General Apple gave up data on Dems to Trump DOJ
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Would you want to be in that beasts guard. Street fight or sanctioned fight? I sure as fuck wouldn't.He's singling out@Sex Chicken and it's kind of rude.
Democrats demand Barr, Sessions testify on Apple data subpoenas
thehill.com
"The revelation that the Trump Justice Department secretly subpoenaed metadata of House Intelligence Committee Members and staff and their families, including a minor, is shocking. This is a gross abuse of power and an assault on the separation of powers,” Schumer and Durbin said in a joint statement Friday. “This appalling politicization of the Department of Justice by Donald Trump and his sycophants must be investigated immediately by both the DOJ Inspector General and Congress."
Democrats demand Barr, Sessions testify on Apple data subpoenas
The top two Senate Democrats on Friday called for multiple investigations into the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decisions in 2017 and 2018 to issue subpoenas seeking metadata records of Hous…
thehill.com
not even sure how to rate this
I need about 8 of the ratings because this post is so deep
Voting is not civic engagement. It's the bare minimum expected in a democracy. Political parties put a lot of emphasis on voting in republics because it's a necessity, but as we've seen in authoritarian systems, it's not the be all end all of political involvement. Most of us posting here are fortunate to live in nominally democratic countries, cities, states and provinces, but in the US at least, an overwhelming majority have no idea what goes on in even local politics unless it involves a tax hike or something that might directly impact their neighborhood. The issue is local politics become death by a thousand cuts leading to disenchantment with representative government and a feeling that well, I'll vote for this team because I like the things they say, usually in national rhetoric. A more engaged civic orientation includes going to local meetings, writing editorials, attending candidate forums, organizing people in your neighborhood when changes are proposed, reviewing the local and state budgets when they come out, voting for boring positions like county clerk and various judges, and building coalitions to take over the local version of a political party if the leadership is misrepresenting you. This is how grass roots efforts are built, sometimes around single issues, but sometimes with a comprehensive political program. It also involves donating to people working on similar causes or to the kinds of programs that need support to bolster the most vulnerable in a community. After this, the next step is finding other like minded individuals or people with similar concerns in other communities and building solidarity with them. This will never be a perfect one to one match so it requires negotiation over what you'll stand together on and what you'll agree to disagree about for now. With this kind of solidarity, people can push for policy to restrain corporate excess or bad foreign policy or address the root causes that threaten everyday safety. Sometimes these coalitions win and sometimes they lose.
Now obviously, this form of civic engagement is incredibly time and labor intensive and that's no accident. It was created by and for elites to maintain their privileges and keep anyone else demobilized. It would be very difficult for any individual to do all of these things all the time, but I've certainly known many people who have done it. I've done it myself in places I've lived. Sometimes you have the time and sometimes all you have the time to do is vote, donate and express your support publicly here and there. Affiliating with the people doing the work on the ground is vital, however, as it at least allows you to think about where and when you can be useful, sometimes via participating in a protest, sometimes donating to others doing the work, sometimes via a simple letter to an editor, sometimes via a few words said in a conversation and sometimes simply by making a phone call to your legislator's community relations person to say no, I'm not down with this. What social media has unfortunately done is make people believe a retweet or a like is enough, which is really the ultimate demobilization strategy, especially when those media rely on an advertising model totally predicated on surveillance and sorting us into categories for targeting with all sorts of predatory information. There is some value in social media participation setting the agenda for media and as a tool to build awareness about something that may not otherwise rise to the national concern, but it has hard limits. Posting online is easy because you hardly ever lose. You can go join a filter bubble or block people or like and share what someone else said, but real struggle involves embracing the grind.
As an individual, this strategy of direct involvement and coalition building is our only hope, especially considering the money and power arrayed against it. Voting, boycotting and finger pointing in anonymous spaces is the most useless thing imaginable. Rooting for this team or the other once we give them our vote is also a way of saying someone else will handle it. People owe it to themselves to get educated by reading books and talking with other people directly involved in processes rather than deferring to YouTube videos and cable news hot takes. Each have their utility, but they're a beginning, nowhere near an end. The idea of policing how reasonable someone is being when you have no idea the personal stakes of some policy issues in their lives is symptomatic of this problem. Rather than doing anything, people can become self satisfied with sounding smart in conversations that mean nothing. "I sure told him" becomes a substitute for I stopped people with actual power from messing up people's lives.
We're currently on the back foot. The leadership of both political parties in this country have more or less written off vast swaths of the population as useful idiots at best in many cases. But the leadership is not the party. Anyone can become the party. On the right, the tea party and the Trumpists have demonstrated this in our lifetime as they took things over. On the left, the neoliberal wing of the party took over in the 1970s and hasn't relinquished power since, though there are signs of other coalitions gaining strength. These victories, when they've occurred, have been the result of massive expenditures of time and often money. But they're proof that they can happen. It's tiring to fight and our political economy is organized so we have less time for it, but it's better to go out fighting than pulling guard and hoping we can figure something out before we get curb stomped.
This is rich.
You have the nerve to speak to the members of this site in this manor after pouring your heart out and asking them advice on how you should be handling your parenting responsibilities? You have the nerve to accuse people of gaslighting when you call people your friends in one post, and then ridicule every thought they post? You have the nerve to accuse people of "not having balls" and lament about "resignation" after voting for the guy who torpedoed the candidate you campaigned for (twice)? You have the nerve to call people cowardly while you look to Daddy Government to right all of your perceived wrongs? You make a quip about pulling guard in a street fight when you're the kind of guy who blocks people on an internet forum for hurting your feelings? Do you really not realize when you go on these diatribes that you're only exposing your own short comings and insecurities?
We all have character flaws, and we've all done things we wish we hadn't, but most of us have enough self awareness to know that projecting our shortcomings on to other people doesn't accomplish anything other than making us look weak. Talking down to people you'll probably never meet, while using language that you would never consider actually using in person (because you'd get your head beaten in) doesn't make you wise, tough, or any other thing you're trying to project. It exposes your warts, your hypocrisy. You're lucky that the mods here think you're something more special than you actually are. Because every time you post the type of crap you did in the above quoted post, you flagrantly violate the TOS of the site. Of course, I suspect you're looking to be martyred so you can skulk off to your echo chamber and tell them about the intolerant, neanderthals who didn't want to hear your truth.
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Apple informed former White House counsel Don McGahn and wife that their records were sought by DOJ in 2018
Former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn and his wife received disclosures from Apple last month that their account records were sought by the Justice Department in February 2018, while McGahn was still the top lawyer representing the presidency, according to a person familiar.
www.cnn.com
Rod Rosenstein joins Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions in denying ALL knowledge of secret DOJ subpoenas sent to Microsoft and Apple for Congress members' data
www.dailymail.co.uk
Sessions, Barr and Rosenstein all deny knowledge of secret subpoenas
Neither Sessions nor Rosenstein knew about the subpoena, a source close to them said. Barr has also denied that he was aware of the subpoena.
- The Justice Department sent a secret subpoena to Apple on February 6, 2018 for 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses
- Trump and his administration were infuriated after detailed conversations between his aides and the Russian ambassador to the U.S. were leaked
- The Justice Department began probing the sources of the embarrassing leaks
- The subpoenas included requests for data from accounts for Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell
- Sessions served as Attorney General at the time the administration started probing the leaks, and Rosenstein served as his deputy attorney general
- Neither Sessions nor Rosenstein knew about the subpoena, a source close to them told the Wall Street Journal on Friday
- Sessions' successor William Barr ordered the probe continue well into 2020
- Barr told Politico he also was 'not aware of any congressman's records being sought in a leak case' while he was attorney general