Zachary Rehl following his release from a wholly unjustified sentence, via Wikipedia Commons.
On January 20, 2025, President Trump pardoned the vast majority of the Capitol kerfufflers, but there were 14 for whom he only commuted their sentences, and did not pardon their convictions. Now four remaining injustices have been corrected: Continue reading
My digital subscription to The Philadelphia Inquirer hits my bank account for $27.96 every four weeks, or $363.48 every year. The City of Brotherly Love is where the members of the Continental Congress met and finally declared our independence from King George and Great Britain 250 years and one day ago. Yet our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper used the Semiquincentennial primarily to trash the United States of America. Continue reading
Why do the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer hate America?
In an editorial that reads suspiciously like it was primarily written by far-left columnist Will Bunch, I found this:
After all, it is difficult to be proud when masked federal agents kill U.S. citizens in broad daylight.
Mr Bunch, oops, sorry, the Editorial Board somehow failed to mention that Renee Good tried to run over an ICE agent with her car, or that Alex Pretti was pulling a gun in a struggle with law enforcement agents. Both are stone-cold graveyard dead now because they just couldn’t think Pretti Good. If they had been exercising their constitutional right to peaceably assemble to protest immigration enforcement, they’d still be alive today. Continue reading
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984
Living on a rural farm, in a small, mostly rural county, in a very politically conservative state, I only rarely see the ‘transgendered.’ I saw one such gentleman pretending to be a lady, as a customer, in the Corto Lima restaurant in downtown Lexington several years ago, and another such gentleman working as a waiter in the now-several-years-closed Applebee’s on Bypass Road in Richmond. I thought such was humorous, because neither one came anywhere close to ‘passing’ as a real woman, but I had no interactions with either of them. They were doing what they wanted to do, in a manner which had no impact on me at all. Unlike the “Party’s” most essential command, I accepted the evidence of my eyes. Continue reading
My good friend Jeffery[1]I do know his last name, but as he has tried to keep that private, I shall not publish it here, whether under that name, or his subsequently adopted screen names of Jethro Bodine or, currently, Elwood P Dowd, on William Teach’s fine site, The Pirate’s Cove, once made a claim, “The truth has a liberal bias,” sometimes expressed as “The facts have a liberal bias,” something I have seen elsewhere. It seems, however, that whatever they might say, our friends on the left are afraid, really afraid, of the truth, because the truth, the facts, actually have a conservative bias!
It was just over four years ago that we wrote about The New York Times publishing an article by a member of their own Editorial Board, Greg Bensinger, telling readers of that august supporter of Freedom of the Press that it was bad, bad, bad that Elon Musk was trying to buy Twitter, and that his promise to make the social media service an “inclusive arena for free speech” and that “Twitter Under Elon Musk Will Be a Scary Place.”
Mr Bensinger was by no means alone in that, as Brynn Tannehill of The New Republic told us that Mr Musk’s “idea of ‘free speech’ will help ruin America“, Taylor Lorenz, Amanda Marcotte, CNN’s Kara Alaimo, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Helen Ubiñas, as well as did the newspaper’s Editorial Board, and even 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry all exercised their freedom of speech and of the press to tell us that other people exercising those same rights without restrictions is harmful.
We pointed out that The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[2]Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.” to claim that restrictions on speech actually promoted freedom of speech. They also published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, a not-very-good conservative alternative to Twitter following the banning of several conservative voices, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to other platforms.
And today? There were riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland, following the attempted beheading of a Scotsman by a Sudanese asylum seeker, and the Usual Suspects complained not about the attack, but about Twitter not censoring people writing about it! There’s more of that here and here and here.
The United Kingdom’s Secretary for Northern Island Hilary Benn said, following the knife attack in Belfast:
Social media companies have a very heavy responsibility. It’s why we’re going to bring forward new powers next week to make it clear that social media companies need to take down illegal content, particularly when we are facing circumstances such as the ones we’ve seen in Northern Ireland over the last two days.
