quote:

Former classmates describe Highland Park shooting suspect as withdrawn and odd

Former classmates of the Highland Park, Illinois, shooting suspect on Tuesday described him as an odd, soft-spoken kid who didn’t participate in class or school activities and showed little interest in engaging with his peers.

The few friends Robert “Bobby” Crimo III had tended to be troublemakers who seemed to relish the notion of being outsiders, a couple of his former classmates said.

"They wanted to be the 'anti-' group, like the rebels," said Mackenzie, a former classmate who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her privacy. "The aura they presented was opposite, negative and harsh."

Mackenzie said she attended middle school and high school with Crimo and once shared a Spanish class with him. "Whenever I heard him speak, it was very lifeless and negative," she said. "He's always been down and not enthusiastic."

One former classmate who requested anonymity for privacy reasons said he and Crimo used to hang out and play video games and skateboard together in middle school but that they drifted apart when they were freshmen at Highland Park High School.

“He was a skater kid,” he said of Crimo in middle school. “He would make YouTube videos all the time back then. Kind of DIY videos on how to grip a skateboard or replace a wheel, stuff like that.”

But in high school, the former classmate said, Crimo grew more insular and distant.

“He was always by himself,” he said. “No one seemed to try to be his friend.”

Just before Crimo dropped out of Highland Park High in 2017, he splattered “Awake” stickers in the school’s stairways and bathrooms, the former classmate said. Crimo made rap music under the name “Awake the Rapper.”

On Monday, when authorities announced that Crimo was “a person of interest” in the Fourth of July shooting, a one-time friend said he “was not shocked.”

Molly Handelman, who also said she attended middle school and high school with Crimo, described him as a “very quiet” guy. “When he did talk, he was very soft. He didn’t seem aggressive ever, at all.”

Handelman, who worked with Crimo on class projects a few times, said “something definitely seemed off” with him.

“If he was asked to speak, he definitely had an opinion,” she said. “I just remember if he was asked to speak, he would be like, ‘I don’t care,’ kind of thing.”

“He made it very clear he didn’t care about school,” Handelman said. “His friends got into trouble pretty often in school. He stayed pretty reserved and quiet, so it seemed pretty interesting how he was very quiet but his friends were very rebellious,” she added.

Handelman said she was shocked to learn of Monday’s shooting. “It’s very traumatizing. A lot of people in Highland Park feel like it’s a very safe community,” she said.

Another former classmate, who also requested CNN not use his name due to privacy concerns, said Crimo “kind of kept his head down, listened to music, walked through the hallways, minded his own business.” This classmate, however, said he didn’t think there was a darker side to Crimo’s reclusive nature. “By no means was I like ‘this kid has demons,'" he told CNN.

Zombie Lemur posted:

Pretty much, yeah
https://mobile.twitter.com/BenBradleyTV/status/1544456036014252038

quote:

* "Rudderless, aimless and hopeless" is how one member of Congress described the White House.
*Multiple Democratic politicians who have reached out to work with Biden -- whether it's on specific bills, brainstorming or outreach -- often don't hear anything back at all. Potential appointees have languished for months waiting to hear if they'll get jobs, or when they'll be done with vetting. Invitations to events are scarce, thank you calls barely happen. Even some aides within the White House wonder why Biden didn't fire anyone, from the West Wing or at the Food and Drug Administration, to demonstrate some accountability or at least anger over the baby formula debacle.
*Several officials say Biden's tendency to berate advisers when he's displeased with how a situation is being handled or when events go off poorly has trickled down the ranks in the West Wing, leaving several mid-level aides feeling blamed for failings despite lacking any real ability to influence the building's decision-making. That's contributed to some of the recent staff departures, according to people familiar.
*"There's no fight," another Democratic member told CNN. "People understand that a lot of this is out of his hands -- but what you want to see is the President out there swinging."
*"There's not a frontline office out there that isn't frustrated with the lack of action coming from the White House on inflation," one aide told a member fighting to hang onto an endangered seat. "At the very least, the President should get caught trying to bring prices down just about every day."
*Sources also say that decisions in the White House are getting bottlenecked, as veteran advisers urge Biden to take the long view, rather than focus on fast responses. Few are trying, and even fewer succeeding, in pushing back against Biden's infamous inability to settle on decisions, on everything from whether to lift tariffs on Chinese imports or cancel student loan debt.
*Biden has been mulling what to do on student loans for more than a year. White House staff drafted a memo on the topic weeks ago, and a final decision is now being targeted ahead of when the current repayment pause expires on August 31 -- further aggravating progressives who say Biden's indecision is hurting people with debt who are trying to make plans, and losing much of the political benefit he could get from it.
*Fundamentally, Biden and his aides are operating from a very different sense of the presidency. He's being realistic, they believe, and responsible -- not just because his options are truly limited, but specifically because he's trying to restore the structural integrity of the government and of democracy after four years of Trump. They also see him as taking a more integrated view -- moving on canceling student loan debt, for example, they believe, could imperil whatever is left of the legislative agenda that is starting to emerge from Senate negotiations.
*The attacks Biden is facing now are "the same foolishness that got us Donald Trump -- 'Hillary wasn't good enough,' 'She's not fighting hard enough,'" Richmond said. "That's what got us Donald Trump. And that got us Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Case closed."

