The General US Politics Thread

Something I just found out, there was actually a WW 2 battle in North America, specifically the Battle of the Caribbean between the allies and the Italians and Nazis

I personally think that the 500k deaths in Somalia or the current Darfour conflict can be linked to UK imperialism, or that the Rwandan genocide is hard to dissociate from French interference. That's how I came to the conclusion that Western imperialism isn't necessarily that much better than Communist one. Even though the deaths are indirect - they are still caused by foreign imperialism.

I haven't said people have defended US imperialism, I said that people have tried to somewhat dedramatize it by saying "Russia was worse". And that if you keep doing that, you are just feeding the trolls who claim that the US are fundamentally anti-Russian and have lost objectivity on the subject.

60 million dead in Maoist China. Direct result of Soviet support for Mao. That's more dead in one country than in all the American interventions combined. That's more dead than most of the 19th century colonial wars combined.

"It was mainly due to the errors of the great leap forward and of the struggle against "Right opportunism" together with a succession of natural calamities and the perfidious scrapping of contracts by the Soviet Government that our economy encountered serious difficulties between 1959 and 1961, which caused serious losses to our country and people

It had no impact. The Soviets’ break with China was in 1960. People had been starving to death for more than a year already. They built a tractor factory and that was finished in 1959. Wouldn’t that have been a help to Chinese agriculture rather than a hindrance?...The key reason is political misjudgment. It is not the third reason. It is the only reason. How did such misguided policies go on for four years? In a truly democratic country, they would have been corrected in half a year or a year. Why did no one oppose them or criticize them? I view this as part of the totalitarian system that China had at the time. The chief culprit was Mao.

The internet giants are staying mum after a leak from the Kremlin-backed troll farm confirmed that they were key nodes in the Russian disinformation campaign.

MOSCOW — Trolling political opponents has become so routine in Russia, such a part of the everyday landscape, that operations are typically performed without much effort to cover any tracks.

So when Russian trolling techniques were exported to the United States as part of the effort to influence the 2016 presidential election, it seems to have been done with the same lack of discipline that characterizes the practice in Russia.

That devil-may-care attitude helped make possible the identification and indictment of 13 Russians and three Russian companies, with the United States accusing them of trying to subvert the election, including efforts to bolster the candidacy of Donald J. Trump and undercut the campaign of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Just because the operation was thinly veiled, however, does not mean that the Russian trolling — creating provocative online posts about immigration, religion and race to try to sway voters — lacked high-level support.

Indeed, ever since the first reports surfaced in 2014 about the existence of a troll farm called the Internet Research Agency, there have been questions about its Kremlin ties.

The United States indictment is among the clearest documents yet in stating outright that Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a businessman grown fabulously wealthy off government contracts, controls the agency despite denials from him and the Kremlin. He has long been linked to President Vladimir V. Putin, not least through his nickname, “Putin’s cook,” inspired by his catering company, which mushroomed from hosting state banquets to feeding much of the military.

“Because it targets someone pretty close to the Kremlin, it really points at the Kremlin,” said Konstantin von Eggert, a veteran journalist and political analyst, referring to the indictment. “Such things are very tightly controlled in Russia. You cannot launch your own private war against the United States.”

Others noted, however, that degrees of control vary. There is a saying in Russian that the Kremlin has many towers, meaning that various bureaucratic cabals and government agencies hold differing and sometimes competing interests.

The Kremlin; the F.S.B., the main security service; and the S.V.R., or the foreign intelligence service, all have interests overseas, which complicates singling out the troll farm’s ultimate godfather.

Also, this kind of operation is designed for deniability, with the overall mandate endorsed by the government but probably not the day-to-day operations.

“People do not go ask permission from Putin: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, can we go hack the servers of the Democratic Party?’ It’s not like that,” said Anton Merkurov, an internet analyst. “Putin never really uses the internet, so he doesn’t understand how it works.”

Those named in the indictment have proved difficult for reporters to reach, with their cellphones often shut off and no response to messages left for them on social media.

The overall aim of the Russian government — be it through trolling, hacking or disinformation — was to spread confusion and unease about government institutions in the West and to shore up popular support at home. The actual techniques were unlikely to be laid out in a paper trail, Mr. Merkurov noted.

The fact that the efforts of the troll farm described in the indictment — the fake campaign protests in Florida or New York; the myriad accounts mimicking Americans set up on Twitter and Facebook; the trips to the United States to organize it all — were so easy to trace back to the Internet Research Agency that it probably underscores that the intelligence services were not involved in running the organization.

