SHAKEUP AT THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS; JIM RICH EXITS DAILY NEWS; ARTHUR BROWNE IS NEW EIC:
During his brief editorship, Rich pushed the News into the national conversation with strong, crusading front pages on divisive issues like gun control and the presidential campaigns. But the paper continues to struggle with print circulation and revenue declines that have prompted significant downsizings over the past several years.
Hey, when did Fox Butterfield start working for the Politico?
NAKED, UNATTRACTIVE TRUMP STATUES: HILARIOUS!
Naked unattractive Hillary statue: Obscene! An insult to women! And note the violent response: “The statue was up for less than three hours before an enraged woman toppled it over and started yelling at the statue’s creator.”
RON RADOSH: In Defense of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature—He Deserves it!
Radosh knew Dylan as a young man (in-between taking banjo lessons from Pete Seeger himself, before Ron joined the Dark Side of the Force). Read the whole thing.
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND INFURIATE PEOPLE. Trump’s Wisconsin strategy: Burn it all down.
“There’s no question, anytime Donald Trump takes after Paul Ryan, it just makes the people in Wisconsin a little more angry at him,” said Brandon Scholz, a longtime GOP operative who runs a governmental and public affairs shop in Madison.
Trump has never led a poll in Wisconsin during the general election, according to RealClearPolitics, and a Marquette Law School poll last week found him trailing Clinton by 7 percentage points — a departure from signs in September that he was closing the gap with Clinton.
In southeastern Wisconsin, home to the Milwaukee suburbs and some of the state’s most populous, heavily Republican counties, Clinton led Trump by just 42 percent to 40 percent, according to that October poll. In three of those deep-red counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington, known as the “WOW counties” — Trump led Clinton by only 39 to 37 percent.
“He doesn’t have a prayer if he can’t do well in those Republican counties, the WOW counties outside Milwaukee,” Scholz said. “Those are ground zero for Republicans. If you intend to … do well in Wisconsin, you’ve got to take those three counties with 70, 80 percent of the vote.”
It’s a sharp decline from Mitt Romney’s performance last cycle.
2016 isn’t going nearly as well as I’d hoped.
STATE DEPARTMENT PROTECTING HILLARY: Ecuador cut off Assange’s internet at U.S. request, WikiLeaks says.
IN THE MAIL: From Jeb Kinnison, Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations.
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NEWS YOU CAN USE: No, Christians Who Vote Trump Are Not Guilty by Association.
THE 2016 ELECTION: It has a tabloid simplicity.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1258.
HE WHO CONTROLS THE PAST… Rosenberg Lies Never Cease.
Robert and Michael Meeropol (they took the surname of their adoptive parents), just 6 and 10 years old when their birth parents went to the electric chair, are now old men, and they have campaigned for decades to clear Julius and Ethel, the only people executed by the United States for espionage during the Cold War.
None can deny that their story is chock-filled with pathos. CBS has them explaining how they asked to see the electric chair where their parents were soon to die, then recounting how there wasn’t exactly a long line of volunteers to take in the orphans of traitors back in 1953.
Getting their father off the hook for his service to Stalin, including passing atomic secrets to Moscow that helped the Soviets get “the bomb” years before anybody in Washington thought they would, became all but impossible in the mid-1990s, when the National Security Agency declassified top secret intercepts that made it crystal-clear that Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet spy.
Read the whole thing.
I’d just add that with a majority of Millennials approving of socialism, and a third of them convinced that George W. Bush killed more people than Stalin, that it may be only a matter of time before the traitorous Rosenbergs get the official rehabilitation they don’t deserve.
THE PUBLIC PENSION CRISIS may be worse than we think:
Regular readers of this blog know that a pension meteor is headed for state and local governments, and that deceptive accounting practices obscure the likely scope of the destruction. The biggest source of confusion has to do with rates of return: Most pension funds assume that their assets will grow at rates of seven to eight percent per year indefinitely, a virtual impossibility in this age of low interest rates and sluggish growth.
A recent Governing magazine report highlights another way liabilities can be mismeasured. Many taxpayers live in jurisdictions that are on the hook for pensions from many different government agencies, including city governments, county governments, and school districts. So while the per capita pension debt for the City of Denver is just $709 per capita, for example, the “overlapping” obligations on its taxpayers are actually nearly eight times that high. . . .
Estimating the true cost of unfunded pension obligations is a messy business. Numbers publicly touted by politicians, unions and the actuaries they employ tend to downplay the $3.4 trillion problem and the existential threat it poses to blue model governance nationwide.
A sustainable fix to America’s public pensions will likely require intensive reforms to state and local governance, including the replacement of defined-benefit plans with 401(k)s and robust checks on the lobbying and political power of public sector unions. But the first step toward implementing these changes is for public administrators to come clean with taxpayers about the extent of the mess they are in. Until public sector pension funds are governed by the same rigorous accounting rules that apply in the private sector, it’s likely that instead of gradual reforms, states and localities will continue to govern by crisis, propping up the current system with every last cent and then declaring bankruptcy or asking for bailouts when it all comes tumbling down.
