Archive for the ‘Border Control’ Category
Monday, July 19th, 2021
The “infrastructure” bill was already a dog’s breakfast of hard-left graft wish lists. But Democrats also want to use it as a Trojan horse for illegal alien amnesty as well:
What better time to push through amnesty for potentially millions of illegal immigrants than during the Biden border crisis? As tone-deaf as the plan is, that is exactly what Senate Democrats are planning to do in the $3.5T infrastructure bill. A decision has not been made on the numbers yet but Senator Dick Durbin, the Senate Democratic Whip, confirmed this week that it will happen. Democrats will try to push through immigration reform in the budget process.
With the news being reported today that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wants to bring a trial vote on infrastructure to the floor of the Senate by Wednesday of next week, this is an interesting turn of events. Add that to the ruling by the federal judge who determined that DACA is “an illegally implemented program”, and immigration reform has come to the forefront of political discourse once again. In the past, it has been an issue that a bipartisan group gets together and comes up with a plan to move immigration reform through Congress but at the last minute it always falls apart and the issue gets kicked down the road. This plan will likely include those people designated as Dreamers, farmworkers, and possibly essential workers like those who worked as health care workers during the pandemic.
Politico reports that this plan is being hatched by leaders of the Progressive Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, and the Black Caucus. The biggest cheerleaders for this move are Senators Durbin, Bob Menendez, and Bernie Sanders. Rep. Raul Ruiz of California is chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and he says, “This is currently our best effort.” Democrats privately admit that this is likely their only chance to ram through immigration reform.
And all this despite a crisis at the border and polls that show illegal alien amnesty is extremely unpopular.
So far, the idea is attracting little resistance from Democrats, even with their threadbare margins in both chambers. House Democrats, which have struggled on broader immigration bills, have already unanimously backed a pathway to citizenship for those Dreamers, farmworkers and immigrants previously granted Temporary Protected Status, known as TPS. Another option is extending a path to citizenship for all TPS recipients.
The possibility of success with this scheme is in question. It would have to survive the Senate’s budget rules in order to pass without Republican support. The Senate parliamentarian is a former immigration lawyer, by the way. Democrats say they will work with the parliamentarian to get as far as they can. Will the parliamentarian rule against including a pathway to citizenship in the budget process? That is the question. She ruled against Democrats including the minimum wage increase in a coronavirus aid bill earlier this year.
You would think that Republicans would have learned from their past mistakes not to give an inch on any amnesty until Democrats are willing to fully fund and enforce border security. However, Texas Senator John Cornyn, who has flirted with amnesty proposals in the past, is doing it again, pushing for an amnesty for DACA recipients (AKA “Dreamers”) that Obama changed the status of by executive order, and which somehow courts ruled President Trump was unable to rescind via executive order.
Any illegal alien amnesty, no matter how tiny, should be completely off the table until the border is secure.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Tags:Border Controls, DACA, Democrats, Illegal Aliens, John Cornyn
Posted in Border Control, Democrats | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 8th, 2021
Today the Texas Special Legislative Session begins:
Governor Greg Abbott unveiled an agenda of 11 items for the legislature to tackle in its first special session of 2021 when it convenes later this week.
The whole agenda includes:
Bail reform
Election reform
Border security
Social media censorship
Article X funding
Family violence protection
Requirement for student athletes to compete within their own sex
Restriction on abortion-inducing drugs
Supplemental payment to the Teachers Retirement System
More comprehensive critical race theory ban
Property tax relief
Foster care system appropriation
Cyber security appropriation
Items like election reform, social media censorship, and a more comprehensive ban on critical race theory were already identified by Abbott as part of the agenda.
After House Democrats walked out of the chamber on the last night of the regular session — breaking quorum and killing various pieces of legislation, most notably the election bill — Abbott declared that he would call a special session to tackle some of those items in addition to the fall special dealing with redistricting and federal coronavirus funds.
Another bill that died that night was bail reform, which was among Abbott’s emergency item list. It is included on the special session call.
Abbott then vetoed Article X of the state budget which governs funding for the legislature due to, in his words, the legislature not “showing up and doing their job.”
House Democrats petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to block Abbott’s veto of legislative funding and also appealed to Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont) earlier this week to commit to stalling any special session agenda item until Article X funding is restored.
Here’s Abbott on the special session:
Notably missing from the agenda: A ban on the genital mutilation of minors.
Michael Quinn Sullivan noted via email:
The items placed on the call by Gov. Abbott can be thought of as the “primary effect” – which is to say, how the coming contested primary is impacting the governor’s actions.
The items on the call read like a laundry list of what the Texas Senate under Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has actually done… and what the Texas House under Speaker Dade Phelan failed to do.
Whether Speaker Phelan intends to help enact the governor’s agenda remains to be seen but he did announce a brand new committee to deal with them:
The day before Abbott released the agenda, Phelan announced the creation of a new committee: the House Select Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies. “The issues that will be submitted by the Governor for our consideration in the upcoming special session impact some of the most fundamental rights of Texans under the U.S. and Texas Constitutions,” Phelan said.
“These issues, by their very nature, are complex. A select committee with expanded membership and expertise is the ideal forum for ensuring the thoughtful consideration of diverse viewpoints as these constitutional issues are expressed, debated, and decided by the House.”
The committee will be chaired by Rep. Trent Ashby (R-Lufkin) and vice-chaired by Rep. Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston).
The other members on the body include:
John Bucy (D-Austin)
Travis Clardy (R-Nacogdoches)
Charlie Geren (R-Fort Worth)
Jacey Jetton (R-Richmond)
Ann Johnson (D-Houston)
Stephanie Klick (R-Fort Worth)
Brooks Landgraf (R-Odessa)
J.M. Lozano (R-Kingsville)
Oscar Longoria (D-Mission)
Joe Moody (D-El Paso)
Victoria Neave (D-Dallas)
Matt Shaheen (R-Plano)
James White (R-Hillister)
That committee doesn’t fill one with confidence. Geran was Joe Straus’ righthand man for many years, and an aide once filed a false child protection report against a primary opponent. Klick was one of only 16 Republicans to vote for creation of a Critical Race Theory-friendly Office of Health Equity in the regular session.
Then there’s a the question of whether Democrats will walk out again to avoid the election integrity bill from passing, just as they did during the regular session.
Stay tuned…
Tags:2022 Texas Governor's Race, 87th Texas Legislature, Ann Johnson, Brooks Landgraf, Charlie Geren, Crime, Critical Race Theory, Dade Phelan, Dan Patrick, Democrats, Greg Abbott, J. M. Lozano, Jacey Jetton, Joe Moody, John Bucy, Matt Shaheen, Oscar Longoria, Republicans, Senfronia Thompson, Social Justice Warriors, Stephanie Klick, Texas, Travis Clardy, Trent Ashby, Victoria Neave, voting fraud
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 7th, 2021
The hard left-wing, Critical Race Theory-embracing, Social Justice Warrior-staffed “City-Community Reimagining Public Safety (RPS) Task Force” has come up with recommendations for “reimagining” (i.e. defunding and destroying) the Austin Police Department. And most are absolutely bugfuck insane.
All across the country, more mainstream Democrats are waking up to the fact that the “defund the police” messaging crushed them at the polls, hemorrhaging black and Hispanic voters to the GOP in record numbers. But that didn’t deter the task force in the least! They’re going full steam ahead with the same madness that’s resulted in skyrocketing crime rates across the country.
The document is filled top-to-bottom with wokespeak codswallop, but a whole lot of it boils to a single word: GIMME! Over and over again, the RPS task force, staffed from leftwing activists groups, demands that taxpayer money be taken away from the police and funneled directly into their pockets. Let me see if I can translate the choicer bits into comprehensible English:
“Equity Reinvestment in Community Working Group Goal: Identify and create upstream mechanisms that prevent the need for policing and invest in impacted communities to address long standing inequities.” Translation: Take money away from the police and give it to us so we can spread the graft and fraud far and wide among far-left activists.
“There is both a need for immediate, direct economic support for Austin residents who have been made the most vulnerable and are facing critical needs as well as long-term and sustain-able investment in community equity.” Translation: Spend more money on welfare so we can get our paws on it and create more voters dependent on the state.
“The City invest at least $11 million from the current fiscal year budget to be used to address the needs of 10 neighborhoods that have high concentrations of poverty, high unemployment, limited access to health insurance, high concentrations of COVID cases and/or a high level of need for basic-needs assistance based on calls to 2-1-1.” Translation: No, really, we want all the money to flow through us so we can wet our beaks.
“The City invest $44.8 million annually starting in FY 2021-22 to support long-term and sustainable investment in community equity. a. The City will develop strategically located neighborhood ‘hubs’ managed by local grassroots organizations and administered by the City’s Equity Office in collaboration with Austin Public Health.” Translation: SHUT UP AND GIVE US THE MONEY! WE WANT ALL OF IT! ALL OF IT MUST FLOW THROUGH OUR STICKY FINGERS! COUGH IT UP!
“Oversee the implementation and distribution of a guaranteed income pilot program for residents in the hubs’ jurisdiction in the form of direct recur-ring cash payments. Total $12 million annually.” Translation: We’re taking money from police and paying people not to work. And you’re paying for it, Austin taxpayers.
“There are a number of Austin neighborhoods that are suffering simultaneously from over-policing and under-investment.” Translation: Take money from the police and give it to us!
“The City via the Equity Office will set aside $100,000 each for 10 neighborhood areas that have seen the greatest health and economic impacts from the pandemic. The City, through the Equity Office, must engage community partners (organizations) already engaged with and centering residents, to identify and distribute to residents in need.” Translation: Give us $1 million in slush funds we can use for ‘walking around money’ to buy votes! (I do note that one of the criteria for determining which neighborhoods get designated is “Areas lacking tree canopy coverage.”)
“Annual Investment of Funds to Support Neighborhood Hubs. Once at least five neighborhood hub sites have been selected, the City Equity Office will designate panels of community members that will select partner organizations to manage and lead the organization of each hub. Screening should be stringent; the panel should demonstrate that selected organizations have an established history of direct community engagement and out-reach with directly impacted communities, especially non-white communities, marginalized and underserved populations, and other survivors of structural violence.” Translation: Create government organizations for money transfer and then put leftwing groups in charge of them!
