US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8732

Martin Shkreli Is Jailed for Seeking a Hair From Hillary Clinton

Martin Shkreli, the former pharmaceutical executive who is awaiting sentencing for a fraud conviction, was sent to jail on Wednesday after a federal judge revoked his bail because he had offered $5,000 for a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair.

Mr. Shkreli, who was free on $5 million bail while he awaited sentencing, had made two Facebook posts offering cash to anyone who could “grab a hair” from Mrs. Clinton during her book tour.

At the hearing in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto said that Mr. Shkreli’s post could be perceived as a true threat.

“That is a solicitation to assault in exchange for money that is not protected by the First Amendment,” she said.

Mr. Shkreli, 34, gained notoriety as a pharmaceutical executive for increasing the price of a lifesaving drug, Daraprim, by 5,000 percent. He was convicted in August of three counts of fraud, relating to two hedge funds and a pharmaceutical company he previously ran. On Wednesday, he was scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 16, but he most likely will not be released before then unless his lawyers can show that he poses no threat to the community.

Mr. Shkreli’s online offer last week prompted prosecutors to request that his bail be revoked — and the Secret Service to investigate. “On HRC’s book tour, try to grab a hair from her,” he wrote, referring to Mrs. Clinton. “Will pay $5,000 per hair obtained from Hillary Clinton.”

Although Mr. Shkreli edited the post to say that he had meant it to be satirical, and he later took it down altogether, prosecutors contended that there was a risk that one of Mr. Shkreli’s social media followers would take the post seriously and act on it.

It was, they noted, not the first time that Mr. Shkreli had made inflammatory posts on social media.

Just before his conviction, prosecutors wrote, Mr. Shkreli had made a sexual threat toward a female journalist on Twitter; since then, they wrote, “Shkreli has engaged in an escalating pattern of threats and harassment.”

Mr. Shkreli’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, argued at the hearing that Mr. Shkreli was not violent and that the post had been “a momentary lapse in judgment.”

Mr. Shkreli, he said, deserved another chance.

“Stupid doesn’t make you violent,” Mr. Brafman said, adding that his client’s Facebook posts had shown “immaturity, satire, a warped sense of humor.”

But Judge Matsumoto was unmoved.

“What is funny about that?” she responded. “He doesn’t know who his followers are.”

Judge Matsumoto said that while Mr. Shkreli had edited the original post to say, “this is satire, meant for humor,” the next day he put up another post that echoed the first: “$5,000 but the hair has to include a follicle. Do not assault anyone for any reason ever (LOLIBERALS).”
Mr. Shkreli, dressed in a lavender button-down shirt, was animated for much of the hearing, as he had been throughout his trial. But his behavior changed when Judge Matsumoto said that she had decided to jail him, and he sat quietly at the defense table for the rest of the hearing.

After the hearing, two deputy United States marshals led Mr. Shkreli to a holding cell adjoining the courtroom. He will be held at a federal jail in Brooklyn.

On September 14 2017 15:16 Wulfey_LA wrote:
What failures? Pelosi has been in the minority for a long time, but when she was in the majority she ran a rocket docket of legislation. It was stuff dying in the senate from the 60 vote cloture rules, not Pelosi. Contrast her brief two years of majority leader under a Dem president to Paul Ryan's tenure under Trump. Pelosi was getting bills with the President, Ryan is ... watching Pelosi get bills with Trump? Lulz

EDIT: the measure for effectiveness of a majority leader should really be how well they can keep their caucus together on tough votes. Not easy ones. Not grandstanding go nowhere votes (like Ryan's 39 ACA repeals). Hard ones, where you make concessions but your bargaining power only works when everyone votes together.

Pelosi full stopped Trump's planned budget back in April. Schumer and Pelosi are writing Trump's budget right now. They are the minority leaders yet their caucus unity and ability to deliver votes is giving them far more power than they ought have. That is what a strong legislator looks like.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-budget/budget-deal-may-map-u-s-congress-road-ahead-via-trump-bypass-idUSKBN17X0YF

On September 14 2017 06:03 xDaunt wrote:

What, are you really going to blame voter suppression in Alabama for the fact that a stupidly large majority of black babies nationally are born out of wedlock? Let's focus on the big issues.

