According to court documents filed Monday, Meek has agreed to plead guilty to the charges and fully cooperate with authorities in exchange for a possible reduced sentence. From The State:
When he was indicted, federal prosecutors alleged Meek knew about Roof’s plans to shoot African-American parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.
An indictment said he “did not, as soon as possible, make known the same to some judge or other person in civil authority.
It also alleges that on the day after the shootings, Meek told an FBI agent “he did not know specifics of Dylann Roof’s plan” to kill people at the church.
Speaking to reporters last year, Meek said that he briefly hid Roof’s handgun after his roommate delivered a “drunken rant” but returned the weapon after Roof sobered up.
“People think it’s my fault,” Meek told The Washington Post. “Would you believe your friend if they said something like that when they were drunk? [...] You can’t tell me you would. I didn’t believe it. I brushed it off.”
The two campaigns separately announced the non-aggression pact—brokered by Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, and Kasich’s chief strategist, John Weaver—on Sunday evening. According to Politico, the candidates themselves never spoke directly.
While the Cruz campaign responded to criticism by pointing to math and delegates, Kasich had already veered off message by Monday morning. “I’ve never told them not to vote for me; they should vote for me,” the Ohio governor told reporters, referring to Indiana voters.
“I’m not over there campaigning and spending resources. We have limited resources,” he added. “Mine is like the people’s campaign. I have a campaign where, you know, we’ve been outspent basically 50-to-1. You folks have been counting me out before I even got to New Hampshire. And now we can’t jam all of you into this diner. I mean, everybody chill out.”
Kasich’s chief strategist, Weaver, quickly clarified the candidate’s comments: “We’re not telling voters who to vote for in IN, only where we are going to spend resources to ultimately defeat Hillary. They get it.”
“Typical politician,” Trump sneered. “Can’t make a deal work.”
An unnamed, high-level Trump operative told Politico that the campaign is unconcerned with such “cynical manipulations,” focusing instead on the general election. (In a statement on Monday, Trump accused Cruz and Kasich of “collusion.”) “It’s the next logical step for people who are losing. It’s become increasingly clear that the Republican primary electorate has been ignoring these strategic games,” this person said. “We don’t think John Q. Lunchbuckets in Indiana is going to take it very well, being told what to do.”
Doesn’t really have the same ring as Joe the Plumber but we’ll work with it.
Fist-pumpin’ Jersey boy Chris Christie took time last night to relax, unwind, and forget all about the existential dread that comes with publicly supporting Donald Trump, at a concert given in Brooklyn by his favorite musician, Bruce Springsteen.
“Out in the Street,” the classic The River cut to which Christie is so enthusiastically jamming, is about letting loose and being yourself after a hard, oppressive day at work. After what the governor’s de facto boss has put him through in recent weeks, it’s easy to imagine why he enjoys it so much.
Billionaire son of a bitch Vinod Khosla, who wants to charge the public $30 million to use a beach in California just because he’s a greedhead, rudely blew off an LA Times columnist who he’d agreed to speak to about his greedy-ass position. It is now even more acceptable to dislike Vinod Khosla.
A federal judge in North Carolina handed a major victory to local Republicans Monday, upholding a swathe of changes to election rules in the swing state. Activists say the changes disproportionately affect people of color, denying tens or even hundreds of thousands of people their right to vote.
In 2013, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Shelby County v Holder, throwing out large parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—including requirements that nine, mostly southern states gain federal approval before changing election laws. The restrictive North Carolina law to which Monday’s decision pertains (HB 589) was passed just days later. From the New York Times:
The opinion, by Judge Thomas D. Schroeder of Federal District Court in Winston-Salem, upheld the repeal of a provision that allowed people to register and vote on the same day. It also upheld a seven-day reduction in the early-voting period; the end of preregistration, which allowed some people to sign up before their 18th birthdays; and the repeal of a provision that allowed for the counting of ballots cast outside voters’ home precinct.
It also left intact North Carolina’s voter identification requirement, which legislators softened last year to permit residents to cast ballots, even if they lack the required documentation, if they submit affidavits.
The plaintiffs in the case, which include the Justice Department, the NAACP, and the League of Women Voters, plan to appeal the decision to the Fourth Circuit. “We’re disappointed in the ruling, reviewing the decision carefully and evaluating our options,” a DOJ spokeswoman, Dena Iverson, said.
“We believe that the legislature intentionally passed a law that would discriminate against African Americans and Latinos, and potentially one of the reasons is the rising electorate and more participation by people of color,” Donita Judge, an attorney representing the NAACP in its suit against North Carolina, told the Guardian earlier this year.
“Of the 11 states with the highest African American turnout in 2008, seven of them have new laws in place,” Jonathan Brater, counsel for the voting rights nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, said. Altogether, according to the Brennan Center, seventeen states will have new voting restrictions in place for the 2016 presidential election. Some 218,000 (largely African-American) registered voters lacked an acceptable form of government identification in North Carolina’s primary, the Nation reported last month.
“North Carolina has provided legitimate state interests for its voter ID requirement and electoral system,” Schroeder, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote in his decision.
“There is significant, shameful past discrimination,” he continued. “In North Carolina’s recent history, however, certainly for the last quarter century, there is little official discrimination to consider.”
According to the CEC’s analysis, based on stats from the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and others, raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would lead to a three to five-percent reduction in the crime rate. (Currently, the federal minimum wage is $7.25.) By contrast, dumping $10 billion into funding for incarceration would only cut the crime rate by one to four percent.
It isn’t exactly clear how the CEC arrived at its percentage points, but common sense supports the theory. Poor people have less money and fewer resources than rich people, and fewer opportunities to obtain money and resources. There is a well-established relationship between poverty and crime. A higher minimum wage would help more poor people get by without resorting to drug sales, theft, sex work, et cetera. Crime goes down.
The statistic comes from a larger report about criminal justice reform. Because these are the president’s economic advisors, they were focused on cost-benefit analyses of mass incarceration versus other, potentially more productive uses of the public money. Aside from the minimum wage statistic, they also found that spending more on education and hiring more police were both more effective on the whole at reducing crime than putting more people in jail for longer times.
