Hasta La Gadget!

Popular fighting game Skullgirls has been released on almost every other modern platform; now it’s time to play it on your smartphone. Originally teased last July, the free-to-play version of this fan-favorite title is slated to arrive in Spring 2017…

Negan is not happy.

“Walking Dead” seemed to find itself in a big pile of shirt after news broke that one of its products was being pulled from international retailer Primark for being “racist” and “offensive.”

The shirt in question shows a picture of Negan’s signature barbed wire baseball bat and reads, ”Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe,” which Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character says while picking out his victim in the Season 6 finale.

In “The Walking Dead,” the phrase is followed by “catch a tiger by his toe,” but some historical versions of the rhyme did include a racial slur, replacing “tiger” with the N-word. 

That’s why the controversy erupted. Primark reportedly received a complaint, and the shirt was pulled.

Now, Morgan is responding to the debacle, and he’s about as blunt as Negan.

“Holy crap people are stupid,” the actor wrote on Twitter.

Morgan’s sentiment was echoed online. 

“He’s not wrong,” said one Redditor, while another added, “If a shirt that says ‘Eeny meeny miny moe’ genuinely outrages you, you have bigger problems in life.”

Many Twitter users seemed to agree.

As we previously reported, the line isn’t meant to be a racist comment on the show. In an ironic twist, Negan actually says the rhyme in the comics so he won’t be perceived as racist. He wants his victim to be chosen at random. 

Still, as one Twitter user pointed out while criticizing the shirt design, the product didn’t even display “Walking Dead” on the front. It just had the graphic imagery and the rhyme. 

If Negan truly wanted to eliminate the possibility of appearing racist, he probably shouldn’t have used the line in the first place, but the “outrage” and confusion over it appears to come down to context.

As Entertainment Weekly points out, the Season 6 finale, in which the line was uttered, aired in April 2016. This discussion is happening almost a full year later.

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Steve Bannon appeared at CPAC after Darth Vader commanded that CPAC be moved out of the asteroid field so that it could send a clear transmission. The Trump administration is looking to beef up the private prison system, proving that the ??? in the plan, “1. Offer to profit off of recidivism 2. ??? 3. Profit” is actually just, “a Republican president.” And Kellyanne Conway said Donald Trump is tremendously “compassionate” toward women, making us wonder whether she is truly a Republican operative or a robot created by Upworthy to drive indignant viewers to its site. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Thursday, February 23rd, 2017:

BANNON SPEAKS! – It sure was kind of him to take a breather from having that captured child communicate with the Upside Down. Igor Bobic: “Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference alongside White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on Thursday, Bannon warned the situation between the administration and the fourth estate will only get worse. ‘If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you’re sadly mistaken,’ Bannon said. ‘Every day there is going to be a fight.’ Bannon denounced the ‘corporatist, globalist media’ for being ‘adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda’ the president is pushing. He repeated a reference to the media as the ‘opposition party,’ and bashed it for being ‘always wrong’ about the workings of the administration. Priebus agreed with the sentiment, adding that he hoped the relationship between the press and the White House would improve. ‘It’s going to get worse,’ Bannon said.” [HuffPost]

GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO DIE OF NEGLECT IN PRISON – Also good news for people who profit off of such deaths: it might finally be time to get that new range hood for your kitchen!  Ryan J. Reilly: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday withdrew an Obama-era Justice Department memo that set a goal of reducing and ultimately ending the Justice Department’s use of private prisons. In a one-page memo to the acting head of the Bureau of Prisons, Sessions wrote that the August 2016 memo by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates ‘changed long-standing policy and practice, and impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.’ A Justice Department spokesman said Sessions’ memo ‘directs the Bureau of Prisons to return to its previous approach to the use of private prisons,’ which would ‘restore BOP’s flexibility to manage the federal prison inmate population based on capacity needs.’” [HuffPost]

Read Zach Carter’s rundown of all the ways Donald Trump has drained the swamp in the month he’s been in office. And by “drain the swamp,” we mean “blindly serve Wall Street.”

