Free Republic

Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, blames “typos” for the fact that Ocasio-Cortez’s official Congressional website said that Ocasio-Cortez wanted to get rid of airplanes, stop cows from farting, and give “economic security” to everyone who was “unwilling to work” As I explained in this previous post, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently put a document on her official Congressional website which said that she wanted to get rid of airplanes, stop cows from farting, and give “economic security” to everyone who was “unwilling to work.” After a huge number of people criticized her for this, she took the document down. Fortunately, the...

WASHINGTON – CNN political analyst April Ryan, Washington bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks, said past U.S. presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush refused to formally “apologize for slavery” because it would lead to some form of reparations for descendants of slaves. “In my first book, I tackled the issue of reparations as a healing, as a possible healing, asking people… from the time I started at the White House, when the race initiative happened with Bill Clinton, oh my God, everybody was saying that’s the girl who is always asking, ‘Mr. President, will you apologize for...

As the payday campaign manager for the liberal group Americans for Financial Reform, Alcoff participated in congressional Democratic press conferences, was a guest on a House Democratic podcast and met with senior officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2016 through 2018. He was also pictured with now-House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Both committees oversee financial regulatory policies Alcoff was advocating.Alcoff met with then CFPB Director Richard Cordray and other senior CFPB officials on April 2016, again in March...

The Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald wrote a searing column on Friday documenting Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos’ extensive relationship with intelligence agencies and the deep state. The reminder of Bezos’ corporate partnership with controversial government entities such as the CIA and NSA couldn’t come at a more appropriate time, as the Amazon founder has attracted attention for lashing out at what he calls an attempt by the National Enquirer to invade his privacy. Bezos alleges he’s the victim of attempted blackmail on behalf of the Enquirer, which supposedly threatened to release his personal lewd photos if he didn’t shut down a...

For the world’s richest man, charity begins — and stays — at home. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has given only a tiny fraction of his $160 billion fortune to philanthropic causes, falling far behind fellow billionaires such as Bill and Melinda Gates and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, public records show. Although Bezos, 55, and his estranged wife MacKenzie recently pledged $2 billion to a new charitable initiative, their previous giving amounts to a total of just over $145 million or .0906 percent — far less than one percent — of their net worth. Out of $100,000,...

In her 25 years of marriage to Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos has been a loyal ambassador for Amazon, the company that made her and her husband the richest couple in the world. She was an integral part of its origin story, driving to Seattle in 1994 while Mr. Bezos sat in the passenger seat, working on the nascent company’s business plan. She was Amazon’s first accountant and was involved in its transformation from a small online bookseller to the e-commerce behemoth it is today, the second company in American history to be valued at over a trillion dollars. Ms. Bezos,...

The brother of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' girlfriend, former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez, criticized the tech billionaire's decision to try to preempt the National Enquirer's scoop on their affair. Michael Sanchez told Fox News' "MediaBuzz" Sunday that he had been negotiating with the Enquirer's parent company, American Media Inc., to soften a forthcoming story on the couple's extramarital affair when Bezos' longtime security adviser Gavin de Becker "launched World War III against AMI" by advising Bezos to undermine the scoop with what Sanchez called a "misleading" tweet about Bezos' divorce from wife MacKenzie. "Everything that Gavin has advised...

A lawyer for American Media Inc. pushed back at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ claim that the parent company of the National Enquirer threatened to expose nude selfies and bawdy text messages he exchanged with his mistress. “It absolutely is not extortion and not blackmail,” Elkan Abramowitz said on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday. “That is not extortion because all that AMI wanted was the truth.” He said the information about Bezos and former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez came from a “reliable source.” “Bezos and Ms. Sanchez knew who the source was,” Abramowitz said. “Any investigator who was going to investigate this...

That's one aspect of this fiasco that keeps ticking Bezos off - there's this unspoken meme out there that the richer you are, the smarter you must be. (Look at guys like Bill Gates or the founders of Google - smart computer guys, right?) And as The World's Richest Person, Bezos was happy to bask in this implied adulation too. But the fact that he would take "intimate self-pix" and send them over electronic media - which everyone, even poor peons like us, knows is hackable - shows really dumb behavior. (Bill Gates and Donald Trump never did this). Sure...

As soon as President Trump finished his State of the Union address Tuesday night, The Washington Post deployed its fact-checkers to blunt any positive narrative that might come of the President’s unifying speech. “President Trump’s State of the Union speech once again was chock-full of stretched facts and dubious figures,” the article begins, employing the standard terminology used by liberal reporters when they want to accuse the President of lying, but can’t find any actual falsehoods in his remarks. While most of their so-called fact checks were opinionated and/or arbitrary in nature — for instance, they waved away President Trump’s...

