Donald Trump MAGA Repubican cult now victims of cruel racist policies and tariff taxes

Dear Editor, The Pine Bluff Commercial news in Arkansas:


What follows is my personal opinion. I have been reading of the poor abused farmers lately. It seems the markets for their crops have been damaged again by Trump. My checking shows that 79% of farmers voted for him. He's a pathological liar, and they knew that at the time!

The reports show that 83% of the white evangelicals voted for Trump who is shutting down USAID and any foreign aid dispensed through them. Thousands of children are now starving becuse that farm produce raised here used to feed them. Way to go hypocrites.

Trump is forbidding truthful history of America to be taught using any federal funds. White folks wrote that history the way they wanted it taught. Trump and his cabal couldn't care less what American Indians consider to be genocide committed against them.

Hundreds of years of enslaved Black folks❓ Careful what you say in class about that. Some delicate white😳😧😥 kids feelings might be hurt❗

A complete cabinet of the least competent candidates imaginable were approved by the most gutless, integrity deprived, Trump servile specimens that the electorate were offered.

Trump is running rampant over the rights and duties of the Congress. Few of the repulsive specimens have the decency to insist that the Constitution they each swore to uphold will be followed. Trump continues to degrade and disparage our military at all levels, both active and veterans. 

Congress, which has three Arkansas veterans, hasn't the courage or integrity to put a hard and fast stop to that. 

As Liz Cheney said, "Trump, whom you adore and cater to, will die. But your dishonor will endure forever on the pages of history."

From Karl Hansen, in Hensley, Pulaski County Arkansas

Republicans cannot accept the fact that paying hush money to a porn actress is NOT a legal expense

Echo opinion letter published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/jun/12/letters/

Paying hush money is not a legal expense

It should come as no surprise that Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 counts against him in his hush money trial. Maureen Dowd with The New York Times summed up the case against Trump in one simple sentence. She wrote, "You don't slime your way into the presidency by having your creepy gofer pay off a porn star you slept with while your wife was home with a newborn and call it a legal expense."

At one and the same time, Gov. Sarah Sanders and our entire congressional delegation piously claim to represent "Arkansas values" while shamelessly defending and supporting the immoral and mendacious Trump. Their photograph ought to be placed in the dictionary next to the word "hypocrite."


From Eugene Bramblett in Camden Arkansas

When presidential leadership cared - President Johnson: A Rick Holmes essay

Thank God (and I mean that prayerfully, in thanks!) there are essayists like Rick Holmes, an opinion columnist published in the Arkansas Time Record newspaper! "On the Road", reminding readers about the humanitarian legacy of presidential leadership, in this opinion column:  

President Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973) was determined to make a difference.

President Lyndon Johnson 

"When it comes to rural poverty, neither party has a plan', Rick Holmes in the Arkansas Times Record.

Johnson City, Texas – It’s no coincidence that the offices of the Pedernales Electric Cooperative sit just across the street from Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood home.

In the 1930s, the Texas Hill Country was like most of rural America: Isolated, dusty and poor, with few jobs and limited prospects, losing its brightest young people to the growing cities. Those left behind still lived pretty much like they had in the 19th century. They didn’t even have electricity, because it cost too much to string wires to houses spread so far apart.

Young Lyndon Johnson ran for Congress in 1937 on a promise to bring power to the Hill Country. He had an ally in President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose Rural Electrification Administration – one of dozens of New Deal agencies trying to improve the lives of struggling families – provided start-up loans to customer-owned electric cooperatives. Once elected, Johnson got the federal loan and went farm-to-farm talking people into joining the cooperative. Soon enough, folks in the Hill Country had refrigerators, radios and the opportunities that come with being part of the wired world.

Johnson knew the lives of the rural poor. He taught school in Cotulla, Texas, where his students, nearly all Mexican-Americans, were trapped by poverty and discrimination. He saw the toll taken by underfunded schools and unavailable health care.

A passionate New Dealer, Johnson believed the government could make life better for people his father had described as “caught in the tentacles of circumstance.” In Congress, and especially after he became president on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Johnson delivered. The domestic agenda enacted under LBJ stands second only to FDR’s in shaping modern America: Medicare and Medicaid to help the sick; food stamps to feed the hungry; Head Start, federal education aid and Work Study to help close the education gap. 

