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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.

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The Lexington Herald-Leader and journalistic ethics

In The First Street Journal, I frequently refer to journolism. 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.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy states:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures.

To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print.

Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

So, if a rape suspect was arrested in Madison County, someone who cannot be an urgent threat to the community, since he’s now in custody, someone who isn’t a public official or suspect in a hate crime, a serial killer or suspect in a high-profile crime, One would assume that the Lexington Herald-Leader wouldn’t publish his picture, right?

    Screenshot from Lexington Herald-Leader

    Kentucky State Police assists Madison County Sheriff’s Office with arrest of rape suspect

    by Christopher Leach | Thursday, January 27, 2022 | 7:23 AM EST

    Troopers with Kentucky State Police in Estill County arrested a suspect accused of sexual assaulting a minor on Tuesday, according to the Madison County Sheriff’s Office.

    Burl Hollon, of Waco, was charged with two counts of rape, two counts of sodomy and two counts of sexual abuse. He is being lodged at the Madison County Detention Center.

    No other details have been released about Hollon’s case. The sheriff’s office conducted the investigation while KSP made the arrest.

The mugshot there? That’s a screenshot taken from the Herald-Leader original, and it’s most certainly a police mugshot, taken from the Madison County Sheriff’s Facebook page.

Now, I have no sympathy for the accused, but not yet convicted, Mr Hollen. The Facebook page states that he has been accused of:

  • Rape, 1st Degree – Victim <12 years of age
  • Rape, 2nd Degree – No Force
  • Sodomy, 1st Degree – Victim <12 years of age
  • Sodomy, 2nd Degree
  • Sexual Abuse, 1st Degree – Victim U/12 years
  • Sexual Abuse, 3rd Degree

Just the first charge:

    KRS § 510.040. Rape in the first degree.
    (1) A person is guilty of rape in the first degree when:
    (a) He engages in sexual intercourse with another person by forcible compulsion; or
    (b) He engages in sexual intercourse with another person who is incapable of consent because he:
    1. Is physically helpless; or
    2. Is less than twelve (12) years old.
    (2) Rape in the first degree is a Class B felony unless the victim is under twelve (12) years old or receives a serious physical injury in which case it is a Class A felony.

Class A felonies in the Bluegrass State can result in prison sentences of 20 to 50 years, or life imprisonment.

If convicted, Mr Hollen should receive the maximum sentence allowable under the law; the only way he should ever leave prison is in a hearse.

But I noticed, as I have before, that the Herald-Leader, which very much eschews publishing the mugshots of photos of black persons accused of, or even convicted of, serious crimes, certainly seems less reticent when it comes to publishing the photos of white suspects.

According to the Lexington Police Department’s shootings investigations page, there have been nine non-fatal shootings in the city . . . and eight of the victims have been black. In 2021, 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. The lead McClatchy newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, stated that publishing mugshots and crime videos, “disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

So what are the editors of the Herald-Leader doing? Whether intentionally or otherwise, the paper’s coverage of crime and their choices in which photos to use appear to be aimed at persuading readers that the perpetrators of crimes in the region are primarily white. While in the eastern Kentucky areas of the Herald-Leader’s circulation area, that’s probably true, given that the non-white percentage of the population in that area is very low, but when you get to the city of Lexington, the numbers say that no, that’s not the case.

To not “perpetuat(e) stereotypes”, the newspaper would print no mugshots at all; printing a disproportionate percentage of mugshots in which the accused are white is an active attempt to not just avoid stereotypes, but to skew the public’s perception in an inaccurate direction.

Part of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states:

    Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

  • Never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information. Clearly label illustrations and re-enactments.

What the editors of the Herald-Leader are doing is distorting the facts, using visual information.

This is journolism, not journalism, this is the skewing of information to produce a false impression. If the editors are aware of what is being done in the newspaper and website they control, they are deliberately lying to their readers; if the editors are somehow not aware of what they have been doing, then they are not competent in doing their jobs, and need to be replaced.

It’s easy enough to just tell the truth. If the editors are concerned that publishing mugshots “disproportionately harms people of color,” then they should stop publishing all mugshots. In that manner, while they would not be telling the whole truth, they would not be distorting the truth. But what they have been doing recently is a distortion of the truth, and rotten journalism.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch is horrified that some Democrats want to actually fight crime!

Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard, hard left columnist, really hates the police and radical things like, oh, people having to obey the law!

