Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt contemptuous, anti-gay civil servants.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis said that the harsh words she’s received since trying to deprive same-sex couples of their right to marry don’t “define her,” characterizing the criticism as “everybody’s opinion” and “everybody’s right.”

“I’ve called ‘Hitler,’ I’ve been called ‘hypocrite,’ I’ve been called a homophobe,” said Davis in the interview, which is scheduled to air Tuesday. “I’ve been called things and names that I didn’t even say when I was in the world. Those names don’t hurt me.”

Davis did not elaborate on what those words she never used pre-martyrdom (and which presumably also begin with ‘H’) actually were, but she did identify the one thing you could say to make her feel bad, if you wanted to do that, for some reason.

“What probably hurt me the worst is when someone tells me that my God does not love me or that my God is not happy with me, that I am a hypocrite of a Christian,” said Davis.

Meanwhile, the ACLU filed a motion on Monday accusing Davis of adulterating marriage licenses immediately after returning to work by removing her name, her title and the name of her office. Because while the county clerk was happy to put “Kim Davis” on four different marriage licenses as a private citizen, she still refuses to do it as part of her job.

http://jezebel.com/deputy-clerk-c...

[Image via AP Images//h/t CNN]

On Monday, Nightly Show host Larry Wilmore engaged in the age-old comedy tradition of making an old white guy say #teenblackthings, encouraging guest Bernie Sanders to say his plans for criminal justice reform were “on fleek”—or, as Sanders pronounced it, “un fleek.”

As far as “old dudes messing up on fleek” goes, it was actually pretty funny, if only for the look of utter incomprehension on Sander’s face.

Stay #unfleek, Bernie.

[Image via Comedy Central]

On Monday, the BBC posted an edited interview with the Dalai Lama in which, among other things, the highest-ranking Tibetan Buddhist expresses some unexpectedly fucked-up opinions about women and their “use.”

Around 4:50 in the video, journalist Clive Myrie asks if there will be a 15th incarnation of the Dalai Lama after him—and if so, could the next Dalai Lama be a woman?

“Yes!” he replied. “The female biologically [has] more potential to show affection... and compassion.”

The Dalai Lama said that a reporter in Paris had asked him the same question awhile back, and he had responded similarly.

“Today in a more troubled world, I think females should take more important roles, and then I told that reporter, if a female Dalai Lama comes, their face should be very attractive.”

“So you can only have a female Dalai Lama if they’re attractive? Is that what you’re saying?” asked Myrie, trying valiantly to let him take it back.

“I mean if female Dalai Lama come, then that female must be very attractive, otherwise not much use.”

“You’re joking, I’m assuming,” says Myrie. “Or you’re not joking?”

“No. True!”

He then laughs at his own joke that his success is largely due to his attractiveness.

While the religious leader is known for his tolerance, he has made similarly unsettling comments before. He has previously remarked (and been criticized for) his view that a woman Dalai Lama would be useful because of the sex’s trademark compassion. He has also said that same-sex relationships (as well as oral sex and masturbation) are “misconduct” in Buddhism, but can be “enjoyable and harmless,” for society.

Contact the author at joanna@jezebel.com.

Image via Getty.

Say you’re a wild raccoon and you want to use the Precious Moments-esque saucer eyes you’ve been gifted with to trick a human into feeding you regularly. You could pick just anyone, or you could be efficient and choose a hippie who will let you walk all over her (or in this case, roll a stone over her glass door for sometimes hours at a time, causing physical damage to her property). What do you do? If you’re the wily motherfucker above, you go with the hippie and you roll your way to viral fame while eating the profits.

A few weeks ago, a Sarasota, Fl., resident named Susie Chinn posted a video of a beggar raccoon she has dubbed “Rocksy” on YouTube. To date, the video has received over 2 million views.

In the clip, Chinn refers to Rocksy, a thieving vandal, as “girlfriend!” and says, “I just want people to know that raccoons are wonderful, and just because you see a raccoon out in the day does not mean it has rabies. That is such a myth! Usually it’s a nursing mother raccoon who is out trying to get food for her babies.” Chinn points out Rocksy’s nipples, confirming that Rocksy has mouths to feed. Note that you can barely hear Chinn over the clanging of Rocksy’s rock against Chinn’s glass door.

Chinn tells local news station WFLA that Rocksy will not be deterred. “I’ll take her rock and then I’ll throw it into the garden and within a couple minutes, she’ll go get another one,” Chinn sing-songs with a smile. Clearly, Rocksy has Chinn whipped.

