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Column: The essence of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi comes through in her not-farewell address

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Column: The essence of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi comes through in her not-farewell address

The not-farewell deal with Nancy Pelosi delivered Thursday captured the quintessence of her history-making profession.

The departing Home speaker was, as ever, immaculately turned out. She wore white, the colour of the suffragette motion, of which Pelosi was a legatee and large champion.

She learn, dutifully, from ready remarks that have been crammed with the everyday exhortations and platitudes — a reference to the “Star Spangled Banner,” a paean to the Capitol and its moon-glow dome at evening — that pepper her often-uninspiring speeches.

Above all, she was clear-eyed and unsentimental. Her voice solely briefly quavered when Pelosi talked about her husband, Paul, who continues to be recovering from an assault by a hammer-wielding assailant who invaded the couple’s San Francisco residence on a mission of hatred and political vengeance.

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Pelosi’s nice power has by no means been that of a public speaker. Fairly, it’s the expertise she dropped at the speakership: great political savvy, a mastery of the legislative course of, an absence of blind ideology and — not least — the power to rely votes, learn a room and know when it was time to name the vote, and time to maneuver on.

Pelosi had given her phrase, 4 years in the past when her maintain over the Democratic caucus was shaky below strain from formidable youthful members, that she would serve not more than two further phrases within the speakership.

That point runs out in January and Democrats’ far-better-than-expected exhibiting in final week’s midterm election gave her a swish technique to preserve her phrase. She knew her departure was being anticipated and now she will be able to take her go away and accomplish that beneath no darkish cloud.

Her choice to remain in Congress, falling again into the ranks of Democratic members, was a shock, although Pelosi — the primary girl speaker in historical past and one of the completed ever to wield the gavel — will clearly be no typical back-bencher.

President Biden and Pelosi’s counterpart within the Senate, Majority Chief Chuck Schumer, made clear their want she keep on, and she is going to likely be accessible for counsel to these two and whomever takes her place as head of the Democratic caucus.

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(Shrewd to the final, it appeared no accident that Pelosi’s announcement coincided with — and vastly overshadowed — Republicans’ first day because the majority-in-waiting and obscured the announcement the brand new GOP majority would launch a probe into Biden and his household’s enterprise dealings.)

“When you’ve recognized Nancy Pelosi as I’ve going again to when, as she mentioned, she simply was a housewife, that is precisely what you’d count on,” mentioned Artwork Agnos, a former San Francisco mayor and buddy of the Pelosi household. “She’s leaving with grace and dignity whereas promising to be round and accessible if she may be of assist to anybody.”

If there may be disappointment — and none dare converse it aloud — it’s among the many ranks of San Francisco politicians, who’ve quietly waited for the day Pelosi would stand apart. It isn’t a operate of disrespect; on the contrary, Pelosi is a beloved and deeply admired establishment within the metropolis she has represented in Congress for properly over three many years.

Fairly, it’s the reality Pelosi has been in workplace so lengthy and generations of would-be successors have aged out and retired from public life, their hopes aborning as her tenure endures.

Anybody eyeing the congressional seat — the one San Francisco has to supply — should wait no less than one other two years. Pelosi was simply reelected for the 18th time final week with 84% assist. Though it’s onerous to think about, it’s not inconceivable to see Pelosi working once more in 2024, at age 84, and handily being ushered right into a nineteenth time period.

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4 years in the past, sipping espresso at a bistro in downtown Miami, Pelosi indulged in a uncommon dialogue of her political future. She is strongly allergic to the topic, an aversion that’s shared amongst her congressional workers and others near the speaker.

However on that sunny day, whereas campaigning in a midterm election that will return Democrats to energy and restore Pelosi to the speakership, she was unusually open to the dialogue.

“I see myself as a transitional determine,” Pelosi mentioned in an interview, through which she expressed attribute confidence of victory and reclaiming the speaker’s gavel. “I’ve issues to do. Books to write down; locations to go; grandchildren, at first, to like.”

Pelosi named these grandchildren Thursday in a proud reverie as she spoke from the properly of the Home. However they’ll have to attend for her undivided consideration. So, too, any books she could want to write.

Pelosi is just not completed in Congress.

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Trump team fires back at Biden campaign's Mother's Day video: 'Sad, miserable, cowardly existence'

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Trump team fires back at Biden campaign's Mother's Day video: 'Sad, miserable, cowardly existence'

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The Biden campaign is using Mother’s Day to criticize former President Trump in a new campaign video, urging Americans to “Stop Trump.”

“Happy Mother’s Day. At the Biden campaign, we are asking Americans to do the moms in their lives a favor. Stop Trump,” the Biden campaign wrote in a press release.

