It did not take long for Trump to add Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner to his list of why Washington, D.C. has lost touch with America. This time he focused on the fact she, like Hillary, worked for the government yet also used the Clinton private email server for sensitive business.
Of course this always makes the story more interesting and did not even mention Huma might have been working for the Secretary of State and the Clinton Foundation at the same time, a potential conflict of interest.
The following was a report in the Coltons Point Times on Anthony Weiner from 2013. So he had so much pride in his rather limited physique that he lit up the Internet with his nude self-portrait photos.That was when he was a Congressman from New York.When the photos, hardly an asset for such an ass, were exposed so to speak he was forced to resign from Congress.
A year later, knowing what the people were missing not having him in public office, the Weiner man is running for Mayor of New York City and his campaign slogan must be "It's time for change - make the Big Apple the Bigger Banana" or some such nonsense. Once again he gets caught when his I phone again gets fascinated with his perceived Rambo body and he can't resist the empowerment of sharing his joy with the women of the world.
So once again we have a mea culpa for a mea big opinion of ones' own self.This time he had to recruit his wife.
In a public statement that one political strategist said hearkened to the Hillary Clinton days, Huma Abedin said Tuesday she’s forgiven her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, for his sexting scandals — including the latest, which went public this week — and said most marriages encounter difficulties and challenges.
“Our marriage, like many others, has had its ups and its downs,” she said, in what The New York Post reported was her first speaking engagement at a press conference. “It took a lot of work and a whole lot of therapy to get to a place where I could forgive Anthony.”
Huma Abedin is a well respected aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and this time her awkward defense of her goofy husband seemed far more political than personal.One could only wonder how she could let herself become such a ripe subject for yet another tragic country song and not kick his skinny butt out the door.
It is sad.
Sad for his well meaning wife.Sad for his son who was born between his two disgraceful episodes of cyber sex simulation or whatever you want to call it.Sad for the Jewish community of New York City he claims to represent and sad for the voters of New York City who hardly need another ego driven sex freak on the public dole.
My year of saying yes: why Emma
Freud and Richard Curtis are moving their family to the United States
In the first of her weekly diary
entries chronicling her New York
adventure, Emma Freud reveals how the plan was hatched and ponders what to do
with the pets and her inlaws' ashes
I’m starting at the beginning
here. Richard, who I live with, co-founded Comic Relief and I am now the director of Red
Nose Day – yes, I know, I literally slept my way to the top. 2015 has so far been a mighty
year. In March we mounted our biggest Comic Relief campaign so far, where we
passed a total of a billion pounds raised since the organization began 30 years
ago. In May we held the first ever Red Nose Day USA, which was the single toughest campaign of
our lives. In September Richard is working
on the launch of the new Global Goals with The United Nations. I am definitely fond of my
boyfriend (it’s been 25 years, though I still won’t marry him in case someone
better comes along.) But the workload this year has nearly killed him, and I
can’t pretend there haven’t been rows, because there have.
I know, you aren’t supposed to
argue with someone who is busy trying to save a life or two - but what about
the fricking school run? After a year of 16-hour working days and an average of
30 meetings a week things got a bit shouty (a lot shouty) and a radical change
became inevitable. One night he finished work at 2 am
and we discussed it seriously. I said I’d love to become one of those families
who do brave and amazing things – like living abroad and having adventures
instead of staying up all night re-editing fundraising films about mosquito
nets. Richard said he promised to stop campaigning once these three events were
done. "I don’t believe you,"
I said, quietly (it wasn’t very quiet). "It’s true," he said,
tentatively. "Let’s move to America in September for a year then," I said. “What?” he said. "Say ‘Yes’," I said. “Yes”, he said. It was a deal.
As a result, in nine weeks' time
we’re taking our two youngest children out of school, swapping our mobiles for
cells, packing one large suitcase each, renting out our West
London house and moving to the West Village of Manhattan for a
year of saying yes. As yet, I’m not quite sure what
we’re saying yes to, so last week we wrote a list of 10 things we’d like to
embrace in this grown-up gap year. It read: 1. In a town with 24,000 restaurants, let’s never go the same
restaurant twice even if we love it. 2. Let’s try to become movie
experts – go to old films, festivals, talks and debates, not just films
featuring the complete oeuvre of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. 3. We should embrace American
sports culture – baseball,
basketball, American football, bowling, hot dogs.
