Author Archives: Dana Pico

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When you’re a desperation candidate, you might as well take desperation shots!

I follow former state Representative Charles Booker (D-43rd District, Louisville) on Twitter not because I like him, but because he is a candidate, and now the Democratic nominee, to challenge Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in the general election. Mr Booker, who ran for the Democratic nomination to challenge Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in 2020, but lost a tightly contested primary to Amy McGrath Henderson, was running to Mrs McGrath’s left, as the ‘progressive’ candidate. He hasn’t changed that a bit.

Knowing that he’s running, at the most charitably, an uphill campaign, or, perhaps most realistically, a sacrificial lamb one, Mr Booker is taking wild, long-range three-point shots in the hope of somehow catching up to Dr Paul.[1]I almost typed ‘Hail Mary’ shots, but I would never use a Catholic comparison, in any way, with regard to a candidate who supports abortion. It should be noted, that, as a Kentuckian, I … Continue reading The latest is shown in this tweet.

Mr Booker’s new campaign ad is all about lynchings in the past, and he claims that three of his uncles were lynched. But while lynchings have occurred, they are very much in the past. Even the Lexington Herald-Leader, which endorsed Mr Booker against Mrs Henderson in 2020, and which will endorse him again for the general election, because the editors are both stunningly liberal and out of tune with their readership, noted just how “striking” and “unconventional” the ad is: Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 I almost typed ‘Hail Mary’ shots, but I would never use a Catholic comparison, in any way, with regard to a candidate who supports abortion. It should be noted, that, as a Kentuckian, I worked in a basketball metaphor.
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May shooting victims in Philadelphia.

Math geek that I can be, I downloaded the Philadelphia Shooting Victims database, and then ran the numbers.

The database is awkward, any you need to manipulate it to be able to read it easily. While race, sex and age of the victims are in three columns together, the column indicating whether the victim is Latino is far to the right, and then, even further, is the column indicating whether the victims was killed. I saved it to a Microsoft Excel file, then moved the columns around, and hand-tallied the results.

Black males were 65.49% of the shooting victims, and 77.08% of the fatal shooting victims. Black females were 11.95% of the shooting victims, and 4.17% of the fatal shooting victims. Remember: the population of the city are only 38.3% non-Hispanic black.

The gang-bangers are rather poor shots, killing their victims ‘only’ 21.24% of the time.

The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer lamented that non-Hispanic white Philadelphians feel much safer in the city than people of color. I suppose that they should: white males and females together accounted for 6.19% of shooting victims, and only 2.08% of shooting fatalities.

Make of the numbers what you will.

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This is how prosecutors should treat criminals! Try them, convict them, lock them up, and throw away the key.

Jake Messer did not kill anyone; Tonisha Hendrickson did. Mr Messer, prosecuted seriously, was sentenced to life in prison; Miss Hendrickson, treated leniently by Lexington prosecutors, got ten years, much of which she had already served.

Kentucky man sentenced to life in prison in kidnapping over a botched drug deal

by Bill Estep | Wednesday, June 1, 2022 | 11:26 AM EDT

Jake and George Messer. Photo via Clay County News. Click to enlarge.

A southeastern Kentucky man who kidnapped and sexually assaulted a woman after a drug deal went bad has been sentenced to life in prison.

A jury in federal court convicted Jake Messer, 39, of Whitley County, on charges of kidnapping a man and his girlfriend in April 2018.

Messer believed the male victim, who was not named in court documents, had stolen $10,000 that Messer had provided to buy marijuana, according to court documents.

The man thought he had arranged to buy marijuana, but the purported dealers were con men who stole the cash, Todd E. Tremaine, a special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said in an affidavit.

Messer directed the kidnapping of the man in an effort to figure out if he was involved in taking the money, and kidnapped the man’s girlfriend as what one witness called “human collateral,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jenna Reed said in a sentencing memorandum.

Read more here.

The woman was raped at least twice while she was held.

But this is how criminals should be treated: try them, convict them, lock them up, and throw away the key.

The Messers were bad seed: Jake Messer had a previous conviction for distributing methamphetamines and other drugs, and his father, George Oscar Messer, who raped the kidnapped victim at least once, also received a life sentence. But, as far as I could tell, they didn’t kill anyone, unlike Miss Hendrickson, Xavier Hardin, Seantel Watson, Jemel Barber, Malachi Jackson, and James Ragland, who were all allowed to plead down in exchange for more lenient sentences.

The Messrs Messer were prosecuted by the Feds, and not local prosecutors. But Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn ought to take notice: we can lock away bad guys for the rest of their miserable lives, rather than allowing them to plead down to lesser offenses and being able to look forward to eventually getting out of jail while they are still relatively young.

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The math of school shootings

I know, I know, the math doesn’t match Teh Narrative, but sometimes it is necessary to do the math.

The Washington Post has published yet another school shooting scare story, but it’s entirely propaganda.

As we previously noted, the Post reported that there have been 185 people killed in schools since Columbine, 185 in 23 years, or 8.04347826 per year. With a public school population of 50,700,000, that works out to a homicide rate of 0.0159 per 100,000 population. Students, teachers and administrators are far, far, far safer when they are in school than when they are out in public.

Even the Post’s story was propaganda, because while the 185 killed number appears to be solid, they claimed that “more than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine”, but were counting the entire school’s attendance when things like one student shooting another in the bathroom as “students experiencing gun violence at school”.

Philadelphia suffered through 562 homicides in 2021, with a guesstimated population of 1,576,251, yielding a homicide rate of 35.65 per 100,000, almost all with handguns. Washington DC, with a 2021 population of 670,050, saw 226 murders in 2021, for a murder rate of 33.73 per 100,000 population. Even much safer Lexington, Kentucky, with 37 homicides in 2021, spread over a population of 321,793, had a homicide rate of 11.50. Compare that to a homicide rate of 0.0159 per 100,000 for school shootings! Continue reading →

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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.