President Trump thanks OANN for providing ‘fair coverage and brilliant reporting’

President Trump gave One America News a shout-out on Thursday morning for our “fair coverage” and “brilliant reporting.” The president thanked the network in a tweet, saying “it is appreciated by many people trying so hard to find a new, consistent and powerful voice.”

Thank you to @OANN One America News for your fair coverage and brilliant reporting. It is appreciated by many people trying so hard to find a new, consistent and powerful VOICE! See you tonight at the Big Rally in Minneapolis.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 10, 2019

He added “See you tonight at the big rally in Minneapolis” in a nod to our commitment to provide full coverage of all of his rallies.
President Trump also tweeted about Fox News on Thursday, saying the media company “is so different than it used to be.” He criticized a new Fox poll, which claims 51 percent of Americans want him impeached. The president said he has never had a good Fox poll since the day he was elected.

From the day I announced I was running for President, I have NEVER had a good @FoxNews Poll. Whoever their Pollster is, they suck. But @FoxNews is also much different than it used to be in the good old days. With people like Andrew Napolitano, who wanted to be a Supreme….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 10, 2019

He went on to say that Fox News has recently been going downhill, suggesting that contributors like Andrew Napolitano, Shepard Smith and Donna Brazile have changed the channel.
“Fox just doesn’t deliver for us anymore,” reiterated the president.
Shepard Smith was one of the only reporters at Fox to publicly criticize the president’s Ukraine call. Donna Brazile, a former CNN anchor, was hired by Fox in an effort to shift the network’s coverage to a more moderate stance.

'Trump watch party’ reinstated at Michigan restaurant after RNC chair Ronna McDaniel's tweet rallies the troops: report

Management at a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in Michigan had a sudden change of heart this week after initially canceling a plan by local Republicans to hold a “Trump watch party” at the location because of unspecified “complaints.”
Perhaps helping speed the reversal: Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel of the Republican National Committee – a former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party whose grandfather was a Michigan governor – learned the event had been called off and alerted her 376,000 Twitter followers.
"Just learned @BWWings cancelled a Michigan viewing party for @realDonaldTrump’s rally," McDaniel wrote in a since-delated post, according to the Washington Examiner. " ... tell them the left's cancel culture has gone too far."
Soon the restaurant’s location in Howell, Mich., and the corporate office in Minneapolis were receiving calls and messages from Republicans, the Examiner wrote -- and officials decided to allow the Trump watch party to proceed.
A representative for the chain later told the Examiner that the cancellation had been “based on a misunderstanding.”
“The group has in fact previously hosted events at the restaurant without incident,” the statement said. “The franchise owner apologizes for the misunderstanding.”
McDaniel later tweeted a "thank you" message to the chain.
"Thank you @BBWings for letting the watch party proceed as planned," McDaniel wrote, "and thank you to everyone who expressed their support for @realDonaldTrump!
Howell is about 55 miles northwest of Detroit.

