The Federal Government Basically Admitted Trump Lied to America

Even before he became president, Donald Trump was known as a routine liar, a bullshit artist of the first order even by the standards of high-end real estate and reality TV. The question when he took office wasn't so much about whether he'd become more honest and restrained—that was never on the table—but whether his habit of outright fabrication would seep into the government he oversees. His press secretaries have lied on his behalf, of course, and his allies have dishonestly defended his most heinous policies, but a recent response to a lawsuit from the Department of Justice shows just how deep the Trumpian rot has spread.

The lawsuit was filed by Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes, a national security journalist who has become a prominent Trump critic and favorite of liberals. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request in response to a statement Trump made in a speech to Congress last year: “According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” Wittes didn't think that statistic was right—a lot of domestic terrorism is obviously committed by US citizens—and he didn't think that the DOJ even kept that kind of data on where terrorists were born. So he asked for information, and in February got some documents from the National Security Division that were only related to international terrorism. This did not back up Trump's claim, as Wittes wrote on Tuesday:

Both NSD and the FBI emphasized the limitations of this data. The Justice Department explicitly warned the White House that the data did not “include convictions related solely to domestic terrorism.” And the FBI noted that “database checks are limited in their ability to accurately identify a date/place of birth.”

So Wittes sued for additional documents from the DOJ, and after some lawyer-on-lawyer action, the government eventually told him that there were "no responsive documents" related to his request. If the DOJ had data showing most terrorists were born outside the US, it would have been able to find it in response to Wittes's request—the data's absence means that wherever Trump got that (likely made-up) statistic, it wasn't the DOJ.

"What the President of the United States said before a joint session of Congress was not true," Wittes wrote. "It wasn’t true about immigrants and terrorism. And neither was it true about the Justice Department."

This is far beyond a casual falsehood that Trump might throw out in the heat of an interview or improvised rally (though even then, you'd rather the president not lie, period). It was part of an official speech to a joint session of Congress, and therefore presumably vetted by multiple people. Nor was Trump simply spinning obviously fake personal anecdotes as he so often does—this time, he was hitching his lie to the Department of Justice, the top law enforcement agency in the land.

The proof that Trump's nonsensical claim about immigrants being terrorists was in fact nonsense won't have much practical effect on American politics, unfortunately. It barely qualifies as a scandal; I can't imagine it will make even a minor dent in Trump's nativist crusade. (An absence of facts has never slowed him down before.) But it's worth pausing on this lie because of how much effort it took to prove it definitively to be a lie—Trump can invent a statistic in a second, but it might take a journalist months to disprove it, by which point the public has moved on.

By the Washington Post's count, Trump made over 3,001 "false or misleading statements" as of this May. Not all of these can be properly classified as "lies"; Trump might have been shading the truth in the manner of many politicians, or just getting something wrong. A lie is a more malicious concealment, rarer than the garden-variety "misleading statement," but that's plainly what his lie about terrorism was: A conscious effort to mislead the public. In this case, the lie obviously served his larger purpose of limiting immigration to the US, and he's continued to link immigrants to terrorists in dubious fashion since that speech.

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It's impossible to chase down every falsehood Trump has birthed—that 3,000 number is impressive, in a way. He talks constantly, whether it's through Twitter or in speeches or during impromptu encounters with the traveling press corps, and when he talks he's likely to say something untrue or incorrect. Evidently, no one in the White House is trying to make sure what he's saying is true—it's only a moderate surprise that that isn't even the case when it comes to addresses before Congress. Instead, Trump's cronies are often working overtime to cover for him. It took a FOIA lawsuit for the government to cop even implicitly to the stupidest, most obvious sort of lie on Trump's behalf.

Trump's dishonesty isn't new or novel or even all that interesting. What should worry us is the dishonesties that are being deployed every day to block the truth from getting out. The lesson here is if you still trust the government, stop doing that right now.

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Millennials Are Sick of Old Politicians but Too Poor to Replace Them

Bernie Sanders is old. Even in a Congress where the average age of a legislator is about 60—closer to 58 in the House of Representatives and almost 62 in the Senate, this being one of the oldest congresses ever—the 76-year-old senator from Vermont is, well, up there. So it's a bit ironic that he owes his surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 presidential primary and his enduring popularity in large part to legions of young, left-leaning supporters who can't get enough of the fiery democratic socialist who says what he thinks. But when you actually ask young people whether they might like a chance to pull the lever for a fellow Young, the overwhelming answer—at least according to an Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research /MTV poll of people aged 15–34 out this month—is yes.

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Among other things, the poll found that 79 percent of young people think their own generation would run the show better than the current crop of career politicians out there.

So why don't more young people actually run for office and satisfy that demand? Well, they are: Hundreds of them have signed on to races large and small since 2016, with women and people of color in particular jumping into roles as candidates. But one enduring factor that stands in the way of more young politicians becoming an army of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez copycats is the thing that looms over us all: money.

The same economy that's screwed young people for generations—burdening them with insane debt and catastrophically high costs of living that might make staying at home into their 30s seem halfway reasonable—also makes it extremely hard to try and become a politician and change all that.

Being rich has always been the easiest way to win elections in America. Even before the most recent evisceration of limits on campaign spending, in 2008, $75 million in outside money coursed through the national political system, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that didn't include cash spent by major party committees or actual campaigns, who shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars to support Barack Obama, John McCain, and all the other candidates for offices large and small. Political ad spending alone reached $2.6 billion that year; it topped $9 billion in 2016. These days, even if you're running for a state legislative seat in a place like Texas, local political insiders might write you off if you don't have—or have plans to quickly raise—hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Obviously the barrier to entry varies by jurisdiction and office—a campaign for, say, school board is not likely to draw millions in outside spending. Yet only 5 percent of state legislative seats (which are often the most appealing to young people frustrated with the mess in DC) were held by Millennials last year. Campaigning means fundraising (a.k.a. knowing rich people) and either being able to quit your job outright or take a sabbatical, things that are foreign to many millennials.

