Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Because Larry Krasner won’t put the bad guys in jail, the decent people of Philly are putting themselves behind bars

Ho hum, another Friday night, and more gunfire in the City of Brotherly Love. As we noted here, Thye Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jenice Armstrong lamented that “if (Kasheeda) Jones had been white, and driving a minivan, her death could be national — or even international — news. But in Philly, it was just another Friday night.”

Well, last Friday night’s shooting is big news, because a Philadelphia Police officer was shot. Fortunately, he was not killed, and the punk who shot him is now laying on a slab at the morgue.

Philly police officer shot and suspect killed after ‘scuffle’ erupts in corner store

The shooting happened around 8:45 p.m. inside a store at the corner of North Mascher and West Cambria Streets. Police were searching for a man who they said picked up the suspect’s gun and fled.

by Robert Moran | Friday, January 26, 2024 | 9:23 PM EST | Updated: 11:49 PM EST

A police officer was shot Friday night in the Fairhill section of North Philadelphia and the suspected shooter was killed by the officer’s partner during a confrontation inside a neighborhood store, police said.

The shooting happened around 8:45 p.m. inside the store at the intersection of North Mascher and West Cambria Streets.

The “store” at the intersection? Google Maps Streetscape shows us this “store,” and it calls itself the Jennifer Tavern, with a nice picture of a frothy mug and “Ice Cold Beer” in snow-capped letters. A photo in the Inquirer’s story shows the same place, if less clearly.

“Shots fired! Shots fired!” an officer told police dispatchers, then reported that an officer was down.

The injured police officer, who was not identified, was transported to Temple University Hospital, where he was reported in stable condition with two gunshots to the right thigh, Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel said at a news briefing around 11 p.m. outside the hospital.

The suspected shooter also was transported to Temple and was pronounced dead, Bethel said. . . . .

Said a visibly angry Bethel: ”I’ve been here too many times. It is unacceptable.”

That statement, along with the newspaper’s photo of the Commissioner, reminded me eerily of very similar pictures of then-Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, saying the same things after yet another police officer had been shot. Fortunately, this officer will survive.

A Philadelphia crime blogger who goes by the amusing Twitter handle Stinky Feat has looked up the dead punk’s rap sheets, and posted a long series showing how the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating and criminal fellating loving District Attorney, Larry Krasner, and his minions in the District Attorney’s office gave extremely lenient breaks to a persistent criminal and felon, including a 3-to-23 month sentence, immediately paroled, which would, had he actually served it, kept the criminal behind bars through March of this year. Instead of looking forward to getting out in a month or so, he’s now laying on the slab in the morgue.

Did the soft-hearted and soft-headed Mr Krasner really do this punk any favors? I will admit to having snarkily tweeted that we just didn’t understand and appreciate what a super-genius the District Attorney is, with his incredible policy of getting the bad guys killed and thus off the streets without the good taxpayers of the Keystone State having to provide them with three hots and a cot for years on end.

2800 block North Mascher Street, via Google Streetscapes. Click to enlarge.

While others are looking at the thug now assuming room temperature’s criminal record, I have been looking at things in a different manner: I looked at the neighborhood. The 2800 block of North Mascher Street shows older Philly rowhomes, many with metal bars on first-floor windows and front doors, in the Fairhill neighborhood, in what the Inquirer was very upset is called the Philadelphia Badlands. The people there have, in effect, put themselves in jail to try to protect themselves from the criminals who Mr Krasner has not and will not put behind bars.

The 28-year-old felon who will now never turn 29 has a criminal record dating at least as far back as New Year’s Eve of 2015, when he was just 20; if he had a juvenile record, that is sealed. And if perhaps not this particular person having now gone to his eternal reward — I do not know if he lived in the Badlands personally — the city has allowed enough people who do terrorize the decent folks in Philly to push themselves into living behind bars themselves.

2818 North Mascher Street.

This is 2818 North Mascher Street. Would you want to live in this house, in a neighborhood so bad that the owners had to build themselves a jail cell? Zillow shows nearby 2845 North Mascher Street, which does need interior work, currently for sale, for a whopping $74,500. There are a lot of similarly-priced homes in the neighborhood.

New Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins expressed her outrage at the shooting, and she has promised to clean up nearby Kensington of its junkies and open-air drug market, and while Kensington is the most infamous of the bad areas — though not actually in the Badlands definition — the problems are far more widespread. The problem is the culture in these areas, a culture which doesn’t seriously educate kids growing up to be decent, law-abiding citizens. The left want to blame it on poverty, but I grew up poor, too, and I didn’t knock over liquor stores or shoot up bars and bodegas. And is it’s too late for that won’t-reach-29-years-old punk, law enforcement, strict law enforcement, has to be part of the solution. Philly needs to start showing kids growing up that they’re more likely to end up behind bars if they break the law than Mr Krasner is willing to put them.

And that’s the sad part: because of lenient treatment, because Mr Krasner and his minions don’t want to put the bad guys behind bars, the decent residents have felt the need to do it to themselves.

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You have been taxed to help kill Americans!

Is it any surprise, any surprise at all, that the United Nations agency which has been ‘helping’ the Arabs in Gaza would ‘help’ Hamas in their October 7th attack on Israel? These idiots dedicated relief workers live among the ‘Palestinians,’ are sympathetic to them, probably sleep with some of the Gazans, and are exposed to the same propaganda that the Islamist radicals spread throughout Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

U.N. agency in Gaza fires employees over alleged involvement in Oct. 7 attack

By Geoff Brumfiel | Friday, January 26, 2024 | 2:17 PM EST

TEL AVIV, Israel — The main United Nations agency that provides aid to Palestinians in Gaza has fired multiple employees following allegations that they were involved in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed some 1,200 people in Israel.

