A staged "carjacking" that the police got lucky enough to "stumble upon" — the "victim" of which just so happened to be the DOGE employee known as "Big Balls" — isn't enough justification for the presence of the National Guard for you?
In fact that’s actually what they’re doing:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-wash...
https://whyy.org/articles/30-years-ago-george-hw-bush-held-u...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assault...
If by "highest" you mean nineteeth in this year's tally so far, then....I....guess?
https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-...
St. Louis, MO's rate was 69 per 100k and DC was 17 per 100k.
St. Louis has a murder rate four times DC, yet curiosly no talk of deploying the FBI and national guard there.
But critically, the trial in which the legality of that action is considered is happening the week. Whether or not the action is judged to have been a constitutional violation ultimately doesn't matter; the administration did it, and even if the court rules against the administration, it will have been two months too slate. Effectively, the president has demonstrated he can federalize the national guard whether or not the governor consents for long enough to score whatever political/media points he's currently fixated on, and if the legal system stops him, he will have moved on to other issues.
https://apnews.com/article/california-trump-national-guard-l...
Pretty sure that doesn't apply in LA in 2025.
https://apnews.com/article/national-guard-los-angeles-immigr...
It's now winding its way through the appeals process.
Legally, there are exceptions to that (primarily the Insurrection Act, though there are some deployments that are permitted within states on federal authority on other legal bases with tightly-constrained functions), and practically, the legal limits don't matter because response time off the courts is to slow for them to act as a meaningful brake. (E.g., the lawsuit filed the first court day after the order to mobilize the guard for LA just reached the trial stage this week.)
St. Louis situation is absolutely abysmal. 20 is way too high, 69 is way too high. These are 3rd world numbers that are absolutely inexcusable. And we're only talking about murders here, if you look into other violent crime data, it's also substantial for D.C.
The FBI frequently gets involved in murder cases all over the country, there are field offices everywhere. States are significantly different things than the special federal District of Columbia. There, it is generally up to the Governor to deploy the national guard, although plenty of exceptions and precedents exist for the President to do so.
Widespread poverty and guns.
The cause is not "poverty and guns," because Idaho, which has a lot of poverty and a ton of guns, has one-third the homicide rate of Maryland, which is one of the richest and most educated states.
That’s a bridge too far for me.
Partisan violence was de facto sanctioned by Trump’s January 6th pardons. Coristine, moreover, was directly involved with decisions—almost certainly ones he made outside the cover of law—that cost lives in America and around the world [1].
Finding schadenfreude in a violent person receiving the violence they gleefully meted out to others isn’t toxic. It’s quintessentially human.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-07/musk-s-do...
You can dispute the evil of those acts, but it should be clear that many people do find it evil to kill several hundreds of thousands or potentially even millions of innocent people in order to yield $66 per year per average taxpayer in savings. So their feelings about Big Balls' victimization is not mediated by their disagreement with him.
Maybe I missed something.
We can reasonably anticipate these programs will be shuttered for at least another year, if not another decade (or permanently). We can argue here or there about the exact numbers, but it's a waste of everyone's time so I just provided a generous range instead.
At the end of the day... what exactly do you think the billions of dollars of food and drugs sent to unfathomably poor areas were doing if not keeping a huge number of people alive?
I may have said in another comment, that I was actually against most of these cuts. Those programs (like PEPFAR). I actually worked with USAID 20 years ago teaching programming classes in Romania and Serbia, and not once did anyone I encountered have a single cynical view on anything. We were all just working hard to "teach a man to fish". So I know that these types of programs play a huge part in showing the world that we actually walk the walk in wanting a better world.
I still can't get behind the idea of wishing violence for policy changes. Maybe that's a core principle of mine. It feels anti-American, since we (historically) try to rise above that, even if we often fail.
The nature of policy changes at such high levels is that many decisions are going to result in people dying (think of geopolitical decisions, think of Syria, the famine in Sudan right now, etc).
And while this administration has definitely been more damaging than the past administrations, my reaction is to argue till our faces are blue whether it was a bad policy decision or not, rather than wish violence.
As a self-aware reductio ad absurdum, you ought to agree that violence in response to a policy of rounding up a certain ethnic group and murdering them en masse would be justified or at least in the realm of "not regrettable?"
And yes, I agree that many policy decisions can result in people dying. The moral valence of each one depends on the costs and benefits and the efforts undertaken to minimize the former and maximize the latter. And the intent is a factor too. Killing someone after a period of community deliberation for killing a child is a very different moral event than killing someone for fun.
In this particular instance, the cost/benefit analysis comes out to many people's calculation outrageously weighted to the cost side, and it is demonstrably the case that zero effort was put into minimizing those costs. This was also all knowable from Big Balls' position given that he knows how to use the Internet and could gain access to any expert in the world to more fully understand what he was doing. So he holds a lot of moral culpability (which does not imply carjacking him is a good way to deal justice, to be clear).
I will take my own advice on “intent matters” - and there’s been little care intent wise shown to actually study the impacts of these cuts. Which does make them feel more malicious.
All I did was give a short reply and a link to a news source.
Maybe you should talk to someone about your persecution fetish?
It's conceivable this his shirt got pulled off during the fight, but equally conceivable that he took it off and wiped blood on himself. I've seen people fake injuries at political demonstrations, using the old pro wrestling trick of making a small cut in the hairline with a sharp blade (scalp wounds bleed a lot because there are so many capillaries on the head). I can't say this is what's happened here, but it just doesn't look consistent with real violence.
Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion. If it were a regular mugging or carjacking, you'd expect to read the woman was pushed to the ground and her bag taken. This could be poor quality reporting, but stories like this generally include a catalogue of all victims' injuries.
Article including the photo I'm describing: https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assault...
> Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion.
The story is that he pushed her into the car first then faced the carjackers.
No proof, but wow do they just happen to get exactly the event they need for the PR.