Category Archives: Law

Posted on by

“No one is above the law.” — Joe Biden Unless, of course, it's immigration law, and then our good friends on the left support breaking the law!

We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer’s radical left columnist Will Bunch was adamant in his support for legality, railing against President Trump’s pardon of the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers, even though the vast majority of them had already been punished, already served their sentences, his indignation over the United States sinking drug trafficking boats rather than arresting the drug traffickers, and, as we reported last June, his support for illegal immigrant and accused wife beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Mr Bunch even said that he did not “like” President Biden’s final flurry of pardons “at all,” though he claimed that “they were understandable” to protect critics of then-incoming President Trump. Clearly, Mr Bunch believed the Democrats mantra of “no one is above the law,” used when they were trying to throw Mr Trump in prison.

But now, it seems that Mr Bunch has changed his tune. To him, some people clearly are above the law, those people being ones who have violated our immigration laws:

In New Orleans and across U.S., anger over ICE raids sparks a 2nd American Revolution

Everyday folks are rising up to resist immigration raids with whistles, car chases, and noisy protests. Revolution is in the air.

By Will Bunch | Pearl harbor Day, December 7, 2025 | 2:24 PM EST

NEW ORLEANS — In a city of frayed nerves over an invasion by more than 200 masked, tactical-gear-wearing federal immigration agents, a chaotic scene suddenly broke out right in front of the altar at First Grace United Methodist Church on Canal Street, just a couple of miles from the Superdome.

There follow several paragraphs noting that this was not the real thing, but a rehearsal for activists to disrupt actual immigration law enforcement.

This was a play-acting, casual-dress rehearsal during an emergency training session organized by the immigration-rights group Union Migrante. The activists were planting more seeds for what is rapidly sprouting as the most important American uprising of the 21st century.

It took about 66 hours to go from basic training to frontline action. On Friday afternoon, in a heavily Latino neighborhood near the New Orleans airport, the cartoon-villainous, strutting Border Patrol commander of the Louisiana immigration raids named “Catahoula Crunch,” Greg Bovino, struggled to conduct a sweep through blocks of low-slung apartments.

Word that Bovino and his masked secret police were in suburban Kenner spread quickly on a series of chat groups of activists who’ve played cat-and-mouse with his agents ever since their op began Wednesday, tailing government SUVs across superstore parking lots and down boulevards lined with strip malls.

Eventually, according to the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune, the caravan of citizen resisters following the agents grew to as many as 30 vehicles, until Bovino-friendly cops from the Kenner Police Department formed a blockade to stop them. That didn’t deter other neighbors who, as captured on video, chased the masked feds across lawns while filming with cell phones and blowing shrill whistles, a signal for immigrants to stay indoors.

In other words, the activists were attempting to disrupt and interfere with a legitimate immigration law enforcement action. Some people apparently are above the law!

You can feel the sheltering impulses of the antebellum Underground Railroad, combined with the righteous fervor of 1964’s Mississippi Freedom Summer. I spent much of last week in and around New Orleans, the resiliently rebellious heart of one of America’s reddest states. I watched everyday folks protest on street corners, create “Know Your Rights” pamphlets, and learn how to legally confront masked, armed law-enforcement officers. Nearing the end of a year that began with the grim inauguration of authoritarianism, I left here convinced I’d seen the green shoots of a second American Revolution.

Heaven forfend! “(A) second American Revolution”? I suppose that Mr Bunch would be in favor of anything that might get rid of our freely and legally elected President, but revolutions frequently do not turn out quite the way people expected. Our first, and hopefully only, American Revolution brought forth a nation of individual rights, freedom, and democracy, but most recent revolutions have produced authoritarianism, suppression of dissent, and dictatorship. Remember: our previous President tried to impose mandatory administration of a vaccine approved only on an emergency basis, pushed social media such as (pre-Elon Musk) Twitter and Facebook to censor posts the Administration didn’t like, and tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board. Even The Grey Lady, our nation’s most famous newspaper, The New York Times, was giving OpEd space to those who wanted to restrict Other People’s — certainly not their own! — Freedom of Speech and of the Press.

However, I followed Mr Bunch’s link to the Times-Picayune, and found something somewhat different than the Inquirer columnist told his readers:

In Kenner, Border Patrol leader Gregory Bovino faces mixed reactions and police backup

By Lara Nicholson, Staff writer | Friday, December 5, 2025

As the U.S. Border Patrol conducted their third day of immigration raids in the New Orleans area, Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino, the agency’s leader, toured the streets of Kenner Friday to mixed reaction from the public, taking photo ops at one point to fielding protesters at another before ultimately using a Kenner Police blockade to leave the area.

Bovino and a team of at least six agents conducted operations at gas stations and in neighborhoods along Williams Boulevard, the main corridor of the city lined with Latin American restaurants and department stores. At one point Bovino’s team approached a vehicle at a gas station to question a passenger before letting him go. It’s unclear if they detained anyone on Friday.

