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At what point will we start treating crime seriously? At least in the Bluegrass State, that point has not yet been reached

Kevin James Wright Kentucky Registered Sex Offender. Photo from state sex offender registry.

Kevin James Wright, 44, of Winchester, was arrested on March 18th, and is facing 20 child pornography charges after he was allegedly caught uploading images by Kentucky State Police, when they executed a search warrant and seized the equipment Mr Wright had used. Mr Wright is no stranger to such charges, having been charged and convicted in 2015 of 40 child pornography and distribution offenses.

He pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to three years in prison, along with being required to register as a sex offender.

Wright’s most recent arrest resulted from an undercover Internet Crimes Against Children investigation conducted by the state police Electronic Crime Branch, officials said. His arrest in 2015 was also the result of an Electronic Crime Branch investigation, state police said. . . .

All 20 of Wright’s charges were possession of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor, according to state police. That’s a Class D felony, punishable by one to five years in prison for each count.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that he was still locked up in the Clark County Detention Center on Friday.

Now, how could Mr Wright’s alleged offenses have been prevented? By having him sentenced much more severely on the first forty counts!

Mr Wright is obviously stupid; he got caught this year the same way he did in 2015. Given his previous conviction, only an idiot would not have known that the State Police would be checking up on him for the same offenses. I have long been persuaded that most criminals who get caught get caught because they are stupid.

Mr Wright’s stupidity aside, one thing is obvious: his previous conviction and sentence was not enough to have deterred him from (allegedly) having committed the same type of crime again.

What happened when an Oregon judge ignored a sex offender’s record?

But it isn’t just Mr Wright who’s an idiot. The obvious question is: why was a man male who was convicted on forty counts including possession and distribution of child pornography sentenced to just three years in prison? Why was it not thirty or forty years? Even if it had been only ten years, he would still have been in prison this year, when he (allegedly) committed the offenses with which he has now been charged? Heck, if he had been sentenced to just ten years in 2015, it would have been better for him, because he’d be looking at getting out of prison in 2025. Now, unless he is allowed to another sweetheart plea bargain arrangement, he’s looking at remaining in jail well after 2025.

As we noted two days ago, treating criminals leniently doesn’t always work out well.

Cody Alan Arnett was convicted for two robberies in Lexington, on August 7, 2015, and sentenced to five years in prison for each offense. As early as June 26, 2018 he was recommended for parole, and was scheduled to be released on August 1, 2018. This would mean that he served a week less than three years for his (supposedly) consecutive five year sentences. Within two months of his release, Mr Arnett was arrested for the forcible rape at knifepoint of a Georgetown College coed, at a time in which he could have and should have still been in prison. Mr Arnett had five violent felony offenses on his record. Had the state parole board kept Mr Arnett in prison, where he belonged, he wouldn’t have been free to rape a young woman.

Mr Arnett has not been tried yet for the rape; the COVID-19 pandemic put a hiatus on trials. But his parole was revoked, and he will not be eligible for parole from his previous convictions until November of 2022. He could be locked up until as late as August 5, 2030, even without that trial ever happening.

Just how many children did Mr Wright endanger by downloading child pornography? Possession of child pornography is illegal because, by creating a market for it, children are raped to create more and more of it. And while the charges against Mr Wright, as reported by the Herald-Leader, do not include distribution of child pornography, his offenses in 2015 did.

I can only hope that, if convicted on the new charges, a Kentucky judge will have Mr Wright locked away for multiple decades. He will have proven, if convicted, that his obsession is not reducible by prison sentences, and that the only way to stop him from committing these crimes again and again and again is to have him locked away, with no opportunity to commit them again.

But one thing is absolutely certain: no lenient plea bargain arrangement should be accepted. If he will not plead guilty in exchange for a long, long sentence, don’t give him a short one. Take him to trial, get him convicted, and sentence him harshly.

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Amanda Marcotte doesn’t care about murders unless they are politically useful

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter photo was taken in a bar.

My good friend Amanda Marcotte — OK, OK, she’s not actually my good friend; she hates my evil reich-wing guts and has blocked me on her Twitter account — left Brooklyn and moved to South Philadelphia a couple of years ago. One would think that the über-feminist would be concerned about the huge homicide rate in her adopted home town, but if she is, she certainly hasn’t written about it in Salon.

The City of Brotherly Love saw 499 people give up their last breath in 2020, just one under the record of 500 set in 1990, the depths of the crack cocaine wars. That’s an average of 1.363 murders per day!

Well, guess what: with 77 days elapsed thus far in 2021, Philly is slightly ahead of that mark, at 1.377 per day. But 2020’s 499 mark was ‘achieved’ a bit later in the year; while 106 people were murdered in Philly’s mean streets by 11:59 PM EDT on March 18th, ‘only’ 80 had done so by the same date last year, and the same date last year included another day, due to 2020 being a leap year. City homicides increased as the weather warmed up, as is usually the case.

Miss Marcotte never noted the near-record homicides from last year, when even The Philadelphia Inquirer, which seems to run homicide stories only when something unusual happens, the victim is a ‘somebody’ or an innocent or, of course, a cute little white girl.

Instead, she continued in her usual #TrumpDerangementSyndrome ways.

However, her most recent two stories are about murders. Murders in Georgia, that is: Sarah Everard and the Atlanta spa shootings show how victim blaming continues even after #MeToo and Atlanta spa shootings and the Capitol riot: Gun control is the best tool to fight terrorism.

