Now that 7,000 American men and several drunk farm animals have officially declared their candidacies for President, keeping track of them has never been more confusing or difficult. Luckily, we’ve put together a “cheat sheet” with “quick trivia” to help the political layperson discuss with confidence the nuances of each male candidate’s views and legitimacy. Feel free to use any and all of these in kicky water cooler conversations about politics this summer, and impress your friends!

Jeb Bush

Who? Former Florida governor
Strength: Bilingual, centri$t
Weakness: Once listed himself as “Hispanic” on a voter registration form, which is very silly because he’s a Bush, which is like double the white of the average white. It is an almost-lethal dose of toxic levels of white. He’s Write An Entire Feature Length Screenplay in 12 Hours-levels of white, if you catch my drift.

Scott Walker

Who? Union-busting hot ham enthusiast
Strength: Is married to woman named “Tonette,” which makes him and his wife the couple with the most Wisconsin names in US History.
Weakness: His record as governor of Wisconsin; he is also physically unable to move the top half of his face while speaking which makes him come across like a lying potato.

Rick Perry

Who? Rubber-faced Texan Dick Tracy villain
Strength: New glasses.
Weakness: Pills, numbers.

Fig 1: Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry

Donald Trump

Who? Serious candidate with good and viable ideas.
Strength: Possesses neither shame nor self-awareness, the two most important traits of highly successful people in 2015.
Weakness: None; he’s perfect and America needs him in the race for as long as possible. We deserve this. We’ve earned this.

Bernie Sanders

Who? An unkempt self-identified socialist from Vermont
Strength: Good ideas, adorable.
Weakness: The Rand Paul of the Left.

Ted Cruz

Who? Oh he’s that guy whose face is melting, right? Like, the smug debate team captain? That one right?
Strength: Can talk for a long long long long long long long time.
Weakness: Polling so low in a crowded field that he might not even make the first GOP debate.

Fig 2: Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz

Rick Santorum

Who? A frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter, frequently found on the wrong side of history.
Strength: Unprecedented chickenfucking stamina.
Weakness: Muscular thighs ;)

Lindsey Graham

Who? Definitely not a lesbian. I know that for sure.
Strength: Literally doesn’t know how to do anything else but grandstand about politics. If society ended and it was every man for himself, the strong would definitely eat the bloggers and Lindsey Grahams first.
Weakness: About as inspiring as a half-licked yogurt lid.

Mike Huckabee

Who? Jolly sociopath from Arkansas. The one Megyn Kelly always rhetorically spanks on her show.
Strength: Real affable.
Weakness: Famous for aligning self closely with people who abuse animals and children.

Fig. 3: Mike Huckabee, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum

Martin O’Malley

Who? Former Maryland Governor
Strength: Is hot, can play guitar.
Weakness: Is Tommy Carcetti from The Wire.

Chris Christie

Who? Oh, you know. That guy. That dick guy from New Jersey. The Springsteen fanboy who had his feelings hurt when Bruce was like, ugh, not you. The one who yells. You know the one.
Strength: Loud.
Weakness: A dick.

Fig 4: Martin O’Malley, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie

Marco Rubio

Who? Oh, man. Uh, he’s a Senator right? From Florida? And he’s Cuban.
Strength: Inspiring to the base, young enough to seem fresh.
Weakness: Balding, a natural byproduct of aging for many men. But, in our denial of the finite nature of our lives, voters want a President who they can imagine living forever. It’s not fair, Marco. It’s not fair. Why do we pretend? Why do we fear the beautiful inevitability of silence?

Rand Paul

Who? That guy those ultimate frisbee players were talking about on the bus.
Strength: Free pot for everybody, even fetuses.
Weakness: Is made of mostly water, susceptible to infections resulting from ever-evolving microbes.

Lincoln Chaffee

Who? ????
Strength: Sounds like he might be good at ??? baseball??? In the 40’s maybe?!?
Weakness: Like every human being who has ever existed, like every human civilization that ever existed, he will one day die.

Bobby Jindal

Who? Some nerd from Louisiana
Strength: Excellent security system.
Weakness: Everything made by people must come to an end. Paint peels off, books are forgotten, buildings collapse and are buried beneath hundreds of years of soil. Rome ended whimpering. The Aztecs were all slaughtered. What difference does it make who is in office when a Cortez or Pizarro lands ashore?

Fig 5: Lincoln Chaffee, Bobby Jindal and Rand Paul

Jim Webb

Who? zzz
Strength: zzz
Weakness: The other week I was cleaning out my room and I came across a box of keepsakes—ticket stubs, maps, newspaper clippings—that I’d been saving. Who are these for? I said aloud. I’m not going to have a child. They’ll just be another thing for somebody to throw away.

Fig. 6: Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog, George Pataki dressed as Werner Herzog at ComicCon

Ben Carson

Who? The doctor. The actual doctor. Isn’t it funny that Scott Walker, a college dropout, thinks he’s as qualified to run America as a literal brain surgeon? That’s some white man confidence.
Strength: Brain surgeon.
Weakness: How could the pitiful finiteness of our individual consciousness be worth preemptively mourning, if nobody has any knowledge of what the alternative is?

John Kasich

Who? A clump of cells, conceived out of sheer luck, nurtured from zygote into fetus into baby into man that gradually aged without succumbing to innumerable indifferent deadly hazards at every step of life.
Strength: Is made from the same material that existed at the moment of the creation of the universe.
Weakness: Every day, every atom in his body loses an infinitesimal amount of energy. Just as your body does. Just as my body does. We are skidding to a stop over billions of years, slowing until there’s nothing left.

