Posts Tagged ‘Boris Johnson’

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Tory Landslide, Corbyn’s Failure And The American Left: Analysis Roundup

Saturday, December 14th, 2019

There are lots of conclusions to be drawn and lessons learned from Boris Johnson’s Conservative landslide victory over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, especially for the American left, who I suspect will learn none of it.

First, let’s establish how many American liberals lionized Corbyn as the future of politics:

“Only Socialism Can Defeat Trumpism,” by Nicole Aschoff and Bhaskar Sunkara, The Nation, November 2016

“The past year has shown that millions of ordinary people are ready for an alternative, one pointed to by the success of Sanders and the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain …

As with the collapsing social democrats in Europe, the Democratic Party’s best bet is to move left and embrace a platform that speaks to the real needs, fears, and aspirations of working people …

For the Democrats, no less than their peers in Europe, where the neoliberalization of social democracy has opened up space for a populist right, the choice on offer might well be either socialism or irrelevance.”

“Jeremy Corbyn’s Success is a Model for American Progressives,” by James Downie, Washington Post, June 2017

“Corbyn’s success provides a model for U.S. progressives in 2018, 2020 and beyond: If you need turnout to win — as liberals in the United States do — you need a bold, uncompromising platform with real solutions …

Why was turnout so high? Because Corbyn was able to generate excitement among Labour voters, especially the young. That’s in no small part because of this year’s Labour manifesto (the British equivalent of a party platform). Unlike other recent versions, mostly incrementalist documents that tweaked what came before, the 2017 edition is the boldest in decades: more money for the National Health Services and other major initiatives, a “jobs first” Brexit and free university tuition, financed by taxing corporations and the wealthiest. The manifesto and the campaign were summed up by their elegantly simple slogan: “For the many, not the few.”

There’s lots more where that come from, but it’s striking that even his boosters boil down Corbyn’s appeal to the left as socialism, free stuff and hoary cliches. (Hat tip: wretchardthecat.) Like their embarrassing support for Hugo Chavez, I suspect their support for Corbyn will be memory-holed as quickly as possible.

Andrew Sullivan offers up (mostly) keen insight into Johnson’s win and Corbyn’s fall:

The sea of Tory blue seats that now envelop Labour’s heartlands on the electoral map of Britain is one kind of future for Western democracies. Unleashed by a revolt by ordinary people to take back control of their own laws and rebuild national sovereignty, and by their insistence that their decision to leave the E.U. be respected and implemented, it may have changed Britain’s politics in a structural way. Three political parties were decimated yesterday: the Labour Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the Brexit Party. Each party’s defeat tells you something more about a potential realignment of new politics.

The revulsion at Jeremy Corbyn was a big factor — especially, it seems, in the safest Labour seats in the north. The British people, after giving him the benefit of the doubt in 2017, turned on him. On his expansive, super-ambitious plan for massive investment in infrastructure and public services, they just didn’t believe the math. On his rancid long history of sympathizing with terrorists, they feared what he might do to the security services. On his anti-Semitism, they righteously humiliated the old codger. It tells you a lot about him that he still hasn’t resigned after the Labour Party’s worst showing since 1935. He has only promised not to lead the party into the election. He will stay on to control the succession battle and try to keep his faction in power. His goal was always controlling the Labour Party, not winning elections. He has lost two elections, but his grip on the party is going to be very hard to break. It took Labour 18 years to return to power after its drubbing at the 1983 election. It may take as long to recover from an even worse shellacking.

The Liberal Democrats collapsed for two core reasons. They epitomized the London liberal elites. A key promise was simply: We will revoke Brexit altogether, you dumbass voters. No second referendum, just a parliamentary program to nullify the referendum of 2016. Hard to think of a more elitist project than that. Then they embraced wokeness. In the last week of the campaign, their leader, Jo Swinson, got caught in long discussions about what she believes a woman is. She didn’t just lose the election, she lost her own seat. It is clearer and clearer to me that the wholesale adoption of critical race, gender, and queer theory on the left makes normal people wonder what on earth they’re talking about and which dictionary they are using. The white working classes are privileged? A woman can have a penis? In the end, the dogma is so crazy, and the language so bizarre, these natural left voters decided to listen to someone who does actually speak their language, even if in an absurdly plummy accent.

But the Brexit Party’s extinction may be the biggest deal. In last summer’s European elections, the Brexit party won 32 percent of the vote, and the Tories won a mere 9 percent. Six months later, the Brexit party is at 2 percent, and the Tories won 45 percent of the entire vote. It took a special kind of political genius to pull that off — and Dominic Cummings, the brilliant strategist behind the Leave campaign, should take a few minutes and take a bow. There is a chance now to harness the populist tide, rather than be drowned by it.

Here are the big gambles Johnson took to turn what was a nadir in Tory fortunes — plummeting to 22 percent this summer — into a landslide. He realized, unlike his peers, that ordinary people were close to revolt, and backed the cause of those left behind by the global economy, by grasping the Brexit issue. Without Johnson, the referendum would have been won by Remain. If he’d lost that referendum, his political career would have been over. The second big risk was quitting his own government when its Brexit plan seemed too soft, which he did by resigning as foreign secretary in the summer of 2018. And then, as the May deal failed to pass Parliament, he struck again — winning the leadership contest. In office, he rewrote the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement which the E.U. had said was nonnegotiable, and got his deal passed by a 30-vote majority.

Then the real gamble: Instead of sticking to getting Brexit done in Parliament, he called an early election to give himself a clear mandate for it. By fighting on the genius and simple slogan “Get Brexit Done,” he exposed the deep divides on the left, unified the right, and knocked his opponents for six (if you will forgive a cricket metaphor). But just as important, he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.

All this is so on-point that you know Sullivan must be saving up some Trump-bashing to sooth the outrage of his remaining leftwing readers. And indeed he throws some up in the next paragraph (snipped, along with the Disraeli “One Nation Conservatism” comparison).

What does this remarkable result mean for the U.S.? Here are some thoughts: Many will dismiss any lessons are applicable. They’ll say Britain is a very different place, Brexit is a unique issue, and Corbyn was exceptionally unpopular. There’s truth in all that. But take each point. Britain actually is very much like the U.S. right now. It too has become divided between liberal urban elites and everyone else, between nationalists and internationalists, between big cities and everywhere else, between those favoring a crackdown on new immigration and those who revel in open borders with 28 other countries. The polarization, tribalism, legislative gridlock: It’s uncanny how similar the places feel these days. And there’s a historical pattern in which Britain echoes the U.S. in political shifts: Thatcher and Reagan, George H.W. Bush and John Major, Blair and Clinton, Obama and Cameron, Brexit and Trump. I guess you can say this time it’s different. I suspect not.

And is Brexit that unique? Brexit was fueled by fears of mass immigration, globalized trade, cultural fragmentation, demographic shifts, and liberal overreach. So no, it’s by no means unique. It’s very much the same movement of left-behind people expressing their views on the same issues, who, tragically, put their trust in Trump. What we’ve seen is how tenacious a voting bloc that now is, which is why Trumpism is here to stay. If we could only get rid of the human cancer at the heart of it. [Told ya. -LP]

How much can be blamed on Corbyn? A lot, but what kind of politics does Corbyn represent? He was endorsed by AOC, love-bombed by Left Twitter, and favors proposals like borrowing massively to finance a Green New Deal that is as much about socialism as environmentalism. He’s deeply hostile to the Jewish state, wants to abolish NATO, declared he would never use a nuclear weapon, larked around the Soviet bloc for decades, and admired the regime in Venezuela. Hmm. Remind you of anyone?

Even on health care, which should have been Corbyn’s strongest issue, his spending plans were so fantastically huge that he lost credibility. Johnson wisely heaped praise on socialized medicine and proposed a big increase in investment but came nowhere near Labour’s proposals. And yet he won. It seems to me that the difference between Johnson and Corbyn is somewhat like that between Buttigieg and Bernie. A push left is essential. But a huge and unaffordable shift left? The British working classes said no. The same, I suspect, will happen here. If the Democrats go with Sanders or Warren’s Medicare for All, the Democrats could be obliterated. If the Democratic candidate cannot persuade people he or she wants to halt mass illegal immigration, ditto.

The political sweet spot in the next few years will be a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state.

I sincerely doubt that the American center lies between “Buttigieg and Bernie.” The UK has had socialized medicine for a long time, making it impossible to dislodge. But I believe that his critique of the 2020 democratic presidential contenders going too far left on socialized medicine and open borders is spot on. As for “a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state,” there’s a vein of truth embedded in a larger load of implied falsehood that needs to be unpacked at a greater length than I have time to undertake right now. (But see previous posts on how that sort of thing is playing out in Europe.)

I’m omitting most of his discussion of Labour’s cozy relationship with antisemitism to focus on this paragraph:

Why this relative indifference? Perhaps for the same reason I didn’t see it coming: So many of us thought this kind of thing was done with, we dismissed some of this news from our minds. But perhaps too it is a function of the race of these particular anti-Semites. We easily recognize — as we should — the familiar and ugly anti-Semitism of the far right, which remains much more of a threat than the far left. There was a telling tweet by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, when she first heard the Jersey City news: “This is heartbreaking. White Supremacy Kills.” But the anti-Semitism of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement doesn’t as well? Remember the last time the Black Israelites were in the news — for taunting and lobbing racist insults at the white schoolboys from Covington. Adam Serwer, who sees white supremacy everywhere, reassured us that there was nothing really to see here: “Its members stand on crowded street corners with bullhorns and yell vile things, including racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs, at anyone who passes by. D.C. residents do not respond to these provocations with confrontation. They ignore them.” If those same insults were delivered by members of the Klan on street corners, would Serwer have said the same thing?

