Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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Hold them accountable! The good old boys’ network strikes again

I have frequently called out The Philadelphia Inquirer for poor reporting, so it is only fair when I note when they do good journalism.

The quiet handling of rape allegations at two Philly health institutions

How Jefferson and Rothman dealt with an alleged sexual assault involving an orthopedic surgeon and a medical resident.

by Wendy Ruderman | Monday, May 8, 2023

It was almost midnight and Jessica Phillips, a doctor training in orthopedic surgery, was one of the few guests remaining at a pool party that surgeon John Abraham hosted each summer for Thomas Jefferson University medical residents at his nine-bedroom Main Line home.

Phillips sat in an Adirondack-style chair by a stone fire pit with Abraham, a (Thomas) Jefferson (University) professor and division chief at the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, a private practice whose physicians work at the university’s hospitals.

The band had packed up, and caterers had cleared the wine glasses and plates smeared with cocktail sauce. Abraham handed her a lit Cuban cigar. She later remembered being so drunk she dropped it on her pants.

The medical resident remembered little else afterward. In flashes, while in and out of consciousness, she recalled Abraham on top of her on the ornate rug in his library. She awoke in his bedroom naked and bruised, she later told multiple investigators.

In Abraham’s recollection, Phillips pulled him on top of her on the library floor, court records show, while his judgment was impaired by alcohol. Nonetheless, in a text message sent to his boss after the party, Abraham acknowledged it was “unethical” to have sex with a medical resident.

It’s a very long story, and there’s a lot of he said/she said in it. Both physicians were intoxicated, both married, though Dr Abraham, then 43-years-old, was going through a divorce, and neither was really capable of consent. As her supervisor, Dr Abraham was contractually barred from a sexual relationship with a subordinate. An investigation resulted in no criminal charges. This is being made public because both Dr Abraham and Dr Phillips are suing.

The events of the June 2018 party spurred three separate investigations and three lawsuits – all now rolling back the confidentiality that usually cloaks how major institutions handle sexual misconduct claims. The cases chronicle sex, power and money in the male-dominated world of orthopedic surgery.

Both Phillips and Abraham say they were victims. They blame Jefferson and Rothman for protecting their institutional interests despite federal regulations that are supposed to ensure sexual assault cases are dealt with fairly.

Ahhh, yes, “protecting their institutional interests”. That’s what “institutions” do!

Jefferson used the threat of federal reporting requirements to force Abraham out of its hospitals while evading formal reports that would let other institutions know what happened.

Then Jefferson’s and Rothman’s leadership brokered a deal that avoided a sexual misconduct hearing and ultimately closed an investigation opened under the federal Title IX law prohibiting sex-based discrimination.

Rothman’s all-male board of directors decided not to fire Abraham. Instead, they restricted him from working in Jefferson’s hospitals or interacting with Jefferson residents. Eventually, they moved him to a hospital network not affiliated with Jefferson in New Jersey.

I remember when then-District Attorney Seth Williams went hard after Monsignor William Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s supervisor of priest assignments, who was convicted on one of two counts of child endangerment for “knowingly placing minors in danger when he reassigned troubled priests to parishes where they would have access to children.” Msgr Lynn wound up serving almost three years of his three-to-six year sentence, when his conviction was overturned, twice actually, for Mr Williams and Judge Teresa Sarmina misapplying the law.

So, with all of this, why isn’t current Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner going after Thomas Jefferson University and the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute for doing what is a very similar thing? According to the Inquirer, Rothman basically moved Dr Abraham to someplace where his conduct wasn’t widely known, and to a hospital network outside of their control . . . and their liability.

Amid investigations by the university and Rothman, Abraham said, a Jefferson top doctor offered him a deal in a private conversation: Take a voluntary leave, and we won’t report the alleged sexual misconduct.

Congress generally expects health institutions employing doctors accused of wrongdoing to file a report into the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), a federal tracking system.

Hospitals must query the data bank before credentialing a newly hired doctor to ensure that the person hasn’t gotten into trouble elsewhere. Data bank reports also go to state licensing boards.

In court depositions, Abraham recalled getting a phone call from Edmund Pribitkin, chief physician and executive vice president of Jefferson Health, telling him that he had to take an immediate leave of absence from Jefferson.

If he didn’t do as told, Pribitkin said, the sexual assault allegations would go before the hospital’s medical executive committee and they’d likely have to report him to the NPDB, according to Abraham.

So, Rothman essentially blackmailed Dr Abraham into taking an immediate leave, by saying that the Institute would commit a crime by not reporting the sexual assault allegations. Perhaps it’s not just the District Attorney who needs to look into this, but the United States Attorney as well, given that this is an allegation of violation of federal law.

There’s a lot more information at the Inky’s original, and it’s not limited to subscribers, though if you access more than a few articles a month, the paywall does come down.

As a Mass-every-Sunday Catholic, I was very disappointed with the allegations against Msgr Lynn. At most, I saw what he was alleged to have done as a crime by Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, but when this became a criminal case, the Cardinal, by then retired, 88-years-old, and suffering from cancer and dementia, couldn’t be tried. Early in the trial, Judge Sarmina ruled that Cardinal Bevilacqua was able and competent to give testimony as a witness in the case, but just two days after her ruling, the Cardinal died in his sleep. But while Mr Williams and Judge Sarmina misapplied the law as it stood, which resulted in an unfair, and eventually reversed, conviction, the point that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia shuffled around offending priests to keep them from being defrocked or, worse, charged, tried, and convicted in sexual abuse cases was a valid one. Supervisory officials such as then Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, who was responsible for oversight of the campus police department, were all held accountable for covering up former Assistant Football Coach Jerry Sandusky’s rape of a young boy, though they were incarcerated for just a couple of months each.

