Author Archives: Dana Pico

Posted on by

Everybody has lost

As Lord Eddard Stark said in Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming.” Winter across the forests and steppes of Ukraine is bitterly cold and brutal.

Our good friends at The Washington Post have spent the last 1,437 days being wholly supportive of President Joe Biden and every move he has ever made, so when they tell readers that “Russian forces have continued to make gains and maintain the offensive initiative” in Ukraine, you know that it’s serious.

As Ukraine marks Christmas, exhausted soldiers wonder if Trump can end the war

Asked for their thoughts about a potential ceasefire in 2025, Ukrainian soldiers said they’d welcome a reprieve but were skeptical one was coming soon

By Isabelle Khurshudyan and Serhii Korolchuk | Thursday, December 26, 2024 | 2:01 PM EST

DNIPROPETROVSK REGION, Ukraine — Christmas on Ukraine’s front line started, fittingly, in an old barn filled with hay. Soldiers filed in as Lt. Mykola Bagirov, the brigade’s chaplain, began chanting prayers in a setting straight out of a Nativity scene — never mind the M113 armored personnel carriers parked beside him.

Bagirov spent the rest of the day dressed in a colorful jacket and carrying a painted spinning star while merrily singing traditional Ukrainian carols and banging a tambourine against his thigh.

His audience, though thankful for the attempt at holiday cheer, was noticeably less enthused. Continue reading →

Posted on by

No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! Another "journalist" tries to cover up the media's culpability in keeping Joe Biden's dementia a secret

Woodrow Wilson goes over papers at his desk with his wife Edith Bolling Wilson. Photo: Getty Images

Peggy Noonan is not some poorly-paid reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, out in the hinterlands and isolated from the centers of elite power, but a Washington insider — though she now lives in New York City — beginning with the Reagan Administration, who now writes a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal, and is a regular contributor to other credentialed media sources. She is frequently a panelist on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” While she is described as being mostly “center-right,” but she distanced herself from the Republican Party when Donald Trump was winning the 2016 nomination. She called on Congress to censure President Trump following the release of the Mueller Report.

The President Who Wasn’t There

What we’re learning about the Biden White House is reminiscent of Woodrow and Edith Bolling Wilson.

by Peggy Noonan | Boxing Day, December 26, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST

We button up the astounding year with the scandal of 2024, which won’t take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts—who did what, starting when, how it worked—will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians.

The story is the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity, a word we use because it sounds both clinical and polite, and by which we mean the president has been in apparent cognitive decline for some years, perhaps since before taking office, and wasn’t fully up to the job. His family and friends, top White House staff and other administration officials covered it up. Some no doubt thought his presidency was good for the country and some, perhaps, good for them.

In a front-page story this month, the Journal’s Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer and Siobhan Hughes spoke to nearly 50 people in and around the presidency and outlined how the White House adapted to the needs of “a diminished leader.” He met infrequently with cabinet members and congressional leaders, and the president’s staff seemed to be running things. This system “insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.”

Continue reading →

Posted on by

Feminists and their secret fear that women are inferior

Our good friend, the very lovely Amanda Marcotte of Salon magazine, in a three-part skeet on Bluesky explained to us why she is so very supportive of males claiming to be female participating in women’s sports.

The end game of this was always “we have to end women’s sports to protect cis women from trans women.”

I hammer at this periodically, but the fear-mongering here isn’t just about anti-trans rhetoric, but about promoting an image of cis women as delicate flowers.

Undergirding all transphobic rhetoric around women’s sports is this idea that women’s sports aren’t “real” sports, because cis women’s bodies are incapable of true athleticism.

I am trying, and admittedly failing, to understand how this makes sense. Did Miss Marcotte miss the resurgence in the WNBA, thanks primarily to the rookies Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink? Of course, some of our good friends on the left were telling us that the resurgence is just because Miss Clark is white and heterosexual, but that ignores the fact that recent WNBA stars like Sabrina Ionescu, Breanna Stewart — both of whom play for the New York Liberty, in America’s biggest media market — and Kelsey Plum are also white, and did not generate the kind of excitement Miss Clark did. Nor does it take into account that Miss Clark challenged and then broke Pete Maravich’s career NCAA scoring record. That story was all over my feed, and it didn’t come from nowhere. Continue reading →

Posted on by

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to (foul) things up.” Don't tell me that you are opposed to capital punishment, but you'll make exceptions for politically difficult cases

Also see: Charles Lane in The Washington Post, “Biden’s commutations paradoxically prove the pro-death-penalty case“

Barack Hussein Obama supposedly once said of his former Vice President, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to (foul) things up.” Snopes calls the claim that President Obama actually said this “unproven,” but whether our 44th President actually said this about the man who was about to become our 46th President, Mr Biden has proven its accuracy.