Trump protest in Minneapolis erupts in pepper spray, MAGA hat fires

Hundreds of protesters outside President Trump’s rally in Minneapolis Thursday night set fire to Make America Great Again hats and other memorabilia in an effort to show their defiance to the current administration before police broke up the crowd, reports said.
There were reports that multiple protesters were arrested. One report indicated that protesters threw urine.
Cell phone video posted by Star Tribune reporter Chao Xiong showed Trump supporters walking through a crowd of protesters outside the Target Center in Minneapolis, shouting, “Lock him up” and “Shame on you.”
A reporter for The Washington Post posted a video on Twitter that appeared to show a protester punch a Trump supporter in the back of the head as he left the rally. The crowd can be heard shouting “Nazi scum! Off our streets!” The video shows a Trump supporter being followed by protesters before someone calls out “There’s a Nazi over here,” prompting the attack.
The apparent Trump supporter was also slapped and pushed before eventually running to safety.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that police deployed pepper spray.
Police officers on horseback and bicycles formed a protective line in front of the arena, according to The Tribune. Officers with riot batons and shields also maneuvered through the crowd of protesters. The  Post captured video of one Hispanic family who wore pro-Trump clothing departing from the rally as one protester shouted “He hates you!” The mother repeated “Mexicanos for Trump!" as she left the scene.
Trump arrived in Minnesota as polls show Americans' support rising for impeachment. Democrats claim he used his office to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens for his political gain. Trump insists that he was just making sure the country was doing its part to weed out corruption.
Trump was joined by Vice President Mike Pence, who had a separate schedule of appearances in the state Trump is trying to tip his way next year.
CLICK HERE FOR THE ALL-NEW FOXBUSINESS.COM
Trump praised police officers during his rally.  USA Today reported that Minneapolis police were not allowed to attend the rally in their uniforms, so they wore, "Cops For Trump" t-shirts.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Californian Gas Price Cartoons

Millions playing waiting game over electricity shutoffs

SONOMA, Calif. (AP) — Millions of Californians played a waiting game with the winds Thursday as Pacific Gas & Electric watched the weather before deciding whether to restore power to an enormous portion of the state blacked out on purpose.

The state’s largest utility pulled the plug to prevent a repeat of the past two years when wind-blown power lines sparked deadly wildfires that destroyed thousands of homes.

The unpopular move that disrupted daily life — prompted by forecasts calling for dry, gusty weather — came after catastrophic fires sent PG&E into bankruptcy and forced it to take more aggressive steps to prevent blazes.

The blackouts began Wednesday, hitting more than 500,000 homes and businesses north of San Francisco Bay, in the wine country, the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills, where a November wildfire blamed on PG&E transmission lines killed 85 people and virtually incinerated the town of Paradise.

Late Wednesday night, after a full day of delays, PG&E began cutting power in the Bay Area, excluding the city of San Francisco.

Overall, about 734,000 customers and as many as 2 million people could be affected. PG&E has warned that they might have to do without power for days after the winds subside because “every inch” of the power system must be inspected by helicopters and thousands of groundworkers and declared safe before the grid is reactivated.

“It’s just kind of scary. It feels worse than Y2K. We don’t know how long,” Tianna Pasche of Oakland said before her area was powered down. “My two kids, their school situation keeps moving every second. It’s not clear if we need to pack for a week and go out of town or what to do. So I’m just trying to make sure we have water, food, charging stations and gas.”

“For me, this is a major inconvenience in my life as a parent but also, if it saves a life, I’m not going to complain about it,” she said.

Residents of the Oakland Hills, where a wildfire in 1991 killed 25 people and destroyed thousands of homes, spent the morning buying bottled water, getting cash and filling their cars with gas.

In the northern wine country, most of downtown Sonoma was pitch black when Joseph Pokorski, a retiree, showed up for his morning ritual of drinking coffee, followed by beer and cocktails.

The Town Square bar was open and lit by lanterns, but coffee was out of the question and only cash was accepted. Pokorski decided to forgo a 30-minute wait for a cup of joe from the bakery next door and move on to beers and a couple greyhound cocktails of vodka and grapefruit juice.

“I’m not a coffee freak,” Pokorski said. “I can take it or leave. It’s no big thing.”

In the El Dorado Hills east of Sacramento, California, Ruth Self and her son were taking an outage in stride while leaving a Safeway grocery store that had been stripped nearly bare of bottled water and ice.

Self said she wasn’t upset, given the lives lost nearly a year ago in Paradise, invoking images of people who burned in their cars trying to escape.

“I just can’t imagine,” she said. “Hopefully (the outages) are only for a couple days. I think it’s more of a positive than a negative. Ask me again on Friday night when I haven’t had a shower in two days, when I’ve had to spend two days playing card games.”

There was some good news. PG&E also announced that by reconfiguring its power system, it had restored electricity to 44,000 customers who weren’t in areas of high fire risk, and it could bring back power to 60,000 to 80,000 customers in the Humboldt area, where gusty winds had subsided.

