Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Why should Philadelphia spend money keeping drug addicts alive?

I’m enough of an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to ask: why do we want to keep junkies alive?

They have to steal from innocent people to support their habits, they cannot keep jobs to support themselves, and are nothing but a burden on society. And, heaven forfend! they probably don’t even wear their facemasks properly! Trying to get them off of drugs, so that they can become responsible members of society might make sense, but Safehouse simply enables them to keep shooting up.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A federal appeals court rejects plans for a supervised injection site in Philly

by Jeremy Roebuck and Aubrey Whelan | Updated: January 12, 2021 | 5:36 PM EST

In a setback to advocates who had hoped to open the nation’s first supervised injection site in Philadelphia, a federal appellate court ruled Tuesday that such a facility would violate a law known as the “crack house” statute and open its operators to potential prosecution.

In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit lauded the goals behind Safehouse — the nonprofit that, in an attempt to stem the city’s tide of opioid-related deaths, has proposed the site to provide medical supervision to people using drugs.

But, Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the majority, “Safehouse’s benevolent motive makes no difference.”

“Congress has made it a crime to open a property to others to use drugs,” he added. “And that is what Safehouse will do.”

There’s more at the original, and the Usual Suspects in Philadelphia have supported Safehouse: Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner and former Mayor, and Pennsylvania Governor, Ed Rendell, all Democrats.

United States Attorney William McSwain, who brought the suit for the Department of Justice and argued the case himself in court, an unusual move, was pleased with the victory, so if he doesn’t resign by January 20th, will probably be fired by Joe Biden. That would hardly be unprecedented: President Clinton fired all 93 US Attorneys in one day, and President Trump, after a couple months delay, told the 46 remaining Obama Administration appointees to tender their resignations. Given that Mr McSwain was a strong critic of Mr Krasner, the George Soros-financed District Attorney will want him gone, gone, gone!

As a lower-case “l” libertarian, but not a Libertarian, I should be perfectly happy with recreational pharmaceuticals being legal. And if the only damage that drug abusers did was to themselves, it would be fine with me.

But that’s not the case: drug abusers damage, and financially burden, society in a major way. Junkies can’t hold jobs, and thus burden our welfare rolls. Junkies can’t support their habits, and wind up stealing from innocent people to support their habits. And, most importantly, drug addicts usually wind up being, at some points, responsible for children.

My wife was a pediatric nurse, and she has told me that she has never seen a case of child abuse — and they had to be pretty bad, hospitalization bad, before she saw them — in which drugs or alcohol, usually drugs and alcohol, were not involved. Here in eastern Kentucky, drugs are a scourge, and my nephew, formerly an Emergency Medical Technician, has told me that at least half of the ambulance calls on which he went were drug related. He worked in Lee and Owsley counties; Beattyville, which CNN called the poorest white town in America, is wracked with poverty and drug abuse:

Rugged explorer Daniel Boone made this part of Kentucky famous in the late 1700s around the time of the Revolutionary War. The rolling hills and forests are still as picturesque as when Boone found them. Rock climbers come from all over the world to tackle the area’s peaks and natural bridges.

But today it’s also easy to come by heroin and cocaine in Kentucky’s hills. Almost every family CNNMoney met in Beattyville had been impacted by drugs.

(Barbara) Puckett and her husband are currently raising a great niece and nephew because their biological parents are drug addicts. The situation is so common in Beattyville that the local elementary school runs a support group for grandparents raising grandkids.

(Chuck Caudhill, the general manager of the local paper, The Beattyville Enterprise) estimates that 40% of kids in the area don’t live with their birth parents because of drugs.

“We need help. Eastern Kentucky is beautiful, but it needs help,” says Patricia “Trish” Cole. Her son died of an overdose when he was 27. Pictures of him are all around her living room. She’s normally quick to smile, but she gets choked up when his named is mentioned. She has a tattoo on her chest that reads: “Can’t keep your arms around a memory.”

Cole saves lives as an EMT for the local ambulance company. She estimates 80% of the ambulance runs she makes now are for drug-related issues. The day after her son died, she had to go get a young man who overdosed out of a closet.

The slow death of the coal industry has strangled many counties in eastern Kentucky, and drugs are destroying the rest. It’s hard to hold that recreational pharmaceuticals ought to be legalized when they are destroying our society around them. Kentucky has the nation’s highest rate of grandparents or other relatives raising children— with 9 percent of kids being raised by a relative compared with the national rate of 4 percent, according to Kentucky Youth Advocates.

Eastern Kentucky ought to be a dream location for industry: a beautiful landscape plus a population with, let’s be honest here, fewer options, ought to leave a potential employer with a more stable workforce, with less employee turnover. But with illegal drugs being rampant, what decent employer would want to come here?

This is what drugs have done to Kentucky! So why, I have to ask, should Philadelphia spend money keeping drug addicts alive?

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Governors are becoming more resistant to imposing COVID-19 restrictions.

It seems that some of our state Governors, including the most rabid fighters against COVID-19, are learning that the public are just plain fed up. From the Associated Press:

As pandemic worsens, most US states resist restrictions

By Julie Watson and Terry Tang | January 12, 2021

PHOENIX (AP) — As the U.S. goes through the most lethal phase of the coronavirus outbreak yet, governors and local officials in hard-hit parts of the country are showing little willingness to impose any new restrictions on businesses to stop the spread.

And unlike in 2020, when the debate over lockdowns often split along party lines, both Democratic and Republican leaders are signaling their opposition to forced closings and other measures.

