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Killed Them All? Did Robert Durst Kill More Than Three Victims?

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Dead-eyed mass murder suspect Robert Durst’s riveting open-mic soliloquy in the last episode of HBO’s “The Jinx” true-crime miniseries places him at the center of a media frenzy that obsessed over a dramatic couplet that may or may not constitute a confession: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

Who is or who was this “all?”

How many?

Lost in the haze of discussion and debate about this “Gone Girl”-esque mash-up of infotainment and policing — the cops arrested him the day of the documentary’s finale — is another line uttered by Durst in that restroom, one that has been ignored by the media:

“But, you can’t imagine.”

Can’t imagine what?

Here’s a complete transcript of Durst talking to himself:

There it is. You’re caught. You’re right, of course. But, you can’t imagine. Arrest him. I don’t know what’s in the house. Oh, I want this. What a disaster. He was right. I was wrong. And the burping. I’m having difficulty with the question ‘What the hell did I do?’ Killed them all, of course.”

Usually, like when news anchors were blaming Al Qaeda within hours after the 9/11 attacks, the media speculates too much. This time, a failure to speculate may be missing a bigger story: that Durst may have killed more than three people.

“You can’t imagine.” What did Durst mean?

There are several ways to interpret that. The first one that came to my mind was: You can’t imagine how much bigger this is…how many more victims there really are.

Durst has been charged with the 2000 execution-style murder of his friend Susan Berman, possibly to prevent her from testifying against him about the disappearance and presumed murder of his first wife, Kathleen, in 1982. He killed and chopped up a neighbor’s body in Texas in 2003. A Texas jury declared it self-defense and acquitted him.

robert durstAssuming that Durst killed all three, the 18-year gap between the Kathleen Durst and Susan Berman murders would be unusual. It wouldn’t be unprecedented — California’s Lonnie Franklin Jr. earned the nickname the “Grim Sleeper” due to a 13-year space between killings of sex workers. Still, 18 years is a long time for a serial killer to refrain from taking a life.

In several respects, Durst fits the typical profile of a psychopathic serial killer more than of a man who killed his wife in a fit of range during a domestic dispute. This includes a history of cruelty to animals that predates his first known killing.

His brother Douglas, who lived in fear of his brother, claims that as a young man Robert owned seven malamutes, all named Igor, who “died, mysteriously, of different things, within six months of his owning them. We don’t know how they died, and what happened to their bodies. In retrospect, I now believe he was practicing killing and disposing his wife with those dogs.”

Durst reportedly used the term “doing an Igor” to refer to murdering someone.

The judge who presided over Robert’s trial in the Texas case found “a perfectly clean and preserved cat head cut up by someone who knew what they were doing” at her front door after his acquittal. She believes it was Durst.

Serial killers sometimes mark their territory. Douglas’ break with his brother moved toward finality in the 1990s, when he discovered that Robert had been urinating in the wastepaper basket at the New York real estate company where both worked.

Robert was considered a “prime suspect” in the 1997 disappearance of Karen Mitchell, 16, in Eureka, California. He was never charged.

“You can’t imagine.”

Bye, Bye, Body Scans: Let’s Get Rid of the TSA

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Here’s a modest proposal: get rid of airport security.

I’m serious. Let’s get rid of the whole insane nightmare of TSA checkpoints. No more taking off your shoes and removing your belt, no more possibly carcinogenic and definitely humiliating body scans, no more long lines. Dump the x-ray machines (which also aren’t good for you). Really.

Yeah, yeah, I understand why we have all that crap: 9/11. Also, hijacking planes became so common during the 1970s that “I’m taking this plane to Cuba” became a sitcom joke.

getting rid of the TSABut I’m willing to bet – with my life, and yes, yours, but also those of everyone I love and care about – that eliminating airport security as we know it would be a boon in many ways.

First and foremost, the hassle of flying would be greatly reduced. Shorter travel times would increase the appeal of flying; there are many people like me who drive up to six or eight hours in order to avoid flying in large part because of airline security. Because the roads are more crowded, people are dying.

