Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Why is murder not taken seriously in Lexington? Yet another killer allowed to plead down to manslaughter

Just last Thursday we learned that Xavier Hardin, who murdered, oops, sorry, manslaughtered Kenneth Bottoms, Jr, in Fayette Mall would get out in 20 years, maximum[1]His sentence was 22 years, but he has credit for 619 days already served., when he would still be just 41 years old, because Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn negotiated a plea deal, even though the murder was caught on security cameras. If Miss Red Corn thought she couldn’t win that kind of case at trial, she shouldn’t be a prosecutor.

When Mr Harden gets out of prison, Mr Bottoms will still be stone-cold graveyard dead.

Now we learn that Tonisha Hendrickson, who murdered, oops, sorry, manslaughtered a man, was sentenced to only ten years: Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 His sentence was 22 years, but he has credit for 619 days already served.
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In which I tell you, very politically incorrectly, how to solve all of Philadelphia’s problems

I really, really, really wanted to write about something else this morning; I’ve spent so much time on the homicide rate in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia that I felt in a rut.

Then the Memorial Day weekend happened, and I had two stories entitled Killadelphia in a row, as the blood flowed freely in the city’s streets. A three-day holiday weekend, commemorating American soldiers who dies in wars to protect our liberty, our freedom, and our country’s interests abroad, was celebrated by killing other Americans, civilians, because the City of Brotherly Love has run out of that love, because civilization has degenerated into savagery. Even The Philadelphia Inquirer couldn’t ignore it! Continue reading →

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Killadelphia The City of Brotherly Love is up to at least 207 murders so far this year

This is the 36th time I’ve used KIlladelphia as an article title. That, in itself, should tell you how bad the situation is.

What makes you think that it mattered? This was a planned assassination, and they were going to carry it out, period.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics database does not update the current year until normal business hours, and with Monday being a holiday, that means Tuesday morning. The last update had 194 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, May 26th, and Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News has tweeted that there have been 13 homicides since the weekend began. Being the math genius that I am, I can add 194 + 13 and get a total of 207.

The previous years’ numbers do update automatically, telling us that through May 29, 2021, there had been 212 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love.

So, let’s do the math. 207 homicides in 149 days yields an average of 1.39 per day. Just using that number, multiplied by 365, we get an ‘anticipated’ total of 507 homicides for the year.

But that’s not how I do things, because the warm months are just beginning, and homicides spike during the warm months. Instead, I divide the current 207 by the 212 homicides as of the same day last year, and get 0.9764. Multiplying 562, the number of murders in 2021, by 0.9764 gives me an estimated 549 homicides for the year.

Even the lower number of 507 would be solidly in second place all time.

In 2013, Mayor Michael Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and (later convicted himself) District Attorney Seth Williams helped lead the city down to 246 homicides. Using the 1.39 homicides per day figure, Philadelphia is on track to tie that the 2013 total in just four weeks, before the year is even half over.

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Killadelphia At least 199 murdered in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year.

The Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, or at least its website main page, was just full of stories about firearms. Soccer beat writer and website home page editor Jonathan Tannenwald wrote “Alejandro Bedoya leads Union protest against gun violence: ‘This ain’t American exceptionalism’: ‘It ain’t freedom that we have to now look over our backs all the time,’ the Union’s captain said after his team wore T-shirts at Saturday’s game with the message ‘END GUN VIOLENCE.’” Breaking news editor and President of the News Guild Diane Mastrull wrote “2 women leaving a church funeral service were hit by stray bullets in Philly fatal shooting,” noting, almost as an aside, that there were three homicides in the City of Brotherly Love on Saturday. She did, however, scrub the story of any reference to race, even though the Philadelphia Police reported the race of the victims in each report. In that, she was following what is quite obviously the newspaper’s editorial policy under publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ and executive editor Gabriel Escobar’s orders.

Decades ago, the Inquirer’s masthead declared that the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper as a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People.” Those days are long gone!

But the Inquirer did publish a few stories which might not quite fit Miss Hughes’ and Mr Escobar’s editorial slant. Continue reading →

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They are doing their jobs; they are protecting our constitutional rights!

The Democrats and the left — please, pardon the redundancy — are never willing to inflate a crime into a crisis, and are using the school shooting in Texas to try to infringe on the rights of Americans who have done nothing wrong. There was District Attorney Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner, who would rather prosecute police officers and exonerate criminals chiming in with “What organization does more to enable murder by gun & mass shootings of Americans than the @NRA? Every elected official who panders to the NRA is failing. Period.”

