Greetings, and welcome to another super-late Friday LinkSwarm! Been a busy week at the day job. I hope that next week is less frantic, but I also have to start working on my taxes…
It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley’s antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.
I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.
I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country’s history and adds no understanding to any of today’s societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction.
I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression. Facile and unsupported beliefs such as these are the polar opposite to the intellectual and scientific truth for which Brearley claims to stand. Furthermore, I call bullshit on Brearley’s oft-stated assertion that the school welcomes and encourages the truly difficult and uncomfortable conversations regarding race and the roots of racial discrepancies.
I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites. Brearley, by adopting critical race theory, is advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work. What Brearley is teaching our children is precisely the true and correct definition of racism.
I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners. They are an insult to parents and unbecoming of any educational institution, let alone one of Brearley’s caliber.
I object to Brearley’s vacuous, inappropriate, and fanatical use of words such as “equity,” “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought. And if Brearley really cared about “inclusiveness,” the school would return to the concepts encapsulated in the motto “One Brearley,” instead of teaching the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors.
l object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests.
I object to, as we have been told time and time again over the past year, that the school’s first priority is the safety of our children. For goodness sake, Brearley is a school, not a hospital! The number one priority of a school has always been, and always will be, education. Brearley’s misguided priorities exemplify both the safety culture and “cover-your-ass” culture that together have proved so toxic to our society and have so damaged the mental health and resiliency of two generations of children, and counting.
I object to the gutting of the history, civics, and classical literature curriculums. I object to the censorship of books that have been taught for generations because they contain dated language potentially offensive to the thin-skinned and hypersensitive (something that has already happened in my daughter’s 4th grade class). I object to the lowering of standards for the admission of students and for the hiring of teachers. I object to the erosion of rigor in classwork and the escalation of grade inflation. Any parent with eyes open can foresee these inevitabilities should antiracism initiatives be allowed to persist.
Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz has poured over $5 million into a network of nonprofits run by Black Lives Matter leader Patrisse Cullors, according to financial disclosure records, raising questions about whether this relationship played a role in the company’s decision to censor unflattering news articles about the activist last week.
The social media giant blocked its users from posting links to a New York Post story that revealed Cullors, a self-described Marxist, spent $3.2 million on high-end real estate as her Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation raked in millions in donations.
Facebook said the reporting violated its “privacy and personal information policy.” The Post argued that the decision was “so arbitrary as to be laughable” and noted that the media routinely report on real estate purchases by other celebrities and political figures without facing social media censorship.
“Democrat Mayor, BLM Activist Hit With 11 Child Sex Felony Charges.””Robert Jacob, progressive former mayor of Sebastopol in Sonoma County, Northern California, was arrested for ‘five felony and one misdemeanor sexual assault charges against a minor,’ according to a statement from the Sebastopol Police Department.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died — and, just like the now-discredited Russian bounty story also unveiled by that same paper, cable outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible….
As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick’s own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media’s claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.
But the gruesome story of Sicknick’s “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren’t murdered by them, then nobody was (without Sicknick, the only ones killed were four pro-Trump supporters: two who died of a heart attack, one from an amphetamine overdose, and the other, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot point blank in the neck by Capitol Police despite being unarmed). So crucial was this fairy tale about Sicknick that it made its way into the official record of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, and they had Joe Biden himself recite from the script, even as clear facts mounted proving it was untrue.
“Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey may have just handed over the city to rioters as he made it clear that the overarching leftist narrative surrounding the Derek Chauvin trial is the real story, regardless of the facts.”
“Corporations that have criticized election reform — including Apple, American Airlines, and Uber — have received over $2 billion in Texas public dollars collectively.”
The information was compiled by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a think-tank and supporter of Texas’ election reform legislation.
That total is likely even higher due to undisclosed subsidy amounts for multiple companies.
Most of the public funds come from state and local subsidies, with the single biggest beneficiary being Berkshire Hathaway, run by Warren Buffett, which has pulled in $802 million for its subsidiary Nebraska Furniture Mart.
Speaking of TPPF: he idea that expanding Medicaid by embracing ObamaCare is bunk:
But that’s not the experience in states that have expanded Medicaid.
