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PoliGAF 2017 |OT3| 13 Treasons Why

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S

sc0la

Unconfirmed Member
Trouble said:
I'm not sure how I feel about this. As much as I despise Sessions, I'd rather not have a new AG who isn't recused from Russia and actively works to impede Mueller.
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The Mueller ship has sailed. A new AG is unlikely to change that.

Oh god, we are in the timeline where AG Christy is a marked improvement. Kill me.
 
O

Ogodei

Member
Trouble said:
I'm not sure how I feel about this. As much as I despise Sessions, I'd rather not have a new AG who isn't recused from Russia and actively works to impede Mueller.
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A month from the Comey firing and we haven't even gotten a nomination. A Sessions resignation would presage months of a rudderless DoJ (which, under Trump, is a damned good thing).
 
K

Kevinroc

Member
Fenderputty said:
What the fuck does this mean? lol
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It means some of the crap that got the Freedom Caucus on board may not make it into the final bill and that will be very interesting. At least we can hope that's what it means.

(Of course at this point in time, it's best to go in thinking the worst.)
 
A

Ac30

Member
Gruco said:
If that's the ruling from the parliamentarian, people should riot. Genuinely the most offensive single thing to happen since Trump took office.

It would be nice if it just killed the 60 vote threshold in practice (everything is budget now). But if this is coming from the parliamentarian, we just created seperate legal regimes for the development and for the destruction of programs.


Changing the relative pricing ratios and removing guaranteed benefits are at best incidental budget responses to non-budgetary regulation of industry, which is explicitly disallowed by the Byrd rule.
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Honestly the Dems should just kill it when they regain control of the Senate. Once you give people entitlements they're unlikely to be willing to give them up - it's taking the Republicans forever to kill the ACA when they have total control of the government.
 
N

nature boy

Member
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/atto...uggested-resign-amid-rising/story?id=47875090

As the White House braces for former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony Thursday, sources tell ABC News the relationship between President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has become so tense that Sessions at one point recently even suggested he could resign.

The friction between the two men stems from the attorney general's abrupt decision in March to recuse himself from anything related to the Russia investigation -- a decision the president only learned about minutes before Sessions announced it publicly. Multiple sources say the recusal is one of the top disappointments of his presidency so far and one the president has remained fixated on.

Trump’s anger over the recusal has not diminished with time. Two sources close to the president say he has lashed out repeatedly at the attorney general in private meetings, blaming the recusal for the expansion of the Russia investigation, now overseen by Special Counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
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Somebody's afraid of an investigation....
 
E

Ernest

Banned
And if Sessions leaves, who's Trump gonna replace him with - who in the fuck wants to work with Trump when money isn't involved?
 
broz0rs

broz0rs

Member
Sigh.. that Politico article about McConnell getting Pubs in line and ramming down AHCA next month got me shook again
 
O

Ogodei

Member
Bam Bam Baklava said:
Probably best to accept it will happen.
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Rand Paul's a definite no vote, and then you let Dean Heller take a dive because he's Dem target number 1 next round, but then you have to get everyone else from medicaid heavy states to go tell their constituents that they killed them?
 
S

sphagnum

Banned
NYT has been doing a Red Century series in the run-up to the 100 year anniversary of the October Revolution. Today they put up a nice little essay about the CPUSA of old and its early work in intersectional struggles. The article tries to pass itself off as an essay about the "afterlife of communism" for some reason but that's pretty minor and just seems to be an excuse to link it to Bernie Sanders: it doesn't go deep enough into the race-class problem in the election if that was what they were going for, though it does bringing up. Anyway, good stuff:

The Communist, in the American imagination, has always been the ultimate outside agitator.

No matter how homegrown a resistance movement was, or how local the organizers were, the first response from those facing protest has always been to blame an outsider. This was as true for town hall protests during the February 2017 congressional recess as it was for anti-lynching struggles more than 80 years ago during the Great Depression.

...

The Communist Party U.S.A., founded in 1919, was closely tied to what emerged as the Soviet Union after the 1917 October Revolution, but the American party also drew on decades of local radical organizing. Many of its members came out of the Socialist Party, the labor movement and even anarchist activism, but the party also found a base among African-Americans when Communists proved willing to take on their struggles for self-determination.

In short, American Communism was a movement that grew out of what the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression,” calls “the most despised and dispossessed elements of American society.” It was the black workers drawn to the party, Professor Kelley argues, who shaped its political choices as much as the varying dictates that came from the Communist International, Moscow’s directorate for foreign parties.

