Author Archives: Dana Pico

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We can see it coming: the spreading of fear to allow the government to impose new restrictions on our constitutional rights

When the elites see control slipping away, they resort to fear tactics.

“Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.” — Glenn Greenwald, “The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun — Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants”.

Mr Greenwald wasn’t writing about COVID-19, but the efforts of the Biden, and past, Administrations to fight terrorism by restricting civil liberties. There is a lot with which I disagree with Mr Greenwald, but on this, he’s dead on target.

Fear, of course, was what governments used to get a free people to go along with restrictions on their constitutional rights. Now that almost everyplace in the United States has lifted restrictions — Pennsylvania’s mask mandate ended today — we are seeing the fearful wanting them back:

Gottlieb says parts of U.S. could see “very dense outbreaks” as Delta variant spreads

By Kimani Hayes | June 28, 2021 | 7:39 AM EDT | CBS NEWS

Washington — As the U.S. continues to navigate its way through the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said areas of the country could experience “very dense outbreaks” with the concerning Delta variant continuing to circulate.

“It’s going to be hyper-regionalized, where there are certain pockets of the country [where] we can have very dense outbreaks,” Gottlieb said Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

The most vulnerable areas continue to be those with low vaccination rates and low rates of immunity from prior infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many southern states have vaccination rates that lag behind the national average.

“I think as you look across the United States, if you’re a community that has low vaccination rates and you also think that there was low immunity from prior infection, so the virus really hasn’t coursed through the local population, those communities are vulnerable,” he said. “So, I think governors need to be thinking about how they build out health care resources in areas of the country where you still have a lot of vulnerability.”

Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, a state where hospital admissions are up 30%, expressed concern about the Delta COVID-19 variant and low vaccination rates in his state.

“The Delta variant is a great concern to us. We see that impacting our increasing cases and hospitalizations,” Hutchinson said on “Face the Nation.” The governor also noted that vaccine hesitancy is high in his state, which he attributed to conspiracy theories, the pause in Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot regimen in April and individuals simply not believing in the efficacy of the virus.

There’s more at the original.

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY), having scheduled the end of almost all of the restrictions for following day anyway, argued before the state Supreme Court that he needs the laws passed, over his veto, by the state legislature earlier this year to be declared unconstitutional, because they would restrict his executive authority to fight a pandemic like COVID-19. One can argue that the restrictions on the Governor’s authority under KRS 39A were unwise, which is what his mouthpiece, Amy Cubbage, did, but unwise is not an argument that a law is unconstitutional. I, however, do not trust the state Supreme Court not to make its usual obeisance to Mr Beshear and let him get away with things again. Despite the best efforts of Republicans, and Kentucky’s voters,[1]In 2020, Republican candidates for the General Assembly ran against the Governor’s orders, and voters rewarded them with 14 additional seats in the state House of representatives, for a 75-25 … Continue reading Governor Beshear has pretty much gotten away with his dictatorial and unconstitutional actions. At this point, the battle is to keep him from being able to do it again. I am not confident that the state Supreme Court will follow the law; they’ve been far too compliant with the Governor’s wishes. But, with the restrictions over, there is no reason at for the justices to ignore the laws passed by the General Assembly other than the argument of what might happen sometime in the future.

It’s easy enough to see coming: just a few cases of the new ‘Delta variant,” and the Governor might once again issue his mandatory mask orders and attempt to close down ‘non-essential’ businesses, because dictators gotta dictate!

References

References
↑1 In 2020, Republican candidates for the General Assembly ran against the Governor’s orders, and voters rewarded them with 14 additional seats in the state House of representatives, for a 75-25 majority, and 2 additional seats, out of 17 up for election, for a 30-8 majority.
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Le #TourDeFrance

The Tour de France is our vicarious French vacation, and we’ve been watching it every year since 2017. I started following Julian Alaphilippe when he won the King of the Mountains in the 2018 Tour.

But one thing always bothered me, and that was how close some of the spectators were to the racers. Then, today, on the first stage of the 2021 Tour, a spectator caused a spectacular accident. I’ll put the YouTube below the fold, so it doesn’t mess up the main page.

Continue reading →

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The politics of the #COVID19 vaccines have always been more important than the science Today's left have no tolerance for divergent views

I am not an #AntiVaxxer by any means, and I have had both doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. But I also do not dismiss the concerns of those who are skeptical, especially given that we have no information on any long term effects, because the vaccines haven’t even been around for a year yet.

The left try to dismiss such concerns as simply those of the uneducated, or as the lovely Amanda Marcotte tried to do, blame it on Republicans.

