Fire Walk With Me

I lived in Evanston, Illinois and learned about the warm weather massacres in Chicago that happen every spring break or beginning of summer where dozens of high school kids get shot within matters of hours. And how nobody seemed to care. Living in New Orleans and near Chicago has left me jaded to what America prioritizes or chooses to ignore.

So I shouldn’t be surprised that the Mother’s Day Parade shooting has largely been forgotten. On Sunday, shots were fired into a crowd during a parade in the New Orleans 7th ward. Police said they saw three suspects running from the scene.

This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free.

So why am I allowed to go outside? Where’s the city quarantine or FBI and Homeland Security presence for this act of “terrorism”?

Because this is an act of domestic terrorism right? Just because the alleged shooter was wearing a white tee and jeans does that suddenly make the shooting a gang-related affair? And we all know how irrelevant gang-related shootings are in America. The Mother’s Day shooting is so irrelevant that politicians haven’t even bothered to mention it to further their anti-gun agendas. If the shootings aren’t even important enough for politicians to spin, then it’s truly reached a black hole of irrelevance.

Did I mention the shooter is still on the loose? I have? Just checking. Police have released photos and video of one of the suspects, but he is still at large.

What’s it going to take, America? I’m too angry to talk about this myself, so here’s The New Yorker:

After Sandy Hook, after twenty children were shot and killed at a place where they should have been safe from all harm, there was some optimism among supporters of gun control: perhaps now, finally, both Democrats and Republicans could see the light—and the suffering—and revive the assault-weapons ban. It was a futile hope.

Less than a week after Adam Lanza shot up an elementary school, it was already basically clear that an assault-weapons ban could not pass Congress—that it probably couldn’t even get through the Democratic-controlled Senate, never mind the House. So it was hardly a surprise when, three months later, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the ban would be removed from a larger gun-control package that is making its way through the upper chamber and given a separate vote that it will not survive. The scale of the defeat suffered by the ban’s supporters, though, is shocking. This wasn’t a close call; it was a body blow.

Those gun-control supporters who tend toward the glass-half-full side of things can reasonably view this as Feinstein et. al realizing that the real goal of the post-Newtown anti-gun push was a law making background checks universal—that the ban was just a sacrifice offered up to ease that law’s path through Congress—and letting any Democrats nervous about the backlash against a pro-ban vote off the hook.

There’s another way to interpret Reid’s vote count, though. Even after Tucson, and Aurora, and Sandy Hook, the N.R.A. won. Even with polls showing a majority of the country in favor of a ban and the President publicly behind it, more than a quarter of the Senate’s Democratic caucus would have voted against it, and there may not be any Senate Republicans who would have voted for it. Three months ago, there were pro-gun senators—including Reid—who were making noises about coming around on assault weapons. To a man, it appears, they have reconsidered.

10. Taxi Driver - Increased hours on the road make accidents more likely.

9. Electrical Power Line Workers/Adjusters - Line workers work with high-voltage electricity at great heights -you do the math

8. Truck Drivers - Same as taxi drivers, with the added labor of delivering heavy cargo

7. Farmers and Ranchers - heavy equipment, large animals, and (increasingly) chemical hazards

6. Structural Iron and Steel Workers - physically demanding work, at great heights, in unfinished buildings during all kinds of weather hazards

5. Roofers - pitched roofs are super-easy to fall off of, y’all

4. Trash and Recyclable material collectors - all the dangers of truck drivers+taxi drivers, plus potentially hazardous materials

3. Aircraft pilots - Including small aircraft, helicopters, and rescue vehicles.

2. Logging workers - working in isolated areas, sometimes at great heights and in hazardous weather conditions

1. Fishers - motorized nets and fishing lines are pretty hazardous, plus boat-related accidents including falling overboard

The best-paid of these jobs are the pilots, who average $92,060 per year.

The lowest-paid of these jobs are Taxi Drivers, at an average $22,440 a year ($10.79 an hour) and Trash/Recyclers, at 22,560 a year ($10.85 per hour) and the Fishers, who get paid 25,590 a year ($12.30 an hour).

Most of the people doing our most dangerous jobs are also among the lowest-paid workers in the country. Several of these jobs are below the poverty line for a family of four (which is currently $23,050).

The Payroll tax cut, even in the current Senate compromise bill, is not being extended for 2013. 

