Author Archives: Dana Pico

Posted on by

Are journalists today trying less to inform public minds than steer public opinions?

As we have previously noted, McClatchy’s mugshot policy is:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures.

To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print.

Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

Jacob Heil, uncredited photo in the Lexington Herald-Leader, February 22, 2019. Photo cropped by DRP. Click to enlarge.

On Wednesday, October 13th, we pointed out that the Lexington Herald-Leader kept publishing the courtroom photo of Jacob Heil, the 21-year-old former University of Kentucky student charged with reckless homicide and driving under the influence of alcohol for killing 4-year-old Marco Lee Shemwell while his family and he were standing beside Cooper Drive near Scoville Drive. Mr Heil allegedly veered off the road, striking the boy and killing him.

The photo of Mr Heil that the Herald-Leader has been using was a press pool photo, and in it, he is wearing a face mask. However, the very first line of the text in this story, published on February 22, 2019 — before the McClatchy Mugshot Policy went into effect — in which Mr Heil’s full face photo is shown, in a full width of the story format.

Remember: the McClatchy policy states, “The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever,” and Mr Heil has not yet been convicted of any crime! He is not an urgent threat to the community, he is not a public official or suspect in a hate crime, is not a serial killer or the suspect in a high-profile crime. Why, then, is the newspaper festooning its website with his courtroom photo?

Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, from Lexington station WTVQ.

In an article by Herald-Leader reporter Karla Ward, also published on October 13th, Lexington man sentenced to 21 years in prison for cocaine trafficking, the newspaper declined to print the publicly available photo of a convicted felon. Since federal law requires that Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, serve at least 85% of his 262 month sentence, he will not be eligible for release for 18½ years, when he would be 71 years old. I’m not certain how an 18-year-old mugshot would harm an elderly convict on his release. Mr Salahuddin is not a charged but not convicted person, but one who pleaded guilty. It’s not like the paper needed to save bandwidth; they included a stock photo of jail cell bars.

So, now we come to this:

Kentucky man sentenced to jail for involvement in Capitol riot

By Christopher Leach | Wednesday, October 13, 2021 | 3:44 PM EDT

A man from Cave City has been sentenced for his involvement in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Robert Bauer, a Kentucky resident, was identified through photos of himself during the Capitol riot, according to the FBI. This photo was included in a criminal complaint filed against him. PHOTO VIA FBI. Click to enlarge.

Robert Bauer, 44, was sentenced to 45 days in jail, 65 hours of community service and $500 restitution, the Louisville Courier Journal reported.

As part of a deal with prosecutors, Bauer pleaded guilty to a charge of parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building, according to court records. Bauer originally faced four charges for his involvement in the riot that injured hundreds of police officers.

The judge could have sentenced him to a maximum of six months in prison, a fine of no more than $5,000 and supervised release of no more than one year, according to court records.

The plea agreement document shows that Bauer agreed to the plea in late June.

In other words, as an old UK professor of mine, Gerard Silberstein, used to say, not much of a much. Yet, unlike Mr Salahuddin, whose crimes were so serious that he will spend at least 18½ years behind bars, the Herald-Leader decided to publish Mr Bauer’s photograph.

And while Mr Bauer now stands convicted, the Newspaper published his photo on January 15, 2021, January 30, 2021, and March 3, 2021, all when he was charged but not yet convicted of anything.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy was put into effect the previous summer, so all photos were in violation of the policy.

So, what might be the distinguishing difference in these photos published and not published? There’s one very obvious one: Messrs Heil and Bauer are white, while Mr Salahuddin is black.

Thud!

Could that be it? Could it really be that simple? Remember, the McClatchy Mugshot Policy is based on two ideas:

  • Those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever; and
  • Inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color.

At the very least, these statements could mean that editors, even just subconsciously, think that publishing photos of white suspects is simply not as harmful as publishing those of black suspects. But, at a more pernicious level, it could mean, as the Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, put it, publishing mugshots:

  • Perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

If that’s the case — and that last part was left put of the McClatchy policy in general — then might some McClatchy editors, at some papers, think that publishing photos of white suspects or convicted criminals while not doing so for black suspects or convicted criminals could actively steer the public away from such stereotypes, and thus be considered, at least to the left-inclined mind, an affirmative good?

If you suspect that I used the adjective “affirmative” deliberately, to bring Affirmative Action to your mind, you’d be right!

Journalists tend to have an elevated opinion of their place in society; the constitutional protection of freedom of the press has led many of them to think that they are some sort of super-duper constitutional guardians. Is it that much of a further leap for some of them to think that their role in society is to guide society into what hey would see as rightthink?

But journalists can only be respected when they tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That is sadly lacking among today’s journolists.