Reports Bloomberg: “Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day.”

More passengers means more profits for the airlines and more face-to-face business meetings, both of which would be awesome for the economy. The impact could be enormous: during the five years after the 9/11 attacks, passenger volume dropped by 5 percent.

A recent study found that Americans avoided 38 million trips by air in the year 2013 in order to avoid security checkpoint hassles at the airport, costing the U.S. economy at least $35 billion that year alone. Extrapolating over the 14 years since the September 11 attacks, we are looking at a loss of half a trillion dollars in economic activity.

Second, taxpayers would save $7 billion a year by eliminating the TSA. That money could go to any number of better priorities, or it could be used to build more terror drones, or whatever, but still: $7 billion a year. (Obviously, we would need to find jobs for the 55,000 screeners.) That’s a lot of money, and well worth saving.

What would happen terror-wise?

What would happen terrorism-wise? Probably nothing.

Every day, millions of Americans get on subways and buses in American cities without the slightest pretense of a security check. How many of them blow up? Zero. Every day, millions of Americans ride medium-distance commuter trains and buses with similar happy results, despite the fact that they don’t have to go through a scanner first. The same goes for long-distance trains, long-distance buses, ferries and so on. (The TSA has recently begun targeting Amtrak and other forms of ground transportation, but only sporadically and – by all accounts – with no apparent results other than annoying everyone.)

If taking off our shoes is preventing another 9/11, why don’t terrorists target these other forms of transportation? Because they don’t want to, or can’t.

You are at least 2000 times more likely to commit suicide than to get killed by a terrorist.

To clarify: I’m not talking about getting rid of security. I’m talking about getting rid of the airport security checkpoints currently run by the Transportation Security Administration. I would maintain and even beef up security behind the scenes. Every plane should have several armed sky marshals aboard. (That’s not currently the case.) Check-in suitcases and cargo must be carefully tracked and scanned.

And what if someone brings a gun onto your next flight?

What if someone brings a gun on board? I’ve seen it happen. Get this: it was not a problem.

It happened in Afghanistan. Flying out of Kabul airport on a domestic flight a few years ago, I was surprised and amused to see that all of the US supplied x-ray machines were turned off and/or out of order. Passengers filed by; no one was searched. When it was time to board the flight, I observed several people casually stowing weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, in the overheads. I’m writing this, so obviously nothing bad happened. And this was in an active war zone.

Afghans aren’t crazy or stupid. If a passenger on an Afghan plane tried to use a gun to hijack a plane, he have to contend with a planeload of similarly armed men determined to stop him. Chances of success: slim.

Which is exactly what would happen here. Since 9/11 there have been a number of incidents in which mentally disturbed people raised hell on American planes. Invariably they were overpowered, restrained and turned over to the authorities, usually by a coalition of passengers and crewmen.

That happened on a bus in Seattle recently.

let's get rid of the TSA Ted RallAnyway, it’s not like the current system screens everyone equally.

Pay $85 and submit to fingerprinting, and you can get out of having to take your laptop out of your bag, keep your shoes on, and your jacket thanks to your membership in the TSA’s PreCheck program. Determined terrorists, especially 9/11-style suicide bombers, aren’t going to be deterred by the application fee or the fingerprint requirement; after all, they know they aren’t going to be prosecuted after the bombing.

Oh, and I bet you probably guessed this one: most airport employees don’t go through any screening whatsoever. “One of the greatest vulnerabilities for this airport and probably any other major airport like MIA is the insider threat,” Lauren Stover, security director for Miami International Airport told CNN a month ago. It’s a story that many people missed at the time, but box cutters were found on several planes grounded after the 9/11 attacks; officials suspected that they were placed on board as part of an “inside job.”

In other words, they are making old ladies take off their shoes while ignoring the real threats.

Besides, whatever power there is in the argument that people who pass the TSA vetting process are less likely to commit terrorist acts is obviated by something that frequent travelers know: at many airports, security staff routinely direct ordinary, non-screened, non-PreCheck members into the PreCheck line. Which exposes the program as a fraud. And yet: there have been no attempts to hijack an American airliner since 2001.

