Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Did Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth really not know about the Dylan Mulvaney boondoggle?

When your company does something just boneheadedly stupid, always blame a low-level staffer, even if that low-level staffer holds the title Vice President of Marketing.

My good friend, and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach noted how Anheuser-Busch is trying to backtrack away from the idiocy of using ‘transgender activist’ Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesthing:

Anheuser-Busch CEO Realizes They Really Messed Up, Issues Statement Which Pleased No One

By William Teach | Saturday, April 15, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

Brendan Whitworth must have taken a look at the plummeting stock, and, more importantly, the plummeting sales, and decided to do a little damage control:

Anheuser-Busch CEO Issues Statement After Dylan Mulvaney Beer Can Scandal: ‘We Never Intended to Be Part of a Discussion that Divides People’

Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth issued a mea culpa Friday in the wake of the company’s partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, a former gay man who now claims to be a woman.

The move sparked backlash across the nation as the company became the latest to focus on woke social issues — namely, the radical left’s attempts to promote woke gender ideology into society by injecting it into schools and placing it on the forefront of favorite brands in corporate America. According to reports, Anheuser-Busch lost more than $6 billion in market value following its promotional campaign with the transgender TikTok star as tensions rose and boycotts ensued.

On Friday, Whitworth issued a statement, contending that the company “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.”

Translation: “We were f(ornicating) clueless!”

Anheuser-Busch is headquartered in St Louis, and the Missouri state legislature has been fighting over proposed legislation to prohibit ‘transition’ quackery for minors; did no one there read the St Louis Post-Dispatch? Does no one there pay any attention to the local news broadcasts?

The St Louis Dispatch, rescued from bankruptcy by Joseph Pulitzer in 1878, and merged with John Dillon’s St Louis Post, to become the Post and Dispatch, soon the Post-Dispatch quickly became the city’s most important newspaper, and eventually the largest in the region. It’s a regional newspaper that no one can ignore, and if the paper’s editorial position appears to support ‘gender affirming care,’ the newspaper publishes a fair amount of coverage of the political fight over it. Local television stations also cover the topic.

The leadership of Anheuser-Busch can’t not have known that this is a controversial topic, even if some, or all, of them come down on the side of transgenderism stupidity, even if some, or all, of them swallow the whole idea not just hook, line, and sinker, but all the way up to deep throat the rod-and-reel. But someone in the company decided to make Mr Mulvaney the face of Bud Light advertising.

So far, that decision has been attributed to Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, who said she had a mandate to keep America’s best-selling beer from losing customers, to expand its customer base.

I’m a businesswoman, I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was ‘This brand is in decline, it’s been in a decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand there will be no future for Bud Light.

Advertisers have been doing that for decades. We began to see ads including minorities in the 1970s, and many, many ads these days show groups of people who are racially integrated, in an attempt to appeal to all races and ethnicities and show growing friendship. The New York Times was reporting on an increase in interracial couples being shown in advertising five years ago.

But Dylan Mulvaney? He’s not just claiming to be a ‘transgender girl,’ but his shtick is actual mockery of the whole notion; rather than trying to fit in as a woman, his act is one which is a wholly over-the-top of every silly stereotype there is. Mrs Heinerscheid, who is a graduate of Harvard University, was either too clueless or too stupid to see that using Mr Mulvaney as a brand spokesthing would cause a backlash, or she just plain didn’t care, and wanted to use her position to push an agenda, when her job is to sell more beer.

I’ve got to ask: did Chief Executive Officer Whitworth really not know about Mrs Heinerscheid’s brilliant idea? It’s not as though a lot of other people didn’t know: television commercials had to be produced, cans with Mr Mulvaney’s picture were made, checks were cut, contracts signed, all of which involves people, a lot of people, people including attorneys.

We don’t know if Mrs Heinerscheid will be, as Mr Teach suggested, promoted to customer, but something like this would seem to fall well into the category of a Career Limiting Mistake. A corporate Vice President, coming up with an idea as controversial as this one, would normally protect himself by taking it up the ladder, crediting himself with the decision but getting feedback from his bosses.

Yet Mr Whitworth is distancing himself from Mrs Heinerscheid’s decisions. That’s kind of what some people would do when something like this blows up in their faces, leaving Mrs Heinerscheid twisting in the wind.

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If you’re scared, say you’re scared! But don't be afraid of stupid stuff.

That things get stupid following a mass shooting, such as the one in Louisville, or school shooting like the one in Nashville, is expected. But there’s a point at which stupidity gets squared. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Parents say Bala Cynwyd fifth graders texted about who should be shot in the next school shooting

“Everyday i think of school shootings and hope the most people die,” one student wrote, according to a screenshot of an exchange shared by two parents.

by Maddie Hanna | Friday, April 14, 2023

Three weeks ago, parents say fifth graders at Bala Cynwyd Middle School had a conversation over text about school shootings.

