This afternoon, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Twitter account posted the above photo of a sandwich at the recently reopened Carnegie Deli, along with the caption “America.” It got us wondering: Is de Blaz more of a Carnegie partisan or a Katz’s guy? The answer, his people told Gawker, is neither.
The photo and its caption were intended both as a spoof of Jeb Bush’s instantly infamous gun tweet (the mayor is as late to memes as he is to important speaking engagements, it seems) and as a celebration that the Seventh Avenue pastrami outpost was back in business after a 10 month hiatus.
Carnegie Deli closed temporarily last year after Con Ed workers discovered it had been siphoning gas for cooking without paying for it, a practice that had allegedly been going on for years. And a glance at the iconic deli’s menu shows most sandwiches going for anywhere between $15 and $30. America, according to the tweet, is a thieving tourist trap full of unhealthy and overpriced food. It would be hard to find a more appropriate metaphor.
But what about the meat? “I have to be careful, but this is the finest pastrami sandwich in New York,” de Blasio claimed spuriously at deli’s reopening. In fact, as any reasonable resident of the city knows, the finest pastrami sandwich in New York is about 58 blocks downtown from Carnegie, at Katz’s Delicatessen. The price is admittedly just as steep—$20 per breaded stack of meat—but Katz’s has never been accused of utilities theft, as far as I know. More importantly, the pastrami at Katz’s is like a fatty, salty full-tongue kiss. The pastrami is just sublime, is what I’m saying. Just look at this thing.
Does de Blasio really prefer Carnegie? Could it possibly be true? I asked a spokesperson for the mayor to give an official comment on his sandwich preference, and here’s what I got in response:
“The Mayor enjoys sandwiches from many of New York’s great Jewish delis.”
Hmm.
Certainly, no one would accuse Bill de Blasio—the NYPD reform mayor, the horse-and-carriage mayor—of being overly accommodating toward his ideological opponents. But certain issues demand strong stances from our leaders, and this is one of them.
Like Carnegie Deli, Katz’s is absolutely a tourist trap. But as expensive as it may be, it is the rare tourist trap that fully delivers on its promise, sometimes even exceeds it. Kind of like the glittering and way-too-expensive metropolis we all live in, when you think about it. If Carnegie Deli is America, Katz’s is New York City. I stand with Katz’s, and so should Bill de Blasio.
Image via Bill de Blasio/Twitter. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.
Tonight’s going to be weird. In one corner, we have Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson engaging in an ostensibly civil “town hall” on CNN (the other three get their shot tomorrow night). In the other corner, Donald Trump and Joe Scarborough will be doing... something. Either way, we’ll be liveblogging every last second of it.
At least 28 people were killed and 61 wounded by a car bomb that went off during evening rush hour near parliament in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports. Officials said the bomb had targeted buses carrying military personnel.
“We believe that those who lost their lives included our military brothers as well as civilians,” Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said, calling the attack “contemptible and dastardly.”
“We do not yet know the perpetrators,” he told reporters. “This attack did not only target our military personnel in those shuttles. This attack openly targets our entire nation. We condemn those who carried it out, those who instrumentalised the perpetrators, and those who gave logistical, intelligence and even political support to such attacks.”
An official at the armed forces’ general staff confirmed military buses had been the target, hit by an explosive-laden car as they waited at traffic lights. The country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the attack would only strengthen Turkey’s resolve against insurgents.
Plumes of smoke were seen rising over the area and the powerful blast was heard all over the city, sending residents to their balconies in panic. Television footage showed an intense fire around a burned-out bus and emergency vehicles rushing to the scene. A spokesman for the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), Ömer Çelik, said he strongly condemned the attack as a “heinous act of terrorism”.
Car maker Ford has ended its relationship with the climate-denial lobbyist group ALEC, the Guardian reports, joining tech companies like Google, Facebook, eBay, and Yelp, as well as the energy companies like Shell and BP in distancing themselves from the Koch-funded network.
“Ford appeared to be very happy to quietly fund ALEC when its membership was secret, but now that the relationship has become public it has become a liability,” Nick Surgey, CMD’s director of research, told the Guardian.
The issue is that Ford wants consumers to believe that it prioritizes environmental sustainability, while ALEC aggressively pursues a legislative agenda that would limit environmental regulations on big businesses. From the Guardian:
Part of the group’s anti-green agenda was to agitate to make it more difficult for homeowners to install solar panels. Several of its model bills aim to block federal efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to cut back on emissions from energy creation under the Clean Power Plan.
In its model bill on research on climate change, Alec says that “human activity has and will continue to alter the atmosphere of the planet” and that such activity may lead to warming of the planetary temperature. But it goes on to suggest that “such activity may lead to deleterious, neutral, or possibly beneficial climatic changes”.
Even more contentiously, the lobby group goes on to state that “a great deal of scientific uncertainty surrounds the nature of these prospective changes, and the cost of regulation to inhibit such changes may lead to great economic dislocation”.
No one knows how much the Kochs have given ALEC in total, but the amount likely exceeds $1 million—not including a half-million loaned to ALEC when the group was floundering. ALEC gave the Kochs its Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award, and Koch Industries has been one of the select members of ALEC’s corporate board for almost twenty years. The company’s top lobbyist was once ALEC’s chairman. As a result, the Kochs have shaped legislation touching every state in the country. Like ideological venture capitalists, the Kochs have used ALEC as a way to invest in radical ideas and fertilize them with tons of cash.