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1544664768832802820
https://twitter.com/BenjySarlin/status/1544680350953226240

Senate Democrats have most of the specifics of a reconciliation bill agreed to. It's essentially what was reported earlier this week. Schumer wants a vote before the August recess. Manchin has agreed to most of it in exchange for making half of the revenue go to deficit reduction.


McConnell says he will filibuster the bipartisan bill to improve the supply chain and produce semiconductors domestically if Democrats pass a reconciliation bill.

https://twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell/status/1542600738823618564

Furnaceface posted:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/nadm/maps for anyone that hasnt seen the up to date drought map for North America. Its pretty wild how little coverage this seems to get in both media and from any of the 3 governments considering how much agricultural land is currently within that blob.

A big flaming stink posted:

https://twitter.com/jordanzakarin/status/1545876493263323136

Gotta say I did not expect the admin to so quickly return to trashing the left, especially when the subject at hand is abortion rights!

Like, even they must realize that the combo message of "Vote!" and "gently caress off with your demands" is mixed messaging, right?

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

That very same poll has him beating Trump even with 33% approval and only 13% of Americans saying the country is on the right track.

Plus, nobody has actually committed to a primary and you need a challenger to have a challenge. Nobody is going to force him to voluntarily step down for Harris or JB Pritzker.

Biden also does not strike me as a the kind of person who can be talked into basically admitting he is a loser. So, even if he wasn't still beating Trump, had some obvious much better successor that everyone agreed on, and everyone really was trying to make him step down, I doubt he would ever do it. That seems like wishcasting because the reality is almost assuredly going to be a boring uncontested primary followed by a relatively close general election.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

But as they weigh this trade-off, Biden officials are wary of approving these projects only to then lose Manchin’s vote on the climate and energy deal anyway. Manchin is known for refusing to be pinned down, leaving administration officials wondering what he wants, and he has used his power in an evenly divided Senate to block his party’s goals. Negotiations between Biden and the West Virginia senator have repeatedly broken down over the past year.

Discendo Vox posted:

That's not how administrative rulemaking works. Hell, a big part of the problem in this moment is that the administration can't guarantee the projects would go forward, because they will have to go through notice and comment or some similar administrative process. Many of the decisions involved in individual projects occur at a level below normal political influence.

Oracle posted:

This. Time for hardball. gently caress Manchin, his word is worth poo poo. Worst case scenario you don't get what you weren't going to get anyway if you gave it to him.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

That is basically what they are doing right now.

The issue is that Manchin wants some kind of guarantee that he gets what he wants before he gives up his leverage. The admin wants Manchin's vote before they move forward with this.

Each one wants the other to move first because they are wary that the other won't deliver (either intentionally or unintentionally). That is why Manchin is mad that they haven't approved the projects yet.

Gumball Gumption posted:

No but they currently have it out for him because he's loving with their money. A raging rear end in a top hat who's trying to take money from the rest of the raging assholes? Yeah, they will do something.

BiggerBoat posted:

I'm kind of idiot about these things and honestly wonder what specific steps Biden could take or might have taken to help this; both domestically and globally. I don't accept that the direct covid payments and expanded UEI are to blame in any significant way.

Mr Hootington posted:

They did whine about spending when the stimulus happened, but nobody in power gave a poo poo about high inflation until wages started rising. We had like 6 or 7 of steadily growing inflstion before wages started increasing.

quote:

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon didn’t mince words when it came to the regulatory process that forced his bank to suspend its stock buybacks.

Asked by veteran banking analyst Betsy Graseck of Morgan Stanley on Thursday about the Federal Reserve’s recent stress test, Dimon unleashed a series of critiques about the annual exercise, which was implemented after the 2008 financial crisis nearly capsized the world’s economy.

“We don’t agree with the stress test,” Dimon said. “It’s inconsistent. It’s not transparent. It’s too volatile. It’s basically capricious, arbitrary.”

JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, is scrambling to generate more capital to help it comply with the results of the Fed test. Last month, steadily increasing capital requirements within the test hit the biggest global financial institutions, forcing the New York-based bank to freeze its dividend. While Citigroup made a similar announcement, rivals including Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo boosted investor payouts.

Under the exam’s hypothetical scenario, JPMorgan was expected to lose around $44 billion as markets crashed and unemployment surged, Dimon said. He essentially called that figure bunk on Thursday, asserting that his bank would continue to earn money during a downturn.

After JPMorgan released second-quarter results, it disclosed a raft of other measures it is taking to husband capital, including by temporarily halting share repurchases. That move, in particular, wasn’t welcomed by investors, as the stock hasn’t been this cheap in years.

Shares of the bank fell as much as 5%, hitting a fresh 52-week low.

Big changes
CFO Jeremy Barnum added to the conversation, saying that while regulators give plenty of information about the contours of the annual exam, a key element of the so-called stress capital buffer doesn’t get released to banks, making it “really very hard at any given moment to understand what’s actually driving it.”

“We feel very good about building [capital] quickly enough to meet the higher requirements,” Barnum said. “But they’re pretty big changes that come into effect fairly quickly for banks, and I think that’s probably not healthy.”

Other steps the bank has been forced to take: JPMorgan is pulling back the capital devoted to volatile trading operations called “risk-weighted assets,” as well as reducing some forms of deposits and dumping mortgages from its portfolio, according to Dimon.

A consequence of these moves is that JPMorgan, a massive institution with a $3.8 trillion balance sheet, is forced to withdraw credit from the financial system just as storm clouds gather on the world’s biggest economy.

The actions happen to coincide with the Fed’s so-called quantitative tightening plans, which call for a reversal of the central bank’s bond-purchasing efforts, including for mortgages, which could further roil the market and drive up borrowing costs.

‘Making it worse’
The upshot is that the bank has to act at “precisely the wrong time reducing credit to the marketplace,” Dimon said.

The moves will ultimately impact ordinary Americans, particularly lower-income minorities who typically have the hardest time obtaining loans to begin with, he said.

“It’s not good for the United States economy and in particular, it’s bad for lower-income mortgages,” Dimon said. “You haven’t fixed the mortgage business and then we’re making it worse.”

During a media call Thursday, Dimon told reporters that while JPMorgan isn’t exiting the business, the capital rules could force other banks to recede from home loans entirely. Wells Fargo has said it would shrink the business after surging interest rates caused a steep drop in volume.

Instead, JPMorgan will originate mortgages, then immediately offload them, he said.

“It’s a terrible way to run a financial system,” Dimon said. “It just causes huge confusion about what you should be doing with your capital.”

Nessus posted:

BiggerBoat posted:

Yeah, I hear you. Could be worse though. You could be surrounded by a band of uninformed FOX News watching dittoheads that you constantly overhear spouting right wing talking points they gleaned from Sean Hannity that week and constantly lamenting how nobody wants to work anymore. Like I typically am.

As to that bolded part: it's incredible how much people have forgotten about 8 years of W - or even Reagan and Nixon for that matter. Trump is definitely a symptom and the manifestation of a RW conservative monster who was decades in the making. Trouble is, now he's the model and the prototype moving forward and the Q's and supply side Jesus gun nuts are actually getting elected.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Marjorie Taylor Green did an interview and said she's a Christmas nationalist and that the GOP is the party of Christmas Nationalists.

Acebuckeye13 posted:

In fairness, that happened mostly because Harris was such a bad candidate that she couldn't answer how her policy on bussing was any different from Biden's after the debate. a b s o l u t e clown show of a campaign.

Oakland Martini posted:

There is no legal definition of a recession. "Real GDP falls for two consecutive quarters" is an extremely common definition among pundits because it's black and white. But policymakers go by the NBER business cycle dating committee's recession calls. And they generally call recessions based on whether they think actual real GDP has fallen below its potential. And potential real GDP isn't something we can directly measure in the data. It's a holistic construct of synthetic control forecasting, quantitative modeling, etc. The important thing, though, is that if a decline in real GDP is driven mostly by a decline in potential GDP, that's not a recession. Or at least, it's not a situation that we think monetary or fiscal policy can do much to fix in the short run.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Yeah this fits perfectly

https://twitter.com/BpopeTV/status/1552700743156736000

quote:

Taylor acknowledged that third parties had failed in the past, but said: "The fundamentals have changed. When other third party movements have emerged in the past it’s largely been inside a system where the American people aren’t asking for an alternative. The difference here is we are seeing an historic number of Americans saying they want one."

