Category Archives: Uncategorized
Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen. When the CDC say that "fully vaccinated" Americans can go maskless, does that mean states will require vaccine passports?
In an attempt to boost President Biden’s status reopen the closed economy, the Centers for Disease Control are stating that Americans can start to take off their masks. From The New York Times:
Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the C.D.C. said.
May 13, 2021 | 2:20 PM EDT
In a sharp turnabout from previous recommendations, federal health officials on Thursday advised that Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus may stop wearing masks or maintaining social distance in most indoor and outdoor settings, regardless of size.
The advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention comes as welcome news to Americans who have tired of restrictions and marks a watershed moment in the pandemic. Masks ignited controversy in communities across the United States, symbolizing a bitter partisan divide over approaches to the pandemic and a badge of political affiliation.
Permission to stop using them now offers an incentive to the many millions who are still holding out on vaccination. As of Wednesday, about 154 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, but only about one-third of the nation, some 117.6 million people, have been fully vaccinated.
But the pace has slowed: Providers are administering about 2.16 million doses per day on average, about a 36 percent decrease from the peak of 3.38 million reported in mid-April.
“The science is clear: If you are fully vaccinated, you are protected, and you can start doing the things that you stopped doing because of the pandemic,” the C.D.C. said in a statement on Thursday.
The new advice comes with caveats. Even vaccinated individuals must cover their faces and physically distance when going to doctors, hospitals or long-term care facilities like nursing homes; when traveling by bus, plane, train or other modes of public transportation, or while in transportation hubs like airports and bus stations; and when in prisons, jails or homeless shelters.
In deference to local authorities, the C.D.C. said vaccinated Americans must continue to abide by existing state, local, or tribal laws and regulations, and follow local rules for businesses and workplaces. Individuals are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot or the second dose of either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine series.
Still, the changes are likely to galvanize Americans who have become unaccustomed to appearing in public unmasked — or to seeing others do so.
Note what is being said here: when the CDC say “Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus may stop wearing masks,” they are talking about Americans who are completely indistinguishable from any other American. At least so far, I haven’t seen any proposals from the CDC that getting that second dose of the vaccine be accompanied by a six digit tattoo on my forearm, complete with the date that the final dose was given, so that anyone could tell that I was two weeks past receiving the second dose.
Upon receiving my second dose of the Moderna vaccine, on Cinco de Mayo, the Estill County Health Department indicated the vaccine lot number and the date I received it on a CDC-provided COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card, with a special plastic container in which to keep it, and the record-keeper told me that I should carry it with me.
Well, not just no, but Hell no! She had no real authority, of course, but she was giving me the message that the government would like us all to have: Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen.[1]Ich spreche kein Deutsch. Dies war die Antwort von Google Translate auf “We need to see your documents.”
So, what will the CDC, or President Joe Biden, or Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) try to do now? Yes, I will be considered “fully vaccinated” on May 19th, which just happens to be our 42nd wedding anniversary, but I will look no different then from the way I look now, nor from the way I looked on March 31st, the day before my first dose. Will Governor Beshear order the Staatspolizei to stop everyone they see not wearing a mask, and demand to see their vaccination cards?
As we noted previously, Governor Beshear has been trying to finesse his executive orders, to try to render the legal cases against his illegal and unconstitutional executive orders moot before the state Supreme Court decides on them. He stated earlier that he would ease — not lift — his capacity restrictions on businesses on Friday, May 28st, just before the Memorial Day holiday weekend, and his most recent renewal of the mask mandate expires the day prior to that.
The Governor said that he hoped that the Bluegrass State would have no restrictions at all by July. That, of course, is designed to end all restrictions before the (probable) time the state Supreme Court would issue its rulings on the cases concerning his executive orders, so that the Court could simply dismiss the cases as moot. That would mean that the injunctions by Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd, a Democratic partisan, would expire, so the laws restricting the Governor’s executive orders would go into effect, but, without a ruling, if the Governor decided that he wanted to issue such orders again, he would still have a basis on which to file suit, again with the odious Judge Shepherd, to enjoin enforcement of those laws, and another several months of legal limbo.
Can you tell that I have exactly zero trust in either the Governor or Judge Shepherd?
While it will be a relief when all of these ridiculous restrictions are gone, we cannot forget that our constitutional rights were restricted by government orders, frequently by executive decrees only and not with the consent of state legislatures, and if this can be done once, it can be done again. If tyranny is excused, tyrants will return.
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Update:
From the Lexington Herald-Leader:
Beshear: Fully vaccinated Kentuckians can take off their masks in most settings
By Alex Aquisto | May 13, 2021 | 3:54 PM | Updated 4:11 PM EDT
Heralding it as a return to “normalcy” for many, Gov. Andy Beshear announced Thursday that Kentuckians who are fully vaccinated will no longer be required to wear a mask in most indoor and outdoor settings.