Civil aviation demonstrates the pointlessness of airport security checkpoints. Every day, tens of thousands of airplanes leave and land at airports all over the United States, carrying passengers and cargo that haven’t undergone a screening. Defenders of the current system might argue that the risk from a smaller plane is, well, smaller. But I suspect the real reason has more to do with the fact that the wealthier, whiter pilots and passengers in the civil aviation system are simply more privileged.

Based on fear and paranoia, sucking countless man-hours and dollars out of the US economy every day, airport security in 2015 is like a religious ritual, something we all do even though nobody knows why, and those who do know that there is no reason whatsoever to do it.

Bye bye, TSA!

Who Is This “Together” Starbucks’ Howard Schultz Is Talking About?

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

He’s considered a hero, and rightly so. Still, when French General Charles de Gaulle gave his most famous speech, the Appeal of 18 June 1940, not everyone was moved. “Nothing is lost for France!” the future leader of the Free French intoned into the BBC microphone to the people of France, who had just lost their country to the Nazi invasion. “The flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished!”

“Easy for him to say!” my grandfather raged. “He’s sitting over there in London, sipping tea! Here we’ve got the krauts up our ass!”

He changed his mind later. But still: terrible first communiqué.

Communications 101: If you hope others to follow you as a leader, remember who and where and what you are.

If you don’t, others will.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz forgot self-awareness with this week’s clumsy rollout of the coffee conglomerate’s “Race Together” advertising campaign featuring social media hashtags and handwritten cups — and stepped in something that looked and felt like a pile of day-old coffee grinds but smelled worse on Twitter.

Howard SchultzWhat could go wrong? Schultz wanted to spark a discussion about race in America. The slogan, though cloddish, was something few would argue with: Unity is good. But then: everyone hated it. “Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well,” tweeted the usually placid PBS NewsHour host Gwen Ifill.

“The brand has been called tone-deaf and obnoxious,” reported The New York Times. “Many have pointed out that the company’s leadership is predominantly white, while many of its baristas are minorities.”

Oh, that.

Which is also a class thing: Schulz “earned” $28.9 million in 2012 alone. The average barrista gets $10 an hour.

What went wrong? Starbucks in general, and Schultz in particular, didn’t have the social standing — the political legitimacy — to declare a national conversation on race.

Starbucks is too white. Too unequal. Without a history of engaging customers on political issues, it jumped straight into one of the most fraught, complex and emotional: America’s original sin. “The last person I wanna discuss race with is a snotty condescending 18 yr old barista that corrects me when I say ‘large’ instead of ‘venti,’” one Twitterer tweeted.

And there’s that “Together” thing. Zillionaire Schultz and thousandaire me? We’re not even a little “together” — even though we both cash in on white male privilege. And he’s a lot less “together” with the African-American community — members of which he isn’t hiring enough of, and not paying enough to when he does.

Who the hell was Howard Schultz to lecture us about race?

Nobody.

Similarly, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has turned herself into a national laughingstock by forgetting who she is and who’s she talking to.

It began with “Lean In,” her book/PR campaign/wannabe movement to encourage working women to break through the glass ceiling by being more assertive in demanding raises, promotions and responsibility. Now the zillionaire feminist is promoting “Choreplay,” in which sex-starved husbands are encouraged to buy sexual favors from their tired working wives by performing household duties like cleaning the dishes and doing the laundry.

Let’s set aside the facts that the “girls make passes at guys who wash and dry dishes and glasses” meme (a) is way old and (b) has been decisively debunked. From a 2013 study in the American Sociological Review: “Couples in which men participate more in housework typically done by women report having sex less frequently. Similarly, couples in which men participate more in traditionally masculine tasks—such as yard work, paying bills, and auto maintenance—report higher sexual frequency.”

Nothing destroys credibility like spouting outdated nonsense.

The point is: who the hell is Sheryl Sandberg to tell us anything?

