Video Shows Moment Before 'Rust' Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins' Death (VIDEO)

On Twitter, "The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office has released evidence related to the deadly shooting on “Rust” movie set in New Mexico last year. Included is this clip of the scene where the film’s cinematographer was killed by a gun in Alec Baldwin’s hands."

Baldwin is shown pulling the trigger without a doubt, contradicting his claims that "I didn't pull the trigger..."

And at the Los Angeles Times, "Hutchins family surprised by massive ‘Rust’ data dump, calls for discretion":

The family of Halyna Hutchins was taken aback by the extraordinary data dump from the “Rust” movie set shooting investigation released by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office Monday.

The rising star cinematographer‘s final moments were captured on film released by the authorities, as she fought for her life after Alec Baldwin accidentally shot her on the set of the low-budget western last fall. Included in the haul were personal details such as social security numbers and home phone numbers of other crew members.

Lawyers for the Hutchins family, who have filed a wrongful-death suit against Baldwin and the production, called for restraint in sharing the footage.

“We were surprised by the decision of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office to release such a large amount of evidence given that the investigation is still ongoing and active,” Brian Panish, attorney for the Hutchins family, said in a statement. “We hope the press will exercise discretion in how they use the graphic images and videos of the fatal events.”

Hutchins’ death sent shockwaves through the film industry, which is still grappling with how to respond to the accident. Hollywood has not seen a case like this since 2014, when Sarah Jones, a camera assistant, was killed during unauthorized filming on a train track in Georgia.

The fact that a household name such as Baldwin pulled the trigger on the prop gun, killing the mother of one, has brought intense scrutiny to the investigation.

Legal experts said the amount of information released was unprecedented: It included a 204-page case report, several videos of witness interviews, dash cam footage from officers arriving at the set and crime scene photos.

“This is just something that you don’t see,” criminal defense attorney Joshua Ritter, a former prosecutor with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, said in an interview. “We’re not talking about a few hand-picked reports or videos, but it’s almost like they’ve released their entire file and it’s just remarkable to me.”

He added that the move would put the New Mexico district attorney in an “untenable” position. “They’ve almost invited public opinion to weigh in on whether or not they think criminal charges are strong or not,” Ritter said.

The Sheriff’s Office said that the release of the information was in reaction to requests for records, which it is required to comply with under New Mexico’s Inspection of Public Records Act. The law requires that the public and media get access to public information.

“We had received many requests for the information since the beginning of the investigation back in October when the incident occurred and it took us a lot of time to compile the data,” Juan Rios, a spokesperson for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, said Tuesday. “When information is requested in New Mexico that is a public record, which these files are, we’re obligated to release them.”

The release, which included all the information the office has, was not any indication of the timing of any charges that might be filed, Rios said in an interview.

Not included in the release are FBI firearm and ballistic forensics along with DNA and latent fingerprint analysis, the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator findings report, and the analysis of Baldwin’s phone data, which the Sheriff’s Office has yet to receive.

The decision to release the documents was made by Sheriff Adan Mendoza, Rios said. He confirmed that the release included telephone numbers and social security numbers that had not been redacted and that anyone who had requested the records received them.

New Mexico has a victim’s rights law that requires that victims be treated with fairness and with dignity and privacy throughout the criminal justice process, as well as timely disposition of the case. Rios said the data release was in compliance with New Mexico law.

Lisa Torraco, attorney for “Rust” assistant director David Halls, said the Sheriff’s Office was negligent in releasing the information.

“We are very very disappointed the sheriff released personal information,” Torraco said in a statement...

Keep reading.

 

Jamie Thompson, Standoff

At Amazon, Jamie Thompson, Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation.

Bloodied Man in Hospital Gown Broke Into Cole Valley Home Early Saturday Morning (VIDEO)

It's a neighborhood in San Francisco, the most unlivable city in America. 

See Dion Lim on Twitter.

Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko

At Amazon, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

Why Democrats Self-Destruct on Crime

From Michael Shellenberger, "Progressives still deny rising crime even as it undermines Joe Biden's presidency."

Plus, "Victory! San Francisco Mayor Promises Crackdown on Drug Dealing & Crime."

Tough Talk: Mayor London Breed Cracks Down on Crime (VIDEO)

At KPIX CBS 5 San Francisco, "S.F. Mayor London Breed Announces Crime Crackdown; ‘Less Tolerant Of All The Bulls-t That Has Destroyed Our City’."