The murders in the Atlanta burbs have their trumped up racial element, because six of the eight ‘massage parlor workers’ were of Asian ethnicity. Miss Marcotte just loves to blame interracial murders on conservatives or Donald Trump, or really anybody she doesn’t like. She was pretty gleeful about the #BlackLivesMatter protests after the killing of convicted felon George Floyd, attending at least one herself, openly lamenting that “It’s true that anti-lockdown protesters who pack high-powered rifles and scream in cops’ faces haven’t hurt anyone, at least not yet.“

Also see: The Other McCain: Atlanta: The ‘Yellow Fever’ Theory

She wrote:

“Noobs are forever.” That’s what my partner[1]While Miss Marcotte has long been proud of living with Marc Faletti absent the benefit of clergy, her Wikipedia biography lists Mr Faletti as her “Husband.” jokingly said to me this weekend, after the two of us attended the strikingly huge Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Philadelphia on Saturday.

We were talking about the phalanxes of newcomers to the movement — often identifiable by their well-meaning but tone deaf signs — who had joined with more seasoned BLM protesters who have been at this for years. We’d both been to BLM protests before, most notably an enormous one in New York in 2014, after an NYPD officer choked Eric Garner to death. But there’s no question that something has shifted, and lots of people who had previously stayed out of the movement now felt compelled to pick up signs and march in the streets against police brutality.

The result is not just that protests seem bigger, but almost more numerous, spreading out not just to every large city but also the suburbs and small towns of America. (The Texas town where I went to high school, which has a population of 6,000, saw a protest on Saturday that drew hundreds of attendees.) There have been many and varied protest movements in the era of Donald Trump, with some — like the Women’s March or the climate strikes — being more successful than others. But BLM seems to be rising above, becoming the protest movement that is doing the best at harnessing the larger anger out there about Trump and his supporters and enablers.

Black Lives Matter is capturing those who have just woken up and, more than any other progressive movement, is turning that noob energy into action.

I will admit it: not being an aging hipster like Miss Marcotte, 43, I had to look up the meaning of ‘noob.’

I spent some time perusing her Salon articles on the George Floyd protests, and one thing struck me: she was far more concerned about the political value of the protests, and their ability to hurt President Trump, than she ever was about that fact that Mr Floyd was killed.

Naturally, as a writer who can work from home, with a partner who can apparently do the same, she absolutely supported the lockdowns, and contrasted them with the #BlackLivesMatter/Antifa protests:

Liberals never wanted “forever quarantine.” That’s a straw man erected by Donald Trump and his supporters. What liberals wanted was an temporary and necessary lockdown to buy time for the federal government to ramp up a testing regime and other health care capacity to deal with the virus.

Trump refused to use the time to do any that, and so it’s no wonder the progressives — who are just as fed up with staying home as conservatives — are exploding in the streets right now. Of course the primary reason for the protests is police brutality, and the motivating incident was the police murder of George Floyd. But the anger fueling the movement has many causes, including three and a half years of the Trump presidency and rage at the federal government for failing us so miserably with the coronavirus response.

Perhaps the left not wanting a “forever quarantine” is laid a bit hollow by President Biden wanting everyone to wear masks until “everyone is, in fact, vaccinated,” and well into 2022. That people might protest the lockdowns because, unlike her partner and her, they can’t work from home and many have lost their jobs, well, who cares about them? Mr Faletti and she apparently saw nothing wrong with breaking Governor Tom Wolf’s (D-PA) orders against large gatherings to join the protest marches.

Oddly enough, I couldn’t find much from her on the actual killings of George Floyd, who was high on a toxic dose of Fentanyl and methamphetamines, or Breonna Taylor, who was killed when her bedpartner started shooting at police and they returned fire, or Walter Wallace in Philadelphia, who was charging at the cops with a knife; all that concerned her was the political advantage to be gained.

And that, to me, explains her stony silence about the murder rate in her adopted home town. While Chicago sees more total murders, Philadelphia’s murder rate is significantly higher, 31.60 per 100,000 population compared to the Windy City’s 28.38, but the uncomfortable fact is that the vast majority of both murder victims in Philly, and their killers, where known, are black, and that does not yield any political benefit for the liberals’ positions.

Of course, I’ve used Miss Marcotte’s writings as a small example of what the left do writ large. I’ve said it before: in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in many of our larger cities, black lives don’t matter unless they are taken by a white person.

References

References
↑1 While Miss Marcotte has long been proud of living with Marc Faletti absent the benefit of clergy, her Wikipedia biography lists Mr Faletti as her “Husband.”
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This is what happens when criminals are treated leniently At least no one was killed this time

It was the headline on this Lexington Herald-Leader story that caught my eye!

Lexington man gets more prison time for gun possession than he did for reckless homicide

By Jeremy Chisenhall | March 17, 2021 10:38 AM | Updated March 17, 2021 03:20 PM

A Lexington man is set to spend more time in prison for gun possession than he did after pleading guilty to reckless homicide years ago.

Darryl W. Stewart Jr., 32, was sentenced Tuesday to nearly seven years in federal prison for possessing a gun as a convicted felon after admitting that he had one when detectives searched his car on Sept. 3, 2019. In contrast, he was sentenced to a three-year suspended prison sentence when he pleaded guilty to a previous Lexington killing.

Stewart was charged after detectives encountered him on Sept. 3, 2019, while trying to arrest Tavis Chenault, a relative of Stewart’s who had outstanding warrants, according to court records. Chenault was riding in the front passenger seat of a Lexus Stewart was driving, according to court records.

There’s more at the original.

