Author Archives: Dana Pico

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No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! Only a fool would believe that the credentialed media didn't know about President Biden's descent into dementia

Jake Tapper, the lead Washington anchor for CNN, and Senior White House correspondent for ABC News before that, is a very well connected man in Washington media circles. He knows everybody who’s anybody, and everybody who’s anybody in DC knows him. With a guesstimated net worth of $20 million, he gets invited to all of the great parties.

Perhaps that $20 mil just isn’t enough for him, because any he’s been taking heroic measures to try to save his journalistic reputation. Too bad that no one with any sense, any sense at all, would believe that a journolist — and you can see the reason I spell it that way — as well connected as Mr Tapper was wholly unaware that President Joe Biden was slowly losing his marbles.

And here he goes again, this time in the pages of The New Yorker:

How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump

At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?

by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson | Tuesday, May 13, 2025

President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again.

His pollsters told us that no such polls existed. There was no credible data, they said, to support the notion that he would have won. All unspun information suggested it would have been a loss, likely a spectacular one, far worse than that suffered by his replacement as the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris.

The disconnect between Biden’s optimism and the unhappy reality of poll results was a constant throughout his Administration. Many insiders sensed that his inner circle shielded him from bad news. It’s also true that, for Biden to absorb those poll results, he would have had to face the biggest issue driving them: the public had concluded—long before most Democratic officials, media, and other “élites” had—that he was far too old to do the job.

Of course, there was the wicked former President Donald Trump, and a legion of evil, reich-wing conservatives all pointing out the President’s numerous gaffes, slip-ups, and dazed wandering off. While CNN and almost all of the credentialed media were firmly in Mr Biden’s corner, in the corner of anyone who could prevent Mr Trump’s election victory, wouldn’t an actual journalist of Mr Tapper5’s standing at least wonder about the videos and statements concerning the President’s mental status? Wouldn’t a real journalist at least consider investigating to see if there was anything to the stories? Chris Cillizza, late of CNN — he was laid off around Christmas of 2022 in a cost cutting move — tried to salvage his journalistic integrity with a YouTube apology for not pursuing that story aggressively enough, and letting White House aides, who had a vested interest in protecting Mr Biden, steer him away from such questions. Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal reminisced about First Lady Edith Wilson’s role shepherding President Woodrow Wilson’s last years in office following his 1919 stroke.

Messrs Tapper and Thompson again:

The real issue wasn’t his age, per se. It was the clear limitations of his abilities, which got worse throughout his Presidency. What the public saw of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse. While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as President, there were several significant issues that complicated his Presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments when he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.

The simple, “What the public saw of his functioning was concerning,” ought to have been enough for a real journalist, especially one with Mr Tapper’s connections, to at least think it worth investigating, and it tells us, as clearly as anything Mr Tapper would ever admit in public, that he knew that the President of the United States was seriously slipping.

The rest of the article tells us about what some of the high muckety-mucks got to see, and how worried they were at Mr Biden’s obvious decline, but this was all spring and summer of 2024 stuff, well after the President had decided to run again, well after he had secured the delegates for re-nomination, and well after anyone could seriously do anything about it.

In reality, it’s just a shill for the authors’ upcoming book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. I’m not willing to spend $16.99 for the Kindle edition, but I have to wonder: will the authors admit that they knew, personally knew, about Mr Biden’s decline early and kept it covered up?

The Amazon sales blurb includes:

Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.

Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.

“From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told.” Really? I notice that that list doesn’t include reporters, doesn’t include journalists! If all of those people knew about the President’s “condition and limitations,” how is it that journolists journalists, apparently not a single one of them, knew, or even had a clue?

Robert Stacy McCain likes to call the credentialed media “Democrats with bylines,” and Messrs Tapper and Thompson are setting about proving his point.

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In defense of the single family home In the end, they're a lot better than rowhouses, apartments, and condos in large cities.

