Also, as Cheney taught us, there are other less-straightforward but equally effective avenues for declassifying info.
Threatening to shoot the other person in the face?
Simply leaking the classified info yourself and burning our intelligence contacts in the process. i.e. Plame’s contacts re: weapons proliferation.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story-fbi-wiretap-russians-trump-tower/story?id=46266198
There, indeed, was an FBI wiretap involving Russians at Trump Tower.
But it was not placed at the behest of Barack Obama, and the target was not the Trump campaign of 2016. For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower in New York.
The more interesting case to me is a different Russian mob money laundering case (the Prevezon case), which was being investigated by… wait for it… Preet Bharara.
Well, it was heading in interesting directions until the key witness (whoopsie!) fell off the top of a building in Moscow yesterday. Russian news sources say it was an accident, but witnesses seem to disagree. That’s okay, though, the case marches ahead under the new US Attorney. Bharara’s replacement is likely to be the son of a former lawyer for the defendant Prevezon, so I’m sure it’ll work out fine.
FWIW, Bharara’s refusal to resign was neither pointless grandstanding nor some scheme to get some critical work done before he got fired. In the event of impeachment, firing a US Attorney investigating matters related to the cause of impeachment is considered obstruction of justice, another charge to pile on the rest–and if it got to that point, it would be both serious and difficult to refute.
Of course not, they merely have the power to declassify any documents they wish.
How can they declassify something they don’t know exists?
In the particular matter we’re discussing, Trump either a) knows they exist, or b) is making unsubstantiated shit up again. Because either he knows a factual basis for the claim or he doesn’t. If it exists and he didn’t know about it, that means he still made it up–he just got lucky by the stopped-clock standard.
Also, as Cheney taught us, there are other less-straightforward but equally effective avenues for declassifying info.
Because the President is not omnipotent nor a dictator.
Of course not, they merely have the power to declassify any documents they wish.
If names are masked, the President and the Oval office don’t gather the info, so they have to request the name unmasking from the agency that gathered the intel.
Yes, they have the authority to direct the agencies to do that too. I was including that in the declassification powers.
Because the President is not omnipotent nor a dictator.
Of course not, they merely have the power to declassify any documents they wish.
I pull the color from an image of the logo Mike Verta shared on his forum a while ago.
What’s the hex code for that color?
I’d imagine our ROTJ 35mm preservation (Harmy’s) would be pretty close, since that’s low-fade filmstock. Whether that would exactly match the other films is an open question, but I’d think it’d be pretty close.
Luckily, the President has the power to declassify anything he likes, so I’m sure it’ll be cleared up in a jiffy.
Besides, there was a wiretap at Trump Tower. But it was targetting a Russian mob-operated money laundering operation.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story-fbi-wiretap-russians-trump-tower/story?id=46266198
TLDR summary, although the FBI operation was largely a success, the big Russian mafioso got away, and was last seen in the VIP section at one of the President’s events, right near the man himself.
Self-indulgent filmmaking is the worst kind.
Except when it’s John Waters – then the worst kind of filmmaking is an indulgence.
I have never been able to see anything wrong with the GOUT. Could somebody tell me what the big deal is?
Although DVD features had made the transition to anamorphic years prior, the GOUT was still non-anamorphic, which was galling. Those who watched it on an SD-CRT might not have noticed the difference, but others would either get the “tiny window in the middle of the screen” effect, or they’d zoom in to see it nice and big… and blurry. Basically if the reason you bought the GOUT in the first place was specifically for the GOUT, and it got treated like some unfinished deleted scene (which was the only time non-anamorphic video was on DVD at that time anymore), you’d be pretty pissed. And considering it was presented side-by-side with another release clearly demonstrating that better source material existed (and wasn’t used), that was another kick in the teeth. Then, if you decided to get beyond the size and blurriness of the film, you’d start seeings things like the colors and DVNR, neither of which were out of place or particularly bad… for an early-nineties Laserdisc release. But for a contemporary DVD, they kinda sucked. And compared to HD, well, ick.
And then there’s the audio. This was the release that was being billed to be “just like it was in theatres”. Well, actually no, it wasn’t. The audio is the 93 mix, which was never in the theatres, and had lots of issues people complained about (nineties effects mixed into seventies audio, effects simply being left out). And lossy, so it actually managed to fare worse than Laserdisc in this respect.
Basically if you just want to re-create the feeling of watching Star Wars on television in the 80’s, the GOUT does a competent job of that. Minor issues, yeah, but it’s not too far off the mark. But if you want to re-create the feeling of watching it in the theatre? No, not one bit.
Ok. I still don’t see how what I’ve posted makes me a condescending liberal elitist but whatever.