Mr Stewart must ser5ve a minimum of 85% of his sentence before he is eligible for parole, and will have three years of probation following his incarceration. That’s typical enough. But what shouldn’t be typical, what shouldn’t have ever happened, was his lenient sentence, in Kentucky state courts, for the 2013 killing of Jered Taylor in what was described as a narcotics deal which went bad.

Taylor, 26, was shot four times in the upper body, according to police testimony.

Police also found duct tape on Taylor’s pants, his head and on one wrist — indications that he had been bound before he was shot, a detective testified at a hearing for Stewart.

Stewart was originally charged with murder, but the charge was amended down. He entered an Alford plea, meaning that he didn’t admit guilt but acknowledged there was enough evidence to convict him. He was facing a three-year prison sentence, but his prison time was suspended, and he was given five years of probation, according to court records.

The obvious question arises: if Mr Stewart “acknowledged there was enough evidence to convict him,” why did prosecutors let him off so lightly? Four shots to the torso isn’t reckless homicide; it’s murder, and the Lexington Police, prosecutors and judges allowed him to walk free.

A bad guy, one who carried guns, and one who dealt drugs, and he was let off with probation!

Who knows, perhaps the prosecution believed that the evidence was weak enough that Mr Stewart would have been acquitted had the case gone to trial, in which event he would have walked out a free man. But, with the acceptance of the plea agreement, he walked out a free man anyway!

Oh, there were some consequences, but not many:

Stewart’s probation order was modified in 2018, and he was ordered to serve 90 days in custody, minus 19 days credited to him for time served, according to court records.

In February 2019, his probation was completely revoked after he tested positive for cocaine and fentanyl, according to court records. He was ordered to serve his full three-year prison sentence at the state penitentiary, with credit for time served while his case was being heard.

Must’ve been a lot of time already served, I suppose:

Stewart was released from custody just months later on May 1, 2019, according to records from the state Department of Corrections.

Fortunately, Mr Stewart didn’t kill anyone, or at least we don’t know that he killed anyone, since he was let out of the hoosegow. But when he was arrested again, his relative, Tavis Chenault, a known narcotics dealer, and he were traveling with multiple weapons and cell phones, along with $1,642 in cash. A shyster might argue that such is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but we all know what was happening: Messrs Chenault and Stewart were involved in the same ‘business’ Mr Stewart was involved in when he murdered ‘recklessly homicided’ Mr Taylor.

How many crimes did Mr Stewart commit when he was out, when he should have been in prison for murder? We don’t know, but he at the very least bought cocaine and Fentanyl, or he wouldn’t have tested positive for their use. He obtained firearms he was, as a convicted felon, legally barred from having. All of this, because Fayette County prosecutors didn’t do their jobs when it came to the murder reckless homicide of Mr Taylor.

I note that Mr Stewart is going to prison for federal offenses related to gun possession, for crimes committed back when Donald Trump was still President. Perhaps President Biden’s appointment, Carlton S. Shier, IV, as Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, isn’t quite as soft on crime as one would expect from the ‘Social Justice’ Department, or perhaps he’s just tough on people owning firearms, as the President would like. But at least the Feds in Lexington seem to be doing their jobs more diligently than then-Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Larson, who retired in 2016. The current Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Anna Red Corn, was Mr Larson’s first deputy at the time of Mr Stewart’s 2013 murder reckless homicide of Mr Taylor.

The Herald-Leader said, at the time of Mr Larson’s retirement:

In nearly 32 years as chief prosecutor, Larson said he has been guided by three principles: “Every person should be treated fairly and the same under the same facts; every person should be held responsible for their conduct; and every person should suffer consequences for violating our laws.”

At the same time, Larson said, he has tried to keep politics out of the office.

“No prosecutorial decision should ever be based on political motives,” Larson said in a statement. “The safety of the public is one of the primary responsibilities of any government, and we at the Fayette commonwealth’s attorney’s office have endeavored to do all that we could to carry out that responsibility and ensure better treatment of crime victims by our court system.”

That was obviously untrue when it came to Mr Stewart. If “the safety of the public” were truly one of his primary responsibilities, his office and he would never have agreed to a plea deal which let a cold-blooded murderer ‘reckless homicider’ walk out of court a free man. Probation does not keep a cold-blooded murderer ‘reckless homicider’ and drug dealer off the streets, does not keep him from continuing to commit crimes, and Mr Stewart is living proof of that.

Perhaps Mr Larson and Miss Red Corn would have lost in an actual criminal trial of Mr Stewart; no one can be certain how a jury will decide things. But what they got by agreeing to the plea agreement was little better than actually losing in court: Mr Stewart was still out on the streets, when he could have been serving a very long sentence, perhaps even life, in Eddyville.

A true concern for “the safety of the public” means taking every effort to get thugs like Mr Stewart off the streets, and into prison for as long as the law allows. It does not mean being soft on criminals, it does not mean taking the easier way out with plea bargains, and it does not mean letting killers walk out free men if there is any way to prevent it.

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I wonder if King Henry VIII is smiling about this somewhere

As we noted yesterday, Pope Francis reaffirmed Catholic doctrine, and said that priests may not ‘bless’ homosexual unions of any sort.

Group of priests vows to defy Vatican and continue blessing same-sex couples

By Caitlyn O’Kane | March 17, 2021 | 9:43 AM EDT | CBS News

A group of priests who have distanced themselves from the Catholic Church are criticizing the Vatican’s recent decree that the Catholic Church cannot bless same-sex marriages. The Austrian Priests’ Initiative, a group of priests leading a campaign of disobedience against the Vatican, said this week they will continue to bless same-sex couples.