“These neighborhood hubs will be created and staffed by the neighborhoods, and local community members will determine and prioritize both the needs in their community that the hubs should address and what resources are needed.” Translation: Give us patronage jobs for leftwing cronies!
“As an additional step towards this City’s divestment from policing and investment into community wellbeing, stability, growth and safety, this Working Group supports and calls for the implementation of the Community Health Workforce recommendation set forth by the Public Health Reinvestment working group. We believe the development of a community health worker workforce complements our recommendations in advancing our goal of equity reinvestment.” Translation: Fire police officers and hire leftwing social workers instead!
“Utilize paid commercials, TV, Radio, social media, billboards & busses, bus stops (in mul-tiple languages) to notify the community about City Council conduct prior to, during and post any city council meetings.” Be sure to kickback some money to our friends in the leftwing media via ad dollars.
“IMMEDIATELY invest $5M for the Communications & Public Information Office (CPIO) budget to cover translation and interpretation services.” Translation: Fund our Ministry of Propaganda!
“Fund immigrant defense through the public defender’s office.” Translation: Use taxpayer money to hire leftwing lawyers to keep illegal aliens here so they can vote for Democrats when we amnesty them.
“Include a base budget line item for community engagement, flexible funds to pay partners (community organizations) for the following (including/but not limited to):
- translation/interpretation services
- child care
- venue support
- remote access support
- request community organization(s) to provide facilitation
- community person(s) who can provide above
- stipend for resident(s) with lived experience to support above
Translation: Hire more leftwing activists!. You have to admire the chutzpah of demanding money for “resident(s) with lived experience.” (Critical Race Theory postulates that only non-white people have “lived experience.”) They want taxpayers to pay leftwing activists merely for living.
“$250K, annually, added to the base budget of the Equity Office for 2 new staff members (salary/benefits for 2 FTEs).” Translation: Hire more leftwing activists for leftwing agitation!
They want to “Take contracting out of APD control.” Because of course they do. Translation: You have to let us stick our fingers in all the pies!
Additional police units and functions they want to defund:
- $216,581 Crowd management
- $2,276,488 Gang Suppression Unit
- $312,381 Nuisance Abatement
- $600,00010 Riverside Togetherness Project
- $1,453,743 US Marshals’ Lone Star Fugitive Task Force
- $685,161 Weapons and military supplies (rifles, pistols, ammunition, “less lethal”, targets & backers)
- ~$7.6M Training and recruitment of new cadets
- $3,174,647 Overtime
- $5,634,493 Park Police
- $2,042,835 Mounted Patrol
- $53,519 Specialized Patrol
- $17M ~10% of “Neighborhood policing” patrol
- $7,408,707 Motors
They want to get rid of the mounted patrol because they’re too popular, provide good press for the police, and are effective at countering antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioters. Same thing for police dogs (“Dog bite incidents primarily involve Hispanic and Black men,” i.e., the same demographics that disproportionately commit crimes), which are too popular and effective to keep funding.
$4,471,999 Special events: Take APD entirely out of event review and security. Convene a team of community members to co-create a re envisioned [sic] process for event safety that includes unarmed security. Re-assess needs and reduce spending so that some of this money can be reallocated.
Translation: We’re going to make every concert and event unarmed targets for mass shooters.
Safety is…freedom of speech and movement without surveillance In Austin, community members who are organizing events or simply going about their daily lives are subject to ever-growing surveillance. Through video surveillance and real-time monitoring, we are all being watched. Through the Austin Regional Intelligence Center (ARIC), a cadre of untrained informants are encouraged to report “suspicious behavior”. Recently, Black activists organizing cultural events were surveilled by a social media mining contract, also through ARIC. This data, as well as police interactions are uploaded into databases shared with hundreds of other law enforcement agencies, including DHS and ICE. This surveillance leans into Trumpi-an narratives of Black organizers as “Black Identity Extremists” and lays the groundwork for COINTEL-PRO style attacks on community organizers at the local and federal level. It also endan-gers immigrant communities by sharing their location data with ICE, placing anyone who leaves their home at risk of deportation and family separation. The city must immediately defund and decommission this surveillance infrastructure and ensure that data is deleted from shared law enforcement databases.
Recommendations:
1. Defund the following budget items
• $2,022,228 Austin Regional Intelligence Center (ARIC)
• $2,402,429 *Real Time Crime Center / HALO
• $55,500.00 StarChase Pursuit Management Technology Solution
Translation: Stop watching our precious criminals and violent leftwing radicals!
“The Patrol & Surveillance working group met with 40 people directly impacted by incarceration, deportation, or immigration enforcement.” Translation: We met with crooks and illegal aliens. Shockingly, they don’t like police, and approve of transfer money from police to us.
Safety is…ending the war on drugs and treating drug use as a public health issue Communities of color have been deeply harmed by the war on drugs. Many drug possession and distribution statutes were crafted to have intentionally harsher sentences for substances more often used by Black, brown, and poor communities. Many disparities remain. The 2020 Austin racial profiling report showed stark racial disparities in probable cause searches leading to arrest and prosecution for drug charges. K9 units can exacerbate the impact of existing bias, as it has been shown that handlers often consciously or unconsciously cue their dogs when they expect to find something, which then allows a search. They can also lead to greater use of force and escalate encounters unnecessarily due to the historic trauma associated with police dogs, particularly for Black Americans.18 Furthermore, criminalization and incarceration fail to address addiction or its underlying causes. Imagine the behavioral and mental health treatment services that we could fund with $10.4 million, and the impact on safety in families and communities if the city fund-ed recovery instead of punishment.
Recommendations:
1. Defund the following budget items:
• $1,713,812 K-9 Unit
• $1,286,953 K-9 Interdiction
• ~7.5M Narcotics (conspiracy, support, street) Total: $10.4M
2. Reallocate this money to fund:
• Behavioral and mental health treatment services, particularly Harm Reduction drop-in centers and concurrent Medication Assisted Treatment programs as recommended by the Public Health Reinvestment working group
• Low-income and supportive housing, including a harm reduction housing first program as recommended by the Public Health Reinvestment working group and housing trusts for trans people of color, housing subsidy programs, and crisis safety net programs as recommended by the VSSP working group.
Translation: “We love those giant open-air crack, heroin and meth markets in Baltimore, San Francisco and Seattle and want them here in Austin!” Also, note, once again, the desire to funnel money into homeless housing. The Homeless Industrial Complex must offer lots of opportunities for graft, given how hard leftwing grifters push for it.
We will save observations on the difference between ad hoc de-facto legalization of narcotics and actual conscious phased legalization for another time.
They even object to APD handing out food and toys.
When uniformed officers run programs for under-resourced kids or hand out baseball cards in schools, we are teaching a whole new generation that safety means police, even as youth of color are killed by police outside the limited context of those programs. It is APD’s responsibility to stop the harm, not the community’s responsibility to trust or forgive police while harm continues to occur. Instead of paying officers to do damage control for APD’s image, the city should reallocate these resources to fund community based initiatives that truly prevent and address violence.
Translation: 1. Cops are always evil. 2. Hard left organizations are “the community.” 3. “Reallocate these resources” means, as always, “Give us all the money!”
Over and over and over again, all RPS “suggestions” boil down to the same thing: “Give us the money, and create sanctioned leftwing bureaucracies that entrench our power and control.” By contrast, they want APD disarmed and powerless.
Here are some other lunatic suggestions:
- The entire $210,604,299 Neighborhood-Based Policing line item in the APD budget should be phased out because it is based on an inherently problematic model. Driving around looking for “criminals” is based in a system of surveillance and control enforced through the threat of violence.
- No more cadet classes. Training officers in this model will inevitably create an “us vs. them” mentality regardless of what the training looks like.
- Phase out all use of deadly weapons. Maintaining a fully armed and staffed police force is a public safety threat. It is intolerable that many Black and Brown people pulled over in traffic stops fear for their lives from the people who are paid to protect them. This reality cannot be addressed with more community outreach; it will only be resolved by stopping the danger to their lives.
- Traffic enforcement should be decoupled. State level changes are needed to decriminalize traffic offenses and allow unarmed civil servants to direct traffic and make stops for civil traffic violations. There are some interim changes that are possible now.
- Reallocate money from policing to reinvest in economic, health, and housing resources that create REAL safety and well-being for overpoliced communities. Communities of color are deprived of the resources they need to survive, which fuels a vicious cycle of criminalization. We are all safer when everyone in our community has what they need to survive.
And by “all” they mean “left-wing activists” and by “safer” they mean “richer.” They just want to defund and disarm the police so antifa and #BlackLivesMatters mobs can run riot over the city. Is that so much to ask?
The entire paper is full of logical fallacies, such as jumping from “police can’t prevent all crimes” to “police are useless and should be defunded.”
The rest of the document is a laundry list of leftwing causes, from solar power to free bus passes for anyone on welfare.
Here is a list of all the hard-left lunatics who contributed to this report, so we can know in the future never to trust anything any of these people are involved in ever again:
- Brion Oaks – Chief Equity Officer, Equity Office
- Paula X. Rojas – Communities of Color United (CCU)
- Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde – Deputy City Manager
- Rey Arellano – Assistant City Manager
- Shannon Jones – Interim Assistant City Manager
- Farah Muscadin – Director, Office of Police Oversight
- Quincy Dunlap – Austin Area Urban League
- Hailey Easley – Austin Asian Community Health Initiative
- Jessica Johnson – Texas Fair Defense Project
- Monica Guzmán – Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin (GAVA)
- Priscilla Hale – allgo
- Dawn Handley – Integral Care
- Chris Harris – Texas Appleseed
- David Johnson – Grassroots Leadership
- Amanda Lewis – Survivor Justice Project
- Nelson Linder – National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
- Kathy Mitchell – Just Liberty
- Chas Moore – Austin Justice Coalition
- Cary Roberts – Greater Austin Crime Commission
- Matt Simpson – American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
- Alicia Torres – ICE Fuera de Austin
- Cate Graziani – Texas Harm Reduction Alliance
- Marisa Perales – City of Austin Environmental Commission/Texas Campaign for the Environment Fund/Clean Water Action
- Andrea Black – May First Movement
- Elias Cortez – Texas Harm Reduction Alliance
- Raul Alvarez – Community Advancement Network
- Nyeka Arnold – Black Austin Coalition
Needless to say, Austin should defund any “Equity Office” and no taxpayer money should fund any of these organizations in the future.