Bovino and his entourage wore green uniforms and face coverings, and he dismissed a request Friday from New Orleans Mayor-Elect Helena Moreno, a Democrat, that federal agents remove masks as part of a broader demand for more transparency.

“I think this is about as transparent as it gets right here,” Bovino told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune in response to Moreno’s demands.

But in Kenner, a suburban city of about 65,000, the political landscape is much different from its more progressive anchor. While having the largest Hispanic population per capita of any Louisiana city at 30%, its government is almost entirely Republican. Its police chief, Keith Conley, has in recent years complained about the increase in undocumented immigrants and is one of the only officials in the parish that’s been a vocal supporter of Border Patrol’s efforts in the city.

While New Orleans/Orleans Parish, the murder capital of the United States, gave 130,749 votes, or 82.16%, to then-Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024, and only 24,119, 15.16%, to then-former and now current President Donald Trump, Mr Trump carried Jefferson Parish, in which Kenner is the largest city, 98,810, or 55.45%, to 75,731, 42.50%, for Mrs Emhoff. Overall, Mr Trump carried Louisiana 1,208,505, 60.22%, to 766,870, 38.21%. Note that Mr Bunch reported that the activists were training at First Grace United Methodist Church on Canal Street, just a couple of miles from the Superdome, in New Orleans itself; the activists protesting in Kenner were mostly not from Kenner.

The Times-Picayune again:

At a Star Gas Station on Williams Boulevard where Bovino’s team stopped for a break, customers asked to take pictures with him while he waited to purchase pork cracklins and an energy drink. He offered to buy one of them their coke while a gaggle of photojournalists took pictures.

In the parking lot outside, a man in a camouflage jacket and a red “Make America Great Again” hat held up a makeshift metal sign saying “THANK YOU I.C.E ❤︎ U D.H.S. U.S.A!” in blue paint.

“We love you and we work for you,” Bovino told the man before entering his SUV.

Our frantic Philadelphian somehow didn’t include that in his column; perhaps he didn’t actually read all of the news report he cited?

Freed of the old constraint of 750 words, Mr Bunch continued, but if you read it, you’ll see that he was reporting on ‘resistance’ from New Orleans, which even he noted was but a “Democratic dot in a state that Trump won with 60% of the vote in 2024.”

One last bit from him:

In Charlotte, the Bovino-led operation dubbed “Charlotte’s Web,” which was also met with widespread community opposition, was abruptly cut short after just four-and-a-half days.

As my good friend and occasional website pinch hitter William Teach reported Monday morning, a previously, 2018 under President Trump, deported illegal immigrant who sneaked back in in 2021, under President Biden, was just arrested for stabbing a man in the chest on Charlotte’s light rail system, the same public transportation system in which Decarlos Brown — not an illegal immigrant, but a mentally ill man with dozens of previous arrests — (allegedly) murdered Iryna Zarutska.

Perhaps Mr Bunch never heard of the murder of Miss Zarutska, given that a site search of the Inquirer’s website foe “Iryna Zarutska” turned up zero results. Had Mr Brown been white and Miss Zarutska black or Hispanic, you can bet your last euro that it would have been all over the Inky.

Perhaps if our friends on the left in general, and Mr Bunch specifically, included our immigration laws and street crime under “no one is above the law” we’d have a safer society.
__________________________________
Related Articles:

Posted on by

Democrisy: There’s nothing the Democrats hate more than President Trump actually enforcing the laws

On Wednesday, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a decent article on a wound care clinic in Kensington, the center of the drug trade in the City of Brotherly Love, and how they’ve been struggling with injuries caused by “tranq,” the veterinary tranquilizer xylazine, which was never approved for use in humans, which dealers have been using to ‘cut’ opioids, to give them a longer effect.

Inside a Kensington wound care clinic

Xylazine, which was never approved for human use, has wreaked havoc in Kensington. Amputations among opioid users have more than doubled.

by Aubrey Whelan | Wednesday, November 26, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

In a small clinic room at Mother of Mercy House on Allegheny Avenue in Kensington, Emma Anderson unwrapped a bandage from a man’s swollen hand.

“It hurts really bad in the cold,” the man said, wincing at the inflamed wound that covered most of a right-hand finger.

Cleaning it with saline solution proved so painful that Anderson, an EMT and St. Joseph’s University student, let the patient take the lead, wiping carefully at the yellowish-white tissue at the center of the wound.

It was his second time attending the wound care clinic at Mother of Mercy, the Catholic nonprofit that twice a week opens its doors to people with addiction dealing with the serious skin lesions, caused by the animal tranquilizer xylazine, that can develop into wounds so severe the only treatment is amputation.

There follows a long section telling readers about the work the Mother of Mercy House does, which is not necessary for this article, but I recommend readers to follow the embedded link to read it.

Much further down:

This year, medetomidine, another animal tranquilizer that causes severe withdrawal, has supplanted xylazine’s dominance in the Philadelphia area drug supply. Fewer patients addicted to opioids are visiting emergency rooms with soft-tissue damage, according to city data.