George Pataki

Who? Water, air, electricity, bile.
Strength: I remembered his name for this list.
Weakness: What happens after this? We swim forward like sharks, gulping it all down, washing experiences over our gills so that we can breathe, and for what? At the end we sink and dissolve. Our consciousness is the product of a vulnerable biological shell, instantaneously breakable, endlessly fragile. The limited life spans of our living matter doom us to make the same mistakes over and over as a species, never passing on the full accumulated wisdom of those who died before us. Eventually, we all fade back into the biological sludge from whence we came, our secrets, our hopes, our dreams dissolved to their atomic fragments.

Robert David Steele

Who? All of you and none of you.
Strength: Is.
Weakness: If a big enough meteor strikes us before next November, we won’t have to worry about any of this.

Contact the author at erin@jezebel.com.

Images via Wikimedia, Getty.

Your best friend Taylor Swift is going to China. At least, a line of officially licensed Tayla merchandise bearing her initials and birth year will be available in the country soon. Do you think the Chinese people will buy it?

Why wouldn’t they? Well, 1989 was the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when Chinese troops killed hundreds of pro-Democracy protesters who were gathered in the titular Beijing square. 1989, duh, is also the title of Swift’s newest album. And her initials, T.S., well—you get it. The Guardian notes that the Chinese government is so defensive about the date that it has blacklisted social media users from publishing any successive combination of 6, 4, and 89 online. (The massacre happened on June 4.)http://gawker.com/twenty-five-ye...

Swift’s line of inadvertent protest-wear will include t-shirts, sweatshirts, and dresses, the Guardian reports, which will be available via the Chinese online retailers Alibaba and JD.com. A video posted to Weibo to promote the line shows several shirts emblazoned with “1989,” and 1989 the album is already available on JD.

It remains to be seen whether items like this official Tayla hoodie, which reads “T.S. 1989” without any additional text or information, will be made available in the country. Chinese Swifties looking for an extremely punk rock look might give it a try.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Welcome to Midweek Madness, where we go out to dinner with our best friends Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert the day before they announce their divorce and listen to them make passive aggressive comments about each other’s orders like, “I thought you only ate meat when you were on tour with someone else?” and “The waitress is really your type, isn’t she?” and then you don’t even offer to split the bill because they owe you. This week: Khloe is pregnant, Kourtney is pregnant, Miranda is pregnant, and Tom Cruise is pregn—oh wait, no, he’s just getting married.

Here we go!

OK!

KHLOE PREGNANT: BUT WHO’S THE DADDY?

When Khloe Kardashian found out she was definitely maybe officially pregnant, there was only one one question on her mind: who is the daddy, and what does he do? See, what happened was that she hooked up with both her “estranged husband” Lamar Odom and her “new man” James Harden around the same time, leaving her uncertain as to whose lucky sperm wiggled its way into her egg. But, claims a source, she eventually figured it out. The father of her unborn child is…Lamar! And she and Lamar will soon reconcile and everything will work itself out because babies fix all the problems in a relationship.

Mariah Carey and That Billionaire are still very much in love, but that’s probably due to all the demands Carey makes of their relationship. Allow me to share them all, because it will likely the most important and life-changing bulleted list you ever read.

• Only have sex on Mondays.
• Never mention Nick Cannon.
• Always make sure there’s chilled champagne in the house
• Spoon-feed me whenever I ask, because it is “the most romantic thing on earth.”
• Keep 24 humidifiers in the house.
• Never smoke cigarettes around me.
• Always keep in touch and let me know where you are.

Never in my life have I read a more effective recipe for eternal love.

Prince George and Princess Charlotte, both literal royalty, aren’t treated as such by their parents! Nope, Kate and William refuse to spoil their children and “insist on keeping life as normal as possible.” One source says “George is a typical little boy who loves running around, getting dirty and playing with his digger truck.” That’s very admirable, but eventually one of the Queen’s Corgis will convince George and Charlotte to eat a piece of fruit from a spooky tree in the backyard of Buckingham Palace and they’ll quickly realize just how immune they are to the problems of normal life. Until then, though!

And Also:

• Lena Dunham “admires” Malia Obama’s work ethic.
• Lisa Vanderpump is getting more powerful.
• Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts are making a movie together despite being frenemies.
• Gigi Hadid and Joe Jonas are “nocturnal.”
• Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott are nearly broke.
• George Clooney is itching to get Amal Clooney as pregnant as she could possibly be.
• Colin Farrell and Britney Spears may start dating again. (They had “a fling” in 2003.) I need this to happen.
• No really.
• Please make this happen.
• Let’s all light some candles.

Grade: D- (Queen Elizabeth’s offers you a fruit from the backyard of Buckingham Palace but it’s not even the sinful one.)

Life & Style

OH NO...KOURTNEY’S PREGNANT

Oh no! Oh no!!!! I would have gone with ‘Oh, the humanity’ but I guess ‘oh no’ works nearly as well. In case you missed it earlier in this paragraph: oh no, Kourtney’s pregnant! And, oh no, Scott Disick is the father! The immaculate conception between Lord Disick and his former lover occurred during “a rare moment when Scott was being charming,” and now things are quite complicated. A source says Kourtney is “definitely not down with having Scott as her baby daddy anymore,” and why should she be? He’s “addicted to cocaine and has been hooking up with a bevy of younger women.” An insider revealed that “no one has told Scott about the baby news,” but did not confirm whether or not he subscribes to Life & Style.

