Golly gee willikers gee whiz! Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t have lost to Orange Man Bad, so someone must have sabotaged her!
Our good friends on the left were stunned, shocked, aghast, appalled that Kamala Harris Emhoff lost the 2024 election to then former President Donald Trump, and they keep looking for reasons why it happened. But the one thing that they just can’t bring themselves to consider is the notion that she was simply a rotten candidate. Continue reading
Happy St Valentine’s Day!
I awoke this morning to a tweet from Libs of TikTok, noting that yet another federal judge has tried to block President Trump’s ‘pause’ in foreign aid spending.
Judge orders Trump administration to temporarily allow funds for foreign aid
by the Associated Press | Thursday, February 13, 2025 | 11:53 PM EST
WASHINGTON — A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to temporarily lift a three-week funding freeze that has shut down U.S. aid and development programs worldwide.
Judge Amir Ali issued the order Thursday in U.S. district court in Washington in a lawsuit brought by two health organizations that receive U.S. funding for programs abroad.
Newsweek noted that Judge Ali was one of President Joe Biden’s last judicial appointees, confirmed by the then Democrat-controlled Senate after the election. Continue reading
I check Bluesky so you don’t have to because it sometimes leads me to interesting things. I saw this skeet from The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard-left columnist Will Bunch, which he did not post on Twitter, leading me to an article in the UK’s The Guardian.
Canada intercepts people trying to cross border in ‘incredibly cold’ conditions
Nine Venezuelans including children found by police in Alberta with a second group apprehended in Manitoba
by Leyland Cecco | Friday, February 7, 2025 | 6:30 AM EST
More than a dozen people have been caught making the hazardous crossing into Canada, renewing focus on the closely watched – and seasonally perilous – border with the United States.
Police in Alberta this week intercepted two groups attempting to cross into Canada illegally, including one which included five children who were ill-prepared for the cold which can plunge as low as -30C (-22F) at this time of year. Continue reading
My good friend Robert Stacy McCain has frequently written, “I watch CNN” or sometimes MSNBC, “so you don’t have to.” Well, I created an account and check Bluesky, the liberal version of Twitter, so that you don’t have to. And checking this morning I found the very lovely Amanda Marcotte complaining that Mark Zuckerberg, the creator and owner of Facebook, is no longer going to apply liberally-oriented ‘fact checkers’ to posts on Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta makeover: MAGA grandpa is about to get much worse
Facebook ditches its fact-checking program in favor of Elon Musk’s army of disinformation zombies
by Amanda Marcotte | Wednesday, January 8, 2025 | 8:00 AM EST
In part because of his goofy appearance and in part because he doesn’t engage in fascist trolling like fellow billionaire Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg is rarely seen as a sinister character in modern American life. But Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook and Instagram will soon cease fact-checking is such a stellar model of villainous doublespeak that George Orwell would have thought it was a bit much. Zuckerberg insisted it’s in the name of “free speech” that he must unleash uncontrolled disinformation on his platform, adding, “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.” Continue reading
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.
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
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
It isn’t that much of a surprise, I suppose, that the heavily politicized cable news networks would lose viewers after the political season and elections are over, but it seems that our good friends on the left are giving up in droves on the hard-left journolists of MSNBC.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid loses roughly half her viewers since the election, primetime hosts also struggle
MSNBC lost a whopping 53% of its total viewerership in primetime since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory
By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Friday, December 6, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST
MSNBC host Joy Reid and her primetime colleagues have faced a brutal decline in viewership since the election. Continue reading
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