Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Remember you haters! Calling them ‘groomers’ and saying that ‘they’re coming after our kids’ is sexist, homophobic, transphobic and just plain false!

There are times I think that I’ve written on the subject of ‘transgenderism’ too frequently, but it keeps coming up in the news. I wouldn’t care if Jack wanted to call himself Jill, if the ‘transgendered’ weren’t trying to use the power of the state to force other people to go along with their delusions.

You will not find this story many places, and certainly not in the leftist part of the credentialed media. From the New York Post:

California school suspends 2 children for misgendering classmate

By Hannah Grossman , Fox News | Friday, July 7, 2023 | 3:31 PM EDT | Updated

A California school district suspended two children for five days after a misgendering incident took place, and then subjected them to a training called “restorative justice,” according to an email reviewed by Fox News Digital.

The email was sent by a recently departed principal of Herbert Hoover High School located in the Glendale Unified School District. It was first reported by GUSD Parents Voices.

The former principal, Jennifer Earl, described two students who misgendered a transgender student, and then ran away as the teacher attempted to correct them.

There’s some disagreement here. The Post story states that the students correctly referenced a student’s sex “misgendered a transgender student,” but the local Fox 11 report has the suspended student “misgendering” a teacher.

So, what is “restorative justice” in the Glendale United School District? The district has a handy graph of its system, as shown in a photo in the Post. It has “Control” on one axis, defined as “Pressure Limits (and?) Expectations”, which can only mean that the district believes that, in the case of “restorative justice”, high pressure is acceptable, as long as it is accompanied with high levels of “Support – Encouragement – Nurturing”.

Further down:

GUSD explained to Fox News Digital that they make determinations if a misgendering – generally defined as using the wrong pronouns – is considered bullying based on whether a student’s perceived intent.

“A student has never been punished, much less suspended, for accidentally using the wrong pronoun to refer to a peer or staff member. However, a student could be suspended if the action escalated to harassment or bullying,” a spokesperson said.

Translation: if we assume that the school district’s spokescritter is telling the truth, the district decided that the “action escalated to harassment or bullying”.

Now we get to the district’s definition of a re-education camp “restorative justice”

The district’s website explains restorative justice on its website.

Restorative justice is a re-education of students and gaining control over a situation based on the perceived wrongs they committed.

So, even the district uses the term “re-education”. Got it!

First the person making the restorative justice circle will ask “barrier breaking” questions, such as:

“What is the greatest value that guides your life?”

“What gives you the most security?”

“If you could smash one thing… what would you smash?”

If I could smash one thing, it would be the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

“Describe the ideal family.”

Simple: a mother and father, married to each other, living with and rearing their minor children. Anything else, anything else, is less than ideal. This is the system which successful human societies have had for as far back into the past as we have any real knowledge of human sociological structures.

The district’s website continues, “When there is harm or conflict within the established community, restorative responses help to repair the damage. This is done through processes that bring harmed and harmers together to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals. As a result, community is once again restored bringing back a sense of belonging to all.”

So, “restorative justice” exists when the “harmed and harmers” are brought together, but note the rest: “to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals.” Simply put, “restorative justice” cannot be achieved unless the two students who correctly recognized the ‘transgender’ person’s sex who “misgendered” someone agree that the Special Snowflake™ person they correctly referenced “misgendered” is actually the sex the transgender individual claims to be rather than the sex they actually are, and say that they are oh-so-sorry.

Simply put, the Glendale Unified School District is teaching that transgenderism is real, that a person actually can change his ‘gender,’ and if you decline to go along with that notion, you will be punished.

Remember how we have been told that the government may not establish a religion? Well, the Catholic Church, the majority of Protestant Christian denominations, Judaism, and Islam all agree that transgenderism is not something with which their faiths agree, yet the Glendale Unified School District, apparently as required by law in California, are teaching something major which is against the religious faiths of most Americans.

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Killadelphia: A Philadelphia councilcritter tells us the truth The problem isn't guns; the problem is her rotten constituents

Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier (D-Philadelphia). Photo from her city biography page and is a public record. Click to enlarge.

The Washington Post quoted Philadelphian City Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier, a Democrat who represents the area of southwest Philadelphia in which the mass murder occurred, though possibly in a way she might regret:

Philadelphia City Council member Jamie R. Gauthier (D), who represents areas where the shooting occurred, described her district as “under siege” by gun violence.