And from the Mayor, "A Safer San Francisco."

Democrats Legalized Crime, Thousands Died (VIDEO)

 From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "And the killing is just getting started":

Here’s former Philly Mayor @Michael_Nutter denouncing “white wokeness” and “white privilege” for resulting in more homicide and crime pic.twitter.com/05bLU1Tdqn

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 14, 2021

4,901 more people were murdered last year than in 2019. The 30% increase in murders during the year of Black Lives Matter and criminal justice reform was catastrophic. And it’s not over.

With the early numbers coming in, over a dozen cities broke their murder records in 2021. Cities across California are continuing to show double digit increases. Philly broke past 500 murders and in response Soros DA Larry Krasner, whom many blame for the crime wave, assured tourists that everything was fine and they should feel safe coming to the City of Brotherly Love.

"We don't have a crisis of lawlessness. We don't have a crisis of crime. We don't have a crisis of violence,” Krasner, newly reelected with a mandate to keep giving criminals a pass, insisted.

That was too much for even Philly’s Democrat establishment.

"It takes a certain audacity of ignorance and white privilege to say that right now," former Mayor Michael Nutter blasted Krasner, "I have to wonder what kind of messed up world of white wokeness Krasner is living in to have so little regard for human lives lost, many of them Black and brown, while he advances his own national profile as a progressive district attorney."

"I’d like to ask Krasner: How many more Black and brown people, and others, would have to be gunned down in our streets daily to meet your definition of a 'crisis?'"

Krasner belatedly apologized, after critics, many of them, like Nutter, black, attacked him for gaslighting them, insisting that he had just said “some inarticulate things”. Why did Krasner think he could offer up a crazy lie like that? He had just won his reelection race by 69% to 31%.

The proponents of the leftist pro-crime policies that led to this nightmare keep telling crazy lies.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that, “A lot of these allegations of organized retail theft are not actually panning out.”

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki falsely argued that the pandemic was the "a root cause" of the crime wave.

The legalization of theft, the elimination of bail, the revolving door arrests and releases of criminals, the mass jailbreak of violent felons and gang members to “protect them” from the pandemic, reduction in sentences, diversion programs, refusals to prosecute certain offenses, police defunding, and the rest of the catalog of criminal justice reform are the real root causes.

In typical leftist fashion, a radical transformation was enacted through a set of policies disguised as reforms based on an even more radical understanding of how society should work. And, much as with critical race theory or wealth redistribution, we’ve been bombarded with pop propaganda, but virtually no discussion of what the underlying ideology behind it believes.

Criminal justice reform was based on the conviction that crime was due to social inequity, that criminals were innocent victims of an uncaring society, that the police were the latest incarnation of slave catchers, that prisons were the new slavery, and that crime prevention was racist.

Pro-crime ideologues argued for legalizing property crimes since property was theft, and for substituting restorative justice therapy sessions for prison sentences for rapists and killers. They called for abolishing police and prisons because once society is transformed, there will be no more crime because the root cause of crime isn’t individual choice, but systemic racism.

This isn’t some fringe idea by a few nuts. It’s what the Squad believes. That’s why Rep. Tlaib introduced a bill that called for freeing all federal prisoners. It’s what key elected officials in cities like New York City, Minneapolis, and Chicago used as their guiding light when advancing the disastrous policies that wrecked their respective cities.

And yet the media has offered virtually no exploration of these beliefs to mainstream audiences.

Instead the media lied about the most basic things like the meaning of “defund the police”, denying that it meant the elimination of police departments, and justifying assorted “abolitionist” measures like opening up prisons as one-time responses to the pandemic. Even now the media continues echoing the false claims of the Democrats that the crime wave is a pandemic crisis.

And that’s a lie.

The crime wave has followed political patterns. That’s why commercial burglaries and gang murders are up while rape is down. Those crimes that Democrats still take seriously, like rape, are not in crisis mode. It’s those crimes that they either don’t take seriously, like property crimes, or those that they enable, like murders by the career criminals they freed, that are booming.

Criminal justice reform is not the first time that radical leftists imposed a dramatic policy program with virtually no public explanation of what it was or how it would work. The few times that media talking heads actually asked Democrat officials, like those in Minneapolis, who would deal with crime if the police were no longer around to respond to calls, the responses were nonsensical.

