Serbia puts its army on high alert over Kosovo (again) because having just one war in Europe obviously isn’t enough. But that was three days ago, so maybe it’s just more sabre-rattling.
As usual, it’s good to be in tech. “Laid Off Tech Workers Are Having No Trouble Finding New Jobs.” This is why all that “get back to the office or get fired” rhetoric is an empty threat.
Sure, there was a very bad storm. But any frequent flyer knows that airlines love to trot out the liability-shielding word “weather” when a more honest reason for a delay is a chronic staff shortage, as was clearly the case in Denver for Southwest; no backup plans; or, in this instance, problems with an archaic, off-the-shelf phone and crew-scheduling system that buckled under pressure even as every other airline quickly got back to normal.
Evidence mounted that Southwest, apparently still stuck in the 1990s, had ignored numerous calls to upgrade its technological support system even after it knew the danger of a meltdown. Rather, it focused on restoring its stock dividend and, reportedly, installing a pickleball court at its headquarters.
As with many businesses in crises, Southwest and its top executives were slow to heed the scale of the problem coming over the net this week: Airline delays on this scale aren’t just about missing family gatherings, although that is bad enough, or sitting on the floor for hours. They can be matters of life and death.
I also read somewhere that the top people at Southwest have finance backgrounds, not airline operations backgrounds.
Studios are shocked, shocked that properties they’ve ignored the advice of fans to infect with social justice are hugely unpopular.
Henry Cavill is like many leading men. He’s handsome and talented, and anything he appears in automatically attracts viewers. However, unlike most leading men, his fanbase consists of both typical and atypical elements for someone like him. While he does have the love of moviegoers, women, and the respect of many a man, he also has a massive following in the nerd and geek communities.
This is because Cavill is, himself, a rabid geek and an unabashed one at that.
It’s this geeky quality that led Cavill to pursue various roles that should have made studios a lot of money. All they had to do was listen to Cavill. However, that’s not what they did. They ignored him, and now things are crumbling around them.
Netflix’s “The Witcher,” in particular, is one lesson that studios could learn a hard lesson from because it represents studios ignoring the geeks on a singular level. Cavill is a man who pushed for Netflix to take on “The Witcher” and he even succeeded in landing the role as the series protagonist “Geralt of Rivia.”
The Witcher is a well-known property. It started as a successful book series that was adapted to successful games. Cavill was a no-brainer for the role of Geralt, not just because he looked and acted the part flawlessly, but because he was a massive fan of both the games and the source material.
Cavill was more excited than anyone that this series was being made and said he’d stick it out with the show for seasons on end and would only depart if they didn’t respect the source material and change the show for their own purposes.
And true to form, Netflix hired showrunners that did exactly what Cavill warned again. Believable rumors began circulating that Cavill was unhappy with the show. It later came out that Cavill was oftentimes fighting to maintain various elements of the story. It was also revealed that the showrunners would laugh at, or show disdain for, the source material that Cavill loved so much. Soon enough, he announced he was exiting the role as Geralt and handing it to Liam Hemsworth. I can only imagine the heartbreak Cavill suffered over this, but it was the right move…according to both his fans and fans of “The Witcher.”
Cavill is one of the few actors who he and his fans can say truly understand each other. He’s one of them and it shows.
Greetings, and welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm! Bad weather and bad driving are themes, as the ice storm mentioned yesterday already slammed Texas hard. I was without power for over 10 hours last night and this morning, and every tree is heavy with frost.
Hit black ice at 95/They said I’m lucky to be alive…
Bad news for law-abiding Austinites: Police Chief Brian Manley is retiring after 30 years on the force. I’m sure the City Council is eager to replace him with some social justice warrior approved tool. On the other hand, if he wants to run for mayor…
The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.
The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.
You can ding France (and French intellectuals) for a lot of sins, but “insufficient appreciation of western civilization and culture” is not one of them.
The bloom was off the Andrew Cuomo rose for anyone who had eyes to see last year, but now even the Democratic Media Complex is is being forced to admit what a giant pile of manure he is:
America’s worst governor probably never thought he would miss America’s most obnoxious president.
But that is the situation that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo likely finds himself in now that Donald Trump is no longer around to take all the heat for mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, now that the man who commanded nearly every minute of the media’s attention has shuffled off to Florida following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Cuomo is at long last experiencing widespread criticism and scrutiny in the press for his grossly incompetent handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Empire State.
The New York Times, for example, took the governor to task after he announced that indoor dining in the state can resume as soon as Feb. 14, arguing that the flip-flop makes no sense based on the available data and his past diktats. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said on Friday that New York City could reopen indoor dining on Feb. 14,” the newspaper notes. “But by nearly every measure, the coronavirus outbreak in the city is worse than it was when he announced a ban on indoor dining in December.”
The New York Times adds, “As the governor spoke on Friday, citing the ‘current trajectory’ of cases as his reasoning for reopening, average per-capita case counts in New York City were 64% higher than when he announced the ban in December.” The paper even published an article titled “N.Y.C.’s Covid Metrics Are Dire. Cuomo Is Reopening Restaurants Anyway,” laying into the governor for his about-face on indoor dining.
