovered his final statement would have been different. Wouldn't it be reasonable to grant immunity to people if you don't think you have a case sgsinst them anyway, and just want to know what they know?