The Inquirer’s story is the first step, and now law enforcement needs to look into this case. Yeah, there are some wealthy and powerful interests involved here, people able to pay for major league legal help, but the potential prosecution has plenty of money as well. Hold them accountable, and maybe some other good old boys network will think twice before covering up things.

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Danielle Outlaw will probably fire another good cop

To be a Philly cop, you must be politically correct and like totally #woke!

A Philly detective who handles sex crimes is under investigation for allegedly posting crude tweets about women, police say

Ron Kahlan’s account often tweeted vulgar sexual innuendo and used boorish language. Internal Affairs is investigating, police said.

by Chris Palmer and Ellie Rushing | Sunday, May 7, 2023 | 4:21 _PM EDT

A detective in the Philadelphia Police Department’s special victims unit who is assigned to investigate sex crimes is under internal investigation for a series of offensive tweets posted on his account over the years, including a number of crude sexual remarks about women.

“The only reason [I’m] watching the Phils now is because [of] the hot chick behind the on-deck circle!!!” read a tweet posted on Ron Kahlan’s Twitter page in 2012. That post was among the tamest of the tweets Kahlan allegedly wrote that were shared Saturday by an Instagram account called WatchOutPhilly.

In 2012? Holy calculator, Batman, that was 11 years ago! More, it was the latest of the tweets shown in the links; all of the rest pictured are dated in 2011.

In others, Kahlan’s account replied to pages such as “@ILikeGirlsDaily” with vulgar sexual innuendo and boorish language.

Many of the tweets in question were from 2011 or 2012, according to an Inquirer review. In more recent years, Kahlan’s account — which used the handle “@rkppd” — tended to comment instead on politics, often by making disparaging remarks about Democrats, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs.

If you read the entire article, you will note that nowhere in it is any contention that he wrote in any way differently about male Democrats. And the Inky’s story does not indicate any of the social media activities “with vulgar sexual innuendo and boorish language” occurred later than 2012.

In February, his account re-tweeted a post from another account asking if Christine Blasey Ford — the woman who accused then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault — should be arrested.

So, he didn’t write it himself, but retweeted someone else. And a lot people have thought that Dr Ford’s completely unsubstantiated allegations, in an attempt to deny Justice Kavanaugh confirmation, should entail some consequences for her, especially given that Mr Kavanaugh had actually kept detailed engagement calendars from the time, and none indicated that he ever attended the event Dr Ford alleged that he did. Why shouldn’t Dr Ford’s false allegations subject her to some negative consequences?

The Inquirer continues to note that the case has been turned over to Internal Affairs.

Many of the tweets on Kahlan’s page were crude, including comments about woman’s appearances and vulgar descriptions of sex acts.

Shockingly, it appears that Detective Kahlan is a normal male, attracted to women. No wonder the left are appalled!

You know what else isn’t in there? There are no allegations that the Detective unjustifiably threw any cases.

Kahlan, a 24-year veteran of the force, is not the first Philadelphia officer to come under scrutiny for his social media presence. In 2019, advocates with the Plain View Project published a database of racist or offensive Facebook posts or comments made by hundreds of city cops.

The Police Department went on to fire 15 officers and discipline dozens of others for what they wrote, an unprecedented undertaking. Still, some officers have since won their jobs back in arbitration proceedings mandated under the city’s contract with the police union.

So, the city engaged in a rush to judgement, and had to reinstate some of the officers.

Clearly, the standard is that a Philadelphia police officer must have zero social media presence, unless all of his postings are either innocuous things about birthdays and puppies and kittens, or politically support Democrats. I’m pretty sure that if Detective Kahlan had tweeted “Helen Gym is very attractive,” it would have been acceptable.

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In trying to avoid calling street gangs gangs, The Philadelphia Inquirer has again beclowned itself.

We have frequently mocked, as have others, when we were reliably informed by what I have frequently referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups.” Somehow, some way, the #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading publisher and editors and journolists[3]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 … Continue reading at our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper just can’t bring themselves to say the word “gang.”

And here they go again!

West Philly street group members charged with three shootings, including two homicides

The investigation follows a December bust by the District Attorney’s Office’s Gun Violence Task Force

by Jesse Bunch and Ellie Rushing | Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Philadelphia law enforcement officials on Tuesday announced the arrests of four people affiliated with West Philadelphia street groups who they say are responsible for committing multiple shootings in 2021 that left two people dead.

The District Attorney’s Office, following an investigation that took longer than a year, said it has charged four people connected with the street groups known as “56st” and “524″ for their roles in the shooting deaths of two people in Southwest Philadelphia, as well as shootings that injured three others.

Roderick Williams, 23, faces charges of murder, attempted murder, and firearms violations in the shooting death of 21-year-old Michael Mines in April 2021, said Jeffrey Palmer, assistant supervisor of the District Attorney’s Office’s Gun Violence Task Force.

Williams is affiliated with “56st,” Palmer said, a group based in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood that also goes by “Christy Rec,” a reference to the nearby recreation center.

There’s more at the original.

The Inky’s original was 693 words long, in which I counted 11 uses of the word ‘group’ or ‘groups,’ and no use at all of the words ‘gang’ or ‘gangs.’ The previous Inquirer article linked in the blurb also used the words ‘group’ and ‘groups,’ but, in the sixth paragraph down, did use the description “rival gang”, almost certainly for prosaic reasons, since reporters Rodrigo Torrejón and Ellie Rushing used the word group earlier in the same sentence.