The initiative (also as Pfarrer-Initiative) said in a statement that its members “are deeply appalled by the new Roman decree that wants to prohibit the blessing of same-sex loving couples.”

Appalled? Then these turbulent priests must be appalled that God, the God they claim to worship and serve, did more than just “prohibit the blessing of same-sex loving couples,” but specified a rather harsh punishment for them. Jesus, the only begotten Son of God, whose name they invoke in every Mass, in whom they say they believe when they recite the Nicene Creed, which is part of the Mass that those priests supposedly celebrate every day, in which they purportedly believe, said that “until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter shall pass from the Law,” and that “whoever nullifies one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” The Law included the prohibitions on homosexual activity, and the Son of God said that the Law would not pass away, but apparently these priests believe themselves to be wiser, nobler, and just plain better than the Messiah they claim to worship.

King Henry VIII had his problems with the Church as well, and he went and split his kingdom away from the Catholic Church, though I would guess that even His Majesty the King would have problems with what the revolting priests are saying, given that he had An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie (25 Hen. 8 c. 6) passed by Parliament, which specified the penalty as death.

“This is a relapse into times that we had hoped to be overcome with Pope Francis,” the group’s statement continues. “In solidarity with so many, we will not reject any loving couple in the future who wants to celebrate God’s blessing, which they experience every day, in a church-service.”

“Reality has long since shown that same-sex couples connected in love can very well celebrate God’s blessing in church. A state-of-the-art theology establishes this responsible practice,” the statement reads.

Clearly, God, when he gave the Law to Moses, something every Catholic priest affirms that he believes truly happened, did not think that homosexual “love” was permissible, but, now we know that Father Helmut Schüller and his adherents believe that they are wiser than God. Obviously, when Jesus said, in the Sermon on the Mount, something that every Catholic priest supposedly believes happened, that the Law was and always would remain unchanged, he included the total prohibition on homosexual activity, but the roughly 350 members of the Austrian Priests’ Initiative must believe that they are somehow wiser than the only begotten Son of God, in whom they have professed belief.

We do have a word for it; it is called Protestantism. They should embrace that word, because that is what they have become.

“The Austrian Priest’s Initiative is an Austria-wide movement of Roman Catholic priests and deacons who follow their conscience and campaign for new paths in the church,” the group said in its statement. “Its goals are: lively congregations, contemporary synodal church structures and, above all, a credible and open-minded world church that focuses on sincere service to people.”

How odd. Here I thought that the Church focused primarily on bringing people closer to God, for the salvation of their souls.

The group also said it “vehemently” protests against the assumption that same-sex couples are not part of God’s divine plan. “We deeply regret that this decree, which seeks to revive the spirit of bygone times, widens the gap between Roman bureaucracy and the local Church,” the group said. “This decree offends many Christians and obscures and discredits the liberating message of Jesus.”

“The liberating message of Jesus”? The last I knew, Jesus did not liberate people from the Law, but tightened the law. He said that the Law concerning adultery stood, but also pointed out that the thought behind adultery was a violation, even if the physical act didn’t occur.

Is there an underlying reason that these priests are so dedicated to schism on this issue? As I asked 2½ years ago, How many priests are homosexual?

Of course, many factors influence a person’s decision to join the clergy; it’s not like sexuality alone determines vocations. But it’s dishonest to dismiss sexuality’s influence given that we know there is a disproportionate number of gay priests, despite the church’s hostility toward LGBTQ identity. As a gay priest told Frontline in a February 2014 episode, “I cannot understand this schizophrenic attitude of the hierarchy against gays when a lot of priests are gay.”

So how many gay priests actually exist? While there’s a glut of homoerotic writings from priests going back to the Middle Ages, obtaining an accurate count is tough. But most surveys (which, due to the sensitivity of the subject, admittedly suffer from limited samples and other design issues) find between 15 percent and 50 percent of U.S. priests are gay, which is much greater than the 3.8 percent of people who identify as LGBTQ in the general population.

In the last half century there’s also been an increased “gaying of the priesthood” in the West. Throughout the 1970s, several hundred men left the priesthood each year, many of them for marriage. As straight priests left the church for domestic bliss, the proportion of remaining priests who were gay grew. In a survey of several thousand priests in the U.S., the Los Angeles Times found that 28 percent of priests between the ages of 46 and 55 reported that they were gay. This statistic was higher than the percentages found in other age brackets and reflected the outflow of straight priests throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

The high number of gay priests also became evident in the 1980s, when the priesthood was hit hard by the AIDS crisis that was afflicting the gay community. The Kansas City Star estimated that at least 300 U.S. priests suffered AIDS-related deaths between the mid-1980s and 1999. The Star concluded that priests were about twice as likely as other adult men to die from AIDS.

I do not know why so many homosexual men are attracted to the priesthood, though I do have a pet theory. But that there are so many of them leads to the obvious question: are they doing this because they wish to enter into homosexual marriages themselves? After all: one of the goals of the Austrian Priest’s Initiative is that a man or woman, married or unmarried, can serve as a priest. They could, were their group to get its way, enter into homosexual marriages and still keep their jobs as priests.

Is that cynical thinking on my part? Yes, I suppose that it is. But it is also thinking that makes perfect sense.

The Bible holds many laws and restrictions for living a life that is upright and moral, things which Catholic priests claim to believe. Do the members of the Austrian Priest’s Initiative believe that, say, the commandment that we shall not commit adultery is somehow not really valid anymore, because, hey, an adulterous couple really could love each other? Maybe the Austrian priests would say, “Hey, they can get divorced and then marry each other, but, oops!, Jesus had something to say about that as well, something stricter than Mosaic Law.

