According to the latest FBI data, violent crime and property crime are down sharply in 2024. The new data shows substantial drops in every category, including murder (-26.4%), rape (-25.7%), robbery (-17.8%), and property crime (-15.1%). These declines follow steep drops in violent crime and property crime in 2023.
There are two key factors. First, high-profile politicians are constantly making false claims about crime rates in the United States. For example, speaking at a Black church in Detroit last Saturday, former President Trump said the following:
We’ll bring back public safety and defend our communities for law-abiding American citizens. The crime is most rampant right here in African American communities. And more people see me, and they say, “Sir, we want protection. We want the police to protect us. We don’t want to get robbed, and mugged, and beat up, or killed because we want to walk across the street and buy a loaf of bread.” They want it so badly. Fake news doesn’t talk about it.
But most people do not watch Trump deliver remarks live. The second factor creating misconceptions about crime is how these comments are covered by major media outlets. Here is how Trump’s remarks were covered in the Washington Post:
Note that if readers simply read this headline, they would not know that Trump’s claims about “rampant crime” are false. Worse, you would not know that Trump’s claims about crime are false if you read the entire article. You do learn that “recent polls show Trump has made gains with Black men, alarming some Democrats because even a small change in Black turnout or preferences could tip such pivotal states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.”
The Washington Post also notes that the event included two Black men Trump is considering as his running mate, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson (R) and Congressman Byron Donalds (R-FL). The piece also criticizes Trump for “playing on racial stereotypes, such as his suggestion that Black voters will look more favorably on his candidacy now that he has a mug shot and has faced criminal prosecution.” But accurate information on crime in Detroit — and the nation — is completely missing.
It should have been in the headline and it should have been blaring. It’s not just irresponsible journalism, it’s a huge disservice to their readers. It’s downright cruel to amplify this liar’s fear mongering and help him scare the hell out of the population when things are actually getting demonstrably better. It’s very good news that the crime rate is plunging but I guess it isn’t as sexy as passing on Trump’s lies.
It shouldn’t be this hard to tell people the truth.
The result, hitting TV sets across the country on Monday, was the campaign’s unleashing of its sharpest attack ad yet, depicting Trump as a “convicted criminal who’s only out for himself.” And the campaign says it’s just the start. Biden advisers say they plan to hammer Trump over the coming weeks — aiming to both set up a favorable narrative ahead of next week’s debate and keep Trump’s felony conviction top-of-mind for voters who haven’t yet fully tuned into the election.
“We’ve seen in polling since the conviction that the more the conviction is front and center in voters’ attention, the worse it is for Trump,” said a Biden campaign pollster granted anonymity to describe internal polling because they were not authorized to do so publicly.
The pollster said their research concluded that Trump’s conviction could effectively be used in a broader depiction of Trump as being self-centered and unwilling to take responsibility for his actions.
“Trump has dug his own hole deeper on the convictions,” the pollster said, “and we’re seeing him pay the price for that in the polling.”
Twenty-one percent of independents surveyed by Politico and Ipsos said they believe the verdict is an important issue in determining their vote and that they are now less likely to support Trump.
Among other independents who consider the conviction an important factor, 10% said it would not impact their vote while 5% said it would make them more likely to back Trump. Sixty-five percent of independents said the verdict is not important to how they will vote.
While Republican voters have largely continued to express support for Trump since the verdict and Democrats have remained critical, the poll sheds light on how independents — the all-important swing voters the candidates are vying for — view Trump today.
Among all voters, a plurality of 38% say Trump’s conviction is unlikely to affect their support for the presumptive Republican nominee. But about twice as many respondents — 33% — said they are less likely to support Trump than those who said they are more likely to support him — 17%.
It’s a problem for him, no doubt about it. And it’s not just the conviction. It’s the message that he cares more about himself than he cares about the country, which is obvious. When you put that explicitly as we hear him whining incessantly about how unfair everything is and his ongoing denials of ever doing anything wrong, it just has the ring of truth.
Republican voters know that, they just can’t admit it. They bought the line of a criminal conman and that’s really hard to come to terms with.
I mentioned this the other day but now it’s official. President Biden is announcing today that he will legalize the undocumented immigrant spouses of American citizens:
President Biden on Tuesday is announcing a large-scale immigration program that will offer legal status and a streamlined path to U.S. residency and citizenship to roughly half a million unauthorized immigrants married to American citizens.