Biden Commutes 37 Death Sentences Ahead of Trump’s Plan to Resume Federal Executions

Those affected by the president’s action on Monday are still subject to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Three men will remain on federal death row.

By Aishvarya Kavi | Monday, December 23, 2024 | 5:01 AM EST

President Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of nearly all prisoners on federal death row, sparing the lives of 37 men just a month before Donald J. Trump will return to the Oval Office with a promise to restart federal executions. Continue reading →

Posted on by

‘Sanctuary’ policies could, and should, send those who obstruct justice to jail.

We do not normally use photos from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for copyright reasons, but this one is too important. For a newspaper which editorially supports significant immigration, maybe a picture of demonstrators in support of illegal immigrants might have thought harder about an image with three signs in Spanish.

Philly schools’ immigrant student population is booming. Advocates want the district to recommit to ‘sanctuary schools.’

The population of English learners in the Philadelphia School District is on the rise. Superintendent Watlington says he’s committed to ensuring students feel safe.

by Kristen A Graham | Monday, December 16, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

At Franklin Learning Center, Michelle Ferguson’s students, all new arrivals to the U.S., are worried.

With President-elect Donald Trump promising stricter immigration laws and mass detention and deportation of immigrants, many students at the Philadelphia School District high school that draws English learners from around the city have shared their fears with Ferguson and other staff. Continue reading →

Posted on by

How does it work, going on strike in a job for which a replacement can be trained in half a day?

This site reported, back in June, how the ‘baristas’ at the OCF Coffee Shops in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia moved to unionize, and then owner Ori Feibush simply closed all of the shops he owned.

Now the Starbucks Workers United union has announced, on Bluesky, that they ain’t going to take anymore, that they’re going out on strike!

In the heyday of unionization, unions were representing workers who actually had some skills, workers who could not easily be replaced, because their skills were needed to do their jobs, and it took a long time to develop those skills. Perhaps, just perhaps, pulling a cup of coffee isn’t that difficult a skill to learn?

I’ve mentioned it before: rather than driving to a coffee shop, and paying $3.50 or $4.25 or whatever for a ‘barista’ to pull a cup of coffee for me, I can make it at home, in less than a minute, in my Keurig, for roughly 50¢. I’m saving money on the coffee, saving the environment a paper cup to be recycled or thrown in the trash, saving however much gasoline I would burn to get to such a coffee shop, and saving however many miles of additional wear-and-tear on my truck to get me there and back.

I am wryly amused.

Posted on by

Half of the real women are deserting SJSU volleyball team

We have previously reported on the controversy over San José State University’s ‘transgender’ women’s volleyball player. Brayden Fleming, a male, has been passing himself off as female, apparently well enough that most of the women’s volleyball team didn’t know that she was a he. During recruiting, prospects were not told that there was a male on the team.

Five colleges chose to forfeit seven regular-season games rather than play SJSU, and then one of those five opted to forfeit the semi-final match against the school in the Mountain West Tournament as well. SJSU lost in the conference final, and was not invited to the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team, which ended Mr Fleming’s career; he was a redshirt senior, and is out of eligibility.

One SJSU player, and an assistant coach, joined the lawsuit against the college, but it seems that perhaps more than one of the team members were unhappy:

SJSU responds to volleyball player mass exodus after trans athlete scandal rocked program

7 players have entered the transfer portal

Continue reading →

Posted on by

Journolism: Even now, the credentialed media try to blame their laziness on Joe Biden’s staffers

At 2:55 PM EST on December 17th, I asked the question to which The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal admitted the answer on the 19th: “Why didn’t the press play its ‘adversarial role’ when it came to Joe Biden?”

How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge

Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.

Continue reading →

Posted on by

I check Bluesky so you don’t have to

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain has frequently written, “I watch CNN” or sometimes MSNBC, “so you don’t have to. Well, I went ahead and checked out Bluesky, the liberal version of Twitter, so that you don’t have to.

As we reported on December 3rd, Bluesky suspended the account of Libs of TikTok. Given that Chaya Raichik’s modus vivendi is to search out idiocy from leftists on social media and then publish it more widely, to mock the left, it seems that Bluesky just can’t handle the truth. No one, after all, accuses Miss Raichik of falsifying what she posts.

And now she’s tweeted out this one:

BlueSky Sees Surge in New Users and Child Sexual Abuse Material

Continue reading →