House Bill 2789—which proposes the creation of the Staff as First Emergency Responders Act—seeks to hold schools legally accountable for shootings if they prohibit their teachers from carrying firearms.
The bill—drafted in the wake of a shooting last month that killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—was first presented to the state’s House Committee on Insurance on Tuesday.
“Inside our schools there are sleeping dogs willing to protect our kids,” Republican Rep. Blake Carpenter, who helped draft the presumption of negligence provision, argued in Tuesday’s hearing, which ended after two hours in a no-vote.
“The day will come when we’ll have to face this fear,” echoed Joseph Clay, an Iraq War veteran and Wichita math teacher. “Our children are not safe on campus in Kansas.”
“At one point, he apologized to lawmakers: ‘I feel like I’m getting a little aggressive with you guys.’ And at another, he described his 3-year-old son as someone who ‘has a temper, like his daddy.’ An opponent of the bill later cited Clay, ‘with all due respect,’ as exactly the sort of person who has her convinced that arming teachers would make her children less safe.”
The bill would further prohibit insurers from denying coverage to schools that allow its teachers to carry guns.
Concealed carry was legalized on the state-level in Kansas public K-12 schools in 2013, but with the provision that individual school districts could ban firearms from certain buildings on school grounds but not the “grounds” itself—a blurry distinction at best.
Democratic committee member and ELL teacher Rep. Brett Parker told the Associated Press, “The further we go down this rabbit hole, the more chance there is for even more obnoxious legislation moving forward.”
Brendan Gauthier is a freelance writer and nonfiction MFA candidate at Columbia University.
Fox News is distancing itself from its former tentpole personality, Bill O’Reilly, as some of his harassment accusers now want out of their nondisclosure agreements.
The New York Times reported in April that Fox News doled out a total of $13 million in settlements to five women who had accused the “O’Reilly Factor” host of “sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior.”
After O’Reilly told the Times he’s “vulnerable to lawsuits from individuals who want me to pay them to avoid negative publicity,” three of the women—Rachel Witlieb Bernstein, Andrea Mackris and Rebecca Gomez Diamond—filed a defamation suit against O’Reilly and the network in December.
A motion filed on Tuesday by Fox News’s legal team argues that O’Reilly, who was “dismissed” shortly after the Times investigation, “was no longer acting in the course of his employment,” and so the network “cannot be vicariously liable.”
“Nor can Fox be liable for O’Reilly’s limited statements prior to his firing,” the motion continues, “because those statements were made to advance his personal interests, not those of Fox News.”
O’Reilly’s baggage is not unlike that of Donald Trump, who’s now facing three potentially damning lawsuits regarding alleged extramarital affairs and harassment.
Citing Clinton v. Jones—the Supreme Court ruling that set the legal precedent for former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment—New York Supreme Court Justice Jennifer G. Schecter on Tuesday allowed a defamation lawsuit against Trump filed by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos to proceed.
Also on Tuesday, former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal filed a defamation suit against tabloid magazine The National Enquirer in an effort to nullify an agreement she signed to keep quiet about the affair she says she had with Trump a decade ago. Similarly, adult film actress Stormy Daniels claims Trump never signed a $130,000 “hush agreement” to hide their decade-long affair.
Brendan Gauthier is a freelance writer and nonfiction MFA candidate at Columbia University.
The Mississippi State Senate on Tuesday passed by a vote of 35 to 15 House Bill 1510, which would prohibit abortions after 15 weeks except for medical emergencies and “in cases of severe fetal abnormality.”
“The Legislature finds that the intentional commitment of [dilation and evacuation procedures] for nontherapeutic or elective reasons is a barbaric practice, dangerous for the maternal patient, and demeaning to the medical profession,” the bill states.
The Gestational Age Act, as it’s called, was first proposed by Rep. Becky Currie in January, and the State House passed it by a vote of 80 to 31 in early February. It will now return to the House for a procedural vote on minor amendments made by the Senate to penalties for offending physicians.