And yet no media outlet was willing to bottom line the agenda of criminal justice reform by admitting that its proponents did not believe that crime needed to be “fought” to begin with.

"If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police I invite you to reflect: are you willing to stick with it? Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?" Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender tweeted.

What was this new system? No one was willing to discuss what exactly it entailed.

But the system is plain to see. Watch a video of a thug hauling away trash bags full of stolen merchandise from a CVS. Or more videos of porch pirates brazenly walking away with packages. At the local supermarket, staff have been told not to interfere with shoplifters.

The new system abolishes private property by legalizing theft.

It’s a simple proposition that the media refuses to speak out loud because the vast majority of the public would never go along with it. That’s why statements by criminal justice reform politicians and police defunding slogans can never be followed to their logical conclusion.

The new system abolishes private property and treats gang violence as a social problem to be met with wealth redistribution, community intervention, and other means of bribing the thugs.

The crime wave is not a baffling phenomenon, but exactly what the defunders wanted.

Thousands of people have died as a result of a leftist social experiment. And thousands more will go on dying because it’s a lot easier to destroy public safety than it is to restore it.

And that won’t change until we start telling the truth about what’s really happening...

 

Jussie Smollett Found Guilty of Lying to Police in Fake Hate Crime

At the Other McCain, "GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY! Chicago Jury Convicts Jussie Smollett in Fake ‘Hate Crime’ Hoax." 

RELATED: From Batya Ungar-Sargon, "The liberal elites believed Jussie Smollett for the same reason they don't want to confront America's crime wave - because it doesn't fit their racial world-view, says BATYA UNGAR-SARGON."

This is quite something. https://t.co/MWEuY79cI7

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 10, 2021

San Francisco Out of Control

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: 'San Francisco’s vaunted tolerance dims amid brazen crimes' — and after 30 or so years of a city in decline, the AP is finally on it!"

Another smash & grab in #SanFrancisco. This time the victims, including 2 toddlers, were inside the van when it happened. The victims visiting from a Chicago say the suspects stole a bag w/ a laptop, headphones, passport & the kid’s birth certificates.More tonight on @kron4news pic.twitter.com/31q1BUKjhP

— Taylor Bisacky (@TaylorBisackyTV) December 9, 2021

Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko

At Amazon, Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

Alec Baldwin: I Feel No Guilt For Shooting My Cinematographer, Because It Was Someone Else Who Really Did It

At AoSHQ, "Like OJ Simpson before him, Alec Baldwin vows to find The Real Killer."

Representative Rashida Tlaib Struggles to Defend Closure of Federal Prisons

She sponsored a House bill called the BREATHE Act.

It's the Black Live Matter bill. According to Wikipedia:

The BREATHE Act's most notable diversion from past reform efforts is its explicit demand that Congress repeal the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, colloquially known as the "crime bill." For example, the BREATHE Act would repeal the "three-strikes law," which when it passed in 1994 was seen as a rule that would deter repeat criminal activity, and prohibit use of the modern Taser, which was developed in the '90s by a private company and subsequently marketed as a way to prevent police killings as an alternative to firearms.They bill's supporters argue that these practices and policies have been harmful and dangerous.

The bill also stipulates that all federal prisons would be closed within ten years of passage into legislation. This is, in other words, bat-shit crazy.

More here, "The Ghost of Defund Comes for Rashida Tlaib."

And her embarrassing interview with Axios' Jonathan Swan:

 

Why the Left Must Start Caring About Its Victims

It's Michael Shellenbarger, at London's Daily Mail, "The Waukesha Christmas parade slaughter exposes the deadly insanity of the progressive left's drive to protect alleged criminals at the expense of crime victims":

Milwaukee's District Attorney John Chisholm admitted on Monday that the $1,000 bail that released Darrell Brooks Jr., the man who went on to kill at least six people at a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, was 'unacceptably low.'

But Brooks, a repeat offender, was just one of several men to have been charged with serious crimes, who had recently been given relatively low cash bails and diverted away from pre-trial detention by Chisholm and Milwaukee judges.

On November 11, Kenneth Burney was charged with four counts of attempted murder.

Burney reportedly shot and wounded at least three Wauwatosa police officers in a hotel, while he awaited trial for serious charges including 'disorderly conduct with use of a dangerous weapon as a habitual criminality repeater and with domestic abuse assessments.'