Really wasn’t targetting you so much as the media coverage of all these “Trump voters are so screwed by Trump’s policies” articles in the media these days, which include graphics like the one you used. It’s rare for one of these articles to successfully get to the issues that actually motivate these voters to continue to rally behind Trump. Taking a look at this story, the Charla McComic story is your typical “there are huge gaps in her motivation/logic here that could easily be filled in by a pushy reporter but instead we’ll leave the gaps in place and she’ll sound like a moron”. The Nancy Ware story is better – the motivations are fully revealed, but not analyzed in the least.
Did people in the Appalachians vote for Trump knowing he’d eliminate programs that are designed to help them?
I can’t be absolutely certain or other people’s motivations, of course, but Trump is hardly the first person who promised to eliminate programs that help Appalachia, got their overwhelming support, and then once elected proceeded to eliminate those programs as promised. And then will get their overwhelming support in the next election. There’s a lot about Trump that’s unprecedented, but this particular refrain has been playing on repeat for decades.
They aren’t getting what they need economically (they never have), but Trump is absolutely giving them more than they thought they’d ever get ideologically. The problem with this pattern is the ideology, not the economics.
I want to break out my soapbox for a little bit.
The whole discussion of “Republicans voting against their self-interest” is the sort of elitist, condescending, liberal-bubble nonsense that does more to reinforce bad stereotypes of liberals than to actual further any political analysis.
Everyone votes against their own self-interest. Everyone.
Liberals vote to increase their own taxes. Those taxes may fund schools their kids don’t go to. Republicans look at this and roll their eyes, talk about those crazy liberal cities that love taxes. But you know what they tend not to do? Talk about those liberals as if they were a bunch of slow-witted slack-jawed yokels who will someday come to their senses.
There is an understanding that there’s a thinking brain behind these decisions. That the liberals weighed the very tangible and measurable economic self-harm against some ideological greater good they believe they’re working toward.
Where is that understanding on the left, when people on the right vote to cut the social programs they rely on? People on the right also have a concept of the greater good, it’s simply a very different-looking greater good than the one envisioned on the left. When they decide to take a personal hit to do what they believe advances their society, they may consider it a brave and noble act. Then every single liberal they see implies they’re just morons. Way to build bridges, people.
Now, full disclosure. My people don’t come from too far from that pink stripe on Frink’s map. I go camping for a weekend and could easily be mistaken for an extra from Deliverance. I don’t think a whole lot of these voters are going to be lining up to support Kamala Harris in 2020. But some can be convinced, and it’s a start. And it’s not going to be by saying “What’d you go and do that for? I hope you’re happy without your health care, har!” It would be by showing them the better world envisioned by liberal ideals. Yes, yes, I (painfully) realize that most wouldn’t see what’s so much better about a world with so many brown people in it, but some could. And that’s the way forward.
Also Bernie would have been less popular after he underwent months of general election attacks and scrutiny.
I’ve been a big fan of Bernie since 1990 (that’s, uh, well, let’s not count the years, shall we?) and supported him in the primary, didn’t particularly like Clinton (voted for her anyway), and have to agree. The bar for congressional investigation is very low. Sanders was a Senator when Benghazi happened. What did he know? Why didn’t he do more to stop it? Did he give a secret order to stand down that there’s no record of? Yeah, that sounds ridiculous, but no more so than when those same questions were asked about Clinton. And Sanders used e-mail, therefore crooked Bernie. He’d have gotten the same treatment, and the press would have still gone easy on Trump, grading his whole candidacy on a curve. Maybe he would’ve stayed popular, maybe not. However, if popularity was any sort of measure of electoral success, Bernie may have been going through Senate approval for some executive branch agency right now.
I’m guessing Jeebus is in his early 20s and a libertarian.
Wrong on both fronts.
jeebus is a 1920’s librarian.
I coulda sworn he was a 20/20 libation.
Holland ain’t looking bad, even without taking the cheese into consideration.
I guess my main question - and I’ll try to word it better this time - is whether Harmy will still be using “recreated” shots (like he did with the dewback outside the cantina) or if he’s going to keep that kind of thing to an absolute minimum.
I understand that the majority (the roughly 80% of the film that remains unaltered) will be sourced from the blu-ray. But what I’m wondering is if the newly available print scans will fill in all the missing pieces or if Harmy will still need to do some recreating like he did with that dewback shot.
I can’t see how he wouldn’t keep it to a minimum. If we’d had adequate film footage back when 2.5 was released, I doubt that would have been done in the first place.
So… mixed into the CBO report which says so-and-so-million will lose insurance, such-and-such money will be saved, is a really standout number. They project that Social Security outlays would fall by $3 billion. That’s part of their “Yay for the impact on the budget” numbers.
