There is no fairer review of cheap bus travel than this.
On Sunday, Lucas Peterson, a journalist who writes forThe New York Times’ Frugal Traveler blog, boarded a Megabus in Chicago bound for Milwaukee. At first, there was an irritating, but not disastrous, problem.
Soon enough, things took a turn for the worse. The bus quickly caught fire, and the passengers were forced to evacuate the bus, leaving their luggage inside.
Peterson, probably the very last person Megabus could have hoped for to be riding this specific bus at this specific time, tweeted out updates of the incident as it happened:
Summary: we left Chicago, immediately there seemed to be something wrong bc we stopped on shoulder of highway couple times, driver got out.
Then driver said we have to turn around and go back to Chicago to switch buses. About five min later tire blows and we pull over on hwy 41
Driver says it’s just a flat tire, that there’s no need to panic, and goes outside. Minutes later smoke starts pouring out of the bus.
Someone on the top deck eventually says: “we should get off of this bus.” So we all get out. People trying to get their luggage. Small fire.
S mall fire over wheel becomes big; people abandon luggage and get away. Entire thing goes up in flames, series of loud booms.
Thankfully, no one was injured. Peterson reports, however, that passengers are angry that they lost their luggage—some of them lost laptops and even a birth certificate. Of course, Megabus only guarantees liability for lost luggage up to $250.
Luckily, the passengers made it to their destination at last. Their mode of transportation was, naturally, another shitty Megabus.
A fire—the result of suspected arson—tore through a former hotel in eastern Germany on Sunday, causing possibly irreparable damage, the Associated Press reports. Police said onlookers cheered as the building, which was in the midst of being converted to a home for refugees, burned.
No one was injured, police in Bautzen said, but three people were ordered to leave the scene after they impeded firefighters’ getting to the burning building. Two people, described as drunk 20-year-olds, were detained. Others were “commenting with derogatory remarks or unashamed joy” as they stood and watched the fire.
Germany saw an increase in attacks against refugee housing last year. From the AP:
Saxony is home to the anti-Islam and anti-immigration group PEGIDA, and incidents there have caused concern before. In August, a mob in Heidenau, outside Dresden, hurled bottles and fireworks at police protecting a shelter being set up for refugees.
The Bautzen fire came after a mob in the small town of Clausnitz, also in Saxony, on Thursday screamed “We are the people!” and “Go home!” as they blocked a bus carrying asylum-seekers outside a new refugee home.
Police drew criticism in that case for roughly hauling some migrants off the bus into the building — which they insist was necessary to prevent the situation from escalating — and for saying that some of the migrants had made provocative gestures.
Saxony Governor Stanislaw Tillich called the two incidents “appalling and shocking” and described the perpetrators as “criminals.”
According to the BBC, police in Brandenburg, to the north of Saxony, are investigating the distribution of leaflets advocating for “absolute resistance” against the “foreigner invasion.” More than a million people applied for asylum in Germany last year.
Sideshow comedian and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been long-regarded as a political anomaly in the United States. But in Westeros? Well, that actually makes more sense.
Former reality TV star Kristin Cavallari only follows one reality TV housewife on Instagram, and that is Ms. Yolanda Foster of Beverly Hills. Makes total sense to me.
Not long after it became clear that Hillary Clinton had won Nevada’s caucus on Saturday, America Ferrera, an actress who stumps for Clinton, claimed that Bernie Sanders supporters at Harrah’s Las Vegas, a casino, had earlier in the evening chanted “English only” at Dolores Huerta, a civil rights activist and labor leader who also stumps for Clinton, to stop her from translating an explanation of the caucus process from English to Spanish.
“What happened is the person who was running the caucus said we need a translator and he said the first person that comes to the stage can be the translator, so I walked up to the front and then some of the organizers, the Bernie organizers, decided to shout ‘No, no, no,’” Huerta later told CNN. “Then a Bernie person stood up and said, I can also do translation. So then the person running the caucus said we won’t have a translator.” She added: “Then some of the organizers were shouting ‘English only, English only.’ This is bad.”
Video evidence corroborates some of this account, but not all of it. The debate over who should be permitted to translate the proceedings begins in the following footage at around 53:30:
A number of people, presumably Sanders supporters, can be heard to indistinctly objecting to Huerta’s offer to translate. Their concern is, perhaps, understandable: Just two days ago, Huerta—who, with Cesar Chavez, in the late ‘60s, cofounded the National Farm Workers Associated, which would eventually become one of the most influential farm-labor unions in the country—authored a post on Medium titled “On Immigration, Bernie Sanders is Not Who He Says He Is.”
In the above footage, after some incomprehensible muttering and agitation in the crowd, the precinct’s permanent chair declares (around 55:22), “We’re going forward in English only.” This is met with cheers and applause. The precinct chair goes on to ask anyone in the room who speaks both English and Spanish to inform their neighbors who only speak Spanish of what’s going on.
Based on census data, however, Clark County (which includes Las Vegas) must conduct all elections in English, Spanish, and Filipino/Tagalog, according to the Federal Voting Rights Act, which is enforced by the Department of Justice. And, as the Washington Post points out, the Help America Vote Act provides federal funds to provide translated voting materials, language assistance, or interpretation.
All of that being the case, the real culprit would seem to be the Democratic National Committee (or the Nevada state Democratic party) for failing to provide voters whose sole or preferred language is Spanish with the resources to fully and properly participate in the wonder that is representative democracy.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the DNC or the state party.
