Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[mike777]

Nice example, but I don't discuss hypothetical false comparisons, I discuss FEDERAL LAW and FEDERAL CODES.

 

I said Trump Jr. might be guilty of solicitation since an intermediary he knows offered for him to meet a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. accepted the offer from his intermediary and then coordinated to meet the Russian lawyer through his intermediary. The Russian lawyer and Trump Jr. met and nothing of value was exchanged.

 

Solicitation of political contribution -- indirectly, yes.

 

Acceptance of political contribution -- Ummm, no. You can't accept a thing of value the Russian lawyer doesn't have.

 

Receipt of political contribution --- Ummm, no. You can't receive a thing of value the Russian lawyer didn't give.

 

https://transition.fec.gov/pages/brochures/foreign.shtml

 

I will let you handle the federal crime and codes...got it as I mentioned before don't know if it is a crime ...something might not be a federal crime and still be stupid...or dumb or bad really really bad

 

----

 

from what I have read or seen on tv at least to me...no crime...no jail time..no fine...but really bad...still bad...

[RedSpawn]

I will let you handle the federal crime and codes...got it as I mentioned before don't know if it is a crime ...something might not be a federal crime and still be stupid...or dumb or bad really really bad

 

----

 

from what I have read or seen on tv at least to me...no crime...no jail time..no fine...but really bad...still bad...

Agreed. It is bad and poor, hasty decision-making. I am surprised that this request was not run through their legal counsel which should have nipped this in the bud early on. They had to wait a few days to meet so there was time to dot the I's and cross the T's.

[cherdano]

I think this is all just a well-timed distraction from the fact that Chris Froome lost 20 seconds in 300 meters!

[y66]

Is Game of Thrones attractive to liberals because they have secret monarchical longings?

 

From Ross Douthat's blog post today:

 

As I said above, fantasy from Tolkien to the present (in both its fictional forms and role-playing varietals) partakes by its nature of romantic and reactionary themes, often scratching the same anti-modern itch as certain forms of far-right and New Age lefty politics — and perhaps the same monarchical itch as certain forms of Macron-esque centrism as well. There are fantasy writers who completely deconstruct that tendency, but for all his beheadings and betrayals Martin — unless he has serious surprises in store in the last two books — is not one of them. Westeros is not as naturally appealing to liberal audiences as Hogwarts, yes (I have some thoughts on that as well), but still it is not a dystopia in the style of Gilead or an antechamber to hell in the style of Tony Soprano’s gangland; instead it’s a world in which the fabric of a feudal society gets rent and you root for a very particular set of noble families to regain their rightful place and help weave it back together while also saving the world from some ice demons according to a prophecy. As such its doorway into illiberalism is different in kind from the doorway offered by the Soprano crime family: In the end, whatever their politics in this world, both the show’s bad fans and its good fans are rooting for a queen or a king.

[Winstonm]

My local crack dealer told me he had a really hot ten year old girl who wants to give me free sex and crack if I show up at his hotel room. I told him I LOVE IT

I show up and the rotten dealer had no girl...no drugs he just wanted me to do him a favor in regards to my famous Dad. rats////

 

for the record my brother in law showed up but left after 7 minutes...and my manager just played with his phone the whole meeting.

 

I want to make clear for the record this meeting was a complete waste of all of our precious time.

What if it had been your local FBI agent who said he had explosives to sell and you said "I love it" but when you showed up there were no explosives? Do you think the FBI would let you go because they didn't provide what they had promised?

 

A big part of criminal law is intent. There is no doubt about Trump Jr.'s intent.

[Zelandakh]

In the end, whatever their politics in this world, both the show’s bad fans and its good fans are rooting for a queen or a king.

I said back in series 1 that we would end up with both in the form of Jon Snow and Daenerys and have seen little during the intervening years to doubt this conclusion. My feeling is that this was GRRM's intention from the start simply because starting your main characters at opposite ends of the world and heading away from each other is such a classic form for an epic series. Given the incredible success he has achieved in the meantime, particularly from "surprises", I could envisage him changing that to an epic battle, but my belief is still that we will end up with the main two in power at the end (with Tyrion as Hand, Arya as Mistress of Whispers and perhaps Sam as Grand Maester (though that would require a little plot-forcing as it is not a royal appointment). It all seems so convenient that it is almost necessary for GRRM to throw us a curveball - but this would, to me, be the natural progression of the plot as it was laid out at from the opening pages.

