CNN’s Don Lemon calls out the rich asshole for Amazon attack: ‘What’s really at issue’ is his ‘hard feelings’ about Jeff Bezos
Don Lemon (CNN / Screengrab)
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When fact-checking President Donald the rich asshole’s Twitter tirade about Amazon, CNN’s Don Lemon addressed the commander-in-chief directly — and called him out for having a bone to pick with the company’s founder.
“What’s really at issue here,” the host mused, “are the president’s hard feelings for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also own The Washington Post, a paper that has aggressively been covering his administration — and he doesn’t like that.”
Continuing his opening monologue, Lemon also asked the rich asshole whether he’d seen the stock market plummet due to his Amazon attacks and fears of a trade war with China.
“They’re wearing heavily on your friends, Mr. President, on Wall Street,” he said.
“You have repeatedly taken credit for the boom in the market since 2016,” Lemon concluded. “Now, sir, you must take responsibility for the market’s tanking today.”
Watch below, via CNN:
REVEALED: Mueller is investigating a consulting firm with ties to Kushner’s Middle East policy point man
Jared Kushner (Al Jazeera)
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Special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly investigating a consulting firm linked to a George Nader, an associate of Jared Kushner’s who serves as a senior adviser to an Arab prince.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday night that Mueller is probing Wikistrat, an Israeli-founded consulting firm that “bills itself as a crowdsourced consulting firm that draws on a large network of experts to help analyze geopolitical problems on behalf of corporate clients and governments.”
Joel Zamel, now based in Washington, D.C., was asked questions about Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who works as a top adviser to United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed and was regularly seen at the White House in the first few months of the the rich asshole administration.
“Wikistrat was contracted by the U.A.E. beginning in 2015 to conduct war game scenarios on Islamist political movements in Yemen,” the Journal‘s report noted.
Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that Nader, suspected to be Kushner’s “Middle East policy point man,” was cooperating with Mueller over his participation in a meeting between the rich asshole campaign adviser and Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Kremlin-linked banker on the Seychelles island in January 2017. Though Prince has denied the meeting was anything more than coincidental, the Times report claimed Mueller is looking into whether Nader was there to help “funnel” money from Russia to the rich asshole through the U.A.E.
Shortly after Nader’s cooperation with Mueller was revealed, The Atlantic reported on a decades-old scandal involving the businessman being sent pornographic images of children in the mail. The case was eventually thrown out due to issues with the warrant used to search Nader’s mail, and the Atlantic‘s report suggested the Secret Service and FBI were likely aware of the charges.
the rich asshole attorney seeks to force Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit into arbitration
Stormy Danilels, some rich asshole -- (NBC screencapture/SOTU screencapture)
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President some rich asshole’s personal lawyer asked a federal judge on Monday to force adult film star Stormy Daniels to use arbitration to settle a dispute over an agreement to keep quiet about a sexual encounter she says she had with the rich asshole.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, last month sued Michael Cohen, the rich asshole’s personal attorney, to be released from the non-disclosure agreement she signed in October 2016 in exchange for $130,000.
The White House has denied that the rich asshole had sex with Daniels. Cohen has said he paid Daniels out of his own pocket.
In Monday’s court filing in Los Angeles, Brent Blakely, Cohen’s attorney, argued the agreement included a provision that any disputes over it be settled through arbitration, as opposed to open court.
Federal law “dictates that this motion be granted, and that Clifford be compelled to arbitration, as she knowingly and voluntarily agreed to do,” Blakely wrote.
Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, said the matter should be settled in open court.
“We will vigorously oppose the just-filed motion by some rich asshole and Mr. Cohen to have this case decided in a secret arbitration, in a private conference room, purposely hidden from the American public,” Avenatti said in a statement.
Last week, U.S. District Judge S. James Otero ruled that a request by Daniels to depose the rich asshole and Cohen was premature because they had yet to formally request that she arbitrate her claims.
Avenatti has argued that the non-disclosure agreement is invalid because the rich asshole never signed it. But in Monday’s filing Blakely responded that the language of the agreement did not specify that the rich asshole, using the pseudonym David Dennison, needed to sign it for the agreement to be binding.
Blakely also argued that Daniels accepted the $130,000 and did not dispute the agreement for 16 months even though the rich asshole had not signed it.
Daniels has said she and the rich asshole had sex once in 2006 but that they kept in touch for a period of time.
A former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, has described having a 10-month affair with the rich asshole starting the same year, which the White House has said the rich asshole denies. the rich asshole was married to his wife Melania at the time.
Wife of ex-deputy FBI director McCabe rips the rich asshole’s ‘false and utterly absurd’ narrative attacks on her husband
President some rich asshole (left, via Creative Commons) and Dr. Jill McCabe, wife of ex-FBI dep. director Andrew McCabe (right, via screengrab).
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Jill McCabe, the wife of Andrew McCabe, on Monday penned an op-ed for the Washington Post detailing the “false and utterly absurd” narrative about her state Senate campaign—which some rich asshole had used in his crusade against his former FBI deputy director.
Jill McCabe, an ER pediatrician, laid our her brief stint in politics and her experience receiving “funding from the state Democratic Party and the governor’s PAC.” As Jill McCabe wrote, following her “disappointing” defeat in November 2015, “she enjoyed returning to normal life.”
“Almost a year later, everything changed,” Jill McCabe wrote. “A reporter called my cellphone on a Sunday in October 2016, asking questions about contributions to my campaign and whether there had been any influence on Andrew’s decisions at the FBI.”
“This could not be further from the truth,” she continued. “In fact, it makes no sense. Andrew’s involvement in the Clinton investigation came not only after the contributions were made to my campaign but also after the race was over. Since that news report, there have been thousands more, repeating the false allegation that there was some connection between my campaign and my husband’s role at the FBI.”
McCabe explained how the rich asshole “started tweeting about how the contributions to my campaign made it clear that Andrew (and all the senior leadership at the FBI) were corrupt and that he should be removed.” She noted that as her husband neared retirement, “the president made threats” related to Andrew McCabe’s pension.
“To have my personal reputation and integrity and those of my family attacked this way is beyond horrible,” Jill McCabe wrote. “It feels awful every day. It keeps me up nights. I made the decision to run for office because I was trying to help people. Instead, it turned into something that was used to attack our family, my husband’s career and the entire FBI.”
“I have spent countless hours trying to understand how the president and so many others can share such destructive lies about me,” she added. “Ultimately I believe it somehow never occurred to them that I could be a serious, independent-minded physician who wanted to run for office for legitimate reasons. They rapidly jumped to the conclusion that I must be corrupt, as part of what I believe to be an effort to vilify us to suit their needs.”
“Now that I can speak on my own behalf, I want people to know that the whole story that everything is based on is just false and utterly absurd,” Jill McCabe wrote.
“We will not allow ourselves to be defined by a false narrative,” she said.
