The list of people Ted Cruz hasn’t disavowed grows narrower still as his campaign this week pulled merchandise designed by the overtly racist artist Sabo.
Cruz’s campaign pulled the designs, which were featured on posters, buttons, and t-shirts, not long after an online liberal talk show, The Young Turks, aired a segment calling accusing Sabo of being a racist.
Sabo, who has publicly disparaged “blacks,” “new mexicans,” and Syrians, and repeatedly made reference to assassinating President Obama, did not respond to a request for comment. But he did tell the Texas Tribune that he stands behind every word.
In Sabo’s defense, people should have figured this out a long time ago. In Ted Cruz’s defense, this picture is probably the coolest thing about him.
Ted Cruz has not been shy about telling undocumented immigrants that they would be deported if he was elected President, even to their faces. But he had stopped short of saying that he would authorize federal agents to pull the undocumented from their homes and ship them out of the country—that is, until last night.
In an interview on his program, Bill O’Reilly drilled into Cruz’s planned immigration policy and extracted that Cruz would plan to use U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to actively search out and deport undocumented immigrants. The exchange began like this:
O’Reilly: Here’s a policy question I need you to define for me tonight: 12 million illegal aliens here in America. Mr. Trump says he would deport them forcibly, that federal agents would round them up and send them back home. Costs a lot of money but he says it’s worth it because we just can’t allow the law to be broken this way. Would you round up 12 million illegal aliens this way here and if so, how?
Cruz: Listen, we should enforce the law. How do we enforce the law? Yes, we should deport them. We should build a wall, we should triple the border patrol and federal law requires that anyone here illegally that is apprehended should be deported.
At this point, Cruz thinks he’s answering a fairly easy question and gives what passes for standard immigration policy among all the leading GOP candidates, which is that, yes, of course, illegal immigrants who are “apprehended” will be sent out of the country.
But O’Reilly stops Cruz to hone in on the concept of apprehension, and he quickly boxes Cruz into announcing a reversal of his previously stated beliefs:
O’Reilly: Would you go look for them, though? Mr. Trump would look for them to get them out. Would you do that if you were President?
Cruz: Look, Bill, of course you would. That’s what ICE exists for. We have law enforcement that looks for people who are violating the law that apprehends them and deports them. But Bill-
O’Reilly: Wait, wait, let me get this straight, because this is important, very important. So, and I use the same example: So Tommy O’Malley from County Cork, Ireland is over here and he overstays his Visa and he’s got a couple of kids and he settled into Long Island, and you, President Cruz, are gonna send the feds to his house, take him out and put him on a plane back to Ireland?
Cruz: You better believe that.
As various outlets have pointed out, all the way back in January Cruz told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he specifically opposed Donald Trump’s plan to create a “deportation force” to round-up the undocumented:
“No, I don’t intend to send jackboots to knock on your door and every door in America. That’s not how we enforce the law for any crime.”
Just a day after Media Matters, and then this website, surfaced new and old sexist and racist tweets written by ex-Donald Trump operative and part-time CNN talking head Roger Stone, the network announced it will stop inviting him on air.
In a statement released to Media Matters, a spokesperson said that Stone “will no longer appear on CNN.” In his tweets, Stone attacked fellow CNN contributors on openly racist and sexist grounds. He called Ana Navarro an “entitled diva bitch” and said “black beans and rice didn’t miss her.” He also called Roland Martin a “stupid negro” and a “token buffoon” and instructed him to “eat somemore Popeye’s.”
He will be missed by fellow insane racists and whoever else watches CNN these days.
In 2008, billionaire venture capitalist and real selfish bastard Vinod Khosla paid $32.5 million for an 89-acre beachfront property in California. Now, he’s asking for $30 million just to let the public use the beach.
To be clear, Khosla—whose Twitter bio reads “entrepreneurship zealot,” if you can fucking believe it—is not offering to sell his 89 acres of beachfront land to the state. He is offering to simply allow the public to walk down the access road and use the beach, for the reasonable price of $30 million in taxpayer money.
In 2010, Khosla decided to close and lock the gate on the public access road that led to the beach (and posted guards to keep people out), “citing the high cost of maintenance and liability insurance.”
