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It doesn’t matter if Omicron is waning: Philadelphia’s tinpot dictators want to keep #COVID19 restrictions in place for months!

The news was certainly appreciated when we learned that Denmark was ending all COVID-19 restrictions:

    Denmark has lifted all Covid-19 restrictions within the country, with coronavirus no longer considered a “socially critical sickness,” according to the government.

    This means that an indoor mask mandate, the use of a “Covid pass” for bars, restaurants and other indoor venues, and the legal obligation to self-isolate if you test positive are all ending.

    “No one can know what will happen next December. But we promised the citizens of Denmark that we will only have restrictions if they are truly necessary and we’ll lift them as soon as we can,” Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke told CNN on Monday. “That’s what’s happening right now.”

    Denmark is the first country in the European Union to lift all restrictions. The move comes at a time when it has the second-highest infection rate, or seven-day average of new infections, of any nation in the world, according to Our World in Data.

There’s more at the original.

Denmark does have a high vaccination rate, 81% being “fully vaccinated,” though the story does not specify what percentage have received the booster. Denmark has no vaccine mandate.

Sadly, here in the United States, supposedly the beacon of freedom in the world, we have too many petit dictators who just love them some authoritarian controls. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    Lifting COVID-19 mandates likely still ‘several months away’ in Philadelphia as omicron recedes

    “Our team is actively discussing what an off-ramp looks like,” the city health commissioner said.

    by Justine McDaniel and Erin McCarthy | Groundhog Day, February 2, 2022

    Philadelphia is likely “several months” away from being able to drop its current pandemic restrictions, even as the omicron surge wanes, Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said Wednesday.

    City officials hope to drop the indoor mask mandate eventually, but it’s too early to do so now, Bettigole said at a virtual briefing Wednesday, citing much-improved but still-high case and hospitalization numbers.

    However, officials have begun discussing plans for easing restrictions and providing guidance to residents once the pandemic relents. The city will also consider when to eliminate the vaccine mandate for indoor dining at restaurants, which Bettigole said would not be permanent.

Cheryl Bettigole, from BillyPenn.

At this point in writing an article, I would normally consider adding an illustration, the photo of Cheryl Bettigole, Philadelphia’s Health Commissioner. In previous articles, I used the photo from Dr Bettigole’s Twitter account, but, alas! she went ahead and deleted it. I wonder if perhaps, just perhaps, she was getting too many people calling her a petit dictator. When I found another photo, it let me know one thing: the one she used in her now-defunct Twitter account was definitely a much younger, glammed up photo!

    “Our team is actively discussing what an off-ramp looks like,” Bettigole said when asked about easing restrictions. “If you think about where we are with this particular wave and case rates right now, we’re probably several months away from a place where we will have the kind of safety to drop all the current restrictions.”

    With the surge rapidly declining but transmission levels still categorized as high, public health officials nationwide are urging continued caution for now — while saying optimism is warranted as the spring looks likely to bring at least a period of relief.

A period of relief? What they are saying is simple: at least for the Xi Omicron variant, COVID-19 is a seasonal disease, like influenza.

    In New Jersey, the rate of COVID-19 transmission is the lowest it has been in several weeks, Gov. Phil Murphy said.

    “Trends that we are seeing across literally all metrics continue to suggest the omicron tsunami, as fast as it washed in, is washing out at nearly the same speed,” the governor said. Still, “we have to remain on a vigilant footing.”

    The average daily new case count has dropped 70% in New Jersey and 57% in Pennsylvania over the last two weeks, according to federal data analyzed by the New York Times. Still, more than 10,000 new cases are being reported each day in Pennsylvania and more than 5,000 in New Jersey.

Vaccinations remain slow, for a simple reason: the people who wanted to take the vaccines had already done so, and the people who resisted have mostly still resisted; only dictatorial action, mandating vaccination, with the cost of non-compliance being job loss or being unable to participate in society, has pushed some of the reluctant to take the vaccines.[1]Yes, I am fully vaccinated, and boostered, but that was my choice, and I absolutely refuse to carry my vaccination card with me, to yield to the officious little pricks demanding, “Papiere, … Continue reading And we already know: the vaccines do not stop the spread of the Omicron variant, and they do not reduce the transmissibility of Omicron from vaccinated people. More, the face masks most people use just don’t stop Omicron, and the so-called experts recommend a N-95 mask.

Click to enlarge.

Of course, many, and perhaps even most, men now wear beards, and the Centers for Disease Control issued a chart for which facial hair styles will and will not allow an N-95 mask to properly seal! I shall admit to previous ignorance of the names attached to various styles of beards.

With my full beard, an N-95 would not work for me, so I have to ask: would Dr Bettigole and the rest of the tinpot dictators in the City of Brotherly Love try to require men to shave off their beards to wear properly the recommended N-95 mask? That would seem silly, but I put nothing beyond these drunk-with-power bureaucrats.

