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Venezuela pulls back on threats as US warns of ‘significant response’ – New York Post
Venezuela pulls back on threats as US warns of ‘significant response’ – New York Post

Venezuela has backed down from their demand that US diplomats leave the country, saying they’re open to talks — as the Trump administration warned of a “significant response” if American personnel are threatened or intimidated.

The country’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying that far-left President Nicolas Maduro was suspending the expulsion of US diplomats, to allow for a 30-day window to negotiate with American officials.

The embattled second-term leader cut ties with the US Wednesday after the Trump administration recognized opposition leader Juan Guiado as Venezuela’s interim president, a move Maduro blasted as an attempted coup. He gave US diplomats three days to leave the county — but the Trump administration said it wouldn’t obey.

Venezuela’s last-minute Saturday night decision to pull the expulsion order may have avoided a potential showdown with the US. Still, US National security adviser John Bolton cautioned that any threat on a US diplomat or Gaido would yield a forceful reaction.

“Any violence and intimidation against U.S. diplomatic personnel, Venezuela’s democratic leader, Juan Guiado, or the National Assembly itself would represent a grave assault on the rule of law and will be met with a significant response,” Bolton tweeted Sunday.

Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Sunday refused to rule out US military action to address the unrest in Venezuela, where violent anti-government protests have broken out.

“I don’t think any president of any party who is doing his or her job would be doing the job properly if they took anything off the table,” Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Meanwhile, Maduro struck down calls from European countries to hold early elections within eight days. France, Germany and Spain threatened to follow the US in recognizing Guaido as the true leader. Russia has called the ultimatum “absurd” and Turkey said it supports Maduro.

In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Maduro said he was open to a dialogue with the US but that it was improbable — but not impossible — that he meet Trump.

Venezuela has sunk into a crushing economic crisis under Maduro’s policies, with widespread food and medical shortages that have forced millions of people to starve or flee.

With Post Wires

Source Article from https://nypost.com/2019/01/27/venezuela-pulls-back-on-threats-as-us-warns-of-significant-response/

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Byron York: On closer examination, Roger Stone indictment is less than it seems – Washington Examiner
Byron York: On closer examination, Roger Stone indictment is less than it seems – Washington Examiner

There are two sides to special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. On one side there are the under-oath statements Stone made to the House Intelligence Committee that Mueller says are false. On the other, there are the Stone statements Mueller did not challenge.

The testimony for which Stone was indicted concerns his descriptions of dealings with two men — Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico — who Stone used to attempt to get in touch with WikiLeaks head Julian Assange in the summer and fall of 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, when WikiLeaks published hacked emails relating to Hillary Clinton. Some of Mueller’s charges seem somewhat small; for example, Stone was charged with lying because he said he and Credico communicated by phone but not by email when in fact, according to Mueller, they communicated by both phone and email. But in each case, Mueller says Stone knowingly made false statements.

On the other hand, the indictment does not accuse Stone of lying in some key instances when he defended himself against some of the most serious allegations of the Trump-Russia matter. Remember the media frenzy over Stone’s August 2016 tweet that it would soon be “the Podesta’s time in the barrel”? Remember Stone’s tweets with Guccifer 2.0? And remember his claim, “I dined with my new pal Julian Assange last night”? House investigators asked Stone many questions about those topics, which Stone answered. Mueller did not charge Stone with lying about those issues, or with any illegal underlying behavior, either.

First, a warning: It is impossible for the public to fully evaluate the Stone indictment. It is based entirely on Stone’s testimony to the Intelligence Committee, which took place on Sept. 26, 2017. There is, of course, a transcript of that testimony. It would be useful for anyone trying to understand the Stone case to read the transcript. It should already be public, because the committee voted unanimously last September to release it and other interview transcripts. But before actually releasing the documents, the committee sent them to the Director of National Intelligence for clearance, on the slight chance that they contained classified information. (The Stone interview was conducted in a nonclassified setting and concerned nonclassified events.) The DNI has had the Stone transcript for months, far longer than necessary to do a routine clearance. Yet it has not cleared the transcript for release, which means Stone’s testimony remains largely secret.

The Stone indictment, of course, contains snippets of the transcript. (The committee gave the transcript to Mueller.) But it is an indictment — a one-sided accusation — not a balanced picture of Stone’s entire testimony. Still, even though the whole transcript remains under wraps, some passages from it have been published, which can give us at least a hint of what Stone said.

The two places to find excerpts of Stone’s testimony are the Intelligence Committee’s Trump-Russia report, entitled “Report on Russian Active Measures,” published by majority Republicans on March 22, 2018, and the Democratic response, published on March 26, 2018.

The reports delved into Stone’s testimony about three particularly notorious public statements he made during the 2016 campaign. The first was the Aug. 21, 2016, tweet in which he wrote, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary.” (The wording is exactly as Stone originally wrote it, although the tweet is often misquoted to read, more ominously, that “it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel.’) The tweet has been interpreted to mean Stone predicted the October 2016 disclosure of hacked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

According to the House GOP report, Stone denied that he “knew in advance about and predicted the hacking of…Podesta’s email,” noting that Stone said his tweet “makes no mention whatsoever of Mr. Podesta’s email.” Stone told the committee his motive was anger about the treatment of former partner Paul Manafort, saying the tweet was posted “at a time that my boyhood friend and colleague, Paul Manafort, had just resigned from the Trump campaign over allegations regarding his business activities in Ukraine. I thought it manifestly unfair that John Podesta not be held to the same standard.”

Mueller did not charge Stone in connection with his testimony about the “time in the barrel” matter.

The second part of Stone’s testimony that the reports dug into was his explanation of his August 2016 statement that, “I actually have communicated with Julian Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.” According to the Republican report, Stone told the committee that he wanted to “clarify that by saying the communication I refer to is through a journalist who I ask [sic] to confirm what Assange has tweeted, himself, on July 21st, that he has the Clinton emails and that he will publish them.”

The Democratic response went into some detail about the question of any Stone-Assange communications. In fact, it was on that topic that Democrats published the longest section of Stone testimony that is public — this exchange between Stone and Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley:

QUIGLEY: You never met with Julian Assange.

STONE: Correct.

QUIGLEY: You never communicated directly with him.

STONE: Correct.

QUIGLEY: You’ve never spoken to him on the phone.

STONE: I never communicated directly with him during the election, correct.

QUGLEY: Did you ever communicate with him outside of that timeframe?

STONE: We had some, I think, direct message responses in April of this year [2017].

QUIGLEY: You and Julian Assange?

STONE: Correct.

QUIGLEY: Can you make those available to the committee?

STONE: Yes, we can.

QUIGLEY: Okay. Had you ever communicated with him before the campaign?

STONE: No.

QUIGLEY: So, back on this other streak, you’ve never emailed with him?

STONE: Correct.

QUIGLEY: Have you ever sent or received texts/SMS to and from Mr. Assange?

STONE: No.

QUIGLEY: Have you ever communicated with Mr. Assange over any other social media platform or encrypted application?

STONE: No.

Mueller did not charge Stone in connection with his denial that he had had any contact with Assange during the campaign.

Mueller did charge Stone on his testimony about using an intermediary — the radio host Randy Credico — to attempt to contact WikiLeaks. Quigley and ranking Democrat (now chairman) Adam Schiff asked Stone about that intermediary, and the resulting testimony formed the basis of one of Mueller’s charges against Stone. Here is the entirety of the passage published in the Democratic report:

QUIGLEY: And so, just to reiterate, in an Aug. 12, 2016, interview with Alex Jones on Infowars, you reiterated your contact with Julian Assange, quote “in communication with Assange,” adding, quote, “I am not at liberty to discuss what I have.” That was correct, too?

STONE: That is correct.

QUIGLEY: But you were referencing the same thing you pointed to before?

STONE: Again, I have sometimes referred to this journalist as a go-between, as an intermediary, as a mutual friend. It was someone I knew had interviewed Assange. And I merely wanted confirmation of what he had tweeted on the 21st. And that’s what I refer to.

QUIGLEY: — like Twitter, LinkedIn, anything?

STONE: No.

QUIGLEY: Have any of your employees, associates, or individuals acting on your behest or encouragement been in any type of contact with Julian Assange?

STONE: No.

QUIGLEY: Have you ever been in direct contact with a member of WikiLeaks, whether by phone, email, test, Twitter, encrypted message platforms, other social media platforms, or other means of communication?

STONE: I am not certain, but I don’t think so …

SCHIFF: Mr. Stone, I wanted to ask you, on Oct. 12, [2016], you gave an interview to NBC News where you said that: We have a mutual friend who’s traveled to London several times, and everything I know is through that channel of communication.

STONE: Yes.

SCHIFF: Referring to a friend of Assange.

STONE: Yes.

SCHIFF: And you said something similar in another interview on October — to CBS Miami. Did the intermediary tell you how often he traveled to London to meet with Mr. Assange?

STONE: No. I just knew he had been there a couple times.

SCHIFF: So throughout the many months in which you represented you were either in communication with Assange or communication through an intermediary with Assange, you were only referring to a single fact that you had confirmed with the intermediary —

STONE: That —

SCHIFF: — was the length and breadth of what you were referring to?

STONE: That is correct, even though it was repeated to me on numerous separate occasions.

Stone did not name Credico in his testimony, but a few weeks later, on Oct. 13, 2017, Stone wrote a letter to the committee identifying Credico as his sole go-between. Mueller charged Stone with making a false statement because Stone had also contacted Jerome Corsi, not just Credico, to act as a go-between with WikiLeaks.

The third issue the committee asked Stone about was his communication with the hacker Guccifer 2.0, identified in another Mueller indictment as a creation of Russian military intelligence agents. The Republican report said Stone described his tweets and direct messages with Guccifer 2.0 as “innocuous,” adding that Stone “denied taking action in response to Guccifer 2.0’s messages.” The GOP report noted that Stone later gave the committee additional messages involving WikiLeaks.

The Democratic report listed Stone’s tweets and direct messages with Guccifer 2.0. But the report included just one exchange about Guccifer 2.0, a request for more material from Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell:

SWALWELL: If we were to send you a request asking for any direct messages with respect to the 2016 campaign, particularly around Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, you would be cooperative and turn that over to us?

STONE: Well, I attached the exchange with Guccifer as an exhibit, and you’re welcome to look at it. Beyond that, we’d have to go review the material. I don’t know what’s there.

Stone later turned over more material to the committee.

What else did Stone say about Guccifer 2.0? Neither Republicans nor Democrats included any more of Stone’s testimony on that subject in their reports. But whatever Stone said, it did not serve as a basis for any charges from Mueller, who did not mention Guccifer 2.0 or any Stone statement about Guccifer 2.0 in the Stone indictment.

