US politics general thread

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Russian-US tycoon boasted of ‘active’ involvement in Trump election campaign

A Russian-American businessman who donated a substantial sum to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election effort boasted to a senior figure in Moscow that he was “actively involved” in the Republican candidate’s campaign, the Guardian can reveal.

Simon Kukes said he was helping Trump with “strategy development” and shared photos of his 29-year-old Russian girlfriend posing with the future president.

Kukes made the claims to Vyacheslav Pavlovsky, a career Kremlin official and former ambassador to Norway. Pavlovsky is currently vice-president of Russian Railways.

The disclosure raises questions about the role played by Kukes in the run-up to the election and what information, if anything, was being relayed by him to his associates in Russia.
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OrbitalDawn said:
Because a generic 'media sucks' claim isn't intended to actually identify a mistake in their reporting (which wouldn't really work, given the staggering amount of anonymously sourced reporting that is vindicated, day in, day out). It's to create a false equivalence that devalues any reporting that you perceive to be negative about Trump, regardless of accuracy.

Not to mention Trump's own hypocrisy on anonymous sources.

Ask yourself why you take a Trump tweet at face value, despite the sheer volume of lies he's told, including on Twitter, about anything and everything. Why do you think he's being honest there?
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I don't take any trump tweets at anything. I don't actually follow anything 'trump'. This forum is where I get my 'trump' news... which has turned into just conspiracies and echos.

If there was some list as claimed for trump to control the investigation, the one person he(they, them evil pubs) would want on the very top of the list would be Julie Swetnick, she'd be easy to discredit due to her own past throwing some spokes in wheels over all claims. The fact the so called 'list' excludes her, says to me, there is no list.
 
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What a whack story about Nunes.

Devin Nunes's Family Farm Moved to Iowa, Employs Undocumented Workers

Rep. Devin Nunes is head of the House Intelligence Committee and one of President Trump’s biggest defenders. For years, he’s spun himself as a straight talker whose no-BS values are rooted in his family’s California dairy farm. So why did his parents and brother cover their tracks after quietly moving the farm to Iowa? Are they hiding something politically explosive? On the ground in Iowa, Esquire searched for the truth—and discovered a lot of paranoia and hypocrisy.
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OrbitalDawn said:
What a whack story about Nunes.

Devin Nunes's Family Farm Moved to Iowa, Employs Undocumented Workers
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Talking nonsense when they ask the question: who will milk the cows?

They will do what Europe is starting to do and mechanise the process.

This actually shows why restriction on immigration is actually needed. Cheap labour that isn't protected by the law is exploitable.

Applying labour law to illegal immigrants or giving them citizenship leads you to exactly the same place BTW.
 
konfab said:
This actually shows why restriction on immigration is actually needed. Cheap labour that isn't protected by the law is exploitable.
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So you are actually in favour of legislation to protect the poorest workers, minimum wages, unionization etc? Thats quite a unique view for a conservative...
 
Cray said:
So you are actually in favour of legislation to protect the poorest workers, minimum wages, unionization etc? Thats quite a unique view for a conservative...
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I don't have a problem with most of those things so long as they don't isolate people and institutions from the market. Which is unfortunately what most of them end up doing.

Minimum wages are fine if they are geographically limited in scope.

Unions are OK if employers can fire their workers for going on strike.

Labour laws establishing courts to fairly deal with labour disputes are a very good thing.

Ultimately though, I think the poor are better off with economic growth than with the laws that attempt to protect them but impede growth.

South Africa is the perfect example of this. We have all the labour laws, unions and affirmative action that every good socialist would want, yet the poor in this country are rapidly heading in a bad direction.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/opinion/james-comey-fbi-kavanaugh-investigation.html

Opinion
James Comey: The F.B.I. Can Do This
Despite limitations and partisan attacks, the bureau can find out a lot about the Kavanaugh accusations in a week
<snip>.

In that world, the F.B.I. is now being asked to investigate, on a seven-day clock, sexual assaults that the president says never happened, that some senators have decried as a sham cooked up to derail a Supreme Court nominee, and that other senators believe beyond all doubt were committed by the nominee.

If truth were the only goal, there would be no clock, and the investigation wouldn’t have been sought after the Senate Judiciary Committee already endorsed the nominee. Instead, it seems that the Republican goal is to be able to say there was an investigation and it didn’t change their view, while the Democrats hope for incriminating evidence to derail the nominee.

Although the process is deeply flawed, and apparently designed to thwart the fact-gathering process, the F.B.I. is up for this. It’s not as hard as Republicans hope it will be.

F.B.I. agents are experts at interviewing people and quickly dispatching leads to their colleagues around the world to follow with additional interviews. Unless limited in some way by the Trump administration, they can speak to scores of people in a few days, if necessary.

They will confront people with testimony and other accounts, testing them and pushing them in a professional way. Agents have much better nonsense detectors than partisans, because they aren’t starting with a conclusion.
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Here's Chad Ludington's full statement:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/us/politics/chad-ludington-statement-brett-kavanaugh.html

I have been contacted by numerous reporters about Brett Kavanaugh and have not wanted to say anything because I had nothing to contribute about what kind of justice he would be. I knew Brett at Yale because I was a classmate and a varsity basketball player and Brett enjoyed socializing with athletes. Indeed, athletes formed the core of Brett’s social circle.

