The FBI has finally released crime figures for 2019, and both violent crime and property crime were down compared to 2018. Property crime is at its lowest level of the past several decades, while violent crime is at its second-lowest (only 2014 has been lower).

As for 2020, we won’t know anything reliable until this time next year. There have been several estimates based on sampling of cities, but I’d take them all with a grain of salt. For now, this is the best we have.

Are you curious how your state stacks up? Here are violent crime rates by state:

CDC Director Robert Redfield says that if everyone wore masks we'd defeat COVID-19 in a couple of months.Pool Via Cnp/CNP via ZUMA

A reporter for NBC News listened in on a telephone call a few days ago:

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has grown increasingly concerned that President Donald Trump, pushed by a new member of his coronavirus task force, is sharing incorrect information about the pandemic with the public. Dr. Robert Redfield, who leads the CDC, suggested in a conversation with a colleague Friday that Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data about a range of issues, including questioning the efficacy of masks, whether young people are susceptible to the virus and the potential benefits of herd immunity.

“Everything he says is false,” Redfield said during a phone call made in public on a commercial airline and overheard by NBC News.

It’s worth remembering that Redfield’s nomination as director of the CDC was controversial at the time. In addition to being accused of scientific misconduct in the ’90s, Redfield is a conservative Christian who has promoted abstinence-only policies for AIDS patients. He was viewed by many liberals as a likely promoter of bad science if Donald Trump asked for it, so it’s notable that he has refused to play along.

But there’s probably nothing that Redfield can do about Scott Atlas. Trump has finally found someone who will tell him what he wants to hear, and in Trumpworld that’s the highest credential of them all. Tomorrow night I imagine we can expect a flurry of Atlas-provided nonsense about COVID-19 when Trump takes the debate stage.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 27. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

As we all know by now, the New York Times has somehow gotten hold of Donald Trump’s tax information from 2000-2018. They have an immense piece about it today, with more coming in the following weeks, but there was only one thing I wanted to know: just how much money does the guy make? Without further ado, here’s what Trump has claimed on his tax returns:

Trump’s story turns out to be pretty simple. After screwing everybody in sight during the ’90s, he entered 2000 in parlous shape. What saved him was The Apprentice, which earned him a boatload of money and formed the foundation of his flurry of licensing and endorsement deals over the next few years. But as revenue from the show faded, so did Trump’s finances, and since 2012 he’s been losing money every year. Long story short, Trump has lost money at pretty much everything he’s ever done. The only exception is The Apprentice and the licensing money it enabled—which probably owes more to reality show mogul Mark Burnett than to Trump himself.

Trump’s ability to squander the money he inherited is breathtaking. He’s also deeply in debt, it turns out, with about $300 million in loans coming due over the next few years. It’s no wonder he’s been so assiduous at trying to turn the Oval Office into his own private ATM.

I want to briefly follow up on the catastrophic COVID-19 news out of Argentina. Here’s what their case rate looks like:

Argentina’s case rate is higher than the worst resurgences in Europe (Spain and France) and far worse than any other country in South America. So what’s going on?

Experts link the increase in cases to the easing of a nationwide lockdown amid rising economic and political pressure on center-left President Alberto Fernandez. Argentina’s quarantine has been in place for almost 170 days in various forms.

It’s the same old story. No matter how successful you’ve been, when you ease the lockdown the virus roars back.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 26. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I don’t know what happened in Argentina, but their death rate is absolutely skyrocketing. This looks very bad, especially when we’re seeing a resurgence of COVID-19 deaths all over Europe.

This is a quick follow-up to my post about QAnon a couple of days ago. I was wondering how popular QAnon really was, and came up with two polls: one said it had 3 percent support and the other said it had 9 percent support. That’s a huge difference.

Now there’s a third poll, and it puts the number at . . . 7 percent.

If you average these polls you come up with about 6 percent. That makes it more than the typical 3 percent you can get for just about anything in the United States, but less than the 9 percent that would indicate a scary level of support. This is, let’s say, concerning but not yet much more than that.

And a quick note: even if the correct number is 3 percent, that represents 8-10 million followers. So whenever you hear about a QAnon forum having “millions” of fans or something similar, ignore it. It’s meaningless. In a country the size of the United States, a few million just isn’t that many.

A few days ago I suggested that Republicans were already so energized by Supreme Court choices that a new vacancy could hardly energize them even more. Democrats, on the other hand, had never given the court as much attention, which meant the new vacancy could potentially energize them a lot. A new Washington Post poll confirms this:

There are a couple of caveats here. First, don’t take this to mean that Republicans aren’t energized. They are. They just aren’t a lot more energized than they’ve always been. Second, the same poll asks which issues are most important. The Supreme Court landed in sixth place, with only 11 percent choosing it. So it might be that the fight over the Supreme Court turns out not to be pivotal after all.

But I suspect otherwise. The fighting has barely begun, and a few weeks from now a whole lot more people will have been bombarded with jeremiads about how the future of civilization depends on what happens to the Supreme Court. This will heat up soon enough.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 25. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Preston Ehrler/SOPA Images via ZUMA

Today Barton Gellman tells me something that I didn’t know: “the consent decree is gone.” Here’s what that means:

The 2020 presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a federal judge requiring the Republican National Committee to seek approval in advance for any “ballot security” operations at the polls. In 2018, a federal judge allowed the consent decree to expire, ruling that the plaintiffs had no proof of recent violations by Republicans. The consent decree, by this logic, was not needed, because it worked.

The order had its origins in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 1981. According to the district court’s opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, the RNC allegedly tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers as members of a “National Ballot Security Task Force,” some of them armed and carrying two-way radios. According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged people’s eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls. The power of these methods relied on well-founded fears among people of color about contact with police.

So what does this mean? Let’s turn the mic over to President Trump’s wastrel son:

It sounds like a drive to raise a militia. “We need every able-bodied man, woman to join an army for Trump’s election security” https://t.co/n0IJ7fjIP2

— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) September 25, 2020

It’s 1981 all over again. Trump Jr. is recruiting “an army” to provide “election security,” and I think everyone with more than a room temperature IQ knows what that means. It means descending in force on polling places in Black neighborhoods and trying to scare people into staying away. This is what Republicans routinely did until a judge stopped them, and it’s what they’re going to do again now that a judge has removed the leash. Apparently 40 years wasn’t enough.