“The Israeli Authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on 7 October,” said Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the U.N. agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees, in a statement.

“To protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay.”

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called for “an urgent investigation by UNRWA regarding the involvement of its employees in the terrorist events of 10/7.”

“It is important that UNRWA conduct a thorough internal inspection regarding the activities of Hamas and other terrorist elements in its ranks in order to ensure that the organization’s humanitarian activities are not abused,” it said in a statement.

Neither Israel nor the United Nations immediately provided further details on the allegations against the UNRWA employees. . . .

Twelve UNRWA employees were allegedly involved, according to the U.S. State Department, which also said it has temporarily paused additional funding for the U.N. agency “while we review these allegations and the steps the United Nations is taking to address them.”

Early reports had at least 29 Americans killed in the October 7 attack. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The White House said in mid-December that eight Americans, including three male soldiers, remained hostage, but later in the month, U.S. citizens Gad Haggai, 73 years old, and Judi Weinstein, 70, were declared dead. The husband and wife were killed on the day of the attack and their bodies were taken to Gaza and are still held by Hamas, a spokesman from their kibbutz said.

Also see: David T Cloft, “The Enduring Legacy of Judeo-Christian Values in the Western World“

In other words, workers for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, used dollars provided by the United States and American taxpayers to kill and capture American citizens.

But let’s be honest here: Hamas are able to exist because the surrounding population support them, support them with food, clothing, shelter, water, and concealment. That’s no surprise: every army or guerrilla group do the same thing, depending upon civilian support. And that means that all American dollars sent to UNRWA have gone in at least some respects to support Hamas. You have been taxed to help kill Americans!

The United Nations were formed by the Western democracies, by the nations which enjoyed the fruits and ethics and morality of Western civilization, in the aftermath of World War II, but other than our Security Council voting status, the vast majority of the UN member nations are not Western democracies, and want no part of — save our economic largesse — Western civilization.

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Sorry, Sarah Jones, but journalism really is a business just like any other You just aren't the super-duper special person you think your are

The serious layoffs at the Los Angeles Times have other journolists — The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. — up in arms, not in the least part because they are seriously worried about being the next victims themselves.

Billionaires Are Journalism’s False Saviors

by Sarah Jones | Wednesday, January 24, 2024

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times announced that it would lay off at least 115 journalists, 20 percent of the newsroom. The cuts would have been larger were it not for the newspaper’s union, which fought back and walked out of the office for one day last week in protest. The cuts follow a previous round of layoffs last June, meaning the Times has lost around one-third of its staff in under a year. The same day, Time announced cuts of its own. Condé Nast was already on the way to cutting 5 percent of its workforce when also on Tuesday, members of the company’s union walked out after the company proposed significant layoffs and downsized its original severance offer. Earlier, Univision announced significant cuts and the company that owns Sports Illustrated laid off most, perhaps all, unionized staff, which could kill the storied magazine. The Washington Post slashed its newsroom late last year. Journalism’s fate was never assured, but now it looks bleaker every year.

Many of these companies had been purchased by billionaires who struck an altruistic pose. At one time, they said they believed in journalism, not the bottom line. When billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the L.A. Times in 2018, he “knew in my heart of hearts” that “we need to protect the newsroom … I came in there with an inner belief it’s all or nothing,” he said in 2021. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in part because it’s an “important institution,” the New York Times recently noted. “I said to myself, ‘If this were a financially upside-down salty snack food company, the answer would be no,’” he told the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., in 2018. Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder of Salesforce, told CNBC in 2019 that he bought Time to address “a crisis of trust.” He added that his magazine “can be a steward of trust … It’s one of the core values of Time: trust, impact, the core magazine itself, and that it’s about equality.”

Now altruism has worn thin. Plain business interests are taking over, and media workers are feeling the blow. The implications for them — and the public — are devastating. “In 20 years you truly will not be able to believe anything that you see or hear online — which will be the only place you see or hear things,” Jack Crosbie wrote at Discourse Blog. “Every person trying to learn more about the world around them will be forced to navigate a chaotic ecosystem of rage and deceit in search of one of the few honest or good-faith news-providers that still exist. Almost all of us will fail at this.” Billionaires aren’t rescuing journalism. They’re a threat to it.

A threat to journalism? If Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong hadn’t bought the Los Angeles Times, would that newspaper even exist today? If Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com, hadn’t bought The Washington Post when the Graham family realized that they had to sell, would the Post exist today, and if so, in what form?

Dr Soon-Shiong is a billionaire, but not one of the super, super wealthy ones: with a guesstinated net worth of ‘just’ $5.4 billion, his family and he can’t keep just taking $50 million a year losses in keeping the Times afloat forever. Mr Bezos, on the other hand, is worth something on the order of $180.0 billion, so yeah, he could absorb, the Post’s losses more easily, at least if his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez doesn’t demand too many more ridiculous mansions and yachts, but even he has been demanding that his newspaper do something really radical like start to break even.

But here’s the part that Sarah Jones, the New York Magazine author of the cited article, just doesn’t quite understand: these august newspapers, both considered one of America’s five “newspapers of record,” were losing money before the billionaires bought them. It isn’t Mr Bezos’ or Dr Soon-Shiong’s fault that they are losing money!

