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Tag Archives: courting
Thailand is courting Indian weddings
Thailand hopes to boost its tourism revenue by targeting high-spending groups like Indian wedding parties and honeymooners, a senior tourism official said.
Famous for its white-sand beaches and nightlife, Thailand hopes to tap into “pent-up demand” from the multi-billion-dollar Indian wedding industry, Tourism Authority of Thailand deputy governor Siripakorn Cheawsamoot told Reuters in an interview this week.
“Data from the last two years showed that many Indian couples got married, but couldn’t find honeymoon locations … or held back on getting married because they wanted to have their reception overseas including in Thailand,” he said on Tuesday.
Foreign tourism revenue from January to August 2022 came in at 186 billion baht ($5 billion US) from 4.2 million visitors, and 10 million arrivals are expected for the full year.
The Southeast Asian country relies heavily on tourism as a driver of economic growth. Foreign arrivals plummeted to just 428,000 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with a record of nearly 40 million in 2019 when tourism made up 12% of GDP.
Now, having dropped most pandemic-related restrictions, the government is targeting revenue of $11 billion in the second half of 2022.
Indian weddings in Thailand can last up to a week and include everything from event planning to catering, decoration and transportation.
About 60% of Indian destination weddings in Thailand were those of residents of India, while the remainder were from overseas Indian families, he said, so Thai tourism representatives in Mumbai and New Delhi are expanding partnerships with wedding planners.
Siripakron expects tourists will be spending at least 48,000 baht per trip this year and in 2023 he hopes that number will rise to 50,000 baht per trip, helped by other high-spending segments like medical tourism and executives choosing to work remotely in Thailand.
The government will also extend some tourist visas from 15 to 30 days starting in October as traveler behavior changes to favor longer stays due to expensive flights and low availability, he said.
Laid-Off HBO Max Execs Reveal Warner Bros. Discovery Is Killing Off Diversity and Courting ‘Middle America’
Former HBO Max executives say the streaming service has been left with few people of color to oversee its diverse slate of programming as Warner Bros. Discovery continues its ongoing corporate reshuffling.
The platform reportedly laid off close to 70 people this month. That includes the entire teams overseeing unscripted, kids and family, and international content, according to two former HBO Max execs who asked not to be named.
Those three divisions, responsible for buying shows from production companies and creators and working closely with them during production, are now completely gone.
One former employee says as many as 13 people of color previously in charge of developing shows like The Gordita Chronicles and the Spanish-language docuseries Menudo: Forever Young have been let go, likely influencing the types of shows and movies that are greenlit moving forward. Among those laid off are Jen Kim, an Asian woman who served as the senior vice president of the international team, and Kaela Barnes, a Black woman who worked under Kim.
“I don’t think anyone knows just how white the staff is,” one former executive told The Daily Beast.
Former HBO Max staffers say there are barely any non-white people left in the upper ranks of content, with one naming Joey Chavez, an executive vice president of drama, as one of the few people of color still there. Because HBO Max and the original HBO channel operate somewhat independently, one former executive conceded that “there may be one Black woman on the HBO side. Maybe.”
The layoffs have “amplified the lack of diversity at HBO,” another former executive told The Daily Beast. “HBO is the most homogenous part of this umbrella. Instead of trying to figure out how to integrate some of the [Max] executives into HBO, they just made this sweeping cut of three divisions: kids, family, and international. A lot of Black and brown people lost their jobs.”
Ever since parent company Warner Bros. merged with Discovery earlier this year, employees at Warner have grappled with the changing values of the newly created company. Discovery CEO David Zaslav was charged with helping Warner crawl out of a $50 billion hole. He came in like a wrecking ball, tearing up CNN’s $300 million streaming service CNN+ and vowing to pull the Warner-owned news channel away from “advocacy” journalism.
More changes have come in the past couple of weeks.
Earlier this month, it was announced that Batgirl, the $90 million film planned for HBO Max starring Afro-Latina actress Leslie Grace, would be shelved completely in favor of a tax write-off. Over the weekend, CNN media correspondent and host Brian Stelter, a frequent target of right-wing criticism, was fired from the network.
Former Warner employees believe these changes are just as much about business as they are about reshaping the ideological perception of Warner properties. It all points to the same end, they say: A rejection of left-wing or highly diverse content in favor of more homogenous, Middle America-friendly fare. The lack of diversity in content staff might just make that goal easier.
“HBO is the most homogenous part of this umbrella. Instead of trying to figure out how to integrate some of the [Max] executives into HBO, they just made this sweeping cut of three divisions: kids, family, and international. A lot of Black and brown people lost their jobs.”
