BY RAUL HERNANDEZ
The Face of the GOP
Trump is a reptile.
This guy will do and say anything to get votes or make money.
Sunday, Trump immediately got on Twitter after 50 people were gunned down by an Islamic lunatic and thumped his chest: He bragged: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”
Two hours later, he posts the same message on Facebook.
No doubt that the Trump apologists like Scottie Nell Hughes, Jeffrey Lord and other Republicans are already preparing their scripts to say that Donald doesn’t really mean what he says on social media. He is just being Donald and was off script. Besides the media treats him unfairly and twists around his statements.
His political handlers insist that if Donald can be taught to tuck in his fangs and stick to the prepared scripts, they can make the face of the GOP sound almost human.
Sign on the Dotted Line for God’s Sake or Else!
Gannett is urging Tribune Publishing Corporation to sell 11 of its newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and take its $15-per-share offer. There is a warning: If Tribune doesn’t stop “delaying negotiations,” Gannett will conduct a hostile takeover of the Los Angeles Times by circumventing the Tribune board and going directly to its stockholders, according to a Gannett press release issued last month.
BTW: The $15-a-share offer is good until August. Why is that?
That’s when Tribune Publishing’s second quarter financial results will be made public, and if the financial picture of Tribune Publishing is bleak, the offer might go down, Gannett hinted in its press release.
“It is imperative for due diligence to occur soon given the apparent rapid series of changes taking place inside Tribune that may diminish the value of Tribune to Gannett,” Gannett stated.
Earlier this year, Gannett purchased the Ventura County Star and 13 other newspapers including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The Star is located in Ventura County, California, which is next to Los Angeles County. Gannett is now eyeing the Tribune Publishing’s L.A. Times along with 10 other iconic newspapers.
Gannett’s offer might cause the Department of Justice to look at what is at stake for readers, consumers and businesses.
In March, the feds did just that on a similar newspaper sale. The department announced that they had gone to court to oppose Tribune Publishing from buying the Press Enterprise, located in Riverside County, and the Register in Orange County, California. The newspapers were being sold during a bankruptcy auction involving Freedom Communications Inc., which owned them.
The feds maintain that this sale would stifle newspaper competition, which is against federal antitrust laws. Also it could raise the price of ads, and those costs will be passed down to consumers.
Tribune winning the auction would create a monopoly, with 98 percent and 81 percent of all newspaper sales in Orange and Riverside counties, respectively.
The Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit doomed this sale, and this allowed Digital First Media, which owns 11 daily newspapers and more than a dozen community weeklies in Southern California, to buy the Press Enterprise and Register in March.
Digital First Media now publishes 11 daily newspapers, including the Los Angeles Daily News, and more than a dozen community weeklies in Southern California. The Daily News has a circulation of 56,493 daily; 79,646 Sunday in 2014.
Is the Department of Justice keeping its federal eye on Gannet buying the L.A. Times? I asked the feds last month.
They respectfully declined to comment to this and other questions about Gannett’s bid.
“My apologies, but unfortunately DOJ declines to comment to those questions as well,” Mark Abueg, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice stated in an email to American Justice Notebook.
Recently, the web site Echo Media stated that the Star’s daily circulation at around 45,700 and its Sunday circulation at 58,600.
The Los Angeles Times is the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in the country, with a daily readership of 1.4 million and 2.4 million on Sunday, more than 36 million unique latimes.com visitors monthly and a combined print and online local weekly audience of 4.3 million, according to the newspaper’s website.
Taking into consideration the L.A. Times’ and Ventura Star’s combined circulation numbers in both counties and lack of competition that remains to be seen.
Another problem is what Gannett does with the newspapers it buys. It has a long history of making big profits by gutting newsrooms, ordering the staff to do more with less.
When the newspaper industry was taking circulation and financial beatings about eight years ago, Gannett’s profits soared.
Columnist Bruce Murphy wrote last year: “Back in 2008, when the meltdown of print media was still in its early stages, writer Jim Hopkins did a story on the extraordinarily high profit margins of Gannett’s newspapers (based on 2007 numbers), with the Green Bay Press-Gazette leading the pack with a 43.5 percent profit margin. Many of the 80 Gannett papers Hopkins had numbers for were making a profit margin of 20, 32, 30 or 35 percent.”
