Society

Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg may just be the smartest man in DC, likely even a card-carrying Mensa member, according to a fawning WIRED interview published Thursday.  Virginia Heffernan, a contributor to the magazine, came to this dazzling conclusion when she sat down to speak with Mayor Pete “in his undernourished corner office one afternoon in early spring.”  “I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers,” she recalled. Cockburn, however, thinks the people of East Palestine would like it to take up slightly more mental headspace.  Heffernan is right, however. Buttigieg does hold much of his mind’s “functionality in reserves.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were followed by paparazzi in a "near catastrophic" car chase Tuesday night in New York City, according to a statement from the couple's spokesperson. "Last night, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Ms. Ragland [Markle's mother] were involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi," the spokesperson said. "The relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD officers." https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1658844017918869510 The incident supposedly occurred as Harry and Meghan were leaving the Ms. Foundation for Women gala at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Midtown.

One year into his tenure as the CEO of CNN, Chris Licht is taking a battering. Ratings are dwindling, viewers are outraged and an internal rift is widening. The mountain of problems facing the embattled CEO erupted into public view last week in the wake of the network’s town hall with Donald Trump, an event that sparked outrage inside and outside the CNN newsroom. “It feels very bleak,” one CNN journalist told me. “Staffers are nervous about the future.

As President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy begin to square off on a compromise debt ceiling bill, the subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, for the purchase of electric cars will prove a major, if not the major, sticking point. McCarthy clearly knows that Goldman Sachs, Brookings and other respected observers have predicted that these EV credits could cost taxpayers $390 billion over the coming decade — or at least twenty-seven times the original estimate. Yet the president is also acutely aware that preserving the IRA’s role in facilitating a rapid transition away from gas-powered vehicles is the reddest of lines for his progressive base.

Elon Musk has decided it's too much work for him to be the chief executive of Twitter, a fraying social network, in addition to running Tesla and SpaceX and a potpourri of other startups. He recently named Linda Yaccarino, an NBC ad executive, as the new CEO so that she could focus on business operations and he could focus on product design and new technologies. As an employee of Musk's, Yaccarino has an impossible mission — to stem the bleeding, appease the advertisers, and, of course, keep her new boss happy. Good luck to her, I say, for Twitter's current fortunes are going in only one direction — south. When Musk acquired Twitter, he paid $44 billion for a company that no one else wanted nearly as much. Since then, its value has fallen to almost $20 billion.

It is out of sight and usually out of mind, but recent events are forcing Americans to focus on the security of a vast network of undersea cables that the nation depends upon. In early February 2022, cables connecting Taiwan to its Matsu Islands off the coast of China were cut in what appears to be an act of sabotage that Taipei later ascribed to Chinese vessels. It took nearly two months for the internet to be up and running again, highlighting the importance of a largely ignored element of a country’s critical infrastructure.  According to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research and consulting firm, there are around 552 undersea cables, connecting almost every inhabited landmass. Most are fiberoptic, utilizing light to transmit massive quantities of data.

After what could only be described as a dizzying month in news media, Fox is on the hunt for a Tucker Carlson replacement. Cockburn has some thoughts — and suggestions — on who might be a good fit for the network’s coveted 8 p.m. slot. First, there are obvious candidates within Fox already. Jesse Watters currently hosts Jesse Watters Primetime in the 7 p.m. time slot. Bumping Watters up an hour is thought to be the preferred and likeliest solution within the network. Greg Gutfeld is a close second, having hosted late-night shows from 2007 to the present, with the current Gutfeld! earning impressive viewership numbers. On the more conventional side, there is Brian Kilmeade, who hosts both the weekday Fox & Friends and Saturday’s One Nation with Brian Kilmeade.

It’s been a pattern under Joe Biden’s time in executive office. As much as he has prefaced his political career in the media on his deeply held faith as a Catholic, time and again it is his administrations, as vice president and now as president, that have targeted American Catholic organizations with burdensome and often ridiculous regulatory challenges. The Little Sisters of the Poor met the ire of the Obama administration. Now Biden's Department of Health and Human Services is demanding that the largest hospital system in Oklahoma, Saint Francis Health System, literally snuff out the flame of their belief to keep their doors open. St. Francis, a nonprofit hospital system which opened in 1960 and now serves 400,000 Oklahomans every year, has chapels, you see.

Sources familiar with Abby Grossberg's time at Fox News are raising further questions about claims made in a lawsuit filed by the former booker against the network, which accuses Tucker Carlson of encouraging a sexist and hostile workplace environment. Grossberg describes in her suit how her colleagues at Carlson's show hung up and laughed at pictures of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a low-cut bathing suit, routinely and harshly judged women based on their appearance and made comments meant to belittle her for being Jewish and a woman. "On October 26, 2022, less than a month and a half after starting at Tucker Carlson Tonight, Ms.

Joe Biden has held the fewest press conferences and interviews of any president since Ronald Reagan. And now we’ve learned that when he is allowed to take questions, they appear to be pre-selected, approved by White House staff and agreed to by reporters in the White House pool. Yesterday, while appearing alongside South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol, Biden fielded a question from Courtney Subramanian of the Los Angeles Times. A photojournalist captured a notecard in Biden’s hand that showed an avatar of Subramanian, the words “Question 1” and a pre-written text of the question she asked the president.So how does a question from a White House reporter make it to the president of the United States’ hands before she even asks it?

Cockburn’s soul surged with admiration earlier as he witnessed the brave employees of the Washington Post do something truly heroic. Risk life and limb to report from the front lines? Well, no. Attend a White House press briefing and grill Karine Jean-Pierre? Nay, something far more daring still: more than 450 members of the Washington Post Guild, the publication’s union — brace yourself — stepped away from work on their lunch break to demand “Washington Post management gets serious about management and bring [them] a wage proposal.” It looked to be a beautiful sunny day outside the Post offices in Franklin Square, where employees mingled in t-shirts and helped themselves to — are those boxes of pizza?! — and what appears to be a variety of flavored bubbly water.

Fox News stunned its viewers — and, according to sources within the company, its own staff — when it let go of primetime host Tucker Carlson on Monday. Fox News employees were said to be "shocked" and "upset" when they read the public press release announcing Tucker's departure from the network. "FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," read the muted release. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor." Speculation as to the reasons behind Tucker's abrupt exit has run rampant. The initial online consensus was that Tucker was out due to his being named prominently in Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox — but that doesn't explain why Maria Bartiromo and Judge Jeanine Pirro are still on the air.

Don Lemon announced that he had been officially squeezed out of CNN earlier today. “I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN. I am stunned,” the former anchor and morning show host tweeted. “After seventeen years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have the decency to tell me directly. At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network. It is clear that there are some larger issues at play. With that said, I want to thank my colleagues and the many teams I have worked with for an incredible run. They are the most talented journalists in the business, and I wish them all the best.” CNN's PR wing later disputed Lemon’s claims.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic that killed millions of people across the world, taxpayers may still fund one of the ethically plagued American organizations that worked closely with the Chinese lab where the pandemic is believed to have originated. The inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services testified to Congress this week that she did not recommend that EcoHealth Alliance, the NGO accused of gross conflicts of interest and mismanagement of its relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology be suspended or debarred — the process by which the federal government bans any funding to an NGO.