Capital Crime Wave Prompts DC Mayor’s Major Reversal on Police Restraints
Amid escalating crime in the nation’s capital, President Joe Biden went to bat for a “police reform” law passed by the D.C. Council by vetoing a bipartisan congressional measure that would have overturned it. Now, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser wants to roll back the same law that Biden protected.
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee, whose oversight includes the District of Columbia, held two hearings earlier this year on the D.C. crime problem.
“Unfortunately, President Biden refused to stand by the Metropolitan Police Department and allowed the D.C. Council’s anti-police bill to go into effect,” House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told The Daily Signal in a written statement Tuesday.
“As a result, crime in the District has continued to surge and now the D.C. mayor is even trying to roll the D.C. Council’s disastrous law back,” Comer said.
The D.C. Council previously enacted laws to restrict police and to reduce sentences for felons. Congress voted to block both.
Meanwhile, Biden signed a measure—also pushed by the oversight panel to reverse a D.C. law reducing sentencing for felonies, including carjackings and burglaries.
The Oversight Committee adopted a resolution blocking the D.C. Council’s 2022 police reform legislation from taking effect. However, Biden vetoed that bipartisan measure in May.
House Resolution 42, which blocked the D.C. anti-police law, was sponsored by Reps. Andrew R. Garbarino, R-N.Y., and Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.
“I’m glad that Mayor Bowser can admit that her policies have contributed to rising crime in the District of Columbia. However, the proposed legislation is the definition of too little, too late,” Garbarino said Tuesday in a written statement.
The city’s new law expanded the definition of chokeholds, already banned for the Metropolitan Police Department, to mean most neck restraints; established a new office to investigate complaints against police; and made it more difficult for officers to disperse riots.
The formal name of the D.C. law is the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022.
“MPD has hemorrhaged officers over the last two years, leaving the department severely understaffed,” Garbarino said, adding:
Criminals have been empowered to break the law while our men and women in blue have been vilified and hindered from doing their jobs. D.C., New York, and [other] liberal cities across the country are paying the price for their anti-police policies and rhetoric. If Mayor Bowser wants to make a real difference to D.C. crime rates, she would completely roll back all of the D.C. Council’s anti-police efforts and empower law enforcement to tackle rising crime as they see fit.
Axios first reported Bowser’s proposal over the weekend. The mayor released a public statement Monday about a proposal (dubbed the Addressing Crime Trends Now Act, or the ACT Now Act) to amend the D.C. police reform law.
“This legislation reflects what our community is telling us: They want appropriate accountability for those who choose to commit crimes and inflict fear in our neighborhoods,” Bowser said. “At a time when we’re dealing with historically low staffing levels at MPD, we’re making commonsense changes that recognize the day-to-day operational challenges our officers experience and that will better support safe and effective policing.”
Bowser’s proposal would reinstate the ability of the Metropolitan Police Department to declare drug-free zones for 120 hours, to prohibit congregating in public space to purchase, sell, or use illegal drugs. The legislation also would impose criminal penalties for organized retail theft, establishing that “directing organized retail theft” is a crime.
The mayor’s bill also calls for reinstating a law against wearing a mask for the purpose of committing criminal acts or intimidating and threatening others.
House Republicans first raised concerns that the D.C. Council’s “policing reform” would lead to more crime. The Oversight Committee pushed the resolution to block the law in April. and the Senate followed in May.
However, Biden then vetoed the measure, saying:
While I do not support every provision of the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022, this resolution from congressional Republicans would overturn commonsense police reforms such as: banning chokeholds; setting important restrictions on use of force and deadly force; improving access to body-worn camera recordings; and requiring officer training on de-escalation and use of force. The Congress should respect the District of Columbia’s right to pass measures that improve public safety and public trust.
After Biden vetoed the congressional resolution, Comer noted that crime in the District of Columbia was up 27% from 2022 levels. Specifically, homicide was up by 19%, other violent crime by 16%, and vehicle theft by 118%, Comer said.
“House Republicans have pledged to advance policies that make our nation safe and take on left-wing efforts to defund the police,” Comer told The Daily Signal.
“The House Oversight Committee has held two hearings on historic crime in the District and we’ve advanced legislation to block the D.C. Council’s radical pro-crime and anti-police bills from taking effect,” he said.