Remember the Lytro Illum? The professional-grade light field camera that could refocus and shift perspective on photos after you took them? It was undoubtedly cool, but a tough sell at its original $1600 price. But could you be tempted at $335? [LYTRO ILLUM 40 Megaray Light Field Camera, $335]
Today only, Amazon’s offering big savings on comfortable Calvin Klein underwear, sleepwear, and more for men and women. Be sure to make your selections before the most popular items sell out. [50% off Calvin Klein Underwear and Sleepwear]
Steaming your clothes might not get them as crisp as ironing, but it does a decent enough job in a fraction of the time, and for $15, why not? [Pure Enrichment PureSteam Fabric Steamer, $15 with code STEAMR15]
I used to chop garlic by hand, and I think deep down, I was hoping I’d cut my finger off just so I’d have an excuse to stop. That all changed when I bought a garlic press, which smashes a clove with just one squeeze, and does a far better job of it than I could ever do with a knife. [X-Chef Premium Stainless Steel Garlic Press, $7 with code 5VBXWVGS]
You can get cheap Lightning cables just about anywhere, but if only the best will do, you should give Anker’s PowerLine models a look.
These cables are built with kevlar fiber and feature reinforced stress points, which means they can last 5 times longer than typical cables. I own a couple of these, and while I can’t yet speak to how long long they actually last, I can say that they just feel extremely well made. Weighty, solid, premium. In fact, I just bought three more to replace my most used & abused Lightning cables on my night stand and in my car.
Today on Amazon, you can buy three for $22, which averages out to about the regular price you’d expect to pay for a standard third party Lightning cable. With a near-perfect 4.8 star review average, I’d say they’re worth every penny.
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A story about Meryl Streep’s response to questions at the Berlin International Film Festival went very viral, because it seemed like she was saying the Oscars don’t have a diversity problem, since white people are essentially African. Turns out, that’s not exactly what happened.
The story was initially filed by the AP on February 11. Then on February 20, a correction was issued by Mashable, apropos of nothing. They wrote above their original article:
CORRECTION: Meryl Streep’s “We’re all Africans, really” comment was a direct response to a question about Arab and African films, not a response to questions about the Berlinale Film Festival’s all white jury, as the article and headline originally suggested. A recording of the panel shows that Streep’s original comments were misrepresented in subsequent reports.
At the panel, a reporter from Egypt spoke about how the festival had a film “representing Tunisia, the Arab world and Africa in the main competition” and followed that up with a question for Streep: “How do you see this part of the world? And is it easy for you to understand that culture? And are you following any of the Arab movies?”
This was Streep’s response.
“Yes, in fact I’ve just seen a film called Theeb, which I loved. I saw Timbuktu recently … I don’t know very much about, honestly, about the Middle East, and yet I’ve played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures. The thing that I notice is that we’re all, there is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture. And, after all, we’re all from Africa originally. We’re all Berliners, we’re all Africans, really.”
That contextualizes her comments somewhat, I guess? They were as baffling as they were outrageous, and now they’re just kinda classic out-of-touch-actor eye roll inducing. Upgrade!
Here is what Melania Trump, a woman of few words, had to say in South Carolina on Saturday, as her husband took one more improbable step towards securing the Republican nomination for president: “Congratulations to my husband, he was working very hard.”
She spoke these words—the first she has uttered (in public) for the first time in months, according to the New York Daily News—at her husband’s request. “Say something,” he told her.
“Just wanted to say, an amazing place, South Carolina,” she complied. “He loves you, we love you.” She added: “To be going ahead to Nevada, we will see what happens. He will be the best President.”
Trump thanked his family before noting his daughter Ivanka’s pregnancy. “I have a great family, I just really want to thank all of you,” he said. “And Ivanka, we have a hospital ready just in case and South Carolina, we’re going to have a baby and there’s nothing wrong with that. It could be any second. It could even be before I’m finished.”
We’re going to have a baby and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Last year, Right to Rise USA, the super PAC supporting Bush’s erstwhile candidacy, raised $118 million. According to Saturday’s monthly FEC filing, however, it only took in $379,000 in January. Most of that, the Associated Press reports, was from Richard DeVos, owner of the Orlando Magic, who gave $250,000 on January 19. (He gave the same amount, on the same day, to a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio.)
Bush’s official campaign, meanwhile, didn’t do much better, raising just $1.6 million last month. It had less than $3 million cash on hand at the beginning of February. Meanwhile, Right to Rise (which, incidentally, is run by Charles Spies: the guy who ran Mitt Romney’s super PAC), still had quite a bit of money in its coffers at the end of last month—$24.4 million, actually.
What happens to the official campaign contributions is strictly regulated—candidates can’t put that money towards personal expenses. What happens to a defunct candidate’s super PAC funding is less clear, however, as this is only the second election in which such groups have figured. From CBS News, after Rick Perry and Scott Walker dropped out of the Republican race last fall:
“There are no constraints beyond the ban on giving to candidates and political parties,” said Paul Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center. “A single individual could set up a super PAC and use every penny she raises to pay herself a salary.”
That means the leaders of the organization could legally cash out, buy a yacht, name it The SS Thank You FEC and sail off into the political sunset. Really. The only federal entity that might possibly come after them, Ryan says, is the IRS.
