Best result of Donald Trump’s Taiwan phone call so far? The Taiwanese Animation of it:
Taiwanese Animation on Trump’s Phone Call
December 10th, 2016LinkSwarm for December 9, 2016
December 9th, 2016The Dallas police and fireman pension fund has halted withdrawals of money to stop a pension run in order to keep the system (temporarily) solvent. Texas municipal pension debt is a big story with a lot of different ramifications and angles, and I need to do some research before I post, hopefully sometime next week.
In the meantime, enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Working-class Americans have been mocked, maligned, and forgotten long enough. They are fed up and they went to the voting booth last week and said so.
This election’s “red state” vote had little to do with racism or any phobias. The message we heard last week was, rather, a clear and simple plea from the average blue-collar, small-town mother and father for Washington and other big-city elites to stop belittling, disparaging and vilifying them and their families. It was their way of telling the “know-it-alls”; the politicians and pundits, to stop flying over and driving past their gutted factories and dying towns and pretending they don’t exist and do not matter. They simply wanted the “smarter and more educated” city folks to know that they are tired of insults and that the condescension needs to stop. They voted for Trump because someone finally appeared to care and listen.
They voted for Trump because he seemed to get it. Finally, someone seemed to understand that the average guy: the plumber, the carpenter, the truck driver, the farmer — the good and decent family man from Dewey, Oklahoma, and from Hillsdale, Michigan — is the one who is now suffering from more cultural disrespect than perhaps anyone else in all the country.
They voted for Trump because they’re sick and tired of being laughed at. They voted for Trump because they have, frankly, “had it” with being labeled intolerable by those who claim to be tolerant. They voted for Trump because they think it’s deplorable that they are the ones being called “deplorables.”They voted for Trump because they can’t turn on the TV, listen to the radio or read the news without some highbrow elitist in the mainstream media calling them “low-information,” “uneducated white males” who are too dumb to know what’s best for them and too stupid to see that Washington knows best. They voted for Trump because all they want is to have a job, get some respect, pick up a paycheck, go to church, raise their kids and be left alone.
This is why. This is the explanation.
Hate had nothing to do with it.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
They recently resurrected Nancy Pelosi for another glorious term winnowing away the House Democrat caucus. Pretty soon it’s just going to be her and some guy representing Berkeley who they recruited while he was shouting “Workers of the world unite!” at bored coeds on Telegraph Avenue. You know, if you want to reach out to the kind of hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, normal Americans who voted for the black guy then allegedly refused to vote for the woman because they are racist, you totally want an ancient, rich, snooty, San Francisco leftist and Botox after-picture like the Nanster.
The only way you could further alienate these alienated voters is, I don’t know, making your DNC chairman some radical leftist, urban black Muslim who hates guns, loves Farrakhan and who parties with Middle Eastern scumbags who issue fatwas to kill those voters’ soldier sons and daughters. Now, that’s some real diversity, and the Dems should totally get right on it. But seriously, we could never dare to hope that the Democrats would be that stupid. Could we?
And I had to laugh at this, even a little guiltily:
Next up at bat is the hard-4 hedgehog that is anti-gun activist and alleged comedian Amy Schumer, another over-praised, over-hyped mediocrity who Tinseltown is trying to force down our throats like the fingers she clearly never forced down hers.
The rejection was apparent in the 2010 and subsequent House elections; Republicans have now won House majorities in ten of the last 12 elections, leaving 2006 and 2008 as temporary aberrations. You didn’t hear Hillary Clinton campaign on the glories of Obamacare or the Iran nuclear deal, and her attack on “Trumped-up, trickle-down economics” didn’t strike any chords in the modest-income Midwest.
