In a turn of events that frankly seems more suited for a TLC reality star, Deadline reports that Abby Lee Miller, a.k.a. the lady with the big hair who made children cry on Lifetime’s Dance Moms, has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison by a federal judge in Pittsburgh. Miller was indicted on nearly two dozen counts of fraud about a year and a half ago, in October 2015; she stepped down from Dance Moms in March of this year. The charges, which stem from a bankruptcy case Miller filed when Dance Moms was first on the air and included charges that she had used family members and members of the Dance Moms team to hide more than $755,000 in income from the courts, carried a maximum penalty of up to $5 million in fines and five years in jail.
FBI Director James Comey has been accused of making a false claim while under oath during his Senate testimony about Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Mr Comey said in front of the Senate intelligence committee that Ms Abedin “forwarded hundreds and thousands of emails” from then-Secretary of State Clinton to husband and erstwhile Congressman Anthony Weiner.
References to Donald Trump's promised “Muslim ban” have been scrubbed from his campaign website minutes after a White House reporter brought them up in a press briefing. During the briefing ABC’s Cecilia Vega asked Press Secretary Sean Spicer why the Trump campaign website still calls for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” when the White House has denied that Mr Trump's executive order to block travel from six Muslim-majority countries is a "Muslim ban".
Did everybody watch Monday’s fun Sally Yates hearing (also featuring former director of national intelligence James Clapper), where she kicked ass and took names, even though dumb Republicans tried REALLY HARD to change the subject to “unmasking” and “wire tapps,” because they are unpatriotic Trump-licking trolls? It was great! (If you didn’t see it, may we suggest Wonkette’s liveblog?) Taken in its totality, we can safely report that Donald Trump and his BFF literal foreign agent/disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn did not fare well in the hearing.
So Monday night, Trump pulled out his Twitter box (like he did before the hearing) and tried his damnedest to do “fake news” to what everybody saw on TV with their own eyes, to try to convince us all that Donald Trump rules and Sally Yates drools.
Oh goodness, Trump must have been watching a different hearing from the one we saw. Maybe Kellyanne flipped the TV onto “Judge Judy” when Trump wasn’t looking and he’s too dumb to know the difference. But Trump was so sure Clapper said there is “no evidence” of mutual masturbation between Trump and Russian intelligence that he excitedly changed his Twitter banner to look like this, albeit briefly:
Oh baby doll, you have embarrassed yourself, YET AGAIN.
Let’s go to the transcript and see what ACTUALLYhappened, via the Washington Post:
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Ms. Yates, do you have any evidence — are you aware of any evidence that would suggest that in the 2016 campaign anybody in the Trump campaign colluded — colluded with the Russian government intelligence services in improper fashion?
YATES: And Senator, my answer to that question would require me to reveal classified information. And so, I — I can’t answer that.
GRAHAM: Well, I don’t get that because [James Clapper] just said he issued the report. And he said he doesn’t know of any. So, what would you know that’s not in the report?
(CROSSTALK)
CLAPPER: Are you asking me, or …
GRAHAM: No, her.
CLAPPER: Oh.
YATES: Well, I think that Director Clapper also said that he was unaware of the FBI counter intelligence investigations.
GRAHAM: Would it be fair to say that the counter-intelligence investigation was not mature enough to come to his — to get in the report. Is that fair, Mr. — Mr. Clapper?
CLAPPER: I — that’s an — that’s a possibility.
GRAHAM: What I don’t get is how the FBI can have a counter-intelligence investigation suggesting collusion, and you, as director of National Intelligence not know about it, and the FBI sign on to a report that basically said there was no collusion.
CLAPPER: I can only speculate why that’s so. There wasn’t — the evidence, if there was any, didn’t reach the evidentiary bar in terms of the level of confidence that we were striving for in that intelligence community assessment.
