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Mugshot and photo hypocrisy from the Lexington Herald-Leader

We noted on Sunday that the Lexington Herald-Leader declined to post the mugshot of Brent Dyer Kelty, a man previously convicted of “several prior felonies in Fayette County since 2010,” in their story about him being indicted for the murder of an infant. In that, the newspaper followed the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, despite the fact that Mr Kelty, even if acquitted of murder, is still a multiply convicted felon.

The McClatchy policy is due to the possibility that an accused person might not ever be convicted, and thus having his mugshot published could harm him later in life. Of course, someone’s name is far more easily searchable, and just printing the suspect’s name can have far wider implications. For instance, prospective employers who do their due diligence on an applicant, will be searching for his name, not his photo.

But it seems that the Herald-Leader has no compunctions about printing the photo of someone accused of, and convicted of, a simple misdemeanor:

    Woman who attended University of Kentucky pleads guilty in U.S. Capitol riot case

    By Beth Musgrave | August 30, 2021 | 1:21 PM EDT

    Gracyn Dawn Courtright, a University of Kentucky student, faces charges linked to the Capitol riot on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2020. This photo was included in a criminal complaint filed against Courtright and allegedly shows her holding the “members only” sign. PHOTO VIA FBI.

    A woman from West Virginia who attended the University of Kentucky pleaded guilty Monday to charges related to entering the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.

    In federal court in Washington D.C., Gracyn Dawn Courtright pleaded guilty to a charge of entering and remaining in a restricted area, according to federal court records. She had faced more charges.

    Courtright will be sentenced Nov. 16. She could face up to six months in prison in addition to other fines and restitution.

There’s more at the original.

It might be complained that Miss Courtright is a convicted criminal now, but the Herald-Leader published the same photo on June 28th, before she was convicted of anything.

Miss Courtright is hardly the only one of the Capitol kerfufflers whose photo has been published by the Herald-Leader, even before they were convicted of anything. The newspaper had at least two articles on Lori Vinson, one of which was before she was even charged with any crimes, which featured her photos.

Both Miss Courtright and Mrs Vinson are facing maximum sentences of six months in jail; Mr Kelty is a multiply convicted felon looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison, but the Herald-Leader protected the photo of Mr Kelty. On March 3rd, the newspaper published a story which identified 12 Kentuckians by name, with photos of 10 of them — some difficult to identify — who were charged with crimes related to the demonstration, but at the time not convicted of anything.

The Herald-Leader also declined to publish the mugshots of two men sentenced to a year for their part in assaults during a Black Lives Matter protest in the city. Their crimes were more serious than any of the ones of which the Capitol kerfufflers were convicted.

Of course, the very liberal Herald-Leader probably sees the Capitol kerfuffle as a hideous and heinous crime, because that’s what the left do, when it was, in reality, little more than an out-of-control, disorganized frat party. The only shot fired was from a Capitol policeman, and even though a few firearms were recovered from a couple of the protesters’ vehicles, none were taken from protesters in the Capitol Building.

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Ignoring a very, very large elephant in the room

Do reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer read their own news paper?

Inquirer reporter Harold Brubaker, who specializes in the business side of health care and nonprofit sector, reported on the Keystone State’s attempts to revise nursing home regulations, but somehow he managed to miss the elephant in the room:

‘Insulting and dumb.’ That’s how a nursing home manager labeled criticism of Pa.’s new staffing proposal

Advocates say more staffing is desperately needed. But nursing home executives say Medicaid rates won’t support it.

by Harold Brubaker | August 28, 2021

Anne Clauss hates to imagine what her mother would have endured at a nursing home in Langhorne if she or another relative hadn’t visited daily during her stay from 2017 to 2018.

One evening Clauss found her mother at the end of a hallway facing away from her room, where she had been stuck for a few hours, another resident told her. Other times, staff — whom she called underpaid and overworked — forgot to bring her mother her meals.

Her mother died at a hospital in 2018. But that experience prompted the Levittown resident to comment in favor of a Pennsylvania Department of Health proposal to increase the homes’ minimum level of direct care to 4.1 hours daily per patient, up from the current 2.7 hours.

“I hope regulations can be updated to help our elderly live out their lives well cared for and treated respectfully,” Clauss wrote to the Independent Regulatory Review Commission, which will review the comments and eventually hold a public hearing. It’s not clear how quickly the commission will act.

Let’s tell the truth here: nursing homes are dreadful places, facilities in which to warehouse the elderly who can no longer care for themselves, but who can, and do, live on with nursing care and physical assistance. It’s a truth all of us know, but no one is willing to say out loud, because so many people fear that they will one day have to warehouse their aging parents in such a facility.[1]My family has been fortunate in that regard; such a decision was never one we faced. And I cannot imagine that any of us do not dread the thought of having to be in a nursing home themselves. I’m very thankful that I’m very healthy, but who can know what the future holds.