One wonders if they got the backs of their hands smacked by Inquirer Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar. 🙂

Of course, the Inky, which publisher Elizabeth Hughes promised to make an “anti-racist news organization,” is very, very worried about anything which could cast doubt on that:

A group of Black community advocates criticized a recent Inquirer investigation as racist and harmful

Advocates said the story perpetuated unfair stereotypes. The Inquirer’s editor said “the goal here was to bring a serious issue to light, and the story has done that.”

by Chris Palmer | Monday, May 1, 2023

A group of prominent Black community advocates gathered Monday to criticize a recent Inquirer investigation into how the city awarded millions in anti-violence grants as racist and harmful, calling it an unfair portrayal of the difficult work advocates have long been performing in communities suffering from high rates of gunfire.

Speaking at a news conference in North Philadelphia, Reuben Jones, executive director of the nonprofit Frontline Dads, said the story — which found that a city-run grant program had invested in some community nonprofits without budgets, employees, or directors — perpetuated racist stereotypes, including the notion that Black people from poor neighborhoods can’t be trusted to responsibly manage taxpayer money.

Standing before a group of about two dozen other advocates, Jones said: “These are the community members that represent healing … in the community that you don’t respect, that you don’t value, that you don’t trust.”

There’s more at the original, but the Inky’s story was basically pointing out that several — not all — of the organizations granted the funds did not have the kind of internal organizational structure which allowed either efficient spending or responsible reporting of expenditures.

But the city’s grant program (with administrative costs it totaled $22 million) was also marked by a politicized selection process that flushed millions of dollars into nascent nonprofits unprepared to manage the money — resulting in millions of dollars left unspent and tens of thousands unaccounted for, an Inquirer investigation has found.

Is that racist?

Speakers at Monday’s news conference defended the work that many grassroots organizations do, saying many have provided services for years without any outside funding or recognition. They said advocates frequently have to adjust tactics or spending to respond to the needs of participants, many of whom are difficult to reach — and that their groups should not be criticized for having to change course.

Holston was among the speakers who said the city needs to distribute more funding to grassroots organizations led by Black men and women. He added that critical reporting could make that more difficult to achieve.

“Do not bash the city for actually doing what we asked: To be creative and take a risk in the middle of an emergency. That’s what they’re supposed to do,” Holston said. “When you bash them like that, we can’t get them to do that again.”

You know what wasn’t in the article? There were no claims that the investigative article by the Inquirer actually got anything wrong, just that it was harmful for the newspaper to actually investigate the subject. But the Inky was worried enough that the top editor, Mr Escobar, felt the need to respond, something he rarely does.

So, if simply questioning what a civic organization does with government money is racist, I have to ask the next question: is referring to gangs, the word most people would use, racist, so racist that the Inky has to use the awkward formulation “street groups”? It’s not as though readers don’t know that the newspaper is referring to gangs.

Do the editors and journolists of the Inquirer simply assume that all readers will see the word ‘gang’ and read ‘black’? It’s not like all gangs are black gangs, but perhaps the denizens of the newsroom believe that they are.

In striving to become an “anti-racist news organization,” the Inquirer has beclowned itself. The vast majority of readers would have seen nothing special about the words ‘gang’ or ‘gangs,’ but the newspaper went through the blatantly obvious verbal contortions in a way which makes readers pay attention to the awkward phraseology, something which can only lead readers to do the opposite of what the Inky is trying to do, downplay the notions of gangs.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑3 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.
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It was never about tolerance; it was always about forced acceptance

We first mentioned Dylan Mulvaney a month ago, when, as Robert Stacy McCain put it, “satire is rapidly becoming impossible because reality has gotten so weird.” Since then, two well-paid executives accepting his ‘reality’ have managed to get themselves fired “leaves of absence“.

Mr Mulvaney managed to keep his mouth shut for a while, as someone told him he realized that opening it would not help his cause.

Well, he’s talking again, but it isn’t helping his case. According to Mr Mulvaney, I should be in jail!

What did he say?

The articles written about me using ‘he’ pronouns and calling me a man over and over again, and I feel like that should be illegal, I, I don’t know, that’s just bad journalism.

He may rest assured, while I always referred to him as male and use the masculine pronouns, I have never called him a man. Nevertheless, Mr Mulvaney believes that “should be illegal.” I’m not certain under what existing laws he believes that it “should be illegal,” or whether he believes that a new law should be passed to make it so, but I’m pretty solidly in favor of this one:

The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.

You’ve heard of the First Amendment, right? That pesky part of the Constitution of the United States which states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What Mr Mulvaney doesn’t seem to understand is that the First Amendment protects his right to claim that he’s actually a girl, or to say that he believes it should be illegal for [insert plural slang term for the anus here] like me to refer to him in ways which do not accept his claim that he’s really a woman. I absolutely support his right to say what he wishes, but I also have the right to say that I believe anyone who accepts what he has said as somehow truthful is dumb as a box of rocks.

Naturally, the vast majority of the professional media have been using Mr Mulvaney’s preferred terms, and, as we have previously reported, The Philadelphia Inquirer decided to double down with a fluff piece on Will Thomas, the male former University of Pennsylvania swimmer who decided that he was really a woman, and was calling himself “Lia.” The credentialed media have been quite diligent in their attempts to ‘normalize’ the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

That wasn’t all Mr Mulvaney had to say. This is from the HuffPost, so naturally it’s all favorable to him!

