Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Let’s tell the truth: we have been bamboozled before

It wasn’t that long ago that the United States fled evacuated Afghanistan, leaving it to the Taliban, and the Taliban promised that they’d be, if not all sweetness and light, more tolerant than they had been during their previous reign. I do not know whether then-President Donald Trump actually believed the Taliban’s claims as he negotiated the withdrawal, or was simply looking for a fig leaf of cover for the withdrawal — which wasn’t completed until President Joe Biden too office — as President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did during the peace talks in Paris, but the Taliban have been not-so-slowly returning to the restrictions on the public, especially on women, that they had imposed previously.

Syrian rebel leader’s victory speech holds a message for Iran – and for Trump and Israel too

Continue reading →

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Yet another war in which Bill Kristol wants the US involved

I was at the tire shop early this afternoon — the left steering tire on my 2010 Ford F-150 broke a belt and the tire got out-of-round — and tweeted from my phone, at 1:10 PM EST:

I saw a news blurb while at the tire store, in which former and future President Trump said that we should stay out of the mess in Syria, so I wonder how soon the warmongers like @BillKristol and @AmbJohnBolton will want to get involved there.

Well, it didn’t take long!

At least as of this writing, Mr Bolton hasn’t tweeted anything, but Bill Kristol, who turned 18 in 1970 and thus could have enlisted and served in Vietnam — he had a high draft lottery number, and wasn’t conscripted — has, and the man who wants to see the US involved in every war on earth is pushing again.

There are no good guys in Syria. Bashir al-Assad is a murderous thug, while the recently advancing rebel forces are Islamist in nature and a former offshoot of al Qaeda. The Turks are in the north, trying to seize land and attacking the Kurds. Whichever side wins is a loss for Western civilization. President Assad has, reportedly, made overtures to the United States and Israel to help him, in exchange for promises to end Iranian involvement with his government and expel Hezbollah fighters, but if those reports are true, no one could take Mr Assad at his word anyway.

Mr Kristol knows all of that, but he still wants the US involved. In this case, incoming President Trump is right: we should stay out of it!

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Is it possible that our friends on the left prefer journolism to journalism?

It isn’t that much of a surprise, I suppose, that the heavily politicized cable news networks would lose viewers after the political season and elections are over, but it seems that our good friends on the left are giving up in droves on the hard-left journolists of MSNBC.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid loses roughly half her viewers since the election, primetime hosts also struggle

MSNBC lost a whopping 53% of its total viewerership in primetime since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Friday, December 6, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST

MSNBC host Joy Reid and her primetime colleagues have faced a brutal decline in viewership since the election. Continue reading →

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Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right

It was 6½ months ago that we published “Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right,” noting Olivia Reingold‘s report that addiction activists say they’re ‘reducing harm’ in Philly, but Kensington locals say they’re causing it. It was an article noting that the oh-so-well-intended activists trying to help junkies — we’re not willing to use the less loaded term “addicts” any more than necessary — are actually harming the larger community around them. We also snarked that Miss Reongold’s article would never, ever, have been published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, the ever-soft-hearted liberal newspaper.

And here they go again:

Banning mobile care in Kensington could lead to amputations, hospitalizations, maybe even deaths

No shirt, no shoes, no wound care? A bill proposing a ban on mobile services runs counter to best health care practices, writes street wound care nurse and researcher Eleanor Turi.

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The Democrats say we need more affordable housing, but look what has happened when they were in charge of it

Jim McGovern is the United States Representative from the Second Congressional District in Massachusetts. After being in the House of Representatives since 1997 — that’s 14 terms! — he tweeted:

I’m on the floor talking about how we need to cut grocery prices, lower people’s mortgage and rent costs, and make it easier for folks to get ahead.

The Distinguished Gentleman from Massachusetts was whining that people’s grocery bills are too high, and that mortgages and rents are too high, and need to be brought down. And yes, those are issues on which former and future President Donald Trump, and the majority of Republican congressional candidates ran, but the point is obvious: those costs skyrocketed right after President Joe Biden took office, taking office with Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress, though the GOP won a bare majority in the 2022 elections, the Republicans winning largely on the high inflation during Mr Biden’s first two years, inflation which drove those grocery and housing prices so high.

Why, it’s almost as though the Democrats’ policies didn’t work.

“Affordable housing” has been the Democrats’ theme of late, but that raises an obvious point: what is “affordable housing” like in cities run by the Democrats? From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The death of Jah’Nae Campbell underscores the lax oversight of Philadelphia’s low-income rental housing | Editorial

As repeated complaints went unheeded, the 12-year-old’s family blames substandard living conditions inside their West Philly affordable housing complex for her death.