There’s a lot more at the original, and Mr Brubaker did a thorough job in his story, save for one thing. He noted that nursing homes have real difficulties in attracting staff, and that Medicaid payments for patients work out to roughly $8.00 an hour, which is significantly less than certified nursing assistants are paid. To provide more hours of patient care, more nursing staff would have to be hired, but there’s simply not enough money paid to nursing homes to do so. For the details, read Mr Brubaker’s original.

The effort is coming to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic in which over 13,000 people have died in Pennsylvania’s nursing homes.

This is where Mr Brubaker’s story fails. He mentions the COVID-19 panic just this once, and that’s it. But, as we previously noted, and as Mr Brubaker’s own newspaper has reported, Philadelphia’s Acting Health Commissioner, Dr Cheryl Bettigole, has mandated that all health care workers in the City of Brotherly Love must be vaccinated against COVID-19 by October 15th. Dr Bettigole has noted that more than a dozen long-term care facilities in Philadelphia have less than 50% of their staff vaccinated.

If you’re more committed to not getting the vaccine than to the safety of your patients, it’s time to do something else. Health care is not for you.

This is something that Mr Brubaker should have mentioned: not only are patients in nursing homes getting fewer hours of care than they should, Dr Bettigole and the city of Philadelphia want to fire the CNAs and RNs who refuse to get vaccinated.

Oh, they won’t put it that way — though the Commissioner came close — but that’s the result of the policy. The city obviously wants to force the reluctant to get vaccinated, and some will probably concede, but if over half the staff have resisted vaccination, in an industry which has been continually pushing for it, it has to be expected that at least some, quite probably a significant percentage of them, will continue to refuse to comply.

From an article referenced by the much nicer Dana on Patterico’s Pontifications:

As of last night, there were 102 people waiting for an ICU bed in the greater Houston area.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo told Begnaud that she was prepared to open a field hospital, but as of Friday morning, hospitals in the Houston area were telling her they had extra beds — but not enough nurses. Seven hundred nurses arrived last week, but it’s still not enough to meet the demand.

Of course, that article, too, failed to address the elephant in the room:

Houston hospital workers fired, resign over COVID-19 vaccine

By Jamie Stengle | June 22, 2021

DALLAS (AP) — More than 150 employees at a Houston hospital system who refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine have been fired or resigned after a judge dismissed an employee lawsuit over the vaccine requirement.

A spokesperson for Houston Methodist hospital system said 153 employees either resigned in the two-week suspension period or were terminated on Tuesday.

The case over how far health care institutions can go to protect patients and others against the coronavirus has been closely watched. It’s believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S. But it won’t be the end of the debate.

It’s not a case of some health care workers may quit, or may be fired, for refusing vaccination, but that some have already quit, some have already been fired.

I get it: the editorial position of the Inquirer is strongly in support of vaccination, and perhaps noting that the city’s vaccine mandate will actually cost the city’s nursing homes employees isn’t something a biased newspaper like the Inquirer wants to report.[2]I take publisher Elizabeth Hughes opinion piece as an admission that the Inquirer has, and will continue to have, a bias toward the left. But for an article like Mr Brubaker’s to fail to note the potential loss of nursing home employees, just as he is noting that the Commonwealth might require more, is simply poor journalism. It wasn’t just a missed point, but ignoring a very, very large elephant in the room.

References

References
↑1 My family has been fortunate in that regard; such a decision was never one we faced.
↑2 I take publisher Elizabeth Hughes opinion piece as an admission that the Inquirer has, and will continue to have, a bias toward the left.
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Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader hides a mugshot, this time of a convicted felon.

As we have previously noted, the Lexington Herald-Leader adheres to the McClatchy Mugshot Policy. The policy states as one of its reasons is the possibility that a criminal suspect might be acquitted or have the charges dropped, in which case publishing his mugshot would have a detrimental effect on him.

But what if the accused is already a convicted felon, one with “several prior felonies”? Why should he be shielded?

    New Lexington murder indictment was from an infant’s death in 2018. Bond set at $500k

    By Jeremy Chisenhall | August 27, 2021 | 4:41 PM

    Brent Dyer Kelty. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center. Click to enlarge.

    The Lexington man indicted by a grand jury this week is accused of killing an infant three years ago, according to court records.

