Author Archives: Dana Pico

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The Biden Administration want to snoop into your private text messages, looking for COVID “misinformation”

President Biden and his Administration are planning to get tough on social media sources, including text messaging, and ‘conservative news shows’ which question the efficacy and safety of the various COVID-19 vaccines. Our good friend William Teach noted an article from Politico, a site I don’t normally check:

‘Potentially a death sentence’: White House goes off on vaccine fearmongers

The administration has shifted to a head-on strategy to dispel fear-mongering over its door-to-door efforts.

By Natasha Korecki and Eugene Daniels | July 12, 2021 | 1:22 PM EDT

The Biden administration is casting conservative opponents of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme, adopting a more aggressive political posture in an attempt to maneuver through the public health conundrum.

The White House has decided to hit back harder on misinformation and scare tactics after Republican lawmakers and conservative activists pledged to fight the administration’s stated plans to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates. The pushback will include directly calling out social media platforms and conservative news shows that promote such tactics.

Well, at least the authors wrote a good lede paragraph, something vanishing from a lot of journalism these days!

“The big misinterpretation that Fox News or whomever else is saying is that they are essentially envisioning a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you’ve got to do something that you don’t want to do,” Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview on Sunday. “That’s absolutely not the case, it’s trusted messengers who are part of the community doing that — not government officials. So that’s where I think the disconnect is.”

What, the Administration don’t think that the “trusted messengers who are part of the community” haven’t already been talking to their friends? The displacements caused by COVID-19 and the federal, state and local governments’ overreactions to it have been topic number one among people, for five seasons now, whether over the phone, in people getting together — sometimes in violation of ‘gatherings’ limits[1]Petty dictator Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) issued orders that banned families from getting together during Thanksgiving and Christmas in groups of more than ten persons and from more than two … Continue reading — and people finally meeting people they had missed, people getting back to work, and people discussing the odious mask mandates. What the Administration want to do is to send not “trusted messengers who are part of the community” going door-to-door, but people who are not “trusted messengers who are part of the community,” because people have already been talking to the people they’ve known and trusted.

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

Really? And just what is an SMS carrier?

An SMS gateway or MMS gateway allows a computer (also known as a Server) to send or receive text messages in the form of Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) transmissions between local and/or international telecommunications networks. In most cases, SMS and MMS are eventually routed to a mobile phone through a wireless carrier. SMS gateways are commonly used as a method for person-to-person to device-to-person (also known as application-to-person) communications. Many SMS gateways support content and media conversions from email, push, voice, and other formats.

It’s not quite the same thing as sending text messages from your phone to one of your friends, or a group of friends, but it’s along the same lines. Unlike a service like Facebook or Twitter, where anyone can access your messages, SMS systems are messages sent directly to individuals or small, specified groups.

Translation: the Biden Administration believe that they have the right to, without a warrant, look into your private messages. This is a 21st century form of wiretapping. How could the Biden Administration know what “misinformation” might be in private messages you might send, or receive, over your phone or computer, unless they look, or get your email or SMS service or wireless telephone carriers to snoop?

We have noted it before: the greatest death threat from COVID-19 has not been to individuals but to our constitutional rights. And the sheeple will go right along with it.

References

References
↑1 Petty dictator Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) issued orders that banned families from getting together during Thanksgiving and Christmas in groups of more than ten persons and from more than two households. My family did not obey that order.
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Why won’t The Philadelphia Inquirer report on neighborhood conditions?

I am shocked, shocked! I tell you, that The Philadelphia Inquirer covered the shootings in the City of Brotherly Love over the weekend.

First, the numbers. The Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 294 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 11th. Over 192 days in the year, that works out to 1.53125 per day, on pace for 559 murders for the entire year. That’s a 34.25% increase over the same day last year.

On the same day last year, the numbers worked out to a projected 415 killings, and we know that the city actually finished with 499. The record of 500 was set in 1990, during the height of the crack cocaine wars.