What about the teaching on abortion? After all, some women feel that they really, really need to have an abortion! Do the Austrian priests simply nod sagely and tell them that it’s sad, but acceptable?

Perhaps my conclusion is harsh, but I have to say that it appears that the Austrian priests either do not believe in that part of the Nicene Creed, “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come,” or at least they think that less important than our limited, mortal lives here on earth.

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A stunning lack of perspective Sending people to their deaths is no big deal, but Andrew Cuomo making naughty remarks? That has the Democrats incensed!

Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) ordered state nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients. He later denied that such orders had been issued, but even the Democratic Party’s media mouthpiece, CNN, noted that his denial was a lie:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that nursing homes “never needed” to accept Covid-positive patients from hospitals in the state due to a shortage of hospital beds.

During a press call Wednesday, Finger Lakes News Radio asked Cuomo about his administration’s advisory in late March requiring that nursing homes accept the readmission of patients from hospitals, even if they were positive for Covid-19.

The governor’s office has repeatedly said the advisory was based on federal guidance, which prohibited discrimination based on a coronavirus diagnosis. The state’s Department of Health told CNN, “Residents were admitted to nursing homes during that time not as an overflow facility, but because that’s where they live.”

Cuomo said that the advisory was a precaution if hospitals became overwhelmed — calling it an “anticipatory rule” — which he said didn’t happen.

“We never needed nursing home beds because we always had hospital beds,” Cuomo told Finger Lakes News. “So it just never happened in New York where we needed to say to a nursing home, ‘We need you to take this person even though they’re Covid-positive.’ It never happened.”

Facts First: Cuomo’s assertion that “it never happened” is false. According to a report from the New York State Department of Health, “6,326 COVID-positive residents were admitted to [nursing home] facilities” following Cuomo’s mandate that nursing homes accept the readmission of Covid-positive patients from hospitals. Whether or not this was “needed,” it did in fact happen.

So, how many people died due to COVID-19 in nursing homes due to the Governor’s orders? The New York Times reported:

Cuomo Aides Rewrote Nursing Home Report to Hide Higher Death Toll

The intervention was the earliest action yet known in an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo that concealed how many nursing home residents died in the pandemic.

By J. David Goodman and Danny Hakim | Published March 4, 2021 | Updated March 11, 2021

Top aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo were alarmed: A report written by state health officials had just landed, and it included a count of how many nursing home residents in New York had died in the pandemic.

The number — more than 9,000 by that point in June — was not public, and the governor’s most senior aides wanted to keep it that way. They rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.

After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes.

Well, of course it was “withheld” out of concern that President Trump might use it politically . . . which doesn’t explain why it was withheld after election day. And after a whole year of Fredo CNN news anchor Christopher Cuomo reporting on his own brother, CNN finally decided that no, it’s not appropriate that he do that anymore.

Of course, no one can say, for certain, how many of New York State’s nursing home deaths are directly attributable to the Governor’s decision, but it’s safe to say: a whole lot.

And now, from The Wall Street Journal:

Manhattan Law Firm to Lead Andrew Cuomo Impeachment Probe

Democratic governor faces allegations of sexual harassment and criticism over handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes

By Jimmy Vielkind | March 17, 2021 | 9:33 AM EDT

ALBANY, N.Y.—Democrats who dominate the New York state Assembly on Wednesday said that a Manhattan law firm will lead an impeachment investigation into allegations that Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women as well as his administration’s handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes.

Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP will assist the chamber’s judiciary committee in examining Mr. Cuomo’s conduct, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said.

“Hiring Davis Polk will give the committee the experience, independence and resources needed to handle this important investigation in a thorough and expeditious manner,” said Mr. Heastie, a Democrat from the Bronx.

The speaker first announced the impeachment investigation on Thursday and said Monday that he would not predict how long the inquiry would last. A vote to impeach a governor would require a majority of members in the 150-seat chamber.

Three former female aides to the governor and one woman who still works on his staff have accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior. The third-term Democrat has denied he inappropriately touched anybody and apologized if any of his remarks or behavior made people uncomfortable.

Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, is overseeing an investigation into the harassment claims and has already interviewed at least one of the women who complained. Mr. Cuomo has asked people to withhold judgment until that review is completed.

The governor has rebuffed calls for his resignation by senior leaders of his own party, including U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat from Yonkers.

There’s more at the original, including noting the nursing home investigation, but the Democrats controlling the state House of Representatives never considered impeaching the Governor over ordering people to their deaths, yet are now angry, very angry, that he may have inappropriately touched a woman or that some of his remarks or behavior made people uncomfortable.[1]Laughably, Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte wrote, on March 2nd, that Governor Cuomo’s alleged actions “(fall) short of sexual harassment, but more social opprobrium would help stop the … Continue reading

He’s never been accused of an actual rape or sexual assault, mind you, but he may well have behaved poorly. To the Democrats, that’s much more serious than forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients into crowded environments, primarily populated by the elderly, the most vulnerable group when it comes to the virus.

Just how f(ornicating) stupid can this be? How stupid can the Democrats get? The left are invested in complaining about Dr Seuss’ writings and maintaining fences, concertina wire and National Guard troops to defend against non-existent threats, but ignore actual deaths! The Democrats want to worry that some people might not always wear facemasks, but don’t give a damn about virtually deliberately infecting a notably vulnerable population with the virus against which those facemasks are supposed to protect! William Teach noted that the Democrats voted against a bill requiring the Department of Homeland Security Department to test all migrants crossing the border illegally that the DHS releases into the country, as though it’s important to prevent American citizens from spreading the virus, but not illegal immigrants, and not the Governor of New York.