America’s prison population rate is the highest of any country on Earth. That is a national failure and shame from an ethical standpoint, and according to this analysis, it is from an economic one, too. It’s expensive, and it isn’t even very good at keeping America safe. Stop punishing so many poor people. Give them more money instead.
Confronted with the implications of Lena Dunham moving to Canada should he become president, Donald Trump took a reflective pause before delivering a measured answer. Just kidding—he said something totally rude and moved on.
“Speaking of women, a woman actress by the name of Lena Dunham, she said this yesterday: ‘I know a lovely place in Vancouver and I can get my work done from there,’” Steve Doocy said during a phone interview with Trump this morning on Fox and Friends. “She says she’s going to move to Canada, Donald Trump, if you get elected. What’s your message to her?”
Trump, if you can even believe it, was supportive.
“She’s a B-actor, and has no mojo,” Trump said. “I heard Whoopie Goldberg said that too. That would be a great, great thing for our country.”
Earlier this month, the Washington Post was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its project on police violence, “Fatal Force.” The Pulitzer Prize Board singled out the paper “For its revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be.”
The paper’s media reporter, Paul Farhi, provided details on the win in an April 18 write-up: “After covering several high-profile incidents involving the killings of civilians by police officers in 2014, Washington Post staff writer Wesley Lowery was surprised to discover that there were no official statistics about such fatalities. So Lowery pitched an idea to his editors: The newspaper, he suggested, should collect the information itself and analyze it for patterns in law enforcement.”
Except that’s not exactly how it went down. I know, because I was the one who suggested the idea to Lowery.
Back in 2012, I was the editor and publisher of the Reno News & Review, a small alternative newsweekly that covers northern-Nevada news, politics and culture. After a fatal police shooting occurred in Reno, I did some digging and discovered that no local, state or federal agency accurately kept track of such shootings. So I decided to start a website and database called Fatal Encounters to collect and log data on police killings.
My colleagues, students from the University of Nevada, Reno, volunteers, and I began collecting data on deadly police violence and releasing it for free to anyone who wanted to use it for any reason. Universities, artists, news media, activists, national politicians, police organizations and even the FBI used our data. But interest in the Fatal Encounters database exploded after Aug. 9, 2014, when Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth, was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
A couple of weeks later, I got an email from Wesley Lowery, at the time a Congressional reporter at the Washington Post, who had read the piece:
From: Lowery, Wesley J
To: D. Brian Burghart
Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 7:34 AM
Reaching out because I’m working on a piece about the lack of national information about police shootings, and have seen your work everywhere. Caught the piece you wrote for Gawker, and was hoping you might have a few minutes to chat sometime today about your work to catalog every police shooting.
Let me know if you’ve got a few minutes to chat,
Wesley
Wesley Lowery
Congressional Reporter
The Washington Post | Post Politics | The Fix
We talked on the phone the next day, and during the course of our interview, I told Lowery it was absurd that a grad student and editor at a four-person alternative newsweekly in Reno, Nevada, should be doing the job of the national press in their spare time, and I suggested the Post should pick it up. A few minutes after our chat, he got back to me, writing, “Thanks! Immediately after I got off of the phone I ran over to my bosses to insist that we get a databasing project underway. Will keep you posted.”
A few days later, Lowery published a story on the lack of statistics on police shootings. He was complimentary of Fatal Encounters’s work, writing that “prior to the Brown’s (sic) shooting, the only person attempting to keep track of the number of police shootings was D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the 29,000-circulation Reno News & Review, who launched his ‘Fatal Encounters’ project in 2012.”
When Lowery’s story ran, Fatal Encounters had already gathered more than a year’s worth of data, which was incorporated in numerous stories by the Reno News & Review and other media such as TruthOut, CNN, and CounterPunch. When I submitted the Reno News & Review’s work to the Pulitzer Board for consideration for the 2015 Public Service Award, on January 25, 2015, we had more than 4,000 entries cataloguing all deaths that happened during interactions with law enforcement in the United States, and the complete data for nine states going back to 2000. (By contrast, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fatal Force” series contained 990 shooting fatalities for the year 2015.) We’ve catalogued 1,143 gun homicides involving police during 2015 (and 153 officer-involved deaths by other violent means).
We’d been collecting data on seventeen data points: Subject’s name, age, gender and race, image of the deceased, date of injury resulting in death, location of injury (address), location of death (zip code, city, county, and state), agency responsible for death, cause of death, a brief description of the circumstances surrounding the death, official disposition of death (justified or other), link to news article or photo of official document, and symptoms of mental illness. The Post was collecting thirteen: Subject’s name, date, age, gender, race, city and state of death, manner of death, whether the subject was armed or fled, signs of mental illness, “threat level,” and whether the officer had a body camera.
Fatal Encounters itself wasn’t the first attempt to catalog shootings by police. The October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation with its Stolen Lives Project predated the mass adoption of the internet, so it’s primarily a list, not a database. Operation Ghetto Storm, written by Arlene Eisen in 2012, advanced the issue of a racial imbalance in the killing of Americans by police. Even Killed By Police, on Facebook, started two years before the Post’s project.
Of course, neither Fatal Encounters nor Killed by Police won the 2016 Pulitzer. We didn’t even apply. After all, theWashington Post and the Guardian’s project “The Counted” had used Fatal Encounters’s data to inform their projects and cited that they did, and going up against giant news organizations with resources as large as those at the Guardian and the Post felt like an exercise in hubris. At any rate, money was tight, and the $50 entry fee seemed like a luxury; the costs for the first two years of Fatal Encounters came out of my own pocket.
Plus, the competition for Pulitzers sometimes comes down to which category a paper is smart enough to enter itself in. As the Huffington Post reported, the Guardian missed out on the Prize because it entered the Explanatory Reporting and Public Service category, where the Washington Post entered the National Reporting category. The Washington Post was savvy about timing as well: Guardian’s project was set to publish on June 1, 2015, so the Post went live with their project on the night of May 30. According to the Huffington Post:
“We were getting ready to publish for a Sunday and we got — and one of our reporters got an email from someone at The Guardian saying, ‘Hey, you should report on our new database we’re going to put out on Monday,” Post database editor Steven Rich said at an investigative reporters and editors conference last month. “So we basically launched at the same time, which was advantageous for both of us.”