Finally, there was the big-picture question of whether Stone and the Trump campaign knew ahead of time about the WikiLeaks disclosure of hacked documents. A close reading of the Mueller indictment suggests they did not. In the House interview, Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro asked Stone whether he knew in advance about the October 2016 Podesta disclosure:

CASTRO: You have now just told us that the intermediary told you in August that the emails would be released in October. Is that prior knowledge?

STONE: I guess you could consider it prior knowledge. I would have to go back and look. I think that Assange himself had said October on Twitter. I was seeking a confirmation of what he’d already said.

CASTRO: Mr. Stone, you’ve said multiple times here today that you had no prior knowledge. You’ve just now admitted that you had prior knowledge that these emails would be released.

STONE: I believe that was a — I think that was publicly known, in all honesty.

Mueller did not charge Stone with lying in that exchange.

What an indictment does not say can be as instructive as what it does say. To take another example from the Trump-Russia investigation, look at the indictment of Trump fixer Michael Cohen for lying to Congress. Mueller charged Cohen with lying when he told lawmakers that talks over the proposed Trump Tower Moscow project ended in January 2016, when in fact, according to Mueller, they continued until June 2016. But on another aspect of the Trump-Russia affair, Mueller did not charge Cohen when he strongly denied that he had ever been in Prague, which was a key allegation of the so-called Trump dossier. The fact that Mueller did not question Cohen’s Prague denial — in testimony that Mueller examined carefully and actually indicted Cohen for another statement — suggests that there’s nothing to the Prague story.

Similarly, there are the parts of Stone’s testimony that Mueller chose not to indict Stone over. Stone’s defense of himself in the “time in the barrel” matter, in his contacts with Guccifer 2.0, and in his lack of direct contacts with WikiLeaks all resulted in no accusations from Mueller. And, of course, the indictment did not charge that Stone knew about the WikiLeaks disclosures beforehand, or that he was involved in any conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election, or that such a conspiracy even existed. Put it all together, and the Stone indictment adds up to less than it at first seems.

We will know more when the full transcript of Stone’s testimony is released, or rather, if it is released. A new statement from Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff, released after the Stone indictment, does not offer much hope of quick publication. “The first order of business for the committee will be to release all remaining transcripts to the Special Counsel’s Office, and we will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead,” Schiff said. That is a pledge to quickly get the transcripts to Mueller, not to the public, even though Mueller already has the transcripts and the committee voted more than four months ago to make them public. It could be a long time before the public knows all of what Roger Stone said.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/byron-york-on-closer-examination-roger-stone-indictment-is-less-than-it-seems

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UPDATE: Police in Virginia arrest suspect in Louisiana shooting that killed 5 – KTRK-TV
UPDATE: Police in Virginia arrest suspect in Louisiana shooting that killed 5 – KTRK-TV
Police have caught the man suspected in a shooting spree that killed five people in Louisiana yesterday.
Investigators say 21-year-old Dakota Theriot made his way to Virginia after killing his mother and father, his girlfriend and two of her family members.
Police near Baton Rouge says his parents made dying declarations naming their son as the person who shot them.
They had recently kicked him out of their house.

Saturday night, police in Louisiana said they were searching for an “armed and dangerous” 21-year-old accused of killing his parents and three others in two separate but related shootings.
They said Dakota Theriot first shot and killed three people – the woman believed to be his girlfriend, her brother and father – in Livingston Parish before taking her father’s truck, driving to neighboring Ascension Parish where he shot and killed his parents.

“We are totally focused on finding him. We’re following every lead that we come up with,” said Livingston Parish Sheriff Jason Ard during an evening news conference streamed online.

Theriot was being sought on first-degree murder and other charges. He was believed to be driving a stolen 2004 Dodge Ram pickup, gray and silver in color.

Investigators identified the victims in Livingston Parish as Billy Ernest, 43; Tanner Ernest, 17; and Summer Ernest, 20. Ard said Summer Ernest and Dakota Theriot were in a relationship and that Theriot had been living with her family for a few weeks.

But he said after talking with Summer’s mother, there was no indication of any red flags ahead of Saturday’s multiple shootings.

Police earlier identified the other two victims as Theriot’s parents – Keith, 50, and Elizabeth Theriot, 50, of Gonzales.

They were shot in their trailer on Saturday morning.

“The father was gravely injured at the time we found him and has since passed away,” said Ascension Parish Sheriff Bobby Webre. But before he died, Webre said authorities were able to get a “dying declaration from him, and only enough information to let us know that it was his son that committed this act.”

Webre said there were indications that Theriot was traveling east and maybe was in another state by that time.

“We’re going to work every lead. We’re going to follow every tip,” he said during the evening news conference.

Ard said Dakota Theriot was believed to be armed with at least one handgun.

“We do not have a motive. It is still undetermined,” Ard said.

Crystal DeYoung, Billy Ernest’s sister, told The Associated Press that she believes Theriot had just started dating her niece, Summer Ernest.

“My family met him last weekend at a birthday party and didn’t get good vibes from him,” DeYoung said. She said she wasn’t sure how her niece and Theriot met, but that she believed the relationship was relatively new.

“My mom is a good judge of character and she just thought he was not good,” DeYoung said of Theriot.

DeYoung said she skipped the birthday party and didn’t meet Theriot herself. DeYoung said Summer and Tanner Ernest were two of Billy’s three children. He was also raising his wife’s children.

DeYoung said Theriot doesn’t have a vehicle and she’s not sure how he ended up at the Ernest home on Saturday, but after the killings, he took off in her brother’s truck.

There were also two young children in the home at the time. DeYoung said a 7-year-old took the baby out of the house and went to a neighbor’s.

DeYoung said her brother, niece and nephew were good people.

“They all had very good hearts. They trusted people too much,” she said, as she began crying. “They all loved unconditionally.”

Charlenne Bordelon lives near the house where the Ernests were killed. She told The Advocate newspaper that two young children from the house ran to her home. They were uninjured and asked for help after the shooting.

Bordelon said Theriot was the older daughter’s boyfriend and that he’d recently moved in with the family but she did not know him.

A Facebook page appearing to belong to Dakota Theriot was filled with defensive and sometimes angry posts. He shared someone else’s post in June that said “wish i could clear my mind jus for one day” (sic) with a sad face emoji.

In May, he reposted something saying, “If you have a problem with me, tell me. Not everyone else.”

He also shared someone else’s post that said, “I don’t care what people say about me I know who I am and I don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”

Webre said Dakota had lived with his parents briefly but was asked to leave the residence and not return.

“I would not approach this vehicle. We feel no doubt that Dakota is going to be armed and dangerous, and we need to bring him to justice really quick,” Webre said.

Webre said Dakota Theriot had some run-ins with law enforcement in other parishes that he described as misdemeanor-type incidents that did not include violence: “Certainly nothing of the magnitude that we’ve seen today.”

Webre said there was no reason to think Theriot was now targeting someone else but warned that because he’s armed and dangerous: “Anybody he comes into contact with could be a target.”
__

Amy Forliti in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Courtney Bonnell in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://abc13.com/update-police-in-virginia-arrest-suspect-in-louisiana-shooting-that-killed-5/5107897/

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Dangerous cold will follow clipper system moving through Midwest – ABC News
Dangerous cold will follow clipper system moving through Midwest – ABC News

The National Weather Service has already issued alerts ahead of a clipper system — a fast-moving blast of snow, ice and rain originating in central Canada — that will move into the Midwest on Sunday afternoon.

Conditions are expected to be rather windy Sunday from Montana to Nebraska, with gusts in excess of 60 mph. Snow that is already on the ground will be picked up by the gusty winds, and visibility can be drastically reduced.

The disturbance moves into the Midwest on Sunday afternoon with snow expected to fall by the time the low reaches the eastern part of the Dakotas. Winter weather alerts have been issued from the Northern Plains east to Michigan.

ABC News
The clipper system will be in the Northern Plains by late Sunday night.

Cold air behind the low, and moisture being wrapped into the system, will bring the heaviest areas of snow from southeastern North Dakota to northeastern Iowa late Sunday.

ABC News
The Chicago area will see snow on Monday afternoon.

The Chicago metro area will be in the bull’s-eye of the clipper system Monday morning into early afternoon.

Areas south and southeast of Chicago have a greater chance of seeing rain or a wintry mix, however, snow is possible into Missouri.

ABC News
The clipper system will move into the Northeast on Tuesday, with snow inland and rain and an icy mix on the coast.

The storm will race eastward and impact the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic by Tuesday night.

For coastal areas and the New York metro area, rain will dominate at first. As the cold front passes through Tuesday night into early Wednesday morning, precipitation is expected to change over to snow.

While accumulation amounts will likely be very low for the New York City area, the rain and then snow Wednesday morning could make for a sloppy and potentially hazardous commute.

ABC News
Snowfall totals will be 6 to 12 inches in northern Michigan, northern New York and northern New England, with lesser totals farther south and closer to the coast.

Forecasts show a relatively thin amount of excessive snow accumulation in the storm’s wake. Southern Minnesota and Wisconsin as well as upstate New York and northern New England will see the greatest snowfall — about 6 to 12 inches with locally higher amounts possible.

There will be little accumulation along the coast.

Dangerous cold follows snow

ABC News
Behind the clipper system, brutal cold temperatures will move into the Northern Plains on Monday.

A dip in the jet stream associated with the passage of the clipper system will bring extremely cold air from the Arctic south into the Midwest.

The air mass will begin to drop temperatures immediately in the wake of the clipper, but its full effect will not be felt until midweek.

ABC News
Wind chills on Tuesday morning will be minus 14 in Chicago and minus 30 or lower in Minneapolis, Minn., and Des Moines, Iowa.

By Wednesday, wind chill temperatures will reach unprecedentedly low levels: minus 60 in Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota, and 50 below in Chicago.

Record breaking high and low temperatures are possible. The temperature in Chicago on Wednesday is minus 11, and the low is minus 20. If this occurs, it will smash the previous records for Jan. 30 of 3 degrees and minus 15, respectively.

ABC News
Record-low temperatures are possible on Wednesday in the Northern Plains and Midwest with minus 60 wind chill readings possible in Minneapolis, Minn., and Des Moines, Iowa.

The all-time record low temperature in Chicago was minus 27 on Jan. 20, 1985. There is an outside chance this will be broken.

These temperatures will be the coldest that the region has seen in decades. Everyone should exercise caution when heading outdoors, and they should prepare their homes and cars for such brutally cold conditions.

