Author Archives: Dana Pico

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In telling the truth about its history, The Philadelphia Inquirer tells us that they will no longer tell the truth in the news

Screen capture, Philadelphia Inquirer website, February 17, 2022, 8:15 AM EST. Click to enlarge.

It began on Tuesday, February 15th, with the huge headline on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, “Black City. White paper. The summer of 2020 forced a reckoning for the country, Philadelphia, and its newspaper. But after perpetuating inequality for generations, can The Inquirer really become an anti-racist institution?”

The article, by Wesley Lowery, began with an editor’s note:

The following account of The Inquirer’s history, failed attempts at newsroom integration, and current efforts at internal reckoning is based on more than 75 interviews with current and former staff members, historians, and Philadelphians. Inquirer editors were uninvolved with the production of this piece, which was written by Wesley Lowery, an independent reporter. Lowery’s reporting was edited by Errin Haines, a Philadelphia-based journalist, and member of the board of The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which currently owns the paper.

The “Buildings Matter, Too” headline was published June 2, 2020 on page A12 of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.

It’s pretty long, and gives us the history of the Inquirer as time passed, concentrating on the inclusion, or, more accurately, mostly the exclusion of black journalists and employees through time. The takeoff point was the article headlines “Buildings Matter, Too,” which thoroughly offended many black journalists in the Inquirer’s newsroom.

Cassie Haynes started the morning of June 2, 2020, as she does most mornings, with a copy of her hometown newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer. What she read that day horrified and enraged her.

For weeks, Black people in Philadelphia and across the country had protested amid dual pandemics. They had been traumatized and enraged by cell phone video showing a Black man, George Floyd, begging for his life as his windpipe was crushed beneath the knee of Derek Chauvin, a white police officer in Minneapolis. And the millions who poured into the streets did so despite a global public health crisis that was disproportionately ravaging Black communities.

That Tuesday morning, The Inquirer published on Page A12 a column by the newspaper’s Pulitzer-Prize winning architecture critic beneath the three-word headline: “Buildings Matter, Too.”

Two years earlier, Haynes, who is Black, cofounded Resolve Philly, a group that works with media outlets across the city to create community and solutions-oriented journalism. The Inquirer is one of their partners. Yet, here was the newspaper likening the value of her life to that of a few storefront windows. Her cofounder happened to have a meeting that morning with The Inquirer’s executive editor, Stan Wischnowski. Haynes said to tell him she was canceling her subscription.

“A few storefront windows”? The article has since been retitled:

Damaging buildings disproportionately hurts the people protesters are trying to uplift

“People over property” is a great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia – and in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles and in a dozen other American cities – could be devastating for the future of cities.

by Inga Saffron | June 1, 2020

Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?

That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.

Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered. . . . .

“People over property” is great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia — and in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and a dozen other American cities — is devastating for the future of cities. We know from the civil rights uprisings of the 1960s that the damage will ultimately end up hurting the very people the protests are meant to uplift. Just look at the black neighborhoods surrounding Ridge Avenue in Sharswood or along the western end of Cecil B. Moore Avenue. An incredible 56 years have passed since the Columbia Avenue riots swept through North Philadelphia, and yet those former shopping streets are graveyards of abandoned buildings. Residents still can’t get a supermarket to take a chance on their neighborhood.

A photo that accompanied the article was captioned:

The intersection of Ridge Avenue and Sharswood Street shows the blight that has plagued the area since the 1964 Columbia Avenue riots. The building has since been demolished.

Intersection of Ridge and Sharswood, August 2021, via Google Streetscapes. Click to enlarge.

And what’s there more recently? The building on the corner has been demolished, and it was, at least in August of 2021, when Google Maps made their most recent pass, a street with business locations with rolled down steel doors or bars across their windows, litter in the streets, and cars parked on the sidewalks.

Was it really racist to note, as Inga Saffron did, that buildings in heavily black areas had more than just front windows smashed but that some were burned out? Is it racist to point out that many of the buildings burned out and businesses destroyed housed black-owned businesses, or the places of employment of black Philadelphians?

When you need to go to work, to earn a paycheck, to pay your rent and put food on the table, if the business at which you worked has been damaged beyond near immediate reopening, then that building mattered to you!

The initial article cited followed the history of integration at the Inquirer, which was not rapid. However, the history as given is from the perspective of the 21st century, an attempt at holding the newspaper in the middle of the 20th accountable to today’s standards.

Much further down, the article notes how the staff meetings at the Inquirer went. Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski did not write the “Buildings Matter, Too” headline; that was the work of an unnamed copy editor, and approved by the editor who oversaw the print desk. Both editors submitted their resignations, but Mr Wischnowski refused to accept them.

The “newsroom’s journalists of color” were not happy, and organized a sick out. Then, by Thursday, June 4, 2020, Mr Wischnowski, who had been with the paper for twenty years, was telling his colleagues at the newspaper that he expected to lose his job. The subsequent Saturday evening, published Elizabeth Hughes announced that Mr Wischnowski had resigned. In other words, I have been right all along when I characterized his departure as being fired. Fortunately, Mr Wischnowski landed on his feet, and is now the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a position to which he was named on September 5, 2020, so he wasn’t out of a job for too long.

The article noted that, in November 2020, Miss Hughes named Gabriel Escobar, a longtime Inquirer journalist who was previously Mr Wischnowski’s deputy, the new executive editor. The article then lamented that while Mr Escobar “is the first Latino journalist at the top of the masthead,” “To date, a Black journalist has never run the paper.”