Also because of shifting forecasts, the utility said it was reducing the third phase of its blackout plan, set to begin Thursday, to only about 4,600 customers in Kern County — one-tenth of the original estimate.

Unsurprisingly, the unprecedented blackouts sparked anger. A customer threw eggs at a PG&E office in Oroville. A PG&E truck was hit by a bullet that shattered a window in Colusa County before Wednesday’s outages, although authorities couldn’t immediately say whether it was targeted. PG&E put up barricades around its San Francisco headquarters.

“We realize and understand the impact and the hardship” from the outages, said Sumeet Singh, head of PG&E’s Community Wildfire Safety Program. But he urged people not to take it out on PG&E workers.

“They have families that live in your communities, they have friends, they are members of your communities,” he said. “They’re doing this work in the interest of your safety.”

PG&E took drastic action because of hot, dry Diablo winds sweeping into Northern California, said Scott Strenfel, PG&E’s principal meteorologist. They were also part of a California-wide weather system that will produce Santa Ana winds in the south in the next day or so, he said.

“These (weather) events historically are the events that cause the most destructive wildfires in California history,” Strenfel said.

Winds gusting as high as 70 mph in places were forecast to begin hitting Southern California later Thursday. Southern California Edison warned that it might cut power to nearly 174,000 customers in nine counties, including Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. San Diego Gas & Electric has notified about 30,000 customers they could lose power in back-country areas.

While many people said the blackouts were a necessity, others were outraged — the word that Gov. Gavin Newsom used in arguing that PG&E should have been working on making its power system sturdier and more weather-proof.

“They’re in bankruptcy due to their terrible management going back decades,” Newsom said in San Diego. “They’ve created these conditions. It was unnecessary.”

Singh said the utility has more than 8,000 employees and contractors who have been clearing brush, inspecting power lines and putting power lines underground.

But he said the power grid wasn’t built to withstand the changing weather and the previous safety factor “no longer exists.”

Although fire agencies had beefed up their crews because of red-flag conditions of extreme fire danger, very few fires were currently burning in California. Only a tiny fraction of acreage has burned, so far, this year compared with recent years, though no one has attributed that to the power cuts.

___

Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Janie Har and Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco, Jocelyn Gecker in Moraga, Don Thompson in El Dorado Hills, Haven Daley in Oakland, and Christopher Weber and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

White House aides try disappearing act amid impeachment talk

WASHINGTON (AP) — They’ve skipped the high-profile Sunday TV shows and avoided driveway chat sessions with reporters. Few who are typically eager to defend the president have appeared at all on television so far this month.

White House officials close to President Donald Trump are pulling off a disappearing act, remaining largely absent from public view — in the middle of the storm over impeachment.

“We invited the White House on to answer questions on the show this morning,” CNN’s Jake Tapper explained to his viewers on Sunday’s “State of the Union.” ″They did not offer a guest.”

It’s a well-worn strategy in the Trump White House: Senior officials conveniently manage to be elsewhere when major controversies engulf the building. The frequent absences of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and presidential daughter Ivanka Trump during moments of consequence have long been a running joke among their detractors. Their detours included a trip to Florida during the partial government shutdown.

Plenty of others have jumped town during tense moments.

As Trump struggled with mounting Republican defections over his decision to declare a national emergency to pay for the stalled border wall, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney wasn’t at the Capitol cajoling his former colleagues or in the West Wing making calls. Instead, he was in Las Vegas for an annual friends and family getaway.

More recently, embattled national security adviser John Bolton scheduled a trip to Mongolia while Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea, a gesture that didn’t sit well with Bolton, who would leave the administration a few months later.

Indeed, knowing “when to be out of town” was one of the top nuggets of advice that Kevin Hassett, the president’s former top economic adviser, said he’d received from a predecessor and had to offer his successor.

