In what seems to be a bit of politically pointed commentary on the sad state of American politics, thirteen bald eagles unexpectedly fell from the sky to their deaths on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Frankly, the whole thing feels a little stale to me—I liked it better when Robert Rauschenberg did it 60 years ago and it was called Canyon.
You don’t need a yard, or even any gardening skills to grow your own food at home; you just need Miracle-Gro’s Aerogarden line. These fully-integrated, soil-free indoor gardens can grow herbs, vegetables, and salad greens up to five times faster than regular soil, and nearly the entire lineup is on sale right now.
Prices start at just $45 for the Sprout model, which can grow three pods at a time, and range up to $198 for the Bounty, which fits nine. All of these prices are either all-time lows, or the best we’ve seen outside of special one-day promotions, so don’t hesitate. If you need help deciding, each Amazon page has a comparison chart with all of the main features.
Far Cry Primal comes out tomorrow, which is a great opportunity to remind you that Amazon Prime members can save 20% on all video game preorders and new releases. To help you find eligible titles, we’ve even put together a handy calendar.
It’s no secret that the Xbox One Kinect never really got off the ground, but it’s still great for invoking the system’s game DVR, or pausing a Netflix stream if you can’t find the remote. At $61, it’s definitely a justifiable purchase. [Xbox One Kinect, $61]
Want Bluetooth audio and handsfree calling in your older car? This little dongle takes the Bluetooth signal from your phone, and retransmits over a 3.5mm AUX connection, or to the FM radio station of your choice. If you go the FM route, the sound quality will take a hit, but it’ll be a truly wireless experience, and probably your best option short of buying an entirely new stereo. We’ve seen deals on similar products before, but rarely for this cheap. [Senbowe SW-BFT-01 Wireless In-Car FM Transmitter with Bluetooth, $11 with code BI25OHDH]
This 55” Vizio M-series 4K TV is one of the single most popular TVs we’ve ever posted, and Dell is offering a screaming deal on it today. You’ll spend $800 up front (which is just $20 more than its all-time low), but you’ll get a bonus $250 Dell promo gift card tossed in for good measure. That’s good for anything Dell sells online, including video games, speaker systems, and of course, computer gear. [Vizio M-Series 55” 4K, $800 + $250 Dell promo gift card]
Note: Make sure you see the gift card in your cart before checkout; these deals can end without warning. The gift card balance is valid for 90 days after purchase.
Not only do you save $20 with this PS4 Uncharted Bundle deal, you get a second DualShock 4 controller as well. Normally, this setup would cost you about $400, making this one of the better PS4 deals we’ve ever seen. [PS4 Uncharted Bundle + Extra Controller, $330]
Update: Some people are having trouble with this promo code (though it was still working for me). If it doesn’t work, here’s another pair for $8. [Heat Resistant Silicone Gloves BBQ Grilling Gloves, $8 with code 2UZEM8AF]
With a good set of silicone cooking gloves, you’ll have full finger control when you handle hot pans in the kitchen. Hell, you could use them to just pick up a piece of meat directly off the grill, like some sort of barbecue superhero. [Grill Armor Heat Resistant BBQ Silicone Gloves, $5 with code 35OS7FHB]
You all sure do love Brother laser printers, and this wireless model is marked down to just $80 today. It even includes Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print for seamless operation with your mobile devices. [Brother HL L2360DW Wireless Mono Laser Printer, $80]
This great looking grinder is perfect for spices, herbs, or things that aren’t legal in most states. Add in its clever magnetic lid and 4.4 star review average, and it certainly seems like a steal at $9. [Ohuhu 4 Piece 2.38" Tobacco Spice Grinder, Black, $9 with code EAUYGG7W]
The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ hit the New York Times bestseller list the week of the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Consummate political insider Roger Stone makes a compelling case that Lyndon Baines Johnson had the motive, means, and opportunity to orchestrate the murder of JFK. Stone maps out the case that LBJ blackmailed his way on the ticket in 1960 and was being dumped in 1964 to face prosecution for corruption at the hands of his nemesis attorney Robert Kennedy. Stone uses fingerprint evidence and testimony to prove JFK was shot by a long-time LBJ hit man—not Lee Harvey Oswald.
If your movie theater of choice is operated by AMC, this discounted gift card essentially amounts to ten free dollars. That’s like a free large popcorn (hopefully)! [$50 AMC Theaters Gift Card, $40]
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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Each and every hedge fund investor in the world believes that he is paying all that money to a hedge fund manager because he has one of the really good hedge funds. The reality is, most hedge fund investors are suckers.
Hedge fund investors believe in the “magic genius” myth, which is to say that they believe their hedge fund manager’s high fees are justified because he is brilliant enough to beat the market and/ or provide steady returns in times of crisis. The numbers show that for the vast majority, this assumption is completely wrong. Please, urge your Smart Finance Guy friends to read this analysis by Pension Partners of the past decade in hedge fund returns:
Since the start of 2005 (10+ years), the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index and HFRX Equity Hedge Index (two investable indices widely used as benchmarks in the industry) have posted negative returns (-1% and -6.4% respectively). Over that same time period, the Barclays Aggregate Bond Index was up 62.1% and the S&P 500 up 97.6%.
In plain English: for the past decade, hedge funds—which are expensive— have been a much worse investment than either a cheap stock index fund or a cheap bond index fund. Furthermore, the analysis points out that even if you invested in hedge funds only because you wanted something less volatile than stock and not fully correlated with the stock market... you still would have been way better off just buying bonds. “The hedge fund myth is that hedge funds as an asset class have been additive to portfolios over the last 10+ years,” Charlie Bilello writes. “They clearly have not.”
I know your hedge fund manager is a big genius, of course, but everyone else: Read it and weep motherfuckers.
There are very few people who can speak about their personal connections to Donald Trump who aren’t hideous in some way, but that doesn’t mean CNN should keep asking Roger Stone, a bad person, to be a guest.
