Last week, senior advisor Rebekah Caldwell Mason left the staff of Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, with whom she allegedly had an affair. The circumstances of her resignation—whether she volunteered it, or if it was requested or forced—remain murky but today, Republicans in the state House moved to impeach Bentley.
In a news conference this afternoon, Rep. Ed Henry told reporters that Bentley had “betrayed the trust” of his constituents and thus should no longer serve: Via AL.com:
“We’re looking at this governor who has essentially betrayed the trust of the people of Alabama through actions and lies that have caused us to have some doubt about his leadership,” Henry said.
“And as such, the only course the people of Alabama have to address this issue is through the impeachment process.”
Henry said that he hopes the House will vote on Bentley’s impeachment next week.
Henry and his backers face a challenge. According to the AP, the impeachment resolution will likely be sent to the House Rules Committee, and it’s not certain to move past that point. If it does, it will have to pass a vote in the House before being referred to the Senate, which would then hold a trial.
Another issue is that, perAL.com, the current legislative session ends next month, and there are only 12 meeting days between then and now. Rep. Mac McCutcheon, who chairs the state’s rules committee, told the AP that it’s unlikely the issue will be resolved by that point.
Bentley issued a statement today which said in part:
There is a lot of work to do before I end my term in office in 2019,” Bentley said. “I have laid out a strategic plan for success, and I will continue to focus my efforts on making Alabama a great state.
“That is what the people of Alabama overwhelmingly elected and re-elected me to do. I will continue to work hard for them every day.”
At his press conference, Henry stated that if Bentley “truly loves the people of this state, he’ll step down.”
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Inside, you’ll find discounts on shirts, jackets, beanies, gloves, and more. Just note that this is a Gold Box deal, meaning these prices are only available today, or until sold out.
If you need a little extra push to get out and go for a run, Amazon will sell you a pair of Mizuno Wave running shoes for just $50 today. These shoes typically sell for about $60-$70 around the web, and you even get to pick your favorite color; Just click through to the product page to find the color selector.
If your phone supports Quick Charge 2.0 (or even 3.0), we’ve found great deals on a compatible car charger, USB battery pack, and multi-port dekstop charger today on Amazon. Just be sure to note the promo codes below to score the discounts.
Target’s eBay storefront is currently selling the newly released The Force Awakens Blu-ray for $17, the best price we’ve seen so far. Granted, that’s not an enormous discount, but if you were going to pick up a copy anyway (and let’s face it, you were going to pick up a copy anyway), it’s a nice chance to save a few bucks.
Reader Will sent us quite the deal tip today, and rather than editorialize, I’m just going to share his email in full (emphasis mine).
Hello,
Amazon has an insane deal on a gaming PC made by CybertronPC at the moment. I purchased it a few days ago after helping a friend pick out a new PC to buy with his tax return and some savings. When we saw it I had him order immediately and figured worst case it wont ship and we will find something else. Hell at this price I bought one because it was too good to pass up. I didn’t think it would actually ship as I figured it had to be a pricing mistake, but I received mine today.
We bought it when it was listed at $1213 on the weekend and it has since jumped to $1698 (as of 10am CST 4/5/16), but this is still a crazy deal. List Price is $3999 (haha) and looked like Amazon was to be selling them at $3299. To put this deal in perspective I normally build all my PC’s as its fun and much cheaper, but I cannot build this PC for less than $2618 if a purchased all of the parts myself off Amazon. You can take a look at the parts yourself and you’ll quickly see I’m not exaggerating. I’m sure I could shed maybe $100-200 if I shopped around for the parts going outside of Amazon, but the point is theres 8 PC’s in stock at a price that would be insane for a gamer looking for a new PC to pass up.
Link to deal is below. Only the Red version is listed at this price.
There are only a few left in stock, so don’t miss out.
We’ve seen a lot of deals on motion sensing night lights, but this model from Etekcity is unique in that it can automatically turn on when it detects a power outage, and will even work as a flashlight or portable lantern while untethered from the wall, thanks to its built-in battery backup. Amazon has it listed today for $17, but promo code DJJEFES6 will save you an extra $3.
Sony’s Alpha A7 famously crammed a full frame image into an impossibly compact body, and the A7 II adds new goodies like 5-axis optical image stabilization and improved autofocus. If you’re ready to make a serious investment in photography, you can get the body today for $1199. That’s about $500 less than elsewhere, and the best deal we’ve seen.
Mpow’s Swift Bluetooth headphones dominated 2015, and the company’s ergonomic Cheetah line looks like a great sequel. Note that this is actually the second generation of Cheetah earbuds; Mpow claims to have improved their water resistance this time around, making them perfect for exercise.
Modern Motif Socks: Metropolitan and Jefe Collection, $31 with code CB6K499Q
These Modern Motif socks prove that men’s dress socks don’t need to be drab and colorless, and today on Amazon, you can save $5 on a box of five pairs. There are two collections to choose from, but personally, I’m a fan of the Jefe collection.
If you’re going to invest in goodknives, you really ought to invest in a magnetic knife bar to show them off. Not only does it look cool; it also won’t dull your blades like a knife block can.
When you pack your lunch for work, you always run the risk of Kevin from accounting stealing your food from the communal fridge. But with these thin, lunchbox-friendly ice packs, you’ll be able to keep your food will never have to leave your sight.
This clever little camping lantern can recharge itself with a built-in solar panel, and even expands into a waterproof “bottle” that can hold your phone, keys, and other small items. The lantern function and the bottle function seem completely distinct and unrelated, but still, they’d both come in handy during your average camping trip.
The Paris Architect, a 2014 New York Times bestseller, is on sale today for just $2 on Kindle. I read it last year, and really enjoyed it.