“The noise sometimes drives me crazy, but I look forward to her coming,” says Chinn.

Chinn adds, “I’m hoping that people will learn from this and just respect animals and love them because we all have a reason to be here.”

Chinn truly seems like a kind person, and her message of compassion is important. I’d say that I wish there were more people like her, but I also suspect that if there were, the raccoons would have taken over by now.

A 17-year-old non-celebrity, who those Kylie Jenner’s “camp” claim never to have heard of, is suing Kylie for allegedly threatening her, having her followed, and eventually staging a car accident to injure her, all because Jaden Smith was into this teen and Kylie was jealous. Whoa-kay.

The plaintiff, an unfamous non-adult named Chelsea Clark, claims that the rivalry over Jaden has been going on for three years, and that Kylie called her to say “Leave my boyfriend alone cause you will never be like me,” and “This is war,” according to legal documents viewed by TMZ.

Kylie and Jaden were “best friends” back in 2013, but they haven’t been a rumored couple in quite a while. The two were seen together at the Kimye wedding last May, but Kylie has been conspicuously “hanging out” with Tyga for the past 14 months.

That leaves a pretty narrow window of time when Kylie Jenner could have plausibly been jealous enough over the mystical boy in the white Batman costume to stalk a girl and plot to take her out in a car accident. She’s a big girl, now, dawg, according to sources close to her (Tyga).

A court (TMZ helpfully doesn’t specify which one, and a search of PACER and of Los Angeles County Court turned up nothing) reportedly denied Chelsea Clark’s request for a restraining order against Kylie, and Clark failed to show up to court with her alleged evidence on Monday.

TMZ reports the next hearing in the case is October 9th.

[TMZ, Photo of Kylie and Jaden near the beginning of the alleged conspiracy: Getty Images]

Sean Penn—a famous actor who has been accused of beating up a woman—says he’s nothing like Terrence Howard—a famous actor who has been arrested for beating up a woman. And incredibly, Penn is suing Empire showrunner Lee Daniels for $10,000,000—just for making the comparison.

Daniels made the comment to the Hollywood Reporter while discussing Terrence Howard, the often-unhinged actor with a long history of domestic violence charges currently starring in Empire.

http://defamer.gawker.com/terrence-howar...

In the Hollywood Reporter story, Daniels defends Howard by pointing out other famous actors who have allegedly beaten their wives and gotten away with it.

“That poor boy,” he says, fiercely protective of his actor. He then alludes to other actors who have been the subject of domestic abuse allegations in the past. “[Terrence] ain’t done nothing different than Marlon Brando or Sean Penn, and all of a sudden he’s some f—in’ demon,” says Daniels. “That’s a sign of the time, of race, of where we are right now in America.”

Enter Sean Penn, who’s calling the comparison “egregious” in a $10,000,000 defamation suit filed today. And it’s true—it’s not a flattering comparison. But what’s not clear is whether it’s untrue.

In the suit, Penn argues, there’s simply nothing to support the allegations that he was ever violent with a woman.

“Daniels falsely equates Penn with Howard, even though, while he has certainly had several brushes with the law, Penn (unlike Howard) has never been arrested, much less convicted, for domestic violence, as his ex-wives (including Madonna) would confirm and attest.”

But according to multiple reports Penn was accused of domestic violence—in 1988, after his then-wife Madonna called the cops on him. He allegedly terrorized the singer, tying her to a chair and beating her with a bat. At least that’s how the commonly reported version of the story goes—while it’s clear that there was an altercation that night in December of 1988, and that the police got involved, it never reached a court because Madonna reportedly asked that her complaint be withdrawn.

Penn has also been arrested multiple times for assaulting photographers, once serving 33 days for allegedly hanging a photog “by the ankles from a ninth-floor balcony after discovering him in the actor’s hotel room.”

http://gawker.com/sean-penn-and-...

Which is all to say, it’s strange that Terrence Howard isn’t the one who feels offended by the comparison.

http://defamer.gawker.com/the-six-times-...

Correction: This post has been corrected to reflect the fact that Penn was never charged with domestic assault, and that there are conflicting reports about whether or not he was arrested.

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

If Bill Gates gave away his entire fortune, he could give $1,736 to every American living in poverty, enough for each of them to buy themselves an Apple laptop.

http://gawker.com/is-it-okay-to-...

On September 20, police officers in Sunrise, Florida detained a 24-year-old man named Fidel Lopez after he admitted to disemboweling his 31-year-old girlfriend, Maria Nemeth. Police released the following complaint affidavit for Lopez’s arrest to Gawker under Florida’s Sunshine Law.

