Every year I teach about the Freedom of Information Act and my students are very intrigued with the idea that any citizen can petition the government for information. And now I'll have a powerful example. So much of this information that is coming out now about Hillary Clinton's emails is coming about because Judicial Watch issued a FOIA request for Hillary's aide Huma Abedin, the wife of Anthony Weiner, and her outside work while serving as Hillary's aide. As the WSJ writes,
Judge Sullivan is overseeing a Freedom of Information Act case brought in 2013 by Judicial Watch. The watchdog group sought documents relating to the employment of Huma Abedin, who was allowed to work outside the government even as she served as a top Clinton State Department aide. State told Judicial Watch in 2014 it had turned over everything relevant, and the group then dropped its lawsuit.
But the news of previously undisclosed Clinton emails convinced Judge Sullivan in June to take the rare step of reopening the Abedin case. To ascertain whether State was finally searching through every record, he ordered State on July 31 to request that Mrs. Clinton and two of her aides—Ms. Abedin and Cheryl Mills—confirm under penalty of perjury that they had produced all government records in their possession, and that they describe their use of Mrs. Clinton’s server for government business. That response deadline was last Friday.
Mrs. Clinton’s reaction to the deadline was a classic. “While I do not know what information may be ‘responsive’ for purposes of this law suit, I have directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody, that were or potentially were federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done,” she wrote in a declaration submitted to the court. Translation: If everything wasn’t turned over, it’s not her fault.
But her declaration to the court did disclose that Mrs. Abedin had an “account” on Mrs. Clinton’s server “which was used at times for government business.” The admission that her aides were also using her server demolishes Mrs. Clinton’s previous claim that she used this server for personal “convenience.” She was really running a parallel mini-State email operation.
Both aides were also supposed to submit declarations that they had turned over all government records to the State Department. Instead, they blew off Judge Sullivan and directed their attorneys to explain that they are still searching their private records and in time will get around to supplying them. This is remarkable given that State first requested they turn over any work-related records in March.
Mrs. Clinton and her lawyers have been careful to never use the word “delete” regarding her emails. Mrs. Clinton said that she “chose not to keep” her yoga diary and the rest. Her lawyer, David Kendall, has said emails no longer exist on the server. But do those emails still exist in another location—on a hard drive or thumb drive—or in someone else’s possession? The FBI has the forensic ability to retrieve the emails if they still exist, assuming that the agency isn’t merely going through the pro-forma motions.
Keep in mind that none of this would have happened without Judge Sullivan enforcing the freedom-of-information law. Credit as well goes to federal Judge Rudolph Contreras for ordering the State Department to start producing the Clinton records, and to federal Judge Richard Leon for rapping State over its delays producing the emails. Congressman Trey Gowdy’s House committee on Benghazi has also been indispensable in pressing the server issue.
If Hillary is brought low by this whole scandal, then the conservative organization Judicial Watch, which came into being in response to Bill Clinton's administration and their efforts resulted in the Clinton administration siccing the IRS on them. Sound familiar? Nothing is new in Clinton corruption.
Kimberley Strassel describes the weaknesses in the Clinton campaign that are striking terror in the hearts of Democrats.
Democrats also see new weakness in their favorite themes. Here is Mrs. Clinton trying out an inequality argument, as she builds up her personal bank account. Here she is floating the “war on women” theme, as her foundation takes donations from countries that whip rape victims. Here she calls for lower college costs while charging these institutions $250,000 for a speech. Here is a candidate who was in the past for Keystone, and for trade, and for more intervention overseas. And who maybe now is not. Though they don’t really know. Which is also a problem.
And now, they see danger. The party trusted the Clintons to handle the email scandal in their usual way—to ignore it until it faded. But there’s no ignoring stories containing the words “FBI,” “criminal inquiry,” “classified” and “secret”—all in one sentence. On Tuesday, her use of private emails while serving as secretary of state turned from a political problem into a potentially legal problem. Thousands of Democrats woke Wednesday morning from nightmares of landing an “unsinkable” nominee that gets indicted.
For now, no one significant is jumping off the Clinton ship. That's mostly because the party believes it has no other ship to jump to. Martin O’Malley? Jim Webb? Heck, even Mrs. Clinton’s rivals seem convinced she’s a better bet than they are. Amid all the news this week, not one of them—not even Mr. Sanders—said boo about her ethics.
