Category Archives: Lies

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Let’s tell the truth: we have been bamboozled before

It wasn’t that long ago that the United States fled evacuated Afghanistan, leaving it to the Taliban, and the Taliban promised that they’d be, if not all sweetness and light, more tolerant than they had been during their previous reign. I do not know whether then-President Donald Trump actually believed the Taliban’s claims as he negotiated the withdrawal, or was simply looking for a fig leaf of cover for the withdrawal — which wasn’t completed until President Joe Biden too office — as President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did during the peace talks in Paris, but the Taliban have been not-so-slowly returning to the restrictions on the public, especially on women, that they had imposed previously.

Syrian rebel leader’s victory speech holds a message for Iran – and for Trump and Israel too

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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 →

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The truth shall set you free, but some people want to hide the truth

One of the things that I do at The First Street Journal is to use primarily — though certainly not exclusively — liberal sites as sources, because it stifles complaints that I’m using only evil reich wing sources, which our good friends on the left will not trust. Thus, when I use LGBTQ Nation, no one can throw a hissy fit that the source is opposed to homosexuals and the ‘transgendered.

Volleyball players sue their coach for accepting a trans teammate

The player hasn’t caused any unfair advantage or injuries, but the lawsuit claims she has stifled women’s “free speech.”

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Who do you believe?

This site reported, on October 28th, about the efforts of collegiate officials to stop female athletes from complaining about male members on their teams or having to compete against males who claim to be female on other teams.

Well, no, complains the Athletic Director of the University of Nevada at Reno, that’s not what happened at all!

Nevada AD addresses allegations of pushing volleyball women to face trans athlete, says she apologized

A player alleges the university told them that the trans athlete opponent would be at a disadvantage

By Jackson Thompson, Fox News | Wednesday, October 30, 2024 | 7:35 AM EDT

The University of Nevada, Reno athletic director Stephanie Rempe addressed a recent national controversy surrounding her women’s volleyball program in a statement to Fox News Digital.

A dispute between volleyball players and the athletic department over whether to compete against a team with a trans athlete resulted in a last-minute forfeit due to not having enough players to participate on Friday. Players had told the university they did not want to play the match, but the program refused to forfeit until the day before it was scheduled.

Team captain Sia Liilii then alleged that the school told her and her teammates that “they didn’t understand the science” and to “reconsider their position,” at a press conference on Saturday.

On Sunday, Liilii alleged that she and her teammates were told the trans opponent “was at a disadvantage” due to the medication taken to transition from male to female, during the “Stand With Women” event in Philadelphia.

Why, how odd. A site search of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website for “Stand withe Women” didn’t have any story on that event.

Sophomore Masyn Navarro alleged her teammates had been told to “stay quiet” about the controversy during the Saturday press conference but did not specify who told them.

Athletic Director Remke denied it all:

“I did not tell, and am unaware of any member of the athletics administrative team telling members of our women’s volleyball team that they ‘weren’t educated enough,’ that they ‘didn’t understand the science,’ that they should reconsider their position or that they should ‘stay quiet’ regarding their participation in an Oct. 26 match that was scheduled against San Jose State University.”

Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? But note how she expressed it: she stated that she never stated those things, and that she was unaware of anyone else saying so.

Absent an actual recording of the meeting, we have no evidence of who is telling the truth, but the “didn’t understand the science” remark had been reported a couple of weeks earlier.

It isn’t difficult to imagine the university trying to claim that Brayden ‘Blaire’ Fleming was somehow disadvantaged, or, as was previously reported, isn’t really that good, but whether those claims are accurate or not misses the point. It isn’t that males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports based on how good or poor they happen to be, but that they shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports period. If you are male, compete in men’s sports!

The university actually was put in a problematic legal position. Because the state constitution prohibits discrimination against a whole host of things, including “gender identity,” if the university refused to play SJSU due to the presence of Mr Fleming, on the UN-R campus, there could be legal problems. So UN-R and SJSU moved the contest to San José, and the forfeit wouldn’t occur in Nevada. More, when the UN-R players didn’t appear for the match, it was a forfeit:

On Thursday, (October 24th) the Nevada women’s volleyball team traveled to Fresno State to take on the Bulldogs. They lost, 3-2.

According to OutKick sources, Nevada provided two buses for players. One bus was destined for San Jose State, for players who wanted to play against the Spartans and Blaire Fleming.

The other bus was destined for Reno, to take the women home. The players elected to go back to Reno.

Because of that, the school officially announced on Friday that they would not play the match against San Jose State.

“Due to not having enough players to compete, the University of Nevada women’s volleyball team will not play its scheduled Mountain West Conference match at San José State on Saturday, Oct. 26,” the school said in a statement.

So, UN-R forfeited the match not because SJSU had a male player, but because not enough UN-R players were available to compete. Yup, that’s the lawyers being involved.

