After hitting the Yucatan, Hurricane Beryl took a sharp turn and made Texas landfall straight over the Houston area. According to CenterPoint Energy (the linear successor to Houston Lighting and Power following deregulation) some 1,765,034 of 2,600,000 customers are currently without power. Yesterday evening that number was over 2.2 million, so progress is being made.
Houston is a huge, sprawling city, and a certain amount of power outages are to be expected from a hurricane with 70 MPH winds. But given the widespread destruction wrought by Harvey and Ike (both more powerful hurricanes), one would have thought CenterPoint and other relevant energy producers would have conducted more vigorous tree trimming, but evidently not.
Acting Governor Dan Patrick (Governor Abbott is off on an economic development trip to Asia) declared 121 counties disaster areas.
Having endured Allen, I can assure you that living through an extended power outage in Houston during the summer is a hot, humid and deeply unpleasant experience.
So far only seven people have died, so let’s hope the death toll stays that low.
This story has a little bit of everything: Fake identities, forged passports, human trafficking, shadowy gambling associates and communist infiltrators. But mostly it’s about small Philippines town mayor Alice Guo, who actually seems to be Guo Hua Ping, a Chinese national with ties to the CCP.
“A Philippino mayor may actually be a Chinese woman working for the CCP.”
The Philippines may be onto a Chinese conspiracy so intricate and wild you’d think it was the plot to some thriller flick. I would call it Dr. Filipi-No.”
“Small town Filipino mayor Alice Guo was accused of being a Chinese spy.”
“Guo drew national attention after the police raided Zun Yuan Technology Inc., a Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator, or POGO, in her constituency of Bamban back in March.”
I doubt this POGO is that cute.
“During the raid, police found several documents that tied Guo to the POGO’s operations. This led to a Senate hearing, where Guo was questioned about her involvement with the POGO and seemed unable to answer basic questions about her background.” Some of those clipped.
“Guo gave conflicting information about her father, Angelito Guo, whose business records identify him as Jian Zhong Guo, at one point saying he was Filipino, even though she had previously said he was Chinese.”
“For one, the birth certificates of Alice Guo and her two siblings show that her father, Angelito Guo, married her supposed mother, Amelia Leal, but the three certificates have three different marriage dates.” More of that sloppy CCP corner cutting on display.
“Buuuuut, there might not be an Amelia Leal. Investigators found no records of her birth. Leading one official from the Philippines Statistics Authority to say that it’s possible she doesn’t exist.”
“So who is Guo’s mother, if it’s not Amelia Leal? One candidate is a Chinese citizen named Lin Wenyi. She was listed as an incorporator of several registered companies of the mayor’s family.”
Guo not only listed Lin Wenyi as her mother in bank accounts, she “listed a whole bunch of names, such as ‘Winnie Leal,’ ‘Wenny Leal Lin,’ ‘Weny Lin Leal,’ ‘Winnie C. Leal’ and ‘Amelia Lim Leal.'”
“If Alice Guo’s real mother is Chinese, then this throws a pretty big wrench into Guo’s claim to Filipino citizenship, since the Philippines grants citizenship through the mother.”
“The mayor Alice Guo’s fingerprints matched that of a Chinese woman named Guo Hua Ping.”
“Records from the Board of Investments of the Guo family’s application for a Special Investors Resident Visa show Alice Guo, or shall I say, Guo Hua Ping, entered the Philippines on January 12, 2003 when she was 13 years old…According to those documents, rather than being born in Tarlac on July 12, 1986, Guo was actually born in Fujian, China on August 31, 1990.”
“According to Senator Risa Hontiveros, ‘This confirms what I have suspected all along. Mayor Alice is a fake Filipino—or should I say, Guo Hua Ping. She is a Chinese national masquerading as [a] Filipino citizen to facilitate crimes being committed by [Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators].'”
“The Senate probe also found that Guo allegedly faked her incorporators in the POGO Hongsheng Gaming Technology by stealing the identities of vendors at the public market in Tarlac.”
The Philippine’s Nationalist People’s Coalition expelled Guo from its roster. “Too much of a liar and too corrupt to be a politician? This is almost more impressive than it is nefarious.”
There’s also the human trafficking charges. “Guo was linked to an alleged ‘grand conspiracy to commit labor trafficking’ of around 500 foreign POGO workers who were rescued during a raid on the compound on March 13.”
“Now lots of POGO scam suspects are trying to flee the Philippines. Guo’s family is being subpoenaed. This includes Guo’s father, suspected biological mother, and her siblings Shiela, Seimen and Wesley Leal, along with the accountant in charge of filing documents for Guo family’s businesses.” Her business partners are also being sought.
One wonders how many Guo Hua Pings there are used assumed identities not just in the Philippines, but here in the U.S. How many of the Chinese nationals pouring over our southern border thanks to the Biden Administration’s open borders policies will be taking up fake American identities and positions in illegal gambling operations, fentanyl distribution, or marijuana grow operations?
Austin security guard Percy Payne got chewed out by his boss on camera for giving an interview in his security guard outfit about trying to stop two hooded thugs in the parking garage he was patrolling.
So he quit on camera.
Some takeaways:
He had to call 911 twice to get an officer out. “Defund the police” is still hurting response times four years later.
He got attacked by thugs, and his boss blames him for fighting back.
