Category Archives: Politics

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It’s just so easy for the white liberals in safe neighborhoods to support ‘progressive’ politicians After all, most of the crime happens in other places

My good friend Harrison Finberg — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him, but we can be good friends on Twitter these days — noted this tweet from Philly First Ward, the Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia’s First Ward. We have previously noted the mayoral candidacy of Helen Gym Flaherty,[1]Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect. one of the furthest left of the ever-growing list of hopefuls, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer described as a “longtime activist who is typically aligned with the Democratic Party’s left wing”. Mrs Flaherty’s campaign website is full of the usual ‘progressive’ bromides, but, at least as of this writing, there’s no actual issues page, telling the city’s voters — of which I am not one — what she would actually do, other than those bromides, in office if elected.

While she says that she will fight “gun violence,” what she doesn’t want to do is fight the criminals who use guns. I guess that’s not much of a surprise, since ‘progressives’ seem to think that guns simply levitate and shoot people all by themselves.

Helen Gym makes it official and launches a run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address gun violence

The now-former Council member and leader of the city’s progressive movement launched her run at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Center City.

by Anna Orso | Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Former City Councilmember Helen Gym announced Wednesday that she will run for Philadelphia mayor on a pledge to address the city’s alarmingly high rate of gun violence, saying, “Everything is at stake right now.”

In remarks to a room of about 350 supporters gathered at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Gym centered her message on public safety, vowing to declare a state of emergency on her first day in office and prioritize improving homicide clearance rates.

I am amused that Mrs Flaherty chose a homosexual ‘Community Center’ as the place in which she announced her long-anticipated candidacy, but that’s probably something of which The Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia’s First Ward approves.

But while the longtime activist who is typically aligned with the Democratic Party’s left wing said violence is “destroying our city and our people,” she was far from taking a tough-on-crime tone.

“I will not use this crisis to roll back the clock on civil rights,” she said. “While many people in this race will talk about public safety, let me be clear: Decades of systemic racism and disinvestment brought us to this place.”

Further down:

Gym has opposed tax cuts for businesses and corporations, and has been critical of the Police Department, championing legislation to ban the use of tear gas on protesters and rejecting calls to bring back stop-and-frisk. In 2020, she voted against a planned increase to the Police Department’s budget — along with a majority of Council.

And here’s what Mrs Flaherty tweeted in 2019.

I support reducing the prison population by 50% from 2019 levels, We must center transformative and restorative justice practices in Philadelphia.

Can any policy have failed as badly as District Attorney Larry Krasner’s ‘decarceration’ program has failed the city since then? Murders get the most attention, and yes, they’re down a bit, but shootings, and every non-self-defense shooting is an attempted murder, are up.

So, who are The Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia’s First Ward? The First Ward is a gentrifying area, between Wharton and Mifflin Streets north and south, bounded on the west by South Broad Street and running east to the Delaware River. To the left is their group photo from their website, and with only four exceptions, they’re all as white as ceiling paint.

The area? Even a dump fixer-upper like this one is listed for sale for $475,000, though the fixed up row house at 1007 Mifflin Street is listed for $465,000.

It’s pretty typical in today’s urban areas, where the well-to-do whites who aren’t worried about street crime, who aren’t seeing the dead bodies or hearing the gunfire in their neighborhoods can blithely support ‘restorative justice‘ and ‘decarceration‘, because the bad guys who aren’t locked up aren’t in their neighborhoods.

Then again . . . .

Armed Delf-Defense in Dallas

by Robert Stacy McCain | Saturday, February 18, 2023

This happened in December, but the police took a while to complete their investigation and make arrests, so we’re just now getting a detailed account of what happened:

There are a lot of new details about how a recent attempted carjacking of a luxury car went down in an upscale area of Dallas.

Police arrested the three suspects they were looking for, and court documents detail a good lead police had.

One suspect showed up at a hospital with a gunshot wound minutes after the attempted carjacking and shootout last December.

Police say he was shot by a friend of the Maserati owner they were trying to carjack.

