U.S. Politics: Contempt and the Courts

[LongRider]

31 minutes ago, Gareth said:

HIPPA doesn't applies when a law is broken.  I'm sure Texas anti-abortion law has a stipulation that not reporting is subjective to a fine.  

SHE DID NOT COMMIT A CRIME.

 See above, the DA dropped the charge because they determined that no crime was committed.

 

[LongRider]

11 hours ago, Zorral said:

From other stories released now we learn that probably the woman arrested had a miscarriage not even a self-induced abortion. 

"Self-induced abortion" the new term for miscarriage in Texas.  

[LongRider]

23 hours ago, DMC said:

Elon Musk, free-speech absolutist, may be Trump’s Twitter ticket:

Seems like an obvious inference but didn't think about it when the news broke.

 

Guess Elon changed his mind.  Good, I was worried about Trump coming back to Twitter as well.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

23 minutes ago, LongRider said:

Guess Elon changed his mind.  Good, I was worried about Trump coming back to Twitter as well.

 

Every good Bond villain has setbacks. There's still a lot of chatter that he might try and take over the whole thing.

[LongRider]

5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Every good Bond villain has setbacks. There's still a lot of chatter that he might try and take over the whole thing.

Well, if that happens, I'll cancel my twitter account.   

[Zorral]

 

1 hour ago, LongRider said:

SHE DID NOT COMMIT A CRIME.

 See above, the DA dropped the charge because they determined that no crime was committed.

 

It's shocking that on this very board so many men attending remain ignorant of women's bodies, reproduction medical need, and the male instituted laws in the USA aimed at damaging their lives, physical, emotional and financial. Just like the DA in Texas who had her arrested for murder -- he didn't even know his own GODDAMN LAW, for which we pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.  SPIT!!!!!!!  Not to mention that goddamn sacred fetal heartbeat that doesn't exist because an embryo isn't a fetus and doesn't have a heart at all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fiona Hill: connecting dots; takes on Bush, Cheney, Obama, Trump, Putin, Manafort, Miller, Stone, Hillary etc.

"As one of the foremost experts on Putin and a current unofficial adviser to the Biden administration on the Russia-Ukraine war, Hill, 56, has already made a specialty of issuing warnings about the Russian leader that have gone unheeded by American presidents. "

She's on a book tour promoting her memoir. Review of the book: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/books/review-fiona-hill-there-is-nothing-for-you-here.html

Interview here: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/magazine/trump-putin-ukraine-fiona-hill.html

Subscription paywall, alas.  A long read, or one can click on the audio version.

Quote

 

.... Her descriptions of Russia’s president to her audience that morning — “living in his own bubble”; “a germaphobe”; “a shoot-the-messenger kind of person” — were both penetrating and eerily reminiscent of another domineering leader she came to know while serving as the National Security Council’s senior director of Russian and European affairs from April 2017 to July 2019. Though it stood to reason that a Putinologist of Fiona Hill’s renown would be much in demand after the invasion of Ukraine this February, it surprised me that her tenure in the Trump administration almost never came up in these discussions.

The Colorado events were part of a book tour that was scheduled long before the Russian attack. Her memoir, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century,” traces the journey of a literal coal miner’s daughter from working-class England to the White House. But it covers a period that can be understood as a prelude to the current conflict — Hill was present for the initial phase of Trump’s scheme to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who was elected in 2019, by withholding military aid in exchange for political favors. It is also an insider’s look at a chaotic, reckless and at times antidemocratic chief executive. (In response to queries for this article, Trump said of Hill: “She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about. If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing.”)

Her assessment of the former president has new resonance in the current moment: “In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.”

Looking back on the Trump years, Hill has slowly come to recognize the unsettling significance in disparate incidents and episodes that she did not have the arm’s-length view to appreciate in the moment. During our lunch, we discussed what it was like for her and others to have worked for Trump after having done the same for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Her meeting in the Bush White House in 2008, Hill told me, offered a sharp contrast to the briefings she sat in on during her tumultuous two years of service in the Trump administration. Unlike Trump, President Bush had read his briefing materials. His questions were respectful. She offered him an unpopular opinion and was not punished or frozen out for it. Even the vice president’s dyspeptic behavior that day did not unnerve her, she told me. “His emphasis was on the power of the executive branch,” she said. “It wasn’t on the unchecked power of one executive. And it was never to overturn the Constitution.”

Of her experience trying to steer policy during her two years in the Trump White House, Hill said: “It was extraordinarily difficult. Certainly, that was the case for those of us who were serving in the administration with the hopes of pushing back against the Russians, to make sure that their intervention in 2016 didn’t happen again. And along the way, some people kind of lost their sense of self.”

With a flash of a smile, she said: “We used to have this running shtick in our office at the N.S.C. As a kid, I was a great fan of Tolkien and ‘Lord of the Rings.’ So, in the Trump administration, we’d talk about the ring, and the fear of becoming Gollum” — the character deformed by his attachment to the powerful treasure — “obsessing over ‘my precious,’ the excitement and the power of being in the White House. And I did see a lot of people slipping into that.” When I asked Hill whom she saw as the Gollums in the Trump White House, she replied crisply: “The ones who wouldn’t testify in his impeachment hearing. Quite a few people, in other words.” ....

