Mountain Views News, Pasadena Edition [Sierra Madre] Saturday, February 2, 2019

B3

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, February 2, 2019 

HAIL Hamilton


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Hail Hamilton


IF NOT NOW, THEN WHEN 
SPEAKER PELOSI? 

If I sound angry it is because I am—very angry. For more 
than 18 months the Mueller investigations have been 
revealing more each day about Russian collusion with the 
Trump campaign during the 2016 Presidential Elections. 
Recently more serious allegations have been reported that 
Trump may have been working as a covert Russian agent. 
That’s right, the President of the United States may be a 
traitor to his country and his countrymen!

 I am angry as hell watching President Trump bring this nation to its knees both 
domestically and overseas. The just released quadrennial Director of National 
Intelligence Report warns that Russia used “Active Measures,” including sophisticated 
cyber-warfare techniques to interfered in our 2016 Presidential Elections that 
this Russian interference has continued through the 2018 midterms to this day 
unchallenged. 

 This attack is no less serious than Pearl Harbor or 9/11. “Make no mistake,” one 
of the report’s authors said. “We are at war with our principal global adversary 
Russia—a cyberwar directed by Vladimir Putin, but a war just the same.” A war that 
looks increasingly, I would add, like its being aided and abetted by Donald Trump! 

 Perhaps as maddening is Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s apparent reluctance to more 
aggressively pursue congressional oversight hearings, including starting impeachment 
proceedings, since Democrats took back control of the House three and a half weeks 
ago, out of fear of appearing too partisan?

 What is Speaker Pelosi’s waiting for, how bad do things have to get before Trump 
is held to responsible for all he has done since becoming president? At the very 
least, Speaker Pelosi should immediately form a House Special Select Committee to 
investigate the Trump Campaign Collusion with Russia during the 2016 Presidential 
Election. 

 My recommendation is that it be organized along the same lines as the Senate Select 
Watergate Committee formed February 7, 1973. The hearings began September 17 
and ended November 15, 1973, which the Committee chose to be televised “gavel-to-
gavel,” without commercial breaks and rebroadcast at night on C-Span for those who 
had missed any of the live broadcasts. There were a total of 51 days and 319 hours of 
televised hearings. “A gripping, dramatic narrative of a national tragedy,” wrote one 
columnist at the time.

 The Trump-Russia hearings, like the 1973 Senate Select Watergate Hearings, 
should be bipartisan and include members from key committee, such as Oversight, 
Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, Appropriations, Armed services, and Ethics, 
just to name a few. Americans need to know whether their president is a crook or a 
spy or both?

 Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer should immediately begin 
regularly appearing together on the steps of the Capitol holding a weekly, if necessary 
daily, televised news conferences voicing their concerns about what the President is 
doing and about what the President is saying he is doing, correcting the record by fact 
checks on every statement the President or his staff makes.

 There has been too much comparison between Mueller’s Special Counsel’s 
investigation of the alleged Trump Election Campaign collusion with the Russian 
intelligence community during the 2016 Presidential Election with the Special 
Prosecutor’s Watergate Investigation. Comparing the two is interesting but not all 
that informative because Special Counsel Mueller and the Senate Select Watergate 
Independent Prosecutor are/were governed by different Department of Justice 
guideline statutes. 

 More important is the fact that the most damaging evidence against Nixon was 
disclosed inadvertently in testimony by White House aide, Alexander Butterfield, 
who testified to the Senate Watergate Committee that he had set up a hidden tape 
voice-activated tape-recording system in the Oval Office, one tape of which was later 
found to show that Nixon was involved in a cover-up go the only 6 days after the June 
17, 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters. 

 Speaker Pelosi, this brings me to my main contention. You do not need to wait for 
Mueller’s report to act. There is absolutely no precedent to wait. Waiting only allows 
Trump more time to inflict more damage on an already seriously wounded nation. 
The nation and the world simply can not suffer two more years of Trump rule. 