"We hear that from a lot of folks that one of things they're concerned about is finances writ large, whether that's student debt or the cost of running or needing to quit their job," Amanda Litman, former email director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and co-founder of Run for Something, a group that encourages young progressives to seek office, told me. She cited a (non-scientific) survey of about 18,000 under-40 potential candidates her group carried out to support their work. (She said they had been in touch with about 1,000 or so young people on the ballot so far this cycle.)

"Money and the way systems are structured means that they can't run because they can't afford it," she added.

Take Ocasio-Cortez, the upstart democratic socialist of the moment who, at just 28, beat a powerful incumbent Democrat in a New York City congressional primary earlier this month. As the New Yorker reported, she was waiting tables at a taco spot less than a year ago. But a combination of encouragement from fellow alumni of the Bernie Sanders campaign and likeminded activists—and an infusion of money and online energy outside the traditional political channels—gave her the lift she needed to go from moderately inspiring also-ran to political shockwave.

There are more obstacles to young people seeking office than money. People under 21 couldn't even vote until the Nixon era, and for centuries the major parties' political machines were designed explicitly to let entrenched (and often geriatric) bosses dictate who ran for what major office. It was only in the 1970s, with the emergence of something resembling the modern primary system at the national level and the loosening in recent decades of machines' dominance in large cities, that outsiders like Ocasio-Cortez were presented with a more inviting opportunity.

The problem is that even as politics started to open up in that sense—at the primary level and in terms of young people being able to vote—an ocean of dark money moved in to make running for office more expensive than ever, an ocean that only got deeper and more imposing after the Citizens United decision in 2010. That allowed the people already in office to shape a national political debate that rarely engaged the youngest among us; according to US Census data, only about 46 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds (and 59 percent of 30-to-44-year-olds) voted in 2016. Meanwhile, 71 percent of those 65 and older reported showing up, continuing a long trend of Olds invested in the system making sure it keeps working for them.

"A lot of politics is skewed to older people—the issues are targeted to people who are going to vote more, and the big programs tend to benefit older rather than younger people," Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, told me. "The very reason a younger person might want to run to change that is the same reason you might be less interested—you feel there's less at stake."

It's not like student debt or rent—issues important primarily to young people—were anywhere near the top of the agenda in the fall of 2016. Instead, when structural social programs to help the poor and those struggling to make it were discussed at all, they tended to be the ones that are, by design, for old people: Social Security and Medicare. (Trump diverged from Republican orthodoxy by promising not to mess with those programs.) That makes sense: Old people vote, and the major party nominees wanted their support. But it makes politics seem even more out of reach for young people, and systemic change less possible.

"The majority of millennials don't believe politics will solve the problems they face, and less than a third of us see public service as an honorable profession," said Steven Olikara, founder and president of Millennial Action Project, a nonpartisan group focused on engaging young people in the political world. "When you don't believe in the system, then you don't believe you can make change through it."

According to the AP poll's results, however, most younger Americans do think their own vote in the midterms gives people their age at least a whiff of influence on the government. "I haven’t voted so much in the past, but I’m paying attention this year,” Tyler Seulean, a 26-year-old left-leaning truck driver from Houston, Texas, told the AP. He's the kind of sporadic voter who could make the midterms interesting in conservative regions of the country. Still, the overall picture is a bleak one: A June poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Atlantic reported just 28 percent of Millennials were "absolutely certain" they'd vote in the midterms—traditionally extra-old turnout elections—compared to 74 percent of seniors. (Other polls, the AP survey among them, have painted a more bullish picture of potential Millennial turnout.)

Perhaps it'd be easier to attract young people to the polls if they saw versions of themselves running for office. But attempting to get elected in a country where money is speech and corporations are people can seem hopeless and possibly even insane. It's also nearly impossible for many: Research suggests women of color in particular might be discouraged from running by the massive cost (and amount of time one need spend fundraising) on the one hand and the prospect of facing discrimination on the other. But that seemingly rational cost-benefit analysis only goes so far—and if Ocasio Cortez's race, where young people do, in fact, seem to have turned out at a higher-than-normal rate to help power her to victory—was any indication, this is the start of a wave, not the crest.

"The crisis that we're in right now means they're willing to make the sacrifice anyway, or figure it the fuck out," Litman told me.

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Let's Applaud This Man Who Made Himself Right at Home on the Subway

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America's First Comedy Museum Preserves a Time When We Knew How to Laugh

Comedy is in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis. Jerry Seinfeld and other high-profile comics refuse to perform on college campuses, because they claim political correctness is destroying the medium they hold dear. Roseanne was booted off network TV following a racist tweet, a YouTuber was booed off stage at comedy's biggest festival for saying comedians shouldn't talk about race or sexuality, Michelle Wolf was criticized for bringing truth to power. Male comics like Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby are finally having to answer for their years of sexual misconduct. And Hannah Gadsby, in her groundbreaking Netflix special, Nanette, declares she's quitting stand-up all together, because of the humiliation she's suffered from her own self-deprecation—from all too often making herself, a queer woman, someone who already lives on the margins, the butt of her own jokes.

Meanwhile, Leslie Jones pleads, from the set of The View, that comedians are given some space and asks that everyone stop being so offended. ("You can't hold me accountable for stuff in 1987," she says. "I wasn't smart.") Comedy has not, in recent years, served as an antidote for our pain. It is now undergoing a period of extreme self-reflection, perhaps its most substantial evolution to date. "When did comedy," Jason Zinoman asks in the New York Times, "become the worst medicine?"