Note: The Austin City Manager will unveil a new budget on Friday, so sane Austinites should be prepared to fight hard if any of these garbage ideas are included.
(Hat tip: johnnyk20001.)
Tags:Alicia Torres, Amanda Lewis, Andrea Black, Austin, Austin Equity Office, Austin Police Department, Border Controls, Brion Oaks, Budget, Cary Roberts, Cate Graziani, Chas Moore, Chris Harris, Critical Race Theory, David Johnson, Dawn Handley, Democrats, dogs, drugs, Elias Cortez, Farah Muscadin, Hailey Easley, homeless, horses, Illegal Aliens, Jessica Johnson, Kathy Mitchell, Marisa Perales, Matt Simpson, Monica Guzman, Nelson Linder, Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde, Nyeka Arnold, Paula X. Rojas, Priscilla Hale, Quincy Dunlap, Raul Alvarez, Rey Arellano, Shannon Jones, Sky News, Social Justice Warriors, Welfare State
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats | 21 Comments »
Sunday, June 27th, 2021
You know what Americans hate? Open borders and critical race theory:
The Biden administration is failing big time with its inability to control illegal immigration, adding it to one of several issues that could doom Democrats if left unchecked.
In a new Harvard/Harris poll, an overwhelming 80% said that illegal immigration is a serious issue and one that needs more attention than what President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris are giving.
What’s more, 68% said that signals from Biden’s White House are encouraging illegal immigration, and 55% believe that former President Donald Trump’s border closing policies should have been left in place.
The fears of illegal immigration were a key part of Penn’s analysis of his June poll for Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll.
He wrote: “Sixty-four percent of registered voters want the Biden administration to issue new, stricter policies to reduce the flow of people across the border. Only 7% of voters could accurately call out the amount of monthly illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. with 84% underestimate the number, suggesting we should expect stronger voter reactions if the crisis evolves further. Overall, 74% of voters view the current surge in illegal immigrants as a crisis that needs to be addressed immediately, and 56% do not view climate change, racism, and sexism as root causes of migration from South and Central America.”
Nor are Americans any more enamored of Critical Race Theory:
And despite liberal media efforts to dismiss the debates in school districts around the country over the teaching of critical race theory, the poll found that it too was a hot issue.
“On schooling and education, another sleeper issue, 61% do not believe students should be taught that America is structurally racist and is dominated by white supremacy,” said Penn in his email.
Americans oppose critical race theory because it’s racism, and they’re not racist.
Will the Biden Administration change directions in the face of these findings? Almost certainly not. Democrats view both Critical Race Theory and amnestying illegal aliens as tickets to permanent electoral majorities. DNC leadership no doubt views all the House Democrats who will lose races in 2022 as acceptable collateral damage to avoid changing course…
Tags:2022 Election, Border Controls, Critical Race Theory, Democrats, polls, Social Justice Warriors
Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 6 Comments »
Friday, June 18th, 2021
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Hunter Biden channels Hunter S. Thompson (and not in a good way), Slow Joe stumbles around the G7, a top Chinese intelligence official defects, and Gillette inflicts toxic unprofitability on Proctor & Gamble.
Study shows that yes, indeed, Andrew Cuomo killed the elderly.
Kurt Schlichter is not impressed with Joe Biden:
It’s beyond any reasonable dispute that the slack-jawed old pervert staggering through this punchline presidency is getting more senile by the day. All the while, his cackling understudy is biding her time everywhere but at the border, getting huffy at being questioned, and generally failing at a job historically assigned to morons as a role where they could do little damage. The only people who dig their hep jive – yeah, go on and believe the 79 percent approval numbers among people now paying $5 a gallon for unleaded – are the talking tubers of cable news. But even the tater thots of Brian Stelter, who is a potato, can’t dispel the growing sense of unease that watching these incompetent weirdos brings.
This epoch is the interregnum, a caretaker presidency presided over by a human asterisk who cares only about his post-lid bowl of mush and being wrapped in a shawl, set in front of the tee-vee, and allowed to watch his stories. The only thing moving less expeditiously than his bowels is his ridiculous legislative agenda, and all the prunes in the world aren’t going to help clear out that particular constipation, not with Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema refusing to commit ritual political suicide on the altar of coastal leftist dreams.
The progs were so close, just a vote or two away, to the unrestrained power they thought they could flex and thereby secure their control forever. But * is no Franklin Roosevelt. Nor is he Teddy Roosevelt. Nor Eleanor Roosevelt, though he could be if he really, really wanted to be. He’s not even Melvin Roosevelt. Instead, Grandpa Badfinger is a rickety joke, bumping elbows with his younger fellow-incompetents at the G7, wandering about mindlessly chasing moths until his ridiculous wife, with her ridiculous “Dr.”, wrangles him back into the hapless pack. You look at this sorry set of leaders of the formerly-free world and the vibe you get is “exhaustion.” There’s no energy, no drive, no hope. Boris Johnson, formerly a man, explained to a bored UK that that “nations coming out of the pandemic need to ‘build back better’ in a ‘greener,’ ‘more gender neutral and perhaps a more feminine way.’” Hack clichés are their solution, but these relics have nothing else. They are weak and stupid and they represent a spent elite that cares about nothing except just a little more time holding fast to their uncertain sinecures.
You can feel the tension beneath the surface, the sense that something is coming, a great changing. Oh, the elite at Davos fantasizes about a “Great Reset,” but they mean it literally – they want to reset the world back to how it was set when they were young and had energy and people hadn’t yet noticed that their venality and incompetence was matched only by their insanely inflated sense of their own abilities. But why would they be any better at pulling that off than they are at anything else? When the shattering disruption comes, they are the ones who will be disrupted, they and the whole post-War establishment our betters thought would last a thousand years and that won’t make it past 80. The elite aren’t, not even close, and we all know it now and we all sense that their Jenga tower o’ power can’t keep from toppling over even as they pull more and more blocks out of it, shredding norms (just this once – it’s always “just this once”) to keep their grip.
But what comes next? Something big, but the question is “What?” The only thing for certain is that the people running things now won’t like it. It’s been said here many times that Donald Trump was not our last chance, but theirs, our final fair warning to our failed elite from back when, at some level, we still thought the ruling caste acknowledged that we normals had at least some theoretical right to participate in our own government. But such illusions, to the extent they had endured, got shattered last November. We heard for four years how the 2016 election had been hacked, stolen, whatever the hyperbole du jour was, and the minute they could proclaim His Asteriskness president questioning elections became treason. But we saw the cheating, and we saw the judicial and executive sleight-of-hand that changed the rules in ways a real Supreme Court would have objected to, and we saw the informal rigging of the election through the lies and covering-up of the professional, licensed, and registered janitors of narrative journalism.
Now it’s all about holding onto power no matter what the cost. The corrupt feds toss trespassers into solitary while letting Antifa/BLM scumbags walk. Their tech buddies desperately try to play whack-a-mole with the unapproved ideas that keep popping up. The garbage media celebrates noted onanists while it ignores the Snortunate Son’s latest entry on his CV of shame – he’s added racial epithets to his remarkable and remarkably unremarked-upon record of tapping the tills of Slavic oligarchs, tapping rando strippers, and re-imagining the classic 80s novel of coke-fueled excess as Bright Lights, Big Guy (who gets his 10%).
It can’t last. Maybe if these puffy clowns were pros they could keep their boots on our throats forever, but they don’t own boots – too cis – and their Guccis and Birkenstocks just don’t have the same heft. They are weak, and stupid, and they are not even cunning enough to ensure that the cops and military, who would be expected to provide their final protective fire when accountability comes to overrun them, are prepared to do their dirty work.
Our venal ruling class: “President Biden and first lady Jill Biden kicked out the British media — to get the pub garden table they wanted.”
Hunter Biden is selling his “artwork” for up to half a million dollars to anonymous buyers. It’s like they want to rub the money-laundering in the faces of ordinary Americans…
Hunter is such an epic scumbag that he was banned from the Chateau Marmont (AKA “the hotel John Belushi ODed in”) for “drug use.” That’s like being banned from Studio 54 for doing too much cocaine…
Speaking of Hunter, congratulations to old friend Diana Fleischman for appearing on Gutfeld to talk about Hunter and other things. “Given the nepotism he’s been given, this is the least harmful way he could be using it…he’s making art at home and blowing through straws rather than sucking through them like he usually does.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Mike the Musicologist.)
Did China’s top counterintelligence officer just defect?
Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.
Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.
(Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)
The FBI has evidently decide it can just seize whatever valuables it wants:
When FBI agents asked for permission to rip hundreds of safe deposit boxes from the walls of a Beverly Hills business and haul them away, U.S. Magistrate Steve Kim set some strict limits on the raid.
The business, U.S. Private Vaults, had been charged in a sealed indictment with conspiring to sell drugs and launder money. Its customers had not.
So the FBI could seize the boxes themselves, Kim decided, but had to return what was inside to the owners.
“This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes,” Kim’s March 17 seizure warrant declared.
Yet the FBI is now trying to confiscate $86 million in cash and millions of dollars more in jewelry and other valuables that agents found in 369 of the boxes.
Prosecutors claim the forfeiture is justified because the unnamed box holders were engaged in criminal activity. They have disclosed no evidence to support the allegation.
I’m so old when that I can remember when the FBI were regarded as incorruptible knights of justice. Those days are long gone…
Nine out of ten Republican congressman who voted for the last iteration of the Trump impeachment farce have drawn primary challengers.
Congressional members Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio), Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) all voted to impeach Trump, while the majority of Republicans voted against the impeachment, believing it was unconstitutional and unwarranted.
Good. (Previously.)
“Rep. Richard Hudson and 140 House Members Urge DOJ and ATF to Withdraw Guidance on Stabilizing Braces.” Now we’ll find out if the Biden Administration really does want to turn millions of law-abiding gun owners into felons overnight… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Is Kamala Harris being set up for failure?
