House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday issued a blistering statement, hours after FBI agents arrested President Trump’s long-time ally Roger Stone. “The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people,” Pelosi said. She continued: “In the face of 37 indictments, the President’s continued actions to undermine the Special Counsel investigation raise the questions: what does Putin have on the President, politically, personally or financially?” “The Special Counsel investigation is working, and the House will continue to exercise our constitutional oversight responsibility and ensure that the Special Counsel investigation can continue free from interference from the White House,” Pelosi added. Several charges were filed against Stone, including witness tampering and false statements. He was “charged as part of the special counsel investigation over his communications with WikiLeaks, the organization behind the release of thousands of stolen Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign,” reports the New York Times. Reacting to the development, Trump tweeted: “Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of our Country! NO COLLUSION! Border Coyotes, Drug Dealers and Human Traffickers are treated better.”
Witchy sez : Please resign! Trump is the worst prez of all time. No one believes the lies coming out of his mouth. The stock market is tanking due to his tariffs. Trump celebrates kidnapping children and babies from their parents. Trump celebrates taking Obama care from millions of Americans with nothing better to replace it with. Trump has more associates in history with criminal indictments. Trump hates the FBI, Mueller, the NFL, women, Latino's, immigrants, blacks ,the media, Amazon, Harley Davidson, GM and more! Do the US and the world a favor and quit! Your leadership is horrible. The traitor even shut down the government. What kind of president does this? Have you noticed how its been nothing but bad news Since Trump took office?
Oh yea, the republicans are in charge! Expect more lies, chaos, gerrymandering, block the vote, power grabs, market drops and more! Everyday Trump and the GOP take the country
A placard calls for an end to the partial government shutdown during the Third Annual Women's March LA in downtown Los Angeles, California on January 19 (Photo by DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images By Jesse Jackson 01/21/2019 With the government still partially shut down, partisan politics is generating more heat than light. President Donald Trump, in his unique blustery style, believes he can slander the Democratic leaders that he must negotiate with, burlesque their position and demand capitulation in return for simply allowing the government to run. When the Democratic-led House recently passed legislation that was approved by the Republican Senate in December to fund the government, Republican senators refuse even to put it on the floor. OPINION House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delights in tweaking Donald Trump, suggesting that he should postpone his State of the Union address until the government is up and running. Trump retaliates by postponing Pelosi’s trip to see the troops in Afghanistan and leaking the schedule, violating basic security. Lost in all this is common sense. And looking at where we are as a country suggests that common sense is now perilously absent. The United States has the largest military budget by far, larger than Russia and China combined. Yet we are adding money to a Pentagon budget already bigger than it was in comparable dollars at the height of the Cold War. That doesn’t make sense. The U.S. has the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world. We have weapons that could literally destroy the world, unleashing a deadly nuclear winter. Yet President Barack Obama and now Trump committed to spending over a trillion dollars on another generation of nuclear weapons. That doesn’t make sense. The U.S. has “locations” — bases — in over 160 countries. We are literally trying to police the world. That doesn’t make sense. The U.S. suffers obscene and debilitating inequality. The three richest billionaires have as much wealth as half of all Americans combined. Yet the Republican Congress just passed a tax bill that will end up giving more than three-quarters of its benefits to the richest 1 percent. That doesn’t make sense Virtually everyone agrees that education is essential if we are to rebuild a broad and vibrant middle class. Yet teachers are on strike across the country because cuts in education funding have left them with crowded classrooms, supply shortages and inadequate salaries. College debts that students are forced to assume now are higher than any other form of personal debt — including auto loans and credit card debt. That doesn’t make sense. We spend nearly twice per capita on health care than any other advanced industrial country and yet have worse health care results. For the first time, life expectancy is declining, something that simply does not happen to advanced countries. Despite health care reform, 20 million people still go without insurance and tens of millions more are underinsured. Taxpayers pay for a good portion of all research on prescription drugs, yet we pay the highest prices in the world for our prescription drugs. That doesn’t make sense. Trump demands $5.6 billion as a down payment for the wall he wants to build along the Mexican border, a wall that he promised Mexicans would pay for. He says it will stem the flow of drugs, but most of the drug trade comes already through legal ports of entry. He says we have a crisis on the border, but in fact undocumented immigration has been declining for years. So, even Republican legislators from the Texas border argue that Trump isn’t making sense. This list can go on. Dr. Martin Luther King said he couldn’t follow the old “eye-for-an-eye philosophy” because “it ends up leaving everyone blind. He told the story of driving from Atlanta with his brother at night. For some reason the other drivers didn’t dim their high beams. Exasperated, his brother said, “I’m tired of this. The next car that comes refusing to dim its lights, I’m going to refuse to dim mine.” “Don’t do that,” said Dr. King, “somebody has to have some sense on this highway.” As a country, we are moving along a winding road toward freedom. There are curves and hills, potholes and perils. We are constantly tempted to retaliate against those who get in the way. We get distracted by those who would divide us, those who foster fear and hate. We are constantly in danger of losing our bearings. But we’ve got to remember Dr. King’s admonition to his supporters in Birmingham, Ala., after the 1963 Ku Klux Klan terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four innocent little girls. “Wait a minute, Birmingham,” he taught. “Somebody’s got to have some sense in Birmingham.” Jesse Jackson