It is in this heightened and cramped climate that on Wednesday, August 1, the National Comedy Center opens its doors, the first museum in the country fully dedicated to comedy. It's been built in Jamestown, a city on the western end of New York near Pennsylvania and Ohio, population 30,000—essentially in the middle of fucking nowhere. It is where, though, Lucille Ball was born and raised. Ball dreamed of a cultural landmark of this sort—not the festival held in her honor or the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum erected in her hometown, but one solely yet broadly focused on her craft and its evolution. Nearly 30 years after her death, she's gotten her wish.

According to the National Comedy Center's "About" page, it will include "50 immersive exhibits," which take you "on an interactive journey through comedy history, from early vaudeville acts to the latest viral memes." It reportedly cost $50 million to construct, with millions from state and federal funding as well as private donations. (Chuck Schumer, a New York senator and cousin of the comedian Amy Schumer, was a big proponent of the project.) In an introductory video on the center's website, famous comedians and the daughters of famous dead comedians discuss its importance—and why comedy should be taken seriously.

"The thing that makes comedy so significant, especially in the States," Seinfeld says over music in the opening, "it's one of the few things that, Americans, we really invented this as a world." (Demanding credit for everything has become a major preoccupation of Seinfeld's retirement, as he drinks coffee and drives cars. Take that Jonathan Swift!)

Entering the museum, a refurbished art deco train station from the 1930s, is almost a futuristic endeavor. You, as a visitor, create what's called a "sense of humor" profile designed to personalize your experience. According to the Wall Street Journal, you can stop to check out George Carlin's entire archive, Rodney Dangerfield's duffel bag, or Lenny Bruce's black trench coat. The Associated Press press mentions Jerry's "puffy shirt" from Seinfeld will be on display as well as scripts from The Dick Van Dyke Show. The joint isn't short, either, on interaction. There's apparently a camera to fuck around with, one that you can twist and turn to see the sets of different late-night talk shows; a hologram theater with a virtual Jim Gaffigan pacing around and delivering a set; and something called "comedy karaoke," where you can try out some of your favorite pithy one-liners. (There's a bar, too!) With 37,000 square feet to get through, it's obviously not lacking in shit to see and do.

"It is not a hall of fame," Robert Klein says later in the center's video, "but is a comprehensive appreciation of the art." (Gaffigan compares it to baseball's Cooperstown, which is a hall of fame.)

Complete comprehensiveness is what the center most wants—or at least hopes—to achieve. And it could arrive, really, at no better time—at a moment when we are clearly asking the very question about what we've been laughing at all along.

As soon as you walk into the lobby, there's a statement, the Wall Street Journal reports, that "will warn [you] that the comedy doesn't necessarily represent the views of the museum." Journey Gunderson, the center's executive director, has repeatedly emphasized that she did not censor anything. "We've taken the approach that when it's necessary for storytelling, to do justice to the history of comedy, we are including the work of controversial figures," she told the Journal. "We're not going to pretend that 'The Cosby Show' wasn't revolutionary for sitcoms."

The National Comedy Center isn't going to solve any of comedy's woes—but it can, in the very least, be what any great museum should be: a place to witness, and learn from, great successes and tragedies.

"Culture is preserved by meaningful storytelling," Gunderson said in a statement to Forbes. "What these artists have done is important, and it should be both celebrated and contextualized, drawing connections that make the past relevant to the present."

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Great, Now MoviePass Is Charging More and Limiting Access to Big Blockbusters

If you were hoping to use your MoviePass to catch some of summer's biggest blockbusters this weekend, you may be out of luck. Following a troubling new report from Business Insider, the flailing subscription service announced Tuesday that it would be upping its monthly subscription fee over the next 30 days and limiting tickets for major releases for their first two-week theater run.

On Monday, MoviePass's CEO Mitch Lowe reportedly called an all-hands meeting after the app faced technical difficulties over the weekend. Lowe apparently announced that the subscription service wouldn't be offering tickets for Christopher Robin, the upcoming Winnie the Pooh feature, or The Meg. But even if you weren't super eager to see Jason Statham and Rainn Wilson chase down a big-ass shark, MoviePass subscribers will now have limited or no access to major blockbusters—any film opening on 1,000 screens or more—in the first two weeks after they open.

It's just the latest change the company has had to make to its business model, which originally charged users around $10 a month or $89.95 for the year to see one free movie per day at most theaters in a deal that costs the company a lot of cash. Now, it's planning to hike up that monthly fee to $15 for the foreseeable future.

Although MoviePass's parent company told VICE losing money was all part of the plan in the short term, it's already proven to be unsustainable. According to Business Insider, the app completely shut down last Thursday after the company temporarily ran out of money and had to borrow $5 million to keep it up and running. Then over the weekend, some users found that they just weren't able to use their MoviePass to buy tickets to Mission: Impossible—Fallout, one of the biggest releases of the summer.

The company has already announced a new "surge pricing" plan that would require monthly subscribers to pay a little extra for more popular titles at peak times, but it's not clear how the hike in the monthly subscription fee or the inability to see major blockbusters on opening weekend will affect that plan. According to Tuesday's announcement, the company is planning "continued rollout and refinement" of its peak pricing plan.

"We believe that the measures we began rolling out last week will immediately reduce cash burn by 60 percent and will continue to generate lower funding needs in the future,” Ted Farnsworth, Chairman and CEO of Helios, said in a statement.

Still, even if the company, which already loses an estimated $20 million to $40 million every month, stands to save some money from the new measures, the constant tweaks to its business model only go to show that sometimes when a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

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Trump's Eyeing Another Huge Tax Cut for the Rich and It's Insane

Since 2016, even as much of the country has been consumed by all things Donald Trump—his personal life, his administration, his alleged crimes financial, sexual, and political—rich people have been quietly having a great time. Corporate profits are enormous, the stock market has (mostly) been excellent, financial regulations have been gutted by a completely compliant federal bureaucracy, and, last year, in their one successful bid to pass big-league legislation, Trump and Republicans pushed through an enormous tax cut that will overwhelmingly benefit their fellow rich people.

