Author Archives: Dana Pico

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A stunning lack of perspective Sending people to their deaths is no big deal, but Andrew Cuomo making naughty remarks? That has the Democrats incensed!

Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) ordered state nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients. He later denied that such orders had been issued, but even the Democratic Party’s media mouthpiece, CNN, noted that his denial was a lie:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that nursing homes “never needed” to accept Covid-positive patients from hospitals in the state due to a shortage of hospital beds.

During a press call Wednesday, Finger Lakes News Radio asked Cuomo about his administration’s advisory in late March requiring that nursing homes accept the readmission of patients from hospitals, even if they were positive for Covid-19.

The governor’s office has repeatedly said the advisory was based on federal guidance, which prohibited discrimination based on a coronavirus diagnosis. The state’s Department of Health told CNN, “Residents were admitted to nursing homes during that time not as an overflow facility, but because that’s where they live.”

Cuomo said that the advisory was a precaution if hospitals became overwhelmed — calling it an “anticipatory rule” — which he said didn’t happen.

“We never needed nursing home beds because we always had hospital beds,” Cuomo told Finger Lakes News. “So it just never happened in New York where we needed to say to a nursing home, ‘We need you to take this person even though they’re Covid-positive.’ It never happened.”

Facts First: Cuomo’s assertion that “it never happened” is false. According to a report from the New York State Department of Health, “6,326 COVID-positive residents were admitted to [nursing home] facilities” following Cuomo’s mandate that nursing homes accept the readmission of Covid-positive patients from hospitals. Whether or not this was “needed,” it did in fact happen.

So, how many people died due to COVID-19 in nursing homes due to the Governor’s orders? The New York Times reported:

Cuomo Aides Rewrote Nursing Home Report to Hide Higher Death Toll

The intervention was the earliest action yet known in an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo that concealed how many nursing home residents died in the pandemic.

By J. David Goodman and Danny Hakim | Published March 4, 2021 | Updated March 11, 2021

Top aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo were alarmed: A report written by state health officials had just landed, and it included a count of how many nursing home residents in New York had died in the pandemic.

The number — more than 9,000 by that point in June — was not public, and the governor’s most senior aides wanted to keep it that way. They rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.

After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes.

Well, of course it was “withheld” out of concern that President Trump might use it politically . . . which doesn’t explain why it was withheld after election day. And after a whole year of Fredo CNN news anchor Christopher Cuomo reporting on his own brother, CNN finally decided that no, it’s not appropriate that he do that anymore.

Of course, no one can say, for certain, how many of New York State’s nursing home deaths are directly attributable to the Governor’s decision, but it’s safe to say: a whole lot.

And now, from The Wall Street Journal:

Manhattan Law Firm to Lead Andrew Cuomo Impeachment Probe

Democratic governor faces allegations of sexual harassment and criticism over handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes

By Jimmy Vielkind | March 17, 2021 | 9:33 AM EDT

ALBANY, N.Y.—Democrats who dominate the New York state Assembly on Wednesday said that a Manhattan law firm will lead an impeachment investigation into allegations that Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women as well as his administration’s handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes.

Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP will assist the chamber’s judiciary committee in examining Mr. Cuomo’s conduct, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said.

“Hiring Davis Polk will give the committee the experience, independence and resources needed to handle this important investigation in a thorough and expeditious manner,” said Mr. Heastie, a Democrat from the Bronx.

The speaker first announced the impeachment investigation on Thursday and said Monday that he would not predict how long the inquiry would last. A vote to impeach a governor would require a majority of members in the 150-seat chamber.

Three former female aides to the governor and one woman who still works on his staff have accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior. The third-term Democrat has denied he inappropriately touched anybody and apologized if any of his remarks or behavior made people uncomfortable.

Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, is overseeing an investigation into the harassment claims and has already interviewed at least one of the women who complained. Mr. Cuomo has asked people to withhold judgment until that review is completed.

The governor has rebuffed calls for his resignation by senior leaders of his own party, including U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat from Yonkers.

There’s more at the original, including noting the nursing home investigation, but the Democrats controlling the state House of Representatives never considered impeaching the Governor over ordering people to their deaths, yet are now angry, very angry, that he may have inappropriately touched a woman or that some of his remarks or behavior made people uncomfortable.[1]Laughably, Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte wrote, on March 2nd, that Governor Cuomo’s alleged actions “(fall) short of sexual harassment, but more social opprobrium would help stop the … Continue reading

He’s never been accused of an actual rape or sexual assault, mind you, but he may well have behaved poorly. To the Democrats, that’s much more serious than forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients into crowded environments, primarily populated by the elderly, the most vulnerable group when it comes to the virus.

