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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy!

How could this have happened? After all, this was illegal! Surely, surely! gun control laws should have prevented it!

Well, it’s Montgomery County, not Philadelphia, so the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating, ‘progressive’ District Attorney, Let ’em loose Larry Krasner, won’t have anything to do with it.

Abington-Cheltenham football game suspended after student found with a gun

The Cheltenham High School student was arrested on felony weapons offenses, including possession of a firearm, police said. Players were safely dismissed to the Abington High School locker rooms.

by Diane Mastrull | Saturday, August 26, 2023

Friday night’s football game between Montgomery County rivals Abington and Cheltenham High Schools was suspended at halftime when a parent noticed a student with a gun in the stadium, police said.

When police found the student at Abington High School’s stadium shortly before 8:30 p.m., a handgun with an extended magazine was protruding from his waist area and the youth was in possession of a second, loaded magazine, police said in a statement posted on Facebook. Continue reading →

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They tried that in a small town

Linda Blackford, the longtime columnist for what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal hasn’t written about Jason Aldean’s hit “Try That In a Small Town,” but she is aghast that someone tried something stupid in a small town and it didn’t work out well:

‘Deeply traumatized.’ Arts retreat at Pine Mountain ends after confrontation. What’s next?

by Linda Blackford | Wednesday, August 23, 2023 | 10:58 AM EDT | Updated: 2:47 PM EDT

For 110 years, a small swathe of mighty Pine Mountain has been a shelter, a school, and a gathering place in Harlan County. But this past weekend, Pine Mountain Settlement School instead became the latest flashpoint in our culture wars.

The Waymakers Collective, a group of Appalachian artists, was holding its annual meeting at Pine Mountain Settlement School. It included performances, artist workshops, film screenings and art activities. Participants stayed in the cottages and dorms around the compound.

They also had permission to use the chapel, and set it up as a “healing space” with pillows, mats, a table of aromatic oils and an “om” symbol, which symbolizes the universe in the Hindu religion. They were not allowed to move the pews, but Pine Mountain staff set up tables.

On Saturday, someone took a picture of the chapel and posted it on social media, which was soon shared around the Harlan County community of Bledsoe, where Pine Mountain is located. According to a statement from the Pine Mountain board, community members called the interim director and board chair about the chapel. Pine Mountain officials asked the Waymakers to move the “healing space” to another location, and the Waymakers agreed, according to the statement.

But before they could do so, a group of men and women in trucks and on ATVs, entered the Pine Mountain campus, blocked the exit, and then made their way to the chapel. According to the Waymakers’ statement, “the people who entered the chapel demanded that we leave. Our group was told they did not belong there, were desecrating a Christian space, and needed to leave right away. We were shocked by this as we had rented out the entire campus of PMSS for our event and were treating the entire property with respect and in the manner we had communicated to PMSS prior to our event.”

But the Waymakers, who are dedicated to the art of the marginalized, including indigenous people, people of color and LGBTQ folks, were terrified. They decided to end the retreat early, and according to their statement, left in a large convoy, so no one would be driving through Harlan County alone.

There’s more at the original.

The Waymakers Collective legitimately rented the grounds on which they were holding their gathering, and should have been allowed to use it as they chose. And the Pine Mountain Settlement School should have been fully aware as to whom and for what the Waymakers were renting their facilities.

But there’s more to it than that: the Pine Mountain Settlement School should also have been aware of the culture in Harlan County, and that the people there might not have been quite as receptive to those “dedicated to the art of the marginalized, including indigenous people, people of color and LGBTQ folks.” Surely the Settlement School folks had heard of Senate Bill 150, to protect normal kids from the homosexual and transgender lobbies, and been aware that both of the county’s state Representatives, Adam Bowling (R-District 87) and Jacob Justice (R-District 94), and state Senator Johnnie Turner (R-District 29), all voted for the bill. They should have known that the voters of Harlan County vote strongly conservative Republican, giving 85.38% of their votes to Donald Trump in 2020, as well as huge margins to Senators Mitch McConnell in 2020 and Rand Paul in 2022.

Translation: renting space to Waymakers would not have gone over well in Harlan County, if the populace in general knew about it.

