Posts Tagged ‘Tina Brown’

Clinton Foundation Shutting Down Clinton Global Initiative

Sunday, January 15th, 2017

Remember the Clinton Global Initiative, the arm of the Clinton Foundation that Clinton supporters claimed helps solve “the world’s most pressing challenges,” and which detractors noted was yet another handy tool to line the pockets of the Clintons and their permanent traveling army of political toadies?

Well, evidently all the world’s most pressing challenges have been solved, as the Clinton Foundation is shutting down the Clinton Global Initiative:

In a “mass layoff” event reported late last week by the Department of Labor, the Clinton Foundation announced it would lay off some 22 employees at the Clinton Global Initiative, which attained notoriety during the John Podesta leaks, when the various details of the fallout between between CGI head Doug Band and Chelsea Clinton were revealed; it also emerged that long-time Bill Clinton friend Band was soliciting donations for Clinton through his PR firm, Teneo in an sordid example of “pay for play” which most of the mainstream media refused to cover, especially after Band emailed Podesta “If this story gets out, we are screwed.”

Filed as mandated by the Department of Labor’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN notice, on January 12, the Clinton Foundation’s Veronika Shiroka advised the DOL that as part of a “Plant Layoff” it would layoff 22 workers on April 15, with reason for the dislocation stated as “Discontinuation of the Clinton Global Initiative.” The layoffs are part of the Clinton plan put in motion ahead of the presidential election, to offset a storm of criticism regarding pay-to-play allegations during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

For those unable to disentangle CGI from the other money-laundering arms of the Clinton empire, here’s a look back at a few of their greatest hits:

  • CGI was a conduit of donation money from associates of exiled Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gulen.
  • CGI provided $2 million in funding for a private energy company run by personal friends of the Clintons…including Bill Clinton’s alleged mistress, wealthy blonde divorcee Julie Tauber McMahon.
  • One of CGI’s “big things” was putting on an annual conference where donors could rub shoulders with various charitable foundation heads, as well as the likes of Bill Clinton, Ben Affleck, Bono, Jon Bon Jovi, Tina Brown and David Bowie’s supermodel widow Iman.
  • Some of the other names on the 2016 conference list:
    • Former NBA player Jason “famous for being gay” Collins
    • Hernando de Soto, chairman of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru (listed here because he sticks out like a sore thumb among the lefties)
    • David Miliband, former UK Labour MP and brother of former Labour leader Ed Miliband
    • Ben Osborne, the editor-in-chief of slideshow-infested sports site Bleacher Report
    • Nancy E. Pfund, founder and managing partner of DBL Partners, an investor in (among others) Podesta Group client SolarCity
    • Becky Quick, co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box
    • Matteo Renzi, the (then current) Prime Minister of Italy
    • Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood
    • Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia
    • Aleksandar Vucic, the Prime Minister of Serbia
    • Casey Wasserman, the chairman and CEO of “Wasserman, a leading sports, entertainment and lifestyle marketing and management agency”

      (And I compiled that list of names mostly as a bookmark for myself for further research. What the hell is a guy from Bleacher Report doing at a conference with the Prime Minister of Serbia? Could it have something to do with their involvement with Qatar’s Word Cup bid?)

    • Anyway, there was already talk that the Clintons were going to shut down CGI when they expected Hillary to win the presidency. With Clinton Foundation donations taking a nosedive following Hillary’s loss, CGI was just another financial, political and legal liability for them. As one Zero Hedge commenter put it, “I’m sure the shredders are running 24×7 tonight.”

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for October 31, 2014

    Friday, October 31st, 2014

    Happy Halloween!

  • This week’s example of Democratic elected official defrauding a non-profit comes to you from Philadelphia congressman Chaka Fattah.
  • Democratic Representative Alan Grayson, the 17th richest man in congress, has cut off funds to estranged wife, and now both she and her kids are on welfare.
  • Former Obama champion Tina Brown now says he makes women feel unsafe.
  • Secret Service investigator into prostitution scandal resigns after his own prostitution scandal.
  • Marine veteran father banned from school after objecting to his daughters history assignment to “list the benefits of Islam.”
  • The war in Ukraine has cemented Putin’s dictatorship in Russia.
  • On the other hand, the ruble is crashing, despite rate hikes.
  • How’s that Chicago model working out?

  • High and trying to grab a cop’s gun is no way to go through life, son. Which goes a long way toward explaining why Michael Brown no longer walks among the living…
  • Japan may have a low murder rate, but as the follow chart from this piece on “haunted” apartments shows, their suicide rate dwarfs our murder and suicide rate combined.