The media is dying. Read about it in the media. Facebook is pumping $300 million into the media. And that’s after the Google News Initiative shoved $300 million into fighting “fake news” and helping struggling media outlets like the New York Times. These aren’t investments. They’re charitable donations by Big Data to Big Brother. Take Jeff Bezos taking $250 million, a little more than the $215 million he makes a day, and using it to buy the Washington Post, not because it’s a good business opportunity, but a good political one. The media isn’t worth investing in. TV and cable...

Responding to congressional efforts this week to sanction Saudi Arabia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the kingdom's role in the bloody conflict in Yemen, top Saudi official Adel Al-Jubeir accused legislators of "providing ammunition to the 'death to America' crowd." "I find it very strange that members of Congress would try to curtail allies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in trying to push back against terrorist organizations supported by Iran and Hezbollah," Al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, told "Face the Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan as part of an interview that will...

A Washington Post reporter challenged her newspaper's billionaire owner Jeff Bezos in a series of tweets on Monday to provide paid paternal leave and give female employees equal pay. National reporter Abigail Hauslohner linked to Bezos' tweet expressing gratitude to journalists and promoting the Washington Post‘s Super Bowl ad. The commercial, which cost $5.25 million, was narrated by Tom Hanks and highlighted the work of journalists to bring citizens the facts, "no matter the cost." "I am proud to report for @washingtonpost," Hauslohner wrote. "I’ve been shot at while on the job, & I’ve run [from] airstrikes. I’ve been threatened...

One of the biggest and most salacious stories currently, involving the world's richest man and one of the most powerful and an upcoming mega billion dollar divorce - the kind the media loves to go on and on for weeks and months - and yet there is a not a mention of Bezos anywhere. Just out of curiosity I scanned the standard MSM sites : abcnews.com - no mention cbsnews.com - no mention nbcnews.com - no mention huffingtonpost.com - no mention nytimes.com - no mention wapo.com - no mention seattletimes.com - no mention latimes.com - no mention chicagotribune.com - no...

Full tile: Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else IF BEZOS WERE the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic. That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with...

Federal prosecutors are reviewing Mr. Bezos’ claim that he has been extorted, according to two people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. And those prosecutors have planned a meeting with Mr. Bezos’ representatives, one of those people said. If American Media is found to have broken a law — any law — it would be in violation of a [previous] deal with federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York.

I am very excited for this new episode in our national drama, in which the world’s richest man publicly accuses allies of the president of extorting him with private photos of his genitalia if he doesn’t stop accusing them of politically driven hatchet jobs.For dramatic purposes, it can’t end any other way except with Bezos producing evidence that Trump himself put the Enquirer up to digging up dirt on him, as revenge for the Washington Post’s negative coverage of POTUS. And then we’ll have a fun national debate over whether it’s wrong for the president to use scandal sheets...

I know this opinion is controversial but I really think season three of “President Trump” might be the best season yet. Washington Posts @RoigFranzia says Bezos' team thinks it's possible that the text leaks were politically motivated and that a "government entity" accessed the Bezos texts and hoo boy that's certainly something pic.twitter.com/MQuzNFbCed— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) February 8, 2019 My first thought when I watched that clip was, “Is … is he suggesting that Trump secretly ordered some federal agency to hack Bezos’s dick pics to ruin him?” That’s hard to believe, not so much because it’s beneath POTUS...

A reporter at the Washington Post says that an investigator hired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos believes that text messages leaked to the National Enquirer between Bezos and his girlfriend may have been sent to the magazine by someone in government. In an appearance on MSNBC on Thursday, Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia said that Bezos's security consultant Gavin de Becker believes that National Enquirer obtained text messages from Bezos through inappropriate means. Bezos on Thursday said in a blog post that the Enquirer was attempting to force him to call off his investigation of the tabloid under the threat of...

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says he was the target of "extortion and blackmail" by the publisher of the National Enquirer, which he said threatened to publish revealing personal photos of him unless he stopped investigating how the tabloid obtained his private exchanges with his mistress. Bezos, who is also owner of The Washington Post, detailed his interactions with American Media Inc., or AMI, in an extraordinary blog post Thursday on Medium.com. The billionaire did not say the tabloid was seeking money - instead, he said, the Enquirer wanted him to make a public statement that the tabloid's coverage was not...