Author Archives: Dana Pico

Posted on by

‘Sanctuary’ policies could, and should, send those who obstruct justice to jail.

We do not normally use photos from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for copyright reasons, but this one is too important. For a newspaper which editorially supports significant immigration, maybe a picture of demonstrators in support of illegal immigrants might have thought harder about an image with three signs in Spanish.

Philly schools’ immigrant student population is booming. Advocates want the district to recommit to ‘sanctuary schools.’

The population of English learners in the Philadelphia School District is on the rise. Superintendent Watlington says he’s committed to ensuring students feel safe.

by Kristen A Graham | Monday, December 16, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

At Franklin Learning Center, Michelle Ferguson’s students, all new arrivals to the U.S., are worried.

With President-elect Donald Trump promising stricter immigration laws and mass detention and deportation of immigrants, many students at the Philadelphia School District high school that draws English learners from around the city have shared their fears with Ferguson and other staff. Continue reading →

Posted on by

How does it work, going on strike in a job for which a replacement can be trained in half a day?

This site reported, back in June, how the ‘baristas’ at the OCF Coffee Shops in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia moved to unionize, and then owner Ori Feibush simply closed all of the shops he owned.

Now the Starbucks Workers United union has announced, on Bluesky, that they ain’t going to take anymore, that they’re going out on strike!

In the heyday of unionization, unions were representing workers who actually had some skills, workers who could not easily be replaced, because their skills were needed to do their jobs, and it took a long time to develop those skills. Perhaps, just perhaps, pulling a cup of coffee isn’t that difficult a skill to learn?

I’ve mentioned it before: rather than driving to a coffee shop, and paying $3.50 or $4.25 or whatever for a ‘barista’ to pull a cup of coffee for me, I can make it at home, in less than a minute, in my Keurig, for roughly 50¢. I’m saving money on the coffee, saving the environment a paper cup to be recycled or thrown in the trash, saving however much gasoline I would burn to get to such a coffee shop, and saving however many miles of additional wear-and-tear on my truck to get me there and back.

I am wryly amused.

Posted on by

Half of the real women are deserting SJSU volleyball team

We have previously reported on the controversy over San José State University’s ‘transgender’ women’s volleyball player. Brayden Fleming, a male, has been passing himself off as female, apparently well enough that most of the women’s volleyball team didn’t know that she was a he. During recruiting, prospects were not told that there was a male on the team.

Five colleges chose to forfeit seven regular-season games rather than play SJSU, and then one of those five opted to forfeit the semi-final match against the school in the Mountain West Tournament as well. SJSU lost in the conference final, and was not invited to the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team, which ended Mr Fleming’s career; he was a redshirt senior, and is out of eligibility.

One SJSU player, and an assistant coach, joined the lawsuit against the college, but it seems that perhaps more than one of the team members were unhappy:

SJSU responds to volleyball player mass exodus after trans athlete scandal rocked program

7 players have entered the transfer portal

Continue reading →

Posted on by

Journolism: Even now, the credentialed media try to blame their laziness on Joe Biden’s staffers

At 2:55 PM EST on December 17th, I asked the question to which The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal admitted the answer on the 19th: “Why didn’t the press play its ‘adversarial role’ when it came to Joe Biden?”

How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge

Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.

Continue reading →

Posted on by

I check Bluesky so you don’t have to

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain has frequently written, “I watch CNN” or sometimes MSNBC, “so you don’t have to. Well, I went ahead and checked out Bluesky, the liberal version of Twitter, so that you don’t have to.

As we reported on December 3rd, Bluesky suspended the account of Libs of TikTok. Given that Chaya Raichik’s modus vivendi is to search out idiocy from leftists on social media and then publish it more widely, to mock the left, it seems that Bluesky just can’t handle the truth. No one, after all, accuses Miss Raichik of falsifying what she posts.

And now she’s tweeted out this one:

BlueSky Sees Surge in New Users and Child Sexual Abuse Material

Continue reading →

Posted on by

Democrisy: the left who concealed everything about Joe Biden’s condition, are terribly worried over Donald Trump’s bruised hand

We noted, just yesterday, how the credentialed media, which the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer told us:

(President) Trump and his allies fail to understand the adversarial role the press plays in a healthy democracy.

Of course, that supposedly-adversarial press failed to tell us that President Joe Biden was in serious physical and mental decline during his term in office, failed to tell us until it was revealed to all in that disastrous-for-him debate on June 27th, and the in-the-bag-for-the-Democrats media couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.

But now? We’re getting the latest meme from the Democrats, telling us our 45th and soon to be 47th President is sick, or injured, or something, from what appears to be a bruise on the back of one of his hands. To me, it looks like bruising from an IV stick, but I’m not a doctor or nurse. It also looks like President Trump can actually walk, unaided, an ability which is increasingly eluding our 46th President. Continue reading →

Posted on by

Why didn’t the press play its “adversarial role” when it came to Joe Biden?

Our regular readers — both of them — know that I am very much attached to the idea of print newspapers, despite them being slightly updated 18th century technology. I delivered newspapers as a teenager, and with my seriously degraded hearing, watching the news on television is difficult for me; even with close captioning, which is usually poor on live broadcasts, I can miss things. With the printed word, even though by printed I mean words on my computer monitor, not actual paper, I don’t miss much, and if there is a point on which I was confused, I can go back and read it again, to make certain I understood what was written.

So, quite naturally, I was reeled in by this story, that Rob Flaherty, the former deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, claimed there was “just no value” in candidates speaking to mainstream newspapers like The New York Times or Washington Post. Naturally, my mind went to the complaints by people like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard left columnist Will Bunch that newspapers specifically, and the credentialed media in general, were not hard enough on former and now future President Donald Trump.

But then came a second paragraph, which destroyed my preconceived notion of what the article was going to say: Continue reading →

Posted on by

Is Bill Kristol running our foreign policy?

There was a no-win question asked on the fourth-grade playground at Mt Sterling Elementary School when I attended, back in the days of quill pens and inkwells: If you were up to your neck in [insert vulgar term for feces here], and someone threw a bucket of [insert slang term for urine here] at your head, would you duck? That’s of what President Joe Biden’s latest foreign policy move reminds me:

US asks Israel to approve military aid to Palestinian security forces

By Jewish News Syndicate | Boston Tea Party Day, December 16, 2024 | 2:55 PM EST

The Biden administration has privately asked Israel to approve an urgent request for U.S. military aid to Palestinian Authority forces, Palestinian, American, and Israeli officials told Axios on Sunday night. Continue reading →

Posted on by

President Trump needs to roll back the ATF’s regulations over the last four years

The old saw is that Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms should be a convenience store, not a government agency, but now New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush tells us that former and future President Trump might not nominate anyone to head it. The article headline, “A.T.F. Braces for a Likely Rollback of Its Gun-Control Efforts,” certainly caught my eye:

A.T.F. Braces for a Likely Rollback of Its Gun-Control Efforts

President-elect Donald J. Trump is almost certain to choose a gun-rights advocate as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or to simply leave the job vacant.

by Glenn Thrush | Saturday, December 14, 2024 | 1:25 PM EST

Many federal agencies are bracing for the Trump era — but few are likely to face the powerful backlash that awaits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which pursued an aggressive gun control agenda under President Biden. Continue reading →