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This is how media bias works! The credentialed media don't have to lie; they can simply not report the truth.

Although anyone can make a mistake, The New York Times doesn’t normally print out-and-out lies; that’s rarely how #FakeNews works. Rather, it’s the editorial decisions taken by the credentialed media which expose media bias.

Trash is piling up in NYC and sanitation workers blame de Blasio’s vaccine mandate

By Larry Celona, Julia Marsh, Kevin Sheehan and Bruce Golding | October 27, 2021 | 7:22 PM EDT

These city employees think Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandate is pure garbage — and they should know!

Sanitation workers outraged over the order to get inoculated against COVID-19 are letting trash pile up across Staten Island and in parts of Brooklyn — and the head of their union said Wednesday that he’s on their side.

The protesting workers are engaging in a rule-book slowdown that includes returning to their garages for things like gloves or gas so collections don’t get finished, sources said.

Supervisors have even been warned to guard the garages this weekend to prevent trucks from getting vandalized, sources said.

When asked what was going on, Teamsters Local 831 President Harry Nespoli, whose union represents the sanitation workers, shot back, “The mandate’s going on.”

“Look, you’re going to have some spots in the city that they feel very strongly about this,” he said.

Nespoli added: “I’ll tell you straight out: I disagree with the mandate because of one reason. We have a program in place right now in the department, which is, you get the vaccination or you get tested once a week.”

There’s more at the original, including several photos of trash piled up on city streets. When the story mentioned that the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn was one of the areas afflicted, I think they should have shot a pic in front of 8070 Harbor View Terrace in Bay Ridge, the house exterior used in Blue Bloods as fictional Police Commissioner Frank Reagan’s house, but I digress.

The cited story above is not from the Times, but the New York Post. The Times founded in 1851, has long been considered our nation’s number one newspaper, and, along with The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, one of the four newspapers of record in the United States. The New York Post is actually older, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton.

So, what’s so special about the Post article cited above? A fairly major New York City story, yet there isn’t a single story about the garbagemen’s slowdown on either in the Times’ New York section or website main page. Hugely important stories, like New York Has a New Band of Buzzy Post-Punk Teens: Geese and 5 Things to Do This Weekend, are there, but a major slowdown by sanitation workers, leaving the garbage piled high in Staten Island and Brooklyn? Nope, not in the Grey Lady!

Site queries for sanitation, garbage and trash all failed to find a single Times story on the slowdown.[1]Research for this was done between 2:20 and 2:24 PM EDT on Thursday, October 28, 2021, and the statements were accurate as of that time. There was one story about the potential disruptions due to the vaccine mandate:

    New York plans for shortages of police officers and firefighters as its vaccination deadline nears.

    By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Troy Closson and Dana Rubinstein | October 28, 2021 | Updated 1:59 PM EDT

    Officials in New York City are bracing for staffing shortages, overhauling schedules and making contingency plans amid fears that thousands of police officers and firefighters could stay home when the vaccine mandate for city workers takes effect on Monday.

    The mandate, set by Mayor Bill de Blasio, requires city workers to get at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine or go on unpaid leave. But workers at some city agencies have resisted getting vaccinated.

    About 65 percent of Fire Department workers and 75 percent of Police Department employees had reported receiving at least one dose of a vaccine by Wednesday, city officials said.

    Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term, predicted on Thursday that many city workers would get a shot at the last minute. He said New Yorkers would be safe and city agencies would weather the storm if some employees do not show up for work because of the mandate. . . . .

    Hundreds of protesters appeared outside Gracie Mansion on Thursday morning to oppose the vaccine mandate. Many wore sweatshirts and shirts bearing Fire Department engine and ladder company numbers from across the city. Union leaders at the demonstration led chants of “Hold the line!” and warned that New Yorkers would be endangered if unvaccinated firefighters and paramedics were sent home.

    The city’s largest police union warned on Wednesday — after a state judge denied their request for an injunction against the mandate — that the city was facing a “real crisis” and that New Yorkers should blame Mr. de Blasio for “any shortfall in city services.”

    The mandate, the union said, “not only violates police officers’ rights — it will inevitably result in fewer cops available to protect our city.”

There’s more at the original, including the Fire Department planning for a 20% shortage in ambulances and closure of about a fifth of the city’s fire stations.

The ‘slowdown’ by sanitation workers was not mentioned in the story.

The possible loss of police and firemen by the city still lays in the future; the sanitation slowdown over the Mayor’s vaccine mandate is already happening. And while police and firemen are certainly important, piles of garbage already laying on the sidewalks impacts far more New Yorkers than most other city services. 389 murders in the city, through October 24th — 15.68% fewer than Philadelphia’s 450 on the same date, even though NYC has 5¼ times Philly’s population — are certainly serious, but still relatively few people in the city have serious dealings with the police or firemen, while not getting the garbage picked up affects everyone.

