US Politics Mega-Blog - Page 96

On December 06 2018 04:32 Doodsmack wrote:


See: multi-billion dollar investment in Kushner's failed NYC skyscraper from a Qatar linked investment fund. At the same time as Kushner was pretty much in charge of Qatar and Saudi Arabia related foreign policy, and was very much on the side of Saudi Arabia as it led a blockade of Qatar. And Kushner had attempted negotiations with Qatar after the election to try to get an investment in teh same building, and they turned him down.

Curious if the above is of concern to Danglars and xDaunt?

On December 06 2018 05:18 Danglars wrote:
The American left might be turning on Obama-era Title IX changes to sexual assault investigations on campus.


NYT

A return of due process considerations and more rights afforded to the accused is a good start. This feminist Democrat is willing to speak the truth about current reforms, regardless of her overall opinion about Betsy DeVos. California State College investigative systems, and a host of publicized abuses within them, will be impacted by these reforms.

On December 06 2018 06:23 xDaunt wrote:

Not really. Shit happens in business for a lot of reasons. And to the extent that there's something there that needs looking into, I don't see Flynn as a viable source. He simply doesn't have the history with Kushner to have the factual foundation to provide anything of use to Mueller on such an investigation. For this reason, among others, I highly doubt that Investigation 1 concerns potential criminal charges against Trump or his people. Flynn has a substantial career that long predates his involvement with Trump. As just an example, he was at the DIA under Obama. Investigation 1 could concern his experience there. We really don't know.

On December 06 2018 07:01 Doodsmack wrote:


I see no reason to believe that the sequence of events surrounding uranium one (Russia pays bill for a speech followed by uranium one approval by state dept) is stronger evidence of corruption than the sequence of events surrounding Kushner's skyscraper. It's a sequence that raises the specter of a conflict of interest. You could search for a distinction in "shit happens in business" but you still have a potential conflict of interest. I could say the distinction on uranium one is that many agencies approved of the deal, and that's a complex process involving a lot of variables. The only real reason to distinguish uranium one is partisan bias.

On December 06 2018 07:09 xDaunt wrote:


Uranium 1 involved many government officials. I'm not that familiar with Kushner's skyscraper deal or the timing of what happened, but I doubt that it was anywhere near the same level as Uranium 1.

On December 06 2018 07:17 GreenHorizons wrote:


I know you like to lean on what has been legally proven (except for things like Uranium 1) but you don't actually think Trump doesn't or at least wouldn't prioritize his own wealth over national security do you?

If you do I have to ask what gives you that impression? There's plenty I disagree with you on but can at least see how you arrive at your conclusion, this one bewilders me a bit.

On December 06 2018 07:22 xDaunt wrote:

I'm not presuming anything with Uranium 1 that I would not with Kushner's skyscraper deal. I'm merely pointing out that each deal is too dissimilar structurally and with regards to who was involved to even be remotely comparable. As for Trump, I haven't seen any real evidence that he has sacrificed national security for his own personal wealth.

On December 06 2018 07:01 GreenHorizons wrote:


Reforms were/are necessary but the process is still clearly flawed. Can't imagine "due process" will do anything about the rate at which Black students are accused, processed, or disproportionately punished though. If they figure that part out they should tell the judicial system and the police so they can get their shit together.

From what I read (outside of the oped) there's a lot of shitty changes Devos is tagging along with it so she's still presenting as the totally incompetent shill she has since she was nominated.

On December 06 2018 07:48 xDaunt wrote:
Oh look, Morales is pointing out the obvious. The US acts in its own rational self-interest instead of some misplaced sense of idealism.

And of course Morales's big ask at the end of his diatribe is for a multi-polar world -- because that is in his country's best interest.

EDIT: And GH, if you're going to make some asinine charge or insinuation of corruption, feel free to make the case.

On December 06 2018 07:09 xDaunt wrote:


Uranium 1 involved many government officials. I'm not that familiar with Kushner's skyscraper deal or the timing of what happened, but I doubt that it was anywhere near the same level as Uranium 1.