    Brent Dyer Kelty, 30, has been charged with murder in the death of 4-month-old Landon Mayes, who suffered head trauma. Mayes died on Sept. 8, 2018. Kelty was indicted on Wednesday, according to court records.

    Lexington police investigated the death, but the attorney general’s office presented the case to a grand jury, resulting in Kelty’s indictment. A spokesperson for Attorney General Daniel Cameron said representatives couldn’t comment on why the indictment came three years after Mayes’ death.

    “We cannot share details regarding the investigation,” Elizabeth Kuhn said.

    Kelty was already in jail on unrelated charges, according to jail records. In addition to murder, he was also indicted on a count of being a persistent felony offender. Kelty had been convicted of several prior felonies in Fayette County since 2010, according to court records.

There’s more at the original, but I would think that a man, a previously convicted felon, who has now been indicted for killing an infant, would qualify as accused of committing what should be considered a “high profile crime”.

The First Street Journal does not hold to the policy of shielding such defendants, and their mugshots are matters of public record. If this guy is guilty of killing an infant, there ought to be exactly one sentence: lock him up and throw away the key.

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Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd!

Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd. Photo: Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts.

I wrote Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd! back on March 3, after he issued his illegal and unconstitutional injunctions against laws passed by the General Assembly, and it appears I was right. It took way, way, way too long for the state Supreme Court to rule that the injunctions should not have been issued, and order the injunctions dissolved:

    We find that this matter presents a justiciable case or controversy but that the Franklin Circuit Court abused its discretion in issuing the temporary injunction.[1]Cameron v Beshear, Section B, pages 13 forward. Accordingly, we remand this case to the trial court with instructions to dissolve the injunction.[2]Cameron v Beshear, page 2.

Now, five days later, we find that Judge Shepherd is not going to follow the instructions to dissolve the injunctions!

    KY judge delays following Supreme Court COVID order as Beshear & lawmakers negotiate

    By Jack Brammer | August 26, 2021 11:57 AM

    Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and legislative leaders are working together on a new set of COVID-19 emergency orders, which they hope to present to a Franklin Circuit Court judge before he dissolves an injunction against new laws that will torpedo Beshear’s existing emergency orders and regulations.

    At a status conference hearing Thursday morning, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd said he will follow the Kentucky Supreme Court’s instructions in a ruling last Saturday for him to dissolve the injunction but he will wait until the court hears more about the work between the Democratic governor and the Republican legislative leaders.

    The high court unanimously said the injunction was wrong and that the new laws limiting Beshear’s emergency powers during the coronavirus crisis should not have been blocked. A provision in one of the new laws would limit Beshear’s executive orders to 30 days unless renewed by the legislature.

Just where in the Court’s ruling does it give Judge Shepherd the discretion as to when to dissolve the injunctions?

    Beshear has said he would like to implement a statewide mask mandate, but lawmakers have shown little interest in that suggestion.

Of course they haven’t: getting rid of the mask mandate was what the voters elected the legislators to do!

    David Fleenor, counsel for Senate President Robert Stivers, told Shepherd he did not know exactly when the negotiations between the governor and lawmakers would be completed but said he expects it to be in days, not weeks, quickly adding, “I hope I’m not being overly optimistic.”

The Court specified that the General Assembly makes policy for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, not the Governor,[3]Cameron v Beshear, page 20: “As we have noted time and again, so many times that we need not provide citation, the General Assembly establishes the public policy of the Commonwealth.” yet somehow Judge Shepherd believes he has the authority to hold off on following the Supreme Court’s instructions to dissolve the injunction until he hears more about what, if any, negotiations are ongoing between the Governor and legislative leaders.

That was not part of the Court’s ruling.

Judge Shepherd has told the parties to report back to him on Tuesday, September 7th, 12 days from now, and 17 days since the Supreme Court issued its ruling. Judge Shepherd, who had already suspended the laws which the state Supreme Court noted were passed legally, for 171 days, now thinks he can add another 17 days on top of that. That would be one day short of 27 weeks, more than half a year.

The state House of Representatives needs to impeach this judge when the regular session begins next January, and the state Senate needs to remove him from office and attaint him from ever holding another office in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The state Court of Appeals needs to overrule him and dissolve the injunctions, if the Supreme Court doesn’t beat them to it; I would expect Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R-KY) to immediately appeal Judge Shepherd’s refusal to dissolve the injunctions, and move that he be removed from the case.

References

References
↑1 Cameron v Beshear, Section B, pages 13 forward.
↑2 Cameron v Beshear, page 2.
↑3 Cameron v Beshear, page 20: “As we have noted time and again, so many times that we need not provide citation, the General Assembly establishes the public policy of the Commonwealth.”
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I point at the moon; they stare at my finger When the left don't like the information, they attack the gathering of the facts

We noted, a month ago, the story of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned as General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after a conservative Catholic site used cell phone data to show him using Grindr, a homosexual dating app, and frequenting homosexual bars. But, as is so often the case with the left, the liberals got all upset about the wrong thing, and The New York Times spent 1,599 works to completely miss the point!

Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr

A conservative Catholic media organization, The Pillar, has published several reports claiming the use of dating apps at several churches and the Vatican.

by Liam Stack | August 20, 2021

The reports hit the Roman Catholic Church in rapid succession: Analyses of cellphone data obtained by a conservative Catholic blog seemed to show priests at multiple levels of the Catholic hierarchy in both the United States and the Vatican using the gay hookup app Grindr.

The first report, published late last month, led to the resignation of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, the former general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference. The second, posted online days later, made claims about the use of Grindr by unnamed people in unspecified rectories in the Archdiocese of Newark. The third, published days after that, claimed that in 2018 at least 32 mobile devices emitted dating app data signals from within areas of Vatican City that are off-limits to tourists.

The reports by the blog, The Pillar, have unnerved the leadership of the American Catholic Church and have introduced a potentially powerful new weapon into the culture war between supporters of Pope Francis and his conservative critics: cellphone data, which many users assume to be unavailable to the general public.

“When there is reporting out there that claims to expose activity like this in parishes around the country and also on Vatican grounds, that is a five-alarm fire for church officials, there is no doubt about it,” said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a progressive advocacy group.

Note that Faith in Public Life is very much a homosexual rights activist group.

The reports have put church officials in an awkward position: Priests take a vow of celibacy that is in no way flexible, and the downloading or use of dating apps by clergy members is inconsistent with that vow. But officials are also deeply uncomfortable with the use of cellphone data to publicly police priests’ behavior. Vatican officials said they met with representatives from the blog in June but would not publicly respond to its reports.

“If someone who has made promise of celibacy or a vow of chastity has a dating app on his or her phone, that is asking for trouble,” said Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark at a Zoom panel organized by Georgetown University. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Of course, His Eminence the Cardinal is far, far, far more concerned with the fact that some priests have been ‘outed’ as active homosexuals than he is about them being active homosexuals!

“I would also say that I think there are very questionable ethics around the collection of this data of people who allegedly may have broken their promises,” he said.

In American jurisprudence, information about a criminal suspect has to be gathered legally, and Americans tend to look at evidence gathered about people concerning things other than criminal law in the same manner.  But the investigation exposed by The Pillar, however it was gathered, has exposed, yet again, the problem of priests not keeping their vows. The Cardinal somehow doesn’t see that as that big a deal. “(T)hat is asking for trouble”? “(P)eople who allegedly may have broken their promises”? I’m sorry, but that is mealy-mouthing the issue.

The only app explicitly named in the reports has been Grindr, which is used almost exclusively by gay and bisexual men, although The Pillar has made vague references to other apps it says are used by heterosexuals. Only one of the reports directly links an app to a specific person, Monsignor Burrill.

The reports have been criticized by Catholic liberals for tying the general use of Grindr to studies that show minors sometimes use the app as well. That conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia is part of a longstanding effort by Catholic conservatives to blame the church sex abuse crisis on the presence of gay men in the priesthood.

Of course, there it is. I wrote, three years ago, about the problems in the Catholic priesthood, including the fact that a significantly large percentage of priests are homosexual,

the actual number unknown, but most surveys (which, due to the sensitivity of the subject, admittedly suffer from limited samples and other design issues) find between 15 percent and 50 percent of U.S. priests are gay, which is much greater than the 3.8 percent of people who identify as LGBTQ in the general population.[1]The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either … Continue reading

The Church does not want to admit that homosexuality is related to the sexual abuse of minors by priests, but the vast majority of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been against boys rather than girls. Several different Google searches have failed to turn up any notation concerning the number of victims in the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report divided by sex, something of obvious interest, because such would reinforce the rather obvious fact that most victims of an all-male clergy have been boys. The John Jay report noted that sexual abuse cases studied between 1950 and 2002 indicated that, rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Only willful, deliberate ignorance could contend that such numbers don’t indicate a problem with homosexuality among priests.

The editors of The Pillar, J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon, said their work was motivated by a desire to expose a secretive culture of wrongdoing within the church.

“Immoral and illicit sexual behavior on the part of clerics who are bound to celibacy, but also on the part of other church leaders, could lead to a broad sense of tolerance for any number or kinds of sexual sins,” Mr. Flynn said on the podcast.

They said Newark was the only American diocese they wrote about because it was once led by the former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019 and charged last month with sexually assaulting a child in Massachusetts in 1974.

