Just a quick one: The Republican Clown Party might be a little bit less crazy tonight without Donald Trump. MAYBE! Nobody knows for sure right now. We will see! Please leave your thoughts in the comments.
A representative from the Puppy Jake Foundation, a local Iowa non profit supporting vets,named Josh, has announced that the Puppy Jake Foundation will benefit from Trump's fundraising event for veterans this evening. Josh says that the Puppy Jake Foundation is a non partisan organisation which only cares about veterans and that it doesn't care what political views supporters have.
Readers here will recall that the Puppy Jake Foundation trained and supplied Sarah Palin with a dog. The dog named Jill was at the center of a huge controversy after Palin posted photos of Trig Palin using the dog as a stepping stool.
Palin recently endorsed Trump and she has appeared at several events in Iowa on his behalf. Trump has declared that Palin is "Vice Presidential material". Palin has also promoted the Puppy Jake Foundation on Facebook.
Nicole Shumate of Paws & Effect, which is also a local Iowa non profit which has successfully trained and supplied dogs to support returning veterans suffering from various disabilities, made the following statement.
"Paws & Effect believes that veterans deserve the utmost dignity and respect. Veterans should seek care from organizations that hold themselves in the highest regard, free from criminal conduct, free from corruption and free from practices that risk their nonprofit status."
This is going to be a nice juicy post, and despite the fact that it contains "private pictures", there will be no invasion of privacy for the simple reason that all participants have been way too happy to let us know what they are doing by purposefully making their photos available to the whole world via the internet.
I am writing this post while I am simultaneously watching an absolutely beautiful documentary on TV about Yellowstone National Park. Who says that men are not able to multitask!
OK, so we have a famous family here, the Palin-family, who desperately needs to pretend in public that they are a conservative, God-fearing family. We know all about it, as we watched these people for years and also know quite a lot of their many, many secrets. While the interest of the public has waned considerably over the years, the Palins still know how to earn a buck. Sometimes, however, things don't go as planned.
So the wedding was cancelled, the relationship between Bristol and Dakota looks like it is over, but in a desperate attempt to save face, Sarah Palin announced that the the families still want to "celebrate life" together in Kentucky on Saturday, May 23.
Sarah Palin, not wanting to upset the military community (which is supposedly her main "core fan base", and therefore invaluable) actually visited Kentucky yesterday. It was our impression that the Palins had possibly sold the wedding to "People Magazine", but surprise, Fox News has apparently stepped in:
Rick Leventhal apparently forgot to add "Big fat liar" to his description in the above tweet...
In any case, all we can see are Sarah, Dakota and a pretty empty tent.
So where is Bristol?
In an almost comical twist, Bristol Palin is very keen to let the world know that she "celebrates life" on a "getaway weekend" in Alaska - together with her new best friend, the "exotic (erotic) model" Marina Lupas, who has quite aggressively marketed herself across the internet.
At this time Tripp is staying with his father Levi Johnston, and his wife Sunny. Tripp is having a great time with his father, as usual.
Marina Lupas and Bristol Palin have been friends for a long time, as has been documented through many photos that each of them has posted on the internet.
However, Marina's profession may raise some eyebrows. She markets herself as an "exotic model" on the internet, and her public photos leave little doubt what that actually means:
While the Palins will continue to pander to their Christian and military base in public, their real life has little to do with their public image, and it was always like this.
Therefore I feel that it's time for some truth.
By the way, we do not judge Marina Lupas for her line of employment. At least she presents herself in public in an honest manner.
Anyway: Bristol, here's some advice! Also, try to be more careful in the future! If you must have a celebrity/hero type as a future husband you should read his autobiographies first. In Dakota's case, this would have been very insightful, as his intense descriptions of killing people, killing animals as a child, alcohol abuse and ignoring the advice of doctors despite suffering from PTSD would have urged at least some caution. Especially when you expose a vulnerable child to yet another "daddy". If not for yourself but for Tripp please spend a little time and effort to "vet" the "vet" next time.
But for now, let's celebrate life! It is even more pleasant without hypocrisy and false pretences.
