Teen dead, 2 men hurt in B’klyn shoot
Who, what & how to watch Sunday’s Grammys show
A teenager was shot dead and two other men were wounded in Brooklyn on Saturday by a gunman who hopped out of a car and opened fire on the group walking down the street, cops said.
The three young men were walking along E. 82nd St. near Farragut Road in Canarsie around 10:15 a.m. when the triggerman got out of the back seat of a silver sedan and started shooting, police said.
Carmen Brown heard the shots go off but didn’t think it was gunfire until she stepped outside.
“I heard the shots and I got under the counter in my kitchen, but then said ‘No, it’s morning time. That wouldn’t happen now,’ ” said Brown. “I finally came outside and a boy was on the sidewalk. We realized he was dead.”
One of the victims, a 17-year-old, whose name was not released, was struck once in the chest and died at the scene, cops said.
“There was blood everywhere. I couldn’t believe what I saw,” Brown said. “People work hard here. They mind their business. To get killed walking on a beautiful morning — it is a tragedy.”
EMS took a 20-year-old man to
Brookdale University Hospital for a gunshot wound to the face, cops said.
A 19-year-old man was grazed by bullets in both legs and was taken to Brookdale hospital. Both were expected to survive, police said.
Another local resident, who didn’t want to be named, recalled seeing the slain teen’s friend overcome with grief.
“Somebody came here after and was crying, screaming, ‘He was my friend, he was only 17!’ It was terrible,” she said.
There were no arrests.
With concerts stalled for almost a year, the Grammys are the closest we can get to a live music event.
The annual awards show, delayed for two months, will go on Sunday, with the hottest musicians taking the stage once again.
Here’s everything you need to know before the show:
THE CEREMONY
COVID-19 safety measures are front and center at the Los Angeles Convention Center, which will be host to performers and nominees but not a standard audience.
The Grammys were originally scheduled for Jan. 31 at the Staples Center.
There will reportedly be five stages at the venue, with four dedicated to performances and another reserved for presenters.
Rotating groups of nominees, artists and their guests will surround the stages during performances. The show’s executive producer, Ben Winston, described it to Variety as “a room of incredible musicians, all safely distanced from each other, and every 45 minutes a new four groups come in and the [previous] four go out.”
THE PERFORMERS
Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, Post Malone, Black Pumas, BTS, Brandi Carlile, DaBaby, Doja Cat, Mickey Guyton, Haim, Brittany Howard, Miranda Lambert, Lil Baby, Dua Lipa, Chris Martin, John Mayer, Maren Morris and Roddy Ricch are all set to perform “in and around” the Los Angeles
Convention Center.
Some performances will be prerecorded, but producers were mum on which ones or how many.
“Artists will come together, while still safely apart, to play music for each other as a community and celebrate the music that unites us,” the Recording Academy said.
THE NOMINEES
Some of pop’s top stars are heavily nominated at this year’s
Grammys, but it’s the Queen who sits atop the throne.
Beyoncé leads all artists with nine nominations, including nods for both record and song of the year for “Black Parade.” She’s also up for record of the year for the remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s hip-hop hit “Savage.”
Swift, Lipa and Roddy Ricch each received six nominations. Swift is a finalist for album of the year for “Folklore” and song of the year for “Cardigan.”
Lipa, meanwhile, is nominated in each of the three major categories, with “Don’t Start Now” up for both record and song of the year, and “Future Nostalgia” a finalist for album of the year.
The only other artist to be nominated in all three of those categories this year is rapper Post Malone, who received song and record of the year nods for “Circles,” and an album of the year nomination for “Hollywood’s Bleeding.”
THE HOST
“Daily Show” host Trevor Noah will take the reins and navigate the hybrid live and recorded ceremony.
Noah, 37, will be aided throughout the evening by noncelebrity presenters, employees at famed music halls like the Troubadour in Los Angeles, the Hotel Café in Los Angeles, the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the Station Inn in Nashville.
Noah was nominated for a Grammy last year for his standup special, “Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia,” but lost to Dave Chappelle.
HOW TO WATCH
The award show will air from 8 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. on Sunday on CBS, and it will stream on Paramount+ (the rebranded CBS All Access). Three-time nominee Jhené Aiko will host the premiere ceremony, beginning at 3 p.m., with eight performances and dozens of awards handed out. The show will kick off with a tribute performance celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Marvin Gaye track “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology).” It will stream live on Grammy.com.
First lady of the United States is one of the most visible, yet least defined, jobs.
It is also one of the trickiest to maneuver; a true damned-if-you-do-too-much, damned-if-you-don’t.
In the exhaustively researched “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight,” by Julia Sweig, we learn just how much Lady Bird did, quietly.
Drawn from Johnson’s recorded diary of 1.75 million words, and a huge array of books, articles, oral histories, letters and interviews, Sweig’s book masterfully explains the woman, concentrating on her time in the White House.