It’s simple: our good friends on the left are afraid, deathly afraid, that if the people in general have the information Our Betters would rather not see disseminated, people might, horrors! draw conclusions from that information of which the left would disapprove!
That’s why The First Street Journal publishes the truth! That’s why we publish the photos and mugshots of criminals, regardless of race, because do not adhere to stupidity like the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and why we maintain our own Stylebook, which mandates actual truth in names, titles, and pronouns. The left want to obscure the truth, because yes, the truth has a conservative bias.
On Sunday, November 28, 2021, Temple University student and a fellow with Philadelphia City Commissioner’s Office, Samuel Sean Collington, 21, was robbed and then murdered near the school in North Philadelphia. Mr Collington was a white victim, murdered by a black juvenile named Latif Williams in a botched robbery. On Thursday, December 2, 2021, The Philadelphia Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him.
On Thursday, September 22, 2022, recent Drexel graduate Everett Beauregard, 23, was senselessly murdered, shot in the neck.
Now there’s another senseless murder of 22-year-old William Schmidt, a Penn State student, in South Philly:
A Penn State student was shot to death in South Philadelphia, police said
The victim lived just steps away from where he was killed.
by Michelle Myers and Andrew Kitchenman | Sunday, June 7, 2026 | 1:59 PM EDT
A 22-year-old Penn State student died after being shot a half block from his home in South Philadelphia early Saturday, police said.
Police said officers from the 1st District responded at 1:32 a.m. to a radio call for a person with a gun on the 1900 block of Durfor Street. They found William J. Schmidt lying in the street with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said.
Schmidt was returning home from a local bar where he had been watching the NBA Finals with friends, according to his father, 6abc reported.
Surveillance cameras captured video that appeared to show the moments before the shooting, 6abc reported. A man can be seen throwing a cell phone in one video, and seconds later, another man ran around a corner with Schmidt chasing him, before the gunman turned around and shot him, according to another video.
There’s more at the original.
Note that there was video, but the newspaper simply referred to the suspects as “a man”, “another man”, and “the gunman”. Now, on Wednesday, 6ABC released images of the suspects, and though they do not describe the suspects, we can see that the suspects are black males. Perhaps the newspaper, the day after Karmelo Anthony, a black male, was convicted of murdering Austin Metcalf, a white teenager, the Inquirer doesn’t want to fan any flames of racial hatred. Those who love to fan the flames of racial hatred have been decrying the fact that Mr Anthony was convicted at all, but at least as I am typing this, the Inky has neither any stories on the trial or the Usual Suspects among the columnists pontificating on the subject.
But that doesn’t mean the newspaper won’t have any stories about a black man being murdered by a white criminal!
Brooklyn man is convicted of fatally stabbing a Philly dancer at a gas station
Dmitriy Popov faces up to 25 years in prison for killing O’Shae Sibley at a Brooklyn gas station in 2023.
by Rob Tornoe | Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | 4:38 PM EDT
A Brooklyn man has been convicted in the killing of beloved Philadelphia dancer O’Shae Sibley, who was stabbed to death at a New York City gas station in 2023.
Dmitriy Popov, 20, was convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime and other charges related to “taunting, stabbing, and killing” Sibley, which included “hurling homophobic and anti-Black slurs,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.
Sibley, 28, was a gay Black man, while Popov, who was 17 at the time of the killing, is white. Popov, who was tried as an adult, faces up to 25 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for June 30.
The reporter, Rob Tornoe, went out of his way to tell us that there was a racial aspect to the killing. More, as the newspaper has been celebrating homosexual “Pride” month, Mr Tornoe had to tell us that the victim was homosexual. I’m not certain how Mr Sibley being black or homosexual makes him either more or less dead.
I do not celebrate the conviction of Karmelo Anthony, because he is a young man who had his whole life ahead of him. He got stupid, killed another young man with his whole life ahead of him, all due to a fight which should never have been a fight. Austin Metcalf is stone-cold graveyard dead, and Mr Anthony, when he gets out of prison in 17½ to 35 years will be a hardened criminal, with no future other than the next crimes he’ll commit. He’ll wind up back in prison, or dead.
