Poop! It’s funny! So when White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was asked to comment on a Super Bowl opioid-induced constipation “awareness” ad, paid for by the pharmaceutical companies which spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire a new constipation drug for painkiller users, soft giggles rippled through the press pit. Drug companies profiting off drug users who can’t poop! Poop is funny, but this is bad. The White House is on it! Sort of.
Opioid-induced constipation is a real problem. Opioids like oxycodone (OxyContin, Oxynorm, OxyNEO) and heroin (smack, dope, junk) bind to receptors in the brain that inhibit the perception of pain, but also to receptors in the gastrointestinal tract. Not only is constipation a common side effect—it can be so frighteningly uncomfortable that chronically ill users forgo medication.
In the black-and-white Super Bowl ad, a nicely dressed middle-aged man watches as other people leave, beaming, from public bathrooms. A dog squats by a tree, looking mockingly into his eyes. The man is sad. Information for an “awareness” website (whose traffic jumped 400% after the Super Bowl) appears. That’s where the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo tell you to ask your doctor about their hot new drug, Movantik.
All the non-profit pain advocacy group logos at the end of the ad might suggest this is purely an “awareness ad”, but AstraZeneca didn’t go on Super Bowl to fight constipation stigma at $166,666 per second. The LA Times:
Advocacy groups that put their names on the Super Bowl ad said the grants they received from AstraZeneca did not require them to do so and were for other educational projects...
Penney Cowan, head of the American Chronic Pain Assn., of Rocklin, Calif., said her group — which received at least $175,000 in grant money from AstraZeneca in 2015 for promoting awareness of opioid-induced constipation — would not have endorsed the ad if it directly promoted the drug.
A delicate, though lucrative distinction—officially, the “awareness” ad only directly promotes the website that promotes the drug that will treat the side effects of another drug. The opioid constipation treatment market is estimated to reach at least $500 million by 2019, according to the research firm GlobalData.
Earlier this week, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough criticized the ad for “fuel[ing] opioid addiction” instead advocating addiction treatment, an initiative of the Obama administration. To that end, last week President Obama said he would push forward a $1.1 billion bill to expand treatment for the country’s booming opioid addiction to painkillers and heroin. And epidemic-themed statistics are surging: An estimated 2.2 million Americans need treatment for opioid abuse; some link 28,648 deaths to opioid overdoses (18,893 specifically to prescription painkillers) in 2014; painkiller prescriptions are up least 300% since 1999. In 2012, 259 million prescriptions were written for painkillers in 2012 (overwhelmingly in the South), at a rate the CDC catchily refers to as “enough for every American adult to have a bottle of pills.” And in New York, tipped off by the skyrocketing rate of prescriptions in Staten Island, the State Attorney General’s office investigated OxyContin manufacturer Purdue for aggressively courting and encouraging healthcare providers to prescribe their drug to patients. But what are we going on about? These are, like, totally unrelated things, according to Dave Fredrickson, AstraZeneca’s vice president of specialty care.
This condition, which affects millions of Americans, is something we needed to raise awareness and dialog about. I think that is separate and distinct from the topic around the appropriate use of opioids.
McDonough’s tweet suggested that the White House wasn’t happy with the ad. That’s a rare statement since the administration has been slow to admit that overprescribing of painkillers is a cause of the opioid abuse crisis. When asked by the press if the criticism meant they were planning to “push back” on the pharmaceutical companies for their marketing tactics, Earnest said that’s not really part of the plan right now.
I don’t have any regulations to preview but I think we have been quite clear across the administration about our determination to confront opioid addiction as a significant public health threat.
He went on to say a few more words about their “prioritizing the treatment of individuals who are suffering from this kind of addiction.” But they’re going to need some help.
We want to make sure that we can mobilize necessary resources to confront it but that’s also going to require working closely with medical experts including the pharmaceutical industry to get this problem under control.
That is to say, they’re going to need some help from the dealers.
Last month, the Internal Revenue Service filed a federal tax lien against Martin Shkreli, alleging that he owes the government quite a bit of money—$4,628,928.55, to be precise.