Skipping the details of the crime, down to Mr McCain’s conclusion:

This attempted carjacking happened, as they say, “in an upscale area” on the north side of Dallas, which shows that there is no such thing as a “safe” neighborhood in 21st-century America. Who knows what might have happened had it not been for the fact that the Maserati owner’s friend was armed? Permit me to recommend two books by my friend Robert Waters, The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a Firearm and Guns Save Lives: True Stories of Americans Defending Their Lives With Firearms.

It is unfortunate that civilization has collapsed to the point that no one is safe unless they’re carrying a pistol, but we must live in the world as it is, rather than that fantasy world where “safe” neighborhoods still exist.

The good, noble, progressive Democrats of Philadelphia’s First Ward might, just might, find the effects of the politicians and policies for which they have voted visiting their own gentrifying streets.

The feelgood story about the three ‘unsuccessful’ carjackers came from Dallas, and there’s always a better chance that Texans will be armed. The good progressive Democrats of the First Ward? The city’s Democratic politicians — and Democrats outregister Republicans in Philly about 7 to 1 — don’t want the public to carry firearms, so it might be less likely that an attempted carjacking on Wharton Street would be met with a prospective victim who was armed. Might as well give up their wheels, and hope the ‘jackers don’t go ahead and shoot you anyway.

References

References
↑1 Even though Mrs Flaherty does not respect her husband, attorney Bret Flaherty, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal will not show him a similar disrespect.
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Once mayoral candidates wanted to bypass Larry Krasner, The Philadelphia Inquirer leapt to his defense

Yup, I expected this.

Despite the tremendous rise in crime, the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed District Attorney Larry Krasner for re-election on Monday, May 9, 2021, a day in which the City of Brotherly Love was reporting 183 homicides thus far that year, 46 more than the same day the previous year, and 1.4186 per day. The Editorial Board wrote at the time:

The Democratic primary for Philadelphia district attorney has been drawing national attention, and understandably so. Aside from its colorful main characters — an incumbent DA who’s a national icon in progressive circles, opposed by a former assistant DA whom he’d fired when he took the job — the race hinges on a powerful question: Is dramatic criminal-justice reform possible in a time of rising gun violence and murder rates?

No one can dispute the numbers: Philadelphia experienced the most homicides in 2020 in nearly 60 years, and 2021 is off to an even worse start. The first-term incumbent district attorney, Larry Krasner, notes that this spike parallels a national trend, and he insists it isn’t connected to his programs aimed at curbing mass incarceration. But his opponent, Carlos Vega, argues that Krasner’s approach to prosecuting gun offenses is too lenient — citing recent reports on low conviction rates for such crimes — and that the “bad guys” all know it. . . . .

A complex, relatively recent spike in gun violence isn’t a reason to return to the mass incarceration regime of yesteryear, but a challenge to do better.

It’s all that you need to know: the #woke[1]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 Editorial Board supported Mr Krasner’s very effective efforts at reducing “mass incarceration.” That criminals who could have been in jail but were not behind bars because of Mr Krasner’s policies, such as Hasan Elliot, were killing people just didn’t seem to matter to the Board.

Now, three current mayoral candidates, three Democratic mayoral candidates, have said they will find ways to circumvent the George Soros-sponsored District Attorney, to get those accused of violent crimes prosecuted by the United States Attorney, under federal law, rather than state law under Let ’em Loose Larry.

As we previously reported, the Editorial Board are perfectly aware that Philadelphians don’t feel safe in the city, and that the “percentage of Black and Hispanic Philadelphians who feel unsafe in their neighborhood is double the percentage of white Philadelphians.” Of course, teh Board blamed that not on crime, not on criminals, but the internal segregation in the city.

And now it seems that the Board are aghast that some politicians, some Democratic politicians want to cut the District Attorney out of the loop:

Circumventing DA Larry Krasner is not the answer to city’s gun woes | Editorial

A consistent theme that emerges in conversations on public safety in Philadelphia is, some say, how difficult Krasner makes it for others to work with him. It is critical they keep trying.

by The Editorial Board | Thursday, February 16, 2023 | 8:07 AM EST

Gun violence is one of the defining challenges facing Philadelphia, and whoever wants to be the next mayor must have answers on how to ensure public safety. But while there is room for debate on solutions, securing long-term results will require a coordinated effort across city government — no matter how difficult some agencies are to work with.

