Ex-HPD Raid Officer Goines Charged With Murder

August 23rd, 2019

The Houston Police narcotics officer at the center of the deadly botched raid has been charged with murder:

A former Houston Police Department narcotics officer has been charged with first-degree murder, nearly seven months after a botched drug raid that left a couple dead and unleashed a sprawling police scandal.

Ex-case agent Gerald Goines on Friday was hit with two counts of felony murder and is still under investigation over claims he stole guns, drugs and money, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced at a news conference downtown. His partner, Steven Bryant, was also charged with one count of tampering.

The two former officers both turned themselves in Friday in court, where a judge set Goines’ bond at $300,000 and Bryant’s at $50,000. Aside from the arrests, prosecutors said a review of more than 14,000 cases and a broader investigation into the rest of the squad is still underway.

“We have not seen a case like this in Houston,” Ogg said. “I have not seen a case like this in my 30-plus years of practicing law.”

Snip.

On Jan. 28, Houston narcotics officers burst into the house at 7815 Harding Street looking for heroin.

The raid went awry almost immediately, with gunfire erupting moments after an undercover narcotics team broke down the door to the Pecan Park home. Dennis Tuttle and his wife, Rhogena Nicholas, were killed and five officers were injured, including Goines.

Police said they were looking for heroin dealers, but the raid only turned up small, user-level amounts of cocaine and marijuana. In the days that followed, an internal investigation sparked questions about the officers’ justification for the search warrant. Though a sworn affidavit – signed by case Goines – recounted a controlled buy made by a confidential informant, police quickly realized they could not verify that claim or find the alleged informant.

When questioned about it, Goines eventually admitted there wasn’t one, Ogg told reporters Friday. Instead, he allegedly said he made the buy himself before conceding that he couldn’t confirm Tuttle was the same man he’d bought the drugs from.

If the charges against Goines are true, he’s going to rank pretty highly on the “infamous rouge cops” list.

(Previously.)

(Hat tip: Dwight.)

LinkSwarm for August 23, 2019

August 23rd, 2019

Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Why evangelicals support Trump:

    Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”

    That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.

    Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.

    Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.

    Snip.

    Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.

    Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.

    Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.

    First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.

    He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.

    Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.

    Well, it’s about time!

    It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.

    Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.

    Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.

    No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Man goes to car dealership, finds it booming:

    “It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.

    He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”

    If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
    The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.

    The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.

  • The Trump Administration ends catch-and-release.
  • The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:

    Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.

    We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.

    Snip.

    In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.

    They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.

    But it won’t.

    It’s all a lie and a scam.

    And we know it.

  • How Boris Yeltsin defeated the 1991 Communist coup. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady.)
  • “The Department of Justice says one of its own “repeatedly” helped the Bloods street gang protect its interests by identifying and exposing informants and cooperating witnesses.”

    Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.

    If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.

  • Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
  • Israel reportedly hit a Hezbollah arms depot in Iraq. According to Wikipedia, Israel has 16 F-35s total.
  • Hong Kong’s leaderless protests:

    Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.

    Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.

  • WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
  • Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Still true: “Red-light cameras undermine rule of law.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered.”
  • “Trump Executive Order Cancels Student Loan Debt for Disabled Veterans.” Bet none of them have degrees in feminist critical theory, either…
  • Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
  • “Robert Mueller crushed their dreams, so Democrats pivot to race.”

    They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.

    And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.

    Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.

    With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.

  • “Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
  • Reporter discovers, much to her surprise, that, yes, you do have to pass a background check before buying a gun. She fails.
  • The army wants microwave weapons against drones.
  • “Man Accused Of Shooting 6 Philadelphia Police Officers Was Federal Informant.” (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
  • Gregory Benford says that the Epstein smear against Marvin Minsky is baseless. (Hat tip: Instapundit, which is a backup source if you can’t get to Greg’s Facebook page.)
  • Borepatch says that red flag laws are malicious:

    False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.

    But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.

    This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.

    To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.

    And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.

    Malice.

  • Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
  • President Trump may have failed to buy Greenland, but we can all learn from the failures of Greenland’s public housing.
  • Lt. Governor Dan Patrick frowns on Bonnen’s shenanigans. (Hat tip: Cahnman.)
  • Republican John Lee wins seat on LA City Council, beating Green New Deal supporter.
  • What it’s like to be a roughneck in west Texas.
  • Miss Nevada banned from competing for Miss America over supporting President Trump.
  • First picture of light as both a wave and a particle.
  • “When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”

    I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.

    As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.

  • China Has A Great MMA Fighter. Problem: The Communist Government Hates Him.

    August 22nd, 2019

    Chinese MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong (known as “Mad Dog”) is winning martial matches across his country. Result? The Communist Chinese government hates him because he’s beating traditional Chinese martial arts masters:

    MMA was so named in 1993. It is a veritable postmodern pastiche of combat styles—including Brazilian jiu jitsu, Israeli krav maga, Thai kickboxing, and more. This no-holds-barred whatever works form of fighting is immensely popular worldwide. In China, however, where traditional martial arts like tai chi and kung fu are practiced by young and old alike, champions of MMA may beat old-school masters in matches, but they can’t win a cultural battle that has been raging for years.

    The outspoken Chinese MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong—also known as “Mad Dog”—was recently ordered by a Chinese court to pay 400,000 yuan (nearly $58,000) in fines and publicly apologize on social media—seven days consecutively—for insulting tai chi grandmaster Chen Xiaowang. His social credit score has been lowered, and the South China Morning Post reports that Xu also faces travel restrictions for accusing Chen of being a fake master. As a result, Xu can’t ride in second class or above on planes or sleeper trains, and cannot ride high-speed trains at all (and if he had kids they’d face prohibitions, too).

    Despite the legal smackdown and accompanying constraints, however, Xu is fighting for his fight style, and winning. It took him 36 hours to travel from Beijing to his latest bout in Karamay on May 21—thanks to the travel restrictions—yet he still managed to destroy traditional wing chun master Lu Gang.

    Yeah, that fight is a lopsided slaughter. Fast-forward to 5:45 in to see the actual start of the fight:

    The Tai Chi Master fight is even briefer:

    And here’s Joe Rogan commenting on that fight:

    There’s an old Chinese proverb that says that “the nail which stands up must be hammered down.” It doesn’t matter if your martial art is demonstrably superior if the Party has already decided otherwise. Do you have any doubt that the Social Justice Warrior “cancel culture” hellbent on deplatforming and demonetizing conservatives would hesitate for a second if they could also keep you from buying plane tickets for exhibiting wrongthink by owning guns or thinking there are only two biologically determined sexes?