Dylan Mulvaney Breaks Silence In Wake Of Bud Light Partnership Backlash

Story by Ben Blanchet • Friday, April 28, 2023

Dylan Mulvaney said she (sic) has struggled to understand “the need to dehumanize and be cruel” following right-wing outrage over her partnership with Bud Light earlier this month. . . . .

Mulvaney, in her (sic) first TikTok in roughly three weeks, said some of what’s “been said” about her (sic) has been far from the truth and revealed that she’s been “having crazy deja vu” after facing criticism.

“I’m an adult, I’m 26 and throughout childhood I was called too feminine and over-the-top and here I am now being called all those same things but this time it’s from other adults,” said Mulvaney, who later quipped that she (sic) should be accused of being a theater person who is camp.

Well, that last is true enough: he is a “theater person who is ‘camp’.” His schtick is over-the-top campiness, and a total parody of how real girls act, yet he doesn’t seem to see how the whole thing makes him wholly unbelievable, and actually hurts people who are ‘transgender’ and are simply trying to fit in to society as they see themselves. Making a spectacle of yourself hardly seems to be trying to fit in.

If that’s all it was, no one would really care. But the left are pushing laws which require other people to go along with a ‘transgendered’ person’s faux name and requested pronouns and honorifics, some of which have passed, subjecting employers to hostile workplace violations if an employee refuses to lie about another employee’s sex, and can even fine businesses if an employee ‘misgenders’ or ‘deadnames’ a customer.

Translation: at least in New York City, the truth will set you free . . . from your job.

As Erick Erickson put it, “You will be made to care.”

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The credentialed media don’t understand their home state! Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader is out of touch with Kentuckians

We have previously reported how the Lexington Herald-Leader, a McClatchy newspaper, follows the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and refrains from publishing the photos of black suspects and convicted criminals, and does not refer to race in its criminal reports, though somehow, photos of accused criminals who are white manage to make it into the newspaper.

So, imagine my surprise when reporters Taylor Six and Aaron Mudd wrote this line:

Connor Sturgeon, a white male who police said was live-streaming the shooting, was a former employee at Old National Bank, the site of Monday morning’s shooting.

Naturally, I took the screen shot of the sentence, before it vanishes into the ether.

Authorities identify former Old National Bank employee as Louisville shooter

by Taylor Six and Aaron Mudd | Monday, April 10, 2023 | 4:10 PM EDT | Updated: 9:52 PM EDT

Louisville Metro Police have identified a 25-year-old man as the shooter who killed five people and injured several others before he was fatally shot by police at a downtown bank Monday morning.

Connor Sturgeon, a white male who police said was live-streaming the shooting, was a former employee at Old National Bank, the site of Monday morning’s shooting.

The new details emerged during a Monday afternoon press conference attended by city officials and Gov. Andy Beshear, who said he’d lost a close friend in the shooting.

According to police, officers were dispatched to Old National Bank Monday morning for reports of an active shooter. When they arrived, the shooting was ongoing, but the shooter was reported dead soon after.

Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel named him Monday afternoon during a press conference. She said Sturgeon was formerly an employee with Old National Bank and assumed he was a Louisville resident.

According to the police chief, Sturgeon was killed by police gunfire. He was reported to have used a “rifle,” although police did not specifically state what type.

There’s a little more at the original, but nothing that hasn’t been all over the news. The story mentions that the killer was a “former” employee of the bank, but does not state what several other sources have, that he was discharged by the bank.

Naturally, the Herald-Leader’s primary columnist wants gun control:

After Louisville shooting, it’s time to get out our bullhorns. We’re sick of gun deaths. | Opinion

by Linda Blackford | Monday, April 10, 2023 | 12:28 PM EDT

Have we had enough yet?

Exactly two weeks after a deranged shooter killed six people in Nashville, three of them precious, innocent children, a deranged shooter killed four people in Louisville (the shooter also died), and sent eight more to the hospital.

Also see: William Teach, “Gun Grabbers Push Gun Grabbing Immediately After Leftist Nutjob Kills People“

There have been 131 mass shootings — defined as more than four people dead or injured — THIS YEAR alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Almost 10,000 people have died from guns since Jan. 1.

Today made 132. The archive updated its numbers as police gave their final reports.

A tsunami of “thoughts and prayers” from politicians will now roll down, hoping to drown us in distraction from the fact that they could stop this if they wanted to.

If we made them.

After several more paragraphs blaming “the guns,” Mrs Blackford comes up with a statement she has made before, and one she knows is a lie:

But once again, gerrymandered political districts do not represent the will of the people, who are sick of seeing people, children, die for nothing but a perverted misunderstanding of our founding fathers.

“Gerrymandered”? In 2020, Republicans dramatically increased their number of seats in the Kentucky General Assembly, from 61-39 in the state House of Representatives to 75-25, and in the state Senate from 28-10 to 30-8. But those gains happened under the district lines passed following the 2010 Census, when Democrats controlled the state House, and a Democrat was Governor. Republicans did not take over control of teh state House until after the 2016 elections; they did previously control the state Senate, including prior to the reapportionment.

Republicans did increase their seats in the 2022 election, up to 80-20 in the House and 31-7 in the Senate. Interestingly enough, the Democrats never even fielded candidates in 44 of the House districts, so there was no way they could even think about regaining control. In my own district, no serious Democrat ran in the primary, and a perennial kook candidate won the nomination, a candidate so bad that the state Democratic Party disavowed him.

