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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading

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

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

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

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

The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

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

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

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

by John Lavenburg | Tuesday, December 3, 2024

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

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

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

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

I check Bluesky so you don’t have to

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

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

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

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

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

No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! The legacy media rarely lie outright, but their biases can be seen in their editorial choices of what to cover, and what to ignore

One thing I saw frequently on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — in the weeks before the election were claims, unsourced claims, that Kamala Harris Emhoff’s campaign had internal polling which was showing that she was losing to former President Donald Trump. Those were cheering, no doubt about that, but I am heavily biased toward verifiable claims, claims that I can back up on The First Street Journal. I make no claim that my site should be considered part of the credentialed media, nor do I claim it to be unbiased; my occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, and I are both definitely politically conservative, even though we have some disagreements on a few issues.

But while the credentialed media have long told us that the contest between Vice President Emhoff and Mr Trump was a close one, one thing I never saw, in any of the credentialed media sources I do check — The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to name just a few — was any hint that the Emhoff campaign knew they were behind. Yet someone, at the very least, was leaking that information, leaked it well enough that some conservative sites heard it. Continue reading

John Podesta makes commitments for our government that President Trump will not keep

Yeah, this might not work out!

Conservatives actually love John Podesta. Thanks to his lax computer security, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks was able to hack into many of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, the exposure of which helped her to her strong second-place finish in that election. Mr Podesta helped, in his own inimitable way, to elect Donald Trump!

Cop29: wealthy countries agree to raise climate finance offer to $300bn a year

EU and nations including the UK, US and Australia indicate they will make the increase in exchange for changes to a draft text, sources say

Adam Morton, Fiona Harvey, Patrick Greenfield and Dharna Noor in Baku and Damian Carrington | Saturday, November 23, 2024 | 2:45 AM EST

Major rich countries at UN climate talks in Azerbaijan have agreed to lift a global financial offer to help developing nations tackle the climate crisis to $300bn a year, as ministers met through the night in a bid to salvage a deal.

The Guardian understands the Azeri hosts brokered a lengthy closed-door meeting with a small group of ministers and delegation heads, including China, the EU, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the UK, US and Australia, on key areas of dispute on climate finance and the transition away from fossil fuels. Continue reading

Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and hate!

It is entirely possible that I have been, believe it or not, too charitable to our friends on the left. In my recent article, Will Bunch uses his Freedom of Speech and of the Press to tell us that he hates Freedom of Speech and of the Press, I mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch for his tirade against MSNBC’s (supposed) journalists, Joe and Mike Scarborough for having gone to Mar-a-Lago and meeting with former and future President Donald Trump. Mr Bunch told his readers about the brave “journalists left who do plan, in a moment of increased risk, to keep asking the tough questions in this muddled new era,” but trashes two (purported) journalists who have gone to cover a story about the next President of the United States as somehow “supplicants,” showing fealty and making obeisance to him. Uhhh, you can’t “keep asking the tough questions” to Mr Trump if you are unwilling to talk to him in the first place.

I would have thought that a journolist, oops, sorry, journalist like Mr Bunch would appreciate freedom of the press and the willingness of journalists to go into hostile territory, to get their stories, to report the news, even from people who didn’t like or respect them. Continue reading

Will Bunch uses his Freedom of Speech and of the Press to tell us that he hates Freedom of Speech and of the Press

Let’s get this part out of the way early: I have little respect for Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch’s intelligence. But even he ought to have seen the silliness in his Tuesday morning newsletter.

Mr Bunch began with his very great concern that our “45th and soon-to-be 47th POTUS” would be cracking down on free speech and dissent:

Mother Jones also notes in a new piece that the anti-Gaza-protest playbook will likely inspire a Trump regime in other ways, including following through on his campaign threats to deport campus protesters. Cornell University grad student Momodou Taal — a protester whose student visa was revoked but has dodged deportation, for now — told the magazine that last spring’s crackdown set an awful precedent, saying: “I think what [President Joe] Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

Indeed, Cornell’s moves to suspend Taal and other pro-Palestinian students who disrupted a job fair in September is just one part of a campus crusade against dissent and, arguably, free speech that seems to have succeeded in sharply reducing protests against the killing of civilians in Gaza — or against anything else for that matter.

Uhhh, even Mr Bunch (unwittingly?) admitted that Mr Taal “disrupted a job fair,” which means that this was beyond freedom of speech and peaceable assembly, but was infringing upon the freedom of speech and peaceable assembly of other people.

Mr Bunch then advocated the new social media site Bluesky, the anti-Twitter refuge of those who can’t stand actual freedom of speech: Continue reading

Bob Casey and his minions are desperately trying to cheat

Screen capture from Philadelphia Inquirer website main page, 8:45 PM EST on Monday, November 18, 2024.

We have been told, ever since the election of 2020, that no, of course not, there are no attempts to cheat on election results or vote counting!

Pa. Supreme Court again rules that Philly and other counties cannot count undated mail ballots

The ruling comes after several Philly-area counties defied the court’s previous guidance. The issue has come under close scrutiny as the race between Bob Casey and Dave McCormick undergoes a recount.

by Sean Collins Walsh, Gillian McGoldrick, and Fallon Roth | Monday, November 18, 2024 | 4:30 PM EST

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Monday issued a ruling reiterating its previous stance that undated or misdated mail ballots should not be counted in the 2024 election, dealing a blow to Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey’s hopes that a recount and litigation will help him overcome his just over 17,000-vote deficit to Republican Dave McCormick as of Monday evening. Continue reading