Two weeks ago, Ferguson officials and the U.S. Department of Justice announced that they’d come to an amicable deal over police reform, which would bring law enforcement in the Missouri city more in line with the constitution and avoid a lengthy battle in court. So much for all that: after Ferguson welched on the deal this week, the DOJ announced its plans to sue.
The two sides previously reached an agreement for reform based on the DOJ’s findings that civil rights abuses by Ferguson police were rampant. According to the terms of the agreement, cops would stop practices like making warrantless arrests, and the city would repeal a jaywalking ordinance that was used overwhelmingly to target black people for fines, among other changes. But Ferguson’s City Council unanimously voted to reject the agreement, which they saw as prohibitively expensive.
The people of Ferguson “should not be forced to wait any longer for justice,” U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a press conference this afternoon about the lawsuit the DOJ filed in response. The suit, filed today alleges that Ferguson cops used excessive force without justification and engaged in “racially discriminatory law enforcement conduct,” the Washington Post reports.
As you can imagine, going to court against the full legal might of the U.S. government can get pretty expensive. If council members were worried about the price tag of complying with the federal reforms, I wonder what they think about what it will cost to fight them.
On Wednesday, a gunman shot and killed two sheriff’s deputies—one inside a Panera restaurant in Abingdon, and the other in a shootout shortly thereafter. According to the Associated Press, the suspect, David Brian Evans, had a warrant out for his arrest in Florida, where he allegedly assaulted a police officer.
Evans, 67, was killed in the shootout. No bystanders were hurt, officials said.
Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said that he believed the deputy killed in the initial shooting was targeted for wearing a uniform. Police, however, have not yet released a motive. From the AP:
Sophia Faulkner, 15, said she and her mother were getting lunch and almost sat right next to the gunman. Instead, they chose a booth about 10 feet away because the man appeared “sketchy” and disheveled. He was sitting in the back and hadn’t ordered any food, Faulker and her mother said.
A sheriff’s deputy was called to the restaurant to check on a report about someone causing a problem. The deputy tried to talk to the man, who was apparently known to local deputies and workers at the restaurant. The deputy sat down beside him, asked how he was doing and the man shot him in the head.
“I saw him fall back out of his chair and the blood started coming out,” Faulkner said. “I didn’t know how to process it. My mom said, ‘What’s going on?’ and I said, ‘Get down, someone just got shot.’”
Panera’s corporate office, in a statement, said, “The Panera Family is heartbroken over today’s incident at our Abingdon bakery-cafe. Our thoughts and actions now are directed towards the victims and their families. This location will remain closed as we work with law enforcement to investigate.”
The names of the deputies killed have not yet been released, the Baltimore Sun reports, but both were long-term veterans—one was with the Sheriff’s Office for 30 years, and the other for 16 years.
The City of Cleveland has devastated the family of Tamir Rice several times over, and seems to have no intention of stopping. This afternoon in probate court, Cleveland Scene reports, the city filed a creditor’s claim for $500, saying that Rice’s family still owes them for the ambulance and paramedics that tended to the 12-year-old’s body after he was shot by a police officer in November 2014.
In the language of the notice, the city states that the Rice family is responsible “for emergency medical services rendered as the decedent’s last dying expense under Ohio Revised Code.” Broken down, the city is billing Rice’s family $450 for “advance life support” that did not save him and $50 for the mileage driven by the ambulance to the hospital where he died.
In a statement given to Cleveland Scene, Subodh Chandra, one of the Rice family’s attorneys said:
“That the city would submit a bill and call itself a creditor after having had its own police officers slay 12-year-old Tamir displays a new pinnacle of callousness and insensitivity. The kind of poor judgment that it takes to do such a thing is nothing short of breathtaking. Who on earth would think this was a good idea and file this on behalf of the city? This adds insult to homicide. The mayor and law director should apologize to the Rice family and withdraw this filing immediately.”
The California parole panel has denied parole once more for Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was his 15th hearing.
During a press conference on Tuesday, Karen Weaver, the mayor of Flint, announced that a $55 million pipe replacement program is scheduled to begin this month. Homes with pregnant women and children will get higher priority.
In 2014, before Weaver took office, Flint officials changed the city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, which led to lead poisoning, rashes, possibly legionnaire’s disease and innumerable future lawsuits from residents against the city and state. Weaver, according to the Detroit Free Press, is trying to stay focused on making the city’s water supply safe again.
“In order for Flint residents to once again have confidence and trust in the water coming from their faucets, all lead pipes in the city of Flint need to be replaced,” she said. “The success of the Fast Start plan will require coordination between the city, state and federal officials as well as funding from the Michigan Legislature, Congress or both. I’m asking Gov. Snyder and the state to partner on this effort.”
It’s unclear exactly where the water replacement will begin in the city, but retired National Guard Brig. Gen. Michael McDaniel, who is aiding Weaver in the Fast Start plan, thinks all of the pipes can be replaced over the next year “under optimal conditions.”
The first phase of Fast Start will focus on replacing pipes for homes with “children under the age of 6, children with elevated blood-lead levels, pregnant women, senior citizens, residential day care facilities, people with compromised immune systems.” Schools and other places around Flint where people can rely on bottled water will be tackled during the second phase. The lead pipe replacement is intended to come at no cost to Flint homeowners, though they will have to sign an agreement giving the city access to their property’s water system and open their home to a meter.
