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Hold them accountable! The good old boys’ network strikes again

I have frequently called out The Philadelphia Inquirer for poor reporting, so it is only fair when I note when they do good journalism.

The quiet handling of rape allegations at two Philly health institutions

How Jefferson and Rothman dealt with an alleged sexual assault involving an orthopedic surgeon and a medical resident.

by Wendy Ruderman | Monday, May 8, 2023

It was almost midnight and Jessica Phillips, a doctor training in orthopedic surgery, was one of the few guests remaining at a pool party that surgeon John Abraham hosted each summer for Thomas Jefferson University medical residents at his nine-bedroom Main Line home.

Phillips sat in an Adirondack-style chair by a stone fire pit with Abraham, a (Thomas) Jefferson (University) professor and division chief at the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, a private practice whose physicians work at the university’s hospitals.

The band had packed up, and caterers had cleared the wine glasses and plates smeared with cocktail sauce. Abraham handed her a lit Cuban cigar. She later remembered being so drunk she dropped it on her pants.

The medical resident remembered little else afterward. In flashes, while in and out of consciousness, she recalled Abraham on top of her on the ornate rug in his library. She awoke in his bedroom naked and bruised, she later told multiple investigators.

In Abraham’s recollection, Phillips pulled him on top of her on the library floor, court records show, while his judgment was impaired by alcohol. Nonetheless, in a text message sent to his boss after the party, Abraham acknowledged it was “unethical” to have sex with a medical resident.

It’s a very long story, and there’s a lot of he said/she said in it. Both physicians were intoxicated, both married, though Dr Abraham, then 43-years-old, was going through a divorce, and neither was really capable of consent. As her supervisor, Dr Abraham was contractually barred from a sexual relationship with a subordinate. An investigation resulted in no criminal charges. This is being made public because both Dr Abraham and Dr Phillips are suing.

The events of the June 2018 party spurred three separate investigations and three lawsuits – all now rolling back the confidentiality that usually cloaks how major institutions handle sexual misconduct claims. The cases chronicle sex, power and money in the male-dominated world of orthopedic surgery.

Both Phillips and Abraham say they were victims. They blame Jefferson and Rothman for protecting their institutional interests despite federal regulations that are supposed to ensure sexual assault cases are dealt with fairly.

Ahhh, yes, “protecting their institutional interests”. That’s what “institutions” do!

Jefferson used the threat of federal reporting requirements to force Abraham out of its hospitals while evading formal reports that would let other institutions know what happened.

Then Jefferson’s and Rothman’s leadership brokered a deal that avoided a sexual misconduct hearing and ultimately closed an investigation opened under the federal Title IX law prohibiting sex-based discrimination.

Rothman’s all-male board of directors decided not to fire Abraham. Instead, they restricted him from working in Jefferson’s hospitals or interacting with Jefferson residents. Eventually, they moved him to a hospital network not affiliated with Jefferson in New Jersey.

I remember when then-District Attorney Seth Williams went hard after Monsignor William Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s supervisor of priest assignments, who was convicted on one of two counts of child endangerment for “knowingly placing minors in danger when he reassigned troubled priests to parishes where they would have access to children.” Msgr Lynn wound up serving almost three years of his three-to-six year sentence, when his conviction was overturned, twice actually, for Mr Williams and Judge Teresa Sarmina misapplying the law.

So, with all of this, why isn’t current Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner going after Thomas Jefferson University and the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute for doing what is a very similar thing? According to the Inquirer, Rothman basically moved Dr Abraham to someplace where his conduct wasn’t widely known, and to a hospital network outside of their control . . . and their liability.

Amid investigations by the university and Rothman, Abraham said, a Jefferson top doctor offered him a deal in a private conversation: Take a voluntary leave, and we won’t report the alleged sexual misconduct.

Congress generally expects health institutions employing doctors accused of wrongdoing to file a report into the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), a federal tracking system.

Hospitals must query the data bank before credentialing a newly hired doctor to ensure that the person hasn’t gotten into trouble elsewhere. Data bank reports also go to state licensing boards.

In court depositions, Abraham recalled getting a phone call from Edmund Pribitkin, chief physician and executive vice president of Jefferson Health, telling him that he had to take an immediate leave of absence from Jefferson.

If he didn’t do as told, Pribitkin said, the sexual assault allegations would go before the hospital’s medical executive committee and they’d likely have to report him to the NPDB, according to Abraham.

So, Rothman essentially blackmailed Dr Abraham into taking an immediate leave, by saying that the Institute would commit a crime by not reporting the sexual assault allegations. Perhaps it’s not just the District Attorney who needs to look into this, but the United States Attorney as well, given that this is an allegation of violation of federal law.

There’s a lot more information at the Inky’s original, and it’s not limited to subscribers, though if you access more than a few articles a month, the paywall does come down.

As a Mass-every-Sunday Catholic, I was very disappointed with the allegations against Msgr Lynn. At most, I saw what he was alleged to have done as a crime by Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, but when this became a criminal case, the Cardinal, by then retired, 88-years-old, and suffering from cancer and dementia, couldn’t be tried. Early in the trial, Judge Sarmina ruled that Cardinal Bevilacqua was able and competent to give testimony as a witness in the case, but just two days after her ruling, the Cardinal died in his sleep. But while Mr Williams and Judge Sarmina misapplied the law as it stood, which resulted in an unfair, and eventually reversed, conviction, the point that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia shuffled around offending priests to keep them from being defrocked or, worse, charged, tried, and convicted in sexual abuse cases was a valid one. Supervisory officials such as then Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, who was responsible for oversight of the campus police department, were all held accountable for covering up former Assistant Football Coach Jerry Sandusky’s rape of a young boy, though they were incarcerated for just a couple of months each.