The Department of Homeland Security policy will allow these immigrants to apply for work permits and deportation protections if they have lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years and meet other requirements, senior administration officials said during a call with reporters.
Perhaps most importantly, however, Mr. Biden’s move will unlock a path to permanent residency — colloquially known as a green card — and ultimately U.S. citizenship for many of the program’s beneficiaries. The policy, if upheld in court, would be the largest government program for undocumented immigrants since the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, which currently shields 528,000 so-called “DREAMers” who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation.
Mr. Biden is slated to announce the measure at a White House event on Tuesday marking the 12th anniversary of DACA, alongside another move to make it easier for employers to sponsor “DREAMers” and other undocumented immigrants for work visas.
You will note that this, like all policies, must be upheld in court so who knows if it will actually come to pass. (And people will inevitably blame Joe Biden for being the failure who couldn’t get it done.) It would be very much be preferable to have this done legislatively but I think we know that MAGA will not let that happen right now.
This is the right thing to do. If someone has been in the US for 10 years and is married to an American — and in many cases has American children — they should be allowed to stay and work here. It’s the practical and humane thing to do.
The other side, by the way, wants to deport them and if they have to deport their American spouses and kids too, well that would just be collateral damage. Trump is all prepared for it saying often on the campaign trail that they’ll be deporting “beautiful women and children.”
John Oliver on Project 2025 and a second Trump term.
I was going to clip this segment out into shorter sections but decided to keep it together because it's too important and, frankly, it should terrify you. pic.twitter.com/Kaqo07lurB
Project 2025 is hundreds of pages long and it’s difficult to get through. And that’s just for starters. There’s more in it every day. So this run-down by John Oliver is about as short and succinct and explanation possible. If you have a few minutes it’s well worth watching. You might want to have a drink handy…
Cutman Jacob “Stitch” Duran administers treatment to fighter Vladimir Klitschko. Photo via Wkimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
A high school friend was raised a good Southern Baptist. “We couldn’t cuss in the house,” he said. “Except you could say ‘damn yankee,’ because that’s just what they were.”
The Biden campaign is taking that approach with Donald Trump: A convicted criminal is just what he is.
Donald Trump is only out for himself. I'm fighting for the American people.
Ankush Khardori, a senior writer for Politico Magazine, speaks with Greg Sargent about a Politico poll “with some pretty big surprises: A larger-than-expected percentage of Americans say Donald Trump’s criminal conviction in Manhattan makes them less likely to vote for him.”
Thirty-three percent of respondents said that the conviction made them less likely to support Trump, while only 17 percent of respondents said that it made them more likely to support Trump.
“Support” is one thing. Voting is another.
Twenty-two percent of respondents said that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them less likely to support Trump. Only 6 percent of respondents took the other side of that question — reporting that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them more likely to support Trump.
A nearly identical net-negative effect showed up among independents. Twenty-one percent of independents reported that they were less likely to support Trump and that the conviction is important to their vote. Just 5 percent of them said that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them more likely to support Trump.
Trump is cut over the eye. Now, work the eye, people. Retweet, repost, re-whatever on every platform you follow. (Biden-Harris is not on all platforms.)
“The next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees — two more. [Trump has] already appointed two that have been very negative in terms of the rights of individuals,” President Joe Biden told Jimmy Kimmel during a Los Angeles fundraiser over the weekend (CNN):
“The idea that if he’s reelected he’s going to appoint two more flying flags upside down,” Biden said in an apparent reference to a flag that once flew outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito. Asked by Kimmel whether he considered this the scariest part of a second Trump term, Biden responded, “It is one of the scariest parts.”
Federal courts are not the only ones on the fall ballot. Only a handful of state do not elect judges in some manner. After Republicans won a 5-2 majority on North Carolina’s state Supreme Court in 2022, they quickly reversed cases decided in the last court session, “one blocking a photo ID law and one striking down partisan gerrymandered maps.” Justice Anita Earls, a former civil rights attorney, decried the move as a “process driven by partisan influence and greed for power.”
“In a single blow, the majority strips millions of voters of this state of their fundamental, constitutional rights and delivers on the threat that ‘our decisions are fleeting, and our precedent is only as enduring as the terms of the justices who sit on the bench.’ ”
Your state similar? Pay attention to those down-ballot races.
ProPublica has been busy examining conservative thumbprints on the scales of justice. In North Carolina, just by coincidence:
Last fall, out of public view, the North Carolina Supreme Court squashed disciplinary action against two Republican judges who had admitted that they had violated the state’s judicial code of conduct, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the decisions.