And it wasn’t just one day; the Post noted that, at least in the Dongan Hills neighborhood of Staten Island, garbage collection was missed on both Saturday the 23rd and Wednesday the 27th.

But, for The New York Times, it just wasn’t news that was fit to print.

That is how media bias works! The Times wasn’t lying to anybody, but simply not saying anything about a major problem in the Big Apple. Sanitation workers in parts of the city, almost certainly including the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated, are putting pressure on the city in a way that, if it spreads, every New Yorker will feel, and that’s the kind of pressure which can really force Bill de Blasio to back down.

References

References
↑1 Research for this was done between 2:20 and 2:24 PM EDT on Thursday, October 28, 2021, and the statements were accurate as of that time.
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Hold them accountable! The Loudoun County school officials who covered up a rape all need to go to jail

I had actually ignored this story for awhile, figuring that Robert Stacy McCain would include it in his ‘Violence Against Women’ series, but, alas! he’s been working on other things. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

“Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Us?”: Angry Loudoun County Students Stage Walk Outs Over Sexual Assaults in Their Schools

Every student that participated in today’s walkouts should take their activism directly to the next school board meeting and demand answers and mass resignations.

Posted by Teri Christoph | Tuesday, October 26, 2021 | 07:00 PM

Students in Loudoun County have had enough. They’ve endured lockdowns, distance learning, all-day masking, and attempts to teach them a radicalized curriculum, all while their county’s partisan and inept school board declared war on their parents and failed to keep schools safe.

What finally moved the students to action, though, was the revelation that one of their own — and possibly two — was sexually assaulted inside a school, the very place kids should feel safe and secure. To make matters worse, the superintendent, Scott Ziegler, failed to inform parents and students that attacks had taken place, thus jeopardizing every student in the county.

Today, hundreds of Loudoun County students walked out of their classrooms, protesting the treatment of the victims, the victims’ families, and the student bodies of every high school, who were kept in the dark about the danger looming in their schools.

There’s more at the original.

Why didn’t the school inform the students what had happened? A couple of reasons spring to mind:

  1. The school administration were afraid that, if the rapes were made known to the students, some students might have administered a ‘hands on’ lesson to the rapist. Even if the administration didn’t reveal the identity of the rapist, once the ‘incidents’ had become known about, there’s no way that the identity of the perpetrator would not have become known.
  2. The rapes were perpetrated by a male student who may have been claiming to be a ‘transgender’ girl.

Heaven forfend, we can’t have the students or the public in general know that a student assigned male at birth but identifying as a girl[1]Regular readers of this site will realize that I formulated that description mockingly. Sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth, but determined at conception, and no amount of drugs, hormones or … Continue reading  committed these crimes. After all, that might lead to discrimination against the ‘transgendered,’ and that would be wrong!

Reports in the credentialed media have played down the transgender angle. In the article noting the rapist’s conviction, all we get is:

`The victim was assaulted in a women’s restroom at Stone Bridge High School by a male allegedly wearing a skirt.

One of the main arguments among conservatives, though not an argument I have chosen to make, is that males claiming to be female are doing so to gain access to female-only public restrooms and locker rooms, for voyeuristic purposes, and possible even for sexual assault. The Loudoun County case reinforces the arguments of conservatives that biological males should not be treated as females for such purposes, and the left cannot have that!

Would other students have beaten the crap out of administered a ‘hands on’ lesson to the perpetrator? Perhaps they would have, but that possibility could easily have been avoided had the school district done the right thing and removed the perpetrator from school entirely. But the school district’s actions, to ‘protect the rights’ of the rapist, and a possibly ‘transgendered’ student, resulted in a second girl getting raped.

The article concluded:

Every student that participated in today’s walkouts should take their activism directly to the next school board meeting and demand answers and mass resignations. This isn’t about petty partisan politics anymore, it’s about safety.

Yes, but that’s not enough. In the Keystone State, former Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, all went to jail — albeit not for long sentences — for child endangerment and other charges in the Jerry Sandusky case, because they failed to call the police to report Mr Sandusky’s rape of a young boy when informed about it.

Loudoun County did worse. Mr Sandusky was, at least, banned from the Penn State athletic facilities, but in Virginia, the school district simply transferred the rapist to another school, where he was free to rape again. I’ll put it bluntly: every member of the school board and administration who was aware of the first rape, and allowed the perpetrator to simply be transferred, needs to be criminally charged and sent to prison! Hold them accountable for their actions!

