Republicans must stop the Donald Trump tariffs. Americans cannot pay tariff costs to fund Trump's tax cuts to the rich

Tariffs are an added tax on all Americans. A "zero sum" scheme.

Echo opinion letter published in the The Salt Lake Tribune:

Dear Editor: Tariffs are a “regressive” tax because everyone pays the same amount of tax, both the wealthy and the average American. Conservatives have long wanted a flat tax on all goods, and, at the same, time lower income tax rates for the wealthy. Income tax is considered a “progressive tax” because its rates increase at higher incomes. Now,  Donald Trump is doing the same thing by having tariffs (in which everyone pays the same amount) and using the money that it produces to give a tax break to the wealthy!
It is important to ask who the tariffs help the most❗ 

Big corporations will adjust to maintain their profits while the average American will pay more for goods regardless of whether they are made in the U.S. or not.

It is time to wake up 👀⏰ and realize that Donald Trump does not care about the average American❗💢


From David Hart, in Torrey Utah

P.S. In other words, nobody "wins" a tariff war. Donald Trump loses credibility driven home by his chaotic leadership. Corporations lose because the business plans cannot keep pace with the arbitrary implementation of tariffs based more on Trump's "whims" and his retribution intentions, rather than on any economic theory, and the consumers are getting "hammered". 

President Joe Biden executive order resets White House Office of Faith Based Partnerships

The nuns who taught the future president based their religious instruction on the Gospel of Matthew: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Published in Utah, The Salt Lake Tribune- Jack Jenkins and Adelle M. Banks

Washington • President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Sunday (Feb. 14) reestablishing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, undoing former President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape an agency that went largely unstaffed for most of his tenure.

In a statement accompanying the announcement of the executive order, Biden echoed his recent remarks to the National Prayer Breakfast, bemoaning widespread physical and economic suffering due to the coronavirus pandemic, racism and climate change. He added that those struggling “are fellow Americans” and are deserving of aid.

“This is not a nation that can, or will, simply stand by and watch the suffering around us. That is not who we are. That is not what faith calls us to be,” he said. “That is why I’m reestablishing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to work with leaders of different faiths and backgrounds who are the front lines of their communities in crisis and who can help us heal, unite and rebuild.”

He added: “We still have many difficult nights to endure. But we will get through them together and with faith guiding us through the darkness and into the light.”

The White House announced the appointment of Melissa Rogers, a First Amendment lawyer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, to oversee the office, as she did in former President Barack Obama’s second term. Rogers will also serve as senior director for faith and public policy in the White House Domestic Policy Council.

“It’s configured very differently than it was in the Trump years, a little bit differently than it was during the Obama-Biden administration,” Rogers told Religion News Service in an interview Monday.

Among the new aspects of what the Biden White House is calling the “Partnerships Office,” Rogers said, are her seat on the policy council and the creation of a deputy director.

The office’s deputy director will be Josh Dickson, who ran faith outreach for the Biden-Harris campaign. Trey Baker, who worked as the national director of African American Engagement on Biden’s campaign, will serve as the White House office’s liaison to Black communities, a role that includes Black religious groups.

Dickson, who, along with Rogers, officially started his job Sunday, said in the same interview that he and Rogers are seeking to enhance existing collaborations between government and faith organizations to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re currently developing materials that we’re working on getting out far and wide that just share information and facts about the vaccine and that help provide great resources for COVID education,” he said.

Besides fighting the pandemic, the office will focus its efforts on helping disadvantaged communities, advancing global humanitarian work, strengthening pluralism and protecting “cherished guarantees of church-state separation and freedom for people of all faiths and none.”

Rogers said the office would also work with religious and secular partners to address inequities in economic and educational opportunities.

“We’ll be engaged in that particular effort, as well as others, in breaking down silos and communicating across agencies to try to find out what we can do with our partners to ensure that we really attack these disparities, which are part of the scourge of systemic racism,” she said.

The announcement noted that the office will work with Centers for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that are embedded in 11 agencies across the federal government. “These issues are ones that every agency, I think, can play a role,” Rogers said.

The faith-based office has been called by different names since President George W. Bush established it, and different presidents have granted religious and secular organizations varying degrees of access.

Biden will return the office to the name it had during the Obama administration, when Rogers led it from 2013 to 2017.
Under President Trump, the office went largely unstaffed until 2019, when he tapped Pentecostal preacher and longtime Trump adviser Paula White to oversee what he called the Faith and Opportunity Initiative. Until then, much of Trump’s religious outreach involved informal meetings with mostly Christian faith leaders — especially a core group who became known as his unofficial evangelical advisers.
The two previous administrations made concerted efforts to connect with a wide array of faith groups, with bipartisan and interreligious access through the faith-based office, related cabinet-level offices and task forces.