Were I a cynic, I’d say, yeah, sure, now that the election is over!

Some have expressed fear of compounding the heavy economic damage inflicted by the outbreak.. Some see little patience among their constituents for more restrictions 10 months into the crisis. And some seem to be focused more on the rollout of the vaccines that could eventually vanquish the threat.

The most notable change of tune came from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, who imposed a tough shutdown last spring as the state became the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak.

“We simply cannot stay closed until the vaccine hits critical mass. The cost is too high. We will have nothing left to open,” Cuomo said this week as confirmed infections in the state climbed to an average of 16,000 a day and deaths reached about 170 per day.

The cost was too high back in June, Mr Cuomo! We told you that, but no, the Democrats wouldn’t listen.

Governor Doug Ducey (R-AZ) has opposed most of the restrictions, including the mandatory mask mandates and closing restaurants and bars. That’s a good thing; the Governor and state health officials can ask people to wear masks, but should have no power to compel such. People can choose whether to patronize restaurants, gyms and bars. Mr Ducey said:

If we’re really all in this together, then we have to appreciate that for many families ‘lockdown’ doesn’t spell inconvenience; it spells catastrophe.

At last, a political leader who recognizes that throwing people out of their jobs, and eventually their homes, is not the right thing to do.

The AP reported that the pettiest of the little tyrants, Governor Gretchen Whitless Whitmer is allowing restaurants to open for inside dining on Friday, January 15th. I’d guess that outside dining, in Michigan, in January, wouldn’t be a pleasant thing.

One thing is obvious: even in our bluest of blue states, the people are voting with their feet:

Even in states with strict measures in place, such as California, people are flouting the rules. On Monday, as intensive care units in Southern California found themselves jammed with patients, people packed beaches in San Diego to see this week’s high surf, many standing less than 6 feet apart with no masks.

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)

It would seem that even liberal Democrats are tired of Governor Gavin Newsom’s tyranny. I’d note here that Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY), who imposed so many restrictions on the Bluegrass State, and mostly gotten away with, has not tried to reimpose new restrictions, other than a renewal of his repugnant mandatory mask mandate, despite a positive test rate of 12.23%.[1]Governor Beshear condemned the four civilians who filed impeachment requests against him as “terrorists.” Despite two protests at the state Capitol in which some of the demonstrators were … Continue reading It’s possible that he is simply trying to appease the General Assembly into not overriding his anticipated vetoes of legislation which would dramatically curtail his ’emergency’ powers.

Americans are a freedom loving people; our country was founded on the desire for liberty, and we don’t take well to petty dictators trying to take away our rights.

References

References
↑1 Governor Beshear condemned the four civilians who filed impeachment requests against him as “terrorists.” Despite two protests at the state Capitol in which some of the demonstrators were armed, no shots were fired. The Governor was hanged in effigy.
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Prosecutor who sought to end cash bail imprisonment is bemoaning lower bail for violent offenders

Every once in a while, I’ll come across a story that has me both laughing my butt off and shaking my head in disbelief. As we’ve noted before, Larry Krasner won the election to become District Attorney in Philadelphia in 2017, and was the beneficiary of a huge campaign contribution from leftist billionaire George Soros, is a leftist who hates the police and doesn’t pursue supposedly petty offenses, and ran on a platform saying he would:

  • Stop prosecuting insufficient and insignificant cases
  • Review past convictions, free the wrongfully convicted
  • Stop cash bail imprisonment
  • Treat addiction as an illness, not a crime
  • Protect immigrants while protecting everybody
  • Reject a return to the failed drug wars of the past
  • Stand up to police misconduct

The cost of Mr Krasner’s victory has been written in blood. Philadelphia has seen more murders, many more murders than New York City, which has more than five times Philly’s population.

Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019.

One of the people who wasn’t in jail on Friday, March 13, 2020, was Hasan Elliot, 21. How did the District Attorney’s office treat Mr Elliot, a known gang-banger?

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to mate his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges;he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, and prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering the hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.

On that Friday the 13th, Police Corporal James O’Connor IV, 46, was part of a Philadelphia police SWAT team trying to serve a predawn arrest warrant on Mr Elliott, from a March 2019 killing. Mr Elliot greeted the SWAT team with a hail of bullets, and Corporal O’Connor was killed. Had Mr Elliot been in jail, as he could have been due to parole violations, had Mr Krasner’s office treated him seriously, Corporal O’Connor would have gone home safely to his wife that day. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 president John McNesby also has criticized Krasner, saying his policies led to the killing of O’Connor. “Unfortunately, he’s murdered by somebody that should have never been on the street,” McNesby said.

McNesby also said FOP members and police officers formed a human barricade to block Krasner from entering the hospital Friday to see O’Connor’s family.

The numbers don’t lie. Under Mayor Jim Kenney, who has managed to make past Mayors John Street and Michael Nutter look great, District Attorney Krasner and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (who, to be honest, is really just Mayor Kenney’s puppet), Philadelphia has become measurably much worse. Mr Kenney has been in office since the beginning of 2016, and Mr Krasner since the start of 2018, and Philly is now much more dangerous. Their policies were put into governing practice, and, unless chaos and death was the goal all along, they failed miserably.

And now — and it’s difficult not to laugh about this — the esteemed Mr Krasner is lamenting that judges are not imposing high enough bail!