So why aren’t multiple FEC-themed yachts aren’t sailing around the Caribbean? It has very little do to do with regulation and a lot to do with reputation.
“You have serious political professionals who are closely associated with serious candidate’s campaigns, and they have a real profession incentive to not abuse the good will of their donors,” Ryan said.
Come to think of it, $24.4 million—or even a fraction of that, really—would buy an awful lot of MacBook Pros.
There were many bad omens foretelling the demise of Jeb Bush’s laughably ineffectual run for the White House. There was his confusion about his position on the invasion of Iraq, his awkward performances in the debates. “Please clap.” That desperate gun tweet. On top of all those real life failings, he also got thrashed in a video game simulation of the campaign.
The game in question isThe Political Machine 2016, the fourth in a series of simulation computer games that debuted during the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry campaign. Among people who played out the 2016 presidential campaign, Jeb Bush was the winning candidate only 0.8% of the time. That’s a little better than Ben Carson (0.6%), so there’s that. But players won the virtual White House more frequently with Ted Cruz (1.9%), Marco Rubio (2%) and Hillary Clinton (5%). They won significantly more with Bernie Sanders (13.2%) and Donald Trump (13.8%).
Bush was either an ineffective character or an unpopular choice that players didn’t even bother to commandeer through the simulation. It was probably a bit of both. The former Florida governor might be pleased to know that the most successful candidate for people playing this game has been “Custom Candidate” (43.9%). But among the pre-set candidates programmed by the game’s developers at Michigan-based independent studio Stardock, Bush was less successful than virtual versions of Chris Christie, Al Gore and even Michelle Obama.
In one session of the game, we miraculously won California for Bush, with help from running mate Rubio. A Clinton-Sanders ticket cleaned up in the northeast.
The Political Machine isn’t a crystal ball. It’s not science, either, so don’t go expecting Trump to narrowly edge out Sanders in the general election. It’s simply a game and, as an added benefit, an amusing exercise in quantifying the candidates and clowns running for President. It turns candidates into strategy game characters by putting numbers on a variety of otherwise unmeasurable qualities such as credibility, experience and media bias. You pick the candidate, check their stats and see how far you can take them.
Here are Bush’s stats in the game, each crunched on a scale of one to 10:
Some of those categories are self-explanatory, others pretty video gamey. Stamina, for example, affects how many actions a candidate can take per turn in the game. In each turn, Bush or whoever else is on the ticket uses their Stamina points to fly from state to state, give speeches, run ads and so on.
Appearance is a measure of how effective the candidate is during interviews with the game’s version of 60 Minutes and The O’Reilly Factor. A high Intelligence stat gives the candidate more possible answers in those interviews.
Credibility measures the effectiveness of the candidate’s negative ads and his or her ability to withstand any negative ads targeting them. Experience makes it easier to pick up endorsements.
Jeb Bush’s 6 for Money and 7 for Fund Raising Ability seem a little low and too similar to the other candidates’. He raised an absurd $155.6 million as of January 31st, second out of all candidates to Hillary Clinton, according to a New York Times round-up. But that 5 for Charisma, the game’s measure of effectiveness in speeches and ads, feels more on target.
A high Media Bias stat is supposed to indicate that the media likes you and that the resulting coverage can sway independent voters. For this stat, The Political Machine’s designers have had to game their own game and give Donald Trump a higher media bias stat to account for how the press’ disdain actually seems to help him. Bush’s 7 in the Media Bias category feels right in that the press pegged him as a presumed front-runner early on, even though he wasn’t. All that bias just didn’t really amount to much.
Stardock calculates the politicians’ stats by researching news coverage and candidate bios. The numbers are also a product of “contentious” debate among the Political Machine’s development team, according to Stardock founder, Brad Wardell. “Most of the [game’s] stats are largely uncontroversial,” he said. “Where it gets harder are things like Credibility, Charisma, Intelligence. We need those stats in the game in the same way we [a role-playing game] needs similar stats. But they’re obviously subjective.
“For example, we gave Jeb Bush a 4 on Intelligence, which affects what interview answers he has available, but a 7 on Religious, which makes him perform better in States with a large religious population. By contrast, we have Hillary Clinton a 7 on Intelligence but only a 3 on Religious. Does this mean we think Secretary Clinton is smarter than Governor Bush? Not necessarily. A lot of it comes down to trying to make the overall simulation more accurate.”
Nevertheless, the game puts Bush’s Intelligence a point below Trump’s, which is a point below Cruz’s.
Here are the stats for the candidates still active in the race, ready for you to debate them. Note that the developers say that stats need to be balanced out, so a high number in one category usually mean a low number elsewhere:
Ben Carson
Carson’s stats are middle-of-the road, but with high religious and intelligence.
The septuagenarian senator from Vermont has great charisma and credibility, but is near the bottom in appearance (that’s effectiveness during interviews) and ability to appeal to religious voters.
Not surprisingly, Trump does great in the money categories, not so great in the categories relating to people who know not to say “Two Corinthians” or are not white.
Rubio’s numbers seem underachieving, which is fitting, but he’s got a solid combo of religious appeal, minority appeal and media appeal, which squares with reality.
The Texas senator’s religious stat is appropriately high, but his fundraising ability looks a bit low. It certainly tracks that the media doesn’t like him.
