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BRIDGEWATER, N.J./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Thursday decried the removal of monuments to the pro-slavery Civil War Confederacy, echoing white nationalists and drawing stinging rebukes from fellow Republicans in a controversy that has inflamed racial tensions.

Trump has alienated Republicans, corporate leaders and U.S. allies, rattled markets and prompted speculation about possible White House resignations with his comments since Saturday's violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a white nationalist protest against the removal of a Confederate statue.

Republican Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, questioned Trump's capacity to govern.

"The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the ability or the competence that he needs to be successful," said Corker, who Trump had considered for the job of secretary of state. Corker said Trump needed to make "radical changes."

In a series of Twitter posts on Thursday, Trump unleashed attacks on two Republican U.S. senators, Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham, raising fresh doubts about his ability to work with lawmakers in his own party to win passage of his legislative agenda including tax cuts and infrastructure spending.

Trump took aim at the removal or consideration for removal of Confederate statues and monuments in a long list of cities in California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and Texas, as well as Washington, D.C.

"Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can't change history, but you can learn from it," Trump wrote on Twitter, refusing to move past the controversy.

"Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!" Trump added. He was referring to two Confederate generals in the Civil War that ended in 1865, and to early U.S. presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves but whose legacies are overwhelmingly honored.

Opponents call the statues a festering symbol of racism, while supporters say they honor American history. Some of the monuments have become rallying points for white nationalists but also have the support of some people interested in historical preservation.

Trump also denied he had spoken of "moral equivalency" between white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, and the anti-racism activists who clashed in Charlottesville.

Amid the controversy, the White House knocked down rumors that Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn might resign. An official said Cohn "intends to remain in his position" as National Economic Council director at the White House.

Rumors of Cohn's impending departure had rattled the U.S. stock market and dollar. World equity markets and U.S. bond yields fell while gold rose on Thursday as investors favored safe-haven investments amid growing skepticism that Trump can make good on his economic agenda.

On Wednesday, Trump announced the disbanding of two high-profile business advisory councils after the resignation of several corporate executives over his Charlottesville remarks. On Thursday, a White House official said another planned advisory council on infrastructure issues will not move forward.

In another indication of businesses not wanting to be associated with the president, a world renowned hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, canceled a planned 2018 Florida fundraiser at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Florida resort, where it had held such events for seven straight years. Spokeswoman Eileen Sheil said the Cleveland Clinic considered "a variety of factors" in deciding to cancel an event that typically generates $1 million a year.

The clinic's chief executive, Toby Cosgrove, was a member of a one of the two councils that disbanded on Wednesday.

The Charlottesville violence erupted when white nationalists marched to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. A 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when a man described as a white nationalist crashed his car into the counter-protesters.

Trump has blamed the Charlottesville violence on not just the white nationalist rally organizers but also the counter-protesters, and said there were "very fine people" among both groups. Trump also expressed distaste for removing Confederate statues in a heated news conference on Tuesday.

After Trump blasted Graham on Twitter, the senator who was one of Trump's rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination fired back.

"Because of the manner in which you have handled the Charlottesville tragedy you are now receiving praise from some of the most racist and hate-filled individuals and groups in our country. For the sake of our Nation - as our President - please fix this," Graham said. "History is watching us all."

Another Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, added on Twitter, "Anything less than complete & unambiguous condemnation of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK by (Trump) is unacceptable. Period."

Graham on Wednesday had said Trump's remarks at Tuesday's news conference had suggested "moral equivalency" between the white nationalists and anti-racism demonstrators and called on the president to use his words to heal Americans.

"Publicity seeking Lindsey Graham falsely stated that I said there is moral equivalency between the KKK, neo-Nazis & white supremacists and people like Ms. Heyer. Such a disgusting lie. He just can't forget his election trouncing. The people of South Carolina will remember!" Trump wrote.

In a separate tweet, Trump called Flake "WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate. He's toxic!" and appeared to endorse Kelli Ward, Flake's Republican challenger in his 2018 re-election race.

Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, called for the immediate removal of Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol. U.S. Senator Cory Booker, also a Democrat, said he would introduce legislation so that could be done.

"There is no room for celebrating the violent bigotry of the men of the Confederacy in the hallowed halls of the United States Capitol or in places of honor across the country," Pelosi said in a statement.

A spokesman for Republican U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said it was up to U.S. states to determine which statues were displayed on their behalf in the Capitol building.