The White House did not respond to questions about the tactic Wednesday. But even when they’re in Washington, many of the White House’s most visible officials have been staying out of public view, letting the president’s indignant Twitter feed and his frequent commentary drive the public conversation.

That includes White House spokesman Hogan Gidley, a frequent guest on Fox News shows and the gaggles with reporters that often follow on the White House driveway. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, an aggressive defender of the president, has not made an appearance on the driveway since a highly contentious Sept. 27 gaggle in which she berated reporters and dismissed a question about whether the White House was organizing an impeachment war room.

“I’m the only person out here taking your questions,” Conway noted then. She did, however, appear at an event with first lady Melania Trump, speaking with teens and young adults about their experiences with electronic cigarettes and vaping.

Appearances have come instead from lower-profile staffers, including the vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short; the acting director of Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought; and economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who tried to stay out of the controversy. He’s said repeatedly that questions about Ukraine and the president’s efforts to dig up damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden are way out of his lane.

Adding to the vacuum is the continued lack of White House briefings. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham has yet to hold one.

“It’s surprising that they’re not using the many levers on the most powerful communications platform in the world, which is the White House,” said Joe Lockhart, who served as press secretary during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He said that the White House is losing out on effective platforms to try to drive its message.

“Nobody is vouching for him or validating him and filling in the blanks,” Lockhart said of Trump.

Many aides to the president have grown reluctant to speak out on Trump’s behalf for fear the president will then contradict them. Instead, they allow the president to set the day’s message on his Twitter feed and vigorously defend himself.

But one of the reasons Clinton’s impeachment strategy was effective, Lockhart said, was that the president almost never talked about the impeachment drama. He relied on his lawyers, his communications staff and outside allies to make the case for him.

“The president shouldn’t be his own defender,” Lockhart said. “The president should be focused on doing the job of the president.”

But unlike Clinton, Trump has another tool at his disposal: a massive and well-funded campaign operation that has vigorously defended the president on Twitter and cut a series of ads that paint the impeachment inquiry as nothing more than a Democratic “coup” aimed at overturning the results of the 2016 election.

Another ad released Wednesday focuses on allegations against Biden and his son Hunter, which the president and his allies have been pursuing despite lacking evidence of any wrongdoing.

Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said the campaign team speaks with its counterparts at the White House every day and work in tandem.

“At all times we take our lead from the White House,” he said. “The president is our boss and we are an extension of him we make made all of our decisions accordingly.”

Biden campaign slams NY Times for running 'Clinton Cash' author's op-ed on ex-VP's Ukraine ties

The deputy manager of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign slammed The New York Times on Wednesday in a letter to the newspaper’s executive editor -- blasting the paper's coverage of the former vice president’s involvement in Ukraine.
The letter, written by Kate Bedingfield to Dean Baquet of the Times, criticizes the paper for “giving top billing" to "Clinton Cash" author Peter Schweizer in a Wednesday op-ed titled, “What Hunter Biden Did Was Legal – That’s the Problem," CNN reported.
In his article, Schweizer asserts Biden was "self-dealing" in Ukraine while vice president.
Bedingfield goes on to criticize The Times' Ukraine coverage at large. She writes that the newspaper had an "outsized hand in a baseless conspiracy theory" promoted by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani that Biden acted inappropriately in helping get rid of a Ukrainian prosecutor.
She then accuses the Times of "active participation" in a "smear campaign" against Biden, citing a May article titled, "Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies."
The Times later pushed back against the Biden campaign official's assertions, according to a statement obtained by CNN.
"Our coverage of the Biden campaign and Hunter Biden has been fair and accurate," the newspaper wrote, adding it "will continue to cover Joe Biden with the same tough and fair standards we apply to every candidate in the race and we’re happy to sit down with Biden advisers anytime to discuss news coverage."
The Times' statement emphasized the Schweizer story was published in the Opinion section, "where their mission is to invite intelligent discussion on a range of opinions and ideas."
The Biden campaign also sent letters to Twitter and Facebook on Wednesday, asking them not to run ads from the Trump campaign that promote what it described as conspiracy theories about the Bidens in Ukraine, according to CNN.