  • Texas Tech student admits to filing false sexual assault charges. Under California’s new kangaroo courts, the student falsely accused would have already been convicted and expelled by now. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Fund managers are the fish in the game. They can’t leave the table.
  • Interesting piece on GamerGate. “The feminism of male demonization and female victimhood has become an insidious force that, despite its faux-progressive trappings, stands in the way of genuine equality. Whatever its flaws, GamerGate is a politically diverse movement of cultural resistance to this brand of toxic feminism. For that, it deserves at least two cheers.”
  • Dear Ridley Scott: Moses did not wear scale armor.
  • Links to this and previous years’ Fark scary story thread.
  • Now that’s what I call shag carpeting.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Economics, Texas, Welfare State | No Comments »

    How Tina Brown Lost $100 Million Trying To Nail Newsweek Back To The Perch

    Monday, May 5th, 2014

    If you’ve been following the story of Newsweek‘s demise (click those two links if you haven’t), then this Politico piece on Tina Brown’s ill-fated editorship is required reading, both for what it says, and for what it doesn’t say.

    What it says is that Brown was a creative, involved editor who hired good writers and worked long and hard to make the magazine a success. It also says that she was a spendthrift perfectionist who called people at 3 AM, expensively redid things at the last moment and never had a solid business plan for putting the magazine back in the black. She also had sensibilities that only rarely aligned with the world of news, and readily fell back on stale tabloid topics that were only slightly more hip than disco (Regis Philbin, Jerry Seinfeld, Zombie Princess Diana).

    Because Politico is part of the Democratic media complex, one thing they barely even allude to is Newsweek‘s decision to change itself into a liberal opinion magazine, in essence alienating (at least) half its readers. Brown did nothing to change the magazine’s disasterous, naked liberalism, and indeed abetted the trend (like her desire to make Michelle Bachmann look crazy on the cover). Newsweek had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal. The course may have been laid in before she climbed into the cockpit, but Brown never veered from it. In plane crash parlance, this was “controlled flight into ground.”

    Saving a declining newsweekly was always going to be a difficult job in the Internet age; the relentless liberal slant and Brown’s feckless ways just made it an impossible one.

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »

    Newsweek Owner Seeks New Buyer To Nail It Back To The Perch

    Wednesday, May 29th, 2013

    Evidently Newsweek (or the online-only digital carcass of same) is for sale again. Gee, people don’t want to pay for an online version of a stale newsweekly turned into another carrier-medium for liberal opinion? Who knew?

    Previously:

    Back in 2009, you may remember Newsweek‘s decision to remake itself as a liberal opinion weekly, an odd financial choice in a country where conservatives outnumber liberals nearly 2-to-1. Since then Newsweek has managed the amazing feat of hemorrhaging readers faster than other print publications. Then the Washington Post company decided to sell the venerable newsweekly to Sidney Harman for $1, screwing its shareholders but keeping the magazine’s money-losing liberal slant under Tina Brown’s editorship. Hired to steer the ship around the iceberg, Brown instead decided to teach the iceberg who’s boss by ramming it a few more times.

    Vast swathes of legacy print media are in trouble in the Internet-era, but Newsweek‘s demise is more like an assisted suicide than a graceful decline. It’s like a Type II diabetic who had already lost three toes deciding to immediately go on a diet consisting entirely of ice cream.

    Newsweek had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.

    And remember that Newsweek‘s steep circulation decline, which happened right around the same time they decided to tack hard-left, was considerably more severe than declines at other newsweeklies.

    So if Newsweek was worth $1 before Tina Brown managed to destroy all its remaining value, how much is it worth now?

    Can they find someone willing to shake the cage a little longer?

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    Posted in Media Watch | No Comments »

    Newsweek To Start Pining for the Fjords

    Thursday, October 18th, 2012

    Today Newsweek announced that they were ceasing print publication and going all digital. For a national general-interest weekly news-magazine, that’s tantamount to saying that you’re dead but you don’t feel like lying down just yet.

    Back in 2009, you may remember Newsweek‘s decision to remake itself as a liberal opinion weekly, an odd financial choice in a country where conservatives outnumber liberals nearly 2-to-1. Since then Newsweek has managed the amazing feat of hemorrhaging readers faster than other print publications. Then the Washington Post company decided to sell the venerable newsweekly to Sidney Harman for $1, screwing its shareholders but keeping the magazine’s money-losing liberal slant under Tina Brown’s editorship. Hired to steer the ship around the iceberg, Brown instead decided to teach the iceberg who’s boss by ramming it a few more times.

    Vast swathes of legacy print media are in trouble in the Internet-era, but Newsweek‘s demise is more like an assisted suicide than a graceful decline. It’s like a Type II diabetic who had already lost three toes deciding to immediately go on a diet consisting entirely of ice cream.

    Newsweek had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.

    Tags:, , ,
    Posted in Media Watch | 7 Comments »