#scott pelley

[justinspoliticalcorner]

CBS News:

A "60 Minutes" candidate hour will feature only Vice President Kamala Harris after former President Donald Trump, who'd previously agreed to be on the show, decided not to participate in the Monday, Oct. 7 special. 

"For over half a century, '60 Minutes' has invited the Democratic and Republican tickets to appear on our broadcast as Americans head to the polls," "60 Minutes" said in a statement. "This year, both the Harris and Trump campaigns agreed to sit down with 60 Minutes. Vice President Harris will speak with correspondent Bill Whitaker. After initially accepting 60 Minutes' request for an interview with Scott Pelley, former President Trump's campaign has decided not to participate. Pelley will address this Monday evening. Our election special will broadcast the Harris interview on Monday as planned. Our original invitation to former President Donald Trump to be interviewed on 60 Minutes stands." Harris and Trump only debated each other once and have no other debates planned before the Nov. 5 election.  Leading up to the candidate hour, Trump, through campaign spokespeople, was the first candidate to accept the "60 Minutes" request to be interviewed for the special, according to CBS News. It had been agreed that both candidates would receive equal time during the broadcast. "60 Minutes" will uphold its agreement with Harris and interviews are scheduled on the campaign trail this week.  In a statement, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung said that Trump's team had not agreed to an interview.

Monday’s edition of 60 Minutes on CBS will feature an interview of Kamala Harris by Bill Whitaker, while Donald Trump cowardly declined to be interviewed by Scott Pelley.

If Trump cannot stand being interviewed by a real journalist like Pelley, then how in Hades can he handle a real crisis? He had a big crisis the last time he was “President” and bungled it, and thus cannot be trusted to handle another crisis event again.

[biographyjoy]

Scott Pelley Net Worth

[aunti-christ-ine]

~*([([([( bawkbawkbawk )])])])*~

[rodgermalcolmmitchell]

The insurance mystery solved

I often listen to the public radio show, “Freakonomics Radio” by Stephen J. Dubner. Today, the story was about insurance and how intractable it is, both from the insurance providers’ and the buyers’ perspectives. We all have some forms of insurance: Life, health, accident, liability, home, personal property, unemployment, retirement, and many others. Lloyds of London has a reputation for creating…

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Anne Applebaum :: @anneapplebaum

This was the moment that mattered. Trump's political movement relies on total impunity for liars, and mostly gets it. The lies bind them together, cement their feeling of power.

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 1, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 02, 2024

More than 45,000 U.S. dock workers went on strike today for the first time since 1977, nearly 50 years ago. The International Longshoremen's Association union, which represents 45,000 port workers, is negotiating with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike will shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping. Analysts from J.P. Morgan estimate that the strike could cost the U.S. economy about $5 billion a day. The strikers have said they will continue to unload military cargo.

Dockworkers want a 77% increase in pay over six years and better benefits, while USMX has said it has offered to increase wages by nearly 50%, triple employer contributions to retirement plans, and improve health care options. In the Washington Post, economics columnist Heather Long pointed out that the big issue at stake is the automation that threatens union jobs.

Although the strike threatens to slow the economy depending on how long it lasts, President Joe Biden has refused requests to force the strikers back to work, reiterating his support for collective bargaining. He noted that ocean carriers have made record profits since the pandemic—sometimes in excess of 800% over prepandemic levels—and that executive compensation and shareholder profits have reflected those profits. “It’s only fair that workers, who put themselves at risk during the pandemic to keep ports open, see a meaningful increase in their wages as well,” Biden said in a statement.  

In the presidential contest, the Trump-Vance campaign is trying to preserve its false narrative. In Wisconsin today, Trump accused Vice President Harris of murder—although he appeared to get confused about the victim—and claimed that she has a phone app on which the heads of cartels can get information about where to drop undocumented immigrants. He also said that Kim Jong Un of North Korea is trying to kill him.

When asked if he should have been tougher on Iran after it launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured, Trump rejected the idea that soldiers with traumatic brain injuries were actually hurt. He said “they had a headache” and said he thought the attack “was a very nice thing because they didn’t want us to retaliate.”

Trump also backed out of a scheduled interview with 60 Minutes that correspondent Scott Pelley was slated to conduct on Thursday. 60 Minutes noted that for more than 50 years, the show has invited both campaigns to appear on the broadcast before the election and this year, both campaigns agreed to an interview. Trump’s spokesperson complained that 60 Minutes “insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.” Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in her interview as planned. 