Of course, under Mr Krasner, a defense attorney who hates cops, but who was elected District Attorney thanks to George Soros pumping money into ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ candidates, while the Philadelphia Police Department were making record numbers of arrests for illegal possession of firearms, the DA’s office was winning, or even attempting to win, a far lower percentage of such cases.

Pennsylvania does not have outrageously tough gun control laws, but Mr Krasner isn’t attempting to enforce the ones they do have. We do know that Samuel Collington and Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV would still be with us if Mr Krasner had kept previously charged violent criminals in jail when he had the chance.

Now comes Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA), calling for the state legislature to enact tougher gun control laws:

Students and leaders rally in Philly for stronger gun laws: ‘It doesn’t have to be this way’

“Our message to our legislators in Congress and Pennsylvania’s General Assembly needs to be: do your jobs,” said Gov. Tom Wolf.

by Oona Goodin-Smith | Friday, May 27, 2022

Gov. Tom Wolf rallied Friday with fellow lawmakers, clergy, students, and gun violence prevention activists in Philadelphia, calling for the Pennsylvania General Assembly to pass more stringent gun laws in the wake of the Texas school shooting that killed 19 children and two adults.

William Teach: House Democrats To Investigate….Gun Makers In Wake Of Texas Shooting

“Our message to our legislators in Congress and Pennsylvania’s General Assembly needs to be: Do your jobs,” Wolf, a Democrat, said to applause and a sea of orange CeaseFirePA T-shirts.

Wolf said the Republican-controlled state legislature for years has stymied the passage of “commonsense legislation” in the commonwealth. He urged lawmakers to: require reporting for lost and stolen guns within 72 hours, close loopholes and require background checks on all gun sales, require safe storage of firearms, and create “red flag laws” to protect those who may be a danger to themselves or others.

The renewed demand for action came days after the Uvalde massacre — the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, and the 27th school shooting in the country this year — and two weeks after 10 Black people were shot to death in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in a killing reportedly motivated by a racist conspiracy theory.

Twenty-seventh school shooting this year?

  • May 17: Walt Disney Magnet School, Chicago: an 8 year old student discharged a gun, injuring a 7 year old. The Washington Post counted this as 1,420 students experiencing gun violence at school.
  • April 26: Aspen Ridge Elementary School, West Ishpeming, MI: Student shot himself in bathroom during school hours. Post counts this as 700 students “experiencing gun violence at school.”
  • April 11: Pine Bluff High School, in Pine Bluff, AR: Student fired shots in parking lot, no one injured. 820 students present.

Using The Washington Post’s interactive graphic of school shootings, it quickly became clear: the 26 other school shootings were gang violence involving kids who brought guns to school themselves, killing five in five separate incidents, along with security officers shooting outsiders harassing parents in two separate incidents. This is the kind of propaganda that the credentialed media use to artificially pump up numbers.

In Philadelphia, where gun violence is often unrelenting, shootings have surged in the past years with killings reaching record levels in 2021.

Well, yes, shootings have spiked in the City of Brotherly Love, but that’s because the District Attorney keeps turning loose criminals on ‘minor’ offenses, enabling them to be out on the streets to commit major ones. It is because the city and, let’s be honest here, the ‘disadvantaged communities’ tolerate and enable gang violence. So-called “red flag” laws will do nothing, because the public aren’t even providing evidence against actual shooters, and can’t be expected to report potential ones. The Buffalo shooter had posted plenty of messages on social media giving clues that he was a whacko, and New York state has a red flag law, but he was never reported or investigated. Red flag laws seem to be of more use for one enemy to get another enemy hassled by the police than stopping mass shootings.

Require “safe storage” of firearms? Philadelphians have been seeking permits and buying firearms at record paces due to the increased homicide rate; the last thing they want to do is have their weapons locked in a safe or inhibited by a trigger lock when seconds count while someone is breaking into their homes.

Governor Wolf and the ralliers shouted that they wanted the General Assembly to “Do your jobs!” but their jobs include protecting the constitutional rights of the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. What the ralliers want is for the legislators to infringe on our right to keep and bear arms. There is a certain irony involved when people exercise their constitutional rights to advocate that other people’s constitutional rights should be abridged.

In the end, the entire thing is enabled by utter stupidity: criminals are criminals because they violate the laws! They don’t care about gun control laws, because they don’t care about any laws that stand in the way of their desires. If someone is willing to violate the laws about shooting people, about trying to kill others, why would anyone expect him to care about a law trying to restrict his ability to do so?

The only people that gun control laws would affect are those who haven’t been breaking the law, those who do not intend to kill anyone, save perhaps in self-defense.

