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A Republican Form of Government

In his New York Times biography, it states that “Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine.” Yup, you’re right: that’s pretty much the definition of an American political liberal. Mr Bouie on Friday set out to claim that the Guarantee Clause to the Constitution means that Democrats can fight gerrymandering by Republicans:

    Madison Saw Something in the Constitution We Should Open Our Eyes To

    by Jamelle Bouie | Friday, November 12, 2021

    Not content to simply count on the traditional midterm swing against the president’s party, Republicans are set to gerrymander their way to a House majority next year.

    Last week, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled statehouse passed a new map that would, in an evenly divided electorate, give it 10 of the state’s 14 congressional seats. To overcome the gerrymander and win a bare majority of seats, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, Democrats would have to win an unattainably large supermajority of votes.

    A proposed Republican gerrymander in Ohio would leave Democrats with two seats out of 15 — or around 13 percent of the total — in a state that went 53-45 for Trump in 2020.

    It is true that Democrats have pursued their own aggressive gerrymanders in Maryland and Illinois, but it is also true that the Democratic Party is committed, through its voting rights bills, to ending partisan gerrymandering altogether.

Of course, Maryland, in which the Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in both houses of the state legislature, wants to gerrymander the state’s lone Republican congressman out of office.

The Democrats in Congress are concerned because there are simply more “red” states than blue ones; Joe Biden is President only because the blue states are mostly larger in population than the red ones. The Democrats were perfectly fine with gerrymandering decades ago, when the South was solidly Democratic, and most elections were determined not in November, but in the earlier Democratic primaries.

    The larger context of the Republican Party’s attempt to gerrymander itself into a House majority is its successful effort to gerrymander itself into long-term control of state legislatures across the country. In Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other states, Republicans have built legislative majorities sturdy enough to withstand all but the most crushing “blue wave.”

And in those states, Republicans seized control of state legislatures after Republican candidates won under district maps passed by Democrats. In Kentucky, the GOP finally won control of the state House of Representatives in the 2014 elections, in districts drawn by a previously Democrat-controlled state House, and signed into law by Governor Steve Beshear, a Democrat. In districts drawn by Democrats, Kentucky Republicans won 75 out of 100 state House districts in the 2020 elections.

In the 2004 elections, President George W Bush got zero votes in five Philadelphia precincts; John Kerry won twenty congressional districts by greater percentages than Mr Bush’s best district. In 2008, John McCain got zero votes in a whopping 57 city precincts, and four years later, Mitt Romney was blanked in 59 precincts. The Philadelphia Inquirer, of course, could find no evidence of fraud in any of this, but it points out a fact that everyone knows, but the Democrats just don’t want to talk about: Democrats, and Democrat votes, are very heavily concentrated in our major cities. How would you redistrict Philadelphia to not gerrymander the state of Pennsylvania? Remember: it’s the weight of Philadelphia that carries statewide elections for Democrats. President Trump would have easily carried the Keystone State in 2020, which he lost by 80,555 votes, were it not for Joe Biden’s 471,305 margin in Philly. Mr Trump just barely overcame Hillary Clinton’s 475,277 margin in the city to carry the state in 2016. Even President Obama’s 2012 309,840 vote margin in Pennsylvania would have been a loss without his 492,339 vote win in Philadelphia.

The problem for Democrats isn’t that Republican legislatures have gerrymandered the districts; the problem is that the people have gerrymandered themselves with their choices of where to live.

    In Article IV, Section 4, the Constitution says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

Mr Bouie claims that the Guarantee Clause should mean something other than what it was understood to mean, a government not headed by a King or Prince. Rather, he wants it to mean, citing Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v Ferguson, that Congress should have the right of approval of each state government:

    Still, a broad understanding of the Guarantee Clause might be a potent weapon for Congress if a Democratic majority ever worked up the will to go on the offensive against state legislatures that violated basic principles of political equality.

That cuts two ways; Congress is sometimes controlled by Republicans!

But, it seems to me that the wisest way to read, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” given that “Republican” is capitalized in the original document, is that the United States should guarantee to every state that it will be governed by Republicans! 🙂

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Philly ties for 3rd place!