Just how f(ornicating) stupid can this be? How stupid can the Democrats get? The left are invested in complaining about Dr Seuss’ writings and maintaining fences, concertina wire and National Guard troops to defend against non-existent threats, but ignore actual deaths! The Democrats want to worry that some people might not always wear facemasks, but don’t give a damn about virtually deliberately infecting a notably vulnerable population with the virus against which those facemasks are supposed to protect! William Teach noted that the Democrats voted against a bill requiring the Department of Homeland Security Department to test all migrants crossing the border illegally that the DHS releases into the country, as though it’s important to prevent American citizens from spreading the virus, but not illegal immigrants, and not the Governor of New York.

References

References
↑1 Laughably, Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte wrote, on March 2nd, that Governor Cuomo’s alleged actions “(fall) short of sexual harassment, but more social opprobrium would help stop the louts.” Her subsequent Salon writings have ignored the issue completely, at least as of 10:45 AM EDT on St Patrick’s Day.
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His Holiness the Pope tries to actually be Catholic

Yes, Pope Francis did the right thing, eventually, but this should never have taken as long as it did. From The Wall Street Journal:

Vatican Rules Out Blessings for Same-Sex Relationships, Despite Calls for Liberalization

Pope Francis pushes back at some liberal bishops’ call for church to embrace gay unions

By Francis X. Rocca | Updated March 15, 2021 | 9:55 AM EDT

ROME—The Vatican on Monday forbade blessings of same-sex relationships, contradicting calls for the practice by progressive bishops in Germany and elsewhere, and setting a limit to the conciliatory approach to gay people that has marked Pope Francis’ pontificate.

The Vatican’s doctrinal office, in a document personally approved by Pope Francis, said it wasn’t permissible for clergy to pronounce blessings on any sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman.

His Holiness the Pope helped to start the movement which many hoped would lead to allowing homosexual unions to be blessed by the Church, perhaps including approving homosexual marriages, with his silly response to a question early in his pontificate:

On Gay Priests, Pope Francis Asks, ‘Who Am I to Judge?’

By Rachel Donadio | July 29, 2013

ROME — For generations, homosexuality has largely been a taboo topic for the Vatican, ignored altogether or treated as “an intrinsic moral evil,” in the words of the previous pope.

In that context, brief remarks by Pope Francis suggesting that he would not judge priests for their sexual orientation, made aboard the papal airplane on the way back from his first foreign trip, to Brazil, resonated through the church. Never veering from church doctrine opposing homosexuality, Francis did strike a more compassionate tone than that of his predecessors, some of whom had largely avoided even saying the more colloquial “gay.”

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis told reporters, speaking in Italian but using the English word “gay.”

Francis’s words could not have been more different from those of Benedict XVI, who in 2005 wrote that homosexuality was “a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” and an “objective disorder.” The church document said men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should not become priests.

Who is he to judge? He’s the Pope, that’s who he is, and yes, that does include judgement.

The document reaffirms Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality when several liberal bishops, including the head of the German Catholic bishops’ conference, have called for blessing same-sex couples in committed relationships. Priests in Germany have widely blessed such couples for years, as have clergy in some other parts of Northern Europe.

Such blessings are wrong, the Vatican said on Monday, because they would seem “to approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God,” adding that God “does not and cannot bless sin.”

All of that is in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which every priest and every deacon and every bishop, archbishop and cardinal should have, and with which he should be familiar.

§2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,140 tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”141 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

§2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

§2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

What part of “under no circumstances can they be approved” do some priests and bishops find unclear?

I get it: the left believe that it’s just wrong to deny homosexuals their desires, but a Catholic priest, a Catholic bishop, must follow the teachings of the Bible in which they all profess to believe, and the Bible is unambiguous in its condemnation of homosexual activity, in both the Old and New Testaments. While some have claimed that Jesus never personally addressed homosexual activity, specifically, they are incorrect.

Matthew 5:17 “Do not presume that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.
18 For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter shall pass from the Law, until all is accomplished! 19 Therefore, whoever nullifies one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
20 “For I say to you that unless your righteousness far surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

The law included the prohibition on homosexual activity in Leviticus 18:22, and proscribes the penalty in Leviticus 20:13. There is no ambiguity whatsoever in this.