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Anti-racism supersedes actual medicine, endangers patients
Ibram X. Kendi’s gravy train could soon screech to a halt. The famous "anti-racist" professor is under intense public and institutional scrutiny after a Boston University investigation revealed that his "Center for Antiracist Research" squandered tens of millions of dollars, producing practically no research.
But while the ideologue is disgraced, his ideological fingerprint remains impressed upon academia. Nowhere is anti-racism’s influence more concerning than medical research, where racialized pseudoscience has effectively replaced scientific rigor in making sense of matters of life or death.
Anti-racism asserts that race-blind policies allow bigoted attitudes and beliefs to flourish, and that disparities across racial groups must be evidence of racism. In accordance with the ideology, leading healthcare organizations now uncritically and reflexively claim that health disparities across racial groups must be the result of racism disguised or fueled by race-neutral policies.
In writing on the "impact of racism on our public nation’s health," the CDC now claims that racism is a "fundamental" cause of "health inequities, health disparities and disease." It further states, "these health disparities underscore the urgent need to address systemic racism as a root cause of racial and ethnic health inequities and a core element of our public health efforts." The National Institutes of Health similarly states that structural racism "lies at the center" of health disparities.
Previously, leading health experts dispassionately embraced intellectual curiosity and the scientific method to understand and address health disparities. Take, for example, a Health and Human Services initiative launched in 2000 called "Healthy People 2010." The initiative made eliminating health disparities across populations one of its overriding goals.
The final review noted that such disparities arise due to a "range of personal, economic, and environmental factors that influence health status, including factors such as biology, genetics, individual behavior, [and] access to health services."
The 560-page "Healthy People 2010" review doesn’t once speculate or assert that disparities are caused by racism, and for good reason. Across society, racist beliefs are rare and declining. Doctors in particular are laser-focused on treating individual patients, regardless of skin color.
Yet racism is now blindly stated as fact, in service to the anti-racist demand that medicine be viewed through a racial lens. As Yascha Mounk points out in his recent book "The Identity Trap," it remains baffling why attempting to purge unverified individual racism through training and other coercive measures would even solve supposedly systemic issues. Orthodoxy supersedes not only facts, but basic logic.
Problems aside, anti-racist ideology is enforced and propagated through peer-reviewed medical journals, the information bank that journalists, judges, and lawmakers generally entrust to make sense of what "science" says about critical issues.
The American Medical Association’s "Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity," for example, cites research as a "lever for change." It goes on to clarify that "methods will be informed by social epidemiology and critical race theory."
The American Medical Association’s strategy is perverse. Research is fundamentally about the pursuit of knowledge, not a "lever" for social transformation. Once the objective of research is determined to be something other than the pursuit of knowledge, it ceases to be research, but opinion weaponized as "fact" operating under the guise of "science."
Consider, for example, a recent meta-analysis (i.e., compilation of studies) published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that Black patients in the emergency department were more likely to be physically restrained.
A curious scholar might probe whether this finding is related to factors like the disproportionate number of Blacks treated in the emergency department for substance abuse disorders or schizophrenia. Instead, the "researchers" dismiss this possibility by saying that racial difference in these measures would also be proof of racism.
The Journal of the American Medical Association is not alone in this radicalism. Health Affairs, another widely cited journal, devoted their October 2023 issue to "structural racism," essentially accepting the argument that disparities are evidence of racism.
The New England Journal of Medicine, the world’s most widely cited medical journal, has pledged a commitment to anti-racism that routinely plays out in its pages. For instance, a commentary published in early October notes the disproportionate number of Black medical residents who face remedial intervention or dismissal from their programs, which is alleged to be a sign of racism.
In writing on the "impact of racism on our public nation’s health," the CDC now claims that racism is a "fundamental" cause of "health inequities, health disparities and disease."
Yet Occam’s razor would point to radically lower medical school admissions standards for Black students, who are more likely be unprepared for the demands of the job.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/anti-racism-supersedes-actual-medicine-endangers-patients
*****************************************************Rodeo Events: The Far Left's Latest Target
The Far Left - ranging from elected Democrats to their preservationist environmental friends - are determined to ban rodeo events across the U.S.
On October 17th, 2023, the San Diego County Democratic Central Committee unanimously voted in favor of a resolution condemning an upcoming rodeo event scheduled for January 2024 at Petco Park. What’s their beef? The SDCDC equated rodeos to “animal torture devices.”
The San Diego Rodeo is tentatively scheduled for January 12-14, 2024, at the scenic ballpark in downtown San Diego.
