Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times

The process was routine. L.A. County Sheriff’s homicide investigator Kevin Lloyd was flipping through snapshots of tattooed gang members.

Then one caught his attention.

Inked on the pudgy chest of a young Pico Rivera gangster who had been picked up and released on a minor offense was the scene of a 2004 liquor store slaying that had stumped Lloyd for more than four years.

Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13…

Megan McArdle:

Kevin Drum doesn’t think it will be so hard to solve our fiscal problems with tax hikes:

I said that federal taxes had averaged 21% of GDP over the past 30 years, and Ross correctly points out that it’s federal spending that’s averaged 21%. On a macro level this might or might not matter (“to spend is to tax”), but it does matter if we’re trying to figure out how voters will react to an increase in the total tax take. However, I continue to believe that the impact would be much less than Ross thinks. The federal tax take was around 20% of GDP during the Clinton era, so here’s what we’re talking about: letting the Bush tax cuts expire in a couple of years and then raising tax rates by about four or five points of GDP over the next 20 or 30 years. Done reasonably and fairly, I just don’t believe that an increase this gradual would be wildly oppressive.

This is not true, and it’s important to point out why it’s not true.  First of all, while it is technically true that the federal tax take was “around 20% of GDP” during the Clinton era, this was only true at the height of the stock market bubble.  Tax revenues exceeded 20% of GDP for exactly one year: 2000.  The average tax take under Clinton was 19%.  And if you exclude 1999 and 2000, the very height of the bubble, it was more like 18.5%.

Without arguing about whether our tax system is fair or not, the fact is that the federal income tax is the most variable part of the code, and the federal income tax is now very progressive; it collects most of its revenue from people at the top.  (Whether it should collect even more is an argument for another day.)  Because it collects most of its income from people at the top, and because the incomes of the wealthy are more variable than the incomes of the poor and middle class (Warren Buffett’s income can drop by $300,000; mine can’t), we’re going to get deep troughs in recessions, and high peaks in boom times.  We will get particularly high peaks when the booms are delivering huge chunks of income to a handful of people in a very short timeframe.  According to the CBO, capital gains receipts alone, which more than doubled in Clinton’s second term, accounted for more than 30% of the increase in income tax receipts above the rate of GDP growth.  Obviously the ancillary ordinary income, like banking fees, also contributed substantially. Between 1996 and 2000, payroll taxes increased a tidy 30%.  But income taxes increased by 55%.  In 1996, social insurance receipts were about $500 billion, while income tax receipts were $650 billion.  By 2000, payroll tax receipts had grown to $656 billion–but the income tax was collecting over a trillion.  Today they’re roughly at par again (though that won’t last–social insurance contributions will drop as the worker to population ratio declines.)

Saying “all we have to do is go back to the tax rates under Clinton” is effectively saying “all we need is another asset price bubble that funnels a huge amount of money into the pockets of the rich”.  This seems neither particularly feasible, nor desirable.

…this would be a headline story about hate crimes.

…Two black females beating the hell out of a white patron, while several black employees stand by and watch. One black male manages to provide the facade of assistance to the white victim in this brutal attack.

The two black females exit, then re-enter the store to continue the beating, until a an older white woman attempts to stop them from dragging the white victim outside into the parking lot. note: the black male employees have disappeared from camera view, even though they are plenty well capable of stopping the attack.

At the end, the white victim is beaten until she has a seizure, at which point the camera operator warns the black female attackers to flee, because the police are on the way. Note: he makes sure to repeatedly tell the criminal attackers to flee, instead of keeping them there for the police to apprehend.

There’s video of the attack if you can stomach it.

…via his recess appointees to the NRLB:

In what may be the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, the agency filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to force Boeing to bring an airplane production line back to its unionized facilities in Washington State instead of moving the work to a nonunion plant in South Carolina.

In its complaint, the labor board said that Boeing’s decision to transfer a second production line for its new 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina was motivated by an unlawful desire to retaliate against union workers for their past strikes in Washington and to discourage future strikes. The agency’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said it was illegal for companies to take actions in retaliation against workers for exercising the right to strike.

Although manufacturers have long moved plants to nonunion states, the board noted that Boeing officials had, in internal documents and news interviews, specifically cited the strikes and potential future strikes as a reason for their 2009 decision to expand in South Carolina.

Obama and his ilk just don’t know their place.

Claire Berlinski writes:

Do I need to explain how many kinds of wrong this is? Not only is the federal government saying to Boeing that it gets to decide where it puts its production lines, it’s telling South Carolina it may as well not enact laws designed to attract investment. All that’s missing are the words “Five Year Plan.”

Remember those two recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board? The guys making these decisions about the commanding heights of the American economy have never even been confirmed by the Senate.

As if determined to prove three things about ultraliberals — that they’re humorless, grouchy and self-righteous– a University of  Iowa prof got nasty over an email invitation to the campus GOP’s “Coming out Week.”

Ellen Lewin, a professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies in the Department of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, sent a vulgar response [“#*@% [F-Word] YOU, REPUBLICANS] to a College Republican email about the group’s, “Conservative Coming Out Week.”

Campus politics today are such that openly declaring oneself conservative is akin to admitting homosexuality in the 1950s.

Lewin, who pulls down $94,800, defended her nasty, hurtful, insensitive and uncivil language, noting that:

“This is a time when political passions are inflamed, and when I received your unsolicited email, I had just finished reading some newspaper accounts of fresh outrages committed by Republicans in government.  I admit the language was inappropriate, and apologize for any affront to anyone’s delicate sensibilities.  I would really appreciate your not sending blanket emails to everyone on campus, especially in these difficult times.”

Political passions are often inflamed, particularly by thin-skinned academics who spew angry invective over a mild joke.

But she wasn’t done.

I should note that several things in the original message were extremely offensive, nearly rising to the level of obscenity.  Despite the Republicans’ general disdain for LGBT rights you called your upcoming event “conservative coming out day,” appropriating the language of the LGBT right movement.   Your reference to the Wisconsin protests suggested that they were frivolous attempts to avoid work.  And the “Animal Rights BBQ” is extremely insensitive to those who consider animal rights an important cause.

So F-you is okay, but satire is offensive. Where is Orwell when we need him?