A Tennessee bill to be heard in the state senate Thursday would create a marriage class specifically for marriage between a man and a woman.
SB562/HB233 creates a “Record of Marital Contract at Common Law” to be filed by county clerks and establishes common law marriage in the state as “between one man and one woman,” according to an amended version of the bill.
In addition to creating a separate marriage class in the state, the bill also protects local officials from legal action. The bill states the attorney general would have to defend local officials and political subdivisions of the state against actions targeting them for their decision to issue or deny a marriage license.
The bill’s sponsor, Tom Leatherwood (R-Arlington) said the law being considered would add a new marriage option for Tennesseans. “So, all this bill does is give an alternative form of marriage for those pastors and other individuals who have a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law.”
But missing from the bill are age requirements, opening the door for possible child marriages. Something the bill sponsor acknowledged during a Children and Family Affairs subcommittee. “There is not an explicit age limit,” Leatherwood said.
The bill would create a class specifically for marriage between a man and a woman. It would also protect local officials from legal action in denying a marriage license: https://t.co/C02JJP69bL
Republican politicians routinely claim that cities run by Democrats have been experiencing crime waves caused by failed governance, but a new study shows murder rates are actually higher in states and cities controlled by Republicans.
“We’re seeing murders in our cities, all Democrat-run,” former President Donald Trump asserted at a March 26 rally in Georgia. “People are afraid to go out.”
In February, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., blamed Democrats for a 2018 law that reduced some federal prison sentences — even though it was signed by Trump after passing a GOP-controlled Congress. “It’s your party who voted in lockstep for the First Step Act that let thousands of violent felons on the street who have now committed innumerable violent crimes,” Cotton said during a speech in the Senate.
Last December, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, told Fox News viewers, “America’s most beautiful cities are indeed being ruined by liberal policies: There’s a direct line between death and decay and liberal policies.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at a rally on March 26 in Commerce, Ga. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
But a comparison of violent crime rates in jurisdictions controlled by Democrats and Republicans tells a very different story. In fact, a new study from the center-left think tank Third Way shows that states won by Trump in the 2020 election have higher murder rates than those carried by Joe Biden. The highest murder rates, the study found, are often in conservative, rural states.
The study found that murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won. (The report used 2020 data because 2021 data is not yet fully available.) The five states with the highest per capita murder rate — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri — all lean Republican and voted for Trump.
There are some examples of states Biden won in 2020 that also have high per capita murder rates, including New Mexico and Georgia, which have the seventh- and eighth-highest murder rates, respectively. And there are Trump-supporting states with low murder rates, such as Idaho and Utah. Broadly speaking, the South, and to a lesser extent the Midwest, has more murders per capita than the Northeast, interior West and West Coast, the study found.
Those findings are consistent with a pattern that has existed for decades, in which the South has had higher rates of violent crime than the nation as a whole.
Demonstrators march in Atlanta on April 14, 2021, to protest the shooting death of Daunte Wright three days earlier. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)
“We as criminologists have known this for quite some time,” Jennifer Ortiz, a professor of criminology at Indiana University Southeast, told Yahoo News. “States like Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have historically had high crime rates.”
Criminologists say research shows higher rates of violent crime are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance. Those conditions characterize some portions of the American South.
“They are among the poorest states in our union,” Ortiz said of the Deep South. “They have among the highest rates of child poverty. They are among the least-educated states. They are among the states with the highest levels of substance abuse. All of those factors contribute to people engaging in criminal behavior.”
“I thought that was a very good study,” Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and former president of the American Society of Criminology, told Yahoo News about the Third Way report. “In Republican states, states with Republican governors, crime rates tend to be higher. I’m not certain that’s related to the fact that the governor is a Republican, but it’s a fact nonetheless.”
Police and emergency personnel work on a crime scene in Waukesha, Wis., in November 2021. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
(While the Third Way study divided states by presidential vote in 2020, using gubernatorial party affiliation leads to similar results because most states have recently chosen the same party for governor and for president. Based on presidential vote, eight of the 10 states with the highest murder rates lean Republican, versus seven of the top 10 if one uses the governor’s party.)
