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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Trump Scraps New Sanctions Against Russia, Overruling Advisers
The president’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, had announced on Sunday that the administration would place sanctions on Russian companies found to be assisting Syria’s chemical weapons program. The sanctions were listed on a menu of further government options after an American-led airstrike on Syria, retaliating against a suspected gas attack that killed dozens a week earlier.
But the White House contradicted her on Monday, saying that Mr. Trump had not approved additional measures.
“We are considering additional sanctions on Russia and a decision will be made in the near future,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.
Speaking later with reporters aboard Air Force One as Mr. Trump headed to Florida, Ms. Sanders added that “the president has been clear that he’s going to be tough on Russia, but at the same time he’d still like to have a good relationship with them.”
Another White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said Mr. Trump had decided not to go forward with the sanctions. Mr. Trump concluded that they were unnecessary because Moscow’s response to the airstrike was mainly bluster, the official said.
Russia analysts said the whipsaw policy shift once again highlighted an administration struggling to find a coherent and consistent voice in dealing with Russia, which in the past four years has annexed Crimea, intervened in eastern Ukraine, sought to influence the American election in 2016, allegedly poisoned a former Russian spy living in Britain and propped up the murderous government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Mr. Trump has mostly spoken hopefully of his efforts to forge a friendship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including congratulating him on a re-election widely denounced as a sham and even suggesting a White House meeting. At the same time, the Trump administration has imposed two rounds of sanctions against Russia in the last month, expelled 60 of Moscow’s diplomats and closed a consulate in retaliation for the poisoning attack in Britain.
“Trump seems to think that if he accepts what his advisers recommend on even days of the month and rejects their recommendations on odd days, the result will be a strategy,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia University who served as ambassador to former Soviet states in the 1990s.
“By and large, other governments don’t know whether to laugh or cry at all this,” Mr. Sestanovich said. “But in Russia, laughter is getting the upper hand.”
Trying to make it up to your boyfriend, I presume?
edited 16th Apr '18 8:14:38 PM by megaeliz
Oh, and amusingly, both the (failing) NY Times and Washington Post both won a Pulitzer for their coverage and reporting on "Fake News" Russian Interference in our Democracy.
Now that I think about it, do you guys know about Jared Kushner's cursed New York Property?
edited 16th Apr '18 8:29:06 PM by megaeliz
Guardian Article about the 666 Property
If anyone is interested in Jared Kushner, this is actually a really interesting investigative documentary, done by a Dutch news Outlet. It traces the ties between Kush and a wealthy Israeli Diamond Trader, with close ties to the Kremlin, named Lev Leviev, so it gets pretty obscure, but still has a pretty good overview some of the things that Mueller could be looking into with him.
edited 16th Apr '18 9:18:23 PM by megaeliz
He's apathetic/a Prosperity Gospel
guy, which should probably be considered one of the most heretical versions of Christianity that exists today, if not ever.
Trump is doing so through a sweeping executive order that was quietly issued earlier this week — and that largely flew under the radar.
It calls on the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture and other agencies across the federal government to craft new rules requiring that beneficiaries of a host of programs work or lose their benefits.
Trump argued with the order, which has been in the works since last year, that the programs have grown too large while failing to move needy people out of government help.
“Since its inception, the welfare system has grown into a large bureaucracy that might be susceptible to measuring success by how many people are enrolled in a program rather than by how many have moved from poverty into financial independence,” it states.
The order is directed at “any program that provides means-tested assistance or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households or families that have low incomes.”
Democrats have blasted the effort, arguing the order blends the issues of welfare and broader public assistance programs in a deliberate way they say is intended to lower support for popular initiatives.
“Welfare” has historically been used to describe cash assistance programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Democrats and liberal activists say the Trump administration is seeking to expand the definition of welfare to mean food stamps, Medicaid and other programs as a way to demonize them.
“This executive order perpetuates false and racist stereotypes about certain groups supposedly taking advantage of government assistance,” House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said in a joint statement reacting to the order.
President Trump “is trying to erect a smokescreen in the shape of Reagan’s ‘welfare queen’ so people don’t see he’s coming after the entire middle and working class,” said Rebecca Vallas, managing director of the Center for American Progress’s Poverty to Prosperity Program.
Welfare reform has long been a goal of GOP lawmakers, and there’s broad support in the Republican conference for changing the federal safety net to impose stricter work requirements and block grant state funding for programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
...
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Institute, said the executive order is meant to signal support to congressional Republicans.
