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Pennsylvania Attorney General cuts Philly DA out of the loop

Pennsylvania state Attorney General announced that his office has charged over five dozen bad guys with carrying guns and selling drugs in West Philadelphia.

    Philly Police and state prosecutors made 65 arrests for guns and drugs in West Philly

    Those arrested face charges ranging from conspiracy to illegal gun possession and drug violations, Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office said Monday.

    By Chris Palmer | Monday, September 13, 2021

    Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said Monday that his office has charged 65 people over the last six months with carrying guns and selling drugs in West Philadelphia as part of a new initiative with city police.

    At a news conference in the neighborhood, Shapiro cast the effort as an example of how law enforcement agencies can work together to address the city’s violence crisis. Philadelphia is on pace to record more homicides in 2021 than in any other year in its history; 372 people have already been slain this year, by far the highest year-to-date total in decades.

    “This is an important part of making a difference,” said Shapiro, flanked by residents and officials including Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and State Sen. Anthony Williams. “Talking, finger-pointing — that ain’t enough, and that’s not going to get the job done.”

    The news conference was spare on details about those arrested. Shapiro did not name any defendants or specify what charges any were facing.

There’s more at the original, in which Mr Shapiro credited cooperation and communication between the state Attorney General’s office and the Philadelphia Police Department. What the article doesn’t say is that, by having the state prosecute what would normally be a city case, Philadelphia’s odious District Attorney Larry Krasner has been cut out of the loop, so hopefully we won’t see slap-on-the-wrist plea deals or cases dropped by George Soros’ stooge.

Danielle Outlaw, Mayor Jim Kenney’s puppet Police Commissioner was there, so Mr Kenney was involved. How much Mr Krasner was kept in the dark, we don’t yet know. He could have been fully informed, but told by the Attorney General to sit down and be quiet.

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The #VaccineMandate is already causing nurses to quit

We have previously noted that vaccine mandates in the nursing profession would have some rather negative effects in an already short-staffed position.

    Lewis County Health System to “pause” maternity services due to staff unwilling to vaccinate

    By Julie Abbass | September 11, 2021

    LOWVILLE — The maternity department at the Lewis County Health System is the first casualty of staffing challenges made worse by health care workers prioritizing remaining unvaccinated for COVID-19 over their jobs with the hospital.

    Because of a number of vacant positions in the department already, the resignations of six staff members this week combined with the looming possibility that seven other unvaccinated people in maternity may follow suit made it clear to the Health System’s leadership that they needed to hit “pause” on services provided by that department.

    “We are unable to safely staff the service after Sept. 24. The number of resignations received leaves us no choice but to pause delivering babies at Lewis County General Hospital,” Chief Executive Officer Gerald R. Cayer said. “It is my hope that the (state) Department of Health will work with us in pausing the service rather than closing the maternity department.”

    In addition to the maternity ward, there are five other departments whose services may be curtailed in some way if a significant number of staff members decide to leave their employment rather than be vaccinated for COVID-19.

    The “pause” will begin on Sept. 25, two days before the final deadline for healthcare worker vaccination across the state for those who chose to continue their employment.

    Mr. Cayer, who spoke at a news conference on Friday afternoon in the county board room, said 30 people have resigned from their health care roles since the vaccine was mandated on Aug. 23, 20 of whom worked in clinical positions like nurses, therapists and technicians, totalling 70% of the resignations so far.

There’s more at the original, but, further down:

    Regardless of that perspective, however, there are still 165 of the approximately 650 employees who are unvaccinated and have yet to declare their intention to stay or go. About 73% of this group provide clinical services, Mr. Cayer said in a separate interview.

    In the nursing home at the health system, there has only been one resignation so far, but there are 48 people who have not yet taken action.

Doing the math, 165 unvaccinated employees out of 650 is fully a quarter of the staff, 25.38%. If 73% of the unvaccinated employees are clinicians, that’s 120 of them.

The Associated Press version of the story stated:

    Cayer said 30 people have resigned since the vaccine mandate was announced last month, most of whom held clinical positions like nurses, therapists and technicians. Thirty others have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, he said.

That’s a small sample size, but if thirty have quit and thirty have knuckled under — an expression I believe appropriate, given that they had plenty of time to be vaccinated earlier, and thus the delay in doing so seems indicative of a determined reluctance — that works out to a 50% compliance rate.

Hospitals can try moving staff around, and the article noted that there were some nurses who were currently in administrative positions rather than in direct patient care, but eventually this is going to have a real impact on patient care.