And that helps expose how the social-justice movement has diminished anti-Semitism as a threat. Since racism has been redefined to mean “structural racism” — as opposed to prejudice against others because of the color of their skin — the Black Israelites or groups of young black men in Brooklyn as agents of bigotry doesn’t compute for many of the woke. Under the new orthodoxy, people of color are almost by definition incapable of manifesting racial hatred, because it is merely a form of power. We were told by Tamika Mallory, former co-president of the Women’s March, that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.” That is, Jews are victims but also victimizers according to these rules. The social-justice response to targeted murders of Jews qua Jews is thereby qualified.

The idea that “white supremacy” more of a threat to Jews than left-wing Islamic grievance mongers and the perpetual toleration of jihadism in the name of victimhood identity politics is a long-enduring myth on the left not backed up by 21st century facts. But the bit on the social justice warrior corruption of the left is spot-on.

(Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt.)

Mark Steyn offers some analysis:

[Johnson] was fortunate, of course, in finding himself up against Jeremy Corbyn rather than Justin Trudeau. Whether this was a referendum on Corbynism or on Brexit I leave for the exit pollsters, but either way Labour looks set to be reduced to fewer than 200 seats [Actually, 203. – LP] for the first time in eighty-four years. As I write, there appears to have been, in pure psephological terms, a swing away from Labour of about ten per cent. Six per cent of that went to the Brexit Party, not that it was enough to win them any seats, with the rest being split between Tories and the Liberal Democrats. So, put crudely, historically Labour working-class constituencies in northern England that voted Leave and were then screwed over by the subversives of a Remainer Parliament abandoned century-old tribal loyalties to Labour and shifted to pro-Brexit parties.

On the other hand, in leafier southern territory middle-class Remainers weary of Corbyn’s equivocation on the subject shifted in smaller numbers to the LibDems, as the party most upfront about its willingness to subvert the result of the referendum (“Bollocks to Brexit”). As a result, Labour has been reduced to a pantomime horse of urban redoubts – immigrant enclaves in the North and Midlands and upscale champagne-socialist quartiers of London, either indifferent or rather partial to Jeremy Corbyn’s particular baggage.

The only bad news for Boris came from Scotland, where the Scottish National Party is on course to win 55 of 59 seats. So that was naturally the straw the otherwise gloomy BBC panjandrums clutched at: The Union is in trouble; also the Irish “Troubles” will be back. Bombs away! The leader of the Democratic Unionist Party at Westminster, Nigel Dodds, lost his seat to Sinn Féin, suggesting Brexit is somewhat straining the loyalties of Ulster Loyalists. In that sense, Brexit is realigning British politics: in Wales and Northern England, working-class constituencies prioritized Leave over Labour, while, in southern England, prosperous suburban voters shrugged off traditional Tory inclinations for their Remainer opponents. And for the SNP the logic of Brexit is that, as Scotland and Northern Ireland were the only two of the “Awesome Foursome” (in Boris’ words) to vote to Remain, Scotland should either get the same deal Ulster does or a second crack at an independence referendum.

Whether this is a permanent realignment remains to be seen: It could be that if Boris lives up to his slogan and “gets Brexit done” – however defined, but enough at least that it fades from the headlines – then perhaps normal politics will resume. Or perhaps the peculiar Jeremy Corbyn, IRA-lover and appeaser of Jew-hate, a closet Leaver leading a Remainer party, has mortally wounded Labour. Can you have a United Kingdom whose constituent parts all have their own political parties and only the Tories’ seats in eastern Wales make it more than an English organization? Conversely, if you can’t, who cares? Many English supporters of the “Conservative and Unionist” party would be happy to cede the latter as the price of Brexit.

But those are questions for the long term. For now, Boris can contemplate half-a-decade at Number Ten, and no rivals on the opposition benches in the Commons: the LibDem leader who was supposed to be a bright young star lost her seat, the DUP leader who broke with Johnson over his Brexit deal is gone, the Labour leader is inclined to linger awhile to further damage his own party, and Tony Blair’s constituency went Tory. A triumph for Boris by any measure.

A few tweets on the subject:

Too many to embed, but also see this thread on everything Labourites blame their defeat on…except, of course, Corbyn and their policies.

The primary change accomplished by The Independent Group for Change was to change the occupiers of the seats previously held by the group. (Previously.)

The British Left has reacted to their loss in the usual calm manner:

Finally: “British Progressives Horrified As Boris Johnson Removes Mask Revealing Self To Be Donald Trump.”

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Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

LinkSwarm for December 13, 2019

Friday, December 13th, 2019

Happy Friday the 13th! Going to be a short one, since I spent most of the week finishing up the book catalog I sent out yesterday. And there are a lot of big news topics (like the Horowitz report) I want to do longer posts on. Maybe this weekend…

  • Boris Johnson’s Tories won a huge general election victory, winning an absolute majority projected at 364 seats, a net gain of 47 seats. By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour lost 59 seats, down to 203. That’s the largest majority Tories have enjoyed since Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 majority following the Falklands War. The combination of Corbyn and absolute opposition to Brexit has halved the number of seats Labour holds since Tony Blair’s first term. You know that second referendum Remainers were always nattering about? They just had it.

  • Howard County, Maryland is bringing back forced busing. Crime, rampant drug use, forced busing: It’s like Democrats are trying to turn the areas they control into The 70s Sucked theme parks.
  • Funny how Chuck Todd cuts off Ted Cruz when he wants to talk about Ukrainian interference in U.S. elections.
  • Update: After all the talk of accused cop killer Tavores Dewayne Henderson heading for Louisiana, he didn’t even leave the Houston area and was apprehended yesterday. And $150,000 bond for a cop killer does seem pretty low.
  • Supreme Court lets Kentucky ultrasound law stand.
  • Ilhan Omar seems to be missing some receipts in her reports to the FEC. (strokes chin)
  • Vegan eats steak for 30 days, says she feels better than she’s felt in years.
  • “Russia’s Only Aircraft Carrier Has Erupted In Flames.” I would say that’s a big deal, but it’s an ancient rustbucket with a long history of fires and other mishaps, and the only northern dry dock big enough to accommodate it sank last year. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Space Force is go!
  • Visualizing the most traded goods between the U.S. and China.
  • Thanks to impeachment coverage, CNN ratings have hit a three year low.
  • “Austin Council Wants Even More Homeless Hotels.” Of course they do. The more homeless hotels, the more opportunity for graft…
  • Ann Althouse reads the latest entry in that time-honored genre, New York Times Profile Of Woman We’re Supposed To Find Sympathetic That Actually Makes Us Hate Everyone Living In New York City.
  • University of Scranton doesn’t want any of those stinking conservative groups on campus.
  • Paglia: “The Death of the Hollywood Sex Symbol.”
  • There’s not a facepalm big enough.
  • Louis C.K.: “I’d rather be in Auschwitz than New York City.” Pause. “I mean now, not when it was open…”
  • “Nation Looking For Right Phrase To Describe Media That Behaves Like Some Kind Of Adversary Of The Populace.”
  • I have no good reason to have laughed at this as hard as I did:

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Supreme Court, Texas | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for November 29, 2019

    Friday, November 29th, 2019

    Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! Enjoy a complimentary Friday LinkSwarm before your Black Friday battles!

  • Supreme Court to Democrats: “No Trump financial records for you!”
  • “Last week the presidential campaign of Donald Trump announced a six-figure ad buy across black radio stations and in black newspapers. The newspaper campaign targeted 11 major markets in key states across the nation, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia — all states that the Trump team believes will be in play in 2020.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Border apprehensions are down almost 70% since May, meaning those border detention facilities Democrats love to yammer about are no longer overcrowded. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Tories headed toward 80 seat majority.
  • President Donald Trump signed a bill expressing support for Hong Kong protestors.
  • This comes on the heels of a huge pro-Hong Kong, anti-Beijing majority being elected in Hong Kong district council elections.
  • Map of Chinese defense spending by university.
  • The first rule of Frozen 2 Machete Brawl Club is is you don’t talk about Frozen 2 Machete Brawl Club. Bonus: This takes place in Birmingham, UK, and the video displays an awful lot of that vibrant diversity the last Labour government imported…
  • A look at how details of Steve Job’s illness were withheld from the public…and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
  • Texas woman killed by feral hog attack.
  • Heartwarming dog story:

  • New exhibit of futuristic vehicles from dystopian SF films.
  • Speaking of futuristic vehicles, I don’t think that this is eligible for Iowahawk’s Car ID Service…
  • How much for financial fraud, how much for voter fraud?

  • Gahan Wilson, RIP.
  • The horror of Microsoft Teams.
  • Whale falls.
  • “Millennials In Panic As Outraged Boomers Threaten To Withhold Participation Trophies.”
  • Why are Social Justice Warriors so stupid?

  • Gobble Gobble:

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Elections, Foreign Policy, Military, Republicans, Supreme Court | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for November 22, 2019

    Friday, November 22nd, 2019

    Another week of the impeachment farce, another week of an embarrassing nothingburger and bombing ratings for Democrats:

  • Week one impeachment farce summary: “None of those three witnesses were have met with the President, none of them were on the July 25th phone call, and none of them have firsthand information, and none of them are aware of any criminal activity or impeachable offense. In short, why are we here?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The so-called “Whistleblower” has no statutory right to anonymity.
  • The impeachment farce is boring American voters to sleep. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • “Impeachment Inquiry Canceled After 5 Episodes Due To Low Ratings.”
  • How the impeachment farce has actually validated reports of Democrat skullduggery in Ukraine:

    The half dozen seminal columns I published for The Hill on Ukraine were already supported by overwhelming documentation (all embedded in the story) and on-the-record interviews captured on video. They made three salient and simple points:

    • Hunter Biden’s hiring by the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, while it was under a corruption investigation, posed the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father. That’s because Vice President Joe Biden oversaw US-Ukraine policy and forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor overseeing the case.
    • Ukraine officials had an uneasy relationship with our embassy in Kiev because State Department officials exerted pressure on Ukraine prosecutors to drop certain cases against activists, including one group partly funded by George Soros.
    • There were efforts around Ukraine in 2016 to influence the US election, that included a request from a DNC contractor for dirt on Manafort, an OpEd from Ukraine’s US ambassador slamming Trump and the release of law enforcement evidence by Ukrainian officials that a Ukraine court concluded was an improper interference in the US election.