But it’s unknown how medetomidine affects those wounds, and there are still enough people suffering from them in Kensington, the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis, that the clinic felt it necessary to increase its hours.

One doubts that the move away from xylazine by the drug dealers was meant for altruistic reasons. If medetomidine causes severe drug withdrawals, it would seem to be something to ‘encourage’ junkies to keep buying the junk.

But then there was Friday morning’s lead editorial:

It’s Trump — not service members — who could benefit from a reminder about following the law | Editorial

There’s nothing seditious about Democrats reminding military members not to follow unlawful orders.

by The Editorial Board | Friday, November 28, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

Six lawmakers, including two from Pennsylvania, had good reason to remind military members not to follow unlawful orders, given Donald Trump’s illicit history and recent actions, such as sending federal troops into cities and boat strikes that violate international law.

The six Democrats, who either served in the military or the intelligence community, posted a short video telling their former counterparts that “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

As William Teach noted, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), one of the six Democrats who made that short video, admitted:

To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal — but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes, and everything related to Venezuela.

And even the Editorial Board backtracked somewhat:

For example, the legality of Trump’s boat strikes — which have killed more than 80 people — is dubious.

A secret U.S. Department of Justice memo reportedly blessed the strikes by claiming the U.S. is in an armed conflict with drug cartels. But members of Congress from both parties argue it is illegal to target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat. The United Nations’ human rights chief said the strikes violated international law.

It isn’t sedition for the six Democrats to make a video stating that American servicemen do not have to obey illegal orders, but their intent is clear: they wanted to cause some servicemembers to question orders that Senator Slotkin herself were not illegal. The Editorial Board certainly want you to believe that the strikes are illegal.

So, here we have the very same editors, who have read or should have read the previously cited article about the tremendous damage to which drug smuggling from Venezuela has done to our country. Those editors absolutely know about the devastation in Kensington, yet they are appalled, aghast, and outraged that President Trump is actually trying to do something to halt drug trafficking, just as they have waxed wroth about his efforts to reduce crime and stop illegal immigration and deport the illegals already here.

That President Trump sure is an evil genius! He’s managed to get the left to defend previously deported and returned again illegal immigrants accused of domestic violence, crime in our major cities, illegal immigration, and drug traffickers, all by the same people who told us that “No one is above the law” when the Democrats were trying to throw Mr Trump in jail.

Posted on by

You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Drug criminal released early under President Biden caught back to his old ways

Khyre Holbert, mugshot by Omaha Police Department, and is a public record.

Another one of the violent criminals released early by Biden White House staffers misusing the President’s autopen signature — no, no one will admit that it was one of the staffers, but I’d bet 20€ that’s what happened — has returned to his previous life, a life of violent crime, to the surprise of absolutely no one. From Fox News:

Felon freed by Biden arrested after shooting, raising fears of more ‘second chances’ gone wrong

Case highlights concerns over 2,490 inmates freed in Biden’s final clemency wave for drug and gun offenses

By Stepheny Price | Sunday, November 9, 2025 | 8:00 AM EST

A Nebraska felon whose prison sentence was reduced under a Biden administration clemency initiative is accused of possessing a gun linked to multiple crimes, intensifying scrutiny over whether reform efforts have come at the expense of public safety.

Federal prosecutors say 31-year-old Khyre Holbert, who had served roughly seven years of a 20-year federal sentence for gun and narcotics offenses, was arrested after an Oct. 4 shooting in Omaha’s Old Market district.

Investigators allege Holbert discarded a loaded handgun fitted with a high-capacity magazine as officers closed in, a weapon later tied to several other violent crimes across Nebraska.

Holbert’s sentence had been commuted in January 2025 despite objections from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which warned of his gang ties, long criminal record and prior weapons convictions. Months later, he’s accused of reoffending and his case has thrust former President Joe Biden’s clemency program back into the national spotlight.

This is where the Fox News headline is bad. “(S)econd chances”? Mr Holbert has a “long criminal record and prior weapons convictions,” so it would seem to me that “second chances” were far back in his rearview mirror.

I have said it before: we should allow leniency, some leniency to first-time offenders, in the hope that a reduced sentence and some probation might show them the error of their ways and give them a chance to straighten up and fly right. But second and subsequent offenses? Such criminals have clearly not learned to become civilized men, and should be sentenced to the maximum allowed under the law. At second and subsequent offenses, justice should be about protecting the public.

Mr Holbert (allegedly) discarded a gun following a shooting in a public place, a firearm with an extended magazine, and which was ballistically linked to other crimes. It would seem that Mr Holbert simply went back to the same group of bad guys he ran with seven years earlier.

The linked story continues to note other felons released under the autopen clemency program; Mr Holbert is not the only one who quickly returned to a life of crime.

For Michael Rushford, founder and president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, Holbert’s arrest is more than a tragedy. It’s a warning. . . . .