Burney was reportedly released on a $1,000 signature bond in March. A signature bond does not require a defendant to deposit any money. It only asks for a promise to pay the bond if they fail to show up at trial.

On November 13, Michael Dabney was charged with 1st-Degree Intentional Homicide, while he awaited trial for 1st-Degree Recklessly Endangering Safety involving use of a weapon. His bail was set higher at $10,000.

But Dabney posted bail and was later accused by police of killing a woman and attempting to make it look like a suicide.

All three men had supposedly been under the supervision of the same non-profit diversion program, JusticePoint.

How many lives could have been saved and how many fewer people would have been victimized, had Brooks, Burney, and Dabney, been kept in jail? We do not yet know because the reports that JusticePoint was supposed to file with the Milwaukee Board of Supervisors in 2020 or 2021 are not available on its web site, and the reports for 2017 through 2019 are incomplete, according to an investigation by Bill Osmulski of the MacIver Institute.

Calls to JusticePoint and to the Milwaukee Board of Supervisors requesting the reports were not returned.

What we do know is that some defendants facing serious crimes, some sickeningly similar to the circumstances of the Waukesha Christmas parade tragedy, were given low cash bails and released awaiting trial in Milwaukee county.

The MacIver Institute found that defendants charged with crimes like felony hit and run 'are often released without any kind of supervision at all.'

In 2019, 'judges have released 11 of 31 defendants charged with hit and run involving injury or great bodily harm without supervision. Their bail was set as low as $250.'

Regardless of the specifics, the Waukesha killings points to how progressive prosecutors, judges, and policymakers are sacrificing public safety on the altar of reducing incarceration at all costs, ostensibly to reduce racial inequities, namely the disproportionately high representation of African Americans in prison. But the main reason for high levels of incarceration isn't because America is a racist society, it's because we're a violent society. The homicide rate in the United States is four times as high as that of France and Britain and more than five times higher than Australia's. Rising incarceration rates in the past reflected rising rates of violent crime. From 1990 to 2010, two-thirds of the increase in inmates nationwide came from people convicted of violent offenses.

It's true that black people are more likely to receive higher bail requirements for the same crime, to be offered plea bargains that include jail time, and to be incarcerated while waiting for trial, than white people. And African Americans are more likely to be charged with low-level offenses, fined for jaywalking, and have their probation revoked, than white people.

Black Americans are also seven to eight times more likely to commit and die from homicide than white Americans. In 2019, the homicide rate for white people was 2.3 per 100,000 whereas it was 17.4 for black people. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 81% of white victims are killed by white offenders, and 89% of black victims are killed by black offenders.

Our goal should thus be first and foremost on reducing violent crime, which has the secondary benefit of reducing incarceration. And yet the focus of progressives has over the last two decades been narrowly on reducing racial inequity in incarceration.

When District Attorney Chisholm was elected in 2007, he announced that he was seeking to send fewer people to prison even though he knew it would result in homicides. 'Is there going to be an individual I divert, or put into a program, who's going to go out and kill? You bet.'

By diverting even people who attempted homicide, like Brooks, Jr. did of his girlfriend, progressives like Chisholm have been removing the threat of jail from the calculus of criminals. In 2007, the homicide rate in Milwaukee was 12 per every 100,000 people. It rose to 25 in 2015, fell to 17 per 100,000 in 2019, and leapt to 33 in 2020.

In 2019, Milwaukee judges diverted every single one of the 19 people charged with murder into JusticePoint, rather than hold them in jail, Osmulski found. And, between 2017 and 2018, the share of defendants that committed a new crime while under Justice Point's supervision increased from 8 percent to 13 percent.

But another factor behind rising homicides has been the progressive demonization of police which, demoralizes police officers, leading them to withdraw from policing, and emboldens criminals.

In 2014, the police chief of St. Louis described less aggressive policing and more empowered criminals as the 'Ferguson effect.' Three months earlier, a white police officer in nearby Ferguson had killed an unarmed eighteen-year-old black teenager. 'I see it not only on the law enforcement side,' said the chief, 'but the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment.'

In 2015, the US Department of Justice asked one of the country's leading criminologists, Richard Rosenfeld from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, to investigate whether homicides had, in fact, risen after Ferguson. At first, Rosenfeld was skeptical. He noted that homicides in St. Louis had already started rising before 2014...

