Beet L. Jooz

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin on Thursday said Facebook's removal of accounts controlled by various Russian media was a hostile move that smacked of censorship.

The K-9 was being used to search for the 13-year-old after he left his house because he was upset over a video game.

Terrifying video of an armed robbery at a Gentilly Domino's has been released by the New Orleans Police Department. 

"The president has directed that the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security work together with our governors to deploy our National Guard to our southwest border."

After a high court overturned a Baton Rouge federal judge's stay, construction along the entire length of the Bayou Bridge pipeline is now in progress.

In a series of tweets, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel explained why the media freakout over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s travel expenses is a bunch of hooey.

In the past week, multiple media outlets have published pieces freaking out over Pruitt’s travel expenses after it was discovered the EPA administrator flew first class on the taxpayer’s dime as a security precaution after he received multiple death threats. In a column for The Washington Post, Hillary Clinton’s longtime lackey John Podesta wrote that “Scott Pruitt Needs To Go.”

“Pruitt was forced to release documents indicating that he spent more than $105,000 on first-class flights in his first year at the EPA alone,” Podesta writes. “The Post recently reported that one week’s worth of travel in June 2017 by Pruitt and his staff cost about $120,000, which the EPA inspector general is investigating.”

As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway explained in a column yesterday, the media-invented scandal surrounding Pruitt’s travel expenses is largely manufactured garbage. You can read that in full here.

In a series of tweets, Strassel also explained that the travel costs of Pruitt and his staff are not unprecedented and that previous EPA heads actually spent more.

1/ Mr. Eisen, actually, no. Wrong on all counts.
Pruitt travel/security costs for 2017: $160k
Gina McCarthy travel/security costs for 2013-16: $630k
Lisa Jackson travel/security costs for 2009-12: $332k
Coming up next, the breakout for their trips… https://t.co/uLhArnzkoI

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) April 4, 2018

2/ Pruitt in 2017:
–G7 Summit in Italy: $84k
–Morocco: 40k

McCarthy in 2016
–Ghana: 68k
–Peru: 45k
–Tokyo: 75k

McCarthy in 2015
–Paris: 41k
–Dubai: 90k
–Tokyo: 68k
–Italy: 56k (a trip that, like Pruitt, involved a private tour of Vatican)

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) April 4, 2018

3/ McCarthy in 2014
–Vancouver: 62k (btw, it’s impressive to spend that much just getting to Canada)
–Vietnam: 68k

McCarthy in 2013
–China: 55k

Jackson in 2012

–Israel: 65k

Jackson in 2011
–Rio De Janeiro: 60k
–Montreal: 51k
–China: 156k (wow).

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) April 4, 2018

She also reiterated the statement from EPA ethics official Kevin Minoli dated March 30, which said Pruitt didn’t violate any laws or ethics rules when he stayed at a condo owned by environmental lobbyists.

“Therefore, entering into the lease was consistent with federal ethics regulations regarding gifts, and use of the property in accordance with the lease agreement did not constitute a gift a defined in those regulations.”
And you are welcome, for all these facts.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) April 4, 2018

“the Ethics Office [staffed by career officials] reviewed the lease agreement . . . Under the terms of the lease, if the space was utilized for one 30-day month, then the rental cost would be $1500, which is a reasonable market value.” And more:

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) April 4, 2018

The unwinding of public support for tech companies generally, and especially the giants, has come with surprising speed and is acknowledged these days by just about everybody. Indeed, the consensus view, shared even by some tech CEOs, is that government should regulate them.

But there are two problems with this approach: Whatever else they may do, such regulations would  likely have the practical effect of protecting these companies from competition, and insofar as these outfits traffic in constitutionally protected speech, regulations would undermine that speech online, and perhaps in the courts.

A better approach would be for these companies to regulate themselves, but to do so they would first have to show they understand what is upsetting people on the right, left, and all points in between. Though popular culture is clearly controlled by liberals and Democrats, and therefore speaks loudest about technology from their perspective, the view from here is that in fact it is Republicans and conservatives who pose the greater political threat and whose goodwill, therefore, is the more urgent task.

So what is it that has alienated people on the center-right? At bottom it is the industry’s embrace of all things PC, an affinity that is exhibited in their political bias, transparent virtue signaling, and sympathy for identity politics. Let’s look at a few of these things among the five biggest tech companies — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google — one at a time:

Facebook: The most frequent conservative complaint against Facebook has been that it favors liberal and progressive stories, both in its “trending topics” and among its employees. This matter reached a head in 2016, with the company admitting that certain “rogue employees” may have deliberately  downplayed conservative issues.

Facing withering criticism from people of all political stripes, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently opined that maybe the government should regulate the company.

Amazon: Among the least remarked but nevertheless most instructive decisions made by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, was his hire in early 2015 of Jay Carney, president Obama’s former press secretary, as head of Amazon’s Washington office.  As with all companies, the head of the DC office oversees the staff and serves as the figurehead of the company in all of its dealings with congress, the White House, and the independent and executive branch agencies.

