Trump declares 'socialism is dying' amid Venezuela 'catastrophe,' promises 'this will never happen to us'

President Donald Trump, speaking in a major foreign policy address in Miami to members of the Venezuelan community, declared Monday that "a new day is coming in Latin America" and issued a stark assessment that "socialism is dying" across the world.
In a wide-ranging rebuke of socialism that seemed targeted as much at Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua as it was at congressional Democrats, Trump remarked: "We know that socialism is not about justice, it's not about equality, it's not about lifting up the poor -- it's about one thing only: power for the ruling class. And, the more power they get, the more they crave. They want to run health care, run transportation and finance, run energy, education, run everything. They want the power to decide who wins and who loses, who's up and who's down, what's true and what's false, and even who lives and who dies."
Before a supportive and raucous crowd at Florida International University in Miami Trump announced, flanked by large American and Venezuelan flags, "This will never happen to us. ... To those who would try to impose socialism on the United States, we again deliver a very simple message: America will never be a socialist country."
The president's vow came as Democrats have proposed an evolving agenda of "Medicare-for-all," free college tuition, minimum wage increases and even guaranteed basic income.
"When Venezuela is free, and Cuba is free, and Nicaragua is free, this will become the first free hemisphere in all of human history," Trump said.
The address was the second time Trump publicly and forcefully has condemned what he has called "the horrors of socialism and communism" and "massive wealth confiscation" in recent weeks, following his similar vow during the State of the Union address that "America will never be a socialist country."
That remark, which left Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., stone-faced, came as part of a larger condemnation of disputed President Nicolas Maduro for "turning that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair" through a mixture of "brutality" and "socialist policies."

Venezuelan boys holding cups of a grape-flavored drink, part of the free lunch that is given out daily at the "Divina Providencia" migrant shelter in La Parada, near Cucuta, Colombia, on the border with Venezuela, on Monday. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

On Monday, Trump hammered that theme repeatedly and called on Venezuela's military to rise up and take on Maduro, who has blocked U.S. humanitarian aid shipments.
"We know the truth about socialism in Venzuela, in Cuba, in Nicaragua, and all around the world. Socialism promises prosperity, but it delivers poverty," Trump said. "Socialism promises unity, but it delivers hatred and it delivers division. Socialism promises a better future, but it always returns to the darkest chapters of the past. That never fails. It always happens. Socialism is a sad and discredited ideology rooted in a total ignorance of history and human nature, which is why socialism, eventually, must always give rise to tyranny -- which it does. Socialists profess a love of diversity, but they always insist on absolute conformity."
DEMS SIT EXPRESSIONLESS AS TRUMP DECLARES SOCIALISM WILL NEVER COME TO THE U.S.
As the crowd chanted "USA," Trump, who was joined by first lady Melania Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Adviser John Bolton, asserted, "The people of Venezuela stand at the threshold of history -- ready to reclaim their country and to reclaim their future. Not long ago, Venezuela was the wealthiest nation by far in South America. But, years of socialist rule have brought this once-thriving nation to the brink of ruin.
"The results have been catastrophic," Trump continued. "Almost 90 percent of Venezuelans now live in poverty. In 2018, hyperinflation in Venezuela exceeded one million percent. Crippling shortages of food and medicine plague the country. Socialism has so completely ravaged this great country that even the world's largest reserves of oil are no longer enough to keep the lights on."
As the monthslong political crisis in Venezuela continued, Trump took multiple generalized shots at socialism that pointedly were not limited to the country's borders.

"America will never be a socialist country."
— President Trump

"The days of socialism and communism are numbered not only in Venezuela, but in Nicaragua and Cuba as well," Trump said, as the crowd roared. "Do we love Cuba? Do we love Nicaragua? Great countries. Great potential."
Trump again declared that Guaido was the country's rightful president amid what he called an unprecedented "humanitarian disaster." He also made a public case to Venezuela's military, which has remained loyala to Maduro and could play a decisive role in the stalemate, to support Guaido's government.
Trump issued a dire warning to Venezuela's military that if they continue to stand with Maduro, "you will find no safe harbor, no easy exit and no way out. You will lose everything."
Trump added: "We seek a peaceful transition of power, but all options are open."
Trump urged the Venezuelan military to accept Guaido's offer of amnesty and refrain from violence against those opposing Maduro's government. And he praised the Venezuelan opposition, saying of the people of Venezuela, "They are turning the page on dictatorship and there will be no going back."