Now, the CBO can only deal with the impact of the law as written, and the law as written doesn’t really touch Social Security (one third rail at a time, get in line). So, please tell me if I’m missing something, but to me that says that the number of people receiving social security payments will fall, and fairly sharply. I mean, the actuarial numbers are out there–the mortality rate of seniors with insurance vs. those without–but ick. But at least they’re gonna put a stop to those death panels.
Only Harmy can say for sure, but he has said he’s not likely to do an all-film-sourced DeEd, because at that point, lots of others could do that work (although I’d personally still encourage him to go for it, because he has demonstrated solid skills beyond despecializing). I expect we’ll see something more like Jedi 2.5, where lots of pure film footage was mixed in, but only where it blended well with the surrounding footage. I’m sure film sources will be heavily used in despecializing Blu-ray footage though. Complete lack of GOUT is a pretty safe bet though.
The current plan has Empire 2.5 first, then 3.0 for the trilogy (order of films not yet determined, but I’m guessing Star Wars gets priority for 3.0 due to the already damn near perfection of the others).
How can you not hate a culture that doesn’t easy access to cheese? Those bastards.
They do make an effort, which is why I said “proper” bread and cheese. But… yeah, it’s even less convincing than Wonder Bread and American Cheese. By the end of my visit, my arteries were too soft for me to get worked up about it.
I was never saying that American culture is better in all aspects. The familial bonds of foreign cultures is one of the positives of other cultures that I was thinking of. My main points was that I can’t think of any other culture that I’d rather live in. So far no one has even told me that they disagree with that.
The problem with this is, that you don’t just live in a culture, you live in a country and under a government. So again is the culture the problem(and maybe some cases it is and maybe some cases it is not) or the country/government?
Not only that, but living in a culture other than the one you’re used to is often enough of a turn-off, all other things being equal. I loved my time in Indonesia and in many ways could see living there, but the lack of easy access to proper bread and cheese pretty much settles it. It’s not because I think we’re superior, it’s because mmmmmm cheese.
Yeesh. What a mess. People load up the word culture with lots of extra meanings. When people like Steve King talk about cultures or civilizations, what they really mean is races–that much is pretty obvious to everyone. But adding these meanings is easy to do even without his special brand of malice. People can equate cultures and countries (American culture vs. Canadian culture, when Seattle honestly has a lot more in common with Vancouver than it does with Tallahassee). People can equate culture with history, where, for example, societies can be thrown into turmoil by events, but the culture of that society is not necessarily chaotic.
And talk of comparative cultures is an anathema to pluralistic ideals–where it is just assumed that culture will end up a mish-mash, ideally taking the best from each and continually re-making itself into a greater whole. Sure, there’s something about every culture (no matter how you define it) that sucks. The idea of pluralism is that we learn from each other and everyone benefits, and the world sucks a little less over time. But not everyone accepts pluralistic ideals–in fact the last election was in many ways a wholesale rejection of pluralism and a return to naked identity politics.
PM sent.
Disagree on many, many points.
First, Germany. Immigrant minorities gravitate more to the SPD than Merkel’s CDU, so if Merkel’s trying to pad her party’s demographics through immigration, that would be a stupid strategy. Also, it’s much harder to become a citizen in Germany than the US, so many immigrants, whose families have lived in Germany for generations, cannot vote. No birthright citizenship. Immigrants have even less electoral influence there than the US.
“Open borders” is a heavily abused term these days, so I don’t blame you at all for this. Nevertheless, the only open borders the US has are between one state and another state (same in Germany). The international borders are absolutely not open, nor is there any significant group advocating for that in either country.
The US has quite a lot of undocumented immigrants, but at least lately it’s a fairly static amount. The net amount of undocumented immigration into and out of the US for the past decade has been approximately zero–with possibly slightly more leaving than arriving. So the presence of undocumented immigrants is actually a very different issue than border security.
I think “social consequences” needs a better definition. The economic consequences of immigration has been well-studied and there really isn’t much one way or the other. Immigrant communities (documented, undocumented, refugee, etc) do have a lower crime rate than the general population, but I don’t think the numbers are such that they lower the crime rate of the country they live in by any significant amount.
Now I’d agree on some points–the coalitions are shifting, but not as much as they appear to be. Even back before unions had their backs broken, the upper midwest white working class was a solidly Republican demographic, the only question being how many votes the Dems managed to peel off. Reagan Democrats and Trump voters–in that demographic, it’s the same thing really. I’d like to say they loved Dems for strong union support/good jobs and abandoned them over free trade/job losses or somesuch, but AFAICT the evidence doesn’t really support that narrative. They mobilized against welfare queens in the 80’s, and bad hombres today. Lee Atwater was absolutely correct in his assessment of the electorate, and it’s still true today.