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Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

Post your news stories here!

Starting a fresh thread, looks like the old one got a little overgrown.

Overgrown? *REALLY!?*

IMAGE(http://www.chud.com/articles/content_images/123/Creepshow%20King.jpg)

Just a little overgrown. Nothing to worry about. A little trimming and everything will be okay, right?

=/

Older article from The War Zone on sales of the F-35 and the problems ALIS presents as the F-35 program grows.

/insert joke here

Anywell....

We'll Be Paying For Mark Halperin's Sins For Years To Come

In mid-2005 I packed two duffel bags and took a train to Washington, where I hoped, as a young reporter, to better understand the city, and our politics and our country. As much as it was anyone’s, Washington was my city. I grew up there.

But when I arrived, I became aware there was a new don of Washington, one whose rules I would have to master. His name was Mark Halperin. He ran a chummy daily political newsletter, The Note, from his perch as political director of ABC News.

Three weeks ago, numerous women stepped forward to accuse him of extraordinary acts of assault: One said he masturbated in front of them at work; another said he slammed her against a restaurant window before attempting to kiss her (“I bear responsibility for my outrageous conduct,” Halperin said in an apology posted soon after). He lost his job, a book deal, and a movie contract. Case closed, it would seem: another predator, thankfully, out of a workplace.

But I’m not here to talk about that. I want to talk about the deeper, subtler, more insidious effect Mark Halperin had on our politics — one which we’ll be paying for for years to come.

The Note purported to reveal Washington’s secrets. In fact, its purpose was the exact opposite: to make the city, and US politics, appear impossible to understand. It replaced normal words with jargon. It coined the phrase "Gang of 500," the clubby network of lobbyists, aides, pols, and hangers-on who supposedly, like the Vatican's cardinals, secretly ran DC. That wasn't true — power is so diffuse. But Halperin claimed he knew so much more than we did, and we began to believe it.

Once you believe that, it’s not hard to be convinced that politics is only comprehensible, like nuclear science, to a select few. There were those chosen ones — the people who'd flattered Halperin to get a friendly mention in his newsletter, the ones he declared to be in the know — and the rest of us. Halperin wrote about Washington like it was an intriguing game, the kind that masked aristocrats played to entertain themselves at 19th-century parties: Everyone was both pawn and player, engaged in a set of arcane maneuvers to win an empty jackpot that ultimately meant nothing of true importance.

At the same time, The Note made it seem that tiny events — a cough at a press conference, a hush-hush convo between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell in a corridor — held apocalyptic importance. Cloaked in seriousness, with the imprimatur of Peter Jennings' ABC News, in reality The Note was not news but simple gossip.

Gossip: The word comes from the old English for "baptismal sponsor” — a godparent — and Halperin positioned himself as the priest who stood between the layman and the sacred mysteries of Washington, only letting a person through in exchange for the corrupting coin of accepting your own personal idiocy. It required acknowledging, like a cult initiate, that you had to learn the Master's arcane knowledge before claiming to know anything at all.

The Note was a cult. Between bits of knowledge in each mailer, Halperin inserted birthday wishes to his gang, cementing the impression of Washington as a place where people are much more interested in buttering each other up than they are in the lives of the kind of Americans whose names Mark Halperin did not know.

As I said: Washington was my city. But it is a city for all Americans, as the seat of our democracy. For his efforts to make the city seem, instead, like a nonstop exclusive party to which almost nobody is invited, I dare say Halperin is the single journalist most responsible for Donald Trump. Think that's too bold? Name me another.

After all, what did Trump respond to? Most of all, two things: the sense among Americans that the language of politics has become an incomprehensible jargon of the elite, and the sense that a disaster or a dramatic change that will upend everything looms at every moment — hidden from sight, but still imminent.

Mod: Just wanted to add this note here, which is now in the final post of the old thread:

Unsurprisingly, nyanta has been banned from the forum.

We also decided that due to the poisonous nature of his words, it would be a good idea to expunge almost that entire thread of discussion (some 15 pages worth). There were some excellent points made, but without the context of the poisonous posts things didn't really hold together, and with the context of those posts things were just... gross.

I've left posts not relating to the incident in place, as well as a handful of posts talking about this kind of trolling in the general sense rather than addressing this particular event.