Miss Jones lamented that, “Plain business interests are taking over,” as though newspapers are somehow not businesses like any other. Yeah, I know: a lot of credentialed media people, basing their view on the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press, somehow think that they are not just special, but super-duper special, but, just like every other business, they have to produce a product that other people are willing to buy. And newspapers, facing the competition of a mostly free internet, have not been producing a product that enough people have been willing to shell out their hard-earned money to buy.

That’s partly because their greatness is a myth. In Soon-Shiong’s case, his business acumen was always a little unclear. He bought a controlling stake in Verity Health System, a California-based hospital chain, in 2017. He told employees he “was the last owner we were going to have,” Politico reported a year later, not long after the hospital chain announced it was in serious debt. It soon declared bankruptcy. “A big, rude awakening, from ‘I’m the savior’ to, ‘Maybe I’m going to keep my promise to you, maybe not,’” one hospital executive told Politico. There are troubling parallels to his management of the Times. He staffed up, expressing major national ambition. Workers are paying for the failure of his ambition.

Really? So Miss Jones is telling us that more journalists had jobs at the Times for awhile, because of Dr Soon-Shiong’s ambitions, but, Alas! his reach was greater than his grasp, and he just couldn’t realize his dreams. Where would the 115 laid-off staff have been during the last several years if he had not bought the Times? Baristas, anyone?

The situation is revelatory. Media layoffs tell us something about an owner’s business prowess, but they also show bigger forces at work. Though companies say layoffs are business decisions, there is an ideology underneath the jargon. Owners like Soon-Shiong sound noble at first, but ultimately they prioritize profit over the public interest. Their goals, then, are at odds with the purpose of journalism. Media workers can’t serve the public if there are no opportunities for them to do so. By cutting jobs in journalism, the ruling class cedes ground to the rabid right-wing media — whose benefactors are committed to an ideological project. The prospect of an emboldened right wing and a corresponding reduction in reputable news sources does not trouble them nearly as much as the loss of profit.

That Miss Jones is a fairly far left liberal is obvious from her article list on New York Magazine. But this site has expended considerable bandwidth on documenting how The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and a clearly left-oriented publication, has continually censored information that just didn’t fit Teh Narrative.

I’ve quoted more of Miss Jones’ article than I’d like, but there’s one more sentence from her concluding paragraph that deserves some real attention:

Journalism doesn’t function like a traditional business, nor should it; its objective isn’t profit but service.

Lots of businesses provide services: cleaning services, financial services, medicine. Miss Jones apparently believes that journalism is somehow different, and deserves your fealty and respect, perhaps more than roofers or concrete finishers or garbagemen. But her take on the difference raises the obvious question: if “journalism doesn’t function like a traditional business,” how can it be supported? Who pays the journalists — and sadly, journolists — if it’s not a business?

The answer is that journalism always has been a business, with reporters being paid, and printing presses run, by ordinary people subscribing to the newspapers and paying good money to consume the journalists’ product. Now? Print journalists are finding that fewer people are willing to shell out good money for their product when there are so many free sources of information on that internet thingy that Al Gore invented. I’m not a subscriber to New York Magazine, but found her article thanks to a tweet from someone I do not follow, but a couple of the other people I do follow, follow! That’s all thanks to another billionaire, Elon Musk, net worth $204.3 billion. Who would have even seen what she wrote, other than subscribers, without Mr Musk providing Twitter — I refuse to call it “X”! — for free?

I haven’t seen the calls yet, though it’s very possible that I have just missed them, for the government to subsidize or pay for, or even own, the newspaper industry. With Miss Jones most certainly not the only Democrat with a byline, as Robert Stacy McCain would call them, who believes that journalists are somehow special, somehow members of an elite and should-be-protected class, I expect such calls to be made.

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Look to your own house!

Let’s tell the truth here: most people at least occasionally complain about their employers and “those idiots up there,” their bosses. It’s just that when professional journalists do it, they get to combitch — not a typo, but a Picoism — about it to a wider audience.

Jenice Armstrong is a fairly privileged person, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and she has just complained about a lack of media coverage over the killing of a black mother of four in the City of Brotherly Love.

A mother of four got killed. It should have been big news.

If Kasheeda Jones had been white, and driving a minivan, her death could be national — or even international — news. But in Philly, it was just another Friday night.

by Jenice Armstrong | Thursday, January 25, 2024 | 7:00 AM EST

Kasheeda Jones’ life revolved around her close-knit family.

A 2004 honors graduate of University City High School, she briefly attended Cheyney University, hoping to become a TV weather personality, but left for financial reasons. Eventually, she became a corrections officer like her mother and worked in the prison system for 15 years. Along the way, she had four daughters — now ages 15, 12, 6, and 3 — and purchased a three-bedroom rowhouse on Gilbert Street in East Mount Airy.

A few paragraphs omitted here.

Kasheeda Jones was shot that night (November 17, 2023) on the 800 block of West Venango and transported by a private vehicle to Temple University Hospital, where she died. No arrests have been made, and police have no suspects.

I bet most people reading this right now didn’t hear about Jones’ death.

What happened to her went largely unnoticed outside of her wide circle of family and friends. News coverage of her killing was cursory — a couple of brief mentions in local outlets, nothing more.

It was that last paragraph which got me to fisk Miss Armstrong’s column, because neither of the two media stories the columnist referenced were in her own newspaper. A site search of the Inquirer’s website for “Kasheeda Jones” returned only Miss Armstrong’s column; there wasn’t a single news story on her killing which identified the victim by name. The columnist was right, at least as far as I am concerned: I didn’t hear about Mrs Jones death because the newspaper to which I pay $285.40 per year for a digital subscription didn’t cover it!