It takes a special kind of toxic boss to chew out a subordinate on camera while they’re being interviewed by the media.
Fortunately for Payne, Central Texas Gun Works owner Michael Cargill saw the video, and decided to hire Payne “just like that.” “I’m confident he’s going to be an outstanding person.” Karl told me about Cargill a while back: A black, gay gun store owner who also teaches firearms classes. The Second Amendment is a very big church indeed.
It’s always nice when a story like this has a happy ending.
And businesses will keep getting robbed until they make it clear to criminals that they won’t allow themselves to be robbed…
YouTube, as part of their eternal quest to marginalize gun owners on their platform, has informed the top tier of gun YouTubers of new content rules, one of which is that you can’t show automatic weapons being fired, on pain of being demonetized or age-restricted. (YouTube also banned showing “high capacity” magazines, but refuse to define what that entails.) But! There are exceptions.
Demolition Ranch’s Matt Carriker, who sat in on that meeting, set out to make a YouTube video to exploit all those exceptions.
It’s clever video, in that Carriker covers the exceptions listed by YouTube, then provides a snippet utilizing them while firing a full auto AK-47, including:
An exception for “artistic content, such as a film” presumably so they don’t have to ban clips from Saving Private Ryan and most of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies. So the video throws up a letterbox and some CGI muzzle flash.
He fires a burst offscreen.
He throws up a censored bar.
He does a mini movie with a one page script, “Give me my money.”
They do another in sepia tone.
He drapes a blanket over the AK while firing, so you can’t actually see it.
“This video is probably going to get 18 up restricted, it would be my guess, and then they will have to tell me. I will have to get on a phone call with my YouTube representative and he will actually have to tell me what is 18 up restricted about the video, and which parts of it made it 18 up restricted.”
Of course, YouTube and parent company Google could just stop trying to censor conservatives instead, but what are the odds of that?
I hope you survived Independence Day will all your digits intact! Slow Joe’s poll numbers plumb new depths, everyone knows the media is complicit in hiding his mental decline, Israel settles all family business, Rishi’s snap election is a debacle for the Tories, Wall Street looks to get the hell out of the Rotten Apple, and California legalizing weed was a big win…for illegal weed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Voters that say Biden has the mental health to be President: It was only 35% pre-debate, look where it’s dropped to now post-debate, 27%.
How ’bout that he should be running for President? It’s 37% pre-debate, it’s now 28%…
I have never seen numbers this bad for an incumbent president during my lifetime … These numbers looked NOTHING like this in 2020. These numbers were bad already … they have gotten considerably worse even in just a few days after that first presidential debate.
How bad is Biden doing? This should come with the standard Instapundit “don’t get cocky” disclaimer, as well as a disclaimer that I haven’t examined this guy’s methodology and model at all, but even if the margins are half what he’s saying, it’s still really, really bad for Biden.
As in “Biden is winning Illinois…by three points” bad. New York is within striking distance for Trump. And right now he’s even edging Biden in New Jersey. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Biden says that no one is pushing him out of the race, though even Lightbringer McLegTingle himself has reportedly joined the chorus of concern over Slow Joe’s debate meltdown.
According to ‘several people familiar with his remarks,’ and perhaps most notably conveyed via the Washington Post, not only has Obama grown more concerned following the debate (and having to physically guide the 81-year-old off of a stage last month), the former president “has long harbored worries about his party defeating Donald Trump in November, repeatedly warning Biden in recent months about how challenging it will be to win reelection.”
Not only that, “Just before the debate, Obama conveyed to allies his concerns about the state of the race.”
So Obama gets to save face, while adding to the growing chorus of Democrats who have expressed everything from quiet panic to public hints, to outright calls for Biden to drop out of the race.
Usual “sources close to” caveats apply.
The mainstream media is shocked, shocked that Democrats lied about Biden’s cognitive decline as they actively aided and abetted them.
If you’re looking for a broader takeaway from all this, take how the press covered up Biden’s infirmity because it wanted to protect the Democrats, and apply it to literally every single thing that it does, on any topic, in any year, in any circumstance, forever.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 3, 2024
They all knew:
Now that all the liberal journalists are claiming they didn't try to cover up Biden's deteriorating mental condition, here's a supercut of them claiming any and all damaging videos of Biden are fake and/or deceptively edited. pic.twitter.com/XI5zeTGih5
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) July 3, 2024
Democrats decided to shut Joe Biden down for a week. Not because they wanted to, but because they figured they had to. It was the only chance Biden had — thin as it turned out to be — to get through a 90-minute session in which he’d be asked questions he couldn’t answer with note cards, in which he’d be challenged vigorously and need to be quick on his shuffling feet.
Here’s the thing, though. What we saw on Thursday night was the result of that week of preparation and rest. And it was a disaster. So . . . what must the prep have been like?
Biden’s closest aides and the top Democrats with whom they are in constant communication know better than anyone in America that the president cannot function, that he cannot do the job. Yet, rather than ease Biden out, invoke the 25th Amendment if he wouldn’t go voluntarily, and ensconce in the Oval Office the vice president they insisted in 2020 would be ready to take over if the octogenarian collapsed, they decided they had to try to drag Biden across the finish line.
Why?
Because the Democratic Party is a trainwreck.
