Bizarre-sounding Mangione trial rulings

The New Neo Posted on by

This seems absurd:

First, Judge Gregory Carro in New York State argued that Luigi Mangione, the leftist terrorist, wasn’t a terrorist because he said he wasn’t.

Judge Gregory Carro argued that Luigi Mangione was wrongly being charged as a terrorist since the radical terrorist’s objective “was not to threaten, intimidate or coerce, but rather to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed of the insurance industry. …

“The defendant emphasized that he wished to spread a ‘message’ and ‘win public support’ about ‘everything wrong with our healthsystem.’”

One man’s terrorist is another man’s do-gooder.

More:

More of the same now at the federal level where Judge Margaret Garnett, a recent Biden appointee, decided that Luigi Mangione stalking Brian Thompson in order to kill him wasn’t a “crime of violence”.

Judge Garnett, a Biden appointee, noted the “apparent absurdity”, arguing that “the analysis contained in the balance of this opinion may strike the average person — and indeed many lawyers and judges — as tortured and strange, and the result may seem contrary to our intuitions about the criminal law.”

You said it, ma’am.

And:

But stalking a man in order to kill him, according to the Biden judge, isn’t a “crime of violence” and has decided to “foreclose the death penalty as an available punishment to be considered by the jury”’

That is so very strange that I did some more research, and discovered the rationale:

To seek the death penalty, prosecutors needed to show that Mangione killed Thompson while committing another “crime of violence.” Stalking doesn’t fit that definition, Garnett wrote in her opinion, citing case law and legal precedents.

So there has to be a separate crime of violence to elevate the charges to a capital offense in New York. So as strange as it sounds, Garnett’s ruling might indeed be correct on this.

I will add that in New York, the difference between capital charges and life imprisonment is more technical than real. You can read about the complicated history of New York executions here, but this is the most relevant part for today:

Capital punishment was reinstated in New York in 1995 for a wide-range of aggravating factors, when Pataki signed a new statute into law, which provided for execution by lethal injection.[28] However, there were no executions before the capital punishment statute was nullified in 2004.

On June 24, 2004, the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, held 4–3 in People v. LaValle that the state’s death penalty statute violated the New York Constitution, because in case of a deadlocked jury the judge could impose a sentence lesser than life without parole, so jurors would be “coerced” to vote for death solely to prevent the convict from being paroled. Governor Pataki criticized the ruling and called for a quick legislative fix.

Between December 2004 and February 2005, public hearings were held in Manhattan and Albany. …

In 2007, the New York Court of Appeals decided in People v. Taylor that the statute defect could not be corrected by a judge instruction to the jury that he would impose life without parole. This led to the commutation of the last of the seven death sentences that were imposed under the 1995 statute.

In 2008, the State Senate again passed legislation that would have established the death penalty for the murder of law enforcement officers, but the Assembly did not act on the legislation. In July of that year, Governor David Paterson ordered the removal of all execution equipment used to perform lethal injection and the closure of the execution chamber at Green Haven Correctional Facility.

The 1995 statute has never been repealed and is still on the books. …

There is currently no inmate on federal death row sentenced for a crime committed in the state of New York.

However, the death penalty can still be imposed in federal cases, even in New York. The reality is that it has not been imposed. The Mangione case is in line with that.

Right and left, left and right: in Costa Rica and in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed a Latin American wave of elections won by politicians on the right. The latest is in Costa Rica:

The rightwing populist Laura Fernández has won Costa Rica’s presidential election in a landslide after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade.

Fernández’s nearest rival, centre-right economist Álvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40% needed to avoid a runoff.

The link is to the leftist Guardian, so it’s hard to know exactly what they mean by “rightwing populist” (Trumpish?) and “centre-right” (Romneyish?). But clearly, Costa Ricans want someone on the right rather than the left. Has the country ever had a leftist government? Yes, and it turned to the right only in 2022. But this recent election is a continuation of that trend.

