Petition To Move Melania Trump To White House, OR, Pay For Her Own Security…

More than 108,000 people have signed a petition urging First Lady Melania Trump to move to the White House or pay for security costs at Trump Tower herself.

The Change.org petition was started after a senior White House aide indicated the president’s wife and son, Barron, will remain in New York until the school year ends. It’ll be delivered to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren if at least 150,000 people sign.

“The U.S. taxpayer is paying an exorbitant amount of money to protect the First Lady in Trump Tower, located in New York City,” the petition reads. “As to help relieve the national debt, this expense yields no positive results for the nation and should be cut from being funded.”

Now here is one petition worth encouraging EVERYONE to sign. Trump, and his family, is NO better than any prior presidential family.

Please Sign The PetitionI just did.

Is A Government Shutdown On The Horizen?…

Sometimes you just have to do what is ethically and morally right. So, democrats, bring on the shutdown unless the Trump wrecking ball powers down!

Bloomberg – Senate Democrats warned Republicans Monday that attempts to take funding away from Planned Parenthood or pay for President Donald Trump’s border wall in a stopgap spending bill that must pass by late April would result in a government shutdown.

The threat from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democratic leaders sets up a climactic first showdown with the president, particularly with their inclusion of Trump’s signature border wall proposal.

“If Republicans insist on inserting poison pill riders such as defunding Planned Parenthood, building a border wall, or starting a deportation force, they will be shutting down the government and delivering a severe blow to our economy,” Schumer said in a statement.

Up until now, Trump hasn’t needed Democratic votes to stock his cabinet or advance the repeal of Obamacare, but a spending bill keeping the government open is subject to a 60-vote threshold in the Senate. If Congress doesn’t act, a partial government shutdown would begin on April 29.

Democrats also warned against including funding for a “deportation force” as the Trump administration emphasizes ramped up arrests and deportations of immigrants in the country illegally.

A Planned Parenthood funding fight brought Congress to the brink of shutting down the government in March 2011, and immigration has also been a major fight in previous spending bills. {Continue Reading}

Trump Is Not Responsible For Strong Job Numbers, Yet…

Bloomberg – President Donald Trump used the first federal jobs report of his presidency to promote a narrative of an invigorated economy that may strengthen his political position as begins the drive to win passage of legislative priorities including an Obamacare replacement and a tax overhaul.

“GREAT AGAIN: +235,000,” Trump posted on his Twitter account in a retweet of a Drudge Report headline on Friday minutes after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released payrolls data for February showing the U.S. added a net 235,000 jobs during the month.

Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. president who’s now director of the National Economic Council, used the report as validation of Trump’s approach to bolstering the economy, which has included bringing in corporate executives to the White House to press them for hiring commitments and publicly scolding companies over plans to move production abroad.

Sounds GREAT! Certainly will have all the Trumpians ecstatic and singing The Bullshitter In Chief’s praises.  But wait a minute. Lets put on the thinking cap and examine this just a bit.

FiveThirtyEightHiring was strong and wage growth accelerated in President Trump’s first full month in office. But don’t give Trump credit, at least not yet.

The U.S. economy added 235,000 jobs in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday. That topped economists’ expectations and marked the second consecutive month of strong hiring. The unemployment rate fell a tenth of a percentage point to 4.7 percent, reversing its January uptick. Average earnings rose six cents an hour and were up 2.8 percent from a year earlier.

Trump will probably point to the report as proof that his economic policies are working. (On Friday, he retweeted a Drudge Report tweet hailing the jobs number as “great again.”) That isn’t supported by the evidence. Hiring was essentially the same in February as it was in January, when President Obama was still in office, and represented a continuation of an existing pattern of steady job growth. The jump in wages was widely anticipated by economists following an unexpected slowdown in January, and the unemployment rate has been stuck in a narrow band just below 5 percent for most of the past year.

Even if the economy does start to change direction in coming months, it’s unlikely Trump or his policies will be the primary cause. Presidents in any case have little control over the economy, especially in the short-term. The government can (probably) help ease the impact of a recession, and bad policies can (definitely) slow down growth. And presidential policies on things like education, infrastructure and tax policy can have long-term effects, for good or ill. But presidents have little influence over the month-to-month ups and downs of hiring or inflation.

What Friday’s report does show is that the economy continues to hold in the steady-but-not-spectacular pattern that it’s been in for most of the seven and a half years since the recession ended. U.S. employers have now added jobs for 77 consecutive months, a record, and the improving job market has begun to draw more Americans into the workforce. Recent hiring has been relatively broad-based, with good-paying industries such as construction and professional services adding jobs alongside lower paying sectors such as retail and hospitality. (Retailers actually cut jobs in February, although that was probably a one-month blip.)

So, basically what we’re really seeing is the long term effects of the economic policies of the prior administration at work. Seven and a half years of policy and history is certainly more indicative the present than the one month Trump has played president. But as we all know, Trump is incapable of doing anything other than tooting his own horn and telling everyone HE is responsible for making things Great Again.  Even when he has NOTHING to do with it.

Much more relevant, interesting, and truthful data BELOW THE FOLD.