The Inquirer’s story is the first step, and now law enforcement needs to look into this case. Yeah, there are some wealthy and powerful interests involved here, people able to pay for major league legal help, but the potential prosecution has plenty of money as well. Hold them accountable, and maybe some other good old boys network will think twice before covering up things.

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Danielle Outlaw will probably fire another good cop

To be a Philly cop, you must be politically correct and like totally #woke!

A Philly detective who handles sex crimes is under investigation for allegedly posting crude tweets about women, police say

Ron Kahlan’s account often tweeted vulgar sexual innuendo and used boorish language. Internal Affairs is investigating, police said.

by Chris Palmer and Ellie Rushing | Sunday, May 7, 2023 | 4:21 _PM EDT

A detective in the Philadelphia Police Department’s special victims unit who is assigned to investigate sex crimes is under internal investigation for a series of offensive tweets posted on his account over the years, including a number of crude sexual remarks about women.

“The only reason [I’m] watching the Phils now is because [of] the hot chick behind the on-deck circle!!!” read a tweet posted on Ron Kahlan’s Twitter page in 2012. That post was among the tamest of the tweets Kahlan allegedly wrote that were shared Saturday by an Instagram account called WatchOutPhilly.

In 2012? Holy calculator, Batman, that was 11 years ago! More, it was the latest of the tweets shown in the links; all of the rest pictured are dated in 2011.

In others, Kahlan’s account replied to pages such as “@ILikeGirlsDaily” with vulgar sexual innuendo and boorish language.

Many of the tweets in question were from 2011 or 2012, according to an Inquirer review. In more recent years, Kahlan’s account — which used the handle “@rkppd” — tended to comment instead on politics, often by making disparaging remarks about Democrats, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs.

If you read the entire article, you will note that nowhere in it is any contention that he wrote in any way differently about male Democrats. And the Inky’s story does not indicate any of the social media activities “with vulgar sexual innuendo and boorish language” occurred later than 2012.

In February, his account re-tweeted a post from another account asking if Christine Blasey Ford — the woman who accused then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault — should be arrested.

So, he didn’t write it himself, but retweeted someone else. And a lot people have thought that Dr Ford’s completely unsubstantiated allegations, in an attempt to deny Justice Kavanaugh confirmation, should entail some consequences for her, especially given that Mr Kavanaugh had actually kept detailed engagement calendars from the time, and none indicated that he ever attended the event Dr Ford alleged that he did. Why shouldn’t Dr Ford’s false allegations subject her to some negative consequences?

The Inquirer continues to note that the case has been turned over to Internal Affairs.

Many of the tweets on Kahlan’s page were crude, including comments about woman’s appearances and vulgar descriptions of sex acts.

Shockingly, it appears that Detective Kahlan is a normal male, attracted to women. No wonder the left are appalled!

You know what else isn’t in there? There are no allegations that the Detective unjustifiably threw any cases.

Kahlan, a 24-year veteran of the force, is not the first Philadelphia officer to come under scrutiny for his social media presence. In 2019, advocates with the Plain View Project published a database of racist or offensive Facebook posts or comments made by hundreds of city cops.

The Police Department went on to fire 15 officers and discipline dozens of others for what they wrote, an unprecedented undertaking. Still, some officers have since won their jobs back in arbitration proceedings mandated under the city’s contract with the police union.

So, the city engaged in a rush to judgement, and had to reinstate some of the officers.

Clearly, the standard is that a Philadelphia police officer must have zero social media presence, unless all of his postings are either innocuous things about birthdays and puppies and kittens, or politically support Democrats. I’m pretty sure that if Detective Kahlan had tweeted “Helen Gym is very attractive,” it would have been acceptable.

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‘Decarceration’ is deadly to black Americans The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time.

It was two months ago that Congress, which is normally hands off but does have jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, rejected the city’s attempt to overhaul its criminal law, an attempt which would have reduced or eliminated mandatory minimums.

Crime has increased in our nation’s capital, increased dramatically this year. The chart at the right is from the city’s Metropolitan Police Department, and was current as of 12:00 AM EDT on Friday, May 5th. You’d think that the residents of the District would want safer streets, but the far-left leadership apparently do not.

Well, the city’s retiring police chief has spoken out:

In D.C., many killers were previously jailed. We deserve better.

by Colbert I King, Washington Post Columnist | Friday, May 5, 2023 | 3:24 PM EDT

The average person arrested for homicide has been arrested 11 times previously, said D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III during a March news conference on D.C. crime with Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). Contee’s widely publicized statement drew a comment from Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.), an outspoken opponent of the D.C. Council criminal code reform bill that Congress recently rejected. Carter said the chief’s statement “means that before someone commits the horrible act of ending an innocent life, they’ve already left — at least — 11 other victims in their wake.”

