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Weiner Won't Get Women's Votes but He'll Take Their Money

[image error]Anthony Weiner is holding a fundraiser called "Women for Weiner" next week, Politico's Maggie Haberman reports. The politicians who really need "Women for…" groups are the ones who have women problems. Weiner is one of those guys, having apologized for tweeting a photo of his crotch, and explained in an excruitiating interview with The New York Times Magazine that he did it because he just wanted people to like him. The New York City mayoral candidate is now going where Herman Cain and Todd Akin have boldly gone before.

He needs women's support. A late May Quinnipiac poll showed that 52 percent of women thought he shouldn't run for mayor. Frontrunner Christine Quinn is beating Weiner by 27 percent to 17 percent among women in the crowded race, according to a Marist poll. In a head-to-head contest, Marist found Quinn beats Weiner among women by 51 percent to 30 percent, and wins over all by 48 percent to 33 percent.

But if some behind-the-scenes reporting is accurate, this event is actually Women for Huma. "Those close to the couple say that Ms. Abedin, a seasoned operative well versed in the politics of redemption, has been a main architect of her husband’s rehabilitative journey, shaping his calculated comeback and drawing on her close ties with one of the country’s most powerful families to lay the groundwork for his return," The New York Times reported in May. "Ms. Abedin considers [image error]the coming race an adventure, and she has even been willing to break her cherished status as a seen-but-not-heard insider."

Abedin, of course, is the long-time aide of Hillary Clinton, having worked her way up from intern to Clinton's deputy chief of staff at the State Department. The fundraiser is being held at the home of Jill Iscol, a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2008. Those attending "Women for Anthony" include Abedin's sister Heba, the designer Reem Acra, and Rory Tahari, the wife of designer Elie Tahari. Abedin is known for her fashionable style. Her husband isn't.

       

The World Will Not Forget George Zimmer — We Guarantee It

We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cellphone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

Sad news: Today, Men's Wearhouse, the cheap-suit standard-bearer of TV ads, decided to fire its founder and chairman, George Zimmer. If that name doesn't ring a bell, then how about these words: "You're going to like the way you look. I guarantee it." Okay, fine we give up — roll the tape: 

How this man trained his cat to do this will remain one of this day's great mysteries: 

Nor do we know why this woman trained her giant snake to open doors: 

And, finally this, Mental Floss video catalogs 41 of the most historic ways people have met their ultimate demise. We still think drowning in a barrel of wine is one way we wouldn't mind going out: 

       

Is Julian Assange Pretending to Help Snowden for Publicity?

The two most high-profile, hiding-in-plain sight figures at Wikileaks now claim to be helping the high-profile, on-the-lam leaker Edward Snowden on his apparent quest to seek asylum in Iceland. But Glenn Greenwald, Snowden's defacto spokesperson, denies that Wikileaks is involved at all. Julian Assange, it appears, might just be trying to make leakers cool again.

On Tuesday, it seemed like his next move was getting clearer: Snowden had contacted the Icelandic government for save haven as he continues to evade investigators in the U.S., the U.K., and beyond — perhaps already on the move from being holed-up in Hong Kong. WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson had told Reuters that, via a middleman, he was helping Snowden arrange passage to Iceland. Today, Assange, the Wikileaks founder, told a conference call of reporters that the Wikileaks legal team is ready to rescue Snowden: 

“We are in touch with Mr Snowden's legal team and have been, are involved, in the process of brokering his asylum in Iceland,” Assange said. “Our people in Iceland have been in contact with his legal team.”

Asked whether Snowden, who reportedly made his disclosures from Hong Kong but whose current location is unclear, could fly to Iceland without being stopped by the U.S. government or America’s allies, Assange replied: “All those issues are being looked at by the people involved.”

Last we checked in with Snowden — that is, the last time anyone, including Greenwald, actually knew where he was — the NSA leaker was somewhere in Hong Kong checking out of hotels, communicating through newspapers and online chats. But those last two public appearances didn't have locations attached to them, and we don't know where he is so much as that it increasingly appears he really wants to get to Iceland to hole up for an extended period of time. (You know, like Assange.) 

Iceland was Snowden's endgame, he told Greenwald in that big first interview that broke two Sundays ago. Greenwald also told The Atlantic Wire that Snowden "might" have "a contingency plan to protect himself" with more leaks than even The Guardian had left on hand. But good ole Mr. Greenwald is here to break up the apparent leaker lovefest: "I'm not aware that WikiLeaks has any substantive involvement at all with Snowden, though I know they've previously offered to help," he told Buzzfeed's Rosie Gray on Wednesday afternoon. 