In a statement to The Daily Beast, HBO highlighted shows like Euphoria, Rap Sh!t, A Black Lady Sketch Show and Los Espookys, all of which are led by diverse characters.
“HBO and HBO Max have always shown a commitment to diverse programming and storytellers, and always will,” the company said.
An internal graphic comparing the audiences of Discovery+ and HBO Max showed a stark demographic difference between the two streamers. Where HBO Max is popular with diverse groups, single people, and drivers of hybrid cars, Discovery+ is popular with white, married people who drive SUVs, minivans, and “traveling buses.” HBO Max viewers are on TikTok and Instagram, while Discovery+ viewers use social media platforms Facebook and Twitter, with the added caveat, “if any.” HBO Max viewers have no kids. Discovery+ viewers are either “empty nesters” or have grandchildren. Discovery may be trying to pull HBO into its orbit as it focuses on what it does best.
HBO Max’s reality offerings presented an obvious sticking point for the new bosses. Where Discovery properties like TLC and HGTV send camera crews out to film what they can find, HBO Max’s offerings are more carefully crafted. They’re sometimes buoyed by stars like Selena Gomez or Steph Curry, who have the power to command big paychecks, and they’re noticeably sleeker, with smoother edits and more complicated camera set-ups adding to their budgets.
One former exec describes Discovery+ as a “more general audience platform that doesn’t have the specificity that HBO Max was tailored to. I think Discovery is just a very ‘all’ audience, [they] don’t wanna make things that are political, topical, alienate Middle America—more Chip and Joanna,” they said, referring to the home renovation show Fixer Upper: Welcome Home hosted by Chip and Joanna Gaines.
“If David Zaslav had his wish, he would just program Chip and Joanna all day long,” the executive said. “There was just a massive, ‘We don’t need you. You’re not offering the things we’re focused on.’”
The change in perspective could also partly explain why so many titles have recently disappeared from HBO Max’s platform. Our sources agree that the removals are mostly related to money. The company can claim a tax break for the costs associated with certain shows as long as it promises to stop profiting off them, which means taking them down altogether.
“They’re canceling a lens of perspective that I don’t think exists when you look at Discovery-branded shows,” one former staffer said.
Speaking of the company’s plans to combine HBO Max and Discovery+ into one giant streaming service in the near future, the laid-off exec said: “Don’t be surprised if there’s a new name for the platform.”
Overall, there’s a sense that HBO Max’s executives of color were just another casualty in the company’s quest to get itself out of debt, content quality be damned.
“In terms of people seeing themselves reflected, whether it’s ethnic or LGBTQ, when you have people who are diverse, the lens with which they evaluate [content] factors in things that I think my white colleagues just don’t think about,” one former executive said.
“It’s deep,” said another. “What are they going to do with this disproportionate amount of people of color that were let go? They need to replace them in some capacity. Or do they not care? That’s what we’ve been told, that they just don’t care.”
Pence walks tightrope between owning Jan. 6 role and courting Trump voters
In Nashville, meanwhile, Christian conservatives will gather for the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference that’s a traditional stop for emerging presidential hopefuls, especially candidates rooted in the movement like Pence. When Pence appeared at the group’s event last year, he was booed and heckled with calls of “traitor.”
Pence’s decision to skip both highlights his challenge as he positions himself to take on Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024. Advisers say the former vice president stands by his actions on Jan. 6 but doesn’t want to be known for attacking Trump like Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), who lost his primary on Tuesday after voting to impeach Trump, or Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who is leading the Jan. 6 committee’s most aggressive broadsides against the former president.
“The way he views it is, he did his duty, he doesn’t need to talk about it more,” Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “He doesn’t want to re-litigate the past. He believes that voters want to look forward, not backwards.”
Short said he doesn’t believe Pence’s actions before and during Jan. 6 will be a political liability for Pence in the long run, though he said there were people who questioned Pence over the decision.
“In certain circles, there’s a lot of admiration, and in certain circles, there’s a, ‘Let’s don’t talk about it, we love you for all you did, but it’s uncomfortable for all of us,’ ” Short said. “History has a way of sorting out truth, and I think more and more people will come to appreciate what he did that day. I can’t tell you exactly when that happens, but I think over time, it’s to his benefit.”
But Thursday’s hearing could complicate that posture, whether Pence likes it or not.
A committee aide said Wednesday that the hearing will be divided in four major parts: the emergence of the theory that Pence could unilaterally reject President Biden’s electors; how the theory was rejected by Pence and his advisers; the pressure campaign applied on Pence driven by the former president; and how that campaign directly contributed to the insurrection and endangered Pence’s life.
