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Martin O'Malley, A Stock Photo Of A Handsome Man, Ends His Presidential Bid

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Martin O'Malley, A Stock Photo Of A Handsome Man, Ends His Presidential Bid

Generic man Martin O’Malley ended his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination last night. The Iowa caucus was rough on the former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor: Once poll-workers sorted out the caucus-goers who thought they were standing in line to get their photo taken with “that guy from, uh, like, NCIS or one of the CSIs or whatever,” he came away with a measly one percent of the vote, comprising kindly geriatrics whom he reminded of their grandson. Don’t you think he looks like my Timmy?

Why was he running for president? The simple impulse to ask this about Martin O’Malley is weird in the first place. For generations, the machines of both parties have looked for guys pretty much exactly like him—tall, unthreateningly good-looking ex-mayor and/or -governor guys from valuable states with responsible hair and good teeth—to get behind in elections. That is the reason for a guy like him to run for president; it is the reason for a guy like him to run for governor, and mayor, and city council, and chairman of the PTA, too. It is the entire promise of being a guy like him: That being a guy like Martin O’Malley is a 99-yard head start in the hundred-yard-dash of American politics. The deal has been, pretty much forever, that if a guy like Martin O’Malley can get out of bed and make himself presentable, someone, somewhere, would actively seek him out with a dump truck of power and money and status. The answer to the question, “Why was Martin O’Malley running for president?” is, or has always been, “Why would Martin O’Malley not run for president?”

This is not to say that O’Malley lacked a platform, beyond the idea that singing folk songs in the Oval Office might be cool. He had one! Unfortunately, it was as generic as everything else about him. Some positions that are not much different from Hillary Clinton’s, some positions that also are not much different from Hillary Clinton’s but are phrased maybe a little bit more like how Bernie Sanders says stuff, and a polished, telegenic, and relentlessly safe advocacy for the idea that his credentials make him a good person to elect president.

I’m not bad. I like things that are not bad. You, too, like things that are not bad! If you like things that are not bad, vote for me, a thing that is not bad. Thank you.

In American history, being a generically good-lookin’ white dude who mostly can say these things without accidentally biting his own tongue off pretty much has been a golden ticket to elected office. If you can keep it up for a few election cycles while some good stuff happens and some especially bad stuff doesn’t, eventually you get your own cult! Which is weirder: that pattern, or the fact that it didn’t carry Martin O’Malley all the way to the presidency?

This time around, the very traits that in pretty much any other cycle would have made Martin O’Malley an electoral unicorn, or at the very least a tough out, made him almost uncannily anonymous and insignificant. Not just along demographic axes, either. Next to Hillary’s global profile and time as Secretary of State, his solid résumé of executive officeholding looks like piddly generic shit, not nearly enough to make him the safe, statespersonly choice for voters (and horserace political media) who value “experience” as some abstract thing, divorced from the complexity of analyzing and forming judgments about what a given candidate has actually done with it. Meanwhile that same résumé, taken on equally abstract terms but from a different perspective, tells a truth about O’Malley that no amount of, uh, busking ...

... can obscure: That he is not Mr. Smith Going to Washington, but a mainstream party product, guided and funneled along to presidential candidacy as surely as a log sent down a flume from the hilltop. He is no idealist’s radical outsider choice. He’s just a healthy-looking, generic, mainstream politician with a Dad-like hobby.

I suppose a noteworthy part of this is the evident change in the values and penalties assigned to all these various attributes by voters, donors, and media. Dapper Dan the Electable Man’s handsome-ish dudely electability not only wasn’t the decisive factor in a campaign against a woman and an actual garden gnome—it couldn’t get him any traction whatsoever. That’s something. It really is something! I doubt many people predicted it a decade ago.

On the other hand, probably one arc of one still-not-remotely-complete presidential campaign cycle is too small a sample size from which to go drawing Big Conclusions About America. The GOP has its own Martin O’Malley, after all. His name is Marco Rubio, and the politics media is treating him like Caesar returning to Rome today because he finished in third place in a race where he was expected to finish in third place. It’s still pretty nice to be a Martin O’Malley! It will remain nice to be a Martin O’Malley for the foreseeable future.

So no, this was not the death knell for a certain political type, probably not even on the left. Barack Obama won the presidency eight years ago, after all, and then again four years ago over Mitt Romney, the Martin O’Malley-est Martin O’Malley who ever lived, and the Martin O’Malleys are still out here boogie-boarding down the electoral log flume in embarrassing Aqua Socks. If it’s nice that this particular Martin O’Malley could not play his Martin O’Malley-ness as a Price Is Right fail-horn against his starkly un-Martin O’Malley competitors, the overwhelmingly likely outcome remains a depressing four- or eight-year reminder that none of these choices ever were as radical or dangerous or transformative as they seemed. Butthole-Americans come in all shapes and sizes, including whatever the fuck Donald Trump is.

This Martin O’Malley’s lowly, thwarted exit has less to do with grand social transformations, and much more to do with neatly polarizing (and almost entirely bogus) narratives of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as an apocalyptic choice between two irreconcilable paths for the future of liberalism. Which is a whole other thing, and doesn’t make O’Malley’s summary dismissal any less fair. If the belief that liberalism will pretty much be okay with either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders as Democratic nominee and/or president could congeal into the form of a person who walked around and played the banjo, it would be Martin O’Malley—but it also wouldn’t vote for Martin O’Malley, because it would not believe there was any particular reason not to pick one of the other two.

So what the hell was all this about, then? Casting. Somebody has to get gunned down in the second act, and he might as well be good-looking.

Farewell, Martin O’Malley. You’ll always be No. 1 on Shutterstock.

Photoshop by Jim Cooke, photos via Getty/Youtube


Contact the author at albert.burneko@deadspin.com or on Twitter @albertburneko.


Someone in Texas Just Got the Zika Virus From Sex

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Someone in Texas Just Got the Zika Virus From Sex

The first new case of Zika, the mosquito-born virus that shrinks babies’ brains, was just reported in the U.S. It was transmitted, health officials say, through sex.

The transmission was reported in Dallas, a terrifying ground zero for infectious disease, where the casual outbreak observer may recall the first, second and third cases of stateside Ebola were also observed. The details, via the New York Times:

The Dallas County Health and Human Services Department reported that a patient with Zika virus was infected after having sex with an ill individual who had returned from Venezuela, where Zika is circulating.

No other identifying information was given.

“This significance is parallel with the HIV/Aids case,” Alaka Basu, a senior fellow for public health at the UN Foundation, tells the BBC. “It’s worse in some ways, because there are two modes of transmission.”

It’s serious enough for the World Health Organization to deem Zika an “international public health emergency,” at least for fertile women with skin and/or an active sex life. Men are apparently unaffected—typical.


