All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[The Overlord]

I agree, f him. But I agree with a part of what he said...I do think sometimes people have weird priorities on what they choose to spend their money on. Some times people will opt to get the thing that is immediately fun over spending on something that is boring, but more critical.

But everyone should have access to affordable healthcare. I don't think Chaffetz gives a rat's ass about that part of it.

I think Chaffetz wants to save some money and he and everyone else in the Senate and Congress can give up their health insurance.

Seriously though, the ACA was compromise Obama tried to make with the Republicans, with a system similar to one Romney introduced into Massachusetts, which offers more coverage, but still has a far amount of private sector involvement. But the Republicans hated anything Obama proposed, so they opposed the ACA just because its

Seriously its not like the ACA is a single payer system like they have in Canada or Europe, which I think are better then ACA but the Republicans and their supporters would scream about socialism if anyone proposed that in the US.

[JCAll]

well that Iphone cost one months worth of healthcare

so... what about the other months?

(yes, people are **** with money, which is a whole other subject, but this is the worst analogy ever)

I wonder if these are the same people that saw refugees from the middle east that had nothing but the cloths on their back and an iphone and were calling them entitled.

[Tami]

Representative and man who doesn't understand how money, numbers, and charts work Jason Chaffetz had this to say about the new GOP healthcare plan about poor Americans.



Video here.


Also, f him.

Top Republican thinks chemotherapy and an iPhone cost the same

This is Freedom in Rep. Jason Chaffetz's stunted mind: with the Republican Obamacare repeal plan, you can make choices. The choice he's suggesting you make, however, shows that he understands healthcare about as deeply as he understands ethics in government.

[Tami]

Trump incorrectly blames Obama for release of 122 'vicious' Gitmo detainees

But according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 113 of the 122 former detainees who have re-engaged in terrorism were released before January of 2009, when former President Barack Obama took office.

The former detainee recently killed in the U.S. airstrike, Muhammad Tahar, was transferred to Yemen in December of 2009, according to Department of Defense files compiled by the The New York Times.

Bush43 released detainees, not Obama.

[Tami]

Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions defends Russia testimony and says he didn't mislead Congress

He announced his recusal on Thursday and promised to send a letter to clarify his January testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In the letter, Sessions told his former colleagues that he had correctly answered a question when he said he “did not have communications with Russians” during the campaign.

Sessions reiterated what he told reporters last week: that he had focused on part of the question posed by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) that sought to determine what the attorney general would do about “continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”

Sessions said in the letter that he answered honestly.

“I did not mention communications I had had with the Russian ambassador over the years because the question did not ask about them,” Sessions wrote.

The Justice Department disclosed last week that Sessions also met twice with Kislyak in 2016, first after a speech at the Republican National Convention in July and then in a private sit-down meeting in Sessions’ Senate office in September.

Justice Department officials have said that Sessions had conversations with more than two dozen foreign ambassadors and that his meeting with Kislyak was not unusual. They said he met the Russian diplomat in his capacity as a member of the the Armed Services Committee, not as a representative of the Trump campaign.

The day before his sit-down with the Russian, he met the Ukranian ambassador, for example, they said.

Sessions Changes Tone on Failure to Acknowledge Russia Envoy Meetings

Attorney General Jeff Sessions toughened his defense for failing to acknowledge two meetings last year with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday, Sessions said he was “correct” in not mentioning those contacts during his confirmation hearing because he wasn’t asked about them in a question that focused on what he’d do if he found out that anyone affiliated with President Donald Trump’s team was communicating with the Russian government during last year’s presidential campaign.

“I did not mention communications I had had with the Russian Ambassador over the years because the question did not ask about them," Sessions wrote. While he met with the ambassador twice during the campaign, he has said it was in his role as a senator, not as a Trump adviser and supporter.

Here's Exactly What Jeff Sessions Said About Russia at his Confirmation Hearing

SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn't have — did not have communications with the Russians, and I'm unable to comment on it.

[Tami]

WikiLeaks publishes CIA trove alleging wide scale hacking

WikiLeaks on Tuesday published thousands of documents purportedly taken from the Central Intelligence Agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence, a dramatic release that appears to expose intimate details of America's cyberespionage toolkit.

It was not immediately clear how WikiLeaks obtained the information, which included more than 8,700 documents and files. The CIA tools, if authentic, could undermine the confidence that consumers have in the safety and security of their computers, mobile devices and even smart TVs.

WikiLeaks said the material came from "an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia." It didn't say how the files were removed, such as possibly by a rogue employee, by hacking a federal contractor working for the CIA or breaking into a staging server where such hacking tools might be temporarily stored.

The more than 8,000 documents cover a host of technical topics, including what appears to be a discussion about how to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices. WikiLeaks said the data also include details on the agency's efforts to subvert American software products and smartphones, including Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft Windows.

Hmmm....I wonder, is it possible that was this done to either help Trump or hurt him?

[Tami]

Russian TV Crew Tries to Bribe Swedish Youngsters to Riot on Camera

Coming up short apparently wasn’t an option for one Russian TV crew, who decided to bypass deontology and just make up the news themselves.

