Category Archives: Law

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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?

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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.
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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
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How do you ‘normalize’ this?

Do you remember the names of William and Zachary Zulock? We covered the case of the two men males “married” to each other who adopted two young boys for the purposes of child rape and production of child pornography, not so much about their crimes, but on the notable lack of interest by the credentialed media in covering so sensational a story.

We did point out that Zachary Zulock was “a Biden voter and ardent Black Lives Matter advocate who championed left-wing causes on Facebook”, so we knew that he was obviously guilty.

The only good news in that story is that, over a year later, both men males pleaded guilty and were each sentenced to 100 years in prison without the possibility of parole. We saw no national media outlets reporting that, either.

If the Zulock’s case was extreme, it’s not as rare as you might think. From this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Former Chester County sex offender conceives child via surrogacy, spurring calls to close legal loophole

Continue reading →

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Has lenient treatment really done the bad guys any favors?

We have previously reported on the mass shooting in the Gray’s Ferry section of the City of Brotherly Love, and now The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported an arrest in the case.

One man has been arrested for his role in Grays Ferry mass shooting that left 12 shot

Terrell Frazier is among multiple gunmen who shot 12 people on the 1500 bock of South Etting Street, police said.

by Ellie Rushing | Thursday, August 7, 2025 | 10:10 AM EDT

Philadelphia police on Thursday said they have arrested one of the gunmen involved in a mass shooting in Grays Ferry that left three young men dead and nine others wounded. Continue reading →

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! I guess that previous lenient treatment didn't work all that well

When Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News tweeted out the surveillance photos of a sexual assault suspect in Center City Philadelphia, I naturally checked The Philadelphia Inquirer, and noted that their story didn’t include the photos. Well, to give credit where credit is due, the newspaper surprised me and updated that story to include the photos released by the Philadelphia Police Department.

Then, earlier on Hiroshima Day, the Police identified him, and Mr Keeley tweeted out that information, including a photo which was taken from his driver’s license records. It didn’t take too long after that for an atomic bomb exploded on the suspect, who was apprehended Wednesday afternoon:

A 37-year-old man was arrested for a string of sexual assaults in Center City, police said

Police said Dynel Walker was taken into custody in connection with six attacks in Center City and South Philadelphia in the past three weeks.

by Ellie Rushing | Wednesday, August 6, 2025 | 12:13 PM EDT | Updated: 5:19 PM EDT

A Northeast Philadelphia man was arrested Wednesday after police said he committed a string of sexual assaults in Center City over the last month, attacking women as they walked or entered their homes.

Dynel Walker, 37, of the 13000 block of Philmont Avenue in Somerton, was taken into custody in Montgomery County to face multiple counts of aggravated assault, indecent assault, and false imprisonment in connection with assaults on six women within three weeks in Center City and the Schuylkill section of South Philadelphia, police said.

Capt. Margo Alleyne-Parker of the Special Victims Unit said she believed Walker likely attacked additional women who had not yet come forward.

Walker’s arrest comes just days after police had asked for the public’s help in identifying a man responsible for a rash of assaults, and whose behavior was escalating. An anonymous tipster then told police that Walker resembled the photo officials had released of the suspect.

So, publishing photos of suspects does help in their identification and apprehension!

If you want to read the details of Mr Walker’s (alleged) crimes, you can get that at the inquirer’s original. This is the part that I see as important:

Court records show that Walker has been arrested multiple times over the last decade in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs, albeit for relatively low-level crimes.

Between 2011 and 2016, he was in and out of jail in Philadelphia for charges including drug possession and improper use of a motor vehicle, according to the records.

In Bucks County in 2021, he was convicted of disorderly conduct. And most recently, in Montgomery County in 2023, he pleaded guilty to identity theft and receiving stolen property, and was sentenced to five years’ probation.

Mr Keeley noted that Mr Walker had 21 prior arrests, though none were for sexual assault. And that makes me wonder: why, in 2023, was he allowed to plead guilty in Montgomery County and receive five years probation? By that time, with his record, surely someone in the prosecutor’s office should have realized that Mr Walker is not a very nice guy. Under Pennsylvania Title 18 § 4120, Identity theft can be either a first-degree misdemeanor, if the value of the property stolen using identity theft is less than $2,000, (c)(1)(i), or a third-degree felony id valued at more than $2,000, (c)(1)(ii). Under Title 18 §106(b)(4), a third-degree felony has a maximum sentence of seven years in the state penitentiary. Both offenses were charged as third-degree felonies.