I have said it before: I believe that, potential side effects be damned, it is wiser to choose to take the vaccines than not. But I also believe that the decision to take, or not take, the vaccines, ought to be the free choice of every individual.

More, I have to wonder: among those who did not want to be vaccinated, but felt that they had to knuckle under to keep their jobs, how will their employee morale be after this? Will they do their jobs as well after having been forced to comply as they did previously? Will their loyalty to their employers suffer as a result?

No one I have seen has been asking that question, and employee morale can be a very difficult thing to measure, but one thing seems certain: these mandates will not improve morale in the slightest.

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Laurie Penny and Americans “weird” about our First Amendment

I first heard of Laurie Penny through my good friend Robert Stacy McCain, who pretty much has no use for her:

    Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) was the subject of an item here yesterday because of her quarrel with lesbian feminist Cathy Brennan, an argument that highlights the profound schism between radicals like Brennan (who are and always have been the core of the feminist movement) and trendy opportunists like Ms. Penny. The American reader may ask, “Who the hell is Laurie Penny, and why the hell are you writing about her?”

    Briefly, then: An ambitious young British journalist who attended exclusive private schools (which are for peculiar reasons called “public schools” in England), Ms. Penny graduated from Oxford and then went to New York. There, she was rescued from death by actor Ryan Gosling, an incident that became the subject of an embarrassingly narcissistic article at Gawker. Ms. Penny is a certain type — a “posh bird,” as the Brits would say, whose ostentatious leftism is a fashionable pose among many upper-class youth — and as such is well on her way to becoming the Most Despised Woman in England. She came to my attention here in the States only because, in researching my “Sex Trouble” series on radical feminism, I was browsing Amazon for recent feminist books and came across Ms. Penny’s new volume, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution. Ranked #6 by Amazon in the “Gender Studies” category, and #11 in “Feminist Theory,” this seemed relevant to my project.

    With our American reader’s questions asked and answered, then, we proceed to explain what no English reader needs to be told, namely that Laurie Penny is an impudent young fool with a penchant for making an utter spectacle of herself. As soon as I blogged about her yesterday, comments on the blog and feedback on Twitter began to fill up with notices of Ms. Penny’s previous self-inflicted embarrassments, including this public implosion in June 2012:

The rest is available on Mr McCain’s website, which I shan’t quote further here.

Now, I wouldn’t be particularly interested in this British posh bird, but I found myself particularly amused that Miss Penny was exercising her freedom of speech and of the press to criticize freedom of speech and of the press.

Where We’re going, We Don’t Need Platforms….

When does free speech absolutism become moral cowardice?

by Laurie Penny | September 10, 2021

Imagine you’re throwing a party and somebody kicks off. It was going so well. You spent ages deciding on drinks and making a playlist, and now some blowhard is off on a homophobic rant. He’s not holding back, either. He’s getting loud and mouthing off with the vilest bigotry you can imagine, and people are getting uncomfortable. It’s your party. What do you do?

What you do depends on lots of things. What sort of party is this? Is it your birthday, or a rave, or Christmas dinner, or a fundraiser for sick kids? Who is this guy? Did you invite him? Is he an old friend who’s going through something and is very drunk and likely to be very embarrassed in the morning? Is he the father of a gay son? Is he your father-in-law? Your most important client? Your boss? Your husband’s boss? Your husband? What are the consequences of calling him out? Who gets hurt if you don’t? Are there any gay people in the room?

Are you sure?

There’s no good choice here. The mood is already ruined. Doing nothing would be a statement in itself. It’s up to you, and you’ve got minutes to decide, and your decision matters.

So does context.  Are you throwing this party in a fascist, homophobic dictatorship where gay people are persecuted every day? Is this guy surrounded by people who are secretly waiting for permission for a bit of rhetorical queer-bashing? If you confront him, will other people be in danger? Character matters, including your own. How brave are you? How much are you prepared to sacrifice, or ask others to sacrifice, for a quiet life and the pretence of civility? How important is it that this party goes well, and is that still even an option? Lastly – this one’s important, so be honest, if only with yourself.

In one regard, she is right: context matters. While Miss Penny is firmly stuck in the #woke mentality of the early 21st century, for the vast, vast majority of the time about which we have any knowledge of human societies, said “blowhard” would be thought of as informed and sage, and homosexual activity thought of is immoral, sinful, wrong and mentally deranged. And you don’t have to venture far from Western societies to find the same opinions this very day.