Life & Style is really sticking with this whole “Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux are married” thing, because this week they’re reporting that the possible newlyweds just went on a secret honeymoon. I almost believe them! The alleged honeymoon took place in Austin (Justin is filming The Leftovers in Texas) at the home of Sandra Bullock. (Was Jon Hamm there?) It was a “rollicking barbecue,” complete with a “margarita fountain,” guacamole, badminton, and “mutual friend Jason Bateman.”

ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT:

And Also:

• Justin Bieber is “every waiter’s worst nightmare.”
• Farrah Abraham gave her daughter $600 “for her two front teeth.”
• ‘Cause baby Giuliana Rancic and Maria Menounos have bad blood.
• Calvin Harris and Taylor Swift are “house hunting.”
• Karim Benzema is cheating on Rihanna with Karrueche Tran.
• Kendall Jenner and Cara Delevingne are getting a reality show.
• Britney Spears dumped Charlie Ebersol because he didn’t want more kids.
• Mariah Carey wants to have babies with That Billionaire.

Wrong Answer:

Grade: F (You think you see a famous couple at dinner, but it’s just Hillary Swank and her tennis coach.)

inTouch

BLAKE AND MIRANDA DIVORCE: SHE’S PREGNANT AND DUMPED

It won’t end! It just won’t end. Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton are divorcing. Some claim it’s because Miranda cheated. Others claim it’s because Blake cheated. Maybe they both cheated! Maybe nobody cheated. There’s only one person we can trust, and that person is whoever leaked this newest bombshell to inTouch: Miranda is pregnant. Despite the fact that “Miranda made it clear...that she didn’t want kids ‘until [Blake] got his act together,” there is a bun in her oven and it was kneaded by Blake Shelton. The source claims Miranda didn’t find out about the pregnancy until after the divorce papers were filed, and that she’s “not feeling sorry for herself.” Three days of news about this divorce could fill three whole albums.

Jen and Ben’s divorce is getting “ugly.” (Apparently it hasn’t been ugly until this very moment.) She’s planning on doing “whatever it takes to get sole physical custody of their three children,” even if that means burning him in court. “She knows about the rumors of affairs with co-stars,” and “Ben’s links to [those] other women could be [her] trump card.” Sources say Ben is “fighting an uphill battle—and is most likely going to lose.” When it comes to battles Ben will soon be fighting, it appears that Superman has nothing on a crusader named Jennifer Garner.

And Also:

• No one in New York City cares about Brandy.
• All of Brody Jenner’s hookups on The Hills were fake.
• Vanessa Lachey posed with popsicles on a red carpet.
• All of Kaitlyn Bristowe’s friends think she’s “headed for heartbreak.”
• All of the Duggars are “at war.”
• Louis Tomlinson’s “baby mama has a shady past.”
• Brad Pitt’s mom is desperate for him to save his marriage. Same.

Grade: F
(You’re trying to commute to work in peace, but Brandy gets on your train and starts singing.)

STAR

TOM CRUISE: GETTING MARRIED

But enough about divorce! Let’s talk about love. Tom Cruise, 53, is probably going to marry his 22-year-old assistant, Emily Thomas! She’s been “quietly seeing the superstar since late 2014,” and Tom is “smitten” as hell. Thomas was hired to work “as his assistant on Mission: Impossible-Rogue Nation, and it looks like she turned it into Mission: Possible-Love Connection! Though they’re not engaged yet, rumors are already flying that Suri will be the flower girl. When asked for comment, Suri probably said, “Wait wait wait. What are you talking about? Tom who?”

Meanwhile, I’m gonna drop this bomb in with no further commentary: Katie Holmes and Jamie Foxx are engaged.

A Royal bodyguard was “eager to spill” some secrets about the Royal Family to Star of all places! Here’s what he said:

• Kate does pole dancing exercises. God, save the queen!
• Harry loves putting temporary tattoos on his butt. Gasp!
• Queen Elizabeth goes on secret trips to McDonald’s. Storm the palace!
• William does charity work while wearing disguises. Burn him!
• Camilla talks shit about Diana sometimes. Burn her, too!

These rumors are so dull that they must be true.

The other long features were a piece about about Lamar and Khloe (a story we’ve already covered) and a weirdly out of place feature about Amy Schumer’s sister’s private trauma, and then there was this:

And Also:

• Kirsten Dunst lives on juices and smoothies.
• Jimmy Fallon was hammered as hell the night he broke his finger.
• Johnny Depp went broke after giving Vanessa Paradis $150 million.
• Liam Hemsworth is so crazy jealous of his brother Chris.
• Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult had a huge fight in an “elegant restaurant.”
• Keanu Reeves is in love with transgender actress Jamie Clayton.
• Jennifer Garner’s rebound is Martin Henderson.

Wrong Answer:

Grade: F- (Tom Cruise asks you to marry him.)

Appendix:

Fig. 1 (inTouch)

Fig. 2 (inTouch )

Fig. 3 (OK!)

Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

Last week, we recounted the time in 2010 that Kristin Cavallari publicly offered advice to Lindsay Lohan via a CNN reporter at Comic-Con. The advice—for a recently incarcerated Lindsay—was this:

Even, like, when it comes down to parking tickets, pay your parking tickets on time! Just make sure everything is taken care of so that things don’t follow you and then all of a sudden you’re knee-deep in DUIs or parking tickets or whatever it is. Handle everything as it comes in.

Three years later, thoughtful Kristin was rudely stopped by police for speeding in her adopted city of Chicago (which she hates). Kristin was then forced to go downtown and post bail?!! because she did not have an Illinois license.

Who knew having a California drivers license in Illinois was a CRIME to be escorted to the police station to post bail?!! What a morning

September 6, 2013

According to the Chicago Tribune, she posted $150 bond at the police station.

Kristin’s defense for not carrying the proper license...

FYI...I still have an apartment in LA so I'm a resident of California

September 6, 2013

...was denied.

What a morning.

What a life.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old man accused of killing nine people at a Charleston church last month, has been indicted on 33 federal charges, including hate crimes.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the charges at a press conference this afternoon, saying Roof “decided to seek out and murder African Americans because of their race.”

Days after the shooting, Roof’s racist manifesto was uncovered. Below is a passage in which he justified his attack:

I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.

http://gawker.com/here-is-what-a...

If convicted of the federal charges, Roof would be eligible for the death penalty, though the Justice Department has not decided if they’ll pursue it. Earlier this month, Roof was charged with nine counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder in South Carolina, where he also faces the death penalty if convicted.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Most people would frown upon a business journalist lobbying the mayor of New York City over a political issue on behalf of a corporation she covers. CNBC’s Amanda Drury doesn’t see the big deal.http://gawker.com/heres-ubers-ri...

Uber is currently conducting an astroturf campaign to combat Mayor De Blasio’s attempts at regulating the vampiric amoral transit firm. Earlier today, every Uber customer in New York received an email explaining why Uber is good for the economy and American way of life, and why capping the company’s ability to chauffeur people around will likely lead to some sort of economic crisis (I’m not really sure, I didn’t read the whole email).

Financial and transit policy wonks like Ashton Kutcher and Kate Upton are already shilling for Uber:

This isn't a conservative or liberal debate it's about politicians representing their personal interests and not their community. #uberNYC

July 22, 2015

.@BilldeBlasio Why do you want to return to days when only those in Midtown & Lower Manhattan could get a ride? #UberMovesNYC

July 22, 2015

And now, CNBC’s Drury is too:

.@BilldeBlasio 25% of Uber rides are in the outer boroughs vs 6% for taxi. Do you only care about riders in Manhattan? #UberMovesNYC

July 22, 2015

It’s hard to imagine how one could get away with something so brazenly gross—try to imagine a journalist tweeting against Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban with a special message brought to you by Pepsi®.

The only thing more egregious than Drury turning her Twitter account into Uber informercial is the fact that she’s not even creating her own ads—the tweet was almost certainly randomly generated through a link included in today’s promo email:

Clicking that “Tweet at Mayor de Blasio” button launches Twitter, and automatically suggests a pre-written message like this:

Drury, it would appear, is literally just spreading Uber’s copy and pasted public relations bullshit.

Actually, this explanation of why her shilling is acceptable is the most egregious thing:

@mattbuchanan It's not a publicly traded company, and I'm a concerned user.

July 22, 2015

Good stuff, great stuff.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

The Federal Election Commission Wednesday released the 92-page personal financial disclosure of one Donald J. Trump, a $4 billion puddle of tinted moisturizer haphazardly garnished with hair and eyebrows who wants to be the next president. The Trump-puddle, who oozed slowly down an escalator last month and (inaccurately) declared he was worth $8.7 billion, has increased his claim by more than a billion since then. http://gawker.com/donald-trumps-...

Where did the secret 10th billion come from? Hard to say. As CNN points out, assets over $50 million don’t have to be broken down in the election commission document, and their value doesn’t have to be specified. Also, the information Trump released last month was current as of 2014—the new document reflects his income over the past 18 months, which has apparently been substantial.

Apparently. Trump has always been a man of “verbal billions,” who has been caught exaggerating his net worth numerous times over the years. Forbes estimated his June report was trumped up (kill me now) by as much as 100 percent. That doesn’t mean Trump lies on financial documents, though. Mostly, he fudges the numbers by valuing his personal brand at billions more than most outside commenters would credit it for. As he once put it in a deposition: Lying? No. Exaggeration? Could be.

His brand is obviously not valueless: “Mr. Trump earned at least $9.5 million in royalties from merely licensing his name” last year, the New York Times reports. There’s no totaled-up line item for “brand and licensing deals” on the FEC disclosure form, but he valued the Trump name at $3.3 billion as of last year.

Also of note: Trump was paid up to $450,000 per speaking engagement last year, and also collected $110,000 in Screen Actors Guild pension—his position on unions is surprisingly positive for a billionaire monopolist-wannabe.

“The construction unions I deal with want more in the pay envelope for their rank and file. That’s what they tell you every time you sit down at the table. You can respect that-even as you push back to cut the best deal from your perspective. That’s the American way,” he wrote in The America We Deserve, a book for which he collected less than $201 in royalties last year.

[Photo: Getty Images]

On Wednesday afternoon, one day after rapper Nicki Minaj and white rapper Taylor Swift became embroiled in an extremely heated Twitter exchange about race and about nothing, area woman Katy Perry tweeted this:

Finding it ironic to parade the pit women against other women argument about as one unmeasurably capitalizes on the take down of a woman...