Take environmental protections. The Kochs have a penchant for paying their way out of serious violations and coming out ahead. Helped by Koch Industries’ lobbying efforts, one of the first measures George W. Bush signed into law as governor of Texas was an ALEC model bill giving corporations immunity from penalties if they tell regulators about their own violation of environmental rules. Dozens of other ALEC bills would limit environmental regulations or litigation in ways that would benefit Koch.
A spokesman for ALEC, Wilhelm Meierling, told the Guardian that Ford’s departure is offset by the introduction of 30 new private sector members: “It’s an exciting time to be at Alec, with private sector growth in a variety of sectors including renewable energy.”
The Manhattan district attorney, Cy Vance, has moved to recuse himself from the criminal investigation into (now apparently recanted) allegations that former Governor Eliot Spitzer assaulted a 26-year-old woman he was with at the Plaza Hotel Saturday, the New York Times reports. The investigation has reached a “standstill,” police said.
The formal request to transfer the case to the district attorney’s office in another borough had not yet been granted on Wednesday. From the Times:
Officials in Mr. Vance’s office said the ties between the former governor and the office were too close to erase doubts about impartiality. Some of Mr. Vance’s top aides, including his deputy chief of staff and his executive assistant, were top aides to Mr. Spitzer when he was governor. Mr. Spitzer’s daughter also worked for the office as a paralegal.
Beyond those connections, Mr. Spitzer has had a long relationship with the office itself, having started his career there as a prosecutor in 1986. The former governor was also a political ally of Mr. Vance, both Democrats. In 2009, for instance, he appointed Mr. Vance to the New York State Commission on Sentencing Reform.
The woman Spitzer was with, Svetlana Travis, decided not to press charges before returning to Russia on Saturday, and subsequently apologized, in an email that Spitzer’s lawyers shared with the Times and the D.A.’s office, for lying about the alleged assault.
Nevertheless, the Times reports, the investigation is ongoing—the NYPD executed search warrants and continues to review phone and computer records related to the case. However, officials said Wednesday that police were at an impasse.
“We are at a standstill now, absent a complainant,” the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of public information, Stephen Davis, said. “If she would change her mind we would have to reconsider, but what we would have to have is her telling us what happened and saying she wants to press charges.”
Have you been paying attention to the latest Matt Drudge-powered anti-Hillary Clinton conspiracy theory festering in the most absurd pocket of the right-wing internet? I hope not! Assuming you haven’t here is some context for the above image:
In December 2012, Hillary Clinton fainted. When she hit the floor she suffered a concussion. In 2014, she was asked if she was still suffering lingering effects from the concussion and said she wasn’t. But the health of her brain has nonetheless remained a constant topic of suspicion among terrified conservatives, and it has not abated despite her entirely competent presidential campaign: Just last month, after she was late returning to the debate stage after a commercial break, Brietbart cited a “law-enforcement source” who attributed her momentary tardiness to “health issues stemming from a previous brain injury.”
It will not surprise you to learn that Clinton’s brain has been of particular fascination to Matt Drudge. Today, splashed across his website, is a link to an AP photo of Clinton wearing dark-rimmed glasses, which Drudge believes are the same ones she wore while recovering from her concussion in 2014.
You may notice that in his rush to slyly question Hillary Clinton’s mental capacity, Drudge spelled the word “prism” as “prisim.” This perhaps might seem like an innocent typo, except that, as of this writing, Drudge has not altered his spelling of this rather elementary word.
Matt, if you’re reading, below is a link to Katy Perry’s blockbuster 2013 album Prism. Gawker Media would benefit from your purchase via the link, but so, clearly, would you.
LePage said asylum seekers don’t get medical assessments and can bring foreign diseases to Maine.
“And what happens is you get hepatitis C, tuberculosis, AIDS, HIV, the ‘ziki fly,’ (sic) all these other foreign type of diseases that find a way to our land,” he says.
Beware the ziki fly, residents of Maine. But most of all—beware Paul LePage.
If there’s one thing Donald Trump loves, it’s his smokin’ hot daughter Ivanka. But if there are two things Donald Trump loves, the second is most definitely drama. Trump’s latest source? None other than the Holy Father himself: Cool Pope Francis.
Earlier today, Cool Pope Francis suggested that Donald Trump might not be as pious as he claims, saying, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” It’s worth noting that Jesus, a carpenter, did likely build both walls and bridges.
In a statement to the press, Trump explained that “the Mexican government fed the Pope a tremendous amount of stuff about me: ‘Trump is not a good person.’” Tremendous amount of stuff indeed.
Why was the Mexican government going to the Vatican to attack Trump? How does Trump know so much about ISIS’s secret agenda? Will Donald Trump’s approval rating rise to an unprecedented 100 percent? Good question, better question, and almost definitely.
Still, to make the feud official, Trump of course had to release a statement. It is my genuine honor to present to you what is perhaps the most perfect document ever wrought by human hands.
Remember when we all thought that Donald Trump would never actually be a serious candidate and haha what a lark?
America’s roads and bridges are in horrible shape. We could fix them up and provide lots of jobs in the process. But we won’t!