The announcement comes on the heels of a recommendation issued earlier Thursday by the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who says it’s safe for vaccinated people to remove their masks and not practice social distancing in most indoor public spaces. Everyone will still need to mask in crowded groups of others, like when using public transportation, in hospitals and in congregate settings such as nursing homes and correctional facilities.
“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities — large or small — without wearing a mask or physically distancing,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing. “If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.”
Beshear, in a brief video update, called the change “outstanding,” and said he would alter Kentucky’s statewide mask mandate to reflect the easing of that restriction. Nearly 1.9 million Kentuckians have received at least their initial dose of a COVID-19 vaccine — 53% of the population age 18 and older, and 43% of the total state population.
“The CDC says it is safe to take that mask off,” and Kentucky will “immediately follow that guidance,” Beshear said. “It means that we are so close to normalcy, and we’re going to be changing Kentucky’s mask mandate to be the same with those CDC guidelines.”
How interesting it is that, among the laws passed by the General Assembly, was House Bill 1, to allow businesses and other organizations to reopen as long as they followed CDC guidelines. Governor Beshear vetoed that bill, which was then passed over his veto, yet he has almost immediately followed the changes in CDC guidelines anyway. It’s almost as though his primary objective was to exercise his power, rather than allow the state legislature to do so.
References
| ↑1 | Ich spreche kein Deutsch. Dies war die Antwort von Google Translate auf “We need to see your documents.” |
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The #woke really do hate them some Israelis! The left love the people who would kill them first
The Israelis made a huge mistake in 1967-68. When they conquered Gaza, the Sinai, Judea and Samaria, they should have decided, right then, that if they wanted to keep that territory, that they needed to round up and expel every last Arab living in those lands. It would have been harsh, it would have been brutal, and it would have been too reminiscent of the Nazis’ roundup of the Jews, but it would have settled things over fifty years ago. Israel would have the land they want, along with shortened, more defensible borders, while the Palestinians would be problems for Jordan and Syria, not Israel.
The world might not have liked it, the world might have shaken its collective finger in disapproval, but the world would have gotten used to it.
That they didn’t do. Rather, Israel decided to just make life tough on the Arabs living there, thinking that they’d all emigrate to Syria and Jordan and Egypt. That didn’t happen, and now hundreds of thousands of Arabs have turned into millions of Arabs. The Israelis are strong, tough, and smart, but they have proven to be piss poor conquerors.
So, now they are stuck with millions of Arabs who hate their guts, and don’t know what to do about them. The Israelis want the land in Judea and Samaria, and are slowly trying to colonize it, but that isn’t really going to work.
Arial Sharon ordered the Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005, turning the land over to the ‘Palestinians’ to do with what they would. The hope was that the Arabs would actually be responsible, and turn Gaza into a peaceful, self-governed Palestinian enclave. Gaza is on the resource-poor side, but it does have the best beaches in the Mediterranean. The Arabs could have built a tourist Mecca serving all of Europe, but, instead, they let their hatred of the Jews fester and flourish, and simply built a stronghold for Hamas.
So, every so often, Hamas shoot rockets into Israel, and Israel returns the favor, in kind and in spades. The majority of the Palestinian population are too f(ornicating) stupid to realize that all they are doing is setting up getting their own homes destroyed, and keeping themselves poor, by providing cover and support for Hamas. The Palestinians couldn’t turn Gaza into a peaceful, self-governed area because they are too stupid to do so, and have proven that for the past 15½ years.
You think the NYT isn’t liberal? This is a screen capture from today’s NYT webpage.
The Biden administration has been timid and restrained, slowing the U.N. Security Council’s engagement on the issue, and it has yet to name an ambassador to Israel. But the stakes are too high for evasions, and President Biden should stand with others on the Security Council to demand a cease-fire before this escalates further.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken helpfully said “it’s vital now to de-escalate.” The administration should also express strong concern about the planned evictions of Palestinians that provoked the crisis. Dithering and vacillation help no one.
Nicholas Kristof, the column author, admitted that the United States have little influence on Hamas, but that our aid to Israel gives us more leverage, and he believes we should pressure the Israelis to back off. The notion that the US should be pressuring Hamas to stop shooting is regarded as silly.
Mr Teach pointed to another article:
Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?
The global woke loathing for Israel is taking an even darker turn.
by Brendan O’Neill | May 12, 2021
Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.
But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?
This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?