    All three of these points have since been validated by the sworn testimony of Schiff’s witnesses this month, starting with the Bidens.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Schiff and Pelosi are racing two clocks: The narrative clock for dropping the Horowitz IG report into FISA, etc. abuse, and the judicial clock against three different court cases that might derail the farce. And since they just went into their Thanksgiving break, the House only has eight voting days in December to do it and pass a budget before leaving for the Christmas brealk.
  • “Former FBI lawyer under investigation after allegedly altering document in 2016 Russia probe.”

  • Trump is surging with suburban women, raking in more donations than any of the Democratic candidates.
  • Trump Administration to start enforcing new asylum rules by sending asylum-seekers back to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “[Democratic] Former Baltimore Mayor Pugh indicted on 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion in ‘Healthy Holly’ book scandal.” (You only have to get six paragraphs in to learn that Pugh is a Democrat. Progress!)

    Federal prosecutors have charged former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh with 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy in what they allege was a corrupt scheme involving her sales of a self-published children’s book series.

    In a grand jury indictment made public Wednesday, prosecutors allege Pugh defrauded area businesses and nonprofit organizations with nearly $800,000 in sales of her “Healthy Holly” books to unlawfully enrich herself, promote her political career and illegally fund her campaign for mayor.

    Though her customers ordered more than 100,000 copies of the books, the indictment says Pugh failed to print thousands of copies, double-sold others and took some to use for self-promotion. Pugh, 69, used the profits to buy a house, pay down debt, and make illegal straw donations to her campaign, prosecutors allege.

    At the same time, prosecutors said, she was evading taxes. In 2016, for instance, when she was a state senator and ran for mayor, she told the Internal Revenue Service she had made just $31,000. In fact, her income was more than $322,000 that year ― meaning she shorted the federal government of about $100,000 in taxes, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

    The charges Pugh faces carry potential sentences totaling 175 years in prison. Prosecutors are seeking to seize $769,688 of her profits, along with her current home in Ashburton, which they allege she bought and renovated with fraudulently obtained funds.

    Uncle Sam is not omniscient, but if you’re a public official and you’re taking in ten times as much money as you declare, yeah, I bet they’re gonna figure that one out, Crooked Kathy.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Speaking of Democratic Party mayors being indicted, Mayors Against Illegal Guns member Dennis Tyler, mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested by the FBI as part of a corruption probe. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • More background on corruption in Muncie.

    Last January, former Muncie Building Commissioner Craig Nichols pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

    Others charged in the federal corruption probe include Muncie Sanitary District Administrator Debra Nicole Grigsby, Muncie Sanitary District official Tracy Barton; and local businessmen Jeffrey Burke, Tony Franklin and Rodney A. Barber.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • The U.S. just extradited a top Russian cybercriminal from Israel.

    The Russian government has for the past four years been fighting to keep 29-year-old alleged cybercriminal Alexei Burkov from being extradited by Israel to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. That effort failed as well, and Burkov had his first appearance in a U.S. court last week. What follows are some clues that might explain why the Russians are so eager to reclaim this young man.

    On the surface, the charges the U.S. government has leveled against Burkov may seem fairly unremarkable: Prosecutors say he ran a credit card fraud forum called CardPlanet that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards.

    However, a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.

    There seem to be very few elite Russian hacking organizations Burkov, AKA “K0pa,” didn’t have a key administrative role in.

  • Speaking of hacking: “Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai.” Somebody in Shanghai has been spoofing GPS signals to make ships (and anything else using GPS) appear they’re someplace else, and GPS experts don’t understand how they’re doing it. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • China is stealing our secrets from inside our own government:

    Foreign-born researchers working at U.S. agencies secretly joined China’s payroll, sending sensitive U.S.-funded research to the country while U.S. government agencies took almost no defensive measures against a major recruitment operation, a Senate investigation found.

    Researchers linked to the Chinese government formed a Chinese cell within the Department of Energy, attained access to American genomic data, and recruited other U.S. researchers to join, the bipartisan report stated.

    China’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) aims to get foreign governments to finance the communist power’s military and economy by buying off researchers who are doing work abroad. The experts apply to the program, and if approved by the Communist Party, they join China’s payroll and sign secret side agreements that the experts will share their research with that country, according to the investigation.

  • China’s looming class struggle. As always, the proletariat get screwed by communism…
  • The Clinton Foundation suffered a $16.8 million loss in 2018. It’s a great mystery how that could have happened…
  • The upcoming UK election is no longer an election about Brexit, it’s an election about how incredibly unpopular Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson enjoys a mere plus 4% favorability rating. Corbyn has a minus 43% favorability rating. “This election is no longer primarily about Brexit, it’s primarily about Corbyn and his extreme socialist policies! Corbyn is rightfully getting clobbered.”
  • Snipers kill protestors in Iran.

    The sudden move by the oil-rich regime to ration gasoline and hike fuel prices is a direct result of President Donald Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. While the regime thrived under the Obama administration, which handed billions of dollars to Tehran for signing the nuclear deal, the current administration has reinstated stiff sanctions against the ruling Mullahs.

    After President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, the sanctions have crippled Iran’s state-run oil, shipping, and banking sectors. The U.S. government implemented the sanctions against the regime’s top brass and the IRGC, which controls critical sectors of the Iranian economy.

  • “Reuters Deletes Story Meant to Make Trump Look Bad After Realizing it Made Obama Look Bad.” The Ministry of Truth confirms that this story has been rectified.
  • “Google Is Blacklisting Conservative News Sites, Despite Denials Made Under Oath.”
  • Trump appointment flips the 11th circuit court, which covers Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
  • Jeffrey Epstein evidently had cameras in every bedroom…and every toilet. Makes the “honeypot for blackmail” idea seem all the more likely…
  • The MSM doesn’t trust you to handle the truth.
  • Woke Charlie’s Angels is the latest box office disaster.
  • “Call us old-fashioned, but we don’t think the chairman of the Homeland Security committee should fly cocaine from the Mexican border into the interior.”
  • How NBA executive Jeff David stole over $13 million from the Sacramento Kings. That amount of money will get people’s attention…(Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Climategate refresher.
  • Heh:

  • Florida Man, meet Wisconsin Man: “Man arrested for 4th OWI, fake license plates made of cardboard beer case.”
  • “Democrat Finally Releases Something Of Substance.”

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    Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for September 6, 2019

    Friday, September 6th, 2019

    For all this talk of hurricanes, it’s rained like five minutes in the last eight weeks here in Austin…

  • Imagine that there’s a long, informative paragraph here explaining the latest twists and turns of the Brexit saga, because I have no friging clue what’s going on as of today. The House of Commons narrowly ruled out a no-deal Brexit, but the House of Lords vows to block it, Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed to call an early election, but evidently the votes don’t exist for that either, so who knows? Maybe this Jim Geraghty piece will do the trick, but it’s already two days old, so…
  • The American economy looks an awful lot like full employment.
  • “Defense secretary greenlights $3.6 billion for 175 miles of border wall.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Trump’s gonna win in a landslide.” Here’s why.
  • Robert Mugabe, the brutal, incompetent ex-dictator of Zimbabwe, has died, but not before he destroyed his country’s economy through Marxist policies, land confiscation and hyperinflation. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Remember when Democrats swore up and down they weren’t going to take our guns? They’ve stopped pretending:

    The media should stop using absurdly lazy phrases like “mandatory gun buybacks.” Unless the politician they’re talking about is in the business of selling firearms, it’s impossible for him to “buy back” anything. No government official—not Joe Biden, not Beto O’Rourke, not any of the candidates who now support “buyback” programs—has ever sold firearms.

    What Democrats propose can be more accurately described as “the first American gun confiscation effort since Lexington and Concord,” or some variation on that theme. Although tax dollars will be meted out in an effort to incentivize volunteers, the policy is to confiscate AR-15s, the vast majority of which have been legally purchased by Americans who have undergone background checks and never used a gun for a criminal purpose.

    The “mandatory gun buyback” exemplifies the impracticality and absurdity of do-somethingism (although Biden’s proposal to ban “magazines that hold bullets”—so most guns—is also a contender!). Democrats want to turn millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals overnight for refusing to adhere to a law that retroactively transforms the exercise of a constitutional right into a crime.

    And they do it without any evidence that it would curtail rare mass shootings or save lives.

  • Indeed, Democratic plans for gun control aren’t about reducing crime, they’re about complete civilian disarmament:

    emocrats are going after guns for two reasons. First, since the advent of the big-government Democrat Party under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they have increasingly opposed people having arms with which they might most easily defend themselves against government overreach.

    After imposing the NFA and GCA, primarily to restrict guns particularly useful for defensive purposes, Democrats in the late 1970s and 1980s supported campaigns to get handguns banned. In 1986, when most members of the House of Representatives were not present, Democrats snuck into the otherwise favorable Firearms Owners’ Protection Act an amendment banning newly manufactured fully-automatic firearms. In 1989, they began campaigning to ban various semi-automatic firearms. Democrats also signed amicus briefs supporting the District of Columbia’s handgun ban in Heller.

    Second, midway through the Obama administration, “progressives” decided to use “guns” as a core issue around which to rally their voter base.

    Also:

    Democrats claim that the Supreme Court never considered the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to arms before Heller. To the contrary, the court did so in U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), Presser v. Illinois (1886), Miller v. Texas (1894), U.S. v. Miller (1939), and U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990). Heller was only the first case in which the court was asked specifically to state whose right the amendment protects.

    (Hat tip: Karl Rehn.)

  • Kurt Schlichter makes the same argument in more pungent form:

    No gun bans, ever. You feel us?

