The Project Veritas Deep State Videos

October 14th, 2018

Remember back all the way to last month, when the the Kavanaugh hearings went from senators questioning a nominee over his philosophy to ideological nuclear war over what one woman may have remembered about something that may have happened at a nameless party at an unknown person’s house at an unremembered location sometime in the early 1980s?

Just as that was sucking up every last bit of America’s political oxygen, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas had the misfortune to start dropping hidden camera videos of deep state bureaucrats bragging how they worked for “democratic socialism”/”social justice”/etc. on the taxpayer’s dime. If you’re like me, you may have been aware of the videos, but were too busy focusing on Kavanaugh stuff to actually watch them. As a public service, I thought it would be good to post all those videos in one place now that people might actually have time to view them all.

Bonus! Here’s a Prager University video of O’Keefe talking about his various earlier media bias videos.

Gosnell Opened Yesterday

October 13th, 2018

You might want to consider seeing it if you’re the “watching movies in theaters” type.

Here’s the trailer:

LinkSwarm for October 12, 2018

October 12th, 2018

Trying to edit this last night brought up a repeated 502 error, since fixed. So enjoy this LinkSwarm as a triumph of persistence over technology:

  • How the Kavanaugh fight united the right around President Donald Trump:

    Trumpism is now the unregretted tattoo that altered the Republican coalition, making it edgier, more rugged, and more relentless in pursuing its policy objectives.

    Confronted with a liberal self-styled “resistance” movement—whose very name reeks of the virtue-signaling that galls the right—Trump responded in kind. Left-wingers march in the streets and chase prominent conservatives out of restaurants; he bows his back and marches Kavanaugh onto the bench for a lifetime. Liberals feel better for a weekend; pragmatic conservatives get to feel vindicated for decades. Good trade.

    Trump not only refused to rescind Kavanaugh’s nomination when the confirmation process got rocky—as both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had done with flagging nominees—he barnstormed the country and held campaign rallies in jam-packed basketball arenas rallying his coalition behind Kavanaugh. After playing nice for a handful of surprisingly diplomatic days, enabling a judiciary committee hearing to fairly hear the allegations against Kavanaugh, Trump retrieved his megaphone from its holster and unleashed on the judge’s liberal Senate and media antagonists.

    Conservatives who may have been privately uncertain on how to proceed in the face of the allegations found the light in the flames of Trump’s heat. The consensus on the right became clear: this was not a competition of memories between two middle-aged professionals who grew up privileged at boozy teen parties in suburban Maryland. By last Saturday’s confirmation vote, this episode was not even predominantly about Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford; it was a tectonic struggle between the voters’ chosen Republican government and the ruthless Democratic minority seeking to topple it by any means necessary.

  • Republicans quintuple fundraising in wake of Kavanaugh hearings.
  • There Is No Such Thing As A Moderate Democrat In 2018.” Focused on the Tennessee senate race, but applicable everywhere. “Dianne Feinstein picks your judges, Bernie Sanders runs the budget and Chuck Schumer runs everything.” I’ve been making the same point since 2010. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Jay Cost, by way of Alexander Hamilton, explains why America won’t have a another civil war: “To put matters bluntly, we do not have to like one another, so long as we continue to make money off one another.” To which I would add: Only left-wing loudmouths on Twitter are really trying to provoke a civil war. Average people rarely mention the things that rage huge on the Internet in their day-to-day lives…
  • Remember, it’s only a “mob” if it’s made up of Republicans. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of mob violence:

  • Some anti-Kavanaugh protestors were indeed paid Astroturf. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Border agents in Texas arrested three sex offenders in two days, one of whom had been jailed in Dallas. All three men have been previously convicted of offenses involving a minor, according to officials with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.” (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abbott’s twitter feed.)
  • Hurricane Michael leaves at least six dead.
  • Video of the aftermath:

  • Speaking of devastating: Holy moly!

  • Least anyone think I’m reflexively pro-Trump, his idea to increase the amount of Ethanol in gasoline is an astonishingly bad idea for numerous reasons. And get ready for it to start destroying your lawnmower engines…
  • How Soviet Communism tried to kill weekends. (Hat tip: Charles Martin on Twitter.)
  • The Navy is slowly working its way back to actual readiness. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Army to add WindGuard active radar defense systems to work with Trophy active defense systems on M1 tanks.
  • Mass criminal roundup in northern Mississippi.

    Around 150 gang members were arrested or validated with affiliations to the Simon City Royals, Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings, Vice Lords, and the Aryan Brotherhood.

    Over 200 registered sex offenders living within the Northern District of Mississippi were checked for compliance in regards to sex offender registration requirements. Around 150 home visits were conducted on high- to moderate-risk offenders on probation with the Mississippi Department of Corrections and the United States Probation Service.