D.C. police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck told me this week that Contee’s statement was based on data in the department’s records management system. Asked for clarification on the meaning of the number, Sternbeck said, “The 11 prior arrests include various crimes, and not just homicide offenses.” Contee, who is retiring in June, added another dimension to the arrest data. He said during the news conference that “the average homicide victim … also has been arrested 10 or 11 times prior to them being a homicide victim.”

Is anyone really surprised by that? While the numbers may vary from city-to-city — and many of my reports deal with Philadelphia — the trend is the same, bad guys killing other bad guys.

A December 2021 analysis of shootings and homicides in the District, conducted by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, sheds some light on both the scope of gun violence and Contee’s observations regarding D.C. arrest histories.

The NICJR report aggregates what is anecdotally known or suspected. It found that across homicides and shootings, victims and suspects are demographically similar — about 96 percent of those in both categories in homicides and nonfatal shootings were Black, while about 65 percent were between the ages of 18 and 34. Roughly 90 percent were male.

In addition, and to underscore Contee’s statements, approximately 86 percent of homicide victims and suspects were previously known to the criminal justice system. About 46 percent had been incarcerated, according to the report.

So, if both killers and victims are very likely to have been, to use the euphemism, “previously known to the criminal justice system,” wouldn’t one very powerful way to reduce homicides be to prosecute them seriously, and incarcerate them to the maximum allowed under the law, because criminals, and apparently their victims as well, aren’t out on the streets and able to kill or be killed.

If you decide to do a Google search for mass incarceration, you’ll get “About 24,400,000 results”, and at least the first one shown are all lathered up about the horrors of mass incarceration. The Sentencing Project tell us:

Fifty years ago, the United States embarked on a path of mass incarceration that has led to a staggering increase in the prison population. Today, almost 2 million individuals – disproportionately Black Americans – are incarcerated in our nation’s prisons and jails. The prison population has grown 500% since 1973, the year America began to sharply increase its prison population.

But when the statistics given above noted that 96% of the murders and shootings in Washington, DC, had both perpetrator and victim being black, in a city where only 43% of the population are black, the notion that incarcerated prisoners are “disproportionately black Americans” seems kind of silly; incarceration depends on who actually commits crimes, not on their percentage of the population.

Nor is Washington somehow different. While few police departments report racial breakdowns on a daily basis, the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department does, and in a city in which 44.8% of the population are black, 87.8% of murder victims so far this year have been black, and 35 out of 38 identified suspects, 92.1%, were also black.

Yet the ‘decarceration‘ movement is all about the fact that so many black Americans are in jail, ‘disproportionately’ to their percentage of the population, but seemingly far less disproportionately to the who are committing crimes.

Simply put, the decarceration movement is all about getting more black Americans murdered! Oh, the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter activists might not realize it — or admit it if they do — but that’s what the statistics show.

The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time.
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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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Remember when we were told that it was nobody else’s business what people did in their bedrooms?

Sometimes the stupidity gets piled so high and deep that I wind up just shaking my head. Yeah, I realize that some people just feel that they have to top the past sexual revelation, and when I find myself saying, “Well, this takes the cake,” I have to realize that something even dumber will soon arise.

When my boyfriend transitioned into my girlfriend, men started to regularly hit on her. It feels like they’re erasing our queer relationship.

Story by insider@insider.com (Lucy Aalto) • Tuesday, May 2, 2023

When Summer came out as transgender, the people around us — both the people we knew and complete strangers — started treating us differently.

I’m shocked, shocked! that people would treat a couple who previously fit in, at least on the outside, as normal, would be treated differently when they ‘transitioned’ into not normal.

Now that we both identify as women, people treat me like a queer woman for the first time in my life, even though I had been openly identifying as bisexual for years. But I was most surprised by the amount of attention we got from strangers in public, especially from men.

The author, Lucy Aalto, may have “been openly identifying as bisexual for years”, but how would strangers have known that?

Before Summer’s transition, our relationship passed as heterosexual. In other words, when Summer identified as a man, I was straight in the eyes of everyone I knew. My bisexuality was easily erased.

When Summer came out as trans and started identifying as a woman, everything changed. As Summer grew into her newfound femininity, people close to us finally noticed I was queer.

While they were all mostly accepting, they had some inappropriate questions. “How do you have sex?” someone asked me as if the configuration of our genitals had changed in the few short months since Summer’s coming out. “A woman wants to be with a man, right?” Summer’s mother asked, looking for assurance that we weren’t just roommates now.

I knew these questions — misguided as they were — came from a place of ignorance, not malice. They were a natural and expected part of Summer’s transition. But for me, they meant something else. I’ve long identified as queer, but for the first time, I was being treated as openly and visibly gay. This brought me mixed feelings. Sure, I’m now being seen for who I truly am, but it comes with the “othering” that so many queer folks experience.

I’m old enough to remember when we were told that it was nobody else’s business what people did in their bedrooms, but this is different on a completely different level. Miss Aalto stated that she is bisexual, but was apparently bothered when people she didn’t know didn’t know that. Now, people are perceiving her as a lesbian, because she’s hooked up with someone who is trying to appear to be a woman, and the couple are into public displays of affection, but that bothers her as well. There’s just no satisfying some people!

The first thing I noticed was the looks. People took note of us in public so much more. Before, the only time I’d felt this way was when we visited my hometown, where the population is majority white. I, too, am white, but Summer is ethnically Chinese. It was clear that some of the locals were not used to interracial relationships. If we felt scrutinized before, it multiplied by 10 the first time we visited after Summer’s transition began.

