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

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

No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough!

Upon seeing this tweet from Eyal Yakoby, I had to check the article to see if it was as bad as I suspected. In some ways, it really wasn’t, because most of it was based on the legal problems for JosĂŠ Ibarra’s defense, and the decision to seek a bench trial, a trial by a judge rather than a jury.

Laken Riley’s killer never stood a chance

For all the political controversy surrounding Jose Ibarra, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

By Danny Cevallos, MSNBC legal analyst | Thursday, November 21, 2024 | 7:07 PM EST

Jose Antonio Ibarra was convicted on multiple counts of murder Wednesday in the February killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. Ibarra was immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, along with other consecutive sentences for lesser crimes, including aggravated assault with intent to rape and “peeping Tom.”

Riley’s murder became a political rallying cry at this summer’s Republican National Convention because Ibarra entered the country illegally in 2022. But for all the political controversy, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer keeps up with the hate of Donald Trump even after the election

Wouldn’t the answer be, to children who might ask why former and future President Donald Trump beat current Vice President and future private citizen Kamala Harris Emhoff in the election, that the United States held a free and fair election, and as in every election, one serious candidate won, and one serious candidate lost? But no, the American left, having gone off the rails in their #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, think something else is required.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

How do we explain this election to our children?

Children need us to accept their gift of hope, even if we aren’t feeling it, and they need us to use it to fight for them.

by Gwen Snyder, For The Inquirer | Wednesday, November 13, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST

The past two months have been a whirlwind of autumnal novelty and stimulation for my preschooler. There was Sesame Place, then her 3rd birthday, then her first day of school. Just as things began to settle, we launched into a cascade of Halloween activities. And then, fast on their heels came the election.

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Let them eat cake!

This site noted, two days after the election, that the college-educated elites who supported Kamala Harris Emhoff just couldn’t understand how a majority of Americans didn’t just love her to death and cast the vast majority of their votes for her. We pointed out on Friday that working class voters along the Mexican border in Texas were casting their votes for Donald Trump because the economy that the Democrats told us was so very great wasn’t so great for them.

The following article from The Philadelphia Inquirer wasn’t about the election at all, but it seems to me that it says a lot about it:

$500 hair appointments are becoming the norm as the cost of cuts and colors rise

The increased costs of color and other products, as well as the greater complexity of trending hairstyles, have led many salon owners to raise their prices over the past five years.

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The losses at The Washington Post * Updated! *

My subscription to The Washington Post is very reasonable, and far less than subscriptions to The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other newspapers. Both the Times and the Inquirer endorsed Kamala Harris Emhoff, whom I regard as a crackpot, socialist, and unChristian supporter of prenatal infanticide, but I didn’t cancel my subscriptions to them over their endorsements.

I doubt that anyone would have cared had the Post endorsed Mrs Emhoff, and I also doubt that newspaper endorsements mean much, especially now that their circulation continues to decline. Newspapers are, as I have previously called them, 18th century technology.

We have previously noted how the butthurt left were cancelling subscriptions to the Post, but have apparently misunderestimated just how butthurt they have been! From National Public Radio:

Over 200,000 subscribers flee ‘Washington Post’ after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement

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Once again, I was right: the Lexington Herald-Leader has endorsed all Democrats.

On October 4th, I engaged in a Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — conversation with Rick Green, the executive editor of what passes for my closest newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, concerning newspaper’s endorsements of candidates. In a response to Daniel Pearson, the primary editorial writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote:

How much good do you think newspaper endorsements actually do? My ‘local’ newspaper, the Lexington @heraldleader, will endorse every Democrat running in the Sixth District, and every last one of them, other than for small districts, will lose. @EditorRAG

Mr Green responded, with a quoted retweet:

Well, considering our editorial board hasn’t yet interviewed all the candidates, your predictions may be flawed. The endorsement process allows us to ask tough questions + probe deeper on visions + platforms than most voters get to hear. Our report-out in the form of endorsements is designed to inform voters, not direct them for whom to vote.

Was my prediction wrong? Continue reading

USA Today sports columnist is incredibly butthurt that two top athletes didn’t speak out the way she wanted

For whom Patrick Mahomes and Caitlyn Clark intend to vote has absolutely no bearing on for whom I intend to vote, but sports columnist Nancy Armour apparently believes that it’s their duty to open their secret ballots to me.

Caitlin Clark, Patrick Mahomes’ bland answers evoke Michael Jordan era of athlete activism

by Nancy Armour | September 13, 2024

Not every athlete can be LeBron James or Megan Rapinoe.