But when The Wall Street Journal starts to take notice of vaccine side effects, it’s no longer just the evil reich wing Republicans:

Continue reading →

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Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader hides mugshots of two accused murderers who are still on the loose Police say they are armed and dangerous, but apparently not dangerous enough for the Herald-Leader to tell readers how they look

I’ve run enough stories about the journolism[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ 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 … Continue reading of the Lexington Herald-Leader that I sometimes think I should include a subscription box for them!

The Herald-Leader is bound by the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, which prohibits the publication of police mugshots, unless approved by an editor, for serious reasons. One of those reasons is “is there an urgent threat to the community?”

1 man charged, 2 others wanted by Lexington police in separate murder cases

By Jeremy Chisenhall | June 25, 2021 | 3:33 PM | Updated: 4:33 PM EDT[2]Mr Chisenhall’s article was published at 3:33 PM. I have been refreshing the article during the writing of this article, to see if he has updated it with those mugshots. As of 5:00 PM EDT, he … Continue reading

Lexington police identified Friday suspects in two homicide cases and charged a suspect in another slaying, officials said Friday.The three homicide victims were found outside earlier this month.

Police first announced they were searching for Brandon Dockery, 31, who is accused of killing Raymar Alvester Webb. Webb was suffering from a gunshot wound when police found him in a parking lot near North Mill and West Short streets at about 1:40 a.m. on June 19, according to Lt. Dan Truex.Webb was taken to University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital where he later died, police said.

Dockery is considered armed and dangerous, police said.

Armed and dangerous, huh? Certainly seems as though he would qualify under the exception of an urgent threat to the community! And yes, the Lexington Police Department has his mugshot available, on their Homicide Investigation page. If it was available to me, it was available to Jeremy Chisenhall, the Herald-Leader reporter, who is certainly computer-savvy enough to have looked it up.

Kamond D Taylor, from his Michigan arrest record.

Lexington police also charged a man with murder after a fatal shooting outside The Office, which is a gentleman’s club in the 900 block of Winchester Road.Kamond Taylor, 30, was charged with the murder of 43-year-old Ali Robinson, police said. Robinson was shot June 9 outside the club. He was found by police and died at the scene, Lt. Ronald Keaton said.Taylor had already been detained in Detroit on local charges, police said.

Of course, under the McClatchy policy, the Herald-Leader would never publish Mr Taylor’s mugshot, because, already being in custody, he doesn’t constitute an urgent threat to the community. I am not bound by the McClatchy policy, and I do publish mugshots.

But Danzell Cruze certainly does!

Danzell Cruze, from the Kentucky Offender Online Lookup.

Also on Friday, police said a murder warrant had been issued for Danzell Cruse in the death of 38-year-old Jocko Green who was found about 3:50 p.m. June 17 in a parking lot outside an apartment complex in the 600 block of Winnie Street near the University Kentucky Chandler Hospital.He died about 7 p.m. at UK Hospital of gunshot wounds.

Cruse, who is considered armed and dangerous, also faces a charge of possessing a handgun as a convicted felon.

According to the Kentucky Offender Online Lookup, Mr Cruze was convicted on Jaunary 7, 2019, and sentenced to five years in the pokey, plus another year for a second offense. Yet he was released on December 30, 2020, after just two years, or 40%, in the slammer; I guess that the sentences ran concurrently. He is still supposed to be on probation.

If Mr Cruze had been kept locked up for his full five years, he would have been behind bars, and if really is the person who murdered Jocko Green, Mr Green would be alive today. This is precisely the kind of bad guy for whom the McClatchy policy has the listed exception. Did the Lexington Police Department not provide his mugshot to the Herald-Leader? Nope! It is on the Lexington Homicide Investigation page.

It’s simple: in their efforts not to “disproportionately harm people of color,”[3]Quote is actually from the Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, and the first (as far as I know) to implement the no mugshot policy. the Herald-Leader is sacrificing the public’s right to know.

The paper, of course, has its First Amendment freedom of the press, and can choose not to publish anything the editors so choose. But my freedom of the press allows me to criticize their decisions.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ 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.
↑2 Mr Chisenhall’s article was published at 3:33 PM. I have been refreshing the article during the writing of this article, to see if he has updated it with those mugshots. As of 5:00 PM EDT, he had not.
↑3 Quote is actually from the Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, and the first (as far as I know) to implement the no mugshot policy.
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This is what happens when the #woke try to think. It usually isn’t pretty. How can anyone apologize for someone else, for people long gone?