Oil lobbyist linked to EPA secretary Scott Pruitt’s cheap DC condo rental had pipeline project approved
EPA AdministratorScott Pruitt of Oklahoma speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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After his wife rented a Washington, D.C. condo to Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt for $50 a night, a Canadian oil lobbyist had his pipeline project approved by the department.
The New York Times reported Monday that the firm led by J. Stephen Hart, whose wife Vicki rented the condo to Pruitt, successfully lobbied the EPA to approve the Alberta Clipper pipeline in March 2017. The approval came despite Enbridge Inc. — a Calgary-based company that Hart’s firm Williams & Jensen lobbied for — being fined $61 million by the agency towards the end of Barack Obama’s presidency.
A spokesperson for Williams & Jensen told the Times that they did not interfere with the EPA or Pruitt before or after the administrator’s stay in the Hart condo. The company also said “it had not worked on similar regulatory issues for Enbridge in the past year, even though it was registered at the time as lobbying for the company on ‘issues affecting pipelines and construction of new pipelines,'” the report noted.
Shortly after the Times broke the story about the Alberta Clipper pipeline, Politico reported that White House chief of staff John Kelly has considered firing Pruitt — once considered to be a replacement for Attorney General Jeff Sessions — over this latest scandal.
The Daily Beast also reported Monday night that the owners of the townhome Pruitt rented hosted GOP fundraisers when he was living there
‘It’s war’: some rich asshole is ‘obsessed’ with Jeff Bezos — and wondering how he can ‘f*ck with’ the Amazon founder
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (left, via Wikimedia Commons) and President some rich asshole (right, via Creative Commons/Gage Skidmore).
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President Donald the rich asshole has reportedly grown “obsessed” with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — and is poised to take regulatory action against the company as he reshapes his Cabinet to his liking.
Vanity Fair‘s Gabriel Sherman reported Monday evening that four sources close to the White House confirmed that the rich asshole’s growing preoccupation with Bezos and Amazon, as evidenced by his weekend Twitter tantrum about the company, may be a prelude to further action.
“He gets obsessed with something, and now he’s obsessed with Bezos,” one of the sources said. “the rich asshole is like, how can I f*ck with him?”
“He’s off the hook on this,” another of Sherman’s sources said of the president’s escalating jibes. “It’s war.”
Vanity Fair‘s sources also confirmed that the rich asshole is seeking to raise Amazon’s shipping costs — a move that never would have flown under former White House economics adviser Gary Cohn, but which the president may now be able to undertake with impunity.
“the rich asshole doesn’t have Gary Cohn breathing down his neck saying you can’t do the Post Office sh*t,” one Republican source close to the West Wing told Sherman. “He really wants the Post Office deal renegotiated. He thinks Amazon’s getting a huge f*cking deal on shipping.”
Capitalizing upon the president’s ire, some advisers are “encouraging the rich asshole to cancel Amazon’s multi-billion contract with the Pentagon to provide cloud computing services” and suggesting attorneys general in red states open investigations into the company’s business practices, Sherman’s sources said.
Ex-Sinclair reporter blasts ‘cookie cutter’ the rich asshole ‘propaganda’ — and describes similar practices during the Bush years
Former Sinclair weatherman Kirk Clyatt. Image via screengrab.
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A journalism veteran who worked for Sinclair Broadcasting in the past blasted the company for their “cookie cutter” promos about “fake news” — and said they issued similar “must-run” segments for anchors to read during the George W. Bush presidency.
“This is not the first time Sinclair has tried something like this,” former Sinclair weatherman Kirk Clyatt told an MSNBC panel on “The Beat” led by stand-in host Stephanie Ruhle. “Right after 9/11, I was out of the country for Fox 45 WBFF, but at that time, with great controversy and great angst in the newsroom, the anchors and a number of the reporters, they were compelled to do something very similar — reading a statement about how they supported President Bush’s ‘War on Terrorism.'”
“If the anchors come to these conclusions, let them come to them themselves” said the former weatherman, who was fired in 2014 from a Sinclair affiliate in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for asking to modify his schedule.
Clyatt went on to highlight the insidiousness of the scripted “must-run” segment that Sinclair required dozens of their anchors to read that went viral after Deadspin superimposed anchors across the country reading them into a single video over the weekend.
“Everybody knows in propaganda, the most important thing you can do is repeat the same message over and over again,” he said, noting that by claiming they aren’t propagating fake news while forcing reporters to read scripted segments, they’re promoting the very type of journalism they claim to be against.
Clyatt cited Sinclair’s acquisition of KOMO News in progressive Seattle as an example of how jarring the must-run segments can be for viewers.
“You have these extreme commentaries coming from this station in a very cookie cutter way that is not good for America,” he said.
Watch below, via MSNBC:
‘A treasure trove for the investigation’: CNN panel details Mueller’s focus on Roger Stone’s WikiLeaks connection
the rich asshole ally Roger Stone (left) and WikiLeaks Julian Assange (left). Images via screengrab.
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CNN contributor Bianna Golodryga noted Monday that whether or not the rich asshole ally Roger Stone actually met with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange during the 2016 campaign, the information obtained from his testimony before special counsel Robert Mueller’s grand jury will be a boon for the investigation into Russian meddling.
Stone, Golodryga noted, “has been at the front of this relationship with WikiLeaks.” She cited Twitter direct message screenshots acquired by The Atlantic in February of this year that countered Stone and Assanges’ claim that they had never met or interacted. With the Wall Street Journal‘s reporting today that Mueller is probing a 2016 message the the rich asshole confidante sent to campaign aide Sam Nunberg, the relationship has moved back into the spotlight.
“There’s this recurring theme of had he spoken with Julian Assange, when did he speak with WikiLeaks,” the contributor noted.
Stone, Golodryga noted, claimed the email he sent to Nunberg in August of 2016 was a “joke” he was playing on the controversial aide, though she doesn’t understand “what’s so funny.”
“All of this is confusing,” she said, but “at the same time offers a potentially huge treasure trove for the Mueller investigation.”
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin noted that the Stone-Assange news is particularly interesting given that Mueller has not yet filed any charges regarding the Democratic National Committee’s hacked emails, which WikiLeaks had a hand in.
Watch below, via CNN:
the rich asshole’s DOJ to impose an ‘unprecedented’ quota on federal immigration judges: report
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks at a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, U.S., March 2, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
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The rich asshole administration is imposing a quota on federal immigration judges, according to Justice Department memos reported on by the Washington Post.
The quota system is billed as a way to “clear a backlog of more than 600,000 cases pending before the Executive Office of Immigration Review,” and is part of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ pledge to tighten immigration laws, according to the Post. Judges will have to clear 700 cases per year to receive a “satisfactory” rating on their annual performance reviews.
A union representing the federal immigration judges described the move as “unprecedented.”