The beach, called Martins Beach, is a real nice beach. The public sure would like to use it. In fact, people have been suing Khosla for years to try to get him allow the public to use the beach. Public interest groups like Surfrider say the public is entitled to beach access under state law. Others—perhaps, just imagine, a normal and decent human being whose heart is not made of rotten cheese—believe that regardless of state law, this beach should be open to the public, because it’s a nice beach and lots of people would like to use it and it sure wouldn’t hurt any.
But Vinod Khosla, who does not even live on the land in question, disagrees.
The letter, which came from the Supreme Court’s own attending physician, noted that Scalia had long suffered from “coronary artery disease, obesity and diabetes, among other ailments that probably contributed to the justice’s sudden death” in an effort to argue that there was nothing suspicious about Scalia’s demise.
This certainly gives us a lot to think about, namely that, though the 79-year-old Justice was clearly in poor health, it seems in poor taste to insult the man when he’s already very much down.
Featuring an eight foot power cord, 11 AC outlets, plus coax and phone line protection, this APC surge protector is exactly what you need behind your home theater. Amazon will sell you one for $16 right now, which is an all-time low. [APC SurgeArrest Surge Protector, $16]
A good deal on a clothing iron probably isn’t the most exciting thing we’ve ever posted, but everyone should own one, and you could do a lot worse than this 4.5 star-rated Rowenta.
Amazon lists the price at $83, but the $6 coupon on the page will drop it to $77 at checkout, which is the second lowest price they’ve ever listed. [Rowenta DW5197 Focus Steam Iron, $77 with $6 coupon]
Today’s best console deals are nothing if not unique. If you’re interested in an Xbox One, this Gears of War Bundle comes with a free bonus Halo gamepad and a copy of Far Cry Primal, for some reason. If you’d prefer a PS4, this Star Wars Battlefront bundle costs $50 more than usual, but it comes with a Sphero BB-8 droid toy, which is a $140 value on its own.
2016 will be the year of Quick Charge 3.0, which can take your phone from zero to 80 in 35 minutes, and you can get ready with some of the first deals we’ve seen on compatible chargers.
If you’ve been waiting for a deal on Huawei’s excellent-but-expensive Android Wear smartwatch, Amazon’s taking $50 off the base stainless steel/leather strap model today. It was cheaper for a little while around Black Friday, but this is the best deal of 2016. [Huawei Watch, $300]
Sure, you could throw your old SSD into a cheap plastic enclosure, and have yourself a speedy little external drive. But if you do that, how will people know you’re a tech savvy person using an external SSD, and not a plebe who bought an $80 hard drive at Best Buy? These two alternatives will keep your drive on display for all the world to see, so you can sit back and accumulate your precious nerd points.
Giddyup over to Amazon, where you’ll find not one, but two western-themed Gold Box apparel deals today. As always, these are only available today, or until sold out.
Note: The “Western Clothing & Accessories” sale includes some perfectly normal-looking jeans.
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.
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]
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]
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Send deal submissions to Deals@Gawker and all other inquiries to Shane@Gawker
On Day 390 of Kristin, Gawker reported that Kristin Cavallari had landed the cover of Bella LA magazine. It has come to my attention that Bella LA magazine does not exist.
A Bella publicist named Jenna reached out to me via email with the following correction:
Hi Allie,
I hope you are well! I handle the PR for BELLA New York and recently came across your post for “500 Days of Kristin, Day 390: Put This On My Tombstone.” Thanks for mentioning BELLA! Kristin was actually on the cover of “BELLA New York” magazine, not “BELLA LA.” Would you be able to update the post?
The confusion likely stems from BELLALAMag.com which is the new sister website to BELLA New York (which is both a print/online publication). But Kristin was on the cover of the print edition of BELLA New York.
This email confused me, because I learned about Kristin’s Bella (BELLA?) cover via a Twitter account for “Bella LA Mag.”
In the video above, Kristin refers to “exclusive” content on BellaLAMag.com, but she does not mention BELLA New York. I asked Jenna for clarification on this point.
“Yes, the bts [behind the scenes] video is exclusively on BELLALAMag.com (only web),” she wrote back. “It’s a sister outlet to BELLA New York (both web and online). If you wanted to reference it though, you can use the full site name ‘BELLALAMag.com’ versus ‘BELLA LA magazine.’”