But their decision to investigate the use of a gay dating app in suburban New Jersey, instead of a city with a large gay population, has raised suspicion that their real goal may have been to undermine Cardinal Tobin, an ally of Pope Francis.

So, now The Pillar is being accused of targeting Cardinal Tobin and his archdiocese, as that somehow exculpates the entire behavioral issue.

A great deal of the Times article concerns how The Pillar obtained their information, and it includes a lot of speculation that is hardly consistent with good journalism.

Father Bob Bonnot, the executive director of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests, said the use of cellphone data to track the movement of Monsignor Burrill had deepened a sense of vulnerability many priests feel.

“It can be terribly threatening,” he said. “It can make all priests uncomfortable and worried.”

It makes them worried about what, that such cell phone tracking might expose their own homosexual hook ups?

I don’t know why so many homosexuals are attracted to the priesthood. My guess is that they know that homosexual relationships are immoral and sinful, and they hope that, by the grace of God and the promise to be celibate, they can live life celibately.

But this really is a celibacy problem, in that priests are forced to live unnatural lives, and while it might be politically incorrect, it is also intellectually dishonest to deny that this is a homosexuality problem as well. We have a priesthood of sexually immature men — what else could they be, having been denied mature sexual relationships by the nature of their careers? — who are far more heavily than the population homosexual in orientation. The statistics we do have indicate that they were preying on boys just entering puberty, not prepubescent children, and that is an indication that sexual orientation as opposed to pedophilia is the primary motivation.

We need a priesthood who understand and participate in normal, adult sexual relationships, and, given that the Church does not, and cannot, recognize homosexual marriages as legitimate, that can mean only one thing: a priesthood in normal, heterosexual marriages.

That will not eliminate all sexual abuse; Jerry Sandusky, were he available for comment — and cared to tell the truth — could tell us all about men in stable, heterosexual marriages who still had a preference for underaged boys. Nor will it prevent the inevitable, some priests being divorced by their wives, and some children or married priests turning out badly.

But it has to be better than what we have now, a priesthood with an out-of-proportion homosexual cohort, and all being denied the most natural of human impulses, that of mating.

This is what we must have, this is what the Catholic Church needs in order to survive to serve the faithful into the future. Denying it, because it is politically incorrect, is denying the truth.

References

References
↑1 The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. This does not support the article’s contention that 3.8% of the population are homosexual.
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Lies, damned lies, and statistics If you have a good case to make, getting caught using skewed statistics doesn't help you make it

There it was, on the left hand side of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website main page, a story about ‘breakthrough’ COVID-19 cases, which naturally got my attention.

    Fayette County vaccination rates inch up but so do breakthrough COVID cases

    By Beth Musgrave | August 24, 2021 | 5:52 PM

    Lexington’s vaccination rate for those over 18 has hit 70 percent as COVID breakthrough infections — typically far less serious — have increased in those immunized, health and city officials said Tuesday.

    Although 70 percent of those over 18 have been immunized, the overall vaccination rate, which includes those 12 to 17, is about 58.7 percent, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data as of Sunday.

OK, here’s the first statistical problem: the vaccines were not approved for use in patients 12 to 15 years of age until May 10, 2021, so of course the vaccination rate for minors is going to be lower . . . but the Herald-Leader doesn’t tell us that. The vaccines have still not been approved for use in patients under 12, though that is expected soon.

    The city also hit another more grim milestone this week — the number of coronavirus cases in Fayette County has now topped 40,000. In the past four weeks, the city has had more than 4,000 reported cases, with 486 of those new cases from Saturday through Monday, say city and health leaders who held a press conference Tuesday on COVID issues.

    Approximately 28 percent of all August cases have been in fully vaccinated people, according to health department data.

    “But that’s also because more people are getting vaccinated,” said health department spokesman Kevin Hall.

    Still, vaccinated people are much less likely to be hospitalized, Fayette County Health Department data shows.

    Since February, 88 percent of people hospitalized locally have been unvaccinated or only received a single dose of the vaccine. Of the 94 Lexington residents who are currently hospitalized, 79 percent are unvaccinated, Hall said.

And here we go again: “Since February, 88 percent of people hospitalized locally have been unvaccinated or only received a single dose of the vaccine.” The vaccines were not even available to people under 70, who were not health care workers, until March, and even then, supply shortages meant that people under 70 could not get the vaccines in March. Nor does this account for children under 12, who have never been approved for vaccination; including children under 12 further skews the statistics.