I will admit it: I have not always been kind in my coverage and criticism of the Lexington Herald-Leader. But sometimes an editorial just takes the cake!

The Herald and Leader got it wrong. Our apology to the woman who integrated Lexington schools.

By the Herald-Leader Editorial Board | June 25, 2021 | 8:33 AM EDT | Updated: 12:28 PM EDT

In 2004, the Herald-Leader wrote a series of stories about how Lexington’s newspapers had not covered the city’s civil rights movement. The stories described the historic practice of numerous Southern papers that ignored protest in their own backyards because their leaders thought that by doing so, they could minimize the protesters’ impact or make them disappear altogether.

There was much material never before described in these pages that led to many other stories, such as the integration of Rupp Arena, Keeneland’s segregated bleachers, numerous Black students whose achievements were ignored, or the teenage Calvert McCann, whose many previously unpublished photographs documented so many important moments of the struggle here.

1976-77 University of Kentucky mens basketball team.

“The integration of Rupp Arena”? Rupp Arena opened in 1976, many years after integration. If the editors are referring to the integration of UK’s basketball teams, there were several black players on the 1976-77 UK team, including Jack Givens, James Lee, Larry Johnson, Truman Claytor, Lavon Williams, Dwane Casey, and Merion Haskins. This was not the first integrated UK team.[1]It is certainly true that long time Coach Adolph Rupp did not like to recruit black players, but Coach Rupp retired following the 1971-72 season. In June of 1969, he signed his first black player, … Continue reading

But naturally, there is always more to this story, and a reader recently pointed out an entry in the University of Kentucky’s Notable Kentucky African Americans database on Helen Caise Wade, the brave 16-year-old who integrated the Fayette County Public Schools when she attended summer school at Lafayette High School in 1955. The entry notes that the Lexington Herald, the morning paper, reported Caise’s entry, her parents and her home address.

Emphasis in the original.

Newspapers today do not normally report specific addresses, but tend to put them down as block numbers. The editorial makes it sound as though the Herald was trying to get young Miss Caise and her family targeted.

But the obvious question is: what was the Herald’s stylebook at the time? Was this exceptional, or did it follow standard procedure at the time?

Oh, wait, we already have our answer, from the story itself:

Database founder and UK librarian Reinette Jones said newspapers frequently printed people’s addresses back then.

So, the criticism of the Herald’s, and Leader’s, coverage is to judge journalism in 1955 by the standards of 2021. Of course, the Editorial Board apologized, but they were apologizing for treating the Caise family just the same as they treated other families.

The Herald-Leader wishes to apologize to Mrs. Wade. Although hardly anyone who worked at the papers in 1955 is still alive, we think it’s important to recognize the harmful ways that the white power structure as represented in a newspaper did and still can harm marginalized communities.

What, are the Editorial Board apologizing for the people working there 66 years ago not being 21st century #woke?[2]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

“So, the thing that bothers me is not only the published home address, but the articles gave a minor’s name and other personal information about her, along with her parents’ names and occupations,” Jones said. “There was a disregard and lack of caring on the part of the newspapers for the safety of this African American teenager and her family, regardless of whether that act was intentional or unintentional. It was left to the devices of the Caise family members to ensure that Helen would get to the school and back without being harmed.”

Did the newspapers not do that all the time, regardless of the race of the subject of the story?

UK historian Gerald Smith, whose 2002 book on Black Lexington and research into Lexington’s civil rights protests in the 1960s guided the 2004 series, was more critical of the Herald and the Leader, which consolidated under corporate ownership in 1983.

“Yes, it was that malicious,” he said. “It was another form of intimidation.”

This is poor scholarship. Dr Smith is assuming a malicious mindset on the part of someone who apparently followed then-current journalistic standards, someone he did not ask, because he is judging it by the standards of the 21st century.

The Board complained, in their first paragraph, that “The stories described the historic practice of numerous Southern papers that ignored protest in their own backyards because their leaders thought that by doing so, they could minimize the protesters’ impact or make them disappear altogether.” But they later wrote:

After she went to Lafayette, her father’s business was destroyed, with one client asking John Caise if he was related to Helen, then firing him.

Reading those two together — and this is part of the reason I prefer news in print, because I can go back and take these connections — it would seem as though it would have been better for the Herald and the Leader not to have covered the story at all. Mr Caise, a plastering contractor, would probably not have been fired, nor seen his business fail, had the newspapers not covered the story at all.

