LinkSwarm for May 28, 2021

May 28th, 2021

Like inflation and unemployment, crime rates are rising again. Biden is really the 1970s gift that keeps giving!

  • Democrats are weaker than they appear:

    Vulnerable red- and purple-state Democrats need some bipartisan cover if they’re going to vote for another massive spending bill. And Biden would prefer to have a unified Democratic Party blaming Republicans for the inability to come to a consensus than to have a divided Democratic Party with one side of the Senate caucus blaming the other side of the Senate caucus for the inability to come to a consensus.

    Chuck Schumer is largely bluffing when he says the Senate will pass an infrastructure bill in July, with or without Republicans. Democrats can go down this path, but it’s a risk that at least a handful of their senators don’t want to take, and when the Senate is split 50–50, the Democrats can’t afford to lose anyone. Those with long memories can remember when Democrats were convinced all the legislation they passed in 2009 and 2010 would protect them in the midterms.

  • Speaking of Democrats in trouble, rising violent crime rates are another thing that might doom them in midterm elections:

    A rise in violent crime is endangering slim Democratic congressional majorities more than a year out from the midterm elections and threatening to revive “law and order” as a major campaign issue for Republicans for the first time since the 1990s.

    Homicides in cities increased by up to 40% over the previous year, the biggest single-year increase since 1960, a trend that has not abated so far in 2021. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one category of violent crime, ranging from homicide and rape to robbery and assault, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Homicides and shootings have gone up for three straight years in Washington, D.C., and at least a dozen mass shootings were reported nationwide over the weekend.

    Democrats’ flirtations with defunding the police — a handful of lawmakers on the Left nearly scuttled a $1.9 billion Capitol security bill in the House — may make them ill-equipped to handle the reemergence of crime as a top issue for voters.

  • Speaking of rising crime rates, having Soros-backed Democratic District Attorney Larry Krasner overseeing Philadelphia has helped create the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast:

    Mirrors are useful. A hooker walking down the street can easily fix their makeup. They can lean on them when they nod out too. In addition, when a heroin addict has no more veins left to inject in their arms, that mirror can help them find one in their neck.

    It’s kind of hard to inject a needle in your neck otherwise. Think about it.

    You’ll eventually get a sideview mirror ripped off your vehicle sooner or later. It generally happens as they nod out or “dip out” when the drugs kick in. When they slump towards the ground, they generally just take the mirror with them.

    You also become way to comfortable with people “dipping out”. It’s the local dance craze around here. As heroin takes effect, it’s almost like they fall asleep on their feet — slowly getting ever so close to the ground. Miraculously, they rarely hit the pavement. Many yoga masters couldn’t duplicate their prowess.

    Dippers are everywhere. It’s so common, YouTube has endless clips up and down Kensington Avenue; many have hundreds of thousands of views. A YouTuber named “HoodTime” has over 5 million views on a walk he captured through Kensington March of this year. Many others are following suit.

    Just walking through Kensington and filming gets you instant material. There’s always something to see here. It’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re in America or a third-world nation at points. But money hides in trash and addiction.

    As Mike Newall explains in his article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, some of the drug corners near where I work pull in over $20 million a year. He also quotes Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro as saying Kensington’s drug trade is close to a billion dollar a year enterprise.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.) There are ways to decriminalize drugs that don’t give a pass to widespread “quality of life” offenses. merely ceasing to prosecute people for open criminality doesn’t make the problems that open criminality engenders go away.

  • Even Ezra Klein says that rising crime rates are a threat to Democrats. Gee, I must have missed him expressing such concerns when antifa and #BlackLivesMatter were burning down large swathes of American cities last year…
  • In news of the Biden recession, both both inflation and unemployment picked up in April. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he opposes teaching critical race theory in the state’s public schools, calling the ideas pushed by its advocates as ‘based on false history’ and ‘teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.'” Good.
  • Kurt Schlichter: Bring on the ‘Asperger’s Republicans’:

    Far too many Republicans, for far too long, have found themselves distracted and/or enslaved by the elite consensus, restrained by norms and conventions that the liberal elite demands we observe, but that it itself flaunts when those rules limit its options. These Fredocons care what people who care nothing about them think, and they find themselves responding to the outside stimuli of the garbage mainstream media instead of focusing intently on conservative change while disregarding the slings and arrows of the haters. When it comes to fighting the establishment, political Asperger’s is indicative of awesomeness.

    And our next generation of Republicans needs to embrace their place on the Spectrum – the more inappropriate the liberal elite finds their reactions to its cues and signals, the better. No more tame, pliable sissies like Mitt (R-ish – Miracle Whip). No more of Nikki! Haley’s sucking up to the establishment while trying to grift the base by leveraging hack conserva-cliché’s from 2005 to present to us as hardcore instead of Jeb! in a dress. No more Kristi!s and Asa!s fronting as all tuff about men pretending to be girls to win races then folding the second the establishment disapproves. Instead, we need GOP politicians who are utterly immune to the siren song of a media and an establishment that seek to draw them in and crash them upon the rocks. Our pols need to ignore MSNBCNN and its hysterical horsehockey. They need to stop reading the NYT and WaPo and being scared that a bad write-up will get them uninvited to all the cool parties. They need to lock onto their target and take it out like an Israeli missile flattens a Hamas/AP frat house.

