Next week, according to sources, seven black Fox News employees plan to join a racial-discrimination suit filed last month by two colleagues. The original lawsuit alleged that Fox News’ longtime comptroller, Judy Slater, subjected members of Fox’s payroll staff to racial insults for years. (Fox News fired Slater in February after those employees began litigation against the network.)
Lawyers representing the payroll employees are demanding that Fox’s accounting director, Tammy Efinger, also be removed from supervising an employee because she allegedly participated in Slater’s racist behavior. In a letter to the network’s lawyers obtained by New York, the attorneys state: “Not once did Ms. Efinger step in or attempt to interfere with Ms. Slater’s outrageous conduct.” The letter adds, instead, “Ms. Efinger chose to laugh or giggle following Ms. Slater’s vitriol.”
The letter also includes new allegations of racism in Fox News’ accounting department. According to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Slater demanded that black female employees hold “arm wrestling matches’” with white female employees in her office, just down the hall from Ailes’s office on the second floor of Fox headquarters. “Forcing a black woman employee to ‘fight’ for the amusement and pleasure of her white superiors is horrifying. This highly offensive and humiliating act is reminiscent of Jim Crow era battle royals,” the letter says, referring to the practice of paying black men to fight blindfolded at carnivals for white spectators’ entertainment. The lawyers argue that Efinger bragged about wanting to “fight” a black employee.
They made black employees arm wrestle?
They might as well have forced them to sing old plantation songs and call all of the white men "Massa."
You know I kind of scoffed at the idea that Fox News was going to be forced to close its doors, but now I am a little less sure they will survive.
Fox hacked Andrea Tantaros’ phone and used her dead brother in campaign of psychological torture: lawsuit
ReplyDelete...NPR reported that the lawsuit filed on Monday claims co-President Bill Shine and other executives paid media consultants to spy on Tantaros’ electronic communications. The information gathered was allegedly fed into a social media campaign intent on undermining her determination to pursue sexual harassment charges against the network.
The lawsuit says that information about Tantaros’ private communications began to appear on social media “sockpuppet” accounts beginning in 2016 after she refused a $1 million payout from Fox News.
“The criminal scheme has continued unabated through the date of this Complaint, long after the end of Ms. Tantaros’ employment by Fox News and Ailes’ departure from the network,” the lawsuit states. “[T]he Defendants devastated Ms. Tantaros by illegally surveilling her emails and telephone conversations and then communicating that they were doing so through cruel social media posts — conduct which has continued to the present.”
The complaint details one instance of receiving sockpuppet tweets about the movie The Black Scorpion after Tantaros had conversations about a close friend who was hospitalized for a scorpion bite.
Tantaros also received social media harassment about her dead brother. In one case, she was speaking to her dead brother’s children at Disneyland when she was sent a photo on Twitter of Mickey Mouse hugging two children. The caption read: “Mickey Mouse and ‘new friends’.”
Tantaros’s attorney, Judd Burstein, told NPR that the campaign was “not just cyberstalking.”
“This is cyberstalking on steroids, because, as alleged in the complaint, they harassed her through sock-puppet social media accounts which conveyed the illegal fruits of their electronic surveillance of her,” Burstein said. “It was in essence two crimes committed at the same time.”
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/fox-hacked-andrea-tantaros-phone-and-used-her-dead-brother-in-campaign-of-psychological-torture-lawsuit/
Trump Prepping To Fold Like a Cheap Suit on Wall Demand ... SAD!
ReplyDelete...President Trump’s advisors are now signaling that Trump plans to back down because he knows he’ll lose. In other words, Mr Winning, Dominating, Make the Best Deals is about to go Low Energy and walk away from a sure loss while trying to pretend it never happened.
Folks on the Hill are saying they don’t think there needs to be shutdown. President Trump’s key advisors and spokespeople are today saying, well, it doesn’t really have to be money for the wall. Anything tied to border security will do.
Let’s not ignore what’s happening here. President Trump’s OMB Director Mulvaney said very clearly: dollar for dollar, you get $1 for Obamacare (actually, one not taken from Obamacare) in exchange for every dollar you give us for the boss’s wall.
And yet, just days later, Trump appears ready to go full low-energy, agreeing to call any money tied to border security or even paperwork a ‘wall’, not a ‘brick and mortar’ wall as Republicans have been explaining today but rather a conceptual ‘wall’ which is to say, not a wall.
Trump for either a major stumble by going for a shutdown test of wills or an ignominious fold, LOW ENERGY! SAD! and all the rest.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-prepping-to-fold-like-a-cheap-suit-on-wall-demand-sad
The accounting department head is named Efinger?
ReplyDeleteAs in "Yeah, she's f-ing her all right..."
Ah HA HA HA HA!!!