Back to the Journal:

German bishops have tangled with the Vatican on other matters, including the question of giving Communion to Lutherans, and are unlikely to back down in their stance on blessing gay unions. German bishops and lay Catholics are currently involved in a national synod that is considering changes to aspects of church life, including the possibility of women clergy and teaching on sexuality.

A move by German bishops to approve blessings of same-sex unions would exacerbate tensions with more conservative parts of the church, including in Africa and the U.S. Conservative bishops in the U.S. have been critical of what they see as an excessively progressive drift away from traditional teachings, with the archbishop of Denver warning in 2019 that the German bishops are moving toward a schism.

It has been said that if it is a choice between heresy and schism, choose heresy, because it is an action that is solely your own, while schism injures the Body of Christ that is the Church.

Pope Francis has taken a more liberal approach than his predecessors to some questions of marriage and sexuality, including divorce and homosexuality. In one of the most famous statements of his pontificate, he responded to a question about gay clergy in 2013: “Who am I to judge?” During his 2015 visit to the U.S., he met privately with a gay couple in Washington, D.C.

In comments published last year, the pope expressed support for same-sex civil unions, saying that gay couples “have the right to be legally covered,” a stance he had held as archbishop of Buenos Aires.

But the pope has also written that “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”

This is where the Pope has failed: in attempting to soft-peddle the issue, in attempting to be nice and conciliatory toward homosexuals, as a good liberal should do, he opened the door to the hope of many that he would, he could, change the teachings in the Bible.

But, in the end, you can be a 21th century liberal, or you can be a Catholic; you really cannot be both. Some current liberal views, such as those on immigration, can easily fall within biblical teachings and the traditions of the Church. We can easily reconcile opposition to capital punishment with the Bible, because we now have modern methods of permanent incarceration that the Israelites lacked in their journeys through the wilderness.

But modern liberal beliefs on homosexuality and transgenderism and marriage are simply and unequivocally opposed to the Bible, and there’s no ambiguity, no wiggle room there. Priests and bishops who ‘bless’ homosexual unions are, in plain effect, giving their blessings to sin; it is clearly blasphemy, a sin in itslef.

“It is not surprising but still disappointing,” said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for LGBT Catholics. “This decision though is an impotent one because it will not stop the Catholic people in the pews, nor many Catholic leaders, who are eager for such blessings to happen.”

Sadly, His Excellency The Most Reverend John Eric Stowe, O.F.M. Conv, Bishop of Lexington, has supported the misbegotten New Ways Ministry. As a parish priest, Bishop Stowe is excellent; I’ve attended two Masses in which he was the celebrant, and there is no question in my mind at all that he truly believes in Jesus.

But when it comes to homosexuality, he has truly lost his way. When I see Joseph Cardinal Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, on the list, I am seeing a prince of the Church, and one of the voters who will select the next Pope, when Francis retires or dies.

The question of homosexuality has roiled other Christian denominations, fomenting division within the world-wide Anglican Communion between liberal churches in Europe and North America and more conservative churches in Africa. Last year, the United Methodist Church agreed in principle to split because of disagreements over same-sex marriage and gay clergy, though a meeting to approve the move has been delayed because of the pandemic.

Protestants have already suffered through denominational schisms over this issue. I would like to think that the Holy Father has put this issue to rest for a while, but I can too easily see the next Pope deciding to be ‘trendy,’ and sin, it seems, is very trendy.

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The truth? The truth? They can’t handle the truth!

I have had my differences with Patrick Frey, the Los Angeles County assistant district attorney who blogs as Patterico. A devout #NeverTrumper, I believe that he allowed his hatred of President Trump to outweigh the huge policy problems of having Joe Biden in the White House.

Nevertheless, unlike some of the conservative #NeverTrumpers, he actually remained (mostly) conservative.

Law Professor Ends Her Career By Speaking Uncomfortable Truths About Race

As a second professor ends his own career by listening.

Patterico | March 14, 2021

Let’s handle the latest Big Racial Controversy in a different way. Instead of reading a predictable, cookie-cutter story summarizing the Big Racial Transgression and the aftermath, let’s watch the transgression unfold first, and imagine how we should react if we saw this happen but didn’t know how it had played out. I’ll give you the cookie-cutter summary afterwards. (You already know if you read the headline.) Try to ignore the commentary in the next two tweets and just watch the videos.

Here’s the transcript.

PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: They were a bit, jumbled?
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Yeah.
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: [Laughs] That’s the best way I can put it. It’s like, OK, let me reason through that, what you just said, kind of thing.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Right, right.
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: Yeah, unfortunately. And you know what? I hate to say this, I end up having this, you know, angst, every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Hmm, mmm. [Nods]
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: And it’s like, “Oh, come on.” Get some really good ones, but there’s also usually some that are just plain at the bottom, and it drives me crazy.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Yeah, and, and —
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: So I feel bad.

There is more: namely, the other professor’s response.

You can follow the link embedded in the article title to read more; the entire thing is around 2,600 words long, but, very briefly, Mr Frey discusses the obvious impacts of Affirmative Action, that admitting lesser qualified students based on race means that those students, being less well-prepared, are more likely to underperform or fail.

In the meantime, Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, has apologized for the private remarks of two nursing professors. At least as far as I can tell from The Philadelphia Inquirer article, there were no racially based comments made, but simply general assessments of their students.

In the video, two members of the nursing faculty at Widener University are discussing their students’ academic progress in blunt terms.

“They’re going to bomb this next test,” one said to the other, who responds, “I think so, too.”

“I don’t care though. Let ‘em fail.” the first one said.

The conversation was meant to be private, according to the university, but the professors mistakenly shared it with their nursing class, causing conversation on social media accounts and outrage among some students, parents and alumni in the Widener community. . . . .

“They do not know anatomy at all,” Francis says on the video, expressing concern that students would “move on” and not “represent the school well.” Marquis said she got so mad at students last year before the pandemic hit that she decided to make her “heart failure” questions harder.

I’m just an evil reich-wing conservative, but it seems to me that when a nursing professor assesses that her students “do not know anatomy at all,” that’s not being mean and cruel and vicious, but a real assessment on something nurses are supposed to know. That statement isn’t one for which the University should apologize, but one which should concern the school about how poorly the students are doing.

If a waitress messes up an order, a customer might not get the food he wanted. If an accountant makes a mistake, the books won’t balance. But if a registered nurse makes a mistake, a patient can die! Depending upon specialty, a nurse has to be able to accurately administer chemotherapy, which is basically the administration of poison into the body in a dose designed to kill cancer cells but not quite kill the patient. A nurse has to be able to accurately assess a patient. A nurse has to be able to read orders and spot errors that a tired doctor might have made.

But now, the most important educational concern is that the school not hurt someone’s precious little feelings. That’s far more important than actually educating students, and granting degrees only to those who have learned the material.

The truth is not always a pleasant thing, but the truth is that not all people were created equal, that some were simply born smarter than others, some simply worked harder than others, some are simply better prepared for academic challenges than others. But as long as we pretend differently, as long as we fail to recognize the plain truth right in front of our faces, we are going to get poorer performances from people who asked for admissions and jobs and roles for which they were simply not well-prepared.

Mr Frey’s article noted the differences between performance in law schools based on race, differences which are very real. My part noted two Widener University professors, and race does not seem to be a part of the equation; the problem was that most of their students, regardless of race, weren’t performing, and weren’t performing in a field of study which could lead to them having other people’s lives in their hands.

The acceptance of mediocrity leads to mediocre performance; the acceptance of the lesser leads to poorer performance.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer laments job losses by women due to COVID-19 But somehow the paper doesn't tell readers that those job losses were pushed by Democrats and women

Being in The Philadelphia Inquirer, even in the business section, it was going to be an opinion piece, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have some good statistics:

Job or kids? One in three working moms forced to choose as pandemic enters Year Two.

Kids at home, chores, and full-time career? Philly’s burnt-out moms quit jobs in droves, setting women back for years. Solutions? Flex time, backup childcare and $39 billion in federal relief.

by Erin Arvedlund | Sunday, March 14, 2021

After 15 years in a high-paying finance job, Joanna Lepore knew she’d have to quit, for a once-unthinkable reason — she has children.

“I never had any intention of leaving my job,” said the married mother of two kids under 10 years of age living in Haddonfield. But working remotely — while home-schooling her son and watching her toddler daughter shut out of day care — burned her out.

With child care and schools closed, the veteran of the Wall Street investment firm PIMCO left her job onboarding clients in August, just before the remote school year resumed. Her husband is employed in food distribution and works outside the home.

Lepore, 38, has lots of company. Women have borne a greater share of job losses during the pandemic. One in three working mothers is considering leaving the workforce or downshifting careers, which could stunt their incomes for decades, surveys show. Women already shoulder more responsibility for the domestic and emotional work in a family — disparities heightened by COVID — and typically make less than men — 82 cents on the dollar.

