Random Politics & Religion #21

ITT: Is ok with criminal and illegal leaks coming from Obama Admin holdouts, but is concerned with legality of disclosure when a House Representative who leads an Intelligence Committee discloses information.

In other words, partisan hack in progress. Nothing to see here folks.

I'm going to target Vienner's cookies for surveillance. Since she is a foreign citizen, she doesn't have rights under US code, so I'm not breaking any Constitutional rights. Also, it's delicious investigation.

"Obama Admin holdouts" Oh? Prove it.

That's your shtick.

Let's see here.

You say that Trump was investigated with ties to the Russians. That was proven wrong.

You then say that Nunes shouldn't have released classified information. Except, you know, he didn't. So, wrong again.

Now you are saying that this was after the election. Well, you are partially right that the investigation was done after the election, but you are wrong that it was only after the election (newsflash, Comey stated that Trump was investigated prior to his election win). So, still wrong.

Keep it up Vic. You are still wrong. So, get over it.

"Obama Admin holdouts" Oh? Prove it.

Remember that there are three teams in the white house all jockeying for Trump's favor and the ability to script him. The leaks could come from any of them too.

Come on Chanti, you know better than that.

... Yates had warned the Trump administration that Flynn misled officials about the content of his phone call with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and could potentially have left himself open to blackmail by the Russian government.

...
You think it's peaceful at the Trump admin? Until he does a complete firing of all federal employees, he will always have somebody who will look to do some harm to him.

I know little but the president can't do that.

If one comes to light the smoking gun will implicate his underlinings more so than him. It would require one them to roll over on him, like Dean did Nixon or Gravano did Gotti, to make something stick.

earlier today:

This afternoon:
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/325346-fbi-has-info-suggesting-coordination-between-trump-aides-russia

That... was practically a non-article. It was 90% stuff we already know, and 10% third-party reporting of CNN's info from mysterious, uncited officials that "does not conclusively prove collusion between Trump associates and Russia and would have to be further investigated."

Hurray for clickbait?

Without discussing the matter with the Intelligence Committee, Nunes went to the White House to brief Trump on the information, sparking fury among committee Democrats. Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) slammed Nunes’s decision, accusing him of routing the panel and muddying the investigation.

"The Chairman also shared this information with the White House before providing it to the committee, another profound irregularity, given that the matter is currently under investigation,” Schiff said in a statement on Wednesday.

Their beer is better than their cooking.

This part is new.

Think you're confusing the Belgian and German flag. Belgian cookkng is really good (if you dont go to the wrong places) think we have the highest density of Michelin star restaurants in the world ... if you're into that kind of thing.

That... was practically a non-article. It was 90% stuff we already know, and 10% third-party reporting of CNN's info from mysterious, uncited officials that "does not conclusively prove collusion between Trump associates and Russia and would have to be further investigated."

Hurray for clickbait?

Love how people don't blink an eye when some Muslims kill people but have our panties in a bunch over Russian ***...

Love how people don't blink an eye when some Muslims kill people but have our panties in a bunch over Russian ***...

I didn't know the UK Parliament was a part of the American government and that any unfortunate events outside of it should be a bigger concern for American citizens...

The fight to save western civilization does not stop at the shores of America

Then get out there fight your good fight if you feel that passionate about it.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes told reporters yesterday that members of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team — possibly Trump himself — had been caught up in surveillance during the last days of the Obama administration. Nunes says the surveillance, by both the FBI and NSA, looked to be legal “incidental collection” that had nothing to do with concerns over Russia collusion.

If true, this isn’t the “wiretapping” of Trump Towers, as Trump claimed in his infamous tweet a few weeks ago, but it is spying in any commonly understood sense of the word. The NSA routinely listens to calls and reads emails of Americans and collects other data “incidentally” from third parties, avoiding warrants. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, which has been found constitutional, states that government doesn’t need a warrant to collect information on Americans as long as the target of the collection is a foreigner.

That’s one thing. But if we’re to believe Nunes, the names of Trump and/or associates were “unmasked,” and details “with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in an intelligence community report.” CNN is reporting that some of the communications picked up were Trump transition officials talking about the president’s family. What possible need was there for those details to be passed around in an intelligence report? Who ordered the unmasking of the people involved? Was the information properly minimized? If the investigation wasn’t aimed at collusion with the Russians, what investigation ensnared the president-elect and his transition team?

While the answers might not vindicate Trump, they are legitimate questions.

If it turns out intel wasn’t properly minimized, this is the kind of abuse that civil libertarians have long warned undermines Americans’ privacy, a Fourth Amendment right. Many Democrats (and a few Republicans) have been warning about exploitation of 702 for years. Only last year, Minnesota Sen. Al Franken admitted that “information that we get through 702 can be misused.” The American Civil Liberties Union also opposes it (“We Must Rein in President Trump’s Spying Powers,” says a headline. Right.)

Some Senate Democrats specifically worried that the NSA could spy on politicians. The case of Jane Harman illustrates that it’s probably easier to smear a politician than to blackmail one. But in 2014, Sen. Bernie Sanders sent a letter to NSA Director Keith Alexander, asking him whether NSA had spied on members of Congress “or other American elected officials” Spying, he wrote, among other things gathers “any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business.”

