Politics

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi may have survived November’s contentious leadership vote - securing an eighth term as the Democrats’ leader in the House despite an abysmal election-day performance and a formidable challenge by Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, a 43-year-old Congressman from Youngstown, Ohio – but tensions between the San Francisco congresswoman and rank-and-file lawmakers, many of whom believe (correctly) that her toxic public personal outweighs her effectiveness as a fundraiser, never subsided.

In the months leading up to the November 2016 election, Trump repeatedly referred to Obama's secretive Iran Nuclear deal as "the worst deal I've ever seen negotiated" (here's just one example).  Of course, for a man who only speaks in absolutes, it's difficult to know what that meant for the fate of the deal but it didn't sound positive, nonetheless.

Via The Daily Bell

It’s all illegal! That’s Madrid’s position on the referendum in Catalonia. Of about 5.5 million eligible voters, about 2.4 million chose–or were able–to cast ballots. 90% of them voted in favor of independence from Spain.

Spanish courts have ruled, and leaders have repeated, that the country’s Constitution does not allow a region to separate. European Union courts have echoed this position.

The House passed its 2018 budget resolution Thursday (with 18 Reps voting against) crossing the first threshold toward its goal of sending tax reform legislation to President Trump.

As WaPo reports, the House budget resolution includes major spending cuts demanded by the party's conservative wing, but the party's focus is now on passing a tax bill that could add as much as $1.5 trillion to the budget deficit. Special procedures set out in the legislation would ultimately allow Republicans to pass the bill over a potential Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

Over the past two months, China, North Korea’s economic benefactor and formally the source of 90% of its foreign trade, has been withdrawing financial support, ostensibly under the auspices of US sanctions, as Communist Party leaders try to rein in the North’s nuclear program to appease the US and prevent a potentially destabilizing conflict on its border – a development that would be particularly unwelcome during the Communist Party’s upcoming national congress.