JOHN CONYERS IGNORED CLUES IT WAS TIME TO LEAVE OFFICE GRACEFULLY (TERM LIMITS)

JOHN CONYERS IGNORED CLUES IT WAS TIME TO LEAVE OFFICE GRACEFULLY:

GOOD POLITICIANS KNOW HOW TO GET ELECTED & KNOW WHEN IT'S TIME TO LEAVE.

JOHN CONYERS' CONGRESS SEAT IS NOT A MONARCHY:

HIS SEAT BELONGS TO ALL MICHIGAN VOTERS NOT THE CONYERS' FAMILY.

TERM LIMITS

TERM LIMITS

TERM LIMITS


Sources: Politico, CNN, Fox News, Washington Post, YouTube


***** John Conyers Was An Icon. Then He Lost His Way.


It’s time to reckon with the legacy of a man who saw so much and stayed too long.



When, in that brief pillow of time between the Kennedy assassination and the escalation of the war in Vietnam, a 35-year-old John Conyers first ran for Congress, he had a method of connecting with voters—“a pet theory of personality projection,” Simeon Baker wrote in a 1965 profile in Ebony magazine: “Using his good looks as bait and charm as the sticking power, [Conyers] wooed women to support him.” “Sex appeal,” oozed a photo caption in the accompanying spread, was the bachelor’s “greatest asset in winning women’s votes.”

It’s indicative of the era in which the piece was written that Ebony framed Conyers’ political support among women this way despite the fact that the few women Baker includes in the story don’t seem to agree with the depiction. “Sure, he’s good-looking,” said one female supporter, but “what converted him into a winning candidate was his ability to make people feel important.”

“He became a symbol of the new middle-class Negro,” Baker wrote. “He vowed to represent people who are caught between the VIP class of Negro life and the lower class which is dependent on relief, low-income housing, and welfare.”

That John Conyers burned out a long time ago. And this week, any hope that something of the steady glow of a pilot light remained has been extinguished. On Tuesday morning, on the friendly airwaves of a Detroit radio station, Conyers resigned in disgrace following accusations from half a dozen women alleging various forms of sexual harassment, unwanted touching, assault—and the revelation, first reported by BuzzFeed, that his office used taxpayer money to try and cover it up.

It is an ignoble and overdue end to what has been, by any measure, a momentous public life. Conyers’ service in Congress has spanned 10 presidencies and 52 years—he’s been in the House for more than one-fifth of the entire existence of the U.S. Congress. In 1964, he went to Jim Crow Mississippi during Freedom Summer and offered legal representation to black voting-rights activists; one year later, he supported the Voting Rights Act as a member of House of Representatives. He was the only congressman ever endorsed by Martin Luther King Jr., and was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Rosa Parks worked as an aide to him for 23 years. He introduced single-payer health-care legislation long before Bernie Sanders claimed “Medicare for All” as his own. He served on the Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, and was one of the original 20 names on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” He was the top Democrat on the committee two decades later, when a president was impeached for the first time since Reconstruction. He was still on the committee a decade after that, when the nation elected its first black president—another young black attorney whose appeal was, in no small part, his ability to make people feel like they too were part of something larger than themselves. All of this is why House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called him an “icon” even as she was trying to nudge him into retirement.

Yet even as many black Detroiters saw Conyers as their champion against the elite and powerful few, Conyers—or, perhaps more accurately, those he surrounded himself with—sought to entrench themselves in the VIP class he once scorned. There can be no doubt that Conyers’ ordeal is of his own making—the accusations against him are serious and profoundly disturbing. But the political fallout from his surprising, bizarre nosedive off the national stage this week throws new light on the actions of those he’s depended on for decades, and whose influence has skyrocketed as old age has ravaged him. And in their slipshod attempts to build a Conyers dynasty, they’ve diminished the man who would be its patriarch.

The highlights of Conyers’ long career are, by now, somewhat familiar. But less known, at least nationally, are the lows.

There are, at age 88, natural questions about his mental state; he sometimes seemed confused in House proceedings, and even when he joined Mildred Gaddis’ morning show to resign on Tuesday, the host essentially had to remind him why he’d called in. For decades, the non compos mentis question has hung over Conyers—there was an incident in the early 1990s when he was supposedly found in the very early morning standing in the middle of Livernois Avenue in Detroit, barefoot and waving at cars. It was reportedly routine for staff members to find him in various states of undress—“his closet is in his office,” his former communications director explained to CNN—and at least one former staffer has alleged he showed up to a meeting clad only in underwear. Knowing this, there’s the inevitable question of why his inner circle wouldn’t step in as stewards. The answer, perhaps, is that they were too invested in his success.

There’s his bizarre relationship with his decades-younger wife, Monica, a roving tempest prone to Trumpian outbursts. The couple married in 1990—she’d been an intern in his office a year earlier—when the congressman was 61 and his bride was 25. From the beginning, the couple were dogged by rumors that their's was a marriage of convenience, or that one party was simply taking advantage of the other. Initially, at least, nobody seemed sure who was taking advantage of whom.

In 2005, Monica Conyers was elected to Detroit’s city council largely on the strength of her husband’s name. Her tenure in public office was memorable for its volatility. There was the time she threatened to shoot an aide to the mayor of Detroit; the time she had to be restrained during a city council meeting after an argument broke out and she made fun of another council member’s need for a hearing aid; the time she petulantly addressed city council president Ken Cockrel Jr. as “Shrek,” a “Li'l Marco”-esque jab at Cockrel’s gleaming bald pate and prominent ears; and her encore, a televised argument with an eighth-graderover whether this was or was not an appropriate way for a role model to act.

More damning were her crimes. In 2009, she pleaded guilty to federal charges that she’d accepted bribes from a wastewater-treatment contractor—making her the first Conyers forced from office. Though she’d later try, unsuccessfully, to withdraw her guilty plea, she was sentenced to three years in federal prison. After serving two, she was released into a halfway house, and in 2015, filed for divorce from the congressman, which apparently didn’t take; the couple renewed their vowsin 2016.

Last week, amid a glut of reporting on the assault and harassment allegations against her husband, Monica, once a mainstay of metro Detroit’s nighttime news broadcasts, emerged from the couple’s family home in the city’s University District/Palmer Park neighborhood to ask, angrily and rhetorically, whether the reporters outside would “go and stalk white people’s houses,” or whether “you just come to the black neighborhoods and stalk our houses?”

As the public face of her embattled husband over the past few weeks, she was joined by Sam Riddle, a Detroit political consultant and huckster known throughout the metro region for his attention-grabbing stints on local news shows—and of course, for his role as a top aide to Monica Conyers, where he helped facilitate bribes that landed Conyers in prison. For years, Riddle “seemed to play the role of Clyde Barrow to Monica Conyers’ Bonnie Parker,” Pulitzer-winning journalist Charlie Le Duff wrote in his book, “Detroit: An Autopsy.” In Riddle’s own trial on the bribery charges, federal prosecutors offered a wiretapped 2007 call in which Councilwoman Conyers told Riddle, “You’d better get my loot.” Faced with prosecution in 2009, Monica said she regretted working with Riddle: “If I was smart, I would have listened to my husband, and he never would have worked for me.”

To Michigan politicos, there’s another reason why Riddle’s re-emergence amid the sad coda of Conyers’ career is a flummoxing twist of events, especially given the very specific accusations the congressman has faced: In 2010, Riddle was sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of felonious assault and a gun crime after pulling a shotgun on his girlfriend during a domestic dispute. The mind strains to imagine a rationale for hiring someone with such a background to act as your “family spokesperson” under any circumstance, let alone when you’re facing allegations that you’ve assaulted women.

Across Detroit, there are still a great many people who see in Conyers a man who fights for them, a lion in winter. At a hastily organized rally on Monday, a cavalcade of black Detroit’s leaders came out to voice their unwavering support for him. The Rev. Wendell Anthony, the longtime head of Detroit’s chapter of the NAACP, spoke for many when he questioned why Conyers was being held to a different standard than other national politicians accused of sex crimes: “[I]f we’re going to raise this unholy and unlawful guillotine, calling for the head of John Conyers, then in fairness we must begin with the president of the United States.” “For those in the U.S. Congress to call for his resignation is shameful,” thundered Wayne County Executive Warren Evans as Riddle stood behind him. “Until we know what happened, I can’t fathom why a [Nancy] Pelosi or a [Michigan Congressman Dan] Kildee would ask for the resignation of a man who has not been given due process.”

