Hours after explosions tore through the Belgian capital of Brussels, killing dozens of people, Ted Cruz called for police patrols of Muslim neighborhoods in the U.S. “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized,” the presidential candidate said in a statement.
The proposal, tucked into a larger missive about “political correctness and fear,” makes clear an important truth about Cruz: Though Donald Trump’s call for banning all Muslims from entering the United States made all the headlines, his opponent’s views on Islam are no less radical.
Cruz’s proposal to monitor Americans who are only guilty of subscribing to a religion he finds scary is wrongheaded and frightening, but it is not exactly unprecedented. After the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD enacted a sweeping program of surveillance against Muslims in the region that lasted over a decade. Those years of spying on U.S. citizens led to exactly zero leads on terrorism cases, according to a 2012 AP report.
At least ten people died at the city’s international airport when a pair of bombs exploded around 8 a.m. Tuesday. Another twenty were killed when a bomb exploded inside a subway car pulling out of the Maelbeek metro station. Between the two locations, more than 230 people were injured.
The carnage could have been worse, the New York Times reports—a third bomb planted at the airport apparently failed to detonate. Authorities were able to neutralize it on the scene with “a controlled action.”
Officials tell the AP the bombs appear “sophisticated.” ISIS has since claimed responsibility for the attack.
Belgian police have released the following security camera capture of three suspects in today’s bombing at Zaventem airport in Brussels. The explosions at the airport and a subsequent attack on one of the city’s metro stations left at least 30 dead, with hundreds more injured.
Per Belgian broadcast network VTM, via The Guardian, the two men in black at the left of the image frame are suicide bombers who detonated their belts in the Zaventem terminal. The man in khaki on the right is suspected of having fled the scene and is currently being sought by police.
Along with the approximately 30 dead in today’s attack, officials say at least another 230 people were injured. In a statement posted to the website of its media apparatus Amaq, ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack:
Islamic State fighters carried out a series of bombings with explosive belts and devices on Tuesday, targeting an airport and a central metro station in the center of the Belgian capital Brussels, a country participating in the international coalition against the Islamic State.
Islamic State fighters opened fire inside Zaventem Airport, before several of them detonated their explosive belts, as a martyrdom bomber detonated his explosive belt in the Maalbeek metro station. The attacks resulted in more than 230 dead and wounded.
Here is a wild idea you might like: the government giving money to everyone, for free. This lovely idea is growing more realistic by the week, friends!
The accepted term for this idea is “helicopter money,” a term coined by Milton Friedman, an economist who, like Dick Nixon, is generally beloved by conservatives but who had some kinda wild ideas if you dig down a little. For Friedman, dropping free money out of a helicopter in an effort to create the optimum supply of money was a thought experiment. But now, in the real world where we live, after many years of “quantitative easing” have failed to produce the high-functioning global economy that you, the consumer, demand, the idea of helicopter money—which could also have the salutary effect of reducing economic inequality—is beginning to be discussed as a real possibility, by people who wear nice suits.
Epic!!
Let us track the steady creep of helicopter money’s increasing mainstream respectability, just this week:
ITEM: A Governing Council member of the European Central Bank gives an interview in which he “warned against starting a discussion” of helicopter money. This interview succeeded in fueling the discussion.
ITEM: Bloomberg columnist Mark Gilbert writes a column exploring the idea, headlined “Milton Friedman’s ‘Helicopter Money’ Is Looking Less Crazy.” Alright!
ITEM: Mainstreamest of the mainstream Wall Street Journal economics columnist Greg Ip also writes a column on the topic today, in which he writes that helicopter money is “actually not that exotic or, for the U.S., unprecedented. It’s a logical option for any country struggling with deflation and slow growth.”
Dude if this shit happens... it’s gonna be awesome.
The onetime vice presidential candidate has been tapped to preside over a new reality court show that would premiere next year. She signed a deal in February with Montana-based production company Warm Springs, a source close to the process tells PEOPLE.
“It’s a production deal,” the source explains. “What happens next is she’ll meet with stations, make a pilot and sell it.”
PEOPLE adds that Palin’s TV courtroom team includes a “TV executive who found Judge Judy and Judge Joe Brown.” At last, the diametric opposite of the no-nonsense Judge Judith Sheindlin: someone who is complete nonsense. This sounds more or less like the worst idea for a show, which might make it actually perfect trash TV. Jury’s out till Palin’s in!
