Tuesday, November 23, 2021

TRUMPWORLD: Here We Go Again!

Mike Masnick writing in TechDirt yesterday updated one more episode.
The latest is that Trump is literally threatening to sue the Pulitzer Prize Committee if they refuse to retract the 2018 prize that was given to the NY Times and the Washington Post for reporting on Russia's attempted interference with the 2016 Presidential campaign.

"Former President Donald Trump really has perfected every little thing he doesn't like being a grievance that he thinks he can sue over. . .In a letter sent to the Pulitzer Committee, Trump lawyer Alina Habba has some, well, bizarre theories about basically everything.

... it is hereby demanded that the Pulitzer Prize Board take immediate steps to strip the New York Times and The Washington Post of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Pulitzer Prize Board’s failure to do so will result in prompt legal action being taken against it. Please be guided accordingly.

What is the basis for this?

Well, Trump is massively exaggerating the recent indictments of Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko by a grand jury working with Special Counsel John Durham. Sussmann was indicted for lying to the FBI regarding who he was representing when he spoke with the FBI about concerns associated with what was in the Steele dossier. The Danchenko indictment is moderately more damning in suggesting that he provided sketchy information that ended up in the Steele dossier, but that's got little to do with what the Pulitzer Prize was about.

[...] But, in Trumpworld, these indictments are being used to claim that anything about "Russia" and the "2016 election" are completely disproved, despite that not being the case at all.

As highlighted in President Trump’s letter, it has recently become apparent that the subject articles were based on incontrovertibly false information provided by dubious sources who were maliciously attempting to mislead the public and tarnish our client’s reputation.

These sources are now facing criminal charges for their illicit conduct. On September 16, 2021, attorney Michael Sussman was charged with providing false statements to the FBI when he reported potential incidents of cooperation between our client and Russia. It has now been revealed that he was acting at the behest of the Clinton Campaign and that the accusations made by him were entirely fabricated.

Thereafter, on November 3, 2021, another analyst associated with the Clinton Campaign, Igor Danchenko, was charged with making false statements to the FBI. Specifically, it is alleged that Mr. Danchenko, who has been identified as a key contributor to the widely debunked “Steele Dossier,” lied to the FBI when he denied colluding with the Clinton Campaign in providing his contributions to same.

Despite these revelations, the Pulitzer Prize Board has failed to take any action to correct, retract, or otherwise repudiate the false reporting contained in the subject articles.

Except, as Liz Dye at Above The Law notes, the vast majority of the reporting that resulted in the Pulitzer Prize had nothing to do with the dossier.

Never mind that the prize encompassed a full year of coverage, including stories about Russia’s social media influence operation and coordination with Wikileaks, Don Jr.’s cack-handed effort to get dirt from a Russian spy — “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” — Michael Flynn’s promise to the Russian ambassador to ditch sanctions once Trump got elected, and FBI Director James Comey’s dismissal. None of which has been disproven.

In fact, only one of the stories for which the prize was awarded had the dossier as its main focus. It referred to the document as “controversial” and acknowledged that the FBI might have paid investigator Chris Steele.

And, even if that wasn't true and the reporting was about the dossier, there's nothing that the committee did that gives a cause of action to Donald Trump.

The Pulitzer Prize is, inherently, a subjective opinion of the committee. And that's the committee's own protected speech.

> The letter claims that the committee awarded the prize "erroneously" to the Times and the Post, but that's not his call, nor is it a legal issue. If the Pulitzers want to give an award to terrible reporting, that's it's fundamentally protected 1st Amendment right.

In short, Trump is saying that the Pulitzer Prize committee is not allowed to express an opinion, and such a threat is fundamentally both petty and censorial. What a sad little man, threatening bogus censorial lawsuits over petty little grievances based on someone's opinion he doesn't like. "

Filed Under: donald trump, free speech, journalism, opinion, pulitzer prize, reporting, russia, steele dossier, threats
Companies: ny times, pulitzer committee, washington post

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Monday, November 22, 2021

TIMELESS BEAUTY: A Chance Virtual Visit with Super Model Iman

One of the joys of living in New York City for many years is the unexpected pleasure of meeting interesting people. I can't remember what year it was, but it was an on-location catering job on a sultering Summer day in the backyard of a townhouse on the Upper East Side.
We immersed bottles of champagne on-ice outdoors in an inflatable child's pool for a birthday celebration.
Life goes on with that memory-trace (no other details. It was private; nothing more being said)

Getting Personal With Iman

The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love

By Guy Trebay

Iman at the Polo Bar in Manhattan, wearing Ralph Lauren.