At least 58 people were killed in a double suicide bombing at a refugee camp in Dikwa, in northeast Nigeria, on Tuesday, Agence France-Presse reports. A third suicide bomber surrendered to authorities after realizing her family was in the camp, officials said.
The camp, some 55 miles outside Maiduguri, the Borno state capital, houses nearly 53,600 people displaced by Boko Haram. Earlier this month, the militant Islamist group firebombed the village of Dalori.
“From what we gathered three female suicide bombers disguised as IDPs arrived at IDP camp at about 6:30 am (0530 GMT),” Satomi Ahmed, head of the Borno State Emergency Management Agency, told AFP.
“Two of them detonated their explosives. The third one refused to set off hers when she realised her parents and siblings were in the camp. She surrendered herself to the authorities.”
Elsewhere in Nigeria on Wednesday, two soldiers were arrested for allegedly attempting to smuggle arms and ammunition to Boko Haram extremists. The Associated Press reports:
Col. Sani Kukasheka Usman said the two were sappers, or combat engineers, who worked in an explosive ordinance unit in the northeast where Boko Haram commits most attacks, and may have trained insurgents in bomb-making.
Some soldiers have told the AP that Boko Haram has infiltrated Nigeria’s security forces and some fight with the army by day and with the extremists by night.
Usman spoke at a news conference where he also reported that in recent days the military has killed 35 extremists and rescued about 300 civilians held by Boko Haram.
His statements come a day after Nigeria’s Secret Service said it arrested an alleged recruiter for the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, identified as Abdussalam Enesi Yunusa. It did not give his nationality.
Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State last year.
Starting today you can get the best deals on the Internet delivered to your inbox daily at 4pm.
Subscribing is easy. Sign into (or sign up for) your Kinja account, and then click here. Type in your email address, and you’re all done. Once you’re signed up, your first newsletter will arrive that afternoon at 4pm ET (or the following one, if you sign up after 4).
While you’re at it, follow us on Facebook to get Kinja Deals in your newsfeed, and on Twitter to see every deal immediately, including lightning discounts and brief price mistakes.
Illustration by Tara Jacoby
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. We want your feedback.
Rand Paul dropped out of the Republican presidential campaign after he came up shy of five percent in the Iowa caucus. This must have been a tremendous disappointment to ... well, nobody.
All along, the myth of Rand Paul (and of his dad, That Weird Elf-Kid From Legend If He Got Old And Was Super-Duper Racist) basically has been as follows: The right’s obsession with waging wars both cultural and, uh, military had underserved/was underserving/is underserving traditional conservative principles of limited government, fiscal discipline, and individual liberty. This has alienated a body of smart, skeptical, rational people, who can’t be pandered to with anti-intellectual horseshit or roped into culture-war signaling or rallied around whatever the next great unnecessary foreign war might happen to be, but who also mistrust liberalism’s notions of an empowered, activist government fixing people’s problems. These people were fundamentally conservative, the myth goes—more so along certain axes than their Christian-right brethren, even—and the Republican Party lost them in its rush to solidify the South. These people, according to the myth, are the Pauls’ constituency.
In short, the myth was that South Park fans are libertarians, rather than blithe, privileged nihilists. Or rather, the myth was that those two things are not actually the same thing. The myth was bullshit. The reality is Donald Trump. The South Park bloc’s pants are down, and its dick has a world-historically embarrassing combover.
Superficially, to whatever extent Trump can be said to have actual political positions beyond repeating what the guy next to him said and claiming to be better at it, he and Rand Paul share ideological common ground about as thick as a pencil. Certainly Trump does not even bother pretending to care about principled limits on the size or function of federal government, or enforcing fiscal discipline consistently across all manifestations of it (or at all), or erring on the side of avoiding rather than seeking foreign wars. That has not prevented him from rendering Paul-brand “libertarianism” almost completely redundant.
That’s because the very last thing Paul-brand libertarianism’s fleeting popularity was ever about was Ron or Rand Paul’s professed libertarian ideas. No, all along, the vein Ron and Rand Paul tapped into wasn’t rational libertarianism or principled dissatisfaction with the Republican Party, but mere sour, snide, irreligious contemptuousness: the practiced, unearned misanthropy and disaffection posed as a coherent outlook by the internet’s slightly-smarter-than-average suburban teens. Donald Trump just packages it better and more honestly, as the frontrunning it always has been. He gets South Park—its cheap spite, its self-congratulation, the fantasy that privileged scorn for political correctness is subversive, rather than the exact opposite—better than the Pauls ever did, which might not be the very worst thing you can say about him, but still is pretty bad, because South Park sucks.
Anyway, fuck Rand Paul. If he believes his brand of conservatism is good for anybody but the powerful, he’s an idiot, and if he doesn’t, he’s a fraud. The dais will have no shortage of either for him having been winnowed the fuck off it, and South Park fans don’t vote anyway, at least not until you can cast your ballot via Reddit.
Donald Trump almost certainly has a dick. This much we know. What we don’t know (and let’s hope that never changes) is what that dick actually looks like. Artist Illma Gore, though, has an idea. And thanks to her most recent artwork, that idea is about to be seared into your memory.
There he is. Shocking at first, but as you stare at it, you begin to notice a quiet beauty enveloping you, much like Trump’s scrotum envelops the micropenis under which it sits.
Anyway.
There is meaning behind the spectacle, which Gore describes as:
“Make America Great Again” is about the significance we place on our physical selves. One should not feel emasculated by their penis size or vagina, as it does not define who you are. Your genitals do not define your gender, your power, or your status.