Rich didn’t mention the reporter by name, though sources told HuffPost that Lowery received The Guardian’s release.
Timing isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing: Who publishes first matters, and the Post’s rush to beat the Guardian proves it.
The Post’s project deserves credit for its original insights; Fatal Encounters, for example, did not distinguish between armed vs. unarmed victims, and the Post did. But in other areas, the Post makes unearned claims to have been the first to report what they were not. For example, in the same write-up from April 18, Farhi writes:
The data showed, for example, that about one-quarter of those fatally shot had a history of mental illness; that most of those killed were white men (although unarmed African Americans were at vastly higher risk of being shot after routine traffic stops than any other group); and that 55 officers involved in fatal shootings in 2015 had previously been involved in a deadly incident while on duty.
(The Post’s data can be compared with Fatal Encounters’s relatively easily at Numeracy, which is an independent enterprise that builds tools that make it easier to work with, understand, and share complex data.)
The Washington Post and its editors and reporters are heroes of mine, and the Watergate reporting inspired me to get into journalism in the first place. More importantly, Fatal Encounters was open to the public, and we’d designed it intending and hoping that the data would reach a wider audience by being picked up by a national news outlet, and that’s exactly what the Post’s project did. Their project was easy to use and clear, and the paper’s reputation and readership all but guaranteed that the issue of police killings would get the attention it warranted. But the paper gave no credit to Fatal Encounters or any other grassroots data-collection project in their submission to the Pulitzer Board.
After a police officer shot and killed a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., people began asking pointed questions about the use of deadly force by police. How often do police shoot people? Who are the victims? Are the officers ever charged with a crime?
None of those questions could be answered when Michael Brown died in August 2014 because police are not required to report fatal shootings to the FBI. Without that data, it was impossible to say whether Brown’s death fit a pattern. It was impossible to hold police to account.
So The Washington Post launched an unprecedented effort to tally every fatal shooting by an on-duty officer in 2015.
This line, from the same letter, signed by executive editor Martin Baron—yes, the Spotlight guy—expressed the Post’s regard for the impact of its own work quite well: “The [FBI’s] new approach will mirror The Post’s, capturing shootings and other violent incidents in real time and logging many of the same details.” Yet, the Post’s database only contains information about fatal shootings. Fatal Encounters’ and the Guardian’s were the ones that contained “other violent incidents,” such as deaths during high-speed chases or fatalities by Taser.
So I fired off an email to Wesley Lowery, Martin Baron, Paul Farhi, and managing editor Cameron Barr congratulating them on their Pulitzer, but complaining that I didn’t think they’d given Fatal Encounters the credit we were due.
Barr graciously responded. He wrote that the Post had given us credit several times, and that they had gathered their own data, but, “As a backstop, we periodically checked your site and Killed by Police, which is why we credited the two organizations.”
Fine, even though no credit was mentioned in their Pulitzer application—it wouldn’t have been traditional to cite outside sources anyway—I was grateful that thePost management had responded. Still, I couldn’t help but register one final complaint that the Post, it seemed to me,had created an origin story after the fact: “After you guys launched, there seemed to be a strategy to talk down what FE had accomplished to make the Post’s project seem more innovative,” I wrote, by email, “Even the Medium story that misrepresented what was in our database appeared designed to undermine the work we’d done and are still doing.” While the Post’s Medium oral history referred to Fatal Encounters only collecting information on five data points, we collected data on 17, and tracked deaths not only by gunshot, but by Tasers, vehicles, and asphyxiation.
I was content with my knowledge that Fatal Encounters was the first national open-data, crowd-sourced and journalist-vetted database, and that its data was making an impact. We’re now at 25 complete states, complete national data for three years, more than 12,670 records, and we’re growing at the rate of 200 records a week. We’re 10 times larger and far more detailed than the Post on each record.
Then Wesley Lowery appeared on the PBS News Hour with Judy Woodruff on April 20. PBS’s description of his appearance read: “No one kept track of police shootings until this Pulitzer-winning project.”
Perhaps Lowery meant to say that no government body kept accurate track, but he went on to describe the origin of the project: “Smart editors asked an obvious question, which is true, ‘We should be able to provide some clarity to this debate, and it turned out that we could because no one was keeping track at the national level or even at the state levels. No one knew exactly how many people were being killed by police’” and “the sheer number did surprise us, right, the fact that it was almost a thousand over the course of the year and that very many of them—even in cases someone was armed or unarmed—you had issues of mental illness you had people how had knives instead of guns, cases where it seemed that perhaps something could have been done to prevent this person from being killed” and “previously, this wasn’t out there.”
Unless he was referring to me or one of my colleagues at the Reno News & Review as the smart editor, Lowery and the Postdescribed something as unprecedented that wasn’t.
PBS also tweeted a link to the segment using similar language, and a minor fracas erupted between Lowery and Veronika Cernadas, who is, according to her Twitter bio, the Media Relations Manager for the Guardian:
In fairness to Lowery, he is not at all responsible for how PBS described the segment on the air, on Youtube, on Twitter, or anywhere else, and he tweeted his own response to PBS:
The thing is, the Pulitzer citation specifically said they were awarding the Post for creating an unprecedented database: “For its revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be.” But it was not the Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” project that proved that the federal government had been misrepresenting the number of people who were killed by law enforcement for decades. It was Fatal Encounters and Killed by Police that took the initiative and proved that instead of 400 people a year, it was closer to 1,200.
This Pulitzer Prize heralds the arrival of the era of data journalism in earnest, and the reception of the Post’s project will set the tone for data-driven investigations for years to come. It shouldn’t matter who collected data on police killings first, but it does. Claiming to be first when it was not, claiming not to know that other databases existed for years, and claiming to be comprehensive when it was not is, quite frankly, beneath the Washington Post.