In 1942 Paris, gifted architect Lucien Bernard accepts a commission that will bring him a great deal of money - and maybe get him killed. But if he’s clever enough, he’ll avoid any trouble. All he has to do is design a secret hiding place for a wealthy Jewish man, a space so invisible that even the most determined German officer won’t find it. He sorely needs the money, and outwitting the Nazis who have occupied his beloved city is a challenge he can’t resist.
But when one of his hiding spaces fails horribly, and the problem of where to hide a Jew becomes terribly personal, Lucien can no longer ignore what’s at stake. The Paris Architect asks us to consider what we owe each other, and just how far we’ll go to make things right.
Written by an architect whose knowledge imbues every page, this story becomes more gripping with every soul hidden and every life saved.
Gaming gear can be great for getting real work done as well, and these DBPower peripherals are deeply discounted on Amazon today. The mouse includes seven buttons and adjustable DPI, while the keyboard features customizable backlighting and mechanical key switches for a clicky, tactile feeling.
Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year, $20 | PS4/Xbox One
Shadow of Mordor was one of the best games of 2014, and if you still haven’t picked it up, the Game of the Year Edition is on sale for an all-time low $20 today on PS4 and Xbox One. That’s about the same price as the standard edition, so you’re basically getting all of the DLC for free.
The best bet for most people is probably the Kindle Paperwhite for $90, which is $30 less than usual, and $10 less than its semi-frequent deal price. The Paperwhite has the same ultra-sharp screen resolution as the Voyage, which is the most important aspect of any e-reader, but for $60 more, the Voyage adds pressure-sensitive page-turning bezels, slightly more contrast, and an ambient light sensor to control the backlight.
Once again, these deals are only available for Prime members, and you won’t see the discounted price until checkout, but you can sign up for a 30 day free trial, and still get access to the deals.
Uniqlo just kicked off another shipping holiday, with absolutely free shipping on every order, from a single pair of socks to an entire wardrobe. Concurrently, you can also score two button up linen shirts for men or women for $50, or $10 less than usual. Just add any two marked “Multi-Buy” to your cart, and you’ll see the discount at checkout.
We’ve posted several deals on USB power banks that can also jump start a dead car battery, but this model from Anker puts out 600 amps, compared to 400-450 on most other models. For your standard dead car battery, 400 is probably enough, but if it’s really dead, or hasn’t been started in a long time, the extra oomph could make a big difference.
Apple’s 15" Retina MacBook Pro isn’t for everybody, but if you demand a lot from your laptop, it’s one of the best options on the market. The newest model comes complete with a 256GB SSD and 16GB of RAM, and you can save a whopping $400 on yours today, with no sales tax for most buyers.
For a limited time, Dell will sell you this 55" Samsung 4K Smart TV for $1000 (the same price Amazon’s currently charging), and toss in a $400 promo gift card for good measure. These promo gift cards are only valid for 90 days, but that’s enough to buy you a new game console or sound system to complement your new TV.
Note: Dell has been known to pull these offers without much warning, so make sure you see the gift card in your cart before checking out.
Fitness trackers can help you ward off winter weight gain, but if you don’t want to commit to wearing a bracelet every day, the clip-on Fitbit One is is a great alternative.
In addition to steps, the Fitbit One will monitor calories burned, stairs climbed, and distance traveled, and you can even configure it as a silent, vibrating alarm clock so you don’t have to disturb your sleeping partner. If that sounds like an appealing package, you can grab one on eBay today for $50, one of the best deals we’ve ever seen. [Fitbit One, $50]
I’ve owned a corded electric trimmer for a couple years, and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually bothered to use it; dealing with the extension cord is just too much of a pain. This battery-powered alternative is somehow marked down to $30 right now on Worx’s official eBay store, and I’m not sure I’ve ever made a purchase more quickly in my life.
If you missed out on on last month’s Bosch Insight wiper blade sale, or if you just don’t like Bosch Insight blades, Amazon will sell you two Michelin Stealth blades today for $20. Just add any two to your cart (shipped and sold by Amazon.com), and the price will automatically be reduced to $20 at checkout. The deal even works if you buy two different sized blades, so you should have no trouble finding a combination that fits your car.
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In the clip above, Hasan asks the former embodiment of Big Brother directly, “Do you believe [Snowden] should be assassinated and put on a kill list as many say you suggested?”
Hayden is... less direct, spending a lot of time demurring and offering half answers to what should be a fairly simple of course not, I’m not a maniac.
Michael Hayden: “I didn’t say that.”
Mehdi Hasan: “You said he should be put on a list.”
Hayden: “...I was there in a panel in downtown Washington, and he was nominated for [an awards] list.”
Hasan: “And you said, ‘I could think of another list.’”
Hayden: “What I said was, ‘In my darker moments, I have thought about that.’”
Hasan: “So in your darker moments, you have thought about killing him?”
Hayden: “Well, because he has been tremendously destructive to American security.”
Hayden goes on to say that he’s “never supported assassinating Edward Snowden.” But apparently, even though he’s never officially supported Snowden’s assassination, a boy can still dream.
And does Hayden support executing Edward Snowden? “I probably don’t,” he says. Probably.
So does Michael Hayden want Snowden dead? He certainly doesn’t not want Snowden dead. Whether or not Hayden believes that Snowden belongs on either a birthday or Christmas-card list, as Hasan suggests, remains unclear.
As easy as 1, 2, 3. Image from Arizona Capitol Times
Arizona’s been in the spotlight a lot this election year, with the Department of Justice announcing today it’s investigating the too-long voting lines during the state’s primary. Then there’s the accusations of straight-up election fraud: Apparently people are tampering with vote-by-mail ballots using microwaves.