OK, now we understand that Donald Trump isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, so maybe he really doesn’t understand what happened right there. What that exchange actually revealed is that Sally Yates knew about the FBI investigation — since she was the acting attorney general, a position which is boss over the FBI — and Clapper didn’t. So, based on what Clapper knew at the time, he hadn’t seen evidence of collusion. Based on what Sally Yates knows right now, she can report that CLASSIFIED! CLASSIFIED! CLASSIFIED!
Trump wasn’t done though:
Actually she revealed a lot! She told us just how hard she encouraged the Trump administration to shoot Michael Flynn into space because he was a LITERAL ACTUAL FOREIGN AGENT, for one thing.
There was also a really cool part when Senator Ted Cruz (R-Everybody Hates Him) tried to score points and make it look like Yates was being a Bad Actor by refusing to enforce Trump’s Muslim ban (which was not the point of the hearing at all), and Yates just casually dropped some truth about the Constitution, and about how it’s unprecedented for the president’s Office of Legal Counsel to be “advised not to tell the attorney general about [something like the Muslim ban] until after it was over.” ZING!
In fact, just watch the entire exchange with Cruz, because he was doing that know-it-all thing he does where he thinks he’s SO SMART, but then Yates completely out-lawyered him and reduced him to a puddle of foreign Canadian maple syrup:
In case Trump doesn’t understand yet, all the points here are being scored by Sally Yates, and none of them are being scored by the GOP or Trump.
Try again, Trump:
As soon as all the guilty parties are living in jail.
NEXT:
Nope. That fake non-story ended weeks ago and literally nobody in the media is talking about it.
Nice try, loser! Maybe Trump should resign, because America’s tired of being appalled and mortified by the incompetent, sad failure in the White House.
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Remember, kids getting a fucking cheese sandwich is a waste of taxpayer dollars, but putting 5,000 American men back on the ground in Afghanistan to possibly die for basically NO FUCKING REASON is ok
President Trump has yet to decide on a variety of options being presented to him by U.S. military leaders, senior administration officials say.
A post shared by Starbucks Coffee ☕ (@starbucks) on Apr 19, 2017 at 6:05am PDT Before there was the shockingly sweet, super colorful, social media–friendly Starbucks' limited-edition Unicorn Frappuccino, there was the healthy version, known as the Unicorn Latte, and the creators aren't so keen on the copy.Served up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by The End cafe, the drink doesn't contain coffee or artificial colors, but it does contain “cold-pressed ginger, lemon juice, dates, cashews, blended with additional healthy, dried ingredients ...
This changed a lot of Logan Square when they built the 606. Really increased property values along the trail.
CHARLESTON, South Carolina—Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A city in the throes of rapid demographic change, where rents are going through the roof, wants to convert an overgrown freight railway into a selfie-ready linear park.
When did Billy Ray Cyrus turn into Mac from Its Always Sunny?
Billy Ray Cyrus feels he is due for a career makeover and is therefore implementing several ingenious edits to his life’s work, according to an interview with Rolling Stone published Friday.
It has been brought to the attention of Deadspin’s Thursday night editorial staff that the blog somehow failed to cover the 38th Annual Drake Relays Beautiful Bulldog Contest, which took place last week in Des Moines. We apologize for the grave oversight and invite you to take a belated look at these beautiful…
Alyssa Silver's interest in studying gun-related injuries in kids was prompted by her son's reaction to a t-shirt. When he was in kindergarten, she bought him a glow-in-the-dark dinosaur shirt. But instead of being excited, he was cautious. "He was nervous to wear it because in school they do drills where they have to hide in the corner with the lights off in case bad people with guns are in the building. He is afraid if his shirt glows the bad people will see him," says Silver, who is an attending physician and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore/Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
"This was heartbreaking to me, so I wanted to look into the true scope of the problem and raise awareness of the need to stop this epidemic of gun violence in our country," she says. Gun violence in the United States is notoriously difficult to study, in part because of a 20-year-old Congressional ban on funding for research that might be seen as advocating for gun control. The hyper-charged political atmosphere around guns has also made public-health researchers leery of wading into the fray—though that may be changing.
