Tag Archives: celebrity

Trump: Obama Tapped My Phone, He’s a Sick Guy

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s Saturday. I figured I’d sleep in and eat breakfast before I checked in on the news. After all, how much can happen on a Saturday morn—

Oh FFS. Fine. Let’s hear the evidence:

Then, just to show how serious this is, an hour later Trump tweets about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “pathetic” ratings on Celebrity Apprentice. Then it’s off to the golf course.

So what’s going on? Did Obama really tapp Trump Tower during the sacred election process? I hope so! If he did, it would mean a judge had found probable cause that Trump had committed a crime of some kind.

Alternatively, it could mean that the FBI or the NSA was listening to a foreign phone call and Trump was on the other end. That would be great too.

Or, of course, Trump might be full of shit. Sadly, this is the most likely possibility. But you never know. Maybe there’s some real dirt here and Trump is trying to get ahead of it. When it leaks, he’ll try to convince everyone that the real issue is all the illegal leaks. Or the Nixonian/McCarthyite use of wiretaps. Or the fact that Obama is a sleaze, which is guaranteed to excite the base.

In any case, our next White House press briefing should be interesting, don’t you think?

UPDATE: Hmmph. Breitbart News ran a story yesterday summarizing a Mark Levin radio show that outlined a bunch of stuff that’s already been reported, including the fact that a FISA warrant was obtained to monitor the communications of some Trump aides:

In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.

Is that it? The Washington Post reports that the Breitbart story “has been circulating among Trump’s senior staff.” How boring.

Read article here: 

Trump: Obama Tapped My Phone, He’s a Sick Guy

Posted in Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump: Obama Tapped My Phone, He’s a Sick Guy

JK Rowling Just Trolled Piers Morgan So Good

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Valentine’s Day: A Play in 3 Acts.

Act 1:

Act 2:

Act 3:

(curtain)

(via Jamie Ross)

View original post here:  

JK Rowling Just Trolled Piers Morgan So Good

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on JK Rowling Just Trolled Piers Morgan So Good

Trump on Black History Month: Frederick Douglass "Has Done an Amazing Job"

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

During a listening session at the White House to honor Black History Month on Wednesday, President Donald Trump praised Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, as “somebody who’s done an amazing job” and whose work is “being recognized more and more.”

The remarks immediately called into question whether the president knew who the abolitionist actually was:

Trump went on to use the listening session to give shout-outs to his own black surrogates, including Omarosa Manigualt, the former Celebrity Apprentice contestant who is now an adviser to the president. Despite once labeling her an untrustworthy liar, Trump on Wednesday said she was an “actually very nice person.”

The president also took the opportunity to bash CNN as “fake news” and plug Fox News, a network he says has “treated him very nice.”

See original article here:

Trump on Black History Month: Frederick Douglass "Has Done an Amazing Job"

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump on Black History Month: Frederick Douglass "Has Done an Amazing Job"

Here’s Why Donald Trump Needs a Facebook Page

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’ve been so fixated on Donald Trump’s mesmerizing Twitter performances that it’s escaped my attention that he also has a well-maintained Facebook page.1 As near as I can tell, it’s used for three things. First, when 140 characters won’t do and he needs someone to write an in-depth 65-word essay for him:

Second, when he wants to add some grade-school artwork to a grade-school tweet:

And third, when he wants to make a poster, suitable for scrapbooking, out of one of his quotes:

The quotes are great. I expect a Trump 2017 calendar made up of these pearls. Putin has one, after all. Plus a calendar offers tons of opportunities for keeping his message front and center. January 25: “68th anniversary of first Emmy Awards. Celebrity Apprentice should have gotten one!” February 2: “Groundhog Day! Yes, I’m still president.” March 23: “Obamacare is 7 years old. I’ll repeal it!” April 1: “Sexual Assault Awareness Month starts today!” April 15: “We’re the most highly taxed nation in the world. Sad!” May 5: “Time for a taco bowl!” June 14: “It’s my birthday!”