More, even the people who were able to receive their first dose in early March — I was not able to get my first dose until April Fool’s Day, due to shortages of the vaccine — could not have gotten the second dose until early April, and would not have been considered fully vaccinated, meaning 14 days after the second dose, until mid-April. Thus, any statistic like the one given us above, using percentages from before almost anyone could have received both doses, is going to be seriously skewed. We’ve noted this previously, when Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) and state Health Commissioner Steven Stack released a wholly misleading graphic on Twitter. I do not disagree with the Governor that people should get vaccinated; I just see these tweets as wholly dishonest. Of course, I see the Governor as totally dishonest on just about everything.

If the case for vaccination is a good one, and I believe it is, why do public officials use skewed, obviously skewed, data to try to make their case? When you are trying to sell people on something — and trying to persuade people to do something they’ve previously been reluctant to do definitely qualifies as selling — getting caught using misleading information sure doesn’t help your case.

Would you buy a used car from Andy Beshear?

Beth Musgrave, from her Herald-Leader biography.

I have previously stated that the Herald-Leader employs journolism[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ 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 … Continue reading as much as journalism, and this is another example of it. According to her Herald-Leader biography blurb, Beth Musgrave, the article author,

    has covered government and politics for the Herald-Leader for more than a decade. A graduate of Northwestern University, she has worked as a reporter in Kentucky, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois and Washington D.C.

If she has covered government and politics for over ten years, I have no doubt that she’s at least reasonably intelligent, and ought to be able to spot the bovine feces which comes from the mouths of government officials. She should not have missed how misleading the statistics presented were, and if she managed to miss it, Peter Baniak, the newspaper’s editor, should have caught it.

I understand: it is the Herald-Leader’s editorial policy to push vaccination and mask mandates, and I absolutely support people choosing to take the vaccine. More, the newspaper is, like medium sized newspapers everywhere, on shaky financial footing. But it takes little energy and few dollars to ask the questions which get statistics which are not biased, not misleading, and this the Herald-Leader does not do.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Haven’t the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer noticed the numbers? Homicides and shootings in the city have dropped significantly

We have previously noted the recent decrease in the number of homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. We noted, on July 9th, that there had been 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. If I recall correctly, that 562 number was my highest projection for the year.

But then, as of the 221st day of the year, 325 homicides had been recorded. 325 ÷ 221 days in the year, = 1.4706 homicides per day, for a projected 537 for the year. That number stayed fairly consistent, as a week later, with ‘just’ 339 homicides in 228 days, Philadelphia was seeing ‘only’ 1.4868 homicides per day, which works out to ‘just’ 543 over the course of 2021.

As of 11:59 PM on Sunday, August 22nd, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 345 homicides in the city. 345 ÷ 234 days = 1.4744 per day, or 538 projected for the year. The big news is that, over the past 31 days, a full month, if not a calendar month, there have been ‘just’ 31 homicides, ‘just’ 1.00 per day. With 131 days remaining in 2021, if that rate could be maintained, there would be ‘only’ 476 killings in Philly for the year. If The Philadelphia Inquirer has noticed that decrease, I haven’t seen it mentioned. It certainly doesn’t seem as though their Editorial Board has noticed.

    In Philly, someone has been shot every day since Jan. 2 as multiple crises plague the city

    January 2nd was the only day in 2021 in which no person was shot in Philadelphia.

    by The Editorial Board | August 23, 2021

    If you’re looking for ways to quantify the depths of the gun violence crisis in Philadelphia, there may not be many bleaker statistics than this: There’s only been one day so far this year — Jan. 2 — when not a single person was shot in the city.

    Since then, nearly 1,500 people have been shot in Philadelphia, including 295 fatalities. At least 50 other people were murdered by an assailant who used a weapon other than a gun.

    Gun violence drives Philadelphia’s murder rate, which is on pace for a record this year, but it’s essential that the city also address three other factors if officials hope to stem a seemingly unrelenting tide of killings — increasing the rate at which murders are solved, fostering more cooperation from witnesses in criminal prosecutions, and rooting out corrupt officers whose bad practices later lead to convictions being overturned.

    In Philadelphia, murderers have a better chance of winning a coin toss than being arrested. Last Wednesday, during the most recent briefing on the city’s response to gun violence, the police presented data showing that through Aug. 15, only 43% of homicides this year led to an arrest. That homicide clearance rate, or the percentage of killings that lead to an arrest, is on par with recent years.

Am I wrong in thinking that the Editorial Board ought to be noting that fewer people are being killed?

But it’s not just that fewer people are being killed. According to data provided by the city, there were 272 shootings during the 31 days of July, and ‘only’ 145 through the first 22 days of August. If that rate of 6.59 shootings per day holds up for the rest of the month, there would be 204 total shootings in August, a 33.33% decrease.

