Is today a good day for dinosaur news? Every day is a good day for dinosaur news. They lived then to make us happy now.

In case you don’t quite get the reference, for some years there was a moderately popular chain of Gas Stations owned by Sinclair Oil. Their logo was an Apatosaurus. I’m not sure there is any connection (and am much too lazy to look it up) but broadcast Television is likewise an extinct reptile of enormous size with two pea sized brains because the main one didn’t have the processing power to run the back legs.

If you have spent the last 200 Million years or so liquifying under a rock you might have missed the fact that Sinclair Broadcasting is to TV what IHeartRadio (Clear Channel) is to Radio. They own over 170 local stations covering about 2 thirds of all households in the United States.

Since 2017 they have formally been trying to acquire Tribune Media which only has 42 stations, but many are in metropolitan areas like Chicago and New York City Sinclair doesn’t already have service in.

As if rising from a 66% to 75% monopoly were not enough reason to be alarmed, Sinclair has a Teabagger/Trump Republican editorial policy which includes deliberately broadcasting “Fake News” out of the mouths of hitherto trusted (at least to be attacked by animals and stand outside in bad weather) local newscasters.

The “Fake News” must be covered. There are no exceptions to the policy.

But ek, you said it was a good day!

That’s because it probably won’t happen.

FCC sends Sinclair mega-deal to likely doom
By MARGARET HARDING MCGILL, Politico
07/16/2018

As originally proposed in May 2017, the $3.9 billion deal would see conservative-leaning Sinclair, already the largest U.S. TV station owner, gobble up 42 Tribune stations in key markets like New York and Chicago, adding to its existing footprint of more than 170 stations and giving the company access to nearly three-quarters of U.S. households.

But the regulatory review dragged on for more than a year, as Sinclair revised the deal several times, offering to sell off 21 stations in an effort to gain government approval. Critics took issue with some of the proposed sales, which were so-called sidecar arrangements that would allow Sinclair to keep a stake in the revenue and programming of the spun-off stations, as POLITICO reported on May 30. Another two of the sales would have been to a company with close ties to Sinclair.

Pai said “certain proposed divestitures” were a sticking point for the agency.

“Based on a thorough review of the record, I have serious concerns about the Sinclair/Tribune transaction,” the chairman said in the statement. “The evidence we’ve received suggests that certain station divestitures that have been proposed to the FCC would allow Sinclair to control those stations in practice, even if not in name, in violation of the law.”

FCC officials said one problematic deal was the plan to sell Chicago station WGN to Steven Fader, a Maryland business associate of Sinclair Executive Chairman David Smith who oversees car dealerships. Others that raised alarm were the deals to sell stations in Dallas and Houston to Cunningham Broadcasting, a company with close ties to the Smith family.

The FCC’s decision is a significant blow for Sinclair, which has been been a frequent target for Democrats and liberal groups disturbed by reports that it favors President Donald Trump in its coverage via “must-run” segments pumped to its network of stations.
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The Washington Post reported Sinclair “gave a disproportionate amount of neutral or favorable coverage to Trump during the campaign” while airing negative stories on Hillary Clinton. That followed POLITICO’s reporting on a boast by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner that the president’s campaign had struck a deal with the broadcast group for better media coverage. Sinclair disputed the characterization, saying it was an arrangement for extended sit-down interviews that was offered to both candidates.

Sinclair has also drawn fire for mandating its stations carry conservative content, including regular commentary from former Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn. Earlier this year, the company faced heavy criticism from Democratic lawmakers and others for directing local anchors to read a script on the threat of “fake news,” widely seen as a Trump-style broadside aimed at mainstream press outlets.

Critics ranging from congressional Democrats to Sinclair’s conservative media rivals like Newsmax have warned the Sinclair-Tribune merger would give too much power to a single company to control the airwaves. But Sinclair argued that broadcasters must get bigger to effectively compete in the modern media ecosystem.

Further complicating the merger’s prospects was the legal challenge to the FCC’s decision to reinstate the UHF discount. The discount gives broadcast companies the ability to reach up to 78 percent of U.S. television households without technically violating the 39 percent cap. Judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals expressed skepticism about the decision to bring back the loophole during oral arguments in April.