Fortunately, I no longer live in the Keystone State, but I am constantly amazed at the number of people yielding to dictatorship, who give up some of their essential liberty to purchase a bit of temporary safety.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I am fully vaccinated, and boostered, but that was my choice, and I absolutely refuse to carry my vaccination card with me, to yield to the officious little pricks demanding, “Papiere, bitte.”
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What does it say when CNN is getting beat out by the Hallmark Channel and the Food Network? In any sane business environment, Jeff Zucker and his minions would have been fired years ago

The Cable News Network, or CNN, was launched on June 1, 1980, by Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld, the world’s first 24-hour news network. Now a part of WarnerMedia, it’s being spun off by parent AT&T T: (%). From The Wall Street Journal:

    AT&T Sets WarnerMedia Spinoff Plan and Lowers Its Dividend

    Shareholders will get 0.24 shares in new media company and reduced annual dividend of $1.11 a share

    by Drew FitzGerald | Tuesday, February 1, 2022 | 6:07 PM EST

    AT&T Inc. said it would roughly halve its dividend payout and divest itself of its WarnerMedia division through a spinoff that would give shareholders 0.24 share for each AT&T share they own, a move that would complete its retreat from the entertainment business.

    The spinoff is part of AT&T’s planned deal to combine WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc., DISCB: (%) a merger that is expected to close in the second quarter. AT&T plans to use the transaction to refocus its remaining assets on its core telecom operations.

    After the spinoff, AT&T said it expects to pay an annual per-share dividend of about $1.11, down from its most recent $2.08 level. The new payout would cost the company just under $8 billion a year, down from the roughly $15 billion it paid out in 2021.

    AT&T is one of the most widely held U.S. stocks, and the company has historically offered one of the largest regular dividend payouts on the market. Based on Tuesday’s closing price, it had an 8.52% dividend yield. By comparison, rival Verizon Communications Inc. VZ: (%) had a dividend yield of 4.81% based on Tuesday’s prices.

    Shares of AT&T fell 4.2% to $24.42 on Tuesday. The stock has lost about one-third of its value since AT&T agreed to buy Time Warner Inc. in October 2016, while the S&P 500 index has doubled during the same period.

There’s more at the original.

Now, with a net worth of $60 million, and an annual base salary of $6.3 million, you’d think that Jeff Zucker, the current president of CNN Worldwide and Chairman of WarnerMedia News, would be a top, top performer; you’d think that CNN would be dominating the ratings in the 24-hour news network business, right? You wouldn’t think that it was getting stomped by Fox News and MSNBC, would you?

Well, it is, and it gets worse: CNN gets beat out by the Hallmark Channel, which shows reruns of Reba and the Golden Girls, along with really cheesy romance movies, and the Food Network, which is basically cooking shows and silly cooking competition games. Home and Garden Television (HGTV), which is 95% reruns, beats CNN.

CNN has had more than just ratings problems. The network took the absolutely brilliant journalistic decision to have its number one host, Chris Cuomo, interviewing his brother, then Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), for the better part of a year over the Governor’s response to COVID-19. Then, when the Governor got in trouble over sexual harassment claims, his younger brother Fredo Chris was giving him advice and access to defend himself, all of which got the younger Mr Cuomo fired. Maybe, just maybe, if CNN had followed responsible journalistic ethics, and not allowed Chris to interview Andy all of those times, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

One of the younger Mr Cuomo’s producers, John Griffin, 44, was then fired after he was indicted for trying to lure minor girls, one only 9 years old, to his home for sexual subservience training. There’s no indication that anyone at CNN knew about Mr Griffin’s alleged activities, but it was another public relations black eye, for a network which has had a lot of them.

Under any sane business plan, Mr Zucker and all of his executive vice presidents would have been fired, and would have been fired several years ago; that they haven’t makes me wonder just what pictures Mr Zucker has of his bosses. There’s really no excuse for the kind of failure that CNN has been.

No wonder AT&T wants to get rid of WarnerMedia!

___________________________________________

Updated! 4:00 PM EST

Looks like I spoke too soon, From The New York Times:

    Jeff Zucker Exits CNN After Relationship With Senior Executive

    The relationship came up during the network’s investigation into the former anchor Chris Cuomo. “I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t,” Mr. Zucker wrote in a memo to colleagues.

    by Michael M Grynbaum | Groundhog Day, February 2, 2022

    Jeff Zucker resigned on Wednesday as the president of CNN and the chairman of WarnerMedia’s news and sports division, writing in a memo that he had failed to disclose to the company a romantic relationship with another senior executive at CNN.

    Mr. Zucker, 56, is among the most powerful leaders in the American media and television industries. The abrupt end of his nine-year tenure immediately throws into flux the direction of CNN and its parent company, WarnerMedia, which is expected to be acquired later this year by Discovery Inc. in one of the nation’s largest media mergers.

    In a memo to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Zucker wrote that his relationship came up during a network investigation into the conduct of Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor who was fired in December over his involvement in the political affairs of his brother, former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.