As catastrophic as Biden is in his senescence, he remains useful cover for the fact that the youth, energy, and money in the Democratic Party is woke-leftist, Islamist, counter-constitutionalist, post-American, and unelectable.
This doesn’t mean the whole Democratic Party is that way. But it does mean that sensible Democrats have to mind their tongues and genuflect in the crazies’ direction if they want to remain viable. They may personally believe, like the majority of Americans believe, that the border needs to be secure; that we can’t allow millions of illegal aliens a year to enter the country; that we don’t want boys and men invading the formerly safe spaces of girls and women; that mere statistical racial disparities in outcomes do not establish racism; that crime — especially recidivist crime — is a serious problem; that we need to back Israel’s wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian patrons; that a radical “green energy” transition the country is not ready for weighs too heavily on the budgets of everyday Americans even as it drives the national economy deeper into the ditch; and that America, warts and all, is fundamentally good — rightly, the envy of the world. But woe betide the Democrat who gives voice to such commonsense views.
Democrats have thus rolled the dice with Biden, and with the nation’s security, because the alternative is dealing with that rift.
Joe Biden is a lifelong mediocrity. But he has the fortuity of being both a Democrat from another era and Obama’s vice president. Because he’s a doddering blank slate, Democrats of all camps could project onto him their kind of Democrat. He could run in 2020 as the guy who could face down the radicals, and then govern under the thumb of the radicals — but with enough rhetorical feints to the old establishment Dems that they might yet rally around him . . . especially with no alternatives except the hard left and Donald Trump.
Why Joe Biden? Because Democrats want to stay in power and propping him up, as impossible as that has now become, seemed to be the best plan. Sadly, it may yet be.
Unemployment is at a three year high. And those are just the official figures. The truth is probably far worse.
Rigging the 2020 election through Zuckerbucks. “(a) tax-exempt non-profits are prohibited by federal law from engaging in partisan political activity, and (b) the Zuckerberg-funded ‘cabal’ had no other purpose except to guarantee Biden’s election.” And it did this through get-out-the-vote efforts exclusively in heavily Democratic precincts.
If you look at the Livemap, Israel also seems to have stormed various towns in the West Bank this week.
Israel may be in a “settle all family business” sort of mood…
“National Education Association members will vote on several anti-Israel resolutions at the union’s annual ‘Representative Assembly’ in Philadelphia this week, including the adoption of an official position holding that Israel is conducting a ‘genocide’ in Gaza and that opposing the Jewish state’s existence is not antisemitic.” I’m sure they’d rather focus on Gaza than undertake radical courses of action like teaching kids to read.
Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave Desert. Four of the men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.
Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead, the legal market has failed, and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.
California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently, as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado, whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.
Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it’s a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homelessness, drug overdoses and law enforcement.
While the legal drug business is also collapsing in California, the state is spending a fortune fighting marijuana even as it tries to tax it. Gov. Gavin Newsom paradoxically promised to close the budget deficit with $100 million in drug revenue, meant to be used to fund law enforcement and fight substance abuse. The state seized over $300 million in illegal pot this year and uses satellite imagery and heavily-armed raids to fight untaxed marijuana.
But despite all those efforts, illegal marijuana has won and legal marijuana has lost.
The Los Angeles Times warned two years ago:
“Proposition 64, California’s 2016 landmark cannabis initiative, sold voters on the promise a legal market would cripple the drug’s outlaw trade, with its associated violence and environmental wreckage.
“Instead, a Los Angeles Times investigation finds, the law triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never before witnessed.
“Rogue cultivation centers like Mount Shasta Vista now engulf rural communities scattered across the state, as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the steep mountains on the North Coast, and the high desert and timberlands of the Sierra Nevada.
“Residents in these places describe living in fear next to heavily armed camps…”
Some of the growers are private citizens, but they aren’t likely to remain in business for long.
Cartels and gang members dominate the business. And open borders allowed them to bring massive numbers of laborers to boost their ranks. Not only California, but places as far afield as Maine that have large open areas and limited law enforcement resources, have been overrun by drug operations that more closely resemble parts of Latin America and Asia than the USA.
The coasts, from Southern California up to Oregon, are controlled by Mexican cartels which have expanded so much that they’re running short of workers even during the Biden open borders boom. Some have taken to brazenly advertising for illegal workers in Europe.
A local California DA described “Mexican cartel groups coming up to grow pot, and people from Bulgaria, France and Russia.” The vast exodus across the border has made it possible for cartels to freely bring in any workers they want, even as drug legalization and open borders effectively ended any real penalties for either illegal migration or marijuana.
Asian organized crime may be less on the radar, but it is no less ruthless or violent.
A few years ago, four Chinese people were murdered at an Oklahoma illegal pot farm. Chinese organized crime had “taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” the head of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs revealed.
Once again, “the mafias set their sights on Oklahoma when the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes.” Now the Triads run their own compounds “ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes” with 3,000 illegal grows having a value estimated at as high as $44 billion a year.
The Triads are not just in the illegal marijuana business, they traffic in everything from heroin to fentanyl. Legalizing marijuana, however, provided them with a profitable and semi-legal market that gives them a base to expand their efforts trafficking in even more lethal drugs.
