Chart from the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, 3/19/2-18
Western slope Congressional Representative Scott Tipton on March 14 voted against a motion to prohibit President Trump and his family from benefitting personally from a bill currently under consideration by the federal legislature to change federal banking rules.
Milo Yiannopoulos
People are hyperventilating over a scheduled appearance in Grand Junction by white supremacist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at 7:00 p.m. on April 14th at a currently undisclosed location. Some are planning protests, but the best thing to do might be to just yawn and ignore Yiannopoulos entirely.
“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump told a group of lawmakers at a meeting about school safety and gun violence.
“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.
“Believe me,” said Trump. But no, Mexico won’t pay for a wall. Trump is now demanding American taxpayers pay for it.
While still promising Mexico will pay for it, President Trump is now trying to extort $25 billion from U.S. taxpayers to build a “big, beautiful” border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and he’s holding DACA recipients hostage to do it.
It’s clear Trump either doesn’t understand, or is ignoring the nuances of legal and illegal immigration as well as actual statistics about the rates of crime committed by immigrants vs. U.S. citizens, and how most contraband gets into the country illegally.
By far the biggest contributor to violent deaths in the U.S. is not immigrants, but our country’s own violent culture paired with easy access to deadly firearms — a fact President Trump completely ignores in his effort to whip up xenophobic fear among Americans.
The stakes for Trump’s wall are extremely high for American taxpayers in many ways. The first is financial.
President Donald Trump spent years spreading the racist lie that President Obama was born in Kenya. He’s publicly described Mexicans as rapists, called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” said immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS,” used the gang MS-13 to disparage all immigrants and called African countries “shitholes.”
Sad to say, but there are people in our own community who actually believe these things, and worse, and Trump is empowering them to more freely express their racism and xenophobia.
NBC Nightly News
Kick the kids out of the room. The president in on TV again, and again it’s for a shockingly offensive comment, especially from an American president.
The Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump actually told a bipartisan group of Senators in a conversation about immigration today,
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
Many ardent Trump supporters happily call themselves “deplorable,” making fun of a point Hillary Clinton tried to make during her 2016 campaign that many Trump supporters are racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic.
Members of Trump’s “Deplorable” contingents across the country, including those locally, typically deny they are any of these things, yet the Facebook pages of “Deplorables” groups (Trump supporters across the country who have personally labeled themselves “Deplorables”) do in fact reveal a strong component of sexist, racist, xenophobic and homophobic thought runs within these groups.
From the Washington Post, December 20, 2017:
To President Donald Trump: “We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country — the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions; the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.” — Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
President Trump was so excited about passing his first major piece of legislation Wednesday that he blurted out that the Republican Party had misrepresented the entire bill, handing Democrats some potentially troublesome talking points for the 2018 midterm elections.
Speaking at the White House just before the House prepared to sign off on the tax-cuts bill one last time, Trump reveled extensively in his win before turning things over to Vice President Pence to heap praise upon him continuously for a few minutes. It was a thoroughly unique spectacle, even as victory dances and Trump Cabinet meetings go.
But along the way, Trump basically admitted that the GOP’s talking points on the bill weren’t exactly honest in two major ways.
While talking about the corporate tax rate being cut from 35 percent to 21 percent, Trump said, “That’s probably the biggest factor in our plan.”
Graffiti left in the restroom at the Horizon Drive Safeway this evening.
An employee at the Horizon Drive Safeway discovered hateful anti-gay graffiti scrawled in the store’s restroom tonight and posted photos of it on social media. The employee discovered the graffiti while changing out of work clothes in the restroom.
One message was “Trump 2020” with a swastika. The other message said “God hates all fags,” also with a swastika.
CO Senator Cory Gardner voted for a measure that will let big banks fleece consumers and get away with it
Why is the stock market zooming up so high?
Because the Trump administration is gutting consumer protections, most notably against the big banks, so the banks can more freely commit fraud and fleece customers like you and me without being held accountable.
Republicans just voted to end consumer protection rules that ban banks from forcing people into arbitration after banks defraud them. The rule strips Americans of their right to go to court to get justice against fraudulent activity, theft and other wrongdoing by big banks.
Colorado House Rep. Scott Tipton. The bill that hobbled DEA’s pursuit of out-of-control opioid pharmaceutical distribution passed the House on a voice vote, so no record of individual votes was made.