A new annual survey of our nation’s bridges, out today, finds that one in ten of our nation’s bridges—about 58,000 total—are “structurally deficient,” meaning they are in pressing need of repair. The good news is that that’s 2,500 fewer structurally deficient bridges than in 2014. The bad news: “The current pace of investment would take 21 years to replace or upgrade all the deficient bridges.”
It is safe to say that our roads and bridges are going to be in use for a while. For many decades to come. We are not all going to be flying in hovercars in the next five years. These roads and bridges will need to be fixed. The money to fix them will need to spent. The longer we wait to fix them, the worse condition they will be in, the more money it will take to fix them, and the more accidents and transportation delays will be caused by their failures.
Interest rates are very low right now on a historical basis. If you ever wanted to, say, borrow a trillion bucks to finance a national infrastructure program to repair our crumbling roads and bridges, this would not be a bad time to do it. Oil prices are extremely low right now. If you ever wanted to, say, impose a gas tax that could be used to fund a national infrastructure program to repair our crumbling roads and bridges, this would not be a bad time to do it. While the official unemployment rate is relatively low, certain demographic segments of our society—particularly young people and minorities—are suffering from high unemployment. If you ever wanted to, say, start a nationwide government-funded jobs program to put these unemployed people to work, thereby unleashing a great deal of economic potential and mitigating a variety of social problems linked to unemployment and poverty and, in the process, repairing our crumbling roads and bridges, this would not be a bad time to do it.
Repairing our nation’s crumbling roads and bridges is the definition of a nonpartisan goal that “both sides of the aisle” can support. If you ever wanted to, say, demonstrate to the dispirited American public that our epically unpopular Congress can actually work together to get something meaningful done, this would not be a bad time to do it.
But we won’t do it! Because various special interests oppose gas taxes and a fully formed insane conservative ideology opposes any new big government spending programs, even ones that are targeted to something that we will need to spend money on eventually anyhow. Instead, we will do this in a piecemeal, inferior, more expensive way, that will not do as much good.
We get the political leadership that we deserve, as always.
While conspiracy theorists continue to suss out the real cause of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, both sides of the Senate are preparing themselves for a long, insane fight over his replacement. Does Obama stand a chance of getting a nominee confirmed in the next 11 months? Here’s how the battle’s looking so far.
“What is less than zero? The chances of Obama successfully appointing a Supreme Court Justice to replace Scalia?”
Mere hours after Scalia’s death on Saturday, Senate Republicans made it clear that they have no plans to confirm any Supreme Court nominee Obama puts forth, because uggghhh it’s not fair. Conn Carroll, a spokesman for Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Mike Lee, tweeted this:
And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement confirming that Republican senators have no plans to confirm anyone. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” he said. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”
Days later, however, other Senate Republicans have said they would be open to at least holding hearings about nominees (as a defense against Democrats calling them obstructionists). Drama!!!
“President Obama can nominate people until his heart’s content”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is certainly not jumping at the chance to confirm a nominee, but he has so far declined to say that he won’t even consider any. Grassley told The Washington Post Tuesday that he is taking it “a step at a time” and will “wait until the nominee is made before I would make any decision” about holding hearings. Judiciary Committee member Sen. Thom Tillis suggested to the Post that the Senate should hold hearings, so that Republicans don’t “fall into the trap of being obstructionist.”
This kind of talk does not make right-wing donor groups happy. To be clear, holding hearings would be a hollow gesture on Republicans’ part, not a real first step toward confirming a nominee, but even the idea of a making that gesture has flustered Tea Party organizations like FreedomWorks.
In an interview with Talking Points Memo today, the executive director of FreedomWorks, Curt Levey, said, “The strategy that makes the most sense is to say that there should not be any consideration of this nominee. It would be irrelevant to have a hearing because it’s the situation: the fact that it’s an election year, the fact that his policies are before the court, the fact that the court is so finely balanced at the moment.”
Travis Weber at The Family Research Council (where Josh Duggar used to work) also told TPM that the Senate should not hold any hearings. “The Senate is under no obligation to consider [nominees],” he said. “President Obama can nominate people until his heart’s content and they have no obligation to look at them one way or another, given the gravity of the moment.”
All of these groups have pointed to McConnell’s original statement as the strategy Republicans should carry out. If McConnell has a change of heart, he will have to answer to a lot of angry conservatives who think he already drew the right line in the sand.
“We should reverse the presumption of confirmation”
What are the Democrats doing, amidst all of this? Trying to convince everyone they wouldn’t block nominees like Republicans if the situation was reversed. Republicans have latched on to a speech Sen. Chuck Schumer made in 2007 that the declared the Senate should “reverse the presumption of confirmation” for justices. He said:
“We should reverse the presumption of confirmation [for justices]. The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice [John Paul] Stevens replaced by another [John] Roberts, or Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg by another [Samuel] Alito. Given the track record of this president and the experience of obfuscation at the hearings, with respect to the Supreme Court, at least, I will recommend to my colleagues that we should not confirm a Supreme Court nominee except in extraordinary circumstances. They must prove by actions—not words— that they are in the mainstream, rather than the Senate proving that they are not.”
Republicans are now calling this the “Schumer Standard.” Burn!!! Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said on Dallas radio yesterday, “We’re embracing this precedent that Sen. Chuck Schumer advocated for back in 2007...If it’s good enough for them when they’re in the majority, then it’s good enough for us when we are. This is a hypocritical argument on the part of Sen. Schumer.”