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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to On that nice, polite, all-sweetness-and-light social media service, the Usual Suspects are cheering the murder of a health insurance CEO

A thus-far unidentified gunman waited for 50-year-old Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, and shot him to death, in what the New York Police Department labelled a “brazen targeted attack.” Naturally, some of the [insert plural slang term for the anus here] are celebrating the murder of this innocent man, as can be seen in the tweet screen captured at the right. The waste of water and air in the video called the murderer a hero.

In a land of fruits and nuts, in which anyone has the right to say stupid stuff and then put it on TikTok, it’s unsurprising that some deranged guy would celebrate a targeted murder like that. But, what would you say if a well-paid columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and the winner of over twenty Pulitzer Prizes, celebrated the same attack? Continue reading →

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My local Bishop really, really doesn’t like Donald Trump

The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

While I cannot say that I am friends with His Excellency, the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M. Conv., Bishop of Lexington, we are at least acquainted with each other. The Bishop at least recognizes me when he sees me, though I cannot be certain he remembers my name. We have had some pleasant conversations the few times he has visited our small parish.

I have written about him, or at least mentioned him, on this poor site, in 17 previous articles, not always charitably. Bishop Stowe is an excellent homilist, one who can really connect with a congregation, and I have no doubts at all about his faith. But, as a Catholic priest, he chooses the wrong things far too often for me.

Kentucky prelate calls lack of election response from American Church ‘disappointing’

by John Lavenburg | Tuesday, December 3, 2024

NEW YORK – In the month or so since former President Donald Trump was elected to occupy the White House for a second term, the majority of American bishops have either not commented on the election publicly, or issued a generic statement about the importance of civility, unity, and democracy.

That extends to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where – outside of responses to Trump’s stated plan for mass deportations – not much has been said. Bishop John Stowe, in a recent conversation with Crux, said that reality isn’t surprising considering how American Church leaders have handled the presidency of Joe Biden over the last four years.

“It was not surprising coming from the USCCB. What was surprising was the attitude when Joe Biden was elected, a Catholic president four years ago, and there was such an uproar in the conference about that election, and because of that, I really had no expectation that there would be much said about the Trump election,” said Stowe, the bishop of Lexington in Kentucky.

His Excellency the Bishop does not like former and future President Donald Trump. Speaking in August of 2020, before the 2020 election, the Bishop let us know, let all of his Catholic parishioners know, that he was opposed to President Trump’s re-election. Bishop Stowe was appalled by Mr Trump’s anti-illegal immigration policies, calling them “anti-life.” Continue reading →

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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.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Bluesky has suspended the account of Libs of TikTok.

Chaya Raichik, the doxed by Taylor Lorenz creator of the Twitter account Libs of TikTok began with the amusing tactic of searching TikTok for leftists saying or doing utterly stupid things, and publicizing them more widely. She recently deployed again to the oh-so-polite company of Bluesky, but it seems that the leftists over there just can’t stand having their own words repeated back to them.

Miss Lorenz, who blocks people on her Twitter account, because she can’t stand criticism, hasn’t blocked me, at least, on Bluesky.  She is personally “severely, severely immunocompromised,”  and is “in and out of the hospital constantly bc I have the immune system of someone going through chemo”, so she chronically complains about people not taking COVID precautions, skeeting we “dumbfucks are out raw dogging the air and spewing ur disease laden breath all over ur elderly neighbors.” According to the Urban Dictionary, “rawdogging” originally meant copulating without a condom.

Translation: Miss Lorenz is complaining about people breathing! Robert Stacy McCain was amused. Continue reading →

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San José State University’s mostly women’s volleyball team is beaten in conference finals

Brayden Fleming, photos by San José State University.

This site has previously reported on the forfeits that several colleges have accepted when their women’s volleyball teams refused to play against San José State University, which has Brayden Fleming, a male player pretending to be a female going by the pseudonym of “Blaire”. The credentialed media have been trying to ignore the story to death, but my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, reported on Saturday how the Grey Lady finally said something . . . and tried to make it seem as though men males claiming to be women playing on women’s sports teams was no big deal.

How a Women’s College Volleyball Team Became the Center of the Transgender Athlete Debate

Not since the swimmer Lia Thomas has a college athlete or team put the fiercely contested issue of transgender rights in sports under such a bright spotlight.

by Juliet Macur | Thursday, November 28, 2024

On the court, they seem like any other college women’s volleyball team. At a recent game, the players moved around the court in staccato rhythm, setting and spiking the ball, springing into the air like pogo sticks to block attacking shots, all in their blue and gold uniforms of the San Jose State University Spartans.

Off the court, though, the team is trying its best not to crumble during an unexpected season of tension and tears, confusion and anger. The players are at the center of a drama playing out over one of the most explosive issues in American life: whether a transgender woman can play on a women’s sports team. Continue reading →