    Overall, 255 violent offenders were picked up during Operation Triple Beam. They were wanted on charges including homicide, aggravated assault, sexual assault, illegal gun crimes, narcotics possession and distribution, robbery, arson, and sex offender registration violations.

  • More voting fraud down in the Rio Grande Valley:

    Following a nine-day trial, a district court judge has voided the results of the City of Mission mayoral election after finding the winning campaign engaged in a conspiracy to bribe voters and harvest mail-in ballots.

    Norberto “Beto” Salinas, the former mayor of Mission of 20 years, filed a lawsuit against current mayor Armando “Doc” O’Caña after several witnesses claimed bribery, mail-in ballot harvesting, and illegal voting during the June 9 runoff election. On Friday, 93rd District Court visiting Judge J. Bonner Dorsey agreed with Salinas and voided the results of the election. “I cannot ascertain the true outcome of the election,” Dorsey said.

    Salinas’ camp had to prove 157 votes were illegally cast, the number the candidate lost by in the election. Dorsey ruled, “I hold or find, by clear and convincing evidence, that the number of illegal votes was in excess of 158.”

  • China blinks thrice over the trade war:

    First, it conceded in August by removing U.S. oil imports from a list of possible duties. Two months earlier, China – perhaps trying to either intimate U.S. oil producers (who have been largely supportive of Trump’s policies thus far) who would in turn pressure President Trump, or either by pressuring Trump directly, indicated it would levy a 25 percent duty on U.S. oil imports.

    Second, since China is the largest buyer of American crude, Beijing likely discarded one of its strongest bargaining chips in the trade war so far. Some reports claim that U.S. oil imports to China are worth $8 billion all by themselves, so erasing oil from the tariff list reduced the value of sanctioned goods by roughly one-third.

    As far as Beijing’s LNG tariff threats are concerned, the reduction from an earlier 25 percent duty to 10 percent could also be considered another blink on China’s part. Beijing, though it does have a host of other gas and LNG suppliers, at the end of the day still needs American LNG as the country continues to pivot away from dirtier burning coal needed for power production in favor of cleaning burning natural gas. By 2020, per government mandate, gas is earmarked to make up at least 10 percent of China’s energy mix, with further earmarks by 2030.

  • Creepy porn lawyer endorses Beto.
  • NFL running back legend Jim Brown comes out against NFL players taking a knee:

    “I am an American. That flag is my flag, and I want to represent it that day.”

    How many tweets it takes before a white liberal calls him “Uncle Tom”: One.

  • Speaking of Twitter, they’ve banned conservative GayPatriot again.
  • “Cant find a Nazi to punch? Make one!” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Cost for male student to defend himself from charges of sexual assault even though the girl admitted the sex was mutual: $12,000. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin.)
  • Austin writer decides that maybe he shouldn’t spend every waking moment of his life high on weed:

    My son was born in 2002. I didn’t have an office job, so I was around a lot to get high and enjoy the cartoons. I opened a packet of Reefer’s peanut butter cups at his preschool fund-raiser and stunk up the place. But pot wasn’t just an occasional funny thing for me to do on weekends. I got stoned the day my son came home from the hospital and stayed that way, with few breaks, for a decade and a half. Of course I put him in danger because I couldn’t stop getting high. I was a drug addict.

    Snip.

    In March of 2017, my mother died. The hour before she passed, I was outside the hospital, getting a shipment of medical gummies from a friend. I was high when I watched her die, I was high at her funeral, and I was high every day for the next eight months. To say I was “self-medicating” to deal with grief would be too kind. My addicted self took grief as a no-limits license to get stoned.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Facebook Engineer Quits Over Company’s Mob-Like Attacks On Anyone Opposed To ‘Left-Leaning Ideology.’”
  • Carlos Danger is eligable for early release.
  • Dallas City Council lives in fear that the state legislature may actually allow voters to turn down tax increases.
  • “Amazon Raises Minimum Wage For Workers Building Their Own Robotic Replacements.”
  • Beto Boomlet Busts

    October 11th, 2018

    Remember all that breathless talk on how Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was going to beat incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz as part of a giant “blue wave” against President Donald Trump?

    New polls say: Not so much.

    According to a New York Times poll, Cruz leads Democratic challenger O’ Rourke by nine points. The crosstabs further down the page show a 10 point Republican-over-Democrat edge among respondents, 38% to 28%, which much more closely mirrors previous exit polls than any of the other 2018 Texas Senate race polls I’ve covered. The piece also shows different results based on different turnout models; if the electorate looks like it did in 2014 (the last midterm election), Cruz lead is closer to 16 points. (Hat tip: Empower Texans, which notes that early October polls for Texas races like this have understated Republican support by 4-5 point.)