    “As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years,” Mr. Zucker wrote. “I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong.”

There’s more at the original.

So, he completely trashed CNN’s brand, but he’s been fired resigned because he was copulating with a subordinate? How much of this was known to AT&T, and did it push the decision to divest from WarnerMedia?

Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Mr Zucker’s co-copulator, and who kept her job, said:

    Jeff and I have been close friends and professional partners for over 20 years. Recently, our relationship changed during Covid. I regret that we didn’t disclose it at the right time. I’m incredibly proud of my time at CNN and look forward to continuing the great work we do everyday.

So, at a time when a lot of people were locked down, and when all sorts of other improper relationships were publicized, Mr Zucker and Miss Gollust were happily screwing away — both are divorced — and neither of these two highly paid executives thought, ‘hey, maybe we need to do the right thing here, policywise’? They could have disclosed it, obviously knew that they needed to disclose it, but did not until it was discovered during the investigation into the conduct of Chris Cuomo? Does this explain CNN’s wholly unprofessional decision to allow Chris Cuomo to keep having his brother on his show?

Then there’s the obvious question: if this was only discovered during the investigation into Mr Cuomo’s behavior, yet it started “during Covid,” whatever that means, just who else at CNN knew about it, and kept his mouth shut?

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Big Brother will be watching you!

Pennsylvania did away with new registration stickers for license plates several years ago, in favor of scanners in all police cars which checked every license plate which came within visual range, and would alert the officers in the police car if someone’s registration had expired. I speculated, at the time, that the Commonwealth would eventually tie those in with insurance and inspection reporting, but I don’t know if that has been done.

Sadly, Big Brother is now coming to the very conservative Commonwealth of Kentucky:

    Cameras that read, track license plates coming to Lexington. Why some are concerned.

    by Beth Musgrave | Tuesday, February 1, 2022 | 10:29 AM EST

    Lexington crime fighting is about to go high tech.

    The city recently partnered with Flock Safety and the National Police Foundation for a one-year pilot study using 25 fixed cameras that automatically read license plates in areas experiencing high crime.

    Police are expecting to have the cameras in the next three to four weeks, Lexington police officials said. The department will likely have a press conference soon to release more details about the program.

    Lexington Assistant Police Chief Eric Lowe told the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council in November the city will not have to pay for the cameras for a year. Typically, those 25 fixed cameras would cost approximately $70,000 a year.

    “It’s a pilot project and but also a study being done in in conjunction with the National Police Foundation looking at the effectiveness of license plate reader cameras in law enforcement to solve and reduce crime,” Lowe said.

You can read more here.

Fortunately, what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal included a video which shows the public what these things will look like, which will enable the bad guys to destroy them before they commit their crimes.

We are told that these cameras will not be used for traffic law enforcement, but who knows if that will change:

    A Kentucky state law requires an officer to witness a traffic violation in order for someone to get a ticket, he said. There have been attempts to change state law to allow for red light cameras but those attempts have stalled in Frankfort.

They should stay stalled.

The left are very, very concerned, and the American Civil Liberties Union said the quiet part out loud:

    Samuel Crankshaw, a spokesperson for the ACLU of Kentucky, said they have concerns the cameras will be placed based on crime data, resulting in too many cameras in predominately minority neighborhoods.

    “Crime maps are based on where illegal activity is documented. Communities of color and low income areas are historically overpoliced, meaning more crimes are documented in those areas than in areas with a lesser police presence,” Crankshaw said. “This creates a false impression that people in communities of color participate in more illegal activity than others.

Uhhh, no: crimes are documented when crime victims report them. If more crimes are reported in “communities of color and low income areas”, it is because more actual crimes are committed in “communities of color and low income areas”. Thus far in Lexington, in 2022, there have been 13 non-fatal shootings, in which one of the victims is white, two are listed as Hispanic, and in the other ten, the victim is black. Last year, with 134 shootings reported, there were 20 victims who are white, and 12 more listed as Hispanic, which leaves 102 victims listed as black. That’s 76.12%, in a city in which just 14.2% of the population are black.

But the real question is: should the people of Lexington be spied on at all? The easiest way to not have these cameras concentrated in any particular neighborhood is to not have them at all.

Some will be deliberately destroyed, of course, and I cannot say that I would blame the people who did so. We do not need Big Brother watching our every move! Perhaps these cameras will only record license plates — though the story notes that at least one malefactor was caught because the readers captured a bumper sticker as well — but that’s now. As the public get more and more used to the surveillance state, more and more things will be subject to surveillance.

I’ll be very blunt here: these things should be destroyed! I don’t like the idea of fewer criminals being caught, not in the slightest, but I like even less the notion of government spying on people.

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44 murdered in Philly in January . . . which is actually an improvement!

Well, January is over, and the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page has the numbers: as of 11:59 PM EST on January 31st, 44 people had lost their life’s blood in the city’s mean streets. That’s a pretty horrible number, but it’s better than last year’s total of 50 in January.

