Trump

FBI is controlled by the government.

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Originally Posted by mark12345

FBI is controlled by the government.

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If it's that simple, would you think then that the FBI investigation of Clinton's emails shortly before the election was also the work of the Obama administration?

No. That came due to pressure following a public outcry.

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Originally Posted by mark12345

No. That came due to pressure following a public outcry.

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So if the actions of the FBI aren't always controlled by the government, what evidence do you have to suggest that it was the case in this instance?*

*Assuming for the purposes of debate that Heatstreet has good info on this.

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Originally Posted by mark12345

FBI is controlled by the government.

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It doesn't seem to be controlled by the current government.

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Originally Posted by mark12345

Why would you want to stand up for him?
Because he's the only presidential candidate ever (I stand to be corrected) who stood on an anti-drug platform. And he's following through on that promise.
Have you witnessed first hand the drug problem in America?

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The term "War on Drugs" has enjoyed widespread use in mainstream US discourse ever since Richard Nixon popularised it in 1971 and the US has, in latter years, spent $51 billion annually on policies purportedly geared towards eradication, prohibition and incarceration. Although the Obama administration eschewed use of the term popularised by Nixon (as it was deemed to be "counter-productive"), Obama did not significantly alter long-standing drug enforcement policy.

Is Trump's hard-line stance - which, in accordance with pre-existing US convention, misguidedly (or perhaps mendaciously) regards drugs as a criminal matter rather than a public health issue - really anything novel then?

Have you ever seen Eugene Jarecki's The House I Live In?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlPNRaXj2OQ

It's worth a watch if the US's (failed) anti-drug policies are something in which you're interested.

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Originally Posted by Wanda Bershen

The House I Live In takes on the 40-year history of the "War on Drugs," exploring in depth why it has been such a costly failure. No dry exegeses, this story is full of unexpected twists and turns, and compelling accounts from police officers, prison authorities, Federal judges, journalists, politicians, inmates and families trying to deal with drug users in their own homes. Jarecki lays out complex issues in accessible terms, delineating a clear analysis of what has happened over four decades-- and in the process telling the stories of individuals from all over the United States.

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One of the key issues in the film is the contention by several academics and journalists that drug policy is driven by economics. Scholar Richard Lawrence Miller relates an eye-opening history of drug policies as a means to oppress minority populations in America, whether through the criminalization of opium to purge the Chinese in California, or cocaine and hemp to vilify blacks and Mexicans.

This disturbing pattern is what journalist/television producer David Simon (The Wire) characterizes as a "chain of destruction." Draconian sentencing laws have driven thousands into the prison system, which has consequently evolved into a big business--in many cases providing economic support to entire towns. There's more of an incentive, then, to populate the prisons than to address the culture of drugs.

"Drug abuse is ultimately a matter of public health that has instead been treated as an opportunity for law enforcement and an expanding criminal justice system," Jarecki observes. "I saw how this misguided approach has helped make America the world's largest jailer, imprisoning her citizens at a higher rate per capita than any other nation on earth."

Police officers in the film reveal that colleagues with multiple arrests per week or month are able to generate significant overtime pay, while those in homicide or fraud don't get those perks. The Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, laws enacted in the 1980s allow cops to pull over any car and search for drugs, even if they find nothing and make no arrests. In the process the police may confiscate any drugs or large sums of cash they find.

Mike Carpenter, chief of security at Lexington Corrections Center in Oklahoma, doesn't mince words in describing the policy failure, which forces everyone-law enforcers and defendants- into untenable positions. "Some of the prison guards there were among the most thoughtful people I have met and have better ideas on how to change things than most I've heard," Jarecki notes. "They confront the problems of over-crowding, over-penalization of non-violent drug offenders, and diminishing resources on a daily basis."

We also hear from US District Court Judge Mark Bennett regarding the disastrous results of the extreme sentencing laws. He has no choice but to give life sentences to defendants arrested for possession of a small amount of drugs. That is a major way the prison system has mushroomed into a billion-dollar industry.