    But you can argue about gun rights if you want to – here are some suggestions how – but I prefer the threat of the total political destruction of those who would betray us. That’s not because our arguments are weak – our arguments are ironclad – but because arguments mean nothing anymore, since the goal of the gun grabbers is not enacting good policy. If it were, they wouldn’t be targeting law-abiding citizens like us. Nor would they have tolerated decades of bloodbaths in every Democrat big city. They would have unleashed the cops to bust the drug-dealing, gang-banging scumbags who wander about loose today because the liberals in charge simply do not care about scores of dead inner-city citizens.

    There’s no good faith argument to be had because our gooey elite, supported by the Ahoy Division of Fredocon submissives eager to once again receive their ration of establishment table scraps, don’t care about facts or reason. They already have their objective and they aren’t going to let bourgeois conceits like “evidence” and “rights” get in their way.

    They want power, and they want to demonstrate their power over those knuckle-dragging cisgender Jesus people who work for a living, like you, by taking away a right that is central to your conception of yourself as an American citizen. Guns represent your power to protect yourself and your family, and your power to remove a tyrannical government. Taking that from you allows them the delightful opportunity to rub your face in your own submission, and it puts you in your place. Oh, and there’s also the practical value of depriving you of the power to remove a tyrannical government, since that’s what the elite aspires to enact. Disarmed, you are at their mercy and, as the history of left-wing governments teaches, they have none for such as you.

  • San Francisco’s government goes full retard, declares the NRA a “terrorist organization.” You can probably smell the lawsuits from here, assuming that’s not just homeless feces…
  • Former General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis says that Obama and Biden really screwed up Iraq.
  • Liberals embrace the Thanos option:

    No idea should be as discredited as the irrational fear of too many people, yet this Malthusian temptation has somehow managed to avoid the stigma it deserves. The belief popularized by [Paul] Ehrlich, that the planet has a finite “carrying capacity” and that we’re currently running up against it, has justified some of the most abhorrent episodes of state-sponsored bigotry and eugenics since the end of World War II. The United States, in cooperation with groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, justified the sterilization of low-income Native American and Puerto Rican women through population control hysteria. In the developing world, the goal of ensuring “sustainable” population levels led organizations like the World Bank to create incentives for voluntary sterilization and punishments for larger families. The campaign went so far as to include the USAID-backed dissemination of untested and potentially hazardous contraceptive devices in 60 developing countries.

    Ehrlich has a habit of being wrong. He claimed that the average American lifespan would decline to just 42-years-old by 1980. In 1970, he predicted that “the death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” That same year, he warned that “all important animal life in the sea will be extinct” by 1980. At least 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in what he dubbed “the great die-off” between 1980 and 1989. “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people,” Ehrlich said in 1971. The Stanford Professor evinces no contrition about his errors. “As I’ve said many times,” he warned as recently as last year, “‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell.’”

    Though the population controllers have not altered their diagnosis or recommendations in the last 40 years, the world around them has changed dramatically. Between 1981 and 2008, 700 million people emerged from extreme poverty even as the world’s population increased by 48 percent. The elimination of subsistence living is no longer a utopian prospect but an attainable goal. Global life expectancy grew by 5.5 years between 2000 and 2016, with the gap between the sexes remaining stable. Global food production has risen to meet demand, and the number of people suffering from undernourishment declined by half between 1960 and 2008. Deaths attributable to global conflict have declined to proportional rates almost unknown in human history. This revolution in human existence is a product of two conditions: the triumph of the market over its socialistic alternatives in the last decades of the 20th century and the increasing number of people who participate in that market, augmenting the incentives associated with innovation and growth.

  • “A Very Fast, Very Safe, Very SLIMM Nuclear Reactor.” Thorium molten salt design. Would like to see how a working prototype of this compares to comparable prototypes of fast integral reactions and pebble bed designs. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)
  • Thanks to Venezuela, FARC is back. Because why feed your people when you can back a fellow communist terrorist organization instead? You submitted this to FARK with a funnier headline. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Has actor Jared Leto formed a cult? Sure seems so. I was unaware he was in a band called 30 Seconds to Mars, I only know him (by reputation) as the Joker in Suicide Squad. Since I just saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I’d rather keep cult leaders away from Margot Robbie…
  • Hey hey, my my. Rock and roll is gonna die:

    Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).

    A few of these legends might manage to live into their 90s, despite all the … wear and tear to which they’ve subjected their bodies over the decades. But most of them will not.

  • Ed Driscoll thinks Hollywood may be heading the same way:

    Music concerts and the film industry are really the last media institutions that still require an audience to turn up en masse in a single location to consume its product. No wonder Hollywood relies on the fumes of Marvel and DC comic books, plus midcentury franchises such as James Bond, Star Trek, Star Wars, Mission: Impossible and Brit-lit such as the Lord of the Rings, the Narnia franchise and Paddington to keep itself alive. No wonder rock music as a whole already has one foot in the grave.

    In other words, the last remaining universally known products of mass media are getting very old and their freshness sell-by dates have long expired. And there’s no mass media left to create something that strikes a sufficiently universal chord in either rock music and Hollywood to influence the zeitgeist any longer. Rock music has arguably already given way to rap as the most popular genre of American teenagers. Hollywood could be in deep trouble if the public turns away from superhero and sci-fi franchises the same way that moviegoers abandoned the musical as a genre in the late 1960s. It’s not like either industry hadn’t seen these trends coming, and they will each be “riding the gravy train” for as long as possible, as Roger Waters (age 75) would say. But for both, the end of the line may be in sight.

  • A teapot tempest example of Our Stupid Media’s incompetent mendacity. Appellate lawyer Leif Olson resigned from the Labor Department on August 30, less than four hours after Bloomberg Law asked the department for comment on a Facebook conversation that referenced anti-Semitic tropes. The posts Bloomberg Law referenced had been making fun of anti-semites, which was clear from context, but Bloomberg Law spun them as antisemitic, Because Trump. Now Olson has rejoined the agency, but Bloomberg Law still hasn’t apologized for a lying smear job.
  • Secrets of a 911 dispatcher.
  • Game developer who thought people were trying to drive him to suicide commits suicide.

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    LinkSwarm for August 30, 2019

    Friday, August 30th, 2019

    I hope you’re ready for the Labor Day Weekend. I certainly am…

  • At the G7, President Donald Trump is the popular one. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Three documents President Trump should declassify. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Obama’s Social Justice Warrior dictates harmed American military readiness.
  • Democracies around the world should hope that President Trump wins the trade war with China. “China’s victory [would] bring about a world in which democracies are enfeebled and the largest autocracy is emboldened.”
  • Boris Johnson has outflanked remainers by proroguing Parliament for a Queen’s speech.

    For this, Johnson is being pilloried as a dictator by Remainers. Why? By doing this, Johnson has made it harder for parliamentarians who oppose a no-deal exit from the European Union to interrupt Johnson’s Brexit negotiation strategy, which includes the possibility of no deal. Johnson has very sharply limited the time in which parliamentarians could organize to force the government to request another extension from the EU and thus make a mockery of Johnson’s promise of leaving the European Union — deal or no deal — by October 31. Essentially, parliamentarians will face a choice: Allow Johnson to proceed with his form of brinkmanship while negotiating with Brussels, including the possibility of no deal, or make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.

    Remainers should look into the mirror, however. They have shaped this outcome as much as any hardcore Brexiteer. At every single turn, in fact, it has been Remainers who have increased the chances of the U.K.’s not only leaving, but crashing out on a series of ad hoc emergency measures, rather than a comprehensive adjustment to its relationship to Europe.

    Following this maneuver, Johnson’s Tories have surged in the polls.

  • How President Trump started a war between the UN and Hamas:

    While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees], the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.

    Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”

    The power struggle between the UN employees and Hamas was tested before during clashes over the teaching of the Holocaust in UNRWA schools and the use of UNRWA schools to launch attacks on Israel.

    The real crackup came when the Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA.

    Snip.

    “I am the captain of the ship which has 13,000 sailors on it and they have basically thrown me off the bridge and consigned me to my captain’s quarters,” Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director of field operations in Gaza, whined.

    Schmale had never actually been the captain. [Hamas co-founder Mahmoud] Zahar and other Hamas leaders had been running things.

    The UNRWA was forced to evacuate most of its 19 international staffers from Gaza, including its ten senior leaders, leaving behind only 6 international staffers. This made no practical difference as the UNRWA operation on the ground was actually being run by the 13,000 Hamas UN employees.

    But the UN isn’t moved by protests or violence. It runs on reports. And soon a report arrived.

    Al Jazeera debuted an internal UN report alleging corruption and misconduct by UNRWA leaders. Al Jazeera is an arm of Qatar. The Islamic terror state is currently the biggest backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, supports Hamas, and is extensively involved in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s barrage of stories on the UNRWA report was a clear signal that Qatar was targeting the UN agency on behalf of Hamas.

    Al Jazeera claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report from agency employees “concerned” that action wasn’t being taken against an “inner circle” running UNRWA. The inner circle consists of the international leadership that Hamas is angry at for trying to fire hundreds of its people.

    The report, aired by Al Jazeera, claimed that UNRWA boss Pierre Krahenbuhl had carried on an affair with his senior adviser, Maria Mohammedi, which “embarrassed” their colleagues and donors.

    Krahenbuhl, a Swiss NGO vet, is officially married to Taiba Rahim, the head of an Afghan non-profit, and Maria Mohammedi, is an Algerian who was, at least in the past, married to Rashid Abdelhamid, a “Palestinian filmmaker”, who is really an Algerian educated in France, and living in Gaza, and while this is all very multinational, it’s also the sort of “international diplomacy” that the UN frowns upon.

    But if the allegations are true, the Swiss humanitarian had just gone native by adopting polygamy.