Source Article from https://abcnews.go.com/US/dangerous-cold-set-follow-clipper-system-moving-midwest/story?id=60655468

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Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez: The yin and yang of Democratic politics – The Hill
Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez: The yin and yang of Democratic politics – The Hill

The Democratic odd couple in the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy PelosiNancy Patricia D’Alesandro PelosiHow the government will reopen Midterms show Ohio remains firmly in play for 2020 ‘Fox & Friends’ host to Trump aide: Who are these ‘unicorn’ Dems who will suddenly work on a wall? MORE (D-Calif.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-CortezAlexandria Ocasio-CortezMost favor policies to improve environment, but are divided over paying for it Ocasio-Cortez on shutdown: ‘GOP senators should be scared for their jobs in 2020’ WaPo fact-checker fires back at Ocasio-Cortez criticism over rating: ‘She’s wrong’ MORE (D-N.Y.) are the yin and yang of Democratic politics.

One is a veteran establishment Democrat; the other is a young grassroots activist. Pelosi is Ms. Inside and Ocasio-Cortez is Ms. Outside. Pelosi is a shrewd and skilled political player. Ocasio-Cortez, already known simply as “AOC,” can work around the power structure because she commands the media like no other House member can. Between the two of them, they cover a lot of ground.

The Speaker’s contributions are manifest. She stonewalled the president’s obsession with bricks and mortar border security. While I watched President Trump’s televised speech folding on his beloved wall, I imagined Pelosi just off camera holding a gun to his head while he announced his concession. Teddy Roosevelt had his bully pulpit. Well,Trump is just a bully. Trump tried to face Pelosi down but she stood up to him and forced him to cave.

The president owned casinos so he should have known the house always wins. Trump underestimated Pelosi’s steely resolve but he should have known better. While she was House Minority Leader in the first half of Trump’s term, he failed to get a single Democratic vote in the House for his two most important legislative initiatives TrumpCare and his tax plan.

Pelosi has already introduced comprehensive plans to fight government corruption and to reduce gun violence. These initiatives should please the progressive wing of her caucus but there might be a fight over health care. AOC and other progressive Democrats favor a single-payer plan like Sen. Bernie SandersBernard (Bernie) SandersLikely 2020 Dem contenders to face scrutiny over Wall Street ties Sanders poised to announce presidential campaign: report On The Money: Trump agrees to end shutdown without wall funding | Senate quickly clears short-term funding measure | House to vote tonight | Federal workers could get back pay within days | Dems take victory lap MORE‘ (I-Vt.) Medicare for All proposal while the Speaker will probably opt for a more limited plan that restores the vitality of ObamaCare law undermined by the actions of the Trump administration. Pelosi’s effort to broker a resolution to this conflict will be a true test of her political skills.

Critics have demanded for years that Democrats stand tall and go toe-to-toe with right-wing Republicans. Now they have stand-up Democrats like Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez to do the job. Both women are tough as nails. They bring different but complementary skill sets to the table. 

The president found out the hard way that experience still matters in Washington. Pelosi is as experienced as anybody can be. Trump is a babe in the wild ways of Washington. AOC doesn’t have much experience but she has plenty of energy and she can channel the enthusiasm of the millennials who are the rising force in national politics.

AOC is a breath of fresh air in the fetid Washington swamp. She shares the public’s distaste for established economic and political power. No one should dismiss the representative from New York City as an extremist when she represents a national constituency of Americans who believe that government and the economy are rigged against working families.

She caused a major ruckus recently when she called for a 70 percent marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans. But most voters believe the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes and that the 2017 Trump tax scam favored corporations and wealthy Americans at the expense of working families. 

Data from a national Gallup survey conducted last year demonstrated the public’s concern with tax fairness. Two of every three Americans indicated that they felt corporations (66 percent) and upper-income Americans (62 percent) paid too little in federal income taxes. 

The marginal tax rate was higher than 70 percent under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower but somehow her proposal makes Ocasio-Cortez a radical. If she is a radical so are a majority of Americans.

Pelosi and AOC both want to repair the damage from the disastrous Trump tax law that lowered taxes for corporate America and raised the national debt to record levels. The Trump tax plan cheated middle-class Americans of their right to significant tax relief. Worse, it gave the GOP an excuse to call for cuts in Social Security and Medicare to bail the nation out from the deficit that Republicans themselves created.

AOC will not get anything close to a 70 percent marginal tax rate with a GOP president and Senate. But her proposal gives Pelosi leverage in her battle to reduce the tax burden on working families. The Speaker can tell Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellThe Memo: Trump concedes defeat on shutdown On The Money: Trump agrees to end shutdown without wall funding | Senate quickly clears short-term funding measure | House to vote tonight | Federal workers could get back pay within days | Dems take victory lap Shutdown ends without funding for Trump’s border wall MORE (R-Ky.) that she would like to accept his compromise but he’ll need to sweeten it so she can satisfy the demands of AOC and the other young progressives in the House Democratic Caucus.

Pelosi and Ocasio represent the two wings of the Democratic Party. But a bird needs both wings to fly. Both congresswomen want to fight corruption, improve health care coverage and to reduce income inequality. There are differences in opinion on the means to deal with these problems. The two Democrats and their supporters have their differences but if everybody focuses on their common concerns, they will accomplish a lot and lay the groundwork for a big Democratic victory in 2020 which will allow them to do even more with a Democratic President and Senate.

Brad Bannon is a Democratic pollster and CEO of Bannon Communications Research. He is also a senior adviser to, and editor of, the blog at MyTiller.com, a social media network for politics.

Source Article from https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/427148-pelosi-and-ocasio-cortez-the-yin-and-yang-of-democratic-politics

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Roger Stone does not rule out cooperating with Mueller – CNN
Roger Stone does not rule out cooperating with Mueller – CNN

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By Eli Watkins, CNN

Updated 10:20 AM ET, Sun January 27, 2019

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Steve King (R-IA) responds, after being rebuked by his own party, to comments he made in the New York Times that questioned why white nationalists and white supremacists were offensive.”},{“title”:”GOP lawmaker: I didn’t compare immigrants to critters “,”duration”:”01:43″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/26/rep-adam-kinzinger-trump-border-wall-comment-msnbc-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/26/rep-adam-kinzinger-trump-border-wall-comment-msnbc-sot-nr-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190126111134-kinzinger-thumb-01262019-vpx-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/26/rep-adam-kinzinger-trump-border-wall-comment-msnbc-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) defends his comments about the border wall, saying he didn’t compare immigrants to \”critters.\” “,”descriptionText”:”Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) defends his comments about the border wall, saying he didn’t compare immigrants to \”critters.\” “},{“title”:”Trump: We need fair deal, or government will close again”,”duration”:”01:19″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/25/trump-shut-down-again-rose-garden-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/25/trump-shut-down-again-rose-garden-sot-nr-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125142410-trump-2-rose-garden-large-169-3.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/25/trump-shut-down-again-rose-garden-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”President Donald Trump says that the government could be shutdown again if an agreement is not reached on border security funding that includes a border wall.”,”descriptionText”:”President Donald Trump says that the government could be shutdown again if an agreement is not reached on border security funding that includes a border wall.”},{“title”:”Cooper: Trump tries to redefine victory to avoid losing”,”duration”:”04:26″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”http://www.cnn.com”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/26/kth-trump-redefine-victory-to-avoid-losing-shutdown-over-ac360-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/26/kth-trump-redefine-victory-to-avoid-losing-shutdown-over-ac360-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125202132-ac-kth-1-25-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/26/kth-trump-redefine-victory-to-avoid-losing-shutdown-over-ac360-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”CNN’s Anderson Cooper says President Trump is trying to redefine victory to avoid losing, after agreeing to temporarily end a partial government shutdown that lasted 34 days.”,”descriptionText”:”CNN’s Anderson Cooper says President Trump is trying to redefine victory to avoid losing, after agreeing to temporarily end a partial government shutdown that lasted 34 days.”},{“title”:”Roger Stone exits court with Nixonian salute”,”duration”:”02:27″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/25/roger-stone-nixon-salute-leaving-court-bts-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/25/roger-stone-nixon-salute-leaving-court-bts-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125131328-roger-stone-nixon-salute-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/25/roger-stone-nixon-salute-leaving-court-bts-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”Trump associate Roger Stone gave a Nixonian salute after speaking to reporters outside federal court. Stone claimed he has been falsely accused and will not testify against the President. “,”descriptionText”:”Trump associate Roger Stone gave a Nixonian salute after speaking to reporters outside federal court. Stone claimed he has been falsely accused and will not testify against the President. “},{“title”:”‘Manhattan Madam’: Slim chance Stone would cut a deal “,”duration”:”02:04″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/26/kristin-davis-stone-trump-fbi-cpt-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/26/kristin-davis-stone-trump-fbi-cpt-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125214853-kristin-davis-cpt-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/26/kristin-davis-stone-trump-fbi-cpt-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”In an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Kristin Davis, the woman famously known as the \”Manhattan Madam,\” defends her long-time friend and colleague Roger Stone by stating that she never doubts Stone and doesn’t believe he will cut a deal after his indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller.”,”descriptionText”:”In an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Kristin Davis, the woman famously known as the \”Manhattan Madam,\” defends her long-time friend and colleague Roger Stone by stating that she never doubts Stone and doesn’t believe he will cut a deal after his indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller.”},{“title”:”Burnett on Trump: No wall, just a cave”,”duration”:”03:29″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/26/trump-shutdown-cave-burnett-monologue-ebof-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/26/trump-shutdown-cave-burnett-monologue-ebof-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125191244-erin-burnett-1-25-2019-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/26/trump-shutdown-cave-burnett-monologue-ebof-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”CNN’s Erin Burnett criticizes President Trump for reaching an agreement with the Democrats after the government was partially closed for over 30 days.”,”descriptionText”:”CNN’s Erin Burnett criticizes President Trump for reaching an agreement with the Democrats after the government was partially closed for over 30 days.”},{“title”:”GOP strategist on Trump: It’s less than getting nothing”,”duration”:”01:29″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/25/trump-shutdown-deal-kevin-madden-bill-kristol-lead-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/25/trump-shutdown-deal-kevin-madden-bill-kristol-lead-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125175741-kevin-madden-1-25-2019-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/25/trump-shutdown-deal-kevin-madden-bill-kristol-lead-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”Conservative writer Bill Kristol and GOP strategist Kevin Madden criticized President Donald Trump after he reached a deal with Democrats to temporarily reopen the government.”,”descriptionText”:”Conservative writer Bill Kristol and GOP strategist Kevin Madden criticized President Donald Trump after he reached a deal with Democrats to temporarily reopen the government.”},{“title”:”Trump: Deal reached to reopen government”,”duration”:”02:19″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/25/trump-government-shutdown-remarks-rose-garden-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/25/trump-government-shutdown-remarks-rose-garden-sot-nr-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125142142-trump-1-rose-garden-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/25/trump-government-shutdown-remarks-rose-garden-sot-nr-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”President Trump announces that a deal has been reached to temporarily reopen the government for 3 weeks.”,”descriptionText”:”President Trump announces that a deal has been reached to temporarily reopen the government for 3 weeks.”},{“title”:”Sanders: Stone arrest has nothing to do with Trump”,”duration”:”02:07″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”http://www.cnn.com”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/25/sarah-sanders-roger-stone-arrest-trump-sot-vpx-newday.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/25/sarah-sanders-roger-stone-arrest-trump-sot-vpx-newday.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125085320-sarah-sanders-new-day-1-25-19-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/25/sarah-sanders-roger-stone-arrest-trump-sot-vpx-newday.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”White House press secretary Sarah Sanders discusses the arrest of President Donald Trump’s longtime associate Roger Stone. “,”descriptionText”:”White House press secretary Sarah Sanders discusses the arrest of President Donald Trump’s longtime associate Roger Stone. “},{“title”:”Sanders: President isn’t hung up on the wall”,”duration”:”02:11″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”http://www.cnn.com”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/25/sarah-sanders-government-shutdown-sot-vpx-newday.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/25/sarah-sanders-government-shutdown-sot-vpx-newday.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125155801-sarah-sanders-government-shutdown-sot-vpx-newday-00001713-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/25/sarah-sanders-government-shutdown-sot-vpx-newday.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says Democrats are playing politics instead of putting the American people first.”,”descriptionText”:”White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says Democrats are playing politics instead of putting the American people first.”},{“title”:”CNN reporter watched Stone’s arrest. Here’s what happened “,”duration”:”02:13″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/25/roger-stone-arrest-play-by-play-shortell-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/25/roger-stone-arrest-play-by-play-shortell-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125092107-cnn-shortell-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/25/roger-stone-arrest-play-by-play-shortell-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”CNN’s David Shortell describes the scene as Roger Stone was being arrested. “,”descriptionText”:”CNN’s David Shortell describes the scene as Roger Stone was being arrested. “},{“title”:”Toobin: Stone arrest is shocking, but not surprising”,”duration”:”00:51″,”sourceName”:”CNN”,”sourceLink”:”https://www.cnn.com/”,”videoCMSUrl”:”/video/data/3.0/video/politics/2019/01/25/roger-stone-arrested-vpx.cnn/index.xml”,”videoId”:”politics/2019/01/25/roger-stone-arrested-vpx.cnn”,”videoImage”:”http://www.noticiasdodia.onlinenewsbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/190125072347-jeffrey-toobin-1-25-19-large-169-1.jpg”,”videoUrl”:”/videos/politics/2019/01/25/roger-stone-arrested-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/”,”description”:”CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/jeffrey-toobin-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Jeffrey Toobin\u003c/a> says it’s shocking, but not surprising, to hear that the FBI has arrested longtime Donald Trump associate Roger Stone.”,”descriptionText”:”CNN’s \u003ca href=\”http://www.cnn.com/profiles/jeffrey-toobin-profile\” target=\”_blank\”>Jeffrey Toobin\u003c/a> says it’s shocking, but not surprising, to hear that the FBI has arrested longtime Donald Trump associate Roger Stone.”}],’js-video_headline-featured-piq2ld’,”,”js-video_source-featured-piq2ld”,true,true,’this-week-in-politics’);if (typeof configObj.context !== ‘string’ || configObj.context.length