More, they should all be, individually, sued into penury. Their actions allowed a second girl to be raped! The school board and administration personnel are all adults, and are all responsible for the safety of students. The now-convicted rapist is only 15 years old, so he’ll receive a juvenile sentence. Knowing how northern Virginia has been ruined by the influx of federal government workers, a slap on the wrist would not surprise me.

But at least the adults can be prosecuted as adults, and face adult time in prison. It is only by holding people like them accountable for their actions that we can deter other officials from doing the same things.

References

References
↑1 Regular readers of this site will realize that I formulated that description mockingly. Sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth, but determined at conception, and no amount of drugs, hormones or surgical interventions can change a person’s sex.
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Lexington is on pace for 38 homicides for 2021, which would easily break the record. The city has already seen 31 murders, which is good for second place all time, with 67 days left in the year

It was just ten days ago that we reported that Lexington had tied it’s then-record of 30 homicides recorded in 2019, a record rewritten with 34 killings in 2020. Alas! that number 30 didn’t last for long. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported a 9:50 PM Monday assault in the Victorian Square Parking Garage at 350 West Short Street, in which one man died at the scene from his injuries. A suspect was taken to the hospital with unspecified injuries.

    Benjamin William Call, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

    Victim’s name released. Man faces murder charge after fatal Lexington garage assault

    By Christopher Leach | October 26, 2021 | 7:37 AM EDT | Updated 11:43 AM EDT

    A man was killed after being assaulted in a downtown Lexington parking garage Monday night, according to Lexington police.

    John Tyler Abner, 31, was pronounced dead on scene due to blunt-trauma injuries sustained from the assault, according to the Fayette County coroner.

    Police have charged Benjamin Call, 39, with murder. Call is currently being held at the Fayette County Detention Center.

There’s more at the original; the Lexington Police believe that the victim and his (alleged) assailant knew each other prior to the assault.

The mugshot published here was, of course, not published by the Herald-Leader, but, as is our policy, The First Street Journal does publish such photos. The mugshot was from the Fayette County Detention Center, and is freely available as a matter of public record. It was available to the newspaper had the editors chosen to use it.

This is not Mr Call’s first brush with the law, given that the Detention Center had a previous mugshot of him, dated August 25, 2015.

This is the city’s first homicide of the year that was not committed with a firearm.
____________________________

Update: 7:20 PM EDT

It isn’t just The First Street Journal which publishes these mugshots. WLEX-TV, Channel 18, the Lexington NBC affiliate station, not only has the story, complete with mugshot available on their website, but ran the story, complete with mugshot, on the air at approximately 7:04 PM EDT.

The Herald-Leader’s idiotic mugshot policy — which is dictated to them by McClatchy Company, which owns the paper — doesn’t keep the mugshots of offenders charged with crimes off the internet, but simply withholds information from their subscribers, from people who are paying for their service.

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The left really, really don’t understand conservatives Today's American left believe that the needs of the State outweigh the rights of individuals

My good friend, William Teach, wrote something that our friends on the left just really cannot understand:

Despite what you might think from posts, I’m very much pro-vaccine. I’m anti-mandate. I got the vaccine the minute I was eligible to protect myself. And I will get the booster to continue protecting myself, so, this is good news, as I’d like something different from Pfizer if possible.

If Mr Teach is “very much pro-vaccine”, why, so many on the left wonder, doesn’t he believe in requiring everybody to get it?

The New York Times, a much bigger voice on the left, decided to tell us why vaccine mandates are such a good thing:

    Their Jobs Made Them Get Vaccinated. They Refused.

    The willingness of some workers to give up their livelihoods helps explain the country’s struggle to contain the pandemic.

    By Sarah Maslin Nir | October 24, 2021 | Updated: October 25, 2021 | 5:22 PM EDT | Print edition: October 25, 2021, Section A, Page 1

    Under the threat of losing their jobs, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers finally got a Covid-19 vaccine. Teachers, nurses and home health aides accepted their occupations’ mandates. The mass resignations some experts had predicted did not occur, as most workers hurriedly got inoculated.

    Josephine Valdez, 30, a public school paraprofessional from the Bronx, did not.

    Failing to meet the New York City Education Department’s vaccination deadline, Ms. Valdez lost her job this month. She is among the 4 percent of the city’s roughly 150,000 public school employees who did not comply with the order.

There’s more at the original, but 4% of 150,000 employees works out to 6,000 people.

    Ms. Valdez, an anti-vaccine mandate activist who has been involved in protests against vaccines and masks in the city, is also part of a sizable, unwavering contingent across the United States whose resistance to the vaccines have won out over paychecks, or who have given up careers entirely.

Much of the article is devoted to individual stories of the reasons given for some people refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccines.

