Hello Don, got a new tax cut? Trump continued

[PerkingFaintly]

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3035639-Is-he-Right-Left-or-is-He-Nothing-at-All-Trump-thread-continued?pg=1

Nice work if you can get it.

thought the gunman got to himself before the police

I’m not sure that it’s entirely clear yet, Stuff.

Doesn't the second amendment only concern the right of state militia to bear arms anyway?

The Supreme Court has ruled that it's an individual right.

Thanks Seneca, I thought I must've been missing something!

Matt Murphy‏
@MattMurph24
The gun silencer bill being introduced by House Republicans also includes the legalization of armor piercing bullets.

How does this relate to hunting?

Andrew Beatty‏Verified account
@AndrewBeatty
#BREAKING @AFP (Washington) - Pentagon's Mattis says he 'fully' backs Tillerson on North Korea

Trump recently humiliated Tillerson over Korea talks + rumors abound of his sacking. This sounds very much like a warning shot from Mattis.

Mueller Tasks an Adviser With Getting Ahead of Pre-Emptive Pardons

www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-03/mueller-tasks-adviser-with-getting-ahead-of-pre-emptive-pardons

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a distinctly modern problem. The president, judging by his tweets, could try to pardon people in his circle even before prosecutors charge anyone with a crime.

Mueller’s all-star team of prosecutors, with expertise in money laundering and foreign bribery, has an answer to that. He’s Michael Dreeben, a bookish career government lawyer with more than 100 Supreme Court appearances under his belt.

Acting as Mueller’s top legal counsel, Dreeben has been researching past pardons and determining what, if any, limits exist, according to a person familiar with the matter. Dreeben’s broader brief is to make sure the special counsel’s prosecutorial moves are legally airtight. That could include anything from strategizing on novel interpretations of criminal law to making sure the recent search warrant on ex-campaign adviser Paul Manafort’s home would stand up to an appeal.

"He’s seen every criminal case of any consequence in the last 20 years," said Kathryn Ruemmler of Latham & Watkins LLP, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama. "If you wanted to do a no-knock warrant, he’d be a great guy to consult with to determine if you were exposing yourself.”

Renato Mariotti‏Verified account @renato_mariotti

MINI-THREAD: What does it mean that Mueller is researching preemptive pardons?
1/ According to @business, Mueller has Michael Dreeben researching the issue of preemptive pardons
2/ Dreeben is a legendary criminal appeals lawyer. Lawyers like Dreeben focus on challenging intellectual legal questions, rather than
3/ investigation and prosecution. This news is interesting because it tells us that Mueller is concerned about the use of pardons to
4/ derail his investigation. The questions that Dreeben is looking at likely focus on the limits of the President’s pardon power in unusual
5/ circumstances like pardons that would obstruct an investigation. Those questions are new and unanswered. While there has been a lot of
6/ speculation over the past months, the language about the pardon power in the Constitution is very broad and the unusual circumstances
7/ that commentators (and now Dreeben) are considering never happened before. Mueller and Dreeben are likely planning their legal argument
8/ in advance as well as plotting out next steps in case the President issues pardons that could otherwise hinder the investigation. /end

Dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s.

Here we are but behind the paywall.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/10/03/trump-on-response-to-las-vegas-shooting-what-happened-is-in-many-ways-a-miracle/?utm_term=.321f885b1104

Maryz there's definitely a lack of understanding about how social media/internet platforms operate, which doesn't help with the applying critical thinking (or maybe is a product of not applying critical thinking). Things like this don't help:

Fake news takes the world

www.axios.com/fake-news-takes-the-world-2492360210.html

An excerpt:

How it spreads: Google, Twitter and Facebook are still getting dinged for showing questionable news sources as top referrals for breaking news on their platforms. On Monday, all three tech giants featured content from outlets that have been known to publish false or misleading information as top sources of news about the Las Vegas shooting:

Google issued an apology for 4chan threads in their top story unit and said it will "continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future."

A Facebook user reported that posts from Russian-owned news site Sputnik were appearing within their personalized collections of articles related to the Las Vegas shooting. (Sputnik is currently being investigated by the FBI for spreading propaganda, per Yahoo News.)

A Twitter user reported that an InfoWars article was featured in the "Top News" section of its breaking news collection on the shooting. BuzzFeed found over a dozen instances of fake news being spread online, many on Twitter, within just hours of the Vegas shooting, mostly from far-right sources.