.... The relationship between the Trump campaign, and then the Trump administration, and Russia would have implications not just for the United States but, eventually, for Ukraine as well. The litany of Trump-Russia intersections remains remarkable: Citizen Trump’s business pursuits in Moscow, which continued throughout his candidacy. Candidate Trump’s abiding affinity for Putin. The incident in which the Trump campaign’s national security director, J.D. Gordon, watered down language in the 2016 Republican Party platform pledging to provide Ukraine with “lethal defense weapons” to combat Russian interference — and did so the same week Gordon dined with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, at an event. Trump’s longtime political consigliere Roger Stone’s reaching out to WikiLeaks through an intermediary and requesting “the pending emails,” an apparent reference to the Clinton campaign emails pirated by Russia, which the site had started to post. Trump’s chiming in: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The meeting in the Seychelles islands between Erik Prince (the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and a Trump-campaign supporter whose sister Betsy DeVos would become Trump’s secretary of education) and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in an effort to facilitate a back-channel dialogue between the two countries before Trump’s inauguration. The former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s consistent lying to federal investigators about his own secretive dealings with the Russian political consultant and intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom he shared Trump campaign polling. Trump’s two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in the summer of 2018, unattended by staff. Trump’s public declaration, at a joint news conference in Helsinki, that he was more inclined to believe Putin than the U.S. intelligence team when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The dissemination by Trump and his allies in 2019 of the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election, in support of the Clinton campaign. Trump’s pardoning of Manafort and Stone in December 2020. And most recently, on March 29, Trump’s saying yet again that Putin “should release” dirt on a political opponent — this time President Biden, who, Trump asserted without evidence, had received, along with his son Hunter Biden, $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor. ....

 

 

 

 

[Martell Spy]

Quote

 

As political pressure grows to crack down on Russian oligarchs, U.S. policymakers are training fresh scrutiny on an industry that has long avoided anti-money-laundering rules: real estate.

House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) plans to introduce legislation in the coming weeks to shore up anti-corruption laws related to the industry, according to her staff. And Treasury’s main unit for combating such wrongdoing, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, is working on regulations to cut down on money laundering through property holdings.

 

Oligarch's big loophole for stashing money
The effort to close anti-money-laundering loopholes was already picking up momentum in Washington even before Russia invaded Ukraine.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/11/washington-poised-to-clamp-down-on-oligarchs-real-estate-00023347

[Gareth]

1 hour ago, LongRider said:

SHE DID NOT COMMIT A CRIME.

 See above, the DA dropped the charge because they determined that no crime was committed.

 

Yes, this is after the grand jury indicted her.  I don't know the specifics but my guess is that the hospital is trying protect themselves against the new abortion law in Texas.  

[Zorral]

1 minute ago, Gareth said:

Yes, this is after the grand jury indicted her.  I don't know the specifics but my guess is that the hospital is trying protect themselves against the new abortion law in Texas.  

They were cashing in on the bounty rewarded to ANYONE who reports an abortion has taken place.  It wasn't the hospital who did this, it was a specific PERSON who worked there.

I'm going to shout yet again: THERE WASN'T EVEN A CRIME COMMITTED.  MOREOVER THERE IS NO WAY TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MISCARRIAGE AND INDUCED ABORTION.  DO YOU NOW SEE HOW HORRIFIC THIS IS?

 

[LongRider]

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

They were cashing in on the bounty rewarded to ANYONE who reports an abortion has taken place.  It wasn't the hospital who did this, it was a specific PERSON who worked there.

I'm going to shout yet again: THERE WASN'T EVEN A CRIME COMMITTED.  MOREOVER THERE IS NO WAY TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MISCARRIAGE AND INDUCED ABORTION.  DO YOU NOW SEE HOW HORRIFIC THIS IS?

 

Apparently, now in Texas, if a woman has a miscarriage, she needs to lawyer up to protect herself of false accusations of criminal behavior.  This so fucked up!  Many pregnancies end in miscarriage, and miscarriage should not be criminalized, nor should abortions.  

[Gareth]

50 minutes ago, Zorral said:

They were cashing in on the bounty rewarded to ANYONE who reports an abortion has taken place.  It wasn't the hospital who did this, it was a specific PERSON who worked there.

I'm going to shout yet again: THERE WASN'T EVEN A CRIME COMMITTED.  MOREOVER THERE IS NO WAY TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MISCARRIAGE AND INDUCED ABORTION.  DO YOU NOW SEE HOW HORRIFIC THIS IS?

