Stunning Facts You Don’t Want to Miss

In 1962, 85 percent of white Americans told Gallup that black children had as good a chance as white kids of getting a good education. The next year, in another Gallup survey, almost half of whites said that blacks had just as good a chance as whites of getting a job.

Merrick Garland is set to officially make Supreme Court history this week ― not for something he did, but for something others haven’t done.

As of Tuesday [July 19, 2016], President Barack Obama’s choice to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia has matched the record for the high court nominee who has waited the longest to be confirmed for the job.

The milestone couldn’t be more symbolic. Garland, who was nominated in March, is poised to surpass Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest justices to ever live, who exactly 100 years ago endured the largest gap between nomination and confirmation of any Supreme Court nominee: 125 days.

Grant Miller of Stanford University found that when states, one by one, gave women the right to vote at the local level in the 19th and early 20th centuries, politicians scrambled to find favor with female voters and allocated more funds to public health and child health. The upshot was that child mortality rates dropped sharply and 20,000 children’s lives were saved each year.

Pew research indicates that since the early 2000s, every year a majority of Americans surveyed have felt that crime has increased since the year previous. According to a 2014 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans think that the crime rate is increasing, up from 63 percent in 2013. But the reality is that America is getting safer. The national crime rate is about half of what it was at the peak in 1991.

… During Reagan’s presidency, which lasted from 1981 to 1989, America was way more dangerous than it is today. In that era, there was an average of 20,377 murders a year in the U.S. There were 14,249 in 2014, the latest year with official FBI data. Meanwhile, the U.S. population has grown from 229 million to 310 million, a 35 percent increase, driving down the per capita rates. There’s also never been a safer time to be a child in America, and while an average of 101 police officers were intentionally killed every year during Reagan’s presidency, the annual number is just 62 under Obama — the lowest recorded amount.

[Tim] Kaine's selection extends a remarkable streak in which 17 of the last 18 Democratic conventions -- including the last eight in a row -- have nominated for vice president either a sitting senator or an incumbent vice president who was a senator when he was first elected.