In the likelihood that the bill makes its way to his desk, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant says he will sign it into law. He expressed his unequivocal support on Twitter on Tuesday:
As I have repeatedly said, I want Mississippi to be the safest place in America for an unborn child. House Bill 1510 will help us achieve that goal. https://t.co/ffqRfhwx51
Mississippi’s current abortion laws allow for an abortion to be performed “at 18 or more weeks postfertilization (20 weeks after the woman’s last menstrual period) only if the woman’s life is endangered, her physical health is severely compromised or there is a lethal fetal anomaly,” according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for women’s reproductive health rights.
The current law, the Institute argues, “is based on the assertion, which is not consistent with scientific evidence and has been rejected by the medical community, that a fetus can feel pain at that point in pregnancy.”
Mississippi is not the only state in recent weeks to take drastic measures to restrict Roe v. Wade freedoms. Last month, the South Carolina State Senate’s judiciary committee approved a so-called “Personhood Act” proposing a sweeping ban on abortions with no exceptions for medical emergencies or cases of incest and rape.
In his State of the State address, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said, “This right to life is the most precious of rights—and the most fragile.” A spokesperson confirmed to The Post and Courier in January that McMaster intends to sign the bill should it reach his desk.
Brendan Gauthier is a freelance writer and nonfiction MFA candidate at Columbia University.
There are especially bad times for a government agency to spend $31,561 on a table and chairs, the Department of Housing and Urban Development learned after The New York Times reported on Tuesday that it spent as much on a dining room set for Secretary Ben Carson’s office in late 2017. Around the same time, it’s worth noting, the White House sought to “slash HUD’s programs for the homeless, elderly and poor.”
HUD spokesman Raffi Williams told the Times that though Carson “didn’t know the table had been purchased,” he wasn’t going to return it. Neither did the House or Senate Appropriations Committees know that the 50-year-old custom hardwood table had been purchased, as Williams claimed it served a “building-wide need” and so was exempt from federal law requiring congressional approval for renovations to a department head’s office with costs exceeding $5,000.
Carson is hardly an exception to the rule. President Trump’s cabinet is brimming with purported fiscal conservatives letting taxpayers foot their enormous bills.
1. Scott Pruitt, EPA
By measure of frivolous office renovations, HUD only slightly outspent the Environmental Protection Agency, which, in September, contracted Acoustical Solutions to build Scott Pruitt a $24,570 soundproof “privacy booth.”
2. Steve Mnuchin, Treasury
In August, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his wealth-obsessed wife, Louise Linton, took a $26,900 flight on an Air Force jet to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for no known reason other than to watch the solar eclipse.
3. Ryan Zinke, Interior
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke dismissed as “a little BS” scrutiny of his practice of chartering private jets from Republican donors to attend campaign events. In one particularly questionable instance in June, Zinke spent $12,375 to fly from Las Vegas to Kalispell, Montana, “aboard a private plane owned by the executives of a Wyoming oil-and-gas exploration firm,” according to The Washington Post.
4. Tom Price, Health and Human Services
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign in September, after Politico reported that he took five charter flights in two days at an estimated cost of at least $60,000. In his short tenure, Price was believed to have spent nearly $1,000,000 in taxpayer money on charter and military flights.
5. Donald Trump
Since assuming use of Air Force One, the president has made 13 visits to Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach. And more than half of his 404 days in office have been spent outside Washington, D.C., adding costs (which don’t have to be disclosed) in the form of security.
Brendan Gauthier is a freelance writer and nonfiction MFA candidate at Columbia University.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly gave staffers in a Friday meeting a revised account of his response to allegations that former staff secretary Rob Porter physically and emotionally abused two ex-wives, according to a Washington Postreport.
“Kelly told those in attendance to say that he took action to remove Porter within 40 minutes of learning that abuse allegations … were credible,” two anonymous sources in attendance relayed to The Post: “He told the staff he took immediate and direct action.”
The narrative Gen. Kelly pushed Friday runs counter to reports that he kept Porter on staff despite knowledge of the allegations, which prevented him from gaining permanent security clearance from the FBI back in November.