Simply put you can be a massive prick, despite what is in your pants.
Less than a day after the city of Cleveland filed a $500 claim against Tamir Rice’s family for the ambulance sent in an attempt to save the 12-year-old, Mayor Frank Jackson said the whole thing was a miscommunication between the city and Rice’s family.
Speaking to reporters at city hall today, Jackson said that the executor of Rice’s estate—as much as a 12-year-old can even have one—requested any outstanding charges the family had with the city. He then went onto explain that the standard procedure upon that request is to file a claim with a probate court in order to “reimburse Medicaid.”
Nonetheless, Jackson acknowledged that while the city never intended to make Rice’s family pay that $500 (which may or may not be true for all we know), some system needs to be put in place so that it doesn’t again appear that Cleveland is attempting to bill families of people killed by cops for medical services.
Of course, inherent in that answer is an acceptance that his cops will kill people in the future, which is actually the real problem.
In our current time of intermittent financial panics, the banking sector stands out in its unpopularity: major bank stocks are trading well below the book value of those banks. What has everyone so terrified?
The tangible book value of a company should, in essence, be the value of everything tangible the company has—what you could get if you decided to liquidate the company today. In that sense it is odd when the stock market values a company lower than its tangible book value, because it presumes not only that the company does not have growth potential, but even that the theoretical fire sale price of it is too high.
And just about every big bank around the world is now selling below its book value! If you love bargains, Greek banks are trading at one-ninth of their book value. Credit Suisse has reached its lowest stock price in 27 years. In Europe, “banks are trading at only 62 per cent of book.” In India, “all public sector banks” are trading below their book value. In the US, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and others are priced at a substantial discount to their book value.
The entire investment world is extremely terrified of bank stocks.
Are there theories about why? You bet there are! Tons. Very generally speaking the reason is “people don’t think these banks are going to be making money any time soon.” But why the extremity of sentiment, that even as we type is causing a global selloff? Some of the more prominent reasons (or theories, if you prefer):
Oil! Oil prices are mad low. This means lots of energy companies are fucked. It also means that lots of banks that made lots of loans to energy companies when oil prices were higher may be fucked by extension. Investors don’t quite know how bad the damage will be from the ongoing oil rout, so they’re fleeing banks just in case it turns out to be horrible. Also, the sovereign wealth funds of many nations that depend on oil revenues hold a lot of bank stocks, and some believe that they are being forced to sell now, driving down prices.
The “yield curve” for banks is looking bad. This means banks can’t make as much money lending money as they used to. Unfortunately, lending money is how banks make money. Along with soaking customers with outrageous fees.
Economic growth is slowing around the world, particularly in emerging markets, which could cause a big slowdown in growth (or big losses) for financial institutions.
A bunch of hedge fund types all piled into bank stocks late last year and now they are all running out again based on the latest news from the Fed, and this is depressing prices abnormally.
And hey, there are plenty of people out there saying now is the time to buy bank stocks because they’re so cheap. But you only need to look at prices to see that those people are vastly outnumbered by the people saying “no, now is the time to panic sell bank stocks no matter how cheap.” Either lots of people are acting very irrationally right now, or something very bad is coming down the pike for banks.
In the end, either one group or the other will turn out to be right, and the other group will be painfully wrong. Let us know if you know which is which.
God help me, I actually enjoyed reading Ivana Trump’s dishy, ridiculous,semi-autobiographical 1992 novel, For Love Alone. Except, of course, for the parts where I kept picturing Donald Trump in the throes of orgasm.
The story of the book’s existence goes like this: Donald and Ivana Trump were hugely famous, larger-than-life characters, and it was big news when they divorced in 1991. As Ivana struck out on her own, somebody got the idea she should write a big commercial fiction love story. And so, in 1992, For Love Alonehit the shelves.
For Love Alone was packaged like a romance novel—compare to Judith McNaught’s Perfect, for instance—but it’s closer to the great primetime soap operas of the 1980s. That’s probably because much of the actual writing was done by Camille Marchetta, who worked on both Dallas and Dynasty, though the only clue provided is a note at the beginning: “I would like to thank my friend Camille Marchetta for helping me to tell Katrinka’s story.” As a 1992 Los Angeles Times piece noted, Ivana preferred to consider Marchetta as her “collaborator,” rather than her “ghostwriter.”
“Ghostwriter is a person which you meet for 20 minutes and then the book is done and they put a name on it and that’s the end of it,” she said, explaining that she spent many hours talking through her vision for the book.
And so the results are—if you enjoy that campy rich-people-misbehaving Dynasty/Scruples vibe, which I do—surprisingly entertaining. Sure, the first 150 pages are dedicated to Katrinka’s youth in Czechoslovakia and largely to her competitive skiing. She also gets pregnant by a married man and is strong-armed by an unscrupulous doctor with a financial incentive into giving up the baby for adoption, but mostly she skis. She skis her way onto the Czech Olympic team, and finally she skis right on into Switzerland and defects.
From there it doesn’t take long to find her way into modeling, and then hotel ownership, and then the international jet set. (It’s all pretty simple once you’re out from behind the Iron Curtain, I guess.) She marries Adam Graham, an up-and-coming businessman, and together this beautiful couple climbs to the upper echelons of the business world. Katrinka supports Adam every step of the way, even while building her own portfolio of very classy hotels.