Now comes Lisa Hughes, the publisher, again making her promise to turn the Inquirer into an “anti-racist” newspaper:

    From the publisher of The Inquirer: An apology to Black Philadelphians and journalists

    A More Perfect Union’s first chapter showed how The Inquirer has historically failed the Black community and journalists who fought for change.

    by Elizabeth H Hughes | Wednesday, February 16, 2022

    Two years ago we made a pledge to become an anti-racist organization. An important part of that work requires an unflinching examination of ourselves and our approach to journalism, past and present. This work had a marked beginning but has no fixed end. It is in many ways a daily duty, for all of us.

    This endeavor requires honesty. In that light, we must recognize that The Philadelphia Inquirer has historically failed in its coverage of the Black community — in a city where Black people have been integral since before the founding of the republic. We must also recognize that as an institution, we have failed Black journalists who for decades have fought, often in vain, for us to be more representative and inclusive.

    The journalistic examination of The Inquirer by Wesley Lowery published this week puts our failings in brutal relief. The reporting shows not only that we have not done right — it reveals, starkly, that we have done wrong. Black voices in the story — inside and outside the newsroom — articulate forcefully the harm we have inflicted over decades.

    It is worth noting that the story focuses primarily on the modern Inquirer — taking specific note of the racist headline published in 2020 and an offensive editorial published in 1990 — but it does not delve deeply into its long past. First printed just three months after Andrew Jackson was inaugurated president, The Inquirer has been a chronicler of life in the city for almost two centuries, and any historic assessment would doubtless find many more faults.

    An acknowledgment of our failings is not sufficient. We also apologize — to the Black residents and communities of Philadelphia, to the Black journalists of The Inquirer past and present, and to other communities and people whom we have also neglected or harmed.

    We recommit ourselves to the anti-racist mission we set in the summer of 2020, which has already yielded important changes. If there is skepticism of what we have done, or what we can or will do, we have earned that as well. We recognize that the judgment of our efforts will not be based on the promises we make, but on the actions we take, and the policies and practices we put in place to improve our journalism.

“Improve (their) journalism”? According to the Philadelphia Police Department, two more people were murdered in the City of Brotherly Love on Wednesday, but there isn’t a single story about either killing on the newspaper’s website main page, or its Crime & Justice page. As we noted last month, the concept of “anti-racism” means, as far as the Inquirer’s journolism is concerned, to censor the news when the news could be seen as reflecting poorly on minority communities.

No, “journolism” was not a typo: the spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. And to Miss Hughes, formerly the publisher of New York Magazine, telling the truth about the heavily black-on-black homicides in the Inquirer’s home city would be harmful to the black community.

I have to ask why that is, because, let’s tell the truth here: everyone already knows that the vast majority of homicides in Philadelphia are the killings of black people by other black people. Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas, wrote, in December of 2020, “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names,” saying:

    The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city. By the end of 2020, that number more than doubled: 447 people gunned down.

    Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

    At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

      “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

    That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

That was then, and this is now: such stories, when they are printed at all, don’t say ‘A 21-tear-old black male’ but just a ’21-year-old male’ was killed. To identify the victim by race would be to, as the Sacramento Bee once said about publishing mugshots, “perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

Translation: to the publisher and editors of the Inquirer, telling the truth is racist! To Lisa Hughes and Gabriel Escobar and, apparently, to much of the newsroom, to be ‘anti-racist’ is to censor the news, to not tell Philadelphians and the other subscribers to the newspaper a truth that they already know, but a truth that the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading just can’t handle. How is that journalism rather than journolism?

The originally cited article said:

Several longtime staffers made a point to defend Wischnowski — noting his longtime service to the paper and that he had been uninvolved in writing the headline itself — and that his resignation did not have the unanimous support of the room, even among those pressing for more racial equity.

“It was a knee-jerk reaction,” said reporter Mensah Dean, who is Black. “Everyone got real, real woke, real fast.”

The truth simply did not matter! Mr Wischnowski didn’t write the catchy headline — and aren’t headlines supposed to grab the readers’ attention, to get them to read the articles themselves? — and he apparently didn’t give his approval for it, but he also didn’t fire the two people who were actually responsible for it.

Mentions of Black Philadelphia appeared in the white papers primarily through the lens of crime. To read The Inquirer then would leave one wondering if Black people ever were born, ever died, if they lived lives in between — or if they simply sprouted, fully grown, in the city streets to call for civil rights, seek elected office, and commit various criminal infractions.

That, of course, was what Miss Hughes told us in her previous column, that the Inquirer was:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Miss Hughes did something really radical in that: she told us the truth, that the Inquirer would no longer tell the truth, not if that truth might offend some people.

I admit it: I prefer the print medium, because it takes the space to publish more information than the broadcast media normally do, and, with my poor hearing, it’s simply easier for me. But television news, due to the visual nature of the medium, publishes mugshots, publishes photos, and doesn’t have the luxury of hiding the truth the way newspapers can. But when I see what our major newspapers are doing, I cringe.

If I had a billion dollars, I would do what Jeff Bezos did when he bought The Washington Post: I would buy The Philadelphia Inquirer — and no, it wouldn’t cost a billion dollars, probably not even $50 million — and re-establish it as a news organization that told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s what the city sorely needs.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Could Philly be ending its COVID mandates soon?

Cheryl Bettigole, from BillyPenn.

