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Angie’s List Cancels $40 Million 1000 Jobs Indiana Expansion Over Anti-Gay ‘Religious Freedom’ Law

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Popular local business review and search site Angie’s List is canceling its expansion plans in response to Indiana’s “religious freedom” law.

Since the year after its 1995 founding, Angie’s List has been headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. The $315 million corporation which lets users review local businesses, especially home improvement professionals, has been planning a $40 million renovation of its own, moving its headquarters across town and adding 1000 new jobs over five years.

But thanks to state lawmakers and Republican Governor Mike Pence‘s new Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, those expansion plans have been canceled.

“Angie’s List is open to all and discriminates against none and we are hugely disappointed in what this bill represents,” CEO Bill Oesterle said in a statement today, adding, the expansion is “on hold until we fully understand the implications of the freedom restoration act on our employees, both current and future.”

UPDATE: 
How’s This For Proof Mike Pence Is Lying When He Says His Anti-Gay Bill Isn’t About Discrimination?

The company’s statement noted it “will begin reviewing alternatives for the expansion of its headquarters immediately.”

The IndyStar adds that Angie’s list “hinted that moving some parts of the company out of state is ‘on the table.'”

Oesterle has said in the past that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, signed Thursday by Gov. Mike Pence, was non-inclusive and would make it harder for the state’s companies to attract top talent.

Oesterle is well known in Republican and business circles, and he was former Gov. Mitch Daniels’ campaign manager in 2004.

The decision by Angie’s List to pull back its investment in Indiana is part of a huge and growing negative response from businesses and other financial interests across the country that do business or are based in Indiana, and other public individuals and entities, including the world’s largest and most-respected corporation, Apple, Inc., the City of San Francisco, the White House, Broadway’s Audra McDonald, $4 billion software firm Salesforce, $50 million annual gaming convention Gen Con, Fortune 500 member Cummins, Eskenazi Health, Eli Lilly and Co., Yelp, Hillary Clinton, George Takei, Pat McAfee, Jason Collins, Ashton Kutcher, Miley Cyrus, James Van Der Beek, Sophia Bush, Dustin Lance Black, Mara Wilson, Jack Antonoff, the Mayor of Indianapolis, and the State of Indiana’s own tourism board.

 

Image by WFIU Public Radio via Flickr and a CC license
Hat Tip: TJ

 

 

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News

Trump Teases 2028 ‘Campaign’ With New Slogan

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President Donald Trump continues to tease out a possible 2028 run, despite the constitutional prohibition on a third term. On Friday, the 79-year old unveiled a new “slogan,” and his new name for Trump Republican voters.

Trump has acknowledged the constitutional block on a third term, recently telling reporters that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a constitutional attorney, told him a third term is not allowed — a fact he appeared to accept.

But Trump on Friday afternoon posted an AI meme of a silver-haired, older-looking Donald Trump, holding a campaign sign that reads — not “Make America Great Again” — but, “Trump 2028, Yes!”

READ MORE: ‘For Sale’: Trump Torched Over Report He’d OK Russia Controlling Parts of Ukraine

The post, on his Truth Social website, also says, “Trumplicans!”

“There is a new word for a TRUMP REPUBLICAN, which is almost everyone,” he recently wrote. “It is, TEPUBLICAN??? Or, TPUBLICAN???”

Apparently, “Trumplicans” won out.

Health care activist Melanie D’Arrigo remarked on Wednesday that “Trump is workshopping names for his cult, while Americans struggle to afford the rising costs of groceries, healthcare and housing.”

Reporting on Trump’s musings, TIME on Thursday noted that his new MAGA moniker comes “amid high-profile divisions within the MAGA base.”

Were Trump to run for a third term, he would be 82 on Election Day in 2028.

READ MORE: Trump Order to Keep ‘Jalopy’ Coal Plant Open Costs Taxpayers Over $100 Million

 

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‘For Sale’: Trump Torched Over Report He’d OK Russia Controlling Parts of Ukraine

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President Donald Trump is under fire over a report that claims he is proposing that the U.S. recognize Russian control of parts of Ukraine, including Crimea, which Russia has unlawfully annexed, as a means to end the war.

“The Telegraph understands that Donald Trump has sent his peace envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner to make the direct offer to Vladimir Putin in Moscow,” the news outlet reported. “The plan to recognize territory, which breaks US diplomatic convention, is likely to go ahead despite concerns among Ukraine’s European allies.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin “on Thursday said Washington’s legal recognition of Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as Russian territory would be one of the key issues in negotiations over the US president’s peace plan,” according to The Telegraph.

READ MORE: Trump Order to Keep ‘Jalopy’ Coal Plant Open Costs Taxpayers Over $100 Million

Critics are blasting President Trump.

Shaun Pinner, a former British soldier who served as a contracted Marine fighting in Ukraine’s armed forces, responded to the report:

“I’ve lived through the cost of losing ground. I’ve seen the bodies, the destroyed homes, and I’ve been tortured by Russia like so many others. Land is never ‘just land.’ It’s people. Families. Lives shattered.”

“So yes, watching Trump casually bargain away territory that isn’t even his to give feels like a deep betrayal,” he added. “It’s a lesson I wish none of us had to learn the hard way, and one far too many are being forced to relive again because one of our so-called allies is now suggesting we reward genocide.”

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Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, remarked, “Trump would be rewarding imperial conquest, thereby encouraging other autocrats to do so, resulting in a very unstable world.”

Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, co-founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative, issued a warning:

“If the US recognizes territory taken by force, just replace ‘leader of the free world’ with ‘for sale’. Xi can come up with more cash than Putin for Trump and his pals to do the same for Taiwan.”

Marko Mihkelson, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Estonian Parliament, remarked, “If this is true, then we have a major problem, Houston.”

READ MORE: Republicans Scuttled Trump Health Care Fix Because They Felt ‘Left Out’: Report

 

Image via Reuters

 

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Trump Order to Keep ‘Jalopy’ Coal Plant Open Costs Taxpayers Over $100 Million

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A Trump administration order to keep an aging and unneeded Michigan coal-fired power plant open and online reportedly is costing taxpayers about $615,000 per day, or $113 million to date. Closing the plant would save taxpayers about $640 million by 2040.

“The Trump administration in May ordered utility giant Consumers Energy to keep the 63-year-old JH Campbell coal plant in western Michigan, about 100 miles north-east of Chicago, online just as it was being retired,” according to The Guardian.

“The costs of unnecessarily running this jalopy coal plant just continue to mount,” Michael Lenoff, an attorney with Earthjustice, which is suing over the order, told The Guardian.

READ MORE: ‘Total Authoritarian Population Control’: Experts Sound Alarm on Trump’s Immigrant Attack

President Donald Trump signed a national energy emergency order on his first day in office this year, rolling back regulations.

In court documents, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said that the administration’s latest order is “arbitrary and illegal.”

Consumers Energy, the operator of the plant, did not ask the Trump administration for the order to keep the coal plant running, and the Trump administration did not consult local regulators, a spokesperson for the Michigan public service commission (MPSC), told the Guardian in May.

“The unnecessary recent order … will increase the cost of power for homes and businesses in Michigan and across the midwest,” the chair of the MPSC, Dan Scripps, said in a statement at the time.

Reporting on what it called Trump’s “pro-fossil fuel agenda,” The Guardian in January quoted the president:

“We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it – let me use it,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”

READ MORE: Republicans Scuttled Trump Health Care Fix Because They Felt ‘Left Out’: Report

 

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