They quotes they’re actually getting are from Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer.
It’s a shame he didn’t follow up with the people who said the quotes were “racist.” It would be interesting to get recations to a quote calling illegal aliens “webtbacks” and then reveal to them it came from Hispanic labor icon Cesar Chavez.
(Hat tip: Hot Air.)
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! At least those of you not among the millions dead from the shutdown, assuming you already survived the tax cut and the end of Net Neutrality…
In December, the United States reached a staggering level of oil production, pumping some 11.6 million barrels per day. For the first time since 1973, America is now the world’s largest oil producer
Since Trump took office, the United States has increased its oil production by nearly 3 million barrels per day, largely as the result of fewer regulations, more federal leasing, and the continuing brilliance of American frackers and horizontal drillers.
It appears that there is still far more oil beneath U.S. soil than has ever been taken out. American production could even soar higher in the months ahead.
In addition, the United States remains the largest producer of natural gas and the second-greatest producer of coal. The scary old energy-related phraseology of the last half-century—”energy crisis,” “peak oil,” “oil embargo”—no longer exists.
Near-total energy self-sufficiency means the United States is no longer strategically leveraged by the Middle East, forced to pay exorbitant political prices to guarantee access to imported oil, or threatened by gasoline prices of $4 to $5 a gallon.
The American economy grew by 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2018, and by 3.4 percent in the third quarter. American GDP is nearly $1.7 trillion larger than in January 2017, and nearly $8 trillion larger than the GDP of China. For all the talk of the Chinese juggernaut, three Chinese workers produce about 60 percent of the goods and services produced by one American worker.
In 2018, unemployment fell to a near-record peacetime low of 3.7 percent. That’s the lowest U.S. unemployment rate since 1969. Black unemployment hit an all-time low in 2018. For the first time in memory, employers are seeking out entry-level workers rather than vice versa.
The poverty rate is also near a historic low, and household income increased. There are about 8 million fewer Americans living below the poverty line than there were eight years ago. Since January 2017, more than 3 million Americans have gone off so-called food stamps.
Abroad, lots of bad things that were supposed to happen simply did not.
After withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States exceeded the annual percentage of carbon reductions of most countries that are part of the agreement.
North Korea and the United States did not go to war. Instead, North Korea has stopped its provocative nuclear testing and its launching of ballistic missiles over the territory of its neighbors.
Despite all the Trump bluster, NATO and NAFTA did not quite implode. Rather, allies and partners agreed to renegotiate past commitments and agreements on terms more favorable to the U.S.
The United States—and increasingly most of the world—is at last addressing the systematic commercial cheating, technological appropriation, overt espionage, intellectual-property theft, cyber intrusions, and mercantilism of the Chinese government.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
House Democrats are up and running, and their first bill is instructive. Couched as an anti-corruption and good-government measure, it is really an attempt to silence or obstruct political opponents.
A central part of H.R. 1 is “campaign-finance reform,” no surprise given the progressive fixation with money in politics, which oddly turns to mist when Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg are spending. The House bill requires some advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, even if the groups aren’t running ads that endorse candidates but merely inform voters about the issues.
The goal is to identify donors who don’t genuflect to progressive views, then bully or harass them to stop giving. Recall how the Mozilla CEO was driven out after he donated to California’s referendum opposing same-sex marriage.
(Hat tip: MQ Sullivan on Twitter.)
How long would it take for police to arrest me if they found 24 syringes, meth, cocaine, other ILLEGAL drugs and paraphernalia AND a dead body in my home?
How long b4 prominent politicians like @HillaryClinton to distance themselves?
Why wasn’t Ed Buck charged the 1st time? pic.twitter.com/rTGd48jH1C
— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) January 11, 2019
Jair Bolsonaro is “far right” and the media means that as a pejorative.
Turns out he favors the private sector and wants to get rid of government owned industry.
He favors expansive gun rights as a way to combat crime and let people protect themselves. This has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
He favors conservative social policy including a rollback of the LGBT agenda in Brazil. Again, this has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
Most damning in the eyes of many in western media, he favors abandoning restrictions on private property that could threaten Amazonian forest growth, i.e. he’s bad for climate change.
The media has focused a lot on Bolsonaro talking favorably about Brazil’s American backed military dictatorship that ruthlessly exterminated communists and other dissident groups from the 1960’s into the early 1980’s. They suggest Bolsonaro might bring it back.