We noted, on February 3rd, that Philadelphia’s Health Commissioner, Cheryl Bettigole, said that lifting the city’s COVID-19 mandates would likely be several months away.

Of course, Dr Bettigole has an appointed position, not an elected one, and it seems that the elected Democrats who control the City of Brotherly Love might be moving somewhat faster than she would like:

The vaccine mandate for dining inside restaurants was being enforced by restaurant hostesses, and one has to wonder just how diligently these minimum wage workers were doing so. As we have previously noted, there was a theft of some 5,000 blank vaccination cards from the Penn Medicine Clinic in Philly’s Center City, and two nurses in Amityville, New York were arrested for selling faked COVID-19 vaccination cards. How could anyone expect poorly-paid restaurant hostesses to scrutinize vaccination cards, and spot fakes? And how would anyone not think that a $20 bill, presented when the hostess asked, “Ihre Papiere, bitte,” would often get prospective diners through?

The city government was depending on people who were not their employees, and encouraging a black market in faked cards at the same time. And I will be honest here: I absolutely support people forging vaccination cards, and hope that there are thousands upon thousands of those black marketeers, and that no more of them get caught.

    And if cases continue to decline, the mask mandate could also lift some time later.

    The benchmarks would create a novel system where restrictions could ease when overall illness falls and be reimposed in the event of a COVID-19 resurgence. The effect could ease the bite on hotels and restaurants, which have lost significant business during the pandemic, while also protecting people’s health and reducing the burden of illness on hospitals and caregivers.

    Relaxed mandates won’t be welcomed universally in the city. Jennifer Kolker, associate dean for public health practice at Drexel University, said last week she thought states were moving too quickly to end their vaccine mandates. “I would love to see them maintain the vaccine mandate,” she said before the city’s plan came to light.

Well, of course she would; the Karens of our society always want stuff like that.

Further down:

    Business was down 37% in Philadelphia’s leisure and hospitality industry through the second quarter of 2021 compared to the same time in 2019, before the pandemic began, according to a report last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That’s greater than the national drop over the same time period of 13%. The industry is the city’s fourth-biggest job sector and 76% of its workers live in Philadelphia.

    (Ben) Fileccia (director of operations & strategy for the Philadelphia Restaurant and Lodging Association) and others in the industry said there have been hotels that have lost events and conferences to competitors in the city’s suburbs because those areas did not have mandates.

In other words, people are tired of the mandates and restrictions, and have been voting with their actions, and their wallets, against them. The greatest victims? The hospitality industry’s workers, three-quarters of whom live in Philly, the poorest of the 10 most populous U.S. cities, and the only big city with a poverty rate above 20%.

Of course, for highly paid people like Commissioner Bettigole and Dean Kolker, for people like Mayor Jim Kenney, the struggles of the working class are abstractions, something that they can neatly measure against the probabilities of contracting the virus. To them, the need to put food on the table is no different from the goal of not contracting the virus, but to the single mother with hungry kids to feed, the need to feed her children is far more immediate than the probabilities of contracting COVID-19.

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A prayer vigil for Police Office John Pawlowski He was murdered 13 years ago today

Officer John Pawlowski.

KYW-TV, Channel 3, the CBS owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, reported on a prayer vigil for slain Police Officer John Pawlowski held Saturday:

    Loved Ones Hold Prayer Vigil For Philadelphia Police Officer Killed In Line Of Duty

    By CBS3 Staff | February 12, 2022 | 10:11 PM EST

    PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Loved ones are remembering a Philadelphia Police officer killed in the line of duty 13 years ago. They held a prayer vigil Saturday for officer John Pawlowski.

    He was shot at Broad and Olney Streets 13 years ago on Sunday.

    Officer Pawlowski was responding to a dispute between a cab driver and a man with a weapon. He was just 25 years old when he was killed.

There’s more at the original, but if the “anti-racist” Philadelphia Inquirer covered it, a site search for John Pawlowski didn’t reveal it, though I’m certain that a memorial service for a white police officer killed by a black previously convicted felon had nothing, nothing at all, to do with that editorial decision.

Officer Pawlowski was killed when he approached Rasheed Scrugs, a convicted felon, who had been threatening Emmanuel Cesar, 32, a Haitian immigrant who had been in Philadelphia for six years at the time, and who knew Mr Scrugs as a fellow “hack” – unlicensed cabbies who use their own cars and vie for fares near the SEPTA transit station at Broad Street and Olney Avenue.

    But on the night of February 13, 2009, Cesar testified, Scrugs was on foot and angry. He said Scrugs came up to him on the northeast corner of the intersection, grabbed his shirt by the neck and demanded to know how much money he had made that day.

    “I said, ‘I’m not telling you that,'” Scrugs testified, and said Scrugs responded by slamming him back against the security grate of a closed store several times.

    Cesar said he got loose and began walking across Broad to get away and Scrugs followed, yelling, “You better not be calling the cops. If you call the cops I’ll shoot you and the cops.”

When the officers approaching Mr Scrugs ordered him to remove his hands from his pockets, he instead fired a handgun concealed in his pocket, striking Officer Pawlowski.

Mr Scrugs:

    had been arrested nine times for crimes including robbery, car theft, weapons offenses and drugs, according to police and court records.

    He was convicted of a 1997 armed robbery and sentenced to five to 10 years in prison. He was released in 2002, but he violated his parole in 2004 and was sent back to prison for an additional year.

Why not back to prison for the entire rest of his sentence?

Rasheed Scrugs.

