The Current Events, News, and Politics Thread
12-05-2019, 02:09 PM
Retired Mech Design Engr
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EDIT: Quote and comment removed.
I was totally serious that:
1) There was a recently passed and signed federal law against cruelty to animals
2) that is in no way what the federal government should be involved with.
I was totally serious that:
1) There was a recently passed and signed federal law against cruelty to animals
2) that is in no way what the federal government should be involved with.
Last edited by DNMakinson; 12-05-2019 at 02:11 PM. Reason: Now I understand what was said. So I removed quote
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12-05-2019, 02:20 PM
Boost Czar
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It probably has more to do with being able to pursue it during other investigations. For example, if border patrol uncovers a dog/**** fighting ring, they now has jurisdiction to do something about it. Same reason why the State Department has an entire law enforcement division handle child **** -- since they get a lot of sex traffickers and child **** smugglers when investigating visa and passport fraud.
Someone has to do it, since local governments are too busy trying to normalize bestiality.
Someone has to do it, since local governments are too busy trying to normalize bestiality.
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12-05-2019, 02:35 PM
As compared to espionage, arms smuggling, the international drug trade, human trafficking, bogus collusion with foreign nations, etc., yes, possession of child pornography is the sort of thing that usually gets prosecuted at the state level with little to no fanfare, as opposed to being televised on C-SPAN and making it into the Times and the Post.
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12-05-2019, 03:53 PM
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Word that you can read:
and just in case you feel like googling: "TREATY WITH UKRAINE ON MUTUAL LEGAL ASSISTANCE IN CRIMINAL MATTERS 1999"
THE GOVERNMENT HAS POLITICALLY WEAPONIZED ITS SURVEILLANCE POWERS, AND THE MEDIA IS SILENT
Editorial by Kevin Ryan
It’s seems like every day there’s another jaw dropping example of hypocrisy coming out of Washington. There have been so many recently:
• A two-year long investigation of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to take down Democrats… based in part on info Democrats bought from Russians to take down the Trump campaign.
• Trump, the first president to send U.S. military aid to Ukraine, being impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine by the party that refused to send military aid to Ukraine.
• And accusations that Trump held up U.S. funding to Ukraine for personal benefit… to investigate whether Joe Biden held up U.S. funding to Ukraine for personal benefit.
But the newest example of hypocrisy dwarfs all that, in my opinion.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), head of the impeachment inquiry into whether President Trump abused his powers to dig up dirt on his political rival, just used his powers as head of the House Intelligence Committee to compel AT&T and Verizon to hand over the private call records and metadata of reporter John Solomon, the President’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Republican minority leader of the Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), and others.
And Schiff then made the call records public.
Calls between a president and his lawyer, which are protected by attorney-client confidentiality. Calls by a member of congress who is also Schiff’s biggest rival on the Intelligence Committee. And calls by a member of the free press who just so happens to have been investigating Vice President Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine.
If that’s not abusing the power of your office to dig up dirt on your rivals, I don’t know what is.
Schiff says it is somehow evidence of a conspiracy that there are calls between the president and his lawyer and members of congress.
“It is, I think, deeply concerning, that at a time when the President of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity,” Schiff said earlier this week, despite the fact that calls such as these are normal and nothing can be gleaned about their content from call metadata.
And recall how members of the press rightly balked when it was revealed that the government was collecting metadata on Americans? Well where is the outrage now that journalist John Solomon, one of their own, had his call records targeted and publicly released?
The Wall Street Journal is so far one of the only mainstream media outlets to point out how wrong Schiff’s actions are. Indeed, as the Journal points out, imagine how the media would react if Republicans released the call logs of journalists? Or between Bill Clinton and his attorneys.
Or between, say, Schiff and the whistleblower?
Editorial by Kevin Ryan
It’s seems like every day there’s another jaw dropping example of hypocrisy coming out of Washington. There have been so many recently:
• A two-year long investigation of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to take down Democrats… based in part on info Democrats bought from Russians to take down the Trump campaign.
• Trump, the first president to send U.S. military aid to Ukraine, being impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine by the party that refused to send military aid to Ukraine.