There’s more at the original, but the subtitle tells you much of what you need to know: the very #woke Erin Arvedlund Beattie, who “cover(s) all things personal finance and investing, as well as Wall Street frauds and other miscreants,” wants changes in how businesses operate and, of course, taxpayer money to address the issue.

Day care centers, Mrs Beattie told us, saw enrollment greatly decline, while expenses for new equipment and more thorough cleaning increased; “up to 40%” of dat care centers eventually shut down. What she did not say is that, in many cases, state and local governments ordered day care centers closed. In the Bluegrass State, Governor Andy Beshear ordered all daycare centers closed by the end of business on Friday, March 20, 2020. A lawsuit finally got a Boone County judge to set aside that order, on July 2nd, 15 weeks later, but, of course, the Governor appealed, and just two weeks later the state Supreme Court voided all of the state court injunctions against the Governor’s orders, saying that it would decide all of the cases. The Court scheduled oral arguments for September 17th, and did not issue its decision until November 12th, upholding the Governor.

Many states had similar government action concerning day care centers. That Mrs Beattie neglected to mention this in her reasons that so many day care centers have closed down is pretty poor journalism.

Mrs Beattie had a subtitled section “Schools must open”:

Alison Perelman calls the “emotional labor” of working from home the toughest double-duty — attending to a child educated on Zoom, motivating family to stick to a routine, undertaking household chores, and cooking endless meals.

”This falls predominantly on women,” Perelman says. ”As we’ve all made peace with the one-year anniversary, it’s now a hinge point where women are opting out. And once we all start to return to the workplace, it’s not clear to me that because women were first out, will we be first back in?”

As executive director of the political advocacy group Philadelphia 3.0, she’s incredulous that the Philadelphia School District has announced only vague plans to reopen in September.

“Why do we not know? This alone is a catastrophe for working women with dependents, and it’s only part of the tsunami destroying their careers,” said Perelman, who has a 6-year-old.

“For women, there’s no going back to work without school.”

However, the greatest resistance to reopening schools fully comes from the teachers’ unions, which are roughly ž female. More, President Biden’s criteria for reopening are nowhere close to a full reopening, according to The Washington Post:

Since making his 100-day goal, Biden and his aides have repeatedly loosened their definition of an open school, making it easier to meet his target.

Schools where children are in buildings even one day a week will count as “open.” Opening “most” schools means 51 percent, a metric the nation has probably already reached. And high schools, which are the most likely to be online only, aren’t counted in the measurement at all.

If in-person instruction is only one or two days per week, that isn’t going to get mothers back to work.

Let’s be honest here: the public schools perform a function that teachers are loath to admit, that they serve as free day care centers for children for most of the workday. Opening up paid day care centers because the kids aren’t in school becomes an added expense for working families, primarily, as Mrs Beattie pointed out, working mothers. At some point, calculations have to be made: is it costing more for mothers to work than they bring home from work?

Back to Mrs Beattie’s original for one final point:

Ellen Yin, one of Philly’s top restaurateurs, had to fire 150 workers last spring, roughly 90% of her staff.

“Our industry has large numbers of undocumented workers and immigrants, many of whom never had income before,” she said. “They don’t qualify for unemployment, and that weighs on us.”

There is little which pisses me off more than this: If “one of Philly’s top restaurateurs” has been employing “large numbers of undocumented workers,” she shouldn’t be receiving our sympathy but prison time! At a time when we have 9,972,000 million people officially unemployed, along with 8,493,000 more who have dropped out of the workforce and are thus not counted as officially unemployed, based on February 2020 numbers, 18,465,000 people who ought to be working but aren’t, the last thing we should be worrying about are jobs for illegal immigrants!

As William Teach noted, COVID-19 cases have begun to fall in Florida, even though Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) rolled back restrictions much sooner than in most states, raising the obvious question: did the restrictions actually reduce the spread of the virus, or did they simply force a recession for no useful reason?

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Killadelphia!

I noted, just three days ago, that with 89 homicides in just 67 days of 2021, that the City of Brotherly Love, at that point killing off 1.328 people per day, ought to hit 100 homicides on March 16th.

Well, it seems that the good natured and kind hearted people of Philadelphia have taken that as a personal challenge; at the end of the 70th day, March 11th, 96 people have bitten the dust there, raising the rate to 1.371 per day. That means it should only take three days to kill off the four people needed to reach 100 homicides, which now means the end of March 14th.

