Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who is currently polling at one percent in Iowa, has a message for those who think she has zero chance of winning the election. “Polls don’t win elections,” she said at a campaign event in Iowa City today.

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

Earlier today, Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski and Megan Apper published a list of the 49 “best” tweets sent by Donald Trump Jr., the 38-year-old son of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. It is a thorough list, featuring a large number of entertaining tweets on a variety of topics. But 49 is a lot of tweets. To save time, here is the single best Donald Trump Jr. tweet:

[Via Buzzfeed]

At a Tuesday hearing in State Supreme Court on Long Island, Sean Ludwick was remanded to jail with no possibility of bail. The New York City real estate developer, facing vehicular homicide charges, was arrested last week after attempting buy a boat in Puerto Rico to take him to South America. “When I set bail at $1 million, I never contemplated the possibilities heard here today,” State Supreme Court Justice Fernando Camacho said. “There is no bail package to ensure his return to court.”

Ludwick had already wired $380,000 to Puerto Rico to purchase the 50-foot sailboat when Southampton Town Police arrested him outside his home, 27east.com reports. According to Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota, Ludwick was planning to fly back down on a few days later.

At the bail hearing on Tuesday, Chief of the Vehicular Crimes Bureau John Scott Prudenti produced a list of Google searches Ludwick had made immediately following his arraignment on January 4th. According to 27east.com, they included, but were not limited to:

• “10 secrets to being a good liar”
• “Percentage of bail jumpers caught”
• “Does Venezuela extradite to the U.S.?”
• “Can I leave on a cruise with an arrest warrant?”
• “5 countries with no extradition”
• “Why do fugitives get caught”
• “How do fugitives escape”
• “Seeking citizenship in Venezuela.”
  

As it turned out, the sailing instructor Ludwick contacted (through a concierge at the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel) to teach him how to actually use the boat was an FBI agent.

Ludwick, who faces up to 32 years in prison, is accused of drunkenly crashing his 2013 Porsche after a night of drinking last August, leaving his friend, Paul Hansen, to die on the side of the road. According to the East Hampton Star, the D.A.’s office has not ruled out the possibility that Hansen was alive when Ludwick allegedly dumped him out of the car.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

It’s been nearly three months since we first wrote about Tony the Tiger’s little furry problem, and it looks like the object of so many fuzzy affections has finally taken action. According to hordes of furious furry Twitter accounts, Tony the Tiger is on the purge.

http://internet.gawker.com/tony-the-tiger...

If you’ll recall, when we last left Tony, furries were propositioning him for all sorts non-cereal related fun. Most likely, as Gawker Editor-in-Chief Alex Pareene said at the time, this is because “Tony is pretty buff and athletic.”

But for whatever reason, Tony has had quite enough. And Twitter’s furry masses are pissed.

Yes, Tony. As “stray dog strut” so eloquently said, “Get with the times, or get left behind.”

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

As we noted yesterday, Amazon.com has released over 50 pages of former Laguna Beach star Kristin Cavallari’s forthcoming book Balancing in Heels. Even better, the site has also published the full index of the book. Below please find some of the most intriguing entries, in no particular order.

Flour, white, avoiding, 96

Nap time schedule, 51

Army green jean shorts, 146

Jean shorts, army green, 146

Dietary philosophy, 83, 86, 88, 99, 114

Kissing advice, 58

Friends
desired qualities in, 78-79

Acting jobs, 184

Charcoal pills, for hangover prevention, 98

Arguments, marital, 72

Sodium benzoate, 91

Sodium nitrites and nitrates, 91

Sodium sulfite, 92

Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), 91

Butylated hydroxytoulene (BHT), 91

Potassium benzoate and bromate, 91

Fussy eaters, 37

Work. See Career

Psychics, 164

Countdown to the 2012 Academy Awards, 196

Trail mix, 19, 30, 93

Wine, headaches from, 92

Quesadilla, as a breastfeeding snack, 30

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

If you couldn’t make it out to the Swiss resort town of Davos to attend the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of rich people and the politicians that serve them—or if you were there but decided instead to hit the slopes—there is still some good news: The WEF made a series of image macros that allow you to experience Davos’ unique brand of terrifying futuristic delusion from a hemisphere away.