References

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↑1 Laughably, Uber-feminist Amanda Marcotte wrote, on March 2nd, that Governor Cuomo’s alleged actions “(fall) short of sexual harassment, but more social opprobrium would help stop the louts.” Her subsequent Salon writings have ignored the issue completely, at least as of 10:45 AM EDT on St Patrick’s Day.
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His Holiness the Pope tries to actually be Catholic

Yes, Pope Francis did the right thing, eventually, but this should never have taken as long as it did. From The Wall Street Journal:

Vatican Rules Out Blessings for Same-Sex Relationships, Despite Calls for Liberalization

Pope Francis pushes back at some liberal bishops’ call for church to embrace gay unions

By Francis X. Rocca | Updated March 15, 2021 | 9:55 AM EDT

ROME—The Vatican on Monday forbade blessings of same-sex relationships, contradicting calls for the practice by progressive bishops in Germany and elsewhere, and setting a limit to the conciliatory approach to gay people that has marked Pope Francis’ pontificate.

The Vatican’s doctrinal office, in a document personally approved by Pope Francis, said it wasn’t permissible for clergy to pronounce blessings on any sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman.

His Holiness the Pope helped to start the movement which many hoped would lead to allowing homosexual unions to be blessed by the Church, perhaps including approving homosexual marriages, with his silly response to a question early in his pontificate:

On Gay Priests, Pope Francis Asks, ‘Who Am I to Judge?’

By Rachel Donadio | July 29, 2013

ROME — For generations, homosexuality has largely been a taboo topic for the Vatican, ignored altogether or treated as “an intrinsic moral evil,” in the words of the previous pope.

In that context, brief remarks by Pope Francis suggesting that he would not judge priests for their sexual orientation, made aboard the papal airplane on the way back from his first foreign trip, to Brazil, resonated through the church. Never veering from church doctrine opposing homosexuality, Francis did strike a more compassionate tone than that of his predecessors, some of whom had largely avoided even saying the more colloquial “gay.”

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis told reporters, speaking in Italian but using the English word “gay.”

Francis’s words could not have been more different from those of Benedict XVI, who in 2005 wrote that homosexuality was “a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” and an “objective disorder.” The church document said men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should not become priests.

Who is he to judge? He’s the Pope, that’s who he is, and yes, that does include judgement.

The document reaffirms Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality when several liberal bishops, including the head of the German Catholic bishops’ conference, have called for blessing same-sex couples in committed relationships. Priests in Germany have widely blessed such couples for years, as have clergy in some other parts of Northern Europe.

Such blessings are wrong, the Vatican said on Monday, because they would seem “to approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God,” adding that God “does not and cannot bless sin.”

All of that is in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which every priest and every deacon and every bishop, archbishop and cardinal should have, and with which he should be familiar.

§2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,140 tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”141 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

§2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

§2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

What part of “under no circumstances can they be approved” do some priests and bishops find unclear?

I get it: the left believe that it’s just wrong to deny homosexuals their desires, but a Catholic priest, a Catholic bishop, must follow the teachings of the Bible in which they all profess to believe, and the Bible is unambiguous in its condemnation of homosexual activity, in both the Old and New Testaments. While some have claimed that Jesus never personally addressed homosexual activity, specifically, they are incorrect.

Matthew 5:17 “Do not presume that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.
18 For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter shall pass from the Law, until all is accomplished! 19 Therefore, whoever nullifies one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
20 “For I say to you that unless your righteousness far surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

The law included the prohibition on homosexual activity in Leviticus 18:22, and proscribes the penalty in Leviticus 20:13. There is no ambiguity whatsoever in this.

Back to the Journal:

German bishops have tangled with the Vatican on other matters, including the question of giving Communion to Lutherans, and are unlikely to back down in their stance on blessing gay unions. German bishops and lay Catholics are currently involved in a national synod that is considering changes to aspects of church life, including the possibility of women clergy and teaching on sexuality.

A move by German bishops to approve blessings of same-sex unions would exacerbate tensions with more conservative parts of the church, including in Africa and the U.S. Conservative bishops in the U.S. have been critical of what they see as an excessively progressive drift away from traditional teachings, with the archbishop of Denver warning in 2019 that the German bishops are moving toward a schism.

It has been said that if it is a choice between heresy and schism, choose heresy, because it is an action that is solely your own, while schism injures the Body of Christ that is the Church.

Pope Francis has taken a more liberal approach than his predecessors to some questions of marriage and sexuality, including divorce and homosexuality. In one of the most famous statements of his pontificate, he responded to a question about gay clergy in 2013: “Who am I to judge?” During his 2015 visit to the U.S., he met privately with a gay couple in Washington, D.C.

In comments published last year, the pope expressed support for same-sex civil unions, saying that gay couples “have the right to be legally covered,” a stance he had held as archbishop of Buenos Aires.

But the pope has also written that “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”

This is where the Pope has failed: in attempting to soft-peddle the issue, in attempting to be nice and conciliatory toward homosexuals, as a good liberal should do, he opened the door to the hope of many that he would, he could, change the teachings in the Bible.

But, in the end, you can be a 21th century liberal, or you can be a Catholic; you really cannot be both. Some current liberal views, such as those on immigration, can easily fall within biblical teachings and the traditions of the Church. We can easily reconcile opposition to capital punishment with the Bible, because we now have modern methods of permanent incarceration that the Israelites lacked in their journeys through the wilderness.