Although murder rates tend to be highest in the South, the biggest increases in 2020 were found in the Great Plains and Midwest, according to Third Way. The largest jumps were in Wyoming (91.7% higher than in 2019), South Dakota (69%), Wisconsin (63.2%), Nebraska (59.1%) and Minnesota (58.1%). Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska all voted for Trump and have Republican governors. Wisconsin and Minnesota voted for Biden and are led by Democrats.
Few large cities are governed by Republicans — only 26 of the 100 largest U.S. cities have Republican mayors — making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult. But cities that do have Republican mayors do not have lower murder rates than similarly sized Democratic-led cities, the study found.
Some experts warn against the impulse to use crime data to score quick political points.
“Being a Republican or Democratic state or city is correlated with many other issues,” David Weisburd, a professor of criminology and executive director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, wrote in an email to Yahoo News. “That means that the murder rate may be due to the state being Republican, or it may be due to the fact that Republican states have many other risk factors related to crime or murder rates. Even with a very comprehensive modeling of all of these factors, it is very difficult to get a valid causal result for explaining crime rates.”
Police tape blocks a street where a person was shot in a drug-related incident in Philadelphia in 2021. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
That argument cuts both ways, however. Weisburd also thinks the claims of Trump and other Republicans who say Democrats have caused a crime wave in the cities and states they govern are unfounded. “I don’t think this argument can be supported no matter which way you go,” Weisburd said.
Murder rates in the U.S. rose dramatically in 2020 from record lows, and the increases are similar across states — regardless of partisan preference. For homicides in 2020, Third Way found a 32.2% uptick in Trump-backing states versus a 30.8% rise in those that voted for Biden. Some states with large cities, such as New York and Pennsylvania, saw larger-than-average increases: New York went up 47% and Pennsylvania is up 39%. But the largest increases were in rural, Republican-led states, including Montana (+84%) and South Dakota (+81%).
The higher national murder rate is naturally causing public concern, although violent crime does remain far below its early 1990s high point. “Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2019,” from 757 incidents per 100,000 people to 379 per 100,000, the Pew Research Center noted last November. Between 2019 and 2020, the murder rate jumped from 6 homicides per 100,000 people to 7.8 homicides per 100,000, but that was still 22% below the rate in 1991 of 10 homicides per 100,000.
Yesterday, I sat through first day of jury selection in the trial for my daughters killer. Since her murder, my mission is to reduce gun violence. Never should have been a partisan fight. Simply put, Republican states are deadlier & they need to change.https://t.co/uol9NUOr3E
“The 5 states with the highest per capita murder rate — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri — all lean Republican. Broadly speaking, the South, and to a lesser extent the Midwest, has more murders per capita than the Northeast and West.” https://t.co/1SI8ZFvk52
House Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chairman Jim Banks (R-IN) wrote in a letter to Disney CEO Bob Chapek he will fight to rescind Mickey Mouse’s copyright renewal over the megacorporation’s LGBT campaign.
Banks wrote to Chapek as the Mickey Mouse copyright will expire on January 1, 2024. Given Disney’s opposition to Gov. Ron Desantis’s Parental Rights in Education Act, and its push to include as “many, many many LGBTQIA characters in its stories,” he cannot support an extension of its copyrights.
Banks explained that Congress had repeatedly extended Disney’s copyright due to intense lobbying from Disney. Now, Disney could lose its copyright renewal when Republicans are slated to hold the House majority after the 2022 midterm elections.
Read the full article. Banks last appeared on JMG when he falsely claimed to be on the Capitol riot committee in letters to federal agencies seeking information to be turned over to the committee.
This is what the party of small government wants. Complete control over everything. Complete control over people from forced birth to what is indoctrinated to them in conservative run public schools, to what people can do in the bedrooms and this their genitals, to what businesses can do or say. That is freedom, right? Isn’t that why the maga crowd refused to wear masks because it took away their freedoms? But telling restricting what you can read, say, watch, and what sex you can have along with who you can marry due to the church doctrine is pure freedom. Not for me.
Next year, the woke Disney lobbyists will ask Congress to extend Micky Mouse’s trademark.
On Thursday, the House passed a Democratic-sponsored bill to cap the price of insulin at $35 a month for most Americans, an effort to crack down on price-gouging by drug makers who have raised the price of a lifesaving product used by millions of Americans by almost 500 percent in recent years. Some people now pay more than $1,000 a month for insulin to treat diabetes, even with insurance. Democrats had been seeking a way to rein in drugs prices overall in a broader policy proposal, but it had little chance of passing the Senate. Hoping for bipartisan compromise, they siloed the insulin price control as its own measure. Still, only 12 House Republicans voted in favor of a bill that’s wildly popular with the American public.
