Author Archives: Dana Pico

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#TrumpDerangementSyndrome: the left are wholly upset, but the Venezuelan people are overjoyed. Who can actually be angry that Nicolas Maduro is out of power, except the leftist sympathizers?

I will admit to not having liked the fact that the United States armed forces were used to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, because the last thing I want is the US involved in yet another war, but it’s very easy to appreciate that the tinhorn dictator has been removed. I do worry that there is enough #TrumpDerangementSyndrome in the United States that it may be impossible to find a jury which will convict the now former dictator, because the American left hate President Donald Trump so much that they’d be mad if he cured cancer or walked across the reflecting pool. New York City’s new socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was particularly upset, though, as one commenter to his tweet said, “‘Unilaterally attacking a sovereign nation is an act of war and a violation of federal and international law’ – sorry I thought this was a statement from October 8th 2023, but I think you had phrased that one differently…”

The Louisville Courier-Journal had this interesting report:

Report: Delta Force practiced Maduro extraction in Kentucky

by Leo Bertucci | Sunday, January 4, 2026 | 11:47 AM EST

Commandos in the elite U.S. Army unit tasked with extracting Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and his wife early Jan. 3 trained for their mission using a full-scale model of the Maduro compound built in Kentucky, The New York Times reported.

Leading up to “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela, Delta Force commandos “practiced blowing through steel doors at ever-faster paces” inside the model compound constructed by the Joint Special Operations Command, The Times reported.

Alas! What my best friend used to refer to as the Curious Journal is hidden behind a paywall, and I do not subscribe to it; I’m paying out enough for the newspapers to which I do subscribe, one of which is The New York Times, so, even though I’m always willing to give a Kentucky source its props, I have to go to the Times for more.

In August, a clandestine team of C.I.A. officers slipped into Venezuela with a plan to collect information on Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president, whom the Trump administration had labeled a narco-terrorist.

The C.I.A. team moved about Caracas, remaining undetected for months while it was in the country. The intelligence gathered about the Venezuelan leader’s daily movements — combined with a human source close to Mr. Maduro and a fleet of stealth drones flying secretly above — enabled the agency to map out minute details about his routines.

That’s the kind of mission which put agents at serious risk, because the United States does not have an open embassy in Caracas, meaning that none of the agents had diplomatic immunity.

It was a highly dangerous mission. With the U.S. embassy closed, the C.I.A. officers could not operate under the cloak of diplomatic cover. But it was highly successful. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that because of the intelligence gathered by the team, the United States knew where Mr. Maduro moved, what he ate and even what pets he kept.

El Presidenté moved around a lot, and the mission required certain knowledge of where he would be.

In contrast to messy U.S. interventions of the past — by the military in Panama or the C.I.A. in Cuba — the operation to grab Mr. Maduro was virtually flawless, according to multiple officials familiar with the details, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plans.

In the run-up, Delta Force commandos rehearsed the extraction inside a full-scale model of Mr. Maduro’s compound that the Joint Special Operations Command had built in Kentucky. They practiced blowing through steel doors at ever-faster paces.

The military had been readying for days to execute the mission, waiting for good weather conditions and a time when the risk of civilian casualties would be minimized.

Translation: this mission had been laid on for months. The model of Mr Maduro’s compound had to be constructed, the plan and the team put together, and practice time organized. Yet, with all of that, the secrecy of the mission was kept.

Let me be clear about this: while the Democrats in Congress have been whining that President Trump didn’t notify them in advance, if they weren’t notified it’s because some of them would have immediately gotten the message to Venezuela to sabotage the mission! Can you picture what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of her squadristi, or Bernie Sanders, or Eric Swalwell would have done if they had learned of the mission in advance?

That the United States was forced to take this move is unfortunate, and we should absolutely not try to occupy Venezuela, but only the truly deranged haters of President Trump, such as Will Bunch, linked below, can actually be sorry that Mr Maduro is now in prison. There’s no guarantee that this will Make Venezuela Great Again, but it’s certainly a step in that direction.
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#TrumpDerangementSyndrome: the left and the media go nuts over bruising on President Trump’s hands

Searching Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — for Trump bruised hand brings up scads of tweets, mostly from our good friends on the left, searching for something, anything! to somehow trash our 47th President. Shredder Girl wrote, “CNN ignored every concern about Joe Biden’s health but they’re all over Trump’s bruised hand”.