By Michael Balsamo - Associated Press - Updated: 8:59 p.m. on Monday, April 2, 2018
LOS ANGELES — President some rich asshole asked a federal judge on Monday to order private arbitration in a case brought by a porn actress who claimed she had an affair with him.
the rich asshole and his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, filed papers in federal court in Los Angeles asking a judge to rule that Stormy Daniels’ case involving a non-disclosure agreement must be heard by an arbitrator instead of a jury.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has been seeking to invalidate the agreement she signed days before the 2016 presidential election. She has offered to return the $130,000 she was paid as she tries to “set the record straight.”
She’s said she had sex with the rich asshole once in 2006 and their relationship continued for about a year. the rich asshole married his current wife, Melania the rich asshole, in 2005, and their son, Barron, was born in 2006.
The White House has said the rich asshole denies having an affair.
the rich asshole’s attorneys have argued that Daniels could owe about $20 million for violating the non-disclosure deal.
Daniels argues the agreement is legally invalid because it was only signed by her and Cohen, not by the rich asshole.
In Monday’s court filing, Cohen said Daniels had never raised any issues with the settlement agreement or suggested it was invalid or legally unenforceable before she filed her lawsuit last month.
Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, said they would oppose the motion to have the case heard in private arbitration, “hidden from the American public.”
“This is a democracy and this matter should be decided in an open court of law owned by the people. #sunlight,” he tweeted.
Copyright © 2018 The Washington Times, LLC.
the rich asshole Insanely Tells Kids At Easter Egg Roll That ‘There Is No Name’ For The White House (VIDEO)
Former reality show star some rich asshole spoke to the children attending today’s Easter Egg Roll to brag about the military which he said would soon be “at a level it’s never been before.” It was straight out of a surreal script with a batshit crazy manbaby acting as leader of the free world. the rich asshole was speaking off-script because he’s talking to kids, but the so-called president really should have used a teleprompter anyway. This, of course, followed the rich asshole major Tweetstorm in which he blamed Democrats for not fixing DACA, a policy he ended, raged at Amazon, yelled at his own Department of Justice, then praised Sinclair broadcasting, a group that was just outed for its blatant propaganda. So, it’s one of those days.
Before boasting of the military, the rich asshole spoke of the White House, but referred to it as “this house or building or whatever you want to call it because there is no name for it, it is special.” Except there is a name for it. It’s called the White House. Last year, it was reported that the rich asshole referred to the White House as a “dump.”
Raw Story notes that the rich asshole went on to say that he and his staff keep the White House “in tip-top shape, we call it sometimes tippy-top shape, and it’s a great, great place.”
Watch:
the rich asshole then spoke about the economy, saying “we’ve never had an economy like we’ve had now” then he boasted about the military and said that “you see what’s happening with funding” and “just think of $700 billion, because that’s what’s going into our military this year.”
He told that to children. Little kids. the rich asshole tried to make the day all about him. Let that sink in for a moment.
POLITICS
Scott Pruitt Buffeted By Growing Pressure To Resign From EPA
Even former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who weathered “Bridgegate,” wonders how Pruitt will survive the furor over his Capitol Hill rental.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt faces mounting pressure to resign amid ballooning scandals over his spending habits and a sweetheart deal to rent a Capitol Hill condominium linked to a gas industry lobbyist.
A coalition of environmental groups last Wednesday launched a website called BootPruitt.com and offered a series of Op-Eds lambasting him as part of the first coordinated campaign to oust the administrator. On Thursday, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) called for Pruitt to resign.
And on Sunday, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), whose so-called “Bridgegate” scandal over politically motivated lane closures on the George Washington Bridge helped tank his presidential ambitions, became the first major Republican to call out the ethical concerns over Pruitt’s rental.
“I don’t know how you survive this one, and if he has to go, it’s because he never should have been there in the first place,” Christie said on ABC News’ “This Week.”
Pruitt has come under scrutiny over his accommodations in Washington after ABC News reported last week that he rented a room in a luxury townhouse co-owned by the wife of a top gas industry lobbyist. That same day, Bloomberg News reported that Pruitt paid $50-a-night for the room, well below market value for a place in that neighborhood. The EPA’s Office of General Counsel issued a hasty memo on Thursday arguing that the administrator paid a fair rate.
By Friday, ABC News reported that Pruitt’s adult daughter, a White House intern, stayed in another room at the property. Justina Fugh, the EPA’s ethics lawyer, struggled to defend the arrangement when pressed by BuzzFeed News: “I don’t have any facts to know what the daughter did and didn’t pay. I don’t have any facts to know if she’s a dependent on his taxes.”
The ethical storm over Pruitt’s housing comes amid a groundswell of criticism over his spending.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent a letter to the EPA’s inspector general last week highlighting the cost of Pruitt’s use of taxpayer-funded security details on trips home to Tulsa, Oklahoma, a family vacation to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and an outing to the Rose Bowl college football game in Pasadena, California.
Pruitt’s penchant for first-class flights has drawn particular scrutiny. Federal regulations require government employees to be “prudent” when “making official travel arrangements” and book “the least expensive class of travel that meets their needs.”
Yet Pruitt spent between $2,000 and $2,600 on first-class flights to Oklahoma, and regularly books $1,400 to $4,000 flights to Boston, New York and Corpus Christi, Texas, according to The Washington Post. He often stays at luxury hotels.
Pruitt’s international travel costs are especially high. His trip to Italy for an environmental summit last June cost more than $120,000. Pruitt’s trip to Morocco in December to promote liquefied natural gas ― a bizarre decision for an EPA administrator ― cost nearly $40,000, according to E&E News.
The EPA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.
Pruitt is the latest in a line of the rich asshole administration officials who have faced a firestorm of criticism over their ethics lapses. In September, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned over spending more than $1 million on chartered planes and military flights. Brenda Fitzgerald, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stepped down for buying shares of a tobacco company while leading the nation’s top health agency.
Pruitt’s chummy industry ties and lavish travel are not new. He cultivated a deep relationship with the oil and gas industry as Oklahoma’s attorney general before President some rich asshole named him to head the EPA last year.
In 2011, he allowed lawyers at Devon Energy Corporation, the Oklahoma City-based oil and gas giant, to write a three-page complaint to the EPA under his letterhead, which he signed and sent as his own. He made his name on the national stage suing the EPA more than a dozen times to block rules such as the Clean Power Plan, President Barack Obama’s landmark greenhouse gas regulation, which Pruitt is in the process of repealing. He championed Exxon Mobil Corp. in investigations into whether the oil giant committed fraud by covering up evidence that emissions from burning fossil fuels warm the planet.
Fossil fuel interests returned the favors. Between 2002 and 2016, Pruitt received more than $300,000 in donations from the oil, gas and coal industries. Even more money went to a political action committee and a super PAC set up to help him get re-elected and aid like-minded politicians. Yet only a fraction of the money went to campaigns while the fundraising groups paid for trips Pruitt took to places such as Hawaii and New Orleans, where he stayed in luxury hotels, according to filings reviewed by HuffPost in January 2017.