    Wilco Less-Than-LivePD

    August 21st, 2019

    Since I don’t have cable, I was unaware that reality TV show LivePD had a contract with Williamson County to be one of the departments featured. (I’ve heard LivePD described as “NFL Red Zone TV for Cops.”) Now comes word that the Williamson County Commissioner’s Court just voted unanimously to terminate the LivePD contract, saying “it did not accurately portray life in the county.”

    I imagine that having a complaint filed because Patrol Division Cmdr. Steve Deaton asked underlings to have sex with one of the shows producers might have had something to do with it. (I suppose that this might have just been an attempt at cop humor that fell flat.)

    On the one hand, yeah, he shouldn’t have done that. On the other hand, slamming Deaton for personal Facebook posts that mock “The Elf on The Shelf” is a lot closer to PC run amuck, like saying this:

    is “an Elf dismembering a black football player at the knees with a chainsaw.” As opposed to an action figure attacking a plastic football player.

    You know what law enforcement conduct really infuriates me? Murdering innocent people based on false information from fake informants. Non-PC Facebook posts involving plastic figurines don’t make the list.

    And the fact that the original complaint came from those dishonest radicals at the Southern Poverty Law Center makes me even more inclined to cut Deaton some slack, and believe that Williamson County Sheriff Robert Chody made the right decision in not taking further action.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

    Texas Towns Hit By Ransomware Attack

    August 20th, 2019

    This isn’t good:

    Early on August 16, a total of 23 local government organizations in Texas were hit by a coordinated ransomware attack. The type of ransomware has not been revealed, and Texas officials asserted that no state networks were compromised in the attack.

    A spokesman for the Texas Department of Information Resources (TDIR) told Ars that authorities are not ready to reveal the names of the entities affected, nor other details of the attack. State and federal agencies are in the midst of a response, and TDIR did not have information on whether any of the affected governmental organizations had chosen to pay the ransom.

    But the TDIR did reveal that the ransomware came from a single source. “At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor,” a spokesperson said. “Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.”

    Texas Department of Information Resources has more information:

  • On the morning of August 16, 2019, more than 20 entities in Texas reported a ransomware attack. The majority of these entities were smaller local governments.
  • Later that morning, the State Operations Center (SOC) was activated with a day and night shift.
  • At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor.
  • Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.
  • It appears all entities that were actually or potentially impacted have been identified and notified.
  • Twenty-three entities have been confirmed as impacted.
  • Responders are actively working with these entities to bring their systems back online.
  • The State of Texas systems and networks have not been impacted.
  • The following agencies are supporting this incident:
    • Texas Department of Information Resources
    • Texas Division of Emergency Management
    • Texas Military Department
    • The Texas A&M University System’s Security Operations Center/Critical Incident Response Team
    • Texas Department of Public Safety
    • Computer Information Technology and Electronic Crime (CITEC) Unit
      Cybersecurity

    • Intelligence and Counter Terrorism
    • Texas Public Utility Commission
    • Department of Homeland Security
    • Federal Bureau of Investigation – Cyber
    • Federal Emergency Management Agency
    • Other Federal cybersecurity partners
  • And in convenient retweetable form:

    Consider this yet another reminder to use strong passwords you can remember, to backup all your files (especially all your important files) regularly, update your virus definitions and security patches regularly (between starting and publishing this piece, I updated both Firefox and macOS), and to never open an email attachment or click on a link unless you’re absolutely sure you know who it’s from.

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for August 19, 2019

    August 19th, 2019

    Hickenlooper is Out, Sanders slams the press, Gabbard comes out for legal pot and serves joint duty, and Biden just keeps chug-chug-chuging along. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Polls

  • Fox News: Biden 31, Warren 20, Sanders 10, Harris 8, Booker 3, Buttigieg 3, Yang 3, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Williamson 1.
  • Gravis Marketing (New Hampshire): Sanders 21, Biden 15, Warren 12, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7, Gabbard 5, Yang 4, Steyer 4, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2. First for Sanders to top Biden, first recent poll with Buttigieg over Harris, and first poll with Gabbard or Steyer that high.
  • Post and Courier (South Carolina): Biden 36, Warren 17, Sanders 16, Harris 12, Buttigieg 5, Booker 4, Gabbard 2.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Politico has an analysis of candidate fundraising cycles, based on ActBlue data. It’s interesting data, but it’s not the whole story, as candidates have non-ActBlue avenues for fundraising.
  • Are Democrats jumping off the cliff? “I’ve been doing political consulting for over 30 years, and I can tell you that if the 2020 campaign is viewed as Freedom vs. Socialism, we Democrats are in deep trouble. Furthermore, giveaways vs personal responsibility is not a winning argument either.” A lot of the writer’s proposals are less popular than he thinks they are, but they’re clearly less insane than those most of the clown car has been putting forth. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Castro, Gabbard, Gillibrand and Steyer scramble to try and make the debates.
  • It’s another “drop out of the race and run for the senate” piece. “Senate bids by Hickenlooper, O’Rourke or Bullock are no guarantee that Democrats would win either those specific states or the broader majority come November 2020. But it would sure improve their chances.” As you can see below, Hickenlooper took the advice.
  • Guy polls his family BBQ to see who black voters prefer.
  • Here’s sort of a tedious thumbsucker exploring the shocking idea that some Democratic voters actually consider electability.
  • Heh:

  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Threatening To Get In. Lots of Avenatti news, but its all about his impending trials. (Avenatti appears to be a slimy, dishonest creep, but it wouldn’t bother me at all to see him take the NAACP and Nike down with him.) Now it’s been two weeks since his “I might get in” outburst. Unless I see something this week I’ll drop him back down to the Out of the Running list.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Get’s a WBUR profile. “I don’t think banning private insurance and putting a $23 trillion tax on the American people is going to be something that people are going to want to sustain as the price for getting universal health care coverage, which we desperately need.”
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden’s support doubles between the youngest and oldest black voters. “Grassley, invoking ‘Uranium One,’ probes Biden-linked sale of sensitive tech company to China.” That’s going to rustles some jimmies. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) Speaking of rustled jimmies: “Joe Biden heaps praise on GOP during Massachusetts fundraiser.” “Voters Care About Biden’s Age — Not About His Gaffes.” Sort of a package deal, isn’t it?
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Cory Booker’s plan to fight intergenerational poverty, a cornerstone of his presidential bid, includes a novel proposal: a trust fund for every American child seeded by the federal government that could eventually provide up to nearly $50,000 for college tuition, buying a home or starting a business.” This just in: There’s no shortage of ways for Democrats to spend federal money we don’t have. Oh, and he wants a White House office to fight “white supremacy.” “Social Justice Warrior Powers Activate!”
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says Democrats are blowing it by going too far left. Asked if Warren and Sanders could beat Trump, he said “I don’t know that they can win places like Montana or Iowa, Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.” Bitches about Steyer buying his way into the debates.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He lags in Iowa:

    Pete Buttigieg burst into the 2020 presidential race by building national excitement on social media and cable news shows. Now, pork chop in hand, he’s playing catch-up in the all-important first caucus state.