Amid rising gun crime in Philly, DA Larry Krasner blasts low bail

by Mensah M. Dean and Chris Palmer | January 11, 2021 | 7:21 PM EST

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on Monday blasted bail commissioners for setting lower bails than his office routinely seeks for those charged with gun crimes at a time when the city is besieged by near-record gun violence.

While his office often has asked for million-dollar bails for those charged with violent gun crimes — with suspects typically having to pay 10% of that amount — the median bail last week for those arrested for possession of a gun was just $110,000, and $150,000 for those arrested for a violent offense involving a gun, Krasner said during a news conference in West Philadelphia with community leaders and anticrime activists.

“I’m not saying that’s a tiny amount of money, but what I am saying is for people who have resources, including criminals who are deriving substantial profit from illegal activity, this is not a hard thing to pay,” he said. As a result, he said, many of those accused of gun crimes are back on the street while awaiting trial.

Within 60 days, his office will release a report that will explore the impact bail amounts are having on crime, Krasner said during the first of what he said would be weekly press conferences to keep the public apprised on his offices’ efforts to combat violence.

He campaigned on ending cash bail imprisonment, and now he’s shocked, shocked!, that bail commissioners are setting lower bail amounts. In asking “for million-dollar bails for those charged with violent gun crimes,” is he not seeking to keep those charged, but not yet convicted, suspects in jail, in “cash bail imprisonment”?

This is the type of thing that “social justice,” rather than real justice, law enforcement gets you. By not seriously pursuing the little crimes, when the bad guys get a bit older and are graduated to bigger and badder things, they have less of past criminal record, which naturally means lower bail amounts. More, it means that some of those “charged with violent gun crimes” could have been locked up in jail, on the lesser offenses, on the days that they committed worse crimes. As documented above, Hasan Elliot was one of those criminals who could have been in prison, not just on his original sentence, but on parole violations, had Mr Krasner treated him seriously. Police Corporal James O’Connor IV is stone-cold graveyard dead because Mr Krasner and his office didn’t treat him seriously.

From the Inquirer:

(Mr Krasner’s spokeswoman Jane) Roh responded (to Mt Nesby’s statements) on Friday saying it was “frankly ghoulish that anyone, much less an authority figure, would choose to spread lies for personal or political gain in response to this tragedy.”

On Monday, McNesby shot back, contending that police again “are under attack from the district attorney’s rogue staff.” Calling Roh a “Krasner henchman,” McNesby wrote in a statement that Roh was using “O’Connor’s murder as a reason to attack ALL Police as ‘ghoulish,’” and contended that the “vicious” attack was “tacitly approved and supported by Krasner.”

On Twitter Monday night, Roh said McNesby’s language in the aftermath of the shooting was filled with “Trumpian, deliberately inflammatory falsehoods.” She said he should be “working 24/7 to protect the health & safety of his members” during the coronavirus outbreak.

As opposed to protecting them from the bullets of street thugs Mr Krasner allowed out of jail? COVID-19 is serious, but bullets fired by criminals appear to be a deadlier danger. You can check out Miss Roh’s Twitter feed to see how much of a whacked-out leftist she is; it’s no wonder she is Mr Krasner’s spokesidiot.

Larry Krasner has brought this on himself, through his idiotic, social justice policies. Under his ‘leadership,’ Philadelphia jumped from 315 homicides before he took office, to 353, then 356, and then 2020’s whopping 499. Mr Krasner isn’t all of the reason behind those huge jumps, but he’s definitely part of it. He may be bemoaning the lower bail, but it’s the result of his policies. Thing is, he’s not paying the price for his failures, the good citizens of Philadelphia are.
____________________________________________
Cross-posted on RedState.

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The out-of-touch Lexington Herald-Leader doesn’t like it when the riff-raff express their opinions

It is with some amusement that I noted that the Editorial Board of what my, sadly late, best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal, in their complaints that Republicans in the Bluegrass State need to grow up:

Impeach Beshear? Seriously? In Frankfort and DC, Republicans need to act like grownups.

By Herald-Leader Editorial Board | January 22, 2021 | January 11, 2021 | 11:01 AM EST | Updated 11:11 AM EST

In the same week the U.S. Capitol was overrun by the domestic terrorists who make up Donald Trump’s base, Kentucky’s state legislature got to work. The “superdupermajority” of Republicans put all their energy and brain-power into making sure Gov. Andy Beshear was hampered in efforts to save us all from coronavirus, and then to put a cherry on it, announced they will set up a committee to impeach him.

So on one side of Frankfort is an earnest, serious politician, one who hasn’t gotten everything right but has tried hard to battle a pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1918. On the other side, we have some distinctly unserious people who are working hard on curbing said serious politicians, and, say, on how to hamstring the last two abortion clinics in the state while thousands of people get sick of COVID-19 and die.

If you want to know just how not serious these people are, they had to quickly amend their bill curbing the governor’s powers to close schools and businesses after Beshear himself reminded them that sometimes his rules were less stringent than the CDC.

Then to top off this tragicomedy of errors, House officials announced a panel to take up articles of impeachment against Beshear as a bunch of armed thugs circled the state Capitol. This is the same kind of militia movement that earlier this year hung an effigy of Beshear outside the governor’s mansion.

This must stop.

Senators Dennis Parrett, D-Elizabethtown, from left, Jared Carpenter, R-Berea, and Brandon Smith, R-Hazard, right, walk past demonstrators a protest at the State Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Saturday, Jan. 9, 2021. Alex Slitz ASLITZ@HERALD-LEADER.COM

Armed thugs, huh? According to the dictionary, a thug is defined as “a violent person, especially a criminal.” Yet the article the Editorial Board linked bears no mention of any shots being fired. An accompanying photograph shows three state senators, one of whom was a Democrat, walking past the “armed thugs” without an apparent care in the world.

