Day: December 8, 2016

From Jezebel:

Early next year, NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice will return to television with a new host—former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, appropriately enough. Donald Trump will retain his executive producer credit on the series, Variety reports, and will be paid through MGM, the show’s production firm.

“The fact that a sitting president will be on the payroll of a current TV show is another example of the thicket of potential conflicts of interest raised by Trump’s segue from private businessman and TV star to commander-in-chief,” Variety notes, which doesn’t even begin to describe the horrific absurdity of this situation.

NBC severed its business relationship with Trump (sort of?) in August 2015. “At NBC, respect and dignity for all people are cornerstones of our values,” the network said in a statement. “Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBCUniversal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump. To that end, the annual Miss USA and Miss Universe Pageants, which are part of a joint venture between NBC and Trump, will no longer air on NBC. In addition, as Mr. Trump has already indicated, he will not be participating in The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC.”

Here’s the catch, though: Celebrity Apprentice is licensed from Mark Burnett’s United Artists Media Group and that relationship will continue.” And how!

Trump continues picking his cabinet of nightmares:

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a fast-food executive who’s spoken out against both overtime and minimum wage regulations to be the country’s next Labor secretary, the cabinet post charged with enforcing overtime and minimum wage regulations.

No other government agency plays such a strong role in protecting the rights of restaurant workers; this is the department whose regular investigations reveal that food and drink establishments withhold millions in wages from their staffers every year. And now that agency will be run by Andrew Puzder, the 66-year-old CEO who runs both the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s chains. He has no government experience.

This should erase any doubt about how Trump — a Republican, businessman, and media personality who leaned into populist, pro-worker language on the campaign trail — plans to actually deal with the working class, which is to say, by selecting a man who openly muses about replacing workers with robots and who helped turn around his own burger chain with models in bikinis eating burgers. Perhaps you’ve seen the one of Paris Hilton erotically washing a Bentley while chowing down on a patty?

It’s common, though not uncontroversial, for a Treasury Secretary to come out of the business world — both Robert Rubin (who served under Bill Clinton) and Hank Paulson (who served under George W. Bush) were higher-ups at Goldman Sachs. But having a restaurant industry executive tapped as Secretary of Labor appears to be unprecedented. There’s a good reason for this. Federal data suggests that the restaurant industry is the country’s largest employer of workers earning less than the minimum wage, with up to 16 percent of workers earning less the lowest legal wage of $7.25/hour, according to census data.

Really asshole? WTF kind of “investigation” starts with running into a pizza place with a couple of guns? Fortunately, nobody was hurt while this guy was holding people up at gunpoint while asking if there were children locked in cages behind the tomato sauce but this has really just pissed me off. This is now the country we live in.

The North Carolina man jailed for allegedly firing a gun inside a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant he believed was at the heart of a child sex trafficking ring has some regrets.

In a Wednesday jailhouse interview with The New York Times, Edgar Maddison Welch said he “just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way.”

Welch was arrested and charged with assault with a dangerous weapon on Sunday after barging into Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 rifle and Colt .38 handgun to search the premises for child sex slaves. He had bought into a bogus online conspiracy which holds that Democratic Party operatives, including Hillary Clinton, were tied to the sex ring because its owner exchanged emails with her campaign chair about a fundraising dinner.

Welch told the Times he learned about “Pizzagate” from friends and then conducted his own online investigation once he had internet installed at his house. His research convinced him that “something nefarious was happening.”

This feeling prompted him to drive from Salisbury, North Carolina, to D.C. to give the restaurant a “closer look,” he told the Times. A father of two, Welch worked himself up on the drive thinking of the children he believed to be imprisoned, and at some point decided to enter the restaurant armed.