Porter—who resigned on Wednesday—is reportedly involved romantically with White House communications director Hope Hicks, for whom his second ex-wife, Jennie Willoughby, says she’s worried.
“I mean, it definitely worries me because if I’m being frank with you, if he hasn’t already been abusive with Hope, he will,” Willoughby told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday. “And particularly now that he’s under a lot of stress and scrutiny. That’s when the behaviors come out. If he hasn’t already, he will.”
“We certainly wish him well,” President Trump told press in the Oval Office on Friday, calling Porter’s resignation “obviously a tough time for him” and stressing that he’s denied all allegations.
“And hopefully he will have a great career ahead of him,” he added. “But it was very sad when we heard about it. And certainly he’s very sad.”
The Washington Post reported on Friday that Trump is the first president in over half-a-century to forgo the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a written intelligence document compiled primarily by CIA analysts.
President Trump—whose Fox & Friendsdependence and accompanying short attention span are hardly secrets—prefers an oral briefing, “according to three people familiar with his briefings.”
The President’s Daily Brief is highly classified, and it’s impossible to know how much detail is lost in its oral translation. But former CIA Director Leon Panetta worries that President Trump will miss important context, to the detriment of national security.
“Something will be missed,” Panetta told the Post. “If for some reason his instincts on what should be done are not backed up by the intelligence because he hasn’t taken the time to read that intel, it increases the risk that he will make a mistake.”
Former CIA director Mark Lowenthal echoed Panetta’s sentiment:
You need to get immersed in a story over its entire course. You can’t just jump into an issue and come up to speed on the actors and the implications. The odds are pretty good that something will arise later on for which he has no intelligence basis for helping him work through it.
In August, VICE Newsreported that President Trump also twice daily requires so-called “propaganda folders,” containing “screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.”
Eclipse apocalypse, white reparations, and a journalism crash course from a conspiracist blogger. Welcome to This Week In Crazy, The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Joe Arpaio
Awaiting sentencing for a July contempt of court conviction, the former Arizona sheriff — who, along with then-Celebrity Apprentice host Donald Trump, was at the forefront of the birther movement in 2012 — Skype’d into Alex Jones’ show on Wednesday to thank theTWIC regular for potentially convincing the president to pardon him.
“I want to thank you, Alex, and your staff, Jerry Corsi, Roger Stone, for bringing this story out and reaching the president,” Arpaio told Jones. “I supported him from, what, two years ago at the same forum that he did yesterday and I’m with him and I’m with him to the end.”
Despite early rumors to the contrary, Arpaio was not invited — and didn’t show up — to Trump’s rally on Tuesday night in Phoenix. He told reporters on Monday, “I don’t want to cause any havoc, if you know what I mean.”
The president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia — who told students at a convocation service after the San Bernardino attack in 2015 that they should get concealed carry permits to “end those Muslims before they walked in” — is apparently self-styling as moral policeman.
“You know, [Trump’s] a little abrasive sometimes in the way he says things, and we have some thin-skinned Americans sometimes who ignore the substance of what he’s saying because they’re put off by his demeanor,” Falwell told Fox News Radio’s Todd Starnes. “And I think we need to grow up as a people and stop being so easily offended. It’s offensive for anybody to say that President Trump is a racist. He’s anything but.”
3. Paul Begley
This week was punctuated by the solar eclipse for which at least one McDonald’s shut down for a whole three minutes to allow its employees “to allow our employees to enjoy the ‘once in a lifetime’ spectacle of the totality of the Solar Eclipse.”
To summarize: President Trump looked directly into the sun, Tucker Carlson made fun of him for it, and — as far as I know — the world didn’t end. This despite Indiana Pastor Paul Begley’s prophecy that the eclipse was a sign of the apocalypse.
“It happened in the plagues of Egypt,” he reasoned — citing Joel 2:31 — during his radio show, Coming Apocalypse. “In one of the plagues the sun went dark for three days.”
