Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 853
December 14, 2013
'Homeland' Season Three Has a Leak Problem
Showtime For a show about the CIA, important episodes of Showtime's Homeland leak with an alarming regularity. This season the premiere and the finale both made their way online earlier than intended.
At some point over the last 24 hours, Homeland's hotly-anticipated season three finale, "The Star," hit file-sharing and torrent sites, in high-definition, no less. Impatient Mandy Patinkin fans already have downloaded the episode thousands of times, and spoiler-heavy debates have already begun in certain corners of the Internet. The episode isn't set to air on Showtime until Sunday, December 15 — so the season's most important episode appeared online at least a full day ahead of its scheduled release.
In music, albums leak all the time. In television a leak is much more rare. But Homeland, a show about spies and top secret CIA operations, can't seem to keep its episodes under wraps. The season three premiere leaked a full month ahead of its air date, and pirates downloaded that episode more than 100,000 times in its first few hours online. The leaked finale, which is expected to provide final answers about the fate of Nicholas Brody, the politician-turned-terrorist-turned-??????, can probably expect similar numbers. (A non-spoiler spoiler: Morena Baccarin and Morgan Saylor, who play Jessica and Dana Brody, have been downgraded to guest stars for season four.)
How this episode made its way online remains a mystery. Clues about the leaked season premiere pointed towards screeners given out at a critical junket over the summer, because the episode's editing was unfinished — it lacked proper opening credits. The leaked finale appears to be a polished final product.
Wether or not Homeland fans should rush and download the episode is unclear. Downloading TV is illegal, so there's a moral question at hand, and I am not a Homeland fan, so I can only tell you it's out there if you want it. But on a weekend when so much of North America seems to be suffering from horrendously cold weather, staying in with a warm meal, a blanket and an episode of good-to-decent-to-occasionally-great TV doesn't sound so bad. Just maybe don't tell the feds what you're watching.
If you want the episode that badly, you'll have to find it on your own, though.
Edward Snowden Took Data from NSA Computers the NSA Wasn't Watching
The NSA's Utah complex, with fewer palm trees and views of the beach than the Hawaii offices. (AP) By now we know the National Security Agency watches nearly everything on the Internet, with a few exceptions. But apparently Edward Snowden was able to steal the information he did because the NSA failed to monitor its internal networks.
A security failure allowed Snowden, the former contractor now living in asylum in Russia, to move around the NSA's computer system and steal an unimaginable trove of top-secret documents without leaving a trail behind, senior administration officials told The New York Times' Mark Mazzetti and Michael Schmidt.
Officials have literally no idea what Snowden stole, or how much, or from where, because computers at the NSA's Hawaii office, where Snowden took the information, were "not equipped with up-to-date software that allows the spy agency to monitor which corners of its vast computer landscape its employees are navigating at any given time," according to Mazzetti and Schmidt. The NSA wasn't tracking its own employees internal movements, while the NSA was tracking the digital movements of millions worldwide. Oh, good.
In 2011, in the wake of the Wikileaks scandal, President Obama ordered federal agencies to "better safeguard their classified secrets," among other things. The executive order was to protect the government from the kind of internal leaks caused by Chelsea Manning, and eventually Edward Snowden.
So what happened in the two years between both leaks? The NSA lolly-gagged upgrading their security system. In theory, the executive order implemented immediate change. In practice, the NSA was behind, and Edward Snowden took advantage of the opening:
Officials said Mr. Snowden, who had an intimate understanding of the N.S.A.’s computer architecture, would have known that the Hawaii facility was behind other agency outposts in installing monitoring software.
According to a former government official who spoke recently with Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A. director, the general said that at the time Mr. Snowden was downloading the documents, the spy agency was several months away from having systems in place to catch the activity.
Now the investigation that began months ago into Snowden's leaks, separate from the review of government surveillance practices, which Obama will review soon, has hit a wall. “They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” one official told the Times. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”
With Her Surprise Record, How Closely Did Beyoncé Watch The Throne?
AP Beyoncé's Internet-breaking album release on Thursday night was as stunning as it was remarkable: in a day and age where leaks are king, how did no one, not even the industry's closest watchers, know that this was even coming down the pipeline?