Mrs Blackford was, of course, highly upset about the whole thing, about how Harlan Countians might be less than eagerly receptive to a group touting, among other things, homosexual and transgender acceptance. Of course, Mrs Blackford’s newspaper has a solid record of endorsing politicians who really don’t line up with the voters in the Bluegrass State:

And yes, every one of them lost. In 2022, when no serious Democrat chose to run in the Sixth District, and a perennial kook candidate won the primary, a guy so bad that even the state Democratic Party wouldn’t support him, the Herald-Leader couldn’t bring itself to endorse the incumbent Republican, Representative Andy Barr, but chose to make no endorsement at all. That’s how much they hate conservatives and Republicans.

This is where Mr Aldean’s song arises: as much as the urban left hate it, it reflects an obvious truth, that the culture of the rural areas, and most certainly in the rural areas of the Bluegrass State, is simply not the culture of the larger cities, and attempting to force urban culture on rural counties simply hasn’t worked out very well.

Back to Mrs Blackford:

Harlan Judge Executive Dan Mosley, who was married at the chapel, said he understood the feelings of people like (Tate) Napier.

“One way to coexist is respect,” he said. “Respect for different people’s culture and ideology. Someone may not agree with my religious beliefs but they could respect them by not disrespecting where I worship, and I could respect their religious beliefs, too.”

Mrs Blackford, and the majority of commenters on her column, apparently do not see hosting homosexual and transgender-positive meetings in a Christian church as “disrespecting where (Harlan Countians) worship,” but it’s pretty obvious that some in the county did.

‘Read the room‘ is defined as “to be or become aware of the opinions and attitudes of a group of people that you are talking to”. In choosing Harlan County for their gathering, the Waymakers just didn’t read the room very well.

More, it seems that the only real objection came when the Waymakers started using the chapel for part of their meeting; that put them in direct conflict with a conservative, Protestant Christian community. At a time in which there’s a great deal of conservative pushback against the forcing of homosexual and transgender ideologies on people who want no part of it, there’s really no surprise that the Waymakers encountered resistance.

If the homosexual and transgender activists had simply kept to the apparently-very-outdated maxim, “What we do in our bedrooms is nobody else’s business,” rather than today’s, “We’re here, we’re queer, and you damned well better approve of, use our pronouns, and fête us,” there’d have been no legislation such as Senate bill 150, and it’s highly unlikely that the mostly leave-us-alone people of eastern Kentucky would have bothered the Waymakers. Then again, the Waymakers would have probably been actually displaying their art, rather than going on to point out that particular artists were in some fashion different from normal people.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well-reasoned conservative commentary.

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Will Bunch really, really, really hates Joe manchin!

Will Bunch is a hard-left columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper which is located in, to no one’s surprise, Pennsylvania. Joe Manchin is the senior United States Senator representing West Virginia. Though the two states do share part of their borders, West Virginia is not Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania is not West Virginia. The distinguished Mr Bunch, however, does not seem to understand that.

In the long hot summer of climate change, how can Joe Manchin justify his love for fossil fuels?

by Will Bunch | Tuesday, August 22, 2023

In 2012, the government website for the NASA space agency — on its climate change page — published an article with this simple, search-engine friendly headline: “Could a hurricane ever strike Southern California?” The answer was a barely qualified “no.”

“The interesting thing is that it really can’t happen, statistically speaking,” Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, said at the time. “The odds are infinitesimal — so small that everyone should just relax. Like 1 in 1,000. Of course, there’s always a chance.” Unlike the Atlantic and its warming Gulf Stream waters, California’s cold coastal currents are tropical-storm killers. At least they used to be.

There’s a long section here that follows — Mr Bunch angrily wrote — or at least I so judge him to have been angry, given all the internet screaming he did using boldfaced words, boldfaced words that I left in place — in which he attempts to persuade his readers that global warming climate change means that we’re doomed, we’re all doomed!

At any rate, I’ve deleted some of that, but you can read Mr Bunch’s writing in full if you follow the embedded link.

Then there is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — nominally a Democrat, arguably the most powerful player on Capitol Hill in the 2020s, and a profile in cowardice.