The Lexington Herald and the Lexington Leader were part of the community in the 1950s, and it is probable that the writers and editors who worked there then reasonably reflected the norms of the community. They probably did their jobs as they had been trained to do their jobs. The notion that today’s Editorial Board can judge them by today’s standards is as laughable as the #woke trying to change the names of schools names after American Presidents who used to own slaves.

Oh, wait, that’s happening, isn’t it?

Even more laughable is the idea that the Board can apologize for people at least long retired or, more probably, having gone to their eternal rewards.[3]Anyone 20 years old on June 7, 1955 would be 86 years old today. If we assume that the editors, being senior employees, were at least 34, they’d be 100 or older. No one, other than an attorney, I suppose, can speak for someone else, at least not someone else long gone.

References

References
↑1 It is certainly true that long time Coach Adolph Rupp did not like to recruit black players, but Coach Rupp retired following the 1971-72 season. In June of 1969, he signed his first black player, Tom Payne of Louisville, but Mr Payne had a lot of problems, and spent most of his adult life in prison.
↑2 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, and I am certainly doing that here. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑3 Anyone 20 years old on June 7, 1955 would be 86 years old today. If we assume that the editors, being senior employees, were at least 34, they’d be 100 or older.
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What happens to liberal voters when the consequences of liberal policies start to interfere with their own lives?

We recently noted uber-liberal Austin — Joe Biden carried Travis County, where Austin is located, 435,860 (71.62%) to 161,337 (26.51%) — and how it cut the city’s police department budget by a third. Of course, the city has seen a 73.68% increase in homicides from January through May over the same period in 2020, but the lovely Amanda Marcotte, a former Austinite, claims that’s because guns are so easy to get, not that they were any harder to obtain in 2020.

But, with few exceptions, it’s just the riff-raff killing other riff-raff, so the liberal elites in the city government and around the University of Texas don’t really care. It seems that they only care when problems encroach on their neighborhoods. From The Wall Street Journal:

As Austin Booms, Homelessness Faces Crackdown

Bans on public camping in Texas are breaking up encampments downtown

By Elizabeth Findell | June 24, 2021 | 8:15 AM EDT

AUSTIN, Texas—A freeway overpass shaded Elizabeth Contreras’s tent from the hot Texas sun, five years into a stretch of on-and-off homelessness that began when her husband left her, she said. Austin Police Officer Rosie Perez stopped by the tent last week with a written warning for Ms. Contreras: Within weeks, she would need to be gone.

Police officers are beginning to enforce new city and statewide bans on public camping, after a two-year battle over Austin homeless policies. Amid a growth boom that accelerated the city’s affordability crisis, homelessness has increased and local shelters are mostly full.

“You guys are asking ‘Where do I go?’ and I don’t have an answer for you,” Ms. Perez told Ms. Contreras. “But I know the process is going to continue.”

Cities nationwide are grappling with how to respond to homelessness after the coronavirus pandemic. This rapidly growing city of nearly 1 million has an estimated 3,160 people experiencing homelessness, according to an estimate by the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, a nonprofit that serves as the lead agency for homeless services in the Austin area. While that is a small number compared with many West Coast cities, the issue gained visibility after a change to city policies led homeless encampments to spread across downtown Austin and popular walking and biking paths.

Austin City Council members voted in 2019 to rescind a longtime city ban on sitting or sleeping in public, following testimony, mostly from homeless people and advocates, on its impact. One man spoke of a friend who had been killed when, sleeping in a tunnel to keep from being cited, she was swept away in a flood. Others said citations made it more difficult to work out of homelessness.

The majority of city council members agreed, saying camping rules criminalized homelessness and were inhumane and ineffective.

Backlash against the move was swift from Republican state officials, who often tangle with Austin’s liberal leaders. Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to override the decision days after the vote. Matt Mackowiak, head of the local GOP, spearheaded a petition effort to force the camping ban onto an election ballot. That effort gained steam, drawing support from police and some Democrats frustrated by the city’s limited action.

After initially saying they would carve out specific areas for camping, city leaders made no further adjustments to their policies. Efforts to purchase and operate hotels as transitional housing stalled. The Covid-19 pandemic complicated anti-homelessness efforts and reduced shelter capacity.

In May, critics of City Hall notched two victories. Austin voters approved Mr. Mackowiak’s ballot proposition, 57%-43%, forcing the city to reinstate the ban. State lawmakers also approved a ban on camping, with some recreation exceptions, on all public land in Texas. Neither ban made provisions for where to send people evicted from public spaces.

“Their social experiment on the camping ordinance failed so spectacularly that it can never be attempted in the state of Texas anywhere,” Mr. Mackowiak said.