Even if Mr Scrugs had been locked up for the maximum of ten years, he’d still have been out at the time he murdered Officer Pawlowski. That he had not in any way been reformed, simply not caught, is attested to by the fact he was carrying a six-shot, .357-caliber revolver, a felony for a previously convicted felon, and police found 19 packets of crack cocaine in his pockets when he was arrested; that’s felony distribution weight. He was apparently high on PCP at the time.

This guy was, as then-Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey called him, a “A career criminal,” “Cold-blooded killer,” and “Unsalvageable.”

Lynne Abraham, then the District Attorney, and her office put Mr Scrugs on trial for capital murder. Mr Scrugs changed his plea to guilty on the first day of the trial, leaving his attorneys to ask the jury to sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, rather than the death penalty. They told the jury what a poor, poor soul Mr Scrugs was, how he’d shown remorse, had ‘troubled formative years, had an IQ of just 80, and might have been brain damaged from years of using PCP, or ‘angel dust.’ The jury deadlocked on the penalty phase, which left Common Pleas Court Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes no choice but to sentence Mr Scrugs to life without the possibility of parole. Officer Pawlowski’s family was distraught that he wasn’t sentenced to death, but it really doesn’t matter: other than three men who voluntarily gave up their appeals, no one has been executed in the Keystone State since the 1960s.

One thing is obvious: while Mr Scrugs would not have been on parole or probation from his previous conviction at the time he killed Officer Pawlowski, if he had been treated more seriously by District Attorney Abraham for his previous offenses, he could, and should have been in jail for longer than he was. Remember, Lewis Jordan, a.k.a. John Lewis, had been treated leniently by the office of then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham, and was out on the street when he could, and should, have been in jail. On October 31, 2007, Philadelphia Police Officer Charles Cassidy walked into a Dunkin’ Donuts, the scene of a previous robbery, to check on it, just as Mr Jordan was attempting to rob the place; Mr Jorden shot Officer Cassidy in the head, killing him. Had law enforcement treated Mr Jordan seriously, rather than dropping the charges if he’d attend drug counseling courses, he would have been in jail, and Officer Cassidy would have gone home to his wife that Hallowe’en.

Treating criminals leniently has a consequence, and the killing of Officer Pawlowski was only one example. Giving these thugs a break too often results in innocent people being killed. Treating Mr Scrugs leniently wound up getting him locked away for the rest of his life; did previous breaks from the District Attorney really wind up doing him a favor?

When we catch the bad guys, we need to lock them up, lock them up for as long as the law allows. Perhaps they will learn a lesson, and perhaps not, but one thing is certain: as long as they are behind bars, they aren’t out on the streets and a menace to the public.

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The neo-conservatives beat the drum for war Are you willing to face nuclear annihilation over Ukraine?

It ought to be an established truth: if Bill Kristol and his gaggle of ‘neo-conservatives’ at The Bulwark support something, you just know that it’s wrong:

    The Right’s Argument Against Aiding Ukraine Is Wrong—and Dangerous

    A Russian conquest of Ukraine would be perilous for America and our allies.

    by Reuben Johnson | Friday, February 11, 2022 | 5:18 AM EST

    Kyiv – Conservative opinion in America seems to be hardening around opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine. The United States, the logic goes, has no stake in whether or not Russia invades Ukraine. Ukraine is a European nation and that makes it Europe’s problem.

    This argument is wrong and reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of what is at stake in Ukraine’s confrontations with Russia.

    For starters, modern Europe has never been able to handle its own military confrontations. The only nation in the NATO alliance that can lead the Europeans in a major multinational endeavor is the United States. There is a simple explanation for this imbalance: Because a European state strong enough to lead a coalition against a threat such as Russia would also be strong enough to dominate Western Europe. Which is not a state of affairs helpful to America’s interests.

Ignoring for the moment the pitiful grammar of the final sentence, the obvious question is: so what? At a certain point, it has to be asked what is to be gained here.

On March 31, 1939, finally realizing that Adolf Hitler’s word was worthless, the United Kingdom and France offered guarantees of Polish sovereignty. Two days after the Wehrmacht rolled in, on September 1, 1939, the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany.

But they could do nothing about the invasion: they hadn’t the men or equipment in place, and when it came to actual war, in the spring of 1940, the two nations’ militaries reeled before an attack by Germany on their forces on French soil. In the end, Poland was ‘liberated’ not by the United Kingdom, not by France, but by the Red Army, and that ‘liberation’ meant not freedom, but 45 years of Communist domination.

    Next, what happens in Ukraine does not necessarily stay in Ukraine. Previous invasions of Ukraine by Russia have devastated the Donbas region and the cost has been tremendous. If Russia invades again, the cost of rebuilding Ukrainian infrastructure Russian forces destroy could, in the words of the former Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, “turn Ukraine into a failed state.”

Well, that would then be Russia’s problem, wouldn’t it?

    Finally, tolerating a militaristic expansion of this kind would mean that “European security and stability” is a myth. There is every reason to believe that failing to stop Russia from continuing to try and destroy its much-smaller neighbor does not prevent war with Moscow, but rather makes likely a much larger, wider war in Europe in the future.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, as the Western democracies were worried that the huge Red Army could roll right in and conquer what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany more colloquially, and the Europeans hadn’t the strength to stop it. NATO’s guarantee was that an attack on one was an attack on all, which was, in effect, a guarantee that the United States, with its large forces and its nuclear weapons, would come to West Germany’s defense.