My understanding now is that Kristin is on the March/April cover of Bella New York. There is some Kristin video content on BellaLAMag.com, but Kristin is not on the cover of Bella LA, because “Bella LA Mag” is just a website.
Jenna sent me the following cover image, which does say “New York” on it.
After blowing up the internet with those sweet white Vans, Damn Daniel’s creator has now become the victim of one of the internet’s worst “pranks.”
ABC 7 is reporting that Riverside, CA police got a prank call on Tuesday which claimed that the teen who filmed “Damn Daniel,” a popular internet meme, had shot his mother with an AK-47. In response, the police descended on the teenager’s home...only to find out it was all fake. The culprit had used a voice modulator to fool the police into thinking an emergency was unfolding, when in actuality nothing was happening.
Given the video’s popularity—it’s gotten hundreds of thousands of retweets on Twitter, and everyone on the internet seems to be talking about it—this outcome probably isn’t a surprise. Once you get big enough on the internet, swatting has practically become a (dangerous) rite of passage. Celebrities, congresswomen, and randos on the internet alike have all fallen prey to swatting, which is awful when you consider that, at best, this “joke” wastes everyone’s time, and at worst, someone actually gets hurt by SWAT teams who are just trying to do their jobs.
“We believe and the family believes that since their video went viral, it’s somehow connected,” said Riverside police lieutenant Kevin Townsend. “Ever since their video has gone out there, they’ve received a number of what they call strange phone calls and emails, and a lot of strange things happening so tonight was just another incident for their family.”
Damn, Daniel. Hopefully they won’t be back at it again with those S.W.A.T. vans.
According to the Guardian, Catholics in St Louis, Missouri, find themselves confronted with an ethical dilemma over whether they are permitted to buy cookies from the troublingly feminist Girl Scouts. “Each person must act in accord with their conscience,” the archdiocese advises.
Senate Republicans have declared, in no uncertain terms, that not only will they refuse to confirm any nominee of President Obama’s choosing to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, they will refuse to meet with an Obama nominee at all.
According to the New York Times, Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans issued a letter on Tuesday unanimously refusing to schedule any confirmation hearings: “Because our decision is based on constitutional principle and born of a necessity to protect the will of the American people, this committee will not hold hearings on any Supreme Court nominee until after our next president is sworn in on January 20, 2017.
Speaking on the Senate floor, majority leader Mitch McConnell went a step further, asking the president to reconsider whether he should even nominate anyone at all. “He has every right to nominate someone. Even if doing so will inevitably plunge our nation into another bitter and avoidable struggle, that is his right. Even if he never expects that nominee to actually be confirmed but rather to wield as an electoral cudgel, that is his right.”
“But he has also has the right to make a different choice. He can let the people decide and make this an actual legacy-building moment rather than just another campaign roadshow.”
Two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Kirk of Illinois, have said they would be willing to vote. Democrats hope that other senators facing re-election in swing states like New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will also be willing to break ranks.
“The party of Lincoln is now the party of Donald Trump,” minority leader Harry Reid told reporters on Tuesday. From the Associated Press:
Filling the vacancy left by Scalia’s unexpected death on Feb. 13 is crucial because without him, the Supreme Court is left in a 4-4 ideological knot between justices who are usually conservative and its liberal wing. The battle has invigorated both sides’ interest groups and voters who focus on abortion, immigration and other issues before the court.
“He hasn’t seen the pressure that’s going to build,” Reid said when asked if McConnell might relent. “It’s going to build in all facets of the political constituency and the country.”
No. 3 Senate leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said McConnell wanted to quickly end any talk of a nomination process proceeding because, “He wants to lock his people in because he knows the whirlwind’s coming.”
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said it was “absolutely” possible the Senate would end up holding hearings, pointing to statements by Collins, Kirk and others. Earnest said Obama has spoken in the last day to Republican lawmakers, including some on the Judiciary panel.
On Tuesday, Representative Darrell Issa quite possibly set a new standard for cynical invocations of shameful incidents in American history to defend similarly shameful practices today.