“The same kind of militia movement that earlier this year hung an effigy of Beshear outside the governor’s mansion”? Hanging the hated in effigy has a long history in America, as noted in The Hill:

Americans have a long history of citizens committing violence against president effigies to voice political dissent.

James Madison, John Tyler, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter were all burned in effigy during their presidencies. And each time this happened, the offending party leaders repudiated the distasteful and disrespectful actions of their constituents.

President Obama was hanged in effigy, and Kathy Griffin posted a picture of her holding President Trump’s severed head.

The Editorial Board again:

But Republicans in Frankfort and Washington, D.C., who have played pattycake with these kinds of extremists for years, have got to stop this wing of the party from hijacking them literally, it seems, and on policy. They have got to become grown-ups and stop with these silly games that end in not so silly ways.

Did the hanging of Governor Beshear in effigy last spring end in violence? It seems that no one was harmed, other, perhaps, than the feelings of his supporters. Did the armed demonstration on January 9th result in injuries, damage or death? If it did, the Herald-Leader had nothing about that.

The Editorial Board appear to be like Twitter and The New York Times and others: they don’t like freedom of speech when it isn’t speech with which they agree.

In the article on the impeachment request, Herald-Leader reporter Daniel Desrochers noted that the petition was by four citizens, and that while there has been some talk about it in the legislature, “no sitting lawmaker has formally called for Beshear’s impeachment.” It would seem, then, that the Editorial Board is railing not against members of the General Assembly, but against a few citizens.

Of the four citizens who filed the petition, two aren’t even Republicans. Mr Desrochers noted that one of them, Jacob Clark, a 38-year-old machinist from Grayson County, is a Libertarian. Andrew Cooperrider of Lexington is also a Libertarian.

I would point out here the Editorial Board’s recent political endorsements:

  • 2020: Joe Biden for President, Amy McGrath for Senate, and Josh Hicks for 6th District Representative;
  • 2018: Amy McGrath for 6th District Representative
  • 2016: Hillary Clinton for President, Jim Gray for Senate, and Nancy Jo Kemper for 6th District Representative
  • 2014: Alison Lundergan Grimes for Senate, and Elisabeth Jensen for 6th District Representative

All Democrats, and all defeated in Kentucky and in the 6th District. It seems that the Herald-Leader Editorial Board isn’t exactly in tune with the voters of the Commonwealth.

Sadly, the editorial board did get their way in 2019, and Andy Beshear was elected. All he did was unconstitutionally suspend our First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion and peaceable assembly, claiming that COVID-19 somehow trumped the Constitution of the United States, the same Constitution they are so vociferously defending when it comes to the election of Joe Biden. It’s almost as though there was some hypocrisy there!

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No, no attack on #FreedomOfSpeech at all! It isn't just 'insurrection' speech the left are trying to stifle

As we noted a few days earlier, Twitter hates Freedom of Speech. Parler is a Twitter-like message sharing board, created specifically because Twitter and Facebook had been censoring messages, primarily from conservatives. Oh, both services claimed that they were just keeping threats and violence off their services, but, as one might expect when the ‘judges’ of such things are almost entirely from the political left, messages from conservatives, and the banning of certain users, was heavily tilted against patriotic Americans. They deleted President Trump’s accounts, but the Twitter account of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is still active:

From The New York Times:

How Parler, a Chosen App of Trump Fans, Became a Test of Free Speech

The app has renewed a debate about who holds power over online speech after the tech giants yanked their support for it and left it fighting for survival. Parler went dark early on Monday.

By Jack Nicas and Davey Alba | Published January 10, 2021 | Updated January 11, 2021 | 3:21 AM EST

John Matze, chief executive of the alternative social networking app Parler, has said the app welcomes free speech. Credit…Fox News, via YouTube

From the start, John Matze had positioned Parler as a “free speech” social network where people could mostly say whatever they wanted. It was a bet that had recently paid off big as millions of President Trump’s supporters, fed up with what they deemed censorship on Facebook and Twitter, flocked to Parler instead.

On the app, which had become a top download on Apple’s App Store, discussions over politics had ramped up. But so had conspiracy theories that falsely said the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump, with users urging aggressive demonstrations last week when Congress met to certify the election of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Those calls for violence soon came back to haunt Mr. Matze, 27, a software engineer from Las Vegas and Parler’s chief executive. By Saturday night, Apple and Google had removed Parler from their app stores and Amazon said it would no longer host the site on its computing services, saying it had not sufficiently policed posts that incited violence and crime.

Early on Monday morning, just after midnight on the West Coast, Parler appeared to have gone offline.

Translation: Freedom of Speech, the raison d’être for Parler’s existence, was not to be allowed. Mr Matze parlayed:

That’s a screenshot, because Mr Matze’s parlay is not visible on the site, because the site is down.

I’ve said in the past that Parler has some serious issues with its presentation, as you can see in the screenshot; it just isn’t as good as Twitter, and Mr Matze’s efforts to update it haven’t been particularly successful. But that does not mean it should be shut down.

From Wikipedia:

Many jurisdictions have laws under which denial-of-service attacks are illegal.