It wasn’t all supposed to end this way. For more than a year, it was an open secret that when Conyers left office, he would be replaced by his great-nephew Ian, a sitting state senator from Detroit. In recent weeks, as the elder Conyers first voiced his intent to retire at the end of his current term, Ian’s candidacy became a surer and surer thing, culminating in the younger Conyers telling the New York Times in a Tuesday morning scoop that the congressman was going to announce his retirement and that he, Ian, was launching a congressional campaign.

The news jolted Detroit. And it led an irate Monica Conyers, the self-appointed carrier of the torch, to hatch a sloppily arranged change to the succession plan—one in which she would play a central role instead of being pushed aside.

On Tuesday, as John Conyers resigned, he stunned observers by endorsing his and Monica’s son, John Conyers III, as his successor. Conyers III, a 27-year-old who has never held elected office, is no stranger to controversy and comes pre-loaded with his own political scandal.

In 2010, he reported two laptops and $27,000 in concert tickets were stolen from a Cadillac Escalade he’d apparently been using for personal purposes despite the fact that its lease was registered to his father’s congressional office and was being paid with taxpayer money. Other photos online showed Conyers III, then 20, seated behind the wheel of the Cadillac while holding a bottle of Moët. More recently, NBC News reports that on Feb. 15, 2017, Conyers III was arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of domestic violence; his girlfriend called law enforcement after he, in the words of the police report, “body slammed her on the bed and then on the floor where he pinned her down and spit on her,” before allegedly swinging a knife at her and cutting her arm.

His mother’s intervention sets up the spectacle of a free-for-all primary in which at least two members of the Conyers family seem intent to run.

In a since-deleted tweet, Ian Conyers suggested that Conyers III’s candidacy wasn’t the former congressman’s true wish, and, by name, pinned the credit/blame for the endorsement as someone else’s preference: “Monica - I spoke to my great uncle Thursday night via phone from hospital. His advice Run!”

The fight over John Conyers’ legacy will not end soon, perhaps not even in our lifetimes. But to some degree, its demise comes from the liberalism Conyers championed over more than a half-century—the belief that we can use our collective power to repair the wrongs of the past.

Conservatism has long had a posture that favors standing athwart history yelling stop, a belief in preserving the old way of doing things, standing up for tradition, living up to the nation’s past glories, working to make America great again. Liberalism isn’t so much about restoring the way things used to be as it is about overcoming history. And it’s because of this—and the forward march of progress—that what is acceptable to one generation of Democrats is no longer acceptable to another.

The present always stands in judgment of the past, and one generation’s liberal heroes become another’s problematic figures. Woodrow Wilson was a visionary idealist who sought to make the world safe for democracy—until he was remembered as a racist reactionary with Lost Cause sympathies.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the man who lifted the nation from the depths of the Great Depression, fought the powerful and moneyed, and expanded the scope of what we believed government could and should do—until the exclusion of black Americans from the New Deal and the internment of Japanese-Americans became stains on his legacy.

We now find ourselves in the middle of such a reckoning, as the sins of the past catch up to the reputations of the present.

Al Franken was the progressive intellectual with a scathing wit, the left’s answer to bloviating talk radio on the right—and he’s also a man accused of forcing himself on at least seven women.

Bill Clinton was The Natural, the man from Hope who charted a course for a new type of Democrat, oversaw an economy that gained 23 million new jobs, balanced the budget and built a bridge to the 21st century—and he’s also preyed on women, with errant sexual behavior ranging from the consensual-but-inappropriate (as with the Lewinsky affair) to charges of harassment (as with Paula Jones) and accusations of rape (as with Juanita Broaddrick).

John Conyers was a civil-rights hero, a voice in the wilderness who advocated far-left positions before they were fashionable, a champion for Detroiters—especially black Detroiters—who felt and still feel locked out of the room where decisions get made.

But whatever else he was, Conyers is also the man Courtney Morse says propositioned her when she was an intern, who after his advances were rebuffed, raised the specter of Chandra Levy; the man Elissa Grubbs says groped her in a church and regularly undressed in front of female staff; the man Marion Brown saysstroked her legs, propositioned her in a hotel room and “violated” her body.

And where once those abuses wouldn’t have been career-ending, today, people are starting to listen to what women are saying.

“He made people … believe in their own strength,” a Conyers campaign aide told Ebony in 1965. “He … showed them the value of sticking together.”

And that’s exactly what his accusers have done.


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****** John Conyers could be replaced by his son — who has his dad's name but not his political resume


The son of Rep. John Conyers Jr. — the embattled congressman who announced his sudden retirement Tuesday — may be headed for his father’s seat, carrying on a decades-long political dynasty in Michigan.

Conyers (D-Mich.) resigned Tuesday amid allegations of sexual harassment.

In doing so, the erstwhile dean of the House endorsed his eldest son, John Conyers III, to take his place representing Michigan’s 13th Congressional District — even though the 27-year-old has never run for political office.

Tuesday evening in a statement posted on Twitter the younger Conyers said that he had not decided whether to enter the race but hoped “to come to a decision by the new year — once I have taken the time to thoroughly listen to our community.”

Conyers was one of his father’s fiercest defenders as the 88-year-old faced increasing pressure from Democratic leaders to step aside when a growing number of female former aides accused him of mistreatment and unwanted advances.

“It’s very unfortunate to see him fight so long for so many people and to automatically have the allegations assumed to be true,” John Conyers III told reporters last week, according to NBC affiliate WDIV. “And of course, with sexual assault, women are to be believed. But in this instance, he has no history of this.

“And I think that if we’re not going to make [Sen.] Al Franken resign when we have evidence of him groping a woman while she was asleep … it’s disconcerting to me to see the way my father is being treated after he’s given so much to this country, not just for black people but for people alike.”

Of his father, he added: “He fights for everyone.”

Here’s what we know about John Conyers III.

He lacks political experience

Steve Hood, a political consultant in Detroit, told the Detroit Free Press that not much is known about Conyers, at least in political circles.

Conyers is from Detroit and attended Morehouse College as well as New York University, according to his contributor bio on HuffPost.

That bio, whose details The Washington Post has not yet confirmed, identifies Conyers as “a partner at Detroit’s first minority run hedge fund” and “a seasoned multi-discipline consultant who has provided fundraising and social media services to both political and business clients.” It also says he served as an intern in the Department of Community Outreach in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “John is committed to melding community engagement, entertainment and politics,” the bio states.

According to his Facebook page, Conyers is a managing partner at the Detroit hedge fund EIA Alpha Partners Fund Management and an owner/partner at Palette Agency in Los Angeles.

He caused public headaches for his father in 2010

In 2010, MLive.com reported that John Conyers III was cited for speeding in his father’s Cadillac Escalade — or rather, the government-leased vehicle his father used as a member of Congress.

There were also reports that year that the younger Conyers had driven the vehicle to a rap concert and that it was broken into, according to the news site. The then-20-year-old reported to policethat two laptops had been stolen from the Escalade, along with tens of thousands of dollars worth of concert tickets.

After the incident, the elder Conyers apologized.

“I have just learned about the inappropriate use of a congressional vehicle by my son over the Thanksgiving holiday,” he said in a statement at the time, according MLive.com. “I am sorry it happened and will make sure that it does not happen again.”

The Detroit Free Press reported that the congressman said he reimbursed the Treasury Department more than $5,600 for his son’s unofficial use of taxpayer money.

A photo on social media at the time showed his son in a Cadillac with a bottle of French champagne, according to an MLive.com article. The story’s headline: “The fabulous online life of John Conyers III, or why his family needs to do damage control immediately.”

He’s an opinionated writer

In a HuffPost op-ed, under the headline “Orange Watergate: The Inevitable Impeachment of the 45th President,” Conyers wrote that the “reactionary and cavalier nature of the president will ultimately be his down fall.

“As his approval ratings tumble and confidence wanes, expect the weight of possible impeachment to make his already poor decision making worse. Self-preservation is ultimately the downfall of the narcissist.”

In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Conyers wrote that the national debate should be about gun control, not mental illness, explaining: “I have dealt with Major Depressive Disorder since I was 15 years-old. I’ve not once thought about murder. I know right from wrong.

“My friends with bi-polar and depression and multiple personality disorder don’t think about hurting others, if anything we think about hurting ourselves.”

“So if you grapple with mental illness do not let the medias stigmatization of our ailments make you self-conscious,” he wrote in his October op-ed. “As much as they love to make us their scapegoats, It’s not our fault. You, as well as I, know we know right from wrong. When they need someone to blame they look to us first, when it’s time to lend their hand to help us they’re nowhere to be found.”

He’s a rapper

In a 2013 song, “Rich Glorious,” Conyers talked about his battles with the media amid his mother’s 2012 bribery conviction, as well as the Cadillac mishap, according to Roll Call.