It wasn’t really that much of a stretch to guess that 475 wouldn’t be the final homicide number for Thursday, and it wasn’t: the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows that 476 Philadelphians have been murdered so far this year, up from ‘just’ 428 on the same day last year. Last year being a leap year, the gang bangers had an extra day to hit that 428 number.

The numbers are ugly: 476 homicides in 315 days works out to 1.5111 per day, or a projected 551.5555, rounding up to 552 for the year.

With 50 days left in the year, and ‘only’ 24 murders needed to tie the all-time record of 500, set in 1990, the homicide rate would have to drop to slightly less than a third of what it is right now, and, at this point, only God could make that happen. At the current rate, the city should tie the all-time high in just 16 days, or Saturday, November 27th.

Mayor James Kenney (Democrat-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (Soros stooge-Philadelphia), and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (Kenney Puppet-Philadelphia) have certainly done a fine, fine job, haven’t they?

But hey, Philadelphians must like all of those bodies stacked up like cordwood, because they just re-elected George Soros stooge District Attorney Larry Krasner. No one can say that they didn’t know what they were getting.

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Killadelphia

This brings the homicide total in the City of Brotherly Love to 475 for the year; one more, and Philadelphia ties 1989’s Bronze Medal for most murders! Of course, as of this writing, Thursday isn’t over, and the police could still report more killings.

    Nicetown fire that killed 2 ruled arson

    The fire occurred on the 1400 block of West Jerome Street shortly before 4 a.m. Thursday.

    by Robert Moran | Veterans’ Day, November 11, 2021

    A predawn house fire Thursday that killed two men in the city’s Nicetown section has been ruled an arson and is being investigated as a homicide case, police said.

    Firefighters and police responded to the blaze just before 4 a.m. on the 1400 block of West Jerome Street. Two men in their 50s were found in an upstairs bedroom and were transported to Temple University Hospital and Einstein Medical Center. Both were pronounced dead shortly before 5 a.m. Their names were not released.

    Investigators from the Philadelphia Fire Department and the ATF Arson Task Force found an accelerant was used inside the front door.

    Police said the motive for the arson was unknown.

One thing is certain: whoever started this fire didn’t care for anyone’s life. The 1400 block of West Jerome Street consists entirely of Philadelphia row houses. The Google Maps street view shows them as primarily brick buildings, presumably with brick firewalls between each unit, but there’s still plenty of century-old wood involved, and the arsonist could have burned down a whole side of the street.

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The Dems blew off the best they had!

One thing I’ve said all along: while Republicans wouldn’t have been happy that President Trump lost, if the Democrats had nominated then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI) in 2020, we’d have been a lot happier with the outcome than we are about Joe Biden being President.

Make no mistake about it: Mrs Williams is very much a liberal. But she’s a lieutenant colonel in the Hawai’i National Guard, and has served in Iraq and Kuwait. Most importantly, she understands and respects our individual liberties. Were she President today, she would be strongly encouraging vaccinations, but she’d never try to order them.

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Happy Veterans’ Day!

Happy Veterans’ Day to my daughters. Our older daughter, a staff sergeant in the United States Army Reserve, will be headed for an overseas deployment in May, while our younger daughter has completed her eight years in the Army Reserve and is a civilian again.

And Happy Veterans’ Day to Hoagie, a Vietnam veteran!

Also having served: my mother and father, during the Korean war, and grandfather, during World War I.

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How gun control works Convicted felon tells police that he'd never be caught without a gun

Erich Storck. Photo by Nicholasville Police Department.

Were criminal stupidity an actual legal violation, Erich Storck would be guilty of it.

Mr Storck is a previously convicted felon, and, well, you can read it for yourself:

    Man who fired shots with police in his house said he’d ‘never be caught without a gun’

    by Karla ward | Tuesday, November 9, 2021 | 6:33 PM EDT

    Nicholasville police arrested a man who fired a gun inside his home multiple times while police were there talking with him.

    Police said they went to Erich Storck’s home on the 500 block of Courchelle Drive Monday evening in response to a call about shots fired in the area, according to a police uniform citation.

    When they arrived, Storck, 49, was inside. With three officers inside the home trying to talk to him, police said Storck “fired multiple bullets,” which police said put their lives in danger, as well as the lives of his neighbors.

    Police said two bullets exited Storck’s home, went through a neighbor’s window and lodged in the neighbor’s bathroom wall, which put the lives of the seven residents there “in substantial danger of death or serious physical injury.”

