Vind(icated)man

And on the COVID front, case numbers and trajectory look like last November. that BTW is not good.  We went from 11,414 per day on July 5 to 99,699 on August 5 (using 7 day rolling average). The last 80K jump in daily cases in a month or less was last October 31 to November 25, and the only other similar rise of that magnitude was December 1 – January 12 (a jump of 87 K over a 43 day period).  In short, from simply a numbers perspective, the GROWTH of cases over the past month is as bad as its ever been – but the victims now are by and large the unvaccinated.  Deaths, thankfully, are not following suit.
 
Here’s the buzz – of the top 25 states in per capita new cases 20 are Republican states, (14 of 15 for comparison with the lowest 15) two are republican states that voted for Biden and 3 are Dem states (those are at Nos. 23, 24 & 25.  Similarly, 12 of the lowest 15 are Dem states (13 of 16 if you count DC) – not sure what’s going on with ND and OH, although DeWine doesn’t seem to be trying to compete with Abbott and DeInSanity in killing his state’s citizens.  

Agreed.  The challenge is doing something, anything to address it and effective messaging.  The numbers probably won’t do an abrupt about face, but they are as follow: the rise in crime rate was 25% in 2020, (BBC) but it was driven primarily by the rise in the murder rate (Guardian). The “crime rate” isn’t rising so much as the gun violence murder rate is.

What we know and don’t know
The homicide increase appears to be primarily driven by rising gun violence, with the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive reporting nearly 4,000 additional gun killings nationwide in 2020 compared with the year before.
But what’s happening with homicides is not part of some broader “crime wave.” In fact, many crimes, from larcenies to robberies to rape, dropped during the pandemic, and continued to fall during the first few months of 2021. “Crime” is not surging. Even the broader category of “violent crime” only increased about 3% last year, according to the preliminary FBI data from a large subset of cities. It’s homicide in particular that has increased, even as other crimes fell.

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Early data also suggests the homicide increase isn’t happening at random, but that much of the additional violence is clustered in disadvantaged neighborhoods of color that were already struggling with higher rates of gun violence before the pandemic, according to Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist who has authored multiple national reports on crime and violence trends.
“Everything we know suggests that the increases in homicide are occurring in the very neighborhoods where homicide has been traditionally concentrated,” he said. “What we’re not seeing is a spreading-out of homicide.”
National demographic data for the people killed in 2020 is not yet available. But it’s likely that a substantial proportion of the homicide victims were Black Americans, at the same time that Black Americans were suffering disproportionate rates of Covid-19 infection and death, as well as witnessing the aftermath of a global uprising against police killings of unarmed Black people.
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We’ll see what happens in the last 5 months of this year, but the real challenge IMHO is messaging, and making sure that the message is that the rise in  the murder rate was huge in the last year of Dumbass the Former’s reign of terror and that the Biden admin is working with the states and cities to address it.

I’ve just been listening to Cuomo‘s lawyers give a statement, and my earlier assessment may change. I’m thinking the odds are trending toward Cuomo not resigning. It’s clear that they’ve got a fulsome defense in the works and that there are some questions regarding Ms. Boylen’s account of the event on November 13 and the AG investigation of it. I don’t know which version is true but I know that there are two sides to the story now and it’s gonna take time to get the facts out to find out where the truth seems to lie. I think as it stands right now I rate the odds are 50-50 at best he’ll resign by the 13th trending toward “I’m not resigning.” As they say in TV, stay tuned.

And lest I forget, Vindman is the model of what a patriot looks like.  I’d love to see him run for office. Although the political world might not be his forte, he would elevate the body in which he served.

Corey, what’s “sacked” mean re Cousins? was he a spokes guy or something?