Fernandez’s inspiration is Bukele of of El Salvador:

The country of 5.2 million people, famous for its white-sand beaches, has long been seen as an oasis of stability and democracy in Central America. But in recent years, it has gone from transit point to logistics hub in the global drug trade.

Drug trafficking by Mexican and Colombian cartels has seeped into local communities, fuelling turf wars that have caused the murder rate to jump 50% in the past six years, to 17 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Fernández cites the iron-fisted Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who has locked up thousands of suspected gang members without charge, as an inspiration on how to tackle crime. Bukele was the first foreign leader to congratulate her.

Fernández’s win confirms a rightward lurch in Latin America, where conservatives have ridden anger towards corruption and crime to win power in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Honduras.

In Argentina at least, it was also economics.

Compare and contrast to this news in the US:

The January New York Times/Siena College poll found that only 32 percent of registered voters believed the country was better off than when Trump returned to office. 49 percent said it was worse. Trump’s approval rating stood at 40 percent, disapproval at 56 percent, and a majority of respondents, 55-42 percent, described his first year as unsuccessful.

These figures were released just days after the White House’s “365 Wins in 365 Days” announcement. They reveal a populace largely unmoved by achievements that objectively transformed policy, economy, and security.

Skepticism of this polling is not misplaced. The New York Times has long demonstrated a pattern of framing narratives through a left-leaning lens. It often underreports Republican accomplishments while amplifying Democratic perspectives. Trump condemned the poll as “fake” and “fraudulent,” denouncing it on Truth Social as a rigged effort to undermine his agenda. He promised to incorporate it into a multibillion-dollar defamation suit against the Times.

It may not be totally accurate, but I don’t think it’s fake. I think it represents something real; some sort of backlash. Look at the results of a recent Fox News poll:

A new Fox News survey, released Thursday, finds the Republican Party is seen as better able to handle border security (by 15 points), national security (+12), and immigration (+5).

The Democratic Party is favored on transgender issues (by 22 points), healthcare (+21), vaccines (+16), helping the middle class (+14), and affordability (+14).

And on three issues where Republicans have recently held the edge, now neither party has shown a clear preference: taxes (+1D), foreign policy (even), and the federal budget deficit (+2R). …

The survey shows if the election were today, 52% of voters would back the Democratic candidate in their House district and 46% the Republican. That’s a 6-point edge, which is right at the poll’s margin of sampling error.

The current 52% Democratic support is the highest recorded for either party; the previous high was 50% for the Democrats in October 2017.

Do people have such short memories of what Democrats do when in office? Do voters require that the current administration fix everything or they turn on it and turn to the opposition, no matter what the record is of the latter? Is it perhaps the dying off of older voters and the ascendance of young voters steeped in leftism?

It was “affordability” that got Mamdani elected. And special elections are not going well for the GOP; for example, this just happened:

Democratic Texas Senate candidate Taylor Rehmet defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss, who President Donald Trump endorsed, 57.21% to 42.79% in the runoff election for the District 9 seat. …

Trump won District 9 by 17 percentage points in 2024. It encompasses Tarrant County and parts of Fort Worth and Arlington.

What gives? I quote two comments to that LI post:

I live in TX Senate 9 district and consider this a major upset. Rehmet aligns 90% with Jasmine Crockett’s positions. His (incessant) mailers seemed all warm and fuzzy, but his positions on his website are pure leftist dogma. Early voting was hampered by the storm last week, but that’s no excuse. We need a nationwide message on the positive economy now through November.

I, too live in this district. The WSJ has a column today about how this vote was all about immigration enforcement. I disagree. I have several friends that typically vote Republican withhold their votes because the disliked the candidate. This was a runoff election and there were two Republican candidates that split the vote. Don’t let the press confuse or discourage you.

Those two GOP candidates ran in November, however. I think that commenter is saying that, because there were two, the worse GOP candidate ended up being the person who ran against Rehmet. But the final result wasn’t even close; you can read more about it here.

I can’t find statistics on turnout, but my guess is that it was fairly low. At any rate, both candidates will be running against each other again in November.

