CNN's Don Lemon on Friday's record job numbers report for blacks: "What's full employment without full respect?"

When someone hires you, it is safe to assume he respects you enough to entrust an important corner of his business to your care, and that he intends to pay you with money.

In any corporate hierarchy, full respect is reserved for those who fully deserve it.  The CEO earns the most respect, and everybody else splits the remaining respect into uneven portions depending upon his position.  Mid-level managers probably overspend their respect credits – most of us have worked for the archetypical jerk at one time or another – but that issue is a reflection upon the specific corporate culture.

Don Lemon earns a salary of around $720,000 per year.  Donald Trump was elected to lift the economic tide for all Americans.  He can't direct the flow of respect.  Nor can any government program raise the portion of respect allotted to individual citizens.  

The fact that Don Lemon's $720,000 contract didn't come with a "full respect" rider is a matter his agent should rectify the next time the two parties negotiate.  Considering its recent ratings slide, CNN might just agree to lop twenty-five grand off his cash earnings and replace it with full respect payments at quarterly intervals.  

Then, this from WGN Chicago: "The warm weekend weather was accompanied by a sharp increase in gun violence on Chicago's streets.  Five people were killed and at least 35 others were wounded in shootings since Friday evening."

It seems some people in Chicago are showing little respect for their brethren.  Happens every weekend in Democrat-controlled cities. 

For years, the left has been passing out cheap and easy self-esteem at the bargain basement window; this effort has apparently not accrued sufficient interest in the intrinsic value of and respect due other people to suspend the mayhem in Chicago.

Respect is like money; you have to work hard to earn a lot of both.  Running up and down streets squeezing triggers at human targets seems an irregular way of stimulating respect from neighbors.

Money pays the rent and furnishes food for the family.  Respect won't buy you a teacup of Starbucks, but then Don Lemon's cup is always way more than half empty.