These numbers are derived by people, and people aren’t perfect. The Political Machine’s creators say that, if anything, the game’s creators tip the scales away from candidates they personally like.
“We find that designers tend to bias against the party they support,” Stardock vice president Derek Paxton, who said that the series has been worked on by Democrats, Republicans and Independents. “We don’t know if they are overcorrecting for their personal bias or if they tend to place reasonable numbers for the candidates they are more familiar with and tend to be more extreme with the ones they aren’t familiar with. But, by having multiple different political ideologies in the process, we tend to come to a reasonable balance.”
That seems right. The game doesn’t appear to be weighted toward any chosen candidate. Stardock CEO Wardell, for example, had recently Tweeted about how he had favored Carly Fiorina for President, but the now-former candidate’s stats in the game are largely unremarkable: Money 7, Charisma 5, Intelligence 6, Appearance 5, Experience 6 and so on.
In recent weeks, players have been using The Political Machine’s candidates to run simulations of the election, which is where Bush’s paltry 0.8% success rate comes from. Trump gets the most wins of the named candidates, slightly more than Sanders, but Democrats score more victories in the general election, winning 55.5% of the time. Top issues, as tabulated on the game’s after-action stats site, are Fighting ISIS, Resettlement of Refugees and Securing The Borders.
With all these numbers at hand, Stardock boss Wardell noticed something telling in the player stats that the game collects and publicly displays: “based on the ladder rankings, players seem to think maximizing their Fund Raising Ability is the key to victory,” he said in an e-mail. “I wonder what that says about our election system. :)“
Whatever it says, in the real world, raising $155.6 million in the campaign didn’t do much for Jeb Bush. His other stats were just a bit too lacking.
Less than a week after practicing physician “Dr. Love” was exposed as a mere teen, the good (fake) doctor’s prank throne is under attack. His competition: Eighteen-year-old Izaha Akins, who is now facing felony charges after Ohio school officials realized the state senator who had given a lecture to a high school class was actually just a teen. A normal, non-senator, prank-lovin’ badass teen.
Akins’s ruse, while elaborate, wasn’t sophisticated. After learning about Ohio Senator Dave Burke’s upcoming visit to the school’s American government class, Akins called the class’s teacher to explain that Burke had been forced to resign due to an illness. Akins, naturally, had been chosen as Burke’s replacement, “making him the youngest state senator ever.”
Should Akins have done this? No, probably not. But should an American government teacher have known that this teen probably wasn’t an actual state senator? Why, yes—yes he should have.
When the teacher, Henry Stobbs, asked why he hadn’t heard about Akins’ appointment, the teen replied that he was the second choice and that the first choice had declined the offer. He also said that Burke had yet to publicly announce his resignation but would do so in the coming weeks.
Akins’ request to move his visit from January to December was approved and the teen and people posing as his aides secured a car and driver from a local car dealership, according to reports. When he arrived at the school for his visit, he used his own ID card to sign in. He received a tour and went on to give a lecture to the students, authorities said.
Everything seemingly in perfect order, the young Senator’s visit went off without a hitch. As the school’s superintendent, Ken Ratliff, told The Toledo Blade, “The presentation was about being active in politics, political processes. Everyone thought it was legit, bought into it, including the teacher.” Until several weeks later, that is.
When Burke showed up on January 14—a month after Akins’s staged event—school officials realized that perhaps the 18-year-old child roaming their halls had not been a state senator after all. According to a statement from the (actual) Senator’s office: “This was an extremely elaborate scheme and not a [sic] simple as walking through the door. When I learned about this, the school and I immediately began working with law enforcement.”
Akins has since been arrested and is facing one count of impersonating a peace officer and one count of telecommunications fraud. Both are felonies.
Now, there are two major injustices at play here.
The first: Any teacher who would believe this kid without faltering probably isn’t the best person to be teaching our nation’s youth about government. If anything, teen senator did a public service by exposing yet another crack in the foundation of our education system.
The second: Anyone who manages to pull off a cool prank of this magnitude deserves a reward, not jail time.
In an ideal version of our deeply shitty country, every mass shooting would be a referendum on guns. If that were the case, the murder spree conducted this past weekend by a man in Kalamazoo, Mich. would perhaps be the ultimate litmus test for what this country can stomach when it comes to guns.
Others might point elsewhere. A popular gun control tweet I see frequently is this one, from British political commentator Dan Hodges:
There is an undeniable element of truth to it. If the ritual slaughter of kindergartners won’t permanently shift this country’s attitude towards guns, then what could? But Sandy Hook was just a particularly horrifying spin on one of the most common sub-genres of American mass murder: the school shooting. The ages of the Sandy Hook victims made it an impossibly sad story, but the victims at Columbine were children, too, and the dozens killed at Virginia Tech weren’t much older. The truth is that America accepted the possibility of so many bright futures coming to their permanent ends in the classroom when Adam Lanza himself was still in elementary school.
Most high-profile mass shootings in America have a depressingly familiar narrative. They happen in schools or malls or offices or movie theaters, and are conducted by people who seem mentally disturbed. But Jason Dalton, who drove around Kalamazoo on Saturday night murdering folks at random, breaks the mold.