“It creates a situation where mostly Black and Brown people can’t be in their neighborhood enjoying summer weather. Kids — anyone — enjoying their block should not live in fear of being shot and killed,” she said Tuesday.

Now that Democrats control the state house for the first time in 12 years following last November’s election, Gauthier said some movement on gun control legislation has started. However, any house bills would still face opposition in the GOP-controlled state senate.

“In Pennsylvania, you have Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the cities and outside of that, you have a lot of rural areas that don’t look like us and don’t have the same issues with everyday gun violence — and don’t have the same motivation to really cut off access to these types of weapons,” she said. “We have a long way to go to get these kinds of weapons off the street.”

“(D)on’t look like us” means ‘are mostly white,’ or so I inferred, rather different from the Kingsessing neighborhood in southwest Philly. that’s fairly innocuous. But then we get to “don’t have the same issues with everyday gun violence,” and it raises the obvious question: why does Miss Gauthier’s district, why does her city, have “issues with everyday gun violence” when so much of Pennsylvania outside of Philly does not?

I previously wrote that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse in 2021: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.

Things got slightly better in the City of Brotherly Love in 2022, with 516 homicides officially reported in the Philadelphia, out of 1,015 total homicides for the Commonwealth. That’s still 50.84% of the killings in the Commonwealth!

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

The Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 population estimates for Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia specifically, were 12,972,008 and 1,567,258 respectively, meaning that Philly had just 12.08% of the state’s population. The homicide rate for the rest of the Keystone State was 4.38 per 100,000 population, while for Philly it works out to 32.92 per 100,000, 7½ times the rest of the Commonwealth.

Strip out the 138 homicides in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, and the 65 other counties in the Commonwealth had 361 homicides for 10,171,497 people, for a murder rate of 3.55 per 100,000.

Councilwoman Gauthier was born in Kingsessing; she more than represents the third councilmanic district, but this mass killing was in her home neighborhood. She knows it, and has told the truth about it, however inadvertently, so it has to be asked: why is her neighborhood, why is her city, so much worse than the rest of the Keystone State?

Carbon County, 2022 population of 65,460, where I lived before retirement, has had exactly zero murders this year, and a high, for them, number of killings in 2022, two. My former home county has plenty of woods, and there are a lot of hunters there. I remember stopping at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe on my way to work, when buck season began, and I’d see plenty of deer hunters, including some teenagers, in their camouflage gear, and with their weapons in their trucks and Jeeps, and never worried about it in the slightest. Everyone I knew in Jim Thorpe had a firearm of some type, but, shockingly enough, we weren’t killing people at anywhere close to the rate of the City of Brotherly Love.

The Democratic ‘leaders’ in Philly have long been whining that state law does not allow the city to pass and institute gun control laws which are stricter than those of the Commonwealth as a whole, but that begs the obvious question: if the homicide rate in Philly is the fault of the state’s gun control laws, why don’t we see homicide rates across Pennsylvania like are the case in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh?

Dear Councilwoman Gauthier: the problem isn’t the laws, but the rotten people in your neighborhood, the people you represent.
__________________________________
Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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The journolism of The Washington Post Why won't the professional media tell the whole truth?

No, I did not misspell journolism in the title of this article. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity, and boy, did The Washington Post demonstrate that today!

I normally use the headlines from articles in newspapers, with the hyperlink embedded in the headline, but today I am using a screen capture of the Post’s article, because I want to document for the reader the time it was published, at 12:28 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 4th, but updated at 7:03 PM. If you cannot see the image clearly enough, just click on it, and it will show up enlarged.

What we know about the mass shooting in Philadelphia

By Kim Bellware, Tamia Fowlkes, Kelsey Ables and María Luisa Paúl | Updated July 4, 2023 at 7:03 p.m. EDT | Published July 4, 2023 at 12:28 p.m. EDT

Five people were killed and two children were wounded in a Monday night mass killing in Philadelphia, authorities say. A man suspected of the shooting has been arrested after firing on victims “seemingly at random,” Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said during a Tuesday news conference.

“Let me crystal clear: What happened last night in our Kingsessing neighborhood was unimaginably disgusting and horrifying,” Outlaw said.

Here’s what we know about the shooting in the largely residential area in southwest Philadelphia.

The victims

The five who were killed are all male, Outlaw said Monday.