LOL! I find it interesting that the Editorial Board have restricted this to paid subscribers only.[2]Though the Inquirer does have a paywall, non-subscribers can usually get around five ‘free’ articles a month, with the website tracking IP addresses to determine that. You could, and I … Continue reading Given that the Lenfest Institute, the non-profit organization which owns the Inquirer sent out yet another begging letter to subscribers on February 12th, you’d think that they’d want a wider audience for their editorial, if they thought it would express a popular sentiment.

That includes the office of District Attorney Larry Krasner, who — to the consternation of his critics — has questioned the efficacy of pursuing charges against those who are carrying guns without a permit.

The Inquirer very much supports increased gun control, yet it does not seem as though the Board are questioning Mr Krasner’s reluctance to enforce an existing gun control law. How does that work?

Skipping down a few paragraphs, in which the Board note that yes, under Mr Krasner, there has been a significant decrease in convictions under the Violation of the Uniform Firearm Act, and that many people, including Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw believe has led to increased crime. The Board itself recognized that “convictions on gun cases have mostly declined since Krasner took office in 2018.”

The District Attorney has blamed the decrease in convictions on poorer cases brought by the Philadelphia Police Department, but that doesn’t explain why there were more convictions previously on cases brought by that same Department.

The embattled district attorney, who was impeached last year by the Republican-controlled state House, told The Inquirer that any effort to circumvent his authority was an attempt to undo the will of the voters and compared it to the politically motivated impeachment.

“Some of the candidates for mayor are not in touch with Philadelphians,” he said. “This office has never enjoyed more love and support than it enjoys right now.”

That may be the case, but what love and support Krasner has is a result of his focus on restorative justice, not his often abrasive and condescending professional demeanor.

And there it is: the Board love Mr Krasner’s ideas about “restorative justice.” We recently noted the concept of restorative justice as stated by the University of Wisconsin Law School:

Restorative justice is a set of principles and practices that create a different approach to dealing with crime and its impacts. Restorative justice practices work to address the dehumanization frequently experienced by people in the traditional criminal justice system. Instead of viewing a criminal act as simply a violation of a rule or statute, restorative justice sees this action as a violation of people and relationships.

Restorative justice seeks to examine the harmful impact of a crime and then determines what can be done to repair that harm while holding the person who caused it accountable for his or her actions. Accountability for the offender means accepting responsibility and acting to repair the harm done. Outcomes seek to both repair the harm and address the reasons for the offense, while reducing the likelihood of re-offense. Rather than focusing on the punishment meted out, restorative justice measures results by how successfully the harm is repaired.

What, exactly, would be ‘repairing the harm’ to a shooting victim? How would one ‘repair the harm’ to someone who has been murdered? Given that the Board have recognized that a very significant number of Philadelphians, 70% of them, see public safety as the most important issue facing the city, and that two-thirds of residents have heard gunshots in the city over the past year, it would seem to me that the harm is citywide, as the people who haven’t been robbed or carjacked or stabbed or shot yet are still fearful that they could be the next victims. How can a criminal malefactor repair that harm?

There’s a lot more, with the Board noting that Mr Krasner doesn’t play well with others, and is zealous in his anti-police crusade, something with which the Board are wholeheartedly in support. They concluded:

Ultimately, for the sake of Philadelphia, it is far better for whoever is elected mayor to find a way to partner with the district attorney.

After all, it isn’t politicians who bear the brunt of leadership failures on public safety, it is vulnerable Philadelphians who must live with the everyday reality of gun violence outside their doors.