New York, one of the earliest and most earnest adopters of Medicaid expansion, has seen Medicaid enrollment explode in the last decade and is now dealing with a $6 billion budget shortfall.
In California, lawmakers cut money from education just to stay afloat as they addressed an astonishing $54 billion deficit. The new demands of Medicaid expansion placed on the state’s budget mean either more cuts to critical programs or ballooning deficits.
Enrollment of able-bodied adults in the California program ended up 278% over official projections, with actual cost hitting nearly $44 billion instead of a projected $11.6 billion over a two-and-a-half year period. One out of every three people in California are now on Medicaid.
It’s not just big blue states. Ohio, thanks to Medicaid expansion, now allots a full 38 percent of its state budget to Medicaid spending. It was just 21 percent prior to expansion in 2009.
This is true in Indiana as well, where the share of the state budget eaten up by Medicaid has doubled from 18 percent to 35 percent since 2000. On average, states that expanded were about 50 percent over enrollment and spending projections.
States see dramatic increases in spending whenever Medicaid is expanded. This problem is even worse now because there is a federal prohibition against removing any enrollees from the program — in place until the COVID-19 emergency expires. States are handcuffed indefinitely.
Texas can’t ignore these outcomes.
What. The. Hell? “The Postal Service is running a ‘covert operations program‘ that monitors Americans’ social media posts.” Who they hell approved that bright idea and can we get them fired? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Texas’s statewide mask mandate ended March 9. The day before, Texas had 5,119 new cases of COVID-19, and the seven-day average for new cases was 3,971. On that day, the state had 126,404 active cases of COVID-19. As of March 9, the seven-day average for new deaths was 104.
Yesterday, the state had 3,859 new cases, and the seven-day average for daily new cases is 3,057. The state had 93,430 active cases. The seven-day average for new deaths was 54. As I noted in late March and early April, the end of the statewide mask mandate did not generate a surge in cases or deaths, and shouldn’t have been reflexively denounced as “Neanderthal thinking” by President Biden.
Tokyo Olympics bans taking a knee. “The IOC’s Rule 50 forbids any kind of ‘demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda’ in venues and any other Olympic area and the Games body concluded the rule should be maintained following an athlete consultation.”
Partly thanks to their crackpot one-child policy (one child per family) that was implemented in the late 1970s in order to limit China’s population growth, the ChiComs have a serious demographics problem on their hands, too. And the one-child policy exacerbated another demographics problem:
The one-child policy produced consequences beyond the goal of reducing population growth. Most notably, the country’s overall sex ratio became skewed toward males—roughly between 3 and 4 percent more males than females. Traditionally, male children (especially firstborn) have been preferred—particularly in rural areas—as sons inherit the family name and property and are responsible for the care of elderly parents. When most families were restricted to one child, having a girl became highly undesirable, resulting in a rise in abortions of female fetuses (made possible after ultrasound sex determination became available), increases in the number of female children who were placed in orphanages or were abandoned, and even infanticide of baby girls.
The combined result has been an aging population and a declining birth rate, as well as a gender imbalance (approximately 30 million more men than women looking for marriage partners), which resulted in the implementation of the two-child policy in 2016 (and recent recommendations from the People’s Bank of China – the Chinese central bank – to drop the limit altogether). China’s birth rate per 1000 people has decreased from 46 births in 1950 to just over 11 births in 2021.
Finally! “UK Parliament declares China’s treatment of Uyghurs a genocide.” Now we’ll see what difference that makes in foreign and economic policy, if any…
“Sinema, Kelly Call on Administration to Help Address Crisis at the Arizona Border, Fund National Guard Deployment.” “There is a crisis at the southern border… As such, we request you reimburse the state of Arizona for the deployment the Governor announced yesterday to support border security and continue to increase DHS personnel who can further assist with the processing of migrants, securing the border, and executing important security missions.” Both Kelly and Sinema are Democrats.
At the age of 8, my great-great-grandfather, Silas Burgess, arrived in America shackled in the belly of a slave ship and was sold on an auction block in Charleston, South Carolina, to the Burgess Plantation. He escaped through the Underground Railroad and saved up enough money to purchase a 102-acre farm, where he worked through tremendous challenges to live a prosperous, productive life.
