Tag Archives: Barack Obama

business news

Jobs report: once cooked up, now legit?

Donald John Trump has this maddening capacity for talking out of both sides of his mouth and for avoiding accountability for it.

The U.S. Labor Department’s jobs report this week is an example of it. The bean counters at the Labor Department reported that 223,000 jobs were added to non-farm payrolls in May. Unemployment fell to 3.8 percent.

Good news? Of course it is! The president should take a victory lap on this one. He hailed the report so much that he actually sort of spilled the beans an hour before the data were released, breaking with longstanding presidential protocol. Some critics are concerned that he might have manipulated stock markets around the world by offering that hint of the good news that was about to be revealed.

But wait! He once derided those same bureaucrats’ findings when they delivered stellar jobs report numbers during the Barack Obama administration. He called them phony, cooked up. He said the actual jobless rate during President Obama’s time in office was many times greater than what the Labor Department said it was.

So, which is it? Were they cooked up then and have gained validity just because Trump is in office?

This is the kind of duplicity that Trump gets away with. It simply is astonishing in the extreme that the man’s “base” continues to cheer him on, giving him more incentive to keep lying to the nation.

Weird.

entertainment news, political news

POTUS keeps this story burning

A two-day story has been given more life by none other than the president of the United States.

Yep, Donald J. Trump has weighed in on ABC-TV’s decision to cancel “Roseanne” because of a stupid and blatantly racist tweet by the star of the show, Roseanne Barr.

She compared former Barack Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an “ape.” Oh, yes. Jarrett is African-American. Barr’s tweet also had a touch of Islamophobia, too, referring to the “Muslim Brotherhood.”

ABC canceled “Roseanne” on the spot.

Trump’s response was to fire off a tweet of his own wondering why ABC didn’t react to all the negative things that have been said about him on the network.

Good grief, Mr. President.

Your plate should be overflowing with important matters. You know, things like that on-off-again summit with Kim Jong Un, trade wars with China, keeping the Middle East from exploding in flames.

Instead, this tweet tyrant in chief brings more attention to Roseanne Barr, a noted fan of the president.

Should this story be on millions of Americans’ minds right now? No. It should be set aside. The head of state has bigger fish to fry. If only the president of the United States would butt the hell out.

entertainment news

‘Roseanne’ not too big to … cancel

Roseanne Barr now has managed to offend both ends of the wide political spectrum.

Years ago, she took the field at the start of an athletic event to offer a horrendous rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Many of us have heard her “singing” of the anthem. We weren’t pleased. It wasn’t funny. Conservatives were outraged.

Ahh, but the comic wasn’t done. Today she posted a tweet in which she offered a racist reference to Valerie Jarrett, a former senior policy adviser to President Barack Obama.

She wrote: “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”

Funny, huh? Nope. It isn’t. ABC Television promptly canceled the return of “Roseanne.”

Barr apologized. She took her tweet down. She deleted her Twitter account. Too late, Roseanne. The damage is done.

As for ABC’s decision to cancel the show, well, I don’t much care one way or the other. I didn’t watch the show 30 years ago; I didn’t watch its return. I had heard about Roseanne Barr’s pro-Donald Trump tilt and about her TV character’s similar leanings. Honest to goodness, that didn’t bother me in the least.

Racist rants from public figures? They bother me. A lot.

Good riddance, Roseanne.

national news

Another Trump allegation proving false?

I am not a betting man, but if I were I might be willing to wager some real American money that Donald John Trump’s allegation of spying within his 2016 presidential campaign is going to go the way of earlier allegations that flew out of his guy’s mouth.

You know … that Barack Obama wiretapped his office; that millions of undocumented immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton; that thousands of Muslims cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11; that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father might have been complicit in President Kennedy’s murder; that Obama was born in Africa and not in Hawaii and, thus, was ineligible to run for president in 2008.

It’s all crap. Now the latest.

He accuses the FBI of planting a “spy” in his campaign. He says the deed was done for “political purposes.” He has produced as much actual evidence of this latest assertion as he did for all the others.