Police identified them as Daujan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 20; Dymir Stanton, 29; Joseph Wamah Jr., 31; and Ralph Moralis, 59. Brown’s address was unknown; the other victims all lived close to the scene of the shooting. The two wounded children, ages 2 and 13, were in stable condition late Monday, Outlaw said.

Two people were also injured by broken glass during the shooting, including the twin of the 2-year-old gunshot victim, Philadelphia Police staff inspector Ernest Ransom said Tuesday.

“The suspect fired at a vehicle being operated by a mother who was driving her set of twins home,” Ransom said. “One of the twins suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. Their sibling sustained injuries to the eyes from shattered glass.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

That’s all pretty unremarkable, standard journalism. But here’s where the Post veers off into the weeds:

Who’s the shooter?

Two people were in custody in connection with the shooting, authorities said: a 40-year-old man who is suspected in the killings, and one person who may have fired at the shooter.

The gunman was shooting as police pursued him on foot and was found wearing a bulletproof vest and magazines, police said. He had an AR-style rifle and a handgun, as well as a police scanner, according to Outlaw. Police found about 50 spent shell cases, Outlaw said.

Charges are pending for the 40-year-old man suspected in the killings, police said Tuesday afternoon.

“The suspect, while wearing body armor, a ski mask and holding a AR-15-style assault rifle was observed at several locations near 56th Street near Chester Avenue and Springfield Avenue,” Ransom said. He noted that the suspect began shooting “aimlessly at occupied vehicles and individuals on the street as they walked.”

There’s more at the original.

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

I’m waiting to find out if Mr Carriker left us a ‘manifesto,’ the way the ‘transgender’ Nashville murderer, Audrey Hale, did, a ‘manifesto’ that the authorities have thus far refused to release, and have managed to keep from being leaked.

At least The New York Times managed to include:

In initial reports, police described the suspect as a 40-year-old male, but authorities later clarified that they were unsure of the suspect’s gender identity and in a news conference on Tuesday used the pronouns “they/them.”

It wasn’t just the Post. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in an article time-stamped “an hour ago” when I opened it at 9:29 PM, said absolutely nothing about Mr Carriker being black, or anything about him being ‘transgender,’ a cross-dresser, or whatever.

The New York Post, our nation’s second-oldest newspaper, one which does not shy away from sensationalism, but one which is also unafraid of publishing the truth regardless of political correctness, did tell us about the alleged shooter.

The professional media love to tell us how special they are, because the First Amendment mentions the press specifically. Of course, the First Amendment is protecting the right to publish, and not somehow glorifying individual publishers, but the people at the Post and the Times and the Inquirer sure don’t like to see it that way. To me, the best way for an individual media company to glorify itself would be to simply tell the truth, and tell us the whole truth.

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Out-of-control ‘wilding’ teens run Wawa out of Center City, so Josh Kruger blames not the brats, but Wawa

I’ve said it before: Wawa coffee is the best you can buy! Better than Starbucks, better than Doughdaddy’s, better than Dunkin’ Donuts. And in Philadelphia, Wawa sponsors the Independence Day fireworks, as though the city can’t produce fireworks on its own. But Josh Kruger is mad at Wawa!

Hey Wawa, we’ll take Center City stores over fireworks, please

The way Wawa has treated us is hardly worth a parade or fireworks or title sponsor recognition.

by Josh Kruger | Independence Day, July 4, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

By now, you’ve seen the commercials and swirling, groovy banners for Wawa Hoagiefest. You might’ve even eaten one of the beloved local brand’s sandwiches at a discount as part of this year’s 15th anniversary of “Hoagie Love” — at least that’s what the convenience chain calls it. Or maybe you’re participating in any one of over 40 Wawa Welcome America community events celebrating America’s independence.

That’s all well and good — if you don’t mind fraternizing with a company that sees you as the enemy.

If you’re confused, that’s OK. I, too, was disconcerted when I came to the realization that Wawa is no good anymore.

Really, folks, if we have any respect for ourselves, we’ll stop this charade and simply speak the truth: It’s time that we as a city broke up with the idea that we are into Wawa because Wawa is definitely not into us. Not when it counts, at least.

Good heavens, what has Wawa done that has so upset Mr Kruger? After a paragraph in which he trashes Wawa’s quick foods, he continued:

Bad food is one thing. Bad manners exhibited by a company that scapegoats the community we live, work, and play in is another matter altogether. This, unlike the terrible food, is personal.