So you might think that with unemployment low and lots of other macro-economic indicators that don't capture actual human misery looking so strong, Republicans would be content to dig in and hype this latest chapter of American greatness on the midterm campaign trail. Turns out, as the New York Times reports, one of the more cartoonishly plutocratic people in Trump's orbit is considering using executive authority to unilaterally slide an extra $100 billion or so to the rich by slashing taxes on capital gains. Here's the gist:

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina this month that his department was studying whether it could use its regulatory powers to allow Americans to account for inflation in determining capital gains tax liabilities. The Treasury Department could change the definition of “cost” for calculating capital gains, allowing taxpayers to adjust the initial value of an asset, such as a home or a share of stock, for inflation when it sells.

(snip)

Capital gains taxes are overwhelmingly paid by high earners, and they were untouched in the $1.5 trillion tax law that Mr. Trump signed last year. Independent analyses suggest that more than 97 percent of the benefits of indexing capital gains for inflation would go to the top 10 percent of income earners in America. Nearly two-thirds of the benefits would go to the super wealthy — the top 0.1 percent of American income earners.

Basically, the idea here is that instead of taxing the difference between how much people pay for investments and how much they're worth when they sell them—a.k.a. capital gains—the government would invent a new way to tax a narrower slice of that investment money. For example, if a wealthy heiress invested $500,000 in a wellness company's stock in the year 2000, and sold it for a cool million and a half this year, they'd owe capital-gains taxes on $1,000,000, or the amount the investment ballooned in the market. Under current law and a capital-gains rate of about 20 percent, that might mean a tax bill of $200k. But if the original $500k was adjusted for inflation to $746,412.91 (as of this year), the capital gains would be reduced from $1 million to a little over $750k. That, in turn, would reduce the tax bill to about $150k—a savings of nearly 50 grand she probably didn't need and would be extremely unlikely to spend rather than hoard.

The move was deemed an illegal one by a (Republican) administration in 1992—the GOP has long craved to use the federal government to just straight-up give money to the rich, but in that era, at least, they concluded they'd never get away with this. What's changed since? Well, partisanship has exploded, rich people have gained an even stronger stranglehold over American democracy, and a guy with a history of mob ties and business deals with corrupt oligarchs won the presidency. In some ways, it makes a certain kind of sweet, sweet dystopian sense: The rich have gotten away with this much already in the Trump era, and with the Russia investigation looming and the prospect of Congress flipping in the midterms, now seems like as good a time as any to make another cash grab.

Besides, even if they don't get away with this kind of thing—if the courts intervene and decide that the whole Congress-makes-tax-policy thing remains the law—they'll likely have already won.

“No matter what the courts do, you’ll get the main economic benefit the day, the month after Treasury does this," one GOP tax lobbyist told the Times. "I think it’s going to happen and it’s going to be huge," Grover Norquist, the GOP tax king and vape apologist, told the paper.

In other words: We know we're being fucking craven as all hell, but so what? Who's going to stop us?

Good question.

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Watch Venom Growl About Turds in the New 'Venom' Trailer

So far, the first couple of Venom trailers have given us Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, a bunch of Eddie Brock's emo voiceover, and a few shots of Venom himself in all his giant, slimy, bizarrely erotic glory. But while those Venom clips offered plenty to fantasize about, one thing was sorely missing: poop jokes.

Thankfully, that all changed Tuesday with the latest Venom trailer. The three-minute clip is our most exciting look at the movie yet—there are some fight scenes that give Venom a chance to show off his goopy punching abilities; a brief clip introducing Riz Ahmed's symbiote villain, Riot; and a bunch more waggling tongues. But the gritty and serious tone takes a really strange left-turn right at the trailer's end, when Venom, uh, starts talking about poop.

"We will eat both your arms and then both of your legs, and then we will eat your face right off of your head," Venom threatens a would-be convenience store thief, before somehow putting a poop-related spin on the whole thing.

"You will be this armless, legless, faceless thing, won't you?" the slimy, hulking Venom continues, as the dude quakes before him, "rolling down the street... like a turd in the wind."

Of course, the thief doesn't have much time to stop and question what exactly that means, because pretty soon after Venom just up and eats his face. Still, the scene leaves us with a lot of questions: First of all, what's so scary about "a turd in the wind"? Did Eddie Brock—a journalist—pick that line up somewhere and actually think it would work, or was it just off the fly? The Venom symbiote is a sentient space goop that turns a hapless Eddie Brock into a giant killing machine, but apparently, the its powers don't extend to crafting decent threats.

Venom drops October 5, so get ready for more vaguely sinister references to dookie once fall rolls around. All turds aside, the trailer looks pretty great.

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The Best Way to Steal a Shark Is by Pretending It's a Baby, Apparently

Behind most great heists is an intricately hatched plot: If you're a professional thief looking to jack rare wine by tunneling through the French catacombs, rob a truck full of iPhones on the highway, or steal a massive gold coin from a museum, a lot of meticulous planning is involved. But if stealing marine wildlife is more your speed, apparently all you need is a blanket, a stroller, and the fearless ability to hold a live shark.

That's all it took for three thieves in San Antonio, Texas, to make off with a 16-inch horn shark named Miss Helen from the city's aquarium over the weekend, the Washington Post reports. According to the aquarium's owner, the criminals snuck in through the back with a stroller and a baby, and hit up an exhibit where you're allowed to (for some ungodly reason) pet and feed a handful of sharks.

In the aquarium's security footage, you can see one man walk up to the edge of shallow pool next to a handful of people and just stick his hands in. He then turns around from the tank carrying something in a net, passing other aquarium visitors milling about seemingly unaware that the guy is dripping something wet all over the floor behind them.

According to the aquarium's Facebook page, the man, along with two accomplices, then placed the 16-inch horn shark in a bucket before swaddling it in a blanket. Disguised as a baby, Miss Helen is then brought back into the frame and placed into the stroller by another man, before the group waltzes out of the aquarium with their score.