 

I didn't read that the specific person received a bounty or was trying to get a bounty.  I have always been pro-choice and the new Texas law is absolutely wrong.  There are ways to tell the difference between miscarriage vs induced abortion.  Induced abortion requires an inducer, eg chemical, trauma, etc.  Unfortunately I have seen my fair share of cases of women taking an overdose of OTC or prescription medications to induce abortion.  

edited to add:  If a specific person turned the woman in hope of cashing in on a bounty, that is violation of HIPPA and subjected to $250,000 fine personally as well as the hospital system that person works for.  I'm sure that hospital compliance dept will be viewing this.

[HoodedCrow]

I recall that up to 80(!) percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Most natural genetic errors end up with a non viable pregnancy and do not make it past go. I did notice that fox entertainment didn’t seem to have that story about the woman who was arrested. I wonder who the bounty money went to.

[Zorral]

There are many ways miscarriage can happen, induced or otherwise, and there is not a way to definitively say 'self-induced' or 'natural' for many of them.  Thus this cannot be criteria. But. you know, men and Texas.  They don't know and they don't care.

6 minutes ago, HoodedCrow said:

I wonder who the bounty money went to.

The stories, perfectly willing, as they have been since January, to call out this unfortunate woman by name, very carefully do not give any other names including the the hospital.  Which means of course we don't actually know whether anyone was claiming bounty or not, but the bounty offer is there for EVERYONE, including your own kids.  Like I say, the commie Stassi has nothing on Texas.

 

 

 

[DMC]

4 hours ago, LongRider said:

Guess Elon changed his mind.  Good, I was worried about Trump coming back to Twitter as well.

Elon Musk doesn't join boards.  Elon Musk IS THE BOARD!!!!

[DMC]

Just want to file this for posterity in anticipation of the inevitable "Biden didn't do enough to appeal to rural voters" hot takes:

Quote

What they’re doing to sell it: Their playbook will pair with “a rural infrastructure tour,” which leads off with Biden visits this week to Menlo, Iowa, and Greensboro, N.C. Transportation Secretary PETE BUTTIGIEG will be in Tell City, Ind., on Wednesday. Also on the docket this month, per The Hill’s Alex Gangitano: Agriculture Secretary TOM VILSACK, Energy Secretary JENNIFER GRANHOLM, Commerce Secretary GINA RAIMONDO, infrastructure coordinator MITCH LANDRIEU, EPA Administrator MICHAEL REGAN and Interior Secretary DEB HAALAND, fanning out to states including Alaska, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington and West Virginia.

 

[ThinkerX]

3 hours ago, HoodedCrow said:

I recall that up to 80(!) percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Most natural genetic errors end up with a non viable pregnancy and do not make it past go. I did notice that fox entertainment didn’t seem to have that story about the woman who was arrested. I wonder who the bounty money went to.

Well...babies are big news amongst my younger relatives.

Lovely young daughter has had two offspring over the past half-dozen years - and two miscarriages, the second of which was life threatening.

Another quasi relative had six kids over about fifteen years. Was going to have more but got told flat out by midwives and professionals that stood a high chance of being fatal - the last one was plagued by 'complications.'  Memory serves, she also had at least one miscarriage.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

Was reading through the headlines this morning and came across, "The new White House rule: Don't talk about Joe Manchin."

I thought, "Finally, Biden's pissed enough at the asshole to be like, 'quit bringing his name up as the reason we can't do something, I'm the President."

But, then I read the sub headline: "As another round of talks on climate and spending ramps up, aides and advocates are under strict orders to keep their mouths shut--lest they antagonize the all-important senator."

President Manchin indeed.

He's "willing to deal again." He's "open to reopening talks about spending." Who the fuck is this guy, and why is he stopping progress? Why did the huge New York Times piece about his financial corruption largely go unnoticed? 

[Zorral]

The ma$$ive Kushner corruption partnership with Saudi in the open --

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-big-big-money

Quote

 

.... But it’s not just the big money payoff to the tune of over $2 billion. The relationship continues. There’s little question that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, now totally controlled by MBS, continues to work on behalf of the Trump/Kushner family and against the Biden administration. Certainly that is not their only aim. But it is a key one that advances numerous interests. The Saudis biggest goal is to get the U.S. to support its war in Yemen and their broader confrontation with Iran. This is what the Trump administration accommodated and the Obama and Biden administrations have generally resisted. The unwillingness of the Saudis and their Gulf allies to raise oil production and thus take some of the pressure off oil prices is also part of this equation. It helps put the squeeze on the Biden administration. (The Saudis have said explicitly and pretty openly, why should we help them on oil prices when the U.S. isn’t helping fight the war in Yemen?) Yes, it’s complicated. The Kushner corruption is only one part of this multi-player relationship. But the continuing political power of the Trumps over the GOP and their possible return to the White House is the critical factor.

Much more to come here.

 

 

[BigFatCoward]

Fresh tragedy, I assume now is still not the time to discuss gun laws for the right? 

[Rorshach]

12 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Fresh tragedy, I assume now is still not the time to discuss gun laws for the right? 

There's always a fresh tragedy, so it's never really the right time.

Nice perpetual, that.