There’s more at the original.

Remember: the voters who forced the reinstatement of the camping ban are the same ones who elected all of those Democrats and socialists to the city council, and the same ones who gave Joe Biden such an overwhelming victory in Travis County.

The Mayor stated that it’s easy to find political support to create more housing for the homeless, but a major political battle to figure out where to locate it. Translation: NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard.

This is what happens when liberal policies are enacted and start to actually affect mostly white, well-to-do liberal voters. They wouldn’t mind all of those tents if they were in the lower-class areas, but when they encroach on downtown high-rise condos or posh office buildings, that’s a different story altogether.

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Credit where credit is due The Lexington Herald-Leader does the right thing

I have been critical enough of the Lexington Herald-Leader for not publishing mugshots of black criminal suspects, due to McClatchy’s mugshot policy. I specifically noted the failure to publish the mugshot of Juanyah J Clay, even though Mr Clay, an accused murderer, was on the loose, and publishing his mugshot might have helped the Lexington Police Department to apprehend him. He was apprehended the following day.

McClatchy policy is that mugshots will not be published, save for special circumstances, and an editor must decide whether to make an exception to the policy.

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?

Well, there is an urgent threat to the community, and someone at the paper took the correct decision:

Updated: FBI seeking man in Lexington after exchange of gunfire with law enforcement

By Jeremy Chisenhall and Morgan Eads | June 24, 2021 | 2:37 PM | Updated: 5:59 PM EDT

The FBI is seeking a fugitive after exchanging gunfire with him in Lexington, the agency announced Thursday afternoon.

FBI agents were in the process of trying to apprehend Antonio “Tony” Cotton on a fugitive warrant in Lexington when the officials exchanged gunfire with Cotton near the intersection of New Circle Road and Eastland Parkway, according to the FBI. Cotton fled the scene.

Cotton was wanted on a charge of interference with commerce by robbery, according to Katie Anderson, an FBI spokesperson.

There’s more at the original.

The image to the right is from the Herald-Leader’s story. Since I have been so critical, I should give credit where credit is due.

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Amanda Marcotte doesn’t want you to exercise a right she chooses not to use Today's left support freedom of choice on exactly one thing

Salon senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte moved to South Philadelphia sometime in early 2019, but unless she never listens to the local news — always a possibility, given that she never writes on it — she has to have noticed the tremendous homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love.[1]One wonders: does the uber-feminist in Miss Marcotte object to the appellation “City of Brotherly Love” as leaving out sisterly love? As of the end of Wednesday, June 23rd, the Philadelphia Police Department reported 262 homicides. 262 murders in 174 days so far is 1.506 homicides per day in Philly, which works out to, if that average is maintained, 550 for the year.[2]With only one homicide each day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the rate has come down slightly this week, but the weekend’s coming. Philadelphia’s record is 500, during the crack cocaine drug gang wars of 1990, with last year coming in in second place with 499.

At the end of June 23rd last year, there had been ‘only’ 190 homicides in the city, so this year’s number is 37.37% higher than 2020.

How Democratic is Philadelphia? Joe Biden carried Philadelphia County 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%)

Unless something changes pretty drastically, 2021 isn’t just going to set the record, but blow it out of the water. And remember: the long, hot summer has just begun.

So, what is leading to all of this mayhem? According to Miss Marcotte, it ain’t the bad guys, but those inanimate guns!

oe Biden is right about the rise in crime: Blame guns — not police or protesters — for the violence

Conservatives are using crime as cover for ugly race-baiting, but their own lax gun policies are the real culprit

By Amanda Marcotte | June 23, 2021 | 1:11PM (EDT)

Violent crime is on the rise and it’s making Republicans happier than a fire sale on wraparound sunglasses.

Conservatives will find any excuse to indulge in their favorite sport: racist fear-mongering. The current uptick in violent crime fulfills their desire to use police to terrorize and stigmatize people of color while spinning it as merely in the interest of “public safety.” (Which is especially rich coming from the same people who left hundreds of thousands of Americans to die of COVID-19 rather than accept emergency pandemic measures.) And boy, they’re throwing themselves into the scare tactics with a relish usually reserved for sharing grammatically confusing memes on Facebook.

As the AP reported earlier this month, Republican politicians across the country are using rising crime rates as an excuse to pass laws aimed at suppressing Black Lives Matter protests and at protecting police budgets from re-evaluation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on June 11 blaming crime on “radical and reckless decisions by some jurisdictions to defund their police forces,” which is, at best, a wild exaggeration of what have largely been efforts to redirect funds to crime prevention. Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, falsely accused Democrats of supporting “the dangerous idea of defunding the police.”

