USA News and Discussions

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caltrek
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weatheriscool wrote: Tue May 31, 2022 6:23 pm
caltrek wrote: Tue May 31, 2022 4:24 pm Putin Coaches Orban and the GOP
by Thom Hartmann
May 22, 2022

Introduction:
...
Read more here: https://www.laprogressive.com/progressi ... -the-gop

Isn't preserving culture and national heritage important? Thousands of years of tradition. I wouldn't want to see Japan, China, Nigerian, or any culture being wiped from this planet. I feel that the Hungarians have every right to preserving their beliefs and culture. The republicans are welcome to preserve what they feel is their culture and heritage. I miss the time when the left and liberalism used to agree with the concept of protecting culture and letting people honor their forbears.
What are some examples of "the left and liberalism" not agreeing "with the concept of protecting culture and letting people honor their forbears"?
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caltrek
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Trump’s “Russia Hoax” Narrative Just Took a Big Blow
by Dan Friedman
May 31, 2022

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) The Trump-Russia scandal feels like ancient history. But the truth still matters. And the narrative of what occurred remains fiercely contested, as advocates of the former president press the false claim that the entire scandal was a hoax fabricated by his foes.

A jury’s acquittal Tuesday of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, after just six hours of deliberation, on a charge he lied to the FBI in 2016 when he shared a tip about potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, was an embarrassing defeat for the three-year-plus investigation of special counsel John Durham. But it was also a blow against the attempt to rewrite history to vindicate the wild lies of a man who hopes to be elected president again.

Durham was first appointed by Attorney General William Barr in May 2019, just after Barr used lies to bury special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Durham’s charge was to investigate the origins of DOJ’s Russia investigation and determine if related intelligence collection was “lawful and appropriate.” (Barr gave Durham special counsel status in October 2020.) Durham has not identified any wrongdoing on that front.
Conclusion:
All the exertions of Durham and Trump backers to suggest malfeasance in the origin of the Trump Russia investigation cannot alter what was found: Trump knowingly benefited from Russian efforts to interfere in US politics on his behalf. He lied extensively about his campaign’s ties to Russia, about the business interest he had in Russia, even as he publicly sucked up to Vladimir Putin. He obstructed justice to cover up his actions.

It’s true that suspicions of a more organized conspiracy, despite some unresolved evidence, have not been borne out. And early speculation that drew wide attention, including the server story, have gone unsubstantiated. Some claims were overhyped. But Donald Trump and his enablers are running a campaign to use this lack of a resolution, this muddle, and the human dislike of nuance, to declare he did nothing wrong at all when it comes to Russia. He will probably repeat this on the campaign trail. It is a lie, a false narrative. It took a hit Tuesday.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... big-blow/

Edit: Courthouse News also had an article presented prior to the acquittal on this same topic: https://www.courthousenews.com/sussmann ... eractions/
Last edited by caltrek on Thu Jun 02, 2022 8:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Vakanai
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Re: USA News and Discussions

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wjfox wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 7:28 am
I can believe neither of those two have a clue what a woman is...
weatheriscool
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Chesa Boudin ousted as San Francisco district attorney in historic recall
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco voters tossed District Attorney Chesa Boudin from office on Tuesday, favoring a recall effort that argued his progressive reforms were too lenient and made the city less safe.

Boudin was trailing by 24 percentage points, according to the first batch of election results released at 8:45 p.m. Tuesday.

Boudin will be removed from office 10 days after the Board of Supervisors formally accepted the election results. The city’s more moderate mayor, London Breed, would choose his immediate replacement, and voters would elect a new district attorney in November. With a failed recall vote, Boudin would be up for re-election in November 2023.

The results capped off a furious debate over crime and criminal justice in San Francisco, with the two sides fighting over Boudin’s approach to incarceration and rehabilitation and his leadership. As his supporters lauded his efforts to find alternatives to jails and prisons — which he said had failed the public for decades — his detractors slammed him as too permissive.
Read more: https://www.sfchronicle.com/election/ar ... 226641.php

If you're weak on crime and you let criminals do evil shit to good people they will vote you out. Let this be a warning!
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caltrek
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San Francisco Voters Just Ousted Their Reformist District Attorney
by Samantha Michaels
June 7, 2022

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) San Francisco voters approved a measure to recall the city’s embattled district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in the primary election on Tuesday.

With 45 percent of the expected votes counted and Boudin trailing by about 23 percentage points, Boudin conceded defeat around 9:30 p.m. “This was never about one vote count. It was never about one election night party. This is a movement, not a moment in history,” he told a crowd of his supporters, according to New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller.

Boudin, a former public defender, took office in 2020. He was elected with endorsements from progressive heavyweights like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and was one of numerous reform-minded district attorneys around the country who pledged to reimagine the role of prosecutors by rolling back mass incarceration, holding violent police officers accountable, and limiting racial injustices in the criminal legal system.