A feature in Billboard magazine details Queen Bey's strategy, which included shifting code names (the album, titled Beyoncé, was once named Lily), only informing the most senior of iTunes executives about the digital drop, and working on the album as recently as Thanksgiving. The album was still a work-in-progress, with a flexable release date, until roughly last week. Only then did Beyonce tell non-Illuminati members the rest of the world about her plans:
Then late last week, final meetings were held with Columbia, Parkwood (Beyonce’s management company) and iTunes to finalize plans for the album, which was code-named “Lily” to avoid leaks. Another final meeting announcing the album to employees and producers was held at Columbia yesterday, Dec. 12. Only the most senior executives at iTunes, the album’s exclusive distributor until a planned physical release on Dec. 21, were clued in on the plans.
That short timeline makes the visual album, which has earned praise from many critics, including The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, all the more impressive, considering its grace and cohesion.
Beyoncé's reasoning for the surprise drop isn't all that different from that of her own husband, Jay Z, when he released Watch the Throne with Kanye West in 2011: she says she was looking for an "immersive" mass experience.
Now people only listen to a few seconds of a song on the iPods and they don’t really invest in the whole experience. It’s all about the single, and the hype. It’s so much that gets between the music and the art and the fans. I felt like, I don't want anybody to get the message, when my record is coming out. I just want this to come out when it’s ready and from me to my fans.
Compare that to what a Roc Nation executive told Billboard in 2011 about Watch the Throne's very careful leak-free rollout:
That was the driving force of it–to create that moment of unwrapping the CD and listening to it for the first time. It was a very old-school way for things to happen. People really were anticipating an album on a certain day and everyone got to experience it simultaneously.
More fascinating specific details will likely roll out in the days to come about how Beyoncé pulled off this modern-day sorcery, but, or now, it's not clear if Beyoncé's team went to the extreme lengths Jay and 'Ye did in advance of their Watch the Throne collaboration. To avoid leaks, according to Billboard, the pair only recorded in person, ensuring nothing existed online, and by storing their tracks on fingerprint-protected hard-drives carried in a locked briefcase.
Or this could have happened, maybe, because this is her world and we're just ugly peons living in it:
Beyoncé's publishing team: how are we going to promote your new album Beyoncé: i'm Beyoncé Beyoncé's publishing team: true
— no (@ughsassy) December 14, 2013
The release of the self-titled album produced more than 1.2 million tweets in 12 hours and sold 80,000 copies in the first three hours. Lady Gaga holds the record for most first-week digital sales with 662,000, though that was helped by a 99-cent Amazon promotion.
Death Mars Yet Another World Cup Stadium in Brazil
AP There have now been fatalities at a quarter of the 12 stadiums Brazil is building for the 2014 World Cup after a construction worker plummeted off the roof of the Arena Amazonia in Manaus.
Twenty-two-year-old Marcleudo de Melo Ferreira died early Saturday morning when a cable supporting him snapped and he fell more than 100 feet, reports the Guardian.
While six of the stadiums were ready for the Confederations Cup, the project to build the remaining six has been dogged by cost overruns and delayed construction, causing teams to work 20-hour days and prompting questions of whether the arenas will even be ready on time. The Manaus stadium was already behind schedule, according to an AP report.
Two workers died just over two weeks ago in Sao Paulo, when a crane holding a 500-ton chunk of metal roofing at Sao Paulo's Itaquerao – which will host the World Cup's opening match – snapped and crushed them. The incident means that stadium won't be ready until April – just two months before the games begin. FIFA had told Brazil to have the stadiums ready by the end of the year.
Work restarted on the Itaquerao just five days after the two workers' deaths.
Manaus itself has endured criticism from British media, which called it a "hellhole" for its deadly creatures and environment. The city is playing host to the English team's opening match. The U.S. team will play Portugal in its second game at the stadium at Manaus.
The Letters Newtown Kept, One Year Later
Embracing Newtown, Letters sent from Connecticut 
In the months following the Newtown elementary school shootings — one year ago today — hundreds of thousands of letters made their way to the grieving town. A lot has been said about the meaning of the Newtown massacre since last December, as the deaths of 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School became a national rallying cry for a stalled attempt to change the country's gun laws. But the messages sent there, many of which were written by children, say something else.
