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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?

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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.

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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:

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.

The Editorial Board celebrated Mr Krasner as being different from his “‘law-and-order’ predecessors,” and that’s the entire problem: Philadelphia’s homicide rate was bad enough under the District Attorney’s “‘law-and-order’ predecessors,” but it has gotten much, much worse under Mr Krasner. He took office in January of 2018, and under his regime, homicides, an already unacceptably high 315 the previous year, jumped to 353 in 2018, them 356 the following year, and then to 499 in 2020. At the current rate of 1.45 killings per day, Philly is on track for 528 homicides this year, and the long, hot days of summer haven’t started yet.

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.

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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.

Well, it seems that the Lexington city government is just as eaten up with political correctness as its newspaper. The unreadably small chart to the right, which you can expand by clicking on the image, is a screen capture from the city government’s Shooting investigations page, taken at 4:02 PM EDT on Monday, May 10th. If you expand it, you will see that it lists the victims’ sex, race and age, along with the suspect, if known. Of 31 shooting investigations, 24 of the victims are listed as black, 3 as Hispanic, and 4 as white.

Lexington Police Department shooting investigations chart; screen capture from city website.

But when you come to the city’s Homicide investigations page, on a different page of the same website — the two pages are linked — shown on the left, you’ll notice, if you click on the screen capture and expand it, the victims’ sex and race are not included. The Shootings investigation page excludes homicide victims.

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

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?
↑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.
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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

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.

We noted on Thursday that Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) was lifting his restrictions on Memorial Day, May 31st, and asked why he was going to ruin 2/3 of the holiday weekend and then suddenly declare, on the final day, that no restrictions were needed. At least Governor Beshear recognized the silliness of that!

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.

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A probably meaningless victory for property rights

It was August 12, 2014, when my wife and I toured the property that we decided to buy for our retirement home. Great location, a livable, if nevertheless fixer-upper house, and a fantastic price. However, we were not quite ready to retire, so, rather than leave the house sitting vacant, we rented it out.

In January of 2017, we gave our renters notice that we would be taking possession of the property on July 1, 2017. That gave them six months to find someplace else to live, and enabled their children to finish out the school year to finish out the school year.

But just imagine: what if I had retired in 2020 instead of 2017. With the eviction moratoria imposed by various levels of government, if our renters had simply decided to cease paying rent in April, and not to leave the property by the end of June, we could still be stuck in Pennsylvania, still waiting to take possession of our own property.

The Washington Post has a long, feature story on what has happened to rental property owners due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the covid economy of 2021, the federal government has created an ongoing grace period for renters until at least July, banning all evictions in an effort to hold back a historic housing crisis that is already underway. More than 8 million rental properties across the country are behind on payments by an average of $5,600, according to census data. Nearly half of those rental properties are owned not by banks or big corporations but instead by what the government classifies as “small landlords” — people who manage their own rentals and depend on them for basic income, and who are now trapped between tenants who can’t pay and their own mounting bills for insurance, mortgages and property tax. According to government estimates, a third of small landlords are at risk of bankruptcy or foreclosure as the pandemic continues into its second year.

There were bills we had to pay on our rented-out property: property taxes, some repairs, and, just a couple of months before the renters were to leave, to have the septic tank pumped out. The HVAC system needed to be serviced. Fortunately, this was before the virus struck, and we were still receiving our rent payments.

The Post story details the problems through which other landlords have had to go, but so many people see landlords as all being wealthy, all being Snidely Whiplash about to tie Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks.

Now a federal judge has thrown out the nationwide eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control:

Federal judge vacates CDC’s nationwide eviction moratorium

Court rules agency lacks legal authority to impose it

By Kyle Swenson, Staff Writer | May 5, 2021 | 3:11 PM EDT

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overstepped its legal authority by issuing a nationwide eviction moratorium, a ruling that could affect millions of struggling Americans.

In a 20-page order, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich vacated the CDC order, first put in place during the coronavirus pandemic under the Trump administration and now set to expire June 30.

“It is the role of the political branches, and not the courts, to assess the merits of policy measures designed to combat the spread of disease, even during a global pandemic,” the order states. “The question for the Court is a narrow one: Does the Public Health Service Act grant the CDC the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium? It does not.”

The Biden administration has indicated it will appeal the decision. The ruling does not affect state or local eviction moratoriums. In Washington, D.C., for example, the city government’s ban on all evictions remains in place.

Translation: the ruling is very limited in scope. But here was the line that really got to me:

After Wednesday’s decision, tenants’ rights advocates called for the Biden administration not only to defend the policy but to step up legal protections that will keep people in their homes.