Bristol, maybe Marina Lupas could vet your next guy first! She definitely seems qualified.
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VERY FUNNY UPDATE:
OK, so Rick Leventhal from Fox News covers the event with Sarah in Kentucky, "celebrating life", without Bristol (see his tweets above).
Why him?
Kathleen googled him, and discovered that Rick is uniquely qualified to cover the cancelled wedding!
Rick Leventhal was once engaged to a journalist called Lauren Sivan. Back then, she worked with Fox News.
Lauren is not married, but she was once engaged with her long-time boyfriend Rick Leventhal. They got engaged in September 2005. They were due to get married in 2006, but they called off the wedding a week before it took place, owing to some unforeseen circumstances. Apart from her news reporting skills, she is also widely considered to be one of the funniest reporters around. Her wit and humour has been the talk of the town, and one of the main points on her show that makes her stand out from the crowd. She was ranked the “Funniest News Reporter” in 2010.
Breaking up is hard to do - especially right before Valentine's Day. But at least two high-profile couples have shattered their romances: budding real- estate mogul Ivanka Trump and socialite and sometime movie producer Bingo Gubelman - who split after 31/2 years. And Fox News correspondent Rick Leventhal and News 12 reporter Lauren Sivan - who were supposed to have gotten married on Saturday. "We broke up a month ago," the 24-year-old Trump told Lowdown yesterday. "But we're very good friends. Prior to that, I was in another long-term relationship. For now, I'm just enjoying being single.
" The 25-year-old Gubelman - who was a producer on the 2003 documentary "Born Rich," in which Ivanka appeared - couldn't be reached for comment yesterday. Apparently he's been focused on renovating his huge SoHo bachelor pad. "He started the apartment while we were together," Trump said. "I think it will be done in a few more months.
" Meanwhile, the 46-year-old Leventhal and the 27-year-old Silvan canceled their wedding just a week before the date. The cable-news blog FTV Live theorized: "Apparently, Rick and the boys went to Las Vegas ... for his bachelor party and it's possible that what happens in Vegas did not necessarily stay there this time around. " Leventhal denied that. "Our canceling the wedding had nothing to do with my bachelor party or her bachelorette weekend. We just decided to wait.
" But Sivan isn't on the market, Leventhal insisted. "We're still very much together. We went to South Beach together for a few days last week. We spend every possible minute together and that will absolutely continue.
" Still, he conceded, "We're returning everyone's gifts.
Lauren Sivan and Rick Leventhal
Therefore, the marriage never did take place, although according to Rick Leventhal, it was merely postponed. That was in February 2006. You do the math!
In July 2014 it was reported that Lauren Sivan is still unmarried, and is also "living a happy and satisfied life with her parents in Los Angles, California."
Her twitter can be found here, and here is her instagram. Her handle is "idiotsivan", which may or may not be "a pun" in regard to past events.
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UPDATE 2:
Here is a nice shot of Marina Lupas and Bristol, with Sarah and Todd in the background, taken when they made the fun trip to Las Vegas, where Bristol eventually met Dakota Meyer.
The Daily Mail sent a photographer to Kentucky, and they got the scoop with the photos from the "re-branded" wedding, and they also observed that Sarah Palin and Dakota Meyer had a "heated exchange."
The bizarre set of circumstances mean't that while the former vice presidential candidate hung out with her daughter's ex-fiance and ex-Marine Dakota Meyer and his family in Kentucky, Bristol made a very public showing of her non-attendance by posting a series of photos of her enjoying a 'weekend getaway' back in Alaska with her best friend who is an exotic model.
Sarah Palin had taken to Facebook last Monday to reveal that her 24-year-old daughter would not be marrying Meyer as previously planned just days after accusations emerged that the 26-year-old Marine had covered up a 'secret wife' he had married at 19 and then legally divorced.
Despite the cancellation, the former vice presidential candidate confirmed a celebration would still be held on May 23 and both families would be gathering for a barbecue at Meyer's Kentucky farm.
'This Kentucky farm is a beautiful setting for our friends and families to gather in celebration of life itself this Memorial Day weekend,' wrote Palin.