    The report is filled with allegations of bullying, nepotism, abusing travel vouchers, and, the worst possible sin in a bureaucracy, bypassing official channels. And it might be more serious if the behavior being described weren’t slightly eclipsed by the fact that the rest of the UNRWA, which likely includes the employees behind the report, is an Islamic terror group dedicated to murdering children.

    But in the UN, using schools as munition dumps isn’t a serious issue, going outside official channels is.

    Result: Other nations, including the Swiss and the Dutch, are cutting off money to UNRWA.

  • Feminists just couldn’t accept their victory:

    In a grim determination never to take “Yes” for an answer, a different breed of feminist waddled onto the scene. Feminism had taken a vicious, vindictive and male-hating turn. Like other “civil rights” movements, it turned out to have less to do with “justice” and more to do with raw, abusive power, payback, quotas, unqualified people having set-aside slots based on their plumbing, and getting rich. Society needed to make some changes. And it did. However, we’ve all heard the expression “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Well, don’t look now, but there goes the baby…literally.

    Abortion was always a divisive subject. The first time Mr. AG and I heard a friend wax poetic about what a great thing abortion would be, I almost got into a fistfight with him, except he was also a pacifist! Where’s the fun in pummeling a pacifist? To a non-psychotic, the very idea of killing a baby is appalling, admit it. But by the early ’70s there was a growing consensus that in the first 12 weeks, the proverbial “clump of cells” should be able to be terminated. How quickly and predictably that morphed into abortion any time for any reason, including the sex of the baby, or no reason at all. I knew one certifiable, deranged feminist who used abortion as birth control. She had had 8 abortions that I heard of before I lost track of her.

    Today, after ultrasound has proven that the clump of cells looks remarkably like a baby, only 7 percent of the American people agree with third trimester abortion. SEVEN PERCENT! You could get more than 7 percent to say they have had lunch with Bigfoot and Elvis. (Bigfoot selected the steak tartare; Elvis chose the Biscuits and Gravy.) Yet seven of nine black-robed arbiters set the stage for what has become legalized infanticide.

    As they say on late-night informercials: But WAIT, there’s more! The old guard, who educated and litigated and lobbied for the rights and privileges women have today are driven from the movement, indeed from the public square. They have failed to get onboard with the quaint and unscientific notion that sex is a more or less imaginary construct and can change on a whim. How shocked Eve Ensler must have been to find that her tedious but lucrative play about chattering vaginas is now verboten because “some women don’t have vaginas.” Though she died in 1986, De Beauvoir herself wrote, “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.” Gotta love those cheery existentialists!

    Newly-minted women who are actually men can now win every athletic competition against real biological women. Title IX has been rendered meaningless. Protest if you dare, even if you’re an iconic lesbian tennis pro, and you will face a Twitter storm or legal action in Canada. Even backpedaling and groveling will not save you. As the famous novelist Max Cossack queried the other day over breakfast: “If men and women are exactly the same, why don’t we see women who’ve transitioned into ‘men’ winning athletic events against other men? How come that only goes one way?” Bueller? Mueller? Is that in anybody’s purview?

    So what you might call Fairness Feminism is dead. The loony ghouls feasting on its corpse will carry on, but it will never again approach being any kind of mass movement.

  • Kurt Schlichter is delighted that our liberal media elites are being hoisted on their on petards:

    You must have a heart of stone not to burst into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter at the agony of the failing New York Times and the rest of the media over how conservative activists are going to apply the same internet colonoscopy to lib journalistas as they apply to us.

    Monsters!

    Fascists!

    Meanies!

    Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.

    Drink in their pain.

    Drink it all in.

    Mmmmm, that’s some delicious pain.

    Yeah, conservatives are fighting back, and to the other side it’s an assault on the free press and further evidence that Trump is totally Hitler and probably Stalin too. But to us, it’s long-overdue counterpunching right into the progs’ soft gut. (Note: The author knows some of the conservatives allegedly involved, but was not involved in this glorious initiative).

    This is righteous retribution, and the screaming and hollering about it is further evidence that there’s plenty of dirt to dig up.

    Welcome to Accountability City. Population: All you liberal media jerks.

  • Ann Althouse wonders how a New York Times travel writer balances their job demands of selling air travel to rich people with his bedrock religious belief in global warming. Answer: with good old-fashioned hypocrisy:

    After a few more tips — including buy carbon offsets — [Seth] Kugel ends with this mind-bogglingly elitist paragraph:

    Most of this will make travel more expensive — and that may mean traveling even less. Think of it as a progressive tax paid by those lucky enough to travel for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in. It is a small price to pay. And maybe it will make you feel a little less shame.

    No! You should feel MORE shame for even thinking like that. Kugel is saying that the people with the money to pay more will pay more and should feel lucky and less ashamed for “for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in.” But refraining from doing what you can do is a core component of morality! To travel is to choose to cause damage. Kugel is just desperately trying to scare up every argument for continuing to travel by air…. other than relinquishing the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the world’s climate.

  • “Young Turks Host Hasan Piker Mocks Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s War Injuries, Declares America Deserved 9/11.” Thought about noting this for the Joe Rogan interview with Dan Crenshaw post, but decided the little shit just wasn’t worth mentioning there.
  • You can see the progress on the border wall here. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • “Obama Blows $15 Million on Mansion Doomed by Rising Tides He Failed to Slow.”
  • “NAACP President to Reporter: ‘I don’t talk to fucking Jews.'” That’s president of the Passiac NAACP, not the national organization. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Iranian rocket blows up on pad.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Karachi, Pakistan suffers through a plague of flies:

    First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.

    And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.

    Flies and flooding can often go together, and Karachi is no stranger to either. But Dr. Seemin Jamali, the executive director for the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, one of Karachi’s largest public hospitals, said this was the worst infestation of flies she had ever witnessed.

    “There are huge swarms of flies and mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s not just affecting the life of the common man — they’re so scary, they’re hounding people. You can’t walk straight on the road, there are so many flies everywhere.”

    The city started a fumigation drive, but the flies remain, and frustrations are growing. It’s all drawing new attention, and anger, to the city’s longstanding problems with garbage and drainage — an issue that feuding political factions have wielded against each other for years, but that hasn’t gotten any better.

    Experts say this infestation was probably brought on by the combination of stagnant rainwater, which stood in the city for days, with garbage on the streets and waste left behind from animals slaughtered during the recent Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Guy does the opposite of what I do every day, going out on the Internet without any blockers of any kind to see what sorts of tracking cookies he picks up. He picked up hundreds. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Homeowner in Round Rock? The city council is going to be taking more of your money.
  • Lying about lobsters.
  • Stationary bicycle maker Peloton is preparing an IPO despite never having been profitable, having no realistic plans to be profitable, and a CEO who makes more than the CEOs of Ford, Home Depot and Cisco. “So, Peloton, while pretending to be a technology company, lost $195 million last year, yet paid its top three executives more than $50 million (up from $17.9 million in Fiscal Year 2018).”
  • “Gun stolen during anonymous masked orgy, police admit ‘we’re probably not going to solve this one.'” Bonus: Exactly the state you think.
  • Critics hate Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because it’s not boring and woke. (I saw this last Saturday, and I highly recommend catching it in theaters while you can.)
  • “Liberals Clarify They Only Want Black Voices To Be Heard When They’re Saying Liberal Things.”

    “When black people agree with me, I very much want their voices to be heard,” said Helga Bannerman, 28, Portland, she/they/her/xen. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re pretty much just not black anymore. They’re basically an evil white person like me at that point. And the last thing we need on this planet is more white people like Dave Chappelle.”

  • A heh for the weekend:

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for July 26, 2019

    Friday, July 26th, 2019

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Democrats just keep making the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to President Donald Trump.

    This month, Netroots Nation met in Philadelphia. The choice was no accident. Pennsylvania will probably be the key swing state in 2020. Donald Trump won it by only 44,000 votes or seven-tenths of a percentage point. He lost the prosperous Philadelphia suburbs by more than Mitt Romney did in 2012 but more than made up for it with new support in “left behind” blue-collar areas such as Erie and Wilkes-Barre.

    You’d think that this history would inform activists at Netroots Nation about the best strategy to follow in 2020. Not really. Instead, Netroots events seemed to alternate between pandering presentations by presidential candidates and a bewildering array of “intersectionality” and identity-politics seminars.

    Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged that, if elected, she would immediately investigate crimes committed by border-control agents. Julian Castro, a former Obama-administration cabinet member, called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But everyone was topped by Washington governor Jay Inslee. “My first act will be to ask Megan Rapinoe to be my secretary of State,” he promised. Naming the woke, purple-haired star of the championship U.S. Women’s Soccer team, he said, would return “love rather than hate” to the center of America’s foreign policy.

    Snip.

    Many leftists acknowledge that Democrats are less interested than they used to be in trimming their sails to appeal to moderates. Such trimming is no longer necessary, as they see it, because the changing demographics of the country give them a built-in advantage. Almost everyone I encountered at Netroots Nation was convinced that President Trump would lose in 2020. Earlier today, Roland Martin, an African-American journalist, told ABC’s This Week, “America is changing. By 2043, we’ll be a nation [that’s] majority people of color, and that’s — that is the game here — that’s what folks don’t want to understand what’s happening in this country.”

    It’s a common mistake on both the right and the left to assume that minority voters will a) always vote in large numbers and b) will vote automatically for Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in part because black turnout fell below what Barack Obama was able to generate. There is no assurance that black turnout can be restored in 2020.

    As for other ethnic groups, a new poll by Politico/Morning Consult this month found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics is at 42 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll showed Trump at 32 percent among Hispanics; another poll from The Hill newspaper and HarrisX has it at 35 percent. In 2016, Trump won only 29 to 32 percent of the Hispanic vote.

    Netroots Nation convinced me that progressive activists are self-confident, optimistic about the chances for a progressive triumph, and assured that a Trump victory was a freakish “black swan” event. But they are also deaf to any suggestion that their PC excesses had anything to do with Trump’s being in the White House. That is apt to be the progressive blind spot going into the 2020 election.