So, that's kind of weird, right? A day after Snowden started drawing comparisons to the egomaniacal Assange because of his comments in that online chat, the Wikileaks founder claims (perhaps falsely) that the two have teamed up. But if that's not true, then this is really a sad cry for help, right? Wikileaks isn't relevant anymore, and neither is Julian Assange. He's just a dude squatting in an embassy to avoid sexual assault charges. No one was paying him any attention until Snowden came along. So is this just a cry for attention? A reason for Assange to garner more headlines and for reporters to call him more often? Maybe! Probably. Almost certainly.

For the record: Wikileaks's track record vis-as-vis asylum and getting people safely to their desired country is a little spotty. Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London one year after the country granted him asylum, and his Snowden comments happened to come in the middle of an anniversary press tour of sorts. What we're getting at is: Maybe Ed Snowden shouldn't want his help, because Ed Snowden might be in even bigger trouble.

       

Meet Sam Taylor-Johnson, the Shocking Pick for the '50 Shades of Grey' Director

Though Gus Van Sant apparently wanted it really badly and Joe Wright's name was thrown around, the coveted job of directing the 50 Shades of Grey movie adaptation has gone to Sam Taylor-Johnson, Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr reports. For a relatively unknown English director like Taylor-Johnson, it's a coup, and for the rest of us, it's heartening to know that a studio believes in a female director to carry a movie based on a book with a massive female fan base. But... who? She's really quite cool. Trust us.

Taylor-Johnson only has one feature film to her name: Nowhere Boy, a 2009 biopic about the young lide of John Lennon. Before then, she was best known as a photographer and a video artist. A 2009 profile of her in The Guardian by Simon Hattenstone explained how "her work was fixated on decay, madness and death." Hattenstone points to "Hysteria," which features a woman laughing, and "Breach," which features a woman crying. Taylor-Johnson's book Crying Men features famous actors crying. 

For a very commercial movie like 50 Shades, Taylor-Johnson is a very un-commercial choice, despite her roster of celebrity friends. In that same Guardian profile she told Hattenstone about how she walked out of meetings in Los Angeles. "It was when someone said, 'We're interested in making dramadies,'" she said. "I said, 'What the fuck's a dramady?' 'It's a drama comedy.' The combination of the two words made me think: I'm in the wrong place. It's all motivated by box-office returns, and I'll never be able to make the kind of film I want to make next." 

And while clearly 50 Shades is looking to make big bucks, the producers seem unafraid of this impulse, considering many of the names surrounding the project were more on the artistic side. According to Fleming at Deadline, Michael De Luca, a producer, said: "Sam's unique ability to gracefully showcase complex relationships dealing with love, emotion and sexual chemistry make her the ideal director to bring Christian and Anastasia’s relationship to life." Aside from Taylor-Johnson's credentials, the choice is already being cheered because of the mere fact that this particular director, as opposed to some of those other names that had been bandied about in the trade press, is a woman. Which would only make sense, right? 50 Shades is a film based on a book written by a woman that was a big hit with women. But Hollywood doesn't work that way, so Taylor-Johnson's new job can be seen as a victory for women in the industry.

Picking Taylor-Johnson as director might also offer some new casting hints. Johnson is married to Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the actor known for his roles in Anna Karenina, Savages, and Kick-Ass, and who starred in Nowhere Boy. They met when she was 42 and he was 19, providing fodder for tabloids. But Aaron's star has only continued to rise and his name has already been mentioned as someone people would like to see playing 50 Shades' Christian Grey. 

       

Gabriel Gomez and the Impossible GOP Embrace

Massachusetts Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez is both the Republican Party's hope of the moment and supremely disadvantaged against his opponent — an average of the latest state-wide polls shows him lagging behind Democratic Congressman Edward Markey by more than 10 points, less than a week before special-election voting arrives on Tuesday. This has made Gomez something of a novel figure among his party's national leaders, who have struggled to decide what to do with a candidate who disagrees with their stance on a litany of social issues and deplores Washington's penchant for manufactured distraction, yet represents, as a Navy SEAL-turned-businessman and the son of immigrant parents, the sort of coalition the Republican Party says it wants to win over. Republican strategist Alex Castellanos recently argued, for example, that "Gomez is an antidote to the stuffy Republican establishment that only says 'No' and scares next-generation voters away." On Wednesday morning, however, Arizona Senator John McCain issued a statement saying he disagreed with Gomez's idea for term limits in the Senate. This was a formidable blow to Gomez's team, which has endlessly campaigned against Ed Markey's long tenure in Congress. 

