Free Republic

Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has repeatedly been assigned cases to do with President Donald Trump's second term, as Townhall has been covering. Congress has taken notice, and the House last month passed a bill to rein in rogue judges like Boasberg and others. Questions still remain, though, and on Monday, Townhall obtained a letter from Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Chip Roy (R-TX) regarding such concerns. The letter was sent to Angela D. Caesar, the Clerk of the Court for the U.S. District Court for...

A law enforcement expert is poking holes in the now-former Biden administration Department of Justice's repeated claims that violent crime sank to a 50-year record low, saying the agency "manipulated data" to reach its conclusion. In 2024, the Biden administration repeatedly claimed that violent crime was at a 50-year low, based on FBI statistics. The FBI defines the following as "violent crime": murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. But Ken Alexandrow, a security expert who served for 26 years as a Nashville, Tennessee, police officer, said the former administration "manipulated data" to reach a certain outcome. "The way crime...

Do you carry a gun?Bad idea, says Hollywood. Civilians with guns are fools. You are more likely to hurt yourself than the bad guy.“Leave it to a good guy with a gun to really screw things up,” says a cop on ABC’s “The Rookie.”Liberal politicians agree.“A good guy with a gun will stop bad guys with a gun?! It doesn’t hold up,” smiles New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.“An adolescent rescue fantasy,” adds an “expert” on CBS.Now, I’m not a gun person. I was raised among lefty gun haters. I assumed Hollywood and “experts” were right.When I saw economist John Lott’s...

em>Real Clear Investigations has caught the FBI manipulating crime statistics, stealthily changing the final stats for 2022 to show that crime went up that year—and not down, as the bureau originally reported. “When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1% … But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults,” RCI reported Wednesday.According to RCI, the updated data show that...

There has obviously been a lot of juking the economic numbers to make the economy look better than it is, but this report from the Brownstone Institute explains that systemic flaws in how economic statistics are generated account for some of the disparity between the statistics and our observations. This study corrects bad inflation data and merges that with output -- to show that we've been in recession 2.5 years already! It furthers reveals the devastation of the Covid response. https://t.co/i0MUCCq6hq via @brownstoneinst pic.twitter.com/koqaqWCPUp— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) October 9, 2024As I have said several times, the relatively new Brownstone...

People often ask if the Fed is political, and therefore predisposed to lowering interest rates before the election. The Labor Department and Bureau of Labor Statistics deserves equal questioning. Their job growth statistics are untrustworthy, to put it politely. They are almost always revised downwards after Biden had a chance to gloat. A Labor Department report encompassing annual benchmark revisions to the nonfarm payroll numbers was released on August 8, 2024, covering the period of April 2023 through March, 2024. It showed actual non-farm job growth was nearly 30% lower than previously reported. On October 4, just an hour ago...

U.S. job gains increased by the most in six months in September and the unemployment rate fell to 4.1%, pointing to a resilient economy that likely does not need the Federal Reserve to deliver large interest rate cuts*** In addition to the better-than expected increase in nonfarm payrolls reported by the Labor Department on Friday, wages rose at a solid pace last month. The closely watched employment report also showed the economy added 72,000 more jobs in July and August than previously estimated. The report followed on the heels of annual benchmark revisions to national accounts data last week that...

Crime is a major issue in this year’s election, yet major media ignored the release of a significant new government report showing a surge in violent crime. The increase in violent crime during the Biden administration is a record increase.The latest data released last Thursday from the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) reveal a sharp increase in violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration compared to when Trump left office.During the debate, Mr. Muir noted: “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” But Mr. Muir would have been...

There are lies, damned lies, and government statistics — and maybe none is more damnable than the official unemployment rate which is half the actual rate .. Worse, the number of Americans who are neither retired nor employed is more than four times higher than July's official rate of 4.3%. ... July the percentage of Americans who are unemployed and looking for work — this is the number that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should report each month — was 8.4%. The BLS reported a rosy 4.3% unemployment ... One in four adult Americans is retired, which is nice...