Media Matters points out that Stone, who looks like he answered a casting call for an educational film about why white people are bad, has appeared on CNN programs seven times in the last month alone, presumably because he might have some insights into what transpires in the fluorescent orange head of Trump:
Stone worked for Trump’s presidential campaign last year and is now organizing against Clinton’s campaign again. He is a frequent presence in the media because of his long ties to Trump; their friendship and professional relationship goes back decades.
Also going back decades? Stone’s history of unrepentant race-baiting and sexism, which continues to this day on Twitter (and most likely off of Twitter as well):
Booking TV guests last-minute can be challenging, and, again, I understand that the bar for appearing on cable news is low. But let me pose the following thought question: What if CNN didn’t give a flagrant bigot a national television platform?
Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com. Public PGP key PGP fingerprint: PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7
According to Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Getting, Dalton waived his right to self-incrimination before confessing to the crimes. He has been charged with murder and attempted murder, and several handguns and long guns have been seized from his home. From the AP:
The attacks began Saturday evening outside the Meadows apartment complex on the eastern edge of Kalamazoo County, where a woman was shot multiple times.
A little more than four hours later and 15 miles away, a father and his 17-year-old son were fatally shot while looking at cars at a car dealership.
Fifteen minutes after that, five people were gunned down in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Four of them died.
Police have not yet provided a motive for the shooting, and Kalamazoo County Sheriff Richard Fuller is pessimistic that any motive that prosecutors do determine will offer any sort of clarity.
“In the end, I ask people, because I keep hearing this question of why, ‘What would be the answer that would be an acceptable answer for you?’ They have to think about it for a moment, and they say, ‘Probably nothing,” Fuller said. “I have to say, ‘You are probably correct.’ I can’t imagine what the answer would be that would let us go, ‘OK, we understand now.’ Because we are not going to understand.”
Dalton was arraigned via video to hear the charges against him on Monday. He has been ordered held without bond and will be represented by a court-appointed attorney.
The CDC is “now certain” that sexual transmission of the Zika virus is possible. Since the outbreak, there have been 500 microcephaly cases in Brazil, with 3,900 more suspected cases being investigated. Hey, seems like a good time for the Brazilian government to increase jail time for women who get abortions!
Under current law, women consenting to an abortion face one to three years in prison. The draft law seeks to punish women with up to 15 years in prison for aborting fetuses with “microcephaly or other abnormalities,” Time reports.
Anderson Ferreira, the author of the bill (a representative of Pernambuco, the epicenter of the Zika virus epidemic) says that “feminists” are pushing to liberalize abortion restrictions by riding the Zika crisis bandwagon:
With the crisis that has hit our country a feminist movement has tried to take advantage to change our abortion laws. This movement needs to be confronted. Everyone needs to realize the gravity of the crime that is abortion and that it is not acceptable.
The draft law further outlines their mission: “We intend to regulate once and for all this urgent matter and reject pro-choice movements.” (Because it’s “absolute evil” and “what the Mafia does,” Cool Pope would add.) And who’s in this feminist mafia, aside from the UN? Time:
The movement Ferreira refers to is the Institute of Bioethics, which is preparing a submission to Brazil’s Supreme Court to allow women to abort fetuses with microcephaly, and ensure women have access to contraceptives and Zika tests...
Given the difficulty of identifying microcephaly before near the end of a pregnancy—tests usually don’t work until the third trimester—the group wants to legalize abortion for all women diagnosed with Zika.
Currently, termination of pregnancy is only legal if the fetus has anencephaly (a severe fetal malformation of the brain and skull, similar to microcephaly), if the woman’s life is in danger or if the pregnancy is the result of rape. For now, a rape victim’s word is sufficient to obtain abortion services, if she can afford to travel to one of Brazil’s 37 clinics. (A different pending bill requires they file a police report and undergo a forensic medical examination first.)
The main reason that the conflict between Kesha and Dr. Luke feels both so unbalanced (the people are seemingly on Kesha’s side, the court on Dr. Luke’s) and obscure (we wonder how anyone is arguing that an artist should work under the name of her alleged abuser, and why this conflict has been worked out in this protracted, ugly way) is that Dr. Luke, real name Lucasz Gottwald, enjoys a shroud of secrecy on his work that Kesha has never and does not. In the 12 years since he co-wrote “Since U Been Gone” with Max Martin, Dr. Luke has become the closest thing radio pop has to a magic bullet; he’s built up a large, unreleased roster of hit-making songwriters and producers on his label Kemosabe Records and publishing imprint Prescription Songs; he has also barely done any press whatsoever, and so functions within the pop industry like a non-fraudulent Wizard of Oz.
To be so, so incredibly successful in pop music and have almost nothing about your private life publicly known—it’s fascinating; a producer like Dr. Luke lives an inversion of the lives of the artists he produces. And so the very few times he’s sat for a journalist—for a 2010 Billboard story by Chris Willman, and for the New Yorker’s John Seabrook in what would become both a magazine story and part of Seabrook’s 2015 The Song Machine—have been extremely fascinating, even before the Kesha allegations.
Dr. Luke is a meticulous, obsessive, punishing technician (as you’d expect, and as he should be), a fact that bears out in both the praise he gets from his collaborators and the allegations put forward about his abusive tendencies, as well as even in the little side details—like the fact that he owns a rave toilet. From the New Yorker:
With “Wrecking Ball,” for example, Gottwald wasn’t sure it was a smash, and he wagered against it, telling Cyrus he would buy her a Numi toilet like his, the ultimate in potty technology (it has a Bluetooth receiver that can stream music from a smartphone), if he was wrong. Cyrus told me, “Contrary to what he thinks, Dr. Luke isn’t always right. I bet him that ‘Wrecking Ball’ would go to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and it did. Now he has to buy me a ten-thousand-dollar toilet. I’ll be thinking of him every time I go.”