  • In the US, denial-of-service attacks may be considered a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with penalties that include years of imprisonment.[109] The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the US Department of Justice handles cases of DoS and DDoS. In one example, in July 2019, Austin Thompson, aka DerpTrolling, was sentenced to 27 months in prison and $95,000 restitution by a federal court for conducting multiple DDoS attacks on major video gaming companies, disrupting their systems from hours to days.[110][111]
  • In European countries, committing criminal denial-of-service attacks may, as a minimum, lead to arrest.[112] The United Kingdom is unusual in that it specifically outlawed denial-of-service attacks and set a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison with the Police and Justice Act 2006, which amended Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.[113]
  • In January 2019, Europol announced that “actions are currently underway worldwide to track down the users” of Webstresser.org, a former DDoS marketplace that was shut down in April 2018 as part of Operation Power Off.[114] Europol said UK police were conducting a number of “live operations” targeting over 250 users of Webstresser and other DDoS services.[115]

On January 7, 2013, Anonymous posted a petition on the whitehouse.gov site asking that DDoS be recognized as a legal form of protest similar to the Occupy protests, the claim being that the similarity in purpose of both are same.

What the big boys have done to Parler is different in method, by the same in kind.

The Times again:

Parler’s plight immediately drew condemnation from those on the right, who compared the big tech companies to authoritarian overlords. Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican, told Fox News on Sunday that “Republicans have no way to communicate” and asked his followers to text him to stay in touch. Lou Dobbs, the right-wing commentator, wrote on Parler that the app had a strong antitrust case against the tech companies amid such “perilous times.”

Parler has now become a test case in a renewed national debate over free speech on the internet and whether tech giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon have too much power. That debate has intensified since Mr. Trump was barred from posting on Twitter and Facebook last week after a violent mob, urged on by the president and his social media posts, stormed the Capitol.

The tech companies’ actions last week to limit such toxic content with Mr. Trump and Parler have been applauded by liberals and others. But the moves also focused attention on the power of these private enterprises to decide who stays online and who doesn’t. And the timing struck some as politically convenient, with Mr. Biden set to take office on Jan. 20 and Democrats gaining control of Congress.

The tech companies’ newly proactive approach also provides grist for Mr. Trump in the waning days of his administration. Even as he faces another potential impeachment, Mr. Trump is expected to try stoking anger at Twitter, Facebook and others this week, potentially as a launchpad for competing with Silicon Valley head on when he leaves the White House. After he was barred from Twitter, Mr. Trump said in a statement that he would “look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.”

Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was understandable that no company wanted to be associated with the “repellent speech” that encouraged the breaching of the Capitol. But he said Parler’s situation was troubling.

Troubling, huh? How odd that an organization dedicated to defending Freedom of Speech, such as the march by neo-Nazis through the heavily Jewish village of Skokie, Illinois, only finds this “troubling,” and not outrageous.

Skokie authorities contended that the activities planned by the Nazi party were so offensive to its residents that they would become violent and disrupt the Nazi assembly, initially planned to take place on the steps of city hall on May 1, 1977. Therefore, they sought an injunction against any assembly at which military-style uniforms, swastikas or Nazi literature were present. Frank Collin appealed to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to represent the marchers’ right to free speech and assemblage. The President of the Chicago ACLU chapter said: “We have no choice but to take the case.” In its brief, ACLU attorneys claimed that so long as the demonstrators were peaceable, no injunction could be issued against their activities; furthermore, that such an injunction would constitute a prior restraint forbidden by the First Amendment. The ACLU relied upon First Amendment doctrines articulated consistently over the past fifty years by the Supreme Court, and recently by Chief Justice Warren Burger, who said: “The thread running through all of these cases is that prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.”

The Times article with which I began was a straight news piece, but this was on their OpEd pages last week:

Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?

A debate has broken out over whether the once-sacrosanct constitutional protection of the First Amendment has become a threat to democracy.

By Thomas B. Edsall | January 6, 2021

In the closing days of his presidency, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he can make innumerable false claims and assertions that millions of Republican voters will believe and more than 150 Republican members of the House and Senate will embrace.

“The formation of public opinion is out of control because of the way the internet is forming groups and dispersing information freely,” Robert C. Post, a Yale law professor and former dean, said in an interview.

Before the advent of the internet, Post noted,

People were always crazy, but they couldn’t find each other, they couldn’t talk and disperse their craziness. Now we are confronting a new phenomenon and we have to think about how we regulate that in a way which is compatible with people’s freedom to form public opinion.

Trump has brought into sharp relief the vulnerability of democracy in the midst of a communication upheaval more pervasive in its impact, both destructive and beneficial, than the invention of radio and television in the 20th Century.

The left like to claim that the Capitol demonstration was some sort of coup d’etat attempt, but if it was planned at all, it was planned even worse than the Beer Hall Putsch. Yet, using that as an excise, they would stifle our Freedom of Speech.

There’s a lot more at the original, but it’s amusing. The New York Times was a staunch defender of the First Amendment, fighting against prior restraint in New York Times Co v United States, 403 US 713 (1971), the so-called Pentagon Papers case. But that was then, before the internet, when the Times was the biggest voice among the gatekeepers, the ones who got to decide what got published, and what did not. The credentialed media have long despised that they no longer have that control, that anybody can now publish, and anyone who wants to read what someone has to say can access it, normally for free.[1]The Times allows people without subscriptions ten ‘free’ articles per month before things go behind the paywall. I am not a Times subscriber, and I opened the Times’ articles cited … Continue reading Freedom of speech and of the press are things the Times supports, when it comes to the speech of which the editors approve. For others, not so much.