My grandfather, Oscar Kirby, served our country in World War I and was the first member of my family to get a traditional education. My father, Clarence Burgess Owens Sr., fought for democracy abroad in World War II. He was undeterred by the Jim Crow South that denied him a post-graduate education and built a successful legacy as a professor, researcher and entrepreneur.
I grew up in the 1960s Deep South during the days of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and segregation. I was one of the first four Black athletes recruited to play football at the University of Miami and the third Black student to receive a scholarship for my education. Now, I am humbled to represent Utah’s 4th Congressional District in the U.S. Congress.
This intergenerational progress represents the common thread of self-worth that allowed each of my ancestors to see themselves as victors instead of victims. I think my great-great-grandpa Silas would agree that reparations are not the way to right our country’s wrongs.
It goes without saying that Rep. Owens is a Republican…
Related: Glenn Loury makes the case for black patriotism:
There is a fashionable standoffishness characteristic of much elite thinking about blacks’ relationship to America—as exemplified, for instance, by the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Does this posture serve the interests, rightly understood, of black Americans? I think that it does not.
Indeed, a case can be made that the correct narrative to adopt today is one of unabashed black patriotism—a forthright embrace of American nationalism by black people. Black Americans’ birthright citizenship in what is arguably history’s greatest republic is an inheritance of immense value. My answer for black Americans to Frederick Douglass’s famous question—“Whose Fourth of July?”—is, “Ours!”
Is this a venal, immoral, and rapacious bandit-society of plundering white supremacists, founded in genocide and slavery and propelled by capitalist greed, or a good country that affords boundless opportunity to all fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of citizenship? Of course, there is some warrant in the historical record for both sentiments, but the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly favors the latter. The founding of the United States of America was a world-historic event by means of which Enlightenment ideals about the rights of individual persons and the legitimacy of state power were instantiated for the first time in real institutions.
African slavery flourished at the time of the Founding, true enough. And yet, within a century of the Founding, slavery was gone and people who had been chattel became citizens of the United States of America. Not equal citizens, not at first. That took another century. But African-descended Americans became, in the fullness of time, equal citizens of this republic.
Our democracy, flawed as it most surely is, nevertheless became a beacon to billions of people throughout what came to be known as the “free world.” We fought fascism in the Pacific and in Europe and thereby helped to save the world. We faced down, under the threat of nuclear annihilation, the horror that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Moreover, we have witnessed here in America, since the end of the Civil War, the greatest transformation in the status of a serfdom people (which is, in effect, what blacks became after emancipation) to be found anywhere in world history.
“The NBA has suffered another ratings disaster, with ABC falling 45 percent since the 2011-12 season, while TNT was down 40 percent, and ESPN was off 20 percent.”
“Woman who lost partner in crossbow attack wants ‘medieval’ weapon regulated.” Can Pointy Stick Control be far behind?
Before the Texas Legislature receives its census data and starts redrawing state voting maps, Dallas City Council is asking local citizens to eliminate the requirement of being a taxpayer or a registered voter to be on city boards and commissions—including the one that will redraw city council districts.
On February 10, by a vote of 10-5, the Dallas City Council decided to put two proposed amendments to the city charter on the May 1 ballot.
Proposition A, if approved by voters, would eliminate the requirement that members of city boards or commissions, created by the city charter, be “registered or qualified to vote.” Doing so would allow city council members to nominate noncitizens to these positions.
In response to a question from Councilmember Cara Mendelsohn, Liz Cedillo-Pereira, Dallas’ chief of equity and inclusion, said 25 percent of the city’s population are immigrants, and to her knowledge, “approximately 70 percent or so” of those immigrants are noncitizens.
Just having a “chief of equity and inclusion” is already a sign that the social justice rot has set in and taxpayer dollars are already being raked off for the far left.
According to City Attorney Chris Caso, Proposition A would affect the city planning commission, the civil service board, the park board, and the redistricting commission (which is charged with redrawing the city’s voting precincts).
“I know Councilmember [Jaime] Resendez said that he has somebody that he would like to consider that this would affect,” Mendelsohn said at the time. Resendez, who put forward the motion for both propositions, didn’t deny it.
