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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
So that van attack in Toronto the other day? The driver (allegedly) drew inspiration from Elliot Rodger, the guy that went on a shooting spree because he couldn't get a girlfriend.
Plus, as a 32-year-old virgin myself, this sort of bullshit is horrendously stupid, and something I wish they'd just grow out of, though societal/cultural values being what they are, I doubt it'll be an easy thing to have happen.
edited 25th Apr '18 1:58:50 PM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"I heard about that. Honestly got me re-listening to The Last Podcast on the Left episode on Manifestos, which covers Rodgers while discussing manifestos that are Crazy, "Reasonable", and Pathetic. They place Rodgers firmly in Pathetic and thoroughly mock him as they read from his manifesto and even play some clips from his Youtube.
So Sessions is not recusing himself from the Cohen Case.
Sessions versus the SDNY office, aka the “Sovereign District of New York”
. This is going to be good.
edited 25th Apr '18 2:35:35 PM by megaeliz
Got a feeling Sessions did this because he needed to keep his job.
"The devil's got all the good gear. What's God got? The Inspiral Carpets and nuns. Fuck that." - Liam GallagherI get why he's necessary, but I don't like Sessions. He's a racist jerk, and has a terrible ethical and moral track record.
I do actually rather like Rosenstien though, from what I know about him.
And does this look Botlike to anyone?
We're not sure.
edited 25th Apr '18 3:12:50 PM by megaeliz
Sessions versus the SDNY office, aka the “Sovereign District of New York”. This is going to be good.
There's no reason he would. Unlike the Mueller probe, Sessions himself is not a person of interest. To our knowledge, he has no direct connection to Michael Cohen, and thus nothing obligating him from stepping aside.
"Jeff Sessions will not recuse himself from a case in which there is no legal grounds obligating him to recuse himself in the first place," is a slow news day story.
edited 25th Apr '18 3:18:52 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Cambridge Analytica whistleblower urges U.S. lawmakers to investigate company
Asked by reporters what he hopes lawmakers will do with the information he gave them, Wylie responded, "They can investigate it and see if the actions were compliant with American law." Asked if they will, in fact, investigate, Wylie said: "I hope so. That’s why I came."
Wylie didn't answer a question about what information he provided during the closed-door briefing with Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees. Wylie was a source for news reports indicating Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users.
Rep. David Cicilline called the briefing "disturbing" and said it showed an effort on the part of Cambridge Analytica to undermine U.S. democracy using military-style information warfare tactics. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said Congress is abdicating its duty to investigate what sort of interference occurred in the 2016 election and warned the U.S. is not prepared to prevent something similar from happening again in future elections.
Meanwhile, Rep. Jerry Nadler, ranking member on House Judiciary, bashed Republicans for avoiding the Wylie briefing.
"Judiciary Committee Republicans refused to participate in the interview, choosing instead to focus on a hearing this Thursday featuring social media personalities Diamond and Silk, who argue that social media companies are engaged in a plot to silence conservative voices on the Internet," Nadler's office said in a statement.
To me, the most notable thing to come out of this, is how the House Former Republican Party is on some nonsense mission to find out if Facebook censors conservatives, instead going to a briefing about actual information Warfare conducted by Cambridge Analytica.
I wonder how many of them used Cambridge Analytica, and are worried that they could get swept up In this?
edited 25th Apr '18 4:10:25 PM by megaeliz
Cohen is pleading the fifth in the Stormy Daniels hush money case.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/25/politics/michael-cohen-fifth-amendment/index.html
Buddy is guilty as sin.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Speaking of Cohen.
Trump offers to personally review documents in Cohen case: report
ABC News reported that Trump's attorneys told Judge Kimba Wood that the president would be willing to review, as needed, documents taken from the home, office and hotel room of Michael Cohen earlier this month, and check them for privileged information.
The court filing is the latest in a series of attempts by Trump and Cohen to prevent federal prosecutors from looking over documents that might contain information that falls under attorney-client privilege.
Trump's lawyers previously asked Wood to block federal prosecutors from reviewing the documents, arguing the Department of Justice could not fairly evaluate the materials.
Trump can read?
edited 25th Apr '18 5:29:25 PM by megaeliz
And their argument is that Trump, of all bloody people, knows how to be fair and impartial?
Hitokiri in the streets, daishouri in the sheets.Trump wants Giuliani to try to negotiate an end to the investigation. Good luck with that.
An early priority for Trump’s newest personal attorney will be to resolve the question of whether the president even needs to sit for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller.