This is my morning coffee as I write this!

“You have to look and see if there was a real injustice in the case,” Rushford said. “With the Biden administration, I’m not sure that was done. The Justice Department under him was not really interested in fighting crime.”

The concern extends beyond Nebraska. In March 2025, authorities in Alabama arrested Willie Frank Peterson, another Biden clemency recipient, on new drug- and gun-related charges, just months after his release.

According to a federal complaint, Peterson, who had served more than a decade of a 20-year sentence, was caught with cocaine, meth and a loaded handgun. His sentence was also commuted in Biden’s Jan. 17, 2025 clemency wave, which freed 2,490 inmates, mostly for drug and gun offenses, according to the DOJ Office of the Pardon Attorney.

Rushford said that by the time offenders reach federal prison, most have already exhausted their “second chances.”

Mr Rushford also questioned whether President Biden was really directly involved with the clemencies, implying what I stated directly, that I believe that many of the pardons and commutations were begun by young, #woke staffers, with little if any input from the doddering Delawarean. Mr Biden was, as a Senator before he began losing his marbles, involved in passing stricter sentences for drug dealers and traffickers.

Now what we have is an epidemic of crime by previously caught criminals, criminals released by judges — often with little choice — and criminals arrested but not prosecuted by criminal-loving and police-hating prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner. The time has come, the time has long passed, when we need to protect the decent, law-abiding people in our society rather than give the bad guys uncountable second chances. Remember: the criminal who is in jail is not out on the streets committing more crimes.

Posted on by

Democrisy: the left said that no one is above the law, right up until the law impacted the people they favored.

Our good friends on the left spent much of the Biden Administration years telling us what Senator Dick Durbin did in a tweet pictured to the right, telling us that no one is above the law. Letitia James said the same thing, many times, in her witch hunt against then-former President Trump, yet, today, she’s denying that she has any responsibility as far as her clearly fraudulent mortgage applications are concerned. And one of my favorite columnists, Will Bunch, was appalled, aghast, everything rolled into one that Mr Trump wasn’t thrown in prison and that, upon returning to office, pardoned the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers as well as some police officers, even though the vast majority of them had been punished, having already served their sentences.

Yet somehow, some way, our good friends on the left believe that illegal immigrants are above the law!

How an ICE shake-up will bring Chicago-level terror to Philly

The brutal arrest tactics and stepped-up immigration raids that have roiled Chicago are coming to Philadelphia after an ICE shake-up.

by Will Bunch | Thursday, October 30, 2024 | 1:33 PM EDT

There was sheer terror and panic in the voice of the sobbing woman who dialed 911 in Chicago on the afternoon of Oct. 4. It was a day of utter chaos along Kedzie Street in a heavily Latino neighborhood on the city’s South Side, as federal agents led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brutally arrested brown-skinned residents and clashed with a growing group of protesters.

The woman told the 911 dispatcher that the federal agents swarming her block had just slammed a man to the ground in front of her, according to a recording from the city’s emergency dispatch center obtained by the Talking Points Memo site.

“The agents started beating him up,” the unidentified caller said. “They have rifles and they’re pointing it at people.” She added that the man who was getting pummeled was unarmed, then said, “We have rights, we’re citizens here, please help us.”

If you’ve been following the news out of Chicago this fall, you know this 911 call wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced “Operation Midway Blitz” in the nation’s third-largest city, boosted by a Trump-posted meme promising a hellish “Chipocalypse Now.”

We reported, in September, how the columnist lamented that President Trump wasn’t giving Venezuelan drug smugglers a fair chance to escape and deliver their cargoes to our shores. We noted last June that he was cheering on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, even while admitting that he did “find quite troubling the allegations of domestic abuse that caused Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, to briefly seek a protective order.”

Why then is the distinguished Mr Bunch so upset that President Trump is enforcing our immigration laws? Why isn’t he telling us that no one is above the law, including illegal immigrants?

Mr Bunch’s own newspaper reported, last inauguration day, that there were roughly 47,000 “undocumented immigrants,” to use the left’s mealy-mouth whitewashing of the more correct term, illegal immigrants. We did the math, and calculated that slightly over 3% of the city’s population were there illegally. If 47,000 illegals living in the City of Brotherly Love were sent back to their home countries, of left voluntarily, wouldn’t that help alleviate one of the city’s other problems, a lack of affordable housing, with tens of thousands of housing units becoming vacant?

If Mr Bunch specifically, and the newspaper in general, truly believed that no one is above the law, shouldn’t the Inquirer be advocating that the illegal immigrants take advantage of programs to help them return home, or, if being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, comply peacefully?

No one likes being arrested, and criminals frequently resist or try to get away, but most people have little sympathy for an accused thief or rapist or murderer winds up being rather forcibly arrested if he doesn’t simply surrender. Yet Mr Bunch complains that resisting arrest by ICE doesn’t usually work and has sympathy for those roughed up or even injured while resisting arrest.