During the Depression, the party took on fights not just for better wages and working conditions but also against evictions by landlords and abuses of the criminal punishment system. In the Deep South, the battle for freedom for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape in 1931, was led by the International Labor Defense, a legal arm of the Communist Party U.S.A.

...

The party inspired loyalty for reasons beyond simply an affinity for Marxist ideas. It was the campaigns Communists ran against police brutality, the practice of lynching and the Jim Crow laws that made their politics relevant to the lives of ordinary people. In the North as well as the South, on soapboxes on the streets of Harlem as well as on plots of sharecropped land in Alabama, Communist organizing addressed the bread-and-butter concerns of black people.

Communists believed that organizing the working class would work only if white workers realized that their liberation, too, was bound up with the fate of black workers. Facing this threat, anti-Communists and segregationists worked hard to sustain the fractures. They blamed Communists for fomenting “race mixing,” evoking sexualized fears that social equality would mean black men having sex with white women — the very fears that put the Scottsboro Boys on trial. In turn, when black people agitated for civil rights, the Bull Connors of the world called such demands Communist-inspired, returning to the same narrative of dangerous outsiders.

Such an argument said, in effect, that black people had to be whipped up by radical foreigners in order to challenge the remnants of slavery in the Jim Crow South, and that without those outsiders, America was, to steal a phrase from the 2016 election, already great. The view also ignores that it was the black members of the Communist Party U.S.A., raised in such circumstances, who made it clear that their struggles for economic independence were bound up with the racist violence they faced from both the police and white supremacist groups.

Those black Communists often had to fight to hold their party accountable to its professed ideals when the party shifted its strategy toward courting white liberals. The debates that resurfaced during the 2016 election cycle, about the primacy of race or class in left-wing organizing, particularly around the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, echoed these past battles.

In the 1930s, the party taught its members to discuss their problems using the language of exploitation. This language meant that people “understood that racism and what they called male chauvinism wasn’t simply people acting badly or being psychologically controlled or being ignorant,” Professor Kelley said. “It was about the benefits that they derived from exploitative relationships.”

That framework, which has been revisited today in platform documents like “A Vision for Black Lives,” argues that racism, at root, is not about hate between groups, but about the way power is held in society. And class, according to this analysis, is created by relationships of exploitation.

These arguments were championed by organizers like Claudia Jones, a black leader within the Communist Party U.S.A. and a journalist for its newspaper, The Daily Worker. According to Charlene Carruthers, the national director of Black Youth Project 100, Ms. Jones expounded the idea now known as intersectionality decades before that term became so ubiquitous that Hillary Clinton used it in a tweet on the campaign trail. For Ms. Jones, understanding the lives of black women and the economic and social position they occupied would create a better understanding of the system of capitalism as a whole. It followed, Ms. Carruthers explains, that black women’s work was central in the struggle to replace the system.

Within organized labor, particularly the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1940s, the Communist-led unions were consistently the leaders on racial and gender equality. Sometimes this clashed with the wishes of white male members, who occasionally went on strike against the inclusion of black members. With the eventual purge of such so-called red unions from the federation, the cause of antiracism slipped to the sidelines. Only in the past decade or so has it returned as a priority for some unions.

...

Yet for all the work that went into killing the idea that another system was possible, the specter of Communism haunts us still. The Communist Party U.S.A. had its greatest successes as the country reeled from the Depression. Today, as we are still picking our way out of the rubble left by the crash of 2008, left-wing ideas have gained new purchase. It was the material conditions of people’s lives, Ms. Kaba points out, that made them willing to listen to something radically different during the 1930s and ’40s. It was that economic reality that drove millions of people to pay attention to both the nationalist bombast of Mr. Trump and the democratic socialist message of Bernie Sanders.

...
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https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/...e_unexpected_afterlife_of_american_communism/
 
S

sphagnum

Banned
Wilsongt said:
The founding fathers failed to predict the collective IQ decline of white people and their tendency to be fleeced by orange gonads.
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You joke but a lot of the FF's were not fans of democracy and this is part of the reason why. They didn't trust the common person to make smart decisions. They were also protecting their own wealth, of course.
 
