US Politics November 2017

why not, it is the 21st century and nothing makes sense anymore

all of this makes perfect sense, it's just horrifying

also I'm not entirely sure what her twitter statement means

Perpetual War politics: as with the Cong in Vietnam, if the US kills you, you're obviously ISIS:

"Between April 2016 and June 2017, we visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes across northern Iraq, not long after ISIS was evicted from them. We toured the wreckage; we interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors, family members, intelligence informants and local officials; we photographed bomb fragments, scoured local news sources, identified ISIS targets in the vicinity and mapped the destruction through satellite imagery. We also visited the American air base in Qatar where the coalition directs the air campaign. There, we were given access to the main operations floor and interviewed senior commanders, intelligence officials, legal advisers and civilian-casualty assessment experts. We provided their analysts with the coordinates and date ranges of every airstrike — 103 in all — in three ISIS-controlled areas and examined their responses. The result is the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since this latest military action began in 2014.

"We found that one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. It is at such a distance from official claims that, in terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history. Our reporting, moreover, revealed a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all. While some of the civilian deaths we documented were a result of proximity to a legitimate ISIS target, many others appear to be the result simply of flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants. In this system, Iraqis are considered guilty until proved innocent. Those who survive the strikes, people like Basim Razzo, remain marked as possible ISIS sympathizers, with no discernible path to clear their names."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/16/magazine/uncounted-civilian-casualties-iraq-airstrikes.html

"if i had a dollar for ever time i find myself thinking"

^ too easy, we can't think ourselves rich, lady.

Otoh: what a terrible shitshow to see her twitter mentions. What she became "famous" for was 20 (TWENTY) years ago. And there wasn't the amplification of social media back then. Boy is there right now. She's experiencing dozens of ppl shouting at her every single day because of something twenty years ago. I applaud her for staying so cool and level headed. I wouldn't be able to cope.

also I'm not entirely sure what her twitter statement means

― akm, Thursday, November 16, 2017 4:41 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

she’s saying bill and hillary have gotten off easy, and she’s right

Hillary got off easy

?

Why senators shouldn't be so quick to expel Roy Moore should he win.,

that just seems like a weird thing to say re: Lewinsky

xp

http://cookpolitical.com/analysis/house/house-overview/wave-comin

her role in the gennifer flowers case was pretty fucked up, and probably would have been received a lot differently today

yeah that's true

Congressional Office of Compliance releases year-by-year breakdown of harassment settlements and awards: pic.twitter.com/vxbezi22wb

— Reid Wilson (@PoliticsReid) November 16, 2017

at the same time I do feel like she suffered plenty from that whole debacle (Bill, not so much)

xp

DJP otm

not a patch on fox news' payouts in total money involved, but that seems like a lot of separate incidents.

also considering that's taxpayer money, it seems like more details might be in order

man what happened in 2002 and 2007 lol

It's taxpayer money but it goes back into the economy. Plaintiffs and their attorneys buy goods and services with it, so it's all good, right? It trickles back up.

Alabama Senate poll (Fox News)

Jones (D) 50%
Moore (R) 42% https://t.co/mN9Lvg8tK4

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) November 16, 2017

I'm not sure but that's a really tight window

haha

pic.twitter.com/xb6Fo8oPNS

— warrior cop (@wyatt_privilege) November 15, 2017

Senate continues to devolve
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/16/chuck-grassley-trump-court-picks-245367?lo=ap_a1

ha, someone uncovered a tax break for owners of private plans. That's the middle class for you.

maybe I just totally misread Monica's twitter but I thought she was referencing the hypocrisy of those defending Moore while others call for Franken to resign. but maybe I am overthinking it.

i'm almost impressed by how brazenly evil this tax plan is. they really have no respect for their voters at all.

well their voters are letting them get away with it

there's nothing to say except it represents a severely malfunctioning democratic system

Lewinsky's twitter post was from October 19th. Who knows what it was about? So much shit has gone down that I can't even remember what was happening that far back

After Al Franken and Roy Moore, We Are Dangerously Close To Botching The #MeToo Moment

Today, two women accused Senator Al Franken (D-MN) of harassment. Radio host and model Leeann Tweeden wrote that back when she and then-prominent comedian Franken were on a USO tour together in 2006, he forcibly kissed her during rehearsals for the show. Accompanying the story was a photo of Franken reaching for Tweeden’s breasts while Tweeden appeared to be asleep. Franken has apologized and called for a formal ethics investigation into his conduct. Reaction from the left was swift and mostly damning. Democrats have no moral authority on the issue of sexual assault and harassment unless they condemn it from everybody, even their caucus’s class clown.