Is there gerrymandering? In 2020, President Trump received 1,326,646 votes from Kentuckians, 62.09% of the total, while Joe Biden got only 772,474, or 36.15%. President Teump carried 118 out of the Commonwealth’s 120 counties, losing only Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington). In the same election, Senator Mitch McConnell won 1,233,315 votes, 57.76%, while his well-funded Democrat opponent, Amy McGrath Henderson received only 816,257, 38.23%. Mrs Henderson carried only three counties, Jefferson, Fayette, and Franklin, which included the state capitol of Frankfort.

In 2022, Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican, won 913,326 votes, 61.80%, to Democrat Charles Booker’s 564,311 votes, 38.19%.

Those were statewide elections, which means there was no gerrymandering possible. Mrs Blackford might argue gerrymandering at the margins of the 2022 General Assembly races, but a difference of two or three would hardly matter against the GOP’s overwhelming majorities.

Mrs Blackford called the Commonwealth’s gun laws “a perverted misunderstanding of our founding fathers,” but that completely ignores history. When what became the Second Amendment was written, it was by the generation which had just won a revolution against Great Britain. In 1775, the military Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Gage, had ordered gun control himself, ordering the confiscation of firearms and ammunition from the wretched colonials. It was to seize reported storehouses of gunpowder and ammunition that General Gage sent the redcoats to Lexington and Concord, resulting in the shot heard ’round the world, and the first battles in our revolution. Does Mrs Blackford seriously believe that the revolutionaries who began that war fighting against gun control by the British would not have meant for individuals to have the right to keep and bear arms.

In 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, many Americans lived on or very near the frontier. Does Mrs Blackford believe that the “founding fathers” would have thought the government could ban individuals from owning firearms when they had to hunt for game to put meat on the table, and be able to defend themselves from the Indian tribes? Does Mrs Blackford believe that when her home state of Kentucky was settled by white families, that the “founding fathers” would have believed it acceptable for the government to have the authority to ban individual ownership of firearms when the settlers needed to hunt for food and defend themselves from the Cherokee and Shawnee Indians who already lived here?

There were no telephones in the late 18th century, and homesteads could be pretty far apart. There were no police departments on the frontier. The first organized, publicly-funded professional full-time police forces in the United States were established in Boston in 1838, New York in 1844, and Philadelphia in 1854. If a bad guy was raiding a homestead, would the “founding fathers” have thought that the government could ban the private ownership of firearms by individuals, leaving them unable to defend themselves?

Mrs Blackford’s biography says that she “writes columns and commentary for the Herald-Leader. She has covered K-12, higher education and other topics for the past 20 years at the Herald-Leader.” Twenty years, huh? That means entirely in the 21st century, on computers and word processors, exercising her freedom of speech and of the press via giant printing presses and an internet which allows distribution of her words widely across the Herald-Leader’s service area, which is central and eastern Kentucky, and even around the world if someone chooses to search. These are certainly things of which the “founding fathers’ had no concept! If we were to accept the columnist’s ideas that the “founding fathers” certainly never meant for the Second Amendment to cover what it covers today, then wouldn’t we also have to say that the First Amendment does not cover more than a megaphone or a hand-set newspaper printed entirely by manual labor?

We have previously documented the newspaper’s endorsement history, and how the voters of the sixth congressional district and the commonwealth as a whole almost always vote the opposite from how what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal want.

When I moved away from the Bluegrass State at the end of 1984, the Herald-Leader was a broadsheet publication, and if not the size of Louisville’s Courier-Journal or The Philadelphia Inquirer, still a reasonable newspaper for central and eastern Kentucky. I used to deliver the old morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in Mt Sterling, and when I returned to the Bluegrass State in 2017, I could see just how far downhill the newspaper had gone. Just a few pages, no longer a broadsheet, and visibly on its last legs. That, too, is freedom of speech and of the press, as, presented with the other news alternatives of television and radio and the internet, the people of the newspaper’s service area have chosen against it.

Perhaps that is why Mrs Blackford personally, and the newspaper’s editors in general, have lost touch with what used to be their service area. They now reflect only the opinions of the state’s second-largest city, and while it’s a significant voting block, it isn’t the majority of even the sixth congressional district. Mrs Blackford may blame it all on gerrymandering, but it’s the newspaper and her which are out of touch with Kentuckians, not the state legislature.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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The left keep making excuses for other leftists who kill.

Democrats in the United States have been very much in favor of enforcing the law when it came to the protests which occurred on January 6, 2021. The federal Department of Justice has charged nearly a thousand people with crimes over a rowdy demonstration, and The Washington Post reported that Attorney General Merrick Garland — who absolutely hates Republicans for denying him a Supreme Court seat — is looking at charges for perhaps another thousand people. What my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal has been very much supportive of charging the Capitol kerfufflers as seriously as possible, even though the actual guilty pleas have been for a single, relatively minor misdemeanor count, 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(G), Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building; the penalty for which is a misdemeanor conviction punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 or up to six months in prison, or both.

But it seems as though the Herald-Leader is actually quite supportive of breaking the law when it comes to something the editors support:

Civil disobedience is now required to fight gun violence and protect our most vulnerable | Opinion

by Fenton Johnson[1] | Thursday, April 6, 2023 | 11:00 AM EDT | updated: Friday, April 7, 2023 | 9:35 AM EDT

The moment I read that the Nashville school shooter was a woman whom the police indicated was being “treated for a mental disorder,” I wrote an email to a friend in Kentucky, like Tennessee a state where a Republican supermajority legislature is waging war on trans children and their parents. “I find myself wondering,” I wrote, “if the ‘mental disorder’ with which the killer was being treated was some kind of gender nonconformity issue, conscious or otherwise. So much mental illness resides there, and may have been triggered, to use the word of the day, by the Tennessee legislature’s actions against LGBT people.”