Elsewhere, Cuomo is weathering blistering criticism over news reports that his administration dramatically undercounted the number of deaths connected to his order last year forcing infectious coronavirus patients into long-term care facilities. Criticism so bad, in fact, that the governor actually declined an invitation to appear on CNN, which has done more than any news network to boost his image amid the pandemic.
The bad press, by the way, appears to be having an adverse effect on the governor, whose increasingly frenetic decrees suggest a man who is spiraling. Recall that Cuomo claimed recently that the effort to vaccinate restaurant workers was a “cheap, insincere discussion.” Now, he has expanded vaccine eligibility in New York to include — you guessed it — restaurant workers. It’s almost as if he has no idea what he is doing.
Then, there is the sudden bout of unflattering news reports regarding the growing number of high-level resignations by New York health officials, including nine top state executives who have stepped down since last summer. Cuomo is also suffering embarrassing news coverage for his recent statement in response to the reports that his administration undercounted nursing home deaths: “But who cares? … Died in a hospital. Died in a nursing home. They died.” Add to it all the fact that the governor is catching heat for saying that he doesn’t trust health experts, and it seems clear we are witnessing the end of the love affair between the news media and the man who won an Emmy recently for his supposedly savvy COVID-19 management.
It is good that the news industry as a whole is finally scrutinizing the Cuomo administration for its ineptitude, but where was this critical look last year? It’s not as if Cuomo flipped a switch. He didn’t become an incompetent, callous, flailing bureaucrat overnight. This is who he is. This is how he has behaved for the entirety of the pandemic. Many newsrooms either did not notice or did not care. After all, there was a bad man in the White House.
The Cuomo who is getting badly beaten up today in the press is the same Cuomo who in April 2020 said glibly of out-of-work, anti-lockdown protesters that if they want to provide for themselves and their families, they should “take a job as an essential worker.”
This is the same man who targeted the state’s Jewish communities over social distancing violations, all while giving a free pass to the thousands of anti-police demonstrators and other political activists who clogged New York’s streets last year, gathering cheek to cheek in both protest and celebration. At a press conference in October of last year, Cuomo even dredged up a 14-year-old photo showing Jewish mourners gathered to mark the death of Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, claiming falsely that it was proof of those people’s refusal to follow his COVID-19 restrictions.
This is the same man whose administration flip-flopped constantly on the timeline for when COVID-19-positive front-line workers should return to work.
This is the same man who, during a press conference in September, attempted to absolve himself of responsibility for his state’s deadly mismanagement of the coronavirus by claiming, “Donald Trump caused the COVID outbreak in New York. That is a fact. It’s a fact that he admitted and the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] admitted and [Dr. Anthony Fauci] admitted.” No one “admitted” any such thing.
Cuomo actually wrote an entire book praising his response to the pandemic. He even hawked a stupid poster boasting of New York’s alleged victory over the outbreak. The poster, which bears more captions than a Herblock cartoon, is careful to highlight infection increases in Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Because nothing says responsible, caring leadership quite like cheering case increases in fellow states, which, by the way, likely got the virus from New York.
Yet, amid all of these missteps, many in the press claimed last year that New York’s governor led one of the best, if not the best, coronavirus responses in the country. The way certain journalists and commentators told it, Cuomo’s wisdom and steady hand safely guided the state through one of the most dangerous and deadly episodes in its history.
Speaking of coronavirus, previous timelines had pegged “Patient Zero” as being infected in November of 2019, but new evidence suggests the first cases showed up October 2019. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Let them have their Impeachment 2: Electric Boogaloo. It won’t result in a conviction. It won’t affect Donald Trump’s standing with his supporters or his detractors. But it will delay the Senate from action on Joe Xiden’s initial legislative goals and confirmation of His Fraudulency’s nominees.”
Democrats may end up paying a higher political price than they anticipate. The trial won’t only delay Mr. Biden’s program. It will tarnish his image as a “unifier” eager to work across party lines. That identity will be much harder to sustain after Democratic senators vote in lockstep to convict Mr. Trump and push through a mammoth Covid relief bill without any Republican votes.
I see they misspelled “trillions in pork graft for politically connected cronies” as “Covid relief.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
During a media presentation at Virtual SHOT Show 2021, Winchester said that if they stopped taking orders for .22 LR right now, it would take 2 years to fill all the back-orders. In December, the Vista family of companies, which comprises Federal, CCI, Speer, and Remington, announced they had a $1 billion backlog in orders. In the first 3 months of the COVID-19 lockdown, Winchester experienced a 17-percent surge in orders, which hasn’t tapered off.
Rancher believes Biden wants to hurt border security to undo President Trump’s legacy. True, but incomplete. The entire Democratic Party sees every illegal alien as a potential Democrat voter.
Heh:
The Lincoln Project has reached the part in the Scorsese film where Clapton or the Stones is playing and everyone is trying to escape with the money and their lives.
