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He won’t debate and now he won’t do the traditional 60 Minutes interview: Former President Donald Trump has backed out of a previously scheduled interview with “60 Minutes,” the most-watched newsmagazine in the United States, CBS News said Tuesday evening.[…] “For over half a century, 60 Minutes has invited the Democratic and Republican tickets to appear on our broadcast as Americans head to the polls,” the network said in a statement. “This year, both the Harris and Trump campaigns agreed to sit down with 60 Minutes.” Trump had committed to the interview first, followed by Harris, through campaign spokespeople, CBS said. Veteran CBS anchor and correspondent Scott Pelley was lined up to interview Trump. “After initially accepting 60 Minutes’ request for an interview with Scott Pelley, former President Trump’s campaign has decided not to participate,” CBS said. Why? Here’s Trump’s spokesman: I don’t understand this.
I suspect a lot of the cult members think they will be contributing to his campaign. But no. He’s running a scam while running for president. Never say he didn’t warn people: Trump had inked a deal with Tony Robbins, the frighteningly upbeat motivational speaker, by which Robbins would pay Trump $1 million to give ten speeches at his seminars around the country. Crucially, Trump had timed his political stops to coincide with Robbins’ seminars, so that he was “making a lot of money” on those campaign stops. “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Trump said. … He wasn’t lying for once.
Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, fresh off verbally abusing an ABC reporter after they dared ask him a question, has demanded that all ABC staff hand over their lunch money to their peers (sic) at Sky News Australia. ”These ABC journalists... Read More ›
Iran fired rockets into Tel Aviv in response to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon. What comes next?
The post Israel’s “Limited, Localized” Invasion of Lebanon Is Sparking a Regional War appeared first on The Intercept.
This award-winning shot offers a candid look at the cagey turkey vulture.
The post The Bird Photo of the Year appeared first on Nautilus.
Just eyeballing it, but it seems that more missiles are getting thru than are intercepted.
Videos show dozens of missiles flying over Tel Aviv, with some of them landing. The Israeli military says the missiles were fired by Iran and that a “large number” had been intercepted. pic.twitter.com/NUYX5bOa29
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 1, 2024
Iran has said this is punishment for the Israeli assassinations. It has also said that it will defend Lebanon. And, as Nate pointed out, the missile attack is widespread:
Tom Nichols has a typically tart piece in the Atlantic today about the state of the election. This part of it is one of the most depressing aspects of this whole thing. Harris will win the popular vote by millions of votes, you can bet money on that, but once again the electoral college could favor Trump. What kind of a democracy is this? I think it’s important to ask why this election, despite everything we now know, could tip to Trump. Perhaps the most surprising but disconcerting reality is that the election, as a national matter, isn’t really that close. If the United States took a poll and used that to select a president, Trump would lose by millions of votes—just as he would have lost in 2016. Federalism is a wonderful system of government but a lousy way of electing national leaders: The Electoral College system (which I long defended as a way to balance the interests of 50 very different states) is now lopsidedly tilted in favor of real estate over people.
As you wait for the debate tonight, watch this if you missed it: Rachel Maddow shows JD Vance explaining his lack of faith that democracy can deliver on his conservative ideals, and shows the influences behind Vance’s preference that the United States government be gutted and instead run by a dictator. This guy is so deeply creepy that I honestly don’t think I can live in a country led by him.
Innocent citizens in Gaza (80 % of whom are refugees), the West Bank, Lebanon and Yemen are being blown to bits in horrific numbers. But it is Palestinian refugees across the region who have been the principal target of this horrific war machine for over 76 years. Continue reading »
It surely behoves our government to stand up to the Israel lobby and the Christian Zionists. The big war that Netanyahu wants would be catastrophic for the peoples of the world. It would cost the lives of ADF personnel and have a serious detrimental impact on our economy... Continue reading »
The context to my article below is today’s extreme media, and Dutton’s and the Albanese government’s hysteria regarding the appearance of the Hezbollah flag at this week’s protest against the Gazan genocide and bombing of Beirut in Melbourne. Unbelievable. The Albanese government is engaging in totalitarian newspeak and doubly so, has the hysterical Victorian Premier Continue reading »
The United Nations is the biggest incubator of global norms to govern the world and the vital core of the rules-based global multilateral order. Four parts of the UN system have complementary roles in efforts to regulate and eliminate nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is a technical organisation that functions as the Continue reading »
Iron ore has underpinned Australia’s prosperity. Gas and coal exports are bound to fall as market countries cut their carbon emissions. Can we build our future on “green” steel? Australia’s number one export today is iron ore. In 2023, our miners shipped out around 900 million tonnes of ore worth $124 billion. This amounted to Continue reading »
The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common; but leaves the greater villain loose who steals the common from the goose. Continue reading »
There are few economies on the planet more concentrated in terms of vital services and markets than Australia. The players and actors are few and far between, be they in banking, insurance, supermarkets, the media or the aviation market. Continue reading »
In the past 5 years both the Morrison and Albanese governments have provided funding to enable each state and territory to build, or expand on an existing, Holocaust museums or education centres. The Tasmanian government announced last year it had secured $2m in Commonwealth funding to build a centre at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Continue reading »
Ren Zeping’s almost frantic call one week ahead of Beijing’s dramatic loosening of monetary policy. Before the People’s Bank of China’s unusually bold, if not unprecedented, big bang last week to boost investor sentiments, the frustration with Beijing’s apparent lack of urgency in aiding the world’s second-largest economy grew increasingly apparent. One of the signs Continue reading »
Is it valid to be annoyed when, as your plane pulls up to the gate...
William S. Burroughs postulated four political parties in his fiction Naked Lunch: Liquefactionists, Senders, Divisionists, and Factualists.
Per Wiki:
The city is contested by four rival political parties: Liquefactionists, who want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity; Senders, who want to control everyone else through telepathy; Divisionists, who subdivide into replicas of themselves; and Factualists, who oppose the other three.
The Senders are a metaphor for mass media propaganda as practiced by Edward Bernays, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Goebbels, and American political consultants.
The Democrats and their allied Never Trumper Republicans are the heirs to this legacy.
The rise of first the Internet, then the World Wide Web, and finally social media threw them for a loop initially, and played a role in Trump taking over the G.O.P.