Really? It was reported almost immediately that Audrey Hale, the murderer — no need to used the qualifier “alleged,” since she was shot dead virtually in the act — was ‘transgendered,’ a woman claiming that she was really a man and calling herself “Aiden.” As we previously reported, with some confusion about Miss Hale’s status in the immediate aftermath, the professional media used some contorted language to avoid gendered pronouns or honorifics, to keep from getting them wrong.

Not that it mattered: “Gender identity advocates accused mainstream news outlets who scrambled to cover the story of ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ Hale by not referring to her as a man or as a transman.”

How did I know this before reading or hearing the news that Audrey Hale was in fact trans? Because I grew up in rural Kentucky in the 1950s, where I attended the most conservative of Roman Catholic grade schools. Shaming and corporal punishment were commonplace and sex was never spoken of because the priestly hierarchy understood that silence was its most powerful tool in protecting its power to abuse children and women.

LOL! I attended a public school in a small town in Kentucky, in the 1960s and very early 1970s, and sex was never spoken of by the teachers and administrators — it was spoken about plenty of times by the students! — because those subjects were simply not supposed to be part of the educational curriculum, and if they had been part, parents would have been very upset. Sex education was a subject for parents, not the public schools.

I who loved learning dreaded not the classroom, where I could sneak a look into the science and literature textbooks that we were often forbidden to read. Instead I dreaded the playground and my walks to and from school, where class bullies beat me up for walking like a woman. They would teach me to be a man like them — they would teach me violence. But I got lucky — I got a scholarship; I got out; I ran away, to San Francisco, to a place where I could heal my wounds, learn peace, and find the courage to come out as a gay man.

The playground and those walks home taught me that the loudest bullies had the most to protect. The meanest bullies were such cowards that they resorted to violence to mask their insecurities. They rushed to buy assault weapons.

Really? The “bullies” of the 1950s “rushed to buy assault weapons”?

Fifty years later, ex-Marine Senator J.D. Vance tweets that “giving into these ideas is dangerous,” as if gender identity is an “idea,” as if his toxic heterosexuality has not slaughtered countless women, children, and men across centuries of war, in the battlefields and in the streets and lanes. Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett implies that the solution is to lock our children up at home and go to the mats — an approach that has some merit, in that it allows loving and compassionate parents to protect their children from the likes of him and his ideologies.

When a homosexual male starts blabbering about “toxic heterosexuality,” you know that he’s pretty much losing it. 🙂

Audrey Hale’s powder keg of anger and self-loathing was prepared in the halls of the school where she acted out her despair on the terms established and promoted by the gun lovers. The leaders who in their public stances told her she was “dangerous” invited her to act out their accusation. That she did so on their terms and using their weapons of choice is a matter of cause and effect.

Oh, look! Fenton Johnson just ‘deadnamed‘ and ‘misgendered‘ Miss Johnson!

Americans live on sidewalks, migrants seeking asylum are murdered at our doors and in our streets, banks go under, our transportation infrastructure is in rotten shape, our students do not receive the literacy, skills, and moral compasses they need to become good and cheerful citizens. Our legislators’ response to these crises is to spend days debating drag performances while defending easy access to assault weapons. Beyond that, they say, they can do nothing.

The hour is here for peaceful civil disobedience, such as that practiced by Tennessee State Representative Gloria Johnson and over a thousand Nashville students, who are taking their case directly to the legislative halls in exercise of their constitutional rights, and whom the Republican supermajority is attempting to silence. As U.S. history teaches us, those who act from courage and compassion must be prepared to face the cowards with their guns. Better our aged bodies than those of our children.

Connor Sturgeon’s LinkedIn profile, screen captured before it could be deleted. Click to enlarge.

“Civil disobedience,” huh? Civil disobedience is defined as “active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government or other lawful authority.” Is Mr Johnson, and the Herald-Leader which chose to publish him, calling for breaking the law? The newspaper, at least, hasn’t been so charitable when it comes to the January 6 protesters, the vast majority of whom did nothing but march in the Capitol Building. Is Mr Johnson willing to go to jail, and be incarcerated amongst those “toxic(ly) heterosexual” other criminals?

Well, Connor Sturgeon, 25, just killed several people at Old National Bank, his employer, in Louisville, going to his eternal reward in the process. Will Mr Johnson “find myself wondering, if he had a ‘mental disorder’, or was perhaps homosexual or transgender, since the General Assembly recently overrode the Governor’s veto and passed Senate Bill 150, which prohibits hormone of surgical ‘transitioning’ of minors — they can do whatever fool thing they want once they turn 18 — and prohibits public school systems from requiring teachers and other employees from being required to go along with a ‘transgender’ student’s preferred name or pronouns? Mr Sturgeon did specify his ‘pronouns,’ “He/him” in his LinkedIn profile, though they only show up if you are logged in to LinkedIn, which I screen captured before it was deleted. Mr Johnson complained that “our students do not receive the literacy, skills, and moral compasses they need to become good and cheerful citizens,” but young Mr Sturgeon claimed that he had a Master of Science degree from the University of Alabama’s Manderson Graduate School of Business, and he had what would appear, from his job title, Syndications Associate and Portfolio Banker, to be a decently-paying job at Old National Bank.

Miss Hale and Mr Sturgeon were insane by any practical definition: both wanted to end it all, and both decided that suicide-by-cop and taking innocent people with them was a great, great way to make a splash as they departed our mortal vale. Anger over a legislative act does not somehow justify what Miss Hale, and perhaps Mr Johnson, did.