And America has watched with shock and awe as ICE and Border Patrol agents have racially profiled and body-slammed Latinos, fired tear gas and painful pepper balls at pastors, journalists, and peaceful protesters, and indicted anyone who stands in their way, even a candidate for Congress.

Yeah, that kind of happens when people are trying to obstruct law enforcement agents in the performance of their duty. Violation of Title 18 USC §372, Conspiracy to impede or injure officer, is a federal offense, a felony which carries a sentence of up to six years in prison.

We get it: the curmudgeonly columnist absotively, posilutely hates President Trump, hates him with a white-hot passion, but should that get in the way of Mr Trump doing the right thing and enforcing our laws? Remember: no one is above the law, as our friends on the left have told us time and again, or at least they did so before November 5, 2024.

Posted on by

Hold them accountable! How many officials' inactions and ineptitude contributed to the murder of Kada Scott?

Communications between Philadelphia law enforcement agencies.

Given that warrants and communications between the courts, the District Attorney’s Office, and the Philadelphia Police Department are done via quill pens and parchment paper, and sent between each other by messengers on foot, it is perfectly understandable that sometimes messages just don’t get delivered in a timely manner. And if the days are cloudy, sometimes it’s difficult for the recipients to read their ledger books clearly by just the light of their oil lamps. All of that makes what happened in the Keon King/Kada Scott case completely understandable!

Months before Kada Scott’s killing, Keon King was wanted for kidnapping his ex, but no one arrested him — even in court

by Ellie Rushing | Thursday, October 23, 2025 | 4:35 PM EDT

A month after Keon King was charged with breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s home and attempting to strangle her, police say, his violence escalated: In January, he returned to her home with a gun, then kidnapped and assaulted her.

A warrant for his arrest was issued days later.

In the weeks that followed, King twice appeared in Philadelphia court and stood before a judge in the initial strangulation case. But no one in the courtroom seemed to know he was wanted for kidnapping.

So both times, King walked out.

Clearly, the city was at fault for relying on messengers on foot, rather than providing a horse on which the messengers could get their pieces of parchment to the right people in a timely manner.

In February, despite the warrant for King’s arrest, prosecutors — seemingly unaware that police said he had recently attacked their key witness — withdrew the burglary and strangulation case when the victim failed to appear in court.

Police did not go to either hearing to take him into custody, and do not appear to have alerted the prosecutor about the new arrest warrant.

The messenger on foot must not have made it to the District Attorney’s Office on time.

And King was not formally charged with the kidnapping until April, when, for reasons that are unclear, he turned himself in.

Turned himself in to whom? Normally, a criminal suspect would have turned himself in at a police station, but reporter Ellie Rushing was not specific about that. But, regardless of where he surrendered, he was out on the streets again twenty days ago.

The shortcomings in those earlier cases came into focus this month after police said King abducted Kada Scott from outside her workplace Oct. 4, then killed her and buried her body in a shallow grave behind an East Germantown school. The death of Scott, 23, of Mount Airy, has unnerved a community and drawn national attention.

Naturally, in his attempt to win re-election, the District Attorney tried to shift blame onto someone else:

District Attorney Larry Krasner has said it was a mistake for prosecutors to withdraw the charges in the alleged kidnapping of King’s ex — and his office has since refiled them. He said the decision not to proceed with the case was made by a young assistant district attorney who was new at handling such prosecutions and who saw the victim’s absence as a fatal flaw, even though there was video evidence of the attack.

Also read: Ben Mannes, “Ideology over justice — How Larry Krasner’s policies failed Kada Scott“

Can we really say that the distinguished Mr Krasner threw a “young assistant district attorney” under the bus, given that there were no buses during the days of quill pens and inkwells?

Or perhaps it was the Republicans who control the state Senate who are to blame, for not funding SEPTA and its buses adequately?

If this “young assistant district attorney . . . was new at handling such prosecutions,” shouldn’t the District Attorney himself, or at least one of his more senior prosecutors have been supervising the “young assistant district attorney”? Shouldn’t someone more senior in that office been teaching him what he ought to do, for what he ought to check? Shouldn’t someone in the District Attorney’s Office other than the “young assistant district attorney” now squished under the wheels of a SEPTA bus he held accountable for his mistakes? Shouldn’t the DA himself bear the responsibility for the “missteps” which put Mr King out on the streets to (allegedly) have kidnapped and murdered Miss Scott?

Kada Scott, victim, and Keon King, alleged murderer. Photos via WPVI TV, because, naturally, the Inquirer would never publish them.

The rest of Miss Rushing’s article details the missteps and miscommunications between the police and prosecutors, something the District Attorney blamed on “their digital information systems (being) decades old.” Really? Microsoft stopped support for Windows XP a couple of decades ago; is the DAO still using that? I was using dispatching systems in the 1990s, the early 1990s, when our Dispatch office was able to send delivery tickets to satellite plants via modems. That was over thirty years ago.

