Posts Tagged ‘New York City’

Anthony Weiner Gets Hard Time

Tuesday, September 26th, 2017

That’s the New York Post headline, and who are we to improve on the experts?

The disgraced ex-congressman broke down crying as he was sentenced to 21 months in prison Monday for convincing a high school student to undress and touch herself via Skype in 2016.

“This was a serious crime. It’s a serious crime that deserves serious punishment,” Manhattan federal Judge Denise Cote said as the convicted sext fiend dropped his head into his hand and wept.

After the courtroom cleared, Weiner sat crying in his chair with his lawyers patting him on the back. His mom also sat crying on the bench behind him, sitting next to Weiner’s brother Jason and Weiner’s dad.

Far be it for me to kick a man while he’s down—

Ha! Just kidding! It’s Anthony Weiner we’re talking about here! He deserves to be kicked.

Repeatedly.

What sort of sex fiend brings his mother to sit next to him at his sentencing hearing? And crying, when he went in knowing he had already been convicted, when he’s getting only a fraction of the sentence he could have gotten, just bespeaks what a pathetic little weasel he is.

It would be best for the nation for Weiner to do his time and then disappear from sight. It would be best for the Republican Party for Weiner to immediately announce he’s running for office again upon his release (or even before). But I suspect Democrats will simply have to find a way to lose elections without having Weiner in the public spotlight.

I’m pretty sure they’re up to the task.

(Hat tip: Dwight.)

(Previously: a long, hard look at Anthony Weiner’s sentence.)

LinkSwarm for April 28, 2017

Friday, April 28th, 2017

It’s been a week, so enjoy an extra-late Friday LinkSwarm

  • There’s lots of meat in President Trump’s tax reform proposal:

    Individual Reform

    Tax relief for American families, especially middle-income families:

  • Reducing the 7 tax brackets to 3 tax brackets of to%, 25% and 35%
  • Doubling the standard deduction
  • Providing tax relief for families with child and dependent care expenses
  • Simplification:

  • Eliminate targeted tax breaks that mainly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers
  • Protect the home ownership and charitable gift tax deductions
  • Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax
  • Repeal the death tax
  • Repeal the 3.8% Obamacare tax that hits small businesses and investment income
  • Business Reform

  • 15% business tax rate
  • Territorial tax system to level the playing field for American companies
  • One-time tax on trillions of dollars held overseas
  • Eliminate tax breaks for special interests
  • Texas House passes anti-Santuary City bill that fines officials for violating federal immigration laws.
  • North Korean ballistic missile test fails. Cue the sad trombone.

  • Obama’s Iran deal was even worse than we thought. “By dropping charges against major arms targets, the administration infuriated Justice Department officials — and undermined its own counterproliferation task forces.”
  • If Democrats keep moving left, they could experience another election like 1972:

    The highest-profile Democratic-party supporters are increasingly smug Hollywood actors, rich Wall Street and Silicon Valley elitists, and embittered members of the media, along with careerist identity groups and assorted protest movements — a fossilized 1972 echo chamber.

    Democrats’ politically correct messaging derides opponents as deplorable racists, sexists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes, and nativists. That shrill invective only further turns off Middle America. Being merely anti-Trump is no more a successful Democratic agenda than being anti-Nixon was in 1972.

  • If the election were held today, Trump would still beat Clinton.
  • Former Mayor of Hubbard, Ohio pleads guilty to raping a four year old. Go ahead, guess which party he’s a member of.
  • The Other McCain does his part for sexual assault awareness month.
  • The media does indeed live in a bubble, both geographic and ideological, of its own making.
  • Hundreds of illegal voters in North Carolina. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Nancy Pelosi: tried, drunk or stroke? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • 107 Cancer Papers Retracted Due To Peer Review Fraud. But don’t worry: All climate science is completely on the level…
  • When Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke swore up and down he never hire any campaign consultants, what he meant was he’d hire some.
  • “Facebook and Google confirmed as victims of $100M phishing scam.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • President Trump as a systems thinking President.
  • NYPD corruption scandal. Bribes? Check. Guns? Check. Prostitutes? Check. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Marine Le Pen heads to a runoff with Emmanuel Macron on May 7. Is there a better figurehead for modern Globalism than a Socialist investment banker?
  • Dishonest medical equipment startup Theranos used a shell company to secretly buy outside lab equipment to actually run the lab tests they were faking as coming from their own equipment. And check out that picture caption: “[CEO] Elizabeth Holmes speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.” Because of course she did.
  • Liberals love denouncing the imaginary Christian theocracy of The Handmaid’s Tale (now a miniseries) because it keeps them from having to think about the real Islamic ones oppressing women all over the world right at this very moment.
  • Related: “Lesbian Couple Discover Islamic Culture During Exciting International Trip.”
  • “When God sends a Plague of Wild Boars against you, he’s done sending messages, and is now sending armored bacon.”
  • Less than half of Democrats know a gun owner.
  • Richard Gere blacklisted in Hollywood on China’s orders.
  • Sonny Bunch has some “helpful” advice for Democrats. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Nordstrom selling $425 fake muddy jeans. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • You too can own a baseball inscribed to Justice Antonin Scalia by Joe DiMaggio.
  • “My Boyfriend Ate Nothing But Pineapple For A Week And Now His Dick Is Covered In Bees.”
  • LinkSwarm for August 26, 2016