    Look at Ron DeSantis – he just doesn’t care what the bad guys say. Not at all. They scream that he won’t enforce face-diapering, that he’s too hard on election fraud, that’s he’s declared open season on those Antifa/BLM nimrods who trap normal citizens in their cars on public roads, and then DeSantis just goes ahead and does what he wants anyway. And it works – he’s super popular.

  • Also weighing in against Critical Race Theory: Austin Knudsen, Montana’s Attorney General.
  • How Democratic foreign policy “experts” are projecting their own failures on Jared Kushner:

    For the past four years, there was no greater laughingstock in the American foreign policy cognoscenti than Jared Kushner. A full-on consensus reigned that cast the previous administration’s Middle East policies as hopelessly ignorant and one-sided, a view that went unchallenged in the smart set’s Op-Ed pages. There was no easier laugh to be had, no quicker way to pull a nodding agreement, than to mock the intelligence and good will of the former president’s son-in-law, charged with crafting an American peace plan, and obviously in way over his head.

    But the Young Pretender in charge of the Mideast portfolio is gone, and the mommies and daddies are back in charge, their think tanks falling over each other producing glossy full-color booklets promoting policies that would bring to bear the priorities of people who actually understood a thing or two about Israelis, Palestinians, international law, justice, and most importantly, American strategic interests.

    And four months into the methodical implementation of all the bright ideas reflecting off those glossy booklets, the situation on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has taken a dramatic turn for the worst.

    Though Kushner is long gone, this latest conflagration has been laid at his feet. His name trended on Twitter for days as hostilities between Israel and Hamas escalated. “They really put Jared Kushner, the slumlord millionaire who couldn’t properly fill out security clearance forms, in charge of Peace in the Middle East. Failure was inevitable,” read one viral tweet. “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed” blared the headline to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column.

    This is not just wrong; it’s complete projection. Kushner-era policies—on Jerusalem, UNRWA, and regional diplomacy—were promised again and again to lead to an “explosion,” but didn’t. The return of the experts was supposed to improve lives and prospects for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but hasn’t. In fact, it was the foreign policy intelligentsia’s values and vision that have led to disaster.

    Back in March, mere weeks into the new Biden administration, a leaked internal State Department memo outlined the contours of a new direction on American policy toward the Palestinian issue. The document called for renewed diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority, restoring aid that had been cut, renewing American contributions to UNRWA, putting pressure on Israel for moves in Jerusalem that would make a new Palestinian Authority election possible, and pursuing a two-state arrangement based roughly on the pre-1967 lines.

    These were all priorities of the smart set miffed by a previous administration that was too close to Israel for their tastes. But they were also terrible ideas. Take the renewal of UNRWA funding. UNRWA is the U.N. agency dedicated to perpetuating, rather than solving, the Palestinian refugee problem. By cultivating the myth of a non-existent “right of return” rather than rehabilitating displaced persons and their descendants, UNRWA ensures that a negotiated two-state deal cannot be reached.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Drew Holden takes us on a trip down memory lane of various MSM talking heads declaring that the Wuhan coronavirus lab leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory,” including all the usual suspects (New York Times, CNN, etc.).
  • “Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Tuesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unfairly raised prices and hurt innovation.”
  • Glenn Greenwald: “A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”
  • “Moms Demand Action [AKA another branch of the Brady Bunch Hydra] member-turned-congresswoman in hot water over bribe.” Allegedly newly-elected Illinois Rep. Marie Newman bribed opponent Lymen Chehade to drop out of the race, then reneged on the cushy congressional job.

  • “Support for Black Lives Matter Movement Collapses Among Whites and Hispanics, Drops For Blacks.” The only question is why it took so damn long, when it’s been obvious for a long time that it is radical marxist garbage.
  • Christian teacher suspended after opposing the district’s transgender doctrine. “The teacher, Byron “Tanner” Cross, made the defiant declaration at a Loudon County school board meeting on Tuesday, according to the nonprofit group, Parents Against Critical Race Theory.”
  • Ted Cruz gets Biden ATF director nominee David Chipman to admit under oath that he wants to ban the AR-15. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Speaking of Ted Cruz: Israel has a right to defend itself.
  • “Hunter Biden’s Ukraine salary was cut two months after Joe Biden left office.” What a curious coincidence!
  • China Warns Australia’s Military Is “Weak“, Will Be “First Hit” In Any War With Western Alliance.” Knowing Australia, this is far more likely to piss them off than make them cower. Maybe Australia should develop it’s own nuclear arsenal…
  • CNN hits new lows. I suppose I should clarify that’s new ratings lows… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Screwed up even by the standards of Baltimore.
  • Politifact tries to fact check The Babylon Bee yet again. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • IDF stats:

  • Interesting: Higher reasoning functions wake up first from anesthesia. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Enjoy the original video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”.” A very different sound mix as well.
  • If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day Windows would run Linux apps, I’d give you a funny look. But that appears to be happening. “New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL.” That’s “Windows Subsystem for Linux.”
  • Now you’ll finally get a chance to read John Steinbeck’s werewolf novel.
  • “Public School Teachers Issue Students Their Summer Book-Burning Lists.”
  • “Newsom Announces Sweepstakes Where 5 Lucky Winners Get To Move Out Of California.”
  • A vicious pack pulls down its pray:

  • Guns Are Hard

    May 27th, 2021

    If you wonder why it takes so long to get new guns into production, Ian McCollum has an answer for you: Because designing and manufacturing guns is hard. Mainly because of the extensive trial and error necessary to establish the correct tolerances for each part.