Though millions of Americans knew her from Lyndon Baines Johnson’s decades in politics, Lady Bird was thrust onto the international scene at the horrifying moment when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
As Vice President Johnson was sworn in as president, the couple weathered a nation’s mourning. Navigating as a couple, though strong individually, is how the Johnsons worked. As is so often the case, much went on behind closed doors.
Lady Bird did more than support, however. She acted. Using a sharp intellect, honed social skills, money inherited and earned, and a close-knit circle of advisers and friends, she advocated for women and the environment. She was influential, yet sadly, isn’t well-known today.
“In college, she studied journalism and history, and throughout her career as a political wife, those two skills served her well as she crafted the public record of what she called ‘our presidency,’ ” Sweig writes early in the book.
Johnson was a rarity in so many ways, beginning with being well educated when most women were not. At the University of Texas, she was classmates with Walter Cronkite. Decades later, when she and
LBJ watched the 1968 Democratic Convention on three TVs simultaneously, two were muted, but they kept on the sound at CBS to listen to the most trusted man in America.
What comes across clearly in this opus is that Bird, as her husband called her, knew how to listen. She also knew how to observe, but because she was also very much a Southern gentlelady, perhaps people underestimated her power. Make no mistake, she had power in the form of the direct line to the president — and he listened.
From taking the VP position to whether to run for a full second term in 1968, Bird was by his side, laying out the pros and cons.
This book explains how their marriage was one of partners. It’s not the expected account of his philandering and her stoically waiting. Sweig’s telling is intimate without being salacious.
A newcomer or someone from another generation might not readily understand the relationship between the Texans.
Sweig writes of how Jackie Kennedy was initially taken aback by Bird’s habit of jotting notes for LBJ:
“Alien to Jackie and mistaken as a sign of Lady Bird’s subordination to Lyndon — not even a paid secretary, but a captive dog — the spiral notebooks, Jackie failed to see, represented the meticulously gathered and assembled brick and mortar of the political network the Johnsons had built together over almost three decades.”
When Johnson first met her, Claudia Alta Taylor was only 22. He was smitten with her intelligence, calling her “the smartest and most deliberate little girl in the world.” He proposed at the end of their first date. He kept asking for 10 weeks until she said yes.
From the beginning, their dynamic included her keeping him grounded. She read LBJ’s moods, knew him better than anyone and did her level best to take care of him. Yet Bird, as Sweig proves, was still
very much her own woman.
She had friends and interests; a devotee of daily exercise long before it became fashionable, she kept herself at 114 pounds, sometimes resorting to a diet of hard-boiled eggs, dry toast, grapefruit and black coffee.
She also had an insider’s understanding of the media. In 1943, the Johnsons bought a nearly bankrupt Austin, Texas, radio station with her family money.
“From her equity and sweat during this grungy, unglamorous beginning, and during the ensuing decades until they entered the White House, the Johnsons built a multimillion-dollar Texas media, land and cattle empire,” Sweig explains. “Their status as political insiders boosted their fortune-building prospects — with FCC licenses and coerced discount advertising rates among the perks they leveraged.”
Perhaps more than any other first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, Bird interacted with the press and cultivated relationships with journalists. When LBJ hadn’t appointed a VP, Lady Bird was considered by some a stand-in.
The cause Bird is most identified with, beautifying America, took root shortly after LBJ’s 1964 election when Interior Secretary Stewart Udall “grabbed Lady Bird’s attention with ideas for planting native flowers and shrubs along the country’s newly built highways — the state of Texas had been doing so for decades,” Sweig writes. But her plans were grander and deeper than planting flowers. Bird understood the necessity of making all areas, including the highways and slums, better. She wanted families to enjoy the national parks, swim in lakes and draw solace and strength from nature, as she always had.
She also recognized that first ladies were often dismissed. “I’ll never forgive Lyndon’s boys for turning my environmental agenda into a beautification project,” she later said.
Befitting the era and her personality, Bird was quietly effective, including on women’s rights. “Her take on women’s empowerment — don’t be afraid of your own strength — articulated for the White House a perspective that no one else in the Johnson cabinet had ventured to set forth, but with her trademark gingerly approach.”
Although she never publicly demanded birth control be accessible to all, new federal guidelines provided funding to do just that.
What not everyone was aware of was the yearslong angst of whether LBJ should run for a full second term. The ongoing war in Vietnam, which he escalated, brought unrest at home. The anti-war movement had Americans in the streets.
LBJ’s War on Poverty, the Voting Rights Act and other social legislation, if not forgotten, were sidelined as the reality of what was going on in Vietnam was broadcast into living rooms nightly.
A year before the election Bird felt their time in Washington had come to an end. As the watershed of 1968 unfolded, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F.
Kennedy were assassinated and the country erupted in protests, the Johnsons finished their years in the White House.
Bird outlived LBJ by 34 years and spent much of that time working on the LBJ Presidential Library and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She traveled with her daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, remained active in environmental causes and continued to love the arts.