Republican success has been even greater in governor and state legislature elections, to the point that Democrats hold governorships and legislative control only in California, Hawaii, Delaware and Rhode Island. After eight years of the Obama presidency, Democrats hold fewer elective offices than at any time since the 1920s.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
When evaluating this unorthodox and, yes, risky move, one has to remember that it is China, not the United States, that has been rewriting the rules of engagement in the East and South China Sea. It is China that has been unilaterally asserting territorial claims against its neighbors, China asserting jurisdiction over international waters and air space, China failing to rein in the increasingly serious North Korean nuclear program. The power that is challenging the status quo in Asia is not the United States.
(Hat tip: The Corner.)
And here are the dates for her “thank you” tour:
I get the feeling the adoring crowds will make Black Friday look tame by comparison… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
We all know that independent websites taking Hillary to task on her very real and very deplorable track record of being a compulsive liar is what was truly decisive. The mainstream media knows this, which is why they haven’t actually been focusing on censoring provably fake news sites, but rather have been promoting an agenda to lump any non-establishment perspectives within the umbrella of “fake news” in order to destroy their competition and regain an upper hand in the national narrative. If those of us who value independent media want to thwart this nefarious plan, we need to fully understand what these cretins are up to.
Or even the sharpest spoon…
A DREAM Act 2.0 that addressed these problems — that prosecuted fraud, implemented enforcement, prevented downstream legal immigration, and focused much more narrowly on those who came very young — would possibly be something that even I, were I a congressman, might be able to vote for. But the lack of these elements is clear proof that the amnesty crowd isn’t interested in fixing the specific problem of a sympathetic but small group of people; rather, these young people are simply poster children who have been used for years to try to justify a general amnesty for all illegal aliens. And when the DREAM Act fails, as it will, Pedro Ramirez and his fellows will need to ask the pro-amnesty politicians and lobbying groups why they were sacrificed on the altar of “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Donald Trump ran for president on the slogan “Make America Great Again!” And he’s also promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. But maybe the way to do that is to make Washington a little less great. Because as Washington has prospered over the last several decades — to the point where people are making Hunger Games comparisons — the rest of the country hasn’t done as well.
So perhaps it’s time for a role-reversal. I propose that over the next several years, we transfer a lot of federal employees out of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, to parts of the country that aren’t doing so well economically. This would provide a boost to places like Buffalo, New York, or Quincy, Illinois, or Fresno, California, while getting federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bubble.
Ex-Astronaut John Glenn Dead at 95
December 8th, 2016Astronaut John Glenn, the first American in space, has died at age 95.
Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, and later a four-term U.S. senator from Ohio, died Thursday at the Ohio State Cancer Center. He was 95.
Glenn became a hero in World War II and Korea, flying an astounding 149 combat missions in the two conflicts. He earned the Distinguished Flying Cross on six occasions and an Air Medal with 18 clusters. In Korea, he downed three Russian MIGs in air-to-air combat during the last nine days of that war. Ted Williams was sometimes his wing man.
He was, at that time, just another American who had served his country. But after the war, he heard about the space program, an outrageous idea of risk and service open to military test pilots. Of course, he was interested. After rigorous and competitive testing Glenn was chosen as one of the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronauts.
On April 8, 1959, Glenn was introduced at a press conference with Scott Carpenter, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Alan B. Shepard, Jr., L. Gordon Cooper, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and Donald “Deke” Slayton as the country’s Project Mercury astronauts. Glenn, who was the last surviving member of the group, a wore a bow tie.
To understand why John Glenn became so important in America, it is important to remember how badly the United States was losing the space race in the early 1960s. The Soviet Union had pulled ahead in this Cold War battle when it launched Sputnik, the first man-made object to be placed into orbit. It then made a mockery of the American program by sending the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Then the Soviets sent a second cosmonaut into orbit.
So all of America was watching at 9:47 in the morning on Feb. 20, 1962. Sitting in the cramped quarters of the Friendship 7 spacecraft, Glenn took off from Cape Canaveral. Scott Carpenter, the backup astronaut for the mission, famously said: “Godspeed, John Glenn.”