It’s actually pretty simple, though the author doesn’t seem to recognize it: ‘transgenderism’ is not seen as normal, by the vast majority of the public. Even those who support the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls as an abstract concept are going to react differently when they actually meet someone who’s trying to do it. This is the bringing the “what we do in our bedroom” part into the public domain.

The author continues to tell us that “Summer” is very physically attractive, and he gets hit on by men — who are obviously drunk or stoned enough not to realize that “Summer” isn’t really the chick they want — when they are in public, even in an obviously ‘coupled relationship.

Of course, the majority of this flirtation comes from men. I don’t fault them for “shooting their shot.” Hell, she’s my girlfriend. If anyone finds her attractive, it’s me. But the male attention doesn’t stop when we’re together. . . . .

It’s a strange dichotomy: We’re so publicly a queer couple now, but some men choose to ignore we are together. It feels like my queerness is being erased in a whole new way.

This is where it really gets amusing: the author doesn’t blame men from “shooting their shot,” she says, but then she tells us that she really does resent it, because strangers aren’t recognizing that she’s a lesbian. More, “Summer” Tao wrote, just two months ago, telling us that he and Miss Aalto were in an “open relationship,” and that he was also into dating men.

We’ve decided to pay no mind to the opinions of strange men. Similarly, we ignore the increased looks in public.

I will not hide my beautiful, queer relationship because others find it strange or want to ignore it. They’re welcome to stop looking whenever they want.

LOL! They’ve “decided to pay no mind to the opinions of strange men,” yet here Miss Aalto is, telling us how much she does mind the opinions of strangers.

At least Mr Tao and Miss Aalto, but really for a lot of the abnormal population, the population who once told us that what they do in their bedrooms is nobody else’s business, very much want other people to have some idea what they do behind closed doors. In a strange way, it’s a form of “arm candy,” men wanting other people to know just what a hot babe they’ve scored, to gain some sort of one-upsmanship and envy over other men, to improve their status by broadcasting that they’ve got a trophy wife or girlfriend. Miss Aalto is acting pretty much the same way, at least from what she has written, but she doesn’t realize what she’s doing.
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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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In trying to avoid calling street gangs gangs, The Philadelphia Inquirer has again beclowned itself.

We have frequently mocked, as have others, when we were reliably informed by what I have frequently referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]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. that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups.” Somehow, some way, the #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading publisher and editors and journolists[3]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading at our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper just can’t bring themselves to say the word “gang.”

And here they go again!

West Philly street group members charged with three shootings, including two homicides

The investigation follows a December bust by the District Attorney’s Office’s Gun Violence Task Force

by Jesse Bunch and Ellie Rushing | Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Philadelphia law enforcement officials on Tuesday announced the arrests of four people affiliated with West Philadelphia street groups who they say are responsible for committing multiple shootings in 2021 that left two people dead.

The District Attorney’s Office, following an investigation that took longer than a year, said it has charged four people connected with the street groups known as “56st” and “524″ for their roles in the shooting deaths of two people in Southwest Philadelphia, as well as shootings that injured three others.

Roderick Williams, 23, faces charges of murder, attempted murder, and firearms violations in the shooting death of 21-year-old Michael Mines in April 2021, said Jeffrey Palmer, assistant supervisor of the District Attorney’s Office’s Gun Violence Task Force.

Williams is affiliated with “56st,” Palmer said, a group based in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood that also goes by “Christy Rec,” a reference to the nearby recreation center.

There’s more at the original.

The Inky’s original was 693 words long, in which I counted 11 uses of the word ‘group’ or ‘groups,’ and no use at all of the words ‘gang’ or ‘gangs.’ The previous Inquirer article linked in the blurb also used the words ‘group’ and ‘groups,’ but, in the sixth paragraph down, did use the description “rival gang”, almost certainly for prosaic reasons, since reporters Rodrigo Torrejón and Ellie Rushing used the word group earlier in the same sentence.

One wonders if they got the backs of their hands smacked by Inquirer Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar. 🙂

Of course, the Inky, which publisher Elizabeth Hughes promised to make an “anti-racist news organization,” is very, very worried about anything which could cast doubt on that:

A group of Black community advocates criticized a recent Inquirer investigation as racist and harmful

Advocates said the story perpetuated unfair stereotypes. The Inquirer’s editor said “the goal here was to bring a serious issue to light, and the story has done that.”

by Chris Palmer | Monday, May 1, 2023

A group of prominent Black community advocates gathered Monday to criticize a recent Inquirer investigation into how the city awarded millions in anti-violence grants as racist and harmful, calling it an unfair portrayal of the difficult work advocates have long been performing in communities suffering from high rates of gunfire.

Speaking at a news conference in North Philadelphia, Reuben Jones, executive director of the nonprofit Frontline Dads, said the story — which found that a city-run grant program had invested in some community nonprofits without budgets, employees, or directors — perpetuated racist stereotypes, including the notion that Black people from poor neighborhoods can’t be trusted to responsibly manage taxpayer money.

Standing before a group of about two dozen other advocates, Jones said: “These are the community members that represent healing … in the community that you don’t respect, that you don’t value, that you don’t trust.”

There’s more at the original, but the Inky’s story was basically pointing out that several — not all — of the organizations granted the funds did not have the kind of internal organizational structure which allowed either efficient spending or responsible reporting of expenditures.