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In the video, the Biden campaign says that “On Mother’s Day, a reminder: Donald Trump stands only for himself and not mothers across America and their families.”

“The stakes of this election are high for all Americans, but especially moms across our country who will suffer under a second Trump term,” the video states.

JD VANCE SLAMS NY V TRUMP TRIAL AS DEM EFFORT TO DISTRACT THAT THE ‘WORLD IS ON FIRE’ UNDER BIDEN

Biden said Trump would devastate maternal health and hurt women across the country by working to sabotage and repeal the Affordable Care Act. (AP/File)

“Under Trump, the government will be allowed to monitor their pregnancies, and rip their families apart. Meanwhile President Biden is fighting to bring back his historic expanded Child Tax Credit to give families a little extra breathing room, and ensure paid leave for all Americans,” the message from the Biden campaign continued.

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The Biden campaign noted several points in explaining why voters need to vote for him over Trump in the upcoming election.

His reasoning included blaming Trump for families being denied access to fertility treatments; allowing states to monitor women’s pregnancies; that Trump believes women who have an abortion should face “some form of punishment”; and that Trump “proudly separated mothers from their children.”

Biden’s other points said Trump would devastate maternal health and hurt women across the country by working tirelessly to sabotage and repeal the Affordable Care Act; Biden’s final point said Trump’s economic plan would be an “inflation bomb” that would raise costs for mothers and families.

“Families depend on moms – and moms deserve a President they can depend on to protect their rights, work to lower their costs, and fight for them. Donald Trump wasn’t and isn’t that President, but Joe Biden is,” Biden’s campaign wrote.

WHITE HOUSE SHOULD BE ‘CONCERNED’ AS TRUMP RALLIES AS MANY AS 100K IN DEEP-BLUE NEW JERSEY: ‘EXTRAORDINARY’

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Trump and Biden split image

Trump’s team fired back at the president, calling his video a disgusting move to make, especially on Mother’s Day. (Getty Images/File)

In response to the new campaign video, Trump’s team fired back at the president, calling his video a disgusting move to make, especially on Mother’s Day.

“What a sad, miserable, cowardly existence Crooked Joe Biden and his campaign must have to make such a disgusting ad on such a joyous day. Their lives are obviously filled with anger, hate, and resentment because they clearly suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump’s team told Fox News Digital.

“President Trump continues to live rent-free in their pea-sized brains, even on Mother’s Day.”

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Opinion: The porn star with a well-deserved place in American history

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Opinion: The porn star with a well-deserved place in American history

Last week, after Stormy Daniels spent nearly eight hours over two days testifying in former President Trump’s hush money trial in New York, the time seemed right to crack open her memoir, “Full Disclosure.”

I had missed the book when it was published in 2018, but now that she has been a star witness in the first criminal trial of an American ex-president, a trial that has seen the introduction of the memorable phrase “orange turd,” I wanted to read her version of her relationship with the man who claims he barely knew her and certainly never had sex with her.

Opinion Columnist

Robin Abcarian

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As you can imagine, Daniels, 45, who began her career as a stripper, has had a fascinating, tumultuous life. She is smart, bawdy and hilariously self aware.

For example, in 1999, while she was unconscious on the operating table, her plastic surgeon decided to dramatically increase the size of the breast implants they’d agreed on. When she awoke, she writes, she was shocked and angry. But not for long. Her breasts, which she calls Thunder and Lightning, have been integral to her success.

“It’s amazing,” she writes, “what blond hair and big boobs instantly do, by the way.” Noted.

By the age of 22, Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had become a successful adult film actor, writer and director.

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She was so successful, in fact, that in 2009, she was recruited to run against then-Louisiana Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter, a family values crusader who was revealed to have ties to prostitutes. “My endgame,” she writes, “was to get someone more qualified to step up to the plate.” Her motto in that brief campaign: “Stormy Daniels: Screwing people honestly.”

She had small parts in the Judd Apatow movies “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up.” For a Maroon 5 music video, she chased Adam Levine in a sexy cop costume.

Apatow’s producer Shauna Robertson invited her to tag along on the sets of “Pineapple Express,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Superbad,” which is how she learned to make films.

After the hush money scandal broke in 2018, Seth Rogen told Ellen DeGeneres, “I’ve known Stormy Daniels a long time, and I’ll be honest, she may have mentioned this stuff around 10 years ago. At the time, when you asked a porn star who they’d been sleeping with, and the answer was Donald Trump, it was like the least surprising thing she could have said.”

The reason she agreed to have dinner with Trump on that fateful evening in 2006, at the urging of her publicist, was because she thought he might help her career. She’d been impressed when she met him earlier that day that he had looked at her face, not her breasts. He wanted to know all about the business aspects of the porn industry.

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She spent three hours in his hotel penthouse, and she still seems mad that he never served dinner. “I am food motivated,” she testified.

