MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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In the News
@ TMZ.com, Oct. 2, 12:00pm PDT
UPDATE:
1:35 PM PT -- Sources tell us at 10:30 Monday morning a chaplain was called to Tom's hospital room. We're told the family has a do not resuscitate order on Tom. The singer is not expected to live throughout the day, but he's still clinging to life. A report that the LAPD confirmed the singer's death is inaccurate -- the L.A. County Sheriff's Dept. handled the emergency.
12:30 PM PT -- We're told after Petty got to the hospital he had no brain activity and a decision was made to pull life support.
__________________________________________________________________
Tom Petty was rushed to the hospital Sunday night after he was found unconscious, not breathing and in full cardiac arrest ... law enforcement sources tell TMZ [....]
By Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman & Adam Entous @ WashingtonPost.com, 1 hour ago
- Associates of President Trump and his company have turned over documents to investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.
- The episodes include an invitation for a top Trump lawyer to attend a major economic conference in Russia just weeks before Donald Trump accepted the GOP presidential nomination. The other was a proposal for a Moscow construction project. Both invitations were rejected.
[....] Paddock had no history of criminality that would raise red flags, police said.
“All of the checks that we have been able to do other than a routine traffic violation here in Nevada and nationwide working with our local FBI partners have been able to find no derogatory history on that individual,” Undersheriff Kevin McMahill said. “It’s one of those really sad, tragic things that a man that’s 64 years old that really had no other reason that we can find at least in his history here to go out and wound that many people.”
Eric Paddock, the suspect’s brother who lives in Orange County, Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel: “We are completely dumbfounded. We can’t understand what happened.” [....]
According to USA Today, Paddock bought his current residence in Mesquite, about 80 miles from Vegas, in 2015. The Sun City Mesquite senior complex features 1,400 homes, an 18-hole golf course, swimming pools and a recreation center.
Paddock owned two airplanes and had a private pilot’s license, according to public records. Meanwhile police had located his companion, Marilou Danley, “a person of interest,” and cleared her of involvement, according to reports. [....]
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‘Appalling’ idea would target profit-shifting to tax havens
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One word -- ‘global’ -- signals companies may keep some leeway
By Lynnley Browning @ Bloomberg News, Oct. 2
[....] On the last page of a nine-page tax plan that calls for slashing business rates, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans proposed a little-noticed, brand-new tax that may hit companies like Apple Inc. and Pfizer Inc.
It’s contained in one sentence: “To prevent companies from shifting profits to tax havens, the framework includes rules to protect the U.S. tax base by taxing at a reduced rate and on a global basis the foreign profits of U.S. multinational corporations.” The rate and formula aren’t specified, but that lone sentence carries multibillion-dollar implications for multinationals. Their lobbyists are noticing.
Proposing a new tax on U.S. companies’ foreign profits “is appalling,” said Ken Kies of Federal Policy Group, whose clients include General Electric Co. and Microsoft Corp. “The whole point of this tax reform was to make U.S. corporations more competitive. It’s going to do the opposite.” [....]
A pioneer of cultural studies, Hall showed a generation how to meld identity and Marxism.
By Jessica Loudis @ NewRepublic.com, Sept. 27
[....] Hall took a more expansive view of popular culture than the previous generations of British leftists, who tended to deride it as a monolithic means by which the working-classes were subjected to upper-class hegemony. He saw pop culture as a field of struggle, which held the potential to bring about positive change, rather than simply oppression. As his thinking evolved, he came to insist on a larger vision of politics, one that ventured beyond traditional actors and institutions into more subjective realms. Politics, he argued, was not simply a matter of elections: Politics was everywhere, present in everything from soccer games to soap operas. “The conditions of existence,” he once remarked in an interview are “cultural, political and economic”—in that order [....]
With a strong Senate candidate and an extremist Republican opponent, the party is wrestling with how much support to provide in the deep-red state.
By Graham Vyse @ NewRepublic.com, Sept. 29
Excerpt has my underlining, of what I think it a very interesting analytic point as to the current climate, seems to go for both parties in many cases:
[....] This raises a familiar conundrum for the Democratic Party as it tries to compete in conservative territory under President Donald Trump: Making it competitive will require heavy investment from outside Alabama, where the state party is weak. But that investment will further nationalize the campaign when Jones desperately needs to be seen as independent of the national party. “Outside of about ten states along the Acela Corridor and the West Coast, the Democratic brand is mostly lousy,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “It’s an unfortunate fact of political life that if you have a ‘D’ next to your name in most places in the country you will pay a price as a candidate.”