 

All Three Defendants Convicted of Murder in Ahmaud Arbery Lynching

Very emotional and uplifting press conference.

Spiritual. Grateful for the grace of God.

At NYT, "Three Men Found Guilty of Murdering Ahmaud Arbery: Defendants Face Up to Life in Prison":

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Three white men were found guilty of murder and other charges on Wednesday for the pursuit and fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, in a case that, together with the killing of George Floyd, helped inspire the racial justice protests of last year.

The three defendants — Travis McMichael, 35; his father, Gregory McMichael, 65; and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — face sentences of up to life in prison for the state crimes. The men have also been indicted on separate federal charges, including hate crimes and attempted kidnapping, and are expected to stand trial in February on those charges.

The verdict suggested that the jury agreed with prosecutors’ arguments that Mr. Arbery posed no imminent threat to the men and that the men had no reason to believe he had committed a crime, giving them no legal right to chase him through their suburban neighborhood. “You can’t start it and claim self-defense,” the lead prosecutor argued in her closing statements. “And they started this.”

Though the killing of Mr. Arbery in February 2020 did not reach the same level of notoriety as the case of Mr. Floyd, the Black man murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer three months later, Mr. Arbery’s death helped fuel widespread demonstrations and unrest that unfolded in cities across the country in the spring and summer of 2020.

The case touched on some of the most combustible themes in American criminal justice, including vigilantism, self-defense laws, the effects of widespread gun ownership and the role of race in jury selection.

Like many other recent episodes involving the killing of Black people, the confrontation was captured on video that was eventually made public. Unlike many of the others, the video was made not by a bystander but by one of the defendants, Mr. Bryan.

From the beginning, Mr. Arbery’s family and friends raised questions about local officials’ handling of the case. The three men who were later charged walked free for several weeks after the shooting, and were arrested only after the video was released, a national outcry swelled and the case was taken over by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Jackie Johnson, the local prosecutor who initially handled the case, lost her bid for re-election in 2020 and was indicted this year by a Georgia grand jury, accused of “showing favor and affection” to Gregory McMichael, a former investigator in her office, and for directing police officers not to arrest Travis McMichael. The case was ultimately tried by the district attorney’s office in Cobb County, which is roughly 300 miles away from Brunswick in metropolitan Atlanta.

The case brought political and legal upheaval. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed a hate-crimes statute into law, and sided with state lawmakers when they voted to repeal significant portions of the state’s citizen’s arrest statute.

During the trial, defense lawyers relied on that citizen’s arrest law, which was enacted in the 19th century. They argued that their clients had acted legally when, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in February 2020, they set out in two pickup trucks in an effort to detain Mr. Arbery, an avid jogger and former high school football player who spent nearly five minutes trying to run away from them.

Eventually trapped between the two pickup trucks, Mr. Arbery ended up in a confrontation with Travis McMichael, who was armed with a shotgun and fired at Mr. Arbery three times at close range. Mr. McMichael testified that he feared that Mr. Arbery, who had no weapon, would get control of the shotgun from him and threaten his life.

Over the 10 days of testimony in the trial, prosecutors challenged the idea that an unarmed man who never spoke to his pursuers could be considered much of a threat at all.

“What’s Mr. Arbery doing?” Linda Dunikoski, the lead prosecutor said in her closing statement. “He runs away from them. And runs away from them. And runs away from them.”

The verdict, read aloud in a packed, windowless courtroom in the Glynn County Courthouse, came at a time when Americans were already divided over the acquittal, a few days earlier, of Kyle Rittenhouse. Mr. Rittenhouse, who asserted that he was acting in self-defense, fatally shot two men and wounded another during protests and violence that broke out after a white police officer shot a Black man in Kenosha, Wis.

Before the verdict in the Georgia case, some observers worried that the racial makeup of the jury — which included 11 white people and one Black person — would skew justice in the defendants’ favor.

Superior Court Judge Timothy R. Walmsley oversaw the proceedings. When he approved the selection of the nearly all-white jury, he noted that there was an appearance of “intentional discrimination” at play, but he said that defense lawyers had given legitimate reasons unrelated to race when they moved to exclude eight Black potential jurors in the final stages of the selection process.

Before the verdict, Wanda Cooper-Jones, Mr. Arbery’s mother, said she had faith in the power of the facts that the jurors were shown. “I’m very confident that they’ll make the right decision once they see all of the evidence,” she said.