Last month, a state bill was proposed to stiffen the penalties for “ballot harvesting”—collecting and destroying mail-in ballots for the opposing candidate. Certainly it might be easy to steal someone’s absentee or early-voting ballot. But the people harvesting Arizona’s ballots actually have a far more complicated methodology, at least according to Republican state senator Don Shooter of Yuma:
Shooter said he got another email just Wednesday, ahead of the vote on this bill, from someone claiming to have evidence and witnesses of fraud.
“I’ve been told the way they do it is they collect the ballots early, they put them in a microwave with a bowl of water, steam them open, take the ballots,” he explained.
“If they like the way it’s voted they put them back in,” Shooter continued. “If they don’t like the way it’s voted, they lose that ballot.”
Journalists at the Arizona Capitol Times went straight to the source—the Arizona Secretary of State’s office—to procure an official ballot envelope and test this theory. In a government office kitchen microwave, no less.
I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I think we can all agree that is one nasty-ass microwave.
One of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s main (if not only) defined policy goals is to erect an enormous, very tall, very expensive wall on the border between The United States and Mexico. Today, in a memo, Trump made it clear how he would pay for this wall—by bankrupting Mexico’s poor.
Trump’s proposal calls for a change to the Patriot Act that would bar non-Americans from wiring money outside of the U.S. unless they provide documentation proving their legal status in the receiving country. This would make the types of money transfers common amongst all immigrants, known as remittances, quite difficult. Trump’s memo explains that this doesn’t have to happen so long as Mexico, and only Mexico, forks over a few billion to pay for that very big, very tall wall.
“It’s an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year.”
Our current president, (rightfully) thinks this is a stupid idea. Speaking to reporters, Obama said, “People expect the president of the United States and the elected officials in this country to treat these problems seriously, to put forward policies that have been examined, analyzed are effective, where unintended consequences are taken into account.”
“They don’t expect half-baked notions coming out of the White House. We can’t afford that.”
Trump’s very big, very tall wall is estimated to cost anywhere between $10-12 billion and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has said, emphatically, that Mexico is not going to pay for that wall. Trump’s response to this fact is apparently to hit Mexico where it hurts.
According to The Associated Press, remittances accounted for about $24.8 billion last year, mainly in the form of small amounts of money sent from family members living in the U.S. back home to Mexico. Cutting off these funds would make it difficult for rural families that rely on money sent from relatives in the U.S to buy the goods they need to survive.
Ricardo Ramirez, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, told AP that Trump’s proposal would hurt American companies like Western Union and might even cause more immigration.
“If remittances are impacted, then the economic stability of Mexico would be threatened. Which means there would be more of a push to have immigrants come to the U.S.,” Ramirez said. “So it might actually have the inverse effect.”
According to his year-end campaign finance disclosure for 2015, Rep. Duncan Hunter, Republican from California, a.k.a. the Vaping Congressman, spend $1,302 on Steam Games from October 13 to December 16. This was, according to the filing, a “personal expense — to be paid back.”
On Monday, the Federal Election Commission submitted a letter to Hunter’s campaign treasurer asking for further explanation. (The letter also raised questions about a payment of $1,650 in September to Christian Unified Schools of El Cajon, which Hunter’s spokesman said was a donation misidentified as a personal expense.) The San Diego Union-Tribune reports:
Hunter’s spokesman, Joe Kasper, said the congressman’s teenage son used his father’s credit card for one game, and then several unauthorized charges resulted after the father tried to close access to the website. Kasper said that Hunter is trying to have the unauthorized charges reversed before repaying his campaign account.
“There won’t be any paying anything back there, pending the outcome of the fraud investigation, depending on how long that takes,” Kasper said.
In 2013, Hunter wrote a passionate op-ed for Politico defending the value of video games against their haters: “With fingers pointing in nearly every direction, video games are often, but wrongly, identified as a catalyst for violence.”
Unfortunately, the year-end disclosures do not identify what games Hunter was (accidentally?) paying for, or why he (or his son) paid so much for them. The congressman has until May 9 to respond to the FEC.
South Central, the historic region of Los Angeles that birthed Gangster Rap and served as the backdrop of the L.A riots, has piqued the interest of none other than ousted American Apparel CEO Dov Charney.
“We hope to create a brand that captures the attention of the world,” Charney said. “It will be irreverent and authentic.”
Charney noted that he has his sights set on South Central for his new venture. He made the claim that Downtown Los Angeles had become “cool” because of American Apparel and that his new company would have the same effect on South Central.
“The next place I intend to make cool is south of the 10 freeway, right on the banks of downtown.” Charney said.
Currently, South Central Los Angeles is experiencing what some fear are the warning signs of gentrification. While the area was for some time seen as a bad investment for developers, a new high-rise development might change things. According to Curbed L.A, The Reef megadevelopment threatens to upend the large parts of community.
“The Reef is a $1.2-billion, 1.66-million-square-foot project that would rise on the site of two parking lots—this thing promises to be a beast, with a 19-story, 208-room hotel and two condo high-rises (32 and 35 stories tall), all overlooking a pedestrian shopping plaza.”
In an interview with Tavis Smiley on PBS, Charney called the neighborhood “the most exciting neighborhood in the United States,” adding “it just has all the ingredients for this creative combustion that’s gonna take place.” Oh boy.
According to NBC News, Bernie Sanders is the winner of tonight’s Democratic primary in Wisconsin. On the Republican side, Ted Cruz beat out Donald Trump by a healthy margin.
Approximately 15 minutes after 8:00 on Tuesday evening, screenshots of an apparent interaction between Canadian pop star Justin Bieber and Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s Instagram accounts began circulating on social media. Bieber, it seemed, had liked one of Trump’s videos.
The video in question features Trump exhorting Wisconsin voters to “make America great again.” It does not appear that Bieber follows Trump on Instagram, although Shady Music Facts reported on Twitter that Bieber follows Trump on that social media platform.