Trump Administration Changes Its Tune on Ed Snowden, Moscow’s Star Defector
ReplyDeleteThe recent statement by CIA Director Mike Pompeo that WikiLeaks is a fraud and an anti-American actor on the global stage has led to gnashing of teeth among fans of that celebrated “privacy organization.” Pompeo did not mince words, declaring that WikiLeaks is an enemy of the United States and Western democracies and he denounced its founder Julian Assange in unusually blunt terms:
“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service…it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia… Julian Assange and his kind are not the slightest bit interested in improving civil liberties or enhancing personal freedom…Assange is a narcissist who has created nothing of value. He relies on the dirty work of others to make himself famous. He’s a fraud, a coward hiding behind a screen.”
The seriousness of the Trump administration’s outing of WikiLeaks and Assange as enemies of free societies has been demonstrated further by reports that the Department of Justice is seriously considering pressing charges against Assange over his role in recent leaks of CIA hacking tools. That Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week described Assange’s arrest as a “priority” for his department indicates that this is more than a theoretical debate for the Trump administration.
This represents a remarkable turnabout for the White House, particularly since last year Donald Trump professed his “love” for WikiLeaks when it was hurting Hillary Clinton by releasing emails that our Intelligence Community has assessed were stolen by Russian spies then passed to Assange to bolster the Trump campaign. Now, however, the president says he is okay with Assange’s arrest, and the rest of his administration has followed suit, abruptly changing its line on the fugitive who’s been holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London for the last five years, on the lam from rape charges in Sweden.
Mike Pompeo stated a truth known to Western counterspies for years—that Assange is a Kremlin agent and WikiLeaks is a pawn of Putin— but his public utterance is a game-changer. Now we must reassess what WikiLeaks really is and whose bidding it’s been doing, at least since 2010, when it leaked hundreds of thousands of classified State Department cables stolen by Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, a disaffected Army private.
Several members of Team Trump may now be facing FBI questions about their dealings with WikiLeaks, especially Roger Stone, the longtime Trump associate and self-described dirty trickster who repeatedly boasted of his relationship with Assange, including admissions that he had foreknowledge of WikiLeaks email dumps that were damaging to the Clinton campaign and Democrats. Collusion with shady political operatives is one thing, while collusion with hostile foreign intelligence services is quite another, legally speaking. Anybody who’s been playing footsie with Assange and his “privacy organization” to influence American politics with help from the Kremlin, should expect a visit by Federal investigators sometime soon.
Admitting what WikiLeaks really is puts certain events of the last several years into proper focus. In particular, the key role played by Assange and his helpers in getting Edward Snowden to Moscow in June 2013 must be reassessed in light of Pompeo’s statement. As I’ve explained for years, Snowden’s defection—first to Hong Kong then to Russia—was from the outset an espionage drama stage-managed by the Kremlin to harm Western intelligence. That Assange played a pivotal role, first in getting Snowden to steal more than a million classified U.S. and Allied intelligence files, then in shipping him to Putin, demonstrates that the official story about Snowden is a sham.
...
Source?
DeleteLast year, Congress admitted as much, blowing apart the carefully crafted fiction that Snowden was a pure-hearted whistleblower moved to expose the secrets of the National Security Agency out of patriotism. In truth, Snowden was a mere patsy, while the Snowden Operation was designed by Kremlin spies to harm the NSA-led Western intelligence alliance, the most powerful espionage partnership in history. For Putin, NSA and its global web of signals intelligence, which involves partners in all corners of the globe, represented a threat to the Kremlin’s plans in Russia’s “near abroad” and beyond. It was therefore imperative to strike blows against NSA and its friends....
ReplyDeletelots more...
http://observer.com/2017/04/mike-pompeo-blasts-edward-snowden-nsa-wikileaks-donald-trump/
Trump Will Provoke a Crisis or Be Humiliated This Week
ReplyDeleteThe president has miscalculated the politics of government funding.
It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for Donald Trump’s presidency than if, backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, he celebrates his 100th day in office by shutting down his own government. This outcome is by no means inevitable, but the odds of it are astonishingly high: Government funding runs out on Friday, and Trump hits the 100-day mark on Saturday.
It is unprecedented in the modern era for an appropriations fight to end in a government shutdown when one party has full control—or really under any configuration other than when the president is a Democrat and Republicans control at least one chamber in Congress. The current partisan alignment should effectively preclude a shutdown, but Trump’s particular mix of incompetence, narcissism, and poor judgment is potent enough to confound basic game theory. As in so many realms of public affairs, Trump’s mere presence creates massive amounts of uncertainty.
...To secure border-wall funds from Congress before day 100, Trump is actually flirting with two different modes of extortion. The first one, which hasn’t been expressed as a formal threat, is that he will not sign spending legislation unless it funds the wall; the second, which he tweets about frequently, is that unless Democrats agree to fund the border wall, he will sabotage the Affordable Care Act by freezing billions of dollars in insurance subsidies the law authorizes to reduce out-of-pocket costs for the near-poor.