  • Democrats’ strategy against President Trump has been a miserable failure. Even CNN agrees!
  • President Trump won the Mueller showdown and now is going on offense:

    Trump is just beginning to advance his arguments about what has blanketed the country since the summer of 2016. The president is going to argue that the real scandal was the attempt to keep him from winning election and, once having won, from governing. And his opponents did so by shocking means far outside the norms of law and U.S. politics. In this offensive against his tormentors of the past 36 months, the president may be aided by the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and by John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to whom Attorney General William P. Barr has entrusted the investigation into what may well become “CoIntelPro 2.0.”

    Even if not, Trump will make this argument simply by force of repetition of the facts we already know: The Steele Dossier was a con job from the start — opposition research passed off as intelligence and, at best, stupidly accepted as legitimate by a naive FBI. It could turn out much worse than this. Wise advice during the Mueller investigation was to wait for the endgame and not guess. The same holds for the inspector general and for Durham.

    That the attack on Trump has decisively failed is not open to debate — except by people unfamiliar with sunk costs. Many political figures and folks in the commentariat heavily invested in the idea that Mueller would bring forth impeachment, and possibly even conviction and removal of the president. He did not. Impeachment proceedings, much less a successful vote on articles of impeachment, seem unlikely.

    Trump has his economic boom, his deregulatory record, his military buildup and his remaking of the judiciary. He has criminal-justice reform to his credit and an overhaul of Veterans Affairs is underway. He now has a spending deal that would guarantee continuing fiscal stimulus via larger deficits, and he has four vacancies (to which he astonishingly has not nominated anyone) on the U.S. courts of appeals for the 2nd and 9th circuits, as well as scores of district court openings to remind his base of the stakes.

  • How long has Robert Mueller been like this?
  • In case anyone still isn’t clear on this point, Democrats still aren’t serious about impeachment:

    Look at the last impeachment, that of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr delivered his report on the Lewinsky affair to Congress on Sept. 9. The House voted to start impeachment proceedings on Oct. 8. The formal impeachment vote was Dec. 19. The matter then went to the Senate, which voted to acquit Clinton on Feb. 12, 1999. The process took a few days more than five months.

    Imagine a similar timeline today. The House stays out on recess until the second week in September. Say they vote to begin proceedings in October. The impeachment vote comes in mid-to-late December, and the Senate verdict in February — probably somewhere between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.

    That is a crazy scenario, and that is what would happen if impeachment work got under way immediately after the House returns from recess. If it were delayed further, the whole thing would move weeks or months farther down the road. Why not a Senate trial during Super Tuesday, or the summer political conventions? The possibilities are mind-boggling.

    Speaker Nancy Pelosi fears impeachment will backfire on Democrats, in large part because the Republican-controlled Senate will never remove Donald Trump from office. Her strategy appears to be to delay and delay until at some point it becomes obvious to all that it is far too late to make impeachment happen. Pelosi will then look at her watch and say, “Oh, my goodness, look at the time!” And that will be that.

    The fact is, it is nearly too late for impeachment right now. Yet the possibility of impeachment is still being discussed seriously.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • While everyone was watching Robert Mueller ask when Matlock was on, the House, in coordination with the Trump Administration, passed a budget agreement that continues profligate spending as far as the eye can see (or at least two years), and which takes a government shutdown off the table until after the 2020 election. Not what I or any conservative activist would have done, but obviously President Trump feels he can continue to hold off the next cyclical recession long enough to get reelected. Kicking the can down the road has become a global pastime for almost all the nations of the world, and sooner or later there will come a reckoning. In America, this fight may have been lost when Bush41 let Gramm-Rudman-Hollings get whacked in 1990…
  • It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this story of Washington, D.C. therapists whose patients’ Trump Derangement Syndromes are making their equally liberal TDS-suffering therapists depressed as well. (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
  • Another lovely side effect of living in a one-party state controlled by the far left: Los Angeles faces an imminent outbreak of Bubonic Plague

    Dr. Drew told Adams that he had predicted the recent typhus outbreak in Los Angeles, which was carried by rats, transferred by fleas to pets, and from pets to humans.

    Bubonic plague, Dr. Drew said, like typhus, is endemic to the region, and can spread to humans from rodents in a similar fashion.

    Though commonly recognized as the medieval disease responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which killed one-third of the population of Europe, the last outbreak of bubonic plague in the U.S. was nearly a century ago, from 1924 to 1925 — also in Los Angeles. Only a “heroic effort” by doctors stopped it, Dr. Drew recalled, warning that conditions were perfect for another outbreak of the plague in the near future.

    Los Angeles is one of the only cities in the country, Dr. Drew said, that has no rodent control plan. “And if you look at the pictures of Los Angeles, you will see that the homeless encampments are surrounded by dumps. People defecate there, they throw their trash there, and the rats just proliferate there.”

  • Incumbent Democrats gear up for the AOC-inspired blue-on-blue violence:

    Representative Jerrold Nadler has served in Congress for 27 years, rising to become the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. He has become a boldface name in the age of President Trump, the linchpin of many Democrats’ hopes of impeachment.

    Eliot Engel leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, after first being elected to the House in 1988. Carolyn Maloney was the first woman to represent her district when she was elected in 1992. Yvette Clarke, serving since 2007, has delivered some of the most consistently progressive votes in her party.

    All four New York House members are facing primary challenges from multiple insurgent candidates.

    Almost a year in advance of the June 2020 primary, more than a dozen Democrats in New York have declared their plans to run, forming one of the most contentious congressional fields in the country at this stage. They are targeting some of the country’s longest-serving or most powerful politicians — most as first-time or outsider candidates, and some in the same district.

    The phenomenon is not unique: Progressives across the country are plotting primary battles, spurred on by the victories last year of figures such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as growing disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s old-guard wing. Early challengers have emerged in blue states including New Jersey and California.

  • How Democrats plan to turn Texas blue:

    Texas Democrats have their eyes on taking over Texas, and a newly released plan lays out how they aim to finally turn Texas blue.

    In a presentation given to political donors and Austin lobbyists this week, Texas Democrats made their case for heavy political investment in the Lone Star State.

    First, they compare Texas to Ohio, a traditional swing state that often receives a heavy influx of cash from national Democrat donors. Both states, the presentation states, voted 43 percent Democrat in the 2016 presidential election. But while Ohio’s trajectory is “successively worse in the last two presidential elections,” Texas Democrats point out that they had their best showing in 20 years. They also highlight demographic differences between Ohio and Texas that they believe make the task easier, such as the Texas’ overall younger and larger minority population.

    Snip.

    Democrats need not worry, they say, about retaining [12 Texas House seats they flipped], as they claim there is “too much GOP defense to go on offense” in order to take those seats back. Recently released campaign finance reports, however, show that many of the newly elected “Democrat Dozen” have an astoundingly small amount in their campaign accounts, depicting what could be an uphill battle for many of them should Republicans wage serious campaigns to take those seats back.

    In addition to John Cornyn’s senate seat, Democrats are targeting six U.S. congressional seats.

  • On the same theme, this piece says those six districts are:
    • TX-10 — Mike McCaul
    • TX-21 — Chip Roy
    • TX-22 — Pete Olson
    • TX-23 — Will Hurd
    • TX-24 — Kenny Marchant
    • TX-31 — John Carter
  • Minnesota, the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984, is trending Republican.

    For example, last month, Trump moved to expand a major copper and nickel mining operation, one of the largest remaining reserves in the world, that Barack Obama had refused to renew in his final weeks in office. Obama’s backpedaling on approving new mining leases was widely unpopular. While liberal environmental groups are still vocally protesting Trump’s decision, polls show that Minnesotans, especially in the five counties surrounding the project, strongly approve.

    Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has also found increasing favor. Minnesota is a major resettlement state for Muslim refugees, many of them from terror-prone Syria and Somalia. Some Somalis have also left Minnesota to join the Islamic State in east Africa. A November 2016 attack by a Somali American, who stabbed eight people in a shopping mall, has fueled support for Trump’s Muslim travel ban.

    Minnesota’s up for grabs for another reason: Massive fallout from the resignation of Sen. Al Franken, a prominent liberal Democrat, over sexual assault allegations that have damaged the party’s standing with voters across the board. Add to this the growing controversy over newly elected in-state Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is widely viewed as anti-Semitic and extremist, and the Democrats are confronting a major crisis of credibility with Minnesota’s electorate.

    Nevada and Colorado could also flip red. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Takeover of federal judiciary by ‘larval Scalias‘ is devastatingly close to completion.”
  • Jeffrey Epstein found injured in New York jail sale after suspected “suicide attempt.”
  • Related: “According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on Thursday, people with inside, compromising knowledge of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial and political dealings are 843% more likely to commit suicide.”
  • The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger, wants to desilo the Corps and reintegrate it into the Navy’s overall structure. CDR Salamander thinks this is a good idea. Maybe. I haven’t followed recent strategic seapower debates much as of late. But it’s a devil-in-the-details move that could badly backfire if improperly implemented. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Sen. Kyrsten Sinema pushes program to streamline removal of migrant families without valid asylum claims.” That’s Democrat Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
  • Interesting profile of Boris Johnson in Quilette:

    I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time. I knew who he was since my uncle Christopher was an ex-boyfriend of his mother’s and he had told me to keep an eye out for him, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight (and sound) of him at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. This was the world famous debating society where ambitious undergraduates honed their public-speaking skills before embarking on careers in politics or journalism, and Boris was proposing the motion.

    With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.

    He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics—theatrical, dramatic, self-serious—when—a few seconds in—he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled—Where am I?—and asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. “What’s the motion, anyway?” Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared above his head and he was off, this time in an even more orotund, florid manner. Yet within a few seconds he’d wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who’d been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plonked down at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.