• And accusations that Trump held up U.S. funding to Ukraine for personal benefit… to investigate whether Joe Biden held up U.S. funding to Ukraine for personal benefit.
But the newest example of hypocrisy dwarfs all that, in my opinion.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), head of the impeachment inquiry into whether President Trump abused his powers to dig up dirt on his political rival, just used his powers as head of the House Intelligence Committee to compel AT&T and Verizon to hand over the private call records and metadata of reporter John Solomon, the President’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Republican minority leader of the Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), and others.
And Schiff then made the call records public.
Calls between a president and his lawyer, which are protected by attorney-client confidentiality. Calls by a member of congress who is also Schiff’s biggest rival on the Intelligence Committee. And calls by a member of the free press who just so happens to have been investigating Vice President Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine.
If that’s not abusing the power of your office to dig up dirt on your rivals, I don’t know what is.
Schiff says it is somehow evidence of a conspiracy that there are calls between the president and his lawyer and members of congress.
“It is, I think, deeply concerning, that at a time when the President of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity,” Schiff said earlier this week, despite the fact that calls such as these are normal and nothing can be gleaned about their content from call metadata.
And recall how members of the press rightly balked when it was revealed that the government was collecting metadata on Americans? Well where is the outrage now that journalist John Solomon, one of their own, had his call records targeted and publicly released?
The Wall Street Journal is so far one of the only mainstream media outlets to point out how wrong Schiff’s actions are. Indeed, as the Journal points out, imagine how the media would react if Republicans released the call logs of journalists? Or between Bill Clinton and his attorneys.
Or between, say, Schiff and the whistleblower?
and just in case you feel like googling: "TREATY WITH UKRAINE ON MUTUAL LEGAL ASSISTANCE IN CRIMINAL MATTERS 1999"
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12-06-2019, 11:30 AM
Boost Czar
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-...trial/11764676
'The quiet person you pass on the street': Secret prisoner Witness J revealed
...Just 13 words are all there are on the public record to note one of the most extraordinary episodes in Australian legal history.
After a secret trial of a secret prisoner, the sentence was delivered — you guessed it — in complete secrecy.
You have to know what you're looking for, but even when you find those 13 words, they are not at all illuminating. In fact, they would defeat the purpose of being there at all, were it not for the legal tease they present.
"Before Justice Burns, in Court Room SC4, at 10:00am," it starts promisingly enough.
Then comes the inevitable punchline: "Sentence: Matter Suppressed."
The date was February 19 of this year. The venue was the ACT Supreme Court in Canberra.
Exactly why the Commonwealth and the justice system should conspire to allow such exceptional measures has unnerved legal experts and dismayed former judges.
"Permanently secret legal proceedings is not the kind of conduct we want an Australian justice system to include," said barrister Bret Walker, a former independent national security legislation monitor.
An investigation by the ABC has uncovered the remarkable events that led to the secret trial, the unravelling of a man's impressive career and the circumstances of his arrest, which led to a jail sentence of two years and seven months for serious national security offences.
...
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12-07-2019, 01:39 AM
Boost Pope
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When in doubt, steal half a million dollars from the charity you run. Use the money for luxury goods, vacations, and also your re-election campaign.
I took special note of the following excerpt from the below: "Johnson-Harrell, 53, is the 60th public official in Pennsylvania to have been arrested by Shapiro’s office since 2017."
I didn't even know that Pennsylvania had 60 public officials.
Movita Johnson-Harrell speaks at a news conference in Philadelphia on Dec. 19, 2018. Johnson-Harrell, a Pennsylvania state lawmaker, is facing charges after prosecutors accused her of stealing money from a nonprofit organization she founded. (Matt Rourke/AP)By
Teo Armus
Dec. 6, 2019 at 6:05 a.m. CSTThe nonprofit founded by a Pennsylvania lawmaker was meant to help some of the neediest people in West Philadelphia, caring for and housing those struggling with addiction, poverty and mental illness.
Yet over the past decade, officials say, state Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell (D) used more than $500,000 from the charity’s bank accounts to pay off a Porsche, multiple fur coats and pricey vacations to Mexico — not to mention funding her two campaigns for a state seat representing a Philadelphia district.