'Nothing is more precious to us than family, faith and America's freedom.'
But the 'celebration of life' appears to have quite heated at one point as this photograph showing Sarah Palin raising her finger in what appears to be a heated exchange with the man who was supposed to have become her son-in-law.
Days earlier Meyer had put out his own statement on Facebook page around the same time as the elder Palin and bearing striking similarities to her message, suggesting a concerted public relations offensive.
But if both sides were supposed to be maintaining a united front someone forgot to tell Bristol.
She was absent from the 'celebration of life' in Kentucky and instead spent the weekend posting photos of her enjoying a 'getaway weekend' back home in Atlanta (typo by Daily Mail - "Alaska").
Sarah Palin makes a big issue of her family's supposed belief in traditional Christian family values, but after the embarassment of a cancelled wedding Bristol's choice of friend for her trip - 'exotic model and video vixen' Marina Lupas - was the last thing the family's tarnished image needed.
Lupas aggressively markets herself as an 'exotic model' on the internet, and her public photos leave little doubt about what she means. She and Bristol are long time friends and they spent the weekend enjoying the outdoors and driving an RV.
Photos from the family barbecue in Kentucky suggest Bristol didn't miss much with only about 100 people showing up.
We should almost be grateful that Rupert Murdoch discovered twitter for himself, because if there is somebody able to expose this man without ethics, decency and intelligence, it is Granpa Rupert himself. Oh wait, I take the last one back, because Rupert Murdoch clearly is intelligent enough to have realized that many people love nothing more than awful right-wing propaganda, and that they can become addicted to it.
For decades, Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen and henchwomen have become experts in poisoning hearts and minds, and why not exploit the recent tragedy in Paris as well with this monumentally ignorant tweet:
That's so "Fox Newsy", isn't it? But thankfully, social media is not Fox News, as even Rupert cannot control the responses. The reply of British author J.K. Rowling made headlines:
Many more people responded on twitter to Rupert Murdoch's tweet, here is an overview of the best reactions I could find, apart from the tweet by J.K. Rowling:
Gabriel Sherman's new book "The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News - and Divided a Country"has been highly praised by many reviewers, and rightly so: Never before have we seen a book which so convincingly provides a detailed account of the rise of the right-wing propaganda machine, a network called "Fox News." At the centre of this organization stands Roger Ailes, who was hired by Rupert Murdoch to create the network in 1996 and has been the boss of Fox News ever since. His personality is carefully explored in Gabriel Sherman's book, and it is fascinating to discover how this man achieved his aims by determination, hard work, bullying, smears, threats and manipulation.
However, this book by Gabriel Sherman is much more than a just biography about Roger Ailes. It provides comprehensive background information about the history of Fox News, of other media personalities who became famous through Fox News, and about the people who pull strings in the background, for example Karl Rove and the right-wing billionaires like the Koch Brothers. Ultimately, the subject matter is also the GOP itself - with Fox News as its very own "media wing."
The book is extremely carefully sourced and documented. Gabriel Sherman uses more than 100 pages just for notes about his sources. This is something we would have liked to see in previous books about various other political topics as well. Such extensive documentation significantly increases the credibility of any book which deals with controversial subjects.
Gabriel Sherman's writing is excellent. In our opinion his book provides much higher quality information than for example a successful book like "Game Change."
Remarkably, The Loudest Voice In The Room doesn’t resort to this same level of cynicism. It’s not the nastiest book about Ailes – that’d be 2012’s The Fox Effect, by David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt of media watchdog Media Matters. But Sherman’s book distinguishes itself in its diligent characterization of Ailes as something more than just some political P.T. Barnum.
Despite the book’s backhandedly praiseful subtitle and constant references to its subject’s “bluster,” Sherman develops an image of Ailes as something more than a showman. Scarier, and more importantly, The Loudest Voice in the Room posits Ailes as a real-deal ideologue: someone who actually believes all the stuff Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck (“Fox News’s id made visible”) spout on his network. (Or most of it, anyway.) This is a man who called the president of Fox-owned cable channel FX and told him not to air a movie about the Pentagon Papers because “It’s bad for America.”