Harris has been crashing and burning in regards to the border for weeks. It’s so bad at this point that even the mainstream media are going after her with the kind of veracity you’d never expect. After all, this is Kamala Harris we are talking about, and critical media coverage isn’t supposed to happen. There’s no way a piece like that gets written by CNN without input from the White House.
But here’s the thing – all Joe Biden has to do to save Harris is send her to the border. So why hasn’t he?
Instead, Harris has been left to twist in the wind, thrown into multiple major network interviews without an ability to answer basic inquiries about why she hasn’t gone to personally survey the illegal immigration crisis. There are no actual risks with her going to the border. It’s not like the media are going to suddenly turn on the Biden administration and stop covering up what’s going on. The only real logical conclusion left is that Harris’s disastrous tour wasn’t disastrous by sheer chance.
Don’t get me wrong, Harris is an absolutely awful politician on her own merits. Every embarrassing flub and hysterical cackle of the last week serves as a reminder of why her own presidential campaign was such a failure. Yet, the Biden administration knows she’s incapable of being a likable, competent figure. Instead of helping her and protecting her, they are hanging the border crisis around her neck and throwing her into the deep end with no floaties on. Further, they are negating to do the one thing that could settle a lot of the questions causing Harris so much consternation – just sending her to the border and getting it over with.
Meanwhile, Jill Biden is chilling at the G7, rubbing shoulders with royalty and cosplaying as co-president to the glowing reviews of the media. It’s all just too perfect to be a coincidence at this point. I’m convinced – Harris is the fall guy, and she’s being pushed over the cliff by the very administration she serves.
“The Rapid Response Team, a unit within the Portland police department, voted unanimously to resign on Wednesday during a meeting with the police union. This follows the criminal indictment of an officer for assault stemming from a riot in August 2020.” (Hat tip: Andy Ngo.)
The Biden Department of Education is trying to force transgenderism down America’s throat. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
California is facing a drought, yet they’re pouring fresh water into the ocean. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“The secret behind Amazon’s domination in cloud computing. Amazon Web Services is snapping up former government officials who can help them gain access to lucrative federal contracts.” Not the only reason. Google was slow out of the gate and Microsoft’s Azure offering started out as a nightmare to figure out how to price and use. (“Which of these four types of inscrutable, poorly described storage do you want to outfit to your cloud?”)
“Parliaments In Czech Republic And Belgium Pass Motion Condemning Beijing’s Crimes Against Uyghurs.” Good for them.
Liberals not only ignore the roots of our democracy, they don’t even know what they are.
Australia’s Sky News slams the American media for their tongue bathes of Biden:
Instagram doesn’t want you reporting on anti-Semitic crimes.
“Joe Rogan Tears Into CNN’s Brian Stelter: ‘Hey Motherf*cker, You’re Supposed To Be A Journalist.'”
Joe Rogan ripped CNN’s Brian Stelter on Thursday’s installment of The Joe Rogan Experience. Speaking with Kyle Kulinski, Rogan referenced an unspecified segment on CNN about the popularity of many YouTubers and podcasters, who in some cases receive more viewers than large cable networks such as CNN.
“This is because the market has spoken and your show’s fucking terrible,” said Rogan, addressing the ratings battles. “Brian Stelter’s show keeps slipping and slipping and slipping in the ratings. Same with Don Lemon’s. It’s the same thing. Everybody knows they’re not real. They’re not real humans.”
The New York Times folds, removes defamatory statement about The Babylon Bee:
Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome strikes again. “The journalist who broke the story about the controversial 2016 tarmac meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch was found dead Saturday morning, according to police. The body of 45-year-old Christopher Sign, a news anchor for ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, was discovered by Hoover police and fire personnel at around 8 a.m.” His death is “being investigated as a suicide.” Of course it is.
Federal Judge Terry Doughty blocked the Biden Administration’s suspension of new oil and gas leases on federal land. “The omission of any rational explanation in cancelling the lease sales, and in enacting the Pause, results in this Court ruling that Plaintiff States also have a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of this claim.” Evidently “because we hate reliable energy” and “because we can’t channel graft to Democratic Party cronies” aren’t considered “rational” reasons…
Based on the just completed legislative session, this fiscal index ranks Texas State Representatives from most to least fiscally responsible. There’s one for State Senators as well.
Supreme Court rejects Texas-led lawsuit to invalidate Obamacare, citing a lack of standing. Much as I want to see ObamaCare stripped from the books entirely, when Clarence Thomas is part of the majority, that suggests there were indeed issues with the filing. Said Thomas: “The plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the harm they suffered is traceable to unlawful conduct. Although this Court has erred twice before in cases involving the Affordable Care Act, it does not err today.”
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
“Gillette’s ‘toxic masculinity’ ad haunts P&G as shaving giant takes $8B writedown.” Get woke, go broke. Everyone involved in that debacle should have been fired.
Happy 50th anniversary to Southwest Airlines, who flew their first flight out of Love Field 50 years ago today.
Heh:
Epic Broadway disaster Spider-Man: Turn off The Dark opened ten years ago. “It opened, after the longest preview period in Broadway history, on June 14, 2011, and went on to lose nearly $100 million.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Biden: ‘Republicans May Have Standards, But We Have Double Standards.'”
“Biden Gets No Pudding Cup Today As Punishment For Taking A Question.”
“Elon Musk Excited To Once Again Be Richest Man On Earth While Jeff Bezos Is In Space.”
“Dems Shocked, Disappointed To Learn The New Israeli Prime Minister Will Still Be A Jew.”
Bath plus skritches:
Tags:2022 Election, 87th Texas Legislature, Adam Kinzinger, Amazon, Andrew Cuomo, Anthony Gonzalez, anti-semitism, antifa, ATF, AWS, Babylon Bee, Belgium, Border Controls, Brian Stelter, Chateau Marmont, China, Christopher Sign, civil asset forfeiture, Clarence Thomas, CNN, Communism, coronavirus, corruption, Crime, Czech Republic, Dan Newhouse, David Valadao, defensive gun use, Democrats, Department of Education, Diana Fleischman, dogs, Dong Jingwei, drugs, Elon Musk, FBI, Foreign Policy, Fred Upton, G7, Gillette, Greg Gutfeld, Guns, Hunter Biden, Instagram, Israel, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Jeff Bezos, Jill Biden, Joe Biden, Joe Rogan, John Katko, Kamala Harris, Kurt Schlichter, LinkSwarm, Liz Cheney, Media Watch, New York Times, ObamaCare, oil industry, Peter Meijer, Portland, Proctor & Gamble, Republicans, Richard Hudson, Sky News, Social Justice Warriors, Southwest Airlines, Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, spying, Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome, Supreme Court, Terry Doughty, Texas, Tom Rice, Uighers
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, ObamaCare, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 11th, 2021
Joe Manchin, controlling the border, and Soros-backed DA’s doing their best to bring back the high crime rates of the 1970s top this Friday’s LinkSwarm:
Seems like this should be a bigger story than it is: Mexico just had it’s midterm elections. But that’s not the big part: “97 politicians had been assassinated. Along with almost a thousand being attacked in some way, shape, or form. Just in this election cycle!”
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says that he will refuse to vote for the Democratic Voter Fraud Enablement Act of 2021. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For The People Act.”
Indeed, Manchin just crushed two anti-democratic Democratic power grabs:
Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) will oppose the Democratic Party’s legislation that would federalize elections, the For the People Act, citing the bill’s overtly partisan nature.
Manchin declared his position in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. According to Manchin, “voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.”
“I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act,” Manchin wrote.
Manchin also laid to rest the possibility he would ever support ending the filibuster.
“Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” he said. “For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Manchin is thwarting The Will of The Party, so naturally Jemele Hill is calling him a racist.
Remember how Democrats were sure Hispanics would usher them into permanent majority status? Not in Texas:
Republicans swept key races for mayor in Texas on Saturday, setting back Democratic hopes that the state’s urban areas will deliver statewide majorities for them in the future. Most shocking: In McAllen, Texas, a border city of 150,000 people of which 85 percent are Hispanic, Republicans elected their first mayor since 1997.
Other cities with strong Hispanic populations also elected Republicans to replace retiring mayors. Fort Worth is the twelfth-largest city in the country and has more than 1 million people. Only a third of them are Anglo. But 37-year-old Republican Mattie Parker easily defeated Democrat Deborah Peoples, becoming the youngest mayor of a major Texas city.
The race was ostensibly nonpartisan, but the divisions were clear.
“We’ve never had a race that was this partisan,” Kenneth Barr, the former Democratic mayor of Fort Worth, told Politico. “This particular election has moved as far in the partisan direction as any we’ve ever had.”
Voters also elected Republican Jim Ross as mayor of Arlington, a suburb of 400,000 people that borders Fort Worth and is only 39 percent Anglo. Ross, a former Arlington police officer, was endorsed by several police associations who liked his anti-crime platform. He defeated Michael Glaspie, a former city-council member who was endorsed by the Dallas Morning News and leading Democratic politicians.
But it was the victory of Javier Villalobos in the overwhelmingly Democratic Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico that shook political observers.
Villalobos, a former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, defeated Democrat Veronica Vega Whitacre, a fellow McAllen city council member, to become mayor. He campaigned as a conservative and said he wanted to cut water and sewage fees. He called for compassion for undocumented migrants but said the safety of local citizens had to be the first concern. His supporters questioned Whitacre’s wooly-headed claim that if migrants were flowing the other way, toward Mexico, they would be treated with as much compassion by Mexican authorities.
Whitacre’s loss was only the latest sign for Democrats that the Rio Grande Valley is slipping away from them. Biden won the region by 15 points last November, a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016. At the same time, Congressman Vicente Gonzalez won reelection by only 51 percent to 48 percent over Republican Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez in a district Democrats always carry.
“Democrats have a big problem in Texas,” Rio Grande Valley congressman Filemon Vela told the Texas Tribune in January, shortly after he became vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “For the first time in generations, or maybe ever, we lost . . . South Texas counties with significant Hispanic populations,” he said. “And we are going to have to . . . wrap our arms around exactly why that happened. It may be a difficult issue to reconcile.”