I’ve written a lot about Manchin in this space because he’s such a frustrating figure. A relic of the bygone era when West Virginia’s coal miners and rural poor were solidly Democratic, his party colleagues in Washington — especially the Biden administration — must bend over backwards to appease Manchin, since his seat would certainly go GOP if he weren’t around. But Manchin’s shtick — centered on his personal clout, as well as growing the coal-millionaire bank account that funds his Maserati and his yacht — is morally unjustifiable in a time of climate crisis.

LOL! I’m pretty sure that Mr Bunch would hate libertarian Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY4) even more, but Mr Massie’s home is off-the grid, using solar cells, and he drives a plug-in electric Tesla. 🙂 But Mr Bunch is just spittle-flecking mad that Senator Manchin drives a Maserati and has a yacht, though I haven’t heard much from him about former Senator and Secretary of State, and now President Biden’s ‘climate tsar’ John Kerry, who has private jets and owned a yacht which he berthed in Rhode Island rather than his home state of Massachusetts to avoid paying “roughly $500,000 in taxes,” though he later tried to sell it.

Manchin’s act is also a complicated one. This time last year, after rebuffing Biden on climate legislation for nearly two years, he surprised political observers by relenting and voting to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. The law includes $369 billion for efforts to curb greenhouse-gas pollution, promoting clean power plants and electric cars. Maybe Manchin understood that Biden and the Democrats needed a pre-election achievement in 2022 to keep a narrow hold on the Senate, which is the basis of the West Virginian’s clout. That mission accomplished, this dying-coal-state senator is doing everything within his power to undermine the bill he voted for, and climate action generally.

LOL! One would think that a writer with as long experience as Mr Bunch would realize that writing “this dying-coal-state senator” could, and should, be read as stating that the Senator was dying, not what he meant, that the “coal state” was dying. “This senator from a dying coal state” would have been much clearer.

Manchin has gone so far as to accuse the Biden administration of a “radical climate agenda” and suggested he could join with Republicans to undo the Inflation Reduction Act, or at least some of its key provisions. The devil is in the details, and according to an in-depth report last weekend from the Washington Post, Manchin is opposing a critical reappointment to the agency that regulates pipelines and threatening to block Biden appointees to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department.

For a whole lot of people, including a lot of West Virginians, President Biden’s climate agenda is radical. Senator Manchin is the only Democrat who has won a statewide race recently, and with his seat due up for election again in 2024, he has found himself well behind in the polls against the probable Republican nominee, current Governor Jim Justice, another ‘coal baron’. Now is definitely not the time for Mr Manchin to go against the beliefs of the majority in his home state.

Mr Bunch is right that the coal industry is dying, but it isn’t dead, and it is still important in the Mountain State. In 2018, Senator Manchin won re-election over Patrick Morrisey by 290,510 (49.57%) to 271,113 (46.26%), in a race in which Libertarian nominee Rusty Hollen took 24,411 votes, 4.17%, numbers greater than Mr Manchin’s margin of victory over Mr Morrisey.

In 2020, President Trump beat Joe Biden 545,382 (68.62%) to 235,984 (29.69%) in West Virginia, Mr Trump’s second strongest state in that election. Mr Manchin, I would remind Mr Bunch, represents West Virginia, not Pennsylvania.

More, if Mr Bunch’s position represents anyone other than himself, it represents the city of Philadelphia, not the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In 2020, Joe Biden carried the Keystone State by 80,555 votes, 3,458,229 (50.01%) to 3,377674 (48.84%), but only because he carried Philadelphia 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%), a margin of 471,050 votes. Without Philly, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%).

Manchin has spoken of passing his love of the outdoors to his 10 grandchildren, so why is he fighting to make it too hot to even go outside? Does a man whose ego seems to relish his frequent TV appearances care that he’ll be remembered for making the Earth uninhabitable for his grandkids, and ours? Because 100 years from now, the textbooks will portray Manchin and other men who enabled the fossil fuel industry as this millennium’s monsters of history.

This, in the end, is where Mr Bunch in particular, and the climate activists in general just don’t get it. West Virginia is, as Mr Bunch stated, a poor state, and the people of the Mountain State tend to be a bit more worried about putting food on the table tonight, and keeping a roof over their heads this month, than they are over what the climate will be 100 years from now.