The campaign’s resistance to independent fact checking of their false narrative came up in tonight’s vice presidential debate on CBS between Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s running mate, and Ohio senator J.D. Vance, running mate for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan moderated the debate.

Walz’s goal in the debate was to do no harm to Vice President Harris’s campaign, and he achieved that. Vance’s goal was harder: to give people a reason to vote for Donald Trump. It is doubtful he moved any needles there. 

The moments that did stand out in the debate put a spotlight on Vance’s tenuous relationship with the truth. When Vance lied again about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are in the United States legally, Brennan added: "Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status."

Vance responded: "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.”

There were two other big moments of the evening, both based in lies. First, Vance claimed that Trump, who tried repeatedly to repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, “saved” it. Then, Walz asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance refused to answer, saying he is “focused on the future,” and warned that “the threat of censorship” is the real problem in the U.S. 

Walz said: “That’s a damning non-answer.” 

Former chair of the Republican Party Michael Steele said after the debate: “I don't care where you are on policy…. If you cannot in 2024 answer that question, you are unfit for office.”

It was significant that Vance tried to avoid saying either that Trump won in 2020—a litmus test for MAGA Republicans—or that he lost, a reflection of reality. While this debate probably didn’t move a lot of voters for the 2024 election, what it did do was make Vance look like a far more viable candidate than his running mate. Waffling on the Big Lie seemed designed to preserve his candidacy for future elections.

It seems likely that the message behind Vance’s smooth performance wasn’t lost on Trump. As the debate was going on, Trump posted: “The GREAT Pete Rose just died. He was one of the most magnificent baseball players ever to play the game. He paid the price! Major League Baseball should have allowed him into the Hall of Fame many years ago. Do it now, before his funeral!” 

Former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Rose died yesterday at 83. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[modern-politics111]

Are you registered to vote? 🗳

You can register to vote here! ☑️

Do you know what/ who will be on your ballot? 📄

Do you know your state voting requirements? 📥

Do you know your polling location? 📍

Can you vote early? 🖊

Can you vote by mail? 📬

Do you need disability services for voting? ♿️

Do you need to know your voter’s rights? 🧑🏽‍⚖️

Do you need a ride to register/ vote?

[thegayhimbo]

Say "I know nothing about the history of Russia's treatment of Ukraine (the Holodomor being one such example) or what's currently going on between Russia and Ukraine" without saying it. 🙄😒

For those who can't access the video due to the "age restriction," here is a transcript of the 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley interviewing Freed Ukrainian Prisoners of War:

SPOILER ALERT: The following video/transcript contains descriptions of beatings, torture, rape, starvation, child deaths, and human rights violations.

As for "Russia is not continuously bombing all civilian infrastructure and committing a genocide," there have been multiple posts and articles over the past 2 years proving otherwise (including their recent attack on New Year's Eve). This also includes the Russian war crime of Ukrainian children being kidnapped by Russian soldiers, deported to Russian reeducation camps, getting brainwashed, and being used as Russian Propaganda tools:

Between the 2:27 and 2:37 mark, Isobel Yeung (the narrator) doesn't mince her words when she notes how Vladimir Putin and his cronies are accused of trying to "ethically cleanse a generation of young Ukrainians."

If you've read this far, you can probably come to the conclusion that imtryingsir did absolutely zero research, or even cared enough to follow the last 2 years of news about the Russian-Ukraine War, before making their abhorrently idiotic comment.

So why am I bothering to dignify this with a response when it's clear this person is being maliciously stupid? Because of this post. Specifically, the disgusting little remark they made where they tried to justify why a Jewish woman on social media deserved to be bullied/harassed (which eventually led to the Russia apologist comment above when they were called out on it by multiple Tumblr users):

Putting aside the gross victim-blaming and thinly-disguised antisemitism (which I'm sure my Jewish followers are deeply sick of at this point), what really gets me is how disingenuous this user is. They don't actually give a rat's ass about what's going on in Gaza: Someone who truly cares about genocide and the deaths/suffering of innocent people wouldn't be going out of their way to downplay/whitewash the genocidal actions of another country (Russia), or making comments dismissing another groups problems/trauma while dehumanizing them, or even straight up wishing for more death and destruction:

People like this (as well as the so-called "Pro-Palestine" users in the Jewish woman's post who were harassing her) are devoid of empathy. They relish in being cruel and condescending to others because they feel empowered in doing so, and they know they can get away with it without facing lasting consequences. They are doing nothing to help alleviate an already horrific situation, and are just making the world a worse place to live in. I'm sure they'll tell themselves the sweet little lies about how their bullying and antisemitism is really "activism" or "caring for Palestinians" or "Being antizionist; not antisemitic" (while continuing to spew the same bigoted rhetoric that Jews have been calling out as antisemitic for YEARS). At this point, I truly don't give a damn what their excuses are since they will grasp at anything, no matter how flimsy, to rationalize their behavior.