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Washington (CNN)Roger Stone said Sunday he would tell the truth about his communications with President Donald Trump and did not shut the door on the possibility of cooperation with special counsel Robert Mueller.

    CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/27/politics/roger-stone-cooperation-robert-mueller/index.html

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Police Arrest Louisiana Man Suspected Of Killing Parents, Girlfriend and 2 Others – NPR
Police Arrest Louisiana Man Suspected Of Killing Parents, Girlfriend and 2 Others – NPR

An image provided by the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office shows a 2004 Dodge pickup truck that was allegedly driven by Dakota Theriot, the suspect in five murders across two Louisiana parishes.

AP


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An image provided by the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office shows a 2004 Dodge pickup truck that was allegedly driven by Dakota Theriot, the suspect in five murders across two Louisiana parishes.

AP

Police have arrested a man accused of killing five people, including his parents and his girlfriend, across two southeast Louisiana counties, following a daylong manhunt.

Authorities say Dakota Theriot shot and killed three people Saturday in Livingston Parish, near Baton Rouge, including the woman he was believed to be dating. He then stole a truck and drove to neighboring Ascension Parish, where he shot and killed his parents, according to police.

“This is probably one of the worst domestic violence incidents I’ve seen in quite a while,” said Ascension Parish Sheriff Bobby Webre.

Police in Virginia arrested Theriot on Sunday in Richmond County, according to the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office. He’ll be transported back to Ascension Parish and booked on two counts of first-degree murder, home invasion and illegal use of weapons.

Theriot was also wanted under three counts of first-degree murder and theft of a motor vehicle in Livingston Parish.

In a news conference on Saturday, Livingston Parish Sheriff Jason Ard said Theriot first killed Summer Ernest, 20, believed to be his girlfriend, her father, Billy Ernest, 43, and her brother, Tanner Ernest, 17, on Courtney Road.

Theriot had been staying with the Ernest family for a couple of weeks. Two children inside the home, a seven-year-old and a one-year-old, were unharmed.

The suspect then left the scene in Billy Ernest’s truck and drove south on LA-447 towards Ascension Parish, according to police.

Webre says Theriot traveled to his parents’ trailer on Churchpoint Road, went inside and shot both his mother, Elizabeth Theriot, and his father, Keith Theriot, in their bedroom. They were both 51, according to the sheriff.

Police found both victims alive at the scene, according to Webre, and Keith was able to identify his son. They were transported to a hospital but later died.

“We do not have a motive,” said Ard. “There is no red flags, no sign of anything.”

Prior to his arrest, police had said Weber might be traveling east, armed with at least one handgun.

Ard says Theriot had one prior run-in with police in Livingston Parrish, for “misdemeanor simple possession of drug paraphernalia.”

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/01/27/689140199/louisiana-police-arrest-man-suspected-of-killing-parents-girlfriend-and-2-others

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Who Is Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó? – NPR
Who Is Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó? – NPR

Venezuela’s National Assembly head Juan Guaidó waves during a mass opposition rally, during which he declared himself the country’s acting president on Jan. 23.

Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images


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Venezuela’s National Assembly head Juan Guaidó waves during a mass opposition rally, during which he declared himself the country’s acting president on Jan. 23.

Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images

In less than a month, Juan Guaidó has risen from obscure, junior lawmaker to self-proclaimed interim president of Venezuela and the most serious threat yet to the authoritarian government of Nicolás Maduro.

Guaidó, who defied Maduro by taking the oath of office on Wednesday, claims to lead a transitional government that will call free elections and return Venezuela to democracy. The 35-year-old was immediately recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader by the United States, Canada and most Latin American nations and received widespread support from European countries.

In a speech Friday to cheering supporters at an outdoor plaza in Caracas, Guaidó proclaimed: “We have awakened from the nightmare, brothers and sisters.”

Maduro, who has led Venezuela into food shortages, hyperinflation and political repression during six years in office, is refusing to budge. His ruling Socialist party controls nearly all government institutions. On Thursday, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López declared that the nation’s powerful armed forces — widely considered to be propping up the government — recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s true president.

But at least for now, Guaidó is breathing new life into an opposition movement that had been deeply demoralized by internal power struggles and government repression.

“Thirty days ago, the opposition was demobilized and fractured with no leadership,” said Michael Penfold, a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “But that’s not the case anymore. Guaidó represents a sparkle of hope.”

“I think Guaidó is delivering exactly what the opposition wanted at this point, which is a bold, risk-taking response,” said Javier Corrales, a Venezuela expert and professor of political science at Amherst College.

A youthful-looking industrial engineer, Guaidó, got his start in politics by organizing student protests against the late Hugo Chávez, who ushered in Venezuela’s socialist revolution two decades ago. In 2013, Chávez died of cancer and was succeeded by Maduro.

As a member of the Popular Will party, Guaidó in 2015 won a seat to the National Assembly – Venezuela’s legislature – amid an opposition sweep of congressional elections. But that momentum quickly stalled.

Anti-government demonstrations were crushed by security forces while an effort to remove Maduro through a recall election was vetoed by the government. The opposition’s most charismatic leaders were arrested, forced into exile or stripped of their right to run for public office. Last year, Maduro won another six-year term in a presidential election widely considered a sham by international observers.

Still, the opposition was determined to challenge Maduro’s grip on power. It hatched an audacious plan to coincide with the start this month of what many view as Maduro’s illegitimate second term. Guaidó became its leader.

Partly because more prominent politicians have been sidelined, the National Assembly in early January named Guaidó as its president. Venezuela’s constitution states that the head of the National Assembly takes over should the presidency become vacant, as the opposition claims it has under Maduro.

After consulting with U.S. and Latin American officials, according to the Associated Press, the opposition organized nationwide street marches on Wednesday and held a make-shift outdoor ceremony where Guaidó took the oath of office and launched his parallel government.

In what amounted to his inaugural speech, Guaidó called on military officers to withdraw their support from Maduro.

“It has to be the Venezuelan people, the armed forces, and the international community that allow us to assume power, which we will not let slip away,” Guaidó told cheering supporters in what amounted to his inaugural address.

At least one high-ranking military official, Col. José Luis Silva, who serves as military attaché at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, has heeded Guaidó’s call. “As the Venezuelan defense attaché in the United States, I do not recognize Mr. Nicolás Maduro as president of Venezuela,” Silva said in an interview Saturday with el Nuevo Herald.

Guaidó lacks any control over government ministries but he is more than just a figurehead. Analysts say that swelling international support for him, coupled with Maduro’s diplomatic isolation, strengthens Guaidó’s claim to the presidency.

Frank Mora, who heads the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University, said Guaidó’s swearing-in ceremony could become a watershed moment, similar to the 2010 episode in Tunisia when an angry fruit vender set himself on fire and helped ignite the Arab Spring.

Alternative leadership in Caracas has also opened the door for the Trump administration to squeeze the vital flow of petrodollars to the Maduro government — which counts on oil for 95 percent of its export earnings.

One option would be to send the proceeds from purchases of Venezuelan oil to foreign accounts that could be set up and controlled by Guaidó’s governing team, said Francisco Rodríguez, a former economic advisor to Venezuela’s National Assembly. He said that diverting oil funds to Guaidó would have a “huge impact” on the Venezuelan economy and put more pressure on Maduro to leave office.

“The pieces are starting to fit together for a peaceful transition in Venezuela,” said Benjamin Scharifker, a leading Venezuelan intellectual and an opposition activist.

But Guaidó also faces new risks.