Newspapers and organizations like Fatal Encounters that have far fewer resources than the Washington Post collect data and publicize it at great cost. Independent media and independent data collection and publication are part of the future of data journalism, and allowing legacy media to take credit for our achievements undermines our ability to sustain our own efforts, which depend on charitable dollars and public support.
The Post did something we didn’t: its analysis and packaging of police-killing data were original, and outstripped what Fatal Encounters could ever have done given the resources available to us. But the idea of keeping track wasn’t new, and the Post newsroom was not the only one to undertake the work of assembling a massive data set that has already begun to change policing in this country for the better. We may have been the scrappiest database of deadly police violence the Washington Post had ever heard of, but we existed before the Post’s did, and they had heard of us. They just told the Pulitzer Board that they hadn’t.
Committed contributors including but not limited to Walt Lockley, Carla DeCeros, Christopher Cox, and Scott Hooper have been the lifeblood of the Fatal Encounters project. Thanks, too, to the Guardian’s project, “The Counted,” and to GunViolenceArchive.org. Follow Fatal Encounters on Twitter @fatalencounters.
Pennsylvania state Rep. Kevin Boyle is up for reelection today, and according to a casting call email forwarded to Gawker, he needs some extra friends at Philadelphia polling stations.
The following was sent to us yesterday:
Only $120 seems a little light for a 13 hour standing workday, but at least there’s an open bar afterwards.
A representative from the Mike Lemon Casting Agency confirmed the email’s authenticity but could not provide any comment. The email provides barely any detail about what “extras” will actually do at these polling stations, though Pennsylvania law prohibits any electioneering inside the sites, or within 10 feet of them from the outside. A spokesperson from the Pennsylvania Department of State told me “there is nothing in the Pennsylvania Election Code that addresses the specific situation you’re describing.”
The Kevin Boyle campaign did not return multiple requests for comment.
Bookmark Kinja Deals and follow us on Twitter to never miss a deal. Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more, and don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter.
Anyone who enjoys cooking should invest in pots and pans that will perform well and last a long time, and today’s Amazon Gold Box offers a chance to upgrade your entire collection.
Every pot and pan in this 10-piece Calphalon AccuCore collection is five-ply, meaning they combine the properties of multiple metals to create a superior cooking experience. The exteriors of the pans are made of brushed stainless steel, which is durable, attractive, and induction-friendly. Inside, two layers of aluminum facilitate rapid heating, and a copper core in the center helps to distribute the heat evenly throughout.
$350 gets you two skillets, two sauce pans, a sauté pan, and a stock pot, which should cover just about any recipe you need to tackle. Buying them separately would set you back nearly $600, so if you like to cook, this really is a deal worth investing in. Just note that like all Gold Box deals, this price is only available today, or until sold out.
Packing cubes can make organizing clothes and toiletries for your next trip a little less hellish, and this highly-rated set of four from AmazonBasics is only $20 today. That’s $5 less than usual, and an all-time low. I actually just bought a set of these, and I absolutely love them.
Like the look of Apple’s Milanese Loop watch straps, but don’t want to spend $150 or more? These third party alternatives (okay, knock-offs) cost about 90% less, but look basically identical.
Just to give you an example of how good this deal is, that promo code will net you 24 Pace 4 cartridges for about $20. These are the exact same cartridges, and work with the same handle, as Dollar Shave Club’s “4X” razor. But with Dollar Shave Club, you’d pay $36 over six months to receive the same number of blades. Even if you had to buy a handle from Dorco (which comes with two extra cartridges), you’d still come out way ahead.
Before heading out for your next tailgate or picnic, be sure to pick up this table top charcoal grill for an all-time low $52. This char-griller’s 250 square inch cooking surface is sufficient for most small get-togethers, and it’ll even connect to an existing Char-Griller to act as a fireside box for smoking meats.
Anker, purveyor of your favorite battery packs, Bluetooth earbuds, speakers, and more, is taking $6 off their PowerPort 4 USB charger today with promo code L7PU4JGO (black model) or QAAUTP8Q (white model). Featuring a foldable plug, 100-240 volt support, and 40W shared between four PowerIQ ports, this is an ideal USB charger for frequent travelers.
This $10 Thermos bottle includes a rotating ring on the lid to help you track your water intake, making this the perfect bottle to keep with you at the office. The deal is only available on the blue model, but this is the best price Amazon’s ever listed.
Obviously, this isn’t a cable you’ll want to travel everywhere with, but if you want to be able to charge your phone or tablet while sitting on the couch, or if your nightstand is are away from the nearest outlet, an extra-long cable like this should get the job done.
Now that it’s nice outside, it might be time to take advantage of this Yukon Outfitters hammock sale, today only on Woot.
Off the bat we should note that these are camping hammocks, meaning they don’t include a stand, and they’re made of lightweight parachute nylon instead of cotton. That said, as long as you can find two trees close together and a cheap set of tree straps, they should get the job done.
Mother’s Day is coming up fast, and if you haven’t gotten a gift yet, Amazon’s discounting several Anne Klein watches to $40-$60, today only. They won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it’s certainly an option if you don’t have any better ideas.
When it comes time to upgrade to 4K, you might as well take the opportunity to upgrade your TV’s size as well. This 65" Panasonic is marked down to $999 today, which is one of the best prices we’ve ever seen on any 4K TV of that size.
50 Cent’s answer to Beats is marked down to an all-time low $40 today on Amazon, in a variety of colors. In addition to great reviews, the SMS Audio Street headphones feature 40mm drivers, a detachable cable, and a foldable design for easy storage. Just note that this is a Gold Box deal, meaning this price is only available today, or until sold out.
If you can hold your nose and tolerate a refurb, you can score an Xbox One, a Kinect, and five games for just $279 today. Kinect is basically dead from a gaming perspective, but it’s still nice to have for pausing videos and saving in-game DVR recordings.
If you’re still listening to any of your TVs through their built-in speakers, here’s an easy fix for $69, as long as you don’t mind buying a refurb.