You can tell that these images mean to connote boldness and authority, but instead their incoherent emphasis on certain words and phrases only highlights the disconnected worldview of the conference’s false prophets while at the same time making actual knowledgable people saying agreeable things sound like fools of equal measure.

Here is a quote from Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, in which a broadly admirable point of view is rendered into a mishmash of self-parodic buzzwords.

Of course, she’s in great company. Here’s part-time hologram will.i.am saying perhaps the most openly ridiculous thing you could imagine will.i.am saying at Davos:

Nita Farahany is a law and philosophy professor at Duke. Here’s a quote from what seems like an interesting panel on neuroscience and the justice system rendered like something a cop would say in a show USA cancelled after one season:

Oh, hey, it’s Kevin Spacey saying something very obvious about one of the world’s most important fields: acting.

But those are the generally sympathetic ones—smart people being boiled down to word soup and the celebrities far out of their intellectual depth attempting to say things that sound profound. Mostly though, Davos is where the drivers of capitalist exceptionalism spin airport self-help mantras with the sort of seriousness normally reserved for the Dalia Lama.

I can’t wait.

Also, this guy was there:

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

“Millennials are misunderstood,” says a new report on the financial proclivities of millennials. But are they?

My understanding of millennials would be: lazy, clueless, self-absorbed, looking at their phones, instead of living real life, not as good as other generations, bad, don’t know about money, can’t define what a “radio receiver” is or how it functions, don’t remember John F. Kennedy, and generally irresponsible. Is that so far “off the mark?” Not according to the results of this very study—which was produced by the Facebook company, better known to millennials as “I never put my ‘face’ in a real live hardback ‘book,’ what even is that?”

So what do millennials think about money, anyhow? Not a whole hell of a lot, my friend! Let me sum it up for you real easy.

WHAT THE REPORT SAYS: “Millennials are redefining financial success.”

BREAK IT DOWN: “The burden of debt weighs so heavily that Millennials have redefined financial success around it, with 46% saying that financial success means being debt free... Regardless of whether they currently own a credit card, 25% of Millennials describe credit cards as something that worsens their financial standing... But Millennials, not a generation to see the world in black and white, can also give credit its due. Millennials who do have credit cards very much see them as a strategic tool.”

These kids don’t know their ass from their elbows folks—any more than the Facebook would know J.D. Salinger if he walked right up and sat down in the “Free Latte Cafe” in their “office,” which probably resembles a jungle gym playland environment more than a place of business.

No one can even remember what millennials are at this point.

[Photo: Flickr]

I guess if you’re Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s nephew who is also a rapper, never has the world called on your presence more than after your uncle was dissed by a rapper who believes that the Earth is flat. So without further ado, here is TYSON’s “Flat to Fact,” the response track to B.o.B’s DeGrasse Tyson diss which itself doubles as a remix of Drake’s diss of Meek Mill.

In the interest of fairness, here is a request from B.o.B I feel required to honor:

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Former viral sensation and aspiring heavy metal star Balloon Boy (otherwise known as Falcon Heene) has officially announced his endorsement of Donald J. Trump in an email to Gawker.

When asked who Balloon Boy might be eyeing for the White House in 2016, his father, Richard Heene, wrote:

Falcon said Donald Trump. He is a get it done guy while all of the other candidates will sit around doing nothing and collect a paycheck. Trump is a businessman and he will run the U.S. that way. Go check out Donald Trumps Victory Song called “Hellyeah!” http://americanchilly.com/donald-trump-v...