Earlier this month, he was briefly detained by security forces and fears are growing that he could be arrested. At Friday’s rally, Guaidó acknowledged that possibility but told supporters that if he were ever kidnapped, they should press ahead with nonviolent protests.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/01/27/688707295/who-is-venezuelas-juan-guaid

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‘Pelosi does not mess around’: Democratic speaker emerges triumphant from shutdown – The Washington Post
‘Pelosi does not mess around’: Democratic speaker emerges triumphant from shutdown – The Washington Post

Mike DeBonis

January 26 at 3:31 PM

Nancy Pelosi’s first showdown with President Trump began with him publicly questioning her political viability. It ended with the House speaker winning an unmitigated victory and reviving her reputation as a legislative savant.

Trump’s capitulation — agreeing to reopen the federal government after a 35-day standoff without funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall — generated rave reviews for Pelosi from fellow Democrats and grudging respect from Republicans who watched as she kept an unruly party caucus united in the face of GOP divide-and-conquer tactics.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) emerges from the shutdown as a stronger leader of her party — and more popular with the public, by early measures — as Democrats eye aggressive efforts to counter Trump’s agenda through ambitious legislation and tough oversight. That suggests the shutdown might have been a strategic misstep for Trump, in addition to a tactical error.

“He’s used to hand-to hand combat,” said former senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a longtime Pelosi friend and partner in politics. “With Nancy, it’s hand-to-hand combat with a velvet glove, and he’s not used to it.”

Even before the shutdown began, it became a clash between Trump, 72 — the political outsider, a New Yorker born to privilege and accustomed to getting his way — and Pelosi, 78 — the oft-caricatured San Francisco liberal who was actually steeped in the street politics of her Baltimore youth and years of hardball on Capitol Hill.

When the two met in the Oval Office on Dec. 11 Trump suggested she was constrained by the fact she had not yet been formally elected speaker: “Nancy’s in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now.”

Pelosi shot back: “Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting.”

In retrospect, the remark was more a warning than a retort. Throughout the past seven weeks, according to interviews with dozens of lawmakers and congressional aides from both parties, Trump and White House officials appeared to fundamentally misjudge Pelosi’s support among Democrats and her resolve to hold firm against border wall funding.

As recently as Thursday, Republicans indicated that they thought they might be able to break Democrats apart by painting Pelosi as intransigent and unwilling to negotiate on the wall. “I think it’s time for the Democratic Party to have an intervention with the speaker,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the Republican Conference chairwoman, told reporters.

Indeed, not all Democrats share Pelosi’s view that the wall is an “immorality,” but she kept fractious Democrats focused on a simple message: There would be no negotiations on the wall as long as the government remained closed.

“We can’t set a precedent for holding the federal workers hostage, holding anyone hostage, and using them as a bargaining tool for a policy discussion,” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a freshman who defeated a suburban Republican and opposes wall funding. “People have different views on the right way to get [border security] done, and there’s legitimate policy differences there, but let’s have that discussion after we get our federal workers back to work.”

Tweeting late Friday, Trump vowed to keep fighting for his wall, saying the reopening of government “was in no way a concession.”

“It was taking care of millions of people who were getting badly hurt by the Shutdown with the understanding that in 21 days, if no deal is done, it’s off to the races!” he said.

But there appears to be little appetite on Capitol Hill for a reprise of the draining shutdown. Trump’s Plan B — declaring a national emergency and tapping military construction accounts to fund the wall — has unnerved many Republicans and spurred Democrats to prepare for litigation that might not be settled before Trump’s term is up.

“I think he’s finally met his match,” said Assistant Speaker Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.). “The speaker always presents herself in public and in private with the utmost respect. But she’s firm, and she’s strong, and she understands how to wield that power.”

Throughout the standoff, Pelosi followed her own advice: Don’t get in the gutter with Trump — or, as she put it colorfully last month, don’t engage in a “tinkle contest with a skunk.” The episode was also influenced by her respect for the presidency, if not for the president himself, aides said.

In a central episode in the shutdown ordeal, Pelosi effectively blocked Trump from delivering the State of the Union address that they had mutually scheduled for Jan. 29. But Pelosi’s initial message to Trump did not cancel the invitation outright — instead, she suggested “that we work together to determine another suitable date after government has reopened for this address or for you to consider delivering your State of the Union address in writing.”

Her decision puzzled observers on Capitol Hill and in the White House — including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.), who declared in a television interview moments after the announcement that the speech had been canceled outright, a step Pelosi had carefully avoided.

Several Pelosi allies said the nuance in her letter to Trump was a sign of respect, not weakness.

“There was no way on earth that he was ever going to get in that chamber if the government was shut down,” Boxer said. “But she did it in the right way. . . . Another guy might have said in a macho battle with Trump, ‘Forget it. It’s not happening. We’re canceling it.’ I think it took him off his track for a little while. It threw him back.”

Trump did not get the hint. A day later, Trump retaliated by canceling a military flight that was set to ferry Pelosi and other Democratic lawmakers on a trip that would include a visit to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Then this week, after Trump indicated that he had no interest in rescheduling the speech, Pelosi informed Trump that she had no intention of calling the traditional joint session as long as the government remained closed.

Finally Trump, in late night tweets, acknowledged that the speech would have to wait.

Speaking to a group of opinion journalists Friday, Pelosi explained the strategy: “You only start with a feather until you get to the sledgehammer.”

Though Trump’s legislative director, Shahira Knight, kept Pelosi’s chief of staff, Danny Weiss, abreast of developments, Pelosi and Trump had no direct interactions after Trump walked out of a Jan. 9 meeting in the White House Situation Room.

There, Pelosi had insisted that any short-term funding extension would not compel Democrats to agree to wall funding. Pelosi stuck to that position throughout the fight.

“Have I not been clear on the wall?” she said Friday when asked if her position had changed after the agreement to reopen the government was reached. “No, I have been very clear on the wall. I have been very clear.”

As the confrontation played out, the House moved bill after bill to reopen government agencies. Meanwhile, in the Republican-controlled Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to move on them without Trump’s assent — creating an imbalance of action that helped cement a perception that it was Trump and Republicans, not Pelosi and Democrats, who were keeping the government closed.

On Friday, after Trump agreed to sign the bill reopening the government, Democrats showered Pelosi with praise.

In one tweet, Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) said Pelosi “should give the State of the Union since she’s obviously the one running the country.” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) referred to the reported physical problem that disqualified Trump from the Vietnam-era draft: “@POTUS has bone spurs. @SpeakerPelosi has a backbone.” And the rapper Cardi B suggested that Pelosi had treated Trump like a pet dog.

One tweet also underscored Pelosi’s ability to unify her diverse caucus, from moderates in Trump districts to the party’s far left.

“I will tell you something most of the country probably already knows: @SpeakerPelosi does not mess around,” wrote freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a dominant voice in the party’s liberal wing.

Said Pelosi on Friday: “Our unity is our power, and that is what, maybe, the president underestimated.”

A CBS News poll released this week pegged Pelosi’s approval number at 39 percent, a figure higher than Trump’s and McConnell’s — and appreciably higher than seen during last year’s midterm campaign, when Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars on ads attacking Pelosi as a symbol of dysfunctional governance. Fourteen percent of Republicans surveyed said Pelosi had outnegotiated Trump during the shutdown, vs. 6 percent of Democrats who saw Trump outmaneuvering Pelosi.

Among Pelosi’s recent fans are some of the Democrats who wanted to oust her as speaker, arguing that the party needed a fresher face at the helm.

Rep. Filemon Vela (D-Tex.) said he was “more than pleased” that Pelosi had held the line against the wall. He represents a border district centered on Brownsville, where a coast-to-coast wall is widely viewed as folly.

“Those of us who represent these border districts who just think that the wall is just a total waste of money are grateful to Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer for the battle that they waged,” he said.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who ran against Pelosi for House Democratic leader in 2016 and tried to recruit an alternative speaker after the 2018 midterms, said, “I don’t think anyone’s ever denied her ability to negotiate, to be very tough and smart in these scenarios. The irony of the whole thing is, Trump was able to run over all of the Republicans and get them to cower with every demand he had . . . and he ran into a buzz saw.”

“People are seeing her as responsible in the face of gross irresponsibility and chaos,” Ryan added. “You don’t know who else would have been better. But she’s definitely up to the task.”

Read more at PowerPost

Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/pelosi-does-not-mess-around-democratic-speaker-emerges-triumphant-from-shutdown/2019/01/26/f2da5da0-20f1-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html

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No Escape for Roger Stone: Mueller’s Case Is a Slam Dunk and He’s Too Slimy to Get Flipped – The Daily Beast
No Escape for Roger Stone: Mueller’s Case Is a Slam Dunk and He’s Too Slimy to Get Flipped – The Daily Beast
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Extramarital affair with Kamala Harris? Former San Francisco mayor, 84, admits it happened – Fox News
Extramarital affair with Kamala Harris? Former San Francisco mayor, 84, admits it happened – Fox News

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown addressed his past extramarital relationship with U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris in his weekly column Saturday, saying he may have boosted the presidential hopeful’s career.

“Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago,” Brown wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was [California] Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco.”

Brown, 84, pointed out that he also helped the careers of other prominent California Democrats, such as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

KAMALA HARRIS’ NEW BOOK PUBLISHED WITH PRAISE FOR ‘LEADERSHIP’ OF NOW-DISGRACED FORMER AIDE

“The difference is that Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I ‘so much as jaywalked’ while she was D.A.,” Brown wrote. “That’s politics for ya.”

Kamala Harris’ career, from California district attorney to the Senate

Kamala Harris’ rise to political power started in California, where she served as a district attorney and attorney general for the state. And it might culminate in a 2020 presidential run.

Brown appointed Harris — about 30 years younger than Brown and just a few years out of law school – to two well-paid state commission assignments on the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

KAMALA HARRIS SAYS PRESIDENT SHOULD ‘OPEN UP’ TRUMP TOWER TO FEDERAL WORKERS FURLOUGHED BY SHUTDOWN

“Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work,” Harris said in a 2003 interview with SF Weekly. “I brought a level of life knowledge and common sense to the jobs.”

“The difference is that Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I ‘so much as jaywalked’ while she was D.A.”

— Willie Brown, former mayor of San Francisco

The former mayor also connected Harris with campaign donors, which helped her outraise her opponent for San Francisco district attorney, Business Insider reported. Brown’s involvement in her election raised questions as to how Harris would remain impartial, given his enormous political clout.

California Sen. Kamala Harris announces 2020 White House run

As the Democrats’ 2020 field grows, presidential candidates face pressure over past positions; reaction and analysis on ‘Outnumbered.’

Questions about Brown’s relationship with Harris began anew after she announced her 2020 presidential bid on Martin Luther King Day.

During his two terms as mayor of San Francisco, Brown was known for his charm, arrogance and ego, according to a 1996 profile in People magazine.