    A Quinnipac poll also has Cruz up by nine points. (That poll had Republican ID at 35%, Democrat at 23%.)

    Other links on the race:

  • The Cult of Beto:

    There is no way Robert Francis O’Rourke, alias “Beto,” a.k.a. the no-doubt gleaming future of the Democratic Party is as delusional about his prospects for success as his followers. That would be impossible.

    The Texas congressman is your average 46-year-old liberal failson politico, the grandson of a secretary of the Navy, the son of a judge, a hanger-on in his party who graduated from playing in an amazingly bad hardcore punk band to a seat on the El Paso City Council. After that, he challenged Rep. Silvestre Reyes, an eight-term Democratic incumbent and chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, with the help of outside cash and endorsements from both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The two issues of crucial importance to reviving the fortunes of the working class on which O’Rourke fought his campaign were support for same-sex marriage and drug legalization, both of which Reyes, a Catholic, opposed.

    Now O’Rourke is the Democratic nominee facing off against Sen. Ted Cruz. This is not some prize that party leadership granted to its favorite son. Defeating a sitting Republican senator in the Lone Star State is the kind of impossible job you give to someone you know slightly but don’t much care about, someone minimally competent but ultimately expendable, someone whose particular qualities don’t matter all that much because it’s a just a slot that needs to be filled and you’re just happy someone is bored or desperate enough to fill it — the kind of job you give, in other words, to Beto.

    Snip.

    No single article or tweet could do justice to the brain-destroying tedium of hyperbole, the willful exaggeration, the gushing faddishness, the hipster capitalist complacency, the novelty songwriting contest banality, the experimental filmmaker commercial-directing pseudo-profundity, the sheer late-night TV-level humorlessness of the Beto cult. In a recent column Dana Milbank promised to reveal the ingredients behind “the special sauce that flavors Betomania.” Here they are:

    • “O’Rourke’s cool factor: skateboarding at Whataburger, playing the air drums, doing his laundry on Facebook Live, and scoring appearances with Ellen DeGeneres and Stephen Colbert …”
    • Fifty thousand people attended a — free — Willie Nelson concert at which he appeared.
    • “His partisan jabs are delicate.”
    • He sometimes says “pendejo.”

    Snip.

    It’s worth recalling that excitable rank-and-file Democrats do this to themselves every few years, especially in Texas. Remember Wendy Davis and the famous shoes with which she was going to vault from the floor of the Texas Statehouse to the governor’s mansion, the White House, and, presumably, to infinity and beyond? The last I heard, after losing the governor’s race in a spectacular landslide she was doing wine-and-cheese one-offs with F-listers at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, where she signed the electric pink Nikes for a lucky fan who had purchased them with his own money years earlier at her estate sale.

  • Jim Geraghty points out the obvious. “And no, Beto O’Rourke does not look like he’s going to win in Texas, which will raise tough questions about whether the $23 million donated to O’Rourke’s campaign could have been better spent elsewhere.”

  • A review of the First Cruz-O’Rourke debate.
  • Twitchy has a roundup, including this:

  • Evidently dozens of fawning profiles in national liberal publications doesn’t actually translate into winning over Texas voters. Who knew? Well, besides Wendy Davis…

    Google Embraces Censorship

    October 10th, 2018

    The leadership of Google is very, very upset that you commoners keep making political choices of which they disapprove, so they’ve crafted a document to justify why they have to censor your views. They favor a “European” regime to emphasize “safety” from your non-liberal views over that pesky and outdated “free speech.”

    The fact that they actually label the document “The Good Censor” sort of gives the game away, doesn’t it?

    An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked exclusively to Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the “American tradition” of free speech on the internet is no longer viable.

    Despite leaked video footage showing top executives declaring their intention to ensure that the rise of Trump and the populist movement is just a “blip” in history, Google has repeatedly denied that the political bias of its employees filter into its products.

    But the 85-page briefing, titled “The Good Censor,” admits that Google and other tech platforms now “control the majority of online conversations” and have undertaken a “shift towards censorship” in response to unwelcome political events around the world.

    Examples cited in the document include the 2016 election and the rise of Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.

    Responding to the leak, an official Google source said the document should be considered internal research, and not an official company position.

    The briefing labels the ideal of unfettered free speech on the internet a “utopian narrative” that has been “undermined” by recent global events as well as “bad behavior” on the part of users. It can be read in full below.

    It acknowledges that major tech platforms, including Google, Facebook and Twitter initially promised free speech to consumers. “This free speech ideal was instilled in the DNA of the Silicon Valley startups that now control the majority of our online conversations,” says the document.