So, who do you believe? Do you believe the very professional Athletic Director, with the school’s lawyers telling her what to say and how to say it, or do you believe the athletes, in their late teens and early twenties, who don’t have professional public relations people behind and scripting them, who are going against the flow and political correctness, who are taking a team loss for the greater good?

I know who I believe!

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Democrats talk a good game, but when they have had the power, their policies have not worked! 3½ years of President Biden have produced record homelessness

Philadelphia’s last Republican Mayor, Bernard Samuel, left office on January 7, 1952, when Harry Truman was still President of the United States, and George VI was still King of England. In the 21½ years since January 3, 2003, Republicans have been Governors of Pennsylvania for just four years, with Tom Corbett leaving office on January 20, 2015. And since January 20, 2009, a Republican has held the White House for only four years. So, if homelessness is rising in the City of Brotherly Love, it isn’t exactly the GOP’s fault.

Homelessness in Philadelphia increases for third consecutive year

The number of homeless Philadelphians exceeded 5,000 for the first time since 2020.

by Layla A. Jones | Monday, September 23, 2024 | 3:09 PM EDT

The number of homeless Philadelphians increased for the third consecutive year, according to the annual point-in-time homelessness count conducted by the Office of Homeless Services.

The count was conducted in January and includes unsheltered people and those living in emergency shelters, safe haven and transitional housing. In 2024, the total number of homeless people reached 5,191, up from 4,725 the previous year — a 10% increase.

Mandated by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the annual point-in-time count is a snapshot of homelessness on one day in January.

Philadelphia’s count calls on volunteers, armed with clipboards, socks, and gloves, to spread across the city interviewing and cataloging people who are homeless.

How is it, if Democratic Party policies work, that homelessness is increasing in Philly? The Keystone State has had Democrats as Governors, and the city is a one-party, Democratic town. Mr Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes in 2020, 3,458,229 (50.01%) to 3,377674 (48.84%), but only because he carried Philadelphia 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%), a margin of 471,050 votes. That’s how Democratic Philadelphia is![1]Without Philly, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%). Whatever the Democrats wanted to do in Philadelphia, they had the votes and the officeholders to do.

High – but declining – poverty, the opioid epidemic and a lack of affordable housing are to blame for the rising numbers of unsheltered people, according to a summary of the city’s winter count.

“Poverty remains a factor, irrespective of poverty trends/trajectories,” said Sherylle Linton Jones, spokesperson for the Office of Homeless Services.

More than 20% of homeless people had either been evicted or displaced for another reason in the preceding 90 days, showing how impactful an issue affordable housing is in Philadelphia.

If poverty is declining, why would homelessness increase?

The drug crisis is certainly a factor, as former Mayor Jim Kenney concentrated on hugely important things, like an additional tax on Big Gulps from Seven/Eleven, but, other than that, had pretty much checked out of doing his job, and the Kensington section of the city had become not just a local laughing stock, but a nationally and even internationally known drug wasteland.

Let’s tell the truth here: Democrats talk a good game, but when they have power, their policies have not worked!

Philadelphia’s rising homelessness comes after the office overspent its budget by almost $15 million, pressured by a mandate to keep people sheltered.

The Democrats tell you that they are going to do something, but even with having overspent their budgets, they don’t get the job done!

Philadelphia’s numbers are in lockstep with a nationwide trend of rising homelessness. In 2023, homelessness grew 12% to the highest level ever recorded. More than an estimated 650,000 people are homeless in the United States, the largest number since the country started tracking the annual point-in-time survey in 2007. The rising homelessness crisis led the conservative-leaning Supreme Court to rule that municipalities could ban sleeping in public places, effectively outlawing unsheltered homelessness.

It hasn’t been just Philly. Under President Joe Biden, and the Administration’s oh-so-sympathetic attitude, homelessness nationwide has still soared to record levels. Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff has been telling us that she’s going to solve the problem by building 3,000,000 new, ‘affordable’ homes, but whatever her ideas to do that are, she never presented it or persuaded President Biden to do it. Once again, the Democrats are talking a big game, but they’ll fail miserably.

Mrs Emhoff is, as the Democrats always say they are, big on labor unions, but if her ‘plan’ includes pushing union labor on building those three million new homes, then she will have automatically made them more expensive, and less ‘affordable.’

Millions of people will vote Democratic this November, but those people will be voting for promises that cannot and will not be kept.

References

References
↑1 Without Philly, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%).
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Bernie Sanders tells us the truth.

Senator Bernie Sanders (S-VT)[1]Technically, Mr Sanders is listed as an Independent, who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, but I believe that S, for ‘Socialist,’ is far more accurate. is many unsavory things, but he does, on occasion, tell the truth. From USA Today:

Bernie Sanders told the truth about Kamala Harris trying to fool voters. Believe him.