But the city’s grant program (with administrative costs it totaled $22 million) was also marked by a politicized selection process that flushed millions of dollars into nascent nonprofits unprepared to manage the money — resulting in millions of dollars left unspent and tens of thousands unaccounted for, an Inquirer investigation has found.

Is that racist?

Speakers at Monday’s news conference defended the work that many grassroots organizations do, saying many have provided services for years without any outside funding or recognition. They said advocates frequently have to adjust tactics or spending to respond to the needs of participants, many of whom are difficult to reach — and that their groups should not be criticized for having to change course.

Holston was among the speakers who said the city needs to distribute more funding to grassroots organizations led by Black men and women. He added that critical reporting could make that more difficult to achieve.

“Do not bash the city for actually doing what we asked: To be creative and take a risk in the middle of an emergency. That’s what they’re supposed to do,” Holston said. “When you bash them like that, we can’t get them to do that again.”

You know what wasn’t in the article? There were no claims that the investigative article by the Inquirer actually got anything wrong, just that it was harmful for the newspaper to actually investigate the subject. But the Inky was worried enough that the top editor, Mr Escobar, felt the need to respond, something he rarely does.

So, if simply questioning what a civic organization does with government money is racist, I have to ask the next question: is referring to gangs, the word most people would use, racist, so racist that the Inky has to use the awkward formulation “street groups”? It’s not as though readers don’t know that the newspaper is referring to gangs.

Do the editors and journolists of the Inquirer simply assume that all readers will see the word ‘gang’ and read ‘black’? It’s not like all gangs are black gangs, but perhaps the denizens of the newsroom believe that they are.

In striving to become an “anti-racist news organization,” the Inquirer has beclowned itself. The vast majority of readers would have seen nothing special about the words ‘gang’ or ‘gangs,’ but the newspaper went through the blatantly obvious verbal contortions in a way which makes readers pay attention to the awkward phraseology, something which can only lead readers to do the opposite of what the Inky is trying to do, downplay the notions of gangs.

References

References
↑1 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.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑3 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Killadelphia Dear Philadelphia Inquirer: Don't tell us a story, just tell us the truth!

We previously noted the killing of three Philadelphia teenagers in a quadruple shooting in the 5900 block of Palmetto Street, and how The Philadelphia Inquirer gave us several paragraphs telling us what good kids the victims were. I expressed some doubt about that, given an odd line noting the belief of the Philadelphia Police Department that the alleged shooters then took the surviving victim to the hospital.

We then pointed out, the following day, the seeming editorial slant of the Inquirer to tell us that some juvenile victims of homicide are as pure as the wind-driven snow, even if the early evidence seems to cast doubt on that.

Well, here we go!

‘Transaction’ gone wrong led to the shooting of four teens in Northeast Philly on Friday, police say

The victims’ families, meanwhile, are grieving and preparing to bury their children.

by Ellie Rushing | Monday, May 1, 2023

Police say they have identified two people who are wanted in connection with a quadruple shooting in Northeast Philadelphia on Friday that left three juveniles dead and another seriously injured, and investigators believe the violence was the result of a “transaction” gone wrong.

Staff Inspector Ernest Ransom, head of the Homicide Unit, said that around 2:15 p.m., two groups of young men arrived in separate cars on the 5900 block of Palmetto Street, and went inside a rowhouse “for some sort of transaction.”

But at some point during the meeting, shortly after 3:15 p.m., something went wrong and gunfire erupted, Ransom said.

“Some sort of transaction,” huh? Just what sort of “transaction” in a private residence can result in gunfire?

Ransom declined to say what the transaction involved, citing the ongoing investigation.

Drugs? Perhaps selling guns? The police haven’t told us, but my imagination isn’t quite good enough to guess what sorts of legal “transaction” could have been involved, despite the characterization in the previous Inky story telling us what great kids the victims were.

Ransom said two cousins are wanted in connection with the shooting: Tyree Lennon, 22, and Taj Lennon, 15.

No, of course the Inquirer didn’t provide us with Tyree Lennon’s mugshot; that came from Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News. Mr Keeley continued, in the series of tweets, to tell us something about the older Mr Lennon:

22yr old WANTED by @PhillyPolice in TRIPLE MURDER of 14, 17 & 18 yr olds on Palmetto St. had just been released by a judge & put on house arrest just 15 days before the three teens shot & killed at the home. He had already (violated) the house arrest in the days before murders.

2/3 Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office requested $1 Million bail. Judge then reduced that to 10% of $400k & put him on house arrest. He had three bench warrants. One for violent attack on 11 month old baby in the SAME Palmetto Street house where murders happened Friday.

3/3 Law Enforcement sources say on October 24, 2020, Tyree Lennon bit 11 month old baby on face, leg & arm drawing blood. Sources say he then beat & strangled baby’s mother. @phillypolice had “violent struggle with Lennon” when they arrested him that day & he had ghost gun on him.”

4/ on April 13th, just 15 days before the triple murder, @philadao (Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office — DRP) asked for over $1 Million bail on all of (Lennon’s) prior gun & aggravated assault charges. Bench warrant court Judge reduced it & permitted house arrest release.

5/ He had already violated the house arrest before the murders in Palmetto Street house. Another bench warrant for that house arrest violation was issued the day after the triple murder April 29th.

