Yesterday was the anniversary of one of The Boston Strangler’s more audacious murders: Albert DeSalvo (right, above) raped and strangled Mary Sullivan in her Boston apartment, then left a card reading “Happy New Year” leaning against her foot. She was the 13th and last victim of the maniac who terrified the Boston area between 1962 and 1964. I had a near meeting with DeSalvo: in 1964, he knocked on the door of my family’s neighbors, the Morelands, one afternoon. I saw him; of course, I didn’t know who he was or why he was there. It turned out that he had the wrong address, and went to the street parallel to ours in Arlington, Mass. and murdered the woman who lived at the same house number.

DeSalvo was a serial maniac. In the late 1950s, he knocked on the doors of young women’s apartments, claiming to represent a modeling agency and telling them he needed to take their measurements. Then he fondled the women as he used his tape measure. Police called him “Measuring Man.” Next he broke into hundreds of apartments in New England, tying up the women and sexually assaulting them. He always wore green handyman clothes and became known as the “Green Man.” But “The Boston Strangler” was the name that stuck. DeSalvo avoided execution or even the full life sentence F. Lee Bailey negotiated for him. He was stabbed to death by an  inmate at Walpole State Prison after less  than a decade behind bars.

Richard Ramirez, aka.”The Night Stalker,” was, amazingly, worse than DeSalvo; last night I watched a documentary about his reign of terror in the ’80s. A Satanist, Ramirez murdered at least 15 people, committed burglaries and rapes, and sexually molested children. He remained defiant throughout his trial, and though he was sentenced to death, California’s endless appeals system kept him alive, at great taxpayer expense, long enough to perish of cancer after less than twenty years in prison.

Both DeSalvo and Ramirez are excellent examples of the kind of anti-social predators who warrant society having and using a death penalty to establish the ultimate punishment for those who have unequivocally forfeited their right to exist in civilized society. For people like them, capitol punishment is ethical. Allowing them to live on society’s dime is unethical, as well as unjust.

1. To lighten the mood, consider this public service spot by Hawaii’s Department of Health. “Keiki” is Hawaiian for “child.”

Yes, this is the level of awareness so many of our state bureaucracies exhibit. The thing was actually greenlighted. After it had been viewed many times, the video was pulled. “As soon as I saw it this morning, I thought, ‘Hey guys, let’s pull this,’ ” Brooks Baehr of Hawaii’s DOH told reporters. “The intentions were noble, but it was clearly not our best work.”

Boy, I hope it wasn’t their best work. With thinking like this going on in our health departments, no wonder the pandemic is still with us.

2. And speaking of Departments of Health, New York’s has has announced that race will be one of the factors determining who gets access to antiviral monoclonal treatments for the Wuhan virus and its variants.

The policy requires that distribution be based on findings that someone has “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness” with key “other factors” including the “risk factor” of being non-white. From the memo:

Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as  longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.

Prof. Turley opines that the policy is DOA on Constitutional grounds when it is inevitably challenged. The measure’s ethics values are dead already. Democrats appear to be determined to institutionalize anti-white discrimination by sheer persistence, confident that the opposition such measures demand will be muted by critics’ fear of being labeled insufficiently “anti-racist.”

3. Prof. Turley’s usual restraint is obviously growing thin as the Biden Administration continues the “It isn’t what it is” narrative with the assistance of the mainstream media propaganda merchants. He was recently particularly contemptuous of Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s assertion, picked up and parroted by various pundits, that Joe’s first year as President was “scandal free,” writing,

Calling 2021 “scandal free” is not merely an example of blinkered commentary, it is an exercise of willful blindness…The only thing more impressive than the relentless coverage of Trump scandals in 2017 was the relentless avoidance of Biden scandals in 2020.  The media did give passing coverage to the host of Biden false claims and stories that range from saying that he was “arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela” to his evolving Amtrak claims to reinventing his positions on foreign wars like Afghanistan. There were also federal violations by Biden officials and allegations of improper presidential influence on pending investigations. However, when it came to scandals that could implicate the President in more serious misconduct (or contradict his past denials), the media was thoroughly uninterested. Consider just three of the Voldemort scandals of 2020, or those scandals which must not be named by the media:

The Hunter Biden Laptop: The successful effort to bury the Hunter Biden story is the single greatest political achievement in modern politics, but it took a concerted effort by reporters and columnists in Washington. What was most impressive is that the Biden campaign and family never denied that the laptop was authentic. The laptop details potential criminal acts by Hunter Biden from extensive drug use to hiring prostitutes to alleged financial and tax violations. It also included his admission that prior files were likely in the hands of foreign intelligence to use for blackmailing him and his father. There is also the “red flag” gun controversy involving Hunter Biden. Not only did social media companies blackout references to the laptop, but the media has steadfastly continued to refuse to pursue these potential criminal acts. The laptop was seized by the FBI in an ongoing federal investigation into possible tax and financial wrongdoing.

