AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

After learning he would face yet another criminal indictment, Former President Donald Trump dined with top Fox News executive at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey as they urged him to take part in the upcoming GOP primary debate on the network later this month, according to New York Times.

Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman reported Wednesday that, moments after Trump learned he would be indicted for his efforts to overturn the election on January 6th, he met with Fox News president Jay Wallace and chief executive Suzanne Scott for dinner.

The executives lobbied the former president to appear on the channel’s GOP primary debate scheduled for August 23rd, appealing to his vanity by saying it’s an opportunity to “show off,” the Times reported.

Trump has stated publicly that he may not attend the debate in Milwaukee or the second event planned at the Reagan Presidential Library in California. However, he told the network executives he was still open to the idea.

The dinner reportedly last two hours and was “cordial,” despite Trump’s consistent attacks on the network on his Truth Social app.

From the NYT:

The Fox executives made a soft appeal for Mr. Trump to attend the debate, two of the people familiar with the dinner said, telling the former president that he excels on the center stage and that it presents an opportunity for him to show off his debate skills. Several people who have tried pushing Mr. Trump to debate in recent weeks have argued that if he does not show up, he could be giving an opening to other candidates to perform well.

Mr. Trump told the Fox executives that he had not yet made a decision and would keep an open mind, the three people said. The Fox team requested the meeting. The dinner was supposed to have included another participant from the network — the host Sean Hannity, who is friendly with Mr. Trump — but he was doing his 9 p.m. show and couldn’t make it.

Despite his legal troubles, Trump is currently the Republican frontrunner in the primary with a commanding lead in key states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

Fox News did not respond to a Mediaite request to confirm the dinner meeting.

For all its advantages, Android has never had a decent reading mode. On iOS, Safari has “Reader View,” which removes formatting, ads, and media from an article. However, it’s only available in apps that choose to use Safari’s in-app browser. Now Google, while being late to the party, has implemented its own reading…

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MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the daily four-hour in-kind campaign contribution to Biden 2024 outdid itself on Tuesday as it sought to excuse and obfuscate the obvious ethical issues inherent to Hunter Biden’s foreign business activities, trotting out a murderer’s row of shills for President Joe Biden.

Devon Archer, a former close friend and business partner of the president’s son, told the House Oversight Committee Monday that Hunter Biden made a habit of calling his powerful father during business meetings, sometimes at the behest of associates, despite President Biden’s repeated claims that he’s never participated in — or even spoken to his son about — Hunter’s business activities.

The Tuesday guests of Morning Joe are absolutely sure that this is a veritable nothingburger that represents no threat to the first family’s reputation or the president’s political prospects. But they nevertheless spent all morning laboring to mount defenses of father and son.

Morning Joe defends Biden & Hunter’s working relationship:@Lemire: “We should put this in context; this is the time when Beau Biden, the president’s other son, was ill & dying & then passed away. So perhaps he wasn’t as attentive to what he should have been”@Eugene_Robinson:… pic.twitter.com/N47jSklbrC

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 1, 2023

Host Jonathan Lemire offered a smorgasbord of explanations for the Biden family’s behavior: It wasn’t “illegal.” House Republicans haven’t proven that Joe Biden “had anything to do with it.” “We should put this in context, this is a time when Beau Biden, the president’s other son was ill and then dying.”

“They’re trying to create a scandal when there’s no evidence that they have one,” Lemire finished, before the Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson jumped in to make a similarly deferential and haphazard case.

“I think it’s pretty clear there is nothing there,” declared the woefully misinformed newsman before doubling down on using the tragic death of Beau Biden to paper over his family’s ethical failings.

Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) has emerged as one of the Biden family’s most vigorous defenders in Congress. Naturally, he also found his way on air Tuesday.

“The critical part here for Congress, and that’s what we have to make sure we understand, is that Joe Biden was doing nothing to benefit his son,” claimed Goldman on Morning Joe, a day after he insisted that the then-vice president would only exchange “niceties” or discuss “the weather” with his Hunter’s business partners.

Goldman’s assertion that Biden avoided impropriety by removing his “vice president of the United States” hat to don his “meteorologist” one was picked up by another Morning Joe guest and congressman.

