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“When Did It Become OK For A $12 Sandwich Not To Come With A Side?” Wow—I could not agree more.

For $12 you should definitely get a side.

[Photo: Flickr]

Hillary Clinton initially brushed off critics of her decision to use a private email server by saying it was more convenient. But now her “convenience” is derailing her presidential campaign. Yesterday, the former Secretary of State and current Democratic frontrunner agreed to turn over her personal server to the Department of Justice.

Exactly how much her insistence on opaque, private control over digital communications will mangle her chances is still in question. Federal investigators are trying to figure out if classified information was mishandled on her server, and a probe from the Intelligence Community Inspector General found that at least four of the emails on the server contained information that remains classified.

“I’m confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent or received,” Clinton has insisted, couching her denial in language that gives her wiggle room to later admit that her “confidence” was unwarranted. State Department spokesman John Kirby has used similarly strategic language defending Clinton, emphasizing that the alleged classified emails were not “marked classified.” Kirby’s defensive posture implies that if what Clinton’s servers hold isn’t explicitly earmarked as Confidential/Secret/Top Secret, it’s no harm, no foul.

If this calculated deflection sounds familiar, it’s because Clinton is far from the first high-powered political player accused of mishandling classified information, and far from the first to initially deny it.

Here’s a list of people the Clinton team may want to call up for legal advice:

1. Alberto Gonzalez

What he mishandled: Classified documents and handwritten notes on classified documents

How he mishandled them: Swung them around in his briefcase

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez took notes on the government’s warrantless wiretapping program and how it interrogates terrorism detainees and got caught carrying them around in his briefcase. The scrawled notes, like Clinton’s emails, were not explicitly marked as classified. He also kept classified documents in a safe in his office that wasn’t properly secured. In 2008, the inspector general published a report outlining Gonzalez’s loose security habits.

What happened to him: For treating classified information like a hot salami sandwich, Gonzalez got...admonished. He was never charged with a crime.

2. Sandy Berger

What he mishandled: Classified documents and his own handwritten notes on classified documents, about the Clinton Administration’s terrorism record

How he mishandled them: Stole and destroyed with pair of scissors

Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger had no intentions of leaking documents—in fact, he got in trouble for destroying them.

In 2003, Berger took classified documents from the National Archives and Records Administration. He took five documents, but once he realized many were identical, he cut the ones he considered duplicates up with scissors at his office. He also took his own handwritten notes, which, like Clinton’s emails, were not specifically marked as classified. Nonetheless, prosecutors noted that he was forbidden to remove them from the Archives “until a classification review was done.”

What happened to him: After initially attempting to suggest that—whoopsie!—he’d flaked out and moseyed off with the documents, Berger fessed up, pled guilty to a misdemeanor, and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and a $50,000 fine.

3. John Deutch

What he mishandled: 17,000 classified documents (contents unknown)

How he mishandled it: Generally inept computer security and/or lack of fucks given about computer security*

Former CIA director John Deutch was caught keeping classified government information on his home computers in Maryland and Massachusetts. In 1996, he left the CIA after his sloppy methods came to light and an investigation followed. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)—now chirping Clinton for her email scandal—was outspoken against Deutch, calling him “a congenital downloader of classified information.’’

What happened to him: He lost security clearances, but he was never charged with a crime.

On the last day of his presidency, Bill Clinton pardoned Deutch.

*sound familiar?

4. David Petraeus

What he mishandled: Notes on classified meetings; classified documents; security codes; names of covert operatives; war strategy; his marriage

How he mishandled it: In a lusty stupor

The only mishandler of classified information on this list to do it all for the nookie, former CIA Director David Petraeus watched his career disintegrate after he was caught for giving eight notebooks full of classified materials to his biographer-cum-sex partner. The notebooks contained extensive notes Petraeus took during meetings, notes that revealed top secret code information and details about war strategy.

After initially denying that he gave his mistress the notebooks, Petraeus pled guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material.

What happened to him: The rich, powerful, philandering fallen military superstar got off easy for his misdeeds in 2015, sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $100,000 for storing gobs of classified information in a rucksack at his mistress’ house.

5. Leon Panetta

What he mishandled: Classified information on the raid of Osama bin Laden

How he mishandled it: By running his mouth like a schmuck

With three on this list, it’s clear that former CIA directors are shockingly inept at not exposing classified information. Leon Panetta straight-up told classified information to a writer in person, leaking the name of the Navy SEAL credited with killing Osama bin Laden during a speech that was classified as “Top Secret” despite the fact that a Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter without security clearance was in attendance.

What happened to him: Panetta was not charged despite clearly (albeit dumbly and accidentally) violating the Espionage Act.

6. Jeffrey Sterling

What he mishandled: Hard to say

How he mishandled them: Allegedly

While Clinton’s no whistleblower, her situation may end up having parallels to Former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling.

Sterling, who allegedly shared classified information with a New York Times reporter in the early 2000s, was pilloried entirely on circumstantial evidence. He was never caught leaking or mishandling classified documents. Prosecutors argued that records of phone calls and emails between Sterling and the reporter showed that they had talked; they did not show evidence of Sterling discussing classified information.

As Clinton’s investigation continues, her political opponents may use the successful prosecution of Sterling as a way to go after her, even without hard evidence that she stored emails containing classified information.

Clinton is also leaning heavily on the idea that her emails were not classified at the time—leaving room for possibility that information in them could’ve been retroactively classified later. But as whistleblower lawyer Jessalyn Radack noted today, “retroactively classified information figured prominently in convicting Sterling.” Sterling’s case shows a gaping hole in Clinton’s defense.