Our previous house in Pennsylvania, photo during winter of 2015-16.

Though I have published pictures of our previous home, of which I was very proud, I usually cropped them on the right, because it was a duplex. When we bought it, in 2002, it was pained entirely white, and the doors were a faded lemon yellow, with a single, brass doorknob on the right-hand door. I added the antique brass door set, deadbolt, and kickplates, and painted it red.

The stained glass in the transom was a Christmas present to my darling bride — of 45 years, 11 months, and 24 days — and the columns are now PVC, purchased from Home Despot Depot, because one of the old wooden ones was getting to be in poor shape. The three-color paint job I left to the professionals. I redecked the porch, but rather than painting it grey, as it had been before, I used Cabot’s Australian Oil in red mahogany on mahogany flooring, and had the porch deck looking like it could have been an interior floor!

Nevertheless, it was a duplex, and that meant a common wall, and a family on the other side of the building. It wasn’t bad, at first; they were decent neighbors. But, alas! they broke up, and the now single guy living on the other side couldn’t afford to keep up the mortgage, and moved out, just walking away, and leaving the other side empty. A young realtor bought it out, did a little bit of work on the inside, and then sold it for an inflated price. OK, fine, that could only increase the value of our side!

The trouble for us is that it was sold to an unmarried couple of Philadelphia cops, who were planning on using it as a vacation home. Less than a year after they bought it, they had an apparently nasty breakup, and stopped paying the mortgage. This was 2010, in the depths of the prime rate mortgage recession, and the house went for over a year in arrears. As winter was approaching, and the house remained vacant, I went and opened the exterior hose bib, to try to drain the water out of the lines. Some did come out, but without being able to open a faucet upstairs, inside the house, I don’t know how well it drained.

I was finally able to get some details from the realtor who was trying to sell it, including which bank held the mortgage. I was willing to make a low-ball, cash offer to buy the place, but the banks in 2010, inundated with non-performing mortgages, hadn’t moved to foreclosure, and wouldn’t entertain any offers to buy it from them, and I certainly wasn’t going to go through the realtor and pay off what was owed on the place! But at least I was able to inform them that the property hadn’t been winterized, and would suffer serious damage.

At least the bank sent a crew to go inside and winterize the place! Nevertheless, I still wound up having to cut the grass, for two years, just so my place wouldn’t look like poop.

Which brings me to this, in Tuesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

When the abandoned rowhouse next door collapses

The Jackson family had complained to the city about the abandoned North Philly rowhouse next door. It partially collapsed last month, sending debris into their yard and endangering their home.

by Michaelle Bond | Tuesday, May 13, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

Thomas Jackson was wearing a headset, immersed in a video game one stormy night in early April when he heard a crash. The 29-year-old was afraid his mother had fallen down the stairs, but Sherrilyn Jackson had slept through the noise and only woke up to his panicked shouts.

They didn‘t see anything out of place in their Sharswood rowhouse, so they assumed Thomas had heard a particularly loud crack of thunder. He returned to his game.

It wasn‘t until the next morning when he stepped into the backyard that he saw what had happened: the back of the abandoned rowhouse next door had partially collapsed. Bricks, glass, and wood had burst free from the plaster, crashed through a chain link fence, and spilled into the Jacksons’ yard.

The rest of reporter Michaelle Bond’s story deals with the problems and worried that the Jackson family has had, from a now collapsed and eventually demolished row home, attached to their own, and the programs the city has to deal with such problems, as well as the reasons so many homes in the City of Brotherly Love get abandoned.

The Jacksons estimate it had been at least eight years since anyone lived in the now demolished rowhouse on North 25th Street.

And for two decades, the property has been racking up unpaid taxes, according to city records. The owner now owes the city about $29,000 in real estate taxes for the property, which has an assessed value of $241,600.