Palin already has a string of shows under her belt, including Sarah Palin’s Alaska on TLC and Amazing America with Sarah Palin on the Sportsman Channel, as well as a contract with Fox News, from which she was dropped in 2015. And one day, her courtroom show will be canceled, too, if it ever gets made. It’s the circle of life wherein she’s the baboon and each TV show is a sickly, this-close-to-stillborn Simba.
In addition to setting up a system for online voter registration, the new law also eliminates government officials called “special registration deputies,” who set up and operate community voter registration drives. Voter registration drives have historically been used in poor and minority neighborhoods, where voter turnout is often low, to encourage people to register.
The ostensible rationale for eliminating these drives in the state is that online registration will render them unnecessary. That’s true, for people who have ID and easy internet access. In other words: For people who have money. And as Project Vote notes, no other state has cut registration drives while rolling out online registration.
If you’re a poor person without ID and you’d like to register to vote, instead of working for a few minutes with the person who is canvassing your neighborhood, you’ll now have to travel to your county or municipal clerk and register there—a much more arduous proposition. Unfortunately, doing so would be kind of a moot point. Scott Walker—whose governorship has been characterized mostly by an outright contempt for the poor—made voting without a photo ID illegal in 2011, whether you’re registered or not.
The decision by a Florida jury to grant $140 million in damages for a story on Gawker.com about a Hulk Hogan sex tape was extraordinary. The number is far larger than even the plaintiff himself had asked for in relief. It’s a huge pay-day for an indiscretion that would have been quickly forgotten, one among many in the professional wrestler’s personal life.
The enormous size of the verdict is chilling to Gawker Media and other publishers with a tabloid streak, but it is also a flag to higher courts that this case went wildly off the rails. The plaintiff’s lawyers, with the occasional assist from our witnesses, successfully painted Gawker as representative of an untrammeled internet that good and decent people should find frightening and distasteful. Emotion was permitted to trump the law, and key evidence and witnesses were kept from the jury.
A state appeals court and a federal judge have already held repeatedly that the 2012 commentary and short video excerpt, which joined an existing conversation and explored the public’s fascination with celebrity sex tapes, were newsworthy. We have had our day in trial court, and we lost. We will have our day back in appeals court, and we will be vindicated.
Hogan did not sue us, as he has claimed, to recover damages from the emotional distress he purportedly experienced upon our revelation in 2012 of a sexual encounter with his best friend’s wife, Heather Cole (then Heather Clem). It turns out this case was never about the sex on the tape Gawker received, but about racist language on another, unpublished tape that threatened Hogan’s reputation and career.
As our lawyers argued in legal briefs that were kept secret by the trial judge from the public—and even from me—until an appeals court unsealed them on Friday, Hogan filed the claim because he was terrified that one of the other tapes, which memorialized his rant about his daughter dating “fucking niggers,” might emerge. As I have come to learn, Hogan himself put it in a text message to his best friend, the radio shock-jock Bubba Clem, days after we published our story: “We know there’s more than one tape out there and a one that has several racist slurs were told. I have a [pay-per-view special] and I am not waiting for anymore surprises….” I had suspicions, but it is now clear that Hogan’s lawsuit was a calculated attempt to prevent Gawker, or anyone else who might obtain evidence of his racism, from publishing a truth more interesting and more damaging than a revelation about his sex life.
Moreover, the basis of his claim that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy during his sexual encounters with Heather Cole, then Bubba’s wife, was that Hogan didn’t know he was being filmed. From the documents released by the appellate court, it is now clear that this is contradicted by multiple statements Bubba made to FBI agents asserting that Hogan knew full well that Bubba had wired his bedroom for video and was filming. We were barred from presenting that crucial evidence to the jury, or asking Bubba how much his most intimate friend knew about the couple’s sexual practices.
Hogan initially blamed his friend for the tape’s release, but later settled his lawsuit against Bubba for the sum of $5,000 and a pledge to play the role that Hogan needed him to in the litigation against Gawker. Bubba complied, asserting his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination to avoid answering our questions about Hogan’s role in the tape’s genesis; the trial court allowed him to keep his end of his settlement bargain and prevented us from putting him on the witness stand.
For his part, Hogan testified that he knew nothing about the other tapes of him and Cole. I learned on Friday that there was substantial evidence that he and one of his lawyers David Houston had watched the tapes—including FBI surveillance audio recorded as they were doing so—and that they were aware that one of them contained racist epithets. The trial court barred us from presenting that evidence to the jury as well.