It’s not at all difficult to reconcile: The modern Democratic Party’s core policies of racist social justice, anti-police, soft-on-crime and pro-illegal alien are anathema to ordinary middle class Hispanic American citizens. Your ideas are unpopular and you’ll continue to lose as long as you let the radical social justice warriors set the agenda for the party.
Indeed, illegal border crossings hit 180,000 in May. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Governor Greg Abbott has announced plans to build the border wall in Texas the Biden Administration stopped work on.
Meanwhile, since being put in charge of the border crisis, Kamala Harris not only hasn’t visited the border, she laughs off questions about it. (Hat tip: Texas Public Policy Foundation.)
Speaking of illegal aliens, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that those who entered the country illegally and were allowed to stay for humanitarian reasons are not allowed to apply for a green card. Also note the Justice Elana Kagan-penned decision makes no mention whatsoever of the “undocumented.” She refers to them, using the standard statutory language, as “aliens.”
“LA Sheriff Attributes Crime Surge To Soros-Backed DA Gascón, Supports Recall.”
The city of Los Angeles saw a sharp 36 percent increase in homicides in 2020—but the L.A. County sheriff said this year is looking even more grim, and he’s blaming the widespread uptick in crime on District Attorney George Gascón.
“In 2021, that 36 percent has now become 92 percent, which is a huge statistical jump,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva told The Epoch Times.
“We’re seeing increases in all the categories – assault with a deadly weapon, arson, rape… these things are continuing upward unabated.”
The widespread uptick in crime is the direct result of Gascón’s election as DA of L.A. County and his failure to prosecute offenses, according to Villanueva. Since Gascón took office, 2,690 cases—about 30 percent—“that normally would have gone through were rejected,” he said.
While Gascón has defended his reform policies, criminals in prison are toasting the DA to celebrate their early release, according to officials—and the sheriff said the DA’s policies are making it more difficult for him to do his job.
“You’re supposed to have a district attorney who represents the people … but [he’s] acting like a public defender,” Villanueva said.
“There’s no one left representing the people. I need to work in partnership with the person who’s representing the people. I don’t have that right now.”
Speaking of Gascón: “Double murderer approved for parole at third hearing; prosecutors barred from attending under Gascón’s reform.” “Howard Elwin Jones has been imprisoned at San Quentin state prison since 1991 for the December 1988 shooting and killing of 18-year-old Chris Baker and another boy at a party in Rowland Heights.” It appears that there’s nothing Soros-backed DAs enjoy more than putting violent, dangerous felons back on the street.
Dozens of Baltimore businesses plan to go Galt:
It comes as no surprise to readers that dozens of Baltimore City businesses, located in the Inner Harbor, in a stretch called “Fells Point,” are threatening the new city government, run by Mayor Brandon Scott, with not paying their taxes because they’re “fed up and frustrated” with the outburst of violence.
In a letter titled “Letter to City Leaders From Fells Point Business Leaders,” addressed to Mayor Brandon Scott, Council President Nick Mosby, Councilman Zeke Cohen, Madam State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Commissioner Michael Harrison, the 37 restaurants and small businesses are threatening to stop paying city taxes and other fees until “basic and essential municipal services are restored.”
What’s happening in Fells Point, known for its hipster pubs and taverns, as well as delicious seafood from the Chesapeake Bay, is experiencing an overflow of violent crime from other troubled areas.
The letter comes after three men were shot in Fells Point over the weekend.
“What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” said the letter.
The 37 businesses are planning to place their city taxes in an “escrow account” and released them until these demands are satisfied:
- Pick up the trash
- Enforce traffic and parking laws through tickets and towing
- Stop illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales
- Empower police to responsibly do their job
The letter continued to say that minor crime that police “ignore” is what is contributing to more violent crime. So Marilyn Mosby’s halt on prosecuting petty crimes appears to be backfiring.
You don’t say. Baltimore has had a problem with open-air drug markets for over three decades. And the last Republican mayor left office in 1967…
“DeSantis Signs Bills Combatting Chinese Communist Party’s Influence In US.””The first bill is intended to safeguard public institutions from ‘undue foreign influence,’ DeSantis said at a press conference, noting that the bill will prohibit ‘agreements between public entities and the Communist Party of China or Cuba or any of these malignant forces.’ The second bill criminalizes theft and trafficking trade secrets under Florida state law.” If Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, right now DeSantis would be the early favorite for the GOP nomination.
More words from the man in question:
Things that make you go “Hmmmm”: “Obama Administration Lifted Block on “Gain of Function Research” Just Eleven Days Before President Trump Took Office, January 9, 2017.”
Own any of the estimated 40 million guns in America with a pistol brace? Congratulations! The Biden Administration wants to make you a felon.
“Today’s proposed rulemaking on pistol-braced firearms represents a gross abuse of executive authority,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America, in a statement.
[Pistol brace inventor Alex] Bosco said the rule would outlaw the vast majority of braces on the market and read like it was “reverse-engineered to make braces illegal.” He called it “arbitrary and capricious.”
How’s that socialized medicine working out for you, UK? “Hospital waiting list tops 5m in England.”
Old and busted: Young families buying homes. The new hotness: Pension funds buying homes. “The consulting firm found Houston to be a favorite haunt of investors who have lately accounted for 24% of home purchases there.”
The Kung Flu lockdowns were a war on the working class:
Fake Florida coronavirus “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones suspended from Twitter.
Charles C. W. Cooke wonders what use Chris Cuomo is to CNN?
Andrew Cuomo’s little brother is a continuous embarrassment to the cable-news network that employs him. So why does he still have a job?
At this point in the proceedings, one is tempted to conclude that Chris Cuomo must have laced CNN’s corporate offices with dynamite and informed the powers that be that, if he goes, they go, too. What else could explain the network’s eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by the man? Here, at the tail end of his long experiment in deficiency, Cuomo resembles nothing more keenly than the inadequate tee-baller who gets to stay in past eight or nine strikes because his uncle coaches the team. His ratings are poor. His insights are vacuous. His conduct is a permanent source of ignominy. All the perfumes of Albany could not sweeten this little man. “What’s in a name?” inquired Shakespeare. Little did he know.
It is unclear why Cuomo was selected by CNN to begin with. He’s a lawyer who knows nothing of the law; a journalist who knows nothing of journalism; an American who knows nothing of America. His temper is third-rate, his interests are bewilderingly narrow, he possesses no discernible sense of shame or self-knowledge, and the opinions he proffers are so ruthlessly subordinated to expedience that hypocrisy is his default mode. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was meant as an extolment of the virtues of personal growth. Cuomo seems to have taken it literally.
On no single topic has the man’s unique set of professional and personal shortcomings been more obvious than COVID-19. In April of last year, Cuomo’s attempt to fake a two-week quarantine was ruined by his failure to remember that, just a week earlier, he had admitted on the radio that he had left the house to visit a property he owns in East Hampton and gotten into an argument with a stranger. And yet, rather than demote him for telling such a galling and obvious lie, CNN encouraged him to inject his peculiar brand of mendacity into a series of interviews with his own brother. Thus it was that while Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was making the single worst mistake of the entire coronavirus crisis — herding the elderly into nursing homes and then covering up the death toll — Television Host Chris Cuomo of New York was using America’s most famous cable-news channel to portray him as a national hero. What America needed last year was a dispassionate examination of Andrew Cuomo’s official messaging. What America got was a smirking nepotist brandishing a comedy-sized nasal swab and tweeting obsequious fluff about his sibling. New York, Chris Cuomo concluded, was “doing way better than what we see elsewhere & no way that happens without the Luv Guv dishing the real 24/7.” In exchange, the “Luv Guv” dealt Chris in on a series of private, government-funded COVID tests that were unavailable to everybody else.
Watching Chris Cuomo work is a little like watching a man jump out of an airplane without a parachute and then become irrationally angry at those who tell him he’s going to die.
Speaking of CNN, they also brought back Jeffrey “lubin his” Toobin. Proving yet again that the the Democratic Media Complex will alwaqys refuse to apply its rules to their own.
Jon Del Arroz wins his lawsuit against Worldcon for calling him racist:
The snowflakes at Worldcon are having a very bad weekend. On Friday, the San Francisco chapter of Worldcon settled a lawsuit and agreed to pay restitution and to issue a public apology for banning conservative author Jon Del Arroz from their convention in 2018 and for besmirching him as a “racist.” Del Arroz is the most dangerous Hispanic voice in science fiction because he refuses to back down in the face of political bullies. He has also written an amazing series, The Saga of the Nano Templar, that my teen daughter is reading for the second time—that’s how good it is—and I don’t have to worry about garbage culture or leftist politics sullying her mind. The Adventures of Baron Von Monacle, a steampunk series, is also highly entertaining. (Always support freedom-loving artists!)
At the time of the banning, Del Arroz was under serious mob attack from social justice warriors trying to drive him out of the sci-fi community. SJWs even sent a spring-loaded exploding can of penis-shaped glitter to his home, which scared his wife and children. The ban came about when Del Arroz asked Worldcon for security measures because he feared for his safety due to the mob-like attacks on him and his family from industry insiders. Instead of helping him, Worldcon banned him and made public statements claiming the author was a “racist” and a “bully,” with no substantiated evidence to back those statements up. I’ve known Del Arroz personally for many years. He is a devout and kind man with a good sense of humor and a love of the art of the troll. He is not vicious, but provocative in a way that is necessary for freedom of speech to be preserved. He’s the one brave enough to exercise the First Amendment in ways that ensure we will keep it. We all need people like Del Arroz in the fight to preserve liberty.
Now we only need about a hundred such lawsuits to force institutional science fiction to regain its sanity… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Not-so-much news: Gun control bill fails. News: In California.
For all the disappointments of the Texas 87th legislature’s regular session, a number of pro Second Amendment bills were passed.
Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman resigns, said to be interested in running for Attorney General against incumbent Ken Paxton and George P. Bush.
This is probably the wrong Eva to use as clip art here.
French France’s Emmanuel Macron Urges G-7 To Sell Gold Reserves To Fund Bailout For Africa. I imagine that the other G-7 members responses to this proposal ranged from “Are you high?” to “Die in a fire.” (Plus an “Is Matlock on yet?” from Biden.)