EXCLUSIVE: Is This a Preview of Ted Cruz’s Border Defense Policy?

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EXCLUSIVE: Is This a Preview of Ted Cruz’s Border Defense Policy?

Ted Cruz, Iowa caucus winner and current GOP frontrunner, has been hitting border control hard throughout the course of his campaign. And now, thanks to EXCLUSIVE photographs that you can only get here on Gawker.com, we may have our very first glimpse at a President Cruz’s border defense policy.

The photograph of Cruz was taken by our tipster back in October as he was passing through first class while boarding a plane. The game Cruz is playing, according Kotaku Editor-in-Chief and Gawker Resident iPhone Tower Expert Stephen Totilo, is Tower Madness 2, a “tower defense” game.

As Totilo explained, “The idea of a tower defense game is that you have a base that’s usually in a cul-de-sac. Enemies come into the screen walking down a winding path toward the base [and] are called ‘creeps’ because they, well, creep forward. What you do to stop them is set up towers along the wait. The towers usually have cannons, bows and arrows, lasers and shit like that. The more creeps you kill, the more money you get to buy better towers.”

Now, we already know Cruz has his eye on building a wall. A little over a month ago, Cruz told conservative radio host Jeff Kuhner that “We will build a wall that works, we will secure the border, we will triple the Border Patrol, we will increase four-fold the fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft... We know how to solve this problem, and we will end sanctuary cities, we will end welfare for people here illegally, we will end catch-and-release, and we will deport criminal illegal aliens.”

Interesting that Cruz used the term “alien,” because as it just so happens, in Tower Madness 2, the very “creeps” from which Cruz is defending his tower are actual (“actual”) space aliens. Note the flying saucer below:

EXCLUSIVE: Is This a Preview of Ted Cruz’s Border Defense Policy?

Does Cruz see illegal immigrants as space aliens? Does he expect to buy more guns with the money immigrants drop after being blasted, so to speak? Where does Cruz expect to get giant lasers? Has he lost touch with reality? Have we?

We’ve reached out to the Cruz campaign for comment, and will update if and when we hear back.


Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

Your favorite Logitech peripherals, a popular Anker Bluetooth speaker, and a multi-talented weather radio highlight today’s best deals. Bookmark Kinja Deals and follow us on Twitter to never miss a deal. Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more.

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

Amazon just kicked off another of their beloved Logitech Gold Box sales, bringing you great deals on keyboards, mice, headsets, webcams, and more for your computer and tablet.

The highlights for me are the K750 solar-powered keyboards for Mac and Windows, the $25 Anywhere Mouse MX, and the three-years-on-a-single-charge-miracle-of-engineering Marathon Mouse M705 for just $19. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though, so head over to Amazon to see the full list. Just remember, like all Gold Box deals, these prices are only available today, and the best stuff will probably sell out early. [Logitech Gold Box]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

You never want to be in a situation where you need a solar and hand crank-powered weather radio with a flashlight and USB port for charging your phone, but when you can get one for $18, you probably should buy it just in case. [Esky ES-CR01 Dynamo Emergency Solar Hand Crank AM/FM/NOAA Weather Radio, LED Flashlight, Power Bank, $18 with code LWI8ROFG]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

If you’re still storing your leftovers in empty lunch meat containers, you owe it to yourself to pick up this Pyrex set for $13, an all-time low. That’ll get you five oven, freezer, and microwave-safe containers with lids in various shapes and sizes. Trust me, you won’t want to go back after you use them. [Pyrex 10-Piece Food Storage Set, $13]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

I don’t think this will last long, but this is a fantastic deal if you can snag it. I use my SodaStream on an almost daily basis. [SodaStream Fountain Jet Soda Maker Starter Kit, $48]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

Update 2: Back in stock at a different link. (h/t Alex Roth)

Update: Sold out

PlayStation Plus memberships occasionally dip down to $40, but if your subscription is about to lapse, this $43 deal will work in a pinch. [PlayStation Plus, $43]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

Dell’s P2415Q 4K monitor has always been the most affordable 4K IPS display on the market, but today, it’s all the way down to $425 with promo code STACK15%, along with a free $125 Dell promo gift card.

If you aren’t familiar, IPS displays boast superior color accuracy and viewing angles compared to the TN panels you’ll find in most cheap 4K monitors, and with this deal, you’re basically getting IPS for “free” compared to the going rate for similar 4K displays. I happen to own this exact monitor, and I absolutely love it. [Dell P2415Q 24” 4K IPS Display, $425 + $125 promo gift card with code STACK15%]

Note: Make sure you see the gift card offer in your cart before purchasing, Dell has been known to pull them without warning. You’ll receive the gift code 10-20 days after purchase, and it’s valid on anything Dell sells online for 90 days.


Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

The humble Raspberry Pi has been inspiring clever hacks for years, and whether you’re new to the Pi or just want to upgrade your original model, we’ve found a great deal on the new (and much-improved) Raspberry Pi 2.

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This $58 kit comes with everything you need to get started, including a case, Wi-Fi module, microSD card, power supply, and noise filter. If you need some inspiration, Lifehacker has written approximately 17 billion articles on the Pi, including a instructions to turn it into a retro gaming console, and a ton of other fun project ideas to get you started. [Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Starter Kit, $58 with code AY2SHMY9]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

Update: Sold out

For those who don’t need a gooseneck kettle for pourover coffee, and aren’t willing to spring for the ultimate tea maker, the Cuisinart PerfecTemp is the best (and best looking) kettle around. It’s down to $70 today, and has only been cheaper than that one time back in 2013 (when I bought it). [Cuisinart PerfecTemp, $70]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

It wasn’t long ago that portable, USB-powered external hard drives maxed out at 2TB, but Seagate’s new Backup Plus manages to double that, and you can pick one up for an all-time low $120 today. That price even includes 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive storage for two years, which is a $96 value on its own.