“Hey f— making a living, boy, I’m trying to make history. So picture me letting the news nitpick at me,” Conyers said in the rap video, which showed an image from a news story about the incident.

He’s not the only Conyers vying for the congressional seat

State Sen. Ian Conyers, John Conyers Jr.’s great-nephew, has declared his intention to run in the special election.

Ian Conyers, who represents the 4th district in the state senate, graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in government and a master’s in urban and regional planning, according to his biography.

He worked for then-District Mayor Adrian Fenty, who appointed Conyers as a community outreach and service specialist in Ward 6, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In 2012, Conyers served as a regional field director for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, according to his online resume.

Four years later, the political operative became a politician, winning a special election to replace former state Sen. Virgil Smith. He later told Georgetown’s alumni newsletter: “We dispelled the myth that seniors and middle-aged voters don’t believe in young people.”

After John Conyers Jr. endorsed his own son for his seat, Ian Conyers told the Free Press he was surprised, saying: “I didn’t expect him to make an endorsement.”

Hood, the political consultant, described it as “a family in disarray.”

“You have the potential for two Conyers to go for the seat,” he told the newspaper.

He isn’t guaranteed the seat

Political insiders say the seat does not belong to anyone — a Conyers or not.

“There’s no guarantee that anyone named Conyers is going to be the next congressman representing Detroit,” said Sam Riddle, political director for the Michigan branch of the National Action Network. “We are on the verge of the biggest free-for-all politically you’ve ever seen in Detroit. There should not be an automatic ascension to that congressional seat because your last name is Conyers. The people in Detroit deserve the best candidate possible be elected to that seat represents poorest and blackest city.”

MIKE FLYNN PLEADING GUILTY DOES NOT IMPEACH DONALD TRUMP FROM OFFICE (FLYNN vs CONYERS)

MIKE FLYNN PLEADING GUILTY DOES NOT IMPEACH DONALD TRUMP FROM OFFICE:

FLYNN'S PLEA DOES NOT PROVE COLLUSION.

NATIONAL SECURITY PROBE WILL NOT IMPEACH TRUMP EITHER.

DEMOCRATS SHOULD NOT CELEBRATE PREMATURELY.

WHAT DEM LEADERS SHOULD FOCUS ON IS GETTING SEXUAL HARASSER JOHN CONYERS TO RESIGN.

MIKE FLYNN IS NOT ABOVE THE LAW & JOHN CONYERS IS NOT ABOVE THE LAW EITHER.

CONYERS IS A BLACK MAN WHO USED HIS POWER TO HURT PEOPLE NOT HELP PEOPLE.

CONYERS' DISRESPECT OF WOMEN MAKES MOST BLACK MEN IN AMERICAN SOCIETY LOOK BAD.


Sources: Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Michigan News, YouTube


****** Mike Flynn Pleads Guilty to Lying About Russian Contacts


~ Former national security adviser says he is cooperating with special counsel probe


Former national-security adviser Mike Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to federal investigators about his calls with the Russian ambassador and other issues and said he is cooperating with prosecutors, a sign that the special counsel’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election is reaching deeper into President Donald Trump’s inner circle.

In a 45-minute hearing in a Washington federal court, Mr. Flynn admitted he misled Federal Bureau of Investigation agents about a series of calls he had last December with the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, about sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama Administration and about a United Nations resolution critical of Israel.

Mr. Flynn also acknowledged in court documents filed Friday that he had detailed conversations with Trump transition officials about the calls, and that a “very senior member” of the transition team had directed his contacts over the U.N. issue. A person familiar with the matter said that individual is Jared Kushner, a top White House adviser and the president’s son-in-law.

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Kushner, didn’t return requests for comment. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators interviewed Mr. Kushner in recent weeks, focusing their questions exclusively on his interactions with Mr. Flynn, according to people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors said Friday that Mr. Flynn consulted several times with top Trump transition officials on his contacts with Russia, suggesting Mr. Mueller is closely scrutinizing other prominent Trump associates. But his ultimate targets, and the exact nature of any potential wrongdoing, remain unclear.

Mr. Mueller is six months into a wide-ranging investigation into Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election and potential links between those efforts and the Trump campaign. In court documents, Mr. Mueller’s office said Mr. Flynn’s lies to the FBI impeded that investigation.

When asked by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras how he pleads to the charge against him, Mr. Flynn, flanked by his two lawyers, said softly, “Guilty, your honor.”

Given his cooperation, Mr. Flynn is expected to face at most six months in prison, depending on his “substantial assistance in the investigation or prosecution of another person who has committed an offense,” according to his plea agreement.

Prosecutors didn’t elaborate Friday on who else they may be looking at. Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty only to one count of lying to the FBI, but a “statement of the offense” filed in connection with his plea detailed additional wrongdoing, including lying on a regulatory form about his private work directed by Turkish government officials.

Mr. Mueller’s decision not to file more serious charges against Mr. Flynn led many legal experts to infer that Mr. Flynn is providing significant information to the investigation.

“Mueller would not have accepted an agreement to plead to a single charge absent an arrangement of some sort, and presumably that is Flynn’s truthful testimony about other matters within Mueller’s jurisdiction,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former federal prosecutor who was a deputy to special counsel Kenneth Starr during his investigation of President Bill Clinton.

In a statement Friday, Mr. Flynn said, “I recognize that the actions I acknowledged in court today were wrong, and, through my faith in God, I am working to set things right.”

He added: “My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the Special Counsel’s Office reflect a decision I made in the best interests of my family and of our country. I accept full responsibility for my actions.”

Mr. Flynn, who was a high-profile campaign surrogate for Mr. Trump but who lasted in his White House post for less than a month, becomes the most senior Trump associate to face criminal charges in the special counsel investigation. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Mr. Flynn led the crowd in chanting “Lock her up!” in reference to Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton and her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. On Friday, protesters outside the courthouse chanted as Mr. Flynn left: “Lock him up!”

Documents filed in federal court Friday detail Mr. Flynn’s misstatements to the FBI during an interview last January and depict a group of incoming Trump officials concerned about the Obama administration’s new sanctions on Russia and trying to figure out how to react to them.

Mr. Flynn “falsely stated” to the FBI that he hadn’t asked the Russian ambassador to refrain from escalating a response to the sanctions, a senior prosecutor in Mr. Mueller’s office, Brandon Van Grack, said in court. In fact, Mr. Flynn had called a senior official of the Trump transition team on Dec. 29—the day the sanctions were announced—to discuss “what, if anything, to communicate to the Russian ambassador,” according to a statement filed in connection with Mr. Flynn’s plea.

The unnamed senior official was with “other senior members” of the transition team at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s golf club in Florida, the document said. The official and Mr. Flynn discussed the fact that members of the transition team at Mar-a-Lago “did not want Russia to escalate the situation,” the document said.

Among the transition officials who met with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago that day were Stephen Miller, K.T. McFarland, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus, a Trump spokesman said at the time. Mr. Miller and Ms. Conway are now serving in the White House. Mr. Bannon and Mr. Priebus served as chief strategist and chief of staff, respectively, but were ousted over the summer. Ms. McFarland is Mr. Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Singapore.

“Immediately after his phone call,” Mr. Flynn called Mr. Kislyak and asked that Russia only respond “in a reciprocal manner,” the document said.

The next day, Dec. 30, Russian President Vladimir Putin released a statement that Russia wouldn’t take retaliatory measures, and Mr. Kislyak called Mr. Flynn on Dec. 31 to tell him Russia had “chosen not to retaliate in response to Flynn’s request.”

After his phone call, according to the document, Mr. Flynn spoke to “senior members” of the transition about his conversations with Mr. Kislyak and about Russia’s decision “not to escalate the situation.”
In addition to the sanctions issue, Mr. Flynn also lied about calls he made to “Russia and several other countries” about a U.N. resolution submitted by Egypt on Dec. 21, which criticized Israel’s construction of settlements in disputed territories.

Mr. Flynn “falsely stated” that he only asked on the calls about the countries’ position on the votes, the document said. In fact, “a very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team directed Flynn” to contact the officials to “influence those governments to delay the vote or defeat the resolution,” the document said.

The document also said Mr. Flynn made “materially false statements” in a regulatory filing about his separate work for Turkish interests, including stating that his company “did not know whether or the extent to which” the Turkish government was behind the project.

Mr. Flynn is the fourth—and most prominent—figure to be publicly charged in Mr. Mueller’s investigation to date. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his longtime associate who also worked with the campaign, Richard Gates, were indicted in October for prior work they did in Ukraine, unrelated to the Trump campaign.

