“Surprised to hear that Donald Trump is apparently claiming that my late sister Diana wanted to ‘kiss his arse.’ The one time she mentioned him to me—when he was using her good name to sell some real estate in New York—she clearly viewed him as worse than an anal fissure.”
— Earl Charles Spencer, on Twitter, on what Princess Diana really thought of Donald Trump.
A federal judge ruled that Donald Trump cannot keep E. Jean Carroll from showing a jury the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that nearly derailed his 2016 campaign in a lawsuit accusing him of rape, Law & Crime reports.
George Conway: “Trump’s argument here apparently didn’t grab the judge.“
Former FBI Director James Comey is trying out a new look.
Rush Limbaugh’s house in Palm Beach sold for $155 million, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Variety: “For the past year, Volodymyr Zelensky has been greeted with open arms by awards shows, film festivals and even the New York Stock Exchange. But when it comes to landing airtime on the most coveted telecast of all — the Oscars — the Ukrainian leader is being met with a cold shoulder.”
“For the second year in a row, the Academy has snubbed Zelensky, who was hoping to follow up his Berlin Film Festival (remote) appearance last month with a virtual spot on Sunday’s Oscar telecast on ABC.”
“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams told Chris Cuomo that the backlash he faced for urging white people to “get the hell away from Black people” came mostly from white people.
Said Adams: “It’s almost entirely white people that canceled me.”
“I shook the box intentionally. I did not realize how hard I shook it.”
— Dilbert creator Scott Adams, quoted by the Washington Post, after hundreds of newspapers dropped his cartoon over racist comments Adams made on his podcast.
William Saletan: “Every time one of these racially incendiary arguments comes along, the cycle repeats itself. The offender gets canceled. His opinion is dismissed as unthinkably repellent. He and his allies seize on that dismissal as evidence that the establishment is suppressing dissent. Nothing should be unthinkable, the dissenters argue. There’s some secret truth, some taboo insight, that the cancel culture is hiding from you.”
“Sorry, but there’s no great insight here. You can watch hour after hour of Adams’s livestreams, as I have, and you won’t find that nugget of forbidden truth. His reasoning is as sloppy as his research. In every way, he’s just wrong.”
The distributor of the long-running “Dilbert” comic strip, announced late Sunday that it was “severing” ties with creator Scott Adams after he went on a racist rant during his YouTube show, Axios reports.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports Penguin Random House has also dropped plans to publish Adams’ upcoming book.
Tweeted Adams: “My book agent canceled me too.”
“Penguin Random House has announced that it will publish the original versions of Roald Dahl’s books alongside updated editions following an outcry over changes to the celebrated stories that were branded ‘absurd censorship,'” the Financial Times reports.
Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams’s long-running “Dilbert” comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a “hate group” and said White people should “get the hell away from” them, the Washington Post reports.
Said Adams: “Most of my income will be gone by next week. My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can’t come back from this, am I right? There’s no way you can come back from this.”
New York Times: “In the end, Mr. Dalio, with an estimated net worth of $19 billion, agreed to surrender his control over all key decisions at Bridgewater only if the firm agreed to give him what could amount to billions of dollars in regular payouts over the coming years through a special class of stock.”
“These secret arrangements were described by a half dozen current and former Bridgewater employees who said they risked angering Mr. Dalio and could be sued by the firm if they spoke publicly. At an internal meeting last year during the heat of the exit negotiations, Mr. Dalio described the hedge fund as his ‘property rights,’ according to one employee, and indicated that he expected to be compensated accordingly.”
The Telegraph: “Augustus Gloop is no longer fat, Mrs Twit is no longer fearfully ugly, and the Oompa-Loompas have gone gender-neutral in new editions of Roald Dahl’s beloved stories.”
“The publisher, Puffin, has made hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.”
Salman Rushdie: “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”
“The full Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing Jan. 24 in the aftermath of Ticketmaster’s meltdown for fans hoping to score tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour,” Politico reports.
“The World Economic Forum says billionaire Elon Musk wasn’t on the guest list for the annual meeting of business executives, global leaders and cultural trend-setters in Davos, Switzerland — despite what the Twitter owner claims,” the AP reports.
Elon Musk has set a Guinness World Record for the largest lost of personal fortune in history — about $182 billion, CBS News reports.
Dr. Dre threatened Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) with legal action for exploiting his music “to promote your divisive and hateful political agenda,” TMZ reports.
“Elon Musk was the second person ever to amass a personal fortune of more than $200 billion, breaching that threshold in January 2021, months after Jeff Bezos,” Bloomberg reports.
“The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer has now achieved a first of his own: becoming the only person in history to erase $200 billion from their net worth.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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