    How Many Of Steve Adler’s Lies Can You Count In This Joe Rogan Interview?

    May 26th, 2021

    Here’s an excerpt from an interview Joe Rogan did with Austin mayor Steve Adler:

    How many lies can you spot? Here are a few.

    Before they repealed the camping ban: “I had more and more neighborhood associations complaining about more and more encampments, and I had no solution to that.”

    Of course you did. You and the city council could have let Austin police enforce the law and either cleared homeless encampments and/or arrested people for breaking the law. That would have prodded the sturdiest beggars to move on to greener pastures. But the city council wouldn’t let APD enforce the law because there was no money to rake off to leftwing activists as part of the homeless industrial complex.

    So instead you made the problem ten times worse.

    His claim that “90-95% success rate” for “housing first” curing the problem is absolute garbage. Mentally-ill, drug-using transients don’t become magically sane or drug free because they’re in a hotel on the taxpayers dime.

    “Smaller cities than Austin have 3-6x the amount of homelessness.” So that’s why you imported west coast policies to Austin? So you can increase the size of the homeless population like they did? If so, mission accomplished.

    “They told me the same thing as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.” Oh, so you sought advice from the cities with the worst homeless problems and the most obvious failed policies that made the problem worse! Genius!

    When he says that the “overwhelming majority” of the current transient population are “from here,” either he’s lying or his staff is. A good two-thirds of the current homeless population seem to have come from out of town. And they’re not coming from “the areas immediately around us,” they’re coming from Houston and the Metroplex so they can do drugs and sleep in the street and not be arrested.

    “We needed to get people off the streets.” Yeah, that’s why you turned every park and overpass into Bumsville: To get them off the street. Pull the other one.

    “If all they’re doing is surviving…” And by “surviving,” he means “shooting up heroin in public.”

    And note throughout the newly-minted PC neologism “people experiencing homelessness,” which I’m sure focus groups much better than “drug addicted transients” and “gibbering street lunatics.”

    Also, that veterans program isn’t the shining success that Adler is making it out to be. According to a friend that applied for veteran housing, there was a nine month wait, so they put your name on a list, and if you couldn’t accept right then (say, you had just signed a lease), your name went right back to the bottom of the list.

    I suspect the rest of the interview would offer up a lot more lies to flag…

    (Hat tip: Teddy Brosevelt.)

    Report On Police “Reform” In George Floyd Square Interrupted By Drive-By Shooting

    May 25th, 2021

    Man, those police “reform” efforts just keep paying dividends:

    If you put this in a novel, editors would reject it as too unsubtle.

    Maybe CNN will tell us it was a mostly peaceful drive-by…

    Constitutional Carry Passes

    May 25th, 2021

    Good news! The Texas legislature just sent Constitutional Carry to the Governor’s desk:

    After passing different versions of House Bill (HB) 1927, a bill to allow Texans over the age of 21 who can legally possess a handgun to carry it in public without a government-issued permit, both the Texas House and Senate approved a final version of the legislation that will now be sent to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

    Abbott said earlier this year that he would sign the bill, known as “constitutional carry.”

    “The House was very proud of the version of the bill that we sent over and the Senate was very proud of the amendments that they added,” Rep. Matt Schaefer (R-Tyler), the bill’s author, told The Texan.

    “We felt like some of the protections for law-abiding citizens were diminished in the Senate version, and so we fought to get some of that back.”

    After the Senate approved the bill with a number of amendments tailored to concerns voiced by law enforcement, the bill returned to the House where Schaefer decided to send the bill to what is known as a “conference committee.”

    In the conference committee, five members from each chamber worked out the differences in the two versions to create a compromise known as the conference committee report.

    The ultimate version of HB 1927 contained many of the variations of the amendments that were included in the version passed by the Senate rather than what the House first approved.

    After being signed into law, Constitutional Carry will go into effect September 1.

    The good news is the extension of protection for our constitutional rights, and may create a whole new cohort of legal gun owners in Texas. The bad news is that this might make it even harder to find ammo…

    Deroy Murdock Isn’t Having Your Critical Race Theory BS

    May 24th, 2021

    Deroy Murdock is less than impressed with Critical Race Theory:

    Critical race theory may be the Democrat left’s filthiest, ugliest big lie. It defines America as inherently and irredeemably bigoted, denounces all whites as racial oppressors, and diminishes all blacks as racially oppressed victims.

    Lies, lies, lies.

    The third lie is the worst.

    Black Lives Matter, the “diversity” police, and other “systemic racism”-mongers relentlessly claim that white privilege and white supremacy blockade black success. Blacks think, “Yes, we can.” The Democrat left replies: “No, you can’t.”

    Last June, Seattle staged something called Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness. This segregated brainwashing program for white municipal workers accused them of rendering people of color “unable to imagine a way forward that comes from a place of humanity and empowerment.”

    So, blacks are paralyzed victims, as helpless as butterflies ensnared in a tarantula’s web of white racism.

    < That Guy > Tarantulas do build webs, but typically not to ensnare pray. < /That Guy >

    This frightful fantasy is concocted to leave blacks cold and scared—all the better to swaddle them in the warm, loving arms of the left. Ultimately, like every Democrat effort, this is about getting elected, retaining power, and controlling Americans as tightly as possible.

    If this cleaves America like a log split by an ax, so be it. If whites must be vilified unfairly as bigots—to a man, woman, and child—who cares?

    And if blacks feel not empowered but enfeebled within an alleged whirlpool of white hate, then too bad. The Democrat left’s insatiable thirst for political domination must be quenched, by all means necessary.