Despite the ease with which the tragedy has become a rhetorical device, Newtown, both the town and the event, is not primarily a political conduit. It is a place of grieving, and of rebuilding. That is quite possibly part of why the town has closed itself to the press for the anniversary day, in lieu of a public memorial. Some terrible things are actually unspeakable. This is one of them.
But the Newtown letters, taken as an archive, seem to dwell in that gap between a tragedy and the ever-present, ultimately futile need to articulate its meaning. Earlier this week, the Hartford Courant reported on a new database, launched Tuesday, containing a selection of the letters sent to the town in the wake of the tragedy. It's called "Embracing Newtown," headed up by Newtown resident Yolie Moreno.
Moreno is among a group of volunteers — Newtown residents, for the most part — who took on the larger task of preserving and archiving, physically and digitally, the letters, art, quilts, and poems sent to the town over the months. In Mother Jones, Newtown resident Ross MacDonald wrote about the preservation effort back in February, explaining that the outpouring of support had become too much for town officials to handle on their own:
They line both sides of the long main hall, and fill up the branching halls and offices. Posters, paintings, quilts, and flags cover the walls. There are banners from students at Columbine and Virginia Tech; there are letters from school kids across America and from people as far away as France and Australia. And there are boxes of Kleenex on every table for those who read them.
Eventually, the volunteer preservationists received help from outside conservationists and librarians, including Tamara Kennelly of Virginia Tech University, as the Courant reported. Kennelly also advised the team on the emotional fall-out of handling the letters, as the Virginia Tech community had to do after a 2007 massacre there.
Many of those letters are touching messages of consolation, solidarity, and sadness. Others, as the Courant noted, are negative: conspiracy theorists sent their rants to the Newtown town hall, while some fundamentalist Christians wrote the town to tell it the shooting death of 20 children was a punishment from God for America's moral crimes. While volunteers initially tossed some of the negative letters, a representative sample have been preserved for historical accuracy.
Embracing Newtown, however, is not about those negative letters. It is a selective archive, emotionally curated, of empathy. Below are just a few of the messages sent to Newtown over the past year, with permission from Yolie Moreno and Embracing Newtown:
The full archive is here.
Christopher Nolan Goes to Space for His First Post-Batman Movie
On Saturday, Christopher Nolan officially released the first teaser for Interstellar, his first film in a post-Batman world. Instead of Gotham City, the director will travel to space, and possibly other dimensions too. The just-shy-of-two-minutes clip revealed itself Saturday, but some keen-eyed fans already received an early taste. Some low-res versions leaked Friday afternoon but were quickly taken down.
So now that everyone can participate in the discussion, we can all talk about how Nolan's latest slow-burns its way into your mind. The teaser relies heavily on archival footage of American achievement: from the family farm to the war to space travel. But things have gone terribly in this world, and we know this because of ominous shots of a corn field, and then ominous shots of a burning corn field. Corn is the only crop available on earth, so humans take to the skies for a story that involves "time travel and alternate dimensions," according to early reports.
Interstellar could be a mess, but at least it looks pretty, with the oranges and greens of the dark, dry landscapes on the barren earth working well with Matthew McConaughey's ashen face. Weirdly, he's the only person in the star-studded cast who appear in the trailer — Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Topher Grace were left on the cutting room floor.
We know Nolan's capable of taking big ideas and making them into an at least somewhat digestible movie, so there's no reason to doubt he can't do it here, despite The Dark Knight Rises' missteps. We don't know much, but this looks promising. That's all we can really say right now.
Google Buys Boston Dynamics, the Company That Makes Robot Nightmares A Reality
Not even a scattered pile of cinder blocks will stand in the way of Google's latest purchase. (SCREEN CAPTURE/BOSTON DYNAMICS) Google announced late Friday night that it has purchased a robotics firm that builds machines featuring lifelike movement that you shouldn't watch videos of, say, late on a Friday night.
Boston Dynamics, which describes itself as the "leading provider of human simulation software, tools, and solutions," was purchased by the Palo Alto monolith (remember when it was just a search engine?) for an unspecified sum, according to The New York Times.
While Boston Dynamics has contracts with the U.S. military's advanced research department worth many millions, Google has said that it will not pursue that avenue, though it will see through all existing work, which includes Atlas, a humanoid anthropomorphic robot developed for DARPA. Will Google continue in its simple mantra, "Don't be evil?" We'll have to wait and see.