Mr. Arbery’s family said he was out jogging on the day of his death, but defense lawyers said no evidence had emerged to show that Mr. Arbery jogged that day into the defendants’ neighborhood of Satilla Shores, just outside of Brunswick, a small coastal city.

Video footage showed Mr. Arbery, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, walking into a partially built house in the neighborhood shortly before he was killed. It was a house he had walked into numerous times before. Each time, surveillance video showed him wandering around the property, but not taking or damaging anything. The owner of the house told police that items had been stolen from a boat that was sometimes stored on the property, though he was not sure the boat was there when the thefts occurred.

General concerns about property crime in Satilla Shores were widespread in early 2020, residents testified at the trial.

Travis McMichael told the police that he had seen Mr. Arbery outside the partially built house one evening 12 days before the shooting. During that encounter, Mr. McMichael said, Mr. Arbery put his hands in his waistband, as if reaching for a gun. Mr. McMichael called 911 that evening. Mr. Arbery ran away.

On the day of the shooting, a neighbor across the street saw Mr. Arbery in the house and called the police. Mr. Arbery left the house soon after, and ran down the street. Gregory McMichael spotted him and, along with his son, jumped into a truck and gave chase. Moments later, the third defendant, Mr. Bryan, began chasing Mr. Arbery as well.

At the trial, defense lawyers sought to show that the men were acting that day out of a “duty and responsibility” to detain a man whom they felt they had reasonable grounds to believe was a burglar, as Robert Rubin, a lawyer for Travis McMichael, put it. In her closing argument, Laura D. Hogue, a lawyer for Gregory McMichael, noted that Mr. Arbery had been on the property before and said he had become “a recurring nighttime intruder — and that is frightening, and unsettling.”

Travis McMichael was the only defendant to take the stand. He told the court he took his shotgun out during the pursuit because his U.S. Coast Guard training had taught him that showing a weapon could de-escalate a potentially violent situation.

He testified that he believed he had little choice but to shoot Mr. Arbery once they clashed...

More at Memeorandum.

And from Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "AHMAUD ARBERY CASE: Jury finds Travis McMichael, his father Greg McMichael and their neighbor, William “Roddie” Ryan, guilty of felony murder, among other charges."

Batya Ungar-Sargon tweets:

In a country with our ugly history, today is a good day. The tragic lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, the theft of a young man's life, cannot be undone by a just verdict. But it would have been compounded by an unjust one. We haven't overcome all our demons, but we are one step closer. https://t.co/Y8K8t2MijA

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) November 24, 2021

Bari Weiss on the Rittenhouse Not Guilty Verdict

The best. Ms. Weiss is always the best.

If you are shocked by the Rittenhouse verdict reconsider what media you consume: https://t.co/zIMveD3IXN

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) November 19, 2021

Biden's (In)competence

 From Amy Walter, at the Cook Political Report, "The Competency Question":

When Biden was running for president, his message was pretty straightforward: I'm the guy who will bring normal back to Washington. Where President Trump was unorthodox and chaotic, Biden would be conventional and organized. Trump ran the White House like a reality show, Biden stocked his cabinet and high-level staff with Washington insiders with establishment credentials. He was going to usher in an era of boring, but predictable.

But, less than a year into his tenure, voters don't see the 'return to normal' they had been promised. Far from turning the corner on COVID, the country remains anxious and divided over everything from booster shots to vaccine mandates. A botched Afghanistan pull-out was quickly followed by more chaos on the southern border. Earlier success at bipartisan legislating has dissolved into intra-party fighting over the contours of the president's signature legislation.

"I'm kind of a little weary," said one woman in a recent focus of voters who had supported Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. "I think it [Biden's term] started off strong, but some scary things are happening now."

All of this has taken a toll on Biden's standing with the public. Not only are his national job approval ratings underwater (the fivethirtyeight.com average currently has him at 46 percent favorable to 49 percent unfavorable), but he's slipped under 50 percent in a recent Washington Post poll in Virginia — a state he easily carried in 2020. Private polling is picking up double-digit drops in Biden performance in competitive House seats.