    Their resistance goes against reams of scientific data showing that the Covid-19 vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and effective and have reduced hospitalizations and deaths.

    To public health officials, and the majority of Americans, the defiance is unreasonable and incomprehensible. Who would jeopardize their families’ financial security over a shot that has been proven safe and effective at preventing death?

Yup, that’s the liberal line, that “defiance is unreasonable and incomprehensible.” The Times Editorial Board, very much in favor of vaccine mandates, wrote:

    As incursions on bodily autonomy go, this is pretty mild stuff. No one, the Times columnist David Brooks wrote in May, is being asked to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima.

An odd statement, given that the Editorial Board is very, very concerned about bodily autonomy when it comes to abortion, even though getting an abortion kills a living human being. But, of course, to the left, that’s different!

The article author included the worst part:

    And the mandates appear to be working. About 84 percent of adult New Yorkers have now received at least one vaccine dose in the face of state and city mandates, as well as requirements imposed by some private companies.

Translation: under the threat of hunger and homelessness, many people knuckled under and complied, even though they did not want to do so. Many people surrendered in the face of government and its brute force.

The Philadelphia Inquirer was even more gleeful about this:

    In the study, researchers found that people were more likely to say they would get a vaccine if they were told the vaccine was mandated than if they were told they were free to choose to get vaccinated. This held true across racial and ethnic groups. Even people with a tendency toward psychological reactance — people who tend to balk at being told what to do — were more likely to say they’d get the shot if they were told it was mandatory.

The left, who are pro-choice on exactly one thing, are very happy when the government tries to give people no choices. To them, the belief that everyone should be vaccinated translates to everyone must be vaccinated, and they are perfectly willing to use government power to run roughshod over individual rights and choices to achieve their goals. More, they simply don’t understand that conservatives would put people’s individual rights over the goal of getting everyone vaccinated; it is simply outside their conceptual framework.

When it comes to the vaccines, the left simply believe that the needs of the state outweigh the rights of the individual.

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Heather Long gets a promotion

Heather Long first came to my attention when she was an economics reporter for CNN. She wrote, on September 16, 2016:

Problem: Most Americans don’t believe the unemployment rate is 5%

by Heather Long | September 6, 2016 | 3:18 PM EDT

Heather Long

Americans think the economy is in far worse shape than it is.The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

Republican candidate Donald Trump has tapped into this confusion. He has repeatedly called the official unemployment rate a “joke” and a even “hoax.”

There’s more at the original.

I noted, at the time — in a post that is locked up, with so many others, in a file that’s stuck in my server somewhere when I got this site ‘fixed’ from some real technical problems — that what Americans believed, that unemployment was “actually at 9%, or higher,” was correct, if you looked at U-6 rather than the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate.

    • U-1: Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force
    • U-2: Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force
    • U-3: U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)
    • U-4: Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers
    • U-5: Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force
    • U-6: Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.

NOTE: Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

The August, 2016 U-6 rate was 9.6%, which I said was right in line with American’s perception of it. Interestingly enough, with the current ‘official” unemployment rate of 4.8%, U-6 currently stands at 8.5%, while we have employers going begging for workers.

As it happened, Miss Long followed me on Twitter not due to any of my brilliant economic articles, but because I responded to one of her sunset over Manhattan Twitter photos with one of sunset between the olive trees in Tuscany. Hey, I’ll take that.

Search and rescue volunteer, Nate Lair, drives a boat through downtown Beattyville after heavy rains led to the Kentucky River flooding the town and breaking records last set in 1957. March 1, 2021
Alton Strupp / Louisville Courier-Journal

In February of 2017, while still with CNN, Miss Long wrote a series about Beattyville, Kentucky, a place called the “poorest white town in America” from 2008 to 2012. While I don’t live in Beattyville, I do live in the next county over, and my nephew, Nate Lair, lives outside the town and is a volunteer fireman and rescue worker there.

I did get some photos of the Beattyville Wooly Worm Festival last Saturday!

My younger daughter wanted me to get the baby goat. I didn’t.

But I digress.

One of the things I really liked about Miss Long was that, in reading her articles, I couldn’t tell what her political positions were. From a few of her tweets concerning the Defiant Girl statue, facing down the bull on Wall Street, I could tell that she was a strong supporter of more women moving into the financial and technical fields, but whether she is a Democrat or Republican (or independent), liberal or moderate or conservative, I really do not know. To me, that’s the mark of a good journalist, as opposed to journolist.[1]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 … Continue reading

That’s about to change:

    Heather Long to join Washington Post Opinions as editorial writer and columnist

    By WashPostPR | Monday, October 25, 2021 | 12:10 PM EDT

    Announcement from Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, Deputy Editorial Page Editors Karen Tumulty and Ruth Marcus, and Manager of Editorial Talent and Logistics Nana Efua Mumford:

    We are delighted to announce that Heather Long will be joining the Opinions section as an editorial writer and columnist, focusing on economic policy, the future of work and other topics. This is something of a homecoming for Heather, who was deputy editorial page editor of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., when the paper won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for writing about the Penn State/Sandusky child abuse scandal.