2. Michael Snyder
Pastor Begley’s li’l theory was only the second craziest interpretation of Monday’s eclipse. The crown belongs to smalltime conspiracist and Idaho congressional candidate, Michael Snyder, whose Tuesday post on The Economic Collapse Blog was titled Is It Significant That The USS John S. McCain Was Damaged In A Collision On The Same Day As The Solar Eclipse?
The first thing I learned on my first day working in media was not to ask a question in a headline because the answer is more often than not no. And then Snyder came along this week and totally negated the lesson, because (spoiler alert) he indeed thinks it’s significant that the USS John S. McCain was damaged in a collision on the same day as the solar eclipse:
To me, it definitely feels like we have reached a ‘turning point.’ … I have written about the extraordinary confluence of events that are going to happen over a 40 day period beginning with the eclipse and ending with Yom Kippur on September 30th.
I certainly don’t anticipate anything too cataclysmic during the coming weeks, but I do believe that someone up there is trying to tell us something.
You’ll remember the InfoWars figurehead from number five — and every other TWIC I’ve written. Remember when Joe Arpaio thanked Jones for pleading his case for a pardon to Donald Trump? Think for another paragraph about that line of communication between Alex Jones and the president. Now this:
On Monday — just over a week after a woman was killed and 19 others were injured in defiance of a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, ostensibly protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee — Jones issued a “travel advisory” for white people and tried to make the case for white reparations.
“I’ve issued a travel advisory for the United States for white folks going to places like Denver, Detroit. Places like Chicago, places like Seattle, because I’ve been to these towns and I’ve experienced it,” Jones whined. (It’s worth noting here, he was doused with hot coffee during his man-on-the-street “invasion” of Seattle on Friday.)
He added:
There needs to be reparations for white people the last 20, 30 years, getting attacked and killed by the tens of thousands every year. Seriously, if you want to play this whole game, and I’m not actually asking for that. There needs to be real travel advisories. They used to have in the 60s some places like Selma, Alabama, The New York Times would put travel advisories out for black folks. Well, you know what? They needed a travel advisory. That’s true.
Statue fetishists, blubbering neo-Nazis, and Cat Fight Fever. Welcome to This Week In Crazy, The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Scott Adams
The Dilbert cartoonist is secondarily known as an inflammatory right-wing Twitter kook. His response to the weekend’s deadly clash between neo-Nazis and “antifa” protesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was no exception. On Wednesday, Adams tweeted what I’ll admit I at first thought was a sarcastic response to President Donald Trump’s continued both-sides-ism during an impromptu presser at Trump Tower on Tuesday:
Have the fact-checkers weighed in on President Trump's claim there were **SOME** non-racist pro-statue people in the general vicinity?
Everybody knows that one guy in the office that listens to NPR, canvassed for Bernie last year, and gets all jacked up at the sight of a hunking Confederate general cast in copper. Y’know, a “pro-statue” kind of guy.
Of course, that guy doesn’t exist and so he wasn’t marching with a TIKI torch on Friday nor ramming down dozens of counter-protesters on Saturday.
4. Michele Bachmann
Skyline Church’s Pastor Jim Garlow announced on Saturday the appointment of the former Minnesota congresswoman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate to the undoubtedly made up position of “pastor to the United Nations”:
“I don’t know a darker, more deceived place on earth than the U.N.,” Bachmann told the congregation during Garlow’s Sunday service. “Because as we saw at the Tower of Babel, that’s probably the last time when we saw all the nations of the earth come together in a moment of deception … Their goal has been from the very beginning, the creation of a one-world order; but not a one-world order under the umbrella of the Holy Spirit, a man’s attempt at a one-world order that only brings about chaos, confusion, deception, delusion, pain. And that’s where, rather than cursing the darkness, Skyline Church is about to light a candle.”
What does it mean to be “pastor to the United Nations”? Don’t ask me. I can only imagine Bachmann delivering rambling end-times sermons surrounded by tourists with selfie-sticks. Or maybe she’ll hide in the bushes — like she did as a Minnesota state senator in 2005 — outside the entrance and wait to ambush departing delegates with guerrilla gospel.
