donald trump
Obama wants TV stations to stop airing ads that misuse his quotes to attack Biden
Former President Barack Obama asked TV stations on Wednesday to stop airing ads featuring his voice over on-screen attacks on former Vice President Joe Biden. The ads, which aim to depress African-American votes in Saturday’s South Carolina Democratic primary, are funded by the pro-Donald Trump super PAC Committee to Defend the President. They began airing Tuesday in the state, where Biden is relying on a strong showing to revive his struggling campaign. In the ads, a clip from Obama’s reading of his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father is paired with unfavorable media quotes about Biden’s record on race. “This despicable ad is straight out of the Republican disinformation playbook, and it’s clearly designed to suppress turnout among minority voters in South Carolina by taking President Obama...
‘Namaste Trump:’ India’s Modi welcomes U.S. president with pomp and pageantry as trade tensions simmer
Donald Trump got a red-carpet welcome after Air Force One touched down Monday in Ahmedabad, India, kicking off a two-day visit to the country that’s as much about spectacle as substance. Hundreds of performing artists crowded the Ahmedabad airport as Trump’s plane landed. He was greeted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as drummers and dancers carrying colorful cloth umbrellas performed on the tarmac. The scene opened a day that will be packed with pageantry for the American president, who’s made no secret of his predilection for large crowds and impressive displays. Modi is hoping the welcome in his home state of Gujarat will further solidify his friendship with Trump and strengthen bonds with the U.S. that have frayed over trade disputes. From the airport, Trump’s motorcade is expected to ...
Investors shouldn’t underestimate election volatility, warns UBS
UBS says investors are still too confident that a Trump re-election is a given. The majority of investors at UBS’s Investor Forum events have a “high level of confidence” in a Trump re-election, per a UBS report Thursday. But according to UBS Global Wealth Management’s chief investment officer Mark Haefele, recent national polls “portend a close general election contest between any Democratic nominee and President Trump.” In fact, heading into Wednesday’s debate, Bernie Sanders was polling higher, about 10% above the next leading candidate, according to an average of national polls compiled by Real Clear Politics. What’s more: According to a ABC/Washington Post poll this week, the battle would be tight between Trump and any democratic ca...
Dick Van Dyke Endorses Bernie Sanders in Plea to Geriatric Voters: Watch
Tom Seyer is out here paying TLC to play his rallies, while Bernie Sanders keeps racking up the big-name endorsements. The Democratic presidential candidate from New Hampshire has found support from The Strokes, Vampire Weekend, Bon Iver, Miike Snow, Lykke Li, and even newly minted US citizen Neil Young. Now he’s added another beloved name to his list of supporters: comedic great Dick Van Dyke. While a lot of Sanders’ backers have aimed at catching the attention of younger votes, Van Dyke’s endorsement is specifically targeted at an older crowd. In a campaign video released on Friday, the 94-year-old Mary Poppins star says, “The age question keeps coming up. I know that I’m 20 years older than Bernie. I have all my marbles!… It really doesn’t matter, except fo...
Donald Trump Rips Parasite’s Oscar Win: “What the Hell Was That All About?”
Donald Trump, the first Home Alone 2 cast member to be impeached, can’t understand how a foreign film won Best Picture at the 2020 Academy Awards. Though the Oscars occurred nearly two weeks ago, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite was top of mind for Trump when he took the stage for a campaign rally in Colorado on Thursday. “How bad were the Academy Awards this year?” griped Trump to begin a lengthy, largely non-sensical rant in which he seemed to insinuate that liberal Hollywood awarded Parasite in an effort to derail trade negotiations between America and South Korea, and wondered why Gone With the Wind, a film from 1939 that indefensibly racist, didn’t win instead. “The winner is… a movie from South Korea! What the hell was that all about? We got enough problems with South ...
Some Oracle employees stop work in protest of Larry Ellison’s pro-Trump politics
While a wave of employee activism marked by walk-outs and protests has rippled through Silicon Valley the past few years, Oracle glided along unscathed. Now, a symbol of tech’s old guard is facing the stirrings of a worker uprising as well. People left their desks Thursday at Oracle offices around the world to protest Chairman Larry Ellison’s fundraiser a day earlier for President Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. The protest, called No Ethics/No Work, involved about 300 employees walking out of their offices or stopping work at remote locations at noon local time and devoting the rest of the day to volunteering or civic engagement, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. Ellison drew employee ire that most didn’t know exist...