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Anyhow, even if Trump was to sincerely and effectively work towards resolving drug-related problems in the US to your satisfaction - whilst presumably granting unique exemption from any hard-line crackdown on psychoactive substances for drugs like (regulated) alcohol, which is the most medically and socially harmful drug of all, (regulated) nicotine or (legal) caffeine* - does that negate or mitigate his many other failings and prejudices? You must have great time for Rodrigo Duterte too?...

*For what it's worth, I don't advocate criminalisation of the sale, exchange, possession, use or abuse of alcohol, nicotine or caffeine, but I feel that tolerance or acceptance of their legality or regulation by those who simultaneously purport to have a hard-line "zero tolerance" stance on traditionally-banned psychoactive substances is paradoxical. It's demonstrative of gross double standards and, thus, questionable motives.

Really interesting read on FISA here from back in 2013. It's amazing what we now accept as normal. Well worth a read no matter your thoughts on Trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...rocess-secrecy

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"On its face, the 2008 law gives the government authority to engage in surveillance directed at people outside the United States. In the course of conducting that surveillance, though, the government inevitably sweeps up the communications of many Americans. The government often says that this surveillance of Americans' communications is 'incidental', which makes it sound like the NSA's surveillance of Americans' phone calls and emails is inadvertent and, even from the government's perspective, regrettable.

"But when Bush administration officials asked Congress for this new surveillance power, they said quite explicitly that Americans' communications were the communications of most interest to them. See, for example, Fisa for the 21st Century, Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. (2006) (statement of Michael Hayden) (stating, in debate preceding passage of FAA's predecessor statute, that certain communications 'with one end in the United States" are the ones "that are most important to us').

The principal purpose of the 2008 law was to make it possible for the government to collect Americans' international communications - and to collect those communications without reference to whether any party to those communications was doing anything illegal. And a lot of the government's advocacy is meant to obscure this fact, but it's a crucial one: The government doesn't need to 'target' Americans in order to collect huge volumes of their communications."

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When it is time for the NSA to obtain Fisa court approval, the agency does not tell the court whose calls and emails it intends to intercept. It instead merely provides the general guidelines which it claims are used by its analysts to determine which individuals they can target, and the Fisa court judge then issues a simple order approving those guidelines. The court endorses a one-paragraph form order stating that the NSA's process "'contains all the required elements' and that the revised NSA, FBI and CIA minimization procedures submitted with the amendment 'are consistent with the requirements of [50 U.S.C. §1881a(e)] and with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States'". As but one typical example, the Guardian has obtained an August 19, 2010, Fisa court approval from Judge John Bates which does nothing more than recite the statutory language in approving the NSA's guidelines.

Once the NSA has this court approval, it can then target anyone chosen by their analysts, and can even order telecoms and internet companies to turn over to them the emails, chats and calls of those they target. The Fisa court plays no role whatsoever in reviewing whether the procedures it approved are actually complied with when the NSA starts eavesdropping on calls and reading people's emails.

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Another worthwhile Greenwald piece on Democrat opportunism and hypocrisy when it comes to condemning Trump on his approach to Russia; 'Democrats Now Demonize the Same Russia Policies that Obama Long Championed': https://theintercept.com/2017/03/06/...ng-championed/

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Originally Posted by Glenn Greenwald

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The general Russia approach that Democrats now routinely depict as treasonous – avoiding confrontation with and even accommodating Russian interests, not just in Ukraine but also in Syria – was one of the defining traits of Obama’s foreign policy. This fact shouldn’t be overstated: Obama engaged in provocative acts such as moves to further expand NATO, non-lethal aid to Ukraine, and deploying “missile defense” weaponry in Romania. But he rejected most calls to confront Russia. That is one of the primary reasons the “foreign policy elite” – which, recall, Obama came into office denouncing and vowing to repudiate – was so dissatisfied with his presidency.

A new, long article by Politico foreign affairs correspondent Susan Glasser – on the war being waged against Trump by Washington’s “foreign policy elite” – makes this point very potently. Say what you will about Politico, but one thing they are very adept at doing is giving voice to cowardly Washington insiders by accommodating their cowardice and thus routinely granting them anonymity to express themselves. As journalistically dubious as it is to shield the world’s most powerful people with anonymity, this practice sometimes ends up revealing what careerist denizens of Washington power really think but are too scared to say. Glasser’s article, which largely consists of conveying the views of anonymous high-level Obama officials, contains this remarkable passage:

https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.o...1488804138.png

In other words, Democrats are now waging war on, and are depicting as treasonous, one of Barack Obama’s central and most steadfastly held foreign policy positions, one that he clung to despite attacks from leading members of both parties as well as the DC National Security Community. That’s not Noam Chomsky drawing that comparison; it’s an Obama appointee.