But it needs to be said: if the accusations against Keon King are accurate, then a lot of other people contributed to Miss Scott being murdered. Under Pennsylvania Title 18 §2504(a), “A person is guilty of involuntary manslaughter when as a direct result of the doing of an unlawful act in a reckless or grossly negligent manner, or the doing of a lawful act in a reckless or grossly negligent manner, he causes the death of another person.” Were the inactions of the District Attorney’s Office, including the District Attorney himself grossly negligent?

I’m dreaming, of course: no judge would allow a charge of involuntary manslaughter against a government official for gross neglect of his duty, because such could be turned around against the judge himself. But it’s clear that somebody, a lot of somebodies, need to lose their jobs over this. Mr Krasner himself doesn’t have enough of a sense of shame to resign over this, but he should be overwhelmingly defeated in the upcoming election. Whoever was supposed to supervise the “young assistant district attorney” needs to resign or be fired. Whoever is responsible for communication between the police and prosecutors, at both ends of that, needs to join the unemployment line. Should the Police Commissioner, Kevin Bethel, resign? And whoever is responsible for informing judges of other judges’ cases and acts needs to start tending bar somewhere on South Street.

At least as of this writing, the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer have not yet published their endorsement for District Attorney. We can only hope they endorse Pat Dugan and not again support soft-on-crime Larry Krasner.

Posted on by

The President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued that Louisiana voters, exercising their free choices, were not voting correctly She also argued against the foundational guarantees of our representative democracy.

In 1986, Robert Cortez “Bobby” Scott, then a state Senator in Virginia, ran for election to the Commonwealth’s First Congressional District seat against incumbent Representative Herb Bateman (R-VA), losing in a landslide, 56% to 44%. In the redistricting which followed the 1990 Census, the state legislature, at the direction of the federal Department of Justice, reapportioned the Third District into a “majority-minority,” meaning majority black, district, just for Mr Scott. The new Third District ran along the James River, from Newport News to Richmond, packing in heavily black areas. It worked: Mr Scott stomped Republican Dan Jenkins 79%-21%. Mr Scott is still in the United States House of Representatives, having served since January 3, 1993, 32 years, 9 months, and 13 days ago.

But, there was another election result in 1992. Mr Bateman barely won re-election in the reconfigured First District against newcomer Andy Fox, with barely over 50% of the vote. Mr Fox ran against Mr Bateman in 1992, but his time the Republican won in a landslide, because so many solidly Democratic voters had been peeled away from the First and placed into the Third District.

It’s simple: A Republican congressman who was at least subject to a strong Democratic challenger now had his seat in the “safe Republican” category, and Mr Bateman held that seat until his death on September 11, 2000. My family and I were living in Hampton, Virginia, in the First District, during all of this, which is why I remember it so well.

Now comes Louisiana v. Callais, a case before the United States Supreme Court concerning how much legislatures can use race in consideration of redistricting. The Louisiana state legislature, seeing the previous result in Allen v Milligan, 2023, believed that a second majority black district needed to be created to comply with the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 52 USC §10301. But, to do that, the state came up with a district shaped like a snake, wholly unlike any definition of being compact.

Naturally, some state residents sued. Allen v Milligan allowed this kind or racial gerrymandering, but Louisiana v Callais threatens to undo that. Naturally, the left are up in arms, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson went so far as to claim that black Americans are “disabled” when it comes to voting.

Jackson noted that the majority opinion in a 2023 Supreme Court ruling — which found Alabama unlawfully diluted the voting power of black people in the state — “used the word ‘disabled’” to describe voters subject to “processes [that] are not equally open.”

There is an interesting point that is being mostly ignored in all of the debates. Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued before the Court:

(Associate Justice Samuel) Alito suggested that racially polarized voting could easily be identified through statistical analysis, and it could be seen whether White Democrats vote for Black Democrats at a lower rate, for instance.

At which point Miss Nelson stepped right into the trap.

Nelson told him that White Democrats were not voting for Black candidates — whether they were Democrats or not. She said there was no question that even if there is some correlation, that race was the driving factor.

In other words, Miss Nelson was arguing that Louisiana voters, exercising their free choices, were not voting correctly. In a partisan climate in which the Democrats have been arguing about racial ‘equity’ in terms which seem very much like a zero-sum game, the arguments for black empowerment seem to be made in terms in which gains for black Americans concomitantly entail losses for white Americans. But whatever their partisan and philosophical reasons, our system is predicated upon a secret ballot and the right of the voters to choose to vote however they wish.

There is another, even more pernicious assumption behind all of this. In a country which the equal protection of the laws is guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment, the arguments of Miss Nelson are, in effect, that black citizens cannot be represented by white congressmen, and that includes the notion that white citizens cannot be represented by black congressmen. Our system of representation, in our cities and states as well as in Congress, is that our representatives represent all of the people withing the bounds of their districts; the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued against the foundational guarantees of our representative democracy.

Posted on by

When judges assume executive authority What could possibly go wrong?

