“it’s not true that shoplifting less than $950 is no longer illegal—it can still be charged as a misdemeanor. “What Prop 47 did is increase the dollar amount by which theft can be prosecuted as a felony from $400 to $950 to adjust for inflation and cost of living,” Alex Bastian, who co-authored the proposition, told the Associated Press in 2021. “But most shoplifting cases are under $400 to begin with, so before Prop 47 and after Prop 47, there isn’t any difference.”
And even after being raised to $950, California’s felony threshold is lower than more than half of all other U.S. states: Deep red states like Montana and Kansas set theirs at $1,500, while Texas’s is set at $2,500.
“Under current law, prosecutors can already add together thefts that are demonstrably related, for example multiple thefts from the same store in the same week or skimming small amounts from your employer every day,” notes the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy advocacy organization that supports criminal justice reform (and opposes Proposition 36).
In fairness, evidence indicates that certain crimes did increase after Proposition 47. “Driven by larcenies, property crime jumped after Prop 47 compared to the nation and comparison states,” according to a September 2024 report by the Public Policy Institute of California. At the same time, it wasn’t the biggest contributor: “Evidence is clearer that retail theft increased due to pandemic responses by the criminal justice system, and the increases were of greater magnitude than increases due to Prop 47.”
Similarly, a 2018 study in Criminology & Public Policy found “that Prop 47 had no effect on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or burglary. Larceny and motor vehicle thefts, however, seem to have increased moderately,” but the rates of increase were both minor and had other potential causes.”
“According to the exit poll, 35 percent of voters nationally rated the “state of democracy” as the most important factor to their vote. Eighty-one percent of these people voted for Harris and just 17 percent for Trump. But the economy was the next-most-influential issue. Among these voters, Trump led 79 percent to 20 percent. In the end, abortion did not rate as highly as Democrats might have hoped; only 14 percent rated it as their biggest concern.
It’s possible that inflation contributed to the growing divide between high-income voters and low-income voters. According to the exit poll, Democrats increased their vote share by 9 points among voters living in households that make more than $100,000 dollars a year. Among households making less, which account for about 60 percent of voters, Republicans gained 12 points on margin.”
…
“In addition to economic headwinds and deteriorating margins with their base, it looks like Democrats also simply had bad turnout. So far, around 137 million ballots have been counted for the 2024 presidential race. Predictions of final turnout are hovering somewhere in the neighborhood 152 million votes. That would be a decrease from the 158 million who voted in 2020 and would be equivalent to about 61 percent of eligible voters. That would be a decline from 66 percent in 2020.”
“On May 22, 2022, Michael Jennings, a pastor at a church in Childersburg, Alabama, was watering his out-of-town neighbor’s flowers when another neighbor called 911 to report a suspicious person. Two police officers, Christopher Smith and Justin Gable, soon arrived and began questioning Jennings.
Body camera footage of the incident shows that Jennings told the officers that his name was “Pastor Jennings” but refused to hand over his I.D. card, saying “I’m not gonna give you no I.D., I ain’t did nothing wrong….I used to be a police officer.”
“Come on man, don’t do this to me. There’s a suspicious person in the yard, and if you’re not gonna identify yourself—” said one of the officers, before Jennings interjected, “I don’t have to identify myself.”
The officers arrested Jennings, and he was booked at the Childersburg City Jail on obstruction of government operation charges. The charges were dropped just days later, and he then sued, claiming that the officers wrongfully arrested him and violated his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search or seizure.
Last December a judge dismissed the suit, ruling that the officers had qualified immunity, protecting them from civil liability. (Qualified immunity is the doctrine that shields officials from federal civil rights claims unless their alleged actions violated “clearly established” law, with “clearly established” defined extremely narrowly.) But Jennings appealed, and last Friday a three-judge panel for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision.”
…
“Even if the officers had a right to demand Jennings identify himself, Jennings still complied with the state’s ID requirements. He told the officers who he was, that he lived across the street, and why he was in his neighbor’s yard.
“While it is always advisable to cooperate with law enforcement officers,” the opinion reads, “Jennings was under no legal obligation to provide his ID. Therefore, officers lacked probable cause for Jennings’ arrest for obstructing government operations because Jennings did not commit an independent unlawful act by refusing to give ID.”
With the court’s decision, Jennings can continue suing the officers who wrongfully arrested him. But it shouldn’t have taken this intervention for Jennings to be able to lodge his lawsuit in the first place. Stringent qualified immunity protections made police officers—and other government actors—virtually unaccountable for violating citizen’s rights. The fact that Jennings’ clear-cut case was dismissed in the first place reveals the deep flaws in that system.”
“Black voters — men and women — have been the bedrock of the Democratic Party, and in recent years, Latinos and young voters have joined them.
All three groups still preferred Democrat Kamala Harris. But preliminary data from AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide, suggested that Trump made significant gains.
Voters under age 30 represent a fraction of the total electorate, but about half of them supported Harris. That’s compared to the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020. Slightly more than 4 in 10 young voters went for Trump, up from about one-third in 2020.
At the same time, Black and Latino voters appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than they were to back Biden four years ago, according to AP VoteCast.
About 8 in 10 Black voters backed Harris, down from the roughly 9 in 10 who backed Biden. More than half of Hispanic voters supported Harris, but that was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020. Trump’s support among those groups appeared to rise slightly compared to 2020. Collectively, those small gains yielded an outsize outcome.”
…
“about half of Trump voters said inflation was the biggest issue factoring into their election decisions. About as many said that of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to AP VoteCast.
He papered over the fact that the economy by many conventional metrics is robust — inflation is largely in check and wages are up — while border crossings have dropped dramatically. He talked right past the facts and through relentless repetition convinced voters.
He also sold them on the promise of the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history, although he has not explained how such an operation would work. And he is threatening to impose massive tariffs on key products from China and other American adversaries, which economists warn could dramatically boost prices for average Americans.”
“The trouble began on September 20, when the conservative Substack Current Revolt called attention to his history with the porn industry. Several conservative organizations then rescinded invitations for him to speak, and AFC fired him.
“Corey is no longer at AFC,” a spokesperson for the group told Reason in an email. “We wish him well in his next endeavors, and we remain focused on our mission to expand educational opportunity for families, particularly lower-income families, across the country.”
DeAngelis declined to comment, but he wrote on X: “As an activist for parental rights and school choice, my passion is personal. Just like everyone else, I have made mistakes throughout my life, learned from those mistakes, used that as an opportunity to grow and tried to channel that experience into something positive. I was a victim of poor decisions and poor influences. I have turned that experience into the fuel that fires me to save young people from being put in the same position I was put in and to help parents protect their children. I will never stop fighting for what is right.”‘
What’s happening to DeAngelis is a classic example of cancel culture: He is being punished for a regretted incident from his distant past that has nothing to do with his current job. Conservative organizations may well have morals clauses in their contracts, and they are free to hire and fire at will. But any institution that purports to oppose cancel culture, yet refuses to work with DeAngelis on this basis, is engaged in hypocrisy.”
“Trump has repeatedly re-upped the idea that broadcast licenses should be contingent on whether they are used to air content that offends him. Last November, for instance, he complained that MSNBC “uses FREE government approved airwaves” to execute “a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE.” He declared that “our so-called ‘government’ should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity.”
That jeremiad was nonsensical in at least two ways. First, there is nothing “illegal” about MSNBC’s anti-Trump content; to the contrary, the criticism to which Trump objects is constitutionally protected speech. Second, MSNBC is a cable channel, so it does not use “government approved airwaves” to transmit its programming and therefore does not need a broadcast license to operate.”