That piece was published in October 2013, just a month after Kesha superfan Rebecca Pimmel put a “Free Kesha” petition online, echoing the singer’s statements that she lost creative control of her second album Warrior (statements that are corroborated by all accounts, including Seabrook’s, of the album’s production). In the Billboard story, Dr. Luke talks about why he’s particularly obsessive about a second record:
Like with Katy [Perry], she’s now had two records, and I believe if you can get those both right, you’re a career artist. If you can make huge first and second records, if you have a third record that sucks, you can still do a fourth record, no problem. And you have enough material out there that you can tour for as long as you want. But one record? No. You need two. I feel like that’s someone’s career. As opposed to an established artist who just expects it, I do feel it’s more exciting to make a difference in somebody’s life. So I want to do everything I can to make sure that works.
Kesha’s lawsuit would later allege a host of offenses much more serious than being musically controlling (“sexual assault and battery, sexual harassment, gender violence, civil harassment, unfair business, and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress”); she filed that lawsuit a year after the New Yorker piece was published, in October 2014.
Seabrook alludes to the conflict between Kesha and Dr. Luke in the original piece, but only lightly, and in language couched in the producer’s perspective:
He signed Kesha (whose full name is Kesha Rose Sebert) as both a writer and an artist in 2005, when she was eighteen, and helped establish her with the hits “Right Round” and “Tik Tok.” But now that her pop-star dreams had come true she was proving hard to control.
Kesha, it’s worth noting, also helped establish him, particularly as a label head: she was the first signing and an early bold name for Kemosabe Records, a label financed to the amount of $60 million by Sony and controlled by Dr. Luke, a partnership that came with the condition that Dr. Luke produce exclusively Sony artists for five years. She is still the most famous artist signed to that label, and her moneymaking potential gets more important as Dr. Luke gets further into a bit of a personal lull: the last big radio hits he worked on were Maroon 5's “Sugar” and Becky G’s “Shower.”
In other words, Dr. Luke and Kesha’s relationship is more symbiotic than it’s been portrayed—it’s not a matter, purely, of her needing him to make money for both of them, as the New York court and many others seem to believe. In late 2008, Kesha gave Dr. Luke the plaintively unhinged hook for “Right Round,” which functioned as her debut, too. From The Song Machine:
Kesha’s contribution to “Right Round” was the single most memorable detail in the song, and it launched her into superstardom. However, Dr. Luke didn’t give her a songwriting credit, so she earned nothing from the smash. It was around this time that she changed the “s” in her name to “$.”
At this point, Kesha, according to Seabrook’s reporting, was “living out of two cars.” Dr. Luke sent Kool Kojak to look for her during the “Right Round” sessions; Kojak found her in effectively a flophouse in Echo Park, at which point she came to the studio, nailed the song, and didn’t get a cut.
That, however, was already three years after Dr. Luke and Kesha had started working together. He found her demo in 2005, noticing her “bravado and chutzpah.” She was a “high-school senior in Nashville, a good student with excellent SATs who was planning to attend college the following year.” Dr. Luke persuaded her to drop out, sign to his production company Kasz Money and his publishing company Prescription Songs, and also, to come to L.A. and live in his house.
At some point within her early time in L.A., writes Seabrook in The Song Machine, Kesha was introduced to manager David Sonenberg, who had “bad blood with Gottwald” (Gottwald had turned down an offer to be managed by Sonenberg back when he was recording as an artist himself).
Sonenberg, whose company later stated in a legal filing that Kesha was talking about Dr. Luke’s abusive behavior as early as 2005, examined Kesha’s contracts with Kasz Money, and reportedly told her and her mother, “This contract is worse than the one Lou Pearlman made with the Backstreet Boys.” Then Sonenberg managed to get Kesha out of her contract with Kasz Money, but failed to get her the deal with Warner Bros. he was trying to get on his own; after waiting around for Sonenberg, Kesha signed with Dr. Luke again at some point before “Right Round” in 2008.
That, in itself, is a lot of conflict from purely a business angle; you can imagine Kesha, barely out of high school, weighing her desire to be successful with her desire to get away from him, and the former winning in the end. It gets exponentially more contentious when you consider Kesha’s story that Dr. Luke’s alleged sexual aggression, via the lawsuit, ramped up:
When this lawsuit came out in October 2014, Dr Luke countersued her for defamation and breach of contract, pointing out that when David Sonenberg had sued Kesha and her mother (which he did after Kesha had gone back to Dr. Luke), the two of them stated in a deposition that the rumors about Dr. Luke drugging and raping artists (alleged, in this case, by Sonenberg) were not true. John Seabrook writes:
Perhaps, as Kesha and Pebe [Kesha’s mother] maintained, Luke had forced them to lie under oath then. But Dr. Luke’s camp doesn’t see it that way.
Seabrook then closes the Kesha section—and the recounting of the severely disturbing, Phil Spector-ish mess—with a paragraph that outpaces both the book’s epigraph from Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” and its first-page inclusion of the phrase, literally, “thumpa thooka whompa whomp Pish pish pish Thumpah whompah whompah pah pah pah Maaakaka thomp peep bap boony Gunga gung gung,” in terms of dubiousness:
An associate of the hit maker’s argues: Wouldn’t a young girl’s mother, on hearing her daughter had been drugged and raped by her boss, immediately call the police?
Yes, maybe, unless that boss was Dr. Luke.
Why would she wait eight years to file charges, a period during which she and her daughter signed a publishing deal with Dr. Luke’s company and signed with Dr. Luke as an artist?
Because, maybe, look at all the good filing charges ever did anyone.
And, he points out, why would the only remedy they seek be in a civil lawsuit for termination of Kesha’s contract—surely they should be pressing for a criminal prosecution if the charges were true.
That’s a very stupid and distinctly male thought to deploy as the final note of a piece of reporting on a pop star alleging sexual abuse against the most powerful pop producer in America. If Kesha’s team can’t even get her off Kemosabe in the civil suit, they sure as fuck wouldn’t have been able to get a criminal verdict against Dr. Luke.