Astronaut Glenn climbed into space, circled the globe three times, and then dropped down into the Atlantic Ocean. The flight took all of 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds, but it changed the space race and restored American pride.
Later in life Glenn would be elected to the senate as a moderate Democrat, back when there were such things, and would vote in favor of Gramm-Rudman. He would lose the 1984 Democratic Presidential nomination to Walter Mondale, and later be involved in the Savings and Loan scandal as part of the “Keating 5.” The best that could be said about his political career is that he was far from the worst Democratic Senator during his four terms.
Donna ISD Update: December 2016 Edition
December 8th, 2016One update swept aside in late October by the flood of Clinton Corruption news was the latest from Rio Grande Valley’s Donna ISD.
You may or may not remember from back in July when I reported that former Donna ISD employees were sentenced to prison for extortion.
There was a lawsuit filed over their replacements:
A lawsuit filed by two school district trustees claiming the board illegally appointed two replacement board members in February was partially dismissed last week, but plaintiffs who argue the judge wasted precious time on this case have already filed an appeal.
Leslie McCollom, representing plaintiffs and board members Efren Ceniceros and Ernesto Lugo, filed an appeal Monday to state District Judge Luis Singletarry’s ruling on Oct. 20 which allowed the two appointed board members to continue serving until Election Day and all the actions they voted on to stand.
The 92nd District Court judge had already dismissed an emergency temporary restraining order against the board on Feb. 25, but a hearing for both parties to argue their case had been rescheduled or canceled several times since. A final ruling on court and attorney fees is still pending.
“It has been extraordinarily difficult to get what is basically a simple issue of law from the court,” McCollom said Wednesday. “It was unusual that he refused to set a hearing on a temporary injunction.”
Ceniceros and Lugo filed the lawsuit on Feb. 12 after two school board trustees and former members of Team November, Eloy Infante and Elpidio Yanez, were replaced after they both plead guilty to extortion charges.
The duo is currently serving time in federal prison for requesting monetary and gift bribes from an insurer hired while they were on the board.
Since then an entire new board of trustees has been elected. “Out of the six seats available on the board, three were filled by Valentin Guerrero, John Billman, and Dr. Donna Mery from the United for Change slate. Eloy Avila, Alicia Reyna, and Eva Watts from the Restoring Trust slate took the other three.” (I’ll go ahead and tag those names, just in case I need them for the next Donna ISD update…)
Other Donna ISD legal news:
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions over whether Soto’s force was excessive or not.
What’s Happening in the War Against The Islamic State?
December 7th, 2016The twists and turns of the election, Hillary’s corruption, liberal derangement over Trump’s triumph, etc. have pushed a lot of other news stories onto the back-burner.
One of the big ones being: What the hell is happening in the war against the Islamic State?
It looks like I’m not the only one to have taken my eye off the ball. Back when Bush was President, there was heavy mainstream media reporting on conflicts in the Middle East. But ever since Obama’s Iraq pullout engendered the rise of the Islamic State, American reporting on the conflict has been (at best) sporadic.
Which is why I was surprised to see reports that Kurdish-led fighters were closing in on the Islamic State’s de-facto capital of Raqqa:
As the Mosul offensive drags into its second month, another fight is raging 450km to the west around Islamic State’s de facto capital at Raqqa, on the Euphrates River in northern Syria. The battle is already a tragedy for Raqqa’s 320,000 civilians, who’ve suffered under brutal Islamic State occupation for more than three years. Many have fled, with thousands crowding into already overflowing refugee camps since the latest fighting began, and others fleeing across the hills towards the Iraqi border even as night-time temperatures plunge below freezing. Their lives, like those of families still in the city, are about to get even harder.
The battle for Raqqa will shape the Syrian war throughout the coming year. Though smaller than the vast offensive around Mosul, it will be even more significant. It may decide the fate of Islamic State’s “caliphate” in Syria and will set the tone for the incoming Trump administration’s dealings with Turkey and Russia, two critical relationships that will drive events in the region and beyond.