If the city continues on the same pace as established yesterday, it will tie the record of 500 on the 327th day of the year. That would be Tuesday, November 23rd, two days before Thanksgiving, with 5½ weeks left in the year.

15 people shot — one 14 times, another 11 — in a weekend of gun violence in Philly

Last week, the city’s total of those killed or wounded in shootings since 2015 surpassed a staggering 10,000 people, The Inquirer reported.

By Diane Mastrull | July 11, 2021

A sextuple shooting in North Philadelphia, during which one man was shot 14 times, was just one of eight episodes of gun violence from late Saturday night into early Sunday morning involving 15 victims, two of whom died, police said.

Killed were a man of unknown identity and age who was shot multiple times inside a business on the 1600 block of West Cumberland Street in North Philadelphia at 10 p.m. Saturday and a 23-year-old man shot 11 times in the back, chest, leg, arm and neck on the 100 block of Leverington Avenue in Manayunk at 12:54 a.m., according to police reports.

All shootings took place between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. Two were doubles, as Philadelphia continued on a trend seen in cities across the country. Last week, Philadelphia’s total of those killed or wounded in shootings since 2015 surpassed a staggering 10,000 people, The Inquirer reported. July was off to a violent start with 77 people struck by gunfire in the first eight days of the month, according to the report.

The one involving six victims was reported around 11:30 p.m. at West Butler and North Ninth Streets, in the city’s Hunting Park section. The victims were all males, ages 22, 23, 28, 31, 34 and 41. Four were in stable condition and two in critical condition Sunday at Temple University Hospital, police said. The 23-year-old was shot 14 times, they said.

According to police, a surveillance video shows two males walk up to a group gathered on the 900 block of West Butler Street and begin firing before fleeing in an unknown direction. A search for them continued Sunday evening.

901 West Butler Street. Screen capture from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

Well, at least the Inquirer didn’t tell us that two inanimate guns levitated and shot these people themselves. A photo in the Inquirer shows the scene, with two police evidence people working the scene, amidst dozens of evidence markers, and what appears to be three neighborhood loiterers. The photo to the left shows the address, a bodega at 901 West Butler Street, and it isn’t exactly a middle-class area.

This was a targeted hit: shooting one guy 14 times isn’t some sort of accident, and two “males” — note, not “white males” or “black males” or “Hispanic males”, describing either the shooters or their victims[1]Note that in one of the internally referenced stories in the Inquirer, it states, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. … Continue reading — walking up and opening fire isn’t just “gun violence,” but clearly attempted murder. The shooters knew who their targets were, and had a pretty good idea where to find them.

If the survivors decide to tell the police who shot them, and odds are very great that they know their assailants, we’ll eventually find out that the shooters have long rap sheets, and District Attorney Larry Krasner treated them leniently.

909 West Butler. Click to enlarge.

A photo just a couple of buildings away shows that this is an unsafe neighborhood, as the residents at 909 West Butler Street spent good money to completely bar in their front porch. 909 looks like someone has been trying to take care of his row house, but there are a lot of buildings in view with peeling paint and other signs of not being well maintained.

721 West Butler Street. Click to enlarge.

A couple blocks down the street, at 721 or 723 West Butler, the owners have completely barred in their property. Why, it’s almost as though they don’t feel safe in the neighborhood, as though they don’t trust the people there.

This is the part that the Inquirer doesn’t report. People are virtually locking themselves in jail to protect their families and themselves.

Use Google Maps for 3810 North Franklin Street, near 721 West Butler, and toggle up the street. The photos show a racially integrated neighborhood, but one in which several row homes, including three in a row, at 3846, 3848, and 3850 North Franklin, have barred in their front porches. Why doesn’t the Inquirer ever report on that? The paper loves to blame ‘systemic racism,’ but the photos from Google Maps show white people as well as black, show an integrated area.

These neighborhoods are overwhelmed not by inanimate guns, but by bad people living in a bad culture. They are relatively poor, but are trying to protect what little they have, not just from guns, but from theft, from assault, and from rape . . . but all that the “anti-racist news organization” reports on is “gun violence,” because the #woke staff are just deathly afraid of blaming bad people.