An assessed value of $241,600, for an abandoned house in bad enough shape that it partially collapsed? Houses on the same street, North 25th, show up on Zillow as being worth the low to mid $100,000 range, though a brand new condo on the same street, within two blocks, is listed for $269,000. The land itself has value, but vacant lots from demolished rowhouses in the neighborhood are shown in the $10,000 to $20,000 range.

But that isn’t what inspired this article. Rather, several people with whom I interact on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — are pushing more dense, urban housing, and telling their readers how horrible sterile, unwalkable subdivisions, with no corner bodegas or coffee shops or restaurants are. Everyone is entitled to his opinion, of course, but the experience of the Jacksons, living in a rowhouse with attached neighbors on both the left and the right, as well as my own in a duplex, persuades me to defend the single-family home, the land-wasteful, you’ve got to mow your own lawn, and drive to get anywhere single-family home.

The single-family homeowner doesn’t have to worry about his property being damaged if the neighbor’s house collapses, doesn’t have to worry about his home being damaged if the neighbor’s water pipes freeze and burst, doesn’t have to mow the neighbor’s lawn if he refuses, and, in my case, doesn’t have to worry about restricting the color palette if he wants to paint the exterior of his home.

Or at least he doesn’t if he’s smart enough not to buy a home that has officious HOA Karens! 🙂

The single-family home has long been the American dream, complete with driveway, a yard for the kids, and maybe even a white picket fence. Some of our newer subdivisions can be kind of sterile, much of that due to building homes that are larger but still not overly expensive, the McMansion types.[1]I spent an entire winter, 1978-79, in Dayton, Ohio, pouring and finishing garage and basement slabs for McMansion houses already shelled over by Ryan Homes. But nicer subdivisions can be found, as well as older single-family homes, where the trees are still in the yard, and mature, where there’s shade as well as sunlight, and where the noise of urban rowhouses and apartment buildings isn’t assailing your ears.

References

References
↑1 I spent an entire winter, 1978-79, in Dayton, Ohio, pouring and finishing garage and basement slabs for McMansion houses already shelled over by Ryan Homes.
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Bureaucrats gotta bureaucrat It looks like the Philadelphia School District administration don't want to admit the basis of their problems

We noted, last Friday, the waste case that Martin Luther King High School in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia has become. MLKHS at least has the ‘excuse,’ if it can be called that, of being a school in the depressed East Germantown neighborhood, with 100% of students coming from ‘economically disadvantaged’ families.

But what about a case like this?

One of Philly’s premier high schools is in turmoil, staff, parents, and students say

Enrollment issues, staff divisions and other problems are troubling Philadelphia’s storied High School for Creative and Performing Arts, those inside say.

by Kristen A Graham | Monday, May 12, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

One of Philadelphia‘s top magnet schools is in disarray, those inside it say — shedding enrollment, losing teachers, and facing issues with safety and school climate.

Make no mistake: The Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, in its historic, columned building on South Broad Street, continues to produce shows, concerts, a musical. But it has changed, and continuing problems with internal politics and personnel threaten its stability.

“There’s all this positive stuff going on, but underneath all of that is a lot of toxicity,” one teacher said.

More than a dozen CAPA staff and former staff, students, and parents described to The Inquirer a school roiled by internal strife. Most of those interviewed declined to be publicly named for fear of reprisal.

Naturally, I checked the school’s rankings, and again have the obvious question: with only 60% testing at grade-level proficiency in math, and just 44% in science, how does the school have a 98% graduation rate? A quarter of the students are behind in reading, in a school geared to the performing arts, yet 98% are still being graduated.

I do have a question about the statistics. It was no surprise that 100% of MLKHS students were from ‘economically disadvantaged’ families, but the rankings indicated that 100% of CAPA students were from ‘economically disadvantaged’ families as well, and that 100% were on the free school lunch program. That makes no sense in a magnet school like CAPA, which leads me to suspect that the city simply records all students as being poor, to give them a free lunch.

Concerns about problems at CAPA have been brought to the Philadelphia School District for years, to the school board in recent weeks, and, most recently, to City Council. The teachers union is also aware.

