Tag: donald trump

Trump’s Choice For Top Justice Department Role Says Marijuana Is A ‘Gateway Drug’ That Makes Consumers ‘Boring And Smelly’

President-elect Donald Trump has made his selection for another top Justice Department official: Harmeet Dhillon, who has peddled the gateway drug theory about marijuana and says cannabis makes people who consume it “silly, boring and smelly.”

Trump said on Monday that he intends to nominate Dhillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights. The lawyer has served in leadership roles with the Republican National Committee and California Republican Party, and she’s a frequent Fox News contributor.

For those following the marijuana policy positions of Trump’s cabinet picks, Dhillon’s comments on the issue reveal a staunch opposition to the use of cannabis, which she claimed is a “gateway drug and ambition-killer” following President Joe Biden’s mass marijuana pardons.

This choice for a key DOJ position also comes amid the final steps of the Biden administration’s efforts to reschedule marijuana—a task that the incoming Trump administration will inherit and which his Justice Department will play a pivotal role in facilitating.

Dhillon doesn’t seem expressly opposed to the idea of preventing people from going to jail over simple cannabis possession, however, and she’s pointed out that federal prosecutors rarely go after people over that low-level offense. At one point, she criticized Vice President Kamala Harris over her prosecutorial record on cannabis.

But she’s made her distaste for cannabis consumption clear on a number of occasions.

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Understanding the 14th Amendment

In his efforts to get illegal immigration resolved and/or reversed, President Elect Trump has recently hinted of an executive action to repeal birthright citizenship. This seems to indicate a multiple level of misunderstanding the Constitution of the United States. First is his premise of overriding a Constitutional provision via executive or legislative action. When will our elected officials stop with the efforts to ignore or rewrite a Constitutional provision without taking it to the States?

Secondly, Trump could accomplish his goal by ABIDING by the 14th Amendment. In an excellent article by Professor Edward J. Erler in July of 2008, he helps us to understand the original intent behind the citizenship clause. Section one of the Amendment (which contains the citizenship clause) begins as, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Professor Erler states,

“…during the debate of the [14th A]mendment, Senator Jacob Howard of Ohio, the author of the citizenship clause, attempted to assure skeptical colleagues that the new language was not intended to make Indians citizens of the U.S. Indians, Howard conceded, were born within the nation’s geographical limits, but he steadfastly maintained that they were not subject to its jurisdiction because they owed allegiance to their tribes. Senator Lyman Trumbull, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, rose to support his colleague, arguing that ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ meant ‘not owing allegiance to anybody else and being subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.’ Jurisdiction understood as allegiance, Senator Howard interjected, excludes not only Indians but ‘persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.’ Thus ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ does not simply mean, as is commonly thought today, subject to American laws or American courts. It means owing exclusive political allegiance to the U.S.”

In the past there has been support from the Mexican government itself for asserting this argument as applied to illegal aliens in the U.S. of any nationality. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon helped us better understand this provision of the 14th Amendment in 2008 while attending the opening of a Mexican Consulate in New Orleans. A report of the event notes,

“At the opening of the consulate, President Calderon, said Mexico wants to assist and protect its citizens in the states of Louisiana and Mississippi that the consulate will serve,” and further quotes the former president: “With the reopening of this consulate, we will be able to guarantee those Mexicans who live and work in Louisiana and Mississippi that they will have the support of the Mexican government. It is my commitment that no matter where there is a Mexican citizen, he or she will also have the support of our government.”

Author asserts that these are basically re-statements of the Constitutional provisions as explained in Professor Erler’s article, courtesy of the then president of Mexico.

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Trump shooting task force unveils bombshell final report on ‘preventable’ assassination attempt

The House Assassination task force released its final and longawait report on Tuesday.

The 180-page report claims the deadly shooting at Donald Trump‘s Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13 was ‘preventable and should not have happened.’

It was released just days after its final public meeting last week where Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe got into a screaming match with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas).

Rowe did acknowledge at the hearing the agency’s ‘abject failure’ in the July shooting.

The 13-member panel was created by a House vote shortly after the first assassination attempt over the summer. And a few months later they were asked to also look into the second incident.

The group concluded that there was no single failure that allowed shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks to fire at Trump, but ‘various’ decisions and moments that created an ideal situation for the assassination attempt.

The Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump released a series of recommendations it feels will help prevent future incidents.

Members of the task force visited both sites where men tried to take out the former – and now future – president.

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The Coming Sea Change at Trump’s FDA: Towards an Era of Safety and Public Transparency for Medical Devices

It has been over a decade since my late-wife, Dr. Amy Josephine Reed, was harmed and killed by a poorly regulated medical device, known as the Power Morcellator. The sheer force of Dr. Reed’s voice, as a Harvard Medical School faculty member and a physician-scientist — and the injustice it uncovered to countless other women like her — became a bellwether case that demonstrates an ongoing and severe safety failure operational in the medical device regulatory space at FDA.

Of course, this safety failure in the FDA’s medical device regulatory arm, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), is hardly unique to that center. Industry and conflicted academic “experts,” not patients, play an outsized role in governing and corrupting almost all of the FDA’s centers. But, certainly, the source of the safety failure at CDRH is crystallized in the dangerous regulatory regime that the agency center utilizes to clear the vast majority of medical devices for the US healthcare marketplace: The 510(k).

At a legislative level, CDRH’s 510(k) regulatory regime was not designed to ensure the safety or efficacy of the medical devices it regulates — a fact that is well known to most public health experts and FDA regulators themselves. CDRH’s 510(k) does not use anything even remotely resembling an “evidence-based” framework to provide clearance to thousands of new medical devices annually used in the care of patients across the US and abroad.