    Friday, August 26th, 2016

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! We’re just weeks away from The Burning Time giving way to The Season of Football.

    Some links:

  • Here’s one forecast that has Trump and Clinton tied.
  • “Always correct election forecast model predicts Trump win, 51%-48%.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Average ObamaCare premiums surge 24% for 2017.
  • Well, not in Illinois. There, they’re going up as much as 90%.
  • In case you missed it last week, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general Kathleen Kane resigned after being convicted of nine counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.
  • Silicon Valley CEO Gurbaksh Chahal allegedly hit his girlfriend 117 tiems, but was sentenced to probation. Oh, and he gives his political donations exclusively to Democrats. Why do so many Democrats commit violence against women?
  • George Soros hit up for money to sell the Iran deal.
  • Soros also celebrated the European refugee crisis being the new normal.
  • Obama wants to ban smoking in public housing. Hey, if you think we have riots now… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Massachusetts takes rent-seeking to the next level, taxing ride-sharing services to subsidize taxis. Next up: Taxing cars to subsidize railroads and horses.
  • Germany in August.
  • July in the U.S. was one of the least hot months ever. Maybe not in Austin, but elsewhere…
  • Speaking of which, the 1936 heat wave must have been a nightmare to live with without air conditioning. It hit 121°F in North Dakota…
  • At one level, this piece is a good look at Gawker’s demise. At another, it’s shows New York media professionals at their whiny, narcissistic, incestuous, entitled worst. “It’s an inevitable consequence of living in today’s New York: Youthful anxiety and generational angst about having been completely cheated out of ownership of Manhattan, and only sporadically gaining it in Brooklyn and Queens, has fostered a bloodlust for the heads of the douchebags who stole the city.” Waaaah, the world owes me Manhattan real estate because I think I’m so much cooler than people who can actually afford it!
  • “NPR Deletes Comments, Says Commenters Are Too Old And Male.”
  • Google fiber hits reality: “Gee, wiring up that last mile is sure expensive! Why didn’t anyone tell us?”
  • Researchers say they can diagnose clinical depression from Instagram feeds. If they ever get to Tumblr, there won’t be enough Prozac left in the world…
  • “DNC Creates ‘Cybersecurity Board’ Without Any Cybersecurity Experts.”
  • Federal judge puts kibosh on Obama’s tranny bathroom plans.
  • What Canada needs is strict crossbow control laws. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The Silence of the Jews in advance of the slow Islamicization of Sweden.
  • I know that when I think of Jewish history, I naturally think of Yoko Ono. And when I think of people who need Kickstarter to get funding, Yoko is way up there…
  • The tragic history of RC Cola. Too bad Diet RC tastes like crap. (That goes for that crappy offbrand Maine soda as well.)
  • Important Safety Tip: Don’t have sex on a neighbor’s roof, naked and high on meth.
  • I’m not going to pony up $200+ to attend the Texas Tribune Festival, and I doubt I could finagle a press badge. But Phil Collins being there does indeed make it more tempting, if only I could be sure I could get all my old Genesis albums signed…
  • Abandoned Olympic venues from around the world. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • This woman doesn’t have issues, she has a lifetime subscription and bound volumes.
  • And then there was one.
  • De Blasio: Kickbacks, Unions, Cops, Hookers, Horses

    Sunday, April 24th, 2016

    Just because current New York mayor Bill De Blasio is a left-wing loon doesn’t mean he’s not also corrupt up to his eyeballs:

    U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has his sights set squarely on the political operative turned chief executive.

    It’s a sprawling probe, but the main line appears to be following the money trail the Daily News’ Greg B. Smith, NY1’s Grace Rauh and others have extensively tracked since de Blasio ran for mayor in 2013.