(Iman at the Polo Bar in Manhattan, wearing Ralph Lauren.
Credit...Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times)

". . .We were seated on a leather banquette at the Polo Bar. Recently liberated from lockdown, Ralph Lauren’s midtown clubhouse for the shiny set is once more booming, though not yet serving lunch.
Never mind that. Learning that Iman would be in Manhattan for a few days to promote her first project since Mr. Bowie’s death — called Love Memoir, it is Iman’s first perfume and was inspired by their nearly quarter-century relationship — Mr. Lauren not only threw open the restaurant’s doors in welcome but dressed her for the occasion in a stock-tied floral print prairie dress, chunky silver belt and calfskin Wellington boots.
“When David and I met, we had both had successful careers and previous relationships,” Iman, 66, said. Born Iman Abdulmajid, Iman was 36 and had long since achieved both fame and mononym status when she and Mr. Bowie, 45 at the time, were married. “We knew what we wanted from each other,” Iman said in the frank way that is her signature.
People may imagine many things about Iman, projecting onto the screen of her beauty an array of fantasies engendered by someone with her natural refinement, aristocratic bearing and a neck so elegantly attenuated she considered it a superpower at fashion casting calls.
In reality Iman is hilarious and bawdy.
As her 800,000 Instagram followers know, she billboards her truth. Her social media posts alternate between glamour shots and typographical renderings of home truths (“We all have chapters that we would rather keep unpublished”) . . .

She swears with abandon and falls easily into conspiratorial laughter with a reporter — that is until the din of a bartender dumping cubes in an ice bin threatens to drown out conversation. The first time it happens, Iman ignores it. Twice and everything around her stops dead.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Iman says, dispatching an associate at a nearby table to bring the velvet hammer down.

Above all, what she and Mr. Bowie wanted, Iman said, was a refuge from a public always greedy for celebrities’ emotional detritus. They were also keen to get away from the psychic clutter of their own mythologies.


[...]

“It was never for me about the fabulousness,” Iman said. “I came to this country as a refugee. My parents started out poor in Somalia, did well for themselves but then lost everything. So when I came to America, it was a way for me to rebuild. It was a business plan.”

Famously, Iman’s career got its start in the ’70s with a risible fiction ginned up by the photographer and inveterate fabulist Peter Beard.

It was Mr. Beard who introduced Iman to Diana Vreeland at Vogue, claiming that his Somali protégé — a diplomat’s daughter educated at boarding schools in Cairo and at Nairobi University — was the daughter of a goatherd he had stumbled across in the African bush.

“I was not ‘lost’ to be discovered in a jungle,” Iman said with a hoot of derision. “I’ve never been in a jungle in my life!”

[...] The notion of creating a perfume evolved gradually and organically during isolation, she said. “I’ve been in the beauty business since 1994, and I never created a perfume.”

Every culture has its rituals of remembrance: lighted candles, altar building, the burning of incense and shedding of possessions. Victorians braided their loved ones’ hair into rings and lockets, and Iman’s perfume is, in a sense, a Victorian mourning gesture. The perfume weaves memories from the life she and Mr. Bowie shared.

[...] Love Memoir, which comes to market this week, is shaped like two stacked stones, one amber glass and the other hammered gold. The fragrance it contains is a heady and, it should be said, faintly anachronistic blend of bergamot, rose and an essence that was Mr. Bowie’s favorite.

“For 20 years I only wore Fracas,” Iman said. Following Mr. Bowie’s death, she found herself instead wearing his scent — a dry, earthy, and faintly woody smell of a common grass native to South Asia known as vetiver.

So it seemed only natural that, when working with the perfumers at Firmenich on the composition of Love Memoir, vetiver would be one of its most powerfully lingering notes. . ."

READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/style/iman-david-bowie.html 

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"SAINT SINEMA" + JOE MANCHIN III: The Odd Couple Who Can Teeter-and-Totter The 50/50 Party Split

Appearances are everything until two reporters working for the New York Times happen to have tracked their travel plans to the same $18-Million Mansion in Dallas for fund-raisers to fill their re-election coffers with streams of cash from outside the normal Democratic channels.

G.O.P. Donors Back Manchin and Sinema as They Reshape Biden’s Agenda

The two Democratic senators are attracting campaign contributions from business interests and conservatives as progressives fume over their efforts to pare back the president’s domestic policy bill.

