Tag: Federal Government of the United States

Former CIA Director John Brennan pushed back Friday on President Trump's charge that he knew about or participated in an attempt to overthrow the American government. "I don't think it's surprising at all that we continue to hear the sociopathic ramblings of Mr. Trump claiming that there was this effort to try to prevent him from being elected or to unseat him," he told MSNBC's Hallie Jackson. Brennan was reacting to comments Trump made during an interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday night. His comments followed the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report which stopped short of accusing the president of either obstruction of justice or collusion with Russia. Brennan added he welcomed further investigation into his and other officials' conduct while they served in government. "I've testified in front of Congress ... Absolutely, I'll do it again," he said. Brennan also disputed Sen. Rand Paul's, R-Ky., claim that he "insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report." "That's absolutely incorrect and 180 degrees from the truth. It was CIA that was pushing not to have it included and not to be taken into account at all in that intelligence community assessment.

Democrats are fawning over Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s call for “new rules” to regulate internet companies like his — and that should worry every freedom-loving American. This is one of the richest men on earth inviting the American government to help him do what he already wants to do anyway. Let’s be perfectly clear: Every single regulatory measure Zuckerberg is calling for would benefit his company, his political allies, and himself personally. At best, regulation would just deflect from the unsavory practices of Facebook and its competitors; at worst, it would enlist government sponsorship for those practices. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner greeted Zuckerberg’s announcement by saying he was “glad to see” that “the era of the social media Wild West is over.” Of course, when Warner refers to the “social media Wild West,” he’s not talking about tech giants routinely censoring and shadow-banning conservatives, banning memes that lampoon their journalist friends, and blatantly discriminating against Republican candidates during election campaigns. Those on the left are determined to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential election, which is why they are so adamantly pushing for more censorship online. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have demanded answers from Big Tech regarding its ever-tightening campaign of censorship against the political right and Silicon Valley’s exploitation of its power over the main forums of modern public discourse to potentially swing elections — but their point has been that censorship of any kind is an affront to the American people. We don’t need leftist bureaucrats to tell us what we can say on the internet any more than we need leftist tech executives to police our speech. We don’t need an “independent body” to protect us from “harmful content” — we already have the Supreme Court, the First Amendment, and 100 years of precedent to guide our governance of public forums. Sen. Hawley, for instance, has proposed that the special privileges Facebook enjoys under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act be conditioned on it serving as a viewpoint-neutral public forum.

Lawmakers from the southern Iraqi province of Basra have renewed efforts to seek autonomy from the federal government, as they blame it for problems such as lingering electricity crisis in the oil-rich region. This week the 35-member Basra Provincial Council passed a resolution with a majority vote asking Baghdad to give the province control over its oil resources and financial affairs. Basra politicians have been making calls for an autonomy for more than a decade now. “There is a legal ambiguity and lack of a precedent for forming autonomous regions under the current constitution, given that the Kurdistan region has been established well before,” says Harith Hasan, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center. This is something Iraqis are saying a lot these days,” says Ahmed Tabaqchali, an Iraqi investment banker and a commentator on political affairs. Powerful Basra politicians are using autonomy to whitewash their own inefficiency by shifting the blame on the federal government, he told TRT World. Even if by some miracle they get autonomy, they won’t be able to address any of the problems.” Iraq has struggled to generate enough electricity to meet the soaring demand, which in summer can exceed supply by up to 50 percent. It’s all about hope Earlier this year, Iraq approved its 2019 national budget of around $112 billion, it’s largest ever. A Basra politician last year claimed that Bagdad owed the province more than $45 billion. “So I am hopeful.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A growing majority of Americans say marijuana should be legal, underscoring a national shift as more states embrace cannabis for medical or adult use. Support for legal marijuana hit 61 percent in 2018, up from 57 percent two years ago, according to the General Social Survey, a widely respected trend survey that has been measuring support for legal marijuana since the 1970s. Among Democrats, 76 percent now favor legalization. Legalization advocates say the increasing public support should prompt the U.S. government to reverse course. At the federal level, marijuana is categorized as a dangerous illegal drug, similar to LSD or heroin. “Our time has come,” said Justin Strekal, political director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML. “Never in modern history has there existed greater public support for ending the nation’s nearly century-long experiment with marijuana prohibition.” Support for legalization is strongest among 18-to-34-year-olds, with nearly 75 percent favoring it. Views on marijuana legalization have shifted dramatically: In the 1973 GSS, just 19 percent supported legalization. Support for legalization has been gradually growing for years, but it has increased sharply since 2012, when Colorado and Washington state became the first states to legalize the recreational use of cannabis. Sample sizes for each year’s survey vary from about 1,500 to about 3,000 adults, with margins of error falling between plus or minus 2.2 percentage points and plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