Got to admit, 140 MPH is hauling ass. One problem with Most Shocking is that they would intone “…with speeds hitting 90 miles and hour!” and I wanted to ask “Dude, have you never driven on a Texas highway before? That’s pretty much the prevailing speed…”
"We rescue ALL animals, though dogs need us the most. But we rescue cats, bunnies, rats, snakes, small exotics, eleflumps, bears, big cats, wildlife, sea life, primates…"-@ElayneBoosler#tailsofjoy 🐶😺🦜🐭https://t.co/gWA4VEWyoc
— Elayne Boosler's Rescue Dog, Ralph (@BooslerS) February 5, 2021
By the way, the current forecast is for it to hit 1°F here on Monday, which would only be 3 degrees above the coldest temperature ever recorded in Austin…
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Looks like I may have to start doing BidenWatch again, given all the stupid things the newly ensconced Biden Administration has been up to…
US government debt now stands at $20 trillion, or roughly 100% of GDP. This should be a concern, but Democratic economists are not worried. A much-discussed November 30 paper by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Jason Furman suggests that Democratic thinking has veered into the paranormal, with an emphasis on levitation. Governments will be able to borrow and spend as much as they want for whatever purpose they want, the authors argue in so many words, and interest rates will remain low forever.
As Washington Post editorialist Charles Lane commented Dec. 7, “Far from burdening future generations, governments have a golden opportunity to fund long-standing needs by borrowing for investments in future prosperity—the list includes child care, early education, job training and clean water.”
The argument so easily refuted by casual reference to the facts that it takes a doctorate from Harvard (which both Summers and Furman hold) to suspend disbelief in the obvious. The authors aver:
We note that with massive increases in budget deficits and government debt, expansions in social insurance, and sharp reductions in capital tax rates, one would have expected to see increasing real rates if private sector behavior had remained constant. We suggest that changes in the supply of saving associated with lengthening life expectancy, rising uncertainty and increased inequality along with reductions in the demand for capital associated with demographic changes, demassification of the economy, and perhaps changes in corporate behavior have driven real interest rates down. This characterization is rather like Hamlet without the Ghost, for the ghost in the interest machine during the past decade has been the Federal Reserve Board’s multi-trillion-dollar purchases of Treasury and agency securities. Summers and Furman do not mention this in their 50-page excursus.
Today, President Biden doubled-down on critical race theory in the federal government.
In response, I am announcing a new coalition of legal foundations and private attorneys that will wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America's institutions.
Thomas Zimmerman, who will serve as a Special Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel under Joe Biden, formerly served as a visiting scholar at what the FBI has called a “front group for Chinese intelligence collection and overseas spy recruitment,” The National Pulse can reveal.
While at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, Zimmerman also served as a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security.
The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), which the FBI views as a “front group for Chinese intelligence collection and overseas spy recruitment,” was involved in a 2019 criminal case involving a retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative selling classified U.S. defense documents to China.
The operative, Kevin Mallory, was contacted by a SASS official via LinkedIn to begin the relationship that culminated in a 20-year prison sentence for Mallory.
It must be understood that Critical Social Justice is an administrative and bureaucratic ideology by its very design. It was formulated by activist academics to train not just activists but, very specifically, either people who will go on to produce the culture industry (like in media and arts) or who will become administrative bureaucrats where they can produce a kind of unaccountable policy that we find in HR departments, where pushback is irrelevant unless it’s from the top down. These sorts of people dream of positions not specifically of power and influence, like the presidency, but of training and administrative roles where they will receive relatively little scrutiny or opposition while they engage in their favorite activity of all: telling other people what to do, not directly, but through a shield of very official and institutionally binding paper.
For any of his late and thin comments about the violence that has rocked our streets for the last half of this year, Biden has given us absolutely no indication that he’s going to resist any of this bureaucratic totalitarianism. In fact, he’s done the opposite, using the language of the ideology, like saying he has a “mandate” from the voters (in an election that hasn’t yet even been decided, two weeks later) to take on “systemic racism,” and tapping individuals like Mehrsa Baradaran (who believes in full reparations) for the Treasury Department and Margaret Salazar (whose focus is on “cultural responsiveness”) for Housing and Urban Development. These come among roughly 500 more appointments to his administrative bureaucracy—so far—who allegedly express a commitment to racial justice, in line with precisely the racial equity programs touted by Biden and Harris on their campaign and now transition websites. In few domains has it been signaled that this will be more powerfully considered than in public health and the Covid-19 response, which Biden has already indicated will lead to a permanent position: “At the end of this health crisis, it will transition to a permanent Infectious Disease Racial Disparities Task Force,” we’re told on the Covid-19 priorities page on Biden’s “Build Back Better” transition site.
This renders Biden and, perhaps, Harris largely irrelevant to the “Woke” impacts of their election. They are, if you’ll accept the metaphor, “not the room.” These administrators are the room. Biden (and Harris, maybe) can be as moderate as moderate gets, and if even a modest fraction of the administrators in key departments favor the Critical Social Justice style of policy, that’s most of what we’ll get. So far, we have reason to suspect that at least an eighth of Biden’s administrative apparatus will be in that vein, including in key and powerful sectors like public health—to say nothing of apparatuses like the FBI.
