Former Laguna Beach star Kristin Cavallari began a 10-day countdown on Instagram this week. On Wednesday, she posted a photo of herself surrounded by copies of her forthcoming book Balancing in Heels with the caption, “Doing 10 days of signed giveaways for #BalancingInHeels ! Like this picture to enter to win a signed book. My publisher @rodalebooks will direct message the winner each day [confetti emoji].”
On Thursday, she posted a photo for “Day 9.”
And on Friday, she posted a photo for “Day 8.”
Today she got confused.
To be fair, today would be “Day 4" if Kristin had started the project by counting up from 1. But now everything’s all fucked up. Is tomorrow Day 6? Or Day 5?
Kindle e-readers, Anker PowerLine cables, and a Wi-Fi smart plug kick off Sunday’s best deals. Bookmark Kinja Deals and follow us on Twitter to never miss a deal. Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more.
This deal pops up every couple of months or so, but if you have a Kindle e-reader on your wish list, today’s your chance to save $20.
Like the Belkin WeMo Insight Switch, this Edimax Smart Plug allows you to remotely control any lamp, space heater, or air conditioner with your smartphone, and can even monitor energy usage over time to tell you how much the appliance costs to run. It won’t integrate with IFTTT like the WeMo line, but if that doesn’t bother you, this is a great price. [Edimax Wi-Fi Smart Plug with Energy Management, $26]
Our readers have bought tens of thousands of monochrome Brother laser printers, but if you’ve been holding out for a deal on a color model, today’s your lucky day. [Brother - HL-3170CDW Color Laser Printer, $160]
Range extenders can’t work miracles, but if a corner of your house just doesn’t quite get acceptable Wi-Fi reception, this little gadget can probably do enough to help. [TP-LINK AC750 Dual Band Wi-Fi Range Extender, $35]
For a limited time, Amazon will give you a $25 account credit when you spend $50 on eligible “luxury” beauty and grooming supplies. Included items run the spectrum from shaving gear to lotions to makeup, and that’s just for starters, so chances are, you won’t have any trouble filling your cart. Just be sure to use promo code LUX25BACK at checkout to get the account credit. [$25 Amazon account credit with $50 luxury grooming purchase]
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Sometimes parody is too real to be funny—too accurate and terrifying and nightmarish to make you laugh. This week’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ cold open is just that: too, too real.
“I really am running the best campaign, aren’t I?” says Darrell Hammond as Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. “The media is saying they haven’t seen anything like this since Germany in the 1930s.”
Earl Wolff, a safety out of N.C. State who has played for the Eagles and the Jaguars, was the victim of an armed kidnapping on February 23. According to a report yesterday from the Fayetteville Observer, Wolff was visiting friends when armed men forced him into his car. Police are unsure how long he was held for, but they eventually found him unharmed about ten miles south in Hope Mills, and his car was recovered at least 25 miles out of town in Cumberland County.
A police spokesman said that Wolff was only held for a short amount of time:
“We don’t know how long he was kidnapped,” Fayetteville police spokesman Antoine Kincade said. “But it was a short period of time.”
[...]
Kincade said investigators don’t know whether Wolff was targeted or if the crime was random.
The Observer spoke to an assistant communications director from NC State who said Wolff was, “really shook up and did not wish to discuss the incident.” Wolff is now back down in Florida, and, according to Jaguars PR man Tad Dickman, doing well.
Police apparently have a suspect in the crime. Wolff’s NFL career has been slowed by injuries, but he was competing for a starting job for a time with the Eagles. He’s on Jacksonville’s practice squad at the moment.
Donald Trump wants Ted Cruz all to himself, probably in a closed-off room with no cameras and soft lighting.
At an election night press conference in West Palm Beach on Saturday night, the Republican presidential frontrunner called on Marco Rubio to drop out of the race, a move that would likely deliver Florida voters to Trump. Trump chose a great way to challenge Cruz:
“Rubio had a very, very bad night and personally I’d call for him to drop out of the race. I think it’s probably time. … As a party we should come together and stop this foolishness ... I would love to take on Ted one-on-one. That would be so much fun. Because Ted can’t win New York. He can’t win New Jersey. He can’t win Pennsylvania. He can’t win California. I want Ted one-on-one, OK?”
If and when this one-on-one encounter occurs, we already know who’ll be the top.
According to ESPN’s Chris Mortensen, who presumably had to work for years just for the right to be the first person to tweet it, Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning will announce his retirement tomorrow. What awaits Manning in the football afterlife? Coaching? Ownership? Broadcasting? Diplomatically answering questions about hired goons and/or face-sitting? One can only speculate.