Kristin Cavallari is currently pregnant with a baby girl due this fall. (Her book is due many months later.) Ever the planner, Kristin—who named her first two children Camden and Jaxon—has already picked out a name for baby number three.

In a recent interview with the baby registry site Cricket’s Circle, she revealed not the name but its origin:

We picked out this baby girl’s name when I was pregnant with our first. I met a woman and her dog, and I loved her dog’s name. Funny enough, it was the name she had picked out if she had a girl, but she had boys, so she used it for her dog instead. Here we are 3.5 years later, and we are going to use that name for our little girl!

Sorry, baby.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Years ago, Showgirls star Gina Gershon admitted that she was aware of how ridiculous the movie was while they were filming it. Then just this summer, Elizabeth Berkley finally made peace with the movie she was widely ridiculed for and whose name she didn’t speak of for years. Now, in a Rolling Stone interview pegged to the camp classic’s 20th anniversary, the Dutch madman who directed it, Paul Verhoeven, has revealed that the movie is precisely as tacky as he wanted it to be.

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/sh...

Verhoeven blames himself for Berkley’s frenzied, finger-in-a-socket performance, explaining, “Good or not good, I was the one who asked her to exaggerate everything — every move — because that was the element of style that I thought would work for the movie.” And boy does it work.

Verhoeven continues:

I asked David Stewart of the Eurythmics, who was our composer for the film, to write the music for the big Vegas shows in a kind of banal way, because I was thinking an American audience seeing a show called “a musical” was probably expecting these numbers to be written by Leonard Bernstein and choreographed by Jerome Robbins. So I didn’t do that. I wanted to push the fact that it was all not-so-good stuff. I won’t say “shit,” but that’s what it would be. It was basically over-the-top Vegas. And I’m responsible for a lot of those things.

I always felt that it was what you might call a hyperbolic approach to filmmaking. Yes, it was over the top. And that was on purpose. The environments were very flashy. There were too many lights, too many idiotic things, and too much Vegas — not only in the surroundings, but “Vegas” in the way the people behaved, in the dialogue, in the acting. As for the finished product: I thought it was perfect. Otherwise I would have changed it. I had time to change it. I could change whatever was there.

Well, would you look at that? Though seeming like an out-of-control disaster has always been this movie’s charm, at a 20 year remove Verhoeven contends that the chaos was intentional. It just goes to show that some things are never too old for that whorey look.

Additionally, Verhoeven calls Showgirls a “very elegant movie.” Yes, as elegant as a pairing of champagne and Doggy Chow. Here, taste the elegance:

[h/t]

College newspaper controversies. Is there anything more amusing? I’ll tell you a secret: there is not. Oh, we have a good one today.

At Wesleyan—the dictionary representation of “Stereotypical Ultraliberal Private University”—there is a movement afoot to defund The Argus, the student newspaper. Not only to defund it, but to dispose of all the copies of the vile rag that remain on campus. A petition to do so has nearly 150 signatures. These crusaders demand that the trashy broadsheet be completely disappeared, until some very reasonable steps are taken, including (from The Argus):

These demands include commitment by The Argus to create work study/course credit positions; a monthly report on allocation of funds and leadership structure; a required once-per-semester Social Justice/Diversity training for all student publications; active recruitment and advertisement; and open space on the front page in the publication dedicated to marginalized groups/voices, specifying that if no submissions are received, The Argus will print a section labeled “for your voice.”

lmao

Wow—it will be a tragedy for the media at large if the writers of this petition do not bring their bold layout and design choices into the newspaper world upon graduation. Shake up the stodgy front page layouts of today in favor of a glorious vision of the future.

“What,” you may ask, “has angered so many people?” I am frankly disappointed in you, that you have to ask. The answer, as always, is “a stupid op-ed written by a college student and published in the student newspaper.” In this case, it was a stupid conservative op-ed arguing that the Black Lives Matter movement is maybe, just maybe, responsible for every riot and dead cop in America. If I were summing this op-ed up for you I would say “in expending this number of words to sum up this op-ed for you, I have already wasted a small piece of both of our lives.”

If you were ever a college student, you may recall that everything a college student writes is bound to be ill-informed, charmingly naive, knuckleheaded, remarkably ignorant, or some mixture of all of the above. It is thoroughly unsurprising for any college newspapers to publish any stupid op-ed on any topic. And, for the same reasons, it is equally unsurprising for college students to enact a dramatic, poorly thought out and philosophically inconsistent backlash to said op-ed.

