Tag: golden globes
#EndorseThis: 'Borat' Thanks Giuliani During Golden Globes Acceptance Speech

#EndorseThis: 'Borat' Thanks Giuliani During Golden Globes Acceptance Speech

The most unusual Golden Globes ever took place last night-- hosted by the girl power duo of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler,. The veteran hosts delivered an amusing monologue that righteously called out the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which sponsors the awards, over longstanding diversity and inclusion problems that its leaders then vowed to remedy.

But perhaps the funniest moment of the night was when Sacha Baron Cohen remotely accepted an award for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. He didn't neglect to thank his "co-star" Rudy Giuliani, "a fresh new talent who came from nowhere" and suffered exposure for his inappropriate behavior on file.
Only Rudy could inspire a speech this hysterical. Did you miss it? No worries.
What’s In Trump’s Heart Comes Out Of His Mouth

What’s In Trump’s Heart Comes Out Of His Mouth

How about if we let Jesus answer Kellyanne Conway?

Donald Trump’s indefatigable apologist was at it again Monday on CNN, defending her boss against, of all people, Meryl Streep. The 19-time Oscar nominee got under Trump’s famously thin skin with a speech at Sunday night’s Golden Globes.

In it, she chastised him for, among other things, mocking Serge F. Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who has arthrogryposis, a congenital condition that causes abnormal muscle development and severely restricted joint movements. Trump, lying as is his wont, has frequently denied what he did, even though the proof is as near as Google.

He denied it again while tweeting about Streep. Conway, appearing on CNN, took umbrage when anchor Chris Cuomo expressed skepticism. “Why don’t you believe him?” she asked. “Why is everything taken at face value? You can’t give him the benefit of the doubt on this and he’s telling you what was in his heart? You always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.”

It bears repeating because even by the standards of Trump World, it’s a humdinger. Don’t listen to what the president-elect says, she says. Go by what’s in his heart.

Jesus saw that one coming 2,000 years ago: “ A good man,” he taught, “brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”

For those of you playing along at home, that’s Luke 6:45, the Son of God calling BS on the son of Fred, and on Conway’s bizarre insistence that somehow people have — repeatedly — misread his intentions all these months. Sorry, but if the eyes are windows to the soul, then the mouth is its megaphone, and Trump has used his repeatedly and effectively to tell us what sort of person he is.

So it’s funny, but frankly also chilling, to see Conway scurrying around at this late date, in effect asking America to grade Donald Trump on a curve. Don’t go by what comes out of his mouth?

Seriously? Seriously!?

She does know this man is about to president, right? She realizes, doesn’t she, that a president’s words can incite revolution? That they can move the stock market? That they can get people killed?

Yet this woman thinks the problem with Trump’s diarrheal mouth is the fact that we listen to it. In other words, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Is that to be the message our ambassadors give our foreign friends — and foes — for the next four years?

“Oh, don’t worry about it, Mr. Prime Minister. That’s just Donald. He’s just talkin’.”

Yeah. That’s totally not ridiculous.

To hear Conway tell it, some combination of Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama has been hiding in plain sight all along, except that somehow, Trump’s unruly mouth failed to properly represent Trump’s saintly heart and it’s all your fault, anyway, for believing words and actions have meaning. The trouble is, inconvenient realities like this one insist on telling a different story. Indeed, the Kovaleski case is the whole tragedy of Donald Trump in microcosm: the scorn, the bullying, the pettiness, the lying, the self-delusion.

In the face of that, Conway’s entreaty to disregard Trump’s mouth and look into Trump’s soul is beyond asinine. Sorry, but Jesus — big surprise — was right. “The mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Trump’s mouth has made it starkly clear what fills his heart.

And, sadly, what does not.

IMAGE: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during the first debate with Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, U.S., September 26, 2016.  REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

McConnell Does The GOP’s Dirty Work While All Eyes Follow Trump

McConnell Does The GOP’s Dirty Work While All Eyes Follow Trump

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

As Senate Republicans make a mockery of Trump cabinet confirmation hearings this week by ramming as many appointees through as quickly as possible to avoid scrutiny, Americans are going to discover there are many shades of darkness in GOP-led Washington.

Trump, needless to say, is not merely the headline grabber-in-chief, as evidenced by his 3:27am tweet Monday smearing Meryl Streep, who had the guts while receiving a Golden Globe lifetime achievement award Sunday to remind viewers that not all U.S. citizens agree with Trump’s boundless bullying.

Streep’s comments came only hours after the New York Times published a Sunday op-ed by Jonathan Raban, a Seattle author and early tea partier, who affirmed the very qualities most upsetting to Streep. “Mr. Trump has great gifts in the arts of vengeance and humiliation,” he wrote, which serve a “blunt pugnacity” marked by an “unholy tangle of lies, misapprehensions, disinformation and personal insults.”

Trump’s attention-grabbing qualities are already serving Washington’s other GOP power brokers by diverting attention from slightly less venal qualities that serve the Republican’s dismantle-the-federal-government agenda even before Trump is sworn in. Exhibit A in this sordid department is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is as comfortable lying with a poker face as Trump is attacking critics like Streep. The takeaway is, watch what they do, not what they say.