So the entire point of putting illegal aliens in positions of power is to reward cronies? Imagine my shock.
Just letting illegal aliens into the country in hopes of harvesting their illegal votes is evidently no longer enough for the victimhood identity politics left. Now we have to start giving the leftwing activists among them sinecures from which to wage social justice against actual citizens.
Federal District Judge David O. Carter has issued a preliminary injunction in a really interesting ruling that has something in it to offend everyone:
U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday ordering the city and county of Los Angeles to ensure that every homeless person living in the notorious Skid Row district has housing by October 18 this year.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
Judge David O. Carter granted a preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiffs in the case last week and now is telling the city and county that they must find single women and unaccompanied children on skid row a place to stay within 90 days, followed by helping families within 120 days and finally, by Oct. 18, offering every homeless person on skid row housing or shelter.
“Los Angeles has lost its parks, beaches, schools, sidewalks, and highway systems due to the inaction of city and county officials who have left our homeless citizens with no other place to turn,” Carter wrote in a 110-page brief laced with quotes from Abraham Lincoln and an extensive history of how skid row was first created.
Elsewhere in the decision, the Judge Carter — a Bill Clinton appointee — cited claims of “systemic racism,” and argued that homelessness is partly a result of historical racial discrimination.
In an unusually complex set of instructions, Judge Carter also ordered $1 billion earmarked by the city for spending on the homeless, announced Monday evening as part of L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s “Justice Budget,” to be placed in an escrow account. He also ordered a 90-day audit of city and county spending on the homeless, and a 30-day “audit of any funds committed to mental health (MH) and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment.”
Judge Carter is right about skid row being a long-standing disgrace. In the 50s and 60s, Los Angeles forced the closure of numerous dilapidated Skid Row residential buildings, including SRO hotels, resulting in the former residents becoming homeless. That, and the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the late 1960s, plus the explosion of illegal drug use, laid the groundwork for the gigantic, sprawling Skid Row of today.
The 30 and 90 day audits of homeless program spending are a great idea, and should be conducted in any city that has both: A.) Big spending on homelessness, and B.) A growing homeless problem despite/because of that increased spending. How much of that money is going directly into the pockets of “activists” and “homeless advocates”? I’m looking at you, Austin.
Likewise the halt to spending from that $1 billion slush fund account. Just where is all that money going?
“Los Angeles has lost its parks, beaches, schools, sidewalks, and highway systems due to the inaction of city and county officials who have left our homeless citizens with no other place to turn.” Mostly true, but the homelessness that plagues Los Angeles is due not to government inaction, but government action in promulgating policies and regulations, both those designed to limit and discourage private sector housing that would otherwise meet the demand for housing (see: slums and SROs), and those designed to lure sturdy beggars, transients, drug addicts and the mentally ill to the area (California’s generous welfare state policies and the need to feed the Homeless Industrial Complex). Plus aggressive policing of the homeless has not been tried and failed, it’s been declared difficult and left untried.
Minuses:
Critical Race Theory is garbage, and using “racism” as a justification for the above infects the entire decision with clearly unconstitutional concerns.
There’s a saying that for any question that begins “Can a federal judge…” the answer is always “Yes.” (Though I should note that Carter is a District Judge for the Central District of California, not the higher Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.) But a federal judge can no more conjure material goods out of the air than King Canute could control the tides. If you declare that every homeless person has a “right” to housing, you guarantee a lot more people will become homeless to enjoy the free ride. This is what previous generations understood as “moral hazard.”
I suspect that the “L.A. Alliance for Human Rights” doesn’t actually want to solve the problem of homelessness, they just want a bigger cut of the Homeless Industrial Complex pie.
Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s Vice President and the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee in 1984, has died at age 93.
It goes without saying that Mondale was wrong about just about everything, with the possible exception of the problems of budget deficits. In many ways Mondale, tied to Carter malaise, redolent of old-style union boss politics and possessing the charisma of a can of generic beets, made a perfect foil for Ronald Reagan. Mondale even promised to raise taxes! All of which led to Reagan winning 49 states in 1984.
(Could rival Gary Hart have done better? Slightly. I could see him winning Minnesota, Colorado and Massachusetts.)
