Welcome to the beginning of the long Memorial Day weekend! Here in Texas, we’re going to celebrate the long weekend by building arks and gathering up two of every animal.
“If the Obama Administration loses [the King vs. Burwell ObamaCare case] in the Supreme Court, the political pain will fall almost exclusively on the President and his Party.”
A good many of those Ferguson protestors were paid to protest. And now many say their paymasters refuse to cough up the dough. It’s sleazebags all the way down.
It’s another one of those New York Times pieces that seem designed to make you hate both rich Manhattanites and the writer equally, about how terribly, terribly isolating it is to be a rich woman on the Upper East Side. (File under: “Three people in New York make a trend.”)
By way of partial counterpoint (and, in some ways, almost equally annoying), here’s dating advice for Uptown divorcees from a few years ago. “Our biggest challenge, time and again, is matching up middle-aged divorcées in the ‘pre-realist’ stage, who have not realized that they have a choice of sex, money or companionship —but not necessarily all three in the same package.”
Security camera footage from the restaurant shown to the media but not released to the public (thanks a lot) shows members of the Cossacks, as well as members of “Scimitars, Boozefighters and Leathernecks.” Previous reports hadn’t listed the Boozefighters, who have a colorful history (they claim they were the inspiration for the movie The Wild One) but claim today “We are very patriotic & support the US military. We strive to do our best to continually improve ourselves, our Club, and the communities we live in.”
For those keeping track on the home game, motorcycle clubs/gangs listed as having been at the Waco shootout include: Bandidos, Coassacks, Scimitars, Vaqueros, Pirados, Leathernecks, Boozefighters and Veterans. Which is eight groups, though initial reports said five.
The names of the dead from the Waco biker shootout have been released, including two (Jesus Delgado Rodriguez and Manuel Issac Rodriguez) with Hispanic surnames.
Also make that at least two black bikers arrested after the Waco shootout. Bonus: One is an ex San Antonio cop.
I can understand the Waco police’s impulse not to give out the names of the biker gangs involved so as not to give them more publicity. However, in today’s media environment this is an essentially meaningless gesture
“March marked a phenomenal run of 99 consecutive months when Texas’ unemployment rate was at or below the national average.” Also: “Texas employs an impressive two and a half times more people since December 2007 than the rest of the nation combined.”
Will Franklin looks at local bond debt in Texas. It’s creeping up, partially due to big government advocates scheduling off-year bond elections when fewer people are voting. Even so, voters seem willing to reject big-ticket bond items.
And San Bernardino is planning to outsource their firefighting operations, not least of which because the fire department sucks up $7 million worth of overtime a year. And the fact their union stopped participating in bankruptcy talks didn’t help… (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
“In another corporate exodus from Torrance, California, to North Texas, Kubota Tractor Corp. and Kubota Credit Corp. announced Thursday that they will move their headquarters to Grapevine from the Los Angeles area.”
“The number of young adults admitted to California hospital emergency rooms with heroin poisoning increased sixfold over the past decade.” (Hat tip: Cal WatchDog.)
The Weinstein Company hit with $130 million lawsuit. File under: Hollywood Accounting.
Senate Bill 1223 seeks to turn Texas into a two-party (rather than one-party) notification state for recording communications. This is a bad idea, for much the same reason that Jason Villalba’s House Bill 2918 was a bad idea, though SB 1223 has much broader implications.
In addition to making it illegal to secretly record interactions with government officials (including police) without informing them, it would also make most secret investigative journalism illegal (including pretty much everything James O’Keefe has recorded to embarrass the Democratic Party), recording interactions with corporate customer service representatives, and recording illegal activity would itself become illegal.
Or take this recent video of a counselor threatening to file harassment charges against a student merely for waiting for his adviser:
That too would be illegal under SB 1223. It’s a bad idea that should be quashed.
Earlier Monday, Dallas TV station WFAA reported that the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Joint Information Center issued a bulletin May 1 that cautioned authorities about increasing violence between the Bandidos and the Cossacks. McNamara has said all nine people who were killed in the melee Sunday were part of those two groups.
The bulletin said the tension could stem from Cossacks refusing to pay Bandidos dues for operating in Texas and for wearing a patch on their vest that claimed Texas as their turf without the Bandidos’ approval.
“Traditionally, the Bandidos have been the dominant motorcycle club in Texas, and no other club is allowed to wear the Texas bar without their consent,” the bulletin said, according to WFAA.
The bulletin said the FBI had received information that Bandidos had discussed “going to war with Cossacks.” It also outlined several recent incidents between the two groups, including one instance in March when about 10 Cossacks forced a Bandido to pull over along Interstate 35 near Waco and attacked him with “chains, batons and metal pipes before stealing his motorcycle,” WFAA reported.
That same day, a group of Bandidos confronted a Cossack member fueling up at a truck stop in Palo Pinto County, west of Fort Worth, the bulletin said. When the Cossack member refused to remove the Texas patch from his vest, the Bandidos hit him in the head with a hammer and stole it.