Gawker was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the screenshots, which appear to be taken from the “Following” tab of the app’s “Activity” screen. We scrolled (several times) through the tens of thousands of likes Trump’s video had received, searching for “justinbieber” to no avail. It is possible, of course, that Bieber liked the video, and then unliked it. One of the sources of the screenshots, JustinBieberTracking, exists to track Justin Bieber on Instagram.
We have reached out to Bieber’s label, Def Jam Records, for comment and will update if we hear back.
Last week, George Mason University announced that its law school would be renamed, at the request of an anonymous donor who gave $20 million to the program, after the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia: the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University—ASS Law. (Or ASSoL.)
There are plenty of reasons why ASS Law is actually a great name for a school named after Scalia. In his dissent on Lawrence v. Texas, a case that challenged a Texas law that literally made it a crime to have homosexual sex, Scalia wrote “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home,”
“They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”
Today, footage surfaced of Florida governor Rick Scott, at a Starbucks in Gainesville, getting yelled at by a customer—local woman Cara Jennings, who is none to happy with the governor.
“You cut Medicaid so I couldn’t get Obamacare,” Jennings shouts. “You’re an asshole. You don’t care about working people. You should be ashamed to show your face around here.”
The two have a small back and forth as Scott attempts to remind the customer that he’s “created 1 million jobs.” “Where?” Jennings responds.
As he leaves the cafe—without any coffee—Jennings accuses Scott of denying women access to vital care, presumably because that is precisely what the governor did last month. He then says something unintelligible back to the customer before hurrying out of the store.
Jenning told ABC Action News that she knew she had to say something about the abortion bill to the governor when she saw him in her local Starbucks and that “a number of people came up to me and thanked me.”
Hollywood actor Tim Robbins—a Trojan horse sent by the Clintons to spoil Bernie Sanders’ chances in Guam, a well-meaning, beautiful idiot, or something else entirely? Let’s review.
Robbins maligned the Micronesia territory’s macro-nesia sense of pride this week when at a Bernie Sanders rally, calling Clinton’s win in the South Carolina primary “about as significant” as winning in Guam, which has 11 delegates. South Carolina carries 39.
And not that it matters to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, but Guam is now officially With Her.
“I am deeply disappointed by remarks made today by Tim Robbins at a campaign rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders that used the inability of the people of Guam to vote for president as a political punch line,” Guam Delegate Madeleine Bordallo said in a statement, The Politico reports. “These remarks are an insult to our community and they trivialize the disenfranchisement of our people in selecting our president. As a candidate for president of the United States, Sen. Sanders and his campaign should be working to be inclusive of all Americans, regardless of where they live.”
Guam votes May 7. The results will surely be reported somewhere.
It’s 2 A.M. on March 20 in France and Ta-Nehisi Coates is not sleeping. “I’m up learning to make maps so I can make one of Wakanda, believe it or not.”
The award-winning writer who’s steering the future of one of Marvel’s most important characters is taking his job very seriously. “I’ve been messing around with this software called Fractal Mapper,” Coates told me during a phone call two weeks ago. “I was using this other one today but it was too complicated. So I’m trying to come up with something which I’m assuming they’ll then send to a designer who will do something else with it.”
Coates doesn’t have to do this. He can write Marvel’s new ongoing Black Panther series without figuring out the topography of the character’s fictional African homeland of Wakanda. But the Atlantic writer and MacArthur Fellow grant recipient wants to. There are weak spots in the character’s publishing history that he’s taking the opportunity to correct. “I was going back through the stuff from the ‘70s, which was mostly before my time, and looking at the maps there,” Coates elaborated. “They bear the mark of the time. They weren’t trying to do harm. At the same time, you can’t put out a map where every location reference is an animal.” I laugh at this because I know exactly what he’s talking about.
When we were trading messages prior to getting on the phone, he mentioned a problem with maps, and I wondered if he had a beef with Wakanda’s supposed location on the African continent. But, no, it’s just basic nomenclature that’s the problem. “You can’t have Panther Island, Piranha Cove, Gorilla Peak. You can’t do it, buddy. You can’t do it.”
I’m glad to hear Coates is taking his mandate so seriously. The Black Panther is my favorite superhero character. More than Batman or even Luke Cage. Ta-Nehisi is someone who I got to know a few years back through mutual friend Chris Jackson, the editor on Coates’ books Between the World and Me and The Beautiful Struggle. We knew lots of people in common yet never hung out regularly. I’ve watched his writing become more and more important from afar. So it took me by surprise when the news came months ago that Ta-Nehisi would be writing Marvel’s Black Panther book.
T’Challa wasn’t Coates’ favorite superhero when he was growing up. That honor went to Spider-Man. “I actually came to him as an adult,” Coates says, as we talked about the way the idea of a teenage Peter Parker has persisted for years. “That Ron Frenz era. It’s not the kid in high school or the kid in college. He had dropped out of college and was a social misfit, living in some bum-ass apartment. That was my Peter Parker.” And while he’s become an ignore-at-your-own-peril writer with regards to how race is lived in America, Coates wasn’t thinking about superhero characters in that way. On one hand, he says the Marvel comics of the past “was the only place I could go to see black people doing heroic shit.”
But the escapism was the main draw. “What’s interesting about comics and race is that when I was a kid and I read comics—Jesus, this is going to sound crazy.... To the extent that somebody could be post-racial, that was me. I just didn’t care. There was some black people in the [Marvel] world but then after that I didn’t think too much. Peter Parker didn’t strike me as a white dude, which is not to say that he struck me as a black dude.”