Tulsi Gabbard reveals why congress won’t attempt to reign in Big Tech:
"It goes to money… Google will have a big reception, members of Congress will go, and then they'll pick up their checks."@TulsiGabbard explains why Congress has failed to act on big tech censorship pic.twitter.com/i7TOJYQ7lv
He was made a martyr. Yes, die-hard anti-Trump Democrats always would hate him, and die-hard pro-Trump Republicans would love him no matter what. But the great American center, comprised of reasonable Democrats and Independents, flocked towards Trump during and after the prior impeachment. They saw he was being railroaded.
He now is being railroaded again. We still all are trees inside the forest, lacking the broader perspective that time will afford. Right now tensions are too high for people to step back a moment and to gauge objectively. But that is only today. The Democrats irresponsibly have just done something that perhaps is all but unprecedented in American history: they charged, tried, and convicted a person — the impeachment phase of the political drama — in less than a day. If impeachments are meant to be fit in during a coffee break, why did the last one drag on so long? Why did Clinton’s and Johnson’s? Last year’s annual Trump impeachment took weeks of testimony from witnesses all over the place. Remember their names — all your favorites — from last time? Kurt Volker. Marie Yovanovitch. Fiona Hill. George Kent. Gordon Sondland. Bill Taylor. Laura Cooper. Alex Vindman. His medals. Catherine Croft. It went on and on and on. If they had not shut it down for Christmas, Kato Kaelin would have been next.
But this time it was Darkness at Noon: instead of pretending honesty, Pelosi and her Democrats did the impeachment as Josef Stalin conducted his show trials in the Soviet Union: first declare the guilt, then type up some charges, and then vote to convict without so much as a meaningful hearing. She did not even bother with the souvenir pens — presumably just ink-refill cartridges this time.
“City councilman in Louisiana arrested for election fraud.” “Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin Thursday morning announced their offices have arrested an Amite City Councilman on eight counts of election fraud. Emanuel Zanders, III is accused of submitting voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent.” I know you’ll be shocked to learn he’s a Democrat.
As COVID-19 settled into its new home in NYC, my local coffee shop closed, my gym shuttered, I lost my job at SUNY, and everything I loved was temporarily put “on pause.” A term that nine months later now feels like a cruel joke. None of us knew what we were facing back in March, or how long it would last. The streets became quiet, the city became still. All the sounds, the familiar faces, the busy restaurants, the daily rituals, the very pace of our existence slowed to a full stop. The silence was deafening.
The homeless and mentally ill flourished in my Chelsea neighborhood overnight. Many residents fled our beloved city to safer suburbs and second homes. After a night in the West Village where I saw men looting cars, and a gunpoint robbery happen by the West 4th train station, I no longer felt comfortable here. I decided that I couldn’t abide the lawlessness and my first pandemic at the same time, so I spent the first wave of the pandemic upstate in a guest room at my family’s house, where at least I didn’t have to worry about the crime.
After spending three months in quarantine upstate, I decided it was time to start putting my NYC life back together. The idea of suffering through this time with my closest friends felt like a step in the right direction. Even if we didn’t have our bars and restaurants for an undetermined amount of time, at least we’d have each other.
I imagined my summer would be filled with long walks, bike rides on the West Side Highway, and small gatherings on rooftops. I imagined we’d get over COVID and that the energy of the city would come back slowly over the next six months. I was optimistic, loved my city and loved my life here with all my heart. I hopefully assumed most New Yorkers had the same feelings I did. And then the riots happened.
The dark tone of daily life here now seems permanent. For months after the riots, stores in my area were still being burglarized. The helicopters were so close they would shake my top-floor apartment all night. In peak summer there were always two or three homeless people on both sides of every street in my area. Every aspect of my life became about avoiding them and staying far enough away from anyone who might attack me. Someone broke into my building one night but fled when they accidentally set off the alarm on the roof. The whole summer felt like living in a war zone.
Dating used to be a pleasure for me, but during my summer in Chelsea there were so many stabbings and robberies within one block of my apartment, I no longer felt comfortable making plans that involved meeting anywhere. I’d walk to get coffee in the morning and get harassed and threatened by homeless people every day.
Six months after NYC’s first wave of riots, I was clearly wrong about my hopes of returning to the fast-paced yet wonderful life that I once loved.
The City of Houston wants to regulate your homes for looks. “Everything from what color you paint your home, to whether you put shutters on your windows, would be subject to government control.” Nuts to that.
In the end, it was not the British deep state, Darwinists, Jews, Freemasons or any of the sinister cabals that Adnan Oktar long railed against that defeated him. It was the Turkish judiciary.
On Monday, the notorious 64-year-old preacher, often referred to in salacious headlines as a “sex cult leader,” was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail for crimes including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, fraud, and attempted political and military espionage.
It marks the end of a long and bizarre career for the preacher, television host, author and filmmaker.
Beginning his career in the 80s as a firebrand orator, railing against Jews, Freemasons and Charles Darwin, he later became (in)famous for his shows on Turkish TV, in which he would discuss Islamic principles while scantily clad women with bleached blonde hair danced around him to popular music. These women Oktar referred to as his “kittens”.
