The Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which is prosecuting Daniel Penny, has decided to drop the second-degree manslaughter charge against him, hoping jurors can come to a verdict on the lesser charge. Jurors on Friday said they were deadlocked on whether Penny “recklessly” caused the death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway train last May, prompting Judge Maxwell Wiley and Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran to discuss the possibility of dropping the manslaughter charge, journalist Matthew Lee reported. After discussing it with her colleagues, Yoran told the judge that the DA would like to dismiss the manslaughter charge against Penny, which could have landed him up to 15 years in prison. As Lee reported, Penny’s attorneys argued that such a move would be coercing the jury, but the judge – who has been favorable to the prosecution throughout the trial – disagreed. Penny’s lawyer Kenniff: This would be elbowing the jury, coercing them Judge Wiley: The DA’s proposal would resolve that. ADA Wu: Your Honor put it correctly. Removal of the top count, with prejudice, takes that concern away. Judge Wiley: What do I tell the jury? — Inner City Press (@innercitypress) December 6, 2024 Judge Wiley then asked Yoran what he should tell the jury, Lee reported, to which she responded that the judge shouldn’t tell them that this is an acquittal on the manslaughter charge, but simply that it has been dismissed. Penny’s attorney, Thomas Kenniff, shot back that such a tactic had not been used before, and could create a precedent where prosecutors over-charge someone with the option to withdraw the top charges if a jury cannot make a decision. Judge Wiley: I’ll take a chance and grant the People’s application. I’m going to let them go to return and consider Count 2 on Monday. Bring them in. Jury entering! Judge: Manslaughter in the 2d degree is dismissed. You are free to consider Count 2- on Monday — Inner City Press (@innercitypress) December 6, 2024 After this exchange, the judge again sided with the prosecution, and told the jury they would return on Monday to deliberate on the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. If convicted on this charge, Penny faces up to four years in prison. The prosecution has argued that Penny, a 26-year-old Marine veteran, held Neely in a chokehold for six minutes in May 2023, causing Neely’s death. Penny’s defense, meanwhile, has argued that there is doubt about whether Neely died from the chokehold or if he died due to his medical condition and the drugs in his system at the time of his death. Jurors have been asking to review crucial evidence in the case, including videos from the incident and Penny’s police interrogation, during which he was not told Neely had died. They have also asked Wiley to reread the definitions of recklessness and negligence, The Daily Wire reported. Jurors have also asked to be reread portions of New York medical examiner Dr. Cynthia Harris’ cross-examination, where she testified that she made the determination Neely died due to asphyxiation based on video alone – before the toxicology report came back.

After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, PA, there was an outpouring of very primal and vicious rage from all corners of the Left — both on social media, and in the mainstream corporate outlets. For the first time in American history, the near-assassination of a president didn’t bring about a period of national mourning, or condemnations from Hollywood and academia. Instead, the overwhelming sentiment was, in effect, that Donald Trump had it coming. It continued even after their second assassination attempt on Trump, which led the the New York Times to explain that Trump was blameworthy because he had “stirred” anger among the public. Many other publications followed suit. Obviously, blaming Trump for his own attempted assassination was always demented. But we were supposed to believe that it was acceptable to blame Trump, at least in part, because he’s such a polarizing figure. The Left insisted that they aren’t always this bloodthirsty. They said that they didn’t want to see every single one of their enemies get murdered in public, live on national television. Instead, they said that they just wanted to see Donald Trump get murdered in public, because he’s basically Hitler, and Hitler is a special case. Once Hitler’s out of the way, they said, they’d return to being normal, functioning citizens who don’t want to murder their enemies all the time. This is a defense that was never believable. But after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan this week, even the Left is completely abandoning the whole pretense. If anything, the Left seems to be gloating over the execution of Thompson even more than the Trump assassination attempt. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I’ve never seen anything quite like this. They are declaring, without any hint of reservation, that it’s “open season” on everyone they don’t like. They are gleefully celebrating the horrific demise of a human being. Whether you’re a politician or a business executive, it doesn’t matter. They don’t want you fired, they don’t want you in prison — they want you dead. Former Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz couldn’t have been any more explicit about this. She posted an article on her newsletter entitled, “Yes, ‘we’ want insurance executives dead.” She also posted an image of party balloons with the celebratory caption, “CEO Down.” And she wrote that, while people shouldn’t “murder” these executives, it’s “normal” to wish death upon them. WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show Separately, in response to a news article about how Blue Cross Blue Shield recently announced that it won’t pay for anesthesia past a certain point, Lorenz wrote: “And people wonder why we want these executives dead.” She also posted the name and picture of the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield, effectively suggesting that someone assassinate her. There’s really no other way to interpret it. This is the same woman who says you’re a psychopath if you go outside without