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The Democrats’ obsession with Russia has not just led them to want investigations into allegations of hacking and (thus far evidence-free) suspicions of Trump campaign collusion – investigations which everyone should want. It’s done far more than that: it’s turned them into increasingly maniacal and militaristic hawks – dangerous ones – when it comes to confronting the only nation with a larger nuclear stockpile than the U.S., an arsenal accompanied by a sense of fear, if not outright encirclement, from NATO expansion.

Put another way, establishment Democrats – with a largely political impetus but now as a matter of conviction – have completely abandoned Obama’s accommodationist approach to Russia and have fully embraced the belligerent, hawkish mentality of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol, the CIA and Evan McMullin. It should thus come as no surprise that a bill proposed by supreme warmonger Lindsey Graham to bar Trump from removing sanctions against Russia has more Democratic co-sponsors than Republican ones.

This is why it’s so notable that Democrats, in the name of “resistance,” have aligned with neocons, CIA operatives and former Bush officials: not because coalitions should be avoided with the ideologically impure, but because it reveals much about the political and policy mindset they’ve adopted in the name of stopping Trump. They’re not “resisting” Trump from the left or with populist appeals – by, for instance, devoting themselves to protection of Wall Street and environmental regulations under attack, or supporting the revocation of jobs-killing free trade agreements, or demanding that Yemini civilians not be massacred.

Instead, they’re attacking him on the grounds of insufficient nationalism, militarism, and aggression: equating a desire to avoid confrontation with Moscow as a form of treason (just like they did when they were the leading Cold Warriors). This is why they’re finding such common cause with the nation’s most bloodthirsty militarists – not because it’s an alliance of convenience but rather one of shared convictions (indeed, long before Trump, neocons were planning a re-alignment with Democrats under a Clinton presidency). And the most ironic – and over-looked – aspect of this whole volatile spectacle is how much Democrats have to repudiate and demonize one of Obama’s core foreign policy legacies while pretending that they’re not doing that.

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Originally Posted by SkStu

Anyway, Dahamsta ban or not, it would probably be best for me not to post on here anymore. It's difficult to have a conversation about him without getting backed into a corner or painted as something I'm not. It's tiring! :)

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Sport and politics don't mix Stu, be careful out there. :)

FISA is not Obama. SkStu is suspended from this forum for 1 week.

Seriously, I'm simply not having /r/The_Donald conspiritard behaviour in here, it's pathetic and I'm not giving it a platform. Call it censorship, call it whatever you want, it's not happening in this forum.

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Originally Posted by SkStu

Because America is disgusting and decades of interventionist policy has led to carnage across almost very continent. I think Obama and Clinton pulled the wool over everyone's eyes on a number of big issues and made the world a worse place. Trump ran on a platform of America First and Draining the Swamp and I think he deserves a chance to see what he can do in that regard.

I am not really standing up for him (this started as me being anti-Obama, DNC and Clinton) - I don't think he's an angel and I don't think he's the devil. I agree with some of his policies and I disagree with others. He's ridiculously transparent with his thoughts but he's also a buffoon. I also don't believe everything the mainstream media pushes, I can see their agenda clearly and so I just want to consider other points of view and I think everyone should do the same.

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Except you're contradicting yourself FFS.

'America First' is going to be as bad as anything Obama/Clinton did or would have done. Plus lying about jobs that simply don't exist, making healthcare more difficult, groping women and picking on immigrants, non-whites and other minorities is NOT 'Draining the Swamp', it's adding to the pure sh*te blocking it all up. Not to mention clueless sucking up to Putin and now claiming he's going to spend record amounts on military hardware...plus being endorsed by the KKK and other Nazi wannabes like 'the alt-right'.

Yeah, great changes! Not.
That 'swamp' will never be cleared!