US official charged with leaking secrets to journalists

DiGenova & Toensing's Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova on a report that the FBI referred 14 employees to OPR for leaking classified information and how Democrats are demanding access to records from Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s time in George W. Bush’s White House.

A Defense Intelligence Agency official was arrested Wednesday and charged with leaking classified intelligence information to two journalists, the Justice Department said.
Henry Kyle Frese was arrested by the FBI when he arrived at work at a DIA facility in Virginia. He was charged with willfully disclosing national defense information.
Frese is alleged to have accessed at least five classified intelligence reports and provided top secret information about another country’s weapons systems to the reporter with whom he was having a relationship.
Frese has a top secret government security clearance.
The arrest is the latest in a series of prosecutions under the Trump administration of government workers accused of providing nonpublic information to journalists.
In 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions pledged to take a stand against leaks.
Neither reporter was identified by name in court documents, but an analysis of news articles and social media posts indicates they are Amanda Macias of CNBC and Courtney Kube of NBC News. Those posts include a photo of Macias and Frese on Instagram from 2017.
The Justice Department declined to provide any additional details about the classified information that was leaked, but the articles focused on China’s missile systems.
“Frese betrayed the trust placed in him by the American people — a betrayal that risked harming the national security of this country,” said Assistant Attorney General John Demers, who leads the Justice Department’s national security division.
Although officials would not rule out the possibility of bringing criminal charges against the journalists, the top prosecutor whose office is prosecuting the case said investigators are “focused on the leaker, not the journalist.”
It was not immediately clear whether Frese had a lawyer who could comment on his behalf. A message left by the associated Press on Frese’s cellphone was not immediately returned. Frese was expected to make an initial appearance in federal court in Virginia on Thursday.
Representatives for CNBC, NBC News and the Defense Intelligence Agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.

Elizabeth Warren Cartoons

Better polling means sharper scrutiny. Is Warren ready?

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — When Elizabeth Warren campaigned in Nevada in February, Abbie Peters was there. Energy and enthusiasm for the Massachusetts senator was not.

“It was early and she wasn’t as popular,” said Peters.

Nearly eight months later, Peters, a retiree from California, was back again to see Warren. The message hadn’t changed. But she felt like she was watching a different messenger. The crowd swelled with enthusiastic supporters, and Warren’s status near the top of the Democratic presidential field was affirmed.

“She gave pretty much the same speech, but it’s a good one and it’s authentic,” Peters said.

Still, Warren is quickly finding that her rapid ascent is accompanied by heightened scrutiny and criticism, from both President Donald Trump and her Democratic opponents. Her political allies and foes alike say Warren has appropriately sharp elbows and isn’t afraid to throw them — something she’ll likely increasingly have to do during the Democratic primary and in Twitter combat with Trump.

The latest examples came this week, when Warren was forced to defend a critical portion of the biographical story she tells on the campaign trail and a top Democratic challenger said that her health care plan would potentially alienate half the nation’s population.

With less than four months until the first votes in the Democratic nominating process are cast, Warren can anticipate that those criticisms will sharpen and accelerate.

“It’s a new phase for her, but if you’re the front-runner, all that means is everybody’s behind you and they want to be in front of you,” said Bill Miller, a longtime Texas political strategist who has worked for Republicans and Democrats. “You get their best shots, and you get the most shots.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, Warren’s chief competitor atop the primary polls, has seized on Warren’s support for “Medicare for All” universal health insurance, noting that she “has not indicated how she pays for it.”

So has Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who notes that the plan would eliminate choice for Americans who might prefer to stick with private insurance plans.

“I’m also committed to the idea that we can be bold and unified,” Buttigieg told The Associated Press. “But I also think that boldness doesn’t require jamming half of the American people.”