We’re not sure how long this deal will last, so if you need to keep a lot of storage in your travel bag, or plugged into your Xbox One, I’d grab this quickly. [Seagate Backup Plus 4TB + 200GB Microsoft OneDrive, $120]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

Gaiam makes some of the most popular yoga gear on the market, and several colors of their 3mm mats are on sale for $17 today. [Gaiam Yoga Mats, $17]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

I’m pretty sure this is the first time anyone’s sent us a deal on a drinking game set, so we just had to post it. The included shot glasses are even made out of real glass, shockingly enough. [Ohuhu Shot Glass Roulette Drinking Game Set (2 Balls and 16 Glasses), $13 with code 54P7RFQL]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

This 50" Vizio M-series 4K TV is the single most popular TV we’ve ever posted, and Prime members can score one for an all-time low $598 today ($30 discount shown at checkout). That comes complete with local dimming, smart apps, and a well-reviewed upscaling engine for 1080p content. With all these home theater deals, you’d think there was a major television even happening soon or something. [Vizio M-Series 50” 4K, $598 for Prime Members]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

This Bluetooth speaker might cost a bit more than others that we list, but having owned it for about a month now, I can tell you the the sound quality absolutely blows away my trusty Jawbone Jambox, and Anker isn’t exaggerating when it boasts about 24 hour battery life. [Anker SoundCore Dual-Driver Portable Bluetooth Speaker, $36 with code NKJTGELK]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

As long as you don’t mind an open-box unit, you can save a whopping $60 on the high capacity model of the new Apple TV. That’s easily the best deal we’ve seen to date. [Apple TV 4th Generation Digital HD Media Streamer 64GB, $140]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

If you have a little one in your life, or one on the way, Amazon’s offering great discounts on well-reviewed Graco car seats and travel cribs, today only. [Get Up to 35% Off Graco Baby Products]


Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

If your current home theater audio setup isn’t going to cut it for the Super Bowl, Amazon’s marked this Sony sound bar system down to $200 today. That’s an all-time low, and about half its usual price. [Sony HT-CT770 2.1 Channel 330W Sound Bar with Wireless Subwoofer, $200]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

Most smartphone cameras are crazy-good these days, but if you want a little more versatility, this $10 kit lets you take fisheye, wide angle, and up-close macro shots that you could never get otherwise. [Aukey 3 in 1 Clip-on Cell Phone Camera Lens Kit, $10 with code 3QZSUUIX]

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Got a spare internal hard drive or SSD laying around? Turn it into an external storage device with this cheap, tool-free enclosure. [Inateck 2.5 Inch USB 3.0 HDD SATA External Hard Drive Disk Enclosure Case, $10 with code RHA9UO9K]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

It’s no secret that you guys love Dyson vacuums, and you can upgrade to a brand new DC39 for just $230 today, courtesy of Dyson’s eBay storefront. That’s about $100-$150 less than you’ll find it elsewhere, and right in line with what we’d expect refurbs to sell for. [Dyson DC39, $230]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

We see deals on car-starting battery packs just about every day, but even by our standards, $35 is a really fantastic price. Just note that this model is only 300A, so if your car’s engine is 3L or larger, keep reading for a more powerful alternative. [Bestek 300A Car Jump Starter, $35 with code 5VXFE6I6. Use code D5DZPWUZ for the red model]

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For larger trucks and SUVs, you’ll want to shell out an extra $20 for this 600A alternative from the same manufacturer. [BESTEK 600A Peak Current Portable Car Jump Starter and Power Bank, $55 with code R7CCIONH]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

If you still haven’t gotten yourself a Chromecast (or six), Best Buy is giving out $10 gift cards with your purchase today. Plus, Google will throw in 90 days of unlimited music, two months of CBS All Access, and a month of Sling TV for free. [Chromecast/Chromecast Audio, $35 + $10 Best Buy Gift Card]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

Far Cry Primal comes out later this month, but if you missed out on the previous entry in the series, Far Cry 4's complete edition is marked down to just $30 today on PS4 and Xbox One. [Far Cry 4 Complete Edition, $30]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

You don’t need to get your eyes checked, this really is 11,200mAh of extra battery for $8, plus a surprisingly bright flashlight. This Kmashi pack doesn’t have the build quality of our favorites from Anker, but it might be the best pure value we’ve ever seen. [Kmashi 11200mAh Portable External Battery Pack, $8 with code FVSA9NY2]

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

Here are some great stainless steel bar accessories, for all your boozing needs.

Ohuhu Luxury Corkscrew and Wine Stopper Set ($7) | Amazon | Use code NHLRY2SD

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X-Chef Stainless Steel 3-Piece Martini Bar Kit, Classic and Elegant ($14) | Amazon

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Today's Best Deals: Logitech Peripherals, 24 Hour Bluetooth Speaker, and More

You can get cheap Lightning and MicroUSB cables just about anywhere, but if only the best will do, you should give Anker’s PowerLine models a look.

These cables are built with kevlar fiber and feature reinforced stress points, which means they can last 5-10x longer than typical cables. I own a couple of these, and while I can’t yet speak to how long long they actually last, I can say that they just feel nice. Weighty, solid, premium.

These were on sale briefly last week for the same prices, but if you missed out, here’s another chance.

Anker [3-Pack] PowerLine MicroUSB Kevlar-Wrapped Cables ($7) | Amazon | Promo code D6SWG2EN

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Anker PowerLine 6ft Apple MFi Certified Lightning to USB Cable (White/Space Grey Only) ($10) | Amazon | Promo code Y4QNX8RS

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Secretary of Defense Announces How He'll Waste $582 Billion

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Secretary of Defense Announces How He'll Waste $582 Billion

You hear that? It’s the sound of 582 billion dollar bills falling down an infinitely deep hole, as narrated by your Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter. Yes, his name’s Ash. And yes, he’s going to spend a couple billion defending outer space from ISIS.

In a speech delivered and published today, Carter outlined some of the ways in which our great and war-craving nation will squander over half a trillion dollars in Fiscal Year 2017. It ain’t good:

Thanks, David. Appreciate it. And good morning, everyone. Appreciate you being here. It’s a pleasure for me to be — what I understand, David, to be the first secretary of defense to address the Economic Club of Washington.

What? What kind of polite, tippy-toe shit is this? The guy in charge of war shouldn’t be saying please and thank you so much—you’re the war man. And you’re also a war man at a time when we have to fight those scary guys in the cool black masks; this $582 billion is going to include tools to obliterate ISIS, right?

And challenge number five is our ongoing fight to defeat terrorism and especially ISIL, most immediately in its parent tumor in Iraq and Syria, and also, where it is metastasizing in Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere.

Great—with an effectively infinite supply of money, our armed forces should be able to defeat ISIL, just like we did with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Carter highlighted projects inside the “Strategic Capabilities Office, or SCO for short,” a murky and extremely wasteful corner of the Pentagon where some of our dumbest, most-likely-to-fail projects are born (and often die, at great expense):

Another project uses swarming autonomous vehicles in all sorts of ways and in multiple domains. In the air, they develop micro-drones that are really fast, really resistant. They can fly through heavy winds and be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach 0.9, like they did during an operational exercise in Alaska last year, or they can be thrown into the air by a soldier in the middle of the Iraqi desert. And for the water, they’ve developed self-driving boats which can network together to do all kinds of missions, from fleet defense to close-in surveillance, without putting sailors at risk. Each one of these leverages the wider world of technology. For example, the microdrones, I mentioned a moment ago, use a lot of commercial components and are actually 3-D printed and the boats build on some of the same artificial intelligence algorithms that long-ago and in a much more primitive form were on the Mars lander.