As for the Broncos, they’re now free to turn over the franchise to Brock Osweiler, who lost his job last season to a guy with a dead arm. Sounds promising!
With the threat of a perhaps the worst presidential candidate in history actually getting elected looming, groups are doing everything they can to stop Donald Trump’s rise.
According to The New York Times, an anti-tax super PAC called Club for Growth Action spent $2 million in ads targeting the Republican presidential frontrunner, to air in Illinois ahead of the March 15 primary.
“Everything hinges on March 15,” Doug Sachtleben, a spokesman for Club for Growth, told the Times. “If he were to have a solid day and win Ohio and Florida, it gets very difficult to press forward.”
Last September, Trump threatened to sue the organization, saying that claims that he would raise taxes across the board as president weren’t true.
One of the group’s most high-profile donors is Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Facebook’s first outside investor.
Ted Cruz is concerned with many issues, foremost among them is not the size of Donald Trump’s tiny trump.
Cruz took to Face The Nation in an interview aired Sunday to discuss such important issues. When asked about the “coarsening of the culture,” Cruz independently brought up Trump’s reference to the size of his own penis at last week’s Republican presidential debate.
Well, listen, there’s no doubt that there are aspects of this campaign that — that have gone into the gutter. I mean we saw moments with — with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio engaging in insults, engaging in — in off-color jokes, just getting nastier and nastier and nastier and throwing mud.
My approach, John, I’m not going to play that game. I’m not going to engage in the insults. I’m not going to throw the mud. I don’t really have any views on the size of any parts of Donald Trump’s anatomy And I’m not interested in talking about that.
He’s not even going to talk about it, even when he brings it up himself. So don’t ask!!!
Joe Biden, the most GIF-able VP we’ve ever had the privilege of knowing, put his patented shit-eating grin to good use at the Gridiron Dinner, a Washington, D.C. roast that gives politicians the opportunity to make each other cry under the pretense of “humor.” In the true spirit of an election year (AKA probably just having no fucks to give anymore), Biden lampooned everyone from the Bush family to the Supreme Court. But the vice saved his best one-liners for the sociopaths who are responsible for the circus of your nightmares: the GOP primary candidates.
The vice president finally had the proper venue to get back at America’s least-favorite robot, Marc Rubio, for when he invoked Biden at a GOP debate. (He also reminded me why I should get Snapchat.)
“Marco Rubio: That debate where Robo Rubio appeared. Look, it shows exactly why I’ve never bothered with any talking points. They just get you in trouble.
And when Marco brought my name up in a debate, he said Biden’s got 1,000 years of experience in Washington. Well, you know what that makes me? A millennial.
That’s why I’m on Snapchat—
which is perfect for me.”
While Biden did not say whether he thinks Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer, he made sure to note how much he loathes him—along with everyone else in D.C. (and pretty much everywhere).
“Ted Cruz? An inspiration to every kid in America who worries that he’ll never be able to run for president because nobody likes him. He’s running. And look, I told Barack, if you really, really want to remake the Supreme Court, nominate Cruz. Before you know it, you’ll have eight vacancies.”
But most importantly, he did everyone except the state of New Jersey a favor by demanding that Donald Trump remove Chris Christie’s brain from the jar he keeps in the basement of Trump Tower and restore the zombified governor to full human form.
“Donald has attacked every person of color – except John Boehner.
And he has demonstrated that he has a very difficult time when he has to deal with bright women of authority, like Megyn Kelly and Governor Nikki Haley. Can’t you picture it? Can’t you picture his reaction watching Hillary take the oath of office? It’s going to be worth the price of admission.
But folks, on a serious point, Trump said he likes ‘people who don’t get captured.’
What a terrible thing to say about my friend and a genuine war hero, John McCain.
So tonight I call on Donald Trump to be a man of his word – and release Chris Christie right now.”
Even though Christie denies he was held hostage at Trump’s Super Tuesday conference on March 1, we know Stockholm Syndrome when we see it. #FreeChrisChristie and let him roam in the wilds of the Garden State he calls home, that desperate little potato of a man.
According to Decision Desk, Rubio was leading out the gate. The winner must reach 50 percent of the vote, and picks up all of Puerto Rico’s 23 delegates.
Interestingly, the votes included those of some 6,000 prisoners, who were allowed to cast absentee ballots on Friday. Only about 25,000 voted in all.