Bruising on Trump’s left hand sparks renewed questions about his health

By Adam Cancryn | New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2025

New bruising on Donald Trump’s left hand is reviving questions about his health nearly one year after he became the oldest president to take the oath of office.

Across a series of events last week, the 79-year-old Trump appeared with discoloration or light bruising on the back of his left hand, in addition to the more persistent bruise on his right hand that has been visible for months.

The new bruise appears to complicate the White House’s explanation that the right-handed Trump developed the bruising through constant handshaking along with a regular regimen of aspirin that can make such discoloration more common.

And while medical experts told CNN there is no fresh cause for concern, calling it a likely benign condition common in older people, they warned that Trump’s reluctance to be more transparent about his health only threatens to intensify the scrutiny that he’s struggled all year to escape.

“They’re just feeding the curiosity cycle,” said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “He’s in the public eye, he has a certain image he wants to portray, and even these minor things detract from that image.”

Donald Trump is President of the United States, and the President’s health is always something of a public concern, but somehow, some way, our credentialed media managed to ignore every concern about the health of our 46th President, even as he was tripping on stairs, losing his train of thought, and just plain zoning out in public, right up until they couldn’t hide things any more.

Didn’t President Joe Biden look handsome and strong and healthy there? That’s the image the Democrats and the Biden campaign tried to project, and you were supposed to believe it. The tweet screen captured to the right is time-stamped at 10:53 PM, after the debate.

Jennifer Rubin is the former ‘neoconservative’ columnist and warmonger for The Washington Post, always agitating for more money and weapons to keep the Russo-Ukrainian War going, and completely infected by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome. On May 19, 2024, she wrote:

President Biden took the media and political world by surprise in challenging Donald Trump to two debates — and then swiftly accepting offers from CNN and ABC. Trump accepted the debates, on June 27 and Sept. 10, but whether he will show up is another matter.

Yup, Mr Trump showed up! Oops! Then the whole nation saw what the credentialed media, the ones who tell us All the News That’s Fit to Print, the ones who say that Democracy Dies in Darkness, didn’t previously print, didn’t want to life the darkness.

It’s hardly the first time that the credentialed media stifled any criticisms of a presidential candidate’s health: they covered up for Hillary Clinton as well, her several falls and then her brief lapse into catatonia, minimizing what they couldn’t completely hide.

But, alas! it seems that the media being reticent only applies to Democratic candidates.

Is Mr Trump’s health in question? He is, after all, 79 years old, he’s obese, and he loves his junk food. He has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition among older adults, something which can explain his frequently swollen ankles. But somehow, some way, I don’t see that stuff as being disqualifying for Mr Trump to continue as President. Franklin Roosevelt managed to lead us through World War II when he was mostly dependent upon a wheelchair, and could only walk with heavy metal braces on his legs.

The Democrats thought that Joe Biden could run again, even though he was clearly sinking into dementia, all because they hate Republicans in general, and Mr Trump very, very specifically.

But now the left are fixated on our current President’s ankles and bruised hands.

Nevertheless, at his advanced age, it’s always possible that Mr Trump could fall too ill to do his job, or even die. But that’s where we are fortunate, in that the insipid Mike Pence is not Vice President, and J D Vance is. I suppose it would then be his turn to be ‘literally Hitler.’

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Deonte Demarcus Carter ain’t in too big a heap o’ trouble

Sadly, my usual title for these articles, “You in a heap o’ trouble, boy!” doesn’t really apply to Deonte Demarcus Carter, because he’s in far less trouble than he should be for killing two men.

Mother says she was failed by KY courts after man gets 10 years in 2 killings

Deonte Demarcus Carter, mugshot via Kentucky Online Offenders Lookup, and is a public record.

By Taylor Six | December 26, 2025 5:00 AMCristina Sandusky feels failed by the Fayette County justice system.

Deonte Demarcus Carter was sentenced this month to 10 years in prison for his role in a pair of fatal Lexington shootings that happened 21 days apart. One of those killed her son.