Biden Family Influence Peddling: Influence peddling has long been associated with the Biden family but only sparingly reported, even though both President Biden’s brothers Frank and James are accused of openly hawking their ties to him.  Hunter’s laptop added evidence of hundreds of emails on transactions by Hunter Biden, his uncle James Biden, and Joe Biden. The emails magnify earlier allegations that the Biden family engaged in open influence peddling when Joe Biden was Vice President with an assortment of foreign figures and countries. Some of those dealings continued into the Biden presidency. Hunter Biden admits that he was a hopeless drug addict well into his father’s presidential campaign. However, these foreign figures continued to give Hunter millions and Hunter openly assisted in their meetings with his father and linking up with Administration officials. One of the key figures in these dealings has claimed that he met personally with Joe Biden to discuss the deals.

These meetings and dinners directly contradict denials from President Biden, who is referred to extensively in emails concerning payments and meetings as “the Big Guy,” “Celtic,” and other names. President Biden appears to have had bills paid from out of these accounts and his shared card may have been used in some of the most dubious transactions. Some dealings have direct national security implications for the United States. Despite the ongoing federal investigation, there has been no call for a Special Counsel even though President Biden is referenced and potentially implicated in some of these transactions. Nevertheless, Hunter continues to rack in the dough by other means, including art deals that have been denounced as ethically corrupt.

The Ashley Biden Diary: The latest scandal involves the other first child, Ashley Biden.  Like her brother Hunter, Ashley has struggled with addiction and left her diary with some clothes in a house in Delray, Florida.  The diary was later sent to Project Veritas, a conservative publication which decided not to run the information. The contents of the diary, however, have been reported on other sites, including allegations against her father involving “inappropriate” contacts. As with the Hunter Biden laptop, the Biden family has not denied the authenticity of the diary or the underlying passages. It also did not sue the other conservative sites for defamation in publishing what they alleged to be passages from the diary. Instead, the family lawyers called upon the Justice Department to get involved the case of a missing diary. The Justice Department’s response was so overwhelming you would have thought that they were investigating the snatching of Lindbergh’s baby rather than Ashley’s diary.  It conducted raids on journalists and the seizure of confidential material around the country.

The media was not interested in the use of the FBI to launch a national investigation into the missing diary. Indeed, the raiding of the home of a conservative publisher was barely noted even though the New York Times could also have been raided on the same grounds as Project Veritas. The Times acquired confidential and presumably stolen legal material from Project Veritas and, unlike Project Veritas, published the presumably stolen information. However, the Biden Justice Department was only interested in cracking down on the acquisition or coverage of the Ashley Biden diary.

In reviewing these scandals, ask yourself what the media would have done with a diary from Ivanka Trump with these allegations or foreign influence peddling by the Trump children.

Nice summary! It sure would have been helpful if it didn’t appear on a law prof’s blog, but in a major mainstream news source that wasn’t considered “conservative.”

How did I miss the part about Joe’s influence-peddling brothers this long? Never mind, I know how: I subscribe to the New York Times.

4. And speaking of the Times, today it notes with thinly restrained pleasure that more than 700 arrests have come from last year’s Capitol riot: “As of this week, more than 225 people have been accused of attacking or interfering with the police that day. About 275 have been charged with what the government describes as the chief political crime on Jan. 6: obstructing Congress’s duty to certify the 2020 presidential vote count. A little over 300 people have been charged with petty crimes alone, mostly trespassing and disorderly conduct.”

This is a purely a partisan investigation and prosecution, drawn out for political gain. It is one political party using the power of government to criminalize dissent, and adopting special standards to do it. This isn’t healing the rifts in society and political discourse, it is exacerbating them. Tomorrow, the anniversary of the “insurrection” that has never been charged as such and never could be, in which the only individual killed was a rioter and which an inept response by authorities allowed to get out of control, will see more deliberate efforts to magnify an incident that was indistinguishable in motive and stupidity from the rioting that targeted Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017. “The resistance,” however, was behind that, and that meant it was good rioting.

“But a big question hangs over the prosecutions,” the story tells us. “Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?” If it does—and I still can’t believe that the Administration could be that reckless– watch out. Eventually, those being persecuted will have no alternative but to fight back.