Free lunches prepped with lentils, a slice of bologna, rice and a piece of plantain ready to be served at a migrant shelter in La Parada, near Cucuta, Colombia, on the border with Venezuela, Monday. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

The Maduro-controlled military has blocked the U.S. from moving tons of humanitarian aid airlifted in recent days to the Colombian border with Venezuela. The aid shipments have been meant in part to emphasize the hyperinflation and shortages of food and medicine that are gripping Venezuela.
"Unfortunately, Dictator Maduro has blocked this life-saving aid from entering the country. He would rather see his people starve than give them aid, than help them," Trump said. "Millions of Venezuelans are starving and suffering while a small handful at the top of the Maduro regime plunder the regime into poverty and death. We know who they are and we know where they keep the billions of dollars they have stolen."
The aid is supposed to be moved into Venezuela on Feb. 23 by supporters of Guaido. But, Maduro has called the aid unnecessary and said it constituted an attempt to destabilize his government.
Trump delivered the remarks to a supportive audience at Florida International University in Miami. South Florida is home to more than 100,000 Venezuelans and Venezuelan-Americans, the largest concentration in the country. Trump has largely been spending the holiday weekend at his private club in West Palm Beach.

Juan Guaido speaking during an economic forum in Caracas last week. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Critics said Maduro's re-election last year was fraudulent, making his second term illegal.
On Sunday, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio -- whom Trump invoked in his Monday address -- visited a border staging point for U.S. aid to Venezuela and warned soldiers loyal to Maduro that it would be a "crime against humanity" if they blocked entry of the goods being channeled through Maduro's rivals.
An enthusiastic throng of Venezuelan migrants, some chanting "Rubio! Liberty," met the senator as he visited Cucuta and held a news conference in sight of a border bridge that has been flooded in recent months by people escaping the hardships of Venezuela's hyperinflation and severe shortages of food and medicine.
While Russia, China, Turkey and a large number of Asian and African countries still back Maduro, Rubio dismissed them, saying in English: "The countries that support Maduro do not surprise us. All of them are corrupt and none of them is a democracy and many of them are owed billions of dollars that they want to get paid by the corrupt regime."

Warren set to release $70B-per-year plan for universal child care, will tap wealth tax

It's all about tax, tax, tax!

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., acknowledges cheers as she takes the stage during an event to formally launch her presidential campaign. (AP)

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, is expected to announce a plan Tuesday that would fund universal child care by tapping into revenue from her wealth tax proposal, reports said.
The broad strokes of the plan-- which would cover 12 million children-- would mean no family would have to spend more than seven percent of its total household income, according to The Huffington Post, which first reported on the announcement. The report said the number is based off a Department of Health and Human Services figure on what qualifies as affordable child care.
The plan is still being worked on, but sources told the news outlet that they expect it to cost about $700 billion in new funding over 10 years, or four times what the federal government pays on these programs.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the average family pays $7,200 a year on child care.
The Massachusetts Democrat, a 2020 presidential candidate, would use part of the revenue from her proposed tax on the ultra-wealthy to fund the plan. Her plan calls for a two percent tax on household wealth above $50 million and an additional one percent on those above $1 billion.
Warren’s plan would set up a federal program to guarantee child care from birth until children’s entry into school. Families with income less than 200 percent of the poverty line would get free access.
Her plan would guarantee compensation for child care program workers at rates comparable to public school teachers in their areas.

Venezuelan who escaped socialist nightmare slams Green New Deal

A Venezuelan citizen who left the crisis-stricken country in his teens for America is speaking out against socialism and the Maduro regime -- and giving a warning to anyone who may support the Green New Deal backed by liberal Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Daniel Di Martino, a college student who grew up in Venezuela before his family left the socialist country when he was 16, said Monday on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” that his family went from flourishing in the upper middle class to making just two dollars a day under now-disputed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and former President Hugo Chavez.
“By the time I left Venezuela in 2016 we had a blackout every week -- and I was privileged,” Di Martino told Martha MacCallum.
He said he saw parallels between what he experienced in Venezuela and the rise of socialism in America. “I hear what I heard from the socialist regime in Venezuela, ‘everything is alright.’”
He continued, “People are starving in Venezuela because policies such as the one that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [supported] in her Green New Deal, which in reality is just the ‘red new deal’ which is just a socialist wish list, would destroy the U.S. economy and lead us into the path of Venezuela.”
President Trump on Monday spoke in Miami in front of a crowd comprised mostly of Venezuelan and Cuban Americans and asked military officials loyal to Maduro to abandon him and accept opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country's new president.
"We seek a peaceful transition of power, but all options are open," Trump said.
Di Martino outlined his family's struggles in Venezuela in a USA Today op-ed.
“I watched what was once one of the richest countries in Latin America gradually fall apart under the weight of big government,” Di Martino wrote.