On December 06 2018 07:01 GreenHorizons wrote:


Reforms were/are necessary but the process is still clearly flawed. Can't imagine "due process" will do anything about the rate at which Black students are accused, processed, or disproportionately punished though. If they figure that part out they should tell the judicial system and the police so they can get their shit together.

From what I read (outside of the oped) there's a lot of shitty changes Devos is tagging along with it so she's still presenting as the totally incompetent shill she has since she was nominated.

The Question of Race in Campus Sexual-Assault Cases
Is the system biased against men of color?

Since there are no national statistics on how many young men of any given race are the subject of campus-sexual-assault complaints, we are left with anecdotes about men of color being accused and punished. There are many such anecdotes. In 2015, in The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote that in general, the administrators and faculty members she’d spoken with who “routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases” said that “most of the complaints they see are against minorities.” For two years I have received a daily Google Alert on college sexual assault. It captures only those cases that make it into the news, and is not a comprehensive or statistically valid measure. But it is illuminating. Usually the reports don’t disclose race, but sometimes it is mentioned, and if the accused is named, it’s often possible to determine his race through photo searches or other online information. Black men make up only about 6 percent of college undergraduates. They are vastly overrepresented in the cases I’ve tracked. [...]

In several recent civil lawsuits against their schools, male students found responsible in campus tribunals for sexual misconduct have made the racial aspects of their experience explicit. These include cases involving Amherst College, in Massachusetts (which recently settled for undisclosed terms); Butler University, in Indiana; Drexel University, in Pennsylvania; Indiana University of Pennsylvania; Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania; the University of Findlay, in Ohio; the University of Pennsylvania; and William Paterson University, in New Jersey. Each suit says a student or students were subject to specious charges and in some cases abrupt expulsions because they were minorities.

In the University of Findlay case, Justin Browning and Alphonso Baity II, two black athletes, each had a separate sexual encounter with a white female student one Saturday night in September 2014. According to their federal suit, the encounters were consensual and the female student spent the night with Browning and bragged about it afterward to her friends. But a week and a half later, on a Wednesday, she filed a written complaint of sexual assault. That Friday, the two young men were expelled. The school then issued a campus-wide alert announcing their expulsion, and their names and photos were printed in the local paper. Findlay’s president, Katherine Fell, said that the university had dealt with “a serious incident of sexual assault on our campus, and we’ve done it with compassion, thorough research and effectiveness.”

Browning and Baity’s suit says that the university’s probe and disciplinary proceedings were a “sham” and that its actions were “motivated by race.” The suit notes that fewer than 2 percent of Findlay’s students are black men and that the only other student expelled in the prior two years for sexual misconduct was a black man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. To date, Browning and Baity have been unable to resume their education at a four-year school. The university said in a statement that it conducted its investigation and appeal process “with integrity and fairness” and “will vigorously defend the process and our decision.” In a court filing, the university denied the allegations in the suit; the case is ongoing.

In November 2014, five 18-year-old black male freshmen at William Paterson University were arrested for allegedly holding a female student in a room and forcing her to perform sexual acts. In their suit, two of the students, Garrett Collick and Noah Williams, say they had consensual sex with the woman on the night in question—Collick says she initiated it with him—and that she had initiated sex with each of them on at least one previous occasion. Right after the arrests, the president of the university, Kathleen Waldron, released a statement in which she said, “I am angry and dismayed that this crime was committed on our campus and allegedly by students. My deepest concern is for the victim of this criminal act who has courageously stepped forward to take legal action and seek justice.” Collick and Williams were jailed for nine days. Ultimately, a grand jury, which decides whether there is sufficient evidence for formal charges—a very low evidentiary standard—declined to indict the men, and they were freed. About 50 William Paterson students showed up in court to support their classmates. [...]

Melissa Kagle is one of three people who brought the race-discrimination complaint about Colgate to OCR. Kagle is a former assistant professor of educational studies at the school who, over the course of her last three years at the university, became a prominent critic of Colgate’s handling of sexual misconduct. (She left after being denied tenure in 2016 and now works at an education nonprofit.) Her co-complainants were minority students who’d been accused of assault or harassment, and to whom Kagle had become an informal adviser. Kagle viscerally understands the horror of rape because as a young woman she experienced it herself. But she told me that over the past several years, she’d become deeply concerned that in some cases fear of assault on campus was clouding people’s judgment and creating a reflex to presume guilt. In several cases that she’d come to know closely, at first by happenstance and then because minority men began to seek her out for assistance, “people believed something terrible happened when it hadn’t.”