But he soon became a target for tough-on-crime critics who, in several cities, have sought to oust those very same district attorneys.
In all these places, “people are using fear narratives to paint a picture that reform and safety are opposite,” Akhi Johnson, a former prosecutor who now works at the Vera Institute of Justice, a think tank, told me recently. Progressive chief prosecutors in Los Angles, Chicago, and multiple districts in Virginia have faced recall proposals recently. But so far, Boudin is the only one to go down in the fight. “The pushback is becoming organized and targeted,” Jamila Hodge, an attorney who now helps lead the criminal justice reform group Equal Justice USA, told me last year as the recall effort against Boudin was getting off the ground. “It scares me that we’re seeing it get to this level.”
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... ttorney/

By way of background, her is a previous article by the same writer:

Introduction:
San Francisco is on the cusp of a historic recall election that could boot out one of the country’s most progressive district attorneys, Chesa Boudin, who took office in early 2020. Boudin, whose parents were incarcerated when he was just a baby, has rattled the establishment by trying to lower the city’s jail population and divert low-level offenders from prisons—changes that he says will, in the long run, keep the community safer. His critics, who include venture capitalists and a Republican billionaire, accuse him of turning San Francisco into a lawless Gotham City.

Their fight against Boudin is part of a broader tough-on-crime movement that has gained momentum during the pandemic. In Los Angeles, progressive District Attorney George Gascón faces a well-funded recall effort, too. Last year, so did multiple prosecutors in Virginia who campaigned on similar promises to make the legal system fairer for low-income people and people of color. In March, an Illinois lawmaker introduced a bill to recall reformist State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, accusing her of creating a “crisis of confidence in the Cook County judicial system.”

In all these places, “people are using fear narratives to paint a picture that reform and safety are opposite,” says Akhi Johnson, a former prosecutor who now works at the Vera Institute of Justice, a think tank that collaborates with progressive district attorneys. For instance, one anti-Boudin group in San Francisco wrote recently on its website that “as car break-ins, burglaries, and overdoses reach a crisis level in San Francisco, Boudin’s refusal to hold serial offenders and drug dealers accountable is putting more of us at risk.” Fearmongering like this can be persuasive: A few polls suggest that a majority of San Francisco voters (between 57 and 68 percent) now want to oust Boudin in the recall, including many Democrats. (One poll, commissioned by Boudin’s supporters, suggested that 48 percent of voters want to recall him.)

Boudin’s critics say they feel unsafe under his leadership. But the thing is, while the pandemic has undoubtedly heightened existing crises around homelessness, drug use, and mental health in San Francisco and elsewhere, crime rates are not spiraling out of control, and there’s no evidence that Boudin or other DAs are responsible for the upticks that have occurred. In fact, academics who studied progressive prosecutors around the country found that their policies did not cause violence to rise….here’s a breakdown of the most relevant research about crime rates, progressive prosecutors, and the link (or lack thereof) between the two.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-just ... kim-foxx/
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caltrek
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Study Finds Supreme Court on Far Right of American Public
by Kelsey Reichmann
June 7, 2022

Extract::
(Courthouse News) — WASHINGTON (CN) — Ten years ago, the Supreme Court’s rulings were generally in line with the preferences of most Americans.

That’s no longer the case, however, according to a decade-long study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The court’s rulings shift away from public opinion when surveyed in 2021 after Justice Brett Kavanaugh became the median justice on the court. The conservative majority became a conservative supermajority, shifting the bench rightward ideologically.

“The public is kind of saying one thing, and the court is actually moving more to the right,” Sen said.

While the study found that the court leans more conservative as compared with the average American, the public underestimated just how conservative its rulings were. Most survey respondents predicted that the justices’ rulings would be mostly in line with their views, but the decisions were actually more conservative. In particular, the study found that Democrats were more likely to underestimate the court’s conservative lean.
Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/study-f ... n-public/
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weatheriscool
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Biden: Tuesday primaries sent 'clear message' voters want tough-on-crime policies
Source: The Hill
President Biden said that Tuesday’s primary results in California, Mississippi and other states sent a message that voters want leaders who will take a tough stance on crime.

“I think the voters sent a clear message last night. Both parties have to step up and do something about crime, as well as gun violence,” Biden told reporters on Wednesday before boarding Air Force One to travel to California.

He called on states and localities to spend billions of dollars allocated in the American Rescue Plan “to hire police officers and reform the police departments.”

“Very few have done it,” he said.
Read more: https://thehill.com/news/administration ... -policies/
weatheriscool
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Attorney General Garland Condemns Violent Threats Against Supreme Court Justices
Source: Bloomberg News
US Attorney General Merrick Garland condemned threats of violence against justices of the Supreme Court, saying they “strike at the heart of our democracy.”

“We will do everything we can to prevent them,” Garland told reporters Wednesday at a news conference to announce a team led by the Justice Department to review the police response to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

His remarks came after an armed man who had threatened Justice Brett Kavanaugh was arrested near the justice’s home in the early morning.