Dalton had a wife and two children. He had no criminal record. There was nothing, in any state, that would have prevented him from having a gun. A neighbor of Dalton’s told the New York Timesthat he had “periodically shot his gun out the back door,” which the Times describes as “troubling,” but apparently not enough for anyone to have called the police, who probably wouldn’t have done anything anyway. Whoever manufactured Dalton’s gun needn’t care either because they have no legal liability for mass shootings.
His victims were not gathered in a single place where maybe, in the backs of their minds, they should have been scouting escape routes in the event that some crazy guy with a big rifle stormed through the door. They did not know Dalton from the office kitchen or from the school cafeteria. They were just in parking lots, basically, at an apartment building and a car dealership and a Cracker Barrel. There was nothing, even in the context of our horribly fucked-up country, that could have signaled to his victims that they were sitting or standing in the spots where they would soon die.
A man who would never be stopped from legally purchasing a gun taking his Saturday to irregularly murder people he doesn’t know is America’s most uniquely unstoppable and unpreventable crime. It is baked into our society, and ours alone.
In a press conference after the shooting, Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Getting was frank in expressing his despair over the shootings: “How do you go and tell the families of these victims that they weren’t targeted for any reason other than they were there to be a target?”
The answer to that question says everything about America’s relationship with guns.
Kristin Cavallari announced last week that she will embark on a cross-country book tour next month to promote her debut true crime thriller Balancing in Heels. If you were planning to catch Kristin when she hits Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Illinois, beware: The event has strict rules.
To be admitted to the book signing, attendees must purchase tickets in advance. A $26 ticket ($27.90 w/ service fee) includes a copy of the book and NO GUARANTEES. From the ticketing website:
This is a book signing event only. Each fan in line must purchase a ticket (which includes a copy of the book) in order to attend. Books purchased at other vendors are not permitted in the signing line.
Leave your backup copies of Balancing in Heels by Kristin Cavallari at home, please.
There will be no personalization of names, just her signature. She will NOT be able to sign any memorabilia or fan art.
Kristin is extremely busy and has no time for Kristin Cavallari fan art, of which there is surely a lot.
The seat number is actually your assigned place in the signing line. There are no actual seats for this event.
Hope you can walk, bitch.
You will receive your book when you arrive at the event. They will NOT be available for pick up before that time.
Don’t even ask!
PLEASE NOTE that this event follows the author’s and publisher’s wishes and may mean limits on photos and the number of signed or personalized books. Anderson’s Bookshop is not responsible for changes made by the author to the guidelines prior to or during the event. Your understanding is appreciated.
Thank you.
Napervillians, Kristin looks forward to seeing you on March 19!
Ted Cruz today fired his director of communications, Rick Tyler, over a video released over the weekend that appeared to depict Marco Rubio insulting the bible.
Tyler was responsible for distributing the video, which showed Rubio walking past Cruz’s father and a Cruz aide, who was reading the bible, in a South Carolina hotel lobby.
“Got a good book there, not many answers in it,” Rubio said to the aide, according to the video’s subtitles.
In fact, Rubio actually said, “Got a good book there, all the answers are in there.”
The incident doesn’t look good for Cruz, who has already been accused of lying about fellow candidates, including Rubio and Ben Carson.
“It’s every single day, something comes out of the Cruz campaign that’s deceptive and untrue, and in this case goes after my faith. So I understand, I guess one of their spokespersons apologized and I’ll accept his apology, but this is a pattern now and I think we’re now at a point where we start asking about accountability,” Rubio said after Tyler apologized for failing to fact check the video before distributing it.
According to the Daily Beast, Tyler was preparing to go on MSNBC and “abruptly left’ when the news broke.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, seems delighted by the news.
It’s been a difficult week for the students of Georgetown Law.
First, there was the loss of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Depending on your view, he was a legal mind without parallel or a boil on the face of everything that is decent about America. Anyway, he’s gone now.
Then, there were the official emails about Scalia sent to students by the administration of the law school and the university at large, both of which took some version of the former view. “Scalia was a giant in the history of the law, a brilliant jurist whose opinions and scholarship profoundly transformed the law,” the law school dean was quoted as saying in one of them. Strictly speaking, all of that is probably true. The dean might be found guilty of misleading by omission—did Scalia transform the law in good ways or bad, would you say?—but he’s the head of a prestigious institution, you can’t exactly expect him to piss on the dead justice’s grave.
I was put-off by the invocation of the “Georgetown Community” in the press release that Dean Treanor issued Saturday. I imagine many other faculty, students and staff, particularly people of color, women and sexual minorities, cringed at headline and at the unmitigated praise with which the press release described a jurist that many of us believe was a defender of privilege, oppression and bigotry, one whose intellectual positions were not brilliant but simplistic and formalistic.
At this point, the matter could have been settled. The cautious institution issues its expectedly mealy-mouthed statement; the idealistic professor voices his objection. Georgetown Law students have only three items to contend with in the inboxes.
Although this email was upsetting to us, we could only imagine what it was like for these students. Some of them are twenty-two year-old 1Ls, less than six months into their legal education. But we did not have to wait long to find out. Leaders of the Federalist Society chapter and of the student Republicans reached out to us to tell us how traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry, were their fellow students. Of particular concern to them were the students who are in Professor Peller’s class who must now attend class knowing of his contempt for Justice Scalia and his admirers, including them. How are they now to participate freely in class? What reasoning would be deemed acceptable on their exams?