Bala Cynwyd is not exactly a depressed area. The mean household income is $128,94574.9% of residents 25 or older have at least a baccalaureate degree, 76.8% of homes are occupied by their owners with a median value of $568,200. 77.1% of the population are non-Hispanic whites.

These aren’t disadvantaged kids stuck in a rotten school. Unlike the disasters that Philadelphia Mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty champions, Bala Cynwyd Middle School ranks 8th best out of 877 middle schools in Pennsylvania, with 87% of students ranked as grade-level proficient in reading, and 71% in math.

“Everyday i think of school shootings and hope the most people die,” one student wrote, according to a screenshot of the exchange shared by two parents. The exchange continued: “I hope the following people will get shot,” before listing names that were blacked out.

The parents who provided the exchange to the Inquirer said they knew who the listed names were — because one was their child.

The Lower Merion School District has not informed most parents of the details of the incident — referring in a message to the community Thursday to “text messages that included threatening language.”

Lower Merion police assisted the district in investigating, “and concluded that no credible threat to the safety of the school community ever existed related to those text messages,” Acting Superintendent Megan Shafer said in the message Thursday.

I turn 70 in just a few more days, but I can still remember some of the [insert slang term for feces here] that my classmates and I said when we were middle school aged. Sixth, seventh, and eighth graders aren’t exactly the type for serious plotting.

To reach that conclusion, Shafer said the district followed its threat assessment process — using a model developed by University of Virginia researchers involving “multiple data points” and “various staff members and outside agencies, including law enforcement when indicated.”

That isn’t assurance enough, said the parents who spoke to the Inquirer, who asked not to be named to protect the anonymity of their child. They said other parents were similarly frustrated following a town hall Wednesday night with Shafer and Bala Cynwyd’s principal, Jeffrey Hunter, during which the parents said administrators disclosed that students involved in sending the messages would be allowed to return to school Monday.

“If you’re going to deem this to not be a credible threat …there still needs to be a little more transparency as to why parents should feel safe with these children being readmitted,” one of the parents said.

Paranoia much?

Look, I get it: with all of the sensationalized stories in the media, some parents are just panicked. But just a little bit of self-awareness, of remembering the [insert slang term for feces here] that they said when they were those ages, ought to bring them to the realization that middle schoolers just say stuff, silly stuff, and stupid stuff. Heck, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades are when kids are going through puberty, and that only increases the stupidity.

Our society has been permeated with fear, oftentimes unreasoning fear. Don’t give in to fear.
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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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More than a slap on the wrist, but not much more, for killing someone

We have twice previously reported on Eyvette Hunter, 52, a registered nurse accused of murdering 97-year-old James Morris. Well, she’s now pleaded guilty, but she’s not going to spend the rest of her miserable life behind bars.

Lexington nurse pleads guilty after death of a 97-year-old patient

by Taylor Six | Thursday, April 13, 2023 | 9:36 AM EDT | Updated: 408 PM EDT

Eyvette Hunter, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

A Lexington nurse who was charged with killing a patient has pleaded guilty to manslaughter after she was initially charged with murder.

Eyvette Hunter, 52, pleaded guilty Wednesday after participating in court-ordered mediation. She was accused of killing 97-year-old patient James Morris, who police said died as a result of Hunter’s intentional medical maltreatment. Morris died May 5 after Hunter’s actions a few days prior.

Hunter faces five years in prison for the amended charge of manslaughter, according to court documents. She was originally expected to stand trial June 12. Her sentencing is scheduled at 9 a.m. June 8 with Fayette Circuit Judge Thomas Travis.

Hunter’s attorney, Daniel Whitley, said her case was troubling on multiple levels and said she was used as a “scapegoat” for negligence of the hospitals.

“What I have learned about the criminal justice system, prosecutors can make anyone a murderer,” Whitley said. “When you are facing 20 (years) to life in prison, you sometimes have no other choice but to resolve your case and take a lesser charge even though you are innocent.”

Read more here.

Naturally her attorney is going to claim that Miss Hunter is just an innocent victim in all of this, but he believed that his case was winnable, believed that the commonwealth didn’t have the evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, wouldn’t he have advised his client to go to trial instead?

But my question is: why was Miss Hunter allowed to plead down to KRS §507.040(1)(c) second degree manslaughter, a Class C felony, and apparently, allow the minimum sentence? Under KRS §532.060, the penalty for a Class C felony is “not less than five (5) years nor more than ten (10) years” in prison.

Let’s be clear about this: she killed someone! And she’s getting off with, if more than a slap on the wrist, not a lot more considering her crime.

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The left combitch about #gerrymandering, but Democrats have gerrymandered themselves into small areas

The New York Times usually does decent reporting, but on occasion, not so much. In what is touted as a straight news article, the Times veered off into editorializing:

If Tennessee’s Legislature Looks Broken, It’s Not Alone

State legislatures around the country — plagued by partisan division, uncompetitive races and gerrymandering — reflect the current pressures on democracy.

by Michael Wines | Thursday, April 13, 2023 | 3:54 AM EDT

WASHINGTON — There are 99 legislators in the Tennessee House of Representatives, the body that voted on Thursday to expel two of its Democratic members for leading an anti-gun protest in the chamber.