In recent days I have become deeply troubled by what has been a blatant mischaracterization by Brett himself of his drinking at Yale. When I watched Brett and his wife being interviewed on Fox News on Monday, and when I watched Brett deliver his testimony under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, I cringed. For the fact is, at Yale, and I can speak to no other times, Brett was a frequent drinker, and a heavy drinker. I know, because, especially in our first two years of college, I often drank with him. On many occasions I heard Brett slur his words and saw him staggering from alcohol consumption, not all of which was beer. When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive. On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.

I do not believe that the heavy drinking or even loutish behavior of an 18- or even 21-year-old should condemn a person for the rest of his life. I would be a hypocrite to think so. However, I have direct and repeated knowledge about his drinking and his disposition while drunk. And I do believe that Brett’s actions as a 53-year-old federal judge matter. If he lied about his past actions on national television, and more especially while speaking under oath in front of the United States Senate, I believe those lies should have consequences. It is truth that is at stake, and I believe that the ability to speak the truth, even when it does not reflect well upon oneself, is a paramount quality we seek in our nation’s most powerful judges.

I can unequivocally say that in denying the possibility that he ever blacked out from drinking, and in downplaying the degree and frequency of his drinking, Brett has not told the truth.

I felt it was my civic duty to tell of my experience while drinking with Brett, and I offer this statement to the press. I have no desire to speak further publicly, and nothing more to say to the press at this time. I will, however, take my information to the F.B.I.
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But but but... M'uh credibility?
 
Gov. Brown signs tough net neutrality law, sets up battle with FCC, tech companies

Advocates of net neutrality hope the move in the home of the global technology industry will have national implications, prompting Congress to enact national net neutrality rules or encouraging other states to follow suit.

It's the latest example of the nation's most populous state seeking to drive public policy outside its borders and rebuff President Donald Trump's agenda.

Within hours of the bill-signing, the Trump administration announced it is suing California over the legislation.

The Federal Communications Commission last year repealed rules preventing internet companies from exercising more control over what people watch and see on the internet.

California's law seeks to reinstate those rules.
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PaRTy of StATeS RiGhTs..
 
konfab said:
Ultimately though, I think the poor are better off with economic growth than with the laws that attempt to protect them but impede growth.

South Africa is the perfect example of this. We have all the labour laws, unions and affirmative action that every good socialist would want, yet the poor in this country are rapidly heading in a bad direction.
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Well stated.
 
The only clear beneficiaries of the Sanders proposal are minimally-selective and open-enrollment colleges, which would not exist but for the enormous subsidies that already support thousands of such questionable institutions. These schools will get huge amounts of new government money while not being required to yield results for their students or the taxpayers.
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Sanders touts Germany as an example of a country that makes higher education free. But while Germany’s universities are fully funded by the state, they aren’t universally accessible. Germany practices extensive academic tracking that funnels nearly half of students into vocational programs. Only about 40 percent of German secondary-school students attend a university preparatory program, or Gymnasium, for secondary school, and these students must pass a difficult, high-stakes exam called the Abitur in order to qualify to attend a university. About 300,000 students pass the Abitur each year, and another 200,000 students qualify to attend technical colleges.
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https://quillette.com/2018/09/29/the-high-cost-of-free-college-for-all/

Very good article on the problems with Sanders and the Democrats and their delusions about higher education.
 
New NAFTA deal:
The new USMCA makes a number of significant upgrades to environmental and labor regulations, especially regarding Mexico. For example, USMCA stipulates that Mexican trucks that cross the border into the United States must meet higher safety regulations and Mexican workers must have more ability to organize and form unions. Some of these provisions might be difficult to enforce, but the Trump administration says it is committed to ensuring these happen — a reason U.S. labor unions and some Democrats are cheering the new rules.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...hats-it/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f9201cca531f

How to kill the economic driver of illegal immigration 101
 
US ambassador to South Africa nominated - report
Lana Marks, an American fashion designer who was born in East London, has been nominated as the US ambassador to South Africa, according to reports.
SABC news reported that Ramaphosa was said to be considering the nomination by the US State Department.
Ramaphosa's spokesperson Khusela Diko told News24 on Saturday: "We would not be in a position to confirm the Ambassador nominee until the President has accepted their credentials".
Department of International Relations and Cooperation spokesperson, Ndivhuwo Mabaya, said they would comment once the process was completed.


According to her website, she is the designer and CEO of a brand of luxurious handbags crafted from exotic leathers such as crocodile and ostrich, which have been spotted on the arms of celebrities.
She is also a philanthropist and supports charities, including those dedicated to breast cancer, underprivileged children and the arts.
Clarendon High School in East London lists her as an alumni.
She is believed to be based in Palm Beach in Florida with her family.
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An entrepreneur from slummies as US ambassador to SA.. I can faintly hear the screeching of all the political science majors in their restaurant jobs right now. :ROFL:
 
Source: Rachel Mitchell Memo Lists ‘Weaknesses’ in Ford Claim: READ
Rachel Mitchell, the veteran sex crimes prosecutor from Maricopa County, Arizona who was chosen by the GOP to question Christine Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, sent a memo to Republican senators calling Ford’s allegations a “he said, she said” case that “is even weaker than that.”

You can read the five-page memo and a four-page timeline at the end of it in full here ...
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Is this why they got her to do the questioning perhaps? To convince the only voters who matter, GOP senators?
 
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