Now, we noted, just yesterday morning, that very white, very liberal Portland, Oregon, had cut its police budget enough that the department was 150 officers under strength, and according to Portland Police Department numbers, the city is on pace for 92 murders this year, shattering 1987’s record of 70. With a city population of 662,549, that would give the city a murder rate of 13.89 per 100,000 population. How liberal is Portland? Joe Biden carried Multnomah County 367,249 (79.21%) to 82,995 (17.90%).

Just two days prior to that, we noted that Austin, Texas, where Miss Marcotte lived before her boyfriend and she moved to Brooklyn, had slashed its police budget by 1/3. Austin is the most liberal city in Texas; Joe Biden carried Travis County, where Austin is located, 435,860 (71.62%) to 161,337 (26.51%).

Our deadliest city, St Louis? As of June 22nd, there had been 88 murders in the Gateway City, and 82 of the victims, 93.18%, were black. Of the 36 known killers of those 88 dead black people, all were black. Joe Biden carried the city by 110,089 (80.85%) to 21,474 (15.77%).

So, unless those inanimate guns are just leaping into the air by themselves and shooting people, those guns are seemingly leaping into the hands of Democrats.

Miss Marcotte claims that, since the rise in the homicide rate is seemingly everywhere, with no distinct differences between places like Austin, where the police have lost a third of their funding, and other big cities, where the funding drops have been significantly less, the increase in the homicide rate cannot be attributed to defunding. But then she goes on:

The sociological reasons for the rise are still ambiguous, though there is little doubt that the pandemic contributed by adding economic and social stress, while also depriving young people of jobs and school opportunities that keep them out of trouble. Pfaff also suggests there may be a reason to believe that rising tensions between police and communities contribute, if only because people are unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement they see, for good reason, as oppressive. If that relationship “deteriorates significantly,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of St. Louis-Missouri, told Salon’s Igor Derysh in February, “that simply widens the space for street justice to take hold.”

Well, yes, that’s true enough, but it undermines her other points. She claimed that crime, overall, had dropped, and the violent crime rate had spiked only modestly. As I have previously noted, there are two kinds of crimes: crimes of evidence and crimes of reporting. If a man rapes a woman on the streets of Philadelphia, as far as the police are concerned, if it wasn’t reported, it didn’t happen. It is commonly assumed that most rapes go unreported, with some guesstimates being as high as 90% not reported. Crimes like robbery might go unreported if the victims do not trust the police or think it will do any good, or are fearful of revenge by the criminals.

But murder is different: it is a crime of evidence. It isn’t easy to dispose of a dead body in a way that it won’t be found, especially if you haven’t carefully planned things. You’re looking at 100 to 300 pounds of dead meat, bone and fat, and something which will put off a strong and nasty odor after very little time. The vast majority of dead bodies get found.

So when I read that other crime has decreased, I just don’t believe it. Murder is not normally an entry-level crime; it’s a crime committed primarily by people who have committed other crimes. When you read about a murder who was caught — and the police actually catching killers is getting progressively worse — you almost always read that the killer was legally barred from owning a firearm, or that he was carrying it illegally. Noting Miss Marcotte’s own statement that people are less willing to cooperate with the police, it stands to reason that crimes of reporting would be reported less.

After a few paragraphs in which the author ties the existence of illegally purchased or possessed guns to the existence of legally owned firearms, she gives us her solution:

The surest way to reduce murder rates is to get guns out of people’s hands.

Miss Marcotte’s biggest issue has always been abortion, but it’s certainly not the only right she cherishes. She frequently and loudly exercises the rights she believes she should have. She exercises her freedom of speech and of the press in her tweets, her articles in Salon, and other places. She exercises her right to use contraception. She has exercised her right of peaceable assembly to join the #BlackLivesMatter protests in Philadelphia. An avowed atheist, she exercises her right not to go to church. She will defend those rights to, well, to the death is the common phrase, but I can’t say that she’d go that far.

But the right she has and chooses not to exercise — and, to me, it is actually choosing to exercise the right in the negative[3]Just as choosing not to speak or publish something is still an exercise in your freedom of speech and of the press. — is her right to keep and bear arms. Because it is a right she chooses not to keep and bear arms, she doesn’t think that anyone else should have that right. Her solution to the illegal use of firearms is to take guns away from people who have not used their weapons illegally.