The Clintons might also trust that Barack Obama still sees her as his best bet to win and preserve his legacy. This administration, of course, exercises influence over the Justice Department (don’t forget that FBI non-probe into the IRS scandal). And so it remains a possibility the feds took Mrs. Clinton’s server as a means of safeguarding it from other prying hands—the courts, inspectors general, Congress—until this election is over. If the FBI now goes quiet, and other agencies start using the FBI probe as an excuse to stop any further action on Clinton emails, that will be the tipoff.
Then again, the Clintons have now reached the point at which all it might take is one, big first-class passenger heading for a lifeboat to inspire an exodus. It might be Mr. Obama, who could signal his view by giving the FBI free rein. Or Sen. Elizabeth Warren might see her moment. Or maybe a respected party elder who calls out the candidate. Let’s hope so. The Democratic Party deserves to steer its own future. Not just lash itself to the RMS Hillary.
At this point, I don't know whether to cheer on the sinking of the Hillary campaign or hope that she lumbers on to the nomination and the GOP have to face such a weakened candidate. Imagine if Elizabeth Warren got in now. She'd be hailed as a modern progressive hero, come to rescue the party from its wounded leader. She would be portrayed as a modern, female Cincinnatus leaving her senatorial plow to save the nation. At this point, I think Warren would be a much tougher foe for the Republicans than Hillary would.
Of course, the Democrats might have to look to Joe Biden or Al Gore to come to the rescue. Nothing says new and exciting like sending in tired, old, former losers. Of course, each has his own baggage. Joe Biden would tied to all the unpopular Obama actions without Obama's star power. And he is, after all, the same Joe Biden people have been laughing at for years. And Al Gore has a lot of baggage himself, as Ed Morrissey reminds us.
Thanks to a decade demanding carbon restrictions and attacking coal and oil, Gore’s not exactly going to thrill the Rust Belt, the Gulf states, or the upper Midwest.
And let’s not forget the big cash-out with oil-rich Qatar in the sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera. Gore’s suing them over the deal now, but that won’t play well among progressives, national-security hawks, or really anyone else.
In any other environment, this would be seen as a potential practical joke. The fact that this trial balloon legitimately makes news shows just how badly events have played out with Coronation 2.0 for Hillary Clinton.
And Al Gore would have another problem reminiscent of Bill Clinton. He keeps having problems with his massage therapists. Sure the story comes from The National Enquirer, but remember that that was the sole media outlet that uncovered the John Edwards story. Without them, we'd probably be musing whether Edwards would also be jumping into the ring.
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Charles C. W. Cooke wonders why so many discount the idea that Hillary Clinton should be charged with a crime.
The obvious question, then, is this: Given all that we now know, why is the very idea that Clinton may have committed crimes that require punishment still being met with such disbelief? If you are willing and able, forget for a moment that a conservative is posing that challenge, and suppose instead that it has come from a Black Lives Matter activist, or from Glenn Greenwald, or from anybody who is a part of our present conversation about judicial and structural inequality. In such an instance, what do you imagine is the best answer that you would be able to give? Certainly, the government has a great amount of leeway in these circumstances — as so often in life, prosecutorial discretion rules supreme. But to acknowledge that is not to answer the underlying question so much as it is to restate it in different words: To wit: Why, given that the government can choose whom it wishes to prosecute, is it ridiculous to imagine that it would choose to do so if the case involved Hillary Clinton? Meditating upon that inquiry, I cannot help but think that the answer is, “because Clinton is running for president, because she is extremely famous, and because Loretta Lynch is the attorney general.” Is that just?
The Department of Justice is notoriously reluctant to pull the trigger on a prosecution if their doing so could be construed as an overtly “political” act, or if it could swing an election (especially if that possible swing is away from the president’s own party). In a vacuum, one can make a reasonable case in favor of the overall prudence of this approach. But one cannot credibly deny that, whatever virtues it might have to recommend it, this preference will inevitably accord to its beneficiaries a form of legal privilege that is not available to most people who are suspected of having crossed the same statutes. To the many intelligence officials who have been prosecuted by the Obama administration in the last seven years, “she’s running for high office” would presumably not represent a convincing reason for sparing Hillary Clinton the consequences of her indiscretions. Nor should it.
We are at present hearing a great deal of talk about injustice and caprice. Is nobody vexed by the manner in which the suggestion that a prominent figure might actually go to jail is being so casually dismissed?