Among those voting “no” was Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the GOP’s leading troll, who has come up with perhaps one of the most offensive justifications for GOP opposition to the popular bill. In his newsletter Friday, Gaetz told his constituents that he opposed the bill because fat people, not Big Pharma, are responsible for driving up the cost of insulin. He suggested that Type 2 diabetes, which is often linked to obesity, could be cured if only people would workout more and lose weight, at which point they wouldn’t need insulin anymore and the drug costs would fall without government intervention. Gaetz wrote:
While Democrat posturing of H.R. 6833 victimizes insulin payees as people with an uncontrollable disease that are being taken advantage of and need Big Brother to throw them a raft, lifestyle changes en masse would expeditiously lower demand and the subsequent prices of insulin. 90-95% of people with diabetes have type 2 diabetes, which “can be prevented or delayed with healthy lifestyle changes, such as losing weight, eating healthy food, and being active.” Arbitrary price controls are no substitute for individual weight control. Since 2000, the number of diabetes cases in the U.S. has nearly doubled. The demand for insulin has increased and the requisite price increase has followed suit. In other words, the price of insulin increases as waistlines increase.
More than a quarter of Florida residents are obese, including Gaetz’s favorite Palm Beach resident, former president Donald Trump. And more than 10 percent of the state’s population suffers from diabetes, not all of which is caused by lifestyle factors. Gaetz’s attempt to sympathize with them was probably not very convincing. “While I empathize with all Americans suffering from disease and will continue to fight Big Pharma, I voted against H.R. 6833,” he wrote. “I will not see a reemergence of FDR price controls and join the Democrats in their attempt to pave the Road to Serfdom.”
This isn’t the first time Gaetz has shown real scorn for overweight people. In January, on his podcast “Firebrand,” he decried Twitter’s banning of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for “telling the truth” about the relationship between Covid and obesity. After a segment about his advocacy for medical marijuana, he warned that legal weed was “not an excuse for America to sit home fat and high.” He decried “woke” culture for “cheerleading for the chubbies.”
“I’m not here to fat shame anyone,” he said. “I’d have no room to talk. I know personally how challenging issues of weight can be. I’m frequently way behind in my own goals. But society has now gotten to the point where it’s considered verboten to consider that a daily salad might make you more resilient to all kinds of disease than the vax of the month pushed by Big Pharma. Where’s Michelle Obama when you need her?” He expressed nostalgia for the former First Lady’s “Let’s Move!” campaign and puzzled over how the country had gone from her push for a better diet to the current “obesity-embracing woketopia,” where people are accusing “the Body Mass Index of being a tool of white supremacy.”
Even his own colleagues are not immune from Gaetz’s obesity scorn. He once took a potshot at Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who has openly discussed his struggle with obesity and went through weight-loss surgery in August 2002, suggesting that Nadler should be put in charge of the “congressional weight loss program.”
While Gaetz may claim to empathize with people struggling with weight issues, he clearly doesn’t think he’s one of them. In August, he declared that he didn’t “fit in” with other members of Congress because most of them are old, obese people.
Matt Gaetz says today that the reason he doesn’t “fit in” well with other Members of Congress is because most of them are old and obese. pic.twitter.com/4k8MinxYUE
“If we get back the Senate and we’re in charge of this body and there is judicial openings, we will talk to our colleagues on the other side. But if we were in charge, she would not have been before this committee. You would have had somebody more moderate than this. So, I want you to know right now, the process you started to go to a simple majority vote is going rear its head here pretty soon when we’re in charge. Then we’ll talk about judges differently.” – Sen. Lindsey Graham, this afternoon.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) attempts to explain voting ‘no’ on Judge Jackson's Supreme Court nomination despite voting to confirm her in the past:
“If you win an election, I expect you to pick somebody I wouldn’t support on the court.” pic.twitter.com/kh2C9bZT0N
Sen. Lindsey Graham claims he only previously voted to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the D.C. Circuit because it was the ‘game’ he was expected to play following an election pic.twitter.com/bs7CYWWK3V
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