[News] Post a Political News Story

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.

MEANWHILE....

One of the ministers who serves a Theodore church where Roy Moore spoke Wednesday night was federally convicted of trying to block an investigation involving claims his son molested children in Honduras.

Rev. Bill Atkinson led the music portion of the Moore event at the Magnolia Springs Baptist Church, where the U.S. Senate candidate spoke for over 20 minutes and was interrupted twice by people in the audience.

In 2012, Atkinson was found guilty of obstruction and conspiracy for ordering two of his children to destroy a hard drive of a digital video recorder, which held evidence that incriminated his son for child molestation. At the time, William James "Will" Atkinson IV was in a Honduras jail awaiting trial on charges that he molested children at an orphanage the Atkinson family owned. Those allegations came to light when his younger brother, Jonathan Atkinson, set up a secret surveillance system in Will's office after some of the children said they had been touched inappropriately.

Authorities maintained that the eldest Atkinson then tried to get his son out of Honduras and back to Theodore.

Moore's still the odds-on favorite to win, mind.

I suggest, since Cotton does not believe waterboarding is torture, that he submit to waterboarding until he changes his stupid ass mind.

Jayhawker wrote:

I suggest, since Cotton does not believe waterboarding is torture, that he submit to waterboarding until he changes his stupid ass mind.

It's Archer, so semi-NSFW...

tl;dw - changed his tune, right quick.

OG_slinger wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:

Looks like Tillerson may be on the way out, to be replaced by Pompeo.

NYT

On the one hand, I've hated Tillerson since before he started.

On the other hand... Pompeo.

It's just chaos over there.

Yeah, while I have grave concerns about Tillerson... then there's Pompeo.

What? No one's going to say anything about Tom Cotton becoming the new head of the CIA? The 40-year-old with no intelligence experience who's been quietly pushing Trump into open hostilities with Iran (and supporting Trump's sabre rattling with North Korea) and who once said "...the only problem with Guantánamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now"?

EDIT: Prederickhaused with sauces.

My horror processes slowly.

The Trump Administration Is Mulling A Pitch For A Private “Rendition” And Spy Network

Now, "mulling a pitch" does not mean "is currently undertaking", to be fair.

WASHINGTON – The White House and CIA have been considering a package of secret proposals to allow former US intelligence officers to run privatized covert actions, intelligence gathering, and propaganda missions, according to three sources who’ve been briefed on or have direct knowledge of the proposals.

One of the proposals would involve hiring a private company, Amyntor Group, for millions of dollars to set up a large intelligence network and run counter terrorist propaganda efforts, according to the sources. Amyntor’s officials and employees include veterans of a variety of US covert operations, ranging from the Reagan-era Iran-Contra affair to more recent actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Amyntor declined to discuss the proposals, but a lawyer for the company said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that the type of contract being contemplated would be legal “with direction and control by the proper government authority.”

Another proposal presented to US officials would allow individuals affiliated with the company to help capture wanted terrorists on behalf of the United States. In keeping with that proposal, people close to the company are tracking two specific suspects in a Middle Eastern country, the sources said, for possible “rendition” to the United States.

A source speaking on behalf of the company stressed that while Amyntor officials are aware of and involved in the rendition plan, the company itself would not be involved.

Looks like Amyntor Group is another Whitefish Energy: a tiny-ass company HQ'd in the sticks of Montana whose grand idea is that they're just going to subcontract everything.

Another company based out of Whitefish, MT. What's the deal with Whitefish. I know Zinke is connected to there. That's how we got that no-bid company fixing the power grid in Puerto Rico. Prior to this, though, the main thing Whitefish was known for was Richard Spencer oh...

DSGamer wrote:

What's the deal with Whitefish.

The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote an article about the Flathead Valley years before Spencer moved there.

SPLC wrote:

What is happening in Montana — thanks to this newest wave of extremists — is a convergence of two “separatist” ideas that have long fermented in the brew of Pacific Northwest extremism. The antigovernment “Patriots,” the larger of the two movements, want to establish a remote base of like-minded allies as a bastion of resistance for the day when, as they believe, the government will impose martial law. White supremacists are organizing around the idea of forming a long-desired all-white homeland far away from the multicultural cities.

The idea of staking a claim in the American West is tied intimately to Montana’s history and identity. The state is quintessentially Western, predominantly white, and home to a frontier ethos of militant individualism and support for the Second Amendment. Moreover, Montana’s residents tend to distrust the federal government, which is seen as a distant meddler, and they are vigilantly protective of the privacy afforded by the state’s remote location and rugged terrain.

Such an environment has historically drawn antigovernment and extremist groups — from the Freemen to the Militia of Montana, founded in 1994 by John Trochmann, a militant with white supremacist leanings. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski also was caught after years of hiding in Montana’s remote forests in 1996.

Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former top strategist and the chairman of the right-wing Web site Breitbart News, told me, “Next to Trump, he’s the elected official who gets it the most—the economic nationalism.”

"Economic" in this case means "white".

So the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could be, y'know, pretty important long-term.

Planet Money did a great little story on it recently.