The more successful a pop artist, songwriter or producer becomes, the more likely that he or she will at some point have been connected to Dr. Luke (particularly via the 50+ people signed to Prescription Songs). RX, for example, has joint publishing deals with both Diplo’s Mad Decent and also Big Machine, whose biggest artist is Taylor Swift. This is surely at least part of the reason why artist responses have been vague in general and relatively nonexistent from Sony artists in particular. As far as I can tell, Kelly Clarkson so far is the only major Sony artist who’s said anything, and in the most couched of terms:
By Seabrook’s account in The Song Machine, Clarkson is another artist who found herself in creative conflict with male label heads over a sophomore album, which she (like Kesha) had wanted to take in a rock direction; the men at the label wanted her to stay pop. She also, reportedly, wrote the (perfect) bridge of the (perfect) song “Since U Been Gone,” the pop-rock compromise that took her to #1 and a Grammy, and—like Kesha on “Right Round”—Clarkson didn’t get a cut.
Seabrook recounts Clive Davis’s memory of Clarkson breaking down in tears at a sales meeting. “I didn’t like working with Max Martin and Dr. Luke, and I don’t like the end product. I really want both songs [“Behind These Hazel Eyes” and “Since U Been Gone”] off my album,” Davis recalls her saying, before bursting into “hysterical sobbing.” Clarkson disputes this account to Seabrook. “But there could be no disputing that ‘Since U Been Gone’ made Clarkson a superstar,” he writes.
That’s the point everyone seems to be making, and on an amoral level it’s certainly true: you can debate whether pop’s favorite producer raped his young protégé, you can debate whether or not she should be contractually obligated to make as much money as possible for herself, for him and for Sony. But money, on the other hand, is never debated. “Sometimes you have to do things in people’s best interests and they don’t even know it, and maybe they’ll figure it out later and thank you, and maybe they won’t,” Dr. Luke toldBillboard. “Most likely they won’t.”
Nick Confessore, apolitical reporter for the New York Times, was on MSNBC yesterday to discuss how Donald Trump has leveraged free media to support his presidential campaign. In the midst of the segment, MSNBC cut away to...give Donald Trump more free media.
This dynamic—the press distracting itself from self-recriminating lamentations over Trump’s increasing popularity to give more airtime to his Rorschachian stump speeches—is rendered all the more ironic for the fact that Trump spends a not-insubstantial amount of time fomenting resentment against the media whose attention he courts.
But, as Confessore later pointed out on Twitter, the notion that Trump is solely a product of the coverage he successfully attracts is a misguided one, and one that ignores the fact that there is something about his performance that speaks to people—they’re not just showing up to his rallies, they’re voting for him. (At least for now.)
The relevant counterfactual, then, is this: Were Trump not to receive so much coverage, would he have spent the money necessary to compensate for that fact? Poor Jeb Bush’s super PAC dropped $84 million on advertising and look where it got him.
Except, like all counterfactuals, this is a meaningless thing to ask. The Trump that MSNBC cut away for on Sunday is the Trump that has always been and always ever was going to be. As Mark Singer wrote in his 1997 profile of Trump for the New Yorker, the man is, essentially, a performance artist:
A securities analyst who has studied Trump’s peregrinations for many years believes, “Deep down, he wants to be Madonna.” In other words, to ask how the gods could have permitted Trump’s resurrection is to mistake profound superficiality for profundity, performance art for serious drama. A prime example of superficiality at its most rewarding: the Trump International Hotel & Tower, a fifty-two-story hotel-condominium conversion of the former Gulf & Western Building, on Columbus Circle, which opened last January. The Trump name on the skyscraper belies the fact that his ownership is limited to his penthouse apartment and a stake in the hotel’s restaurant and garage, which he received as part of his development fee. During the grand-opening ceremonies, however, such details seemed not to matter as he gave this assessment: “One of the great buildings anywhere in New York, anywhere in the world.”
As Trump’s business acumen then was nothing more than an “opera-buffa parody of wealth,” his political acumen now is nothing more than opera-buffa parody of politics. The real question is not whether Trump would have spent money on campaign ads if the media wasn’t so willing to cover his every ridiculous move but whether the difference between Trump and the other candidates, in either party, is one of degree, or one of kind—whether he has taken this whole, absurd process to its horrifying and brutal conclusion.
Chanel Austin, a 36-year-old transgender woman from the Bronx who was held at Rikers Island last spring after being arrested on grand larceny charges, plans to sue New York City for $3 million for transferring her out of the 30-bed transgender housing unit and into an all-male unit.
According to the New York Daily News, inmates in the all-male unit assaulted and harassed Austin—breaking a chair against her back while she was on the phone one day and peeing in her cell another. One man allegedly tried to rape her.
“Her constitutional rights were violated in these instances—because of her gender, this is what she was exposed to,” her lawyer, Matthew Waller, said. Austin filed a $3 million Notice of Claim against the city in July, and Waller said he intends to file suit in federal court later this week.
Austin was transferred after another inmate stole her Walkman, she told the Daily News. “I begged for them to please not move me,” she said. “Tragically, I already knew it was going to be a problem.”
Adelson, who spent upwards of $100 million trying (and failing) to sway the 2012 presidential election, is essentially a single-issue candidate: His driving concern is not only maintaining but supplementing the diplomatic and military cover that the United States offers the state of Israel. The Palestinians, he has said, are an “invented people” whose sole purpose “is to destroy Israel.”
The casino magnate has not yet graced a Republican candidate with his largesse in this election, though he is thought to favor Marco Rubio. Here is a delightful passage from a New York magazine story on Adelson this fall:
Marco Rubio reportedly phones Adelson every other week. “Rubio calls and says, ‘Hey, did you see this speech? Did you see my floor statement on Iran? What do you think I should do about this issue?’ ” says one person close to Adelson. “It’s impressive. Rubio is persistent.”
Anyway, Politico reports that Adelson is “waiting to see how [Rubio] fares in a few more primaries.” (Wouldn’t want another $100 million to go to waste!) That reluctance, however, has begun to agitate Republican operatives who see Adelson’s millions as the potential antidote to Donald Trump. “Nobody knows exactly why he’s still on the sidelines or when he might come off,” one Adelson-affiliated operative told Politico, “but the party needs him to get in the game before it’s too late.”