Giuliani plans to meet in the coming days with Mueller and his team of prosecutors, and will also press them to swiftly conclude the portion of his investigation that deals with whether the president obstructed justice.
The former New York mayor is banking in part that his understanding of Mueller—whom he’s known for more than three decades, dating back to the Reagan Justice Department— can help clear logjams between the special counsel and Trump’s legal team.
“We’ve continued to maintain this cooperative attitude. Now, with the new legal team, we plan to move in an expeditious manner,” said Jay Sekulow, who serves as one of Trump’s personal attorneys.
But Trump’s legal team has talked of hurrying Mueller along before, with optimism that proved misplaced. And legal experts are skeptical that the addition of Giuliani and a pair of Florida-based lawyers are likely to resolve Trump’s headaches anytime soon.
“People have to understand that this is going to take some time,” former Attorney General Eric Holder told MSNBC on Thursday. “We’re only about a year or so into this. From my view of this, I always thought this was about a two-year case.”
While Mueller is likely to show Trump some deference when arranging a meeting time and place, he controls the timeline of the investigation—and almost certainly doesn’t share Trump’s sense of urgency, although some analysts believe he would like to avoid dramatic moves in the midst of the 2018 midterm election campaign that could be interpreted as political.
Mueller likely still has much work to do. At a minimum, he must see through his case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has pleaded not guilty to charges including bank and tax fraud and is set to face trial starting in July.
Talk of a speedy end to the Russia probe is “wishful thinking,” said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor from Miami. “It’s obvious the client wants it to be over and the people surrounding him want it to be over. But the only person who can determine when it’s going to conclude in the case of the Russia investigation is Mueller.”
One upcoming landmark is an early July legal deadline for Mueller to provide his supervisor—Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—with a status report on his work. Rosenstein then must determine whether the Russia investigation should continue.
Those practical requirements are clashing up against Trump, who has shown for more than a year that he wants the Russia investigation finished.
The president complained last March to then-FBI Director James Comey about the “cloud” hanging over his White House and how it was distracting everything from his foreign policy agenda to his legislative loss on health care.
His ire has only grown since he fired Comey, a move that prompted Mueller’s appointment and then later ensnared some of his former aides with criminal charges, while forcing dozens more to sit for interviews and spend thousands of dollars on lawyer fees.
Late Friday Trump tweeted: "James Comey illegally leaked classified documents to the press in order to generate a Special Council? Therefore, the Special Council was established based on an illegal act? Really, does everybody know what that means?"
During a press conference earlier this week with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump described Mueller’s work as “a very bad thing for our country.”
“We are hopefully coming to the end,” Trump said.
Enter Giuliani, who has his own longstanding relationship with Trump and who told CNN Thursday that the Russia probe “needs a little push.”
“I don’t know yet what’s outstanding. But I don’t think it’s going to take more than a week or two to get a resolution. They’re almost there,” Giuliani also told the New York Post. “I’m going to ask Mueller, ‘What do you need to wrap it up?’”
Pundits mocked Giuliani for what seemed a totally implausible timeline. But Trump’s associates said Friday that Giuliani was referring not to the entire investigation, just on concluding talks with Mueller about a possible interview with Trump.
Giuliani has also been highlighting his personal ties to Mueller, which date to their service together as high-ranking Reagan Justice Department officials. They were thrown together again by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, when Giuliani was mayor of the city and Mueller was freshly at the helm of the FBI.
The negotiations between Trump’s lawyers and Mueller to hash out the details for a potential interview had been on track earlier this month but got shelved after the FBI last Monday raided the office and hotel rooms of Michael Cohen and seized materials as part of what the Justice Department later disclosed was a months-long investigation into the president’s longtime personal attorney.
With Giuliani on board, Trump wants to resolve the interview question quickly so that Mueller move towards a final determination on the president’s legal exposure.
That’s a risky move. A Trump interview can expose the president to questions under oath about everything from potential obstruction of justice to his knowledge of Kremlin support for his 2016 White House campaign.
Legal experts have their doubts that Giuliani will be the magic ingredient to get even Trump’s portion of the Russia probe finished.
“The idea that Giuliani has a special relationship with Mueller that will convince Mueller to end the investigation early is silly,” said Renato Mariotti, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago.
“Asking a prosecutor to end an investigation early is an extraordinary request that is a Hail Mary at best,” he added. “If Giuliani achieves any success, it’s because Trump gives him leverage by misusing his power as president.”