    Since joining The Post in 2017, Heather has reported and written brilliantly on how economic trends and policies — and more recently, a pandemic — affect real people across the country. In 2020, she helped coin the “K-Shaped Recovery,” and in 2021, she recognized the “Great Reassessment of Work” taking place as the deep psychological impact of the pandemic caused people to quit jobs, retire early and seek something very different in their careers. She has won two SABEW “Best in Business” awards and twice been a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for breaking news.

    As a member of the Post editorial board, Heather will become the lead writer on economics, business, inequality, labor and related issues, taking the place of Charles Lane, who assumed chief foreign-policy duties when Jackson Diehl retired in August. On our op-ed page, she will join Catherine Rampell (recent winner of first prize in commentary in the Online News Association awards), Megan McArdle and Helaine Olen to comprise one of the liveliest economic teams anywhere. In time we hope to take full advantage of Heather’s proven broadcasting skills as well.

    Heather grew up in Virginia and Pennsylvania, graduated summa cum laude in Economics and English from Wellesley College, earned two Master’s degrees as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and worked at an investment firm for a couple of years before joining the Patriot-News from 2009 to 2012. She was an opinion editor and columnist for The Guardian in 2013-2014 and senior reporter and editor for CNN from 2014-2017.

    Heather is finishing some reporting projects and hopes to join us Dec. 1.

And thus I will be able to discern whether Miss Long is a liberal or conservative, and how close to the ends of that spectrum she is. But even if it turns out that her political views are rather far from mine, knowing that she actually understands business and economics, will have me continuing to pay attention to what she writes. My congratulations to her.

References

References
↑1 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Let’s go, Brandon!

Regular readers of this site — both of them — know that I use f(ornicate) rather than another word beginning with an ‘F’ when that other word seems appropriate. The also know that I use the formulation [insert slang term for the rectum here] to describe myself, and others, when the seven letter word is appropriate.

And it’s more than just how I write; that’s usually how I speak as well. A (somewhat) good Catholic boy, I actually do try to limit profanity. But I’m also a strong proponent of freedom of speech.

    Biden’s critics hurl increasingly vulgar taunts

    By Ashley Parker and Carissa Wolf | October 23, 2021 | 6:00 AM EDT

    BOISE, Idaho — On a quiet street south of downtown Boise, Michael Dick has festooned his front yard with homemade signs, including a large yellow placard that facetiously thanks President Biden for a growing list of grievances — $4-a-gallon gas, inflation, Afghanistan, covid-19. In capital letters in black marker, Dick, 59, recently added “dead civilians” and “dead U.S. soldiers” to his bill of particulars.

A photo of this appears in the Washington Post original.

    In another part of town, alongside a “No trespassing” sign, Michael Schwarz, 60, used black spray-paint to scrawl “Joe Blows” across an electric-pink poster board.

    And that’s mild compared to the sentiments some people — largely in conservative areas — are expressing in their front yards and on the signs they lug with them to greet Biden as he travels the country.

    On Wednesday, when the president visited Scranton, Pa., he was greeted at the corner of Biden Street by a woman holding a handmade “F— Joe Biden” sign, with an American flag as the vowel in the offending word. And back in Boise, Rod Johnson, a retired gunsmith, has hung a blue flag from the roof of his home that reads “F— Biden.” Underneath, in smaller letters, he added, “And f— you for voting for him!!”

Sadly, Lackawanna County, in which Scranton is the largest city and county seat, did give a majority of its votes to Joe Biden, 61,991 (53.58%) to 52,334 (45.23%) to President Trump, which wasn’t too much of a surprise, given that the odious Hillary Clinton also carried the county in 2016, a year in which Mr Trump won the state overall.

There’s more at the original, and the authors do make something of an attempt to note that Mr Biden is hardly the only American President who has been subjected to coarse insults:

    Boos, jeers and insults are nothing new for politicians, especially those who reach the White House. Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as Trump, were all heckled, weathering protests along their motorcade routes and at some of their events. At one 2011 fundraiser in Los Angeles, a heckler called Obama the Antichrist; “F— Trump” graffiti adorned some walls in Washington.

President Bush was burned in effigy uncounted times, and the credentialed media treated it as normal, though the Lexington Herald-Leader’s Editorial Board described armed, but still peaceful, protests and the hanging of Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) in effigy as the work of “a bunch of armed thugs.”