During a visit to the Middle East last week, I spoke to Syrian, Kurdish, Iraqi and American leaders involved in the campaign. They told me that while the military offensive is progressing about as well as anyone expected, the politics are proving characteristically complex.
The troops fighting Islamic State in Raqqa come from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a rebel coalition backed by the US, among other countries. SDF units have received a stream of weapons, training and advisers since last year. Supported by coalition airstrikes, they attacked Raqqa early last month, timing the offensive (known as Operation Euphrates Wrath) to coincide with the Mosul assault, to stop Islamic State shifting reinforcements between fronts.
The SDF has achieved considerable battlefield success. In the past month it has cleared 600sq km of rural terrain in Raqqa province, recapturing 45 villages and expelling hundreds of Islamic State fighters. Many recovered settlements are ruined, however, their populations massacred or driven off by Islamic State, or bombed out by Bashar al-Assad’s regime in previous fighting.
The frontline sits just north of Raqqa city, in Ayn Issa district, where heavy combat (including coalition airstrikes called in by observers on the ground) has killed as many as 200 Islamic State fighters in the past two weeks.
In the same timeframe, SDF spokesmen announced the recapture of the towns of Hazima, al-Taweelah and Tel al-Samman, north and west of Raqqa, bringing the SDF main force within 25km of the city’s outskirts, with reconnaissance teams pushing forward to the edge of town.
Islamic State resistance is increasing as SDF advances, and most commanders expect a ferocious fight against a determined enemy once they reach the fortified downtown area.
As the investment of Mosul has been going on for weeks, the battle for Raqqa will probably be at least equally slow and grinding, especially given the difficulties inherent in managing a diverse force of various factions:
More than 25,000 SDF members — by far the largest faction in a force of about 30,000 — come from the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the affiliated Women’s Protection Units (YPJ, an all-female combat brigade of 7000 troops). SDF also includes a few hundred Arab fighters from the Shammari tribal confederation, plus an Assyrian Christian militia and a small ethnic Turkmen force. The Shammari have a longstanding blood feud with Islamic State, which has massacred their men and boys and enslaved women and girls as it seeks to intimidate tribes in its region of influence. Christians and Turkmen are fighting for survival against Islamic State, which has engaged in genocidal slaughter against both groups wherever it has gained control. There also is a small secular nationalist force drawn from regime military defectors, the Free Officers Union. But these are minorities, perhaps 15 per cent altogether, in an alliance that is overwhelmingly Kurdish.
Evidently the fighting is going poorly enough for the Islamic State that their spokesman urged their own soldiers not to flee Raqqa and Mosul. (That would be their new spokesman, the old one having been removed from office by a Hellfire missle.)
There’s also indications that the Iraqi forces closing in on Mosul have cut off escape routes for Islamic State fighters, though Islamic State forces just launched a counterattack.
Some have suggested that the Islamic State is preparing to retreat to a desert stronghold, in Wilayat al-Furat near the Iraq-Syrian border if it’s ejected from both Raqqa and Mosul. (This, as far as I can figure, is about where it is.)
More far afield, Libyan militias backed by American airstrikes said they have cleared Sirte, the stronghold of the Islamic State in Libya.
One thing that may be making battlefield progress against the Islamic State possible: Cheap oil prices. Without excess petrodollars to spend, the Islamic State’s backers on the Arabian peninsula (not to mention Anatolia) may not have the spare cash to prop up their miniature caliphate.
That said, the war against the Islamic State is far from over, and expected it to drag on into the Trump Presidency.
Texas SEIU Declares Bankruptcy To Avoid Judgment
December 6th, 2016Remember when a Houston jury smacked Texas SEIU with a $5.3 million judgment for filing false claims in their unionization campaign against Professional Janitorial Service?
Well this weekend Texas SEIU declared bankruptcy:
The Service Employees International Union in Texas filed for bankruptcy protection over the weekend, three months after a jury in Harris County hit it with a $5.3 million judgment.