Mr Bunch has a guesstimated net worth of a million bucks, nowhere close to the league of the billionaires against whom he rails, but certainly comfortable enough. If the Biden Administration mandates plug-in electric cars, Mr Bunch can afford one. If the government has to raise taxes to pay for some cockamamie scheme to build more solar and wind plants, Mr Bunch can afford it.

Living here in eastern Kentucky, I can see the things that Mr Bunch cannot. I can see the houses with no dedicated parking spot in which they could safely put an electric car charging station, and I can see the older homes which have older electric service, a 100-amphere breaker panel, which isn’t going to support both the home as it is and a 50-amp, 220-volt electric car charger.

And even that’s generous: our church recently, recently as in this spring, had to replace the electric service for the convent, which was powered by two 40-amp fuse boxes, because we had to replace the heating system, and the older service just wouldn’t support it.

Still, the Inquirer columnist ought to be able to see something of poverty. His newspaper bio states that he has “some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.” Surely someone so interested in “social injustice (and) income inequality” ought to understand that his hometown is “the ‘poorest’ of the largest U.S. cities, with 23.3% of residents living in poverty, surpassing the next largest poor U.S. city, Houston, by 2.9%.” As the left, including his favored Mayoral candidate, Helen Gym Flaherty, wanted to get everyone changed over to electric heat pumps rather than the gas furnaces so prevalent in Philly’s poorer row home areas, he ought to understand that a whole bunch of city homeowners can’t afford the costs of such a changeover. Surely someone so concerned about “income inequality” ought to realize that in the city’s crowded rowhome neighborhoods, where tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of homes have nothing but on-street parking, that charging their cars is just not something easy and secure.

On May 11th of this year, Mr Bunch published a column entitled On CNN, lying Trump was a late-night comedian for an America I didn’t recognize, and while I care nothing about his column, the title was revelatory, because Mr Bunch told a truth he might not realize, that there is a lot of American that he just doesn’t recognize. Heck, outside of Philly, even including the collar counties, the majority of Pennsylvanians, 52.56%, voted for Donald Trump.

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SEPTA should be paid for by the people who use it, not people who can’t use its service

Our house in Jim Thorpe.

I used to live in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, fifty miles north of foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, did not have a bus or train service up into Carbon County; I commuted every day. Why, then, I asked myself, was I taxed to support and subsidize the people who did have SEPTA service in Philadelphia and its collar counties. I no longer live in the Keystone State, so this story doesn’t affect me, but the question still remains: why should my old neighbors and friends in Pennsylvania, many of whom are out of reach of SEPTA’s service area, be taxed to support a system they cannot use?

SEPTA wants more state sales-tax revenue to avoid ‘draconian’ service cuts next spring

A change in the law would give SEPTA an additional $190 million from the state sales tax each year to run its buses, trolleys and subways.

by Thomas Fitzgerald | Thursday, August 24, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

In an effort to secure desperately needed funding, SEPTA officials are lobbying for a proposal in Harrisburg that would increase by about 45% the annual share of state sales-tax revenue devoted to paying for public transportation.

If their efforts are successful, the state’s Public Transportation Trust Fund would receive 6.4% of the money generated by the sales tax, up from 4.4%, generating an additional $295 million annually for public transit operations across the state. The sales tax itself would not increase.

SEPTA estimates that it would get an additional $190 million annually, with a $65.6 million increase for Pittsburgh Regional Transit and $38.8 million more for other systems, based on the state’s funding formula, which allocates dollars to transit agencies.

“We’ll really be able to prevent a draconian service reduction and extraordinary fare increases,” SEPTA CEO Leslie S. Richards said Wednesday when asked about the proposal. “That is what we will be left with when we get to next spring, if we don’t see a way out of this looming fiscal cliff.”

Part of that “looming fiscal cliff” would be from the $75,000 per year raise that the SEPTA Board gave CEO Leslie Richards just last May:

A panel of three board members reviewed publicly available salaries for the leaders of other large transit systems to help determine Richards’ salary, SEPTA said in a statement announcing the reappointment.

Perhaps, but shouldn’t that also be based on whether Mrs Richards was actually doing her job well?

SEPTA has been plagued by delayed service and accidents, with chronic shortfalls in essential staff:

One in six budgeted engineer positions is unfilled, per SEPTA figures, and the total number of train operators and trainees is 12% lower than it was in January 2019. Funding isn’t the problem, although overall the agency is generally worried about its fiscal future.