Drug legalization has failed on every level. The legal drug business is collapsing. MedMen, which once promised to be the Apple of weed, fell from a $3 billion valuation to a bankruptcy with $411 million in liabilities. Despite the green crosses and online apps, 80% of Californian’s pot is still the old-fashioned illegal kind. Politicians may be boasting about hundreds of millions in revenue, but the cartels are making tens of billions and they’re taking over entire forests.
The future isn’t pot shops, weed apps or MedMen: it’s Mexican and Chinese organized crime compounds that are spreading across the West and parts of New England like a plague.
Also in California, State Farm is jacking home owners insurance into the stratosphere.
State Farm requested massive increases to its California residential insurance rates, which calls its financial stability into doubt amid an ongoing crisis in the state’s insurance market.
The company’s California subsidiary, State Farm General, the state’s largest writer of homeowners insurance, according to the Insurance Information Institute, submitted a request on Thursday to the California Department of Insurance for the following rate hikes:
30% increase in homeowners insurance
336% increase in condominium owners insurance
352% increase in renters insurance
With California’s property insurance market already facing an availability and affordability crisis, driven largely by rising wildfire risk, the timing could hardly be worse.
Gee, maybe you shouldn’t have legalized shoplifting in the name of “social justice.”
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled unanimously in a case involving a 2021 Texas social media transparency law, sending it back to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
House Bill (HB) 20, which requires major social media platforms to be more transparent and prohibit viewpoint-based censorship, passed in the 87th Legislature. It faced an immediate legal challenge, resulting in a temporary block by a federal district court. This decision was appealed to the 5th Circuit, which temporarily lifted the block, allowing the law to take effect.
Justice Elena Kagan delivered the opinion for SCOTUS, writing, “Texas has never been shy, and always been consistent, about its interest: The objective is to correct the mix of viewpoints that major platforms present. But a State may not interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.”
So the Supreme Court will not save Americans from big tech companies teaming up with secret government entities to impose censorship on their platforms. Americans will have to do that for themselves.
The Tories got slaughtered in Rishi Sunak’s spectacularly ill-advised snap election, handing Labour, which seemed on life-support just a few years earlier, a 170 seat majority. “Labour got 3 times as many seats, but did not win – the Conservatives lost, and lost badly, punished by the electorate. Reform were the real winners – although they only got 4 seats.” Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB KC will now become Prime Minister, Sunak is going to go down as one of the Tories worst leaders, and Nigel Farage will finally sit in parliament. Will Labour take this as a greenlight to go full speed ahead on unlimited immigration and hard green NetZero? I wouldn’t put it past them.
Belarus does more sabre rattling on the Ukraine border. I suspect this is just a feint to tie up Ukrainian units on the border, as Putin puppet Aleksander Lukashenko might face a real revolt from his military if he tried to send units into Ukraine.
Remember all that panic over investors buying up housing? Thanks to the Biden Recession, they’re now unloading them at firesale prices. “It’s impossible to make money on mortgage properties with interest rates where they are today.” Well, unless they took out fixed rate mortgages, which real estate companies are evidently loath to do. “Inventory [in this Florida zip code] has gone up 800 to 900%.”
So I thought about doing a post on this Chinese-constructed, Malaysia-based, eco-themed Forest City ghost city just outside Singapore, with the obvious “post apocalyptic” slant, but one thing stopped me: It actually looks kinda cool and well-maintained, and if the usual shoddy tofu dregs building processes have been used, they’re not apparent in this brief tour. Everything looks classy and expensive. And for once, you can’t entirely blame the CCP for the debacle, since the Malaysian government evidently changed foreign ownership rules after most of it had been constructed.
This is a weird story: “Walter Ringfield Jr., the 27-year-old Phoenix resident charged with stealing keys to voting equipment from Maricopa County elections headquarters, has a history of theft allegations – and an apparent interest in running for public office.” He stole keys to a tabulating machine that couldn’t be used without access to other keys he didn’t have for a job he was temping at. Could be a another Democratic attempt at election fraud, or the guy just might be a klepto.
Michigan lawmakers want to make the AR-15 the official state gun. Nice. Texas already has a state gun, the Colt Walker pistol, which is pretty important historically. Tennessee’s official state gun is the Barrett M82, which I think wins the firepower crown, until someone names the Ma Deuce the offical state gun…
I love the smell of Democratic panic in the morning. It smells like…victory.
Outside the Biden White House, the roars for Biden to step aside after revealing his cognitive decline to the nation via his disasterous debate performance grow louder.
Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-TX-37) became the first federal Democratic official to call on President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race following last week’s debate with former President Donald Trump.
The statement followed an interview where former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA-11) told MSNBC, “I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’”
“And so when people ask that question, it’s legitimate — of both candidates.”
Doggett’s statement reads, “President Biden has continued to run substantially behind Democratic senators in key states and in most polls has trailed Donald Trump. I had hoped this debate would provide some momentum to change that. It did not. Instead of reassuring voters, the President failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies.”
“Our overriding consideration must be who has the best hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang. … I represent the heart of a congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw. President Biden should do the same.”
In 1968, LBJ declined to run again because his escalation of the Vietnam War was deeply unpopular with Democrats, not because his brain was operating on the level of a baked rutabaga. The two situations are not comparable.
In television interviews, some Democrats are already throwing a bone to Vice President Kamala Harris. “I will support her if he were to step aside,” Representative Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.), a Biden-Harris campaign co-chairman and former House Democratic whip, told MSNBC. “This party should not, in any way, do anything to work around Ms. Harris. We should do everything we can to bolster her whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket.”