References

References
↑1 Note that in one of the internally referenced stories in the Inquirer, it states, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males,” but the Inquirer story won’t tell you that about the victims in the reported shootings. I wonder why that is. There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.
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The Washington Post will never get the right answers because they refuse to look at uncomfortable data

It’s always good when a credentialed media source catches up with The First Street Journal, but one thing is certain: it only happens reluctantly.

    If progressives don’t start taking rising crime seriously, they risk getting mugged by reality

    Opinion by Helaine Olen Roshkow | Washington Post Columnist | July 10, 2021 | 8:00 AM EDT

    Democrats, Republicans and independents all say there is a “major crisis” in violent crime, according to a poll released this week. This a serious matter. Crime is up throughout the United States. The murder rate surged nearly 20 percent in 2020, compared with 2019. Road-rage shootings have doubled nationally, claiming victims such as 6-year-old Aiden Leos in California in May.

    But many among the progressive community don’t want to admit this. They seem to believe that acknowledging a covid-era crime wave will jeopardize hard-won gains fighting for bail and sentencing reform, attempts to reform the nation’s police forces, and the fight to address racial injustice. MSNBC host Joy Reid, for example, recently accused the media of riling people up over the issue, tweeting: “I’ve seen more TV stories about crime than the actual anecdotes from friends in [New York City] or other big cities bear out.” Others point out the levels are rising from numbers significantly lower than during the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, so why worry?

It was 1999, and I was on the ‘management team’ with the company for which I then worked. A friend of mine named Ken, also on the management team, was responsible for our safety numbers, among other things. We were all under instructions from the corporate Vice President to have numerical goals for different things, and Ken was supposed to have a numerical goal for lost time accidents. He quipped, “So, if we’re below our target, does that mean we have to go out and deliberately hurt someone?”

Obviously, the goal for lost time accidents should be zero, but if it’s always zero, you’ll always fail. Mrs Roshkow at least seems to recognize this: going higher on a negative is always a failure, and no one is going to be satisfied with an “it’s not as bad as the 90s” answer.

Trouble is, she doesn’t recognize what happened in the 1990s, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the horror story that was then New York City by being a Republican who was tough on crime.

    The denial needs to stop. The failure to engage and take on the issue of growing violence and lawbreaking now — no matter how unpleasant, distasteful or uncomfortable — will only harm the progressive agenda and potentially cause swing voters to pull the lever for Republican candidates.

You mean Republicans who will actually get things done in reducing crime?

    Traditionally, voters view Democrats and progressives as softer on crime than “law and order” Republicans. That’s why even right-leaning Democrats are sometimes vulnerable to getting pinned as supporters of the far-left slogan “defund the police.” Rising crime rates provide an opening to grandstanding Republicans, who claim it is the result of Democrats not adequately supporting cops. As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said this week: “Crime is soaring in cities managed by Democrats.”

    Ridiculous. But the politics of backlash is a real thing. As we’ve seen in both the distant and near past, fear can lead otherwise left-leaning people to vote in a more right-wing direction. The violent crime wave of the 1990s ultimately gave us the now-reviled federal anti-crime bill in 1994 and California’s “three strikes” law, which sent shoplifters to prison for decades. More recently, the “defund the police” slogan is widely suspected of costing Democrats votes in tight 2020 congressional elections while in June’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, Eric Adams, running on a “law and order” platform, decisively defeated more progressive challengers, such as Maya Wiley.

Mrs Roshkow said that Mr McCarthy’s claim was “Ridiculous,” but it’s the stone-cold truth. I’ve harped on foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia on this site, but the numbers don’t lie: the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page showed that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, 291 people had spilled their life’s blood out on the city’s mean streets. 291 ÷ 189 days so far in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. Philly’s record is an even 500, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, while 2020 came in second with 499. If the rate continues as is, the City of Brotherly Love will not just break the unfortunate record, but leave it far behind in the rear view mirror. The current pace is so bad that, if maintained, the city will tie the 1990 record on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, with six weeks left in the year.