As Dan Froomkin of The Intercept pointed out, if this stuff sounds familiar to you, it might be because you’ve recently played Call of Duty, a game that, as far as I know, is based on the imagination of a large group of dudes, and not reality (much like the Department of Defense, you might say):

Here’s some more expensive impracticality:

And the last project I want to highlight is one that we’re calling the arsenal plane, which takes one of our oldest aircraft platform and turns it into a flying launchpad for all sorts of different conventional payloads. In practice, the arsenal plane will function as a very large airborne magazine, network to fifth generation aircraft that act as forward sensor and targeting nodes, essentially combining different systems already in our inventory to create holy new capabilities.

There’s no way to be sure what any of that really means, though I’m assuming he said “wholly new” not “holy new capabilities”— which honestly sounds pretty sweet.

At no point in this roughly 4,000 word rhapsodic free-association of war pornography and science fiction does Carter explain how drone swarms and “arsenal planes” will defeat the enemies we actually face, namely ISIS and other militant jihadist groups. Although, I did see this tweet earlier today

So maybe that justifies the nine new Virginia-class attack submarines the FY17 budget includes. ISIS has develop underwater capabilities.

And then there’s space, which, I have the displeasure of informing you, is now a war zone:

I also want to mention space because at times in the past, space was seen as a sanctuary, new and emerging threats make clear that that’s not the case anymore and we must be prepared for the possibility of a conflict that extends in space. Last year we added over $5 billion in new investments to make us better postured for that. And then in 2017 we’re doing even more, enhancing our ability to identify, attribute and negate all threatening actions in space. For so many commercial space endeavors, we want this domain to be just like the oceans and the Internet: free and safe for all.

Emphasis added. Sorry, space. Now you’re just another place where we do war. At least we now know that, although our country’s defense budget is the largest and dumbest, it ensures that we will beat the shit out of the Islamic State wherever it may seek refuge in orbit or perhaps on various lunar rock formations. The message is clear: we will meet and destroy ISIS in space, perhaps using a swarm of 3D-printed drones.

http://gawker.com/watch-the-fina...

Unmentioned in Carter’s remarks was whether or not part of the $582 billion budget will go toward making sure our military is able to keep stationary blimps from floating away and causing mayhem across the eastern seaboard.

Photo: Getty/Universal History Archive


Harper’s Editor-in-Chief Christopher Cox Suddenly Fired After Editing Only Two Issues

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Harper’s Editor-in-Chief Christopher Cox Suddenly Fired After Editing Only Two Issues

Last fall, Harper’s publisher and CEO John R. MacArthur promoted Christopher Cox, then serving as deputy editor of the 165-year-old literary and political magazine, to editor-in-chief. But this past Friday, less than three months into Cox’s tenure, MacArthur abruptly changed his mind. “I can confirm that I have been terminated from Harper’s Magazine because of editorial differences with the publisher,” Cox wrote in an email to Gawker on Tuesday. “I’m not prepared to say more than that at this time.”

We’re told that those “editorial differences” arose from a particularly tense meeting in late January, during which staffers debated implementing a redesigned cover of the print magazine—a change Cox apparently supported. Several days later, on January 29, with little warning or explanation, the famously change-averse MacArthur informed Cox that he was firing him. Cox’s termination was reportedly opposed by the magazine’s entire staff.

Cox became editor-in-chief on November 1, 2015, succeeding Ellen Rosenbush, who became editor-at-large. Due to the magazine’s slower schedule, however, Cox only oversaw the January and February issues of 2016 before he was terminated. It is unclear whether his name will appear on the masthead of the upcoming March issue. Cox is still listed as editor, however, on the magazine’s website.

MacArthur did not immediately return a voicemail left on his office phone. A Harper’s spokesperson did not answer an email or call requesting comment, either. If you know any more about Cox’s firing, please get in touch.

Email the author: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · Photo credit: Twitter, Harper’s

Son of Former Top de Blasio Administration Aide Pleads Not Guilty in Fatal Stabbing

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Son of Former Top de Blasio Administration Aide Pleads Not Guilty in Fatal Stabbing

On Monday morning, 16-year-old Savion Lewallen was stabbed while trying to rob, with four others, 19-year-old Khari Noerdlinger, in Edgewater, New Jersey, NBC New York reports. Noerdlinger’s mother is Rachel Noerdlinger, former chief of staff to First Lady Chirlane McCray.

Officials said Khari Noerdlinger stabbed Lewallen in the leg in the process of defending himself during the attempted robbery. Lewallen died of the wound at Palisades General Hospital. Noerdlinger, who allegedly tried to remove evidence from the scene, was arrested Monday on charges of aggravated manslaughter, weapon possession, and hindering apprehension.

At a hearing on Tuesday, ABC 7 reports, prosecutors claimed that Noerdlinger knew the victim. “He had a pre-existing relationship with the victim, who we identified and will continue to identify as the S.L. He had this pre-existing relationship,” Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Danielle Grootenboer said. “The evidence will show that they also shared a business together. The evidence showed, and does show, that they were in fact drug dealers.”

Defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman said Noerdlinger—who pleaded not guilty—had acted in self defense. “They were looking to kill him,” Lichtman said. “So, for his trouble—for trying to stay alive—Khari Noerdlinger is now being charged with manslaughter.”

“The fact is that he was attacked, attacked by armed people.”

Police have also filed charges of conspiracy to commit armed robbery against Mirleny Tremols, 35; Kevensky Lubin, 18; Richard Jean-Pierre, 18; and Calim Gaspard, 23, the Journal News reports.

Noerdlinger left City Hall in 2014, after reports emerged that she was dating an ex-con, Hassaun McFarlan, who referrred to police as “pigs.” From DNAinfo:

Court and police records show that the two have lived together for nearly two years.

McFarlan, 36, has been arrested at least five times, including for the fatal shooting of a teenager over a down jacket, records show.

Two of the arrests occurred while he was dating Noerdlinger, a former aide to the Rev. Al Sharpton. While they’ve been an item, McFarlan has also trashed police officers on his Facebook account, referring to them as “pigs” in two posts.

In one online rant, McFarlan said, “I cant come outside without the pigs f——— with me in the hood.”

Lewallen was recently sentenced to six months in jail on charges of holding and assaulting a 15-year-old girl, who police said he had a history of harassing, for an hour and a half in the woods near a high school. He was released with credit for time served (he’d spent 164 days in jail, on $75,000 cash bail, awaiting sentencing).