Unfortunately for these shark bandits, their heist was just a little too slapdash to go undetected. The aquarium's general manger, Jenny Stellman, told the Post she followed the trio out to their car and grilled them on why their stroller was leaking all over the place.

“He said the water was dripping because they had spilled a Yeti cup onto the stroller and they were leaving in such a hurry because their baby that was with them needed medication," Stellman told the Post, adding that when she asked to search his car, the driver just "jumped in his truck and drove off."

Luckily, Stellman managed to catch their plates, and by Monday, the cops had tracked down the thieves and recovered Miss Helen, finding her in an amateur aquarium in a garage. According to the cops, one of the criminals has since been charged with theft, and charges against the other two are still pending while the police figure out if they can pursue felonies, and why anyone in their right mind would want to take home a living shark.

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The Infamous Accused High School Pooper Is Suing the Cops for $1 Million

In May, Thomas Tramaglini, the Superintendent of the Kenilworth School District, was arrested for pooping on a near high school track in New Jersey where he'd reportedly been shitting on a daily basis. The 42-year-old was charged "with lewdness, littering, and defecating in public," according to a Holmdel Township Police Department Facebook post, before resigning from his job last week. The district has commenced its search for a new superintendent, according to an official statement, and expects to fill the post by October.

But the drama isn't over: Tramaglini is now suing the Holmdel Township Police Department for $1 million, claiming the cops "unlawfully took [his] photograph and distributed and disseminated the 'mug shot' to third parties, including the media, with the intent to harm [him]."

The tort notice cites "loss of income, harm to reputation, emotional distress, and invasion of privacy" as a result of the release of his mugshot. (Tramaglini reportedly made $147,500 a year as a superintendent.)

It's unclear when Tramaglini will go to trial but he is evidently interested in fighting the charges, even though the cops reportedly have a surveillance video.

"The hallmark of our system of justice is the presumption of innocence. Unless or until proven guilty at trial within the framework established by the rules of evidence, every defendant enjoys that basic, liberty-defining right," one of Tramaglini's attorneys, Matthew S. Adams, wrote in a statement last month. "Leaks, half-truths and outright falsehoods about a good man with an exceptional record of public service are not a substitute for admissible evidence."

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Liam Neeson's Stunt Double Taught Me a Particular Set of Skills

Bernie's 'Medicare for All' Might Cost $32.6 Trillion and That's Fine

"Medicare for all," the healthcare holy grail many progressives have dreamed of for decades, continues to look like both an utter fantasy and a potent possibility. Democrats are at least three years away from even being able to pass a healthcare bill, which would require control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. Still, dozens of progressives politicians are now part of a Medicare for All Caucus, and it seems likely that healthcare will be a defining issue of the 2020 primaries, which are closer than you think. The central questions both Republican and Democratic opponents of the plan will ask is: How much will it cost, and who will pay for it?

A new paper by the right-of-center wonk Charles Blahous at the libertarian Mercatus Center offers an answer at least to the first question, giving the idea a $32.6 trillion price tag over the decade 2022–2031 if a Medicare for all bill was passed this year (which obviously won't happen).

That actually sounds like a pretty good deal.

It's tough to analyze Medicare for all as a proposal since the specifics are so far away from being worked out. But Blahous focused on a bill introduced last year by Bernie Sanders, who has spent a good chunk of his Senate career calling for Medicare for all, also referred to as "single-payer" healthcare. Sanders's bill would, over a four-year period, replace the current hodgepodge of employer- and government-provided insurance plans with a government-run system. (This four-year phase-in is why Blahous started his projections in 2022.)

In a statement to Fox News, Sanders called the paper “grossly misleading and biased,” in part because the Mercatus Center gets funding from the Koch Center, whose billionaire patrons are key sugar daddies of right-wing politics. But it's not far away from other cost estimates, and it actually shows that Medicare for all would reduce healthcare costs in the US in a huge way.

Granted, $32.6 trillion over ten years is a lot of money—Blahous estimates the additional cost to the federal government in 2031 would be about $4.2 trillion, or "nearly 12.7 percent of GDP." But in 2016, the US spent $3.3 trillion on healthcare, or around 18 percent of the country's GDP. As Axios, no bastion of left-wing thought, put it:

All told, "Medicare for All" would actually slightly reduce the total amount we pay for health care. But the plan would increase the share of that cost paid through taxes, rather than through insurance premiums or out of pocket.

So instead of paying for healthcare through premiums and co-payments, Americans would pay through taxes. In exchange, the tens of millions of people who still lack health insurance would have access to it—even dental and vision plans—and out-of-pocket costs would be smaller than they are for even current Medicare recipients. By Blahous's math—and remember, he's not a Medicare-for-all hype man—national health expenditures would drop $93 billion in 2022 as a result of lower prescription drug costs, administrative savings, and lower reimbursement rates to healthcare providers. (National health expenditures is what the country as a whole, not just the government, pays for medical care.)

It's that point about reimbursements where things get a bit murky—Sanders's plan would save a lot of money by paying Medicare rates to hospitals and doctors, and those rates, Blahous writes, "are projected to be roughly 40 percent lower than those paid by private insurers during the first 10 years of M4A’s proposed implementation." That cut in rates could cause huge problems: "Universal Medicare-like payment rates would almost certainly cause some major disruptions, like hospital closings," wrote the New York Times in an explainer on Sanders's bill last year. If the government tried to remedy this by reimbursing hospitals at higher rates, that price tag on Medicare for all gets even higher.

Reimbursement is the sort of issue that would be hotly debated should Democrats actually take control of the federal government in 2021. But in broad strokes, this right-wing attack on Medicare for all winds up looking perversely good for Sanders and his sympathizers. Yes, healthcare costs would shift to being the responsibility of the federal government, and thus taxes would be a lot higher. But that shifting would insure millions more for less money—as Matt Bruening pointed out in socialist mag Jacobin, Blahous's paper suggests net national health expenditures would drop by $2.054 trillion over a decade if Medicare for all became law. So what's the catch again?