President Donald Trump speaks at the American Farm Bureau Federation's 100th Annual Convention, Monday Jan. 14, 2019, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) By Jesse Jackson 01/14/2019 Since the striking victories of Democrats up and down the ballot in 2018, President Donald Trump has been flailing more and more wildly. He’s setting new records for the length of the government shutdown, watched his defense secretary resign after suddenly announcing the withdrawal of troops from Syria, forced his attorney general to resign, found it difficult to find a permanent replacement for his departing chief of staff, and tweeted that he is “all alone in the White House.” OPINION Quietly, the unrelenting investigation of Robert Mueller becomes ever more ominous. Now the new Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives will probe the corruption of this most corrupt administration, from Trump’s business dealings to the corporate lobbyists who are running entire departments in the interests of their once and future employers. While Trump issues insult after insult against opponents — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — he reveals just how desperate he is. Essentially, Trump now has three choices. He can stay in office and be impeached. The evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors is building each day, from trampling election laws by payoffs to keep his mistresses quiet to blatant self-enrichment that surely offends the Constitution’s ban on emoluments, to open and secret efforts to obstruct justice. Democrats will no doubt wait for special prosecutor Mueller to issue his report. They will wait to see if Republicans, alarmed by their sinking poll numbers, begin to separate themselves from Trump. Sen. Mitt Romney’s blast at Trump may be an early warning of what’s likely to come. Hearings on the impeachment of the president are inevitable. Impeachment in the House is likely. Whether the Republican-led Senate will protect the president remains to be seen. If not impeached, Trump could stay in office and be disgraced. Disgrace appears unavoidable. He lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes at a time many Americans were desperate to change things. Republicans lost several key congressional races last fall. That’s when the economy was at its best, and Trump’s foreign policy chaos hadn’t yet been felt. Two years from now, if he chooses to run for re-election, Trump will try to pull the Electoral College equivalent of an inside straight again, but he is most likely to be routed, bringing down with him many of the Republican senators who have lacked the backbone to stand up to him. At the same time, the investigations of his various business dealings, his tax returns, his conflicts of interests will end in myriad lawsuits, if not criminal charges. Once he is defeated, Trump will face not only unending lawsuits for damages, but the real possibility of jail time for himself or his family or both. Alternatively, Trump — the deal maker — could cut a deal to define his fate. After the Mueller report is issued, as the congressional investigations accelerate, as various criminal investigations begin, he could seek to negotiate his way out. Cut a deal that would give him and his family immunity from criminal liability and possibly civil liability in exchange for his resignation, sparing the nation the agony of what will inevitably be an ugly, divisive fight over impeachment and over criminal indictment after he is defeated. Americans tend to forgive and forget, once an offender resigns. President Gerald Ford took a hit for pardoning President Richard Nixon, but Nixon survived and regained some of his stature with books on foreign policy. Pelosi and Schumer might take a hit for cutting a deal with Trump, but Trump could retain his freedom and his celebrity, with a base surely willing to support him in the wilderness. It has come to this: impeachment, disgrace or resignation. Trump, no doubt, will rail against his fate. He’ll claim he could be vindicated in court or in Congress or in the elections. His twittering will grow more frantic and more venomous. His impulsive and destructive behavior — pulling troops out of Syria suddenly and then reversing position and reversing again, shutting down the government over a wall that won’t be built, using the bully pulpit to try to intimidate his former associates who are testifying against him — will get ever more dangerous. His flailing only deepens the hold that he is already in. Trump never expected to win the presidency. He clearly might find it sensible to save his fortune and freedom by resigning from a position he never expected to hold. Thanx Jesse Jackson