So far, the only thing Bolsonaro seems to be doing is keeping his campaign promises to fight corruption, roll back progressive social policies his socialist predecessor supported, and expand gun rights. But the American commentariat can do nothing but see everything through the lens of Trump and if you hate Trump, you must hate Bolsonaro apparently.
HOW ELSE AM I SUPPOSED TO CUT STRAWBERRY SLICES FOR MY CEREAL BENNY??
But seriously, we are presented with a K-Bar knife at SEAL training graduation, engraved with the name of a fallen SEAL. Never Forget. https://t.co/ZEfI4M0dw3
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) January 11, 2019
Sure, Beto may have the social media upper hand now. But just wait until Joe Biden livestreams his nipple-piercing on Twitch.
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) January 10, 2019
That is to say, the spyware Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman installed on his own wife and girlfriends’ phones.
The story in Twitter form:
The texts are mind-boggling.
One moment, the couple is cooing over how cute their twin daughters are and talking about Emma's enchiladas, the next their talking about whether Chapo's soldiers were slaughtered in a gunfight.— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019
Having left everything behind in the panicked escape, Chapo then asks Emma to send him what he needs: sweats, underwear, some shirts & shoes, shampoo, after shave–and, yes, black mustache dye.
— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019
But there's more.
Chapo wasn't only spying on Emma's phone. He had two side chicks (who look exactly like her by the way) and he was spying on their phones too.
So guess what the FBI got their hands on?
That's where we're headed after this quick break, it seems.— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019
Oh forgot to mention:
Emma, the wife, was so knee deep in Chapo's business that she would often hand her phone to her father who was one of Chapo's lieutenants.
Chapo and the father used Emma's phones to plan major-league drug deals.
Un. Be. Lievable.— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019
Agustina is clearly shrewd. She knows Chapo's spying on her & complains about it to her friends. She tells one friend she "doesn't trust" the BlackBerries he's given her "because the bastard can locate them." She refers to him as an idiot.
"I'm way smarter than him," she writes.— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019
It bears repeating:
Chapo ran what seems to be a substantial amount of his international drug business through the women he was involved with.
We know this because he was spying on them and the FBI was able to leverage his paranoia into devastating evidence.— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019
How freaking stupid a drug lord do you have to be to doing drug deals through your mistresses?
But El Chapo violated a whole lot of “Crime Boss 101” rules:
Finally, to misquote Nietzsche: “Gaze not into the spyware, for the spyware also gazes into you.”
The 86th Texas legislative session starts today. There’s a new speaker and boatloads of bills have already been filed.
Here are some of the pressing issues that Empower Texans has highlighted as key priorities:
The state should use existing funding streams to permanently buy down local school property taxes until they’re abolished, along with Robin Hood. If enacted, the average Texan would eventually see a 40 percent cut in their total property tax bill.
The existing “Robin Hood” funding system — known formally as the Ch. 41 Wealth Redistribution Program — effectively allows lawmakers to overtax property-rich areas as a means of supplementing public education spending. The system is a relic of a Democrat-controlled legislature, but Republicans have since done little to fix it.
Not only is the system complex, but it has resulted in horrendous side effects.
Most notably, property taxpayers are being gouged. Since becoming law in 1993 under Democrat rule, a larger portion of the education-funding burden eventually shifted onto local property taxpayers.
Voters should automatically be given a voice on excessive property tax hikes.
State law does not currently require that all local governments obtain voter approval for tax hikes that exceed the state’s “rollback” limit. The “rollback” limit is essentially the percentage localities can increase property taxes on the existing tax base before voters have the option to challenge it.
While school districts are required to hold public elections on excessive tax hikes, cities, counties, and other localities are not. As a result, city and county officials habitually take advantage of taxpayers who have no effective remedy to stop them.
Under current law, taxpayers only have one option — a burdensome petition drive.
In both rural and urban areas, this onerous process requires that taxpayers collect an overwhelming number of voter signatures over a very short period of time — and hire lawyers to protect their validity — before a public vote on the proposed tax increase is triggered.
Politicians routinely instruct their staff to fight and discredit these efforts. They also spend taxpayer money on lawyers to resist holding public votes, forcing citizens to file expensive lawsuits.
Upon closer review, it becomes obvious that state laws pertaining to the citizen petition process were designed to thwart voters in favor of money-hungry governments. These petition requirements should be replaced with automatic elections.
Red-light cameras have been installed in cities across Texas and the nation under the pretense of promoting safe driving but, in reality, the automated devices are little more than another vehicle for municipalities to rob citizens of their money.