Sixty of them had no opponent in last November’s election.

Of the remaining House races, almost none were competitive. Not a single seat flipped from one party to the other.

“We’re just not in a normal political system,” said Kent Syler, a political science professor and expert on state politics at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. “In a normal two-party system, if one party goes too far, usually the other party stops them. They put the brakes on.”

In Tennessee, he said, “there’s nobody to put on the brakes.”

And not just in Tennessee.

Nationwide, candidates for roughly four of every 10 state legislative seats run unopposed in general elections.

And across the country, one-party control of state legislatures, compounded by hyperpartisan politics, widespread gerrymandering, an urban-rural divide and uncompetitive races, has made the dysfunction in Tennessee more the rule than the exception.

It took reporter Michael Wines eight paragraphs to get down to the word he wanted to use, ‘gerrymandering.’ Mr Wines wants readers to think that evil reich-wing Republicans are being just unfair!

But look at the county-by-county map of the Volunteer State in the 2020 presidential election. There are 95 counties in Tennessee, and Joe Biden carried exactly three of them. Mr Biden didn’t carry a single county in the eastern half of the state, regions 1 and 2 as defined by the state Department of Transportation. Even Knox County, where the University of Tennessee is located, was carried by President Trump, 124,540 (56.47%) to 91,422 (41.45%). Of the three counties carried by Mr Biden, one, Haywood, is relatively small, and is one of the two counties which have a majority of the population being black. The other two, Davidson (Nashville) and Shelby (Memphis) are large, urban areas. The last time a Republican won Davidson County was 1988, and even in 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, Davidson County was carried by the Democrat, with a whopping 59.08% of the vote.

In 2020, President Trump won 1,852,475 votes, 60.66% of the total, from Tennesseans, compared to 1,143,711, or 37.45%, for Mr Biden. If Republicans have a super-majority in the Tennessee state legislature, it’s because Democrats have gerrymandered themselves, being heavily concentrated in three counties. There’s no way to apportion districts, other than some minor adjustments at the margin, to help Democrats very much.

The 2018 Senate election, 2018 gubernatorial election, 2020 Senate election, and 2022 gubernatorial election, all statewide races and thus not subject to gerrymandering by anybody, all showed the same thing: heavy Republican victories, with the same three counties being the only ones carried by the Democratic candidate. In the 2022 gubernatorial campaign, incumbent Republican even carried Haywood County, albeit by a small margin.

We have previously documented the same type of thing in Kentucky, where a liberal Lexington Herald-Leader columnist whined that “gerrymandered political districts do not represent the will of the people”, but the state legislative and congressional results fairly accurately represented the actual votes of Kentuckians.

Pennsylvania is a great example of the problem: in 2020, Joe Biden carried the Keystone State by 80,555 votes, 3,458,229 (50.01%) to 3,377674 (48.84%), but only because he carried Philadelphia 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%), a margin of 471,050 votes. Without Philly, Mr Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%). The Democratic vote has effectively gerrymandered itself, concentrating in major cities, smaller geographical areas, while sensible people are more likely to live in more suburban and rural areas.

In the 2004 elections, President George W Bush got zero votes in five Philadelphia precincts; John Kerry won twenty congressional districts by greater percentages than Mr Bush’s best district, yet President Bush won nationwide 62,040,610 (50.73%) to 59,028,444 (48.27%). In 2008, John McCain got zero votes in a whopping 57 city precincts, and four years later, Mitt Romney was blanked in 59 precincts. The Philadelphia Inquirer, of course, could find no evidence of fraud in any of this, but it points out a fact that everyone knows, but the Democrats just don’t want to talk about: Democrats, and Democrat votes, are very heavily concentrated in our major cities. At 142.7 square miles, out of Pennsylvania’s 46,055 mi², 0.31% of the state’s total area, how would you redistrict Philadelphia to not gerrymander the state of Pennsylvania?

Oddly enough, we don’t seem to see the left whining about gerrymandering in states like New York and California, where Republicans don’t have much of a chance.

But it is Republican-run states, many experts say, that are taking extreme positions on limiting voting and bending or breaking other democratic norms, as Tennessee did in expelling two lawmakers last week.

Perhaps Mr Wines has forgotten that congressional Democrats wanted to expel Republican members who they claim supported the Capitol kerfuffle, and probably would have, if they had a strong enough majority. While I disapprove of the Tennessee House expelling the two Democrat members — both of whom have been reappointed by their local governments pending special elections — this is an example of what goes around, comes around.

It’s simple: with accepted rules for drawing legislative districts calling for as close as is reasonably practical in the number of residents and that districts should be contiguous and at least reasonably compact, and cities in which Democrats have huge percentage advantages, there aren’t that many ways to draw district boundaries reasonably which don’t pack Democrats into a smaller number of districts, unless a state is heavily Democratic as a whole.