This Vizio Sound Stand pumps out up to 95 dB of crisp stereo sound, which needless to say is a lot louder than your TV’s build in speakers. Plus, you won’t even need to find a place to put it, because your TV sits right on top. This might not be ideal for your main home theater setup (personally, we’d recommend this 5.1 channel Vizio system), but it’s a perfect little integrated system for your other TVs around the house.
For a limited time, Amazon’s taking an extra 25% off select baking items when you check out with Subscribe & Save. The catch is that you’ll have to buy most items in bulk, but your options include Jello-O, peanuts, taco seasoning, and a lot more, so be sure to check out the full list.
You’ll need to purchase your items through Subscribe & Save for the deal to work, and you won’t see the 25% discount until checkout. After you receive your first shipment, you can always cancel the subscription if you don’t want to receive it again.
Burt’s Bees makes your favorite lip balm, but this classics kit also includes hand salve, hand repair cream, foot cream, and more, and Amazon’s taking an extra 15% off today when you clip the coupon on the product page. It even comes with in a giftable tin, so you’ll feel extra special when you give it to yourself.
If you’re worried that you won’t get a ton of use out of this thing, note that in addition to standard pressure cooking, you can also use the Instant Pot as a slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, and more.
If your nearest movie theater is run by AMC or Regal, these discounted gift cards will save you 20% on your next outing. When popcorn costs $8, every buck you can save helps.
Lifehacker has a great explainer on sous-vide cooking for you to check out, but the basic idea is that you seal your food in plastic bags, and then cook it in precisely heated water over a fairly long period of time. Here are some advantages to this process from Lifehacker’s guide:
Cooking sous-vide results in evenly-cooked meat and fish.
Cooking sous-vide gives you specific control over the final temperature of the meat, avoiding overdone, dried-out food.
You can hold foods cooked sous-vide at their specified temperature for long periods of time without damaging the texture or quality of the dish, making it an ideal cooking method for holiday dinners or meals with multiple components and side-dishes.
Bacterial or other contamination is largely not an issue with sous-vide cooking. While you may be cooking up to minimum safe temperatures, the length of time you’re holding the food at its safe temperature will pasteurize your meat and ensure the safety of your food, meaning “safe” meat doesn’t have to equal “dry” or “not pink” meat any longer. Still, keep your meat thermometer handy, and test before serving. Remember, sous-vide lets you hold food at temp for long periods without diminishing the quality of the food, so if it’s undercooked, you can seal the bag and put it back in.
Sous-vide cooking is by nature a repeatable process. Set the temperature, set the timer, and walk away. You will wind up with perfectly cooked food every time you do it.
I got the Bluetooth model as a gift a few months ago, and I can’t say enough good things about it. In fact, I might just use it to make scrambled eggs this morning.
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more, and don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter. We want your feedback.
During Monday night’s town hall on MSNBC, Hillary Clinton promised that, if elected president, women would make up half of her Cabinet.
After responding to an audience member who asked Clinton why she was a feminist (Clinton: “I believe that women deserve the same rights as men in every aspect of our economy and our society”), host Rachel Maddow followed up, asking the candidate how she would close the gender gap on an individual level. “Canada has a new prime minister, Justin Trudeau,” Maddow said. “He promised when he took office that he would have a cabinet that was 50 percent women, and then he did it. [...] Would you make that same pledge?”
Clinton responded, “Well, I am going to have a Cabinet that looks like America, and 50 percent of America is women.”
This isn’t the first time that Clinton has mentioned gender equality in the upper echelons. In an interview last week, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, said that women would be included on her short list of vice presidential picks. “We’ll start with a broad list and then begin to narrow it. But there is no question that there will be women on that list,” Podesta told the Boston Globe.
Clinton also toldCosmopolitan earlier this month that “very diverse Cabinet representing the talents and experience of the entire country,” was her “aim.” It looks like she’s upgraded the 50-50 Cabinet from a goal to a promise.
In 2013, disgraced former U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner decided to run for mayor in an attempt to rehabilitate his image after a sexting scandal drove him from office. Instead he got caught up in a new sexting scandal—and this time a documentary film crew was there to record the whole thing. This week the first trailer dropped, and damn does it look good.
The two-and-a-half minute trailer is jam packed with tense behind-the-scenes moments as Weiner, ostensibly on a comeback tour, falls prey to his own hubris again and again.
In between, he practices apologizing: “I am profoundly sorry,” he says to an empty room, before trying another tack. “For that, I am profoundly sorry.
The trailer also previews two other much-hyped scenes. In the first, Weiner’s wife, longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, calmly instructs a nervous aide about to face an onslaught of reporters, “Just a quick optics thing—you will look happy.”
“We’re going to try to look like we’re holding together as a group,” Weiner says during the same meeting.
In the second, Weiner’s mistress Sydney Leathers—codenamed Pineapple by his staff—chases him barefoot through a McDonalds in an attempt to confront him.
“This is the worst, doing a documentary on my scandal,” Weiner grumbles with a pained look on his face. I beg to differ.
Subreddit of the Day is about celebrating the cool, weird, fun parts of Reddit. Every day the moderators of SROTD pull a subreddit from a large pool of nominees and promote it. In the past few weeks’ they’ve featured subreddits devoted to stuff like drones, fan art, and frustrating gifs that cut off the best part at the end.
The SROTD is the unofficial gatekeeper of cool on Reddit. While its power to make subreddits mainstream isn’t what once was, it’s still a big deal to be chosen. (The mods are not employed by Reddit or affiliated in any way.)
But SROTD has started using that power to promote some of the worst Reddit has to offer. Like their choice for April 11: a transphobic piece of trash called SwordandSheath. More recently, on Sunday April 24, they promoted another hot steaming pile of excrement, TheRedPill. The Red Pill, or TRP for short, is about helping men be men and is known in polite company as “a complete waste of human experience.” It’s also repeatedly come under fire for promoting rape and violence towards women.
SROTD’s interview with TRP moderator bsutansalt gives you an idea what we’re dealing with:
“Just look at how it’s open season on men in college, in large part due to the Dear Colleague letter. Another example is the notion of “teach men not to rape”. If that’s an accepted notion, then why not “teach women not to falsely accuse” or “teach blacks not to steal”? If the latter are misogynistic or racist, then logic demands the anti-male version be misandrist/sexist.”