But modern liberal beliefs on homosexuality and transgenderism and marriage are simply and unequivocally opposed to the Bible, and there’s no ambiguity, no wiggle room there. Priests and bishops who ‘bless’ homosexual unions are, in plain effect, giving their blessings to sin; it is clearly blasphemy, a sin in itslef.

“It is not surprising but still disappointing,” said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for LGBT Catholics. “This decision though is an impotent one because it will not stop the Catholic people in the pews, nor many Catholic leaders, who are eager for such blessings to happen.”

Sadly, His Excellency The Most Reverend John Eric Stowe, O.F.M. Conv, Bishop of Lexington, has supported the misbegotten New Ways Ministry. As a parish priest, Bishop Stowe is excellent; I’ve attended two Masses in which he was the celebrant, and there is no question in my mind at all that he truly believes in Jesus.

But when it comes to homosexuality, he has truly lost his way. When I see Joseph Cardinal Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, on the list, I am seeing a prince of the Church, and one of the voters who will select the next Pope, when Francis retires or dies.

The question of homosexuality has roiled other Christian denominations, fomenting division within the world-wide Anglican Communion between liberal churches in Europe and North America and more conservative churches in Africa. Last year, the United Methodist Church agreed in principle to split because of disagreements over same-sex marriage and gay clergy, though a meeting to approve the move has been delayed because of the pandemic.

Protestants have already suffered through denominational schisms over this issue. I would like to think that the Holy Father has put this issue to rest for a while, but I can too easily see the next Pope deciding to be ‘trendy,’ and sin, it seems, is very trendy.

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The truth? The truth? They can’t handle the truth!

I have had my differences with Patrick Frey, the Los Angeles County assistant district attorney who blogs as Patterico. A devout #NeverTrumper, I believe that he allowed his hatred of President Trump to outweigh the huge policy problems of having Joe Biden in the White House.

Nevertheless, unlike some of the conservative #NeverTrumpers, he actually remained (mostly) conservative.

Law Professor Ends Her Career By Speaking Uncomfortable Truths About Race

As a second professor ends his own career by listening.

Patterico | March 14, 2021

Let’s handle the latest Big Racial Controversy in a different way. Instead of reading a predictable, cookie-cutter story summarizing the Big Racial Transgression and the aftermath, let’s watch the transgression unfold first, and imagine how we should react if we saw this happen but didn’t know how it had played out. I’ll give you the cookie-cutter summary afterwards. (You already know if you read the headline.) Try to ignore the commentary in the next two tweets and just watch the videos.

Here’s the transcript.

PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: They were a bit, jumbled?
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Yeah.
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: [Laughs] That’s the best way I can put it. It’s like, OK, let me reason through that, what you just said, kind of thing.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Right, right.
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: Yeah, unfortunately. And you know what? I hate to say this, I end up having this, you know, angst, every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Hmm, mmm. [Nods]
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: And it’s like, “Oh, come on.” Get some really good ones, but there’s also usually some that are just plain at the bottom, and it drives me crazy.
PROFESSOR DAVID BATSON: Yeah, and, and —
PROFESSOR SANDRA SELLERS: So I feel bad.

There is more: namely, the other professor’s response.

You can follow the link embedded in the article title to read more; the entire thing is around 2,600 words long, but, very briefly, Mr Frey discusses the obvious impacts of Affirmative Action, that admitting lesser qualified students based on race means that those students, being less well-prepared, are more likely to underperform or fail.

In the meantime, Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, has apologized for the private remarks of two nursing professors. At least as far as I can tell from The Philadelphia Inquirer article, there were no racially based comments made, but simply general assessments of their students.

In the video, two members of the nursing faculty at Widener University are discussing their students’ academic progress in blunt terms.

“They’re going to bomb this next test,” one said to the other, who responds, “I think so, too.”

“I don’t care though. Let ‘em fail.” the first one said.

The conversation was meant to be private, according to the university, but the professors mistakenly shared it with their nursing class, causing conversation on social media accounts and outrage among some students, parents and alumni in the Widener community. . . . .

“They do not know anatomy at all,” Francis says on the video, expressing concern that students would “move on” and not “represent the school well.” Marquis said she got so mad at students last year before the pandemic hit that she decided to make her “heart failure” questions harder.

I’m just an evil reich-wing conservative, but it seems to me that when a nursing professor assesses that her students “do not know anatomy at all,” that’s not being mean and cruel and vicious, but a real assessment on something nurses are supposed to know. That statement isn’t one for which the University should apologize, but one which should concern the school about how poorly the students are doing.

If a waitress messes up an order, a customer might not get the food he wanted. If an accountant makes a mistake, the books won’t balance. But if a registered nurse makes a mistake, a patient can die! Depending upon specialty, a nurse has to be able to accurately administer chemotherapy, which is basically the administration of poison into the body in a dose designed to kill cancer cells but not quite kill the patient. A nurse has to be able to accurately assess a patient. A nurse has to be able to read orders and spot errors that a tired doctor might have made.

But now, the most important educational concern is that the school not hurt someone’s precious little feelings. That’s far more important than actually educating students, and granting degrees only to those who have learned the material.

The truth is not always a pleasant thing, but the truth is that not all people were created equal, that some were simply born smarter than others, some simply worked harder than others, some are simply better prepared for academic challenges than others. But as long as we pretend differently, as long as we fail to recognize the plain truth right in front of our faces, we are going to get poorer performances from people who asked for admissions and jobs and roles for which they were simply not well-prepared.