So when you hear about the left combitching — yes, I created that word myself, and the etymology ought to be obvious 🙂 — about gerrymandering, remember: they did it to themselves.
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Shocking! Who could ever have predicted this? Get woke, go broke?

I have said before that I don’t see Dylan Mulvaney as an actual ‘transgender’ woman; his act, “Days of Girlhood,” is so much a parody, so different from how actual girls act, that it’s difficult to take him seriously. Of course, the dummkopf from Delaware did, as President Biden actually sat down for an interview with Mr Mulvaney. Is there any Catholic doctrine that our purportedly Catholic President won’t trash?

Nike hired Mr Mulvaney to sell sports bras when he has “nothing to put in the sports bra, when actually it’s really important women get proper support when they do sport,” 1980 women’s Olympic silver medalist Sharron Davis said.

Anheuser-Busch somehow thought that it would be an absolutely groovy cool idea to use Mr Mulvaney to sell Bud Light beer!

Bud Light Distributors Fear Unemployment After Beer Sales Plummet Over Dylan Mulvaney Partnership

Story by Haley Gunn • Tuesday, April 11, 2023 • 8:30 PM

Anheuser-Busch distributors have begun to fear for their jobs after Bud Light sales in the Midwest and South plummeted following the beer’s new sponsorship with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, RadarOnline.com has learned.

News of Mulvaney’s partnership with the popular beer sparked controversy online. Conservative celebrities like Kid Rock took to social media to post their outrage at the brand. Critics accused the brands partnering with the TikTok star of going “woke.”

Frenzy surrounding Bud Light, which is owned by Anheuser-Busch, reached new heights when a man, who claimed to be an affiliate distributor of the beer, posted his grievances on Twitter.

There’s more at the original.

Budweiser beers had already seen slumping sales, so perhaps this was a ‘Hail Mary’ pass attempt. Whatever it was, it seems to have fallen as flat as an open can of beer:

Also read: William Teach: What A Shame: Anheuser-Busch Sees $6 Billion Loss After Trans Stunt

Anheuser-Busch distributors in the South were “spooked” by the widespread backlash Bud Light received after teaming up with transgender social media star Dylan Mulvaney.

The intense opposition to Mulvaney promoting the beer has been alarming to Anheuser-Busch distributors, which placed fewer orders after the partnership sparked outrage from conservatives who argued the company is pushing “gender propaganda,” according to a Beer Business Daily report reviewed by Fox News.

“We reached out to a handful of A-B [Anheuser-Busch] distributors who were spooked, most particularly in the Heartland and the South, and even then in their more rural areas,” the popular beer industry trade publication wrote.

Beer Business Daily said it assessed the situation “purely from a marketing and sales perspective,” noting that current data are very limited but “it appears likely Bud Light took a volume hit in some markets over the holiday weekend” since rural customers are also most likely to celebrate Easter.

“Whether it lasts or whether the publicity sparks incremental off-setting demand from over the ideological divide in metro areas, remains to be seen,” the publication wrote, adding that it will be difficult for Bud Light to “appeal to the sensitivities of a new generation of drinkers” without offending some longtime customers.

It’s too early to know if the slump in sales will continue, but companies use celebrities and athletes to advertise their products because they are hoping for some form of audience identification with the celebrity or athlete. Nike’s sports bra is pretty much the same as any other manufacturer’s sports bra; will using a flat-chested male-in-drag. While Mr Mulvaney has ‘famously’ had ‘facial feminization surgery,’ at least as of a few months ago had not had been castrated or had ‘bottom’ surgery or breast augmentation done. How does that sell sports bras? Does making Mr Mulvaney the ‘face’ of Bud Light really appeal to the vast majority of beer drinkers as someone with whom they’d want to identify?

I cannot boycott Bud Light, or Budweiser beer, or any of Anheuser-Busch’s other products, because I never bought them in the first place, but Bud Light was the nation’s number one beer by sales. Perhaps other beers which taste great but are less filling, whatever the heck that means, will supplant Bud Light, or perhaps they won’t.

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“Claims she has a bad back”

Her job is riding a desk. Is she bed-ridden? Is she hospitalized? Is she too doped up on pain meds to work from her La-Z-Boy? Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is off of work with a back injury.

Police Commissioner Outlaw is out for a month with a back injury after a car crash

Outlaw suffered a back injury in a car accident on March 29. She’s been out of work since and hopes to return in about two weeks, officials said.

by Ellie Rushing | Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is expected to be out of work for about a month after suffering a back injury in a motor-vehicle crash two weeks ago, the department said Tuesday.

Outlaw was injured on the afternoon of March 29, after her police SUV collided with an Uber driver at 15th and Race Streets.

The commissioner suffered “injuries to her back” during the collision and has been out of work since, said department spokesperson Sgt. Eric Gripp.

“She is recovering and hopes to be back to work in approximately two weeks,” he said.

There’s more at the original.