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This Video of a Van Splashing People Is Pretty Goddamn Satisfying

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

One of the most wonderful things about the internet is when you discover a new pleasure button in your sick brain.

The best is when that feeling comes from something you don’t expect—such as when it emerges from a short video of a van in Ottawa intentionally hitting puddles to splash the fuck out of pedestrians. Don’t believe me that this video hits those weird, particular pleasure centers in your brain? Well, take a look for yourself below.

I don’t know exactly why it’s so satisfying—maybe because all of us yearn to do this every time it rains—but it certainly is. The 45-second video filmed on July 27 starts out with a rear-facing dash cam looking at a van. The vehicles begin moving and enter an intersection we see two people begin to cross the road. At this point, the van veers to the side of the road—you can almost ALMOST hear the Jaws theme being to play—hits a puddle and just fucking drenches this couple.

The driver has to quickly swing back into the middle of the road as to not rear end the fuck out of a red Toyota. However, like a puppy after its first rainstorm, the driver is drawn to the water and immediately moves over to the side of the road once they have successfully avoided hitting the parked car. No puddle is safe from this van! When a man appears walking with an umbrella, the driver only edges closer. Hitting a huge puddle with pinpoint precision, the van sends so much water up in the air that the walker disappears for a second.

When I say this person gets fucking covered… they get fucking covered.

The third victim of the renegade splasher seemingly gets off easily. The driver carries on their merry way fucking on the road when a person comes into frame. Our driver is already on the side of the road, desperately searching for a big puddle to smoke but no avail. The driver even speeds up to make the most of what their working with—it’s not the size of the wave but the motion of the ocean—but the most they get is a little spray going this person’s way. The person looks annoyed but nothing more.

You can taste the driver’s disappointment.

The van then pulls off and turns out of the frame presumably taking the driver home where they can surprise their family by whipping buckets of water at them. As reported by the CBC, this video was shot near the University of Ottawa and has been viewed over 800,000 times since being uploaded. The people at Black and McDonald—the company that owns the van—were, shall we say, not too pleased about this video and relieved the driver of his duties.

“This is an isolated incident and the individual is no longer employed with Black & McDonald,” reads a Facebook post by the company. An Ottawa police officer also stated the man driving the van was fired.

Thankfully for the now unemployed driver, it’s still summer which means water parks are still operating and maybe one or two are looking for a person with some experience.

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This Book Highlights the Forgotten Women of History

History is shaped not just by facts and documents, but also by the contemporary lens through which it is being viewed—and that leaves plenty of room for racism, sexism, and discrimination. But two feminist thinkers have worked to add women who have been largely left out of the text books back into our collective history with a new book, History vs. Women: The Defiant Lives That They Don't Want You to Know.

Written by Anita Sarkeesian, director of the nonprofit Feminist Frequency, and Ebony Adams, an educator and activist who studies black women in the diaspora, the book details 25 women who were either minimized or erased from history, including Native American ballerinas, Japanese novelists, and Chinese pirates. Sarkeesian and Adams talk about the project on today's podcast.

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'A Little Help and Imagination,' Today's Comics by Benny Montero

Inside the Funeral Homes Posing the Dead Like They're Still Alive

Song Suggestions for Paul Manafort's $18,000 Karaoke Setup

This week, Paul Manafort will become the first of Trump's ex-aides to stand trial thanks to Mueller's Russia probe. Manafort is accused of, among other charges, allegedly laundering more than $18 million through off-shore accounts to keep up his fancy, expensively dressed lifestyle without having to fork over any money for taxes.

According to new court filings, though, $7,000 suits weren't exactly Manafort's only splurge—he also dropped a whopping $18,000 on karaoke equipment, Talking Points Memo reports.

Of course, he also spent a shit-ton of money on other stuff, like blowing upward of half-a-million dollars on landscaping for his Hamptons home, so the karaoke setup doesn't seem exactly extravagant in comparison. Still, he forked over $500 for the machine itself, $950 on a "song package," $50 on two mic stands (ostensibly for duets), $600 for a touchscreen remote, and $6,000 on the installation alone, TPM reports.

Seeing as Manafort seems pretty serious about the art of karaoke, the news raises one important question: If he really loves singing karaoke so much that he's willing to drop five figures on some equipment, what's the man's go-to song?

Unfortunately, the court filings don't do a deep dive into Manafort's karaoke habits, and its doubtful that the trial will detour into that specific line of questioning, but we here at VICE are committed to getting to the bottom of this one—so here's a rundown of our best guesses for what Manafort jams out to when he's not living the VIP life in jail, starting with a stone-cold karaoke classic.

"It Wasn't Me"—Shaggy

Manafort has already pleaded "not guilty" to all 18 charges against him, so it seems like Shaggy's 90s summertime jam would be a natural choice for him. Of course, in the song, the weak denial doesn't really work out so well for Shaggy, since his girlfriend basically walks in on him mid-sex with another woman, but we'll see how it pans out for Paul.

"I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)"—The Clash

Another karaoke classic. It may seem like the law's already won since the guy spent a good chunk of this summer in jail, but Manafort isn't exactly "breaking rocks in the hot sun" or whatever—his time in lock-up actually sounds pretty plush.

"Rasputin"—Boney M

This song's got it all: Russia jokes, fresh-ass hooks, and more Russia jokes. Though Manafort's expensive slacks are probably not roomy enough to give him the flexibility to pull off this song's incredible dance moves.

"Up Like Trump"—Rae Sremmurd

OK, Paul Manafort has probably never heard this song before in his life, let alone belted it on some expensive karaoke equipment in his Hamptons home. But it's a great song, with references to both Trump and Russia before the man became president, so listen to it again and marvel at the fact that it's already almost four years old.

