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

[InformationGeek]

Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica has closing up shop. Hell of a day, isn't it?

[Kevinroc]

Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica has closing up shop. Hell of a day, isn't it?

I'm pretty sure they'll be back under a different name. Like when Baron Zemo rechristened himself Citizen V.

[Iron Maiden]

What was the final amount?

They kept it at a little over 25 million. The hold up was that one of the people in the class action suit filed some kind of motion because she said she was prevented from leaving the class action suit. She wanted to have her own suit but I think she had missed the deadline to withdraw anyway.

NY Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued an interesting official statement on the case

Reason #411 why 45 won't release his tax returns ...

If the Democrats were smart, they should make a list of everything the GOP has done to enable this fraud of a President, even the little things like his frequent trips to his golf course at Mar a Lago. I wonder what the cost of those trips adds up to so far.

[Mister Mets]

And, then again, maybe we're missing the point of this discussion... the last time Republicans doing anything admirable, per Mets, a Republican, was 2008.

He just acknowledged his party have been s***s with no concern for any human being that isn't rich or religiously intolerant for at least the past decade, and that's if you ignore that the majority of them voted against the 2008 moment he's citing as an example of their accomplishments.

My comment was in the context of people here suggesting Republicans hadn't done anything good since Nixon.

I was also trying to find something that was significant, and met a very high burden of proof, that a generally liberal group of readers could agree with. You guys will probably trust someone on Thinkprogress who thinks Bush is underrated more than someone from National Review.

If you want the most recent developments, here's a useful online resource that lists all the bills that have been signed by Trump, and gone through the Republican congress.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bil...nt_status_date

On Monday, they voted to designate a National Memorial to Fallen Educators. That appears to be the most recent bill. Recent votes include reauthorizing amber alerts in Indian Country, allowing states to prosecute websites involved in sex trafficking, an establishment for a date for compliance for ceiling fans and energy standards, higher standards for day health care for veterans, allowing development in the city of Old Town, Maine, and a travel reciprocity for visits for high level officials from and to Taiwan. For whatever reason, there were a lot of Veterans Affairs administration votes on March 9th.

The 15 most popular Governors in the United States are Republicans, so if you want to look up recent things Republicans have done that are beneficial you could google them.

https://morningconsult.com/2018/04/1...lar-governors/

Right now, the negotiations for a ceasefire with North and South Korea seem to be going well. Both Koreas seem to be on board with how things are going, so there's also that.

[Iron Maiden]

Things are not going well for Michael Cohen's other business....Business Insider reports Uber and Lyft played a key role in Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's financial downfall

Cohen and his wife, Laura, built up a substantial taxi business in New York on the back of their 32 taxi licenses, known as medallions.

But the value of a medallion has plummeted to roughly $163,000 from more than $1 million within the past four years amid Uber and Lyft's gains in the taxi market, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the Cohens' income from their taxi fleet diminished as millions of dollars in loans they took out for the business went underwater. Now their taxi companies have piled up unpaid taxes and fines, and about half of their medallions have been suspended, Bloomberg reported, citing city records.

The taxi business the Cohens built is "deeply in debt and losing money daily," Bloomberg reported.

They took out at least 16 loans based on the once sky-high value of the medallions, according to Bloomberg. Sterling National Bank, which lent the Cohens cash, said in a November filing that it had loans out to three taxi borrowers and that all were at high risk of default.

I know I read recently in the Chicago Tribune that he has taxi medallions in Chicago that are suspended also. No wonder he was complaining about Trump not paying back that money that went to Stormy Daniels, for which he had to take out a loan. He's not exactly a pauper but his legal defense bills could get really big really fast.

[Kevinroc]

Poll finds 4M lost health insurance in last two years

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare...te-is-climbing

About 4 million Americans lost health insurance in the last two years, according to a new survey from the Commonwealth Fund, which attributed the decline to actions taken by the Trump administration.

The uninsured rate was up significantly compared with 2016 among adults with an individual income of about $30,000 and a family income of about $61,000.