The government and its proxies had been using bots and trolls for so long against its internal critics that it probably did not consider that shifting the operations overseas demanded a significantly different approach, said Vladimir Frolov, a foreign affairs analyst.

“It was very ad hoc, very amateurish,” he said. “They did not consider this to be a sensitive operation. They used easily traceable methods.”

A lot of the information in the 37-page indictment had appeared previously in Russia, especially in a nearly 5,000-word article in RBC magazine last November. Quoting unidentified current and former employees, the article’s details ranged from the names of key employees, to their tasks, to their working methods.

Analysts noted that the relatively easily tracked efforts by the Internet Research Agency are very different from, for example, the American investigation into what could be a strategically more threatening case: whether Kaspersky Labs gave a back door entry to Russian intelligence services into United States government computers running its software. Kaspersky Labs strenuously denies any such collusion.

On Thursday the White House also blamed Russia for the calamitous ‘Not Petya’ cyber attack last year, echoing the British government in condemning Moscow for unleashing a virus that shuttered some of Ukraine’s infrastructure and damaged computers globally. Russia denied any link.

Those operations involved highly sophisticated penetration of cybernetworks, the analysts noted, whereas the troll farm work is akin to graffiti — writing nasty messages on Twitter and Facebook.

If there was any substantial Russian influence in the election, it was far more likely from the information hacked from the Democratic Party headquarters that was leaked to the press, Mr. Frolov said.

In Russia, all kinds of dirt about opposition figures turns up online, or even on state television channels, ranging from documentaries that set out to prove these politicians are fifth columnists on the payroll of the State Department to videos from hidden hotel room cameras that show them engaging in extramarital sex.

So for many Russians, the main surprise after the United States indicted the most notorious troll farm was that the work might be considered criminal.

Lyudmila Savchuk, an internet activist who went undercover as an employee at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, said that there should be thousands of names in the indictment, not just 13 top managers.

“We are in a situation now where these people are not even criticized by society, much less punished legally,” Ms. Savchuk said in a telephone interview. No troll or propagandist ever bears any responsibility for what they write in Russia, she said.

The Internet Research Agency was initially formed in 2013 to attack members of the political opposition, like Aleksei A. Navalny, Mr. Putin’s most outspoken critic. The basic task of the trolls was to flood social media with articles and comments that painted Russia under Mr. Putin as a stable, comfortable country in contrast to the chaos and moral corruption of the West, according to two former trolls who worked there. From domestic matters it moved on to attacking Ukraine and eventually the West.

In Russia, one discussion about the ramifications of the indictment was the extent to which it might actually help the Kremlin. The charges laid out in the indictment roughly correspond with Mr. Putin’s position that perhaps rogue patriots are responsible not only for the trolling, but also for the email hacking and other cyberattacks connected to the U.S. election.

The fact that there were no senior government officials named probably helps Russia, said Mr. Frolov, because that echoed statements from Mr. Putin last summer that any election meddling was the work of eager Russian civilians rather than government agents.

“The first impulse is to dismiss it as inconsequential, something that makes clear that there is no evidence of Russian state involvement in what Mueller describes as an interference operation,” Mr. Frolov said, referring to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who brought the indictment. “Assuming it ends up only with those pranksters, that gives Moscow room to maneuver, the ability to distance themselves from this.”

On Saturday, Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, dismissed the indictment as “just blabber.”

“I have no response. We see these statements and indictments multiplying,” Mr. Lavrov said at an international security conference in Munich, Germany.

The official reaction basically mocked the idea that 13 people could somehow muster a negative impact on American democracy. “Mueller’s list: Russian superagents are capable of anything” read one sarcastic headline on a television website.

The veterans say they were less-than-honorably discharged for minor infractions related to post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries and other mental problems they developed during their service.

They also say the Naval Discharge Review Board, which handles applications from former sailors and Marines, unlawfully denied their requests to change their discharge characterization. The board granted 16 percent of discharge upgrade applications involving PTSD last year, compared with 51 percent approval of such applications by Army and Air Force boards, the veterans say.

The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, Marine veteran Tyson Manker, of Jacksonville, Illinois, said Americans need to know that hundreds of thousands of veterans with service-related mental health problems are being denied Veterans Affairs resources because of unfair discharge classifications.

"It is a national disgrace," said Manker, who served during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "By taking this action with the courts we intend to restore the rule of law along with honor for thousands of patriots who were treated so poorly by the nation they served."