You know, that’s true enough: the city shouldn’t have to go around one of its elected officials, and the city shouldn’t have to bring in the Feds because local law enforcement won’t do its job. But Mr Krasner won his elections, in landslides, because actual law enforcement is not what a whole lot of city voters want. They want things to be nice, and they’d like things to be peaceful, but they also want things to be nice and peaceful without the police around, as though that were actually possible.

References

References
↑1 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.

↑2 Though the Inquirer does have a paywall, non-subscribers can usually get around five ‘free’ articles a month, with the website tracking IP addresses to determine that. You could, and I have before I subscribed, gotten five on your home computer, then five more on your smart phone as long as it wasn’t using your home WiFi for access, than five more on your computer at work.
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Why is Lexington hiding this?

Rigoberto Vasquez-Barradas, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

We previously reported on the arrest of Rigoberto Vasquez-Barradas, charged with fetal homicide in the first degree, a capital offense under KRS §507A.020, for allegedly kicking a woman who was 18-weeks pregnant thrice in the stomach, along with other forms of assault.

Mr Vasquez-Barradas was arrested on Friday, January 20, 2023, which was 2½ weeks, or 17 days ago. According to the Fayette County Detention Center, Mr Vasquez-Barradas is still behind bars, facing the same charges as we detailed in our previous story, though it now states that he “can post property bond” to meet his $300,000 bail.

The Lexington city government has a rather sketchy record of posting information in a timely manner, but after 17 days have passed, the Lexington Police Department’s Homicide Investigations Page still does not show the fetal homicide Mr Vasquez-Barradas allegedly committed. That the suspect is still behind bars, or so the Fayette County Detention Center records show as of 1:00 PM EST,> and still charged with fetal homicide, tells us that yes, it’s still considered a murder, but the city, for some reason, does not show it as one.

So, I have to ask: does the city, in which the public officials all support abortion, simply not wish to state that a fetal homicide under state law is actually a homicide?

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Republicans take control of the House of Representatives; Vanity Fair writer waxes wroth If there's one thing the left despise, it's populism

The Democrats in the House of Representatives, the ones who created the silly Capitol Kerfuffle Committee, the one which almost all Republicans refused to join, are just terribly, terribly worried that, now that the GOP have regained the majority, they’ll, Horrors! investigate Democrats.

Remember Paul Ryan? He was House Speaker in 2018, the last time Republicans were in control. He left Congress quietly in the middle of the night. Well, not really, but sort of. Blaming “identity politics” and “polarization,” Ryan abruptly announced in April 2018 that he’d be exiting at the end of his term the following January, just as Democrats assumed power. Ryan went on to join the board overseeing the place that helped cause so much of that polarization in the first place, Fox News. Ryan may have reaped the benefits of Donald Trump moving into the White House—tax cuts!—but he didn’t have the stomach for MAGA. The same cannot be said for “my Kevin,” the little nickname the former president has given to Kevin McCarthy.

McCarthy helped rehabilitate Trump after the January 6 riots with a visit weeks later to Mar-a-Lago, where the two grinned side by side for a photo op. As fellow Republican Liz Cheney pointed out after McCarthy’s trip, “He’s not just a former president. He provoked an attack on the Capitol, an attack on our democracy. And so I can’t understand why you would want to go rehabilitate him.”

Here’s where Vanity Fair’s paywall begins, but, if you have only checked in for one of their articles in a month (?), you’ll still be able to access it for free. That’s how I did it; I would certainly never pay for it!

There is, of course, the amusing point of referring to Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY At Large) as Representative Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA 22) “fellow republican,” when Miss Cheney decided to abandon all party loyalty and accept Nancy Pelosi’s appointment to the January 6th committee.

Wyoming was President Trump’s strongest state in the 2020 elections, but Miss Cheney hated him. Despite having won re-election in 2020 with 66% of the vote, her participation in the Democrats’ witch hunt had her lose the 2022 Republican primary to Harriet Hageman by a landslide margin. Molly Jong-Fast Greenfield’s[1]Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by … Continue reading article, which is based heavily on sources from not just the Democrats in the House, but the farthest left Democrats, is so ridiculously biased that her calling Miss Cheney Mr McCarthy’s “fellow Republican” is more of a mockery than an accurate description.