A simple tie-up would have seen the combined companies reach more than 72 percent of TV households. Under the deal structure Sinclair proposed most recently, with the 21 station sell-offs, the post-merger company would have reached about 59 percent of American TV households before factoring in the UHF discount. Critics said even that scaled-down deal would have given Sinclair an unfairly broad reach in light of the sidecar arrangements freeing the company to maintain close ties with certain divested stations.

Judge will temporarily halt deportations of reunited families
By TED HESSON, Politico
07/16/2018

A federal judge on Monday said he will issue a temporary halt to deportations of migrant parents who are reunited with their children.

U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw said during court proceedings in San Diego that he will stay deportations pending resolution of the issue.
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Justice Department attorney Scott Stewart said in court Monday that the Trump administration opposes delaying deportations and will file a briefing in response by July 23.

Sarah Fabian, another DOJ attorney in the case, suggested the stay of deportations could affect the process of reunifying families due to limited immigration detention space, but Sabraw rejected that idea.

“That’s not an option,” the judge said. “If space is an issue, then the government will have to make space.”

Sabraw excoriated the administration last week for its execution of his order to reunify migrant families who were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Trump administration faced a July 10 deadline to reunite 102 children under age 5 with their parents, but failed to reconnect 46 children due to security concerns and other logistical hurdles. Under Sabraw’s order, the administration must reunite a broader pool of more than 2,500 separated children by July 26.

Sabraw on Friday complained that HHS officials seemed to be using safety concerns as “cover” to avoid meeting the late-July deadline.
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In a filing Friday, (Chris) Meekins (Deputy Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response for HHS) argued a streamlined reunification process ordered by Sabraw “materially increases the risk of harm to children.”

Sabraw on Monday called the declaration “deeply troubling” and said it seemed to ignore that children had been separated from parents at the border and instead treated them as typical unaccompanied minors who arrived alone.

“Mr. Meekins, apparently, wants to hold children for months,” Sabraw said, calling such a decision “not in the best interest of children.”

During his court testimony Monday, (Jonathan) White (Deputy Director for Children’s Programs at the Office of Refugee Resettlement) said that ORR had identified 2,551 separated children in its custody ages 5 to 17. Of those, the refugee office has matched 2,480 to parents, which leaves the parentage of 71 still undetermined.

According to White, 1,609 parents of those children remain in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He said 1,317 have cleared ORR parentage and security checks.

ICE is conducting its own security checks after ORR, according to White. As of this morning, 918 parents had completed the ICE process, he said.

Fifty-one parents failed the ICE check and 348 have pending clearances, White said.

In its filing Monday, the ACLU argued that the situation of migrant parents has grown more complex in recent weeks, which required the judge to halt deportations.

In June, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an immigration law decision that restricts asylum eligibility for victims of “private violence,” including domestic violence and gang violence.

“As a result of the Attorney General’s (patently unlawful) asylum decision, it will be that much more difficult to advise families about whether a child will ultimately prevail in his or her asylum claim,” the ACLU said in the filing, “or instead will spend years by themselves in the United States fighting their case in the immigration courts, only to be removed at the end of the day.”

Vive Le Quatorze Juillet!

(An Annual Tradition)

The socially redeeming aspect of golf lies in the vast number of lawyers and bankers and managers who play it, and when you think of the damage they would do if they were at the job instead, you can see why golf courses are a wise investment for any municipality.

So Trump is at Turnberry filming an Emoluments Clause breaking Infomercial on yet another looming bankruptcy. One can, I suppose, take a small amount of satisfaction that his tiny hands and feeble mind are not fixed on some whim of greater destructive capacity.

In Trump’s U.K. Visit, Some See ‘Infomercial’ for Money-Losing Golf Resort
By Katie Rogers, The New York Times
July 14, 2018

Mr. Trump was ensconced at Trump Turnberry, the luxury Scottish resort where he is staying, from members of the American news media who traveled with him here — but not from British journalists, who captured protesters on a nearby beach shouting, “No Trump, no K.K.K., no racist U.S.A.” at him as he teed off on Saturday.