Philip Glass pulls out of Kennedy Center – and buys a loaf of bread

The New Neo Posted on by

Composer Philip Glass, 89, is apparently not a Trump fan:

Composer Philip Glass announced Tuesday that he is withdrawing his symphony from the Kennedy Center, pointing to the arts center’s values and leadership.

“After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” Glass announced in a statement posted to X.

“Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” he continued. “Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.”

Really? I was unaware of Trump’s support for slavery, or his advocacy of the South’s defiance of the federal government (seems the opposite, actually).

And I wonder whether Glass is aware that Lincoln met with many accusations similar to those against Trump: that he was a tyrant who didn’t respect the law. For example:

“What shall we call him? Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln, the Fiend?”

So wrote Virginia’s Richmond Enquirer of the President of the U.S. in 1862. It was not unusual. Caught up in the passions of the era, the Northern Copperhead papers no less than the Southern press called Abraham Lincoln names that for venomous variety have been unsurpassed before or since in editorial tirades against a President—”The Ape,” “Simple Susan,” “Kentucky Mule,” “Illinois Beast,” “traitor,” “lowborn, despicable tyrant,” “cringing, crawling creature.” …

Thus the Illinois State Register (Springfield), taking Lincoln to task for his “assumed clownishness,” charged that his “buffoonery convinces the mind of no man, and is utterly lost on the majority of his audience.” The Chicago Times, one of his angriest foes, sneered that “he cannot speak five grammatical sentences in succession.” One of Lincoln’s greatest speeches, the second inaugural (“with malice toward none”) was dismissed by the Times as “slipshod” and “puerile.” …

Of his assassination, the Dallas Herald wrote: “God almighty ordered this event.” Houston’s Tri-Weekly Telegraph crowed: “From now until God’s judgment day, the minds of men will not cease to thrill at the killing of Abraham Lincoln.”

Then again, Philip Glass actually is a loaf of bread. If you’re unfamiliar with Glass’s work, the following parody may not make sense. It’s from a favorite play (or rather, series of short plays) of mine by David Ives, called All In the Timing:

News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Doesn’t it seem like shutdowms are threatened every couple of weeks? See this:

Leader, Chuck Schumer, eked out a deal for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, later on Thursday, to be sequestered from the six-bill minibus, in a last-minute attempt to avoid the shutdown that begins midnight on Friday. Instead, DHS will be funded with a short-term continuing resolution for two weeks.

(2) I guess the White House ballroom isn’t big enough. Trump’s itching to build something even bigger:

When Trump first displayed models of the proposed arch last October, a reporter asked him who it was for. Trump replied “Me. It’s going to be beautiful.”

In a December update, the president said the new arch “will be like the one in Paris, but to be honest with you, it blows it away. It blows it away in every way.”

There was one exception, he noted: “The only thing they have is history […] I always say [it’s] the one thing you can’t compete with, but eventually we’ll have that history too.”

The president clearly believes his arch will be part of creating that history. “It’s the only city in the world that’s of great importance that doesn’t have a triumphal arch,” he said of Washington DC.

(3) I’m uninterested in the Epstein file dump. But if you’re interested, see this or this or this.

(4) The US and Israel deny any involvement in a Tehran blast that killed at least five people. Iran says the cause was a gas leak.

(5) Judge rules that ICE can stay in Minnesota:

U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez ruled this morning against a lawsuit filed by state Attorney General Keith Ellison seeking to have ICE ejected from Minnesota.

And from the comments at that Powerline post:

[The judge] apparently based part of her decision on the 8th circuit court’s panel repealing of her order last week restricting ICE. Saying “If that injunction went too far, then the one at issue here—halting the entire operation—certainly would.”

On therapists as social justice warriors

The New Neo Posted on by

On yesterday’s thread about anti-MAGA rage in the health professions, there was some discussion about the leftism of therapists. I’m unaware of any threats by therapists to kill MAGA fans. But then again – unlike nurses and doctors – they’re not in the business of directly tending to their clients’ bodily needs, so they don’t have as much opportunity – or is it temptation?