Photo enforced traffic citations violate drivers’ due process rights. Cities don’t have to prove who was driving the ticketed cars, and wrongly accused drivers aren’t able to fight charges in front of a jury trial.
While lawmakers talk tough on border security, little has been done to destroy a major magnet created nearly 15 years ago that entices illegal immigrants to the state: subsidized tuition to public universities.
Under the terms of a law passed in early 2001, illegal aliens are allowed to receive “in-state tuition” at the state’s public universities – the same discounted tuition rate offered to Texas residents — giving them a cheaper education than is available for U.S. citizens and legal residents from other states. That “cheaper” education comes from tax dollars paid by Texas taxpayers.
One more issue: banning paid lobbying by government entities.
Buckle up…
Despite President Donald Trump’s announcement of a pullout of American troops from Syria, the war against the Islamic State contains apace.
Information is scanty, but Syrian Democratic Forces appear to be systematically crushing what remains of the former Hajin pocket. Their offensive has rolled south into Shafa, AKA Al Shaafa, AKA Asi-Sha-Fah, and two British soldiers were wounded in an Islamic State missile attack there.
Here’s what the remnants of the Hajin pocket look like today:
This is what it looked like back on December 20:
There’s at least some evidence that other Arab countries are stepping in to pick up some of the slack:
In the last few days, Egyptian and UAE military officers visited the contested north Syrian town of Manbij. They toured the town and its outskirts, checked out the locations of US and Kurdish YPG militia positions, and took notes on how to deploy their own troops as replacements. On the diplomatic side, the White House is in continuous conversation with the UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Muhammed Bin Ziyad (MbZ) and Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi. The deal Trump is offering, is that they take over US positions in Manbij, where the Kurds have sought protection against a Turkish invasion, and American air cover will be assured against Russian, Syrian or Turkish attack.
As DEBKAfile has noted, the Egyptian president, during his four years in power, was the only Arab leader to consistently side with Bashar Assad against the insurgency against his regime. Assad may therefore accept the posting of Egyptian forces in Manbij so long as Syrian officers are attached to their units. The Syrian president would likely also favor a UAE military presence. Not only was the emirate the first Arab nation to reopen its embassy in Damascus after long years of Arab boycott, but unlike most of its Arab League colleagues, the UAE can well afford to contribute funding for the colossal reconstruction task needed for getting the war-devastated country on its feet.
Approval of the Egyptian-UAE forces to Manbij would kick off the stationing of mixed Arab forces in other parts of Syria, including the border with Iraq. If the Trump administration’s plans mature, then countries like Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Algeria would send troops to push the Iranian military presence out of key areas where they have taken hold.
That sounds swell. So swell that I’m suspicious that Syrian, Turkish and Russian leaders will actually let it happen. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
National Security Advisor John Bolton stated that U.S. trops would not complete their withdrawal from Syria until the Islamic State is defeated and the safety of the Kurds is guaranteed.
I would take this pronouncement with several grains of salt.
Even after Hajin falls, there are still large tracts of uninhabited land in Syria and Iraq the Islamic State hasn’t been cleared from. Just today, U.S. special forces conducted an operation near Kirkuk, Iraq that killed three Islamic State fighters who had reportedly been attacking the country’s electrical transmission infrastructure.
Also, the Islamic State in West Africa reportedly captured the town of Baga in northeastern Nigeria in late December.
Borepatch and co-blogger ASM826 have been trading off talking about the massive pile of failure that is the War on Drugs.
Start with Borepatch’s piece on the similarities between gun control and the war on drugs:
Let me take a stab at providing answers to these questions from the “we should declare victory in the War on Drugs and go home” perspective. The proposal is that most or perhaps all drugs be decriminalized, offered for sale, and taxed.
Rule #1. Can the person proposing the law state what they think the law will accomplish? This is intended to accomplish five specific things:
- Remove the perceived need to militarization of the police forces, no-knock raids, asset forfeiture, controls on how much you can deposit at your bank, etc. It’s caustic for the Republic and it costs us a lot of money. It’s an anti-tyranny goal.
- Improve the purity of the drugs on the market which will reduce overdose deaths. Food and Drug purity laws would apply and so the heroin that Joe Junkie buys at the local Alcohol Beverage and Drug Emporium wouldn’t be the equivalent of bathtub gin. His gin isn’t adulterated (like it was during the Prohibition days) and his smack shouldn’t be either.
- Lower the price of drugs, by eliminating the risk premium that must exist to cover expected loss from seizure, arrest, etc.