The topic of term limits — which, like filibuster reform, goes to the heart of Washington intransigence — surfaced on Tuesday night during the final debate between Markey and Gomez held in a Boston television studio. The relevant exchange, according to the Associated Press, highlighted the awkward space Gomez continues to occupy: "Gomez said he told veteran Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who campaigned for Gomez in Boston last month, that he should leave the Senate at the end of his term. 'Mr. Gomez did not tell John McCain that this is his last term,' said Markey. 'That did not happen.'" Later, Gomez appeared to trap himself on the topic of his conversation with McCain:  "Gomez told reporters McCain had indicated his support for term limits [but] a spokesman for McCain said ... on that particular issue McCain disagreed with Gomez." So this charged moment designed to expose Markey as clueless — and reveal the Republicans as selfless forward-thinkers — demonstrated precisely the opposite. Indeed, Markey displayed the depth and utility of his political savvy: He can know his adversaries more than they know each other.

The GOP's national fundraising apparatus hasn't quite settled on how to boost Gomez, either. Last week — 16 days before the special election day — several members of the National Republican Senatorial Committee appeared in a 1,800-word feature in Politico (obviously) to discuss the mindless Twitter feuds they enjoy waging against their Democratic counterparts, and vice versa. "The men fighting the Twitter war (and they are all men) insist the time-consuming antics serve an actual political strategy," Politico noted. On the same day, Markey posted a 7-point lead over Gomez in a Suffolk University poll. And on Wednesday morning — six days before election day — NRSC officials issued a breathless press release claiming that Markey has lied about living in Massachusetts for over 20 years. After going over the evidence supplied by a conservative super PAC, the right-leaning Boston Herald responded: "It's highly unlikely [this] will prompt an investigation in the week remaining in the campaign."

To be fair, Gomez has often tripped himself up, making a habit of responding to nearly all questions — about a massive tax deduction he took on his historical home; about the clients of his private equity firm; about his precise view on abortion policy — by accusing Markey of being old, and being a politician. He told Markey at a recent debate: "You are basically Washington, D.C. I’m sorry sir, but you are." At a press event, unprompted, he called Markey "pond scum." At the same time, he has accused Markey, falsely, of not writing any significant legislation during his Congressional tenure. As Boston Magazine recently observed, "this argument requires either naked dishonesty, or an utter ignorance of common legislative procedure, or both." You could attribute these outbursts to naiveté — Gomez has repeatedly insisted that he's not a "smooth-talking politician" — but when taken together they indicate something odd: that he never has the time — nor, apparently, the inclination — to fit in with the political structure he says he wants to rescue. 

By the same token, it's unclear why the GOP, a party desperately seeking to consolidate both power and party opinion, would want throw so much weight behind a candidate who can't yet be trusted to toe the party line. Other than, of course, to pull John Kerry's old Senate seat into their column. And, of course, this is Gomez's argument: that his election would augur a kind of post-partisan future in which the multi-party system, instead of encouraging endless Twitter feuds, might actually, you know, solve some problems.

       

The Re-Invention of Miss Utah Will Be Televised

There was no way Miss Utah was going to fade into obscurity after unleashing that incoherent stream of consciousness upon the world on Sunday night at the Miss USA pageant. But in a series of interviews in the wake of her "create education better" gaffe, 21-year-old Marissa Powell's self-effacing sense of humor — and actually pretty intelligent thoughts on the gender pay gap — have brought her back from under-the-spotlight mess to perhaps exactly what the pageant industry needs: a redemption story, a conversation about beauty and brains, and a re-thinking of just how hard it is to answer tough questions under the spotlight.

Powell was subject to all the ridicule one would expect after the pageant Q&A bumbles that preceded her — Caitlin "The Iraq" Upton, Carrie "opposite marriage" Prejean, and all the rest. It's a pretty easy thing to laugh at. To recap, Powell, asked a tough question about bread-winning moms, responded: 

I think we can relate this back to education, and how we are … continuing to try to strive to ... figure out how to create jobs right now. That is the biggest problem. And I think, especially the men are … um … seen as the leaders of this, and so we need to try to figure out how to create education better so we can solve this problem. Thank you.

Now that made absolutely no sense. Still doesn't. Still makes you cringe. But after all the pointing and laughing of the days that followed, there was also a discussion of whether pointing and laughing is actually a pretty bad thing when it comes to beauty pageants. Sure, "The Iraq" is an easy way to mock that these primetime contests care about looks and make a mockery of brains themselves. But: "On the other hand, cackling at bimbos is not exactly progressive either," wrote Slate's Amanda Marcotte. "Hard to say which urge any random person is expressing when they pass along these videos." Gaby Dunn at the Daily Dot thinks the piling-on has deeper roots, in making sure that a woman can't be both pretty and smart: "We cannot abide by a woman being both beautiful and intelligent, and in our insecurity and jealousy, we are given something to mock," Dunn wrote. "We love it when beautiful women mess up because it throws down the perfectly crafted curtain and reveals that behind veneers and make-up, they are flawed." And they're not exactly wrong. Can you name the winner of a Miss USA pageant without Googling it?