[y66]

From Liu Xiaobo's Unflappable Optimism by Xiaorong Li:

 

I last spoke to Liu Xiaobo from my home in Maryland the day before the police detained him in Beijing in December 2008. He wanted to discuss the use of a few words in the final draft of Charter 08, a constitutional reform manifesto. He was proud of how he had collected one more signature from a reformer who had been kicked out of the government by showing up at 5 a.m. in a Beijing park, where the old man practiced tai chi.

 

I worried about the risks to him and his friends and suggested delaying the release of the document. “What’s the worry? The worst for me is going back to jail. But it’s worth it: It’s nearly 20 years since Tiananmen, but there’s been no justice. I’ll do anything,” he said calmly.

 

The charter called for respect of “basic universal values,” including freedom, human rights, equality, democracy and constitutional rule. More than 300 Chinese activists, lawyers and intellectuals had added their signatures, some of which Xiaobo tirelessly collected by email, by Skype or at dinner parties. The main organizers planned to release the charter as several important anniversaries approached: the 20th of the Tiananmen massacre and the 60th of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

 

Around 2 a.m. Beijing time, on Dec. 9, 2008, I realized something had gone wrong. Xiaobo could always be counted on for a lively chat in the early morning hours and mesmerizing his friends with his self-deprecating jokes, told in his strong northern accent with a slight, distinctive stutter. Yet on this day the colors indicating his availability kept switching back and forth on my screen. “You all right? Your Skype is behaving oddly,” I wrote. It turned off abruptly. I later learned that the police were searching his computer at that moment.

 

The Beijing police detained Xiaobo and his friend, Zhang Zuhua, a former official turned dissident, who was a co-organizer of the charter. Within two days, the document was released. Soon after, the police detained and interrogated hundreds of signatories, searched their residences and confiscated personal belongings.

 

Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison in December 2009 for “inciting subversion of state power.” He had been imprisoned several times since 1989, when he was jailed for his role supporting the Tiananmen protests. In May of this year, he learned he had terminal liver cancer and was hospitalized. In hindsight, his conviction was nothing short of a death sentence.

 

China’s tyrants may believe Xiaobo’s death on Thursday in captivity shows their strength and victory. But their efforts to erase Xiaobo’s ideas from the Chinese public haven’t totally worked. Many Chinese people may not have heard of Liu Xiaobo because of the government’s stranglehold on the media, but according to reports, more than 34,000 people — most of them in China — recently signed an open letter demanding his freedom and his right to choose his own medical care.

 

And while China has become more repressive in recent years under President Xi Jinping, Xiaobo’s vision of “transcending fear” with love and of fighting for freedom peacefully “with optimism” continues to inspire new generations of democracy and human rights activists.

 

Many more Chinese today than in 1989 or 2008 are carrying out small but significant peaceful acts of protest to further human rights protections. I have met many college graduates working in nonprofit groups advocating for the rights of the disabled, those who are L.G.B.T.Q. and victims of sexual violence. One group I worked with trained laypeople to use the law to bring officials to court, to protect their land or to seek compensation for illnesses and injuries incurred at work.

 

One woman, assisted by a lawyer who had training in the United Nations convention on women’s rights, sued her village officials and won a case involving gender discrimination. Another lawyer filed an appeal to the United Nations alleging arbitrary detention of his client, who was locked up at a labor camp without a trial. Officials told the lawyer that a United Nations inquiry about the case had led to the client’s release.

 

Brave Chinese people like these are helping to build the foundation for democracy. A schoolteacher, who was among the first group of signatories of Charter 08, has organized village election monitoring and become an expert on local election laws. His group has trained hundreds of people online about free and fair local elections.

 

Liu Xiaobo never harbored the illusion that nonviolent action would not be returned by violence. Chinese lawyers who used the courts to challenge the state-controlled judiciary, attempting to hold the police accountable for using torture to extract confessions or keeping detainees in secret locations, have been detained or tortured themselves.

 

But Xiaobo didn’t let the repression cloud his unflappable optimism. His firm belief that freedom is “the source of humanity and the mother of truth” should continue to guide all of us.

[Winstonm]

Another bomb drops. From NBC by way of Vox:

 

The now-infamous Donald Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer during the presidential campaign had a previously undisclosed attendee. And that person is allegedly — I kid you not — a former Russian spook.

 

This latest news comes courtesy of a report published by NBC News on Friday morning. The man in question, according to NBC, is a “Russian-American lobbyist” and “a former Soviet counter intelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence.”

 

NBC chose not to publish his name, but the Associated Press has identified him as Rinat Akhmetshin — a longtime Washington lobbyist who was accused in court filings of being a former Soviet military intelligence officer who "developed a special expertise in running negative public-relations campaigns” (a charge he denies).