Back injuries are no fun, to be sure, but can’t Miss Outlaw do some of her work from a recliner? If she can’t sit at her desk, is there no hospital-type desk that she could use? Are there no phones that she could use, no computers that she could access?

The cop-hating incoming Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, will have to select a new Police Superintendent now that David Brown has resigned; he was going to be fired anyway. May I suggest that Miss Outlaw get the job? Anything, just get her out of Philly!

The City of Brotherly Love is in the middle of a four-year-long crime wave, but the Commissioner, and perhaps you could read this with the same voice and inflection Tony Joe White did in Polk Salad Annie, “claims she has a bad back.”

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The credentialed media don’t understand their home state! Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader is out of touch with Kentuckians

We have previously reported how the Lexington Herald-Leader, a McClatchy newspaper, follows the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and refrains from publishing the photos of black suspects and convicted criminals, and does not refer to race in its criminal reports, though somehow, photos of accused criminals who are white manage to make it into the newspaper.

So, imagine my surprise when reporters Taylor Six and Aaron Mudd wrote this line:

Connor Sturgeon, a white male who police said was live-streaming the shooting, was a former employee at Old National Bank, the site of Monday morning’s shooting.

Naturally, I took the screen shot of the sentence, before it vanishes into the ether.

Authorities identify former Old National Bank employee as Louisville shooter

by Taylor Six and Aaron Mudd | Monday, April 10, 2023 | 4:10 PM EDT | Updated: 9:52 PM EDT

Louisville Metro Police have identified a 25-year-old man as the shooter who killed five people and injured several others before he was fatally shot by police at a downtown bank Monday morning.

Connor Sturgeon, a white male who police said was live-streaming the shooting, was a former employee at Old National Bank, the site of Monday morning’s shooting.

The new details emerged during a Monday afternoon press conference attended by city officials and Gov. Andy Beshear, who said he’d lost a close friend in the shooting.

According to police, officers were dispatched to Old National Bank Monday morning for reports of an active shooter. When they arrived, the shooting was ongoing, but the shooter was reported dead soon after.

Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel named him Monday afternoon during a press conference. She said Sturgeon was formerly an employee with Old National Bank and assumed he was a Louisville resident.

According to the police chief, Sturgeon was killed by police gunfire. He was reported to have used a “rifle,” although police did not specifically state what type.

There’s a little more at the original, but nothing that hasn’t been all over the news. The story mentions that the killer was a “former” employee of the bank, but does not state what several other sources have, that he was discharged by the bank.

Naturally, the Herald-Leader’s primary columnist wants gun control:

After Louisville shooting, it’s time to get out our bullhorns. We’re sick of gun deaths. | Opinion

by Linda Blackford | Monday, April 10, 2023 | 12:28 PM EDT

Have we had enough yet?

Exactly two weeks after a deranged shooter killed six people in Nashville, three of them precious, innocent children, a deranged shooter killed four people in Louisville (the shooter also died), and sent eight more to the hospital.

Also see: William Teach, “Gun Grabbers Push Gun Grabbing Immediately After Leftist Nutjob Kills People“

There have been 131 mass shootings — defined as more than four people dead or injured — THIS YEAR alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Almost 10,000 people have died from guns since Jan. 1.

Today made 132. The archive updated its numbers as police gave their final reports.

A tsunami of “thoughts and prayers” from politicians will now roll down, hoping to drown us in distraction from the fact that they could stop this if they wanted to.

If we made them.

After several more paragraphs blaming “the guns,” Mrs Blackford comes up with a statement she has made before, and one she knows is a lie:

But once again, gerrymandered political districts do not represent the will of the people, who are sick of seeing people, children, die for nothing but a perverted misunderstanding of our founding fathers.

“Gerrymandered”? In 2020, Republicans dramatically increased their number of seats in the Kentucky General Assembly, from 61-39 in the state House of Representatives to 75-25, and in the state Senate from 28-10 to 30-8. But those gains happened under the district lines passed following the 2010 Census, when Democrats controlled the state House, and a Democrat was Governor. Republicans did not take over control of teh state House until after the 2016 elections; they did previously control the state Senate, including prior to the reapportionment.

Republicans did increase their seats in the 2022 election, up to 80-20 in the House and 31-7 in the Senate. Interestingly enough, the Democrats never even fielded candidates in 44 of the House districts, so there was no way they could even think about regaining control. In my own district, no serious Democrat ran in the primary, and a perennial kook candidate won the nomination, a candidate so bad that the state Democratic Party disavowed him.

Is there gerrymandering? In 2020, President Trump received 1,326,646 votes from Kentuckians, 62.09% of the total, while Joe Biden got only 772,474, or 36.15%. President Teump carried 118 out of the Commonwealth’s 120 counties, losing only Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington). In the same election, Senator Mitch McConnell won 1,233,315 votes, 57.76%, while his well-funded Democrat opponent, Amy McGrath Henderson received only 816,257, 38.23%. Mrs Henderson carried only three counties, Jefferson, Fayette, and Franklin, which included the state capitol of Frankfort.