But Miss Utah is coming out from behind the curtain. In the last two days, Powell has been booked on a myriad of talk shows, perhaps in hope that she'll say something dumb again, but also because she is, without a doubt, the most memorable impression America has from the Miss USA pageant — of beauty and stupidity. Except on Jimmy Kimmel's show last night, Powell came off as bright, conversational, and not at all afraid to poke fun at herself or her brain fart:

On Today, Matt Lauer asked Powell an even more nuanced version of that gender pay-gap question that stumped her, and after two nights to think about it, she had an answer, even amidst the ridicule: "So this is not OK. It needs to be equal pay for equal work, and it's hard enough already to earn a living, and it shouldn't be harder just because you're a woman," Powell said on Tuesday morning, garnering applause from the Today staffers on set. She sounded almost like the politician, which is ostensible what crowned winners are supposed to say, not the pageant idiot.

So, was the pay-gap question too "hard" for a pageant to begin with? The question, asked by renowned gender pay gap expert Real Housewife of Atlanta Nene Leakes, was:

A recent report shows that in 40 percent of American families with children, women are the primary earners, yet they continue to earn less than men. What does this say about society?

That isn't easy. "Not to put too fine a point on it, what kind of a simultaneously (1) dumb and (2) impossible to answer question is that? First of all, it's three questions rolled into one," writes NPR's Linda Holmes, adding: 

"What does this say about society?" Asked by NeNe Leakes? While you're standing next to Giuliana Rancic, whose other job involves making people walk their fingernails down a tiny, hand-sized red carpet? What would have been a good answer to this question that could have been delivered in the time frame she had?

I think about this kind of stuff a lot. I've studied it. I've had about 20 years longer than Miss Utah USA to think about it. I have no idea what I would have said if someone had asked me such a moronic question on live television.

Holmes is brutal, but completely honest — that question was tough. And it's easy to see why anyone would be flustered, on camera, on stage, on primetime, trying to sort out gender equality, education, and the state of the economy, without preparation, and on the clock. Maybe the deck was stacked against Miss Utah, or whatever unfortunate human drew that kind of pressure. 

Powell, it seems, has been and will continue to recover from her Miss USA debacle splendidly. And hopefully she can teach us a thing or two on the way. 

       

Journalist Michael Hastings Dead at 33

Michael Hastings, most recently of Buzzfeed but well-known and respected for his reporting in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and elsewhere, had died at the age of 33. According to Buzzfeed, he was killed in a car accident early this morning in Los Angeles.  

Here's Buzzfeed's statement, tweeted out by the site's editor Ben Smith: 

"We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone. Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians. He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold. Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague and a joy to work with. Our thoughts are with Elise and and the rest of his family and we are going to miss him."

If you didn't know his name, which you should, you know his reporting. Hastings wrote the 2010 Rolling Stone profile on Stanley A. McChrystal that led to the general losing his job. 

Here's Hastings, tearing into Piers Morgan and his panel over General Petraeus's record in Afghanistan and Iraq: 

 

       

It Takes 'Morning Joe' to Make Russell Brand Likeable

We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cellphone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:

Now, we're not exactly the biggest Russell Brand fans (is there really such a thing as a die-hard Russell Brand fan?) here at the Wire. And     

Will Google's Request to Publish Secret Court Orders Do Anything?

Google has filed a motion to end the gag order on the secret FISA court requests that it gets from the government as a part of the National Security Agencies surveillance, which could work considering how recent efforts to reveal the secrets of the secret court have gone. Just the other day, right after we all learned about PRISM, the court granted the Electronic Frontier Foundation a legal victory in its battle to uncover some of the secret courts secrets. Of course, that was just one tiny step in the path toward more transparency. And, the court made the current FISA disclosure deal with other tech companies, hoping to not give up this exact information. Plus, Google has tried this kind of thing before, asking for an end to National Security Letters — and failed. But, maybe other tech companies will hop and pressure the government to change its position? 

The way it stands now, Google — among other tech companies cooperating with the program — can only publish the total number of requests it gets, both FISC ordered and otherwise. Google would like to outline the requests separately  and has refused to participate in that method calling it a "step back for users." "Greater transparency is needed, so today we have petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow us to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately," Google said in a statement per the Washington Post's Craig Timberg. The filing also mentions the First Amendment. 