Miss Marcotte is but a small, if vocal, part of the left in America. Very much proclaiming her own views, she, like The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post, doesn’t like hearing other people expressing their own. The left just plain don’t like anyone exercising their constitutional rights in a way of which they don’t approve.

Me? I support Miss Marcotte’s right to choose to buy, or not buy, a firearm. I support her right to write, or not write, whatever she chooses. I support her right not to go to church, and I even support her right not to read what I happen to write. Our freedoms are both positive and negative; we may choose to do or not do something as we please.

The left used to support that, but that was a long, long time ago.

 

References

References
↑1 One wonders: does the uber-feminist in Miss Marcotte object to the appellation “City of Brotherly Love” as leaving out sisterly love?
↑2 With only one homicide each day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the rate has come down slightly this week, but the weekend’s coming.
↑3 Just as choosing not to speak or publish something is still an exercise in your freedom of speech and of the press.
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The Supreme Court bitch-slaps a small school district in Pennsylvania Mahanoy Area School District should never have appealed the initial decision in the first place.

Have you ever been to Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania? It’s a bit more than a wide spot in the road, but only a bit, having an area of 0.5 mi² and a population of 3,944 people. Located in the Keystone State’s old anthracite coal mining region, it has fallen on hard times as the demand for coal has greatly waned. I have driven through Mahanoy City several times, as it was on Pennsylvania Route 54 just a mile from Exit 131 onto Interstate 81; that was my shortest route from our previous home in Jim Thorpe and the farm in the Bluegrass State.

I can’t say that I was impressed.

There have been a lot of people who’ve yelled, in anger, “I’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court.” Well, taking something all the way to the Supreme Court costs money, lots of money, something Mahanoy City, and the Mahanoy Area School District do not have in abundance. From Wikipedia:

Mahanoy Area School District serves the borough and Mahanoy Township. The district operates: Mahanoy Area Elementary School (K-4), Mahanoy Area Middle School (5th-8th) and Mahanoy Area High School (9th-12). The district has provided full day kindergarten since 2004. In 2015, the Mahanoy Area School District’s enrollment declined to 1,004 students.[16] Mahanoy Area School District was ranked 433rd out of 493 Pennsylvania school districts, in 2015, by the Pittsburgh Business Times.[17] Mahanoy Area High School has been listed on the Commonwealth’s annual lowest achieving schools list.[18] In 2015, Mahanoy Area School District’s graduation rate was 91%. In 2012, Mahanoy Area School District declined to Warning Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) status, due to a low graduation rate and lagging student academic achievement.[19]

Brandi Levy. Photo from tweet by WNEP.

Near the end of the 2016-17 school year, Brandi Levy,[1]Though the courts continued to refer to Miss Levy by her initials, they specify her father’s last name in the decision title, and her name is in the public domain on the Associated Press. I am … Continue reading who had tried out for the school’s varsity cheerleading squad, posted two angry messages, one of which was profane, on SnapChat; Miss Levy was not on school grounds, nor was school in session at the time she posted the messages. One of the SnapChat recipients, a cheerleader herself, took offense, and made a screencap of the self-deleting SnapChat message, and showed it around.[2]Justice Alito, in his concurrent opinion, made the greatest ‘Karen’ criticism of all: “(Miss Levy) did not send the messages to the school or to any administrator, teacher, or … Continue reading The school responded by suspending Miss Levy from participating in the junior varsity cheerleading squad for one year. Her parents filed a lawsuit on her behalf in federal court, arguing that the district had unconstitutionally punished her for speech made completely outside of the school that did not pose a risk of disruption.

Miss Levy won both a preliminary injunction, preventing the school from suspending her from cheerleading,[3]Preliminary injunction granted to plaintiff, B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District, 289 F. Supp. 3d 607 (M.D. Pa., 2017). and then her case.[4]Summary judgment granted in favor of plaintiff, B.L. v. Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist., 376 F. Supp. 3d 429 (M.D. Pa. 2019).

At that point, the Mahanoy Area School District appealed the decision. The judgement for Miss Levy had been in the whopping sum of $1.00, so it’s not as though the School District had lost a bunch of money. The School District lost again in the Court of Appeals for the Third District.

But, because the Third District’s ruling clashed with other rulings from other district Courts of Appeals, there was a justiciable split that the Supreme Court could, and did, address.