Despite the escalating calls for his resignation, strong support from the Republican-controlled Congress may serve to insulate Pruitt ― no GOP House or Senate member has joined the push for him to step down. To gain perspective on his survival chances, it helps to look back at the resignation of Anne Gorsuch Burford, the EPA administrator to whom Pruitt is most often compared.
Gorsuch Burford went to war with environmental regulations during her 22-month tenure under President Ronald Reagan. She slashed the agency’s budget by 22 percent and, as The Washington Post wrote in her 2004 obituary, “boasted that she reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half-inch.”
In 1982, Gorsuch Burford faced a congressional investigation into her use of the Superfund to clean up pollution sites. In December of that year, she refused to turn over 42 documents to a House energy subcommittee, arguing that the president ordered her to invoke executive privilege. She was cited for contempt of Congress and forced to resign.
Pruitt faces much better odds in a historically hyper-partisan Congress. Democrats controlled the House in 1982, and voted 259 to 105 to hold Gorsuch Burford in contempt, with 55 Republicans joining 204 Democrats to vote against her. Just four Democrats voted with 101 Republicans to oppose the citation, according to a report from The New York Times’ archive.
Pruitt, meanwhile, is often lauded by Republicans who see him as an effective operator for the White House’s deregulatory agenda and an agitational avatar who riles Democrats and environmentalists. In December, the National Review and The Weekly Standard, two neo-conservative magazines whose writers spearheaded old-guard Republicans’ #NeverTrump movement, published fawning profiles of Pruitt as cover stories a week apart from each other.
On Monday, the EPA announced a proposal to significantly roll back Obama-era regulations on vehicular fuel standards, marking yet another victory for the the rich asshole administration’s deregulatory agenda if the move is allowed to take effect.
Fox News, not advertisers, are hurting the most from the Laura Ingraham boycott
New data shows the network has taken the biggest hit in the public's eye.
Advertisers fled Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle en masse last week after the host, Laura Ingraham, made disparaging comments mocking Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg.
While some corporations might have expected to see some damage to their brand as a result of the boycott, new data from YouGov BrandIndex shows that the companies have actually fared well in spite of the boycott.
Advertisers boycotting Laura Ingraham appear unscathed, while Fox News sees perception decline. Nine of them show negligible movement in their Buzz score. This indicates consumers are not swayed positively or negatively toward their actions so far bit.ly/2GQxcrq
Poll respondents were asked, “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the past two weeks — through news, advertising, or word of mouth — was it positive or negative?”
The only brand that gained a significant amount of negative perception among consumers in recent days was Fox News.
The data reaffirms the idea that consumer-driven boycotts are effective. As Michael Hiltzik points out in a Los Angeles Times column, “Advertisers of consumer products fear controversy more than anything — especially political controversy.”
Similarly, boycotts of companies supporting the National Rifle Association (NRA)gained traction after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February.
Since Hogg called for an advertiser boycott last week, over a dozen companies have announced they will no longer advertise during Ingraham’s show, specifically citing her rhetoric as the reason.
Liberty Mutual, one of the Ingraham’s top advertisers, called the Fox News host’s comments “inconsistent with our values as a company.”
The backlash began when Ingraham mocked Hogg last Wednesday for not getting in to certain colleges. “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.),” she tweeted.
David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable given acceptance rates.) dailywire.com/news/28770/gun…
Ingraham’s tweet was up for over 24 hours before she eventually issued an apology to Hogg. Her apology only came after a number companies announced they would stop advertising during her show.
Whether planned or on accident, Ingraham is taking a week-long break from the show to celebrate “Easter break” with her children. Ingraham’s “break” immediately drew comparisons to another former Fox News host whose show was the target of an advertising boycott.
Shortly after The New York Times reported that Fox News paid millions of dollars to five women who said they were sexually harassed by Bill O’Reilly, 77 advertisers left the show in a mass exodus.
O’Reilly subsequently announced he would be taking a “scheduled” vacation that he had planned — but he never returned. O’Reilly was supposed to return on April 24 of last year, but on April 19, Fox News let him go.
Zinke’s Interior Department reassignments disproportionately targeted Native Americans and women
the rich asshole's Interior secretary reportedly told employees "diversity isn't important."
Newly released government documents show that the reassignment of top staffers last summer by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke disproportionately targeted Native Americans and women.
Half of the 33 individuals reassigned in July 2017 are women. And nearly a third are Native American. A few other individuals also reassigned are black and Latino.
Zinke was already facing criticism for his approach to diversity after recent reports that he repeatedly told employees “diversity isn’t important.” Last week, Democratic lawmakers called for Congress to investigate whether Zinke’s reassignment of the 33 senior career civil servants violated federal anti-discrimination laws. This release of documents provides specific details about each reassignment.
The new revelations also come amid growing tensions between the administration and tribal groups and conservationists, as Zinke continues to push for public lands to be opened to oil, gas, and minerals extraction. Many of the sites targeted by the Interior Department thus far have been deemed highly sensitive by environmentalists, indigenous communities, and the National Parks Service.
The documents released are part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by attorney Katherine Atkinson, who represented Joel Clement, an Interior Department climate scientist whose reassignment saw him go from director of the Office of Policy Analysis to a senior adviser position at the Department’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue before he resigned in protest.
Clement made headlines with his July 2017 Washington Post op-ed. In it he wrote, “I believe I was retaliated against for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities,” later adding, “I was reassigned with the intent to coerce me into leaving the federal government.”
Interior Department employees who focused on climate change were also among those reassigned last year, as was highlighted by the media at the time. The U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) former associate director for climate and land use, Virginia Burkett, for example, “voluntarily took a downgrade” to an ecologist position during the reassignment notice period. Burkett currently works as the chief scientist for Climate and Land Use Change at USGS.
“I absolutely think they were targeting people who worked on climate issues,” Atkinson told ThinkProgress.
Now, additional details have come to light about other senior career officials impacted by Zinke’s reassignments.
“When you compare it to the demographic data” for those working at the Interior Department, women and Native Americans were disproportionately affected, Atkinson explained.
She added that further conclusions cannot be drawn about the new positions individuals were reassigned to, or who took over the roles, without individuals coming forward to say they believe the action was taken for discriminatory reasons.
The Interior Department denies that Zinke has said anything about criticizing the need for diversity. The agency did not respond to ThinkProgress’ request for comment.
While Zinke’s comments about diversity aren’t good, Atkinson said, they’re not necessarily unlawful. This changes, however, if he was referring to a position that has rules that say Native Americans must be prioritized for filling that role.
Under Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, federal agencies are not allowed to make hiring decisions using race as a basis for the decision. However, there is an exception under the DOI’s Indian Preference rules, that for some positions in some of the agencies — within the Indian Health Service and Indian Affairs — they require preference be given to hiring Native Americans.
A former government official has described the reassignment of top Native American staffers as “part of an effort to remove internal opposition to Zinke’s plan to open up more tribal and public lands to the fossil fuel industry,” Talking Points Memo reported.
At least 10 of the individuals reassigned last July are Native American, according to analysis of the released reassignment list by Talking Points Memo (TPM).