 When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution they foresaw the possibility that 
a time might come when the removal of a President from office might be necessary. 
But their thinking was not necessarily for a “crime requiring the usual criminal intent 
and criminal action and proof, rather one in common with “Treason, Bribery, or 
other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” because whatever the accusation the official 
is charged he has somehow abused the power of his office and is unfit to serve. 


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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

MICHAEL Reagan

DICK Polman


SEX TRAFFICKING 

AT THE SUPER BOWL 

Super Bowl week isn’t just the biggest, holiest and most 
publicized event of the year for America’s sports fans.

 Unfortunately, it’s also a popular event for America’s human 
sex trafficking industry.

 It’s a myth that the Super Bowl is the country’s largest annual 
sex-trafficking event.

 Every sports championship, convention or city where men with money go in large 
numbers attracts professional sellers of illegal sex from around the country.

 But there’s no doubt that thousands of them have flocked to Atlanta for Sunday’s 
Rams-Patriots matchup.

 Federal agents have already reported arresting 33 people this week on charges of 
sex trafficking, which often involves underaged girls and boys who’ve been forced into 
prostitution.

 But Atlanta is no stranger to the illegal sex-trafficking trade. Like Los Angeles, San 
Francisco and San Diego, it has been a center of human sex trafficking activity for years.

 According to the FBI, its predators specialize in children from Mexico.

The statistics on human sex trafficking are not easy to get with precision, but they are 
grim.

 The second largest international crime industry behind illegal drugs, human trafficking 
reportedly includes 40 million people and generates $32 billion in profit a year, half of 
which is in industrialized countries.

 According to the U.S. State Department, as many as 800,000 people are trafficked 
across international borders every year, including an estimated 15,000 into the United 
States.

 Most human trafficking worldwide – about 80 percent — involves sexual exploitation 
and the rest involves labor exploitation. About 80 percent of all trafficking victims are 
female and half are children.

 In the United States the average age of a teen who is forced into the sex trade is 12 to 14 
years old.Many of them are troubled runaway girls who were sexually abused as children.

Many are graduates of our horrible, broken foster care system. As I’ve said before, if you 
really want to fix sex trafficking in America, you have to first fix foster care.

 Each year, like a baseball farm system, it feeds the sex-trafficking industry with a 
steady stream of fresh prostitutes. Many are recruited by their friends who aged out of 
foster care at 18 the previous year.

 In 2014 I wrote a column about sex trafficking and the Super Bowl with Jerome Elam, 
who at five years old was forced by his stepfather to become a sex slave for pedophiles in 
Florida.

 Elam, who was also coerced into child pornography and forced to take drugs, attended 
school and appeared to be a normal kid.

 He only escaped from his hell after a suicide attempt – at age 12 – landed him in a 
hospital emergency room. Today my friend is a writer and child advocate who speaks 
around the world about the evils of sex-trafficking.

 We don’t hear much about America’s sex-trafficking business in the mainstream media 
except when the Super Bowl Sunday rolls around.

 You might read a report in USA Today or online about some arrests, but the big 
newscasters, the cable shows and the sportscasters are not going to touch the sex-
trafficking issue, much less get outraged by it.

 That’s the tragedy.

 Everyone says over and over they want to save the children from sexual predators, but 
that’s a lot of BS.

 The only way sex trafficking in the United States is going to get the publicity it deserves 
is if some famous sportscaster or bigwig politician has one of their kids kidnapped and 
sex trafficked.

 Then they’ll call for Congress and everyone else to do something about the sick men 
in our midst who pay to have sex with children and the evil creeps who make it happen. 
Until then, expect crickets. Absolute crickets. 

 Super Bowl Sunday is a good time for the media to start talking seriously about human 
sex trafficking and what to do about it. But let’s not forget about it on Monday, because 
the traffickers won’t.