What happened to him: In May 2015, Sterling was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

Whistleblowers like Sterling, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning have seen their lives shredded after sharing classified documents with reporters, but leakers aren’t the only people who can get busted for doing bad things with top secret intel. We’ll never hear about most of the people who bungle classified information. “Most often, it’s not prosecuted,” Bradley Moss, an attorney who specializes in national security cases, told me. “I handle cases where people mishandle classified information all the time. They just never get prosecuted, they’ll have a security clearance ramification.”

That said, if a classified information fumble is scandalous, egregious, or politically polarizing enough, it’ll come out (and, often, wind up in court). Clinton’s political enemies are frothing at the mouth, with House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) insisting that Clinton has endangered national security. Despite a New York Times report to the contrary, Clinton is not facing a criminal inquiry.

However, mishandling classified information can carry heavy legal consequences, and just because she isn’t facing one yet doesn’t mean she won’t. And just because information she circulated wasn’t explicitly marked as classified doesn’t mean it wasn’t classified.

Image: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Authorities say one inmate was killed and at least five others were hospitalized with stab wounds on Wednesday after a riot involving about 100 inmates at California State Prison, Sacramento, called “New Folsom” to distinguish it from adjacent Folsom State Prison, KHTK reports.

#EDHFire M85 assisting #FolsomPrison with possible stabbings. Units transporting to local hospitals.

August 12, 2015

According to prison officials, a fight involving “inmate-made weapons” broke out in one of the facility’s general population yards just before 1 p.m. From The Sacramento Bee:

Officials said guards used pepper spray and at least two warning shots from a Mini 14 rifle to quell the disturbance, which occurred with inmates using weapons they had fashioned themselves.

Corrections officials said in a statement that “numerous inmates were injured,” including five taken to an outside hospital for treatment. The others were being treated at the prison.

In a statement, a corrections department spokesperson said administrators are still investigating the cause of the riot.

[Image via Flickr user Vince]

Bumble Bee Foods has agreed to pay $6 million to settle criminal charges over the death of worker burned alive in an industrial pressure cooker, the AP reports. “This is the worst circumstances of death I have ever, ever witnessed,” said Deputy District Attorney Hoon Chun.http://gawker.com/tuna-company-c...

Chelsea Manning, who is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking government documents to WikiLeaks, has been threatened with possible “indefinite solitary confinement” for a series of seemingly trivial infractions, including owning expired toothpaste and “sweeping food onto the floor,” her lawyer said on Wednesday.

ACLU attorney Chase Strangio says Manning is additionally accused of “disrespect” for requesting her lawyer while speaking to a guard and “prohibited property” for owning books and magazines that include the Caitlyn Jenner cover issue of Vanity Fair.

In response to the charges, Manning’s supporters have started an online petition providing a detailed list of her alleged violations:

According to the website, Manning’s “prohibited property” was as follows:

Vanity Fair issue with Caitlyn Jenner on the cover, Advocate, OUT Magazine, Cosmopolitan issue with an interview of Chelsea, Transgender Studies Quarterly, novel about trans issues “A Safe Girl to Love,” book “Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy — The Many Faces of Anonymous,” book “I Am Malala,” 5 books by Robert Dorkin, legal documents including the Senate Torture Report, book: “Hidden Qualities that Make Us Influential.”

“Given the materials that were confiscated, it is concerning that the military and Leavenworth might be taking action for the purpose of chilling Chelsea’s speech or even with the goal of silencing her altogether by placing her in solitary,” Strangio told Buzzfeed News. “Hopefully with public scrutiny the prison will respond by dismissing these charges and ensuring that she is not unfairly targeted based on her activism, her identity, and her pending lawsuit.”

Manning’s attorney says she is scheduled to have a hearing on the charges on August 18th.

The Associated Press reports that military officials have yet respond to requests for comment.

What do the nation’s premiere teen mom sex tape purveyor and the nation’s House minority leader have in common? The answer, surprisingly, is lack of access.

See, earlier this month Nancy Pelosi went to the Hamptons. And for some inexplicable reason, she opted to stay at The Capri, a wonderful place to find a European girlfriend but perhaps not the most suited to a septuagenerian politician.
http://gawker.com/nancy-pelosi-m...

Long story short, Pelosi tried to dine at the resort’s onsite restaurant Beautique, a club haunted by the ghosts of the Real Housewives of New York, and she got straight-up denied.

(According to Page Six, “Pelosi had wanted to dine at the hotel’s restaurant, Beautique, that night, but arrived without a reservation and they were forced to turn her away.”)

Embarrassing! But turns out Pelosi is in good—pejoratively speaking—company: this weekend, the restaurant also refused Farrah Abraham entry.

“Teen Mom” “star” Farrah Abraham, who’s perhaps as famous for her adult videos with porn star James Deen, was dragged out of a fancy Hamptons party by security on Saturday.

She turned up to Beautique at the Capri hotel in Southampton for a Bella magazine bash after she’d had her RSVP declined.

“She refused to leave, and had to be escorted out by three security guards,” says a spy. “A whole scene was made.”

That’s the great thing about America. It doesn’t matter who you are—young, old, respected or not—you’ll always have an equal opportunity to get rejected by a doorman.

Images via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com

Happy birthday, kiddo. Here’s one of those Minion things you like, plus a little box stuffed with cocaine. What’s in the big one? Also cocaine.