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Update on a Lexington killer Fayette County Commonwealth's Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn allows another killer a chance to get out of jail while still relatively young

On March 12th, we reported that Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn had ‘negotiated’ another lenient plea bargain arrangement for a murderer.

Xavier Hardin, mugshot from Fayette County Detention Center, dated June 15, 2021, and is a public record.

Lexington man who committed deadly Fayette Mall shooting reaches plea deal. Here’s why

by Jeremy Chisenhall | Friday, March 11, 2022 | 12:19 PM EST | Updated: 1:06 PM EST

The man who shot and killed a 17 year old inside Fayette Mall in 2020 has reached an agreement with prosecutors to accept a conviction for manslaughter instead of murder, according to court records.

Xavier Hardin, 21, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, assault and wanton endangerment charges in the killing of Kenneth Bottoms Jr., after reaching a plea agreement earlier this week, according to court records. Hardin, who was 19 at the time of the incident, also injured two bystanders when he fired shots inside the mall on Aug. 23, 2020.

Fayette Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn said Hardin’s plea agreement was reached through mediation and Bottoms’ family was in agreement with the plea deal. The plea agreement accounted “for the facts of the case,” Red Corn said, which included that “both the defendant and Kenneth were carrying handguns that day at the mall.”

“There were video recordings of their encounter, and the defendant raised a claim of self-protection,” Red Corn said. “Regardless of the defendant’s claim, he injured innocent persons and put others in harm’s way when (he) started shooting. This is another tragic example of why teens should not be carrying guns in the first place.”

There’s more at the original here. Naturally, what my late best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal didn’t publish Mr Hardin’s photo, due to the stupid McClatchy mugshot policy, but The First Street Journal is not bound by that! Continue reading →

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Ihre Papiere, bitte!

As we have previously noted, with the HITECH Act pushing making medical records electronic and transferable — with appropriate precautions, of course! — we already have records in place which the government could search to see who has admitted to having firearms at home. If you think that the government is not interested in your medical records, and would never actually check them, think again. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A digital COVID vaccination record is coming in Philly, but is there a need?

A digital vaccination card is coming to Philly, but not many places are asking for the record any more.

by Kasturi Pananjady and Jason Laughlin | Friday, May 27, 2022 | 9:09 AM EDT

Philadelphia is pushing ahead with an effort to issue digital vaccine cards to residents, though businesses and health experts say they may be irrelevant at this stage in the pandemic.

The digital record encrypts the same vaccination information found on paper cards in a QR code format that can be scanned by businesses and others seeking to confirm vaccine status.

“There is a value, but its uptake would be very limited,” said Tinglong Dai, professor of operations management and business analytics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “People don’t really use vaccination records much unless you travel outside the United States.”

The city is moving ahead with the system despite ending its vaccine mandate for indoor dining in February. It has no plans to renew any COVID-19 safety restrictions. It declined to say when the digital cards will be available, citing technical issues with the rollout.

Proof of vaccination, though, is useful for more than just access to indoor dining, said Matt Rankin, a spokesperson for the health department. Some businesses do still require customers prove vaccination, as do many employers and schools, Rankin said. The digital proof of vaccination would also be helpful as people get booster shots.

There’s more at the original, and I can’t just quote it all; that’s plagiarism and a copyright violation, but the article noted several points:

  • Philadelphia had planned an online portal for vaccination records even before the panicdemic.
  • People seeking their vaccination records must use a two-factor identification process, including a digital log-in which would send an e-mail or text message for authentication. If the system did not have an e-mail or cell phone number on file, the system wouldn’t work for that individual, so the city askedg vaccine providers to maintain up to date contact information in January.
  • Public health services been seeking a national vaccination database that physicians could access, but such nas not yet been created.

Some of the systems which would be used to scan the QR code in a digital vaccination record do not retain the information, but that does not mean that all of them do. You could ask the doorman who scans your code, but he might not actually know, nor do you have any way to verify that he’s telling the truth when he does answer.

It is, of course, for our own good, right? After all, COVID-19 was a serious public health emergency, right? So, naturally, those not vaccinated simply needed to be excluded from all of public life, right?

So, if “gun violence” is a “public health emergency,” the way the left keep telling us, then the same justifications used to infringe on our constitutional rights during the panicdemic will be available against people who own firearms, won’t they? Except, of course, that would only apply to law-abiding people whom the government know have firearms, not the thugs carrying them illegally.

Expect calls for a national firearms registry!

Political interest in a national record-keeping system sparked by the pandemic has recently waned. That’s in part because vaccinated people are still able to transmit the virus, making vaccination less critical as a tool to prevent COVID’s spread.