The conviction was necessary, but no one is better off for it.
The Washington Post, one of our nation’s truly great newspapers, a national newspaper of record as far as the Federal Government is concerned, and the exposers of the Watergate coverup, has once again struck bigly with a major, major, yuge scoop:
The hair-loss drug Trump took for years is now absent from his medical records
White House officials say they are not obligated to disclose all of Trump’s medications, including whether he still uses finasteride.
In the 1960s, I was the boy who was embarrassed about growing up without a father in small-town Mt Sterling, Kentucky. Divorce was far less common at the time, and all of the kids I knew in Mt Sterling Elementary School had fathers, or at least the ones about whom I knew anything about their families. I was the outlier!
My mother moved us to Mt Sterling because her sister had been able to get her a job. Our family, from Antioch, California, with a detour to Portland, Maine, my mother’s hometown, was completely unknown to the people there, and naturally no one had seen or heard of my father; there was no knowledge of him whatsoever, no knowledge that he had completely abandoned his wife and three children, so it could have been, at least for the townspeople, a question of whether it was somehow my mother’s fault. If you think that’s strange, it wouldn’t be to the mind of a nine-year-old boy with a girl’s first name, and the first one wearing glasses to boot. I at least think I can understand what life must be like for almost eight-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, growing up without her father, Hunter Biden.
Oh, there are certainly differences: my sisters and I grew up poor, because good jobs for women were rare in the sixties, and my father saw child support as more of an option than an obligation; men could get away with that far more at the time. My mother worked hard and struggled, in ways that it has taken the responsibilities of adulthood to make me understand now. Young Miss Roberts, and her mother Lunden Roberts, aren’t having to struggle too much financially, because her father has been hit with very substantial child support payments, but it’s also public knowledge that the younger Miss Roberts is a bastard, something that, as a child, I only feared people might think of me, and the fact that the older Miss Roberts was working as a stripper undoubtedly has many people thinking poorly of her. I guess that she was doing what she had to do to keep a roof over her head.
At a time when the Biden family ought to be slipping back into obscurity, former First Lady Jill Biden is back in the headlines as she has to do a tour to sell her book View from the East Wing: A Memoir. The problem for the tour is that Dr Biden has been denying that she saw in her husband what any wife should have noticed: that he was in serious mental decline, and her stories as she makes the rounds of talk shows have been shifting and never sounding truthful.
ABC’s ‘The View’ is a place for journolism, not journalism, but it is also a place in which the hostesses sometimes go off-script, and things like Dr Biden’s paean for her stepson get broadcast without critical thinking. Critical thinking is then applied from outside, as the former First Lady’s effusive praise of her wastrel stepson gets hammered from outside. President Biden finally acknowledged the young Miss Roberts as his granddaughter, though to my knowledge Dr Biden never did.
She’s certainly never been invited to family get-togethers, but the younger Mr Biden had married Melissa Cohen not long after his daughter was born, so such would be pretty awkward. Mr Biden knew that he had knocked up the elder Miss Roberts before he married someone else.
I have to confess here: I do not understand family relationships these days. My wife and I had been married, married for a few years, before our children were born, and after 47 years, we’re still married. I just don’t get men fathering children without the least regard for marrying the mothers or rearing their children. I suppose the things I saw so negatively when I was a child are commonplace now, and perhaps children growing up today without their fathers around just see it as normal, and hardly different from a bunch of the other children they know.
Our great, Christian society and culture has lost something. Now discussions are about “body counts,” how many people you’ve screwed, and, as much as it would horrify the lovely Amanda Marcotte, the fact that men trying to rack up high body counts for themselves are also ruling out women with high body counts as potential wives, even though women don’t get to rack up high body counts without men going right along with it.
But there is hope! Britain’s very leftist The Guardian reported that ‘millennials’ are not ‘hooking up’ for random sex as much as previous generations. A Google search for current generation having less sex turned up many more such articles, though several were hidden behind paywalls.
