I noted yesterday that high profile GOP consultant Benjamin Spark (worked for Romney, Ryan, Walker and many others) signed an agreement with his new fiance for her to be his “slave and property” and do various BDSM-like things around the house. But things broke down when he demanded she have sex with other men, bound and blindfolded, while he watched. She said no. He attacked her. And when the cops showed up, he fled the state, apparently absconding to Texas.

There’s a warrant for his arrest in Nevada. So I figured we’d hear some time yesterday or today that he’d been picked up in Texas. But so far nothing. No updates or news reports I can find. Has he been arrested yet? Have you seen him? Has he enrolled a new woman as his sex slave in Texas? In all seriousness, if you see any updates on Sparks’ whereabouts or arrest, please let me know.

On a visit to the CIA President Trump got irked that agents paused to wait for a targeted terrorist to leave his house before launching the attack so that his family wouldn’t be killed.

35 year old Benjamin Sparks, a prominent Republican political consultant who has worked for Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Scott Walker among others, was engaged to an unnamed woman. Sparks had his fiance sign a five page contract in which she agreed to be his “slave and property,” shortly after they started dating last November. This involved kneeling, looking at the ground while she spoke to him, being nude at all time, engaging in sex on demand at any time and wearing a collar. At the end of March he began to demand that she have sex with other men, while bound and blindfolded, while he watched. She refused. That led to a fight in which he allegedly attacked her. Sparks himself then called the police and then fled the scene. He apparently absconded to Texas where he is currently hiding out while there is a warrant for his arrest in Nevada.

We’ve rebranded our Sum Ups as ‘Weekly Primers’. In case you missed it yesterday, here’s our Weekly Primer on the Battle for Obamacare, every significant development on the health care policy front this week.

The audio is poor. But here’s President Trump with what I believe are his first public comments on the Stormy Daniels story. Key thing: he says he didn’t know anything about the payment and didn’t know where the money came from.

Audio is pretty poor. But here's Trump saying he didn't know anything about the $130k to Stormy Daniels. pic.twitter.com/QBBaugUTTO

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 5, 2018

Stormy Daniels’ lawyer makes the obvious point. This would seem to strengthen Daniels’ case since it makes it even harder to see how President Trump was a party to the agreement. More significantly, there’s a non-trivial chance that President Trump will eventually have to answer this question under oath.

InsideEPA, an EPA trade sheet, reports that Scott Pruitt’s downfall is the work of disgraced former White House aide Rob Porter, who leaked damaging information about Pruitt to retaliate against a former girlfriend who told White House officials about Porter’s history of domestic violence. Read More

Trump claims that Central American immigration ‘caravan’ is marauding band of rapists.

Trump claims immigration ‘caravan’ is lumbering group of rapists. “Yesterday it came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before. They don’t want to mention that.” pic.twitter.com/MU7wEZMvAP

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 5, 2018

In fact in many cases, they’re traveling in groups because immigrants and asylum seekers are often victims of rape and theft.

For more than a year, Facebook has faced a rolling public relations debacle. Part of this is the American public’s shifting attitudes toward Big Tech and platforms in general. But the driving problem has been the way the platform was tied up with and perhaps implicated in Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election. Users’ trust in the platform has been shaken, politicians are threatening scrutiny and possible regulation, and there’s even a campaign to get people to delete their Facebook accounts. All of this is widely known and we hear more about it every day. But most users, most people in tech and also Wall Street (which is the source of Facebook’s gargantuan valuation) don’t yet get the full picture. We know about Facebook’s reputational crisis. But people aren’t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook’s core business model, its core advertising business.

Facebook is fundamentally an advertising business. Almost all of the company’s revenue comes from advertising that it targets with unparalleled efficiency to its billions of users. In a media world in which advertising rates face almost universal downward pressure, Facebook’s rates have consistently risen. Monopoly power may drive some of that growth. But the key driver is efficiency. If old-fashioned advertising shows my advertisement to 100 people for every actual buyer and other digital platforms show it to 30 people and Facebook shows it to 5 people, Facebook’s ads are just worth a lot more.

As long as the rates bear some relationship to that efficiency (those numbers above are just for illustration), I’ll be happy to pay it. Because it’s objectively worth more. Indeed, as the prices have gone up, Facebook has actually gotten more efficient. As one digital ad agency executive recently told me, even if Facebook jacked up the prices a lot more, his firm would likely keep using them just as much because on this cost to efficiency basis it’s still cheap. This is the basis of Facebook’s astronomical market capitalization which today rates at over $450 billion, even after some recent reverses. Read More

We just released a new “Extra” edition of The Josh Marshall Podcast where I talk to comedy writer Nell Scovell about #MeToo, equality in Hollywood, her new book Just the Funny Parts and what it’s like being a female comedy writer in the all dudes writers room in Late Night or Hollwood. Listen and please subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.

It sounds like some of Bill O’Reilly’s forest of NDAs may not be long for this world.