July 22, 2015

Katy Perry is exactly as literate, clever, and judicious as her chosen profession requires her to be, but no more than that—three factors which combine to make her statement extremely difficult to comprehend.

A clearer version of the tweet might have read:
I find it ironic that Taylor Swift is raising the How Dare You Pit Women Against Other Women argument while she herself is directly profiting from the takedown of a woman.

A little easier to diagram, perhaps, but still too coy to be entirely lucid.

Here’s all the background knowledge a person must possess in order to understand that tweet:

1. Taylor Swift hates Katy Perry.

2. Taylor Swift’s popular single “Bad Blood” is widely understood to be a knock at Katy Perry, though she and Perry have never explicitly addressed this fact. (From Rolling Stone: “The angriest song on 1989 is called ‘Bad Blood,’ and it’s about another female artist Swift declines to name.”)

3. Taylor Swift received an MTV Video Music Award nomination for Best Video for the “Bad Blood” video, the cast of which pointedly includes every white woman in America except Katy Perry. (It was this nomination that prompted the tussle with Nicki Minaj.)

4. Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Nicki Minaj are all popular musical entertainers, Twitter is an online social messaging service that allows users to broadcast 140-character written “tweets” to the world, MTV is a basic cable channel created in the 1980s to promote music videos and sell products to young people, etc.

5. Katy Perry hates Taylor Swift.

By releasing a single all about her aggressively antagonistic relationship with Katy Perry; by releasing a video in which a team of girlfriends helps her prepare to physically destroy a proxy for Katy Perry (played by Selena Gomez); by picking a fight with Nicki Minaj about the sanctity of female solidarity—a fight brought on by her award nomination for a video for a song about how Katy Perry is a bad friend—Taylor Swift is being hypocritical.

Argues Katy Perry.

And now you understand the tweet.

[Images via Getty]

A Florida man was taught one of the primary laws of vehicular combat this weekend when he brought a head to a bus fight and lost, badly.

According to police, the man became agitated after he disembarked from his rectangular foe Saturday morning and attempted to reboard. From WTSP:

The driver told him he would have to pay another $2, and he got mad.

The driver left the bus and went inside the terminal. The passenger sat on a bench, then walked away. But about four minutes later, he returns and head-butts the glass doors on the bus, shattering the glass.

He appears to be knocked out for a few seconds, but then wakes and runs off.

Authorities described the suspected head-busser as approximately 5-foot-9 with a slim build and an “OUNCES 40” graphic t-shirt.

[h/t Raw Story]

An alleged burglar was arrested as many as five days after sneaking into a New Jersey family’s house this spring when the homeowner heard a noise and found the intruder hiding under his daughter’s bed, WABC reports.

According to police in Spotswood, New Jersey, Jason Hubbard entered the family’s home while the owner was taking out the trash and made his way to the daughter’s vacant bedroom. He then lived hiding under the bed for several days, charging his four cell phones with a nearby electrical outlet.

Resident Margaret Adamcewicz says Hubbard dated her daughter five years ago, but she hadn’t heard from him since.

“I don’t think he was eating,” Adamcewicz told WABC. “I think he just had water under the bed.”

Authorities say the homeowner immediately called police after discovering Hubbard, who they then charged with burglary and theft of electricity.

Asked if she had a message for Hubbard, Adamcewicz told WABC, “To stay away from this house and never come back.”

[Image via Spotswood Police Department//h/t NBC News]

Three men were hospitalized on Wednesday after lightning struck Haulover Beach in Miami-Dade County, Florida, America’s largest public nude beach, The Miami Herald reports.

Officials say the lightning hit the beach at about 4:15 p.m., knocking two men in the water unconscious and sending a third on the shore into cardiac arrest.

“We had just closed the beach because of a lightning strike in the area 10 minutes beforehand,” Lt. Matthew Sparling of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue told NBC News. “We were in the process of clearing the area when the strike occurred.”

According to the Herald, one of the victims was treated at the scene and airlifted to a nearby trauma center. The two other victims were sent to area hospitals and are expected to recover.

“It looked like people were just relaxing in the water,” a witness told WSVN, “and I thought to myself, ‘Why are people just hanging out in the water after that happened?’ But they were really kinda paralyzed. They couldn’t move, and then there was some guy face down in the water.”

[Image via Flickr/osseous]

According to his partner of 17 years, a California man recently found decomposing in an SUV near his home containing over 1,200 guns claimed to be an undercover operative, the L.A. Times reports.http://gawker.com/cops-find-more...

Fiancée Catherine Nebron identified the dead man as Jeffrey Alan Lash and said she believed him when he told her he worked for multiple unnamed government agencies.

“The story itself sounds totally crazy but then how do you explain all this?” Nebron’s attorney, Harland Braun, told the Associated Press. “There’s no evidence he was a drug dealer or he stole these weapons, or had any criminal source of income, no stolen property, all the stuff you’d look for.”

According to Braun, Lash had been suffering from cancer but told Nebron “he had been exposed to nerve-damaging chemicals on a mission and his condition was worsening.” From the AP:

Braun said Nebron and two friends were in a car at a supermarket early July 4, when Lash felt hot and had trouble breathing. For three hours they tried to ice him down.

“He wouldn’t go to a hospital and didn’t want any 911 call,” Braun said. When he died, Nebron parked him in a car down the street from the condo they shared, the lawyer said.