    That was when a union run by his cousin and a top donor to him both wrote six-figure checks to an anti-carriage horse group run by big developers that days later cut checks for the exact same amount to another group — very ironically named New York City Is Not For Sale — that promptly spent the cash, not disclosed until well after the damage was done, on TV ads that brought down then-frontrunner Christine Quinn.

    Wait, Democrats and unions involved in corruption? What are the odds?

    That happened just as de Blasio found religion on the carriage-horse issue, repeatedly vowing to end on “day one” of his administration an industry that very few New Yorkers saw as a scourge but that would open up what’s now vastly valuable land where the stables now sit on Manhattan’s Far West Side. The developer behind that push, Steve Nislick, wrote a “Shermanesque” statement to the Voice of the People last year vowing he wouldn’t personally profit from their closing.

    And it’s not just ponies: “The feds are also looking at how the city helped turn a nursing home for AIDS patients into luxury condos and at a series of scandals involving hookers for top cops and diamonds for their wives.” Among many other transgressions.

    That cops and hookers scandal (which took place on a plane to Las Vegas, a nice plus for a juicy sex and corruption story) involved Jeremy Reichberg and Jona Rechnitz, both of whom are De Blasio donors.

    Given that Bharara took down former Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver and former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, there’s a good chance he’ll succeed in taking down De Blasio. Then it might finally be Andrew Cuomo’s turn in the barrel…

    (Hat tip: Instapundit’s Twitter feed.)

    LinkSwarm for August 7, 2015

    Friday, August 7th, 2015

    Time for the traditional Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Unions represent the main political obstacle to just about every kind of reform: School choice. Entitlements. Pensions. Health care.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Since the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing is upon us, time for a classic reprint: “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.”
  • Illegal alien pulls gun on police in Pearland, lucky to still walk among the living. (Hat tip: SooperMexican.)
  • Side effect of Seattle’s minimum wage law: workers asking for fewer hours so they can keep getting government money.
  • Once again Dwight is on the DefCon beat.
  • “As I dug the bodies of several women out of the rubble, one of the other rescue workers asked if I’d heard that Cecil the Lion was killed. I froze in shock, dropping part of what I assume was once a human arm on the ground. ‘Not Cecil the Lion!’ I exclaimed. ‘Not him! Truly, is there no innocence left in this world?’ I cried harder than when we discovered my brother was gay and ISIS forced us to throw him off a building.”
  • Why the news media can’t do straight reporting on guns:

    The news, like Hollywood, became trapped in creating and fawning over celebrities. Getting Anderson Cooper publicized became more important than breaking the big story. When you have celebrity reporters telling you how they feel about being in Iraq instead of reporting on how our troops are doing you begin to lose perspective. With guns, instead of going to gun ranges, gun-owner’s homes, instead of interviewing women who’d stopped an attacker, and instead of really trying to understand the world such women live in and what they’re going through, they just tell us how they feel.

  • Respectable Dallas Observer liberal Jim Schutze goes to a Social Security office to get a replacement card for the one he lost. Simple, yes? Eh, not so much.
  • Speaking of the Dallas Observer, here’s one of their writers praising the Tea Party. Dogs and cats sleeping together!
  • Oh boy: Via Mark Steyn comes another story from Rotherham involving children with something to offend everyone.
  • St. Louis judge: Mere taxpaying peasants don’t get to vote on stadium subsidies their betters have decided on.
  • A sinkhole grows in Brooklyn. You can’t really expect Mayor Bill De Blasio to deal with this sort of trivia when there are so many cops to insult…
  • Welcome to the era of the $400 textbook.
  • Speaking of cops, a Taco Bell worker was fired for writing PIG on a policeman’s order (Hat tip: SooperMexican.)
  • Just about all Olympic athletes are doping.
  • LinkSwarm for July 7, 2015

    Tuesday, July 7th, 2015

    It looks like the the riots in Athens aren’t quite ready to start yet, so let’s do a little LinkSwarm:

  • Nixon drunk is better than Obama sober.
  • Boko Haram/Islamic state burns 32 Christian churches in Nigeria. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • Russians miss good cheese. Well, maybe they should avoid supporting dictators who invade other countries… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • China bans pension funds from selling stocks? That can’t possibly end well…
  • Rick Perry talks about how rich liberal elites are screwing minorities. “The left has to race-bait not just for ideological reasons, but for sheer self-preservation.”
  • Ex-CNN anchor’s husband kills armed felon who opened fire on them. “If you don’t want to carry please don’t. Then, shut the fuck up about it. Make your own decisions.”
  • Wait, you mean a Clinton is a money-grubbing influence peddler? What are the odds?
  • Dear Burning Man attendees: Fork over $1 million for Uncle Sam to add air conditioning to your anarchy. (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
  • Thanks to Bill De Blasio’s magic, crime is up in New York City again. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Today is the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 attack in London. So how many articles you can find that bend over backwards to avoid mentioning the words “Muslim,” “Islam” or “Jihad.”
  • Even Donald Trump deserves defense from the “outragists.”
  • Paedophiles of Wikipedia.
  • LinkSwarm for May 22, 2015