The judgement and treatment of Israel by a double standard is one of the most disturbing facets of global politics in the 21st century. That double standard has been glaringly evident over the past few days. Israel is now the only country on Earth that is expected to allow itself to be attacked. To sit back and do nothing as its citizens are pelted with rocks or rockets. How else do we explain so many people’s unwillingness to place the current events in any kind of context, including the context of an avowedly anti-Semitic Islamist movement – Hamas – firing hundreds of missiles into civilian areas in Israel? In this context, to rage solely against Israel, to curse its people and burn its flag because it has sent missiles to destroy Hamas’s firing positions in Gaza, is essentially to say: ‘Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?’
No other nation would be expected not to respond either to internal disarray – Hamas supporters have rioted in parts of Jerusalem and around Al-Aqsa Mosque – or to foreign attack. Imagine if the Isle of Wight was home to a movement whose founding constitution expressed loathing for all ethnic Britons and which regularly fired hundreds of missiles into Sussex, Kent, Hampshire. Wouldn’t the British military respond? Of course it would. But the woke demonisation of Israel is now so acute that Israel is expected to take the military assaults of the radical Islamists to its south. To Western activists who find the very existence of Israel abhorrent, any effort Israel makes to protect its borders or its citizens is an affront to global peace and decency. They cannot understand why Israel doesn’t hate itself as much as they hate it, and therefore will not allow itself to be punished by its righteous enemies. How dare you live?
The article is so good that I’d like to reprint the whole thing, but that would be plagiarism. But it doesn’t take much awareness at all to see how der Führer was able to get millions, tens of millions of Germans, and of Frenchmen and Ukrainians and Poles and Belgians and Czechs and others in lands they occupied to cooperate in the Shoah — the Israeli name for the Holocaust — in turning in Jews, in exposing Jews in hiding, in helping to put Jews into the railcars, in helping the Einsatzgruppen and the rest of the Schutzstaffel to guard and herd the Jews right into the gas chambers and the mass graves.[1]Three different Dutch have been suspected as being the informants who turned Anne Frank and her family over to the Nazis, but this has never been proven. The Jews are not allowed to defend themselves, don’t you know?
More, it explains how the British, one of the victors against the Third Reich, one of the countries which saw Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and Sobibor first hand, could have erected their own prison camps and set up their blockades, trying to keep the dispossessed Jewish survivors of the
Max Boot, from his Twit pic.
The silliness of the left when it comes to the Palestinians, to the Arabs in general, and to Muslims, is obvious. Israel is the only functioning democracy on the Middle East. Human rights? The left almost unanimously support homosexual and transgender rights, but try being homosexual in the Muslim-ruled nations: if you get caught, Da’ish will throw you to your death off a tall building, Iran will hang you, and other Islamic countries have their own punishments. Six countries, all majority Muslim, impose the death penalty for consensual same-sex sexual acts: Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia.
Women’s rights? Women are, to varying degrees, second-class citizens throughout the Middle East . . . except in Israel. Virtually nothing for which the American and Western left stand is supported in any Middle Eastern country except Israel.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev once said that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope by which the communists would hang them; in today’s left, “LGBT” groups support the Islamic groups which would, were they living under Islamic rule, throw them in jail, at the very least.
References
| ↑1 | Three different Dutch have been suspected as being the informants who turned Anne Frank and her family over to the Nazis, but this has never been proven. |
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Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader and McClatchy
We have previously noted that the Lexington Herald-Leader apparently does not post photos of criminal suspects, — though an exception was recently made for a white suspect — even though the other city media do, and that McClatchy Company, which owns the Herald-Leader, apparently does not either. So, when I spotted the story below on the Herald-Leader’s website, I pretty much knew what I’d find:
Bartender attacked after woman complains drink wasn’t strong enough, Kentucky cops say
By Mike Stunson | May 11, 2021 | 12:58 PM | Updated May 11, 2021 | 6:48 PM
A bartender at a family-friendly Kentucky business needed extensive facial surgeries after being assaulted by a woman complaining about drinks, cops say.
The alleged assault happened April 2 outside Main Event, a popular entertainment center that features bowling and arcade games in Louisville, according to a citation.
Ciara Pardue, 24, ordered drinks from the business and later complained there was no alcohol in them, an arrest citation states. The bartender stated there was alcohol in the drinks and said a shot could be added for an additional price, police said.
Pardue angrily refused, and police said the bartender did not have more issues with the woman until later in the night.
The bartender went outside with two other employees for a smoke break around last call, and they were followed by Pardue and an accomplice, police say.
Ciara Pardue (Source: Louisville Metro Corrections)
The story continues to tell the reader that Miss Pardue’s “accomplice” repeatedly struck Rachel Hendricks, the bartender, and then Miss Pardue struck Miss Hendricks with an unspecified object. The Herald-Leader website reproduced Miss Hendricks Facebook posting, which shows her injuries, but, of course, did not post Miss Pardue’s mugshot. However, WDBR did, as did WAVE-TV. Judging from Miss Hendrick’s Facebook post on the incident, in which she wrote, “Hopefully these girls rot in jail for what they did,” the “accomplice” was also female.