This is my first post on Substack, and it’s partly about why I’m on this platform, given that Substack continues to host and profit from the propaganda of, among others, transphobic hatemonger Graham Linehan. The best and most comprehensive breakdown of Linehan’s behavior and why it’s so abhorrent comes from Grace Lavery, also on this platform. I share her conviction that Substack ought to throw this deranged bigot out of their party right now, before anyone else gets hurt.

I said so, in fact, in my initial conversations with Substack. I also spoke with some queer creators and allies who have decided to leave or boycott the platform. I respect that choice. I made a different one, for lots of reasons, but mostly because I think I can do a lot of good work here, with the tools and structure Substack offers, and that that work outweighs what I’d achieve with a public boycott. Before I made that choice, I told my contacts at Substack that they ought to ban Linehan, along with anyone else doing deliberate, wilful, hateful harm to any oppressed minority.

I didn’t actually expect them to change their policy based on my objection. They’re libertarians. They really are libertarians, and I believe that because they know I’m writing this post and told me I had every right to do so, and I’m holding back on details purely out of respect for privacy.

I do not know how much money Miss Penny makes from Substack; given that this was her first article there, probably not much so far. But it is interesting that she exercised her freedom of speech, over Substack’s ‘press,’ if we can call an internet platform that — and I do — to advocate that Graham Linehan not be allowed to use Substack’s press, in an attempt to keep his exercise of freedom of speech as unheard by others as possible. Miss Penny even admitted that Substack knew of the subject on which she was going to right, and stressed that she “had every right to do so.”

I also told them that at some point soon, whether they like the idea or not, they’ll find themselves having to make an active moral choice about whose ideas are worthy. I said that the time is coming when all platforms and publishers will need to take a stand somewhere, and I advised them to start thinking now about how to do so with dignity.

That paragraph of Miss Penny’s is one I take two ways. First, I take it as a not-so-veiled threat, that unless the ‘publishers’ of Substack start refusing to publish ideas she doesn’t like, bad things will happen to them. But secondly, and more importantly, is Miss Penny’s belief that some ideas are not worthy, at least not worthy of debate.

One wonders: if Miss Penny believes that Substack should judge “whose ideas are worthy,” does she not realize that, a hundred years ago, even sixty years ago, her ideas would be rejected as not “worthy” of publication.

What does it mean, then, when a company like Substack chooses to host this sort of malicious hate speech- and to do so in the name of free speech?

This is a post about platforming, and censorship, and moral choices, and why they matter. The question of who does and does not deserve a ‘platform’ is a massive, active issue. So much of our political speech and action is now effectively also publishing– and publishing using platforms that function as public space but are owned by private companies. Every platform is now having to make decisions about what it will and will not tolerate, and those decisions set the political agenda and shape our social world.

It’s significant that most of those platforms are run by precisely the sort of people most likely, for all sorts of reasons, to be free speech fundamentalists. That includes white, straight, cisgender men who are far less likely to be personally harmed by targeted hate speech than they are to be disadvantaged by speech restriction; tech libertarians soaked in a specific vintage of California ideology which considers the freedom of the individual utterly sacrosanct; and Americans. Who are weird about their First Amendment. Sorry, but they really are.

Sadly, Miss Penny is not quite right about that, as Google, Twitter and Facebook have most certainly censored or flagged speech they don’t like, and have done it in a one-sided direction: the mad mullahs of Iran and, now, Afghanistan are allowed Twitter accounts, but the immediate former President of the United States is banned. I have already noted how Twitter allowed a Tweet from Rachel Maddow, one which spread absolutely false and quickly debunked information, claiming that “patients overdosing on ivermectin” were clogging up hospitals in Oklahoma, while putting warning flags on those which stated that masks “don’t work” to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

We have previously noted how Twitter has banned “deadnaming” and “misgendering,”[1]‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring … Continue reading and The New York Times, with its logo “All the News That’s Fit to Print, gave OpEd space to Andrew Marantz to claim that Free Speech is Killing Us, and Chad Malloy[2]Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names … Continue reading to claim that Twitter’s restrictions on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promote the freedom of speech.

For some people, the principle that all ideas have equal value, and that measured debate will always lead to reasonable compromise, is a shield against the realization that the world is worse than you imagined. Insisting that the liberal exchange of ideas still works protects you from having to face a world where the liberal exchange of ideas doesn’t work.