Glenn Greenwald, no conservative, reminds us of Hillary's previous support for prosecuting and jailing people who mishandled classified information. He reminds us that the Obama administration has prosecuted more people under the 1917 Espionage Act "Than all previous administrations combined."
NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, for instance, faced years in prison, and ultimately had his career destroyed, based on the Obama DOJ’s claims that he “mishandled” classified information (it included information that was not formally classified at the time but was retroactively decreed to be such). Less than two weeks ago, “a Naval reservist was convicted and sentenced for mishandling classified military materials” despite no “evidence he intended to distribute them.” Last year, a Naval officer was convicted of mishandling classified information also in the absence of any intent to distribute it.
In the light of these new Clinton revelations, the very same people who spent years justifying this obsessive assault are now scampering for reasons why a huge exception should be made for the Democratic Party front-runner. Fascinatingly, one of the most vocal defenders of this Obama DOJ record of persecution has been Hillary Clinton herself.
He quotes Hillary Clinton approved the prosecution of Bradley/Chelsea Manning.
Manning was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. At the time, the only thing Hillary Clinton had to say about that was to issue a sermon about how classified information “deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so” because it “affect[s] the security of individuals and relationships.”
That was during the time that she had covertly installed a non-government server and was using it and a personal email account to receive classified and, apparently, even top-secret information. While there’s no evidence she herself placed those documents on the server or sent them herself, it is her use of a personal server and email account that — quite predictably — caused the vulnerability.
It goes without saying that the U.S. government wildly overclassifies almost everything it touches, even the most benign information. As former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden said in 2010, “Everything’s secret. I mean, I got an email saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a top secret NSA classification marking.”
For that reason, almost all of these prosecutions for mishandling classified information have been wildly overzealous, way out of proportion to any harm they caused or could have caused, certainly out of proportion to the actual wrongdoing.
But that’s an argument that Hillary Clinton never uttered in order to object as people’s lives and careers were destroyed and they were hauled off to prison. To the contrary, she more often than not defended it, using rationale that, as it turns out, condemned herself and her own behavior at least as much as those whose persecution she was defending.
Ron Fournier, who professes to admire and support the Clinton is still disgusted at Hillary's mendacity.
Know this: Government officials have been convicted of mishandling unmarked classified material. And this: The fact is, any chain of events or excuses that led to the disclosure of these documents begins with Clinton's decision to go rogue with government email.
This is her fault, all of it.
Including her no-win situation. If the FBI is able to recover deleted email from her server, it's almost certain that more classified documents will be discovered (given what has already been found in the tiny sample size). That would raise more questions about her judgment.
Furthermore, a thorough autopsy of the deleted email might lead to details about other embarrassing topics, such as Benghazi (a GOP fetish), or the intersection of Clinton Foundation donors and State Department business ("Follow the money," a Democrat close to Clinton told me in March). Though this is pure speculation, her closest allies worry about what might be found.
If the deleted emails can't be recovered, Clinton will never be able to clear her name. Only the most blindly loyal and partisan voters will accept her word and ignore the serial deception. Even people like me who have known and respected Clinton for years will walk into the voting booth asking ourselves, "What is she hiding?"
Sure, she might win. Just look at the weak spots in the GOP line. But why win this ugly? Why commit Americans to another four years of a politics and government they can't trust? Why run a grind-it-out, 20th-century campaign amid the rise of purpose-driven millennials?
Why not be an aspirational, transformational leader—the architect of a presidency that matches her potential.
Aw, that's sweet, Mr. Fournier. But that has never been Hillary's way.
This typifies the week that Hillary has had.
Whoops: Clinton Campaign’s “Three Priorities” Is A List Of Four Things
Ah, the woman of the people.
Following Hillary Clinton’s recently announced plan to help the middle class, she and Bill are again renting a house in the Hamptons for the last two weeks in August for a rumored $100,000.
The Clintons are renting a four-bedroom home from Republican art collector Andre Nasser and his real estate guru wife, Lois, at 44 Broadview Road — a hidden cul-de-sac in Amagansett that boasts wealthy neighbors, including Harvey Weinstein.
The couple rented the same place for three weeks last year, after Hillary controversially declared they were “dead broke” after leaving the White House in 2000. But this year, the Democratic presidential candidate is making the most of her time in the playground of the rich by organizing a string of campaign fundraisers, titled “Hillary in the Hamptons,” to rub shoulders with wealthy donors.
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Jonah Goldberg examines the trend in the media and the Hillary campaign to cast blame elsewhere, even on inanimate objects.