But the news comes hot on the heels of Google's announcement that it dreams of android sheep a robot workforce that would allow humans to avoid more dangerous work as well as electronics assembly. According to The Times, it had already purchased seven firms before this major addition in Boston Dynamics.
The only possible explanation for the purchase is that Google is set to launch Google Night Terrors, as Boston Dynamics robots move with the kind of lifelike movement shared by demons and hellhounds. Just take a look at this galloping monstrosity, capable of moving at 16 mph, meaning there is no escape.
And then there's this lumbering horror, the BigDog, spindly black legs and all, which could theoretically help rescue people in tough terrain or track you down, growling at the scent of your blood.
You can't even knock them down by kicking them. What hope do we have?
It's hard to say whether this is a general sentiment of terror or the coming of the singularity, or if Google is just taking the whole conceit of the Android brand to the next terrifying level.
Desmond Tutu Will Attend Mandela's Funeral, After All
AP Update, 4:08 p.m. After cancelling his Friday flight and suggesting he was snubbed from his close friend Nelson Mandela's funeral by the government, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has changed his mind, saying he will indeed attend the ceremony.
In a short statement that offered no details in regards to the about-face, a spokesperson for Tutu said that he would fly out early Sunday morning to the funeral in Qunu.
A government official had responded to the archbishop's initial claim by saying that he was an "important man" who was on the list.
Original: Not going to invite Archbishop Desmond Tutu to his friend's funeral? Fine: he won't go at all, then.
Tutu, the 82-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate (and a frequent critic of South Africa's government), says he didn't receive credentials from the government to attend Nelson Mandela's funeral on Sunday, which will be attended by about 5,000 dignitaries. So despite plans to fly into Qunu, where Mandela will be interred, he's decided to cancel his flight to the family funeral after he says he wasn't told by the South African government that he was invited:
Much as I would have loved to attend the service to say a final farewell to someone I loved and treasured, it would have been disrespectful to Tata (Mandela) to gatecrash what was billed as a private family funeral. Had I or my office been informed that I would be welcome there is no way on earth that I would have missed it.
The government says this was a misunderstanding, and that Tutu has indeed been invited to the funeral. "He is definitely on the list," presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj told AFP. "The Arch is not an ordinary church person, he is a special person in our country," he said, before promising to ensure Tutu could attend the ceremony successfully.
Tutu, a leading anti-apartheid figure, did deliver a sermon at Tuesday's memorial service which saw dignitaries from around the world in attendance. After the public funeral ceremony on Saturday, with 5,000 expected to attend, the burial itself will be a "private family matter."
Tutu was a close friend of Mandela's. Tutu officiated Mandela's 1998 wedding, and as soon as he was released from his long imprisonment in 1990, Mandela spent his first night with Tutu.
It caps something of a terrible week for the apartheid survivor, as his Cape Town home was also robbed while he and his wife were attending the public memorial on Tuesday night, according to the archbishop's aides. It's the third time his home has been robbed since 2007; that year, his Nobel prize was among the items stolen, though it was later recovered.
While government officials say this was an honest mix-up, this very public spat won't do any favours for Jacob Zuma. The South African president has already been booed at Mandela's memorial and has been criticized for a shoddily managed event that saw a man who has claimed to have had psychotic episodes stand next to the most powerful man on earth. Even the small ceremony on Saturday, where Zuma and his party received Mandela's body in Qunu, was slammed for restricting members of the community from attending.
The alleged snub of the archbishop comes off as petty, considering Tutu's own criticism of Zuma ever since 2009, when Tutu mused openly about not even casting a ballot and questioning why Zuma never faced trial to oppose, in-person, 16 allegations of corruption, fraud, racketeering and tax evasion.
U.S., Chinese Ships Nearly Collided in the South China Sea
AP In what sounds like a high-stakes game of naval chicken, an American missile cruiser narrowly dodged China's first-ever aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.
The incident took place Dec. 5 but only became public on Friday. The USS Cowpens was forced to take evasive maneuvers, coming as close as 200 yards from striking the Chinese ship, according to The New York Times. A ship accompanying the Liaoning, China's first air-craft carrier, cut across the bow of the American ship and forced the Cowpens to avoid a collision. The afternoon was supposed to be a quiet one: the Liaoning was on its maiden voyage into the South China Sea.