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Named one of the world’s 10 sexiest men by Playgirl magazine in 1984, Brown sometimes attended parties with his wife on one arm and a girlfriend on the other, according to a reporter quoted by the magazine.

Brown and Harris broke up in 1995 but remained political allies. In Saturday’s column, Brown said Harris is “riding a buzz wave the likes of which we haven’t seen in years.”

Fox News contacted Harris’ office for a response to Brown’s claims but did not receive a response.

For the past decade or so, Brown has reportedly been linked with Sonya Molodetskaya, a Russian refugee and socialite. He is said to be separated from wife Blanche Vitero, whom he married in 1958.

Brown and Vitero have three children, while Brown also fathered a child in 2001 with his former fundraiser, Carolyn Carpeneti, according to the Chronicle.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/former-san-francisco-mayor-addresses-past-relationship-with-sen-kamala-harris

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Americans fault Trump for chaotic government shutdown, as more believe US is ‘on the wrong track’: NBC-WSJ poll – CNBC
Americans fault Trump for chaotic government shutdown, as more believe US is ‘on the wrong track’: NBC-WSJ poll – CNBC

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Politics

The government shutdown that just ended has deepened Americans’ discontent with the state of the nation–and they place the blame primarily on President Donald Trump, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday showed.

The poll’s results showed that by 63 percent to 28 percent , a margin greater than two to one, Americans believe the country is “off on the wrong track” rather than “headed in the right direction.” That’s significantly worse than the 56 percent to 33 percent finding from the December NBC/WSJ poll, taken before the shutdown.

And by 50 percent to 37 percent, Americans blame Trump, rather than Democrats in Congress, for the debacle. That result reflects their disagreement with his stance on the issue that caused it.



Pluralities disapprove the president’s handling of border security and immigration issues, and say would-be immigrants across the southern border with Mexico would strengthen rather than weaken America. A 52 percent majority opposes construction of a wall or fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, while 45 percent favor it.

Unlike some other national polls, the NBC/WSJ survey did not show a decline in Trump’s overall approval rating. That assessment, buoyed by majority support for his handling of the economy, remained unchanged from December: 43 percent approve, 54 percent disapprove.

Underneath that unimpressive showing lies sharply negative assessments of the president. Just one-third of Americans express confidence that Trump has the right goals and policies; an even lower proportion, 28 percent, express confidence that he has the right personal characteristics to be president.

On both counts, he compares unfavorably to public assessments of his predecessors: Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

By 47 percent to 36 percent, Americans rate Trump negatively rather than positively for “being a good negotiator,” the characteristic he has long claimed as his signature quality. He fares even worse on “being steady and reliable” (53 percent negative, 32 percent positive), “being knowledgeable and experienced enough” (54 percent negative, 32 percent positive), “being honest and trustworthy” (58 percent negative, 28 percent positive) and “having high personal and ethical standards” (58 percent negative, 24 percent positive).

The telephone survey of 900 adults, conducted Jan. 20-23, carries a margin for error of 3.27 percentage points.

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Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/27/trump-faulted-for-government-shutdown-nbc-wsj-poll.html

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Bishop Claims He Was ‘Bullied’ into Apologising for MAGA Teens Involved in Encounter With Native American – Newsweek
Bishop Claims He Was ‘Bullied’ into Apologising for MAGA Teens Involved in Encounter With Native American – Newsweek

The bishop of the Covington Diocese in Kentucky claimed that he and Covington Catholic High School were “bullied” into condemning the behaviour of students engaged in a controversial encounter with a Native American elder. 

In a letter to parents, the Most Reverend Roger Foys said that he apologised to high school junior Nick Sandmann, who was filmed in a face-to-face-encounter with Native American elder Nathan Phillips near the Lincoln Memorial. 

“We should not have allowed ourselves to be bullied and pressured into making a statement prematurely, and we take full responsibility for it,” Foys wrote in the letter cited by news outlets. “I especially apologize to Nicholas Sandmann and his family, as well as to all CovCath families who have felt abandoned during this ordeal.”

Nick Sandmann in an interview denied attempting to provoke Nathan Phillips Screenshot

The students had been Washington on January 18 for the anti-abortion March for Life protest, while Phillips had been attending an indigenous people’s march. 

In footage that went viral after the protests, Sandamnn could be seen standing face-to-face with Phillips, who was playing a drum and singing. Other students were accused of jeering at Phillips. 

Many of the students wore clothing emblazoned with President Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan. 

The diocese in a statement last week had condemned the students and apologised to Phillips. 

“We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips. This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person,” said the diocese in a statemtnt last Saturday. 

However, footage that emerged later on showed Phillips approaching the group of students, in what he claimed was an effort to defuse tensions between them and a group of African American activists who had been insulting them. 

Sandmann in a statement rejected claims he had been taunting Phillips.

“As far as standing there I had every right to,” he said in an interview on NBC’s Today show. “My position is that I was not disrespectful to Mr. Phillips I’d like to talk to him.

He said he had been sent death threats in the wake of the incident. Kenton County Commonwealth’s Attorney said he and police were investigating multiple threats made against students and the school.

Foy said a third party investigator had been hired by the diocese to probe events in Washington D.C.

“The best we can do is, first of all, to find out the truth, to find out what really went on, what really happened. So we do have investigators who are here today, a third-party who is not associated with our diocese,” he said.

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Several undocumented workers fired from Trump golf course: report – The Hill
Several undocumented workers fired from Trump golf course: report – The Hill

About a dozen employees were reportedly abruptly fired last week from Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, because they were found to be in the country illegally.

The firings, which were reported Saturday by The Washington Post, follow revelations last year that undocumented immigrants were hired and subsequently fired at a Trump property in New Jersey.

The workers in New York were told that the Trump company had recently audited their immigration documents, which were found to be fake, the Post reported. Those documents had been submitted years prior to their firing. 

“Unfortunately, this means the club must end its employment relationship with you today,” a Trump executive told the employees, according to a recording one worker gave to the Post.

“I started to cry,” Gabriel Sedano, a former maintenance worker from Mexico, told the newspaper. “I told them they needed to consider us. I had worked almost 15 years for them in this club, and I’d given the best of myself to this job.”

Eric TrumpEric Frederick TrumpSeveral undocumented workers fired from Trump golf course: report Watchdog group: Trump had over 1,400 conflicts of interest in first two years Trump 2020 campaign manager hits George Conway: ‘Think how bad of a husband you have to be’ MORE, who along with President TrumpDonald John TrumpBillionaire investor says he’d back primary challenger to Trump: report Trump donates 0,000 from salary to alcoholism research How the government will reopen MORE‘s other adult son Donald Trump Jr.Donald (Don) John TrumpSeveral undocumented workers fired from Trump golf course: report Trump and associates had over 100 contacts with Russians before taking office: NY Times Former NYPD commander claims Trump got special treatment for gun licenses MORE has managed the president’s business empire since he entered office, told the Post that the Trump Organization is seeking to fire anyone who has submitted false hiring paperwork.

“We are making a broad effort to identify any employee who has given false and fraudulent documents to unlawfully gain employment. Where identified, any individual will be terminated immediately,” Eric Trump said in an email to the Post.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.

The news comes as President Trump has adopted several hard-line stances on immigration and asylum, maintaining pressure on Congress to appropriate the funds necessary to build a border wall. He has also denounced illegal immigration as harmful to American workers.

“On immigration policy, ‘America First’ means protecting the jobs, wages and security of American workers, whether first or 10th generation,” Trump said in 2016. “No matter who you are, we’re going to protect your job because, let me tell you, our jobs are being stripped from our country like we’re babies.”

Anibal Romero, who is representing the workers fired from the New York and New Jersey clubs, asserted that the Trump Organization has shown “a pattern and practice of hiring undocumented immigrants, not only in New Jersey, but also in New York.”

“We are demanding a full and thorough investigation from federal authorities,” Romero told the Post.

A former manager of the New York property also argued that the Trump Organization placed a higher emphasis on hiring cheap labor rather than checking for immigration status. 

“It didn’t matter. They didn’t care [about immigration status],’” the former manager told the Post. “It was, ‘Get the cheapest labor possible.’ ”

Source Article from https://thehill.com/homenews/news/427115-several-undocumented-workers-fired-from-trump-golf-course-report

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Dems must join Trump in wall compromise to keep government open – Fox News
Dems must join Trump in wall compromise to keep government open – Fox News
Video

Trump: We have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the government

President Trump praises federal workers and their families, announces that he will sign a bill to open the government for three weeks until February 15.

President Trump’s agreement with congressional leaders Friday to reopen the government until Feb. 15 has temporarily put off the confrontation with Democrats over his call for $5.7 billion to build a wall along part of our southern border.

The House and Senate both passed a short-term spending bill after President Trump announced the agreement and the president signed the measure Friday night, ending the partial government shutdown that began Dec. 22. There is no border wall funding in the bill.

The legislation will enable 800,000 federal workers to start collecting paychecks again and get back to work. But we’ll be back to Square One in three weeks if Democrats refuse to budge in their stubborn opposition to providing any funding for a wall that is obviously needed as an important element of border security.

TRUMP SIGNS BILL TO END PARTIAL GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

The illogic of the Democratic opposition to providing any funding for a border wall, fence or other barrier is mind-boggling, because most Democrats who’ve served in Congress for several years have voted to fund border fencing in the past.

President Trump has been more than reasonable in offering compromises to the Democrats. He announced last weekend that he would extend protections against deportation for three more years to 1 million immigrants now taking part in two programs he has been trying to end – if Democrats agree to give him $5.7 billion in border wall funding.

That’s a major concession to the 700,000 young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children who are now protected from deportation by the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. It’s also a big concession to another 300,000 immigrants who remain in the U.S. under temporary protected status after they came here following natural disasters and other calamities in their home countries.

But if Democrats refuse to compromise from their insistence on refusing to provide any money for a border wall or barrier of some sort we’ll be back in crisis mode in three weeks. That would be bad news for all Americans, regardless of their political affiliation.

President Trump indicated Friday that if no agreement is reached with Congress by Feb. 15 to fund the border wall that he has promised repeatedly to build he would declare a national emergency and order the U.S. military to build the wall, using Defense Department funds.

The idea of simply declaring an emergency and building the border wall without getting approval from the House and Senate understandably must sound appealing to President Trump.

But my strong advice to the president – speaking as a Republican who represented a Pennsylvania district in the House from 1977 to 1997 – is that he should not under any circumstances declare a national emergency to get wall funding.

But my strong advice to the president – speaking as a Republican who represented a Pennsylvania district in the House from 1977 to 1997 – is that he should not under any circumstances declare a national emergency to get wall funding.

Any attempt by the president to go around Congress to fund a border wall by declaring a national emergency would be sure to generate lawsuits. Those lawsuits could take years to wind their way to the Supreme Court, probably assuring that the wall could not be built in the president’s first term.