“[Administration officials] have been talking to Congress, and the executive order is designed to set the table for them,” Rector said. “Do what they can in the executive branch, and give support to similar efforts on the Hill.”
But a short legislative calendar and a slim Republican majority in the Senate mean the administration may be largely on its own.
Agencies are limited in what changes they can make to their programs, so comprehensive welfare reform may be off the table without major legislation.
Republicans have already acknowledged they won’t be able to cut spending on entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
“I think it’s very tough to get this thing through the Senate when it requires 60 votes. I certainly don’t have any problem with the president taking initiative,” Cole said.
The executive order doesn’t set any new policy, but Center for American Progress’s Vallas said the order is important as a messaging document, and it shows that Trump is willing to act without Congress.
“This is more of President Trump not being content to wait for Congress to dismantle these programs. This is him wanting to take matters into his own hands,” Vallas said.
The order follows policy shifts already underway at various agencies.
Health and Human Services officials have encouraged states to pursue work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries. Arkansas, Indiana and Kentucky have already been granted such waivers, and several other states have waivers pending with the administration.
Earlier this year, the Agriculture Department sought input on “innovative ideas to promote work and self-sufficiency among able-bodied adults” participating in the food stamp program.
In Congress, House Republicans unveiled a provision in the 2018 farm bill to expand mandatory work requirements in the food stamp program. The broader legislation will be marked up later this month, but it faces a long uphill battle.
The administration’s effort could also face legal challenges. Medicaid advocates in Kentucky have already sued over the work requirements, and additional safety net changes could provoke even more lawsuits.
A criticism of the Syria strike from a former State Department special advisor
Who is, one has to say, utterly juvenile in his approach to war. He was motivated by a horror of children being poisoned, as he was earlier on in his presidency. Pictures can motivate him to act, but the abstraction of hecatombs of corpses does not. Chemical weapons he views as horrific, but somehow the power drills, the electrodes, the hot irons, the piano wire, the hooks, the bombs filled with nails, for that matter the knives, do not. He boasted about shiny new missiles and telegraphed his punch in time for the Syrians and their allies to prepare for the blow. And when it was all over the inevitable tweet “Mission Accomplished”—a piece of triumphalist idiocy. At least when President George W. Bush spoke underneath a banner with those words it was the sailors who had asked to put it up, not his communications team, let alone the president himself.
This attack was unserious but intended to relieve emotional pressure, a kind of martial onanism masquerading as strategy. Its effects can be compared to the police coming upon a mass murderer, cited multiple times for firearms violations, reloading his AR-15 in the midst of a massacre. The cops step past the twitching bodies, take the weapon, eject the 30-round magazine, take out half a dozen bullets, and return the remainder and the weapon to the murderer with a stern look. They then swagger back to the squad room shouting, “Showed him, didn’t we!”
But, some would say, at least we did something. Surely that is better than nothing? No, it is not. A slight slap preceded by bluster and followed by evasion and more bluster conveys a very precise message, actually, but not the one that the president believes and perhaps some of his advisers have now convinced themselves they have sent. It is that the commander in chief of the American armed forces is an impulsive coward. Real punishment for the purposes of deterring the Syrian regime and others from the use of poison gas would have been more like the fire and fury that President Bill Clinton rained down on Saddam Hussein in 1998. Operation Desert Fox lasted four days, did serious damage, and shook the Iraqi regime.
In this case it would have been air attacks to smash the Syrian air-defense system, destroy helicopters and aircraft, and above all kill a good number of the men who conducted these attacks and the men who ordered them. It would probably have killed some Russians, Iranians, and Hezbollah militia members too. Not proportionally, even then, but something closer to justice, and more importantly, a use of force with a sound strategic purpose.
That would be hazardous in a number of ways, particularly vis-à-vis the Russians. But as it is, Vladimir Putin has yet another piece of evidence that President Donald Trump will steer away from a direct confrontation with him, even though, in any kind of military conflict in the Middle East it would be the Russians, not the Americans, who by far would have the worst of it. He would secretly fear a president who would do that, because he knows that military humiliation has provoked the downfall of more than one czar in the past. So message received: The American enemy will posture and thump his chest, but is afraid to actually stand up to you, even though his air force could blow yours out of the sky and his navy sink yours to the bottom of the sea.
