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| Jim Acosta |
Playing nice with Trump? Jim Acosta, who as White House correspondent topped Trump’s “enemy of the people” list during his first term, is out at CNN as CEO Mark Thompson shuffles the cable TV line-up and repositions the network for a digital blitz.
Thompson took away Acosta’s 10 am program and reportedly offered to exile the anchor to Siberia (e.g., a program beginning at 12 am from Los Angeles).
Getting rid of nearly-18-year CNN veteran Acosta, who had his White House “hard pass” revoked by Trump, is bound to earn the struggling news organization brownie points in Maga-land.
In signing off, Acosta said his CNN highlight was interviewing Cuban dictator Raul Castro about political prisoners while covering president Obama’s trip to the island.
“I took home the lesson … it is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant,” said Acosta, a son of a Cuban refugee. “I have always believed it’s the job of the press to hold power to account.”
Let’s hope America’s media end their groveling before Trump and follow Acosta’s philosophy.
What’s wrong with Elon… Ahead of the Jan. 27 commemoration at Auschwitz to mark the 80th anniversary of the Russian army’s liberation of the death camp in which 1.1M Jews were murdered by the Nazis, Elon Musk urged Germans to get over their fascist past.
He told a gathering of the hard-right Alternative for Germany political party that their country has focused too much on past guilt.
Musk’s video remarks to the German right-wingers follow his infamous Nazi salute during the Trump inauguration festivities.
The world’s richest man, who doled out more than $250M to bankroll Trump’s campaign, is a big favorite in MAGA-land and serves as the country’s shadow president.
His remarks urging Germany to get over its dark past, and flashing the Nazi salute come at a time when antisemitic attitudes run rampant throughout the globe.
Nearly half (46 percent) of the world’s adult population hold deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes, according to a survey released in January by the Anti-Defamation League. That’s double the number recorded a decade ago by the ADL.
Respondents younger than 35 have elevated levels of antisemitic sentiments (50 percent), 13 percentage points higher than respondents over 50.
"Antisemitism is nothing short of a global emergency, especially in a post-October 7 world,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “We are seeing these trends play out from the Middle East to Asia, from Europe to North and South America."
Elon is playing with fire.
Fun and games at NASA… Adhering to Trump’s war on “woke,” the space agency killed the website for its Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity.
That site now diverts to a 404 page with the message: “The cosmic object you were looking for has disappeared beyond the event horizon,” referring to the power of a destructive black hole. Pretty funny—unless you worked in the diversity office.
NASA’s DEI program was a flop. Prior to the shutdown, the diversity office reported that of the agency’s 17K staffers in 2010, 35 percent were women, 11.8 percent Black, six percent each for Latino and Asian-American.
A 2024 report showed similar numbers, begging the question: Is Trump right about DEI?
NASA did make one DEI breakthrough. Temporary head and Trump appointee Janet Petro is the first woman to head NASA since its launch in 1958.
She wrote the harsh email sent to NASA staffers about ending the DEI programming that “divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars and resulted in shameful discrimination.”
Irony?
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