This weekend, Silver will be adding to the data on gun violence when she presents a paper which found that more than 5,800 American children were hospitalized as a result of gun injuries in 2012—that's roughly 16 kids a day, or one every 90 minutes. And it doesn't include those who died without being admitted to the hospital, like the 20 kids who were murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
More than a year after a Missouri jury ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $72 million to the family of a woman who died from ovarian cancer linked to the company’s talcum-based products, another jury in the state awarded a Virginia woman a record-setting $110.5 million in a similar lawsuit.
Thursday’s jury ruling is the fourth in a string of cases involving allegations that Johnson & Johnson ignored a possible link between cancer and its talcum-based products.
The most recent case, the Associated Press reports, involves 62-year-old Lois Slemp, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2012.
According to the lawsuit, the woman claims her illness was caused by more than 40 years of using Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder products, including baby powder. She alleges that Johnson & Johnson concealed the possibility that its baby powder and other talcum-based products could cause cancer.
The woman’s lawyers cited much of the same research used in previous cases. The studies showed that woman who used the products had a greater risk of being diagnosed with cancer.
Studies going back to 1971 have suggested this link exists. In fact, at least one lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson cites a 1982 study on the issue that found a 92% increased risk in ovarian cancer with women who used talc-based products around their genitals, the researcher behind that study directly advised a J&J doctor to place a warning label on their products.
Johnson & Johnson and other companies have continued to defend the use of talcum powder in feminine hygiene products; however, the condom industry halted the mineral’s use in the mid-1990s amid the growing concerns about its link to ovarian cancer risk.
Johnson & Johnson tells the AP that it will appeal the $110.5 million verdict, noting that it disputed the scientific evidence behind the case.
The company has previously appealed three cases, including the $72 million verdict handed down last year. Those cases remain under appeal.
Thursday’s case is just one of around 1,200 cases currently being pursued against J&J in courts in Missouri and New Jersey.
This has been a really tough spring for farmers. While water is great (and I'm sure the aquifers in the midwest are refilling, which is important) too much water makes planting and early fertilizing really difficult. Some years we've had record drought; now this year its been too much rain. It is almost as if the climate is changing.
River levels are falling after record and near-record flooding in parts of the Midwest, but the crisis is far from over. Downpours that dumped up to a foot of rain in parts of the nation's midsection last weekend led to the sudden surge of water. Flooding is blamed in at least nine deaths, and...
this is 10,000% staged. There is no way she went to a full term pregnancy with an IUD in her uterus.
This photo of a baby clutching a Mirena IUD implant has gone viral, probably because it implies he ripped it out as he exited the uterus, then waved it in a triumphant “FU” to his mom for trying to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. It is staged. I hope.
Unlike her husband, Melania Trump hasn’t been much of a tweeter recently. In fact, in her personal verified account, the all-capped @MELANIATRUMP (not to be confused with her official @FLOTUS one), her last message was to vote for her husband on November 8, and we all know how that turned out. As of this morning, she’s only ever liked one tweet, and that was the one she herself wrote, saying hello to Twitter in 2012. But yesterday that “like” total mysteriously stood at two.
As New York and others have pointed out, it appears that, briefly, @MELANIATRUMP liked a tweet that highlighted the huge gulf between herself and her husband:
In an interview aired on CBS’s Face the Nation, host John Dickerson backed Donald Trump into a literal corner over his baseless claim that Barack Obama wiretapped him at the Trump Tower. After Trump seemed to realized he would have to produce some hard facts, he cut the interview short and motioned for Dickerson to…
As was recently noted right here on Flavorwire.com, six documentary films and TV specials examining the aftermath of the brutal beating of Rodney King were just released, timed to the 25th anniversary of the 1992 L.A. riots. One was made by Spike Lee; another, by John Ridley. One of those films was not, however,by Donald Trump’s advisor in all things white nationalist, Steve Bannon. In fact, the last person whose opinion about the L.A. riots that anyone who remotely cares about social justice — or film, for that matter — would want hear is probably Steve fucking Bannon.
