Richard Nixon leaving White House grounds by helicopter after resignation.
In October 1973, President Richard Nixon committed the “Saturday Night Massacre,” in which he fired the Watergate Special Prosecutor who had been appointed at the behest of Congress, which caused the U.S. Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General to resign. Nixon also abolished the office of the special prosecutor. This Constitutional crisis, which occurred nearly five years into Nixon’s presidency, ultimately led to Nixon’s impeachment and his resignation.
Last night, after just 10 days in the White House, Donald Trump had a Saturday Night Massacre of his own. Trump fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates after Yates wrote a letter to top Justice Department lawyers, directing them not to defend Trump’s Muslim immigration ban in federal court. Trump also fired Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Daniel Ragsdale, for reasons thus far unspecified. Several days earlier, Trump fired top career officers in the State Department.
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Leave a comment! Tags: Dana Boente, Daniel Ragsdale, Donald Trump, ICE, Jeff Sessions, Merrick Garland, Muslim, Muslim ban, President Barack Obama, Richard Nixon, Sally Yates, Saturday Night Massacre, U.S. Supreme Court, Watergate
Anti-Trump protest, January 2017
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
–George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905
Massive protests are planned in Washington, D.C. and around the country against tomorrow’s inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Most of the people who will be protesting are on the political left. How many of these people voted against or publicly attacked Hillary Clinton when she was the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee? How many of them didn’t vote at all? If they did those things, they helped elect Trump. Protesting now is certainly in the American tradition, but voting smarter in the first place would have greatly reduced the number of things against which to protest, or even eliminated the need to protest at all.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2000 election, 2016 election, Al Gore, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Iraq War, Jill Stein, Ralph Nader, recession, Republican Party, Russia, Vladimir Putin
President Obama at the Tomb of the Unknowns, Nov. 11, 2016.
President Barack Obama is leaving office on a high note. Many people might not remember what it was like when Obama took office in January 2009. The Bush Recession was underway, and America was losing 779,000 jobs per month. Stores were closing. Restaurants were empty. And our treasury was also empty (in fact, trillions in debt) from Bush’s disastrous Iraq War. Obama, with no help from the Republicans, turned things around to the point where he will be turning over a country that, by most objective measures, is doing very well. Let’s take a look at some of those numbers, so that we will have a comparison for the future:
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Leave a comment! Tags: clean energy, climate change, Donald Trump, economy, environment, Gas, GDP, George W. Bush, growth, healthcare, Iraq War, jobs, President Barack Obama, unemployment
