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“…Data from 2014, the most recent year that a county level breakdown is available, shows us that 54% of counties (containing 11% of the population) had zero murders. 69% of counties had no more than one murder, and held about 20% of the population. These counties account for only 4% of all murders in the country.
The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders. The study shows more than half of all murders occurred in just 2% of counties nationwide. Note that 2% of counties is overstating the land area involved here.
In Chicago, the story is almost identical- with admittedly higher numbers. In the first four months of 2017, 222 murders took place in the heavily gun-controlled windy city. Lott writes, “But 23 of the 77 neighborhoods in the city have zero murders, and most of the 40 neighborhoods have only one murder. Twelve of the neighborhoods have 10 or more murders.”…”
MARK TAPSCOTT:
“…WASHINGTON—Former aide Justin Cooper said in a Judicial Watchdeposition created on March 19 and made public on June 18 that he worked with Huma Abedin in 2009 to set up the unsecured private email account used by the former secretary of state to conduct official U.S. diplomatic business.
Cooper’s statement contradicts Abedin’s claim in a 2016 deposition by the non-profit government watchdog that she only learned about the private email setup in 2015 by “reading in some news articles about a year, a year-and-a-half ago, when it was—it was being publicly discussed.”
Abedin, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, was deputy chief of staff throughout Clinton’s tenure as the United States’ chief diplomat and continued with her during the Democratic candidate’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2016.
Asked if the Cooper deposition represents additional legal problems for Abedin, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told The Epoch Times on June 18 that “the legal liabilities never went away, so it’s a matter of political will by the Justice Department. … The leadership is going to have to step up to move forward on any of this.”
Cooper, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton, also said that a week before his deposition, he spoke with Cheryl Mills, the attorney who served as Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department and represented her legally during the FBI’s investigation of the email server. Mills accompanied Hillary Clinton when she was interviewed by the FBI.
Mills is especially controversial because U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Royce Lamberth said in a related case that he “was actually dumbfounded when I found out, in reading that report, that Cheryl Mills had been given immunity because … I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case, where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in, by the DOJ [Department of Justice] in the Hillary Clinton email case.”
Cooper’s deposition was given as a result of a blistering Lamberth decision granting Judicial Watch limited discovery, after the judge concluded that attorneys and officials representing DOJ, Hillary Clinton, and the State Department filed false affidavits in the non-profit’s 2014 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents…”
Paul Bedard:
“…In a first, only one TV outlet — MSNBC — will be allowed to deliver live coverage of Saturday’s South Carolina Democratic Convention where 21 presidential candidates are expected to speak, drawing heated complaints from other networks.
C-SPAN, which has never been denied live coverage of a state convention in the network’s 40 years, has reluctantly pulled out of the convention and other weekend events sponsored by the party. CNN has filed a complaint. Fox will also be barred from providing live coverage to its viewers.
The decision by the South Carolina Democratic Party was a surprise to the outlets and came just yesterday, long after all three had begun to ready for live coverage of the nine-hour event, one of the biggest on the Democratic presidential calendar so far…”
Ed Morrissey responds to the latest nonsense from AOC:
“…The Trump administration doesn’t call then concentration camps for the same reasons the Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations didn’t — they’re not concentration camps. With thousands of people flooding across the border, the US and Mexico both have to set up facilities to house them while their status gets adjudicated. Their presence in those facilities are necessarily temporary and ends when their cases are finally decided, at which point they’re either admitted or sent out of the country.
The term “concentration camps” is more accurately used for facilities meant for ethnic-cleansing purposes rather than control of immigrants and refugees. This is not a situation in which citizens and residents of a country are being relocated en masse into detention facilities, as happened to the Japanese by FDR in World War II, where the term applies even with its historical baggage. It’s certainly not the situation created by actual fascists in the 1930s and 1940s to isolate, enslave, and then exterminate ethnic minorities within their own citizen populations, intended as a permanent policy. That ethnic cleansing from an existing population is precisely what the term “concentration” connotes, in fact. Regardless of whether a handful of historians use the term to engage in histrionics, the two situations aren’t equal, analogous, or even exist in any connectable context.
Is this an anti-Semitic remark? Possibly some will feel that way, in terms of watering down the term “concentration camps” and minimizing the industrial slaughter of the Jews into an immigration issue. (Jeff Dunetz has a nuanced take on that issue.) What should be more disturbing is the incredible ignorance and idiocy being spouted by an elected representative, who acts as though the world was created when she first began paying attention to it in January 2017…”
I think Walter Mondale ran on a similar pledge. How did that work out?