Buttigieg unveiled a prescription drug cost reduction proposal in a Monday op-ed in The Boston Globe, Warren’s hometown newspaper. He said voters should expect him to continue to make the contrast, likely at an influential union forum coming up in Iowa on Sunday, as well as at next week’s Democratic debate in Ohio.

“I’ve got a job to do to make sure that people understand the differences,” Buttigieg said.

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, meanwhile, questioned the legality of Warren’s signature wealth tax, which she’s planning to use to help pay for many of her most ambitious proposals if elected, including Medicare for All and expanded Social Security benefits.

“She’s talked about the wealth tax, but that’s been assigned so many different possible things and it’s not clear that it’s constitutional,” Bennet said in an interview Tuesday.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is competing with Warren for the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party and has refused to go after Warren, but some of his highest-profile supporters have. Actress Susan Sarandon noted that her candidate was “not someone who used to be a Republican,” reminding some of Warren only becoming a Democrat in 1996, when she was in her 40s.

Republicans have willingly joined in.

Warren’s taking a DNA test last year to show Native American ancestry backfired — while it showed distant tribal ancestry, it also sparked a rebuke of Warren from some Native Americans for attributing tribal membership to genetics. The controversy nearly derailed her campaign before it got started and she apologized for her past claims. Trump had derided her with the ethnic slur “Pocahontas” during his 2016 campaign and continues to do so.

On Tuesday, Warren stood by her account of being fired from a New Jersey teaching position five decades ago because she was pregnant. She was put on the defensive after a 2007 video surfaced — and was widely shared in conservative circles — in which she seemed to describe the change in her career more as a choice and without the claim that her pregnancy led to the loss of her job.

Others note that the “Two Income Trap,” the 2004 book Warren wrote with her daughter, argued in favor of allowing parents more freedom to choose the public schools they send their children to rather than being limited to their neighborhood, saying families overreaching to move into more expensive ZIP codes was a key driver for the insurmountable debt many took on. That’s a different kind of “school choice” than the voucher programs that use public funding for private and religious schools cheered by many conservatives — but is a distinction some may miss.

A national audience got a glimpse of Warren’s fighting skills during the Democratic debate in July. After former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland spent much of the evening criticizing Warren and Sanders about using “fairytale economics,” Warren shot back: “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do.”

There were also flashes while Warren was running for the Senate in 2012 against Republican incumbent Sen. Scott Brown, who two years earlier won a seat controlled for decades by Ted Kennedy.

Warren had just been denied a job running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She was packing up her apartment in Washington when Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List, stopped by and spoke to her for hours about running for office. Schriock recalled at the time that, for any Democrat challenging Brown, “this was not going to be a simple slam dunk.”

“I know folks now look back and go, ‘Massachusetts was an easy race.’ That was not the case in the moment, in that environment,” said Schriock. “We were dealing with the situation where we’d just lost Kennedy’s seat. Scott Brown was this attractive, charismatic Republican senator. Mitt Romney is getting ready to run for president.”

Brown tried to paint his opponent as an elitist from Harvard, calling her “Professor Warren” and arguing that she saw the Senate as a consolation prize.

“We knew that, running as a Republican in a state as blue as Massachusetts, you have to not only make voters like your candidate, you have to give them active reason to dislike your opponent,” said Colin Reed, who was Brown’s campaign spokesman. “It was a hard-fought race.”

Warren ultimately won by 7-plus percentage points.

Jeremy Hasson, a 26-year-old high school career counselor in New York, said Warren’s steady climb from also-ran to formability may leave her in a better position to fend off criticism.

“She’s so good at addressing root causes and not feeding into people’s traps,” said Hasson, who attended a Warren rally last month in Washington Square Park. “Even if she’s in the lead, she still has an underdog message where she can say, ‘I was behind once and I got here.’”

___

Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Hunter Woodall in New London, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.