Jurors in the 9-year-old case determined the union’s aggressive organizing campaign maligned Professional Janitorial Service, a commercial cleaning company.
The Texas branch of the nation’s second-largest labor union filed the bankruptcy petition Saturday in federal court in Corpus Christi. The union also filed notice with the Harris County court hearing the case that the bankruptcy petition will prevent the janitorial company from taking possession of property belonging to the union.
Since the jury’s decision in September, damages in the case have grown to $7.8 million when $2.5 million of interest was added.
The state-wide union, which has headquarters in Houston, warned that the judgment would put the group into a dire financial situation.
The head of Professional Janitorial Service says the SEIU’s plan to avoid judgment won’t work:
Brent Southwell, the CEO of the janitorial company, said it plans to continue seeking information from the union to ensure that it is not hiding money to dodge the jury award. He said the company could pursue action against the union’s national office, which has more than 1.5 million members, if the Texas branch is not able to pay the judgment.
“The SEIU won’t escape its fate after attacking my company,” Southwell said in a press release. “We will keep this process going for as long as the SEIU wants, first by making them reveal their secrets and then by making the union’s Washington, D.C., office pay for its sins.”
The union’s national office did not return a request for comment about the lawsuit or the resulting bankruptcy.
SEIU Texas was formed by workers from the Chicago-based SEIU Local 1, which sent organizers to the state to rally employees in the janitorial and service sectors to join the union. Those organizers waged a three-year organizing campaign to pressure PJS into accepting card check unionization rather than a secret ballot election organized by the National Labor Relations Board, the top federal labor arbiter. The union filed 19 unfair labor practice complaints to the NLRB over the course of its campaign, a popular delaying and pressure tactic utilized by union organizers. All of those complaints were dismissed or withdrawn.
Remember: Unions couldn’t even ram card check down America’s throat when they held the House, Senate and White House. With Republicans now firmly in charge, it’s deader than Jimmy Hoffa…
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Mad Dog Mattis Tidbits
December 5th, 2016Now that President-elect Donald Trump has officially nominated retired Marine Corps General James Norman “Mad Dog” Mattis as his Secretary of Defense, here’s a roundup of some Mattis links:
@20committee My new Patron Saint. #SaintMattisOfQuantico #HeIsMySECDEF #PatronSaintOfChaos pic.twitter.com/lkqG5VfD9H
— Kevin (@75almanac) December 2, 2016
(Hat Tip: Dwight.)
Dean Drops Out of DNC Chair Race
December 2nd, 2016Republicans everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief:
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean dropped out of the race to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Friday.
Dean, who served as DNC chairman from 2005 to 2009, announced in a pre-recorded video to a conference of state Democratic chairs that he would step aside to allow for a new face to lead the party as it seeks to rebuild.
That reduces the field of candidates to three.
The front-runner is Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who has racked up endorsements from Washington lawmakers and national labor unions.
South Carolina Democratic Chairman Jaime Harrison and New Hampshire Chairman Ray Buckley are also in the race.
President Obama’s allies are trying to recruit Labor Secretary Tom Perez for the role, and NARAL President Ilyse Hogue is also considering a bid.
I didn’t have Ray Buckley in my last roundup. Among the first links that comes out on the openly gay Buckley are a story about unproven child pornography charges against him and this oddly-edited hit video:
So we have a black Muslim vs. a gay white man for DNC Chair. Well, this ought to be interesting…
Trump Nominates Mattis as Secretary of Defense
December 1st, 2016Confirming widespread rumor, President-elect Donald Trump announced he’s nominating retired Marine Corps General James Norman “Mad Dog” Mattis as his Secretary of Defense.
Being Trump, he made the announcement at his “Victory Tour” rally in Cincinnati.
Mattis is a universally respected a military leader (at least outside the fever swamps of the left that hate all American military power, as well as those who serve), and should make a great Secretary of Defense.