Krystal Marie Ball (born November 24, 1981) is an American businesswoman and was a certified public accountant. She was a co-host on the MSNBC's afternoon news/talk show The Cycle for the duration of the show's run from June 2012 to July 2015. She was also the Democratic Party nominee for United States Congress in Virginia's 1st congressional district in the 2010 election, losing to Republican Rob Wittman.
Video Krystal Ball
Early life and education
Ball was born to Edward and Rose Marie Ball, a physicist and a teacher, respectively. The name Krystal came from her father, a physicist who did his dissertation on crystals.
Ball graduated from King George High School and received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Virginia. She also attended Clemson University for a year where she participated on the swim team.
Maps Krystal Ball
Career
She is a business owner and previously was a certified public accountant prior to her license expiring in 2013. Ball previously worked for the federal contractor CGI Group and traveled to Louisiana to assist in the courts' efforts to recover after Hurricane Katrina.
In 2012, Ball launched a website calling for a boycott of advertisers on the Rush Limbaugh Show after Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke. The boycott attempted to get almost 100 advertisers to drop the show but eventually the boycott died out.
2010 U.S. Congressional campaign
In 2010 Ball ran to represent Virginia's 1st congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives and was defeated by Republican incumbent Rob Wittman. Despite being defeated by a margin of 63.90% to 34.76%, the former candidate was named by Forbes Magazine as number 21 on the magazine's "The Top 25 Most Powerful Women Of The Midterm Elections".
During the campaign, Ball supported education reform, including charter schools, using technology, alternative certification of teachers, and paying teachers six figure salaries. She also called for a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress, banning lobbyist gifts, increasing disclosure, and establishing a new Independent Ethics Commission to investigate and audit influence by special interests. Of Ball's funding, 72 percent was from out of state donors.
In October 2010, while in the final stages of her Congressional campaign, Ball received national attention when photos taken six years earlier emerged showing her at a holiday party dressed as a "naughty Santa" sucking a red dildo attached to her husband's nose and leading him around on a leash. The event quickly became a launching point for Ball, resulting in her being called upon by various news organizations for her inputs on the challenges faced by women in today's society and political environment.
Political action committee
In May 2017, Ball created the People's House Project, a political action committee (PAC) purportedly working on behalf of Democratic causes. However, in May 2018, McClatchy reported,
thus far, nobody has benefited more financially from the group than Ball herself. Of the $445,000 Ball raised for the group, she paid herself more than a third of that -- $174,000 -- in salary, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission. The majority of her salary -- $104,000 -- came in the first three months of this year alone. That's nearly eight times more than the nearly $22,000 the PHP has used to support its dozen endorsed candidates, some of whom have received just a single $1,000 contribution.
According to McClatchy, PACs where the founders of the committee earn vastly more than is given in contributions to individual candidates are referred to as "Scam PACs". Ball responded to McClatchy's reporting, saying that her salary ought to be $180,000 annually, but that because the PAC receives money in fits and starts, she paid herself a large sum in the first months of 2018 as backpay for what she should have earned in 2017. Ball further explained the basis for her payments and the services the PAC provided to progressive House Crogessional candidates in an interview on TYT Investigates.
Media
Ball has made multiple appearances as a political commentator and Democratic strategist on television news channels, including Fox News Channel, CNN, CNBC, and is a contributor under contract for MSNBC. She is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.
On June 25, 2012, Ball became one of four co-hosts on a new MSNBC show, The Cycle, with Touré, Steve Kornacki, and S.E. Cupp. It replaced the Dylan Ratigan show in 2012, where Ball had been a regular guest on a panel of political pundits. It was announced during the July 31, 2015 taping that The Cycle has been cancelled, as NBC revamped its weekday afternoon programming.
Ball's book Reversing the Apocalypse: Hijacking the Democratic Party to Save the World was published in 2017, in which she argued that the Democratic Party needed to return to its New Deal roots by emulating Franklin Delano Roosevelt and advocating a more economically interventionist agenda than it has done in recent decades.
In 2018, Ball, along with conservative radio talk-show host Buck Sexton, hosts a new show called Rising at The Hill.
Personal life
Ball is married to Jonathan Dariyanani, and they have three children: a daughter Ella Marie (born 2008), a son Lowell Maxwell (born 2013), and a daughter Ida Rose (born 2017).
References
External links
- The Cycle on MSNBC
- Profile at Vote Smart
- Financial information (federal office) at the Federal Election Commission
- Campaign contributions at OpenSecrets.org
- Collected columns at The Atlantic
Source of article : Wikipedia
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