Before being convicted of felony securities fraud, smirking cartoon villain pharma-douche-bro Martin Shkreli had to be tried in front of a jury and this presented a unique problem because everyone hates Martin Shkreli, and thus more than 100 jurors were dismissed from the pool during pre-trial questioning. Here are some of the statements that led to those dismissals. Read the rest
HB 214 signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott [R], bans abortion coverage from all public and private health insurance plans, and mandates that abortion insurance be sold as a separate product to women who are concerned that they'll need an abortion in future due to risks to their lives, unplanned pregnancies, unviable pregnancies, or rape-related pregnancies. Read the rest
CJ Hunt was at the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville when he spotted this young man in white supremacist uniform (white polo and khakis) running away from counterdemonstrators, then turning abruptly and stripping off while insisting that he was not really a Nazi and had just shown up for fun. Read the rest
Russ writes, "Via a FOIA request I made, this is Ajit Pai's detailed schedule from January 20 to the end of June. Shows who he met with, where he traveled, etc." Read the rest
Martin Shkreli is the smirking, remorseless poster child for trumpism: a serial fraudster who leavened his ponzi schemes by presiding over pharmaceutical price-gouging. Read the rest
One of the most enduring symbols of 2016's UK Brexit referendum was the huge red "battle bus" with its message, "We send the EU £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead. Vote Leave." Read the rest
AT&T, which has successfully lobbied state governments and the FCC to ban any broadband competition in the markets where it operates, says that its forced arbitration "agreements" aren't really forced, because people in the markets it serves could just not use the internet. Read the rest
Anish Kapoor is an artist and a colossal, controlling asshole: there was that time he said that the presence of his $270M sculpture in a Chicago park gave him the right to decide who could take pictures in a public space. Read the rest
Senator Joe Manchin [D-WV, @Sen_JoeManchin, +1 304-342-5855] is a right-wing Democrat Senator whose inglorious career includes breaking with his party to endorse President Trump's deal to sell record quantities of weapons to the Saudis. Read the rest
When Eric Trump raises money for kids' cancer charities at his annual Eric Trump Foundation golf invitational, he boasts that his events are super-efficient because he holds them at his dad's Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, where "We get to use our assets 100% free of charge." He lied. Read the rest
Palmer Luckey, the guy who founded Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then used the money to fund racist, far-right meme creation in the 2016 election cycle is now running a Peter-Thiel-backed startup to build surveillance technology that could be part of Donald Trump's border wall. Read the rest
Greg Gianforte is a short-tempered, hyper-conservative Montana political hopeful who is standing for the GOP in a special election for a Congressional seat; he is also invested in Russian firms that are under US sanction. Read the rest
Before the FCC stopped taking comments on its plans to destroy Net Neutrality (but after so many people rallied to tell it not to that its site crashed and the agency manufactured a fake denial of service attack to avoid admitting how much America hated its plans), the FCC's comment form was flooded with 128,000 identical comments sent by bots that used an alphabetical series of stolen names and addresses, possibly taken from an old voter registration data breach. Read the rest
On Wednesday 25-year-old Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland -- who is being sued for $100M over his catastrophic schadenfreudefest -- gathered his long-unpaid employees on a conference call this week to tell them that "After conferring with our counsel and all financial people, unfortunately we are not able to proceed with payroll. We’re not firing anyone, we’re just letting you know that there will be no payroll in the short term." Read the rest
Racist, perjuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions has issued guidance to federal prosecutors, ordering them to charge the people they will face in court with "the most serious offense you can prove," paving the way for a surge in America's already-shameful record of racially biased, family destroying, community-devastating, private-prison-enriching mass incarceration, which already outstrips the rates of incarceration in Apartheid-era South Africa, China and the USSR. Read the rest
Trumpcare was dead on arrival (again) until Rep Tom MacArthur [R-NJ; Twitter: @RepTomMacArthur; DC: (202) 225-4765; Burlington County: (856) 267-5182; Ocean County: (732) 569-6495] introduced an amendment that allowed insurers to refuse to cover people with "pre-existing conditions" including surviving domestic violence and/or rape, living with PTSD, being born with a congenital defect, and so forth. Read the rest