The USSR detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, far earlier than it was estimated they could.

NATO was a military alliance, including the nuclear-armed United States, against the wholly conventionally-armed Soviet Union; that lasted for 4½ months.

Of course, the Soviets had no way of delivering atomic bombs to targets at the time, and only a few of the devices, but they kept building, and building, and building. By 1951, the USSR tested an air-dropped atomic bomb, which meant that the USSR now had deliverable nuclear weapons.

If NATO had kept to itself, and not expanded following the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, NATO might still be a credible deterrent. But NATO expanded into Poland, and the Baltic States, right on Russia’s doorstep. Russia now has the nuclear arsenal to completely destroy the United States; does anyone seriously believe that Joe Biden, or any American President, would put the lives of 330 million Americans in danger of nuclear incineration to defend Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia?

There is a part of the calculation that is going unsaid: while Western sanctions could impose some real costs on the Soviet Union Russian Federation, those sanctions would inevitably be temporary, while conquering Ukraine would be a permanent addition to Russia. Byelorussia is already approaching vassal state status. Xi Jinping is making the same calculations when it comes to conquering Taiwan.

Reuben Johnson, the article author, after several paragraphs on the history of Russian adventurism and the inability of NATO to stop them, got one thing absolutely right:

    All of which means that if Ukraine receives no help from NATO because they are not a full-fledged member, it will send an ominous signal. It would say that decades of partnering with our alliance, participating in its missions, and contributing personnel and equipment to its operations counts for nothing. If you are attacked by the Russians, there will be no boots on the ground coming to your aid. Which would make the status of being any kind of NATO partner nation worth nothing—and could cripple, if not destroy, the alliance.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is just as aware of that as Mr Johnson, and it is an incentive for President Putin to go ahead and act. More, he has an incentive to strike sooner rather than later:

    Which European Countries Depend on Russian Gas?

    by Katharina Buchholz | February 3, 2022

    As the United States and the EU are working on a strategy to replace natural gas supply to Europe should Russia turn off the tap in a standoff with Western powers over Ukraine, Qatar has said that it sees no way that it could replace the needed amount by itself. If new sanctions were to be introduced against Russian President Vladimir Putin personally or his country, this could trigger an energy crisis on the continent due to much of Europe’s reliance on Russian gas, which arrives on the continent via pipelines.

    According to Reuters, close U.S. ally Qatar wants guarantees that natural gas diverted to Europe would not be resold and has urged European countries to resolve their investigation into Qatari gas contracts in order to become a regular customer themselves – which could more permanently shift gas dependencies in Europe.

    Data from the European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators shows which countries’ energy supply would be most at risk in the case of a Russian gas freeze. Among Europe’s major economies, Germany imports around half of its gas from Russia, while France only obtains a quarter of its supply from the country, according to the latest available data. The biggest source of French gas was Norway, supplying 35 percent. Italy would also be among the most impacted at a 46 percent reliance on Russian gas.

    The UK is in a different position, drawing half of its gas supply from domestic sources and importing mostly from Norway and also Qatar. Spain is also not on the list of Russia’s major customers, the biggest trade partners of the country being Algeria and the U.S.

    Some smaller European countries rely exclusively on Russian gas, namely North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Moldova. Dependence also was above 90 percent of gas supply in Finland and Latvia and at 89 percent in Serbia, as per the latest available data.

It’s the middle of February, and cutting off Russian gas to Europe would mean that many Europeans could freeze to death. Any sanctions that the West could impose on Russia for invading Ukraine would take time to work, and, to be brutally honest about it, Russia could withstand a loss of euros coming in for a lot longer than Europeans could survive without heat during the winter. More, alternate sources of fuel coming in would be coming in by liquified natural gas tankers, and sinking just one of them would probably mean that no future shipments would be made; the LNG tankers are privately-owned, no insurance companies would cover subsequent shipments, and many crew would simply refuse to become targets for Russian submarines.

More, as Western Europe tries to move away from fossil fuels, Russia’s position as the primary gas supplier becomes weaker every passing year; it is to President Putin’s advantage to move sooner rather than later.

It seems difficult to blame this on President Biden, because there’s really nothing serious he could do about it, but it is worth noting that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping weren’t putting this kind of pressure on President Trump.

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Lexington “manslaughterer” will be out of prison by age 39, if not earlier Fayette County's Commonwealth's Attorney Lou Ann Red Corn allowed him to plead down from murder

Jemel Barber. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

We have twice previously reported on Jemel Barber, 23, who shot and killed 40-year-old Tyrese Clark.

    2 died in a robbery, gunfight spree in Lexington. Shooter pleads in 1 case

    by Jeremy Chisenhall | November 16, 2021 | 7:44 AM EST | Updated: 4:16 PM EST

    A Central Kentucky man has pleaded guilty in one of two fatal shootings during a string of robberies and gunfights in Lexington.

    Jemel Barber, 22, pleaded guilty last week to manslaughter and second-degree robbery more than four years after he shot and killed 40-year-old Tyrece Clark, according to court records. He was initially charged with murder and first-degree robbery, but his charges were amended down after a plea agreement was reached.

    Barber told police after the deadly shooting on July 23, 2017, that he showed up at a Lexington motel with a rifle, intending to rob Clark of narcotics and/or money, according to court records.

    But Clark started shooting after Barber knocked on his door, Barber told police, so he shot back. The plea agreement was reached after attorneys disputed whether or not Barber could claim self-defense. Barber maintained that Clark was the aggressor and his attorneys continued to blame Clark as the court case played out.