Skipping over a lot, including the bit where he went from being a Holocaust denier to being a supporter of building the Third Temple in Jerusalem.
In July 2018, Oktar was arrested on a number of charges, including forming a criminal organisation, sexual abuse of children and sexual assault.
According to the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office, he was caught while attempting to run away from the arresting officers. As he was led away, he told journalists that the charges were a conspiracy by the British deep state.
“They are thinking of covering the whole region with Christianity. They targeted me because they saw me as the effective inhibitor of this game,” he would later say in court.
Though “the British deep state” has yet to officially comment on the case, many have questioned the timing of Oktar’s arrest, considering accusations against him dated back decades.
In 1999, Oktar and a number of associates were arrested and charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organisation with the intent to commit a crime. A Turkish prosecutor listed a number of companies tied to BAV, which was accused of using blackmail and sex traps to generate revenue. The legal process against Oktar and BAV lasted two years, during which the majority of the complainants retracted their claims.
In the case file during his most recent trial, prosecutors presented an array of photos depicting sexual acts involving members of the organisation purportedly taken secretly at Oktar-owned properties for the purpose of blackmail. It also revealed WhatsApp messages involving male and female members of the group, in which they were given instructions to get used to anal sex.
Yuksel told MEE that he was aware of a number of senior politicians who had been involved with (or had relatives involved with) Oktar and were compromised by their association with him. However, he declined to offer any names.
In October 2017, the University of Texas at Austin announced that it had signed a new memorandum of understanding with the China University of Petroleum, a school directly affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education.
According to a statement released at the time by the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, the agreement would “encourage academic cooperation through research and study in furtherance of the advancement of learning.”
But in October 2020, the U.S. Department of Education released a report critical of such foreign entanglements, specifically deeming contracts with China University of Petroleum a security risk.
“Academic research regarding oil and gas extraction should not be considered separate from the Chinese government’s geopolitical ambitions,” the Education Department report reads, adding, “China’s largest oil companies are state owned and dominate China’s oil market, so this could cross paths with Chinese government endeavors.”
In the past, writing these annual reviews, we have said harsh things about previous years. We owe those years an apology. Compared to 2020, all previous years, even the Disco Era, were the golden age of human existence.
This was a year of nonstop awfulness, a year when we kept saying it couldn’t possibly get worse, and it always did. This was a year in which our only moments of genuine, unadulterated happiness were when we were able to buy toilet paper.
Which is fitting, because 2020 was one long, howling, Category Five crapstorm.
We sincerely don’t want to relive this year. But our job is to review it. If you would prefer to skip this exercise in masochism, we completely understand.
Snip.
Back in mid-December, the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment, after which Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in accordance with the U.S. Constitution, handed out souvenir signing pens. Everyone expected that Pelosi would then send the articles to the Senate. But as of early January the Senate has not received them. People are wondering if Pelosi, what with her various official duties and hairdresser appointments, simply forgot to send the articles. Or maybe she tried to send them, but because of a bureaucratic snafu they wound up at a different federal entity, such as the Coast Guard.
Eventually, however, the articles arrive at the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch “The Undertaker” McConnell promises that the impeachment issue will receive full and fair consideration. He is of course joking, but this is not obvious, because even when Mitch is in a jovial mood he looks like a man passing a kidney stone the size of the Hope Diamond.
Meanwhile in other political news, all eyes are on Iowa as it prepares for the caucuses, which are closely scrutinized because they are the first opportunity for a tiny group of unrepresentative voters to engage in an incomprehensible and deeply flawed process by which they anoint presidential candidates who traditionally go on to fail. This year, in an effort to modernize the caucuses, the Iowa Democratic party has upgraded from its old-fashioned manual reporting procedures to a modern, state-of-the-art “app” based on the same software used in the Boeing 737 MAX airliner.
Snip.
In other political news, Iowa Democratic party officials sense that there may be a problem with their new “app” when it declares that the winner of the state’s caucuses, with 43 million delegates, is Walter Mondale, followed by the Houston Astros (who also win the Super Bowl). This fiasco does not sit well with the other Democratic candidates, who realize they have wasted an entire year trudging around Iowa eating fried objects on sticks and pretending to care about Iowans.
Things go more smoothly for the Democrats in the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses, with Bernie Sanders emerging as the clear front-runner, which only seems to make him angrier. A new challenger emerges in the form of charisma-impaired billionaire Mike “Mike” Bloomberg, who uses his personal fortune to hire a vast army of consultants to supply him with a powerful arsenal of focus-group-tested policies, retorts, memes, jokes and humanoid personality traits. Nevertheless he struggles in the debates, the low point coming when Elizabeth Warren, during a heated exchange about non-disclosure agreements, pulls the waistband of Bloomberg’s underpants over the top of his head, a debate tactic known as the “atomic wedgie,” first performed by Lincoln on Douglas in 1858.
Snip.