Does any of this matter? No, because—and I say this not to denigrate college newspapers—college newspapers are the most unimportant segment of the media in the whole wide world. They’re just practice! Journalism scratch pads. Since college newspaper content is not really worth getting that upset about, we are able to just sit back and enjoy the spectacle of, on the one hand, a hapless conservative kid bumbling through an anti-BLM argument in the pages of the Wesleyan paper, of all places, and, on the other hand, a group of outraged liberal kids exhibiting a knee-jerk reaction that reveals that they should probably go to a few more philosophy classes before doing, really, anything at all.

When someone writes something dumb you just write about how dumb it is on the internet, kids, that’s how free speech works. Never stop talking.

[Photo: FB]

Violence erupted Sunday at a Burbank, California, Costco after an elderly shopper reprimanded a 24-year-old man for allegedly eating too many Nutella samples. According to police, Derrick Gharabighi punched the 78-year-old victim in response to the allegations of hazelnut spread hoarding.

The L.A. Times reports that as the older man reached for the delicious treat, Gharabighi reportedly snatched the remaining samples away. Undeterred by their 54-year age difference, the older man confronted Gharabighi and asked for a sample.

“The victim told Mr. Gharabighi that he wanted a sample and he shouldn’t take so many,” Burbank police Sgt. Claudio Losacco told the Los Angeles Times.

This didn’t sit well with Gharabighi, who allegedly responded by punching the older man just above his left eye, resulting in a 1-inch gash and enough swelling that the man required hospitalization.

Gharabighi was arrested and is being held in lieu $50,000 bond on charges of elder abuse, with an additional charge that he inflicted significant bodily harm on a person over 70; if convicted, he faces up to 11 years in prison.

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

The miserable lack of diversity in Silicon Valley is so exhaustively documented by now that we’ve nearly run out of ways to point it out. It’s most conspicuous at the top echelons, where the money is invested and recouped—and longtime VC John Doerr just made the problem glaringly obvious.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/marc-andreesse...

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is one of tech’s most powerful (and luckiest) investment firms, and senior partner John Doerr is currently giving a talk at the software-themed self-satisfaction festival known as TechCrunch Disrupt. The issue of diversity came up:

Yowza, OK, let’s sit down, pour a tall glass of cool Soylent, and unpack this. Not only does John Doerr, man in charge, think that “diverse” is something a person can be (rather than a contextual situation), he didn’t even take the time to fucking learn the non-Anglo Saxon names of two new colleagues.

TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler (good luck with that one, John!) says one of the partners in question is Swati Mylavarapu. Swati seems easier to pronounce to me than “Doerr” (Door? Do-er? Drrrrrrrrhhhh?), and it would probably take little of his tremendous investment brain to correctly pronounce Mylavarapu.

I don’t know who the other un-pronounceable is, but the staff listing is here. And it’s beside the point, really. Maybe the point is that... non-white tech workers... might feel uncomfortable... or unwelcome... working for someone... who would refer to their ethnicity... in... this.... way.

Photo: Getty

Update: KPCB partner and apparent messenger of John Doerr emailed me to say that he, according to this tweet, was trying to make a joke:

To which I say, from one one white man to another, no harm no foul, John!

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

At any big, flashy new car release, you expect to be accosted by public relations people all wearing name tags. “How do you like it?” they normally ask, or “Isn’t this exciting?” After I spent a few minutes milling around the entrance to the unveiling of the Volkswagen Passat last night, a security guard walked up to me. “Are you supposed to be here?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. In fact, I wasn’t sure any of us were supposed to be there.

Three weeks ago, the German car company invited us, and seemingly every other New York-based auto journalist, to the unveiling of the new 2016 Volkswagen Passat at a big warehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was the same place where the Cadillac CT6 was unveiled, but unlike that party, none of us really wanted to go at the time. This is, after all, the Passat we’re talking about here, not the Bugatti Veyron successor.

One of us actually just wanted to reply to the invite with “thanks,” and a simple link to the much nicer European version of the car, which we had already seen a while ago.

But that was before we knew that Volkswagen had deceived regulators across the world and the car-buying public for years by rigging cars to massively cheat on emissions tests. Before we knew about the criminal and the Congressional investigations. Before we knew that a whole bunch of people were about to get fired. But the Passat reveal party had to move forward; like a wedding, it could not be canceled, because Aunt Mabel was flying in from Seattle and they already bought all the meat.