3. Alex Marlow and Milo Yiannopoulos
The former is Breitbart‘s editor-in-chief. The latter resigned from Beitbart in February after video surfaced of him endorsing pedophilia. Yet the two met on Monday’s episode of Breitbart’s Sirius XM radio show to discuss “virtue signaling” in GoDaddy’s decision to stop hosting The Daily Stormer, an infamous neo-Nazi blog that ran an incendiary article about Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer.
Marlow was quick to distance his publication — itself frequently bookmarked by neo-Nazis — from The Daily Stormer, which, “by the way, has boycotted Breitbart because we let [Milo] write for us and other gay people.”
“You’ll never hear that in the media,” Yiannopoulos said. (And, because I’m petty, I’ll note that I wrote about the antisemitic family feud in Salon in September.) He adds: “The Daily Stormer, the white supremacist hub on the Internet, hates me and hates Breitbart. That’s not coming to CNN anytime soon.”
Marlow initiates the craziness: “The Daily Stormer was white supremacist yesterday too, and the day before, and a year ago, and two years ago, yet GoDaddy decides to ban them today. This virtue signaling is just getting absolutely ridiculous at this point.”
Only the originalist trolls at Breitbart would even think to whine about the unconstitutionality of censoring “the white supremacist hub on the Internet” for calling a murdered counter-protester a “Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut.” If that’s not hate speech, I don’t know what is.
2. Chris Cantwell
And speaking of whining neo-Nazis, this “Unite the Right” organizer — featured prominently in the Vice documentary Charlottesville: Race and Terror — couldn’t even pretend to be tough for a less-than-five-minute vlog after he found out a warrant had been issued for his arrest.
In the documentary, Cantwell claims his band of white supremacists who infested the Virginia college town over the weekend is “not non-violent. We’ll fucking kill these people if we have to” — evidenced by the death of Heather Heyer.
But when the effects of adrenaline and mace wore off and the fuzz got his number, a softer, self-doxxing Cantwell surfaced:
1. Ted Nugent
When in November the United States elected a taller, less literate Alex Jones to run the country, there was concern over which jaundiced, nouveau-riche cretin would fill which cabinet position. Amid the confusion, I totally forgot about all two of candidate Trump’s so-called celebrity endorsers: Kid Rock and Ted Nugent.
The former got the better end of the deal: he’s running to be a U.S. senator in a possibly illegitimatecampaign cosigned by Warner Brothers that’s definitely not just some stunt to sell hats.
Nugent, on the other hand, peaked when he grabbed his crotch on stage at a Trump rally in November. He’s since gone back to appearing sporadically on Fox News and claiming the only reason he’s not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is because he’s on the NRA’s board of directors and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation member Jann Wenner “hates the Second Amendment.”
Hall of Famer — as part of Crosby, Stills, and Nash — David Crosby posited another reason the deer-hunting rocker didn’t make the cut:
Nugent then took to (where else but) Fox News to air his rebuttal.
“With all due respect to David Crosby — if any is due,” Nugent told Fox’s Specialists, “here’s a bloated carcass that has abused his body all his life. He’s a repository for every chemical and drug known to man. And if he doesn’t have that much respect or soul, then his criticism to me is a badge of honor. He can kiss my ass.”
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Nuclear holy war, Chi-Raqi occupation, and Al Gore’s “big ugly ass.” Welcome to This Week In Crazy, The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Jack Posobiec
Less crazy than dumb, Posobiec — the alt-righter who sued Alamo Drafthouse for its limited all-female screenings of Wonder Woman — tweeted the following in response to President Trump’s escalatory remarks on North Korea:
This is a classic example of justifying incompetence as three-dimensional chess. If you asked Trump to spell “genius,” he’d start writing the letter j before getting distracted by a push notification.
(Also, there’s no precedent for writing six as “VI” — unless you learned Roman numerals in school that day and wanted to show off. But I don’t care: this tweet’s not going on the fridge.)
4. Jesse Watters
I have a special place in my — what’s the opposite of heart? — for this ‘80s movie villain because he and I went to the same college and, aside from maybe Tucker Carlson, he’s probably the slimiest alum. (Though I reckon he could say the same of me if he wanted.)