There’s more at the original, but, if you remember when publisher Elizabeth Hughes said she was going to make the Inquirer “an anti-racist news organization“, you won’t be surprised that the Editorial Board turned quickly to a Larry Krasneresque condemnation of the Philadelphia Police Department, noting Mr Krasner’s ongoing attempts to overturn what they claim are false convictions.

    These exonerations, as well as recent reporting by The Inquirer, have shed light on the coercive and illegal tactics detectives used to get false confessions. This month, Krasner charged three former homicide detectives for lying in the 2016 retrial of Anthony Wright, whose murder conviction was vacated due to DNA evidence.

    Also this month, Krasner asked a judge to hold the Philadelphia Police Department in contempt for failing to turnover police misconduct records.

    Philadelphia’s twin crises of gun violence and homicides are multilayered and intertwined. To reduce the number of unsolved murders in the city, the homicide clearance rate needs to go up. For the homicide clearance rate to go up, witnesses need to have faith that the system is actually seeking justice — not simply trying to improve its statistics by throwing another person in prison.

I’m trying to figure out how the Editorial Board are trying to give witnesses “faith that the system is actually seeking justice” by continually slamming the performance of the Police Department, and so far, I’ve got nothing. When the Board say that the Police Department needs to be “rooting out corrupt officers,” the impression the #woke at the Inquirer are giving — and, I suspect, trying to give — is that most of the city police officers are corrupt.

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The unintended consequence of #MaskMandates: schools can’t find enough bus drivers

I have previously noted, on Twitter, how Fayette County is having real problems with manning school buses:

Well, it looks like I haven’t been the only one noticing that!

Bus driver shortages are latest challenge hitting US schools

By Amy Beth Hamson and Lindsay Whitehurst | August 22, 2021

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A Montana school district is dangling $4,000 bonuses and inviting people to test drive big yellow school buses in hopes of enticing them to take a job that schools are struggling to fill as kids return to in-person classes.

A Delaware school district offered to pay parents $700 to take care of their own transportation, and a Pittsburgh district delayed the start of classes and said hundreds more children would have to walk to school. Schools across the U.S. are offering hiring bonuses, providing the training needed to get a commercial driver’s license and increasing hourly pay to attract more drivers.

The shortage of bus drivers is complicating the start of a school year already besieged by the highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19, contentious disagreement over masking requirements, and the challenge of catching up on educational ground lost as the pandemic raged last year.

The Lexington Herald-Leader story I had linked with my tweet noted the shortage of drivers, and that “several” had called out sick the previous week, which was the first week of school, made no mention at all of the mask mandate imposed by the Fayette County public schools. I had previously noted the problem, and pointed out, “Neither story says, of course, that the mask mandate ordered by Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) might be having an impact, but it’s an obvious question: would you want to be a bus driver and face possibly being accosted by angry students and their parents over such. Given the very liberal unemployment eligibility and the government paying people not to work, why sign up to take such abuse?”

Of course, given that the Herald-Leader Editorial Board supported Mr Beshear on his mask mandate, it’s not likely that one of the newspaper’s reporters would mention the mandate as part of the problem. As we have pointed out previously, the newspaper’s Editorial Board aren’t exactly in tune with the voters in the Commonwealth.

Now, what I have guessed to be true has been reported by the credentialed media. The Associated Press report noted that:

In Helena, the company (First Student) has 50 bus drivers and needs 21 more before classes start on Aug. 30, a shortfall (Dan) Redford called unprecedented.

Attendance ended up being light at Helena’s event, but similar demos, like one held recently in Seattle, led to more applications.

The delta variant also drove the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend universal mask wearing in schools, especially for children too young to be vaccinated. But in many areas, there’s a wave of fierce anti-mask protest.

First Student lost some Helena drivers to mask requirements on buses, Redford said.

The left will howl that such potential drivers are selfish in not wanting to wear face masks, but it is what it is: not everyone in the United States agrees with the #MaskMandates, and it isn’t as though we are seeing the left rushing in to fill the bus driver vacancies.

We have already noted how #VaccineMandates are contributing to a shortage of health care personnel. Now, Axios has noted that the ‘pandemic’ and the responses to it have led to a significant shortage of teachers as well.

It seems that some people just will not comply with authoritarian dictates!

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Paul Krugman waxes wroth because you didn’t take your medicine!

We have previously noted Amanda Marcotte’s article on Salon, It’s OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms. Miss Marcotte was upset, very upset, that the gym of which she was a member responded to Philadelphia’s new regulations to either impose vaccination requirements, complete with “Ve need to see your papers” enforcement, or require all staff and patrons to wear a mask, and the gym chose the latter. She is, she sand, “incandescent with rage” at the willfully unvaccinated.