According to a press release from the New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor, Minions aren’t just good for pairing with unrelated slogans and posting to Facebook. They’re also handy for disguising a kilo of coke you shipped up from Puerto Rico.

Albert Fortosa, an allegedly high-level drug smuggler who distributed his product in Manhattan and Brooklyn nightclubs, apparently received his bulk shipments via USPS Express Mail packaged in birthday wrap and accessorized with popular kids’ toys—including the aforementioned Minions and Olaf the Snowman from Frozen. (Using a snowman to hide your blow? That’s a little on the nose.)

From the press release:

FORTOSA was arrested on July 2 at 230 West 111th St. as he accepted delivery of an express mail package that had the appearance of a child’s birthday gift, but actually concealed a kilogram of cocaine. The package was addressed to another individual. Inside was a gift bag with a stuffed toy Minion and two boxes covered in “happy birthday” wrapping paper. The gift wrapped boxes held the kilogram of cocaine.

Two similar packages, each with a kilogram of cocaine disguised as a child’s birthday gift, were intercepted that same day, and another two on June 15 and June 24. All four of these packages were seized by U.S. Postal inspectors prior to delivery. The kilograms of cocaine were placed inside wireless internet router boxes and the majority of the packages also contained a stuffed Olaf doll.

Fortosa allegedly moved $225,000 worth of cocaine in packages like these. Four other accused members of his drug ring were also arrested.

[h/t Daily Dot]

Now we know how fast the universe is dying. Nothing matters.

I was a young boy in 1965 when we moved into an area of Los Angeles where many New Orleans expatriates settled. I got to watch my older brothers and their friends run like rabbits when the pigs would roll by. At one point I thought that’s what you called the police, “pigs,” but Gregory, my second oldest brother said don’t you ever call them that to their faces. Once, when the police roared up on us with their high beams, Gregory dragged me like a limp doll to escape. All these well-built, tough-ass knuckleheads scattered to avoid arrest or worse. Their crime: smoking weed and drinking beer on the steps of our house. Gregory threw me down behind a hedge and covered me with his body while the police looked for someone to apprehend. They didn’t see us, but the impression stayed with me. The police were to be feared.

So when a 21-year-old black man, arrested for drunk driving in Watts was treated so brutally by the police that the crowd watching reacted like what they were, a combustible material that just needed a spark of a reason to explode, nobody should have been surprised. Six days of rioting, resulting in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, and almost 4,000 arrests, and the destruction of property valued at $40 million and, most importantly, the fear of a nation of millions who were comfortable with having a foot on the neck of black and brown folk, nobody should have been surprised either

‘‘The only way we can ever get anybody to listen to us is to start a riot’’ was the common sentiment.

On my way to the liquor store to buy candy I could see the National Guard in the back of WWII vintage trucks wearing helmets, carrying rifles heading east on Exposition Boulevard to stop the black people from rebelling in Watts. It was kind of exciting, in a war movie way, if we weren’t the enemy to be stopped. The fire in the sky and the smoke in the streets just continued to spread and it feels like it never really stopped. We segued from James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” to the Last Poets’ “Niggers are Scared of Revolution,” to NWA’s “Fuck the Police.”

Then came 1992.

I don’t think that Los Angeles much wants to remember the largest and costliest civil disturbance in the history of the US. No, it’s almost as though the city has some sort of amnesia or maybe it’s fear; fear that what happened then could jump up and bite us again.

For some Angelinos that riot was almost a random event, linked tenuously to the Rodney King beating; another example of those damn black and brown folk getting out of hand again. At least that’s what the media fed us. I guess their reasoning was that the minorities accepted police abuse before and didn’t try to burn the city down like back in the Watt’s Riot of 1965, so why should 1992 be much different? This kind of thinking is only viable when the natives are so far off you can’t hear the drums pounding away, venting rage.

My wife at the time didn’t want me to go, insisting that it was a stupid thing to do when the television shows were being pre-empted by breaking footage of rioters setting ablaze palm trees in front of Parker Center. I told her not to worry, that as a big brown-skinned man, wearing his Malcolm X beanie man with a walking stick and a seventy-five pound Siberian husky on a leash, I felt fully capable of handling whatever might happen my way. Yeah, I was a fool.

The protestors started downtown at Parker Center and seemed much like the Greens and other social activists protesting World Bank and IMF gatherings, but that was only the beginning; the turmoil rolled on, gathering in strength and viciousness and by that time the fires had spread to dozens of neighborhoods and got huge legs and the rioting involved seemingly much of the central city and beyond. I shared that rage, that the police were sadistic pigs; that the city had earned its bitter harvest—but I didn’t know then how intensely the fires were burning, or how sharp the odor of burned-out homes and looted businesses would be.

I turned onto Prospect Boulevard, that lovely tree-lined street with the occasional mansion designed by Frank Lloyd Wright or the Green Brothers. By the time I reached Arroyo, the street that overlooks the Rose Bowl, I heard the faint but unmistakable sound of staccato gunfire coming from around the stadium. I heard it again, this time the sound of various caliber weapons. I was genuinely panicked. Looking into the darkness, I strained to see what was jumping off down below. Then tires squealed and I saw various cars roaring away from the road that encircled the bowl; where we jogged and cyclists buzzed by in their crazed Peloton. I heard it again, closer. Looking into the weirdly dark roads below I saw various cars roaring away from the Rose Bowl, flashes from the muzzles of their guns, up towards the sweet, moneyed Prospect neighborhood. The neighborhood I was walking in. They’d see my big white husky and me and think I was a rich bastard that needed shooting.