Jason Kint‏Verified account
@jason_kint
Dear Google and Facebook engineers, there is no conceivable math in which @4chan or @infowars should make “Top Stories.” None. ht @axios /1
The duopoly refuses to judge trust at the brand level because it’s messy engineering (and bad economics and policy outcomes for them). /2
Duopoly has failed at this for yrs, and it’s how they disintermediate. Brands are proxies for trust, carry value and G/FB arb this $$$. /3
Serious questions whether Google should be allowed to manage section titled “Top News” or Facebook “Newsfeed”. It’s highly deceiving. /4
In Delaware, use of the word “trust” is highly protected. Maybe platforms shouldn’t be able to use “News” without some responsibility. /5

Yes, the blurring between news that has to be accountable to journalistic standards and what John from down the road has decided to pontificate on is a big problem (and that's not even addressing that newspapers can also be problematic looking at you DM ). Which isn't to say I think that social media can't be useful (as my Twitter habit would attest to ) but it could be hugely improved. There's not much transparency at the moment.

I caught something on radio four where someone was talking about how with new ways of disseminating information came new problems as the powers in charge had to play catch up with legislation and regulations. He was talking about the advent of printing presses (and other things but the DC were being too noisy) and said that he thought we were living through one of those times where the status quo had changed and now we had to figure out how to adapt to the new situation in a way compatible with our values etc.

It's even more depressing to see certain influential columnists Hopkins retweeting and commenting on such fake news. All adds fuel to the fire.

BILLIONAIRE ROBERT MERCER IS HELPING PAY DONALD TRUMP'S LEGAL BILLS

www.newsweek.com/trump-legal-fund-paid-billionaire-robert-mercer-day-comey-fired-676383

Billionaire Robert Mercer and his wife Diana donated almost $200,000 to the legal defense fund of the Republican Party on the day that President Donald Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, financial filings show.

The combined $193,400 donation the Mercers made on May 9 went to the GOP legal fund that Trump has been drawing from to pay the lawyers defending him during the investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

The Mercers are just one of several billionaire couples donating heavily to the fund in recent months, according to the filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is probing whether Trump obstructed justice when he fired Comey as well as whether the Trump campaign assisted Russia in a hacking campaigns to help the billionaire property developer beat his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

The Mercers have been linked to this investigation through their stake in the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica and involvement in the Trump campaign. They own a $10 million share in the firm which helped the Trump campaign use granular data to target ads at specific American voters on Facebook.

The Mercers first began to play a central role in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign after the New York City real estate mogul won the Republican nomination. They helped bring on board figures like advisor Kellyanne Conway and Breitbart’s Steve Bannon, who chaired the campaign until Trump’s election victory November 8.

[...]

Amy Siskind‏Verified account
@Amy_Siskind
Mercer has a lot at stake: $6.8bn of back due taxes for his hedge fund and liability for Cambridge Analytica‘s role

He was talking about the advent of printing presses... and said that he thought we were living through one of those times where the status quo had changed and now we had to figure out how to adapt to the new situation in a way compatible with our values etc.

Yy, that's very much what I think.

The Hill @thehill
Trump administration announces support for bill criminalizing abortion after 20 weeks
thehill.com/policy/healthcare/353533-trump-administration-backs-20-week-abortion-ban?amp

I found it - it was from yesterday's Today programme:

0840

History has always been documented through hierarchies, telling the stories of presidents, prime ministers, armies, corporations, political parties. But it doesn’t document the less formal social networks that have the ability to spread revolutionary ideas. That is the argument of Niall Ferguson in his new book The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power.

I'm going to be a hypocrite and post this without having watched and vetted it but I'm afraid I can't bring myself to.

CNN Politics‏Verified account
@CNNPolitics
President Trump: “I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little our of whack”

twitter.com/CNNPolitics/status/915249263520690177

Thanks for that, Pain, I might give it a watch, despite thinking Niall Ferguson has considerable twat tendencies...

I watched the CNN clip.

He really did say that. It did NOT get any laughs.

I thought it got worse from there...

That’s a rather odd Mercer donation.

Pain urgh. I can't even think of how to respond to that. How callous and completely lacking in humanity. Someone on Twitter said it could be an attempt to cover his own arse if he bankrupts the country.

See, Twitter agrees with me.

He's talking about the death toll. I don't think it's been updated for 6 days because it's been impossible to update it.