But I think it might be time to recycle a post I wrote in May of 2023 on the topic of the leftism of therapists, and the fact that many have been refusing to treat people on the right for many years prior to Trump. So the rest of this post is a repeat of that earlier post.

Here’s a long article on how therapists have become social justice warriors. I haven’t yet read the whole thing, although I intend to do so. But I’ll just point out that: (a) there have always been many bad therapists out there, although there are probably many more these days; and (b) the vast majority of therapists have been on the left for a long long time.

On a personal note connected with point (b), twenty or so years ago when I was newly divorced and newly conservative and wanted to discuss both issues with a therapist, I had an amazingly difficult time trying to find a therapist willing to deal with a client on the right. So this sort of ostracism is not a new phenomenon at all, although I’m virtually certain it is now far more common than it was back then, and it was already common back then. If anyone is interested, here’s a website which purports to list therapists willing to work with conservatives. I have no idea whether it’s reliable or not, however.

If anyone is looking for a therapist, I suggest being basically up-front about your politics when you first speak to each therapist on the phone. Explain that you are politically conservative and ask whether they’re comfortable working with a conservative, whether they come from an identity politics ideology, and that sort of thing. The therapist may be truthful in telling you yes or no. You can often get a good sense of this in even a brief conversation, and it doesn’t cost a cent.

But what a terrible mess.

The nomination of Kevin Warsh

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t have too much to say about Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh for Federal Reserve Chairman. But many of you probably do, so here’s a thread for discussing it.

There’s this:

Gold and silver prices plummeted early Friday morning following news that President Trump planned to nominate Kevin Warsh as the next chair of the Federal Reserve.

Investors started selling off precious metals with gold falling by as much as 10%, dropping from $5,500 an ounce to around $5,136 per ounce. …

Precious metals have been a safe have for investors concerned that the next Fed chair would cede to Trump’s demands to cut interest rates sharply.

News of the Warsh pick appeared to mollify those concerns.

Don Lemon arrested for the church invasion

The New Neo Posted on by

You may or may not agree with the FACE Act (1994), but it’s pretty clear that Lemon and the other activists in the Minnesota church invasion violated it. Leftists are perfectly fine with the Act’s application to anti-abortion activists, but apply it to those who harass churchgoers and the left’s not so happy.

Especially if the person is Don Lemon, who says he was just there as an observing reporter:

Presumably, the DoJ got an indictment from a grand jury, the only practical option open to them at that point. If so, it certainly didn’t take long to get, and underscores the point that they should have probably tried that first. …

Lemon has hired Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell to represent him, and Lowell is already all-in on the First Amendment defense …

However, this defense is a loser for several reasons, the first of which is that Lemon wasn’t the only party to this incident that had First Amendment rights at stake. The First Amendment protects the right to freedom of religious expression, the core of which is the right to worship in one’s own church in peace. Even people claiming to be journalists can’t interrupt worship services and demand impromptu “interviews” with the minister or celebrant, especially inside the church on private property. Lemon filmed himself preparing with the instigators outside before invading the church, and his “interview” consisted of demanding answers to the instigators’ claims and demands.

Next up, the criminal statutes involved do not have “journalist” exceptions. Neither the FACE Act nor the Ku Klux Klan act allow for disruption of church services for the purpose of “journalism.” …

As for Lemon’s thirty years in journalism, that’s irrelevant to the crime at hand. If a journalist is dumb enough to commit a crime on video, that doesn’t automatically transform itself into a news report. Lemon filmed himself actively conspiring to invade a church for a protest in violation of both the FACE and Klan Acts, and then participated in the act by buttonholing the pastor and harassing him while his co-conspirators terrorized the rest of the congregation.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. But the left is really into the elevation and expansion of the right of freedom of speech over everything else when it’s their “speech” that’s involved.

What’s up with all these leftists in healthcare professions who proudly advocate harming MAGA supporters?

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ve seen the articles: healthcare workers (often nurses) who boast that they won’t treat MaGA supporters or even that they’ll harm or kill them. Another variant is the same claim about not treating, or outright harming, Israelis.