What preceded the Rodney King rebellion of 1992 was the 1965 riots but maybe there wasn’t really a gap of decades between these events, maybe it was one continuous through line: incoherent rage becomes coherent rage and shit happens.

I trotted back to my working-class neighborhood, but not so quickly as to miss noticing how deserted the streets were. Just about home, I saw a black woman working on her car; adroitly using an engine jack to drop her engine all by herself. I shouted to her that some fools were shooting up the Rose Bowl. She sighed and shook her head. “I told those idiots not to be doing that. Nothing good is gonna come out of shooting up the city. That’s not gonna do nothing for nobody.” I remember that woman’s words more clearly than Rodney King’s “Can we all get along?”

Now, in an ever-diversifying LA, and with more police accountability, we seem to be getting along for the moment, hopefully a very long moment before another riot fueled by discontent and rage happens our way.

Jervey Tervalon is the author of numerous books, most recently the novel Monster’s Chef. He teaches at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

[Image via Getty]

Americans tend to think of our Constitution as a hallowed source of wisdom that should be tampered with only in the most extreme circumstances. But what if it’s really just old—and dumb?

I’m not saying it necessarily is dumb, you understand. The Constitution seems like it has a lot of good things going for it. Then again, it surely does have some dumb ideas, too. (The electoral college?? Psht.) Whether you think it’s dumb or not, we can all agree that it’s old. And, further, that it was written a long time ago by a bunch of dudes who have been dead for a long time and who were not that far removed from believing in witchcraft.

I bring all this up only because of this Peter Singer op-ed about the various types of “political fallacies” identified by Jeremy Bentham in the early 1800s, many of which are still applicable to our modern day world of “satellite television” and “Donald Trump as serious presidential candidate.” This, in particular, stood out:

Bentham’s objection to “natural rights” is often cited. Less frequently discussed is what he calls “the Posterity-chainer’s device.” One example is the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which requires all succeeding sovereigns of the United Kingdom to take an oath to maintain the Church of Scotland and the Church of England. If future generations feel themselves bound by such provisions, they are, Bentham thinks, enslaved by long-dead tyrants.

Bentham’s objection to such attempts to bind posterity applies not only to the union that created the UK, but also the one that formed the US: Why should the current generation consider itself bound by what was decided hundreds of years earlier? Unlike the framers of the US Constitution, we have had centuries of experience to judge whether it does or does not “promote the general welfare.”

If it does, we have all the reason we need to retain it; but if it does not, don’t we have as much power and as much right to change the arrangements under which we are governed as the framers had to prescribe them in the first place? If we do, why should provisions that make the constitution so difficult to amend bind a majority of the electorate?

It is true that the Constitution is a real bitch to amend, and “long-dead tyrants” is a great phrase. Why not have a new Constitutional Convention once a generation—say, every 25 years—to make amendments as necessary, so each generation of Americans could feel that they had input on the document?

Might be fun.

[Pic via]

One more historical dispute has been settled by DNA analysis, according to today’s New York Times: Nan Britton, who claimed to have been a longtime mistress of President Warren G. Harding, did in fact bear Harding’s child out of wedlock in 1919, when he was in the Senate.

Despite the old Harding family story that the president had been left infertile by a childhood case of the mumps, the Times reports that his genetic material lives on in Britton’s grandson. Nan and Warren definitely did it. Maybe, as she had written, they did it a lot, notoriously including a quickie in a White House closet.

As it is the unavoidable function of history to shed light on our own present condition, the question naturally follows: Would you?

Would you have sexual intercourse with President Warren Gamaliel Harding, if he were alive and available?

The Times, bless its heart and other body parts, goes to the trouble of putting this matter in its appropriate context:

[Britton] was consumed with Harding, who was married but had no children and was seen by women of the time as attractive.

Ever objective and epistemologically demure, the Times isn’t saying that Warren Harding was attractive. Just that he was seen—by women of the time—as attractive.

The Times also reports that the DNA investigation, checking rumors of Harding’s “black blood,” “found that President Harding had no ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa.” Taken literally, this would mean that Warren Harding’s ancestry diverged from the rest of the human line more than 4.4 million years ago. (What we write around when we write around race!)

So: Warren Harding. Successful, six feet tall, generally regarded as handsome, possibly a member of an entirely different species. Also notoriously callow, dimwitted, and incompetent; a keeper of at least two mistresses; and a man who left no provision for the support of his own offspring.

Here, for further consideration, is a photograph from his pre-presidential days.

Yes or no? Vote below!

Photos via Getty

Donald Trump, speaking in Michigan Tuesday: “Jeb Bush or Hillary, or one of these politicians, all controlled by lobbyists and special interests—and donors, people like me from previous months—total control. Bing bing, bong bong bong, bing bing. You know what that is, right?”

Sure, Robo-Trump. All flesh-units know what that is. What a perfect description of some familiar type of human interaction. Your machine-learning algorithms are functioning flawlessly.

(Whispering) What the fuck is it talking about? We’ve gotta fix this thing before the next debate.

[h/t CNN]

In the face of adversity, one courageous defender is holding strong: the Rowan County clerk’s office in Morehead, KY, which is bravely defying a federal judge’s order in its quest to ensure that not all people are treated as equals, no matter what the Supreme Court says.

Citing religious beliefs (as opposed to, say, deep-seated, bigoted hangups), County Clerk Kim Davis has declined to treat gay couples as equal to straight couples, refusing to issue gay couples marriage licenses despite the Supreme Court June ruling that declared same sex marriage legal nationwide.