No president since has come close to President Johnson's domestic legacy.

President Johnson called it the War on Poverty, a term conservative critics ridiculed after he left office, declaring it was a war poverty had won. It was a bad metaphor – war metaphors usually are – because it takes constant effort to minimize poverty, and there’s no final victory. But while he was in office, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line fell from 23 percent to 12 percent, no mean accomplishment. Johnson cut poverty in half, and if Vietnam had not derailed his presidency, he likely would have cut it more.

“I hope it may be said, a hundred years from now, that by working together we helped make our country more just, more just for all its people, as well as insure and guarantee the blessings of liberty for all of our posterity,” Johnson said as his presidency drew to a close. “That is what I hope.

“But I believe that at least it will be said that we tried.”

In my travels across America over the past year, I’ve seen a lot of places where the main commerce seems to be dollar stores, pawn shops, payday lenders and disability claims. Further from the interstates there are no signs of economic life at all.

Rural America is hurting today, at least as much as back in the 1930s. Jobs have been lost to trade and mechanization. Family farms have been lost to corporatization. Rural America is steadily losing population, as bright and ambitious young people flee to cities and suburbs. Those left behind are isolated from the global economy, dependent on government benefit programs and increasingly addicted to opioids.

Persistent poverty, passed down from generation to generation, comes in all colors: white in the hollers of Appalachia, black in the Mississippi Delta, brown in the Rio Grande Valley, red on the Indian reservations of the west. As in the ’30s, discrimination strengthens poverty’s grip.

The difference is that today, nobody in Washington is fighting to get high-speed Internet into rural towns like LBJ fought to bring electricity to the Hill Country. There’s no national plan to break the opioid epidemic or revive communities on the brink of becoming ghost towns. Rural voters are fed culture wars rhetoric by Republicans and mostly ignored by Democrats. 

When it comes to rural poverty, neither party has a plan.

There are no easy answers. Some of President Johnson's War on Poverty programs came up empty. But, at least he and Congress made the effort. What deepens the desperation of the nation’s rural poor today is that Washington doesn’t even seem to be trying.

My blog today is a picture - Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton

First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Rodham Clinton
Senator from Illinois and President of the United States Barack Obama

Native child of Illinois Hillary Rodham

Native son of Hawaii, Barak Obama

New York State Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
taaaadaaaa

Now....Washington DC !

Affordable Care Act in Maine - fighting to expand coverage for uninsured

It's hard to believe, but here I am, again, sitting in Augusta, at a public hearing of the Joint Standing Committee on Health and Human Services room, in Maine's State House, to advocate for the Affordable Care Act. If Maine would accept the funds, the coverage would provide thousands of people with health care coverage as well as provide people with jobs in the human services sector. These are not mutually exclusive points. As Maine looses population, it is essential for the state to keep the workforce healthy  and to create jobs to attract qualified workers.

Our state is among the poorest in America, but has not yet accepted the expanded funding offered under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), like 29 other states.  

Eloquent speakers are providing compelling testimony, made even more meaningful with data from states like Arkansas, and Kentucky and others that have accepted the available funds.

My testimony is supporting the American Nurses Association of Maine (ANA-Maine) in keeping with the association's mission of Nursing advancing our profession to advance health care for all.

LD 633:  An Act to Improve the Health of Maine Citizens and the Economy of Maine by Providing Affordable Market-based Coverage Options to Low-income Uninsured Citizens. Senator Saviello, Franklin

LD 854:  An Act to Increase Access to Health Security by Expanding Federally Funded Health Care for Maine People. Representative Sanborn of Gorham

LD 808:  An Act to Decrease Uncompensated Care, Reduce Medical Debt and Improve Health Outcomes. Senator Haskell of Cumberland

ANA Maine membership includes over 353 nurses who work throughout the spectrum of Maine’s health care delivery systems. 

ANA member nurses work in Universities, colleges, public health agencies, community health agencies, home care, hospice, mental health, acute care, long term care, and all other health care organizations.

We support the expansion of health care benefits to include all Maine people regardless of their socio economic status or their pre-existing health conditions. These three bills: LD 854 sponsored by Representative Sanborn, or LD 808 sponsored by Senator Haskell and LD 633 sponsored by Senator Saviello, include the provision to meet the criteria of helping as many Maine people to access health care coverage as possible. 