The Clinton team claims it handed over the server voluntarily — a classic example of Clinton’s penchant for half-truths. For months, they insisted they’d never turn it over. They caved because they had to. The decision was about as voluntary as a bank robber relinquishing his sack of cash to the cops at gunpoint.
Revealingly, many media reports say “the campaign” handed over the server. But the campaign wasn’t in charge of the server — if it was, that’d be a whole other scandal. It was Clinton’s server, full stop. To say otherwise is to protect Clinton, the author of a book called Hard Choices, from her own hard choices.
Which brings us to that evil server.
The first rule of Clintonism is that someone else is always to blame. That’s why the first iteration of Clinton’s defense was that evil Republicans were simply smearing her. When that didn’t stick, Team Clinton expanded the indictment to include the partisan witch hunt by that famously right-wing organ the New York Times and two independent inspectors general (one at the State Department, the other for the intelligence community).
The reason the intelligence community’s IG referred the case to the Justice Department stems from the apparent fact that Clinton mishandled classified information, which she denied.
An investigation into a random sample of just 40 e-mails from a batch of more than 30,000 revealed that four contained classified information and at least two were “top secret.”
So now that the FBI and the Justice Department, both run by Obama appointees, are on the case, attacking the motives of inconvenient people no longer works. So the Clinton campaign has invoked a little-known codicil to the first rule of Clintonism: Blame an inanimate object.
The amazing thing is that this spin isn’t coming directly from the campaign but from the reporters covering it. National Public Radio’s Tamara Keith reported Wednesday morning that the inquiry “isn’t targeted directly at [Clinton]” and is simply intended to determine whether the server was secure. Business Insider reported that “Clinton’s private server is under investigation by the FBI, though Clinton is not a target of the investigation.” Even the conservative Washington Free Beacon has fallen into using this locution, referring to the “private email server being investigated by the FBI.”
McClatchy’s Anita Kumar, who helped break the story that two of the e-mails were top secret, felt compelled to step on her own scoop. She said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “there are several investigations into her conduct, not into her, but into her use of personal e-mail and a personal server.” Go ahead and try parsing the difference between an “investigation into her conduct” and an investigation “into her.”
Clinton, in violation of State Department rules, guidelines from the White House, and all common sense, used her own unsecured stealth server. She sent classified material on it. But it’s the server that’s being investigated?
Hopefully the server will one day be able to testify on its own behalf: “I was just following orders.”
The WSJ points out how Obama's new climate plan hits the poor disproportionately. The EPA itself acknowledges that the plan will lead to increased energy prices that will hurt the poor.
Regulations that artificially raise energy prices are regressive. By definition the poor—er, low-income community members—spend a larger share of their incomes on fuel and utilities than the well-to-do climate activists of Marin County and Hyde Park.
As energy prices rise, they spill into other basic needs like food, via fertilizer and feed, and housing, via building materials like cement. Everyone ends up with less disposable income and a diminished standard of living, but low-income workers really are worst off.
The EPA thus requires states to set up “financial assistance programs” only for those living near or below the poverty line....
At the federal level, the EPA is creating a program that gives twice as large a subsidy for renewable and efficiency projects that are built in inner-city neighborhoods and disadvantaged rural areas. There will be job retraining for laid-off coal miners. The agency also plans to install more solar generation on top of or around public housing. So while it will raise their utility bills, at least the poor will get a complementary photovoltaic panel.
Perhaps it is bad manners to suggest that the poor themselves might prefer higher incomes rather than the EPA’s form of carbon justice. U.S. economic growth is already much slower than it should be, and the new EPA climate-change rule will make it worse by subtracting billions of dollars every year from potential GDP by misallocating capital and undermining business confidence. This will result in few opportunities and smaller wage gains, with damage to the poorest Americans in particular.
For these reasons, a recent study commissioned by the National Black Chamber of Commerce estimates that the EPA plan will increase the black poverty rate to 32% in 2025 from 26% today. Hispanic poverty will rise to 29% from 23%. No fewer than 28 states raised such economic hardships in their comments to the EPA, to no avail.
The contradiction of modern climate liberals is that they promise lower energy bills and a wind-and-solar jobs boom, with zero trade-offs. But then they demand more redistribution to mitigate the economic and human damage that are the real outcome of their policies. Instead of offering to weatherize the homes of the least fortunate, how about trying to increase prosperity?