    Snip.

    These “anti-racist” racists are serving social cancer from huge, boiling cauldrons. They are ladling defeatism into the bowls of black people and sickening the entire nation with their evil stew.

    They must be ridiculed, shunned, defunded, and dismantled.

    Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    Man With Rifle Stops Mass Shooter

    May 23rd, 2021

    Good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun in Fort Smith, Arkansas:

    Good thing Colion Noir is doing the reporting the national media refuses to do…

    Inside The Kamala Harris Bubble

    May 22nd, 2021

    This long and mostly friendly Edward-Isaac Dovere piece on Kamala Harris is pretty revealing once you shear the piece of the requisite “first black woman VP” rah rah fluff bits:

    Air Force Two is a smaller plane than Air Force One. The exterior is the same light-blue and white, but unlike the commander in chief’s plane, the vice president’s aircraft is open plan—from the back, you can see all the way to the front, where a small office doubles as a bedroom. Kamala Harris spends most of her Air Force Two flights in that office, with the door closed. She doesn’t work the plane, the way Joe Biden or even Mike Pence did.

    Snip.

    For a political world in palace-intrigue withdrawal post-Trump, the Biden-Harris dynamic drips with promise. Harris tried to propel her own presidential campaign by calling Biden a relic and pointedly not a racist in their first debate. But he rolled on to victory while her campaign fell apart, and now her political existence is in limbo while everyone waits to see how long he wants to remain in charge.

    Snip.

    The woman who launched her presidential campaign to 22,000 people packing the streets of Oakland—about three times more people than showed up for Biden’s launch—has had to adjust to a smaller role than the one she once campaigned for. A few weeks ago, in Chicago, she made awkward small talk with a window washer at a vaccination site. She asked what the tallest building he’d ever worked on was. “Trump Tower,” down by the river, he told her.

    Zing!

    The vice president and her team tend to dismiss reporters. Trying to get her to take a few questions after events is treated as an act of impish aggression. And Harris herself tracks political players and reporters whom she thinks don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience. (She often mentions an episode in which a Washington Post reporter mistook the cheer of the historic Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha for “screeches,” I was told.) She particularly doesn’t like the word cautious, and aides look out for synonyms too. Careful, guarded, and hesitant don’t go over well. But she continues to retreat behind talking points and platitudes in public, and declines many interview requests and opportunities to speak for herself (including for this article). At times, she comes off as so uninteresting that television producers have started to wonder whether spending thousands of dollars to send people on trips with her is worthwhile, given how little usable material they get out of it.

    Snip.

    Harris has been an elected official for 18 years straight, but she has only a few senior aides on staff who have worked for her for more than a few months. Turf battles have been a recurring feature of Harris offices over the years, but her newest circle believes it is finally getting her on track after years of past staffers not serving her well. Some have been surprised at how much work there is to be done, whether that’s briefing her on certain policy issues or helping her improve her sparring-with-journalists skills.

    Wait, you mean the presidential candidate that didn’t even make it to the primaries is a bad manager and a slow learner who is poor at dealing with people? Color me shocked.

    Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told me he was “dumbfounded” trying to come up with what Harris’s precise role or impact has been. Bob Casey, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania who’s been close with Biden for years and is now a Harris fan too, fondly recalled how much he enjoyed being in the Senate until 5:34 a.m. to watch Harris cast the tiebreaking vote to move the COVID-relief bill forward. As for her specific influence, he added, “It’s probably the case that there are a number of things where her imprint or her presence on that team is the reason why there’s a particular emphasis. I can’t say that I can identify one.” Other members of Congress who have sat in Oval Office conversations with the president and vice president struggled to answer this question too. Biden, who has shown a new confidence since he returned to the White House, has been making clear that he’s the one running the meetings, and Harris has been diligently deferential.

    Welcome to John Nance Garner’s famous “warm bucket of spit.”

    In March, Biden put Harris in charge of diplomatic efforts around migration from Latin America. Obama had given him the same assignment, so Biden imagined that he was showing Harris respect while also giving her a prime chance to build up her nearly nonexistent foreign-policy experience. To much of the political world, though, it looked like he’d stuck her with a worse setup than Nelson Rockefeller’s description of the vice presidency: “I go to funerals. I go to earthquakes.”

    Harris’s staff initially told reporters that the border was part of her assignment. Republicans eager to create the news narrative of a “border crisis” demanded that Harris visit a detention facility or inspect some stretch of land where Donald Trump’s wall would supposedly have gone. House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana appeared at a press conference with a mock-up milk carton that declared Harris MISSING at the border.

    A few weeks ago, I went to a White House press briefing to try to get a sense of what the vice president’s role is supposed to be. Harris had held a virtual meeting with the Northern Triangle leaders that morning, so I asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki how that call fit into the administration’s overall effort. Psaki started by saying that the conversation was part of a series of meetings the vice president had been having with other leaders and staff, not all of which had been public. Had the president given Harris any directives? I asked. “Well, the president and the vice president see each other quite regularly. She’s in many of the meetings, when she’s in town—almost all of them—that the president is in as well. So I would say it’s more of a discussion with others who are leading and running point on these issues.”

    No one, including the vice president’s staff, has been able to tell me what any of this means. Migration and immigration are multinational, multilayer problems. Saying that Kamala Harris is going to fix them is like declaring that she’ll be the one to figure out how to land a crewed mission on Jupiter.