    You can tell the document has came out a while ago (the date on it is March 2018), since the “Russia hacked the election” fantasy still plays a prominent role.

    PP26-34 – The briefing explains how “users behaving badly” undermines free speech on the internet and allows “crummy politicians to expand their influence.” The briefing bemoans that “racists, misogynists, and oppressors” are allowed a voice alongside “revolutionaries, whistleblowers, and campaigners.”

    “Social Justice Warriors: Good! Republicans: Bad!” How dare the proles be allowed to express approval for politicians of which we disapprove? And always remember that “racists, misogynists, and oppressors” is SJW-speak for anyone who refuses to toe the party line.

    P45 – After warning about the rise of online hate speech, the briefing approvingly cites Sarah Jeong, infamous for her hate speech against white males (Google is currently facing a lawsuit alleging it discriminates against white males, among other categories).
    P45 – The briefing bemoans the fact that the internet has until recently been a level playing field, warning that “rational debate is damaged when authoritative voices and ‘have a go’ commentators receive equal weighting.”

    “Stop embarrassing our experts! Only experts with approved political opinions should be allowed to hold the conch!”

    Page 70 indicates the shift to censorship is in response to “user demand,” which is false in the aggregate. Users aren’t clamoring for censorship, only the SJW hard left is doing that. Ordinary users want freedom of information, not what Google thinks we should be reading because the left keeps losing elections.

    It ends with lots of fig-leafs about “transparency,” but the real purpose of the doc is to talk about the “problems” of free speech.

    You can read the entire document itself in all its 85 pages of PowerPoint glory.

    Google’s assertions to the contrary, this is not an internal document to decide what to do, this is an internal document to justify what they were already doing.

    I don’t want my Internet search engine to be a “good” censor, or indeed any kind of censor. I don’t want my search results filtered for the “correct” opinions Google’s far left leadership wants me to hold. Between this, James Damore’s firing, and their decision to build a better censorship engine for China, Google already made the decision to embrace their inner censor before this document was ever commissioned.

    Now would be a good time to switch your default search engine to DuckDuckGo, if you haven’t already…

    Kavanaugh: The Aftermath

    October 9th, 2018

    Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed to the United States Supreme Court, but the Democrats’ last-minute Hail Mary smear attack has inflicted lasting damage…on themselves:

  • What exactly do Democrats mean by “take the gloves off?”

    There is a dangerous and irresponsible strain of opinion telling the Democratic Party today that when they lose, it’s because they aren’t fighting hard enough…The thesis goes something like this: the left has total dominance of the culture, and total dominance of the popular vote, so the answer to why they lose not infrequently is that the system is rigged against them, and they must fight all the harder and “take the gloves off” or something like that to achieve their ends.

    The gloves have been off for a very long time in American politics. How quickly we forget the attempted murder of multiple Republican politicians including Steve Scalise, who may never walk normally again. Just this past week we saw a Democratic staffer who doxxed multiple Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee indicted, facing nearly 50 years in federal prison for his crimes. We saw Cory Gardner revealing his wife had received graphic texts of a beheading after his vote for Kavanaugh, along with their home address. And in Washington, we saw whatever all this is.

    And this is not new, of course – it stretches back a long time. The gloves were off for the American Left in the late 1960s, when campus and activist violence became normalized. They were off in the 1970s when the outgrowth of that spirit of protest led to the sequence of Weathermen bombings that crisscrossed the nation.

    Snip.

    What this whole “we’re the wet rag party” talk really translates too is: we, the abidingly secular Americans who were repeatedly promised we were the ethnically and sexually diverse and dominant coalition during the Obama years, now feel frustrated by being merely ascendant and feel instead entitled to absolute and immediate victory. And that justifies the “we’re coming for you” attitude today. Because any roadblocks or speedbumps for that agenda are now viewed as the vestiges of dead old white men protecting the interests of modern old white men.

    This was a surprisingly dominant viewpoint as recently as a few years ago, accepted even among intelligent people on the right. Then a surprising group of people came along willing to say: No. And that has made all the difference.

  • The Kavanaugh witch hunt has radicalized the normals:

    Even the gimpiest of conservagimps can’t pretend that the attack on Kavanaugh isn’t an attack on us. The last few weeks has made it impossible for them to live in denial any longer. Hell, when Bret Stephens wakes the hell up you know the alarm is going off. At this rate, next we will see anti-Trump sex symbol George Will announce that the Democrats have been “unsporting.”

    Snip.

    But the rest of us are woke, and getting woker . We are red-pilled, and getting red-pillier. We are getting, you might say, militant.

