BEN CARSON ON TRUMP’S PUERTO RICO TWEETS: Not Good ‘to Go Around Shaming People.’
Author Archive: Stephen Green
October 13, 2017
THE DAM HAS BURST: Amazon TV Producer Goes Public With Harassment Claim Against Top Exec Roy Price.
Isa Hackett is the daughter of author Philip K. Dick, whose work is the basis for Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, as well as the upcoming anthology series, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. Hackett, 50, is an executive producer on both series. Price, 51, is head of Amazon Studios and has presided over its growth into a major streaming service with such series as Transparent and movies such as Manchester by the Sea. His family has deep connections in the entertainment world: His father, Frank, ran Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios.
On the evening of July 10, 2015, after a long day of promoting Man in the High Castle at Comic-Con in San Diego, Hackett attended a dinner with the show’s cast and Amazon staff at the U.S. Grant Hotel. There she says she met Price for the first time. He asked her to attend an Amazon staff party later that night at the W Hotel (now the Renaissance) and she ended up in a taxi with Price and Michael Paull, then another top Amazon executive and now CEO of the digital media company BAMTech.
Once in the cab, Hackett says Price repeatedly and insistently propositioned her. “You will love my dick,” he said, according to Hackett, who relayed her account to multiple individuals in the hours after the alleged episode. (The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed Hackett told at least two people about the alleged incident in the immediate aftermath.) Hackett says she made clear to Price she was not interested and told him that she is a lesbian with a wife and children.
Hackett says Price did not relent in the cab or once they arrived at the Amazon party. As she talked with other executives, she says that Price stepped close to her and loudly said, “Anal sex!” in her ear.
I don’t want to hear one more goddamn lecture on civility from anyone in Hollywood.
UPDATE: Price has been suspended.
THEIR APPEAL HAS BECOME MORE SELECTIVE: Layoffs begin at Disney’s ABC amid pressures in TV market.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Start your Friday the 13th Here.
BIG BADDA-BOOM: U.S. Cruise Missile-Carrying Sub to Visit South Korea This Weekend.
A nuclear-powered submarine that can launch more than 150 precision-guided cruise missiles is due to visit South Korea this week. The guided missile submarine USS Michigan will visit the port of Busan this weekend for the second time this year, in what is a clear warning to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
The Michigan last visited Busan in late April of this year, at which time North Korean state media reportedly warned “the USS Michigan won’t even be able to rise to the surface when it will meet a miserable end and turn into an underwater ghost.”
The Michigan’s visit comes at a time when the United States is putting increasing pressure on North Korea in response to nuclear and long-range missile tests. Analysts now believe Pyongyang can strike as far as New York City with a nuclear weapon—maybe. In addition to the submarine visits, the U.S. Air Force has repeatedly flown B-1B heavy bombers near North Korea, with the latest flight occurring earlier today.
Years ago, the Navy converted four Ohio-class submarines from carrying 24 nuclear-armed Trident ICBMs to carrying 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles. One of the quietest subs ever constructed, the Michigan and her sister boats can sneak in very close, then very quickly unleash a whole lot of hell — before sneaking back away.
The Catholic Church, whatever temporal problems it may have, is the keeper of one of the world’s great faiths. Faithful Catholics remain largely faithful Catholics, whatever disgust they may feel for the Church’s very real problems.
But if Hollywood is self-destructing, as Roger L. Simon and now Chris Hayes believe, what will keep audiences coming back for more? Blade Runner 2082? The fourth young man to play Spider-Man in my adult lifetime? An Ishtar reboot? Audiences have been shrinking for years before we learned about Weinstein.
Tinseltown is in trouble, and it’s not clear they understand just how much trouble.
October 12, 2017
GOOD LORD: FBI Reviews Allegations Of Puerto Rican Officials Withholding Hurricane Relief.
“People call us and tell us some misappropriation of some goods and supplies by supposedly politicians, not necessarily mayors, but people that work for the mayors in certain towns,” FBI Special Agent Carlos Osorio told The Daily Caller Wednesday.
Osorio explained, “They’re supposedly withholding these goods and these supplies and instead of handing them out to people who really need them, [there are claims] that [local officials] are assigning them to their buddies first–people that have voted for them or people that contributed to their campaigns or what not.”
He added, “So what we’re doing is looking into these allegations. That I can tell you is happening. Again, I cannot say that we have any ongoing investigation. We’re just corroborating these allegations.”
I would hope there’s nothing to these allegations, but if there is: Tar, feathers.
JOURNALISM, NBC/BUZZFEED-STYLE: “Controversy Framing” and the “SQUIRREL! Distraction,” Explained.
CYBERWAR: Cyberattack Captures Data on U.S. Weapons in Four-Month Assault.
A cyberattacker nicknamed “Alf” gained access to an Australian defense contractor’s computers and began a four-month raid that snared data on sophisticated U.S. weapons systems.
Using the simple combinations of login names and passwords “admin; admin” and “guest; guest” and exploiting a vulnerability in the company’s help-desk portal, the attacker roved the firm’s network for four months. The Australian military referred to the breach as “Alf’s Mystery Happy Fun Time,” referring to a character from the soap opera “Home and Away.”
The incident, detailed by a senior Australian intelligence official in a speech on Wednesday, was the third major breach of sensitive U.S. military and intelligence data to come to light in the past week.
On Tuesday, a South Korean lawmaker said North Korean hackers had accessed a military database and stolen top-secret files, including a plan for a decapitation strike against top leaders in Pyongyang. That followed reports that hackers working for the Russian government stole details of how the U.S. penetrates foreign computer networks and defends its own.