    Friday, May 22nd, 2015

    Welcome to the beginning of the long Memorial Day weekend! Here in Texas, we’re going to celebrate the long weekend by building arks and gathering up two of every animal.

  • “Islamic State seizes Syria’s last border crossing with Iraq.” (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • Obama’s toothless Iran deal is pushing the Saudis to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan.
  • Saudi convicted of keeping a sex slave refuses to attend a mandatory sex offender course, because Islam.
  • “If the Obama Administration loses [the King vs. Burwell ObamaCare case] in the Supreme Court, the political pain will fall almost exclusively on the President and his Party.”
  • Evidently Bill de Blasio has mistaken himself for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
  • Coming soon: homebrew heroin.
  • Ted Cruz is the only republican arrogant enough to be President. (Though I have some disagreements with Spengler’s subsidiary foreign policy points.)
  • Democratic pollster Pat Caddell: Obama is more corrupt than Nixon. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “How To Spot And Critique Censorship Tropes In The Media’s Coverage Of Free Speech Controversies.”
  • The Stephanopoulos lies: worse than you think.
  • A good many of those Ferguson protestors were paid to protest. And now many say their paymasters refuse to cough up the dough. It’s sleazebags all the way down.
  • Slashdot post: Look at all this STEM sexism! Slashdot comments: Your link is garbage and you should stop talking out of your ass.
  • It’s another one of those New York Times pieces that seem designed to make you hate both rich Manhattanites and the writer equally, about how terribly, terribly isolating it is to be a rich woman on the Upper East Side. (File under: “Three people in New York make a trend.”)
  • By way of partial counterpoint (and, in some ways, almost equally annoying), here’s dating advice for Uptown divorcees from a few years ago. “Our biggest challenge, time and again, is matching up middle-aged divorcées in the ‘pre-realist’ stage, who have not realized that they have a choice of sex, money or companionship —but not necessarily all three in the same package.”
  • Good: List of speed-traps to avoid in Texas. Bad: Slideshow.
  • Police chief in small Texas town get’s drunk and starts hitting on another policeman’s soon-to-be-ex-wife. Beatdown ensues.
  • Dogs are Awesome.
  • LinkSwarm for January 5, 2014

    Monday, January 5th, 2015

    Time waits for no man, so here’s your first LinkSwarm of the new year:

  • ObamaCare’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.
  • “Democrats are grappling with the reality that the Obama presidency is nearing its end, and they don’t know what to say about it.”
  • Pricks in the Democratic party continue to prick people to donate.
  • Grand juries that examine hard facts live in a different world from mobs who listen to rhetoric and politicians who cater to the mobs.”
  • Thanks to The Magic Power of Socialism, Venezuela ice cream shop closes due to lack of milk.
  • Just as everyone who wasn’t a socialist predicted, France’s 75% tax on the rich has been a miserable failure. “Even by its own standards, the tax was largely a failure — the watered-down version brought in minimal revenue and did little to tackle wealth inequalities.” But it did succeed in driving Gerard Depardieu to Russia and Johnny Depp to England.
  • The top ten Jihad news stories of 2014. Though personally I would have found room for the Peshawar school attack…
  • ISIS executed nearly 2,000 people over the last six months.
  • “The mobs in New York, Ferguson, and elsewhere are not calling for metaphorical murders of policemen, but literal ones.”
  • If you want to “young black men to stop being shot,” perhaps they should refrain from aiming guns at cops.
  • Evidence suggests that the “Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee” was behind the “Dead Cops” chant.
  • Teacher’s unions are very upset that home schooling has allowed children to escape their clutches.
  • Excess vodka consumption killing Russian men. Stop the freaking presses! But aren’t the deaths of thousands of Russian men a small price to pay for unlimited quantities of amusing YouTube fail videos? (NSFW)

  • You know who fought “rape culture” in the 19th and 20th centuries? The KKK. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Lying for a good cause doesn’t mean that you care; It means you’re a liar.”
  • I’ll Take “Because I’m An Idiot” for $4,000, Alex

    Thursday, September 4th, 2014

    I’m struggling to come up with fresh, insightful commentary on such weighty topics as ISIS or Rotherham, so instead let’s talk about a moron who spent $4,000 on a jacket she couldn’t afford.

