Reddit Politics Summary Wednesday Dec 20th 17

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This is a digest of the top posts on reddit/r/politics over the last 24 hours.
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How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America

(25271) (comments)

• The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed "generational plunder," pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.
• I don’t want to get bogged down in an ocean of numbers and data here , but think of it this way: I’m 41, and when I was born, the gross debt-to-GDP ratio was about 35 percent.
• But even if we want to be market-oriented about this, we can think of the climate as an asset, which has degraded over time thanks to the inaction and cowardice of the boomer generation.

Here Are the 227 GOP House Members Who Just Voted to Raise Taxes on 90 Million Working Families to Give Tax Breaks to Millionaires and Corporations

(7928) (comments)

• "These are the 227 GOP House members who voted for the #GOPTaxScam. They voted to raise taxes on over 90M working families, while giving massive tax breaks to millionaires and corporations that will be paid for by cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and education.

Support for Donald Trump’s Impeachment Is Higher than His Reelection Chances

(5492) (comments)

• Donald Trump is hemorrhaging support among the American people, and now more than 40 percent of them think it's time to start the process to impeach him, a new poll finds.
• The NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, out Wednesday, carried very little good news for the president and put him on notice that 41 percent of Americans believe there is enough reason for Congress to hold impeachment hearings, even before the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
• The White House has both publicly and privately suggested that Mueller's investigation will come to an end early in the new year, but that would appear to be wishful thinking.

Massive Fraud in Net Neutrality Process is a Crime Deserving of Justice Department Attention

(4853) (comments)

• As I wrote earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of comments were submitted to the FCC in spikes during the public comment period about its proposal to eliminate the 2015 "Open Internet Order"; and, upon further investigation, were found to have been written not by humans, but by artificial intelligence programs using "natural language generators." Wired.com reports that "over a third of the nearly 22 million comments that poured into the . included one of seven identical messages," and "more than half were associated with duplicate or temporary emails." Additionally, the New York Attorney General is also investigating reports that as many as two-million fraudulent submissions used the names and addresses of real people, both living and dead, from multiple states in a scheme to sway the FCC’s vote.
• There is also the possibility that favoring the FCC’s proposed plan was deceptive as well, hoping that it would cast a broad cloud over the entire process, and possibly delay it altogether; a good bet since that was precisely what Democrats in Congress called for when reports first surfaced of the suspicious commentary.
• The Justice Department should immediately launch a full investigation into this fraud to discover who are the perpetrators; not only because the crimes are serious, and not just because they threaten to shroud the final net neutrality decision in controversy, but because as long as individuals, groups and organizations feel safe launching campaigns of fraud to influence government officials, the problem will only get worse.

Yes, America, There Is a Class War, and You Just Lost It

(3430) (comments)

• The Republicans aren’t actually doing anything for Alabama, except maybe making them feel good about themselves by buttering them up, or indulging them in their weird idea that fundamentalist Christianity should dictate social policy to 320 million Americans, who do not share those values.
• I get angry when I see those trucks on the highway with the sign that they payed $9277 in tolls and fees last year to be on the highway.
• There will be less money for the things the government does– education, funding science, dealing with national health crises, road building, dealing with interstate crime, etc.

Wall Street Journal Killed Editorial on Trump’s Mob Ties

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• The general cause of their departures, willing and otherwise, is known: the Journal editorial line has increasingly conformed with the pro-Trump dictates of the rest of the Murdoch media empire.
• But the chidings have been gentle, and reserved for the sources of frustration shared by Trump’s own staff and legislative allies: He tweets too much, he expresses his racism a little too bluntly.

White House Counsel Knew in January Flynn Probably Violated the Law

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• The records reflected concerns that McGahn, the White House counsel, had that Michael Flynn, then the president’s national security advisor, had possibly violated either one or both laws at the time, according to two of the sources.
• 29, 2016 — while Barack Obama was still president — had counseled the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey Kislyak, not to retaliate against U.S. economic sanctions imposed against Russia by the outgoing administration.
• Despite McGahn’s concerns that Flynn violated one or both of these laws, Trump allowed Flynn to continue in his job and only fired him after the Washington Post reported that Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence and other senior administration officials about his contacts with Kislyak.

Russia Wants to Destroy Our Democracy, McMaster Says

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• McMaster added that President Donald Trump has "publicly" acknowledged Russian interference, though he did not give examples.
• The intelligence community issued a report in January, shortly before Trump took office, that accused Russia of damaging the political campaign of Hillary Clinton to help then-candidate Trump.
• The Trump administration denies colluding with Russia, which is a part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which has already yielded two guilty pleas by Trump campaign staffers.

Discussion Megathread: Congress votes on GOP Tax Bill

(1856) (comments)

• The violation of the so-called Byrd Rule forced the Senate to strip those provisions from the bill and vote on a different version than what passed the House, that vote passing after midnight on Wednesday. That, in turn, will require a second vote from the House, likely on Wednesday, before the legislation can advance to President Donald Trump's desk.
• If they can economically make a profit, regardless of impact, then by their beholden nature to shareholders, forward they shall go.
• No one, including the authors, understand the scope of the loopholes and unintentional distortions that are baked in, we are simply going to have to discover them all together.

We're the VICE News team that discovered police shoot people twice as often as previously known. Trump is walking away from reforms that could stop these shootings. Ask Us Anything!

(1854) (comments)

• In our report, we analyzed data from the 50 largest local police departments in the United States and revealed that police in these departments shoot black people at a higher rate and shoot unarmed people far more often than any data has shown. Cities that adopted reforms, including improved training and new policies around use of force and accountability, saw their number of police shootings decline by about 29 percent on average. We also found that under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has stopped pursuing efforts that led to dramatic drops in these types of police shootings.
• Some police departments — we’re looking at you Seattle, Austin, and Cincinnati — were very transparent and either already posted the records on their websites or quickly responded to our requests for additional info.
• The Memphis Police Department required a Tennessee resident to file the records request, then asked for $3,300 unless the documents were reviewed in person at police headquarters." We actually sent somebody to Memphis to review those records, btw. An official in the Essex County District Attorney’s Office told us that Newark police likely didn’t keep a list of officer-involved shootings so that they could charge reporters fees to retrieve the case files. "The Detroit Police Department said it would take up to 3,120 business days and cost at least $77,532 to retrieve records that other departments made available online for free.