Police say they don’t believe there was any foul play involved in his death, but the official cause has been deferred pending further investigation.

Lash told Nebron the government agencies would take care of his body and the items in the home, so Nebron and her friends took a trip to Oregon, distraught.

Braun says Nebron was shocked to find that agents hadn’t removed Lash’s body when she returned 10 days later.

After his body was discovered on Friday, police searched Lash’s home and removed at least $500,000 worth of guns and two tons of ammunition from the house. Since then, authorities have also located eight of the 14 vehicles registered to Lash’s name, including a Toyota SUV “designed to drive underwater,” the Associated Press reports.

“One of the mysteries of this guy is who he really is,” Braun told the L.A. Times.

[Image via KNBC]

Gizmodo How Prolific STDs Are Across the U.S. | Jalopnik How The Hell Did This Wreck Happen, Exactly? | Jezebel How to Tell the Difference Between All the Dudes Running for President | Kotaku It’s Starting To Feel Like The UFC Sold Its Soul |

At about 5 a.m. last Thursday, a woman was discovered naked in the bushes behind the House of Blues in Downtown Disney in Orlando. She had no recollection of how she got there, and police found her clothing, her purse, and a used condom nearby.

According to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, the woman said she drank “two bottles of ale and seven or eight shots of vodka” with at least one friend at her apartment before arriving at Downtown Disney.

“She remembers being at the House of Blues and dancing, but not leaving,” the sheriff’s report says, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “The victim said she currently has no memory of who might have taken advantage of her [and] left her naked and helpless in the shrubbery.

Early the next morning, Disney security officers found the woman, who they described as “disoriented,” in the bushes behind House of Blues and Cirque du Soleil. One of the guards gave the woman his vest and called the local fire department for a paramedic.

From the Sentinel:

The woman did not know the whereabouts of her friend or when they became separated, records show. Detectives have interviewed her friend since the incident but are not releasing any other details.

Late Tuesday night, the Sheriff’s Office released one sentence about a sexual battery “in the early morning hours of July 16, 2015 near Lake Buena Vista” along with surveillance photos of a person of interest. Officials would not release any more details Tuesday night.

On Wednesday, Watrel said the three surveillance photographs released show a man, described as a suspect in the possible rape, as he left the House of Blues that morning.

The full report was not released until yesterday afternoon, almost a week after the suspected rape occurred.

“Our detectives worked this case vigorously until they felt they needed the public’s help,” sheriff’s spokeswoman Jane Watrel told the Sentinel. “Sometimes they want to hold things close to the vest so they can proceed with the investigation.”

Image via Flikr. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Facing down a $5 million judgment for posting a sex tape of Rick Ross’s baby mama, 50 Cent has declared bankruptcy to prove he can’t pay. It’s somewhat convenient that, after Forbes named him one of the richest rappers in the world just a few months ago, 50 claims his reported $155 million fortune is really just $4.375 million. He said this week that he rented cars and borrowed jewelry to keep up appearances.

In Manhattan Supreme Court Tuesday, 50 described his opulent lifestyle as “entertainment,” the New York Daily News reported, adding that he had to trade in two other cars to buy the Rolls-Royce he bragged about picking up “on a whim” early this month.

A Bentley and a Ferrari he’s posed with turned out to be rented, and his gold chain with diamonds was just a loaner. When questioned about a cat-shaped Cartier diamond pinky ring he posted on Instagram—”Cartier Cat 65k google that lol”— he said, “65 carats? I don’t think that’s even possible.”

(I did google that lol, and he’s right: a Panthére de Cartier ring with 292 diamonds still comes in at less than 2 carats. The Hope Diamond is 45 carats. I’m going to go out on a limb and say “65K” means the piece cost $65,000, which is on the high end for Cartier panther rings. The NYDN didn’t report whether he owned or borrowed it.)

The thing is, 50 is probably bullshitting about bullshitting. He has an $80 million endorsement deal with Reebok, plus $78 million from an underwear company, and $23 million from Interscope Records, all admitted to in court. And then there’s the reported $100 million he made from the sale of VitaminWater to Coca-Cola back in 2007. He told the court an NDA prevented him from revealing how much he actually profited.

If all that money’s gone, the rapper who was smart (or well-advised) enough to take equity instead of cash on that VitaminWater deal mysteriously got significantly worse at managing his finances over the past half-decade.

[Photo: AP Images]

It’s the end of the day and I’m craving a brewskie. IPA? More like I.P.-NO WAY. Brooklyn Lager? Throw it in the garbage bag-ger. That’s right, baby. Mama wants to live the High Life.

There are a lot of negative things that you can say about the champagne of beers, all of them equally wrong. “It tastes like piss,” you might say and sure, I’d agree with you... if we’re talking about the delicious piss of the gods.

That’s right. I am the bold, brave hero who is willing to come out and say it: Cheap beer is better than “good” beer, and Miller High Life is the best beer of all.

Imagine this. It’s a blazing hot day. The sun is beating down. You’ve sweated through your clothes. Steam rises off the blacktop and it feels like your body is on fire. Suddenly, the silhouette of a person—an angel? Your brain is too fried to tell—blocks the sun.

“You look thirsty,” they say.

You nod, desperate.

“Here. Take this”—they hold out a bottle —“German style schwarzbier.”