And if President Trump’s decision to spend billions of dollars without congressional approval by declaring a national emergency was upheld by the Supreme Court, the checks and balances in the Constitution that make Congress a co-equal branch of government could be tossed out the window. That would set a terrible and dangerous precedent.

Imagine a future Democratic president declaring climate change a national emergency and ordering a ban on coal mining and drilling for oil and natural gas, along with the closure of nuclear power plants.

Or imagine a future Democratic president declaring a national emergency to provide government-run health care funded by massive tax increases.

The nightmarish possibilities of “national emergencies” that future presidents could declare are endless. A president empowered to spend money without congressional approval could give us exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent – one-person rule by a president with vastly greater powers who could ignore the will of our elected representatives in Congress.

While $5.7 billion is certainly a lot of money, it’s just a tiny fraction of the federal budget. So it’s hard for most rational Americans to understand why the fight over this amount of funding for a border wall turned into battle between President Trump and Democrats that resulted in the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

In fact, the real reason for the shutdown was that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and President Trump were on a collision course that resulted in a wreck.

President Trump decided Friday that the American people needed their government to reopened, so stepped forward and agreed to the three-week plan to bring federal workers back to their jobs without the wall funding that he wants. Now Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., need to compromise as well so there’s not another shutdown or a declaration of a national emergency by President Trump.

Candidate Trump made it very clear in his 2016 campaign that he intended to secure the border by building a wall and taking other important steps. Throughout his presidency, Trump has shown that he is intent on keeping his campaign promises.

The president has never wavered on his determination to build the wall, but on several occasions has deferred to Congress on the timing for wall funding because of immediate fiscal concerns. He was told that the border security issue would be handled at the end of the year. When that promise evaporated, he decided to make his stand.

The election of a Democratic majority in the House exacerbated the situation. That new majority is made up of factions – and a substantial number of representatives wanted a change of leadership in their caucus and in the House.

Consequently, Pelosi had a difficult battle to find the votes to elect her to the speakership. Many new Democratic representatives and some firebrands from the past were passionately anti-Trump and heavily focused on electing a speaker who would oppose President Trump at every turn. To them, the wall stood as a symbol of everything they hate about the president.

What we know of Speaker Pelosi’s quest for her job was that there were many accommodations made to the Democratic dissidents. The question that should be asked of Pelosi now is: “In the course of your campaign for the speakership, did you promise anyone in your caucus that you would stand firm for absolutely no funding for the wall?”

I don’t know the answer to that question, nor do I know whether it has been asked. But there is every reason to suspect that the wall was a subject of discussion in Pelosi’s campaign to become speaker and that she led the rebels to believe she would never allow wall funding to proceed. She could be trapped by what she had to promise in her quest for power.

There is a provision in the House rules that allows a majority of members to remove the speaker from office. Such a motion has never succeeded, but if far-left Democrats angered by a future Pelosi move to provide some border wall funding joined forces with Republicans they might be able to force Pelosi out of the speakership.

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The threat of that happening is likely contributing to Pelosi’s refusal until now to make reasonable compromises with President Trump on border security.

Let’s hope Pelosi decides to put the welfare of the nation ahead of political considerations and the preservation of her position. She and Sen. Schumer should meet President Trump halfway and avoid another government shutdown or declaration of a national emergency by the president. Our national interest requires such a compromise.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/dems-must-join-trump-in-wall-compromise-to-keep-government-open

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Bishop Claims He Was ‘Bullied’ into Apologising for MAGA Teens Involved in Encounter With Native American – Newsweek
Bishop Claims He Was ‘Bullied’ into Apologising for MAGA Teens Involved in Encounter With Native American – Newsweek

The bishop of the Covington Diocese in Kentucky claimed that he and Covington Catholic High School were “bullied” into condemning the behaviour of students engaged in a controversial encounter with a Native American elder. 

In a letter to parents, the Most Reverend Roger Foys said that he apologised to high school junior Nick Sandmann, who was filmed in a face-to-face-encounter with Native American elder Nathan Phillips near the Lincoln Memorial. 

“We should not have allowed ourselves to be bullied and pressured into making a statement prematurely, and we take full responsibility for it,” Foys wrote in the letter cited by news outlets. “I especially apologize to Nicholas Sandmann and his family, as well as to all CovCath families who have felt abandoned during this ordeal.”

Nick Sandmann in an interview denied attempting to provoke Nathan Phillips Screenshot

The students had been Washington on January 18 for the anti-abortion March for Life protest, while Phillips had been attending an indigenous people’s march. 

In footage that went viral after the protests, Sandamnn could be seen standing face-to-face with Phillips, who was playing a drum and singing. Other students were accused of jeering at Phillips. 

Many of the students wore clothing emblazoned with President Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan. 

The diocese in a statement last week had condemned the students and apologised to Phillips. 

“We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips. This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person,” said the diocese in a statemtnt last Saturday. 

However, footage that emerged later on showed Phillips approaching the group of students, in what he claimed was an effort to defuse tensions between them and a group of African American activists who had been insulting them. 

Sandmann in a statement rejected claims he had been taunting Phillips.

“As far as standing there I had every right to,” he said in an interview on NBC’s Today show. “My position is that I was not disrespectful to Mr. Phillips I’d like to talk to him.

He said he had been sent death threats in the wake of the incident. Kenton County Commonwealth’s Attorney said he and police were investigating multiple threats made against students and the school.

Foy said a third party investigator had been hired by the diocese to probe events in Washington D.C.

“The best we can do is, first of all, to find out the truth, to find out what really went on, what really happened. So we do have investigators who are here today, a third-party who is not associated with our diocese,” he said.

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Discovery of Hezbollah ‘attack tunnels’ rattles a northern Israeli town – NBC News
Discovery of Hezbollah ‘attack tunnels’ rattles a northern Israeli town – NBC News

METULA, Israel — A soldier rushes up to a farmer who had just skirted a metal gate to get onto a patch of red earth.

“Move back,” thesoldier commands as the hum of a generator fills the air.

“But this is my land,” Haim Hod shoots back. Hod, 71, nicknamed Hamke, stands his ground alongside his wife, Miriam, on what is officially a restricted military area.

Behind the couple, rows of winter-bare apple trees march down toward Metula, Israel’s northernmost town. The soldier is guarding a long white tent that squats before a huge concrete wall. Above the imposing barrier looms a hill speckled with houses — the Lebanese town of Kafr Kela.

The Israeli military found more than apples in Haim Hod’s orchard. Hezbollah miltants had dug a tunnel across the border from Lebanon.Dusan Vranic / for NBC News

Only a few weeks ago Hod’s trees grew on what is now beaten-down earth. On Dec. 4, the couple and the nation were told that an “attack tunnel” had been discovered in Israeli territory that led into Lebanon.

The first of the six tunnels that were eventually found ran under farmland near Metula, which sits among apple, plum and peach orchards that ring with the chirrups of parakeets and the caw-caw of crows.

Officials later warned that hundreds of Hezbollah fighters could have streamed through the tunnels, kidnapping and killing civilians and soldiers.

Some in Metula theorize that the town as a whole would have been captured by Hezbollah — a pro-Palestinian militant group and political party that dominates Lebanese politics and is sponsored by fervently anti-Israel Iran.

Hezbollah fighters are coming home from the war winding down in Syria, where they helped prop-up President Bashar al-Assad as he battled rebels trying to unseat him. Fears are running high that as the battle-hardened militants return to an estimated arsenal of 100,000 rockets and missiles, they will intensify their focus on their original foe: Israel.

Metula, at the tip of a stretch of land jutting north into Lebanon, is especially vulnerable to the frequent flare-ups with enemies across the border. The town was shelled during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, which devastated parts of Lebanon.

In the decade before the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, rockets from Palestinian fighters often sent the people of Metula running to shelters.

But not Hod — rockets weren’t going to drive this third-generation farmer from his home.

His stoicism was beyond exasperating when warning sirens sounded and his wife chased the couple’s four children to safety.

After she got the family, minus dad, into a shelter the kids cried over Hod’s absence.

“He is never afraid,” Miriam Hod says over dinner in a hotel the couple run in town. “That is the problem.”

Miriam Hod, 68, is an artist with short hair, wide eyes and flowers tattooed onto the soft skin of her right hand.Dusan Vranic / for NBC News

Haim Hod smiles, his white teeth standing out against skin darkened by working in the fields since the age of 9.

“In all the wars, I have never gone to the shelter,” Hod said. “I always sleep in my bed.”

Hod may be brave, but he wept last month when he saw what the army had done to his orchard. The military rolled over his precious apple trees, snapping trunks and branches as they sped toward the newly discovered Hezbollah tunnel. The clearing made, 350 trucks flooded the tunnel with cement.

“The trees are like my children,” he says. “But security comes before children.”

The government will reimburse the Hods for losses incurred during the operation.

The Hods’ long tenure in Metula has seen many such trade-offs, the thick stone walls of the 120-year-old family home having been buffeted by waves of war and hardship.

Miriam and Haim Hod stand in front a tent erected by the Israeli military over the exposed tunnel, with the border wall and the Lebanese village of Kafr Kela behind them.Dusan Vranic / for NBC News

Haim Hod’s grandparents were the first couple to be married in the town after Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who encouraged the settlement of Jews in what is now Israel, bought the land from a local Arab family.

Times were often hard and it took the family four decades to repay the French banking scion. Along with other villagers, they periodically had to flee violent flare-ups.

After the state of Israel was created in 1948, poverty drove many of Haim Hod’s 10 uncles and aunts away. Some went abroad, but others stayed and helped “build Israel,” Miriam says.

Now Israel is warning that it may strike Hezbollah because of the tunnels.

“This is not merely an act of aggression. This is an act of war,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said soon after the tunnel’s discovery was announced. “The people of Lebanon have to understand that Hezbollah is putting them in jeopardy and we expect Lebanon to take action.”

Such statements and are part of a wider effort to keep Hezbollah and Iran away from Israel’s northern border. Israel has only recently admitted carrying out thousands of attacks on Iranian forces in Syria since 2011, abandoning a policy of secrecy that cloaked its military forays.

On Jan. 20, Israel attacked targets near Damascus — killing 21, including at least 12 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, according to a Syrian war monitoring group.

In response, Iran launched a rocket toward the crowded Mount Hermon ski resort. It was intercepted by Israel’s missile defense system. On Monday, the head of Iran’s air force announced: “We’re ready for the decisive war that will bring about Israel’s disappearance from the Earth.”

While Israel’s strikes on Syria are not unusual, drawing attention to them so publicly is, said Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Hezbollah regularly engages in attempts to encroach on its enemy, Byman said.