“Chinese Police Storm Rare Student Protest Inside Nanjing Normal University.”
“50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat.”
Demolition Ranch’s Matt Carriker has his truck broken into while he was in San Antonio. The Democratic Party’s soft-on-crime stances just keep reaping their rewards…
Speaking of Carriker, he just hit 10 million subscribers.
Three reporters at the New York Post are breaking the first rule of Fight Club. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The world’s creepiest McDonalds is an abandoned barge.
Crazy criminals, UK edition:
Babylon Bee counts down genders:
“How to Protect Your Shopping Trolley From Improvised Explosives.” However, I feel compelled to point out a technical error: The Trophy active protection system is not yet available on the British Challenger tank, making it deeply unlikely that the system would be made available for a Tesco shopping cart.
Tags:2022 Attorney General's Race, 2022 Election, 2024 Presidential Race, 87th Texas Legislature, Alex Villanueva, ATF, Baltimore, Border Controls, border fence, Brandon Scott, California, Charles C. W. Cooke, China, Chris Cuomo, CNN, Communism, coronavirus, Crime, Deborah Peoples, Democrats, Demolition Ranch, drug lords, Elections, Elena Kagan, Emmanuel Macron, Eva Guzman, Filemon Vela, Florida, Fort Worth, France, G-7, George Gascon, George Soros, gold, Greg Abbott, gun control, Guns, H. P. Lovecraft, Hidalgo County, Hispanics, Houston, Howard Elwin Jones, hydroxychloroquine, Javier Villalobos, Jemele Hill, Jim Ross, Joe Manchin, Jon Del Arroz, Kamala Harris, LinkSwarm, Los Angeles, Marilyn Mosby, Matt Carriker, Mattie Parker, McAllen, McDonald's, Media Watch, Mexico, Michael Glaspie, Michael Harrison, Nanjing Normal University, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Nick Mosby, Rebekah Jones, Rio Grande Valley, Ron DeSantis, San Antonio, science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, sugar, Supreme Court, Tesco, Texas, Texas Supreme Court, Trophy active defense, Twitter, Veronica Whitacre, Vicente Gonzalez, video, Worldcon, Zeke Cohen
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Guns, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Welfare State | 7 Comments »
Saturday, May 22nd, 2021
This long and mostly friendly Edward-Isaac Dovere piece on Kamala Harris is pretty revealing once you shear the piece of the requisite “first black woman VP” rah rah fluff bits:
Air Force Two is a smaller plane than Air Force One. The exterior is the same light-blue and white, but unlike the commander in chief’s plane, the vice president’s aircraft is open plan—from the back, you can see all the way to the front, where a small office doubles as a bedroom. Kamala Harris spends most of her Air Force Two flights in that office, with the door closed. She doesn’t work the plane, the way Joe Biden or even Mike Pence did.
Snip.
For a political world in palace-intrigue withdrawal post-Trump, the Biden-Harris dynamic drips with promise. Harris tried to propel her own presidential campaign by calling Biden a relic and pointedly not a racist in their first debate. But he rolled on to victory while her campaign fell apart, and now her political existence is in limbo while everyone waits to see how long he wants to remain in charge.
Snip.
The woman who launched her presidential campaign to 22,000 people packing the streets of Oakland—about three times more people than showed up for Biden’s launch—has had to adjust to a smaller role than the one she once campaigned for. A few weeks ago, in Chicago, she made awkward small talk with a window washer at a vaccination site. She asked what the tallest building he’d ever worked on was. “Trump Tower,” down by the river, he told her.
Zing!
The vice president and her team tend to dismiss reporters. Trying to get her to take a few questions after events is treated as an act of impish aggression. And Harris herself tracks political players and reporters whom she thinks don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience. (She often mentions an episode in which a Washington Post reporter mistook the cheer of the historic Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha for “screeches,” I was told.) She particularly doesn’t like the word cautious, and aides look out for synonyms too. Careful, guarded, and hesitant don’t go over well. But she continues to retreat behind talking points and platitudes in public, and declines many interview requests and opportunities to speak for herself (including for this article). At times, she comes off as so uninteresting that television producers have started to wonder whether spending thousands of dollars to send people on trips with her is worthwhile, given how little usable material they get out of it.
Snip.
Harris has been an elected official for 18 years straight, but she has only a few senior aides on staff who have worked for her for more than a few months. Turf battles have been a recurring feature of Harris offices over the years, but her newest circle believes it is finally getting her on track after years of past staffers not serving her well. Some have been surprised at how much work there is to be done, whether that’s briefing her on certain policy issues or helping her improve her sparring-with-journalists skills.
Wait, you mean the presidential candidate that didn’t even make it to the primaries is a bad manager and a slow learner who is poor at dealing with people? Color me shocked.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told me he was “dumbfounded” trying to come up with what Harris’s precise role or impact has been. Bob Casey, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania who’s been close with Biden for years and is now a Harris fan too, fondly recalled how much he enjoyed being in the Senate until 5:34 a.m. to watch Harris cast the tiebreaking vote to move the COVID-relief bill forward. As for her specific influence, he added, “It’s probably the case that there are a number of things where her imprint or her presence on that team is the reason why there’s a particular emphasis. I can’t say that I can identify one.” Other members of Congress who have sat in Oval Office conversations with the president and vice president struggled to answer this question too. Biden, who has shown a new confidence since he returned to the White House, has been making clear that he’s the one running the meetings, and Harris has been diligently deferential.
Welcome to John Nance Garner’s famous “warm bucket of spit.”
In March, Biden put Harris in charge of diplomatic efforts around migration from Latin America. Obama had given him the same assignment, so Biden imagined that he was showing Harris respect while also giving her a prime chance to build up her nearly nonexistent foreign-policy experience. To much of the political world, though, it looked like he’d stuck her with a worse setup than Nelson Rockefeller’s description of the vice presidency: “I go to funerals. I go to earthquakes.”
Harris’s staff initially told reporters that the border was part of her assignment. Republicans eager to create the news narrative of a “border crisis” demanded that Harris visit a detention facility or inspect some stretch of land where Donald Trump’s wall would supposedly have gone. House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana appeared at a press conference with a mock-up milk carton that declared Harris MISSING at the border.
A few weeks ago, I went to a White House press briefing to try to get a sense of what the vice president’s role is supposed to be. Harris had held a virtual meeting with the Northern Triangle leaders that morning, so I asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki how that call fit into the administration’s overall effort. Psaki started by saying that the conversation was part of a series of meetings the vice president had been having with other leaders and staff, not all of which had been public. Had the president given Harris any directives? I asked. “Well, the president and the vice president see each other quite regularly. She’s in many of the meetings, when she’s in town—almost all of them—that the president is in as well. So I would say it’s more of a discussion with others who are leading and running point on these issues.”
No one, including the vice president’s staff, has been able to tell me what any of this means. Migration and immigration are multinational, multilayer problems. Saying that Kamala Harris is going to fix them is like declaring that she’ll be the one to figure out how to land a crewed mission on Jupiter.
This is a pretty stupid metaphor on Dovere’s part. As a gas giant, Jupiter lacks an observable solid surface for a crewed mission to land on and at a gravity some 2.5 times Earth’s, it would be nearly impossible for the crew to do anything were they able to manage the feat. You would send a crewed mission to the Jovian system and leave exploring the surface (such as it is) to robots.
It appears to me like President Biden handed her a hand grenade and pulled the pin, and she was quick to get rid of it as fast as she could,” Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas told me, noting that despite the border legislation he’s working on and his obvious interest in the issue, he hasn’t heard from the vice president’s office.
Harris hasn’t spoken with Republican leaders about the border, her aides say now, because she was never supposed to be dealing with the border—she was supposed to be handling migration-related diplomacy with Latin American countries. She’s going to Guatemala and Mexico in June to meet with leaders there, because that’s the assignment. Pretty much everyone—reporters, members of Congress, advocates—gets confused about what the parameters of her role are. On a Friday afternoon last month, for example, the White House announced one policy on refugee caps, and then, a few hours later—after being bombarded for sticking to Trump policy by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois—announced another, higher cap. Theoretically, this change had something to do with the immigration crisis that Harris was supposedly managing, because refugees are fleeing dangerous conditions at home. But as far as most people could tell, Harris wasn’t a key player in the discussions leading up to the first cap, or the revised one. [Washington Democratic representative Pramila] Jayapal, who is a leader on the refugee issue, called the process “incomprehensible,” and said she hadn’t even thought to go to Harris to ask for an intervention.
Funny how the much-despised Donald Trump managed to handle the “multinational, multilayer” problem by enforcing border controls, stopping illegal aliens from coming here in the first place and building a border wall. That may have been imperfect solutions, but they were manifestly better at controlling the border than the Biden Administration’s abandonment of them. This is because Democrats don’t want to control the border because they view every illegal alien as an undocumented Democratic Party voter.
These days, when friends and allies try to reach out, they often can’t get through (she got a new cellphone after being elected, for national-security reasons). When she sees friends from her pre–Naval Observatory life who tell her they’d like to connect her to some cause or supporter who might be helpful down the road, she’ll tell them that they should talk to her sister and closest confidante, Maya Harris, who’s not on staff and who often tangled with aides during her presidential campaign.
So Maya Harris is the bagman and cutout, a convenient role to channel communication through. Presumably she’s much more discreet than hunter Biden in this role.
Being in a bubble leads Harris to talk in terms like “human infrastructure,” by which she means measures such as child care. Human infrastructure is one of those self-defeating phrases that some liberals like to popularize. Even most Democrats roll their eyes at it; Republicans think that it’s too “woke.”
Note the scare quotes around “woke,” as though it’s some inexplicable, imaginary thing.
Is her more stilted approach one reason the administration doesn’t put her on television or send her to talk to members of Congress as much as, say, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg? No, West Wing aides insist: She’s just busy actually building the administration’s policies.
Sure she is.
Read between the lines and you see the same Kamala Harris we saw in the 2020 Presidential campaign: A maladroit, out-of-touch, hard-left political novice championing divisive social justice causes and language who was in over her head and was singularly unable to connect voters despite reams of fawning political coverage of he from the Democratic Media Complex. She’s a slow learner who’s never run a successful competitive political race in her life, and her current performance (and the Biden Administration’s disasterous policies) suggests she never will.