In something that absolutely pegs the irony meter, Miss Armstrong, who just hyperlinked Fox 29 News’ coverage of Mrs Jones murder, complained herself that Fox 29’s and reporter Steve Keeley’s coverage of crime “is disturbing.”

Don’t tell me that it’s a terrible wrong that Mrs Jones’ murder didn’t receive more attention from the media when you have combitched that someone else’s crime coverage is too strong or blatant or “disturbing.”

One wonders about WHYY’s Cherri Gregg’s statement that “it is not good reporting to simply repeat police accounts/ narratives, center reporting on an alleged suspect,” when that is exactly what most Philadelphia Inquirer crime reporting — when they report on it at all — is, as I have documented here and here and here. The Inky’s own Helen Ubiñas noted the same thing, in December of 2020, though apparently before publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ edict that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization,” and the paper ceased noting the race of suspects and victims. Miss Hughes declared that the Inky was a “white newspaper” in a “black city”, and our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, serving the nation’s sixth largest city — my good friend, the Inky’s editorial writer Danial Pearson claims Philly is fifth largest because Phoenix cheats on its population numbers — and seventh largest metropolitan area, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, which frequently reports on “gun violence” in general, couldn’t be bothered to cover Mrs Jones’ murder . . . or at least didn’t want to publish it.

It matters, also, that if Jones had been white, and driving a minivan, her death could be national — or even international — news. But in Philly, it was just another Friday night.

In this, Miss Armstrong was absolutely correct. The newspaper had plenty of coverage in the senseless murder of Everett Beauregard, a white Temple grad, the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s five separate stories, a whole lot more than the two or three paragraphs most victims get. There was the murder of Samuel Collington, a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. The Inquirer then published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. The Inquirer even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

We previously reported on the tremendous coverage of the murder of white homosexual activist Josh Kruger, while the killings of four “nobodies” were ignored.

We have noted, really too many times to note all of them, that The Philadelphia Inquirer is not really concerned about individual homicides in the City of Brotherly Love unless an ‘innocent,’ someone already of some note, or a cute little white girl is the victim. On Monday morning, it was reported that Josh Kruger, a freelance journalist of at least some note in Philly was murdered, which we noted here, and the left in Philly — Rue Landau, Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing, Jordan Winkler, Mayor Jim Kenney, the Liberty City Dems, state Senator Nikil Saval, The New York Times, WPVI-TV, Inquirer editorial writer Daniel Pearson, CNN, Taj Magruder, Maggie Hart, and an untold number of other people are all mourning his death.

Yet what about the three people murdered early this morning, along with a fourth person critically wounded, in the Crascentville section of the city, and the ‘person of interest’ suspected in the killings? They are, as far as the media have told us thus far, not ‘somebodies,’ and there are few tweets about them, few messages I have seen, and, as far as I can tell, other than friends and family, nobody f(ornicating) cares. Mayor Kenney has said nothing about those four people, whom I assume to be black from this photo in the Inky. Mr Kruger was white.

Of course, the coverage of Mr Kruger’s murder dried up quickly after it was reported that Mr Kruger’s alleged killer, Robert Davis, said that he had been in a sexual relationship with Mr Kruger when he was only 15 years old, while Mr Kruger was 35. Once the story got into that politically incorrect accusation, everybody clammed up.

As a Black journalist, I’ve heard the complaint many times: that the media don’t cover the deaths of people of color with the same ferocity as they cover the deaths of white people. Many African Americans have a negative view of the media, according to a study released by the Pew Research Center. Unequal coverage is one of the reasons.

Well, guess what? This site, The First Street Journal, has been “cover(ing) the deaths of people of color with the same ferocity as we cover the deaths of white people,” and I’m a libertarian, conservative white guy. Then again, our ‘angle’ is that credentialed journolists — the spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity — are hiding news that doesn’t fit Teh Narrative.

Thankfully, some Black journalists are trying to change that. Recently, members of the newly formed Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists met at The Inquirer to discuss the Pew findings and what can be done about them. It was hard to hear because many of us have devoted our entire careers to helping our newsrooms do a better job covering African Americans. Things have gotten better, but so much still needs to be done — not that Black people expect much to change anytime soon. Nothing was resolved that night, besides renewing our commitment to helping the industry right itself.

And therein we find the problem: much of the news about black Americans in general, and black Philadelphians more particularly, falls into categories that the politically correct coverage of the Inquirer doesn’t want to touch. Reporting on Mrs Jones’ murder would have exposed the fact that the victim was black, and the most frequent assumption that a black woman murdered in Franklinville, an area near the Philadelphia Badlands, will have been killed by another black person. Publisher Elizabeth Hughes said that the newspaper was going to be very careful in its coverage of crime, in its efforts to be an “anti-racist news organization,” would be “Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media,” which is the very thing which has kept stories on things such as Mrs Jones’ murder out of the Inquirer.

To Miss Armstrong I say: look to your own house! Don’t complain about the lack of coverage on a black mother of four in Philadelphia when your own newspaper, the place at which you work, actively discourages reporting on such killings. And consider whether the newspaper’s own editorial philosophy really helps the people of Philadelphia, and the profession of journalism.

“

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The Los Angeles Times is on the road to failure If you give your potential customers less reason to buy your product, fewer people will buy your product!