Davis’s argument—which was soundly rejected by a federal judge Wednesday—is that “issuing a same-sex marriage license that contains her signature is the same as her approving the marriage.”

Eh, no says the judge, via the AP:

Judge Bunning rejected that argument in his ruling Wednesday, saying Davis has likely violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on the government establishing a religion by “openly adopting a policy that promotes her own religious convictions at the expenses of others.”

“Davis remains free to practice her Apostolic Christian beliefs. She may continue to attend church twice a week, participate in Bible Study and minister to female inmates at the Rowan County Jail. She is even free to believe that marriage is a union between one man and one woman, as many Americans do,” Bunning wrote. “However, her religious convictions cannot excuse her from performing the duties that she took an oath to perform as Rowan County Clerk.”

Now her office reportedly won’t issue any licenses to any couples—straight or blasphemous—in some sort of cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face reasoning.http://gawker.com/alabama-county...

Kentucky’s governor, Steve Beshear, has reportedly told Davis to resign if she won’t issue the licenses, but that apparently goes against her religious beliefs (or whatever) as well: as of Thursday she was still in her position, albeit on vacation. Can you blame her though? Trampling human rights must be exhausting.

Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

This spring, undergraduate coder and incoming Facebook intern Aran Khanna published a problem with Facebook Messenger, the most popular app on the entire iTunes Store: it was transmitting your location to everyone and you probably had no idea. Instead of rewarding his vigilance, Facebook fired him.
http://gawker.com/facebook-messe...

It’s important to make a few things clear: at no point did Khanna “hack” Facebook, or publish any new exploitative code that would allow someone malicious the company’s software. Rather, he explained how a deliberate feature of Facebook’s widely used IM app had some uncomfortable consequences for privacy, and he devised an app of his own that illustrated the problem:

But in a new paper for Harvard’s Journal of Technology Science, Khanna explains how Facebook—whose motto was up until recently “move fast and break things” and literally fucking resides at an address of its own making called “1 Hacker Way”—treated him like a criminal:

On the afternoon of the 29th, three days after my initial posts, Facebook phoned me to inform me that it was rescinding the offer of a summer internship, citing as a reason that the extension violated the Facebook user agreement by “scraping” the site. The head of global human resources and recruiting followed up with an email message stating that my blog post did not reflect the “high ethical standards” around user privacy expected of interns. According to the email, the privacy issue was not with Facebook Messenger, but rather with my blog post and code describing how Facebook collected and shared users’ geo-location data.

That response is bullshit. Not only is the airing of software security vulnerabilities an honored (and rewarded!) practice at technology firms, Facebook has above all its peers spread the myth of the virtuous hacker, the company that made “hackathon” standard jargon for MBAs. Before the company went public, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a ponderous letter to investors titled “The Way of the Hacker”:

“Hacker culture is … extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win.”

Unless the best idea embarrasses Facebook, that is. Khanna told me over the phone that it was exactly this “hacker culture” that drew him in to the internship to begin with. But after exemplifying that culture by calling out his employer for loose privacy practices—as if he were the first!—Facebook told him he “clearly didn’t care about user privacy,” and the offer was rescinded. The irony of Facebook canning a young Harvard student for breaking the rules with his computer is off the fucking charts.

But it’s also scary that Facebook would rather preserve its image than admit wrongdoing and, say, give Aran Khanna a full-time job offer for showing initiative and an obvious interest in user privacy. Lucky for Aran, he’s clearly smart as shit, and I’m sure another, less craven tech firm will make use of him soon. His resume is on his website.

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

Deep Blue is one of the largest great whites ever caught on film, with an estimated length of 20 feet. That’s funny because she looks at least 5,000 feet long to me. In the gif above, she’s like, “Hey guys, my head is literally the size of your body lol.”

This week, shark researcher Mauricio Hoyos Padilla shared this previously unseen footage shot in 2013 off the coast of Mexico’s Isla Guadalupe. Padilla was also featured in the Shark Week 2014 special Jaws Strikes Back. At the time the video below was shot, Deep Blue was pregnant.

On Blue, Padilla wrote:

When I saw Deep Blue for the first time, there was just one thought in my mind: Hope. A shark of that size is at least 50 years old and that tells me protection and conservation efforts are really working. Deep Blue has been spared from longlines and the inherent dangers of being in the wild, and somehow she has found her way in the vast ocean.

They remain in this protected area for a few months but now there is a new challenge. This amazingly enormous female is carrying several little baby white sharks, just waiting to be swimming free in the ocean. When white sharks are about to give birth, they get close to the shore and deliver their pups in shallow areas known as nursery grounds, which are full of food and free of predators. Unfortunately, these areas are close to shore and are vulnerable to several human threats and Deep Blue, her pups, and fellow white sharks need your help!

Padilla is the general director of the conservation initiative Pelagios Kakunjá, which accepts donations here.

We should all be so lucky to look as good at 50 as Deep Blue does. Sometimes I love living on this planet so much, I barely can find words to express it. Sometimes a shark high-five (from this previously posted footage of Deep Blue) says more than I ever could.

[h/t Towleroad]

In our second episode of This Broad’s Life, we followed Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards around Washington, D.C. in early July—just weeks before the organization fell under attack from the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group, and subsequently from Republicans all over the country.

In the last few weeks, the Center for Medical Progress has released a number of heavily edited videos alleging that Planned Parenthood misuses and sells “fetal tissue” from abortions performed in their clinics. In response, Richards has publicly stated that the allegations are untrue. Selling tissue is illegal, she noted, and the organization abides by the law when donating to research facilities.