The identity and affiliation of the hackers in the Australian attack weren’t disclosed, but officials with knowledge of the intrusion said the attack was thought to have originated in China.
Doesn’t anybody take security seriously?
POWER CORRUPTS: Some College Campuses Opting to Stick with Old Title IX Rules.
ASSAULT IS EASY; COMEDY IS HARD: Seth Meyers on Slow Walking the Weinstein Story.
So where are the late night hot takes?
Not since Bill played cigar aficionado with Monica in the Oval Office has there been a subject so ripe for comedic plucking—and yet the after-hours comedy set has been sluggish to take up the subject. Stephen Colbert, who once gleefully called the president Vladimir Putin’s c*ck holster, has had little to say about where Harvey has been sticking his. Lorne Michaels, meanwhile, made a lame excuse for SNL, saying that it was “a New York thing” that nobody else would care about—as if they ever cared how a skit played in Peoria.
Seth Meyers, whose show Late Night was also late to the party, offered his own take on why the late night comedy establishment dragged its feet when it came to Weinstein. The former “Weekend Update” anchor explained to The Hollywood Reporter that it was discretion, rather than squamishness, that dictated the decision
You can read the whole thing, but I doubt you’ll be buying Meyers’ excuse.
INDEED: We Can’t Only Blame Men for the Orgasm Gap.
Communication should be a two-way street. And fun, too.
HAPPY DREADFUL BIRTHDAY! Legal Insurrection is 9 years old, and filled with dread.
ALIEN VOTER SIGHTING: Meet Kassiah Kamara.
(Essex County Election Records)
J. Christian Adams has the story.
WAPO HEADLINE: Trump to sign order to eliminate ACA insurance rules, undermine marketplaces.
Imagine the mental summersaults one must jump through to believe that allowing people to buy the kind insurance they need from the insurer they prefer “undermines” marketplaces.
SARAH HOYT: Why We Must Go to the Stars.
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE: West Point superintendent responds to outrage over pro-Communist former cadet.
On Wednesday, West Point superintendent Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen responded to the outrage in a letter addressed to the men and women of the U.S. Military Academy.
“I ask that you help me prevent the negativity associated with the alleged behavior of one graduate from causing us to lose sight of the thousands of graduates who sacrifice and serve honorably every day,” he wrote.
Second Lt. Spenser Rapone, who is assigned to 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, is under investigation for his subversive political views by both his unit and West Point.
USMA’s investigation is focusing on “policies and procedures as they pertain to then-Cadet Rapone’s time at USMA, and USMA’s determination of his suitability for graduation and commissioning,” Caslen wrote.
There doesn’t seem to have been any mystery about Rapone. As Kurt Schlichter wrote last week:
We have now reached the pinnacle of the military’s moral bankruptcy with the revelation that one Second Lieutenant Spenser Rapone is a communist. Not like a wannabe communist, not like a routine college-years liberal dummy, but a full-on, dictatorship-of-the-proletariat communist.
While at West Point.
Yeah, and the Academy knew. The chain of command knew what this guy was, because he told them (Army alumni have done the job the MSM, which probably sympathizes with this idiot, has failed to do, digging up plenty about him and putting it out on social media). But the Academy let this creep slide through anyway. They let a guy who unequivocally stated his hatred for this country get a security clearance.
“You go to war with the Army you have,” and apparently too many in our Army would rather let things slide than fight.
BRUCE BAWER: ‘Reading the Riot Act’ to Truth-Tellers at UT San Antonio.
This is a Texas case of academic bullying of a bisexual student for having mentioned that there are about a dozen Islamic countries where he could be legally killed for his sexuality.
BUH-BYE: British IS recruiter Sally-Anne Jones ‘killed by drone.’
The BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner said Jones had been a useful propaganda agent for IS on social media and her death would be “significant”.
Whitehall officials have declined to comment publicly. However, they have not denied the story, and US sources are confident she was killed in an unmanned drone strike in June, our correspondent added.
She was reportedly killed close to the border between Syria and Iraq by a US Air Force strike.
Jones, 48 – who had no previous military training – had been married to the jihadist Junaid Hussain, who was killed in 2015 in a drone strike.
Previously a punk musician, she had been used to recruit western girls to the group and posted threatening messages to Christians in the UK.
Jones, who was born in Greenwich, London, also encouraged individuals to carry out attacks in Britain, offering guidance on how to construct home-made bombs.
She used her Twitter account to provide practical advice on how to travel to Syria and shared pictures of herself posing with weapons.
She won’t be missed.
MORE ON THE ROSE MCGOWAN SUSPENSION: Rose McGowan suspended from Twitter after Ben Affleck tweets.
She announced the 12-hour suspension in an Instagram post. During this period she is not able to send tweets or retweets from her account, unless she deletes “tweets that violate our rules”, the notification from Twitter said.
It was not immediately clear which tweets had fallen foul of Twitter regulations.
McGowan has been a vocal figure in the Weinstein scandal since the New York Times broke the story last week and has been using Twitter to express her support for other women who have come forward, as well as to attack those who she sees as being complicit, including the Weinstein Company board of directors and high profile Hollywood figures such as Matt Damon and Affleck.
On Wednesday, Affleck apologised to actor Hilarie Burton for groping her during an appearance on MTV’s Total Request Live in 2003. He had earlier published a statement condemning Weinstein for alleged acts of sexual harassment, prompting the Twitter responses from McGowan, who claimed Affleck was aware of the mogul’s behaviour.
Plus: “Twitter has not made the exact conditions for locking an account public.”