Not at all. I most certainly do not believe that Miss Penny’s ideas have “equal value” with mine, or even much value at all. Others may think differently, and put their money where their ideas are by subscribing to her Substack. But I am one of those Americans who are “weird about (our) First Amendment,” and strongly believe that the censorship of speech, and the punishment of ideas some people don’t like, is a far, far greater threat to liberty than censoring or ‘deplatforming’ Miss Penny.

Back to that dinner party, with the homophobe who is, by now, getting up in your other guests’ faces and making himself everyone’s problem and yours in particular. It’s not just about free speech. It’s about social context, and harm done. If you ignore him, if you brush him off by saying it’s his right to express himself, you’ve made a statement about whose comfort and safety matters in your space. This wingnut is still shouting about how gay men are perverts who can’t be trusted around children, and your best friend’s kid who just came out is sitting right there. You’re going to have to do something.

“(A)nd harm done.” Miss Penny is telling us that a person who does not approve of homosexuality is actively doing harm to other by expressing his opinions, without ever considering the harm done to individuals and to society in general by censoring those with whom the ‘governors’ disagree. Miss Penny’s example is about disagreeing with homosexuality, but somehow, some way, she has forgotten that without active societal discussion about homosexuality, the change in public attitudes about the subject in many people would never have occurred.

There is one thing about Americans, who are so “weird” about our First Amendment, that Miss Penny, and, sadly enough, far too many of the Special Snowflakes™ in the United States, really don’t understand. Freedom of speech and of the press require a thick skin for those who are willing to speak in public or publish what they think. More, it requires a thick skin of those who would listen or read, because it is always possible that someone will say, or write, something their listeners or readers just don’t like. Miss Penny would subscribe to cowardice, to the shutting down of all ideas which do not fit neatly into her own worldview.

In a world without white supremacy or transphobia or misogyny, we wouldn’t have to put a price on absolute free speech, or consider who might end up paying it. But we don’t live in that world, and if we don’t have the courage to make moral judgements when it matters, we never will.

And in the concluding paragraph of her 2,754 words,[3]No, of course I haven’t quoted all of her article, though I have quoted more of it, using ‘fair Use” standards, than is my wont. Miss Penny expresses the same ideas as The New York Times, once a great defender of freedom of the press, when it was their freedom of the press in question, that certain ideas are simply so beyond the pale that they ought not to be allowed.

When I read such things, I keep thinking that George Orwell was right about everything but the date.

References

References
↑1 ‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by sex-specific terms referring to his biological sex rather than the sex he claims to be.
↑2 Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names and biological sex.
↑3 No, of course I haven’t quoted all of her article, though I have quoted more of it, using ‘fair Use” standards, than is my wont.
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When The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news

We have previously noted information which can be found, if you look, but which the credentialed media journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ 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 … Continue reading mostly choose not to report, that COVID-19 restrictions and mask mandates are contributing to a shortage of school bus drivers.

And this morning we hear from a newspaper I frequently call The Philadelphia Enquirer:[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.

    Philly’s bus driver shortage is a ‘crisis,’ leaving kids missing school or stranded

    After a year-plus of pandemic-disrupted learning, persistent bus woes have kept some students out of school completely and left parents and school staff scrambling yet again.

    By Kristen A Graham | Saturday, September 11, 2021

    Most days, the yellow bus that’s supposed to take Denise Madre’s kids from their Germantown home to school in Roxborough doesn’t show up at all. A bus did come on one of the seven days school has been open so far — nearly four hours late.

    That happened after Madre, who doesn’t drive, paid for an Uber to get Jonan and Braylee to Shawmont Elementary, and also after the time the children — both of whom have autism — were left waiting at school for hours because no bus ever came to take them home.

    Philadelphia School District officials warned the community about worsening school bus driver shortages this summer, and shifted start times over community and school objections to streamline operations. The district is even offering families $1,500 annually to drive their children to school instead of putting them on a yellow bus.

    But the transportation reality has been much worse than anyone had braced for, affecting schools across the city, leaving some students stranded and others on buses for hours or dropped off in the wrong neighborhoods. After a year-plus of pandemic-disrupted learning, persistent bus woes have kept some students out of school completely and left parents and school staff scrambling yet again.

It’s a fairly long story, primarily filled with the horror stories of children not picked up, or dropped off at the wrong location, including one girl who is legally blind. But, far down, is this paragraph:

    (Danielle) Floyd, the transportation general manager, said the district is working on offering bonuses and paying for trainers for its own drivers, which represent about 20% of its driver workforce; vendors are also generally offering perks and upping salaries. But in this employee market, it’s been especially difficult to find workers who can get their CDL licenses, pass physicals and drug tests, and make it through safety training.