One of the judges had ordered, without legal justification, that a witness be jailed. The other had escalated a courtroom argument with a defendant, which led to a police officer shooting the defendant to death. The Judicial Standards Commission, the arm of the state Supreme Court that investigates judicial misconduct by judges, had recommended that the court publicly reprimand both women. The majority-Republican court gave no public explanation for rejecting the recommendations — indeed, state law mandates that such decisions remain confidential.
North Carolina’s disciplinary procedures are unusually opaque, ProPublica reports (note my bolding):
Since 2011, North Carolina’s Judicial Standards Commission has referred 19 cases to the Supreme Court for judicial discipline, according to the court’s annual reports. In that time, the court has issued 17 public disciplinary orders, ranging from reprimands to suspensions without pay.
Had the Supreme Court followed the commission’s recommendations in the cases of the two Republican judges, it would have meant publicly reprimanding them ahead of elections for both in 2024. Judge Lori Hamilton, a longtime Republican, had campaigned with the slogan, “the ideal conservative.” Judge Caroline Burnette had previously been a Democrat — but she switched her registration before her case got to the Supreme Court, according to public records.
See ProPublica for the details of those cases. But ICYMI:
Months after the Supreme Court decided in the fall of 2023 to let Hamilton and Burnette off without public consequences, it issued its most recent disciplinary order. In March 2024, the court concurred with the commission’s recommendation for punishment of Angela Foster, a Black Democratic judge who had pressured a court official to reduce a bond for her son and had taken over a courtroom reserved for other court officials, thereby delaying over 100 cases. The Supreme Court suspended her without pay for 120 days.
By the way, Earls has been a target:
In March 2023, Earls, the Supreme Court’s lone Black justice and a Democrat, received a letter from the commission informing her that she was under investigation. The letter stated that Earls had been accused of disclosing “confidential information concerning matters being currently deliberated in conference by the Supreme Court.” If the commission found evidence of a serious violation, it could send the case to the Supreme Court, which would make a final determination and could go as far as to expel her.
At the center of the anonymous complaint was the allegation that Earls had told lawmakers and state bar members at two different meetings about proposed rule changes that would give more power to the Republican justices. The complaint, which was made after WRAL News published an article describing the meetings, also alleged that she’d provided confidential information to a reporter.
In her response to the letter, which later was filed in court, her lawyer argued that it had been standard practice for justices to discuss the court’s rule changes with affected parties and that no information had been leaked. Earls’ lawyer also wrote that if the matter proceeded to a hearing, Earls planned to make the investigation public and subpoena “current and former Justices” about their “actions.” In May, the commission dismissed the complaint, providing Earls with verbal and written warnings “to be mindful of your public comments,” according to court documents.
In June, Earls, the only person of color on the court, gave an interview to Law360 in which she criticized Chief Justice Paul Newby and other conservative justices for refusing to address the lack of diversity in the state’s court system. She revealed that Newby had effectively killed its Commission on Fairness and Equity by not reappointing its members and that he had ended implicit bias trainings for judges, which Earls had helped set up. Much of the interview was framed around a Law360 analysis and an outside study that found that the vast majority of state appellate court judges, and the attorneys arguing before them, were white and male. In reference to the findings, Earls said that “our court system, like any other court system, is made up of human beings and I believe the research that shows that we all have implicit biases.” She said that her five Republican colleagues “very much see themselves as a conservative bloc” and that “their allegiance is to their ideology, not to the institution.”
In August, Earls received another letter from the commission alerting her that it had “reopened” the former investigation. The letter warned: “Publicly alleging that another judge makes decisions based on a motivation not allowed under” the code, such as racial or political biases, without “definitive proof runs contrary to a judge’s duty to promote public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary.”
Rather than letting the investigation proceed in secret again, Earls sued the commission in federal court, seeking an injunction to stop “an on-going campaign” by the commission to “stifle the First Amendment free-speech rights of Justice Earls and expose her to punishment.”
Two weeks after the lawsuit was filed, Democratic state lawmakers held a press conference to call the investigation into Earls “a political hit job” — and one state representative accused Newby of pushing it, though he said he could not reveal his sources. Four sources knowledgeable about Newby’s or the commission’s actions told ProPublica that the chief justice encouraged the investigation. The sources requested anonymity because the inner workings of the commission are confidential and because they feared retaliation.