Their world is described in loving detail. They bounce from St. Moritz to London to Manhattan to Los Angeles. Katrinka goes to couture shows and hosts charity parties. Entire paragraphs are dedicated to interior decor. Famous names are sprinkled liberally through the text, with Rupert Murdoch, Barbara Walters, and the Prince and Princess of Wales all making appearances. (My favorite celebrity cameo: “‘Nice place,’ said Ted Turner in his flat voice with its pronounced Southern drawl.”) But there’s a fly in the ointment: The gossip columnist Sabrina. Sabrina is unattractive and unappealing, and she is vicious because she is just jealous, causing trouble the entire book. This isn’t even one of the nastiest descriptions:
“She writes about fashion?” Katrinka had rarely felt so shocked. The woman’s upswept hair was falling out of its clips in dull, lifeless strands, her makeup looked smudged, and, in a year when waistlines were definitely in, she was wearing a full, gathered blouse over a long straight skirt in what looked like a very cheap silk. “What is that thing she is wearing?”
“With Sabrina it is always difficult to tell.”
But much of the book details Katrinka’s relationship with her dashing, arrogant husband. Now, Adam Graham is not Donald Trump. One of the central conflicts of their marriage is their inability to get pregnant and present an heir to Adam’s withholding, demanding mother; the Trumps had three children, two of them boys. Trump was born to a successful Queens real estate developer, while Adam is from Newport and money so old it’s truly geriatric. His family even makes yachts, though not at a profit. Their fortune has withered and Adam is determined to revitalize it. His inner life sounds less like Trump than what Trump might imagine is happening inside some stereotypical Harvard Man antagonist’s head:
While the Graham family star was sinking into oblivion, whose was rising? Pop singers and television actors, film directors and computer designers, real estate developers and advertising executives, salesmen and hustlers, the sorts of people he had been raised to consider somehow inferior. Not that he did, of course. He had too much respect for success to discount those who had achieved it. But he was not about to take second place to them, to relinquish what he considered his rightful place, to give up one inch of social position or one ray of limelight.
“He had no intention now of letting a bunch of nouveau riche ‘entrepreneurs’—how respectable the word sounded, he thought contemptuously—walk away with the prizes,” the book informs us at another moment. Meanwhile Donald, despite his father’s money, seems to revel in being seen as newly minted, the social equivalent of a bright, shiny penny.
But the book shares so many of the same beats as Ivana’s public biography—the baby plot is fictional and her parents were still alive when she published the book, unlike the orphan Katrinka, but the skiing, the modeling, and the hotel work all track—that Trump is always lurking in the back of your head. So when Adam starts blustering about business, well, he sounds a little familiar. More disturbingly, every time there’s a sex scene, it’s impossible not to superimpose the Donald’s panting face onto the proceedings. His mouth haunts passages such as this one, where they fuck on a private plane:
Reassured, she returned her attention to Adam as she felt his hands again on her thighs lifting her body slightly from the seat so that he could, still concealed by the blanket, raise her skirt and slip her panties and hose down past her knees. Reaching to take them off entirely, leaving them in a crumpled heap on the carpeted plane floor, she could feel Adam’s hands stroking her bottom, her stomach, between her legs. She turned back to him and, as his mouth closed over hers, she opened the belt of his trousers and pulled down the zipper of his fly.
Here we have them poolside:
He poured a small amount of oil into his hand, put the bottle down, rubbed his palm together, and began again to stroke her legs, moving upward, over her knees, gently prying her legs apart. “Don’t you think we should get started?” he had said, his fingers straying under the thin protective strip of her bikini.
The part when Adam buys Katrinka a fur coat broke me. Emphasis and also horror mine:
While he stroked her naked back with his hands, his mouth followed the line of the partially open coat to her breast. He took a nipple between his lips, flicked it with his tongue, and felt Katrinka’s arms tighten around his neck, her body arch in pleasure. In a moment, they were on the floor, on top of the mink coat, Katrinka’s legs gripping his waist as he moved deeper and deeper into her. Finally, after a long time, they finished and lay quiet, each one trying to come to terms with the depth of feeling the other inspired, so much stronger, more compelling than anything either had experienced with other lovers, sometimes bewildering in its intensity, producing alternately joy and terror.
As Adam pulled away from her, his cock fell for a moment into the valley between her legs, leaving a smear of semen on the dark silk. He smiled with satisfaction. “Now you have to keep the coat.”
Enough people went looking for similarities between the real Trump marriage and the fictional Graham marriage that it became a legal scuffle within the larger war that was the ugly Trump divorce, with Donald’s lawyers fighting to preserve a gag order keeping Ivana from talking about their marriage. For her part, Ivana insisted she wasn’t writing about her ex. She told the Los Angeles Times: “There is no way he can prove that he’s Adam because he’s not Adam and I make sure that he’s not Adam,” adding that, “And even I think I have constitutional rights of speech in America. I did not abuse them.”
At any rate, Adam is ultimately unfaithful and they eventually divorce—while we’re doing comparisons, maybe more amicably than the Trumps. Katrinka ends up with the handsome newspaper magnate who always remembered a short Czech phrase to say to her, instead of pestering her about her English verbs.
Critics of course had a field day with the book. The Columbus Dispatch noted: “Sooner or later, every character is described as ‘’good-looking,’’ which is the common way the rich imagine themselves,” with the headline: This Love Story Is Worth Hating. But it was a success, attracting scads of media attention, spending weeks on the best-seller lists, and ultimately making it as far as the small screen as a CBS Sunday movie, the trailer for which you can still see on YouTube. It has not, however, remained in print.