By the 1980s, though, Ailes had settled into the role of "the most successful political consultant of his generation," Sherman writes. "Between 1980 and 1986, Ailes propelled thirteen GOP senators and eight congressmen into office." In dealing with clients, his counsel was wide-ranging and often very specific. Ailes, Sherman writes, had particular concerns about George H.W. Bush's clothes, telling the presidential candidate, "Don't ever wear that shirt again! You look like a f- clerk!"
Ailes has presided over Fox News since its inception in 1996. The Clinton-Lewinsky saga, the 2000 court fight over hanging chads and butterfly ballots, the rise of the Tea Party - Sherman carefully chronicles the network's role in shaping these and other developments, but inevitably some of this material reads like a rehash.
On the other hand, his behind-the-scenes anecdotes are enlightening and entertaining. Sherman's Ailes is a gifted media operator who's alternately menacing, catty and suspicious.
One episode concerns a Wall Street Journal staffer who wrote a story that angered Ailes. When they subsequently met at a social function, Sherman reports, Ailes threatened her: "You've had your chance. ... Now I have the rest of my life to get back at you."
The book provides a lot of facts which are rather alarming, as it is quite terrifying to see how efficiently the American public is being manipulated by Fox News on a daily basis. However, the book also raises an interesting question: Has Roger Ailes and Fox News actually done more harm than good for the Republicans? Before Fox News had been created, when there was only the "mainstream media", Republican candidates were far more successful in presidential elections than they are today.
It is very possible that Fox News, while successfully preaching to the base, was also unwillingly quite successful in driving people away from the Republican Party. More and more US citizens realize that they are being manipulated, and citizens also witness on a daily basis how the GOP becomes more and more extreme - a development which again was supported by Fox News by giving a voice to characters from the "fringe" like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and of course Sarah Palin.
However, times have changed. Today Sarah Palin surely isn't the "president of right-wing America" any more. These days, her publicity stunts and her trademark moronic remarks and word-salads only continue to damage the GOP, a party which so badly wants to get rid of "stupid party" label.
The new revelations in Sherman's book about Sarah Palin reveal just why the ex-Governor ultimately became a liability - and why she joined Fox News in the first place.
First, the most hilarious revelation. It will come as no surprise to anyone who followed the career of Sarah and her business associate/husband Todd closely, that some producers at Fox News created their very own nicknames for the illustrious couple from Alaska: "The Bitch" and "The Eskimo".
Excerpt from pages 342 and 343:
In the control room, the Palins entertained producers with their private reality show. Fox staffers, chuckled watching Sarah and husband Todd on the video link Fox had installed in her Wasilla office. “On the internal feed you see everything. Someone should tell her that. Todd does the camerawork. She barks at him big time. ‘Todd, what are you doing!’. It’s embarrassing,” one person explained. Fox producers came up with names for their characters: “The Bitch” and “The Eskimo”.
A very interesting new revelation is also the fact that Sarah Palin rejected the idea to appear in front of a live-audience. Again, not too surprising for anyone who followed the career of the mentally ill, bipolar Sarah Palin, who has the constant need to control the potentially hostile environment around her.
Excerpt from page 342:
Fox was on track to generate a billion dollar profit. (...) But Ailes's biggest stars - Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin - were burning hot – too hot – which posed new problems.
(...)
Palin also ruffled Fox executives’ feathers. In the winter of 2010, tensions between Palin’s camp and Fox arose over a prime-time special that the network wanted her to star in. Nancy Duffy, a senior Fox producer wanted Palin to host the show in front of a live studio audience. Duffy hoped to call the programme Sarah Palin’s Real American Stories. Palin hated the idea. She complained to her advisors that she didn’t want to be a talk show host. She wanted to just do voice overs. More important, she didn’t want Fox to promote her name in the title of the program. Not that it mattered: Palin’s ratings were starting to disappoint Ailes anyway. Fox did not schedule any additional specials.