And then, unfortunately, comes…
MARPRIL
…which starts off calmly enough, as the Democratic party, desperate to find an alternative to 132-year-old white guy Bernie Sanders, settles on 132-year-old white guy Joe Biden, who cruises to a series of primary victories after replacing “No Malarkey” with a bold new campaign slogan: “Somewhat Alert At Times.” Biden is endorsed by most of his Democratic opponents, including “Mike” Bloomberg, who spent more than $500 million on his campaign, which seems like a lot of money until you consider that he won the American Samoa Caucus, narrowly edging out Tulsi Gabbard, who spent $13.50.
And then, sprinkled in amid all the political coverage, we begin to see reports that this coronavirus thing might be worse than we have been led to believe, although at first the authorities still seem to be saying that it’s basically the flu and there is no reason to panic, but all of a sudden there seems to be no hand sanitizer for sale anywhere, which makes some sense although there is also no toilet paper, as if people are planning to be pooping for weeks on end (ha) and then we learn that Tom Hanks — Tom Hanks! – has the virus and now they’re saying it’s a lot worse than the flu and we need to wash our hands and not touch our faces and maintain a social distance of six feet and use an abundance of caution to flatten the curve (whatever “the curve” is) but they’re also saying we don’t need face masks no scratch that now they’re saying we DO need face masks but nobody HAS any face masks but hey here’s a funny meme about toilet paper but ohmigod look at these statistical disease models WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE but Trump says maybe this hydroxysomething medicine will work no it won’t work yes it will work no it won’t and now they’re saying there won’t be enough ventilators or hospital beds or PPE and Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx are saying everybody has to shelter at home or else WE ARE ALL DEFINITELY GOING TO DIE hey here’s another funny toilet-paper meme but seriously what is PPE and is that different from PPP and where will we get the ventilators and there won’t be enough hospital beds and there is still no hand sanitizer and I keep touching my face and they just canceled the NBA can they even DO that wait now they canceled ALL the sports and closed all the schools the colleges the stores the restaurants the bars the theaters the hair salons the parks the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and now they’re saying we need to stay at home for HOW LONG what about the toilet paper I can’t stop touching my damn face are you seriously telling me all this is because somebody ate a freaking bat maybe Amazon has toilet paper ohmigod they’re sold out too WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THE TOILET PAPER not another Zoom meeting I am so tired of shouting at people in little boxes maybe I should take a shower but what’s the point hey here’s a bunch more funny memes ohmigod look at the Stock Market the price of oil maybe I’ll just take a peek at my 401k oh NOOOOOOOO and WHAT ARE PEOPLE DOING WITH ALL THIS TOILET PAPER and how long do we have to keep being abundantly cautious what did Trump say about the ventilators and what did Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci say about what Trump said about the ventilators and what did Trump say about what they said about what he said about the ventilators ventilators ventilators LOOK AT THESE MODELS WE ARE STILL GOING TO DIE but do we really want to go on living in a world where there’s no toilet paper and every single TV commercial sounds like “as we navigate these difficult times together, the National Association of Folding Chair Manufacturers wants you to know that we are committed to running these TV commercials with a somber narrator voice telling you how committed we are” and WHY WOULD SOMEBODY EAT A DAMN BAT these memes are getting old hey do you think that Carole Baskin woman actually fed her husband to a tiger maybe we should order pizza tonight wait I think we had pizza last night are you sure it’s Tuesday because it feels more like Thursday no please God not another freaking Zoom meeting stop already with the memes if the tiger ate her husband shouldn’t there be a skeleton somewhere are we flattening the curve yet Dr. Fauci Dr. Birx because we’re in a recession no wait maybe it’s a depression look at the unemployment numbers we are never going to recover from this if the virus doesn’t kill us we will starve to death we need more money from the government we need billions no we need trillions no we need MORE trillions where is this money coming from we have to open the economy up but if we do WE WILL ALL DIE hey I found some toilet paper oh no it’s one-ply which is basically the same as using your bare hand thank God I also found some hand sanitizer and speaking of good news Bernie Sanders is endorsing Joe Biden so apparently they’re both still alive if I see one more meme I am going to puke in my facemask I’m afraid to get on a scale my thighs are basically two armadillo-sized wads of pizza dough hey Dr. Birx Dr. Fauci when will we have a vaccine when will we have herd immunity when can we go outside when can we go back to work what is the “new normal” good lord what did Trump say about disinfectants DON’T INJECT CLOROX YOU IDIOTS what about the food chain what about reinfection what about the second wave hey they’re showing the NFL draft and Georgia is opening the tattoo parlors and holy crap now it’s…
MAY
…and we are, as a nation, exhausted. We are literally sick and tired of the pandemic. But amid all the gloom, there is a ray of sunshine: As we go through this harrowing experience — affecting all Americans, in both red states and blue states — we are starting to realize that our common humanity is more important than our political differences.
Ha ha! Seriously, we hate each other more than ever.
Snip.
Meanwhile, in a basement somewhere in Delaware, Joe Biden and his campaign team have managed to procure a “webcam,” which they intend to use to “log on” to the “Internet” so that Joe’s campaign message can go “viral,” just as soon as Joe decides what it is.
In scandal news, the justice department moves to drop all charges against former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Outraged Democrats claim this is a travesty of justice; outraged Republicans claim it is proof that the Deep State tried to stage a coup. And thus we are back to arguing about the 2016 election, which we are going to keep arguing about until everybody involved has been dead for 50 years.