Mike Stunson, who wrote the story, has a mcclatchy.com rather than a herald-leader.com email address.
So, why did the Lexington Herald-Leader put this story, out of Louisville, on its website? Louisville is out of the newspaper’s normal circulation area, though there are probably some kentucky.com subscribers in the Louisville area, because if there’s one thing the Herald-Leader does well, it’s cover University of Kentucky sports. Still, why cover the news if you aren’t going to cover the news?
The assault against Miss Henricks occurred at the beginning of April; the assault itself was no longer news. The news story was the arrest of Miss Pardue, but the Herald-Leader specifically, and, apparently, McClatchy in general, didn’t cover the entire thing, because censoring a mugshot is not covering the entire thing.
“The victim lost some eye sight in her right eye, which may never return, and numbness to her teeth and lip,” police said in the arrest citation.
Pardue was charged with first-degree assault Monday and was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday.
“It’s just sad, sad that honestly my face will never be the same,” Hendricks wrote on Facebook a week after the incident. “I’ll have to get fillers in my face because fat won’t grow on top on the plates. I may never regain feeling in the front part of my mouth. And all this because of what? Because of a shot? because of a tip? Because someone was ‘too busy’ to come the first time they called for security? I want to place blame (and) I want answers to why this happened but I don’t think I’m going to get any. I’m just ready to put this behind me and get back to work and play with my kids like normal.”
Miss Pardue was charged with first degree assault, a Class B felony under KRS §508.010, which carries a sentence of “not less than ten (10) years nor more than twenty (20) years;” under KRS § 532.060. There’s no telling how much time she will stay in prison, or even if she will be convicted. If the evidence against her is strong enough, she’ll probably plead down to a lesser offense. But if the media publish her photo, wouldn’t that give Kentuckians a greater chance of recognizing her and maintaining their distance from her? Is not the McClatchy policy of not printing mugshots endangering the public?
It’s time to leave Afghanistan
One of the better, but sadly more neglected, blogs out there is Donald Douglas’ American Power:
Afghanistan Bomb Attack on Girls Highlights Threat to Women’s Education
by Donald Douglas | May 10, 2021
Things are going badly in Afghanistan.
And at almost 20 years, I doubt the U.S. could do more to secure the country, besides sending in 500,000 troops and just take the whole place over. We’re still in Germany, Japan, and South Korea, for darned sake, and as it is the U.S. would probably defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, although who knows that “China Joe” Biden has up his sleeves? Both China and Russia are major threats, and it’d be nice to know exactly which country — or countries — hacked the East Coast power grid a few days ago. But it probably doesn’t matter, because this kind of thing is going to happen more often, a lot more often, and the Dems probably do not care.
In any case, I’m not against the Afghan pullout, though I’ve also thought the most noble element of our intervention in that country has been our great earlier success at improving human rights, especially for women.
From The Wall Street Journal:
Afghanistan Bomb Attack on Girls Highlights Threat to Women’s Education
Kabul residents on Sunday buried dozens of schoolgirls killed by explosions outside a school
By Sune Engel Rasmussen and Ehsanullah Amiri | May 9, 2021 | 11:54 AM EDT
KABUL—Zainab Maqsudi, 13 years old, exited the library and walked toward the main gate of the Sayed Shuhada school to go home on Saturday when she was blown backward by an explosion. When she stood up, the air was thick with dust and smoke, and she was surrounded by shattered glass.
“Suicide attack!” everyone yelled, she said, reflecting how common such attacks have become in Afghanistan. She noticed she was bleeding from her arms. An older sister took her to hospital.
“I’m not sure if I will go back to school when I recover,” Zainab, who is in seventh grade, said from her hospital bed Sunday, with her parents by her side. “I don’t want to get hurt again. My body shakes when I think about what happened.”
Preventing girls like Zainab from going to school was the likely goal of the terrorists behind Saturday’s attack in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Kabul. Widening access to women’s education was one of the most tangible achievements of the 20-year U.S. presence in Afghanistan—progress that could be reversed once American forces leave the country later this year.
Afghan authorities on Sunday raised the official death toll from Saturday’s attack that targeted schoolgirls at Sayed Shuhada to 53. It was the latest assault on the area’s mostly Shiite Hazara minority, which in recent months has suffered horrific attacks by Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, including on a maternity ward and an education center.
No group has claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack. The Afghan president blamed the Taliban. The Taliban denied responsibility and condemned the bombings, accusing Islamic State of being behind them.