    It’s an annoyingly discursive example (from the comments: “I think this might be the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever read”) of that most irritating genre, Essays That Seem Designed To Make You Hate New Yorkers. Most entries in that genre are about rich New Yorkers buying ridiculously overpriced garbage. But Mary H. K. Choi’s essay is particularly irksome, because she only aspires to run with that crowd.

    The well-to-do can afford status goods because they pay cash for them. Non-rich people buying expensive status goods they can’t afford tend to find themselves bankrupt.

    The first commentator on the story actually nails it: “No one else will say it, so I will. You bought a $4,000 coat that you couldn’t afford because you’re an idiot.”

    Says Choi: “The coat was the distillation of everything I’ve ever found seductive about not only living in New York but the prospect of belonging there, too.”

    And there’s your reason: I live in New York City. I’m extra-special.

    I was in London last month for the World Science Fiction Convention, where I had lunch with friends at a pub just off Saville Row. I thought to myself “maybe I should think about getting a Saville Row suit while I’m there.” Then I looked at the prices, and went “Nope!” Now keep in mind that I could pay cash for a £3,750 suit (just over $6,000 at today’s exchange rates), and all it would do is eat into my “two years of emergency jobless living” savings. But since I’m not a millionaire, movie star, lawyer or politician, I would have precious few occasions to wear it. It didn’t make any sense for me to buy a Saville Row suit.

    But common sense seems to be a commodity that Ms. Choi does not possess in over-abundance.

    Actions have consequences. People who live within their means tend to have much happier, stress-free lives compared to wastrel spendthrifts. I suspect that Ms. Choi will soon be learning this lesson, good and hard…

    Guns Roundup for June 12, 2014

    Thursday, June 12th, 2014

    It’s been a while since I did a roundup of gun news, so here it is. Just don’t be surprised if you read some of this on gunny blogs weeks ago…

  • Obama praises “Australia’s gun laws.” Which is to say, the total confiscation of all firearms from law-abiding citizens.
  • So how much “safer” has New York’s gun-grabbing SAFE act made New York City?

    In the last month alone, 129 people were shot, according to the latest CompStat figures, or 43.3 percent more than for the same period last year.

    Since January, there has been an overall 13.2 percent increase in shooting victims, while 10.2 percent fewer guns have been recovered compared to 2013.

    Of course, some of that is probably due to the work of new Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio…

  • Oklahoma’s House and Senate successfully override governor Mary Fallin’s veto of a bill establishing a 15 day denial window for local law enforcement to turn down approval of certain NFA-regulated firearms and accessories (silencers, suppressors, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, machine guns, etc.), after which approval becomes automatic. Why a Republican governor tried to veto a popular pro-Second Amendment bill (which passed 39-0 in the Senate and 86-3 House, which puts Fallin to the left of many state Democrats) in a deep red state is a deep mystery…
  • CNN admits it got played by the lying liars at Everytown for Gun Safety, who produced a map of “school shootings,” 80% of which were easily debunked as bogus. (Hat tip: Alphecca.)
  • George Soros-funded Moms Demand Action demands Tulsa Chipolte kick out the Oklahoma Open Carry group. The result?

    The manager refused to kick out OKOCA and even gave them free drinks. MDA activists then proceeded to take pictures of the gun owners and attempted to portray them as intimidating and threatening. The management wasn’t having any of it; he threw Moms Demand Action out of his store!

  • How did I miss this? The son of infamous Philadelphia abortion doctor (and now convicted felon) Kermit Gosnell “shot several times” by a homeowner during an “alleged home invasion.” Gosnell family values…
  • Why does the sheriff of an Indiana county with a population of 13,124 need a 60,000 pound mine-resistant MRAP vehicle? (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • School shooting stopped by good guy with a gun. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • Why Civil Rights and Gun Rights Are Inseparable. This is a review of Nicholas Johnson’s Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms.
  • The NRA says, in effect, “Hey, cool it with the Open Carry hi-jinks.”
  • Target considering a gun ban. Contact links there to let them know this is a bad idea…
  • Armed Cincinnati homeowner confronts three home invaders. Result: All three arrested, one with life-threatening injuries. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes…
  • Probably the saddest story you’ll read all year. Seriously. We’re talking industrial strength sad here. Click with caution. (Hat tip Dwight.)
  • Debunking the latest over-hyped bullet.