As we noted yesterday, Kristin Cavallari recently attempted to count down from 10 and failed. On Wednesday, she began a 10-day countdown on Instagram in order to give away signed copies of her forthcoming book Balancing in Heels. “Doing 10 days of signed giveaways for #BalancingInHeels!” she wrote. “Like this picture to enter to win a signed book. My publisher @rodalebooks will direct message the winner each day [confetti emoji].”
Everything seemed to be okay after that—for a time. On Thursday, Kristin posted a photo for “Day 9,” and on Friday, she posted a photo for “Day 8.” On Saturday, however, she got confused:
On Thursday, Mitt Romney (unfortunately) made a speech condemning Donald Trump as a bully and a fraud. But as NBC’s Chuck Todd pointed out on Sunday, when accepting the real estate developer’s endorsement in 2012 Romney spoke glowingly of Trump’s character and business acumen.
In Thursday’s remarks, Romney enumerates Trump’s failed businesses—all of which had failed long before the failed candidate sought Trump’s endorsement. But in 2012, Romney said, “Donald Trump has shown an extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works, to create jobs for the American people. I spent my life in the private sector, not quite as successful as this guy, but successful nonetheless.”
On Sunday, Romney said: “He tries to sell himself in this campaign as nothing but successful. He’s not a loser. You know what? He’s lost time and time again. And he’s crushed a lot of people in the process.”
Chuck Todd also pointed out to Romney that Trump was also already actively agitating the paranoid nativists who are supporting him now. Indeed, aformer Romney staffer recently claimed that Trump had suggested that the campaign embrace the theory that President Barack Obama may not be a citizen of the United States “because rightwing crazies will believe it.”
“You were pretty critical of the vulgar language that he uses, the insulting of Muslims. But, you know, he was pretty insulting of Muslims four years ago. He was the face of the birther movement, which has been totally discredited,” Todd said. Romney doesn’t have an answer.
For his part, Trump rated the show “mostly false.”
Mourners lament the deaths of nine Iraqi soldiers killed fighting ISIS outside Fallujah. Photo via AP Images
On Sunday, a fuel tanker rigged with explosives detonated at a checkpoint south of Baghdad, Reuters reports, killing at least 60 people and wounding at least 70 more. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the bombing.
“A martyr’s operation with a truck bomb hit the Babylon Ruins checkpoint at the entrance of the city of Hilla, killing and wounding dozens,” a statement posted to the website of the pro-ISIS Amaq news agency claimed. Hilla is the capital of the predominantly Shi-ite Babylon province.
“It’s the largest bombing in the province to date,” Falah al-Radhi, the head of the provincial security committee, told Reuters. “The checkpoint, the nearby police station were destroyed as well as some houses and dozens of cars.”
According to Al Jazeera’s Jane Arraf, “It was apparently a suicide bombing, at a checkpoint that is usually manned by Iraq soldiers and federal police forces. A long line of cars along that key road were also caught in the blast.”
A provincial hospital reported that 23 of those killed were members of the police and other security forces. The rest were civilians.
Tonight, CNN is hosting a Democratic presidential debate in Flint, Michigan, the site of a recent poisoned water crisis. Here’s how to watch the debate online, even if you don’t have cable.
The debate will begin at 8PM ET/5PM PT. The two remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, will square off yet again on CNN’s stage. Here are all your options for watching it online:
Just minutes after the Democratic debate began in Flint, Michigan, on Sunday, the Associated Press called the Democratic presidential caucuses in Maine for Bernie Sanders. Sanders has won eight states thus far in the race for the Democratic nomination.
According to Politico, Hillary Clinton has not made an in-person appearance in the state since September:
Sanders has done well in states with largely white populations — like Maine — but has struggled among non-white voters, especially across the South.
Maine awards its 25 Democratic delegates on a proportional basis. As of Sunday morning, Clinton was leading Sanders by more than 200 pledged delegates, a margin that will narrow after Maine’s are apportioned. When superdelegates are added to Clinton’s total, she holds a commanding lead of more than 600 total delegates.
Sunday’s turnout was so high that the Maine Democratic Party is reportedly considering switching from a caucus system to a primary system in future elections.
Kenyan runners have dominated men’s and women’s distance running for decades now, and they own 18 world records, from the middle distances to the marathon. Nike has an exclusive sponsorship agreement with the Kenyan athletics federation (Athletics Kenya), wherein they pay a boatload of money for Kenyan athletes to wear their shoes and gear. They’ve been bankrolling the federation’s athletes for over 20 years, but after Chinese company Li-Ning made a competitive offer, Nike allegedly paid out hundreds of thousands in “honorariums” and “commitment bonuses”on top of the $1.3-$1.5 million they pay already, according to a report from the New York Times. Surprise! The money disappeared.