So in the end, instead of swarming with the place with the hard-nosed Jalopnik beat reporters that we regularly employ, I somehow drew the short straw. Despite our best last-minute efforts to get as many people into the party as possible, I would be the only one going from our team.

And in fairness to the security guard, at that exact moment I did look pretty out of place. Volkswagen had hired a bunch of water taxis to take the vast majority of the people from Battery Park to the Navy Yard. Most of the time, these things feel like the pre-game to a booze cruise. But I had a car, so I figured I’d just drive in, through the back entrance.

Through the back entrance, there were no other journalists. Just guys from local dealers, who laughed at random jokes but then seemed to go way too quickly back to very nervous faces.

But after a half hour of the event staff politely, but firmly denying my pleas to get beyond the entrance area and into the main event, Doug DeMuro finally showed up, and they finally let us in to the big room where the reveal party was located. (You’re probably wondering why Doug got in, even though I just said they weren’t letting any extra Jalops in. All I can say is that the Doug works in mysterious ways, but also occasionally does freelance for other publications.)

And it was a big room. A vast, empty room. Large enough to fit several elephants that no one from Volkswagen wanted to discuss at the moment.

There’s a weird feeling that you get when you’re at a party that’s highly inappropriate. No one throwing it really feels like celebrating much, and everyone sort of looks at the floor or pretends to be Very Busy with something. All the invited guests – in this case, the journalists – make horrible, dark jokes about what’s been going on. Maybe it should’ve been canceled, everyone thinks.

But it was not canceled, so everything just sort of goes on, without anyone acknowledging everything that’s happening. Which isn’t to say we didn’t try to acknowledge it. Any Volkswagen staffer I could find, which is to say, every person that I asked if they worked for Volkswagen, could only offer a firm, polite “no comment,” along with a firm, polite, and icy glare, from the booth professionals to the suits.

We milled around for an hour or so, listlessly or boisterously depending on how much of the VW-supplied alcohol we’d gone for while black-shirted waiters and waitresses tried to offer us a constant stream of miniature crab cakes. They had the ostensibly mandatory televisions, displaying tweets with the ostensibly mandatory hashtag for the night. They didn’t post my tweets to the televisions, no matter how hard I tried.

It was lot emptier than I, and probably Volkswagen, expected. The room wasn’t getting any smaller, and it wasn’t filling up as fast as these things usually do. When there’s something to be celebrated, people like to celebrate. When the only thing being celebrated is a mid-cycle refresh, accompanied by a scandal of massive proportions, intention, and deceit, I guess people don’t really feel like showing up to celebrate.

I didn’t have any of the crab cakes.

After an hour of what felt like interminable mingling, Volkswagen USA CEO Michael Horn finally arrived. And, like any gracious and exuberant party host, he began by proclaiming his company’s own dishonesty, and proclaiming its mistakes:

“In my German words, we totally screwed up,” he said. A single person clapped.

To be honest, it was almost refreshing to hear this Reaganesque mea culpa. Though it was almost wholly unsatisfying in what wasn’t said. No questions were allowed, even though we were all wondering variations on similar themes. Who knew about this? When did they know about this? Surely you, personally, had to have known about this? Why did you do it? How could you think you wouldn’t get caught? How long did you think this would go on? Why didn’t one of your competitors, who buy up your cars to endlessly study them, X-ray them, take them apart and test them six ways to Sunday, blow the whistle in the supposedly “ruthless” automotive business?

We didn’t get any answers. Because in the world of Volkswagen, when you’re staring down the barrel of an investigatory gun but you’re still throwing one of the biggest parties in New York, we were “only here to talk about Passat.”

And once Horn was finished issuing his apologies, music started blaring and three Passats immediately rolled out. One white R-line, one silver example in a basic trim, and a blue diesel model.

Not much was said about the diesel.

We all performed the requisite kabuki of getting live photos of the cars, even though most of the writers there had already agreed to embargoes and had seen photos of the car hours ago, scheduling articles on it to go live even before Horn had finished reading off of the press release. The ritual continued unabated.

They left the cars out, rotating silently on three little stands. After the first 15 minutes, most stopped crawling all over a vehicle that was already too familiar. We had been told Lenny Kravitz was playing, and by then, when we realized none of our questions truly would be answered, and there was nothing of this car that was going to light our hair on fire, was the only reason for staying much longer.

After an hour, Lenny finally showed up. He brought the house down. He was a professional. He earned the money I’m sure he was paid. He shoved his guitar-crotch into the face of a poor model Volkswagen had paid to be there.

