Study finds no crime increase in cities that adopted 'sanctuary' policies, despite Trump claims

Cities that have adopted “sanctuary” policies did not record an increase in crime as a result of their decision to limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, according to a new Stanford University report. The findings appear to rebut the Trump administration’s rhetoric about the policies’ dire effects on public safety.

The study is one of the first to measure those effects by looking at data on violent crime and property crime. Researcher David K. Hausman compared statistics across more than 200 sanctuary counties and jurisdictions between 2010 and 2015, when the policies were adopted in many U.S. cities with a large number of residents living in the country illegally.

The data show that the policies were effective at limiting deportations of nonviolent offenders but did not result in higher crime rates in those cities. And Hausman found that violent criminals continued to be deported at the same pace because the sanctuary policies do little to prevent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from taking those offenders into custody.

“Sanctuary policies do serve a protective role, but there’s not the cost to public safety that critics claim,” Hausman said in an interview. His findings were published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/sanctuary-city-study-immigration-crime/2020/10/21/5810d13a-12fa-11eb-82af-864652063d61_story.html

Tissue Alert! We all need a little comfort from Uncle Joe:

WaPo: Voters don't need a definitive number to know that the Trump family is fleecing taxpayers

THE STATE DEPARTMENT has reported that it has about 450 pages of records detailing its spending at properties owned by President Trump. The public has a right to this information. The State Department, responding to a public records lawsuit brought by The Post, said in August it would try to produce 300 of the pages by Oct. 15.

Want to guess how many pages it actually coughed up that day? Two — that’s right, a paltry two pages. No explanation was provided and, in a further thumb in the eye to the public’s right to know, the State Department signaled it has no plans to release more until mid-November. That is, of course, after the election that will decide whether Mr. Trump gets another four years in office. The State Department’s stonewalling is part of an overall effort by the president and his administration to keep secret how much public money has gone to his businesses, again raising troubling questions of what Mr. Trump is hiding. It’s also a sign of how he is infecting the entire government with his contempt for the law and the public.

The repeated refusal by federal and Trump Organization officials to provide information about government spending benefiting Mr. Trump’s properties — and often underwriting the travel of his adult children — prompted The Post to undertake an effort, led by reporter David A. Fahrenthold, to compile its own tally by using Freedom of Information Act requests and a lawsuit to obtain receipts one at a time. So far, The Post has found more than $1.2?million in federal money paid to Mr. Trump’s company, largely for hotel rooms and other expenses for aides and Secret Service agents when Mr. Trump visits — which he does with frequency — his own properties.

The lawsuit filed by The Post in June alleged that the State Department had improperly withheld all records responsive to eight public record requests submitted over the previous three months. Under the law, federal agencies are required to respond to requests in 20 business days, followed by prompt delivery of documents. Of the 450 documents the State Department catalogued as responsive to The Post’s requests, it produced just two documents showing $8,316 paid to the Trump Organization’s Doonbeg golf club in Ireland for a visit of Trump’s daughter-in-law and campaign adviser Lara Trump. Redacted from the records was the rate per room the organization charged federal taxpayers. Good guess it wasn’t the bargain rate Mr. Trump’s son Eric Trump once claimed is all the organization charges the government.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/voters-dont-need-a-definitive-number-to-know-that-the-trump-family-is-fleecing-taxpayers/2020/10/20/89ba2ba6-124a-11eb-bc10-40b25382f1be_story.html

Dodgers headed to World Series once again after defeating Braves in Game 7

Source: KTLA News

The Los Angeles Dodgers celebrated as Cody Bellinger’s drive soared deep into the Texas night. Bellinger flung his bat off to the side and strutted up the first-base line. All the way to the World Series.

Bellinger hit a tiebreaking solo homer in the seventh inning, and the Dodgers advanced to the Fall Classic for the third time in four years by topping the Atlanta Braves 4-3 in Game 7 of the NL Championship Series on Sunday.

“This year is our year,” manager Dave Roberts said.

Bellinger connected an inning after Kiké Hernández became the first pinch hitter with a game-tying or go-ahead homer in a winner-take-all-game. His homer tied it at 3 and, like Bellinger’s, came on the eighth pitch of the at-bat.

Read more: https://ktla.com/sports/dodgers-braves-face-off-in-nlcs-game-7/

11-Year-Old's Kamala Harris Costume Gets VP Candidate's Stamp Of Approval

Erinn Harley-Lewis said seeing daughter Celeste emulate Harris speaks to the power of diverse representation in American politics.

Last week, Erinn Harley-Lewis of Vienna, Virginia, posted a short video of her daughter Celeste Harley dressed as Harris to Twitter.Wearing a blue blazer, pearl necklace and high heels, Celeste walks confidently down her family’s driveway as if it were a debate stage.

“I want to help all the American people,” she proclaims to her mother, who plays the role of reporter. “I want to deliver health care for all, equality and justice under the law.”

Harley-Lewis posted the adorable video to Twitter on Oct. 6, just one day before Harris debated Vice President Mike Pence.

https://twitter.com/ErinnFHarley/status/1313473405514125313

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5f89ad1bc5b62dbe71c237a4

Czech Republic goes from model Covid-19 response to brink of second lockdown

The current outbreak is a far cry from last spring, when the Czech Republic became one of the first countries to close its borders and impose a nationwide lockdown in response to the pandemic. Its regulations on face masks, which required coverings to be worn even outdoors for nearly two months, won widespread international praise as infection numbers remained modest compared with other countries.

