Are Murder Rates Really Going Back Up?

As I've mentioned in a number of posts over the years, I believe the Late 20th Century Crime Wave was one of the two or three most politically and culturally consequential events in the US in the second half of the twenty century. It is hard to overstate the impact of this very real rise in the rates of all violent crimes but most especially murder. And one of the greatest mysteries about it is that that for all the studies, theories and attempts to control it, we simply do not have a clear understanding of why it began in the early 1960s or why it ended over the course of the 1990s. I've noted that, somewhat against my better judgment, I've become increasingly open to the seemingly crude and monocausal theory that lead poisoning played a key role in driving the crime wave. Still, I think we still basically do not know. Yet, over the last year or so we've seen a rising chorus of commentary and political posturing which claims that increasing civil rights activism (i.e. Black Lives Matter or the so-called "Ferguson Effect") and more permissive or cowed policing is at least starting to push crime rates back up toward where they were in the bad old days.

So what's actually happening?

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Please Proceed, Plutocrat

Pundits seem to have a problem getting their heads around this.

Donald Trump is saying that he will make Bill Clinton's past infidelities and misbehavior a campaign issue ("fair game") against Hillary Clinton. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a tactic that may work great for Trump in a Republican primary - particularly with the people who make up Trump's core constituency. But in a general election, with an electorate not driven by the things that drive Trump supporters, having a thrice married, philandering blowhard like Trump trying to beat up on a woman over her husband's philandering, about which she is if anything the victim rather than the perpetrator, is almost comically self-destructive on Trump's part.

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Place Your Wagers!

We know you're just now recovering from Christmas and getting ready for New Year's. But don't forget the event that comes only once a year, on December 31st. That's right, the announcement of this year's Golden Duke Award winners, our annual awards granted to the year's greatest slimbeballs, crooks, the comically corrupt or simply criminally ridiculous. To refresh your memory, here are this year's nominees, announced back on December 15th. This year's judges are Susie Bright, Rick Hertzberg, Dan Savage and TPM alums Hunter Walker and Megan Carpentier, who we believe are all uniquely suited to judge this sort of achievement. So stay tuned and get ready for the big announcement on December 31st!

Be Us! On Facebook and Twitter ...

TPM is hiring a Social Media and Community Manager. Is it you? Check out listing below the fold. And spread the word.

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The Wrongly Targeted Sikhs

Perhaps I'll regret doing this. The topic is so fraught that maybe it makes no sense for a uninvolved bystander to discuss it at all. But today we have yet another story about a Sikh man attacked in what appears to be a hate crime. This phenomenon started right after 9/11 (I'm sure it happened earlier but presumably not so frequently) and appears to spike when the country gets more agitated or afraid about terrorism.

Obviously, these are individual attacks which inflict some mixture of physical assault, pain and in some cases even death on a specific individual. Beyond that, as intended, they spread a penumbra of fear and menace far beyond the victims who are directly affected. But on a public level they have a unique resonance since they capture something we expect about attackers or perhaps an assumption that we see confirmed, which is the overlap between bigotry, propensity to violence and stupidity and ignorance.

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ICYMI, The Adelson Force Awakens

As you can see, I've gotten really, really interested in this increasingly far-flung story of Sheldon Adelson's effort to break into the US news industry - with the main show going on in Vegas with his acquisition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a sort of off-stage, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern part of the story unfolding in Connecticut with Adelson's lickspittle and cut-out Michael Schroeder. I tried to pull together all the threads of the story here in a post I did over the holiday. But I have little doubt there is more to come.

So if you see more developments in this story, either in Nevada or Connecticut, please drop us a line. Similarly, I've already noted Adelson's already dominant position in the news business in Israel. Now, I'm also interested in Adelson press acquisitions in the US as well. So if you see press stories or even more if you know about things that are not yet public, please drop me a line.

The Empire Grows

Michael Schroeder is the owner of The Bristol Press and the New Britain Herald and also served as the cut-out to help Sheldon Adelson buy the much-larger Las Vegas Review-Journal. Now he's just announced he's buying yet another paper. Now it's the Block Island Times, over in Rhode Island.

Making An Exception

I try very hard to avoid getting involved in news stories myself, especially ones I'm highly interested in. But here I'm making a very small exception. Steve Collins is the Connecticut reporter who quit his job at The Bristol Press over his comically corrupt boss Michael Schroeder's work trying to destroy journalism on behalf of Sheldon Adelson, both in Connecticut and Las Vegas and quite possibly in other places we haven't learned about yet. Here's the gist of the story. In any case, Collins quit his job right in the maw of the holidays, he's already won one award for his principled stand and now he's set up a gofundme page to raise some funds to get by while he's looking for his next gig.

