Kimmel is back but not quite, Canada no longer an honest broker and you paid for it...
Some ABC affiliates won't put him back on air.
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Jimmy Kimmel will be back on the air Tuesday night, but not on all stations.
ABC made the announcement Monday and it was immediately met with pushback from a major affiliate, Sinclair Broadcasting. If you recall, when this story broke last week, I said this was more about affiliates being angry than the Trump administration and it looks like that is still the case.
As a friend has long said, “You can listen to BLill now or catch up with everyone else next week!”
So, back to the news. Here is the full statement from Disney.
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive," the company said in a statement. "We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday."
Most local ABC stations are not owned by Disney, they are owned by other companies and Sinclair Broadcasting with 30 affiliates is one of the biggest, they won’t be putting Kimmel back on air just yet.
“Beginning Tuesday night, Sinclair will be preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! across our ABC affiliate stations and replacing it with news programming. Discussions with ABC are ongoing as we evaluate the show’s potential return.”
This all goes back to Kimmel’s false claim just over a week ago that the killer of Charlie Kirk was MAGA and his decision to use Kirk’s assassination to mock and attack Donald Trump. ABC had asked Kimmel to apologize, he refused and doubled down with a more inflammatory monologue and that is when ABC pulled his show and suspended it indefinitely.
I never thought Kimmel was being fired over this, Disney wanted to cool things down and clear the air, putting Kimmel on air last week to further inflame things would have been the wrong decision. The Trump administration should not have threatened anyone via the FCC, but Disney made the decision last week based on business concerns and affiliate pushback.
Disney stock is down about 3% since all of this started. I’ll have more to say on Kimmel and how poorly his show has been performing later.
First though, as they used to say in TV, a word from our sponsor, and it’s a political word, so pay attention.
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Canada is no longer an honest broker…
An honest broker, that is how Canada’s foreign policy establishment liked to view itself and Canada’s role in the world, especially in the Middle East. We can’t claim that now since there is no doubt that we have chosen sides and we have chosen the wrong side.
When Stephen Harper was PM, Liberals would invoke the honest broker image and say that under Harper, Canada had become too close with Israel. Now, there is no doubt that Canada is on the side of the Palestinians and is openly hostile to Israel.
That so much of the movement on this front happened in the wake of October 7 and the horrific terror attacks is deeply disturbing for me.
At a conference in New York on Monday, Carney made his announcement in public.
He says he is doing this in the context of the Israeli government saying there will be no Palestinian State. What about Hamas saying there will be no Israel? That they will commit October 7 over and over again? That there will be no peace for Israel?
We would all love for the two state solution that has been on the books since the 1940s to come to fruition. That would require the other side to accept Israel’s right to exist.
The wars in 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, the ongoing violence and terror attacks over the past three decades are proof that the Palestinian side has rejected peace again and again. They rejected peace and walked away from ceasefire negotiations immediately after it was announced that Canada, the U.K., France and others would recognize a Palestinian State.
Prime Minister Carney says this is about ensuring peace, I fear his actions make peace less likely.
Still in New York, Carney met with the President of Kenya yesterday. Today he will meet with the PM of Barbados, trransitional leadership from Haiti, the Premier of China, Li Qiang, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
He will finish the day at a reception hosted by Donald Trump.
You paid for it…
Ahead of the budget, coming out on November 4, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is pointing out that there is a ton to cut in Ottawa. In a must read column published in the Toronto Sun, Franco Terrazzano outlined some outrageous spending, and remember, you paid for all of this.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council takes more than $1 billion from taxpayers every year. It spent $20,000 studying the gender politics of Peruvian rock music, $105,000 “tracking the birth, life and death” of a grocery cart and $50,000 studying the “affective experience of sexual and erotic video games.”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more that he details in the piece, give it a read and share it.