This includes Chickasaw Nation member Stanley Speaks, who was the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) regional director for the northwest region. He was reassigned to be BIA’s regional director for the southern plains but, according to notes in the released documents, Speaks decided instead to retire at the end of 2017.
Oglala Sioux member Michael Black worked as a senior adviser to the director of BIA. While the July 2017 document says Black’s reassignment was still to be determined, in January it was announced that he would become the regional director for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Great Plains region.
Former BIA director and member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, Weldon “Bruce” Loudermilk, was also reassigned from his directorship to become the deputy director of field operations at the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians. (In October, Bryan Rice, citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, was named the new BIA director.)
More broadly, Interior Department offices that serve Native Americans remain severely understaffed. A report by the Government Accountability Office last year found more than 1,500 vacancies at the Indian Health Service, for instance. President the rich asshole’s pick to run the office withdrew his nomination in February after reports that he had lied on his resume.
“If you have experienced people who understand the U.S. government’s responsibility to Indian tribes, they’re more likely to stand up and say, ‘Hey, we have an obligation to our 567 tribes, and you can’t just open everything up to mining and drilling,” Bryan Newland, former senior policy adviser at BIA under the Obama administration, told TPM.
“Those folks were moved to get them out of the way,” Newland argued, “so that the oil- and gas-centric policy can move quickly.”
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April 2, 2018
CNN reporter Jim Acosta dared to ask the rich asshole a question, and now the rich asshole team wants him suspended.
the rich asshole campaign manager Brad Parscale freaked out and demanded that a CNN reporter be disciplined just for doing his job Monday afternoon.
During a photo op with children at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, CNN reporter Jim Acosta asked about the rich asshole’s recent Twitter rants about DACA, the program he rescinded in September that protected young immigrants from deportation.
“What about the DACA kids?” Acosta asked from behind the press barrier. “Should they worry about what’s going to happen to them?”
the rich asshole responded with his new favorite, and completely baseless, talking point.
“The Democrats have really let them down,” he said. “They really let them down. They had this great opportunity. The Democrats have really let them down. It’s a shame. And now people are taking advantage of DACA and that’s a shame.”
“Didn’t you kill DACA, sir? Didn’t you kill DACA?” Acosta called out, only to be ignored by the rich asshole.
While the rich asshole frequently fields questions at photo ops, Acosta’s extremely brief questioning did not sit well with the rich asshole campaign manager Brad Parscale.
“Maybe it is time for Jim Acosta to get a suspension for breaking protocol,” Parscale tweeted. “He continues to embarrass himself and @CNN
Acosta responded to Parscale in fairly short order.
“Just doing my job, which is protected by the First Amendment of The Constitution,” he tweeted. “You might want to give it a read.”
Parscale later said that the White House should “pull credentials,” and accused Acosta of being “disrespectful” for “yelling questions.” He said such behavior “would have never been allowed previously.”
Obviously, there is no such protocol, and even when President Obama was heckled in the middle of a Rose Garden speech about immigration — which is a violation of protocol — no action was taken against that reporter. And Obama never went more than a year without a press conference.
But the rich asshole is no Obama. the rich asshole’s sycophants are conspicuously averse to having their boss questioned or challenged in any way. And while Jim Acosta has been a favorite target of the rich asshole’s attacks, the CNN correspondent refuses to back down.
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April 2, 2018
Of course Fox News sides with an adult who's attacking kids.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham got herself in a world of trouble when she attacked Parkland teen David Hogg, but her employer is standing with her and attacking the kids who called out her atrocious behavior.
“We cannot and will not allow voices to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts,” the network said in a statement. “We look forward to having Laura Ingraham back hosting her program next Monday when she returns from spring vacation with her children.”
Ingraham’s abruptly announced vacation came at the end of a long week of advertisers fleeing her in droves. After she mocked Hogg for not getting into a few colleges, he called on her advertisers to stop funding her hateful show.
And it worked. It really worked. Even after Ingraham issued a belated apology on Twitter, her advertisers kept dropping her. More than a dozen companies have answered Hogg’s boycott call and bailed on the Fox host.
On Friday night, Ingraham announced she herself was fleeing the airwaves for a weeklong vacation.
But while she gave the half-hearted appearance of regretting her noxious attack, it seems Fox News saw nothing wrong with it. Instead, in Fox’s view, the adult who needlessly and cruelly used her position of power to mock a teenager is the real victim.
Fox, like much of right-wing media, has no problem smearing the teenagers who survived the horrific school shooting in February. The network has given plenty of airtime to NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, for example, who last week lectured the kids for organizing the March for Our Lives instead of paying for increased security at their school.
Other conservative media outlets have accused Hogg and his fellow students of being “crisis actors” who didn’t really survive a horrific shooting. Some have compared the kids to Nazis.
Now, even though Ingraham has expressed a shred of remorse for her attack on a high school student, Fox is apparently still endorsing it.
It isn’t yet known whether Ingraham really will return to her show in a week. Other Fox hosts have taken “vacations” in the past in the midst of scandal, most infamously disgraced chronic sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly, never to return.
What is known is that Ingraham is barely hanging on to her show, even after admitting her behavior was wrong. If Fox really wants to double down on her attacks by also lashing out at the teenage survivors-turned-activists, that just might backfire for the network as well.
the rich asshole casually lies about deporting kids at Easter Egg Roll for kids
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the rich asshole can't tell the truth about immigration — even when he's in front of children.
It was bad enough when the rich asshole went off a ugly, partisan immigration rant as he approached the front doors of church on Easter Sunday morning.
On Monday, the rich asshole might have stooped even lower when he essentially threatened to deport children across the country while surrounded by children at the annual Easter Egg Roll.
The bizarre scene unfolded on the White House lawn.
“What about the DACA kids?” NBC News’ Jim Acosta shouted to the rich asshole, since reporters were being kept so far away from the media-reclusive president. “Should they worry about what’s going to happen to them?”
The question may have been prompted by the rich asshole’s two-day racist rant on Twitter.
After huddling with race-baiting Fox News hosts over the weekend, the rich asshole ended a weeklong period of Twitter calm by posting an array of angry attacks, which were built around simplistic lies about immigration in the U.S. (i.e. “Caravans” of Mexicans are set to overrun our borders.)
“DACA is dead because the Democrats didn’t care or act, and now everyone wants to get onto the DACA bandwagon…No longer works,” he Tweeted on Monday. “Must build Wall and secure our borders with proper Border legislation. Democrats want No Borders, hence drugs and crime!”
Essentially, if the rich asshole has his way hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants previously covered by the popular and successful Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program initiated by President Barack Obama could be forcefully deported.
Under Obama, the program that allowed roughly 800,000 young people brought to the U.S. as children, known as the Dreamers, to live and work without fear of reprisal.
Last September, the rich asshole unilaterally canceled the program without creating anything to take its place, thereby putting Dreamers in jeopardy. Since then, the rich asshole has rejected bipartisan plans to fix the problem, while a White House-backed immigration bill failed miserably in the Senate in February.
