June 1, 2019

Kirsten Gillibrand unveils LGBTQ agenda on first day of Pride

BY CARA KORTE

JUNE 1, 2019 / 9:21 AM / CBS NEWS

The only Democratic candidate for president who has campaigned at a drag club, is now the first candidate to roll an agenda to protect the rights of gay and transgender Americans. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand announced Saturday -- the first day of Gay Pride Month — her agenda for LGBTQ rights. Gillibrand's plan sorts priorities into four categories: equal rights, families and children, health care, and safety.

To ensure equal rights, Gillibrand would call on two federal agencies to fight LGBTQ discrimination. Upon being elected she would direct the Department of Defense to ban discrimination against HIV-positive or transgender members of the military. Gillibrand would also use the Department of Justice to classify LGBT individuals as a "protected class" and direct specific attorneys in the department to focus on the abolition of LGBT discrimination.

Decreasing the murder rate of transgender people was specifically noted as a Justice Department objective. According to the Human Rights Campaign, 23 trans people were killed in the U.S. in 2016, 29 in 2017, 26 in 2018, and five have been killed so far in 2019.

Regarding families and children, Gillibrand outlined multiple policies focused on gay parents and children. She would codify gay marriage, nominate an Education secretary who focuses on LGBTQ issues and ban conversation therapy – the controversial practice of coaching, sometime aggressively, gay children into believing they are heterosexual.

more
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kirsten-gillibrand-unveils-lgbtq-agenda-on-first-day-of-pride-2019-06-01/

June 1, 2019

Guess who's feeding Trump that crap about "the courts won't allow my impeachment"

Dershowitz: Supreme Court could overrule an unconstitutional impeachment

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/446394-dershowitz-supreme-court-could-overrule-an-unconstitutional-impeachment

June 1, 2019

Illinois Senate approves sweeping abortion rights bill, sending the plan to Gov. J.B. Pritzker

Source: The Chicago Tribune




May 31, 2019, 11:50 p.m.

A bill that establishes a “fundamental right” for women to get an abortion in Illinois cleared the state Senate late Friday night, sending the sweeping measure to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who already has signaled his support.

As the clock approached midnight Friday, the Senate voted 34-20 in favor of the abortion legislation, which comes amid an increased sense of urgency among advocates looking to protect abortion access as a series of states have passed laws essentially banning the practice.

“I believe, frankly, there’s a war against women’s rights going on,” Sen. Melinda Bush, the Grayslake Democrat who sponsored the bill in the Senate, said about the restrictive laws other states have passed.

The bill establishes the “fundamental right” of a women to have an abortion and states that a “fertilized egg, embryo or fetus does not have independent rights.” It repeals the Illinois Abortion Law of 1975, doing away with provisions for spousal consent, waiting periods, criminal penalties for physicians who perform abortions and other restrictions on facilities where abort

Read more: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-met-illinois-abortion-legislation-senate-20190531-story.html

June 1, 2019

President Trump's Anti-LGBT Agenda Is Louder Than His Pride Message - Michelangelo Signorile

On Friday, President Trump tweeted a message in support of Pride month, which was breathtakingly disingenuous given his administration’s systematic assault on LGBT rights.

Michelangelo Signorile
05.31.19 8:03 PM ET

After ignoring LGBTQ Pride month since he took office—and moving to roll back LGBTQ rights in so many areas—President Donald Trump had the gall to tweet about celebrating Pride on the eve of Pride month, in a couple of tweets on Friday in which he also claimed he had “launched” an effort to decriminalize homosexuality around the world.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1134538168324300800

But Trump’s celebration of Pride is as fraudulent and calculated as his claim to be fighting to decriminalize homosexuality. This is in fact an attempt to portray himself as supportive of LGBTQ people as he gears up for the 2020 re-election campaign.

The goal is less about getting much of the community’s backing—which will be near impossible—but more about keeping or getting the support of many others who might be turned off by blatant anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

It’s exactly what Trump did in 2016. And the media in particular should be forewarned this time around that it’s all one big sham.

Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ rights from early in his presidency have been documented, from his Twitter announcement in July of 2017 that he was banning transgender people in the military to his Justice Department’s federal court brief, filed at about that same time, defending discrimination against gay, lesbian and bisexual people in employment.

But in the past several weeks the assault on LGBTQ rights has ramped up aggressively. The president trumpeted the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) expansion of a so-called conscience rule allowing for health care providers—including physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and teachers—to turn away LGBTQ people and others based on religious grounds.

more
https://www.thedailybeast.com/president-trumps-anti-lgbt-agenda-is-louder-than-his-pride-message

June 1, 2019

Facing down liberal critics, Rep. Cheri Bustos pledges to keep Democrats' tent big

By Mike DeBonis June 1 at 6:00 AM

PEORIA, Ill. — When Rep. Cheri Bustos canceled her appearance at a fundraiser to be held this month for one of the last antiabortion Democrats in Congress, many liberals cheered the move — and many more saw it as cementing a new Democratic litmus test.

Not so fast, Bustos says.

In her first interview addressing the controversy, the chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said this week that she remains committed to keeping the party tent as open as possible and defended her efforts to protect Democratic incumbents, even those — such as Daniel Lipinski, a fellow House member from Illinois and the beneficiary of the fundraiser that Bustos skipped — in safe districts who have drawn opposition from the left.