For his part, Schumer now says that what he was talking about in 2007 is way different than what Republicans are talking about now. He wrote a post on Medium (lol) claiming that the GOP is comparing “apples to oranges.”
“What I said in the speech given in 2007 is simple: Democrats, after a hearing, should entertain voting no if the nominee is out of the mainstream and tries to cover that fact up,” he wrote. “There was no hint anywhere in the speech that there shouldn’t be hearings or a vote. Only that if after hearings and a vote, Democrats determined that the nominee was out of the mainstream and trying to hide it, they should have no qualms about voting no.”
This has not convinced any Republicans to stop hammering Schumer to justify their own obstructionism. Everyone’s a hypocrite.
A couple of Fridays ago, I walked my older son to school and then my younger son to daycare. Then I crossed over the ice-and-salt encrusted overpass to the metro station and headed downtown. As I emerged back up onto the street, I checked my phone and enjoyed a little lift of triumph. Getting places a bit early or exactly on time is one of my small pleasures. It means all my systems are humming just right. That morning, I was five minutes early for my appointment to have an abortion.
Why am I sharing this with you? Isn’t this personal business, best kept to myself? No. The abortion debate is immeasurably worse off for having been dominated by everyone except the women who actually receive abortions, and any medical procedure whose legality is being debated at the federal level is everyone’s business, besides. There are an estimated 1.2 million abortions performed each year in the United States. That’s more than twice the number of angioplasties performed each year, according to the Center for Disease Control. If angioplasties were suddenly on the chopping block, I imagine some men whose lives had been changed by them would be compelled to speak up.
I found out I was pregnant at my mom’s house, over Christmas. I had an IUD, the copper kind, and after two years of loyal service it went and took a sick day. For weeks I’d been feeling like my legs were filled with wet cement. My emotional state had been ass. Part of me was relieved to learn what was causing that, but mostly I was pissed. I did not want to bring another child into the world. My husband and I had already had this conversation. We have two kids and the younger one isn’t yet two and a half. We’d decided that once he is nearing five, we’d reconsider a third kid. I’ll be 35 then. The little joke I always tell is that I’ll only want to have another if in three years we find ourselves suddenly rich and bored.
According to a study published in the June 2011 issue of Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, roughly 60 percent of women seeking abortions in the United States between 2001-2008 were mothers. I am a mother, and this abortion would be my first.
We tend to think of reproduction as following a strict teleological pattern: You use birth control until you’re ready to have a family, then you stop, get pregnant, have the family you’ve planned for, and then resume birth control until menopause. There’s no room in what’s acceptable for unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, or trouble conceiving. A woman’s body ripens into fertility and then, babies duly birthed, folds tidily in on itself at the desired time.
But the experiences of most women I know who are in their thirties or older have not followed this narrative. Whether due to miscarriage, conception trouble or abortion, this teleology is a lie.
My mom seemed sad when I told her. Not because she opposes abortion, but she didn’t want me to suffer. For women of her generation, abortion is associated with suffering. She wanted to make sure I was OK. For me, a third pregnancy would be suffering. The abortion would be a relief.
I could go into more detail about why I didn’t want to have a third kid this year, but do you really need to hear that? You can trust that my feeling was justified, right? Let’s skip the part where I argue my case, for both my sake and yours. It feels great to do that.
I texted and called my best lady-friends near and far. “I’m preg w an IUD WTF is this shit.” We’re all terrible correspondents but everyone replied right away.
“CALLING U NOW,” they texted. “OH FUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKK CALL ME. I’m calling tonight.”
Most of my friends said the same thing: Don’t feel shame. Their absolution was such a relief. I wasn’t ashamed, but I felt like I was supposed to express regret that I didn’t truly feel. One friend texted that she was on her way to spend the evening Netflix-and-chilling with another mom-friend who’d just had an abortion, too.
I called a clinic back home in Montreal. The woman on the phone was sweet. “We’ll take out your IUD,” she said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
But there was a little wrinkle: We were about to embark on a long-planned family trip to the southwest, to take a road trip in my in-laws’ old VW camper van. My husband had taken on extra work for months to pay for this trip and the kids couldn’t wait to go. The abortion would have to wait a month, until I got home. I was worried that I’d be an asshole to my family on this trip, that the symptoms of early pregnancy—which, for me, have always been the worst—would make me listless. I couldn’t let my five-year-old overhear anything about a pregnancy. Once I made the abortion appointment, we stopped talking about it.
Despite my exhaustion, the trip ended up being a hoot. We drove past many anti-abortion billboards in West Texas and New Mexico, blasting stern reminders that the fetus already had fingernails and eyelashes. I ate a lot of tacos and tried not to think about all the ways I knew my body was changing to accommodate pregnancy. When I was pregnant with my sons I loved learning about how my body was making more blood, how my joints were softening. I didn’t eat my placentas, but I did give them both a good long look and found them very impressive. The billboards weren’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.
During that month I ended up telling a few other people I was getting an abortion, mostly family members. I was compelled to tell them so they’d understand why I was going to bed at 8 p.m. every night, and why I lacked patience with my kids. I was too proud not to explain myself. The older people I told—including my mom, ultimately—tended to settle on a final justification that seemed to satisfy them: “It’s better for the kids.” I would be better able to care for them if I weren’t saddled with a third, they said, consoling themselves more than me. I would be a happier mom.