 

Trump Jr. somehow failed to disclose Akhmetshin’s presence at the meeting, making this the fifth time he chose to either lie about the meeting or omit some vital piece of information about it. To make matters worse, his own lawyer, Alan Futerfas, partially confirmed the story in a statement to NBC — admitting that there was at least one previously undisclosed attendee, possibly even two, at the fateful meeting.

 

The Daily Beast runs with that story to find this:

 

KEVIN POULSEN

NICO HINES

KATIE ZAVADSKI

07.14.17 10:49 AM ET

The alleged former Soviet intelligence officer who attended the now-infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other top campaign officials last June was previously accused in federal and state courts of orchestrating an international hacking conspiracy.

 

Surely just another coincidence....

[RedSpawn]

Another bomb drops. From NBC by way of Vox:

 

The now-infamous Donald Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer during the presidential campaign had a previously undisclosed attendee. And that person is allegedly — I kid you not — a former Russian spook.

 

This latest news comes courtesy of a report published by NBC News on Friday morning. The man in question, according to NBC, is a “Russian-American lobbyist” and “a former Soviet counter intelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence.”

 

NBC chose not to publish his name, but the Associated Press has identified him as Rinat Akhmetshin — a longtime Washington lobbyist who was accused in court filings of being a former Soviet military intelligence officer who "developed a special expertise in running negative public-relations campaigns” (a charge he denies).

 

Trump Jr. somehow failed to disclose Akhmetshin’s presence at the meeting, making this the fifth time he chose to either lie about the meeting or omit some vital piece of information about it. To make matters worse, his own lawyer, Alan Futerfas, partially confirmed the story in a statement to NBC — admitting that there was at least one previously undisclosed attendee, possibly even two, at the fateful meeting.

 

The Daily Beast runs with that story to find this:

 

Surely just another coincidence

What does Russian-American lobbyist mean?

 

I am interested in the hacking accusation. Can the news expound on the nature of the hacking accusation which did not result in a conviction? This drawing out of pieces of the story is insulting to the general public. I didn't realize the whole story required carefully crafted piecemeal distribution.

 

And on the flip side, who was the wise person who decided that a former Soviet counter intelligence officer should be granted American citizenship? This smells very fishy on both sides; he appears to be an equally dangerous agent as a Washington lobbyist.

 

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/e6091af2f6d83f7f7436b5adcf10f9450c0f542e/c=1-0-1022-768&r=x513&c=680x510/local/-/media/2015/04/23/Louisville/Louisville/635653905546972822-murphy-0424.jpg

[ggwhiz]

All this circus with smoke, mirrors, slight of hand and tongue, does it not come back to the same place we started many months ago?

 

Tax returns, business records showing the financial relationship with and obligations to Russian interests, not only of Drumpf but everyone connected with his business empire and campaign.

 

Follow the money!

 

That used to be the prime directive and I suspect that Meuller and others are still on it and this whole "thing" won't be solved 1 way or the other without it.

[Al_U_Card]

All this circus with smoke, mirrors, slight of hand and tongue, does it not come back to the same place we started many months ago?

 

Tax returns, business records showing the financial relationship with and obligations to Russian interests, not only of Drumpf but everyone connected with his business empire and campaign.

 

Follow the money!

 

That used to be the prime directive and I suspect that Meuller and others are still on it and this whole "thing" won't be solved 1 way or the other without it.

Well, it never works for other types of conspiracy theories but....

[y66]

Special Counsel Mueller Lets His Actions Do The Talking: 15 Hires, More to Come.

[RedSpawn]

Within a year of assuming the presidency of Russia, Vladimir Putin had placed all three national television networks under state control, effectively creating a national information bubble.

 

What I find odd is that we in the U.S. seem to have accomplished the same ends via a different technique - a consolidation of information into small, interconnected orbs either colored blue or red. Without a neutral press, it has become extremely difficult to ferret out unbiased information. This has made our country susceptible to enemies both without and within.

 

This is not a hijack but a continuation of an earlier thought you had about consolidation and its influence on how we see the world through the red and blue sunglasses:

 

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-w3wOv0wqjeY/UXBRc0iETkI/AAAAAAABhqk/9gaLBu-kmt8/s1600/graphic.jpg

 

This screen caps says volumes and just makes me say wow!

 

MOVIE STUDIOS now control the NEWS companies.

[barmar]

Not on that list is Sinclair Broadcast Group. John Oliver did a scathing exposé on them on last week's "Last Week Tonight". They're one of the largest owner of local TV stations, and they're acquiring Tribune Media Co, which would doule their size. They inject lots of right-wing commentary into the local news programs of the stations they own.