At least on its main page, at 10:45 AM EST, The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t have a single story about any of the murders, about any of the seven homicides over the past three days. I guess none of the victims was a ‘somebody’ or a cute little white girl.

I’ve said it before: in Philadelphia, black lives don’t matter. The Philadelphia Tribune reported that, of the 499 homicides in the city in 2020, 86% of the victims were black, in a city in which less than 44% of the population are black. That black lives don’t matter is evidenced by the silence of the Inquirer when they are snuffed out. The #woke staffers who forced the resignation of Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski for his headline “Buildings Matter, Too” during the #BlackLivesMatter protests don’t seem to bother reporting on young black men being murdered because, well because young black males being murdered in Philadelphia simply isn’t news anymore. It would be a bigger story if a weekend day passed in the city without a killing.

I’m guessing that the Inquirer will have a story once that 100 homicides milestone is reached. That’s about all you can expect from them.

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The credentialed media want to muzzle Glenn Greenwald They're finding out just how well that works

I have never been a particular fan of Glenn Greenwald. Born in the United States, he now resides in Rio de Janeiro with his “husband,” and has been a mostly left-wing journalist throughout his career. His participation in helping the odious Edward Snowden reveal classified documents was repugnant.

But if there is one thing I definitely do appreciate about Mr Greenwald is his devotion to Freedom of Speech and of the Press.

Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers: to Bar Critiques of Journalists

This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent.

by Glenn Greenwald | March 11, 2021

Glenn Greenwald

On Wednesday, I wrote about how corporate journalists, realizing that the public’s increasing contempt for what they do is causing people to turn away in droves, are desperately inventing new tactics to maintain their stranglehold over the dissemination of information and generate captive audiences. That is why it journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.

That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with “harassment,” “abuse” and “violence” — so that it is not just culturally stigmatized but a banning offense, perhaps even literally criminal, to critique their journalism on the ground that any criticism of them places them “in danger.” Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people’s reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them.

Any independent platform or venue that empowers other journalists or just ordinary citizens to do reporting or provide commentary outside of their repressive constraints is viewed by them as threats to be censored and destroyed. Every platform that enables any questioning of their pieties or any irreverent critiques of mainstream journalism — social media sites, YouTube, Patreon, Joe Rogan’s Spotify program — has already been systematically targeted by corporate journalists with censorship demands, often successfully.

Back in November, the media critic Stephen Miller warned: “It’s only a matter of time before the media tech hall monitors turn their attention to Substack.” And ever since, in every interview I have given about the success of Substack and every time I have written about journalist-led censorship campaigns, I have echoed that warning that they would soon turn their united guns on this platform. Miller’s prediction was prompted by a Columbia Journalism Review article entitled “The Substackerati” which claimed that Substack was structurally unfair because “most” of “the most successful people on Substack” are “white and male; several are conservative” and “have already been well-served by existing media power structures.”

I will admit to having little contact with Substack. I knew that Patrick Frey, who has blogged for free as Patterico since 2003, and Bari Weiss, who was forced out at left The New York Times by the hatred of the young #woke in the newsroom. Mr Frey is an educated, (mostly) conservative, his hatred for Donald Trump notwithstanding, heterosexual married white male, but Miss Weiss is a mostly liberal lesbian.[1]A couple of commenters I consider to be anti-Semitic on The Other McCain have sought to educate me that she can’t be white, because she’s a Jew.

Thus, I never realized that Substack is a bastion of conservative white males. Mr Greenwald continued to note that most successful Substack writer is a somewhat obscure female History professor at Boston College.

In fact, looking at the list of ‘Substackerati’ Mr Greenwald used, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Heather Cox Richardson, along with Messrs Greenwald, Frey and Miss Weiss, I find three who are homosexual, and the majority liberal.

Mr Greenwald continues to note what has really bothered the currently credentialed media:

That is precisely why they are so furious. They cannot stand the fact that journalists can break major stories and find an audience while maintaining an independent voice, critically questioning rather than obediently reciting the orthodoxies that bind them and, most of all, without playing their infantile in-group games and submitting to their hive-mind decrees. In fact, the more big stories you break while maintaining your independence from them, the more intense is the contempt they harbor for you: that explains, among other things, their willingness to watch Julian Assange (who has broken more major stories than all of them combined) be imprisoned for publishing documents.