Another adviser, George Papadopoulos, has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian go-betweens.

Former FBI Director James Comey, whom Mr. Trump fired in May, has testified that Mr. Trump asked him to back off his investigation of Mr. Flynn, which the president denies.

Prosecutors’ references Friday to Mr. Flynn’s conversations with other Trump transition officials suggest Mr. Mueller is scrutinizing the actions of other high-profile figures in Mr. Trump’s orbit. Mr. Kushner said in a statement to Congress in July that, at Mr. Trump’s request, he served as the main point of contact for foreign countries during the transition.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Friday’s plea shows that a Trump associate was “negotiating with the Russians against U.S. policy and interests before Donald Trump took office and after it was announced that Russia had interfered in our election.”

She added, “It’s critical that we determine whether Flynn spoke with the Russians on his own initiative and who knew and approved of his actions.”

A statement from White House lawyer Ty Cobb played down the guilty plea, noting that Mr. Flynn was in the job less than a month and had “entered a guilty plea to a single count.”

Mr. Flynn’s false statements, Mr. Cobb added, “mirror” similar ones he made to Vice President Mike Pence about his Russian contacts earlier this year, which the White House has said resulted in his resignation. “The conclusion of this phase of the special counsel’s work demonstrates again that the special counsel is moving with all deliberate speed and clears the way for a prompt and reasonable conclusion,” Mr. Cobb said.

U.S. investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador after the two spoke in a series of phone calls during the presidential transition in December 2016, according to people familiar with the investigation.

During those calls, Mr. Flynn discussed the potential easing of U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia after the Trump administration came to power in January, current and former officials said at the time, citing transcripts of intercepted communications between Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak.

ROY MOORE vs JOHN CONYERS JR- DEMOCRATS' HYPOCRISY

ROY MOORE vs JOHN CONYERS JR- DEMOCRATS' HYPOCRISY:

PELOSI WANTED TO CRUCIFY MOORE BUT DRAGS HER FEET ON CONYERS & FRANKEN.

PELOSI ONLY PUTS WOMEN FIRST OVER POLITICS WHEN ITS ABOUT ABORTION NOT SEXUAL HARASSMENT.

WHERE IS DEMOCRATS' HONOR FOR WOMEN?


Sources: The Week, Meet The Press, Youtube


***** Democrats need to find some honor and get rid of Al Franken and John Conyers


America is in the midst of a reckoning about sexual misconduct, as a steady stream of men in the public eye have resigned or been fired from their jobs over sexual harassment and assault allegations.

Politicians have been no exception, with allegations coming against Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore for allegedly harassing and assaulting teenagers — but also against Democratic members of Congress: Sen. Al Franken (Minn.) and Rep. John Conyers (Mich.).

As has become glaringly obvious, while the allegations against Moore are categorically worse than anything Franken or Conyers is accused of, harassment has no particular political affiliation.
Democrats need to find some honor and address their side of the sexual harassment problem, by forcing out Conyers and Franken. Not only do harassment victims deserve a measure of justice, Democrats' political reputation is on the line. These two — and I would guess probably a few others — need to go.

So far Democrats are only beginning to find their spines on this. When the first Franken allegations came out — from radio host Leeann Tweeden, that he had harassed, forcibly kissed, and then taken a shocking picture groping or nearly groping her while she was sleeping — Democratic Party hacks like Kate Harding wrote that he should not resignbecause Democrats are better on women's issues than Republicans. (Garrison Keillor said the idea of firing Franken was "absurd" before being firedover his own sexual harassment allegation.)

But as has also become very clear over the past few weeks, where there is one allegation, there are generally many. Some six different women in total have since come out with stories about Franken harassing, kissing, or groping them — most recently allegations of groping a veteran's breast in a photo-op, and a former elected official in New Hampshire who said he tried to give her an unwanted "wet, open-mouthed kiss."

When the allegations against Conyers came out (that he had exposed himself to his staff, as well as harassed, groped, and verbally abused them), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi first hemmed and hawed, suggesting on Meet the Press that because he is an "icon," he would do the "right thing" — not saying what that would be. Later, she finally joined several of her colleagues in saying he should resign. This might be because Conyers is 88 years old, and was recently hospitalized reportedly due to stress over the story. It seems likely he'll be gone soon in any case — though his lawyer recently said that "Nancy Pelosi did not elect the congressman, and she sure as hell won't be the one that tells the congressman to leave."

But as yet, there has been no sustained pressure from the rest of the Democratic caucus to actually force him out, and almost no pressure of any kind for Franken to leave.

The first and most important reason for these two men to go is that sexually harassing and assaulting women is a grotesque crime and anyone who does it is unfit to hold high office (or any office). As Justin Charity argues, even a new partial standard that senators are not allowed to get away with it would be a large political victory in itself against sexism and harassment. Arguing that the occasional sexual assault is simply the price to pay to keep Democrats in power (so they can pass stuff like 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave for some employees, I guess?) overlooks this enormous benefit.

Furthermore, axing these two would probably help Democrats politically, on net. They had the moral high ground against Roy Moore at first, but Franken and Conyers failing to resign make Democrats look like hypocrites, because they are. It muddles the case against Moore, and allows Republicans to excuse themselves for voting for him. Moore's Democratic opponent Doug Jones might well lose because of this cowardice.

Indeed, defending them is almost certainly not even the smart move in the narrowly cynical political sense. Minnesota has a Democratic governor, and so a replacement senator to serve out Franken's term would be of the same party. Conyers won his most recent election by over 60 points, so any replacement would certainly be a Democrat.

On the other hand, if these abusive men try to hang on to their seats, then they might well lose them in their upcoming elections. Conyers has so far promised not to run for re-election, but Hillary Clinton only won Minnesota by less than 2 points. Since the allegations, Franken's popularity has collapsed, falling from 53 percent to 36 percent. The opening for a Republican to win in 2020 would be a large one. The smartest move from a purely tactical standpoint would be for Franken to step aside and allow, say, Keith Ellison to step up. That way the incumbent can be a popular Democrat, and the party avoids a bitter primary battle.

One of the biggest problems with American politics is the distrust the population holds for elite politicians — perceiving them as a pack of amoral, dishonest, wagon-circling, featherbedding, logrolling, favor-trading, corrupt scumbags. This distrust is, to a great extent, deserved. One absolute necessity in rebuilding a measure of trust is for Democrats to behave honorably, and hold themselves to the standards they espouse. They can start by getting rid of the sexual predators in their midst.

GOP VOTES TO PASS TAX BILL WHILE DEMS PROTECT SEXUAL HARASSERS (2018 & 2020)

GOP WORKS TO PASS TAX BILL WHILE DEMS PROTECT SEXUAL HARASSERS:

IS THIS HOW THE GOP PLANS TO WIN IN 2020?


Sources: NY Times, Bloomberg Politics, Youtube


****** Senate Weighs Changes to Tax Bill on the Same Day They Could Vote


• The Senate will convene at 10 a.m. Friday to continue the debate on taxes, ahead of a possible final vote later in the day.

• Republicans seemed to be inching toward victory on Thursday and picked up the support of Senator John McCain of Arizona.

• But they faced a setback late in the day when they were left scrambling to find hundreds of billions of dollars in extra revenue to satisfy concerns about the bill’s deficit effects.

• Lawmakers are now mulling options that would result in a tax increase down the road, including a possible increase in the corporate tax rate and the revival of the alternative minimum tax on wealthy individuals and some companies.

Republican leaders ended Thursday with the same problem they started with: They still need to secure 50 votes to be able to pass their tax bill.

Their effort appeared to be gaining momentum on Thursday, with talk of a final vote later that night or early Friday.

But by the end of the day, they were contending with twin setbacks, both involving how the bill would affect federal budget deficits.

The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation said in an analysis released on Thursday afternoon that the legislation would add $1 trillion to federal budget deficits over a decade, even after accounting for economic growth.

In addition, a provision meant to prevent ballooning deficits ran into parliamentary problems. The provision would have increased taxes if economic growth fell short of expectations, but it was deemed by the Senate parliamentarian to run afoul of budget rules that must be followed if the bill is to be shielded from a Democratic filibuster.

Without the so-called trigger, the votes of a handful of Republicans, including Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, appeared at risk.

“Senator Corker has been pretty clear he doesn’t want any deficit spending,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on Thursday, adding that he did not agree with the Joint Committee on Taxation’s assessment.

To pass the tax bill in the Senate, Republican leaders can lose only two of their members, assuming Democrats are unified against the measure.

The Senate will convene on Friday morning and the debate on taxes will continue. At some point, the Senate will undertake a marathon of amendment votes known as a vote-a-rama. Eventually, there would be a final vote on the legislation.