In 2022, Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican, won 913,326 votes, 61.80%, to Democrat Charles Booker’s 564,311 votes, 38.19%.

Those were statewide elections, which means there was no gerrymandering possible. Mrs Blackford might argue gerrymandering at the margins of the 2022 General Assembly races, but a difference of two or three would hardly matter against the GOP’s overwhelming majorities.

Mrs Blackford called the Commonwealth’s gun laws “a perverted misunderstanding of our founding fathers,” but that completely ignores history. When what became the Second Amendment was written, it was by the generation which had just won a revolution against Great Britain. In 1775, the military Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Gage, had ordered gun control himself, ordering the confiscation of firearms and ammunition from the wretched colonials. It was to seize reported storehouses of gunpowder and ammunition that General Gage sent the redcoats to Lexington and Concord, resulting in the shot heard ’round the world, and the first battles in our revolution. Does Mrs Blackford seriously believe that the revolutionaries who began that war fighting against gun control by the British would not have meant for individuals to have the right to keep and bear arms.

In 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, many Americans lived on or very near the frontier. Does Mrs Blackford believe that the “founding fathers” would have thought the government could ban individuals from owning firearms when they had to hunt for game to put meat on the table, and be able to defend themselves from the Indian tribes? Does Mrs Blackford believe that when her home state of Kentucky was settled by white families, that the “founding fathers” would have believed it acceptable for the government to have the authority to ban individual ownership of firearms when the settlers needed to hunt for food and defend themselves from the Cherokee and Shawnee Indians who already lived here?

There were no telephones in the late 18th century, and homesteads could be pretty far apart. There were no police departments on the frontier. The first organized, publicly-funded professional full-time police forces in the United States were established in Boston in 1838, New York in 1844, and Philadelphia in 1854. If a bad guy was raiding a homestead, would the “founding fathers” have thought that the government could ban the private ownership of firearms by individuals, leaving them unable to defend themselves?

Mrs Blackford’s biography says that she “writes columns and commentary for the Herald-Leader. She has covered K-12, higher education and other topics for the past 20 years at the Herald-Leader.” Twenty years, huh? That means entirely in the 21st century, on computers and word processors, exercising her freedom of speech and of the press via giant printing presses and an internet which allows distribution of her words widely across the Herald-Leader’s service area, which is central and eastern Kentucky, and even around the world if someone chooses to search. These are certainly things of which the “founding fathers’ had no concept! If we were to accept the columnist’s ideas that the “founding fathers” certainly never meant for the Second Amendment to cover what it covers today, then wouldn’t we also have to say that the First Amendment does not cover more than a megaphone or a hand-set newspaper printed entirely by manual labor?

We have previously documented the newspaper’s endorsement history, and how the voters of the sixth congressional district and the commonwealth as a whole almost always vote the opposite from how what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal want.

When I moved away from the Bluegrass State at the end of 1984, the Herald-Leader was a broadsheet publication, and if not the size of Louisville’s Courier-Journal or The Philadelphia Inquirer, still a reasonable newspaper for central and eastern Kentucky. I used to deliver the old morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in Mt Sterling, and when I returned to the Bluegrass State in 2017, I could see just how far downhill the newspaper had gone. Just a few pages, no longer a broadsheet, and visibly on its last legs. That, too, is freedom of speech and of the press, as, presented with the other news alternatives of television and radio and the internet, the people of the newspaper’s service area have chosen against it.

Perhaps that is why Mrs Blackford personally, and the newspaper’s editors in general, have lost touch with what used to be their service area. They now reflect only the opinions of the state’s second-largest city, and while it’s a significant voting block, it isn’t the majority of even the sixth congressional district. Mrs Blackford may blame it all on gerrymandering, but it’s the newspaper and her which are out of touch with Kentuckians, not the state legislature.
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The left keep making excuses for other leftists who kill.

Democrats in the United States have been very much in favor of enforcing the law when it came to the protests which occurred on January 6, 2021. The federal Department of Justice has charged nearly a thousand people with crimes over a rowdy demonstration, and The Washington Post reported that Attorney General Merrick Garland — who absolutely hates Republicans for denying him a Supreme Court seat — is looking at charges for perhaps another thousand people. What my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal has been very much supportive of charging the Capitol kerfufflers as seriously as possible, even though the actual guilty pleas have been for a single, relatively minor misdemeanor count, 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(G), Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building; the penalty for which is a misdemeanor conviction punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 or up to six months in prison, or both.

But it seems as though the Herald-Leader is actually quite supportive of breaking the law when it comes to something the editors support:

Civil disobedience is now required to fight gun violence and protect our most vulnerable | Opinion

by Fenton Johnson[1] | Thursday, April 6, 2023 | 11:00 AM EDT | updated: Friday, April 7, 2023 | 9:35 AM EDT

The moment I read that the Nashville school shooter was a woman whom the police indicated was being “treated for a mental disorder,” I wrote an email to a friend in Kentucky, like Tennessee a state where a Republican supermajority legislature is waging war on trans children and their parents. “I find myself wondering,” I wrote, “if the ‘mental disorder’ with which the killer was being treated was some kind of gender nonconformity issue, conscious or otherwise. So much mental illness resides there, and may have been triggered, to use the word of the day, by the Tennessee legislature’s actions against LGBT people.”