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Originally Posted by mark12345

Why would you want to stand up for him?
Because he's the only presidential candidate ever (I stand to be corrected) who stood on an anti-drug platform. And he's following through on that promise.
Have you witnessed first hand the drug problem in America?

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Lol. Yeah right. You must be on some good stuff if you ever think there's any chance of that ever happening. And how is he 'following through'? By bullying Mexico? What a joke...

'Leading Putin Critic Warns of Xenophobic Conspiracy Theories Drowning U.S. Discourse and Helping Trump' by Glenn Greenwald: https://theintercept.com/2017/03/07/...helping-trump/

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Originally Posted by Glenn Greenwald

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and author who has become one of the nation’s leading Russia experts and one of its most relentless and vocal critics of Vladimir Putin. She has lived her life on and off in the U.S. and Russia, but as a Jewish lesbian and mother of three children, she left Russia in 2013 and moved back to the U.S. in part because she felt threatened by the increasingly anti-LGBT climate there, one that began particularly targeting LGBT adopted families with discriminatory legislation.

Throughout the years Gessen (pictured, above) has become one of the go-to Kremlin critics for the U.S. media, publishing harshly anti-Putin reporting and commentary in numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, Harper’s and several articles about political repression in Russia for the Intercept. She has also become a virulent critic of Donald Trump, writing shortly after the election that “Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won,” while describing the critical lessons that can be learned on how to resist Trump’s autocratic impulses by studying Putin.

She now has a new article in the New York Review of Books – entitled “Russia: the Conspiracy Trap” – that I cannot recommend highly enough. Its primary purpose is to describe, and warn about, the insane and toxic conspiracy-mongering about Russia that has taken over not the fringe, dark corners of the internet that normally traffic in such delusional tripe, but rather mainstream U.S. media outlets and the Democratic Party. Few articles have illustrated the serious, multi-faceted dangers of what has become this collective mania in the U.S. as well as Gessen’s does.

To begin, Gessen details several examples of classic, evidence-free, unhinged, and increasingly xenophobic conspiracy theorizing masquerading as serious news in mainstream outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, and the Washington Post. Routine diplomatic interactions are depicted as dark and sinister if they involve Russians. When the most flamboyant, alarmist, tabloid-style Russia stories from leading news outlets collapse (as so many have), or when Trump’s actions (such as hiring numerous anti-Russia hawks for key positions) explode the “Putin’s puppet” narrative, it makes no difference to our mainstream conspiracy obsessives because – as she puts it – “such is the nature of conspiracy thinking that facts can do nothing to change it.”

https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.o...1488887149.png

Wild, melodramatic claims about hidden Russian plotting and Trump collusion are routinely and constantly hyped by leading media outlets based on nothing but their imaginations or, at best, coordinated whispers from intelligence officials utterly insusceptible to verification, from operatives trained in disinformation. As she writes:

The backbone of the rapidly yet endlessly developing Trump-Putin story is leaks from intelligence agencies, and this is its most troublesome aspect. Virtually none of the information can be independently corroborated. The context, sequence, and timing of the leaks is determined by people unknown to the public, which is expected to accept anonymous stories on faith; nor have we yet been given any hard evidence of active collusion by Trump officials. . . .

The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him. If that happens, it will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community—setting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome. . . . More likely, the Russia allegations will not bring down Trump.

The crux of her article is the point that has been driving everything I’ve been writing and saying about this topic for months: that this obsession with Russia conspiracy tales is poisoning all aspects of U.S. political discourse and weakening any chance for resisting Trump’s actual abuses and excesses. Those who wake up every day to hype the latest episode of this Russia/Trump spy drama tell themselves that they’re bravely undermining and subverting Trump, but they’re doing exactly the opposite.

This crazed conspiracy mongering is further discrediting U.S. media outlets, making Washington seem even more distant from and irrelevant to the lives of millions of Americans, degrading discourse to the lowliest Trumpian circus level on which he thrives, and is misdirecting huge portions of opposition energy and thought into an exciting but fictitious spy novel – all of which directly redounds to Trump’s benefit. As Gessen puts it in the key sentence that ought to be pinned everywhere in neon lights:

Russiagate is helping [Trump]—both by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.