It’s something of a surprise that the Inquirer admitted what we already knew, that the various vaccinations, while they seem to mitigate the virulence of the disease, don’t appear to do much in preventing people from either contracting or spreading the virus. In January, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” Remember: this was during the first Xi Omicron variant, before there was any real spread of the BA.2 Xi Omicron variant, which is, supposedly, even more infectious.

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What would so-called ‘red flag’ laws actually do? Far more harm than good is what they would do!

How does one actually implement the so-called “red flag” laws? It’s clear that neither Salvadore Ramos nor Payton Gendron were reported to law enforcement prior to buying his weapons, despite having left significant warnings via social media.

Nikolas Cruz had many ‘encounters’ with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, but they always let him off with a warning. He assaulted a student in school, but the soft-hearted and soft-headed school board, eager to disrupt the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, declined to report that to law enforcement.

William Teach discusses foot-in-the-door gun control proposals.

If private citizens were unwilling to see Messrs Ramos and Gendron as serious enough threats to take some action, if the idiots in Broward County were unwilling to actually enforce laws already on the books, with what does that leave us? Nina Jankowicz and her Ministry of Truth scouring Twitter and Facebook, reading every message, trying to ferret out bad people? Perhaps some sort of government surveillance of email, looking for nut cases?

No, what we’ll have are people using the system to cause problems for their enemies, cheating wives or their boyfriends trying to get at husbands, beta males trying to take the alphas down a peg, gang members trying to get opposing gang members disarmed and into the ‘system,’ cheating husbands or their girlfriends trying to get cheated on wives checked on by the police, or just liberals trying a new form of ‘SWATting‘ against sensible people. How about #woke teachers or school administrators upset when they find out some of their students are hunters? We’ve already seen efforts to get physicians and their staffs to ask patients, especially children, if there are any guns in their homes! With the HITECH Act pushing making medical records electronic and transferable — with appropriate precautions, of course! — we already have records in place which the government could search to see who has admitted to having firearms at home.

I was asked that question one time, and I responded that not only was it none of their business, but that I found the question intrusive and offensive.

Robert Stacy McCain talks about The ‘Gun Lobby,’ ‘Assault Weapons,’ ‘Common Sense Gun Laws’ and Other Things Joe Biden Keeps Lying About

In the end, they’re typical leftist ideas to get more and more government supervision of our lives, Minority Report thinking that we can somehow police impure thoughts of people who may not have committed any crime.

You think that’s alarmist concern? Look at the way the government tried to track people — ‘contact tracing,’ they called it[1]In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient … Continue reading — who tested positive for COVID-19, and tried to punish people who chose not to get vaccinated.

The left say that this is a minor thing, just something to keep us safer, especially after the recent massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas. But these ‘minor things’ are just more attempts to get their foot in the door, just another ‘minor step’ to achieve their eventual goal of disarming the public.

References

References
↑1 In jurisdictions with testing capacity, symptomatic and asymptomatic close contacts to patients with confirmed and probable COVID-19 should be evaluated and monitored. For areas with insufficient testing support and/or limited public health resources, the following evaluation and monitoring hierarchy (Box 4) and the case investigation and contact tracing prioritization recommendations can be used to help guide prioritization. The hierarchy is based on the assumption that if close contacts listed in Priority 1 become infected, they could potentially expose many people, those at higher risk for severe disease, or critical infrastructure workers. If close contacts in Priority 2 become infected, they may be at higher risk for severe disease, so prompt notification, monitoring, and linkage to needed medical and support services is important.
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But the horse identified as a mare! Apparently, the rules are the same for horses and a horse's ass.

Shades of William Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who identified as a female, calling himself “Lia”!

Shoes from Herbager, French Derby winner, embedded in concrete along Main Street in Paris, Kentucky. Photo by D R Pico. Click to enlarge.

I am slightly familiar with Blood Horse magazine only because a friend of my mother’s worked there in the 1970s. This is the kind of publication that you’ll see around horse farms. In Paris, Kentucky, north of Lexington, with a lot of thoroughbred farms along Paris Pike between the two cities, you’ll see horseshoes of famous race horses embedded in concrete along the sidewalks.

Suit Alleges Stakes-Winning Broodmare Prospect is Male

Kept True competed against females in 14 races and won over $300,000.

By Dick Downey | Tuesday, May 24, 2022 | 6:26 PM EDT

A New York-bred stakes winner that sold for $150,000 at Keeneland as a broodmare prospect is actually a male, according to a lawsuit pending in Fayette Circuit Court in Lexington. Continue reading →