JONATHAN TURLEY:
“…Across the country, academics have caused lasting damage to their institutions by failing to stand up to, or actively supporting, extreme demands for speech codes, limits on academic freedom, and tenure changes. In Washington, Evergreen State College faculty members supported students who mobbed biology professor Bret Weinstein in a disturbing confrontation outside his office. The result was a significant $500,000 settlement with Weinstein and a major decline in applications. The University of Missouri experienced a similar meltdown on campus after assistant professor Melissa Click led attacks on a student journalist during heated protests in 2015. The university sought to accommodate protesters as applications plummeted and entire dorms were closed.
Other colleges have been hit with damages from students denied basic due process rights after being accused of sexual assault or harassment. While such rulings are mounting across the country, officials continue to ignore them and refuse to allow minimal rights for accused students. An even greater cost of acquiescence can be seen in reduced academic quality. Students increasingly demand changes based solely on the race or gender of authors, like Yale University students objecting that a course on English classics only included white authors like William Shakespeare.
We are reaching a critical point in higher education in the United States where leaders are ceding control to a small group of activist students and faculty members. Too often, those challenges are met not with acts of conscience but with cowardice. Professors fear being labeled as either insensitive or racist for objecting to protests or changes on campus…”
BJØRN LOMBORG:
“…A 2018 study by the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food looked not just at plastic waste, but also at climate-change damage, ozone depletion, human toxicity and other indicators. It found you must reuse an organic cotton shopping bag 20,000 times before it will have less climate damage than a plastic bag.
If we use the same shopping bag every single time we go to the store, twice every week, it will still take 191 years before the overall environmental effect of using the cotton bag is less than if we had just used plastic.
Even a simple paper bag requires 43 reuses to be better for the environment – far beyond the point at which the bag will be fit for the purpose.
The study clearly shows that a simple plastic bag, reused as a trash bag, has the smallest environmental impact of any of the choices…”
Don Surber:
“…Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the soul of the Democrat Party. She represents 50 years of indoctrination in colleges, which endangers the party because she has been fed a steady diet of ignorance.
An ABC News interview today underscored her simplistic view of the world.
AOC and her ilk want reparations. Now! AOC and her ilk want open borders. Now! AOC and her ilk want their student loans erased. Now! AOC and her ilk want gun confiscation. Now! AOC and her ilk want the end of coal, oil and gas. Now! AOC and her ilk want whatever they want, and they want it now.
They view America as genocidal, racist, sexist, Islamophobic and ignorant.
The problem is most Americans know the facts. They not only reject her views but laugh at them.
Nevertheless, Democrats are stuck with delivering on these nutty promises…”
Victor Davis Hanson:
“…Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.
No one wished to say that. Trump did. He canceled the flawed deal without a second thought.
Iran is furious, but in a far weaker—and eroding—strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest. So a desperate Tehran knows that it must make some show of defiance. Yet it accepts that if it were to launch a missile at a U.S. ship, hijack an American boat, or shoot down an American plane, the ensuing tit-for-tat retaliation might target the point of Iranian origin (the port that launched the ship, the airbase from which the plane took off, the silo from which the missile was launched) rather than the mere point of contact—and signal a serial stand-off 10-1 disproportionate response to every Iranian attack without ever causing a Persian Gulf war…
…Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for elites to virtual signal their green bona fides while making no adjustments in their global managerial lifestyles—at best. At worst, it was a shake-down both to transfer assets from the industrialized West to the “developing world” and to dull Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China. Not now. Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed convention. The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S. departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance to their own targeted goals…
…Trump jawboned and ranted about the asymmetries. And more nations are increasing rather than decreasing their defense budgets. The private consensus is that the NATO allies knew all along that they were exactly what Barack Obama once called “free riders” and justified that subsidization by ankle-biting the foreign policies of the United States—as if an uncouth America was lucky to underwrite such principled members. Again, no more fantasies…
…China was fated to rule the world. Period. Whining about its systematic commercial cheating was supposedly merely delaying the inevitable or would have bad repercussions later on. Progressives knew the Communists put tens of thousands of people in camps, rounded up Muslims, and destroyed civil liberties, and yet in “woke” fashion tip-toed around criticizing the Other. Trump then destroyed the mirage of China as a Westernizing aspirant to the family of nations…
…The Palestinians were canonized as permanent refugees. The U.S. embassy could never safely move to the Israeli capital in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights were Syrian. Only a two-state solution requiring Israel to give back all the strategic border land it inherited when its defeated enemies sought to destroy it in five prior losing wars would bring peace. Not now…
…An aging population, the veritable end to U.S. manufacturing and heavy industry, and an opioid epidemic meant that America needed to get used to stagnant 1 percent growth, a declining standard of living, a permanent large pool of the unemployed, an annual increasing labor non-participation rate, and a lasting rust belt of deplorables, irredeemables, clingers and “crazies” who needed to be analyzed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…
…Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) assured us that the world would be suffocating under greenhouse gases within 12 years. Doom-and-gloom prophecies of “peak” oil warned us that our oil reserves would dry up by the early 21st century. Former Vice President Al Gore warned us that our port cities would soon be underwater. Economists claimed Saudi Arabia or Russia would one day control the world by opening and closing their oil spigots. Not now…Trump blew up those prognostications and replaced them with an optimistic agenda that the working- and middle classes deserve affordable energy, that the United States could produce fossil fuels more cleanly, wisely, and efficiently than the Middle East, and that ensuring increased energy could revive places in the United States that were supposedly fossilized and irrelevant. Normal is utilizing to the fullest extent a resource that can discourage military adventurism in the Middle East, provide jobs to the unemployed, and reduce the cost of living for the middle class; abnormal is listening to the progressive elite for whom spiking gasoline and power bills were a very minor nuisance…
…Open borders were our unspoken future. The best of the Chamber of Commerce Republicans felt that millions of illegal aliens might eventually break faith with the progressive party of entitlements; the worst of the open borders lot argued that cheap labor was more important than sovereignty and certainly more in their interests than any worry over the poor working classes of their own country. And so Republicans for the last 40 years joined progressives in ensuring that illegal immigration was mostly not measured, meritocratic, diverse, or lawful, but instead a means to serve a number of political agendas. Most Americans demurred, but kept silent given the barrage of “racist,” “xenophobe,” and “nativist” cries that met any measured objection. Not so much now…
…The Republican Party’s prior role was to slow down the inevitable trajectory to European socialism, the end of American exceptionalism, and homogenized globalized culture. Losing nobly in national elections was one way of keeping one’s dignity, weepy wounded-fawn style, while the progressive historical arc kept bending to our collective future. Rolling one’s eyes on Sunday talk shows as a progressive outlined the next unhinged agenda was proof of tough resistance.
Like it or not, now lines are drawn. Trump so unhinged the Left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and showed us what progressives had in store for America…”
Liz Sheld:
“…Another day, another leak from a “friendly.” Do you ever see these kinds of shenanigans coming from the Democrats: people supposedly “on their side” sabotaging their candidate or their president with leaks? No, we see people “on their side” lying under oath to protect their candidate, we see them smashing phones to hide evidence, deleting emails after they were subpoenaed, or even using the government surveillance apparatus in the service of “their” side. Maybe the internal saboteurs aren’t really on our side? It’s worth a thought.
The leak, which showed that Trump trailed Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential contest in several states, prompted a swell of negative headlines, causing a headache for Trump’s advisers and annoying the president himself. It comes as Trump is preparing to announce his re-election bid during a rally in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday.
As a result of the leak, the Trump campaign is ending its relationship with Brett Lloyd, Mike Baselice and Adam Geller, according to the person. It will continue working with its other pollsters, Tony Fabrizio and John McLaughlin.
Lloyd is the head of the Polling Company, a firm started by Kellyanne Conway in 1995. Conway is now a senior White House adviser to Trump and is no longer formally connected to the company. Baselice is the founder of Baselice & Associates, a national research firm. Geller is the founder and CEO of National Research Inc., and has done polling for former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.
The polls in question starting appearing in the media a few months ago. Last week The New York Times reported that Trump wanted the results of the poll downplayed. Scandalous!
It’s much too early to put any stock in the presidential horse race, the media has been weaponizing polls for years and more so now that they have abandoned any pretense to reporting information and are all in with the #resistance. Wasn’t Jeb! on the fast track to the nomination at this time during the 2016 campaign? The polls are an early snapshot of an electorate that has not yet been exposed to campaigning for 2020. The numbers are being used as propaganda…”
Keith Farrell:
“…This is not the first time the US has dealt with an illegal immigration problem. Only last time it was dealt with in a decidedly swifter and sterner manner. The response, coordinated by President Dwight Eisenhower, resulted in nearly 3 million illegal immigrants being sent home.
During his administration, Eisenhower became the first American president forced to deal with problems stemming from illegal immigration. Only, in Eisenhower’s time the politically correct culture of liberal sensitivities had yet to emerge.
There was not much in the way of sympathy for those who had crossed into the country illegally.
‘Ike’ took quick and decisive action. He used 1,075 Border Patrol Agents to seal the border. In doing so, he achieved a task our government today deems impossible with a force that is 10% larger. Once the border was sealed, Eisenhower went about the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens.
In June of 1954, he appointed retired General Joseph “Jumpin’ Joe” Swing to head “Operation Wetback,” which sent local and federal officials on sweeps of Mexican neighborhoods looking for illegals.
These illegals weren’t just dropped at the border; Swing arranged for buses and trains to take immigrants deep into Mexico before releasing them. Tens of thousands more were shipped by boat from Texas to Vera Cruz, Mexico…”