There are also other outstanding factors at play, from the prospect that materials seized during the Cohen FBI raid might have legal implications for the president to the prospect that Manafort might be flipped into a government witness as his July criminal trial approaches.
“Any suggestion it should be resolved before the Manafort case is cleared is a ridiculous suggestion. Who knows what Manafort is going to do?” said Ray Jahn, a former U.S. assistant attorney in San Antonio who worked on Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation into President Bill Clinton.
Mueller’s current pace, Jahn added, has hardly been slow. “To have gotten this far this fast is phenomenal,” he said, noting the one-year anniversary is approaching in May for the special counsel’s appointment.
In his MSNBC interview, Holder also said the special counsel was “moving almost at light speed what they have done in that first year.”
“But this is, you’re building from the bottom up. You build the case that you can and try to flip people until you work your way up to the top. It’s a classic public corruption case,” Holder added.
Trump allies remain impatient with such talk.
“The important thing here is getting any distraction being put in front of the president taken care of,” said Jason Miller, the former Trump campaign communications director who also served in a similar role during Giuliani’s 2008 White House run. “That’s very clearly what the mayor’s goal is.”
One question is how Mueller will fulfill the requirement of an internal Justice Department regulation that says special counsels must submit a report 90 days before the beginning of the next fiscal year about “the status of the investigation, and provide a budget request for the following year.”
“The Attorney General shall determine whether the investigation should continue and, if so, establish the budget for the next year,” the regulation also says. In the case of the Mueller probe, Rosenstein is serving as the acting attorney general because of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the Russia investigation.
But it is unclear how detailed Mueller’s report needs to be and whether it might be made public.
Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and Duke University law school professor, said Mueller could use his report obligations to detail his decisions on whether to prosecutor or not prosecute key figures in the Russia probe—potentially including Trump himself.
“He seems to like to be consistently sending the message that he’s not dawdling,” he said. “One way to do that is to say, 'here’s a picture of it, and we’ve run everything to the ground.'"
But there are other complications, including the fate of the materials seized by the FBI during the Cohen raid–and that could extend Mueller’s investigation much longer than Trump and his lawyers would like.
“More facts and more legal proceedings can lead to more witnesses, which can potentially lead to more facts. And so on,” Buell said. “In this sense, the case is expanding and not contracting.”
edited 25th Apr '18 6:24:07 PM by megaeliz
Grassley amendment could undermine Mueller investigation protection bill
. Short version, or if you can't get past the paywall: the amendment would cut Rosenstein out of the process of sharing Mueller's findings with Congress, so that if Trump replaced him with a loyal stooge, they wouldn't be able to block or bury the report, but it also includes a provision that would allow Congress to micromanage everything about the investigation, leak information, allow evidence to be destroyed, and generally hinder Mueller in all kinds of ways.
If the Democrats on the committee refuse the amendment as is, and the Republicans won't change it, I'm not sure if this means the bill would be tabled, or if it would be sent to the floor without amendments. In the latter case it wouldn't have that extra layer of protection involving Congress instead of Rosenstein, but at least it would still allow for Mueller to contest his firing in court.
Either way though, now we know why Grassley went ahead and seemed so amenable all of a sudden. Just more false sense of security before trying to pull another fast one on us.
edited 26th Apr '18 2:51:48 AM by Ingonyama
Another development in the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, this time with even more Russia connections.
In a closed-door meeting Tuesday, Wylie told Democratic Members of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that Bannon specifically tasked Cambridge Analytica with looking at ways to depress Democratic turnout with their messaging.
Cambridge Analytica “was set up to be essentially a full service propaganda machine,” Wylie said. He spoke to Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee in separate closed-door meeting Tuesday.
Bannon acknowledged helping to found Cambridge Analytica and coming up with the company’s name at a Financial Times conference in March. “I helped put the company together and gave it that amazing name,” Bannon told the conference.
But, he said he “didn’t even know about the Facebook mining,” referring to the scandal surrounding data on up to 87 million Facebook users that was improperly sold to Cambridge Analytica to help the company develop messaging for Republican candidates in U.S. elections. The company was later hired by Donald Trump’s campaign.
Bannon did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
According to House Judiciary Committee Democrats, Wylie also told lawmakers Cambridge Analytica tested messaging for an American audience about Vladimir Putin and Russian expansion in Eastern Europe. But based on a transcript of his comments provided by the committee, it was not clear to Wylie whether Bannon directed the research.
“It was the only foreign issue, or foreign leader, I should say, being tested at the time I was there,” Wylie said. “I can’t explain why it was that they picked Vladimir Putin to talk about in focus groups or to do message testing or to do models on, and why that would be useful to Steve Bannon.”