At the National Women’s Conference in 1977, Bird received an ovation when she said, “I once thought the women’s movement belonged more to my daughters than to me. But I have come to know that it belongs to women of all ages. I am proud to say, and I want you to know, that Texas was the ninth state to ratify the right of women to vote, and the seventh state to ratify the equal rights amendment.”
Honors continued to be bestowed upon her not only because of who she married, but because of who Lady Bird Johnson was.
President Biden’s gun plan includes mandatory registration of “assault weapons” for anyone wishing to keep those they already own. He is the first president to raise the issue of gun registration in more than 50 years since President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He’s the first ever, too, to propose banning new sales of “assault” or tactical, semiautomatic weapons.
The Biden administration is responding to pressure for gun reform led today by survivors of the Valentine’s Day 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The plan has finally put on the table what gun reform advocates including surviving parents and others have long demanded, seemingly in vain until now. The House just passed major gun control bills on Thursday.
Gun rights advocates, however, a group that seems to include nearly every leader of the Republican Party, are readying for a fight. If there is one issue that could reunite the GOP, from Sen. Mitch McConnell to former President Trump, not to mention every group from Three Percenters to neo-Nazis who joined in the Jan. 6 Capitol takeover, it is gun registration. Against it, that is.
It is impossible to imagine how Biden could succeed in healing the nation, as he has promised, and still enact all of his gun plan. Many if not most of the 74 million people who voted for Trump’s reelection would also oppose this plan. Not to mention many elected officials, from governors to constitutional sheriffs, who might refuse to comply. Or the new Roberts Supreme Court, which will one day no doubt rule on gun laws.
Millions of people, today, see gun control itself as an existential threat.
“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” as President Trump said in 2018 when he reversed himself on background checks after the back-to-back weekend shootings in El Paso and Dayton. He did so after speaking with the National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre, who, like the NRA, has long promoted this theory.
Biden has yet to address the details of his own gun plan. Throughout his 48-year career, moreover, he is not known to have ever addressed the issue of gun registration. Gun groups have been circulating for months what they call the “Biden plan to destroy the Second Amendment,” filling the vacuum left by his silence with fear. They claim that this is the fateful step, after background checks, that could start the slide to disarmament, and then genocide.
This kind of cowardice has long led reformers astray. The nation has not passed any comprehensive and lasting national gun laws in more than a half-century. In 1994, during the Clinton years, Congress passed the “Assault Weapons Ban,” which outlawed, for just 10 years, select semiautomatic firearms based on their cosmetic features, like both a pistol grip and a flash suppressor. But this only led gun manufacturers to design weapons to bypass the ban, which, since it expired, has resulted in more sales of more AR-15 rifles and other tactical, semiautomatic weapons than ever before.
The Biden plan would give existing owners of semiautomatic weapons (like me) the choice of either selling their weapons back to the federal government, or registering them under a prior gun law, backed in 1934 by the NRA, along with paying a tax of up to $200 for each weapon. This would put hardship on working-class gun owners, noted the former NRA commentator and independent merchandiser Colion Noir.
The plan would limit, too, although no one has yet suggested the cap, the number of weapons one may own, along with banning high-capacity magazines. All these steps are opposed by the NRA and others who share the belief that firearms in civilian hands are a necessary check on the power of federal as well as state governments, and that they are also necessary for self-defense against not just lone criminals but also armed mobs. Firearms sales spiked last year after the death in police custody of George Floyd as the uprising began of Black Lives Matter protests.
Biden said he would also reverse the immunity granted under President George W. Bush to hold gunmakers civilly liable, again, for the potential misuse of their weapons to commit harm. He would eliminate the “gun show loophole” to require background checks on private sales. It remains to be seen whether this proposal might include an exception for, say, the passing down of a firearm heirloom to the next generation.
The president left out one measure in his recent remarks, on the third anniversary of the Parkland shooting, still posted online: to ban online sales of ammunition. The nation has experienced an unprecedented, ongoing shortage of ammunition from both overthe-counter and online retailers, according to both the trade press and the NRA. It’s been fueled by ever-rising demand, as manufacturers have been producing ammo at “above-normal capacities” throughout the pandemic. Demand spiked again to worsen the shortage after first CNN, and then Fox News, announced that Biden had won the presidency.
No doubt any attempt to end commerce in the firearms industry’s fastest-growing sector would meet opposition. Most of the outrage already smoldering in resistance to the gun plan, however, is based on speculation, not facts. This shows how much the NRA, in particular, has shaped how we as a nation look at guns and their regulations. The NRA wasn’t always like this. The NRA backed gun control from the 1930s into the 1970s, as its leaders long sought to balance the needs of gun owners against public safety.
Despite what today’s NRA may suggest, gun registration is the norm in every other advanced nation, and not one of them has deteriorated into either a totalitarian or genocidal state. Canada, the nations of Western Europe and Japan all control guns by strictly licensing owners and registering each weapon, to the degree that they permit civilian ownership at all.
A few more, like Australia and New Zealand each confiscated semiautomatic