“They came up to us and said they wanted to see some action. They wanted to bribe us 400 [krona] each,” Mohammed, a Rinkeby resident, told Danish radio station Radio24syv. (400 krona is about $45.)

But when Swedish police approached the camera crew and group of youngsters, the Russian journalists suddenly changed their tune. “While we were talking to them, the police came over to us. We did not want to do any of that. But when the police came the Russian journalists said that we were the ones who had said that we would show them some action for 400 [krona] each,” said the boy.

The Russian TV crew didn’t identify their outlet. But it falls in line with a wider pattern of Russian state-funded media portraying Europe as falling apart due to immigration. Sweden has been at the receiving end of the Kremlin’s subversive media-turned-foreign policy tool before, particularly as it deepens its relationship with NATO, Russia’s former Cold War adversary.

That is insane.

[worstblogever]

On this date in both 2015, as well as 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Vito Barbieri, a member of the Idaho House of Representatives who has voted to nullify federal firearms laws and the entirety of the Affordable Care Act. But Barbieri is far more interesting for all of the ways he wants to regulate a woman's reproductive system, such as allow an employer to deny birth control coverage to an employee on their health insurance plan, or to require medically unnecessary ultrasounds prior to a woman having an abortion. His campaign website denies the existence of a separation between church and state, calls public schools a "godless institution", and expresses paranoid concerns about the United Nations' Agenda 21 environmental treaty. In the middle of the state legislature about the latter issue, Barbieri showed how ignorant he is on the issue by asking the doctor giving testimony if a gynecological exam could be performed by having a woman orally swallow the camera, and have it reach the vagina for photos. (We wish that was a joke.)

Barbieri's disgust with public schools having a lack of preaching about Jesus in them boiled over yet again in March of 2016, shortly after we completed his profile update, when he voted for S 1342, a bill sponsored by fellow Idaho CSGOPOTD alumni Sheryll Nuxoll, that would authorize the use of the Bible in public school. Because, y'know, it's not like the Abington School District v. Schempp ruling is a thing.

Vito Barbieri coasted to re-election in 2016, winning his GOP Primary with 68% of the vote over Fritz Weidenhoff, and in the general election in 72% of the vote over Democrat Kathy Kahn. No word on if he's figured out the basics of female anatomy yet, though.

[ImprobableQuestion]

WikiLeaks publishes CIA trove alleging wide scale hacking



Hmmm....I wonder, is it possible that was this done to either help Trump or hurt him?

They aren't interested in hurting Trump. Trump is their key to destabilizing the country, which is why they never attacked him during the campaign, and won't now.

[Tami]

More insanity

Ben Carson told HUD staff he could zap their brains into reciting whole books read 60 years ago. What?

As a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1987, Carson famously separated infant twins conjoined at the head. But on Monday, he told a factually wrong parable about the brain. Specifically, Carson said, the brain was incapable of forgetting and could be electrically stimulated into perfect recall — a statement that, even though made by one of the most famous former neurosurgeons alive, was far more fiction than science.

It came in an anecdote meant to motivate the federal employees, a bit Carson developed on the public speaking circuit. He described the brain’s surprising power as a way to show the audience that they were more capable than they believed.

The insinuation that Carson could zap a patient into reciting, from cover to cover, a book read in 1957 was not true, experts said.

“Using electrodes placed in the human brain to implant memories or to recall forgotten memories is simply not possible at this time,” Darin Dougherty, a psychiatrist and the director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s neurotherapeutics division, told Gizmodo.

Dan Simons, a University of Illinois psychologist who studies attention and memory, told Wired that Carson’s claim was “utter nonsense.” Simons said it failed on nearly all counts: Humans cannot recall large swaths of text unless memorized for that purpose. Doctors cannot force patients to remember anything in crystal detail, even with deep brain stimulation. No human brain holds within it “a perfect and permanent record of our experiences,” the psychologist said.

[Iron Maiden]

They aren't interested in hurting Trump. Trump is their key to destabilizing the country, which is why they never attacked him during the campaign, and won't now.

It will be very telling to see what Trump's statement on this will be. Will he praise WikiLeaks and trash the CIA or defend the CIA and trash Wikileaks?

[Malvolio]

Is he Dr. Carson or Dr. Frankenstein?

[Shining Trapezohedron]

They aren't interested in hurting Trump. Trump is their key to destabilizing the country, which is why they never attacked him during the campaign, and won't now.

Yeah, not going to happen.

They aren't even hiding that they are pro-Russia Propaganda nowadays anymore.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

More insanity

Ben Carson told HUD staff he could zap their brains into reciting whole books read 60 years ago. What?

What? Seriously? Good Lord! This fool REALLY needs to shut the **** up! IMMEDIATELY! What in hell compels this four-alarm moron to spout that sort of ridiculous ****? The more Dr. Don't Know speaks, the more I'm convinced he lost his common sense on the campaign trail last year and it never came back.

[MindofShadow]

Are we sure Carson didn't hit his head after he quit being a surgeon and is sufferiing from diagnosed and untreated post concussion syndrome?