FIVE TAKE AWAYS FROM THE 
TRUMP SHUTDOWN

It’s morning in America. Air traffic controllers will get paid again 
to ensure our safety. Food inspectors will get paid again to stop 
the spread of disease. And the economy will stop hemorrhaging 
money (the shutdown tab was $11 billion). Hopefully, this 
detestable episode – assuming it’s not repeated – will be viewed 
as just another Trumpian debacle.

 Here are five quick takeaways, culled from the 35 days of needless pain:

here is a concept in the American system called “checks and balances”

 How is it possible that Trump failed to process the message that voters sent last 
November? By a historic margin of nearly 10 million votes nationwide – the most 
massive repudiation ever suffered by a president in a midterm election – Americans 
awarded the House to the Democrats and told them to put a leash on Trump.

 It’s clear by now that “The Art if the Deal” was just a book title concocted by his 
ghostwriter, because this guy can’t negotiate a parking ticket. Nancy Pelosi has proven 
that Trump is just as susceptible to the laws of political gravity as anyone else. Does he 
really think the next three weeks will melt Pelosi’s steel?

 There is a limit to the public’s patience

 For many Americans, especially those who rarely pay attention to politics, Trump has 
likely been viewed as a distant carnival act. But this time, he was hurting real people. 
His job approval rating, in the latest poll sponsored by the Associated Press and the 
NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, is 34 percent. Another new national poll 
says that his job approval among women has dropped to 27 percent. And in the latest 
Quinnipiac poll, only 28 percent of independents endorsed shutting the government to 
finance a border wall.

 If those trends continue – and it’s hard to foresee a reversal – many Republicans on 
the 2020 ballot may have to decide whether it serves their interests to follow him off the 
cliff. And speaking of Republicans…

 There is even a limit to the Senate Republicans’ servility

At any time over the past month, Mitch (“We are all behind the president”) McConnell 
could’ve pushed legislation to reopen the government and sought to rally a veto-proof 
majority. Instead, he indulged Trump’s intemperate and pernicious actions. As the old 
saying goes, if you lie down with a dog, you get up with fleas.

 But in the end, even some Republican senators opted for flea medicine. Cory 
Gardner and Susan Collins (both of whom face tough re-elections in blue states), Lisa 
Murkowski, Ron Johnson (who reportedly yelled at McConnell, “This is your fault!”), 
Lamar Alexander (who’s retiring in 2020 anyway), and Mitt Romney all signaled their 
restiveness.If Trump threatens another shutdown in mid-February, perhaps other 
Republicans will join these slim ranks in rediscovering Article I of the Constitution, 
which entrusts Congress to “provide for… the general welfare of the United States.”

 There are no limits to this regime’s ignorance about how average people live

 A quick memo to Trump’s fervent rally-goers: He is nothing like you, and he has no 
clue. This is a guy who recently thought that people needed a photo ID to buy food. 
Then he said, during the worst of the shutdown, that his victims can simply go to the 
supermarket and work out a deal to buy food on credit.

 When was the last time he bought food in a supermarket? (Likely, never.) Can you 
imagine going into Wegman’s, loading up on $300 worth of family food for the week, 
and saying, “Hey, I have no money, so can we just work 
along?”

 There are no limits to his delusions

 OK, we knew that already. But one particular lie – his riff about immigrant women 
being blindfolded with duct tape and driven across the wall-less border – is a veritable 
road map of his mind. There isn’t a shred of evidence that this happens, and nobody in 
his administration has the faintest idea what he’s talking about.

 It all reminds me of the scene in “Citizen Kane” when Orson Welles’ blustering 
plutocrat was nailed by a political foe. Kane, pig-headed as always, vowed to fight on. 
But his foe said, “You’re making a bigger fool of yourself than I thought you would. 
If it was anybody else, I’d say that what’s going to happen to you would be a lesson to 
you. Only you’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re going to get more 
than one lesson.”

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