    Police said Storck’s possession of a firearm was also “a violation of his Kentucky DVO.”

    “When advised of this charge the above subject stated he would never be caught with out a gun,” police wrote in the uniform citation.

Naturally, the Lexington Herald-Leader did not publish Mr Storck’s mugshot, but it was easy enough to find.

This is why gun control will never work. Mr Storck is a previously convicted felon, and thus it is illegal for him to have a firearm. He was under a domestic violence order, which also prohibited him from having a firearm. But he was a drug dealer — the police got a warrant after seeing pot plainly visible in his house, and a more thorough search found plenty of evidence — and drug dealers, even small time ones, find firearms to simply be a necessary tool of their trade.

Mr Storck, allegedly, of course, reacted as a smoked up drug criminal would act: stupidly. But his statement shows that criminals won’t obey gun control laws, regardless of how the left think gun control laws will work.

Of course, there’s more. With his criminal history, he could not have purchased a firearm legally, so someone else must have violated the law in getting it for him. That guy might never be found.

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Fear is the mind-killer!

William Teach noted New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s paean to fear:

    When you see how hard it’s been for governments to get their citizens to just put on a mask in stores, or to get vaccinated, to protect themselves, their neighbors and their grandparents from being harmed or killed by Covid-19, how in the world are we going to get big majorities to work together globally and make the lifestyle sacrifices needed to dampen the increasingly destructive effects of global warming — for which there are treatments but no vaccine?

Perhaps, just perhaps, when the plebeians see the patricians taking 118 private jets to the ‘climate summit’ COP26, they simply aren’t convinced that global warming climate change emergency is all that much of an emergency. Whether Mr Friedman took a private jet or, gasp!, flew commercial I do not know, but we do know that he’s been flying all over the globe to attend these things, telling us that he has “been to most of the climate summits since Bali in 2007”.

Yeah, if I could get the Times to pay for a vacation in Bali, I’d go, too!

But Mr Friedman hit upon the instrument of control the government, at all levels, have been trying to use: fear! When he complains that some people are not cooperating with the message that COVID-19 could harm or kill people’s grandparents, neighbors, and themselves, he frets that people, free people, are just not going to go along with the “lifestyle sacrifices” the patricians demand of others, though seemingly not of themselves.

But he needn’t worry: there have been plenty of people who were filled with fear, and are still filled with fear. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    The catharsis of attending my first concert of the COVID-19 era | Opinion

    I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world.

    by Rachel Kramer Bussel, For The Inquirer | November 5, 2021

    “Is this your first time?” a stranger asked me in an elevator at the Met as we tried to find our seats at the St. Vincent concert a few weeks ago.

    Stunned, I stared back at her, trying to form an answer. How did she know? Did I look stricken by the nerves I’d felt bouncing around for weeks as I tried to decide if attending a public event was finally safe? I eventually nodded.

    “You have two masks, just like me. It’s my first too,” she said. We both knew she meant it wasn’t our first concert ever, but our first pandemic outing.

    I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world. For the last few months, we’d been going to a local grocery store to supplement our Instacart deliveries, but beyond that and work interactions, we hadn’t been close to such a large group of people since before the mid-March 2020 lockdown.

There’s a sadness in that: Miss Bussel has just told us that her boyfriend and she had virtually shut down their social lives for nineteen months. For the “last few months” they’d worked up the nerve to venture out to go to the grocery store, apparently when they’d missed putting something on their Instacart order. Of course, they were willing to put other people at whatever risk they were afraid to take themselves, because Instacart requires living human beings to put together the grocery order, and living human beings to drive through Egg Harbor Township[1]Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’ to deliver the orders. The stressful social situations Her boyfriend and Miss Bussel avoided themselves they thought little of putting on other people.

    I was expecting to enjoy hearing St. Vincent perform for the first time, but I wasn’t prepared for the sense of catharsis the communal experience would be. I looked around at my fellow concertgoers, at the dazzling chandelier, at the dancers and musicians onstage, and felt deeply grateful that I’d said yes to attending. In August, I’d reluctantly had my boyfriend sell our long-awaited tickets to see Sleater-Kinney and Wilco at the Mann Center, even though that was an outdoor show. The risks felt too great.