McConnell’s latest bout of high-stakes hypocritical lying came Sunday, when he told CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” he would not slow down or reschedule any of this week’s conformation hearings, after Democrats protested that nominees like billionaire Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education designate, had not submitted financial disclosure forms. McConnell has scheduled most of the hearings for Wednesday, the day Trump gives his first press conference since Election Day and the day after President Obama gives his farewell address. The hearings will get scant coverage on television, the medium that most helped elect Trump.

“All of these little procedural complaints are related to their frustration at not only having lost the White House but having lost the Senate,” McConnell said, referring to Senate Democrats’ demands for probing the many conflicts of interest and private agendas of the most billionaire-filled cabinet in history. “I understand that, but we need to, sort of, grow up here and get past that.”

When McConnell mocks “procedural complaints” and says “grow up,” he means the GOP must be free to quash anything that interferes with their power grab. This is the GOP’s Senate leader who single-handedly blocked President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a moderate praised by Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-UT. McConnell is also responsible for blocking Obama’s appointment of 84 federal district court judges—one-eighth of the district court bench—including noncontroversial nominations. And he is the same Republican who in February 2009 wrote a letter to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, saying “prior to considering any time agreements on the floor on any [Cabinet] nominee, we expect the following standards will be met.” That included completing FBI background checks, all financial disclosures, Office of Government Ethics vetting, committee questionnaires and “courtesy visits with members.”

McConnell has long been one of the least principled Republican leaders. In the late 1990s, he opposed all forms of campaign finance reform when the McCain-Feingold bill was proposed, countering deregulation of donation limits and disclosure by donors was all that was needed. McConnell changed his tune on disclosure after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, because the biggest GOP donors wanted to throw all the mud they could but were too cowardly to publicly attach their names to the political attacks they funded.

In McConnell, Trump has the perfect henchman. If one takes a look at the press releases from the Senate Majority Leader’s office since the election, one finds not just kneejerk fealty to the president-elect’s nominees and relentless criticism of all things Obama but propagandistic rhetoric in which plain language loses its meaning when held against any objective standard based on facts. Take what McConnell said about Treasury Secretary designate Steven Mnuchin, whose past business experience includes running the mortgage lender IndyMac, which foreclosed on thousands of borrowers instead of refinancing so average Americans could keep their homes and equity.

“It is time to get serious about the problems families and businesses large and small across the nation face,” McConnell said. “Whether it is the urgent need for tax reform or wide-ranging regulatory relief, we will need someone like Steven working with both parties in Congress to make it happen. His private sector expertise will be valuable as we begin to tackle these challenges and reverse the last eight years of economic heartache.”

McConnell is the perfect partner and lying propagandist for Trump. He maintains a straight face, which never upstages the television coverage of Trump’s latest antics. As McConnell’s praise of Mnuchin reveals, the GOP’s agenda is simple—give corporate America more power to do what it wants, enrich the wealthy with more tax cuts, and keep insisting, with a straight face, that’s what’s best for the nation. As Americans will soon see, many shades of darkness inhabit Trump’s Washington.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s democracy and voting rights, campaigns and elections, and many social justice issues.

Meryl Streep, Trump’s Attack On A Reporter’s Disability, And Reality

Meryl Streep, Trump’s Attack On A Reporter’s Disability, And Reality

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

On November 25, 2015, during a speech before thousands of supporters in South Carolina, Donald Trump mocked the disability of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski.

This is not a controversial statement, or one up for debate. It is a reflection of reality.

Here’s the video. The despicable attack came as Trump was attempting to rebut Kovaleski’s work debunking Trump’s false claim that he saw “thousands” of Americans cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center. You can see Trump holding his right hand at an angle while flailing about in cruel mimicry of Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, which limits the functioning of his joints.

Following criticism of his vicious attack on Kovaleski, Trump claimed he had not been mocking the reporter’s disability. He lied. Part of his defense was that he had never met Kovaleski and didn’t know what he looked like. That was false. Here’s PolitiFact’s ruling that his denials were false. Here’s The Washington Post FactChecker’s.

This is not in question. So why is The New York Times itself helping Trump redefine reality?

During a speech at The Golden Globes on Sunday, Meryl Streep criticized the “instinct to humiliate” on display during Trump’s attack on Kovaleski. The Times’ Patrick Healy called Trump up for his reaction, then authored an article depicting the exchange as a she said/he said: Streep had called attention to a speech in which Trump was “seeming to mock” its reporter and Trump had “flatly denied” the claim.

The Times knows better. When Trump first attacked Kovaleski in July 2015, the paper responded, “We’re outraged that he would ridicule the physical appearance of one of our reporters.”

This is what Trump and his allies do. When Trump says something that exposes a real vulnerability, they outright lie about what he said and why. Trump lies habitually, so unwinding the rationale behind any particular falsehood is difficult. But the result is a news environment in which facts become unstable, reality is constantly under attack, and both journalists and news consumers are unable to process new information within a coherent collective framework.

If the paper of record won’t stand up for the truth about an attack on one of its own reporters, I have to question whether the Times will be able to do so regarding key issues of policy and politics. And that’s a real concern as the next administration unfolds.