Having been in the ready-mixed concrete industry for thirty years, yeah, I can testify as to the difficulty of finding drivers who can pass the drug test. But Kristen Graham, the article author, never mentioned the elephant in the room, that some potential drivers simply won’t take the jobs because they don’t want to wear face masks.

It’s not as though she doesn’t know that, because the Enquirer Inquirer has reported on that in the past, in an article linked with the story above:

    In Pennsylvania, some drivers aren’t coming back to work because they don’t want to mask and others are concerned about the health ramifications of being around large numbers of people, said Ryan Dellinger, executive director of the Pennsylvania School Bus Association.

How, I have to ask, did the article author miss that part? Or, more probably, why did she choose not to include it?

The answer is simple: the Inquirer’s editorial position is that masking is a universal good, and noting that the mask mandate has the ‘unintended consequence’ of keeping those people who refuse to wear the infernal things away from such jobs undercuts the newspaper’s editorial position.

We noted an article by uber-feminist Jill Filipovic McCormick, The Importance of Being Honest: Sometimes we have to sacrifice for public health. But don’t deny the sacrifice itself:

    The impulse to downplay inconvenient outcomes of one’s own position has been in full force throughout Covid, and with the school reopening + Delta, it’s gotten even more extreme. I keep hearing, for example, that wearing a mask is no big deal and anyone who complains about masking is probably a Covid denialist reactionary. This is pretty weird, because it seems to me to be obviously, demonstrably true that wearing a mask is an inconvenience and a personal and cultural sacrifice — it means you can’t fully read other peoples’ facial expressions, it impedes basic human interactions, it makes you break out, it irritates your face, it fogs up your glasses,[3]In the only place I will wear a mask, at Mass, because our Bishop has mandated it, I have to pull it down to read, because it fogs up my reading glasses in seconds. Being partially deaf, I read the … Continue reading and I find that when I wear one I start to feel a little disoriented after a while, especially inside under bright lights. Wearing a mask sucks! But it sucks far less than giving someone else Covid, or getting Covid yourself. And so of course, in scenarios where people are not all fully vaccinated and infection rates are high, we should continue wear masks inside. I wear masks inside and I think indoor mask-wearing for essential activities should be mandatory (I also think vaccines should be mandatory for inessential activities, like dining out).

Another far-left liberal and strident feminist, Amanda Marcotte, complained about having to wear a mask:

    I really wanted to get back to my spin class. And for a couple of months, I did just that. Exercising at home for the past year was fine, but nothing beats a 45-minute spin class for leaving one red-faced and sopping wet with sweat. But it’s that “sopping wet” part that became a problem this week when the gym sent out a memo bringing back their indoor mask mandate. This isn’t a 5-minute jaunt in a grocery store with a mask. Exercising with a sweat-soaked mask is like being waterboarded. So I canceled my class and sent a polite but angry note to my gym.

If these leftists can combitch about wearing masks, why would it be a surprise to anyone that some people would choose not to accept what Mrs McCormick called “an inconvenience and a personal and cultural sacrifice,” and opt not to take a job that required wearing one? If you have a Class B CDL, what you need to drive a school bus, you could also drive a dump truck or a concrete mixer or a box truck, and not have to wear one of the infernal things. The left simply don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, that some people take their personal decisions based on things that the left think unimportant.

The credentialed media don’t outright lie as much as they simply don’t report information that would hurt their editorial slant.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ 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.
↑2 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑3 In the only place I will wear a mask, at Mass, because our Bishop has mandated it, I have to pull it down to read, because it fogs up my reading glasses in seconds. Being partially deaf, I read the readings from the missal before Mass, to help me understand what the lector is going to read, and to get a heads up on the responsorial psalm, because I don’t always hear it well enough to catch the individual words.
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Andy Beshear is displeased that the state legislature refused to do his bidding, but it’s his own fault

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)

As I said, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) regrets having called the General Assembly into special session, but he has no one to blame but himself. On July 10, 2020, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that Mr Beshear stated he wouldn’t involve the legislature because he believed that they wouldn’t do his bidding.

    Beshear was asked at Friday’s news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

The Governor refused to call a special session of the legislature during 2020. Republican candidates for the legislature ran against the Governor and his edicts, and the voters rewarded them with 14 additional seats in the state House of Representatives, and two in the state Senate.