GOP HEDGING SUPPORT FOR TRUMP – Luckily for House Republicans, gerrymandering means they can keep on sitting pretty right up until Trump declares a war on guns and/or cell phone belt clips. David Weigel: “This week’s congressional town halls have repeatedly found Republicans hedging their support for the new president’s agenda — and in many cases contradicting their past statements. Hostile questions put them on record criticizing some of the fights Trump has picked or pledging to protect policies such as the more popular elements of Obamacare. And voters got it all on tape, promising to keep hounding their lawmakers if they falter. ‘There’s more of a consensus among Republicans now that you’ve got to be more cautious with what you’re going to do,’ Grassley said after an event here, referring to efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. ‘That didn’t mean much to me in November and December. But it means a lot now.’ ... Other Republicans who held public events this week have pushed back against Trump’s characterization of protests and his attack on the media as an ‘enemy’ of Americans. ‘No American is another American’s enemy,’ [Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom] Cotton said Wednesday night. He also said: ‘I don’t care if anybody here is paid or not. You’re all Arkansans.’ Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) tweeted on Tuesday, referring to the protesters: ‘They are our fellow Americans with legitimate concerns. We need to stop acting so fragile.’” [WaPo]

Like HuffPost Hill? Then order Eliot’s book, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A-Z Guide To Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government

Does somebody keep forwarding you this newsletter? Get your own copy. It’s free! Sign up here. Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to eliot@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter – @HuffPostHill

MORE LIKE PAUL MANAFORK-IT-OVER, AMIRITE? –  Ken Vogel, David Stern and Josh Meyer: “A purported cyberhack of the daughter of political consultant Paul Manafort suggests that he was the victim of a blackmail attempt while he was serving as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chairman last summer. The undated communications, which are allegedly from the iPhone of Manafort’s daughter, include a text that appears to come from a Ukrainian parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, seeking to reach her father, in which he claims to have politically damaging information about both Manafort and Trump.” [Politico]

WHAT ARE THE VEGAS ODDS ON ALL OF US DYING – Like gold trim in his 9th guest bedroom, President Trump wants way more nuclear weapons in our arsenal than necessary. Steve Holland: “President Donald Trump said on Thursday he wants to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal to ensure it is at the ‘top of the pack’ saying the United States has fallen behind in its atomic weapons capacity. In a Reuters interview, Trump also said China could solve the national security challenge posed by North Korea ‘very easily if they want to,’ ratcheting up pressure on Beijing to exert more influence to rein in Pyongyang’s increasingly bellicose actions. In his first comments about the U.S. nuclear arsenal since taking office on Jan. 20, Trump said the United States has ‘fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity.’ ‘I am the first one that would like to see everybody – nobody have nukes, but we’re never going to fall behind any country even if it’s a friendly country, we’re never going to fall behind on nuclear power.’” [Reuters]

Standards! “White nationalist leader Richard Spencer was kicked out of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday. A spokesman for CPAC said that the unabashedly racist ‘alt-right’ leader was removed because organizers viewed him as ‘repugnant,’ according to NBC News. Security personnel approached Spencer after he spoke to reporters for approximately an hour in the halls of the National Gaylord Resort, the site of this year’s gathering of conservative activists and elected officials.” [HuffPost’s Igor Bobic]

GOOD NEWS: WE’RE NOT INVADING OURSELVES – What’s the over-under on Trump suggesting we need a military solution to acquiring a White House Christmas tree? Elise Foley: “Hours after President Donald Trump said that recent immigration enforcement efforts were ‘a military operation,’ Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly assured Mexican officials and the public that they were not. The secretary, a retired general, said emphatically that the military forces would not carry out deportation efforts, which are a law enforcement priority. ‘There will be no ― repeat, no ― use of military forces in immigration operations. None,’ Kelly said during a press conference after he and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with Mexican officials in Mexico City. ‘Yes, we’ll approach this operation systematically, in an organized way, in a results-oriented way, in an operational way, in a human dignity way,’ Kelly continued. ‘This is the way great militaries do business…. It is also the way great legal organizations ― police and federal police ― do business.’” [HuffPost]