Really? It was reported almost immediately that Audrey Hale, the murderer — no need to used the qualifier “alleged,” since she was shot dead virtually in the act — was ‘transgendered,’ a woman claiming that she was really a man and calling herself “Aiden.” As we previously reported, with some confusion about Miss Hale’s status in the immediate aftermath, the professional media used some contorted language to avoid gendered pronouns or honorifics, to keep from getting them wrong.

Not that it mattered: “Gender identity advocates accused mainstream news outlets who scrambled to cover the story of ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ Hale by not referring to her as a man or as a transman.”

How did I know this before reading or hearing the news that Audrey Hale was in fact trans? Because I grew up in rural Kentucky in the 1950s, where I attended the most conservative of Roman Catholic grade schools. Shaming and corporal punishment were commonplace and sex was never spoken of because the priestly hierarchy understood that silence was its most powerful tool in protecting its power to abuse children and women.

LOL! I attended a public school in a small town in Kentucky, in the 1960s and very early 1970s, and sex was never spoken of by the teachers and administrators — it was spoken about plenty of times by the students! — because those subjects were simply not supposed to be part of the educational curriculum, and if they had been part, parents would have been very upset. Sex education was a subject for parents, not the public schools.

I who loved learning dreaded not the classroom, where I could sneak a look into the science and literature textbooks that we were often forbidden to read. Instead I dreaded the playground and my walks to and from school, where class bullies beat me up for walking like a woman. They would teach me to be a man like them — they would teach me violence. But I got lucky — I got a scholarship; I got out; I ran away, to San Francisco, to a place where I could heal my wounds, learn peace, and find the courage to come out as a gay man.

The playground and those walks home taught me that the loudest bullies had the most to protect. The meanest bullies were such cowards that they resorted to violence to mask their insecurities. They rushed to buy assault weapons.

Really? The “bullies” of the 1950s “rushed to buy assault weapons”?

Fifty years later, ex-Marine Senator J.D. Vance tweets that “giving into these ideas is dangerous,” as if gender identity is an “idea,” as if his toxic heterosexuality has not slaughtered countless women, children, and men across centuries of war, in the battlefields and in the streets and lanes. Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett implies that the solution is to lock our children up at home and go to the mats — an approach that has some merit, in that it allows loving and compassionate parents to protect their children from the likes of him and his ideologies.

When a homosexual male starts blabbering about “toxic heterosexuality,” you know that he’s pretty much losing it. 🙂

Audrey Hale’s powder keg of anger and self-loathing was prepared in the halls of the school where she acted out her despair on the terms established and promoted by the gun lovers. The leaders who in their public stances told her she was “dangerous” invited her to act out their accusation. That she did so on their terms and using their weapons of choice is a matter of cause and effect.

Oh, look! Fenton Johnson just ‘deadnamed‘ and ‘misgendered‘ Miss Johnson!

Americans live on sidewalks, migrants seeking asylum are murdered at our doors and in our streets, banks go under, our transportation infrastructure is in rotten shape, our students do not receive the literacy, skills, and moral compasses they need to become good and cheerful citizens. Our legislators’ response to these crises is to spend days debating drag performances while defending easy access to assault weapons. Beyond that, they say, they can do nothing.

The hour is here for peaceful civil disobedience, such as that practiced by Tennessee State Representative Gloria Johnson and over a thousand Nashville students, who are taking their case directly to the legislative halls in exercise of their constitutional rights, and whom the Republican supermajority is attempting to silence. As U.S. history teaches us, those who act from courage and compassion must be prepared to face the cowards with their guns. Better our aged bodies than those of our children.

Connor Sturgeon’s LinkedIn profile, screen captured before it could be deleted. Click to enlarge.

“Civil disobedience,” huh? Civil disobedience is defined as “active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government or other lawful authority.” Is Mr Johnson, and the Herald-Leader which chose to publish him, calling for breaking the law? The newspaper, at least, hasn’t been so charitable when it comes to the January 6 protesters, the vast majority of whom did nothing but march in the Capitol Building. Is Mr Johnson willing to go to jail, and be incarcerated amongst those “toxic(ly) heterosexual” other criminals?