    The 37-year-old mayor has yet to snag a single in-state endorsement in Iowa, and while his campaign has 57 staffers on the ground, it expanded to that number only recently. It’s a sharp contrast to other top Democratic candidates, who made investments in Iowa last winter to try to identify supporters and build a foundation for 2020, knowing the results here will shape the rest of the fight for the Democratic nomination.

    All Buttigieg’s money will buy a lot of campaign infrastructure there. He doesn’t like Trump’s China tariffs.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. His Obama moment that wasn’t:

    The night before Julián Castro delivered the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention for President Barack Obama’s re-election, he had eaten by himself at the T.G.I. Friday’s not far from the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C.

    No one recognized the 37-year-old mayor of San Antonio. As the other delegates party-hopped around Charlotte, Mr. Castro studied his notes over dinner and went to bed by 9 p.m. He wanted to be well-rested before giving the biggest speech of his political career — a speech that he and his family now remember as transforming everything.

    “The next morning, when we walked down the street, he was just mobbed,” said Mr. Castro’s twin brother, Joaquin, who is a United States congressman. “It was this instantaneous example of how things can change so quickly.”

    Mr. Castro’s speech, in a prime-time slot, burst him onto the national stage, just like the one that had catapulted Mr. Obama to superstardom in 2004. Mr. Castro symbolized a new moment in American politics: The grandson of a Mexican immigrant with a fourth-grade education, the young mayor talked about his family’s story, one so common for millions of Latinos and yet almost nonexistent at the highest level of national politics. “My family’s story isn’t special,” Mr. Castro said. “What’s special is the America that makes our story possible.”

    The applause was raucous. The reviews were overwhelmingly glowing (“A Political Star is Born” and “A Latino Obama?” the headlines read). People started to recognize Mr. Castro, even if they often confused him for Joaquin. On the way back to San Antonio, a fan stopped him in a men’s room at the Atlanta airport to shake his hand. (“He wanted to shake my hand in a men’s room!” Mr. Castro said. “I couldn’t believe it.”) Political pundits declared the Castro brothers the future of the party.

    “He was this kind of phenom and, you know, was this symbol of the growing diverse country,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, said of Julián.

    Party leaders waited for him to seize on his “Obama Moment.” And waited. And waited. And waited.

    The keynote, as it turned out, became a turning point that didn’t quite turn him.

    Yeah, it’s another Failure To Launch piece. He’s having a big birthday party September 16. Maybe all those people his twin brother doxxed will show up…

  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s lying about his record:

    Falsehood No. 1: “I’m proud to say in New York, we’ve divested $5 billion” in pension-fund assets “from the fossil-fuel industry,” Hizzoner bragged in Iowa.

    Uh, no. As Politico noted, the city’s pension funds have divested exactly zero from fossil-fuel companies.

    Yes, there are plans to study the idea, but no such study has even begun. And even if, at some point, the pension funds do divest, de Blasio won’t be able to take credit because he doesn’t control their boards.

    Gets bashed by the NYPD police union (again) for being off in New Hampshire while cops were getting shot at.

  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He refuses to label Trump a white supremacist, because, unlike the rest of the Democratic field, he hasn’t gone completely insane. He plans to stay in the race even if he misses the September debates.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. On the next two weeks, Gabbard is on active military duty, but before she went she came out for an end on federal marijuana prohibition. “The Hawaii Democrat announced in a news release earlier this week that she will be joining the joint military exercise.”

    Did Gabbard’s post-debate ads get taken down due to a Google exploit? Maybe Google will blame “Russians.”

  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She wants to put gun owners in prison. I’m just annoyed that we have to keep pretending she’s an actual candidate…
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Want to know which celebrities are supporting Harris? Me neither, but here it is: “Eva Longoria, Elizabeth Banks and Empire director, Lee Daniels…Jane Fonda, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barbra Streisand, Halle Berry, Reese Witherspoon, Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Charlize Theron and a long roster of studio executives.” Also Spike Lee, who held a fundraiser for her. She launched a Spanish-language organizational push.
  • Update: Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Dropped Out. Says he’s mulling a senate run instead. A successful moderate governor of a purple state would be enough to be considered a contender in previous election cycles, but he’s old, white and male, and only Biden is evidently able to overcome those disadvantages in the age of the Democratic Party’s hyperpartisan wokescold hysteria.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of old, white and male governors. “Three Strikes offender on the run after twice given clemency by Inslee“:

    The Washington state Three Strikes You’re Out law holds that felons who have been convicted of two serious violent offenses in the past — such as murder, rape, or child molestation — must go for jail for life with no chance of parole after a third such conviction.

    At that point, the only way for the offender to walk free would be with a pardon from the Clemency and Pardons Board, along with the governor.

    Tracy Hoggatt, 59, had a long list of offenses — first-degree robbery, second-degree assault, second-degree theft, and on and on.

    How is he on the loose today, you might wonder?

    In January of 2017, Governor Jay Inslee and the Clemency Board approved Hoggatt’s request. Inslee wrote that Hoggatt had “taken steps to turn his life around and developed a strong sense of empathy.” So after being put in prison for life without parole, he was granted clemency.

    Three months later, he went back to jail for violating the terms of his release. He had consumed alcohol, he was living at an unapproved address, and he was hanging out with known criminals. So they picked him up again and put him back in prison for life without the possibility of parole.

    Guess what happened then?

    This past Tuesday, Inslee let Hoggatt out on clemency for a second time, with the condition that he go to a halfway house in Kelso.

    However, he got off the bus in Seattle without going all the way to Kelso. He told the Department of Corrections that he missed the bus, but that his fiancée would drive him to Kelso.