So constitutional issues aside, we now know that the trial was a sham from the start. The real, and actually embarrassing, reason Hogan sued Gawker to begin with was hidden from the jury, from the public, and from me, while he put on a show about being violated by the publication of nine seconds of his sex life, after years of boasts about his prowess on talk radio and shows like Howard Stern.
The absence of essential testimony and evidence explains why Gawker Media was found liable in this first round in the courts. It is harder to explain the immense sums awarded to compensate Hogan for his emotional distress and economic loss.
There is a reason why judges typically hew to the First Amendment and protect free speech from the censorious impulses of juries. It is specifically designed to protect minority opinion from majority outrage. Freedom of expression will always be more popular in principle than in practice. We want to be free to express ourselves, but are less enthusiastic when that freedom is exercised by others with whom we disagree. Nobody likes a critic.
The jurors sent a message by the only means they had available, through damages. They appear to have bought the argument that a single popular article, which carried no advertising and which stimulated no sustained increase in traffic, had increased Gawker’s brand value by $15 million, and that the wrestler should be paid $4.95 for each view of the video on Gawker’s sites as well as many others over which we had no control, racking up an additional $35 million. And they awarded him $60 million for emotional distress with precious little evidence that he actually experienced any, principally a welling of tears backstage when Hogan’s media tour made a stop by Kathie Lee. The median jury award for wrongful death cases in the United States, according to a 2004 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, is $961,000.
Hogan’s attorneys played this state circuit court trial as a popularity contest between the local celebrity and the miscreants from New York. It was as staged as a professional wrestling bout, with victory of the crowd favorite over the “deviant” bloggers—who were held responsible for internet pornography, the dangers of search engines to children, and the indecency of what Hogan’s attorney Ken Turkel described as “Fifth Avenue” publishers—ordained from the start. It was a classic obscenity trial disguised as a test of a person’s right to privacy.
I can understand disapproval from other journalists of the explicit portion of video, even if screenshots had already been published elsewhere. They can criticize the language of A.J. Daulerio’s article, despite the fact that the words were accepted even by the plaintiff as newsworthy.
Back in 2012, to the largely young and metropolitan audience of Gawker, and to those who found the story through news reports and search engines, the post was not particularly offensive. It was their choice to click on the headline and the play button. But the climate has changed since Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton made their names with celebrity sex tapes; they seem like artifacts from an earlier and more licentious internet era. Internet journalists, like all journalists, are subject to the criticism of their peers and readers, and adjust accordingly. That is how free speech defines its own limits.
In this litigation, however, taste and changing cultural norms are not at issue. A federaljudge and three members of Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal have already found the entire story, including the video excerpt, protected by the First Amendment as a matter of general interest and public concern—another fact that we were not allowed to tell the jury. Even if some could not see the point of Gawker’s initial story, the saga has become ever more newsworthy as details have emerged about the cover-up Hulk Hogan attempted and the yawning gap between the charming showman he presents, and the calculating businessman he is.
Celebrities, especially ones as public about their personal and sex life as Hulk Hogan, have a narrower zone of privacy than ordinary people. Regardless of questions about Gawker’s editorial standards and methods, self-promoters should not be allowed to seek attention around a specific topic and then claim privacy when the narrative takes an unwelcome turn. The benefits of publicity come at a price; and for someone like Hogan, whose whole life is a performance, it’s a full-time and long-term commitment.
On the stand, Hogan claimed his sexual boasts and inconvenient public statements fell under the umbrella of his “artistic liberty” as an actor. He can be untruthful when in character, he admitted cheerfully, and he is in character whenever he leaves his home. That split personality was revealed at its most bizarre when he gave an example: Hulk Hogan the character has a bigger penis than Terry Bollea the man, he said. Hogan’s is public, Bollea’s is private, but the fact is that most of us can’t tell the character from the man—especially when the trademark bandana is worn by both, even in court.
Fine, that confusion may be a symptom of the modern era, in which everyday life itself becomes a performance on talk radio, reality television, or social media. Indeed, Hogan’s lead counsel spent some time explaining to the jury the concept of “scripted reality,” in which performance and real life are blurred. We heard an echo of the argument recently, when a spokesperson for Donald Trump dismissed his long history of misogynist remarks as the words of “a television character” rather than a presidential candidate.
But these always-on celebrities should not be surprised when their credibility is questioned, and journalists attempt to sort out what is real and what is fake. That’s our job, and we intend to pursue it both in the courts and on the page.
In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, housing is expensive and in short supply. All throughout the Bay Area, cities are discussing where the hell all their schoolteachers are supposed to live.
