goethe.cx posted:

they know the due process argument is dumb, it’s in bad faith. they said the same thing about kavanaugh, despite there being no property or liberty interest in becoming a supreme court justice

deoju posted:

The next president should immediately take a picture of her/himself behind the Resolute Desk with the doors and windows open. Air out the Oval Office.

TulliusCicero posted:

Pakistani Brad Pitt posted:

Genuine question because not Christian. Is there any place in American Christianity for social justice type Christian politics ala the type who built near every charity and homeless shelter in the company 120 years ago (even if it was a means to an end to evangelize)? Are these people already absorbed into the Democratic party? Lost causes because of abortion or gay rights?

Pakistani Brad Pitt posted:

But put these people in a voting booth, and what lever do they pull at the end of the day? Is abortion enough to override any societal good?

Does the calculus change if the Democratic party actually goes full DemSoc in a way that significantly improves the amount of good they do for the poor and downtrodden, instead of paying it lipservice while mostly maintaining the status quo?

pacerhimself posted:

The horrific nature of this administration is the least satisfying "I told you so" in the world. It's as bad and worse than I thought it would be.

booseek posted:

To be fair, a lot of people do this, even non-Russia/Trump supporters. I notice it every time, too. It's so prevalent that often conservatives will say "Ukraine" and liberals will say "the Ukraine."

But of course, the President of the United States should know better.

Xand_Man posted:

A while back someone posted a game thsy made where you looked at a graph and had guess when Trump took office. I enjoyed it and want to spread further afield. Anyone have a link? Google is failing me and it's not the easiest thing to search for.

a slime posted:

I think this is just a general strategy used to influence vulnerable groups of people. One of Jordan Peterson’s hooks is “why you should clean your room”.

eke out posted:

at least that's their story, yeah. the sudden influx of reports last night that republican allies now want Sondland to testify because they think it will help them sure seems suspicious though, especially given that he's still refusing to turn over documents and texts

anyways, all those people are insanely stupid, and if this guy thinks he's going to go in and lie he's going to get hosed, so this is probably a good thing overall

quote:

The business relationship between President Donald Trump's private lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the men charged Thursday in a campaign finance scheme is a subject of the ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by federal authorities in New York, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The investigation became public after the FBI had to quickly move to arrest Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman before they boarded a flight out of the country from Washington Dulles Airport with one-way tickets. They have been named as witnesses in the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

The investigation is being conducted by the FBI's New York field office and prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, the same U.S. Attorney's office Giuliani ran before he became mayor of New York.

Giuliani has declined to comment on the case.

Parnas and Fruman, two Soviet-born, Florida-based businessmen, assisted Giuliani in his effort to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his family. The association among the three men goes back several years. Giuliani has represented Parnas and Fruman in the past.

The two men were charged Thursday with four counts, including conspiracy to commit campaign finance fraud, false statements to the Federal Election Commission, and falsification of records.

Two associates of Parnas and Fruman, David Correira and Andrey Kukushkin, were indicted along with Parnas and Fruman on Thursday. William Sweeney, FBI assistant director in charge of the New York Field office, said at a Thursday news conference that Kukushkin was taken into custody in San Francisco, while Correia had yet to be arrested.
(MORE: Trump pushed Tillerson to help Giuliani's client out of DOJ probe: Source)

In his first reaction to the indictments on Thursday, President Trump said he doesn't know the associates of Rudy Giuliani -- even though he may be in a photo with one of them.

"I don't know those gentleman. That is possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody -- I have a picture with everybody here. But somebody said there may be a picture with -- at a fundraiser or somewhere so, but I have pictures with everybody. I don't know if there's anybody I don't have pictures with. I don't know them," Trump said.

"You have to ask Rudy. I just don't know," Trump told reporters as he departed the White House on his way to a political rally in Minnesota on Thursday.

Rent-A-Cop posted:

I'm the Windscale of posters.

Herstory Begins Now posted:

If the Turks actually shelled a major SOF post then good lord. Like 50-100 people is a big one as far as those go and Turkey knows exactly, as in to within a millimeter, where they are. IDK there's a lot more to say on that but hanging them out to dry is going to have some ridiculous implications throughout the entire military.

