Trumpism in all its glory

These two are the best.

Trumpism in all its glory

Ex-Navy sailor pardoned by Trump says he's suing Comey and Obama

He'll never win but he has a point. Look at the facts pointing to an extreme bias.

 Compare what happened to Dinesh D'Souza vs Rosie O'Donnell concerning campaign contributions. 

  

How about General Petraeus vs Hillary Clinton? Petraeus knowingly gave classified information to his mistress Paula Broadwell and admitted his guilt. On the other hand, Hillary placed America’s most secret information on an unsecured server, information no doubt obtained by foreign hackers. She is certainly guilty of gross negligence which is in violation USC 18 Section 793 of the Espionage Act. Believe me, if anyone in the Trump administration had done this they would be behind bars! 

Now juxtapose what happened to the sailor vs Hillary. Which one is more egregious? Do you think for a minute had Hillary taken photos in that same submarine, the exact same photos, and showed it to her family and friends she would have served time in a federal prison?

 I didn't think so. 

Is she truly blind?

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A former Navy sailor who is one of five people to receive a pardon from President Donald Trump is planning to file a lawsuit against Obama administration officials, alleging that he was subject to unequal protection of the law.

Specifically, Kristian Saucier, who served a year in federal prison for taking photos of classified sections of the submarine on which he worked, argues that the same officials who meted out punishment to him for his actions chose to be lenient with Hillary Clinton in her use of a private email server and handling of classified information.

His lawyer, Ronald Daigle, told Fox News on Monday that the lawsuit, which he expects to file soon in Manhattan, will name the U.S. Department of Justice, former FBI Director James Comey and former President Barack Obama as defendants, among others.

 President Trump pardons former Navy sailor imprisoned for taking photos on a nuclear submarine; Kristian Saucier speaks with 'Fox & Friends.' “

They interpreted the law in my case to say it was criminal,” Saucier told Fox News, referring to prosecuting authorities in his case, “but they didn’t prosecute Hillary Clinton. Hillary is still walking free. Two guys on my ship did the same thing and weren’t treated as criminals. We want them to correct the wrong.”

Daigle said that a notice about the pending lawsuit was sent to the Department of Justice and others included in it in December. There is usually a six-month period that must elapse before the lawsuit actually is filed.

“We’ll highlight the differences in the way Hillary Clinton was prosecuted and how my client was prosecuted,” Daigle said. “We’re seeking to cast a light on this to show that there’s a two-tier justice system and we want it to be corrected.”

While campaigning, and after taking office, Trump frequently voiced support for Saucier, who in March became the second person he pardoned.

Trump often compared the Obama administration’s handling of Saucier’s case with that of Clinton.

Saucier, who lives in Vermont, pleaded guilty in 2016 to taking photos inside the USS Alexandria while it was stationed in Groton, Connecticut, in 2009. He said he only wanted service mementos, but federal prosecutors argued he was a disgruntled sailor who had put national security at risk by taking photos showing the submarine's propulsion system and reactor compartment and then obstructed justice by destroying a laptop and camera.

Didn't Hillary destroy her phone and erase 31,000 emails... under subpoena no less? Didn't she say, "I never sent nor did I receive any classified emails?" Wasn't that proven to be a lie?

The fact she intertwined her personal emails like a Gmail account with the affairs of Secretary of State had to be a crime unto itself. 

Saucier said that he recognized he had erred in taking the photos, which he said he wanted to show only to his family to show them where he worked. But he lashed out at Obama officials, saying that his prosecution was politically motivated, prompted by sensitivity about classified information amid the scandal involving Clinton's emails.

“My case was usually something handled by military courts,” he said. “They used me as an example because of [the backlash over] Hillary Clinton.”

Saucier, 31, said that the pardon has enabled him to pick up the pieces and rebuild his life with his wife and young daughter.

 A felony conviction left him scrambling to find work; he finally landed a job collecting garbage. Now, he works on design and engineering projects for an industrial boiler company.

“Things are starting to go in the right direction,” Saucier said. “I work with a group of really great people, I get to use my skills set.”

Because of the loss of income during his imprisonment, as well as earning below his potential when he collected garbage, he and his wife Sadie lost their home to foreclosure.

Debt collectors called and his cars were repossessed.

“With a pardon, there’s no magic wand that gets waved and makes everything right,” he said, “But I try to stay positive and look forward.”

He praises the pardons that Trump has granted after his, and takes exception at the criticism.

“The Obama administration singled out Dinesh for things most people don’t even get charged for,” Saucier said. “President Trump noticed that my career was exemplary and that I didn’t deserve what happened to me.

Conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza, who was pardoned by Trump last week, had pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud.

Trump tweeted Thursday: "Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D'Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!"

D'Souza was sentenced in 2014 to five years of probation after he pleaded guilty to violating federal election law by making illegal contributions to a U.S. Senate campaign in the names of others.

Ex-Navy sailor pardoned by Trump says he's suing Comey and Obama

Dennis Rodman will be in Singapore during Trump-Kim summit, report says

There's got to be a joke in here somewhere.

Reports say that the former NBA star will be in the country prior to the president's meeting with the North Korean leader, Fox Business Network host Charles Payne provides insight on 'Your World.'

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un will reportedly continue their unusual bromance at the much-anticipated summit in Singapore.

Rodman, who struck up a relationship with the strongman during a visit in 2013, will be traveling to Singapore a day before the June 12 sitdown between President Trump and Kim, the New York Post reported Tuesday.

“No matter what you might think about his presence, one thing’s for sure the ratings will be huge,” a source told the Post. “A lot of times in situations that involve complex diplomacy, countries like to identify ambassadors of goodwill, and whether you agree with it or not, Dennis Rodman fits the bill."

The Hall of Famer is also reported to be playing “some sort of role in the negotiations.”

In the past, 56-year-old Rodman has praised Trump for the planned summit, saying it was “a historical meeting no U.S. president has ever done.”

The legendary rebounder -- who played from 1986 to 2000 for the Pistons, the Spurs, the Bulls, the Lakers and the Mavericks -- has previously said that he would have liked to “straighten things out” between Kim and the U.S. amid nuclear tensions, but also admitted that the dictator was “probably a madman.”

Dennis Rodman presents Donald Trump's "Art of the Deal" to North Korean Sports Minister Kim Il Guk in June 2017. (Associated Press)

Rodman has visited the Hermit Kingdom five times since 2013 and even gave the regime’s sports minister a copy of Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” as a gift for Kim's birthday in 2017.

Rodman, aka “the Worm,” also has ties to Trump, with an appearance on his reality TV show “Celebrity Apprentice” back in 2009 and again in 2013.

Dennis Rodman will be in Singapore during Trump-Kim summit, report says

Trump's 'tragic' policies likely to make child poverty much worse, says UN

First of all the UN is about worthless as used toilet paper. Secondly, this article is from The Guardian not exactly a bastion of conservative thought. 

New report finds millions of children are without food and homes, and the prospect of escaping poverty is impossible under Trump

Bear in mind children living in poverty only occurred when Trump became president. There was none when Barry occupied the WH. 

BTW...I guess no one at The Guardian bothered to check the latest blowout economic numbers under the Trump presidency.

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Ed Pilkington Sat 2 Jun 2018 01.00 EDT

The Trump administration must pay urgent attention to the shockingly high number of children living in poverty in the US, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty declares in a heavyweight report on the condition of America today – warning of the prospect of the American dream “becoming the American illusion”.

Philip Alston, who acts as the UN’s watchdog on poverty and inequality around the world, spells out in blunt and unremitting terms the damage wrought by child poverty in one of the world’s richest countries. In his findings on conditions in the US, he highlights the personal suffering of millions of children who are left without food, homes and futures and warns that such deprivation is killing the American dream. 

He lays out the brutal statistics:

18% of American children – some 13.3 million – were living in poverty in 2016, making up almost a third of the total poor; more than one in five homeless people are children, including 1.3 million school students who were without a home during the academic year; infant mortality, at 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births, is almost 50% higher than other advanced nations; the US ranks 25th out of 29 industrialized countries in terms of the amount it invests in young children. 

“This is tragic and unconscionable, to treat so many children in this way, but it is also a totally self-defeating economic policy,” Alston said in an interview with the Guardian. “The ramifications are clear and considerable – the US is building a future citizenry that is under-nourished, under-educated, under-stimulated, and that in turn will rebound dramatically on the society itself.”

While child poverty has been a pressing problem for many years in the US, Alston warns that policies being pursued by the Trump White House are likely to make it much worse. Food stamps, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Snap, helped almost four million children stay out of the clutches of poverty in 2015 – now Trump is proposing in his 2019 budget to cut the program by almost a third.

Carolyn Miles, president and chief executive of Save the Children US, said the food stamp program was critical for struggling families. “This is certainly not the time to be cutting these benefits in America,” she said.

A new report by Save the Children on the US finds that children in America are at least twice as likely to be poor as children in Norway, Iceland, Slovenia, Ireland, Sweden, and Germany. That disparity rises to more than five times as likely to be poor when compared to children in Finland and Denmark. 