DONALD TRUMP: COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF – From S.V. Date’s rundown of the disastrous SEAL mission that left both civilians and SEALs dead: “As a team of elite U.S. commandos found themselves under unexpectedly heavy fire in a remote Yemeni village last month, eight time zones away, their commander in chief was not in the Situation Room. It’s unclear what he, personally, was doing. But his Twitter account was busy promoting an upcoming appearance on the Christian Broadcasting Network. ‘I will be interviewed by @TheBrodyFile on @CBNNews tonight at 11pm. Enjoy!’ read a tweet from President Donald Trump’s personal account on Saturday, Jan. 28. Whether it was Trump himself or an aide who sent out that tweet at 5:50 p.m. ― about half an hour into a firefight that cost a Navy SEAL his life ― cannot be determined from the actual tweets, and the White House isn’t saying. Likewise, it’s not clear who deleted the tweet some 20 minutes later, or why the new president, just a week on the job, chose not to directly monitor the first high-risk military operation on his watch.” [HuffPost]

Alan Colmes, who for years was Fox News’ token liberal, has died. It’s unclear whether Sean Hannity will show up to the memorial service to yell at his casket.

KELLYANNE CONWAY: NATIONAL TREASURE – She was the “Hunger Games” villain that really could’ve provided that series the umami it sorely lacked. Amanda Terkel: “If you were hoping to hear more from Kellyanne Conway about the inner workings of the White House, what policies President Donald Trump might be pursuing or even whether things are running smoothly in the administration, you would have been sorely disappointed Thursday morning.  Conway, a top aide to the president, took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference and talked instead about how wonderful Trump is ― especially when it comes to his treatment of women. ‘Donald Trump is someone who is not fully understood for how compassionate and what a great boss he is to women,’ Conway told the conservative crowd Thursday.” [HuffPost]

Kick out your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free: “An undocumented woman in desperate need of brain surgery has been forcibly removed from a Texas hospital — and her relatives in New York fear she could lose her life, a family representative said early Thursday…. Earlier this month, Beltran-Hernandez, 26, began complaining about severe headaches, nosebleeds and memory loss. Last week, she collapsed and was subsequently taken to a hospital. Doctors diagnosed her with a brain tumor and determined that she needed surgery. But Zuniga told The News that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents forcibly removed Beltran-Hernandez from the Huguley Hospital in Fort Worth on Wednesday evening.” [New York Daily News’ Chris Sommerfeldt]

TED CRUZ FORESEES DEATH – *Stephen Breyer walking out of a Tastee Freez licking a soft serve, sees Ted Cruz, drops cone, scampers away* Marina Fang: “Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday predicted that President Donald Trump will get another chance to nominate a conservative Supreme Court justice as soon as ‘this summer.’ Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservatives, the Texas Republican did not specify the circumstances. ‘I think we’ll have another Supreme Court vacancy this summer,’ Cruz said. ‘If that happens, as much as the left is crazy now, they will go full Armageddon meltdown,’ he said.” [HuffPost]

We all know what his dad did to JFK.

LOL LOL LOL – You just know Boehner is loving every minute of Paul Ryan’s struggles. Darius Tahir: “Former House Speaker John Boehner predicted on Thursday that a full repeal and replace of Obamacare is ‘not going to happen.’ Boehner, who resigned in 2015 amid unrest among conservatives, said at an Orlando health care conference that the idea that a repeal-and-replace plan would blitz through Congress is just ‘happy talk.’ … ‘Republicans never ever agree on health care.’ ‘Most of the framework of the Affordable Care Act…that’s going to be there,’ Boehner concluded.” [Politico]

BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR – Here’s a cockatoo that thinks it’s a dog.

ASSHOLE GETS COMEUPPANCE ON CAMERA – Savor it. “A man was taken off a United flight headed to Houston after making racist remarks towards passengers on Saturday. According to United Airlines, the incident happened on Flight 1118 as passengers were boarding and a man asked a couple if they had a bomb in their bag…. ‘The person ahead us turned around and asked where my boyfriend was from; my boyfriend said it’s none of your business,’ she said. ‘At that point he said all illegals and all foreigners and need to leave the country.’” [KHOU]

COMFORT FOOD

– What a middle finger sounds like as a piece of music.

