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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
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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