No, of course what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal didn’t publish the killer’s mugshot, but it was easy enough for me to look it up. While the McClatchy Mugshot Policy describes the non-publication of mugshots as meant to protect those accused but not yet convicted of a crime, something which would not apply to Mr Carter, but also frets about “disproportionately harm(ing) people of color.”

Carter pleaded to lesser charges of manslaughter in both cases, and Judge Julie Muth Goodman sentenced him to a total of 15 years: two 10-year sentences, to be served simultaneously, for the killings, and five years for criminal facilitation to robbery.

The charges were reduced as part of a plea negotiations made with prosecutors, who felt they didn’t have enough evidence to convict Carter of murder.

In a Dec. 9 interview with the Herald-Leader, Sandusky described different parts of her experience with legal officials as “dismissive,” “disheartening” and “disrespectful.”

“They didn’t do anything for my son,” she said of Fayette County prosecutors. “Just got to have a win under their belt.”

Sadly, if Cristina Sandusky feels failed by the justice system, she would feel even more failed if she chose to use the Kentucky Online Offender Lookup system, to see what Mr Carter is facing. According to the system, Mr Carter’s maximum date of release is December 21, 2036, eleven years from now. However, his potential “good behavior” release date is March 21, 2033, 7¼ years from now, and he will be eligible for parole as early as June 21, 2030, in just 4½ years from now, when he will be just 32 or 33.

From the moment Carter’s case was assigned to Judge Goodman, Sandusky said she was told the judge was not friendly to victims’ families.

Goodman has been criticized, including by Kentucky’s attorney general, for previous rulings deemed lenient. But Sandusky maintained faith the judge would do the right thing.

For the mother, that meant sentencing Carter to the maximum sentence of 20 years — 10 years apiece for the killings, plus some additional time for the robbery charge.

But Sandusky instead described Goodman’s comments in the courtroom as “more sympathetic to the defense.”

“She was nasty and dismissive,” Sandusky said. “She didn’t look at me one time.”

I would suspect that Her Honor was at least slightly ashamed of what she was about to do, but to be ashamed requires a sense of shame, and too-lenient judges have none.

Goodman lauded Carter and said the justice system had failed him throughout his youth, Sandusky recalled.

The judge “lauded” Mr Carter, a man who killed two people? “(T)he justice system had failed him throughout his youth”? How does that excuse him murdering two people?

Judge Julie Muth Goodman, from 2022 Kentucky Voter Guide.

So, who is Judge Julie Muth Goodman? The 2022 Kentucky Voter Guide gave the Her Honor the opportunity to post a campaign biography, as well as answer a couple of questions:

What do you see as your primary responsibilities and duties if elected to this office?

My primary responsibilities are to enforce our laws and by doing so make sure our community is the safest and fairest possible.

I will admit to not seeing how a sentence which could have a two-time murderer to possibly be back on the streets in just 4½ years, still at a young age, as “mak(ing) sure our community is the safest and fairest possible.”

What are your views on whether the court, as a whole, deals effectively with racial bias? What could improve that?

Unfortunately I do not believe that the Court system or our community always effectively addresses racial bias. I have effectively worked with the Administrative Office of the Courts to mandate that the county attorney’s diversion program which often denied people of color the opportunity to participate because the office inappropriately used Juvenile records which are adjudications and confidential to deny people of color access to the program and to also require that the program use a sliding scale so that all eligible people can afford to participate. By making these changes more people of color have been given the same access to the program as others.

Translation: she’s going to give defendants “of color” a real break, or at least she certainly did for Mr Carter. Even with the Alford plea, she could have sentenced him to 25 years in the state penitentiary — two consecutive ten-year sentences for manslaughter plus five years for the robbery — but chose to give him an extreme break. It should be noted that both of the men Mr Carter killed were black; do black lives not really matter to Judge Goodman?

Of course, Kobby Martin and Devon Sandusky are both stone-cold graveyard dead, pushing up daisies for four years now, so what’s the point of locking up their killer for 25 years; it won’t bring Messrs Martin and Sandusky back to life, will it? Just because Mr Carter is a ‘persistent felon,’ as described under Kentucky law, but not prosecuted this time as part of the plea deal, doesn’t mean that he won’t straighten up and fly right after this prison term, does it? And if Mr Carter kills someone else after he gets out of prison, whenever that is, it won’t be Judge Goodman’s fault in the slightest, will it?