After last night’s tense, harrowing confrontation, during which it felt like both the FBI and four remaining militiamen could open fire on each other at any moment, the final holdout just surrendered himself into federal custody. Thus ends weeks of lawlessness in a small pocket of Oregon, in which a whole community was menaced by rifle-toting, Jefferson-quoting zealots, and law enforcement mostly watched quietly.
David Fry was the last to leave the compound, which a month ago was bustling with armed pseudo-patriots who considered the remote nature reserve an armed fortress and symbol of libertarian resistance. Fry was also perhaps the most psychologically fragile of the bunch: during the final moments, all streamed via YouTube, he made repeated promises to kill himself and shoot federal agents, condemned abortions, complained about taxes, invoked CIA drone strikes, nuclear power, and a litany of other frantic asides. Ideology at Occupied Malheur was both abundant and scattered.
The standoff’s climax was made all the more unsettling by the fact that Fry was in constant cell phone contact with Gavin Seim and KrisAnne Hall, both prominent figures in the anti-government militia scene without any training in life-or-death negotiations, who did just as much to rile Fry up as they did talk him down. Their conversation jumped wildly from biblical scripture and the life of Jesus Christ to Islam, Obama, and whether or not Fry could get a pizza if he gave himself up. It seemed entirely possible that at any moment Fry would either aim his gun at the FBI or squeeze the trigger at his own head.
In the final moments before Fry walked out to meet the FBI and was placed in cuffs, he signed off by saying he would eat one more cookie and maybe smoke a cigarette. The illegal occupation of the Malheur compound lasted 41 days.
Photo: Getty
Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com. Public PGP key PGP fingerprint: PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7
You may have noticed an increase in virally-shared political pieces on your Facebook page recently. Here’s our contribution to the cause.
Wow. Yes. This. All of this.
Okay, so, I want to preface the following rant with this: I never usually feel comfortable expressing my political views so publicly. But I guess I am so fed up with the level of discourse surrounding this particular election that I decided I just don’t give a damn about remaining neutral or seeming emotional (which I shouldn’t even have to worry about) or whatever.
Basically it all boils down to one word: Feminism.
We are looking at a Democratic party that is split between two candidates—one, who is honestly kind of a savior for women, and the other who will do the equivalent of making sure that every woman is back in the dog crate in which she was born and lived through preschool. And for some reason, every time I try to bring that up, I get shut down by social media trolls (not to mention some family members who I really used to respect).
My whole life I’ve been a radical feminist. In middle school I was the girl handing out contraceptives to my classmates, despite a cease-and-desist order from my principal and the eventual nine months I spent in a “juvenile center” after I punched holes in all of her tires. I was the girl who campaigned in Nevada, South Carolina, and Puerto Rico for Hillary Clinton in 2004, 2000, and 1996 (she wasn’t even running for president, and I did consider myself a moderate for part of that time) even after receiving multiple violently-worded letters from her spokesperson telling me that my enthusiasm was appreciated, but misguided. I am the one who is in a pile of very scary debt for maxing out not one but two separate VisaBuxx cards so that I could tattoo my entire body in venus symbols and sliced-off middle fingers.
But now in 2016, that identity is suddenly a negative! I mean—the recent remarks by Madeleine Albright AND Gloria Steinem? It’s just like, (sorry for caps, but I really mean it) I AM CONCERNED WITH THE FUTURE OF AMERICA AND I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY THAT IS MAKING EVERYONE SO MAD. WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO HAVE A PRESIDENT WITH WHITE HAIR AND SCARY ANKLES AND NO ONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO SAY “GRANDMA THIS” OR “GHOST DAD THAT.” ARE WE IN THE 1800S? THE PARTICULAR VALUATION I PLACE ON MY SPECIFIC GENDER IDENTITY SHOULD NOT BE A REVOLUTIONARY IDEA?
Also, now when I try to bring up The Banking System, which is ensuring that a thumb monkey will be running America by 2020, by the way—and if you don’t agree, you’re not paying attention—I get slammed for not standing up for women? Um, I don’t think so. Gender is a CRUCIAL issue in this election, as is race. I’ve actually met ISIS (in the ‘90s) so I would appreciate if people not fill my feed with uneducated bullshit.
Sorry for the profanity but this really pisses me off.
I don’t even need to mention the worst part about the divisiveness in the Democratic party right now—which is the sham of a Republican party that my preferred candidate is up against and the fact that my preferred candidate, who will triumph over the objections if we just BELIEVE in them and stop PLAYING AT POLITICS, would WIPE THE FLOOR with that mud pig Doland Trimp. He says we need to turn America into the biggest (width-wise) skyscraper in the world. I’m not even sure if the Earth’s surface could withstand that kind of pressure, and, secondly, I’m not sure that’s a country that I would like to live in.
Try looking at this and tell me if you don’t feel afraid of the direction our country is heading.
Sure, I’m a millennial. I know I don’t have as much experience as the pundits on cable news. But, honestly, I don’t care. I am not going to allow anyone to tell me how to vote. Rather, I am going to loudly tell you who I am voting for. We are the generation that is going to inherit this fucked-up country and I am not willing to be passive in this election. And you shouldn’t either.
Today’s episode of Fox News’ early morning variety hour, Fox & Friends, featured Gawker’s recent post about the ways in which Hillary Clinton’s press operation bends reporters to their will. You can watch Steve Doocy interview Judge Andrew Napolitano about the emails we published on Tuesday above.