    See, we Normals get that if they can do this to Brett Kavanaugh, they can do this to anyone. If they win, they can destroy anyone Normal, or Normal-friendly, by a mere accusation (Notice how none of this applies to the elite – since they really don’t care about sexual abuse, their own gross collection of woman beaters, abusers, and pervs get a pass). This is the left’s dream tool. They don’t have to prove anything. They simply have to point, screech “Witch!” and their enemy disappears like in that bizarro universe Star Trek episode where Spock had a beard.

    But it has become clear that we are not accepting this, because to accept this is to accept our own submission to these goofs in perpetuity. At first, the response was anecdotal. Hugh Hewitt had a bunch of women callers dial in, all of them irate, in what he described to me as an unprecedented “avalanche.” I personally got emails from center right folks, Normals, who do not like politics. In fact, they hate politics. But now they are paying attention. And they are mad. Every man knows he has a bull’s-eye on his back. Every woman knows her husband, brother, or son could be next. These people aren’t afraid of men being held accountable for things they did, but of false accusations that liberals would strip them of their ability to defend themselves against.

    he attempted human sacrifice of Brett Kavanaugh on the altar of unrestricted abortion is too much for them. And now the polls are making it clear that that they are angry, ticked off, and ready to low crawl over jagged glass shards to vote against the Democrats who instigated this atrocity.

    Sure, anecdotes are tricky. But the polls are less so. Heidi Heitkamp is gone. She’s toast. Claire McCaskill, toast. That goofy guy in Indiana, looking bad. Manchin? He knows what time it is, so he might weasel through.

    We are not going to forget what happened here. And this is going to have a lasting impact, but not one the Democrats are going to like.

  • More proof of the Kavanaugh effect on 2018 races:

    Several public polls have shown a fading “enthusiasm gap” between Democratic and Republican voters since the Kavanaugh fight escalated. The campaign arm for House Republicans reported an explosion in small-dollar donations. “[W]hat the Kavanaugh experience has done is gotten Republicans excited,” Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, chairman of the NRCC, told Fox News.

    Other polls showed Republicans pulling away in red-state Senate races. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., both broke 50 percent in the CBS/YouGov polls. Blackburn is running to replace Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., who voted against Kavanaugh, is down by nearly 9 points in the RealClearPolitics average. The Cook Political Report has shifted the Montana Senate race in the GOP’s favor.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Even Democrats taking back the house is no longer the slam dunk Democrats previously pretended.
  • Poorly written editorial blames white women for Kavanaugh’s confirmation, voting Republican. “After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.” Yes, there’s nothing like spicing up your turgid, far-left Social Justice Warrior feminist prose by breaking out the purple pulp writing cliches of the 1930s!
  • “We ain’t cray cray like ya’ll!”

    October 8th, 2018

    Enjoy this Terrence K. Williams tweet about the left’s ongoing meltdown, complete with embedded video of liberal lunacy. “Ya’ll need to go to bed!”

    Who was it in the Democratic Party that decided “Yeah, chanting, screaming lunatics, that’s the look we want for our party!” It used to be these lunatics would come out for special occasions like May Day and then go away. However, since Occupy Wall Street and the Wisconsin recall, they now seem like a year-round phenomena of rent-a-protestor lunacy. It’s not entirely a coincidence that their rise has coincided with a dramatic decline in Democratic Party officeholders.

    It seems their primary accomplishment is keeping Democrats focused on pleasing the hard left while alienating moderates and independents, which is hardly a recipe for electoral success. It’s more like a recipe for becoming the Texas Democratic Party: Pleasing your activist base while throwing away all chances of top-of-the-ticket success.

    A smarter party might realize that and correct course, but today’s Democratic Party is quite far from smart…

    Official Roll Call Record of the Kavanaugh Vote

    October 7th, 2018

    Since I went looking for this and actually had trouble finding it, here are links to the official roll call records of the cloture and confirmation votes for Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court:

  • The cloture vote, with 51 Yeas and 49 Nays.

    Brett Kavanaugh Cloture Vote Alphabetical

    Brett Kavanaugh Cloture Vote Yea or Nay

  • The confirmation vote, with 50 Yeas, 48 Nays, and a paired set of Present (Murkowski (R-AK) and Not Voting (Daines (R-MT)).

    Brett Kavanaugh Vote Alphabetical

    Brett Kavanaugh Vote Yea or Nay

  • One reason I’m putting this up is a saw someone on Twitter stating that Vice President Mike Pence cast a deciding vote, but in fact he was not required to break a tie for either vote. Thus far the only vote Vice President Pence has cast to break a tie in the Senate was the vote confirming Russell Vought as Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

    Kavanaugh Confirmed and Sworn In

    October 6th, 2018

    I was going to post a “Kavanaugh will be confirmed today” post this morning, but then figured an extra large helping of sloth would let me report that he was confirmed. “The Senate confirmed Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court Saturday, in a close 50-48 vote that saw just one Republican and one Democrat cross party lines.” The Democrat was Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and the Republican was Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, of whom Sarah Palin is already making noises about primarying.