Shkreli, who is facing federal securities fraud charges in Brooklyn, allegedly owes $3,431.85 from 2013 and $4,625,496.70 from 2014. The lien was prepared on December 18, 2015 and filed with the Office of the City Register on January 11, 2016.
“We are giving a notice that taxes (including interest and penalties) have been assessed against the following-named taxpayer,” the document states. “We have made a demand for payment of this liability, but it remains unpaid. Therefore, there is a lien in favor of the United States on all property and rights to property belonging to this taxpayer for the amount of these taxes, and additional penalties, interest, and costs that may accrue.”
Earlier this month, federal prosecutors revealed that one of Shkreli’s E-trade brokerage accounts, initially worth about $45 million had shrunk considerably, to less than $5 million, thereby endangering his bail.
Shkreli declined to comment on the lien to Gawker, as did his attorney Benjamin Brafman. The IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last night, MTV’s True Life featured two people in their 20's who are HIV positive and dating. The picture was at once bleak and hopeful—both Jonahs, 22, and Lexi, 24, are undetectable and yet face other people’s reservations (if not outright bigotry) regarding their status. And still they persevere. In the clip above Jonahs gets rejected after disclosing his status to a guy he met online.
“I feel like this is a cycle that is never ending,” he says. “Not getting a reply from someone after I disclose my status to him makes me feel almost less than human.”
Depressing along the same lines as that is the reaction of Lexi’s boyfriend, Max, upon learning that he’s contracted ureaplasma from her. Per the show’s framing, he breaks up with her as a result. Lexi, who was born with HIV, tells a friend that Max was the first person who accepted her status and “loved all of me.”
The resolution of True Life: I’m Dating With HIV, was relatively upbeat, as it revealed that Jonahs and Lexi are both still dating (and the former is “enjoying the single life”). Their problems with connecting are specifically related to their condition, yet universally relatable in a sense to anyone who’s attempted to forge a connection in these modern times when the internet can give the impression of a seemingly bottomless dating pool, and rejecting someone is as simple as not responding to his or her text message.
The best Sous Vide cooker, Reebok workout gear, and the new Apple TV kick off Thursday’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.
Lifehacker has a great explainer on Sous-Vide cooking for you to check out, but the basic idea is that you seal the food in plastic bags, and then cook it in precisely heated water over a longer period of time. Here are some advantages to this process from Lifehacker’s guide:
Cooking sous-vide results in evenly-cooked meat and fish.
Cooking sous-vide gives you specific control over the final temperature of the meat, avoiding overdone, dried-out food.
You can hold foods cooked sous-vide at their specified temperature for long periods of time without damaging the texture or quality of the dish, making it an ideal cooking method for holiday dinners or meals with multiple components and side-dishes.
Bacterial or other contamination is largely not an issue with sous-vide cooking. While you may be cooking up to minimum safe temperatures, the length of time you’re holding the food at its safe temperature will pasteurize your meat and ensure the safety of your food, meaning “safe” meat doesn’t have to equal “dry” or “not pink” meat any longer. Still, keep your meat thermometer handy, and test before serving. Remember, sous-vide lets you hold food at temp for long periods without diminishing the quality of the food, so if it’s undercooked, you can seal the bag and put it back in.
Sous-vide cooking is by nature a repeatable process. Set the temperature, set the timer, and walk away. You will wind up with perfectly cooked food every time you do it.
I’ve been cooking Sous Vide for a few years now (with a different model), and it still feels like cheating to me.