In Mondale’s favor was that I never remember him embarrassing the Carter Administration (Carter was quite capable of that on his own), and he seems to have been well-regarded by staffers and people who worked with him.
I couldn’t find either of the Saturday Night Lives bits with Mondale I remembered (“What were you thinking?” for the tax hike and “Thanks a lot, Mr. Thirteen Electoral Votes!”) on YouTube. However, I did find a clip of a pre-SNL Dennis Miller on Letterman doing a bit about Mondale’s defeat.
In a followup to yeterday’s story, Stephen Nicholas Broderick, the ex-Travis County Sheriff’s deputy wanted for murdering three people, was arrested.
Authorities have arrested the former law officer wanted in the shooting that left three people dead and launched a massive manhunt.
Stephen Nicholas Broderick, 41, was arrested Monday morning around 7:30 a.m. without incident approximately 20 hours after the shooting, Manor Police confirmed. They did say Broderick had a pistol at the time of his arrest, but no shots were fired.
Broderick was found between Manor and Elgin on Old Kimbro Road just south of Highway 290 after at least two 911 calls reporting a suspicious person. The Travis County Sheriff’s Office took the lead with the arrest with Manor Police assisting.
On May 1st, voters in the Texas Sixth U.S. Congressional District, a suburban Metroplex district that runs from Arlington down to Corsicana, go to the polls to fill the seat vacated by late Republican Representative Ron Wright, who died February 7. It’s a Republican-leaning district that’s recently gotten more purple, and there are a bunch of candidates from both parties (plus a Libertarian and an Independent) running for the seat.
I haven’t paid close attention to the race, but one name has popped up a few times in my Twitter feed, that of Republican candidate “Big Dan” Rodimer, who’s running “More Texan Than Though” ad campaigns like this:
Wow, sure was impressive how that guy who’s face we never saw rode that bull! One tiny problem, though: Rodimer ran for a U.S. Congressional seat last year…in Nevada:
A Republican former professional wrestler is district-hopping in hopes of winning a U.S. House seat — and has apparently changed his personality as he tries to make those congressional dreams a reality.
Dan Rodimer won the GOP nomination in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District in November 2020. He went on to lose to Democratic Rep. Susie Lee by a 3-point margin in the suburban Las Vegas-based seat.
A little more than four months later, he’s back, this time running in a special election in a Dallas-based seat more than 1,200 miles away — and he’s almost unrecognizable from his previously failed bid.
In his Nevada race, Rodimer ran ads painting himself as a clean-cut family man, wearing a collared shirt and seated on a couch with his wife and five children.
In the ad, he was defending himself from reports that he had been accused of assault three times between 2010 and 2013. According to a report from the Associated Press in October 2019, Rodimer was accused of punching men “at or outside of nightclubs.”
Now, Rodimer is back and running in a special election in Texas’ 6th Congressional District — a Dallas-based House seat left vacant after Rep. Ron Wright died following a COVID-19 diagnosis.
And Rodimer looks like a totally different person, donning a cowboy hat and positioning himself as a rodeo bull rider with a Texas accent.
American Independent is a lefty source, which explains the bad writing, repetition (can you tell me whether the district is Dallas-based?) and sloppy errors (Rodimer won his Nevada primary June 9, not in November), but the basic outline of facts is correct. Rodimer himself even mentions his Nevada run in his bio. “Dan Rodimer lived in Houston, Texas and worked as a home builder. He owned a house in Galveston and has always thought of Texas as his true home.” So the question is: Was his Nevada bid a carpetbagger bid, or is his Texas bid one now?
I asked Rodimer exactly when he moved to Texas on both his campaign email address and his Twitter account, and have not received a reply.
Issue-wise, I have have no problems with Rodimer, but I do have issue with his carpetbagger bid and how thickly he spackles on his Texas persona.
There are ten other Republican candidates running in the TX-06 field. I suspect more than one of them are acceptable conservative Republican candidates.
Just imagine that there’s an “allegedly” in that headline, but that does appear to be the case:
Authorities have lifted the shelter in place order near the apartment complex where three people were shot and killed Sunday, but the suspect remains at large, Interim Austin Police Chief Joe Chacon said during a second update on the .