B

balladofwindfishes

Member
sphagnum said:
You joke but a lot of the FF's were not fans of democracy and this is part of the reason why. They didn't trust the common person to make smart decisions. They were also protecting their own wealth, of course.
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And of course, they wanted to protect their ability to own other human beings and force them into labor
 
K

kirblar

Member
sphagnum said:
You joke but a lot of the FF's were not fans of democracy and this is part of the reason why. They didn't trust the common person to make smart decisions. They were also protecting their own wealth, of course.
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Yup. They were absolutely correct to be concerned.
 
S

SexyFish

Banned
Is this what the tick tick tick was about?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/polit...ump-russian-investigation/index.html?adkey=bn

Washington (CNN) In his much-anticipated congressional testimony on Thursday, fired FBI Director James Comey will dispute President Donald Trump's blanket claim that he was told he was not under investigation multiple times, according to sources familiar with Comey's thinking.

Rather, one source said that Comey is expected to tell senators that he never assured Trump he was not under investigation, because such assurances would have been improper. Another source hinted that the President may have misunderstood the exact meaning of Comey's words, especially regarding the FBI's ongoing counterintelligence investigation.
In his letter to Comey firing him, Trump raised the Russia investigation and asserted that: "...I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation." The White House has not provided details of when those three conversations allegedly took place.
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D

Diablos

Member
Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who has been outspoken about his concerns with the party's direction, but now says he is feeling increasingly comfortable and "very encouraged" by Republicans' plans.
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It is going to pass.

Fuck
 
W

whyamihere

Banned
The French left is dead.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-f...ed7e&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

Emmanuel Macron's party is set to win the biggest parliamentary majority for a French president since Charles de Gaulle's 1968 landslide, a survey of voter intentions for the coming legislative elections showed on Tuesday.

Such a majority would give Macron's government a strong mandate to push ahead with economic reforms, starting with a pro-business overhaul of France's labor code, a notoriously difficult area of policy to agree with trade unions.

Macron's centrist Republic On The Move (LREM) party, which launched in April last year and has revolutionized the French political scene, was seen scoring 29.5 percent of the vote in the June 11 first round, the Ipsos Sopra-Steria poll found.

With a solid lead ahead of other parties, LREM would go on to win 385-415 seats out of 577 in the lower house of parliament in a June 18 second round of voting, the poll showed.

The projected majority fits with a Cevipof survey for Le Monde on Friday, and would be the strongest since voters rallied behind former president and wartime hero De Gaulle in 1968 after student revolts and nationwide general strikes.

The conservative Republicans and their allies were seen at 23 percent, with the National Front on 17 percent, the hard-left France Unbowed 12.5 percent and the Socialists 8.5 percent.

LREM's first round lead has narrowed from 31 percent the last time the poll was conducted a week ago after Macron's former campaign chief - now a cabinet minister - came under investigation for past financial dealings.

The investigation into the activities of Richard Ferrand took a new turn on Tuesday as a media report said investigators had raided a business headquarters linked to their inquiries.

But that has so far done little to dent Macron's popularity after he beat the National Front's leader Marine Le Pen. Sixty percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with Macron.

And, after the first round eliminates any candidate who gathers less than 12.5 percent of the vote, Macron's candidates will be strongly placed across the country to win the decisive second round, pollsters say.

In the second round, the poll projected that The Republicans party would win just 105-125 seats in parliament, the Socialists 25-35 seats, France Unbowed 12-22 seats and the National Front 5-15 seats.

The poll, conducted on June 2-4 for France Televisions and radiofrance with a sample of 2,103 people, also found that 68 percent of those surveyed had definitely made up their minds about whom they would vote for.

That rose to 75 percent for those backing Macron's party.
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L

Loxley

Member
Ernest said:
And if Sessions leaves, who's Trump gonna replace him with - who in the fuck wants to work with Trump when money isn't involved?
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It's hilarious to look back on the period where Trump was first putting together his cabinet. It seemed like every Republican political hack (Gingrich, Giuiani, Christie, etc) was falling over themselves to try and get a position in Trump's cabinet because they so desperately wanted to be in the White House. Now though? Hasn't even been six months yet and no one wants to touch him with a fucking 100-foot pole.
 