It’s well known that housing costs in booming Bay Area cities are out of range of most public school teachers, who earn middle class salaries. And yet all of these cities have public schools. Gotta put those teachers somewhere. The most popular current out-of-the-box solution for this issue seems to be: build designated affordable housing for teachers. USA Today reports that San Francisco, Cupertino (where Apple is headquartered), Palo Alto, and Santa Clara are all building or considering building teacher-specific housing—although not enough to meet the need of all the teachers. In Mountain View, where Google is headquartered, the school district is also considering various ways it could build housing for teachers. The district has the land, but Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph tells the local paper that there is another barrier to the project: “’We have a lot of land in our district that is available for us to use, but some of the most ideal spots that we have are actually not in places (zoned for) high density,’ Rudolph said. ‘The residents that live there would probably put up a fight against putting up high-density property.’”
Yes: The residents of this rich town with a six-figure median income and a housing crunch so acute that the people who teach its children cannot afford to live there might object to the construction of an apartment building to house those teachers because it is too “high-density.” This is dumb.
The real issue here, besides selfish rich people, is that teachers are but a symptom of the problem. Would it be nice to build designated affordable housing for teachers? Sure. And when you’re done with that, please build affordable housing for the firefighters, cops, sanitation workers, retail employees, restaurant workers, janitors, social workers, nurses, carpenters, roofers, and all of the other lower-or-middle-class people who are necessary to keep your city running but do not make enough money to live there.
We need affordable housing for teachers. But more to the point, we need affordable housing for everyone who can’t afford housing. One way to do this is to raise everyone’s wages. Another way to do this is to build more fucking housing. Better yet, do both.
And don’t complain about it, unless you want to teach everyone’s kids yourself.
First, it was offensively inauthentic sushi at the Oberlin dining halls. Now, a new—and somehow worse—wickedness torments America’s students: Someone drew the word “Trump” on the ground at a college.
Thanks to a new report in the Emory Wheel, I’ve learned two things: the student paper at Emory is named the Wheel, and a bunch of these kids are extreme weenie babies, so sensitive and unprepared for the mild psychic hurdles of our shared reality that they are literally crying out in pain because of a letters they saw when they turned their heads in certain directions.
Because those letter made up words. And not just any words—political words (Words = literal murder? Unclear):
Students protested yesterday at the Emory Administration Building following a series of overnight, apparent pro-Donald Trump for president chalkings throughout campus.
[...]
Many students carried signs featuring slogans such as “Stop Trump” or “Stop Hate” and an antiphonal chant addressed to University administration, led by College sophomore Jonathan Peraza, resounded “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” throughout the Quad.
[...]
“I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” one student said. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school,” she added.
The students in question seem unable to distinguish between a wall with “Trump 2016" written on it and Donald Trump, the person:
Singh reported having seen multiple chalkings that read “Trump 2016” between Cox Hall Bridge and the Dobbs University Center (DUC). “What I also saw on the steps near Cox [Hall] Bridge was ‘Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016,’” he said. “That was a bit alarming. What exactly is the inevitable? Why does it have to be accepted?”
It’s true that Trump’s vile campaign has moved straight past the bounds of rhetoric into actual acts of violence, but chalk drawings on a college campus are not instances of such acts. The proposed solution to an imagined non-problem is as vague and fractious as you’d guess:
One student asked if Emory would send out a University-wide email to “decry the support for this fascist, racist candidate” to which Wagner replied, “No, we will not.” One student clarified that “the University doesn’t have to say they don’t support Trump, but just to acknowledge that there are students on this campus who feel this way about what’s happening … to acknowledge all of us here.”
Better yet: Free pizza with pepperoni in the shape of a smiley face? Or, short of a pointless email “to acknowledge all of us here,” the university could reject fascism by acting itself like some sort of fascist police apparatus, as is apparently the plan:
The University will review footage “up by the hospital [from] security cameras” to identify those who made the chalkings, Wagner told the protesters. He also added that if they’re students, they will go through the conduct violation process, while if they are from outside of the University, trespassing charges will be pressed.
It’s been a long day (terror, politics, grief, my chicken sandwich had a piece of chicken bone in it) and this gentleman from Seattle agrees, which is why he’s gone berserk and up a tree, and man, he just won’t come down.
According to KOMO News in Seattle, the above man “has climbed to the top of Seattle’s iconic Sequoia tree, next to the Macy’s store downtown, and apparently is refusing to come down.” He’s also reportedly “flipping the bird” at spectators and throwing apples at nearby law enforcement.