You might remember this dastardly move as Wawa announced the closure of some Center City locations, citing public safety concerns. Just recently, it announced the impending July 16 closure of the landmark Second and South Streets location, too, following neighborhood complaints of public disorder and crime.

After news of the first two closures, The Inquirer’s own Editorial Board somberly wept that the action was a “dire statement about public safety in Philadelphia.”

To me, it was more a dire statement about the ethics of the privately held corporation’s executive leadership.

One would hope that this alleged “dire statement about the ethics of the privately held corporation’s executive leadership” is a statement that the corporation’s executive leadership doesn’t want to see its employees assaulted, injured, or even killed. Such would seem to me to be a pretty positive statement about the leadership!

Mr Kruger combitched that, Heaven forfend!, Wawa was moving into more suburban areas, and starting to sell gasoline. As we have previously noted, at least some Wawas are also installing Tesla charging stations. Gosh, moving into areas with less crime, and meeting a potential customer demand? How evil is that!?!

But then the author complained that Wawa was moving into other dangerous areas:

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Democrats Kill Each Other in Baltimore; Mayor Blames … Texas, Florida, Alabama?

In 2019, Wawa cheerily announced it was expanding into Baltimore, despite Baltimore’s murder rate of 58 homicides per 100,000 residents. Philly’s rate was a comparatively less horrific 22 that year. Likewise, Wawa has moved aggressively into locations in Florida — such as Jacksonville, where the homicide rate is only slightly better than Philly’s. Other Florida cities like Miami Gardens — also home to multiple Wawas — have homicide rates that are nearly identical to Philly’s.

This is hugely oversimplistic. Yes, the homicide rate in ‘Charm City,’ as Baltimore has sometimes been called, is horrible, far, far worse than Philly’s, but it isn’t just the homicide rate. The editorial Mr Kruger cited pointed out:

The closings come just weeks after about 100 teens ransacked a Wawa in Mayfair. In February, a man was stabbed to death outside of a Wawa in South Philadelphia. On Thursday, a Wawa employee in University City was pepper sprayed during a robbery involving five suspects. In 2020, Wawa cited the pandemic as the reason to close its flagship store at Broad and Walnut Streets.

What foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia is seeing is not just a terrible homicide and shooting rate, but stores robbed and simply trashed, and a law enforcement system that just flat doesn’t care. Philadelphia’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, a police-hating former defense mouthpiece who believes in ‘restorative justice‘ rather than punishing criminals, has aided and abetted the crime, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is, put as charitably as possible, overworked and overwhelmed in Philly, though many would say that she’s just plain incompetent and marking time until she can get another job. The Philadelphia Police Department is seriously undermanned, and crimes like ransacking a Wawa just fall far down the ladder in police priorities.

Then there’s Mayor Jim Kenney, who has just plain checked out, marking time until he’s no longer in the job. Mr Kenney says stuff, but doesn’t actually do anything.

With all that money coming in, you’re telling me the company had no more resources to devote to safety in Philly? Was it even efficiently protecting Philly stores?

Can we tell the truth here? The out-of-control teens who have been trashing the Center City stores have been primarily out-of-control black teens, and any resources that Wawa put into “efficiently protecting (its) Philly stores” would quickly be characterized as racist attempts to keep black teens out of the stores, and the Inquirer, the Editorial Board of which so lamented the closing of Center City Wawas, would be among the first to point that out. A committed leftist — or so I judge from his Twitter feed — Mr Kruger probably would as well.

You know, I get it: Mr Kruger, who has admitted that he “used to do a lot of meth,” loves his Wawa coffee — I do, too, and was heartened by the news that Wawa is expanding into the Bluegrass State — but he’s blaming Wawa and its corporate executives for abandoning Center City, when the truth is that Philadelphians, the out-of-control teens and the rotten parents who reared them, have actually run Wawa off.

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Today’s left really, really, really hate Freedom of Speech, and normality

There has been all sorts of leftist angst and hollering and combitching about laws, passed in several states, which ban hormone and surgical ‘treatments’ for minors who believe themselves to have been born the wrong sex. It’s discriminatory, it’s wrong, it will hurt people, and lead to suicides, we are told.