Conservatives have been gleeful that some out-of-control federal judges like James Boasberg have been frequently bitch slapped by higher courts in their attempts to stymie President Trump’s agenda, and those are the things about which we hear, but those are not the only instances of judges deciding that they know how to run executive agencies better than the people who are supposed to have the authority.

SEPTA fare increases and Regional Rail cuts can’t start next week, judge rules

Judge Sierra Thomas-Street issued her order from the bench, telling the attorney for the transit agency that “everything must stop.”

by Abraham Gutman and Andrew Seidman | Friday, August 29, 2025 | 5:39 PM EDT

A Philadelphia judge on Friday ordered SEPTA to halt planned service cuts to Regional Rail and fare increases due to begin next week, following a daylong hearing in a City Hall courtroom.

Judge Sierra Thomas-Street issued her order from the bench, telling the attorney for the transit agency that “everything must stop.”

“Status quo must be maintained,” Thomas-Street said.

The parties will meet again in court on Thursday, when Thomas-Street will consider whether to make the order permanent and expand it to include reversing cuts already in place.

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportion Authority (SEPTA) has been taking steps to remain solvent since the hoped-for $213 million assistance from the state government has not yet been approved by the General Assembly. Democrats control the state House of Representatives by one vote, 102-101, and want to give SEPTA the money, but the state Senate, controlled by Republicans 27-23, hasn’t been willing to go along. The state budget was due July 1st, the beginning of the Commonwealth’s fiscal year but still hasn’t been passed by the legislature, and that $213 million remains in limbo.

So, SEPTA’s leadership had to deal with the fact that the anticipated aid hasn’t come yet. General Manager Scott Sauer didn’t want to make the cuts, didn’t want to cut service at all, but he still has to make SEPTA operate within its means.

The ruling came after attorney George Bochetto filed a lawsuit this week in Common Pleas Court on behalf of a consumer advocate and two riders who argued the transit agency’s actions were unlawful. They contended that the cuts — which started Sunday amid a state budget stalemate — would have a disproportionate impact on marginalized groups, violating their rights protected by the Pennsylvania Constitution.

“The judge is saying: No more further cuts,” Bochetto said after the ruling. “Enough double talk, enough triple talk. Do it.”

What? Does Her Honor believe that she can order the state Senate to pass the budget she wants?

We previously reported on Mr Bochetto’s lawsuit and his attempt to compel SEPTA to act as a welfare agency.

SEPTA maintains a Service Stabilization Fund of roughly $300 million, which the system uses “to pay bills and unexpected expenses, as well as a reserve for potential catastrophes.” Some $100 million from that fund had already been spent to fill the budget deficit. The plaintiffs want SEPTA to use that fund to avoid the fare increases and service cuts, which could be done, and here’s where Judge Thomas-Street’s order comes into play: SEPTA’s leadership took executive decisions, the decisions which are their responsibility and for which they are paid to take, but the judge is saying that no, their decisions were wrong, and those decisions must be taken a different way. Judge Thomas-Street has, in effect, arrogated SEPTA’s leadership to herself, dictating a decision to SEPTA’s managers.

It is legitimate to argue with a decision taken by someone in authority to take those decisions; who hasn’t at times thought of his bosses as ‘those idiots up there’? But that does not and should not mean that a judge should have the authority to change those decisions and specify a new one. SEPTA’s decisions were not illegal; they just didn’t go the way that some people wanted them.

There is some wry humor in all of this. With Judge Thomas-Street’s decision, the pressure on Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman to cough up that asked-for $213 million is reduced. With slightly over $300 million in the Service Stabilization Fund, SEPTA could more than cover that $213 million deficit, the taxpayers of the Commonwealth don’t have to fund SEPTA at all! And next year is next year, so who cares, right?

Posted on by

Now this pisses me off!

We noted, in December of 2021, that my wife and I bought a house. No, we didn’t buy it for ourselves, but for my wife’s sister, as she was retiring back to the Bluegrass State, and couldn’t really afford to do it herself. When we croak, it’ll be inherited by our two daughters, and my sister-in-law’s son.

Fortunately, we bought it in a small town without the ridiculous prices in larger cities — it would probably have cost $100,000 more in Lexington — and before Bidenflation hit interest rates. Alas! we couldn’t just pay for it in cash, as we did for our present home, but had to get a mortgage. And during the negotiations for the mortgage loan, when I mentioned that it was a rental house, I was informed that the mortgage rate for a non-primary residence would be one percentage point higher, while I might have thought ‘darn’ and ‘heck’ and even ‘shoot!’ we nevertheless didn’t try to list it as a primary residence, because that would have been a lie.

Lisa Cook is a well-connected former academic who currently serves on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors — currently serves perhaps being outdated, in that President Donald Trump is trying to fire her — with a guesstimated net worth if $1.1 million to $2.7 million. Dr Cook apparently declared both of her homes as her primary residence, supposedly to get the interest rate down. If Mrs Pico and I, who have a net worth of much less than Dr Cook and her husband, can tell the truth and bite the bullet on the higher interest rate, why can’t wealthier people?