Reporting by Steve Holland and Susan Heavey; Additional reporting by Makini Brice, Richard Cowan, Caroline Valetkevitch, Deena Beasley and Gina Cherelus; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Frances Kerry and Howard Goller

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Fellow Republicans assail Trump after he defends Confederate monuments - Reuters

White supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups have no place in the Republican Party, its chairwoman, Ronna Romney McDaniel, said Wednesday morning, hours after President Donald Trump insisted that those groups did not deserve 100 percent of the blame for their violent rally over the weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.

McDaniel defended Trump, who reiterated in a Tuesday news conference inside his Manhattan skyscraper that theres blame on both sides for the deadly clashes Saturday, telling ABCs Good Morning America that the president had condemned the hate groups.

Story Continued Below

That condemnation, delivered Monday, came under great political pressure and was quickly undone Tuesday when the president repeated what had been his initial reaction, that the white supremacist groups and the protesters gathered to oppose them should share the blame for the violence that erupted.

Well, the president condemned the white supremacists and the KKK and the neo-Nazis unequivocally, McDaniel told ABC anchor David Muir.

But it took 48 hours for him to do that, Muir replied.

But he did it, and he should have, and he did. And our party across the board has said this is unacceptable. We have no place in our party at all for KKK, anti-Semitism, race racism, bigotry, it has no place in the Republican Party, she said. There is no home here. We don't want your vote. We don't support you. We'll speak out against you. The president has said so.

The violence in Charlottesville peaked Saturday when a man drove a car into a group of anti-white-supremacist protesters, killing one woman and injuring 19 other people.

Trumps remarks Tuesday that the hate groups that marched Saturday in Virginia and the demonstrators gathered to oppose them shared blame for the violence prompted quick and forceful rebukes from prominent members of his own party, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who is McDaniels uncle.

Former KKK leader David Duke, a former Louisiana state representative, thanked Trump via Twitter for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists.

Oh, I think that makes everybody's stomach turn, and I think it makes the president's stomach turn, McDaniel said when asked about Dukes online comment. She said Trump has condemned David Duke. David Duke has nothing to do with the Republican Party.

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Duke supported Trump during last years presidential campaign, an endorsement that the president did not immediately reject when asked about it in an interview. Later, under political pressure, Trump said he did not want Dukes support.

While McDaniel was insistent that the president had been unequivocal in his condemnation of the hate groups that marched on Saturday in Virginia, she diverged from Trump in assessing the blame for the deadly violence.

When it comes to Charlottesville, the blame lays squarely at the KKK and the white supremacists who organized this rally and put together an entire event around hate and bigotry, she said. I don't think comparing blame works in this situation, because we know what initiated the violence and the death of this young woman whose life was taken too soon.

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RNC chair: No place for white supremacists in the Republican Party - Politico

This August, hes been laying the groundwork for his re-election bid by holding town hall meetings around his district. The first took place on August 6 at a packed Dairy Queen in El Paso. Hurd stood in front of a line of confused locals queuing for Blizzards and offered a master class in the rhetorical skills many Republicans are going to need this cycle, a collection of talking points hes been repeating throughout his district. If you face an unhappy electorate next year, here are a few things you can learn from Will Hurd:

1. Emphasize that youll always, always shoot straight.

The people like an independent thinker, an iconoclast. They like when the Straight Talk Express comes to their town. We might not always agree, but Im always gonna be honest, Hurd tells the Dairy Queen crowd. Im gonna come out here and tell yall why Im doing what Im doing. Im gonna stand tall in Washington, D.C., and work on behalf of the 23rd District.

That sounds great. Now, lets get ready to hear some tough talk on the issues of the day the stuff that matters.

2. Quickly skate past the stuff that matters.

Washington, D.C., is a circus, Hurd says. And, uh, but, look, we havent been able to sort out the issues with health care on the individual market. We havent been able to come up with a strategy to counter covert influence so that we can stop what the Russians tried to do in 2016. In September, were gonna have to deal with a debt ceiling increase. There are still a lot of problems that were gonna need to solve.

Thats it. No solutions to the problems. Can we at least get a pithy, feel-good closer? Hurd: We cant just focus on our own jersey, whatever team were on. Theres way more that unites us than divides us.

3. Duck.

A high school teacher stands up to ask a question. Hurd, the man begins wearily, voted to repeal Obamacare nine times. He also voted to end the Obama administrations protections for Dreamers, and hes against net neutrality. Oh, and why isnt he speaking out about the administrations gutting of the EPA while representing a district with serious pollution and water quality problems?