Under the proposed system, Google would report a range of FISC orders as a separate part of its transparency report and how many users those requests affected. It would not give any more details about the nature of the FISA order. All Google wants to do it show the public around how many of these its getting a year: it's pretty innocuous and, yes, more transparent. Though, the way President Obama sees it, the current system is transparency in action. 

The Google version should sounds very good to users, who just the other day were concerned that Google let the NSA have a back door right into its servers, grabbing all our information whenever it wants. But, that's all this might be: A way for Google to look good. 

       

The Great Battle Over the IRS Scandal Enters the Please-Let-It-End Phase

This is where we are with the IRS scandal: bogged in a subset of a subset of a subset of a war between Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats fired a shot today, releasing a transcript of an interview in an attempt to get the Republicans to release other transcripts of other interviews. 

To be fair, there are at least two people on Capitol Hill who care passionately about the increasingly contentious back-and-forth over these transcripts. Those two people are Rep. Darrell Issa of California, Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, ranking Democrat on that committee. The documents are records of a series of interviews conducted on behalf of the two with current and former IRS employees who may or may not have had a hand in the scandal, which involved isolating Tea Party groups for additional scrutiny when applying for tax-exempt status. The real goal, as we've noted before, is to prove or disprove that the isolation came as a result of direction from someone linked to the White House, with each side leaking portions of these interviews aimed at bolstering their argument. You can see why most of America is indifferent to the debate.

What Cummings did today is try to force the issue. For days, he's called on Issa to simply release the full set of transcripts, instead of allowing the press piecemeal access — as Cummings himself did with a favorable interview last week. Now Cummings has put his money where his mouth is, releasing the full transcript from his interview, in which a self-decribed "conservative Republican" agreed that he was the first to suggest that Tea Party groups be segregated for further review. Cummings explained his move in a letter to Issa:

Although I fundamentally disagree with the unsubstantiated claims you have made about the IRS matter being driven by the White House to attack the President’s political enemies, I wanted to give you appropriate deference in conducting Committee investigations. I hoped we could focus on a bipartisan approach that maximizes transparency and accuracy, but your staff refused several follow-up requests to meet with my staff on this issue.

So he released the transcript.

Issa responded in a statement.

After unsuccessfully trying to convince the American people that IRS officials in Washington did not play a role in inappropriate scrutiny of Tea Party groups and declaring on national television that the case of IRS targeting was ‘solved’ and Congress should ‘move on,’ this looks like flailing. Americans who think Congress should investigate IRS misconduct should be outraged by Mr. Cummings’ efforts to obstruct needed oversight.

No one — literally, no one — will be so outraged.

This is politics, guys! Remember: the transcript that Cummings leaked is the same one he shopped around last week, that we and others reported on. We looked through the full thing, and there are a few new details — for example, the man being interviewed was once called by Lois Lerner, the department head who is now on administrative leave, and told he didn't get a job. But the raw facts remain the same. Someone brought him a Tea Party application, noting that it didn't fit into the group's regular sorting system. The agents reviewed 20-25 applications daily, so the manager would often isolate similar applications so that they could be reviewed by the same person, given that they shared similar characteristics. Look, if you've ever wanted to get a more complete sense of the detailed operations of a division of the IRS that deals exclusively in the routing of complex paperwork, you should definitely read the full interview.

What actually happened is not an unimportant consideration, of course. If one of the employees said he'd received a call from Barack Obama who, between evil chuckles, asked that all Tea Party cases be sent to the FBI for prosecution, that would be important. But that's because it would be much closer to ending this war.

The interviewers even asked this guy if that happened, in essence.

Q: Do you have any reason to believe that any executives in Washington directed the screening of all Tea Party cases for enhanced scrutiny?

A: I do not.

And:

Q: In your opinion, was the decision to screen and centralize the review of Tea Party cases the targeting of the President's political enemies?

A: I do not believe that the screening of these cases had anything to do other than consistency and identifying issues that needed to have further development.

Later he says that the responsibility doesn't lie only in Cincinnati, but also in Washington — because a group there was responsible for determining standards under which such applications should be approved. Beyond that, no smoking gun so far, in either trench.

Cummings is in the trickier position, being asked to prove a negative. This is the way with scandals. It is easier to imply wrongdoing than to prove it didn't happen. It is easier to raise the question than to answer it. It shows in polling; a CNN poll today found that 55 percent of Americans thought DC was involved in the scandal, up from 37 percent.

This is not good news for Cummings. World War I ended only once German troops threatened to mutiny. In politics, as in war, the opinion of the masses matters.

Photo: Cummings and Issa at a hearing earlier this month. (AP)