    This is a pretty stupid metaphor on Dovere’s part. As a gas giant, Jupiter lacks an observable solid surface for a crewed mission to land on and at a gravity some 2.5 times Earth’s, it would be nearly impossible for the crew to do anything were they able to manage the feat. You would send a crewed mission to the Jovian system and leave exploring the surface (such as it is) to robots.

    It appears to me like President Biden handed her a hand grenade and pulled the pin, and she was quick to get rid of it as fast as she could,” Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas told me, noting that despite the border legislation he’s working on and his obvious interest in the issue, he hasn’t heard from the vice president’s office.

    Harris hasn’t spoken with Republican leaders about the border, her aides say now, because she was never supposed to be dealing with the border—she was supposed to be handling migration-related diplomacy with Latin American countries. She’s going to Guatemala and Mexico in June to meet with leaders there, because that’s the assignment. Pretty much everyone—reporters, members of Congress, advocates—gets confused about what the parameters of her role are. On a Friday afternoon last month, for example, the White House announced one policy on refugee caps, and then, a few hours later—after being bombarded for sticking to Trump policy by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois—announced another, higher cap. Theoretically, this change had something to do with the immigration crisis that Harris was supposedly managing, because refugees are fleeing dangerous conditions at home. But as far as most people could tell, Harris wasn’t a key player in the discussions leading up to the first cap, or the revised one. [Washington Democratic representative Pramila] Jayapal, who is a leader on the refugee issue, called the process “incomprehensible,” and said she hadn’t even thought to go to Harris to ask for an intervention.

    Funny how the much-despised Donald Trump managed to handle the “multinational, multilayer” problem by enforcing border controls, stopping illegal aliens from coming here in the first place and building a border wall. That may have been imperfect solutions, but they were manifestly better at controlling the border than the Biden Administration’s abandonment of them. This is because Democrats don’t want to control the border because they view every illegal alien as an undocumented Democratic Party voter.

    These days, when friends and allies try to reach out, they often can’t get through (she got a new cellphone after being elected, for national-security reasons). When she sees friends from her pre–Naval Observatory life who tell her they’d like to connect her to some cause or supporter who might be helpful down the road, she’ll tell them that they should talk to her sister and closest confidante, Maya Harris, who’s not on staff and who often tangled with aides during her presidential campaign.

    So Maya Harris is the bagman and cutout, a convenient role to channel communication through. Presumably she’s much more discreet than hunter Biden in this role.

    Being in a bubble leads Harris to talk in terms like “human infrastructure,” by which she means measures such as child care. Human infrastructure is one of those self-defeating phrases that some liberals like to popularize. Even most Democrats roll their eyes at it; Republicans think that it’s too “woke.”

    Note the scare quotes around “woke,” as though it’s some inexplicable, imaginary thing.

    Is her more stilted approach one reason the administration doesn’t put her on television or send her to talk to members of Congress as much as, say, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg? No, West Wing aides insist: She’s just busy actually building the administration’s policies.

    Sure she is.

    Read between the lines and you see the same Kamala Harris we saw in the 2020 Presidential campaign: A maladroit, out-of-touch, hard-left political novice championing divisive social justice causes and language who was in over her head and was singularly unable to connect voters despite reams of fawning political coverage of he from the Democratic Media Complex. She’s a slow learner who’s never run a successful competitive political race in her life, and her current performance (and the Biden Administration’s disasterous policies) suggests she never will.

    LinkSwarm for May 21, 2021

    May 21st, 2021

    Biden behaving badly, Palestinian backers beating Jews, Portland crime soars, and the latest pause to the latest Israel beatdown of Hamas. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Dispatches from the swamp: “Former FBI director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and spoke with the then vice president in 2016 ‘to explore lucrative future work options’ with Hunter as the middle man.” Who watches the watchmen?
  • Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter, but worse:

    There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something. Biden’s presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.

    We’re five months into Biden’s presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter’s incompetence by Christmas. Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn’t exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.

    Snip.

    For Carter, this came in the form of skyrocketing inflation and fuel shortages, the hostage crisis in Iran, compounded by an inability to work with Congress and constantly butting heads with Tip O’Neill and the Left wing of the Democrats. Carter, simply put, did not get how to work with Congress when he arrived in Washington, having spent his entire career playing Georgia politics. Unfortunately, this contributed to his inability to pass legislation, even though at the time Democrats controlled the Senate.

    Moreover, Carter’s inability to get his own messaging right added to his problems. The best episode of this is of course the notorious “Malaise” speech, where Carter essentially told Americans that their best days were behind them. This certainly didn’t inspire confidence when there was indeed a crisis of confidence on the home front, while abroad the Soviets and Iranians caused their fair share of mischief. It took the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan to fix things.

    During the 1980 campaign, an observer took note of the difference between the two men saying, “If you ask Jimmy Carter what time it is, he’d tell you how to build a watch but if you asked Ronald Reagan what time it is, he’d say it time to get this country moving again.” Reagan always knew where he was going and where he wanted to lead the nation,

    Today, Biden only seems capable of being led by the hand by his staffers and signing whatever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer shove across his desk. When he does bother to make rare appearances, he seems to always pour gasoline on the proverbial fire.

    Already, inflation is rising under Biden’s direction, and despite a jobs relief bill that spent trillions of dollars, less than 300,000 new jobs were created as a result. On top of that, Biden seems determined, come Hell or high water, to ignore the crisis on the southern border, so much so that he refuses to call the situation an actual crisis. Did I also mention he’s done little to nothing to help Israel while Hamas pounds it with rockets lately?

