The Department of Justice made public this week a letter written by Ryan Routh, the would-be Trump assassin. In it, he writes that he expects to fail, but that he hopes others will “finish the job” and offers $150,000 to whoever does. This incensed people across the political spectrum, but particularly on the right, and for once I agree. Although I imagine any sane person would understand that a man in federal custody, and likely to remain so for many years, is going to call backsies on the $150K promise, the sorts of people who might attempt it, aren’t. Sane, that is. It just seems there should be multiple ways to indicate probable cause to a judge without revealing that detail.
But I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll leave it to them. However, I am a writer, and I just want to pick a small peeve in these stories, i.e., the labeling of any statement by a person who’s committed an act of violence as a “manifesto.”
Granted, this is mostly done by dumbass news sources, like the New York Post or Rod Dreher, but it bugs me just the same. I suppose it started with the Unabomber, and whatever else you can say about Ted Kaczynski, he took his violence seriously. His manifesto was called “Industrial Society and Its Future,” and it ran 35,000 words. Publishing it got him arrested, but he had something to say, and said it. Supposedly he has a fan club now.
By contrast, the woman who shot up a school in Nashville, Audrey Hale, left behind a journal of sorts, marked with some coherent passages but also a great deal of angry scrawling. The Tennessee Star is the only publication that published selections from it. This photo, with the publication’s watermarks all over it, gives you an idea:
To their credit, they put “manifesto” in quotes in their reporting. I’ve said before that I don’t mind it (too much) when language changes, but every time I hear some racist ranting or anguished scrawling called the same thing that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels labored over, I cringe.
Ai-yi-yi, another bout of insomnia last night. I turned off the alarm and tried to stay in bed as late as possible, but I probably got four hours, total. Since I missed morning swim, I took a bike ride in the cool, cloudy conditions, something that usually makes me feel good, but I multitasked by listening to the “The Daily” podcast, and it just depressed me. It was about the shortage of housing, particularly affordable housing, and toward the end, the reporter pointed out, correctly, that we have faced extreme housing shortages in this country before, the period after World War II being the most obvious example. It was solved in part by enormous federal incentives to build middle-class housing, the obvious answer today, as well. But will this ever be accomplished? I doubt it.
Even assuming the best-case scenario, i.e., a Harris victory and a Democratic Senate, any effort to enact a large federal program to, you know, HELP PEOPLE would be attacked nonstop by the usual suspects, who will wail and throw sand in the gears and churn out memes and do whatever possible to stop the whole thing.
I also considered how we might leave our current house, maybe downsize to a condo in a different municipality and leave this three-bedroom Colonial to someone with children in the schools. We’d get a decent price for it, but then we’d have to buy in this overheated market, and our taxes would skyrocket. Why? Because Michigan adopted Proposal A 30 years ago, which pegged property taxes to the rate of inflation or 5 percent, whichever is less. When you buy a house, its taxes “pop up” to whatever value the market placed on it by your purchase, but then they’re pegged. During the great recession, when our house lost nearly half its market value, the taxes adjusted downward, a small relief at a very scary time. Now they’re pegged again, and as a consequence, we’re paying far less than newer residents who bought after the recovery, for the same services. If we bought a new place, we’d almost certainly be paying more. So we stay put, empty nesters in a community that desperately needs school-age children, because our taxes-and-insurance nut in our paid-off house is about $500/month.
When Proposal A was passed, real estate wasn’t the volatile market it is today. The population was different. Everything was different. It’s probably time to revisit Proposal A (which had other moving parts about school funding). But the Michigan legislature now has term limits, the worst idea ever, and is now populated by people who whirl in and out of their seats, never stay long enough to develop true legislative skills and pass truly meaningful policy. And like Washington, the camps are divided and dug in. Things only get done when one party has complete control in Lansing. People wonder why the Democrats put the pedal to the floor when they got bicameral/executive control in 2022, for the first time in 40 years. That’s why.
OK, enough of that.
I was reading this Atlantic piece about legal sports gambling this morning, too. It concentrates on the personal price paid by legal gambling — the precarious households made even more so, mostly — but I wonder: We can’t be more than a hair’s breadth away from a Black Sox-style scandal in college or professional sports, can we? And when it happens, what will we do? Stick a stake in the heart of a multi-billion-dollar industry and drive gambling back into the shadows? Don’t be silly.
OK, then. In cheerier news, I have had a pork shoulder simmering in the crock pot since morning, and it’s almost time to shred it into tasty pulled-pork bits. Enjoy early autumn, wherever you are.