Former representative Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) has been even more candid — calling on Biden to step aside and urging Democrats to rally around Harris in his place. “You’re asking the American people to ignore what they saw last week,” Ryan, who distanced himself from Biden on the campaign trail during his 2022 Senate run and who expressed early opposition to Biden’s reelection campaign, said in an interview with National Review on Tuesday “It’s completely irresponsible for those people to hide this from us — for him to be in in that condition.”
Ryan said his party’s failure to confront voters’ concerns about Biden’s fitness for the job risks causing “irreparable damage” to a party that is already seen as out of touch with large swaths of the American public — including black voters and working-class voters — on a range of issues such as border security, the economy, and public safety.
They’re seen as “out of touch” because the party’s hard left ideological core wanted a third term for Obama despite wildly unpopular policies that brought Republican majorities to both houses of Congress and thought they could blithely lie to the American public about a whole host of issues (importing millions of illegal aliens, radical transgenderism), not just Biden’s cognitive decline, while imposing revolution from above.
But what Doggett and other Democrats are getting at is that now that Biden has revealed that he’s as cognitively declined as Republicans have said all along, his chances of beating Donald Trump in November just went from slim to none, and boy howdy are they right about that.
Again, their position is untenable. They can't tell the truth, that their candidate is well below the threshold of someone who should be president for another 4 years, so they tell obvious lies that nobody but the dumbest partisans will buy. https://t.co/Dpn9SECqEo
What? A Democrat telling “obvious lies that nobody but the dumbest partisans will buy”? You mean it’s a day ending in “-y”?
My friend Stephen Green is reveling in schadenfreude over Silver’s latest election forecast, which is developing a trendline in exactly one direction — from bad to worse for “Sundown Joe,” showing “Biden with just a 27.6% chance of winning the Electoral College and 44.2% odds of taking the popular vote.” As a Democrat, Silver is grief-stricken and angry about the situation, going through the “woulda coulda shoulda” second-guessing about the process by which his party’s establishment, after foisting upon the electorate the Oldest President Ever, then apparently decided there was no risk in attempting to extend his White House tenure another four years. Last week’s debate disaster should have been foreseen, because what’s the point of getting paid as a “campaign strategist” if you can’t anticipate potential problems?
Now, however, the same fools who led Democrats into that disaster are busy trying to convince their voters (and, perhaps more importantly, their donors) that they can somehow recover enough to win in November.
“It’s fundamentally a terrible idea to ask the public to make the guy they saw on Thursday president until he’s 86,” Silver says in his pay-walled newsletter, stating the blindingly obvious truth.
You’ve got to understand that Silver was one of those 20-something lefties who jumped into the political fray during the years when the Iraq War made George W. Bush very unpopular on college campuses. (One reason most conservatives my age roll our eyes at rhetorical symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome — the Hitler comparisons, etc. — is that it’s basically the same thing we heard about Dubya during the Bush Derangment Syndrome epidemic two decades ago.) Silver’s first big “win” as a forecaster, the foundation of his reputation as a polling expert, was in 2006, which in hindsight was the 21st-century’s high-water mark for Democrats. Silver predicted a big win for Democrats and he was right, and his winning streak continued two years later when Obama got elected. However, his accuracy since then has not been so stellar. In October 2010, Silver offered a “best guess” that Republicans would gain 48 House seats in the midterms; the GOP’s actual net gain in 2010 was 63 seats, the biggest net gain for House Republicans since 1938.
Generally speaking, when Democrats have a good year, Silver’s projections are more accurate than they are when Republicans have a good year. Silver has never overestimated Republican performance. So if Nate Silver’s numbers are telling him that Biden’s got barely a one-in-four chance of winning? That’s bad for Joe, because the reality of his situation is probably a lot worse than that.
In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.
Like many people his age, Mr. Biden, 81, has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time. But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.
The uncomfortable occurrences were not predictable, but seemed more likely when he was in a large crowd or tired after a particularly bruising schedule. In the 23 days leading up to the debate against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden jetted across the Atlantic Ocean twice for meetings with foreign leaders and then flew from Italy to California for a splashy fund-raiser, maintaining a grueling pace that exhausted even much younger aides.
Mr. Biden was drained enough from the back-to-back trips to Europe that his team cut his planned debate preparation by two days so he could rest at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., before joining advisers at Camp David for rehearsals. The preparations, which took place over six days, never started before 11 a.m. and Mr. Biden was given time for an afternoon nap each day, according to a person familiar with the process.
Won’t someone please think of the terrible strain on Joe from having to start work at the crack of 11 AM?
Let’s hope he got milk and graham crackers after his nap to reward him for being such a good boy.
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said on Tuesday that “the president was working well before” the 11 a.m. start time each day, after exercising. Still, at a fund-raiser on Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden blamed fatigue for his debate performance. “I wasn’t very smart,” he said. “I decided to travel around the world a couple times, I don’t know how many time zones.” He added: “I didn’t listen to my staff, and I came back and I fell asleep on the stage.”
Are you trying to say that your staff advised you not to travel around the world to meet with international leaders, and not to celebrate the 70th anniversary of D-Day? So not to perform the regular duties expected of anyone who’s job is President of the United States of America?