Tweets slightly edited by The First Street Journal for spacing and clarity.

As we have previously noted, the rest of the professional media in Philly don’t much like Mr Keeley reporting the facts when it comes to crime, but the Inquirer story had no details on Tyree Lennon other than his name, and a site search of inquirer.com for “Tyree Lennon”, at 12:42 on Tuesday, May 2nd, returned no other stories mentioning him.

Some have stated on Twitter that it was Judge Jacki Lyde-Frazier who reduced Mr Lennon’s bail. If this is true, how do we hole Judge Frazier-Lyde accountable for reducing the bail to a level that Mr Lennon could manage, to let him out of jail, to (allegedly) shoot four people? When even the notoriously police-hating, soft-on-crime District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office are requesting a million-dollar bail amount, you know that they believed that Mr Lennon was a real threat and flight risk.

Back to the Inky:

Two others, ages 15 and 16, have also been charged with illegal gun possession in connection with the incident. Police believe the teens dropped off a 16-year-old, who had been shot in the stomach at the Palmetto Street shooting, at Jefferson Frankford Hospital on Friday afternoon. Police recovered their vehicle, a Ford Edge, crashed nearby shortly after and arrested the teens.

There’s a lot of information we haven’t been given. Were the two teens arrested with the Lennons, or were they with the victims? Whichever it was, they were carrying firearms illegally.

“My son was a good kid,” said Khalif Frezghi’s mother, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons. “He was caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

We really can’t expect a murder victim’s mother to say anything other than something good about him, but if he was at the Lennons’ for an unspecified but very probably illegal “transaction,” he was more than at “the wrong place, at the wrong time,” but also there for the wrong thing, with the wrong people, as well.

After the previous quoted paragraph were more, telling us what good kids the deceased were, and the Inquirer published them uncritically. The Inky is still trying to push the image that the deceased were just innocent little angels, trying to tell us a story rather than simply telling us the truth.

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Why should we spend money keeping junkies alive?

In January of 2021, I asked the hard question:

I’m enough of an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to ask: why do we want to keep junkies alive?

They have to steal from innocent people to support their habits, they cannot keep jobs to support themselves, and are nothing but a burden on society. And, heaven forfend! they probably don’t even wear their facemasks properly! Trying to get them off of drugs, so that they can become responsible members of society might make sense, but Safehouse simply enables them to keep shooting up.

The topic was the proposed “Safehouse,” a the nonprofit that, in an attempt to stem the city’s tide of opioid-related deaths, has proposed the site to provide medical supervision to people using drugs. The Usual Suspects in Philadelphia have supported Safehouse: Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner and former Mayor, and Pennsylvania Governor, Ed Rendell, all Democrats. Mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty, while somewhat coy in her current answers to the question of supervised drug injection centers, has more openly supported the idea in the past.

The idea has been tied up in court, and no such facility currently exists in the City of Brotherly Love. Now, it looks like the state is going to step in and put the kibosh on any such plans:

State Senate approves ban of supervised injection sites in Pa.

Pennsylvania’s GOP-controlled state Senate passed a bipartisan bill to ban supervised injection sites anywhere in the state by a 41-9 vote. The legislation now moves to the House.

by Gillian McGoldrick and Aubrey Whelan | Monday, March 1, 2023 | 6:09 PM EDT

HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania Senate voted Monday to stop any supervised injection sites from opening in the state, potentially creating a new hurdle for a nonprofit hoping to open one in Philadelphia.

The GOP-controlled state Senate passed a bipartisan bill, sponsored by state Sen. Christine Tartaglione (D., Philadelphia), to ban supervised injection sites anywhere in Pennsylvania by a 41-9 vote. The bill must pass the state House before reaching the desk of Gov. Josh Shapiro, who said he’d support banning supervised injection sites.

Governor Shapiro, the previous state Attorney General, is a Democrat, albeit not a hard-left one. Democrats control the state House of Representatives, by a bare one-vote margin, and Senator Tartaglione, who wrote the bill, is a Democrat; the bill enjoyed bipartisan support in the state Senate, and should pass the state House fairly easily . . . if Speaker of the House, Rep Joanna McClinton, who is from Philadelphia doesn’t somehow prevent it from coming to a vote.

More Democrats in the state Senate, 13, voted for the bill than against it.

The legislation is the latest attempt by a state or federal government to intervene on a nonprofit’s attempt to open a supervised injection site in Philadelphia, which is widely seen as the epicenter of the opioid epidemic.

Tartaglione, who introduced Senate Bill 165 and represents parts of Kensington, said Monday on the Senate floor that her proposal will bring state law up-to-date with current federal laws. Furthermore, her constituents don’t want a supervised injection site opened in their community, she said.

Kensington is Philly’s most drug-infested area, and parts of it are so bad that the Mexican government used street scenes in Kensington in ads warning Mexican citizens of the dangers of drug use.

The bill now goes to the House, which has a one-seat Democratic majority. Beth Rementer, a spokesperson for House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) did not commit to vote on the bill, and said the Democratic caucus will review it once the legislation moves to the House.

I guess we’ll see: the Democrats could block it, even though a majority of Senate Democrats supported it, as does the Governor.