A blockbuster CBS News/60 Minutes and Washington Post investigation reveals that after the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) cracked down on big pharmaceutical distributors who were knowingly pumping millions of addictive opioid drugs into the black market in cities and towns across the country, the U.S. Congress passed a law to block DEA from freezing such highly suspicious drug shipments to keep them from getting to the streets.
A recently-released confidential transcript of an April, 2017 phone call from President Donald Trump to Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte reveals Trump praised Duterte, telling him he’s been “doing an unbelievable job on the drug problem” in his country.
President Duterte has had death squads gun down approximately 7,000 Filipino citizens in the streets of his country since June, 2016, in a systematic program of extrajudicial killings. Often the killers, many of whom reportedly received compensation for each person they killed, plant evidence to try to justify the killings.
The small article to the left of the photo is the only “coverage” the Sentinel gave to a Tax Day march against President Trump keeping his tax returns secret from the American people, and it doesn’t even mention Grand Junction. The photo right is of a child at the Easter egg hunt at the Botanical Gardens. Almost 300 people marched through downtown in Grand Junction.
Sometimes, what newspapers don’t cover is as important than what they do cover.
Today’s Daily Sentinel is a case in point.
Hundreds of people marched in the streets of downtown Grand Junction on Saturday, April 15 yelling and protesting President Trump keeping his tax returns secret from the American people and claiming they don’t care, and the Sunday April 16 issue of the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel carried no coverage of it at all. Zip. The only article in Sunday’s Sentinel about any Tax March at all was on page 3 of the first section, right below the “You Said It” column, and it mentioned Tax Marches held in Denver and Colorado Springs, but contained nothing at all about the big march in Grand Junction.
Tax Day march planned in Grand Junction April 15
Activists are organizing a local tax day march on Saturday, April 15 in solidarity with a national effort to show President Donald Trump that Americans very much want him to reveal his tax returns.
The Trump administration poses unprecedented economic conflicts of interest to the office of president. People across the country are participating in Tax Day Marches to urge the president to make these potential conflicts visible, including pertinent documentation regarding foreign influences and financial interests which may confirm that President Trump is in conflict with the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Trump has insisted on keeping his tax returns secret. He is the first president in decades who has refused to make his tax returns public.
U.S. Congressman Ted Lieu of Los Angeles County
In the wake of the insults President-Elect Donald Trump hurled at civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis today on Twitter, just days before Martin Luther King Day and his own inauguration, Congressman Ted W. Lieu (D – Los Angeles County) issued the following statement explaining his decision to not attend Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017.
The flap started when Rep. Lewis said in an interview today with Meet The Press host Chuck Todd that he will not be attending Trump’s inauguration in part because he doesn’t think Trump is a legitimate president due to Russia’s reported interference the U.S. election.
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox (2000-2006) has been trolling Donald Trump on Twitter and responding to Trump’s incessant Tweets in English, writing devastating responses questioning his legitimacy as president, telling him Mexico won’t pay for the (expletive) wall he’s been promising to build between the U.S. and Mexico, and much more:
Trump: Electorally illegitimate President-Elect?
The New York Times and other news outlets including AlterNet, RawStory, and DailyKos are reporting that a bipartisan nationwide team of attorneys has performed detailed research into each of the 538 members of the electoral college and found that more than 50 members who voted for Donald Trump were ineligible to vote because they violated their state’s laws governing who is eligible to serve as an elector. For example, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi served as an elector and voted for Trump, but the Florida state Constitution specifies electors cannot hold any other paid government office while serving as an elector. In other cases, electors did not reside in the congressional district they were charged with representing, or were not registered to vote in the districts they were supposed to represent as electors. Each of these situations constitute legal violations of eligibility to serve as electors.
The report states:
“We have reason to believe that there are at least 50 electoral votes that were not regularly given or not lawfully certified (16 Congressional District violations and 34 dual office-holder violations). The number could be over a hundred.”
The group issued an “Electoral Vote Objection Packet” containing this information, as well as the specific language they need to use to object to certification of the vote, to members of Congress and are asking them to stop the certification of the 2016 Electoral College results scheduled for 1:00 p.m. on Friday, January 6.
You can read the entire report here:
The Electoral Vote Objection Packet and spreadsheet detailing the problems the attorneys found with the 50+ electors can be seen here.