    But having received my Pfizer booster shot two days before the St. Vincent show, and knowing the Met requires a COVID-19 vaccination or a recent negative test, I felt that was a risk worth taking.

Uhhh, if Miss Bussel got her COVID-19 booster shot two days prior to attending the concert, it hadn’t had time to work yet![2]“At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to … Continue reading

Of course, she was reassured by the fact that other concert goers had to show their papers! Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen![3]Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ … Continue reading

The author continued to tell us how she is now facing decisions about what her boyfriend and she can and cannot, should or should not, do to return to a normal life, but I have to wonder: after nineteen months of seemingly abject fear, is it reasonable to think she ever can just turn it off? The ‘experts’ are now telling us that SARS-CoV-2 will be with us forever, though it will become endemic and not be classified as a panicdemic pandemic. Miss Bussel revealed that she has asthma, which could mean that, if she became infected, the disease could be worse for her. Nevertheless, at least to judge from the photo she supplied to the Inquirer, as well as on her website, she’s a fairly young woman, and younger people, while still susceptible, tend to have far less serious outcomes.

Life is full of risks, and COVID-19 is but one of them. Miss Bussel was in about as much danger driving to that concert from a traffic accident as she was of contracting the virus. And since we know that even those who have been vaccinated can contract and spread the virus, going to that concert did not reduce her risk of contracting the virus to zero.

What government, governments at all levels, have done, is to spread fear through our society, fear of contracting a disease which can be deadly, and is deadly in a small percentage of cases, to the extent that it has crippled our society. The American Automobile Association has reported that Thanksgiving travel plans appear to be near pre-pandemic levels, despite Joe Biden’s soaring gasoline prices, but that simply tells us just how much restrictions and fear disrupted Americans’ lives in 2020. Many Governor’s, including Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, issued orders restricting how many people, and from how many households, people could have in their own homes for Thanksgiving last year, orders that I am proud to say the Pico family ignored. For government to have tried to virtually cancel Thanksgiving is something that only induced fear could accomplish.

We must not fear! As Frank Herbert wrote, fear is the mind-killer, but fear is also the freedom killer, the liberty killer! We allowed fear to get people to obey unconstitutional orders from state governors, orders restricting our freedom of religion and freedom of peaceable assembly. When we let fear get us to go along meekly with government diktats that infringe on our individual rights, we enable governments to keep doing so. They only need to instill the next subject of terror and fear to be able to do so.

References

References
↑1 Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’
↑2 “At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to 12.3), for an absolute difference of 86.6 infections per 100,000 person-days.”
↑3 Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ Day, but the county health department would have been closed for the holiday, so I got it on the 9th. It was my choice — well, actually, my wife, a hospital nurse, asked me to do so, because she says she puts me at risk, since she treats COVID patients — but I absotively, posilutely refuse to carry around the vaccination records. I will not comply with “Ve need to see your papers!”
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The Lexington Herald-Leader mugshot policy They love to print photos of Capitol kerfufflers being sentenced to just probation, but hide the photos of convicted sex offenders!

The Lexington Herald-Leader adheres to the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, which begins:

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.

Though I disagree with that policy, its basis is clearly and explicitly stated protection of those charged with crimes, but not yet convicted. Why, then, is what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal not publishing the mugshots of those convicted of serious crimes?

2 sentenced to prison time over ‘very disturbing’ sexual assault of a Lexington child

Crystal Secrest. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, via Lexington Herald-Leader, December 8, 2018.

by Jeremy Chisenhall | Monday, November 8, 2021 | 12:04 PM EDT | Updated: 4:04 PM EDT

A Lexington woman and an Indiana man will each spend more than a decade in prison after entering pleas to sex crimes against a child.

Crystal Annette Secrest and Patrick Christopher Noble were both sentenced in Fayette Circuit Court Friday after pleading guilty in the same case; Secrest was accused of repeatedly forcing the victim to perform oral sex on Noble. Judge Thomas L. Travis, who sentenced Secrest to 16 years in prison and Noble to 18 years in prison on Friday, said the case was a “very disturbing situation.”

“I must say this is one of the more disturbing things that I’ve had the occasion to see and read about while I’ve been here on the bench,” Travis said prior to imposing Secrest’s sentence.