Mr Edsall quoted Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale:

The problem of propaganda that Tim Wu has identified is not new to the digital age, nor is the problem of speech that exacerbates polarization. In the United States, at least, both problems were created and fostered by predigital media.

The central problem we face today is not too much protection for free speech but the lack of new trustworthy and trusted intermediate institutions for knowledge production and dissemination. Without these institutions, the digital public sphere does not serve democracy very well.

Ahhh, yes, those “trustworthy and trusted intermediate institutions for knowledge production and dissemination,” meaning, for The New York Times, the Times itself and its long-lost gatekeeping functions.

A strong and vigorous political system, in Mr Balkin’s view,

has always required more than mere formal freedoms of speech. It has required institutions like journalism, educational institutions, scientific institutions, libraries, and archives. Law can help foster a healthy public sphere by giving the right incentives for these kinds of institutions to develop. Right now, journalism in the United States is dying a slow death, and many parts of the United States are news deserts — they lack reliable sources of local news. The First Amendment is not to blame for these developments, and cutting back on First Amendment protections will not save journalism. Nevertheless, when key institutions of knowledge production and dissemination are decimated, demagogues and propagandists thrive.

We do not need an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth,” the pundits tell us, but they are arguing for almost that, that the dissemination of thoughts and information be somehow regulated by the elites, private company elites to be sure, so that “demagogues and propagandists” do not thrive, that the ideas which are so very, very appalling to the political left die of loneliness.

Yet we are a nation created by “demagogues and propagandists,” by Thomas Paine and his Common Sense, by Patrick Henry and his great statement, “Give me liberty or give me death.” We had a great Civil War, egged on by “demagogues and propagandists” such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by John Brown’s rebellion, and slavery was ended due to this.

The left are appalled that Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, that he used media like Twitter to talk above the credentialed media, that WikiLeaks was able to publish Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails over the internet, and that, horrors! President Trump still has millions of supporters. But, despite Mr Trump’s supporters, he was still defeated, and handily, for re-election. The ugly demonstration at the Capitol on January 6th was just that, an ugly demonstration, one far less destructive and deadly than the Summer of fire and Hate led by the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations. The left like to claim that the Capitol demonstration was some sort of coup d’etat attempt, but if it was planned at all, it was planned even worse than the Beer Hall Putsch. Yet, using that as an excise, they would stifle our Freedom of Speech.

Of course, it isn’t just insurrection from which the Times believes we ought to be protected. On October 4, 2019, they published an OpEd by staffer Andrew J Marantz, entitled Free Speech Is Killing Us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

Then there was the Times publishing an OpEd by Parker Malloy, claiming that Twitter’s restrictions on ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ transsexuals actually promoted freedom of Speech:

How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech

Trans people are less likely to speak up if they know they’re going to be constantly told they don’t exist.

By Parker Molloy | November 29, 2018

In September, Twitter announced changes to its “hateful conduct” policy, violations of which can get users temporarily or permanently barred from the site. The updates, an entry on Twitter’s blog explained, would expand its existing rules “to include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.” A little more than a month later, the company quietly rolled out the update, expanding the conduct page from 374 to 1,226 words, which went largely unnoticed until this past week.

While much of the basic framework stayed the same, the latest version leaves much less up for interpretation. Its ban on “repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone” was expanded to read: “We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

The final sentence, paired with the fact that the site appeared poised to actually enforce its rules, sent a rumble through certain vocal corners of the internet. To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur. But to many on the right, it reeked of censorship and “political correctness.”

Twitter is already putting the policy into effect. Last week, it booted Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who runs the website Feminist Current. Ms. Murphy hasn’t exactly supported trans people — especially trans women. She regularly calls trans women “he” and “him,” as she did referring to the journalist and trans woman Shon Faye in a 2017 article. In the run-up to her suspension, Ms. Murphy tweeted that “men aren’t women.” While this is a seeming innocuous phrase when considered without context, the “men” she was referring to were trans women.

As a transgender woman, I find it degrading to be constantly reminded that I am trans and that large segments of the population will forever see me as a delusional freak. Things like deadnaming, or purposely referring to a trans person by their former name, and misgendering — calling someone by a pronoun they don’t use — are used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities.

Defenders of these practices claim that they’re doing this not out of malice but out of honesty and, perhaps, even a twisted sort of love. They surely see themselves as truth-tellers fighting against political correctness run amok. But sometimes, voicing one’s personal “truth” does just one thing: It shuts down conversation.

It shuts down the conversation? And just what does compelling those who do not believe that someone can simply change his sex to acquiesce in the claims of a ‘transgendered’ person by agreeing with his changed name and the use of his preferred pronouns do? If I am compelled to refer to Mr Malloy as “Miss Malloy” or “Parker Malloy,” am I not conceding in the debate his claim that he is a woman?[2]The Times identifies the author as “Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) is a Chicago-based writer and editor at large at Media Matters for America.” Mr Malloy identified himself as “a … Continue reading

Let’s cut through the bovine feces here: the left are simply opposed to the Freedom of Speech and of the Press when what is said or printed is opposed to what they want people to be able to hear or read. It isn’t just they are trying to save the country from a rebellion, but they are concerned that someone might say that Bruce Jenner isn’t a woman.

