Here are my observations and opinions on selected news of the day.

LET’S TRY AGAIN – My attempt to give you an opportunity to see an impressive one-minute video of President Trump standing in the hot sun, shaking the hands of 1,042 Naval Academy graduates in yesterday’s post to this site failed.  So let’s try again.  Click here to see the video Tweeted @joshcaplan.

WOULDN’T YOU HAVE THOUGHT that the Justice Department would have ordered FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to turn over all of their e-mails, texts and Tweets, agency records, personal accounts, personal devices by now?

It has been months since a handful of their anti-Trump e-mail exchanges were revealed.

You will recall that the FBI raided the offices and homes of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen to seize their documents and devices. It appears as though there is again a double standard when it comes to “their own.”

As FBI agents, they would certainly know how to scrub their communications and “clean” their records and devices, over the past several months since their relationship was revealed.

“We’re pleased the Bureau is taking steps to make sure government records don’t go missing,“ said an overly optimistic Tom Fitton at Judicial Watch

Thanks to Judicial Watch, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton, has ordered the FBI to begin processing 13,000 pages of previously undisclosed e-mails exchanged between Strzok and Page from February 1, 2015 to December 2017. Judge Walton gave the FBI a timetable for processing the documents that requires the processing of 500 documents a month. That could take them into the fall of 2020.

“The FBI’s purposeful slow-walking of the Strzok-Page materials shows contempt for both transparency law and the public interest in (determining) how and why the FBI was politicized to target President Trump, while protecting Hillary Clinton,” said Fitton

Obviously, the DOJ and FBI are still trying to cope with the embarrassment they have experienced at the hands of some high-level individuals. As I have written before, the DOJ and FBI might as well get it all out in the open while there’s still an opportunity for them to restore integrity to our justice system.

GOOD NEWS ON THE ECONOMIC FRONT has apparently helped to reduce the giant blue wave takeover of the U.S. House by Democrats to a ripple, according to Deroy Murdock at the National Review.

While Reuters reports a 6.2 percent lead in its generic congressional ballot, CBS News revealed that 68 percent of Americans consider President Trump “somewhat” to “a great deal” responsible for the buoyant economy.

“Sixty-seven percent of Americans believe now is a good time to find a quality job in the U.S., the highest percentage in 17 years of Gallup polling,” said Gallup’s Jim Norman, “Optimism about the availability of good jobs has grown by 25 percentage points since Donald Trump was elected president.”

The annual median household income has grown from $59,471 in January 2017 to $61,483 in April, according to the Sentier Household Income Index.

Interestingly, the IMD World Competitiveness Index shows America moving from fourth place in 2017 to first place in 2018.

THEN THERE’S THE FAKE NEWS churned out by The New York Times in an effort to convey deep divisions between the president and his advisors, reported by Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. “The Times argued that Trump said a June 12 summit was still possible, while his top aids said it was ‘impossible.’

Other media types, including Yashar Ali, who writes for New York magazine and HuffPo, “rushed to the The New York Times defense, claiming they heard a White House official say ‘impossible’ in a background briefing,’ says Hemingway.

However, when someone leaked an audio of the briefing, the word “impossible” was never used.

The fact that there was no record that an official was at odds with Trump and Trump wasn’t listening – the premise of the story – undermines the Times story and makes it more fake news.

“A media that desires to hold this president accountable simply must be accurate in its newswriting. It failed dramatically here, and failed to hold itself accountable when caught. That’s why the media’s credibility is in tatters and why President Trump and others find it so easy to hold them up for ridicule.” – Mollie Hemingway,  The Federalist

THEY SAY THAT ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL, and a good example of this played out in Phoenix as it was reported by Judicial Watch that before resigning to run for Congress, Greg Stanton, the mayor of America’s fifth-largest city, gave an open-borders ally millions of taxpayer dollars to complete a job in an area it suspiciously has zero experience.

“Under the shady deal,” Judicial Watch reports that “the radical La Raza group, Promise Arizona (PAZ), will receive $2.4 million from the city of Phoenix to conduct ‘Business Assistance’ during construction of a light rail extension.”

“(A) Phoenix government staffer called it a prime example of race-based political payback,” according to Judicial Watch.

PAZ claims to be at the forefront of the fight for immigrant rights and strives to promote and harness the power of the Latino community in Arizona, according to its website. “Promise Arizona aims to unite the millions of Arizonans who reject the divisive politics of immigrant-baiting, millions who believe in treating their neighbors with fairness and dignity,“ the group proclaims.

Last year, Judicial Watch tied city funding to the arts to a controversial billboard that depicted President Trump as a Nazi.

It seems to me that Stanton has a head start on his goal to join the Washington “Swamp.” But he still has to face the electorate.

         God bless the United States of America