Mr Barber was sentenced today:

Interesting article title, that. If you follow the link, and hover on the article tab, you’ll see that the original working title was “Jemel Barber sentenced to prison for manslaughter and robbery.” The current title is far less specific; a “Central KY man” could be from Georgetown or Paris or Mt Sterling or Richmond. Why not “Lexington man”? Why go from the specific to the general? Could it be that almost everyone reading the name “Jemel Barber” would assume that Mr Barber is black?

The Lexington Herald-Leader, which had access to Mr Barber’s mugshot, once again chose not to publish it. The McClatchy Mugshot Policy states that it is concerned that mugshots of people accused of crimes follow them forever, even if they are acquitted, but Mr Barber pleaded guilty.

    Jemel Barber, 23, was sentenced to 20 years in prison Friday morning by judge Thomas Travis on charges of manslaughter and second-degree robbery. Barber shot and killed 40-year-old Tyrece Clark during an attempted robbery at a Lexington motel in 2017, per court records.

    Barber told police after the deadly shooting on July 23, 2017, that he showed up to the motel with a rifle, intending to rob Clark of narcotics and/or money, according to court records.

    But Clark started shooting after Barber knocked on his door, Barber told police, so he shot back, killing Clark. . . . .

    Prosecutors recommended a 15-year sentence for the manslaughter charge and a 10-year sentence for the robbery charge. Barber’s attorney asked Travis for concurrent sentences, citing how a string of events in his young life have affected him dramatically and concurrent sentences could give him a chance to get back on track.

    Travis partially obliged, making five years of the 10-year sentence for the robbery charge concurrent with the 15-year sentence for the manslaughter charge.

Mr Barber was arrested on May 2, 2018, which means he has already served 3 years and 9 months of his 20-year sentence. Assuming he serves the full 20 years, he’ll be out on May 2, 2038, when he’ll be just 39 years old. Tyrese Clark, on the other hand, will still be stone-cold graveyard dead.

So, why did the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Ann Red Corn, allow such a lenient plea bargain? The Bluegrass State still has the death penalty, though it is rarely carried out. Other than a capital sentence, punishments for capital offenses can include life without parole, 25 years to life in prison, or 20 to 50 years of imprisonment. Commonwealth’s Attorney Red Corn could have put Mr Barber away for the rest of his miserable life, but instead chose to cut him a break, and give him a chance to get out of jail while still a relatively young man.

Why give him the plea bargain? Mr Barber had already admitted killing Mr Clark, so try him for murder. Include the manslaughter charge, to give the jury the option if they have sympathy for his self-defense claim, but keep the option of sparing the rest of society from seeing Mr Barber back on the streets.

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Larry Krasner won’t put criminals in jail, so Philadelphians lock themselves up for protection

The George Soros-funded District Attorney for Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, doesn’t believe in putting criminals in jail to make the rest of the community safer. He won’t enforce the gun laws unless someone is shot, and he doesn’t want to pursue less important crimes:

    This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.

He’s so lenient on criminals that state Attorney General Josh Shapiro ran a sting in Philly, with the cooperation of Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and the Philadelphia Police Department that cut Mr Krasner out of the loop.

From Friday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

    Family of 6 stabbed in Kensington

    One of the victims, a 46-year-old woman, had sustained wounds to her head and neck and was in critical condition

    by Rodrigo Torrejón | Friday, February 11, 2022

    A family of six were stabbed in a Kensington home early Friday morning, with the suspect in custody soon after the violent attacks, according to a report.

    Shortly after 4 a.m. Friday, police received a call of a stabbing on the 3000 block of North Front Street, 6ABC reported. When officers arrived, they found six members of a family suffering from stab wounds. The victims ranged in age from 26 to 46.

Normally, the Inquirer does not specify the specific house in which the crime occurred, but a photo with the article clearly shows the address as being 3027 North Front Street.

    One of the victims, a 46-year-old woman, had sustained wounds to her head and neck and was in critical condition. Police said she was the mother of some of the other family members, 6ABC reported.

    Police arrested a 29-year-old man a few blocks away from the house, covered in blood and with cuts on the inside of his hands, according to the report. Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small said some of the family members identified the man as the suspect.

North Front Street, via Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

The WPVI-TV report specified that the ‘suspect’ is a family member who lived in the home, something the Inquirer story did not include.

With all of the murders in the City of Brotherly Love, a crime in which six people were stabbed, but none fatally — though, with one victim in critical condition, a fatality is possible — seems almost pedestrian. But, as is my wont, I checked Google Maps street scenes to check out the neighborhood.

What did I find? Three of the first four rowhouses on the ‘odd’ side of the street had barricades in their front porches with metal bars. Across the street, four out of the first seven row houses show metal bars. Further up the ‘odd’ side, nine houses in a row, beginning with 3033, have barred in their front porches. Since the Google Maps survey was done 2¼ years ago, more residents may have added physical barriers since then. District Attorney Krasner might not believe that putting criminals behind bars makes Philadelphia safer, but the embattled residents of the 3000 block of North Front Street, in the crime-ridden Kensington area, are so afraid of crime that they’ve put themselves behind bars, for their own protection.

Just what does it say when people have to put themselves in jail, to protect themselves from the criminals who aren’t behind bars?

