3/9-10/19: Here are a few recent stories you might have missed, or, rather, all the stories you missed if you watch Fox News.
First, let’s consider how the president is spending his time. It used to bother him when President Obama golfed. Now the Big Orange Duffer has a different opinion regarding time spent on the links. Saturday, he played a round with Lexi Thompson at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.
Sunday, he was at Mar-a-Lago, hanging with his fat cat friends. You know – taking the pulse of MAGA world. This means he has spent 173 days at golf clubs he owns since taking office.
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SECOND, LET’S NOTE that the U.S. economy added a paltry 20,000 jobs in February. To be fair, this was “a blip” and the president said so. For once, he wasn’t even lying. Still, if you remember all the times Trump and the talking heads at Fox News bashed Obama over job numbers, no matter how good, it can be amusing to share with your conservative friends a few basic facts.
In his first 25 full months in office (not counting the last part of January 2017), Trump has added…
4,911,000 jobs to the U.S. economy. He has bragged about each and every one.
True, those gains are good; but not as good as Obama in his last 25 full months in the White House. In those 25 months,
5,316,000 jobs were added to the economy.
Those numbers
come to you straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Just total up the
monthly figures.
BLOGGER’S NOTE
(9/12/20): The Bureau revises numbers twice, for every month, as final data is
compiled. Eventually, the February job gains are reduced to 1,000, narrowly
avoiding breaking a streak of what was by January 2019 a hundred consecutive
months of job growth.
That string would not be snapped until
after reaching 113 months in February 2020.
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SPEAKING OF BIG NUMBERS, the Senate Finance Committee finally got something right, calling in the heads of seven Big Pharma companies to testify about the ballooning costs of prescription drugs. You can boil down all the testimony of the Seven Robber Barons to this: Don’t blame us!
A slight price increase: from $35 to $234.
Indeed, the Big Pharma guys swore they were doing the best they could to keep prices down and it wasn’t their fault if – to take just one example – the price of insulin, which 3,000,000 Americans with type-1 diabetes must have daily to survive – has skyrocketed in recent years. Eli Lilly, for example, sold insulin for $35 per vial in 2001. By 2015 the price was $234 and still rising.
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A type-1 diabetic will need shots of insulin regularly, to survive. |
Doctors and nurses, patients who wanted to live, and families who loved them and hoped they wouldn’t die, got angry. Senators got upset, too, because angry people might vote them out of office no matter how much money drug company lobbyists threw at them to help with campaigns.
How much money does Big Pharma toss at politicians? In 2018 alone, 1,440 lobbyists for the industry, or 3.3 lobbyists for every member of Congress, handed out checks totaling $280,305,523.
You
can buy a lot of lawmakers for that much cash.
See, for example, the fine work done by Rep. John Shimkus, who serves the people of Illinois. Well, not the sick ones, anyway. In 2016 the congressman was instrumental in gathering 242 Republican signatures to block an Obama administration project to test ways to lower drug costs of Medicare Part B.
In honor of all his fine work, the pharmaceutical industry donated $295,649 to his campaign that year.
Now, here were senators from both parties lodging protest against runaway prescription prices. Even the Big Pharma guys got nervous.
Well, what do you know! On March 4, Eli Lilly announced that
it had done some thinking about how maybe prices were a little high and they
might be able to help by selling a half-price version of Humalog, their most
popular insulin injection drug, for “only” $137.50 per vial. That would still
mean insulin cost four times as much as in 2001, but that was better than eight
times, which was what it cost till this week. Of course, you had to be asking
yourself: Why was Eli Lilly charging $275 per vial to start the week?
Then again, the CEO was earning $14,498,000 per year, and lobbyists are expensive, and you have to pay Shimkus, too.
The high costs of doing business, one would guess.
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You have to assume that if Big Pharma is giving politicians billions of dollars, Big Pharma is getting repaid in some way. |
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Trump ordered staff to grant the clearances
WE LEARNED this week that intelligence experts with the F.B.I. and C.I.A. tried to block White House aide Jared Kushner from receiving a top-level secret security clearance. They were concerned that the president’s son-in-law might be manipulated due to manifold business dealings with foreign companies.
The president stepped in and ordered top officials to give Kushner (and daughter Ivanka) top-level clearance.
Then, like George Washington in reverse, the president told reporters he had nothing to do with the process.
Now we know. Trump did interfere. How do we know? The “enemies of the people” in the free press broke the story. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and White House Chief Counsel Don McGahn both wrote memos saying Trump ordered staff to grant the clearances.
And why might this matter, besides the troubling fact that
the president lies with freakish abandon?