Already quite well-know from other reports is the reason why Roger Ailes started to distance himself from Sarah Palin - the infamous "blood-libel" response which she published against his advice - from page 343:
Ailes began to doubt Palin’s political instincts. He thought that she was getting bad advice from her kitchen cabinet and saw her erratic behaviour as signs that she was a “loose cannon.” A turning point in their relationship came in the midst of the national debate over the Tucson shooting massacre.
(...)
Palin ignored Ailes's advice and went ahead and released her controversial "blood libel" video the morning Obama traveled to Tucson. For Ailes, her decision was further evidence that she was flailing around off-message. "Why did you call me for advice?" he wondered aloud to colleagues. "He thinks Palin is an idiot", a Republican close to Ailes said. "He thinks she's stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven't elevated the conservative movement."
Gabriel Sherman's book also provides a very detailed description how Sarah Palin and Fox News got in touch in the first place - and confirms that Greta Van Susteren's husband John Coale was instrumental in kick-starting Palin's "post-2008-election" career.
From pages 340 and 341:
For Sarah Palin, the months since Election Day had been a letdown even bigger let down than the loss to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Being governor, she found, was drudgery compared to her media stardom. “Her life was terrible” one advisor said. “She was never home, her (Juneau) office was four hours from her home. You gotta drive an hour from Wasilla to Anchorage. And she was going broke.“ Her sky high approval rating in Alaska – which had topped 80 per cent before McCain picked her – had withered to the low 50s. She faced a hostile legislature, a barrage of ethics complaints, and frothing local bloggers who reveled in her misfortune. All this for a salary of only $125,000? The worst was that she had racked up $500,000 in legal bills to fend off allegations that she had dismissed Alaska’s public safety commissioner because he refused to fire a state trooper who was her ex-brother-in-law. She needed money and worried about it constantly.
Partly because her embarrassing campaign interview with Katie Couric, and partly because of her outlandish family life and moose shooting habits, Palin was a massive American celebrity. In November 2008, John Coale, tagged along with his wife, Greta Van Susteren, on a trip to Alaska to tape an interview with Palin for Fox News. Later, the Fox camera crew, Van Susteren, and Coale, gathered around the Palin’s kitchen table for some moose chili. After dinner Coale and Palin retreated to the pantry and sat on stacks of boxes and talked for the next hour about her Troopergate dilemma. Palin confessed that she didn’t know what to do about her legal bills. Coale assured Palin he would figure something out.
Whatever one thought of her intelligence she was more than shrewd enough to see that there was money to be made from her newfound national profile, and she hadn’t been the one making it. Planning quickly got under way for a book. Conservative pundit Mary Matlin introduced Palin to Washington superlawyer Robert Barnett, who helped Palin land a reported $7 million book contract with HarperCollins. Two former Palin campaign aides were hired to plan a book tour with all the trappings of a national political campaign. But there was a hitch: with Alaska’s strict ethics rules, Palin worried that her day job would get in the way. In March, she petitioned the Alaska attorney general’s office, which responded with a lengthy list of conditions. “There was no way she could go on a book tour while being Governor,” is how one member of her Alaska staff put it.
On the morning of July 3rd, 2009, in front of a throng of national reporters, Palin announced that she was stepping down as governor. To many, it seemed a mysterious move, defying the logic of a potential presidential candidate, and possibly reflecting some hidden scandal – but in fact the choice may have been as simple as balancing a checkbook.
Once she resigned from the governorship in July, the race was on to sign her up on television. Producers had already put out feelers. Weeks after the 2008 election, Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor, called Palin and pitched her on starring in her own show. Then, in September 2009, Ailes arranged for Palin to fly on a private jet when she needed to travel between San Diego and New York to meet with her editors at HarperCollins. During the visit, Murdoch met Palin at a charity dinner hosted by his wife, Wendi, at Cipriani 42nd street, and that only increased the network appetite. Ailes deputized Bill Shine to land her.
Negotiations dragged out over the next six months. Palin made it clear to fox that she wouldn’t be willing to move to New York or to Washington. Fox offered to build a remote camera hookup in her Wasilla home. Palin also told Fox that she didn’t want producers hounding her for interviews. She wanted all her interviews to have to go through Shine personally. In January, 2010, Palin finally had her $1 million-a-year deal. Shine was responsible for making sure that the various Fox personalities got equal booking time, to maximise her ratings appeal across the network. “Obviously there needs to be a sense of fairness” Shine explained.
