US Politics Mega-thread - Page 563

On August 01 2018 00:35 Plansix wrote:

They don’t. Political parties do not have any real power beyond the offices they are running for. They can’t kick out a candidate. They can’t tell them how to run their campaign. They can deny money, which isn’t that helpful if the candidate is getting more money from folks like the Kochs. They don’t control these candidates, especially when there are so many ways for a candidate to get funding to run their campaign these days.

Federal Judge Orders Government To Seek Consent Before Medicating Migrant Children

A federal judge in Los Angeles has ordered the Trump administration to seek consent before administering psychotropic drugs to immigrant children held in a facility in Texas.

U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee ruled that the government was in violation of a court decree dating to the mid-1980's known as the Flores settlement which governs the treatment of detained immigrant children. There are more than 10,000 minors in federal custody. The vast majority of them arrived at the southern border unaccompanied from Central America long before the current controversy over separated families created by the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy. The settlement required the government to hold youths in the least restrictive setting possible.

Lawyers argued that the children at the Shiloh Residential Treatment Center in Manvel, Texas, were administered powerful psychotropic drugs without any explanation to them. Such drugs are used to treat a range of conditions from schizophrenia to depression. In some cases, children allegedly were told that if they didn't take the drugs their detention periods would be prolonged.

Judge Gee says the government must get parental consent or a court order before giving children psychotropic drugs, unless it is an emergency. The judge also ordered the government to explain to the children in writing why they are being detained. She also ruled that the government cannot detain a minor only for "reported gang involvement."

In addition, Gee ordered that all youths covered under the Flores ruling be removed from the Shiloh Residential Treatment Center unless a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist determines that a minor poses a risk to himself or others.

The judge's ruling follows another decision issued Friday in which she said she would appoint an independent monitor to oversee the facilities where immigrant children are detained.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined comment on Gee's ruling.

On August 01 2018 01:22 Dan HH wrote:

What would stop a party from kicking a member out and having someone else run as that party's candidate for that office? I get them preferring to turn a blind eye instead of losing an office but that's not the same as having no say over who runs under your name.

On August 01 2018 01:28 Plansix wrote:

The primaries are over, how do you kick someone out of the party? They can't legally remove them from the ballot. They can't legally change the ballot. They can't have someone else hold the party standard, what was what the primary was for. The political parties in the US are open facing, anyone can join and there is no system in place for revoking membership. If they could, the Republicans wouldn't have a Nazi running under their banner in the 2018 elections.

On August 01 2018 01:47 Dan HH wrote:

Usually by voting on it, isn't that entirely up to a party's internal rules? Seems unlikely to me that there would be a law stopping political parties in the US from kicking members out, but it's possible so that's why I asked that question.

In most places a party member can be removed at any point, even while in office, no office require someone to be a member of a party or to not change party membership. Sure, parties prefer to do that before submitting their candidates, but I think GH meant that these people should have been removed a long time ago not in the last moment before an election.

On August 01 2018 01:22 Dan HH wrote:

What would stop a party from kicking a member out and having someone else run as that party's candidate for that office? I get them preferring to turn a blind eye instead of losing an office but that's not the same as having no say over who runs under your name.

On August 01 2018 01:54 Plansix wrote:

Ok, let me put this another way.

No one in the US has any power to remove anyone from a political party. There is no system in place to remove or add anyone, legally or otherwise. If someone says they are a Republican, they are a Republican. If someone says they are a Democrat, they are a Democrat. That is the entire system.

WASHINGTON — Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections.

In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week and a public post on Tuesday, the company told lawmakers that it had detected and removed 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference. It publicly said it had been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

Facebook said that the accounts — eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts — were created between March 2017 and May 2018 and first discovered two weeks ago. Those numbers may sound small, but their influence is spreading: More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the suspect pages, the company said.

Between April 2017 and June 2018, the accounts ran 150 ads costing $11,000 on the two platforms. They were paid for in American and Canadian dollars. And the pages created roughly 30 events over a similar time period, the largest of which attracted interest from 4,700 accounts.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said that the activity bore some similarities to that of the Internet Research Agency, but that the actors had better disguised their efforts, using VPNs, internet phone services and third parties to purchase ads for them. He said the company had yet to see any evidence connecting the accounts to Russian IP addresses, like the ones sometimes used in the past by Internet Research Agency accounts. But there were also connections between some of the accounts and others tied to the notorious Russian troll farm that were taken down by Facebook already.

“These bad actors have been more careful to cover their tracks, in part due to the actions we’ve taken to prevent abuse over the past year,” Mr. Gleicher said.

The company has been working with the F.B.I. to investigate the activity.

Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues.