The magnitude of the Syrian debacle is difficult to absorb. Half a million dead. Millions more refugees. Ancient cities in ruins. The politics of the region and even Europe destabilized. Norms about the use of chemical weapons shattered. Iranian influence extended into the Levant, and Russia’s ability to meddle and inflame exacerbated. Sunni Islamist extremists suppressed only for now, but hundreds of thousands of potential recruits for future jihad waiting in the smashed cities and desolate refugee camps. A much larger regional war brewing and indeed in its early stages. And there is not the slightest evidence of an American policy concept to deal with that.
While on the subject of Syria: John Bolton apparently pushed for a massive strike
, Assad is said to be taking it as a sign that Western Powers won't seriously threaten his rule
, and while the average Syrian is divided on approving of attacks on Assad by the West, everyone seems to agree that the strikes were sound and fury signifying nothing, and did very limited damage
.
Back to the domestic front:
Medicaid expansion may be on the ballot in Utah, Idaho, and Nebraska, all deep red states
. Utah already has well over the signatures needed to add it as a ballot referendum, both Idaho and Nebraska advocates are working on it and claim they'll have the signatures needed by the deadline. Last year Maine became the first state to approve a Medicaid expansions via a ballot referendum.
Kentucky's governor Matt Bevin had to try to walk back comments he made where he said that teacher strikes probably caused an increase in child abuse and sexual assault
. Yes, really. If you've ever wondered why US politics seems to make politically attentive Americans crazy, here you go.
Worth remembering: many Never Trump Republicans are also Never Democrats
. Long story short contest: Never Trumpers who remain committed to their opposition to Trump are desperately looking for ways to win back the party. However, what they are definitely not doing in the face of Trump's continued approval from Republicans (despite the many signs that Trump isn't fit or capable of being President) is either jumping parties to join with Democrats or working against the attempts of the Republican party to gain more power. Never Trump Republicans are still Republicans, and can't be counted on to do anything to curtail the power of the current Republican party. They just want to be the ones in the driver's seat again.
But Brooks’s column did not come to that conclusion. Indeed, amazingly enough, he did not even consider the option. Instead, he suggested that critics of Trump must try harder and somehow do a better job of persuading Republicans to stop loving Trump so much. The idea of abandoning the Republican Party because it is authoritarian and toxically anti-intellectual was apparently as unfathomable to him as a fish in a polluted river deciding to live on land.
...
The nomination of a candidate who refused in advance to accept defeat, who encouraged violence at his rallies and called for the imprisonment of his opponent, did lead some prominent Republicans — Mitt Romney, John Mc Cain, several Bushes — to withhold endorsements of their party’s nominee. But none of them later supported the only candidate who could have defeated Trump. The only sitting Republican officeholder willing to go so far as to endorse Hillary Clinton in 2016 was a single retiring member of Congress, Richard Hanna of New York. The Republicans who refused to actively support Trump mainly removed themselves from the discussion.
Imagine being one of those moderate Republicans of some political consequence. Looking around at what 16 months of President Trump has wrought, watching Fox & Friends, refreshing the news sites for the latest national-security debacle, would you decide, each morning, to remain in the Republican Party? And yet in varying ways, anti-Trump conservatives have all taken the impossibility of trans-partisan cooperation as a given.
Also, it was an interesting weekend for race in America. A 14 year old black boy knocked on a door for directions, only to have to dodge bullets from the white homeowner
. (Apparently it wasn't the first time said homeowner got himself into trouble with a gun either
.) Meanwhile a pair of black men who were real estate agents were arrested in Starbucks for... trying to use the bathroom while waiting for a business partner to join them. That last one led to protests, the two men meeting with the Starbucks CEO, and the manager who called 911 on them being fired
.
edited 16th Apr '18 9:44:13 PM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |Step 1: Buy massive properties that cost literal billions of dollars and are too big and expensive to be worthwhile for 99.99% of the world while it's at the very height of its price around 2007.
Step 2: Get stuck holding onto it when the market crashes and you're busy having grandiose dreams of knocking down the current building and replacing it with a bigger one.
Step 3: Flounder and watch helplessly as nobody wants to finance your pet project and bunches of your celebrity & business tenants (who are the only ones able to pay enough for the property rentals and the only way to make it remotely possible to make a profit) either save money by moving somewhere cheaper or somewhere that won't get them associated with you.
Step 4: Lie down in paralyzed fear and break out in so much nervous sweat that it makes people in the apartment below you think that a pipe burst and is leaking through their ceiling.
If necessary, rinse and repeat.
edited 16th Apr '18 10:04:42 PM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |A little something to add re: the Idaho ballot measure for Medicaid:
Luke Mayville and his Medicaid for Idaho campaign are proving political ‘experts’ wrong
http://www.idahostatesman.com/opinion/bill-manny/article208784784.html
Basically detailing the efforts of the campaign to get signatures.