U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. outside the US Capito on ian. 4. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) ByJesse Jackson 01/07/2019 When new U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked on “60 Minutes” whether she thinks President Donald Trump is a racist, she responded with the candor that makes her a compelling force in Washington: “Yeah, yeah, no question.” This, of course, lit up the social media, with Trump supporters denouncing Ocasio-Cortez and progressives praising her. One would think after his dog-whistle, race-bait politics — from slurring immigrants to slandering a Hispanic judge to embracing the racist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., to denigrating Haiti and African nations as “s—hole countries” — that the question had been answered long ago. OPINION What is clear is that, whatever the president’s personal views, the Trump administration is intent on weakening enforcement of civil rights laws across the board. The same week that Ocasio-Cortez spoke, two widely respected reporters from Washington Post, Laura Meckler and Devlin Barrett, reported that the Trump administration is taking the first steps toward rolling back a centerpiece of civil rights enforcement: the doctrine that starkly disparate impact can provide evidence of discrimination even without proof of intent. If a government contractor announces that it won’t hire anyone who is living with someone of the same sex, the victims may not be able to provide direct evidence that the employer intended to discriminate, but the disparate impact of the announcement would provide the basis for finding discrimination. Disparate impact isn’t dispositive. Those accused can demonstrate that they have a rational reason for the regulation or action and that there are no less discriminatory alternatives. In some areas, like election law, disparate impact is written in the legislation itself. In most areas, however, it derives from regulations on enforcing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, particularly Title VI which bars discrimination based on race, color or national origin by entities, including schools that receive federal funding. Blood Sugar? Why Did No One Tell You About This? By Glucocil — The simple, natural solution for normal blood sugar that takes GNC by stIn 2014, as Meckler and Devlin report, the Obama administration formally put public school systems on notice that they could be found guilty of racial discrimination if students of color were punished at dramatically higher rates than white students. Trump’s Education Department issued a report criticizing the regulation and has begun discussions about rescinding it. This assault on a centerpiece of civil rights enforcement comes on top of Trump’s stunning reversal of civil rights enforcement across the government. Under Jeff Sessions, the Trump Justice Department essentially abandoned the Obama effort to work with police departments to address systemic racially discriminatory police practices. Sessions directed the Justice Department to stop defending affirmative action programs and start enforcement actions against them. The administration rolled back protections for transgender students, while banning transgender people from the military. The Justice Department chose to defend a discriminatory Texas voter ID law, which a district court later ruled was passed with discriminatory intent. In department after department, the administration has sought to weaken civil rights divisions and cut their budgets. As head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump’s acting chief of staff Mike Mulvaney gutted the unit responsible for enforcing anti-discriminatory lending laws. This list can go on. Is Donald Trump personally a racist? Whatever your conclusion, Trump surely campaigned by trying to stoke racial fears and divisions. And this administration is the most hostile to civil rights and to equal justice under the law than any since the passage of the Civil Rights laws. Trump’s defenders insist that the president objects to being called a racist, that he signed the recent legislation rolling back some of the discriminatory sentencing practices, and that he happily has his picture taken with African-American children. But the record of his administration is clear, and the disparate impact of the measures it has taken provides compelling evidence of its intent. Jesse Jackson
HuffPost US LYDIA O'CONNOR Jan 3rd 2019 WASHINGTON ― After squashing a small revolt in her own caucus around Thanksgiving, Nancy Pelosi reclaimed the House speakership Thursday, becoming the first politician in 58 years to take back the gavel. Pelosi’s path back to House speaker wasn’t easy. Part of the reason Republicans were able to win back the House majority in 2010 was through a “Fire Pelosi” campaign that made her toxic in some Republican-leaning districts, and Republicans have run on a similar playbook for every election since, including in 2018. A number of freshman Democrats made promises during the campaign to not support Pelosi if they were elected to Congress. But Pelosi was able to quell a revolt from about a dozen and a half Democrats who were already in Congress. She was able to frame the opposition as misogynist. (Her supporters started the hashtag #FiveWhiteGuys to describe the opposition, even though it wasn’t only white men opposing her and there were more than five.) She picked off individual members through small promises. (She got the vote of Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio by promising to bring back a subcommittee on elections and make her the chairwoman, and she got Rep. Brian Higgins of New York simply by publishing a statement supporting his Medicare buy-in idea.) And she swung a large chunk of detractors through a deal where she stated her support of term limits for leadership roles and committee chairmen. (The deal set up Pelosi to not only serve this term as speaker but to serve next term as speaker if Democrats hold onto the House.) It was a classic demonstration of her skill as a legislator. She outworked her opponents. She wore them down, made it uncomfortable to oppose her, and then offered a carrot for their support. And by giving the smallest concession, Pelosi actually solidified her future position. If she serves the next two terms as the No. 1 Democrat in the House, she will have spent 20 years in that position and practically assured through rule changes that no one else could ever do the same. Pelosi takes the speakership from Republican Paul Ryan, who exited the building entirely in deciding not to run for re-election, during a partial government shutdown. The fitting