Of course, Miss Marcotte, while she does have a following, is still relatively unknown, at least as far as the big picture is concerned. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, however, is well known, and if he didn’t use the phrase “incandescent with rage,” you can tell that it it would fit:

So how do you feel about anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers? I’m angry about their antics, even though I’m able to work from home and don’t have school-age children. And I suspect that many Americans share that anger.

The question is whether this entirely justified anger — call it the rage of the responsible — will have a political impact, whether leaders will stand up for the interests of Americans who are trying to do the right thing but whose lives are being disrupted and endangered by those who aren’t.

To say what should be obvious, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in public spaces aren’t “personal choices.” When you reject your shots or refuse to mask up, you’re increasing my risk of catching a potentially deadly or disabling disease, and also helping to perpetuate the social and economic costs of the pandemic. In a very real sense, the irresponsible minority is depriving the rest of us of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Actually, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask are personal choices. Dr Krugman himself, exercised his personal choice to get vaccinated, as did Miss Marcotte, and as did I. What Dr Krugman wants is for the rest of us to not have a personal choice in this matter

Dr Krugman spent 834 words telling us how evil conservatives are, and, reading it, it could have been written by Miss Marcotte! But then there was this:

Recent polling suggests that the public strongly supports mask mandates and that an overwhelming majority of Americans opposes attempts to prevent local school districts from protecting children. I haven’t seen polling on attempts to prevent businesses from requiring proof of vaccination, but my guess is that these attempts are also unpopular.

Really? I’ve pointed out dozens of times that when Republican state legislative candidates in Kentucky ran against Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) executive orders, the voters rewarded the GOP hugely.

But it wasn’t just the Bluegrass State, which President Trump carried by a wide margin. In Pennsylvania, which Joe Biden won, the state legislature put two constitutional amendments on the May 18, 2021 primary ballot, measures which would limit the governor’s executive authority, and both of them passed, 53.3% to 47.7% and 53.2% to 47.8%.

One thing, however, ought to be obvious: if the public really do “strongly support” mask mandates, why aren’t we seeing that out on the streets? I had to go to Lexington again today, and drove through part of the University of Kentucky; had I been able to find a place to park, I would have gotten lunch at the Local Taco. Alas! I couldn’t find a parking space, but the other thing I couldn’t find were students, most of whom are normally more liberal than the population as a whole, wearing masks.

I spotted one, one! lady coming out of Sqecial Media wearing a mask, and she was visibly older than the usual student population.

As I made a right turn off South Limestone Street onto Vine Street to head home, I saw one lawyer-looking type wearing a mask.

That was it. Kentucky was very much a red state, with President Trump winning 62.09% of the vote, but Joe Biden carried Fayette County, 59.25% to 38.50%. In 2019, Attorney General Andy Beshear beat Governor Matt Bevin (R-KY) by 65.51% to 32.95% in Fayette County. If anyplace in Kentucky was going to “strongly support” a mask mandate, it would have been the areas around UK and downtown Lexington.

Lexington, however, isn’t the only place I saw. The NFL Network had the preseason game between the Boston New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles. It’s only pre-season, so the games don’t count, but I was happy to see the Patriots stomp the Iggles, 35-0. What I noticed, because I was deliberately looking for it, was that when the cameras panned the crowd at Lincoln Financial Field maybe, maybe! 1% of the crowd were masked.

In Philadelphia, which gave Mr Biden 81.44% of its votes.

Of course, as we have note previously, the City of Brotherly Love does not have an 81.44% vaccination rate, and the Philadelphia zip codes with the lowest vaccination rates are heavily minority.

Well, I think the pro-public health majority is also getting increasingly angry, and rightly so. It just hasn’t been vocal enough — and too few politicians have sought to tap into this righteous rage. (Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, is trying. He’s pointing out, correctly, that voting for his recall would probably install an anti-vaccine, anti-mask fanatic as governor, with dire consequences for the state.)

So it’s time to stop being diffident and call out destructive behavior for what it is. Doing so may make some people feel that they’re being looked down on. But you know what? Your feelings don’t give you the right to ruin other people’s lives.

How, I have to ask, is Dr Krugman’s life being ruined? He is, or so I have inferred from his column, vaccinated, he is able to work from home, and he is perfectly capable of wearing a mask. His chances of contracting COVID-19 have to be pretty low, but, in the end, it’s not about his chances of catching the virus that have him outraged. No, what has him so angry is that not everybody is doing what he believes they should be doing.

The left are like that these days.