44 homicides ÷ 31 days = 1.4194 per day, x 365 days in the year = 518.0645 projected killings, if that rate is maintained throughout the year. That would be well short of the record of 562, set in 2021, but above 2020’s 499, and the old record of 500 set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

It’s still too early in the year to really draw any conclusions from the numbers: the 50 in 2021 worked out to a projected homicide total of 588.7097, which was well above the final numbers, while the 38 killings in January of 2020 worked out to a projected 448.6452 for the year, which was well under the carnage for the year.

But it’s still the same old, same old at The Philadelphia Inquirer: neither the newspaper’s website main page, nor its specific crime page, indicates a single story, even a brief few paragraphs, on any of the five homicides committed since Thursday, January 27th,[1]The Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so we do not get reports on the end of the day on Friday and Saturday. which leads me to conclude one thing: all of the victims were young black males, because the “anti-racist news organization” into which publisher Elizabeth Hughes has turned the nation’s third-oldest continuously published daily newspaper, to report the unedited truth would, in itself, be racist.

What has anti racism really become? At least in Philadelphia, it has become the acceptance of an urban black culture in which the killing of young black men by other young black men is just plain expected, and the Inquirer goes right along with that.

References

References
↑1 The Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so we do not get reports on the end of the day on Friday and Saturday.
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Left coasters just don’t understand American politics Mother Jones editors think that Joe Manchin should represent the Democratic party, not his constituents in West Virginia

Mother Jones, named after Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, an Irish-American trade union activist, and socialist advocate, is a far left opinion journal founded in 1976, so the following article they printed is hardly a surprise.

    The Whole World Is Hating on Joe Manchin

    “He’s a villain, he’s a threat to the globe.”

    by Oliver Milman | Wednesday, January 26, 2022 | 2:00 AM EST

    Within the brutal machinations of US politics, Joe Manchin has been elevated to a status of supreme decision-maker, the man who could make or break Joe Biden’s presidency.

    Internationally, however, the Democratic senator’s new fame has been received with puzzlement and growing bitterness, as countries already ravaged by the climate crisis brace themselves for the US—history’s largest ever emitter of planet-heating gases—again failing to pass major climate legislation.

    For six months, Manchin has refused to support a sweeping bill to lower emissions, stymieing its progress in an evenly split US Senate where Republicans uniformly oppose climate action. Failure to pass the Build Back Better Act risks wounding Biden politically but the ramifications reverberate far beyond Washington, particularly in developing countries increasingly at the mercy of disastrous climate change.

As it happens, the article is not a Mother Jones original, but was reprinted from the United Kingdom’s left-wing newspaper, The Guardian, and the Guardian original had a slightly less dramatic headline: “‘He’s a villain’: Joe Manchin attracts global anger over climate crisis: The West Virginia senator’s name is reviled on the streets of Bangladesh and other countries facing climate disaster as he blocks Biden’s effort to curb planet-heating gases”.

One might have thought that an American-based opinion journal like Mother Jones would have had a greater understanding of American politics, but apparently not. You see, the “whole world” is not hating on Joe Manchin, because the people of West Virginia, the ones he represents in the United States Senate, aren’t hating on him. As William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted, Senator Manchin is pretty popular in his home state, with 72% of his constituents approving his opposition to President Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ plans. Mother Jones, headquartered in San Francisco, appears unaware of that fact.

In Senator Manchin’s last campaign, in 2018, the incumbent drew a Democratic primary opponent, Paula Jean Swearengin, a very ‘progressive’ candidate, so ‘progressive’ that, in July 2021, she left the Democratic Party for the far-left People’s Party. West Virginia’s Democrats didn’t think much of Miss Swearengin’s candidacy, giving Mr Manchin 111,589 votes, 69.8% of the total, to Miss Swearengin’s 48,302 votes, 30.2%. West Virginia’s voters knew what they had in Mr Manchin, as he was one of very few Democrats to vote to confirm most of President Trump’s cabinet nominees, yet they still gave him the vast majority of their votes.

Miss Swearengin tried again in 2020, against incumbent Republican Shelley Moore Capito, and was stomped 547,454 (70.28%) to 210,309 (27.00%).

Still, Senator Manchin, who had won statewide elections in 2000 (for Secretary of State), 2004 and 2008 (for Governor), and 2010 and 2012 (for the United States Senate) didn’t have an easy time of it, defeating Republican Patrick Morrisey by the relatively narrow margin of 290,510 (49.6%) to 271,113 (46.3%).

The truth is simple: the voters of the Mountain State are very conservative, and Mr Manchin, who has described himself as a “centrist, moderate, conservative Democrat”, is not only representing the voters of his state the way they would like, but has been true to the way he has described himself to the voters.