Dexter Friend said on September 24, 2024 at 3:59 pm
Umpires gambled, said Dave Pallone, retired ump, just not on baseball, oh no. Gambling is pushed between innings of televised baseball games, and even during play between hitters. NIL “snuck up” on me when I realized Michigan’s basketball center of 2 season ago transferred to Kansas and is paid a cool mil a year now. I am all for NIL and the transfer portal rules, but it has created an atmosphere totally different than before, before amateur play was decreed to be for suckers and losers.
Not all college athletes are on NIL, however. Some get paid so damn much they search for ways to spend it. Last year’s star running back Blake Corum spent thousands of dollars buying turkeys for poor residents in the Ann Arbor environs…a good thing. Now he’s on the LA Rams as a special team kickoff returner.
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Sherri said on September 24, 2024 at 4:16 pm
We narrowly avoided a BlackSox scandal just recently, when Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter really was stealing from him rather than placing bets for him. But it feels inevitable.
I’ve heard all the arguments against building more housing, and they all boil down to “I’ve got mine, don’t care about anybody else.” Neighborhood character, infrastructure, traffic, schools, blah, blah, blah. But boy will they get angry if you call them a NIMBY.
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Sherri said on September 24, 2024 at 4:41 pm
On a different note, I went to grad school and am good friends with the parents of the author of that Atlantic piece, Charles Fain Lehman, and knew him when he was a kid. The last time I saw him he was in high school, very into baseball and computers, and I never expected him to turn into a right wing think tank person.
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Sherri said on September 24, 2024 at 4:50 pm
Legalized sports gambling has made this kind of toxic fan culture worse: https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/41415886/report-lions-dan-campbell-doxxed-daughter-classmate
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Julie Robinson said on September 24, 2024 at 4:51 pm
Florida has a similar real estate tax law, which makes it hard to predict what taxes you will owe your first year. The idea was to keep fixed income folks in their homes, but now they’re being driven out by ridiculously high insurance premiums. Which will probably go up again if Helene is half as bad as predicted.
Peeve 2: Today I stopped by the credit union to pick up my new debit card, as per instructions over the phone. Turns out they only mail them and I will have to wait 7-10 business days. Sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream. Since I didn’t want to appear on the local news, I left.
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David C said on September 24, 2024 at 5:21 pm
We’re working on moving back to Michigan. It’s not going to be easy. Our last house in MI sold for $139k and our new house in WI cost us the same. The Michigan house sold a couple years ago for $325,000. If we’re lucky, we’ll get $260k for our current house and it’s a much better house. Our current mortgage is 2.38%. We’ll probably end up with a 30 year at 6-ish% and we’ll just treat it as cheap rent. We’ll end up in a condo. Even with the condo fees, they’re cheaper than a stand alone. It hasn’t been confirmed by a neurologist yet, I’m sure Mary has Parkinson’s, so I’ll giving up lawn chores for house chores is going to be a necessity anyway. I’m glad you reminded me about Prop A. The taxes listed on Realtor.com and such are the current taxes, not the tax after it resets. Rot in hell, Headley.
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alex said on September 24, 2024 at 7:12 pm
Well you could always come back to Indiana where we love and miss you and real estate is still relatively cheap if you can snag it before a cash buyer does.
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Jeff Borden said on September 24, 2024 at 8:17 pm
Yet another unintended consequence of deporting immigrants will be the shortage of construction workers. Not just Hispanics–though they seem to be a huge part of the crews around us–but also Eastern Europeans, who may have overstayed their visas. We already know agriculture will be decimated by the MAGA roundup. As Charlie Pierce often notes, These really are the mole people.
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Julie Robinson said on September 24, 2024 at 8:20 pm
David, I’m so sorry; what a lousy diagnosis. Make sure whatever you buy has a bedroom on the ground floor, no steps going in, and wide doorways and hallways. We learned the hard way with my sister how even a four-inch step becomes an obstacle course.
Not sure what I was thinking up there with a single Peeve 2. I think I’m super tired.
Just finished harvesting our roselle, so the storm doesn’t destroy it. We dry it for the most refreshing iced tea ever. Now watching Mike’s Weather Page, beloved by Floridians for hurricane news. He’s not a hysterical person but he thinks it’s going to be big and bad. Orlando is on the back, dirty side, where you get tornadoes. Yippee.
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Sherri said on September 24, 2024 at 9:41 pm
Missouri just executed a possibly innocent man, despite the wishes of the prosecutor and the victim’s family, after the reactionary majority on SCOTUS refused to stay the execution. Someone needs to explain to me how those Opus Dei more Catholic than the Pope justices are so fond of the death penalty.