Facebook discovered coordinated activity around issues like a sequel to last year’s deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Specifically, a page called “Resisters,” which interacted with one Internet Research Agency account in 2017, created an event called “No Unite the Right 2 — DC” to serve as a counterprotest to the white nationalist gathering, scheduled to take place in Washington in August. Mr. Gleicher said “inauthentic” administrators for the “Resisters” page went as far as to coordinate with administrators for five other apparently real pages to co-host the event, publicizing details about transportation and other logistics.

Mr. Gleicher said it disabled the event on Tuesday and notified 2,600 users of the site who had indicated interest in attending the event.

Coordinated activity was also detected around #AbolishICE, a left-wing campaign on social media that seeks to end the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, according to two people briefed on the findings. That echoed efforts in 2016 to fan division around the Black Lives Matter movement.

Democratic lawmakers said the disclosure only clarified what they have feared since the extent of Russian involvement in 2016 became clear more than a year ago.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has exerted intense pressure on the social media companies, praised Facebook on Tuesday for bringing the activity into the public but asked for its cooperation in updating laws to prevent influence campaigns.

“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation,” he said. “And I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity.”

After being caught flat-footed by the Internet Research Agency’s efforts to use social media to sow division ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Facebook is trying to avoid a repeat disaster in 2018. The company has expanded its security team, hiring counterterrorism experts and recruiting workers with government security clearances.

The company is using artificial intelligence and teams of human reviewers to detect automated accounts and suspicious election-related activity. It has also tried to make it harder for Russian-style influence campaigns to use covert Facebook ads to sway public opinion, by requiring political advertisers in the United States to register with a domestic mailing address and by making all political ads visible in a public database.

On a conference call with reporters earlier this month, Mr. Gleicher declined to directly answer multiple questions about whether the company had detected additional Russian information campaigns.

“We know that Russians and other bad actors are going to continue to try to abuse our platform — before the midterms, probably during the midterms, after the midterms, and around other events and elections,” Mr. Gleicher said. “We are continually looking for that type of activity, and as and when we find things, which we think is inevitable, we’ll notify law enforcement, and where we can, the public.”

American intelligence and law enforcement officials have been warning for months that Russia’s efforts to undermine American democracy remain active and pose a threat to this year’s elections. If in fact Russian, the activity would provide vivid evidence that the kind of cyber operations used around the 2016 campaign were still in use.

On August 01 2018 02:18 Dan HH wrote:

Do you not have party registration? Without it you could for example vote in the primaries of both parties for the same office. It seems logical that you'd have to be registered to a party in order to have a say in their affairs. That's where the room for revoking someone's membership would be if parties were inclined to give themselves this ability.

The federal investigation into alleged Russian agent Mariia Butina stemmed from a series of suspicious, high-dollar money transfers to limited liability companies tied to Butina and her onetime boyfriend, South Dakota-based GOP operative Paul Erickson, according to a new report.

The Tuesday report by McClatchy laid out the origins of the probe into possible Russian attempts to infiltrate and channel money to the National Rifle Association. According to McClatchy, the NRA probe predates President Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, and is being overseen by the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, rather than Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

On August 01 2018 02:49 Plansix wrote:

Many states have open primaries and anyone can vote for either party. The logical system that you are talking about does not exist in many states in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_primary

We have 50 different states, all who have their own rules, systems and even vote on different days. Each state party oversees how these primaries take place, with assistance from the state government. They can decide if the primary is open, closed and so on. The national party has limited say in how the state conducts itself. Our political parties are far more fragmented that the EU parties, mostly due to the size of our country and the nature of our government.

On August 01 2018 03:06 GreenHorizons wrote:


I mean you know that my point has never been about "removing them from the party", if you don't play ball the party shoves you into useless committees, your legislation can never get cosponsors, if it does it never leaves committee, and so on and so on. The whole argument for the futility of third parties rests on the absolute control the 2 parties have on the system even if you elect a handful of third party people around the country.

They don't need to kick someone out of the party, they can just make being a member have no benefit for them and they leave of their own accord.

The bottom line is that taking Koch money is less disruptive to Democrat party hegemony than backing universal healthcare. Trying to make it seem the opposite is just disingenuous.

On August 01 2018 00:48 KwarK wrote:

Gov employee?

Also look up how much your employer is paying towards your coverage. There’s no material difference between getting $50k, of which $10k is taken out pre-tax as employee health insurance contributions and getting $40k + $10k of employer paid health insurance. You’re still performing the labour and having your cash earnings reduced to pay for healthcare benefits.

On August 01 2018 03:27 Simberto wrote:


I post this whenever the topic of healthcare costs comes up. Granted, it is slowly getting more and more dated, being from 2015, but the general point still stands. The US pays a lot more public money for their healthcare than most universal healthcare systems, throws a bunch of additional private money on top of it, and gets worse results.

You are getting majorly screwed, and because this has turned into some sort of ideological argument as opposed to an argument about efficiency, results, costs or ease of use, this does not seem to matter.