    That was Tuesday. This is Friday, and nobody knows where he is. This Three Strikes offender is still on the loose.

    Man, that decision would surely haunt him in the general election he won’t be the nominee for…

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “In Iowa, Amy Klobuchar looks for room to grow.” Hey, when you’re polling at 3%, you have plenty of room to grow.

    Six months ahead of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, that centrist message of electability at the heart of Klobuchar’s long-shot presidential bid has yet to pay off in the polls, adding urgency to her pleas to a Democratic base that has lurched markedly to the left.

    With much ground to make up, and the days of summer growing shorter, Klobuchar’s path to the party’s nomination is dotted with Iowa road signs, each town a stop in a long game to outlast a field of bigger names with more fulsome campaign coffers.

    Over four days in early August, in a state crucial to her presidential hopes, Klobuchar courted Iowa Democrats in cafes and private homes, union halls and farms, at fundraising dinners and the Iowa State Fair. She asked them to look past her low poll numbers and support a fellow Midwesterner as their best hope against Trump in 2020.

    “I think it is pretty important, Iowa, to have a candidate from the Midwest,” Klobuchar told hundreds at the State Fair in Des Moines. “And someone that just doesn’t have a bunch of policies written down on a piece of paper but has a track record of looking out for rural America.”

    Her “I’m the most Midwest of the Midwest” campaign strategy hinges on Iowa Democrats being less insane than national Democrats. Probably, but are they less insane enough? Speaking of less insane: “On judicial nominations, Klobuchar’s bipartisan votes put her out of step with the Democratic field…Apart from Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Klobuchar has voted with Republicans to confirm many of President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, more than the other Senate Democrats running for president.”

  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Onion: “‘And Then There Were 23,’ Says Wayne Messam Crossing Out Hickenlooper Photo In Elaborate Grid Of Rivals…’Another foe vanquished, and another step taken toward Messam’s glorious ascent…My plan is continuing apace. First Swalwell, now you, and soon all these fools who stand before me will begin dropping like flies, and then the era of Messam will be nigh.'”
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Seth Moulton’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad summer vacation.”

    Seth Moulton has been a busy man.

    The North Shore congressman has been crisscrossing the early presidential-primary states like any of the viable candidates. Just last week, he hit Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, before heading to Weare, Exeter, and Hillsborough in New Hampshire. He ate corn dogs and ice cream.

    And America ignored him — as it has, resolutely, since he announced his candidacy in April.

    In poll after poll after poll, Moulton has registered at zero percent. Yes, zero. The same number your dog or cat would poll. Yet the Harvard-educated US Marine Corps veteran soldiers on. He has not approached any of the benchmarks for getting onto the overcrowded Democratic debate stage.

    Snip.

    Why not pack it in? Or, rather, when does he pack it in?

    “My experience working with candidates is that they’re the last ones to know,” said Democratic strategist and pollster Brad Bannon. “They’ve invested all their time and energy and money into running for president, and they have a hard time admitting that they’ve failed.”

    Another piece asks why Moulton is still running for President:

    Moulton is frustrated there hasn’t been more conversation about national security in the presidential primary. “The Democratic Party is failing to have a clear national security strategy. We’ve got to show America how we will make our country strong and safe. How we will stand up for patriotism, for our values. We’ve got to stop letting conservative Republicans own the flag,” he said.

    With his campaign barely registering in the polls, Moulton wasn’t on any of the debate stages to make this case. Barring an unprecedented upheaval in the race, Moulton won’t be the Democratic presidential nominee. So what is he doing?

  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. O’Rourke tries to relaunch his campaign. I’m sure this one will explode on the pad as well. Can he get back into the race?

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Swears “I will not in any scenario run for the United States Senate.” Yeah, if you’re doomed to lose, why not lose nationally?

  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Tim Ryan jokes he’s having ‘dance-off’ with Andrew Yang.” That’s really the only Ryan news this week…
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s proposing a massive criminal justice system overhaul. “The plan calls for banning cash bail, solitary confinement and civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to seize people’s homes and other property even if they are not convicted of a crime. The plan also looks to legalize marijuana and abolish the death penalty, a practice Sanders has long opposed.” Ending civil asset forfeiture and ending federal marijuana prohibition I can get behind. (And why is it that only this week are Democratic candidates coming out for legal marijuana legalization? Hickenlooper and Inslee should have made that their themes week one.) The rest don’t seem like federal jurisdiction. “Bernie Sanders South Carolina crowd size one-third of Elizabeth Warren’s.” (300 vs. 900) Sanders also slammed his treatment in the press:

    Bernie Sanders Monday gave a speech in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. He took shots at the press, mentioning coverage of his campaign against Amazon:

    I talk about (Amazon’s taxes) all of the time… And then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why.

    Employees of the Post were put out by Sanders’s comments. They insisted they hold no ill will against him for regularly bashing the man who writes their checks as one of earth’s most obnoxious plutocrats, and moreover that Sanders is wrong to make the media a “boogeyman” the way he’s turned “billionaires and corporations” into boogeymen. This “doesn’t add up,” noted the Post, going so far as to put the term “corporate media” in quotation marks, as if it were a mythical creature.

    Perhaps the negativity toward Sanders isn’t over Amazon. After all, Sanders gets similar treatment from the New York Times, CNN, the Atlantic and other outlets. Still, the Post’s Bernie fixation stands out. The paper humorously once wrote 16 negative pieces about Sanders in the space of 16 hours (e.g. “Clinton Is Running for President. Sanders Is Doing Something Else,” “Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals,”etc).

    The Post in 2017 asked readers how Democrats would “cope” with the Kremlin backing Bernie Sanders with “dirty tricks” in 2020. In April of this year it described the Sanders campaign as a Russian plot to help elect Donald Trump. They’ve run multiple stories about his “$575,000 lake house,” ripping his “socialist hankering” for real estate. “From each according to his ability,” the paper quipped, “to each according to his need for lakefront property…

    Apart from being described as a faux-Leninist Russian stooge who wants to elect Trump and mass-release dangerous criminals, what does Sanders have to complain about?

    It’s not just about Sanders.

    The public is not stupid. It sees that companies like CNN and NBC are billion-dollar properties, pushing shows anchored by big-city millionaires. A Vanderbilt like Anderson Cooper or a half-wit legacy pledge like Chris Cuomo shoveling coal for Comcast, Amazon, AT&T, or Rupert Murdoch is the standard setup.

