Hasta La Gadget!

If President Donald Trump is in need of an ego boost on Saturday, Twitter may not be the place to find it.

The president was slapped with a scalding reality check, compliments of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), after suggesting his supporters have their own rally.

“It would be the biggest of them all!” Trump proclaimed on Twitter Saturday.

Exciting idea, except that Trump had a rally just last month, for Inauguration Day, as Sanders reminded him.

“They did. It wasn’t,” Sanders smartly snapped. 

Sanders, backing up his pointed statement, shared side-by-side photos showing Trump’s patchy inauguration crowd compared with what appears to be the Women’s March on Washington, which took place a day later. 

Crowd-counting experts have said the women’s march drew three times more people than Trump’s swearing-in.

Adding some sizzle to Sanders’ burn, Trump’s tweet got 83,000 likes and 19,000 retweets as of Saturday afternoon, which may seem “yuge,” but not compared with Sanders, whose tweet earned 152,000 likes and 61,000 retweets.

Ouch.

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ATLANTA ― Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez was elected chair of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday after a contentious race that highlighted divisions within the party.

Perez bested Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only other candidate remaining in the race after an inconclusive first round of voting. The final tally was 235 for Perez and 200 for Ellison. 

Perez will now begin the work of rebuilding a Democratic Party battered by historic electoral losses as it is undertakes the task of confronting President Donald Trump and his agenda. 

He also will have to win the trust of those who supported Ellison, his chief opponent. Many progressive activists who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the 2016 presidential primary viewed Ellison’s candidacy as a way to secure a foothold in the party after Sanders’ defeat.

Perez immediately moved to appoint Ellison deputy DNC chair and accepted a hug from his rival on the conference room stage. “I’m asking you to give everything you’ve got to support Chairman Perez,” Ellison told his supporters.

Perez bashed Trump and the “know-nothing movement,” and vowed to lead Democrats to victory against the president in 2020. 

“We are one family, and I know we will leave here united today, no doubt about that,” Perez said. “We are indeed the party that turns hardship into hope. We are the party that turns doubts into dreams.”

Perez’s supporters cited his management experience, rather than his policy views or association with Obama.

“When I look at the job of the chairman, it’s a very complicated position … Ultimately, I think Tom’s experience managing large organizations was one of the factors that really led me there,” Missouri DNC member Brian Wahby said after endorsing Perez on Friday. “Any of these people would be fantastic, and it was a tough, tough decision.”

Idaho Democratic Party executive director Sally Boynton Brown, U.S. Air Force veteran Sam Ronan, media strategist Jehmu Greene and attorney Peter Peckarsky withdrew after the first round of voting on Saturday. Ronan and Peckarsky endorsed Ellison, while Greene threw her support to Perez. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg dropped out just before voting began, without endorsing anyone.

The party chair’s main role is to raise funds, recruit candidates and represent the party to the media. The job typically is neither coveted nor influential when a party controls the White House and the president’s choice takes precedence.

But when a party is out of power, as Democrats are now, the race for chairmanship reflects competition among rival factions over how best to re-orient the party for future elections. In addition to losing control of the White House in 2016 and failing to retake either house of Congress, Democrats have lost almost 1,000 state legislature seats since 2009.

To complicate matters, the Democratic Party is divided along ideological lines. Some progressives who backed Sanders in the presidential primary remain convinced that the DNC favored Hillary Clinton, and that the party failed to channel Sanders’ populist economic message in the campaign against Trump.

Shortly after Trump’s victory, Sanders and prominent Clinton supporters like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) coalesced behind Ellison’s candidacy in an apparent effort to unite the party.

Perez entered the race in mid-December, reportedly after aides to then-President Barack Obama encouraged him. He has proven a formidable adversary for Ellison, picking up support from key Obama administration figures like former Vice President Joe Biden and former Attorney General Eric Holder.

Perez pitched his federal executive experience, but he drew criticism for his public support of the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement while serving in Obama’s Cabinet. Like Ellison, Perez has a stellar reputation in progressive circles, leading some liberals to downplay the significance of a Perez victory.

Ellison, a congressman since 2007, pointed to his electoral success and his previous career as an organizer. He was hobbled early in the race by concerns about his past ties to the Nation of Islam, and leaked audio of controversial remarks he made about Israel at a 2010 fundraiser.

Over the course of a race that spanned over three months, all of the DNC candidates agreed the party desperately needs new, innovative leadership.

And across ideological lines, state party chairs and operatives have criticized the Obama administration’s formation of Organizing for Action, a fundraising and organizing arm that many Democrats say undermined party infrastructure. They also lament previous chairs’ lack of transparency and failure to attend to the needs of state and local parties.

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BlackBerry isn’t dead, and the new BlackBerry KeyOne is aiming to underscore that, not least by giving physical keyboard lovers a new fix for their addiction. Unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2017 today, the smartphone previously known as the BlackBerry Mercury has a QWERTY keyboard underneath a 4.5-inch capacitive touchscreen. Like other recent BlackBerry devices, it runs Android rather than … Continue reading

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George Clooney was in Paris on Friday for the 42nd César awards, France’s version of The Oscars, where he was presented with an Honorary César for his body of work. 

On stage with actor Jean Dujardin, who presented the award, the actor at first thanked his wife, Amal Clooney, and the French Academy, before turning to the state of things in the U.S.

“As citizens of the world, we’re going to have to work harder and harder not to let hate win,” he said, later adding, “I was thinking about Edward R. Murrow as we find ourselves nostalgic for when America was great and when the news wasn’t fake.”

Clooney then weaved together quotes from one of the broadcast legend’s most famous telecasts, when Murrow famously criticized Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) on CBS’ “See It Now” on March 9, 1954, as the senator ramped up his anti-communist activities.

Said Clooney on Friday:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must not walk in fear of one another. We must not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. If we dig deep in our history and remember that we are not descendants from fearful people, we proclaim ourselves indeed as we are the defenders of freedom wherever it continues to exist in the world. But we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of this president have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it—and rather successfully.

Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Good night, and good luck.

Cassius, in this instance, refers to the character from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Clooney also swapped in a few words to bring Murrow’s words into the modern era, switching out the journalist’s “the junior Senator from Wisconsin” for “this president.”

Edward R. Murrow’s famous criticism of  Joseph R. McCarthy

Clooney is a known fan of Murrow’s career, as he wrote, directed and starred in 2005’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” a film that followed the tension between Murrow and McCarthy in the 1950s. 

The actor has repeatedly taken President Donald Trump to task in recent months. Just earlier this week, he called Trump a “Hollywood elitist” who collected “$120,000 a year in his Screen Actors Guild pension fund.”

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