Californians going to Texas Cartoons

Bill introduced to prevent President Trump from using disaster relief funds for border wall

A bill has been introduced in congress to prevent President Trump from using disaster relief funds to build the border wall.
The legislation was proposed by a group senate democrats, including several 2020 presidential contenders.
If passed, the bill would block the White House from tapping into funds from the Department of Homeland Security, and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Army Corps of Engineers.
This comes as the President signed the compromise deal last week which provides about $1.4-billion to build a border barrier. He then declared a national emergency to secure more funding for wall construction.
The White House has yet to respond to this bill.

OAN Newsroom
8:20 PM PT — Sun. Feb. 17, 2019

McCabe says Rosenstein was 'absolutely serious' about secretly recording Trump

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said in an interview broadcast Sunday that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "was not joking" when he suggested secretly recording President Donald Trump in the Oval Office following the May 2017 dismissal of FBI Director James Comey.
McCabe, speaking to CBS News' "60 Minutes," recounted a conversation soon after Comey's firing about the ongoing Russia investigation in which he said Rosenstein told him: "I never get searched when I go into the White House. I could easily wear a recording device. They wouldn't know it was there."
"Now, he was not joking," McCabe said of Rosenstein's comments. "He was absolutely serious. And in fact, he brought it up in the next meeting we had."
McCabe told "60 Minutes" that he "never actually considered taking [Rosenstein] up on the offer," but said he did discuss the matter with the FBI's then-general counsel, James A. Baker. Last fall, Baker told lawmakers during a closed-door deposition that McCabe and FBI lawyer Lisa Page came to Baker "contemporaneously" and told him details of the meeting where Rosenstein made the comments. Baker told congressional investigators he took the word of McCabe and Page "seriously."
McCabe told CBS News that "I think the general counsel had a heart attack" when he told him of Rosenstein's plan.
"And when he got up off the floor, he said, 'I, I, that's a bridge too far. We're not there yet,'" McCabe added. Days later, Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to oversee the bureau's investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Rosenstein repeatedly has denied he "pursued or authorized recording the president" and also has denied McCabe's suggestion that the deputy attorney general had broached the idea of invoking the Constitution's 25th Amendment, which allows Cabinet members to seek the removal of a president if they conclude that he or she is mentally unfit. The Justice Department echoed both denials in a statement released last week, saying Rosenstein "was not in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment."
"Rod raised the [25th Amendment] issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort," McCabe told interviewer Scott Pelley, adding that he believed Rosenstein was "counting votes or possible votes" to remove Trump from office.
"What seemed to be coursing through the mind of the deputy attorney general was getting rid of the president of the United States one way or another," Pelley suggested.
"I can't confirm that," McCabe answered. "But what I can say is, the deputy attorney general was definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity and about his intent at that point in time."
According to McCabe, Rosenstein was affected by what McCabe called an "incredibly turbulent, incredibly stressful" time after Comey's firing. The former FBI deputy director claimed Trump had instructed Rosenstein to cite the Russia investigation in a memo Rosenstein wrote justifying Comey's dismissal.
"[Trump was] saying things like, 'Make sure you put Russia in your memo.' That concerned Rod in the same way that it concerned me and the FBI investigators on the Russia case," said McCabe, who added that Rosenstein "explained to the president that he did not need Russia in his memo. And the president responded, 'I understand that. I am asking you to put Russia in the memo anyway.'"
During his interview, McCabe criticized Trump for what he called an "unwillingness to learn the true state of affairs that he has to deal with every day." He cited an account by an anonymous FBI official who met with the president only to be met with "several unrelated diatribes by Trump."
"One of those was commenting on the recent missile launches by the government of North Korea," McCabe said. "And, essentially, the president said he did not believe that the North Koreans had the capability to hit us here with ballistic missiles in the United States. And he did not believe that because [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin had told him they did not. President Putin had told him that the North Koreans don't actually have those missiles."
When intelligence officials allegedly told Trump that their information did not match what the Russian leader had told him, Trump allegedly said, "I don't care. I believe Putin."
McCabe was dismissed from the FBI in March 2018 after the Justice Department's internal watchdog concluded he approved leaking information to a Wall Street Journal reporter in order to cast himself in a positive light, then lied under oath about it. In the interview broadcast Sunday, McCabe denied intentionally misleading the DOJ's internal investigators, saying: "There's absolutely no reason for anyone and certainly not for me to misrepresent what happened ... Did I ever intentionally mislead the people I spoke to? I did not. I had no reason to. And I did not."
He added, "I believe I was fired because I opened a case against the president of the United States."
In the White House response to McCabe's claims, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders noted that "Andrew McCabe was fired in total disgrace from the FBI because he lied to investigators on multiple occasions, including under oath. His selfish and destructive agenda drove him to open a completely baseless investigation into the President. His actions were so shameful that he was referred to federal prosecutors.
"Andrew McCabe has no credibility and is an embarrassment to the men and women of the FBI and our great country."