At this point, the rich asshole still has no idea what DACA is, or he lies about the issue constantly.
Or both.
“The Democrats have really let them down…and now people are taking advantage of DACA, and that’s a shame,” the rich asshole said on Monday. And yes, he continued to play hardball on DACA — indirectly threatening to deport kids — while seated at a table with elementary school-aged children gathered for the Easter Egg Roll.
Afterward, the rich asshole’s 2020 re-election campaign manager and the GOP media whined about Acosta’s Easter Egg Roll question, implying it was rule breaking or inappropriate.
But of course, the rich asshole has refused to hold a press conference for 13 months, which means reporters are forced to shout questions at him any chance they get.
That doesn’t mean the rich asshole has to lie in front of children.
Fox News co-president releases statement in support of Laura Ingraham: ‘We will not allow voices to be censored’
Laura Ingraham speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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Fox News Co-President Jack Abernethy on Monday released a statement in support of host Laura Ingraham, even as at least 10 companies announced last week they would no longer advertise during her program.
“We cannot and will not allow voices to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts,” Abernethy wrote. “We look forward to having Laura Ingraham back hosting her program next Monday when she returns from spring vacation with her children.”
Ingraham courted controversy last week when she mocked Parkland survivor David Hogg over his college rejections. Ingraham apologized “for any upset” she may have caused Hogg after advertisers began pulling sponsorship of her Fox News show.
In response to her apology, Hogg called Ingraham a “bully” and accused her of only saying sorry because her show was on the line. He also demanded an apology for NBA superstar LeBron James, whom Ingraham famously told should “shut up and dribble.”
Ex-GOP counsel gets ‘fired up’ over Kushner’s role in pro-the rich asshole TV news promos: ‘What’s he doing in the White House?’
Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to President some rich asshole. (DoD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro)
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A former GOP counsel to the House Oversight Committee during a Monday MSNBC appearance pinpointed White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role in the pro-the rich asshole Sinclair promo controversy.
As news on Sinclair’s “must-run” segments — which require anchors at most of their hundreds of stations across the country to read scripts that decry “fake news” in a manner reminiscent of the president — made headlines this weekend, author and former GOP operative Sophia Nelson reminded MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that Kushner struck a deal with the broadcasting company during the campaign that resulted in coverage favorable to then-candidate some rich asshole.
In December 2016, Politico reported that Kushner admitted to business executives after his father-in-law’s victory that he traded access to the rich asshole for unfettered, non-opinionated campaign coverage on Sinclair affiliates. As Nelson noted, Kushner acting as the company’s cheerleader in the White House is just another reason he shouldn’t be there.
“Why is he still there?” she mused. “Here is a guy who has security clearance issues, he’s meddling in the Middle East, he’s meddling in Saudi Arabia. He’s meddling now with television, FCC things and Sinclair and they’re cutting deals. What is this guy doing at the White House?”
“This is not Trump and the the rich asshole business,” Nelson continued. “This is the United States of America. This is the White House. This is our country and you can’t do here what you were able to do on Wall Street in New York or wherever you did it and that’s the problem I have.”
Nelson, whose book “E Pluribus One” focused on the Founding Fathers’ vision of America and was released just before the rich asshole’s inauguration, said the issue “goes back to ‘we the people.'”
“What in the hell is wrong with us that we continue to just sit here and act like this is okay?” she wondered. “It’s not okay!”
Wallace noted that Nelson appeared passionate about the subject, to which she replied, “I’m fired up.”
Watch below, via MSNBC:
CNN’s Jim Acosta fires back at the rich asshole’s 2020 campaign director for attacking his reporting: ‘Look up the First Amendment’
CNN correspondent Jim Acosta (left), and the rich asshole 2020 campaign director Brad Parscale (right). Images via screengrab.
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After President Donald the rich asshole’s 2020 campaign manager called on CNN’s Jim Acosta to be suspended for “breaking protocol,” the reporter clapped back with the Constitution.
“Maybe it is time for Jim Acosta to get a suspension for breaking protocol,” the rich asshole 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted Monday, linking to a right-wing blog article that claimed the White House correspondent shouted at the president while he was entertaining children during Easter celebrations. Parscale added that the reporter is embarrassing himself and his network and that CNN should “pull his credentials for each incident.”
Maybe it is time for Jim Acosta to get a suspension for breaking protocol. He continues to embarrass himself and @CNN. Pull his credentials for each incident. twitter.com/dailycaller/st…
Quoting the tweet, Acosta responded that he was just doing his job that is “protected by the First Amendment of The Constitution.”
“You might want to give it a read,” he added.
Just doing my job.. which is protected by the First Amendment of The Constitution. You might want to give it a read. twitter.com/parscale/statu…
According to USA Today, which cited the White House press pool reports, Acosta asked the president and the First Lady “what about the DACA kids?” as they were coloring at a table with Barron the rich asshole and other children. the rich asshole responded that the Democrats “let them down,” to which the reporter followed up asking if the president himself had killed it. He received no response, per pool reports.
‘Pull his credentials’: the rich asshole campaign manager says CNN should suspend reporter for asking question
The president has not held a press conference in 409 days.
CNN reporter Jim Acosta asked President some rich asshole a question on Monday morning at a public event. On Monday afternoon, the rich asshole’s 2020 campaign manager publicly called for Acosta to lose his credentials for doing so.
Maybe it is time for Jim Acosta to get a suspension for breaking protocol. He continues to embarrass himself and @CNN. Pull his credentials for each incident. twitter.com/dailycaller/st…
Brad Parscale tweeted the demand in response to a Daily Caller story about Acosta’s outrageous decision to ask about immigration policy during the White House Easter Egg Roll. the rich asshole has not held a press conference in over a year — 409 days, according to the Washington Post — so reporters have had to ask questions when the opportunity presents itself.
the rich asshole did not answer Acosta’s query about the rich asshole’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that protects hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Ironically, the rich asshole ran on a promise that he would be more responsive to inquiries than his predecessor.
President Obama refuses to answer question about Iran terror funding. I won't dodge questions as your President. ntknetwork.com/obama-spends-7…
Acosta responded on Monday afternoon to Parscale in a tweet, reminding him that the First Amendment protects his right to to ask questions, even to the President of the United States.
Just doing my job.. which is protected by the First Amendment of The Constitution. You might want to give it a read. twitter.com/parscale/statu…
Pascale later tweeted that Acosta asking the question was “[d]isrespectful and would have never been allowed previously.”
Mueller is probing Roger Stone’s claim that he spoke with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in 2016 — that he later called a ‘joke’
Special counsel Robert Mueller (left) and the rich asshole confidante Roger Stone (right). Images via Obama White House archives and screengrab.
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Special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly investigating the rich asshole associate Roger Stone’s 2016 claim that he met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — a claim Stone later walked back.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that a person close to the special counsel’s probe is looking into the claim, which Stone made in an email to now-controversial campaign aide Sam Nunberg in August 2016.