This shouldn’t surprise us, although it probably does. People who work in healthcare are people, after all, and there’s always been a certain number of natural sociopaths drawn to the profession. We’ve always heard of the random nurse or doctor who injects patients with something lethal, although their numbers have mercifully been very low. But they have always existed.

However, what’s going on now seem to be a new phenomenon, and although it continues to involve a small number it’s certainly more people than the group I described above. This time, also, they seem to have little awareness that they will face any negative consequences for publicly stating their willingness to harm or kill patients. They brag about their intent to commit such crimes, and seem to consider it a good way to virtue-signal. When they are suspended or fired, they’re probably very surprised.

If they are young (and by “young” I mean anything under forty) they’ve been steeped in leftist education, for the most part. So some of this is a generational phenomenon. Then there’s widespread TDS and the demonization of anyone supporting Trump, which has increased over the years rather than decreased. I see it myself, nearly constantly. It becomes standard in many circles, and that escalates matters as well, when one’s colleagues and friends and family seem to all agree that MAGA equals Nazi. That thought is reiterated and magnified through the MSM, Democrat and NeverTrump politicians and pundits, and social media.

Healthcare professionals often go into the profession through a desire to do good, and if killing Nazis is good then they’ll do that, too. Nor is their professional training politically neutral, either. You can find loads of articles describing the extent to which medical training has veered into leftist indoctrination, and the results: for example see this, which notes the leftist bent of health:

[A] follow-up paper, published in 2019, demonstrated that recent medical school graduates—especially women, but men as well (though to a slightly smaller degree) skew much more to the left than their older colleagues, a progressive shift the authors argue is likely to continue, and over time, shift the political balance of the profession as a whole.

Most of the articles I found on leftist training in health care involved medical school and doctors, but it stands to reason the same is true for nurses and the like.

There’s also this, for a description of some of the training:

The most sweeping of the “implicit bias” training mandates, and a possible harbinger of future state-wide edicts in other states? That would be in California, where according to the very letter of the law, “all continuing medical education courses”—which physicians need to complete to have their licenses renewed—must “contain curriculum that includes the understanding of implicit bias.”

But indoctrination programs that anger, demean, and insult people are unlikely to persuade them. Objective data demonstrating benefits in medical outcomes resulting from intrinsic bias training is inconsistent and sparse. Even those who believe racism is the source of disparate medical outcomes and support implicit bias training urge some caution using the current approach because of methodological problems.

While I recognize that social injustices exist, I remain unconvinced that racism is a major cause of outcome disparities—and I’m concerned that this indoctrination causes more harm than good. In fact, the evidence already suggests that this divisive ideology, rooted in racial discrimination, is being prioritized over the findings of scientific research to the detriment of patient health.

There’s this sort of thing:

First-year [medical students at UCLA] are reportedly assigned readings in the required course, Structural Racism and Health Equity “SRHE,” which pushes far-left views supporting protesting climate change and abolishing police and prisons. …

A current student in the medical program at UCLA claimed that this class isn’t alone and that far-left politics pervade every class in the program.

“This curriculum is laced through all four years of medical school,” the student told Fox News Digital.

National Review had this 2023 article on the topic, but it’s behind a paywall.

There’s an organization called “Do No Harm” that’s dedicated to eliminating some of this indoctrination:

“We are a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers united by a moral mission: Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology. We believe in making healthcare better for all – not undermining it in pursuit of a political agenda,” the organization’s website explains.

There’s a lot of information at the website, and I wish them much good luck with that. It’s late and getting later.

Alteration inflation

The New Neo Posted on by

I have an old sweatshirt of which I’m very fond. It’s a pretty color, and it’s in good shape despite its antiquity.

Except for the zipper, which broke. I can do simple sewing, but I’ve never put in a zipper and I don’t have a sewing machine. So I called the local place that does alterations, the one that’s got the best prices in town, and asked them how much it would cost to put in a plain old zipper in a sweatshirt.

The answer? Fifty-six dollars.

I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon. Who would?