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When a raging anti-Semite feels comfortable enough to go on a tirade.

Lower Gwynedd Township was established in 1698 by William Penn, a very well-to-do township in what is now mostly well-to-do Montgomery County, one of the collar counties of the City of Brotherly Love. I have done a couple of projects in Lower Gwynedd, and not only could I not have afforded a home there, I couldn’t even afford some of their driveways! In the 2024 election, the residents of Montgomery County gave 317,103 votes, 60.62% of the total, to then Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff, and only 198,311 votes, 37.91% of the total to our then 45th and now 47th President, Donald Trump. Only neighboring Delaware County, 61.15%, and Philadelphia itself, 78.57%, gave Mrs Emhoff a higher percentage of their votes in the Keystone State.

Perhaps that’s why Philip Leddy, the principal of Lower Gwynedd Elementary School felt it safe to go on an anti-Semitic rant, even in private, as so many of our nation’s good Democrats have decided that they hate Jews for defending themselves following Hamas’ October 7th massacre.

Well, he shouldn’t have felt too safe, because he’s now the former principal!

Pennsylvania principal axed after ranting about ‘Jew money’ in voicemail to parent

By David Spector | Saturday, December 27, 2025 | 9:33 AM EST

Philip Leddy, photo by Wissahickon School District, and is a public record.

A Pennsylvania principal whose antisemitic tirade about “Jew money” was inadvertently recorded has been fired.

Lower Gwynedd Elementary School Principal Philip Leddy was axed Tuesday by the Wissahickon School Board.

Leddy, 45, was returning a call from a parent when he got the dad’s voicemail and left a message, but then apparently failed to end the call, Philadelphia’s ABC 7 reported.

That’s actually ABC 6, not ABC 7, but the link is accurate.

Leddy allegedly accused the parent of having “Jew money” and could be heard muttering “they control the banks,” according to recording, which was posted by the advocacy group StopAntisemitism.

”They go to Jew camp . . . everyone at the camp hates that family . . . ,” he was also caught saying, according to the group’s recording.

Parents in the district have accused the school board of attempting to paper over their longstanding issues with antisemitism by hanging Leddy out to dry.

“It was an easy one for them because it was old school anti-semitism versus more modern, like anti-Zionism antisemitism,” Beth Ages, who has two kids in the district, told The Post.

Jewish parents in the district noted a mural in Wissahickon Middle School which depicts the rabid anti-Semite Linda Sarsour.

Perhaps the anti-Semites are achieving their mostly unstated goals:

“Jewish families are leaving in droves,” said Lynn Simon, who has two kids in the district.

I was unable to find Mr Leddy’s credentials, but he must have at least a Master’s degree to have been a principal in a Montgomery County school district. He has to be an educated man, at least as far as education in education goes. He had to have gone to college, and, at his age, 45, it had to have been several years ago. He became principal in 2023, presumably before the October 7, 2023 attack.

But this was the funniest point of all, from the 6ABC news story: he had “previously chaired an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee in another district, according to his school bio.” Looks like being all in on DEI doesn’t cover inclusion of Jooooos.

The School District leaders said that Mr Leddy wasn’t just talking to himself, but was apparently speaking with another district employee at the time. No action has been taken against that employee, who contributed nothing anti-Semitic to Mr Leddy’s tirade, but left unreported is the fact that the now former principal felt comfortable enough to engage in that tirade with another school employee.

And that’s the part that gets to me. Unless Mr Leddy is an absolute moron, he had to have known that an anti-Semitic rant was the kind of thing that could get him fired, yet he felt secure enough to do it anyway in front of another school district employee. That tells me that not only did Mr Leddy not think his rant was wrong, but he seemingly didn’t think that whomever the other school employee was wouldn’t find it a problem either. Just how anti-Semitic is wealthy Lower Gwynedd that this could have occurred?

Fortunately, with the ongoing strike, there should be plenty of available positions as baristas at Starbucks, so maybe he won’t starve. But, then again, he probably won’t be able to afford to live in Montgomery County.