    That’s all well and good (Biden is hardly the first president to bungle domestic and foreign policy) but Biden seems to genuinely care little for the country he was elected to govern.

    Unlike Carter, who to his credit is a patriot, Biden has caved to the whims of the radical deconstructionists by ignoring the very real threats of Antifa and BLM. Biden has entertained the possibility of giving federal grants to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT), which postulates that all White Americans are born evil and that all Black Americans are born victims. While on paper CRT is supposed to teach “diversity and inclusion,” in reality it’s undoing the sacrifices of the Civil Rights pioneers who wanted us to not see color or race.

    Jimmy Carter was a bad president but he wasn’t a bad man. Biden is a bad president and a bad man. Carter never at his worst ever contemplated the things Biden does willy nilly, such as revoking Donald Trump’s protection of American statues from the evil of BLM and Antifa.

  • “‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens.” Electing the hard-left to control your cities the quickest way to destroy your quality of life. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Masking doesn’t do jack against Flu Manchu:

    The predominant conclusion is that face masks have a very important role in places such as hospitals, but there exists very little evidence of widespread benefit for members of the public (adults or children) as well as evidence that masking is truly an ineffectual way to manage pandemic-related spread of viral disease. As Kolstoe stated, it has become less about the science and more about politics and a symbol of solidarity.

  • Israel reaches ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza.

  • Of course the Associated Press knew they were sharing an office with Hamas:

    The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. In fact, Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, even said as much on Saturday. “I talked to someone who *used* to work out of that building periodically who said he believed there may have been Hamas offices there,” Vietor tweeted. In other words, anyone who worked in the building on a regular basis understood that they likely shared an address with the Islamic Resistance Movement. Vietor also acknowledged on Twitter that terror groups “purposefully co-locate operations with civilians. But that is not a new problem.” Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.

    Here’s the thing: There’s nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes. It happens all the time in the Middle East. CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open. The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

    This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza. The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it’s never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance. That’s because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity. Through direct threats as well as fixers and minders appointed to steer journalists in the right direction, Hamas lets every press outfit and journalist in Gaza know that if they do not understand this fundamental angle, they are not welcome in Gaza.

  • Peace-loving Palestinian supporters in London: “‘F**k the Jews’ ‘Rape their daughters.'”
  • More of the same fun in New York City: “‘Pro-Palestinian’ Gangs Attack Jews In Multiple Locations in Manhattan.”
  • “China aligns with Palestinians to deflect criticism of Uyghur Muslim genocide.” Call it the Axis of Scumbags. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brandon Smith on why the U.S. military will never be woke:

    The language of leftists and globalists can be rather confusing because they never mean exactly what they say. The word “diversity” generally means “more leftists/Marxists”, not more brown people. Leftists are incredibly racist towards any minority person that argues from a conservative or moderate position. The phrase “white supremacist” is usually a hatchet reference to all conservatives. So, to translate their woke gibberish, the goal of the Pentagon under Biden will be to divest the ranks of the military of conservatives and replace them with more regime friendly leftists.

    The goal of propaganda is often to create false word associations in the minds of the masses. The mainstream media constantly mentions “white supremacists”, “neo-nazis” and “extremists” within the same articles they mention “conservatives”. Though there is no evidence whatsoever to link the majority of conservatives with race identity groups, the hope within the establishment is that the conservative base in the US can be dismantled through guilt by manufactured association.

    Anyone who stands against the social justice mob is labeled “white supremacist”. Therefore, all conservatives are white supremacists, because the social justice cult controls who gets labeled. The social justice cult thus becomes the self anointed arbiters of who gets canceled and who does not. See how that works?

    As far as the military is concerned, the obvious intent is to link all conservative views with “extremism and racism”, thereby creating an artificial rationale for removing conservatives from the ranks or denying them the ability to sign up in the first place. The Pentagon is already openly discussing plans to comb through the social media histories of troops in order to root out those with “extremist backgrounds” (conservatives and constitutionalists). In theory, this would only leave devout social justice warriors behind. It is a political and ideological cleansing of the armed forces.

    The Cult of Woke is like a hive of parasitic termites that feeds its way through the various pillars of western society until they crumble; once a pillar is hollowed out, they move onto the next one, and the next one until the nation or civilization breaks apart completely. As the nation is destabilized, they then offer their own social model as a solution to the problem. Invariably, their model is one that eliminates all individual freedom and inherent rights in the name of collective “safety” and “equity”. It is totalitarianism posing as compassion.

    To be sure, the Department of Defense is fast-tracking the woke agenda.

    Snip.

    Straight white men are noticeably absent from the Pentagon’s new series of commercials, and the people represented are a perfect pie chart of diversity hiring, even though the US is around 70% white and around 96% straight (according to Gallup).

    But who are these commercials really made for? The Army admits they had to search a worldwide roster of soldiers, obtaining only 100 submissions that fit their woke criteria, and then filtered those submissions down to just a handful that met the diversity requirements of the marketing campaign. Some of the commercials are subtle, and some of them are not. The US campaign seems to be mimicking the “Snowflake” ad campaign used by the UK military in 2019 in a bid to attract what they call “Me Me Me Millennials”.

    Clearly, the percentage of soldiers that check most or all of the woke boxes is tiny. The commercials are also notably in cartoon form, because SJWs have a hard time absorbing information unless it is animated.