When I was in elementary school, I participated in a kid-friendly adaptation of West Side Story, in which I had to sing a Barbara Streisand song to two groups of tensely competitive surfers. Bannon’s script, I’d say, is slightly less good than that.
Interestingly, Bannon and his co-author, Julia Jones, had attempted to sell the story as an exploration of “how the culture of greed, elitism, discrimination and inhumanity repeats itself today in a self-defeating replay of atrocities.” (It was Jones who provided a copy of the script to NowThis.) Like many who seek to stretch Shakespeare to fit specific, contemporary political climates, Bannon applied the plot of the rarely performed Coriolanus — about the clash between the Romans and Vorsicans — to early ’90s L.A., seen as a war zone between the Bloods and the Cripps. Some examples of the dialogue:
“You call him noble that was once your enemy, then dis your king.”
“They hang out shooting pool and think they know what’s going down. Who’s out, who bounds, and if there’s crack enough.”
“Abandon hope all ye who fuck with her.”
The script is also filled with ridiculous descriptions meant to sound edgy in their anachronism, like, “Agrippa rides up to the entrance. Two Cripp guards stand watch.”
The Post writes, “Coriolanus’ rise and downfall in The Thing I Am present him as someone who could stop the violence in his own community but is temperamentally incapable of making the compromises and taking the strong stands necessary to do so.” The paper equates these strong stands with threats like Trump’s own warnings to black communities with high crime rates — his Tweeted threats to send the National Guard into Chicago, for instance.
Williams, one of a few select actors interviewed for the Post article, said of Bannon’s take on early ’90s L.A., “I think Steve Bannon thought he had figured out black people, much in the way of Trump: ‘Carnage! Chicago is carnage! … American carnage! That I have the answer. That if you could listen to me, this can fix that.’”
If you have 20 minutes, it’s certainly worth a watch — beyond its relevance to Bannon’s current political life, this is also simply the unearthing of an embarrassingly bad piece of writing. Since it’s being read by a group of actors who mostly work in comedy, it also happens to be very funny. NowThis recruited a huge cast: Gary Anthony Williams (who plays Coriolanus), Reno 911!’s Cedric Yarborough, Whose Line…? recurring cast-member Nyima Funk, Jordan Black, MadTV‘s Daniele Gaither, John Henson, Danny Zuker, Ishmel Sahid, Tawny Newsome, AJ Crew, Ellie Rose Boswell, Ify Nwadiwe, Kate Berlant (who spoke with Flavorwire about politicized comedy not too long ago), Parvesh Cheena, Morgan Evans, Charlie Carver, Lucas Neff, and former Daily Show correspondent Robert William Corddry. Some key moments:
And, finally, the full video:
If this somehow leaves you hungry for more adaptations of classic theater about gang violence in contemporary American cities, there’s always Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, which, you know, actually got made.
Taco Bell follows up on the Naked Chicken Chalupa with new Naked Chicken Chips, which give the chicken taco shell a new but familiar shape.
The new dish is slated to arrive starting May 11, 2017 and features chip-shaped marinated, white meat chicken encased with a crispy, deep-fried shell. Since they're "chips," they come with warm nacho cheese sauce for dipping.
You'll be able to find Naked Chicken Chips nationwide in either a 6-piece order for $1.99 or a 12-piece order for $2.99. It's also available as part of a $5 Box along with a Burrito Supreme, Crunch Taco, and medium drink.
With the return of crispy chicken on the Taco Bell menu, the Crunchwrap-like Chickstar will also be available for a limited time.
Taco Bell follows up on the Naked Chicken Chalupa with new Naked Chicken Chips, which give the chicken taco shell a new but familiar shape.