Apologies to everybody for not being able to shut stuff down earlier and for excising much of your words contesting those poisonous views. And, thank you very much for reporting the problem.

Also left the kwisatz hadercat because wow.

Oh, man. The reason for that lawsuit is just pure Trump.

WaPo wrote:

The reimbursement from the golf course relates to payment the Trump Foundation made to settle a lawsuit against the Westchester club.

The case began in 2010, when a man named Martin Greenberg was playing in a charity tournament at the course. There was a $1 million prize for a hole-in-one on the 13th hole.

Greenberg aced the hole. Then, after a celebration, he was told he couldn’t claim the prize. The rules said the hole had to be a certain length. Trump’s club had allegedly made it too short.

Greenberg sued the golf club. The parties settled. On the day that the parties informed the court they had settled their case, a $158,000 donation was sent to the Martin Greenberg Foundation.

That money came from the Trump Foundation, according to the tax filings of both Trump’s and Greenberg’s foundations.

OG_slinger wrote:

Oh, man. The reason for that lawsuit is just pure Trump.

WaPo wrote:

The reimbursement from the golf course relates to payment the Trump Foundation made to settle a lawsuit against the Westchester club.

The case began in 2010, when a man named Martin Greenberg was playing in a charity tournament at the course. There was a $1 million prize for a hole-in-one on the 13th hole.

Greenberg aced the hole. Then, after a celebration, he was told he couldn’t claim the prize. The rules said the hole had to be a certain length. Trump’s club had allegedly made it too short.

Greenberg sued the golf club. The parties settled. On the day that the parties informed the court they had settled their case, a $158,000 donation was sent to the Martin Greenberg Foundation.

That money came from the Trump Foundation, according to the tax filings of both Trump’s and Greenberg’s foundations.

It could only get more Trump with an orange background and the top paragraph being badly covered.

Hypatian wrote:

kwisatz hadercat

Deserved special mention.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

kwisatz hadercat

Deserved special mention. :lol:

Now I want a new tag.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

kwisatz hadercat

Deserved special mention. :lol:

May His Meowing Cleanse the World.

BoogtehWoog wrote:

IMAGE(http://www.chud.com/articles/content_images/123/Creepshow%20King.jpg)

Just a little overgrown. Nothing to worry about. A little trimming and everything will be okay, right?

That pic sums it up. I regret being away and not cutting that guy off at the pass a lot sooner. So gross.

The Root of All Cruelty?

A recent episode of the dystopian television series “Black Mirror” begins with a soldier hunting down and killing hideous humanoids called roaches. It’s a standard science-fiction scenario, man against monster, but there’s a twist: it turns out that the soldier and his cohort have brain implants that make them see the faces and bodies of their targets as monstrous, to hear their pleas for mercy as noxious squeaks. When our hero’s implant fails, he discovers that he isn’t a brave defender of the human race—he’s a murderer of innocent people, part of a campaign to exterminate members of a despised group akin to the Jews of Europe in the nineteen-forties.

The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, commenting on this episode on social media, wondered whether its writer had read his book “Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others” (St. Martin’s). It’s a thoughtful and exhaustive exploration of human cruelty, and the episode perfectly captures its core idea: that acts such as genocide happen when one fails to appreciate the humanity of others.

One focus of Smith’s book is the attitudes of slave owners; the seventeenth-century missionary Morgan Godwyn observed that they believed the Negroes, “though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men” but, rather, “Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and treated accordingly.” Then there’s the Holocaust. Like many Jews my age, I was raised with stories of gas chambers, gruesome medical experiments, and mass graves—an evil that was explained as arising from the Nazis’ failure to see their victims as human. In the words of the psychologist Herbert C. Kelman, “The inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion.” The Nazis used bureaucratic euphemisms such as “transfer” and “selection” to sanitize different forms of murder.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted, “humankind ceases at the border of the tribe, of the linguistic group, even sometimes of the village.” Today, the phenomenon seems inescapable. Google your favorite despised human group—Jews, blacks, Arabs, gays, and so on—along with words like “vermin,” “roaches,” or “animals,” and it will all come spilling out. Some of this rhetoric is seen as inappropriate for mainstream discourse. But wait long enough and you’ll hear the word “animals” used even by respectable people, referring to terrorists, or to Israelis or Palestinians, or to undocumented immigrants, or to deporters of undocumented immigrants. Such rhetoric shows up in the speech of white supremacists—but also when the rest of us talk about white supremacists.