Naturally, instead of supporting the get tough on criminals policies which worked in the 1990s, she blames not actual criminals, but those inanimate guns that seem to levitate and shoot people all by themselves!

    Progressives, instead of denying rising crime, should stick the blame right where it belongs — on Republicans. Gun sales increased significantly last year. The one thing that links almost all gun violence? Easy access to firearms. But Republicans refuse to back even minor restrictions on guns ownership. Another thing that stops crime? Summer jobs programs for teens living in poverty. Fund more of them — and remind people which party often opposes doing that.

Thing is, it might not be those evil reich-wing Republicans buying all of those guns. Also from The Washington Post, on the same day:

    ‘Fear on top of fear’: Why anti-gun Americans joined the wave of new gun owners

    Pandemic, police violence, calls to ‘defund the police’ fuel surge of first-time buyers

    By Marc Fisher, Miranda Green, Kelly Glass and Andrea Eger | July 10, 2021

    All his life, Jabril Battle was anti-gun. Then came the pandemic, the lockdown, the shortages and a feeling that at any moment, things could blow. Battle bought a Beretta.

    Drawn to last summer’s protests against police violence, Savannah Grace found herself face-to-face with a camo-clad officer’s long gun. She’d always hated guns, but went out and got a Glock 45.

    In blue cities and red suburbs alike, firearms purchases soared last year — to the highest level in half a century, based on federal background checks. A striking portion of those sales went to first-time gun buyers — 40 percent, according to the firearms industry’s trade association. Other studies show first-timers accounting for more like a fifth of sales in 2020, but that’s still unusually high, retailers said.

    Overall gun ownership nationwide jumped from 32 percent of Americans to 39 percent last year, according to University of Chicago survey data — well under the 50 percent level of half a century ago, but the biggest jump in recent decades.

    From the downtown streets left empty by the pandemic’s shutdowns to the sharp spike in homicides and the nationwide conflict over the role and behavior of police officers, a disorienting and often frightening year drove many decisions to buy guns, according to dealers and buyers alike.

That doesn’t sound like the bad guys buying guns — not that most of them buy them legally anyway — but by ordinary people afraid of the bad guys, and of policies by the left that would reduce police protection.

    Sales to women and people of color rose in 2020. Firearms industry data shows sales jumping 50 percent among Black customers, 47 percent among Hispanics and 43 percent among Asian Americans, though gun ownership remains proportionately lower among those groups compared with Whites.

Actually, the linked data show that “The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women who show a 58.2 percent increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year.” Maybe this from The Philadelphia Inquirer is why:

    Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot (in Philadelphia) since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.

There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.

This is the real reason “anti-gun Americans joined the wave of new gun owners”: because the incredible surge in homicides has occurred in their neighborhoods! The very people they politically support are the ones among whom the surge in violence has occurred.

A lot of the city statistics released do not include the race of victims and known killers, but St Louis, our highest homicide rate city, does. According to the report dated July 11th, out of 99 homicide victims thus far, 92 (74 males and 18 females) were black. In a city that is not quite half black, 46.41% black to be more precise, 92.9% of the homicide victims are black. More, of the 42 identified suspects of those 92 murders, 41 are black, and the other is listed as ‘unknown.’

So, how dangerous is it to live in St Louis? Using the figures from the St Louis Police Department, I created the chart above. Taking the population of St Louis, 294,890, adjusting it for race and sex by percentages of the population, dividing the number of homicides by 191, for the number of days so far in the year (up to July 10th), then multiplying that number by 365, I arrived at projected homicides for 2021. Taking those numbers, dividing by population, and then by 100,000, I got the anticipated homicide rate per 100,000 population, the way figures are normally reported. If you are a white male, you are facing a homicide rate of 8.26 per 100,000 population; white women are looking at a homicide rate of 5.73.