N

nature boy

Member
Maggie Haberman‏Verified account @maggieNYT 2m2 minutes ago

Confirmed that Sessions at one point told the president, amid tensions NYT reported last night, that he needed room to do his job and 1

Maggie Haberman‏Verified account @maggieNYT 28s28 seconds ago

...did not need to remain it if the president didn't want him there. Trump declined to accept. 2/2
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WEAK LEADER FOLKS
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
NSA's alleged leaker got tripped up by a secret printer feature

The pages from the NSA's printers came with invisible tracking dots. This is a common feature in modern printers for forensics investigations, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're nearly invisible to the naked eye, but if you invert the colors, like Rob Graham from Errata Security did, they're a lot more obvious. Take a look now:

EaUgVWX.png


Those dots are part of a DocuColor pattern, a grid of 15 by 8 yellow dots repeated over the edges of printed pages. It's a code packed with tracking information, and can be translated to tell you the time, date and serial number of the printer it came from.

By using the code in the leaked documents, Errata Security saw that the pages were printed on May 9 at 6:20 p.m., on a printer with the serial number 29535218.

"This code the government forces into our printers is a violation of our 3rd Amendment rights," Graham wrote in a blog post.
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O

Ogodei

Member
It was also a time before public education, so intellectual differences along class lines were much more stark. Trump voters are probably 98% literate (since illiteracy in the US is more strongly minority or native american), which is a different ballgame compared to an 18th-century farmhand.
 
K

kirblar

Member
Spoiled Milk said:
I don't understand this at all. The French revolted in the streets when Hollande tried to roll back some labor laws and excoriated him with a sub-10% approval rating. Can someone explain French politics to me, please?
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They have 10% unemployment. In contrast, UK's at 4.8, Germany's at 3.9, and the US is at 4.7.
 
B

Bonen no Max'd

Banned
Spoiled Milk said:
I don't understand this at all. The French revolted in the streets when Hollande tried to roll back some labor laws and excoriated him with a sub-10% approval rating. Can someone explain French politics to me, please?
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if I had to guess it's that no one trusts PS anymore so their base has collapsed

presumably they don't really have an alternative, or maybe Macron got some easy points by being like "Trump is dumb"

but I'm not French and I have no idea
 
O

Ogodei

Member
Macron stole their thunder, just like how Syriza (the radical left) swallowed up PASOK (the old center-left) in Greece. The issue is that unlike Syriza, En Marche is basically a centrist party, though it might hew left due to forces of political gravity if the Republicans end up as their main opposition.
 
D

Diablos

Member
balladofwindfishes said:
Still don't think it's happening any time soon

Remember, they have to vote after the CBO report, they can't vote before it.
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Their meeting today basically suggests they pass it by July or go off a cliff politically. They were given a PowerPoint presentation that showed the consequences of not doing anything and it apparently made a big impression on them.
 
S

Spoiled Milk

Banned
kirblar said:
They have 10% unemployment. In contrast, UK's at 4.8, Germany's at 3.9, and the US is at 4.7.
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It's just amazing to me that labor reforms last year were a death knell for Hollande but this year are the créme de le créme for Macron. Unless I'm woefully misunderstanding and the labor reforms last year were wildly popular.
 
P

platypotamus

Member
I've never understood the whole "offer to resign" and the whole "declining to accept" resignations. Anytime I've resigned from a position, I haven't ever given my bosses a choice about whether to accept it or not. Is this only a thing in politics?
 
B

Bonen no Max'd

Banned
whyamihere said:
The French left is dead.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-f...ed7e&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
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wait is France's parliament still elected by district and it was only held together by a successful but dead two party system

because getting two thirds of the seats with one third of the votes is disgusting and seems like a totally broken democracy

ohhh they do runoffs for each seat I guess? that's incredibly broken but it makes sense that it kills the left the same way it did in the presidential election.
 
O

Ogodei

Member
Bonen no Max'd said:
wait is France's parliament still elected by district and it was only held together by a successful but dead two party system

because getting two thirds of the seats with one third of the votes is disgusting and seems like a totally broken democracy
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I think they have a two-round system?
 
H

Hyoukokun

Member
platypotamus said:
I've never understood the whole "offer to resign" and the whole "declining to accept" resignations. Anytime I've resigned from a position, I haven't ever given my bosses a choice about whether to accept it or not. Is this only a thing in politics?
Click to expand...

When I was a little kid and I complained about how one of my friends had some privilege or thing that I didn't have, my dad would sometimes threaten to go sign some adoption papers and ship me off to live with said friend's family.

I think this offer to resign was made in much the same spirit - intended more as a wake-up call than a serious proposal. Of course, given Trump is who he is, it wouldn't surprise me if he misinterpreted or took people up on offers that were never meant to be considered seriously.
 
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