“Hunter Biden’s business partner [Archer] said, ‘Yeah, he was on some phone calls talking about the weather.’ Talking about the weather! Exchanging pleasantries. You know, is that in the category of presidential family members that are problematic? Billy Carter, Hugh Rodham? Maybe it’s in that category. But it is sure and absolutely not a crime,” argued Rep. Jim Hines (D-CT) before his impressed hosts.

To sum up the arguments of those most willing to debase themselves for the Bidens: It was acceptable for the sitting vice president to assist his son in his influence-peddling campaign in countries where he was serving as the point man for U.S. policy (Ukraine), because his other son was sick, and because the demonstration of access to American power was veiled behind small talk.

Biden should be thankful the contingent at Morning Joe is willing to marshal any argument — no matter how weak — in defense of this behavior, because there are no good ones to make.

Fox News contributor and radio host Richard Fowler schooled his Outnumbered co-hosts on the Civil Rights-era origins of the term “woke” during a segment about an anti-“Woke” shopping app.

Republican Florida Governor and current presidential distant second Ron DeSantis has made battling “woke” things his main identity, and while his audience seems to know what he means when he says it, many have a difficult time defining it. And one smartphone app called “Veebs” has piggybacked on that concept by allowing conservatives to identify and shun “woke” brands while they shop.

On Tuesday afternoon’s edition of Fox News Channel’s Outnumbered, Fowler used the occasion of a segment about Veebs to ridicule the buzzword by repeatedly professing not to know what the term is supposed to mean to these conservatives — and revealing one deadly-serious meaning that originated during Jim Crow and the struggle for Black civil rights:

KAYLEIGH MCENANY: First you have Modelo overtaking Bud Light as America’s beer. Ben and Jerry’s losing 2 billion and Disney losing 900 million. So if people want to vote with their pocketbooks, do it.

HARRIS FAULKNER: Richard.

RICHARD FOWLER: I mean, there was an interview that Governor Santos gave, I think, last week to another network where he said, I’m not sure what woke is. I don’t know how, he said I know how to find it. Other people define it differently.

HARRIS FAULKNER: But he did define it.

RICHARD FOWLER: He defined what he defined.

HARRIS FAULKNER: He went on to define it. He got credit for, by the way…

RICHARD FOWLER: He defined it as “cultural Marxism.” I’m not sure what that.. so… Look, I think we have to define the word first and understand what his exact meaning is before you can say that…

HARRIS FAULKNER: What does it mean to you?

RICHARD FOWLER: I don’t know. What it means to me?

KAYLEIGH MCENANY: It’s your party, they use it all the time!

RICHARD FOWLER: I don’t use it. I don’t, because I don’t know what it means. I think what it meant when it was utilized in the. I mean, a couple of years ago was it was like the idea was… It was it was actually created in the early 1950s after a group of Black men were found guilty of a charge. And they were they, were found guilty of things they didn’t do. And they were like, stay woke, keep an eye open because this is happening in our community. All right. It’s come to mean something else now. And so, like I said, in this current version of the word, I have no idea what it means. I don’t know what the app means.

KAYLEIGH MCENANY: (inaudible) knows what it means at this.

HARRIS FAULKNER: Technically it’s the same thing, but from different points of view. So keep an eye out, stay open, stay woke to whatever aligns with your values.

RICHARD FOWLER: Yeah, but. now they’re saying, Oh, so now they’re passing anti-woke policies? I don’t…

Watch above via Fox News Channel’s Outnumbered.

Press Association via AP Images / Scott Garfitt/Invision/AP

Warner Bros. has apologized for being “insensitive” for hyping fan-made memes celebrating the release of both Barbie and Oppenheimer.

The official Barbie Movie account has come under fire after a series of responses made in reaction to fan memes were branded as insensitive toward the 1945 atomic bombings. One of the memes included both Margot Robbie’s Barbie character and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in front of a cloud from the atomic bomb.

“It’s going to be a summer to remember,” the official Barbie Movie account replied. This tweet has since been deleted.

The memes have angered many who believe the celebration of the film is overshadowing the destruction of the real bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Warner Bros. studios quickly released an apology on the matter.

“Warner Brothers regrets its recent insensitive social media engagement. The studio offers a sincere apology,” they said in a company statement to Variety.

According to USA Today, the Japanese division of Warner Bros. also released a statement via Twitter.

“We apologize to those who felt uncomfortable because of these inconsiderable reactions,” they wrote.

No release date has been set for the Oppenhemier film in Japan.

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