a mask and “rawdog the air.” But wishing death on healthcare executives is apparently completely fine. I could spend the next month going through all of the reactions like this from the Left. Suffice it to say, this kind of response was not unusual. For example, Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus, who apparently specializes in the field of “social work,” wrote: “Today, we mourn the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down…. wait, I’m sorry – today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.” Then there was this response from someone named “Angie,” who said that the murder of the CEO had made her feel “reinvigorated”: Brian Thompson's death gives Angie "hope" and has reinvigorated her. Why? Because her echo chamber makes it seem that "Class consciousness" is on the rise. These Communists are gross ? pic.twitter.com/R5XiDKesSi — Stu (@thestustustudio) December 5, 2024   These people are euphoric over the murder of a man with a family, supposedly because they’re not happy with his company’s insurance coverage. And now, like Taylor Lorenz, they’re turning their attention — and their threats — towards other CEOs. And it appears to be working. Within hours of the online campaign to harass and threaten the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield, the company announced a reversal of its planned policy on anesthesia coverage. They now say they’re going to “halt” their proposed limits on coverage for anesthesia during surgery. The company put out a statement reading: “There has been significant widespread misinformation about an update to our anesthesia policy. As a result, we have decided to not proceed with this policy change. To be clear, it never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services. The proposed update to the policy was only designed to clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.” On the surface, this looks like a victory for the assassin and his supporters. The assassin kills one insurance company CEO, and then the next day, an insurance company rescinds its plans to limit coverage. It’s the kind of thing that seems like a major victory if you have no idea how the health insurance industry works. The catch is that, as a result of this reversal, anesthesiologists no longer have any incentive to stop overbilling — which has been a major problem in their field in recent years. Blue Cross Blue Shield, along with other insurance companies, was trying to force anesthesiologists to accept the standard, per-procedure Medicare rate for their services. Anesthesiologists hated that idea, because they’d prefer to keep charging high rates for hours that they weren’t even working. And now, because of a harassment campaign by Left-wing activists in the wake of a CEO’s murder, those anesthesiologists have won. In other words, the same people who complain that healthcare costs are too high might have just made it a lot easier for anesthesiologists to jack up healthcare costs even further. It’s a development that underscores the complexity of the situation here. There are nuances that are lost when you’re re-enacting the French Revolution and murdering people in the street, instead of discussing complicated issues like reasonable people are supposed to do, in the “democracy” that the Left told us was so important. To be clear, there’s certainly evidence that companies like UnitedHealthcare are becoming much more aggressive in denying certain kinds of claims. A Senate report from this year, for example, found that: “In 2019, UnitedHealthcare issued an initial denial to 8.7 percent of the post-acute care prior authorization requests it received; by 2022, it denied 22.7 percent of all such requests, an increase of 172 percent. … Its 2022 denial rate for skilled nursing facilities was nine times higher than it was three years before.”  The Democrat-led Senate committee concluded that, “Medicare Advantage insurers are intentionally targeting a costly but critical area of medicine — substituting judgment about medical necessity with a calculation about financial gain.” What the report doesn’t mention is that UnitedHealthCare has profit margins of around 6%. After tax, it’s really under 4%. That means that, as a matter of basic finance, they’re not driving up profits to some ridiculous degree. Like any business, they have a lot of operating costs. They assume risks. If they started approving every claim, they’d go out of business overnight. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE The other important element here that Democrats overlook, for obvious reasons, is that Democrats are the ones who implemented coverage mandates, which inevitably raise the price of insurance for everyone. We saw that immediately after Obamacare, which was supposed to lower everyone’s premiums. In reality, it increased them dramatically.  The point I’m making here is not that UnitedHealthcare is blameless, or that the insurance industry in general shouldn’t be criticized. Or that the CEO that was just killed is some kind of saint. I have no idea what kind of guy he is. He could be the very face of evil, or he could be a decent guy, or somewhere in between. I have no clue. What I’m saying is that there are no open-and-shut, clear-cut solutions to this problem. Any kind of solution requires real debate and discussion, not murdering executives in the streets. And that should make you wonder why, exactly, the Left is so supportive of Brian Thompson’s murder. If they don’t actually care about fixing the health insurance industry, then what do they care about? It would be one thing if these Left-wing activists had the view that sometimes, when things get bad enough, an assassin needs to step up and take someone out for the good of the community. I’m not endorsing that view, obviously, but at least there’s a kind of moral coherence there. If they really believed that United Healthcare is essentially murdering people, and profiting from unspeakable moral evils, then you can see why some of these depraved Leftists might get excited by the prospect of eliminating one of the company’s executives. But any semblance of coherence goes out the window the moment you zoom out a