[ed2962]

Well, why not? Everything about this administration has been right out of a comic book, albeit a bad one, like the dogshit Marvel vomited in the 90's. To be honest, I'm surprised nobody's taken a shot on a book about Trump himself, unless of course a publisher is scared to death of blowback by the perpetually thin-skinned and easily outraged Whiner-in-Chief.

There's been a least a few indie comics by way of superhero parody satirizing Trump. And one about Pence suggesting that Mike is the one really running the show.

[Gray Lensman]

Poll finds 4M lost health insurance in last two years

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare...te-is-climbing

And most of the loss of coverage is among Republican voters.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I don’t know if this had already been mentioned, but Tammie Jo Shults, the pilot who successfully landed that stricken Southwest Airlnes jet in Philadelphia was invited to the White House Monday for some gladhanding with Dolt45. Meanwhile, James Shaw Jr., the young man who disarmed that half naked nutbag at Waffle House last month hasn’t been given so much as a mention by Trump, never mind a visit to the Oval Office. Why is that? I think we all know why, because Shults is white and Shaw is black, and Trump, being a bigot, wants nothing to do with a good BLACK guy who disarmed a bad guy WITHOUT a gun.

[BeastieRunner]

Speaking of Southwest, they had another plane go down today with a blown window.

[Gryphon]

North Korea has agreed to release all American detainees

[Mister Mets]

And most of the loss of coverage is among Republican voters.

The main reason for the loss of coverage is that people don't want to pay for it. It's not that they're losing an awesome benefit.

Well, why not? Everything about this administration has been right out of a comic book, albeit a bad one, like the dogshit Marvel vomited in the 90's. To be honest, I'm surprised nobody's taken a shot on a book about Trump himself, unless of course a publisher is scared to death of blowback by the perpetually thin-skinned and easily outraged Whiner-in-Chief.

I'd imagine that would be good publicity, especially for an indie.

I don't put much stock in what people "like" on the internet. I'd wager a certain percentage of those who "liked" it have patronised a local Chinese restaurant with Caucasian hostesses wearing very similar dresses and never batted an eye.

Definitely. But it's not a story of the right inflating the significance of idiots on the left. Among other things, twitter promoted the story as a moment, prior to the right-wing pushback at the appropriation pushback.

Michelle Wolf wasn't saying that Sarah Huckabee Sanders looks like Aunt Lydia. She was saying that she acts like Aunt Lydia.

When you say you love someone in a role, it typically suggests they look like the actor.

[Mister Mets]

Esquire has a spotlight on Jordan Peterson, a philosopher who has become popular on the right. It's generally rather favorable

In these moments, Peterson is filled with frustration that so many need his message, for want of what had once been common wisdom. At the refusal to address men in the language that summons them to embrace their better instincts. (Yes, Peterson is one of those problematic figures who believe that men have a nature that is best appealed to in ways consistent with that nature.) Why has no one ever set these young men straight before? Where were their fathers? Where were their teachers? Why have they left it up to him, a YouTube personality, to roust them from their hiding places and send them out into the world?

12 Rules for Life is nominally a self-help book, with each chapter heading consisting of a rule: Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie. The rules are followed by long chapters that mingle personal anecdote with practical advice and an idiosyncratic mix, familiar from his lectures, of secular homiletics, biblical references, Jungian archetypes, twentieth-century history, and scientific findings. As of this writing, it is a best-selling nonfiction title in the U. S., Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

Peterson teaches at the University of Toronto and, until his book became a surprise global hit, he was also a practicing clinician. He has since put his practice on hold and taken an indefinite sabbatical from teaching to continue his journey into a curious sort of fame, one without any clear definition, fixed limit, or certain future. “I was talking about this with my kids the other day,” the father of two says. “What am I exactly? Most days, I can’t even think of my situation more broadly because it’s changing very rapidly.”

Peterson inhabits a polarized and fractured media landscape in which the very concept of a consensus reality has become undone, perhaps permanently. He is promoted by Random House Canada as a bearer of timeless truths and denounced on Canadian public television as a borderline fascist.