It was a trick. That wasn’t an angel, but a demon. It’s trying to poison you with a heavy beer on a hot day. You die on the sidewalk, alone and with an awful taste in your mouth.

Now imagine the alternative: “Here. Take this,” the being says. They hold out an ice cold bottle of golden liquid. Cold condensation beads on the outside of the glass. “It’s a Miller High Life.”

You drink it and feel invigorated.

“Here have another,” the angel says. Turns out, the High Life is magical. You immediately cool down and, as a bonus, the angel tells you the secret to immortality. You decide not to use it because, feeling the cold beer trickle down your throat, you finally understand that brevity is what makes life precious.

“Excellent. You passed the test,” the angel says. It gives you a high five, then another beer. “Have the gift of flight and invisibility instead.”

You pass away at the age of 101, happy and adored by all.

Congratulations, you lived the High Life. And it’s all thanks to Miller’s easy-on-the-wallet, liquid gold. It’s the champagne of beers. The champagne of champagne. No, I’m not being paid extra to write this. It’s just one girl’s expert opinion.

Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com.

Should the published writing of professional writers be subject to any criticism? I believe yes. At least one professional writer disagrees.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a longtime writer for Salon. She writes about “culture,” in the most tepid sense of the word. As an essayist, her style is to follow around day-old conventional wisdom like a water skier follows a speed boat. I do not care for her as a writer or a thinker.

Several years ago, I periodically wrote items here explaining why I do not care for Mary Elizabeth Williams as a writer or thinker. Such items constitute a significant part of my job. Gawker has always critiqued the media; Thomas Friedman writes like a child, David Brooks is a simpleton, look at this piece of curdled tripe that Mary Elizabeth Williams published today, and so on. In turn, people write such things about what we write here as well. If you take all of this together—writers publish stories, people critique those stories, those critiques are themselves critiqued, ad infinitum—it constitutes “the public discussion.” Though messy and often insulting, the public discussion is at the center of the media’s value. It is a national conversation that plays out like a Hegelian dialectic. Point, counterpoint, counter-counter-point, you are hack, synthesis. In this way, ideas slowly evolve and become better over time.

By taking a job as a writer and writing and publishing stories, you implicitly accept a position in this national conversation. That means that you, as a writer, have the freedom to write and share with the world what you think, and the world has the right to say what they think about it. You don’t have to agree with what the world says about you and what you’ve written. You’re free to think—and publicly argue—that the world’s position makes the world a god damn moron. But you do have to accept the right of everyone else to have thoughts and say them. It is the same right you’ve reserved for yourself, by becoming a writer.

Which brings us back to Mary Elizabeth Williams. A brief glance at our archives shows that I wrote four posts critiquing Mary Elizabeth Williams. The first was in March of 2011 and the last was in July of 2012. Each one is about Mary Elizabeth Williams’ writing. They are as true today as they were the day I wrote them. You can read them all here.

Today—three full years after the last time I wrote a post about Mary Elizabeth Williams’ bad writing—she has written a column about being written about by Gawker. “I was slimed by Gawker: in the worst year of my life, I became a regular target,” goes the headline, “and it was devastating.”

In it, Mary Elizabeth Williams says that Gawker was being mean and insulting her during a time in her life when she was fighting cancer. She implies that it was monstrous of Gawker to use, in two posts, a (perfectly lovely) picture of her “ that had run in Salon seven months before, when I shared that I had just been diagnosed with malignant melanoma. A photo that had been taken just a few days prior, one of my last remaining images of myself before I learned I was sick.” She presents this use of a (perfectly lovely) photo of her as an assault upon her, rather than as the inevitable result of Google Image searching “Mary Elizabeth Williams” in 2011. She writes that these four blog posts criticizing her writing caused her “constant low-level dread,” and constituted “one of the most toxic things that ever happened in my life.” She also alleges that Gawker had mocked her as well as stories written elsewhere by some of her friends “because we — females in our 40s — had committed the crime of failing to entertain our youthful male media watchers.”

In summation, she writes “For a company that claims to pride itself on freedom of expression, I wonder if they’ve ever considered the profoundly chilling effect their tactics have had on others.”

For Mary Elizabeth Williams, a critique of a bad piece of writing is an ominous and outrageous act that produces a “chilling effect.” On this, I guess I would agree with her—anyone who writes something arguing that a bad writer wrote a bad thing is probably holding out hope that as a result there might be less bad writing in the future. It rarely works, but there’s nothing wrong with being optimistic.

She does not link to any of the Gawker stories about her, or to any of the stories that she wrote that were being critiqued. And, with great sanctimony, she adds that “I am not using [the Gawker writer’s] name, because you know what? This is about the Gawker culture, and because I have it on very good authority that publicly shaming individuals is an ass move.”

Hi. My name is Hamilton Nolan. And I find Mary Elizabeth William’s thesis in this piece to be loathsome and actually dangerous. Her argument boils down to this: any critique of a writer’s work is a personal attack; a personal tragedy should insulate a writer from any critical thinking about her work; and the entire point-counterpoint nature of the public discussion is bad because it may make writers feel bad for their work to be insulted. She waited three full years—until the day that Gawker had reached its very lowest point of public popularity—to opportunistically trot out this argument.