The hearings have already highlighted tensions between Trump and Pence, as in the prime-time opener last week when Cheney quoted unspecified testimony saying Trump expressed support for rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” saying they “had the right idea” and that Pence “deserved it.” (Trump has denied saying, “Hang Mike Pence.”)
Pence resisted appearing before the committee himself, believing it would not be helpful and was not a good forum for him to appear, advisers said. But he accepted his aides, including Short, would talk and blessed their cooperation.
In a January deposition, Short described Pence’s demeanor on Jan. 6 and his interactions with Trump. The committee is likely to use video clips from Short’s testimony. Thursday’s hearing will also feature live testimony from Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob, who spoke in his deposition about an Oval Office meeting between Pence, Trump and others on Jan. 4, 2021, in which attorney John Eastman outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency.
Pence has not looked for opportunities to attack Trump directly, but he has defended himself when taking heat from Trump and his allies. Several people who have spoken to him privately say he has no plans to attack Trump for some of his more incendiary actions in office and sees no political lane in being explicitly critical of Trump.
“President Trump is wrong,” Pence said in February at a Federalist Society meeting in Florida. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
Pence has not spoken to Trump in more than a year and rebuffed initial invitations to visit him at Mar-a-Lago, advisers said. A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Pence has told others he may run against Trump, and allies have pushed for an announcement early next year. He has taken an aggressive travel schedule to early 2024 states, particularly South Carolina and Iowa.
Early polls of the 2024 Republican field consistently show Pence trailing Trump and other potential candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Such surveys are not reliable predictors this far out from an election, but they could indicate that Pence may struggle to find a strong base of support.
His case to voters is that he supported Trump but did not have the power to do what Trump wanted. He has given this explanation when asked by donors and activists, as recently as his trip to a crisis pregnancy center in South Carolina last month, according to a person who heard his comments. Pence is not negative about Trump in these private conversations, this person said.
“He’s been asked in a few places here and there what his take is on it, and he generally just said, ‘The vice president has a ceremonial role there. I had no constitutional authority to do that,’ ” said Josh Kimbrell, a state senator from South Carolina who has organized trips for Pence there and accompanies him around the state. “We’ve been at eight events together, and of the eight events we’ve been at, it’s maybe come up four times. It hasn’t been a dominant topic.”
Some of his advisers note that Trump, since leaving office, has not lit into Pence as viciously as he has some other former advisers such as former attorney general William P. Barr or former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, and that Trump’s harshest words for Pence have come from a spokesman rather than the former president himself. Pence often praises the “Trump-Pence agenda.”
“Mike Pence clearly delineates between being proud of the policies he helped deliver for those four years, and he sees that as separate from what he was asked and pressured to do post-election,” said Tim Phillips, a Republican operative and Pence ally. “He is proud of the policies he helped implement and he’s proud of what he did in that period after the election. He separates those things.”
Pence has also joined other Republicans in criticizing Democrats and the media for focusing too much on Jan. 6. The adviser said Pence’s team believes Republican voters are becoming less interested in the 2020 election, and that the residual anger from that day toward Pence has waned. He has found that in visiting early 2024 states, he doesn’t get asked about the topic as often.
Pence only briefly mentioned the 2020 election, for instance, at a campaign rally last month for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. That appearance was another way for him to establish his independence from Trump without attacking him directly, since Trump was backing an unsuccessful challenge by former senator David Perdue in the GOP primary.
Pence’s emphasis on campaigning with 2022 candidates and highlighting Republican priorities — he just returned from a visit to the border — instead of fighting over the 2020 election draws another contrast with Trump, said a person in frequent contact with the former vice president who spoke anonymously to discuss private conversations. Pence will spend Thursday in Ohio, fundraising with Gov. Mike DeWine and Rep. Steve Chabot, and joining DeWine for a roundtable with an oil and gas industry group.
The Ohio commitment is the reason Pence won’t appear at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, the person said, adding that the heckling he faced last time wasn’t a factor in the decision.
A person familiar with the conference said Pence remains close with the coalition’s founder and chairman, Ralph Reed, and will be invited back. Pence and Reed appeared together last month at an event in North Carolina.
Though Pence was invited to speak at Reed’s program in Nashville, according to multiple people involved, he wasn’t advertised as an invited speaker on the conference’s webpage. The lineup includes other potential 2024 Republican contenders including Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
The speaker who got top billing: Trump.
