Hurricane Lane, Mollie Tibbetts, Cohen/Manafort: 3 Stories You Should Read 8-22-2018
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In the category of: The slowest moving trainwreck in political history.
I Lived Through Watergate. I Lived Through the Saturday Night Massacre. There Never Was Anything Like This.
It is now plain that the Trump campaign in 2016 was merely a vehicle for various grifters and opportunists to get rich. I still believe none of these people had the foggiest notion that Trump would become president*. But if your primary goal in life is to grab enough loot from enough places, a political campaign is a nice fat turkey to be sliced up. So I think they all had their own agendas, including the president*, and all of them were sort of in business for themselves, but under the Trump flag, as the Gambinos used to put it. Most of them had been working in a corrupt business enterprise for decades before it turned itself into a political campaign and then a presidency*.
Then, my god, he gets elected. Who’s stupid fcking idea was that? He’s president*, and we’re all in trouble now.
In the category of: The statistical true story.
Fox News is trying to make this into an immigration story. But immigrants are less likely to commit crimes in the US.
After weeks of searching, police on Tuesday found what they believe to be the body of Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old student from Brooklyn, Iowa. The case — one of a missing white woman — had already drawn a lot of media attention before Tibbetts’s body was reportedly found.
But it has drawn particular attention this week from Fox News due to another development: The suspect in the killing is an undocumented immigrant, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, whom police charged with first-degree murder on Tuesday.
As of Wednesday, Fox News was emphasizing Rivera’s immigrant status. The story got regular coverage on-air throughout the morning. A banner at the bottom of Fox’s website blared, “Tibbetts slaying becomes immigration debate lightning rod.” The top story on the site focused on Rivera’s immigration status — with the headline “Illegal immigrant arrested in murder of Mollie Tibbetts was local farmhand, say police.”
It can be easy with this kind of story, though, to lose sight of the bigger picture: In the US, immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than their native-born peers.
In the category of: Trouble in paradise.
Hurricane Lane: Hawaii braces for category five storm
The US state of Hawaii is bracing for a category five hurricane – the second ever in the state’s history – which could make landfall later this week.
Lane was upgraded to a category five storm, the strongest on the scale, with sustained winds of 160mph (257km/h) on Tuesday.
Forecasts say the islands will face strong winds and surging waves even if the storm does not make landfall.
The last storm of this scale to come this close to Hawaii was John in 1994.
The National Weather Service (NWS) has issued a hurricane warning for the Big Island and a hurricane watch for the islands of Oahu, Maui, Molokai and Lanai as of Wednesday morning.
On the Big Island, the first in Hurricane Lane’s path, damaging tropical storm and hurricane-force winds could pick up as soon as Wednesday afternoon or evening.
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