18 U.S. Code § 201 - Bribery of public officials and witnesses
(a) For the purpose of this section -
(1) the term “public official” means Member of Congress, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner, either before or after such official has qualified, or an officer or employee or person acting for or on behalf of the United States, or any department, agency or branch of Government thereof, including the District of Columbia, in any official function, under or by authority of any such department, agency, or branch of Government, or a juror;
(2) the term “person who has been selected to be a public official” means any person who has been nominated or appointed to be a public official, or has been officially informed that such person will be so nominated or appointed...
Margaret Carlson, writing in The Daily Beast: It’s all well and good for Paul Manafort to spend 15 years in prison for money laundering, and Rick Gates to plead guilty to cut a deal, and Alex Van Der Zwaan to miss the birth of his first child because he lied to the FBI.
But it would be an injustice if, once again, those around the president suffer and he is left unscathed. He was the beneficiary of the highly questionable Russian contacts his campaign made and desperately tried to keep secret leading up to the 2016 election, which speaks of collusion and much worse. Trump couldn’t have chosen two top advisers with more contacts with the Kremlin than campaign manager Manafort and national security adviser Michael Flynn. He could hardly have praised Russia President Valdimir Putin more. And he could have hardly benefitted more from Russian interference than to win.
- and -
...It is Title 18 United States Code, section 201 that specifically makes it a crime for a public official to take “anything of value,” a bribe, in exchange for government action, which can be prospective.
Note that above I wrote “public official.” That’s because the law is generally wielded against public officials. Problem: Mueller is investigating conduct before Trump became one. Enter Waxman. He points out that in 1962, Congress extended the bribery law to cover activity prior to the assumption of office. It did so, he says, in order to close a “loophole” afforded those “who assume public office under a corrupt commitment.” The upshot? Trump became covered by 18 USC not when he was sworn in but as of July 21, 2016 when he became his party’s nominee in Cleveland, Ohio. And one last tasty little tidbit - It could be a coincidence, but Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin lawyer who was at the Trump Tower meeting, had long been fighting a money laundering case in New York and suddenly won a favorable settlement after Trump’s election.
The 1994 moratorium on assault rifles did what it was intended to do - it drove down the numbers of dead Americans due to mass shooting incidents. WaPo, Christopher Ingraham: Critics of bans on assault weapons, however, say they do little to save lives. The NRA correctly points out that assault weapons are used only in a tiny fraction of gun crimes. The gun rights group also notes that a federally funded study of the previous assault weapons ban, which was in place from 1994 to 2004, concluded that “the ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” Similar points have been made in arguments against a new ban in publications running the ideological gamut from Breitbart to the New York Times to HuffPost.
But the 1994 assault weapons ban was never intended to be a comprehensive fix for “gun violence” writ large. Its purpose, according to gun violence experts and the lawmakers who wrote the bill, was to reduce the frequency and lethality of mass shootings like the ones in Parkland, Sandy Hook and elsewhere. And on that front, the data shows it had a significant impact.
In the last few days, I've had people tell me (people I've known for a long time) - they've told me I'm lying to them when I present facts about things. It's almost like they've decided the numbers themselves don't even exist anymore, much less the facts those numbers illustrate. I had one guy tell me I was lying when I pointed out that congress, in the mid 1990s, had cut the funding for CDC to study gun violence as a public health issue (they did it in a sneaky way, but they did it), and they added an amendment to a spending bill instructing CDC not to "advocate or promote gun control". So, of course, any study where the authors conclude that their findings suggest gun control measures might be appropriate is deemed in violation of that "non-advocacy" rule. You may also have heard a while back all the noise about family docs and ER clinicians being told to shut up and stop asking patients about guns in the home. I pointed to all of that when discussing the gun issue on several sites, and got nowhere. I went back and dug up some of the articles available in the archives, and showed them to my debate opponents, who dismissed them out of hand simply because they were Washington Post, and so they couldn't be trusted. As usual, this gets worse before it gets better.
Wanna know how fucked up this joint is? How well and truly fucked we are? WaPo, Travis Anders: The Florida House of Representatives was in session on Tuesday considering several issues. These included a motion to debate a bill banning the sale of assault weapons in the aftermath of the mass shooting that killed 17 people last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and a resolution declaring pornography a public health risk.
The House chose not to consider the gun-control bill.
It later passed the resolution claiming that porn is dangerous.
And this, from the Tamba Bay Times, Jeffrey Solocheck: With the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting still looming large, its students in the Capitol to lobby for gun controls, the Florida House overwhelmingly passed a measure Wednesday its sponsor said aimed at bringing "light" to the schools.
The bill (HB 839) would require all public schools to post the state motto, "In God We Trust," in a "conspicuous place."
45* is a shitty salesman. Today, he met with "kids" who're demanding to know what he intends to do to keep them from being slaughtered when they go back to school.
Every good salesman knows, eventually, he'll be called in so the clients can spend an hour or so yelling at him. They yell about how the thing doesn't work the way they expected it to work. They yell about how they weren't trained properly to use the thing. They yell about how the price wasn't anywhere near what they thought it would be. They yell about how you're too hard to get on the phone. They yell about how they can't negotiate the phone menu when they call the help line. They yell. And they yell. And they yell. Well tough shit, cupcake. That's part of the gig. You're gettin' paid, so suck it up and be a man about it. 45* has no fucking clue what he's supposed to do in this perfectly understandable and predictable situation because 45* is a shitty salesman. And it showed today - again. Try as he might, he was uncomfortable; he was dancing too hard; and it showed. Here's the thing - ya gotta shut up and listen. You shit-can the usual script, you shut your flap, and you fucking listen. This is what you don't do:
You don't have your staff jot down a few notes to help you act like you have any clue about what people are going thru, and to pretend you give one empty fuck about what's happened to them. Fuck this guy. Federal prison and hard labor is an extended vacation at Sandals compared with what should happen to this ass hat.