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

Donald Trump Says Ted Cruz Broke the Law to Win Iowa

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Donald Trump Says Ted Cruz Broke the Law to Win Iowa

In a tweet that existed only briefly, like a soap bubble in a toilet bowl, Donald Trump just accused Ted Cruise of illegally winning the Iowa caucus, which is to say Ted Cruz broke the law.

http://gawker.com/donald-trump-r...

This is not a small thing to throw at a political rival in an election year!

Donald Trump Says Ted Cruz Broke the Law to Win Iowa

The tweet was quickly deleted and then replaced by a version that omits the word “illegally,” perhaps because some lawyer advised Trump that publicly accusing someone of criminality is itself a great legal liability. Bad!

http://gawker.com/heres-the-ben-...

FEC regulations are sprawling and opaque, as is Donald Trump, so it’s hard to tell exactly which law he alleged Cruz violated. But his followup tweets give us some idea:

Trump concludes that the results from Iowa should be “nullified” entirely:

Candidates—especially salty ones—routinely accuse each other of such and such misdeed and general sliminess. And it does seem like Cruz engaged in some middle school election trickery to sabotage Ben Carson’s already shitty victory prospects at the caucus. But accusing your rival of actually breaking the law is much more rare and generally stupid unless you’ve very sure it happened. Given that Trump deleted his claim after only seven minutes, he’s probably not very sure at all.

Tweet screenshot via William Turton



Jeb Bush Gives Up on Winning, Begs Voters for Something More Realistic: “Please Clap"

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Jeb Bush Gives Up on Winning, Begs Voters for Something More Realistic: “Please Clap"

Jeb Bush, who once dreamed of a fifth-place victory in Iowa only to have even those grim goals crushed, seems to be lowering the bar yet again. Rather than imploring New Hampshire residents for their votes, Bush has set his sights on something far more reasonable—polite applause.

According to The New York Times, Bush tried his hand at firing up the crowd at a town hall yesterday near the Vermont border. (It didn’t work.)

From The Times:

Mr. Bush finished a fiery riff about protecting the country as commander in chief — “I won’t be out here blowharding, talking a big game without backing it up,” he said — and was met with total silence.

“Please clap,” he said, sounding defeated.

The crowd laughed — and then, finally, clapped.

Please, excuse me for a moment as I weep.

[h/t The New York Times]


America's Great Friend Saudi Arabia Will Whip a Poet For His Poetry

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America's Great Friend Saudi Arabia Will Whip a Poet For His Poetry

The good news is that Saudi Arabia has changed its mind about executing a poet for “the contents of his poetry book.” Then there is the bad news.

The bad news is: Saudi Arabia is America’s closest ally in the Middle East!

Also, the bad news for the poet and artist Ashraf Fayadh in particular is that the Saudi court that tossed out his sentence of beheading has replaced it with a sentence of eight years in prison and 800 lashes.

The good news is that prisoners do not typically die from such floggings, which are administered 50 lashes at a time.

The bad news is that Saudi Arabia, America’s closest Middle Eastern ally and the top destination for U.S. weapons sales, is planning to whip a man 800 times—periodically, as he sits in a prison—for the crime of “apostasy” because they object to the “blasphemy” found in his book of poetry. Fayadh is also being ordered to publicly denounce his own work, which is something I imagine most of us would do in order to avoid being beheaded, but which would bother us greatly, at the same time, although probably not as much as the 800 lashes would bother us.

The good news is that the government of a nation that respects human rights to a greater degree could theoretically have more influence over the government of a nation that respects human rights to a lesser degree by being their ally than by being their enemy.

The bad news is that after more than three decades as America’s closest ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia still treats women like third-class citizens and imprisons those who criticize government authorities and publicly executes nonviolent drug criminals and, with the strong backing of our government, run an authoritarian state that, among many other offenses, plans to whip a man 800 times for writing poetry.

The good news is that U.S. defense contractors have taken in a healthy chunk of change from this dictatorship, which probably helps your retirement portfolio in the long run, assuming you live longer than the average Saudi dissident poet.

The pen has yet to be proven mightier than the sword.

[Photo: AP]

Is This Vigilante Group Fighting ISIS or Just Feeding the Media a Fat Load of Crap? 

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Is This Vigilante Group Fighting ISIS or Just Feeding the Media a Fat Load of Crap? 

In the past few months, dozens of media outlets reported on a disturbing secret app being used by ISIS members to exchange secure messages. The media reports were based on one another, as well as the word of a volunteer hacking collective called Ghost Security Group (GSG). Another story has also made the rounds recently: That this same group, GSG, found information and used it to stop a mass terrorist attack. These are compelling, terrifying stories—and they’re both stories with many holes, from a strange and unverifiable source.

Is a group of strangers working for free to supplement government counterterrorism intelligence in a significant way, or is this collective pulling off a massive hoax? The story of Ghost Security Group only gets weirder the closer you look.

They’re anonymous, not Anonymous

Many Ghost Security Group members used to work with Anonymous, including its ringleader, DigitaShadow. But GSG has pointedly distanced itself from Anonymous, as well as an Anonymous-affiliated group simply called Ghost Security, which also runs a digital campaign against ISIS.

At one point, Ghost Security and Ghost Security Group were one and the same, before they had a schism based on how to best wage their rogue anti-ISIS operation. Now they fucking hate each other.

GSG seems to be courting legitimacy, and has already snagged credulous profiles in Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. It trademarked its name and discarded “the hoodies and Guy Fawkes masks” in a press release in November 2015. In its own words, GSG “uses the internet as a weapon,” although it says it emphasizes funneling data to officials and not actually executing cyberattacks.

A GSG spokesperson says it has sixteen “operatives” in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, running a round-the-clock volunteer counterterrorism effort. These operatives collect data and pass it to DigitaShadow, who then decides what they should pass to the authorities.

DigitaShadow claims to feed the government data now, but he used to have a contentious relationship with authorities. In 2014, he was named a “malicious cyber actor” by the California State Threat Assessment Center for claiming to DoS attack law enforcement. But Tom Duffy, chair of the Multi-State ISAC of the Center for Internet Security, said the group had “not seen any activity from DigitaShadow since January 2015.”

Is This Vigilante Group Fighting ISIS or Just Feeding the Media a Fat Load of Crap? 

“DigitaShadow” image provided by Ghost Security Group

Anything DigitalShadow approves, the GSG spokesperson said, is “sent to Michael S. Smith II of Kronos Advisory which he in turn forwards the data to counterterror officials in the United States and abroad.”

Smith, who founded the South Carolina-based Kronos in 2011, said he acts as a liaison between GSG and his government contacts, although he won’t name any names. Smith (who often appears as a counter-terrorism pundit on Fox News and is quoted frequently in media reports about ISIS) has the connections, GSG has the information—sounds like a convenient partnership for a small defense consulting firm like Kronos, since it outsources the actual intelligence-gathering to volunteers.

