Echos of Watergate. May 9th, 2017 will go down in American history, much like Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre”.
It’s all over the news. In the middle of a FBI investigation into Trump’s connections with Russia, Trump fires the man at the head of that investigation. [Read more…]
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet
On Monday, President Trump nominated 10 federal court judges, beginning a process that will take the judiciary in a far-right direction for years to come.
Trump’s appointees—five to federal appellate courts, four to lower district courts and one to a federal claims court—are doctrinaire right-wingers who started as clerks for the most right-wing Supreme Court and federal court justices, and then went on to build careers in corporate practices and academia siding with big business and religious fundamentalists over other Americans. [Read more…]
Gabriela Melendez / ACLU San Diego & Imperial Counties
American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony D. Romero issued the following statement on the firing of FBI Director James Comey:
“The independence of the FBI director is meant to ensure that the president does not operate above the law. For President Trump to fire the man responsible for investigating his own campaign’s ties to the Russians imperils that fundamental principle. [Read more…]
They are here, by the hundreds, by the thousands, the dispossessed among us. People having little in the way of the niceties of a comfortable existence that equates with the concept of “Home”. Many wear all the clothing they own, on their backs, day and night.
Some push their collection of meager possessions around in a shopping cart they have found or stolen, ahead of them in their endless wanderings to nowhere in particular.
Their days are twenty-five hours. [Read more…]
By Deidre Fulton / Common Dreams
The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) on Tuesday unveiled its “People’s Budget,” offering a vision of economic equality and fairness that comes in sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s “slash-and-burn approach to governing based on ideological extremism.”
The People’s Budget: A Roadmap for the Resistance (pdf) includes a $2 trillion infrastructure investment; closes corporate tax loopholes; ensures families don’t pay more than 10 percent of their income for childcare; and supports progressive measures such as a minimum wage increase, clean energy expansion, and debt-free college. Bottom line, the caucus said Tuesday, the document “puts political and economic power back in the hands of the people.” [Read more…]
Several times every year, the Board of Supervisors approves county Airport Division, requests (1) to expand airport capacity and (2) to seek 90% FAA grants to pay for the expansion. Usually, county avoids any meaningful environmental analysis. For instance, at McClellan-Palomar Airport in North County, county is preparing its first EIR in 40 years for its pending 2017-2037 Palomar Airport Master Plan.
In theory, council members and supervisors vote for projects that best serves the community. In reality, it is the business community which fills campaign coffers thereby sacrificing community betterment to political expediency. [Read more…]
By Michael Steinberg / Black Rain Press / OB Rag
If anything can be believed from anyone in the Trump regime, the US “strike group” led by the San Diego-based aircraft carrier Carl Vinson is indeed heading for the Korean Peninsula.
In dealing with North Korea, Trump said that “all options are on the table,” including a military strike. Vice President Mike Pence added to the war fever escalation, stating that the US warships would be in Korean waters “within days.”
On April 23, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters in Greece, “We need to make peaceful and rational voices….” [Read more…]
The numbers of homeless person in our region counted during the annual Point in Time Count (PITC) conducted January 29, 2017 were released this Thursday. This is the data that will be sent to HUD to determine how much funding will be provided to the County of San Diego for homeless issues, including emergency shelter and efforts to get people into permanent housing. Last year that amounted to $18 million but under the Trump administration those funds could be significantly reduced.
Despite their best efforts to highlight the sliver of good news (veteran homelessness is down by 9%) the numbers reported were a testament to failure. Despite considerable resources being expended this past year to remove the most visible evidence of homelessness – the tent and tarp encampments lining our streets downtown – by making life so miserable for homeless people that some assumed they would go elsewhere, the numbers of homeless people downtown rose by 27% and the number of tents and hand-built structures increased by 104%! [Read more…]
By Jessica Huseman / ProPublica
A federal court in Texas has again ruled the state’s 2011 voter identification law intentionally discriminated against minorities. It’s the latest loss in the case for Texas — which has spent years unsuccessfully defending the law. But it also has implications for the Trump administration.
In February, the new administration abruptly abandoned the crux of the Justice Department’s opposition to the voter ID law. Government lawyers also asked the judge to delay her decision on whether the law intentionally discriminated against blacks and Latinos.
Judge Nelva Ramos Gonzales rejected their request for a delay. And Monday, she ruled that the law “was passed, at least in part, with a discriminatory intent in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
When it passed in 2011, Texas’s law had the country’s strictest voter ID provisions. [Read more…]
Congress will return to ‘work’ next week, and the most pressing matter facing legislators is simply keeping the government from shutting down.
As it turns out, Day 100 of the Trump administration will be the first day past the end of Federal funding for most government departments. House and Senate staffers have spent the past two weeks trying to hammer out a bipartisan deal covering the final five months of the fiscal year.
Standing in the way of achieving an agreement are administration demands for border wall funding, cuts in domestic spending, a windfall for the military, and the eight Democratic votes needed to break a Senate filibuster. [Read more…]
By Jefferson Morley / AlterNet
As President Trump discovers the prerogative of unilaterally making war, the media gaze has turned away from the ongoing FBI, House and Senate investigation of his Russia ties to the simpler dramas of cruise missiles, big bombs and tough but loose talk on North Korea.
Yet even the “mother of all bombs” cannot obliterate the accumulating body of evidence about his relationship with Russian organized crime figures and the not unrelated question about whether he and his entourage colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 presidential election. The story, notes Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, is “Hiding in plain sight.” [Read more…]