But in the meantime, Republicans need to decide how they want to change their bill. To satisfy Mr. Corker, for example, Republicans were discussing putting in place tax increases that would take effect some years from now, a step that would soften the deficit effects of the legislation.

Will they decide to raise taxes?

The options under discussion to satisfy the deficit hawks could essentially result in a tax increase down the road. Lawmakers have talked about raising the corporate tax rate above 20 percent after a period of years. There’s also discussion about reviving the alternative minimum tax, or A.M.T., on high-net individuals and some companies.

Both of those ideas are unlikely to sit well with some Republicans, including those in the House, who could be criticized for essentially voting to increase taxes.

Lawmakers may decide that’s a risk worth taking or they could ultimately decide to jettison the deficit hawks’ concerns and lose their votes.

Several senators are worth watching.

As Republicans mull changes to their tax plan, the spotlight will focus on several senators with varying concerns.

Republican leaders do not need to win over all of these lawmakers. In fact, they could decide that some demands are simply not worth meeting — assuming they can satisfy other Republicans and therefore get the 50 votes they need. Vice President Mike Pence can also provide a tiebreaking vote.

At least a handful of senators have expressed concerns about the deficit, including Mr. Corker and Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and James Lankford of Oklahoma. Now that the trigger is dead, Republicans may need to come up with another idea to protect against piling up debt as a result of the tax overhaul.

Two Republicans, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Steve Daines of Montana, have objected to how the bill treats pass-through businesses, whose profits are distributed to owners and taxed at individual rates. In light of their concerns, Republicans plan to sweeten the tax treatment of these businesses.

Finally, there is Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican who has her own concerns about the tax overhaul. She wants the bill to allow individuals to deduct up to $10,000 in property taxes, and adding that provision could help win her over.

KATHLEEN RICE vs NANCY PELOSI - CONYERS & DEMS' FUTURE (CIVIL WAR)

KATHLEEN RICE vs NANCY PELOSI - CONYERS & DEMS' FUTURE (CIVIL WAR):

RICE REPRESENTS DEMOCRATS' FUTURE (2018, 2020).

PELOSI REPRESENTS DEMOCRATS' PAST (2008, 2012, 1990s).

JOHN CONYERS SHOULD RESIGN BUT PELOSI & OTHER OLDER LEADERS APPEAR TO BE PROTECTING HIM.

IS PELOSI AFRAID OF TERM LIMITS ON THE HORIZON??


Sources: CNN, Daily Beast, Politico, Business Insider, The Hill, Youtube


****** Dem lawmaker: Pelosi harassment response set women back 'decades'


Her defense of John Conyers as 'an icon' squandered the party's moral authority, Rep. Kathleen Rice says.

A Democratic congresswoman laced into Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, suggesting the top House Democrat “set women back and — quite frankly, our party back — decades” by failing to more forcefully confront allegations of sexual harassment by veteran Democratic Rep. John Conyers.

Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, Rep. Kathleen Rice of New York said Pelosi’s appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday — when she raised questions about the accounts of Conyers’ accusers and described the Michigan Democrat as an “icon” — ceded the party’s moral high ground on sexual harassment issues, especially because one of Conyers’ accusers is bound by a nondisclosure agreement.

“I think that her comments on Sunday set women back and — quite frankly, our party back — decades,” said Rice, who is advocating for legislation that would expose a slew of hidden, taxpayer-funded settlements for sexual harassment by lawmakers and aides.

Rice said Pelosi’s comments were particularly egregious in light of President Donald Trump’s tacit embrace of Roy Moore, the Alabama GOP Senate candidate accused of molesting a minor.

“I think that we ceded the moral high ground on Sunday when our leader said on ‘Meet the Press’ that John Conyers was an icon and we don’t even know who these women are, when she was fully aware that the woman in question was bound by a nondisclosure agreement,” Rice said. “I think we had an opportunity to stake that moral high ground when you have a president who is supporting a man for Senate who — all credible allegations that have not been refuted — showed him to be a predator of teenage girls.”

A Pelosi spokesman said Rice’s comments were not an accurate portrayal of the minority leader’s sentiment.

“The leader was very clear on Sunday that no matter how great an individual’s legacy, it’s not a license for harassment,” said the spokesman, Drew Hammill.

Hammill also noted that Pelosi, in her “Meet the Press” interview, said she favored eliminating nondisclosure agreements that silenced victims from speaking out.

“[A]ll of these nondisclosure agreements have to go,” she told NBC’s Chuck Todd in the interview. Since that interview, Hammill added, Pelosi has said she believes Conyers’ accusers and subsequently spoke to one of them about her story. She also has signaled support for legislation from Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) that would reform the system of harassment reporting in Congress to protect victims.

Rice was among of a group of Democrats who vocally opposed Pelosi’s reelection as Democratic leader when the caucus voted after the November election to give Pelosi another term.

Rice’s comments escalate her already pointed criticism of Pelosi’s leadership — and of her Democratic colleagues, who she said earlier Wednesday were not confronting sexual harassment issues within their own ranks seriously enough. She’s one of three Democratic lawmakers, along with Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who have called for Conyers to resign immediately.

Rice left early Wednesday from a closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting and told reporters she bailed because she didn't think her colleagues were approaching the harassment issue seriously. A Democratic aide said Rice exited after Pelosi spoke about the issue and also missed at least a portion of the comments from eight Democratic lawmakers who addressed harassment issues.

"There was a lengthy discussion of sexual harassment policies and reforms needed," the aide said.

JOHN CONYERS JR NEEDS TO RESIGN NOW, END OF STORY (TERM LIMITS)

JOHN CONYERS JR NEEDS TO RESIGN NOW, END OF STORY (TERM LIMITS):

IT'S NOT ABOUT HIM. IT'S ABOUT RESPECTING WOMEN & THE DEMOCRAT'S PARTY FUTURE (2018 & 2020).

HE PAID TO SETTLE A SEXUAL HARASSMENT LAWSUIT.

IS JOHN CONYERS ABOVE THE LAW?

WHAT HAS CONYERS DONE FOR MICHIGAN LATELY?

HOW EFFECTIVE IS CONYERS TODAY?

AGE & RACE DOESN'T MATTER.......HOW EFFECTIVE ARE YOU IN THE 21st CENTURY??

POLITICIANS CAN'T LEAN ON THEIR PAST ACCOMPLISHMENTS FOREVER.

THAT'S WHY CONGRESS NEEDS TERM LIMITS.


Sources: NY Times, ABC News, CNN, Youtube


****** John Conyers Scandal Highlights Divisions, Generational and Gender


WASHINGTON — Representative John Conyers Jr., who took his Michigan seat in the House in 1965, has served in Congress longer than his fellow Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, has been alive.

So when Mr. Conyers, 88, stepped aside as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee amid swirling allegations of sexual improprieties, it fell to Mr. Jeffries, 47, to hint that the accusations that cost Mr. Conyers his position may hasten broader changes to the Democratic Party that began with the election of President Trump.

“House Democrats have been in transition since the 2016 election with younger members being given the opportunity to be on the playing field in a meaningful way,” Mr. Jeffries said. “This moment that we are in, it may accelerate the elevation of younger voices.”

Sexual assault, harassment and other vulgarities have rocked Hollywood, scarred Silicon Valley and darkened media offices from New York to Washington. But the sexual harassment scandal surrounding Mr. Conyers, the longest serving member of the House, has highlighted schisms that are as much about generations as they are about gender.

Especially among Democrats, Mr. Conyers’s troubles have generated friction between the party’s aging leadership and rank-and-file, and underscored the difficulty that newer members of the House have in rising up in a system where leadership positions, including committee chairmanships, are determined almost solely by seniority.

The three top Democrats in the House — Representatives Nancy Pelosi of California, Steny Hoyer of Maryland and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina — are all in their late 70s. Mr. Conyers has been the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee — either as chairman or ranking member — for 10 years.

And for many of them, the response to the Conyers imbroglio has been telling. Mr. Conyers has denied all the charges, but under pressure, did relinquish his post. Mr. Clyburn suggested that for all he knew, “all of this could be made up.”

Ms. Pelosi, the minority leader, swiftly called for an ethics investigation last week after news broke that two aides had accused Mr. Conyers of sexual harassment, and that he had paid a settlement to one. By Tuesday afternoon, she was working quietly behind the scenes with Congressional Black Caucus members who were trying to persuade Mr. Conyers to resign, according to a senior Democratic aide. His lawyer said he had no immediate plans to do so.