There’s nothing noteworthy about this 19.5" 1080p monitor, except its price. $50! Buy a few, and you’ve got yourself a multi-monitor setup for a Craigslist-type price. [Acer 19.5" Monitor, $50]
The price might vary by a few dollars based on the color you choose, but all of them include a $10 coupon that will be applied at checkout. You can also save a few extra bucks by ordering through Subscribe & Save. Shipping will take longer if you go this route, and you’ll want to cancel the subscription after your first one arrives, but the option is available if you want to squeeze every penny. [Waterpik WP-672 Aquarius Professional Water Flosser, $67 after $10 coupon]
On paper, it’s every bit the equal of the SB6141; it has the same number of upstream and downstream channels, and the same maximum speeds. Just check with your ISP to make sure it’s compatible before you purchase; most maintain lists on their websites. [NETGEAR High Speed DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem, $50]
Today only, Amazon’s offering big discounts on an assortment of Remington hair grooming products, including shavers, blow dryers, epilators, and more. This is a Gold Box deal, meaning these prices are only available today, and the best stuff could sell out early. [Remington Gold Box]
Spectre might not have lived up to Skyfall, but if its in-jokes and fan service made you nostalgic for the Bond films of yore, you can get the first 23 on Blu-ray for just $80 today. [James Bond Collection, $80]
The deal works on both the standard and Limited editions. Just scroll down the page to the Special Offers section of the Amazon listing, find the gift card deal, and hit “Add Both To Cart.” [Life Is Strange, $30. Plus $10 gift card. Scroll down to the Special Offers section.]
The LG Watch Urbane is absolutely one of the best looking Android Wear watches on the market, and you can get your own for $180 today on eBay. That’s $170 less than its original selling price, and the best deal we’ve seen. If you’re on the fence, be sure to check out Gizmodo’s impressions. [LG Watch Urbane, $180]
The vast majority of recent PS4 deals have been centered around the Uncharted console bundle, but if Call of Duty is more your speed, today’s your lucky day.
This Hoover Cyclonic is the simple, cheap stick vacuum that all other simple, cheap stick vacuums aspire to be, and you can own it for just $65 today. I’ve owned this exact model for several years, and couldn’t be happier. [Hoover Cyclonic Stick Vacuum, $65]
Amazon’s Prime Pantry program is great for stocking up on household goods and non-perishable foods without actually having to visit a store, but the $5.99 per box shipping charge has always been a drag. This month though, if you buy five select items, you can get that fee waived.
There are hundreds of eligible items running the gamut from granola bars to bandages to toilet bowl cleaner, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding five that you need. Just add them to your box (plus anything else that will fit), and use code PANTRYFEB at checkout to get free shipping. [Free Prime Pantry shipping with five eligible purchases, promo code PANTRYFEB]
Bonus: If you already have a no-rush free shipping credit in your account, this deal actually appears to stack, netting you an extra $6 discount.
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.
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, and don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter. We want your feedback.
“I worked on a video game and I wanted to show y’all,” Kanye said. “The idea of the game is, my mom traveling through the gates of heaven.”
Honestly, it looks pretty sweet. And Kanye is proud of it, too! After he showed off the footage, he didn’t seem happy with how people received the trailer of a game meant to commemorate his late mother, Donda West.
“That’s not easy to do, man!” Kanye said, presumably about making the game in the first place. “Y’all just be acting like that shit is regular.”
That’s when Kanye played the trailer for the audience again. But not without giving us a small tale about the game’s development.
“No, you don’t understand. I go out and meet with everybody in San Fran, and they’ll diss the fuck out of me. And I’ll be like, ‘I wanna make a game,’ and they’ll be like, ‘FUCK YOU.’ That was hard to do, bro!”
I want to know what game developers (?) dissed Kanye for wanting to make a video game. Then again, this was the man who thought Wiz Khalifa was dissing Kim Kardashian on Twitter, when actually Wiz was just tweeting about smoking weed—so who knows.
Pro-tip, by the way: if you’re using Tidal right now, it’s not just you. the streaming for Kanye’s album right now is pretty bad. Guess he should have used Twitch!
Of all the destruction waged by Dick Cheney during his eight-year run of terror in the White House, one incident stands out as the oddest: On February 11, 2006, Cheney shot a hunting partner in the face, nearly killing him. The incident is as fondly remembered as anything could be with Cheney, perhaps because it’s the only one of his un-prosecuted crimes that qualifies as slapstick. But there were several misconceptions about the man on the other side of Cheney’s shotgun, including that he was friends with the vice president, that he only suffered superficial wounds, and that it was merely an unavoidable accent.
When Harry M. Whittington, a prominent attorney in Austin, arrived at Armstrong Ranch in the very southeastern tip of Texas, he had a deep connection not to Cheney, but instead to a few other notorious Republicans of the George W. Bush era. One was Bush himself, who knew Whittington from their days as good ol’ boys—when Bush was still governor in 1999, he picked Whittington to temporarily run the Texas Funeral Service Commission. The other was Karl Rove, who Mike Allen, writing for Time, described as “a longtime friend” of Whittington’s.