Along similar lines, we have reported on the slow growth of the Catholic Church, the faith that President Biden and his wife have professed, a faith which does not support contraception and abortion the way Miss Marcotte does, a faith which encourages personal responsibility and the confession of sins. Our good friends on the left hated people like Charlie Kirk for stressing such to college students, and the previously mentioned 48-year-old Miss Marcotte sees three married Republican women getting pregnant at about the same time through conspiracy theory eyes rather than more conservative women actually having more babies. She really, really, really doesn’t want the next generation of young adults to disapprove of her view about life and marriage and sex.
It will take more time to see how this all plays out, but perhaps, just perhaps, we are seeing a more conservative social and cultural movement among Americans.
The first rule of holes is that when you find yourself in one, stop digging. In the case of former First Lady, Dr Jill Biden, it works out to: when you keep saying stupid stuff, and can’t get out of your own way on it, just stop talking.
But, alas! when she’s on the hook to sell her book, View from the East Wing: A Memoir, she’s got to keep on keeping on, she’s got to keep making those appearances, got to keep talking, and got to keep deep throating her doubtlessly well-pedicured feet.
Why, I have to ask, would anyone pay the cover price of $32.00, $28.42 for Amazon Prime members, for a book of nothing but lies. At every stop she makes, with every word she says, we get the message: she’s just not telling the truth. But Simon & Schuster is paying her several million bucks, the exact amount undisclosed, so she has a contract to keep running her mouth.
The book hasn’t been well-received. CNN’s Jake Tapper, the well-connected Washington journalist who knew everybody who was anybody in Washington, wrote with Alex ThompsonOriginal Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, told us all how they were shocked, shocked! that Mr Biden’s aides helped to cover up the 46th President’s decline, now has an article showing on CNN’s subscribers’ only page entitled “Jill Biden’s rosy if not blindfolded ‘View from the East Wing’.” I guess that he’s trying to seem like a real journalist again, rather than the shill for the Democratic Party he was during the four-year interregnum between President Trump’s two terms. The Wall Street Journal‘s review by Kara Voght was just simping, and reading the review makes me wonder if she actually read the book itself, rather than some Cliff’s Notes version of it. Alexandra Jacobs review in The New York Times might have had the most damning with faint praise line of all, “The general vibe is more popovers in Woman’s Day than popping off in Politico.”
It’s almost as though the talking point had been sent out. Once everybody saw, on June 27, 2024, what we evil, reich-wing conservatives had been saying all along, that President Biden was becoming more and more out of it mentally, our good friends on the left decided that they had to attack President Trump’s health. The very lovely Amanda Marcotte has gone all-out conspiracy theorist on the subject:
Why MAGA buys Trump’s perfect health lie
Cultish devotion leads Republicans to see Trump as more god-like than human
by Amanda Marcotte | Monday, June 1, 2026 | 6:45 AM EDT
“When it happens” — the phrase became a meme almost overnight, as Troy Farah recently observed, in no small part because, even in our attention-addled age, people understand what it means. Donald Trump, who turns 80 this month, is not well, which has led to waves of speculation about his health and, at times, even rumors that he has died.
What great journalism in that first paragraph! Miss Marcotte gave us three citations via hyperlink, all of which lead back to Salon, the hard-left ezine for which she writes. The article is illustrated with a photo of the President’s left hand, with a visible bruise, and the caption, “Speculation continues to rise about the state of Donald Trump’s physical and mental health.” I’m not certain how a bruise on his hand leads to “speculation” about his “mental health.”
The president regularly nods off on camera during public meetings. He appeared to nap during the May 27 Cabinet meeting, even though his appointees were competing with each other to offer empty flattery, which is usually his favorite activity. His hands are not only covered in bruises, but they have also started to swell alarmingly. While he struggles to stay awake during the day, the president is often up at odd hours of the night, raving incoherently on Truth Social while obsessively reposting artificial intelligence-generated memes that frame him as heroic. He’s had at least two surprise trips to the “dentist” this year — even though the White House has its own fully equipped dental suite. On May 26, Trump had his third “annual” exam in 13 months at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, after which he posted, “Everything checked out PERFECTLY.”