And so we come to Mahanoy Area School District v. B. L., a minor, by and through her father, Levy, et al., 594 U. S. ____ (2021). In the case, the 8-1 majority held that Miss Levy’s First Amendment rights had been violated by the School District, though the justices did not go as far as the Third District; the Court allowed that public schools had some authority over student speech, even if off of school grounds, such as when students are transiting to and from school, given that school attendance is compulsory. Justice Breyer concluded:

It might be tempting to dismiss B. L.’s words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed herein. But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary. See Tyson & Brother v. Banton, 273 U. S. 418, 447 (1927) (Holmes, J., dissenting). “We cannot lose sight of the fact that, in what otherwise might seem a trifling and annoying instance of individual distasteful abuse of a privilege, these fundamental societal values are truly implicated.” Cohen, 403 U. S., at 25.

This, to me, is important, because it states that even the most trivial of speech is protected by the Constitution, and that officious little pricks have no authority to impose state punishment just because they don’t like what someone else has said.

Our representative democracy only works if we protect the “marketplace of ideas.” This free exchange facilitates an informed public opinion, which, when transmitted to lawmakers, helps produce laws that reflect the People’s will. That protection must include the protection of unpopular ideas, for popular ideas have less need for protection.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, with Justice Neil Gorsuch agreeing, wrote:

public school students, like all other Americans, have the right to express “unpopular” ideas on public issues, even when those ideas are expressed in language that some find “‘inappropriate ’” or “‘hurtful’”.

and:

But it is a “bedrock principle” that speech may not be suppressed simply because it expresses ideas that are “offensive or disagreeable.” Texas v. Johnson, 491 U. S. 397, 414 (1989); see also Matal v. Tam, 582 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2017) (slip op., at 1–2) (“Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend”); FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U. S. 726, 745 (1978) (opinion of Stevens, J.) (“[T]he fact that society may find speech offensive is not a sufficient reason for suppressing it”); Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S 50, 63–64 (1976) (plurality opinion) (“Nor may speech be curtailed because it invites dispute, creates dissatisfaction with conditions the way they are, or even stirs people to anger”); Street v. New York, 394 U. S. 576, 592 (1969) (“It is firmly settled that under our Constitution the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers”).

The Court, in my opinion, gave less protection to Miss Levy’s speech than it should have. The justices reasoned that, though schools have a right to control some of what students say, such as not being allowed to be disruptive in class, what Miss Levy SnapChatted was be protected not because it was off campus — though they did allow that most off-campus speech did not fall under the school’s authority — but because it did no identifiable harm. It would have been far better to have stated simply that, once the student is out of school and off-campus, and not involved in any school-sanctioned event, his speech was protected, period.

More importantly, the freedom of speech must be protected, period. The left are doing everything they can to censor speech by conservatives, and though they are using mostly ‘private’ methods — if Twitter and Facebook can really be considered private entities anymore — we have reported on how even The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others, are now opposed to freedom of speech. The city of New York even has compulsory speech requirements. If these things are not fought, the freedom of speech will be lost.

The School District attempted to put lipstick on the pig of having lost:

The Mahanoy Area School District is pleased with and vindicated by today’s Supreme Court decision. The School District unanimously won the issue upon which it sought Supreme Court review: all 9 Justices rejected the Third Circuit’s conclusion that school districts lack authority to regulate off-campus speech. The Supreme Court held that it does “not agree with the reasoning of the Third Circuit.” The Supreme Court instead enumerated many examples of situations when school districts can regulate off-campus speech and made it clear that its list was not exclusive. So, although the Court upheld the $1 judgment in favor of Ms. Levy, we are very pleased that the Court agreed with our arguments about schools’ authority to address off-campus speech under a wide variety of situations. This decision is an important vindication of schools’ authority to protect students and staff and to fulfill schools’ educational missions.

https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif The School District could have had that much had they simply not appealed the initial summary judgement. Instead they wasted scads of money, and wound up with eight Supreme Court Justices rhetorically bitch-slapping them for their rotten judgement.

I am amused. 🙂

References

References
↑1 Though the courts continued to refer to Miss Levy by her initials, they specify her father’s last name in the decision title, and her name is in the public domain on the Associated Press. I am not somehow ‘outing’ Miss Levy by the use of her name.
↑2 Justice Alito, in his concurrent opinion, made the greatest ‘Karen’ criticism of all: “(Miss Levy) did not send the messages to the school or to any administrator, teacher, or coach, and no member of the school staff would have even known about the messages if some of B. L.’s “friends” had not taken it upon themselves to spread the word”.
↑3 Preliminary injunction granted to plaintiff, B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District, 289 F. Supp. 3d 607 (M.D. Pa., 2017).
↑4 Summary judgment granted in favor of plaintiff, B.L. v. Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist., 376 F. Supp. 3d 429 (M.D. Pa. 2019).