I never thought I'd see the day where a bunch of Leftist/Westerners would embody two of the most loathsome fictional characters in media (right down to their hateful, sadistic, vile attitudes), and yet that is the point we've currently reached:

To say this has been deeply unpleasant to witness is an understatement. 😒

I talked about this in a recent post about antisemitism from the Left, and I'm going to reiterate something I said: "There is a larger conversation that needs to be had about how selective Leftist empathy and compassion really is. By this, I’m talking about people on the Left who will a.) Only be compassionate/empathetic when it’s convenient for them, or b.) Only be compassionate/empathetic towards people they think are “deserving” of it."

People like imtryingsir only prove why it's important to have this conversation: If you're perfectly okay dismissing/downplaying the suffering of one group of people (be it Jews, Ukrainians, Palestinians, etc) so you can prop up your preferred group of people who are suffering because you think they are more "deserving" of empathy/compassion......................you need to do some serious self-reflection about the type of person you've become.

[divinum-pacis]

Inside Lalibela | 60 Minutes

In the northern highlands of Ethiopia stand 11 churches that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church says were built by angels. Scott Pelley reports.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nina Golgowski at HuffPost:

Vice President Kamala Harris slammed former President Donald Trump for backing out of his interview with “60 Minutes” while accusing him of not being able to give viewers “a meaningful, thoughtful conversation.” “Watch his rallies,” she told CBS’s Bill Whitaker when asked her response to him canceling last week. “You’re gonna hear conversations that are about himself and all of his personal grievances. And what you will not hear is anything about you, the listener. You will not hear about how he is gonna try to bring the country together, find common ground,” she said. “And Bill, that is why I believe in my soul and heart the American people are ready to turn the page.” CBS reported that Trump pulled out of his interview because he didn’t want to be fact-checked. He also wanted an apology for how his previous “60 Minutes” interview went with veteran CBS journalist Lesley Stahl in 2020. That interview ended with Trump abruptly walking off the set. Trump, among other things, left after objecting to being told he was going to be asked some “tough questions.” [...] CBS correspondent Scott Pelley, speaking ahead of Whitaker’s filmed interview with Harris, argued that the program fact-checks “every story” it airs. Pelley also noted Trump’s past criticism of Harris when it comes to her interviews. “Trump has said his opponent doesn’t do interviews because she can’t handle them. He had previously declined another debate with Harris, so tonight may have been the largest audience for the candidates from now until Election Day,” he said.

On last night’s special edition of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Kamala Harris called out Donald Trump’s cowardly move to back out of the interview he agreed to with this response “watch his rallies.”

See Also:

Daily Kos: Harris nails '60 Minutes' interview Trump was too afraid to do

From the 10.07.2024 edition of CBS's 60 Minutes:

[denimbex1986]

'...In April, the Irish actor Andrew Scott donned a pair of retro black-and-white film-noir huggies for his portrayal of the 1950s sociopathic conman Tom Ripley – although they were perhaps less daring than the lime green version worn by Matt Damon in 1999 when playing the same character...'

[bighermie]

Joe Biden Doesn't Even Mention the American People When CBS's Scott Pelley Asks If He is Sure He Wants to Run Again (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 8, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 08, 2024

“It’s been a tradition for more than half a century that the major party candidates for president sit down with 60 Minutes in October,” host Scott Pelley said to the camera last night before 60 Minutes aired an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. This year, both Harris and Republican nominee former president Donald Trump accepted an invitation for an interview.

“Then a week ago,” Pelley said, “Trump backed out. The campaign offered shifting explanations. First it complained that we would fact-check the interview. We fact-check every story,” Pelley said. “Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020. Trump claims correspondent Leslie Stahl said in that interview that Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop came from Russia. She never said that.

“Trump has said his opponent doesn’t do interviews because she can’t handle them. He had previously declined another debate with Harris, so tonight may have been the largest audience for the candidates between now and election day. Our questions addressed the economy, immigration, reproductive rights, and the wars in the Middle East and Europe. Both campaigns understood this special would go ahead if either candidate backed out.”

And with that, 60 Minutes aired its interview with Vice President Harris.

