Billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is putting his money where his mouth is by pledging $20 million to help elect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the next president.
In a Thursday evening post on Medium, Moskovitz said he and his wife, Cari Tuna, are will be donating the money to super-PACs and Democratic committees dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton.
“Like many Democratic voters, we don’t support every plank of the platform, but it is clear that if Secretary Clinton wins the election, America will advance much further toward the world we hope to see,” Moskovitz wrote.
He added: “If Donald Trump wins, the country will fall backward, and become more isolated from the global community.”
Lady Gaga thrilled her little monsters with her first new single in three years – “Perfect Illusion.”
The break-up song starts off with strong rock guitar riffs, leading into powerful vocals from Gaga. The lyrics may not be her deepest as the song is a whole lot of repeating “It was the perfect illusion,” but her fans are sure to be thrilled.
Donald Trump with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi
The editorial board of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel published an op-ed today calling for an independent federal investigation into Donald Trump’s $25,000 donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s reelection fund.
Trump loves to call his presidential opponent “Crooked Hillary” although she has never been charged or found guilty of anything. But in this tawdry campaign donation escapade, it clearly looks like Trump is the one guilty of “pay for play.”
The timing is certainly curious, with the contribution arriving just three days after Bondi’s office said it was considering whether to join a class-action lawsuit against Trump University, an education company that promised to turn students into successful real estate investors, but left many empty-handed. Bondi’s office decided not to join the suit.
The donation from the candidate’s foundation also violated tax rules governing nonprofit organizations. As a result, the GOP presidential nominee recently paid the IRS a pocket-change fine of $2,500.
Maybe there is nothing untoward here. Maybe it’s nothing more than coincidence, as Bondi and the Trump campaign maintain.
[snip]
It’s hard to tell who looks worse in this, Bondi or Trump.
It was learned this week that in 2014, after Bondi decided not to investigate Trump U, the billionaire hosted a $3,000-a-person fundraiser for her at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.
So, to recap: Trump University investigation comes up, three days later $25,000 appears from Trump, the next day Bondi decides not to prosecute, and then Trump throws a $3K a person fund-raiser for Bondi at his resort.
Nope. Doesn’t sound fishy to me. How about you?
For a more entertaining look at the story, check The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert looking into the debacle.
According to VP Republican running mate Mike Pence, speaking at the Reagan Presidential Library today, Donald Trump is now the “second coming” of Ronald Reagan.
“The American people picked a bold truth teller in 1980, and I know they’re going to elect a bold truth teller in 2016,” he said. “These challenging times bear a striking similarity, I believe, to the time America faced in 1980. Then as now we stand at a fault line in history. An economy in decline, joblessness stretched as far as the eye can see, alarming social upheaval and an America pushed around abroad.”
Pence, at times emotional, described Reagan as an outsider who made the political elite uncomfortable but won over voters with a refreshing bluntness. “In his voice they heard the rare and unmistakable sound of a man unbound by Washington niceties and pretense of power. In his voice they heard, for the first time in a long time, the truth,” Pence said. “Ronald Reagan spoke the truth to the American people, just like Donald Trump has.”
Patti Davis, the daughter of President Reagan, is no fan of Trump having recently denounced his “fondness for verbal violence” in regard to his comments about “Second Amendment people” and Hillary Clinton.
Star Trek star Chris Pine was asked by the Hollywood Reporter his thoughts on the news that the character of “Sulu” is revealed to be gay in the latest Trek film, Star Trek Beyond:
“Amen, man. It’s about f—ing time. The fact that there’s still a conversation about it means that there’s still room to go in terms of it being normalized.
“My only rebuttal to George Takei — no matter what kind of creative differences he had about Sulu being gay, and I can understand his creative differences — is the fact that our job is to make people feel less alone. If there’s one kid in Middle America who feels any amount of self-loathing because he feels different, or is being bullied because he feels different or looks different or sounds different, if our film can give him solace and make him or her feel less alone, then abso-effin-loutely we should do it all the time, every day of the week.”
During an appearance by Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning, Mike Barnicle Johnson asked Johnson his thoughts on Aleppo, and Johnson seemed stumped by the question:
Johnson: “What is Aleppo?”
Barnicle: “You’re kidding.”
Johnson: “No.”
Barnicle: “Aleppo is in Syria. It’s the epicenter of the refugee crisis.”
Host Joe Scarborough couldn’t resist commenting:
“You asked, ‘What is Aleppo?’ Do you really think that foreign policy is so insignificant that somebody running for president of the United States shouldn’t even know what Aleppo is, where Aleppo is, why Aleppo is so important?”
Johnson’s campaign released a statement on the gaffe which read:
“Yes, I understand the dynamics of the Syrian conflict — I talk about them every day. But hit with “What about Aleppo?”, I immediately was thinking about an acronym, not the Syrian conflict. I blanked. It happens, and it will happen again during the course of this campaign,” Johnson said in the statement. “Can I name every city in Syria? No. Should I have identified Aleppo? Yes. Do I understand its significance? Yes.”
At last night’s “Commander In Chief” forum, Republican Donald Trump doubled down on his 2013 opinion that sexual assaults were on the rise in the military because “what did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”
From his 2013 tweet (see above): “26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”
When asked about the tweet last night, Trump replied that “I think that’s absolutely correct.”
Of course, one option might be for folks to act as civilized men and women.
You have to wonder if the Trumpster thinks we shouldn’t have coed universities? Maybe segregate office workers?
Discovered in the recent batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server is an communication from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to Clinton informing her how he used his own private email account during his time at the State Department.
Clinton has said in the past that Powell advised her early on in her time as Secretary of State about email use, although Powell says he didn’t remember any such communications.
Up to now, this has been a question of who’s telling the truth? Did Powell advise Clinton on email use or not?
Emails released by House Democrat Elijah Cummings Wednesday evening showed Powell, Secretary of State under the George W. Bush administration, answering a question from Clinton about smartphone use.
“Be very careful,” Powell told Clinton in a January 2009 exchange, saying that using a BlackBerry for State Department work could make the messages “part of the official record and subject to the law.”
He also admitted to going around State Department servers in diplomatic discussions.
Clinton had asked her predecessor about restrictions on BlackBerry use in the department, though Powell replied that didn’t have the device and used a computer hooked up to private phone line to communicate with friends.
“I even used it to do business with some foreign leader and some of the senior foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts,” he wrote.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, who released the exchange as a member of the House Oversight Committee, said that the exchange shows “Secretary Powell advised Secretary Clinton with a detailed blueprint on how to skirt security rules and bypass requirements to preserve federal records.”
From the email dated January 23, 2009 (see above):
“What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient.) So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without going through the State Department servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels.”