We can argue with this definition of spying if you like, but the NSA’s public affairs office answered: “NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.”

Intelligence agencies cannot share details about American citizens with no foreign intelligence value. If Nunes is right, how were these procedures not broken? If a Bush-era intelligence agency had engaged in “incidental collection” of Barack Obama’s phone calls in 2008, and then disseminated that information, the Earth would have stopped in its orbit. (Sen. Rand Paul claims Obama’s phone calls were intercepted 1,227 times and then masked. Being caught up in surveillance doesn’t necessarily mean you’re guilty of anything.) Now, because the person involved is named Donald Trump, journalists sprinted to the nearest media platform to push back against the story.

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, said in a statement that he had “grave concerns with the chairman that a credible investigation cannot be conducted this way.” It could very well be that Nunes is attempting to give the president cover. He’s a partisan, after all. That doesn’t make the incident potentially less serious. For one thing, the idea that the president shouldn’t be shown intelligence is nonsensical. But if partisanship is disqualifying, we might as well shut down DC. I mean, the other day, Schiff tweeted that the Russians had “hacked the election.”

When it comes to conspiracies about the NSA or FBI or collusion or “wiretaps,” my default position is hard skepticism. That goes for Nunes’ claims, as well. This, however, is not the default position of the media at large, especially on accusations against the administration.

Journalists, many of whom take every conspiracy about Russian and Trump seriously, have no reason to dismiss the potential abuses of the NSA. Even if intel agencies failed to minimize frivolous information, it is still an abuse. Nunes, as far as I know, has not made any bizarre allegations in the past. It’s not implausible that information legally obtained about Trump was subsequently abused by a government agency. In fact, Democrats have been warning us for years that something like this would happen.

Hey, everybody, the Trump budget guts everything!

Except, of course, that it doesn’t. It cuts about $54 billion from next year’s budget out of a total of $4 trillion in spending—a reduction of a little over 1 percent. It’s kind of a drop in the bucket.

But as part of their program to grow all spending for everything all the time, Democrats have had to find something that makes Trump’s budget cuts look totally radical and draconian, so they have seized on Meals on Wheels, a program that uses volunteers to deliver food to the elderly.

Not only is this factually wrong, but the really radical and dangerous position is the idea that programs like Meals on Wheels have to be part of the federal budget and must never be cut in any way.

First, the facts. Meals on Wheels is supported by volunteers and overwhelmingly funded by private charity. The national organization Meals on Wheels America gets only 3.3 percent of its budget, less than $250,000, from government grants.

Moreover, the money that is supposedly going to be cut doesn’t even come directly from the federal budget, and Trump’s budget doesn’t even mention Meals on Wheels. Instead, it eliminates Community Development Block Grants, some tiny fraction of which—nobody can say for sure exactly how much—is used by state and local governments to support local Meals on Wheels organizations. Apparently, nothing else done with these block grants is particularly defensible, so Democrats have focused all of their attention on Meals on Wheels.

In the meantime, all of the press attention has led to a surge of donations and volunteers. Did you know citizens could do that—take what they think is a worthy program and support it with their own time and money? Apparently, this is a surprise to everyone on the Left.

So the whole “Trump wants to cut Meals on Wheels” story line smacks of—what’s the phrase I’m looking for here?—oh yes, “facts I don't like.”

Yet here’s why it’s important. The outrage over cutting Meals on Wheels from the federal budget implies that it ought to be part of the federal budget and that it ought to be getting more money. That’s the really radical idea here, and it explains why this country is in the deadly budget predicament we are.

Notice that the supposedly devastating Trump budget proposal says nothing about the largest and fastest-growing part of the budget, the big middle-class entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. If we have to fund Meals on Wheels, we definitely can’t make even the slightest changes to any of those programs. In fact, by this reasoning—if a small fraction of indirect support for a charitable venture is sacrosanct—then the assumption here is that anything good has to be funded by the federal government.

By that reasoning, we aren’t just forced to keep spending money for things the government already does. We will have to keep increasing our spending indefinitely, bring into the federal fold more and more programs and ventures. Anything that benefits anybody has to get government money. Not to support it would be monstrous.

If we can’t even say to any program, “You know that last 3 percent of your budget? We think you’ll be okay on that without the federal government,” then the result is going to be exactly what we have seen: vast, ever-increasing, unsustainable increases in government spending and government debt.

Do you know what happens if we carry this all the way to the end of the road? Take a look at Venezuela, which specifically focused its socialist programs on food banks for the poor, with government taking on an increasingly dominant role in the nation’s food supply. The result? People are starving and reduced to rummaging through trash bins to survive. But no matter how cruel that system ends up being in practice, nobody could ever advocate rolling it back, because that would make you reactionary and cruel and heartless and prove that you hate the poor.

The idea that the government must fund everything, that nothing can happen without it, that it must be the source and impetus behind every initiative, and that it must always expand relentlessly—that is the truly radical notion being pushed in this Meals on Wheels hysteria.

That’s why we have to take an axe to federal funds for Meals on Wheels. We have to do it just to establish that there is some limit, any limit to the scope and fiscal appetite of the federal government—before it yawns its throat open and swallows us whole.