You can watch a live stream of Tree Guy right here, or just take a look in the mirror for the livest “stream” of all—because I tell you what, this man is all of us.
In 2014, in San Francisco, Alex Nieto, carrying a Taser for his shift as a bouncer, was shot repeatedly by four police officers, and died. None of the officers were indicted criminal charges stemming from his death; this month they were cleared in a civil case. But the broader consequences of their actions remain.
Jezebel has covered the unchill wave of riches washing over San Francisco, as tech bros spread across Northern California’s crown jewel. But the death of Nieto, as Rebecca Solnit writes in The Guardian, is a definitive mark of what the city’s become: historically a place of peace and reinvention, it is now a place where minorities, the working class, poor and homeless are no longer welcome in the city they helped create.
Nieto, writes Solnit, “died because a series of white men saw him as a menacing intruder in the place he had spent his whole life.”
They thought he was possibly a gang member because he was wearing a red jacket. Many Latino boys and men in San Francisco avoid wearing red and blue because they are the colors of two gangs, the Norteños and Sureños – but the colors of San Francisco’s football team, the 49ers, are red and gold.
Nieto was not a gang member. He was a bouncer who had taken community college courses in criminal justice and interned with the San Francisco juvenile probation department. He was the child of two Mexican immigrants, a youth counselor as a teen and a Buddhist as an adult. He was active in his community with a good group of friends.
But on the night of March 21, 2014, Nieto was viewed as an outsider by the white transplants who’d moved near his neighborhood park where he was trying to grab a snack.
It all began when Nieto encountered a man named Evan Snow, who was walking his unruly Siberian husky puppy. Snow’s dog wanted Nieto’s chips and went for them, barking and howling while Snow testified in the recent civil trial that he was distracted by a woman “jogger’s butt.” Nieto had been backed on top of a bench by the dog and Snow said he pulled out a taser, a weapon used on his job as a bouncer, and pointed it at both the dog and Snow. But Snow still didn’t retrieve his dog. Instead, he yelled at Nieto. Solnit writes:
Snow apparently used a racial slur, but would not later give the precise word. As he left the park, he texted a friend about the incident. His text, according to his testimony, said, “in another state like Florida, I would have been justified in shooting Mr Nieto that night” – a reference to that state’s infamous “stand your ground” law, which removes the obligation to retreat before using force in self-defence. In other words, he apparently wished he could have done what George Zimmerman did to Trayvon Martin: execute him without consequences.
These are the people—like Justin Keller, who wants all of the homeless pushed out of the city—who define San Francisco now. God help us.
As Nieto tried to calm down, two more men named Tim Isgitt and Justin Fritz passed him. They say they saw Nieto fidgeting “nervously.” Neither men saw the pup showdown, and had no context for his fright. Isgitt told others as they left the park to watch out for the nervous guy—though Fritz didn’t notice anything odd, nor did another man named Robin Bullard, who said Nieto was just “sitting there.” Isgitt still urged his partner to call 911, and Fritz told the dispatcher there was a “foreign” “Hispanic” man with a black handgun in the park. When the dispatcher asked Fritz what Nieto was doing, he said “just pacing, it looks like he might be eating chips or sunflowers, but he’s resting a hand kind of on the gun.”
Police arrived five minutes later, shooting Nieto upwards of 40 times after they say he pointed his weapon at them while presenting a threatening stance. They testified they were afraid for their lives; they thought the taser was a gun, despite the bright yellow strip along the taser’s side that differentiates it.
Like George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, the Cleveland cops who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, and Darren Wilson, who killed Mike Brown, the San Francisco cops described their victim with racist imagery—a villain with Marvel comic strength, somehow borrowed from a script from The Birth of a Nation.
The police had testified as though Nieto had been a superhuman or inhuman opponent, facing them off even as they fired again and again, then dropping to a “tactical sniper posture” on the ground, still holding the Taser with its red laser pointing at them.
The jury in the officers’ trial ruled in favor of them, not Nieto. Protests on the streets followed; Northern California locals like myself are furious but not surprised. Nieto’s murder is a reflection of how far San Francisco has come: from an all-inclusive haven for weirdos to “a cruel place and a divided one,” as Solnit writes—a wealthy enclave of those who describe Mission District natives as “possibly foreign” threats to their peaceful evening dog walk, and get those natives shot.
The indictment against the last defendant charged in the armed occupation earlier this year of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was unsealed yesterday. As of Tuesday afternoon, Jake Ryan, of Plains, Montana, was one of two defendants (out of 26) still at large—the other is Travis Cox.