Adelson’s hesitation may also have something to do with the fact that he is embroiled in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit, filed against his company, Las Vegas Sands, by Steven Jacobs, the former CEO of Adelson’s casinos in Macau, a special administrative region off the southern coast of China. In the suit, which the Nevada gaming board is watching carefully, Jacobs claims that he was fired because he tried to disentangle Adelson’s business from organized crime groups in China and stopping the bribery of Chinese officials. From the Guardian:
The case, which is scheduled to be heard in June, a month before the Republican convention that will appoint the party’s nominee, potentially threatens the gambling licences of his Las Vegas casinos.
If it goes all the way to full trial and the allegations are found to have merit, that would open the door to accusations that Adelson’s political donations have been made with tainted money. The billionaire was last week ordered to give 49 hours of pre-trial depositions beginning this week. That order came the day after Adelson failed in his attempt to have the judge in the case, Elizabeth Gonzalez, removed for alleged bias. That in turn is linked to the billionaire’s purchase of the Review-Journal.
Adelson spent $140m on the paper, somewhere around $60m more than it is considered to have been worth. That has mystified many in Nevada politics. It is possible that Adelson purchased the Review-Journal to influence Las Vegas and state politics. He has campaigned against a publicly funded conference centre to rival one he owns and, in something of a contradiction, is attempting to win public financing to bring an NFL franchise to Las Vegas.
In the meantime, Republicans will continue to twiddle their thumbs. “If you had told me months ago that he would not have made a major play in the presidential race by this point, I would have been shocked,” one fundraiser, who has met with Adelson, told Politico. “I thought he was going to do it after that Vegas debate.” The GOP debate in December was hosted at Adelson’s Venetian Resort Hotel and Casino.
According to Politico, however, some Rubio rivals suspect that Adelson is already backing the non-profit Conservative Solutions Project, which the Wesleyan Media Project reports has spent at least $7.1 million on ads supporting Rubio. Of course, the Conservative Solutions Project is not to be confused with the Conservative Solutions super PAC, with which it shares some staff, and which raised almost $33 million for Rubio last month while spending $27 million.
According to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry, war crimes in Syria are now “rampant.” What is more: “Paradoxically, the international and regional stakeholders that are ostensibly pushing for a peaceful solution to the war are the same that continue to feed the military escalation.”
The players involved in SB Nation’s publication and removal of a story about convicted rapist Daniel Holtzclaw are attempting damage control. The story, which read as highly sympathetic, attempted to frame the former cop’s crimes as a story about his failed football dreams.
After removing the story the same day it was published, SB Nation editorial director Spencer Hall posted a tasteful apology in which he called the story a “failure” and its publication “a complete breakdown of a part of the editorial process at SB Nation.”
In a memo acquired by our friends at Deadspin, VP of editorial operations Kevin Lockland announced that SB Nation would temporarily suspend its longform program and was looking inward to figure out how exactly the story was published in the first place.
We are launching an internal peer review on the process and sequence of events that led up to our publication of this story as well as systemic and organizational factors ranging from how our team is resourced to our efforts to build a more diverse and inclusive culture.
Lockland also revealed that the site had cut ties with Jeff Arnold, the freelance sportswriter who wrote the piece.
Today, Arnold issued his own statement about the story on Twitter, and once again demonstrated a lack of understanding about sexual assault. He does acknowledge the complete disregard he showed for Holtzclaw’s victims by not allowing their voices to be heard in the piece:
By not spending more time reaching out to victims or their families as a way of accounting for the horrific abuse they suffered, I made a grave mistake. I accept responsibility for that.
However, he continues to argue that approaching the story of a man who raped and sexually assaulted 13 black women primarily from a sports angle was somehow a good idea:
In writing this piece – which was reviewed and signed off on by at least four editors prior to its publication – I hoped to present a more fully-rounded portrait of Mr. Holtzclaw than had appeared in the press. I hoped to explore the question of what had happened to this once-promising young man. I and my editor at SB Nation hoped to find possible answers as to what could have led to him to become a convicted rapist and sexual predator. In the end, though, I produced a piece that had massive shortcomings.
The question, of course, is why Arnold felt Holtzclaw deserved a more rounded portrait in the first place. By most accounts, Holtzclaw is an unexceptional man who has been found guilty of serial rape. The difference between Holtzclaw and other men who sexually assault women is that his position as a police officer allowed him a unique opportunity to brutalize his victims while keeping them silent. The other difference, of course, is that Holtzclaw actually got caught and will pay for his crimes.
Arnold fails to grasp that Holtzclaw’s days as a “promising” football recruit are not significantly relevant to his rape and sexual assault of women. As far as we know, Holtzclaw’s predatory nature did not reveal itself until after he graduated and his football days were behind him. That’s an angle Arnold’s editor, Glenn Stout (who we can presume was one of the four editors Arnold reveals read the piece before it was published), considered noteworthy as well. Stout reportedly wrote in a celebratory email to SB Nation staffers last Wednesday that “the fact that he was a football player — and a pretty good one, who fell just short of the N.F.L. — seemed to have escaped all other coverage.
Stout’s email, conceivably sent just before the piece’s negative reception took hold last week, called Arnold’s story “a nuanced portrait that never loses sight of the fact that women were victimized. I think people will be talking about this one,” he added. And here we are.
Letters between city and state officials concerning violence in New York City’s shelter system, provided to the New York Times, indicate that the simmering feud between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio may have boiled over once again.
On Friday, after conducting a surprise inspection of the Bellevue Men’s Shelter on East 30th Street, state officials demanded that the city investigate an alleged “gang rape,” in which a resident was “hog-tied” and raped “a few weeks ago.” From the New York Post:
“The Bellevue security officer stated that the resident was found, still bound, by a security guard,” state homeless-services chief Samuel Roberts said in a letter to city Human Resources Commissioner Steven Banks. Roberts complained the state was not informed of the alleged crime and that an incident report wasn’t filed.
He directed the NYPD and State Police to investigate the alleged crime and why it wasn’t reported.
But in a testy response, Banks suggested the report was erroneous.