Harris is tiptoeing around the positions on issues that won her elections in California and cautiously testing what voters will grab onto and what they will reject.

by Nicole Russell | Tuesday, September 10, 2024 | 5:11 AM EDT | Updated: Thursday, September 12, 2024 | 2:35 PM EDT

You may have heard Maya Angelou’s powerful saying, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Sometimes, when other people tell you who a person is, you should believe them, too. Especially if the person in question doesn’t want to tell you who they really are.

That is the case with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In an interview Sunday on “Meet the Press,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive independent from Vermont, said something about the Democratic presidential nominee that she isn’t willing to admit to voters.

NBC News host Kristen Welker asked: “She has previously supported Medicare for All, now she does not. She’s previously supported a ban on fracking, now she does not. These, Senator, are ideas that you have campaigned on. Do you think that she is abandoning her progressive ideals?”

Sanders: “No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals. I think she is trying to be pragmatic and do what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

You have to give the seasoned senator kudos for saying it like it is, especially because Harris has yet to describe her own campaign with such clarity.

There’s more at the original. If you get stopped by a paywall, you can also read the original here.

Also see: William Teach, in “Biden-Harris Admin Upset Over ‘False’ Pets Eating Stories“

Opinion author Nicole Russell stopped short of writing the unvarnished truth, but I will not: what the Distinguished Gentleman from Vermont was saying is that he believes that Kamala Harris Emhoff — just because the Vice President hasn’t shown enough respect for her husband to have taken his last name does not mean that I shall show him similar disrespect — has been lying to us! Mr Sanders told us, in effect, that he understands that the hard left policies that he has long advocated are not popular enough nationwide to win elections, and that he thinks that the Democratic presidential nominee knows the same thing.

Did Mrs Emhoff tell Mr Sanders thus? Was there a quiet conversation in which she whispered, “Don’t worry, Bernie, I can be my authentic self after the election?,” or is it simply something that the Bolshevik from Burlington believes to be the case? We don’t know the answer to that, but one thing has been pretty clear: a lot of the Vice President’s supporters believe just what Mr Sanders stated.

As it happens, I certainly believe that she would move harder to the left were Americans foolish enough to elect her.

Many voters also got caught up in all the laughter and joy. But when they started to look around to see what the frenzy was about, they found a record of flip-flopping on really progressive policies, running mate Tim Walz’s fabulism and a bunch of vague promises.

Sanders is right, of course. Harris’ pattern of flip-flopping on policies − like favoring a ban on fracking for oil and gas before opposing it now, or supporting mandatory gun buybacks in 2019 but opposing them now − isn’t about her growth as a leader or the evolution of her thinking.

It’s really about her campaign’s recognition that far-left ideas that played well in California won’t sell in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.

At least her policy proposals didn’t play well enough, among Democrats, for her to make any headway in her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and she dropped out in December of 2019, before the first contest in Iowa. It didn’t help her that then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI) demolished her in a previous debate.

Gaslighting is not just bad form; it’s bad news for voters because it violates the principle of informed consent. Politicians have long tried to fool voters into believing they stand for one thing while they quietly support something else − as Sanders says Harris is doing now − but they deserve to be called on it as well.

The Democrats believe that as well, as they continually try to link former President Donald Trump to the so-called Project 2025, even though Mr Trump had nothing to do with writing or approving it, and has politically distanced himself from it.

At a certain point, it becomes laughable. Comedian (?) Kathy Griffin whined that if Mr Trump is re-elected, he’ll throw comedians like her in jail, even though he never tried to do so during his first term, despite the fact she posted a photo of her holding a Trump mask dripping with fake blood, as though he had been beheaded. The Philadelphia Inquirer and columnist Will Bunch in particular keep telling us that if Mr Trump wins, democracy is finished, while Salon writer Amanda Marcotte has gone just bat guano insane with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.

If Mrs Emhoff really knows what she wants to do if elected, and that’s a very big “if,” she’s keeping it down to vague, broad-stroke proposals, trying not to offend anyone, but, in doing that, she’s concomitantly telling us that it will be the bureaucrats and functionaries who will be doing the governing. That’s not really a surprise, because that’s what happens in every modern administration, with the President setting a policy, and then the ‘experts’ trying to figure out how to make it work.

And that’s the real danger of a victory for the Vice President: the people she would bring into office with her will be uniformly hard-left, and they would be the ones who would destroy our society and economy, with proposals written in ways the voters would never approve. Mr Sanders knows this, and knows that the candidate has to temper what she says, but he strongly believes that he would get most, if not all, of what he would want were he the President.

I suspect that a lot of the further left people in the United States believe the same thing.