You can already see it: the distinguished Mr Bunch is more worried about “mass incarceration”, “wrongful convictions,” and “police brutality” than he is about actual crime in the streets. The hysterical, boldfaced parts of his comments? Those are in Mr Bunch’s original; I did not add them.

Have there been brutality cases and wrongful convictions? Yup, sure have; no system of law enforcement is now, or ever will be, perfect. But those cases are far, far, far fewer than criminal acts on the streets. Mass incarceration? No; the problem there is that not enough people have been incarcerated! As we noted yesterday, there have been a lot of cases in which far more serious crimes have been committed by men who could, and should, have been behind bars for less serious crimes, but crimes, though less serious than rape or murder, were still treated too leniently.

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Latif Williams, who (allegedly) murdered Samuel Collington near Temple University, in a botched carjacking? He had been released by a soft-headed judge on an unsecured bond, but could have been in custody when Mr Collington was killed, a crime which incensed the Inquirer so much that they published Mr Williams’ name, even though he is a juvenile?

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Hasan Elliot, whom District Attorney let slide on probation violations and drug charges, before he killed a Philadelphia Police Corporal?

Oh, wait, I’m sorry: there is little evidence that Mr Bunch would be all that upset about a police officer being killed.

    That both political parties tripped over each other in racing to hire more and more cops, lengthen prison sentences, and wage an over-the-top “war on drugs” made it all the more stunning in the spring of 2020 when millions of Americans took to the streets after the police murder of George Floyd to demand radical change. For a remarkable — and remarkably brief — moment, most Democrats rushed to embrace a new world order in which cops wouldn’t just operate under stricter rules but policing itself would be downsized in favor of social services.

    The poster child of this pivoting ideology was arguably the then-Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden. He was a key architect of the 1994 federal crime bill that put a U.S. stamp of approval on mass incarceration, but when taking office in 2021, President Biden promised “to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system and to enact police reform in George Floyd’s name.”

    But the echo of 2020′s bold promises had barely died down when the murder rate spiked across much of America, driven heavily, experts increasingly believe, by rage and ennui over the endless COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified by fear that the activists’ chants of “defund the police” would cost their party the 2020 and 2021 elections, top Democrats are now scurrying back to the old playbook by calling for more cops.

Does anyone think that maybe, just maybe, the public actually want more cops on the street, more police protection, when Philadelphia fell just one murder short of its all-time record in 2020, the year of the summer of riots and hate, and then completely blew that record out of the water in 2021? Might it just be possible that the public, in Pennsylvania, might be a bit more concerned now that the City of Brotherly Love is slightly ahead of the homicide pace it set last year?

    Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Josh Shapiro is leading the way. The veteran Montgomery County politician needed no big push to stand with officers — the controversial Philadelphia Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police donated $25,000 to Shapiro’s 2020 AG campaign — and the lack of a primary challenger has allowed him to drift to the center-right, months before the general election.

    “We need more police … more police with time to form relationships in the community that they serve,” Shapiro said last month in West Philadelphia. Although Shapiro tempers his remarks with a call for community policing and calls for other services besides law enforcement, his emphasis on more cops — including a plan for hiring bonuses of $6,000 for new recruits — have grabbed headlines early in his campaign.

There’s more of Mr Bunch’s cry of outrage at the original, but Josh Shapiro has already won a statewide election, and, one would presume, has at least some idea what Pennsylvania’s voters might want. The Attorney General even cut District Attorney Krasner out of the loop with significant gun and drug trafficking charges, at least in part because he thought that Mr Krasner wouldn’t prosecute the (alleged) malefactors seriously.

    Look, no one is disputing that the increase in murders — including a record in Philadelphia last year, with horrific headlines about little kids struck by stray bullets or the Asian woman pushed in front of a New York subway train — demands full and prompt attention from our political leaders. But is there any evidence that hiring more cops is the answer? Especially when many high-profile killings — involving domestic violence or road rage — happen in places and ways that defy traditional police methods.

Here is where Mr Bunch really veers into the weeds. The high-profile cases might not be affected, but the vast majority of murders, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in St Louis, are low-profile, so low-profile that they rarely make the pages of Mr Bunch’s newspaper, the killings of the young black males who are blowing each other away with such alarming frequency. Those are the murders which would be reduced if lower-level crimes were treated seriously, if the gang-bangers who could have been locked up for lesser crimes had been locked up, had been treated seriously.

Of course, as I’ve said before, black lives don’t really matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer. And the price for doing things the way that Will Bunch wants would be measured in the blood in the city’s mean streets.