Mr Frey’s article noted the differences between performance in law schools based on race, differences which are very real. My part noted two Widener University professors, and race does not seem to be a part of the equation; the problem was that most of their students, regardless of race, weren’t performing, and weren’t performing in a field of study which could lead to them having other people’s lives in their hands.

The acceptance of mediocrity leads to mediocre performance; the acceptance of the lesser leads to poorer performance.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer laments job losses by women due to COVID-19 But somehow the paper doesn't tell readers that those job losses were pushed by Democrats and women

Being in The Philadelphia Inquirer, even in the business section, it was going to be an opinion piece, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have some good statistics:

Job or kids? One in three working moms forced to choose as pandemic enters Year Two.

Kids at home, chores, and full-time career? Philly’s burnt-out moms quit jobs in droves, setting women back for years. Solutions? Flex time, backup childcare and $39 billion in federal relief.

by Erin Arvedlund | Sunday, March 14, 2021

After 15 years in a high-paying finance job, Joanna Lepore knew she’d have to quit, for a once-unthinkable reason — she has children.

“I never had any intention of leaving my job,” said the married mother of two kids under 10 years of age living in Haddonfield. But working remotely — while home-schooling her son and watching her toddler daughter shut out of day care — burned her out.

With child care and schools closed, the veteran of the Wall Street investment firm PIMCO left her job onboarding clients in August, just before the remote school year resumed. Her husband is employed in food distribution and works outside the home.

Lepore, 38, has lots of company. Women have borne a greater share of job losses during the pandemic. One in three working mothers is considering leaving the workforce or downshifting careers, which could stunt their incomes for decades, surveys show. Women already shoulder more responsibility for the domestic and emotional work in a family — disparities heightened by COVID — and typically make less than men — 82 cents on the dollar.

There’s more at the original, but the subtitle tells you much of what you need to know: the very #woke Erin Arvedlund Beattie, who “cover(s) all things personal finance and investing, as well as Wall Street frauds and other miscreants,” wants changes in how businesses operate and, of course, taxpayer money to address the issue.

Day care centers, Mrs Beattie told us, saw enrollment greatly decline, while expenses for new equipment and more thorough cleaning increased; “up to 40%” of dat care centers eventually shut down. What she did not say is that, in many cases, state and local governments ordered day care centers closed. In the Bluegrass State, Governor Andy Beshear ordered all daycare centers closed by the end of business on Friday, March 20, 2020. A lawsuit finally got a Boone County judge to set aside that order, on July 2nd, 15 weeks later, but, of course, the Governor appealed, and just two weeks later the state Supreme Court voided all of the state court injunctions against the Governor’s orders, saying that it would decide all of the cases. The Court scheduled oral arguments for September 17th, and did not issue its decision until November 12th, upholding the Governor.

Many states had similar government action concerning day care centers. That Mrs Beattie neglected to mention this in her reasons that so many day care centers have closed down is pretty poor journalism.

Mrs Beattie had a subtitled section “Schools must open”:

Alison Perelman calls the “emotional labor” of working from home the toughest double-duty — attending to a child educated on Zoom, motivating family to stick to a routine, undertaking household chores, and cooking endless meals.

”This falls predominantly on women,” Perelman says. ”As we’ve all made peace with the one-year anniversary, it’s now a hinge point where women are opting out. And once we all start to return to the workplace, it’s not clear to me that because women were first out, will we be first back in?”

As executive director of the political advocacy group Philadelphia 3.0, she’s incredulous that the Philadelphia School District has announced only vague plans to reopen in September.

“Why do we not know? This alone is a catastrophe for working women with dependents, and it’s only part of the tsunami destroying their careers,” said Perelman, who has a 6-year-old.

“For women, there’s no going back to work without school.”

However, the greatest resistance to reopening schools fully comes from the teachers’ unions, which are roughly ¾ female. More, President Biden’s criteria for reopening are nowhere close to a full reopening, according to The Washington Post:

Since making his 100-day goal, Biden and his aides have repeatedly loosened their definition of an open school, making it easier to meet his target.

Schools where children are in buildings even one day a week will count as “open.” Opening “most” schools means 51 percent, a metric the nation has probably already reached. And high schools, which are the most likely to be online only, aren’t counted in the measurement at all.

If in-person instruction is only one or two days per week, that isn’t going to get mothers back to work.

Let’s be honest here: the public schools perform a function that teachers are loath to admit, that they serve as free day care centers for children for most of the workday. Opening up paid day care centers because the kids aren’t in school becomes an added expense for working families, primarily, as Mrs Beattie pointed out, working mothers. At some point, calculations have to be made: is it costing more for mothers to work than they bring home from work?

Back to Mrs Beattie’s original for one final point:

Ellen Yin, one of Philly’s top restaurateurs, had to fire 150 workers last spring, roughly 90% of her staff.

“Our industry has large numbers of undocumented workers and immigrants, many of whom never had income before,” she said. “They don’t qualify for unemployment, and that weighs on us.”

There is little which pisses me off more than this: If “one of Philly’s top restaurateurs” has been employing “large numbers of undocumented workers,” she shouldn’t be receiving our sympathy but prison time! At a time when we have 9,972,000 million people officially unemployed, along with 8,493,000 more who have dropped out of the workforce and are thus not counted as officially unemployed, based on February 2020 numbers, 18,465,000 people who ought to be working but aren’t, the last thing we should be worrying about are jobs for illegal immigrants!

As William Teach noted, COVID-19 cases have begun to fall in Florida, even though Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) rolled back restrictions much sooner than in most states, raising the obvious question: did the restrictions actually reduce the spread of the virus, or did they simply force a recession for no useful reason?