We have previously noted the hostility of the credentialed media to what everyone would have thought they supported, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, at least for other people.
Now comes Aaron Rupar, who claims to be a journalist for Vox. Mr Rupar us upset, highly upset, that Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade claims that he read Mein Kampf in school:
We have already covered the Lexington-Fayette Urban-County Council’s ban on no-knock warrants in the city, and needn’t go into it further here. Most of our source material came from the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Also on the Herald-Leader website was a ‘national’ story on it, by the Associated Press: Continue reading
As we noted two weeks ago, the Lexington-Fayette County Urban-County Council wanted to ban no knock warrants. Well, on Friday morning, they got that done:
No-knock warrants officially banned in Lexington: Mayor signs new ordinance into law
By Jeremy Chisenhall | June 25, 2021 | 11:59 AM EDT | Updated: June 25, 2021 | 2:44 PM EDT
Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton has signed into law an ordinance which bans no-knock warrants in Fayette County, she told the Herald-Leader Friday morning.
The Lexington council approved the ordinance Thursday night in a 10-5 vote, but Gorton had the option to sign it or veto it. The council would’ve needed at least nine votes in favor of the ordinance to override the veto. But Gorton signing the document made it law, effective immediately.
Gorton previously voiced opposition to totally banning no-knock warrants in Lexington. But she signed the ordinance into law after hearing from local residents who wanted to ban no-knock warrants during the council’s public comment section Thursday.
Further down:
Rev. Clark Williams is a member of a group of Black faith leaders in Lexington who have pushed for a ban on no-knock warrants for more than a year. He said the enacted ban was a “relief” and the Black faith leaders want to work with those on the other side of the issue.
“I’m hopeful those who are on the other side of the issue can appreciate that we disagreed on the issue, but there is absolutely no reason for this to be viewed as an adversarial situation,” he said. “ … No one in Lexington wants the city to be any safer than we do, and so we all have a vested interest in that.”
If no one wants the city to be any safer than (they) do, why take a very infrequently used tool out of the hands of the police? All that can do is make things safer for the criminals! The Lexington Fraternal Order of Police vociferously opposed this move, as did Police Chief Lawrence Weathers.
The problem is simple: in our urban black communities, they dislike the police more than they dislike the criminals in their midst. They are like the Palestinians in Gaza, tolerating, feeding, supporting, hiding, and f(ornicating) Hamas, no matter how much damage Hamas cause in Gaza, because they hate the Israelis more.
The group of Black faith leaders “will be focusing attention” on how council members voted on the ban, Williams said. They’re also going to shift their focus to other issues of racial equity.
“That was merely just a step,” Williams said of the no-knock warrant ban. “That was not the journey. That was not the battle. That was merely a round in the fight for racial justice and equity.”
It is unsurprising that, having taken one tool away from law enforcement, they want to start hobbling the police in other areas.
In other, wholly unrelated news:
Two teens taken to hospital after shooting in downtown Lexington
By Karla Ward | Juna 26, 2021 | 1:40 PM
Two teen boys were taken to a local hospital Friday night after a shooting downtown.
Lexington police were called to a report about an altercation with shots fired at High and Mill streets at 11:19 p.m. and found the teens shot, said police Lt. Daniel Truex. Their injuries were not thought to be life-threatening.
One of the victims approached officers at the Fifth Third Bank Pavilion and told them he had been shot, while the other injured teen was still at the scene, WKYT reported.
There’s a little more at the original.
According to the Lexington Shootings Investigations page, there have been 58 shootings in the city, though the last one recorded was on June 20th, so the page is a few days out of date. Of those 58 shootings, 42, or 72.41%, of the victims were black. Lexington’s population is 14.6% black. When the group of black faith leaders “shift their focus to other issues of racial equity,” perhaps a good place to start would be addressing why black people are being shot in such disproportionate numbers.
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
| ↑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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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.
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:
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
Brandon Dockery, from the Lexington Police Department’s Homicide Investigation page.
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
| ↑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. |
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| ↑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. |
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.
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
| ↑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. |
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| ↑2 | From Wikipedia:
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. |
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.