Finally, a heroic faculty member put the matter to bed. According to ATL’s source, “a professor who is not Barnett or Rosenkranz, but who is respected among all the faculty and staff and definitely says what we’re all thinking” contributed the following to the email chain.
From: [Redacted]
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2016 4:38 PM
To: Gary Peller; All Faculty and Staff Subject:
Re: Mitigating Defamatory Assertions
Please, please, PLEASE stop. At the very least, please omit me from further communications.
Best,
[Redacted]
If nothing else, the professors put on a great display of how not to act if you’d like to avoid looking like a pompous ass in a workplace dispute. The students will be entering the professional world themselves soon enough. I hope they learned something.
GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA—On Saturday, the day of South Carolina’s Republican primary election, Ted Cruz’s Greenville campaign office was buzzing with volunteers—and at least one man who said he was with Keep the Promise, the super PAC that operates as Cruz’s hugely well-funded shadow campaign apparatus.
The man, a familiar face to many in the room, was waiting to meet with someone from the campaign. That little show of casual coordination between campaign and outside group typifies the Cruz strategy, and it was supposed to be his secret South Carolina weapon. Cruz, and the groups campaigning for him, spent more money and manpower than any other candidate in a state tailor-made for his evangelical conservative message, only to come in third place. Somehow, it wasn’t enough.
South Carolina, population 4.8 million, is a state of churches. Big, sprawling ones with even bigger parking lots, small shacks a few feet off the road with peeling white paint, and every conceivable Christian house of worship in between. The state’s top-selling speciality license plate, adorning more than 850,000 vehicles, reads “In God We Trust.” Sixty-five percent of the state identifies as a born-again, evangelical Christian.
The Upstate, home to Greenville and Spartanburg, makes up the bulk of the state’s religious stronghold. It lays at the top of the spine of South Carolina: Interstate 26. The largely four-lane highway, dotted with water towers, industrial buildings, and the occasional discount hotel, runs east through Columbia and down to Charleston, home of the Low Country, whose conservatives tend to lean “fiscally conservative but socially different.” In the midlands lay the moderates.
And first-time voters can come from anywhere, because state laws permit Democrats and Republicans alike to vote in whichever primary they choose.
On paper, Cruz and South Carolina—especially the Upstate—go together like sacramental wine and wafers. His father, Rafael Cruz, is a pastor. He launched his campaign at the evangelical Liberty University. He garnered endorsements from more than 500 ministers in the state. Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson stumped for him, bible in hand. Rick Joyner, of the far-right MorningStar church, preached for him. Last Tuesday, Glenn Beck—who was out on the road campaigning for Cruz—called into his own daily radio program to suggest to his seven million listeners that God killed Antonin Scalia to show the American people how important it is to elect Ted Cruz.
Cruz resonates with people looking for a godly president.
“It’s the fact that he is a constitutionalist, the fact that he relies on his faith, and that he is staunch in what he believes in,” explained volunteer Mardi Padgett.
“He’s the best Christian conservative candidate,” another Cruz volunteer explained Saturday while cold-calling undecided voters. I asked her what she’d say to voters who declined to support Cruz.
“Just tell ‘em you’re praying for ‘em,” she said.
But conservatives in the state also dislike Washington. Ted Cruz may have earned the undying enmity of everyone in the United States Senate, but he’s still a senator. Unfortunately for Cruz, he was running against just about the only person that could conceivably make him look like a Washington insider. Everyone looks like a member of the establishment next to Donald Trump.
“He’s honest. Just think about it this way. He doesn’t have to have our money. He doesn’t have to have a bunch of company’s funds or finances, he doesn’t need it,” one Trump supporter explained. “I’m not going to say incorruptible, I’m going to say he’s not on the level that the rest of them are. He’s on a much different level, simply because he doesn’t have to be pandering or begging or beholden to anyone except his beliefs.”
When I got to Cruz headquarters on Saturday, the massive door-to-door effort was mostly over, and the campaign was trying to call as many households as possible before the polls closed.
The headquarters were located in a one-story dingy office suite, just off Interstate 385, across the street from a funeral home. Its drab rooms were filled plastic tables draped with red plastic tablecloths and dozens of foldout metal chairs. For decoration, a large picture of a gun was overlaid with the text, “We Don’t Call 911.” A snack table was sparsely spread with homemade donations, off-brand crackers, and a large bag of Xochitl tortilla chips. Texas organizer and long-time Cruz grassroots director Kaye Goolsby patrolled the room.
There were only two single-stall bathrooms—one for men and one for women—to serve the dozens of volunteers who were making the last-ditch, get-out-the-vote phone calls. The set-up led to long lines and jokes invoking the word “trans” when someone came out of a stall designated for the opposite gender.
The mood was jovial, and volunteers sounded optimistic Cruz would carry South Carolina, or at least nab second place. Midway through the day, the website Legal Insurrection published a report that Donald Trump had been in Chicago on 9/11, welcome news to the volunteers. The post was later updated to reflect it was likely a mistake.
By 1 p.m. Saturday, the campaign had made a collective 15,000 phone calls, with a goal of 33,000 by the end of the day. The day before, it made 40,000. They intended to call until the polls closed.
Most volunteers said they were receiving largely positive responses. Still, even to some callers, it was clear Cruz wasn’t doing as well as they’d hoped.
“I made a lot of calls and most of the people we called, they would say, it’s between the three,” Rebecca Farmer said.
