The number of migrants crossing the U.S. southern border illegally has dropped more than 40 percent in the three weeks since President Biden announced broad restrictions on asylum claims, administration officials said Wednesday. This is the lowest level of illegal crossings since Biden took office, DHS said. read more
Residents in Newbern, Alabama - a predominantly Black town with 133 residents - will be able to vote in their own municipal elections for the first time in decades after a four-year legal battle. For decades, white officials appointed Newbern's mayor and council members in lieu of holding elections. Most residents weren't even aware that there were supposed to be elections for these positions. read more
Michael Whatley, the current chair of the Republican National Committee, appeared on Fox News late last week to summarize what he sees as the foundational question of the 2024 presidential race: "The American voters are going to go vote based on whether they are better off today than they were four years ago." Four years ago, thousands of Americans were dying each day of Covid-19; more than 20 million Americans were unemployed; also, the country was in the grip of a violent crime wave, with murders soaring. read more
This cohort study of 94,720 recorded infant deaths in Texas and 28 comparison states found that the Texas abortion ban was associated with unexpected increases in infant and neonatal mortality in 2022. These findings suggest that abortion restrictions may have negative spillover effects on infant health. read more
David French: On Friday, eight justices of the Supreme Court not only ruled against Rahimi. They clarified their approach to text, history and tradition in a way that freed lower courts from the straitjacket of finding precise historical analogies. read more
After all, four years ago, thousands of Americans were dying each day of Covid-19. Soaring deaths aside, four years ago more than 20 million Americans were unemployed; Trump left office with the worst job record of any president since Herbert Hoover. Also, the country was in the grip of a violent crime wave, with murders soaring. Today, by contrast, we've just experienced the longest stretch of unemployment below 4 percent since the 1960s, and the violent crime wave - Trump didn't cause it, but it did happen on his watch - has been rapidly receding.Well, since MAGA thinks that they live on Earth II, they invent their own reality so they can cling to their victimhood status of blaming the more successful for their own abject and humiliating failure.
- Paul Krugman
The nation's uninsured rate improved under Biden. The supply-chain challenges improved under Biden. The cost of many prescription drugs improved under Biden. Infrastructure investments improved under Biden. The budget deficit improved under Biden. The U.S. murder rate improved under Biden.
The United States' global standing improved dramatically after Biden replaced Trump in the White House.
Roberts Tries To Put The Bruen Toothpaste Back In the Tube
Thomas' dissent, in which he argues that there is no historical analogue to a law taking firearms from a domestic abuser under a protective order, is (horrifyingly) probably closer to the truth of what Bruen established. Roberts stretches the need for a historical predecessor into generalities, finding laws from the founding that took a bond as punishment if someone committed violence, or that removed weapons from those who'd menaced others. It's clear that the Court's sanctified history and traditions test is more flexible than it appears; when it comes to a drug dealing respondent who has fired his gun at his ex-girlfriend, at cars in traffic, in a fast food restaurant, and kept his weapons in his home nearby a copy of the restraining order forbidding him to have them, our history becomes much more forward-looking.
To be clear: Thank God. Anyone with half a brain already knows that this Court is almost entirely results-oriented, and if the conservatives need to pretend that the founders cared about wife-beating to stop domestic abusers from so easily murdering their victims, so be it.
But it also amplifies the mortification all of the right-wing justices should feel for signing onto Bruen in the first place, in which Thomas made abundantly clear that virtually all gun regulations were now at existential risk.
I'm glad the conservatives were shamed into this ruling; it'll mean fewer dead women. But it's yet more proof that these justices are fundamentally political actors, and that their supposedly ironclad interpretive tests are worth no more than the paper they're written on.
- Kate Riga
store closings due to rampant theft that goes un-prosecuted
Just another gullible mind wallowing in the ignorance spewed by the Trumpist right wing media:
The alleged crime epidemic in places like San Francisco causing stores to flee may actually just be bad management, investment bank suggests
Retail theft in US cities: Separating fact from fiction
The fiction: Retail theft myths
There are three primary problems with the current retail theft narrative, which require policymakers' and the public's attention.
The first is a big one: Existing data on retail theft is highly unreliable and imprecise. First, "retail theft" is not an independent category reported by most police departments. Moreover, the terms increasingly used by industry and government officials - "organized retail crime" or "organized retail theft" - have no consistent legal definition across states and often encompass broader crimes such as cargo and employee theft (which are already associated with more severe sanctions). Even the California Retailers Association has acknowledged a lack of comprehensive and reliable data on retail theft.
The second is that shoplifting in major cities did not actually spike in the ways that media has reported. According to the Council on Criminal Justice, only 24 cities consistently reported shoplifting data over the past five years, and of those cities, shoplifting decreased in 17. Moreover, looking across all 24 cities, the prevalence of shoplifting in 2023 remained below 2018 and 2019 levels. Even San Francisco - which has often been cited as having a "shoplifting epidemic" - saw a 5% decline in shoplifting between 2019 and 2023.
Finally, corporate claims are not holding up to scrutiny, and are being used to close stores that are essential assets for many communities. Although the National Retail Federation said that "organized retail crime" drove nearly half of all inventory losses in 2021, the group later retracted its claim; it now no longer attaches a dollar amount to money that is lost due to retail theft. And in memorable cases, major retailers have chosen to maintain stores with much higher rates of crime, while closing others.
'Total Fiction': CNN Fact-Checker Exposes 30 Obvious Lies In New Trump Speech
Donald Trump's rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday was marked by so many falsehoods that CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale's attempt to list them rapid-fire still took three full minutes.
Dale told Abby Phillip he found 30 obvious lies. Some were his usual false claims and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, while others had a newer origin, such as a reference to a "cheapfake" edit of footage of President Joe Biden at the G7 meeting that made the rounds of right-wing media.
"He said Biden wandered off at the G7 and didn't know where he was," Dale summarized. Then he delivered a correction: "No, Biden was briefly chatting with a skydiver who had landed near the group."
Dale also delivered quick fact-checks to Trump's claims about everything from Al Capone to Nancy Pelosi to taxes.
"He said Biden's plans would quadruple your taxes," Dale said. "Total fiction."
45-46
Stop posting other's works as your own without attribution. What's worse is that you're offering us nothing as it regards your own feelings and sentiments while getting others to respond to what someone else actually said, not you.
For those interested, every single word posted in the above threads was taken from an article written by Daniel Lacalle, a Spanish Economist and Fund Manager, who happens to be the same person that published these things in the recent past:
US economy is already in a 'private sector recession': Daniel Lacalle