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Sherri said on September 24, 2024 at 9:53 pm
Joe Manchin is so worthless. He won’t endorse Kamala because she supports ending the filibuster to protect abortion, and Manchin thinks the filibuster is the “holy grail of democracy,” the only thing that keeps Senators talking to one another. No, Joe, it’s what makes sure the Senate is a roadblock to change. It was indeed the holy grail for the segregationists, for example.
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Dave said on September 25, 2024 at 12:19 am
Julie, our last property tax bill in Florida in 2021 was $2,300 and I just looked, the lady who bought our home, a one story two bedroom with a two car garage, paid $4,900 this year. Our next door neighbors were paying about $1,200 a year, they’d been there since 2010. All the homes in the neighborhood are about the same.
I hate all the gambling ads that are on TV, a number of sports personalities, stars, and the like. It’s wrong on every level but then I’ve never had any attraction to gambling. I also think college sports are completely wrecked but I thought that for a long time.
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Mark P said on September 25, 2024 at 12:26 am
Here in the backwater of Rome, Ga, our rural house of around 1500 square feet has an annual tax of nearly $3000. I have no idea what they do with that money. Back around 2009 my mother got her tax bill with a whopping increase. I did some research and found that home prices in Rome had declined significantly, according to the federal government, so I wrote it up and appealed. The county actually decreased her assessment below what it had been before. I wonder how many people just accepted it and ended up paying more than they should have.
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Julie Robinson said on September 25, 2024 at 9:38 am
We’re upwards of 7K each on taxes and insurance. Each has quadrupled in the eight years we’ve owned the house, and the TI is more than the PI of our house payment.
Now back to the hurricane watch.
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alex said on September 25, 2024 at 10:13 am
I’m awaiting a callback from my former employer’s HR person to explain why their health plan is still paying for my medical care when I’ve taken out a new ACA plan of my own. I just discovered it this morning and I’m fearful of what might happen if it looks like I’m double-dipping.
I had taken out COBRA continuation coverage when I retired late last year (and that was a struggle with bureaucrats to beat all) and I’d set up autopay. Months later I received a notice of termination of my coverage due to nonpayment. Evidently the autopay didn’t process and I assumed it might have been some sort of malfeasance on their end and that they just wanted to get rid of me. I tried communicating with them about reinstating me and they said tough shit, them’s the rules. So I took out a Marketplace plan and had been paying for it and using it ever since.
In June I received new insurance cards from the old insurer and assumed that at United Health Care that the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing. I went onto UHC’s online portal and it showed me as insured, so I called and tried to talk to them and they insisted that I was insured even though I told them that I’d been terminated and even had a letter stating so. Their customer service people seemed just as clueless as usual and I let it drop.
Today I find out that my pharmacies have been filling some of my prescriptions on UHC’s policy and I’ve been paying zero. Usually at the start of the plan year I’m paying my deductible and paying full price for meds, or at least that’s how it was in the past, so that’s strange too.
Anyway, I’m not sure what to do. I left a message with the HR person and I’m eager to get this resolved pronto. I’m afraid it might be a fucking mess.
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Icarus said on September 25, 2024 at 10:45 am
Alex, I may not understand the double-dipping problem. You can have as many insurance policies as you want (or can afford). Obviously, you don’t want to pay more than you have to, but some couples actually do utilize both insurance benefits because some plans will cover some prescriptions that others don’t.
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Bruce Fields said on September 25, 2024 at 11:11 am
“Here in the backwater of Rome, Ga, our rural house of around 1500 square feet has an annual tax of nearly $3000. I have no idea what they do with that money.”
It’s pretty easy to look up!
https://floydcountyga.governmentwindow.com/tax.html
Search the address and it’ll tell you how much went to which taxing entity. If it’s typical, probably 1) schools, 2) whoever pays for police and roads?
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Jeff Borden said on September 25, 2024 at 3:29 pm
Housing prices in much of Chicago are absolutely insane. In our North Side neighborhood, Lincoln Square (not the much tonier Lincoln Park), older homes are being demolished and replaced with McMansions squeezed onto 25×125 and 30×125 foot lots. The home next door to us, which was bought by some wonderful people, went for $1.48 million. Our silly little wooden frame house, built in 1905 and boasting about 1,200-square-feet of interior space, is appraised by the Cook County assessor at $679,000! Some of the real estate sites, such as Redfin, have it at $780,000!!
If we’d like to put a lot of folks to work and really boost the interest in the trades, the nation ought to find a way to start building lots of new housing of all types: single-family, duplex, condos, apartments, etc. The need is overwhelming and younger people are getting royally screwed by the effects of supply and demand. Oh, for the days when there was bipartisan agreement on things like this and our government actually accomplished something beyond aggravating the shit out of its constituents.