Wylie said there was very little U.S.-based staff at Cambridge Analytica. The company, he said, was a “shell” company with most of the work done in London by its parent company, SCL.
Lawmakers asked Wylie about Michael Flynn’s advisory role in the company. Flynn did not disclose his relationship with Cambridge Analytica until he filed his third amended financial disclosure form, which listed work for the SCL Group, but stated that he worked for them only from November 2016 to December 2016.
“As far as I know, it was to open doors and look at potential contracts,” Wylie said of the relationship.
Wylie has publicly stated his suspicions about Cambridge Analytica’s work with Russia but the company has denied ever doing any work with any Russian entity.
A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica and SCL did not respond to requests for comment.
You know that several GOP house Senators used Cambridge Analytica, right?
edited 26th Apr '18 5:09:00 AM by megaeliz
In another "only the best people" case, the nominee for Veterans' Affairs has rescinded the offer after multiple stories about him and a hostile work environment, drinking problems and gratutious handing of medicine have sprung up in recent days.
edited 26th Apr '18 6:23:16 AM by Grafite
Life is unfair...From Ingayama's article:
“The Grassley amendment effectively cuts the deputy attorney general out of the process of deciding which reports by the Special Counsel get shared with Congress,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, tells me. “That would prevent even a Trump loyalist from burying potentially adverse findings by Mueller.”
Here’s the problem
But there’s a problem. The Grassley amendment also contains language that would require the special counsel to notify the heads of the Judiciary Committee whenever “any change is made to the specific nature of scope of the investigation.” The problem here, Vladeck says, is that this language is so loosely worded that it could require Mueller to give Congress new information whenever minor investigative decisions are made. This, Vladeck says, could lead to selective leaking and other mischief along the lines of what we’ve already seen from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)."
While this may be a legitimate concern, it seems to me the article is getting a little ahead of itself. They haven't approved anything yet.
edited 26th Apr '18 6:34:14 AM by DeMarquis
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.I don't know if this hit wider news, but all four heads of the Armed Forces
have gone on record, in Congress, to break with Trump and Mattis and state, unequivocably, that there are no reports of harm to units from transgender personnel serving. Full article text
I heard about this a day or two ago, and I’m posting on the fly while on a short break at my new job, but Pruitt is trying to make changes to EPA that would forever change the way EPA uses science. The rule change would force EPA to only use publicly available scientific/medical reports as evidence.
The trouble with that is that anything which contains medical information that can be traced back to an individual isn’t publicly available, due to medical privacy laws, and furthermore medical journals have enormous issues with falsified and non-reproducible studies due to a number of issues including the pressures of “publish or perish”, companies trying to influence findings for their own purposes, etc. (Some estimates say as much as half of the content of such medical and scientific journals may be false.)
So in short, it’s an end run around real scientific findings in favor of less reliable and less objective ones.
Will try to provide sources later in the day.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |Although it might be funny if they let him do that, and then used all the stuff that was privileged as their case.
Trump is not the person being investigated. The Cohen case is separate from the Mueller probe. Trump is a person of interest here due to his relationship with Cohen and connection to some of Cohen's potential crimes, but he's not presently the suspect.
That said, there is still a clear conflict of interest in allowing a client and friend of Cohen's to review the material to be used to build the case against him. So yes, this is likely to be laughed out of court.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.In more "Trump shoots himself in the foot" news, Trump went on Fox and Friends to claim Cohen did very little work for him
, his go-to dodge. This was immediately used as a reason why Cohen's documents are unlikely to involve him.
x5 here's what the revised version of the bill
that was just released says:
IN GENERAL.—If the Attorney General appoints a Special Counsel under this chapter, the Attorney General shall submit to the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member of the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate and the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives a written notification, with a report explaining—
‘‘(1) the appointment of the Special Counsel;
‘‘(2) the intent of the Attorney General to re- move the Special Counsel; and
‘‘(3) after the conclusion of the investigation of the Special Counsel, to the extent consistent with applicable law, any instance in which the Attorney General concluded that a proposed action by a Spe- cial Counsel was so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.
According to Renato Mariotti
, this is much less problematic than the version that they were reporting on, and wouldn't undermine the investigation at all.
edited 26th Apr '18 8:57:44 AM by megaeliz

I wonder how Trump will react though. Nothing on his twitter yet. The wild card will be how much damage control his staffers can do.
edited 25th Apr '18 1:23:31 PM by megaeliz