"Pardon Me"—Staind

A veiled message to Trump or just Manafort rekindling an old love for nü-metal? Why can't it be both?

"Take the Money and Run"—Steve Miller Band

All jokes about Manafort's tax evasion aside, the man is exactly the sort of boring-ass Connecticut Baby Boomer who would get sweaty drunk and belt Steve Miller Band in a failed attempt to reconnect to whatever sense of youthful exuberance he left in the mid-1970s.

But yeah, also this one's a joke about tax fraud.

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Guys, the 'Bigfoot Erotica' Candidate Is Not Actually into Bigfoot Erotica

On Sunday, Democratic congressional candidate Leslie Cockburn made the race in Virginia's Fifth District the most talked-about contest in the country when she played the old accuse-my-opponent-of-being-into-bigfoot-erotica card. Cockburn tweeted out a screenshot of an Instagram post from GOP candidate Denver Riggleman that appeared to be a teaser for a book called Mating Habits of Bigfoot, complete with a crudely drawn bigfoot illustration that implied the mythical beast was well-endowed. "This is not what we need on Capitol Hill," Cockburn said in her tweet, which sparked a wave of news coverage and social media commentary that boiled down to, "Hey get a load of this!"

Bigfoot erotica is a surprisingly popular subgenre, but is Riggleman actually a "devotee"? I don't know about you, but I don't find the drawing all that erotic. Maybe there's saucier stuff in his Instagram, but it's set to private—and the candidate expressed surprise that this post became, well, a thing. “We actually thought it was a bit of a joke, because everything about it was a joke,” Riggleman told VICE News.

It certainly looks like a crude joke. "There is no way that anybody’s dumb enough to think this is real," Riggleman told the Washington Post. According to Heavy.com, the candidate has a history of making jokes about writing a book about the "mating habits of bigfoot," a pattern also noted by the normally very buttoned-up Cook Political Report in its preview of the race.

If nothing else, Cockburn's gambit has helped draw national attention to what otherwise have been just one of dozens and dozens of obscure midterm contests. But there's not much to this whole erotica thing once you look into it for more than a second. Riggleman evidently thinks it would be funny if bigfoot were both real and had a big dick. And he does seem to be genuinely interested in the creature—back in 2006, he was involved in a fairly jokey "hunt" for the monster that was written up as an "Amazon Short" by a journalist named Don Barone. Riggleman got a coauthor credit for the story, titled "Bigfoot Exterminators Inc," but it was clearly mostly Barone's project.

"He wrote some stuff in it, designed some kind of Bigfoot van diagram," Barone told me over email. "I didn’t have a problem with him being co-author, as it was just a tongue in cheek thing. Amazon sold it for 99 cents, I got 12 cents a sale…I think in total I got $9."

So does Riggleman have a real interest in bigfoot porn? It doesn't seem so. And so what if he did? In a statement, Cockburn's campaign manager said she was "traveling throughout the district meeting with real people about real issues that matter to them" while Riggleman "is home scrubbing his social media of ‘Bigfoot erotica’ and who knows what else.” But the insinuation that he is into some dark shit because of his bigfoot jokes seem like a stretch.

The oddest thing about this bigfoot erotica kerfluffle is that it has tended to obscure Cockburn's more serious charge, which is the allegation that Riggleman campaigned with white supremacist Isaac Smith. (Riggleman denounced white supremacists in a recent op-ed.) But perhaps it's not surprising that "bigfoot erotica," not the racism accusation, is what ended up drawing eyeballs to this race: These days, accusations that a Republican has white supremacist ties are hardly breaking news.

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This Florida Man Brought a Live Gator with Him on a Beer Run

It's no secret that Floridians love their gators. Some keep them as pets or drag them to dorm rooms, while others simply bask in the majestic creatures' glory as they stomp around on golf courses. For one Florida man, even the prospect of getting head-butted wasn't enough to keep him away from his state's favorite reptile, because he apparently decided it'd be really chill to bring one along on a beer run.

A video of the guy's stunt in Jacksonville surfaced late last week on Facebook, First Coast News reports. In it, Robby Stratton, the man in question, strolls into the convenience store holding a live gator like a tote bag, on a mission to get some beer. Then he sets his sights—and his gator—on a man standing by a cooler, shouting "You taking the last bit of beer?" before chasing him through the store and grabbing a few cold ones.

Florida's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is now investigating Stratton, who allegedly committed a third-degree felony for possessing the gator without a permit—punishable by up to a $5,000 fine or five years in prison, Action News Jax reports. In an interview after the incident at the same convenience store with the outlet, Stratton placed the blame for his stunt on "alcohol, man," explaining that he was under "a lot of the influence" when it happened, and that he doesn't remember anything from that night at the convenience store.

He also told Action News Jax that he had no clue where the gator came from—but in yet another video from the extremely well-documented fiasco, you can see Stratton holding the thing with a lit cig in his mouth, describing how his friend caught the beast while he was weed whacking.

Who's to say for sure if Stratton was actually blackout drunk when he brought the gator along in his search for more Natty Light or whatever, considering people have been known to do far more dangerous stunts with the animals at baby showers around their kids. Stratton did admit that, if anything, the stunt was "stupid" and that he'll "probably go to jail, probably not—we'll see."

He claims he's since released the poor, defenseless gator into a creek, so—if he's telling the truth—at the very least, the animal can return to a life of being metal as hell.

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People Told Us About Their Wildest Road Trips

Juul's Legal Problems Keep Getting Worse

D.P. started vaping nicotine when he was 15-year-old high school freshman and quickly became hooked. The jazz musician's parents did everything they could to make him stop: Besides transferring him to a different school, they said, they removed the door to his bedroom and blocked off certain areas of the family home in Valley Park, New York, so he would have no privacy at all. Still, the regular urine tests they subjected him to proved their efforts were for naught: D.P. was "unable to refrain from JUULing," according to a federal complaint, which anonymized the teenager and was filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York last month.