No, no, no, no, no! The eviction moratoria have not kept “people in their homes,” but kept people on other people’s homes!

In the wild and unthinking reaction to the virus, governments across the country, federal, state and local, have devastated our economy and turned individual American citizens into both slaves and agents of the government. The landlord who cannot collect his rent, yet not evict the squatters who are living in his property, has been transformed into an unpaid government housing agency, and has had his property effectively seized by the government for the private benefit of others. What was his is no longer his. The Fourteenth Amendment states that the government may not seize anyone’s property without due process of law, but unless due process of law includes government edicts, that constitutional provision has simply been waved away.

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Journolists: how the credentialed media are limiting reporting to change people’s minds

In my seemingly endless crusade against an irresponsible credentialed media, I have noted, several times, that the Lexington Herald-Leader has been mostly reluctant to publish photos of criminal suspects, even when a criminal suspect was still at large and it was possible that publishing his photo might help the city police to find and arrest him.

Researching the topic further, I found that the Sacramento Bee has done the same thing, and explained it:

Why The Sacramento Bee will no longer publish police ‘mugshots,’ with limited exceptions

By Ryan Lillis | July 9, 2020 | 2:08 PM PDT | Updated July 9, 2020 | 2:24 PM PDT

The Sacramento Bee announced Wednesday it will limit the publication of police booking photos, surveillance photos and videos of alleged crimes, and composite sketches of suspects provided by law enforcement agencies.

Now, I knew, as soon as I saw the story, that the Bee must be a McClatchy paper, just from the website layout. A search of the Herald-Leader’s website failed to turn up anything similar, but Wikipedia noted that the Bee is the “flagship” of the McClatchy papers.

Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

The policy is effective immediately and will be applied moving forward.

The obvious question is: how would publishing photos of criminal suspects “disproportionately (harm) people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community” unless those photos showed a ‘disproportionate’ number of ‘people of color’ being arrested? How could such ‘perpetuate stereotypes about who commits crimes’ unless those stereotypes are accurate?

Of course, the Herald-Leader was perfectly willing to publish one recent mugshot, but, not to worry, that photo wouldn’t disproportionately harm a person of color.

Then we have Trudy Rubin, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer:

As journalists worldwide face repression, GOP lies threaten U.S. media future

Around the world, journalists are killed with bullets, but in the U.S., Fox News undermines media with endless lies about COVID-19 and election fraud.

By Trudy Rubin | May 4, 2021

Monday was World Press Freedom Day, a United Nations-approved “reminder to governments to respect press freedom” that most nations ignore.

The 2021 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders reports that “journalism, the main vaccine against disinformation, is completely or partly blocked in 73% of the 180 countries ranked by the organization.”

Thirty-two journalists around the globe were reportedly killed last year. Already this year, in Afghanistan — in an episode enough to make one cry — three young women employees of a local TV station in Jalalabad were gunned down in March by the local Islamic State affiliate. That’s after a 26-year-old woman presenter at the same station named Malalai Maiwand was shot dead in December.

Can you imagine the courage it takes for young women (and men) to continue to work in journalism in Afghanistan, or civil-war-torn Myanmar or Belarus, or in many African nations? Or to keep trying to present real news in the handful of independent online or provincial outlets that still exist in Russia? (The many brave independent Chinese journalists who once functioned in print and online are almost completely silenced.)

Yet, today’s main threat to press freedom in the United States is more insidious than grisly murders. And it undermines the very future of our democratic system.

I refer, of course, to the growth of an alternative media universe, amplified by Donald Trump, that attracts a sizeable portion of the American public into their own news silo — and feeds them a constant and hypnotic “news” diet of outright lies.

This cuts to the heart of how we define press freedom.

This is almost laughable. Mrs Rubin is complaining that some credentialed media sources do not report things the way other credentialed media sources do, and has claimed that some of the reports are, gasp! false! But her own newspaper, the newspaper of record for Philadelphia, the sixth=most populous city in the country, a newspaper which began publication on June 1, 1829, decades before The New York Times or Washington Post, doesn’t even cover the murders in her city, 169 of which had rocked the city so far this year as of the end of Sunday, May 2nd.

Let’s tell the truth here: while Mrs Rubin is complaining that other media sources are pushing false stories, the credentialed media of which she approves are deliberately concealing information from the public. The truth is that the left in today’s media can’t handle the truth, because it would wholly upset their narrative.

Back to the Bee:

”The Bee has taken several recent steps to work against long-standing stereotypes. We have largely banned the use of the word “looting” – a term rooted in racism – and have sought to elevate the voices of emerging writers from communities we have long underserved through our Community Voices project,” said Bee President and Editor Lauren Gustus. “And building trust takes time. Our intention with this policy change is to take another step forward.”