The Washington Post’s book critic sussed out Sandberg’s no-moral-standing problem in her book: “By the time she describes the pangs of guilt as a mother working outside the home — some of her most poignant passages — it is impossible to forget that she, like many of the female friends she quotes, is a wealthy, white, married woman with a ‘vast support system.’ Surely she could have included a story or two about successful women who are more likely to have been born to nannies than to hire them. Or at least more who didn’t graduate from the Ivy League.”

If you’re tonedeaf, at least be nice. (It might give you standing.) Which Sandberg was not: immediately after collecting a cool $90 million in stock sales, her new foundation posted ads looking for interns.

Unpaid interns.

In other words, slaves.

Like Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Sandberg doesn’t see that as a billionaire who owes her spectacular wealth and privilege, including household staff, to her friendship with an even wealthier man who leads a company whose tiny workforce isn’t unionized, works “at will,” and is increasingly outsourced overseas at insanely low wages, she shouldn’t telling working-class (or middle-class) women what to do.

She ought to shut up and listen.

Then, of course, there’s Hillary Clinton’s latest scandal, Emailgate.

She’d already blown the moral standing thing as a “feminist icon” who’d be unknown to the world had she not married well, and as a millionaire — at least 25 times over — who claims to have recently gone from “broke” to “not well off.”

Then she defended her decisions not to use government email as secretary of state, and delete thousands of contemporaneous private emails as attempts to protect her privacy — something every American could identify with.

“No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy,” she said.

Indeed we do.

Unfortunately, Clinton has as much moral standing on privacy rights as Dick Cheney has as a peacemaker. She voted for the Patriot Act, which unleashed the NSA monster that reads everybody’s emails, everywhere, all the time, and even called Edward Snowden a traitor for letting us know what the NSA is up to. She’s a hypocrite. Worse than that, she’s made herself look ridiculous.

Before you open your mouth to lecture anyone, remember the cautionary tales of tonedeaf elitists like Schultz, Sandberg and Clinton. If you don’t have standing to talk, you’ve got nothing to say.

Why Would Anyone Want To Join ISIS?

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Ted Rall

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

They slash innocent people’s throats. They hew off heads. They rape children, sell women into slavery and vandalize ancient museum pieces. Why would anyone want to join ISIS?

That’s the big question Americans and people in other Western countries are asking — because thousands of their citizens, many of them well-educated and reportedly of sound mind and body, are doing just that.

Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets seem unwilling and/or unable to explain the attraction of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Even when the topic is broached, as it was recently on syndicated talk host Diane Rehm’s NPR radio show, so-called experts can’t or won’t answer the question, instead repeating the usual ISIS-is-incomprehensibly-evil memes we’ve already heard a zillion times.

“I think one characteristic that we see from ISIS is that they pursue every avenue. They have a specific recruitment for women, they have specific recruitment for different countries, different languages. They’re really unusually large for a terror group ,” Jessica Stern told Rehm.

Others say ISIS recruits are thrill-seekers or alienated youths searching for meaning in otherwise empty lives, as The International Business Times argued recently.

If ISIS is America’s enemy, or at least a phenomenon it would be in our interest to weaken or destroy, it is not in our interest to dismiss its adherents as fools, lunatics or alienated losers. Underestimating your adversary plays into his hands. They’re not crazy, and they come from all walks of life: “Four decades of psychological research on who becomes a terrorist and why hasn’t yet produced any profile,” John Horgan, director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, told The Guardian.

Before we attack the Islamic State — OK, it’s too late for that — it behooves us to understand it. Which requires understanding its appeal.

ISIS is a Nation-State.

Corporate media outlets like NPR call ISIS “the self-proclaimed Islamic State” or “self-described Islamic State” as if the predicate weakens ISIS’ legitimacy. Ridiculous! You could apply the same lame undermining modifier to any nation: the self-described United States of America, the self-proclaimed Republic of Ireland, whatever. Nations exist until they don’t; ISIS has no less de facto legitimacy than, say, Panama.

No one knows whether ISIS will survive, but it is the first serious attempt to carve out an Islamist nation-state in memory.