On Sunday, residents of the Afghan capital spent the day burying dozens of schoolgirls on a hillside on the outskirts of the capital. Hospitals across the city treated dozens of injured, including several who remained in intensive care.
We went into Afghanistan because the Afghan government, then controlled by Mullah Mohammed Omar and the Taliban, were providing sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. We quickly routed al Qaeda and pushed the Taliban out of power in the government, but we were never able to wipe out the thought and philosophy behind the Taliban and its very conservative religious views. We have been in Afghanistan for 19½ years now, which means that there are Taliban fighters who hadn’t even been born when United States troops moved in.
Natan Sharansky wrote The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, a book that the younger President Bush purportedly came to like and appreciate for its arguments. The amazon.com link says this about Mr Sharansky:
Natan Sharansky believes that the truest expression of democracy is the ability to stand in the middle of a town square and express one’s views without fear of imprisonment. He should know. A dissident in the USSR, Sharansky was jailed for nine years for challenging Soviet policies. During that time he reinforced his moral conviction that democracy is essential to both protecting human rights and maintaining global peace and security.
Sharansky was catapulted onto the Israeli political stage in 1996. In the last eight years, he has served as a minister in four different Israeli cabinets, including a stint as Deputy Prime Minister, playing a key role in government decision making from the peace negotiations at Wye to the war against Palestinian terror. In his views, he has been as consistent as he has been stubborn: Tyranny, whether in the Soviet Union or the Middle East, must always be made to bow before democracy.
Drawing on a lifetime of experience of democracy and its absence, Sharansky believes that only democracy can safeguard the well-being of societies. For Sharansky, when it comes to democracy, politics is not a matter of left and right, but right and wrong.
This is a passionately argued book from a man who carries supreme moral authority to make the case he does here: that the spread of democracy everywhere is not only possible, but also essential to the survival of our civilization. His argument is sure to stir controversy on all sides; this is arguably the great issue of our times.
Sadly, democracy, a think President Bush believed all people would want once they had the chance to experience it, has not proven that it can stand against a hostile culture, at least not 1,400 years of an Islamic culture which is hostile to its ideas. Dr Douglas wrote that he “thought the most noble element of our intervention in that country has been our great earlier success at improving human rights, especially for women,” but it has become clear that we have improved human rights only via military force; once our military force leaves — and it is already mostly gone — the Afghan government we have imposed and supported will fall, the Taliban will return, and the era of girls being denied education and women reduced to third class status will return.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Well, we never had the Taliban by the balls; we tried to ‘educate’ the Afghans, but it never really took. As we previously noted, neoconservatives like Max Boot seem to want American troops to stay in Afghanistan, practically forever. When Dr Douglas said that he “doubt(s) the U.S. could do more to secure the country, besides sending in 500,000 troops and just take the whole place over,” I doubt we could do such even with half a million troops. The only way to truly defeat the Taliban is how our allies and we defeated Germany and Japan: we killed so many of their fighting-aged men, wounded millions more, and thoroughly cowed the boys too young to fight but growing up, we destroyed their economy and their infrastructure, we rained down so much fire and steel that Germany and Japan simply couldn’t continue to fight. We were not willing to do that in Korea, we were not willing to do that in Vietnam, and we were not willing to do that in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The British could not control the Afghanis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Soviets couldn’t control the Afghanis in the late 20th century, and we can’t control them in the st. That their religion and tribalism and culture do not go along with our ideas of what human rights ought to be is, sadly, irrelevant. After 19½ years, there’s really nothing more we can do that we haven’t already done, and we have been able to do far less than President Bush had hoped.
The Philadelphia Inquirer says Larry Krasner should be re-elected; I say that he should go to prison!
Perhaps I missed it, or perhaps I simply tweeted too soon:
Six more people murdered in Philadelphia over weekend, exactly zero stories about them on main page of @PhillyInquirer‘s website. There is no evidence that #BlackLivesMatter to the editors of the Inquirer.
— Dana Pico (@Dana_Pico on gab.com) (@Dana_TFSJ) May 10, 2021
Well, it turns out that The Philadelphia Inquirer did cover it, though the article doesn’t show a time stamp, so it could have come after I posted my tweet:
Weekend gun violence in city killed 7 and injured 18, police say
Police are investigating 14 shootings that left seven dead and 18 injured in weekend shootings. “This is more violence than I’ve ever seen,” said a detective with 31 years on the job.
by Mensah M Dean | May 10, 2021
A spate of gun violence across the city claimed the lives of seven people and injured 18 over the weekend, making it one of the deadliest stretches of crime in decades, Philadelphia Police Department officials said Monday.
The violence — which included a quintuple shooting, two triple shootings, and three double shootings — pushed the city’s homicide count as of Monday morning to 185 victims, more than 30% higher than at this time last year, according to department data.