Just one of several calamities our unprecedentedly awful political class has saddled us with.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: US and Russia could ‘start Third World War over Syria conflict’, says Turkey.
Turkish deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus said: “If this proxy war continues, after this, let me be clear, America and Russia will come to a point of war,” the Daily Mail reports.
He suggested the Syrian conflict could be the beginning of World War Three, saying it had put the world “on the brink of the beginning of a large regional or global war”.
Earlier this month a Russian newspaper warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing an “astonishingly risky game” in the Syrian conflict that could lead to a Third World War.
Popular tabloid, Moskovsky Komsomolets, ran an article that suggested hostilities in Syria could spark a “direct military confrontation” between the nations of a similar scale to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
There’s a reason “peace through fecklessness” isn’t a saying, and we’ve had eight years of fecklessness.
MARKETING: Vegas Gun Store Holds ‘Pre-Hillary’ Gun Sale.
Get on in there before the price gouging starts!
The Las Vegas gun store Westside Armory is predicting a Hillary Clinton victory in November, and it has a message for customers: Buy now, because things are going to get expensive.
In an advertisement over the weekend in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Westside Armory said it was holding a “Pre-Hillary Sale” on tactical rifles, warning of a price surge if the Democratic nominee wins the presidential election next month.
“Don’t wait!” the advertisement reads. “Prices will skyrocket after Crooked Hillary gets in.”
That’s probably true.
Read the whole thing, especially the Washington Post being all aghast.
I’d add that $699 isn’t a bad price for a Smith & Wesson M&P Sport II, although I got mine for $100 less. But I suspect that $599 isn’t coming back any time soon.
HEY, BIG SPENDER: Big Labor Unions Step Up Presidential-Election Spending.
According to the most recent campaign-finance filings, unions spent nearly $110 million on the elections from January 2015 through the end of August, a 38% jump from $78 million at the same point in the 2012 election, and nearly double their 2008 total during the same period.
Almost every large union is spending more than ever before seen in modern elections. The AFL-CIO has spent $11.4 million funding outside political groups thus far, up from $5 million at this point in the 2012 election, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The National Education Association has spent $14 million, up from $7.7 million.
The unions’ efforts to support Mrs. Clinton are particularly crucial as polling shows white working-class voters—who often belong to labor unions—are drawn to Republican Donald Trump’s campaign message.
Clinton needs the help because she’s a terrible candidate, who in the primaries was able to beat an aging and unknown Vermont socialist only by cheating.
WOMEN WHO HATE TRUMP, but aren’t with Hillary. Weirdly, the most powerfully pro-Trump people I know are women who own their own businesses.
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CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: The FBI’s Own Investigation Summary Proves Hillary Clinton Broke The Law.
“Classification is an art, not a science, and individuals with classification authority sometimes have different views,” a State Department spokesperson said today. No doubt this is true. So why did Kennedy wait until a criminal investigation was well underway to ask law enforcement to scrutinize that particular document at that particular time? Is it customary for undersecretaries of State to ask the FBI to alter the classifications of documents that just happen to protect political candidates at the center of a politically explosive investigations?
Did Kennedy — a man who owes his high position to the Clintons — engage in this conversation on his own? Was he asked to do it? For months, law enforcement had attempted to contact him, and he ignored their inquiries. Why, according to FBI documents, did Kennedy only reach out to make this request?
What’s even more curious is that FBI Director James Comey didn’t consider this event — or, for that matter, the litany of other actions Clinton’s lackeys took to protect her — as a sign that there was, at the very least, an intent to influence the investigation.
It seems likely that Comey was a part of the influence from an early date.
IS THIS REALLY A SURPRISE? “Hillary Clinton was so abusive toward her diplomatic security staff that many quit or sought reassignment during her tenure as secretary of state, a former agent told FBI investigators, according to documents released Monday.”
Also probably not a surprise: USA Today: Companies used Clinton fundraisers to lobby State Department.
NOW OUT FROM TIM WU: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads.
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. CAN IT? “Trump may be an outlet for the anger of many Americans, but his defeat will not end their disaffection. . . . Republics are first and foremost tests of faith. Hundreds of millions of people must believe in the system of government our forebears collectively agreed to; and they must believe the elections are free and fair and that the rule of law applies to all — the lowliest of the low and highest and mightiest. Otherwise, the Constitution is just so many very eloquent words written on really old pieces of paper.”
Our feckless political class seems unaware of this, or maybe just uncaring so long as they get theirs.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Will Obama foolishly escalate his secret wars?
And note this lede, which appears in the centrist-establishment The Week: “Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama is now facing some tough decisions about two countries he is bombing in the Middle East.”
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