Joe, I’ve got to tell you, I have a pretty big problem with that as well.
The recent moments of disorientation generated concern among advisers and allies alike. He seemed confused at points during a D-Day anniversary ceremony in France on June 6. The next day, he misstated the purpose of a new tranche of military aid to Ukraine when meeting with its president.
On June 10, he appeared to freeze up at an early celebration of the Juneteenth holiday. On June 18, his soft-spoken tone and brief struggle to summon the name of his homeland security secretary at an immigration event unnerved some of his allies at the event, who traded alarmed looks and later described themselves as “shaken up,” as one put it.
Democrat gaslighting us about “how sharp Biden is” snipped.
But by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observation and interviews, Mr. Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3½ years ago. The White House regularly releases corrected transcripts of his remarks, in which he frequently mixes up places, people or dates. The administration did so in the days after the debate, when Mr. Biden mixed up the countries of France and Italy when talking about war veterans at an East Hampton fund-raiser.
Last week’s debate prompted some around him to express concern that the decline had accelerated lately. Several advisers and current and former administration officials who see Mr. Biden regularly but not every day or week said they were stunned by his debate performance because it was the worst they had ever seen him.
“You don’t have to be sitting in an Oval Office meeting with Joe Biden to recognize there’s been a slowdown in the past two years. There’s a visible difference,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “I’ve been amazed on one hand,” said Mr. Brinkley, who has not seen the president in person in a year. “The president can zip around the country like he does. But the White House may only be showing the Biden they want us to see.”
The Times piece is peppered with moments when Biden was lucid for some task or short speech, as though occasional periods of lucidity somehow make up for obvious cognitive decline. (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty at National Review.)
Disgraced convicted felon Hunter Biden has reportedly been joining his embattled father and top aides in official meetings at the White House since the Biden family returned from Camp David, Monday evening.
The Biden family gathered at Camp David over the weekend, where Joe Biden sat for a previously scheduled photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz for the upcoming Democrat National Convention.
While staying at the presidential retreat in Maryland, according to reports, the family took the opportunity to urge him to stay in the race and keep fighting despite his humiliating debate performance.
Since then, the scandal-plagued younger Biden has “popped into” official White House meetings and phone calls with advisors, four people familiar with the matter told NBC.
Hunter has also reportedly been spotted talking to senior White House staff, prompting some to ask how the convicted felon could have a security clearance to be included in such high-level discussions at the White House.
According to the sources, Joe Biden’s aides were “struck” by Hunter’s new advisory role.
“What the hell is happening?” senior White House staff is quoted to have said.
Given that my calendar doesn’t show a Take Your Crackhead Son To Work Week, I’m guessing this is to prevent anyone from cornering Slow Joe one-on-one to try to convince him to drop out of the race. The Biden Crime Syndicate shows no signs of being willing to step off the gravy train, and seems to fear (possibly correctly) that a whole lot of criminal indictments might be coming down on them if they did. After all, now that the MSM has stopped pretending that Hunter’s laptop wasn’t real, they have yet to come to grips with the vast pay-for-play foreign graft schemes the documents on that laptop revealed.
Will endangered Democrats be able to convince Biden to drop out “for the good of the party?”
So Emmanuel Macron took a look at EU election results and went “OK, I’ll throw snap elections in France to scare you away from voting for Le Pen.” French voters: “Challenge accepted.”
France’s right-wing National Rally is expected to emerge as the single largest party in the first round of the parliamentary election. National Rally led by its new leader, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, will secure nearly 34 percent of the vote, followed by the newly formed alliance of leftist and Marxist parties, the New Popular Front, which secured 28.5 percent, polls released after Sunday vote show.
“According to an estimate by French polling institute Ipsos Talan, the far-right National Rally party is estimated to win between 230 and 280 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly,” the TV channel France24 reported.
This is few seats short of the 289-mark needed to form the government in the 577-seat National Assembly parliament. National Assembly’s possible post-election coalition partner, the conservative Republicans, is set to get between 41-61 seats with 10 percent of the vote share, early polls indicate.
The French news agency AFP, however, reported National Rally gaining majority in the first round of the vote. “The polling agencies projected this would give the RN a majority of seats in the 577-seat National Assembly after the second round and a possible absolute majority,” the news agency reported.
Leftists and Islamists reacted to the news by doing what they do best: rioting.
The streets of Paris became a war zone overnight Sunday as tens of thousands of left-wing rioters took to the streets in fiery opposition to the historic election victory by the country’s right-wing National Rally (NR).
Rioters smashed storefront windows, vandalized monuments and set massive bonfires in public squares after the election results revealed the party, headed by nationalist Marine Le Pen, took 33% of the vote in the decisive first round of France’s legislative elections.
Naturally, the French left are fighting “Fascism” by unleashing violence upon their political enemies.
An increasing number of Europeans have at last understood that the large-scale presence of Muslims in their countries now threatens to undermine the civilization of Judeo-Christian Europe, and has already resulted in a situation that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for Europe’s non-Muslims, than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence. And the rise of right-wing populism reflects the widespread alarm over the power waged by European political and media elites, who largely oppose restrictions on Muslim immigration. The EU is run by people who are not loyal to the ideal of the nation-state. They are international bureaucrats, able through the supra-national European Union, to impose minimum immigration quotas on its member states. This has led to much unhappiness in those states, some of which — like Hungary— are simply refusing to comply.