References

References
↑1 Technically, Mr Sanders is listed as an Independent, who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, but I believe that S, for ‘Socialist,’ is far more accurate.
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Journolism: The credentialed media don’t exactly lie, but they conceal politically incorrect facts Journalists should try telling us the whole truth for a change

No, that’s not a typographical error in the title: the spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. We use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Journalism at least used to be a profession concerned with the 5 Ws + H: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Those were the questions reporters were supposed to answer if at all possible. Now that print newspapers have been in great decline, and newspapers in digital form are the wave of whatever future newspapers have left, the space limitations that used to hem in stories as measured by word count of column inches are mostly gone. Editors may have to pare down things that are going to be printed in the dead trees editions, but digital bandwidth is incredibly cheap. And Associated Press reporter Nicole Winfield left out a really big answer to “why.” Was it because the “why” is completely politically incorrect? Continue reading →

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If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently?

‘Aayden’ Gallagher, photo from New York Post on Twitter.

I have asked this question previously: if someone was actively trying to sabotage the concept that #TransgenderWomenAreWomen, what would he be doing differently from what the ‘transgender women’ are doing right now when it comes to sports?

The usual conservative outlets carried the story of how ‘Aayden’ Gallagher, a male, won the Oregon Girls’ 6A 200-meter state championship race, and was roundly jeered by the spectators. But now even the liberal credentialed media are reporting on the story. From NBC News:

Transgender teen booed after winning girls’ track race at state championship

High school sophomore Aayden Gallagher won the 200-meter race at the state championship event in Eugene, Oregon.

Continue reading →

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Once again, The Philadelphia Inquirer censors part of the story.

Can someone tell me why I am paying $285.48 per year for a newspaper which censors the news?

When I first saw this photo in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursday, I immediately asked myself, “Self, is that really a girl?” So, I read a story I might normally have skipped.

Bensalem teen faces 15 to 40 years in prison for killing a 12-year-old girl and showing her corpse on Instagram

Ash Cooper admitted her guilt Thursday and was sentenced to prison.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Thursday, March 21, 2024 | 3:41 PM EDT | Updated: 6:02 PM EDT

A Bensalem teen who shot and killed a 12-year-old girl, then displayed her corpse in an Instagram video call as she sought help in hiding her crime will spend 15 to 40 years in prison after admitting her guilt Thursday.

Ash Cooper, 18, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and related crimes in the shooting death of Morgan Connors in the trailer Cooper shared with her father in the Top of the Ridge Trailer Park in November 2022.

In accepting the guilty plea, Bucks County Court Judge Jeffrey L. Finley decried Cooper’s actions and lamented Morgan’s death.

“It’s a horrible tragedy,” he said. “A tragedy no family should ever have to undergo.”

It turns out that “Ash” Cooper is actually Joshua Cooper, as reported by London’s Daily Mail. The Inquirer did leave a clue, in that the hyperlinks in the newspaper’s story took us to stories noting that the killer was named Joshua Cooper at the time those stories were published, but if you read reporter Rodrigo Torrejón’s story, there isn’t the first indication that the murderer is actually a male.

The Daily Mail also told us things that the Inky decided to omit:

Cooper, who was 16 at the time of the murder, also allegedly told police she and Connors were in a sexual relationship. . . .

During the investigation, officials discovered Cooper was accused of sexual assault in a previous unrelated case. She was found guilty in juvenile court.

The victim was in court on Thursday as Cooper received his sentence.

So, not only was young Mr Cooper, 16 at the time, having sex with a 12-year-old, but he was previously convicted of a sexual assault on a different person. How is it that the Daily Mail, from 3,500 miles away had this, but the Inquirer couldn’t get that information from a bordering county?

Well, of course the reporters at the Inky knew. The first story on the murder appeared on November 26, 2022, and the second on March 6, 2023, at which point he was still identified as Joshua Cooper. Now, after that time, we find out that young Mr Cooper is ‘transitioning’, trying to become a girl, and no one asks, “Is he really transgendered and ‘transitioning,’ or is he just doing this to stay out of adult men’s prison?” As you can see from the Daily Mail’s photo, Mr Cooper is not exactly a big guy, and perhaps he had watched NCIS, and saw the scene in which Leroy Jethro Gibbs tells a couple of young college kids, “Believe me, son, you will not do well in prison.”

Were I to ask the editors of the newspaper why they concealed the fact that young Mr Cooper is ‘transgender,’ and referred to him in exclusively feminine terms, they might tell me that hey, that has nothing to do with the murder. I would reject that argument, since it’s obvious that the previously convicted sex criminal was also f(ornicating) young Miss Connors — the London newspaper noted that court records stated that the victim’s body “was found laying facedown with her pants around her ankles” — and that the victim’s state of undress indicated that something sexual had occurred. More, the fact that Mr Cooper is claiming to be a girl will have a huge impact on to which prison he will be sent for hopefully the full forty years. One of us wonders on how the newspaper will cover that story.