Then, as promised, the huge Republican majorities enacted several new laws, over the Governor’s vetoes, restricting his ’emergency’ authority under KRS 39A. So, what did Mr Beshear do then? He went to Democrat sycophant Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd, and got the Judge to enjoin enforcement of House Bill 1, Senate Bill 1, Senate Bill 2, and House Joint Resolution 77.

Can anyone be surprised that the General Assembly is not well disposed to the Governor, and not exactly inclined to do his bidding?

    Beshear rebukes Kentucky legislature for preventing him from issuing a mask mandate

    By Jack Brammer | Updated: September 10, 2021 | 3:23 PM EDT

    A frustrated Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear chided the Republican-led state legislature Friday for getting rid of the state’s mask mandate for public schools and banning any type of statewide mask mandate.

    The legislature’s decision on the mask issues was “wrong” and puts him in a position of trying to fight the alarming spread of the coronavirus pandemic “with one hand tied behind my back,” said the Democratic governor.

    If he had the authority, Beshear said, he would immediately implement a masking mandate for indoor settings and hopes more businesses would impose mask mandates. He also said he encourages school districts to “do the right thing” and require universal masking in schools. Local school officials will have the option of what to do about students wearing masks.

Well, that’s just it: Kentuckians voted for Republicans in last November’s elections because they were fed up with the Governor’s executive orders, and the mask mandate was probably the one which rankled them the most. When Mr Beshear said that if he had the authority he would immediately implement as mask mandate, he was stating the very reason that Republicans enjoy a 75-25 majority in the state House and a 30-8 majority in the state Senate.

    The governor used football analogies to describe the situation, saying for 18 months he has been able “to quarterback Kentucky through this pandemic. I have made the tough calls, sometimes the unpopular calls and I have taken the hits that go along with them.”

Well, that’s just it: a quarterback is only 1/11 of the offense, and without the other ten men on the field, even Tom Brady couldn’t do anything. Governor Beshear thought he could play the game by himself, and leave the other ten players on the sidelines.

Heck, not even on the sidelines, but locked outside of the locker room.

Would the General Assembly have been more willing to play ball with the Governor, if he hadn’t insulted them at every turn, if he hadn’t tried to keep them off the field? Well, who can say, given that he didn’t try it? But instead of trying to put together five offensive linemen, three receivers and two running backs, the Governor created four angry defensive linemen, three mean linebackers, and four fast and hungry defensive backs. So, he got chased back into his own end zone, and sacked for a safety.

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Yup, Andy Beshear regrets having to call a special session of the General Assembly! The state representatives and senators did the will of the people who voted for them

I asked yesterday if Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) would regret calling a special session of the General Assembly to deal with his COVID-19 programs now that the state Supreme Court has ruled that the injunctions against the General Assembly’s restrictions on his authority had to be dismissed. The Governor got the extension of his state of emergency order for which he asked, but the mask mandate he wanted, and said he would impose if he could? Not just no, but Hell no!

    KY lawmakers override Beshear’s vetoes and end all statewide mask mandates

    By Jack Brammer and Alex Acquisto | Updated: September 10, 2021 | 12:17 AM EDT

    The Republican-led Kentucky General Assembly soundly rejected Gov. Andy Beshear’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic late Thursday night, overriding his vetoes of two bills that stripped the Democratic governor’s ability to issue statewide mask mandates in schools or anywhere else.

    The action came as lawmakers ended a special session of the General Assembly just before midnight. The session, called by the governor to comply with a Kentucky Supreme Court decision last month that said the legislature must approve the governor’s emergency orders, began Tuesday.

    Both the Senate and House late Thursday overrode Beshear’s vetoes of Senate Bills 1 and 2, which he had issued shortly after the bills were initially approved by lawmakers. Senate Bill 1 would nullify emergency regulations mandating masks at public schools and daycare centers, leaving that decision to local officials and business owners. Senate Bill 2 bans any type of statewide mask mandate until June 2023.

    Beshear has said he needs that authority to fight the coronavirus, which has claimed the lives of more than 7,800 Kentuckians and is leaving hospitals severely strapped for staff and resources.

The Senate overrode SB1 21-6, and SB2 23-5. The House overrode the veto of SB1 69-24 and SB2 69-22. The reason that Republicans have such huge majorities in the General Assembly was the Governor’s mask mandates in 2020, when 100 state House and 19 state Senate seats were up for election.

The bills outlaw statewide mask mandates by the state government, but do not prohibit local school boards or districts from imposing their own mandates within their jurisdictions. Mr Beshear had asked local school boards to impose such policies, but most declined to do so, so he got angry and made it an order.