[RedSpawn]

Not on that list is Sinclair Broadcast Group. John Oliver did a scathing exposé on them on last week's "Last Week Tonight". They're one of the largest owner of local TV stations, and they're acquiring Tribune Media Co, which would doule their size. They inject lots of right-wing commentary into the local news programs of the stations they own.

http://www.snopes.com/2017/07/11/sinclair-broadcast-group-propaganda/

 

Wow! And the FCC is complicit in the consolidation. . .

[RedSpawn]

Seems to me that Trump talks a lot about other countries doing more and the US having less military involvement abroad. He also talks a lot about how we need to make better deals and how he can (or did) save the US money on some of these expensive planes and other military hardware.

 

So... Why does he want a 50 billion dollar INCREASE in the military budget?

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/14/house-passes-defense-policy-bill-240561

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/12/02/house-passes-611-billion-defense-policy-bill-by-wide-margin.html ==> 2017 amount was $611 billion

 

The House approved a defense spending bill for $700 billion on Friday July 14 which was more than Trump's budgetary appropriation?

 

We can't solve the health care bill but we can approve the 2018 military budget for more than Trump requested....hmmmm

 

Any bill as large as the 2008 TARP bailout should get a little heavier press coverage.

[barmar]

http://www.snopes.com/2017/07/11/sinclair-broadcast-group-propaganda/

The last quote in the Snopes article, with the response from Sinclair to John Oliver's piece, sounds like the kind of BS response Kellyanne Conway gives when defending Trump.

Wow! And the FCC is complicit in the consolidation. . .

There used to be a law limiting the number of TV stations and/or newspapers a single company could own, but I think it may have gone away or been relaxed during a period of deregulation.

 

The FCC probably can't do anything about the content of the broadcasts, that's Sinclair's First Amendment right.

[RedSpawn]

Close the military bases we don't need!

 

How does Congress include language in military spending bills that prevents the Pentagon from closing bases it no longer needs? Just shady.

 

http://time.com/4261276/military-budget/?iid=sr-link3

[y66]

From Please Prove You're Not A Robot:

 

Philip Howard, who runs the Computational Propaganda Research Project at Oxford, studied the deployment of propaganda bots during voting on Brexit, and the recent American and French presidential elections. Twitter is particularly distorted by its millions of robot accounts; during the French election, it was principally Twitter robots who were trying to make #MacronLeaks into a scandal. Facebook has admitted it was essentially hacked during the American election in November. In Michigan, Mr. Howard notes, “junk news was shared just as widely as professional news in the days leading up to the election.”

 

Robots are also being used to attack the democratic features of the administrative state. This spring, the Federal Communications Commission put its proposed revocation of net neutrality up for public comment. In previous years such proceedings attracted millions of (human) commentators. This time, someone with an agenda but no actual public support unleashed robots who impersonated (via stolen identities) hundreds of thousands of people, flooding the system with fake comments against federal net neutrality rules.

[mike777]

From Please Prove You're Not A Robot:

 

 

Robots are also being used to attack the democratic features of the administrative state.

 

 

 

It seems normal for robots to attack, accept your new overlord.

[Winstonm]

The Minority president:

 

Across the battery of questions in the survey, Trump’s hardcore base of support appears to be about a quarter of the public, give or take:

 

24 percent say that, since taking office, Trump has “acted in a way that’s fitting and proper for a president of the United States.” Seventy percent say Trump has acted in a way that is “unpresidential.”

 

24 percent approve of Trump’s use of Twitter. Just 13 percent strongly approve. Two-thirds disapprove of the president’s use of social media, and 53 percent strongly disapprove.

Compared with previous presidents, 23 percent think “Trump is doing a better job than most.” While 17 percent say he’s doing a “much better” job, 38 percent think he’s doing “much worse.”

 

3 in 10 believe Trump is “a positive role model for young people.” For perspective, 18 percent said the same of Bill Clinton in a Post/ABC poll conducted the week after the salacious Starr Report was released in 1998.

 

27 percent think “America’s leadership in the world has gotten stronger” under Trump.

 

26 percent believe it was appropriate for Trump’s son, Donald Jr., to meet last summer with a Russian lawyer who said she had damaging information about Hillary Clinton. (This includes just less than half of Republicans.)

 

Despite all evidence to the contrary, just over 3 in 10 Americans still do not think the Russian government tried to influence the outcome of last fall’s U.S. presidential election.

 

While 34 percent trust Trump to negotiate on America’s behalf with other world leaders, only 19 percent trust him “a great deal.” The other 15 percent trust him just “a good amount.” Two-thirds of the country does not trust Trump at all in negotiations, which is remarkable when you think back to how heavily he emphasized his negotiating skills during the campaign.