BiggerBoat posted:

Or, when the recession hits, "see what happens with democrats in charge?"


Beatles?

Antioch posted:

This is the fourth time I've read the series. I started in the mid 90s when Crown of Swords came out. Every time I've read it it's been different because of the mind space I'm in.

Lemming posted:

The sack of wasps is one of the most single minded evil self interested gently caress and if this is the way he thinks the wind is blowing it's definitely a big lol

Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:

It begins

https://mobile.twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1183729622338490368

Rip Testes posted:

Has it been identified what corruption existed at the time the aid to Ukraine was held up and quantifiably been demonstrated how that corruption was curtailed to an extent that the aid need no longer be suspended? It seems like story is a lot happened in a short period of time.

eke out posted:

It cannot, the Senate Rules do not allow for it and require a majority to change. The same rules define Roberts' authority.

There's not a mystery here: even if there's a larger constitutional question about what the boundaries of that authority COULD be, the current boundaries are clearly valid and that question won't be in play unless they're changed by a vote.

quote:

We found multiple Trump ethics pledge violations hidden in a little-noticed government report. They show inappropriate actions by government employees, lobbyists and former business clients.

by Derek Kravitz for ProPublica Oct. 23, 1:52 p.m. EDT

A governmentwide review has acknowledged for the first time that at least several Trump political appointees violated the administration’s ethics pledge, which was put in place to try to “drain the swamp” by imposing lobbying restrictions and penalties.

The details are tucked away in the Office of Government Ethics’ latest annual report, which attracted little notice when it was released this summer.

While President Donald Trump’s ethics pledge was weaker than previous rules, the government ethics office still found violations in 2018 at three federal agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the National Labor Relations Board.

No federal agency reported a violation of the Trump ethics pledge in 2017.

At the National Labor Relations Board, Republican board member William Emanuel was found to have improperly voted on a case involving franchisee or contractor violations of labor laws. Emanuel’s former employer, the law firm Littler Mendelson, represents a company that was a party to the original ruling, ProPublica reported. Before he joined the board in September 2017, Emanuel was a shareholder at Littler, which represents corporations in labor disputes.

In December 2017, the labor board overturned the original union-friendly ruling, undoing years of precedent and making it tougher for employees to pursue federal complaints against parent or related companies if they indirectly control employee work conditions. Because of Emanuel’s conflict of interest with Littler, the ruling on the case was ultimately overturned a second time and the labor board’s inspector general called Emanuel’s vote a “serious and flagrant problem and/or deficiency.”

The National Labor Relations Board declined to comment on Emanuel’s ethics violation. Emanuel did not respond to requests for comment.

The report cites an ethics violation by an unnamed presidential appointee at the EPA. Agency officials familiar with the matter said the case involves Bill Wehrum, a former lobbyist and attorney who resigned in June as the agency’s assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation. Wehrum is the subject of several internal EPA investigations and faced questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee over his communications with his former law firm Hunton & Williams, now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth. The firm represented several EPA-regulated power plant operators.

Wehrum, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s rollback of the Clean Air Act, the EPA and Hunton Andrews Kurth did not respond to requests for comment.

At the Interior Department, government attorneys disclosed in the annual report that “Ethics Pledge violations may have occurred in 2018.” The Interior Department’s inspector general is looking at potential violations of the ethics pledge by six current and former Trump staffers. (The agency also acknowledged problems with its ethics office after an earlier ProPublica story.)

The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Interior Department in February, alleging that six current and former department staffers violated the ethics pledge, calling it “a disturbing pattern of misconduct” and including one former staffer who went directly from working on energy policy to working for an offshore oil drilling firm. Penalties for violating the pledge include fines and a five-year ban on lobbying.

The Interior Department has yet to make any announcement or ruling on the complaint. But in a statement, the agency said it “immediately consulted with department ethics officials after receiving the Center’s complaint in February. Ethics reviewed each matter and provided materials to the chief of staff, who has taken appropriate actions. All of these materials have been provided to the Inspector General.”

Influence peddling in federal politics is not new; in the Obama administration, appointees in both the Interior Department and the EPA were found to have violated his version of the ethics pledge by talking with former business clients.

The difference, ethics experts who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations say, is both the lack of enforcement and the dearth of information coming from certain federal agencies and the White House about its missteps.