Billy Penn also reported that workers are leaving faster than positions can be filled. If Mrs Richards cannot keep these, to use the Democrats’ mantra, “good, well-paying, union jobs” filled, what does that say about her job performance?

Early Monday morning (June 12, 2023), a Trenton train was delayed because of “manpower issues.” A park and ride service at one station on the line was repeatedly canceled last week “due to operator unavailability.” On Friday (June 9, 2023), trips on the Market-Frankford and Broad Street subway lines were canceled for lack of workers. “Operator unavailability” is frequently given as the reason for delays and cancellations, especially on certain bus lines.

The unreliable service has sparked doubts SEPTA can step in to provide a needed workaround to the highway collapse.

“SEPTA better commit to quick and significant improvements of service or the city is going to see a major exodus from any northern suburb employees,” rider Kristen McCabe of Media wrote on Sunday.

Yet, despite all of that, despite SEPTA’s inability to manage the assets and service it currently has, there’s significant political pressure to build the Roosevelt Boulevard subway line, guesstimated to cost between $2.5 and 3.4 billion, in year 2000 dollars. We have previously noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story in which the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, admitted that they had “lost control of the train cars.”

The Biden Administration and the global warming climate change activists want us to all leave our cars behind — if we would even be allowed to own them — and depend on public transportation as much as possible. The Philadelphia Tribune reported that 42% of Black households and 50% of impoverished households in Philly don’t own a car, yet SEPTA has been hit with decreased ridership:

Ridership remains well below pre-pandemic levels, and SEPTA needs those passengers back, officials say. Federal pandemic aid will run out by April 2024, and the agency depends on rider fares to make enough money to operate.

Really, who would want to depend on SEPTA? The trains are filthy, crime on board the buses and trains, and at the train and subway stations, has been increasing, and too many of the stations have become de facto homeless shelters, littered with trash and used hypodermic needles left by junkies.

That decreased ridership? It has been politically correct to lay the blame for that on the panicdemic — spelled exactly the way I see it, as a huge overreaction — and the fact that some Center City office workers who were able to work remotely during the COVID-19 shutdowns have found that pretty good, and are still doing so. But the crime and the filth are also to blame. It seems that the good Democrats in Philly, who gave 81.44% of their votes to Joe Biden, the President who wants them to use public transportation, aren’t quite so eager to ride SEPTA’s buses and trains.

And so we have Leslie Richards, $425,000 a year Leslie Richards, wanting to make the people in Jim Thorpe and Summit Hill and Mahanoy City have more of the sales taxes they pay go to help SEPTA, rather than those dollars coming back to their communities, even though Mrs Richards has proven that she cannot manage the system she oversees. SEPTA should be paid for not by the citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but by the people who use the service, and fares should be increased to support that service.

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Whenever there is a truth you cannot tell, that is a truth you must tell!

We have previously noted that the Most Rev Salvatore Cordileone has stated that the Archdiocese of San Francisco would probably have to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Well, the time has come. From The New York Times:

Archdiocese of San Francisco Becomes the Latest to File for Bankruptcy

About a dozen dioceses and archdioceses in the United States are currently in bankruptcy proceedings as a result of multiple lawsuits alleging sexual abuse of children.

by Ruth Graham | Monday, August 21, 2023

Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone, photo from Archdiocese of San Francisco.

The Archdiocese of San Francisco, known for its outspoken conservative leadership, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone announced on Monday. The filing is intended to protect the archdiocese from what Archbishop Cordileone described as more than 500 civil lawsuits filed against it under a state law passed in 2019 that extended the statute of limitations for civil claims in child sexual abuse cases.

“We believe the bankruptcy process is the best way to provide a compassionate and equitable solution for survivors of abuse while ensuring that we continue the vital ministries to the faithful and to the communities that rely on our services and charity,” Archbishop Cordileone said in a letter addressed to Catholics in San Francisco.

Archbishop Cordileone signaled the bankruptcy earlier this month, warning publicly that the filing was “very likely.”