Posted on by

The increase in ‘breakthrough’ infections

The Philadelphia Inquirer is all about pushing COVID-19 vaccinations and editorially supports vaccine mandates, mask mandates, all sorts of mandates, so it was with some surprise that I read the following:

The latest on breakthrough cases

Plus, vaccine mandates at Penn State and for the Philly Marathon

by Anthony R Wood | Wednesday, October 13, 2021

The gist: The delta variant has been driving case numbers for months, but evidently another obstacle to ending the pandemic is emerging — waning immunity. Available figures indicated that vaccinated people accounted for more than 25% of the COVID-19 positive tests and hospitalizations in Pennsylvania during the last month. And state Department of Health officials said that was in line with national rates. That said, despite the breakthrough cases, data show that the fully vaccinated people are still less likely to get sick with the virus, and less likely to be hospitalized or die if they do get infected.

Vaccines continue to protect against COVID-19, but latest Pa. data show signs of waning effectiveness

The latest Pennsylvania figures are a change from numbers released last month covering the entirety of the vaccination effort. From Jan. 1 to Oct. 4, the state reported just 9% of COVID-19 infections were breakthrough cases, and just 7% of those hospitalized had been vaccinated. By contrast, in the past month, out of 4,989 hospitalizations, almost 1,300 were fully vaccinated people. One factor in driving up those numbers likely would be the fact that more people have been vaccinated.

The author, Mr Wood, then references an article from five days previously:

Vaccines continue to protect against COVID-19, but latest Pa. data show signs of waning effectiveness

The majority of people infected or hospitalized by COVID-19 are unvaccinated, but waning immunity appears to be playing a role in a growing number of vaccinated people ending up sick.

by Jason Laughlin | Friday, October 8, 2021

Pennsylvania’s latest data on COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations show vaccines continue to provide a significant defense against the virus, but also includes signs that waning immunity may be one factor in the virus’ spread.

More than a quarter of all COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations reported in the state over the past month were among fully vaccinated people, a number Pennsylvania Department of Health authorities said was in line with national rates. Out of 4,989 hospitalizations, almost 1,300 fully vaccinated people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the past month.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in September that the Pfizer vaccine’s protection against hospitalization waned significantly after four months.

The state’s figures are a big change from the numbers first released last month covering the entirety of the vaccination effort. From Jan. 1 to Oct. 4, the state reported just 9% of COVID-19 infections were breakthrough cases, and just 7% of those hospitalized had been vaccinated. Looking at all data from January to present conceals the recent effect of the highly transmissible delta variant and the vaccines’ reduced effectiveness, both relatively new developments.

The Inquirer report tells us that 26.06% of the hospitalization cases were among those fully vaccinated. You have to be careful reading, because when it states that “Out of 4,989 hospitalizations, almost 1,300 fully vaccinated people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the past month,” a too quick reading might have readers believing that there were “almost 1,300” cases among the vaccinated and 4,989 cases among the unvaccinated. When dealing with numbers, professional journalists have to be careful in how they phrase things, to avoid misleading people.

LFCHD data, October 13, 2021. Click to enlarge.

The Lexington-Fayette County Health Department likes to update its statistics, and has (sort of) good graphs. According to the city government, using CDC data, 74.2% of the county’s population 12 years of age and older are fully vaccinated, with 75.6% of those 18 or older. In a hard to read bar chart, the Health Department stated that about 85 fully vaccinated and 210 unvaccinated/partially vaccinated people were hospitalized with COVID-19 during September, if I’ve managed to read the chart accurately enough. That yields a 28.81% breakthrough rate in hospitalizations. Interestingly, the number of fully vaccinated hospitalizations slightly increased over August, but but significantly decreased among the unvaccinated, from roughly 255 to 210.

LFCHD Covid cases, October 13, 2021. Click to enlarge.

The number of breakthrough cases is increasing significantly, from 1,746 to 1,994, a 14.2% increase, while the non-breakthrough cases decreased from 4,051 to 3538, a 12.66% decrease. The total for Fayette County shows a 36.0% breakthrough rate for September, and the beginning data for October — which may be incomplete — is showing a 37.6% breakthrough case rate.

Overall, numbers are dropping, but now the experts are telling us that, at least with the Pfizer vaccine, virus resistance is showing a significant decline after about four months.

Back to the Inquirer:

The CDC reported people 65 and older are particularly susceptible to waning immunity. The agency authorized boosters of the Pfizer vaccine for vulnerable people and people in some high-risk professions last month.

Johnson acknowledged that people who are not eligible for boosters have been getting them anyway. There isn’t any health risk to doing that, she said, but she didn’t recommend it, saying she didn’t want people to get doses they didn’t need.

It’s too soon to tell, she said, how booster shots are affecting infection and hospitalization rates among the vaccinated.

The risks associated with taking the vaccines are small, smaller than the risks of contracting the virus, but they are not zero. Yet President Biden and the Democrats want to compel people to get vaccinated, even though the vaccinated can contract, and spread, the virus. We don’t know, yet, whether the government will try to force those fully vaccinated to get a booster shot. But we do know one thing: the politics of vaccination have run far ahead of the effectiveness of the vaccines.

Posted on by

You can’t fix the problem if you won’t admit what the problem is

Philadelphia’s homicide rate has skyrocketed since Mayor Jim Kenney took office, and only gotten worse since George Soros-sponsored police hater Larry Krasner became District Attorney. The appointment of left coaster Danielle Outlaw –she was formerly Chief of Police in Portland, Oregon, and a deputy chief in Oakland, California — didn’t improve things.