Tags:Border Controls, Democrats, Edward-Isaac Dovere, Kamala Harris, Maya Harris, Media Watch, Pramila Jayapal, Social Justice Warriors
Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 4 Comments »
Friday, April 30th, 2021
If you live inside the Austin city limits and haven’t voted yet, don’t forget to vote to reinstate the camping ban tomorrow!
Joe Biden declares war on America:
The country had “done nothing about immigration in 30 years,” (most of them under Clinton and Obama), except that under Trump illegal immigration was reduced by 90 percent, and the principal problem was effectively solved until Biden stopped construction of the southern border wall and reopened the borders. He said it was time to do something about the ”dreamers” but that was not the policy of his party when Trump attempted to help them. Biden called for resources to deal with the “root cause of why people are fleeing” Central America as if it were the business of the United States to raise the welfare of those poor countries, and feed more graft into them, rather than to monitor its own border and apply a sane system of an admission of immigrants.
He revived the old Obama nonsense about combating employment with unionized green jobs, and leaped into the time warp of bygone days with the bunk that “the middle class built the country and the unions built the middle class, and we must promote the right to unionize.” Unions today are an almost wholly retrograde force redundant to market pressures for higher wages and better working conditions and largely confined to the stagnant backwater the public sector.
The former administration created huge numbers of “millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes…adding $2 trillion of debt and extending the pay disparity between the chief executive and the lowest wage earner to 320 to 1.” Naturally ignored were the facts that under his predecessor the income taxes of 83 percent of taxpayers were reduced, the number of positions to be filled exceeded the number of unemployed by over 750,000 and the lowest 20 percent of income-earners was in percentage terms gaining income more swiftly than the top ten percent.
He taxed the former administration with “trickle-down” economics, though that charge was leveled at President Reagan’s massively popular and successful economic policies. Most outrageously, Biden took all credit for 220 million vaccinations with no hint that if it had not been for Trump’s direct intervention to accelerate the development of vaccines, none of it would have happened.
Almost as disingenuous was the claim that House of Representatives Bill Number 1, which would effectively eliminate any serious method of verifying the validity of individual votes, is really an attack on the Republican effort to attack “the sacred right to vote.“ That bill is almost certainly unconstitutional, would institutionalize and protect mass ballot harvesting, and it ignores the fact that 77 percent of Americans support photo-identification for voters.
The climate was again bandied as an “existential crisis” even though Biden acknowledged that the U.S. only provides 15 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. He also omitted to mention its splendid record in reducing those omissions even though there remains no convincing argument that they are relevant to the alleged crisis. Foreign affairs was an unrecognizable dreamworld: ”while leading with our allies” and “working closely“ with them to deal with Iran and North Korea, (principally by recommitting the West to acquiescing in Iranian nuclear militarization), he will ”stand up to (Chinese leader) Xi” whom he realizes is ”in deadly earnest” in his determination to supplant the United States as the world’s most important country.
After the usual reassertion that everyone is created equal, Biden slipped in the need to ”root out systemic racism that plagues America… White supremacy is terrorism” and has “surpassed Jihadism” as a menace. He gave no hint of what he thinks of organizations that are constantly threatening to burn America down if they’re not successful in extracting a full-body immersion in self-humiliation from the majority of Americans who despise all racism. Rarely in his rabidly bowdlerized summary of the nation’s affairs does the president allow the truth to intrude. This made the opposition response by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina particularly effective.
(Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)
Dissecting Biden’s lies.
Biden tried to persuade his audience that gun violence has exploded due to the expiration of the ban on “assault weapons” in the early 2000s.
In fact, says [David] Harsanyi, “the rate of gun homicide continued falling for more than a decade after the ban ended, even though gun ownership exploded.” Indeed, “from 2006, overall homicides fell ten out of 14 years” and “twenty-one years after a gun violence peaked in 1993, and a decade after the assault-weapon ban ended, homicides by firearms hit a historic low.”
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
North Carolina Senator Tim Scott have the response speech to Biden’s. Naturally, Democrats went full racist in response.
MIT study: Social distancing and limited occupancy are bunk.
“Unions Sell Out Their Own Workers for the Biden Energy Plan“:
Another pro-President Joe Biden union just told its rank-and-file members: Sorry, guys, you are all fired.
Last week, the United Mine Workers of America union endorsed Biden’s energy policies. Yes, you read that right. The coal-mining union bosses have embraced a bill that outlaws coal mining.
This is about as dumb as the Pipefitters Union endorsing Biden for president. He repaid them with his first act as president — killing the Keystone pipeline. So now we have the Pipefitters Union against pipelines and the coal miners union against coal.
Did anyone bother to actually ask the rank-and-file members what they thought? Can they get their union dues back?
They should. The livelihoods of more than 50,000 coal miners just got sold down the river by their own union bosses.
“Bill to Ban Critical Race Theory from Texas Classrooms Passes House Committee.”
State Reps. Steve Toth (R-The Woodlands) and James White (R-Hillister) are each carrying an identical duplicate of the bill, though the Public Education Committee of the Texas House only passed Toth’s. White’s twin never received a hearing.
The bill tackles a number of educational tactics feared by some Republicans to be nascent trends in the classroom, such as “action civics,” overly political curriculums, and a strain of sociological thought which organizes racism through structural rather than interpersonal terms, translated from academia to popular literacy by bestselling writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and commonly called “critical race theory.”
Specifically, the bill would adjust three key areas of education: the state curriculum, classroom education, and training for teachers and other employees.
It would require the State Board of Education to include an understanding of the country’s founding documents in the state curriculum standards, as well as an understanding of “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government.”
On top of barring teachers from asking students to engage in political activism, the bill would also forbid teachers from promoting racial preferences or concepts like inherent racism and racial guilt. It bans similar ways of teaching with regards to gender, such as fostering guilt on account of sex, teaching inherent or unconscious sexism, and encouraging worse treatment for one sex over another.
Lastly, it would forbid “training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex” for school employees.
Good. Critical Race Theory is pure poison.
Tape leaks exposing the truth about Iran’s government:
Deeply embarrassing leaked audio has surfaced which has sparked a crisis in Iran and which may negatively impact ongoing nuclear talks in Vienna. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was heard in audio confirmed by The New York Times as authentic saying that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) overrules many government decisions, strongly suggesting it’s the military that’s actually fully in control of the country. While this may be to some degree stating the obvious, it’s hugely unexpected for Iran’s top civilian diplomat to actually candidly admit as much. One state media newspaper has already emphasized it’s a major “scandal” for the country.
Zarif is typically very guarded, but in the tapes that surfaced Sunday (it’s unclear at this point the origin of the leak) he’s heard discussing slain Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani and how the elite commander undermined him in a variety of ways, noting he often went against Iran’s interests. The audio interview took place over two months ago, reports say, and was intended as a classified “oral history” project covering President Rouhani’s two terms in office from Zarif’s perspective.
“In the Islamic Republic the military field rules,” Zarif is heard telling a pro-government journalist.”I have sacrificed diplomacy for the military field rather than the field servicing diplomacy.” He goes so far as to say that Soleimani would often task himself as Iran’s top diplomat with “requirements”.
“John Kerry, Enemy of Israel“:
We know now that former secretary of state John Kerry isn’t merely a critic of Israel; he is an adversary. In leaked audiotapes obtained by the U.K.-based Iran International, as reported by the New York Times, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a supporter that the former secretary of state had informed him about “at least” 200 covert Israeli actions against Iranian interests in Syria. Zarif listened to this information in “astonishment.”
Snip.
A high-ranking American official feels comfortable sharing this information with an autocratic adversary — a government that’s murdered hundreds of Americans, regularly kidnapped them, interfered with our elections, and propped up a regime that gasses its people — about the covert actions of a long-time American ally. What else did he tell Zarif? The Times doesn’t say.
It wouldn’t be surprising if Israel was more reluctant to share intel with the United States when Democrats such as Kerry show more fondness for those making genocidal threats against the Jewish people than they do for the state that protects them. It’s worth remembering that others like Senator Chris Murphy (who is now “requesting a classified briefing” on the Natanz incident, in which Israel likely sabotaged a nuclear facility) also secretly met with Zarif in Munich in a coordinated effort to undercut the Trump administration’s efforts to derail Iran’s ongoing nuclear-weapons program — an incident that comports far more closely with the definition of “collusion” than anything turned up against Trump officials. We have no idea what Murphy discussed with Zarif, either.
We do know that after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani — head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force and the terror group behind the death of over 600 American servicemen and thousands of others — Kerry and Murphy were among the many people scaremongering over a “massive regional war” that never materialized. In his leaked conversation, Zarif says of Soleimani that “by assassinating him in Iraq, the United States delivered a major blow to Iran, more damaging than if it had wiped out an entire city in an attack.”
Illinois judge finds state firearms ID law unconstitutional:
“A citizen in the State of Illinois is not born with a Second Amendment right. Nor does that right insure when a citizen turns 18 or 21 years of age. It is a façade. They only gain that right if they pay a $10 fee, complete the proper application, and submit a photograph.
If the right to bear arms and self-defense are truly core rights, there should be no burden on the citizenry to enjoy those rights, especially within the confines and privacy of their own homes. A citizen’s Second Amendment rights should not be treated in the same manner as a driver’s license.”
“One Year After George Floyd, Minneapolis Is ‘Murderapolis‘ Again.”
It simply cannot be disputed that the prevalence of unjust killing and violence in the Twin Cities area has vastly increased since last summer’s protests and riots. Minneapolis recorded its second-most homicides ever in 2020 — after only 1995, when the city was ignobly dubbed “Murderapolis” in national media. And the trend has continued to escalate in 2021: between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.
“We’re gonna blow Murderopolis off the charts this year,” one Minneapolis cop told me. (Names in this post have been withheld or partially redacted. As you may be aware, there is often intense suspicion of journalists amongst both civilians and police.)