ISIS isn’t like Al Qaeda and its spinoff groups, or Abu Sayyaf, Al Shabab and Boko Haram (which recently pledged fealty to ISIS). Those are underground insurgent organizations. They carry out attacks against government and private targets in territory that they do not control. A closer analogy is the Taliban, whose formal name during their rule ISIS echoes: The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan — but it’s not a perfect one because, since 2001, “Taliban-held” areas of Afghanistan have been partially held and transited by troops loyal to the Kabul-based central government.

ISIS is trying to build a full-fledged nation-state with all the trappings: discrete borders, coins, stamps, its own monetary system, ministries, control and expansion of infrastructure, educational curriculum, a standing army, social programs, a judiciary, and not least — a cool flag.

“This is more than just fighting,” an ISIS recruit explains on an online video. “We need the engineers, we need doctors, we need professionals … There is a role for everybody.”

ISIS’ message — join us! we aren’t thinking about building a fundamentalist Muslim society, or trying to transform an existing Muslim country, but we’re actually making one now — excites Sunni purists currently living in Western countries or in Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, whose leaders and values have been corrupted by Western and American influence. France, Germany and other countries with large populations of young Muslim immigrants have marginalized them in ghettos with high unemployment, subjecting them to racial profiling and harassment. They haven’t been made to feel at home. ISIS promises them they will be with them.

Ironically, it’s an appeal familiar to Jews who emigrate to Israel.

ISIS is a Caliphate.

Western commentators as well as some Muslim scholars scoff at ISIS’ claim to have reestablished the Islamic caliphate eliminated along with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in World War I. ISIS’ caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is a shadowy Iraqi religious scholar turned jihadi who did time as a U.S. detainee — so what, they ask, is the basis of his legitimacy? Al-Baghdadi probably isn’t, despite his claims, a direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed, which according to classical scholars is required to be named caliph.

The naysayers are missing the point. “All that the Islamic State lacks is the legitimacy derived from mutual international recognition by other states, which it never sought in the first place. It also realized that states in the Muslim world resist its declaration of the Caliphate. Its legitimacy emerges from declaring a Caliphate and a state apparatus to sustain it, thus deriving legitimacy from a small, but devoted core of Muslims around the world, willing to leave their lives behind to travel and become citizens of the new Islamic State,” says Cal State historian Ibrahim al-Marashi.

To echo Nike, this is a “just do it” thing — you’re the caliph if you say you are, and enough people believe you to back you up.

The demise of the caliphate in 1924 stripped Islam of its centuries-old central governing body. Imagine, for example, how Roman Catholicism would be affected by the end of the papacy: new sects would break off, splinterism would rule, no one would agree on what a real Catholic believes or does. The desire to reestablish cohesion — under, of course, radical Sunnism — motivates Muslim fundamentalists who, such as Osama bin Laden, have long called for its restoration.

A caliph, however, is not a pope. He is a religious, military and political leader, all wrapped up in one — and God’s representative on earth. By definition, all Muslims are required to swear allegiance to a caliph and follow his dictates, or be branded apostates, and face death.

ISIS Kills Its Enemies. A Lot.

For ISIS, violence — slave markets, ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter, even of fellow Sunni Muslims — is not merely an unpleasant but necessary tactic, but an end in and of itself.

It’s not just rule by fear, though ISIS leaders use that too, as when they execute deserters by crucifixion. Like the Hotel California, ISIS is a place you can check in but never leave.

The brutality turns off some fighters enough to prompt them to flee, but for many others, it’s a major attraction. Slaughtering Shias, secular Sunnis and non-Muslims serves a double purpose: purification and revenge. For as long as most Muslims can remember — and this goes for liberal-minded Muslims too — they have been on the receiving end of violence: Israel, created by the U.S. and European powers from stolen Palestinian land. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen and countless other Muslim nations oppressed by U.S.-backed tyrants. After 9/11: secret prisons, kidnappings, torture, drone assassinations, multiple invasions, constant bombing.

ISIS offers humiliated fighters a chance to lash out…even if swimming in the blood of a captured Yazidi woman is a poor substitute for an American drone operator, or a congressman.