With the endorsement, Balloon Boy joins the ranks of Sarah Palin, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and John Rocker. We’ve reached out to Trump for comment on what’s sure to be a major jolt to the former viral hoax voter base and will update if and when we hear back.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

“The 20 most profitable hedge funds for investors earned $15 billion last year while the rest of the industry collectively lost $99 billion.”

http://gawker.com/everyone-knows...

Last year, a feeling crept up in me like dread until I could no longer ignore it: Twitter was making me dislike people.

Despite my job bringing down my estimation of humanity as a whole, I still tend to like people in the abstract, as a concept. The specificities of Twitter—the nuances of ego function it displayed, for example—became too much to bear. Stuff I read would get under my skin and stay there. Twitter feuds, especially, are always pointless; they’re performative clashes of ideologies that rarely do any actual convincing. At the very least, participating in them made me feel ashamed for caring as much as I did in the moment, and worse, for showing how much I cared. I like some of the things I tweeted, but I certainly stopped liking the impulse to fire off whatever mildly amusing or unique thought came into my head. Why was I doing that, anyway? Why was I tethered to this medium? For some waning dopamine spikes that came from likes and retweets? Reassurance that my opinion mattered? Or was it just because Twitter was a thing that people did, and I’m a person so ...yeah?

Things written by complete strangers or vague acquaintances bugged me with persistence, and then I started to bug myself for being so bugged. After a while, so much irritated me. There was people’s tendency to waste time by responding to a national tragedy with “No Words,” ie. the acknowledgement that it had happened at all. Or a similarly empty gesture—sharing a link, mourning a death, wondering, “Why, God, why?”—that seemed more driven by imagined crowd pressure than actual expression. I never enjoyed when a fellow writer boasted about their work with Kanye levels of bravado despite the fact that he or she...IS NOT KANYE. I despised the voicing of rage inspired by a willful misreading. I was always embarrassed by retweeted compliments that redundantly expressed to that person’s followers that he or she is worth listening to. Maybe the worst is when someone would place a period in front of an @-reply, thereby broadcasting some petty internet argument to at least one participants’ entire timeline, as though everyone should be aware that someone dared challenge them on a medium that fosters exactly that sort of thing.

Amassed petty irritations combined with rarer and rarer moments of enlightenment and joy led me to the point where I was using Twitter because I used Twitter.

The core problem with Twitter, given the limitations it imposes on its users, is that it promotes telling over showing. The best tweets manage to do both in 140 characters or less, and seem magical as a result. The rest are innocuous, at best. Telling and not showing is a cornerstone of bad writing. Twitter promotes bad writing. It allows false congeniality by way of the mute button, a tool of deception that suggests to another user that you are listening to him or her when you aren’t any longer, and are just following them out of some obligation. It’s hard to say if Twitter makes things matter more, or if it makes more things matter. Or maybe all of that is an illusion.

What a world! Evidence of badness and loathsome people is apparent enough without having to seek it out. Is it not? Checking Twitter regularly however many times a day that I did (25? 50? 100?), amounted to actively looking for the bad. I may have been using Twitter wrong, but at a certain point, using it at all seemed like the true mistake. So I stopped.

The downside of the democratization of communication is the abundance of mediocrity it creates. It does great things, too—at the end of 2015, I spoke to a bunch of trans-rights activists who explained that social media platforms like Twitter were key in correcting the misgendering that occurs so frequently and detrimentally in reports about trans violence. Without the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, would stars like Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith, and Mark Ruffalo have spoken up about the Academy’s inherent racism? Possibly not. There’s a reason Black Lives Matter has become the rallying cry of contemporary activism. You can see online activism working—often it comes with a heaping side of ego, via tweeters who conflate building their brand with enacting social change, but it works.