This is almost certainly a lie, though how big of one remains to be seen. People in perfect health don’t have swollen and bruised hands or the water balloon-sized ankles Trump sometimes sports. Even the White House communications staff has tacitly admitted that something is going on, though all they will say is Trump has chronic venous insufficiency, a conveniently benign condition. There is zero reason to trust Trump or his staff; they lie constantly about nearly everything. This includes false explanations about the president’s health, because the White House keeps insisting he’s merely blinking in photos with his eyes closed, when anyone who watches the videos can see his eyes are shut for long stints of time, and not just milliseconds.
While I certainly cannot speak for the President, I do sometimes close my eyes when I am concentrating, including concentrating on what I am hearing, something not uncommon among those of us who are partially deaf.
But Miss Marcotte is ramping up for the conclusion she wants readers to draw: that the physical ailments of a man who will turn 80 twelve days from now indicate a mental ailment as well. After all, Mr Biden was losing his marbles when he was in his 80s, so why shouldn’t the same be true of President Trump?
Dr. Jonathan Reiner of The George Washington University, who was former vice president Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, told CNN that Trump is showing symptoms of chronic insomnia, which “is a severe illness that can result in an increase in risk of dementia” and a “decrease in cognitive effects” that “increases your cardiac risk of having a heart attack or developing congestive heart failure.” It appears that the president has undergone multiple cognitive tests, because Trump, who seems to confuse them with IQ tests, keeps bragging about how he was told him he had “aced” them. Such exams are typically given when doctors suspect cognitive decline, as journalist Jim Acosta underscored recently by taking the test himself, which involves drawing a cube or identifying common animals.
As a part of my annual Medicare examination — I’m 73 years old — I got the simple cognitive test, mine being to draw a circle and then add the hours of a clock on the face. Being the snarky guy that I am, I made it a 24-hour clock face, just to amuse the nurse, and I’m wondering how today’s generation, familiar almost entirely with digital clocks, will do. 🙂
But it’s amusing: the left want to do something, do anything to get rid of President Trump. The only evidence they have of cognitive problems for the President is that they are outraged by the decisions he takes. Yet if President Trump does fail to complete his term, for whatever reason, Vice President J D Vance then becomes President — something I currently hope he does on January 20, 2029 — and they’ll hate Mr Vance, who is only 41 years old, just as much as they do Mr Trump.
Godwin’s law, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” amuses here. The younger President Bush was “literally Hitler,” which was conveniently ignored when President Trump also became Hitler during his first term, and during the four years in the wilderness, before his triumphal return to Washington. If Mr Vance becomes President, will we see yet another reductio ad Hitlerum applied to him.
Miss Marcotte has already expressed her wish for the Vances to divorce.
There actually is a mental problem rampant among our friends on the left, called Trump Derangement Syndrome. There were a lot of things conservatives disliked about President Biden and his four years in office, but if there were any stories about wild-eyed conservatives saying things about the President on social media that got them fired, I missed them. Chaya Raichik and her Libs of TikTok became hugely successful for quoting what the left were saying about themselves, and even today (supposedly) educated professionals have lost jobs and professional accreditations for posting really stupid stuff about wanting to kill the President and members of the Administration. Conservatives haven’t proven themselves to be that deranged!
That mental problem was never on greater display than the four years of the Biden Administration. Our friends on the left kept assuring us that everything was just fine with Mr Biden, he was sharp as a tack, always on top of his game, pretty much exactly what his loving wife was saying about him. Contrast that with today, and every little bruise on the President’s hand leads the media to speculate that he’s at death’s door, with exactly zero evidence of such.
About his health? The fact is that we do not really know, but we do know that he’s twelve days shy of his 80th birthday, he’s visibly overweight, and despite his many years of wealth, he prefers to eat pure junk. It’s been long reported that he wants his steaks well done, and with ketchup, which is, to my mind, his only impeachable offense. If the man did suddenly die, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. What I’m not going to do, however, is speculate blindly and aimlessly, and I’m not going to stop telling the truth.