TorReaper, a member of the other Ghost Security, dismisses the rival group as frauds. “Those guys work exclusively through Smith because his company (Kronos Advisory) is the commercial vessel through which they sell their ‘Intel’” TorReaper said, implying that GSG is actually a sort of shadowy intel subcontractor that commodifies the threats it discovers.

Smith readily admits that most of the “intel” collected by GSG comes from publicly available information on the internet, but denies that the group is working for Kronos.

He also denies that he is making any profit off GSG’s work. “This is more akin to when attorneys do pro bono work,” he told Gizmodo. “I saw a potential opportunity to help some people and make an impact, and I considered it a civic obligation when I saw the information.”

While Smith is adamant that his liaison position with GSG is on a volunteer basis, separate from his job at Kronos, he does admit that he’s open to possible intermingling in the future—with the goal of generating revenue for the hacker collective. “I feel obligated to examine ways that I can help to generate some revenue for them and that project would basically be to put the data that they’re collecting at the disposal of researchers that want more than just translations of propaganda materials,” Smith said.

According to GSG, it isn’t exclusive with Smith. The spokesperson told me that Smith isn’t the group’s only contact, but wouldn’t provide the names of other partners. I asked if any members had considered joining government intelligence in an official capacity. “Several of our operatives have multiple contacts with governmental sources on a global scale however we are currently independent,” the spokesperson said.

Is it bullshit?

At least one of the two major claims that put GSG in the news is clearly overblown. As the Daily Dot pointed out, there’s a glaring problem with the whole “scary new ISIS encrypted messaging app” claim—there’s no evidence that the app, Alrawi, is a hotbed for terrorist activity, and all the media coverage claiming otherwise relied on bad information.

We’ve seen this sort of second-hand reporting before about how ISIS uses the internet. Remember those trumped-up claims about a 24/7 ISIS help desk that turned out to be nonsense?

GSG denies that the app is fake, though admits that it does not provide an encrypted messaging platform in the way media coverage claimed it did.

“The Alwari.apk does exist and we retain copies however when we were initially contacted in regards to that app we were in the middle of an analysis and found the app to only have Bluetooth file sharing abilities,” the GSG spokesperson said. “This same developer has been found to be working on other projects as well however it is being investigated. Overall we feel he had ambitions to implement communications functions but lacked the technical capacity to do so. What we considered to be a small find the media hyped.”

That hype could influence policymakers: House Homeland Security Committee chair Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) used reports of an ISIS encrypted messaging app as an example of why encryption can become a dangerous tool. Politicians love to use sensational stories like “scary encrypted ISIS app” as bogeymen.

Meanwhile, that second claim, about straight-up helping to stop an ISIS attack? There is no evidence to support it, and the media reports on the incident all use Smith and GSG’s statements as primary sources. The FBI has not confirmed this account, nor have any other government sources. There is no documentation at all that this happened beyond the word of Smith and GSG, and the media reports repeating those words.

The FBI did not respond to our requests for comment or questions about Ghost Security Group, though a spokesperson told Gizmodo “We do not normally comment” on intelligence sources.

It could be that the US government is using information pushed through unofficial side-channels and sourced by an unvetted international group of ex-Anonymous volunteers in its efforts against ISIS. Or we could be passing around the same handful of un-fact-checkable reports from a group that could secure lucrative consulting deals if Smith decides to roll its services into his business, basically doing pro bono PR work for a small defense consultancy.

In the absence of actual information about how the US government is conducting counter-terrorism intelligence to thwart ISIS, it’s tempting to accept the morsels fed to us, especially when they’re fed in such a fascinating and roguish package. That, of course, does not make them true.

Illustration by Jim Cooke

Man Reportedly Sucked Out of Somali Passenger Plane After Midair Explosion

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Man Reportedly Sucked Out of Somali Passenger Plane After Midair Explosion

A Daallo Airlines flight had been in the air over Somalia for only five minutes when a hole opened in the fuselage, sucking one man out of the plane and killing him.

The middle-aged man’s charred body was found in the Balcad area of Somalia, roughly 30 miles north of the city of Mogadishu, where the plane made an emergency landing after the explosion. Two others aboard the plane were injured.

The video below, taken immediately after the explosion, shows a surprisingly calm plane considering that one passenger had, you know, just flown out of the cabin.

Per Reuters, the source of the explosion was a bomb, though not much more beyond that seems to be known. No terror group has yet claimed responsibility.


Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com / image via AP

NYC Council Mulls "Nuclear Option" Over Some Damn Horse-and-Buggies

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NYC Council Mulls "Nuclear Option" Over Some Damn Horse-and-Buggies

Today, the most heat-generating issue in New York City—the issue that is prompting our council to consider a measure that it has never used before, according to one member—is not homelessness, or a lack of affordable housing, or even the L Train apocalypse—but the fate of the horse-and-carriage industry. How did we get here?

The New York Times reports today that while Bill de Blasio was making his frankly sort of depressing visit to Iowa to knock on doors for Hillary, certain City Council members began to reconsider their support for a measure that would drastically downsize the number of carriages in the city and limit them to Central Park. The mayor, you’ll recall, promised to ban the industry outright on his first day in office, and has struggled since then to marshal support for the idea. The Central Park measure, which will see a vote on Friday, was intended as a compromise.

Not so fast! Pedicab drivers, who would be banned from the touristy southern half of the park under the plan, presumably including Columbus Circle, where they congregate now, are seeking to unionize. Transport Workers Union Local 100, the powerful union that hopes to back them, is against the legislation, as are the Central Labor Council, another union, and the carriage drivers, who are represented by the Teamsters. The Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park, also has concerns. That’s a lot of constituencies a member might alienate by voting the wrong way.

According to the Times, some in the council are discussing a so-called “nuclear option,” which would allow changes to be made to the bill on the day of the vote, and might cause some drama and debate on the council floor. Considering the forces at play, a scaling back or outright retraction of the pedicab ban might be one of those changes. “It’s never been done before, but it’s possible,” one councilman said.

So, how did we get here? Why is Bill de Blasio so intent on passing a bill that no one seems to want? NYCLASS, the main organization in support of a carriage ban, donated some money to his 2013 campaign coffers, and even more to an organization devoted solely to taking down former council speaker Christine Quinn, who was seen at the time as a shoo-in for the mayoralty. As Gawker’s Brendan O’Connor laid out in his great column at The Awl last month, the whole affair likely has as much to do with some pricey West Side real estate as it does with protecting animal rights, the ostensible reason for the bill.