July 28: “It’s been a year since Khizr Khan insulted me. He still hasn’t apologized.” August 13: “Berlin wall created. Walls work!” September 17: “Electoral College is 230 years old today. Hooray!” October 19: “Everybody says I demolished Hillary in the third debate a year ago!” November 8: “First anniversary of biggest landslide victory in presidential history!” December 3: “International Day of Persons With Disabilities!” December 31: “Last day for all the rest of you to make charitable donations!”

This has so many possibilities. Trump should be all over it.

1Also Instagram and, at least once, a famous Snapchat filter. But he’s not on Pinterest, Tumblr, or Flickr. Time to branch out, Donald.

Read more: 

Here’s Why Donald Trump Needs a Facebook Page

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s Why Donald Trump Needs a Facebook Page

Conway: It’s Cool for Trump to Be Apprentice Executive Producer Because Obama Golfed

Mother Jones

On Wednesday afternoon, Variety published a scoop: President-elect Donald Trump will stay on as executive producer of Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, the hit franchise he created with reality TV mogul Mark Burnett from MGM. The show returns to air on January 2—hosted by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Trumps spokeswoman Hope Hicks confirmed the president-elect “has a big stake in the show.” Trump won’t be involved in actually producing the show, but his fee per episode is likely to be in the low five figures, according to Variety. According to the Hollywood Reporter, this fee will be paid by MGM Television, the studio responsible for the production—not by NBC.

All this is raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest. As the Huffington Post explained:

Trump’s role is rife with potential entanglements. While his paycheck will come from MGM, the program airs on NBC, a major broadcast network with an influential news division (which employs reporters Trump has personally attacked). It’s also the same network that airs Saturday Night Live, a show Trump has criticized on numerous occasions for its unflattering depiction of him. And NBC is owned by Comcast, a corporation that was recently slapped with a hefty fine by the Federal Communications Commission—an entity that will soon be under Trump’s control.

Today, Trump adviser and former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway appeared on CNN’s New Day to defend the decision. According to Conway, whatever Trump does in his “spare time” is up to him, much in the way that Obama liked to play golf. “Were we so concerned about the hours and hours and hours spent on the golf course of the current president?” Conway said. “I mean presidents have a right to do things in their spare time, in their leisure time.” Watch the entire exchange above.

See the original post: 

Conway: It’s Cool for Trump to Be Apprentice Executive Producer Because Obama Golfed

Posted in Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Conway: It’s Cool for Trump to Be Apprentice Executive Producer Because Obama Golfed

Listen to Donald Trump’s Pathetic Fakery on ISIS

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A few days ago I was griping about armchair generals who demand that we get “serious” about ISIS but don’t have the guts to endorse the one thing that would truly do that: lots of American ground troops in Iraq and Syria. Tonight on 60 Minutes we got to watch Donald Trump peddle this flimflam:

This is pathetic. Trump acts like he’s back in the Celebrity Apprentice boardroom playacting a tough guy for the cameras. He declares that he will get “unbelievable intelligence”; he will “get rid of ISIS big league”; and he will “wipe them out.” But when Lesley Stahl repeatedly asks him about ground troops, he repeatedly says this isn’t in the cards. Maybe NATO will do it. Maybe other Arab countries will do it. Maybe troops will magically appear from a genie’s bottle. Even though Trump claims that we’re at war and President Obama is too weak and stupid to get it, in the end he basically endorses what Obama is doing right now. Like all the other armchair generals, he doesn’t have the backbone to risk taking an unpopular stand, even if it’s the only thing that would actually make a significant difference.

And when he’s done with this empty blather, what does Mike Pence say? “This is the kind of leadership America needs.” Heaven help us.

See the original article here:

Listen to Donald Trump’s Pathetic Fakery on ISIS

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Listen to Donald Trump’s Pathetic Fakery on ISIS

Donald Trump once backed urgent climate action. Wait, what?

Donald Trump once backed urgent climate action. Wait, what?