    After being confirmed, Kavanaugh was quickly sworn in:

    Now some links on the subject:

  • The more the Democratic Party embraces the radical elements of its base, the further power slips from its grasp:

    A Democratic Party lacking the White House, majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate, and the Supreme Court imitated strength in practicing rudeness. Now, hours before the confirmation vote that they sought to postpone, the Democrats’ boisterousness appears, belatedly at least, as camouflage for weakness. This weakness, which may seem anything but when in earshot of protesters, appears most apparent in the U.S. Senate. Democrats lack the raw numbers to win.

    Unable to rely on an institutional or the democratic apparatus to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, they embraced a by-any-means-necessary strategy.

    Jackson A. Cosko, 27, a “fellow” paid by an outside group to work for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and a recent employee of Senator Maggie Hassan, appeared in federal court on Thursday on charges related to the doxxing — the unauthorized publication of personal details for the purpose of harassment — of several senators, including Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, and Lindsey Graham. Cosko allegedly posted personal telephone numbers and home addresses using a Senate computer.

    “If you tell anyone[,] I will leak it all,” the perpetrator allegedly told a Democratic staffer who witnessed Cosko accessing a computer in Hassan’s office. “Emails[,] signal conversations[,] gmails. Senators[’] children’s health information and socials.”

    The doxxing of Kavanaugh supporters follows death threats to the judge’s family and the repeated interruptions at his confirmation hearings that turned the proceedings into chaos — chaos perpetuated by Kamala Harris and other Democrats on the Judiciary Committee — on Day One, which witnessed Capitol police arrest 70 (they arrested over 300 on Thursday). Democrats planned this spontaneous show of outrage on a conference call. Anti-Kavanaugh protesters similarly occupied state offices of Susan Collins and Joe Manchin, resulting in multiple arrests.

    More recent confrontations, including two activists trapping Senator Jeff Flake in a Capitol elevator, also initially appeared as grassroots outrage, a perception that evaporated with the revelation that the two women, like one of Kavanaugh’s accusers, work as social-justice activists (yes, and people make a living playing video games, too). They identified themselves as sexual assault survivors. One failed to note her employment as the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a far-left advocacy group.

    As one Hill staffer explained to me, the protesters work in shifts the way assembly-line workers do. They clock-in, then shout, hold signs, and hector lawmakers. Some, finding their way to the House side of Capitol Hill, need impromptu education sessions instructing that the lower-chamber does not vote on judges. When their shifts end, they abruptly clock-out and another group of workers takes their place. The insult that liberals protest because they do not hold jobs does not work here. These liberals protest as part of their jobs.

    Snip.

    Perpetuating this minority status ironically comes at the expense of, and in service to, the minority rule enjoyed by Democrats for decades. Democrats did not need the U.S. Supreme Court to institute Social Security or establish the Peace Corps. But abortion on demand, gay marriage, prohibition on school prayer, the abolition of the death penalty, and much else on the liberal wish list became the law of the land because of the U.S. Supreme Court, a parallel national legislature when controlled by the Left.

    A party without the speaker’s gavel or the word “majority” prefixing “leader” struggles to pass substantive legislation. Add to these handicaps widespread public contempt for much of that party’s agenda, and one begins to see why Democrats need the courts so much. Unfortunately for them, the rude, no-holds-barred gambit for the high court (dishonestly used as something other than a court in their hands) makes it even further from their grasp.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    Tucker Carlson on how the Democrats lost the fight:

    Ironically, the Democrats adoption of scorched-earth #Resistance tactics, partially in response of Trump’s unorthodox methods and willingness to fight back, has had the effect of uniting the Republican Party behind President Trump.

  • How Democrat tactics in the Kavanaugh hearing threatens all Americans:

    Any rational observer of the Democrats’ non-stop character assassination machine can see that something is seriously sick in our republic. Instead of allowing Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee were permitted to use trumped-up, hip-pocketed charges to stage a show trial more in tune with a totalitarian system.

    Like Justice Clarence Thomas before him, Kavanaugh has undergone pre-meditated, well-coordinated attacks by Democrat elites who cling to the apron strings of an anti-human brand of feminism to justify this craft. There’s a good term for the practice they’re engaged in: ritual defamation.

    Perhaps an apt metaphor for ritual defamation is the gang rape of one’s character and good name. Whatever the end result, this episode represents an underhanded rape of the rule of law, as well as of Brett Kavanaugh’s character.