And then there’s this doozie:
“Masculinity is most definitely under attack in western society. The media denigrates men left and right and often we don’t even realize it. An example is the TV trope of the “doofus dad” in commercials and TV shows.”
While the TRP Subreddit of the Day post was written under the name SROTDroid, the architect of the piece was ZadocPaet—the same person who previously promoted the transphobic SwordandSheath subreddit.
“SROTD’s official goal is to promote well deserving subreddits, [but] it’s secondary role is to allow writers the freedom to be creative and express themselves fully and fearlessly,” SROTD mod jaxspider told Gizmodo.
To further that goal, jaxspider said there’s no oversight over full time SROTD post writers like ZadocPaet. “Writers solely pick what subreddits to feature,” jaxspider said.
The SROTD team knew how controversial their post would be. They prefaced the post, explaining they “had some questions,” but that “the design [of the interview] is to find out what exactly red pill theory is through conversation, and then to leave any conclusions to you, the readers.”
And herein lies a fundamental problem with SROTD’s policy of zero oversight. The writers of SROTD are learning how to express themselves and how to conduct an interview—hugely important skills for non-fiction writers. Yet they’re doing all of this in a large and popular venue. SROTD has over 100,000 followers, and it’s a popular destination for new redditors. It’s basically a giant recommendation list.
So shouldn’t they have an obligation to not promote subreddits that engage in transphobia and misogyny?
ZadocPaet eventually responded to the accusations of promoting TRP irresponsibly.
My interview with TRP is no different from reddit allowing WBC [Westboro Baptist Church] to come on and do an AMA not once but twice, and one time with the username that said got sent the CT shooter. They got a ton of publicity, up votes, and even reddit gold. And they got to cherry pick their questions.
Except it is different; WBC actually is a hate group.
The post got 2788 comments before it was shut down:
This thread has now been locked due to a failure to communicate. In other words, you guys couldn’t keep things civil and no intelligent discussion is happening on here today. Signed your friendly female mod.
That ranks it as the most commented post in SROTD’s history. Nine comments were deleted for unknown reasons.
TRP enthusiasts also jumped into the fray to defend the subreddit and its mods.
The worst part of the entire saga? TheRedPill didn’t need ZadocPaet’s help. It’s currently a larger reddit than SROTD and it’s goddamn notorious throughout Reddit. All ZadocPaet did was give TRP a mouthpiece, and implicitly legitimize it at the same time.
We’ve reached out to Reddit and will update if we here back.
EDITED: The piece originally referred to user jaxspider as an admin. Admins are official employees of Reddit. Jaxspider is the volunteer moderator of SROTDm and is not affiliated with Reddit.
Security guards have a bad reputation for wanton enforcement of arbitrary rules. Is it deserved? Watch this video of a guard at Ground Zero silence a bunch of North Carolina school kids while they’re singing the National Anthem and decide for yourself.
In the video above, posted by a parent of one the kids last week, we see a chorus from Waynesville Middle School, of North Carolina, performing the Star Spangled Banner—with harmony!—only to be shushed and booted by a uniformed security officer (the clip has been viewed over 500,000 times). The New York Times reports that the National September 11 Memorial Museum in Manhattan has apologized for the choral crackdown:
“The guard did not respond appropriately,” Kaylee Skaar, a museum spokeswoman, said. “We are working with our security staff to ensure that this does not happen again with future student performances.”
Apparently, the issue was a $35 permit required for such a performance, which the school group did not acquire. On the one hand, it’s understandable not to want a place of solemn remembrance to become, far down the road, just another large public square in New York filled with drum circles and 9/11 Spider-Men. On the other hand, good rule of thumb is to avoid being caught on video telling little kids they can’t sing the national anthem. On the third, mutant hand, maybe this sort of thing is going to happen forever now that we’ve turned the site of a horrific, world historical terrorist attack into a tourist destination.
Another day, another cop being racist in public. Today’s star is Jacksonville sheriff’s lieutenant Trudy Callahan, who was suspended from her job for 10 days over a series of Instagram posts, including an image of a black man lying on a broken fence captioned “get your Hood Hammock.”
The offending posts also included an image of a black man standing in line at a drive-through ATM, captioned, “When you need money to get gas for the car you can’t drive up to the ATM,” and an image of a police sketch of a man with dreadlocks, captioned, “The police really expect somebody to find this nigga. I know 6 niggas that look like this.”
Callahan seems to have repurposed both the “hood hammock” photo and the police sketch from pre-existing memes (the sketch even does that horrible screencapped-Twitter-text-on-Instagram thing.) In other words, her casual racism was compounded by the grievous offense taking other people’s jokes on the internet and not crediting them.
Let Callahan’s posts be a lesson to cops everywhere: If you’re going to do something racist, make sure your gun at least goes off in the process. Otherwise, you might actually face some consequences for it.
Tom Clancy speaking in the White House screening room while First Lady Barbara Bush laughs and President Bush looks on (February 19, 1990, George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)
President George H. W. Bush hosted a star-studded screening of The Hunt for Red October at the White House on February 19, 1990. The guests included everyone from Tom Clancy and James Earl Jones to the CEO of Paramount and Colin Powell. Robert Gates was there, as was the director of the CIA, and men from the highest ranks of the Navy. But there are some guests who still remain a secret, even to this day.
I obtained photos of the movie screening through a Freedom of Information request to the George Bush Presidential Library. And the photos that have been withheld are nearly as interesting as the photos I got.
It’s sort of a surreal event to imagine, in retrospect. The Hunt for Red October, based on Tom Clancy’s 1984 book of the same name, is notable for being the last American film produced about the Cold War during the Cold War. And this gathering of Hollywood elites and the National Security establishment could almost be seen as both a victory lap for the Cold War and a pre-game meeting for the first Gulf War.
The Hunt for Red October started production in April of 1989, but by the time it hit theaters on March 2, 1990, the Berlin Wall had come down (November 1989) and the Soviet government announced that the Communist Party was no longer in control.
President Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush greet actor James Earl Jones at the White House screening for The Hunt For Red October (George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)
The plot centers around the possible defection of a high-ranking Soviet submarine captain played by Sean Connery. A lone CIA analyst, played by Alec Baldwin, is the only person who understands that this Soviet commander wants to defect with his new high-tech sub, rather than bomb Washington. Baldwin’s character must convince his pals in the Navy that Connery’s character poses no threat. But just as Soviet-American comedian’s Yakov Smirnoff’s career ground to a halt after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea of high-stakes defection was almost a punchline by 1990.
If you saw The Hunt For Red October in theaters, you knew that the Cold War was effectively over. And that made producers nervous. Originally set loosely in what was then “present day,” Paramount Pictures even had to add a text crawl at the beginning of the film to firmly place it in the past: “On November 13, 1984, approximately four months before Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union...”
But Americans loved it. The people of 1990 experienced a sort of instant nostalgia for steely men making tough decisions about the potential for nuclear apocalypse. It wound up being the sixth highest grossing movie of 1990—beaten by Home Alone, Ghost, Dances with Wolves, Pretty Woman, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in that order. And it was cemented into the public imagination as a solid win for both the Navy and the CIA.
Contact sheet of photos at the White House screening room on February 19, 1990 with redactions (George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)
As I mentioned, the photos that have been withheld from my FOIA request hammer at the WHAT ARE YOU HIDING button in my brain. I read heavily redacted government documents all the time. But there’s something about the power of redacted photos from a contact sheet that’s even more alluring. You see those “(b)(3)“ redactions above? Those are presumably photos of CIA agents, and perhaps some people like Robert M. Gates, future Secretary of Defense for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
It has been incredibly common since Jimmy Carter’s presidency to use the White House screening room as a way to entertain high-profile guests. Bush would host numerous movie screenings during his presidency, just as President Clinton would after him.
Bush had Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver over to see Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on February 18, 1989. He had Gary Shandling and Linda Doucett at the White House for a screening of the long forgotten Michael Keaton vehicle The Dream Team on April 29, 1989. But there was something special about this movie get-together and the CIA and military attendees. The Navy was so intimately involved in the production of The Hunt For Red October. They supplied consultants and allowed filming on aircraft carriers at no cost to the production company.
The question that remains is how deeply involved the CIA was in advising the producers of The Hunt For Red October. The CIA didn’t have a formal entertainment industry liaison office until 1995—five years after The Hunt For Red October was released. And the fact that viewers never see the CIA’s official seal in the movie lends credence to the idea that the agency didn’t have any official involvement with the film. But we’re not so sure. The CIA infamously helped finance the 1954 animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
One attendee at the White House for The Hunt For Red October might have seen the potential that night for using film as a way to give the public a better impression of the CIA. That man was Robert M. Gates, then the Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs.
In the 2009 paper “Get Smart: A Look at the Current Relationship Between Hollywood and the CIA” by Tricia Jenkins, we learn about Gates and his attempts at transparency following the screening. Roughly a year later, as Director of Central Intelligence, Gates would create the Task Force For Greater CIA Openness. The document recognized the need for greater transparency by the CIA—an agency that had a less than sterling reputation for openness with the American public.
Part of that bid for transparency was to declassify more documents and open up the archives, so that the world could get a better sense of what the CIA had accomplished. The other side was getting more intimately involved with the media; a move that might be seen with more cynical eyes as government propaganda overtly penetrating film and TV production.
President Bush shows off a Hunt For Red October Hat (George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)
But after that winter screening in 1990, what was next? How would America flex and pose on the world stage militarily with the collapse of their greatest foe? America wouldn’t let those war muscles atrophy, of course, as Saddam Hussein’s spanking would be delivered less than a year later. And slowly but surely, the National Security establishment would learn how to use American popular media to its advantage. The first bombings of the Gulf War were timed to coincide with the US evening news.
Strangely enough, this White House screening was tangentially involved in a sex scandal that would only surface nearly two decades later. Naval aide John Stufflebeem was there at the February 1990 screening with his wife. In 2008 he was fired as a director of Navy staff after it came to light that he had an affair with a federal employee that started in 1989—or, by his recollection, a non-sexual relationship that started the same month as The Hunt For Red October screening.
Stufflebeem, who would work his way up to Rear Admiral in the following years, allegedly told the unnamed woman (only known as Jane Doe in the court documents) that his wife had passed away, which was untrue. According to the US Department of Defense Inspector General’s report, they had engaged in sexual relations many times, including at least one romp session somewhere inside the White House.
Naval aide John Stufflebeem with Barbara Bush (February 19, 1990, George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)
When Jane Doe found out that Stufflebeem was married, she was reportedly livid, leading us to believe that if her version of events is true, she wasn’t at the screening of The Hunt For Red October.
Rear Admiral Stufflebeem at the White House with Jane Doe (US Department of Defense Inspector General report, March 2008)
I’m still compiling what I hope will be a comprehensive list of the movies George H.W. Bush watched while in office, as I have with President Carter and President Clinton. But that will require a bit more digging, as I get a broader picture of not only what Bush watched, but how it influenced the way that government would use the power of film to influence the American people.
Below is the complete guest list for the screening of The Hunt For Red October. I’ve included screenshots of the redacted portions and transcribed the rest of the list verbatim:
Barbara Bush, The First Lady
Marvin P. Bush, the President’s son
Mrs. Marvin P. (Margaret) Bush, the Presidents daughter-in-law
Thomas L. Clancy Jr., author
Mrs. Thomas L. (Wanda) Clancy, wife
Martin S. Davis, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Paramount Communications, Inc., New York, New York.
