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.
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
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
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
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
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
During the COVID-19 panicdemic — no, that’s not a typographical error, but is spelled exactly the way I see it — employees who could work from home were told to do so. As it happened, my younger daughter, an IT/communications professional, worked from our farm. Fortunately, I had already installed an outdoor electric receptacle on the screened-in porch, and she did a lot of her work there.
A cup of raktajino — Klingon coffee — in a mug celebrating my status as a descendant of white, Christian, settler colonialists to start the morning.
And she was quite honest about the whole thing: she was just not as productive working at our home. With cats and dogs and chickens, with fine Kentucky spring and summer weather, there were simply too many distractions.
And it’s good for the employees as well . . . as long as they are not Jeffrey Toobin. A cup of coffee in the morning costs me 50¢, not $4.50 at Starbucks.
Logically, if most employees were as productive working from home as they are at the office, employers would love that. Having employees working at home means that employers could maintain smaller offices, have smaller parking lots, reduced janitorial services, reduced office ‘perks’ expenses, just a whole host of things. It only makes sense to require people who could work from home to come into the office if productivity is a real issue.
From The Wall Street Journal:
Meet the People Who Refused to Go Back to the Office and Lost Their Jobs
These people are coming to terms with the fact that they might never work from home again
by Callum Borchers | Wednesday, December 11, 2024 | 9:00 PM EST
If you’re reading this from your home office, it’s time to consider whether you’re prepared to lose your job over a return-to-office mandate. Continue reading
Does $3,000,000,000 for 93 postal delivery trucks sound like a lot?
One reason I prefer newspapers to other forms of the credentialed media is that newspapers can, and do, provide readers with some detailed, deeply investigative stories, something that television news just doesn’t do well. Fox News or CNN or MSNBC aren’t going to do the kind of deep digging that Washington Post reporter Jacob Bogage has done. According to the story, Mr Bogage has covered the United States Postal Service since 2020 and reviewed more than 20,000 pages of internal agency and company records for his latest story. Heck, I can’t even imagine CBS News retaining a reporter who specialized in the Post Office.
The Postal Service’s electric mail trucks are way behind schedule
Defense contractor Oshkosh had only delivered 93 trucks by November — compared to 3,000 originally expected by now. The delays put Biden’s climate goals at risk.
by Jacob Bogage | Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST
A multibillion-dollar program to buy electric vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service is far behind its original schedule, plagued by manufacturing mishaps and supplier infighting that threaten a cornerstone of outgoing President Joe Biden’s fight against climate change. Continue reading
The First Street Journal reported, on December 5th, just how well the Democrats, whose current cause de jour is “affordable housing,” have done when they’ve actually been in charge of housing. We noted a story and an Editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer[1]Sadly, both stories are now behind a “subscribers Only” paywall, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you’ll just have to take my word for it. showing how a liberally-oriented “affordable housing” landlord ignored conditions in a dilapidate apartment, and the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections, noting in the Editorial that:
(Essie) Campbell filed several complaints, but no city inspectors entered her home or issued violations for the appalling conditions inside.
Well, though no one has died due to it, it’s happening again!
The Embassy Apartments, 2100 Walnut Street. Photo via Google Maps.
Some tenants in a Walnut Street apartment building say they haven’t had heat this winter
Some tenants of the 15-story Embassy Apartments say the temperatures in their units were lower than legally allowable.
by Nate File | Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 5:56 AM EST
For some people, being carried in the arms of firefighters is a kind of fantasy.
But for 83-year-old Deborah Diamond, it was misery. On Friday evening, she and the other residents of Embassy Apartments at 2100 Walnut St. were told by their building’s management to evacuate because the city deemed it unsafe after a daylong power outage had disabled the fire alarm system. Firefighters strapped Diamond, who is on hospice care, to a chair and carried her down nine flights of stairs.
“This building is in tremendous disrepair,” she said of the 15-story property built in 1900.
This building isn’t some dump in North Philly, but is located between Rittenhouse and Logan Squares. In my Google Streetscape search, I noticed two very nice nearby townhouses, one with an historic preservation plaque on it, with “Harris/Walz” signs in the windows. 🙂
Even before the outage, some residents said their apartments had not received heat this winter, or weak heating at best. Two residents said they measured temperatures inside their apartments that were far below legal temperatures.
There’s more at the link. The newspaper’s story does not say that there had been previous complaints to L&I which were ignored, but here we have a 15-story apartment building, in a city which has been run by the Democrats since the latter days of Harry Truman’s presidency, just a couple of weeks shy of 73 years ago, and there are stories like this.
More will crop up as the depths of winter hit the City of Brotherly Love, and we hear of fires caused by electric space heaters, and toxic fumes from desperate people using kerosene heaters; this happens every winter.
According to a 2021 study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, roughly 30% of the city’s rental units lack a rental license entirely, and only 7% of the city’s rental units are inspected during a given year. This presents a troubling lack of clarity on how many households are renting units that fail to meet basic habitation standards.
There’s no surprise in this. Philly is both one of our oldest cities, so the existing housing stock is relatively old, and our nation’s poorest big city. But that also tells us that the Democrats and their policies for “affordable housing” are just words, not matched by deeds.
References
| ↑1 | Sadly, both stories are now behind a “subscribers Only” paywall, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you’ll just have to take my word for it. |
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