Abortion in Quebec is free. It is covered by universal provincial health insurance. But Canada as a whole is not some reproductive health Valhalla. The province of Prince Edward Island forbids abortion; women have to leave the island to access them. In the U.S., there are about a dozen states where it’s just about as easy to get an abortion as it was for me—although there, it’s never free. A steady march of restrictions have been put in place in many other states: 288 new anti-abortion laws in America since 2011, to be exact.Abortion is as contested now as it has been since Roe v. Wade.
The clinic I visited was decorated with framed hand-written thank-you notes from two decades’ worth of patients. Some of the notes were signed by partners. Some had drawings on them, of smiling stick figures, or flowers, or birds. Imagine feeling such gratitude that you’re compelled to doodle a garland of flowers on your thank-you note. I thought of the morally condemnatory billboards I’d seen outside El Paso and experienced a dizzying feeling of relief .
The waiting room was spotless, brightly lit and windowless, with little in the way of distractions. No magazines, no pamphlets. Half a dozen women and a few men stared intently at their phones. Never is one’s Facebook feed so riveting as in an abortion clinic waiting room.
Everyone sees a counselor before heading in for a confirmation ultrasound. The counselor’s job is basically to ensure that patients feel safe and ready to have the abortion. When I told her I was there because of a failed IUD, she chuckled. “You must be frustrated,” she said. “You tried to do the right thing but you ended up here anyway.”
The ultrasound tech who located my errant IUD and confirmed that I was 10 weeks pregnant referred to “the pregnancy” rather than “the fetus,” which I appreciated. And no, she didn’t make me look at the screen.
The abortion itself took about six minutes. As I lay down with my feet in the stirrups, a nurse chatted with me while giving me a dose of anti-anxiety medication through an IV tube in my arm. I was also given a bit of local anesthetic around my cervix. We talked about my sons, and about how I should probably switch to the IUD with hormones in it since she’s never seen a woman come in pregnant with one of those. The doctor dilated my cervix and inserted a small tube into my uterus through which the fetus was suctioned out. I felt no pain, just a little cramping. Maybe it’s the two vaginal childbirths talking, but for me, the least stressful part of the whole experience was actually having the abortion.
I was delightfully medicated and staring at the ceiling, so I didn’t ask myself what they did with the fetus until I got home. I did wonder, though, in the way that you might wonder about the whereabouts of a lover from your past. I’m sure it was disposed of in the most discreet, contained, clinical way possible, but maybe those horrible billboards affected me after all. Where did the doctor put it?
Possessing the physical responsibility of reproductivity is not a condition that lends itself to absolutes and easy answers. A woman’s feelings about childbearing don’t swing on a pendulum between pride and grief. There is a world of ideas between those poles. I wondered where the pre-human tissues that my body was making were put, but I didn’t wonder this out of anger or grief or regret. The fact is, my body was working on something, and I put a stop to it. I never took that choice lightly. No regrets is not the same thing as no questions, or no struggle, or no mute minutes lost in thought while riding the metro home.
Before that, though, the nurse led me to a curtained-off bed to rest. I was supposed to wait until the bleeding tapered off, about an hour. She returned with saltines and ginger ale, and more maxi pads. She checked in on me every few minutes. I felt so cared for, and so respected.
My husband came to take me home. He had taken the afternoon off from work. On the way we picked up some souvlaki for lunch, and ate it on the couch while watching a show on Netflix about a hot Danish dude living among the Saxons in medieval England. I ate an entire bar of Lindt chocolate. Then I went back out and picked up my kids.
I want to thank Lindy West for her #ShoutYourAbortion campaign, without which I would not have written this.
Kathryn Jezer-Morton lives in Montreal with her husband and two sons. She’s 33, her kids are 2 and 5, and she’ll be contributing a semi-regular parenting column called Hey Ma here on Jezebel.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK—On Wednesday night, Bill Clinton stood onstage not five feet away from a large saxophone for close to 40 minutes without touching it or even looking in its direction once.
Clinton had just flown from South Carolina to Williamsburg, where he would headline a Hillary fundraiser at the Brooklyn Bowl, a combination bowling alley and concert venue with two bars and a variety of french bread pizzas. Hillary, who is still campaigning in South Carolina, was not in attendance, though a cardboard cutout was provided for donors to take selfies with, which they did.
Ticket sales for the two-hour private event were slow—the cheapest seats, at $250 a person, were still available for purchase Wednesday afternoon. The most expensive, at $2,700 a piece, were also available. The announcement of a similarly-priced fundraiser early next month with Bill, Elton John, Katy Perry and Hillary herself, did nothing to help sales. Still, because the campaign barred press from the event, as they do at almost every fundraiser, I bought a ticket as a guest and expensed it to Gawker Media.
Hillary has, in fact, had a hard time of late selling her ostensibly millennial-themed events to millennials, at least in New York City. A few weeks before Wednesday’s bowling alley fundraiser, Chelsea Clinton hosted a fundraiser/exercise class at the TriBeCa location of the indoor cycling chain SoulCycle. Many of the 62 available bikes, priced between $500 and $2,700 for the 45 minute class, which Chelsea attended but did not participate in, went unsold. According to CNN, some seats were sold immediately before the class was set to begin—for $50.