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Mark P said on September 25, 2024 at 3:33 pm
Bruce Fields — my comment was ambiguous. The tax bill shows how and to what agency tax funds are distributed. I was trying to say that the outcome is not immediately obvious. We don’t really see much benefit from the taxes we pay. Of course I understand that education is important even if we have no children in school, and the fire department response to a recent call was impressively quick, but beyond that we county residents don’t see much benefit from the taxes we pay.
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alex said on September 25, 2024 at 3:42 pm
Icarus, the ACA doesn’t allow you to have any other insurance. In fact, if my hubby and I were to make it legal, I would be compelled to go on his insurance. We had already looked into that and his employer told us they’d charge us $1,200 a month. I’m paying considerably less through the ACA. I also agreed when I signed up that if they discovered I had any other insurance that I would be required to pay back any benefits I received.
My former employer’s HR person says he’s going to talk to their brokers to see if they can’t get this straightened out. Apparently they’ve continued me as an enrollee and paid my premiums despite the fact that I went on COBRA a year ago.
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Dexter Friend said on September 26, 2024 at 8:39 am
One room studios in rural Massachusetts go for $1800 monthly I learned on You Tube. My grandkids pay $1450 in Findlay, Ohio, for nice 2-room apartments.
Wages are up but not proportionally, for example, when I made $6.25 per hour 50 years ago, I rented a townhouse in a small Indiana city for $140. Now, the kind of factory work I did pays $28, so rents should be $600. For that townhouse, it’s now $1900. So hell no it ain’t fair. But then, it never is .
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Jeff Gill said on September 26, 2024 at 11:19 am
The median price to rent a 2 bedroom apartment in Newark, OH is $1,250 a month. Twenty years ago it was just over $700. And we’re needing to bump our every ten years’ Children Services levy this spring because while our number of kids in care is down, the placement costs have tripled, especially for medically complex kids (aka, most of them when you include mental health issues). I hope it passes, but it won’t be as easy as it was in 2015 & 2017 (we have a two-element levy).
Meanwhile, in my upscale village of Granville we’re paying under $750 a month in mortgage to build equity in a four bedroom, two story house on a quarter acre. But we probably couldn’t buy this house today (we’ve been in it since the last month of 2004).
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Jeff Borden said on September 26, 2024 at 11:55 am
A nation stupid enough to elect tRump a second time deserves the hellish whirlwind he’ll unleash. But it’s not fair to our allies and the struggling democracies we support. tRump yesterday signaled clearly he’ll abandon Ukraine, describing the nation as “in rubble” and its people beaten and dying. Putin probably got a chubby. Damn, tRump is such a despicable piece of shit.
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Jenny said on September 26, 2024 at 3:02 pm
In case you’re interested, there’s talk of building a casino in New Haven, Ind.
https://www.insideindianabusiness.com/articles/all-in-new-haven-residents-speak-out-on-proposal-for-new-casino
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Heather said on September 26, 2024 at 3:34 pm
Jeff Borden, my neighborhood (Irving Park west of Horner Park) is also going insane, with houses going for 700-800K and even up to a million. Meanwhile my little condo has barely budged in value after 20 years. But with rentals around here for something this size starting at around $1800 and going even higher, I’m glad I bought it. I really feel terrible for younger folks dealing with these prices.
I’d love to have a house but even if I could find one I could afford on my own, I’d be so house-poor. I’m not sure I’m up for all the work they require, either–I can barely keep on top of keeping my condo in shape. Both the kitchen and the bathroom need some updating.
I have thought about asking my handy neighbor if she’d like to go in on a two-flat, but I don’t know. I love using my disposable income to travel and I don’t want to let that go. I also really like this neighborhood and the building.
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Brandon said on September 27, 2024 at 2:02 am
In case you were wondering, Kanye West finally sold his house in Malibu.
The property was meant to be part house, part sculpture, but those plans were ditched after Ye quietly shut down his construction company, Yeezy Construction, Inc., in November of 2022.
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Deborah said on September 27, 2024 at 8:59 am
This is fantastic https://wapo.st/4gRT6IW gift article, fantasy about Melania.
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Bruce Fields said on September 27, 2024 at 10:25 am
“I was trying to say that the outcome is not immediately obvious.”
Sure, and it’s entirely possible that your local government just sucks.
(But, also, stuff like roads and water systems can be very expensive to maintain and also easy to take for granted–as long as they’re mostly working.)
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Sherri said on September 27, 2024 at 4:28 pm
Julie, are you okay?
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