Mrs. Martin S. (Luella) Davis, wife
Robert M. Gates, Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs
Mrs. Robert M. (Rebecca) Gates, wife
Cdr. James C. Holloway, guest attending
Mrs. James C. (Beverly) Holloway, wife
Adm. James L. Holloway III, U.S. Navy retired
Mrs. James L. (Dabney) Holloway III, wife
Adm. Bobby R. Inman, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Mrs. Bobby R. (Nancy) Inman, wife
James Earl Jones, actor
Adm. Frank Kelso II, Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Command
Mrs. Frank (Landess) Kelso II, wife
Richard J. Kerr, Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Mrs. Richard J. (Janice “Jan”) Kerr, wife
Virginia A. Lampley, Special Assistant for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Legislative Affairs
Frederic V. Malek, Senior Advisor of the Carlyle Group, Washington, D.C.
Mrs. Frederic V. (Marlene) Malek, wife
Adm. Daniel J. Murphy, partner with Murphy and Demory Ltd.
Sharon Norris, guest attending
Gen. Colin L. Powell, Chairman, Join Chiefs of Staff (JCS)
Mrs. Colin L. (Alma) Powell, wife
Davis R. Robinson, husband of the President’s first cousin, Susue Walker
Mrs. Davis R. (Suzanne “Susue”) Robinson, wife and the President’s first cousin
Brent Scowcroft, Assistant for National Security Affairs
Cdr. John P. Stufflebeem, Naval Aide
Mrs. John P. (Nan) Stufflebeem, wife
John H. Sununu, Chief of Staff
Mrs. John H. (Nancy) Sununu, wife
Adm. Carlisle A.H. Trost, Chief of Naval Operations
Mrs. Carlisle A. H. (Pauline) Trost, wife
James D. Watkins, Secretary of Energy
Mrs. James D. (Sheila) Watkins, wife
William H. Webster, Director, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Poor Chris Christie. Can’t even enjoy the music of a singer who hates him in public without a thousand other attendees jostling him for handshakes, taking selfies, and capturing his “Purple Rain” singalongs and exquisitely well-timed Max Weinberg air drumming on camera for all eternity.
This morning, after footage of the New Jersey governor fist-pumping along to “Out in the Street” at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Brooklyn last night went viral on Twitter, two separate anonymous attendees sent us their own footage from the show.
The first, which shows a few seconds of Christie singing his heart out to the boss’s show-opening Prince tribute, is a glorious thing to behold.
The second tipster sent highlights from Christie’s grooves to “Blinded by the Light,” the Jimmy Cliff cover “Trapped,” “Ramrod,” and the Born in the USA outtake “My Love Will Not Let You Down.”
At one point, someone—Christie?—can be heard asking, “Do you want a drink?” If Chris Christie is selfless enough to buy mid-song stadium beers for his friends at new acquaintances while his favorite band plays, Gawker takes back everything bad we ever said about him. He is a concert hero.
Here’s the money shot, from “Trapped.”
Seeing the governor’s moves in real life was a “true Jersey experience,” the tipster wrote.
Finally, Twitter user @palpatrick tagged me in his clip of a totally frantic Christie playing air guitar in a tweet this morning.
When you go out on the town this weekend, let the sprit of brew-poundin’, finger-jabbin’, straight talkin’, snack-bar tab accumulatin’ Chris Christie be your spirit guide. May we all have as much fun over the course of our lives as he did during a single show last night.
The surprise successes of the insurgency campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have sent a powerful message to Washington insiders: This election year, Americans are hungry for something different. They want a different kind of leader—one who can cut through the red tape and actually get things done.
As the editor of Gawker, I may live and work in the heart of The Establishment, but I think I know a little more about what Normal Americans want than your average media elite. After all, my hometown is in Minnesota, and I have also been to Maine and, briefly, Nebraska—all places where Normal Americans outnumber the other kinds.
Here’s what I’ve learned in those places: Normal Americans know that the government is sclerotic, inefficient, beholden to special interests, and unable to get results. Washington is tied to the old ways of doing things, and bureaucracy stands in the way of utilizing the new technologies and strategies that help our boldest entrepreneurs get ahead in today’s hyper-connected digital world.
Normal Americans are fed up with politics as usual. And what is more “politics as usual” than allowing our two creaky old political parties to maintain a duopoly on electing America’s next head of state?
Normal Americans demand change, and they know that change will have to come from outside the traditional two-party system. Donald Trump may inspire crowds of Normal Americans with his bold talk of shaking up Washington, but his over-the-top tone won’t fly with other business leaders, and he hasn’t shown the dignity necessary to win over the military brass. Bernie Sanders may promise a “revolution,” but soaking America’s job creators is no way to encourage the sort of bottom-up innovation this country really needs.
I appreciated my friend Jim VandeHei’s compelling call for a third-party candidate from “outside the political system” who could “exploit the fear factor,” but he doesn’t go far enough. It’s time for some real change you can believe in: After Obama’s term in office is up (or even before), the United States Armed Forces, backed of America’s most innovative entrepreneurs, should stage a coup d’état.
President Barack Obama is an honorable man who has done his best, but there’s no denying that a bolder leader would have seized on recent ISIS activity as an opportunity to suspend the Constitution and spare America the drudgery of another presidential election.
America needs a strong leader with a military background who is willing to declare a state of emergency, dissolve our do-nothing Congress (let’s send those clowns home to their districts—permanently!), and refuse to relinquish control of the government until we’ve destroyed ISIS, introduced democracy to Iran, brought Putin to heel, and showed China who’s really in charge of the Asia-Pacific region.
We’ll call it the New American Revolution. And of course, a revolution needs a charismatic leader. Why not Gen. James Mattis, who is already a deeply respected figure among the political class?
The military is home to some of America’s brightest warrior-intellectuals, but they don’t have all the answers. That’s why I’d also call on the boldest innovators of Silicon Valley to immediately voice their strong support for the new regime. With titans like Marc Andreesen, Marissa Mayer, and Elizabeth Holmes on board, Americans would know that the country was in good hands.
As long as partisanship reigns, special interests control Congress, and our presidents are forced to answer to the most extreme voices in their bases, we’ll never balance the budget, overhaul our broken entitlement programs, or introduce true competition and choice to the education and healthcare markets. One man could accomplish all of that and more, with the help of America’s fighting men and women, and our bravest entrepreneurs.
If we’re going to disrupt government, let’s really disrupt it.