From October 12, 2020 through October 12, 2021, 551 bodies have littered the streets of America’s sixth largest city. With a population of 1,603,797, that works out to a homicide rate of 34.36 per 100,000 population. As we noted just a few days ago, the city is on track for 554 homicides this year, so the rate has remained constant, despite a slowdown in killings from mid-July through August.

But the city’s homicide rate for all of 2020 wasn’t that high: it was ‘just’ 31.11 for the entire year, even though that year saw 499 homicides, just one short of 1990’s all-time record. No, the killing rate got far, far worse after the death of George Floyd while resisting arrest in Minneapolis, and the summer long protests, demonstrations and #BlackLivesMatter riots against the police. Continue reading →

Posted on by

The whole truth doesn’t interest newspapers these days

While checking on Lexington Police Department data to update the information in Bullets flying in the Bluegrass State, I found that the police had finally updated the city’s shootings investigations page. In 2020, a year which saw the city set its annual murder record with 34 homicides, there were also 140 non-fatal shootings. As of October 10, 2020, there had been 107 non-fatal shootings.

And the thugs are keeping pace, as there have been 109 non-fatal shootings as of October 10, 2021!

Out of 140 non-fatal shootings in Lexington last year, the victim was white 32 times, and listed as Hispanic on four occasions. Out of 140 non-fatal shootings, 104 of the victims, 74.29%, were black, in a city the 2020 census determined was 68.3% white; 14.9% black; 4.2% Asian or Pacific Islander; 7.1% two or more races; and 9.2% Hispanic or Latino.

So far in 2021, there have been 17 non-fatal shooting victims listed as white, and another 10 listed as Hispanic, leaving 82, or 75.23%, listed as being black.

Naturally, the journolists[1]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 … Continue reading at a politically correct newspaper like the Lexington Herald-Leader won’t tell its readers this!

The Sacramento Bee, the lead newspaper of the McClatchy Company MNI: (%), led the way for the group, of which the Herald-Leader is part, in deciding not to publish mugshots:

    Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

Further down:

    And the San Francisco Police Department earlier this month announced it will no longer release mugshots, unless the public is in imminent danger.

    “This policy emerges from compelling research suggesting that the widespread publication of police booking photos in the news and on social media creates an illusory correlation for viewers that fosters racial bias and vastly overstates the propensity of Black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior,” Police Chief William Scott said in a statement.

Perhaps that correlation is not so illusory!

The data are there, but the Herald-Leader reporters and editors do not follow the data, do not investigate something that an elderly man, namely me, was able to find sitting in his home three counties away, and so far out in the boondocks that I can’t get a dead-trees copy of the paper delivered.

Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, from Lexington station WTVQ.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy, which the Herald-Leader follows, claims that publishing mugshots of people charged with crimes is harmful, if they are not actually convicted of the crimes for which they have been arrested. Yet, in an article by Karla Ward, Lexington man sentenced to 21 years in prison for cocaine trafficking, the newspaper declined to print the publicly available photo of a convicted felon. Since federal law requires that Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, serve at least 85% of his 262 month sentence, he will not be eligible for release for 18½ years, when he would be 71 years old. I’m not certain how an 18-year-old mugshot would harm an elderly convict on his release.

Not that it would matter: he’s not a charged but not convicted person, but one who pleaded guilty. It’s not like the paper needed to save bandwidth; they included a stock photo of jail cell bars.

Jacob Heil; photo by WLEX-TV press pool footage.

And the newspaper has assigned reporter Jeremy Chisenhall to sit in and cover the trial of Jacob Heil, 21, who is on trial for reckless homicide and DUI after he was involved in a crash which killed a 4-year-old pedestrian. The Herald-Leader has published at least two stories about the ongoing trial, including Mr Heil’s photograph. Though that phot shows him wearing a face mask, the paper published a full-face photo of him on February 22, 2019.

The paper is willing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when it comes Mr Heil’s trial, on charges of which he could be acquitted, yet when the statistics point to a significant racial disparity in crime and victimhood in the city, all of these well-educated and experienced reporters and editors keep their keyboards closely in check.

References

References
↑1 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.
Posted on by

A stunning lack of perspective

Well, perhaps not that stunning after all.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong tells us how tears came to her eyes as she witnessed a Black Lives Matter demonstration in remembrance of the death of addled drug user and convicted felon, George Floyd:

    Tears came to my eyes during a visit to a West Mount Airy neighborhood

    Each night, residents walk to one of four corners at the intersection of Emlen Street and West Mount Airy Avenue and stand for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in memory of George Floyd.

    by Jenice Armstrong | Monday, October 11, 2021

    People think I’m so tough, but I cried at work on Thursday.

    I didn’t break into the ugly cry, thankfully, but a few tears fell. I was in West Mount Airy, visiting a neighborhood where for the last year, residents have been coming out each night and standing in silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, marking how long a murderous Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck.