Snip.
Here we should at least mention the arrival of the Asian murder hornets. In any other year they would have been a huge story, comparable to famous celebrity pests of the past, such as the killer bees, or the cast of “Jersey Shore.” But in 2020 there is simply too much competition, and the murder hornets end up living in a cheap motel near the Canadian border, their dreams of fame shattered.
Snip.
For their part, the Democrats, fed up with the longstanding pattern of systemic racism and police misconduct in major U.S. cities, vow to bring about real reform, just as soon as they can figure out who, exactly, is in charge of these cities. One much-discussed reform proposal is defunding the police, which is clearly defined by its proponents as “taking the funding away from the police” as well as “not taking the funding away from the police.”
Snip.
COVID19 cases continue to rise sharply in some southern states, accompanied by what the World Health Organization describes as an “alarming” spike in smugness in some northern states, notably New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveils a poster, for sale at $11.50, commemorating, in a cartoony manner, New York’s pandemic experience. Really. It is as if the White Star Line sold whimsical souvenirs of the Titanic.
Snip.
By far the month’s most disturbing event occurs on July 15 when Twitter, responding to a cyberattack, temporarily suspends many verified blue-check accounts. Within minutes emergency rooms in Washington and New York are overwhelmed by media thought leaders whose brains are literally exploding from the pressure of unreleased insights. Meanwhile in the rest of the nation, non-elite Americans wander the streets aimlessly, with no way to know what they should think. Fortunately this situation lasts only a few hours, but it highlights the urgent need for a federally maintained Blue Check Media Emergency Tweet Reserve, similar to the National Helium Reserve, but more gaseous.
Snip.
Meanwhile at home the nation’s mood is increasingly tense and angry as Americans are bombarded all day, every day, with a constant stream of news about protests, boycotts, disruption, despair and rage. And that’s just on SportsCenter.
California, as it traditionally does at this time of year, bursts into flames. Adding to the citizens’ misery are rolling electrical blackouts, possibly related to the fact that the state legislature has banned all sources of electricity except windmills and 9-volt batteries.
Snip.
The federal deficit reaches $3.3 trillion, as the government continues its unchecked descent into horrendous, unsustainable levels of debt, with neither political party even seriously acknowledging the danger, let alone taking meaningful action to prevent future generations of Americans from being permanently screwed.
Snip.
The Senate confirms Amy Coney Barrett after she successfully completes the traditional Judiciary Committee hazing ritual, in which she must answer questions for three consecutive days without saying anything.
Joe Biden enters the final stretch of the campaign with a schedule that sometimes has him doing as many as one appearance per day. Also taking a brutal toll on the former vice president is the fact that he must repeatedly, day after day, deal with the grueling physical strain of not telling reporters what he thinks about packing the Supreme Court. At one appearance, when asked about this, Biden says (this is an actual quote): “the moment I answer that question, the headline in every one of your papers will be on the answer to that question.” While reporters wrestle with the Confucian profundity of this statement, Joe is whisked back to Delaware.
Snip.
In social-media news, Twitter blocks a New York Post story about incriminating emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, on the grounds that the story is of questionable origin. This is of course a violation of Twitter’s extremely strict accuracy policy, under which every single tweet that Twitter does allow to be published is 100 percent vetted and legit.
In sports, the coronavirus causes major disruptions in the fall football schedule, the result being that on a single afternoon the New York Jets wind up losing to both the Kansas City Chiefs and Vassar. On a happier note, the World Series, for the 11th consecutive year, does not in any way involve the New York Yankees.
Snip.
The good news is that several drug companies announce that they have developed promising vaccine candidates, while Budweiser reports “significant progress” on a hard seltzer that also can be used as hand sanitizer.
The bad news is that the number of cases, in what feels like the 37th wave, is spiking once again, and American consumers are once again creating shortages of toilet paper by buying enough rolls per household to wipe every butt in Denmark for a year. Many states impose tough new COVID restrictions, most notably California, which bans “all human activity not personally involving the governor.”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! On a personal note, I was just laid off from my Senior Technical Writer job, so if you have any leads in the department (for either Austin or remote work), drop me a line in the comments.
State-sponsored hackers believed to be from Russia have breached the city network of Austin, Texas, The Intercept has learned. The breach, which appears to date from at least mid-October, adds to the stunning array of intrusions attributed to Russia over the past few months.
The list of reported victims includes the departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, State, and the Treasury; the Pentagon; cybersecurity firm FireEye; IT software company SolarWinds; and assorted airports and local government networks across the United States, among others. The breach in Austin is another apparent victory for Russia’s hackers. By compromising the network of America’s 11th-most populous city, they could theoretically access sensitive information on policing, city governance, and elections, and, with additional effort, burrow inside water, energy, and airport networks. The hacking outfit believed to be behind the Austin breach, Berserk Bear, also appears to have used Austin’s network as infrastructure to stage additional attacks.