It would be foolish to denounce Twitter entirely, as that would wage war against technology (technology will always win). Investing in it wholeheartedly and obsessively, however, seems just as foolish. I was invested it. More troubling than whatever stupid, banal, and/or petty shit I posted to Twitter was the way it was shaping my view of the world. “People think X,” I would find myself saying, based on empirical evidence from a site which only 23 percent of adults online use, one that exists to shave nuance from thought and promote oversized outrage. “People will be mad about this on Twitter,” is the absolute worst reaction to any event that occurs—take it from a person who’s had that thought more times than I can count.

My conception of Twitter once was that it was a tangible representation of the way things are. And yet, I think back to the hours of mine that piled up on the platform, sometimes in a single sitting, and all I see is an endlessly scrolling blur. Few distinct images exist in my head of using Twitter or even absorbing the fruits of the information it promises to impart. Twitter isn’t where I made memories. On the contrary, it’s a void that sucked up opportunity to form them. There’s nothing tangible about that.

Maybe I cared too much about what I saw on Twitter. Maybe I let the bad overtake the good, which is always a risk when observing human behavior. Certainly, I cared too much about Twitter itself. My boyfriend has long been frustrated by my dependency on the platform, so before I met him in Puerto Rico for vacation late last year, I deleted the Twitter app from my phone. I also did this last year, before my trip to write about Epcot Center’s restaurants, and it was great. After the minute or so it took the impulse to tweet about deleting Twitter from my phone wore off, I enjoyed a trip with less clutter and stress. I remember missing out on some events as they occurred, but I’ve since forgotten what they were.

Getting rid of Twitter this time was even easier. It made me feel like a kid again, looking out the car window and pondering the increasingly threatened green and organizations of strip malls and road kill. It’s easy enough to enjoy Puerto Rico’s astonishing beaches by merely existing on one, but it was especially great to do this without feeling the need to interrupt myself to make sure I didn’t just miss something that happened. My focus while absorbing the media of my choice—mostly longer form stuff like novels and movies—sharpened. I could sit through an entire film, read 50 pages of a book straight, without pausing to scroll and click and look at profile pictures and see who said what to whom and and and. (Deleting hook-up apps from my phone also does wonders for my concentration. Other social media distractions like Facebook and Instagram have never quite commanded my attention and life the way Twitter has.)

At one point during our trip, my boyfriend showed me Jacques Tati’s 1967 movie about then-modern technology Playtime, which took about eight years to conceive and execute. The level of detail is astonishing (Tati essentially built a mini-town that he choreographed hundreds of extras to flutter through). The commitment is admirable. (Tati ended up declaring bankruptcy when the film failed commercially.) The evident patience is at odds with the frenetic way of thinking that Twitter promotes. But beyond how Tati’s old-fashionedness might as well be sorcery to contemporary sensibilities is the fact that in all the hours I spent doing what amounted to very little on Twitter, I could have taken two to feed my brain with something as wondrous as that film. It would have simply been time better spent. My primary failure has been one of curation.

And so, avoiding Twitter went from vacation-maximizing strategy to life plan in the form of a New Year’s resolution. I’m not quitting it entirely—it’s impossible for me not to see tweets from time to time, given that I work on the internet. Sometimes I still find myself getting sucked down a hole of bad tweets after I read one (tweets are like toxic potato chips). But generally speaking, it’s fully possible for me to pay less attention to them, let other people handle the mourning and backlash to mourning and reporting on stars’ responses to Twitter users’ responses to the star’s responses to other people’s responses to the star’s friends. I feel liberated from the idea that part of my job and, by extension, purpose for being on this planet is to pay close attention to what’s happening on Twitter.

Just rereading that sentence, I think, makes it clear that I was heading down the wrong path, my eyes glued to my phone. Now my focus is on looking up.

Illustration by Jim Cooke.

Rich Juzwiak is a senior writer for Gawker. Email him at rich@gawker.com.

Speaking at a press conference before a rally in Marshalltown, Iowa, Donald Trump continued to turn the screws on Roger Ailes, threatening that he “probably” won’t participate in the Fox News-hosted debate on Thursday. Trump’s campaign manager, meanwhile, told the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker that the candidate was “definitely not” participating in the debate. “His word is his bond.”