Many of Peterson’s seemingly grandiose pronouncements are, in fact, quite modest. He is often derided for repackaging banal common sense in a vague and pretentious idiom, and there is something to this. Peterson is an apologist for a set of beliefs that we once took for granted but now require an articulate defense, such as: Free speech is an essential value; perfect equality inevitably conflicts with individual freedom; one should be cautious before attempting to reengineer social institutions that appear to be working; men and women are, in certain quantifiable respects, different. His life advice concerns the necessity to defer gratification, face up to the trials of life with equanimity, take responsibility for one’s own choices, and struggle against the temptation to grow resentful. How such traditional values came to be portrayed as a danger adjacent to Nazism is one of the puzzles of our time.

In mid-2016, Peterson was a tenured professor at the University of Toronto. If not exactly an eminent figure, he had authored a robust and frequently cited body of publications. He taught a course based on his book and was regularly named one of three life-changing professors at the university. He had started a popular YouTube channel on which he was posting videos of his lectures. Off campus, he maintained a clinical practice; he consulted with corporations; and he appeared now and then on public television. No one would have regarded him as a potential vector of global controversy.

Then, in September of that year, Peterson posted a video stating his opposition to C-16, a Canadian bill that sought to make gender identity and expression protected categories. He argued that the law might compel people to adopt a panoply of gender-neutral pronouns, something he declared he would not do. He judged these pronouns—zie, and zir, and they, to name three of the more than seventy and growing such terms—to be the invention of “postmodern neo-Marxists” seeking to use state power to decree that gender differences were not biologically based but rather social constructions that could be made or unmade at will. Peterson made plain that he was speaking out against the enforced adoption of an unscientific political terminology, and not to denigrate the transgendered. Yet it was easy to call it an act of hate and harassment directed at a vulnerable minority, and many did. He received two letters of warning from his university, but no further action was taken.

In November 2017, Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, wanted to spark debate among students about C-16, so she showed a clip of Peterson discussing the new law. University administrators accused her of “creating a toxic climate” in her classroom. In a surreptitious recording subsequently uploaded to the Internet, a professor likened Shepherd’s actions to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos” and claimed that showing the video placed her in violation of C-16; in the tape, Shepherd is brought to tears. And though the assertion carried no legal weight, to some it appeared to justify Peterson’s concerns. The university later issued an apology and conceded that it had never received any student complaints about the video.

onto videos of Kermit the Frog, a play on his somewhat Muppetlike voice.

Peterson’s fame on these subversive platforms is often used to paint him in ominous tones. “I have something in common with Nazis,” he told me, “in that I am opposed to the radical left. And when you oppose the radical left, you end up being a part of a much larger group that includes Nazis in it.” But his refusal of the consolations of group identity also puts him at odds with the alt-right. “The alt-righters would say—and they’ve said this to me directly—‘Peterson, you’re wrong. Identity politics is correct. We just have to play to win.’ I think that’s a reprehensible attitude. But I understand exactly why you would come to that conclusion.

“What I’m saying with my YouTube videos is ‘Okay, there’s a different way of playing the whole game. Forget about the bloody group-identity framework and concentrate on what you can do as an individual.’ ”

It's interesting how a figure who seems reasonable is so controversial.

[Tazirai]