    Dozens participated each night during the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of the killing of the unarmed Black man. Lately the numbers have been down. Still, at least a handful of residents emerge from their homes just before 8 each evening and walk to the corners at the intersection of Emlen Street and West Mount Airy Avenue for the observance.

    The evening I was there last week, something else was afoot that led to even more participants: Twice in less than a week, a Black family had been the target of vandalism. First, someone smashed the windshield of their parked car with a rock. Days later, another rock came crashing through a window on their enclosed front porch.

    “An incident like this is unusual in Mt. Airy and is a reminder that there are still people who are unfriendly to anti-racism and that even our peaceful, diverse neighborhood is not insulated from divisiveness, fear and hatred,” Keely McCarthy wrote me in an email.

There’s more at the original, including two photos showing the public out holding Black Lives Matter signs.

But let’s tell the truth here: black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim. We noted, on Saturday, the killing of a 13-year-old boy sitting in a car with “several others” at the intersection of North Judson and West Clearfield Streets, in what the Philadelphia Police and the Inquirer will not say was a targeted hit, but of course, it was. Someone shooting at least ten rounds at a parked car full of people isn’t exactly an accident.

While law enforcement has not released the identity of the victim, The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, noted that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings; non-Hispanic black Americans make up only about 38% of the city’s population. In all probability, on that corner, in that neighborhood, the 13-year-old victim was black.

And now there’s this:

Let’s just stop with the subtitle: the victim, sitting in a parked car after 9:00 AM, was not on his way to school; the E Washington Rhodes School website states “Breakfast will be served from 8:15 am to 8:45 am each day. All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.” The victim was more than 15 minutes late, and not making any move to get to school, which was eleven blocks away at 2900 West Clearfield Street. The shooting intersection is in the middle of the 2300 block of West Clearfield.

    A 15-year-old was shot in the leg in North Philadelphia on Sunday night as he was leaving a vigil for a 13-year-old boy who was killed Friday morning, police said.

    At least 10 shots were fired just before 7 p.m. Sunday on the 2600 block of North 22nd Street, where dozens of people had gathered to release blue and white balloons in remembrance of a boy who was fatally shot Friday just blocks from his school.

    The 15-year-old shot Sunday was struck in the left calf and hospitalized at Temple University Hospital in stable condition, police said. No one was arrested in connection with the shooting, which took place just outside the Cecil B. Moore Recreation Center. Police said it’s unknown if the two shootings are related.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is absolutely true: with each day that passes, the good people of the City of Brotherly Love, and 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 journolists[2]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 … Continue reading of The Philadelphia Inquirer prove that black lives don’t matter, don’t matter much at all. If the shooting on Friday was a targeted attack, then the one at the vigil on Sunday was as well. “At least ten shots” rang out at a vigil for the murder victim, and if the shooter displayed the gang bangers’ notoriously poor accuracy with bullets, it was very accurate in sending the intended message: whatever beef the gang had with the victim, or perhaps someone else sitting in that parked, and possibly disabled,[3]Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it. vehicle, thinking anything good or nice about the victim was not allowed thinking.

Perhaps the Sunday shooter was trying to knock off one of the people sitting in that car but who wasn’t hurt.

I have to ask: what good are the few dozen people in Mt Airy doing, holding up signs and gathering for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in the memory of a career criminal like George Floyd, rather than working to make Philly’s streets safe for the black, and white, and Hispanic, and Asian, people still alive in that city? Don’t tell me how horrible it is that Mr Floyd died while being restrained by a white policeman when nobody gives a damn about the hundreds of people spilling out their blood in the city’s mean streets.

——————————

Update: Tuesday, October 12, 2021 | 8:30 AM EDT

The last referenced story has already disappeared from the Inquirer’s website main page, though truly important stories like this one about a British golf ball remain up and how the paper’s deputy food editor described an egg sandwich as his only comfort food while deciding to ‘come out’ as homosexual. How does revealing to its readership one of the paper’s writers sexual orientation outweigh the murders in the city, and why do we even need to know about it? If he is going to be reviewing a restaurant, why should it be important for anyone who doesn’t know or interact with him personally to know with whom he sleeps?

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page was finally updated after the long holiday weekend,[4]Only government employees get Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day off. and, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, October 11, 2021, 431 souls have been sent untimely to their eternal rewards. 431 Philadelphians murdered in 284 days works out to 1.5176 per day, and if that rate holds constant for the rest of the year, 554 people will bleed out their lives’ blood in the city’s mean streets.

The city has already seen its eleventh highest homicide total ever, with 81 days remaining in this bloody year. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw have already presided over the city’s second bloodiest year, missing tying the record by just one dead body, and now they are on track to not just break the record set in 1990, the depths of the crack cocaine wars, but shatter it, decimate it, blow it out of the water by more than 10%, and nobody at the nation’s third oldest newspaper gives a damn.

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.

↑2 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.
↑3 Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.
↑4 Only government employees get Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day off.
Posted on by

The Patricians really, really don’t like the plebeians! The peasants are revolting!