Hurd runs through his rebuttals as quickly as possible. The man had conflated Congress vote to allow internet providers to sell your browsing history with the issue of net neutrality. Net neutrality has nothing to do with privacy, he says. Its about ensuring that everybody continues to have the kind of access to the internet that they need.

Its about tiers, the man says, trying to get his congressman back on track. Exactly, tiers, thats what net neutrality does, Hurd says. Moving on.

Some of the bills that came through to repeal Obamacare, yes, I voted for it. This time, a new bill came, a new thing, I voted against it, Hurd says. Ive always said, with health care, you gotta do a couple things. One is increase access, and one is decrease cost of health care. That bill didnt do it, so I voted against it.

In other words, Hurd voted to detonate the American health care system nine times because he knew Democrats would prevent the dumb bills he supported from becoming law. The minute he was faced with the possibility of the thing he had said he wanted to happen actually happening, he flipped. That passes for normal behavior in Congress now.

The EPA? We, people, are having an impact on our environment, Hurd says, boldly. So we gotta make sure that we leave our kids and grandkids the kind of environment that we have.

Ok. The Dreamer thing? The issue, Hurd says, is procedural. The Obama administrations method for protecting undocumented kids from deportation was improper. It should be in Congress purview. The obvious follow-up, unasked: Would he, as a member of Congress, push for that policy advocate for the many people in his district it would protect? Well, no, hes always been wishy-washy on the issue, offering verbal support for some kind of modest immigration overhaul while not actually supporting any of the major efforts to accomplish it. But he declined to even talk about that.

4. President who?

Trumps name doesnt pass Hurds lips. The closest he comes to being forced to address the White House and its occupant is when Alma Castillo, a 63-year-old who came to the U.S. at age 3 and later became a citizen, tells Hurd about the rising fear in the immigrant community.

When she misplaced her naturalization papers and sought replacements, she had been threatened with deportation, a memory that nearly brought her to tears. Tell Mr. Trump, let him know, what hes doing to this country, she says. Were all Americans, but he has divided all of us. its a horrible feeling.As Castillo is telling her story, an irate woman who says shes German-American interrupts to tell the room that she, a white person, would have been treated the same way, and that Castillo hadnt experienced racial profiling. It was an ugly moment, and provided Hurd an opportunity to express some of that political independence national observers have praised him for so lavishly. Instead, he walked over and gave Castillo a hug then offered something tepid about the economic benefit of immigration. Weve benefited from this reverse brain drain for many years, he says.

Stories about Hurds town hall tour have often played up his disagreements with the president, but theyre not substantive differences theyre dodges. Instead of Trumps big border wall, Hurd wants a smart border wall, with cameras and sensors. Hes been planning it with the help of Palmer Luckey, a Silicon Valley far-right-winger who secretly funded pro-Trump memes. The idea of the smart wall has been floating around for a while and has some Democratic support, but it also allows him to walk a wire strung between the build-the-wall and the ban-the-wall crowd. Similarly, he offers platitudes on immigration because he cant be seen to identify with a camp. Then, hes lauded for his bravery.Hurd recently told the Texas Tribune that he doesnt believe the Democrats can make Trumps toxic cloud stick to him. If hes right, its in part because of the extraordinarily low standards to which we hold Republicans who express the slightest bit of discontent with the administration. If we want to see more political courage from our elected officials, maybe we should stop so casually rewarding the hint of it.

See more here:
Will Hurd's Guide to Running as a Republican in 2018 - The Texas Observer

In one of the more abysmal legislative failures in recent memory, the Senate failed to successfully pass not only a replacement of Obamacare, but even to pass the so-called "skinny" repeal.

It's a disgraceful ending to a protracted and painful process. Republicans have run for the better part of a decade on repealing Obamacare. They passed a repeal under the Obama administration, when there was no chance of it becoming a reality. But as soon as they had a Republican president who was ready and willing to sign that legislation, too many broke their promises, betraying the voters who put them there.

Or at least some of them did. Let us be clear: Not all Senate Republicans are equally to blame for the current mess in which our government finds itself. Many have stayed faithful to their promises of repeal, even when faced with angry liberal protesters in town halls or with vitriolic comments on social media. But others specifically Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V, John McCain, R-Ariz., Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., Dean Heller, R-Nev., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, turned their back on their constituents and voted to defend Obamacare, which has seen premium increases of triple in some states.