News accounts routinely described Whittington as Cheney’s “old friend” and “hunting buddy.” In fact, the two men barely knew each other. Before the shooting, they had met briefly only three times since the mid-1970s and had never gone hunting together before. “The most you could say is that he was an acquaintance,” Whittington says.
Cheney, ever the humanitarian, didn’t bother to get any closer to Whittington after he sprayed birdshot into the man’s face, neck and torso:
The shooting didn’t bring Cheney and Whittington any closer. Although Whittington says they’ve exchanged birthday greetings, they haven’t seen each other for two years. The last time they met was when they attended the funeral of Anne Armstrong, the ranch owner whose invitation drew the two men together.
Despite his scars, Whittington bears no ill will toward Cheney. He calls him “a very capable and honorable man” and adds, “He’s said some very kind things to me.”
But did Cheney ever say in private what he didn’t say in public? Did he ever apologize?
Whittington, who has been talking about his life and career for hours, suddenly draws silent.
I’m not going to go into that,” he says sharply after a short pause.
Harry Whittington is too gracious to say it out loud, but he doesn’t dispute the notion, either.
Nearly five years on, he’s still waiting for Dick Cheney to say he’s sorry.
To this day, five years after that, Whittington still hasn’t gotten a personal apology from Cheney, and it seems like he’s stopped expecting one. Via the Daily News:
“He never did need to apologize. It was an accident,” he told the Daily News. “He expressed his concern about me publicly, but he never had reason to apologize because we knew how seriously he was affected by it.”
There was one person who did apologize, though: Harry Whittington, who six days after the accident, held a press conference in which he said:
My family and I are deeply sorry for all Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this week. We send our love and respect to them as they deal with situations that are much more serious than we’ve had this week.
So how did Whittington end up getting blasted by Cheney? Well, the blame shifts depending on who you ask. In a New York Times story from four days after the shooting, Katharine Armstrong, whose family owns the ranch where it took place, pinned it on Whittington:
According to Katharine Armstrong, the daughter of Anne Armstrong, Mr. Whittington broke away from a line of three hunters, including Mr. Cheney, and failed to announce that he was returning to the group. When he approached, Mr. Cheney had already begun to shoot into a covey of quail that was taking off from the ground.
“This all happened pretty quickly,” Ms. Armstrong said in a telephone interview from her ranch. Mr. Whittington, she said, “did not announce — which would be protocol — ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m coming up,’ “ she said.
“He didn’t do what he was supposed to do,” she added, referring to Mr. Whittington. “So when a bird flushed and the vice president swung in to shoot it, Harry was where the bird was.”
But the Armstrong family might have been apt to downplay Cheney’s responsibility considering their history with him:
Anne Armstrong, the matriarch of the family that owns the ranch, is a Republican Party stalwart who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and also as ambassador to Great Britain. When her husband, Tobin Armstrong, died in October, Mr. Cheney and James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, spoke at the funeral.
The Washington Post profile of Whittington tells a differing account which, if you can believe it, paints Dick Cheney as someone who might act recklessly when in control of weaponry:
Whittington recalls that he was standing off to Cheney’s right, looking for a downed bird. He doesn’t remember exactly how far away he was when Cheney, tracking a bird, twisted quickly in his direction and fired. Whittington was angled toward Cheney at the time; hence, the wounds on his right side. Cheney later told a police investigator that he was standing in a slightly elevated position relative to Whittington, meaning he was aiming downward. The police report notes that Whittington would have been wounded on the lower half of his body if he and Cheney had been on same level.
This violates two basic rules of hunting safety, says Ralph Stuart, the editor of Shooting Sportsman, a hunting magazine. The first is the shooter’s obligation to ensure that he has a clear line of fire before pulling the trigger. The second is the “blue-sky rule,” meaning that a hunter shouldn’t fire until he can see blue sky beneath a bird, thus greatly reducing the chances of hitting another hunter or dog. “Quail often fly low and demand lower shots,” Stuart points out, but that makes it “doubly important” that the shooter is aware of what’s between him and the bird and just beyond.