Murphy also stated: “Those fat profits were achieved by constant cost-cutting and maintaining lean staffs, but in the years since then, as the full brunt of print’s economic demise was felt, the company still slashed its staff almost in half. “From 2008 to 2012 Gannett reduced total employment by 20,000 positions out of 45,000 positions,” Hopkins noted. “The vast majority were aged 45 and up because they were the highest paid.”
This means veteran reporters lose jobs and are replaced by inexperienced journalists who soon find out that newspaper jobs are shrinking as circulations decline and leave the profession.
The community suffers when there is no accountability of public and elected officials or the taxpayers’ money.
So what Gannett does to the Los Angeles Times newsroom if it acquires the newspaper remains to be seen?
Meanwhile, Gannett is urging Tribune to stop delaying the $15 deal and signed the dotted line or else.
“Gannett continues to believe that the Tribune Board should engage constructively with Gannett toward negotiating a merger agreement that benefits both companies’ stockholders. Gannett also believes it is imperative for due diligence to occur soon given the apparent rapid series of changes taking place inside Tribune that may diminish the value of Tribune to Gannett.”
Also, “Gannett urges Tribune to stop delaying constructive negotiations by insisting on limiting conditions in its non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Gannett is ready to sign a customary NDA for an all-cash transaction of this type that will not have a financing contingency – similar to the version sent to Tribune in April – and does not limit its options to submit an offer directly to Tribune stockholders.”
Gannett believes that maintaining this “flexibility is important in light of the continued opposition to Gannett’s offer from Tribune’s Chairman Michael Ferro-led board,” according to the press release.
The $15.00 per share offer also represents a 76 percent premium to the $8.50 share price at which Tribune recently issued common stock to an entity controlled by Michael Ferro.
Recall Petition
The robed clown posing as a judge who sentenced a rapist to six months in jail needs to be recalled and retired. He is a disgrace.
A recall petition is underway to recall California Judge Aaron Persky who gave a rapist a six-month sentence in a Stanford University case. Rapist and university swimmer Allen Turner, 20, was found guilty in March.
Persky’s judgment is badly flawed, and others are repulsed by it.
Last week, at least 10 prospective jurors refused to serve under Judge Persky over disagreements with the sentence he issued to convicted rapist Brock Turner, the East Bay Times reports.
The light sentence also ignited public outrage across the nation.
Persky should be the Poster Boy for Judicial Reform on the Bench throughout the country. Perhaps, laws can be passed to make it easier to recall these fools who sit behind benches posing as justices.
In the 18 years I spent covering federal, state and county courts, I watched many of these robed clowns during court trials or hearings. They are often arrogant, pompous asses who meted out harsh sentences to the poor and minorities for much lesser crimes. Who swear to administer justice fairly but usually cater to the Entitlement Crowd, usually rich and mostly white.
About a year ago, I had a long conversation with retired Ventura County judge at the gym in Ventura, California. I told him that a few of the judges on at the Ventura County Superior Court were robed clowns that I never had respect for, and that the criminal justice system in Ventura tends to be biased against the poor and minorities.
The judge got his feathers ruffled and said, “I take exception to you calling my colleagues clowns.” I replied, “I don’t care what you take exception to that is my opinion from covering the courts in Ventura County for eight years, and I’m sticking to it.”
Look at the courts in Ventura, most of the defendants are Hispanics, I said. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Hispanics commit far more crimes than whites in Ventura County.
Then I told him: “Go poke your head inside traffic court in the morning or afternoon. Consistently, most of those in traffic court are Hispanics. What does this mean, judge, that Hispanics are also bad drivers?”
Minorities aren’t the majority of the population in Ventura County. But apparently, Hispanics can’t drive as well as whites.
This is a judge who had told me that he gets a lot of his political commentary from Rush Limbaugh and wasn’t sure whether Obama was a U.S. citizen because he hadn’t seen his birth certificate. He said reverse discrimination against whites is a bigger problem than racism.
This is a guy who sat in judgment of others.