Even more problematic is that the medical device industry pays the FDA for the 510(k) clearances obtained. In other words, almost the entire 510(k) clearance apparatus at CDRH is literally funded by the medical device industry — the very industry that stands to gain the most from the 510(k) clearances it funds. This is a serious conflict of interest in the healthcare space, and should not pass ethical muster — even when the argument is that such payments from industry to government are saving taxpayer dollars. The moment the industry starts paying to keep the FDA’s centers’ lights on is when the industry, not the people, will have an outsized voice in governing the agency that is regulating it.

Worse yet, the CDRH personnel whose 510(k)-related activities are funded by medical device makers exert virtually no real scrutiny over the manufacturer’s claims in their 510(k) applications for market clearance — either because their “reviews” are deliberately superficial and nominal, or because they are grossly incompetent from an expert perspective. It is literally true that the overwhelming majority of medical devices that seek 510(k) clearance for use in the US marketplace are granted them, without difficulty and at mach speed, by any reasonable standard — and although these devices are literally directly engaging the most vulnerable of America’s citizens: patients who trust American healthcare at their most vulnerable!

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President Trump Doubles Down On Pledge To End Birthright Citizenship, A Policy Backed By The Overwhelming Majority Of American People

America, since its inception, has been a place of opportunity for aspiring, high-skilled people.

The geniuses and artisans of Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries flooded to these shores, enriching the society in many cases and making invaluable contributions to American culture – from our culinary traditions to newfound architectural styles – that continue to be influential through the present day.

This custom of selecting only the best and brightest is not anomalous to great nations throughout history.

All nations are only as good as the people which compose them: thus, any worthwhile nation would desire to enhance the quality of its people overall in order to elevate its global standing.

That operative goal, however, cannot be achieved under the present, suicidal policy of citizenship by birthright.

Among nations of the world, America is the only developed one that confers citizenship onto anyone simply for having been born to a parent who managed to inhabit these borders, regardless of legality.

That America is the only noteworthy country to still have this policy in place should be enough evidence alone of its insanity. The prevailing view among liberal legal scholars is that the Fourteenth Amendment sanctions this policy, which is permanent and cannot be altered.

This is flatly wrong. This erroneous interpretation is the byproduct of a slipshod and lazy construction of that particular Amendment, through the prism of erroneous interpretations of largely discredited, or at least, increasingly obsolete legal precedent.

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Zelensky rejects Trump’s call for peace

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has rejected a call by US President-elect Donald Trump for an immediate truce and peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.

Following a meeting between Trump, Zelensky, and French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Saturday, the US president-elect issued a lengthy post on his Truth Social platform saying, “there should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin” to settle the Ukraine conflict. According to Trump, Ukraine “would like to make a deal and stop the madness.”

However, Zelensky made it clear that this is not the case, in a post published on X on Sunday, in which he said the conflict “cannot simply end with a piece of paper and a few signatures.”

“A ceasefire without guarantees can be reignited at any moment… To ensure that Ukrainians no longer suffer losses, we must guarantee the reliability of peace and not turn a blind eye to occupation,” the Ukrainian leader stated.

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Trump vows to pardon Jan. 6 rioters on day one after getting into office

President-elect Donald Trump said that he will pardon Jan. 6 rioters on the first day in office in his upcoming administration. 

In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Trump told anchor Kristen Welker that “These people are living in hell.”

Over 1,500 people have been charged with crimes connected to the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot in 2021, according to NPR.

Trump has said in the past that he would pardon many of them. 

“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” he said during a 2023 CNN event. “I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, got out of control. I would say it will be a large portion of them and it would be early on.”

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Trump Gives Stark Answer When Asked If He’ll Split Up Families During Mass Deportations

During a sit down interview with NBC News, president Trump gave a striking answer when asked if he intends to separate families through mass deportations of illegal aliens.

“Well, I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way that you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” Trump declared.

“We don’t have to separate families, we’ll send the whole family very humanely, back to the country where they came,” Trump emphasised.

“If they come here illegally but their family is here legally, then the family has a choice. The person that came in illegally can go out, or they can all go out together,” he added.

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Journo Mark Halperin Calls Coverup of Biden’s Mental Decline ‘One of the Biggest Scandals in American History’

Journalist Mark Halperin said the Democrat Party and media’s coverup of Joe Biden’s mental decline over the years was “one of the biggest scandals” in US history.

Halperin told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Friday that the Democrats and legacy media knew of Biden’s declining mental acuity for years but dared not talk about for fear of helping Donald Trump get elected.

“But I will say that the donors and the Democratic officials who are now so outraged about the conduct, as you said, the press knew all this, so did they,” Halperin said. “They stood silent when Joe Biden’s operatives crushed Bobby Kennedy and Dean Phillips and rigged the rules. They stood silent as he stayed in the race and decided he was going to run for another term. They stood silent when Kamala Harris was given the nomination without a shot being fired.”

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Dem Rep. From Colorado Claims FBI and DOJ Stonewalling in Investigation of First Trump Assassination Attempt

Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat, recently told National Public Radio that the FBI and the DOJ are stonewalling congress as they attempt to investigate the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, PA.

One of the frustrating aspects of this crime is that the public still knows so little about the shooter and how he was able to get so close to Trump with so many obvious red flags. There are also still many lingering questions about motive.

Surprisingly, Crow claims that the Secret Service has been very forthcoming so far.

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