By and on Jun 8, 2016Share

As negotiators headed to Copenhagen in December 2009 to forge a global climate pact, concerned U.S. business leaders and liberal luminaries took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for aggressive climate action. In an open letter to President Obama and the U.S. Congress, they declared: “If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.”

One of the signatories of that letter: Donald Trump.

Also signed by Trump’s three adult children, the letter called for passage of U.S. climate legislation, investment in the clean energy economy, and leadership to inspire the rest of the world to join the fight against climate change.

“We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today,” the letter tells the president and Congress. “Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet.”

In every conceivable way, the letter contradicts Trump’s current stance on climate policy. On the campaign trail, Trump has said he is “not a big believer in man-made climate change.” Last fall, after Obama described climate change as a major threat to the United States and the world, Trump said that was “one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics — in the history of politics as I know it.”

The 2009 ad also argues that a shift to clean energy “will spur economic growth” and “create new energy jobs.” But these days, Trump contends that U.S. action to limit greenhouse gas emissions would put the country at a competitive disadvantage. In 2012, he went so far as to claim: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

The Copenhagen conference that inspired the open letter was part of the same two-decade-long U.N. negotiating process that led to a global climate deal in Paris last year. But whereas in 2009 Trump supported the process via the ad, now he wants to sabotage it, promising recently to “cancel” the Paris accord.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Trump’s signature on the ad, which ran in the Times on Dec. 6, 2009, stands out on a list dominated by liberal media and business figures, including the founder of Patagonia, the cofounders of Ben & Jerry’s, the president of CREDO Mobile, the executive producer of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio, actors Kate Hudson and Adrian Grenier, media heavyweights Martha Stewart and Graydon Carter, and New Age author Deepak Chopra.

None of the signers that Grist interviewed this week could recall who had organized the letter or knew who had asked Trump to sign. The website of the group listed on the ad, businessleaders4environmentalchange.us, is now defunct, and no information was available on who had registered it.

Beyond the Times ad, Trump has supported climate causes and expressed concern about global warming at least twice before. In 2014, Trump sent a $5,000 check to Protect Our Winters, a climate advocacy nonprofit for skiers and snowboarders, after a Celebrity Apprentice contestant requested his support.

The second time was when climate change hit The Trump Organization’s bottom line: His golf course in Ireland is threatened by coastal erosion, so the company recently applied for a permit to build a seawall to protect the property from “global warming and its effects.”

Other than that, Trump has been fairly consistent in his views on climate change — or consistent for Trump. Two months after signing the open letter, he told members of the Trump National Golf Club that Al Gore should be stripped of his Nobel Prize because that winter had been cold. “Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn’t care less,” he said. “It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America’s stupidity.”

Now that sounds more like the Republican nominee.

Share

Get Grist in your inbox

Continued:

Donald Trump once backed urgent climate action. Wait, what?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, Hagen, LAI, ONA, PUR, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump once backed urgent climate action. Wait, what?

Prince May Have Died Days After a Drug Overdose. This "Miracle" Drug Could Save Others.

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Doctors treated Prince for a drug overdose just six days before his death, TMZ reported late Thursday citing multiple unnamed sources.

The seven-time Grammy winner, best known for his eccentric personality and gifted songwriting that helped define pop music, was found unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park estate and studio in Minnesota. An autopsy on Friday will help determine the exact cause of death, though information won’t be available for several days, even weeks.

News of the possible drug overdose comes during an unprecedented surge in US deaths linked to opioids, such as heroin and OxyContin. The sharp rise in overdoses has fueled a debate about making the reversal drug, which may have been used on the pop star, more widely available.

Early reports from TMZ and the Pioneer Press stated that Prince had been battling the flu for several weeks, and the pop icon told an Atlanta crowd on April 14 that he had been “a little under the weather” a week before, according to the New York Times.

Just after 1 a.m. the following day, on his way back to Minnesota after two shows in Atlanta, the pop icon made an emergency stop at a hospital in Moline, Illinois. The celebrity news site TMZ, which first broke the news of the pop icon’s death, reported that doctors reportedly injected the 57-year-old with a “save shot” to counteract the damaging effects of an opiate overdose of Percocet, a prescription painkiller with a combination of oxycodone and acetaminophen. Prince was treated and released from the hospital three hours after his arrival.