Anyone trying to make a shootout between two (or more) biker gangs about “race” or “white-on-white violence” is talking out their ass. Remember that this morning’s follow-up showed 11 Hispanic and one black suspect among those arrested. So the liberal race-hustler /victimhood identity politics/Social Justice Warrior crowd is wrong not just conceptually (as they are 100% of the time), but on basic incident facts as well.
The tensions reached a boil recently when some Cossacks members began wearing a patch with the word “Texas” emblazoned at the bottom of their biker jackets and vests.
Those “bottom rocker” patches, as they are called in biker parlance, were a direct affront to the Bandidos, a larger gang with a long history of criminal activity in several states, Mr. Cook said. The Bandidos had claimed the sole right to display the patch as a sign of their turf, he said.
“The fact that the Cossacks would put on a bottom rocker with the state of Texas is basically saying, ‘We don’t respect you, and we won’t answer to you,’ ” Mr. Cook said. “It was a powder keg.”
So if Mr. Cook is correct, nine people just got killed over this:
“Steve Cook, a police detective in Independence, Mo., who heads the Midwest Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association—a nongovernmental group of law enforcement experts that tracks biker gang activity and shares intelligence among members.” And ironically, he was already scheduled to hold a seminar on outlaw biker gangs in Waco in June…
Although initial pictures of detained bikers them to be overwhelmingly white, eleven of the mugshots show people with Hispanic surnames, and one of the suspects appears to be black. America: So diverse even scumbag outlaw motorcycle gangs are integrated!
This report says that members of the Vaqueros were involved in the fight. Assuming that this website is for the same gang, they claim to be “family men engaged in legitimate business.” Fat Tony nods approvingly.
Here’s a piece on a Bandidos funeral from 2007. “Bandidos parked their bikes and began hugging and kissing one another on the mouth—the traditional Bandido greeting.” Uh huh…
The U.S. Department of Justice identifies the Bandidos as one of the two largest “outlaw motorcycle gangs” in the U.S., with about 900 members in 93 chapters.
According to the Department of Justice website, the Bandidos are “involved in transporting and distributing cocaine and marijuana and are involved in the production, transportation and distribution of methamphetamine.” The group is most active in the Pacific, Southeast, Southwest and West Central U.S.
The Bandidos gang also has members in 13 other countries, according to the Department of Justice.
Some of the biker gangs involved are evidently threatening the Waco police following the shootout. I don’t see that ending well for the gangs involved…
Evidently that particular Twin Peaks was a known recruitment spot for biker gangs. Waco police had known about the meeting between the Cossacks and Bandidos, asked for help from restaurant management, and been refused.
Twin Peaks corporate “is ‘seriously considering revoking’ the Waco location’s franchise agreement.”
“A McLennan County official said the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has revoked Twin Peaks’ alcohol license for seven days while the investigation continues.”
“Police on Sunday afternoon received reports that possibly hundreds of members of the biker gangs from around the state were headed to Waco.”
“Nine people are dead in what was described by witnesses as a “war zone” battle between rival biker gangs outside a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas. All of those killed were members of the biker gangs.”
Twin Peaks is a lot like Hooters, but without so much refinement and class.
It appears that the gangs involved were the Cossacks and the Scimitars, neither of which I’m familiar with. Though if the images are any indication, both are distinctly pale of hue.
Considering the fact that there were a grand total of six murders in all of Waco in 2012, it’s a pretty big story.
Update 2: Now seeing reports that at least five biker gangs were involved in the Waco shootout.
Also the gangs appeared to be there as part of a “peace meeting”:
Swanton said at least five rival gangs gathered at Twin Peaks for a meeting that he said focused on turf and recruitment, two areas where the groups have often clashed. Preliminary findings indicate a dispute broke out in a bathroom and then spilled into the restaurant where it escalated to include knives and firearms, he said. There were 150 to 200 gang members inside the restaurant at the time.
I think we can mark this meeting as way more exciting, and less successful, than the average work meeting…
Update 4: This Daily Mail piece offers up more pictures, and deduces the names of additional gangs from their leathers: “The Pirados, the Veterans (one sitting), and the Leathernecks.” All three show up on this list of Waco motorcycle clubs. Note that a whole lot of those (probably the majority) appear to be law-abiding organizations.
Muslim Brotherhood leader and deposed President of Egypt Mohammed Morsi has been sentenced to death, along with more than 100 other people.
Most of the time, sentencing a popularly elected President ousted from power by the military would be a bad thing. This is not one of those times. Morsi tried to undermine Egypt’s democratic constitutional strictures (however weak and imperfect they were) in the name of turning the country into a radical Islamist state, following the classic African strongman blueprint of “One Man, One Vote, Once.” He lost an existential power struggle with the military and, in the long-standing traditions of the Arab world, he’ll be paying for losing with his life.
Both Egypt, and the world, will be better for his death, and the ruthless suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood.