Trump broke a fifty-year tradition so his false world would not be challenged by reality. He apparently wants to make sure voters cannot base their decisions about the country’s future on facts. Hiding reality is in keeping with his continued refusal to release his tax returns or a medical report—even after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania—or the video from the incident at Arlington National Cemetery, instead insisting that people take him at his word about what happened. 

If voters trust his disinformation campaign, rather than thinking things through for themselves, who will his policies help? 

A bombshell story from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward today revealed that in 2020, when he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it.  

A Trump aide told Woodward that Trump and Putin have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House, prompting Edward Luce of the Financial Times to comment: “What possible business could an out-of-office U.S. president have to call Vladimir Putin seven times?” Woodward recounts a moment when Trump told a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin.” 

The Woodward book also says that when South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham was visiting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, in March 2024, Graham said “Hey, let’s call Trump.” According to Woodward, an aide brought MBS a bag full of burner phones, one of which was labeled “TRUMP 45.”

This news highlights the fact that Trump retained classified documents when he left the White House, carrying them with him to Mar-a-Lago, where he tried to hide them from federal officials. A grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts for those actions, but Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case in July after concluding that Special Counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed.  

Trump’s campaign came out swinging after the story broke, with Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung calling Woodward “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.”

In contrast to Trump’s disinformation campaign, Vice President Harris is running a normal campaign, offering policy proposals. Today she proposed a plan to permit Medicare to help cover the costs of long-term home health care aides for seniors. Harris announced the plan on ABC’s The View, where she spoke of the so-called sandwich generation, people—mostly women—who are taking care of their elderly parents at the same time they are also taking care of children. “[I]t’s just almost impossible to do it all, especially if they work,” Harris said, adding that many end up having to leave their jobs. She also called for Medicare to cover vision and hearing care to enable seniors to live independently for longer.  

Harris said the money to pay for the new services will come from savings realized through Medicare’s new ability to negotiate drug prices—an ability Republicans are eager to end—and through cracking down on Medicare fraud. A fact sheet about the plan emphasizes that it will enable the government to work with the private sector to expand the home care workforce and provide more access to telehealth. 

Her plan also calls for stopping states from seizing family homes of recently deceased Medicaid beneficiaries to restore funding, a program called “Medicaid estate recovery.” Those seizures particularly hurt rural and minority populations, she noted, preventing them from building wealth. 

Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times note that both expanded home care benefits and drug negotiations are popular. KFF, which conducts health policy research, reports that Medicaid estate recovery has been criticized because it “falls primarily on individuals with limited incomes, raises little revenue, and is applied very unevenly across the states.” 

Deepa Shivaram of NPR noted that a relatively large percentage of middle-aged and older women remain undecided in this race and Harris’s plan speaks to their needs. The plan would also bring more money and care workers into rural towns with aging populations, giving those areas an economic boost.  

In a fact sheet, the Harris-Walz campaign noted that Trump is focused on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, has repeatedly called for cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and gave clemency to those abusing the system. As Amy B. Wang and Azi Paybarah explained in the Washington Post: “In his last year in office, Trump commuted the sentences of at least five people who collectively filed nearly $1.6 billion in fraudulent claims through Medicare or Medicaid.”

On The View, Harris said, “In this election, people are ready for a new generation of leadership that’s about fixing problems.” 

The 2020 60 Minutes interview for which Trump demanded an apology last week was the one in which he promised his health care plan was “fully developed,” then angrily walked out. His exit was apparently planned, for shortly after his departure, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany walked up to Stahl with a giant book, saying: “Lesley, the President wanted me to deliver his health care plan. It’s a little heavy.”

Trump and McEnany likely expected that the audience would remember their theatrical move rather than the reality, which was that the book contained no Trump healthcare plan because one didn’t exist. 

Four years later, it still doesn’t. Trump said at the September 10 presidential debate that he has the “concepts of a plan.”

CNN today set a deadline of Thursday for Trump to accept its invitation for an October 23 presidential debate. Harris has already accepted. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mark-matos]

The Lost Expedition: AI Journey Through the Unknown

In the year 2023, the world of artificial intelligence had progressed rapidly, with machines that could teach themselves superhuman skills. One such breakthrough was Bard, a chatbot created by Google that had taught itself how to speak to humans like a peer, with creativity, truth, error, and lies.

60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley interviewed Google CEO Sundar Pichai and explored what the future of AI holds. Pichai believes that AI will be as good or as evil as human nature allows and that the revolution is coming faster than people realize.