“The White House Counsel’s office has taken the lead in making excuses for ethics violations,” said Kathleen Clark, a professor specializing in legal ethics at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. “There’s examples of the White House refusing to impose any sanction for officials found to have committed violations. They’re setting quite the example.”

In the first two years of the Trump administration, 3,887 political appointees — from Cabinet secretaries and acting chiefs to special and confidential assistants — signed the Trump ethics pledge. Of those thousands of political appointees, 116 were registered lobbyists in the two years immediately before starting government service, or roughly 3%.

Employees who signed Trump’s ethics pledge are not allowed to work on “any particular matters” they previously lobbied on. By contrast, the Obama administration banned lobbyists from working at agencies they previously lobbied.

Trump’s ethics pledge also bars those exiting the government from lobbying for five years — except we’ve found dozens of cases of staffers who’ve gone on to do exactly that.

The EPA and the Interior Department, along with other federal agencies, are no strangers to ethics issues over the past 2 1/2 years.

Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, resigned in July 2018 after a tumultuous tenure that saw more than a dozen different federal investigations into ethical and legal allegations, including his lease of a bedroom in a condo linked to a Canadian energy company’s Washington lobbying firm. (Pruitt’s attorney, Cleta Mitchell, told The Washington Post, that ethics rules had been unfairly “weaponized in order to destroy political opponents” like Pruitt and that he was “enemy No. 1” when he left the EPA. Pruitt is now working with coal baron Joseph W. Craft III and as an energy consultant and paid speaker while “in full compliance with both the letter and the spirit of the law,” Mitchell said.) Current EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, had at least three meetings with former clients as Pruitt’s deputy, according to calendars obtained by the trade publication E&E News.

Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, now a lobbyist with Turnberry Solutions, is being investigated by the Justice Department’s public integrity section over allegations he lied to his agency’s inspector general’s office. That’s on top of two separate probes by the Interior Department’s inspector general about his ties to real estate deals in Montana and a proposed casino project in Connecticut. Zinke also exchanged emails about his family foundation’s Montana property in the summer of 2017, in violation of his own recusal memo he signed with ethics attorneys, according to documents obtained by The Post. (Zinke described the ethics allegations against him to Bloomberg News as “false” and “B.S.,” and calling D.C. “so angry and hateful.”)

Tracking White House staffers, Cabinet members and political appointees across the government

As part of a House inquiry into possible ethics violations, current Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist, was found to have met with officials from Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, a division of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, one of his former clients. The nonprofit legal center has also filed a complaint against Bernhardt, alleging he violated the ethics pledge by meeting with another former client, California’s Westlands Water District, the nation’s largest agricultural water district. The Interior Department has said Bernhardt is in “complete compliance with his ethics agreement and all applicable laws, rules and regulations.”

These reported cases of ethics pledge violations don’t represent the many ethics issues found across the Trump administration.

In April, the State and Energy departments released three long-delayed ethics waivers it has granted to Trump appointees, allowing them to talk to former employers and business clients. An additional 10 waivers specific to the Trump ethics pledge were disclosed by agencies in their annual ethics reports.

In 2017 and 2018, federal agencies referred 125 ethics cases to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Of those cases, 91 were declined and 12 were accepted, with the rest pending.

eke out posted:

simply forbid political advertising on facebook

it's good public policy and it discriminates against no one. additionally, it is easy to administer

OAquinas posted:

That too, but when the idiots on your side are doing something especially idiotic (like taking cellphones into a SCIF), sometimes it's better to gloss over/ignore it until you can trot out McCarthy to give a good ole' "boys will be boys...you know when they get that syrup in 'em they get all antsy in the pantsy"

Like this!
https://twitter.com/AndrewDesiderio/status/1187063967673438210

Zotix posted:

Was it ever disclosed how these ~30 Republicans actually got to enter the room? I can't imagine a SCIF in the capitol building is just sitting unlocked while the testimony is going on in-front of committee members.