Yet, oddly enough, I never read one thing about this, in a single sentence from Newsweek:

Last week, Michigan banned conversion therapy, the controversial practice trying to “cure” LGBTQ+ people of their sexual orientation and gender identity, for minors in the state.

Yet:

Research shows that lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) teens are at increased risk of suicide and mental health issues like depression and anxiety. One of the most startling statistics: LGBTQ teens consider suicide and make suicide attempts at about twice the national rate for all adolescents.

So, if the left are arguing that not allowing minors who believe themselves to be the opposite ‘gender’ from the sex they were born to receive ‘gender-affirming’ care increases suicide risk, why would they concomitantly want to ban homosexual minors from treatment for their homosexuality if being homosexual increases their risk of suicide?

The homosexual lobby contend that conversion therapy is both harmful and ineffective, and whether it is ineffective medically, those claims have certainly been effective politically. But the real issue is one of reproduction: since homosexuals cannot naturally reproduce without stepping into heterosexuality, ‘losing’ homosexuals to normal sex is an attack on all of them. They hate being called “groomers”, but what else is it when they try their hardest to keep every kid growing up sexually confused, and to reduce the societal stigma attached to homosexuality, what else can we call it?

And now we have this:

Michigan Pronouns Law Declared an ‘Abomination’ by Former Judge

by Giulia Carbonaro | Monday, July 3, 2023 | 9:00 AM EDT

Michigan’s recent bill making it a felony for people to harass or intimidate someone by misgendering them and using the wrong pronouns has sparked controversy in the state, with former judge and television personality Joe Brown calling the measure an “abomination.”

The new measure, House Bill 4474, is part of a package of legislation that would replace Michigan’s existing Ethnic Intimidation Act and would make it a hate crime to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened” with words.

It expands the existing law to cover sex, sexual orientation, age, gender identity or expression, and physical or mental disability. Religion, ethnicity and race were already included in the previous legislation and will still be covered under the new law.

Michigan has recently been pushing reforms and new measures that would expand the protection of LGBTQ+ rights in the state, going against a nationwide trend that has seen other states moving to limit rights for transgender youth.

There’s more at the original.

Apparently the great state of Michigan, in which Governor Gretchen Whitless Whitmer, a Democrat of course, imposed illegal and draconian executive orders to fight the COVID-19 panicdemic, believes that the Freedom of Speech guaranteed to all of us under the Constitution of the United States can, should, and must be regulated to spare the precious feelings of the ‘transgendered.’ I wonder: while I do not live in Michigan, and have never set foot in that state, could I be punished because my website is available there?

Under the bill — which makes it a hate crime for a person to threaten another by deliberately using the wrong pronouns with an intimidating purpose — offenders would be guilty “of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or by a fine of not more than $10,000.”

This is what today’s left do: they elevate ‘group rights’ over those of the individual, to support the goals of the State — at least, as long as they control the State — above the individual rights protected by our Constitution. If the law passes, which has not yet happened, it will take someone actually charged and convicted of this ‘crime’, appealing the conviction through multiple layers of courts, to get it reversed, even though simply referring to Bruce Jenner as Bruce Jenner doesn’t hurt anyone. Such a person could wind up serving a sentence in prison before it could ever be reversed.

If someone wants to refer to Bradley Manning as ‘Chelsea,’ that’s perfectly up to them, and no skin of my nose, even if I see it as both silly and stupid; that’s within their free speech rights. But the lower house of the Michigan state legislature would make it a crime to refer to Mr Manning as Bradley, or as Mr Manning.

Bill Blankschaen and Erick Erickson coined the phrase, “You will be made to care“. An issue about which most sensible people would not care — it’s none of my business if Harry wants to become Sally — is becoming one in which the homosexual/transgender lobby are trying to use the power of the State to force people to go along with their kinks and delusions; that makes it other people’s business.

We have pointed it out previously: the left are smart enough to know that if they can control the language used, they can subtly, and perhaps not-so-subtly, direct your thinking. If you can get acclimated to calling someone like Richard Levine “Rachel,” and referring to him with the feminine pronouns, the job of the left is half-way done. That some of us stubbornly insist on calling the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names — if we can find them; sometimes I cannot — and using the pronouns and honorifics appropriate to their actual sex not only fights back against the left, but angers them so much that at least some of them want to make it illegal shows just how important they believe it to be.