There weren’t a whole lot of Volkswagen supporters left in the big room. He didn’t say anything about what was happening.

Contact the author at ballaban@jalopnik.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 0D03 F37B 4C96 021E 4292 7B12 E080 0D0B 5968 F14E

Deadspin Bear To Rude Homeowner: Here’s Some Shit For Ya | Gizmodo Why Some Boys in the Dominican Republic Grow Penises at Puberty | Jezebel Dalai Lama: A Female Dalai Lama Must Be Attractive, ‘Otherwise Not Much Use’ | Kotaku The Creator Of The ‘Hardest Super Mario World Level Ever’ Is At It Again | Kinja Popular Posts

On Tuesday, a Florida judge decided that the case against Matthew Apperson, who allegedly tried to kill George Zimmerman in a roadway shooting this May, will go to trial. According to Reuters, Zimmerman testified today that he saw Apperson and the barrel of a gun and then heard “a bang and a ringing in my ears.”

http://gawker.com/attempted-murd...

This afternoon, for the first time after a six-month suspension without pay, Brian Williams returned to the air. As live news anchor at MSNBC, Williams covered Pope Francis’ visit to the United States, which stopped at Andrews Air Force Base. But he did not mention why he had been absent, much less demoted to MSNBC.

Williams had anchored NBC’s Nightly News for 11 years when he admitted to embellishing a story from when he covered Iraq in 2003. NBC replaced Williams on Nightly News with Lester Holt and reportedly had him accept a cut in his eight-figure salary, though kept its investigation on him under wraps.

http://tktk.gawker.com/do-you-have-a-...

“And good day, I’m Brian Williams at MSNBC headquarters here in New York,” he said. “In a short time, Pope Francis will arrive in this country for the first time.” And that was that — he was back.

[Image via MSNBC]

Some humans spend a lifetime waiting to be discovered. Dinosaurs spend millions of years waiting to be discovered, like “Eva,” the dino recently pieced together by a team of Colorado-based paleontologists, CNN reports.

Only a week in the press and Eva’s being called a “fat pony” by the man who discovered her, Mike Triebold.

“(It looked like) a fat pony with a big head and horns,” Triebold, who runs the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland, Colorado, told the network.

Ava is believed to be an example of a new species similar to the triceratops but existed roughly 9 million years earlier. She is also believed to be the first of her kind, wandering around Montana while it still sat across a sea.

It’s rare to find a brand new species of dinosaur these days, so the discovery of Eva is a big deal. And already come the weight comments and the horse comparisons. As Jon Stewart once said: “Welcome to being a woman in America.”

[Image via CNN/KRDO]

Stephen Colbert is the latest to ask Donald Trump if he knows where President Barack Obama was born.

CNN Money reports that, during today’s taping for tonight’s Late Show episode, Colbert tried to make the Republican presidential candidate an offer he couldn’t refuse: Answer this “big fat meatball” of a question, and he’d never have to respond to it again. “Barack Obama, born in the United States?”

Just as Meet the Press on Sunday, though, after failing to correct a rally attendee who called Obama a Muslim, Trump declined to answer. “I don’t talk about that anymore,” he said, a response that Colbert said was the “meatball ... being dragged down subway steps by a rat.”

In 2012 Trump made Obama an offer that he “couldn’t refuse”: Show the applications and records for college and your passport, and he will donate $5 million to the charity of the President’s choice. This was after he demanded that Obama produce his birth certificate, though he’d decline to produce his own.

[Images via Getty Images/AP Images]

A federal judge ruled that the lyrics to “Happy Birthday to You” are not protected by copyright, Variety reports.

The song we know as “Happy Birthday to You” has a dark and muddled history. In 1893, a handwritten and possibly tea-stained manuscript for sheet music included the song “Good Morning to All.” The song was first published in 1893 in the possibly haunted “Song Stories for Kindergarten.” Later, perhaps in a frantic attempt to save our cursed souls, the catchy lyrics of “Happy Birthday” were woven into the song’s melody.

Yet according to U.S. District Judge George H. King’s Tuesday ruling, all this time Summy Co. acquired the rights to the song’s spooky melody, but never any rights to the happy-go-lucky lyrics. Since Summy Co. never acquired the rights to the lyrics in 1935, that means their successor, Warner/Chappell, doesn’t own a valid copyright to the lyrics, just the melody and piano arrangements based on the melody.

We’re halfway there to birthday song freedom. What you do with this new power is on you.

[Image via Shutterstock]