“We could not have reported this incident to you since there is no evidence it occurred,” Banks said.
Indeed, police determined over the weekend that the reported rape did not actually take place. “The incident of a hogtying rape not only didn’t happen a few weeks ago, we found no evidence that it ever occurred,” NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis said. According to the Times, the only similar incident that police found evidence for was a 2014 robbery at Bellevue in which the perpetrators had tied up their victim.
On Monday, in yet another letter, Banks, the city’s Human Resources commissioner, accused the Cuomo administration—who wrote their letter demanding an investigation of the purported rape and released it to the Post before an investigation could actually be conducted—of engaging in a “political media hit.”
“New York law prohibits making gratuitous reports to law enforcement, including initiating or circulating a false report,” Banks noted.
“It may have been reasonable for you to ask us for information about an incident that an O.T.D.A. inspector may have mistakenly believed occurred,” he continued, before declaring the state’s actions (in combination with the Post story) “reckless” and “harmful to our efforts to bring people in off the streets.”
In an interview with Politico, conducted on Saturday as the results of the Republican primary in South Carolina rolled in, Ben Carson argued that Barack Obama didn’t really grow up black. Here’s the exchange, which began when Politico’s Glenn Thrush asked Carson if he “derived any pride, any sense of joy” out of Obama winning the 2008 election:
Carson: Like most Americans I was proud that we broke the color barrier when he was elected but I also recognize that his experience and my experience are night and day different. He didn’t grow up like I grew up by any stretch of the imagination.
Thrush: That’s right.
Carson: Not even close.
Thrush: He is an African American as opposed to an African-American.
Carson: He’s an African American. He was, you know, raised white. Many of his formative years were spent in Indonesia so for him to claim that he identifies with the experience of black Americans is a bit of a stretch.
Thrush: That’s interesting.
Carson is essentially making an economic argument, insinuating that because Obama grew up relatively comfortably in Hawaii he can’t understand what it was like to be raised poor in a city like Detroit during the era of segregation. Though Carson may have had a more difficult upbringing, you would imagine Obama taking offense to the notion that he was “raised white.”
In May of 2008, the AP’s Sudhin Thanawala wrote a story that investigated the exact topic of Obama’s experience as a biracial teenager in Hawaii. Thanawala spoke to a few of Obama’s black classmates from their time at the private school they attended in Honolulu, and found that everyday racism was prevalent. Said one named Rik Smith:
Smith, a geriatrician in California, said his experience at Punahou and in the islands was similar to Obama’s. Smith recalled classmates at Punahou agreeing that he should put his individual identity ahead of his race and remembered girls he wanted to date telling him they’d meet him somewhere else when he came to pick them up.
“Even in Hawaii, I’d walk down the street with a white guy, white girl, Asian person, and they would get uncomfortable if there were a whole bunch of black GIs coming down the street,” he recalled. “It wasn’t that different from the South or the mainland.”
Thanawala also notes that in his memoir Dreams of My Father, Obama mentions several specific instances of racism:
In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama, who is half black and half white, recalled a seventh grader calling him a “coon” and a tennis pro who joked that his color might rub off. One person wanted to touch his hair, and he was asked whether his father, a native of Kenya, ate people. An assistant basketball coach used a racial epithet in referring to black players.
In an interview with People in 2014, both Barack and Michelle Obama spoke about the racism experienced by any black person living in America:
“There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys,” said the president, adding that, yes, it had happened to him.
Mrs. Obama recalled another incident: “He was wearing a tuxedo at a black-tie dinner, and somebody asked him to get coffee.”
Even so, Obama might actually agree with Carson that he missed some sort of the black American experience by growing up middle class in a relatively more tolerant state. Nonetheless, Obama carved out a portion of his life to remedy exactly that.
We all remember Obama being pilloried by Republicans throughout the 2008 election for having been a “community organizer”—it’s such a favorite GOP meme that Sarah Palin even threw the phrase around last month in her rambling speech endorsing Donald Trump. The communities that Obama helped organize in his mid-20s were in neighborhoods in the South Side of Chicago, which, as Ta-Nehisi Coates detailed in “The Case For Reparations,” is a part of the country that, even after integration, was purposefully segregated and economically ravaged. According to the community organizer who hired Obama in 1985, Obama sought out the job specifically so he could learn firsthand what it was like to grow up the way Carson did. Speaking to the New York Times:
The year was 1985 and Gerald Kellman, a community organizer, was interviewing an applicant named Barack Obama to work in the demoralized landscape of poor neighborhoods on this city’s South Side. He liked the young man’s intelligence, motivation and acutely personal understanding of how it felt to be an outsider. He also remembers that Mr. Obama drove a hard bargain.
“He challenged me on whether we could teach him anything,” Mr. Kellman recalled. “He wanted to know things like ‘How are you going to train me?’ and ‘What am I going to learn?’”
Said another colleague:
“All of a sudden Barack finds himself in one of the most complex African-American communities in the United States and he discovers an energizing capacity to connect with the people in these neighborhoods,” said Gregory Galluzzo, a community organizer who worked with Mr. Obama.
“He is experiencing blackness in Chicago on both sides of the spectrum, from residents of public housing to Harold Washington,” Mr. Galluzzo added. “His identification with these people begins his political journey.”
The other aspect of Carson judging blackness in terms of wealth is that Carson and his wife Candy are fantastically rich. His own financial disclosure forms show that they are millionaires dozens of times over. Carson and his wife have three sons, and for part of their lives they lived in an eight-bedroom mansion that sits on 48 acres of property in rural Maryland. Would Carson say that his kids were raised white, or that they experienced a lesser form of blackness?
Actually, he might! Carson makes it clear in the Politico interview that he views the racism of the ‘60s as uniquely significant, and it would be hard to quibble with that assertion. But his hardline stance prevents him from connecting the racism he experienced to the racism that informs and ignites this current generation of black Americans. Says Carson at one point: “But remember now, I’ve been around for 64 years, you know. I’ve had a chance to see what real racism is.”
You can read a full transcript of the interview here.