There's nothing that remarkable — or unique — about a first-term president hitting a soft patch early in his tenure. New presidents often confront a crisis they didn't expect. For Bill Clinton, it was the April 1993 stand-off in Waco, Texas, between federal law enforcement officers and cult leader David Koresh that resulted in the deaths of 75 people. Other times, presidents create their own crises; Trump was probably the best at that (see: Comey, Charlottesville, late-night tweeting, etc.) Obama ran as a transformational candidate who would unify the country. However, his legislative efforts on health care and economic stimulus brought about significant backlash from Republicans in Washington and at the grassroots level.

The bigger question, however, is whether a president can recover after early stumbles. This is even more relevant in this ultra-polarized era where a president starts with unified support from his base, but a shallow reservoir of "benefit of the doubt" from the opposite party or independent voters. In other words, a president doesn't get much of a bump in approval rating when things go well, and he doesn't get much sympathy when he messes up (or is perceived to have messed up).

Trump was able to recover quite a bit from his 'summer swoon' of 2017. For example, at this point in 2017, Trump's job approval rating had plummeted to just 37 percent. But, by late October of 2018, his approval had climbed 6 points to 43 percent. That wasn't enough to help Republicans hold onto their House majority, but his stronger standing was enough to help red-state candidates expand their majority in the Senate.

However, the challenge for Biden is that these early mistakes go directly to the very rationale of his presidency; that it would be low drama and high competence. This was especially true with Afghanistan. While Americans are eager to have our troops out of the country, and may even have assumed there'd be some chaos due to that drawdown, they also expected that this administration's deep expertise and experience, would prepare them for any unexpected snafu. That turned out not to be the case...

Still lots more.

 

Murder Rates Still Up in 2021

The graphs at this piece are staggering. The murder rate surged 30 percent in 2020, by far the highest since the 1960s, if not ever. 

Things are getting back to normal, though rates are still high. Any decent first cut analysis would finger Black Lives Matter for the surge from last year. 

At NYT, "Murder Rose by Almost 30% in 2020. It’s Rising at a Slower Rate in 2021."

At at Fox News, "Violent crime surged across America despite liberal attempt to rewrite narrative: Data show violent crime surged even as property crimes dipped due to COVID-19 pandemic."

Haitian Migrant Crisis (VIDEO)

 At the Associated Press, "Officials: Many Haitian migrants are being released in U.S.":

DEL RIO, Texas (AP) — Many Haitian migrants camped in a small Texas border town are being released in the United States, two U.S. officials said Tuesday, undercutting the Biden administration’s public statements that the thousands in the camp faced immediate expulsion.

Haitians have been freed on a “very, very large scale” in recent days, according to one U.S. official who put the figure in the thousands. The official, with direct knowledge of operations who was not authorized to discuss the matter and thus spoke on condition of anonymity

Many have been released with notices to appear at an immigration office within 60 days, an outcome that requires less processing time from Border Patrol agents than ordering an appearance in immigration court and points to the speed at which authorities are moving, the official said.

The Homeland Security Department has been busing Haitians from Del Rio to El Paso, Laredo and Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border, and this week added flights to Tucson, Arizona, the official said. They are processed by the Border Patrol at those locations.

A second U.S. official, also with direct knowledge and speaking on the condition of anonymity, said large numbers of Haitians were being processed under immigration laws and not being placed on expulsion flights to Haiti that started Sunday. The official couldn’t be more specific about how many.

U.S. authorities scrambled in recent days for buses to Tucson but resorted to flights when they couldn’t find enough transportation contractors, both officials said. Coast Guard planes took Haitians from Del Rio to El Paso...

Keep reading.

 

The Mystery of 22-Year-Old Gabby Petito (VIDEO)

My was was telling me about this story last night, when it was really breaking into the big leagues.

You can make hunches about what happened, especially because the young woman's boyfriend --- with whom she was traveling cross-country, visiting the national parks --- has refused to answer questions, and that's after not reporting his girlfriend missing after arriving back in Florida.

At Deseret News, "Florida police say there are holes ‘to be plugged’ in Gabby Petito missing case."

And the Orlando Sentinel, "Police: Missing Florida woman and slain couple unrelated":

A Utah county sheriff said Friday detectives have determined there is no connection between the disappearance of a Florida woman who went missing during a cross-country trip with her boyfriend and a still-unsolved slaying of two women who were fatally shot.

Police in Florida had said Thursday a possible connection was being explored because the women were found dead in the same tourist town of Moab, Utah, where the missing woman, Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito, and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie had an emotional fight to which police had been called.

Petito and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie were in Utah when the victims in the double homicide, Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner, disappeared, WFLA reported.