Although the Democrat disputed some of those charges, she also submitted her resignation Thursday from office, and officials said she is planning to plead guilty to some charges, which include theft, perjury and related crimes.
“Her theft knew no bounds,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said. “No one is above the law, no matter their position of power. And today is no different.”
Johnson-Harrell, 53, is the 60th public official in Pennsylvania to have been arrested by Shapiro’s office since 2017. But the allegations against her stand out.
Prosecutors say the lawmaker used her charity as a “cash account,” drawing in some cases from her clients’ government benefits, and covered it up by lying on her personal financial records or those of her nonprofit and campaign.
“I vigorously dispute many of these allegations, which generally pertain to before I took office,” she said in a statement to the Associated Press, “and I intend to accept responsibility for any actions that were inappropriate.”
A lawyer for Johnson-Harrell did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
Johnson-Harrell, who said she was the first female Muslim member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, was elected in March and rapidly emerged as an outspoken voice against gun violence. She was in part motivated by her own family’s painful history: Four relatives — her father, only brother, a cousin and her 18-year-old son — have been fatally shot.
The death of her brother, who went undiagnosed and untreated for bipolar disorder and PTSD, is what
first motivated her to start her charity, Motivations Education & Consultation Associates (MECA), https://www.linkedin.com/in/movita-johnson-harrell-6a625626/ two decades ago.
Under her leadership as executive director, the organization “has advocated, cared for and fought to improve the quality of life for disenfranchised groups,” Johnson-Harrell said in a University of Pennsylvania biography.
In 2005, she privately bought three adjacent rowhouses in the neighborhood of West Powelton, prosecutors said, before renting the property to MECA in 2013 — for the exact cost of her mortgage payments.
The three buildings were supposed to serve as a personal care home, in part funded by residents’ Medicaid and Social Security disability benefits. But when state health officials threatened to shutter the space because of its squalid conditions, MECA kicked out its residents.
Even then, with the space unused, the charity kept paying rent to its executive director.
“While Johnson-Harrell was lining her pockets with MECA funds,” Shapiro said, “MECA’s residents were living in squalor.”
In the meantime, Johnson-Harrell was appointed to a job overseeing victim services for Philadelphia’s district attorney in November 2017, and launched an unsuccessful bid for her current seat in the Pennsylvania House.
In addition to making direct transfers to her bank account, “Johnson repeatedly wrote checks for ‘cash’ on MECA’s account, in varying amounts, whenever she needed extra money,” prosecutors said in a lengthy criminal complaint.
The nonprofit’s coffers ended up funding a laundry list of high-ticket items: matching fox fur coats for her and her husband. Designer clothes from Ralph Lauren and luxury online retailers. Overdue car payments on her Porsche Cayenne. Private-school tuition for her grandchildren.
And after MECA paid for trips to Mexico, Atlanta and Ocean City, spending $16,000 on travel in 2017, prosecutors turned to the lawmaker’s social media for answers. “Johnson’s Facebook posts from these vacation destinations, leave no doubt that these were pleasure trips,” they wrote in the complaint.
Johnson-Harrell inflated the salary of a relative who worked at MECA so that family member could purchase a West Philadelphia house that the lawmaker moved into — and for which she paid the mortgage.
In January 2018, when that house was foreclosed on and she went into default on another property, prosecutors said, MECA gave its executive director a $70,000 “loan” ― which she later used to pay off her real estate financial woes.
Last year, the sitting state representative for her district resigned following a bribery conviction. So Johnson-Harrell made another go for the job.
Much like her car, and her house, and her fur coats, though, her campaign was also bankrolled by MECA. Prosecutors say that she transferred $12,500 directly from the charity’s bank account to her campaign committee, which she told to record the money as a personal loan from her. She also allegedly funneled another $30,000 to the charity through her personal bank account.
And while she won the seat handily with nearly two-thirds of the vote, she lasted 10 months in the Pennsylvania House.
In a letter to Pennsylvania House Speaker Mike Turzai (R) on Thursday, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the lawmaker said she was “accepting responsibility for some missteps” she made before her election.