Communities across the United States are grappling with an opioid overdose epidemic. Such overdoses took more American lives than traffic accidents in 2014, and since 1999 these deaths have nearly quadrupled nationwide, with a surge particularly among young white men. The uptick in overdoses has prompted states and cities to make Naloxone, the so-called injectable “miracle drug” used in hospitals for decades, more accessible for use outside the hospital. Naloxone can save a user’s life by reversing the effects of opiates.

The Obama administration has invested $11 million toward aiding states with expanding treatment services while lawmakers and law enforcement agencies have pushed to give schools and police officers access to the reversal drug.

As my colleague Jenny Luna notes, once doctors inject the drug into the user’s system, it blocks the narcotic’s pathways to the brain and can restore normal breathing levels and consciousness if administered early enough.

You can read her story about the drug here.

Jump to original: 

Prince May Have Died Days After a Drug Overdose. This "Miracle" Drug Could Save Others.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, OXO, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Prince May Have Died Days After a Drug Overdose. This "Miracle" Drug Could Save Others.

Here’s Why the Huffington Post Is Wrong About Donald Trump

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

My good pals at Huffington Post have announced a momentous decision: No longer will they treat Donald Trump—a.k.a. @realDonaldTrump—as a serious political candidate and afford him coverage in its news and politics verticals. Instead, they will relegate the tirade-prone and traffic-generating tycoon to the entertainment section. I’ll let them explain:

After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of the Huffington Post‘s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.

Trump has indeed turned an important event—a major political party selecting its presidential nominee—into a stretch Hummer-sized clown car. A Trump-dominated GOP contest does have the feel of a super-charged reality show, with political consumers (that is, the audience) on the edge of their seats, eagerly awaiting the next Trump tweet—Trweet™—blasting another foe or critic. (“Hey Pope Francis, you suck!”) Trump is campaigning as a bombastic buffoon, playing to the crowd and inspiring love-hate viewing. Yet, I believe my dear comrades at HuffPo (and I hope they will link to this article) are wrong.

Continue Reading »

Link: 

Here’s Why the Huffington Post Is Wrong About Donald Trump

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s Why the Huffington Post Is Wrong About Donald Trump

Lemony Snicket Walks the Plank

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Mark Murrmann

THE NOVELIST DANIEL HANDLER is bobbing ahead of me in the cold bay water at San Francisco’s Aquatic Park. His head, swathed in a red cap, resembles a maraschino cherry, and I struggle to keep up as the current presses me back toward land. “They told me to wear a swim cap so I wouldn’t be mistaken for a seal,” he explains. “So I was always wearing it, but then I wondered, ‘What happens if I get mistaken for a seal? What then?'”

The “Balclutha” docked in Aquatic Park Maddie Oatman

Handler, 44, is best known for his Lemony Snicket kids’ books, but his latest novel, the gruesome and delightful We Are Pirates, isn’t so child-friendly. We’d arranged to meet here at the Dolphin Club, where he swims three or four mornings a week in the presence of historic tall ships such as the mighty Balclutha. Swimming makes him feel free, he says. It lets him shake off his celebrity and escape urban life for a bit.

Gwen, Handler’s 14-year-old protagonist, also yearns to slip away. She’s an awkward kid from SF’s hypersafe Embarcadero neighborhood, grounded for pilfering makeup and a porn mag from the drugstore. Aided by her friends and a demented old man spewing pirate lore, she steals a boat and sets out for high adventure on the bay. As the dazzle of piracy darkens, Gwen’s father, a dweebish radio producer, tries to bring her back to safety. Without skimping on talking parrots, Handler’s novel touches on the nature of modern surveillance and the forces that compel us to reckless acts.

Continue Reading »

Link:

Lemony Snicket Walks the Plank

Posted in alo, Anchor, Dolphin, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Ringer, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lemony Snicket Walks the Plank