On this date in 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of John Bennett , a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives first elected in 2010 who has spent three terms in office sponsoring some horrendous legislation from his first day in office, when he submitted both a 20 week abortion ban as well as a Birther bill. Bennett has since submitted nullification bills to try and negate the Affordable Care Act, Federal Firearm Laws, as well as the United Nations Agenda 21 Environmental Treaty (probably because like a lot of paranoid conservatives, he thinks it's a plot to take over the planet). Now, what truly makes John Bennett a despicable individual is his anti-Islamic rhetoric, fear-mongering by falsely spreading the lie that the Quran calls for all non-Muslims to be killed, and insisting any Christian or Jew that refuses to convert will be decapitated on the spot. He has called Muslims "a cancer that needs to be cut" out of America, and that Islam is "not even a religion", but a method to execute a plan of global domination. In February of 2015, Oklahoma's chapter of the Council of American Islamic Affairs hosted the first Muslim Capitol Day in Oklahoma, where the small community of practitioners of Islam in the state opened themselves up to the rest of the state, in a gesture of kindness, acceptance, and understanding, only to see John Bennett turn it into a holy war and show up to with protesters carrying signs that said things like "Allah is a pedophile", or "Mohammed is in Hell" to pass out Bibles and harass attendees with surveys asking them if they would "denounce the terrorist organization Hamas". Adam Soltani, the head of Oklahoma's chapter of CAIR was as chill as someone could be about being demonized to his face by a bigot, saying he had no problem with the bibles being passed out, and that they have repeatedly condemned terrorists of any faith. Fast forward a few months to November 2015, and Bennett began fearmongering, again, and citing that there were already Syrian refugees in Jenks, Oklahoma, and that there should be an immediate halt to more being accepted into Oklahoma, before giving way to a more homophobic display of anger, where he grew irrationally angry about the rumors that someone would place a non-secular, rainbow-colored "Festivus Pole" at the Oklahoma capitol around the holidays, viewing it as a "hostile attack on his Christian beliefs". Bennett, during the build-up to the 2016 election, posted a story on his Facebook page about Hillary Clinton and Benghazi with only the comment, “2 words…firing squad”. The Oklahoman newspaper followed up for an explanation, and at first, in a text message saying the post was meant to be sarcastic, but then added that Clinton “has committed nothing less than treason by leaving fellow Americans to die in Benghazi. If anyone else had done that they would be charged with treason and thrown under the jail at a minimum, and a firing squad likely.”

Now, in August of 2017, after Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia terrorized the town for most of a weekend, leading to the attempted mass murder of counter-protesters in a vehicle attack that did take the life of Heather Heyer… well, there were some terrible reactions from quite a few members of the GOP, and guess what? John Bennett was among their number. He posted a message indicating that he sympathized with the folks who claimed to be there to “support Confederate monuments”, and while he was at it, called for the removal of mosques from the United States:



Why, we dare say John Bennett is a bigoted ***hole. We’re sad to report that in November of 2017, Bennett went on record to compare state agencies in Oklahoma to “terrorists”, because they had the gall… the chutzpah, to expect the state budget to have funding so they continue operating. The nerve of ‘em, right?

You also may have heard the story last month about how teachers in Oklahoma were sick and tired of having some of the worst education funding in the nation, and how they went on strike and eventually their demands were met for a pay raise. Well, one of the worst reactions by Oklahoma Republicans to that strike might have been the one from John Bennett, who during debate on the education bill, argued that money wasn’t really what the teachers needed. What they needed was the right to return to corporal punishment, because apparently they’re just sadists at heart, or something:



If this doesn’t seem like an overall pattern of extremist lunacy, we’ll also add that it wasn’t so long ago that Bennett voted to expand Oklahoma’s “Stand Your Ground” laws, so that a person is not only justified in shooting someone they THINK is a threat to them, but he wanted that law to expand so that a person could shoot anyone who they just perceive to be a threat of anyone who attends their church with them. (Presumably, this is some nonsense about how “victimized” Christians are that they’d like to gun down people who look at them funny, but thankfully it didn’t pass.)

John Bennett is still two elections away from term limits, so it seems likely that he’ll be running for re-election in 2018. We’ll remind everyone, however, that he did only pull down 54% of the vote in 2016, so in an expected Blue Wave election in November, Tom Stites, the man who nearly took him down two years ago, is going to really give him a run for his money in a rematch. Especially when you consider how many seats in the Oklahoma state legislature that Democrats have flipped in special elections since 2016, as well as the groundbreaking shift in support, with Democrats outperforming their previous showing by 20-40 points in those races and that Bennett was dumb enough to post his support online for the folks who marched in Charlottesville only days after Heather Heyer’s murder. If there’s a seat we could see being flipped in the Sooner state, this is it.

Great analysis... so good.
Reminds me of Kemp.

Georgia Gubernatorial Candidate Points Gun at Teen in New Ad

[Tazirai]

The ONLY thing this moron has ever done for me is sponsoring my daughter for the Air Force Academy. She wanted in so I had no choice, BUT he's a warmonger so he sponsored her without a doubt. That said. I hate this mofo...

Why are we still listening to him?