As you’d expect in The Washington Post, the writers have decided to blame President Trump for what they see as increased vulgarity directed at Mr Biden. Perhaps that’s the case, in public signage and chants, but were they not paying attention to online communication and posts while Mr Trump was in office?

    Then there are the chants. In early October, a “F— Joe Biden!” cry broke out among the crowd at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway. Kelli Stavast, an NBC Sports reporter, was interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown live on air at the time, and she quipped, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go Brandon!’”

I’ve wondered: did Kelli Stavast really think that the crowd was chanting, “Let’s go, Brandon,” was she simply trying to suggest that what was background noise for her interview wasn’t the vulgarity that people heard to protect NBC Sports, or was she really trying to hide from the viewers the sentiments of the crowd at Talladega? Was it her original, or was it suggested to her, through an earpiece, from a director?

Regardless of what is the actual case, I absolutely support “Let’s go, Brandon!” as a substitute for “F(ornicate) Joe Biden!” And the chant, and expression, has caught on; it’s really a great meme.

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Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen!

You don’t have to be as old as I am to remember when the horrible, evil, authoritarian dictator named Donald Trump was called a fascist by the left. Now that he’s no longer President, it seems that the left have no real problems with fascist and authoritarian control. Nicole Wyglendowski, a special education teacher with the Philadelphia School District is “passionate about the long-lasting effects education has on social justice,” so passionate that she thinks the order, “Ve need to see your papers!” is a great idea!

There’s more at the original.

How concerned is Miss Wyglendowski about COVID-19? In an OpEd published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on March 8, 2021, she provided a photo of herself teaching online, to an empty classroom, and she is, all by herself except for someone to take the picture, in an empty classroom, wearing a face mask!

The first several paragraphs of her newest OpEd piece express concern that the School District of Philadelphia is not doing enough to get booster shots to teachers, which is, I suppose, something a union member would demand, as opposed to going to a clinic or doctor’s office or Walgreen’s Pharmacy and getting on her own initiative.

But then there’s more. Miss Wyglendowski not only strongly supports the School District’s vaccine mandate, but wants to add to it, requiring that teachers get the booster shots now that they have been approved. Considering that, with her first paragraph, in which she stated “we will most likely need additional COVID-19 shots throughout our lifetimes,” it can only mean that the author wants a requirement that all teachers and other school personnel present their papers to keep their jobs.

Her statement was deemed important enough by the editors of the Inquirer that they enlarged it and put it in a text box, which I have screen captured to the left.

    The district acknowledges that the vaccine is a vital layer of protection for educators. It approved a vaccine mandate for its staff on Aug. 25, and staff who do not comply have to complete two COVID-19 tests per week. If the vaccine is so important that it is mandated (which has my full support), then why are boosters not also being mandated as they come out? Anything else is a show of thoughtlessness, a lack of follow-through, and a grim decision for the community.

What does she want, for school personnel to be forced to either get the shot every six months or have a nasal swab jammed up into their sinuses twice a week for the rest of their lives?

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, when asked by a reporter if she was creating two classes of people, with the vaccinated receiving special privileges, confirmed, “That is what it is, yep”. It appears that that is what Miss Wyglendowski believes the same thing.

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Two Capitol kerfufflers sentenced The January 6 'insurrection' was so serious that they received probation!

We have previously noted the tremendous, tremendous! seriousness of the January 6th ‘insurrection’ in our nation’s capital, what I have frequently called the Capitol kerfuffle.

And now we see the draconian sentence to which Thomas and Lori Vinson were subjected following their guilty plea three months ago:

    Kentucky couple who were part of mob that stormed the Capitol receive sentence

    By Karla Ward | Friday, October 22, 2021 | 8:22 PM EDT

    A Western Kentucky couple who participated in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol were sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

    Both Thomas and Lori Vinson were sentenced to five years’ probation, fined $5,000 and ordered to pay restitution of $500, court records show.

    U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton also ordered the Vinsons to perform 120 hours of community service, the Associated Press reported.

There’s more at the original.

Like the majority of the Capitol kerfufflers, Mr and Mrs Vinson were initially charged with four offenses:

  • 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(1) – Knowingly Entering or Remaining in any Restricted Building or Grounds Without Lawful Authority. Since the Vinsons were not accused of harming anyone or carrying a deadly weapon, the maximum punishment under (b)(2) is a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, in any other case.
  • 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(2) – Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds. Since the Vinsons were not accused of harming anyone or carrying a deadly weapon, the maximum punishment under (b)(2) is a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, in any other case.
  • 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(D) – Disorderly Conduct in a Capitol Building: utter loud, threatening, or abusive language, or engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place in the Grounds or in any of the Capitol Buildings with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress or either House of Congress, or the orderly conduct in that building of a hearing before, or any deliberations of, a committee of Congress or either House of Congress; The penalty for violating 40 U.S.C. §5104(e)(2) is a misdemeanor conviction punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 fine or up to six months in prison, or both.
  • 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(G) – Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building; The penalty for violating 40 U.S.C. §5104(e)(2) is a misdemeanor conviction punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 or up to six months in prison, or both.