By nytimes.com
<div class=__reading__mode__extracted__imagecaption>Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both Democrats, have been winning campaign contributions from donors more usually associated with Republicans.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
(Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both Democrats, have been winning campaign contributions from donors more usually associated with republicans. Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times)

Here are some details from Kate Kelly and Martin P. Vogel:
"WASHINGTON — Over the summer, as he was working to scale back President Biden’s domestic agenda, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia traveled to an $18 million mansion in Dallas for a fund-raiser that attracted Republican and corporate donors who have cheered on his efforts.
In September, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who along with Mr. Manchin has been a major impediment to the White House’s efforts to pass its package of social and climate policy, stopped by the same home to raise money from a similar cast of donors for her campaign coffers.
Even as Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, both Democrats, have drawn fire from the left for their efforts to shrink and reshape Mr. Biden’s proposals, they have won growing financial support from conservative-leaning donors and business executives in a striking display of how party affiliation can prove secondary to special interests and ideological motivations when the stakes are high enough.
[...] But the stream of cash to the campaigns of Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin from outside normal Democratic channels stands out because many of the donors have little history with them.
The financial support is also notable for how closely tied it has been to their power over a single piece of legislation, the fate of which continues to rest largely with the two senators because their party cannot afford to lose either of their votes in the evenly divided Senate.
> This month, the billionaire Wall Street investor Kenneth G. Langone, a longtime Republican megadonor who has not previously contributed to Mr. Manchin, effusively praised him for showing “guts and courage” and vowed to throw “one of the biggest fund-raisers I’ve ever had for him.”
> Stanley S. Hubbard, a billionaire Republican donor, wrote his first check to Ms. Sinema in September and said that he was considering doing the same for Mr. Manchin because of their efforts to trim the sails of the Democrats’ agenda. . .
> Cash has also poured in for Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema from political action committees and donors linked to the finance and pharmaceutical industries, which opposed proposals initially included in the domestic policy bill that the lawmakers helped scale back, including changes to Medicare and the tax-rate increases. . .
> The lawmakers share a campaign finance consultant, who helped organize fund-raising swings through Texas for both lawmakers that yielded cash from Republican donors, as well as a fund-raiser for Ms. Sinema in Washington in late September with business lobbying groups that oppose the domestic policy bill. . .
Mr. Manchin has long been to the right of his party on litmus-test issues like abortion rights and fossil fuels, while Ms. Sinema started her political career as a liberal activist before shifting to the center. One Wall Street executive joked that in his industry, Ms. Sinema — who as a young politician once likened political donations to “bribery” — was now referred to as “Saint Sinema”...

This year, Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema have received donations from major Republican donors who had never before given to them, including James A. Haslam III, who owns the Cleveland Browns football team, and the Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow, who is close to Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court.
> Several other prominent Republican donors who supported Mr. Trump also wrote their first-ever checks to Mr. Manchin in the last few months. They include
- the Dallas-based lobbyist and investor Roy W. Bailey, who helped lead fund-raising for Mr. Trump’s inauguration and a pro-Trump nonprofit group; and
- the banker Andrew Beal, who donated a total of $3 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump from 2018 through last year.
- Executives at Goldman Sachs, including the firm’s president, John Waldron, combined to donate tens of thousands of dollars to Ms. Sinema in the spring and summer. In July, she attended a meet-and-greet at the offices of the Blackstone Group, which is headed by a major Republican donor; some Blackstone employees made donations around the same time.
- A handful of employees from the investment firm Apollo Global Management, including Marc J. Rowan, the chief executive and a major donor to predominantly Republican candidates and causes, donated to Ms. Sinema in late September after the firm sent a plea to industry contacts seeking donations for her.
FACTOIDS:
(1) The $2.6 million raised by Ms. Sinema’s campaign through the first nine months of this year was two and a half times as much as she raised in the same period last year, while the $3.3 million raised by Mr. Manchin’s campaign was more than 14 times as much as his haul through the end of September last year.
(2) Overall, Ms. Sinema’s campaign took in about $6.1 million in donations between the beginning of 2019 and the end of September, and it had $4.5 million in the bank with three years to go until she faces the voters in Arizona. Mr. Manchin’s campaign raised about $3.8 million and had $5.4 million on hand.
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Sunday, November 21, 2021

Elon Musk Reveals INSANE NEW Tesla Phone Features & Insights!

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HUH? OK...Really? Oil Market to Return to Surplus in 2020, ING Says

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China Urges Banks to Cap Speculation as Yuan Surges

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