The apparent success prompted the government of the prime minister, Andrej Babiš, to gradually ease restrictions before lifting them almost entirely in late June.

As the country returned to near normal, however, cases began to surge in August before soaring in September, drawing accusations of complacency from political opponents.

Babiš, who initially vetoed proposals to reimpose mask rules before backtracking, has sought to deflect blame partly onto a supposedly non-compliant public, which he said was less willing than before to follow the rules.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/11/czech-republic-goes-from-model-covid-19-response-to-brink-of-second-lockdown

QAnon High Priest Was Just Trolling Away as a Citigroup Tech Executive

Jason Gelinas lived a normal suburban life with a plum Wall Street gig. He also ran the conspiracy theory’s biggest news hub.
...
Gelinas had registered as a Democrat in the runup to the 2008 election, but then seemed to drift to the right, and not in an “I’m going to vote for Romney this time” sort of way, according to two friends, who spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to be associated with what came next in his political journey. “He hated the idea of Obama,” says one. “He thought that it was a setup and that he was elected to satisfy the Black population.” Gelinas would become agitated when the topic of the president came up, sometimes referring to Obama as “the Antichrist.”

He was increasingly immersed in right-wing internet conspiracies, telling a friend that Hillary Clinton was at the center of a global cabal of sex traffickers. This was about the time that online trolls were starting to promote a theory known as Pizzagate, which claimed that Clinton and others were holding children hostage in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a restaurant and concert venue in Washington, D.C. Shortly after Trump was elected president, a follower burst into the restaurant and fired an AR-15 rifle, standing down only after discovering that the building didn’t actually have a basement. (Nobody was hurt. The shooter, who said he’d been misled by what he’d read on the internet, pleaded guilty to firearms charges and was sentenced to four years in prison.)
...
Even so, the movement had been contained mostly to the internet’s trollish fringes until around the time Gelinas came along. In 2018, while doing his job at Citi, he created, as an anonymous side project, a website dedicated to bringing QAnon to a wider audience—soccer moms, white-collar workers, and other “normies,” as he boasted. By mid-2020, the site, QMap.pub, was drawing 10 million visitors each month, according to the traffic-tracking firm SimilarWeb, and was credited by researchers with playing a key role in what might be the most unlikely political story in a year full of unlikely political stories: A Citigroup executive helped turn an obscure and incoherent cult into an incoherent cult with mainstream political implications.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-07/who-is-qanon-evangelist-qmap-creator-and-former-citigroup-exec-jason-gelinas

Antibody treatment Trump touts relied on testing with cells derived from fetal tissue

President Trump received an experimental antibody cocktail as part of a treatment regimen for covid-19 he has extolled as “miracles coming down from God,” even though its development relied on cells derived from human fetal tissue, a material his administration opposes.

The effectiveness of the antibody therapy was tested by employing a fetal tissue cell line from the 1980s widely used in biomedical research, according to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, its manufacturer. The cell line is old enough that it would fall outside restrictions on federal funding of fetal tissue research the Trump administration imposed last year, according to National Institutes of Health guidelines.

But the president’s repeated praise for the antibody cocktail he requested and received when he was first hospitalized nearly a week ago has generated controversy, given his clampdown on fetal tissue research at the urging of social conservatives crucial to his political base.

“It’s blatant hypocrisy,” said Lawrence Goldstein, a senior faculty member at the University of California at San Diego, who has used fetal tissue in his research. “A lot of the opponents [of fetal tissue research] have looked the other way” when it comes to the cell line involved in both the Regeneron therapy and some of the coronavirus vaccines being developed, said Goldstein, who sits on a federal ethics advisory board created over the summer to review whether NIH should provide federal grants or contracts to researchers whose proposals were deemed scientifically deserving. The board recommended rejecting all but one of the 14 proposals.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/trump-antibody-treatment-fetal-tissue/2020/10/08/92f9b2d6-0971-11eb-9be6-cf25fb429f1a_story.html

Joe is doing a great job at the NBC town hall.

He got asked about his position on "defunding the police" by the mom of a cop. She seemed pleased with the response about bringing people from all the groups toether in the White House to determine the best way to accomplish law enforcement with the minimum amount of force, to get more funding where needed, and get mental health workers to ride with cops with dealing with mentally ill individuals.

Then someone asked him about hate groups. He went into his history as a public defender dealing with how race affected his clients and finished his answer with one of my favorite sayings of his. He said hate never dies, it only hides. It comes back when you breathe life back into it and legitimize it, like what is happening now by Trump. He said that is what convinced him that he needed to run. We must make hate unacceptable again.

CA Pastor Who Visited White House Tests Positive For Coronavirus

Pastor Greg Laurie of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California has tested positive for COVID-19, according to multiple sources. The pastor was at the Prayer March on the Mall in Washington with Vice President Mike Pence Sept. 26, according to Olivia Nuzzi, Washington Correspondent for New York Magazine.

The event was attended by thousands, with few participants wearing masks, Nuzzi said. Laurie, who tested positive on Sept. 27, also visited the White House after the event, according to Nuzzi in a Monday tweet.

The pastor also attended the Rose Garden event for Amy Coney Barrett Sept. 26, New York Magazine reported.

https://patch.com/california/losalamitos/s/h9lns/ca-pastor-who-visited-white-house-tests-positive-coronavirus?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_term=politics+%26+government&utm_campaign=autopost&utm_content=losalamitos-sealbeach