The article author, Ruth Graham, “is a Dallas-based national correspondent covering religion, faith and values for The New York Times. She graduated from Wheaton College and previously worked as a writer and reporter at Slate.” Telling us that she used to write for Slate is telling us that she’s a liberal, but what else would you expect from the Times? While she was very good at telling readers that several other diocese and archdiocese have been forced to file for bankruptcy over the cover ups of sexual abuse claims, she managed to write 547 words, and never mention what everybody already knows, that this is a crisis of having homosexual priests. Continue reading →

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Kendra Brooks just can’t handle the truth!

We reported yesterday evening on Philadelphia City Councilwoman Kendra Brooks and her posturing in front of Edward T Steel Elementary School. It was noted that Steel Elementary, which both defeated mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty and she touted as a victory for public schools, as Mrs Flaherty fought successfully to keep from being privatized, but Steel Elementary is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, in which 8% of students tested grade-level proficient in reading, and a whopping 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math. Perhaps, we suggested, keeping Steel Elementary public rather than charter wasn’t that great a move. After all, it’s difficult to imagine that students could perform much worse than they already have!

It would be, of course, unfair to write an article on Miss Brooks and not let her know that I had done so, so I tweeted a reply to her. I do not know if Miss Brooks read the linked article, but, as of 8:18 AM EDT, Twitter analytics indicates that there were three clicks on the link, along with three profile visits generated by my reply.

Well, I got my reply from the Councilwoman, in a manner that doesn’t really surprise me. 🙂

So funny! Miss Brooks is a member of the Philadelphia City Council, which makes her a person of some political power, and one would think that information on the public school she touted ought to be important to her. But, rather than worrying about Steel Elementary’s, a school she said her daughter attended, poor performance, Miss Brooks chose instead to stick her head in the sand. Political posturing trumps actually doing something to help.

I attended the public schools. When I was in Mt Sterling High School, 1967 to 1971, we had exactly one teacher who had his master’s; all of the others topped out with baccalaureate degrees. A 1937 WPA/CCC building, we had no air conditioning, the teachers had no union, the building was heated by radiators via a boiler in the basement, there had been no cafeteria until the Elementary School across the street was built in 1961, there was no school bus service, and this was well before personal computers and that internet thingy Al Gore invented. Yet somehow, some way, everyone who was graduated could actually read his diploma. We had no metal detectors or security guards, and boys traded pocketknives and argued whether K-Bar or Buck made better blades, on the school’s right front portico, at the top of the tall steps. Oddly enough, no one was stabbed, nor was anyone worried about it. If there was a fight in the parking lot, as happened at least a few times, it was two guys, with a circle of spectators cheering on one or the other, and the odds were good that at least one, if not both of them, had knives in their pockets, but the knives never came out.

Of course, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which endorsed Mrs Flaherty for Mayor, which supports Miss Brooks, would be absolutely aghast at all of that. Why, they’d sputter, teachers have to get their master’s degrees within just a few years, but it has to be asked: why, if advanced degrees are so necessary, did a small-town school in the South do a better job in actually educating its students when every teacher but one had only a bachelor’s degree?

Is it possible, just possible, that everything that the teachers’ unions have been pushing is exactly the wrong thing?

That, of course, is the kind of question that Working Families Party politicians like Kendra Brooks does not want asked, and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers most certainly don’t want answered. They just can’t handle the truth!

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Killadelphia: We knew all along whom the Usual Suspects would blame!

500 block of North Creighton Street, via Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

We have previously noted the shooting in the 500 block of North Creighton Street in West Philadelphia. A semi-dilapidated neighborhood with a few rowhouses boarded up, it’s wholly unsurprising that City Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier would blame it not on bad guys or street gangs, but “massive blight and disinvestment.”

Police identified the 19-year-old man who was fatally shot at a West Philly block party

Kevin July, 19, was fatally shot early Saturday on the 500 block of North Creighton Street, police said. Another eight people were wounded in the incident at a late-night outdoor party.

by Chris Palmer and Rodrigo Torrejón | Monday, August 21, 2023

Philadelphia Police on Monday identified the man who was fatally shot at what officials are now calling an unpermitted block party over the weekend as 19-year-old Kevin July, saying he was one of nine people shot in the violent episode in West Philadelphia’s Mill Creek section. The eight other victims survived, police said.

Still, authorities have released few other new details about the crime as they continue to investigate, saying they were not yet sure of a motive, nor were they even certain how many people opened fire during the incident.