People who were sheltering inside their residences and businesses can now come out, and people who had been out of their homes will now be allowed to go back in, Chacon said.
Chacon also confirmed that the suspect, 41-year-old Stephen Nicholas Broderick, is a former deputy with the Travis County sheriff’s office.
Law enforcement units have begun to leave the Great Hills Trail area where the shooting happened as Chacon said the efforts to find Broderick now transition into a fugitive search.
However, Chacon urged the community to remain vigilant. He asked people who may have information about his whereabouts to avoid approaching him and call 911.
He’s a black male “5 feet, 7 inches tall and was last seen wearing a gray hoodie, sunglasses and a baseball cap.” Also looks like he’s got a tattoo that says “Lord Have Mercy” on his chest at his neckline. If you see this guy, call 911:
Here’s some videos of BAE’s new M1299 self-propelled Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) firing Raytheon’s precision-guided M982 Excalibur artillery round. The round itself isn’t new, it’s been around for over a decade, but using the ERCA, they recently extended the effective range of the shell out to 43 miles:
“That blew up real good!”
Here’s a longer video that shows more detail, but also has one of those annoying computer voice-over tracks:
I suspect the ability to fire and scoot from such long ranges will be useful on future battlefields. They’re also working an integrating an autoloader into the ERCA.
Greetings! Welcome to an extra-late Friday LinkSwarm! I had a doctor’s appointment and have been running behind all day. This week: #BlackLivesMatter activists raking off that sweet, sweet graft, mainstream media keeps up its assault on independent thought, and a bunch of Texas news.
Hustling the rubes for #BlackLivesMatter Dane-geld must really pay well for “trained Marxist” Patrisse Khan-Cullors, because she just bought herself a $1.4 million home in an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood where “the vast majority of residents are white.” Evidently disdaining “whiteness” is for .
Cullors isn’t the only BLM biggie buying houses on the grift. The FBI arrested Toledo, Ohio #BlackLivesMatter activist Sir Maejor Page for allegedly spending “over $200,000 on personal items generated from donations received through BLMGA Facebook page with no identifiable purchase or expenditure for social or racial justice” and is facing “federal wire fraud and money laundering charges for allegedly spending the money on tailored suits, a home in Ohio, and guns.”
I am suing Twitter for defamation because they said I, James O’Keefe, ‘operated fake accounts.’” O’Keefe wrote in an emailed statement to The Federalist. “This is false, this is defamatory, and they will pay. Section 230 may have protected them before, but it will not protect them from me. The complaint will be filed Monday.”
The discovery process for that is going to be lit…
Speaking of censorship, the Epoch Times had to suspend printing of its Hong Kong edition after its presses were busted up. For the fourth time.
“NYT Journalist Erases ENTIRE Twitter After National Pulse Unearths Posts Admitting “Working For The Chinese Communist Party.” That would be one Jonah K. Kessel.
There are three main elements in what @nytimes reporter @farnazfassihi does which infuriates Iranian people.
1. She consistently spreads misinformation regarding Iran. All this misinfo is in one direction: whitewashing the IR regime's actions against its people. Examples follow.
2. She has blocked almost all Iranians who may point out the falsehood of the information she spreads. She used to do that on any instance of noting the lies. But as I will show below, she is now using a bot to block ANY mention of her name in Persian.#NYTimesPropaganda
Public officials across the country are only now discovering the foreseeable consequences of these decisions. City legislatures are realizing that in their attempt to make life better for marginalized groups, they have only contributed to the disproportionate hardships they already face. As it becomes apparent that moves to defund the police have exacerbated criminality, some local authorities are reversing cuts to police budgets passed last year amid much radical breast-beating but without much thought for who would bear the likely consequences.
Minneapolis is the epicentre of the defund movement—the city in which George Floyd died last May as he was being taken into police custody. In spite of a spike in crime there in 2020, including a 70 percent increase in homicides, the Minneapolis City Council decided in December to redistribute $8 million from the police budget to other violence prevention services. At the time, Mayor Jacob Frey said there were “good reasons to be optimistic about the future in Minneapolis.” The move to reallocate funds away from the police department was proclaimed a “Safety for All” plan by its supporters. Unfortunately, it has made the streets of Minneapolis considerably less safe. In the first three weeks of 2021, Minneapolis saw a 250 percent increase in gunshot wound victims from the same time last year.