Far more importantly, it is Bezos who personally owns the Washington Post, an influential newspaper that, along with the New York Times, has badly abused journalistic convention re the separation of fact and opinion in its overwhelmingly negative coverage of president Trump.

Finally, and redolent of the company’s virtue signaling, there is the recent construction, at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, of a “rain forest” for employees. Why people who live in Seattle, which is itself a rain forest, would be inspired by this was almost certainly not a factor in why Amazon built the thing.

Apple: If one deliberately wanted to offend Republicans and conservatives, a good way to start would be to invite Al Gore to serve on the company’s Board. Steve Jobs did just that, and Gore remains a director of the company to this day.

A more recent event concerns Apple’s reaction to Trump’s poor words following the Charlottesville rally organized by far right extremist groups. Avowedly put off by the president’s faint criticism of the rally organizers, Apple awarded a $1 million contribution, for the cause of fighting “hate,” to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has been portrayed by virtually every right-of-center organization in America (as well as in media like Politico) as itself a hate group, and a money grubbing scam operation to boot.

Netflix: No company has caused more heartburn for cable TV and Hollywood than Netflix. And if this were all they’d done they might actually be favored by conservatives. But it isn’t all they’ve done. They’ve also recently added to their board Susan Rice, Obama’s UN ambassador who, immediately after the killing of the American ambassador in Benghazi, said on national TV that the attack was in response to an obscure anti-Muslim YouTube video, an absurd and transparent lie.

Not content to brand himself by providing a board seat to one such as Rice, Reed Hastings, the company’s CEO, reportedly attempted to get Peter Thiel removed from the Facebook board for the latter’s support of president Trump.

Google (Alphabet): The company’s ties to the Obama administration, something that may well have influenced the FTC’s kid-glove anti-trust investigation of the company in 2013, has been well documented. From their extraordinarily uniform political contributions, to their hire of Al Gore as a consultant, Google has been anything but discreet about its political preferences.

The latest evidence of this is the matter concerning a former Google engineer named James Damore. Damore wrote an internal memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” in which he challenged the company’s diversity policy. After being fired for his memo, Damore filed in January of this year a class action lawsuit accusing the company of discrimination against conservatives, white people, and men. The case has attracted a mountain of publicity, and conservative groups see it as evidence of Google’s liberal bias.

It goes without saying that this list omits the large number of grievances that are alleged by groups and individuals who are neither conservative nor Republican. These include anticompetitive effects, deleterious impact on the economy and the working class, the corrosive effects of social media on children, and most importantly, privacy. Tech companies are also accused of destroying not just the commercial lifeblood of media companies (advertising) but also of journalism itself, an accusation that recently attracted support from Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN (and the last guy in the world from whom anyone should take lessons in journalism.)

As suggested at the outset, the plight of the tech companies appears headed for policy venues, whether it’s Congress or the regulatory agencies like the FTC or FCC, and it’s because of that state of play that the Googles and Facebooks of the world should move to clean up their profiles among Republicans and conservatives. Democrats and liberals are aligning against techland too, but Republicans have the majorities in congress and the federal agencies and are, therefore, in a position to act without the support of the Democrats.

There are issues that are of concern to people of both parties, and neither party, like privacy. And in the absence of some real reform of their data mining practices, companies like Google and Facebook look to be in a protracted and losing fight on the issue. But for liberals and Democrats the beating heart of their passion for the privacy issue lies in their embrace of the Trump-Russia collusion myth, and their hope that things like the puny Russian ads on Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica brouhaha will further their campaign against the president.

The chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group is dismissing the public criticism for the company’s corporate mandate for their local news stations to promote scripted, anti-media talking points around the country.

David Smith corresponded with The New York Times earlier this week, expressing disbelief over the backlash after Deadspin‘s compilation video showed anchors acting like corporate drones. Smith argued that “must-run” segments are a “standard practice in the industry,” and local networks “do exactly the same promotional things that we do.”

“You cant be serious!” Smith said. “Do you understand that as a practical matter every word that comes out of the mouths of network news people is scripted and approved by someone?”

Smith also defended the mandated segment by comparing it to late-night shows that networks air on their local affiliates. Smith also seemed to take a swing at the Times, which might not be terribly surprising since he has referred to print media as left wing “meaningless dribble.”

“Not that you would print it, but do you understand that every local TV station is required to ‘must run’ from its network their content, and they don’t own me…That would be all their news programming and other shows such as late-night talk, which is just late-night political so-called comedy.”

Many of Sinclair’s critics have noted that their scripted package carries water for President Trump‘s regular slams against the media. Sinclair issued an internal memo where they shrugged off the recent criticism as “misleading” defamation of their journalistic responsibility campaign.

Trump defended Sinclair over the scandal, though Smith wouldn’t elaborate on what kind of relationship he has with the president, only saying he doesn’t “engage in Twitter, Facebook or other such activities and have not read anything the president has said.”

[Image via Getty]

— —

>> Follow Ken Meyer (@KenMeyer91) on Twitter

A mother of four who campaigns against “gender identity” ideology claims she was threatened with arrest and banned from leaving the UK after saying transgender women are “castrated” men.