President Obama today announced a plan to close Guantanamo Bay, the seven-year culmination of the promise he made during the 2008 election.
There are still 91 detainees in custody at the facility, which was opened in 2002.
The president announced the four-part plan during a televised address from the Roosevelt Room on Tuesday morning, calling on Congress to approve the measure, which was first proposed by the Pentagon.
Under the proposal, eligible detainees would be transferred to one of 13 prisons in the United States, the exact location of which remains to be determined. According to CNN, a federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado; a military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas; and the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina are all on the table as potential sites after Pentagon officials developed prototype plans to convert them into federal detention facilities.
Renovations on a new site are expected to cost as much as $475 million, but the plan is ultimately expected to save the U.S. somewhere between $65 and $85 million a year in operating costs.
And that’s if the Republicans even allow the measure to pass—according to CNN, conservative lawmakers required language on at least two recent bills barring the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. Even so, the White House has not, according to reports, ruled out unilateral action.
Beginning Aug. 1, Texans who legally own guns (so, all of them) will be able to carry their concealed weapons on the campuses of the state’s public universities. Some faculty at the University of Houston appear concerned over what the new law might mean for their safety, so the school recently presented the following Powerpoint slide that suggests ways in which teachers may reduce their chances of being murdered by their students.
It reads:
Be careful discussing sensitive topics
Drop certain topics from your curriculum
Not “go there” if you sense anger
Limit student access off hours
Altering curriculum and reducing the amount of time spent with students doesn’t really seem conducive to the act of “teaching.” But on the bright side, at least professors won’t be the only ones asked to issue trigger warnings?
The group behind CPAC—the nation’s favored gathering for white conservatives who want to take a selfie with a GOP candidate—today issued a statement calling Marco Rubio’s decision to skip the annual mutual admiration conference a “rookie move.”
Though the American Conservative Union, which released the statement, says Rubio is “unwilling to make time to meet with activists and answer their questions,” it’s not clear that he’s officially decided to skip the event. His campaign has said only that his March schedule is still undecided.
Still, the ACU makes it clear it won’t tolerate Rubio’s unwillingness to kiss the ring, pointing out that other GOP luminaries like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina will be there.
Although, Marco Rubio has built a conservative record and has a high ACU rating, he and his campaign have made a rookie mistake. Today the Rubio campaign informed ACU’s chairman that their candidate is unwilling to make time to meet with activists and answer their questions at CPAC 2016. Sen. Rubio cannot have it both ways: he cannot hope to be the inspirational leader of conservatives and at the same time hide at the very moments when activists who compose the heart and soul of the movement assemble and organize. For 43 years CPAC has been that critical moment, and in this year’s conference will be the biggest yet. Ronald Reagan came to CPAC 13 times; he launched his national political career from CPAC and our theme this year comes from President Reagan’s first public address after his 1980 election. That theme is ‘Our Time is Now.’ Reagan’s words ring even truer today than when Reagan first said them. If we do not carry the country in 2016 America will be a different nation. But if conservatives are not central to the effort we will fail before we even begin. We also appreciate those candidates and former candidates who have made CPAC 2016 a priority: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, Scott Walker and Carly Fiorina (our former Foundation Chair.) They honor Reagan’s legacy and they honor the thousands of conservative activists who will spend significant resources to travel to CPAC to learn, be inspired, and eventually vote in our straw poll for the person they want to carry the Reagan torch.
For context on the importance of the CPAC straw poll, Rand Paul has won for the last three years.
As Hillary Clinton’s path to the nomination becomes clearer, our favorite right-wingers have doubled down on the conspiracy theory that she has been—secretly—in exceedingly poor health since she suffered a concussion in 2012. What exactly wrong with her? You would not believe how many things.
Last week, Gawker noted that behatted news aggregator Matt Drudge had misspelled the word “prism” in a headline on top of his site. The headline referred to Clinton’s glasses, which have become a central prop in the increasingly loopy conspiracy theories.
These theories are promulgated by far-right fringe figures like Jerome Corsi at World Net Daily, but they’ve been amplified by people as mainstream as Karl Rove. They’re common knowledge to regular readers of Breitbart and the Daily Caller. The “Hillary Clinton is hiding a serious medical condition” theory has rapidly become an alternate conservative narrative of the election—it is, in other words, already the birtherism of 2016. How did that happen?
“The Benghazi flu”
This theory that Hillary Clinton is tricking the American public into thinking she is well enough to be president started, ironically, with a theory that she tricked the American public into thinking she was sick. The trouble began in December 2012, when Clinton got the stomach flu. She fainted, fell, and got a concussion as a result. The timing of all this was suspicious to many conservatives, because it happened right before Clinton was scheduled to testify about BENGHAZI.
The New York Postcalled Clinton’s concussion a “head fake,” while Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer referred to it on air as an “acute Benghazi allergy.” Allen West accused her of catching “the Benghazi flu,” and the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher called on Clinton to release her medical reports.
Today, in 2016, we live in a different, insane vortex in which conservative conspiracy theorists think Clinton actually did suffer a terrible concussion that left her brain damaged and weak.
“If she really had some weird thing in the hospital, then it should prohibit her from ever being president”
None other than Glenn Beck started conservative conspiracy theorists on the tortured path they walk today. Two weeks after Clinton got the concussion, she suffered a related complication: a blood clot. Beck took to the airwaves a few months later to suggest that something more serious was going on.
“If she really had some weird thing in the hospital, then it should prohibit her from ever becoming president,” he said. “She shouldn’t be President of the United States if she going into the hospital for some sort of heart condition or brain condition or whatever she was in the hospital for, or was that just a scam so that we didn’t talk about [Benghazi]?”
Then, in May 2014, Karl Rove echoed Beck’s concerns in a speech that got picked up by Page Six. “Thirty days in the hospital?” he said. “And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.”
By her account, Clinton spent three days in the hospital after doctors discovered her blood clot, and she wore special glasses for a few months afterward to correct double vision from the concussion. After Rove’s speech, Clinton assured Diane Sawyer in an interview that she fully recovered and suffered “no lingering effects” from the concussion or clot.