When I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page yesterday morning, it stated that there had been 183 homicides, not 185, but it is always possible that there were further updates during the day.
Today? Checking it at 8:55 this morning, 188 homicides have been recorded, a 37.23% increase over the 137 on the same date last year, which was itself an 18.10% increase over the 116 killed by the end of May 10th in 2019.
May 10th was the 130th day of the year. That means that 1.45 people are being murdered every day in the mean streets of the City of Brotherly Love.
Despite all of that, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer endorsed District Attorney Larry Krasner in next Tuesday’s Democratic primary!
Larry Krasner deserves a second term as Philly district attorney | Endorsement
The Editorial Board was surprised and disappointed by Carlos Vega’s lack of new policy ideas.
by The Editorial Board | May 9, 2021
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.
There’s much more at the original, but really, that’s all you need to know about the Editorial Board and their collective stupidity. But one more sentence, from the endorsement’s concluding paragraph, really cements 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.
I have said it before: the problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated!
One of the people who wasn’t incarcerated on Friday, March 13, 2020, was Hasan Elliot, 21. How did the District Attorney’s office treat Mr Elliot, a known gang-banger?
- Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
- Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to make his meetings with his parole officer.
- Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges; he was released on his own recognizance.
- After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, and prosecutors dropped those charges against him.
On that Friday the 13th, Police Corporal James O’Connor IV, 46, was part of a Philadelphia police SWAT team trying to serve a predawn arrest warrant on Mr Elliott, from a March 2019 killing. Mr Elliot greeted the SWAT team with a hail of bullets, and Corporal O’Connor was killed. Had Mr Elliot been in jail, as he could have been due to parole violations, had Mr Krasner’s office treated him seriously, Corporal O’Connor would have gone home safely to his wife that day. The Inquirer reported:
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.
Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 president John McNesby also has criticized Krasner, saying his policies led to the killing of O’Connor. “Unfortunately, he’s murdered by somebody that should have never been on the street,” McNesby said.McNesby also said FOP members and police officers formed a human barricade to block Krasner from entering the hospital Friday to see O’Connor’s family.
James O’Connor is stone-cold graveyard dead because District Attorney Krasner and his minions, in their abhorrence of mass incarceration, left a repeat offender, one with a record of carrying firearms, using and selling drugs, and flouting his required probation meetings. A guy who needed to be incarcerated, and who didn’t even need to be tried again to get him locked up, but Mr Krasner and his office left him out on the streets, even though the police had him in physical custody on January 29, 2019.
Did the lenient treatment do Mr Elliot any good? Had Mr Krasner and his minions treated Mr Elliot seriously, he’d have been in jail on that fateful Friday the 13th, but he’d also be looking at getting out of prison eventually. Now, Mr Elliot, and four of his goons, are looking at spending the rest of their miserable lives in prison.
Even the Inquirer ran an editorial cartoon noting how the George Soros-funded ‘prosecutor’ was blaming all of the city’s woes on everybody but himself, but that didn’t stop the Editorial Board from endorsing him. Then again, we have previously noted that the Inquirer’s newsroom has been taken over by the #woke, who forced the firing resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski for having written a headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”
Is there even honesty in the Inquirer anymore? Philadelphia magazine noted, on June 27, 2019:
Maalik Jackson-Wallace, for example, was given a second chance by Krasner’s office. Jackson-Wallace, whose case was highlighted by the Inquirer, was initially arrested on a gun possession charge. The case was sent to ARD and Jackson-Wallace received probation. He was arrested a second time for gun possession and released on unsecured bail. On June 13th, he was arrested again and charged with murder; police say he shot and killed a 26-year-old man. (Jackson-Wallace’s attorney claims it was in self-defense.)
Yet a site search of the Inquirer turned up zero returns on Maalik Jackson-Wallace or any of several variations of the spelling of his name. Did the Inquirer scrub the stories for some reason? I did, however, find the story, in the Inquirer through a Google search:
“You may have a law-abiding person … who gets beaten up and who goes to purchase a firearm but does not know enough to get a permit, or maybe reads some misleading website from the NRA informing him he has rights he doesn’t actually have, and so is carrying that weapon for self-defense,” Krasner said.
“If you go ahead and prosecute that person, it is very likely that you are going to seriously limit the capacity of that person to complete college. You will definitely limit their earning potential, their capacity to get a job.”
Of course, Mr Jackson-Wallace was not a “law-abiding person,” in that his first arrest was not just for carrying a concealed weapon without a license, but for possession of marijuana. Then again, under Mr Krasner, the District Attorney’s office does not prosecute marijuana possession, in effect nullifying what is a crime in the Keystone State. And, in the end, Mr jackson-Wallace’s “capacity to get a job” was limited by him killing someone else.