Assuming that reporter Kristen Graham’s statement is completely accurate, it would mean that the School District administration has known about problems at CAPA for “years,” but only reported these to the city’s Board of Education — nine members appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by the City Council — “in recent weeks.”

The Board of Education is the governing body responsible for overseeing all policies and budgetary decisions of the School District of Philadelphia.

How, exactly, can the Board take any informed decisions if the School District’s administration doesn’t give the Board the information it needs?

“At this point, it‘s pretty bad in there,” a second staffer said. “CAPA has always been an ‘everyone’s family’ kind of place, and now there’s all this division, and it‘s spilled over into so many things, into enrollment, into teacher retention. Morale is very low, and I suspect that the enrollment is going to be affected for several years to come.”

Because of the projected enrollment drop, CAPA was initially slated to lose five teachers — including those in key roles in the arts school — but district officials said they would restore some of those positions. But no official notice of the restoration has come, and many teachers have accepted other positions or are actively interviewing.

One would think that the Board, “responsible for overseeing all policies and budgetary decisions,” would have noticed an enrollment drop leading to the reduction in teachers. Were the Board really in the dark about CAPA?

Perhaps they weren’t in the dark, but didn’t want anything to do with the problems, because Miss Graham devoted over a dozen paragraphs telling readers that the problems are racial. Assistant principal Kimberly Byrd is black, but has initial problems with then-Principal Joanne Beaver, a white woman. Miss Graham noted a succession of leaders who then just up and left, though Miss Byrd has remained.

The Inquirer story noted that CAPA’s student body is “diverse”: 50% black; 27% white; 12% Hispanic; and 6% Asian. This differs significantly, though not dramatically, from the city’s overall population, which are 39.9% black, 33.6% non-Hispanic white, 15.2% Hispanic of any race, and 7.8% Asian.

Miss Graham stated explicitly that CAPA has “too few Black teachers”, but also noted that both nationwide and in the Philadelphia School District in particular, blacks make up a significantly smaller percentage of teachers, just 6.2% in Philly. Yet, as we noted on Friday, Miss Graham reported that the School District is understaffed by almost 300 teachers, which means that the School District ought to be able to hire about 300 new teachers as long as those teachers were qualified, and could pass the background check and drug test. Are there simply not enough black — or other than black — applicants for those jobs?

The Inquirer story was a long one, and neither CAPA nor the School District wanted to be available to talk to the reporter, but Miss Graham was able to plenty of staff who would talk anonymously:

Byrd, more than a dozen staffers said, often labels CAPA as an “inherently racist institution” to faculty, staff, and students, a notion that those interviewed by The Inquirer — both Black and white — dismiss.

Reporter Graham was careful with her words, and gave plenty of space to Veronica Joyner, education chair of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, who was speaking on her behalf, and Barbara Ransom, Miss Byrd’s lawyer, to defend the Assistant Principal, but as I read the article, it certainly seems as though Miss Byrd was the source of much of the tension. If that’s the case, it’s little wonder that the School District and Board of Education don’t want to get involved; can you imagine the reaction in the City of Brotherly Love if a black school administrator was disciplined or removed for stirring up racial problems?

In a 2021 story — we were unable to find anything more recent — the newspaper reported that Philadelphia was second only to Chicago as the most internally segregated major city in the country between blacks and whites, and sixth most segregated between Hispanic and white residents. We reported, two years ago, that internal segregation was more likely to increase, as much of the new housing being constructed was in the more expensive areas of Philly.

The district declined to make CAPA administrators available for an interview.

Translation: the School District administrators were told by the Inquirer about the story on which Miss Graham was working, and they wanted no part of it. We have written many things critical of the newspaper, and those were deserved, but in this instance, Miss Graham did as good a work as was possible under the deliberate silence of the School District’s high muckety-mucks, and Publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ instructions that the Inky would be an “antiracist news organization.” Telling an uncomfortable truth does not come easily to the Inquirer, but Kristen Graham came close.