Young Freud posted:

Very likely one of the twelve that are supposed to be there opened the door.

cr0y posted:

Can someone tell me what exactly the point of Facebook's internet money is? What is the worst case scenario with it?

oxsnard posted:

fwiw, predictit odds for impeachment went from 70% to 78% in a couple of days. For stuff like this, moves often take place because of inside baseball activities going on in DC

The Glumslinger posted:

Considering the articles about them having schemed this up with Trump yesterday, I really think the plan was to get arrested. I really think he wanted something that he could use as the Democrats abusing power. It would have been dumb, but it would have given other congressional Republicans a shield they'd deflect with every time they got asked a tough question about Trump's latest crime, and "Respectable" Republicans something to bothsides about in lovely op-eds

Inferior Third Season posted:

Kansas will not be in play for the Senate. Voting for a Democratic governor is their way of sending the Republicans to bed with no dessert for misbehaving. But the Senate is something else entirely. Republicans have won every Senate race since 1932, and next year will be no different.

VH4Ever posted:

Yeah the goal here was to get every Republican to sign it, right? Which is why it was so milquetoast. And it still didn't work to get everyone!

Doctor Butts posted:

Peterson's self help books are basically: "take responsibility for yourself”

Which is a totally original and mind blowing concept if you're a white male.

Ague Proof posted:

It's not. Peterson puts all the responsibility on 'post-modern Cultural Marxists', aka Jews, who are making society degenerate. The responsibility of Peterson's audience is to fight back against them.


Peterson's first claim to fame was misreading some Canadian pronoun bill and lying about what it said.

Party Plane Jones posted:

https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1189202772161380353

quote:

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. diverted more than $100 million in gas safety and operations money collected from customers over a 15-year period and spent it for other purposes, including profit for stockholders and bonuses for executives, according to a pair of state-ordered reports released Thursday.

An independent audit and a staff report issued by the California Public Utilities Commission depicted a poorly led company well-heeled in its gas operations and more concerned with profit than safety.

The documents link a deficient PG&E safety culture - with its "focus on financial performance" - to the pipeline explosion in San Bruno on Sept. 9, 2010, that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.

The "low priority" the company gave to pipeline safety during the three years leading up to the San Bruno blast was "well outside industry practice - even during times of corporate austerity programs," said the audit by Overland Consulting of Leawood, Kan.

Making money

But PG&E wasn't hurting for cash, according to the audit. From 1999 to 2010, the company collected $430 million more from its gas-transmission and -storage operations than the revenue authorized by the California Public Utilities Commission, which sets the rates the company can charge its customers.

"PG&E chose to use the surplus revenues for general corporate purposes" rather than improved gas safety, the Overland audit said.

The audit was unable to trace exactly how PG&E spent the diverted money. But in a separate report on the San Bruno explosion released Thursday, the utilities commission staff noted that in the three years leading up to the San Bruno explosion, the company spent $56 million annually on an incentive plan for executives and "non-employee directors," including stock awards, performance shares and deferred compensation.

"A cursory review reveals that a significant portion, in the millions, has been awarded to the CEO," the commission staff report said in a reference to former PG&E head Peter Darbee, who retired last year.

Cutting corners

By cutting back on pipeline-replacement projects and maintenance, laying off workers, using cheaper but less effective inspection techniques and trimming other pipeline costs, PG&E saved upward of 6 percent of the money designated for pipeline safety, maintenance and operations programs, the Overland audit said.

Meanwhile, on the revenue side, transmission pipeline operations were "very profitable" for PG&E since March 1998, the audit said.

Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, whose district includes San Bruno, called the company's diversion of customers' money "criminal behavior."

"When you divert funds intended for maintenance and safety to profits, there is nothing clearer," Hill said. "It is criminal."

Hill noted that the San Mateo County district attorney, the state attorney general and the U.S. attorney's office are conducting a joint investigation of the San Bruno disaster. He said he would talk to them about incorporating the Overland audit in their probe.

oxsnard posted:

I know the KY governor is pretty unpopular these days, but would him losing the day after a Trump rally mean anything about the current state of the Trump loving demographic?

Rigel posted:

It would definitely mean something, but the Dems nominated perhaps the best candidate they possibly could for the race (from the KY Beshear dynasty, proven already he can win statewide, good candidate, etc), so he's going to greatly outperform what a generic Dem would do. If he narrowly wins tonight, that means any other Dem would have lost.

It would be more interesting if Beshear wins by like 10 points.