Donald Trump is planning to hold a summit with Vladimir Putin within weeks of becoming president — emulating Ronald Reagan’s Cold War deal-making in Reykjavik with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Trump and his team have told British officials that their first foreign trip will be a meeting with the Russian leader, with the Icelandic capital in pole position to host the superpower talks as it did three decades ago.
He has no shame. He's being crucified for being Putin's puppet and his first foreign trip is to go kiss Putin's ass. That must be some kind of blackmail.
It's becoming undeniable that Trump is deeply indebted to the Russians, and inextricably so.
I think the foreign press and foreign intelligence agencies are going to do what our feeble press and corrupt GOP politicians won't do. They are going to keep digging until they find something concrete. I hope they dig up enough dirt to bury him.
Donald Trump is planning to hold a summit with Vladimir Putin within weeks of becoming president — emulating Ronald Reagan’s Cold War deal-making in Reykjavik with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Trump and his team have told British officials that their first foreign trip will be a meeting with the Russian leader, with the Icelandic capital in pole position to host the superpower talks as it did three decades ago.
He has no shame. He's being crucified for being Putin's puppet and his first foreign trip is to go kiss Putin's ass. That must be some kind of blackmail.
It's becoming undeniable that Trump is deeply indebted to the Russians, and inextricably so.
And he is soooo thin-skinned and reactive to any perceived slight, can you imagine how worried he is if the Russians really have something dirty on him that they are withholding for now? If there is proof of wrong-doing, gonna be hard for him to deny it forever if it gets dredged up. And not like he is going to have a ton of support from his own party faithful if they sense him going down. He hasn't endeared himself to many. _________________ “There is always light if only we're brave enough to see it, if only we're brave enough to be it.” --Amanda Gorman
Cory Booker's explanation... (doesn't cut it, so so disappointing):
To those of you who have reached out to me by phone, email, social media, or otherwise about a vote I took this week related to the importation of prescription drugs: I greatly appreciate your feedback and I’m grateful for your passion.
I support the importation of prescription drugs. It should be part of a strategy to control the skyrocketing cost of medications. Further, we should be willing to try a lot of ways to control drug prices, because we’re going to need a comprehensive approach to truly solve this problem. Many of them will be counter to the desires of the pharmaceutical industry, but just as insurance companies shouldn’t drive health policies, drug companies shouldn’t dictate them either.
Any plan to allow the importation of prescription medications should also include consumer protections that ensure that the drugs coming into this country are safe. The amendment I voted against last week didn't meet this test.
Public health leaders have long-stressed the need for strong safety standards coupled with any drug importation plan – everyone from commissioners, top officials, and researchers at the FDA to HHS secretaries under Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton.
Please know how committed I am to finding solutions to the problem of skyrocketing drug prices – it’s a problem I’ve been working to alleviate for years. This is a life-or-death issue for millions of families, particularly seniors and those struggling with chronic health conditions like diabetes or asthma. This is a crisis for countless American families, and it is stretching them to the breaking point.
That’s why as mayor of Newark, I brought clinics, nonprofits, and drug companies to the table and developed a free drug discount card program that aimed to cut drug costs for under- and un-insured residents of our city.
It’s why I voted this week for measures that bring drug prices down and protect Medicare's prescription drug benefit.
And it's why I support and am exploring ways to find more comprehensive solutions to this growing problem, including finally allowing the government, through Medicare, to use their purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices and, of course, allowing for the importation of prescription drugs with adequate safety standards.
To those who think pharmaceutical industry pressure matters to me -- it doesn't. I work for the people of New Jersey, and have never and will never let any industry influence a vote I make on behalf of the American people.
Thank you again to all who reached out on this issue. Your passion makes a difference.
Ultimately, as with any politician, you have to make a judgement about the whole of their beliefs. Do you agree with them on 90% of their positions? For me, that's good enough. If you insist on 100% purity then you get Bernie supporters voting for Jill Stein because Clinton wasn't pure enough, then the whole country ends up with Trump.
Booker's explanation sounds reasonable to me but I don't know enough about his past pharma votes to judge the whole.
Cory Booker's explanation... (doesn't cut it, so so disappointing):
To those of you who have reached out to me by phone, email, social media, or otherwise about a vote I took this week related to the importation of prescription drugs: I greatly appreciate your feedback and I’m grateful for your passion.
I support the importation of prescription drugs. It should be part of a strategy to control the skyrocketing cost of medications. Further, we should be willing to try a lot of ways to control drug prices, because we’re going to need a comprehensive approach to truly solve this problem. Many of them will be counter to the desires of the pharmaceutical industry, but just as insurance companies shouldn’t drive health policies, drug companies shouldn’t dictate them either.
