Weeks after a late-summer spike in violence, many Wilmington residents are saying they want to see more services for youth and more beat cops building relationships in their neighborhoods.
At a public meeting and in interviews with Spotlight Delaware, many also raised concerns about police transparency and called for a stronger focus on serious crime in the wake of the violence.
In response, Mayor John Carney and the Wilmington police officials have said they will maintain their existing strategies toward public safety.
“We have a great city. We have some troubled neighborhoods, and we have some groups and gangs that have been fighting back and forth. We had stemmed that tide a little bit, and I think compared to what it used to be, we’re in better shape,” Carney said during a late September community meeting.
Translation: Blahblahblah.
Y’know, were Carney replaced with a bot, the only giveaway would be that the bot would have more personality.
Criminal DOJ Goes After Cali Ballots. They’re trying everything. Check this out:
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is threatening legal action against California unless state and local officials review a list of potential noncitizen individuals on their voter rolls.
Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter on Tuesday sent letters to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan with a list of names of possible noncitizens identified by the federal government. The letters demand they review the list by noon on Thursday.
“Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” McCotter wrote in the letters, which was obtained by NBC News.
McCotter wrote that the DOJ provided a password-protected thumb drive with a list of individuals the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens who were sent a vote-by-mail ballot” for the 2026 election. He asked that county election officials “segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots” until their citizenship status was determined.
Justin Levitt, an NBC News contributor who was a Justice Department official during the Obama administration, said the federal government has no authority supporting its demands.
“They can send the letter,” he said. “California doesn’t have to do anything about it.”
Federal law prohibits systemic list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election. At this point, less than three weeks out from Election Day, the only changes to the voter rolls can come from individualized information, like notification from the Social Security Administration that someone has died.
A DOJ spokesperson said the department is asking California to sequester ballots, not change their voter list.
You can see what this is–first, it’s an attempted workaround of the Courts’ banning of DOJ’s attempt to mess with the voter lists. Second, it’s obviously a voter intimidation tactic. Third, you’ve all seen how the latter votes counted in Cali skew Democratic. Other than that, I see no problem with it.
Since September 2025, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to demand their unredacted voter rolls.
The rolls contain confidential information on millions of Americans and have historically been managed by states. Now these lists are a major focus of President Donald Trump’s push to take federal control over elections and prosecute alleged noncitizen voters.
Here are the two main tactics DOJ has tried:
The first seven lawsuits used the same opening, citing Trump’s March 2025 executive order on election integrity to claim the Justice Department needed states’ voter rolls to check that they were following federal election laws.
The next 19 lawsuits used a different strategy.
They made no mention of Trump’s executive order and didn’t depend on federal voting laws. Instead, they cited a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 called Title III, which requires the preservation of state and local election records.
The government lawyers claimed that Title III gave the attorney general “sweeping power” to obtain these records to curb noncitizen voting. In reality, the law allowed the federal government to access such records to protect the right to vote, for example, by enabling investigations into practices that disenfranchised Black voters in the South.
In those 26 cases, Federal judges have rejected those arguments all 26 times. Eight of the deciding judges were named under Trump. Will Colm Connolly follow suit (Delaware remains one of the undecided cases)? He’s been pretty snarky so far. We’ll see if he follows the law, or if he obeys the orders of those who appointed him. The jury, and the judge, are out.
BTW, great reporting from ProPublica. It even has charts! Oh, this is worth at least a chuckle, perhaps a guffaw:
A Justice Department spokesperson issued a statement in response to ProPublica’s questions: “Our attorneys are skilled, principled advocates who argue every case honestly and in good faith. Disagreement with the government’s position is not evidence of bad faith. We look forward to making our case on appeal.”
In Texas–A ‘Glitch’ Or Criminal Behavior?:
Texas election officials are struggling to process a massive backlog of nearly 600,000 voter registration applications after a major state computer system failure, just days before early voting is set to open on Monday and amid concerns about widespread voter suppression.
The disruption has raised serious concerns about the state’s voter registration system, with voting rights organizations accusing Texas officials of failing to ensure that eligible voters could properly register.
The problem originated from a software error involving the Texas department of public safety (DPS), according to a lawsuit filed last week. The glitch affected a website used for driver’s license applications that was also designed to allow Texans to register to vote.
The lawsuit alleges that between October 2025 and February 2026, residents who selected “yes” when asked whether they wanted to register to vote were given receipts confirming their selections. However, their registration information was never actually recorded.
The League of Women Voters of Texas and Move Texas Civic Fund, a non-profit dedicated to increasing civic participation among young Texans, brought the legal challenge against state officials.
“Defendants have breached and continue to breach the contract by failing to maintain the procedures that ensure simultaneous online voter registration with driver license renewal or change of address transactions,” the lawsuit said.
“DPS had failed to send almost 600,000 voter registrations to the SOS to distribute to local county registrars, with some delayed voter registrations stretching back as far as October 2025,” it added. “Unexpecting counties must now scramble to process this deluge of last-minute voter registrations ahead of the November 2026 election.”
I’m going with ‘criminal behavior’.
Paxton’s Only Contributor. Hey, it’s free speech. The Supreme Court said so:
If Ken Paxton wins in Texas, he may have Elon Musk to thank.
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person and a Texas resident who has major business interests in the state, sent $158 million in September to a super PAC that immediately flipped that much money to a group backing Mr. Paxton’s Senate bid, according to campaign-finance filings released Thursday.
The donations from Mr. Musk, collectively some of the biggest ever recorded in American politics, have allowed Mr. Paxton to remain financially competitive even as he is vastly outraised by his Democratic opponent, James Talarico. Republicans in Texas have grown increasingly worried about the race, one of this year’s most expensive and high-profile contests, fearful of losing a statewide election in Texas for the first time in more than three decades.
Mr. Musk sent the money to Senate Republicans’ top super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, in donations of $75 million on Sept. 9 and $83 million on Sept. 23. Each time, the very next day, the super PAC cut a check of the same amount to Texas PAC, a group that the Senate Leadership Fund had set up to support Mr. Paxton.
Doesn’t Musk have all the popularity of Darth Vader? Even I can concoct a video that should run non-stop on social media. Betcha you can do better than me.
What do you want to talk about?