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Ultimately, what makes Gessen’s article so important – aside from the fact that partisan smear artists cannot dismiss her on the ground that she loves Putin and works for the Kremlin – is that it focuses on the key point: namely, that this fixation on primitive conspiracy-mongering is just a slothful way of avoiding the real work of meaningfully opposing Trump. As she explains, this bottomless, ultimately pointless obsession with Russia has utterly crowded out effective strategies for opposing Trump, and has obscured many of the truly damaging policies he is implementing with little notice:

Meanwhile, while Russia continues to dominate the front pages, Trump will continue waging war on immigrants, cutting funding for everything that’s not the military, assembling his cabinet of deplorables—with six Democrats voting to confirm Ben Carson for Housing, for example, and ten to confirm Rick Perry for Energy. According to the Trump plan, each of these seems intent on destroying the agency he or she is chosen to run—to carry out what Steve Bannon calls the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” As for Sessions, in his first speech as attorney general he promised to cut back civil rights enforcement and he has already abandoned a Justice Department case against a discriminatory Texas voter ID law. But it was his Russia lie that grabbed the big headlines.

Indeed, even the most plausible plank of the story – that the Russians were behind the hacking of Podesta and the DNC – has been widely accepted as Truth despite no evidence from the U.S. Government. As Gessen notes: “A later building block in the story, which has become its virtual cornerstone, is the joint intelligence report on Russian interference in the campaign, which was released in December and is, plainly, laughable.”

Worst of all, our discourse is being drowned by irrational, highly corrosive delusions and feverish conspiracy theorizing – not just from Trump, who built his political career on a racist and deranged conspiracy theory about Obama’s true birthplace, but also from those who have anointed themselves leaders of the Resistance against him. How can one credibly denounce Trump’s birtherism or his fact-free accusation that Obama ordered his wiretapping if one is simultaneously spreading the most blatantly evidence-free claims and conspiracies or venerating those who have built their new platforms based on feeding hungry partisans flagrantly fraudulent “reporting”?

The Russia narrative dominates national discourse, as it has for months, and becomes progressively more removed from evidence. As Gessen concludes: “What is indisputable is that the protracted national game of connecting the Trump-Putin dots is an exercise in conspiracy thinking. That does not mean there was no conspiracy. And yet, a possible conspiracy is a poor excuse for conspiracy thinking.”

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So much for draining the swamp...must be his Goldman Sachs advisers helping out?

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...e-tax-cut-rich

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"I think there's no question that the Obama administration, that there were actions about surveillance and other activities that occurred in the 2016 election...The President used the word wiretaps in quotes to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities."

Spicer also said that Trump was referring to the Obama administration broadly -- and not accusing Obama of personal involvement -- when he tweeted that "Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower" and accused Obama of being a "bad" or "sick guy."

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Sean Spicer must be wincing inside.

A fascinating and frankly alarming TED talk ('How this FBI strategy is actually creating US-based terrorists') by Trevor Aaronson relevant to some previous discussion in this tread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGG97dDfZ7E

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Originally Posted by TED

There's an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI. How? Why? In an eye-opening talk, investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson reveals a disturbing FBI practice that breeds terrorist plots by exploiting Muslim-Americans with mental health problems.

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Originally Posted by osarusan

Sean Spicer must be wincing inside.

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Landscape looks a little different now, wouldn't you say

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Originally Posted by mark12345

Landscape looks a little different now, wouldn't you say

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Susan Rice is hilarious. She lies so often and so prolifically she forgets her lies. First it was 'No one spied, Trump is crazy!' Now its 'We all spy, what's the big deal?'
"I leaked nothing to nobody." Harvard grad who doesn't know (or does) a double negative expresses the affirmative. This is even crazier than her Benghazi lie, and IRS lies. "I don't have a particular recollection of doing that more frequently after the election." --on the unmasking. Let's see her say THAT under oath.

Democracy Now! interview Noam Chomsky on Trump's first 75 days as US president: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/...y_on_democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT4MO9uQxgc

Another terrorist attack. This time in Sweden. A country we were talking about recently.

http://www.independent.ie/world-news...-35603395.html

Don't worry, everyone will make the Swedish flag their twitter avatar for 24 hrs, say we won't be cowed and it will be just fine.