- Eliminate the massive profits that are flowing to drug cartels, which fund a bunch (admittedly not all) of the violence associated with illegal drug use.
- Generate a tax revenue stream that can be targeted towards providing detox centers for drug users who want to fight their addiction.
Laws about theft, driving under the influence, etc would fully apply to junkies who commit these crimes, just as they do today. Peter, Aesop, and Bill are entirely correct that today these are not “victimless” crimes.
Rule #2. Can the person proposing the law state how likely the law is to accomplish the goal from Rule #1? Let’s break these down by the five points above.
- No doubt some agencies will resist this – police unions, prison guard unions, the DEA, etc will rightly see the reduction of public funding as a threat to them. However, this is more of a hinderance to getting decriminalization passed in Congress than in implementation. In any case, I don’t see any fundamental disagreement between the two camps in this as a goal.
- This seems a no-brainer, as the illegal drug market is replaced by a legal one. It will be safer for both sellers and users, and legalization will probably attract big corporations who know how to mass produce pure products. I’m not sure you’ll see Superbowl advertisements for “The Champagne of heroin” but I don’t think you need to for success here.
- This seems like an absolute no-brainer. You are eliminating some very costly parts of the supply chain (machine guns, private armies, etc). Not sure how big this is but it sure isn’t zero.
- We saw this with the end of Prohibition. Today’s Al Capones are drug king pins.
- Tax money is notoriously fungible and is often diverted by politicians, but we see tax revenue streams from legal pot in places where it was legalized (e.g. Colorado).
I endorse this line of thinking. I cannot, however, endorse Borepatch’s heinous use of two spaces after periods in the computer era…
See also his bit on how the war on drugs has made things much worse for people in chronic pain.
My own two cents (familiar to regular readers) is that federal drug prohibition is unconstitutional on Ninth and Tenth Amendment grounds, being neither necessary nor proper for the federal government to enforce, and thus should be left to the states. This is especially true of federal prohibition of growing marijuana for personal use, as only the warped, grossly expansive interpretation of the commerce clause endorsed in Wickard vs. Filburn would give the federal government standing to determine what can and can’t be grown on a person’s private property for their personal consumption. Elimination of federal prohibition would allow states to experiment with the right mix of policies for narcotics. Let Utah try total prohibition, Portland complete legalization and deregulation, Maryland decriminalization and drug treatment, and Pennsylvania state owned drug dispensaries, and see which aspects of which approaches work best. That’s what federalism and subsidiarity are for.
Anyway, there’s a lot more over there, and a lot of links to all sides of the debate, that are worth pursuing.
Welcome to the first LinkSwarm of 2019! If things seem a little thin, I worked most of the week and threw a New Year’s Eve gathering, so things are a little discombobulated right now. Hopefully next week I’ll be back in the groove faster than you can say “Antidisestablishmentarianism.”
Strong US #jobsreport today.
2.6 M net nonfarm jobs added in 2018 & 4.8 M in 2017-18. More than 250K+ avg job growth last 3 mos. 284K jobs added in manufacturing in 2018.
Large ⬆️ labor force pushed unrate up to still low 3.9%.
Avg hourly earnings up 3.2% over year. #txlege https://t.co/5O2Ffa1Cct
— Vance Ginn (@VanceGinn) January 4, 2019
The caucus of black New York state lawmakers runs a charity whose stated mission is to empower “African American and Latino youth through education and leadership initiatives” by “providing opportunity to higher education” — but it hasn’t given a single scholarship to needy youth in two years, according to a New York Post investigation.
The group collects money from companies like AT&T, the Real Estate Board of New York, Time Warner Cable and CableVision, telling them in promotional materials that they are “changing lives, one scholarship at a time.”
The group — called the Association of Black and Puerto Rican Legislators, Inc. — instead spent $500,000 in the 2015 – 2016 fiscal year on items like food, limousines and rap music, the Post found.
The politicians refused to divulge the charity’s 2017 tax filing to the Post despite federal requirements that charities do so upon request.
Its main activity is holding and selling tickets to an elaborate party each year intended to raise money for its stated mission of providing scholarships for youth. But year after year, essentially all the money simply seems to go to festivities.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
EXPLOSIVE REPORT: Scott Israel's son and another student, sexually assaulted a boy after baseball practice. Israel’s son received 3 days suspension. The officer that handled the incident was Scot Peterson. https://t.co/LfJUWw5TCy
— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) May 26, 2018
AKA “the resource officer who infamously failed to confront the Parkland shooter.”