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He’s ugly, and his mother dresses him funny

In his Twitter biography, Harry Pettit describes himself as:

Academic researcher. Geographer: extraction and resistance in MENA. Author of The Labor of Hope. Opinions my own, repost not endorsement. Free Palestine

I’ll reserve judgement on what kind of “academic researcher” he is, but he’s all in on the “Free Palestine”, more accurately described as free barbarism, movement. He even said:

October 7th was a legitimate and successful resistance operation. ‘israel’ made up lies and killed their own because they wanted cover to commit a holocaust.

while retweeting this hysterically funny claim:

Hamas has published a 42-page report rejecting claims that civilians were targeted on October 7. The report says fighters were instructed to avoid civilians, hospitals, schools, & medics, and accuses Israel of spreading false information. It urges the ICC or an independent body to investigate civilian casualty claims.

Yeah, uh huh, right. Hamas were so proud of their “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack that they filmed some of it. And it takes a special kind of stupid to see the kidnapping of children as “avoid(ing) civilians.” Hamas must believe that Westerners are stupid, and there’s at least some evidence that they’re right about that, to judge by the number of Westerners who actually support the Palestinians.

But this latest bit is just as inane. Mr Pettit calls “Olax” an “absolute hero” for throwing a brick through a window of the British embassy in The Hague. Mr Ex-Lax, oops, sorry, Olax has tried to get himself arrested, so that he can begin a hunger strike in solidarity with the Palestina Action hunger strikers in British jails.

Perhaps he hadn’t hears tat four of the eight hunger strikers gave up their action, leaving only Heba Muraisi, 31, Teuta Hoxha, 29, Kamran Ahmed, 28, and Lewie Chiaramello, 22, who is refusing food every other day because he has diabetes, actually on strike. I’m not certain how Mr Chiaramello could be considered a true hunger striker if he’s eating every other day, but I don’t think that not being able to comprehend the logic of the left is a serious deficiency.

Ahhh, but Mr Olax said in his video, “I intend not to eat, to NOT drink, (and) will refuse all life prolonging medical care.” Human beings starting in decent physical condition can survive over a month without food, but the body starts to shut down after just three days without water. Depending upon conditions, and death can occur. Four or even five days survival is possible, but just barely. It looks like he’ll have a pretty short hunger strike if he refuses to drink, and refuses intravenous hydration.

I look at Mr Olax’s video, and my first thought is: how does he really intend to persuade anyone not already on his side while showing wholly messy and unkempt hair, a beard which looks like [insert slang term for feces here], or like a ‘Palestinian’ jihadi, and a belly which looks like he has very little experience in missing meals? Clearly Dress for Success” was not in his bookcase!

John Wayne supposedly once said, “Life is tough, but it’s tougher when you’re stupid.” In starting a war that they knew they could not win, Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’ who supported and cheered them on proved that life is tougher because they’re stupid. And the people living in the luxury of Western civilization who support Islamist barbarism are even dumber than the ‘Palestinians.’

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“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” ― William F. Buckley

I will admit it: there was a strong feeling of amusement among sensible people when the simpleton from Sweden was arrested for protesting in support of the British pro-terrorism group. Greta Thunberg had made a name for herself as a climate kook, but has branched out in support of Hamas, Palestinian terrorism, and against Western civilization defending ourselves from the forces of barbarism, even though it is Western civilization itself which gave her the luxury to protest against anything rather than having to spend her time and energy scratching the dirt in hopes of feeding herself and the three or so kids she’d have popped out by now in a subsistence lifestyle.

But there is a more important point which needs to be made: our British forebears and other European ancestors have been criminalizing the freedom of speech which we take for granted.

Amy Coney Barrett Issues Free Speech Warning

Wednesday, December 24, 2025 | 9:41 AM EST

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has warned about threats to free speech in the United Kingdom.

Coney made the remarks during an interview with Bishop Robert Barron for an episode of his podcast, Bishop Barron Presents, which was released on Sunday.

“Think about what’s happening with respect to free speech rights in the U.K.,” Barrett said during a discussion about the purpose of law. “Contrary opinions or opinions that are not in the mainstream are not being tolerated, and they’re even being criminalized. Because of the First Amendment, that can’t happen here.”