What John Boehner's Pivot On Cannabis Tells Us About The Legal Weed Boom
:
That John Boehner, of all people, is now a proponent of cannabis perfectly illustrates the ironies of the way Americans think about weed as the industry slinks out of the gray market. The people positioning themselves to profit from the nominally legal weed boom are overwhelmingly white, but the people who continue to be punished for its illegality — in part, due to policies that Boehner has supported — are most likely to be black.
Acreage Holdings cultivates and distributes cannabis across 11 states, and as such, hopes to to roll back federal restrictions on the drug. Landing a partner with Boehner's influence and connections in Washington qualifies as a coup. But it's a startling about-face for Boehner, who in 2011 said he was "unalterably opposed" to the legalization of marijuana. In 1999, he voted against legalizing medical cannabis use in Washington D.C.; in 2015, Boehner wrote to a constituent that he didn't want to reschedule, or reclassify, cannabis as less dangerous under federal law, because he was "concerned that legalization will result in increased abuse of all varieties of drugs, including alcohol." (Under the current drug classification system, the federal government considers weed as dangerous as heroin and more dangerous than cocaine.) At one point, NORML, one of country's leading marijuana legalization lobbying groups, considered him enough of a hardliner on legalization that it gave him a zero-percent approval rating for his Congressional voting record.
Marijuana currently occupies a curious, paradoxical position in American life. As cannabis use has lost much of its stigma — nearly six in 10 Americans believe it should be legalized — it has also become an ever-larger focus of drug enforcement policy: today, more than half of all drug arrests in the United States are marijuana arrests.
But even before cannabis gained wide acceptance, the stigma attached to —and its consequences — have never been evenly distributed. As we've explored on the Code Switch podcast, anti-immigrant lawmakers in the early 1900s both exaggerated the cannabis's deleterious effects and began purposely using the name marihuana in order to link the drug's dangers with Mexicans. Harry Anslinger, the head of the agency that would eventually become the Drug Enforcement Agency — and incidentally, an unabashed racist — used his platform to try to associate weed with jazz musicians in the public mind, and thus, implicitly to black people. It was Anslinger who is largely responsible for cannabis being declared a Schedule-1 controlled substance by the DEA, meaning it is has "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." The burden of that stigma has always fallen hardest on black folks, who are four times as likely to be arrested for weed as white people, although there's no evidence that Black folks are more likely to use it.
And those disproportionate arrests for weed-related crimes mean that Black people with experience in the underground weed economy are much more likely to be locked out of participating in the burgeoning legal marijuana industry, since investors are wary of getting into bed with people who have been caught. Black people bore the brunt of the drug war; now they're now being shut out of the weed boom.
edited 16th Apr '18 10:25:33 PM by rmctagg09
Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.Is fine that as a Latino myself, I'm still against non medical Marijuana? Not to the level of send people to jail for having some pot but still.
Watch me destroying my countryEh, most arguments against weed apply in spades against alcohol. The biggest argument against legalization is the terrible effect pot has on automotive safety - Most people use far too high doses of pot, which means it takes days before it stops affecting their reflexes - Which shows up in car accident screenings in a horrible way.
- This is excellent for medical pot. A cancer patient still being kind of high the next day just means they can eat their cookies once a day or whatever, but is less than ideal for recreational purposes.
I think that alcohol is awful too, the only reason why we can't control it like weed was because alcohol is way more widespread and common.
And I said that I'm fine with medical pot.
edited 17th Apr '18 4:16:38 AM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my countryHuman beings have been recreationally altering their consciousnesses for about as long as human beings have existed. You can't erase that from our nature no matter how hard you try. About the best you can hope for is to make it as safe as possible.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
In fact, there's even a species of mountain goat that is known to search out particular herbs in difficult-to-reach places for no other reason than getting high. Also, my dad used to tell stories about cows getting drunk of eating rotten apples.
The Kingdom of Animalia sure knows how to party. Suck it, fungi!
Cool, Chris Wray confirmed David Boditch as Deputy Director of the FBI
, which is another good sign.
He was chosen as the Deputy director right after Mc Cabe went on leave, and is apparently something of a "Mini-Mueller". It's a very strong and aggressive choice, and should win the loyalty of the rank and file.
edited 17th Apr '18 6:15:41 AM by megaeliz

@Singularity Shot: Revelations isn't actually biblical, though that is scarily similar.
Watch Symphogear