It will take more than intercepting recruits on their way to Syria and arresting them, or cheesy, hollow appeals to patriotic sentimentality, to counter these powerful motivating forces.

“Born and raised in the United States, allegedly turned his back on his country and attempted to travel to Syria in order to join a terrorist organization,” said Loretta Lynch, Obama’s nominee for attorney general after the arrest of a Florida air force vet charged with trying to join the Islamic State. “An American citizen and former member of our military allegedly abandoned his allegiance to the United States and sought to provide material support to ISIL,” said assistant attorney general John Carlin.

There will be more like him.

Raaaaand

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Ted Rall

Betcha didn’t know the “a” in “Rand” is long:Untitled-1

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is Rand Paul from Scandinavia?

 

 

SYNDICATED COLUMN: John Kasich’s Ohio Fantasy

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Ted Rall

 

There’s denial.

There’s self-delusion.

There’s hallucination.

Then there’s John Kasich.

It’s just another political horse-race story about another white guy running for president, but “Kasich Looks to Republican Primaries, ‘Ohio Story’ in Hand” in the March 19th New York Times would have made me fall out of my seat had I not been confined by a seatbelt and squished in by a pair of chubby fellow airplane passengers.

John Kasich is the other Scott Walker, another Republican governor of a Midwestern state contemplating a run for president next year.

Kasich runs Ohio. Ohio is my home state.

Says the Times, Kasich is touting his “Ohio story” to make his case for moving into the Oval Office: “On his watch, Ohio’s $8 billion budget shortfall has turned into a $1.5 billion surplus. He has increased funding for mental health services and takes credit for 352,000 new private sector jobs.”

(Note the qualifier “takes credit for.”)

To be fair, the paper quotes Ohio State Senator Joe Schiavoni, who notes that “nearly half of Ohio households are getting by paycheck to paycheck, and 43% of students in public schools are on free or reduced lunch.”

When obscure governors run for president — Carter in 1976, Clinton in 1992, Bush in 2000 — their case to the nation is: Look what I did for my state! Elect me, and I’ll do the same for the country. The fact that Kasich is bragging about what he did to Ohio indicates that he’s (a) politically suicidal and/or (b) has absolutely no idea what’s going on there, especially in the state’s urban centers.

When I looked it up, I was surprised to learn that Kasich has actually visited Dayton, the southwestern Rust Belt city where I grew up. It’s a mess.

To be fair, this disaster predates Kasich by decades. Like many of my friends, I left after we graduated high school in the early 1980s because there were no jobs. Dayton Press, where they printed magazines like Time and Newsweek, closed. Mead Paper moved away. Department stores were boarded up, abandoned and demolished; factories rusted and rotted and were carted away. It got so you could take a nap in the middle of Main Street without being disturbed by traffic.

But things have only gotten worse under Kasich. Dayton’s population has plunged by 40% since I left. The local economy has been devastated since GM’s huge Moraine Assembly plant closed in 2008, throwing 5,000 people out of work.

Forbes listed Dayton as one of the ten fastest-dying cities in America. Four out of 10 were in Ohio. (The others were Youngstown, Canton and Cleveland.)

Forbes tried to put a bright face on Dayton’s problems: “Cash register and ATM manufacturer NCR is based in Dayton, and one of the region’s major employers, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, is not going anywhere.”

NCR moved to Atlanta two years later.

Every day I check the Dayton Daily News app on my phone to follow the latest mayhem. Grim accounts of grinding poverty, drug epidemics and random violence are routine. The national story about the boy who found his neighbor’s mummified body while exploring an abandoned house somehow spoke volumes about the collapse of the city of Dayton. Facing foreclosure, the dude had hung himself five years ago. Bank officials never bothered to look inside.

Even the national economy recovered, Dayton’s contracted last year.

Kasich’s “Ohio Story” is a nightmare.

Cleveland, Dayton, Canton and Youngstown aren’t the Buckeye State’s only urban disasters — though they are some of the state’s biggest cities.