Safe injection sites simply enable drug use, and are a bad idea. Yes, they apparently reduce overdose deaths, but let me be brutally frank here: do we really want to reduce overdose deaths? Junkies are criminals, not just in using drugs and supporting drug dealers, but in the crimes they commit to support their habits. The life of so many of them on the streets creates hazards to the health of other people, and they are making our nation’s sixth largest city an absolute [insert slang term for feces here]hole.

Philly’s huge murder rate? Most of it boils down to gang activity, and most of those gangs are involved in the drug trade.

Safe injection centers are things no city needs. You cannot fight drug abuse by making it safer to abuse drugs.

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World War III Watch: Warmongers gotta warmonger!

We have previously reported on Bill Kristol, the neoconservative founder and later destroyer of The Weekly Standard, because as a dedicated #NeverTrumper he couldn’t stand to allow any support of Donald Trump in a magazine marketed to conservatives and Republicans. Mr Kristol and the other neocons, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, all love wars and want the United States to participate in them. Today’s left have managed to become so seduced by President Biden’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia than even the very much not-a-neocon Amanda Marcotte was supporting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, albeit for different reasons.

I’ll admit the shameful truth: I follow Mr Kristol in Twitter, not because I like or even respect his views, but because he does clue me into some of his silliness. I’m not a subscriber to The Atlantic, and wouldn’t have seen this article, had Mr Kristol not retweeted Adrienne LaFrance’s promotion of it.

The Case for the Total Liberation of Ukraine

Russia must be expelled from all of Ukraine’s territory—including Crimea.

By Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg | Monday, May 1, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

In March 1774, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the favorite general and sometime lover of Catherine the Great, took control of the anarchic southern frontier of her empire, a region previously ruled by the Mongol Khans, the Cossack hosts, and the Ottoman Turks, among others. As viceroy, Potemkin waged war and founded cities, among them Kherson, the first home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In 1783, he annexed Crimea and became an avatar of imperial glory. To Vladimir Putin in particular, Potemkin is the Russian nationalist who subdued territory now impudently and illegitimately claimed by Ukraine, a nation that Putin believes does not exist.

Oh, I’m pretty sure that Vladimir Vladimirovich believes that Ukraine exists now, and that he’s not particularly happy about it.

There follows several paragraphs — the magazine is given to longer articles — on the history of Prince Potemkin and the fight over Kherson, before we get to the meat of the authors’ advocacy.

When we visited again a few weeks ago, the lights were on, the restaurants were open, and the trains ran on predictable schedules. A coffee shop in the station was serving oat-milk lattes. Bucha is a construction site, with a brand-new hardware store for anyone repairing war damage themselves. A conversation with Zelensky is now a more formal affair, with simultaneous translation, a videographer, and an array of English-speaking aides in attendance. Zelensky himself spoke English much of the time—he has had, he said, a lot more practice. But behind the more polished presentation, the tension and uncertainty persist, fueled by the sense that we are once again at a turning point, once again at a moment when key decisions will be made, in Kyiv, of course, but especially in Washington.

“Especially in Washington.” Not in Warsaw, or Berlin, not in nations much closer to Ukraine, but across all of Europe and the broad Atlantic Ocean.

For although the war is not lost, it is also not won. Kherson is free, but it is under constant attack. Kyiv’s restaurants are open, but refugees have not yet returned home. Russia’s winter offensive has petered out, but as of this writing, in mid-April, it is unclear when Ukraine’s summer offensive will begin. Until it begins, or rather, until it ends, negotiations—about the future of Ukraine and its borders, Ukraine’s relationship to Russia and to Europe, the final status of the Crimean Peninsula—cannot begin either. Right now Putin still seems to believe that a long, drawn-out war of attrition will eventually bring him back his empire: Ukraine’s feckless Western allies will grow tired and give up; maybe Donald Trump will win reelection and align with the Kremlin; Ukraine will retreat; Ukrainians will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Russian soldiers, however poorly armed and trained they may be.

Uniquely, the United States has the power to determine how, and how quickly, the war of attrition turns into something quite different. The Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, spoke with us about the “Ramstein Club,” named after the American air base in Germany where the group, which consists of the defense officials of 54 countries, first convened. Still, his most important relationship is with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (“we communicate very, very often”), and everyone knows that this club is organized by Americans, led by Americans, galvanized by Americans. Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told us that Ukrainians now feel they are “strategic partners and friends” with America, something that might not have felt so true a few years ago, when Donald Trump was impeached on charges of seeking to extort Zelensky.

That’s two slams against former President Trump in two paragraphs; no wonder Mr Kristol liked the article. Unmentioned is the fact that Russia invaded and annexed part of Ukraine while Barack Hussein Obama was President, made no moves against Ukraine while Mr Trump was in office, and invaded the rest of that nation once Joe Biden was in the White House.

In our interview with Zelensky, which we conducted with the chair of The Atlantic’s board of directors, Laurene Powell Jobs, we asked him how he would justify this unusual relationship to a skeptical American: Why should Americans donate weapons to a distant war? He was clear in stating that the outcome of the war will determine the future of Europe. “If we will not have enough weapons,” he said, “that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us. If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova, and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus, and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. That’s three Baltic countries which are members of NATO. They will occupy them. Of course, [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.” The fate of NATO, of America’s position in Europe, indeed of America’s position in the world are all at stake.

