Friday, January 12, 2018

Incredibly, A Half Century Has Passed . . .

King’s dream is the American dream 
Today, President Donald J. Trump signed the official proclamation making this Monday, January 15, the “Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday.” This year marks the first time in more than a decade that the federal holiday falls on King’s actual birthday.
Here is a look at what the President told Americans today:
  • Reverend King preached love throughout his life—love for each other, for our fellow Americans, and for humanity. That is what drove his work.
  • We celebrate King first and foremost for standing up for the self-evident truth Americans hold so dear: No matter the color of our skin, or the place of our birth, we are ALL created equal by God.
  • This April will mark half a century since King was cruelly taken from us by an assassin’s bullet. As we mourn his loss, we also pledge to fight for his dream of equality, freedom, justice, and peace.
‘We need to do more than simply remove people’ 
“America has 5 percent of the world’s population, but we have 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated,” Texas Public Policy Foundation President Brooke Rollins told reporters before a meeting with President Trump on prison reform yesterday.
The White House meeting comes as part of the Administration’s effort to improve the U.S. prison system. It brought together prison reform experts—including two governors who are leading the charge at the state level.
Governors Matt Bevin (R-KY) and Sam Brownback (R-KS) walked through how their states have implemented changes in the correctional system, focusing on how to help prisoners become productive contributors to society upon release.
“We’ll be very tough on crime, but we will provide a ladder of opportunity to the future,” President Trump said.

‘More dangerous than they’ve ever been’ 
Earlier this week, President Trump signed the INTERDICT Act, a bipartisan effort to provide Customs and Border Protection officers with the equipment needed to detect fentanyl—“our new big [drug] scourge,” the President said.
“In 2016, nearly 20,000 Americans died as a result of using synthetic opioids such as fentanyl,” he continued. “The drugs, for a lot of reasons, are far more dangerous than they’ve ever been.”
“It’s something that is absolutely urgent. It’s the number one killer now, in terms of overdoses, in . . . Massachusetts,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) said. “And, unfortunately, over the past several years, it has increased every single year.”

PHOTO OF THE DAY


United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin  | January 11, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)

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