It’s not just a matter of words. At Auschwitz, the Nazis tattooed numbers on their prisoners’ arms. Throughout history, people have believed that it was acceptable to own humans, and there were explicit debates in which scholars and politicians mulled over whether certain groups (such as blacks and Native Americans) were “natural slaves.” Even in the past century, there were human zoos, where Africans were put in enclosures for Europeans to gawk at.

Early psychological research on dehumanization looked at what made the Nazis different from the rest of us. But psychologists now talk about the ubiquity of dehumanization. Nick Haslam, at the University of Melbourne, and Steve Loughnan, at the University of Edinburgh, provide a list of examples, including some painfully mundane ones: “Outraged members of the public call sex offenders animals. Psychopaths treat victims merely as means to their vicious ends. The poor are mocked as libidinous dolts. Passersby look through homeless people as if they were transparent obstacles. Dementia sufferers are represented in the media as shuffling zombies.”

The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal. Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth.

Also, Steve King RT'd Identity Europa today, which honestly, if you were a betting man, was probably even odds.

How Coral Researchers Are Coping With the Death of Reefs

When she was in high school, Madhavi Colton was known as Miss Enthusiasm. “I’ve always been a die-hard optimist,” she says. “I tend to be perky. In my family, I was always the one who thought that everything was going to be fine, that we can do this.”

Recent years have tested her optimism. Colton is now a director at Coral Reef Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting coral reefs. And corals need all the help they can get. A third of reef-building corals are in danger of extinction, and their growth rates have plummeted by 40 percent since the 1970s. They have been pummeled by hurricanes, disease, and pollution. Acidifying water makes it harder for them to create their rocky reefs. Rampant overfishing kills off the grazing fish that keep competitors like seaweed and algae in line. Rising temperatures force them to expel the symbiotic algae in their tissues, which normally provide them with both food and vivid colors. Without these partners, the corals starve and whiten. Once-lush ecosystems full of kaleidoscopic fish become spectral wastelands, where scuzzy green algae grows over the bleached white skeletons of dead and dying corals.

The continuing desecration has taken an immense toll on the mental health of people like Colton who have devoted their lives to studying and saving these ecosystems. How do you get up and go to work every day when every day brings fresh news of loss? When everything you are working to save is collapsing, how do you stop yourself from collapsing, too? Maybe everything isn’t going to be fine, after all. Maybe we can’t do this. “Are we going to lose an entire ecosystem on my watch? It’s demoralizing. It’s been really hard to find the optimism,” she says. “I think Miss Enthusiasm has gone away.”

There was a time, just a few decades ago, when this crisis seemed unimaginable, when reefs seemed invincible. Phil Dustan, from the College of Charleston, similarly remembers being fresh out of grad school and telling the famed explorer Jacques Cousteau that “reefs are so big that humans couldn’t hurt them.” Those words seem hopelessly naïve now. Dustan recently dove at Dancing Lady Reef in Jamaica—a place that he had studied as a graduate student in the 1970s, and where scientists “first became intimate with the science of reefs,” he says. “I dropped into the water and I just choked. It was like someone going through their home after a forest fire has gone through, picking through the ashes.” Elsewhere in the Caribbean, he took his son snorkeling at Carysfort Reef, another site of once-legendary beauty. “He stayed real close to me and he wouldn’t range around because he was fearful,” Dustan says. “Finally, he said: Dad, we have to leave this place. It creeps me out. It’s all dead.”

This catastrophe has unfolded slowly. Nancy Knowlton, from the Smithsonian Institution, says that when it comes to corals, the bad news is usually incremental, and only obvious to those who work in the affected places. “But what happened in the Great Barrier Reef was so spectacularly bad that you didn’t need to work there to know it was bad,” she says.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...

Two more women have told HuffPost that Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) touched their butts in separate incidents. These are the third and fourth such allegations against Franken in the past week.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/22/politi...

"Mr. Conyers is not going to resign," Reed said. "If everybody that was facing 'allegations' -- including the President, members of the House and Senate -- resigned, we'd have a lot of unemployed people walking around."