July’s relatives declined to comment when contacted by phone Monday.

The shooting happened on the 500 block of North Creighton Street around 1:30 a.m. Saturday, police said, when shooters fired at least 60 shots into a crowd of dozens of people who had gathered for a party or barbecue. The celebration took place at end of the rowhouse-lined street that dead ends in between Wyalusing and Westminster Avenues.

The article noted that the block party had not applied for or received a permit for such, and that permitted block parties must end at 8:30 PM. Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore told the media that shell casings from at least three different types of ammunition had been recovered, and that means only one thing: gangs!

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who represents the area, said in an interview that she’d spoken to the captain of the 16th Police District and been told that the event was a private gathering that had attracted guests from elsewhere, and that some people who live on the block “didn’t even know people who engaged in the dispute.” . . . .

She also said Mill Creek, the neighborhood in which the shooting occurred, is burdened by “massive blight and disinvestment,” including city-owned properties that have grown dilapidated. And she said the city should focus on investing in housing, clearing vacant lots, and improving the nearby recreation center as ways to improve conditions that can lead to violence.

“The chronic disinvestment experienced in neighborhoods like West Mill Creek lends to the thought that nobody cares here, anything goes here,” she said.

Would you invest in an area like that? If I were going to invest my money in something, it would be something which showed an at least plausible return on investment. West Mill Creek is not a place in which that plausible return on investment exists.

I grew up poor, too, reared by a divorced mother, alone, with two younger sisters, but somehow, some way, I did get involved with street gangs, and I never shot anyone. Poverty is no excuse!

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Kendra Brooks fouls up. Perhaps celebrating a clearly failing public school isn't a good look

Kendra Brooks is an at-large Philadelphia City Councilwoman, who won on the Working Families Party line, with the WFB being even further left than the already far-left Democrats. She has also been affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America.

Upon hearing that Commonwealth Partners will be supporting pro-school choice candidates, Miss Brooks tweeted:

My path to politics began when school privatizers tried to close my daughter’s school. We fought privatization then and will keep fighting it now.

No amount of GOP money can buy community support.

Her tweet included a photo of the Councilwoman, her arms defiantly crossed, and a stern look on her face, in front of the Edward T Steel Elementary School.

We’ve reported on Steel Elementary before, because then Democratic mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty campaigned in front of that school, proudly proclaiming that she saved the school from ‘going charter.’ Miss Brooks, a strong supporter of Mrs Flaherty’s, then tweeted:

I met @HelenGymPHL over a decade ago when my daughter’s school was going to be privatized. We were a few moms saying we want something greater. We DESERVE something better.

That’s what her education plan is about. That’s why I’m standing here today because since day one, she’s been fighting for communities like mine. And winning.

To this day, Edward T. Steel Elementary is a public school.

Being a numbers kind of guy, I did some research. Yes, Steel Elementary is still a Philadelphia public school. But how good a school is it? Steel Elementary is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, in which 8% of students tested grade-level proficient in reading, and a whopping 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math. Perhaps keeping Steel Elementary public rather than charter wasn’t that great a move. After all, it’s difficult to imagine that students could perform much worse than they already have!

Fortunately, Mrs Flaherty finished third in the Democratic mayoral primary, and her public school teacher supported campaign simply failed.

The primary was three months ago, but apparently Miss Brooks hasn’t yet learned the lesson: if you pose in front of, and celebrate a particular public school, maybe, just maybe, you ought to have some idea of just what the school’s performance is, because there will always be someone like me who will check the numbers.

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The Feds create the demand, and then give private investors money to increase the supply!

I had previously noted, on Christmas Eve of 2021, that I spotted six Tesla TSLA: (%) charging stations at the Wawa at the junction of Pennsylvania Route 61 and Interstate 78. Five of the chargers were unoccupied, while a sixth was blocked by a mid-1990s, gasoline-engine beater car, using the charging area as a parking space. 🙂

Alas! That was the last time I’ve been to a Wawa, and as someone who truly appreciates Wawa coffee, that is a tragedy. I have some hope, in that Wawa is expanding into the Bluegrass State, and there’s a permit application for construction of a Wawa at the junction of Interstate 75 and Athens-Boonesboro Road, about 30 miles from me, but someplace I could stop on my way to our daughter’s house.