Any plan to allow the importation of prescription medications should also include consumer protections that ensure that the drugs coming into this country are safe. The amendment I voted against last week didn't meet this test.
Public health leaders have long-stressed the need for strong safety standards coupled with any drug importation plan – everyone from commissioners, top officials, and researchers at the FDA to HHS secretaries under Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton.
Please know how committed I am to finding solutions to the problem of skyrocketing drug prices – it’s a problem I’ve been working to alleviate for years. This is a life-or-death issue for millions of families, particularly seniors and those struggling with chronic health conditions like diabetes or asthma. This is a crisis for countless American families, and it is stretching them to the breaking point.
That’s why as mayor of Newark, I brought clinics, nonprofits, and drug companies to the table and developed a free drug discount card program that aimed to cut drug costs for under- and un-insured residents of our city.
It’s why I voted this week for measures that bring drug prices down and protect Medicare's prescription drug benefit.
And it's why I support and am exploring ways to find more comprehensive solutions to this growing problem, including finally allowing the government, through Medicare, to use their purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices and, of course, allowing for the importation of prescription drugs with adequate safety standards.
To those who think pharmaceutical industry pressure matters to me -- it doesn't. I work for the people of New Jersey, and have never and will never let any industry influence a vote I make on behalf of the American people.
Thank you again to all who reached out on this issue. Your passion makes a difference.
FFS, it's disquieting how masterful our politicians have become in dismissing our concerns with polished talking points. It's almost hypnotic. Well, he's a particularly bright young man, but just like every U.S. Senator, Cory Booker also has a staff brimming with literally dozens of ambitious young functionaries who think they're much sharper than his constituents. Everyone understands that something like 80% of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies have a meaningful presence in his region, and most employ significant numbers of those same constituents. This response may have been drafted in his office by these functionaries, but trust and believe that folks in Bridgewater and New Brunswick blessed this piece of work before "send" was hit ...
Joined: 10 Dec 2006 Posts: 52654 Location: Making a safety stop at 15 feet.
Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2017 8:42 pm Post subject:
ChefLinda wrote:
Ultimately, as with any politician, you have to make a judgement about the whole of their beliefs. Do you agree with them on 90% of their positions? For me, that's good enough. If you insist on 100% purity then you get Bernie supporters voting for Jill Stein because Clinton wasn't pure enough, then the whole country ends up with Trump.
Booker's explanation sounds reasonable to me but I don't know enough about his past pharma votes to judge the whole.
His reasons are based on a false attempt at pretending "safety" is the issue. There are no issues with safety regarding the drugs.
The guy sold out. Once you're a sell out, 90% or 10% doesn't matter, it's all zero.
If there was ever a time we needed people with impeccable integrity, it is now. There are no mulligans any more. _________________ You thought God was an architect, now you know
He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built that’s all for show
goes up in flames
In 24 frames
Joined: 15 Sep 2012 Posts: 29285 Location: La La Land
Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2017 8:44 pm Post subject:
Quote:
Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was - allegedly - a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign.
...
Michael Hayden, former head of both the CIA and the NSA, simply called Mr Trump a "polezni durak" - a useful fool.
Like Colbert said the other night. We'd all trust Trump and his administration more if he would just say 1 negative thing about Russia or Putin.
But nobody from his administration (including Trump) will.
For the same reason he won't release his tax records. He has something to hide. _________________ "Every hurt is a lesson, and every lesson makes you better”
Ultimately, as with any politician, you have to make a judgement about the whole of their beliefs. Do you agree with them on 90% of their positions? For me, that's good enough. If you insist on 100% purity then you get Bernie supporters voting for Jill Stein because Clinton wasn't pure enough, then the whole country ends up with Trump.
Booker's explanation sounds reasonable to me but I don't know enough about his past pharma votes to judge the whole.
Booker, like all senators, voted to protect his home state’s interests
The irony of this backlash is that it actually doesn’t make a lot of sense to see Booker’s vote on the pharmaceutical amendment as a direct result of the money that’s been poured into his campaign war chest.
Instead, the much simpler explanation is that Booker was following the predictable, longstanding pattern of elected officials to try to protect the jobs and industries that dominate their home states.
“Almost any member of Congress from New Jersey — either a senator or House member, no matter how liberal or conservative — will be fiercely protective defense of pharmaceutical industry,” says Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.
Just compare the vote totals with the industry’s contributions. The senator who received the most money from the pharmaceutical industry since 2010 is Arizona Republican John McCain, who received $1.2 million in campaign contributions. McCain voted for the Sanders-Klobuchar amendment. Pharma has donated $800,000 to Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley — who also voted for the amendment.