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A great Mexican family

We are having to renovate the rectory at St Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, which was, to put it bluntly, somewhat neglected for almost twenty years; our previous pastor was an uncomplaining man, and even in very warm, humid Kentucky, never even wanted air conditioning, save for a single, 110-volt window unit.

Now, we are having to catch up, and our new priest, who is Mexican and very well-liked by the Hispanic communities in the surrounding counties — our county really has few Latinos — and a Mexican family who have their own construction and remodeling company volunteered, volunteered I stress, to help us do some major work. They are not even parishioners here, but at St Mark’s in Richmond, where our priest, Fr Enrico Montoya, has been saying the 1:00 PM Mass in Spanish One thing is certain: though I did a lot of work myself, two contractors in their forties can do more work than my 70-year-old body can do! 🙂

On Saturday, our project was to remove the old carpeting from the rectory. After twenty years of our previous pastor, a child of the Depression who hated spending money, things were just plain not clean.

The brothers, Casiano and Anesimo — I’m not going to use their last names here — showed up, with two sons, in their late teens or early twenties, and we started work. I will say one thing: these guys worked! We cut out the carpets, removed them, and removed the ancient padding under them, to expose the hardwood floors beneath them. Pulling the carpets wasn’t that bad; it was cleaning the floors underneath them! The old padding had stuck to the finish on the original floors, not in one piece, but in small pieces across the entire area. We — including me! — were on our hands and knees, scraping the floors, pulling up staples and the nailer strips that hold wall-to-wall carpets in place. I might have said darn or heck or even shoot a couple of times, had our priest not been there.

The doors of St Elizabeth’s Church, after I refinished them last Fall.

Around 11:30, the men’s wives and families showed up. They set up a long table on the covered front porch, and they had brought a ton of food, for everybody. This was real Mexican food, not what you get at Taco Bell or other Mexican restaurants in the United States, and it was great. I’d never pictured real Mexican food as being anything like this, and Anesimo — I wound up closer friends with him than any of the others — told me that they don’t really consider what we see served in Mexican restaurants around here to be Mexican; their families are from far south in Mexico, near the Guatemalan border, so the cuisine is probably different from closer to the United States.

The family are huge! Lots of kids and grandkids, and the older wives joined right in with their husbands in pulling staples from the floor. They all spoke English, though among themselves, Spanish. And my thoughts were simple: these are the kind of immigrants the United States needs!

I do not know, and certainly didn’t ask, if Anesimo and Casiano and their wives were here legally. Considering that they had built companies in Kentucky, the younger kids were almost certainly born in the United States, and are citizens.

But what we need is the kind of border security that allows families like this into our country, to become citizens, while keeping the riff-raff out. And if the family with which I worked Saturday are here illegally, why don’t we just keep them, and deport some lazy, good-for-nothing Americans sucking up welfare in their place?

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The ‘Wise Latina’ says the quiet part out loud.

At the annual Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at UC-Berkeley in 2001, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Those words were fished out after President Barack Hussein Obama nominated her to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. What can those words mean other than, as a jurist, Hudge Sotomayor would take her decisions, at least in part, based not on the law, but on her race, sex, and ethnicity.

She backed away from that statement in her confirmation hearings, “declaring it ‘a rhetorical flourish that fell flat’ and stating that ‘I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment,'” and she was ultimately confirmed, 68 to 31.

Well, today Associate Justice told us, once again, that it isn’t what is written in the law, or the Constitution, that is important, but people’s feelings! In her dissent in 303 Creative v Elenis, she wrote:

The meaning of our Constitution is not found in any law volume, but in the spirit of the people who live under it.[1]303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.

This is rather remarkable. The Justice, utterly horrified by the decision that a Colorado web designer could not be compelled to create a website for a same-sex ‘wedding,’ cited precedent after precedent telling us that the government could, and has, gotten away with both restricting and compelling various forms of commercial speech, along with dozens of citations of laws and court cases concerning equal access to commerce and commercial enterprises. Yet, after all of that long dissent, she broke down and told us that what was written in the law just flat didn’t matter. What mattered, according to our ‘wise Latina,’ is how the people who live in the United States feel about things.

This is a hugely dangerous position, but one which is hardly unexpected. Justice Sotomayor voted against religious freedom in the cases of Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak and South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, but railed against the decision, this time supporting the freedom of religion and assembly in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v Cuomo. The cases were all about the same thing: the states forcing churches to close, due to the COVID-19 penicdemic, and Justice Sotomayor believed that the virus trumped the Constitution of the United States.