Rogers has been critical of what she saw as Trump’s disproportionate engagement with evangelicals, saying in 2017 that “the continuance of this Evangelical Executive Advisory Board, even unofficially, and the apparent failure to have any comparable entity that is open to non-evangelicals, sends a troubling message that the administration prefers evangelicals over other people of faith.”

Rogers also opposed Trump administration plans to remove the requirement that faith-based social service providers offer a secular alternative to people seeking their assistance.

“You can’t benefit from protections you don’t know you have,” she tweeted in January 2020. “The religious liberty of social service beneficiaries is as important as the religious liberty of faith-based providers.”

Rogers came to Biden’s defense in August when she said Trump made “wild assertions” about the former vice president during the 2020 campaign. She said the claims by Trump that Biden would have a “no religion, no anything” approach to faith if he became president “could not be more wrong.”

By Jack Jenkins and Adelle M. Banks | Religion News Service

Impeach Donald Trump editorial echo from Utah

The Salt Lake Tribune was among twelve national newspapers that published unprecedented editorials in support of the impeachment of Donald Trump.  "There are also many other clear violations of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution that could have also led to articles of impeachment."

To paraphrase Mr. Thomas Jefferson,

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to confront the clear and unrefuted wrongdoing of someone in high political office, and to assume among the powers granted to Congress by the U.S. Constitution the duty to oversee, investigate and, if warranted, impeach and remove the president of the United States, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that the Congress should declare the causes which impel them to the action.

That is what the House Judiciary Committee, acting on information and testimony gathered by the House Intelligence Committee, did last week in voting to refer two articles of impeachment to the full House of Representatives. Given the information it had before it, combined with other widely known acts of this president, that panel really had no choice.

To end the process at that point, with all that is known about the president’s conduct and his unremitting stonewalling of the investigation, would be an affront to the Constitution and to democracy.

The full House will have a choice, probably in the coming week, of whether or not to approve one or both articles and send them along to the Senate for trial, the procedure specified in the Constitution. And then, by that same Constitution, the choice of whether to remove the president from office, and whether to disqualify him from holding any federal office in the future, will fall to the Senate.

Some in both chambers may honestly believe that the removal of a duly elected president, less than a year before he is to face the voters, would be overreach. But there is no question that this president has committed impeachable acts.

His blatant threat to withhold millions in congressionally approved security assistance to Ukraine, which was and is facing an ongoing threat of Russian hegemony, unless that nation’s president helped our nation’s president spread damaging rumors about one of his key political rivals placed the security of both nations, and the world, behind the president’s own personal and political interests.

And the administration’s refusal to assist or even participate in the committees’ work amounts to an unconstitutional obstruction of congressional oversight powers.

There are also many other clear violations of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution that could have also led to articles of impeachment. The American intelligence community, including the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, has concluded unanimously that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 presidential election with the intent of tipping the scales toward the current chief executive.

Since his inauguration, the president and members of his family have profited enormously from doing business with, and in, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, nations that clearly do not always have the best interests of the American people at heart.

With all that in mind, it is disappointing to say the least that the coming actions will turn at least as much on naked partisanship as on the facts and the law. 

Indeed, the Democrat-controlled House will almost certainly vote to impeach. The Republican-ruled Senate is (wrongly!) highly likely to vote to acquit.

Much attention will be paid to two Utahns. Rep. Ben McAdams is being counted among the few Democrats who may vote not to impeach, or to advocate for a vote of censure instead. Sen. Mitt Romney is considered one, if not the only, Republican who might be moved to vote for removal.

Both of them, and all of their colleagues, ought to vote their conscience rather than their party. And, if the Senate does acquit, all it really will have done is to hand the matter back to the voters. And it would be difficult to argue that there is anything wrong with that.

Donald Trump is deteriorating so he must be removed from the White House

E.J. Dionne:  Trump’s base is smaller than he thinks it is Washington DC an echo opinion published in The Salt Lake Tribune, in Utah:

The debate over impeaching Donald Trump reveals an irony: Those who favor impeaching him have far more respect for the president’s supporters than those who oppose it.

Critics of impeachment argue that the effort to remove Trump from office over his open invitations of foreign meddling in our US elections will only ignite the Trump "base." Those who say we should let this all go, see his backers as an excitable immovable bloc of people closed to reasoned argument or new information.