Kagle believes that men of color—and especially foreign men of color, students from Africa and Asia—were uniquely defenseless when charged with sexual assault, typically lacking financial resources, a network of support, and an understanding of their rights. She told me that university administrators, in their zeal to address an issue that was a top priority of federal regulators, had gone after rumors and third-party reports of assaults, pressuring some female students to pursue complaints. I spoke with two women who made harassment complaints against a Rwandan student who was later expelled. One said she hadn’t wanted to make a complaint, but was told that it would help another woman feel safer; neither believed expulsion was the right outcome.

“We have laws and rules to make sure people’s rights aren’t violated. When you take away those protections, then you get what’s happening here,” Kagle said of Colgate. She also told me that she and her co-complainants are appealing OCR’s finding, noting that they believe the available numbers do demonstrate significant disparate treatment, and that in any case, the numbers alone do not tell the full story. Colgate declined to comment on the inquiry other than to say in a statement that it has “cooperated fully with the OCR investigation.”

On December 06 2018 09:14 IgnE wrote:
you know dude youve brought up uranium one so much recently that i just tried to read through the wiki article on it, but i gave up trying to understand why you think its so significant in comparison to trump

On December 06 2018 07:48 xDaunt wrote:
Oh look, Morales is pointing out the obvious. The US acts in its own rational self-interest instead of some misplaced sense of idealism.

And of course Morales's big ask at the end of his diatribe is for a multi-polar world -- because that is in his country's best interest.

EDIT: And GH, if you're going to make some asinine charge or insinuation of corruption, feel free to make the case.

[translation]In no way is the United States interested in upholding Democracy. ... It would not have threatened Democratically elected governments, as it has done in Venezuela

On December 06 2018 09:53 Danglars wrote:

I fail to see how anybody (not playing a humorous angle) would cite that speech as a good speech on US imperialism. It's just a snide hit job on the US for our interventions, citing the same kind of idiotic international utopian urges that flip around to push to the US to "do something" when that's more favorable.


Maduro thanks Ecuador for connecting the "responsibility ... to hand over a fairer and more secure world to the following generation" with support for his Democratically elected government.

Do we have to have another Kosovo to prove all the multipolar discussions and internationally signed agreements don't prevent war and constrain evil? That speech was ridiculously stupid and self-serving.

On December 06 2018 09:48 xDaunt wrote:

If you want to understand Uranium One, you need to read this piece by John Solomon. Frankly, his reporting is must-read right now anyway because he's someone who obviously has sources who are in the know regarding whatever investigation is currently taking place (and as an aside, he was getting ready to drop some really big news on Monday before Bush died over the weekend). Here's a brief summary of Uranium One:

1) At the time of the Uranium One deal, the FBI was aware of significant criminal activity (including bribes and kickbacks) regarding the Russian nuclear industry (reminder: the purchaser was the Russian nuclear industry);

2) Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder were among the people on the board whose decision it was to approve the deal;

3) Officials from the Russian nuclear industry gave the Clinton Foundation millions of dollars of donations at the time of the transaction, including a $500,000 speaking fee to Bill Clinton;

4) The DOJ (ie Holder) never notified the board responsible for approving the Uranium One deal of the ongoing criminal investigation into the Russian nuclear industry;

5) After the Uranium One deal was approved, the FBI seems to have buried the evidence that it collected on the matter, including prohibiting an FBI informant from speaking about what he learned; and

6) During the relevant time period, the FBI and the investigation into the Russian nuclear industry were run by a very familiar bunch of people: Mueller, Rosenstein, McCabe -- basically all of the same people investigating Trump.

This is just scratching the surface. But what distinguishes it from anything that might be remotely attributable to Trump is its scale and the sheer number of government officials that are implicated in it.

On December 06 2018 13:45 IgnE wrote:


So what is your theory on why this large number of government officials suppressed all this evidence of the Clintons receiving a quid pro quo? Kickbacks that we don't know about? Pure political favor?