“I am choosing to resign to protect my district, to allow for an orderly election for my successor, and to focus on my defense to these allegations,” she wrote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...ia-state-house
I took special note of the following excerpt from the below: "Johnson-Harrell, 53, is the 60th public official in Pennsylvania to have been arrested by Shapiro’s office since 2017."
I didn't even know that Pennsylvania had 60 public officials.
Fur coats, resort vacations and a Porsche: Lawmaker resigns after allegedly taking $500,000 from her charity
Movita Johnson-Harrell speaks at a news conference in Philadelphia on Dec. 19, 2018. Johnson-Harrell, a Pennsylvania state lawmaker, is facing charges after prosecutors accused her of stealing money from a nonprofit organization she founded. (Matt Rourke/AP)By
Teo Armus
Dec. 6, 2019 at 6:05 a.m. CSTThe nonprofit founded by a Pennsylvania lawmaker was meant to help some of the neediest people in West Philadelphia, caring for and housing those struggling with addiction, poverty and mental illness.
Yet over the past decade, officials say, state Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell (D) used more than $500,000 from the charity’s bank accounts to pay off a Porsche, multiple fur coats and pricey vacations to Mexico — not to mention funding her two campaigns for a state seat representing a Philadelphia district.
Although the Democrat disputed some of those charges, she also submitted her resignation Thursday from office, and officials said she is planning to plead guilty to some charges, which include theft, perjury and related crimes.
“Her theft knew no bounds,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said. “No one is above the law, no matter their position of power. And today is no different.”
Johnson-Harrell, 53, is the 60th public official in Pennsylvania to have been arrested by Shapiro’s office since 2017. But the allegations against her stand out.
Prosecutors say the lawmaker used her charity as a “cash account,” drawing in some cases from her clients’ government benefits, and covered it up by lying on her personal financial records or those of her nonprofit and campaign.
“I vigorously dispute many of these allegations, which generally pertain to before I took office,” she said in a statement to the Associated Press, “and I intend to accept responsibility for any actions that were inappropriate.”
A lawyer for Johnson-Harrell did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
Johnson-Harrell, who said she was the first female Muslim member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, was elected in March and rapidly emerged as an outspoken voice against gun violence. She was in part motivated by her own family’s painful history: Four relatives — her father, only brother, a cousin and her 18-year-old son — have been fatally shot.
The death of her brother, who went undiagnosed and untreated for bipolar disorder and PTSD, is what
Facebook Post
Under her leadership as executive director, the organization “has advocated, cared for and fought to improve the quality of life for disenfranchised groups,” Johnson-Harrell said in a University of Pennsylvania biography.
In 2005, she privately bought three adjacent rowhouses in the neighborhood of West Powelton, prosecutors said, before renting the property to MECA in 2013 — for the exact cost of her mortgage payments.
The three buildings were supposed to serve as a personal care home, in part funded by residents’ Medicaid and Social Security disability benefits. But when state health officials threatened to shutter the space because of its squalid conditions, MECA kicked out its residents.
Even then, with the space unused, the charity kept paying rent to its executive director.
“While Johnson-Harrell was lining her pockets with MECA funds,” Shapiro said, “MECA’s residents were living in squalor.”
In the meantime, Johnson-Harrell was appointed to a job overseeing victim services for Philadelphia’s district attorney in November 2017, and launched an unsuccessful bid for her current seat in the Pennsylvania House.
In addition to making direct transfers to her bank account, “Johnson repeatedly wrote checks for ‘cash’ on MECA’s account, in varying amounts, whenever she needed extra money,” prosecutors said in a lengthy criminal complaint.
The nonprofit’s coffers ended up funding a laundry list of high-ticket items: matching fox fur coats for her and her husband. Designer clothes from Ralph Lauren and luxury online retailers. Overdue car payments on her Porsche Cayenne. Private-school tuition for her grandchildren.
And after MECA paid for trips to Mexico, Atlanta and Ocean City, spending $16,000 on travel in 2017, prosecutors turned to the lawmaker’s social media for answers. “Johnson’s Facebook posts from these vacation destinations, leave no doubt that these were pleasure trips,” they wrote in the complaint.