If you can control the input, the conversation, then you control the output, the decision, and that’s what the heavily leftist controlled media and social media sites are trying to do. If saying things of which they disapproved is censored, then the beliefs of people will eventually be pushed into the things in which the left believe. Or, more bluntly, garbage in, garbage out.

References

References
↑1 The Times allows people without subscriptions ten ‘free’ articles per month before things go behind the paywall. I am not a Times subscriber, and I opened the Times’ articles cited in this post without paying a cent.
↑2 The Times identifies the author as “Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) is a Chicago-based writer and editor at large at Media Matters for America.” Mr Malloy identified himself as “a trandgender woman” in his article. I do not use “Ms” as an honorific; it is an abomination. Women are referred to as Miss, Mrs or, when appropriate, Dr. Parker Malloy is not his birth name; I found a reference which implied, but did not directly state, that his birth name was Chad Malloy.
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The Kentucky General Assembly is trying to protect our rights But Andy Beshear will try to get around them

On Saturday, January 9th, the General Assembly passed legislation to curb the Governor’s ’emergency’ powers.

House Bill 1

Both chambers also passed through an amended version of House Bill 1, designed to allow any business, school, church or nonprofit to remain open so long as their COVID-19 policies meet or exceed the guidelines of the CDC.

The bill was amended in committee that morning following criticism from Gov. Andy Beshear in his Friday COVID-19 briefing, who pointed out that the myriad of guidance from the federal CDC is often vague and contradictory, if not more restrictive than the governor’s own regulations.

The newly amended HB 1 passed by both chambers and sent to Beshear now allows those entities to stay open if they meet either the CDC or executive branch guidance, whichever is least restrictive.

Sen. Ralph Alvarado, R-Winchester, said they bill would provide “stability and predictability” to businesses and schools dealing with Beshear’s orders. However, Sen. Reggie Thomas, D-Lexington, countered that Kentucky would become the “Wild West,” resembling other states with little COVID-19 regulations and far larger rates of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Senate Bills 1 and 2

Both chambers also passed through an amended version of Senate Bill 1 and Senate Bill 2, both tackling Beshear’s COVID-19 emergency orders and regulations that have been fiercely criticized by Republicans as an arbitrary abuse of power for months.

Senate Bill 1 limits the governor’s emergency orders under KRS 39A to 30 days unless extended by the General Assembly, in addition to requiring the attorney general’s permission to suspend a statute under an emergency.

Senate Bill 2 allows legislative committees to strike down a governor’s emergency administrative regulations.

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) has already promised to veto the bills, but Republicans have not just veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, but very strong veto-proof majorities. It requires a “constitutional majority,” meaning an absolute majority of all seats in each chamber, to override a gubernatorial veto. That means 51 votes in the state House of Representatives and 20 votes in the state Senate. Republicans hold 75 seats and 30 seats in those chambers, respectively.

The Governor has promised to challenge the bills’ legality in court if his vetoes are overridden.

In the Bluegrass State, the Governor has ten days, exclusive of Sundays, to sign or veto a bill; if he does neither, it becomes law without his signature. This means Thursday, January 21th. The bills, if vetoed, would be reconsidered when tghe legislature reconvenes on February 2nd.

This leads to a couple of timing issues. The Governor issued his most recent thirty day mandatory mask order in late December, to take effect on January 2th. This means he could, and almost certainly will, issue it again prior to the General Assembly overriding his veto. Since the bills will not become law until after the vetoes are overridden, he could issue it for 120 days, or even the entire year, and could claim that it was not subject to the new laws.

Put bluntly, I do not trust Governor Beshear or the state Supreme Court to respect our rights.

More, the Kentucky Supreme Court is simply not trustworthy. Officially non-partisan, it nevertheless tends to support Democratic positions when they are at issue. Following lower court rulings which granted injunctions against some of the Governor’s executive orders, the state Supreme Court consolidated the cases, and in July declared that it would decide all of the issues, and prohibited lower state courts from taking action on those orders. The Court then set September 17th as the date it would hear oral arguments, meaning that the Governor’s orders would be unchallengeable in state courts for two months.

Then, after that two month delay, the Court waited until November 12th to issue their ruling, which upheld the Governor.

Senate Bill 1 provides that the Governor’s executive orders can last for only thirty days. If the vetoes are overridden, that would mean that an executive order issued on February 2nd would be good until March 4th. A state Supreme Court which favors the Governor could, in late February, issue an injunction against enforcing the laws until the Court decides their legality, schedule oral arguments a couple months later, and then issue their rulings a couple months after that. That could easily take us into summer!

And if every i and j isn’t properly dotted, every t properly crossed, the state Supreme Court would side with the Governor.

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Twitter hates Freedom of Speech

To the surprise of exactly no one, Twitter has permanently banned President Trump.

And now Google blocks messaging app Parler from its store. Parler does not censor people, and was created precisely because Twitter and Facebook do censor people they don’t like . . . which primarily means conservatives.

Google has blocked the messaging and social network app Parler from its store.

The company cited the “urgent public safety threat” in restricting the app, touted as a free-speech alternative.

Google said in a statement that it reminded Parler in recent months of its policies requiring apps with user-generated content to remove “egregious content like posts that incite violence.”

A Google spokesperson told reports in a statement that the app is being suspended until it addresses issues.

Apple is threatening to do the same thing.

Sadly, as my good friend William Teach noted, Parler is kind of a joke:

The best thing about this is that either Parler will be forced to upgrade its software and site, or something else will replace it.

I’m old enough to remember the Free Speech Movement, a movement of the left. Now, the left hate the freedom of speech, or at least they hate it for people other than themselves.