“It’s an old example, but Andy Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, if you will, in the Trail of Tears defied the Supreme Court and marched Native Americans to their deaths,” Issa said. “Remember the Trail of Tears was only possible, the murder of those Native Americans was only possible, because the military obeyed an order in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“So do I believe that the military may push back on the President if he’s given an unlawful order? Actually, I do,” Issa said. “I can see flag officers resigning rather than obeying a clearly unlawful order.”
While it is certainly true that Andrew Jackson was a genocidal maniac who perverted whatever lawful means he had at his disposal to execute the violent removal of Native Americans from their homes during his brutal rise to power, including but not limited to the Trail of Tears, along which tens of thousands of Native Americans (and freedmen) died, closing Guantanamo Bay is...not that.
On Tuesday, Dr. Ben Carson “jokingly” speculated that aides who have left his campaign might have been intentionally undermining his efforts with ostensibly incompetent spending. “We had people who didn’t really seem to understand finances...or maybe they did—maybe they were doing it on purpose.” Haha, maybe!
Actually, some have speculated that Carson’s entire campaign is a direct mail fundraising scheme, a theory that was corroborated, at least in part, by a damning Politico story last month. Immediately following that story’s publication, Carson’s finance chairman and top fundraiser, Dean Parker, resigned.
As Gawker reported last month, in the final three months of 2015 the Carson campaign paid over $9 million to companies owned by its staffers:
$4,769,922.68 to Eleventy Marketing Group. Eleventy Marketing Group’s president is Ken Dawson, who is also Carson’s chief marketing officer.
$2,871,229.50 to TMA Direct. TMA’s president and CEO is Mike Murray, who is also Carson’s senior advisor for grassroots marketing.
$1,256,436.09 to Communication Manager Source, which is run by Joanne Parker, wife of the aforementioned Dean Parker.
$138,666.06 to Vita Capital. Vita Capital’s CEO is Dean Parker.
In the same time period, the Carson campaign paid just over $10 million to other direct mail and marketing companies.
According to new campaign finance filings, Carson raised another $3.8 million in January, and had $4.1 million on hand at the end of the month. He also paid out another $123,212.76 to Vita Capital, of which former finance chairman Dean Parker is the CEO, and $103,225.72 to Communication Management Source, which Parker’s wife manages.
“Obviously, things have improved tremendously” since Parker’s resignation, Carson said Tuesday. “The morale is much better.” Carson finished sixth in the South Carolina primary this weekend.
On Tuesday, as Glenn Beck was speaking on behalf of Ted Cruz, Donald Trump barged into the gymnasium at Palo Verde High School in Summerlin, Nevada, to glad-hand and distract everyone from voting for anyone other than himself.
“We are going to have hopefully a historic night,” Trump said in an extremely truncated version of his stump speech. “I appreciate everybody being here. I wanted to be here myself and say a few words.”
“I’ll be here for a little while. If you need anything, you come see me,” he told the crowd.
On Tuesday evening, outside a caucus site in Nevada, several people dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan, for one reason or another, and bore signs expressing their support for Donald Trump.
We do not presently have a whole lot of context for these photographs, and it’s worth noting that all of them have been posted to Twitter by secondary sources: Senator Ford and radio producer Krystal Heath received their photographs from “friends” and reporter Jon Humbert his from a tipster.
Also, they look like paper cones with eyeholes hacked out.
Whether these are Leftist dickheads doing performance art, or Cruz supporters trying to ratfuck Trump, or Trump supporters trying to ratfuck Cruz by pretending Cruz is ratfucking Trump, or actual, emboldened Klansmen, their appearance coincides the the release of new data, via the New York Times, that quantifies the extent of Trump supporters’ bigotry.
According to Public Policy Polling, for example, 70 percent of Trump voters in South Carolina would prefer the Confederate battle flag to have remained aloft on their statehouse grounds, and 38 percent wish the South had won the Civil War. Meanwhile, a national YouGov poll found that 20 percent of Trump voters disagreed with the executive order which freed slaves in states that were in rebellion against the federal government—that is, the Emancipation Proclamation.
Donald Trump has won the Republican presidential caucuses in Nevada, the Associated Press reports. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are still vying for second.
Trump was favored to win the state, which marks his third consecutive victory after handily winning independents in New Hampshire and evangelicals in South Carolina. Turnout in Nevada, where Mormons and rural activists are influential, the New York Times reports, was very high.