And now we get to it: the old “domino theory.” But it ignores Russia’s experience in Ukraine, an experience that tells Russia that, even if it wins, conquers, and annexes all of Ukraine, that their army has to be rebuilt, their industries have to modernize, and their resources have to be better channeled. Even if Russia wins, the nation will not be in any shape to invade another of its neighbors for a long time. And President Putin is 70½ years old.

There follows many paragraphs about the necessity for a Ukrainian victory to validate freedom and democracy, to show that such can prevail against an authoritarian nation bent on conquest. That’s all very nice, but at some point it has to be asked: how can Ukraine win? President Zelensky keeps asking for more and more weapons, telling its allies that if we can just give them enough weapons, they can defeat a nation with thrice its manpower, in a war that is being fought not in Russia, but in Ukraine, a country in which its infrastructure is being slowly demolished. As we have previously noted, some have said that the only way Ukraine could win, in the way that President Zelensky and the authors of the Atlantic article want, “Russia must be expelled from all of Ukraine’s territory—including Crimea,” necessarily involves more than just NATO shipping weapons to Ukraine, but “direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time.”

Really? Our “full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops” involved 697,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. That would require calling up thousands and thousands of reservists, and we need to remember: it took the elder President Bush six months of diplomacy and work after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to assemble and put in place the forces which drove Iraq out of Kuwait. We used staging areas Iraq could not touch to assemble the forces required, but staging areas which Russia could attack.

There is, of course, the small matter of engaging in a direct war with a nation which has a strategic nuclear arsenal, something just blithely waved aside as a serious consideration by the neoconservatives and warmongers. Yes, it would be absolutely great if Vladimir Putin was deposed and Russian forces driven completely out of Ukraine, but I have to ask: how many American cities are we willing to see burned in nuclear fire to see that accomplished? If the answer is greater than zero, I’d like to know what number Mr Kristol believes would be acceptable.

Because that is the risk here, and no one should doubt it. There are all sorts of rational reasons why Russia should not resort to nuclear weapons, even the ‘smallest’ ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons it has, to stave off defeat, but if defeat becomes eminent, who can promise that President Putin or Russian military commanders would base their actions solely on those rational reasons?

The number of American cities I’d be willing to see burned in nuclear fire to save Ukraine? Zero!

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Is The Philadelphia Inquirer shading stories to fit Teh Narrative? Are victims painted by the Inky perhaps not quite as innocent as the newspaper portrays them?

I have said it many times before: city homicides, individually, are not of much interest to The Philadelphia Inquirer unless the victim is an “innocent,” someone already of some note, or a cute white girl. But has the Inky been making innocents of victims who might not fit into that category quite so well.

As we reported on Sunday, the murder of three teenaged boys in a quadruple shooting led to a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer that gave readers several paragraphs telling us what good kids the victims were. Unexplained in that story was why at least two other teenagers apparently targeted the victims.

Then there was this:

Neighbors are shaken after a 16-year-old was shot multiple times in Southwest Philadelphia

“He’s quiet and respectful. I can’t believe this happened,” said a neighborhood store owner.

by Ellie Rushing | Friday, April 28, 2023

A 16-year-old boy was in critical condition Friday after police say he was shot multiple times while walking to catch a trolley in Southwest Philadelphia on Thursday evening.

Neighbors and loved ones were holding onto hope that the teen, whom police did not identify, would pull through, describing him as a polite young man, dedicated Muslim, and loving older brother.

Longtime neighborhood business owner Guillermo Herrera, of Woodland Grocery on the corner of 67th Street and Woodland Avenue, said he had just seen the teen, a frequent customer, 30 minutes before he was shot, when he stopped in to buy a pair of socks.

He said he spoke with the boy’s mother on Friday morning and she told him between sobs that her son had returned home briefly after making the purchase, then left again and was walking to catch a trolley down the street when he was shot.

“He’s a good boy, a nice kid,” said Herrera, 51. “He’s quiet and respectful. I can’t believe this happened.”

There was another paragraph further down in which a friend of the family described the victim as “a sweet boy who loves going to school each day.”

But there’s the money line:

Video of the incident captured by Herrera’s store and reviewed by The Inquirer showed that the teen was walking alone on the sidewalk along Woodland Avenue when a man stepped out of a black SUV that was double-parked across the street. The man, gun in hand, walked to the teen and shot him multiple times, including in the head, before returning to the car and fleeing north.

In other words, this 16-year-old was deliberately targeted for execution. Why does such a “sweet,” “quiet and respectful” teenaged boy get targeted for a deliberate, broad daylight assassination?

(Capt. James Kearney, head of the Philadelphia Police Department’s nonfatal shootings unit) said police recovered six spent shell casings at the scene, and recovered a gun that the teen had been carrying. No arrest has been made, and the motive remains unclear, he said, adding that the teen had never been charged with a crime and there were no incidents in his past to indicate why someone might target him.

So, even though Captain Kearney said the victim had no record and the police knew of no suspect past incidents, he was still carrying a gun himself. At just 16 years of age, he could not have carried a concealed weapon legally.

At any rate, that’s two stories, Friday and Saturday, in which we were told about such very nice boys, gunned down for no apparent reason.

But murder always has a reason. It’s almost never a good reason, and usually a very stupid one, often completely insane, but someone waiting for a victim, getting out of his car, walking up and putting six bullets into a victim, had a reason. It’s just that the Inquirer isn’t asking questions about what that reason was, even though the fact that the victim was also carrying a gun ought to be a fairly significant clue.