Ten lies about guns that are intended to fog up the debate. Forbes, Chris Ladd: Lie #1: There is no connection between mass gun ownership and gun deaths. It seems obvious that a country flooded with guns will have higher rates of gun deaths than countries with few of these weapons. Why are land mines and hand-grenades forbidden in the so-called “Land of the Free,” despite their obvious value in home defense? Because everyone understands that placing these killing machines in circulation would get a lot of people killed. So why don’t we recognize the same problem with guns?
Lie #2: We don’t need stronger gun regulation because gun violence is declining. This lie is fun because of the way it depends on careful framing. Gun violence, defined as crimes committed with guns, has been declining for decades. That makes sense, since crime in general has been declining for decades.
Lie #3: We didn’t have this problem “in my day” because people loved Jesus and didn’t play violent video games. According to Franklin Graham, gun violence happens because Americans “turned our backs on God.” His “kids these days” explanation of gun carnage is a favorite of drunk uncles in MAGA caps all over the country. Though these claims frequently sour Thanksgiving dinners, they lack empirical support.
Lie #4: The Second Amendment blocks gun regulation. Americans happily place curbs on our rights to religious freedom, blocking people from committing acts of violence, fraud or abuse in the name of faith.
Lie #5: The solution to gun violence is more gun ownership. This lie would be too bizarre to earn column space, but politicians are actually using it build policy, putting guns in places like schools, churches and bars. There is no empirical basis for the claim, but it is sometimes accompanied by one misleading data point.
Lie #6: Chicago has tight gun restrictions and mass gun violence. Ergo, gun laws don’t work. Chicago’s seemingly intractable problem with gun violence is one of America’s fondest fascinations. It’s also a myth. Chicago has more gun murders than other large cities like New York and Los Angeles, thanks mostly to its long, unsecured border with North Alabamastan (sometimes called Indiana). However, Chicago’s murder rate still lags far behind the nation’s leaders, many of which are in red states with loose gun restrictions.
Lie #7: We should enforce existing gun laws before imposing new ones. Calls for more determined enforcement of existing gun laws are the most darkly cynical lie in the debate over guns. Our gun laws are carefully crafted to be unenforceable.
Lie #8: We need guns to protect ourselves from the government. Until 2008, no federal court had ever recognized an individual constitutional right to own a firearm. If anyone imagined that the Constitution protected a right to use violence to overthrow the government, that idea was put to rest in 1794, when George Washington marched an army across Pennsylvania to squash citizens’ “Second Amendment remedies.”
Lie #9: No legislation can curb gun deaths in the US. Americans now have more guns in circulation than citizens. No credible regulatory scheme, no matter how smart or ambitious, is likely to bring the rate of gun deaths in America in line with global standards anytime soon. Whatever we achieve politically in the near term can only be a down-payment on a better world for our children.
Lie #10: Americans oppose tighter gun regulation. When presented with concrete proposals to regulate guns, majorities of Americans almost always favor them. That support is so universal that it spreads across partisan lines. In fact, a ballot proposal on gun control passed in Nevada of all places. More than 90% of gun owners support universal background checks. A majority of Republicans support a national gun registry.
It's kinda pleasing and affirming, but at this point, the joke is getting very stale. Which should be a red flag for us. Stay in the game. Stay busy. Stay focused.
A glimmer of what, I don't really know. Not yet anyway, but WaPo ran an OpEd piece today that tells us the truth about our "Hyper-Partisanship Problem". Catherine Rampell: Dysfunctional Washington refuses to work out its differences to solve problems that matter to Americans.
So say pundits and policy activists, perhaps hoping that diffuse criticism, rather than finger-pointing, will yield a government willing to govern.
But the problem isn’t “Washington.” It isn’t “Congress,” either. The problem is elected officials from a single political party: the GOP. - and - ...Even the awe-inspiring Marjory Stoneman Douglas High student survivors, while calling for stronger gun-control measures, have appeared cautious about disproportionately picking on Republicans.
“I was very partisan in the beginning and violently attacking the GOP. I was angry and scared. Now I know that people from every party are supporting us. Everybody is demanding change,” junior Cameron Kasky tweeted when a critic accused him of spouting “Democrat talking points.”
Kasky is, of course, correct that Americans of all parties demand change. But politicians of all parties do not.
I used to devote more time and viscera deconstructing the Weekend Gasbag Cavalcade back when there was a glimmer of hope that if enough of us documented and published the catastrophic failures of our political media over and over and over again, it might change their collective behavior.
I no longer believe that.
Clearly, their contemptable collective behavior is an organizational feature and not a bug, and therefore unfixable until it becomes unbearably more painful for the men and women who control our corporate media to change their ways than to maintain the status quo. I still take note of the weekly crimes against journalism and the vipers and pettyfoggers who commit them, but now it is more with an eye towards the future. Just a dime-store Josephus documenting who we are and why this is happening to us as our country is systematically gutted by forces beyond my control. And I think I write a pretty honest stick, but this Sunday I can't sum things up any better than @51Renee on the Twitter machine: Trump having a meltdown today.
Jill Stein having a meltdown today. Bernie snapping at Chuck Todd today. Hillary Clinton is laughing her ass off. She tried to tell you. #StillWithHer
Yeah, that's about where we're at. I don't expect driftglass to stop doing what he does, but the guy's been at it for 10 years, thinking only a few of us are hearing it. And he needs a break - everybody does once in a while. You can only slam your face into that wall so many times before you have to walk away, find a good place to sit, and just think about nothing for a while. So Ms Rampell comes through for us with a good assessment, and hope lives in expecting more of that. Hang in there, driftglass - and everybody else too.