It can’t? it wasn’t until Associate Justice Ruth Ginsberg went to her eternal reward and Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed that the Supreme Court took freedom of religion into account when it came to the restrictions that states put on churches to fight the COVID-19 panicdemic.[1]No, that’s not a typographical error; panicdemic was exactly how I intended to spell it, because panic is exactly how governments reacted.

It was under the Administration of President Joe Biden that an FBI “Analyst” submitted a proposal to monitor traditional Catholics who prefer the Tridentine, or Traditional Latin, Mass, “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics,” or RTEs, he called them, because “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists,” or RMVEs might be interested in using Latin Mass Catholics to spread their goals.

Someone leaked a hand-redacted, redacted by magic marker, copy of the “FBI internal use only” document, and the Bureau decided, rather quickly, that they ought to withdraw the document entirely.

FBI retracts leaked document orchestrating investigation of Catholics

By Tyler Arnold and Joe Bukuras | Thursday, February 9, 2023 | 3:15 PM EST

The FBI says it is retracting a leaked document published on the internet Feb. 8 that appears to reveal that the bureau’s Richmond division launched an investigation into “radical traditionalist” Catholics and their possible ties to “the far-right white nationalist movement.”

In response to an inquiry from CNA, the FBI said it will remove the document because “it does not meet our exacting standards.”

Really? The document is ‘sourced’ citing far-left political sources, including Salon, The Atlantic, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. If there are less biased sources, they were redacted from the document. It’s so bad that it makes me wonder: if it was a great departure from the Bureau’s “exacting standards,” why wouldn’t the document author have realized it, and the Bureau have flagged it before it was leaked? Or is the document not really that great a departure from those “exacting standards,” which calls into question just how “exacting” those standards really are.

Can we tell the truth here? The document was retracted because it was leaked, and the FBI were embarrassed. But without our First Amendment, not only would a government investigation of “radical traditionalist Catholics” be perfectly legal and not questionable at all, but the fact that the “FBI internal use only” document was leaked and published could have been illegal.

Barrett’s comments come as Britain has faced increased scrutiny over its policing of speech, including from Vice President JD Vance, in recent months.

Some critics have focused on the Online Safety Act, rolled out this year, which requires social media companies to remove illegal content on their platforms. Critics say is being implemented too broadly and has resulted in the censorship of legal content.

Even with our First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press, our good friends on the left have waxed apoplectic over the freedoms which allow non-liberal, non-leftist news and opinions to be disseminated, as Michael Tomasky, editor of the New Republic blamed those freedoms for Kamala Harris Emhoff’s defeat, even as his own magazine was using those very same freedoms to publish.

The New York Times has published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence, and that Twitter’s bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes freedom of speech. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to Gab and Rumble.

The left were predictably aghast when Mr Musk did buy Twitter and imposed a much broader freedom of speech regime. When it comes to the American left, and how the Biden Administration tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, and that very liberal hater of free speech, Nina Jankowicz.

One thing has been made clear: our First — and Second! — Amendment rights have been under attack even here, not by sensible conservatives, but by the left. Under President Biden, himself (purportedly) a Catholic, we’ve seen attacks on the freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and peaceable assembly, because the left absotively, posilutely hate that their great truths can be challenged.

Thus, while we can chuckle at the fact that a crackpot was arrested for demonstrating in support of the pro-Palestinian British hunger strikers — most of whom have given up their hunger strike anyway — we need to remember that the threats to our freedoms come from the left, and the Biden Administration proved that the plain words of the Constitution mean nothing more than an inconvenient impediment to their goals and them, not a absolute block. We need to support Miss Thunberg’s freedom of speech and peaceable association not because we agree with her, but because we strongly disagree, because that is how we defend ourselves.

References

References
↑1 No, that’s not a typographical error; panicdemic was exactly how I intended to spell it, because panic is exactly how governments reacted.
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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Not a particularly Merry Christmas for yet another pervert

Richard Adamsky, 66, mugshot via Bucks County sheriff.

Say hello to Richard Adamsky, 66, a former sports coach and teacher at Nativity of Our Lord Catholic School in Warminster, Pennsylvania. You can also say goodbye to him as well, as he’s about to spend at least five years in prison.