The report portrayed such information as crucial to holding appointees to high standards. “Strong ethics programs are critical to ensuring public trust in government and the integrity of actions taken on the public’s behalf,” it states. “Political appointees, in particular agency heads, have a personal responsibility to exercise leadership in ethics. … [M]embers of the public need access to information on who is serving in political appointee positions. Otherwise, they are limited in their ability to discern whether appointees are performing their duties free of conflict.” Neither federal agencies nor the White House are required to publicly post full, up-to-date listings of political appointees or senior government officials, many of whom don’t face confirmation or public hearings by the Senate. “In the absence of comprehensive and timely data on political appointees serving in the executive branch, two nongovernmental organizations — the Partnership for Public Service and ProPublica — stated that they collect and report some data themselves,” the report notes. The report states that ProPublica’s Trump Town tracks all types of federal political appointees but “one limitation is that they rely on agency responses to FOIA requests and therefore the data may not be comprehensive or timely.” ProPublica staffers (including the author of this article) were interviewed by the GAO in 2018. The GAO recommended Congress consider legislation that would require the “comprehensive and timely information on political appointees serving in the Executive Branch to be collected and made publicly accessible.” The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is now considering the GAO recommendation. Launched in March 2018, Trump Town is a searchable database of 3,232 current and former Trump administration political appointees, including their jobs and offices, employment history, lobbying records, government ethics documents, financial disclosures and, in some cases, resumes. In 2012, a group of former federal officials in law enforcement, diplomatic and national security positions wrote to congressional leaders, saying a searchable list would “create significant threats to the national security and to the personal safety and financial security of the executive branch officials and their families, especially career employees.” The letter also called complete personal financial information of all senior officials on the internet a “jackpot for enemies of the United States intent on finding security vulnerabilities they can exploit.” The GAO report did not address this assertion, but it implied such circumstances are a long way off: “Until the names of political appointees and their position, position type, agency or department name, start and end dates are publicly available at least quarterly, it will be difficult for the public to access comprehensive and reliable information.” Filed under: The Trump Administration

I am proud of AGU for consistently advancing strong public positions on behalf of science and scientists. Shortly after taking office as AGU president, I wrote in a February 2017 From the Prow post, “Recent political events in the US and across the world have created an urgent demand for science in general, and the Earth and space sciences in particular, to take their rightful and needed place in civil society by injecting their cultures of evidence-driven deliberation.” Now as past president looking back over my 2-year term, I am proud of AGU for consistently advancing strong public positions on behalf of science and scientists in the wake of threats to federal science funding, scientific integrity, transparency and collaboration, and sound science policy. Less was said, however, about his respect for science and evidence-based science policy and his concern for the environment, legacies that form the basis for many of the environmental policies that continue to this day. “We must leave this Earth in better condition than we found it, and today this old truth must be applied to new threats facing the resources which sustain us all.” Bush had championed the development of a “New World Order” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I wrote, “How ironic it is that the leader of the ‘New World Order’ is the dead weight of the environmental world order needed for the 21st century.” Mine was only one small voice among many urging him to take seriously the findings of the 1990 First Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Had the United States not been an early UNFCCC signatory, we may never have achieved these international agreements. Despite President Trump’s personal expression of disbelief of the most recent assessment’s major findings, it was nevertheless released, as required by law, thanks to President Bush, and the current administration did not attempt to significantly alter or censor the scientific findings. In addition to President Bush’s legacy regarding climate change policy and the Earth systems science that it demands, perhaps the most important environmental accomplishment of the Bush presidency was the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. During the preceding Reagan administration, there had been considerable debate among scientists and policy makers over whether observed acidification of soils and lakes was due to human-derived deposition of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, popularly known as acid rain. The science community must continue to articulate the value of science, to inform policy, and to guide Congress and present and future administrations. Fortunately, we have a historical model for how government can benefit from engaging science, not only with the Bush hallmarks of compassion, respectfulness, and decency but also through his genuine respect for science and evidence-based science policy and his concern for the environment.