The Brooklyn Bowl, capacity 600, had quite a few more attendees, though there was still plenty of room to move around the floor in front of the stage. Security for the event, which also featured Sen. Chuck Schumer (a parking-spot-stealing enemy of the Bluestone family), New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, actors Ana Gasteyer and Jeffrey Wright, and the Wailers, who played two songs but declined to use the saxophone, which stood propped up on a stand at the front of the stage the entire evening.
(For whom that sax lolled Wednesday night would remain a nagging mystery.)
To the side of the room, where the venue’s 16 bowling lanes are located a few steps above the main floor, donors who maxed out the $2,700 contribution or bundled upwards of $10,000, mingled with celebrities like Hill Harper and Mary Louise Parker. Both received a special thank you from Clinton when he took the stage. (Clinton also plugged Harper’s new CBS show, Limitless.) These donors were also invited to fill a roped-off section, located directly before the stage and directly in front of the $250-a-head attendee standing section.
But before Clinton began his speech, two notable things occurred. First, security opened the VIP section, which was sparsely filled, to the cheap (relatively speaking) seats. The surge forward, which landed at least one reporter directly in the front row, upset two very tall, painfully thin women who had been standing with a group of friends in the VIP area. After shooting me several dirty looks, the pair ultimately asked a man standing next to me to move so they, too, could be in the very front. The second occurred toward the end of Jeffrey Wright’s rambling introduction, when Clinton suddenly appeared offstage in the wings. For two minutes, the former president stood in the dark bowling alley, rigidly still, looking out past Wright into the crowd. He was surrounded by people but spoke to no one. His posture was perfect.
Finally, the former president and potential first First Man took the stage. Working off a small piece of paper with notes written on both sides, Clinton mostly hewed to so-called millennial issues like fixing student loans, raising wages, and passing immigration reform.When he discussed the Supreme Court vacancy, it was framed in terms of reproductive rights and how a conservative Supreme Court might make voting harder for college students.
Over the course of his speech, Bill’s name-checking of famous audience members only served to call attention to how he barely mentioned his own wife’s name the entire evening, referring to Hillary almost exclusively as “she” and “her.” It took close to thirteen minutes for him to even acknowledge he was there campaigning for Hillary.
“So the real issue in this election is, what are going to be the terms of our interdependence? Should the wealthy pay more? Absolutely. But not because they’re all bad—Hillary says you’ve got to build an economy for the struggling, the striving and the successful, and we have to do it together. And wrongdoers should be punished, but they ought to be punished when they do wrong, not because we need them to invest in the rest of us to grow more jobs and grow more businesses.”
Bill then went into an extended, detailed riff on Hillary’s college affordability plan, clearly the centerpiece of the campaign’s pitch to millennials.
“And she says college ought to be affordable for everyone, and free for middle class and lower-income students. And the lower your income is, the more help you ought to get. You ought to get help with books. Those of us who can afford to pay for our children should. You should use our tax money to put people to work in good-paying jobs.
“And she says the young millennials, who are stuck at home, because of their college debt, she’s got the best deal for them. She says, first of all, a lot of you know this, a college loan is the only bank loan you can get—a multi-year bank loan—that you cannot refinance. How many Americans refinance their home mortgages when interest rates drop below inflation after a crash? You can’t do that.
“Her plan, one, says we’re gonna let 25 million people immediately refinance, and if they did it today, they’d save $2,000 a person. Two, we are going to let them pay for college like they pay for a home, over twenty years. And put a strict cap on how much you can be charged as a percentage of your income after taxes and basic costs. So everybody will be able to pay. Then you can move out of your parents home, you can take a job you like. If you want to take a public service job that pays less, your repayment will go down. You will be free of the prison of this.”
It was unclear how many attendees were actually the sort of millennials who are unable to move out of their parents’ homes. Judging by the price of the ticket, whatever debt burdened the room seemed more likely to come from credit cards than student loans.
But Clinton continued on that subject, with a more focused attack on Bernie Sanders’ plan to eliminate tuition entirely.
“College should be affordable for everyone. But it doesn’t make sense to take income tax money and recycle it through the government to give free tuition. And guess who told me that yesterday. I was in Greenville, South Carolina and this woman was practically crying, she wouldn’t let go of my hand, and she said, ‘I’m a college loan officer. My whole life is devoted to making sure as many young people as possible can get into and out of college without having backbreaking debt.’ And she said, ‘I may be one of the few people who doesn’t list the bumper stickers and slogans, I’ve actually read the plan, and her plan is lightyears better for millennials. If they actually read and understood what the proposals were and the world that we’re living in, they would all be supporting her. Because they’ll be better off if she gets to be president.’”
Building up steam, Clinton made the more general case for Hillary as a true progressive. “She is the best single change-maker I’ve ever met, and she has been since I first met her, 40 years ago next month. Forty-five years ago next month. We’ve been married for 40 years. She turned me down the first two times. Anyway. Smart woman. But here’s what I know. When I met her at Yale, she was working on legal services for poor people. When she got out, she turned down all the law firms and went to work for the Children’s Defense Fund. She went to South Carolina, and tried to end the practice of keeping teenagers, sometimes as young as thirteen, in prison with men, with full-grown men, for years in a way that guaranteed their whole lives would be taken away from them.
“When she came to Arkansas, she brought to the mountains of Ozark, which is our Appalachia, the first legal aid they ever had. When I became governor, she started the first preschool program we ever had, for really, really poor families, without regard to race, at a time when there was no universal preschool in America. There wasn’t even a single state that had mandatory kindergarten at that time.