On September 14 2017 09:06 Leporello wrote:


Please show me the FB or Russian social-media group, called something like "Heart of Moscow", that was created by an American government operation. We're the "top offenders" of government-run social-media operations to subvert other countries' public-opinions? You sure about that?

And regardless, whether the equivocation is false or not, really doesn't matter, does it?

On September 14 2017 16:23 Wulfey_LA wrote:
So she is an excellent caucus leader, but flatlanders get triggered by her San Francisco values. That flatlanders fell for lies on the FOXBOX sucks, but how can you place that at Pelosi's feet? Hannity would lie to his audience no matter what Pelosi did.

EDIT: imagine the reverses:

Would you say she is great if Dems were winning more legislative seats?
Would you say she is bad if she could get votes and repeatedly let Dem policies get overran by Republican policy goals?

For years, climate change activists have faced a wrenching dilemma: how to persuade people to care about a grave but seemingly far-off problem and win their support for policies that might pinch them immediately in utility bills and at the pump.

But that calculus may be changing at a time when climatic chaos feels like a daily event rather than an airy abstraction, and storms powered by warming ocean waters wreak havoc on the mainland United States. Americans have spent weeks riveted by television footage of wrecked neighborhoods, displaced families, flattened Caribbean islands and submerged cities from Houston to Jacksonville.

“The conversation is shifting,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii. “Because even if you don’t believe liberals, even if you don’t believe scientists, you can believe your own eyes.”

Despite consensus among scientists, not everyone is convinced that terrifying weather means climate change is an urgent threat. There is virtually no prospect of large-scale federal action on the issue in the near future, and President Trump has made a top priority of unraveling the Obama administration’s environmental policies, including the Paris climate accord. Republicans, who control the White House and Congress, remain broadly skeptical of climate science and rely heavily on the electoral support of oil- and coal-producing states.

But an array of political leaders — including some members of Mr. Trump’s party, along with emboldened Democrats and environmental activists — see the underlying dynamics of climate politics bending, as drastic weather events throw up practical challenges for red and blue states alike. Mr. Schatz, one of the Democrats’ most assertive spokesmen on global warming, said there were already “pockets of opportunity” to work with Republicans on measures to reinforce coastlines and support solar- and wind-energy production, though not on more ambitious policies.

“We can get a fair amount of bipartisanship if we talk about severe weather and resiliency,” Mr. Schatz said. “For some people, it’s just about the phrase ‘climate change’ being too politically loaded.”

Most movement among Republicans has come from moderates and lawmakers from areas vulnerable to flooding, where seeming oblivious to extreme weather could be politically risky. There have been no notable cracks in Republican opposition to climate policy among party leaders, or even within the powerful Texas congressional delegation — a group battered by Hurricane Harvey but fiercely protective of the state’s oil economy.

For the most part, senior Republicans have avoided directly discussing climate in the aftermath of Harvey and Hurricane Irma, which pounded the Southeast this week. They have focused chiefly on scrambling to get government aid to stricken states. The Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, said debating climate now would be “very, very insensitive.”

But in Florida, where Irma left more than a dozen dead and millions without electricity, a handful of Republicans have been more outspoken. The Republican mayor of Miami, Tomás Regalado, urged Mr. Trump last week to reconsider his climate policies. Several Florida lawmakers founded a bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the House of Representatives, and the group’s Republican membership grew this year to two dozen.

The safe ground for Republicans, party strategists say, may be embracing proposals to mitigate certain effects of environmental change, while skirting debate about more drastic actions that experts see as essential.

That approach reached even the White House this week, with Thomas P. Bossert, Mr. Trump’s Homeland Security adviser, declaring that the administration takes “seriously the threat of climate change.” He added, somewhat vaguely, “Not the cause of it, but the things that we observe.”

Representative Scott Taylor of Virginia, a Republican whose district hugs the Atlantic Coast, said his constituents were growing more sensitive to the implications of climate change, including voters who lean to the right. Mr. Taylor, who is a member of the climate caucus, said he was still wary of hobbling fossil-fuel companies, but favors narrower measures to address dangerous environmental conditions. The Republican nominee for governor of Virginia this year, Ed Gillespie, has taken a similar tack, ignoring climate as an issue but releasing a plan on coastal flooding.