But if you are black? Black women are facing a homicide rate of 46.62 per 100,000, while black males have the number 204.25 per 100,000 population staring them dead in the eye!

If the problem were just that there are too many guns, why is there such a discrepancy between the murder rates between whites and blacks, in the same city? That’s the question which nobody will ask, because nobody is willing to look at the answer.

Yes, I know: some people say that math is racist, but math just is. And if you are unwilling to look at the facts, without excluding things because you don’t look at where certain evidence might lead, you will never get the right answers.

The answer is simple: there is something in the urban black culture which teaches too many of its children that it’s perfectly acceptable to go out and shoot other people. Maybe why that is ought to be the question people should ask.

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Another mugshot missed We publish what the Lexington Herald-Leader will not

Christopher Roberts. Photo by Three Forks Regional Jail, Lee County, via WKYT-TV

WKYT-TV, Channel 27, the CBS affiliate in Lexington, is the news partner with the Lexington Herald-Leader. So, when the Herald-Leader reports a story after WKYT, and WKYT has the mugshot available, we know the Herald-Leader did as well.

    Estill County man charged in connection with woman found dead on rural road

    By Beth Musgrave | July 10, 2021 | 12:24 PM | Updated: 12:42 PM EDT

    A 43-year-old Estill County man was arrested Saturday in connection with the death of a 50-year-old woman who was found on a rural Estill County Road on Wednesday.

    Kentucky State Police have charged Christopher Roberts of Irvine with murder and tampering with physical evidence. Roberts is being held at the Three Forks Regional Detention Center in Lee County.

    Police were called at 10 a.m. on Wednesday to Marbleyard Road after a woman was found lying in the road. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

    The woman was later identified as Cindy Donnela Stevens-Roberts, 50, of Irvine.

The story concluded by saying that there was no other information available, but, of course there was; there was the suspect’s mugshot, which WKYT-TV published at 9:58 AM, 2½ hours before the Herald-Leader story was written. But we all know that publishing the suspect’s mugshot would violate McClatchy Mugshot Policy.

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The #woke destroy more history Will they go after the Jefferson Davis historical marker in Lexington?

Site of the old Jefferson Davis Inn. From Google Maps streetview. Click to enlarge.

As I saw the stories about the removal of statues of Confederate Generals Robert E Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson in Charlottesville, Virginia, I thought back to when I lived in Lexington previously, from 1971 through 1984. When I lived there, last century, the building in the photograph to the right was painted white, and the ground floor housed the Jefferson Davis Inn.

Why was it called the Jefferson Davis Inn? For three years, 1821-1824, then a student at Transylvania College, boarded on the second floor of the building with Joseph Ficklin, then the United States Postmaster in Lexington.

Historical marker attached to 102 West High Street, Lexington, Kentucky.

I’ve never been much of a beer drinker; two is about my limit, because I don’t care what any beer says about being “less filling,” two twelve ounce bottles of beer is more than enough for me.[1]And I really don’t like the feeling of getting drunk. But I have eaten, and had a few beers, at the Jefferson Davis Inn before. As I recall, it was pretty decent.

Alas! The original Jefferson Davis Inn closed in 1996. A second JDI opened, at a different location, in 2013, but closed at the very end of 2016.

Joe Stearns, proprietor of the bar High on Rose in June of 1981. High on Rose was a popular downtown watering hole situated at the corner of East High Street and Rose Street. Stearns opened the business in June of 1975. Photo by Christy Porter

Returning to the Bluegrass State in 2017, I did want to see some of the places I had frequented previously, and the closure of the Clubhouse, more frequently referred to as High on Rose, at the intersection of East High and Rose Streets, saddened me. Creaky old wooden floors, greasy hand cut French fries, general beer bar fare, and beer by the mug or the pitcher.