When I asked Coates what he remembered about the Black Panther from his teenage comics-reading, he responded by remembering the character’s absence from Marvel’s biggest series and events. “Well, he wasn’t in a book. He wasn’t in Secret Wars,” Coates recalled. “This crossover thing that’s happening now didn’t happen as much in the past. The big ones back then were like Secret Wars, Mutant Massacre. There were a few with the Avengers. It’s amazing how the Avengers has taken off. It sounds crazy but they were the B book. But no, he wasn’t really around. I know from back issues that he had been [around as an Avenger]. When I first found out about him, I did not make the connection that he was black. It just didn’t occur to me. In the period when I was collecting, he just wasn’t around really.”
The Bland Panther version of T’Challa settles in when he’s out of the spotlight and no one in Marvel editorial carries a torch for the character. For years, the Panther was one of those characters who simply had on a mask all the time and spoke with a weird speech pattern. He rarely got the kind of single-issue spotlight where we find out about his past and personal interactions with people. He devolved into a standard-issue, genius-level scientist and super-athlete, interchangeable with Hank Pym, Reed Richards or Tony Stark. The cunning schemes of his debut stories faded away, and there wasn’t anything that made him feel unique unto himself outside of some various outlier interpretations. That’s where the character was when Coates was in his most dedicated phase of collecting comics.
“I didn’t really read him too heavy,” Coates said about the Black Panther during that time. Then came the excellent Christopher Priest series. “I left comics for a long time and then, when I came back, it was like ’01, ’02. People were like, ‘This Christopher Priest is really good, you should check him out.’ That was the first time I read a Black Panther solo book. It was relatively late.” Coates admits that defining Panther run looms large over him and also counts the solo series by Reginald Hudlin and Jonathan Hickman’s New Avengers as strong influences. “The whole reason you have a movie right now is because of Priest,” he observed. “He had the challenge of getting a mostly white readership to take the guy seriously. Then I feel like the next thing Hudlin was trying to do was almost like trying to write this character for black folks. I was like, not only is he badass but you know he is going to tell these white folks what time it is. And [other characters] all look up to him. He’s noble. He is like the dream that we wish we had. That’s what he is. And then Hickman just kind of deconstructed all of that.”
The lack of faith extends to the Dora Milaje, the royal guard of elite warrior women drawn from the various tribal regions throughout Wakanda. A Milaje named Aneka faces imprisonment for taking the law into her own hands.
Coates has the primary black women in the Black Panther’s inner circle come into conflict with each other, pitting the Dora Milaje against T’Challa’s stepmother Ramonda.
The Dora Milaje characters in Issue #1 are romantically involved with each other. Prior to Coates’ debut, the biggest plot twist with these characters in previous storylines was when a Milaje named Nakia fell in love with T’Challa.
There was a particular concern when figuring out how to show this scene, sparked in part, Coates says, by Kelly Sue DeConnick’s work on Bitch Planet. “What Kelly does in that book is she writes women,” Coates said. “She’ll have women buck naked in that book and they’re clearly not drawn for me. Like the woman is not there to be seen by me. I remember writing to Brian the moment when they kissed, I told him, ‘listen, it can’t be like porno for us. We got to try and do it for them. It can’t be showing off for us.’”
I mentioned to Coates that I always found Ramonda to be a fascinating part of the Black Panther mythos because she’s an outsider. She’s from South Africa and not a native of the Panther’s xenophobic homeland.
This opening issue runs counter to what many people love about the Panther after the Priest run. That version of T’Challa was a master planner, but Coates is presenting a character who gets surprised by a revolt. “I don’t want him to have all the answers,” Coates told me. “Right now, Wolverine is dead. But, when I was a kid he used to be seen as a sort-of-immortal, always-wins character... can’t be killed. That was always a part of him. But man, he would take some hits. He would get his ass whooped by Sabertooth. That was something you had to see. I have a hard time putting my heart into anybody with all the answers. That’s just not interesting to me. It doesn’t really feel human to me. I think what Priest was doing was trying to construct was a mystique. When you do a mystique, you actually want him at a remove a little bit. But I wanted to write an intimate book. I don’t have to write from the perspective of getting people to take T’Challa seriously. That’s not my challenge. People already do take him seriously.”
Coates says that the idea of a more fallible, human king of Wakanda flows directly from previous storylines. “I am really taking seriously what people did before me,” he said. “If Achebe did rule that country for a period of time. If KIllmonger actually did kill the King, if Morlun did cut a swath through that country and kill M’Baku and a bunch of other people, if Doom did plot with the Desturi and overthrow the government and damn near did kill T’Challa himself, if Shuri and him did have this break and Dora Milaje did turn their back on him, if Namor did perpetrate this holocaust... what would that country look like after all of that?”
“This was the place that said they could never be invaded, they could never be taken over,” Coates continues. “Well, that’s no longer true. Who are you? I didn’t even come in thinking ‘I’m going to take this apart.’ When I started doing the research I was like, ‘Oh, y’all been taking some hits.’ I thought it would be dishonest to just start up again and say ‘hey the king is the king and everything’s great and everybody’s all right. Oh, and by the way, by the way, as far as we know, Shuri died in battle. The Queen was killed.’ I mean, come on!”
“His uncle S’Yan got killed by Doom? W’Kabi’s dead? Azzuri’s dead? All these guys are gone and I felt like that is trauma. It’s clear there’s been some trauma here. I felt I had to write from that perspective. If I had come in at a different time, maybe I would have felt differently. But I felt like oh no, no, no, no. There’s no way that this can hold... this can’t stand.”
While Coates has been reading comics his entire life, his new gig has driven him to understand the crafts of comics-making in a deeper way. “I probably thought that the writer wrote some shit down and the artist just went and drew it. That’s the sort of thing you think when you don’t know anything. By the time I started writing [Black Panther], I knew it wasn’t that simple. But I didn’t know the amount of collaborative activity, which is not something I really have in writing right now. Most of the time it’s just me by myself. So that aspect of it has been just tremendous.”