It appears that the editors of The Guardian, who, being Brits, believe that candidates represent their party rather than their geographical constituency. The way British elections work, the way a lot of European elections work, such a belief is understandable. But the editors of Mother Jones ought to know better; in the United States, elected officials represent the voters of their geographical districts, and politically educated Americans, a subset which ought to include the magazine’s writers and editors, know this to be true. Mr Manchin does not represent the Democratic Party; he represents West Virginians.

So, no, Mother Jones, the whole world isn’t hating on Joe Manchin. A lot of Republicans aren’t hating on him, and, most importantly, his constituents aren’t hating on him. But that might be too difficult a concept for people in the City by the Bay.

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This is hardly a surprise: #VaccineMandates lead to people trying to get around them

The failure of the government to persuade everybody to take the COVID-19 vaccines has led to the coercive measures of vaccine mandates and the wholly repugnant notion of “Ve need to see your papers.” And, just like every other such thing, some people try to get around these things. I only wish that these two had gotten away with this!

    Two New York nurses charged with making $1.5 million off fake vaccination cards

    Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney said the nurses charged $220 for adults and $85 for children.

    by The Associated Press | Saturday, January 29, 2022

    AMITYVILLE, N.Y. — Two nurses on Long Island are accused of forging COVID-19 vaccination cards and pocketing more than $1.5 million from the scheme, prosecutors and police said.

    Julie DeVuono, the owner of Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare in Amityville, and her employee, Marissa Urraro, are both charged with felony forgery, and DeVuono also is charged with offering a false instrument for filing. Both were arraigned Friday.

Further down:

    Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney said DeVuono and Urraro handed out fake vaccination cards, charging $220 for adults and $85 for children. DeVuono, a nurse practitioner, and Urraro, a licensed practical nurse, entered the false information into the state’s immunization database, he said.

    Prosecutors said the nurses forged a fake card showing a vaccine was given to an undercover detective but never administered the vaccine to the detective.

There’s more at the original.

It’s simple: the government, including New York City, New York state, and the Biden Administration, pushed mandates which required people to get vaccinations and show proof to keep their jobs or go into some public facilities. They weren’t the only ones, as many places run by Democrats, including the city of Philadelphia, have done the same. I can only be thankful that the Kentucky General Assembly stripped Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) of any authority to do the same, or he’d have tried it locally.

Obviously there were suspicions about this, given that the Staatspolizei sent an undercover detective. I can only hope that there are more, many more, people engaged in the same enterprise who have not been detected, who are getting away with it.

The vaccines are a good thing, and I think everyone who is eligible should take them. But forcing people to take them is a wholly bad, unwarranted, and unconstitutional infringement on our individual liberties.

The nurses allegedly “entered the false information into the state’s immunization database,” the story reported. The first problem is that there even is a state immunization database, that the state is keeping track of people’s private medical records.

The second is that you just know that the Staatspolizei will be going through that database, pulling out the records of everyone who is noted as having receive the vaccine from the two suspects, and then chasing them down, to see who scammed the system. It’s very probable that the Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare clinic did administer the vaccines in cases where people wanted them, and those who were actually vaccinated will be considered suspects as well. There is at least one blood test which can detect if someone has the COVID antibodies the vaccines are supposed to generate, but, since the vaccines lose effectiveness after several months, it is entirely possible that someone who was legitimately vaccinated several months ago might test negative for the antibodies, and that could lead to people who were legitimately being vaccinated nevertheless being charged with some sort of fraud if the Reichssicherheitshauptamt decides to go after the people who got faked cards.

If there’s a legal defense fund for these two nurses, I shall contribute to it!

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More journolism from the Lexington Herald-Leader Are the editors taking their decisions based upon race?

No, that’s not a typo in the article headline; journolism has a real meaning. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

We noted, on January 27th, that what my best friend used to refer to as the Lexington Herald-Liberal was perfectly fine with ignoring the McClatchy Mugshot Policy when it came to white people accused of crimes, but seemed to decline to do so for black defendants. And here they go again:

    State trooper injured in shooting released from hospital; Lexington man charged

    by Karla Ward | Saturday, January 29, 2022 | 1:23 PM EST | Updated: 4:11 PM EST

    LeeQuan Taylor, photo by Kentucky Department of Corrections, via WCHS-TV.

    A 22-year-old Lexington man is charged with attempted murder of a police officer in connection with a shooting that injured a Kentucky State Police trooper in Harrison County Friday afternoon.

    Kentucky State Police said in a tweet Saturday afternoon that the trooper, whose name has not been released, was recuperating at home after being released from University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital.

    Aside from the attempted murder charge, LeeQuan T. Taylor is charged with first-degree assault and possession of a handgun by a convicted felon. He was taken to the Bourbon County Regional Detention Center after his arrest Friday night.

There’s more at this link.

LeeQuan Taylor, photo by Bourbon County Detention Center, via Fox56. Click to enlarge.

The Bourbon County Detention Center released a more recent mugshot of the accused.