    This is why the White House Correspondents’ dinner is increasingly seen as an unfunny obscenity. The national press at the upper levels really is a black-tie party for bourgeois stiffs who weren’t smart enough for med school, and make their living repeating each other’s ideas and using Trump to sell Cadillacs and BMWs. Michelle Wolf was on the money when she ripped us for only covering “like three topics”:

    Every hour it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel of four people who remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving… You guys are obsessed with Trump… He couldn’t sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric. [But] he has helped you sell your papers, books, and TV.

    That was too much truth for Correspondents’ Association, who decried Wolf’s lack of “commitment” to a “vigorous and free press” and “civility.” They scrapped the comedy idea, and this year brought in a self-described “boring” speaker, who made light of Trump’s complaints about the press by reading from Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People.”

    He’s holding a rally in Sacramento.

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Meet the intriguing presidential candidate you haven’t seen on the debate stage.”

    “I don’t want to be president if I have to win by outrage,” he explained. “I don’t want to just win. I want to govern, and not just by executive order. I understand the outrage people feel right now. But real leadership is taking two different needs and elevating them to one single want.”

    Arguably, Sestak knows a thing or two about this topic. He commanded an aircraft carrier battle group conducting combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq with 30 US and allied ships and more than 15,000 sailors and 100 aircraft. He’s also considered the qualities of a good leader while teaching ethical leadership courses at the historically black college Cheyney University and at Carnegie Mellon.

    It’s sort of like the Jim Geraghty piece on Sestak in last week’s Clown Car roundup.

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. DNC rules make it possible for Steyer to buy his way onto the debate stage. Live in Texas? Now’s your chance to be Tom Steyer’s State Director! He’s loaded, so ask for the sky…
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren: The choice of college-educated white people:

    The latest round of polling shows Elizabeth Warren gaining ground in the presidential race, but she still faces some critical obstacles to winning the Democratic nomination. She’s dominating among white progressive voters and, relatedly, is building support among white college-educated Democrats. But she continues to lag among working-class voters and has demonstrated minimal appeal to African-Americans.

    Unless she builds appeal outside her core constituencies, it will be challenging for her to pull ahead of front-running Joe Biden, who has built his own beachhead of support among moderates, working-class whites, and African-American voters.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Among Elizabeth Warren’s anti-gun-owner proposals: mandatory gun registration and a tax on guns and ammo. “A voter who could be key to Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 hopes? Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” Because he thinks Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Marianne Williamson says ‘powerful forces’ on the left out to end presidential campaign.” Mainly over her questioning various medical orthodoxies. “Marianne Williamson is a danger to feminism — and her ideas could get Americans killed.” Eh, it’s just calling out her New Age power of positive thinking as bullshit and pouting because she’s not Warren or Harris. She spoke to some 350 people in California’s mission district.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Promises a mass pardon for non-violent marijuana offenses. While I suspect this is a crowd-pleasing line, I don’t think there are that many federal felons, and I’m not sure there are that many at the state level where the offender has no other criminal convictions. Gabbard and Yang slightly buck the Democrat’s open borders line. (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.) Hey, I could ace this test as well.
  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: This week she made it official that she’s not running for President.
  • Actor Alec Baldwin. No presidential run news, but he did say Jeffrey Epstein was killed by the Russians.

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    California’s Present, Austin’s Future

    August 18th, 2019

    Wonder where Austin’s “Let the homeless do whatever they want, wherever they want, except in front of the city council building” plans lead to? Watch this.

    (Crap, just before I clicked publish on this, this Tweeter set their account to private. It was a video of a Sacramento business owner talking passionately about how she was leaving because she had gotten tired of removing the needles and washing the poo and pee off the sidewalk in front of her business every day, and how the patrons of her hair salon literally had to step over homeless people to get in.)

    Update: Was poking around and I found an article that transcribes her statement:

    A frustrated California woman took to Twitter on Friday to blast governor Gavin Newsom’s disastrous policies that have created a desperate homeless problem. The woman – who goes by @Jesus_porvida on Twitter – was clearly upset as she posted a video detailing why she may be forced to close the doors of her business.

    I have had a business in downtown Sacramento for 15 yrs, a successful business. I now have to leave my place of business. I have to close my shop.

    Later tweets show pictures of the woman’s shop after the most recent in a series of break-ins, a break-in that apparently was the last straw for the Sacramento are hair stylist.

    I have to clean up the poop and pee off my doorstep. I have to clean up the syringes. I have to politely ask ppl who I care for – I care about the homeless – to move their tents out of the way of the door to my business. I have to fight off people who push their way into my shop that are homeless and on drugs because you won’t arrest them for drug offenses. I have to apologize to my clients as to why they can’t get into my door because there’s somebody asleep there bc they’re not getting the help they need.

    I talk to police offers. They told me to contact you. They want to do something and they can’t because you changed the laws. So I wanna know what you’re gonna do for us, the ones that are unhappy. You wanna make us a sanctuary state. You wanna make it comfortable for everybody except for the ppl that work hard and have tried their hardest to get along in life and now we have to change that because of your laws.

    She shredded Newsom’s “liberal ideology” as the cause for the current chaos that forced her to close the doors of her business.

    While you sit in your million dollar home you don’t have to look at what we have to look at; there’s hard working people who have to deal with this on a daily basis. What are you going to do for us?

    I won’t stop , the gov of CA and his liberal ideology ruined my business.. I decided to close the doors today. I can’t do it anymore and I’m irate. Sincerely , a hard working self built self employed California business owner.

    And Austin is already spending $28,000 in taxpayer money for each homeless person:

    Austin City Council is spending a record-high $62.7 million this year to try and solve homelessness, equivalent to giving roughly $28,000 to each homeless person in the city. But the more startling fact is that Austin officials are leading the city down the same dangerous path San Francisco has already journeyed—a path Austinites should be wary not to travel.

    Before peering down the road toward Austin’s future, let’s look around for a moment at the crisis happening right now in Texas’ capital city. The homeless population is rapidly rising, up 5 percent a year for the last two years; the number of those unsheltered on the streets is the highest it has been in nearly a decade. And you may have even noticed people camping in the middle of public areas all across town, thanks to a recent decision by the city council that has spread contention throughout the community.

    We already know city council’s plan to solve this whole problem is to spend a lot of money, but instead of just writing a $28,000 check to each homeless person, they’re sending pallets of tax dollars through a cash-eating maze of city administration and bureaucracy, hoping that a fraction of it eventually comes out the other side to the people on the streets.

