9.13 Household incomes rose strongly in 2015, breaking a yearslong pattern of income stagnation. The median household’s income in 2015 was $56,500, an increase of 5.2 percent over the previous year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. . . .The median household income is still 1.6 percent lower than in 2007, before the recession. It also remains 2.4 percent lower than the all-time peak reached during the economic boom of the late 1990s.’’
9.13 Adam Jones of the Baltimore Orioles: “Baseball is a white man’s sport.’’
9.12 Roger Cohen remembering 9/11 in the Times: “I emerged late that evening onto Times Square. There was nobody. Not a soul. I started to walk beneath the neon signs. “Put one foot in front of the other,” says Quinn. Turn off your TV. Power down your phone, say hi to your neighbor, and introduce yourself to a stranger. Connect. Be the unity you seek. The fires burned for weeks. The acrid sweet smell below Houston Street persisted. Papers from the towers fluttered across the East River toward Brooklyn. I picked one up and found on it — or did I imagine them? — these lines from Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
9.12 New York Post: “A sharpshooter killed a top ISIS executioner and three other jihadists with a single bullet from nearly a mile away — just seconds before the fiend was set to burn 12 hostages alive with a flamethrower, according to a new report. The British Special Air Service marksman turned one of the most hated terrorists in Syria into a fireball by using a Barett .50-caliber rifle to strike a fuel tank affixed to the jihadi’s back.’’
9.12 John W. Hinckley Jr.is released from custody
9.12 Tim Gunn in The Washington Post: “I love the American fashion industry, but it has a lot of problems, and one of them is the baffling way it has turned its back on plus-size women. It’s a puzzling conundrum. The average American woman now wears between a size 16 and a size 18, according to new research from Washington State University. There are 100 million plus-size women in America, and, for the past three years, they have increased their spending on clothes faster than their straight-size counterparts. There is money to be made here ($20.4 billion, up 17 percent from 2013). But many designers — dripping with disdain, lacking imagination or simply too cowardly to take a risk — still refuse to make clothes for them.’’
9.11 Shannon Sharpe on Fox Sports: ““I see a [black] guy selling CDs, and he’s killed. I see a [black] guy selling loosie cigarettes, and he’s killed. You see, that’s what gets us up in arms. Because you say noncompliance is a death sentence. If a man is gnawing a man’s face after he’s killed two people? We see what happened in Colorado: the [white] guy killed 12, and they take him alive. We see what happened in Charleston: nine parishioners, and not only do they take [the white guy] alive, they take him to Burger King because he’s hungry. . . .We have to acknowledge that this exists. Stop sweeping [racism] under the rug. . . . But don’t tell me [racism] is a figment of my imagination. And when we grieve, don’t tell us what to grieve for, and don’t tell us how long we should grieve. They don’t tell Jewish people that they should get over the Holocaust. Because this is what will happen: The peaceful protesters will try a peaceful route, like Colin Kaepernick sitting down or taking a knee. And then, when you won’t listen, we’ll make you hear us. You’ll have a Ferguson. You’ll have a Baltimore. Or, you’ll have a Watts in the ’60s. You don’t want that.”
9.11 Sully. Pretty good
9.11 Giants top Cowboys, 20-19. Good start.
9.9 Midnight Ramble. Electrifying.
9.9 Molly Ball in The Atlantic: “In a recently published book about political consulting called Building a Business of Politics, Adam Sheingate, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, argues that the consulting industry has ballooned not because its services are particularly effective, but because all the money in politics—which has skyrocketed in the past decade due to campaign-finance deregulation—has to go somewhere. After studying the industry, Sheingate concluded that its practitioners were ardent partisans who wanted to win—but that their motivation was first and foremost financial. “The consultant is selling something to the candidate,” Sheingate told me. “The confidence game is that the candidate is always a little afraid. They’re always a little scared they can lose, and that’s what the consultant exploits.” In the words of a consultant Sheingate quotes in his book: There’s “nothing better than a scared, rich candidate.”
9.9 Hillary Clinton: “ We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket . . . are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
9.8 For years, Wells Fargo employees secretly issued credit cards without a customer’s consent. They created fake email accounts to sign up customers for online banking services. They set up sham accounts that customers learned about only after they started accumulating fees.
On Thursday, these illegal banking practices cost Wells Fargo $185 million in fines, including a $100 million penalty from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the largest such penalty the agency has issued. Federal banking regulators said the practices, which date back to 2011, reflected serious flaws in the internal culture and oversight at Wells Fargo, one of the nation’s largest banks. The bank has fired at least 5,300 employees who were involved. In all, Wells Fargo employees opened roughly 1.5 million bank accounts and applied for 565,000 credit cards that may not have been authorized by customers, the regulators said in a news conference. The bank has 40
9.8 Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on President Obama: “Who does he think he is? I am no American puppet. I am the president of a sovereign country and I am not answerable to anyone except the Filipino people. Son of a whore, I will swear at you.”
9.8 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson on Morning Joe: “And what is Aleppo?”
9.7 Matt Lauer embarrasses himself at the Commander-in-Chief Forum
9.7 Civil War Roundtable of New York
9.4 Dinner at Caffe Oyster Regatta in Pelham with Greg and Susan
9.3 Kim Jong-un executed one of North Korea’s top officials with an anti-aircraft gun after the man fell asleep in a meeting, according to several reports. Ri Yong Jin, a senior official at the education ministry, was sentenced to death after dozing off in a meeting led by Kim. Ri was reportedly taken into custody and interrogated, during which time his alleged “disloyalty” was discovered. According to South Korean newspaper Joongang Ilbo, former agriculture minister, Hwang Min, was also sentenced to death after his plans to improve the country’s agricultural production were seen as an attempt to “undermine” Kim’s authority. Both Ri and Hwang were executed by an anti-aircraft gun at a military academy in Pyongyang.
9.2 Hell or High Water. A new kind of western. I enjoyed it
9.1 in the 49ers final exhibition game, Colin Kaepernik takes a knee during the National Anthem