“Sometimes it is missiles, sometimes it is tunnels, and sometimes it is positions in Syria,” he says.

When Hezbollah’s leader finally owned up to building the tunnels late on Saturday, he indicated that the group would need more than a few tunnels if it ever decided to invade Israel.

Hassan Nasrallah also told Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen TV station that some of the tunnels were old, and called their late discovery “a 13-year-old intelligence failure.”

In spite of Hezbollah’s saber rattling, most experts agree that it does not want a full-scale war with Israel, which is vastly stronger militarily. But there is always the chance that a miscalculation could spiral into one.

Lt. Col. Avshalom Dadon does not intend to make any such mistakes. In his capacity as an engineering officer in the 91st Division, he helped oversee the discovery of the six tunnels found running into Israel.

“We weren’t surprised that we found tunnels,” said Dadon, 33. “But we were surprised by their magnitude and infrastructure, and the effort the Hezbollah obviously put into them.”

Each was different, he says — although they were all big enough for a man to stand upright in and were all wired for electricity.

Lt. Col. Avshalom Dadon stands over one of the hundreds of pipes the Israeli military drove into the ground to find tunnels running across the border from Lebanon.Dusan Vranic / for NBC News

Just a few hundred feet behind him, a barrel on a pole painted blue and emblazoned with ‘U.N.’ marks the boundary with Lebanon.

This is the Blue Line, the border demarcation between the countries. Clearly visible nearby, a cluster of Lebanese soldiers watch. One takes pictures as members of the elite Yahalom engineering unit, faces covered in black balaclavas, drop a tiny camera through a white tube into the tunnel.

“I understand who our neighbors are, and that we’re surrounded by enemies,” Dadon says at a site where a tunnel was pinpointed near the town of Zar’it. “I totally understand that the people we are facing aren’t stupid. They are learning about the IDF every day,” he said, referring to the Israeli Defense Forces.

Dadon punches a fist into his hand several times to describe the process of carving into the hard Dolomite rock. Hezbollah worked for years to dig through the earth here in northern Israel, often living in the tunnels as they built them, he says.

Soldiers drop a camera down through a pipe into what Israeli officials called an attack tunnel running from the Lebanese village of Ramyeh to near the Israeli town of Zar’it.Dusan Vranic / for NBC News

Dadon likens the operation to locate the tunnels to looking for a needle in a haystack, and says his forces drilled more than 600 holes in the ground to depths of around 60 feet until the six were pinpointed.

He breaks into a soft smile as he describes the excitement he felt at discovering the tunnels after years of searching.

“My wife would kill me to say this, but finding the tunnels — it’s a little like giving birth,” says the father of two.

In Metula, a two-minute walk from the Hods’ hotel, students at the town’s primary school discuss regular emergency drills overseen with military precision by headmistress Marsel Leev.

Noga, 11, explains that these help make her feel safe. And as she grows “older and older,” she is feeling “less and less stress” about the threat they all face.

The girl repeats this breathlessly at least three times, brown eyes widening with emphasis behind dark-rimmed glasses.

Later, Leev walks up a flight of stairs and opens curtains in a classroom to expose a wide panoramic view. The window frames orchards, houses and a road leading out of Metula. Just beyond that snakes the border wall, and then fields, houses and the mountains of Lebanon.

The building, teachers and students are in themselves a symbol of resilience, she says.

“The fact that here you have a school that is 150 meters from the border is a statement to the other side,” Leev says. “We will stay here for generations.”

F. Brinley Bruton

F. Brinley Bruton is a London-based senior editor for NBC News Digital. She focuses on news from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

Paul Goldman is a producer and video editor for NBC News based out of the Tel Aviv, Israel bureau. He works for all NBC News platforms — “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “TODAY” and NBCNews.com.

Goldman has worked with NBC for 16 years. Over the course of his career, he has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the first Gulf War, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the ongoing peace talks and Israeli daily life. Outside of Israel, he has covered the Olympics, the Arab Spring and the birth of the British royal baby. 

Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/discovery-hezbollah-attack-tunnels-rattle-northern-israeli-town-n962591

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Trump On Defense As Conservatives Say He Caved On Shutdown – HuffPost
Trump On Defense As Conservatives Say He Caved On Shutdown – HuffPost

Dan Stein, the president of a hardline immigration group called Federation for American Immigration Reform, put the onus on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, who pledged to negotiate once the government was reopened. “The ball is now in Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s court,” Stein said.

Source Article from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/conservatives-react-trump-shutdown-wall-caved_us_5c4cf487e4b0287e5b8b5437

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Trump signs bill to end partial government shutdown – Fox News
Trump signs bill to end partial government shutdown – Fox News
Video

Trump: We have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the government

President Trump on Friday signed a short-term spending bill to re-open the government, ending the longest partial federal government shutdown in U.S. history. Trump signed the stop-gap spending bill just hours after the measure passed the Senate and House, respectively.

“On Friday, Jan. 25, 2019, the president signed into law: H.J. Res. 28, the ‘Further Additional Continuing Appropriations Act, 2019,’ which includes a short-term continuing resolution that provides fiscal year 2019 appropriations through Feb. 15, 2019, for continuing projects and activities of the Federal Government included in the remaining seven appropriations bills,” the White House said in a statement late Friday.  “Also included in the enrolled bill are provisions regarding retroactive pay and reimbursement, and extensions of certain authorities.”

Despite an end to the 35-day partial government shutdown, Trump on Friday night felt the need to defend the move, insisting that he had not caved on his sought-after funding for border security.

The deal for a short-term spending bill, which would keep the government open until Feb. 15, was agreed on to help those affected by the partial shutdown, the president said in a tweet.

“I wish people would read or listen to my words on the Border Wall,” Trump tweeted. “This was in no way a concession. It was taking care of millions of people who were getting badly hurt by the Shutdown with the understanding that in 21 days, if no deal is done, it’s off to the races!”

SCHUMER, POLITICIANS, REACT TO TRUMP’S SHUTDOWN ANNOUNCEMENT: ‘HOPEFULLY NOW THE PRESIDENT HAS LEARNED HIS LESSON’

Trump came to an agreement with Democrats to support a measure to re-open the government and, separately,  negotiate a plan for border security. The deal does not include funding for a wall or barrier along the border, but the president said he was confident negotiations would continue to come to an agreement on wall funding.

After the deal was announced, the president was criticized by some for appearing to have given in to Democrats.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeted: “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.”

STATE OF THE UNION NOW IN THE WORKS FOR FEBRUARY 5, SOURCE SAYS

The New York Daily News, meantime, tweeted an image of their planned Saturday edition, depicting Trump along with the words “CAVE MAN.”

The government ran out of funding on Dec. 22, amid a border security debate between the White House and congressional Democrats. The president requested $5.7 billion in funding for border security and construction of a steel barrier or concrete wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but Democrats vowed to block any spending package that included any wall funding.

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During his announcement, Trump made reference to his previous threats to declare a national emergency to secure the border, calling it a “very powerful weapon,” and noted that if no deal was reached to fund border security and construction of a wall before Feb. 15, he would use his presidential powers to declare an emergency.

“Walls should not be controversial,” he said. “As commander-in-chief, my highest priority is the defense of our great country.”

Fox News’ Brooke Singman, Adam Shaw and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-slams-claims-he-gave-in-on-partial-shutdown-this-was-in-no-way-a-concession

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5 dead in multi-parish shooting spree in Louisiana; suspect identified – WAFB
5 dead in multi-parish shooting spree in Louisiana; suspect identified – WAFB

Three people were found dead inside of a mobile home in Livingston Parish Saturday morning. They were identified as Billy Ernest, 43, Tanner Ernest, 17, and Summer Ernest, 20.

Source Article from http://www.wafb.com/2019/01/26/dead-multi-parish-shooting-spree-suspect-identified-2/

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Trump renews call to ‘build the wall’ after reopening government, warns ‘both parties very dug in’ – Fox News
Trump renews call to ‘build the wall’ after reopening government, warns ‘both parties very dug in’ – Fox News
Video

Trump compromises over shutdown but Democrats still refuse to negotiate on border wall

President Trump on Saturday promised supporters that the wall on the southern border will be built, a day after he agreed to temporarily reopen the government for three weeks without funding for a wall — but warned that “both parties [are] very dug in.”

“21 days goes very quickly. Negotiations with Democrats will start immediately. Will not be easy to make a deal, both parties very dug in,” he tweeted. “The case for National Security has been greatly enhanced by what has been happening at the Border & through dialogue.

TRUMP SIGNS BILL TO END PARTIAL GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

“We will build the Wall!” he added.

Trump signed a short-term spending bill Friday night reopening the government, which has been partially shut down for 35 days in a fight over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in funding for the border wall. Democrats had balked at that number, instead offering $1.3 billion for more general border security. Trump had announced that he would sign such a bill earlier Friday, and Congress passed the measure hours later, sending it to Trump’s desk.

Trump said Friday that he wanted negotiations for border security to continue ahead of the Feb. 15 deadline, and threatened to use the “very powerful weapon” of declaring a national emergency if negotiations came to naught. That move would give him extra powers to build the wall via executive power.

Trump has floated the idea of a national emergency before, something that would receive opposition from Democrats and some Republicans. But some Republicans backed Trump Friday, noting that he has agreed a week earlier to extensions of protections for illegal immigrants who came to the country as children and those from unsafe countries.

ANN COULTER RIPS TRUMP OVER BORDER WALL ON BILL MAHER’S SHOW

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News Friday that Trump had made concessions, and that if Democrats won’t negotiate then Trump would be right to declare a national emergency.

“Here’s what I think come February 15th, if the Democrats still say ‘Go to hell on the wall you get a dollar. That’s it.’ They basically tell Trump ‘I’m not going to do with you what I did with Bush and Obama’ then I hope he will go the emergency route. We don’t need to shut the government down.” he said.

Trump has faced criticism from some conservatives for backing down, for now, in the stalemate and on Friday he responded by saying that it was “in no way a concession.”

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“It was taking care of millions of people who were getting badly hurt by the Shutdown with the understanding that in 21 days, if no deal is done, it’s off to the races!” he tweeted/

However, prospects for a deal looked bleak. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. said Friday that Democrats “remain fully against a wall” but also said that Democrats would approach the negotiations in good faith.

On Friday, Trump spent much of an address in a Rose Garden talking about the dangers that illegal immigration poses, namely the influx of drugs and criminals into the country. On Saturday morning, Trump was back to issuing those warnings, particularly about a caravan of migrants heading toward the border.

“If we had a powerful Wall, they wouldn’t even try to make the long and dangerous journey. Build the Wall and Crime will Fall!” he tweeted.

Fox News’ Elizabeth Zwirz and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-renews-call-to-build-the-wall-after-reopening-government-warns-both-parties-very-dug-in

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