However, Pichai also acknowledged that society may not be prepared for what's coming, as the pace at which technology is evolving is outstripping societal institutions' ability to think and adapt. He also noted that compared to any other technology, more people are worried about AI's implications earlier in its life cycle, which he finds optimistic.

During the interview, Pelley and Pichai explored Bard's capabilities, which come from a self-contained program that the chatbot mostly taught itself. Bard's replies were unsettlingly human, possessing the sum of human knowledge with microchips more than 100-thousand times faster than the human brain.

Pichai noted that AI would impact every product across every company and that it could change the way society thinks about problems and what it can do. However, AI will also pose its problems, such as job displacement, fake news, and fake images.

Despite these concerns, Pichai believes that AI's potential to change society is profound, but it requires society to approach it with humility. Google is introducing AI in steps so that society can get used to it, and Bard is launched as an experiment in a limited way. Pichai is also responsible by holding back for more testing and developing more robust safety layers before deploying more capable models.

Overall, the world of AI is transforming rapidly, and while it holds immense potential, it also poses its problems. Society must adapt to these changes to keep pace with the revolution's pace.

🚀💻 Competitive pressure among tech giants is propelling society into the future of artificial intelligence, ready or not. 🤖🌎 Scott Pelley dives into the world of AI with Google CEO Sundar Pichai on 60 Minutes. Don't miss it! #AI #tech #future #60Minutes

Mark Matos Blog

[ausetkmt]

A rusted fence surrounds a tombstones at the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Portsmouth, VA. Many Black Americans excluded from white-owned cemeteries built their own burial spaces, and their descendants are working to preserve the grounds.AP Photo/Steve Helber

The remains of 328 likely graves have been found from "relocated" Black cemeteries in Florida.

The graves were meant to be moved in the 1950s but were instead simply paved over.

The city of Clearwater is reckoning with its history of racism, CBS News reported.

The remains of 328 likely graves have been found paved over after bodies in supposedly "relocated" Black cemeteries in Florida were never actually moved, prompting the city of Clearwater to reckon with its history of racism and segregation.

Graves from two cemeteries were meant to be relocated in the 1950s to make way for the construction of a swimming pool and department store but were paved over instead, CBS reported. Ultimately, a school and office building were built atop some of the graves.

It wasn't until the 1980s that the cover-up began to be revealed. In 1984, O'Neal Larkin, now 82, watched as a construction crew dug through one of the "relocated" Black cemeteries — though any exhumation of the graves would not occur for nearly 40 more years.

"I remember the parking lot where the engineers — traffic engineer was cutting the lines through," O'Neal Larkin told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, "and they cut through two coffins. That was my first knowledge of seeing it because I walked out there, and I seen it myself."

In 2019, reporting by the Tampa Bay Times about the history of paving over Black graveyards resulted in the city of Clearwater exhuming the two desecrated sites in town.

With help from an engineering services company called Cardno, CBS reported, the North Greenwood Cemetery and St Matthews Cemetery were identified using ground penetrating radar and mapped, and some of the graves were exhumed. Of the 550 graves listed in the cemetery records, 328 likely graves — many under the parking lot of an office building — were identified. Additional remains are likely underneath the office itself and beneath a school building where human remains were found.

"All of the information and the data that we collected does indicate that there are additional burials likely below the footprint of that school building," Erin McKendry, an archaeologist for Cardno, told 60 Minutes.

Representatives for the City of Clearwater and Cardno did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment about the project.

Though forgotten grave sites such as those in Clearwater are found across racial and socio-economic divides, experts have identified that cemetery desecration appears to occur more frequently and systematically in the sacred resting places of minority residents. Other such graves have been found of indigenous students who died at government-run boarding schools in the US and Canada.

"There are abandoned cemeteries across the board," anthropologist Antoinette Jackson, who leads the African American Burial Ground Project at the University of South Florida, told CBS. "There are cemeteries that are not only African American cemeteries or Black cemeteries that have been in some way desecrated, but the issue is more acute with Black cemeteries because of issues like slavery, segregation in which this particular community were legally and intentionally considered lesser than or marginalized by law."

The City of Clearwater remains undecided in how to navigate the exhumation of the bodies beneath the office, parking lot, and school building, though several residents have told CBS and the Tampa Bay Times they prefer to see the cemetery restored and memorialized.

"It is still a cemetery — period," Barbara Sorey-Love, a Clearwater resident who has no family buried in the desecrated graves but has friends who do, told the Tampa Bay Times. "That road should be closed. All the cemetery land should be treated like a memorial site."

Read the original article on Insider