4. Let’s forget TV (too many
adverts) and go to a lot of music concerts and comedy nights instead – the
smaller the venue the better. 5. Let’s be brave about weekends,
go to places like Vermont and Woodstock, stay with people we hardly know,
make fires and do foraging or rummaging or snuffling or whatever it is they do
there. 6. We should be a screen-free
family every evening, even though the last time we tried this we lasted about
13 minutes. 7. Let’s rent an RV truck during
a school holiday – drive somewhere, camp and try not to argue in it like last
time. 8. Let’s definitely and
definitively finally find out whether my brother’s American wife’s name is
"Patty" or "Paddy". 9. Let’s form a family band and
perform songs like Edelweiss without even a hint of irony. 10. And let’s say YES to almost
everything that is suggested at almost all times. I emailed it to the children and
asked them to send us their responses. Bizarrely only one of them replied: it
was the youngest, 11-year-old Spike. and he wrote one word - it was
"No". Good start, I thought, something to build on. The hardest decision has
obviously been what to do with the pets. We have four children, a dog, two
cats, two guinea pigs, two rabbits, about nine fish depending on the time of
day you are checking their tank/graveyard and several hundred nits. After endless discussions, we
have decided to take our three sons with us (the fourth child has already left
home), put the rabbits, guinea pigs and fish up for adoption, exterminate the
nits and take the dog and cats with us on the plane as cargo. However one of
the felines, Badger, has become something of a problem. The airline has said it’s happy
to have any animals in the cabin as long as they weigh 6kg including their
basket. The dog and The Normal-Size-Cat are laughing – but Badger is a big lad:
he’s closer in size to a puma, measures around twice the girth of our dog, and
has very clearly eaten all the pies. He’s currently coming in at an
embarrassing 7kg without the basket, so he’s been put on a diet which has so
far been entirely unsuccessful. Every morning he gets the cat equivalent of a
small bowl of
Special K. And I’m beginning to suspect every morning when he has
finished his food he goes to each of my neighbours' houses and eats the entire
contents of their fridges. They probably don’t stop him because they assume he
is a puma and may be dangerous.
Less of a problem but still an
issue are our books. The new tenants don’t want any of them in the house. I
would happily send most of them to Oxfam
(if I haven’t read them by now, I’m not going to) but the Curtises are
sentimental and like keeping everything they have ever enjoyed. We have shelves of unread novels,
boxes of read novels, and skip-size storage trunks of yellowing newspapers each
one kept for decades because it contained an article that had once been
savoured. Unfortunately I am no longer
allowed to be in charge of book disposal since a day in 2002 when I gave to
Oxfam a pile of books containing a first edition of Wordsworth’s Lyrical
Ballads, signed by the author. I admit it wasn’t my finest hour – I thought it
just looked old and scruffy - but think how lovely it would have been for the
purchaser who snapped it up for 50p. We are also not sure whether to
bring Richard’s parents with us. They currently live in a pair of urns in our
study. His mum wanted to be sprinkled on the waters of the Varanasi, but we have yet to make the trip
there. (NB we will never make the trip there). And nobody can remember where my
father-in-law said he wanted to be scattered so he is still residing in his
urn. The current options are: they go into storage like our books (heartless);
we donate them to Oxfam like the outgrown toys (weird); we leave them to be
enjoyed by the new tenants in our home (weirder); we turn them into an
hourglass or fireworks or paint or a diamond (those are all now a thing); or
they come with us (insane).
I will let you know when an ashes
decision is made because every week for the next 12 months I will be sharing
the joys of this adventure: the horror on the face of my daughter who is a
student in New York when she realises her parents are moving to within
six blocks of her apartment, the rows about what (or who) to bin as we pack up
the house, and the heated family debate about my decision to share the joys of
this adventure with the readers of The Telegraph. It’s going to be an
interesting year.