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As always, the credentialed media report on an individual point, and miss the real story

Every once in a while, I’ll come across a news story in the credentialed media that tells an entire story in just one sentence, but then moves on to a side issue.

This Philly 10th grader has had no English teacher all year. Now, the district wants her to take a high-stakes test.

Almost 300 teaching positions are vacant across the School District of Philadelphia. One student went to the school board to share how a vacancy is hurting her and her classmates.

Continue reading →

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When Will Bunch refers to a prelate as Archbishop Rush Limbaugh, you know that prelate must be a good one!

The Most Reverend Charles Chaput, OFMCap, was appointed to become the Archbishop of Philadelphia on July 19, 2011, in part due to his aggressive and responsible handing of priestly sex abuse cases. The Archdiocese had serious problems in that regard, under former Archbishops Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua and, to a lesser extent, Justin Cardinal Rigali. One would have thought that such would have made The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch happy, but no, Mr Bunch preferred to refer to him as Archbishop Rush Limbaugh.

Actually, being Archbishop Rush Limbaugh, someone dedicated to the letter of the law, would be a good thing!

And today? The distinguished columnist decides to tout an OpEd by Alfred G. Mueller II, an assistant dean of the William T. Daly School of General Studies and Graduate Education at Stockton University, and it seems that Dr Mueller doesn’t like Archbishop Emeritus Chaput very much. Continue reading →

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Harvard admits to anti-Semitism on campus The real question: what will the University do about it?

When I don’t have a good photo for an article, perhaps just a picture of my morning coffee being made will suffice!

We noted, just three weeks ago, how Harvard University, the oldest and most prestigious institution of higher learning in our great nation, rather than at least negotiate with the Trump Administration over policies to end blatant anti-Semitism on campus, was choosing to double-down on discrimination instead.

Harvard is, of course, a private school, so the government cannot order it to comply, but as a private institution the government is not obligated to fund it, either. But that doesn’t mean that the university doesn’t have to address its problems. From The Atlantic:

Harvard Begins to Confront Its Anti-Semitism Problem

Continue reading →

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You in a heap o’ trouble, girl! Nothing quite exposes some people's stupidity like social media!

Sometimes I’m just shaking my head in stunned amazement. How, I have to ask, could a public school teacher call for the assassination of President Trump, in public, on Facebook, and still have a job?

Well, maybe she doesn’t, as Superintendent Peter Hallen notified the public that he and “appropriate authorities” are actively investigating the “incident.”

Hat tip to Carol Marks of The Victory Girls! The copy of the post at the right is a screen capture, before Facebook takes it down or the lovely Miss St Germain takes it down.

At the moment, she’s doubling down. Continue reading →

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Leaping before they looked Bad causes attract bad people, and the Democrats certainly chose a bad cause!

It has to be asked: did President Trump and his staff just plain set up the Democrats for failure?

Following the arrest and deportation of the “Maryland man” Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the left waxed wroth and have trumped it up that his deportation was unjustified, that Mr Abrego Garcia was as pure as the wind driven snow. Several Democratic lawmakers even traveled to El Salvador, to try to rescue the poor, abused soul and return him to the United States.

Oops! Continue reading →

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To the surprise of no one, The Philadelphia Inquirer again endorses softer-than-Charmin-on-crime Larry Krasner Virtually nothing they wrote has to do with actual crime on the city's streets

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering the hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family, because it was the District Attorney who had not kept Cpl. O’Connor’s killer in jail when he could have.

I wrote, on May Day, that I would be “completely unsurprised if The Philadelphia Inquirer in general, and far-left columnist Will Bunch individually endorse(d)” the city’s George Soros-sponsored, police-hating and criminal-loving District Attorney, Larry Krasner, for re-nomination. Well, I am completely unsurprised! Continue reading →