  • Which, in turn, links to Laird Wilcox’s checklist for The Practice of Ritual Defamation.
  • Also, UT beat OU and James Woods had his Twitter account restored, so all in all the last few days have been very good…

    LinkSwarm for October 5, 2018

    October 5th, 2018

    Welcome to the season where ugly monsters in lurid costumes go running around shrieking at the sheer delight at scaring other people. And those are just the Democratic protestors on Capitol Hill!

    The Brett Kavanaugh cloture vote today, and the Supreme Court confirmation vote is Saturday. And Kavanaugh links dominate the top of this LinkSwarm:

  • Republicans are fired up after the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and the Democratic edge for the 2018 midterms has disappeared. Or so says that notorious Republican shill organization, NPR.
  • More on the same subject:

    Let’s say you’re Joe Manchin in West Virginia. What you needed was for this nomination to be uncontroversial, and a sure thing for confirmation. A party-line contested vote the whole country is watching is a nightmare. Why? Because in a red state like the one Manchin represents, the majority will favor confirmation and find it to be a decisive issue in their vote — so Manchin voting against Kavanaugh will set him up to reap the wrath of the voters in a state which went 65 percent for Trump in 2016.

    But it’s worse than that for Manchin, because he doesn’t have a good escape from the Kavanaugh confirmation. You’d say his easy way out is to vote yes, except what the Left has done is to so whip up their voters with the Ford allegations and the copycats who followed that Manchin will lose votes from his own side if he votes to confirm the judge.

    This isn’t a theory, by the way. It’s what the polls show.

  • A new poll finds that 58 percent of voters in West Virginia think Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court following his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.
  • The Public Opinion strategies poll commissioned by the Judicial Crisis Network found an overwhelming majority of West Virginians (59 percent) thought Kavanaugh’s testimony was more believable than Christine Blasey Ford, who accused the federal judge of sexually assaulting her more than 35 years ago at a drunken high school party. Those who believe Kavanaugh include 81 percent of Republicans, 43 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Independent voters.
  • Manchin is locked in a dead-heat race against Patrick Morrissey, West Virginia’s Attorney General, and his vote is now going to be the defining issue in that race either way.

    Manchin’s conundrum isn’t unique. Claire McCaskill in Missouri is already a committed no on Kavanaugh, and her troubles have begun as well…

  • A new poll released by The Missouri Scout on Saturday shows that Republican challenger Josh Hawley has taken a two-point lead over Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in the Missouri Senate race just days after she announced she will be voting against the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
  • Hawley leads McCaskill by a margin of 48 percent to 46 percent in the poll conducted by Missouri Scout over two days, from Wednesday, September 26 to Thursday, September 27.
  • McCaskill announced her opposition to Kavanaugh on September 19. The second day of the poll was conducted on the same day Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of attempting to sexually assault her 36 years ago at a time and place she cannot recall and with no corroborating witnesses or evidence, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    The Missouri Scout poll had worse news for the incumbent Democrat — in that what’s driving down her numbers is unquestionably the Kavanaugh vote…

  • Significantly, the poll found that 49 percent of likely voters said the Supreme Court confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh has made them less likely to vote for McCaskill, while only 42 percent said it made them more likely to vote for her.…
  • Among female respondents, 47 percent said the confirmation process made them less likely to vote for McCaskill, while 42 percent said it made them more likely.
  • Among male respondents, 50 percent said the confirmation process made them less likely to vote for McCaskill, while 41 percent said it made them more likely.
  • Among Non-Partisan respondents, 46 percent said the confirmation process made them less likely to vote for McCaskill, while 39 percent said it made them more likely.
  • Among Republican respondents, 85 percent said the confirmation process made them less likely to vote for McCaskill, while 8 percent said it made them more likely.
  • Among Democrat respondents, 82 percent said the confirmation process made them more likely to vote for McCaskill, while 8 percent said it made them less likely.
  • Also, a new poll commissioned by NBC North Dakota News showed the race between Democrat incumbent Heidi Heitkamp and Republican challenger Kevin Cramer has the latter with a commanding 51-41 lead. That poll has the Kavanaugh nomination as the most important (with 21 percent) of nine named issues in the race, with 60 percent of North Dakota voters polled saying they support the judge’s confirmation against only 27 percent opposed. Heitkamp has publicly called herself a “no” vote, which amounts to more or less a surrender in the race. Without North Dakota, there is only a minuscule chance of the Democrats winning control of the Senate.