The group chanted across windswept grasslands and a protective buffer of dozens of law enforcement officials, some of whom were on horseback. According to footage captured by the BBC, the president appeared to wave at the crowd before turning back to his golf game.
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Before arriving in Scotland — the birthplace of his mother, as well as that of Mr. Trump’s preferred pastime — the president managed repeatedly to plug Turnberry, one of two Scottish resorts that bear his name, as he dealt with some of the most pressing diplomacy problems facing his administration to date.

It is a tactic that has alarmed ethics watchdogs, who say he is using his presidential platform to promote a resort that, according to financial filings, has been a burden on the family business.

While the president has blazed a chaotic streak through Europe this past week, Turnberry has received special recognition amid other Trump-issued sound bites that analysts say have undermined the United States’ relationships with close NATO allies.

At a hastily arranged news conference in Brussels, when asked to discuss his message for Britain on its exit from the European Union, Mr. Trump said he had none — a thought he would later undermine in stunning fashion in an interview splashed on the cover of the British tabloid The Sun. Then, Mr. Trump wove in a reference to Turnberry, on breathtaking bluffs and cliffs on the western coast of Scotland, calling it “magical” and “one of my favorite places.”
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Mr. Trump said he would be taking calls and meetings ahead of the planned gathering with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland. But around the time he hit one of the resort’s two golf courses on Saturday, his official account began posting on Twitter.

In two tweets, he blamed the Obama administration, not Russia, for the hacking and again suggested that a Democratic “deep state” was afoot.
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He also plugged the Turnberry golf course again: “The weather is beautiful,” he wrote on Twitter, “and this place is incredible!”

Ethics experts tend to be cynical about the president’s sentimental references to his resort: His arrival at Turnberry marks the 169th day during his presidency that he has visited a property owned, managed or branded by the Trump Organization. Financial records show the resort has lost money since Mr. Trump purchased it in 2014.

“I view this as kind of a forced subsidy of an infomercial for his properties,” Norman L. Eisen, the chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in an interview on Friday. “He’s attempting to utilize his trip to get beneficial P.R.”

Before Mr. Trump left for Scotland on Friday, he again brought up Turnberry during a news conference in England with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain.

“I was opening Turnberry the day before Brexit,” Mr. Trump said, “and all they wanted to talk about was Brexit, and I said, ‘I think Brexit would happen,’ and it did happen.”

Mr. Trump, in fact, arrived at Turnberry the day after Britons voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, but he spoke about his resort for 15 minutes before he took questions on Brexit at a news conference. He also expressed skepticism when asked if the referendum would send shock waves through the global markets.

“Look, if the pound goes down, they’re going to do more business,” Mr. Trump said then. “When the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly.”

Although Mr. Trump has claimed to have spent at least 200 million pounds, about $264 million, on Turnberry to buy and renovate it since 2014 — a figure that has not been verified independently — the course has yet to turn a profit.

In fact, the Turnberry operation has lost tens of millions of pounds since he purchased it, filings in Britain show: about £17 million in 2016, the last year for which such comprehensive records are available. For 2017, Mr. Trump’s government ethics filing discloses only how much revenue the course generated — $20.4 million — not whether it had earned a profit.

This is not the first time that Mr. Trump has visited a Trump-owned resort while traveling in his capacity as president. On a 13-day trip through Asia, the president swung by the Trump International Hotel Waikiki resort for a 10-minute visit.

“The president stopped by the Trump Hotel on his way to the airport,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement at the time. “It has been a tremendously successful project, and he wanted to say hello and thank you to the employees for all their hard work.”

An analysis of that trip by The Associated Press showed that Mr. Trump’s stopover cost American taxpayers almost $141,000, or more than $100 a minute. The president’s hotel stop itself cost taxpayers $1,000.
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Mr. (Norman) Eisen, the chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, takes a more skeptical view. He serves as co-counsel in a lawsuit accusing the president of violating constitutional anticorruption clauses intended to limit his receipt of government-bestowed benefits, or emoluments.

He sees the Trump family’s efforts this past week as part a broader and problematic effort to use the presidency to gin up interest in the property.

“Through this trip to Turnberry,” Mr. Eisen said, “the president is forcing his foreign hosts and the United States to spend enormous amounts of money so that he can get free advertising for his resort.”

“He’s the master of earned media,” Mr. Eisen added. “It’s an important part of the way he won the presidency, and that’s what he’s doing here.”