Anyway, Watters on Friday called the entire city of Chicago “another swamp that needs to be drained.” His proposed method:
Remember what happened with the surge in Iraq where they went block to block and they invested heavily on boots on the ground, clear/hold [strategy], and they brought in the local population to really turn the tables. And it worked. Now Chicago needs the same thing.
Watters, it seems, gravely misinterpreted the message of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq:
3. Robert Jeffress
The megachurch pastor from Texas added to his craziness CV — which includes attributing 9/11 to God’s punishment for abortion — by again justifying Trump’s chest-thumping. This time, Jeffress — responding to the president’s aforementioned North Korean tough-talk — said “God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.”
It’s hard to imagine a TWIC without Jones. The guy’s as prolific as he is imbalanced. On Tuesday, shortly before making fun of Al Gore’s “big ugly ass,” he revealed that he communicates, at least via written memos, with President Trump:
Big ugly asses notwithstanding, there is a difficult-to-describe poetry in Jones’s diatribes. Some exceptional turns of phrase you shouldn’t ever find in normal political discourse: “fill your hand, turd blossoms;” “my fat will just be accelerant in the fight;” and “You love death, that’s why I’m throwing myself against you.”
Small wonder, then, that his rants also work as indie folk songs.
1. Jim Bakker
Speaking of right-wing crazies who have Trump’s ear, this food bucket huckster revealed this week that he and his wife, Lori, met with other prominent evangelists at the White House on July 31.
According to Bakker — who nearly started crying as he recalled it — George O. Wood, leader of the General Council of the Assemblies of God, “spoke words,” bemoaning “unnecessary swearing.”
“This was not a social meeting,” Bakker said, referring to former communications director Anthony Scaramucci’s less-than-coincidental ouster that same day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LhMqkvIVE0
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Shadow government ruffians, alt-right “journalists,” and bone broth chocolate milk. Welcome to This Week In Crazy, The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Joe Scarborough
I don’t know whether it’s the unscripted nature of Morning Joe or its namesake’s political bipolarity, but Scarborough somehow manages to dig his own rhetorical grave at least once a week. This week — Thursday, to be exact — he tried to perpetuate the thoroughly debunked argument that increased immigration inversely affects the wages of “white working class Americans.”
Contrary to Scarborough’s claim, study after study has found little evidence that immigration negatively affects American’s wages in the long term, and research shows that immigrants tend to take jobs that Americans don’t want.
It’s unsurprising that Scarborough — who fairly recently denounced his old political party — is mimicking the talking points of President Trump, who in early February called the former Florida congressman “a great guy [who] has a great show.”
By then MSNBC execs were reportedly disconcerted by “Scarborough’s friendship with Trump and his increasingly favorable coverage of the candidate.” Of course, Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski subsequently distanced themselves from their old chum, drawing the Twitter ire of Trump.
But with Scaramucci unemployed, Scarborough parroting the right-wing talking points, and Trump ever changing from moment to moment, are we looking at the next White House communications director?
4. Rick Wiles
Some underpaid soul on the RightWingWatch masthead listened to Wiles’s TruNews radio show on Tuesday and clipped the three-and-a-half minutes in which the Florida pastor theorizes that a gang of shadow government ruffians has been injuring politicians in calling-card fashion for more than a decade.
Wiles and his co-host cited vaguely a 2002 incident in which then-President George W. Bush fainted while eating pretzels and sustained a raspberry on his cheek; another in which then-Vice President Dick Cheney, they said, got a “fat lip”; and a third in which Colin Powell, they struggled to remember, broke his arm or leg.
“All three within two weeks” leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, Wiles stressed.
And the violence appears nonpartisan. Wiles also mentioned that Barack Obama and Harry Reid suffered cosmetic injuries between 2002 and Tuesday.
Now with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) showing up on Capitol Hill to deliver the decisive vote on repeal-and-replace with a surgical scar above his eye, that makes six whole politicians — at least three of which were quantifiably old — getting hurt over the span of just fifteen years.
This will not stand.