One of the most insidious aspects of poverty among the under-18s is how it eviscerates individuals’ prospects of advancement, and thus undercuts one of the main glues of American society – the almost universally shared belief in the “American dream” of an equal opportunity to achieve success through hard work and aspiration. Alston points out that the US has one of the lowest rates of social mobility between generations of any rich country – not least because child poverty is so prevalent.

“We know children who grow up in poverty have very little prospect of escaping from it,” he said. “That’s being locked in, here, ensuring the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.” 

Some of the most visceral child poverty can be found in rural areas, particularly in the midwest and deep south, paradoxically where a lot of Trump voters live. Carolyn Miles recently returned from Duncan, Mississippi, a small town of about 500 people in the heart of depressed cotton country where a stunning 80% of the children live in poverty.

(Of course, when Barry was president they all had a Rolls and dined on lobster every night)

“This area is completely desolate, it’s a really rough place to live for kids. Families can’t put food on the table every day. Every single child in local schools is on the federal school lunch program, many schools serve breakfast and some even dinner,” she said.

Save the Children works with Mississippi children to try to improve literacy rates. They have found that by the time they start kindergarten at age four, many kids are already 18 months behind the national average educational ability.

“We are trying to get these kids a shot, just to have a chance at an even playing field,” she said.

The paucity of health care and other services, particularly in rural areas, forces parents into having to make painful decisions about how to allocate their meager incomes. Alston, who carried out an official UN fact-finding mission in December that took him to some of the poorest parts of the US, came across a particularly emotive dilemma.

“Parents explained they had to decide between buying their child a Christmas present or saving it for essential food or shoes. There was no money to spare, and anything that was done out of the ordinary, such as buying a present, would penalize the child,” he said.

Trump's 'tragic' policies likely to make child poverty much worse, says UN

Numbers so good even the leftist NYT'S has to admit it.

Headline June 1, 2018:

We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are


This is the NYT's... right?

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The economy is in a sweet spot, with steady growth and broad improvement in the labor market.

June 1, 2018

Signs of the times in a Jersey City restaurant.Julio Cortez/Associated Press

The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately.

So, for example, “splendid” and “excellent” fit the bill. Those are the kinds of terms that are appropriate when the United States economy adds 223,000 jobs in a month, despite being nine years into an expansion, and when the unemployment rate falls to 3.8 percent, a new 18-year low. 

“Salubrious,” “salutary” and “healthy” work as words to describe the 0.3 percent rise in average hourly earnings, which are up 2.7 percent over the last year — a nice improvement but also not the kind of sharp increase that might lead the Federal Reserve to rethink its cautious path of interest rate increases.

And a broader definition of unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for a job out of frustration, fell to 7.6 percent. The jobless rate for African-Americans fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest on record, which we would count as “great.”

If anything, some of the thesaurus offerings don’t really do these numbers justice. But some aspects of the report would be fairly described as “solid,” “decent” or “benign,” such as the uptick in the ratio of the adult population that is employed to 60.4 percent, which only matches its recent high of earlier in the year. 

Then there are other thesaurus synonyms for “good” that we don’t normally use in reference to employment numbers, but which are apropos this month. For example, “congruous,” in the sense that the various pieces of the report align with each other: Employers are creating more jobs, leading more people to work and fewer people to be unemployed, and leading wages to rise. 

And the numbers are “propitious” and “agreeable” in that they affirm that the United States economy is in basically sound shape, displaying neither the slightest warning signs of recession nor any clear evidence of overheating and inflation risks. 

Not all of the thesaurus words for “good” work quite so well in describing the May jobs numbers. For example, I’ve never tried to eat the 39-page report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I’m pretty sure “toothsome” and “palatable” are not adjectives I would use.

I would also argue against viewing economic data through the kind of philosophical lens that might lead a person to view employment data as “virtuous” or “righteous.” Macroeconomics is more like a really unpredictable machine than it is a morality play in which one set of policies is inherently more righteous than the other. (German economists, with their fierce opposition to deficits and fear of inflation, might disagree.)

So in an era of geopolitical risks and potential trade wars, the thing to take away from the May numbers is that the United States economy just keeps humming along at a steady pace, putting more people to work and at gradually higher wages.

It isn’t perfect — wage growth remains unexceptional despite its growth spurt in May, and the ratio of prime-age adults working remains below its historical levels.

But it has been a strikingly durable and steady expansion, which is what the nation needed after the scars of the 2008 recession. And that’s just plain “good.”

Numbers so good even the leftist NYT'S has to admit it.