Making the transition from fan to professional has also meant learning to work with artists. “In terms of imagining the world, Brian [Stelfreeze] is stellar,” he says of the veteran illustrator he’s partnering with on the book. “I think in the original script, when the rebellion breaks out, I wrote that they had guns. He said, ‘No, they don’t use guns. This is something different.’”
“We have guns later in the arc but that is used to differentiate the Wakandnas from other people who were there. I was like, ‘Damn! OK.’ He is a good concept person.”
“I am really into colorists right now,” he continued. “Like, that’s my shit after I saw what Laura did. When we got the inks back from Brian, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, this is gorgeous. We should just run it as black and white. It’s beautiful.’ But then what I saw what Laura did I was like, ‘Goddamn!’ You can really see it.”
Black Panther marks the first time that Coates’ fiction writing will be seen by a mass audience. He think that people won over by articles like “The Case for Reparations” will find some of the same existential concerns in this Marvel superhero comic. “If they are at all interested in the questions I’m trying to answer in my non-fiction, they should pick this up, because I don’t know that the questions have changed any,” Coates said. “It’s refracted through a different lens but I’m deeply concerned about the capacity of human government.”
“And as didactic as that sounds, that’s [what is] animating the story. That’s what animates a lot of stories. It’s no different here. I think what T’Challa is dealing with over the next few issues is no different than some of the things that we would see and that we have seen in a while.”
A Black Panther who’s more embattled and less unflappable runs the risk of alienating people who love this character because of previous interpretations. Coates says his take comes from a place of affection. “I just want him to be a compelling character,” he told me. “My Spider-Man was a guy down on his luck and was struggling and was going through shit. These are my roots. My T’Challa would come up out of that place. It’s hard for me to construct something that is not that. I can’t just have him going from being awesome to being awesome to being awesome to being awesome. That’s just not my experience.”
Note: I’ve put up a much longer transcript of my conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates here.
Paul Ryan has an aw-shucks boy-next-door appeal and talks about poor people and budgets sometimes. Therefore he is widely considered the face of compassionate conservatism. In fact he is a wacko, extremist class warrior. And not the good kind.
Today’s enactment of the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which protects regular people from being swindled by financial advisors, is an opportune time to reflect on the fact that Paul Ryan led the opposition to this rule, meaning that he is in favor of regular people being swindled by the financial industry. But his undercover fealty to corporate interests is positively run-of-the-mill compared to the contrast between his reputation (caring, concerned with the less fortunate, a believer in the redemption of government) and the reality of his budget proposals.
Among the small class of journalists who crunch numbers, it has never been a secret that Paul Ryan’s economic plans are either ridiculously impossible or ridiculously savage, depending on how you interpret his goals. Still, that fact has not prevented the birth of a cottage industry of hagiography portraying Ryan as the Republican Party’s great uniter—“a man of faith and family values whose only real baggage is the suitcase he carries home each weekend to Wisconsin.”
How does that comport with the reality of Paul Ryan’s stated priorities? The year before Ryan ran for Vice President, the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of his dream budget—the budget that established him as a serious Washington figure, the budget that represents what Paul Ryan would have our federal government do it was up to him. This is a man whose name is still, five years later, being tossed around as Republican presidential nominee this year, despite the fact he is not running. This is a very powerful and popular national political figure. Did you know, friends, that Paul Ryan would like to defund—to in essence abolish—vast swaths of the federal government? Including the parts of the federal government that take care of poor people, and of public schools, and of a lot of other things used by just about everyone.
The CBO’s report explains the formula Ryan uses to slash the part of the federal budget where all the useful stuff is, apart from Medicare and Social Security:
The path for all other federal spending excluding interest—that is, for discretionary spending and mandatory spending apart from that for Social Security and the major mandatory health care programs—was specified by Chairman Ryan’s staff. The remaining part of mandatory spending includes such programs as federal civilian and military retirement, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, unemployment compensation, Supplemental Security Income, the refundable portion of the earned income and child tax credits, and most veterans’ programs. Discretionary spending includes both defense spending and nondefense spending—in roughly equal amounts currently. That combination of other mandatory and discretionary spending was specified to decline from 12 percent of GDP in 2010 to about 6 percent in 2021 and then move in line with the GDP price deflator beginning in 2022, which would generate a further decline relative to GDP. No proposals were specified that would generate that path.
What are the implications of such a spending reduction? The economist Dean Baker lays it out quite clearly. Bolding ours:
The analysis shows Ryan’s budget shrinking everything other than Social Security and Medicare and other health care programs to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2050. This is roughly the current size of the military budget, which Ryan has indicated he wants to increase. That leaves zero for everything else.
Included in everything else is the Justice Department, the National Park System, the State Department, the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, Food Stamps, the National Institutes of Health, and just about everything else that the government does. Just to be clear, CBO did this analysis under Ryan’s supervision. He never indicated any displeasure with its assessment. In fact he boasted about the fact that CBO showed his budget paying off the national debt.
This is the reasonable alternative Republican candidate.
Today, a man named Al Hoffman has a column in The USA Today, the paper of record of America’s airports. At the bottom of the column, it is noted that Hoffman was once George W. Bush’s ambassador to Portugal, just so you get a feel for the type of person we’re dealing with here. Hoffman, as he writes in the column, spent the last several months fundraising for Jeb Bush’s too-big-to-fail presidential campaign, which, of course, failed spectacularly.
Hoffman’s column is titled “Big Donors Can Save Democracy From Donald Trump,” which is essentially a retrofitted hook for someone who gets rich off political largesse to argue in bad faith that political largesse is good for America. Let’s examine his points:
1.