Those extra payouts have gotten both Nike and the Athletics Kenya into some hot water. Nobody debates that the money was siphoned away from where it was supposed to go, but it’s unclear who exactly is at fault, besides a few unnamed individuals:
The money was supposed to be used to help train and support poor Kenyan athletes who dream of running their way out of poverty.
Instead, it was immediately sucked out of the federation’s bank account by a handful of Kenyan officials and kept off the books.
Kenya is notorious for having an entrenched system of corruption, and they have been threatened with sanctions from Western countries in the recent past. The government is currently in the midst of a nationwide anti-corruption campaign. Thus far, Nike has not cooperated with Kenya’s investigation into the matter, and it sure appears that, at best, they made the money easy to embezzle out of the federation:
But the Kenyan authorities are suspicious. They have opened an extensive investigation, and all three Kenyan athletics officials accused of taking money from Nike have been suspended. Investigators with Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations said they had repeatedly asked Nike to provide more information. So far, they say, Nike has refused.
[...]
Now, one question the Kenyan detectives are trying to answer is whether Nike intentionally made it easy for the officials to pocket the money.
The report also mentions that Li-Ning, while trying to court the Kenyan contract, paid out $200,000 which promptly disappeared:
Soon after complaining to Nike, officials at Kenya’s running federation struck a new sponsorship deal with the Li-Ning Company, a Chinese sports empire founded by a famous gymnast, Li Ning. A marketing agent, working as a middleman between the company and the Kenyan federation, then sent nearly $200,000 to Athletics Kenya, money that a top official quickly withdrew.
The middleman? That’d be Papa Massata Diack, son of our old friend Lamine Diack, who is currently banned for life from the IAAF (athletics’ ruling body). According to documents obtained by the Times, Kenyan officials worked to secure the $500,000 commitment bonus in part to pay back Li-Ning.
Nike, for their part, hasn’t exactly concealed that the payments took place. The commitment bonus was right there in their contract, and the honorariums were earmarked for travel expenses and other specific uses when they were sent over. The Times spoke to analysts who told them that the deal between Nike and the Kenyans was probably not liable to be prosecuted or investigated under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and there are reportedly no plans for American officials to get involved.
As for this case, the specifics are murky. Obviously the Kenyan officials who made off with the money are at fault, but Nike’s role in sanctioning or not sanctioning that corruption is unclear, and might not ever be. The Times story cites multiple people who refused to speak up on or off the record for fear of their lives. It would be naive to believe that Nike could have had no idea that its generous payments could be so easily misappropriated, since Athletics Kenya has had corruption problems as long as its existed.
Kenyan anti-corruption officials have called on the American government to hold Nike accountable, but they have no incentive to do so. The United States has been pushing for Kenya to enact better anti-corruption laws, and casting suspicion on one of their largest companies’ involvement with one of Kenya’s most visible cultural exports would severely undermine their credibility.
The athletes at the center of this whole saga hold the nuclear option. Kenyan runners protested in November when the payments first became public. It’s very very unlikely they’d risk alienating the sponsors and federations involved with the Olympics (which has its own series of corruption messes) by staging some kind of protest, but they’re the ones who are left in the lurch when officials skim off the top of Athletics Kenya’s accounts. Money that is supposed to be spent developing young runners and improving infrastructure never makes it that far down, and thus the sport suffers. It’d be ridiculously idealistic to expect athletes to put their careers aside and risk their livelihoods in order to take a stand. But it might take something that seismic to shake up Athletics Kenya.
In tonight’s Democratic debate, citizens of Flint, Michigan have been asking the candidates questions that hit close to home—questions like, what can you do to promise us we won’t be poisoned, for instance. Which, for Hillary, meant swearing to get rid of every last bit of lead in the country in five years time.
More specifically, one Flint resident posed the candidates with the following prompt:
Will you make a personal promise to me right now, that as President, in your first 100 days in office, you will make it a requirement that all public water systems will remove all lead service lines throughout the entire United States and notifications made to the citizens that have such service lines?
Hillary Clinton decided to go one step further, though, saying that “we have to have an absolute commitment to getting rid of lead wherever it is. Because it’s not only in water systems, it’s also in soil and it’s in lead paint that’s found mostly in older homes.”
...So I want to exactly what you said. We will commit to a priority to change the water systems, and we will commit to within five years to remove lead from everywhere
...Water, soil, and paint—we’re gonna get rid of it.
Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Disclaimer: I’ve donated money to Bernie Sanders’ campaign and once bought a sticker from Ben Carson that I immediately regretted.