The federal review of last month’s massacre, which left 19 elementary school students and two teachers dead, comes amid a national debate on gun control and mounting criticism that Texas state and local officials aren’t providing the public with important information about law enforcement’s response to the shooter.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... t-justices
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Re: USA News and Discussions

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I very much recommend listening to this:
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
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Re: USA News and Discussions

Post by SerethiaFalcon »

I listened to the whole thing, and while on some of it I can relate or find commonality, as I also tend to be in the center (but a little left instead of right), I still have some things I disagree with. One of my concerns is the hyper-focus on IQ (granted this was mostly towards the end). Personally, I don't think this is a good metric for measuring intelligence, because it does not account for exposure. What I mean is, if you do an IQ test for a tribe in the Amazon jungle, they may not perform highly on it due to having not been exposed to all the information through school. However, this does not mean they actually have a low IQ. In fact, sometimes this is proven otherwise as in the case of Steve Saint's account of a dentist bringing his equipment into the tribe (Waodani), and in the middle of fixing teeth, had to step away. When he returned, he was stunned due to a member of the tribe finishing the job. When he asked how they figured it out, they said they just watched him do it. IQ tests are also mostly multiple choice. This tests memory and guessing or figuring out the right answer through the process of elimination. It does not test the ability to figure out the answer without any clues, which is entirely different.

I also think relying on data is always going to be finicky because data doesn't tell the whole story. However, they did point this out but still relied on it much too heavily in my opinion (without making room for error). But, the focus on IQ made it hard for me to then trust their perspective on other things. IQ is equivalent in my mind to relying on the Myers-Briggs personality test to put people into boxes. I can, unfortunately, agree with their points about the media being mostly left-leaning and that there are things presented as fact that are so far from the fact it is ridiculous. Definitely trying to support a narrative there. It is difficult for any media to be unbiased, but in this day and age, that has gone further.

Personally, I do think part of the lack of conservative opinions in media is that they don't jump into new technologies as quickly as other groups. I could be wrong, but that has been my experience with conservative groups in my own life. When they arrive late to new media, they tend to have less influence (some arrive early, though, but are a lot quieter or less active than other individuals). The other problem is twofold, holding on to tradition rather than cutting edge opinions is typically not popular with youth, and since American culture has been idolizing youthfulness for a long time, that is what happens. The left takes over because they aren't as focused on preserving tradition or at least don't have that kind of language. The other part of it that they kind of touched on is the right tends to love to argue to the point where they undermine each other, which means unification is a bit more difficult sometimes. Especially when there are so many that think in such strict ways (meaning it is either all this or all that). The left has become more this way as well, just, traditionally the right had that problem and continues to have that problem from what I've seen. Only when they are in a perceived life or death situation do they unify. In my opinion, the right is this way because they like to be right/correct, whereas the left has this problem because of hierarchical squabbles (aka my suffering is greater than your suffering or I deserve more credit for my experiences than you do, etc). This is not discounting the bullying that happens online, though. I'm just saying that if a group is dominating another group in media, it is usually because they are more familiar with the technology, have made better connections with powerful people for one reason or another, or dominate the conversation due to mastering the creative uses of the technology first/talking about something that is more popular (again for varied reasons). Tradition is never going to be popular with youth, at least not fully, so that is rarely going to be the driver of popular culture. If it is perceived as rebellious, then possibly, but only until it is no longer rebellious (which means it will be popular for only a short time).

Old people are rarely the progenitors of cultural change, at least where media is concerned, even though they are most of the time in the majority (in the US at least). And by old, I'm talking anyone over the age of 30-40, depending on how youth define old. In the US, the focus is on the future/youth, especially in media. There is some catering to older individuals. Some movies have been remade as throwbacks to different eras (especially those that are relevant to Millenials), but Millenials are old now. Gen Z is starting to take over popular culture. Within five or so years, popular culture will revolve almost entirely around them, and they will use media that is different than what was popular in the Millenial era. I suspect some forms of the old media will be around, just like cable TV is still around, but it won't make much of a difference to the cutting edges of culture.

Also, when they focused on CNN, Fox, NBC, etc, they focused on the channels. Young people don't care about that stuff. TV is for old people anymore. I am even more obscure, as I prefer to read articles online, rather than watch news on TV. I find that when you actually get articles rather than TV, there can be better quality in writing and presenting of information. However, there is a lot of clickbait out there anymore as well. I find the news channels as a whole do better when they have to present information through writing than giving their opinions on TV. However, this is only valid when they write email newsletters or articles that are not for clickbait. Most young people get their news from the internet, with social media still being quite popular. Of course, TV and articles are valid to older generations, but that is not who is truly steering the ship of US popular culture/popular media. To me, by focusing on TV channels and majority opinions in the general US culture, he didn't actually get to the root of what media is driven by and why conservatives aren't reaching that mark.

These are side issues to the points he was making, and I still felt he presented the information well for his opinion and his analysis of things. The above paragraphs are just my thoughts on where he didn't address things in a way that convinced me.
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