On the heels of Tweeden’s disturbing allegations, however, another woman came forward claiming that she too had been “stalked and harassed” by Franken. Melanie Morgan teased her accusation with a Tweet, and then directed curious readers to her website. On her website, she described how Franken called her more than once because he disagreed with how she was discussing a policy issue on the radio.

Even giving Morgan the extremely generous benefit of the doubt, it’s hard to pretend what she alleges Franken did is the same thing as what Tweeden’s picture shows Franken actually doing. Nor is what Tweeden’s picture shows, horrible as it is, the same as what somebody like Roger Ailes or Bill Clinton did.

Which gets to a problem. Right now, the court of public opinion is faced with the awkward task of assigning degrees of severity to sexual misconduct, because, while they all cause harm, they don’t all cause the same amount of harm and thus don’t merit the same punishment. Furthermore, punishment varies by the power the offender wields. A senator, for example, should have a much higher moral threshold than, say, a comedian. Writing in The New Yorker this week, Masha Gessen treads lightly in making this point, warning that the #MeToo moment could devolve into “sex panic” if we’re not careful. “The distinctions between rape and coercion are meaningful, in the way it is meaningful to distinguish between, say, murder and battery,” Gessen writes.

One’s political ideology or past advocacy doesn’t mean it’s impossible for a person to be victimized by somebody with opposing ideology. But if what she’s written is all she’s got, Morgan’s account reeks of naked political opportunism, of weaponizing victimhood in a way that is so morally bankrupt that it threatens to derail the entire #MeToo conversation for selfish political ends.

(I suppose it also bears mentioning here that while Fox News’ primetime lineup was going up in flames thanks to decades of sexual misconduct coming to light, Morgan was leading the charge to protect men like Bill O’Reilly—who has settled tens of millions of dollars worth of sexual harassment lawsuits during his career—from being fired for what Morgan called “dubious” reasons.)

WTF with Melanie Morgan, what an attention hog. No that is not the same goddamned thing.

i just saw that the photographer said that photo was staged and was her idea? maybe that's why franken called for an ethics investigation on himself.

unnamed twitter rumor though, but who knows.

tom price flights, no obamacare repeal; al franken bulletproof vest groping, obamacare (individual mandate) repeal / american feudalism?

America notices sex only, I've noticed

I'm sorry, but Donald Trump is really on dangerous territory tweeting about Al Franken

dangerous? feels pretty in his wheelhouse

The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps? .....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 17, 2017

he really wants all of his shit to be dragged up? ok then

I think Donald’s id is tweeting directly while he has an erotic daydream

xp What could possibly happen to him? They won't impeach him. He has nothing to lose re: piling on sexual assault allegations.

He knows no one's gonna call him on his own shit, and he sees an opportunity to damage an enemy = standard Trump

but I think it's only a matter of time before the focus of this turns to him, at least I hope

Remember when we had Presidents who could spell "Frankenstein"?

I miss that.

Not gonna happen Dan, ppl already voted, case closed as far as public + GOP is concerned

but I think it's only a matter of time before the focus of this turns to him, at least I hope

― Dan S, Thursday, November 16, 2017

nope

That’s where he pretty much wants it. There’s no mechanism forcing him to leave at all, might as well be the spotlight of all conversations concurrently.

just sitting here agog at "al frankenstien" and the idea that trump actually believes himself to be an actual genius bc of that sickest of burns

lol

Hey, it was good enough for Ben Garrison

tbf he also dropped “short and fat” this week, whaddaya think of that? ZING