Longtime teacher at Catholic school in Bucks County admits to child porn charges

Adamsky, 66, taught seventh and eighth grades and also served as a sports coach at Nativity of Our Lord Catholic School in Warminster. He had worked at the school for 38 years.

by Robert Moran | Monday, December 22, 2025 | 7:24 PM EST

A former longtime teacher at a Catholic grade school in Bucks County pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Philadelphia to receiving and possessing child pornography, U.S. Attorney David Metcalf said.

Richard Adamsky, 66, taught seventh and eighth grades and also served as a sports coach at Nativity of Our Lord Catholic School in Warminster. He had worked at the school for 38 years.

No, of course The Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t include Mr Adamsky’s mugshot, but it is widely available elsewhere.

His sentencing is set for April 14.

Christopher J. Serpico, a lawyer representing Adamsky, said his client faces a mandatory minimum of five years in prison for downloading child pornography.

There’s more at the original. Mr Adamsky faces a maximum sentence of 40 years. Federal prisoners must serve a minimum of 85% of their sentences before becoming eligible for parole, which means he could not possibly get out of prison in less than four years and three months. The Inquirer story did not tell us whether Mr Adamsky was taken immediately to prison.

Mr Serpico is attempting to put together mitigating evidence to keep his client’s sentence as close as possible to the mandatory minimum, and stated that there was no evidence that Mr Adamsky actually abused any children. At least one of the images found in his home included the sexual abuse of a prepubescent child.

I suspect that Mr Adamsky, to use a line by Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS, “will not do well in prison.”

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And now the news you missed

The New York Times reported, in December of 2024, when Joe Biden was still President, that the expected good will and economic resurgence of Cuba due to President Obama normalizing relations with the Communist country didn’t really materialize, noting that most Cubans are:

coping with prolonged power outages, standing in line at poorly stocked supermarkets and watching their friends, family and neighbors — sick of all the hardships — pack up and leave.

During his first term, President Trump walked back some of his predecessor’s policies, and President Biden only weakened Mr Trump’s restrictions slightly.

There were difficulties from the Cuban side as well, as the government was concerned that too much openness, especially to more information about the West, would weaken support for the Communist regime.

Now comes more news, this time from The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Oil Blockade of Venezuela Pushes Cuba Toward Collapse

Communist-ruled island was already suffering from food shortages, blackouts and exodus of people, and now faces loss of cheap oil from Nicolás Maduro

By Juan Forero and Ryan Dubé | Sunday, December 21, 2025 | 5:30 AM EST

Cubans are going hungry, suffering from spreading disease and sleeping outdoors with no electricity to power fans through the sweltering nights. A quarter of the population has fled during the island’s most prolonged economic crisis.

And it’s about to get worse.

The U.S. is ratcheting up pressure on Havana’s key benefactor, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s regime, which has kept the Communist-ruled nation afloat with cheap oil. Now Venezuelan oil exports are at risk thanks to a partial blockade targeting sanctioned tankers — the kind that carry about 70% of the country’s crude.

One tanker that the U.S. has already seized was en route with almost two million barrels of Venezuelan oil.

The blockade adds to a U.S. pressure campaign on Maduro that also includes a major military buildup in the Caribbean, airstrikes on boats allegedly connected to Venezuelan drug trafficking and threats of bombing the country itself.

Were Venezuela’s oil shipments to stop, or sharply decline, the Cubans know it would be devastating.

“It would be the collapse of the Cuban economy, no question about it,” said Jorge Piñón, a Cuban exile who tracks the island’s energy ties to Venezuela at the University of Texas at Austin.

Cuba could, of course, buy oil at market rates, which are rather low anyway right now, but nevertheless higher than what Venezuela was charging.

Cuba is really one of the last old-line Communist states out there, and it would be undoubtedly good if that government fell, though even if a strongly capitalist government took over, it would take many years before that nation could recover. I can’t say whether this was something that the Trump Administration considered when we put the pressure on Venezuelan drug runners, but it’s certainly a happy side effect. Of course, you had to read The Wall Street Journal to even know about it, ot, to say the least, I had not heard about it anywhere else.