U.S. officials who spoke to the Times were not pleased with how things turned out:
The tactic of the Chinese ship “was particularly aggressive” and “unhelpful in trying to increase cooperation between the two navies,” he said.
The U.S. has since rebuked China for failing to communicate. "Whether it is a tactical at-sea encounter, or strategic dialogue, sustained and reliable communication mitigates the risk of mishaps, which is in the interest of both the U.S. and China," an anonymous defence official told NBC News about the incident.
China has made a wide claim of the South China Sea, saying it controls 80 percent of a body of water that also includes countries like the Philippines, Brunei, and Vietnam. Just this week, a naval expert told the Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po that the South China Sea was an ideal place for the newly relaunched Liaoning to establish an assertive military presence for China, widely seen as a naval power in ascension.
It is no surprise that China would unilaterally test its boundaries on sovereignty claims. That's essentially been the thrust of the highly fraught tension between Japan and China over a series of islands that both claim are theirs. China announced in November that it would institute an air defence zone in the East China Sea that included those islands, against the will of the U.S. and other countries in the region.
China has also shown that it is unhappy with the perception that it is being spied upon. However, U.S. Navy officials said the Cowpens was in the area helping with disaster relief after the Philippines typhoon.
Vice President Joe Biden is currently in Beijing in an effort to defray those tensions.
The Liaoning is currently in its first long-distance test and training mission. It had previously been criticized by naval experts as being merely a boost in national patriotism rather than a meaningful threat.
December 13, 2013
What About Your 12 Best Gaffes of 2013?
Last year's gaffe winner. (ASSOCIATED PRESS) Even in a non-presidential year, politicians and officials say damaging things they regret. Here are the best gaffes of 2013, ranked.
12. President Obama: "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it."What was said: Over the course of the 2012 campaign, and until it became obvious that in October that the core assertion was subject to debate, Obama assured Americans that their health care plans weren't at risk from Obamacare. Except, it turned out, for the many, many plans that didn't meet the Affordable Care Act's policy requirements.
The ranking, explained: There's no question that Obama's claim was misrepresentative; there's also no question that it did significant political damage to the president. But! On Thursday, Politifact named it "Lie of the Year," and a lie is not really a gaffe. It's intentional.
11. Harry Reid: "Why would we want to do that?"
AP What was said: At a press conference during the shutdown, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was asked about his insistence on fully funding government employees in lieu of piecemeal funding for individual projects. "If you can help one child who has cancer," CNN's Dana Bash asked, "why wouldn't you do it?" New York Sen. Chuck Schumer jumped in, contrasting employees with the National Institutes of Health, "Why put one against the other?" Reid continued the thought: "Why would we want to do that?"
The ranking, explained: Republicans seized on Reid's comments — because Schumer's interjection was off-mic and hard to hear. It sounded like Reid was saying "Why would we want to do that?" in response to "why wouldn't you" help a kid with cancer — which would be a gaffe. But this wasn't a gaffe; it was politics. The misleading nature of the implication hasn't kept Republicans from using it against Reid to this day.
10. Erick Erickson: Traditional gender roles yield "the most well-adjusted youth in society."
Gage Skidmore via Flickr What was said: Eternal blowhard Erick Erickson went on Fox Business Network to assert that "we are supposed to applaud feminists who teach women they can have it all," when "the male typically is the dominant role" in nature. Then Fox News' Megyn Kelly lit into him. "Who died and made you Scientist-in-Chief?" Then she pointed out that he was wrong.
The ranking, explained: Erickson would never admit that he was wrong, especially to a woman, so this is a gaffe that bore no repercussions. Plus Erickson is an eternal blowhard, so this is to be expected.
9. Martin Bashir's Sarah Palin comments.
MSNBC still What was said: MSNBC's Bashir compared Sarah Palin's (dumb) comments equating the debt and slavery to the actual practices of slavery, suggesting that she deserved similar punishments to those applied to slaves. Including, according to his history studies, defecating in their mouths.
The ranking, explained: Martin Bashir isn't the most important person in the media. But the comments cost him his job, making them a pretty significant gaffe.
8. Louie Gohmert: "Al Qaeda has camps over with the drug cartels."
AP What was said: Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert has made a number of odd comments over the year / his life (including rising to the defense of his asparagus). During an appearance on C-SPAN in April, though, he topped them all. "We know Al Qaeda has camps over with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border," he said. "We know that people that are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanic when they are radical Islamist." There is zero public evidence for this, and probably zero evidence in private.