Petito and Laundrie were in Moab on Aug. 12.

Body camera video shows the police pulling the couple over after a witness reported seeing them arguing and hitting each other, WFLA reported.

According to the Grand County Sheriff’s Department, Turner, 38, and Schulte, 24, were last seen Friday evening, Aug. 13, at a local tavern in Moab. The two women were found shot to death on Aug. 18 in the South Mesa area of the La Sal Mountains.

Friends of Schulte and Turner told authorities the couple told police someone near their campsite was intimidating them and that “if something happened to them, that they were murdered,” WFLA reported.

 

Massive Financial Aid Scam Hits California Community Colleges

This is nasty scam.

My division dean mentioned it last week and she sent out a long email notice to all department faculty members today.

Nasty --- and a bit unreal, to think about it.

At LAT, "More than 65,000 fake students applied for financial aid in wide community college scam":

California student aid official Patrick Perry was beginning a routine check of federal financial aid records a few weeks ago when he came across a mystifying number: 60,000 more aid applications from a particular group of students this year than last.

They were first-time applicants to California community colleges who were older than 30, earned less than $40,000 annually and were seeking a two-year degree rather than a vocational certificate. They were spread out across the state, applying to 105 of the 116 campuses in the California Community Colleges system — with the top number at Cerritos, Pasadena, Chaffey, Merced and Antelope Valley. And their applications began surging in May through mid-August.

“We were kind of scratching our heads going, ‘Did or didn’t 60,000 extra older adult students really attempt to apply to community colleges here in the last few months?’” Perry, director of policy, research and data for the California Student Aid Commission, said Tuesday.

He alerted California community college officials Thursday. Around the same time, chatter emerged about abnormal enrollment patterns on a research listserv for community colleges, on which faculty were beginning to question whether some of their “students” were actually fake bot accounts.

The colleges and student aid officials put their heads together and uncovered what is believed to be one of the state’s biggest financial aid scam attempts in recent history.

California Community Colleges officials declined to say whether any financial aid was disbursed to fake students and said they did not know of any confirmed Cal Grant fraud, but the investigation is continuing.

Perry said he thinks the attempted fraud was stymied before much, if any, aid was distributed because community college classes are just starting and campuses are now on high alert. “I can’t tell you whether any money has gone out or not, but my guess is probably not,” he said. “I think we’ve caught it.”

It was unclear what financial aid may be involved in the fraud — state-funded Cal Grants, for instance, federal Pell Grants or COVID-19 emergency relief grants. California community colleges have received more than $1.6 billion in emergency COVID-19 relief for low-income students.

In addition, the fake applications are roiling the ability of college officials to determine true student enrollment numbers at a time of declining community college attendance and major efforts to recruit students and offer them financial and emergency pandemic aid to help them continue with higher education goals. Many professors are crestfallen trying to assess whether they have a class of students or bots.

Since last week, Perry said, the number of suspected fake financial aid applications has surpassed 65,000, and the problem appears confined to state community colleges. No irregular patterns were detected with the University of California or California State University.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General confirmed it was investigating but declined to comment further because the inquiry is ongoing.

But the financial aid commission and community colleges have found similar red flags for both admission and financial aid. Applications were missing a phone contact or had the same phone number on multiple applications. Numerous applications used an Outlook.com email address, listed student ages as old as 90 and repeated addresses — most to a vacant house.

“We were looking at the financial aid and they were looking at applications for enrollment and we finally put the two together,” Perry said. “The two just matched up and at that point we went, ‘Yeah, this is fraudulent.’”

The community college system is beefing up internal reporting and security measures after finding that 20% of recent traffic on its main portal for online applications was “malicious and bot-related,” according to a memo issued Monday by Valerie Lundy-Wagner, interim vice chancellor of digital innovation and infrastructure.

Nearly three-quarters of that traffic was caught by new software called Imperva Advanced Bot Detection, which was installed in July, and the matter remained of “grave concern,” Lundy-Wagner said.

“I’m certainly alarmed,” said California Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley, who is on temporary leave working for the Biden administration. “There’s lots of unscrupulous players right now trying to access and exploit benefits, not unlike what’s happened with unemployment insurance and any number of other benefits that have been made available recently because of the pandemic.

“But I’m confident that the colleges have been able to identify the activity and are working to mitigate the risk to campuses,” he said.

Keep reading.