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Celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti suggested in a fiery statement to Fox News late Monday that the Los Angeles lawyers suing him for allegedly stealing from a former client's settlement fund -- a matter that prompted California prosecutors to slap Avenatti with federal criminal fraud charges on Monday -- have political motivations and are "close" to the Trump administration. Although Avenatti's dramatic New York arrest for an alleged $25 million extortion scheme targeting sports apparel giant Nike dominated headlines on Monday, the separate federal wire and bank fraud charges that Avenatti simultaneously faces in Los Angeles may pose his greatest legal...

Put Rick Tyler's picture next to "schadenfreude" in the dictionary . . . As news broke during today's Morning Joe that Roger Stone had been arrested and charged with seven counts of obstruction and false statements and witness tampering, Tyler—a former Ted Cruz campaign aide turned MSNBC political analyst—took obvious delight in Stone's predicament: RICK TYLER: Roger Stone, like Donald Trump, is a political con man whose showman shtick has finally caught up with him . . . He's known for dirty tricks, and I think a lifetime of this shtick has finally caught up with him. Get the rest...

The Huffington Post cut down its commentary and healthcare teams Thursday. “As of this morning, HuffPost's opinion section is no more. I and the rest of the team have been let go,” the former head of the opinion section at Huffington Post, Bryan Maygers, tweeted. “I spent the last few years reporting on two of the most pressing issues in public health — gun violence and the opioid crisis — and today @HuffPost eliminated its health team,” former senior public health reporter at Huffington Post, Erin Schumaker, posted to Twitter Thursday, adding that she was in the market for a...

BuzzFeed is preparing lay off 15 percent of its workforce, according to an internal email obtained by The Hill. In an email sent to BuzzFeed staff on Wednesday, CEO Jonah Peretti said the media company would be doing layoffs "next week" across the company. "I’m writing with sad news: we are doing layoffs at BuzzFeed next week. We will be making a 15% overall reduction in headcount across the company," Peretti wrote. "I’m sending this tonight because I wanted you to hear it from me directly instead of from the press." Peretti wrote in the internal memo that BuzzFeed needs...

BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith said Friday that he stands by the outlet's reporting following a rare statement from special counsel Robert Mueller's office disputing its report about allegations against Michael Cohen, President Trump's former lawyer. "We stand by our reporting and the sources who informed it, and we urge the Special Counsel to make clear what he's disputing," Smith said in a statement. BuzzFeed reported Thursday that Trump instructed Cohen to lie to Congress about the timing of negotiations over a potential Trump Tower in Moscow. The story cited two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the...

I’ve written more about Dick’s Sporting Goods in 2018 than I ever thought I would. When the year started, we thought the company would have gotten the message that taking anti-gun stances wasn’t conducive to profits, but it didn’t. So Dick’s doubled down after Parkland and purged the rest of the AR-15s from its stores and then instituted a discriminatory policy against legal adults. And it’s biting it right in the kiester, too. In remarks made to the Goldman Sachs Retailing Conference and first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, CEO Edward Stack explained that the 3.9 percent decline in...

since siding with those who support gun control, business has gone down at Dick’s Sporting Goods and the company may have to close Field & Stream: Edward Stack, chairman and CEO of Dick’s, said during the event that the sporting goods chain’s recent 3.9 percent drop in same-store sales was the result of a mix of factors beyond their control as well as some he called “self-imposed.” Specifically, he said, “the decisions we made on firearms” negatively affected their bottom line but the drop in sales was something they expected. They did not, however, regret their decision to change a...

"....“They threw Megyn’s s**t out fast,” an NBC insider told Radar. “Two show runners went into her office and a literally swooped everything off her desk and off the walls and threw them into two boxes.” “Nothing was handled with care, and some of the items broke, but nobody cares,” continued the insider. “The top just wanted there to be no remnants of Megyn and wanted her and her stuff out of the building immediately.”...."

There is no 12-step program for disgraced network anchors attempting to make a comeback. Brian Williams was eventually able to rehabilitate himself—getting his own show on MSNBC barely a year after being exposed as a journalistic fabricator—only because the network image-making machine, led by NBC News Chairman Andy Lack, threw its substantial institutional weight behind a meticulously orchestrated campaign to resurrect Williams as a credible purveyor of information. Megyn Kelly will receive no such backing if she tries climb out of the smoking wreckage of her career.......