But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from riding this anti-abortion wave through state governments in Alabama, Texas, Georgia, Indiana and Ohio, as well as the Senate, in an effort to defund Planned Parenthood yet again.

“I have never done a job where people weren’t pissed off at me,” Richards told Jezebel. “I grew up in Texas—what can I say? My dad was a civil rights lawyer and defended conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War. My mother was involved in the farm workers movement.” She added, “I just grew up used to being in the center of some social justice movement that not everyone was supporting.”

And, as we followed Richards from a rally on Capital Hill to lobbying in the halls of the Senate building, it was clear that she and her college-age supporters were doing exactly what their mission statement sets out to: making a path for safe, affordable and accessible women’s healthcare in America. Who doesn’t want that?

Enjoy this episode of This Broad’s Life and watch our first featuring Janet Mock, host of MSNBC’s So Popular! and trans activist.

Contact the author at Hillary@jezebel.com.

After weeks of GOP candidates pandering to the anti-Planned Parenthood masses, it looks like the one man who should know better re:fetal tissue donations—famed ex-neurosurgeon Ben Carson—actually does know better. Or at least, he did back in 1992 when he did his own research on 17-week fetal tissue. But, according to Carson, that was different.

This frantic attempt at revisionist history started when author and OB/GYN Dr. Jen Gunter discovered the candidate’s paper Colloid Cysts of the Third Ventricle: Immunohistochemical evidence for nonneuropithelial differentiation (catchy!) in a ‘92 publication of the Human Pathology medical journal.

From Gunter’s blog post on her discovery:

Dr. Carson, like everyone, is entitled to an opinion no matter how wrong, What he says doesn’t change the fact that fetal tissue plays a vital role in medical research. For example it is being used to develop a vaccine against Ebola. Many researchers depend on fetal tissue to understand and hopefully develop treatment for a myriad of conditions from blindness to HIV. Without fetal tissue neurosciences research, something essential for the development of neurosurgical techniques, would be far less developed. Dr. Carson should be intimately aware of this fact.

And how! But as Gunter points out, just this past July, Carson went on Fox News to say that “it’s been over-promised what the benefits of fetal research would be. And very much under-delivered. And if you go back over the years, and look at the research that has been done and all the things that it was supposed to deliver, very little of that has been done, and there’s nothing that can’t be done without fetal tissue.”

All of which would seem to make him look like one hell of a hypocrite. But as Carson so kindly explains to The Washington Post, no, it does not. His reasoning: “To willfully ignore evidence that you have for some ideological reason is wrong.” Agreed! Unfortunately, he goes on, “If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it.”

While Carson’s reasoning is largely nonsensical and relies on the use of “synonyms” to make the words sound “slightly different,” it’s worth noting that the fetuses used in Carson’s research were, in fact aborted:

It’d be one thing if—like his fellow candidates, ostensibly—Carson was spouting off incorrect and potentially highly damaging rhetoric because he actually didn’t know any better. But the good doctor is clearly fully aware of both the necessity and the great potential for good that lies in using fetal tissue in medical research. But hey, maybe it’s only ok when he does it.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Image via AP.

Human beings need sleep. Homeless people are human beings. Therefore, homeless people need sleep and shouldn’t be banned from getting it in what is often the only place they can: outdoors. That’s the simple argument the Justice Department is making in a case out of Boise, Idaho, one of the many U.S. cities with inadequate shelter space that have nonetheless attempted to bar unhoused people from sleeping outside.

Here’s the key passage from the DoJ’s Statement of Interest in the case, which gives the distinct feeling that the writers were clutching their foreheads in disbelief that they actually had to explain this to a judge:

When adequate shelter space does not exist, there is no meaningful distinction between the status of being homeless and the conduct of sleeping in public. Sleeping is a life-sustaining activity—i.e., it must occur at some time in some place. If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.

To effectively make being homeless a crime, the Department argues, violates the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishments” clause.

It also does nothing to solve homelessness. The plaintiffs, represented by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, point out that prosecuting people for being on the street doesn’t help them find jobs and housing—exactly the opposite, in fact—and it also costs more than funding housing programs.

There are still factual disputes in the case regarding the availability of shelter beds in Boise, and whether Boise police are enforcing the (bad, misguided) law against homeless individuals even when all beds are full. The DoJ hasn’t taken a position on that, and whether cities could ban public sleeping if they built enough shelter space is still an open question.

[h/t Washington Post, Photo: AP Images]

Donald Trump, the 69-year-old New York real estate mogul and unrepentant bigot, is still dominating the Republican presidential primary polls. Trump’s sudden ascendance, accelerated by his willingness to insult virtually any ostensible ally within the conservative movement, has left GOP leaders dumbfounded. How did this caricature of a Republican politician, who has never held elected office, and whose personal ideology is remarkably fluid, usurp more experienced, more conservative, and better-funded candidates like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker? Within this vacuum of understanding, an almost-believable conspiracy theory has obtained currency: Donald Trump is in fact a false flag candidate whose actual mission is electing Hillary Clinton as President.

To understand the contours of this theory, it’s helpful to understand where it came from. A Google search suggests the first person to remark upon Trump’s indirect assistance to Clinton was the anti-war activist and “conservative-paleo-libertarian” Justin Raimondo. In a long blog post dated July 13—just a few days after Trump stole Jeb Bush’s lead—Raimondo argued that the timing of Trump’s entry into the presidential race, which the candidate had long hinted at but until this year never followed through on, could only be explained by a hidden “Democratic wrecking operation” designed to assist Clinton’s parallel campaign:

[Trump’s] ties to the Clintons, his past pronouncements which are in such blatant contradiction to his current fulminations, and the cries of joy from the Clintonian gallery and the media (or do I repeat myself) all point to a single conclusion: the Trump campaign is a Democratic wrecking operation aimed straight at the GOP’s base.

