“The new numbers indicate that the violent crime victimization rate fell slightly in 2023, although the change was not statistically significant. “Findings show that there was an overall decline in the rate of violent victimization over the last three decades, from
1993 to 2023,” BJS Acting Director Kevin M. Scott reports. “While the 2023 rate was higher than those in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate 5 years ago, in 2019.”
That observation is inconvenient for Trump, who wants to blame Harris for rising crime during the Biden administration. Leaving aside the plausibility of assuming that a president, let alone a vice president, has much influence on crime rates, Trump’s thesis relies on the assumption that violent crime is more common now than it was during his administration. But even according to the data source he prefers, the 2023 rate was statistically indistinguishable from the rate in 2019, his second-to-last year in office.”
“What plainly irks the governor is how Trump and Vance keep calling the Haitians “illegal” migrants.
“To say that these people are illegal is just not right, you can’t make up stuff like that,” DeWine told me.
He repeatedly criticized President Biden’s handling of the border, but pointed out that’s a different matter than the Haitians who are in the country with Temporary Protected Status.
“Throughout my entire lifetime we’ve had programs similar to that that,” DeWine said, alluding to the Hungarians and Cubans who fled conflict for America. “We have said we’re going to let certain people in because of the great oppression that they are feeling, or the danger they are feeling. We ought to be a country that is capable of doing that.”
Of course, that would be to presuppose that such nuances matter to Trump and Vance, particularly when portraying migrants as threats is so politically rewarding in the heat of a campaign.”
“Special counsel Jack Smith has outlined new details of former President Donald Trump and his allies’ sweeping and “increasingly desperate” efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, in a blockbuster court filing Wednesday aimed at defending Smith’s prosecution of Trump following the Supreme Court’s July immunity ruling.
Trump intentionally lied to the public, state election officials, and his own vice president in an effort to cling to power after losing the election, while privately describing some of the claims of election fraud as “crazy,” prosecutors alleged in the 165-page filing.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the filing said. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”
When Trump’s effort to overturn the election through lawsuits and fraudulent electors failed to change the outcome of the election, prosecutors allege that the former president fomented violence, with prosecutors describing Trump as directly responsible for “the tinderbox that he purposely ignited on January 6.”
“The defendant also knew that he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him. So for more than an hour, the defendant delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol,” Smith wrote.
The lengthy filing — which includes an 80-page summary of the evidence gathered by investigators — outlines multiple instances in which Trump allegedly heard from advisers who disproved his allegations, yet continued to spread his claims of outcome-determinative voter fraud, prosecutors said.
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell,” Trump allegedly told members of his family following the 2020 election, the filing said.”
Trump supporters thrive in falsity and anti-democratic attitudes.
“If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll.”
“among Republicans, Trump proved by far the most trusted source of information about election results, well above local and national news outlets. In an Associated Press/NORC/USAFacts poll from earlier this month, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they believe Trump himself is the best place to get the facts about results.”
“Trump’s long-running insistence that he won in 2020 appears to be having an effect over time, with several surveys measuring greater buy-in of his lies about the election from voters today than in the past. A December Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 36 percent of US adults did not believe Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 29 percent two years prior. And in a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this month, 27 percent of US adults said that Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn the election results, up from 23 percent in April.”
“”Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Under Kamala Harris,” Donald Trump’s campaign avers in a statement issued on Monday. Like Trump’s assertion that “our crime rate is going up,” this claim is completely at odds with reality.
According to FBI data, the homicide rate jumped by more than 27 percent in 2020, when Trump was president; rose slightly in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration; and fell by 7 percent in 2022. Preliminary FBI numbers show bigger drops in 2023 (about 13 percent) and this year (26 percent for the first quarter). So far this year, according to data from 277 cities, homicides are down by about 17 percent.”
“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”
Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””
…
“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.
Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”
Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.
You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”
“The claims that Republicans have made about Walz focus on three issues: his decision to retire from the Army National Guard in 2005, his rank upon retirement, and a comment he made about carrying weapons “in war.””
…
“Walz retired in May 2005, two months prior to his unit receiving an official deployment order to Iraq. He stated in 2009 that his reasons for retiring were to pursue a run for the House of Representatives, which he won the following year, and to avoid conflicts under the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from engaging in certain political activities.
Walz filed for his run for office before the National Guard had notified his unit of the possibility of a deployment to Iraq. It’s unclear if, at the time, he already knew that a deployment could be a possibility.”
…
“Walz did, in fact, attain the position of Command Sergeant Major. However, after he retired, his title was changed to Master Sergeant, because he did not finish the coursework required to retire under the promoted title.
As a result, it’s accurate to say that he was once a Command Sergeant Major, but not that he was a “retired Command Sergeant Major.””
…
““We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at,” Walz said in remarks about an assault weapons ban in 2018.”
…
“Walz was deployed as part of the National Guard to Vicenza, Italy, in August 2003 as part of Operation Enduring Freedom but was not in a combat zone.
The phrasing of the statement in his gun control remarks, suggesting that he carried the weapons “in war,” was imprecise. While technically correct given the operation he was part of, it appears to suggest an experience he didn’t have. Walz has openly acknowledged in other interviews that he hadn’t seen combat while deployed.
The Harris campaign has stressed Walz’s training with firearms in response. “In his 24 years of service, the Governor carried, fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times,” the Harris campaign told Vox in a statement.”
“Whatever you think of Donald Trump, we know what Carlson thinks, thanks to private communications that Dominion Voting Systems uncovered through discovery in its defamation lawsuit against Carlson’s former employer, which agreed to pay $788 million rather than defend its promotion of Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. “There isn’t really an upside to Trump,” Carlson said in a January 4, 2021, text message to his staff, describing “the last four years” as “a disaster.” Back then, Carlson was eager to be rid of Trump: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately.” The day after the January 6, 2021, riot by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol, Carlson privately called him “a demonic force” and “a destroyer.”
But that was then. Carlson, like the GOP politicians whose phoniness he claims to despise, has adjusted to the reality that Trump remains stubbornly popular among Republicans. He is even willing to reinforce the election conspiracy theory that he publicly called unfounded and privately called a lie. Carlson’s current coziness with Trump was on vivid display Wednesday night, starting with the question of why the “far-and-away front-runner,” whose views are of such keen interest to voters, decided to skip the Republican debate in Milwaukee and any other similar forum in which he might have to defend those views or his record as president against competitors keen to make a dent in his commanding lead.
Trump’s answer was that felt no need to go through that ordeal, precisely because he is so far ahead. Why put up with “all these people screaming at me, shouting questions at me”—which Trump contradictorily claimed he “love[s] answering”—when he could sit down with an interviewer who is desperate to please him, especially in light of the criticism revealed in those embarrassing messages? Anyway, Trump said, he would probably get better ratings “using this crazy forum” than he would on Fox News, which televised the debate that he skipped. “I’m grateful that you did,” Carlson replied.”
…
“Trump said Biden “is worse mentally than he is physically,” as evidenced by the fact that he “can’t put two sentences together.” Trump, by contrast, can put many, many sentences together, but they do not necessarily make sense, bear any logical relationship to each other, or stand up to critical scrutiny. Fortunately for Trump, Carlson was offering none of that.”