One thing: At about 0:20, Napolitano suggests, incorrectly, that former Atlantic editor Marc Ambinder’s correspondence with Clinton’s press secretary Philippe Reines was first discovered and published by agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation: “I’m imagining the mentality of FBI agents going through her emails, and they’re finding rabbit holes, they’re finding something that’s fascinating, and they dig deeper, deeper, deeper, and they find an entirely new scandal involving her, totally different from ‘are there top-secret emails on her server?’”
In fact, the emails were released under the Freedom of Information Act—at least once a district court judge in Washington, D.C. forced the State Department to follow the law—several years after Gawker filed a request for them in 2012. They were never the subject of any F.B.I. investigation.
A second thing: For reasonsthat mayor may notbe obvious, Fox & Friends declined to mention or credit Gawker in this morning’s segment. Which we point out here if only to highlight the discord between Fox News’ interest in this particular journalistic standard, or any journalistic standard, and the fact that this segment omitted or misreported the origins of the actual story, and where the information therein came from.
A third thing: Interestingly, Andrea Tantaros of Fox’s afternoon talk show Outnumbered did credit Gawker, and correctly identified the source the emails we published, in a segment that aired yesterday:
After watching a segment from today’s Morning Joe in which a focus group reacted to Donald Trump’s use of the words ass, shit,and fuckat rallies, my first reaction was “I can’t believe Donald Trump said fuck at a rally.” It turns out that he didn’t say fuck at a rally, because he speaks like a radio edit.
The focus group was comprised of undecided Republican South Carolina voters. Early on, Mark Halperin showed them three clips, in which Trump is said saying “sue his ass,” “knock the shit out of ISIS,” and “go fuck themselves,” all bleeped out in the traditional cable TV style. The relevant portion starts at about 1:50 in the video below.
The group members all react fairly strongly to the video. One woman said she thought the cussing was enough to disqualify Trump, and a man hinted that it might make winning over religious South Carolinians difficult for the candidate.
Trump, as he is wont to do, took umbrage with the coverage via Twitter.
It pains me to say it, but Donald Trump is right. As you’ll hear in the unedited clip below, Trump didn’t technically say fuck at the rally. He blanked himself out, like a weirdo.
However, he has shown himself unafraid to say shit.
Trump has a point in disputing the way the videos were presented to viewers. If he didn’t say fuck, it’s a little strange to make it seem like he did, then to place vast political significance on his saying it. (“WILL TRUMP TRANSLATE IN SOUTH CAROLINA?” reads the chyron under the focus groupers’ reactions. It’s unclear whether they got the edited or unedited version of the clip.)
Unnecessary bleeps aside: whether you respond well to Trump’s brand of performative populism or you think it’s a load of s*&^, a candidate who talks like a human clean version is much more bizarre and unsettling than one who actually curses.
A late-breaking update from the Washington Post reveals that the Twix in question was frozen.
Rubio described the extremely depressing incident to the Wall Street Journalthis way: “I just bit into a Twix bar and I go, ‘Man this Twix bar’s got something really hard in it. And I go, ‘Oh my gosh, I cracked my tooth.’”
The 44-year-old, who was supposed to the young, sexy, candidate on the Republican side, added, “I think I’m getting old, man.”
This is Mary Lou Bruner. Mary Lou believes that baby dinosaurs lived on Noah’s ark, school shootings are a product of kids learning evolution, and the New World Order is working to reduce the world’s population by about two-thirds. Mary Lou also just so happens to be running for the Texas State Board of Education. She has a pretty good shot.
To be clear, Mary Lou is not an outsider or “fringe” candidate by any means. In her own words: “I have a master’s degree in Special Education and 36 years of experience as a teacher, counselor, and educational diagnostician. I have a BS in elementary education and English and 6 other Texas teaching certificates.”
She’s not the only one touting her credentials, though. Former Chairman of the Texas State Board of Education Gail Lowe endorsed Bruner, among others. All of which is terrifying when you consider what it is they’re actually endorsing. Don’t take our word for it—luckily for you, Mary Lou loves to espouse her beliefs on Facebook.
Just think about how much money the government has wasted educating the people about the government hoax which officials first called “Global Warming”. Government later changed the term to “Climate Change” because government lies or predictions did not come true, and the people were becoming very suspicious because the world wasn’t getting warmer. It was much easier to call the hoax “Climate Change” because with the new name, corrupt government officials and scientists could say every hurricane, tornado, flood, drought, snow storm, earthquake, tsunami, blizzard, and EVERYTHING that happened was caused by “Climate Change”. And a few people still believe them.
When the flood waters subsided and rushed to the oceans there was no vegetation on the earth because the earth had been covered with water. It took a while for grass and trees to grow back and the big plant-eating dinosaurs needed lots of vegetation to live. The dinosaurs on the ark may have been babies and not able to reproduce. It might make sense to take the small dinosaurs onto the ark instead of the ones bigger than a bus. After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age. Most of the dinosaur fossils which scientists have found are permanently preserved in positions of great distress as if they were trying to keep their heads above water or above the mud.
... The school shootings started after government removed the Ten Commandments and the Bible from public school buildings, and disallowed prayer at school and school events. The school shootings started after the schools started teaching evolution is an absolute fact and the classes cannot talk about weaknesses in the Theory of Evolution. The shootings started after the schools started teaching the Constitution of the USA is a flawed document written by selfish aristocrats who were only looking out for their own wealth, The school shootings started after the government started teaching children to feel sorry for themselves if they do not have as much as other children in the school....