The situation is roughly the same in Saint Paul, which tied its all-time record for homicides in 2020. This year, it is on pace to break that record comfortably. The latest homicide was on Sunday night; a man was shot and killed outside a bar in an apparent carjacking. I visited the bar the following day and there was hardly any sign something was amiss — the manager only insisted that the killing had nothing to do with the bar. (Carjackings in the area have surged to an astronomical degree…)
“There’s way more people it seems like with guns now than there ever has been,” another Minneapolis cop told me, and “much less hesitation to use them.” These officers theorize that the explanation for the crime surge is related to the city’s political climate over the past year, which in their view has allowed perpetrators to wreak havoc without consequence. “They feel emboldened and they feel untouchable, in my opinion,” the cop said.
Texas school district with no racial achievement gap inexplicably institutes white-shaming critical race theory classes. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
“Texas Senate Approves Ban on Puberty Blockers, Sex-Change Surgeries for Minors.”
“Chinese Smart TV-Maker Accused of Spying on Owners’ Other Devices. “Smart TVs made by Skyworth were found to have an app — Gozen Data — installed on the Android-based operating system of the TV, according to a post on the V2EX website titled ‘My TV is monitoring all connected devices.’ According to the post, Gozen Data scanned for and collected the names of his computer, his network interface card, IP addresses, and the usernames of those connected to his and other local wifi networks.” Chinese electronic devices spying? Try to contain your shock…
“Faced with complaints from parents about the indoctrination of children, an official in Rockwood School District, Missouri, instructed teachers to create two sets of curriculum: a false one to share with parents, and then the real set of curriculum, focused on topics like activism and privilege, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.” Fire everyone.
Dan Crenshaw update:
People you’re not allowed to make fun of part 1: cop suspended for daring to make fun of LeBron James.
But: Just pulled in $100,000 from GoFundMe.
People you’re not allowed to make fun of part 2: University of San Diego law professor Tom Smith may be fired for daring to make fun of the Chinese Communist Party.
Eric S. Raymond thinks that since Microsoft makes most of its money off its Azure cloud services these days, and most of their cloud stuff is already on Linux, that their desktop future is actually running Windows on top of Linux via an emulation layer. Maybe. But if the history of tech teaches us anything, there will probably be some new, unforeseen technology that massively disrupts the entire market. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Still a lot of pollen this time of year…
Researchers remove offerings left in “Satanic” Icelanidc cave intended to help ward off the apocalypse. The rest of the script pretty much writes itself, doesn’t it? (Hat tip: Jack Posobiec.)
Merica:
“Dems: ‘If America Isn’t Racist, How Do You Explain These White Hoods We’re Wearing?'”
What sort of grade do you get if you don’t even show up for school for two years? In Baltimore, a D-. “Nearly half of students in one Baltimore high school have 0.99 GPA or lower.” (Hat tip: Nick Short.)
What happens when a hot round blows up your singles-shot .50 BMG in your face. Short summary: Holy crap! For values of “Holy crap!” that includes a lacerated jugular, in-tubing a collapsed lung without anesthetic, Lifeflight, orbital bone repair and 5 pints of blood. This is probably a good excuse to throw up another link to Dwight’s overview of his “stop the bleed” course.
I was thinking of bidding on this, but I fear the shipping from Europe would be prohibitive.
“College is a $120,000 hooker, and you are an idiot who fell in love with her!”
“Biden Official Confirms Plans to Ban Fried Chicken and Grape Drink.”
The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to institute more measures to safeguard black lives by banning products they like. After it was announced that the Biden administration would prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes, officials are looking at other ways the government can save the black community from itself.
Only days after the menthol ban was announced, the FDA declared that it was pushing full steam ahead with its effort to rescue the black community through what they refer to as “strategic race-based prohibition.” An FDA official explained that the fried fowl and grape-flavored cola – also known as “grape drank” – must be banned because “these hopeless negroes don’t know how to act.”
“Preventing black people from killing themselves by banning certain products is the least we can do given the level of oppression they have endured in this country,” said a high-ranking member of the Biden administration. “This is why fried chicken and grape soda have to go.”
He added: “How could they possibly survive if we don’t make these decisions for them?”
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
There’s something weirdly fascinating about this video of England from 1901:
I bought some original art based on a timeless theme. And that theme is “Godzilla.”
It’s Friday!
Tags:.50 BMG, Baltimore, China, Communism, Critical Race Theory, Dan Crenshaw, Democrats, dogs, Feven Kay, Guns, Illinois, Iran, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Javad Zarif, Joe Biden, Kentucky Ballistics, LeBron James, LinkSwarm, Minneapolis, Qassem Soleimani, Republicans, Second Amendment, Skyworth, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Tim Scott, Tom Smith, transexual, University of San Diego, video
Posted in Border Control, Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Guns, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, video | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 27th, 2021
The 2020 Census results are out:
Florida and Texas gained House seats while California and New York lost one seat each as a result of population shifts, according to the 2020 census results announced on Monday.
Texas gained two House seats in the census apportionment for a new total of 38 congressional districts, while Florida gained one House seat, bringing its total number of districts to 28. California lost one House seat and will decline to 52 congressional districts, while New York also lost one House seat and will now have 26 congressional districts. Those four states are the nation’s most populous and together provide one-third of the House’s total seats.
A census official noted that if New York had counted 89 more people, the state would not have lost a House seat.
Too bad Andrew Cuomo killed off all those old people before they could be counted.
The population of California stopped growing several years before the coronavirus pandemic, and in 2020 the state lost more residents to outmigration than it gained. Residents have migrated to Texas as well as to neighboring states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon.
Once again, blue states lost population and red states gained population. People flee Democratic governance and its symptomatic poverty, high taxes, crime and disorder. It’s also the first time California has lost a congressional seat ever.
With two new congressional seats to play with, how will Texas Republicans approach redistricting? I am very far indeed from a redistricting guru, but I have a few educated guesses about how they’ll approach things:
Obviously, they’ll try to carve out two more Republican districts, but that may prove difficult. Expect a new Metroplex-area suburban/exurban Republican majority district, but don’t be surprised if they have to create another Hispanic majority district for Democrats somewhere.
The next-highest priority has to be taking back the two seats lost in 2018, AKA The Year of Beto. Both the 7th (John Culberson losing to Lizzie Fletcher) and the 32nd (Pete Sessions losing to Collin Allred) were typical sleepwalking incumbents caught by end of election cycle demographic shifts, but there’s no reason those districts can’t be redrawn to make them Republican majority districts again. Republican challenger Wesley Hunt only lost by 3% in the 7th in 2020. (Sessions carpetbagged his way into the Waco-based 17th.)
Next up would be protecting Republican incumbents whose current districts are starting to get purple. To that end, I would guess that the 2nd District, with Dan Crenshaw, a rising national star regarded as a solid team player (as newly minted congressmen Beth Van Duyne and August Pfluger can attest) in a district that’s only R+5, would be the top candidate for shoring up. Van Duyne’s 24th (R+2) and Chip Roy’s 21st (R+5) would be next. John Carter’s 31st (R+6) is starting to get purple as well, but since he’s 79, he may not get as much consideration as other incumbents. Michael McCaul’s 10th (R+5) would be another candidate, but as one of the richest incumbents, there might be sentiment that he can stand fast without much additional help. Van Taylor’s 3rd (R+6) looks like a candidate on paper, but neither he nor previous Republican incumbent Sam Johnson ever won by less than 10 points.
A separate issue than the above, due to different dynamics, is what to do about the 23rd. The only true swing district in Texas over the last decade is currently held by Republican Tony Gonzalez, who defeated Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones by 4% in 2020. Despite having a giant target on his back every time, Republican Will Hurd held the seat for three cycles before retiring despite never breaking 50%. The fate of the 23rd is highly dependent on whether they decide to carve out another majority Hispanic Democratic district for San Antonio, or whether they want to…
Make a play for the Rio Grande Valley? One of the more surprising results of 2020 was that Republicans made significant inroads into the Valley, including President Donald Trump winning Democrat Henry Cueller’s 28th outright. Part of this is due to Trump’s increasing popularity among Hispanics, but the Texas Republican Party has been pouring significant resources into the Valley. Combined with Biden’s border crisis, all this adds up to an opportunity to pick up one or more seats through redistricting. Michael Cloud’s adjacent 27th is looking pretty safe, so the temptation will be to turn one or more of the 28th, Vicente Gonzalez’s 15th (D+3) and/or Filemon Vela Jr.’s 34th (D+5) into competitive swing districts.
Another issue will be what the hell to do with Austin, the blue tumor in the heart of red Texas. One driving rationale for the shape of the 35th district (running from Austin down I-35 to San Antonio) was trying to knock off Democratic incumbent Lloyd Doggett by forcing him to face off against a San Antonio-based Hispanic Democrat. That failed, and Doggett won handily. It’s going to be mighty tempting for Republicans to throw in the towel and fashion a liberal urban core district for Austin to free up redder suburban areas to shore up Republican incumbents.
I can see one approach solution that solves a lot of those problems: an urban Austin district, a new majority Hispanic district near San Antonio, and a new majority Hispanic district huddling the Rio Grande Valley, reinforcing the 23rd and turning two of the 15th, 28th and 34th into majority Republican districts. But the fact it is obvious means that it probably won’t come to pass, with the likely result a more sophisticated (i.e., gerrymandered) solution.
Tags:10th Congressional District, 17th Congressional District, 2018 Election, 2022 Election, 2nd Congressional District, 31st Congressional District, 32nd Congressional District, 35th Congressional District, 3rd Congressional District, 7th Congressional District, Andrew Cuomo, Austin, Beth Van Duyne, Border Controls, California, carpetbagger, Chip Roy, Colin Allred, Dan Crenshaw, Democrats, Filemon Vela, John Carter, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, Metroplex, Mike McCaul, New York, Pete Sessions, Redistricting, Republicans, Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, Texas, Texas 15th Congressional District, Texas 23rd Congressional District, Texas 28th Congressional District, Tony Gonzales, Van Taylor, Vicente Gonzalez, Wesley Hunt, Will Hurd
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Democrats, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »
Thursday, April 22nd, 2021
Here’s yet another crazy indicator of America sliding toward the abyss:
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.
Tags:Border Controls, Cara Mendelsohn, Chris Caso, Dallas, Illegal Aliens, Jaime Resendez, Liz Cedillo-Pereira, Social Justice Warriors
Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »