larry ellison oracle
SEE MAIN
SON SKYDANCE MERGER REDSTONE
trump?
===
---
---
MMA
The year the media oligarchs bowed to Trump
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 12/03/25
We warned last year that Donald Trump’s second term as president would turbo-charge the political right’s burgeoning media-intimidation complex. Republican officials and right-wing billionaires were already trying to secure their political agenda by using their wealth, lawfare, and government power to silence journalists. And Trump, we wrote, using his authoritarian strategies, would force media moguls to choose between the journalistic integrity of the news outlets they oversee and their broader business interests, with the fate of the free press in the balance.
Twelve months later, it is clear that many of these corporate media owners have made their choice: They are damaging celebrated news outlets like CBS and The Washington Post out of some combination of personal preference and political expedience. While journalists at their outlets are still producing important stories that reveal the corruption and malfeasance of the Trump administration, it’s anyone’s guess how long they will be permitted to do so.
Trump has spent the last decade at war with the press. He has no regard for free speech, treats all dissent as inherently illegitimate, and uses every available tool to curtail critical journalism. The president’s years of anti-media diatribes have achieved their goal of destroying the credibility of potentially damaging reporting among his supporters, and in his second term, he has backed up those verbal attacks with a flurry of actions.
He and his administration have supplemented or even replaced members of the traditional press corps in favor of MAGA influencers and Trumpist outlets; defunded public media outlets in the U.S. and sought to dismantle them abroad; sued reporters and news outlets for publishing content he dislikes; and terminated rules protecting journalists from prosecutorial scrutiny, while targeting them with retaliatory immigration enforcement.
But Trump’s most unnerving assaults on the press involve his administration's use of state power as leverage against oligarchs who control broadcast and cable news operations and major newspapers. For billionaire owners or top executives at massive multimedia companies, news outlets typically represent a tiny fraction of their overall business interests. And those broader holdings create potential vulnerabilities — like regulatory scrutiny of mergers, federal contracting, and criminal investigations — that an authoritarian president can manipulate to encourage media moguls to cudgel their news outlets into line.
Trump’s strategies resemble those of Victor Orban, the Hungarian autocrat many on the American right take as a model, who has dismantled his country’s independent press and forced the sales of outlets to his allies. Trump's desired result is a cowed journalist corps that will produce Fox News-style propaganda venerating his successes and covering up his corruption and failures.
America’s media oligarchs often resisted Trump’s corrupt abuses of power in his first term, either enduring his attacks without constraining their news outlets or beating his administration in federal court. But in his second term, while some media organizations (including Media Matters) have fought to protect the First Amendment against Trump and his administration, certain wealthy magnates have chosen the path of cowardice, submission, and collaboration.
David and Larry Ellison
David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder who is one of the richest men alive and a close friend and ally to Trump. The younger Ellison took control of CBS News in July after the Federal Communications Commission approved his Skydance Media’s purchase of CBS parent company Paramount. Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr acted only after Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle an absurd lawsuit Trump filed over CBS News’ editing of an October interview with then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — and after he secured pledges from Skydance to push the network’s coverage to the right.
Ellison followed through on his promise. The new ownership appointed “anti-woke” champion Bari Weiss as CBS News’ editor-in-chief and Kenneth Weinstein, a Trump-supporting right-wing think tanker, as its ombudsman. An October wave of layoffs hit nearly 100 CBS News employees, gutting the network’s teams focused on climate change and race and culture. Trump certainly seems happy with the changes — in a November 2 interview that marked his first appearance on the network since 2020, he praised Weiss as a “great new leader” and “great person” and described David Ellison’s takeover of CBS News as “the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”
With the CBS News takeover as proof of concept, Ellison and his father are each making moves to seize additional media outlets and move them in a Trumpy direction.
David Ellison is trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery — and the administration is reportedly signaling that other bidders will face grueling oversight from federal regulators. “Trump wants WBD in the Ellisons’ hands, and insiders say it’s because he wants favorable coverage from its CNN news channel,” wrote the New York Post.
Larry Ellison has even reportedly “engaged in a dialogue” with the White House “about possibly axing some of the CNN hosts whom Donald Trump is said to loathe, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar,” if the sale were to go through.
The Trump White House is also trying to broker a deal in which the social media giant TikTok, a news source for one-fifth of American adults and 43% of those under 30, would be sold to a coalition including companies controlled by Larry Ellison as well as fellow pro-Trump magnate Marc Andreessen.
- ### Jeff Bezos
Bezos owns The Washington Post, but his massive fortune comes from founding Amazon, the online retailing and web service giant, and he also owns the space technology company Blue Origin. During Trump’s first term, Bezos bore numerous potshots at what Trump termed the “Amazon Washington Post,” as well as his administration’s apparent retaliation against Amazon’s operations. But Bezos signaled that things would be different in a second term even before Trump’s election when he barred the Post’s editorial board from endorsing in the 2024 contest, blocking the publication of its piece supporting Harris.
The decision began a deterioration of Bezos’ relationship with the Post, accelerated further by his February demand that the paper’s Opinion section advocate without exception for “personal liberties and free markets.” Opinion editor David Shipley resigned rather than execute that pivot; his replacement, Adam O’Neal, an undistinguished reporter and editor previously at The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, has overseen buyouts and layoffs of the section’s veterans (my wife Alyssa Rosenberg, the section’s former letters and community editor, was among those who took the buyout) and hired several conservative writers, leading one of the paper’s right-wing columnists to boast, “We’re now a conservative opinion page.” The dramatic changes seem to have blown a hole in the Post’s subscriber numbers, with NPR’s David Folkenflik estimating “a net loss of a couple hundred thousand subscribers” at the end of February. With revenue plummeting thanks to Bezos’ decisions and the owner unwilling to eat the losses, more layoffs are reportedly on the way.
But defanging the Post — and finding a way to put money in the Trump family’s pockets — seems to be working out well for Bezos. His rewards include plum seats for Trump’s swearing-in, federal contracts for Blue Origin and Amazon Web Services, and the president publicly applauding him for “trying to do a real job with The Washington Post, and that wasn’t happening before.”
### Patrick Soon-Shiong
Like Bezos, Los Angeles Times owner Soon-Shiong has other business interests that left him vulnerable to Trump’s retaliation; he made his fortune in the biotech industry, and his medical patents and products are subject to federal oversight. Whether due to fear of retribution or a shift in his own political views, Soon-Shiong stepped up his oversight of the Times last year, beginning with the cancellation of a planned endorsement of Harris.
He subsequently shilled for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation as secretary of health and human services; announced a remaking of the editorial board, beginning with the addition of pro-Trump CNN commentator Scott Jennings; killed an editorial that criticized Trump’s Cabinet picks; announced the addition of an AI-powered “bias meter” to the paper’s opinion pieces, which was pulled after it downplayed the Ku Klux Klan; floated a conservative version of The View featuring right-wing actor Rob Schneider; launched “LA Times Studios,” a multimedia studio featuring influencers reading AI-generated scripts; sat for interviews with right-wing commentators including Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly; and put forward an ill-starred initial public offering plan which led The Hollywood Reporter to ask, “Does Patrick Soon-Shiong Want to Turn the L.A. Times Into a MAHA Memestock?”
As with Bezos’ actions at the Post, Soon-Shiong’s changes to the Times have resulted in plummeting circulation, an exodus of talent, and the diminishment of the paper’s influence. But his medical patents are still getting approved by the federal government.
- ### Bob Iger
Iger, who as the CEO of Disney oversees its subsidiary ABC, was at the center of two of the most craven media moves since Trump’s reelection.
First, his December 2024 decision to sign off on a $15 million “blood sacrifice to Trump,” settling a defamation lawsuit that ABC News’ lawyers thought they would win, only looks worse over time. The capitulation made clear to ABC staff that Iger would not support them in a stand-off with the president and set a precedent that media companies and other major corporations would knuckle under to his demands.
Second, after Carr threatened Disney and ABC’s affiliates with FCC retribution if they failed to “take actions” against Jimmy Kimmel over one of his monologues in September, Iger folded by suspending Kimmel’s show within hours. Carr’s threats made a mockery of the First Amendment — but Iger wasn’t willing to fight to uphold those rights in court. Iger relented and returned Kimmel to the airwaves only after an outcry by Hollywood talent and a spike in Disney+ cancellations.
What did Iger’s cowardice bring ABC? When ABC News chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce dared to ask Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a question about his role in the brutal murder of the U.S.-based dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi during a joint Oval Office appearance with Trump, the president became enraged, lashing out at the journalist and calling her outlet “fake news” and “one of the worst in the business.”
“I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and it’s so wrong,” he later added, threatening to shut down a U.S. news outlet for producing reporting he doesn’t like in front of a foreign dictator who represses his own country’s media.
“And we have a great commissioner, a chairman, who should look at that," he added.
---
---
MMA
September 17, 2025, edition of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): So given that context, I want you to look around the U.S. right now and see what's been happening here, right in front of our eyes. In July, the Trump FCC — that's the entity that Brendan Carr controls — approved the sale of Paramount, with it CBS, to Skydance Media, which is controlled by the family of pro-Trump tech billionaire named Larry Ellison. It was his son, actually, who's buying it. Now that approval only came after Paramount paid Trump $60 million to settle the president's obvious frivolous, ludicrous lawsuit against CBS News and 60 Minutes for editing interviews, and after the Ellisons agreed to eliminate DEI programs, and after they agreed to install an executive formerly from a conservative think tank to essentially act as a sort of ideological minder at CBS News for political bias. So they did all those things, then they got the approval for this very, very large merger. After that, CBS canceled Stephen Colbert's top-rated late-night show, which was notorious for its criticism of the sitting president.
Last week, after Larry Ellison officially leapfrogged another pro-Trump billionaire, Elon Musk, to become the world's richest man, the new Paramount conglomerate made another media bid, this time for Warner Brothers Discovery, which just so happens to own CNN. So there's a possibility that they could purchase that and roll that up as well. Then yesterday we got this news about TikTok, perhaps you've seen it. Do you remember the Chinese-owned app that was banned as a security risk because of a bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden? And then Donald Trump just literally ignored the law while he searched for a U.S. buyer. Well, yesterday there was news of a framework of a deal. Interesting. Let's see what the deal is — gives Americans an 80% stake in TikTok. Which Americans? Well, you'll never guess. Yes, Larry Ellison is one of them, along with far-right venture capitalist, Trump donor, DOGE consultant, MAGA-backer Marc Andreessen.
As Talking Points Memo noted, if all those deals all go through that would mean the Murdoch family controlling Fox News, the Journal, New York Post, its other properties. Twitter, TikTok, CBS, CNN and more owned by Elon Musk and the Ellison family. The Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos. The Trump administration is threatening to bring the government down on free speech and use it against dissent. It is also facilitating the sale of some of our biggest private media outlets to Trump allies, and is a very obvious attempt to consolidate power over free expression.
//
07/23/25 9:56 PM EDT
07/18/25 10:06 PM EDT
07/16/25 10:16
---
---
How CBS News’ Trumpy new ombudsman fits into the right's anti-media campaign
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 09/09/25 MMA
The new owners of CBS News announced Monday that they have selected Kenneth R. Weinstein — a Donald Trump supporter and right-wing think-tanker with no apparent newsroom experience who often criticizes the news media’s purported liberal bias — to scrutinize the network’s coverage as its ombudsman.
The position will allow Weinstein to serve as a conduit for the MAGA movement’s complaints about CBS News’ coverage and personnel, allowing Trumpist operatives and right-wing media to discipline the network’s journalists.
David Ellison’s Skydance Media promised to appoint a CBS News ombudsman as part of the shakedown Trump and his administration put it through in order to secure its acquisition of CBS parent company Paramount. When Brendan Carr, the Trumpist head of the Federal Communications Commission, finally blessed the Skydance deal in July, he touted its pledge to “root out the bias” at CBS News.
With Weinstein’s appointment, Trump and Carr are getting exactly what they wanted
A former chief executive of the right-wing Hudson Institute who Trump nominated to serve as ambassador to Japan in 2020, Weinstein is also a GOP partisan who “donated roughly $40,000 to Republican and pro-Trump political groups last year,” The New York Times reported. He has never worked in journalism, though he did serve on the Broadcasting Board of Governors in both the Obama and Trump administrations.
Weinstein’s recent commentary provides more reasons for concern, Oliver Darcy found when he reviewed it for his Status newsletter. Darcy reports that the former Trump appointee had “lavished Trump with praise” in a July column; “fiercely advocated for Trump to win reelection” during an October 2024
; and cheered Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch while issuing innumerable digs at “media elites” for their purported left-wing coverage.
The description of Weinstein’s role that Paramount provides suggests that CBS News’ editorial independence has effectively been terminated. Weinstein will funnel complaints he believes require “further action” above the head of current CBS News president and Executive Editor Tom Cibrowski to Paramount’s president and its chair of TV media. Cibrowski will be consulted only to “recommend and implement any necessary action steps” that Weinstein and Cibrowski’s corporate superiors agree on.
Steve Capus, a former CBS News executive producer who worked with Weinstein at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, told the Times that Weinstein is a “fair arbiter” who deserves “the benefit of the doubt” in the role.
This assessment seems painfully naive. The reason CBS News now has an ombudsman now is because its parent company was trying to assure Carr that if he approved their merger, the network’s coverage would change in a way that the FCC’s Trumpist chair would approve. The president subsequently touted Ellison as a “great man” who would “do the right thing with” CBS. And when Paramount filled the role, the company didn’t pick a journalist with a reputation for neutrality — it went with a right-wing think-tanker and Republican donor with no newsroom experience.
Weinstein has been installed at CBS News to help fulfill Paramount’s promise to move the network’s political coverage to the right.
Weinstein will integrate with the right’s existing anti-media campaign
President Trump regularly attacks and even sues traditional media outlets for providing critical coverage of himself and his administration, as part of a deliberate strategy to keep his supporters from trusting their journalism. He is backed by a massive parallel infrastructure of right-wing media outlets, organizations, and operatives who are constantly on the hunt for instances of purported liberal media bias that they can use to undermine legacy news outlets. And his administration corruptly leverages such claims to threaten and punish the outlets’ owners with adverse regulatory actions.
This campaign’s purpose is not to improve the standards of legacy outlets, but to cudgel them into compliance with Trump’s demands for fawning coverage of his presidency in order to secure right-wing policy objectives. And with Weinstein's appointment, that effort will now have a man on the inside at CBS News who is predisposed to agree with such complaints and aid the right-wing attacks.
There will now be additional steps to the smear cycles in which the right attacks CBS News with preposterous gripes — for example, claiming that its editing of a Kamala Harris interview purportedly concealed her “word salad” responses. After the salvos from MAGA influencers, the endless denunciations on Fox News, and harangues from Trump and other administration officials and Republican notaries, there will now be a push for the ombudsman to step in and compel changes in the CBS newsroom.
It’s also not difficult to imagine someone like Laura Loomer, the notorious conspiracy theorist who regularly gets Trump administration officials fired for insufficient loyalty, scrutinizing the backgrounds and social media activity of CBS staffers and urging Weinstein to ensure their dismissals.
If Weinstein doesn’t take up the right’s cause, or if he does but is then overruled by Paramount’s corporate leadership, that will trigger a new round of right-wing denunciations. It could also lead to painful regulatory retaliation from Carr, who would argue that the company has failed to live up to its pledge. And David Ellison, the son of billionaire Silicon Valley mogul and close Trump ally Larry Ellison, might find the president no longer wants to shower him with praise and sit with him at UFC fights.
What’s happening to CBS News is neither complicated nor subtle: The billionaire son of a Trumpist oligarch is remaking a U.S. news institution to be less of a thorn in the president’s side, installing right-wing leaders and eliminating its independence in response to his grievances. Hoping for the best won’t change that.
---
---
an 9 25
the New York Times reports Larry Ellison is already a major stakeholder in CBS and Paramount, but now he’s angling for the massive empire of CNN and HBO, as well as a major share of TikTok.
“If all goes as anticipated, this tech billionaire, already one of the richest men in the world and a founder of Oracle, is poised, at 81, to become one of the most powerful media and entertainment moguls America has ever seen,” writes Puck cofounder William D. Cohan.
The move has echoes of Rupert Murdoch buying up Fox News a generation ago and giving the Republican Party an exclusive platform to pipe its talking points directly to U.S. viewers.
READ MORE: 'Sided with Democrats': Nancy Mace melts down at 4 Republicans who sank her censure motion
Ellison is up to something very different from millionaires buying up the Washington Post and Time Magazine, said Cohan. Ellison wants to be a media magnate.
“Along with his son, David, he could soon end up controlling a powerful social media platform, an iconic Hollywood movie studio and one of the largest content streaming services, as well as two of the country’s largest news organizations,” Cohan wrote. “Given Mr. Ellison’s friendship with, and affinity for, Donald Trump, an increasingly emboldened president could be getting an extraordinarily powerful media ally — in other words, the very last thing our country needs right now.”
Cohan said Ellison and his son were serious about making Paramount Skydance a major new media force within weeks of buying it, and the “Ellisons have also made no secret of their intention to move CBS News to the right.”
“They are negotiating to acquire The Free Press, a heterodox publication co-founded by Bari Weiss that prioritizes criticism of “woke” culture, and put Ms. Weiss in a senior position at CBS News. The Ellisons also hired as the CBS ombudsman Kenneth Weinstein, the former chief executive of the conservative Hudson Institute. See where this is going, and fast?” asked Cohan.
READ MORE: It is happening here — and we just witnessed the moment everything changed
“No matter their motives, two independent journalistic voices, CBS News and CNN, could soon be combined into something potentially almost unrecognizable, something way too close to what is served up on a daily basis by the Murdochs,” said Cohan.
“And that will put yet another chink in the fragile armor that is America’s democracy.”
Read the New York Times report at this link
---
---
MMA
Trump calls for FCC retribution against “FAKE NEWS” ABC and NBC — while touting the “great man” who “just bought CBS”
How to get off Trump’s media shit list
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 08/25/25
President Donald Trump sent a clear message over the weekend that media companies can forestall his vicious denunciations and threats of federal retribution. All their owners have to do is bend the knee and grant his administration sufficient reassurance that their news outlets won’t prove troublesome.
Trump urged the Federal Communications Commission to punish two of the “Big Three” national broadcast networks for their political content, a straightforward assault on the First Amendment, in a pair of Sunday night posts.
The president condemned ABC and NBC as “FAKE NEWS” and an “actual threat to our Democracy” because they purportedly run too many “BAD STORIES” about him and provide “unfair coverage of Republicans.” He added that in response, these outlets should either “HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC” or be forced to pay “Millions of Dollars a year in LICENSE FEES.”
CBS, the third of the “Big Three,” escaped Trump’s malice.
As recently as April, Trump denounced CBS as “out of control, at levels never seen before,” and called upon FCC chair Brendan Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.” Carr at the time was corruptly delaying the purchase of CBS parent company Paramount by Skydance Media, owned by David Ellison, the son of billionaire Silicon Valley mogul and close Trump ally Larry Ellison, in response to Trump’s frivolous lawsuit over CBS News’ handling of a 60 Minutes interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in October 2024.
But since then:
- Trump got his payoff. Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle the lawsuit and resolve “a threatened defamation action concerning a separate 60 Minutes report,” the company announced on July 1. The president subsequently claimed there is a side deal in which Paramount will air $16-19 million in free public service announcements.
- CBS canceled Stephen Colbert’sThe Late Show.Colbert, an outspoken Trump critic, announced on July 17 that CBS was ending his program. While CBS insiders argued that “the move was financially driven, not politically motivated,” the announcement came the same week Ellison met Carr and other FCC officials in hopes of securing the merger. Trump, for his part, responded the following morning, “I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired.”
- Reports circulated over a possible Bari Weiss role with CBS. The Status newsletter’s Oliver Darcy reported in late June that Ellison was seeking to recruit Weiss, the conservative journalist whose outlet The Free Press provides a sort of permission structure for centrists to support Trump over Democrats, “to work in some capacity” at CBS. In mid-July, several outlets reported that Ellison and Weiss were discussing a possible deal in which Skydance would buy The Free Press.
- The FCC approved Skydance purchase of Paramount late last month, citing Skydance’s “commitment to make significant changes” at CBS News.The FCC announced on July 24 that it had approved the acquisition. Carr cited in an accompanying statement “Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network,” its provision of “written commitments to ensure that the new company’s programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum,” and its pledge to “root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media.”
- Massive layoffs are looming over CBS. It would be difficult to convince or compel CBS News’ current slate of journalists to lay off the president — but it’s easy to fire them. After Variety reported last week that CBS News staffers “are worried about the potential for a new round of layoffs,” the New York Post reported Friday that a “bloodbath” of layoffs at Paramount Skydance is expected in early November.
The moves were more than enough to get CBS off Trump’s media shit list. In fact, the president recently lavished praise on its new owner, Paramount Skydance chief executive David Ellison.
“CBS was just sold to a great person that I know very well,” Trump told reporters on Friday. “A great man. He actually just bought CBS. And I think he‘s going to do the right thing with it.”
Trump’s authoritarian assault on the free press offers media moguls both sticks and carrots — and too many of them have decided they would rather submit to his will than fight. Just seven months into his administration, he’s already forced one of the major broadcast networks to yield. Two to go.
//
04/28/25 1:22 PM EDT
07/23/25 11:57 AM EDT
02/04/25
---
---
CLEANTECHNICA
Why Is Paramount Plus Promoting Big Oil With Its Landman Series?
6 months agoCarolyn Fortuna[
“Landman” is a television series broadcast on Paramount Plus, the digital subscription video on-demand and live streaming service. I’ve watched most of the other Taylor Sheridan series, somehow hoping that a romanticized Old West culture can be combined with positive representations of females. What I didn’t expect from him was a running narrative about the weakness of renewable energy and the gift of Big Oil for everyday citizens. The series presents uneven, almost always one-sided arguments against renewable energy and the work of climate activists.
Core social media narratives like these on Paramount Plus are shaping discourse around the climate crisis due to the persistent “stickiness” of mis- and dis-information — and they’re influencing people to disregard the danger of fossil fuels. Sheridan’s characters boast how the Texans around them could never maintain their lifestyles without ample amounts of oil and gas. Evidence to the contrary points to a robust ability for renewables to substitute for fossil fuel power, thank you.
It’s not just within the US media complex that climate misinformation confuses everyday folks. Renewables like rooftop solar, gridscale wind and solar, and advanced storage now provide around 40% of the electricity in Australia’s main grid. The catch? Fewer than 1 in 10 Australians know it, according to a survey by the Climate Council.
Here are some examples of the “Landman” energy mis-/disinformation. Sammy Roth of the LA Times calls such examples part of a larger “propaganda that serves to lionize the oil industry.”
Lithium is Worse by Implication than Fossil Fuels
“Well, I can promise you all those Chinese lithium mines are bad for the environment.”
The race toward net-zero emissions depends heavily on lithium to power electric vehicles as well as to store wind and solar power. Yes, new battery technology needs to be developed using more common, environmentally-friendly materials. The sourcing, building, and disposal of lithium-ion batteries does have supply chain pollution, yes, but it does not ultimately compare to what we’re currently doing with fossil fuels.
A much more nuanced approach that Sheridan could have chosen would have been to declare that, to meet sustainability goals, we need to strike a balance between energy sourcing and renewable advancements. Think of it this way: once you burn gas, it’s gone. Meanwhile, you can recharge a battery multiple times.
(Note the Othering in the “Landman” quote that cites China’s contribution to lithium mining.)
Cows are So Cute — So What if They Burp?
ENDS RANT WITH SUGGESTING A PLOT TO GET RID OF HUMANS; SHE PLAYFULLY SAYS OH YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE
“They say that a cattle burp is bad for the environment. Now they want to get rid of all the cattle.”
Cattle burps generate significant amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas (GHG) that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. In fact, animal agriculture produces more GHG emissions than all the world’s cars and trucks combined. Methane has a much higher global warming potential (GWP) than carbon dioxide.
Capturing enteric methane emissions from cows running loose in the fields is a challenge of epic proportions. Yes, the culture of food must necessarily continue to morph with the times — about three-quarters of all global agricultural land is vulnerable to substantial climate disruptions. Like many hog farmers, cattle ranchers may find themselves struggling to support their herds, whether it is from destructive storms or consumers’ shifting preferences to plant-based diets.
Do Solar Panels Actually Kill Birds and Whales?
“They put solar panels and wind turbines on these lands that kill these birds, disrupt their patterns. Then they stick ‘em in the ocean and kill the whales.”
Bird species and whales are under threat from climate change. Fossil fuel and nuclear power plants actually cause more bird deaths than solar or wind power. They also threaten the very ecosystems bird species rely on. Furthermore, bird deaths from wind turbines have dropped considerably (per kWh) as the technology has matured, and annual bird death totals from cats, windows, and vehicles each dwarf annual bird death totals from wind power.
North Atlantic right whales are highly endangered, and their survival is at serious risk due to a combination of vessel strikes and entanglements in fishing gear. And, contrary to a highly publicized article filled with disinformation, NOAA Fisheries does not anticipate and has not authorized — or proposed to authorize — mortality or serious injury of whales for any wind-related action.
Are Wind and Solar More Expensive than Natural Gas?
Wind energy “is twice as expensive as natural gas, and solar four times as expensive.”
A LCOE study from Lazard says it clearly — renewable energy from wind and solar resources is cheaper than electricity from thermal generators powered by coal, oil, or methane gas. Period. And that’s without counting the carbon cost of their competitors and the impact of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which has added tens of billions of new financial incentives to the mix.
Solar and wind power have relatively low capacity factors, and making them really useful and comparable to a fossil gas power plant in utility means adding stationary energy storage as well. Adding in storage, onshore wind power has the same low cost as combined cycle gas power plants, and utility-scale solar is not far off.
Solar is Only Good for 8/24 Hours in the Day — Really?
“On its best day of the year, a solar power plant generates electricity for about 8 hours.”
Misinformation about solar is rampant. The value of adding batteries to wind and solar plants located in areas that face transmission congestion is forgotten in this “Landman” statement. Climate scientist Mark Jacobson deconstructed a recent study for us at CleanTechnicathat discussed this point.
*“This paper shows that the main grid in the world’s fifth largest economy was able to provide more than 100% of the electricity that it used from only four clean renewable sources – –solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal — for anywhere from 5 minutes to over 10 hours per day for 98 out of 116 days during late winter, all of spring, and early summer, as well as for 132 days during the entire year of 2024, without its grid failing. The growth of solar, wind, and battery storage, in particular, resulted in fossil gas use dropping 40% during the 116 day period and 25% during the entire year of 2024 relative to 2023.”
But the disinformation continues nonetheless. Michigan climate advocates have had to refute a breathless viral meme told the story of devious deep-state plotters who were conniving with greedy globalist solar developers to cut down a pristine tract of virgin old growth forest — nope, false, a lie.
Is Wind Power Clean, or Isn’t It?
“There’s nothing clean about this” wind power.
A “Landman” character outlines how a whole lotta fossil fuel is used to manufacture, transport, and assemble each turbine, so that, “in its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it.” What he’s not saying is that wind is an energy source that is a viable and clean alternative to fossil fuels, and the worldwide installed capacity of wind power has many economic and environmental advantages.
Wind turbines do not produce any pollutants or emissions during operation that could harm the environment, except those required for maintenance (which are minimal). The major drawbacks of wind energy are high upfront costs, variability in wind speeds, and unsuitability in regions that do not have constant winds. Wind also reduces power-sector emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide. These reductions, in turn, provide public health and climate benefits that are larger than wind’s grid-system value. Big Oil has more upfront pollution and zero environmental benefits when it’s burned.
Instead of doing a deep dig, Sheridan lies in the voice of a “Landman” character, “Getting oil out of the ground’s the most dangerous job in the world. We don’t do it ‘cause we like it. We do it ‘cause we run out of options.”
Can’t Electrify Everything because We don’t have the Transmission Lines
“If the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities… It would take 30 years if we started tomorrow.”
There’s a kernel of truth to this position. However, a visionary filmmaker could have described the value of adding batteries to wind and solar plants located in areas that face transmission congestion. Sure, optimal configurations of hybrid VRE+battery plants might vary between areas types and between solar and wind, yet the plants can contribute to both energy and capacity markets.
It’s important to refine long term planning processes and provide insight into future conditions as renewable energy and battery deployment expands over time.
Final Thoughts about Landman: The Power behind Paramount Media
Paramount Global—the sprawling media empire behind CBS, MTV, and one of Hollywood’s most storied movie studios— was acquired by Skydance Media in late 2024. The complex deal, worth over $8 billion, happened in a two-step transaction that involved Skydance first acquiring Paramount’s controlling company, Shari Redstone’s National Amusements, and then merging Skydance and Paramount. Founded by David Ellison in 2006, Skydance specializes in films, animation, television, video games, and sports.
The week after the November election, once-and-future President Donald J. Trump gathered his top advisers in the tea room at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, to plan the transition to his second-term government, as reported by the New York Times. Two valued houseguests were the billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison.
“I brought the two richest people in the world today,” Trump told his advisers, according to a person who was in the room. “What did you bring?”
Ellison brings a vast communications conglomerate to Trump’s feet. Is he, like the “Landman” billionaire, someone who has helped to elect friendly politicians and to provide lobbying to maintain billions of dollars in subsidies to Big Oil? It’s hard to explain otherwise.
Mr. Ellison, please rein in your boy Taylor and use your ample billions for clean energy, the common good, and truth.
---
no lnx
Defamation, capitulation and phonies: Inside this week's wild and disgusting news
D. Earl StephensApril 27, 2025
Tuesday was a banner day in the news business as it continues its transition into authoritarian-controlled propaganda that is sold to the highest bidders, which in this case are our nation’s ever-increasing collection of hideous tech bros — otherwise known as Boosters of Trump (BOTs).
It was nothing if not a wild and disgusting day, and featured some heavy-hitters in the political, entertainment and journalism world, as well as reputable truth-tellers like Larry David, who was the only person proving capable of seeing though all the never-ending BS that has blanketed the United States of America.
Good ol’ Sarah Palin appeared out of the Alaska wilderness and into a courtroom in New York City Tuesday where she once again provided some much-needed, albeit brief comedic entertainment to a starving American public.
You’ll remember Palin, who with the help of John McCain and his slippery handlers was hurled downward into the Republicans’ glass floor 17 years ago, making it possible for literally anything or anybody to lower themselves and land with a thud in the basements of power in Washington.
Before there was Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, Marsha Blackburn or Lauren Boebert, there was Sarah Palin …
The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, Russia-stalker, second-rate reality TV star, and Hall-of-Fame embarrassment lost in the retrial of her defamation case against The New York Times, because of course she did.
Defamation cases are almost impossible to prove, but you can’t blame her for trying, because as delicious as this loss was by one of America’s all-time fools, the real news here is how bad it made the supersonic losers at ABC-News look by comparison.
Just four months ago, that one-time reputable news outlet flew the white flag in their very public $16M surrender to the America-attacking Trump on similar charges.
This time George Stephanopoulos was the target of the beady-eyed Trump, who was incensed that he was incorrectly referred to as “a rapist” on the air during Stephanopoulos’ questioning of Mace about Trump’s veracity as a serious candidate given his talent for treating women like one of his sand wedges.
Turns out all Trump was technically found guilty of was being a lowly sexual-abuser. Before settling, ABC-News decided to conveniently forget the fact that the very judge who tried the case, said that most people would call what Trump did, and what the jury found him guilty of, was in fact, “rape.”
You say, “potatoes.” I say “rape.”
ABC-News’ capitulation, while weak and embarrassing, also only encouraged lowlifes like Trump, because … also on Tuesday … CBS-News signaled it was about to tell its once-rivals at ABC-News to hold their beer …
The venerable 60 Minutes, which has been one of the few news programs that has continued to righteously pound away on the America-attacking Trump will now be in search of a new leader. Executive Producer Bill Owens, announced his resignation Tuesday saying:
“Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
Owens sudden departure is hinting loudly at yet another surrender by yet another billionaire to Trump.
This time Shari Redstone. The Chairwoman of the Board at Paramount which owns CBS, has been dutifully kissing any inappropriate ass she can find in the White House to ensure her sale of Paramount for gobs of billions to the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison goes through.
She can’t have Trump mad at her for telling the truth on air, so Owens had to sacrifice herself on the Mar-a-Lago altar first.
No surprise, Ellison is yet another slimy tech bro and the buddy of the sexual-abuser Trump, who some judges refer to as a rapist.
The sexual-abuser, who some judges refer to as a rapist, has sued CBS for $20 billion claiming the network aired two different versions of an answer Kamala Harris gave about Israel and Gaza on the network’s flagship news programs, Face the Nation as well as 60 Minutes.
As if the serial-lying Trump doesn't give 17 different answers to any question every hour ….
Well, rather than fight that one out and win going away, Redstone has apparently figured it is much easier to just hand the whole franchise over to Trump’s buddy, Ellison, and be done with the damn thing. And if and when that deal goes through, if you are wondering if you will ever be able to trust anything from the CBS-News division again, the answer is, no.
While insiders at 60 Minutes like correspondent Scott Pelley are saying, “This isn't something Bill (Owens) is doing of his own volition: There was no choice in any of this," I am saying I’d have a whole helluva lot more respect for him, if he stood in strong and made these grotesque sellouts fire him and drag him out of the building.
Resigning in advance is just weak, Bill. I’ve walked a mile in your shoes during my career, and take great comfort I didn’t cave to dishonest brokers who had it out for me and the truth. Ask me about it. I’d be glad to enlighten you ...
Finally, Larry David arrived on the scene to save Terrible Tuesday when he took to the editorial pages of The New York Times to politely skewer the smarmy, one-time comedian, turned Trump-propagandist, Bill Maher, with some deftly aimed satire in his short and sweet piece “My dinner with Adolph.”
David, the genius behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm never mentioned Maher by name preferring instead the roughly 257 million people across the world who will end up seeing or hearing about the piece connect the dots all on their own.
I’ll guess it’s behind a paywall for now, so I’ll treat you to the piece’s conclusion:
“Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night ...”
Maher of course accepted an invitation to dine with the America-attacking Trump recently, and through his 500-lb. smirk bragged to everybody that breaking bread with the racist, Lysol-guzzler was actually a very normal and wholesome experience. Hell everybody should try it, but of course they can’t because not everybody can be Bill Maher.
Here in part is how Maher described his dining experience, sandwiched around his usual overcooked, fatty condescending barf:
“Honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk to Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will.”
Oh we will, sport, no worries there.
Your foolish capitulation and normalization of a woman-abusing, America-attacking thug should finish you off for good. That you tipped him at the door after being played like Stephen Miller’s used violin was pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty pret-ty …pathetic.
You’ve been a damn fool for going on a long time now, Bill. Your once-clever condescension is now full-blown, look-at-me arrogance.
I know you will invariably ignore my advice to just shut up and go away for a period of about six years for some serious introspection, because I have come to understand that guys like you and Trump simply can’t help themselves.
You have the phonies in our billionaire-controlled media to do that for you …
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.
an 10 254 RR
Elon Musk (worth $271 billion) and Jeff Bezos (worth $262 billion) — the richest and second-richest people on the planet — are now showing America why it’s dangerous to have great wealth concentrated in so few hands.
In August 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Postfor $250 million. On Friday, just as the Postwas preparing to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Bezos stopped the paper from doing so.
Partly as a result, the Post has already lost 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its subscriber base.
In October 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billon, turned it into X, and became its biggest user, with 202 million followers.
Musk has endorsed Trump — and weaponized the platform into a supporter of Trump, smeared Harris, and amplified rumors and conspiracy theories.
ALSO READ:[Experts sound alarm over Trump's promise to let RFK Jr. 'control' health agencies
Independent analysts such as Edison Research said in March that X’s usage in the United States dropped 30 percent since last year. Fidelity this month estimated that X’s value has plunged by about 80 percent since Musk’s takeover.
Why have these two oligarchs been willing to take actions that cause so many of their customers to jump ship? What’s the connection between Bezos’s preventing thePostfrom endorsing Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump?
Here’s a hint:
Just hours after Bezos stopped the Post from endorsing Harris, executives of Blue Origin, Bezos’s private rocket company, met with Trump in Austin.
Although Blue Origin is running far behind Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos is the most likely serious challenger to Musk’s dominance in space because of his personal fortune and his billions of dollars in government contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense.
For years, Bezos has focused on beating Musk for the multibillion-dollar contracts to launch payloads and rockets. “Elon’s real superpower is getting government money,” Bezos said in 2016, according to the Post. “From now on, we go after everything that SpaceX bids on.”
Musk’s company appears so far ahead in the competition that it won a contract to rescue astronauts stuck at the International Space Station.
But that could change. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been looking to unload their own joint-venture rocket company, United Launch Alliance (ULA), which has billions of dollars in government contracts, extensive infrastructure, and an experienced team.
Bezos’s Blue Origin is reportedly the favorite to take over ULA. Even the head of the U.S. Space Force’s purchases seems to be pushing for the two rocket companies to merge, telling an industry audience that “they need to scale” in order to meet an aggressive launch schedule.
ULA is still a major force in the space industry, competing for dozens of launches over the next four years, which can bring in billions more revenue. Combining with Blue Origin would make a lot of sense. The Wall Street Journal reports that Blue Origin has already submitted a bid to buy ULA.
If that’s the goal, Bezos’s biggest obstacle would be Trump, should Trump get back in the White House.
Trump has been out to get Bezos since 2017, when Trump first started blaming Bezos for poor coverage in The Washington Post — a grievance that has hurt Blue Origin.
In April 2019, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff alerted Blue Origin officials to Bezos’s poor reputation in the White House, telling them that they have a “Washington Post problem.”
Trump also said he wanted to “screw Amazon” out of a $10 billion deal to provide cloud computing to the Pentagon, according to a memoir by his Defense Secretary James Mattis. (It’s since been reported that Oracle, led by Larry Ellison — Trump donor, Musk mentor, and Oracle founder, who ranks just behind Musk and Bezos as the third-richest person in America with an estimated $211.2 billion in wealth — had sought to sabotage the deal.)
So Bezos has been courting Trump. After Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet during an attempted assassination at a July campaign rally, prompting a Musk endorsement of the former president, Bezos called Trump to say how impressed he was that the candidate had raised his fist after coming under fire, according to a person familiar with that conversation.
Soon after Trump formally secured the Republican nomination, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy phoned Trump, introducing himself and outlining the company’s plans for the future. The call concluded with Trump suggesting that the company cut a large check for his presidential efforts, according to two people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount the private discussion. Trump told Jassy that he was going to win the election and that Amazon should help him because it would be in the company’s best interests.
In this sense, then, both Bezos’s refusal to allowThe Washington Postto endorse Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump can be seen as moves in a proxy war for dominance in government contracting of spaceflight, where the ultimate prize will be hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars — thereby distending the fortunes of either Bezos or Musk.
But the casualty in this war is American democracy, for which neither Bezos nor Musk apparently has a scintilla of concern.
America is now in its second Gilded Age, in which a handful of supremely wealthy men are determining the nation’s future. We must not let them. Bezos should never have been able to purchase The Washington Post in the first place; his conflicting business interests should have prevented it.
Nor should Musk have been able to buy Twitter. Antitrust laws should have been used to break Twitter up, or the platform should be deemed a public utility.
Both Bezos and Musk are poster boys for the importance of a wealth tax, which must be enacted to prevent the grotesque accumulations of wealth that have allowed them to wield such extraordinary power.
When the smoke clears from this rancorous presidential campaign and Kamala Harris is president, she must rescue democracy from these and other oligarchs.
As the eminent jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said near the end of America’s first Gilded Age, “America has a choice. We can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy. But we cannot have both.”
NOW READ:[Legal expert predicts the 'little secret' between Donald Trump and Mike Johnson
*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
===
an 10 22
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), was deeply offended when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — during an event in Kentucky in August — told a crowd that he considers control of the U.S. Senate a toss-up in the 2024 midterms and cited “candidate quality” as a factor. McConnell expressed confidence that Republicans will “flip” the U.S. House of Representatives, but wasn’t nearly as bullish on the Senate. And his “candidate quality” comment was taken as a criticism of the MAGA candidates Trump has pushed.
McConnell, however, isn’t the only Republican who is concerned about the quality of U.S. Senate candidates who former President Donald Trump has been pushing. In an article published by CNBC’s website on September 30, reporter Brian Schwartz takes a look at Republican donors who are reluctant to get out their wallets for Trump-backed Senate hopefuls who have been underperforming in polls.
“Republican megadonors want the GOP to take back the Senate, but they don’t have confidence that some of former President Donald Trump’s top picks can catapult their party to a victory in November,” Schwartz explains. “Billionaire financiers Paul Singer, Dan Loeb and Larry Ellisonhave so far avoided donating directly to some or all of Trump’s staunchest allies running for Senate in the midterms: J.D. Vance in Ohio, Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Adam Laxalt in Nevada and Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, according to Federal Election Commission records and people familiar with the billionaires’ donations.”
READ MORE: 'A harsh reality': Dr. Oz bombards Republican voters with panicked fundraising pleas
The CNBC reporter adds, “All of those candidates have been endorsed by Trump. And many of them have previously sided with the former president on the false claims that the 2020 presidential election had widespread voter fraud — an accusation that’s been debunked by Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, federal courts and several other top Republicans who served in Trump’s administration.”
A Republican strategist, quoted anonymously, told CNBC that those megadonors would “would be lighting their money on fire if they got totally swayed by these candidates.” And that strategist is advising donors to give their money to the Senate Leadership Fund, a political action committee run by McConnell’s former chief of staff Steven Law. That strategist said of the Senate Leadership Fund, “They have the best polls, and they won’t sink money into races they know they can’t win.”
Schwartz notes, “The campaign poll tracking website FiveThirtyEight shows Masters trailing (incumbent Sen. Mark) Kelly by more than seven percentage points…. FiveThirtyEight shows Oz trailing his Democratic rival John Fetterman by more than six percentage points and Walker trailing his competitor, (Sen. Raphael) Warnock, by more than two percentage points. Vance and Laxalt are both in statistical dead heats with their Democratic rivals; both GOP candidates are down by an average of less than a percentage point.”
Schwartz points out that megadonor and real estate mogul Stephen Ross “hasn’t given a penny yet to Vance, Walker, Masters, Laxalt or Oz, according to FEC filings.”
“Ross was criticized for hosting a fundraiser for Trump and the Republican National Committee at his Hamptons home in 2019, but has distanced himself from some of Trump’s favorite candidates this election cycle,” Schwartz observes. “He’s donated over $685,000 to a mix of Republicans, Democrats and their affiliated outside groups this cycle. His biggest checks so far have gone to GOP organizations tied to Republican leadership, such as House GOP campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee and a joint fundraising committee called Take Back the House 2022, federal election records show.”