The ranking, explained: Gohmert is known for holding extreme views, which modifies this somewhat. But only somewhat.
7. Phil Gingrey defends Todd Akin.
AP What was said: Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin became a pariah in political circles in 2012 when he declared that in a "legitimate rape," a woman's body had ways "to try to shut that whole [pregnancy] thing down." It was the sort of comment that Republicans rushed to distance themselves from.
Except for Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey, who in January stuck up for Akin's pseudoscience.
[T]he fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.
The ranking, explained: Defending Todd Akin — particularly with an only slightly better argument — is not a great political decision.
6. The NTSB intern who approved the Asiana Flight 24 flight crew names.
KTVU still What was said: When San Francisco television station KTVU called the National Transportation Safety Board to verify that the names of the crew of the plane that crashed in San Francisco on the Friday before Memorial Day, they got an intern. The intern confirmed that, yes, the names included the obvious racist jokes at right.
The ranking, explained: It's not clear how KTVU got the names or why the intern lost his (or her!) job. It was deeply embarrassing for KTVU, and Asiana threatened to sue.
Fox News still
What was said: Before she left the State Department, House Republicans took the opportunity to get Hillary Clinton on the record about the death of Ambassador Chris Stephens in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. Clinton didn't do her 2016 campaign any favors by dismissing the question of what prompted the attack.
Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they go kill some Americans. What difference, at this point, does it make?
The ranking, explained: Benghazi was not then the rallying cry that it has become for the right. Now, as we've noted, the failure to prevent Stephens' death has become the main critique of Clinton's entire tenure at State. Her brusque rejection of a Congressional question about the events of that night may be one of the earliest gaffes in presidential campaign history.
4. James Clapper: "The most truthful, or least untruthful" answer.
AP What was said: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the director of national intelligence and the head of the country's spying systems, was asked by Sen. Ron Wyden if the NSA was collecting any information on Americans. "Nope," Clapper said, in essence, leaving Wyden, who knew about the NSA's massive surveillance infrastructure, baffled. When the Edward Snowden leaks began, the rest of the country learned that Clapper had lied, prompting him to offer an awkward explanation to NBC News: it was "the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner" in which he could answer.
The ranking, explained: When he knew that Wyden couldn't publicly contradict him, Clapper was happy to lie under oath. When the truth became obvious, Clapper could only offer the most terrible, or least ungood, excuse possible.
3. Marco Rubio reaches for his water.
C-SPAN What was said: Too many things, as the Florida senator's mouth got increasingly dry. Tapped to rebut Obama's State of the Union address, Rubio had a chance to impress America. But then he got thirsty, and without breaking eye contact with the camera, reached for a small bottle of water.
The ranking, explained: It was weird and funny.
2. Steve King: "They’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes."
Newsmax What was said: Iowa Rep. Steve King, echoing Gohmert's well-considered concerns about immigration reform, made one of the oddest declarations in recent political memory.
Some [immigrants] are valedictorians, and their parents brought them in. For every one who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.
What made this particularly ridiculous was that King then proceeded to defend his comments, offering, among other things, an attempt to show data for the valedictorian / cantaloupe calf ratio.
The ranking, explained: King's comments came as the prospect of immigration reform was being discussed in the House. He reflected the often inexplicable opposition of the far-right wing of the Republican Party, which eventually resulted in the House not passing any immigration legislation.
1. The shutdown.
Sarah Parnass What was said: So many things.
There was Rep. Randy Neugebauer demanding a park ranger apologize for closing the World War II memorial and then getting yelled at by a guy in a bike helmet. There was Rep. Pete Sessions telling another person at the memorial that, "we're not French; we don't surrender." (At the World War II memorial.) There was Ted Cruz's not-a-filibuster. There was that guy knocking over the podium. There was Rep. Blake Farenthold telling Wolf Blitzer about the intern who had to go get a vacuum.
It was really all terrific stuff — which added up to a massive black eye for the Republican Party. The shutdown itself was a gaffe.
The ranking, explained: An entire political party tanking its poll numbers to historic lows is a gaffe of the first order. Their only consolation? See #12.
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