    Snip.

    Globalists are very mindful of statistical realities, and they know that the current military dynamic is against them; hence their growing thirst for the wokification of our branches of defense. I want to remind conservatives that this is a good thing. They are trying to force social justice politics into the military because the military is the exact opposite of what they want it to be.

    For example, polling in 2016 showed that around 31% to 35% of the US military is Republican, while around 25% to 29% votes Democrat. But what about the remainder? The media often calls the remaining current serving voters “moderates” or “independents”. As it turns out, up to 40% of the military is actually libertarian or constitutionalist leaning according to polls.

    The mainstream media tries to hide this fact by only talking about “Republican votes” and “Democrat votes”, but the reality is that the vast majority of the military is conservative oriented, with values based in personal freedom and constitutionalism. That 40% of libertarians and constitutionalists is what the elites are really worried about. This is who they are referring to when they talk about “extremists” in the military.

    And what about the 25% to 29% of Democrats? That is the extent of the left’s hold within the general ranks of the military and it is improbable that most of these democrats are hard leftists. Further studies also show that the majority of veterans leaving the military identify overwhelmingly as Republican, conservative or “independent”, not as Democrat or leftist.

    This is probably why the latest social justice recruitment commercials by the Army are getting ratioed into oblivion by soldiers and the public alike. In response the Army YouTube page has shut down comments. Last I checked, the new LGBTQ and feminist inspired “Emma: The Calling” Army video had only 700 up-votes and over 33,000 down-votes. This is an epic fail. Where are all the hardcore social justice warriors just itching to join the military and “get some”? They don’t exist. The establishment is trying to appeal to a phantom demographic.

    The fact is, the only place you will find a preponderance of woke lunatics in the military is among the brass and sometimes in the officer corps; the leadership within the pentagon has been carefully groomed to create a leftist/globalist consolidation, and this has been going on for decades. Generals are for the most part politicians, not warriors (SPECIAL NOTE: Never trust retired generals or retired CIA agents, even if they claim to be on the side of liberty).

    While military leadership might go woke, this does not mean the rest of the military will, nor does it mean that troops will follow unconstitutional orders from such people.

  • Thanks to antifa, a Soros-backed DW and underfunding the police, Portland is enjoying record-breaking levels of violence and homicide.
  • They’re also the only big city that doesn’t use body cameras for police. Probably because they’d exonerate police and help convict their precious pet antifa rioters, and the powers that be in Portland don’t want that…
  • Alan Dershowitz wonders why the hard left loves Palestinian terrorists.

    In a world in which massive violations of human rights have, tragically, become the norm, why has the hard left focused on one of the least compelling of those causes — namely, the Palestinians? Where is the concern for the Kurds, the Chechens, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans? There are no campus demonstrations on their behalf, no expressions of concern by “the Squad” in Congress, no United Nations resolutions, no recurring op-eds in The New York Times, and no claims that the nations that oppress these groups have no right to exist.

    On the merits and demerits of their claims, the Palestinians have the weakest case. They have been offered statehood and independence on numerous occasions: in 1938, 1948, 1967, 2000-2001 and 2008. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Yet, even now, Palestinian leaders refuse to sit down and negotiate a reasonable two-state solution. As the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once aptly put it, the Palestinian leadership never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

    Nor are history and morality on their side. The Palestinian leadership allied itself with Nazism and Hitler in the 1940s, with Egyptian tyranny and antisemitism in the 1950s, and with international terrorism from the 1960s forward.

    The usual history snipped.

    The Palestinian people have suffered more from the ill-advised decisions of their leaders than from the actions of Israel.

    Back to the present: Hamas commits a double war crime every time it fires a lethal rocket at Israeli civilians from areas populated by its civilians, who they use as human shields. Israel responds proportionally in self-defense, as President Biden has emphasized. The Israel Defense Forces go to extraordinary lengths to try to minimize civilian casualties among Palestinians, despite Hamas’ policy of using civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and high-rise buildings — to store, fire and plan their unlawful rockets and incendiary devices. Yet the hard left blames Israel alone, and many on the center-left create a moral equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.

    Why? The answer is clear and can be summarized in one word: Jews.

    The enemy of the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Chechens are not — unfortunately for them — the Jews. Hence, there is little concern for their plight. If the perceived enemy of the Palestinians were not the Jews, there would be little concern for their plight as well. This was proved by the relative silence that greeted the massacre of Palestinians by Jordan during “Black September” in 1970, or the killings of Palestinian Authority leaders in Gaza during the Hamas takeover in 2007. There has been relative silence, too, about the more than 4,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians— killed by Syria during that country’s current civil war. It is only when Jews or their nation are perceived to be oppressing Palestinians that the left seems to care about them.

  • Arizona’s Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema isn’t having any of it:

  • Orthodox Jews: “Live Near Hipsters, Vote Like Mormons.”

    The Pew study highlights a more interesting recent development among Orthodox Jews. They increasingly consider themselves—and are considered by others—to be separate within the Jewish community. Only 9 percent of Orthodox Jews feel “a lot” in common with Reform Jews, and a similar percentage of Reform Jews say the same about the Orthodox. In fact, both groups report feeling more in common with Jews in Israel than with their fellow citizens of the same religion but different denominations.