You can sum the danger up in a few simple steps. When Kushner went to work at the White House his family was saddled with a $1.4 billion loan on a property in New York City, 666 Fifth Avenue, which was deep underwater. So Jared, thinking only of what was best for the country, tried to get Chinese interests to bail his family out. The “enemies of the people” broke that story.
The Chinese backed out.
Eventually, the Kushner family got what was needed: a sweet bailout from Brookfield Asset Management, a most reputable firm! And what do you know! It turned out Qatar was one of the major investors in Brookfield. When that story broke – again in the free press – the Qataris insisted they had no idea their hundreds of millions would be going to help the President of the United States’ son-in-law and his family extricate themselves from a jam.
By the way, the Qataris wondered, could the United States help them out in their dispute with neighboring Saudi Arabia?
Kushner: naïve and susceptible to foreign inducements.
Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano spelled out the dangers in an editorial in the Washington Examiner:
It was lawful for the president to do
this [overrule experts on clearances], but it was extremely dangerous and profoundly unwise [emphasis added throughout].
It undermined the intelligence and law enforcement communities, demeaned those
who obtained such clearances by hard work and merit, and has exposed the
nation’s most carefully guarded secrets to a person who American intelligence
believes is naive and susceptible to foreign inducements to reveal what he
knows.
If that wasn’t bad enough, General Kelly made headlines when speaking to an audience at Duke University. He had a few choice opinions to share regarding his old boss.
What about the claim – a Trump go-to-favorite – that criminals are pouring across our southern border – meaning we have a national emergency on our hands? Nah, Kelly said. The people coming, “They’re overwhelmingly not criminals. They’re people coming up here for economic purposes. I don’t blame them for that.”
What about building a Great Wall of Trump from sea to shining sea? Kelly called it “a waste of money.”
What about the president’s bright idea to use the U.S. military to police the border and build the wall?
Kelly was against it:
We have a long, long tradition
of fighting the away game and have real sense that except for natural
disasters, to interact domestically is
something that most – I would say all – military people prefer not to do….I
would look for another way to do it rather than deploy federal troops on the
border.
As for working with Mr. Trump, let’s just say General Kelly was sparing in praise. He told the audience that working in the White House was “the least enjoyable job I’ve ever had.” (Keep in mind: In one previous job, in 2003, he and his men got shot at by Saddam Hussein’s troops.) He said that for eighteen months he “helped the administration, the president of the United States make the very best decisions that he could based on the information that we could provide him.”
He didn’t say Trump listened to anything he was told.
Interestingly enough, a Fox News story on the Kelly interview carries the headline “John Kelly Reveals He Would Have Worked for Hillary Clinton if She Won, Parts with Trump on Wall.”
That headline and the lead sentence, “He would have been with her,” were enough to prompt a cult-like response from Trump fans. The general had explained that he would have worked for Clinton the same way he worked for Trump had he been asked: out of a sense of duty.
In their comments on the story, Trumpophiles insisted this
proved Kelly had gone “rogue,” that he lacked “integrity.”
My favorite response came from someone named H.R. Green:
Well, that verifies the problem
with Kelly, he’s a liberal,
that explains why a lot of pundits discussed the problem with some of Trump’s
staff. This also makes it very concerning about the movement of the military toward liberalism. I think it would
be wise to begin a major purge of the
upper ranks in the military, they will side with the democrats if push
comes to conflict.
Okay, enough with the nuts.
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DID WE JUST SAY, “Enough with the nuts?”” Perhaps you remember Pam Taylor, the West Virginia woman who made headlines in 2016. Back in the day, she described Michelle Obama as “an ape in heels.”
Ms. Taylor is in the headlines again, this time for stealing $18,149.04 from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
So now we know. Taylor wasn’t just a racist
She was also a crook in heels.
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LAST BUT NOT LEAST, the president learns the hard way (in part because he rarely learns anything at all) that a few “love letters” from Kim Jong-un don’t really mean never having to say you’re sorry.
Intelligence experts now believe that in the time between the first summit meeting between the two chunky world leaders with bad hair and the second summit meeting last month, the North Koreans produced enough uranium and plutonium to build another half-dozen nuclear weapons.
Last June, the president came away from his first meeting with Kim, convinced that he had won serious concessions. Kim had told him that the North “was already destroying” its main rocket-launching site at Sohae, on the Yellow Sea. “That’s a big thing,” Trump bragged. “The site is going to be destroyed very soon.”
That prediction proved wrong and satellite images show the
North is upgrading the site, instead.
On the other hand, this bold prediction proved true. Asked by reporters if he really thought he could trust the erratic North Korean dictator, the erratic American liar replied, “Honestly, I think he’s going to do these things. I may be wrong. I mean, I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.’”
“I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that,” he said with a sappy orange grin, “but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”
He got that right, for sure.
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Still has all his nukes! |
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