References

References
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The left really do hate Freedom of Speech and of The Press

As we have previously reported, the professional media can get very, very upset when other professional media members report things that do not fit Teh Narrative.

Admittedly, I was using the professional media in Philadelphia as my focus, as I frequently express my interest in our nation’s sixth-largest city. But it isn’t just Philly, as CNN is a national source.

Opinion: Why is ‘60 Minutes’ amplifying the views of Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Opinion by Dean Obeidallah | Updated Monday, April 3, 2323 | 8:26 AM EDT

Last year, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia spoke at a white nationalist event organized by Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes that caused Republican leaders to denounce her.

Last week, Greene’s Twitter account was temporarily suspended by the Elon Musk-headed platform over a tweet with a graphic referring to a “Trans Day of Vengeance,” as she denounced a planned transgender rights rally.

And come Tuesday, Greene has announced plans to protest in New York City when former President Donald Trump is expected to be arraigned on an indictment of more than 30 counts, calling the proceedings against him an “unconstitutional WITCH HUNT!”

I’m beginning to get the impression that Mr Obeidallah doesn’t like Mrs Greene very much!

So, who is Dean Obeidallah? The CNN article describes him as: “a former attorney, (and) is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show.” Follow him @DeanObeidallah@masto.ai. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.” So, he, too, is a member of the professional media.

But on Sunday, Greene was featured on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an interview the long-running show promoted on Twitter with the tease: “Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, nicknamed MTG, isn’t afraid to share her opinions, no matter how intense and in-your-face they are. She sits down with Lesley Stahl this Sunday on 60 Minutes.” The images attached to this tweet by “60 Minutes” include Greene and Stahl walking through the US Capitol, taking a stroll outside and Greene showing Stahl something on her phone.

In the segment that aired Sunday night, Stahl noted the congresswoman had moved from the fringe to the GOP’s front row in two years despite a “sharp tongue” and “some pretty radical views” as well as “over the top” comments such as “the Democrats are a party of pedophiles.” Stahl also referred to video of Greene chasing a Parkland, Florida, school shooting survivor, still maintaining that the 2020 election was stolen and failing to criticize Trump over spending. (The interview was conducted before news of his indictment.)

But Stahl didn’t mention Greene spoke at a white nationalist event a year ago while a member of Congress or her extreme anti-Muslim views and her defense of January 6 rioters.

That little related article reference above? I screen captured it, and put it in exactly the same place, and same size, it was on the CNN original. It references another opinion piece, this time by Jill Filipovic McCormick, another hard-left columnist, who wants Mrs Greene kicked out of Congress.

Mrs Greene, however, very well represents the views of her district, the 14th congressional district in Georgia. She won her primary elections easily, and the general election in 2020 by a massive landslide over Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal, 229,827 (74.7%) to 77,798 (25.3%). In 2022, she defeated Democrat Marcus Flowers 170,162 (65.86%) to 88,189 (34.14%). Mrs McCormick’s article was written a month after Mrs Greene’s re-election victory.

Criticism of CBS for amplifying Greene has been swift and well-deserved even before the program aired. Former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois tweeted beforehand: “Wow. Insane that 60 min would do this.” (Kinzinger is a CNN senior political commentator.)

Journalist Molly Jong-Fast also slammed “60 Minutes” with the tweet: “Attention is currency and 60 minutes is spending its currency on the Jewish space lasers woman.” (Jong-Fast was apparently referring to Greene’s past claim that a massive California wildfire was started by “a laser” beamed from space controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family.)

David Hogg, who survived the 2018 horrific school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland and has since become an activist against gun violence, responded, “I look forward to your questions about why she thinks school shootings are fake and why she’s supported QAnon.”

So, Mr Obeidallah listed a #NeverTrump Republican who has become a “CNN senior political commentator”, a liberal journolist[1]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 … Continue reading, and a left activist. Quite the sample size there!

The distinguished Mr Obeidallah is, as you would guess, a hard-left hater of Donald Trump, as the screen capture from his Mastodon to the right shows. It’s just natural that he would despise everything for which Mrs Greene stands. But there’s something which pegs the irony meter that someone who is purporting to be a journalist and opinion commentator, someone who exercises his Freedom of Speech and of the Press, attacking someone else being allowed to exercise her Freedom of Speech, and CNN’s Freedom of the Press for broadcasting her. Mrs Greene’s constituents knew what she is like, and they still gave her an almost two-to-one margin over her Democratic opponent in the last election, so perhaps, if Mr Obeidallah believes she is so utterly, utterly horrible, so many people in her district supported her.

Mr Obeidallah did note that CBS had previously broadcast interviews with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in a not-so-veiled attempt to lump Mrs Greene in with those thugs, but with Mrs Greene being a growing national figure, is covering her not actual news? But, as I’ve said before, journolists don’t really think the media should cover the news that they don’t like.

References

References
↑1 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.
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The laughable contortions taken by the professional media when a school shooter is #transgender Isn't simply reporting the truth much, much simpler?

It did not take long for the crazy person who shot up The Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a woman who killed three children and three adults, to be identified as transgender, a woman who decided that she was a man. Yet that news was primarily confined to Twitter and conservative sites; the professional media seemed reticent to acknowledge that part.

Finally, there was this, at 1:39 AM EDT this morning, in The New York Times:

There was confusion about the gender identity of the assailant in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Chief Drake said the shooter identified as transgender. Officials used “she” and “her” to refer to the shooter, but, according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, the shooter appeared to identify as male in recent months.