Trump’s complaint is primarily with Megyn Kelly, who he said treated him unfairly during the first Fox News debate. “Fox is playing games,” Trump said, according to The Hill. “Fox is going to make a fortune. I told Fox they should give their money to the Wounded Warriors.”

http://theslot.jezebel.com/donald-trump-w...

“I’m not a fan of Megyn Kelly she’s a third rate reporter. I think she frankly is not good at what she does and I think they could do a lot better than Megyn Kelly. And so I’m going to be making a decision with Fox but I probably won’t bother doing the debate.”

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

On Monday, the Guardian reports, Oregon state police arrested a man who said he was on his way to the Malheur national wildlife refuge for driving under the influence of alcohol. Joseph Stetson, 54, was armed with a pellet gun and said he wanted to “help with killing federal agents.”

The Harney County sheriff’s office released body camera footage on Monday night showing Stetson’s arrest at a gas station. In the video, Stetson claims he is retired Army colonel, saying that he served with the Green Berets in Central America in the 1980s, and that his records were sealed by President Ronald Reagan. He also told troopers that he wanted to be Ammon Bundy’s “personal guard,” the Harney County District Attorney’s office said.

As the police officers begin to arrest him, Stetson gets increasingly more violent. “I will kill all of you. You don’t believe me?” he says. “If I go to jail, when I come out, I will kill you...You friggin’ coward sons of bitches!”

“I’m the last hope!” he says. “Let me go, dammit!”

Stetson claims that he is from New York, but the Guardian reports that he is from Woodburn, Oregon. According to the Oregonian, in 2009, he pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree burglary and menacing.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

It’s tough getting back to work after a big snowstorm. I guess it’s extra hard for men, because apparently it was an all-female crew that turned up at the Senate this morning.

The Washington Post reports that it was Senator Lisa Murkowski who spotted what all the attendees had in common:

The Alaska Republican was one of only a few lawmakers in the Capitol building following the weekend blizzard, and it was her job to handle the formalities of delaying Senate business until her colleagues could get back to work. After finishing a bit of parliamentary business, she described what she saw in the ornate chamber.

“As we convene this morning, you look around the chamber, the presiding officer is female. All of our parliamentarians are female. Our floor managers are female. All of our pages are female.”

It was a coincidence. As much as a room full of women who turned up for work while their male colleagues sit at home ever is, of course.

Contact the author at kelly@jezebel.com.

At Davos this weekend, in a “special conversation” between Fareed Zakaria and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister articulated his strategy for defeating extremist ideologies: “I think the key is despair, is to rob them of hope—the hope that their wild fantasies will actually win out the day.”

Netanyahu—who, last year, expressed some dubious ideas about who, precisely, was responsible for the Holocaust—repeatedly expressed his anxiety over the United States’ recent deal with Iran, which he said continues to seek the Jewish state’s destruction. By contrast, he claimed, “Israel doesn’t seek to destroy anyone.”

http://gawker.com/israeli-prime-...

Last year, Israel dealt with a spate of stabbings and shootings by deploying hundreds of troops to reinforce thousands of police officers in cities across the country, as well as erecting concrete walls around Palestinian neighborhoods in east Jerusalem. “We’ve been careful to enable the economy to continue even as we’ve had this wave of stabbings, because we don’t want the rest of the population to fall into that trap,” Netanyahu said.

He also alluded to the rise of ISIS, or Daesh, in Gaza and the West Bank—which is actually a somewhat more complicated issue than he made it out to be, if you can believe that—going on to tell a story about his recently deceased father.

When Netanyahu was six years old, he went outside and found his father, “a great historian of the Jewish people,” working in the garden, planting baby trees. His father asked for his help, and together they weeded out the weeds, poured water, and put down fertilizer for the saplings.