The New Haven-based National Veterans Council for Legal Redress, which includes veterans with less-than-honorable discharges, also is a plaintiff.

"We made mistakes with how we treated the Vietnam generation, before PTSD was well understood, but now we are doling out the same injustice to the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan," said Garry Monk, executive director of the council.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and veteran who lost both legs in the Iraq War, said in a statement released by the plaintiffs that the unfair discharge status is "based on antiquated policies that fail to recognize invisible wounds like post-traumatic stress."

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt dismissed evolution as an unproven theory, lamented that “minority religions” were pushing Christianity out of “the public square” and advocated amending the Constitution to ban abortion, prohibit same-sex marriage and protect the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments, according to a newly unearthed series of Oklahoma talk radio shows from 2005.

Pruitt, who at the time was a state senator, also described the Second Amendment as divinely granted and condemned federal judges as a “judicial monarchy” that is “the most grievous threat that we have today." And he did not object when the program’s host described Islam as “not so much a religion as it is a terrorist organization in many instances.”

The six hours of civics class-style conversations on Tulsa-based KFAQ-AM were recently rediscovered by a firm researching Pruitt’s past remarks, which provided them to POLITICO on condition of anonymity so as not to identify its client. They reveal Pruitt's unfiltered views on a variety of political and social issues, more than a decade before the ambitious Oklahoman would lead President Donald Trump’s EPA.

The views he states, in discussions peppered with references to inalienable rights and the faith of the nation's founders, are in line with those of millions of other conservative, devout Christians. But they also show stances that at times are at odds with the broader American mainstream, and in some cases with accepted scientific findings — an issue that has more recently come up with his skepticism about the science behind climate change.

“There aren’t sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution, and it deals with the origins of man, which is more from a philosophical standpoint than a scientific standpoint,” he said in one part of the series, in which Pruitt and the program's hosts discussed issues related to the Constitution.

EPA would not say this week whether any of Pruitt’s positions have changed since 2005. Asked whether the administrator’s skepticism about a major foundation of modern science such as evolution could conflict with the agency's mandate to make science-based decisions, spokesman Jahan Wilcox told POLITICO that “if you're insinuating that a Christian should not serve in capacity as EPA administrator, that is offensive and a question that does not warrant any further attention."

Republicans in Congress defended Pruitt, saying his religious beliefs should factor into how he does his job.

"All of us are people of faith and obviously influenced by our faith and the role it played in our life … and continue[s] to play in our life on a daily basis," said Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees EPA. "It’s a part of who we are."

Sen. Jim Inhofe, a fellow Oklahoman, said Pruitt's faith does and should play a role in his work.

“He’s a believer. He is a Jesus guy. He believes in the principles,” Inhofe said. “I think it does [have an impact], and I think it has to. Anyone who denies that that has an impact isn’t being totally honest."

Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists — a group that has criticized Pruitt’s environmental policies — said Pruitt’s religious beliefs aren’t relevant to his leadership of EPA “because the job is not to be the nation’s pastor.” But his group still worries that Pruitt has chosen to “sideline science" and “wants to make decisions on a wholly political basis.”

“If I had to say if there was a philosophy behind his decisions, it’s 'Industry is always right and we should just get out of the way,'” Rosenberg said.

In a state, Utah, where most politicians would like to take over federal lands, and where President Trump's proclamation breaking up Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments was rousingly applauded, there's a move to designate a "Donald J. Trump National Parks Highway."

The proposal, introduced to the Utah Legislature by a lawmaker who long has shown his disdain for federal lands management in the state, would attach that designation to a route that runs down U.S. 191 from Interstate 70, past Moab, and down to Blanding, where it would turn right to pick up Utah 95 West and head to Hanksville, where it would connect with Utah 24 and then Utah 12 towards Bryce Canyon National Park. The route would continue west to Cedar City and Interstate 15, where it would head south to St. George, head a bit north to run by Zion National Park, and then wrap up on U.S. 89 at Lake Powell inside Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

All told, the proposed route would pass Arches and Canyonlands national parks, Natural Bridges National Monument, Capitol Reef and Bryce Canyon national parks, Cedar Breaks National Monument, and Zion National Park. And, of course, the fragments of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments.

"Contrary to some beliefs out there, Donald Trump really is a supporter of public lands. He’s a big supporter of national parks," state Rep. Mike Noel said in a Salt Lake Tribune story.