Amid the turmoil, the mayor quietly and extra-legislatively agreed with carriage drivers that NYC & Company, the city’s marketing and tourism arm, would give promotion to the industry, a union official told the Times. If the mayor genuinely believes the carriages are inhumane and inappropriate, as he said after he was elected, giving their drivers free advertising is a strange way of showing it.


Hillary Clinton's Opponents Should Probably Stop Fantasizing About Spanking Her

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Hillary Clinton's Opponents Should Probably Stop Fantasizing About Spanking Her

Here is Chris Christie, speaking today about debating Hillary Clinton, which, it should be noted, will never happen:

Disgusting! Stop it!

Previously in bloated conservatives dreaming about spanking Hillary Clinton:

http://gawker.com/who-told-ted-c...


So Far, The People vs. O.J. Simpson Is Fun TV, and Not Much More

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The opening scene of FX’s new series The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story achieved true horror that no Ryan Murphy production previously has, not even the one named American Horror Story. Dread descended in the dreamlike moments leading up to the discovery of Nicole Brown Simpson’s mutilated body outside her home. That the series was able to achieve actual tension was truly masterful, given that just about everyone tuning in knew exactly where this was going.

Like a lot of TV (too much of it, in my estimation), The People vs. O.J. Simpson arrives on air with almost unanimous critical acclaim. At least some of the goodwill toward the show must come as a result of its impeccable timing—it arrives during a true-crime boom in our culture and at a specific programming moment where, due to winter hiatuses, virtually nothing else is on television. The last twenty-one years have been kind to the O.J. circus, which has gone from proto-reality TV tabloid trash everyone was sick of by its end to prestige television.

The show’s creators have an explicit statement of purpose. “We had the opportunity to be part of a conversation that needed to be had,” producer Nina Jacobson told the New York Times, regarding the decades-long resonance of O.J. and the racial implications of his case. “While we were shooting, the drumbeat of that conversation just kept getting louder and louder and louder. We did feel a sense of purpose, to speak to a giant audience with a director who has an enormous following and access, and actors who have fans in every corner.”

“These are topics that we’ve never gotten right, and never fully understood,” said executive producer and director of the first two episodes Ryan Murphy in another Times article. “It is such an important conversation in our culture now. And such an important thing to get right.”

The basic idea is that beyond repurposing good TV to make more good TV, beyond being simple human theater, there’s a social awareness present that makes The People vs. O.J. Simpson more suited to modern enlightenment. If you believe its creators’ earnest explanations, this show will focus on larger issues of race and sexism and celebrity—things we were supposedly too dumb to truly consider the implications of 21 years ago.

In the first episode, celebrity was certainly a concern, but on a meta-level. The People vs. O.J. Simpson is star-studded enough to be distracting, and the acting is histrionic enough to make the entire endeavor teeter on the brink of absurdity. Cuba Gooding Jr., seems to be just winging it here—despite taking the role of one of the most famous figures in the history of American culture, he did nothing to alter his voice or affect and thus is unconvincing. I don’t see O.J. when I look at Cuba Gooding Jr.; I see Cuba Gooding Jr. playing O.J.. Sarah Paulson plays frazzled like she’s playing a strand of Marcia Clark’s hair, not Marcia Clark, while John Travolta (as Robert Shaprio) is acting his facelift off.

So Far, The People vs. O.J. Simpson Is Fun TV, and Not Much More

On the bright side, Courtney B. Vance, while given very little to do during the premiere, certainly looks the part of Johnnie Cochran, and casting the perpetually underrated Selma Blair as Kris Jenner (then-Kardashian) was a stroke of total genius.

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski’s script is punchy and frenetically paced without being obnoxiously Sorkin-esque, and Murphy has toned down his direction a notch or two from AHS’s campy heights, so it all looks big, bold, and impressively choreographed without quite getting in the way of itself. The effort here seems to be to balance the style with substance, and the result was, at the very least, a fun hour and twenty minutes of television despite the grim subject matter and pretensions of the show’s creators.

Perhaps those proclamations of seriousness were just talk, anyway. Maybe it’s not that we need Murphy, et. al., to tease out the political subtext of the O.J. Simpson, which was clearly visible 21 years ago. Maybe it’s that our modern supposed enlightenment means we need more explicit justifications for indulging in lurid spectacle.

[Footage/images via FX]


Venezuela Is So Fucked

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Venezuela Is So Fucked

Our nation has problems, and your nation has problems, but be thankful you don’t live in Venezuela, which is truly one of the most fucked places on earth.

Sure, Syria has a horrific war and plenty of nations around the world have populations that are destitute and disease-ridden. But the thing that really hurts is how far you fall, and nobody in the world today is falling harder and faster than Venezuela, a place that not so long ago thought it might be able to build a nice socialist paradise on top of an endless sea of oil revenue. And now?

“The only question now is whether Venezuela’s government or economy will completely collapse first,” writes Matt O’Brien in a jaunty overview of this fucked up global fucked-spot. What happened? An incompetent government combined with a huge drop in global oil prices have produced an economy that is shrinking at a breathtaking clip, crumbling infrastructure, a lack of goods for people to buy even if they could afford it, and runaway inflation. (It is worth noting that the government’s top economic official “rejects some basic tenets of conventional economics, for example that printing too much money causes inflation.”) Venezuela’s oil production is falling, and oil prices are falling even faster, leaving the government woefully short on funds. They’re set to default on their national debt. Corrupt officials may have embezzled hundreds of billions of dollars. Venezuela is rated one of the most corrupt countries on earth. The nation’s biggest company is begging the government to seek international aid “to avoid the collapse of the food supply.” Unfortunately, most of their neighbors are too pissed off at them to care.

Also, Caracas is the most dangerous city on earth, and the country is full of the Zika virus.

Book your affordable Venezuelan vacation now.

[Photo: AP]

The Rabbinical Bernie Sanders

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The Rabbinical Bernie Sanders

Yesterday, Gawker reported on a clip of Bernie Sanders playing Rabbi Manny Shevitz (lol) in the 1999 comedy My X-Girlfriend’s Wedding Reception. “We knew Bernie,” the film’s director, Martin Guigui, told us this morning. “He was kind of a fixture in Burlington—a pretty personable mayor, walking the streets.”

http://gawker.com/who-needs-larr...

Guigui grew up in Vermont when Sanders was the mayor of Burlington. His father, Efrain Guigui, was the director of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. “Bernie and my dad—he used to come see my dad perform,” Guigui said.

After going to New York for film and music school, Guigui came back to Burlington to play music and make movies. “Bernie would come see my band,” he said. “I made my first feature film in Burlington. When I wrote the script, I had people in mind that I could put in the movie. Local celebs, local luminaries.” The owner of a popular restaurant played a chef; the drummer for Phish was the drummer in the band. “Everybody played themselves.”