But, I digress. Reading about the removal of the statues made me wonder: will the #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 in Lexington demand the removal of the historic market on 102 West High Street? In 2017, the Democrat-controlled city government removed the statues of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan and John C Breckinridge, a former U.S. Vice President and the last Confederate Secretary of War from the lawn of the former Fayette County courthouse. The statues were taken to the Lexington Cemetery, where both men are buried.

Drinking a couple of beers and eating some food at the old Jefferson Davis Inn did not make me want to run out and join some Confederate memorial society, or become a Civil War re-enactor in a grey uniform, or somehow celebrate the Confederacy. It was a decent place, in an historic building, and it was well done.

Our history is our history, and trying to erase it won’t erase it. But today, the left want to look at everything through the prism of race. Given the way things are going, in twenty years students will be taught that Jefferson Davis had horns and cloven hoofs.

References

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↑1 And I really don’t like the feeling of getting drunk.
↑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. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Free the Capitol kerfufflers!

On Christmas Day of 1868, President Andrew Johnson, who was not re-elected after having failed to be re-nominated, issued a blanket pardon for all remaining Confederate officeholders. An earlier pardon, in July, covered all Confederates who were not already under indictment, meaning that only Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and a few others, faced any possibility of trial.

On May 10, 1865, Mr Davis was captured by Union soldiers in Irwinville Georgia. Sent to Fort Monroe, off Old Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia, he was imprisoned in a fortress casement, in leg irons ordered by General Nelson Miles. His health deteriorating, he was removed from leg irons and the conditions of his captivity improved. He was indicted on charges of treason, but though the Congress wanted a treason trial, there were many worriers in the North that the legal process of a trial could somehow declare secession to be constitutional. From Wikipedia:

After two years of imprisonment, Davis was released on bail of $100,000, which was posted by prominent citizens including Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Gerrit Smith. (Smith was a member of the Secret Six who financially supported abolitionist John Brown.) Davis went to Montreal, Quebec, to join his family which had fled there earlier, and lived in Lennoxville, Quebec, until 1868, while his son Jefferson Jr. and William attended Bishop’s College School. He also visited Cuba and Europe in search of work. At one stage he stayed as a guest of James Smith, a foundry owner in Glasgow, who had struck up a friendship with Davis when he toured the Southern States promoting his foundry business. Davis remained under indictment until Andrew Johnson issued on Christmas Day of 1868 a presidential “pardon and amnesty” for the offense of treason to “every person who directly or indirectly participated in the late insurrection or rebellion” and after a federal circuit court on February 15, 1869, dismissed the case against Davis after the government’s attorney informed the court that he would no longer continue to prosecute Davis.

Robert E Lee was indicted but never tried, and never imprisoned.

Now, why do I bring this up?

The Civil War lasted for four long years, and resulted in almost a million deaths of soldiers and civilians. The damage to property was immense in the South, where almost all of the war was fought. Yet, after the Confederacy was beaten, the United States imposed very few legal penalties against the people who led and fought for the Confederacy. There was considerable concern that putting the Confederates on trial would greatly hinder reunification.

Also see: Good News: Jan 6th Investigations Will Resurrect Democracy!

Yet, today, following the ‘insurrection of January 6th, we see so many on the left who want to lock up those I call the Capitol kerfufflers for years upon years, for an uncoordinated demonstration in which nobody who was not one of the kerfufflers was killed, and which lasted only a few hours. As an ‘insurrection,’ it makes the Beer Hall Putsch seem like a masterpiece of planning and execution. Elie Mystal of The Nation wanted all of the kerfufflers rounded up and arrested, and was incensed that some were released on bail. Federal prosecutors have been arguing, and in a few cases succeeding, for keeping some of the Putsch leaders in jail, held without bail, even though some accused murderers are allowed to go free on bond. Elwood Dowd wants them all locked up, while Brad Bannon, a Democratic pollster writing in The Hill says that a meaningful investigation “will resurrect democracy.”

Yet somehow, some way, the left are united in their resistance of post election audits, in a race in which millions of people believe that massive fraud occurred. If the left believe that the election was almost completely clean and above board, why would they disapprove of an audit to prove such?