Every parent of young children should hear this woman speak. Most parents do not know about the drawings of nude men, women, boys, and girls in some children’s books in our public schools. Many children’s books on the recommended list contain frank discussions about sexual issues which are inappropriate in my opinion. Many of the books which teachers read to your small children are not allowed in jails and prisons because of the bad effect the books have on the prisoners. These books stimulate children to experiment with sex. Please attend this meeting if you can.
Many people believe the Democrat Party had JFK killed because the socialists and Communists in the party did not want a conservative president. Remember who followed JFK as president — (LBJ). the exact opposite of Kennedy — a socialist and an unethical politician. It does seem like this might have been the master plan: They sneaked the bad guy (LBJ)into the administration on the coat-tail of a good guy (JFK). Then they got rid of the good guy; in the end, they got a socialist president which is what they originally wanted.
It is a goal of United Nation’s agenda 21 and the One World Order to reduce the population of the world by 2/3. That should cause people to wake up because to reduce the population more people have to die than are born. At some point it could mean that one of these methods of depopulation are in the Global plan: World War III, mass faminine, mass disease epidemic or pandemic, or Nuclear Bomb.
The Muslims use our own First Amendment against us. Islam is not a religion. Islam is an inhumane totalitarian political ideology with radical religious rules and laws and barbaric punishments for breaking the religious rules.
If Islam is a religion it is a cult religion. A group that forces people to join or die is not a real religion. A group that kills people who try to leave the group is not a real religion. A group that disfigures, dismembers, or mutilates bodies as punishment is not a real religion. A group that practices child sexual abuse or forced marriages of small girls to adult men is not a real religion.
The USA should ban Islam and stop all immigration. from Muslim countries because Islam’s stated goal is to conquer the USA and kill the infidels (nonbelievers).
If you had any doubts about the motivation of the Muslim “clock boy” who made a “clock” using the blueprint of a time bomb, then brought the “clock” to school — possibly this story will help you understand what inspired him.
Was this a “set-up” for the school? Was this an evil scheme to give the Muslim boy an opportunity to claim he was “profiled” because he is a Muslim?
This boy was given a full scholarship and he chose to attend a Muslim school.
Could Obama have been complicit in the scheme from the beginning? Just askin’!!!!!
FB is only partially shut down here. Sometimes my posts are not posted at all. Sometimes the posts are published, but not immediately. Yesterday, I wrote an opinion about education. Several hours had gone by and my comments still had not appeared. I thought the post was not going to be published so I wrote another short post on the topic. Then the first opinion magically appeared. Both posts have been published on my page - at least for now.
When you get on Obama’s Terrorist List you get monitored closely and sometimes even censored. I asked Sheriff Smith if my name was on the Terrorist List. He laughed and said he hadn’t seen it yet.
NO, NO, NO. Don’t tell us the The Supremes have spoken and the gay marriage issue is over. We are not moving on.
WE MUST CHANGE THE THINGS WE CANNOT ACCEPT. WE CANNOT ACCEPT UNCONSTITUTIONAL COURT RULINGS WHICH DESTROY FREEDOM OF RELIGION PROTECTED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT. WE CANNOT ACCEPT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT STOMPING ON STATES’ RIGHTS. WE CANNOT ACCEPT THE DESTRUCTION OF TRADITIONS WHCH ARE THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD AND THE BEDROCK OF OUR SOCIETY. WE CANNOT ACCEPT A COURT RULING THAT SAYS IMMORALITY IS JUST AS APPROPRIATE AS MORALITY. WE CANNOT ACCEPT THE COURT RULING WHICH SAYS GAY MARRIAGE IS LEGAL IN ALL 50 STATES REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE STATE LAWS SAY. WE CANNOT ACCEPT 9 UNELECTED JUDGES TAKING IT UPON THEMSELVES TO CHANGE THE CONSTITUTION ALL BY THEMSELVES, OVER-RULING THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE.
According to the Texas Freedom Network, Mary Lou is running to take the seat of fellow Republican Thomas Ratliff, who “has tried to put an end to the circus atmosphere at the board and is not running for re-election.”
So remember, if you vehemently despise your children, vote Mary Lou Bruner for the Texas State Board of Education.
What, beyond a team of university psychologists, could explain the mechanism of Donald Trump’s mind? In the early 1990s, two journalists thought they’d figured it out, claiming Trump was fighting his overwhelming fear of being fat with a steady stream of amphetamine-like diet pills.
Two decades ago, Donald Trump wasn’t a fascist lightning rod, hick idol, reality star, or political entity. He was just a high-profile rich schmuck and evergreen victim of Spy magazine, which used him as a peg for a February 1992 feature on Dr. Joseph Greenberg, whom they alleged was prescribing powerful stimulants to anyone with a checkbook. Stimulants, Spy’s John Connolly speculated, that might explain how Donald Trump maintains his infinite, inexhaustible arrogance:
Have you ever wondered why Donald Trump has acted so erratically at times, full of manic energy, paranoid, garrulous? Well, he was a patient of Dr. Greenberg’s from 1982 to 1985…Dr. Greenberg diagnosed both of the Trump brothers as suffering from a “metabolic imbalance.”