Whittington, as the Washington Post story makes clear, was not about to hang Cheney out to dry, and anyway the group was hunting under less than ideal conditions, including low light and probably some drink. Via the Post:
Whether alcohol played any role in the shooting has long been a point of speculation. Eyewitnesses, including ranch owner Anne Armstrong and her daughter Katharine, strongly denied it. Cheney did, too, although he later told Fox News that he had had “one beer” during a picnic lunch some five hours earlier. Whittington says alcohol “was available” at the picnic, but he didn’t notice if anyone was drinking at lunch or afterward when the hunting party took a midafternoon break. The police investigation was useless on this point; even if Cheney had been given a Breathalyzer test, the result would have been meaningless since authorities didn’t speak to Cheney until the next morning.
Either way, Whittington got severely fucked up by Cheney. He may or may not have had a mild heart attack caused by an irregular heartbeat triggered by buckshot in his chest (Whittington called it a heart “event.”) Via the Post:
Still, the injuries were more dire than previously disclosed. Whittington suffered a collapsed lung. He underwent invasive exploratory surgery, as doctors probed his vital organs for signs of damage. The load from Cheney’s gun came close to, but didn’t damage, the carotid artery in his neck. A rupture could have been fatal, particularly since it took the better part of an hour to transport him from the vast Armstrong ranch to the Kingsville hospital.
When the Post’s Paul Farhi interviewed Whittington for the story, he still had visible wounds from Cheney’s gun:
Whittington sweeps a hand up to his dusky face and points near his right eye, then to the right side of his forehead. The eye socket, hairline and hand have birdshot pellets lodged in them, too. If you look closely — and strangers occasionally sidle up to him to do just that — the accident’s remnants are evident; there’s a tiny bump in each spot.
Every so often, for months afterward, some of the lead in Whittington’s body worked its way to the surface. But many pieces remain too deeply embedded to remove, including one near his heart. At 82, Whittington knows he will live the rest of his days with about 30 pieces of shot inside him. Somehow, he jokes, he can get through a metal detector without causing a commotion
During the course of his interview with Farhi, Whittington shows the writer the vest he was wearing the day he was shot, which Farhi says is “splattered with brownish, irregularly shaped bloodstains.” Whittington kept it, Farhi explains, to teach people about the “dangers of firearms.”
Harry Whittington saved the vest not just as a souvenir but as a warning. He shows it to friends, and to the children of friends, to illustrate the dangers of firearms. “It’s an education for them,” he says.
Indeed, in much the same way, Dick Cheney’s vice presidency was an education for the world.
Three buildings on Second Avenue in Manhattan collapsed after a gas explosion last March.
On Thursday, the NYPD arrested five people in connection with the East Village gas explosion that killed two people and leveled three buildings last spring. Four were charged with involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors said that the building owner’s greed and willingness to take shortcuts caused the loss of life.
At a press conference announcing the charges, Cy Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said that the landlord at 121 Second Avenue was looking to cash in on skyrocketing rents in the neighborhood, as “financial incentives to take shortcuts has never been stronger.” From the New York Times:
Mr. Vance outlined a scheme as contemptible as it was craven, involving a crooked contractor, an unscrupulous plumber, a greedy landlord and her son — all so eager to get tenants into newly renovated apartments with the average rent running $6,000 per month that they were willing to cast aside any concern for safety.
Even in the last moments before the explosion, two of the defendants are accused of running out of the building without warning any of the residents or patrons inside a ground-floor restaurant or even calling 911.
“The individuals involved in the East Village gas explosion showed a blatant and callous disregard for human life,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in an unusually blunt statement.
“We are heartened that today these defendants will be brought to justice and forced to answer for their criminal actions,” he said.
The building owner, Maria Hrynenko, and her son, Michael Hrynenko Jr., were both charged with involuntary manslaughter, as were a contractor hired to renovate the six-story building’s apartments in 2013, Dilber Kukic, and an unlicensed plumber, Athanasios Ioannidis. Andrew Trombettas is also facing charges for supplying his license to Ioannidis.