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How To Navigate a Divorce

No one gets married with the intention of getting divorced later on. However, a large percentage of marriages end in divorce, and you may not know what to do if you find yourself in this unfortunate situation. A divorce can get nasty, especially if there are children involved. Use these three tips to navigate the divorce process as smoothly as possible.

Hire a Lawyer

You may try to avoid incurring the additional expense of a lawyer if your divorce is friendly. Unfortunately, many divorces are far from amicable. If you find yourself in the middle of a contested divorce Tampa, it is time to hire a legal representative to fight for your best interests. He or she can also help you navigate the legal processes associated with divorce.

Know What You Want

If your divorce is not amicable, it can be tempting to refuse to comply with your former spouse’s requests for asset division. However, these negative feelings can drag out the divorce process and make it harder for everyone involved. You need to be willing to compromise if you want the process to be over quickly. It may help to make a list of which assets you want to keep, which ones are negotiable and which ones you don’t care about.  

Develop a Custody Arrangement

If you and your ex have kids together, the divorce process can get even messier. It is important to learn how to co-parent effectively, but that probably won’t happen for at least a few years. The best thing you can do after a fresh divorce is keep your negative feelings to yourself and focus on your kids. Regardless of how you feel about your former spouse, he or she is still the other parent to your children. Your kids will likely still want to spend plenty of quality time with your ex. You should be supportive and come up with a custody arrangement that everyone involved is satisfied with.

Divorce is not an easy process for anyone involved. Most people want to get the process over with as quickly as possible so that they can resume their normal lifestyles. These three tips won’t take away the pain that comes with filing for divorce, but they can help the process flow more smoothly. Use these tips so that you can get the divorce finalized quickly and start the healing process so that you can have a better life.

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The incomparable genius of Larry Krasner! Albert Einstein supposedly said, "The definition of a fool is someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting different results."

Murder is not normally an entry-level crime. When someone goes out armed and shoots someone else, the odds are very high that the shooter previously had ‘encounters’ with the police, and often a significant rap sheet.

Rudy Giuliani knew this, and that’s why, as Mayor of New York City, he instituted what’s known as ‘broken windows policing,’ cracking down on the minor crimes, to try to get the little guys on the path to becoming bad guys straightened out before they became major bad guys, and to end the social norms that allow crime. If one window is broken out in a building, and left unrepaired, the theory states that the rest will soon be broken as well, because it becomes acceptable for punks to throw rocks to break out the other windows.

Well, George Doros-funded, cop-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) doesn’t believe in that!

    ‘A terrible crisis’: Krasner discusses Philly’s gun violence after officer’s son gunned down

    Homicides in the city have already hit 38 this year, two more than at the same time last year, Krasner said. “This is truly a terrible crisis that we are suffering through,” he said.

    by Mensah M Dean | Monday, January 24, 2022

    The son of a Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed early Monday morning in North Philadelphia, the 38th homicide already this month and one reflecting “a terrible crisis” for the city, District Attorney Larry Krasner said.

    The 23-year-old man, whom police identified as Hyram Hill, was shot in the 1400 block of West Allegheny Avenue at 4:38 a.m. in what appeared to be a robbery. Paramedics rushed him to nearby Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:01 a.m.

    Hill had been shot multiple times in his left chest, right arm, abdomen and back, police said Monday afternoon. In the morning, Joanne Pescatore, Krasner’s newly appointed supervisor of the Homicide and Non-Fatal Shooting Unit, said he had been shot nine times. . . . .

    “This is a slight increase from terrible to terrible,” Krasner said. “That’s where we are with homicides. This is truly a terrible crisis that we are suffering through.”

    The district attorney said the gun-violence toll ― which accounted for the majority of 562 homicides last year, a record ― has convinced him that his office should focus on such violent crimes rather than lesser crimes such as prostitution and marijuana possession.

    “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,” he said. “We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.”

Really? Perhaps, just perhaps, if law enforcement, from the police through the prosecutor, would treat the crimes that “matter less” than homicide seriously, people like the cretin who gunned down Hyram Hill would have been behind bars Monday morning, not out robbing someone, and not putting nine bullets into an apparently innocent victim.

Remember Cody Allen Arnett, the multiply-convicted felon who was let out early by the Kentucky state Parole Board, who then went out and forcibly raped a Georgetown College coed? Now he has a life sentence, but if he’d been kept behind bars when he should have been, if he hadn’t been treated leniently, his victim would never have been raped.