(Here I should admit that, in order to see Cruz’s field operation with my own eyes, I made about 100 calls for Cruz, ultimately getting through to 13 or 14 people. I don’t think my contribution swayed the election. Of the 13 or 14 people I reached, almost everyone either had already voted or hung up on me. My call volume qualified me for a free bumper sticker, which went unredeemed.)
Many of the volunteers were staying at Camp Cruz, a block of rooms in the Simpsonville Value Place extended stay motel—a large white building with black plastic shutters directly overlooking Interstate 385. Some had been staying there since November, praying together in the mornings before cold calling and knocking on doors trying to convince people to vote for Cruz. There were so many volunteers, a second Camp Cruz had to be erected at a nearby Quality Inn.
Trump’s campaign stood in stark contrast. Located less than four miles away on Main Street in chic, quaint downtown Greenville, his offices were set up in a modern building with glass walls and new carpeting inside. The Trump campaign occupied the lobby and a back office of the two-story building, which is also home to a bank and an investment management firm. At the front desk were free buttons, yard signs and bumper stickers and a large cardboard cutout of Trump. In the brightly-lit, modern back office, the dozen-or-so people scattered around the room were clean-cut. All the women had perfect blowouts. The snacks were name-brand.
But by 2:30 p.m. the office had been mostly packed up into boxes. The campaign was taking the rest of the afternoon off to prepare for Trump’s victory party in Spartanburg, some 30 miles away.
The week before the primary, it was clear Trump was leading in the polls. And despite his laissez-faire Greenville office, his campaign did, according to the Daily Beast, send RVs of volunteers across the Upstate knocking on doors. Still, it was nothing compared to the massive Cruz campaign, which was bolstered by his Super PAC collective, Keep the Promise.
Matt Moore, the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, told the website that Keep the Promise was the only Super PAC he knew of running a ground game in South Carolina.
“I’ll be very shocked, honestly, if Ted Cruz doesn’t win the primary,” an operative for a rival campaign told the Daily Beast the week before, citing Keep the Promise’s operations in the Upstate.
The Keep the Promise umbrella of Super PACs has so far raised tens of millions of dollars just to keep Cruz in the top three. According to Bloomberg, the group, made up of four PACs, includes Keep the Promise 1, bankrolled by an $11 million donation from billionaire Robert Mercer; Keep the Promise II, bankrolled by a $10 million donation from Texas investor Toby Neugebauer; and Keep the Promise III, bankrolled by a $15 million donation from a Texas fracking family. Collectively, Keep the Promise raised $38.5 million in the first half of the year.
Though campaign finance laws require PACs operate separately from campaigns, Keep the Promise effectively helmed Cruz’s South Carolina campaign, spending $1 million on radio ads last fall alone. Strategist Kellyanne Conway told the Washington Post that by last week, the group had spent $2.5 million on South Carolina ad time.
In November, Bloomberg reported, the umbrella hired 14 full-time field directors and county organizers to helm the South Carolina operation. According to the Wall Street Journal, a canvassers training program began Nov. 28 and door-to-door campaigning began Dec. 7. In Nevada, which holds its Republican primary on Tuesday, they’ve been running a field and mail operation and last week launched a $573,000 television campaign.
According to the Daily Beast, Keep the Promise has operated more like a shadow campaign than a traditional Super PAC by taking on “typical campaign operations” like gathering voter data, targeting voters, and canvassing across the state. The PAC alone reportedly hired as many as 150 people, who knocked on as many as 100,000 doors leading up to Election Day. And that’s in addition to the campaign volunteers.
Keep the Promise staff explained that the group has been door-knocking across the state, in a few targeted regions and counties, since last November. In early January, those door-knockers started focusing on persuasion: identifying likely Republican primary voters who favor an Evangelical Christian candidate, knocking on their doors, and having conversations aimed at persuading them to back Cruz.
Dan Tripp, who headed South Carolina for Scott Walker’s presidential campaign, is currently in charge of the Keep the Promise operation.
“It’s hard, dirty work,” Tripp told the Daily Beast. “If we’re asking somebody to go out and knock on doors for eight hours, that’s a lot of gas, that’s a lot of time and it’s hard work. So we’ve built a budget around paying our canvassers.”
South Carolina, Tripp suggested, was “where we have a chance to go mano a mano with Trump and, you know, like we did in Iowa, show that a real ground game can make the difference.”
You know what happened instead. Not only did Trump pull off his expected victory, but, somehow, Cruz came in third—by a mere thousand votes!—to Marco Rubio, who, in the home stretch of the campaign, had picked up endorsements from Governor Nikki Haley and a few other members of the South Carolina Republican establishment.
Despite his disappointing finish, Cruz still delivered what sounded like a victory speech Saturday night.
“Friends, we have once again made history. You—the good people of South Carolina, and our incredible volunteers all across the country—continue to defy the pundits and produce extraordinary results,” he declared. “In Iowa, they said it could not be done. And we won. In New Hampshire, they said a conservative candidate could not compete. And we defied expectations. And tonight—despite millions of dollars in false attack ads, despite the unified opposition of all the political establishment—South Carolina has given us another remarkable result.”
As Cruz spoke, Greg Halvorson, a Camp Cruz volunteer, shook his head and typed on his laptop. Afterward, I asked him how he felt. “I thought this was a winnable state,” he said. “I live in Nashville, it was a five-hour drive. And I was like, ‘Well they’re putting us up, man. I’ll go full-time, I think he can win this.’ It’s depressing, but it’s true.”