Facebook has granted authorities in Sweden special powers to remove so-called “fake accounts” on the website ahead of this year’s national elections, reports local media.

WWE Hall of Famer 'Luscious' Johnny Valiant, has died at the age of 71 after being hit by a truck in Ross Township, Pa.

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - An Indian court jailed Bollywood star Salman Khan for five years for poaching on Thursday, lawyers said, a sentence likely to derail the career of one of the country's most popular actors.

Having presumably grown bored of inhaling condoms and ingesting tide pods, some millennials are now taking part in the latest social media...

Aides to President Trump are reportedly preparing for a scenario in which Trump withdraws the U.S. from the Iran nuclear agreement next month.Trump's national security team is considering strategies for pulling out...

President Trump has taken to hosting a slew of private dinner parties at the White House with friends, lawmakers, conservative leaders and prominent television journalists, ...

The cause of the attack was not immediately known.

Some Mississippi residents are seeking to prohibit the state's flag from being displayed in the town of Ocean Springs, arguing in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that it is "racially demeaning and hostile."The federal la...

(Reuters) - An American cameraman and filmmaker who died in December in a jail in the Philippines suffered blunt-force trauma, and his body had markings inconsistent with the official account by Philippine authorities that he hanged himself, a private U.S. pathologist said.

Federal authorities said two men were arrested at a New York airport for trying to smuggle 26 live birds concealed in hair curlers.

"The Civil War is over and he is using the n-word not once, not twice - three times!" said Rodney McCord, a black city commissioner from Georgia.

The trading world was taken aback for several moments yesterday when Jefferies' QE-fanboy David Zervos tweeted an instagram photo that showed what Cloud 9 surely looks like for Fed sycophants:

Besides a promo shot for a new "Lord of the Rings" movie, many were left wondering what exactly was going on here.

As it turns out, this was Janet Yellen merely doing what all of her predecessors had - lucratively - done in the past with her inaugural paid dinner appearance before a wealthy Wall Street crowd of 40, two months after stepping down as Fed chair, in which she discussed the economy and interest rates at an event hosted by investment bank Jefferies.

Speaking to Reuters, Yellen said she revealed no confidential information at Monday's gathering, put on by Jefferies CEO Richard Handler, although there is clearly no way to check just what transpired at this "off the record" gathering where 40 people paid tens thousands of dollars, either hard or soft, to hear the former Fed chair speak. According to Reuters, it was her first such engagement since leaving the Fed.

"I talked about the economy and general perspectives on monetary policy," Yellen said late on Wednesday.

Yellen also "expressed the view that three or four rate rises were likely this year, and that recent U.S. tax cuts and a boost in government spending posed at least some risk of running the economy hot."

Separately, Yellen told Reuters she was paid but declined to say how much, and did not provide details.

In addition to the romantic dinner for 40, the event included a question-and-answer session with more than 100 Jefferies clients, where she reportedly stuck close to the gradual rate-hike message that has since been adopted by her replacement, Jerome Powell.

Later, over dinner at the Manhattan penthouse of Jefferies' chief executive Dick Handler, Yellen told executives from hedge funds, private equity firms and other companies that she considered inflation to be in check and unlikely to spike, so rates would stay relatively low, a Reuters source said.

Which, of course, sounds like each and every press conference and testimony Yellen had given. The economy must truly be recovering if there are those who would pay thousands of dollars to hear what most chugged elephant doses of Redbull just to stay awake through.

That said, one can't blame Yellen who is doing precisely what everyone said she would: cashing in after years in public service is a well-trodden path for policymakers and regulators, highlighting the demand among investors for any exclusive insights they can offer.

As a reminder, Yellen's predecessor Ben Bernanke waited just over a month after leaving the Fed in 2014 before earning some $250,000 for a private talk in Abu Dhabi. He followed that up with similarly-priced private dinners with investors in New York, at which he predicted rates would remain low for a long time.

In the case of former Fed chiefs, who can earn an annual salary in one night and have no constraints on expressing their views provided they do not broach confidential matters, those insights could potentially move markets.

Although, in the case of Yellen - who just last year said there would not be another major financial crisis "in our lifetimes", probably not.

* * *

As for Zervos shown in the pic above, Reuters was not able to him; the only trace was his Tuesday tweet which said "an amazing evening last night hosting Janet Yellen for our clients in NY."

An amazing evening last night hosting Janet Yellen for our clients in NY..she ran it #hothothot… https://t.co/2G8xuX64RK

— David Zervos (@zervoscorfu) April 4, 2018

In addition to his well-known pro-Fed bias, Zervos is also known for his jolly, partying ways, and is not shy about it: here is an instagram photo  of him on Halloween 2017, dressed as, quite literally, a dickhead.

 

A spokesman for Spain’s High Court declined to give additional information or say what might be the next steps

Causeway police investigated 54 crashes on the bridge since the beginning of the year. That’s 54 wrecks on a 90-day period.

A state lawmaker’s attempt to make sexual education a requirement in public schools failed after strong discussion by supporters and opponents of the legislation. 

Anti-sexual harassment policies and mandatory training for all state public servants are one step closer to becoming a reality.