    Like their secular counterparts, Orthodox Jews are clustered in the Northeast, but they differ in having lower levels of educational attainment. About 60 percent of Jews overall are college graduates, almost double the rate of the American population as a whole, but only 37 percent of Orthodox Jews have college degrees. And even though these religious Jews are largely urban and suburban, they vote like rural religious voters. As Alper and Cooperman wrote, “among Orthodox Jews, three-quarters say they are Republican or lean that way. And that percentage has been trending up.”

    This split raises questions about the size of the various communities. The non-religious part of the Jewish community has long been and remains larger than the Orthodox component. Only 9 percent of American Jewish adults identify as Orthodox. They are, like the rest of the Jewish community, grouped largely in blue states. Only eight states have more than 200,000 Jews: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. All of these but Florida voted Democratic in the last presidential election, and six of the eight—all but Florida and Pennsylvania—have voted Democratic in every presidential election this century. However, adding in the seven states with Jewish populations in the range of 100,000-200,000 yields a decidedly more purple cohort: Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. The Jewish vote may be small, but it matters.

    The Pew study also makes it clear that the Jewish community is changing. Eleven percent of Jews under 30 were Orthodox in 2013—largely in line with their percentage among the older set. In the new study, that number rose to 17 percent—a remarkable shift in an eight-year period. At the same time, the older generation has a disproportionately low representation among the Orthodox. Only 3 percent of Jews aged 65 and older identify as Orthodox, and only 1 percent of Jews over 65 belong to the Haredi, or non-Modern Orthodox, community. Given Pew’s other findings on the Orthodox community, including much lower rates of intermarriage (2 percent vs. 47 percent in the non-religious community), and given the fact that Orthodox Jews continue to have more children, it is reasonable to assume that the Orthodox percentage of the Jewish community will grow even more in the future.

  • Kamala the unpopular. “Her favorability is just at 41%, and her unfavorability stands at 48%. Most problematic: One in 5 Democrats polled deemed her unfavorable, as did nearly 3 in 5 independents.”
  • Things that make you go “Hmmmmm”:
    

  • Facebook “fact check” is just there to push the proper narratives, the truth be damned.
  • Scottish university may expel law student Lisa Keogh for daring to point out women have vaginas.
  • AT&T Strikes $43 Billion Deal With Discovery To Launch New Streaming Giant.” “AT&T’s vast WarnerMedia holdings, which include CNN and HBO, will combine with Discovery’s assets – including Discovery Channel and Animal Planet – to create what management hopes will be a formidable competitor to Netflix and Disney.” Yeah, no. CNN is probably a negative asset at this point. And the price tag sounds a whole lot less impressive. And the price tag sounds a lot less impressive when you realize AT&T paid $85 billion for those assets less than three years ago…
  • Follow-up: “The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.”
  • “19-Year Veteran Cop Suspended for Allegedly Running Meth Lab Out of NJ Home.” I think they frown on that even in New Jersey…
  • Speaking of New Jersey, a single rural New Jersey deli has a market cap of $100 million.
  • “Man Hijacks School Bus Full of Children, Gets Frustrated And Lets Everyone Go Because The Kids Won’t Stop Asking Him Questions.”
  • Speaking of attempted crimes gone wrong:

  • Boom:

  • Rudy Tomjanovich inducted into the basketball hall of fame. Long overdue.
  • “BLM Sends Rioters To Gaza To Protest Israel By Burning Down Palestinian Businesses.”
  • “Biden Worried Gas Shortages May Hurt Carter’s Chances Against Reagan.”
  • I laughed:

  • Texas Senate Committee Passes Ban On Teaching Critical Race Theory

    May 20th, 2021

    In a followup to last week’s story about the Texas House passing a similar bill, a Texas Senate committee also passed a ban on teaching Critical Race Theory. And they even made it better:

    When state Rep. Steve Toth (R-The Woodlands) introduced his bill to stem the teaching of critical race theory in Texas classrooms, he accepted almost two dozen amendments by Democrats that heaped a host of figures and documents onto the bill’s list of required reading to understand the nation’s founding.

    After the bill passed the state House and then jumped to the Senate, the State Affairs Committee stripped these amendments away.

    On Monday, Sen. Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola) introduced a committee substitute — a changed version of a bill — nearly identical to Toth’s original version, House Bill (HB) 3979. In fact, the text of the committee substitute is a carbon copy of Toth’s Senate companion bill, carried by Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe), which the Senate already passed.

    This may seem like a lot of hugger mugger, but passing an amended version of the House’s bill makes it easier for the legislation to pass without a conference committee if the House accepts the senate changes.

    While committee substitutes are a common stage in the life of bills, this bill’s committee substitute is notable for confirming a suspicion of some Democrats in the House, who asked Toth if the Senate would slough away their amendments. Toth said he bore no responsibility for the Senate’s actions. Ultimately, his acceptance of the amendments gained no Democratic support in the final House vote on the bill.

    Snip.

    As some critics noted in the State Affairs Committee hearing, the bill does not mention critical race theory explicitly. Rather, one part of the bill forbids teachers from pushing certain tenets of critical theory as it has been distilled and popularized. Examples include the notion that meritocracy is racist or prejudiced, or that certain racial groups bear collective guilt or responsibility.

    Here are the eight concepts that teachers, administrators, and other school employees would not be able to require or make part of a course:

  • one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
  • an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
  • an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race or sex;
  • members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex;
  • an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by the individual’s race or sex;
  • an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
  • an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex; or
  • meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race.
  • Parents of all races, creeds and colors have come together to reject the radical racism of critical race theory, and now Texas is rejecting at the state level.