In the winter of 2010, there was a robbery in Detroit. Two men rush into a Radio Shack on Jefferson Avenue carrying a handgun, and demand smartphones, enough smartphones to fill laundry bags. Then they flee. A few days later, they do it again at a T-Mobile store. And a few months after that, another robbery. They are criminals that need to be stopped.

Police try to gather every bit of evidence they can use to catch the robbers and make the case stick.

By the time Timothy Carpenter is facing robbery charges, the FBI already has a trove of data on him. Enough data to piece together an intimate portrait of his life. They could tell where he went and when, which Sundays he skipped out on church, and which nights he decided to sleep somewhere other than his own house.

They could also tell he was near a Radio Shack in Detroit just about the time it was held up by two armed men.

Authorities had this information because they had Carpenter's cell phone number. Police asked Carpenter's cell phone carrier to turn over 200 spreadsheets detailing where his phone was at the beginning and end of every call for four months straight. They didn't even need a warrant. That's how it works. Each major cell phone carrier gets tens of thousands of requests like this one from law enforcement every year.

For Tim Carpenter, this information helped land him in prison for 116 years.

But should police be able to get that level of intimate data so easily? That's the question before The Supreme Court right now.

Today on the show, the story of Tim Carpenter, his cell phone, and the court battle it sparked.

The government says this kind of data helps fight crime and stop criminals like Carpenter. They say it's like old fashioned police work — tailing someone or staking out a suspect's home — adapted for the digital age. Carpenter's attorneys argue that this is a whole new level of surveillance, seizing this data without a warrant is a violation of the 4th amendment, which protects against illegal searches and seizures. They say this has huge stakes: Everyone is walking around with a spy in their pocket, gathering data on the intimate details of our lives. The police shouldn't be able to get that data so easily.

The case could reach well beyond cell phone location records — and affect what kind of privacy we can expect for all the footprints we leave behind in the digital age.

The Intercept goes into more detail

The case is about much more than cell-site records; it requires the Supreme Court to scrutinize one of the basic tenets of surveillance law – what lawyers call the “third-party doctrine.” The decades-old doctrine is based on the idea that people forfeit their expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment when they voluntarily hand over information to private companies, like banks and telecom and internet companies. When the government is investigating a criminal suspect, it can then obtain information from the third party without a warrant.

The doctrine has its origins in a 1979 Supreme Court case, in which the court ruled that police did not need a warrant to obtain a list of numbers that called a certain phone. Since the information appeared on a monthly phone bill, the court reasoned at the time, the government was simply requesting information people consented to hand over.

That idea formed part of the legal underpinning for a now-defunct NSA surveillance program that the agency used to collect the phone records of every American in bulk. After NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, Congress passed a law to amend it in 2015.

Wednesday’s case asks the court to re-examine the third-party doctrine in a fundamental way. Lawyers for Carpenter conceded that he agreed to have his location tracked by his cellphone provider, but said it was entirely different for the police to access that data over a sustained period of time and to use that to piece together a picture of someone’s life.

Gremlin wrote:

Yeah, Roy Moore makes more sense now. He's friends with a group of vultures and serial sexual assaulters who have been preying on homeschoolers for the past decade or two. They've been covering for pedophiles for ages.

Like, did you think that was hyperbole? Because I wasn't using hyperbole:

Minister who sang for Roy Moore lied for son accused of molesting Honduran orphans

Gremlin wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

Yeah, Roy Moore makes more sense now. He's friends with a group of vultures and serial sexual assaulters who have been preying on homeschoolers for the past decade or two. They've been covering for pedophiles for ages.

Like, did you think that was hyperbole? Because I wasn't using hyperbole:

Minister who sang for Roy Moore lied for son accused of molesting Honduran orphans

Just as a thought experiment, if this had been a minister in, say, Scientology or Mormonism, how do you think this would be portrayed? My guess is that there would be "investigative" pieces in Faux News about how pedophilia was a secret tenet of their religion.

Paleocon wrote:
Gremlin wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

Yeah, Roy Moore makes more sense now. He's friends with a group of vultures and serial sexual assaulters who have been preying on homeschoolers for the past decade or two. They've been covering for pedophiles for ages.

Like, did you think that was hyperbole? Because I wasn't using hyperbole:

Minister who sang for Roy Moore lied for son accused of molesting Honduran orphans

Just as a thought experiment, if this had been a minister in, say, Scientology or Mormonism, how do you think this would be portrayed? My guess is that there would be "investigative" pieces in Faux News about how pedophilia was a secret tenet of their religion.

As opposed to pedophillia being an open tenet of their religion. (The Federalist just published an op-ed that said older men should date 14-year-olds so that they can have more children.)

Though the Christian patriarchy/quiverfull/fundamentalist movement features both extremely controlling fathers dictating who their children date (or, rather, court--no "secular dating" for those kids) and repeated instances of covering up for child molesters. Doug Phillips/Vision Forum is linked to the Duggars (who covered up their own scandal); the Sovereign Grace churches were covering for child molesters for decades, Bill Gothard turned out to be molesting his underage interns in really weird ways.