Americans should look closely at the impact of big money in politics. Some see it as a corrupting influence, a way of buying access to officials and politicians.
Others see it as a stimulant that helps motivate citizens to do their civic duty.
To start, Hoffman attaches his thesis—that the billions of private dollars poured into politics act as a motivational tool—to a nebulous group of citizens he calls, in the great parlance of newspaper columns everywhere, “others.” Do these people exist? My guess would be: no. This is important to remember.
2.
Political donors can, despite the stigma, do some admirable things. They help hire eager younger staffers who are passionate about politics. They pay for mailers that remind people to vote. Donors make it possible for candidates to hire intelligent scholars who work on policy and ideas, allowing campaigns to harness the best minds America has to offer.
It’s possible to almost admire Hoffman’s ability to make the maggot-infested underbelly of politics seems not just benign but virtuous. Here, he argues that mega-rich donors “help hire eager younger staffers who are passionate about politics” (the youngest and most passionate of whom are volunteers working for free stickers), “pay for mailers that remind people to vote” (the Republican direct mail industrial complex is a massive scam that preys on the desperate, and money donated to conservative causes frequently helps push projects designed to depress voter turnout) and “hire intelligent scholars who work on policy and ideas” (people who are paid to intellectually justify policies that materially benefit donors like Hoffman).
3.
But can’t all this be done with small dollar donations? Isn’t it nobler to take in $5 million from a million donors rather than $5 million from 5 donors?
Perhaps. There’s incredible virtue in the college student or retiree or construction worker who is willing to invest in our political process. But Americans also need to take a tough look at how these funds are solicited. And they must ask themselves where their donations go.
The mechanics aren’t pretty. Shaking millions of people by the ankles for five dollar donations is expensive. In the GOP field in particular, the small donor industry is something of a self-licking ice cream cone.
Here’s the math behind it. Last year, the Daily Caller reported that of the $54 million spent by ten large conservative PACs in 2014, only $3.6 million went to candidates. At that rate, a hypothetical fundraising campaign designed to raise a million dollars by imploring voters to “help us stop Obama from taking your guns” might cost $950,000 to hit its target. During Ben Carson’s campaign, 54 cents out of every dollar raised went to fundraising costs. The campaign hired a call center company that had up to 400 callers a night soliciting Republican voters for money. Campaign money also went to solicitation emails, many of them incendiary in their tone and aggressive in their volume.
Just several paragraphs before indicting a fundraising industry that exists mostly to enrich itself, Al Hoffman argued that big-money donors fund mail campaigns that “remind people to vote.” This is an incredible lie. The phone calls made by Ben Carson to prospective small donors were indistinguishable from the mail that showed up at those people’s homes.
4.
The provocative tactics used to elicit small-dollar donations feed a monster of demagoguery. They make voters feel scared, angry or resentful in the hopes of harvesting those emotions for financial gain.
This is how we end up with candidates like Donald Trump. When voters are fed from a manure pile of negativity and rabble-rousing, it makes the soil fertile for firebrand agitators like the reality TV star.
False. “We”—the Republican party—ended up with Donald Trump because people like Al Hoffman pooled very large sums of money in an attempt to place candidates such as Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney—for whom Hoffman once hosted a $20,000 per plate dinner at his own “seaside mansion”—in the White House. Such politicians are favored by the Republican establishment, of which Hoffman is a part. Donald Trump’s base is now loudly and vigorously rebelling against the Republican establishment in part because they perceive—correctly—that their preferred candidates are beholden to donors like Hoffman.
5.
Large donors can insist on accountability. If a campaign is wasting money on frivolous expenses, they can object. If a candidate says something overly hateful or extreme, they can walk. They often serve as an executive board of sorts, challenging campaigns to act worthy of their investment.
Or they “challenge” candidates to adopt positions that are unpopular among the electorate but popular amongst donors, like “free trade” deals and cuts to Social Security. That donors are a check on candidates only highlights the influence they have over said candidates.
6.
Trump brags that he is without big donors. That may be true. But it also means he is without restraint. He is free to agitate and feed chaos. In business and politics alike, oversight is a good thing. It keeps the ship in calmer waters.
The oversight of mega-rich political donors has not led to a single, identifiable positive development in America.
7.
While voters disagreed with my choice for president, even his critics would agree that Jeb released the most detailed set of policies and reforms in the race.
They would not agree.
8.
Political donations are like a firearm. Money can advance both justice and injustice. It depends on whose finger is on the trigger.
This is a remarkably awful analogy.
9.
In the end, it is the character of our country that matters. And that’s how Plato had it. Promote integrity among our citizens, and the negative influence of money will wane.
I forgot to mention that there is a whole bit about Plato threaded through this column.
Anyway, Albert Hoffman and the people he represents are lying hucksters.
If you’re having a good day and would instead like to feel like climbing into a one-woman spaceship and hurling yourself far away from this stupid planet, gather round and read yet another confused Slate think piece where someone tries to understand what the black people are up to.
Today the headquarters for Killing Cool Things With Banal Analysis published a piece titled “Stop Emphasizing Your Point by Putting Clap Emojis After Every Word.”
What has our friend Katy Waldman so perturbed is the internet translation of a real life occurrence that every black man, woman, and child knows well.
But this time, we’re talking about when white people do it—or, at least, this is the subtext of the article, though it’s never clearly stated.
One day, my friends, a think piece is going to kill me. My core will be so deeply shaken by the stupidity of it all that my body will say, “Fuck you Kara!” and stop functioning out of spite. Is today that day? Let’s see.
Sometimes I click over to Twitter and feel great because everyone seems to be clapping for me. I haven’t even done anything! But there’s all this applause. So many of my friends in virtual reality can hardly squeeze a single word out before the urgent desire to thwack their hands together overwhelms them.