The Governor rescinded his mask order following the state Supreme Court ruling, but by then had persuaded the state Board of Education to issue such an order lasting through the entire school year. The Governor needed his emergency declaration extended — it would otherwise have expired today — but by calling the special session, he lost the state Board of Education’s mask mandate. Whether the state Board’s order was covered by the Kentucky Supreme Court’s August 10 decision is legally up in the air, but it would at least have lasted longer if it had to be adjudicated; now, it’s history, or at least it will be in five days, to give local Boards of Education time to meet and take their own decisions. It is expected that at least the large districts in Fayette and Jefferson counties will impose their own mask mandates, but smaller districts in more rural counties might not. In the Bluegrass State, local Boards of Education are elected, and the Board members must be responsive to the wishes of the voters.

Parents can, of course, tell their children to wear masks even if the local school district does not.

It’s amusing to see the reader comments on the Lexington Herald-Leader article cited above, all claiming that the General Assembly was gambling with the lives of students, but the facts are plain: the members were doing the will of the voters who elected them.

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Comment rescue from Patterico To me, the far, far greater danger is the mortality rate to our constitutional rights, to our liberty and our privacy.

Factory Working Orphan wrote:

    As (Time123) pointed out, the fact that the postal workers have been exempted from this shows that this isn’t about enforcing a public safety edict to prevent the spread of a highly lethal contagion. It’s about the cabal trying to take advantage of the situation to grab as much power as they can, so that the tool always stays in the toolbox for when they think it’s needed.

There have been several pushes to repeal the Patriot Act, mostly by libertarians like Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, and Rand Paul.

But a “highly lethal contagion”? Being the [insert slang term for the rectum here] that I am, I did something really radical like actually do the math.

The New York Times had a story with the headline and subhead, “One in 5,000: The real chances of a breakthrough infection.” You have to actually read the story to discover that the 0.02% chance of a fully vaccinated person contracting a breakthrough COVID infection was 1 in 5,000 per day, which means 31 in 5,000 per month, or 365 in 5,000 per year.

I compared that with the published statistics in Fayette County, Kentucky, and found that the breakthrough rate in Fayette County was a bit higher, 0.0290% per day, but not significantly out of line. Then I used the same set of numbers for the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated population, and found an infection rate, in the same community, of 0.0905% per day, 3.121 times that for the fully vaccinated, but still not even a thousand to one chance that an unvaccinated person will contract the virus on any given day.

Yes, it makes sense to get the vaccine, because it cuts the chances that if you do contract the virus, you’ll actually get sick. But that raises an obvious question: if the vaccine helps keep those who contract the virus from getting sick, or as sick, as those who have not been vaccinated, are the asymptomatic but vaccinated population being tested at significantly lower rates?

Highly lethal? With 40,870,000 total cases in the US, and 659,231 COVID deaths, that works out to a mortality rate, under American medical care, of 1.61%. Worldwide, 219,000,000 cases and 4,550,000 deaths, the mortality rate works out to 2.08%. This ain’t the bubonic plague (mortality rate 30 to 60%) or smallpox (30% mortality rate).

To me, the far, far greater danger is the mortality rate to our constitutional rights, to our liberty and our privacy. Though I suspect that nk was kidding — at least to some extent — when he said that he “would hope that the government would have a database (that he) could easily access,” I’m fairly certain that there are a lot of souls on the left who really would want just that. We already know that far, far, far too many people have accepted “Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen!” as perfectly reasonable and normal.

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Scratch a liberal, find a fascist

It seems that President Biden believes he has the authority to order people to get the COVID-19 vaccines:

    Biden expresses frustration over the unvaccinated, says ‘a distinct minority’ is keeping the U.S. from overcoming the coronavirus

    By Annie Linskey, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Seung Min Kim and Lisa Rein | Thursday, September 9, 2021 | 5:52 PM EDT

    President Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates Thursday that will affect tens of millions of Americans, ordering all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be inoculated or face weekly testing.

    Biden also said he was requiring all health facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding to vaccinate their workforces, which the White House believes will impact 50,000 locations.

    And the president announced he would sign an executive order that would require all federal employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus — without an option for those who prefer to be regularly tested instead — in an effort to create a model he hopes state governments and private companies will adopt.

    The cluster of new policies comes as the country grapples with the highly contagious delta variant, which has sent cases surging to more than 150,000 a day and is causing more than 1,500 daily deaths. The White House has struggled to convince hesitant Americans to get vaccinated and has been increasingly shifting toward requirements.