“And she found this program in Israel, and convinced the woman who started it to come all the way to Arkansas, which she couldn’t even find on a map before Hillary called her, and all of the sudden, we’ve got all of these people who could not read, could not write, learning with their children and becoming their parents’ first teachers,” Clinton said, using his wife’s name for the first time in several minutes.
“Today, there are thousands and thousands of Americans, who started school ready to learn, went further in life, because she always makes something good happen. And she doesn’t give a rip, she just always makes something good happen.”
Either way, the room loved it. “Yes!” Ana Gasteyer could be heard hollering as Clinton relayed an anecdote about a Muslim convenience store worker who stopped a robbery in the Bronx this year. Because proper names or not, Clinton is a famously charismatic speaker—a pro who reads an audience, especially one made up of people who paid hundreds of dollars just to see him, and gives the people what they want.
Except the ones who wanted him to play the stupid sax.
Heidi “Ana” Cruz appears onstage at the Brooklyn Bowl
It appears that Ana Gasteyer—the woman who, as Gawker recently exclusively reported, has been masquerading as Ted Cruz’s wife—endorsed Hillary Clinton last night at a fundraiser in Brooklyn.
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Update: Sold out
This popular electric kettle can boil water a speed of one cup per minute, and it’ll do it far more efficiently than your stovetop. That means that at an all-time low $17, it should pay for itself in gas or electricity savings. [Chefman, Cordless Electric Kettle 1.7-Liter, $17]
While new Spotify Premium members can still get a free Chromecast for buying three months of service, here’s an alternative deal if you can’t take advantage.
Extra long Lightning cables are perfect for your couch or bed, where a power outlet might not be close enough to comfortably use the cable that came with your phone. Luckily, this 9' Anker cable is marked down to just $10 today, so you can afford to scatter them all over your house. [Anker 9' Lightning Cable - Black or White, $10]
Tri-ply cookware, which blends the durability of stainless steel with the even and rapid heating of aluminum, is a great investment for any at-home chef, and you can own a full set today for under $200.
$185 gets you three T-Fal frying pans, three sauce pans, a dutch oven, and a steamer insert, which is basically every pan you need for the vast majority of dishes. We’ve seen this set cheaper a handful of times before, but it almost always sells for $200. [T-Fal 12-Piece Tri-Ply Cookware Set, $185. $15 coupon applied at checkout]
Today only, you can add 354 pages of Neil Gaiman short stories to your Kindle for just $2. Trigger Warningincludes “Black Dogs,” which takes place in the American Gods universe, “Nothing O’Clock,” a Doctor Who story, and many more original works by one of the world’s most popular writers. [Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances, Neil Gaiman [Kindle], $2]
Axe teamed up with Philips Norelco to create an electric body groomer, and the resulting product actually has shockingly great Amazon reviews. If you don’t already own something like this, $20 is a steal. [Axe Philips Norelco Body Groomer, $20]
This Corsair K70's clicky Cherry MX Blue switches are great for touch typists, its aluminum chassis lends it a premium feel, and its key-by-key customizable backlighting is just plain cool. For $100, you really can’t go wrong here. [Corsair K70 Mechanical Keyboard, $100]
Fitness trackers can help you ward off winter weight gain, but if you don’t want to commit to wearing a bracelet every day, the clip-on Fitbit One is is a great alternative.
In addition to steps, the Fitbit One will monitor calories burned, stairs climbed, and distance traveled, and you can even configure it as a silent, vibrating alarm clock so you don’t have to disturb your sleeping partner. If that sounds like an appealing package, you can grab one on eBay today for $60, one of the best deals we’ve ever seen. [Fitbit One, $60]
Hopefully you never need this Wi-Fi connected water sensor, but if my house were ever to flood while I was away, I’d certainly be grateful to get that push notification. [D-Link Wi-Fi Water Sensor, $38. Clip the $15 coupon]
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]
Your favorite USB car charger just happens to be the smallest one you can buy, and you can grab it on Amazon for an all-time low price today. [Aukey Dual-Port Car Charger, $6 with code JZMYBJHC]
You could argue that Spotify Premium is a bargain on its own for $10 per month, so when they offer to throw in a free Chromecast when you prepay for three months, I don’t really see any downside. Supplies are limited, so act fast. [FREE Chromecast with 3-Month Spotify Premium Purchase]
Personally, I can’t fathom spending $50 on a non-mechanical keyboard, but if you prefer a thin profile and quiet keys, you won’t find many better options than Logitech’s K740.