The New York Times, always ready to help the elites, gives OpEd space to Republicans of the past.

    We Are Republicans With a Plea: Elect Democrats in 2022

    By Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman[1]Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times … Continue reading | Monday, October 11, 2021 | 5:00 AM EDT

    After Donald Trump’s defeat, there was a measure of hope among Republicans who opposed him that control of the G.O.P. would be up for grabs, and that conservative pragmatists could take back the party. But it’s become obvious that political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national G.O.P., the state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections.

    Rational Republicans are losing the G.O.P. civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democratic Party.

    Earlier this year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps by forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, G.O.P. leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.

    Breaking away from the G.O.P. and starting a new center-right party may prove in time to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.

There’s more at the original, but in the fourth paragraph, Mr Taylor and Mrs Whitman admit the real problem about which they complained in their third. “Rather than return to founding ideals, G.O.P. leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office,” they complained, but they next lamented that “Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries.” Their real problem? The plebeians are simply not voting the way the Patricians tell them they must.

Populism is a name for a kind of political movement. Populists usually try to make a difference between common people and “elites” (meaning usually, top classes of people) . Populists may think of wealthy people or well-educated people as belonging to the class of elites. Populists may also call those who have been working in government for a long time “establishment” and count them as elites too.

According to Wikipedia, Miles Taylor, net worth roughly $2,000,000:

    grew up in La Porte, Indiana, where he was an Indiana state debate champion, and graduated valedictorian from La Porte High School in 2006. While in high school, he served as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. He received a Bachelor of Arts in international security studies from Indiana University Bloomington, which he attended as a Harry S. Truman Scholar and Herman B. Wells Scholar. As a senior, he received IU’s inaugural Presidential Student Internship and was a recipient of the Elvis J. Stahr Award given to the university’s top few graduating seniors. Taylor received an MPhil in International Relations from New College, Oxford, which he attended as a 2012 Marshall Scholar.

Clearly, Mr Taylor, who is only 33 years old, grew up with some privilege. As for the description of him as a “lifelong Republican,” Mr Taylor donated $85, “when (he) was a completely broke college student”, to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. His ‘explanation’ of that is completely disingenuous:

    I’m proud that I spent that $85 because even though I was gunning for John McCain, and John McCain’s been a lifelong personal hero of mine, I wanted to be able to tell my kids that if Barack Obama got elected president, that in some way I supported the first Black president of the United States. Of course, I knew I was going to oppose him on policy issues, and I did that. I was a big McCain supporter.

Oh, good grief! That’s an explanation?[2]Full disclosure: in 2008, I switched my party registration from Republican to Democrat, so I could vote in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary against the odious Hillary Clinton. That meant, alas!, … Continue reading

According to Wikipedia, Mrs Whitman, net worth at least $9,470,000:

    born Christine Temple Todd in New York City, the daughter of Eleanor Prentice Todd (née Schley) and businessman Webster B. Todd. Her parents were involved in Republican politics,] and both the Todds and the Schleys were wealthy and prominent New Jersey political families. Her mother’s family were among the first New Yorkers to move to what became Far Hills, New Jersey, which became a popular suburb for wealthy, moderate Republicans. Her maternal grandfather, Reeve Schley, was a member of Wolf’s Head Society at Yale and the vice president of Chase Bank. He was also a longtime president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. Christine’s father amassed a fortune from working as a building contractor on projects including Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall. Webster used his wealth to donate to Republican politicians, and became an advisor to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Her mother Eleanor served as a Republican national committeewoman and led the New Jersey Federation of Republican Women.

Yeah, that’s a pretty Patrician background, too. Worrying about having food on the table at suppertime was not one of her problems.

For Mr Taylor and Mrs Whitman, the problem is simple: they consider themselves to be leaders of the Republican Party, but Republican voters do not seem to be willing to follow where they would lead. Their complaint that Republican “leaders in the House and in many states” are going along with “Trumpism” is a complaint that elected Republicans are going along with what their constituents want. What, the elected leadership, following the wishes of those who voted for them? Heaven forfend!

Mr Taylor and Mrs Whitman want to get rid of the influence of former President Trump, and to do that, they are urging people to vote for Democrats. But voting for Democrats has a real cost: it puts Democrats in office, and that means pushing the Democrats’ policies. Sunday’s headline in The Washington Post said, “Liberal Democrats have become the mainstream of the party and less willing to compromise with dwindling moderates.” Even the (purported) moderates in the House are going along with the socialists’ progressives’ plans, if only slightly nibbling at the edges, and only Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) are preventing a massive, ‘progressive’ plan from being passed. Elect more Democrats, and a bill festooned with benefits for unions and welfare for the well-to-do get passed. The authors would accept ‘progressive’ policies which would seriously damage our republic, grant greater opportunities for fraudulent voting, destroy all state restrictions on abortion as well as having the taxpayers pay for abortions, and destroy our economy just to get rid of the influence of a 75-year-old man who eats absolute junk.