“I dined with Julian Assange last night,” Stone wrote in an August 4, 2016 email obtained by the Journal. The day after he emailed Nunberg, Stone publicly praised WikiLeaks on Twitter, and then two weeks later said he’d never met with Assange.
“‘I have not spoken to Mr. Assange,'” Stone said on August 18, 2016, as the Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake noted on Twitter. “‘I have not met with Mr. Assange. And I never said I had.'”
Roger Stone on Aug. 18, 2016 -- two weeks later:
"I have not spoken to Mr. Assange. I have not met with Mr. Assange. And I never said I had." twitter.com/ScottMStedman/…
“I never dined with Assange,” Stone told the Journal. The email “doesn’t have any significance because I provably didn’t go…there was no such meeting. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. This was said in jest.”
Politico reporter Marc Caputo asked the rich asshole confidante about the exchange, to which he responded that Nunberg believed him and “can’t take a joke.” He also provided photos of his passport to prove he was in California at the time of the alleged meeting in London.
Roger Stone, sharing a photo of his passport, tells me that Sam Nunberg fell for a joke and that he didn’t fly out to meet @JulianAssange on the day in question.
1/2 tweetswsj.com/articles/roger…
“Apparently Sam can’t take a joke,” Stone said via text after I sent him the WSJ article.
More below from Stone pic.twitter.com/nMsLYilglG
According to the Journal‘s source, Mueller asked Stone about the claim in sworn testimony before the grand jury.
CNN guest sounds alarm at ‘tinpot dictator’ the rich asshole treating Amazon as a ‘political enemy’
Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell appears on CNN (Screen cap).
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President some rich asshole took aim at Amazon once again on Monday — and many critics have said that the president’s attacks on the online retail giant are really attacks against the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Appearing on CNN Monday, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell said she was horrified that the rich asshole would attack Amazon as a way to hurt her newspaper — and she said it was the sort of thing you’d expect to see from an autocratic ruler, not the President of the United States.
“We have a sitting president who is tweeting, apparently with the express intention of driving down a stock price,” she said. “This is something tinpot dictators do… He is trying to punish a perceived political enemy in Amazon, and the reason why he’s going after Amazon, of course, is that Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post.”
She then said that you cannot see the rich asshole’s attacks on Amazon in isolation, but rather as part of a broader campaign against independent news organizations that critically cover his administration.
“It’s part and parcel of his more general attacks on the media,” she said. “He attacks CNN, he attacks the ‘failing’ New York Times, he attacks the Washington Post. He’s going after Amazon because it is a perceived political enemy.”
Watch the video below.
POLITICS
the rich asshole Defends Conservative Media Company After It Orders Anchors To Bash ‘Biased’ News
Dozens of local news anchors across the country read the same strongly worded script, thanks to Sinclair Broadcasting.
President some rich asshole on Monday defended Sinclair Broadcasting Group amid reports that the conservative telecommunications company ordered local news anchors to recite a script condemning other media outlets.
“Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke,” the rich asshole tweeted.
Sinclair, which owns or operates more than 170 TV stations across the U.S., has come under fire in recent weeks for directing dozens of anchors to read from the same strongly worded script during on-air broadcasts.
“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media,” the script read. “Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias. ... This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”
Deadspin created a supercut of anchors reading the script. ThinkProgress shared a similar clip that showed newscasters reciting the identical lines:
Scott Livingston, the company’s senior vice president of news, told The Baltimore Sun that the script was a way for Sinclair to reiterate its “commitment to reporting facts.”
“We are focused on fact-based reporting,” Livingston told the Sun. “That’s our commitment to our communities. That’s the goal of these announcements: to reiterate our commitment to reporting facts in a pursuit of truth.”
Sinclair, the country’s largest broadcaster, has been accused of pushing for pro-the rich asshole content to run on its stations. It’s not uncommon for the company to send its stations “must-run” video segments that feature positive commentary about the rich asshole, The New York Times reports.
The broadcasting group is currently in the process of purchasing Tribune Media, which would allow Sinclair to reach 72 percent of U.S. households.
Sinclair angrily lashes out at critics upset over ‘our well-researched focus on fair and objective reporting’
HBO's John Oliver criticizes Sinclair Broadcast Group (HBO/screen grab)
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Sinclair Broadcast Group on Monday fired back at its critics after the organization required local TV news stations across the country to assail the free press.
After Deadspin released a video highlighting Sinclair-employed news professionals reading the same script about “biased and false news” on dozens of channels, critics accused the company of undermining the press.
In an internal memo obtained by CNN on Monday, Sinclair lashes out critics, and insists that its news initiative has been thoroughly researched.
“There is a lot of noise out there about our company right now, and what is lacking in that analysis is something we constantly preach; context and perspective,” the memo states. “The critics are now upset about our well-researched journalistic initiative focused on fair and objective reporting. ”
Sinclair asserts that its promo was attacking false stories shared by the rich asshole supporters, not legitimate mainstream outlets.
“We are focused on fact-based reporting. That’s our commitment to our communities. That’s the goal of these announcements: to reiterate our commitment to reporting facts in a pursuit of truth.”
The memo also accuses the media of taking the Sinclair promos out of context with “misleading, often defamatory stories about our thriving news operations.”
“Media reports have mischaracterized Sinclair’s coverage of the Clinton and the rich asshole 2016 campaign saying that, ‘(the) the rich asshole campaign made a deal with Sinclair for favorable coverage,'” the memo insists.
“[W]e reached out to both the rich asshole and Clinton campaigns in the summer of 2016, offering both candidates—and their surrogates— the chance to speak repeatedly, and directly, to local news viewers, in our Sinclair markets,” Sinclair notes. “The the rich asshole campaign responded favorably to the opportunity and, as such, received more direct interaction with our viewers. The Clinton campaign, despite our repeated, documented attempts to arrange such interviews, participated at a much lower level; never once providing the candidate herself for an appearance on a Sinclair station.”
Read the entire memo here
the rich asshole’s trade war with China is unwinnable
China just slapped some fresh tariffs on U.S. goods in response to the rich asshole levying ones on their steel and aluminum exports. But where is this going?
In response to President some rich asshole’s approval of higher duties on Chinese steel and aluminum last month, Beijing on Sunday raised import duties on some U.S. goods by $3 billion. And by midday Monday, the Washington Post reported that the markets had taken a hit: The Dow Jones industrial average had dropped 2.4 percent (580 points), The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index slid 2.6 percent, and the Nasdaq was down 2.9 percent.
Although China’s move is unlikely to do significant damage to its $150 billion in annual U.S. imports, it will likely affect agricultural states in the United States (whose products represent $20 billion of those imported by China and are viewed as the rich asshole’s base), as the targeted goods include pork, apples, and sparkling wine, reports the Associated Press.