Prosecutors say that the defendants created an illegal gas link, tapping into the line of the building next door, at 119 Second Avenue. “When greed guides the decisions and respect for human life doesn’t, this is the result,” the fire commissioner, Daniel Nigro, said.
Officer Peter Liang has been found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of Akai Gurley. He has also been found guilty of official misconduct for not helping Gurley, 28, as he bled to death.
Liang’s defense attorneys argued that the rookie cop did not get proper training in CPR at the police academy, and that he panicked after accidentally firing his weapon in the darkened stairwell. Gurley’s girlfriend, Melissa Butler, performed CPR while another woman called 911.
“No matter what happened in the police academy with police training, you can rest assured Peter Liang, Shaun, and every other graduate of the academy was better equipped, better trained, and able to do the chest compressions Melissa Butler was forced to do while she knelt in [Gurley’s] blood and urine,” assistant district attorney Joseph Alexis said in closing arguments earlier this week.
“This is not an accident. This is an officer who couldn’t properly handle his gun,” Alexis said. “It’s no accident [the bullet] hit the wall steps away from where Akai Gurley stood.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, the last NYPD officer to be found guilty in a civilian’s shooting death was Bryan Conroy, convicted by a Manhattan judge of criminally negligent homicide in 2005.
The jury in Liang’s trial deliberated for a little more than two days, the New York Times reports. Liang faces up to 15 years.
Things are heating up in the Democratic presidential campaign, and so are the debates. There’s another one tonight, this time hosted by PBS. It’ll be live on PBS stations, but if you want to watch online or on the go, here’s how to tune in.
Tonight’s debate will start at 9pm ET/6pm PT, with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, both fresh from the New Hampshire primary. If you’ll be on the go, want to watch on your computer, or on a set-top box, here are some mobile and internet-only ways to watch:
PBS also has apps for a variety of set-top boxes, including Android TV, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One, and more—they’re worth a look if you have them, but some people report that they usually offer on-demand streaming, not live.
The debate will also simulcast on CNN, so you can watch it there if you have cable, but if not, try these, where they should be streaming even if you don’t have a provider to choose from:
Of course, since the debate is on PBS, if you have a good over-the-air antenna, odds are it’ll be on whatever PBS affiliate is in your area, so you can tune in that way as well.
These days, almost every presidential candidate has an app that supporters can download, keeping voters informed (ostensibly) and boosting turnout (theoretically). But, according to the Associated Press, none is more invasive than Ted Cruz’s “Cruz Crew” app.
So far, the app has been downloaded to more than 61,000 devices. Upon registration, users give the app access to their Facebook accounts—and all the information contained therein—or else provide a phone number or email address. Users have to opt-out of agreements to share their contact lists and location with the campaign.
“Analytics gives the campaign a roadmap for everything we do,” the campaign’s data and digital director, Chris Wilson. Cruz, whose parents are mathematicians and data processing programmers, “has an acute understanding of our work and continually pushes me on it.” Maybe so, but upon announcing his candidacy, Cruz positioned himself as an advocate for digital privacy: “Instead of a government that seizes your emails and your cellphones, imagine a federal government that protected the privacy rights of every American.”
The Cruz campaign doesn’t just keep the data gathered by the app for itself—it also shares it with a British company called Cambridge Analytica, which is owned, at least in part, by New York hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who also happens to be Ted Cruz’s most generous donor. From Politico, which broke the story of Cambridge Analytica’s activities, and the Mercer family’s involvement, this summer:
Federal Election Commission filings show that nearly 93 percent of the $2.6 million Cambridge Analytica has received in traceable federal payments has come from committees to which the Mercers donated generously. The payments — which all came last year and were for polling, micro-targeting, advertising and other services — came from Cruz’s leadership PAC and a handful of GOP-aligned big-money organizations, including Ending Spending Action Fund, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton’s super PAC and a pop-up super PAC created to boost 2014 Republican Senate candidates. Other Cambridge Analytica clients included the campaigns of GOP Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansasand Thom Tillis of North Carolina, as well as unsuccessful GOP House candidate Art Robinson of Oregon. The Mercers combined to donate nearly $3.3 million to those groups in 2014, according to FEC filings.