...The White House has offered to pay out the subsidies only if the bill also funds the border wall. If Trump gets what he wants, everyone will be fine; if Trump doesn’t get what he wants, he will take insurance away from millions—and the government might shut down! Defeat me, he intones darkly, and I will pants myself. This only makes sense as a shakedown if we assume Trump has badly miscalculated the politics—but if he’s miscalculated the politics, he presumably thinks he has a much stronger hand than he does. This is how a shutdown that most Republicans don’t want, and an insurance market collapse that most Republicans also don’t want, might happen on a Republican president’s watch. Indeed, at his direction.
Perhaps Trump is bluffing, and everything will be resolved painlessly. But if he’s not, then Republicans are about to learn once again that their rejectionist politics and submission to Trump have become paralyzing liabilities. Nobody is willing to tell Trump that his bargaining position is psychotic, and even if someone tried, he would not listen...
https://newrepublic.com/article/142220/trump-will-provoke-crisis-humiliated-week
Who you gonna bomb this week, little donnie, to distract us?
DeleteIf he sabotages Obamacare by freezing funds, it will be grounds for impeachment for causing harm to American citizens.
DeleteHave they explained to him, if he shuts down the government, there won’t be any money to play golf?
Trump Is Writing Fake Executive Orders Because He Doesn’t Know How to Be President
ReplyDeleteDonald Trump’s administration is scurrying around in advance of the 100-day marker, trying to look busy and productive — trying to create the illusion of an imminent health-care deal, hinting at forthcoming plans to cut taxes, and even promising to send somebody to Mars — and, especially, issuing a flurry of executive orders. The executive order has become a totem of power for hopeful Republicans, symbolizing their belief that Trump can or will reshape the federal government, despite the collapse of his first and largest legislative initiative. But what Trump’s fixation with executive orders actually reveals is how little he and his party understand about how government works and what it takes to bring about long-lasting change.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/trump-writing-fake-orders-doesnt-know-how-to-be-president.html
and hacking and cyberstalking...
ReplyDeleteFormer Fox News Host Accuses Network Of Hacking And Online Harassment
Former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros accused former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and current high-level executives of using electronic surveillance and computer hacking to retaliate against her for making sexual harassment claims.
Tantaros leveled sexual harassment allegations against Ailes in August, claiming in a previous lawsuit that the disgraced media executive ran the network like a “sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult.” That suit, which moved to arbitration, also accused top executives of fostering an abusive environment.
Revelations about the toxic culture Ailes created are still coming to light, most recently as host Bill O’Reilly left Fox News amid his own sexual harassment scandal.
In the new suit, Tantaros alleges that Fox News executives resorted to illegal electronic surveillance and computer hacking to “intimidate, terrorize, and crush her career through an endless stream of lewd, offensive, and career-damaging social media posts, blog entries, and commentary, and high-profile ‘fake’ media sites which Fox News (or its social-influence contractors) owned or controlled.”
Tantaros is suing not only Fox News and Ailes, but also current co-president Bill Shine and public relations chief Irena Briganti.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fox-news-andrea-tantaros_us_58fe4886e4b00fa7de16a37a?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
Delicious! Fox News -- the hunt it on...
DeleteIt's interesting that it's not the liberal Democrats who are doing this to Fox, although they accuse Democrats of being behind it all. I, for one, never look at Fox even when I'm waiting in a doctor's office. I have been known to ask if the waiting room television can be turned to something more even tempered, using my blood pressure as a reason. This is Fox imploding on itself.
ReplyDeleteBeaglemom
How soon will Trump News start up after the fall of Fox?
Delete@3:03 I think it is...
Deletehttp://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/trump-rally-broadcast-network-forced-to-apologize-after-host-calls-for-death-of-cnn-personalities/
3:03 PM - I wonder that myself.
DeleteIt’s hard to imagine this isn’t blatantly illegal. Trump’s private business is once again getting a major boost thanks to the government Trump now believes he controls. It’s like cranking his conflict of interest violations up to 11.
ReplyDeletehttp://addictinginfo.com/2017/04/24/trump-runs-full-page-ad-for-mar-a-lago-across-several-government-websites/
Yep, why are we paying to secure his business?
DeleteWhat is this...Blazing Saddles redux?
ReplyDelete"NPR reported that the lawsuit filed on Monday claims co-President Bill Shine and other executives paid media consultants to spy on Tantaros’ electronic communications. The information gathered was allegedly fed into a social media campaign intent on undermining her determination to pursue sexual harassment charges against the network."
ReplyDeleteFLASHBACK!!! 2011!
"British phone-hacking scandal was a low point for Rupert Murdoch"
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-british-scandal-murdoch-20150611-story.html
"Rupert Murdoch’s legacy will forever be tarnished by the phone-hacking scandal that has engulfed British journalism for a decade.
What began as an investigation of eavesdropping on members of the royal family by “one rogue reporter” came to seismically change the British news media.
The scandal shuttered a major Sunday tabloid newspaper - The News of the World - and led to the arrests of numerous journalists and the conviction of some, including the paper’s former editor, Andy Coulson.
OT? “Eurasians”
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/24/russia-s-alt-right-rasputin-says-he-s-steve-bannon-s-ideological-soul-mate.html
Bud Sex Bud