Remember Michael Jordan’s comment about Republicans buying shoes? There’s a long history of athletes putting as much space as possible between themselves and controversy, and what Caitlin Clark and Patrick Mahomes did this week was no different.

Asked about the upcoming presidential election Wednesday and who they might be supporting, both Clark and Mahomes dodged the question and instead found a safe space in encouraging people to register and to vote.

“It’s more than nothing, but it doesn’t put them on the front lines of the discussion,” said David Niven, an associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati who teaches a course on sports and politics.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Mr Mahomes and Miss Clark were not thinking about Mr James or Miss Rapinoe; perhaps they were thinking about Colin Kaepernick, and the activism that persuaded NFL owners not to sign him.

Mr James did himself no favors with his political statements, which only exacerbated people looking at him as an opportunist and a flop artist in the NBA. Miss Rapinoe’s political activism didn’t serve her or women’s soccer very well, either. The fact that Mr Mahomes plays in deeply conservative Missouri, and Miss Clark in very red Indiana might have contributed to their decisions, and Miss Clark, who has led the WNBA from near-obscurity to sold-out arenas when and where she plays, makes her hugely valuable to the league. Miss Armour was saying that it’s a shame the athletes weren’t openly supporting Kamala Harris Emhoff.

Clark’s Instagram account is now flooded with nasty comments from supposed fans who are upset she liked Taylor Swift’s post endorsing Kamala Harris. Mahomes is getting backlash both from people who want him to disassociate himself from his wife’s (presumed) political beliefs and people angry he didn’t defend them.

Perhaps Mr Mahomes disagrees with Mrs Mahomes, who ‘liked’ an Instagram post from former President Trump, and perhaps he doesn’t. That’s really kind of a ‘who cares’ thing as far as I am concerned.

We have a long tradition of a secret ballot in the United States, and while a lot of people, including me, are willing to tell others how they will vote — I will vote the straight sensible ticket, meaning Republican, over the blithering idiots, the Democrats — a lot of other people are not.

The Democrats have even tried to exploit the secret ballot, with comments that women do not have to tell their husbands or boyfriends how they voted, and that they can even lie and support Mrs Emhoff, when the men in their lives vote more sensibly. And when it comes to the presidential contest, it almost doesn’t matter: President Trump will carry the states in which Mr Mahomes and Miss Clark live, and it will not be close.

Outkick noted that Miss Armour did not support Tom Brady speaking out on politics, because Mr Brady supported Mr Trump. It seems as though Miss Armour is really only interested in athletes speaking out on politics if they happen to support the politicians she likes. Miss Armour was similarly upset when Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker spoke in favor of conventional, Catholic morals at a Catholic college. She just retweeted a post in which Mr Butker missed a kick, which said, “Harrison Butker is, once again, a little too far right.”

And she has taken the far-left position that ‘transgender women’ — meaning males who have deluded themselves into thinking that they are girls — should be able to compete in women’s sports. Neither her Wikipedia profile nor her Twitter bio say anything about her ever having played sports.

Miss Armour has, as we all do, the absolute freedom of speech and of the press, and she can say whatever she wishes. But the freedom of speech and of the press carries with it the freedom not to say something, and the columnist is just wholly upset that a couple of well-known athletes didn’t say what she wanted them to say.

Politico Seems Unclear That Kamala Harris Is Part Of The Biden-Harris Admin

You can’t demean these unhinged “journalists” enough

Seriously?

(Breitbart) In what is being described as stark “gaslighting” by many readers on social media, Politico published an article claiming that former President Donald Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) “tried to tie Harris” to the Biden-Harris administration’s policies while speaking at a rally in Big Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday.

In the piece, Politico reporter Mia McCarthy amusingly writes, “Speaking at a rally in Big Rapids, Michigan, former President Donald Trump’s running mate tried to tie Harris to the Biden administration’s policies.”

Politico’s X post was quickly issued a “Community Notes” correction advising the public that “Harris is currently President Biden’s Vice President.”

Vance also reacted to Politico’s post, writing, “The thing is: she’s Biden’s Vice President.”

In fairness, this was the tweet and in the article, not the actual headline of the piece, but, still, they’ve been running it as the Biden-Harris administration, not the Biden admin with Kamala as VP. She’s part and parcel of the policies. She cast the tie breaking vote in the Senate several times to push the agenda forward. She’s heavily featured on the White House website.

And then there’s this doozy from The Hill

Apparently, Kamala had nothing to do with the policies of the Biden-Harris administration. The Credentialed Media is acting like it’s 1992 and no one can actually dig stuff up.