This is the fifth time legislation has been proposed and supported by the people of Maine to expand health care coverage for about 70,000 people under the Affordable Care Act.  Although a majority of the Maine legislators have supported these expansions, the political climate has rebuffed the legislations. 

Maine people elect representatives and executive officials to support their best humanitarian interests.  Repeatedly, the Maine legislators have supported the will of the people and passed the health care reform initiatives, but they were blocked from being enacted by political, rather than humanitarian, interests.

Maine loses important resources to help our most vulnerable citizens when our legislators are blocked from enacting health care reforms. 

Moreover, the health reforms in these three LD’s are reasonable, they have public support and, most important, they will continue to be heard in public hearings until, Maine joins the other New England states, that already have reform initiatives in place.

ANA- Maine urges you to vote to support these bills or, if you can, to create a legislative initiative whereby the intentions of these LDs are passed and implemented.  ANA Maine would be honored to participate in any efforts to expand health coverage for all Maine citizens.

Thank you committee members.

Senator Eric Brakey, Chair

Senator Anne Haskell 

 Senator Earle McCormick

Representative Andrew Gattine 

Representative Christine Burstein 

Representative Scott Hamann

Representative Frances Head

Representative Patricia Hymanson

Representative Richard Malaby

Representative Matthew Peterson

Representative Deborah Sanderson

Representative Deborah Sanderson 

Representative Peter Stuckey 

Representative Karen Vachon

Testimony in support of:  LD 808 and LD 865 and LD 633

Juliana L’Heureux, BS, MHSA, RN

ANA Maine

Juliana@mainewriter.com 

Humanitarian Hillary Clinton on the record

Partisanship aside, paaaaleeeze!

Let's take a look at Mrs. Hillary Clinton's many humanitarian accomplishments, outside of being scrutinized under the the magnifying glass in the public domain.

1. She's mother to Chelsea and grandmother to Charlotte.

• Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983
• Arkansas Mother of the Year in 1984

2. Hillary Rodham is the daughter of an American Navy veteran.
3. Hillary Rodham was the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College in 1969, and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973.
4. Miss Rodham married William Jefferson Clinton on October 11, 1975, at 930 California Street in Fayetteville, AK, the home where they lived while both taught law at the University of Arkansas.

5.  In 1977, Mrs. Clinton founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. This non-profit organization was founded to research, educate on and rethink children’s issues.
6. She became first lady of Arkansas in 1979, when her husband Bill Clinton's was elected governor in 1978. During her 12 years as first lady, Hillary continued to work as an attorney at Rose Law Firm. She gave birth to Chelsea Clinton in 1980.

7.  As Arkansas First Lady, some of her activities included chairing the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, continuing work with Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and serving on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital Legal Services and the Children's Defense Fund. She was also a member of corporate board of directors for TCBY, Wal-Mart and Lafarge. From 1987 to 1991 she chaired the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession.

8. For new and working teachers, Mrs. Clinton fought for teacher raises and mandatory competency tests. She was behind the effort to develop the state’s first set of statewide curricular standards in the 1980s.

9.  She launched the "HIPPY" program- Home Instruction Program for Pre-school Youth.  This program was championed by Mrs. Clinton and sent teachers into the homes of underprivileged families to train parents in school preparedness and literacy. This program became a model for other states.  HIPPY was designed to bring families, organizations and communities together regardless of limited financial resources or educational barriers. Through the program, parents learned the importance of talking to and reading to their children. Today, there are currently 146 HIPPY sites in 25 states and Washington D.C. serving nearly 16,000 children.

10.  Books written by Mrs. Clinton:

• Living History (2004) - An autobiography of her life, including her life with Bill Clinton. 
• An Invitation To The White House : At Home With History (2000) - A photo-filled book of the White House during the Clinton Years.
• It Takes A Village (1996) - Hillary's take on raising children in the modern era. While it does naturally contain some of her political views, it's mostly about taking an active role in parenting, which either political party would agree with.

Americans know Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her family as well as any modern historical leader of our era. She has put herself out there for inspection during every challenge put in front of her, both real and including the muckraking contrived scandals.

Mrs. Clinton more than earned American and worldwide respect, as both a humanitarian and as a diplomat.  

Thank you Mrs. Clinton for accepting the challenge to run as a progressive Democrat, to become the first woman president of the United States.