The K740 comes equipped with a full key layout, backlighting, and a palm rest. One thing you won’t find is a wireless antenna—you’ll need to plug it in over USB—but if you use a desktop at home or at work, that’s not a huge deal. $50 is about as low as this model gets, outside of rare one-day deals. [Logitech K740 Keyboard, $50]
If you need a last minute gift for your favorite outdoorsman, you could do a lot worse than this portable lantern. We’ve seen lots of products like this, but not many include 15,600mAh power banks that can charge your phone over USB, and power the LEDs for up to 35 hours. [Bienna Rechargeable Emergency Lantern with 15600mah Portable Charger, $25 with code ZLXUB948]
Full disclosure, I don’t know if TENS (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) massagers actually do anything useful. I use one occasionally after playing tennis, and I think it helps reduce muscle pain, but it could be a placebo effect! In any event, this is not a medical endorsement, simply a deal post, and this is about as cheap as you’ll ever see one of these things. [Magicfly Massage Handheld Electronic Pulse with Tens Unit Massager Therapy, $19 with code 38DBAWZI]
$4 gets you a bracelet made a over 12’ of 550 pound paracord, and a buckle that also double as a flint fire starter and eye knife, Hopefully you never have to use this, but it’s not a bad idea to keep it handy before you head out into the wild. [Gonex Survival Paracord Bracelet 550 Paracord, $4 with code 9LWV5OJX]
Bethesda just announced that they’ll be releasing at least $60 worth of Fallout 4 DLC, which means at the end of the month, the Season Pass will increase from $30 to $50. You don’t need the Cap Collector perk to understand that this means you should buy it now. [Fallout 4 Season Pass, $30]
Note: Amazon seems to be going in and out of stock. Of course, you can always order the season pass through PSN or Xbox Live.
Stick-anywhere motion-sensing lights are perfect for dark hallways, cabinets, and closets, and the more you buy today, the more you’ll save. Just add as many as you want to your cart, and use the appropriate code from below.
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Here we have Captain Clay Higgins of the St. Landry Parrish Sheriff’s Office. In the video below, Capt. Higgins thunderously addresses members of the so-called Gremlins Gang of southern Louisiana, while holding an automatic rifle, and while surrounded by fellow members of his department, who are also baring very large weaponry. There is no way you will watch the video and not come away feeling very good about the country we have built for each other.
In the video, Capt. Higgins recites the names of seven wanted alleged Gremlins members and then tells them: “You will be hunted, you will be trapped.” He also calls the men “animals,” “uneducated” and “heathens,” and challenges them to battle, saying they’ve “never won a fair fight in their lives.” Anticipating the obvious criticism of an armed white police officer calling a group of young black men “animals,” Capt. Higgins notes that each strapped officer in the background of the video is accompanied by a “leader of our black community.” Maybe Capt. Higgins read about the study arguing that the “black friends” defense actually works.
Capt. Higgins is something of a viral star, at least as much as a cop in backwater Louisiana could be. Last year, CBS News ran a story on the man they say is called “the ‘John Wayne’ of Cajun country.” His videos are so anticipated that the hometown Acadiana Advocate was at the taping for a behind-the-scenes photoshoot.
You can read about the alleged crimes committed by the men named in the video as well as their fellow purported gang members who have already been arrested on the website of local news station KATC 3. There are several allegations of violent crimes including murder and attempted murder, but also a deluge of petty drug offenses. The 17 alleged Gremlins members who are wanted or who were already captured, have, according to KATC 3's accounting, at least 98 arrests in their lifetimes combined.
The video concludes with Capt. Higgins imploring viewers to “stand up, share this video and send a clear message to the world: we’re Americans, we’d rather die on our feet than live on our knees.” The clip has been viewed over 10 million times since it was posted on Facebook 22 hours ago.
Kristin Cavallari is on the cover of this month’s Bella LA magazine. For those who are unfamiliar: This is the magazine that Lisa Vanderpump promoted during the Hamptons episode on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills this season. For those who are unfamiliar with that: can’t help you.
Here is something Kristin said to Bella LA magazine:
Students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst have been asked to shelter in place, after an “armed person” was reported on campus, CBS Boston reports, in first-year residence Pierpont Hall.
University police have reportedly secured the perimeter and are interviewing witnesses. The shelter in place order is for the entire campus, not just the immediate area around Pierpont.
At a campaign event in Bluffton, South Carolina, on Wednesday morning, Donald Trump, in the midst of a rant about how much he doesn’t like Lindsey Graham, seemed to imply that, if elected president, he would reveal the true perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks.
Here is what he said:
We went after Iraq, they did not knock down the World Trade Center. It wasn’t the Iraqis that knocked down the World Trade Center, we went after Iraq, we decimated the country, Iran’s taking over, okay.
But it wasn’t the Iraqis, you will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center. Because they have papers in there that are very secret, you may find it’s the Saudis, okay? But you will find out.
He’d made the same argument earlier in the day, on “Fox and Friends.”
Now, while it is true that Iraq did not knock down the World Trade Center, it is no secret that 15 of the 19 hijackers who participated in the 9/11 attacks were citizens of Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis know what they did. They are not persons who are unaware of the consequences of their government’s actions. Second, the Saudis know that weknow what they did! Somebody in the Federal government has read these 28 pages, someone in the Federal government has read all the other documents that have been covered up so far. And the Saudis know that.
[...]
They have continued, maybe accelerated their support for one of the most extreme forms of Islam, Wahhabism, throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East. And second, they have supported their religious fervor, with financial and other forms of support, of the institutions which were going to carry out those extreme forms of Islam. Those institutions have included mosques, madrassas, and military. Al-Qaeda was a creature of Saudi Arabia; the regional groups such as al-Shabaab have been largely creatures of Saudi Arabia; and now, ISIS is the latest creature!
Yes, I hope and I trust that the United States will crush ISIS, but if we think that is the definition of victory, we are being very naive! ISIS is a consequence, not a cause—it is a consequence of the spread of extremism, largely by Saudi Arabia, and if it is crushed, there will be another institution established, financed, supported, to carry on the cause.
Anyway! It is gratifying to know that President Trump would be so committed to transparency.