The Bourbon County photo was included in the Fox56 story, originally posted at 12:58 PM, and updated at 2:57 PM, well before the Herald-Leader story was updated, so it was available to Karla Ward, the reporter. The newspaper’s story about the arrest of Burl Hollen is still available, and despite the paper being notified, both by comment on the story and via Twitter of their use of the mugshot of a white defendant, the photo is still on the story. The story on Mr Hollen does not indicate that he has a past criminal record.

Yet Saturday’s story on the capture of Mr Taylor noted that he is a previously convicted felon, which means, at least according to the Herald-Leader’s reporting, worse than Mr Hollen; Mr Hollen is innocent until proven guilty, while Mr Taylor, though innocent until proven guilty in the shooting of the state trooper, is guilty of felonies in the past. One would think that, if the editors of the newspaper were going to make an exception to the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, it would have been for Mr Taylor, not Mr Hollen. But, as I have noted in the past, Mr Taylor is black, while Mr Hollen is white.

Is that really the difference?

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What George Soros has inflicted on America

This site has been critical of the George Soros-sponsored District Attorney of Philadelphia, the odious Larry Krasner, many times, but Mr Krasner is hardly the only DA candidate who has been the recipent of Mr Soros’ largesse. George Gascón, who ran for District Attorney of Los Angeles County, received $2,250,000 from Mr Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

So, what did Los Angeles County gain from having Mr Gascón as District Attorney? From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

    L.A. DA Gascón Allows Adult Child Molester to be Housed in Juvenile Detention

    James Tubbs, who committed the crime in 2014 when he was 17, only identified as a woman after they took him into custody so he’ll be housed with the females but supposedly in isolation. He also won’t have to register as a sex offender.

    Posted by Mary Chastain | Friday, January 28, 2022 | 11:00 AM

    James Tubbs, November 11, 2021. If Mr Tubbs identified as female, why was he wearing a wispy, can’t-grow-a-real beard at the time of his arrest? Click to enlarge.

    Superior Court Judge Mario Barrera unleashed his anger at progressive Lose Angeles District Attorney George Gascón for not prosecuting a child molester as an adult.

    James Tubbs admitted he sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in a restroom at a Denny’s in 2014. He was two weeks away from turning 18.

    Authorities did not arrest and charge Tubbs for the crime until January 2021. He kept busy, though:

    In the interim, she had been arrested for battery, drug possession and probation violations in Idaho and Washington and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in Kern County, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials. She was also arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a minor but wasn’t prosecuted for the alleged offense, according to court records.

Note that the Los Angeles Times used the feminine pronouns to refer to Mr Tubbs, but neither Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion nor The First Street Journal go along with that stupidity; we simply do not change the direct quotations from others.

    James now goes by “Hannah.” But prosecutors claim he did not identify as a transgender until they took him into custody.

    Tubbs knows how to play the system. Gascón has refused to prosecute children as adults.

    Even though Tubbs is now 26 Gascón refused to transfer the crime to adult court:

There’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: Mr Tubbs will not be punished in any way as severely as he injured his victim.

With just two years to serve, Mr Tubbs will be back out, on the streets, shortly. Deputy District Attorney Jon Hatami noted that:

    There was evidence presented at the juvenile proceedings which showed that Tubbs sexually assaulted two young girls in different incidents in the past. The child victims will suffer lifelong trauma. Tubbs also has prior violent convictions and conduct as an adult.

Mr Tubbs will not have to register as a sex offender, and he will have no probation or parole period through which he has to report and be monitored once he is released. He will be, in effect, free and clear. He will go back to jail only after he has committed another crime, quite probably another sexual assault on another minor victim. Some other young girl will have to be sacrificed to whatever abuse Mr Tubbs subjects her to get this cretin off the streets for any serious time. When that happens, will Mr Gascón be held accountable for releasing Mr Tubbs back onto a mostly unaware society?

This is what George Soros has inflicted on our society, and this is that for which the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading have voted. The New York Post noted that Mr Soros put $1,000,000 into the campaign of new New York County — that’s Manhattan — District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has decided that he will only prosecute violent offenses.

This is what the current stage of American leftism has wrought. The District Attorney of Los Angeles County takes the word of a (poorly) bearded 26-year-old man male that he is a woman, and treats him like he actually is one. He then decides that this defendant, who was two weeks shy of his 18th birthday, should be treated as a juvenile offender, and sentenced to not-very-much, so that he can get out quickly and do it again.

No one in his right mind would ever take the decisions that Messrs Bragg, Krasner and Gascón have taken, but there you have it, they did. Still, they are just three men; the real out-of-their-minds decisions were taken by the voters who elected them in the first place, because none of these men hid who they were; they all told the voters what they would do.