Similarly, the Democrat who has received the most from the pharmaceutical companies, according to OpenSecrets, is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But Schumer, like McCain, also voted in favor of the Sanders-Klobuchar amendment. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden has received more than $600,000 from pharmaceutical companies — more than three times that received by Booker — and also backed the amendment. (So did Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, who received two times as many donations as Booker.)
The pharmaceutical industry has a “massive” presence in New Jersey, Baker says. It’s almost unheard of for a New Jersey politician to go against pharmaceutical companies — it’d be like a politician from Maine arguing for onerous new regulations on fisheries, or an Iowa Republican voting against ethanol subsidies.
The vote on the pharmaceutical amendment alone shows that the phenomenon is hardly limited to Booker. Washington state Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell — among the more progressive members of the caucus — voted against the proposal.
Meanwhile, Democratic moderates like Michigan’s Gary Peters and Virginia’s Tim Kaine voted for it. Peters and Kaine are hardly more “progressive” than Murray and Cantwell — but they represent states that do not host a heavy concentration of pharmaceutical companies.
Quote:
The Senate has not caught up to the growing nationalization of politics
The fight over Booker’s vote highlights a real, and much broader, disconnect between Capitol Hill and the outside world.
On the one hand, members of Congress have continued to legislate as they always have — with a far greater concern for the jobs and markets in their own states.
But that reality isn’t always reflected in a media environment that increasingly sees everything through its implications for the country as a whole. In part, that’s because of the long decline in the size and staffing of local newsrooms, says Michele Swers, a Georgetown University professor who specializes in Congress. And in part it’s because people have stopped caring nearly as much about politics of their states, as research by political scientist Jonathan Ladd has shown.
“Politics is much more nationalized than it was just a few decades ago,” said Swers in an interview in October 2016.
She added: “That probably has to do with the fact that the way you get your information has changed. Twenty years ago ... if you were a House member, you could get the coverage of your character, of the bill you passed for your home district, or of you in parades or whatever. Now, with there being so much more national coverage and the local papers dying out, it’s much more ideological.”
And that new dynamic will create a new form of headache for senators like Cory Booker who may have higher national ambitions. They are stuck between two bad outcomes — defying the industries of their home states, or taking a position that could be broadly unpopular with their national parties.
This question to anyone far smarter than me in politics: Will anything actually happen to Trump regarding this whole Russia business? I feel like there are aspects of the intelligence community that are protecting him. If they wanted to they could bring him down in an instant. He's out here trashing them and James Clapper is groveling at his feet, the director of national mother (bleep) intelligence! This guy is obviously on the hook with the Russians. And the whole James Comey business? He refused to inform the public about the investigation into trump-russia but let Hillary's email business out in the air. What is going on? Is there something in the fine print I'm missing?
Joined: 12 Apr 2001 Posts: 9315 Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2017 12:06 am Post subject:
Omar Little wrote:
vanexelent wrote:
F the foreign press, we need some rouge Jason Bourne to bring this whole thing down.
You know that Rouge means red, right? Have you been compromised?
Don't know if he's been compromised, but I'm pretty sure "rouge" is a typo for "rogue". _________________ I would rather have questions I cannot answer than answers I cannot question - Richard Feynman
With only days until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.
The new rules allow employees doing intelligence work for those agencies to sift through raw data collected under a broad, Reagan-era executive order that gives the NSA virtually unlimited authority to intercept communications abroad. Previously, NSA analysts would filter out information they deemed irrelevant and mask the names of innocent Americans before passing it along.
The change was in the works long before there was any expectation that someone like Trump might become president. The last-minute adoption of the procedures is one of many examples of the Obama administration making new executive powers established by the Bush administration permanent, on the assumption that the executive branch could be trusted to police itself.
Executive Order 12333, often referred to as “twelve triple-three,” has attracted less debate than congressional wiretapping laws, but serves as authorization for the NSA’s most massive surveillance programs — far more than the NSA’s other programs combined. Under 12333, the NSA taps phone and internet backbones throughout the world, records the phone calls of entire countries, vacuums up traffic from Google and Yahoo’s data centers overseas, and more.
In 2014, The Intercept revealed that the NSA uses 12333 as a legal basis for an internal NSA search engine that spans more than 850 billion phone and internet records and contains the unfiltered private information of millions of Americans.
In 2014, a former state department official described NSA surveillance under 12333 as a “universe of collection and storage” beyond what Congress has authorized.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who gave reporters documents that revealed the breadth of the 12333 surveillance, tweeted this:
As he hands the White House to Trump, Obama just unchained NSA from basic limits on passing raw intercepts to others https://t.co/JkbJhTrUsI
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) January 12, 2017
As the rule change made its way through the review process, Robert Litt, the top lawyer for the intelligence community, publicly explained the rationale: The rules “respond to the widely recognized lesson learned from the 9/11 attacks that intelligence should not be ‘stovepiped’ by individual agencies but should be shared responsibly within the intelligence community.”