But her path to that point has been meandering. Ms. Pelosi offered an awkward defense of Mr. Conyers on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, saying, “Just because someone is accused — and was it one accusation? Is it two? I think there has to be — John Conyers is an icon in our country.” That earned her scathing reviews.

Melanie Sloan, a respected ethics lawyer in Washington who worked for Mr. Conyers in the mid-1990s, was so incensed by the performance that she called Ms. Pelosi’s staff and reminded them that Mr. Conyers had verbally abused her and had once summoned her to his office while he was wearing his underwear. That prompted Ms. Pelosi to switch course again.

“I find the behavior Ms. Sloan described unacceptable and disappointing,” she said in a statement. “I believe what Ms. Sloan has told me.”

Another Conyers staff member, Deanna Maher, came forward Monday to tell The Detroit News that Mr. Conyers had made unwanted sexual advances toward her three times.

Younger Democrats have been far less equivocal than their leaders. Representatives Kathleen Rice of New York and Pramila Jayapal of Washington say Mr. Conyers should resign.

Mr. Jeffries, who said he supports Ms. Pelosi’s leadership, is among a number of House Democrats who lamented in interviews that the party must have a reckoning over the way it promotes younger, newer members.

Ms. Pelosi has been pushing in various ways to create opportunities for less senior members. As part of that effort, Mr. Jeffries, along with Representatives David Cicilline of Rhode Island and Cheri Bustos of Illinois, now lead the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. The group is charged, in part, with revamping the messages Democrats use to appeal to voters.

Representative Beto O’Rourke, Democrat of Texas, said that even after three terms in Congress, he feels frustrated by a Democratic Party that seems wedded to older members and stale ideas. He said he has tried to make the best of his time by working on veterans and armed forces issues, but he will relinquish his seat next year for a long-shot run at Ted Cruz’s Senate seat.

In so doing, he is following the path of other rising Democratic stars, such as Rahm Emanuel and Chris Van Hollen, who left the House to pursue other political posts.

“There’s not really a path or the means to really reflect the diversity in ideas and geographical representation and tenure of service,” said Mr. O’Rourke, who was among 63 Democrats who did not support Ms. Pelosi’s bid to be re-elected as minority leader last year.


Mr. O’Rourke said Republicans do a better job of promoting younger members, in part because they limit, to six years, the length of time a member can be chairman or chairwoman of a committee. Democrats do not impose term limits on committee leaders or so-called ranking members, the top slot for lawmakers who are in the minority.

Representative Donald S. Beyer Jr., a former lieutenant governor of Virginia, added that if Democrats want to appeal to young people, young people need to be at the forefront of leadership.

“The best organizations are the ones that blend the éminence grise wisdom with the energy of young men and young women,” he said. “I’m not sure we do that very well.”

But Democrats must be careful if they decide to shake up the seniority system, said Representative Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat who is in her third term on Capitol Hill.

Several members of the Congressional Black Caucus are concerned that their members might be pushed out of top positions on committees — including Homeland Security, Financial Services, and the Education and the Work Force committee — if Democrats change seniority rules.

“I want to make sure we continue the diversity we have in the Democratic Party,” said Representative Gregory Meeks, Democrat of New York and a member of the black caucus. “A way that African-Americans and Hispanics particularly have able to been make sure that they have been in committee leadership positions is that there has been a seniority system.”

The leadership has been making changes to the party structure since 2016, when Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio challenged Ms. Pelosi. His campaign pushed Ms. Pelosi to back a number of changes, including creating vice ranking member slots on each committee for younger members.

“It’s been no secret that I think we need new people stepping up across the board in the party providing leadership,” Mr. Ryan said.

As vice ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Jamie Raskin, a freshman Democrat from Maryland, has managed floor debate on nine bills, he said.

Mr. Jeffries worries that as lawmakers debate the direction of the party and the rules for its leadership, they will lose sight of their broader mission.


“The worst thing we could do right now is conduct ourselves in a circular firing squad based on a generational divide,” he said. “We should be united and disciplined in executing the mission of taking back the House, because nothing less than the future of the country is at stake. Period. Full stop.”

CONYERS vs PELOSI - SEXUAL HARASSMENT AGAINST WOMEN WHEN MEN ARE IN POWER

PELOSI vs CONYERS - SEXUAL HARASSMENT AGAINST WOMEN WHEN MEN ARE IN POWER:

DENIAL OF GUILT DOESN'T MAKE SOMEONE INNOCENT........JUST VERY CUNNING.

IN MOST INSTANCES I DISAGREE WITH NANCY PELOSI BUT THIS TIME I DO AGREE WITH HER DECISION TO INVESTIGATE CONYERS.

IF CONYERS IS 100% INNOCENT WHY DID HE AGREE TO PAY HIS COMPLAINANTS $$$??

OPRAH DIDN'T SETTLE WHEN SHE WAS SUED BY WEALTHY CATTLE RANCHERS.

WATCH OUT DEMOCRATS; TRUMP IS FIGHTING BACK.

"HE WHO COMMITS ADULTERY IS SENSELESS. DOING SO, HE DESTROYS HIMSELF"
PROVERBS 6:32

"FOR WHAT PROFITS A MAN TO GAIN THE WHOLE WORLD YET LOSE HIS SOUL?"
MATTHEW 8:36


Sources: Washington Post, The Hill, YouTube


***** Pelosi calls for ethics investigation into alleged Conyers sexual harassment


House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called for a formal ethics investigation into Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) following allegations he sexually harassed female staff and reached a settlement with an aide who claimed she was fired for rejecting his advances.

"As Members of Congress, we each have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of the House of Representatives and to ensure a climate of dignity and respect, with zero tolerance for harassment, discrimination, bullying or abuse," Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday.

"As I have said before, any credible allegation of sexual harassment must be investigated by the Ethics Committee," she said.

Pelosi is the most senior lawmaker yet to call for an ethics probe into Conyers's behavior. She did not address whether Conyers, the ranking member of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, should step down from that position.

"I expressly and vehemently denied the allegations made against me, and continue to do so," Conyers stated Tuesday.

"My office resolved the allegations — with an express denial of liability — to save all involved from the rigors of protracted litigation. That should not be lost in the narrative," he stated.

A growing chorus of Democrats has called for an ethics investigation into the matter.

"The allegations against Ranking Member Conyers are extremely serious and deeply troubling," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Judiciary's second most senior Democrat, in a statement.

"Obviously, these allegations must be investigated promptly by the Ethics Committee. There can be no tolerance for behavior that subjects women to the kind of conduct alleged," Nadler stated.

A growing chorus of Democrats has called for an ethics investigation into the matter.

"The allegations against Ranking Member Conyers are extremely serious and deeply troubling," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Judiciary's second most senior Democrat, in a statement.

"Obviously, these allegations must be investigated promptly by the Ethics Committee. There can be no tolerance for behavior that subjects women to the kind of conduct alleged," Nadler stated.

"Beyond the sexual harassment allegations are allegations that call into question the amount of money that is used to settle sexual harassment cases, and whether some Members are using their tax payer-funded office budgets to make settlements under the guise of severance payments," Speier said in a statement, also calling for an ethics investigation.

Citing documents from the case, BuzzFeed News reported late Monday that Conyers settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 with an unidentified woman who alleged that he "repeatedly made sexual advances to female staff that included requests for sex acts." The report included other allegations of harassment by Conyers.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) called the report "extremely troubling" in a statement. He noted a recent rules change requiring members and staff to undergo anti-harassment training and said the House Administration Committee is reviewing congressional workplace policies.

"Additional reforms to the system are under consideration as the committee continues its review," Ryan stated Tuesday. "People who work in the House deserve and are entitled to a workplace without harassment or discrimination."

Pelosi denied knowledge of the alleged settlement in a statement first shared with BuzzFeed, citing the requirement that the parties keep their agreement confidential.

ACORN Broke No Laws According To Congressional Research Report

Report Finds Acorn Broke No Laws


The controversial community organizing group ACORN has not broken any laws in the last five years, according to a Congressional Research Service report released Tuesday evening.

The report, requested by Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, said that federal agencies, mainly the Departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development, have awarded money to the group 48 times since 2005. But, in none of those instances did Acorn violate the terms of their funding, the report said.

Since the 2008 elections, the group, which works primarily to expand voter registration and affordable housing, has become a key Republican target. A series of scandals brought to light by conservative activists led to multiple Congressional hearings and repeated attempts to deny it taxpayer funding.

Acorn has been the subject of scores of investigations—a total of 46 inquiries by federal, state, and local agencies, including the FBI and the Treasury Department, and five by Congress as of October 2009, according to the report.

The report found no evidence that voters attempting to cast ballots at the polls had been improperly registered by Acorn, a chief Republican accusation.