“We have to deal with issues like sea level rise and flooding and resiliency,” Mr. Taylor said, cautioning, “I don’t think we’re there, in a bipartisan way, for comprehensive action.”

Jay Faison, a wealthy Republican donor who has made clean energy a personal cause, said he found Republicans increasingly open to engaging around the edges of the climate issue. Mr. Faison said he had reason to believe there was “some appetite” among congressional leaders for backing resilient infrastructure and energy research.

“I’d like to see more, faster,” Mr. Faison said. “But we play the hand we’re dealt.”

Political polling has long found most voters sympathetic to policies that protect the environment, including the Paris agreement and rules proposed by the Obama administration to curb power-plant emissions. But Americans have also tended to rank climate low among their priorities, behind issues like health care and jobs.

Still, the trend toward taking climate change seriously has been unmistakable, and pollsters say it may intensify after a season of superstorms. In a Gallup poll this year, 45 percent of Americans said they worried about global warming a “great deal,” a sharp increase from the share in 2016 and the highest ever recorded in the poll. About 6 in 10 said they believed the consequences of global warming are already being felt.

But liberals and conservatives hold widely divergent views on climate, even within hard-hit states like Texas and Florida. And research conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that many who are concerned about climate change remain less convinced it will harm them directly.

Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who has studied climate as a campaign issue, said that it was most relevant to voters as a “reference point” to judge a candidate’s worldview, and that voters tended to see those who reject climate science as extremists. Mr. Garin said catastrophic weather could make certain hard-line views less acceptable.

“The salience of climate change denialism grows at moments when the consequences of that are more abundantly clear,” Mr. Garin said, “such as when the country is hit by two exceptionally powerful storms, one right after the other.”

Is unclear whether climate will play a major part in the 2018 elections, when Democrats are defending a number of Senate seats in states that produce carbon fuel. Climate may feature more prominently in the 2020 elections, when a wider range of states will be contested and the environmental policies Mr. Trump has pursued through executive action — like withdrawing from the Paris agreement — will be more directly at issue.

But some Democratic candidates and political donors hope to punish conservative politicians before then. In Florida, Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat seeking re-election next year, quickly went on the offensive this week, accusing one potential Republican opponent, Gov. Rick Scott, of having ignored the mounting threat of climate change.

And advisers to Tom Steyer, a billionaire investor who has spent millions supporting Democrats, said his political committee might seek to link Republicans in Florida, Nevada and California to environmental catastrophes in those states, like the summer hurricanes and wildfires out west.

Mr. Steyer said in an interview that acknowledging the impact of devastating storms should not get Republicans off the hook for opposing efforts to address global warming over all. He predicted the “human tragedy” of climate change would be a permanent feature of politics. “This is not an isolated incident,” he said of Irma and Harvey. “It’s going to happen again, only worse.”

Mr. Regalado, the Miami mayor, said many of his Republican colleagues were wary of being “called crazy or liberals” if they talked about climate. But he said voters on the ground had grown sharply aware of the risks they face.

“I don’t think my statements are going to change the way the administration thinks or the governor thinks, but let me tell you, people are afraid,” Mr. Regalado said. “People are understanding there is a new normal now.”

On September 14 2017 08:55 Danglars wrote:

And I heard it as both the conspiracy theory (and silly conservative bugaboo) and relating Marxist theories to culture throughout the 2000s. As an example, here's Andrew Breitbart going off on it before the attack+ Show Spoiler +

SPLC references the 1998 William Lind speech
That writeup was published in 2003 and cited several persons and organizations.

Buchanan, Nixon & Reagan adviser/speechwriter/etc and Republican presidential candidate, was probably my first exposure. His famous culture war speech (Republican National Convention 1992) and all the books and TV appearances. Explicit in his book and speeches.

So suffice it to say, the term's been around. The last post I commented on its historical accuracy, and I'll restate here it does have a connotation of communist conspiracy if used indiscriminately.