Annie Linskey contributed to this report.
Brad Raffensperger stood up to Trump. Now he’s courting his base.
But in the next breath, the state’s top election official offered Trump voters concerned that elections could be compromised reasons to vote for him in Tuesday’s hotly contested primary: He supported legislation to tighten up the security around balloting — despite resistance from voting rights groups — and has made cracking down on noncitizen voting the No. 1 issue of his campaign, even though the evidence shows it is already quite rare.
That dual message reflects the delicate balance Raffensperger is trying to strike to win in a state where most Republicans still love Trump and believe his false narrative about the 2020 election. Squaring off against an ardent Trump acolyte, Raffensperger has chosen the path of political pragmatism, courting the former president’s base while not completely abandoning his image as the rare Republican willing to take Trump on.
Whether Raffensperger can pull it off could help set the direction for the Republican Party at a time when Trumpism remains very much alive even as Trump himself is struggling to propel his preferred candidates to victory. The outcome will also bear directly on the 2024 presidential vote, when Georgia is again expected to be a key battleground and the secretary of state will have oversight over how votes are cast, counted and certified.
With just days to go before the election, polls suggest an extremely close contest. That reflects a remarkable evolution from a year ago, when Raffensperger was widely seen as politically dead following his showdown with Trump.
“The fact that it’s competitive is a monumental shift in the environment,” said Brian Robinson, a GOP political consultant in the state, noting that many Republican voters are tired of Trump’s election claims whether they like him or not. They want to hear about solutions to inflation and rising gas prices, not about the previous election, he said.
Raffensperger shot to prominence following a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Trump in which the then-president urged him to “find” enough votes to reverse his defeat in Georgia.
Throughout the hour-long call, as Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if he refused to pursue his false claims, Raffensperger stood firm, explaining that the president was relying on debunked accusations and that Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in the state was fair and accurate.
“Well, Mr. President,” Raffensperger said on the call, “the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
In the months that followed, few if any strategists in Georgia said Raffensperger could survive a Republican primary. He had been anointed a hero on the left and shot to near the top of Trump’s enemies list. Many Republican voters wanted someone to blame for Trump’s loss, and Raffensperger became the target.
His top competitor in the primary is U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, a full-throated Trump supporter who earned the former president’s endorsement after embracing the false claim that Biden did not really win Georgia. Hice’s central argument to voters is that if he had been secretary of state in 2020, he would not have certified the presidential result, as Raffensperger did.
“This last election should not have been certified without proper investigation,” Hice said during a May 2 televised debate with Raffensperger and two other candidates. “The allegations were tremendous. They were all over the place and they still are.”
On Thursday evening, Hice told a gathering of the Atlanta Young Republicans that the “voice of the people” had been “violated” in 2020, and he held Raffensperger responsible for not being tough enough in enforcing the law.
In an interview with The Washington Post, he cited allegations of widespread “ballot harvesting,” or residents illegally turning in other people’s ballots. Some of those allegations were dismissed by the Georgia State Elections Board this week.
“If there are no consequences for breaking the law and cheating people will continue to cheat when it comes to elections,” Hice said. “There must be consequences.”
Yet it is unclear whether Georgia Republicans have been persuaded by Hice’s argument. Polls show the Trump-backed candidate for governor, former senator David Perdue, well behind the incumbent, Brian Kemp, who also became an object of the former president’s ire for refusing to go along with false fraud claims.
In polling published last month by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Raffensperger and Hice were roughly tied, with more than 35 percent of likely GOP primary voters saying they were still undecided.
Some Republicans remain skeptical that Raffensperger will eke out a win May 24. But more and more say they believe he will at least qualify for a runoff with Hice in the four-way race should no candidate garner the majority required for an outright win.
Both Raffensperger and Hice have undergone transformations since the start of their political careers. Raffensperger, the soft-spoken owner of a lucrative engineering firm who seems more comfortable talking about building structure than giving rousing speeches, started on the city council in the Atlanta suburb of Johns Creek in 2011. There, he focused on such bread-and-butter priorities as streetlights and sidewalks.
Later, in the state legislature, Raffensperger developed a reputation as a conservative Reagan-style Republican, focused on low taxes and streamlining regulations. In 2018, he was cited by the Faith and Freedom Coalition of Georgia for a perfect conservative voting record. That same year, he was elected secretary of state. His life changed two years later, when he found himself in Trump’s crosshairs.