According to Spy, Dr. Greenberg believed the cure for “metabolic imbalance” (not an actual medical disorder) was Tenuate Dospan, a diet drug similar to dexedrine with known side effects that include “confusions” and “hallucinations,” according to the NIH. It also gives you an amphetamine-like buzz. This is all probably why it’s only supposed to be prescribed on a short-term basis, as opposed to the multiple-monthlong regimens Dr. Greenberg allegedly dosed out, according to Spy:
Dr. Greenberg’s program included no set caloric limit, and Tenuate was prescribed or five months. The long-term use of Tenuate can, according to the medical literature, lead to psychosis—delusions of grandeur, say, like the belief that by simply putting your name on real estate properties, you will double their value.
Or, say, like running for president without a platform beyond “look at that yonder Muslim, what’s he up to?” Most juicily, Connolly included what purports to be the Trump brothers’ medical charts, “indicating many, many visits” to Greenberg. Over email, Connolly told me that the image was in fact a direct photocopy of the Trump brothers’ medical records, and not merely a reproduction from information or an illustration:
Donald Trump’s medical record from the office of Dr. Greenberg, as published by Spy in 1992
It’s unclear how such a document was obtained (though notably the article was written four years before HIPAA established stricter standards of patient privacy).
In the controversial 1993 Trump biography Lost Tycoon, author Harry Hurt attributed a steady stream diet pill habit to “Donald’s mood swings” and “his fits of distemper.” Per Hurt:
On April 19th, 1982, during the period between his license hearing before the Casino Control Commission and the groundbreaking on the Trump Plaza site in Atlantic City, Donald paid a visit to the midtown Manhattan office of Dr. Joseph Greenberg. According to the doctor’s records, Donald had been recommended by his friend Charles Goldstein, an attorney involved in the Penn Central deals. The ostensible purpose of Donald’s visit was to seek assistance in losing weight. He had gone to the right place. Dr. Greenberg was an endocrinologist who specialized in providing patients with drugs to control obesity...
Donald was so delighted with the results that he started recommending Dr. Greenberg’s treatments to his brother Robert, various friends, and celebrity acquaintances such as Diana Ross. The diet drugs, which he took in pill form, not only curbed his appetite but gave him a feeling of euphoria and unlimited energy. The medical literature warned that some potentially dangerous side effects could result from long-term usage; they included anxiety, insomnia, and delusions of grandeur. According to several Trump Organization insiders, Donald exhibited all these ominous symptoms of diet drug usage, and then some.
“The first thing I would do when I got to the office in the morning,” recalled one former vice-president, “was to go see Norma Foerderer and ask her, ‘Is this a Dr. Greenberg day?’ If she said yes, I would do everything I could to stay out of Donald’s way.”
Greenberg’s chemical notoriety was wide enough to grab the attention of Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes, who included his practice in a 1976 segment on amphetamine abuse:
WALLACE: You eventually came to Dr. Joseph Greenberg? WOMAN: Right, in Great Neck. WALLACE: And what did he do for you? WOMAN: I was taking eighty pills a day. WALLACE: Under his direction? WOMAN: Under his direction. WALLACE: Eighty pills? WOMAN: Eighty pills a day. 8-0. WALLACE: And how many of those were amphetamines or amphetamine related or amphetamine substitutes? WOMAN: I would say between four and six a day were amphetamine-type drugs. I had a very, very strange experience, and this is perhaps why I finally left him: I could not determine where I ended and where you began. WALLACE: What? WOMAN: I could not determine where I ended and where you began for two years after that time. I walked around holding my hands because I did not know that they were attached to my body.
Greenberg later sued CBS and settled out of court. He has since passed away, and was thus unavailable for comment.
If Trump suffers from body dysmorphia (or even run-of-the-mill self-loathing of the flesh), it would explain more than just possible side effects from treatment: the man is obsessed with physical appearances. Recall the letter Trump’s physician, Dr. Jacob Bornstein, issued to the public, describing his body in boasting terms usually reserved for show dogs or Triple Crown steeds: “Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” adding that “over the past twelve months, he has lost at least fifteen pounds.” Dr. Bornstein did not return a request for comment on Trump’s use of Tenuate Dospan.
Fat cells provide a moral framework in Trumpian politics, a means of assessing virtue or whether you’re a sad mess. In an interview with People, Trump wielded this campaign weight as both a sign of his dominance and the general shittiness of his opponents:
“I have lost weight because my events are so exciting. When I’m done I don’t want to eat,” he says. “But I could see how it could go the other way for some people. That’s only because their events are boring.”
If Donald Trump hates you, he will talk about your physique. The relative fitness of your body is often what separates the Losers from the Great. When fellow racist and GOP debate moderator Megyn Kelly famously pointed out Trump’s history of calling “women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.” he countered only (and incorrectly) that he’d only ever pilloried the weight of Rosie O’Donnell. Some might chalk this all up to mere obnoxiousness, that Trump is nothing more than a big rich bully.
Which he is, of course. But what we don’t often consider the possibility that Trump equates fatness with badness because he hates himself, that he feels compelled to both drink only Diet Coke at lunch and make fun of fat people who drink Diet Coke. It’d be one thing to support a plain old bigoted bastard—a longstanding American tradition—but quite another to elect someone who so strongly hates the way he looks in the mirror that he’d consult a total quack. We’ve trusted plenty of imbeciles with the nuclear codes before, but are we prepared to hand them to a fundamentally unstable narcissist?
Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson did not return a request for comment.
Here is a three and a half minute video of the corporate business man telling the workers that their plant will be closing. “Fuck you” is one of the milder sentiments expressed.
When you watch videos like this, protectionism is an easy sentiment to understand.