Karl Rove, who is no fool, soon realized that a person like Sarah Palin doesn't help the Republicans. From page 343:
"Why are you letting Palin have the profile?" Karl Rove said to Ailes in one meeting. "Why are you letting her go on your network and say the things she's saying? And Glenn Beck? These are alternative people who will never be elected, and they'll kill us."
Another interesting revelation is the fact that Shushanna Walshe, in 2008 a young producer at Fox News, was sidelined by Roger Ailes after the criticized the Palin-team during the 2008 campaign. From pages 324 and 325:
On September 3, a day after confronting Murdoch, Ailes, watching the Republican convention, was riveted by the appearance of an exotic political creature, Sarah Palin. “She hit a home run,” he told executives the next day. Her gleeful establishment bashing made her a perfect heroine for a new Ailes story line – and Fox’s ratings soared to a cable news record. During Palin’s speech, Fox attracted more than nine million viewers, eclipsing every other news network, cable or broadcast. “At least people care now,” Ailes told his team.
He was intensely interested in the Alaska governor. Palin had some how managed to graft the old western myth of the self-reliant frontiersman onto a beauty pageant face and a counterpunching, don’t tread on me verbal style – a new kind of character, and a remarkably compelling one. A few weeks after her convention speech, Ailes secretly met with Palin during her swing through New York, when she toured the U.N. and had a photo op with Henry Kissinger. That afternoon, Shushannah Walshe, a young Fox producer who was covering Palin's campaign for the network, had gone on-air and criticized McCain's staff, which had prevented reporters from asking Palin questions during her U.N. visit. “There's not one chance that Governor Palin would have to answer a question,” Walshe said on camera. “They're eliminating even the chance of any kind of interaction with the candidate – its just unprecedented.”
Ailes didn't know Walshe, but he was angry when he heard her comments. Liberal media outlets like The Huffington Post were using her words to make it appear that Fox was turning on Palin. He called Suzanne Scott and demanded Walshe be taken off the air. “It's not fair-and-balanced coverage,” an executive later told Walshe. Walshe was allowed to continue covering Palin but was barred from future on-camera appearances. She soon left Fox.
Finally, quite unexpectedly, in the "Note on Sources" at the end of his book, Gabriel Sherman has another revelation which Sarah Palin and her fans surely won't appreciate very much. On page 404 of his book, Sherman reports about a personal meeting with Roger Ailes, an encounter from April 11, 2012, which took place during a party hosted by The Hollywood Reporter at a restaurant in Manhattan.
Gabriel Sherman quotes from a verbal exchange between him and Roger Ailes which happened during this evening, an exchange which can hardly be disputed by anyone, because as Gabriel Sherman explains, CBS president David Rhodes was present and also took part in this conversation.
Gabriel Sherman writes:
Rhodes's stab at humour did not lift Ailes's mood. Ailes took a step back. It was unclear now who he was addressing. "Let's look at this for a minute: Sarah Palin? She couldn't get elected to anything. Huckabee? He says to me, 'I couldn't raise a nickel.' Santorum? When we hired him, no one, I mean no one, knew who this guy was. And Gingrich has been working here for a long time. So the idea that I'm somehow propping up these candidates is just absurd."
Yes, that's very true. Sarah Palin couldn't get elected to anything indeed. That's why she hasn't been elected to anything since 2006, and why her career now mainly revolves around a pre-taped TV-show at a third rate sports channel. Apart from that, she continues to damage the GOP-brand through public appearances like her upcoming speech at CPAC 2014. Which suits us just fine. Sarah Palin once was a serious political contender, which is almost hard to believe, but due to her own blunders, she has been reduced to a running joke.
Gabriel Sherman's book surely will play a role in how Sarah Palin will be remembered in the future, but other chapters of "Palin history" still have to be written. But there's a lot time left for this - and time does not favour Sarah Palin.