The Vinsons were allowed to plead to only the fourth listed offense, which has been the case with almost all of the kerfufflers. The Vinsons said that they were very sorry for their actions, and the judge found their actions so serious that they were sentenced to spend exactly zero days in jail.

Attorney General Merrick Garland absotively, posilutely hates Republicans, because then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to allow the Senate to even consider President Obama’s nomination of then-Judge Garland to the Supreme Court seat left empty when Associate Justice Antonin Scalia died, yet even Mr Garland couldn’t find the ‘insurrection’ serious enough to seriously push felony charges against most of them.

Lori Vinson provided this photo of herself and Thomas Ray Vinson outside the U.S. Capitol to a local news station, according to the FBI. Photo via an FBI Statement of facts.

We have previously noted the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and the Herald-Leader’s very biased choices in making exceptions to it. The paper decided against publishing mugshots of two black accused murderers on the loose, but has been perfectly willing to publish photos of white criminal suspects who are already in custody.

And so we have the photo to the right of Lori and Thomas Vinson. Yes, they have now been convicted, but the Herald-Leader published the same photo in their story of their arrest, before they were convicted of anything.

Marlon Griffin. October 19, 2021. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Still, the Vinsons have been convicted of a single misdemeanor count, sentenced to probation, and what my late best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal went ahead and used their photo, again. Yet the paper declined to post the mugshot of Marlon Griffin, 23, charged with eight felony counts for shooting two people on Endon Drive, and Mr Griffin is already a convicted felon with at least two prior arrests.[1]One of Mr Griffin’s prior arrests occurred just three months after he turned 18. Juvenile records are, of course, sealed, and while it’s not a matter of public record, I would say that … Continue reading

Why, it’s almost as though the only real newspaper in Kentucky’s second largest city, which covers most of central and eastern Kentucky, has an agenda or something!

Amusingly enough, the Herald-Leader is running a fund-raising campaign, saying:

    Your friends and neighbors — people across our communities — are seeking complete and accurate information as they navigate the news, their lives and the changes around us.

    And information is more complex than ever. That’s why we at the Lexington Herald-Leader are launching a new fall fundraising campaign to boost our coverage. We are asking for your support of our health reporting as well as Eastern Kentucky coverage in partnership with Report for America.

    Your tax-deductible donation can help make it happen.

    What this means for you, our readers: More eyes on issues that need more attention. More fair and measured coverage of all of our communities. A boost to our clear-headed watchdog approach.

    And we’re stronger when the voices of all members of our community are part of the conversation.

    Will you join our newsroom campaign to help support more local journalism in this critical area?

    Thank you for supporting our newsroom and the future of local journalism. And thank you for being a contributor to this community-funded effort on local reporting.

“More fair and measured coverage of all of our communities,” huh? It seems as though the newspaper’s coverage is anything but fair, exhibiting a distinct and documented, by me, lack of fairness.

I would love to see the Herald-Leader have some expanded coverage, but it needs to be fair coverage, unbiased coverage. I’m not seeing that yet.

References

References
↑1 One of Mr Griffin’s prior arrests occurred just three months after he turned 18. Juvenile records are, of course, sealed, and while it’s not a matter of public record, I would say that the probability of him having a juvenile record is not low.
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The cannibalism of the left They are eating their own!

I am not normally a fan of Andrew Sullivan, but he’s definitely got one thing going for him: he is a strong defender of freedom of speech and of the press, and he is willing to say what he thinks regardless of potentially being ‘cancelled’ by the left.

The Betrayal Of Our Gay Inheritance

How has the new trans left come to resemble the old religious right?

Activists hold banners and placards as thousands attend the Reclaim Pride march in London on July 24, 2021. (Guy Smallman/Getty images) Click to enlarge.

by Andrew Sullivan | Friday, October 22, 2021It was, as it turned out, a bit of a non-event. The walkout by transgender Netflix employees and their supporters to demand that the company take down and apologize for the latest Chappelle special attracted “dozens,” despite media hype.