That the criminal class would vote for people who would not punish crimes is a given, but the criminal class are not large enough to sway elections. No, these men were elected by the guilty white liberals, who vote for the platitudes of the #woke and the far left, but who are well-to-do enough that they don’t really feel the impact of increased crime in their cities. The liberals in Chestnut Hill and Rittenhouse Square might hear about the murder totals in Philadelphia, but they don’t see the blood in the streets in Kensington or Strawberry Mansion, so they can vote for someone like Larry Krasner, feel good about their liberal bona fides, tut-tut when someone like Samuel Collington or Samantha Maag gets murdered, but never feel the impacts of crime themselves. And they’ll never, ever dream that they, through their votes, are responsible for the chaos in their cities.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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What good are gun control laws when Larry Krasner won’t enforce them? The 'racial justice' advocate doesn't like locking up criminals

Sometimes even the innocuous jargon used in government documents can tell a large truth, From the Philadelphia City Council’s 100 Shooting Review Committee Report:

There appears to be a trend in the criminal justice system where gun cases are treated more leniently than in earlier years. It is particularly concerning that the reoffending rate for another gun offense during a VUFA (Violations of Uniform Firearm Act) open case has increased, when the bail posting percentages have increased and overall sentences have become lighter. The current analysis was limited to arrested offenders; it is important to also take into account the network of criminals; they communicate. Criminals see and hear from their peers.[i]

While the office of the George Soros-funded District Attorney, Larry Krasner, did participate in the committee and its findings and recommendations, the document noted that “all of these recommendations are not unanimous,[ii] a rather curious grammatical construct, which I think means that none of the recommendations was unanimous. It’s difficult to believe that Mr Krasner and his stooges would have agreed to that finding. Specifically, the quote is from the section entitled “Last 100 Shooting Data Analysis: Analysis Result by PPD (Philadelphia Police Department)”, so the District Attorney and his office would very much not like that point.

Comprehensive gun violence strategies should have equally balanced elements of enforcement, intervention, and prevention. As for enforcement, classical deterrence theory suggests three elements for deterrence: severity, swiftness, and certainty. Enhanced sentencing will not be the sole solution; however, being lenient against gun crimes at the time of the gun violence crisis should perhaps be scrutinized. Swiftness of the criminal justice system has always been a limitation to deterrence, but court closures during the pandemic as well as increasing number of gun cases coming in (an average of 7 VUFA arrests per day in 2021) will only aggravate this, unless dedicated and increased resources are allocated. Simply increasing the frequency of stops in hopes for strengthening the (perceived) certainly of arrests is not the solution either. Deterring illegal firearm possessions should be holistically addressed by implementing changes in policing, prosecution, and courts, as discussed in the recommendation section of this report.[iii]

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the DA’s office won’t like that!

The Police Department put together a graphic which showed just what the shooting victims and alleged shooters were like, and it isn’t pretty.[iv] The chart specifically excluded those charges the District Attorney chose not to pursue, and previous charges were limited to the year 2000 and more recently.

Note the obvious: two thirds of the shooting victims had criminal records, most with violent felony records, most with prior firearms charges. The majority of the arrested shooters had violent felony records, had prior firearms charges, and PWID – possession of drugs with the intent to distribute – charges.

These are people who do not obey gun control laws, these are people to whom firearms are simply the tools of their trade, and who are going to carry weapons because, to them, they need those weapons. That most have prior criminal records demonstrates what ought to be obvious to anyone with any common sense: that their actions are illegal doesn’t bother them in the slightest, other than the possibility of getting caught.

There is another graph, on page 21[v] of the report: since District Attorney Krasner took office, the percentage of firearms charges resulting in convictions has dramatically decreased. In Mr Krasner’s first year in office, 2018, 57% of VUFA only arrests resulted in convictions, with 35% having the charges dismissed. Those trend lines crossed the following year, with a larger percentage of charges dismissed, 47%, than resulting in convictions, 43%, and only got worse in 2020 and 2021, 49%/42%, and 62%/36% respectively. In their attempts to get illegal firearm possessions off the streets, the Philadelphia Police Department increased the number of VUFA arrests each year, and each year Mr Krasner’s office let the (alleged) malefactors off the hook in increasing numbers.

 

Of course, the analysis by the District Attorney’s Office (DAO) didn’t look at it the same way at all.  The DAO’s opening statement was:

The urgency of Philadelphia’s crisis of fatal and non-fatal shootings will not be met by looking away from shootings. As noted above, City Council has led a valuable “100 Shooter Review,” a title that makes clear what we already know: that shootings are the primary issue. Our efforts must be focused on preventing shootings and holding people who commit shootings accountable, and we should not accept arrests for gun possession as a substitute.[vi]

This is very much in line with Mr Krasner’s statement:

This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.[vii]

That sounds fairly typical for a ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ warrior, someone more concerned with keeping people out of jail than locking up the bad guys.