We know something essential about the coronavirus. We’re not doing anything about it
This is the web version of Brainstorm Health Daily, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top health care news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here. Good afternoon, Dailies. This is Cliff, back in the driver’s seat for the newsletter for the rest of the week as Sy gets a break. As of Thursday (Feb. 20), the outbreak of the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 has infected more than 75,000 people and killed 2,130. While nearly all of the illness and death so far has occurred in China, where the outbreak began late last year, the virus has managed to sneak across nearly 30 national borders. Indeed, one significant development is that, after being largely contained to mainland China, the disease seems to be gaining a foothold (rather than a mere toehold) in several other Asian n...
Oracle’s Larry Ellison makes friends with his enemy’s enemy, hosting a fundraiser for President Trump
Larry Ellison, the co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp. is a fierce competitor, to put it mildly. This is a man who helped build a $177 billion company, and who likes to unwind by funding ludicrous hydrofoiling racing catamarans. Increasingly, Ellison’s company is competing with the cloud computing wing of Amazon.com Inc., and he does it with zeal. Oracle funded an anti-Amazon group called the “Free and Fair Markets Initiative” to attack Amazon. Oracle also worked desperately to derail Amazon’s bid for JEDI, a lucrative Defense Department cloud contract, going for far as to sue the federal government for illegally favoring Amazon. Now, Ellison is making friends with his enemy’s enemy, who happens to be the President of the United States. On Wednesday, Ellison&nb...
Defense Department’s JEDI contract with Microsoft halted after Amazon complains
A judge has ordered a temporary halt to a major Defense Department contract awarded to Microsoft after rival Amazon complained about the bidding process. In a sealed legal document filed Thursday with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith said the Defense Department’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract is blocked “until further order of the court.” The decision comes just days after Amazon Web Services, the retail giant’s cloud computing arm, revealed in legal documents unsealed this week that it was seeking to depose President Donald Trump and Pentagon officials to obtain more information about the JEDI cloud bidding process. Amazon has alleged that President Trump’s public hostility toward the company and its CEO, Jeff Bezos,...
Trump Threatens to Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, Again
President Donald Trump (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks, via Flickr) For the fourth consecutive year, the Trump administration wants to stop “wasteful and unnecessary funding” in its annual budget proposal by targeting the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), among other programs. Released on Monday, February 10, Trump’s $4.8 trillion “Budget for America’s Future” proposes to increase defense spending in 2021 while slashing funding to culture and the arts, social welfare, and student aid. The NEA and NEH are included in a section titled “wasteful and unnecessary funding.” According to the proposal, these agencies “are not considered core Federal responsibilities, and make ...
Why Amazon wants to depose President Trump about cloud computing
Amazon believes President Trump is key to understanding why it lost a Defense Department contract that is worth up to $10 billion. In legal documents filed in January but unsealed on Monday, the retail-giant’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, revealed that it’s seeking to depose President Trump and six other individuals about the hotly contested Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract. The Pentagon handed Microsoft the coveted cloud computing contract in October, a surprise to many technology analysts who had considered Amazon to be the favorite. The new publicly available filings mark yet another development in Amazon’s quest to challenge the Defense Department’s bidding process and potentially overturn the agency’s selection of Microsoft as ...
Poll: 64% of New Hampshire Democrats prefer death by meteor to Trump re-election
Given the choice, a large majority of New Hampshire Democrats would prefer that, “A giant meteor strikes the earth, extinguishing all human life,” to Donald Trump winning re-election. The new poll comes from the Center for Public Opinion at UMass Lowell. In an online survey of 400 likely voters, 64% of democrats chose the death of all Earthly creatures over four more years of the “very stable genius.” Self-identified Independents were more torn, narrowly desiring a Trump victory to total annihilation, 51% to 49%. Compared to men, women were far more likely to choose the meteor, with over two-thirds of female respondents desiring Omnicide over the pussy-grabber-in-chief. Even 28% of conservatives would rather experience death from above, though these are the kind of ...