Ryan’s parents have said that they don’t know where their son is. “We’ve got stuff going on here that is in progress,” his father, Dan Ryan, told the Guardian. “We’re still considering what options there are.” His mother, Roxsanna Ryan added, “At this point, we’re trying to work with local people.”
In a press release Monday evening, Sanders County Sheriff Tom Rummel said the FBI notified him last week that an arrest warrant had been issued for Ryan for his involvement in the Malheur occupation:
Since that time I have been in contact with the Ryan family and the FBI in order to work out a peaceful resolution to this situation. At this time the Ryan Family has sought the counsel of an attorney who is working with the FBI on the charge or charges against Jake.
From the start of this, it has been my intention to make sure that Jake Ryan’s safety and rights are provided for, and I will continue to do just that. With that said, I want you to know that Federal Officers have not operated in this county without my knowledge. At this point in time, I have no evidence to suggest that Jake Ryan is in this county. At this time, I believe a peaceful resolution is being achieved and outside citizen involvement will not be needed.
Many connected to the Bundy family have been agitating for militia sympathizers to provide assistance to the Ryan family in resisting Jake’s arrest. “Sanders County Sheriff Tom Rummel has held off the arrest for nearly a week because his conscience is bothered, but so far he is not ready stand up fully to these thugs,” reads a message posted to the Bundy Ranch Facebook page on Satuday. “We know it is a Sheriffs authority and duty to stand up to these crimes and defend our Constitution, even to arrest those agents if needed. Our Sheriffs must stand.”
In assuring Facebook users in Sanders County (and beyond) that “I want you to know that Federal Officers have not operated in this county without my knowledge,” Rummel is alluding to a central tenet of the sovereign citizen movement—of which the Bundy family is a part—that the county sheriff is the most powerful law enforcement officer in any given county, and that federal agents must acquire his or her consent before taking action in that county.
According to the Billings Gazette, “Rummel was first elected in 2010, and campaigned on the promise of being a ‘constitutional’ sheriff, which he defined as ‘keeping an eye on what’s going on as far as individual rights, and the encroachment of citizens’ rights, are concerned.’”
Speaking to the Associated Press on Tuesday, Sheriff Rummel seemed to warn those who might want to involve themselves to steer clear. “There is no standoff, and I want to keep it that way,” he said. “I don’t need anybody showing up in my county that’s only going to add tension to the situation.”
Jeanette Finicum, widow of the man shot by Oregon State Police in the final days of the occupation, wrote yesterday: “For those of you that have been keeping up with the plight of the Ryan family in Montana, they have decided to make a stand.” She continued, “After much fasting and prayer, the family has said that they have decided ‘the arrests stop here.’”
One of the other defendants named in the federal indictment, Shawna Cox, who is on house arrest, posted on Facebook that she’d spoken with the Ryan family. “If you would like to help please be on stand by,” she wrote. “Or if you arrive in Plains be prepared to camp or have friends or relatives close by to reside with until called to duty.”
On Tuesday, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics announced that it had chosen Seth Agata, a former aide to Governor Andrew Cuomo, as its new director. Agata is the third consecutive JCOPE director with close ties to the governor whose government it is supposed to hold accountable.
“Seth Agata is a tremendous choice for executive director of the commission,” JCOPE’s chairman, Daniel Horwitz, said in a statement. “He brings a wealth of knowledge, experience and integrity to the position.” Horwitz, incidentally, is Bernie Madoff’s old lawyer.
At a brief public meeting on Tuesday morning, the Albany Times Union reports, Horwitz only said he hoped the nine-month-long search to replace former Executive Director Letitzia Tagliafierro, who left JCOPE in July for a job at the Cuomo-controlled Department of Taxation and Finance, would come to a close soon. Not present at Tuesday’s meeting was JCOPE’s chief of staff and special counsel (and former State Police First Deputy Superintendent) Kevin Gagan, who’d applied for the executive director job and was seen as a favorite for the position.
A letter to the Times Union in July, following Tagliafierro’s exit, from four commissioners appointed by state legislative leaders, warned that the next JCOPE director should come from outside Cuomo’s sphere of influence. “Needless to say, this appointment and the cavalier approach taken only foretells more bad news for JCOPE. Designed to be ‘independent,’ the incessant interference continues,” it read.
“If the next Executive Director is not hired from outside State government after an exhaustive search, the public trust will be inexorably destroyed.”