I have no doubt that she is telling the truth about their sexual encounter, nor that she submitted to him without being physically forced to, in order to get it over with. There certainly was, as she testified, a “power imbalance.” He was almost 60; she was 27. His bodyguard was posted outside his door.

Nor do I doubt, as she testified, that she was shocked when she emerged from the bathroom to find him lying on the bed in his underwear, nor that her hands were shaking so badly afterward that she had trouble putting her shoes on.

And when it was over, I have no doubt that Trump actually said, as she writes, “Oh that was just great. We’re so good together honeybunch.” (I mean, who could make that up?)

Trump, then reality television’s biggest star thanks to “The Apprentice,” had dangled the possibility of her appearing on his show. He thought it would be a ratings boon to have a porn star as a contestant.

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“You’d be fabulous on it,” she says he told her. “You’d be huge.”

That is the only reason she met him again in July 2007 in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she writes, and took his many phone calls until January 2008 when it became clear that there was no way NBC was going to feature a porn star in its hit show.

I am not sure I fully understand why it was so important to put Daniels on the stand for hour after hour last week, and to focus so heavily on whether she and Trump actually had sex in 2006, which he denies.

Aren’t his denials, after all, transparently false? He’s a man who has bragged about grabbing women by the genitals, saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” And he’s been found liable in a civil trial for what the judge called rape “as many people commonly understand the word.”

Anyway, the question in the hush money trial is not whether he actually had sex with Daniels. It’s whether he falsified business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to Daniels for her silence during the 2016 election.

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Of course he did. But only a jury can decide whether that was illegal.

That makes Stormy Daniels, however riveting her testimony, a sideshow at the trial.

Whether Trump is convicted or not, Daniels has secured her place in presidential history. Sideshows, after all, are often the most memorable part of the circus.

@robinkabcarian

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Treacherous migration route through Panama to shut down under newly elected president

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Treacherous migration route through Panama to shut down under newly elected president

The incoming president of Panama has vowed to make big changes to help alleviate the U.S. border crisis.

President-elect Jose Raul Mulino vowed to shut down a crucial migration gap through Panama that has been used by more than 500,000 migrants over the last year, signaling a shift in the country’s policy as the U.S. continues to battle a crisis at its southern border, according to a report from Voice of America.

“Panama and our Darien [Gap] are not a transit route. It is our border,” Mulino said, according to the report.

CNN’S ZAKARIA SAYS BIDEN SHOULD ‘LEARN SOMETHING FROM TRUMP’ AND ADOPT HIS BORDER POLICIES, REFORM ASYLUM LAWS

Panamanian President-elect Jose Raul Mulino celebrates with his supporters after being declared the winner of the presidential election, according to preliminary results from the electoral authority, in Panama City on May 5, 2024. (Daniel Gonzalez/Anadolu via Getty Images)

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Panama had previously helped bus migrants through the critical gap and allowed them to continue their journey north, a policy that has allowed thousands to reach the U.S. border with Mexico.

The shift comes as the U.S. has put continued pressure on Mexico to help alleviate the crisis, calling on the country to help enforce movement restrictions through its territory to prevent migrants from eventually reaching the U.S. border.

The Darien Gap, although a dangerous route north toward the U.S., has become a popular route among migrants in recent years, with cartels and other organized crime organizations stepping in to make it an affordable option for those seeking to reach the United States.

Migrants

Haitian migrants rest in the Darien Gap near Acandi, Colombia, as they travel to Panama on their way to the United States on Sept. 26, 2021. (Raul Arboleda/AFP via Getty Images)

BIDEN’S BORDER POLICY ISN’T INCOMPETENCE, IT’S BY DESIGN: EX-ICE CHIEF

Mulino, who won with 34% of the vote last week, said the new policy would make Panama a less attractive option for migrants and criminal organizations.

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“Because when we start to deport people here in an immediate deportation plan, the interest for sneaking through Panama will decrease,” Mulino said of the plan, according to Voice of America. “I assure you they are going to say that going through Panama is not attractive because they are deporting you.”

Nevertheless, some experts expressed skepticism that such a plan would meaningfully reduce migration. Analyst Adam Isacson of the nongovernmental organization Washington Office on Latin America said Panama does not have the capacity to “massively deport” thousands of migrants.

Dairen Gap migrants in jungle

Migrants, mostly from Ecuador, Haiti and Nigeria, are shown walking in the Darien Gap in Colombia on Nov. 20, 2022. (Jan Sochor/Getty Images)

“A daily plane, which would be extremely expensive, would only repatriate around 10% of the flow (about 1,000 to 1,200 per day). The United States only manages to do about 130 flights monthly in the entire world,” Isacson said.

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