“Everybody has to navigate their own district, and who am I to prescribe how anybody does that?” she said. “I just think, our core values as Democrats, we’re pretty much on the same page. We want to make sure that people have opportunities to do better.”

Five months into their House majority, however, Democrats have had trouble staying on the same page on policy and politics. Proposed expansions of government, such as Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal climate plan, have set liberal activists against the party leadership, and the DCCC’s defense of incumbents of all ideological stripes has similarly rankled the left.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/facing-down-liberal-critics-rep-cheri-bustos-pledges-to-keep-democrats-tent-big/2019/05/31/2381d8ea-83b5-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html

June 1, 2019

Spying, treason and politics: Trump ups the stakes in Russia probe battle despite scant evidence

Spying, treason and politics: President Trump ups the stakes in Russia probe battle despite scant evidence

Kristine Phillips and Bart Jansen, USA TODAY Published 6:00 a.m. ET June 1, 2019 | Updated 8:17 a.m. ET June 1, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is significantly raising the stakes in his public battle with the law enforcement and intelligence agencies that spent two years investigating him and his campaign.

In the past two weeks alone, Trump has charged that federal investigators “conclusively spied” on his campaign, accused perceived political enemies of treason, and signaled that he will make these allegations a major talking point in his reelection bid. Then he gave his attorney general broad power to probe – and reveal – intelligence secrets as part of a new review into how the federal investigation on Trump and his campaign began.

The flurry of accusations has produced a lot of noise – at times in the form of “lock them up” chants at Trump’s campaign rallies – but scant evidence of wrongdoing.

Attorney General William Barr told lawmakers two months ago that he was conducting his own examination of whether the government improperly “spied” on Trump’s campaign, at least the third examination by the department of its conduct around the 2016 election. So far, Barr has not said he has found misconduct, but in an interview with CBS News, he said the investigation of Trump's campaign crossed “a serious red line” and he wants to know how and why the FBI conducted its work.

more
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/01/spying-treason-and-politics-trump-raises-stakes-russia-investigation/3769752002/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatodaycomwashington-topstories

June 1, 2019

Trump's reliance on pressure tactics is showing diminishing returns

By David Nakamura June 1 at 6:00 AM

President Trump’s brinkmanship with Mexico over immigration has opened a new and risky front in his global campaign to pressure other nations to capitulate to his demands, a strategy that has paid few dividends over 2½ years and left his major foreign policy initiatives in doubt.

From his “fire and fury” rhetoric against a nuclear-armed North Korea to an escalating trade war with China to new ultimatums aimed at Mexico, Trump has wielded threats, insults and punishments against his foreign counterparts with diminishing returns.

Though he lured Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table through a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions, Trump’s historic summits with the young dictator ended in failure after talks collapsed in February.

Beijing attempted to negotiate over Trump’s push for a trade deal, but President Xi Jinping has met successive rounds of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods with commensurate retaliatory measures, deepening an increasingly zero-sum clash between the world’s two largest economies.

And although Mexico took steps to comply with Trump’s hard-line immigration policies — allowing Central American asylum seekers to the United States a temporary haven — Trump’s vow this week to impose sweeping tariffs unless that nation curbs unauthorized immigration into the United States stirred a public backlash.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-reliance-on-pressure-tactics-is-showing-diminishing-returns/2019/05/31/1c5e6144-83bc-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html

There's also an article on this news here:
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/trumps-bullying-tactics-blowing-up-in-his-face-as-world-leaders-expect-him-to-lose-in-2020-report/

June 1, 2019

Former Republican Federal Prosecutors Speak Out Against President Trump's Obstruction of Justice

June 1, 2019

Nikki Haley Heads to Iowa

June 1, 2019 at 8:03 am EDT By Taegan Goddard

“Since leaving the United Nations last year, Nikki Haley’s moves have been closely watched for signs that the former South Carolina governor will run for the White House in 2024,” the Charleston Post & Courier reports.

“A new advocacy group, a new book and a series of high-profile speaking engagements were seen as steps toward a presidential bid.”

“Now Haley is heading to Iowa.”

###

https://politicalwire.com/2019/06/01/nikki-haley-heads-to-iowa/

June 1, 2019

Hannity Rails Against 'Deep State' With Big Guest Panel: The 'Day of Reckoning' Is Here

By Josh Feldman May 31st, 2019, 10:15 pm

Sean Hannity assembled a big panel of regular guests to rail against the “deep state” and the investigation into President Donald Trump, saying the “day of reckoning” is coming for the real criminals.

Hannity asked where the “media hysteria” is over “real obstruction, real crime” from Hillary Clinton, said there must be equal application of the law, and brought up the infamous Steele dossier.

“Night after night, we have literally been unpeeling the layers of this onion and ripping the mask off all of this corruption trying to get to the truth to expose what has happened here,” he said. “This was an attempt to literally fix a presidential election and destroy a duly-elected president. There is a deep state, and now their day of reckoning has come.”

Hannity then brought on his big panel, which included several familiar faces: Gregg Jarrett, Sara Carter, John Solomon, Victoria Toensing, Joe diGenova, Matt Schlapp, Pam Bondi, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Fitton, and Doug Schoen.

more + video (if you want to watch the Bozo Hour)
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/hannity-rails-against-deep-state-with-big-guest-panel-the-day-of-reckoning-is-here/

Some real heavy-hitters on that Sham Hannity panel. NOT!