Thus are roughly 40% of our fellow citizens cast as an unthinking blob that will embrace anything Trump says and turn out in droves in 2020, to beat back the wrong labels of being elitist fake newsers and deep staters no matter what the facts are.

Those of us who support impeachment don't deny that there is a "Trump base," but insist that mountains of polling evidence show that it amounts to 25% to 30% of voters at most. The rest of the 46% who voted for Trump have real doubts about who he is, how he behaves and what he is doing to our country. Even those of us who disagree with them on a variety issues see this substantial part of Trump's constituency as made up of rational and engaged citizens open to persuasion.

To begin with, polls conducted throughout Trump’s presidency show that his critics feel far more strongly about their opposition to him than his defenders feel about their support. 

In fact, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, found that only 24% of registered voters strongly approved of Trump’s performance, while 44% strongly disapproved. Significantly, 74% of Democratic registered voters strongly disapproved of Trump, but only 50% of Republican registered voters strongly approved of him. Which base would you rather have going into this fight — and into 2020?

The 24% are the folks you see at the Trump rallies. Trump's more tepid approvers (17% of registered voters in this survey) tend to stay home, take in the news and ask questions about what's going on.

The big gap between strong approvers and strong disapprovers was very predictive of the 2018, election turnout that gave Democrats control of the House of Representatives. Those elections showed that many who voted for Trump in 2016 were prepared to vote for Democrats two years later. This was a telling sign that a sizable share of Trump's voters are not lockstep apologists.

Recall that the three key Trump states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin elected Democratic senators and governors last year. In Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin picked up 14% of Trump’s 2016 voters, while Sen. Bob Casey won 12% of them in Pennsylvania and Sen. Debbie Stabenow got 9% of them in Michigan. If a Democratic presidential nominee can achieve those numbers next year, Trump loses.

Moreover, a stack of surveys show that while Trump has maintained a fairly steady overall approval rating in the low 40s, the proportion of Americans who actually like and trust him is much lower.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted Sept. 13-16, before the White House readout of Trump's Ukraine call was released, found a relatively high 45% saying they approved of Trump's performance. But only 30% said they had "very positive" feelings toward him, and only 25% said that they both liked Trump personally and approved of his policies.

A CNN poll conducted Sept. 5-9 found Trump with a 39% approval rating, but only 9% of the same sample said they trusted "almost all" of what they heard in White House communications, while another 19% said they trusted "most of it." Again, less than 30% has confidence in the stories the White House tells.

The bottom line is that too much political analysis (wrongly) sees this hard core (right wing base) as representing all of those who backed Trump in 2016, because they wanted to send one message or another (or because they loathed Hillary Clinton). In fact, a lot of Trump's one-time supporters do not believe everything they hear from him or from (kool-aid!) Fox News. A fair number of his cult  don't like him very much. Economically minded working-class Trump voters will notice that his signature promise to restore manufacturing is being broken before their eyes as new economic numbers point toward a manufacturing recession.

Those advancing the case for impeachment believe that, whether the Senate removes Trump from office or not, it's important to make clear how corrupt and dangerous his behavior has been. 

More Trump voters are listening to these arguments than their pretend-friends want us to believe.

E.J. Dionne

Orin Hatch has a kiss ass legacy

An echo letter to the editor and Pat Bagley editorial cartoon - harbingers for the Republican party

It's clear Hatch has sold his soul and lost his way ~ Dave Klock

Sen. Hatch, what will you try to sell next just to get re-elected:

• the Grand Canyon? 
• Perhaps the Mormon Temple? 

It’s clear to almost everyone here (Republicans, independents and Democrats alike) that you’ve sold your soul and lost your way.
You have forgotten that you work for the hard-working people of Utah and not the interests of big corporations and a president with questionable ethical standards. 

Your choice to stir the political pot at a time when our country needs real leadership is both sad and embarrassing.

Perhaps you are just too old and out of touch, as many say, or maybe you’ve been away in Washington, D.C., for too long. Either way, I look forward to voting for Mitt Romney in the Republican primary to rid us of a representative who no longer understands our values. No matter how a person feels about the national monuments issue, rest assured that everyone can see through your thinly veiled ruse to save your own political skin at our expense.
We deserve better. Your time is up. Thanks for nothing, Sen. Hatch.

MaineWriter~ Republicans have no moral leadership. Senator Hatch had a chance to show statesmanship by standing up to Donald Trump, but his legacy will be the image captured in the Pat Bagley political cartoon- "kiss ass Hatch".