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"I really think JUUL's responsible for this," the family's attorney, Jason Solotaroff, told me in an interview. "They could have marketed their product like patches, or very pharmaceutical-like. Instead they marketed it as this cool accessory that everybody had to have."

The legal complaint has been rolled into two other suits—one filed in California state court, the other in federal court in that state—that accuse JUUL of engaging in shady marketing practices designed to target teens. (At least one complaint cited an ad in VICE magazine.) These criticisms are similar in nature to those lobbed by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) before the agency cracked down on Juul sales to minors in April, as well as those levied by Massachusetts's attorney general, who announced last week that she was leading a probe into JUUL to find out if they were trying to lure underage users. All the scrutiny raises the question of whether one of the hottest new brands in America has already peaked—and whether teens will soon glob onto another bright, shiny object in the surging vape market.

Most of the people complaining so far have focused on the fact that, despite being advertised as an "alternative for adult smokers," JUUL seems to be insanely popular among kids who otherwise might not smoke. The fact that there are fun flavors like mango has been a sticking point, as has the fact that the company has spent relatively little on marketing relative to its growth. Plaintiffs' lawyers in the California cases have taken this one step further, going so far as to speculate that there are so-called JuulBots out there tweeting out content boosting the company, and that teen influencers might be getting paid to promote JUUL. ("JUUL Labs does not believe the cases have merit and will be defending them vigorously," spokesperson Victoria Davis told me in a statement, while declining to comment on either of these specific claims. Meanwhile, in court, the company has argued at least one suit should be dismissed because the FDA regulates electronic nicotine delivery systems.)

Meanwhile, Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida who's known as "Mr. IPO," said this is all probably less a sign that JUUL is in danger of being forced out of business than it is a to-be-expected blip in the trajectory of a company that introduced its product to market three years ago, and has already been valued to the tune of $15 billion. In an email, he compared JUUL Labs to another famously embattled company.

"With both JUUL and Uber, problems have resulted in lower valuations than would otherwise be the case, but both companies have also grown faster than they otherwise would have if they had been more cautious, and this growth has boosted the valuations," he told me. "In other words, as with so many things in life, there are tradeoffs. A company can push too hard, of course. Investors are willing to take risks, but they need to be compensated for bearing these risks. The compensation comes in the form of paying a lower price. If the company cannot provide acceptable answers to the concerns that investors have, the valuations get even lower."

There's also the fact that the chief complaint against JUUL—that it's undoing decades of work to get kids to stop thinking blowing plumes of smoke out of their mouths is cool—might not be entirely fair. That's what Steve Sugarman, a product liability expert at Berkeley Law School, seemed to think when I asked him about the pending lawsuits.

"One interesting aspect of this JUUL phenomenon, apart from the fact that the national news media seemed to get interested when white, upper-middle class high school kids were seen to be JUULing, is that there—it seems to me—[is] no convincing evidence that JUUL works more to entice kids to smoking cigarettes who would not otherwise smoke than it does to divert kids to vaping who otherwise would have been smokers."

It's a tricky distinction to make, and an important one considering that vaping has completely eclipsed combustable smoking in high school bathroom stalls around the country. But the fact that the JUUL is odorless and easily concealable means more risk-averse teens—who might never mess with regular cigarettes—can be drawn to it. If nothing else, it does seem like the perfect vice for today's puritanical teen.

For its part, JUUL has made some minor concessions: Nicotine pod packs now have massive warning labels on them, and earlier this month, the company announced that they'd be manufacturing lower-nicotine models.

But that was never going to be enough to stop lawyers like Solotaroff from seeking damages (he said his client may or may not suffer from a bona fide addiction to nicotine). He's still trying to figure out what that might be worth, and a response to DP's case isn't due until September. In the meantime, the search for more clients continues: The attorney has even put up a note on a town-wide listserv looking for other kids who may have suffered as a result of vape addiction. Although he's gotten a handful of trolls, he said he's been in touch with others who fit the bill.

"It's not like anyone who's taken a hit of a JUUL needs to be in a lawsuit," he said. "It's affected some people way more than others. D.P. really had his life turned upside down. And I think there are probably a lot of kids like that."

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You Can Breathe Now, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Says She Isn't Going Anywhere

Brett Kavanaugh may be on track to turn the Supreme Court into a conservative stronghold, but worry not: Ruth Bader Ginsburg doesn't have any plans to give Trump her seat on the bench. The 85-year-old justice told a crowd in New York City Sunday that she is nowhere near retirement age yet, and wants to stick around on the Supreme Court until at least 2023, CNN reports.

"I'm now 85," Ginsburg said, following an off-Broadway production of The Originalist, a play about late Justice Antonin Scalia. "My senior colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was 90, so think I have about at least five more years."

And with that, progressives across the country smooched their RBG figurines, cranked up their copies of Notorious RBG in Song, and let out a collective sigh of relief, knowing that Ginsburg is committed to holding down the shrinking liberal side of the fort. There you have it, everybody. RBG won't be going the way of Justice Kennedy any time soon.

Of course, there's always the chance that extenuating circumstances or illness may cause her to end her time early, but Ginsburg doesn't sound like she's expecting anything like that—she's already hired law clerks through 2020, according to CNN. Plus, she's already beaten cancer and keeps in better shape than most normal people a quarter of her age, so you can all keep your organs in your bodies for the time being:

The eternally graceful justice also offered up a nice bit of wisdom for discouraged progressives during Sunday night's chat, after being asked by the play's director how she stays "hopeful" in a world where the ruler of the free world picks caps-lock fights with other countries over Twitter or whatever.

"My dear spouse would say that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle—it is the pendulum," Ginsburg said, speaking of her husband, Marty, who passed away in 2010. "And when it goes very far in one direction you can count on its swinging back."

At least we can count on having RBG around while we wait for that swing.

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