Remember Vincent Pinkney, who could have been behind bars, if he had been treated seriously, and instead was out on the street to murder a Columbia graduate student? How about Latif Williams, who (allegedly) murdered Samuel Collington near Temple University, in a botched carjacking? He had been released by a soft-headed judge on an unsecured bond, but could have been in custody when Mr Collington was killed.

Then there was Hasan Elliot, 21, a known gang-banger, whom Mr Krasner treated leniently:

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to meet his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges; he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, and prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

On Friday, March 13, 2020, Mr Elliot shot and killed Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV. Had Mr Krasner’s office treated Mr Elliot seriously, he would have been behind bars on that Friday the 13th, and Corporal O’Connor would still be alive.

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering Temple University Hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.

The Philadelphia Police saw that as well, and a group of police officers blocked the entrance to the emergency room at Temple University Hospital to deny Mr Krasner and his entourage entrance to visit Corporal O’Connor’s family.

Yet Mr Krasner, who just hates locking up the bad guys, wants to continue with the same policies which have contribute to Philadelphia’s huge homicide rate. Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019. As of January 23, 2022, the jail population was even lower, 4,519 inmates. Mr Krasner sees this as a good thing; I see it as 2,000 more punks out on the street victimizing law-abiding people.

It ought to be obvious even to the densest person: a criminal who is in jail is not out on the streets committing more crimes. But District Attorney Krasner would leave the lower-level bad guys out, walking around free when he could have them behind bars, and then be shocked, shocked! when one of them blows away the son of a police officer.

An intelligent man, which Mr Krasner purports to be, ought to have learned from what treating Hasan Elliot leniently did, and changed his policies accordingly; a stupid man would have just continued with the failed policies of his own, and others, that have let violent crime fester and grow.

There’s really only one conclusion: Larry Krasner is one stupid man!

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“This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

We have written previously about the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘transgender’ women’s swimmer, Will Thomas, who goes by the name “Lia.”[1]In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their … Continue reading Now the New York Post has printed a story from an unnamed teammate of Mr Thomas’:

That part is incorrect: Mr Thomas, was according to the University of Pennsylvania’s athletic department’s swimming and diving 2018-19 team roster, a sophomore member of the men’s team. He was “Second-team All-Ivy in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free after reaching the ‘A’ final of the Ivy League Championships and finishing second overall in each of the events.” During the 2019-20 season, he “won the 500 free against Villanova (Nov. 15).” That is competitive, if not exactly dominant.

    The anonymous female swimmer gave an interview to the Washington Examiner on Sunday — a day after Thomas, 22, racked up two more wins at a meet against Ivy League rival Harvard University.

    She railed against the NCAA for not acknowledging Thomas had a distinct advantage and accused the board of governors of “not protecting women’s rights.”

    “Women are now third-class citizens,” the swimmer told the outlet.

    “Lia was not even close to being competitive as a man in the 50 and the 100 [freestyle events]. But just because Lia is biologically a man, [Lia] is just naturally better than many females in the 50 and the 100 or anything that [Lia] wasn’t good at as a man.”

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

Mr Thomas’ times have been gradually slowing, so much so that there have been suspicions that he has slowed down deliberately, still winning, but by much smaller margins.

But there’s an obvious question here: who is this unidentified female teammate? There are a couple dozen real women on the UPenn team, and it could have been any of them, but I’ve noticed a pattern here: the stories are all broken by the same two outlets, the Washington Examiner, a conservative website, and OutKick. OutKick said:

    While University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who spent three years at the Ivy League school swimming as a male, has been busy smashing female pool records, friction has been building within the team, according to a Penn female swimmer who said she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate. For that reason, OutKick is granting her anonymity to speak out.

Those are reasonable concerns for the teammate, but I have to wonder: has it always been the same teammate who has been the source for these stories? This has sort of jumped out at me as I have read these stories.

But one part of the New York Post story cited above really jumped out at me, a quote from this anonymous woman, who said, “This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

That’s absolutely right: how does Mr Thomas, who grew up male, who competed athletically with men, doing well and occasionally winning at the collegiate level, justify in his own mind beating a bunch of real girls? How does Mr Thomas, in his tremendous concern to be accepted as a woman and not a male, justify competing in events which only serve to point out the differences between him and biological women? I have asked that second question before, and no one has been able to give me an answer.

References

References
↑1 In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their biological sex, not their imagined “gender.” When using Twitter to publicize my stories, I have sometimes had to refer to him as ‘Lia’ to avoid getting banned for ‘deadnaming’ or ‘misgendering’.