    Will that plan work? Enter San Francisco, the potential Austin-of-the-future.

    If you look just past the shiny Golden Gate Bridge, you’ll see one of the worst homelessness disasters in the United States. The Bay City has recently become infamous for homeless crime, used syringes, and human feces littering the entire downtown area (the city even has a designated “Poop Patrol”).

    San Francisco’s city government created a bold plan to solve everything, a plan Austin is now following: Spend lots of citizens’ money.

    From 2016 to 2020, their city government will have spent over $1.5 billion on homelessness. If you do the math of that four-year spending based on the current homeless population of 9,784, that’s over $153,000 on each person.

    Yet despite San Francisco’s mind-boggling payouts per person, the situation for those on the street—and the rest of the city—has only deteriorated.

    Indeed, the homeless population has grown by nearly 7 percent in just the last two years (and 14 percent since 2013), with the vast majority of those new homeless being hometown folks. Oh, and the dangerous turmoil on the streets downtown has only intensified.

    Here’s a piece on volunteers having to clean up the historically black Walnut Creek Cemetery because homeless people have started camping there. (Homeless people camping in cemeteries is a problem Seattle started to have after they stopped enforcing laws against homeless camping.)

    Some more tweets:

    It appears that the Austin City Council has finally started figuring out just how deeply they screwed up:

    Austin will re-examine its new rules governing homelessness, according to a memo released Friday.

    The memo sent to the City Council on behalf of Austin’s Homelessness Strategy Office says the city could abandon its idea to make space for emergency encampments in every City Council district.

    The office said after meeting with the Downtown Austin Alliance, the Greater Austin Crime Commission, service providers, public safety officials and the city’s newly formed Homeless Advisory Committee, it is prepared to limit where people can camp and sit or lie down in public – as well as limit how long a person can camp or rest.

    The City Council voted to scale back rules on that behavior in June, allowing people to rest or camp in public as long as they didn’t do so on city parkland, completely obstruct a sidewalk, or present a public health or safety risk to themselves or others. The decision was met with pushback from Austinites who argued the new rules allowed for more visible encampments throughout the city.

    Here’s an idea: How about they just restore the ban on public camping?

    Want to contact the Austin City Council? Dwight has you covered.

    Bonnen/Sullivan Controversy Takes Down Burrows

    August 17th, 2019

    I haven’t been following the Texas Speaker Dennis Bonnen/Empower Texans head Michael Quinn Sullivan meeting controversy due to lack of time (like I’ve said, the past weeks have been a bear), but this Texas Monthly piece provides an overview of the meeting, which took place June 12. “Bonnen appears to have offered to take an official action if Sullivan would use his political organization to go after ten legislators whom Bonnen found objectionable while avoiding attacks on Bonnen.” Depending on the applicability of various statutes, that’s very possibly illegal.

    Here’s Sullivan’s description of the meeting:

    I was surprised when I got to Bonnen’s office to also be greeted by the GOP Caucus chairman, State Rep. Dustin Burrows (R–Lubbock).

    The meeting started off pleasantly enough. And, indeed, there was a little tongue-lashing. The notoriously thin-skinned Burrows didn’t like a tweet from the session in which I wrote he was “moronic” for floating a proposal that would have gutted property tax reform. For his part, Bonnen said he wants to fight the Democrats—offering amusing (if slightly vulgar) comments about Reps. Michelle Beckley (D-Carrollton) and Jon Rosenthal (D-Houston).

    But the thrust of the meeting took me by surprise. Bonnen invited me there to make me an offer.

    A little context: Given my news background, Empower Texans has long operated as a news-media entity. Our focus on providing information that empowers citizens to exercise their rights as a self-governing people has taken the form of reporting on the actions of lawmakers—especially in exposing the difference between what they say and what they do.

    For the past two sessions, our Texas Scorecard Capitol bureau has applied for House media credentials. Despite falling clearly inside the boundaries of the House’s criteria, and despite being granted credentials by the Texas Senate, those applications have been repeatedly denied. The 2019 session was no exception. We filed a federal lawsuit on the matter, which is going up before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

    Sitting in his Capitol office on June 12, Speaker Bonnen was adamant he wanted to do something for me. I told him I didn’t need anything from him or Burrows. But he really wanted me to listen to what he “wanted to do for me.”

    Bonnen insisted: He would ensure Texas Scorecard reporters received House floor access in 2021 if we would lay off our criticism of the legislative session, not spend money from our affiliated PACs against certain Republicans, and—most shockingly—go after a list of other Republicans in the 2020 primary elections.

    Spending political money was the issue, Bonnen said. Not just refraining from spending it against his pals. He wanted us to spend it against Republicans he saw as not being helpful.

    What strikes me most about this, beyond the rank impropriety, is what a shoddy deal Bonnen is offering. Spend time and money attacking Bonnen’s preferred targets in exchange for…media credentials to the Texas House? That’s it? It’s not only underhanded and unethical, it’s insultingly tacky. “Hey, if you help me whack this guy, I promise there’s a six-pack of Bud Light in it for you!”

    Yesterday, meeting participant Burrows reigned as House Republican Chair. “Following Burrows’ resignation as Chairman, Fort Worth Republican State Rep. Stephanie Klick has confirmed with a North Texas news outlet she has assumed the role of Chairman of the caucus and expects the members to fill her, now vacant, role as vice chair according to House Republican Caucus rules.”

    Cahnman also has some pungent commentary, such as:

  • The hardest part to wrap your head around is that the substance of Bonnen’s ask isn’t necessarily crazy. While he’s doing it for the wrong reasons, Bonnen basically asks Sullivan to focus on rural members instead of suburban ones. There’s a certain logic to that strategy. Unfortunately, there’s no logic that suggests one make oneself a party to a felony in the process.
  • The most surprising part is the degree to which Bonnen’s talking out of both sides of his mouth on his alleged “no campaigning” edict. Bonnen spends nearly a quarter of the meeting telling Sullivan how he plans to vigorously enforce the edict against Democrats, but casually look the other way with Republicans. At this point, the Democrats have every right to tell Bonnen to pound sand.
  • Snip.

    Bonnen, and especially Dustin Burrows, are super thin-skinned about criticisms of the session. They spend a quarter of the discussion trying to spin the results to Sullivan. At one point, Burrows laughably accuses Sullivan of gaslighting the members.

    Snip.