Guigui wrote the part of the rabbi for Sanders, and brought the script to him in his office. (By this point, he was a congressman.) “I told him the idea, read the lines that I’d written. He thought it was fun and funny.” Guigui remembers Sanders as being very gracious, and a natural on camera. “He only needed one take. He nailed it.”

“Bernie to us, in Vermont, was the guy who would always do the right thing. The way he speaks is benevolent, almost sermon-like,” Guigui said. “Bernie lays out—let’s call them truisms. That’s what rabbis do. They just want you to have a good, stress-free life, from womb to tomb. He’s a guy who’s gonna lead us to the promised land—like any good rabbi would.”


Photo credit: Matthew Thorsen. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Report: Ted Cruz Actually More Annoying Than Previously Reported

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Report: Ted Cruz Actually More Annoying Than Previously Reported

Incredibly, Ted Cruz—a man who memorized the Constitution in high school and has not let go of that fact since—has a unique way of relieving stress: Annoying the hell out of his wife.

“He’ll call me and just sing me a Broadway tune,” Heidi Cruz volunteered to a rally yesterday in New Hampshire. According to the New York Times, the sonic attacks can occur without warning, “right before one of these debates” or “in a stressful moment in a state.”

That Ted Cruz is not popular amongst his peers is clear—this is a man whose former classmates have intermittently described as “abrasive,” “intense,” “strident,” “crank,” “arrogant,” and “creepy”—but certainly his wife finds his personality charming?

It is usually well received — “he never ceases to defuse a stressful moment with a moment of levity,” Mrs. Cruz said — but not always.

“I’m thinking, ‘I’m on a finance call right now,’ ” Mrs. Cruz recalled. “Do you really need to be doing this?”

“Do you really need to be doing this”—a question Ted Cruz arguably doesn’t contemplate enough.


Grizzled Young Writer Scoffs at Political Values, Bernie Leanings of Slightly Younger People

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At the New Yorker, writer Alexandra Schwartz wonders if “millennials” should “get over Bernie Sanders,” owing to the outsized political hope that “youth” have before they realize that every politician is a shill, nobody with real values is actually electable, and also that God Is Dead. The writer knows this because she’s been through it before, with Obama, and because she has spent much time on this earth as “a voter north of twenty-five, south of thirty.” Oh.

At the risk of being a Schwartz age truther, it is unclear to me how a person under 30 would actively conjure the phrase “a fist-shaker and haranguer who makes the ‘Yakety Yak’ dad look chill,” but maybe she’s just listening to a lot of oldies radio, and besides, that’s the least of this piece’s problems:

So purity, a highly useful principle to make use of while running for office, is all but useless to politicians who actually arrive there, and the voters least likely to see that are young ones. The belief in the possibility of true purity might be a delusion for most voters, but it’s a privilege of youth, the province of people for whom the thrill of theory hasn’t yet given way to the comparative disappointment of practice. It’s a rite of passage into political adulthood, when the contours of the world seem sharper than they may ever be again, and the notion of the correspondence between the politician one votes for and the one who arrives in office is still intact—that moment of “very heaven,” as Wordsworth’s famous line about witnessing the start of the French Revolution as a young man has it.

A chortle of a paragraph that, not unironically, makes the “Yakety Yak” dad look chill, it’s a lofty notion to fault anyone for voting according to a set of beliefs and aspirations about how the country in which they live should be; it’s what Trump supporters are doing, too, however vilely, and it’s also not helping the writer’s presumable support for Clinton that she’s telling voters slightly younger than she to suck it up and vote for the candidate that they might reasonably think kinda sucks.

Because she’s been there, kiddos! Obama’s sheen wore off, and besides, Sanders will never be as cool as Obama, because cool factor is definitely the reason we should vote for candidates!

But Obama as a candidate may be as close as many of us will ever come to a twenty-something’s ideal politician—the sheer force of that fluid, academically honed intelligence! The nuance and honesty of the race speech! The dancing!—and a comparison of the two on that count yields something very odd. Bernie’s crankiness to Obama’s cool, his age to Obama’s freshness, his nagging to Obama’s rhetorical deftness, his hokiness to Obama’s humor, his gout to Obama’s jump shot: all make for a strangely conservative vision of a youth idol.

By this premise, I should be voting for Marco Rubio despite his desire to strip a woman’s right to choose and confounding immigration stance because he and I both like Pitbull and Nicki Minaj. But then, I’m a grizzled old woman who had the distinct pleasure of voting for a cretin so ancient as Al Gore, the climate change guy, so assertions such as these don’t quite resonate with me:

Sanders’s attention to socioeconomic justice is stirring and necessary, but when his campaign tweets that it’s “high time we stopped bailing out Wall Street and started repairing Main Street,” you have to wonder why his youngest supporters, so attuned to staleness in all things cultural, are letting him get away with political rhetoric that would have seemed old even in 2012.

So now the problem is that Bernie is—dated? Schwartz’s logic switches: instead of tweeting some OLD shit from even BEFORE the archaic days of Occupy Wall Street, Sanders should be focusing on issues that really, truly affect millennial voters, such as dabbing. Free college tuition? Pshhh. Tell it to your Tumblr, bro.

Of course much of the disdain towards Clinton is gendered and vile, particularly when coming from the group we have come to call Berniebros; Sanders supporters, like any progressive politician’s supporters, often act in a way that’s unsettlingly far from the progressive politics they espouse. (And, for the record, this ol’ bag is still undecided.) But faux-sage ideating that the best stance is one in which everyone is automatically compromised is garbage that’s easy to lob from the position of someone who can afford the privilege of being jaded. Expect better, no matter your age.


Rick Santorum, Who Was Still Running For President, Is No Longer Running For President

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Rick Santorum, Who Was Still Running For President, Is No Longer Running For President

Rick Santorum, a relic of a previous political era who doesn’t have the charisma to land a gig as a cable news talking head, was running one of the most pointless political campaigns of this election cycle. Tonight, per CNN, he will announce its demise.

Santorum closing up shop immediately after the Iowa caucus is hardly a surprise. He narrowly won there in 2012 before being steamrolled by Mitt Romney, and if his 2016 campaign was going to be relevant in any way it would have started with a surprising showing in Iowa. Instead, Santorum picked up 1 percent of the vote, finishing ahead of only Jim Gilmore, who received 12 total votes. He is the third GOP candidate to drop out of the race since Iowa, joining Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee.

What is Santorum’s legacy? You could say so many things! For me, I choose to remember him with this iconic photo, taken during the concession speech he gave upon losing his senate seat in 2006.

Rick Santorum, Who Was Still Running For President, Is No Longer Running For President


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