January 1, Trump Rallies Nevada; Bloomberg Drops $100M in FL on Biden

This Day in History | 2004

It was one of the greatest  promotional stunts in TV history. Oprah Winfrey gives a brand-new Pontiac G-6 sedan, worth $28,500, to everyone in her studio audience: a total of 276 cars in all.

Good morning Middle Americans, 

“With friends like these…” The old saying usually means that one of your “allies” is doing something that should help you, but doesn’t. We don’t think that’s what’s happening in Florida though. Former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has plans to spend $100 million dollars on helping Joe Biden’s campaign in Florida, a crucial swing state. That’ll money will go fast, but Bloomberg has plenty of cash to burn, and he might be doing it just to put President Trump on the spot. Trump has hinted that he might spend $100 million of his own money on the race, if he needs to. (fact check) He needs to. The crowds are getting big in places like Nevada, but when it comes to the presidential election time-line, election day is both very close, and light years away. 

Also today, search and rescue crews using dogs combed through neighborhoods left in blackened ruins by massive wildfires burning across three states. California has become a warming, burning, epidemic-challenged and expensive state, with many who live in sophisticated cities, idyllic oceanfront towns and windblown mountain communities thinking hard about the viability of a place many have called home forever.  And finally, Netflix is facing renewed backlash from subscribers and members of Congress after it released the award-winning French film “Cuties” on its platform this week.

Read all about it. 

-Fraser Dixon

Trump Rallies Nevada, Questions Integrity of Election

(AP) – Kicking off a Western swing, President Donald Trump barreled into Nevada for the weekend, looking to expand his path to victory while unleashing a torrent of unsubstantiated claims that Democrats were trying to steal the election.

Trump defied local authorities by holding a Saturday night rally in tiny Minden after his initial plan to hold one in Reno was stopped out of concern it would have violated coronavirus health guidelines. Unleashing 90-plus minutes of grievances and attacks, Trump claimed the state’s Democratic governor tried to block him and repeated his false claim that mail-in ballots would taint the election result.

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Bloomberg to Spend $100M+ in FL For Joe Biden

(Washington Post) – Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg plans to spend at least $100 million in Florida to help elect Democrat Joe Biden, a massive late-stage infusion of cash that could reshape the presidential contest in a costly toss-up state central to President Trump’s reelection hopes.

Bloomberg made the decision to focus his final election spending on Florida last week, after news reports that Trump had considered spending as much as $100 million of his own money in the final weeks of the campaign, Bloomberg’s advisers said. Presented with several options on how to make good on an earlier promise to help elect Biden, Bloomberg decided that a narrow focus on Florida was the best use of his money.

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Crews Search for Bodies In Charred Wake of Wildfires

(Reuters) – Search and rescue crews using dogs combed through neighborhoods left in blackened ruins by massive wildfires burning across three states on Saturday, and U.S. President Donald Trump said he would travel to California to see the devastation first-hand.

Flames have destroyed thousands of homes and a half dozen small towns in the latest outbreak of wildfires that have raged across the western United States this summer, scorching a landscape the size of New Jersey and killing at least 26 people since early August.

But after four days of brutally hot, windy weather, the weekend brought calmer winds blowing inland from the Pacific Ocean, and cooler, moister conditions that helped crews make headway against blazes that had burned unchecked earlier in the week.

At least six people have been killed this week in Oregon, according to the state’s wildfire tracking website. Governor Kate Brown has said that dozens of people remained missing across three counties.

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California ‘Dreams’ Have Turned to Nightmares

(San Francisco Chronicle) – California has become a warming, burning, epidemic-challenged and expensive state, with many who live in sophisticated cities, idyllic oceanfront towns and windblown mountain communities thinking hard about the viability of a place many have called home forever. For the first time in a decade, more people left California last year for other states than arrived.

Learn more here

Netflix’s ‘Cuties’ Sparks a Firestorm

(NY Times) – Netflix is facing renewed backlash from subscribers and members of Congress after it released the award-winning French film “Cuties” on its platform this week.

Some senators are even calling for an investigation into the movie, which has been criticized for sexualizing young girls.

The film, which was released as “Mignonnes” in France and won a directing award from the Sundance Institute in February, follows an 11-year-old girl named Amy (Fathia Youssouf) as she tries to find her place growing up in a poor suburb of Paris. At home, Amy has to please her family, who are observant Muslims from Senegal, but she eventually falls in with a group of friends who have their own dance troupe in defiance of her family’s strict rules.

Maïmouna Doucouré, the film’s director, said in an interview with Netflix that the movie incorporated elements of her own childhood in its portrayal of Amy’s struggles between two distinct modes of femininity: one dictated by the traditional values of her Senegalese and Muslim upbringing, the other by Western society.

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