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Joe Biden, Philadelphia, and the enabling of drug addiction

President Joe Biden’s ‘plan’ to provide free crack pipes to addicts fell apart:

But on the same day, The Philadelphia Inquirer published this gem:

    Philly’s journey to a supervised injection site spans years as overdose rates soar

    Five years since officials announced their support for a site, efforts to open one have been mired in controversy and legal battles.

    by Aubrey Whelan and Jeremy Roebuck | Thursday, February 10, 2022

    In 2017, Philadelphia was on track to see a record-breaking overdose death toll. Calls were growing to open a supervised injection site, where people can use drugs under medical supervision and be revived if they overdose. By the end of the year, 1,217 people had died of an overdose, and city officials made the decision to sanction a site but not pay for it.

    Five years later, the city still has no site, and the deaths go on. Still, advocates see renewed hope in the fact that the Justice Department under President Joe Biden signaled this week it is reconsidering the Trump administration’s long-held opposition to such efforts. Here’s a timeline of key moments in the process:

The article continues to list 18 specific dates and events in the timeline, the most important being the last:

    February 7, 2022: In a statement first obtained by the Associated Press, Justice Department officials say they are “evaluating” supervised injection sites and discussing “appropriate guardrails” with stakeholders — signifying a shift in thinking on the sites. Goldfein, Safehouse’s vice president, says the organization is in productive talks with the federal government.

United States Attorney Bill McSwain had filed a lawsuit in 2019 to block a supervised injection site, “citing a 1986 federal law colloquially known as the “crackhouse statute.” That law makes it a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison to knowingly open or maintain any place for the purpose of using controlled substances.”

The “crack house statute,” 21 US §856, is pretty specific:

  • a) Except as authorized by this subchapter, it shall be unlawful to—
    • (1) knowingly open or maintain any place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance;
    • (2) manage or control any building, room, or enclosure, either as an owner, lessee, agent, employee, or mortgagee, and knowingly and intentionally rent, lease, or make available for use, with or without compensation, the building, room, or enclosure for the purpose of unlawfully manufacturing, storing, distributing, or using a controlled substance.
  • (b) Any person who violates subsection (a) of this section shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of not more than 20 years or a fine of not more than $500,000, or both, or a fine of $2,000,000 for a person other than an individual.

Screenshot of chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.

Translation: the Department of Justice, under President Bidden and Thank-God-and-Mitch-McConnell-he’s-not-on-the-Supreme-Court Attorney General Merrick Garland, are considering not enforcing the law, a law that isn’t being enforced in some other cities, including New York. Perhaps, just perhaps, people should be asking why deaths due to drug overdoses have skyrocketed under Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner. In 2016, Mr Kenney’s first year in office, fatal opioid overdoses jumped from 561 to 752, a 34.05% increase. Just a year later, and they had jumped to 1,075, 91.62% higher than in Mayor Michael Nutter’s (D-Philadelphia) final year in office.

And now the city wants to enable further drug use by making it safer to shoot up! What a great plan!

Drug users are not somehow ‘not criminals’, no matter what District Attorney Krasner likes to think. To obtain their recreational pharmaceuticals, they have to buy them from a drug dealer, and Philadelphia’s record-setting 562 murders in 2021 were largely fueled by gang warfare, mostly drug gang warfare. Junkies buying heroin and fentanyl are a captive market which keeps the dealers in operation, and that endangers all Philadelphians.

Being the [insert slang term for the rectum here] that I am, I’ll ask the question a lot of people will not: why would we want to keep junkies alive? They are almost wholly non-productive, they frequently resort to petty crimes to finance their habits, they enable violent drug dealers, and they are a burden on our welfare systems and society in general. While one assumes that their families will mourn the deaths of individual junkies, society as a whole is better off when they go to their eternal rewards. Having ‘safe injection sites’ simply keeps alive the drags on our society, the petty, and perhaps not-so-petty, criminals who prey on other people to support their drug addictions.

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Bidenomics: Inflation is at a 40-year high, and wages are growing far more slowly than prices

I am old enough to remember the late 1970s and early 1980s. The United States was stuck in what some called ‘stagflation,’ with stagnant economic growth coupled with high inflation. Former Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA) used what he called the ‘misery index,’ the total of the inflation and unemployment rates to hammer President Jimmy Carter right out of office in the 1980 election.

Christopher Rugaber of the Associated Press wrote an article entitled,[1]Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title. in The Philadelphia Inquirer, U.S. inflation might have hit a 40-year high in January: Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, saying:

    Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, according to data provider FactSet. That would be up from a 7.1% year-over-year pace in December and would mark the biggest such increase since February 1982.

Well, the unnamed economists got it wrong: it was 7.5%!

    Prices climbed 7.5% in January compared with last year, continuing inflation’s fastest pace in 40 years

    High inflation is undermining a robust recovery, testing policymakers at the Federal Reserve and White House

    By Rachel Siegel and Andrew Van Dam | Thursday, February 10, 2022 | 8:32 AM EST

    Photo at closest gas station to my house, taken on February 2, 2022.

    Prices continued their upward march in January, rising by 7.5 percent compared with the same period a year ago, the fastest pace in 40 years.

    Inflation was expected to climb relative to last January, when the economy reeled from a winter coronavirus surge with no widespread vaccines. Today’s new high inflation rate reflects all the accumulated price gains, in gasoline and other categories, built up in a tumultuous 2021.

    In the shorter term, data released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also showed prices rose 0.6 percent in January compared with December, same as the November to December inflation rate, which officials revised upward slightly.

    As with previous months, higher prices reached into just about every sector of the economy, leaving households to feel the strain at the deli counter, shopping mall and just about everywhere else.