I have news for them: even if Donald Trump dropped dead today, the populist voters he has energized will still vote for Republican primary candidates who espouse policies similar to his.

Mrs Whitman and Mr Taylor wrote about, as a “last resort,” “starting a new center-right party.” This is where they truly fail: Republican voters tired of a “center-right” party under the younger President Bush, and rejected a “center-right” party not only under the other presidential candidates during the 2016 primaries, but in the TEA Party revolt of 2010 and Republican primaries subsequent to that. They want a truly conservative party, not a ‘moderate’ — moderate meaning: caving in to the left on too many issues, the old go-along-to-get-along Republican Party under Hugh Scott and Everett Dirksen — one.

    For disaffected Republicans, this means an openness to backing centrist Democrats. It will be difficult for lifelong G.O.P. members to do this — akin to rooting for the other team out of fear that your own is ruining the sport entirely — but democracy is not a game, which is why when push comes to shove, patriotic conservatives should put country over party.

The most important vote that any member of Congress casts is his first of the session, the one which sets the majority control of the chamber. It matters not how ‘centrist’ a particular Democrat is, if he is going to be voting for someone like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer to control the chamber, his vote is for the devastation of all that conservatives hold dear, a vote for enacting the agenda that the Post called to now be the “mainstream” of the Democratic Party. That is very much the wrong thing to do.

References

References
↑1 Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff, and was the anonymous author of a 2018 guest essay for The Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s leadership. Christine Todd Whitman (@GovCTW) was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 and served as E.P.A. administrator under President George W. Bush.
↑2 Full disclosure: in 2008, I switched my party registration from Republican to Democrat, so I could vote in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary against the odious Hillary Clinton. That meant, alas!, voting for Mr Obama in that primary. After the primary, I quickly changed my registration back to Republican, and of course I voted Republican in the general election. I have never given as much as a single penny to a Democratic candidate.
Posted on by

Bullets flying in the Bluegrass State

Lexington isn’t Philadelphia, but that doesn’t mean that the guns aren’t firing there! I was checking The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website Sunday evening, to see if there were any stories on homicides, and then said to myself, “Self, you should check the Lexington Herald-Leader as well!”

    1 woman, 1 teenager shot outside a Lexington home, police say. Suspect flees scene

    By Jeremy Chisenhall | Sunday, October 10, 2021 | 4:40 PM EDT | Updated: 7:38 PM EDT

    Endon Drive, Lexington, from Google Maps. The red mark on the map does not indicate the shooting site. Click to enlarge.

    A Lexington shooting suspect fled Sunday after wounding a woman and a teenager outside a home, according to Lexington police.

    The shooting happened around 1:45 p.m. on Endon Drive, according to police. The woman was believed to have “critical” injuries, according to police Lt. Chris Van Brackel. Both victims were taken to University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital for treatment, Van Brackel said.

    The suspect fled in a vehicle, Van Brackel said. But he wasn’t the only one who took off from the area after the shooting.

There’s more at the original, but there wasn’t a whole lot more information. Then again, it seemed as though the Lexington Police didn’t want to share much with the article author. The victims were a 56-year-old black woman and 15-year-old black male.[1]The last sentence was added at 10:30 AM on Wednesday, October 13, 2021, with information taken from Lexington Shootings Investigations page.

Lexington isn’t like Philly, jammed up with row houses. Endon Drive is a starter home neighborhood, some brick, a couple of them stone, some clapboard and even a couple showing what appears to be asbestos shingle siding. The Google Maps streetview image, taken in October 2015, shows an Alison Lundergan Grimes campaign sign in support of her 2015 re-election campaign for Kentucky’s Secretary of State, a campaign she won. Mrs Grimes had been the 2014 Democratic Senate nominee, a campaign she lost to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by a landslide margin.

References

References
↑1 The last sentence was added at 10:30 AM on Wednesday, October 13, 2021, with information taken from Lexington Shootings Investigations page.
Posted on by

Killadelphia

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated Monday through Friday,[1]With Monday, October 11th being a government holiday, Columbus Day, it is possible that the website will not be updated until Tuesday. during “normal business hours,” so it still states that ‘just’ 427 people have been murdered in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, but The Philadelphia Inquirer has the story of the killing of at least the 428th:

    A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school in North Philly, police say

    The victim, whom police did not immediately identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said.

    by Chris Palmer and Anna Orso | Friday, October 8, 2021

    A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school Friday morning in North Philadelphia, according to police and School District officials — another bleak example of how the city’s ongoing gun violence crisis is leaving a record number of young people dead or wounded.

    The victim, whom authorities declined to identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about 20 minutes later.

    Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said detectives believe the boy and several other young people had been sitting in a car parked on the block when at least one gunman walked up and fired shots into it.

    Lunette Ray, 86, heard the shots — at least 10 — right outside her house. She peered out the window and saw several boys jump out of a vehicle and run away. One was severely bleeding and fell in the street. She called 911.

There’s more at the Inquirer’s original. A photo in the article shows a maroon PT Cruiser sitting parked on North Judson Street at the intersection with West Clearfield Street, with bullet holes in the windshield. However, the Inquirer’s headline, that the victim was “on his way to school” appears to be misleading:

    Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.