In turn, according to the AP, the Cruz campaign paid Cambridge $3.8 million last year (8 percent of its total spending). Two outside groups supporting the campaign, meanwhile, have paid Cambridge $682,000 since December. (Mercer had previously given one of those groups $11 million.) The data the campaign provides Cambridge with is valuable, too, supplementing its already gargantuan, 10 terabyte database containing information about the 240 million Americans eligible to vote.
The idea is to pinpoint something Cambridge calls voters’ “psychographic score.” From the AP:
Cambridge considers its methodology highly secretive, but it may include such details as household income, employment status, credit history, party affiliation, church membership and spending habits. Cambridge uses powerful computers and proprietary algorithms to predict Americans’ personality traits.
Cambridge’s database combines government and commercial data sets such as voter rolls and lists of people who liked certain Facebook posts, along with consumer data from grocery chains and other clients that can provide a voter’s preferred brand of toothpaste or whether he clips coupons. In Iowa, where identifying evangelical voters was key to Cruz’s victory strategy, Cambridge’s employees scoured the Internet for such useful information as church membership rolls.
“We’ve quantified the personalities of every adult American,” Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix said, describing five basic personality types the firm has determined from academic research and tens of thousands of monthly questionnaires. (Nix is also the director of SCL Group, a British consulting firm that helps incite coups.) “We can reach out and target those different clusters with messages about the things they care about most, but that have been nuanced to resonate with their personality type.”
Jerry Sickles, a paid Cruz field representative in New Hampshire, dismissed the privacy concerns “It’s not like we’re giving it to the NSA,” he told the AP. Alice Stewart, a campaign spokeswoman, asked “Why wouldn’t we want to use every tool available to us to win?”
[Update: PBS says the moderator was responding to a producer, not making an editorial comment. Their statement is appended below.] Following an otherwise lackluster (if not borderline uncomfortable) attempt at discussing foreign policy, Bernie Sanders moved to something he actually could speak confidently about: Hillary Clinton’s bizarre Kissinger boast. But as Sanders opened with a Vietnam reference, one of the debate’s moderators—apparently unaware her mic was still on—could be heard sighing in the background, “Oh, god.”
It was the reflexive response of an antsy kid who just had to listen to grandpa talk about his Iraq war vote for the 52nd time, and if you weren’t paying close attention, you almost certainly would have missed it. So in case you did, you can watch this rare bit of raw, uncensored moderator emotion above. Enjoy.
Update 12:07 p.m.:
PBS Executive Producer Sara Just has provided Gawker with the following statement on the incident over email:
Throughout the debate Judy and Gwen had occasional low volume, whispered conversation with each other and producers in the production truck about timing and upcoming questions. Because this PBS debate had no commercials, this kind of normal broadcast communications had to happen while on the air.
At this particular moment late in the debate, the producers and anchors were making decisions about questions we had hoped to get to and were running out of time to get to the obligatory closing statements.
There was no editorial comment made.
Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Disclaimer: I’ve donated money to Bernie Sanders’ campaign and fully intend on voting for him in the primaries and, god willing, the general election.
The Cruz campaign has pulled its most recent ad after discovering that one of the actresses featured therein has also performed in softcore pornography, BuzzFeed News reports. The ad, ham-fistedly critical of Marco Rubio, is called “Conservatives Anonymous.”
Amy Lindsay, a Christian conservative and a Republican, plays the woman who says, “Maybe you should vote for more than just a pretty face next time.” She has also appeared in Erotic Confessions, Carnal Wishes, Secrets of a Chambermaid, and Insatiable Desires. BuzzFeed spoke to her before speaking to the Cruz campaign:
While she emphasized that she did not do hardcore porn and that she also appeared in non-erotic films, Lindsay said she thinks it is “cool” that an actor who has appeared in softcore porn could also appear in Cruz’s ad.
“In a cool way, then hey, then it’s not just some old, white Christian bigot that people want to say, ‘It could be, maybe, a cool kind of open-minded woman like me,’” she said of people supporting Cruz.
Though Lindsay initially told BuzzFeed News that the person at the campaign who hired her “absolutely knew everything that I had done,” she later called back to say that she realized that was not the case.