Donald Trump is a false-flag candidate. It’s all an act, one that benefits his good friend Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party that, until recently, counted the reality show star among its adherents. Indeed, Trump’s pronouncements—the open racism, the demagogic appeals, the faux-populist rhetoric—sound like something out of a Democratic political consultant’s imagination, a caricature of conservatism as performed by a master actor.

The idea that Trump is running an elaborate interference campaign on behalf of Hillary Clinton may sound absurd. But there is enough truth to Raimondo’s theory—it makes just enough sense—that it’s already begun to infiltrate, and inform the mainstream voices of, the mainstream Republican Party. On July 23, for example, the popular conservative writer Allen Ginzburg distilled Raimondo’s argument into a vexing thought experiment:

Ginzburg’s tweet has since been retweeted over 400 times (including, earlier this week, by Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto, who serves on the paper’s influential editorial board).

It would, of course, be incredible—and virtually unprecedented in modern American politics—if a major party’s top candidate were to run a campaign for the purpose of electing that party’s most imposing political opponent. So what exactly supports the theory that Trump is such a candidate? Though he has recently rebranded himself as the only Republican brave enough to speak the truth about undocumented immigrants, his past associations and political positions suggest the theory is, if not entirely believable, not exactly implausible, either.

There are three main lines of argument supporting the assertion that Donald Trump is running a false flag campaign:

1. Trump cannot possibly be considered either a Republican or a conservative, once you account for his apparent political beliefs (many of which are remarkably liberal) and concrete policy proposals (or lack thereof).
2. Trump has close ties to both Hillary and Bill Clinton, and has in fact donated to her and other Democrats’ campaigns in the past.
3. Trump’s apparent intent to run on an independent ticket—should he lose the Republican nomination—indicates he cares more about splitting the Republican vote (essentially insuring the election of a Democratic president) than he does about actually electing Republicans. He also lacks the wherewithal and/or long-term funding to mount a legitimate presidential campaign were he to become the actual Republican nominee.

Let’s discuss each of these in detail:

Argument 1: Donald Trump is not actually a Republican (or conservative)

According to voting records, Trump is currently registered as a Republican, but in the past has been registered (and repeatedly voted) as a Democrat. In fact, he appears to have switched between the two parties at least three times in the past 14 years: In 2001, he switched from Democrat to Republican; in 2008, he re-registered as Democrat; in 2010, he re-registered as a Republican (and maintained that affiliation through 2013). So Trump is certainly a Republican, but only in the sense that any voter can register as a Republican; it’s not like party officials perform an ideological litmus tests on mere voters. (Complicating matters further is Trump’s New York City residency. Republican New Yorkers have been known to register as Democrats in order to participate in Democratic primary elections, which are frequently the only elections that matter in municipal politics.)

The question of whether Trump is conservative is trickier to answer. Within the modern conservative movement, for example, it’s more or less assumed that candidates representing conservative interests believe abortion rights should be restricted (in many cases, radically so). It’s also assumed that conservative candidates oppose the 2010 Affordable Care Act—not just the particulars of the legislation itself, but also the general idea of universal healthcare. But, as The Washington Post pointed out last month, Trump has publicly endorsed both abortion rights and universal healthcare in the past. He’s also endorsed increasing taxes on the wealthy and legalizing drugs. It’s true that Trump has since reversed his positions on abortion and the Affordable Care Act, but as many have noted, his change of heart is far from convincing.

One issue on which Trump is very right-wing, however, is immigration. Trump believes the United States is inadequately protected against invading Mexicans, and has accused undocumented immigrants from that country of raping Americans with impunity. The key to Trump’s appeal is his suggestion, which he utters repeatedly, that mainstream Republican leaders are deliberately sidelining both the issue of border security and the broader issue of immigration—a complex topic within both major parties—in order to shore up support among the country’s growing Latino population.

Trump’s implication of GOP cowardice is seductive to the segment of Republican voters who believe they’ve been sold out by the GOP to various elite interest groups who have relentlessly lobbied for immigration reform. At the same time, immigration reform happens to be an issue with which Democrats have bludgeoned Republicans among Latino voters, who are disproportionately affected by the inadequacies of the current immigration system.

In other words: Trump has focused his campaign on an issue that exposes the Republican Party to attacks from both its base (who want the party to move to the right) and Democrats (who have an obvious interest in portraying opponents of immigration reform—that is, most Republicans—as racist lunatics). If you were Hillary Clinton, it would be hard not to appreciate the strategic advantage of Trump’s campaign, which is doing the work of discrediting the Republican Party among its own voters, and the general public, for free.

Argument 2: Trump is friendly with the Clinton family

Based on his public statements, Trump seems to a) admire Bill Clinton, b) admire Chelsea Clinton even more, and c) regard Hillary Clinton with hostility. Here are some representative tweets:

Until very recently, the nature of Trump’s relationship with the Clinton family seemed entirely transactional. After all, Trump is a wealthy resident of New York, and Hillary Clinton, as a former U.S. Senator of the state, was all but required to mingle with people like Trump. During last Thursday’s Fox News debate, Trump even bragged about getting the Clintons to attend one of his weddings, knowing they wouldn’t refuse an invitation from someone who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to various Clinton causes, including Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and the Clinton Foundation.