If the victim was shot “just after” 9:00 AM, it would seem that he wasn’t actually on his way to school. The Rhodes Elementary School website states that “All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.”

This was a targeted killing, though it is entirely possible, and perhaps probable, that the murdered boy wasn’t the intended target, that someone else in the vehicle was.

We have frequently noted that the inquirer only covers homicides when the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl. At least someone in that vehicle wasn’t exactly an innocent, but I have to ask: just what were “several” young people doing sitting in a parked car, at 9:00 AM on a school day? Many things could be speculated, which I will leave up to the reader.

Chris Palmer and Anna Orso, the article authors, perhaps accidentally, stepped away from the Inquirer’s position that it’s all about guns:

    Carl Day, an antiviolence advocate and pastor whose church is two blocks from where the shooting took place, said, “We should be stirred up right now, all of us.” The killing is a mandate for adults in the community, he said, to reach out to more children and teenagers and provide alternatives to violence.

    “We in this community and in this zip code need to put all hands on deck,” he said. “We have to let our youth know this doesn’t have to be life. This world is so much bigger than what they think they see in front of them.”

Pastor Day spoke a truth that the #woke of the Inquirer’s newsroom don’t want to hear, that the problem of homicide in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t about guns, but about bad people, about people who think that killing others is perfectly OK, that killing other people is a reasonable and logical thing to do, for whatever reasons they have. The current generation of kids in Philly have already been lost; it’s going to be up to the next group of parents to start bringing up their children in a manner in which they don’t see killing as a reasonable thing to do, and don’t see drugs as a smart thing to take.

It’s a pretty sad thing to note that murder and death are common risks for 13-year-olds like the victim in this story, but the reality is that they are, and they are due to the aggregate behavior of other teenagers in neighborhoods like North Judson and West Clearfield Streets. The victim in this story may or may not have been doing anything wrong, but enough of his peers have been, and are, that the danger is created for all of them.

References

References
↑1 With Monday, October 11th being a government holiday, Columbus Day, it is possible that the website will not be updated until Tuesday.
Posted on by

#Transgender activism and #FreedomOfSpeech

I start to worry when I agree with both Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, both in the same week! Heck, I’ve even been listening to Glenn Greenwald.

Dave Chappelle Is Right, Isn’t He?

The comedian defends reality. Which is currently under siege.

by Andrew Sullivan | 2:21 PM EDT

There’s an understandable tendency to view the debate about transgender ideology today as a marginal issue, affecting a minuscule number of people, and at most, a trivial matter in the larger culture wars. And I can see why. It does seem on the surface to be about maybe 0.2 percent of humanity. And if you venture an opinion on it, the consequences are intense — so why bother?

And, overwhelmingly, the elite media in the United States prevents readers from knowing that a debate is even happening, let alone what it is really about. If the argument about gender theory is mentioned at all, it is dismissed as a bunch of “anti-trans” bigots — aka “TERFs” — hurting a beleaguered and tiny minority, for some inconceivable, but surely awful, reason.

And so when the greatest living comedian, Dave Chappelle, bases almost an entire Netflix special on the subject — alternately hilarious and humane, brutal and true — and wades into the debate with wellies on, the exact same piece about the special will be written in much of elite media.

You could write it yourself, couldn’t you? 1. He’s a bigot. “The phobic jokes keep coming — and Chappelle’s efforts to ironise them, to dance around rather than wallow in the boorishness, are derisory,” says the Guardian review. 2. He’s out of date: “All that’s left is the same tired observations delivered behind a bizarre form of commiseration, this time with an added dash of JK Rowling solidarity and using someone else’s death to validate his half-decade of public stubbornness,” according to IndieWire. NPR adds a “multi-racial whiteness” edge: “Too often in The Closer, it just sounds like Chappelle is using white privilege to excuse his own homophobia and transphobia.”

Both the “stubbornness” and the “bigot” theme are reiterated in Vulture: Chappelle is full of “outdated excuses masking a refusal to update a worldview … his head is up his ass. He needs new ideas.” And, with respect to the marginalized: “He’s just asking for you to take up less space, to usher in progress by giving other people time to come around to you.”

There’s much more at the original, but it has to be asked: why would a conservative Catholic like me be agreeing with three famously liberal homosexuals?[1]Miss Weiss is actually bisexual, though she eschews that label. Shockingly enough, all three of these famous commentators believe in some very, very radical things like freedom of speech and individual liberty.

In his recent column on substack, Mr Sullivan notes the rather objective truth: despite what today’s left and the ‘transgender’ activists want you to believe, only females can carry a child through gestation and give birth. We noted, last Monday, The Washington Post’s stylebook change to reference “pregnant individuals” rather than “pregnant women”, due to the left’s cockamamie notion that men can be pregnant.