The media have not reported all of the particulars, but if Montgomery County had enough evidence, couldn’t the distinguished Mr Walker have been behind bars when the crimes with which he has been recently charged were committed? Shouldn’t a man with that many priors not be given a break? Shouldn’t a man with that many priors be locked up for as long as the law allows?

It’s simple: if Mr Walker is the man who committed the sexual assaults for which he has been charged, and if he had been behind bars at SCI Greene, those six sexual assaults would not have occurred!

If Mr Walker committed the sexual assaults with which he has been charged, one thing is obvious: five years probation neither punished him nor deterred him from committing other crimes. There comes a point at which the bad guys need to be locked up, and that point is long before 21 separate arrests.

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The Hassan Elliot case finally comes to a close The scumbag cop-killer is sentenced to 75 years in federal prison

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering the hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.

We have previously reported on the murder of Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV by Hassan Elliot, a career criminal even by the age of 21, who could have been behind bars at the time but the city’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, who was just renominated by the Democrats for a third term letting criminals loose, let him slide on probation violations which could have kept him behind bars when he was already in custody.

On Friday, March 13, 2020, Corporal O’Connor and other members of the SWAT team were trying to arrest Mr Elliot, then 21, and Khalif Sears, 18, for a murder and robbery the previous March, when Mr Elliot started firing through the door.

Of course, the city’s police officers knew all about Let ’em Loose Larry, and blocked his attempt to visit Cpl O’Connor’s family at the hospital. They were not going to allow him to make a show of sympathy for an officer that his policies had gotten killed.

Well, now the case has come to closure: Continue reading →

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Poor, poor Larry Krasner is tearfully upset that he couldn’t lock up another cop for longer

Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, recently renominated for a third term, as the city’s chief prosecutor, is just spittle-flecking angry that he cannot keep a former Philadelphia Police Officer in jail any longer, and, of course, the denizens at The Philadelphia Inquirer have been outraged all along. Columnist Helan Ubiñas waxed wroth when the charges against former Officer Mark Dial were initially dismissed, because Mr Krasner’s minions didn’t do their jobs properly. The Inquirer’s long-time columnist, Helen Uniñas, waxed wroth that the charges were dismissed, calling it a “welcome and rare reminder that police are not above the law when Officer Mark Dial’s bail was revoked” last week, to jail him before trial, and yesterday was pissed because “prosecutors apparently did not present evidence that (Officer Dial) had committed a crime.” Shouldn’t her ire be reserved for the District Attorney and his minions, who failed to “present evidence that he had committed a crime”? Does Miss Ubiñas believe that all criminals should be held behind before bars before they are tried and convicted? How else can one interpret that revocation of bail was a “welcome and rare reminder that police are not above the law”?

The District Attorney was able to get the charges reinstated, but not the First Degree Murder charge he wanted. In Pennsylvania, a defendant can be held without bail is the charge carries a potential term of life imprisonment. The DA refiled on Title 18 §2502, “Murder generally,” but Third Degree Murder usually does not result in a life sentence. Mr Krasner still wanted Mr Dial kept in jail before he was tried and convicted of anything, and succeeded to the tune of ten months behind bars.

Former Philadelphia Police Officer Mark Dial sentenced — and immediately paroled — for killing Eddie Irizarry

Continue reading →

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How stupid are the “Occupy Democrats”? And how stupid do they believe their followers are?

One would think that anyone with an IQ above room temperature would have understood that this photo posted by the Occupy Democrats on Facebook is utterly stupid.

  • If Donald Trump’s tax returns did expose crimes, there were eight years under the Obama Administration, plus four more during the Biden Administration, to have charged him with crimes.
  • If the ‘Putin transcripts’ revealed treason, both the Obama and Biden Administrations would have exposed them.
  • If the White House visitor logs proved corruption, the Biden Administration would have leaked them.
  • And if the Epstein list implicated Mr Trump, the Biden and later Harris campaigns would have weaponized it.

Continue reading →