There’s more at the original.

That photo, taken by me on Groundhog Day? On Tuesday, February 8th, 87 Octane regular gasoline was up to $3.259 per gallon locally.

President Reagan, who defeated President Carter by a large margin, saw the Republican Party lose a significant number of seats in the 1982 elections as inflation remained high and recession struck.

    Sharp inflation has undermined an otherwise robust recovery. The economy has rebounded remarkably since plunging into recession almost two years ago. Over the past 12 months, the U.S. economy has added nearly 7 million jobs and average hourly earnings have climbed 5.7 percent. The overall economy has shown relative resilience to new waves of the coronavirus, and stocks have bounced back from their volatile start to 2022.

If wages have risen 5.7%, but inflation is at 7.5%, it’s pretty simple: American workers are falling behind, are becoming poorer in relative terms.

    High inflation has left an indelible mark on the economy, including the highest price increases for housing, food and energy that many workers have ever seen. And questions loom about how or whether policymakers will be able to rein prices back in without slowing the recovery or even causing another recession. The answers will have enormous implications for policymakers at the Federal Reserve and in the Biden administration.

That has always been the problem, and was a large part of the problem that faced Presidents Carter and Reagan; the halting of inflation meant a recession.

The timing is different this year: we are not in a recession, but if there is one, after the elections, and it persists into 2023 and 2024, it could encourage the voters to throw the Democrats out of the White House. The Republicans will point out that the economy was strong, with very low inflation, during President Trump’s term, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and the government’s draconian response to it, much of it ordered by state governors rather than the President.

The President doesn’t really control the economy — no one does — but he normally gets either the credit for a good economy or the blame for a bad one. Come election day, I will be very happy to see Joe Biden get the blame for a bad economy!

References

References
↑1 Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title.
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Voting with their faces The peasants are revolting

Philip Bump, a national correspondent for The Washington Post, made an observation which he really didn’t think through:

    Dealt a bad hand, Democrats are poised to make it worse

    The collapse of containment

    by Philip Bump | Wednesday, February 9, 2022 | 4:27 PM EST

    Before my wife popped into a convenience store on Monday to grab a soda, she put on a mask. That is the rule in New York state, after all: masks to be worn indoors even when vaccinated. She’d probably have worn a mask anyway, with an unvaccinated kid at home, cases in our area still high and test positivity at 10 percent.

    As she put it on, a man leaving the store mocked her. “Gotta get that mask on!” he said — while not wearing a mask, of course. There was a brief, condescending exchange that culminated with my wife responding using language that the editors of The Post would ask I not include in this article.

    It’s a useful incident to consider when reflecting on how the debate over containing the coronavirus has progressed. The man was not adhering to the state mandate, but, as of Thursday, there will be no mandate to which he needs to adhere. New York, like a number of other blue states, is rescinding its state-level mask guidance. Here, the mandate was implemented at the outset of the omicron variant surge. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy (D) went further, announcing an end to masking in schools at the end of the month.

There’s more at the original. You can get around the Post’s paywall and read it here as well.

What did Mr Bump miss? He wrote, “The man was not adhering to the state mandate, but, as of Thursday, there will be no mandate to which he needs to adhere.” It’s pretty clear that there was no mask mandate to which he needed to adhere on Monday, either, in that he didn’t adhere to it, and there were no consequences to his declining to wear a mask other than Mrs Bump apparently using language toward him that the editors of the Post would prefer not to print.

There is no statewide mask mandate in Kentucky, though there surely would have been had the General Assembly not curtailed Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) executive authority under KRS 39A. Yet the Kroger company KR: (%), which operates grocery stores throughout the Commonwealth, had issued its own mask mandate for its stores, and the Kroger our family uses, on Bypass Road in Richmond, still has a mandatory mask requirement sign beside the doors.

While I have not taken a precise count, observationally fewer than half of the customers in the store wear masks; I certainly do not.

    Murphy and fellow Democrats like Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (N.Y.) are linking the shifts to the decline in cases after the spike that accompanied the emergence of the omicron variant. But they’re also acknowledging in the news media that the changes in policy are driven by the broad, bipartisan exhaustion with the pandemic. The New York Times reported that Murphy conducted focus groups measuring that frustration and that his decision to rescind mask mandates for schools was linked to that frustration.

    This is politics, of course, and the will of the voters is important to track. But allowing the impression to set that politics is the central driver for the change — an impression that’s hard to avoid at this point — Democratic leaders are both undercutting their ability to respond to the pandemic moving forward and undercutting two years of rhetoric.

Also see: William Teach: With Midterms Coming, Democrat Governors Break From Biden On Mandates

What? An elected politician, paying attention to the will of the voters? Heaven forfend! But, as the shoppers in Kroger here, and as the man who mocked Mrs Bump, did, people are voting with their faces, people are disobeying the mask mandates wherever they can, and they are able to do so because no one is enforcing them. Certainly no one at Kroger is doing so, and even some of their employees are wearing the masks below their noses. The convenience store into which Mrs Bump walked didn’t enforce the mask mandate on the customer who mocked Mrs Bump. With 2022 being an election year, it is not much of a surprise that elected officials have taken notice.

Mr Bump wrote that the Democratic leaders who are ending mask mandates are undercutting their ability to respond to the panicdemic pandemic going forward, but the truth is different: their ability to respond has already been undercut by public fatigue and public non-compliance. The peasants, Mr Bump fears, are revolting.