Larry Krasner not only does not deserve to be re-elected; he deserves to be sent to prison himself, for aiding and abetting the murder of Corporal O’Connor, and of the killings of other Philadelphians who would still be alive today if the District Attorney had treated their killers seriously when in custody on lesser charges.
Political correctness in the city of Lexington
We have previously noted that the Lexington Herald-Leader apparently does not post photos of criminal suspects, — though an exception was recently made for a white suspect — even though the other city media do, and that McClatchy Company, which owns the Herald-Leader, apparently does not either.
Lexington Police Department shooting investigations chart; screen capture from city website.
Lexington Police Department shooting investigations chart; screen capture from city website.
I wonder why that is.
Now, you can get that information on the website original, in some cases, by clicking on the crime scene location. Nevertheless, I find it an odd omission, considering that the information is posted on the shootings investigations page; why exclude information that the police clearly have?[1]Note that the investigation of the shooting on January 31, 2021, on the 100 block of West Vine Street, has both a surviving shooting victim and the murder of Lonnie Oxendine. Are we to somehow think … Continue reading Why do the Lexington Police and city government censor information they clearly have? Why, if they are going to make the information posted for plain public view in the first place, do they deliberately withhold statistical information?
Well, I think that I can tell you. Lexington is, according to 2019 Census Department guesstimates, 74.9% white, 14.6% black and 7.2% Hispanic (of any race). If the city puts out too much information, then an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like me might look at the numbers and ask something like, ‘If the city is only 14.6% black, why are 77.4% of the shooting victims black? If the Lexington Police Department told us the race of the homicide victims, would we find a similar racial disparity?[2]According to the Homicide investigations page, all 15 of the listed victims — the page had not been updated with the most recent homicide — were killed by gunfire.
Lexington isn’t Chicago or Philadelphia yet, though sometimes it seems as though the criminal element there is taking that as a personal challenge. But if the city’s violence problems are ever going to be solved, they have to be solved by addressing the problem properly, by recognizing what and where the problem lays, and that’s something the city, and its newspaper, just won’t do.
References
| ↑1 | Note that the investigation of the shooting on January 31, 2021, on the 100 block of West Vine Street, has both a surviving shooting victim and the murder of Lonnie Oxendine. Are we to somehow think that the Lexington Police recorded the race, sex and age of the surviving shooting victim but not that of the man who perished? |
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| ↑2 | According to the Homicide investigations page, all 15 of the listed victims — the page had not been updated with the most recent homicide — were killed by gunfire. |
And another one bites the dust! Do black lives matter in Lexington?
There are no suspects yet, so I cannot fault the Lexington Herald-Leader for not posting their photos, but it does seem to be the newspaper’s policy specifically, and McClatchy Company’s policy in general, not to do so.
Teenager killed, two others injured in North Lexington shooting
By Karla Ward | May 8, 2021 07:57 PM EDT | Updated; May 9, 2021 | 10:20 AM EDT
Two men and a teen boy were taken to the hospital with serious injuries Saturday night after a shooting in a neighborhood off Georgetown Street.
The teenager, later identified as 17-year-old Mar’quevion Leach, died of his injuries at University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital, the Fayette County Coroner’s Office announced late Saturday.
Lexington police Lt. Chris Cooper said Saturday that officers were called to the 700 block of Florence Avenue just after 6 p.m. He said police received several calls about shots fired.
“Upon arrival, we did locate several individuals who had been injured by gunfire,” he said.
There’s a little more at the original.
Unless I’ve missed one, young Mr Leach would be the sixteenth person murdered in Lexington thus far this year. Saturday having been the 128th day of the year, that would put Lexington at one murder every eight days, assuming none of the other victims of what may have been a gun battle die. At that rate, Lexington would see 45 to 46 people murdered in 2021; the city set it’s records of 34 murders just last year, and that was four over the previous record of 30, set the year before.
Actually, 45 to 46 (the actual number is 45.625) is a better rate than just three weeks ago, when the city was on track for 51 homicides. But, if one of the other shooting victims succumbs, and becomes the 17th homicide victim, the projected total jumps to between 48 and 49 victims. A 17th would be fully half of 2020’s total, just 1/3 of the way through the year.
And the summer hasn’t started yet!
Do black lives matter in Lexington? It doesn’t really seem so, as young black men are being killed at record rates in a city which used to be fairly peaceful; I lived in the city from 1971 through 1984.[1]There is a Facebook page for a Mar’quevion Leach in Lexington, though the profile photo was posted ten years ago. I assume that this is the same person, as the name is fairly unusual.
The Herald-Leader reported that the police believe that the victims were “probably targeted.” At least to one person, Mr Leach’s black life didn’t matter, nor the lives of the other two victims.