end to Ryan’s speakership is a political gift to Pelosi, as Democrats are able to unify around her opposition to President Donald Trump and his border wall. The first order of business for Democrats is to pass legislation reopening those closed agencies. Pelosi has already shown her mettle with Trump during this shutdown. She has been resolute that Democrats won’t approve any money for Trump’s border wall, and she’s positioned Democrats to hammer the president and Senate Republicans for their refusal to take up a bill that passed the Senate unanimously weeks before. During an Oval Office meeting with Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), she and Schumer were able to goad Trump into taking the blame for a shutdown ― a sound bite that continues to haunt Trump as the shutdown stretches into its second week. As House Democrats address legislation to end the shutdown, they are also set to take up unifying anti-corruption legislation before facing any of the real fault lines in their caucus. Democrats don’t plan to immediately demand Trump’s tax returns, as they could in the Ways and Means Committee. They don’t have any plans to impeach the president, though some members plan to offer articles of impeachment on Day One. And they won’t be taking up contentious health care legislation any time soon. Pelosi was able to head off a small revolt on the rules package. Some progressive members didn’t want “pay as you go” rules enacted in Congress, for hope of passing a Medicare-for-all bill, but the rules package is expected to easily be adopted later Thursday. Pelosi, the only woman to ever serve as speaker, takes the gavel after serving eight years as minority leader, with four years as speaker before that and another four years ― from 2003 to 2007 ― as the minority leader previously. She’s been in Congress since 1987. This is a developing story. Check back for updates. This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
The National Park Service says several partner organizations will assist with trash collection while National Park Service staff are furloughed because of the partial government shutdown. | AP Photo By Jesse Jackson 12/31/2018 The partial government shutdown continues, and 800,000 federal employees are going without pay, either furloughed and forced not to work or deemed “essential” and forced to work without pay. On Christmas Day, President Trump suggested that the workers supported the shutdown that he earlier said he would be “proud” to cause: “Many of those workers have said to me, communicated, stay out until you get the funding for the wall.” OPINION This is a billionaire’s conceit. Federal employees are not wealthy. Like most Americans, many live paycheck to paycheck. The shutdown, which started on Dec. 22, stopped all paychecks just as the holiday approached. It also terminated all paid time off for workers, even for those who have scheduled leave for the holiday and will lose the paid time off if they don’t use it by the end of the year. It is hard to imagine anything more disruptive, or more callous. Unlike the president, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management recognizes the plight that workers face in the shutdown. It issued suggestions on how employees might negotiate with landlords and creditors over missed payments, even suggesting that they offer to do “painting or carpentry” in lieu of rent. Even if Congress eventually votes to reimburse employees for back pay, it isn’t likely to cover the fines, penalty fees, late fees, and hit to credit ratings that the shutdown will cause. For years, conservatives have maligned federal workers as overpaid, inefficient and intrusive. Ever since President Ronald Reagan quipped that the most dangers words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” federal workers have been scorned and mocked. This is just plain ignorant. Federal workers are public servants — they do the public’s work. They are air traffic controllers, park rangers, border patrol officers and prison employees. They guard our coasts, they protect our air and water, they care for public lands, they administer our Social Security and Medicare. We rely on them in big and little ways. When Republicans cut the public servants in the Internal Revenue Service, the wealthy and corporations find it easier to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. When OSHA inspectors are cut, employees are at greater risk in the work place. When the Justice Department cuts back on anti-trust, private monopolies and fraud fleece millions of Americans. When we get stuck waiting in lines or find getting help from a federal official difficult, we should remember that it isn’t because the employees are incompetent, it’s because right-wing attacks on government and cuts in resources have rendered them less able to do their work. Conservatives say they believe in markets, not government, but free and efficient markets depend on government to enforce laws, break up monopolies, police against fraud. Without an active and efficient government, the criminal and the grifters drive out the honest and the decent from the marketplace, and we are all worse off as a result. Trump’s shutdown is simply the most recent of his assaults on the employees of the government that he was elected to run. He’s scorned them as part of the “swamp,” sought to freeze their pay, cut their retirements and undermine their labor organizations. Instead of paying tribute to their service, he’s demeaned their capacity, even while cutting the resources needed to do their jobs. Not surprisingly, the non-partisan Best Places to Work report finds a decline in employee engagement and morale under Trump. The shutdown will do real damage to many federal employees and their families. And it will do real damage to the services that we need and expect from our government. For Trump and the right, this is a sucker’s play. They demean federal employees, shut down parts of the government, cut back resources and staffing to do needed tasks and then use the resulting inefficiency as evidence that government can’t work. Jesse Jackson