I have been writing about
Taylor Swift since we first became "friends" on MySpace back around
2006. At the time her first album and
single had just been released and she was a sixteen year old veteran performer being
introduced to America.
Since then, well you know
the story, Taylor
soon became a hit, then a superstar, and now, at the ripe old age of 25, is a
legend in the music industry. Since that
first album in 2006 released through a small, start up Independent record label
Swift has swiftly become the reigning Queen of country music, then Queen of the
pop-rock genre.
This year the granddaddy
of financial magazines, Forbes, says Taylor
is worth over $200 million and named her as one of the Most Powerful Women in
the World, at number 65. In fact, Taylor has sold over 40
million albums and over 100 million single downloads her first decade in the
public eye.
In the process Taylor parlayed the
Internet potential to become the first true sensation in the music industry to
use the Internet to bypass the record labels through her sophisticated use of
music videos, on line concerts, social media, Internet promotions, and about
every other innovation discovered in this age of the Internet.
Did I mention she earned a
4.0 grade point in high school?
When I wrote how Taylor was far too big
for country music, I received a flood of Country Swifties' emails blasting me
for such an idea. Then she released her
newest album, 1989, in the fall of 2014, and crushed all singers in country,
pop, rock, you name it. By the way, it
was her first pop album - in her own words not mine, and sold over 8.6 million
copies.
So why Taylor Swift for
President when so many are running already?
Before history buffs
mention that she is too young to be president since our Constitution says you
must be 35 to be president, I know and I am not talking about 2016. Taylor
has already demonstrated more guts than most politicians taking on the recording
industry but she will be 35 when she takes office, if she runs for President in
2024.
Why start drafting her to
run almost ten years ahead of time? Because
it gives Taylor
the same amount of time to do things to help prepare for her future in politics as
president. However, in the past year she
has single-handed stood up to the largest music streaming company in the
business, Spotify. Then yesterday, she
stood up to one of the most powerful corporations in the world, Apple.
Most consumers pay little
attention but most people in the music industry make their money in the form of
royalties paid for record sales and plays in the entertainment media. Streaming services for audio, like Spotify,
have to pay royalties to writers, artists, and producers, if they sell ad free
subscriptions for around $10.00 a month.
Unfortunately, most
streaming services do not have many subscribers. What they do have are free members who get
free music with a thick dose of commercials. There are no royalties paid for the free
service, even though ad sales generate money.
To illustrate the problem, Spotify has about 80 million users but only
20 million subscribers. Thus, artists
get a royalty on just 25% of their music on Spotify. Taylor
said it was not fair and pulled her music.
This weekend Apple
announced the new Apple music streaming company and said no royalties would be
paid to the artists for free trial members.
Taylor
responded the same day that it was not fair to all those young artists and
retired artists who would earn no royalty and said she would not allow her new
record-setting album, 1989, to be part of Apple.
Here is what Taylor wrote to Apple. To Apple, Love Taylor I write this to explain why I’ll be holding back my album, 1989, from the new streaming service, Apple Music. I feel this deserves an explanation because Apple has been and will continue to be one of my best partners in selling music and creating ways for me to connect with my fans. I respect the company and the truly ingenious minds that have created a legacy based on innovation and pushing the right boundaries. I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months. I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.
This is not about me. Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt. This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create, just like the innovators and creators at Apple are pioneering in their field…but will not get paid for a quarter of a year’s worth of plays on his or her songs. These are not the complaints of a spoiled, petulant child. These are the echoed sentiments of every artist, writer and producer in my social circles who are afraid to speak up publicly because we admire and respect Apple so much. We simply do not respect this particular call. I realize that Apple is working towards a goal of paid streaming. I think that is beautiful progress. We know how astronomically successful Apple has been and we know that this incredible company has the money to pay artists, writers and producers for the 3 month trial period… even if it is free for the fans trying it out. Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing. I say this with love, reverence, and admiration for everything else Apple has done. I hope that soon I can join them in the progression towards a streaming model that seems fair to those who create this music. I think this could be the platform that gets it right. But I say to Apple with all due respect, it’s not too late to change this policy and change the minds of those in the music industry who will be deeply and gravely affected by this. We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation. Taylor
Taylor used the Internet site Tumblr to send her message to Apple, signed Love
Taylor, and in minutes the social media airways lit up when the tens of
thousands of Taylor Swifties started tweeting, re-tweeting and burning up the
Internet.