For all the endless cries of “Far right, far right!” in the mainstream media, National Rally’s positions on not only immigration, but ecoskepticism and Euroskepticism seems to be shared by the majority of French, and indeed by European voters as a whole. It is only their globalist leaders who disagree.
Some readers may be wondering what a National Rally victory will mean for NATO, as well as Ukraine’s continued resistance to Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression. Well the dark pinks at the World Socialist Web Site have their commie knickers in a knot because Marine Le Pen supports both. “France’s neo-fascist National Rally (Rassemblement National-RN) is aligning itself with NATO’s war escalation against nuclear-armed Russia. It is abandoning its ambiguous tactical criticisms of Macron’s military policies and its campaign promise to withdraw France from NATO.”
All good news in my book.
The National Front under Le Pen père had a lot of worrying antisemitic and anti-American baggage. Under Le Pen fille and Bardella, it seems to have jetisoned most of that baggage, and resembles other Euroskeptic parties across the EU.
Following Joe Biden’s dismal, mentally impaired performance in last week’s debate, there’s a huge roar of panicked Democrats suggesting (or demanding) his replacement as the Democratic presidential nominee. For now, Biden and his family/enablers seem to be digging in their heels.
Editorial boards and editors from the New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New Yorker have joined well-known cable commentators and columnists in pressing the president to step aside and pave a path to the top of the ticket for another candidate.
The Washington Post’s editorial board stopped short of pushing the president to drop out of the race, instead pressing him to cancel weekend plans “in favor of some soul-searching.”
What they’re saying: The Times’ board — in an op-ed entitled “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race” — said Biden appeared as “the shadow of a great public servant” at Thursday’s debate, contending there are “Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency.”
Pieces from the AJC’s board and a New Yorker editor followed, similarly arguing that the best candidate to defeat an unrestrained former President Trump is not the current president.
The New Yorker named Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore as a slate of potential Biden backups who “could energize Democrats and independents, inspire more younger voters and beat Trump.”
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s question of “whether this man we’ve known and loved for a very long time is up to the task of running for president of the United States” presents a particularly damaging dagger to the commander-in-chief, a loyal viewer of “Morning Joe” who often seeks the opinions of the Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, on key issues.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman echoed Scarborough’s tone in a Friday op-ed, writing that watching the man he considers a friend struggle on the debate stage made him weep.
Maybe someone who “weeps” at a politician’s decline is too chummy to be a political commentator.
Also this:
Kinda funny to watch the "Trump is a threat to Democracy" crowd openly strategize how to thwart the will of every Democrat who voted in the primaries by engineering a coup at the convention and placing a candidate on the ticket without a single person casting a vote.
By the end of the debate, I was hearing a level of anxiety and alarm from those Democrats and several other party leaders and operatives that I’ve never seen in 20 years of covering presidential politics. The discussion turned squarely to the need for the Democratic Party to replace Biden as the 2024 nominee, with four months to go to the election, and how to make that happen.
We are monitoring the calls from across the country for President Biden to step aside, either now or before the election, and have concluded that the process for substitution and withdrawal is very complicated. We will remain vigilant that appropriate election integrity procedures are followed,” said Mike Howell, Executive Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.
The Heritage Oversight Project has identified three swing states — Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — where they believe removing Biden from the Democratic ticket would prevent anyone else from replacing him.
Wisconsin does not allow withdrawal from the ballot for any reason besides death, while in Nevada, no changes can be made to the ballot after 5 p.m. on the fourth Friday in June of an election year unless ‘a nominee dies or is adjudicated insane or mentally incompetent.’ In Georgia, if Biden were to withdraw less than 60 days before the election, his name would remain on the ballot but no votes would be counted.
Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin are all states Biden “won” in 2020 (some thanks to 3 AM ballot dumps). A theoretical Biden replacement could, just barely, lose all of them and still win by the skin of his teeth with 271 electoral votes if they held every other state Biden was awarded in 2020. Georgia and Nevada both have Republican governors, and Republicans control both the senate and house in Wisconsin, so last minute Democrat pushes to change the rules before November are off the table. Recent polls show Trump winning all three, as well as the other four swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona.
Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week made it impossible to deny his senility, yet the Western elite is gaslighting they were supposedly oblivious to this until now. Time Magazine published a piece titled “Inside Biden’s Debate Disaster and the Scramble to Quell Democratic Panic”, which was complemented by CNN’s about how “Foreign diplomats react with horror to Biden’s dismal debate performance”.
Both make it seem like Biden’s senility is a surprise for everyone who knew him.
The reality is that they knew about this all along but covered it up by lying that any claims to this effect were “Russian propaganda” and/or a “conspiracy theory”, all because they actually approved of the Democrats installing a literal placeholder in the White House who the liberal-globalist elite could control. It was a refreshing change of pace from Trump, who was much too independent for their liking despite his occasional capitulations to their demands, and it also reassured America’s allies who disliked him too.
They both went along with the lie that Biden is in tip-top mental condition for reasons of political convenience, but now it’s impossible to keep up the charade any longer, hence why they’re all feigning surprise and shock. The elite shouldn’t be allowed to get away with their latest gaslighting and should be exposed for one of the greatest cover-ups in American history. The country is being ruled by a shadowy network of transnational and domestic elites that are united by their radical liberal-globalist ideology.