When it comes to environmental goals and goals to help the poor, for Democrats, the environmentalists always win.
Daniel Henninger points out that Donald Trump did the ultimate GOP nominee a big favor by drawing so many viewers to the GOP debate. They might have come to see Trump, but they ended up seeing several interesting and worthy candidates.
A liberal viewer might have disagreed with every word spoken in two hours. But this wasn’t the famous zoo.
Winning presidential nominations, and then the general election, is about assembling votes at the margin, among minds still open to persuasion. How public opinion forms in elections has become more complex than ever.
Nielsen Social reported that while Jon Stewart’s final hour on Comedy Central produced 233,000 tweets on Twitter, the GOP debate produced 3.2 million. Mix together Facebook, texting, the Web, the still-huge carry of traditional media, and real conversations in all the country’s Brooklyn-like bars. Result: The audience for the GOP primary race is bigger and more open to hearing from the party’s candidates than anyone would have predicted a month ago.
This isn’t good for Donald Trump. Mr. Trump’s audience saw during the debate that most of his opponents aren’t puppets. The kingmaker will not be king. The phenomenon he helped create—a competitive, highly watched race—will now grind him down. Modern campaigns are too professional, too long and too expensive for him to win a 50-state delegate battle that doesn’t end until next June. Consult Rick Perry.
Scott Walker represents a "return to normalcy."
George Kelling, co-author with James Q. Wilson, of the "broken windows" theory of policing defends his theory from attacks blaming the approach for problems resulting from controversial shootings today.
And I would argue that our theory has been largely misunderstood. First of all, broken windows was never intended to be a high-arrest program. Although it has been practiced as such in many cities, neither Wilson nor I ever conceived of it in those terms. Broken-windows policing is a highly discretionary set of activities that seeks the least intrusive means of solving a problem—whether that problem is street prostitution, drug dealing in a park, graffiti, abandoned buildings, or actions such as public drunkenness. Moreover, depending on the problem, good broken windows policing seeks partners to address it: social workers, city code enforcers, business improvement district staff, teachers, medical personnel, clergy, and others. The goal is to reduce the level of disorder in public spaces so that citizens feel safe, are able to use them, and businesses thrive. Arrest of an offender is supposed to be a last resort—not the first.
Read the rest for an exposition on how the theory has been misinterpreted and, in some cases, misapplied.
The Washington Post excoriates Obama for how he's been handling criticism of his Iran deal.
That has not been the spirit in which Mr. Obama and his team have met his Iran-deal critics. The president has countered them with certitude and ad hominem attacks, the combined import of which is that there are no alternatives to his policy, that support for the deal is an obvious call and that nearly anyone who suggests otherwise is motivated by politics or ideology. Mr. Obama’s rhetoric reached its low point when he observed that the deal’s opponents value war over diplomacy and that Iranian extremists were “making common cause with the Republican caucus.”
This was self-contradictory when the president said it; one GOP critic, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (Tenn.), is a man Mr. Obama himself praised, just four months ago, as “sincerely concerned about this issue” and “a good and decent man.” The White House lost further consistency after Mr. Schumer’s announcement. If there’s anyone who’s not a Republican partisan, it’s the arch-Democrat from New York, who’s planning a bid to lead the Democratic Senate caucus after the current leader, Harry Reid (Nev.), retires. As payback, the White House and its allies are openly encouraging Democrats to deny him the job.
After six-plus years of a presidency in which Mr. Obama has himself been the target of relentless, often unfair, often purely partisan attacks, we can understand why he’s gotten a bit jaded about seeking bipartisan support and feels justified to respond in kind. Given his need to retain enough Democratic votes to sustain a veto if both chambers reject the Iran deal, we also get the raw political necessity of making an example out of Mr. Schumer.
Still, by not sticking to the merits of the deal, Mr. Obama implies a lack of confidence in them. The contrast is striking between the president’s tone today and his 2008 speech accepting the Democratic nomination: Looking ahead to debating his GOP opponent, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), he pledged that “what I will not do is suggest that the senator takes his positions for political purposes, because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and each other’s patriotism.” There’s a sad progression from that aspiration to an approach that is all about winning, even if it has to be winning ugly.
Well, of course. Obama never seems to care much for those who suffer under the dictatorships he cozies up to.
