It doesn’t make headlines, but the most important job we have is helping our constituents and small businesses…Rep. Tom Reed
Do we read beyond the headlines? President Trump may not. Tom Reed may not and suppose we don’t either. Tom recently posted articles on facebook with these headlines:
- Great news for hardworking Americans: “U.S. Adds 200,000 Jobs; Wages Rise by Most Since Recession
- Tax bill beginning to deliver bigger paychecks to workers
Tom may not have read beyond the headlines, but his constituents did. Here is a sample of what they found:
- The U-6, or underemployment rate, rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent; measure includes part-time workers who’d prefer a full-time position and people who want a job but aren’t actively looking
- People working part-time for economic reasons rose by 74,000 to 4.99 million in January, though months aren’t directly comparable
- Julia Ketchum, a secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week.
- Todd Anderson of Texas and his fiance, who are both educators, got an extra $200 in their paychecks combined to cover the costs of a second baby on its way.
- Tom Reed: did you read the article? Are we jumping up and down for an extra $100 or $78? And what happens to social security, Medicare, and Medicaid when these programs are targeted to make up the difference for the big tax cuts for your rich donors?
- “He said it’s not enough to feel like a windfall or change his spending habits, but is a pleasant change. Yet, he thinks the tax overhaul wasn’t really about him or other workers, but more about corporations and the wealthy. “I think the people this bill made the most difference for are the ones who needed it least,” he said.”
- “Wayne Love, who works in managed care in Spring Hill, Florida, got an extra $200 in his paycheck last week, which he said will help offset a $300 increase in the cost of his health insurance.”
- Did you read the article, Tom? In the examples cited the increases are pathetically small. $78 dollars a year? For this we are giving billions to you and your cronies who will then slash Medicare and Social Security? This is outrageous highway robbery, taking from the working folk to give to the obscenely wealthy.
Did Tom or the staff member who posted it read beyond the headline? Does Tom know that his constituents may read what he posts? What do readers think?
New NY 23rd 
Shared across-the-board. Informative.
#ReedsLastTerm
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yes… a whopping .20/hr for labor increase of what, 200,000 jobs.. in Food Service and Drinking Places according to the Bureau of Economic Labor.. where employers are now allowed to abscond tips. Good news in the 2017 report of 24,000/month jobs created in Healthcare because of “Obamacare”. and, please tout the worse Dow performance since GW.. down 660 pts today because your “Tax Cut” or “Tax Giveaway” is destabilizing the Bond market.. yay.. recession is progress!
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1. The FBI and DOJ lied to the FISA Court about the grounds for a warrant on Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page. According to the memo, the Fusion GPS dossier, compiled by Christopher Steele and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was the central basis for the FISA warrant against Page. But that dossier was obviously biased — and that information was never turned over to the FISA court. The memo states, “The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of — and paid by — the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.” Furthermore, the FBI did not independently verify the claims of the Steele dossier in any serious way before seeking the FISA warrant. Those involved in the application include current deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, which is likely why President Trump refused to rule out firing him today.
2. The media helped garner the warrant. The Carter Page FISA application apparently cited a Yahoo News article that was based on leaks from Steele to the news outlet. But that was not independent corroborating evidence of the Steele dossier — it was a repetition of the information Steele was disseminating. Steele was later suspended and terminated from the FBI for “an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI.”
3. Steele didn’t like Trump, but this information wasn’t included in the FISA application either. According to the memo, Steele told associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” Ohr didn’t report that in the FISA application, nor was information that Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS on compiling opposition research on Trump revealed to the FISA Court.
4. Most importantly, the Carter Page application was NOT the launching point of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. This is the most important point. If the Page FISA warrant had been the centerpiece and launching point of the investigation, Trump might have grounds to shut the whole thing down — Trump could claim, rightly, that the FBI, DOJ, and Hillary campaign worked together to trump up these charges, and then weaponized our intelligence and law enforcement community against him. But the memo itself states that “The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos. …The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok.” The memo points out that Strzok was also anti-Trump, but provides no evidence that the Papadopoulos investigation was biased — and that would be hard to prove, since Papadopoulos has now pled guilty to lying to the FBI. So the notion of the Mueller investigation as a sort of “fruit of the poisonous tree” springing from Page is undercut by the memo.
5. This memo doesn’t endanger national security. It’s nearly impossible to see how this memo endangers national security. Democrats can’t express a clear reason. The FBI can’t. The DOJ can’t. Which makes it look as though they were all covering their asses in an attempt to avoid culpability for an attempted political hit on Trump.
So, here’s where we are: the FBI and DOJ clearly cut corners in an effort to push forward the Trump-Russia investigation. They worked with Fusion GPS materials to do so, and didn’t tell the FISA court. And then they apparently fibbed to the American people about the supposed risks to the intelligence community if the public found out about their original lies by omission. But the Page warrant isn’t the entirety of the investigation, and attempts to take down the entire investigation based on this memo will be a wild oversell.
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Rynstone, you are commenting on the wrong article, one I haven’t written yet. If I would write it, I might call it “Echoing Propaganda” or “Begging the Question.”
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Sorry, I seem to be having trouble commenting on your blogs and am getting no emails confirming following the blog.
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So, does DT’s base really have that much trouble with reading comprehension? I’m mostly amused by the suggestion that four separate FISA court judges all agreed to renew the warrants without a basis for doing so. (Perhaps all four of them were Hillary Clinton in disguise.) And forgetting that the dossier was originally commissioned by the R’s. And that Steele’s concerns about DT arose from “bias,” and not from “holy hell look at the financial ties this guy has to Russia and look at the ties he has to the Russian mob and look at all the evidence of money laundering.” And you can state that “the FBI and the DOJ clearly cut corners” all day long, but saying doesn’t make it so. Any more than #donniemoscow repeating and repeating that he’s cleared by this memo makes that so. Maybe if he clicks his ruby heels hard enough.
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The idea that DJT read the Nunes memo, or understood it if he did, is silly–he already had learned all he needed to know from “Fox News.”
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