The report also said that a sting-style effort to publicize the group’s allegedly illegal activities, may have broken state laws. Two conservative activists set off a firestorm in September when they posed as a pimp and a prostitute seeking financial advice and secretly videotaped Acorn employees offering advice on how the couple could hide their illicit activities and avoid paying taxes.

Also on Tuesday, a Federal court in Brooklyn, New York, rejected the administration’s request to reconsider its ruling that a House resolution barring the group from receiving federal funding was Unconstitutional.

Earlier this month a judge ruled that the law constituted a “bill of attainder,” legislation intended to punish specific people or groups.

In November the US Justice Department also concluded that the Obama administration can legally pay the group.



View Larger Map


Sources: NY Times, ACORN, Google Maps

Obama & John Conyers: "Stop Demeaning Me"

John Conyers vs. Barack Obama


So President Barack Obama now thinks that Congressman John Conyers (D-Mich.) is "demeaning" him by calling him out on issues such as health care and job creation, particularly as they impact the black community?

Good.

After the 2008 elections, I wondered how progressive black pols from majority black districts would deal with the President when time came for them to stand up for the interests of their constituents, and I think Conyers is doing a pretty good job of remaining true to what he considers to be the biggest concerns of poor and working-class Detroiters. And in truth, he's not being demeaning at all -- just brutally frank.

No, I wasn't crazy about Conyers' apparent move away from supporting single-payer health care, but he's definitely won me back over by going at Obama with both guns blazing as he has urged the President to pay closer attention to the struggles in cities like Detroit.

Now, on the flip side, I also get where Obama is coming from. He may be (part) black, but he's the President of the entire US, not just of black America. I voted for the man, and I no more expect him to harp on only "black" concerns anymore than I'd have expected Bill Clinton to just focus only on issues relevant to Irish-Americans.

Conyers, however, is in DC to represent Detroit and Detroiters--and all the issues they care about, "black" or otherwise.

But the truth is, these "black" issues -- from massive unemployment to the need for an economic bailout of "Main Street" — are, in fact, American issues. And as Americans, black folks have as much right to make demands of the President as anyone else.

What's also just as true is that the Democrats rode a huge black turnout back into the White House and to the majority of the seats in Congress. Given this, I expect black people's issues to be addressed not because Obama is black, but because blacks have been the most loyal part of his base. I don't expect -- or want -- him to pander to black voters. But I don't expect him to ignore us or give us short shrift either.

Feels good to know that, whatever else Barack Obama may say about Conyers, the Congressman from Detroit at least has the President's attention.





President Obama told me to stop "demeaning" him, says Rep. Conyers


President Barack Obama recently called Rep. John Conyers Jr. to express his frustrations with the Judiciary Committee chairman’s criticism.

In an interview with The Hill, Conyers said his opinions of Obama’s policies on healthcare reform and the war in Afghanistan have not sat well with the president.

According to the lawmaker, the president picked up the phone several weeks ago to find out why Conyers was “demeaning” him.

Obama’s decision to challenge Conyers highlights a sensitivity to criticism the president has taken on the left. Conyers’s critical remarks, many of which have been reported on the liberal-leaning Huffington Post, appear to have irritated the president, known for his calm demeanor.

Conyers, the second-longest-serving member of the House, said, “[Obama] called me and told me that he heard that I was demeaning him and I had to explain to him that it wasn’t anything personal, it was an honest difference on the issues. And he said, ‘Well, let’s talk about it.’”

Sitting in the Judiciary Committee’s conference room two days after Obama delivered his speech on Afghanistan, the 23-term lawmaker said he wasn’t in the mood to “chat.”

Obama’s move to send in 30,000 troops to Afghanistan by the summer of 2010 has clearly disappointed Conyers.

He said he intends to press his case in writing soon.

“I want something so serious that he has to respond in writing, like I am responding in writing to him,” he said.

“Calling in generals and admirals to discuss troop strength is like me taking my youngest to McDonald’s to ask if he likes french fries,” Conyers said.

Many on the left have argued that military leaders routinely respond to crises by calling for more troops.

“I’ve been saying I don’t agree with him on Afghanistan, I think he screwed up on healthcare reform, on Guantánamo and kicking Greg off,” Conyers said, referring to the departure of former White House counsel Greg Craig.

Craig was a leading proponent in the White House of closing the terrorist detention center at Guantánamo Bay and releasing photos of detainees undergoing torture. Closing the military prison has proven to be politically difficult, and Obama reversed field on the photos, opting not to make them publicly available.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The liberal Conyers has been an outspoken proponent of a single-payer healthcare system and a critic of U.S. involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He has also been at odds with White House policy on extending expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, crafting legislation that is to the left of the Senate’s version.

Obama and Conyers have a complicated and nuanced relationship.

Conyers was the first member of the Congressional Black Caucus to endorse Obama over then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president.

Conyers earlier this year noted that he spent most weekends in 2007 and 2008 on the campaign trail trying to get Obama elected.

“I did whatever was necessary to be done to win. I met with ministers, I met with unions, I met with lawyers, I met with community activists, I met with healthcare people,” Conyers explained in early April.

The 80-year-old lawmaker, who participated in the civil rights movement alongside Martin Luther King Jr., does not shy away from saying what is on his mind.

In mid-November, Conyers said on the Bill Press radio show that Obama and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been “bowing down” to “nutty right-wing” healthcare proposals in a desperate effort to get legislation passed.

The Michigan Democrat, a friend of liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, said he was “getting tired of saving Obama’s can in the White House,” after progressive Democrats were forced to vote for a healthcare bill that did not call for a “robust public option” and includes language opposed by abortion-rights supporters.

Since the House narrowly passed its healthcare bill, Conyers has grown increasingly frustrated with what he sees as the White House’s willingness to weaken the role of the government in administering the proposed new benefits.

Conyers also said last month that Obama was “getting bad advice from … clowns” on Afghanistan, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press.

At times, Conyers has shown his pragmatic side. For example, he has abandoned hope of moving his legislation calling for a commission to review whether the U.S. government should pay reparations to descendants of slaves. He has called his measure too controversial.

On the morning following Obama’s landmark speech on the war in Afghanistan, Conyers sent around a “Dear Colleague” letter to Democratic and GOP lawmakers interested in joining his newly formed “Peace and Progress in Afghanistan Caucus.”

In the letter, Conyers explained that the caucus “will serve as an informal bipartisan group of members dedicated to reorienting the United States’ commitment to the Afghan government and people by emphasizing indigenous reconciliation and reconstruction strategies, rigorous regional diplomacy, and swift redeployment of the U.S. military.”



View Larger Map


Sources: TIME, The Hill, Photobucket, Google Maps

Obama & Democrats Losing Black Supporters, Black Vote

Rep. Elijah Cummings appears on MSNBC's "Morning Joe Show" discussing concerns Congressional Black Caucus members have with the Obama Administration.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Are Blacks Abandoning Pres. Obama?


Danny Glover, Jesse Jackson, and other activists talk to Lloyd Grove about disappointment in the African-American community with the president’s first year.



Danny Glover heaved a sigh when I asked him recently what he thought of President Obama’s performance so far.

It wasn’t a sigh of relief.

“I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don’t see anything different,” the activist movie actor said of Obama’s policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. “On the domestic side, look here: What’s so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street?”

More in sorrow than in anger, Glover went on: “What choice does he have—in four years, eight years? Let’s just call a spade a spade. Really. There are no choices out there. He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black—and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman—but what choices do they have within the structure?”

Glover is among a growing chorus of African-American opinion leaders who are publicly and privately expressing varying degrees of resignation, disappointment, and outright anger concerning a presidency on which so many hopes have ridden. Who can forget the iconic image of the tear-streaked Rev. Jesse Jackson—who in 1984 and 1988 waged formidable campaigns of his own for the Democratic presidential nomination—as he stood overcome with emotion amid the jubilant crowd at Chicago’s Grant Park as Obama gave his victory speech?

These days Jackson is decidedly dry-eyed.

“Let me distinguish African-American support for the president from the need to challenge policies and protect our interests,” Jackson said. He argues that vocal and effective activism on Obama’s left flank could alter the political dynamic and help him accomplish such goals as health-care reform, job creation, and stricter regulation of Wall Street—in much the same way that civil-rights marches in the South, and the media attention they received, captured the nation’s moral imagination and helped Lyndon Johnson pass landmark legislation in the mid-1960s. “But this doesn’t always turn on a race-based analysis,” Jackson cautioned. “It doesn’t always have to be a function of animus” of one African American for another.