Biden was chosen as the Democrats’ candidate in 2020 precisely because he was already senile and therefore completely controllable. That party, which functions as the public face of the abovementioned elite network, wanted someone who’d do whatever they demanded on the home and foreign policy fronts. In particular, they sought to turn America into a liberal-globalist hellhole while ramping up NATO’s containment of Russia in Ukraine, but the second policy backfired after the special operation began.
Nevertheless, they’ll never have another chance to install someone like Biden since 2020 was an exceptional election year due to it being a referendum on Trump – who a significant share of the public was preconditioned to falsely believe is the new Hitler – and mail-in voting due to COVID-19. These conditions can never be replicated in the same way again no matter how hard the elite try, which is why they decided to keep Biden as their candidate instead of replace him early on.
In 2020, Biden’s mind was clearly already on the downward slope to senility, but he obviously had much longer periods of lucidity and energy than he shows now. In 2020 it was late afternoon, but in 2024, full night has fallen.
At a Camp David gathering on Sunday, President Biden’s extended family urged him to ignore the growing number of voices asking him to quit the race — and many of his loved ones blamed his disastrous debate on his advisors. According to Politico, the two who most forcefully encouraged the 81-year-old Biden to continue were his wife Jill and his son Hunter — the two people whose opinion he reportedly values most.
And really, who makes better decisions than Hunter Biden?
The reports will strengthen a growing sense that Jill Biden is putting her own interests above that of her humiliated and failing husband. As one Democratic advisor told the New York Post over the weekend, “Jill Biden likes being First Lady…she doesn’t want to give that up.”
Meanwhile, Hunter, who doesn’t exactly have strong reputation for sound judgment, is said to long for Americans to see a version of his father that — as paraphrased by the Times — is “scrappy and in command of the facts.” Much as he once was in denial about his drug problem, Hunter now seems incapable of admitting that that version of his father is gone forever:
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 30, 2024
Biden family members are said to have blamed the debate debacle on three advisors: Anita Dunn, her husband Bob Bauer — who played the role of Trump in practice sessions — and Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain, who was in charge of the debate training. Aides to Biden denied these reports from multiple outlets.
Yes, blame the help rather than yourselves for dragging Sundown Joe out on the trail once more so you can keep those sweet power and perks flowing.
With Biden having spent a full week at Camp David gearing up for the debate, his family members and others are claiming the team worked the 81-year-old too hard, and tried to pack him full of too many statistics. They even fault advisors for a debate-night makeup job that transformed his summer-tanned face to one that was pale and unhealthy-looking.
Like Joe Biden’s mental decline, Democrats have sworn up and down that election fraud doesn’t exist, no matter how many documented cases came to light. But a funny things happened on that boating excursion up the River Denial: The Chairman of the Texas Democratic Party just swore in a lawsuit that voting fraud is taking place in South Texas.
The chairman of the Texas Democrat Party, Gilberto Hinojosa, says election fraud is taking place in South Texas.
This claim is based on a lawsuit filed in Hidalgo County contesting the election for Justice of the Peace Precinct 3, Place 1. The certified vote showed Sonia Trevino winning the Democrat primary runoff last month with 4,233 votes, while Ramon Segovia finished second with 4,202 votes.
Segovia is currently challenging the election results, with Hinojosa representing him as his lawyer. The lawsuit makes numerous allegations of voter fraud, including:
– Numerous votes were allegedly cast illegally by individuals registered at an address that was not their residence or was not a residence at all.
– Many voters who cast ballots during early voting and on election day were allegedly assisted in reading or completing the ballot, despite not being eligible for such assistance under the Texas Elections Code.
– Numerous mail-in ballots that were counted should not have been counted due to voters being ineligible to vote by mail, incorrect or mismatching signatures, and mail-in ballots prepared “without direction from the voter.”
The contest argues that “because the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the difference in the total votes cast for the Contestant and those cast for the Contestee, the Court cannot ascertain the true outcome of the election and must declare the election void and order a new election.”
They claim Sonia Trevino “conspired to monitor, influence, and pressure voters to vote for her by unlawfully exploiting the voter assistance laws in the State of Texas.”
So the position of the Texas Democratic Party has gone from “There’s no election fraud anywhere ever” to “There’s no election fraud except for this one race where our party chairman says that a bunch of the election fraud tricks that Republicans have accused us of just happened to happen in this one particular race.”
It sounds like Republicans should take Hinojosa’s filing to Attorney General Ken Paxton and demand the Texas Rangers investigate voting fraud all across South Texas to ensure the fraud Hinojosa alleges doesn’t occur in Hildago County or anywhere else this November. Voting rules should be scrutinized and purged, politiqueras should be interrogated and asked just how they “assist” people in filling out ballots and upon who’s instructions, email and bank account records should be subpoenaed, and Texas Rangers stationed inside early and election day voting centers to verify that Voter ID laws are being followed and to lookout for (and thus deter) in person fraud.
The Chairman of the Texas Democratic Party just said that voting fraud is real, and we should take him at his word.
Just like that Galveston Voting Rights Act lawsuit, the end result of Democrats filing a lawsuit to save their preferred candidate in a single election may be to enure a lot fewer Democrats are elected going forward.