The next year, he found his father in the garden again, and again his father asked him to help pull out the weeds. “But father,” baby Bibi said. “We weeded out the weeds last year!” Sagely, his father told him, “You have to keep weeding the weeds out.”

“Today, 60 years later, they’re gigantic trees,” Netanyahu said. “Israel has grown like that too.” Twist!

http://gawker.com/the-u-s-ambass...

But then, because this was Davos, and Davos is nothing if not a self-congratulatory clusterfuck of technocratic capitalist triumphalism, he waved his hand, invoking the liberating potential of “science” and “technology.”

“You have to give people choice. You have to give people the freedom to see other possibilities, and not to cloister young minds with this extraordinary and savage dogmas,” he said.

Fifty years from now, he continued, modernity will win out over medievalism. “Ultimately, people prefer the benefits of freedom, choice, and pluralism,” he proclaimed. (That this should prove true is far from obvious.)

“You have hope,” he said. “They should have despair.”

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

In a statement, the FBI on Tuesday confirmed earlier reports that Ammon Bundy and several other armed militants were arrested north of Burns, Oregon, after a traffic stop north of Burns, Oregon, turned violent. One of the militants was killed. Six people were arrested.

The Harney District Hospital in Burns is on lockdown, and St. Charles Bend spokeswoman Lisa Goodman confirmed to KTVZ.com that an Air Link helicopter was “on the ground” there.

Anthony Boswith, one of the occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, told OPB.org that Bundy had been due in John Day, a town north of Burns, for a scheduled meeting between community members and militants on Tuesday.

All of those arrested—Ammon Bundy; Ryan Bundy; Brian Cavalier; Shawna Cox; and Ryan Waylen Payne—are charged with conspiracy to impede a federal officer by force, which is a federal felony.

The deceased individual has not yet been identified, but Nevada state Rep. Michele Fiore, a friend and ally of the Bundy family, told OPB that it is Lavoy Finicum.

The Los Angeles Times informed Ammon’s father, Cliven Bundy, of his son’s arrest and the deadly shootout. “Isn’t this a wonderful country we live in?” Bundy said.

“We believe that those federal people shouldn’t even be there in that state, and be in that county and have anything to do with this issue,” he went on. “I have some sons and other people there trying to protect our rights and liberties and freedoms, and now we’ve got one killed, and all I can say is, he’s sacrificed for a good purpose.”

Update – 10:50 pm

The FBI has announced the additional arrest of Peter Santilli—a self-described journalist and Internet radio host. He is also charged with conspiracy to impede a federal officer by force. Santilli was broadcasting live, via YouTube, just before he was arrested.

Update – 11:15 pm

On Facebook, the Bundy Ranch wrote:

The resolve for principled liberty must go on.

It appears that America was fired upon by our government. One of liberty’s finest patriots is fallen. He will not go silent into eternity. Our appeal is to heaven.

Also, Jon Ritzheimer wrote that he is at home, in Arizona, and that he’s been asked to turn himself in.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Former New York Giants safety Tyler Sash—who died in September of an accidental painkiller overdose at age 27—had stage 2 chronic traumatic encephalopathy when he died, according to researchers at Boston University. The researchers told Sash’s family that it was rare to see as severe of CTE in such a young brain, coming up with only one example in the hundreds of brains they’ve studied. Stage 2 is the same severity of the degenerative brain disease that former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau had when he committed suicide at age 43.

The New York Times relays these facts in a harrowing story about Sash’s life after being cut by the Giants, and the toll football took on it. Sash only played for the Giants for two seasons after a standout career at the University of Iowa, but overall he played football for 16 years. He suffered five documented concussions, and likely dozens if not hundreds of the sub-concussive impacts that are increasingly understood to be major contributing factors to brain injuries.