None. Zilch.

Even some congressional Republicans are backing the FBI in the face of these allegations from Trump.

The president is reaching deep into his bag of tricks to discredit the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, who the Justice Department appointed in 2017 to look into the “Russia thing,” meaning whether Trump might have worked with Russians who meddled in our election.

The FBI has become one of Trump’s preferred bogeymen. He fired the former FBI director, James Comey, because of the Russia investigation. He is calling Comey a liar; he is disparaging the reputation of former CIA boss John Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper and, yes, also Robert Mueller.

Where, though, is the evidence to back up the allegation of “spying” within his campaign? No one has seen it.

If I were inclined to place a bet on this one, my hunch is that there is no evidence to be found. Why? Because it didn’t happen.

Which brings me to the question: How in the name of political sanity does this guy, the president, get away with lying at this level?

national news

Longing for a return of this kind of collegiality

I believe I have shared this video already, but I want you to look at it again.

It speaks to a “kinder, gentler” time in Washington, D.C. A president of one political party welcomed back his immediate predecessor, a president of another party.

They unveiled official White House portraits of President Bush and first lady Laura Bush. President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama spoke of the “seamless transition” from one administration to another. They spoke of warmth and hospitality, of cooperation and collegiality.

That kind of mood is missing these days. I want it to return. Perhaps one day it will.

Enjoy this video. It tells me that political opponents need not be enemies. That love of country transcends the partisan divide.

Honest. It does.

business news

Is Trump responsible for gas price hikes?

I believe it was around 2011. Gasoline prices were spiking.

Republicans were aghast at the fuel prices. They couldn’t understand why the president at the time, Democrat Barack Obama, wasn’t doing something about it.

I don’t know what the president can do, short of imposing some sort of price control. That’s been tried. It didn’t work in the 1970s.

So now the price of motor vehicle fuel is climbing steadily. I thought we had a “surplus” of fossil fuels, given that we were using more alternative energy sources, driving more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Oh, no. I guess that was a mirage. Right?

The national average price of a gallon of gasoline is up about 12 cents during the past two weeks.

Hey, where’s the outrage now? Why aren’t we yammering at Obama’s successor, Donald J. Trump?

The president cannot do anything now any more than any president can limit the price of a market-driving commodity.

But … the silence is rather deafening this time.

national news

How will history judge this presidency?

Is it too early to begin thinking about how history is going to judge Donald J. Trump’s term as president?

I think not.

We’re well into the second year of Trump’s time in office. I am beginning to ponder how history might end up categorizing this most unconventional, chaotic, tumult-filled presidency.

Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace during the Watergate scandal; Gerald Ford restored a sense of decency in government; Jimmy Carter was bedeviled by the Iran hostage crisis; Ronald Reagan is remembered for restoring the nation’s sense of confidence; the Cold War ended on George H.W. Bush’s watch; Bill Clinton got impeached and he oversaw tremendous economic growth and the balancing of the federal budget; George W. Bush took us to war against terror after 9/11 and endured a financial collapse that rivaled the Great Depression; Barack Obama helped rescue the economy and ordered the death of the 9/11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden.

Trump’s time in office?

I have begun looking back on it and I keep coming up with a course that hasn’t yet been charted.

He took office in January 2017, delivering a grim and foreboding inaugural speech and then ratcheted up his war against the media. He has described reporters as the “enemy of the American people.”

He uses “fake news” to disparage anyone who reports anything negative about him. He has burned through several Cabinet secretaries and key White House advisers.

Trump awakens  every day and fires off tweets attacking anyone who sits in his crosshairs.

The president is facing a serious shellacking in the midterm election coming up later this year. Democrats might retake the U.S. House; the Senate is within reach, too. Then it might really, really rocky for the president as he sets up a re-election campaign for 2020.

He signed a tax cut into law. He has tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He pulled us out of a deal that seeks to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Trump yanked the United States out of a climate accord signed by virtually every other nation on Earth.