What had he been typing? A status update at his Facebook page, where he posts as “The Conservative Hammer.”
“Hammers,” he wrote to his subscribers, “because I believed he could win, I came to South Carolina to call, canvas, and campaign for Ted Cruz… I worked diligently to reach and inform voters, believing that a collective effort by a passionate, coordinated crew would mean victory — I was WRONG… Ted got THIRD… Every hour was a waste — I FAILED… He FAILED… South Carolina FAILED… And all of it - every MINUTE I’ve spent ferociously defending Freedom - has been a pathetic WASTE OF TIME.”
This piece originally mistakenly referred to the super PAC supporting Ted Cruz as Right to Rise, instead of Keep the Promise. Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.
A recently released study by NYU confirms something that should have been obvious to anyone whose brain hasn’t yet jumped ship waving a white flag: You shouldn’t trust that whatever white, powdery substance you think you’re putting in your body to actually be that substance. A recently released NYU study determined that 40 percent of people who thought they were popping molly—the supposed pure form of ecstasy’s main ingredient, MDMA—actually had unwittingly ingested synthetic cathinones, the active ingredients in bath salts, “and/or” other psychoactive substances new on the market, “intended to mimic the effects of traditional illegal drugs.”
Researchers took a hair sample from respondents of a survey they conducted outside of nightclubs and music festivals last year. Participants were asked if they used ecstasy/MDMA/molly, and whether they had ever “knowingly used any of 35 listed ‘bath salts’ or other novel drugs.” From NYU’s report on the study:
The researchers focused on the hair samples provided by 48 participants who reported ecstasy use. While half of the samples tested positive for MDMA, half tested positive for “bath salts” and/or other novel psychoactive substances. The most commonly detected “bath salts” were butylone and methylone—common adulterants in ecstasy/Molly.
“Among those who reported no use of “bath salts” or unknown powders or pills, four out of ten tested positive for “bath salts” and/or other novel drugs,” said [Dr. Joseph J. Palamar]. “One sample also tested positive for alpha-PVP—the strong stimulant known as ‘Flakka’ that has made headlines in the last year. A lot of people laughed when they gave us their hair saying things like, ‘I don’t use bath salts; I’m not a zombie who eats people’s faces.’ Yet our findings suggest many of these people have been using ‘bath salts’ without realizing it.”
For years, there have been reports of mollymade dirtyby the presence of bath salts (or bath salts being sold as molly), and here’s some science to back it up. Something else to back it up is common fucking sense. As trustworthy as you may think your dealer is, he or she could fail you. You could cautiously hang back, observing as your more drug-adventurous friends to take whatever powder you’ve all decided to share and then determining from their responses if it is actually what it’s supposed to be. (In that case, of course, you’re then trusting the word of people who are on drugs.) Or you could get a pricey testkit, which is exactly what Dr. Palmar suggests:
As Molly is becoming a much riskier substance, I really hope that those who decide to use educate themselves about what they’re doing. While it is safest to avoid use, test kits are available online for those who decide to use, and want to ensure that they’re taking real MDMA and not a new synthetic stimulant such as Flakka.
Of course, you could also keep risking it, reasoning that bath salts don’t quite turn a person into the face-eating zombie that the government would you believe they do. And if the government would regulate the drugs that people are only going to do anyway, we could stop worrying about dirty molly, and get back to focusing on the music and waiting for the drop.
Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri revealed on Tumblr this afternoon that she was recently diagnosed with breast cancer after getting a routine mammogram. “It’s a little scary, but my prognosis is good and I expect a full recovery,” she said.
McCaskill, 62, declined to provide any more information about her diagnosis. She is taking a three-week leave of absence to obtain treatment and will post on her website about any votes she misses.
Regardless of who ends up technically winning come November, the 2016 election cycle already crowned its champion months ago: Congratulations to absurdist video mastermind Vic Berger. We are so very sorry for your loss.
Today on Twitter, CSPAN surfaced a video from 1992 in which Joe Biden argues on the Senate floor that President George H.W. Bush not offer a Supreme Court nominee in the event that a justice retired before that year’s presidential election.
This, of course, is quite an inconvenient bit of video now that Biden, as vice president, will be enlisted to support Barack Obama’s impending nomination to replace the recently deceased Antonin Scalia.
Biden can at least commiserate with Mitch McConnell, who as Senate majority leader will be tasked with spearheading the GOP’s impending blockade of Obama’s eventual appointee. As John Oliver pointed out a few weeks ago, McConnell, in the final year of the other Bush presidency, chastised his Democratic colleagues for citing an unwritten rule in hopes of running out the clock on some of W’s lower court nominations (McConnell’s specific statement comes 3:18 into the below video).
The situations aren’t 1:1 facsimiles: Biden was speaking in June of 1992, whereas McConnell will now be arguing against a nominee put forth by Obama in February or March of this year. Nonetheless, the same dynamic is at play: Biden and McConnell, career politicians, are (or, in the case of Biden, will be) reversing old arguments now that they find themselves forced to hold the opposite position they once did.
There are plenty of things you could take away from all of this, but the most important one is that the best part about being a politician—or a senator, at least—is nothing you say really ever matters.