    I’d been to enough Union debates at this point to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. That was particularly true of freshmen, who were expected to have mastered all the arcane procedural rules, some of them dating back to the Union’s founding in 1823. But Boris’s chaotic, scatter-brained approach had the opposite effect. The motion was deadly serious—“This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment”—yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a Music Hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.

    A long list of Johnson scandals that didn’t even remotely come close to derailing his ascent skipped.

    Another quote that’s often dragged up by Boris’s enemies to discredit him is from a Conservative campaign speech in 2005: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” In their minds, this is appallingly sexist, as well as environmentally suspect. But if Orwell is right about the enduring appeal of the “overwhelming vulgarity,” the “smuttiness,” the “ever-present obscenity,” of Britain’s seaside postcards you can see why constantly reminding people of Boris’s politically incorrect remarks won’t necessarily hurt his electoral chances. It just serves to embed him in the public imagination as a stock British character whom many people still feel an instinctive affection for: the lovable rogue, the man with the holiday in his eye. He’s the guy that tries to persuade the barman to serve one more round of drinks after time has been called, the 14-year-old who borrows his father’s Mercedes at two o’clock in the morning and takes it up to a 100mph on the motorway with his friends shrieking in the back. He’s Falstaff in Henry IV, Sid James in the Carry On films. He’s a Donald McGill postcard.

    In case you’re unfamiliar with the reference, here’s an example:

  • Iran is losing its confrontation with the west and will eventually have to cut a nuclear deal. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • in fact, Iran has already lost:

    Israel has reportedly flown a modified version of the F-35 to Iran and back, circling major cities and military bases and taking surveillance photographs without being detected by Iranian radar or intercepted by Russian missiles.

    That is the story that has been circulating throughout the Middle East for the past year. No one is certain whether it is true, but it has begun to appear in Western sources, especially since Iran recently fired the head of its air force.

    The Israeli version of the F-35, known as the “Adir,” is reportedly the first version of the American-made Joint Strike Fighter that has ever been deployed in combat. But it may have already had a bigger impact in a non-combat role.

    That so many believe the story is a sign Iran is already regarded as the “weak horse” in the middle east. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)

  • “Transgender Athletes Threaten Women’s Sports.”

    Social justice warriors defy any and all pushback, calling it “transphobia.” They argue that gender is a social construct. It’s a theory in feminist sociology that states society and culture, not genetics, define whether one is male, female, or “other”.

    While the argument about what constitutes “gender identity” and “gender expression” – other confusing facets of gender in contemporary society – remain up for debate, what isn’t up for debate is the fact that those born with male body parts and hormone levels have physical superiority over most biological females. It is settled science.

  • Ball-waxing tranny pervert keeps getting people banned from Twitter for pointing out he’s a tranny pervert.
  • Speaking of tranny madness, this piece is about a woke and naive Harvard professor who let himself be taken to the cleaners by a “lesbian” divorced from a tranny who had a one-night stand with him and then proceeded to rob him blind because he was too stupid/woke to resist her.
  • An eye-opening thread about health insurance fraud.
  • Not news: Man robbed at gunpoint in Baltimore. News: He’s the new deputy police commissioner. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Good Disney news: Avengers: Endgame passes Avatar as the highest grossing film of all time.
  • Bad Disney news: Former Disney vice president Michael Laney convicted of sexually abusing a 7 year old girl.
  • Here’s a horrifying story about how San Luis Obispo police chief Deanna Cantrell losing her gun in a toilet stall led police to conduct a warrantless search of an innocent man’s house and seized his children for “neglect” because the house was dirty.
  • Florida town levies hundred of thousands of dollars in fines for things like unmown grass.
  • “Snopes Publishes Helpful Fact Check On 1996 Basketball Documentary ‘Space Jam.'”

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    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Boris Johnson Elected Prime Minister

    Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019

    What the Tories should have done three years ago has finally come to pass:

    Boris Johnson has been elected new Conservative leader in a ballot of party members and will become the next UK prime minister.

    He beat Jeremy Hunt comfortably, winning 92,153 votes to his rival’s 46,656.

    The former London mayor takes over from Theresa May on Wednesday.

    In his victory speech, Mr Johnson promised he would “deliver Brexit, unite the country and defeat Jeremy Corbyn”.

    Speaking at the Queen Elizabeth II centre in London, he said: “We are going to energise the country.

    “We are going to get Brexit done on 31 October and take advantage of all the opportunities it will bring with a new spirit of can do.

    “We are once again going to believe in ourselves, and like some slumbering giant we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self doubt and negativity.”

    Three years ago, Johnson was the favorite to be PM until his former campaign manager Michael Gove stabbed him in the back to run himself, only to promptly lose to Remainer Theresa May.

    And we all know how that turned out.

    So now Johnson finally gets his turn at Number 10 Downing Street, and an opportunity to finally deliver the promised Brexit. Madeleine Kearns worries that Johnson has been frustratingly vague on Brexit specifics, but there’s widespread consensus that, unlike May, he actually wants Brexit to succeed.

    Johnson’s record is uneven, and the word “eccentric” gets tossed around a lot in relation to his behavior. But he comes into office with two huge advantages: He actually wants Brexit, and isn’t Theresa May.

    It’s not a given that he’ll succeed, but with an October 31st Brexit deadline and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party looming as an existential threat to the entire Tory establishment, odds are that he’ll be given a good chance to carry it off from simple desperation, plus exhaustion and disgust that May labored for three years and couldn’t even give birth to a mouse.

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    Posted in Elections, Foreign Policy | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for July 12, 2019

    Friday, July 12th, 2019

    The Jeffrey Epstein child sex trafficking scandal dominates today’s LinkSwarm, as does other people getting arrested for the same offense. Some kind of crackdown going on? We can only hope so.

    Also, if you live in Austin, traffic on I-35 is going to be screwed up again this weekend.

  • The Jeffery Epstein scandal may be even worse than we thought:

    Even by the standards of stomach-turning celebrity criminal scandals, the bits of information about multi-millionare Jeffrey Epstein and allegations of an underage sex-trafficking ring are utterly bizarre, pointing to something perhaps even bigger and worse going on. Just the reports out this morning prompt at least ten big questions.

    One: How did Jeffrey Epstein make his fortune in the first place? One claim is a massive Ponzi scheme.

    Two: Could Epstein really have been connected to some sort of intelligence service? In yesterday’s press conference, labor secretary Alex Acosta offered a weird, vague, contradictory, meandering answer when asked about this. If Epstein was working for some sort of spy agency, which one? What was the aim, to collect blackmail on prominent figures? Who was being blackmailed, and what did they do?

    Three: Why did the office Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance try to keep Epstein from being registered as a top-level sex offender? “A seasoned sex-crimes prosecutor from Mr. Vance’s office argued forcefully in court that Mr. Epstein, who had been convicted in Florida of soliciting an underage prostitute, should not be registered as a top-level sex offender in New York.” The judge denied the request and declared, “I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this.”

    Four: After Epstein was labeled a “Level 3 sex offender” — meaning the worst — Epstein was required by law to check in with the NYPD every 90 days. He never checked in at all over an eight-year span. How did that not generate any consequences?

  • And speaking of Epstein, why is nobody talking about former Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer.

    The former Palm Beach County State Attorney had made national news three times during his career. Once when he went after Rush Limbaugh, then after Ann Coulter, two Republicans, and when, after being handed the case of Epstein, a co-founder of the Clinton Global Initiative, he gave him a pass.

    Barry Krischer is a Democrat. Jeffrey Epstein is a billionaire donor to Democrats.

    As Chief Prosecutor, Krischer had made his reputation with a zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting juveniles as adults. But after Epstein had abused underage girls, Krischer, according to the detective on the case, ignored police efforts to charge him with four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor and instead the billionaire abuser was indicted only on a minor charge of solicitation of prostitution.

    Interviews with over a dozen girls and witnesses were ignored.

    The victims were not notified of when they needed to appear before Krischer’s Grand Jury. Calls by the police to issue warrants for the arrest of Epstein and his associates were ignored by Kirscher’s subordinates. Eventually, Kirscher’s people stopped taking phone calls from the police.

    The Palm Beach police chief claimed that information was being leaked to Epstein’s lawyers and wrote a public letter attacking Krischer and urging him to disqualify himself from the case. Instead the travesty went on. State prosecutors allowed Epstein to skip sex offender counselling, and hire a private shrink.

    When the judge asked assistant state prosecutor Lanna Belohlavek if all the victims had signed off on the deal, she claimed that they had. The lawyer for the victims has said that was not the truth.

  • “Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta on Friday resigned from his post amid scrutiny over a plea agreement he cut with wealthy investor Jeffrey Epstein for sex abuse charges over a decade ago.”
  • Over on Althouse’s blog, many commenters are suggesting that Scott Walker replace him. To which I say: Bring it!
  • Even after pleading guilty and registering as a Level 3 sex-offender, Jeffrey Epstein is still mingled with the Hollywood elite.
  • Speaking of child sex offenders, singer R. Kelly has been arrested on 13 federal sex trafficking charges, including “child pornography, enticement of a minor to engage to engage in criminal sexual activity and obstruction of justice.” The only question is, after all the similar crap Kelly has pulled over the years, how is he not already in jail for the rest of his life?
  • “Epstein, Bean & Buck: The Democratic Donors’ Sex-Creep Club.”

    While serving as the highest-ranking elected woman in America for decades, San Fran Nan has chronically downplayed, whitewashed or excused the sleazy habits and alleged sexual improprieties of a long parade of Dem pervs — from former San Diego Mayor Bob Filner to former New York Reps. Eric Massa and Anthony Wiener to former Oregon Rep. David Wu to former Michigan Rep. John Conyers and current presidential candidate Joe Biden.

    Since the woke-ty woke Democrats are now gung-ho on undoing special treatment of wealthy liberal sex creeps, perhaps they will soon be revisiting the matter of two of their other “faves,” Oregon real estate mogul and deep-pocketed left-wing White House donor Terry Bean and West Hollywood Clinton pal Ed Buck.