The Bee and most other mainstream media outlets have routinely published police booking photos, commonly referred to as “mugshots,” for decades. The photos are typically provided by law enforcement agencies that arrest or charge suspects.

Their publication can have a permanent damaging effect on individuals and communities.

For example, it’s not always reported when a suspect arrested on suspicion of a crime is later released, acquitted by a jury or pleads guilty to a charge of lesser severity. Yet the mugshot of that person in police custody remains.

It’s certainly true that the mugshot will remain on the internet forever. But it is also true that the Bee and the Herald-Leader routinely publish the names of those arrested, even though those arrested might have the charges dropped, be acquitted in trial or perhaps plead guilty to a ‘lesser’ offense, and it is far easier to search for text, for a name, than it is for a photo. If, for example, Ryan Dontese Jones, is acquitted of the several charges against him, charges reported by the Herald-Leader, when he goes to apply for a job after all is said and done, any company with a responsible human resources department is going to do a Google search for his name, and they’ll find that story, even though the newspaper declined to include Mr Jones’ mugshot.

“Thank you for your application, Mr Jones. We will be in touch with you.”

The truth is that this has nothing to do with the suspects individually. Rather, it has to do with exactly what the Bee said it was: to prevent readers from drawing conclusions based upon the perceived race of suspects identified with mug shots.

The credentialed media are manipulating the news, and the Bee has admitted it. And now you know why I call them journolists.

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Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader? (Part 4)

We have previously noted that the Lexington Herald-Leader does not like posting photographs of accused criminals, even when those suspects are still at large and publishing the photo might help the police capture him. Thus, we were somewhat surprised when the Herald-Leader did post a photo of an accused, but not convicted, criminal suspect. Was this an editorial change?

Apparently not.

Man shot by Lexington police accused of taking hostages inside home, firing shots

By Morgan Eads and Jeremy Chisenhall | May 03, 2021 | 3:11 PM EDT

A man who was shot over the weekend by Lexington police is facing multiple charges related to accusations that he held multiple children and adults in a home as hostages.

Ryan Dontese Jones, 21, is charged with first-degree burglary, four counts of kidnapping a minor, five counts of kidnapping an adult and nine counts of wanton endangerment.

Jones was set to be arraigned Monday, but he had been put in isolation in the Fayette County jail due to COVID-19 precautions and could not attend the remote proceedings. His arraignment was rescheduled for next week. His bond is set at $50,000, according to court records.

Lexington police said they were originally called to the 600 block of Marshall Lane for a report of shots fired at about 5:30 p.m. on Saturday. An officer who arrived was shot at by Jones and returned fire, striking him in the shoulder, police said. The officer was not injured.

Jones is accused of forcing his way into a home on Marshall Lane, and pointing a handgun and shooting at the people inside, according to his arrest citation. He is also accused of restraining multiple adults and children to use them as “hostages,” according to the citation.

Ryan Dontese Jones. Photo by Lexington-Fayette County Detention Center.

This is the mug shot of the accused suspect, but no, it wasn’t in what my, sadly late, best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal. It was published by Channel 36, WTVQ, and that’s where I found it.

The photo was provided by the Lexington/Fayette County jail; it is free to the media. Why, then, did the Herald-Leader choose not to use it?

In our previous articles on this subject, we noted that the Herald-Leader included illustrations in their articles that were on topic, but simply fluff illustrations, and thus there were no concerns about a photo of the suspect taking up too much bandwidth. To be fair, in this article, the herald-Leader included a photo which was of the crime scene itself, so whatever bandwidth concerns the newspaper might have had, if they have any at all, were used in a photo directly related to the event. Nevertheless, the photo is simply of seven Lexington Police cruisers, on the street, with crime scene tape. It is a too-common image which does not actually inform the reader of much at all, though we can tell that the neighborhood is one of what appears to be a decent-looking subdivision of brick single-family homes, in what seems like a ‘starter home‘ neighborhood.

So, why is the Herald-Leader so seemingly unwilling to publish mug shots of accused criminal suspects? If it is because the suspects have been accused, but not convicted, why did the paper include the photo of Ronnie Helton? If it is to protect those who have been accused but not convicted, why print the names of the suspects? Those, after all, are far more likely to be found in a Google search, and, if Mr Jones is acquitted of these charges, and then goes out job hunting, any responsible human resources department is going to do a due diligence Google search, and find that he was accused of a pretty serious crime.

What, then, is the point?