Well, that tiny shard of hope was good while it lasted. In the days following the request for an FBI probe, it’s become increasingly clear that the investigation will be...doomed from the beginning...Trump defaults to gaslighting, insisting the FBI has “free rein” in its probe. But, all signs now point to the FBI investigation as hardly an investigation at all...Now, at the White House’s urging, the probe has become a farce and a sham, destined and doomed from the beginning to prove as pointless as a squirmy, sneering Kavanaugh, in his hearing last week, insisted that it would be. Which...

In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Trump claimed "federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases." President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he was canceling pay raises for most federal employees that had been set to go into effect in January, citing government budget concerns. In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Trump wrote that he’d decided “across-the-board” pay raises as well as locality pay raises for civilian federal workers in 2019 would be frozen. “I have determined that for 2019, both across‑the‑board pay increases and locality pay increases will be set at zero,” he wrote. “These alternative...

President Trump on Thursday blocked an automatic pay raise for 1.5 million federal workers, and asked Congress to pass legislation with no increase next year for employees covered by the General Schedule pay system. “Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” Trump wrote in a Thursday letter to congressional leaders, a formality that blocks an automatic 2.1 percent raise from taking effect in January under the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act. "I have determined that for 2019, both across‑the‑board pay increases and locality pay increases will be set at zero," Trump wrote.

Too bad, so sad, NOT! Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s record on Tuesday night for her chosen primary candidates was as bare as a Venezuelan supermarket shelf. The socialist pulled off a stunning victory last month in New York, and is now attempting to parlay that win into helping other leftists win Democratic primaries.

Facebook on Thursday posted the largest one-day loss in market value by any company in U.S. stock market history after releasing a disastrous quarterly report. The social media giant's market capitalization plummeted by $119 billion to $510 billion as its stock price plummeted by 19 percent. At Wednesday's close, Facebook's market cap had totaled nearly $630 billion, according to FactSet. No company in the history of the U.S. stock market has ever lost $100 billion in market value in just one day, but two came close. On Sept. 22, 2000, Intel shed $90.74 billion in market value as the dot-com...

Highlights of Senator Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor (in 2013 I believe) decrying the Democrats' just-implemented "nuclear option" for judicial nominees. My transcript: "Once again, Senate Democrats are threatening to break the Rules of the Senate, break the Rules of the Senate, in order to change the Rules of the Senate. And over what? Over what? Over a court that doesn't even have enough work to do? ... The majority leader promised, he promised, over and over again, that he wouldn't break the rules of the Senate in order to change them. ... If you want to play games,...

What a surprise! A look of terminal shock in your eyes Now things are really what they seem No, this is no bad dream

In a shortsighted effort to fight homelessness, Seattle’s city council has approved a new employee “head tax” on companies based in the city. The policy pits growth and progress against each other in a zero-sum game that will do far more harm than good. The head tax is exactly what it sounds like: a straight levy of $0.14 per hour per employee—about $275 a year for a full-time worker—targeting every business in Seattle with revenues of $20 million or more. The proposal’s backers aim to raise around $48 million per year to fund various affordable housing initiatives in order to...

The narrative casting Jeff Bezos as a transformative media baron reached new heights in 2017. His Washington Post consistently set the political agenda while claiming two straight years of profitability. Bezos himself glowed on the red carpet as an improbable journalism hero when Steven Spielberg’s The Post, a fictionalized account of the newspaper’s publication of The Pentagon Papers, opened in December. Bezos is worth $111 billion. He is the richest man in the world. But over the past eight months, his prized media outlet has repeatedly stymied requests for better pay and benefits from the employees who’ve driven its renaissance....

Schadenfreude, schadenfreude, oh beautiful, beautiful schadenfreude! You will soon be able to enjoy some great Election Night 2016 schadenfreude again in the form of HBO's documentary, The Final Year, which will soon be broadcast on that network. As you can see from the trailer below it appears to be mostly a big borefest of Obama administration hype about how wonderful and wise they were. However, its saving grace is that the HBO film crew was at a Hillary "victory" party hosted by former UN Ambassador Samantha Power to celebrate Hillary Clinton winning the election. When it did not turn out...