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The Kentucky General Assembly is set to restrict Governor’s ’emergency’ powers Reichsstatthalter Andy Beshear waxes wroth

As we have previously noted, the Kentucky General Assembly is trying to limit Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) ’emergency’ executive powers, and the Governor is somewhat annoyed:

Beshear blasts GOP bills limiting COVID-19 restrictions. They advance anyway.

By Jack Brammer and Daniel Desrochers | January 8, 2021 | 3:22 PM EST | Updated 4:31 PM EST

Kentucky Republican lawmakers ignored cries of overreach from their Democratic colleagues Friday and approved in committee two major bills challenging Gov. Andy Beshear’s emergency orders to curb the coronavirus pandemic.

Separately, another committee did not act on a bill that would reshape the state’s courts system after Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr. railed against it.

If the bills limiting Beshear had been in place since the pandemic started last March, “so many more of us could be dead or ill,” said Rep. Kelly Flood, D-Lexington. “This is a wholly inappropriate way to move.”

No, if the bills limiting the Governor had been in place, he would have needed the consent of the legislature to issue executive orders which lasted longer than thirty days. He still could have issued them; he simply would have needed to get the General Assembly to approve extensions.

The Senate State and Local Government Committee signed off on House Bill 1, which would allow businesses to stay open during an emergency if they comply with guidelines from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Beshear warned later Friday that HB 1 could have an array of unintended consequences because the CDC’s guidance is often unclear, outdated or contradictory. For example, he said the CDC’s official guidance still suggests that most businesses should be shuttered because of rising cases, “which does not need to happen,” Beshear said. CDC guidance also suggests that businesses must offer paid sick leave for their employees, he noted.

Loath as I am to agree with the Governor, he’s right on this point: these decisions should not be farmed out to federal agencies. I approve of the idea that businesses could remain open if they followed state guidelines, and, of course the state Department of Health could structure those guidelines based on outside recommendations.

Meanwhile, the House State Government Committee approved Senate Bill 1, sponsored by Sen. Matt Castlen, R-Owensboro. It would limit the Democratic governor’s executive orders under a state of emergency to 30 days unless the legislature extended them.

Both bills are expected to receive final approval in the chambers Saturday and be sent to the governor for his consideration. He pledged Friday to veto them, even though Republicans have the votes to override him.

If that happens, Beshear pledged to challenge their legality in court.

Well, of course he did. Being used to exercising dictatorial power, and having gotten away with it as he has, why would he want to see his ability to rule by decree restricted?

Once a bill is sent to the Governor, he has ten days, not counting Sundays, to sign or veto it; if he takes no action, the bill becomes law after ten days.

Under the proposal, an executive order that places restrictions on the functions of schools; colleges; private businesses; non-profits; political, social or religious gatherings; places of worship; or imposes mandatory quarantine or isolation requirements shall expire after 30 days unless it receives legislative approval.

Here’s where I violently disagree. Neither the Governor nor the General Assembly should have any authority over religious meetings or churches, or anything which restricts the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

I might not get a bill with which I am 100% happy, but as long as the Reichsstatthalter’s power is restricted, I will be happy.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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I’ll take “Stories we didn’t see last summer for $500, Alex.”

During the Summer if Fire and Hate, I saw a bunch of things on Twitter from conservatives, with pictures of violent Antifa and #BlackLivesMatter rioters, trying to get them recognized so that they could be arrested for arson and assault, but I never saw the credentialed media doing that. The Washington Post even published an ‘analysis’ by a thoroughly biased college professor claiming that This summer’s Black Lives Matter protesters were overwhelmingly peaceful, our research finds; Police and counterprotesters sometimes started violence. CNN ran the justifiably mocked banner noting “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”

Contrast that with this, from the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Recognize someone in photos from the DC riot? The FBI wants to hear from you

By Tanasia Kenney | January 7, 2020 | 11:56 AM EST | Updated 2:04 PM EST

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants the public’s help in identifying individuals who wreaked havoc and prompted a lockdown at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.

A mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the nation’s Capitol building as lawmakers met to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s win, sparking violence that left four dead, several injured and dozens arrested, McClatchy News reported.

The FBI is now accepting tips, photos, videos and other digital media showing the chaos and destruction that unfolded on Jan. 6. Witnesses are asked to submit tips online, or call the FBI tip line at ‪1-800-CALL-FBI (1-‪800-225-5324) to provide any information that may be helpful to the investigation, according to the agency’s website.

“Our goal is to preserve the public’s constitutional right to protest by protecting everyone from violence and other criminal activity,” the FBI said.

I have no problem at all with attempting to identify and prosecute those protesters who broke the law, but the hypocrisy of the credentialed medias in trying to help law enforcement on this, coupled with their totally standing down during the left wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests is obvious and blatant.

We had states and cities imposing all sorts of restrictions on the right of peaceable assembly, yet turning a blind eye to the not-so-peaceable assemblies of last summer’s riots. We even had very liberal Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) violating his own restrictions to join the protesters in a rally in Harrisburg.

The right of peaceable assembly allows protesters to make their voices heard; it does not confer the right to storm the Capitol, or any other building, and destroy property. A relatively small number of the hundreds of thousands who descended in Washington stormed the Capitol building, but somehow, some way, you never see the credentialed media mentioning that part. Odd, because they were certainly willing to do that for last summer’s protests!

I suppose that’s what happens when the credentialed media have surrendered to the #woke.
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