  • And still more:

    Of all the cohorts measured by the poll (including Independent men and women), Democratic women are the only group to display less enthusiasm for the midterms this week than they did in July. Meanwhile, Republican women seem invigorated. In July, 81 percent of Democratic women said the November elections were very important, compared to 71 percent of Republican women. Now, Republican women are 4 percentage points likelier to view the midterms that way (83 percent to 79 percent). That’s a 14-point swing in female voters’ interest in the midterms—after the hearings, and in Republicans’ favor.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “Will the ‘Brett Bounce’ Unseat Bob Menendez in New Jersey?” Let’s hope so. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Accused doxxer of GOP senators allegedly threatened to publish lawmakers’ children’s health info.” I just can’t imagine why Republicans are so upset with Democrats in congress…

  • And unless Kavanaugh is confirmed, things will get worse:

    There is no circumstance where everyone involved with those norm-breaking steps suddenly wakes up, has a crisis of conscience, and realizes that they were morally wrong. The only way they decide not to take similar steps in the future is if they conclude that those steps are not effective.

    If these sorts of tactics work, we will get more of them. Right now, Kavanaugh could be a squish who wimps out on Roe vs. Wade and I’d still want him on that court, because this isn’t really about him anymore. This is about what kind of proof is needed before you believe a man is a monster. This is about whether decades of respected public and private life can be wiped away by an allegation without supporting witnesses. This is about whether anyone who ever knew you at any chapter of your life can suddenly come forward and paint you as a malevolent deviant of every kind . . . or whether people who never knew you at any chapter of your life can suddenly come forward and paint you as a malevolent deviant of every kind.

  • The Democrats’ war against the presumption of innocence:

    Social justice presumes the guilt of certain people because of their politics, their positions, their races and their genders. It creates different rules for different classes of people with some entitled to an absolute presumption of innocence, even in the face of indisputable guilt, and others forced into an equally absolute presumption of guilt, even in the absence of any indisputable proof of their guilt.

    America cannot operate under two systems of guilt and innocence, one public and one private. If the majority of Americans are to be judged by a system that presumes their guilt, that attitude will inevitably go on to permeate the courtroom. By eroding the presumption of innocence in public life, the left is eroding it as a legal right. Lynch mobs and kangaroo courts can’t be expected to stop at the courthouse door when they are celebrated and operate freely throughout the rest of the land.

    Kavanaugh’s case is about more than the malicious exploitation of the #MeToo movement to destroy a political opponent. It’s the latest assault on the social presumption of innocence by shadowy forces whose ‘scoops’ dominate the media through cut-outs while their sources remain silently invisible.

    If kangaroo courts and media lynch mobs succeed in overturning a Supreme Court appointment, they will have proven that their war on the presumption of innocence extends even to the highest court in the land. If a Supreme Court justice can’t be presumed innocent, what hope do the rest of us have?

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Let’s not put too fine a point on it: Christine Blasey Ford is a liar.

  • China used it’s supply chain to implant a spy chip in many of America’s top companies, including Apple and Amazon. This is why outsourcing so much of your technological infrastructure is a national security issue.
  • Apple and Amazon issue strenuous denials. I’m not sure they could do otherwise, even if the allegation is true, especially since Amazon currently derives the lion’s share of its profits from AWS. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • President Donald Trump’s approval rating hits 50%.
  • Including 35% of blacks. That’s disasterous for Democratic electoral chances. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Theresa May will change her Brexit policy, or the Tories will change their leader.

    Worse than Remain? Well, yes. May’s Brexit proposals — now known as “Chequers,” after the PM’s country house, where they were imposed on a surprised cabinet days after May had personally assured the secretary of state for exiting the EU that she had no such intentions — would effectively keep Britain inside the EU’s single market (i.e., by accepting its current and future regulations) and its customs union, and keep it subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice while forfeiting its votes in all EU institutions.

    Not enough for you? Then ponder this: The London Times has reported that the government is now prepared to cut a deal with the EU that would prevent a post-Brexit U.K. from reaching free-trade deals with other countries such as Australia, Canada, and . . . the United States. Such a deal would breach the reddest of red lines laid down by Theresa May and the Tory party since the 2016 referendum. Yet no one thinks the report is mistaken. And May has continued to say in interviews that final agreement with the EU will require concessions from both sides. But what has May left to concede?

  • More pushback on the Linux SJW-inspired CoC change. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Saudi solar project flops. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • 96 sheriffs endorse Ted Cruz.
  • Austin government needs an independent audit. Naturally the the city power structure is opposed…
  • “Kamala Harris: ‘We Would Apply The Same Fair Standards To Any SCOTUS Nominee Whose Life We Were Trying To Destroy.'”
  • A typeface to help retain memory? There’s just one tiny problem…

  • First edition of The Wealth of Nations to be auctioned.
  • “Bottle of whisky sold for world record £848,000.”
  • Swedish road covered in herring after elk accident.”
  • Happy birthday, Wallace Stevens.