Congress was able to pass legislation to keep broader middle class income taxes from rising. But workers will still have to pay at least 2% more in payroll taxes.

That’s because the government had temporarily lowered the payroll tax rate in 2011 to 4.2% from 6.2%, in an effort to keep more cash in the pockets of Americans and provide a boost to the economy. The tax cut, which applies on the first $113,700 in annual earnings, expired on Monday.

Now most of the country’s 160 million workers will see smaller paychecks. No one is expecting the payroll tax cut to be extended.

Monthly paychecks will have $50 less for those earning $30,000 annually, and will shave off $189.50 for those with incomes totaling $113,700.

well, fuck.

There are several revealing lessons about this media swooning for Petraeus even as he exits from a scandal that would normally send them into tittering delight. First, military worship is the central religion of America’s political and media culture. The military is by far the most respected and beloved institution among the US population - a dangerous fact in any democracy - and, even assuming they wanted to (which they don’t), our brave denizens of establishment journalism are petrified of running afoul of that kind of popular sentiment.

…

Yet US journalists - whose ostensible role is to be adversarial to powerful and secretive political institutions (which includes, first and foremost, the National Security State) - are the most pious high priests of this national religion. John Parker, former military reporter and fellow of the University of Maryland Knight Center for Specialized Journalism-Military Reporting, wrote an extraordinarily good letter back in 2010 regarding why leading Pentagon reporters were so angry at WikiLeaks for revealing government secrets: because they identify with the military to the point of uncritical adoration:

“The career trend of too many Pentagon journalists typically arrives at the same vanishing point: Over time they are co-opted by a combination of awe - interacting so closely with the most powerfully romanticized force of violence in the history of humanity - and the admirable and seductive allure of the sharp, amazingly focused demeanor of highly trained military minds. Top military officers have their s*** together and it’s personally humbling for reporters who’ve never served to witness that kind of impeccable competence. These unspoken factors, not to mention the inner pull of reporters’ innate patriotism, have lured otherwise smart journalists to abandon – justifiably in their minds – their professional obligation to treat all sources equally and skeptically… .

“Pentagon journalists and informed members of the public would benefit from watching ‘The Selling of the Pentagon’, a 1971 documentary. It details how, in the height of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon sophisticatedly used taxpayer money against taxpayers in an effort to sway their opinions toward the Pentagon’s desires for unlimited war. Forty years later, the techniques of shaping public opinion via media has evolved exponentially. It has reached the point where flipping major journalists is a matter of painting in their personal numbers.”

That is what makes this media worship of All Things Military not only creepy to behold, but downright dangerous.

Mitt Romney’s loss on Tuesday laid bare a Republican demographic problem that, if not addressed, could transform the GOP into a permanent minority party.

Romney dominated among white voters, who made up 72 percent of the electorate: He won that group by 20 percentage points, according to thenational exit poll. But he was crushed among Latinos, who broke for President Obama 71 percent to 27 percent.

The former group is shrinking as a portion of the electorate. In 1988,they were 85 percent of all voters. By the year 2000, that was down to 81 percent. It’s fallen nine more points since them. The Latino population, meanwhile, is growing at a staggering pace: Latinos accounted for more than half of the U.S. population increase between 2000 and 2010,according to the 2010 census. The black and Asian vote, which also broke overwhelmingly for the president, is also growing. Blacks were 13 percent of the electorate this year, up from 10 percent in 1988; Asians have risen from one percent of the electorate to three percent over the past two decades.

It’s a demographic reality that already has some Republicans calling for a new course in the wake of Romney’s defeat.

“The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it, and Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

This is classic Republican Party post-Nixon.

Reconsider strategy, not your platform.

Come up with novel candidates, not novel ideas.

See, their idea of how to deal with the demographic reality of America today is to come up with different talking heads to say the same old shit to new groups. Get more black and latino candidates to talk about why affirmative action is bad and immigration should be super-difficult. They will never consider changing their basic set of ideas, which is that rich old white guys should continue to run everything via big business and big money, and that human rights should be parceled out according to their personal religious preferences. They’re just gonna look for new ways to sell it.

I don’t expect them to figure this out anytime soon. Especially as long as guys like Karl Rove are still around. Expect more of the same in 2016, to diminishing returns.