Kessler, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, acknowledged that this dynamic would hold whether or not Jones received support from the party, and yet he proposed that Jones “convince voters that he’s a different type of Democrat.” “If I were him I wouldn’t take Party money and I’d make a show of it,” Kessler said. “He should be able to raise enough money from grassroots support to finance his campaign anyway. The winner in any contested race is the candidate who seems most independent from their party.” [....]
By Joby Warrick @ WashingtonPost.com, Oct. 1
Last August, a secret message was passed from Washington to Cairo warning about a mysterious vessel steaming toward the Suez Canal. The bulk freighter named Jie Shun was flying Cambodian colors but had sailed from North Korea, the warning said, with a North Korean crew and an unknown cargo shrouded by heavy tarps.
Armed with this tip, customs agents were waiting when the ship entered Egyptian waters. They swarmed the vessel and discovered, concealed under bins of iron ore, a cache of more than 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades. It was, as a United Nations report later concluded, the “largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
[....] A U.N. investigation uncovered a complex arrangement in which Egyptian business executives ordered millions of dollars worth of North Korean rockets for the country’s military while also taking pains to keep the transaction hidden, according to U.S. officials and Western diplomats familiar with the findings. The incident, many details of which were never publicly revealed, prompted the latest in a series of intense, if private, U.S. complaints over Egyptian efforts to obtain banned military hardware from Pyongyang, the officials said.
It also shed light on a little-understood global arms trade that has become an increasingly vital financial lifeline for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the wake of unprecedented economic sanctions [....]
By Michael S. Rosenwald @ WashingtonPost.com, Oct. 1
Johnnie Cochran is dead.
Marcia Clark writes murder mysteries.
Judge Lance Ito is retired.
And F. Lee Bailey, the famed criminal defense attorney, is flat broke [....]
I suppose liberals who find my views distasteful if not worse would use the title See Hal is a Conservative.
By Robert Costa @ WashingtonPost.com, Sept. 30
The next Republican revolution began last week on a bright blue bus parked at a nighttime rally in Montgomery, Ala., days before a firebrand GOP candidate won the state’s Senate primary.
But unlike previous Republican revolutionaries, the hard-line figures who stepped out to cheers did not want to yank the party to the right on age-old issues such as taxes or spending. They wanted to gut it and leave its establishment smashed.
Fury infused these insurgents’ raw remarks as did a common theme: The Republican Party has failed its voters, and a national cleansing is needed in the coming year, regardless of whether President Trump is on board.
Longtime Republicans see a charged civil war on the horizon [.....]
By Lydia DePillis & Collin Easton @ HoustonChronicle.com/Business, Sept. 29
[...] "It's just a little hard to fathom how you go from the fastest-growing neighborhood in America," Navissi said, "to the properties being worth 20 percent of what they used to be."
Hurricane Harvey abruptly changed the fortunes of companies and industries across metropolitan Houston, leaving some that were prospering, such as Cafe Benedicte, struggling to survive, and others that were slumping, such as car dealers, with jolts of new business. In one of the ironies of economics, the Houston economy is likely to get a boost despite the widespread destruction and disruptions, as tens of billions of dollars in federal disaster relief and insurance payouts pour into the region.
Overall, analysts predict that Harvey won't significantly alter Houston's long-term growth trajectory. A survey of Gulf Coast retailers and manufacturers by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that 67 percent were only shut down for a few days, and one in four said they expected an increase in business as a result of the storm [.....]
Their "related" links (warning, they only allow 3 articles per month to non-subscribers):
By Nate Silver @ FiveThirtyEight.com, Sept. 30
His outburst on Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico shows that not everything is a clever ploy to rally his base.
I like NCD's recent interpretation as well.
Sometimes crazy is just crazy and not evil genius. Or as Silver puts it, "impulsive and purely emotional."
By Herman Wong & Rachel Chason @ WashingtonPost.com, Sept. 29, 6:53 pm
Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria had an important message for U.S. Air Force Academy cadets at a moment of crisis.
Five black cadet candidates at the academy’s preparatory school in Colorado Springs had found racial slurs written on the message boards on their doors. Silveria, who took over as the school’s superintendent in August, urged cadets to reach for their phones. “I want you to videotape this so you have it, so you can use it — so that we all have the moral courage together,” he said, surrounded by 1,500 of the academy’s faculty, administrators and athletic coaches. “If you can’t treat someone with dignity and respect, get out."
Silveria’s forceful denunciation has been heard far beyond the walls of the academy in Colorado, introducing the veteran officer to a national audience. “I wanted to have a direct conversation with them about the power of diversity,” Silveria told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on Friday, referring to the cadets. “Ultimately, these men and women are going to be lieutenants in the United States Air Force.” [....]
Ah, so there's a new way to lose your beauty pageant crown. Points for originality.
Twitterverse has been saying this forever, but like the tree in the forest, if a mainstream news outlet didn't hear it, it didn't exist