– A minute-by-minute recap of the 1997 Oscars.

– What’s leaving Netflix in March.

TWITTERAMA

@timothypmurphy: Here in the failing city of Atlanta, which looks like Sherman only just rolled through, to see if we’ll ever get a new DNC chair.

@emmaroller: when tweeting about Tom Cotton, please keep in mind he eats birthday cake almost every day

@SimonMaloy: the “paid protester” stuff is dumb but there are worse investments than hiring people to follow Tom Cotton around and yell at him

Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffingtonpost.com)

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WASHINGTON ― With TV’s Dog the Bounty Hunter looking on from the front row, a civil rights attorney representing an indigent Georgia man appeared before a federal appeals court Thursday in a case that could affect the future of the multibillion-dollar bail bond industry ― and the constitutional rights of people who are legally presumed innocent but can’t afford to purchase their freedom.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit heard oral arguments in Atlanta on Thursday in the case of Maurice Walker v. City of Calhoun. Walker, a 54-year-old with a serious mental health disorder, lived with his sister and was receiving about $530 in Social Security disability payments per month when he was arrested in Calhoun, Georgia, on Sept. 3, 2015, for walking while drunk.

Taken to Gordon County Jail, Walker was told he would not be released unless he came up with $160 in cash ― the amount that Calhoun’s bail schedule set for all people arrested as pedestrians under the influence, regardless of their financial circumstances.

Deprived of his medication and forced to spend 23 hours a day in his cell, Walker was not scheduled to appear before a judge until 11 days after his arrest. But D.C.-based civil rights attorneys and lawyers with the Southern Center for Human Rights intervened, filing a lawsuit on Walker’s behalf while he was still in custody. The suit described Calhoun’s preset bail system as a “money-based post-arrest detention scheme” that discriminated against the poor.

Last year, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against Calhoun and ruled that “any bail or bond scheme that mandates payment of pre-fixed amounts for different offenses to obtain pretrial release, without any consideration of indigence or other factors, violates the Equal Protection Clause.”

The class action suit is about much more than just Walker and the city of Calhoun, which made changes to its bail practices following the litigation. Walker v. Calhoun is one of several cases across the nation challenging the practice of money bail, many of them filed by Alec Karakatsanis, now of the organization Civil Rights Corps, who has been waging a battle against bail policies that have a disparate impact on the poor. 

When pretrial defendants accused of minor offenses are locked up for even a short period of time, it can have severe consequences. They can lose their jobs, their housing and the connections that give their lives stability. Sometimes, they can lose their lives. As part of an extensive investigation of jail deaths across the United States, The Huffington Post reported last year on the death of Mark Goodrum, 60-year-old stroke victim who died in a troubled jail in Virginia (which is now under federal investigation).

Charged with smoking marijuana in his apartment, and after missing a court date while he was ill, Goodrum was held on $1,000 bond, meaning he’d need about $100 in cash to purchase a commercial bail bond. Instead, he died in the jail’s custody a month after his arrest. Goodrum’s death was tragic but not unique: Dozens of people accused of similar low-level offenses died behind bars over the course of the year.

Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department filed an amicus brief in the Walker case stating that when bail practices “do not account for indigence,” they result in “the unnecessary incarceration of numerous individuals who are presumed innocent.” Other amicus briefs in the Walker case calling fixed-money bail systems unconstitutional were filed by the Pretrial Justice Institute and the American Bar Association.

The case was heard on Thursday by Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee; Judge Adalberto Jordan, a Barack Obama appointee; and Judge Bobby L. Baldock, a Ronald Reagan appointee who is visiting from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. They’ll decide whether the lower court erred by issuing a preliminary injunction that, until major changes were made, banned the town from holding anyone charged with a misdemeanor.