But this massive database inevitably includes vast amount of American’s communications — swept up when they speak to people abroad, when they go abroad themselves, or even if their domestic communications are simply routed abroad. That’s why access was previously limited to data that had already been screened to remove unrelated information and information identifying U.S. persons. The new rules still ostensibly limit access to authorized foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes — not ordinary law enforcement purposes — and require screening before they are more widely shared. But privacy activists are skeptical.
Activists have long been concerned about the erosion of barriers between law enforcement surveillance and NSA spying. With access to the NSA’s intercepts, law enforcement could search Americans’ private information for evidence of criminality without going to a judge — a loophole privacy activists have called the “backdoor search loophole.”
Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the ACLU, said in a statement that the procedures raise “serious concerns that agencies that have responsibilities such as prosecuting domestic crimes, regulating our financial policy, and enforcing our immigration laws will now have access to a wealth of personal information that could be misused.”
Nathan White, legislative manager for the digital rights group, Access Now, wrote in an email: “One of the fundamental tenets of privacy among the intelligence community has been that when the collection is large on the front end, you need tighter minimization procedures on the back end.”
He continued: “This decision will be added to the timelines of the most significant expansions of domestic surveillance in the modern era.”
Anyone find the increasing surveillance of the government and continued intrusion of our privacy alarming?
A little bit, but in the context of everything else that is going on right now, not much. Snowden had his 15 minutes of fame, but at this point no one really cares what he thinks. Greenwald and his lackies are trying to milk the story for a little more attention, but it doesn't seem to be working. Every time a bomb goes off, or someone starts shooting at a nightclub or airport, the concerns about hypothetical intrusions into our privacy seem just a little more pointless.
We may regret all of this down the road, but right now this issue doesn't seem to have much traction.
More intimidation from these fascists. They frame everything that is critical of Trump as being "political." Don't criticize or expect accountability from the Dear Leader. You'll get told you're being "political" and that you'd better watch what you say. This is the same crap that Kellyanne Goebbels pulls on every show she's interviewed on.
Another step toward authoritarian rule - continue to restrict and delegitimize the press in order to destroy any public check or balance on your power:
The upset to the existing order caused by the presidential election has been acutely felt by no one, perhaps, so much as it has by the national press. At Donald Trump's press conference on Wednesday, reporters found themselves not only subject to a scolding ("Fake news!" "Disgraceful!") but also awakened to the strong suggestion that, at least in tactical terms, the showdown had been won by the president-elect.
The media's sense of dislocation may soon become literal.
According to three senior officials on the transition team, a plan to evict the press corps from the White House is under serious consideration by the incoming Trump Administration. If the plan goes through, one of the officials said, the media will be removed from the cozy confines of the White House press room, where it has worked for several decades. Members of the press will be relocated to the White House Conference Center—near Lafayette Square—or to a space in the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House.
Thoughts on the European Union and NATO? I know Trump has criticized both, what is the general consensus on both? I know its a popular Russian talking point that they aren't good, but is there any merit to that?
Joined: 15 Sep 2012 Posts: 29285 Location: La La Land
Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2017 6:25 pm Post subject:
Shlumpledink wrote:
Thoughts on the European Union and NATO? I know Trump has criticized both, what is the general consensus on both? I know its a popular Russian talking point that they aren't good, but is there any merit to that?
Feel like Trump is trolling me. Like he purposely says and does things to upset me as much as possible.
What makes Trump's "NATO is obsolete" comment so head scratching is because this is what his incoming Secretary of Defense has said about NATO.
Quote:
Mattis, who served as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander of Transformation from 2007 to 2009, called the alliance “the most successful military alliance probably in modern history, maybe ever.” Mattis dodged questions about whether he’s concerned with the president-elect’s criticisms of the alliance, except he said Mr. Trump has “shown himself to be open.”
As part of his opening statement, Mattis said that Russia poses a threat to NATO.
“I think right now the most important thing is that we recognize the reality of what we deal with Mr. Putin and we recognize that he is trying to break the North Atlantic alliance and that we take the steps -- the integrated steps, diplomatic, economic, military and the alliance steps, the working with our allies to defend ourselves where we must,” he said.
“If we did not have NATO today we would need to create it,” Mattis said, explaining in a written questionnaire that he believes the alliance “must harness renewed political will to confront and walk back aggressive Russian actions and other threats to the security of its members.”
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