 

On health care, 24 percent favor the Republican plan over Obamacare. Seventeen percent “strongly” favor the GOP plan, which was not explained in detail.

 

source; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/07/17/daily-202-only-1-in-4-americans-strongly-support-trump/596be2fee9b69b7071abcb4a/?tid=pm_pop&utm_term=.b163797df2db

[RedSpawn]

[please delete]

[RedSpawn]

With respect to the metadata of telephone call details the US government holds on millions of its US citizens without probable cause:

 

And yet the fact that several companies hold such databases, often holding much more personal information than the government would keep, is perfectly ok?

 

 

 

I think a reasonable baseline is that a baby gets the nationality of its parents and a change of nationality to their country of residence can be applied for after a suitable period, something of the order of 5 years. Does that seem like a sensible way of bringing in the various factors to you? It would mean that, had you stayed in Sweden, your children could decide if they felt more Swedish than Dutch and choose accordingly.

 

That is reasonable. What would not be reasonable is to have a secret database listing all metadata of their recent phone calls/internet access etc. (But of course one would have to be paranoid to believe governments would even collect such data.)

And therein lies the paradox of the surveillance state. How dare anyone suggest that the government would covertly collect meta data on its citizens' telephone calls as a precautionary measure and violate the Constitution. You would have to be paranoid or a nut job to consider, think, or suggest such things. . .until Edward Snowden whistleblows and shows how big our Big Brother has gotten.

[RedSpawn]

I think we have to take a step back here.

 

It is very important that we have a healthy level of professional skepticism of any source from whom we receive information. And yes, that even includes members of the Western Intelligence services and law enforcement community.

 

COINTELPRO was under the Federal Bureau of Investigation but it gathered intelligence illegally, violated Constitutional rights, and was known for disseminating propaganda. See link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO.

 

The huge intelligence failure regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was committed by 16 different members of the Western intelligence community and led to an extended, costly war campaign.

 

Edward Snowden revealed a mass surveillance program that again undermined the Constitutional rights of all American citizens, millions of whom have not committed crimes, and yet were the subject of mass electronic illegal searches and seizures. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden.

 

In March 2014, documents disclosed by Glenn Greenwald writing for The Intercept showed the NSA, in cooperation with the GCHQ, has plans to infect millions of computers with malware using a program called "Turbine." Revelations included information about "QUANTUMHAND," a program through which the NSA set up a fake Facebook server to intercept connections.

 

According to a report in The Washington Post in July 2014, relying on information furnished by Snowden, 90% of those placed under surveillance in the U.S. are ordinary Americans, and are not the intended targets. The newspaper said it had examined documents including emails, message texts, and online accounts, that support the claim.

 

In an August 2014 interview, Snowden for the first time disclosed a cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program would "automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack". The software would constantly look for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. What sets MonsterMind apart was that it would add a "unique new capability: instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement". Snowden expressed concern that often initial attacks are routed through computers in innocent third countries. "These attacks can be spoofed. You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?" [bold and ital mine]

 

So, the ransomware attack in China, was it really executed by North Korea, or could it be Operation "Turbine" perpetrated by any partners of the Five Eyes global surveillance program as a false pretext to war or military action? Or could it have been a preemptive move to get bad actors like China to (1) curtail its ubiquitous software piracy (2) encourage its citizens and businesses to destroy bootleg copies of Microsoft Windows and (3) recommend that all users purchase legal software licenses with appropriate security patches to avoid future malware attacks. This would protect Western intellectual property rights and promote the U.S. economy. Snowden already said the NSA had attacks like these in the pipeline.

 

As citizens of a constitutional Republic, we must determine how much of our Constitutional freedoms we are willing to sacrifice to help our government provide more security. I am surprised that our nation doesn't appear to be extremely disturbed by the revelations of Edward Snowden's actions. It appears we have officially entered the era of "thought police".

 

Note: I am not suggesting Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor. He just pulled back the curtain to reveal how Western intelligence services can abuse their powers and violate the Constitution if their powers remain hidden, unchecked and unquestioned. That is not what I call a conspiracy. It is just an inconvenient truth of our journey towards a surveillance state.

 

Makes me wonder what exactly is the endgame of the surveillance state as the freedoms of citizens get chipped away one Amendment at a time.

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be.

 

This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one.

 

It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time.

 

It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.

 

But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.

 

Any State, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man. . .that State is obsolete.

 

This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth.

 

He's a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he's built out of flesh and because he has a mind.

 

Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in The Twilight Zone.

[Winstonm]

Seriously, dude, you need to start your own government plots thread instead of insisting on continued attempts to hijack this one.