Upon being called for comment in the interim, the Cruz campaign took down the ad. Lindsay reportedly has not yet decided whether to vote for Cruz or Donald Trump.
Disclosure: I paid for one of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” hats but it got lost in the mail. Email me if you have a spare one: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.
Lee Baca was the sheriff of Los Angeles County for 15 years beginning in 1999. Soon, he could be sentenced to jail.
Earlier this week, Baca pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators in a case related to his officers routinely abusing jail inmates, and then trying to obstruct the FBI investigation into the abuse. If you’re interested in learning how bad the LA county jails were under Baca, please see this ACLU report, “How a Savage Gang of Deputies Controls LA County Jails.” Baca lied to protect these deputies, and his own reputation.
When he goes before a federal judge in May, Baca could be sentenced to up to six months in jail. He probably will not be abused. And he will still keep his pension of more than $300,000 per year.
Documents examined by the AP suggest a decades-old policy of borderless travel within Europe is coming to an end as the participating countries grapple with the influx of Middle Eastern refugees fleeing terrorism in their home countries.
The new policy, which has not yet been implemented, would impose passport control centers at borders across the EU for the next two years in an apparent attempt to stem the flow of refugees traveling across Europe.
According to the AP, the EU is planning to declare that Greece—the entry point for about 2,000 refugees each day—has failed to sufficiently protect its border. Such a declaration would trigger an emergency provision that allows the other 25 countries that have abolished passport travel to institute border controls for as many as two years.
But even though reports indicated Greece had been making progress on its border control, the EU’s assessments became “notably more negative” after states like Germany indicated an interest in extending emergency border controls which, under EU rules, max out at six months. Notes the AP:
With asylum-seekers still coming at a pace ten times that of January 2015, European countries are reluctant to dismantle their emergency border controls. And if they keep them in place without authorization, EU officials fear the entire concept of the open-travel zone could be brought down.
Germany’s emergency border checks expire in May, as do several other countries’, including France, Austria, Denmark and Norway. In the meantime, some countries are looking at alternative measures, like taking all items of value from the refugees before allowing them to enter.
The purported cocaine kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman may be sent to Brooklyn to be prosecuted if he is extradited from Mexico, according to federal Justice Department officials cited in the Wall Street Journal today.
Several jurisdictions have cases against the alleged drug lord, and the DOJ settled on Brooklyn after reviewing others and deciding that the Brooklyn indictment is the strongest, the Journal reports. The indictment, brought by the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, alleges that the Sinaloa cartel brought 457,000 of kilograms of product into the area and is responsible for multiple murders.
Because El Chapo escaped from Mexican prisons three times over the years, security is among the chief concerns for his detainment in the U.S. With all of his tunnel-digging experience, maybe the MTA will contract him for help handling the L Train apocalypse while he’s in town.
Photo of an ordinary night out in Williamsburg via Getty. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.
The thread is here, though I suggest you don’t read the comments. The post allegedly made by Cyr has since been deleted, and according to the Dayton Daily Newsan internal investigation is under way to determine if Cyr was the one who made the comment, which would violate the Fairborn Police Department’s social media policy. It also appears as if Cyr’s Facebook page has been deactivated or deleted.
McCarrel II, 23, reportedly helped organize protests in Ohio after the 2014 death of Michael Brown and had also founded an activist group named Pursuing Our Dreams, which aimed to help the homeless population in Columbus.
Update (12:55 p.m.) Per Glendale police, two 15-year-old girls have died as a result of the shooting. Authorities have not yet stated how the two knew each other, or if one was the shooter.
Independence High School in Glendale, Ariz. is on lockdown after what police are calling a “double shooting” occurred this morning.
Per ABC 15 in Glendale, a police spokesperson confirmed that two teenagers were shot in an “isolated incident,” though it has not yet been confirmed if the two were students at the school.
ABC 15 is also reporting that a source said that one of the teenagers has died, but that is also unconfirmed. Police said there is no active shooter and that they are “not necessarily looking for a suspect.”
![Two 15-Year-Olds Dead After Shooting At Arizona High School [UPDATING]](http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--YMsXry9w--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/eds50xp50fcudnxwhxkq.png)