Arc of the Moral Universe and All That

The veteran Connecticut newspaper reporter, Steve Collins, who resigned his job over Adelson lackey's Michael Schroeder's effort to singlehandedly destroy the profession of journalism at The Bristol Press, inspires I.F. Stone's son, Jeremy Stone, to create the I.F. Stone Whistle-Blower Award and make Collins the first recipient.

Thanks, Folks

I've been ranting and cajoling for long enough about our annual Prime sign-up drive, that I wanted to share some great news: We made it. As I've shared with you, we started on September 21st kicking off our annual sign-up drive with a goal of signing up 3,000 new members. But it was more a private goal and it seemed hard to figure we could get to that number, even with a great response. But starting about a month, when we were at about 2200, it started to seem at least possible. And then at some point on Christmas Eve - appropriately enough - we got there. It is no promotional hyperbole to say that I really did not think we'd be able to get that number.

We're currently at 3017 for the drive. And, yes, if you'd still like to sign up, by all means do so. But we set the goal and we got there so no more harping from me. Just to give you a bit more context, this put us at just below 9,500 Prime members - about 500 of whom are monthly subscribers and the remainder annual subscribers.

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A Christmas Story

Let this be our Christmas story. Why? Well, that requires some explaining and perhaps even a stronger rationale than I'm yet able to muster. Because it has no cheer, redemption or family bonding. It's about power, money, greed, recklessness and what can only be termed the sort of roughshod ridiculousness and surreal unintentional comedy that comes from being powerful enough or serving people with sufficient power that the ordinary sort of fear of getting caught and having to explain yourself simply doesn't apply.

You probably heard sometime over the last couple weeks that there was a mystery brewing about the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The paper had been sold and for an oddly high price given the brutal economics of contemporary newspapering. The mystery was that no on knew who bought it. Indeed, even the people who run the paper were kept in the dark. Eventually, to no one's great surprise, Sheldon Adelson was revealed, via a Connecticut cutout, as the buyer. Plutocrats have been buying papers since there were papers. And Adelson, in addition to being one of America's top plutocrats, also makes his home in Las Vegas. So on various fronts, no terribly big surprise. But since vanity and influence are the usual reasons oligarchs buy newspapers, remaining anonymous is a bit hard to understand.

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Merry Christmas!

Some Christmas Eve Morsels

I wanted to discuss a couple questions I keep getting asked.

First, couldn't Trump's sky-high poll numbers just not pan out if he has no ground game in the early or even the primary states?

No, this is not the case.

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Trump Doubles Down on "Schlong", New Truth Movement Emerges

I wanted to follow up on my overnight post noting that rapidly emerging "schlong" revisionist analysis of Donald Trump's statement which now - a mere dozen hours later - has emerged into a full-fledged "schlong truth" movement. Trump himself is doubling down on "schlong" and has enlisted Jeff Greenfield who is vouching for the normalness and non-sexual meaning of the phrase. It was unclear to me at first from Greenfield's tweet whether he was basing this on personal experience as a New York Trump contemporary (Greenfield is only slightly older than Trump but, according to Wikipedia, grew up in tonier Manhattan, not the outer boroughs or Long Island) or based on new research. But I got a reply from Greenfield below which clears up any question on that front.

Since our initial post we have had a number of TPM Readers (generally men born between 1940 and 1952 in Queens and Long Island) who have clear testimony about what we might call the "Trump/Schlong" usage (aging Jewish male readership finally comes in handy!).

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The 'Schlong' Revisionist Analysis We've Been Waiting For?

I'm a bit out on a limb here. But I'll keep the person's identity a secret. So I hope I don't get in too much trouble. An acquaintance of mine just wrote the following on Facebook ...

Not to make too fine a point of it, but when I was growing up on Long Island, not too far from where Donald Trump grew up and around the same time, "shlonged" was a pretty commonplace verb meaning, roughly, "thoroughly defeated." It had nothing to do, at least in the minds of anyone I knew, with the Yiddish noun shlong, meaning penis.

Maybe the etymological evolution of the verb is similar to the American slang word, "screwed," meaning badly wounded, which has become so commonplace that it regularly appears in polite print even though the word's slang usage is originally sexual.

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