    In remarks from the White House, Biden took a more antagonistic tone toward the unvaccinated than he has in the past, as he turned from cajoling toward compulsion and blamed those who refuse to get shots for hurting those around them.

Yeah, that’s going to persuade people who haven’t wanted to get vaccinated to do so!

There’s more at the original, but the Washington Post article never stated under what legal authority the President claims he can order private businesses to do this. The New York Times said that:

    The requirements will be imposed by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is drafting an emergency temporary standard to carry out the mandate, according to the White House.

An obvious question: if getting vaccinated is so important, why did Mr Biden only order it for companies with 100 or more employees?

There’s at least one more day of the special session of the Kentucky General Assembly; I would suspect that the legislators would quickly put together a bill banning all state employees from in any way assisting OSHA in enforcing this order of the President’s/

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Will Andy Beshear regret calling a special session?

As we have previously noted, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) really, really doesn’t like the state legislature, but he didn’t have much choice but to call a special session of the General Assembly. Getting the General Assembly involved is something the Governor very much did not want to do. On July 10, 2020, Mr Beshear stated that he wouldn’t involve the legislature because he believed that they wouldn’t do his bidding.

    Beshear was asked at Friday’s news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

In the Bluegrass State, the legislature’s regular sessions are restricted by the state constitution, to sixty days, the last of which cannot go beyond April 15th in even numbered years, and thirty days, not to run beyond March 30th, in odd numbered years. The Governor, however, can call the legislature into special session, and he has the power to set its agenda during a special session. The General Assembly cannot call itself back into session outside of the constitutional restrictions.

But, with the COVID-19 state of emergency that the Governor declared in March of 2020 set to expire on Friday, September 10th, thanks to the state Supreme Court’s decision on the laws reining in the Governor’s emergency authority, Mr Beshear needed the special session to extend that. The General Assembly voted for an extension of that until January 15th, at which time the legislature will be in its regular session.

However, the Republican-controlled legislature hasn’t been doing much that the Governor wanted. We had previously noted that the Governor had asked school districts to put mask mandates in place, but most districts made them optional. The Governor then got pissed off, and made it an order.

    Bill ditching KY school mask mandate approved by House committee on the second try

    By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Updated September 8, 2021 | 7:15 PM EDT

    It took two attempts, but the House Education Committee on Wednesday passed a bill that would eliminate the state’s mask mandate in K-12 schools and specifies when districts could close to in-person learning.

    The House Education Committee first met at noon Wednesday, when House Bill 1 failed because it only got 11 of the 12 yes votes it needed to win approval in the committee of 22. There were seven no votes and three pass votes.

    Later, a second meeting of the House Education Committee was called for 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. At that meeting, the committee quickly reconsidered and approved the bill. It now moves to the full House of Representatives, and similar legislation remains alive in the Senate. The second vote was 16 yes votes, 2 no votes and no passes. . . . .

    At the second meeting, several lawmakers said they were changing their vote so that the legislation could be heard in the full House. Others said they were afraid if the bill died, schools would miss out on the help the legislation could provide. One provision makes it easier for retired teachers to return to the classroom to ease staff shortages.

There’s more at the original.

The Governor had already said that he would reimpose his despised statewide mask mandate if he could, and when the state Supreme Court ruled that his authority had been limited, he ran an end-around, to get the state Board of Education to issue one, a mandate lasting for the entire school year. I had been noting for awhile that the Governor was looking for an excuse to reimpose the mask mandate, and he admitted it, stating that the high number of COVID-19 cases and hospital staffing shortages would have spurred him to enact a statewide mask mandate for indoor settings.

However, under the proposed bill, local school boards and districts would still have the authority to issue mask mandates for their jurisdictions.

The truth is simple: it was the hated statewide indoor mask mandate which was the primary impetus for voters in the Commonwealth to give Republican legislative candidates such huge majorities in the 2020 elections.

The bill also includes language to allow schools more flexibility on ‘non traditional instruction’, NTI, days. In the regular session last winter, the legislature, fighting the closure of schools and long term use of remote instruction, mandated that no schools could take more than ten NTI days without having to make them up in in-person days. As several districts, at least 38 of them so far, have had to close down due to COVID, those days, normally used for snow days during the winter, would quickly get used up. The legislature is still looking at limits, but with more flexibility for schools who confine NTI to those students or classes which must be quarantined, rather than entire school systems. We do not yet know what the final form will be.