As both of my long-time readers know, I love newspapers. I delivered the old Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader when I was in junior high and high school in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, I’ve read newspapers thoroughly, and, due to my seriously degraded hearing, I find it much easier to read the news than listen to it on television or radio.

Los Angeles County assistant district attorney Patrick Frey, who has been blogging as Patterico for a couple of decades now, has called the very liberally-oriented Los Angeles Times the Dog Trainer, as in the paper is fit only for getting your puppy to poop on it rather than the floor, and his site logo has a Los Angeles Dog Trainer newspaper declaring in its headline, “PATTERICO! Public Enemy #1”. He even had a category named Dog Trainer, though it hasn’t been added to since 2019. Maybe he got tired of reading it?

But this news saddens me:

L.A. Times to lay off at least 115 people in the newsroom

by Meg James | Tuesday, January 23, 2024 | 4:57 PM PST

The Los Angeles Times announced Tuesday that it was laying off at least 115 people — or more than 20% of the newsroom — in one of the largest workforce reductions in the history of the 142-year-old institution.

The move comes amid projections for another year of heavy losses for the newspaper.

The cuts were necessary because the paper could no longer lose $30 million to $40 million a year without making progress toward building higher readership that would bring in advertising and subscriptions to sustain the organization, said the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.

And herein is the problem. Unlike Jeff Bezos, the multi, multi, multi billionaire founder of Amazon.com, with an estimated net worth of $180.0 billion, who bought and rescued The Washington Post for $250 million, Dr Soon-Shiong has a guesstimated net worth of a mere $5.4 billion. Mr Bezos, who is now demanding that the Post find a way to break even, could easily absorb the losses the Post has been experiencing — assuming that his new girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, doesn’t want a new mansion or yacht — but perhaps Dr Soon-Shiong doesn’t believe that he can.

It’s great when multi-billionaires buy a newspaper, as long as they don’t turn it into their personal toys, and are willing to accept the inevitable, that it’s going to keep losing money. If I had Mr Bezos’ money, I’d buy The Philadelphia Inquirer, and rescue it, make some changes to make it more even handed, but otherwise leave it alone, and accept the inevitable losses.

Perhaps I’m just projecting, but my thought is that calling a one-day strike to protest anticipated layoffs is a good way to put yourself on that layoff list, but hey, the Times employees are free people, and can do what they want. Some are now very free people! The chairman of the Times guild unit, Brian Contreras, is one of those newly freed people.

Among the editors included in the cuts were Washington bureau chief Kimbriell Kelly, deputy Washington bureau chief Nick Baumann, business editor Jeff Bercovici, books editor Boris Kachka and music editor Craig Marks. The Washington bureau and the photography and sports departments saw dramatic cuts, including several award-winning photographers. The video unit was hollowed out.

The Los Angeles Times is listed by Wikipedia as one of the five “newspapers of record” in the United States, which makes this news sadder still. But things like this are going to happen as newspapers respond to increased costs by lowering quality. The Times found out:

Soon-Shiong said he became increasingly dismayed by the lack of progress in readership and other decisions, such as last summer’s elimination of the print edition’s sports listings and box scores, which infuriated readers, leading to thousands of subscription cancellations.

“I was very upset when I learned, after the fact, that we took away sports scores,” Soon-Shiong said.

Really? Did he then reverse that decision?

Also see: Charlotte Klein in Vanity Fair, “‘People Are Disgus-ted’: Why Washington Post Staff Walked Out“

The Los Angeles Times is going to go broke, because Dr Soon-Shiong is doing the same thing again, writ larger. A reduction of “more than 20% of the newsroom” has to mean a cut in the quantity and quality of the newspaper’s journalism, unless someone wishes to contend that those 115 people being given their pink slips contributed nothing to the quality of the product. If elimination of the print edition’s sports listings and box scores — something I would point out to Executive Editor Richard Green that the Lexington Herald-Leader, which is heavily dependent upon University of Kentucky sports fans has also done — cost the newspaper “thousands of subscription cancellations,” how many more will subscriptions will be lost with 115 journalists laid off, which follows 70 getting canned last summer because the paper just isn’t worth that much to them?

Newspapers are, in the end, 18th century technology, updated with better presses and color photos, but still printed on paper with news that’s already old when it gets to readers. We have previously noted the decision of the Inquirer to sell its own $299.5 million printing plant for just $37 million, laying off 500 people, and the Herald-Leader’s similar action, outsourcing printing from downtown Lexington to outside of Louisville, which made the newspaper an hour older when delivered to readers, because the printing plant is a hour up Interstate 64. Then, later, the newspaper switched to having the dead trees edition printed in Knoxville, Tennessee, resulting in a print deadline in the early afternoon the day before!

The Times’ original stated:

Drastic changes were needed, (Dr Soon-Shiong) said, including installing new leaders who would focus on strengthening the outlet’s journalism to become indispensable to more readers.

Yet Tuesday’s actions are making the newspaper less “indispensable” to more readers. If you give potential customers less reason to buy your product, fewer people will buy your product. And that’s just what today’s newspapers are doing.

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The uselessness of the death penalty in Pennsylvania

I get it: the family are outraged at the murder of Temple University Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, but let’s tell the truth here: a death sentence in Pennsylvania is virtually meaningless.

Family of slain Temple Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald seeks the death penalty for his alleged killer

“It meets every threshold of the death penalty,” Joel Fitzgerald said of the crime.

by Ellie Rushing | Tuesday, January 23, 2024 | 11:35 AM EST | Updated: 1:21 PM EST

The family of slain Temple University Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, who authorities say was shot and killed by 18-year-old Miles Pfeffer last year, said Tuesday that Pfeffer should be sentenced to death if convicted.