If the Communist government falls, I wonder how many Cuban-Americans would head back to the island, and help bring it back from the brink.

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Twitter has become a go to site for left-wing propaganda! But not to worry, conservatives still have their voices there as well.

Sensible people and patriotic Americans were all very, very glad when Elon Musk bought Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — and installed a (mostly) free speech environment. Freedom of Speech is a good thing, a great thing, something enshrined as a constitutional right in our First Amendment.

But, alas! as we have noted many times previously, the American left are not quite so supportive. Michael Tomasky, Editor of The New Republic, blamed Kamala Harris Emhoff’s defeat on those poor, ignorant, unedumacated saps who don’t get their information exclusively from the mostly liberal credentialed media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and the other approved credentialed media outlets. We noted previously, that, before being bought out by Elon Musk, Twitter had already taken sides on the issue of ‘transgenderism,’ and bans ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering,’[1]‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a … Continue reading as though the issue is settled, no dissent can be tolerated, and dissention could result in the suspension of your Twitter account. Robert Stacy McCain lost his old @rsmccain account, which had something like 10,000 followers, and his newer The Patriarch Tree account has only 2,522, because he said politically incorrect things.

The New York Times has published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence, and that Twitter’s bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes freedom of speech. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to Gab and Rumble. The newspaper has never really liked that Freedom of Speech and of the Press actually applies to people other than themselves.

The left were predictably aghast when Mr Musk did buy Twitter and imposed a much broader freedom of speech regime. When it comes to the American left, and how the Biden Administration tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, and that very liberal hater of free speech, Nina Jankowicz.

One thing Mr Musk did not do, though Mr Tomasky claimed he would, was turn Twitter into a right-wing site. What Mr Musk did was to end (most) of the censorship of conservatives, but he didn’t rein in liberals. I’m still seeing the same bovine feces from the left that I always did, but now we have something new: the pro-‘Palestinian’ bots are flooding Twitter with messages about the poor, poor ‘Palestinians,’ suffering because Israel destroyed much of Gaza, in a war that the ‘Palestinians’ started. We previously reported on how the bots were using AI to create scenes that were not real. The tweet screen captured to the right is just one of hundreds, if not more than hundreds, aimed by the pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas sympathizers and bots trying to pull on our heartstrings, at the plight of the poor, poor Palestinians, and the children! to generate relief aid and, of course, hatred of the Jooooos. I have little doubt that, had ubiquitous cell phones and social media existed in 1944, there’d be people telling us that the Germans were surely defeated by the end of the year, and that we didn’t really need to cross into the Third Reich, killing more innocents, and that we should offer Adolf Hitler and his cronies a ceasefire, to avoid more tragedy.

And now, we’re getting something new. Several pro-Palestinian idiots from Palestine Action, a governmentally proscribed terrorist organization, in the United Kingdom staged a riot, attacking a weapons plant, which, in one instance had a rioter hitting a downed policewoman in the spine with a sledgehammer. The rioters are demanding to be released, but are being held on remand, being detained prior to trial. Eight of the prisoners have decided that a hunger strike would force His Majesty’s Government to release them, but they haven’t gotten their way, and the hunger strikers are now in the upper forties to fifty days of refusing to eat. Most are in rough physical shape right now, and could die at any time.

The left are whining about this, but the hunger strikers have chosen this course of action themselves. The left want the government to do something, but the only something the government could do is force-feed, or provide total parenteral nutrition, TPN, to provide nutrition intravenously, though I’d guess it wouldn’t be easy to get an IV line on these prisoners in their condition. The left are not advocating that; they only want the terrorists released.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is among those pushing this.

Of course, there’s plenty of conservative-leaning stuff on Twitter, and I follow several other accounts which aren’t political in the slightest.

I suspect that I get all of these tweets since I have responded to some of their silliness, because, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knows me, sometimes I just can’t shut up.

But that’s freedom of speech and of the press for you, and Mr Musk has been pretty good about allowing in to continue. I completely support the freedom of speech and of the press of the ‘Palestinian’ supporters, even though I believe their ’cause’ to be rubbish.

References

References
↑1 ‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by sex-specific terms referring to his biological sex rather than the sex he claims to be.