In 2015, Clinton released a letter from her doctor that said the same—she had recovered completely from the concussion and clot, but she continued to take an anticoagulant as a precaution. Her doctor also revealed in the letter that Clinton has hypothyroidism and seasonal allergies. “She is in excellent physical condition and fit to serve as President of the United States,” the doctor wrote.
“A flare up of problems from brain injury”
The theory that Clinton is unwell has expanded exponentially since 2014. Here are just some of the many ailments theorists have claimed she suffers from:
A brain injury. When Clinton took her famous bathroom break at a Democratic primary debate in December, Breitbart breathlessly reported that she was actually missing from the stage due to a “flare up of problems from brain injury.” A “law enforcement source”—aka retired NYPD officer and Blaze radio host John Cardillo—told Breitbart that he had heard from other law enforcement sources that Clinton had been getting “dizzy and disoriented” after speeches.
Vision problems. Both Matt Drudge and Jerome Corsi at World Net Daily have claimed that Clinton is wearing her prism (or in Drudge’s case, “prisim”) glasses again, signifying some kind of vision problems. Clinton has not responded to these claims.
A “bad heart.” Ed Klein, who has written multiple books about the Clintons, published this fall a gossipy Hillary Clinton takedown called Unlikeable. In it, he claimed that Clinton has an undisclosed “heart problem.” Drudge blared the news on his website with the following headline: “BOOK: HILLARY HAS A BAD HEART.”
Hypothyroidism. Clinton does have hypothyroidism, which she controls with thyroid hormone replacement, according to her doctor. Drudge still likes to say “hypothyroidism” a lot, however. In October, he tweeted, “Hillary health was biggest revelation at hearing. Coughing fit. Slow-speaking, obviously induced by meds. Choose not to believe if you must.” He added:
A cough. Yesterday, the Free Beacon got in on the conspiracy theory action by posting a supercut video of Clinton coughing during various hearings and speeches in the last couple years. What does it all mean? No one knows. The video is soundtracked by a Kelly Clarkson song, for some reason.
Neither Corsi nor the Free Beacon have explicitly said what Clinton’s coughing signifies, beyond the fact that she must be hiding something.
A urinary tract infection. In December, the Daily Caller determined that Clinton’s apparent symptoms—“fatigue, mood swings, swelling, weight gain, impaired judgment, confusion, slurring words, frequent urination, and bald spots”—mean she probably has a UTI.
For a full accounting of Clinton’s health from her doctor, click here.
The wreckage of Jeb Bush’s foredoomed campaign has already inspired dozens of articles about the mistakes and miscalculations that led donors, consultants, and Bush himself to believe he had a shot at winning the 2016 race. This genre of journalism reliably offers revealing anecdotes and bitchy anonymous quotes about a campaign’s internal dysfunction. The journalists on Bush’s case, however, seem preoccupied not with behind-the-scenes drama, but with the question of Bush’s soul. Indeed, four reports published in the last four days have emphasized that Bush is “human.” That seems like a trend!
One reporter covering Bush for a major newspaper said that Bush comes off as deeply human. Reporters have felt a sense of poignancy in watching him struggle, something that has been reflected in their coverage. It’s not sympathy, the reporter contended, but rather a simple sense of sadness at watching someone fighting against forces outside his control. Others said Bush simply comes off as a “decent guy.”
I never expected to like Jeb. Boarding school toff. Political scion. Staunch pro-lifer. NRA favorite. Oh, and ugh, the Terri Schiavo stuff. Still, I couldn’t help but warm to him as the campaign wore on. And then even pull for him, a little. It was partly the pathos. Jeb felt somehow more human than other candidates. Vulnerable, struggling, unable to conceal flashes of fear and melancholy.
At the core, what made Jeb compelling to cover was that he was deeply, impossibly human. In a cycle where so many other candidates were able to toggle effortlessly between soaring speeches and masterful debate performances, between well-rehearsed outrage and manufactured indignation, Jeb almost seemed to think aloud in real time, and we got to watch him muddle and bumble through, just like any real person.
If nothing else, Jeb Bush reminded us that we’re all quite helplessly human. He quit the presidential race on Saturday, having spent some $130 million with nothing to show for it but a string of weak primary finishes. The man who some thought was sure to lock up the nomination without even trying served only as a punching bag for Donald Trump and a reminder that it’s possible to feel pity even for scions of the nation’s most powerful political family surrounded by odious warmongers.
What does it mean to call a political candidate “more human” or “impossibly human” in the first place? It’s attached to Bush as a compliment (or, at the very least, an explanation for his weaknesses as a candidate), but none of the outlets or reporters quoted above are ideologically aligned with Bush or his conservative politics. In that sense, “deeply human” could just be a polite way of saying “irredeemably flawed.”
Or perhaps the political journalists covering Jeb Bush really do feel some kind of shared humanity with him, a hidden bond which revealed itself only within the pressure cooker of a presidential campaign. If that’s the case, it’s pretty hard to imagine Bush admitting to seeing things the same way, given his own party’s long-term strategy of relentlessly attacking the media. At the same time, it’s easy to see why journalists would be so eager to recognize the human being behind Bush’s candidacy. The idea that Jeb Bush has something in common with a political reporter at TheNew York Times probably appeals to the reporter a lot more than it does to Jeb Bush.
It seems possible, too, that Bush’s press shop—considered one of the most useful and responsive operations in this year’s contest—helped engineer the theme of him being uncommonly human as a kind of emergency off-ramp, allowing the candidate to withdraw from the race as smoothly as possible. Considering the inherent power imbalance between a candidate and his or her traveling press corps, and the general unreality of the 2016 race, this scenario doesn’t seem impossible. Then again, such a gambit would likely negate the message it was intended to push. If you need a spokesperson to convince you that Jeb Bush is uniquely human, then you probably aren’t inclined to believe that all by yourself.
So maybe Jeb Bush is indeed human—deeply, impossibly, helplessly, whatever—after all.