You heard it from the Dems first. You don't need to resign if it affects the unemployment rate!

Franken needs to go.

TAZ89 wrote:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...

Two more women have told HuffPost that Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) touched their butts in separate incidents. These are the third and fourth such allegations against Franken in the past week.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/22/politi...

"Mr. Conyers is not going to resign," Reed said. "If everybody that was facing 'allegations' -- including the President, members of the House and Senate -- resigned, we'd have a lot of unemployed people walking around."

You heard it from the Dems first. You don't need to resign if it affects the unemployment rate!

Amazing! You are right on top of this issue. Oh wait. I don't see any of the top story Rs in your post. Hmmm....

oilypenguin wrote:

Franken needs to go.

Yup. It's never just one.

TAZ89 wrote:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...

Two more women have told HuffPost that Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) touched their butts in separate incidents. These are the third and fourth such allegations against Franken in the past week.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/22/politi...

"Mr. Conyers is not going to resign," Reed said. "If everybody that was facing 'allegations' -- including the President, members of the House and Senate -- resigned, we'd have a lot of unemployed people walking around."

You heard it from the Dems first. You don't need to resign if it affects the unemployment rate!

It's a bad reason, but I'll take unemployment rate over "because we need the votes to pass tax reform".

oilypenguin wrote:

Franken needs to go.

Get bent, Franken isn't subject to your wang slinging. He invited an ethics investigation, and we should wait to see what unfolds. I'll just wait patiently for the Republicans to investigate Moore or Trump. Hang the man with humility who may be innocent in favor of the narcissistic child molesters who deny everything. HE TOTALLY DENIED IT. You make me sick.

Hockosi wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

Franken needs to go.

Get bent, Franken isn't subject to your wang slinging. He invited an ethics investigation, and we should wait to see what unfolds. I'll just wait patiently for the Republicans to investigate Moore or Trump. Hang the man with humility who may be innocent in favor of the narcissistic child molesters who deny everything. HE TOTALLY DENIED IT. You make me sick.

Uh, no, he is not innocent. Franken needs to gtfo.

Hockosi wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

Franken needs to go.

Get bent, Franken isn't subject to your wang slinging. He invited an ethics investigation, and we should wait to see what unfolds. I'll just wait patiently for the Republicans to investigate Moore or Trump. Hang the man with humility who may be innocent in favor of the narcissistic child molesters who deny everything. HE TOTALLY DENIED IT. You make me sick.

Ok thanks?

I can't control republicans (I know, I tried) but I'd like to hold my side to a higher standard. MN has a democratic governor and will get a D temp sen appointed. That person is likely to win the next election. Hell, if Franken is actually clear after the investigation, I'd welcome him back with open arms.

But instead of going, "but dem guys is worse," I'd like to actually set a standard for which I expect people to be held accountable.

Sorry I made you ill?

Also maybe rein in the personal attacks over the status of a senator neither of us elected?

Edit: Ok, yeah, I'm not done.

Look. I think he's almost absolved of incident 1. Bad joke. Idiot move. She forgave him after he apologized. Done.

Incident 2: Denied grabbing ass while taking a picture. Ok. Looks bad but ok.

Now we're up to 4.

He's not Roy Moore. Not in the least. But the optics are terrible and the press tends to weigh both sides equally regardless of reality. He's a distraction from the monstrous things happening in AL.

Step down. Get investigated. Come back if clean. That's the right thing to do.

Also please define “wang slinging.”

I’m not sure how an investigation will determine Franken is clean unless they call all of these women liars. I think I’m going to believe the women.

Yeah Franken has to go and I did help elect him because he’s my senator.

Hockosi wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

Franken needs to go.

Get bent, Franken isn't subject to your wang slinging. He invited an ethics investigation, and we should wait to see what unfolds. I'll just wait patiently for the Republicans to investigate Moore or Trump. Hang the man with humility who may be innocent in favor of the narcissistic child molesters who deny everything. HE TOTALLY DENIED IT. You make me sick.

Mod: WHOA. Cool down, please. It's okay to disagree with people. Please try not to cuss and shout at people, though. There are times when things hit us so personally that exclamations of outrage are understandable (even if not acceptable), but this is not one of those times.

I defended Al Franken in the previous thread, but yep, seems like that is it.

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