Cuban dissidents, so long the center of U.S. policy toward the island, won't be invited to Secretary of State John Kerry's historic flag-raising at the U.S. Embassy in Havana on Friday, vividly illustrating how U.S. policy is shifting focus to its single-party government. Kerry intends to meet more quietly with prominent activists later in the day, officials said.
The Cuban government labels its domestic opponents as traitorous U.S. mercenaries. As the two countries have moved to restore relations, Cuba has almost entirely stopped meeting with American politicians who visit dissidents during trips to Havana.
That presented a quandary for U.S. officials organizing the ceremony on Friday to mark the reopening of the embassy on Havana's historic waterfront. Inviting dissidents would risk a boycott by Cuban officials including those who negotiated with the U.S. after Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro declared detente on Dec. 17. Excluding dissidents would certainly provoke fierce criticism from opponents of Obama's new policy, including Cuban-American Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio.
As Jay Nordlinger comments,
Do you get the impression that the Obama administration is warmer toward the Castro dictatorship than it is toward its opponents and victims? I do. And if that makes me a McCarthyite, so be it.
Over the weekend, about 90 dissidents were arrested in Cuba. (Read about it here.) This is par for the course — but repression has increased since Obama declared his opening right after the midterm elections in the U.S. (They don’t have elections in Cuba — not democratic ones.) Some of the dissidents were wearing an Obama mask. They did not mean that in a complimentary way.
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In light of the newest video on Planned Parenthood that fetal parts were sold without the mather's consent, Ian Tuttle poses some thoughtful questions.
1. Why is Planned Parenthood so zealous to gather “specimens” for these companies? After all, Planned Parenthood does not make a profit on these “donations,” right? So they go through the hassle — why? Their devotion to the advancement of Science?
2.If the incentives for Planned Parenthood employees are so strong that those employees will blithely break the law, how difficult is it to imagine mothers demanding — to put it crudely — part of the action? After all, mothers are the first link in the fetal-remains supply chain, and women seeking abortions are disproportionately low-income — so they have, in theory, leverage and a financial incentive. Furthermore, we know that markets for body parts can be lucrative; you can earn a quick buck (or several bucks) selling sperm, blood, hair, even feces. If the economic conditions were right, why not baby parts? Again, assuming the right economic conditions, it follows that some women would make a cottage industry of it, getting pregnant so that they could sell the fetus.
About this latter scenario: Yes, it’s hypothetical (as far as I know), and, yes, it is probably far-fetched. But given what we continue to learn about Planned Parenthood and the booming baby-parts industry, it’s not that far-fetched. That’s the problem.
This is the result of Obama's new mandatory overtime rule.
resident Obama's proposed new overtime rule would benefit fewer than 1 million workers by giving them a raise of less than $20 a week, according to a new analysis from a right-of-center think tank.
At the same time, the rule would cost businesses $2.5 billion in compliance costs over the next 10 years, the American Action Forum found.
"This rule provides a pretty minimal benefit to workers while imposing a pretty large cost on employers," said Ben Gitis, the report's author.
The American Action Forum's estimates for the rule's effects on workers and wages are lower than those suggested by other analyses. They are based, however, on numbers from the Department of Labor, which wrote the rule....
But the American Action Forum found that only 988,000 people in 2013 worked overtime and met the Labor Department's other conditions for eligibility for the overtime boost. Those conditions include that the worker not be a manager or professional. Without those exemptions, nearly 5 million would be eligible.
For the nearly 1 million people who would be affected by the new rule, they would see an extra $20 a week from the overtime pay. Employers would respond to the new rule by cutting regular wages and hours for workers who regularly work overtime. But the new pay would more than make up for those cuts, for a net $20 weekly raise.
This is a great satire of how a President Trump would respond to the news that the Iranians have just successfully tested a nuclear weapon.
“Very disappointed in @khamenei_ir, a liar and disrespectful man. Trump is his worst nightmare.” Soon after: “I will be on @oreilly factor tonight on @FoxNews.” Deeper into the crisis: “Have you seen @khamenei_ir’s wife? Neither have I, he is a pig who makes her dress like a ninja.”
“@khamenei_ir called me after my landslide election and begged for money. Tehran is an ugly city I’ll never build a hotel there.” The Associated Press sends breaking news: The Supreme Leader of Iran has issued an apology and agreed to disarm. Mr. Trump notes he’ll be on CNN with Don Lemon. His final tweet: “The Ayatollah is a pathetic negotiator and his English is very bad. Guess he didn’t go to Wharton. No match for Trump.”
(link via Peggy Noonan)