hundred feet, and look at how these same activists are reacting to the trial of Daniel Penny. If these people really thought that it’s good and righteous to eliminate a clear and present danger to the community — as they do with the CEO of UnitedHealthcare — then why exactly do they have any objection to what Daniel Penny did? Why did they storm the subways in protest after Jordan Neely’s death, chanting “No justice, no peace”? Why have they been outside the courthouse for every day of deliberations, pressuring the jurors to convict? Why isn’t Taylor Lorenz writing articles about how it’s “normal” to be happy that Jordan Neely is dead? Why aren’t the Columbia professors telling us not to mourn his death? Even if we assume that Daniel Penny actually murdered Jordan Neely, which isn’t true, what’s the objection? Even if you pretend that Daniel Penny put a silencer on a pistol, waited until 6 AM until Jordan Neely started walking into a Hilton Hotel to terrorize some shareholder meeting, and then shot him in the back — then why exactly would Leftists be upset? There’s no way to dispute that Jordan Neely was a menace to the community. He violently assaulted multiple people, including women who were just trying to take a ride on the subway. He was threatening an entire subway car of innocent passengers the day he died. His Michael Jackson impersonation didn’t seem particularly noteworthy. He was, in every respect, a net negative on society — a clear threat to the safety and well-being of the working class. So why exactly is anyone on the Left upset that Daniel Penny took action to eliminate the threat posed by Jordan Neely, while they’re busy swooning over the assassin of the UnitedHealthCare CEO in Manhattan? There’s really only one way to make sense of it. In their world view, Jordan Neely — as a black drug addict criminal — has a life of greater value than a white male health insurance CEO. Nobody wants to say that out loud, but it’s true. If Brian Thompson had been the CEO of the same company, but he was a black woman, you would not be seeing any of the gloating and celebration. You’d probably be seeing the opposite, in fact. The Washington Post would be working overtime to find the assassin and dox everyone in his family. They’d re-hire Taylor Lorenz and have her track down the white supremacist killer, along with every single social media post he’s made since he was in kindergarten. They’d probably solve the case in about ten minutes. MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+ But as it stands, his victim happened to fit the demographic profile of a greedy, sub-human colonizer. In other words, he was white. It didn’t even matter to them that this CEO was probably a liberal. His company’s PAC certainly donated a lot of money to Kamala Harris. That wasn’t important to them.  So we’re left with murderous, unrestrained anti-white race hatred under the guise of concern about health insurance costs — a problem that none of these people actually have any interest in fixing, because all they do when they’re in power is make insurance premiums even higher. Their primary interest is destabilizing this country by dehumanizing as many white people as possible. And if that means killing some of them, so be it. That explains the response to what happened in Butler. And it explains the response to what just happened in Midtown Manhattan in front of the Hilton Hotel. If you’re a white conservative Christian, and you think that these people wouldn’t gloat the same exact way if you were murdered while you were on your way to work, then you have no idea what the Left is capable of, or what they really believe. At this point, we don’t know why exactly Brian Thompson was executed. But we do know why these ghouls are celebrating his assassin, even as they demonize men like Daniel Penny. Pay attention to what they’re saying. Spend some time reading their euphoric posts on social media. And soon enough you’ll find that, even if you’re not the CEO of a major health insurance company, they’ll have no problem coming for you next.

At 78 years old, Diane Keaton continues reinventing herself and showing her talents. From Woody Allen’s Annie Hall to Father Of The Bride, The First Wives Club, Something’s Gotta Give, and beyond, Diane is a talented and versatile actress. But what many may not realize is that acting isn’t her only passion. She also loves to sing. In early December, Diane Keaton made her solo recording debut with the holiday single First Christmas. She shared a video on her official Instagram account, and fans loved the tune. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Diane Keaton (@diane_keaton) Diane Keaton’s “First Christmas” Is A Tear Jerker The song, written by Carole Bayer Sager and Jonas Myrin shares the story of the first Christmas without a loved one. Diane shared in a press less obtained by ABC News, “When Carole and Jonas first played me ‘First Christmas,’ I got teary,” Diane said. “It is such a beautiful sentiment, and I couldn’t wait to sing it. I’m very proud to be a part of this beautiful Christmas song, and I hope you enjoy it.” In her Instagram video, dressed in her signature androgynous style, Diane delights her fans with a beautifully passionate performance. She wrote, “THIS MORNING, MY HEART IS FILLED WITH GRATITUDE FOR EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU.” One wrote, “This is the second Christmas without my father, but it still feels like the first. He was a huge fan of yours. Thank you for this.” Another fan shared, “This was perfect timing for me as I’m buying my first home and was feeling a little nervous about living alone this Christmas, but this song in the foreground makes it all lovely.” Rita Wilson chimed in, “I love the song and everyone involved! Congratulations, Diane. I remember seeing you sing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I have always loved your voice.” Diane Keaton’s First Christmas is now available on all streaming services. This story’s featured image is by Tinseltown via Shutterstock. The post Diane Keaton Makes Her Recording Debut With A Christmas Single appeared first on InspireMore.

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