Trump’s relationship with Bill Clinton, however, seems to have deepened in the past few years. On August 5, The Washington Post reported that Clinton spoke with Trump in May of this year about Trump’s political ambitions. Here’s the how the paper characterized the exchange (bolding ours):

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House ... Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

An aide to Bill Clinton characterized the exchange as merely “a casual chat” (those are the Post’s words), and Trump later denied the suggestion that the former President somehow persuaded him to run on the Republican ticket, but the fact that the exchange took place at all—that Clinton gives a shit about Trump’s rank within the Republican Party; that Clinton stated, whether obsequiously or sincerely, that Trump’s rank should rise—certainly suggests that Clinton could have pictured what Trump’s campaign would look like, and more importantly, what it would mean for his wife and her own presidential ambitions.

Argument 3: Trump clearly intends to run as an independent

Trump’s current threat to the Republican Party is potentially exceeded by the threat of him running against both the Republican and Democratic candidates on an independent ticket (assuming, of course, he does not secure the Republican nomination). Conservatives believe, with some justification, that an independent Trump campaign would carve away a significant chunk of otherwise Republican voters, thereby lending the Democratic nominee an easy victory. (There’s precedent: The conservative movement still blames Ross Perot’s independent run in 1992 for the election of Bill Clinton. Whether this is an accurate read has been, for years, a matter of considerable debate.)

It remains unclear whether Trump actually intends to run as an independent. But during the debate on Thursday, he pointedly refused to agree to a pledge to endorse whoever wins the Republican nomination—the strongest signal yet that he considers the Republican Party’s political and strategic objectives to be much less important than his own.

What Trump would do if another candidate won the Republican nomination is the key to the False Flag Candidate theory. The best case scenario for the GOP is that he loses and does not run as an independent, allowing the party to dismiss Trumpmania as a passing fancy. Democratic attempts to define the GOP as the party of Trump would be neutered; after all, a lot of Republican candidates look comparatively sane and electable when compared to Trump. In the absence of an independent ticket, Trump’s ridiculousness could help other Republican candidates. (The eventual candidate would still need to secure the support of the nativists Trump appeals to while attempting to win over the moderates he appalls, but that is a dance Republican presidential candidates have been practicing for years.)

But if Trump does run as an independent, then Allen Ginzburg’s suggestion above would prove correct: A Trump campaign based on the candidate’s sincere desire to become President, and a Trump campaign based on his hidden desire to see Hillary Clinton elected President, would be completely indistinguishable.

This scenario would, of course, be an unmitigated nightmare for the Republican Party. At the same time, Trump’s frontrunner status has placed party leaders, in particular the other viable candidates, in the seemingly impossible position of attempting to disavow Trump (in order to shield the party from accusations of vicious racism) without completely pissing him off (in order to lessen the possibility of an independent Trump ticket in 2016). How do you marginalize someone like Trump without marginalizing him too much?

Still, it’s unclear how an actual independent Trump campaign would unfold, given what we know (and don’t know) about both the candidate’s finances and the plans of the wealthy donors who fund Republican campaigns. Whether or not Trump is willing to spend his own money on a campaign that would almost certainly help Democrats, not Republicans — and even whether he believes that an independent Trump campaign would help Democrats — remains to be seen.

So is Trump really a Hillary Clinton plant?

There is, we’re sorry to say, no definitive evidence that Trump and Hillary Clinton are colluding to wreak havoc on the Republican Party’s 2016 primary campaign for the purpose of securing a Clinton presidency. This does not preclude the possibility that Trump has secretly decided that he wants Clinton to be president, and is now sabotaging the GOP in order to help the Democratic frontrunner; nor does it mean that Bill Clinton didn’t encourage Trump to run in order to wreak havoc on the GOP nomination process. Even in those scenarios, however, the likelihood of smoking gun is close to zero.

The lack of evidence is not the biggest problem with this conspiracy theory, though. The biggest problem is that the theory’s most important underlying assumption—that Trump is anomalous, a xenophobic buffoon posing as a Republican—is wildly ignorant of actual Republican policies.

Boiled down, Trump’s appeal to the Republican Party’s base consists of his willingness to say nakedly racist statements and his promises to enact equally racist legislation. But why is that appeal surprising? In its contemporary manifestation, the GOP has repeatedly sought the support of voters who wish to disempower and intimidate racial minorities. This isn’t just about the party’s bizarre obsession with upholding the sanctity of the Confederate flag. To this day, for example, the party continues to advocate for Voter ID laws, which are ostensibly designed to combat in-person voter fraud—a virtually non-existent phenomenon—but in practice help prevent a disproportionate number of eligible non-white voters from actually voting. Its intellectual leaders have dismissed the ubiquitous threat of police violence towards black people as illusory.

Donald Trump’s popularity indicates that this country’s most fervent conservatives are primarily concerned not with reducing abortion rights, or repealing Obamacare, but rather with preserving white hegemony in the United States. For years and years, the Republican Party has happily accommodated these kinds of conservatives under the unspoken assumption that they would never be powerful enough to publicize their own candidate. Trump speaks to the error of that assumption.

In this context, the theory that Donald Trump is secretly helping Hillary Clinton get elected is not really about the Republican Party’s hostility toward Donald Trump or its habit of inventing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton. (Although both factors have certainly helped with its formation.) It’s the result of a major political party coming to terms, however illogically, with who exactly its supporters are.

Email/chat: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · DM: @jktrotter · Photo credit: Getty