References
| ↑1 | There is a Facebook page for a Mar’quevion Leach in Lexington, though the profile photo was posted ten years ago. I assume that this is the same person, as the name is fairly unusual. |
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Andy Beshear tries to finesse his #COVID19 orders to escape a state Supreme Court decision
As we have previously noted, the state Supreme Court has consolidated the cases against the General Assembly’s new laws restricting Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) ’emergency’ powers under KRS 39A, and a lawsuit against the Governor exercising those powers. The state Court then set June 10th, then eight weeks away and still more than a month away, to hear oral arguments in the cases. That means, in effect, that the Governor will continue to exercise authority the General Assembly denied him, for at least 3½ months after the state legislature took its action, and, in all likelihood, a couple of months after that.
Several lawsuits were filed in state courts last year to stop the Governor’s emergency decrees under KRS39A. On July 17, 2020, the state Supreme Court put a hold on all lower court orders against Mr Beshear’s orders and directed that “any lower court order, after entry, be immediately transferred to the clerk of the Supreme Court for consideration by the full court.” Three weeks later, the Court set September 17, 2020, another five weeks later, to hear oral arguments by both sides.
The Court then waited for eight more weeks to issue its decision, until November 12, 2020, which upheld the Governor’s orders.
If the Kentucky Supreme Court, officially non-partisan but in practice controlled by liberals, follows the same pattern, a second eight week delay will mean a decision around the first week of August! Even if that decision supports the duly passed laws of the General Assembly, the state courts will have given the Governor half a year to exercise power that the General Assembly restricted.
And now? The Governor is trying to make most of the cases moot:
COVID-19 capacity restrictions lifting to 75% at most Kentucky businesses on May 28
By Alex Aquisto | May 6, 2021 4:57 PM EDT | Updated May 6, 2021 | 5:34 PM
Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)
Indoor and outdoor businesses in Kentucky serving fewer than 1,000 people can increase capacity to 75% at the end of the month, Gov. Andy Beshear said Thursday, as he announced 655 new cases of COVID-19 and six virus-related deaths.Capacity restrictions right now for these businesses are at 60%. Beshear also said people gathering indoors “for private gatherings and for business” no longer have to wear a mask, as long as “100% are fully vaccinated.” That change goes into effect immediately.
Additionally, for businesses and events serving more than 1,000 people outdoors, Beshear increased their operating capacity from 50% to 60%. Both capacity increases go into effect May 28. Beshear said he expects the state will have no coronavirus capacity restrictions by July.
Translation: by the time the state Supreme Court will probably rule, there will be far fewer restrictions in place, and the Governor will argue that makes the cases moot. The Court would like nothing better than to simply dismiss the cases as moot, and you can bet your last euro that the Court would notify the Governor before any decision is announced what it would be and when it would be issued.
Governor Beshear said that Texas decision to drop mask mandates “will increase casualties,” but COVID cases there have dramatically declined.
The Governor’s latest thirty-day renewal of the illegal and repugnant mask mandate expires on Thursday, May 27th, at 5:00 PM EDT, just before his other COVID-19 restrictions are scheduled to be weakened, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see him issue that one again.
Reiterating that Kentucky will not be repealing its mask mandate anytime soon, Gov. Andy Beshear announced 1,068 new cases of COVID-19 in Kentucky on Thursday, as well as 28 virus-related deaths.
Earlier this week, Republican governors in Texas and Mississippi lifted coronavirus restrictions, repealing their states’ mask mandates and reopening businesses to full capacity. Kentucky will not do that, Beshear said.
“We’re going to continue to lose people until we’re fully out of the woods and everybody is vaccinated,” he said in a live update. “That’s the reason we’re not going to do what Texas or Mississippi has done. Those decisions will increase casualties when we just have maybe even a matter of months to go.”
Except, of course, those decisions did not increase casualties, the seven day moving average of new cases in the Lone Star state being down to 2,651 as of May 6th, the lowest figure since June 17, 2020, while Mississippi is seeing a seven-day moving average of 182 new cases per day, a number not seen since April 14, 2020. Regardless of what the so-called ‘experts’ have told us, the empirical evidence has been that ending the mask mandates has not led to more cases, but, hey, dictators gotta dictate!
If Governor Beshear does not extend the mask mandate past July, virtually all of the cases on the laws would turn moot, so the Governor would not have a decision recorded against him; the state Supreme Court would simply dismiss everything. But that leaves open the possibility that, in a future ’emergency,’ or if COVID-19 cases suddenly increase again, that our authoritarian Governor would once again try to restrict the rights of Kentuckians.
This Governor needs to be slapped down, and slapped down hard, but the only way that will really happen is at the ballot box, in November of 2023.