“The San Diego County Democratic Central Committee condemns the plans of the Padres and City of San Diego to bring a rodeo to PETCO Park and encourages the San Diego City Council to immediately pass an ordinance banning animal torture devices used at rodeos,” the resolution read.
“Cute, innocent, docile farm animals should not be subjected to cruel treatment and torture devices used at rodeos!” Bryan Pease, the lead author of the resolution, wrote. “There has not been such a cruel event in the City of San Diego since the 1980s, and never before at PETCO Park.”
These attacks on rodeo events, however, aren’t new. These campaigns started to ramp up in the early 2000s. More recently, anti-rodeo efforts have materialized several hours north of America’s Finest City in Los Angeles.
The Democrat-majority city council has been toying with a ban for several years. The body passed an ordinance in December 2022 aimed at these events and could spell doom for the annual February Professional Bull Riding (PBR) event at Crypto.com Arena. This past October 10th, the L.A. Board of Animal Services Commissioners unanimously recommended by a 5-0 vote the city ban rodeos within city limits—alleging they promote “animal cruelty.”
Thankfully, not all Angelenos agree with this misguided campaign. Different cowboy organizations - including organizations boasting Hispanic, Black, and Native American members - have sounded the alarm over L.A.’s obtuse ordinance.
Sixth-generation cowboy and professional bull rider Dakota Louis, who is Native American, defended his way of life to Los Angeles Magazine, saying: “The cowboy way is always going above and beyond and taking care of everyone else before you take care of yourself, and that’s exactly how it is at our dinner table. Our animals are taken care of and fed before we eat dinner.”
In February 2022, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo- named after legendary black cowboy and rodeo performer Bill Pickett- urged its Facebook followers to “step up and help keep the LA city council from passing a ban against rodeo and equestrian events.”
Which groups are behind the anti-rodeo pushes? Townhall readers will recognize two familiar groups.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) - a serial alarmist organization - is a big proponent of rodeo bans, writing on their website: “Countless animals have paid with their lives to satisfy humans’ desire to play cowboy in events such as calf roping, bull riding, steer wrestling, and bronc riding.”
PETA also advocates banning the American pastime by urging its supporters to “work to institute a state or local ban on calf roping, the event in which cruelty is most easily documented. Since many rodeo circuits require calf roping, eliminating it can result in the overall elimination of rodeo shows.”
Animal Legal Defense Fund is a litigious outfit behind the bans. The group is also vehemently against predator management, hunting, and wildlife management.
Their workplace culture is similarly hostile to meat products and animal agriculture, with their mission statement reading like this: “Consistent with this mission, the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s staff and volunteers agree that they will not introduce into any Animal Legal Defense Fund office, or at any Animal Legal Defense Fund function outside the office (e.g., staff lunches, meetings, etc.), products that are derived, in whole or in part, from an animal. Such products include, but are not limited to, meat, fish, poultry, eggs, dairy products (including milk, yogurt, and cheese), leather, and wool. This prohibition does not apply to products to be used for the purpose of educating the public about animal cruelty.”
Interestingly, suing in the name of “animal rights” is very lucrative. ALDF reportedly has net assets worth nearly $20 million (as of 2021). But the group, nonetheless, isn’t without internal strife either and has been seen as insufficiently woke and progressive. A June 2023 report revealed former employees found ALDF to employ “union-busting tactics while perpetuating a transphobic, racist, and retaliatory work culture that undermined the organization’s mission and pandered to conservative donors.” Ouch.
Protect the Harvest reminds us that today’s cowboys and cowgirls are “demonstrating their skills across the country, bringing our rich history and culture to cities and towns across America.”
Much to the chagrin of anti-rodeo activists, rodeo events like PBR are quite popular. Bullriding T.V. events are watched by millions. Paramount Network’s hit show, Yellowstone, and its spinoffs have reinvigorated interest in the sport and accompanying culture. And even unlikely venues –including Madison Square Garden in far-left New York City – are holding sold-out events.
Rodeo, like hunting and fishing, is pure Americana. It must be protected and preserved at all costs.
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Imported haters in America
In last week's column, we noted the popularity of Hamas terrorists with BLM representatives. This week, we'll consider the other main contingent of Hamas Boosters: foreigners, who, for reasons I can't understand, are in my country.