Although the choice to defend Obamacare from these six senators shocked the nation, it hardly comes as a surprise to those who have been watching Washington closely. In recent months, there has been a growing number of Republicans who have run away from core Republican values. Indeed, many of them not just Portman, Capito, McCain, Alexander, Heller, and Murkowski hardly deserve the name of "Republican" after the events of the past several weeks.

But this, of course, raises the question what are these core Republican values? Who does deserve the name Republican? It's a complicated question, but at the end of the day, it comes down to three simple principles.

Limited government. A Republican believes in limiting the size and scope of government. Rather than having the government regulate the rise and fall of products, services and industries, a Republican sees fit to put that trust in the people, allowing them to decide how they will spend their money, how they will educate their children and how they will take care of their own health. Practically, this means voting for legislation that decreases federal regulations and reduces the power of unelected bureaucrats.

These six frauds did not do that -- in a very shocking way.

A re-worked tax code. A crucial part of limited government is lowering taxes and making a tax code that is fair and equitable. Too often, large corporate lobbies drive tax reform, securing carve-outs for themselves while small businesses and individual citizens are crushed by outsize tax burdens. True Republicans fight for a fair system, allowing large corporations, small businesses, and individuals alike to invest their hard-earned money in new markets and new ventures.

We will see which so-called Republicans push for or even support fundamental tax reform.

Constitutional government. A Republican reveres the Constitution as the first and final word on government. As such, they fight federal overreach and push for a return of power to state and local governments, per the principles of federalism outlined in the 10th Amendment. Additionally, a Republican votes to restore the constitutional separation of powers, taking a stand against the influence of unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch and against judicial overreach by the Supreme Court. They also fight for the basic rights of citizens, especially their right to privacy both online and offline and their right to due process and a fair trial.

We will watch to see if there is any action from so-called Republicans to protect us from civil asset forfeiture and whether they push more and more decisions to the state level.

These are the characteristics of a true Republican characteristics that are becoming more challenging to find inside the Beltway. But they are the characteristics that will be necessary if Congress is to make any serious headway on other key issues such as Obamacare repeal, tax reform, and regulatory reform. Let's hope that this healthcare failure serves as a wake-up call, and that Republicans can turn things around and start to do what they were elected to do, and what they promised.

Adam Brandon (@adam_brandon) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is president and CEO of FreedomWorks.

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What is a Republican anymore? These 3 key principles - Washington Examiner

WOOD RIVER A former employee of the Wood River Township Assessors Office has filed suit, claiming the assessor fired her because she protested a policy of buying or selling tickets to a Democratic fundraiser.

Sheena Howard named Assessor Sandy Shaw, a Democrat, claiming Shaw convened a meeting of her employees and told them that they were expected to sell a certain number of tickets or to buy at least two.

Plaintiff reasonably believed that it was illegal for defendant Shaw to require or otherwise instruct public employees to engage in political activity while working, including, but not limited to, the sale of fundraiser tickets.

On March 30, 2017, during an office meeting, plaintiff expressed her opposition to the practice of requiring, requesting or demanding that public employees sell tickets to fundraisers, the suit claims.

Howard then went to see Township Supervisor Mike Babcock, a Republican, and informed him of the allegedly illegal activities, the suit claims.

Shaw then allegedly put a note in Howards file, noting that Howard had met with Babcock, according to the complaint.

On April 26 and May 18, Howard was warned of excessive time off for sick days. Howard claims she took no more days off than were allotted to her.

Howard was terminated on June 1 for excessive days off and other disciplinary actions, the suit claims. Howard claims she was paid for nine hours unused sick pay.

She claims that she was perceived as a Republican at worst, or not a Democrat at best and terminated based on her perceived political affiliation. The claim that she took excessive days off was patently false, the suit claims. The stated reasons were merely a pretext, Howard claims.

Defendant Shaw terminated plaintiff in retaliation for plaintiffs speaking to Mike Babcock and to the general public about the matter of a public interest in violation of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, the suit claims.

She is asking for at least $50,000 in damages. Howard is represented Keith Short and Jack Daugherty of Collinsville.

Reached by phone Tuesday evening, Shaw declined comment.

http://thetelegraph.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/web1_TEL-Court-8.jpg

Reach reporter Sanford Schmidt at 618-208-6449.

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Wood River Township Assessor sued for allegedly targeting 'Republican' employee - Alton Telegraph