  • Burrows claims the list is about members who voted against the ban on taxpayer funded lobbying, but Ken King and Gary van Deaver also voted against the ban and didn’t make the list.
  • The list: Steve Allison, Trent Ashby, Dirty Ernie (Bailes), Travis Clardy (“the ringleader of all opposition” according to Burrows), Drew Darby, Kyle Kacal, Stan Lambert, Tan Parker, John Raney, Phil Stephenson.
  • Cahnman also thinks that Burrows is a dead speaker walking.

    There was widespread belief that Bonnen would be easier to work with than former speaker Joe Straus (even by Sullivan), but this year’s legislative session seemed to have just as many conservative bills die in the process as they had under Straus.

    With Burrows down, it’s hard to see how Bonnen survives the scandal as Speaker.

    LinkSwarm for August 16, 2019

    August 16th, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! It hit 107°F in Austin this week, but it was probably only 104° when I rode my bike. Cleared up my sinuses!

  • David Brock’s ShareBlue Media certainly seems to be freaking out over the Epstein “suicide,” sends out talking points to Democratic loyalists to downplay the possibility of conspiracy. Hmmmmm…
  • Illinois is farked.
  • On the same theme: 40% of Illinois education spending goes to pensions. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Trust no one.
  • Democrats are convinced that a wave of Republican retirements is going to help them flip Texas’ congressional delegation. Don’t count on it. “If they nominate a candidate like Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, or somebody like, God forbid, Bernie Sanders, if they nominate somebody who is extremely left of center, they’re not going to get there.”
  • For Democrats, filing for bankruptcy doesn’t prevent you from running for the senate. Boy, Democrats sure love nominating people who can’t even handle their own finances, much less ours.
  • Two illegal aliens charged with repeatedly raping an 11-year old girl.
  • Disillusioned liberal sees Obama as a lying tool of corporate greed. “Our political order is oriented around legitimizing only those who can claim some form of victimization. It’s why the woke stuff/white supremacy is so powerful. It’s a fundamentally anti-enlightenment model of politics.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • More on last week’s Russian nuclear accident:

    United States intelligence officials have said they suspect the blast involved a prototype of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall. That is a cruise missile that Mr. Putin has boasted can reach any corner of the earth because it is partially powered by a small nuclear reactor, eliminating the usual distance limitations of conventionally fueled missiles.

    As envisioned by Mr. Putin, who played animated video of the missile at a state-of-the-union speech in 2018, the Skyfall is part of a new class of weapons designed to evade American missile defenses.

    Lots of Russian military superweapons turn out to be vaporware. This one turned out to be vaporizedware. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Inside the Polar Star, America’s antiquated rustbucket of an icebreaker.
  • Speaking of ice: President Trump contemplates buying Greenland. On the one hand, in the long run, land purchases have worked out very well for the United States. On the other, Liebensraum is bunk and we’ve got plenty of development left to do with Alaska.
  • New York Times editor demoted for daring to voice obvious political truths…and criticizing The Squad. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Important safety tip: Don’t use NULL for your vanity license plate.
  • Shorn of the music and nostalgia, Woodstock was “a field full of six-foot-deep mud laced with LSD.” Bonus: Pete Townshend kicking Abbie Hoffman’s ass. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Lessons from a “local food” scammer.

    My instructions were to claim that all the produce was local, although nothing was or could be local: It was early June in northwestern New Jersey’s Kittatinny Mountains, and the produce had been shipped from warmer parts of the world to the distributor who’d sold it to my boss. But “local” was the magic word hand-painted on our signs; it was what made our customers, most of them New Yorkers driving to country vacation cottages, slam on their brakes and pull over.

    For the first time in my life, I heard about the naturalness, tradition and superior flavor of New Jersey produce. “Taste-wise, nothing compares to Jersey Silver Queen,” the New Yorkers declared, clawing at ears of a fat-kerneled, North Carolina-grown supersweet hybrid, all sugar and no corn flavor, nothing like Silver Queen. They tossed the husks on the ground for me to rake up.

    “Give me Jersey peaches over Georgia peaches any day.” Those were Georgia peaches they were palming to their kids, whispering, “eat up,” before the fruit had been weighed and paid for.

    “I wait every year for the real Jersey tomatoes. You can’t get that country flavor in the city!” They couldn’t get it here, either: These were New Mexican beefsteaks, greased with mineral oil to an enticing sheen and petroleum fragrance. Didn’t they notice the absence of any roses-and-resin tomato-y perfume?

  • CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the lesser son of a greater father, gets called “Fredo” and hilarity ensues:

  • The Brooklyn bridge used to double as a wine storage facility.
  • Max Boot Hits Bottom, Tunnels Down to the Hollow Earth, Falls, Somehow Keeps Digging

    August 15th, 2019

    One inkling of just how important Max Boot was to the conservative movement prior to 2016 (when he famously declared he’d vote for Stalin over Trump) is the fact I never bothered to tag him in a BattleSwarm post prior to 2018, when his Trump Derangement Syndrome was already in full bloom.

    Well, maybe not full bloom, since he’s managed to find a deep end of the deep end. Consider this triptych of National Review pieces:

    John Hirschauer starts out:

    One of Max Boot’s most recent columns in the Washington Post is titled “Get a grip, white people. We’re not the victims.” The headline says in nine words what the text says in 800, doing predictably little to elevate our national discourse at a moment of intense racial polarization.

    Boot’s central contention is that whites in America are beset with a victimhood mentality, one that “can justify everything from a public temper tantrum to a shooting spree.” In the wake of the El Paso tragedy, Boot can make a plausible case that racial grievances (real and imagined) facilitate discord and violence, because, of course, they do. Instead, Boot denounces white-grievance politics (a politics well worth denouncing) while simultaneously granting other grievance groups a blank check to raid the expansive store of imputed guilt and collective punishment. As a matter of course, he favors any repatriation for injustices to which racial minorities and their ancestors may (or may not) have been subject — as long as it’s in an effort to “redress past wrongs,” as he puts it.

    His ultimate prescription to the “white people” he instructs to “get a grip” is something like “Stop whining.” And that’s fine; we could certainly stand less whining in the United States. In effect, however, Boot sets up a Faustian choice for “white” readers: Side with the white supremacists and their detestable program, or sell your political soul to Max Boot and become one of the self-loathing whites so paralyzed by intersectional deference that they can hardly advance an argument without first reciting that neutered prelude: “As a straight, white, cisgender man with privilege, I . . .”