Hice entered Congress in 2015 after a 25-year career as a Baptist minister. At first, he focused almost exclusively on social issues, regularly criticizing same-sex marriage and even extolling the benefits of conversion therapy, the discredited practice of “converting” people to heterosexuality. He also took on the IRS over threats to strip churches of their tax-exempt status if ministers preached about politics from the pulpit.
With Trump’s rise in 2016, Hice became an ardent surrogate for the candidate. Following the 2020 election, Hice was one of the loudest voices in Congress to advocate for overturning the election result. On Jan. 6, 2021, he was among 147 members of Congress to object to the counting of electoral college votes.
That loyalty to Trump remains a positive quality for many Georgia Republicans, who question whether Raffensperger shares it.
“The election was stolen the last go-round by extremely smart people,” said Anne Cooper, 60, a Republican voter in rural Griffin, Ga., an hour south of Atlanta. “I think Raffensperger could have been more diligent getting into the computer system. I don’t think he did everything that he could.”
On the campaign trail, Raffensperger is unafraid to blame Trump directly for his 2020 defeat. “Twenty-eight thousand Georgians skipped the presidential race, and yet they voted down ballot in other races,” Raffensperger told the Savannah Rotary. “Republican congressmen collectively got 33,000 more votes than President Trump. And that’s why President Trump came up short.”
Many Republican voters interviewed at polling locations this month said that they believe fraud tainted the 2020 election and that they like Trump, yet they are exhausted by his singular obsession with it and are ready to move on. Raffensperger and Kemp are also attracting moderate Republicans in the Atlanta suburbs who are no fans of the former president.
Outside the Dunwoody Library in DeKalb County, one of the few remaining Republican enclaves in suburban Atlanta, voters casting early ballots said they were opting for Raffensperger and Kemp. Over three hours, not a single voter among dozens interviewed said they were voting for Hice or Perdue.
“I think the election was stolen, I definitely do,” said Virginia Christman, 72, who is retired from the magazine publishing industry. “But I don’t think Brad Raffensperger or Brian Kemp could have done anything about it. There was a lot of cheating going on that they got blamed for.”
In late March, Trump held a rally in rural Commerce, Ga., in which he touted Hice. More recently, the former president hosted a Hice fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, his club in south Florida.
But Hice is not running ads and regularly goes days at a time without campaign appearances, giving Raffensperger the opportunity to define the four-term congressman in a seven-figure ad campaign airing across the state — a remarkable sum for what used to be a sleepy, down-ballot position.
“When Stacey Abrams attacked Georgia’s elections, Jody Hice did nothing — not a single bill to protect our elections,” states one of Raffensperger’s ads, referring to the presumed Democratic nominee for governor. “Brad was the first to do a full audit to make sure only Americans vote in Georgia. Brad outlawed ballot harvesting and required photo ID in all elections. When Jody did nothing, Brad made Georgia’s elections the safest in the nation.”
Turnout thus far has been heavy, which may be good news for the incumbent. This week, Raffensperger’s office announced that more than 600,000 Georgians had cast ballots so far in early and mail voting — more than triple the number over the same period in the 2018 primary and, remarkably for a nonpresidential year, nearly triple the number in 2020.
“It appears the electorate is going to be historically large,” said Robinson, the GOP consultant. “I would say the bigger the electorate, the more competitive Raffensperger is because a smaller electorate is more ideologically driven and therefore more driven by Trump’s narrative on the stolen election.”
There is also strong evidence that at least some Democratic voters are crossing over to vote in the Republican primary this year. More than 15,000 voters who have previously cast ballots in Democratic primaries have chosen the GOP ballot so far in early in-person voting, which began May 2 and concludes Friday, four days before Election Day.
Antoinette Jordan, the poll manager at a voting center at Emory University in Atlanta, said at least a half-dozen voters had asked her if they could vote in the Republican primary but still vote Democratic in the fall. When she told them they could, they asked for a GOP ballot, she said.
“Georgia is in a very precarious place right now,” said Yvette Barton, 52, a Democrat who works in sales support in Decatur and who considered voting in the GOP primary but ultimately stuck with her preferred party, where five candidates are vying for the secretary of state nomination. “We can’t afford candidates supported by Trump.”
In an interview following his Rotary appearance in Savannah, Raffensperger downplayed the significance of crossover votes. “I’m talking to Republican voters,” he said. “This is a decision for Republicans to make.”
Yet he also acknowledged the tension inherent in his campaign message.
“I’m looking down that thin, red, white and blue line of integrity that all election officials need to walk,” he said. “I have conservative principles, but also I believe you have to have rules, and then you have to follow the rules.”
Alice Crites in Washington and Matthew Brown in Atlanta contributed to this report.