Former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, a widely respected conservative attorney known for (unsuccessfully) arguing before the Supreme Court in 2013 that the Defense of Marriage Act was constitutional, represented the American Bail Coalition, a trade association for the bail bond industry. For-profit bail bondsmen in the U.S. handle $14 billion in bonds each year, raking in $2 billion in annual revenue, according to a 2012 report by the Justice Policy Institute. A handful of large insurance firms are responsible for underwriting the majority of these companies, and have mounted an aggressive lobbying campaign to protect the industry’s bottom line.

Clement entered an amicus brief in the case, but did not appear before the court on Thursday. However, in a separate case in Maryland, Clement recently argued that the U.S. Constitution “does not include a right to affordable bail in every case,” and that pretrial deprivation “is not a punishment.” He also said the Constitution “doesn’t guarantee everyone the means of being able to post the bail,” only that it guarantees the option. (Maryland’s highest court ultimately reached a compromise this month that did not abolish money bail, but rather told judges to look for alternative ways to make sure defendants show up at future court appearances.)

The battle over bail certainly hasn’t broken down along straight party lines, and many conservatives support bail reform. In New Jersey, which recently underwent a massive reform to its pretrial detention and bail system, Gov. Chris Christie (R) defended the new practices and accused the bail bond industry of posting “ridiculous” propaganda “crap” about the reforms failing.

“The bail bonds community has made a fortune over the years predominantly on the backs of poor people in New Jersey,” Christie said in a radio interview. “We are now stopping them from doing it and they’re pissed. Too bad. You shouldn’t be making money off the poor that way.”

And the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, filed an amicus brief in the Walker case arguing that the court’s decision to issue a preliminary injunction against Calhoun was supported by “nearly a millennium of Anglo-American constitutional and common law.” The institute asserted that the right to pretrial liberty has been a procedural right since “time immemorial,” even before the Magna Carta was put in place more than 800 years ago. 

In other parts of the world, paying a person’s bond in exchange for money is the equivalent of obstruction of justice. Today, just one other country in the entire world ― the Philippines ― has a commercial bail bond industry similar to that which exists in the United States.

But Clement, in his brief on behalf of the bail industry in the Walker case, argued that bail is a “well-founded tradition” that has been around since the nation’s birth. His brief called the lawsuit “a frontal attack” on the bail system, and argued that the commercial bail bond industry “allows individuals of all financial means to leverage their social networks and community ties to obtain pretrial release.”

As Clement defends the bail industry in court, two of the most famous people associated with the bail industry ― Duane Chapman, aka Dog the Bounty Hunter, and his wife, Beth ― are aiding a public relations campaign to save the bail industry. Duane Chapman called the battle over the future of bail a “two-front war” involving both litigation and legislation. “This is an all-out assault by the criminal lobby to change a 200 year old practice of cash bail,” he said in a statement about attending oral arguments in the case.

Beth Chapman, who last year was elected president of the Professional Bail Agents of the United States, said the bail industry “provides a service to the government and helps ensure the public’s safety at no cost to the taxpayers.” In reality, though, jailing people is expensive, and U.S. taxpayers end up footing the bill. A report published last month found that pretrial incarceration costs $14 billion a year, with much of that money going to process and house lower-risk defendants who are only locked up because they can’t afford bail.

Chapman said the lawyers challenging cash bail systems are “social justice lackeys” whose “only goal is to make it easier for the bad guys to get out of jail with no repercussion and no deterrent.”

As the bail industry and civil rights advocates await the federal appeals court decision, there’s another court battle shaping up in Texas next month. Harris County, which has an understaffed jail where at least 12 inmates died over the course of a single year, is facing a lawsuit from Civil Rights Corps alleging that its bail system is unconstitutional.

A lawyer for Harris County actually argued earlier this month that some people were in jail because they wanted to be there. The federal judge didn’t buy it.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Amazon proudly announced today it’s adding its 10,000th skill to the Echo, the company’s artificially intelligent speaker. About a year ago, I wrote a love letter to my Echo praising it as the ultimate gadget for a lazy stoner. The prospect of greatness seemed so obvious. The speaker was quickly getting smarter, and…

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