Yet in recent weeks, such prominent voices as Rep. John Conyers, the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and New York Times columnist Charles Blow have been among those taking shots at Obama over his policies, rhetoric, and political positioning.

“A lot of people are pissed off out there,” said one well-known political player who slams the president for embarrassing African-American Gov. David Paterson of New York by trying to shove him out of next year’s Democratic primary election in favor of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and campaigning vigorously for New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s unsuccessful reelection race while ignoring African-American candidate Bill Thompson’s closer-than-expected mayoral bid against Mike Bloomberg. “Thompson could have won that race,” says this politico, who—for the moment, anyway—is keeping his powder dry and declining to criticize the president on the record.

Conyers, in a remarkable outburst to The Hill newspaper, recounted how he cut Obama off a few weeks ago when the president phoned to demand an explanation for the congressman’s blunt criticisms of the troop surge in Afghanistan (“he’s getting bad advice from clowns”), Obama’s compromises on health-care reform (“bowing down” to the “nutty right wing”), and his alleged mishandling of the promised prison shutdown at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“He called me and told me that he heard that I was demeaning him and I had to explain to him that it wasn’t anything personal, it was an honest difference on the issues,” Conyers told The Hill. “And he said, ‘Well, let’s talk about it.’ ” But the 80-year-old Conyers informed the president that he was in no mood to chat. “I’ve been saying I don’t agree with him on Afghanistan, I think he screwed up on health-care reform, on Guantánamo and kicking Greg off,” Conyers added, referring to the forced resignation of White House counsel Gregory Craig over the Guantánamo prison issue.

The New York Times’ Blow, in his Dec. 4 column, noted the president’s surprising lack of empathy for blacks suffering disproportionately from the dire effects of recession.

“There was an expectation, particularly among African Americans, that the first African-American president would at least be vocal about feeling their pain,” Blow said last week on MSNBC’s Hardball. “I think that has not been the case. The president has given a couple of speeches and he has been very heavy on the stick and not very heavy with the carrot… Just in the inability for him to commiserate with that group of people, people feel a bit deflated… He said he’s not going to focus separately on African-American issues at all. That let a lot of people down.”

These sentiments are mirrored in recent polls suggesting that while overall support for Obama among black voters continues to be overwhelming, hovering in the 90 percent range, the intensity of that support appears to be diminishing—a trend that could end up affecting black turnout in next year’s congressional midterm elections and possibly even the presidential election of 2012.

A breakout of black voters in Washington Post surveys over the past eight months shows that those who “strongly” approve of Obama fell from 85 to 69 percent, while his disapproval rating quintupled—from 2 to 11 percent. Admittedly, that’s still very low number, but it’s evidently moving in the wrong direction.

Senior research associate David Bositis, of the African-American-oriented Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, says record black turnout was among the factors that delivered six key swing states to Obama, totaling 107 electoral votes, in the 2008 election—Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Bositis predicted that black turnout for Obama will remain strong in 2012—and that the president enjoys significantly higher approval ratings among black voters than African-American members of Congress in their own districts. But independent pollster Matthew Towery, a former Republican strategist, said even a slight diminution in turnout could have an outsize impact.

“In a state like Florida, which Obama won by two percentage points, a falloff of 10 percent in black turnout might have changed the result and given the state to McCain,” said Towery, who recently conducted a statewide poll showing the president with an astonishing 35 percent disapproval rating among African Americans in Georgia. Towery cautioned that the startling statistics might be a peculiarity, owing to the brutal economic downturn in a state that was only recently booming.

“My best guess is that the current black polling numbers for Obama are somewhat unusual in Georgia because black professionals and the black middle class here have had to get in the unemployment line alongside younger workers who've only recently moved to the city and state; and many of them, too, have seen their houses foreclosed on,” Towery wrote in a recent column.

He added: “Will government’s apparent inability to effect the promised positive 'change' begin to fan discontent in other black communities across the nation? Or will this encroaching uneasiness with Obama stay limited to this one snapshot in time in this one Southern state? We can't yet know, but the early signs are there.”

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Black in the Age of Obama


A hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens opened “A Tale of Two Cities” with the now-famous phrase: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. ...”

Those words resonated with me recently while contemplating the impact of the Obama presidency on blacks in America. So far, it’s been mixed. Blacks are living a tale of two Americas — one of the ascension of the first black president with the cultural capital that accrues; the other of a collapsing quality of life and amplified racial tensions, while supporting a president who is loath to even acknowledge their pain, let alone commiserate in it.

Last year, blacks dared to dream anew, envisioning a future in which Obama’s election would be the catalyst for an era of prosperity and more racial harmony. Now that the election’s afterglow has nearly faded, the hysteria of hope is being ground against the hard stone of reality. Things have not gotten better. In many ways, they’ve gotten worse.

The recession, for one, has dealt a particularly punishing and uneven hand to blacks.

A May report from the Pew Research Center found that blacks were the most likely to get higher-priced subprime loans, leading to higher foreclosure rates. In fact, blacks have displaced Hispanics as the group with the lowest homeownership rates.

According to the most recent jobs data, not only is the unemployment rate for blacks nearly twice that of whites, the gap in some important demographics has widened rapidly since Obama took office. The unemployment rate over that time for white college graduates under 24 years old grew by about 20 percent. For their black cohorts, the rate grew by about twice that much.

And a report published last month by the Department of Agriculture found that in 2008, “food insecurity” for American households had risen to record levels, with black children being the most likely to experience that food insecurity.

Things on the racial front are just as bad.

We are now inundated with examples of overt racism on a scale to which we are unaccustomed. Any protester with a racist poster can hijack a news cycle, while a racist image can live forever on the Internet. In fact, racially offensive images of the first couple are so prolific online that Google now runs an apologetic ad with the results of image searches of them.

And it’s not all words and images; it’s actions as well. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2008 hate crimes data released last week, anti-black hate crimes rose 4 percent from 2007, while the combined hate crimes against all other racial categories declined 11 percent. If you look at the two-year trend, which would include Obama’s ascension as a candidate, anti-black hate crimes have risen 8 percent, while those against the other racial groups have fallen 19 percent.

This has had a sobering effect on blacks. According to a Nov. 9 report from Gallup, last summer 23 percent of blacks thought that race relations would get a lot better with the election of Obama. Now less than half that percentage says that things have actually gotten a lot better.

The racial animosity that Obama’s election has stirred up may have contributed to a rallying effect among blacks. According to a Gallup report published on Nov. 24, Obama’s approval rating among whites has dropped to 39 percent, but among blacks it remains above 90 percent.

Also, this hasn’t exactly been a good year for black men in the news. Plaxico Burress was locked up for accidentally shooting off a gun in a club. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was locked up for intentionally shooting off his mouth at his own home. And Michael Jackson died after being shot full of propofol. Chris Brown brutally beat Rihanna. Former Representative William Jefferson was convicted. And most recently, the “personal failings” of Tiger Woods portray him as an alley cat. Meanwhile, the most critically acclaimed black movie of the year, “Precious,” features a black man who rapes and twice impregnates his own daughter. Rooting for the president feels like a nice counterbalance.

However, the rallying creates a conundrum for blacks: how to air anxiety without further arming Obama’s enemies. This dilemma has rendered blacks virtually voiceless on some pressing issues at a time when their voices would have presumably held greater sway.

This means that Obama can get away with doing almost nothing to specifically address issues important to African-Americans and instead focus on the white voters he’s losing in droves. This has not gone unnoticed. In the Nov. 9 Gallup poll, the number of blacks who felt that Obama would not go far enough in promoting efforts to aid the black community jumped 60 percent from last summer to now.

The hard truth is that Obama needs white voters more than he needs black ones.

According to my analysis, even if every black person in America had stayed home on Election Day, Obama would still be president. To a large degree, Obama was elected by white people, some of whom were more able to accept him because he consciously portrayed himself as racially ambiguous.

In fact, commiserating with the blacks could prove politically problematic.

In a study to be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences this month, researchers asked subjects to rate images of the president to determine which ones best represented his “true essence.” In some of the photos, his skin had been lightened. In others, it had been darkened. The result? The more people identified him with the “whiter” images, the more likely they were to have voted for him, and vice versa.

The Age of Obama, so far at least, seems less about Obama as a black community game-changer than as a White House gamesman. It’s unclear if there will be a positive Obama Effect, but an Obama Backlash is increasingly apparent. Meanwhile, black people are also living a tale of two actions: grin and bear it.





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Sources: The Daily Beast, NY Times, The Hill, MSNBC, Morning Joe Show, USA Today, Examiner, McClatchy Newspapers, Charlotte Observer, AP, Google Maps