Graham defends Trump's border security spending push, says Kentucky students better off

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., reiterated his support for President Trump's national emergency declaration at the southern border Sunday, telling CBS News' "Face The Nation" that students in Kentucky would be better off if funds that might have gone toward the construction of a new middle school would go toward building a wall along the frontier.
White House officials said Friday that they plan to spend $8 billion on the wall — the nearly $1.4 billion Congress approved for new fences and barriers, plus more than $6 billion drawn from other funds. "Face The Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan suggested to Graham that $3.6 billion of that $6 billion could come from military construction, including "including construction of a middle school in Kentucky, housing for military families, improvements for bases like Camp Pendleton [in California] and Hanscom Air Force Base [in Massachusetts]."
"Well, the president will have to make a decision where to get the money," Graham responded. "Let's just say for a moment that he took some money out of the military construction budget.
"I would say it's better for the middle-school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border," the senator added. "We'll get them the school they need. But right now we've got a national emergency on our hands. Opioid addiction is going through the roof in this country. Thousands of Americans died last year or dying this year because we can't control the flow of drugs into this country and all of it's coming across the border."
Graham also declined to say whether Congress should restrict the definition of a national emergency in order to act as more of a check on the executive branch.
"I think that every member of Congress has watched three presidents send troops to the border," he said, "Bush, Obama, now Trump. Not one of us have complained about deploying forces to the border to secure the border. It's pretty hard for me to understand the legal difference between sending troops and having them build a barrier."
"Unfortunately, when it comes to Trump, the Congress is locked down and will not give him what we've given past presidents," Graham added.  So, unfortunately, he's got to do it on his own and I support his decision to go that route."

Bill de Blasio corrects Ocasio-Cortez's claim about spending Amazon tax break money

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, left, said Sunday that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right, was wrong to have claimed the collapse of the Amazon deal would free up $3 billion to fix the city’s subways and hire more teachers. (AP)

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested on Sunday that critics of the potential Amazon campus New York City — such as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — got the facts wrong over the money behind the tax breaks.
On Sunday morning, de Blasio responded in the affirmative when Chuck Todd of NBC News’ “Meet the Press” asked if the tax breaks offered to Amazon weren’t “money you had over here. And it was going over there.”
The Democratic mayor said: “And that $3 billion that would go back in tax incentives was only after we were getting the jobs and getting the revenue.”
“There’s no money — right,” de Blasio added.
Amazon had chosen the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens to build a $2.5 billion campus that could house 25,000 workers, in addition to new offices planned for northern Virginia.
“If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money, if we wanted to,” Ocasio-Cortez said last week after the technology giant announced on Thursday that it had dropped plans to build the new headquarters in America’s largest city amid pressure from politicians and activists.
AMAZON BLASTS OCASIO-CORTEZ, SAYS ‘WE DON’T WANT TO WORK IN THIS ENVIRONMENT IN THE LONG TERM’
The mayor also noted to Todd that the deal could have been a way for progressive leaders to show a balance on economic issues.
“I have no problem with my fellow progressives critiquing a deal or wanting more from Amazon — I wanted more from Amazon, too,” de Blasio said. “The bottom line is, this was an example of an abuse of corporate power. They had an agreement with the people of New York City.”
He added: “They said they wanted a partnership, but the minute there were criticisms, they walked away. What does that say to working people, that a company would leave them high and dry, simply because some people raised criticism?”
The city was eager to lure the company and its thousands of high-paying technology jobs, offering billions in tax incentives and lighting the Empire State Building in Amazon orange in November.
De Blasio and Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the $2.8 billion in tax breaks and subsidies they were offering Amazon would result in $27 billion in tax revenue. The governor and the mayor had argued that the project would spur economic growth that would pay for the $2.8 billion in state and city incentives many times over.
“We are disappointed to have reached this conclusion — we love New York,” the online giant from Seattle said in a blog post announcing its withdrawal.
Cuomo lashed out at fellow New York politicians over Amazon’s change of heart, saying the project would have helped diversify the city’s economy, cement its status as an emerging hub of technology and generate money for schools, housing and transit.
“A small group (of) politicians put their own narrow political interests above their community,” he said.