The Biden Administration and the global warming climate change activists want to force all new vehicles sold in the United States to be zero-emission come 2035, because they believe that our personal choices don’t matter, but even now they are pushing plug-in electrics, seemingly unconcerned with the possible drawbacks. From Fox Business:
Electric buses are sitting unused in cities across the US; here’s why
Cities coast-to-coast grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed
We have previously reported on how some media organizations deliberately conceal facts about the sexual abuse of minors, but at least noted that now-convicted former teacher and coach April Bradford at least got some/i> time behind bars, though 3½ years seems awfully light for having sexually abused two female students, including during the students’ middle school years, aged under 14-years-old.
Well, 3½ years is more than no prison time at all!
NJ teacher who had illicit sexual relationship with student avoids prison time after ex-pupils sent court letters of support
By David Propper | Monday, January 29, 2024 | 8:19 AM EST
A New Jersey teacher who had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old female student evaded prison time last week after her former students sent letters of support to the court ahead of her sentencing.
Unlike so many media organizations, the New York Post did not conceal that the sexual relationship was homosexual in nature. Grooming, anyone?
Ex-Fair Lawn High School graphics arts teacher Christine Knudsen was placed under lifetime parole supervision and forced to register as a sex offender, but won’t see a day behind bars if she doesn’t violate the terms of the sentencing, according to the Bergen Record.
She’s also reportedly prohibited from having any contact with her victim as part of a three-year suspended sentence tied to her illicit sexual relationship with the teenage student that lasted nearly a year in 2017.
The relationship was technically legal because the victim was the age of consent, but for the sentencing, the student was considered a child, the local newspaper reported.
Am I an [insert slang term for the anus here] for suggesting that any school district which hires a teacher with tattoos like that ought to be liable for that teacher’s crimes?
“Parents send their kids to school every day, trusting they will be safe in the care of their teachers,” Bergen County Judge Nina Remson said Wednesday, according to the outlet. “And there is a very strong need to deter not only Ms. Knudsen, but all citizens from violations of the law, especially in this nature involving a breach of trust between the teacher and the student.”
I would point out here that Miss Knudsen is listed in other sources — the Post did not include this — as being 46 years old, and when the abuse occurred in 2017, would have been 39 years-old. This isn’t some Romeo and Juliet type age difference, but Josh Kruger/Robert Davis level stuff.
Knudsen pleaded guilty in July to reckless endangerment after she was initially charged with sexual assault in 2021. She met the victim when the student joined the school’s drama club, which she advised, the Record reported.
The former educator’s lawyer in court last week blamed multiple troubles in her life, including substance abuse, for the inappropriate relationship.
“(S)ubstance abuse”? Is Miss Knudsen an alcoholic, or was she using stuff for which she could and should have been drug tested? Shouldn’t all teachers be subject to routine drug testing?
Knudsen, who taught for two decades, had a positive influence on her classes, according to letters of support from ex-students, Assistant Prosecutor Stephen Bollenbach said, though he pointed out the relationship with the victim violated the trust between educator and pupil.
He described the plea deal as “justice tempered with mercy.”
Yeah, uh huh, right. It certainly is not justice tempered with deterrence!
Of course, there probably is some deterrence there, because who would think that a 39-year-old male teacher who seduced a 17-year-old female student would just get probation?
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.
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.
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:
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
“
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“
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.
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.
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’“
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.