Gun possession arrests that involve no violent acts present a secondary and important frontier in curbing gun violence, but must be targeted to distinguish between drivers of gun violence who possess firearms illegally and otherwise law-abiding people who are not involved in gun violence. On the one hand, the cases of people charged with 6105[viii] (prohibited person in possession of a firearm) are carefully scrutinized to do individual justice, which will usually look like vigorous prosecution. On the other hand, another criminal charge that applies to people who have no felony conviction (carrying a gun in Philadelphia without having obtained a permit in Philadelphia) is only a felony in Philadelphia. The exact same offense in every other county in Pennsylvania (carrying a firearm without a permit to carry) is only a misdemeanor offense.[ix]

I am one who believes that the Second Amendment means what it says, that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and that requiring a permit to carry a weapon ought to be considered wholly unconstitutional. It is, however, a statement wholly at odds with the Democratic Party’s insistence on gun control legislation.

As for ‘racial justice,’ there isn’t much such justice by the demographics:

Offender and victim demographics resemble each other: for the arrested shooters, 94% were male, 95% were people of color (74% Black Male), and the peak age was in late adolescence and young adulthood (18-30 years old). Similarly, for victims, 86.5% were male, 88.5% were people of color (61.5% Black Male), and the peak age was in young adulthood to mid-thirties (21-35 years old).[x]

It is the black population, primarily young black males, who are both the shooters and the victims. In Mr Krasner’s zeal to establish racial justice in the City of Brotherly Love, those who are paying the price for that are primarily black people.

“The role of the District Attorney’s Office is to vigorously, justly, and accurately prosecute people who commit serious and violent crimes,” the DAO wrote.[xi] No, the role of the District Attorney’s Office should be to vigorously, justly, and accurately prosecute people who commit all crimes, not just the ones a particular person believes to be serious. At the point at which the District Attorney and his minions decide that certain crimes are not serious, and should not be prosecuted, they have assumed the function of the state legislature, and declared certain crimes, determined through the constitutional process of legislation and gubernatorial assent, to not be crimes at all.

 

It’s actually pretty simple: even if someone has no previous record, and is committing only the crime of possessing a firearm without a license, 18 Pa.C.S. § 6106, he is knowingly committing a felony, and he must have a reason for that, normally not a very good one. By not prosecuting such people, Mr Krasner and his minions are allowing them to not have criminal records, which means that when they do shoot someone, they’ll have no priors.

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police have charged Steven Thompson, who shot and killed a man trying to steal the catalytic converter from his car, with a firearms violation. I guess that we’ll see if Mr Krasner’s office will prosecute Mr Thompson for ridding the city of yet another criminal.

 

There’s a lot more to the report than I have included here, and much of it is liberal pablum, from the Defender Association of Philadelphia, a group of defense attorneys who represent the indigent and who want to get the accused off, and from the Department of Public Health, which sees the shootings and killings as a public health situation rather than what they actually are, crimes committed by criminals. Access to the document, 196 pages in the .pdf file, is free at this link.

The simplest way to reduce crime is to convict and lock up actual criminals when you catch them; Mr Krasner and his stooges don’t like doing that, and they have helped produce a Philadelphia which saw 353 homicides in 2018, Mr Krasner’s first year in office, an increase of 38 killings, up 12.06% from the previous year, followed by 356 in 2019, then 499, a 30.17% jump, in 2020, just one short of the all-time record of 500 set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, and finally 562, a 12.63% increase in 2021. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, January 27th, the city has seen 39 people bleeding out their life’s blood in the cold, mean streets.

How many of those people would be alive today if Mr Krasner and his office had done the job that they were supposed to do, actually prosecute criminals, rather than deciding that some crimes were just not serious and turned people actually in custody loose?

We can’t know that, but we do know that Samuel Collington and Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV would still be with us.
______________________________________

[i] – 100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 17 of the document, page 19 of the .pdf file.
[ii] – ibid, page 9 of the document, page 11 of the .pdf file.
[iii] – ibid, page 17 of the document, page 19 of the .pdf file.
[iv] – I was unable to copy the internal chart, and had to reproduce it via Microsoft Excel.
[v]  – op cit, page 21 of the document, page 23 of the .pdf file.
[vi] – ibid, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.
[vii] – Original citation: “‘A terrible crisis’: Krasner discusses Philly’s gun violence after officer’s son gunned down”, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Monday, January 24, 2022.
[viii] – There are two main categories of illegal gun possession cases in Philadelphia: Possession of a firearm by a person who has been prohibited from carrying gun due to a past serious conviction or other prohibition (18 Pa.C.S. § 6105), and possession of a firearm without a license (18 Pa.C.S. § 6106). The former is generally viewed as the most serious illegal gun possession statute, while the latter is generally viewed as less serious than possession by a prohibited person. Both are non-violent offenses only related to illegal possession of a gun. Footnote copied from footnote 16 on page 31 of the document, page 33 of the .pdf file.
[ix] – op cit, page 30-31 of the document, page 32-33 of the .pdf file.
[x] – ibid, page 20 of the document, page 22 of the .pdf file.
[xi] – ibid, page 31 of the document, page 33 of the .pdf file.