Shortly after seeing Pfeffer in court for the first time since his arrest 11 months ago, Fitzgerald’s family gathered outside the courthouse and called on District Attorney Larry Krasner to seek the death penalty in the case.

“What we’d like to see is this person to go through the pain that our son went through, to go through the suffering that our family is going through,” Joel Fitzgerald, a former Philadelphia police officer, said of his son’s alleged killer.

Well, that will never happen. Even if executed, the current method is lethal injection, where the Commonwealth would put condemned men to sleep like an unwanted kitten in the shelter; they aren’t going to shoot him and let him bleed to death. Mr Pfeffer’s family might suffer as the Fitzgerald family have, but they’ll suffer just as much if their precious baby boy is locked behind bars for the rest of his miserable life.

“It meets every threshold of the death penalty,” he said. “We’ll be waiting with bated breath to hear from the district attorney to see what they decide.”

Ellie Rushing of The Philadelphia Inquirer has already told us the answer the Fitzgerald family will almost certainly receive:

Krasner has long said he opposes the death penalty, and last year — just two days before Fitzgerald was killed — Gov. Josh Shapiro said the death penalty should be abolished in Pennsylvania.

The Governor does not have the authority to commute a death sentence on his own; he has to receive a recommendation for clemency from the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute a sentence or pardon a crime. Yet, despite a current death row population of 127 souls, no one has actually been executed this century.

There have been three executions in the Keystone State since the restoration of capital punishment, two in 1995 and one in 1999, but look at the chart: all three were what the Death Penalty Information Center labels “volunteers,” men who voluntarily dropped all of their appeals just to get it all over. Even if Larry Krasner did press for a death sentence, which he will almost certainly do not do, and even if Governor Shapiro signed a death warrant, which he has said he will not do, Mr Pfeffer, if convicted and sentenced to death would have an uncounted number of appeals. I’d point out here that Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican, signed almost fifty death warrants during his four years in office, 2011 through 2015, but not a single one was carried out.

So, what’s the purpose of sentencing a man to death when everyone knows it won’t be carried out? It’s better to sentence Mr Pfeffer to life without the possibility of parole rather than set up a situation in which he has dozens and dozens of appeals, drawing out any possible execution for decades, costing the Commonwealth untold thousands of dollars in additional expenses, and bringing Mr Pfeffer a little more publicity every time his appeal goes to court. Realistically, it’s better to just let him languish in prison for the rest of his miserable life, as forgotten by almost everyone as he can be.

Marissa Fitzgerald and her mother- and father-in-law said they were upset that the preliminary hearing had been delayed four times, something they said was a “privilege” extended to Pfeffer.

All four rescheduled appearances were requested by Pfeffer’s defense lawyers, not prosecutors. Joel Fitzgerald said prosecutors should have pushed for an earlier hearing.

The newspaper article noted that Mr Pfeffer has been jailed without bail since his capture at Riverside Correctional Facility, so it’s not as though he gained any real benefit. But in a murder case like this one, judges are going to be extremely careful not to do anything which would be grounds for appeal.

If Mr Pfeffer really is the murderer, he’s unlikely to see the sky as a free man again.

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Awww, what a shame this is! Democratic Socialists of America go all in on their support for Hamas, and donations dry up.

One thing to remember: those who are marching in support of the ‘Palestinians’ and Hamas tend to be younger, and poorer, and are usually not the kind of people who contribute to candidates and political organizations. Had I actually thought about this before, I would have guessed it, but now that it’s been brought to my attention, I do have a smile on my face while I type and drink my coffee.

From National Review:

Democratic Socialists of America in ‘Financial Crisis’ following Brash Support for Hamas

by Haley Strack | Monday, January 22, 2024 | 8:53 AM EST

The Democratic Socialists of America are in a “financial crisis” that will require seven-figure budget cuts and staff layoffs to correct.

News of the DSA’s financial condition surfaced as the group leads anti-Israel protests nationwide; including a pro-Hamas rally held in New York just one day after Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

“The current deficit will force us to make 7-figure budget cuts. This will require us to make painful decisions that will impact all levels of the organization. … Given our current financial state, we do not believe we can have a healthy, democratic, and effective organization while spending the amount we currently do on staff,” Alex Pellitteri, Kristin Schall, and Laura Wadlin, members of the DSA 2023-2025 National Political Committee, wrote in a proposal published last week.

For those of you who might be stymied by National Review’s paywall, you can read it for free here.

Awww, I just can’t put into words how saddened I am that the DSA will have less money to spend on trying to destroy the United States. And it pegs the irony meter that the Democratic Socialists are being hit hard by the capitalist economy. 🙂 As the New York Post’s Carl Campanile put it:

The situation appears to be a case of an organization that blindly seeks utopia and professes support of the working class clashing with reality — forcing it to have to balance a budget like the rest of America and even contemplate layoffs hated by labor unions.

Further down:

Many American progressives believe that DSA has abandoned its domestic political commitments to go all in on the pro-Palestinian cause, executive director Zioness Amanda Berman, told the New York Post.

On the matter of Israel, DSA dissented from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Senator Bernie Sanders (D., Vt.), two of the country’s most prominent progressives, in the days following Hamas’s attack. Instead of condemning the mass rape and murder of Israelis, as Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders did in October, the DSA said on October 7 that “today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime—a regime that receives billions in funding from the United States.”