The left, in their all-consuming hatred of Donald Trump, want to treat something about as serious as a keg party which got out of control more harshly than the United States treated the leaders of the Confederacy! All that this can do is further anger the people who supported President Trump and slow any reconciliation between Republicans and Democrats.

Not that all Democrats want such reconciliation in the first place!

The best thing that President Biden could do, now, is to simply issue a blanket amnesty for the kerfufflers. If he does not, the next President – and may he be a Republican elected on November 5, 2024 – should pardon everyone accused, indicted, tried or convicted in the incident!

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Suspected murderer nabbed

Danzell Cruze, from the Kentucky Offender Online Lookup.

We noted, two weeks ago, that the Lexington Herald-Leader declined to publish the mugshots of two murder suspects on the lam. Naturally, The First Street Journal found the mugshots, and yes, we published them!

Well, we are happy to report that Danzell Cruse, the death of 38-year-old Jocko Green, has been apprehended:

    Man apprehended in Central Kentucky, charged with a Lexington murder, police say

    By Jeremy Chisenhall | July 9, 2021 | 1:43 PM | Updated: 4:14 PM EDT

    A Lexington murder suspect has been apprehended and charged with the shooting death of a 38-year-old man, Lexington police said Friday.

    Danzell Cruse, 26, was located and arrested Thursday in Frankfort, police said. He’s accused of shooting and killing 38-year-old Jocko Green. Green was found in a parking lot outside an apartment complex in the 600 block of Winnie Street on June 17, police said.

    Green was taken to University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital after he was shot, police said. He died about three hours later, according to the Fayette County coroner’s office.

There’s more at the original. Mr Cruse was apprehended due to work by the United States Marshalls and the Frankfort Police Department.

The Herald-Leader did not publish Mr Cruse’s mugshot with the current story, but, since he’s now off the streets, I suppose he no longer falls under the McClatchy Mugshot Policy guidelines for an exception to the no mugshot publication rules.

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Killadelphia The killers are playing catch up; The Philadelphia Inquirer is not

It was just yesterday that we noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t seem to pay much notice to the murders of young black males in the City of Brotherly Love. I pointed out, in the footnote, that with 287 homicides in 188 days (as of 11:59 PM on July 7th) equaled 1.5266 homicides per day, projecting a total of 557 for the year.

Well, it looks like the city’s thugs realized that they weren’t quite meeting their quota, because after two straight days of the Philadelphia Police Department reporting only one homicide, the gang bangers caught up: the Current Crime Statistics page shows 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year.

The Inquirer? Digging into several pages of their website at 8:30 AM — now at 4:42 PM, current update — this morning, I couldn’t find a single story, not so much as what Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas called a “handful of lines in a media alert,” although it’s possible I just didn’t dig into the right place.

Nevertheless, the editors and journolists[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 at the Inquirer didn’t think that four homicides yesterday was worth noting on the website’s main page, where readers had a chance of spotting such.

Why? Because black lives don’t matter to the editors and staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer! Oh, they matter if taken by a white police officer, matter a very great deal, but when one black thug kills another black thug, which is what the vast majority of the city’s homicides are, it just doesn’t fit Teh Narrative that the “anti-racist news organization” wants to tell. Maybe it’s time for me to break out that Philadelphia Enquirer[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. logo once more.

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 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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It’s being set up again!

Long-term readers of The First Street Journal — both of them — know that my trust of Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) is so great that if he told me that 2 + 2 = 4, I’d check his math. I noted his attempts to have the state Supreme Court invalidate Senate Bill 1, House Bill 1, and other legislation which would restrict his ’emergency powers’ under KRS 39A, saying that it was necessary that he have those powers as defined before the General Assembly passed, over his veto, restrictions on how they could be used. The Kentucky Supreme Court has yet to issue its ruling, but I must admit: given how the justices have bent over backward for Mr Beshear, both when he was state Attorney General and now, as Governor, I am not confident that the Court will uphold the laws. Continue reading →