The Biden Administration. Document the atrocities - Praise the graces

Absconded is quite the loaded term here.

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I must have slept through President Petraeus’ term in office…

The problem isn’t inherently the documents, but how they are handled. Whistleblowers should be protected. What Snowden, Winner, Chelsea Manning all did was whistleblowing and each of them should have been protected. 45 is no whistleblower…except to the extent that he tends to blurt out admissions to his own crimes.

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Right?

I appreciate the useful comparison to someone like Winner, but Snowden seems cowed by living in Putin’s shadow.

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That’s exactly right. No negotiating on the fake debt ceiling. Congress appropriated these funds already. The Constitution says that the debts of the US can not be questioned.

Fuck right off.

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Exactly. I find myself getting SO annoyed at the reporting on this. Main example, from what we know so far, documents were discovered, Biden’s lawyers started looking through them, they saw something marked “classified,” and were like, “oh, we don’t have that clearance, let’s hold off until someone gets here with appropriate clearances.” As they should.
Then, when the team with clearance came in and went through the documents that’d already been set aside to be looked at at they discovered it wasn’t just that one item, but 5 more in the box, reporting is all “the administration first confessed to 1 classified document, but now 5 more have been discovered!” As if it was intentionally being hidden.
Who knows where it will go, but the reporting, repeated over and over, is SO misleading!

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This is potentially a very big deal

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The important networks are air-gapped from the Internet and each other, and normally to get access to them you have to go into a SCIF. Getting in and out of the SCIF can be an ordeal, depending on location and content, and once you are inside you don’t have access to things like phones or the Internet.

So, the big brass get their info on printouts which can be physically tracked, which is vastly more convenient for them most of the time. You can be looking at a paper document while you’re on the phone with a foreign head of state or a sweetheart corporation, but you can’t do that from inside a SCIF.

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This is the kind of homespun, normal thing presidents do (like when Obama stopped at Franklin’s BBQ in Austin). Sure it was staged in the way such things are, but still charming.

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BuT tHeY mAdE fUn oF tRuMp fOr oRdErInG bUrGeRs!!!

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X Date

What are the key dates, and what’s tax season got to do with it?

The day when the Treasury can’t meet all of its obligations and defaults is called the “X Date.” Analysts had been predicting it could come in July or August, so Yellen delivered a bit of a surprise with her focus on early June.

In any case, there are some expectations that negotiations over the debt limit won’t begin in earnest until after President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union speech on Feb. 7. There’s also chatter that talks might not ramp up until after mid-April, when tax season hits its peak with income-tax filing day.

The Treasury may be able to extend the X Date if the government takes in more tax revenue than expected this April, said Eurasia Group’s Jon Lieber and Kylie Milliken in a note.

The Eurasia Group analysts also said it’s unlikely that Congress will be able to develop a long-term solution by June, so lawmakers probably will pass a three- or six-month suspension of the borrowing limit to allow more time to come to a consensus.

“This could turn into a can-kicking exercise that aligns the X Date with the end of the fiscal year on 30 September to create one mega-negotiation overspending. In this scenario, Congress could again punt the debt limit until December, as it did in 2021,” they added. via Marketwatch

It’s gQp hostage taking and fear mongering before the 24’ election.

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Just mint the coin now and take all the air out of McCarthy’s sails. Government doesn’t need to be a freakin’ suspense thriller like Jason Bourne.

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Fingers crossed, but I’d be surprised. Biden seems constitutionally incapable of doing something that unprecedented and “radical.”

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I’m assuming that’s what they mean when Yellen says they are going to implement extraordinary measures. It’s possible that they mean instead to send Republicans a strongly-worded letter, but for now I woukd like to keep some of my remaining hair instead of tearing it out.

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“Extraordinary measures” are just creative accounting to keep the ball in the air. It’s estimated that this can work until early June-ish? After that, implosion city.

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I’m not sure it’s very radical. The legislation was passed in the 90’s and it presents a perfectly reasonable end-around of a completely unreasonable obstruction. Republicans are holding the entire world economy hostage; a trillion dollar coin teleports that hostage to safety without any meaningful controversy.

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Absolutely agree, and would be very Dark Brandon, which would make me very happy and the fascists very angry. Win/Win!

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In 2022, the Biden Justice Department prosecuted 96% of referrals for immigration, but only 38% of white collar or corporate crimes. The latter was the lowest count of white collar prosecutions since Reagan. All four years of Trump featured more such prosecutions. Who knew that white collar crime was declining? /s
To be fair, this is the concluding paragraph from the data piece.

These federal government records document that the prosecution of white-collar offenses has been declining for more than a decade. Results also show that the majority of criminal referrals for white-collar offenses that federal prosecutors receive are closed without prosecution. A further clear finding is that the decision to criminally charge a business in contrast to an individual for engaging in white-collar criminal activity is exceedingly rare (just 1%), and this low rate has persisted whether the presidency was held by a Republican or by a Democratic.

https://twitter.com/LeverNews/status/1616147387613085696

But a nadir is a nadir and it came with this administration.

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Funny how (far as I know), Biden isn’t openly encouraging people to start or join a union anymore, as he was in his early days in office.

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