Here is what I believe instead: by publishing a work, a writer automatically invites the world to think critically about that work; people who critique a writer’s work may be unpleasant or wrong in their opinions, but they are not wrong for having and writing opinions; and, in the broadest sense, this messy process of all of us talking about what all of us are saying is what moves the world’s intellectual development forward, at an often imperceptible pace. I say this in the context of working for a place where the writers receive a regular dose of hate mail and online vitriol that is, I would modestly contend, second to none.

The alternative to talking freely is much worse.

[Photo via]

All rounded edges with a futuristic shape and look, the Northrop Grumman Bat drone looks like something out of the UFO crowd’s wet dream.

It’s a mini-version of the high flying stealth drones of the Sentinel family and a more flexible follow-on to the Puma, which is of the same generation. But it’s an adopted bastard.

In April 2009, Northrop Grumman acquired Sonoma Photonics, Inc., as well as assets from Swift Engineering’s Killer Bee product line, which eventually became Bat. On behalf of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), the Air Force Research Laboratory also funded the AeroMech Engineering Inc. Fury B platform as part of its Sand Dragon system. All were rushed and quietly deployed, configured with sensors for IED detection, and shipped to Afghanistan to conduct road reconnaissance and aid with route clearance.

What distinguished Bat from all of the other drones of the same size, besides the fact that it survived the war frenzy and flourishes behind a veil of secrecy, is that using Internet protocol (IP) it can fly Beyond-Line-Of-Sight (BLOS). And, because it is completely modular in design, it can accommodate wingspans ranging from 6.5 to 33.2 feet. It is thus capable of not just surveillance with a wide variety of sensors, including Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT), utilized for counter-IED missions in Afghanistan, but can also act as communications relay, Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) collector and Electronic Warfare (EW) jammer. It has also been tested at sea.

Fun facts about Bat/Sand Dragon/Killer Bee:

• In keeping with the UFO theme, Bat has been flown at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, dubbed by some alien enthusiasts as the “New Area 51.”
• Also, the navy has been looking into a floating “UAV Mothership,” for quite some time. More recently, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, put out calls for a flying UAV Mothership. Interesting nomenclature!
• While not necessarily supported by any other specs, one document claims Killer Bee is able to carry and fire weapons, which makes one wonder what “Bat” is capable of...

[All images courtesy of Northrop Grumman, except for final image, via AP.]
http://www.amazon.com/Unmanned-Drone...

Here are some small stories:

“Margaret, could you bring in a jar of pepper jelly from the pantry? I’d like to have some with my toast.” But Margaret was too busy dreaming of the calm flat air of the Southwest to hear the question.

At home, Winnie wondered if applying to grad school was a good idea. After all, she’d failed the GRE and had missed every deadline and none of the people she’d ask to write recommendations were responding to her emails. She felt assured, however, that her entire body was covered in one type of gray material or another. In some ways, this was her grad school application.

Morgan confronted Dean.

“I thought you loved me.”

Dean only shook his head. “I can’t love a woman who wears overalls, Morgan. You knew that about me.”

“But I am also wearing a blazer.”

He threw up his hands and turned away. “That’s not enough!!”

Sloane died of hypothermia this month. Her funeral was attended by her high school biology teacher, his wife Gretta, and no one else.

“Sloane quite frankly did not understand the science of keeping one’s body warm so we we were not surprised to hear of her death from hypothermia. She never once covered her ankles.”

The winters in Oslo are wicked. The heart wants what it wants. The hounds are out tonight. Put on an entire outfit made out of sweatpants.

Sheila hummed to herself on the way to work, “My bag is full of stuff. My bag is full of stuff. There is so much stuff in my bag and it is full of it. Most people never have this much stuff in a bag, but I am excited to say that my bag is full of stuff.”

When she got to her office, she remembered it was Saturday.

Maryann had lots of regrets but nothing was worse than the day she came to pottery class dressed in the same flannel jumpsuit as Nina.

“What have I done... what have I done... who will love me now?”

“What do you mean I’m facing the wrong way?”

Images via Madewell. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

Loredana Nesci, a 47-year-old reality TV lawyer known as the “Legal Diva,” was found dead Wednesday after her “distraught” boyfriend called 911. Cops say he murdered her.

Nesci, the eponymous star of SundanceTV’s reality show Loredana, Esq. was either stabbed or shot to death, the Daily Breeze reports. Cops found her body in the Redondo Beach, CA home she shared with her long-term boyfriend, 51-year-old Robert Reagan.

The couple’s five-year-old son, Rocco, was reportedly not in the home when cops arrived.

Friends tell the Daily Breeze Reagan could be “controlling and jealous” with Nesci.

Riffel and another of Nesci’s close friends said Reagan, who was a former model and avid environmentalist, was controlling and jealous. Nesci was the breadwinner of the pair while he stayed home to work on the house and care for Rocco.

In 2011, Reagan founded Vlixir Beverage Co., which specializes in “organic distilled spirits,” including super-fruit juice sparkling vodka cocktails, according to a website about the company. Nesci worked as the company’s attorney, though the venture wasn’t very successful.

A neighbor also tells the paper Reagan could be difficult to get along with.

Their neighbor, Ranj Khindri, said Wednesday that Reagan was often home overseeing renovations to their home.

“Since they moved in, they’ve been doing renovations on the house and disturbing the neighbors,” Khindri said. “(Reagan) was always very combative with a (next-door) neighbor but not with us, since we lived up the street. He’s at home all the time, always working on the house.”

Reagan is currently in jail in lieu of a $1 million bail. He’s still apparently awaiting a court date.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.