A transwoman cannot give birth as a woman gives birth. She does not ovulate. Her vagina, if it exists, is a simulacrum of one, created by a multiple array of surgeries. Sex in humans is binary, with those few exceptions at the margins — mixtures of the two — proving rather than disproving the rule. Until five minutes ago, this was too obvious to be stated. Now, this objective fact is actually deemed a form of “hate.” Hate.

This means that the debate is no longer about 0.2 percent of humanity. It’s about imposing an anti-scientific falsehood on 99.8 percent of humanity. It means that we have to strip all women of their unique biological experience, to deny any physical differences between men and women in sports, to tell all boys and girls that they can choose their sex, to erase any places reserved exclusively for biological women, like shelters for those who have been abused by men, and to come up with terms like “pregnant people” to describe mothers. Yes — mothers. The misogyny buried in this is gob-smacking. Is Mothers’ Day next for the trans chopping block?

The struggle is one of language, because language is the formative basis for thought. If the term “woman” can encompass both females and biological males who claim to be female, it has become meaningless. That the terms “cisgender” and “sex assigned at birth“[2]Wikipedia defines “sex assigned at birth” as: Sex assignment (sometimes known as gender assignment) is the discernment of an infant’s sex at birth. Assignment may be done prior to … Continue reading ever came into existence demonstrates the idiocy of modern life.

Mr Sullivan has no problems with homosexual or transgendered persons, but he is mocking the idea that current political correctness requires not only acceptance of transgenderism as something real and normal, rather than a mental illness, but that everyone must publicly conform to the demands of the transgendered for recognition of their claims.

Chappelle’s final Netflix special, “The Closer,” is a classic. Far from being outdated, it’s slightly ahead of its time, as the pushback against wokeness gains traction. It is extremely funny, a bit meta, monumentally mischievous, and I sat with another homo through the whole thing, stoned, laughing our asses off — especially when he made fun of us. The way the elite media portrays us, you’d think every member of the BLT community is so fragile we cannot laugh at ourselves. It doesn’t occur to them that, for many of us, Chappelle is a breath of honest air, doing what every comic should do: take aim at every suffocating piety of the powers that be — including the increasingly weird 2SLGBTQQIA+ mafia — and detonating them all.

I will admit it: I had to follow the link in the New York Post’s mocking article about Justin Trudeau to find out that 2SLGBTQQIA+ stands for “Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual”. As people keep adding letters to “LGBT” it kept getting sillier and sillier, to the point at which mockery is the natural response.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being mocked on social media after he published two posts that mention the latest woke iteration of an acronym for people with different sexual identities — 2SLGBTQQIA+ — which some likened to an encrypted password or “headbutting the keyboard.”

“People across the country are lighting candles to honour Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people who are missing or have been murdered. We must continue to work together, raise awareness, and advocate to end this ongoing national tragedy. #SistersinSpirit,” the prime minister posted to Facebook and Twitter on Monday, referencing the Sisters in Spirit vigil, which honors women of specific racial or sexual identities who are missing or have been murdered.

The number and letter ‘2S’ in 2SLGBTQQIA+ includes people who identify as “Two-spirit,” ​referring to someone who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit. It is used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe their sexual identity.

The acronym, which used to be most commonly known as “LGBTQ,” sparked confusion among social media users.

I guess that some people just aren’t #woke[3]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 enough to keep up with the silly acronyms.

I suspect that Messrs Greenwald and Sullivan, and Miss Weiss, despite the fact that they would not approve of my stance on transgenderism and homosexuality, would very strongly support my right to say and publish my beliefs. Fortunately, I’m retired, so I can’t be ‘cancelled’ from my job, but it’s pretty sad that I have to depend upon that protection.

Mr Sullivan’s subtitle claims that reality “is currently under siege,” which is certainly true, because reality and transgenderism are diametrically opposed. No one really thinks that Bruce Jenner[4]Mr Jenner has legally changed his name to “Caitlyn”, and I suppose that is what has to be used on legal documents now, but my website is not a legal document, and it is The First Street … Continue reading is actually a woman, but political correctness and the #woke left and the credentialed media all pretend that he is, because it’s practically required now.

At some point, the left, who were the champions of unrestricted freedom of speech not all that long ago, will have to recognize people’s freedom of speech. Miss Weiss and Messrs Sullivan and Greenwald have done so, but they are too far and in between these days.

References

References
↑1 Miss Weiss is actually bisexual, though she eschews that label.
↑2 Wikipedia defines “sex assigned at birth” as:

Sex assignment (sometimes known as gender assignment) is the discernment of an infant’s sex at birth. Assignment may be done prior to birth through prenatal sex discernment. In the majority of births, a relative, midwife, nurse or physician inspects the genitalia when the baby is delivered and sex is assigned without ambiguity.

But look at the interchanged terms: discernment is defined as assignment, but assign means, among other things, “to appoint to a post, duty or task,” something which is designated by the authority in question, as though it is that authority’s decision.

↑3 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.

↑4 Mr Jenner has legally changed his name to “Caitlyn”, and I suppose that is what has to be used on legal documents now, but my website is not a legal document, and it is The First Street Journal’s editorial policy to refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their given names and biological sex.