At any rate, I was thinking about those six unused Tesla chargers when I read this, in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Electric vehicle drivers can soon get a Shorti and a charge-up at some Wawas

The federal infrastructure law allocates $7.5 billion for new public charging stations for electric vehicles. Pennsylvania expects $171 million.

by Thomas Fitzgerald | Monday, August 21, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation recently awarded $34 million in federal grants for businesses to build fast-charging stations for electric vehicles in 35 counties across the state, part of a Federal Highway Administration program to spur the development of EV infrastructure.

Note that this is not a federal loan program, but specifically “federal grants,” for businesses to build commercial plug-in electric car charging stations, on which they hope to turn a profit.

Outlets are planned at the massive Breezewood gas-and-go junction of Interstate 70 and the turnpike, a number of motels, existing charging hubs built by Tesla and other suppliers — and around here, Wawas in Bristol, Horsham, Lansdale, Philadelphia, and Woodlyn.

The 2021 bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $7.5 billion over five years to help make EV charging more accessible nationally. Pennsylvania expects to get about $172 million.

“The electric-vehicle fleet is growing in Pennsylvania — there will be more tomorrow than today and more the day after that,” Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll said at an announcement event outside Scranton on Aug. 15.

Why, I have to ask, are our tax dollars being distributed to install commercial electric car charging stations? If people choose to buy plug-in electric vehicles, there will be a growing demand which will cause entrepreneurs to build such stations, using their own money, in order to turn a profit.

Pennsylvania had 47,400 fully electric vehicles registered at the end of 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center. New Jersey had 87,030.

With a population of 9,261,699, New Jersey is less populous than Pennsylvania’s Census Bureau guesstimated 12,972,008, yet the Garden State has nearly twice as many electric vehicles. I guess that proves that Pennsylvanians are smarter than Jerseyites. Having spent some time in traffic on the Garden State Parkway, I shudder to think what it would be like, worrying about a steadily declining battery charge. You can get a five-gallon can of gasoline, but not a five-gallon can of electricity!

Lack of charging infrastructure has been a barrier to sales of EVs, along with high sticker prices relative to vehicles that run on fossil fuels. In turn, that complicates the ambitious federal goal that 50% of the nation’s new cars and trucks be electric by 2030, in order to reduce carbon emissions that cause global warming. . . . .

A major goal of the EV charging program is to use federal dollars to stimulate private investment in the technology, as well as in batteries and vehicles, said Andrew Rogers, deputy administrator of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).

“The ecosystem of charging that’s already underway is really impressive,” Rogers said in an interview. “The private sector has just stepped up in ways that have demonstrated the catalyzing effect of the law.”

If the private sector has “just stepped up” in the way Mr Rogers stated, why does the federal government need to tax poorer people to prop up wealthier investors?

Further down:

Since the Biden administration took office in 2021, the number of publicly available charging stations has increased 40%, with the private sector investing $130 billion in that effort, and developing longer-lasting EV batteries and production lines for the vehicles, Rogers said.

Last month, seven automakers from Detroit, Asia, and Europe joined in an effort to build 30,000 fast-charging ports in the United States and Canada that will work with any brand of electric vehicle

But if the private sector have invested $130 billion in these efforts, why does the federal government have to do this? Oh, wait, the newspaper gave us the answer:

The companies said one of their main goals was to qualify for federal subsidies for charging infrastructure.

Translation: supping at the federal trough to make money for private investors.

I can see why Wawa wants in on this program. While just about the only thing I ever bought at Wawa is their coffee, the convenience store also sells hoagies, snacks, and just about anything else a traveler might want to eat-and-go. The newspaper article claimed that, “Fast chargers can replenish a drained battery in 10 to 30 minutes,” but most sources state that it can take an hour or longer, unless the stop is to recharge just enough to make it home safely. For a business like Wawa, people having to sit around for half an hour or longer means more coffee, more sodas, and more hoagies sold.

If a business wants to add public charging stations, that’s absolutely fine with me; it’s none of my business. But when the federal government is throwing the dollars it taxes away from me for something the private sector has already been doing, then yeah, it becomes my business! And I say not just no, but Hell no!