Through all of this, the president refuses to acknowledge what intelligence officials have said already, that the Russians meddled in our 2016 election and has declared war against the FBI and the Department of Justice.

What a legacy — so far. I am quite certain we’ll have a whole lot more drama in store as this presidency heads toward the next election.

Stay tuned.

national news

Why the lengthy delay on leveling this charge?

Maybe it’s just me, but a question has popped into my noggin that I want to ask out loud.

If Donald J. Trump suspected in real time that the Barack Obama administration was spying on his 2016 presidential campaign, why didn’t he blow the whistle while he was campaigning for the presidency?

He didn’t. He waited until just the other day to allege that the FBI launched a surveillance on his campaign for “political purposes.”

Do I believe what the president has alleged? Umm. No. I don’t.

He has done this before. He has leveled accusations with zero evidence to back up what he has alleged.

He has said: President Obama ordered wiretaps on the Trump offices in New York; millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016; he had proof that Barack Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, as he has said.

Fake news, anyone? Anyone?

Trump had better be able to produce the goods on this surveillance accusation. If not, well, then we have yet another serious problem pertaining to the president’s credibility that, to my estimation, is mortally wounded as it is.

media news

Mark it down: Trump finally defines ‘fake news’

This might be a landmark day — of sorts — for the Donald J. Trump administration.

It’s the day when the president of the United States finally explained what he means by “fake news.” He did so, naturally, via Twitter:

The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?

“Network News about me is negative (Fake) … ”

There it is. Do you get it? Finally, the president comes clean and admits what almost all of us have known already.

He has been impugning the integrity of the media for the past couple of years. He labels all news he dislikes as “fake.” The irony of course is too rich to ignore, given the president’s own propensity for promulgating real “fake news,” which I interpret to be a synonym for “lies.”

The Obama birther story, the “thousands of Muslims cheering” the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11, some phony-baloney link between Ted Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald. All lies. That’s what I call “fake news.”

Negative news coverage in Trump World is “fake” too?

In the president’s goofy mind, perhaps it is. Except that it isn’t.

national news

Why this fixation with Obama’s legacy?

1 Comment

I cannot pretend to know what drives Donald J. Trump to do most of the things he does, even though the public record as we approach the 18-month mark of his presidency does present some interesting questions.

Why does this man appear to be so intent on obliterating his immediate predecessor’s record?

President Barack Obama left two huge policy imprints on the nation before he left after serving two successful terms in office: the Affordable Care Act and the Iranian nuclear arms deal.

Donald Trump has sought to dismantle them both. The ACA remains on the books, more or less, after Congress grappled with ways to “repeal and replace” it with something we’ll call Trumpcare. The ACA became the prime target of the new president almost from the day he took office.

Now we have this withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Secretary of State John Kerry worked day and night under Obama’s guidance to persuade our key allies to sign on to a plan that seeks to prohibit the Islamic Republic of Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Trump calls the Iran deal the worst in history. Has he read it? Does he really know what it says or what it requires? Well, that remains a wide-open question.

Trump’s obsessions with Barack Obama’s legacy has this hideous connection to another fixation he continues to have as it regards the 44th president: his place of birth.

It has struck more than one observer that Trump’s fomenting of the fiction that Obama was born in Africa and not in the United States is a racially tinged vendetta. What’s more, he has been a leader in the effort to discredit Obama’s eligibility because his father — who the president barely knew — was a Muslim. Trump has continued to allow that canard to become a talking point among some Americans who harbor sinister thoughts about Barack Obama’s ethnicity.

Trump’s behavior and his public statements throughout his presidency betray a dark side of the man. The Charlottesville, Va., riot and the moral equivalence he drew between racist rioters and those who opposed them speaks volumes to many of us.

The “birther” lie that Trump simply won’t disavow does as well.

Thus, I believe it is reasonable to presume that Donald Trump’s concerted effort to dismantle so much of Barack Obama’s legacy is born flatly out of racism.

Sickening.