There’s more at the original. Miss Secrest is 32 years old, so if she serves the 13 years remaining on her full sentence — she was credited for time served since her arrest in December of 2018 — she won’t get out of prison until she’s 45 years old. I would like to think that she’ll serve the full term, but don’t really have much confidence of that.

Patrick Noble, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, a public record.

Then there’s Patrick Noble. Mr Noble has been locked up since March 12, 2019, so he’s already served 2¾ years, of his 18 year sentence. Since he’s already 56 years old, we can at least hope he won’t be released until he’s 71 years old.

Mr Noble entered an Alford plea, in which he did not admit guilt, but conceded that there was enough evidence against him to be convicted in a jury trial. Nevertheless, Mr Noble maintains his innocence, and his attorney, Shannon Brooks-English, said that he would appeal. Rosa Noble, his wife, said that she supported her husband 100%, and she knew that he did not commit the crimes.

Uh huh, right.

So, why did the Herald-Leader, which wasted bandwidth on a stock illustration, not publish the mugshots of these two malefactors? Surely their offenses were far greater than those of some of the Capitol kerfufflers, people whose crimes were so heinous that they were allowed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge, the maximum sentence for which is six months, and some of whom have received probation!

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Governor Tom Wolf dances to avoid a court ruling He's going to end mask mandate in January, hoping to get the lawsuits against the state dismissed as moot.

Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) will, thankfully, be gone in a year, but he’s anxious to protect what executive authority he can while he remains in office.

As the Delta variant spread, Governor Wolf initially stated that he would leave mask mandate decisions up to local school boards. Then, when many of those school boards didn’t decide the way he wanted them to decide, the Governor got acting Secretary of Health Allison Beam to issue a public health order requiring masks indoors in the Commonwealth’s schools, public and private alike, as well as early learning and child-care facilities.

We noted, last June, that the Governor scheduled an end to the state’s mask mandate just a day after the state legislature slapped him down over it. Now, he’s doing it again!

Pa. mask mandate for public and private schools expected to end in January, Wolf says

Gov. Tom Wolf’s update to the school mask mandate comes as vaccinations have expanded to children ages 5-11. The mandate will remain in early learning and child care centers.

by Jamie Martines | Monday, November 8, 2021

HARRISBURG — A statewide order mandating students, staff, and visitors to public and private K-12 schools to wear a mask while indoors is expected to be lifted Jan. 17, Gov. Tom Wolf announced Monday.

At that point, local school officials will be allowed to decide what mitigation efforts to implement.

Part of the order that applies to early learning programs and child care centers will remain in effect until further notice, Wolf said in a statement. . . . .

“Now, we are in a different place than we were in September, and it is time to prepare for a transition back to a more normal setting,” Wolf said in a statement Monday. “Unfortunately, the COVID-19 virus is now a part of our daily lives, but with the knowledge we’ve gained over the past 20 months and critical tools like the vaccine at our disposal, we must take the next step forward in our recovery.”

There’s more at the original, but part of the answer is clear: the masking order has been challenged in court, and if the order is ended on January 17th, just 2¼ months from now, given the long delays in the court system, the lawsuits can be dismissed as moot, because the order will have ended. That would leave the method used by the Governor and his minions in place, in case they wanted to use it again.

The plaintiff’s attorney has stated that the lawsuits will proceed anyway, because the order will be kept in place for younger children and day care facilities, and that not challenging the order in court leaves the mechanism available if the Governor wants to use it again.

We had noted the vast assumption of power by the petty dictators in the executive branch. Then-Secretary of Health Richard Levine[1]Dr Levine is a male who is so delusional that he thinks he is female, and goes by the name ‘Rachel.’ In their continuing mission to normalize transgenderism, the credentialed media always refer … Continue reading even ordered Pennsylvanians to wear masks in their own homes, if they had non-household members present.

Of course, the mask mandate might not end in Philadelphia, because Mayor Jim Kenney and acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole just love to exercise authoritarian power.

References

References
↑1 Dr Levine is a male who is so delusional that he thinks he is female, and goes by the name ‘Rachel.’ In their continuing mission to normalize transgenderism, the credentialed media always refer to him as ‘Rachel,’ and no longer note that he is ‘transgender. The First Street Journal, in accordance with its Stylebook, does not go along with such stupidity, and always refers to people by their biological sex and proper name.