After his NFL career was cut short, Sash returned to Iowa, where he struggled to find work. He was taking painkillers because of chronic injuries to both shoulders, and while the shoulder injuries limited his ability to do manual labor, his inability to focus prevented him from doing any other work. His mother attributed his mental problems—he was forgetful, struggled reading emails, and “didn’t quite seem to be the same person he used to be”—to his regimen of painkillers. But as the examination of his brain makes clear, it was just as injured as his shoulders.

[New York Times]

Photo via AP

E-mail: kevin.draper@deadspin.com | PGP key + fingerprint | DM: @kevinmdraper

Police are responding to a shooting at a homeless encampment in south Seattle known as “The Jungle,” KIRO 7 reports. Five people have been shot. The gunman is still at large.

Police have closed the area around Airport Way South and South Atlantic Street for their investigation, the Seattle Times reports. The shooting took place just before Mayor Ed Murray began an address concerning Seattle’s homelessness crisis.

“At this point, we don’t know if it’s safe, we urge people to stay away until we can get you additional information. Again it’s an active crime scene, multiple victims, and we will have a press conference later this evening,” Murray said.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

On Tuesday, after the FBI and Oregon state police arrested six of his comrades following deadly shootout, notorious Islamophobe Jon Ritzheimer (a.k.a. the angry dildo man) turned himself in to the Peoria, Arizona, police department.

http://gawker.com/ammon-bundy-re...

Earlier in the evening, following the arrests in Oregon, Ritzheimer, wrote on Facebook, “I came home to visit my family. The Feds know I am here and are asking me to turn myself in.”

“I just want the country to live by the Constitution and I just want the government to abide by it,” he wrote. He also asked for donations to help pay for an attorney.

Ritzheimer faces the same charge as the six other militants arrested on Tuesday: conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

The quiet militia spokesman Robert “LaVoy” Finicum—popularly known as the “Tarp Man,” after he gave interviews while sitting under a tarp (with a gun in his lap)—was killed in a shootout Tuesday with the FBI and Oregon state police, the Oregonian reports.

Six of Finicum’s fellow militants, including Ammon Bundy, were arrested on Tuesday following the deadly shootout. OPB is also reporting Finicum’s death, citing multiple sources.

http://gawker.com/ammon-bundy-re...

Finicum, a rancher from northern Arizona, near the Utah border, had an amicable relationship with the Bureau of Land Management for most of his life, he told the St. George News last fall. However, after riding with Cliven Bundy during his 2014 standoff with the BLM, Finicum had a change of heart.

“After that incident, I had to do a lot of soul-searching,” Finicum said. “I realized that Cliven Bundy was standing on a very strong constitutional principle—and yet, here I was continuing to pay a grazing fee to the BLM.”

The 2014 grazing fee for Finicum’s allotment, some 17,000 acres primarily administered by the BLM, was $1,126, which he paid in advance. From the Oregonian:

The dispute centered on when Finicum was permitted to graze. The permit allowed 161 cattle to graze from October through May, but the BLM said Finicum was found grazing his cattle on the land in August, outside of the authorized period.

The agency issued Finicum a notice of trespass, then in October a notice of proposed decision that he was “in willful trespass.” Finicum has not gone to the local BLM office to resolve the dispute, the agency said, and he had accumulated about $12,000 in related fees. The case was handled administratively, and the BLM has not tried to impound his cattle.

Earlier this month, Finicum said that four foster children had been removed from his home as a result of “pressure from the feds.”

Speaking from under the tarp on one of the first nights of the occupation, he told reporters that he would rather be killed than be arrested. “I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box,” Finicum said. “There are things more important than your life and freedom is one of them...I’m prepared to defend freedom.”

Officials have not yet confirmed that it was Finicum who was killed, but reports of his death are being shared on the social media accounts of people associated with the Oregon occupiers, including Jon Ritzenheimer, who turned himself into police custody on Tuesday night in Arizona. Bundy-sympathizer and Nevada state Rep. Michele Fiore told an OPB reporter that it was Finicum who was killed.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.