Mind you, Apple's stock
this week passed $700 billion in value and sophisticated investors say it
should reach $1.26 trillion in value soon.
Amazingly, in less than 24 hours and after executive sessions and trying
to reach Taylor,
Apple became the first music streaming company to reverse itself and say,
ooops, now they will test paying royalties for all free trial subscriptions.
Everyone's favorite sweetheart
became a mighty lioness and brought the behemoth mighty Apple to their knees
just to protect those artists, dedicated musicians, and technicians with no
voice in our capitalist system. That skinny country kid from Pennsylvania and Nashville grew up in a hurry, is now based in NYC, the really Big Apple, and is guiding fellow writers, musicians, and producers through some trying times in the music industry.
When Taylor said enough is enough - Apple blinked, then cracked.
We need good hearted,
intelligent, and strong women in politics who are young, successful outside of
politics, and ready to rumble. I urge
the Swifties to start a draft Taylor Swift movement now so Taylor and the nation can be ready for her in
just ten years.
Remember all those bankers
who nearly bankrupted America and lost trillions of dollars in money from the
little people? Well no one in the Obama Administration, in fact no one in the
Democratic or Republican party except for Senator Elizabeth Warren, has stood up
to them, let alone got them to back down.
Perhaps Taylor can finally start throwing the crooks
in jail since she is not a politician and is entering the race with no strings
attached.
In case you do not remember, Anthony Weiner is back in the spotlight thanks to Donald Trump talking about the Hillary Clinton top aide who is also the wife of the disgraced Weiner man. While Trump focused on her access to all Hillary documents on the private email server, other questions remain as well.
One is whether she is being investigated for being paid by both the State Department and Clinton Foundation, perhaps at the same time, as she was handling classified documents for Hillary. By the way, Huma also had a private email account on the server in the Clinton closet or Colorado bathroom.
This was the last report on the antics.
So Anthony had so much pride in
his rather limited physique that he lit up the Internet with his nude
self-portrait photos.That was when he
was a Congressman from New York.When the photos, hardly an asset for such an
ass, were exposed so to speak he was forced to resign from Congress.
A year later, knowing what
the people were missing not having him in public office, the Weiner man is
running for Mayor of New York City and his campaign slogan must be "It's time for change - make the Big Apple
the Bigger Banana" or some such nonsense. Once again he gets caught when his I phone again gets fascinated with his perceived Rambo body and he can't resist the empowerment of sharing his joy with the women of the world.
So once again we have a
mea culpa for a mea big opinion of ones' own self.This time he had to recruit his wife.
In a public statement that
one political strategist said hearkened to the Hillary Clinton days, Huma Abedin said Tuesday she’s forgiven her
husband, former Representative Anthony Weiner, for his sexting
scandals — including the latest, which went public this week — and said most
marriages encounter difficulties and challenges.
“Our marriage, like many others, has had its ups
and its downs,” she said, in what The New
York Post reported was her first speaking engagement
at a press conference. “It took a lot of work and a whole lot of therapy to get
to a place where I could forgive Anthony."
Huma Abedin is a well
respected aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and this time her
awkward defense of her goofy husband seemed far more political than
personal.One could only wonder how she
could let herself become such a ripe subject for yet another tragic country
song and not kick his skinny butt out the door.
It is sad.
Sad for his well meaning
wife.Sad for his son who was born
between his two disgraceful episodes of cyber sex simulation or whatever you
want to call it.Sad for the Jewish
community of New York City he claims to
represent and sad for the voters of New
York City who hardly need another ego driven sex freak
on the public dole.