Six in 10 caucus-goers said they were angry with the government, the AP reports. According to entrance polls, about half of those voted for Trump.
Are you scared of homeless people? Subway dancers? Anyone poor enough to take the subway at all? Do dreams of squeegee men washing windshields with their own public urination keep you up at night? It’s time you ratcheted those fears up—how does “disorder and chaos unlike anything we’ve seen or imagined” strike your fancy?
The New York Post has been crying wolf about the supposed decline of the city for a long time now. Maybe people are no longer listening, maybe the Post got bored, I don’t know. In any case, a spittle-soaked editorial by Michael Goodwin today argues that you should be scared of something much worse:
But what if a return to the sordid past is not what we should be worried about? What if the future holds something far worse, a level of disorder and chaos unlike anything we’ve seen or imagined?
The prospect of unanticipated destructive consequences from a de Blasio mayoralty emerges through recent developments. They include a new campaign to close Rikers Island and a push to extend municipal voting rights to noncitizens, including illegal immigrants.
Coming on top of City Hall’s efforts to handcuff police and decriminalize low-level infractions, to incentivize welfare and homelessness, to dumb down schools and impose burdensome wage and benefit packages on private businesses, the latest measures amount to another round of body blows against the city’s social and economic fabric.
They also add evidence to the suspicion that de Blasio and his radical twin in the City Council, Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, aim to remake New York in the image of the authoritarian fiefdoms they admire. Recall that de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, honeymooned in Cuba, supported the Sandinista Communists in Nicaragua and praised the Soviet Union.
Communism? A horse for a mayor? A collectivist utopia where you only get your fat welfare check after playing 10 rounds of the knockout game? What are we talking about here, exactly? Per the Post’s headline, it’s “a toxic brew of class and racial warfare” that we’re supposed to be worried about.
Goodwin dedicates the second half of his column to the recent news that a prominent good government group filed a complaint against the de Blasio administration over its alleged use of nonprofit groups to raise money outside of campaign finance laws and further its policy agenda. “On the known facts alone, the accusations are warranted, but they only scratch the surface of the growing rot,” he writes.
He’s right that things get hairy when too much money is wrapped up in politics. But Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo used similar groups, as do countless politicians across the country. That’s not a sign of a jackbooted revolution coming to New York. It’s a sign of politics as usual.
Back in May of 2001, culmination of our collective misdeeds Donald Trump called in to Howard Stern’s Radio Show to plug the upcoming Miss Universe competition. But when Trump learned that the day’s guest host was gossip columnist A.J. Benza (the same man whose girlfriend Trump had “stolen” several years back), what started as an innocent promotion quickly devolved into a disgusting display of dick-measuring. Donald Trump hasn’t changed a bit.
The two men spend over half an hour bickering, with particular focus on A) the timeline of each man’s relationship with former model Kara Young and B) who can embarrass the other man more. After a brief discussion of Benza’s new book, in which he apparently accuses Donald of going after his girlfriend, Trump counters with, “No, I did more. I stole his girlfriend, but I didn’t know I was stealing your girlfriend.” Adding later, “I’ve been successful with your girlfriend, I’ll tell you that. A.J., I won your girlfriend. You know it, she knows it, and everybody knows it.”
Trump continues to needle the man, asserting that he somehow “ruined” Young for Benza to the point that Benza “will never be able to go back to her.” In response, Benza starts trying to air some of Trump’s own dirty laundry, repeating (or confirming) the long-held hair plug rumors in addition to alleging Trump’s habit of sending ex-girlfriends news clippings about himself with the word “billionaire” written in Sharpie.
To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers.
Listening to the interview, the most alarming thing isn’t Trump’s deplorable backbiting, but rather the fact that the “political” Trump we see today has undergone no transformation whatsoever. It’s easy to replace Benza with Cruz or Rubio during any of the GOP debates. He’s simply traded one set of punching bags for another—these are simply wearing bad suits.
And still, Donald Trump insists he’ll change when it comes time to take his rightful place in the Oval Office, recently telling Fox New’s Greta Van Susteren, “As I get closer and closer to the goal, it’s going to get different... I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.”