This was the sixth paragraph down. In what is even more amusing is that the article used some stilted prose, to refer to Miss Hale as “the shooter” or “the assailant,” and managed to not once refer to her with a gendered pronoun.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Nashville Shooter Left ‘Manifesto,’ Was ‘High-Functioning’ Autistic

A second Times story also managed to avoid using gendered pronouns or honorifics — like The First Street Journal, the Times uses honorifics, unlike the vast majority of publications — and had this paragraph:

In the aftermath of the shooting, there was confusion about the shooter’s gender identity. Chief Drake said the shooter identified as transgender, and officials used “she” and “her” to refer to the attacker. But according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, the shooter appeared to identify as male in recent months.

Not quite identical, but very close. The author of the second article, Adeel Hassan, was not one of the four listed authors, Emily Cochrane, Ben Shpigel, Michael Levenson and Jesus Jiménez, of the first one. The second article was time stamped at 6:57 AM EDT this morning.

The Washington Post, which does not use honorifics, gave slightly more information:

(John)Drake (chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department) said Hale was transgender. Asked if that had played a role in what he described as a “targeted attack,” Drake said it was part of the police investigation.

“There is some theory to that,” Drake said. But, he added, “We’re investigating all the leads, and once we know exactly, we will let you know.”

Don Aaron, a police spokesman, later clarified the chief’s remarks. “Audrey Hale is a biological woman who, on a social media profile, used male pronouns,” Aaron said in an email.

Not restrained by editorial policy specifying honorifics, the Post story frequently referred to the killer as “Hale”, so there were fewer references to “the shooter” or “the assailant.” Neither the Times nor the Post referred to “the killer.” But there was this highly amusing sentence as a stand-alone paragraph:

Police initially described Hale as appearing to be a teenager before revising the age upward to 28.

In any normal composition in English, that would be “revising her age” or “revising his age”. “(R)evising the age” is incredibly stilted.

The Philadelphia Inquirer simply had an Associated Press story by John Matisse, time stamped 2:34 PM EDT on Monday, which, starting on the fifth paragraph down, included:

Police gave unclear information on the gender of the shooter. For hours, police identified the shooter as a 28-year-old woman and eventually identified the person as Audrey Hale. Then at a late afternoon press conference, the police chief said that Hale was transgender. After the news conference, police spokesperson Don Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale currently identified.

Drake did not give a specific motive when asked by reporters but gave chilling examples of the shooter’s prior planning for the targeted attack.

“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” he said. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”

He said in an interview with NBC News that investigators believe Hale had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”

Like the other stories listed, the AP avoided any gendered pronouns in reference to Miss Hale. An updated version, this one in the Lexington Herald-Leader, time stamped at 7:19 AM on Tuesday, had the same paragraphs, and did the same as the Times, referring to “the shooter.”

The Wall Street Journal, which does use honorifics, had a somewhat briefer story, noted that the killer was transgender, but avoided any language which required honorifics or gendered pronouns, referring to “the shooter” and “the suspect.” The suspect? She’s stone-cold graveyard dead now, so unless there’s some chance that the police shot the wrong person, I believe we can avoid calling her “the suspect.”

These are the hoops through which the credentialed media are jumping to avoid “misgendering” someone. Our Stylebook, which specifies that, “Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth,” avoids that kind of confusion or stupid prose. Isn’t simply telling the truth much, much simpler?

Finally, my compliments to the police! Unlike the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, where the School Resource Officer, Scot Peterson, earned the epithet the “Coward of Broward“, by hiding outside while Nikolas Cruz was inside killing people, or the Uvalde school shooting, where armed responders waited for an hour while the carnage continued, because they were scared [insert vulgarity for feces here]less, Nashville Metropolitan Police received the call of an active shooter at 10:13 AM CST, and by 10:27 AM Miss Hale was dead.
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How stupid can they be? "Satire is rapidly becoming impossible because reality has gotten so weird."

There comes a point at which there is so much silliness, so much absolute stupidity, that my mind has to question just how much of this is real and how much is deliberate parody. As Robert Stacy McCain put it, “satire is rapidly becoming impossible because reality has gotten so weird.” When a ‘transgender woman’ claims that a Transportation Safety Administration agent yelled at ‘her’ for having a penis, “punched her in the testicles” at John F Kennedy Airport, and whined that “that her ‘balls still hurt so bad’,” what can you do but laugh?

“We apologize again for your experience,” the airport tweeted in response, according to the Daily Mail. “Your comments have been noted and shared.”

Well, that part isn’t laughable: the TSA is accepting the unnamed passenger’s complaints at face value, and accepting the notion that a woman can have a penis and testicles.

Then there’s Dylan Mulvaney, an (allegedly) ‘transgender woman,’ and his “Days of Girlhood,” in which Mr Mulvaney acts out his ‘transition.’ I say “acts out,” because it’s such a parody of actual girls that it’s difficult to take it as anything serious about how real girls behave, or even that a ‘transgender’ girl would think real girls behave. But President Biden was apparently taken in, as he met with Mr Mulvaney and “said that states had no right to restrict gender-affirming health care, including sex-change surgery and the prescription of hormone blockers.”

Of course, the states blocking “sex-change surgery and the prescription of hormone blockers” are only doing so for minors; adults can still do whatever silliness they want to their bodies, and some minors have been pushed into ‘sex changes’ well before they were of any reasonable age to have informed consent.

The amazing part is that much of the left have swallowed this, not just hook, line, and sinker, but past the rod-and-reel and up the arms of the ‘transgender’ fisherperson. It’s as though registering ‘Democrat’ has entailed swallowing a stupid pill which causes some people to lose that innate ability of every bird, every reptile, and every mammal, to be able to distinguish between males and females of their own species.