The United States does not import much steel and aluminum from China. Still on Monday, White House Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that through the tariffs, President the rich asshole wants to ensure that “we’re getting a good deal and we’re not taken advantage of anymore.”
“This is a breakdown of all sorts of dialogue. Diplomatically, this cannot but hurt the U.S.”
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce, meanwhile, called the rich asshole’s higher tariffs “protectionist” and said they’re against Word Trade Organization rules. President the rich asshole wants the WTO involved too — he has ordered American trade officials to file a WTO case that challenges China’s technology licensing, asking for 25 percent duties on products from those sectors. (Some think this might actually be the first step in President the rich asshole’s attempt to withdraw the United States from the trade organization.)
ThinkProgress reached out to two experts to help explain the situation: Orville Schell, the head of the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations, and Bart Oosterveld, director of the Global Business & Economics Program at the Atlantic Council.
ThinkProgress: If the U.S. does not import much aluminum and steel from China, why bother targeting those goods to start with?
Schell: You’re asking this question with a logical mind, which is of course not always the way, I think, the rich asshole’s mind works. To look at the bright side first, he is sort of signaling to the Chinese: A) Things are different now, B) We’re sick and tired of the unlevel playing field and we’re not going to take it anymore. Never mind if the signal is appropriate or well-calibrated. It is a signal. The bad side is that these signals can be tremendously destabilizing — and they can incite extreme retaliatory responses.
Oosterveld: I don’t think it ever was about aluminum and steel. It’s a minor part of U.S.-China trade. I don’t know what the strategic purpose was behind announcing tariffs that would mainly affect alleys [including Canada and Australia, which later got exemptions]… The counter-tariffs Europeans proposed and never enacted, were fairly targeted towards the base of the Republican party, and the ones that China announced similarly disproportionately affects states and regions that voted majority for the rich asshole.
TP: Is China really being unfair in its trading practices with the United States, or is it simply doing what any pragmatic country — including the U.S. — would do: To use the weakness of its trading partner to its own advantage?
Schell: I think every country tries to use the weakness of others to their advantage in trade. Such a situation can get so far out of balance that it becomes antagonistic. And we have long since reached that with China.
Oosterveld: China is fairly closed to foreign direct investment — the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] has it in a ranking of the second most-closed economy to foreign direct investment. The Europeans, the Japanese, and the U.S. have long had concerns about China’s trading practices that I think are legitimate, so [China] doesn’t level the playing field, it hasn’t been a fair and open and transparent trading partner, and the U.S., the Japanese, and the Europeans in Buenos Aires late last year issued a joint statement about working on things like intellectual property and other longer-standing concerns.
TP: Can the WTO effectively mediate this rift?
Ooseterveld: That’s what it’s set up to do…that very much remains to be seen. Yes, in theory, all effected parties are in the WTO and this is a WTO-type conflict, so let’s hope it goes that route.
Schell: The problem with the WTO is that its out of date and it’s really not up to being able to rectify all of the imbalances. Moreover, it works very slowly. If I read the situation correctly now, the U.S. and China are at state where Americans have been pushing for years and the Chinese have been yielding very little. And now here comes the rich asshole, basically saying we’re not going to do this anymore, we’re going to blow the whole thing up if it’s not equalized.
TP: What’s the endgame here for President the rich asshole? Or is it all about the optics of a win?
Ooseterveld: To the end that there is [an end goal] it is not visible to me. It’s a basic tenet of economics that trade wars cannot be won or lost… there is no winning. You have to hope, with these kind of retaliatory tariffs, that the latest that’s announced is where it ends, and you have to hope for a reversal at some point….In the end it sets up a vicious cycle of sorts. There may be investment decisions that are made on the margins where people open up new plants in the U.S. or revive plants in the U.S. that may give it [the rich asshole’s trade war] the optics of win, and that may give wins in areas that are important to the Republican party.
Schell: I’m not sure the rich asshole works that way, with a rational policy with a targeted endgame and a set of steps to attain it. I think he responds much more viscerally. And this is precisely what gets the Chinese so off balance. In this sense, it can have — and I want to underline can — a constructive role in that it puts the Chinese on notice.
TP: Does President the rich asshole stand a chance in achieving this? If so, how, and if not, what are the consequences beyond trade?
Schell: the rich asshole’s strange style is not limited to his management of trade issues. Its virtues are that it breaks up a kind of frozen situation. But it’s vices are that it has very little capacity to put a new situation back together again. And that’s the part we have to really pay attention to… We’re at an inflection point. We don’t know whether China will retaliate or whether it will say, ‘Our trade relation with the U.S. is too important to blow up.’… There are enormous consequences. It’s hard to know even where to begin, because [the rich asshole] alternately pulls the keystone out of the arch and then makes testaments of all kinds of friendly relations with China. He’s almost bipolar in his response to China.
Ooseterveld: Leveling the playing field when it comes to concerns about the Chinese trading practices have mostly to do with intellectual property and protection of U.S. and European and Japanese intellectual property. You can address that through negotiations….And that was the plan late last year. So I don’t know where that plan is….I don’t know where the consensus is. This is a breakdown of all sorts of dialogue. Diplomatically, this cannot but hurt the U.S. A strategic dialogue with Beijing about economic and trade topics is dormant, the consensus that the U.S. had build with the E.U. and Japan to address these intellectual property issues is gone or dormant at least. On the topics that I think are important, there’s no progress being made.
Social media rips ‘tone deaf moron’ the rich asshole after his bizarre White House Easter Egg Roll rant
President some rich asshole honks the horn in a truck (Screen cap).
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President some rich asshole seemed to be running late to the White House annual Easter Egg Roll this morning as he continued his Twitter rants and commentary about Fox News. Once he made his way to the Truman Balcony with First Lady Melania the rich asshole, the president rattled off something about the strength of the military to confused children below.
Meanwhile, others lamented an easier time.
I will say I am nostalgic for the Easter Egg Roll tradition of @BarackObama going like 3-for-19 from the foul line as a bunch of NBA stars look on with increasing concern
Others couldn’t help but notice that the first lady looked a little glum — at least until her husband stopped talking.
The rest were simply happy to join in the hilarious mockery. Read some of the best below:
Given how he's on the list, it's prob Jeff Sessionstwitter.com/SarahBurris/st…
So, this was his message to the children there for the traditional Easter egg roll? What a tone deaf moron.
Remember when it was about the kids and not an opportunity to make a speech about how great the Traitor himself is?
The President and First Lady Deliver Remarks at the 2016 Easter Egg Rollyoutube.com/watch?v=QhJ4JH…
.@realdonaldtrump @potus must be pre programmed...even at the Easter egg roll spews the standard line of talking points...the kids don't care...
So sad that the Department of “Justice” and the FBI are slow walking, or even not giving, the unredacted documents requested by Congress. An embarrassment to our country!
Way to bring up the military as you're addressing CHILDREN FOR AN EASTER EGG ROLLEven the Easter Bunny was lookin at you like.. "The F'k is wrong wit you"
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