Contents of would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks' primary cell phone has become a key focus of the probe. While Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle frustrated lawmakers Monday with sparse details about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the FBI has disclosed to Congress that the shooter used three encrypted communications apps ostensibly tied to Germany, Brussels and New Zealand and also possessed an arrest photo of an earlier Michigan school shooter, Just the News has confirmed. In multiple briefings, FBI leaders told lawmakers that the 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks’ primary cell phone has become an important focal point...

Even though most Americans have been struggling financially over the past few years, not everyone has been doing badly during the current economic turmoil. In fact, there are some households that are doing exceptionally well. Some articles point out that companies that cater to average Americans are doing quite poorly right now while companies that market luxury goods and services are reporting massive profits. However, overall consumer spending has been slowing down. It looks like the majority of U.S. workers either can’t spend a lot of money right now or are very hesitant to. At the same time, there is...

Mark Twain said: “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.” Nowhere is this truer than with the statistics the Biden/Garland Department of Justice inflicts on us. Were we to believe what Joe Biden said during the recent debate, the Trump years represented an all-time high of violent crime, but under his enlightened leadership, violent crime has dramatically declined. The FBI/DOJ, and of course the Democrat/socialist/communist (D/s/c) media all say the same. They’re also telling us we have the best economy ever, inflation isn’t bad at all and the border is secure. As Twain said: statistics. The idea crime is under...

Straight forward divorce stats. https://divorce.com/blog/divorce-statistics/

Houston’s police chief has resigned after emails obtained by a local news outlet appear to show that he knew about massive failures in the department well before he said he did. Within hours of issuing a statement about the findings, he resigned. In February, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner first announced that the Houston Police Department dropped 264,000 crime reports, including violent crimes and sexual assaults, which weren’t investigated because a “lack of personnel” code was assigned to them, The Center Square reported. In March, new Houston Mayor John Whitmire appointed an independent panel to review an internal HPD investigation...

As Townhall reported — and anyone not blinded by rabid anti-Israel and pro-Hamas hatred presumed — the number of women and children killed in the Gaza Strip since Hamas launched its massacre on October 7 is far less than the United Nations or its terrorist sources reported. The UN's Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) quite quietly and without an announcement matching the breathless outrage at and coverage of previously reported (and literally unbelievable) numbers, halved the number of women and children it previously claimed were killed in Gaza amid the war. The more than 14,000 children it said...

The United Nations seemingly halved the estimated number of women and children killed in Gaza, according to UN data published on May 6 and 8. The UN published the number of fatalities reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. The Government Media Office in Gaza and Israeli authorities provided a disclaimer below the data: "The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures." On May 6, the UN published data showing that 34,735 people had reportedly been killed in Gaza, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children. On May 8, the...

On Wednesday, the government put out disappointing inflation statistics that show that inflation has accelerated to four-tenths of a percent last month. But that number seems unrealistically low to me. In the numbers, bureaucrats claimed that gasoline prices only went up 1.7% last month, which would be only five cents per gallon. On the New York mercantile exchange, gasoline has risen from around $2.10 per gallon in early January to around $2.75 on March 31st; that is up 30% in three months. Crude oil has risen from around $72 at the end of the year, to $83 at the end...

This past Friday, Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the Democrat Majority Leader, and a Jew in the state with the largest Jewish population in this nation, called for the removal of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though this is interference in democratic Israeli politics, the most disturbing aspect is the idea that underlies this demand. Earlier, President Joe Biden indicated that it was time for him to have a “come to Jesus” moment with Netanyahu. Though it's quite insulting to use this phrase with the Jewish leader of the Jewish State, again the most troubling aspect is the implication...

“There are three kinds of lies,” Mark Twain famously observed. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” You already know that the government's published statistics are not trustworthy. Federal agencies have shifted methodologies over the years, making it hard to compare data sets. In economic modeling, there is a concept called “GIGO” — garbage in, garbage out. And what we have been seeing does seem like a lot of garbage. Then, the number-crunchers perform adjustments, do other kinds of syntheses, and make revisions to that data. A good case could be made that government data has been politicized, too, and some methodologies...

Dr. Wyner is a professor, statistician, and, oh, chair of the undergraduate program in statistics and data science. His specialty is probability models. He has worked with ESPN (Money Ball anyone?) and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the very same NSF of which we've heard so much about the two last weeks. Dr. Wyner knows numbers.