“After Hamas’s brutal invasion of Israel on October 7, DSA doubled down on their strategy of going deep and long on antisemitism, thinking it might get them out of the hole,” Berman said. “Instead, this depraved idea dug them even deeper. True progressives, whether in the grassroots or in political leadership, will continue rejecting this extremist group and its hateful ideas in the name of true justice and equity, including for Jewish Americans.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain, “Democratic Socialists of America Now Planning Layoffs Amid Financial ‘Crisis’“

American Jews tend to be politically liberal and are overwhelmingly Democratic voters:

  1. Jewish adults are more likely to identify as Democrats (50%) than Republican (17%) and are more liberal in their political views (43%) than conservative (22%).
  2. Compared to the overall US electorate, Jewish adults are more likely to be Democrats (50% versus 31%) and liberal (43% versus 26%).
  3. When including independents and Others who lean toward the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, the disparity in party affiliation between Jewish adults and all US adults increases. Sixty-three percent of Jewish adults identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, compared to less than half (45%) of US adults.
  4. Among age groups, Gen Z Jewish adults include the lowest percentage of Democratic identification (43%) and the highest percentage of independents (43%). When including Democratic/Republican leaning, a greater percentage of Gen Z adults identify as Democrats or lean Democratic (65%) compared to older Jewish adults (61%).
  5. Jewish women identify as Democrats or lean Democratic at a greater percentage than Jewish men, similar to the pattern among all US adults, though to a larger degree.
  6. For both Jewish adults and all US adults, those with a college degree have higher rates of liberal identification and are more likely to identify as Democrats or lean Democratic.
  7. Just over one third of Hispanic and Black/other non-Hispanic Jewish adults identify as liberal, though 70-80% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic.

Look at that fourth numbered bullet point: the very group on which the DSA depend most philosophically are also the group which identify less with a political party have the lowest percentage affiliation with political groups. And the DSA have just trashed their brand with other liberals. Why it’s almost as though the baristas living ten to a two-bedroom fifth-floor walkup on 96th Street and the unemployed gamers and incels living in their parents’ basements spend their allowances on things other than political contributions.

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No one wants to live next door to a landfill

I have long said that the conquering Israelis should have expelled every last Arab from the territories they conquered in the Six-Day War of 1967. It would have been a horrible humanitarian disaster, but such would have left the Jewish State with shortened, more defensible borders, and the displaced Arabs would not have been living under Israeli occupation. If Israel was not willing to expel the Arabs, then they should have just annexed what they wanted — primarily all of Jerusalem, the eastern part of which was under Jordanian control prior to the war — and left the Arabs to live in their own state in 1967.

The Israelis somehow thought that the Arabs would slowly emigrate, rather than live under occupation, but in that, they forgot Jewish history, how very few Jews fled Europe even faced with pogroms, discrimination, murders, and even the Third Reich. We’ve all heard about the Jewish refugee ship, the MS St Louis, turned away from ports in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, but out of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany, the ship carried only 937 passengers. Most European Jews thought that they could ride out the storm of Naziism, with some casualties, but mostly their communities and their people would survive intact. It was simply outside their paradigm that the Nazis really did intend to kill them all.

Knowing that part of their history, the Israelis of the late 1960s should have realized that the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs could, and probably would, do the same thing, try to ride out the storm at anchor.

From The Atlantic:

Some Palestinians Want to Leave Gaza. Let Them.

No one should be trapped in a war zone.

by Joshua Krug | Monday, January 22, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST

Recently, I reached out to a prominent Palestinian activist to learn about his experiences in Gaza since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. He told me that his apartment had been destroyed, and that he lives in a tent with his family. They are under the near-constant threat of bombings, are often hungry, and are worried about starvation and sickness. He wants to leave the enclave—but right now, he can’t.

Several other Palestinians I’ve talked with also want to leave Gaza, and have also encountered closed borders. They of course want the violence to stop, and do not want to be permanently shut out. But above all, they want to be safe. (And I have withheld their names to protect their safety.)

An article in The Guardian this month featured a U.K.-based Palestinian who said his family members were killed in Israeli air strikes and echoed the above sentiments: “I’m not sure why no schemes have been introduced, nothing to evacuate people. I don’t even hear humanitarians talk about this any more.”

Alas! The Atlantic now requires readers to either subscribe or “start a free trial”. Fortunately, the article is also in my msn.com, and can be read for free here.

I am an American Jewish academic based in Germany, and I oppose the forced relocation of Palestinians from their land. Gaza is central to Palestinian history, and I would like people there to survive and thrive right where they are. Still, life—rather than land—should be the ultimate value, a simple fact often lost in the heated debates around the current conflict. I hear calls for a cease-fire and for the surrender of Hamas, but almost never for a safe path out of an active war zone. Palestinians deserve a state of their own, and the opportunity to take refuge outside a war zone rather than serve as martyrs for “the cause.”

There are never calls for “a safe path out of an active war zone” because none of the neighboring nations want the ‘Palestinians.’ Letting the ‘Palestinians’ leave concomitantly means having a place for them to go, and none of their neighbors want people they consider to be murderous trash living in their countries.

The Six-Day War is within living memory in the Arab states, but so is Black September. ‘Palestinian’ guerrilla fighters under Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization escaped east of the river into Jordan used the Hashemite Kingdom as a base to attack Israel, but their presence and politics were leading them into calling for the overthrow of Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy and King Hussein. Finally, open warfare broke out between the PLO and Jordanian forces.