HonorableTB posted:

Gallup was in agreement with other pollsters at the time that Romney was up by 3-5%, it was the hurricane specifically that turned it around for Obama because he made a super visible trip to the area and got praised by a Republican. That boosted Obama's approvals a few days before the election and without that, Romney probably wins.

Ciprian Maricon posted:

Apply this incredible logic to the CDC response to AIDS in the 1980s and the Reagan administration's response.

ellasmith posted:

I just voted in the MA democratic primary. The only races that felt remotely interesting to me were lieutenant governor and attorney general. I voted for Eric Lesser for lieutenant governor because he promised to fight for the representation of Western Massachusetts, and Shannon Liss-Riordan for attorney general because she very deliberately focused her campaign around the strength of unions. If any other massholes come across this post please let me know your thoughts.

Josef bugman posted:

Whilst a noble sentiment, personally a little less forgiveness for the rich and powerful would do the world some good.

I dunno, I'd just like him to face jail time and more money costs than what is made in a month.

virtualboyCOLOR posted:

The availability of housing isn’t some strange phenomenon. There’s plenty of land and houses today.

However greed is the overwhelming force here from monopolies in lumber(https://idahocapitalsun.com/2022/08/04/idahos-lumber-industry-is-more-consolidated-than-ever/) to builders wanting the bleed everyone dry instead so their profits aren’t impacted (https://www.fastcompany.com/90775187/bad-news-for-the-housing-crisis-its-getting-more-expensive-to-build-everywhere) to the air BNB cris that was happening before covid(https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/31/landlords-evicting-tenants-for-airbnb-and-holidays-lets-report-finds).

All easily solvable problems if one isn’t an immoral capitalist.

virtualboyCOLOR posted:

This is a solvable issue. This can be solved quite literally today. Just need the party in power to find their morals.

Epicurius posted:

Its twofold. Personal injury lawyers almost overwhelmingly vote Democratic and are big donors to the Democratic Party. So Republicans embrace and do their best to pass tort reform, including damage caps to limit their income. (Personal injury lawyers make most of their money on contingency off damage awards, as generally, the people who sue don't have much money)

It also has the side effect of letting them boast they're good for business, protecting businesses from "over the top" punitive awards.

Epic High Five posted:

Bernie isn't the only one adding amendments, there's no doubt a lot of political reasons in play when deciding to put something forward or not. It seems like it's inevitably going to be a whole bunch and all are going down in flames so I don't get what the big deal is. 99% of people aren't going to know this is even happening, is this just them being cranky about working on a Sunday or something? My daily social media check-in is showing a lot of people angry at Bernie and I honestly cannot figure out why

Grandstanding is good, people like it when people stand up for things they like in a vocal and public way.

Joburg posted:

Hyundai is building an EV plant in Georgia, it’s supposed to be pumping out cars by 2025.

slurm posted:

When was the golden age of high-quality vehicles? Anyone I talk to about older vehicles assures me it's now, or in the recent past given supply chain issues, or even in the near future considering the low maintenance requirements of EVs. There are some specific areas (touchscreens) where cars have become both worse and cheaper, but generally they seem to be overbuilt if anything.

Of course I do still agree with your point about cheap plastic garbage in a lot of other categories of consumer goods, especially clothing.

haveblue posted:

Something like that. He whipped Republicans to allow the chips bill through because he was assured there was nothing like the IRA in the pipeline. Shortly after it passed, the IRA was revealed

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Thousands of new EV's all getting plugged in at 5:30 PM will probably be noticeable on the duck curve.

bird food bathtub posted:

It's amazing how he has the ability to be that irritating and stupid sounding in the text medium.

TyrantWD posted:

The fact that he is tearing up the paper at all suggests he knows not to hold on to things that he thinks will get him in trouble or portray him in a way he doesn’t want to be seen.

TyrantWD posted:

If the FBI actually took things that were incriminating, Trump would be going ballistic. He would have already done an impromptu rally and press conference to rile up his base. Instead he put out a very tame attempt at playing the victim, because it aligns with his me vs. the establishment narrative that he is going to run on again.

Josef bugman posted:

I believe the implication is that this has been planned in advance, or leaked, to gin up GOP voters with something to care about to prevent the midterms being a bit less of a home run for Republicans.

evilweasel posted:

it's also surprisingly difficult to upgrade old systems in the federal government, lots of federal agencies that are not specifically hated by congress have failed to upgrade their systems from 1970s era poo poo

the problem seems to be trying to upgrade everything at once into a new model leads to something not working and massive budget overruns