    Here, let me help.

    Terry Bean is the prominent gay rights activist who co-founded the influential Human Rights Campaign organization. He is also a veteran member of the board of the HRC Foundation, which disseminates Common Core-aligned “anti-bullying” material to children’s schools nationwide.

    Like Epstein, Bean had a penchant for rubbing elbows and riding on planes with the powerful. Upon doling out more than $500,000 for President Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2012, he was rewarded with a much-publicized exclusive Air Force One ride with Obama. His Flickr account boasted glitzy pics with Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton.

    Buck, of course, is the Democratic donor who had two dead overdosed black men in his apartment on different occasions. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Speaking of our supposed betters raping children, “Ex-U.N. Worker Jailed for 9 Years in Nepal for Raping Two Boys in ‘Alarm Bell for the Humanitarian Community.'” Oh, now there are alarm bells over Canadian Peter John Dalglish raping children? But not so much when various UN peacekeepers did the same thing in Africa in past decades.
  • Dow-Jones Industrial Average hits record high of 27,000.
  • Meet the anti-woke left. The usual quotient of socialist claptrap, but also a fierce critique of victimhood identity politics and the dysfunction of the Democratic Party.

    Just as significant as Trump’s victory was Hillary Clinton’s loss, they tell me, in that it represented a rejection of an era of neoliberalism. ‘I’m from Indiana’, Frost tells me. ‘Bill signs NAFTA. That obliterated the towns where I’m from. People are extremely bitter about Bill Clinton for very good reasons. And she is married to that, literally and figuratively – she defends that legacy. How did we not see Trump coming?’

    What’s more, Trump represented a repudiation of the entire establishment – Democrats and Republicans. ‘There is a severe crisis of legitimacy in our institutions’, says Frost: ‘The Republicans did not want Trump to win either… He was nobody’s first choice, except the American people’s, apparently.’

    Snip.

    Three years on from the 2016 presidential election, Democrats are still largely in denial or in despair about Trump’s victory. The now-discredited Russia-collusion narrative provided an excuse to avoid any soul-searching. ‘The whole Rachel Maddow and the NBC crowd have infected the minds of boomers with this dystopian narrative’, Khachiyan tells me. ‘Even my mom, who’s from Russia, buys the collusion narrative.’

    ‘The narrative isn’t itself so interesting’, she argues, but it shows ‘the willful failure of the Democratic Party. Again and again, they fall on their face. There’s some kind of Freudian, masochistic thing they have where they get off on publicly humiliating themselves.’

  • E-Verify will do more to deter illegal aliens than the wall.
  • “Democratic lawmaker unloads on Ocasio-Cortez, chief of staff for ‘using the race card.'” The AOC-Pelosi tiff reminds us, yet again, that the primary purpose of “social justice” is to force in-group ideological conformity on the left. But when it comes to actually threatening a politician’s ability to get their beak into the trough, Rep. Clay and others still know which side their bread is buttered on. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Democrats have tapped former fighter pilot Amy McGrath to lose to Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky senate race. In one day, she raised $2.5 million…and flip-flopped on whether she would have confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. She lost her last race by 10,000 votes, and expect her to do much, much worse against Cocaine Mitch.
  • “The Data Shows Socialists — Not Sanctions — Destroyed Venezuela’s Economy.”
  • John O’Sullivan wonders if anyone can beat Boris Johnson for Tory leadership and the PM spot. Probably not, but it provides a light romp through Borismania…
  • David Scheller of Ammo To Go wrote to point out his deep, detailed look at suppressors. I was happy to see that Texas has more silencers owned than the next three states combined.
  • How bad is the cartel violence in Mexico? Would you believe a 30 minute shootout at Kindergarten graduation?
  • Greek conservatives win in a landslide over leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza’s party. Kyriakos Mitsotakis took over as Prime Minister on July 8.
  • Did the Russians who died aboard the A-12 Losharik submarine prevent a “planetary catastrophe?” Color me skeptical. Short of a Red Tide nuke launch scenario, it’s hard to conceive of any sort of accident, up to complete meltdown or even nuclear warhead detonation, that would result in “planetary catastrophe” on the Russian arctic seafloor. Assuming they were actually in the Barents Sea when the fire broke out, I don’t see how they’d be tapping undersea cables (as widely speculated), as the only one there is the Norway-to-Svarbald cable, which is hardly of crushing information importance. But the Russians have been known to lie before, and the fact that no less than seven first rank captains died aboard the ship (all but unheard of on a submarine) only fuels the speculation. And the arctic is way too far north for discovering either Cthulhu or Godzilla…
  • Seattle City Council candidate Brendan Kolding wants to clean up the homeless drug user problem.

    “It’s gotten worse under this entire current council,” he said. “Because we’ve practiced the policy — and I give Chris Rufo credit for this — the policy of false compassion where we’re not holding people accountable, where we’re not investing in adequate services, where we’re not allowing our law enforcement professionals to do their job.”

    “We just need a sea change at City Hall. We need to reverse the culture because it’s only getting worse … We can offer them treatment and shelter and then insist that if they don’t accept services, we will enforce the law unless they choose to move along. We need both carrot and stick.”

  • “I-95 proves that the government cannot provide services that don’t suck.”

    For those readers who blessedly have not had to drive I-95, it is a national disgrace. It has been congested for as long as I can recall (over 30 years of personal experience with the stretch shown, and what we drove yesterday). It has been congested in exactly the same locations for those 30 years.

    The same exact locations. 30 years. Offered for your consideration, the 20 miles on each side of Fredericksburg, VA. It was a parking lot in the 1980s; it was a parking lot yesterday. The reason then was that the highway lost a lane (more lanes in Richmond to the south and Washington to the north). The reason now is the same.

    So riddle me this, Big Government Man: how in 30 years is it not possible to widen 40 miles of Interstate to remove what everybody in the Northeast Corridor knows is a notorious choke point? And please don’t be so dim and predictable as to say “there isn’t enough funding” – we spent a cool trillion dollars on a “stimulus” that the President swore would be “shovel ready” projects. You don’t get more shovel-ready than widening I-95.

    So we see that it’s not possible for the government to provide services that don’t suck.

  • Prenda Law copyright troll John Steele sentenced to five years in prison.
  • “A traffic stop turns up whiskey, a gun and a rattlesnake, police say — and that was before they found the uranium.” The big surprise here is that it’s from Oklahoma rather than Florida… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Tankfest 2019. I visited the Bovington Tank Museum in 2014, and if you’re interested in tanks and in the UK for an extended period of time, I highly recommend it.

  • Tales from the Lunar Module Simulator.
  • Aviation Week and Space technology profile of the SR-71 from 1981.
  • Dwight celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Disco Demolition Night.
  • And speaking of unlikely events of mass hysteria: 300,000 people on Facebook swear to storm Area 51. Great, they’re going to kill off Alex Jones’ entire audience…
  • “Fun New Teen Vogue Quiz Helps Girls Find Out What Kind Of Hooker They Should Be.”

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Guns, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | 2 Comments »

    Unable to Brexit, May Will Exit

    Wednesday, December 12th, 2018

    The British Conservative Party, enraged by what a dog’s breakfast Prime Minister Theresa May has made of Brexit negotiations, will have a no-confidence vote on her tonight:

    Theresa May vowed to fight with ‘everything I’ve got’ today after a Tory no-confidence vote was dramatically triggered – and will be held within hours.

    The PM insisted she would not give up after hardline Eurosceptics secured the 48 letters from MPs needed to force a ballot that could bring her time as leader to a shambolic end.

    In a defiant speech on the steps of Downing Street, Mrs May warned Brexit will need to be delayed beyond March if she loses and Jeremy Corbyn might end up in power. She appealed for more time to secure further concessions on the controversial exit package she has thrashed out with the EU.

    ‘I have devoted myself unsparingly since I became Prime Minister… and I stand ready to finish the job,’ she said.

    Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the powerful 1922 committee, emerged this morning to announce the threshold of 48 letters had been ‘exceeded’ and Mrs May was eager to resolve the issue ‘rapidly’.

    Mrs May will deliver a make-or-break speech to MPs behind closed doors at 5pm before the secret ballot opens an hour later. The crucial result will be declared as soon as the 315 votes have been counted.

    As financial markets took fright and the Pound tumbled to a 20-month low, Cabinet ministers rallied to try and shore up Mrs May, with Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Michael Gove, Amber Rudd, Penny Mordaunt and Brandon Lewis among those making clear they will be supporting her.

    But despite their entreaties the Tories were plunged into outright civil war, with David Davis hinting that he might vote against the PM and her allies accusing mutineers of being ‘divisive and disloyal’.

    Mrs May – who has cancelled a planned visit to Ireland and a Cabinet meeting this afternoon – can stay on if she wins the confidence ballot by just one vote, and would theoretically be immune from challenge for another 12 months. Some 110 MPs have publicly declared that they will back her, although as it is a secret ballot there is no guarantee they are telling the truth.

    In reality anything short of a handsome victory will make it almost impossible for her to cling on, with rebels saying she must go if she is opposed by more than 80 MPs.

    Allies believe she would have romped home if a contest had been staged last month – but her position has weakened significantly since then.

    There’s a strong possibility May fails the vote, at which point Boris Johnson or Home Secretary Sajid Javid could take her place. (Whether Tories would be willing to place Javid, a man of Pakistani decent who once held several high positions at now-scandal-ridden Deutsch Bank, at the head of the party remains to be seen.) Former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab is another name being bandied about. All, unlike May, were pro-Brexit Euroskeptics. There’s also the possibility (though by no means a surety) that a no-confidence vote could trigger a general election, raising the specter of the Labour Party under the hard-left leadership of Jeremy Corbyn coming to power.

    If May falls, she will likely be viewed as the least competent PM since Labour’s James Callaghan brought on the strike-plagued “Winter of Discontent” in 1978-79.

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