On Tuesday evening, Donald Trump threatened Senator Ted Cruz, via Twitter, over a social media advertising campaign funded by the anti-Trump political action committee Make America Awesome. The campaign included a nude photograph of Melania Trump, originally shot for British GQ in 2000.
The point of the campaign, BuzzFeed News reports, is to consolidate socially conservative Mormon voters around Ted Cruz. The Republican strategist behind the super PAC, Liz Mair, said that the Melania Trump ad was being promoted on Instagram, specifically to LDS women.
In response, Trump tweeted, “Lyin’ Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!” He also deleted an earlier version of the tweet:
The revised tweet still raises more questions than it answers, though. Given all of the “beans” that have already been “spilled” on Heidi Cruz (e.g. she hated Iowa; she secretly funded Ted’s senate campaign; she’s Ana Gasteyer) and the new tweet’s linguistic ambiguity, it’s possible that Trump’s threat is not figurative, but literal. (In which case, we can only say: Whatever you’re into, man, as long as she’s into it, too.)
But! Setting that possibility aside, we’ll take the bait: What figurative beans might Donald Trump have on Senator Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi Cruz, currently on leave from her job as a managing director in Goldman Sachs’ Houston office?
A mentally ill death row inmate convicted of shooting a city inspector in 2005 was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday evening in Huntsville, Texas, only hours after an appeal for a ban filed by his attorneys was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Adam Kelly Ward, who was found guilty of murder in 2007, was refused his last appeal two hours before his execution despite efforts from his attorneys, who argued that his mental impairment constituted sufficient grounds for a stay on his sentence.
“The crime for which Mr. Ward received the penalty of death was an act inextricable from the delusions and paranoia fed by his disabling bipolar disorder,” Ward’s lawyers stated in their petition.
Ward was pronounced dead on March 22 at 6:34 P.M., according to Reuters.
In June 2005, Ward came across Michael Walker, a city code inspector who was observing a pile of junk outside of his home in Commerce, Texas, and taking pictures with a camera. An argument ensued between the two men.
When the city official told Ward he was going to dial for assistance, Ward became convinced that the police were en route to kill him.
After that, Ward procured a .45-caliber pistol from his home and repeatedly fired at Walker, hitting him nine times.
At the time of the incident, “Ward said [in a videotaped confession] he believed Commerce officials long conspired against him and his father,” according to the Associated Press. Ward also was “described in court filings as a hoarder who had been in conflict with the city for years.” Ultimately, he claimed he had killed Walker in self-defense.
“Only time any shots were fired on my behalf was when I was matching force with force,” Ward said in an interview with the AP in February. “I wish it never happened but it did, and I have to live with what it is.”
While a camera and a cell phone were found on the victim, it was confirmed that Walker was not carrying a firearm on the scene.
During his first trial in 2007, Ward’s attorneys submitted evidence to prove that he suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which resulted in paranoia and delusional behavior. After he was convicted, his lawyers then pressed for them to be presented in proceeding appellate hearings.
Ward’s case centered around the meaning of mental impairment, which the high court ruled to be appeal “improper and without merit.”
As the AP reported:
“The justices have ruled that mentally impaired people, generally those with an IQ below 70, may not be executed. However, the court has said mentally ill prisoners may be executed if they understand they are about to be put to death and why they face the punishment.
State attorneys, who said evidence showed Ward’s IQ as high as 123, said the late appeal did not raise a new issue, meaning it was improper and without merit. They also disputed claims of changing attitudes about executing the mentally ill.”
In a report published by the ACLU in 2009, there are estimations that “five to ten percent of death row inmates suffer from a severe mental illness.” As of now, there have been 535 executions in Texas since 1976, ranking it at the top for cumulative executions in the U.S. since that year.
Ward will be the fifth man to be executed in the state, and the ninth nationally, since the beginning of 2016.
Following the deadly terror attacks in Brussels on Tuesday, Ted Cruz declared, “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” The NYPD’s director of communications responded to this horrifying proposal with a snappy tweet.
“Are our nearly 1k Muslim officers a ‘threat’ too?” J. Peter Donald asked Cruz. “It’s hard to imagine a more incendiary, foolish statement.” This was very well received by a certain kind of person.
Brian Beutler is a senior editor at the New Republic. Bradd Jaffy is a senior editor at NBC. Zeke Miller is a political reporter at Time.
Presumably, all of them—including Donald, of course, but in fairness he’s more or less paid to forget these kinds of things—ought to know that the NYPD spent more than a decade spying on Muslims in New York and beyond, generating precisely zero counter-terrorism leads but providing many police officers the opportunity to learn the rules of cricket.