That they are angry and upset is irrelevant. It only matters because these resentments and fears that they are losing their monopolistic power over public thought are translating into increasingly concerted and effective censorship campaigns.

The credentialed media heaped scorn on the recently deceased Rush Limbaugh, virtually celebrating in his death due to cancer, because he was the one who began the breaking of the ‘gatekeeping’ function of the media. When the only way for a contrary voice to be heard was if an editor approved, the editors had the power (mostly) to restrict the terms of debate. Mr Limbaugh, by virtue of his tremendous talent — “talent on loan from God,” he used to say — expressed to an audience of as much as thirty million the things that many people already believed, but rarely heard outside of their circle of friends. Then Al Gore invented this internet thingy, and debates started in America Online chatrooms, and then moved to independent blogs. Powerline and Little Green Footballs, working solely from images on low-definition television screens, were able to expose how CBS News used forged documents to try to turn the election of 2004 against the younger President Bush, and were able to get their findings out to millions of people. They went around the gatekeeping function of the credentialed media.

The older editors of major media sources realized, albeit grudgingly, that their power was lost. But as the young #wokes forced out older and wiser heads like James Bennet and Stan Wischnowski, even though they were liberal themselves, the young #woke lost that institutional memory which should have informed them that the gatekeeping function is gone.[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

And now they think they should somehow get it back. Their success in using #CancelCulture to cow others into silence seems to have emboldened them.

But it’s an effort doomed to failure. As we previously noted, the HuffPost was bought out by BuzzKill BuzzFeed, and now Verizon Media has laid off about 30% of what was supposed to have been HuffPost’s independent newsroom. BuzzFeed has had its own financial problems, cutting salaries a year ago due to COVID-19 and having laid off 15% of its workforce in 2019.

The First Amendment to the Constitution protects the Freedom of the Press, but all that means is that the government cannot control the press, cannot censor it, and cannot punish people for printing things the government do not like. Unfortunately, far too many in the media believe that it confers on them some sort of special status, that it means they are somehow beyond criticism. Mr Greenwald, and a few of the other ‘Substackerati,’ have had the temerity, the unmitigated gall to criticize other reporters, so naturally the credentialed media are striking back. There’s nothing they can do about The First Street Journal and me, and my frequent criticisms of what I sometimes call The Philadelphia Enquirer, because, sadly, 🙁 there’s no one paying me to write and publish what I do.

But Substack? The media know that Mr Greenwald and others are making money due to their Substack affiliation, and they can put pressure on Substack to rein in those horrible, horrible free voices.

The fictitious Police Commissioner of New York City, Frank Reagan of Bluebloods, once said on his show that the freedom of the press is limited to those who actually own a press. In a way, that’s true enough, but with the internet, almost anybody can now own a printing press. Writers on the internet are successful or failures based on their individual merits as writers and self-publicists, and not upon the judgements of newspaper editors.

References

References
↑1 A couple of commenters I consider to be anti-Semitic on The Other McCain have sought to educate me that she can’t be white, because she’s a Jew.
↑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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The HuffPo is biting the dust

While I have often noted that print newspapers are 18th century technology, the contraction of media outlets isn’t restricted to print.

BuzzFeed Announces Deep Cuts To HuffPost Staff After Acquisition

BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost from Verizon Media in February.

By Sara Boboltz | March 9, 2021 | 12:31 PM EST

BuzzFeed announced layoffs for the HuffPost newsroom on Tuesday, three weeks after acquiring HuffPost from Verizon Media in February.

Hillary Frey, the site’s executive editor, and Louise Roug, the executive editor for international, will be departing in the restructuring effort.

HuffPost Canada will also shutter operations later this month.

A deal between BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Verizon Media was first made public in November. Verizon Media stated at the time that BuzzFeed and HuffPost would operate as “separate, distinct news organizations” with their own websites and editorial staff while BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti led the combined company.

Translation: Verizon Media lied to them!

The HuffPost Union, organized as part of the Writers Guild of America, East, slammed the restructuring effort in a statement:

Today, we learned that 33 of our colleagues — nearly 30% of our unit — will be laid off. We are devastated and infuriated, particularly after an exhausting year of covering a pandemic and working from home. This is also happening less than a month after HuffPost was acquired by BuzzFeed. We never got a fair shot to prove our worth. These layoffs reiterate the importance of forming a union and advocating for our colleagues. We are glad that we are protected by a collective bargaining agreement and that our colleagues will receive severance. Our union will continue fighting to make HuffPost a more just and equitable workplace, including pushing for clear and accountable commitments to hiring and promoting more people of color and for transparency around pay equity.