The good Justice also saw nothing wrong with restricting our Second Amendment rights in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen and McDonald v City of Chicago, or upholding equal protection under the law in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The plain words of the Constitution meant nothing to Justice Sotomayor, or the other liberals on the Court, as they went through all sorts of contortions to say that somehow, some way, the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution just didn’t matter when it came to liberal policies.

The liberals on the Court are hardly the only ones who want to massage the words of the Constitution to mean something other than what they say. The Editorial Board of The New York Times opined:

In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure.

The Editorial Board spend many words telling us why Affirmative Action is so desperately needed, yet never manage to give us a reason as to how it fits under the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Thursday’s ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all of the Republican-appointed justices, takes a long time to make a simple — and simplistic — point: There is no real difference between the centuries of racial discrimination against Black people and targeted race-conscious efforts to help Black people. Both are equally bad, in this view.

Left unaddressed was one of the Chief Justice’s points, that, in the context of university admissions, which are a zero-sum game, helping black applicants has another effect, hurting white and Asian applicants.

There is so much more that could be said, but, in the end, it boils down to this: the left have programs in mind which elevate the programs of the government over the rights of individuals, and today’s left are fine with that. And that is why sensible people must fight the left, fight for our rights, because the left won’t help us.

References

References
↑1 303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.
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Special Snowflake™ melts down.

Unfortunately, I have to make a trip to Ashland today, but I felt the need to screen capture a few things before Erica Marsh decides to block me or protect or delete her tweets.

Miss Marsh described herself as a “Proud Democrat: Former Field Organizer to elect President Biden. Volunteer for the Obama Foundation.” And then she included her ‘pronouns,’ as though anyone looking at her photo couldn’t tell that she’s female.

On June 10th, she tweeted:

My name is Erica (She/Her), I’m a Proud Democrat, fully vaccinated and boosted, still wear 2 masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine 🇺🇦. I will never stop advocating for progressive candidates and causes fighting against the fascist ULTRA MAGA. RT IF YOU ARE WITH ME

Naturally, there was a Ukrainian flag in the tweet, but, significantly enough, no American flag. I think that says something. That she “still wears two masks” says something else

Well, on Thursday, she said something pretty stupid:

Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on Black people. No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action based programs were needed. Today’s decision is a TRAVESTY!!!

Apparently Miss Marsh believes that black Americans are just plain inferior. What other way is there to read what she tweeted?

Of course, after people pointed it out to her, she quickly realized what she had said, and had to issue a clarification:

Allow me to clarify this tweet, which is being manipulated for propaganda and misinformation by ULTRA MAGA.

The intention of my tweet is to highlight that prior to affirmative action, there existed a supposedly merit-based system for Black individuals to gain admission to colleges. However, these institutions employed racial profiling to prevent Black individuals from attending under the guise of this “merit” system.

I want to emphasize that my statement in no way suggests that Black individuals are less intelligent than people of other races.

Perhaps she didn’t realize what she wrote, but it was in the past tense, “prior to affirmative action.” If she had actually read the ruling, or Grutter v Bollinger, she’d have realized that the Supreme Court had previously required an end date for Affirmative Action programs, June 23, 2028 under Grutter, but as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in the ruling at hand, neither Harvard University nor the University of North Carolina, the two colleges part of the case, had specified how they were going to taper off their race-based preference systems by that date, had made any progress to doing so, nor could give any projected date for its end.

A lot of people criticized Miss Marsh’s tweets, but hey, when you speak in public criticism is something you can get.

Finally, she went all Special Snowflake™, because she apparently got her precious little feelings hurted.

If anyone is a defamation lawyer who works on contingency, please (direct message) me. Thanks.

President Harry Truman once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” That’s pretty good advice for Miss Marsh. But I checked just before posting this, and at least she hasn’t blocked her critics — at least not me, anyway — or ‘protected’ her account.

Posted on by

Dumb as a box of rocks

Were intelligence indicated by a light, there is a good chance that Dylan Mulvaney would be represented by a 15-watt refrigerator bulb. The backlash against Bud Light for using Mr Mulvaney in any form resulted in a customer backlash and boycott that not only hasn’t faded, but seems to be gaining steam three months after the incident. Executives Alissa Heinerscheid and Daniel Blake, initially reported to have taken ‘leaves of absence,’ have reportedly been terminated.

