Obamas' gay artist Kehinde Wiley uses four to ten assistants in Beijing to produce art cheaper, admits some of his paintings are complete frauds

Kinda like the former president himself, wouldn't you say?

Here:

The spectacle is always carefully staged, particularly with “the boys,” which can sell for more than $100,000. “There are certain ground rules,” says Wiley. Eight to ten paintings per show. Men, usually. Street casting: Wiley goes out with a team to recruit young men as models. Back in the studio, they leaf through art-history books, and the subject gets to decide which old-style work he wants to be portrayed as. He poses for photos, and the photos become templates for full-size paintings, which Wiley produces with his assistants in New York, Dakar, and Beijing.

Or not. In many cases, Wiley acknowledges, none of that official process—the street casting, the selection of poses from art books, the painting based on those ­poses—happens at all. “The clothing, sometimes completely made up,” he says. “The models themselves, brought in from a fashion agency.” And in at least one case, the “boy” is in fact a girl. “Oftentimes, if there’s a show of ten paintings, four of them will be complete frauds.”

Brian Wesbury is back in the excuse-making business for future GDP

Here, complaining that the upcoming two-year Republican $300 billion discretionary spending extravaganza will crowd out the private sector.

Really?

Republicans were quite content under Obama to permit deficits of $7,313 billion over eight years, and Wesbury chirped the whole time about his good old Ploughhorse Economy which produced, for him, passable GDP.

Republicans now are rewarding their constituencies through spending, no less than Democrats did under Obama. The constituencies are different.

We'll see if the spending gets as out of control as it was formerly, but the handwringing, given the disparities, is misplaced. 

The debt bomb rearmed

Republican tax reform in 1986 resulted in a FLOOD of investment out of the country, so how will this time be different?

Investors Business Daily forgets that Bill and Hillary Clinton had FBI files on hundreds in the 1990s

Here in "Russia-Trump Investigation: How Did Hillary Clinton Get FBI, FISA To Do Her Political Dirty Work?".

The Clintons have lots of information on lots of people and have had for a very long time, since they occupied The White House for eight years from 1993-2000. Their unethical and illegal acquisition of the FBI files, Filegate, was a huge scandal in 1996.

That's how they run the FBI.

It's called blackmail.

I don't know about you, but I can't stand Pelosi for 8 minutes

What, and she didn't tip over?

Listen to me, that's not really Donald Trump! He's been taken over by aliens!

Obviously we've been invaded by the Body Snatchers and that's not really Donald Trump up there in The White House

China has taken over and militarized the Spratly Islands, and Trump has done nothing about it

Story and new photos here.

Translating Ann Coulter: Trump is full of BS

Translating Ann Coulter: Why is Trump such a stupid pansy?

Employment in January 2018 still lags the pre-recession high by 4.8 million on a percentage of population basis

Unemployment in January 2018 is now lower than the immediate pre-recession low

YOUR average hourly earnings are NOT up 2.9% as widely reported, for example by Larry Kudlow this weekend

Yes, average hourly earnings of TOTAL PRIVATE, seasonally adjusted, is up 2.9% year over year in January 2018.

Well, whoop dee do. Not seasonally adjusted it's up only 2.2%.

What to believe?

Average hourly earnings of TOTAL PRIVATE reports as much of the total universe of earnings as possible, but that's not the universe of 80% of American workers. It includes everybody, including the higher rollers in the top 20% whose big increases can skew the reported number dramatically. 

80% of American workers inhabit the world of production and nonsupervisory workers, whose average hourly earnings have always been tracked by the government going back to 1964.

Seasonally adjusted those earnings are up 2.4% year over year in January, but not seasonally adjusted BARELY 2%, a below average figure for the measure which is in keeping with what's been going on since 2008.

The little guy in this country has been getting crumbs from the masters' tables since 2008 when the routine increases averaging 3.4% before that went away. The new era averages a gain of 2.2% year over year, a cut of 35%.

The biggest gain in recent memory was 2.8% for January 2017, meaning most workers got their best increases since 2008 in 2016, not in 2017, and the 2% gain for 2017 means . . . THIS IS NOT A BOOM.

When the average worker starts getting ROUTINE year over year increases above 3% you'll know things are better.

They aren't.

You blinked and missed the boom: The best January for full-time job growth since the Great Recession remains January 2015

The Nunes memo simply shows what we've all known for years: The Swamp is evil, yes, but more importantly incompetent

If the entire intelligence community, including the head of the FBI, can conspire with the Democrat Party and the Russians to try to keep Trump from being elected AND FAIL, you just gotta say . . .

Way to go, Brownie!

Rush Limbaugh's "Not Working But Still Eating" soars to new record in January 2018: 96.7 million

Some economic boom, huh.

FBI ex-director belongs in jail for conspiracy, theft of government property, espionage violations, illegal spying, etc.

Rep. Lee Zeldin uses Twitter very effectively to summarize the meaning of the so-called Nunes memo

NY-1 has a good one here. Everything you need to know in about seven short lines.

According to Trump's own government, he's either destroyed 72,000 jobs a month since his election or created 182,000 per month, take your pick

And if it's +182,000 per month, that's not a jobs boom. 

A jobs boom would average well north of 200,000. Even the most recent three month average is south of that, at 192,000 per month.

Year over year in January total nonfarm is increasing at best by 176,000 per month, or 2.1 million a year, not the 2.4 million Trump claimed in his SOTU message.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics. But these are Trump's, both the lies and the reality.