But this is the part which really pisses me off. From The New York Times:

Trump Is Claiming Mortgage Fraud to Attack Enemies. Is Your Information Public?

After President Trump accused a Federal Reserve governor of mortgage fraud, everyday citizens are waking up to just how much information is out there.

by Ron Lieber and Tara Siegel Bernard | Thursday, August 28, 2025 | 10:00 AM EDT

Politicians are using mortgage data against their enemies, so it’s time to figure out how much of it is available and what law-abiding citizens can do to shield it from prying eyes.

On Monday, President Trump said he was removing Lisa Cook from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. He has accused her of declaring both of her homes as her primary residence, which can be a form of mortgage fraud given that interest rates are often higher for vacation homes or investment properties. . . . .

Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who asked the Department of Justice last week to investigate Ms. Cook, suggested this week that she wouldn’t be the last person to face such charges.

“There is too much mortgage fraud in Chicago,” he said on social media, calling out the city where Mr. Trump has threatened to send troops. Mr. Pulte also asked for tips on fraud from the public.

Ms. Cook also wasn’t the first public figure to come in for this scrutiny. Other Trump adversaries, including Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, and Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, are facing similar inquiries. The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a Republican, has also had to answer for his housing records.

Dr Cook is, of course, suing the President over her firing, saying that he’s a big meanie-hoonie, and it’s “illegal and unprecedented” for him to fire her “for cause“. Dr Cook listed two separate residences as her primary residence in 2021, before President Joe Biden appointed her to the Board of Governors in 2022.

Someone who looks a lot like me starting the bathroom renovation at the rental house.

The five quoted paragraphs, if the reader got only that far, leads the reader to believe that this is all political, all Mr Trump using the law to attack his political enemies. Given the multitude of ways that Democrats attempted to attack and even imprison him at the end of his first term, I don’t blame him one bit for returning the favor.

But if you read further, you’ll see that the meat of the article is telling people what information is publicly available at the county clerk’s office, in the property deed of trust or filed mortgage, and that it is public information; anyone can look it up.

The article notes things like primary residences, whether the home is a rental or second home, of, in my case, whether it has a property-tax-saving “homestead exemption”, something we have on our real residence but which we did not claim for the rental house, because that would also be illegal.

The thrust of the article is informing readers what they can do to restrict the publicly available information, or, simply put, how to better commit mortgage fraud.

My wife and I are retired, and we were working-class throughout our careers. A lot of working-class people have bought more than one home, primarily to use as rental income sources, which my wife and I are doing, though the entirety of the rental payments are used for paying off the mortgage; we’re not making a profit off of this. [1]Full disclosure: we bought our current home in 2014, as our retirement home, three years before we moved here, and we rented it out, making a small profit, but we didn’t have to make any … Continue reading

But the people like Dr Cook, who have two residences they use themselves? The people with the money for vacation homes or the hoitiest and the toitiest of summer homes aren’t working-class people. They are the people who have connections in government and can afford the extra interest percentage point, and I admit that I have very little sympathy for those committing fraud to save what, for them, are a few bucks. And that The New York Times is trying to help some of their readers commit mortgage fraud is just plain wrong.

References

References
↑1 Full disclosure: we bought our current home in 2014, as our retirement home, three years before we moved here, and we rented it out, making a small profit, but we didn’t have to make any “homestead exemption”, because we were a bit too young to qualify for it at the time, or “primary residence” claims, because we bought it for cash, and had no mortgage on it.
Posted on by

Killadelphia: I check Bluesky so you don’t have to! The last thing the criminal-loving and police-hating Larry Krasner wants is more law enforcement

According to the Census Bureau, the population of Philadelphia was 1,573,916 as of July 1, 2024, while the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 269 homicides in the city during all of 2024. According to my precise calculations[1]269 ÷ 15.73916 = 17.091128116112931058582541889148, that meant the City of Brotherly Love had a homicide rate of 17.09 per 100,000 population. Apparently, District Attorney Larry Krasner thinks that’s just hunky-dory, a perfectly acceptable figure.

In a skeet on Bluesky, the city’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, posted a bit from an interview with CNN, saying:

The 10th Amendment says he cannot take over the Philadelphia Police Department as he is doing in D.C. D.C. is different. It’s not a state. Pennsylvania is a state, and Philadelphia is its biggest city. Our police department is controlled by the mayor. And oh, trust me, this mayor does not work for Donald Trump, and neither do we.

So, we will stand on this constitutional right that has been there forever. We will stand on the reality that you cannot claim, It is an emergency, when Philadelphia, as of today, has the lowest number of homicides in over 50 years. We may set the record, the record, for lowest crime overall in Philadelphia for more than 50 years, and at the same time we have some of the lowest incarceration. That’s not an emergency. Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 269 ÷ 15.73916 = 17.091128116112931058582541889148