Doug Phillips had a close relationship with the Duggars; when the Duggars discovered that their son was molesting children the had a police officer give him a stern talking to (the police officer was later convicted for child pornography) and sent him to Bill Gothard's institute. All these people know each other, at least professionally.

I don't know how close Roy Moore is to them. Doug Phillips may have just recruited him on the strength of the ten commandments thing. But there's a huge unexamined problem with molesters in the Christian fundamentalist space.

Edit: of course Roy Moore is connected with Christian Reconstructionism. (Doug Phillips was an open proponent of Rushdoony.) I should have pointed that out too. Christian Reconstructionism believes that slavery was good and the holocaust didn't happen.

Salon: Exploring the radical roots of Roy Moore’s theocratic Christianity

Meanwhile, McConnell says they've got the votes for the tax bill.

Helluva week, eh?

Police Failed on Many Fronts at Charlottesville Rally, Review Finds

The police badly mishandled white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Va., in August, by failing to coordinate among agencies, give officers the gear they needed or keep protesters and counterprotesters separate, a former federal prosecutor reported on Friday.

In a report more than 200 pages long, Timothy J. Heaphy, a former United States attorney hired by the city to investigate the episode, found fault with elected city leaders and University of Virginia officials, but directed the sharpest criticism at the Charlottesville Police Department, or C.P.D., and the Virginia State Police, or V.S.P. He said the police remained passive even as bloody clashes raged around them.

“V.S.P. directed its officers to remain behind barricades rather than risk injury responding to conflicts” on Aug. 12, he wrote. “C.P.D. commanders similarly instructed their officers not to intervene in all but the most serious physical confrontations.”

Both agencies failed to deploy additional forces that were available to respond to the clashes, he added, and in fact, “when violence was most prevalent, C.P.D. commanders pulled officers back to a protected area of the park, where they remained for over an hour as people in the large crowd fought on Market Street.”

“V.S.P. directed its officers to remain behind barricades rather than risk injury responding to conflicts” on Aug. 12, he wrote. “C.P.D. commanders similarly instructed their officers not to intervene in all but the most serious physical confrontations.”

Sounds like they had the same problems as just about ever PD in the country seems to be struggling with.

Your job is to protect and serve the public first. Your job is not firstly for yourself to be safe at all times to the exclusion of the public you are supposed to be protecting.

Instead, they did the crowd control equivalent of shooting someone first then trying to figure out if that was justifiable or not after.

I'm trying to think of something more cartoonishly villainous than a minister molesting Honduran orphans, and I'm coming up blank.

BadKen wrote:

I'm trying to think of something more cartoonishly villainous than a minister molesting Honduran orphans, and I'm coming up blank.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?438001...

I think this is in the running.
Edit: Link is to live-stream of Senate Session discussing "Tax Reform Bill."

Demosthenes wrote:

Your job is to protect and serve the public first.

It's very important to understand that this is not true, and the police know it. Castle Rock v. Gonzales is the latest in a long line of legal decisions that have established that the police have no duty whatsoever to protect and serve, and will not be held accountable in even the most appalling cases. And it's clear that's exactly what the police leadership was thinking in Charlottesville. It wasn't a failure of coordination or equipment, it was a deliberate decision to let the violence escalate and stay out of it.

At a press conference Friday morning, Heaphy said he heard from a couple of officers in the police command center that Charlottesville police chief Al Thomas said, “Let them fight for a little. It will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.”

Good point Aetius. It should be their job. It's what they themselves claim their job is.

But that's very much not what their job actually is anymore. :\

This week has been insane.

I have nothing else to add, I just wanted to say that.

Prederick wrote:

This week has been insane.

I have nothing else to add, I just wanted to say that.

I suspect that of the last 52, one could consider less then half of them sane.

ABC has finally clarified they meant *during the transition*.

EDIT: Credit to Brian Ross, who reported, erroneously, that it was "as a candidate" and managed to knock 1.2% off the Dow in the process.

They'll probably make it back with a bit more on Monday.

THIs is going to be a pretty awesome issue to run on in the midterms next extended year. They passed it late on a Friday night before anyone could read it to hide what the hell they had done.

I don’t think it will be defendable going forward. This could flip a chunk of deplorables.

Jayhawker wrote:

THIs is going to be a pretty awesome issue to run on in the midterms next extended year. They passed it late on a Friday night before anyone could read it to hide what the hell they had done.

I don’t think it will be defendable going forward. This could flip a chunk of deplorables.

I doubt the last part. I think they’re too far gone.

DSGamer wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

THIs is going to be a pretty awesome issue to run on in the midterms next extended year. They passed it late on a Friday night before anyone could read it to hide what the hell they had done.

I don’t think it will be defendable going forward. This could flip a chunk of deplorables.

I doubt the last part. I think they’re too far gone.

There's a reason the middle-class provisions expire and the upper-class cuts are permanent. GOP will tout the tax cuts without mentioning that they expire in 2027. GOP voters aren't worried about 9 years from now, they are short-term thinkers.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

You have to pass it to see what's in it

Guess the lootbox ban's too late to take care of that.