“Texas Supreme Court Delivers Dallas Salon Owner Shelley Luther a Delayed Victory.” “The remaining five days in jail and $7,000 fine ordered by the district court is now off the table entirely.”
Until Biden came along, every single covid-19 relief bill was approved with overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses. Congress passed three covid relief packages in March 2020 with margins of 96-1, 90-8, and 96-0 in the Senate, and with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House. This was followed in April by the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, which passed 388-5 in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate. Indeed, the votes were so bipartisan that Democrats blocked another covid relief package until after Election Day — because they did not want to let President Donald Trump claim credit for another bipartisan victory before voters went to the polls. But after he lost and they finally allowed another covid bill to come up for a vote in December, it passed both houses of Congress with similar margins.
Yeah, but bipartisan doesn’t curry favor with the hard left who want massive graft payoffs and total control.
Former Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst was arrested on Class A Misdemeanor Assault Family Violence charges in Dallas after a scuffle over a laptop. “Hotel management told police officers that the woman was assaulted by Dewhurst. Officers spoke with the woman who said that Dewhurst was boarding a bus when the woman remembered that she had his laptop. It was a shared laptop that they both had access to, the affidavit said.” I wonder if the woman is the same 40-year old “live-in girlfriend” Leslie Caron who allegedly broke two of his ribs last year. Also makes you wonder: 1. Just what was on that laptop, and 2. What Dewhurst, a man with a reported net worth of over $200 million, was doing riding a bus…
I want everybody who works hard and plays fair to prosper. I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you’re going to create other problems, like there is a ladder of success that people climb and some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they’re simply not intended to be careers.
The problem with Austin this time of year is that the air is just filled with pollen:
There is no doubt that part of the goal of Allen v. Farrow was to finish off both Allen’s career and his legacy by presenting a definitive guilty verdict in the court of public opinion. The filmmakers, aided by a mostly uncritical press, have undoubtedly won over a large segment of the public—those who come to this subject for the first time through their HBO subscriptions, or who aren’t inclined to question “survivors.” But for those of us who are familiar with the story, or who take the trouble to check it out, the effect is the opposite. If making the case against Allen requires his cultural prosecutors to weave this kind of intellectually dishonest, emotionally manipulative, selectively edited account of the underlying drama, then the case for acquittal becomes stronger, not weaker.
For some reason, WordPress is now putting random gaps between bullet points in the LinkSwarm, so I’m having to tinker with the look and feel a bit. I may even have to update to a more current version…
Congressional Democrats plan to unveil legislation expanding the size of the Supreme Court on Thursday, according to three congressional sources familiar with the closely held measure.
The bill would add four seats to the high court, bringing the total to 13 from the current nine. The bill is led by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, Subcommittee chair Hank Johnson, and freshman Rep. Mondaire Jones. In the Senate, the bill is being championed by Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
Never mind that “sainted” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg opposed court packing, or that Biden himself denounced the idea back in the Bush43 days:
Last week, President Biden announced his new committee to study increasing the size of the Supreme Court. Here’s Senator Biden in April 2005 decrying FDR’s court packing scheme in 1937 as a corrupt power grab: pic.twitter.com/zv1UxIuoCO
The question is whether they’re seriously going to try to push this through, no matter how many seats it loses them in 2022, or if this is all a mime show to appease the activist base that demands seizing complete power by any means necessary.
Just how delusional are Democrats? Certainly the leftwing media bubble lets them continuously get high on their own supply, and they’ve been emboldened since their corrupt push to enthrone Slow Joe over both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump was a success. (And speaking of Bernie, he was on record as opposing court packing as well.) But surely the more sober party strategists realize they actually lost House seats last year, and outright stole three senate seats between Georgia and Michigan. And all that only got them to 50/50 in the senate. Are they really willing to go all in on court packing when pushing through ObamaCare probably cost them a dozen statehouse chambers for generation?
A worst-case scenario for them would to go all-in on court packing, still come up short, and get slaughtered in 2022…
