Chelsea Clinton Gives Career Advice
By John Semmens — Semi-News — A Satirical Look at Recent News
Former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton touted herself as “a working model of what a young woman needs to do to succeed in today's world. I know that a lot of women in my generation are pretty bummed about my Mom's loss to Donald Trump. But they need to get off their duffs and get going. Just do what I did.”“One thing that I highly recommend for others is to get a job with a major television news outlet,” she suggested. “These jobs are very rewarding. My starting salary at NBC News was $600,000. This type of salary will enable any young woman to make a major dent in her student-loan debt.”“Another good way to get ahead is to serve on corporate boards,” Chelsea recommended. “I'm on two. Expedia pays me $40,000 per year plus $250,000 in stock options. Inter Active Corporation pays me a $300,000 annual retainer. The work is not arduous and doesn't take much time—just a couple of meetings a year. You don't even have to say anything at the meetings. You just have to be there. Nod a few times to show interest in what's being said. It's a great gig.”“And don't overlook the opportunity in doing books,” she added. “Find someone who will write what you tell them to write. The publisher will pay for you to go on a book tour, so you get free travel. You get to go on TV and sit in book stores for a few hours signing autographs in a bunch of different cities. It's great.”“Now people are encouraging me to run for president,” Chelsea boasted. “Naturally, I wouldn't expect everyone to rise as rapidly as I have. Not everyone is blessed with the same set of skills I have. But everyone can try a little harder. If you want money, ask for money. If you want more time for yourself, take it. Men have monopolized these tactics for too long. It's time women get their fair share. I've shown them how to do it.”Audit of HUD Uncovers $500 Billion ErrorsIn a bid to improve procedures and results at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), incoming Secretary Ben Carson asked for an audit of past spending. He was stunned by the finding that there were accounting mistakes amounting to more than $500 billion.“I expected to discover numerous problems, but the magnitude of the mess exceeded my wildest estimates,” Carson said. “Whether this is the result of incompetence or fraud or both remains to be sorted out.”The Obama Administration Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro chided his successor for “going backward rather than forward. We don't need to be obsessed with bean counting. We need to ensure that everyone is properly housed. That's a vast undertaking. There are bound to be some mistakes made.”Castro pointed out that “the Inspector General's report by itself can't prove any of the money was stolen. Just because money is missing doesn't mean someone wrongly took it. There could be thousands of explanations for what happened. The important thing is that the number of homeless people in this country declined during Obama's presidency. That achievement was worth any cost.”Carson was not as willing to overlook the financial discrepancies, though. “Good intentions can be undermined by bad methods,” the Secretary observed. “Every dollar lost through waste or theft diminishes the resources available to aid those truly in need. I can't accept the former Secretary's cavalier attitude toward the unnecessarily larger burden imposed on taxpayers as a result of his apparent mismanagement of the Department.”Penalties Proposed for “Fake News”Frustrated with its inability to control the narrative in our current age of abundant social media, the Merkel Regime has decided to fine media firms that allow false news on their platforms. The penalty can range as high as $50 million for an offense the government determines is “dangerously out-of-step with accepted views.”German Justice Minister Heiko Maas lamented that “unconstrained free speech has unleashed an avalanche of uniformed and anti-social messages being posted on FaceBook and Twitter. The proof of the danger is the fact that an unhinged Donald Trump was able to exploit Twitter to foment disrespect for his eminently more qualified opponent and win the American presidential election. We are not going to sit by and let that happen to Germany. It is the government's responsibility to protect its citizens from being duped by unauthorized purveyors of fake news.”A similar piece of legislation was introduced in the California Legislature by Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Monterey Park). Under his bill anyone who writes, publishes or even shares news stories that could be false would face punishment.Chau called the bill “an important step forward in the fight against 'fake news' and deceptive campaign tactics. It used to be difficult for malcontents to slander the government. Newspaper editors controlled whose letters they printed. TV and radio decided who deserved air time. Now, anyone who can write or record a video can have it viewed by millions on the Internet or Twitter. We need to restore the filter provided by legitimate media. My bill does that.”The Assemblyman rebuffed critics who contend his bill violates the First Amendment, saying that “the First Amendment says 'Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech.' Well, the California Assembly is not Congress and my bill doesn't abridge freedom of speech. It merely establishes standards that would outlaw false or incorrect speech by unqualified or deceptive amateurs.”Evolving Views on CrimeRep. Maxine Waters told MSNBC News' Chris Hayes that President Trump and Fox News host Bill O'Reilly “need to go to jail.” Their offense: disrespect toward women.“If you will recall, during last year's presidential campaign Donald Trump was caught on tape bragging about molesting women,” Waters said. “Later on a secret dossier revealed that he paid prostitutes to urinate on a bed that President Obama had slept on when he visited Moscow. In a just world this kind of behavior would be a crime. I'm hoping that after he is impeached he will go to prison for these misogynistic crimes.”Waters' beef with O'Reilly was more personal. “His on-air mockery of my hair style is as an egregious demonstration of sexual harassment as I've ever experienced,” she complained. “It was a low blow. If I ran the government O'Reilly would be behind bars.”Speaking of crime, Georgetown Law professor and former federal prosecutor Paul Butler opined on NPR that “given that Blacks in America suffered through 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow laws they have banked enough misery to offset most of the criminal charges they are accused of under our justice system. Cops shouldn't arrest them. Juries shouldn't convict them. Judges shouldn't send them to prison. And white victims should stop complaining. Getting robbed by a Black man is probably the only form of reparations this country is ever going to see.”In Wisconsin, Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell held forth a similar point of view, saying “I just don't think we should be prosecuting cases of Black people who steal from Wal-Mart. These big companies have insurance, so there's no loss to anyone from allowing our people to get their piece of the pie.”In Philadelphia, Judge Wayne Bennett argued that “white folks deserve all they get and more from the Blacks who prey upon them. No matter how violent young Black punks are towards white people, it will never make up for all the violence against people of color throughout this nation’s history.”Rice Tries Out Different Surveillance RationalesSerial liar and former President Barack Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice tried out several versions of events as emerging evidence demolished earlier stories she told about the surveillance activities carried out during the Obama term.In the first version the possibility that Donald Trump and his team were spied on by the government was flatly denied. “As FBI Director James Comey has clearly stated, there was no wire-tapping of Trump,” Rice maintained.After it turned out that the Obama Administration had covertly listened in on Trump team members' phone calls, Rice asserted that she “knew nothing about it.” When White House logs showed that Rice has explicitly requested copies of transcripts—including the names of the Trump people overheard—her story shifted to “what I did was completely legal. Unmasking the names of Americans incidentally captured on these intercepts is not a crime.”When “incidentally” appeared to founder after it was discovered that Trump was placed under surveillance long before the whole Russian conspiracy theory was hatched, Rice latched onto the “I was just following orders” meme. “The bottom line is that the President is responsible for national security,” she pointed out. “If the President requests surveillance of any person, who among us has the right to refuse this request? I mean, according to the Constitution the president is the nation's supreme leader. Consequently, whatever he orders, whatever he does must, ipso facto, be legal. And by extension, whatever I did at his behest must also be legal.”
A Satirical Look at Recent News
John Semmens is a retired economist who has written a weekly political satire for The Arizona Conservative since 2005. He says working on his satires is one of the ways he tries to honor the liberties our Founding Fathers tried to protect
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