Transgender Influencer Speaks Out After Backlash Against Bud Light

Dylan Mulvaney has faced stalking and personal attacks since featuring Bud Light on her (sic) social media in April, she (sic) said, adding that the beer maker did not contact her (sic) in light of the hostility.

by John Yoon | Thursday, June 29, 2023 | 6:49 PM EDT

A transgender influencer whose social media promotion of Bud Light drew attacks from conservatives and a boycott of the brand spoke directly about the controversy for the first time on Thursday, saying that she (sic) had been bullied and that the beer maker had failed to contact her (sic) in light of the hostility.

Since April, when the influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, featured Bud Light in an Instagram video, she (sic) has faced stalking and personal attacks, she (sic) said in videos she (sic) posted on social media.

“What transpired from that video was more bullying and transphobia than I could have ever imagined,” Ms. (sic) Mulvaney, 26, said. “I’ve been followed, and I have felt a loneliness that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

Throughout the controversy, she (sic) continued, Bud Light has not reached out to her (sic). She (sic) was scared to leave her (sic) home while the company failed to stand by her (sic), she (sic) said.

“I was waiting for the brand to reach out to me, but they never did,” she (sic) said. “For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse, in my opinion, than not hiring a trans person at all.”

As per our Stylebook, The First Street Journal does not change the direct quotations of others. And while we realize that many professional media organizations specify using the names and pronouns that the ‘transgendered’ claim for themselves, the use of fifteen separate pronouns plus a feminine honorific to refer to Mr Mulvaney, in the subtitle and five short paragraphs, just 191 words of story text plus 34 words of the subtitle, 7.11% of the total words in the story, seems so excessive in normal prose that we believed we needed to note each erroneous usage.

As for Mr Mulvaney’s complaint that no one at Anheuser-Busch BUD: (%) has “reached out” to him, he, and really anyone brighter than the aforementioned 15-watt refrigerator bulb, ought to realize that he’s simply toxic. Who at Anheuser-Busch, unless directly ordered to by CEO Brendan Whitworth — who has been doing his best to isolate himself from the decisions of his minions — would contact Mr Mulvaney in any way, after seeing what happened to Mr Blake and Mrs Heinerscheid? Anything that anyone from the company said to Mr Mulvaney would be reported to the media by him, possibly with a recording. If it was sympathetic to Mr Mulvaney and his plight, such would be used against the company yet again, potentially costing Bud Light even more sales. If it was of the “Get lost and stay lost” variety, it would also be used against the company, to show that they were just [insert plural slang term for the rectum here]. Any contact with Mr Mulvaney is a lose/lose proposition for Anheuser-Busch at this point. And it would be a Career Limiting Move for anyone to do unless so directed by Mr Whitworth.

Calls for a boycott followed, fueled in part by those who had previously attacked the transgender community. One of the most prominent voices included the musician Kid Rock, who posted a video of himself shooting a stack of Bud Light cases.

Bud Light’s sales plummeted. Since then, two of the company’s marketing executives have gone on leave. The company also said in May that it would focus marketing campaigns on sports and music. This month, Bud Light was dethroned as the nation’s top-selling beer. The brand is still struggling to win back customers.

Bud Light has been criticized by some members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community for its tepid response to the backlash.

But the conservative outburst has spread to brand partnerships that other companies have struck with transgender people. Like Bud Light, the retail company Target shifted its marketing because of opposition to the company’s inclusion of L.G.B.T.Q. communities. The country singer Garth Brooks was criticized when he said at a music event that his new bar in Nashville would serve many types of beer, including Bud Light.

Simply put, it doesn’t matter what the #woke think. Not everyone is ‘woke,’ and when a lot of your customers don’t go along with the far-left ideology, leave politics out of your advertising, or those customers will leave dollars out of your pocket.

“Supporting trans people shouldn’t be political,” she (sic) said. “There should be nothing controversial or divisive about working with us.”

Sorry, but regardless of how Mr Mulvaney thinks things should be, ‘transgenderism’ is controversial and divisive. While Hahvahd educated Mrs Heinerscheid wasn’t as bright as that 15-watt bulb, almost everyone else can see that it is.