In the past few weeks, Muslims and Arabs have poured into the streets in nearly every U.S. city to celebrate the slaughter of Israelis, while wearing scarves, keffiyehs and other clown outfits and waving the flags of Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Yemen, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and on and on.
It's so obvious that these people don't belong here that the immediate reaction of a number of politicians was to demand that their visas be revoked. (Nobody looked at anti-war protests in the '60s and said, Revoke their visas!)
Question: Why are we importing millions of people from lesser cultures who will inevitably despise and resent the West for its very success?
This isn't the old They hate us for our freedoms! Rather, it is simply an acknowledgment of the fact that the most common and destructive human emotion is jealousy. People will brag about being gluttons, prideful, greedy, angry, lustful and lazy. The only venal sin no one will cop to is envy. That's how insidious it is.
Consider the "open letter" from 33 Harvard student groups blaming Israelis for their own slaughter. In addition to about a dozen Muslim and Arab groups, the letter was signed by clubs for immigrants from various locales notable for their high levels of corruption and leprosy (e.g., Bangladesh, Nepal, Bengal and South Asia).
You think Harvard had a problem with the "Bengali Association of Students" before the 1965 Immigration Act?
Freshly installed and deeply unimpressive Harvard president Claudine Gay (daughter of Haitian immigrants) issued a kumbaya statement in response to the bloodthirsty student letter, expressing sadness about both the 1,500 slaughtered Israelis AND "the war in Israel and Gaza now underway."
At this, billionaire donors to the university finally began to notice the insanity they've been funding. A couple of Israeli billionaires, Idan and Batia Ofer, quit Harvard's Kennedy School of Government board in protest. Another Jewish billionaire, Bill Ackman, demanded the names of the students behind the letter. Gentile -- and Republican! -- Ken Griffin (cumulative gifts to Harvard: more than $500 million) also raised a ruckus.
The same thing happened at other institutions of higher learning.
Sorry to roll my eyes, but where have they been? The gleeful cheering for the mass murder of Israelis is only the latest expression of hate by inferior cultures toward the superior culture of the West -- of which the donors are a shining example.
Here are a few other signposts of our descent into Calcutta.
In the last few years, statues of one great man after another have been toppled, among them: Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, Teddy Roosevelt and Francis Scott Key. White, white, white, white, white and white.
Portraits of scientists at Rockefeller University who'd won the Nobel Prize or Lasker Award had to be removed on the grounds that they were all white men. The portraits made medical student Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako sad, so they had to go.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art disemboweled Beethoven's opera, "Fidelio," to turn it into a story about BLM triumphing over a white supremacist conspiracy to oppress immigrants and people of color (with a discussion sponsored by Columbia University on dismantling "systems of incarceration").
Responding to student demand, the University of Pennsylvania removed a portrait of William Shakespeare and replaced it with a picture of a black feminist writer.
And how did Gay become the president of Harvard in the first place? Obviously, it was a rigorous competition -- just as it was for Vice President Kamala Harris, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sen. Laphonza Butler.
Gay's "historic" appointment gave Harvard its first black president! (Who could've seen that coming?)
The shocked Harvard alums might not even be admitted today, with their cisgender white privilege. The college's admissions office describes its job as "antiracism work."
But when the exact same people who hate our country turned out to hate Israel, too, our clueless elites were gobsmacked. Gee, where'd that come from? We thought you liked us.
Of course barbarians hate Israel! Surrounded by enemies, Jews transformed an unforgiving desert into a first-rate civilization. Did anyone imagine the Holocaust would temper the bitter jealousy? That's like heterosexual white coeds claiming to be "binary" to earn woke street cred. You're still pretty, and they still hate you.
The conflict is far larger than a few hundred disaffected immigrants, "colonized" and "indigenous" people cheering mass murder by invading paragliders.
This is an endemic problem. Israel can't do much about the neighborhood, but why on Earth is the U.S. importing preposterous foreigners from third-rate cultures? The failure of their ancestors to create anything worthwhile, certainly compared to the stupendous accomplishments of the West, is too glaringly obvious. Inviting millions upon millions of them here, to gawk at our magnificent civilization, is a guarantee of perpetual strife and resentment.
It could never work. It was always an insane idea.
Instead of trampling on the free speech rights of people who hate the West, how about avoiding the problem altogether by leaving them where they are? They'll like it! Vastly fewer "white supremacists" to oppress them. They can hate us all they want. Just do it from their own countries.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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