Hey, sounds like you follow a bunch of annoying people on Twitter. I’m thinking that’s the only real issue here.
Of course, any deep dive into black or brown people just living their goddamn lives would not be complete without an Urban Dictionary citation.
The emphasis clap (Urban Dictionary has dubbed it the “ratchet clap”) belongs to the toolbox comedian Robin Thede introduced to the world as “Black Lady Sign Language.” It is when you clap on every syllable of a statement you are making in order to underscore the very important content of that statement.
No.
I don’t know who Robin Thede is and I’m sure she’s great, but absolutely the fuck not. She did not introduce something to the world simply because someone just saw her do a bit about it last week on The Nightly Show.
This—this clapping on every word for emphasis—is something that I have done since I was a cantankerous youth. To this day, if you catch me at a bar trying to explain to some man [insert the exhausting laundry list of topics here] I will almost certainly be doing the black girl clap. BECAUSE THIS IS A THING MANY OF US DO AND HAVE BEEN DOING LONG BEFORE THE INTERNET TRIED TO MURDER ME WITH ITS SELF-IMPORTANCE.
The emojis are just a way of exhibiting this action on the internet. And if this isn’t something you would do in your normal life, I’m not sure why you’re taking up the black girl clap on the internet—doing it, or writing about it, or either, or both.
Do you still need more, dear reader? Do ya still not quite get it? Fear not, here they come with the paddle and the horse carcass. We will now witness the writer arguing that this very obvious emoji depiction of a real life occurrence does not, in fact, translate on the internet.
While IRL emphasis clapping stresses certain syllables, the interpolated emoji seem to arrive after the words, not at the same time. They disrupt the flow of the statement, creating a stuttering and uncertain effect. It’s a rare instance when the multimodality of online expression—its blend of text and image—actually degrades the message being communicated.
No.
Question: How do white people not get tired of explaining things that have nothing to do with them to each other?
Follow up question: Has there every been a Slate-ier piece? These are the people who wrote long explainers of “fuckboy” and “bae”sans irony. But we are really dipping into parody territory here.
This peculiar culture of people—usually white and usually straight—feeling so compelled to dissect things that exist in black spaces or queer spaces or any space they don’t occupy is almost pathological in its desperate need to feel included. It feels like the dark karmic result of giving children participation trophies. You know a good way to figure out what “fleek” and “shade” mean without reading one of these dumb explainers? Hang out with people who actually use those words organically!
Perhaps these articles would be less obnoxious if they weren’t presented with an air of grandstanding, cutesy ignorance, as well as condescension. Every instance is an unnecessary intellectualization of another culture. The author and readers who believe this crap want to feel good about not just knowing what “bae” means, but also understanding how it fits into the zeitgeist—presumably in a way that the people participating in the trend or using the slang do not. Which is impossible.
The result feels less like social anthropology or an embrace of other cultures and more like staring into the fishbowl and tapping the glass. I could do without it.
Alain Sherter reports that two unionized mine workers in West Virginia were very unhappy with a company-sponsored bonus plan that the union had opposed as unsafe. So the workers returned their (paltry) bonus checks to the company inscribed with special messages for CEO Robert Murray (pictured above): “kiss my ass Bob,” and “eat shit, Bob.”
They were fired.
But then their union appealed their firings and the National Labor Relations Board reinstated them, ruling that their words were legal “expressions of protest.”
If you want to tell your boss to kiss your ass, unionize.
Last night’s episode of Friday Night Tykes: Steel Country, Esquire Network’s reality show about elementary-school aged kids who play football, featured a gender-fluid 8-year-old from Manaca, Pennsylvania, who sometimes goes by Abby, and sometimes by Adam. The storyline, however, featured very little direct input from Abby/Adam—the discussion of the kid’s gender fluidity came almost entirely from Abby/Adam’s mother, Sarah Markusic.
This struck me as odd, so I talked to Markusic yesterday by phone. (Markusic used the pronoun she/her to describe Abby/Adam throughout the interview.)
“I’ve sat and we’ve talked to her and I said, ‘This is what’s going on, there’s a community out there that’s like you,’” said Markusic, who explained that Abby/Adam told her (and Abby/Adam’s father) that she was a boy from as early as age 2. It’s hard to tell by watching how Abby/Adam feels about this divide today, because she says so little about anything on the show. According to Markusic, Abby/Adam wasn’t comfortable appearing on camera: “She doesn’t like to talk about it. I think it was too much around the cameras. The cameras were in her face and they had her miked and I think it’s too much for an 8-year-old. They would say, ‘Can you ask her this?’”
So why put your 8-year-old on TV in the first place if she doesn’t seem comfortable with it? Markusic’s short answer is activism: “There’s such a stigma in the community and parents don’t accept their children,” she explained.
While I find it hard to believe in altruism as a primary motivator of any television appearance, there is a plausible logic to Markusic’s behavior. She said that it was only after Abby/Adam turned seven—five years after Abby/Adam was giving indication of gender fluidity—that she began to understand what was going on, with the help of Facebook groups. “I don’t know how many times I questioned, ‘What’s wrong with her? Why doesn’t she want to see herself naked, but then she’s girly the next day?’” says Markusic “I felt like there was something I wasn’t understanding, and then when I found this I thought, ‘Oh, that explains everything.’”
Thus, by putting this story “out there,” for which she says she was not paid by the Esquire Network, Markusic thinks she might reach parents who were similarly confused, or who thought that gender identity was confined to a trans/cis binary, as she once did.
“I grew up [believing] a man should marry a woman, a woman should marry a man,” said Markusic. “And then you have a child like this and it changes your world around. Your child is your world and you want your child to be happy.”