3. Mike Cernovich
Cernovich — of Gorilla Mindset infamy — announced on Monday during one of his daily Periscope diatribes that he’d “pivoted from a pro-Trump guy to more of a journalistic guy” after short-lived communications directory Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci got the boot.
“I don’t want people to think of me as a pro-Trump guy anymore,” he said. “I want people to think of me as a Mindset guy [whatever that means], a journalist, a commentator, a social media personality, a filmmaker, an author.” Cernovich has a lifetime of pivoting to do, however, before anyone credible thinks of him as anything but a joke — even despite his White House press credentials.
2. Corey Lewandowski
Lewandowski — Trump’s formerly embattled campaign manager who pioneered the unfortunate trend of fired staffers becoming mainstream pundits after taking a reportedly six-figure contract with CNN — reared his closely shaven head on Sunday’s Meet the Press.
On the topic of Gen. John Kelly replacing Reince Priebus as Trump’s chief of staff, Lewandowski abruptly veered off topic to suggest the president fire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) head Richard Cordray, who’s rumored to be running for governor of Ohio.
“Do you have any business interests here?” host Chuck Todd asked. “Do you have a client that wants to see this happen?”
Lewandowski denied any such stake in calling for Cordray’s dismissal.
In a later segment, though, Politico‘s Eliana Johnson blew Lewandowski’s cover.
According to BuzzFeed, Lewandowski “will headline a fundraiser [on August 3] for US Rep. Jim Renacci, a candidate in Ohio’s competitive Republican primary for governor.” His appearance on Meet the Press was apparently an opportunity to sling mud at his buddy’s opponent on national television.
1. Alex Jones
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver returned from hiatus on Sunday with a long-form segment on Alex Jones — the conspiracy theorist who (it can’t be stressed enough) ate too much chili and lost custody of his kids — and his InfoWars-brand snake oil supplements.
Like Cernovich (see number three), Jones is — prolific’s not the right word. His show runs four hours every weekday. So a rebuttal was bound to come. And it did, on Tuesday.
Of all potential gripes, Jones honed in on Oliver — whom he confused with Trevor Noah — for mocking his Caveman True Paleo Formula, which is available on InfoWars.com, because of course you’re interested. Oliver said jokingly of the chocolate drink made partially from “Bone Broth … and other Ancient Supernutrients,” according to the website write-up, “I can confirm to you that it tastes exactly how you imagine a drink would taste that’s made from chocolate and domesticated bird corpses.”
Jones’s defense:
Everybody knows you leave the bones in in chicken broth when you’re sick — every wive’s tale, every culture.
He said he did market research at Whole Foods and GNC a few years ago and found bone broth to be “the hottest thing.” So he asked his “manufacturer” to produce a bone broth that was “three times stronger than anything else anybody makes.”
And we did it with chicken broth, bone broth — it’s got all the trace elements, the minerals. It’s got the co-factors. It’s got the — basically the stem cells in it. And they take it and they put it together, and it’s super strong.
So no “domesticated bird corpses.” I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced.
Who’s hungry?
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Wholly unsurprisingly, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made financial pages headlines for abstractly criticizing Washington bureaucracy and the American media during a conference call with reporters on Friday. The call was meant to detail the bank’s record-breaking second quarter earnings.
“It’s almost an embarrassment being an American citizen traveling around the world and listening to the stupid shit we have to deal with in this country,” Dimon — who’d recently returned from an overseas work trip — complained, repeatedly banging on the table.
“The United States of America has to start to focus on policy which is good for all Americans, and that is infrastructure, regulation, taxation, education,” he went on. “Why you guys don’t write about it every day is completely beyond me. And, like, who cares about fixed income trading in the last two weeks of June? I mean seriously.”
Dimon, a major Democratic donorworth $1.16 billion as of this writing, endorsed a theoretical 10% tax hike for top income earners in 2015 before refusing an offer to be President Trump’s treasury secretary.
Asked by one reporter on Friday if his criticism was aimed at the Trump administration, Dimon said “No,” adding, “That was frustration with you.”