I live in one of David Pepper’s “Laboratories of Autocracy” in which a GOP-legislative offense wreaks havoc in the capitol while minority Democrats are perpetually on defense. I spent 2016 telling progressives President Hillary can’t solve my legislature problem; President Bernie can’t either. WE have to solve that problem. Here.
That doesn’t just apply to red legislatures but to red courts in your state too.
First of all, what 23 year old buys a house? Maybe he’s got an inheritance? I would guess that very few 23 year olds are in this position. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of 33 year olds in that position but I have a sneaking suspicion this post isn’t on the up and up.
Be that as it may, Surowecki is correct. Joe Biden doesn’t control interest rates and god knows, neither does Donald Trump. So this is stupid.
But then there’s JD Vance’s grotesque answer to the problem. Deporting 20 million people (20 MILLION!!!!) is the most fascistic policy proposal we’ve seen since 1930s Germany. They were “deporting” the alleged cause of all their problems too.
The sheer amount of pain, suffering and destruction involved in such a horrific policy is impossible to gauge but it’s going to be a nightmare. And as for the public picking up the tab for undocumented immigrants just wait until they see what inflation looks like without 20 million workers who are keeping this country running. Not to mention the vast cost incurred in rounding up such a vast number of people. It’s absurd.
This is Nazi talk, nothing less. It’s not just “Christian nationaism” or “authoritarian.” It’s full-blown Nazi rhetoric.
This should be on tik-tok. (It may be for all I know but I do hope so…) There are a lot of young women who need to see it as well as plenty of decent young men who might be skeeved out by grandpa Trump macking on young women like this. It’s very creepy and he’s still doing it. This video (referenced briefly in that series above) is recent:
You know what is creepy? Adjudicated Rapist Donald Trump sexually harassing a young woman at Turning Point pic.twitter.com/skEE0F6kQG
— Barbara Sobel (BarbaraJ.Sobel on Threads) (@Momof4Cats4) June 15, 2024
With the way the Trump campaign and Rupert Murdoch are pushing doctored videos of Biden every day, I think it’s only fair to spread real videos of Donald Trump’s grotesque behavior. People may have accepted it to some degree but they certainly don’t want to be reminded of it. They should be. They have to be.
This tactic is used by many rich people but very few have used it as liberally as Donald Trump:
The IRS plans to end a major tax loophole for wealthy taxpayers that could raise more than $50 billion in revenue over the next decade, the U.S. Treasury Department says.
The proposed rule and guidance announced Monday includes plans to essentially stop “partnership basis shifting” — a process by which a business or person can move assets among a series of related parties to avoid paying taxes.
Biden administration officials said after evaluating the practice that there are no economic grounds for these transactions, with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo calling it “really just a shell game.” The officials said the additional IRS funding provided through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had enabled increased oversight and greater awareness of the practice.
“These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe,” IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said.
Due to previous years of underfunding, the IRS had cut back on the auditing of wealthy individuals and the shifting of assets among partnerships and companies became common.
The IRS says filings for large pass-through businesses used for the type of tax avoidance in the guidance increased 70% from 174,100 in 2010 to 297,400 in 2019. However, audit rates for these businesses fell from 3.8% to 0.1% in the same time frame.
Treasury said in a statement announcing the new guidance that there is an estimated $160 billion gap between what the top 1% of earners likely owe in taxes and what they pay.
Miles Johnson, a senior attorney adviser and partnership tax specialist at the Tax Law Center at NYU Law, said “these transactions effectively make income disappear from the tax system by creating depreciation deductions or other tax reductions that don’t reflect any true economic cost.”
I’ll look forward to hearing how this change in the tax regulations is really an assault on the everyday Real Americans in rural counties. I’m sure it will be creative.
Trump is running on an explicitly transactional platform planning to enact draconian tariffs on virtually everything because he thinks he can strong arm other countries into doing his bidding — which would crash the world economy and provoke hostility among friends and foes alike. I don’t think that’s what most of the country means when they say we should engage with the world.
Here’s what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said about Biden over the weekend:
“I think that Joe Biden is someone who is very clear, who knows exactly what he is doing and who is one of the most experienced politicians in the world, especially when it comes to international politics. In a difficult situation like this, where a war is taking place right here in Europe, after Russia invaded Ukraine, where many, many other conflicts are raging around the world, this is an asset, a good thing, and therefore I can only say that this is a man who knows exactly what he is doing.”
Or we can have an ignorant, malevolent, pathological liar in charge. That’s the choice.