Well, Connor Sturgeon, 25, just killed several people at Old National Bank, his employer, in Louisville, going to his eternal reward in the process. Will Mr Johnson “find myself wondering, if he had a ‘mental disorder’, or was perhaps homosexual or transgender, since the General Assembly recently overrode the Governor’s veto and passed Senate Bill 150, which prohibits hormone of surgical ‘transitioning’ of minors — they can do whatever fool thing they want once they turn 18 — and prohibits public school systems from requiring teachers and other employees from being required to go along with a ‘transgender’ student’s preferred name or pronouns? Mr Sturgeon did specify his ‘pronouns,’ “He/him” in his LinkedIn profile, though they only show up if you are logged in to LinkedIn, which I screen captured before it was deleted. Mr Johnson complained that “our students do not receive the literacy, skills, and moral compasses they need to become good and cheerful citizens,” but young Mr Sturgeon claimed that he had a Master of Science degree from the University of Alabama’s Manderson Graduate School of Business, and he had what would appear, from his job title, Syndications Associate and Portfolio Banker, to be a decently-paying job at Old National Bank.

Miss Hale and Mr Sturgeon were insane by any practical definition: both wanted to end it all, and both decided that suicide-by-cop and taking innocent people with them was a great, great way to make a splash as they departed our mortal vale. Anger over a legislative act does not somehow justify what Miss Hale, and perhaps Mr Johnson, did.

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Oh, look! Helen Gym Flaherty is getting much of her financial support from people with no connection to Philadelphia! Socialists gotta socialist, and are trying to trash yet another big city

As critical as I have been of The Philadelphia Inquirer, I should note when they do good reporting.

Half the money collected by candidates for Philly mayor comes from outside the city

Some candidates in the crowded Democratic primary field have relied more than others on money from outside Philadelphia than others.

by Aseem Shukla and Anna Orso | Monday, April 10, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Philadelphia’s mayoral race has already drawn millions in fundraising. And half of it has come from outside the city.

Campaigns have already raised more than $17 million. Of that, $8 million comes from the candidates themselves. But an Inquirer analysis shows that of the $9.3 million given by actual donors:

  • About half of the money, at least $4.4 million, comes from donors in Philadelphia.
  • Roughly another quarter, at least $2.5 million, comes from donors elsewhere in the region.
  • The remainder, at least another $2.1 million, comes from donors outside the area.
  • A small fraction, under $100,000, came from small donations that campaigns don’t have to disclose, so the addresses of those donors is unknown.

Maria Quiñones-Sánchez recently withdrew from the race.

That there would be donors from the city’s suburbs is hardly surprising: many people who work in Philadelphia don’t live in the city themselves, but have a vested interest in how the city functions.

It’s interesting that former city Controller Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff is tied for the largest percentage raised from city residents, and has, by far, the smallest percentage raised from outside of the area. The Inquirer surprised me when, rather than the furthest left candidate, Helen Gym Flaherty, the Editorial Board instead endorsed Mrs McDuff.

But here’s the money paragraph from the newspaper:

More than the rest of the field, Helen Gym and Derek Green, both former City Council members, have raised money from donors outside the region entirely. Gym in particular has a national profile as a leading voice in the progressive movement, and has significant financial support from the American Federation of Teachers, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Over one-third of her money comes from donors outside the region.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Why Do Democrats Think They Can ‘Win’ the Crime Issue? Media bias misinforms the public about “gun violence.”

The Inquirer previously reported that the city’s teachers’ union has been one of Mrs Flaherty’s biggest supporters. As we previously reported, Mrs Flaherty has earned her reputation of being a major supporter of public schools, but one of her notable successes, keeping Edward T Steel Elementary School from becoming a charter school, hasn’t worked out all that well, as it is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, with 8% of students ranked as grade-level proficient in reading, and a whopping 1% as grade-level proficient in math.

So, why do I care? After all, I no longer work in Philadelphia and its suburbs, and don’t even live in Pennsylvania now. I care because I’ve seen the disastrous effects of big city liberalism, as the City of Brotherly Love has seen a tremendous spike in crime, with annual homicides more than doubling in fewer than ten years as the good people of Philly elected a mayor who is just plain tired of the job and a district attorney who doesn’t want to put criminals in jail. Chicago has suffered through the same things with outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot and State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, and just elected police-hating Brandon Johnson, who’s even further left than Miss Lightfoot to replace her as Mayor. Manhattan elected Alvin Bragg to be district attorney, and his chief assistant district Attorney, Meg Reiss has said, “We know incarceration doesn’t really solve any problems.” Me? I believe that our problem is not mass incarceration, but that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time.

One thing ought to be obvious: the criminal who is already locked up is not out on the streets, committing more crimes.

But Mrs Flaherty doesn’t seem to understand that. She strongly endorsed and campaigned with, George Soros-sponsored “restorative justice” District Attorney Larry Krasner, later saying, “I support reducing the prison population by 50% from 2019 levels. We must center transformative and restorative justice practices in Philadelphia.” She wants to do everything to increase public safety other than getting criminals off the streets! Yet Mrs Flaherty has been receiving a clear pile of money from public school teachers, who are the epitome of the socialist class, government employees who have no responsibility for actually being good at their jobs, and who seem to want to introduce every bit of #woke idiocy and sexual deviance to children.

The policies of the left, when put into government action, have proven to be actively harmful to our society and our civilization. That’s why I fret for Philadelphia, which is already suffering from such policies, and could well be poised to double-down on the stupidity.