Public opinion polls show more Americans blame President Donald Trump than opposition Democrats at the moment, and to some the standoff is already serving as a likely blueprint for the 2020 presidential election battle. "Trump is losing on this, Congress is losing on this, and then federal workers, who are without pay, are losing on this," said Jim Kessler of Third Way, a center-left public advocacy group in Washington. Wall or bust President Trump remains adamant about funding for a wall along the southern border, a key campaign promise from 2016. On Thursday, the Senate will vote on competing proposals to end the shutdown, one from the White House and Republicans, the other from Democrats. "We, the Coast Guard, the Border Patrol and other folks that make this country safe and secure, we don't get that much money; but, we should be paid for it," Gosman told reporters. "Public opinion polls, I think, are more against the president than against the Democrats," said Fortier. A new poll Wednesday from Morning Consult/POLITICO found that 54 percent blamed President Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown, while 35 percent blamed congressional Democrats. Overall, the president's approval rating has suffered during the shutdown, dropping from an average of around 43 percent last month to around 40 percent this year. A new CBS poll also found that by a margin of 71 to 28 percent, voters believe that money for a border wall is not worth shutting down the government. "And both sides will have to give something.

Timeline shows final hours of second Guatemalan child to die in US custody Read more Early in December, Felipe Gómez Alonzo and his father, Agustín Gómez Peréz, left the family’s modest home in the mountains of Guatemala with dreams of starting a new life in the US. US authorities are investigating the deaths of Felipe and seven-year-old Jakelin Caal, but the circumstances which drove both families to risk sending their children on the long journey north are clear: the absolute poverty besetting swathes of rural Guatemala. “Felipe was happy to leave with his father,” said Alonzo in Chuj, an indigenous Mayan language. She said that both parents had agreed to let Felipe join his father, an agricultural worker, on his trip north. Gómez Pérez hoped to find work to pay off his debts and send money to the family. “We talked as soon as they reached the border,” she said, adding that Gómez Pérez called again the next day when the pair were already in border patrol custody. But for many in rural Guatemala migration is seen as the only hope for a better life. “People leave our village, find work in the US and send money to help their relatives,” said Pérez, who estimated about 200 people from the tiny village live in the United States. Before leaving Yalambojoch, Felipe shared a bedroom with both his parents and three siblings. Now, despite her son’s death, Alonzo still hopes he can remain in the US.

Consequently, the user, platform, and the content provider all play a role in the spread of misinformation. This can make it tricky for social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to manually curate content. Despite YouTube’s incredible ability to curate highly relevant content, there needs to be a greater degree of transparency that reveals where they are pulling information from and why things are being recommended – all while identifying bad actors that are click-baiting controversial searches and topics to drive traffic to videos they are monetizing (which in turn, YouTube is profiting from). Since it is proliferated by machine learning, (which is itself informed by user-decision making,) the program behind the platform cannot be held accountable. Reconsidering Fake News and Advertisements To combat the underlying problems related to Section 230, machine learning, and a lack of transparency, more action is needed by both government and social networks/tech providers to identify, connotate and inform people about what fake news is, the source of political content and advertisements, why they are being targeted, and how to spot the difference. Also, with the risk of advertising occurring on high-performing fake news videos, this can lead to major brand safety issues. 2) Manual review processes: For brands and publishers concerned about brand safety, social networks could implement a system similar to the current manual review process for advertiser-friendly content. 3) Weave fact checking into all news sources: YouTube took a big step this summer when it announced that it would be adding fact check links for videos on topics that inspire conspiracy theories. For instance, they could add the ability to link sources for anyone making substantial claims, with the links needing to be reviewed for quality. The 2016 election may have been a turning point for the proliferation of misinformation, but that doesn’t mean that social networks can’t take concrete steps in stopping its spread.

In a speech in Washington on Tuesday during his first visit since taking over from Boris Johnson as the UK’s most senior diplomat, Hunt will specifically call for tighter regulation of online political advertising and new measures to prevent cyber attacks on electoral machinery. Is free trade always the answer? Read more Hunt will also throw out a challenge to Trump’s protectionist policies by warning a weakening of free trade will only damage western economies, and ultimately western political power. He will say the emergence of an international order based on the application of law rather than might had led to an exponential growth in trade, leading to extraordinary advances in economic and social prosperity across the globe. “Given the importance of the online world for political communication the rules governing online activity in the runup to elections should surely be as strict as those elsewhere – and modern electorates should be given confidence the results cannot be influenced by the cyber activities of other countries.” Hunt’s remarks suggest he is prepared to back the case recently made by the former foreign secretary Lord Hague for a ban on online paid political advertising of the kind that has been imposed on broadcasters for decades. Following the summit, Trump implied that he trusted the Russian president as much if not more than his own intelligence agencies. Trump has always been reluctant to support wider sanctions against Russia. Before the summit Trump clashed with his Nato allies and implied he might accept the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine – a policy the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, repudiated days after the summit. Hunt will urge the EU to stand truly shoulder to shoulder with the US administration by going further to impose more comprehensive sanctions against Russia. The two sides are likely to probe for potential common ground over the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, still supported by the EU, but torn up by Trump.