Jordan and the other Arab nations get it: admitting large numbers of ‘Palestinians’ means a very probable eventual attempt to overthrow their governments.

Egypt says a mass exodus from Gaza would bring Hamas or other Palestinian militants onto its soil. That might be destabilizing in Sinai, where Egypt’s military fought for years against Islamic militants and at one point accused Hamas of backing them.

Egypt has backed Israel’s blockade of Gaza since Hamas took over in the territory in 2007, tightly controlling the entry of materials and the passage of civilians back and forth. It also destroyed the network of tunnels under the border that Hamas and other Palestinians used to smuggle goods into Gaza.

With the Sinai insurgency largely put down, “Cairo does not want to have a new security problem on its hands in this problematic region,” (Riccardo Fabiani, Crisis Group International’s North Africa Project Director) said.

(Egyptian President Abdel Fattah) el-Sissi warned of an even more destabilizing scenario: the wrecking of Egypt and Israel’s 1979 peace deal. He said that with the presence of Palestinian militants, Sinai “would become a base for attacks on Israel. Israel would have the right to defend itself … and would strike Egyptian territory.”

“The peace which we have achieved would vanish from our hands,” he said, “all for the sake of the idea of eliminating the Palestinian cause.”

President el-Sissi regards Hamas as just another part of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical group Egypt has long attempted to suppress.

The ‘Palestinians’ have created trouble wherever they’ve gone, and the other Arab nations really want no part of them; to put it bluntly, they see the ‘Palestinians’ as trash. And nobody wants to live next to a landfill.

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Homeless People Are Dangerous

I’m adapting the title of this article from Robert Stacy McCain’s series “Crazy People Are Dangerous,” because the ‘suspect’ in this case almost certainly is crazy. Really, don’t you have to be a bit nuts to pull out a knife and start stabbing someone else?

Philly DA charges man with assault for stabbing in SEPTA’s 15th Street Station

Jason Howard, 33, was charged with aggravated assault and related crimes for allegedly stabbing another man around 4 a.m. Thursday.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Friday, January 19, 2024 | 2:58 PM EST

A 33-year-old man who authorities say stabbed a man in the back multiple times in the 15th Street SEPTA subway station on Thursday morning has been charged with aggravated assault and related crimes.

Jason Howard attacked the 28-year-old victim after a confrontation around 4 a.m., a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office said Friday.

Both men were experiencing homelessness and likely taking shelter in the subway station when they apparently got into an argument and Howard pulled out a knife, authorities said.

I do so love the newspaper’s stylebook, which tells us that both the victim and (alleged) perpetrator were “experiencing homelessness,” rather than just saying that they are homeless. CBS News tells us that they were “unhoused.”

The following video report is from Fox 29 News, because The Philadelphia Inquirer would never, ever publish photos or other material which would show the image of the suspect!

Police reviewed surveillance footage and a SEPTA police officer later spotted Howard at the station, wearing the same clothing as the assailant in the video, as he stepped off a train on the Market-Frankford Line, said SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch. Philadelphia police arrested Howard on the 1500 block of Walnut Street shortly after, he said.

The Market-Frankford Line, huh? I’ve suggested before that it should be called the MF Line, because nothing good happens on it!

The Transit Police recovered a knife from the suspect, though it has not been reported whether that knife was the one which was used to stab the victim. Mr Howard is currently being held in lieu of $275,000 bail, something which a homeless man is unlikely to have or be able to raise.

We have previously noted that the city is far behind on its payments to privately-run homeless shelters, and it’s January, so yeah, the “unhoused” will seek shelter from the bitterly cold wind chills.

Former District Attorney Seth Williams tweeted, “Why drive when @SEPTA is so easy today! @SEPTAPHILLY“, and a lot of people replied with comments about how unsafe the system is. It wasn’t just this stabbing; Tyshaun Welles, an apparently good kid, was killed at the very same SEPTA station, allegedly by Quadir Humphrey, who just started shooting, apparently not aiming specifically at young Mr Welles, but just because he’s a thug with a criminal history who decided to be stupid.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a federal government agency that, with a name like that, shows how serious the problems are just by its existence, reported that, in 2022, 21% of “individuals experiencing homelessness” reported having a serious mental illness, and 16% reported having a substance use disorder. They also reported a 16% increase in “individuals experiencing chronic homelessness between 2020 and 2022,” which tells us just how much President Biden’s claims that the economy is doing just great are lies.

Let’s be honest here: homeless people are dangerous! With a (probably underestimated) 21% being seriously mentally ill and others besides that 21% — though there is certainly some overlap in these percentages — being alcoholics and junkies, that’s a lot of people you do not want to be around.

This is serious stuff. New Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins has promised to clean up the blatantly public drug market and the homeless encampments in Kensington, but that leads to the obvious question: if she kicks the homeless out of their camps, where will they go? One of the obvious answers is that they’ll go into the SEPTA train and subway stations!

Mrs Mullins is absolutely right: Kensington has to be cleaned up, but it’s not just that neighborhood. Kensington’s Allegheny Station is right along the MF Line, and the junkies will go where they know.

SEPTA needs increased ridership, and a $1.00 fare increase, to pay its bills and a city concerned about ‘climate change’ wants more Philadelphians to use public transportation, but Philly can’t get there if SEPTA stations become nothing but shelters for homeless junkies and crazy people. Over seventy years of unbroken Democratic Party and trade union rule has turned the City of Brotherly Love into what it is today. Mrs Mullins should be given a chance to do what she promised, but the problems in Philly are far greater than anyone is willing to admit.