Toledo is so broke that its mayor asked residents to cut the grass in public parks. So many Cincinnatians are dying of heroin overdoses that the morgue is facing a budget crisis. The infant mortality rate is soaring in the capital city of Columbus.

Under John Kasich, Ohio is in danger of becoming a failed state.

Just what America needs!

The Ohio political blog Underbund has the goods on Kasich.

“The so-called ‘Ohio Story’ Gov. Kasich is out shilling to ruby red western and southern states will never include the kind of statistics reveled Friday in a report by the Pew Charitable Trust, which painted a different portrait of the state,” writes John Michael Spinelli.

Spinelli quotes the Pew report:

  • “In John Kasich’s Ohio, the share of households that are middle class has fallen from 50.9% in 2000 to 45.7% in 2013.
  • “Meanwhile, median income has also taken a dive under Gov. Kasich, from an inflation-adjusted amount of $56,437 in 2000 to $48,081 in 2013, a dip of nearly 15%.
  • “And the share of households spending at least 30% of income on housing as gone up, from 25% in 2000 to 30% in 2013.”

I have a question for Governor Kasich: If you manage to gain traction in the race for the 2016 Republican nomination, how will you keep reporters away from Dayton?

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

Sheryl Sandberg’s Choreplay: Not Too Sexy

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Ted Rall

Originally published by Breaking Modern:

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, famous for her “Lean In” book and its advice to women to be aggressive in the workplace, is now advising women to institute “choreplay” at home — basically, wives exchanging marital favors in exchange for husbands’ completion of household tasks. Whatever its merits, Choreplay certainly doesn’t sound sexy.
Choreplay

Robert Durst and ‘The Jinx’: Is watching TV the future of detective work?

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Ted Rall

Originally published by The Los Angeles Times:The Future of Detective Work

 

Police forces are constantly looking at new technology and new methods for catching criminals: DNA, drones, flying helicopters over high-crime areas to discourage the bad guys from carrying out their dastardly deeds. Could there be a new means of nailing suspects: watching TV?

Last weekend’s arrest of Robert Durst, the New York real estate scion who has been implicated in the deaths of three people over three decades, makes me wonder about that in this week’s cartoon.

Durst has been suspected of being involved in the 1982 disappearance and presumed death of his first wife and now has been charged with the killing of a friend, Susan Berman, in Los Angeles in 2000. He shot and dismembered a neighbor in Texas in 2001 but was acquitted, claiming it was self-defense.

While filming a six-part HBO documentary called “The Jinx,” Durst apparently failed to realize that his microphone was still “hot” (live) when he went to the restroom. Talking to himself, he asks rhetorically, like something out of a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

It isn’t clear whether this qualifies as a confession, at least enough to sway a jury, or whether it’s admissible in court. It also isn’t known whether this statement led to the request to the FBI by Los Angeles police to arrest Durst at a New Orleans hotel where he was staying under a false name, and to ask that he be extradited to California. Whatever the details, the revelation in the sixth and final episode of the documentary was pretty much as blockbuster as blockbuster gets – and it probably isn’t going to help him if and when he gets to trial.

Though the families of Durst’s alleged victims and the detectives who have been trying to nab him for years are no doubt pleased that he may be about to face justice for his alleged crimes, they must be a little frustrated that it was a true-crime documentary rather than traditional police work that finally did the job. That said, the police contributed mightily to where things currently stand.

The Durst case is unusual in several respects, none more than the open-mike gaffe. Generally speaking, alleged serial killers with a run dating back to the Reagan years don’t stay free by absentmindedly blabbing — even if it is to themselves in that most private of places.

In the end, it may not have been so much the cliché that Durst wanted to get caught as his succumbing to his outsize ego by agreeing to do the documentary and by taunting the authorities, like a real-life Hannibal Lecter. “Bob doesn’t seem to feel totally comfortable unless he’s at risk,” one of the documentarians told an interviewer. “He seems to like to put himself at risk. It may make him feel more vital. It may be something he’s just compelled to grasp for. In this case, we felt he had a kind of compulsion to confess.”

Sadly for detectives, murder suspects aren’t usually wired for thrills.

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