In fact, it was only in January that the city agreed to appoint an independent civilian monitor to oversee the NYPD’s counterterrorism strategies, as part of a settlement agreement in a pair of lawsuits filed over the invasive and unlawful security practices. (Even after the notorious Demographics Unit was disbanded, many in the Muslim and Arab-American community feared that the surveillance apparatus remained intact, under a different name.)
“If this adds transparency and a level of public trust that we’re continuing to keep the city safe, but in a lawful way, we welcome and embrace that,” Lawrence Byrne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner of legal matters, said. “We have nothing to hide.”
Turnout in Arizona on Tuesday was high, the New York Times reports, as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump won the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries, respectively. For the Republicans, Arizona is a winner-take-all state, awarding Trump 58 delegates.
Police have been called to help with traffic control in some places, while one polling place ran out of ballots. Some voters wore wide-brimmed hats or carried umbrellas for shade. Others sat in lawn chairs they brought from home.
Dozens of people were lined up before voting started at 6 a.m. at a central Phoenix polling place, and hundreds were in line there by mid-afternoon.
The lines are the result of Maricopa County — home to metro Phoenix — cutting back the number of polling sites to save money. The county had 200 polling places in the 2012 presidential primary and just 60 this year. It had 700 for the last general election.
The state’s 75 Democratic delegates will be awarded proportionally.
Bernie Sanders addressed a rally with nearly 15,000 people present in San Diego, California on Tuesday night. About 30 minutes into his nearly hour-long speech, Sanders said, “We will crush ISIS.” He used more aggressive language regarding ISIS than he did earlier in the day in the wake of the Brussels attacks. At the same time, Sanders also went on to talk about his opposition to perpetual war.
Delegates in both states are distributed proportionally.
Ted Cruz won the Republican caucus in Utah on Tuesday, the New York Times reports, capturing all 40 delegates. Mitt Romney recorded a get-out-the-vote call for Cruz on Monday, and an anti-Trump PAC encouraging Mormons to vote for the Texas senator promoted a nude photo of Melania Trump on Instagram.
Earlier this afternoon, a man in Seattle decided to climb up a tree, throw apples at the surrounding medics, and otherwise refuse any attempt at aid. Twelve hours later, he is showing no signs of letting up. In fact, it looks like our Man in Tree has even begun to build himself a home.
In the initial hours, crews brought a crane to the scene to attempt to negotiate with the man, but to no avail, as he was “tossing small branches, orange peels, pine cones and other materials at rescuers and claimed to be armed with a knife.” He also apparently requested Camel Crush cigarettes.
After hours of refusing to come down, vigilante cosplayer Phoenix Jones decided that he just might have what ailed the man (in the tree).
Self-proclaimed citizen superhero “Phoenix Jones,” who has apparently dealt with Man in Tree before (in what capacity remains inconclusive) came bearing a sandwich, beer, and Newports for the man, demanding to be allowed to help. The cops, however, denied the man’s LARP request.
“We know him. We’ve dealt with him for years. This is how he acts and this is what he needs,” Phoenix Jones said in a tweet, dismayed that the cops turned away his offer to help. Whether or not the cigarettes would have coaxed the man out of the tree has yet to be seen, but we feel confident that the, as far as what the man “needs” goes, medical help of some kind would probably be more effective than whatever Phoenix has in his brown paper bag.
Either way, Man in Tree is nothing if not self-sufficient. As you can see in the video below, after spending a good fifteen minutes unsuccessfully trying to make himself comfortable, he decided to take destiny into his own hands.
If you’re still not totally sure what’s going on in the clip above, Man in Tree is breaking the branches keeping him from certain death (or at the very least, blinding pain) in order to build himself his very own tree bed.
Or as the KOMO News cameraman declared: “Yeah, he made a full-on fort. Like, Bear Grylls style.”
Fortunately, Man in Tree finished his initial remodeling just in time for the cameraman’s shift change, affording us an entirely new angle:
Man in Tree does more than just Tree dweller, though. He is also Man—meaning that he has bodily functions to take care of just like the rest of us. Here, you can see what is presumably Man in Tree relieving himself in some capacity.
It’s hard to tell whether he’s urinating or merely taking care of a particularly maddening itch, but either way one thing is certain—Man in Tree is human. Just like everyone of us.
You can watch Man in Tree in real time here if, like me, you’ve developed an unhealthy level of investment in his emotional and physical well-being. And if you have any information about Man in Tree at all, please do let us know.