Maybe because McCarthy was desperate for the Speakership?

Now, with Republicans winning a slim majority in the midterms, that guy could be Speaker of the House—and honestly that’s the best-case scenario. McCarthy may be a cowardly sycophant, but he’s not full MAGA, something that MAGA-world is very much aware of. Though McCarthy won the Republican nomination for speaker on Tuesday, with 188 votes, dozens of members voted for Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Biggs—a signal that McCarthy might have to make major concessions to the party’s far-right flank in order to secure 218 votes before the full Congress in early January.

Yeah, referring to Mr McCarthy as a “cowardly sycophant” is going to help! 🙂

Meanwhile, the queen of MAGA, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is more than ready for Republicans to be in charge and apparently expects the likely next Speaker to appease the base. Regarding McCarthy, she told The New York Times that “to be the best Speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway.” She even predicted Monday that she’d be on committees investigating “traitors and criminals.” McCarthy has said he plans to put Greene back on committees, with some of her Trumpworld allies reportedly urging the likely Speaker to give her a plum seat on the House Oversight Committee. Imagine, from promoting QAnon conspiracies to possibly landing a key oversight post in Congress.

“We have to have the gavel,” Greene said Tuesday in discussing her support for McCarthy. “That is extremely important, because the gavel means subpoena power. And Republicans need subpoena power going over the next two years.”

Mrs Greenfield was in no way offended when Democrats had the subpoena power!

For Democrats, the outlook of a GOP-led House is grim. As Democratic representative Eric Swalwell texted me, “The GOP has laid a historic egg. Democrats ran on competence and contrasted it with chaos. And if Kevin McCarthy somehow holds on to become Speaker, he’s no Nancy Pelosi who can lead a narrow majority. McCarthy would be the leader of the land of misfit toys, a place that will exist exclusively as a vessel state of MAGA nation. A MAGA House majority will also operate as the largest law firm in Washington, DC, but serving just one client and his endless grievances. Functionally, without a Democratic votes it will spectacularly fail to execute its core functions: keep the government open, pay America’s bills, and fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine.”

I would imagine that the House under the GOP will keep the government open — though I would hope that they’d try to eliminate some of the stupid functions — but “fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine”? Try fund the struggle to make nuclear war more probable, because that’s how I see it. Sure, we all want Russia to somehow lose the Russo-Ukrainian War, but for some of us, including me, not at the expense of making a nuclear war more probable.

There’s more at the original, but what Mrs Greenfield tells us, almost as an aside, tells us a lot about her biases. Eric Swalwell, Ro Khanna, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all congressmen who know where to go for a sympathetic journolist[2]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, reached out to her via text. Richie Torres, “first openly gay Afro-Latino elected to Congress,” is cited as calling Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Tayor Greene as “lunatic likes”. I’m just surprised that Mus Greenfield failed to mention Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), but, then again, Mrs Boebert’s race had not been decided by last Wednesday, when she published the article. Mrs Boebert was re-elected, though by just a few hundred votes.

There are several more paragraphs but none of it is sensible reporting; it’s simply more Democratic propaganda masquerading — though not very well — as a measured and sensible opinion piece.

What Mrs Greenfield and the rest simply don’t understand is that the Republican electorate has moved on from the go-along-to-get-along politicians, and is now solidly populist in outlook. The attitudes of Representatives like Mrs Greene, Mrs Boebert, and Mr Gaetz are the attitudes of the majority of Republican voters. We saw this in 2010, with the emergence of the short-lived TEA Party, rebelling against President Obama’s stimulus and socialized medicine programs, but the TEA Party movement failed to last, dominated in Congress by the more polite Republicans.

Now the populists are the apparent majority of Republican voters, and that means that more populists are among the elected Republican office holders. And the left really, really, really don’t like that.

Donald Trump is mortal. More than just mortal, he’s very overweight and eats terrible food. The populist idea in the United States will outlive him.

References

References
↑1 Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by their proper names.
↑2 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.