    If Boot believes what he is saying — and I’m not sure he does — and assumes that “many” Trump supporters believe “that white supremacy is the natural order of things,” then he’d do well to provide them with a better set of options than white nationalism on the one hand and political impotence on the other.

    Boot was shocked, shocked to find National Review calling him on his blatant social justice warrioring, prompting Hirschauer to deliver a second rhetorical beatdown:

    Max Boot has devoted much of the past twelve hours to distorting a response I wrote to his column “Get a grip, white people. We’re not the victims.” Boot has insisted that mine is “a white supremacist piece,” and implied that I am a “white supremacist.”

    Boot makes my point for me: In the world of Max Boot’s creation, there is only Max Boot’s policy preferences on the one hand, and white nationalism on the other. It’s toxic, and predictable from someone who writes so casually about “fears” that plague “white people” as an indiscriminate bloc in the Washington Post.

    Snip.

    In the piece, I state several times that white nationalists and white supremacists are evil people with repugnant ideologies. I did not do so to create an elaborate ruse to deflect attention from some deeply held, clandestine racist agenda of mine. I did so because I believe that white supremacy, in all its forms, is a sin against the Creator and His creation. I meant, in other words, what I said.

    My point in the self-loathing comment: If Boot is really condemning all white people — and his piece often leaves out any qualifier and talks directly to the unmodified mass of “white people” — then he, as he admits, is part of this all-encompassing category he finds worthy of such rank condemnation (as are Bernie Sanders, Rob Reiner, Howard Dean, etc.).

    This collectivization and mass imputation of guilt would not withstand scrutiny if it were applied to any other group, nor should it.

    All throughout his initial Washington Post piece, Boot speaks in unqualified terms about “white people,” stating categorically that “they fear they are losing their privileged position to people of color,” and that they “can be pretty clueless.” Think, for a moment, of the utter outrage that would have met Mr. Boot had he stated that some other demographic category were in the grip of a group-wide “fear,” or were disproportionately “clueless.”

    Such “totalizing racial language,” as I wrote in my response, is wrong. It treats fraught issues of race with a sledgehammer and stokes division at a time of “intense racial polarization.”

    It only poisons public debate for Boot to pretend that any defection from his ex cathedra declaration of what constitutes a legitimate “attempt to redress past wrongs or foster equal treatment” is a form of white supremacy. No serious or respectable person has any objection to fostering “equal treatment” for all races and ethnicities, but there are basic political disagreements over what an “attempt to redress past wrongs” ought to look like.

    When this takedown failed to have the desired effect, Charles C. W. Cooke stepped in to whale on him like Boom Boom Mancini pummeling Bobby Chicon:

    Before yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot was political in nature. As I wrote in a recent book review, I found it regrettable that Boot’s opposition to the president had not prevented him from “succumbing reactively to Trump’s cult of personality, or from making Trump the origin of every graph onto which he plots himself.” As of yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot is that he is a narcissistic, dishonest, calculating, manipulative writer who is prone to engaging in precisely the sort of willfully dishonorable conduct that he claims to disdain in others.

    Various line-by-line takedowns of manifest Boot dishonesty snipped.

    Those who wonder why so few writers are willing to pen long, thoughtful, descriptive pieces that grapple seriously with the opposing arguments and incorporate honest appraisals of what voters actually want need look no further than this incident for their answer, which is: because bankrupt toadies such as Max Boot use their work as launching pads for calumny. In a sensible world, the editors of the Washington Post would have looked at what Boot has tried to do over the last couple of days, and tattooed “hack” on his forehead. But we are not operating in a sensible world.

    Boot’s approach over the last couple of days has not only been at odds with both honesty and honor, it has been at odds with the reputation he had developed as a serious and rigorous thinker. Such as it is, Boot’s newfound modus operandi works as follows: First, he scans entirely innocuous pieces for sentences that he can willfully misconstrue; second, he presents those misconstrued sentences as evidence of a deeper flaw with a person or outlet or institution; and, finally, he submits the conclusions he has drawn as confirmation of why he, Max Boot, convert to truth and light, is on the Right Side of History. Because Twitter is an echo chamber and the Post is one-tracked, he does this safe in the knowledge that those whom his mendacity incites to outrage will never read the primary sources he is corrupting — and that, if they do, they will never comprehend them.

    And thus the feedback loop is completed. In return for being so flattered, Boot’s readers provide him with wild, conspiracy-laden confirmations that the target he has chosen is indeed perfidious — confirmations that allow him to backfill his story on the fly, to flesh out any subsequent columns he feels compelled to write on the topic, and to insist that any pushback he receives is affirmation of his original critique. By this discreditable process did Boot’s nasty little lie about John Hirschauer’s original criticism become first an “attack”; then a “white supremacist” or “alt-right” attack; then a sign of the institutional decline of a magazine he once admired; then a sign of how awful that magazine has always been; and, finally, an indictment of the entire conservative movement in America that is apparently worthy of a prime-time appearance on CNN. Would that Boot had a sober friend who, early in his spiraling, could tell him, “Max, you messed up here.” Evidently, he does not.

    In and of itself, Boot’s techniques are both tiresome and reprehensible. But when coupled with the ersatz I-take-no-pleasure-in-this lamentations that have become his hallmark in the Trump era, the affectation becomes too much to bear. Boot seems to fancy himself as Mark Antony, here to bury a Caesar he once loved, when in reality he is more like Romeo Montague: a callow, selfish, monomaniacal, self-pitying featherweight, who is constitutionally unable to prevent the escalation of petty infractions. Reading Boot these days is akin to listening to a teenager talk incessantly about himself. “And then I didn’t like this. And then I discovered that. And then this person was mean to me. And then I was attacked.” Oh, do shut up, dear, before we all die from nausea. And learn to read before you come back.

    Boot is just the latest example of hysterical Democratic Party hacks giving up even the pretense of rational argument: “Support every word of the Democratic Party’s agenda or you’re a white supremacist!” It’s as though they looked at the 2016 elections results, then said to themselves: “You know why we lost the Midwest? We just didn’t call ordinary American voters there racists hard enough! Let’s double-down by calling them “white supremacists” at every turn! That will shame them into abandoning Trump!” “White supremacy” is the boogieman that replaced the Russian collusion fantasy, and Boot is a good little solider about parroting the latest lie, as long as it hurts Trump and Republicans.

    Calling him a narcissistic, dishonest, calculating, manipulative hack is probably far too kind…