Johnson-Harrell inflated the salary of a relative who worked at MECA so that family member could purchase a West Philadelphia house that the lawmaker moved into — and for which she paid the mortgage.
In January 2018, when that house was foreclosed on and she went into default on another property, prosecutors said, MECA gave its executive director a $70,000 “loan” ― which she later used to pay off her real estate financial woes.
Last year, the sitting state representative for her district resigned following a bribery conviction. So Johnson-Harrell made another go for the job.
Much like her car, and her house, and her fur coats, though, her campaign was also bankrolled by MECA. Prosecutors say that she transferred $12,500 directly from the charity’s bank account to her campaign committee, which she told to record the money as a personal loan from her. She also allegedly funneled another $30,000 to the charity through her personal bank account.
And while she won the seat handily with nearly two-thirds of the vote, she lasted 10 months in the Pennsylvania House.
In a letter to Pennsylvania House Speaker Mike Turzai (R) on Thursday, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the lawmaker said she was “accepting responsibility for some missteps” she made before her election.
“I am choosing to resign to protect my district, to allow for an orderly election for my successor, and to focus on my defense to these allegations,” she wrote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...ia-state-house
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12-09-2019, 09:28 AM
Boost Pope
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From the extreme-left, everything else appears to be to the right.
From the extreme-right, everything else appears to be to the left.
From a slightly elevated platform near the center, everything else appears to be oddly distorted.
(is this what "Red state" means?)
From the extreme-right, everything else appears to be to the left.
From a slightly elevated platform near the center, everything else appears to be oddly distorted.
(is this what "Red state" means?)
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12-09-2019, 02:32 PM
Boost Czar
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It found no direct evidence of political bias in the launching of the probe, but identified an embarrassing slew of inaccuracies and omissions by the FBI that marred requests for court-ordered surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser.
...The report revealed for the first time that the FBI used a confidential source to approach an unidentified high-level Trump campaign official in September 2016 who was never the subject of any investigation. The approach revealed nothing of value to the probe.
The internal review did not find any indication that the FBI planted anyone in the campaign, but it does bolster concerns that campaign officials were repeatedly the focus of outreach by "confidential human sources" seeking to establish whether the campaign was colluding with Russia.
The report finds those tactics complied with existing FBI policy, but the review contains withering criticism of the pre-eminent law enforcement agency for “basic, fundamental and serious errors” handling of the surveillance applications for campaign adviser Carter Page.
“We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams; on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations; after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI; even though the information sought through the use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign; and even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny,” Horowitz wrote.
“We believe this circumstance reflects a failure not just but those who prepared the FISA applications, but also by the managers and supervisors in the Crossfire Hurricane chain of command, including FBI senior officials who were briefed as the investigation progressed,” the inspector general added, referring to the bureau's internal codename for the Russia investigation.
...The report revealed for the first time that the FBI used a confidential source to approach an unidentified high-level Trump campaign official in September 2016 who was never the subject of any investigation. The approach revealed nothing of value to the probe.
The internal review did not find any indication that the FBI planted anyone in the campaign, but it does bolster concerns that campaign officials were repeatedly the focus of outreach by "confidential human sources" seeking to establish whether the campaign was colluding with Russia.
The report finds those tactics complied with existing FBI policy, but the review contains withering criticism of the pre-eminent law enforcement agency for “basic, fundamental and serious errors” handling of the surveillance applications for campaign adviser Carter Page.
“We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams; on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations; after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI; even though the information sought through the use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign; and even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny,” Horowitz wrote.
“We believe this circumstance reflects a failure not just but those who prepared the FISA applications, but also by the managers and supervisors in the Crossfire Hurricane chain of command, including FBI senior officials who were briefed as the investigation progressed,” the inspector general added, referring to the bureau's internal codename for the Russia investigation.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/co...mp-74779205986
Contradicting Trump, DOJ report finds Russia probe was justified
meanwhile:
Last edited by Braineack; 12-09-2019 at 02:43 PM.
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