It really is just so exhausting working from home! 🙂 It means that you have to make your own coffee in the morning rather than having a $7.25 per hour clerk at 7/Eleven doing it for you.

Now let me be clear here: I don’t like seeing anyone losing his job, but let’s be honest here: the HuffPost was as #woke and biased a ‘publication’ as any around. There was no special reporting there, and nothing you can see on their website front page is not available elsewhere — frequently with better writing — for free. And given the contempt the media have for working class men and women in ‘flyover country,’ it’s difficult not to feel some schadenfreude.

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Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is really just the fall guy (fall gal?). The real problem is Mayor Jim Kenney

March 8th is the 67th day of the year. As of March 8th last year (which was actually the 68th day, 2020 being a leap year), the City of Brotherly Love had seen 67 homicides, or 0.985 killings per day. It was also the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, just before the lockdowns — you remember, 15 days to flatten the curve? — and the school closures and millions of people being thrown out of work.

But on the 67th day of 2021, 89 souls were sent early to their eternal rewards in Philadelphia’s mean streets, 1.328 per day. Doing a little math here, it should take only eight more days, until March 16th, for Philly to reach 100 homicides.

On the 8th, The Philadelphia Inquirer published an OpEd defense of Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw:

Danielle Outlaw put in an untenable position by Kenney administration

In order to ensure the overall safety of Philadelphia’s citizens and their neighborhoods, emergency management in Philadelphia County should be immediately reassessed.

by Joseph Certaine | March 8, 2021

Amid calls last month for Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw to tender her resignation for mishandling the response to summer protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, it’s important to consider that she is not the only person at fault here.

Commissioner Outlaw, who had only been on the job for a few months when the protests began, was put in an untenable position by this administration. From my view, as a former managing director, the Kenney administration allowed the new police commissioner to handle large-scale protests without some of the best practices and institutional knowledge that previously determined how the city handled crisis situations.

At that paragraph break, the Inquirer included the boldfaced blurb:

» READ MORE: Danielle Outlaw’s failure should push Kenney to ask for her resignation — but she didn’t fail alone | Editorial

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw.

Well, of course the editors did that! But, as we noted previously, the editors want to punish the puppet, not the puppet master. The editors love them some Democrats, and endorsed Mayor Jim Kenney for re-election in the 2019 primaries, and if they endorsed a different candidate, Anthony Williams, for the Democratic nomination in 2015, it was still a close choice for them between Messrs Williams and Kenney.

The apparently odd notion that many of Philadelphia’s problems stem from Philadelphia’s poor leadership does not seem to have occurred to them. The apparently even odder notion that many of Philadelphia’s problems stem from Philadelphia’s leaderships leftist policies, well, they couldn’t say that, or they’d get another revolt among the #woke in their newsroom.[1]Apparently the idea of firing the forty employees who called out sick in protest, even though the inquirer could replace them all, within a day, from smaller newspapers across the country, is another … Continue reading

Mr Certaine continued, further down:

Why is it that the Kenney administration was not prepared for the uprising that occurred after George Floyd’s murder? Why aren’t questions being asked about preparedness in general? Why is the Fire Commissioner appointed as County Emergency Management Coordinator?

Why? I can answer that question, but the #woke won’t like it. The Kenney administration was not prepared because Mayor Kenney and his minions are far more concerned about leftist political positions than they are with protecting the city and its people.

The last Republican mayor of Philadelphia left office left office on January 7, 1952. Harry Truman was President at the time, and the last two Mayors, Mr Kenney and Michael Nutter, hadn’t been born yet! The City Council is controlled by Democrats, and the labor unions, and that has been the situation for decades. If the policies of the Democrats, if the policies of the liberals actually worked, Philadelphia ought to be an urban paradise, because the wicked ol’ reich-wing conservatives haven’t had any power to obstruct them.

Philadelphia is a disaster zone, a man-made disaster zone, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, because the voters of the city keep electing people who want to make the disaster even worse. Commissioner Outlaw is a convenient fall guy (fall gal?), but she’s still just a puppet.

References

References
↑1 Apparently the idea of firing the forty employees who called out sick in protest, even though the inquirer could replace them all, within a day, from smaller newspapers across the country, is another apparently odd notion which never occurred to the editors. The idea of telling the Special Snowflakes™ to buck up and do their jobs, or they’d find someone who would, that, too, never seemed to happen.