But the scenes were nonetheless revealing. A self-promoting jokester showed up with a placard with the words “We Like Jokes” and “We Like Dave” to represent an opposing view. He was swiftly accosted by a man who ripped the poster apart, leaving the dude with just a stick, prompting the assailant to shout “He’s got a weapon!” Pushed back by other protestors, he was then confronted by a woman right in front of him — shaking a tambourine — and yelling repeatedly into his face: “Repent, motherfucker! Repent! Repent!”

“The scenes”, huh? While the image at the right was not taken at the “bit of a non-event” Mr Sullivan describes, it is the image that he chose to illustrate his article. While I do not normally use images from articles like that, in this case it falls under Fair Use guidelines, because it illustrates my point: Mr Sullivan is, himself, pointing to an image which is not going to gather a lot of support for the homosexual or transgender rights he supports, not among people who don’t already support such. While London can be a city of clowns when it comes to the anti-establishment population, the image Mr Sullivan chose is not one which is going to persuade a lot of normal people that homosexuals and transgenders are, themselves, normal, but which will leave people thinking that they are a bunch of clowns.

Remember, Mr Sullivan’s column is published on Substack, which means that he chose the image, not Substack editors.

Of course, if there are Substack editors, and they chose the photo to illustrate the article, then Mr Sullivan just might blow his top, because it wholly undercuts his positions.

This is the state of what’s left of the gay[1]As noted in The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, we do not use the word “gay” to refer to homosexuals or homosexuality, but we also do not alter quotations from other people when … Continue reading rights movement in America. Judgmental, absolutist, intolerant, and hysterical, it looks to shut down speech it dislikes, drive its foes out of the public square, compile enemies’ lists of dangerous writers, artists, and politicians, and cancel and protest anything that does not comport with every tiny aspect of their increasingly deranged ideology.

The generation that now leads the movement does not seem to know the actual history of the gay rights movement, or the centrality of free expression to gay identity. They also seem to have no idea of the history of the movement against gay rights. Because if they did, they might be shocked at the ironies involved.

Anti-gay forces, hegemonic for centuries, were just like these trans activists. They were just as intent on suppressing and stigmatizing magazines, shows, and movies they believed were harmful. They too targeted individual artists and writers for personal destruction. They too believed that movies and comedy needed to be reined in order to prevent social harm. They protested in front of movie theaters. They tried to get shows canceled. And if you’d marched in any gay demo or Pride in the 1990s, you’d always be prepared to confront a grimacing Christianist yelling “Repent! Repent!” in your face.

In the 1990s, living in the relatively, though not thoroughly, conservative Hampton Roads region of Virginia, I never witnessed a homosexual rights march, so I certainly never saw what Mr Sullivan was claiming happened happen. But even if it did, it would not have been the marchers’ supposed-to-be allies who were doing so.

This was never, ever the spirit of the gay rights movement in the past. In fact, it was America’s guarantee of free expression and free association that made the gay rights movement possible. It was the First Amendment, and the spirit of the First Amendment, that was easily the most important right for gays for decades.

It’s also what allows the ‘transgender’ rights movement possible, but the ‘transgendered’, like much of the rest of the left, don’t like it when people exercise their freedom of speech to challenge their movements. We have already noted that Twitter, and the left in general, do not like Freedom of Speech. When it comes to the subject of ‘transgenderism,’ Twitter has already banned ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering.’[2]‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; … Continue reading The New York Times, which so strongly defended its right to Freedom of Speech and of the Press in New York Times Co v United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), gave space in the OpEd section to Andrew Marantz to write “Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence.” Mr Marantz, while exercising his First Amendment rights, clearly does not like the unregulated speech of others. The Times had earlier given OpEd page space to ‘transgender’ activist Chad Malloy to claim that Twitter’s ban on ‘deadnamimg’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes the Freedom of Speech.[3]Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their … Continue reading

And now? Twitter, Facebook and other social media are censoring or altering posts which question COVID-19 vaccinations and vaccine mandates, and sometimes suspending if not wholly banning people from their sites for pushing such views. The freedom of speech and of the press are under attack from the left, the people who used to be its most strident defenders.

As I noted in the beginning, I am hardly a fan of Mr Sullivan, or the homosexual and ‘transgender’ rights movements, but in this case, he is right: freedom of speech is too precious a thing to lose, and too necessary a right for all of our freedoms, and our individual liberty in general. It is a far less dangerous thing to allow those with whom we disagree to have their say than it is to allow the suppression of speech and ideas; to allow that is to allow other people, if they gain power, to suppress our own speech and ideas.

References

References
↑1 As noted in The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, we do not use the word “gay” to refer to homosexuals or homosexuality, but we also do not alter quotations from other people when they use it.
↑2 ‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by sex-specific terms referring to his biological sex rather than the sex he claims to be.
↑3 Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names and biological sex.