While the attacks on SolarWinds, FireEye, and U.S. government agencies have been linked to a second Russian group — APT29, also known as Cozy Bear — the Austin breach represents another battlefront in a high-stakes cyber standoff between the United States and Russia. Both Berserk Bear and Cozy Bear are known for quietly lurking in networks, often for months, while they spy on their targets. Berserk Bear — which is also known as Energetic Bear, Dragonfly, TEMP.Isotope, Crouching Yeti, and BROMINE, among other names — is believed to be responsible for a series of breaches of critical U.S. infrastructure over the past year.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) called for new leadership to replace House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), in an interview with The Intercept aired on Wednesday.
The remarks represent Ocasio-Cortez’s most direct challenge to current Democratic congressional leadership, and come a month after Michigan representative Elissa Slotkin vowed not to support Pelosi for another term as House Speaker. Pelosi is the only candidate for the position, but with Democrats projected to win at most 226 House seats, Pelosi can only lose eight Democratic votes to remain Speaker.
I wonder: If enough of the hard left defects to keep Pelosi from one more term as speaker, might there be enough Democrats to vote for a moderate Republican as Speaker rather than being ruled by The Squad?
Another Obama-era crony green energy boondoggle goes bust:
Move over, Solyndra. Another green boondoggle from the Obama era has failed, and taxpayers are out as much as $510 million. Late last week Judge Karen Owens approved a Chapter 11 plan of reorganization by Tonopah Solar Energy. Tonopah operated the Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada that received $737 million in guaranteed loans from the Obama Administration.
The plan includes a settlement with the Department of Energy that leaves taxpayers liable for as much as $234.68 million in outstanding debt, but the total public cost is even higher. Crescent Dunes also received an investment-tax credit, and the 2009 stimulus legislation allowed it to receive a cash payment in lieu of credit. In 2017 the plant received more than $275.6 million from Treasury under the Section 1603 program, which it used to service its outstanding liabilities. So taxpayers already gave Crescent Dunes cash to pay off its taxpayer-backed loans.
Snip.
DOE expected Crescent Dunes to produce up to 482,000 megawatt hours every year, but the plant hasn’t produced that much energy in its lifetime. In 2019 Crescent Dunes’s hot salt tanks suffered what partial owner SolarReserve described as “a catastrophic failure” that has left the plant inoperable.
Since molten salt is one of the key elements in many next generation nuclear plant designs, I searched online for pictures of what a catastrophic hot salt tank failure looks like, but I couldn’t find any.
Last week, Portland law enforcers raided a house that had for months been illegally occupied by trespassers affiliated with Black Lives Matter and Antifa. At the barricaded property, officers made arrests and found a stockpile of firearms.
Under normal circumstances, the armed trespassers would be prosecuted, and that would be the end of the story. But in riot-plagued Portland, Oregon, things are very far from normal.
The city’s “progressive” district attorney immediately dropped the charges against the occupiers, and their comrades soon sent in reinforcements to build a sprawling autonomous zone in the middle of a densely populated residential area.
The militants called the place the Red House Autonomous Zone — named after the red-painted house occupied at the heart of the zone. In doing so, they took inspiration from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, Washington. During the summer, leftist extremists chased police out of a six-block area of the Emerald City and drew their own “borders,” complete with checkpoints manned by armed “security.” The three-week experiment in lawlessness ended in mass vandalism, attempted rape, multiple shootings and two homicides.
Portland’s RHAZ is following in the same footsteps.
The house at the center of the autonomous zone was occupied by members of the Kinney family and their allies. The Kinneys, who haven’t paid their mortgage since 2017, were evicted after a tortuous legal process. The fact that they own a second house nearby didn’t prevent the mixed-race Kinneys and their allies from claiming victimization by — you guessed it — “racism.”
Soon after last week’s raid on the occupied house, some 100 Antifa comrades mobilized through social media to retake the space. “There is an active call for numbers, defensive gear and supplies and change of clothes,” tweeted Antifa group Youth Liberation Front.
Within a few hours, the entire street was blocked off with stolen fencing, wood and junk taken from nearby homes. Some brought in power tools to reinforce the barriers. The militants laid out piles of rocks, metal spikes and glass bottles at strategic points to act as supply points for projectile weapons. They lined the road with impromptu “booby traps” — upward-facing nail strips, caltrops and more.
Portland police officers tried to shut down the RHAZ early on, but they were attacked and chased away. Their police cruisers were smashed up; they didn’t return.
“Those present at the barricades should leave it behind, put down your weapons and allow the neighborhood to return to peace and order,” Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell asked the militants, who ignored his polite request.
Portland residents should file federal civil rights lawsuits against Portland officials for equal protection violations. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A serial sex offender and Black Lives Matter activist recently released from prison served a titular leadership role at the Antifa autonomous zone in north Portland.
Micah Isaiah Rhodes, 27, was convicted of three counts of second-degree sexual abuse of minors in 2018. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after violating probation by being near children during an Antifa occupation of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
“Former [Andrew] Cuomo Aide Lindsey Boylan Alleges Governor Sexually Harassed Her For Years.” Hey, what do you want to bet that #BelieveAllWomen magically doesn’t apply to powerful Democrat yet again? For Reasons.
Rhode Island’s Democratic governor Gina Raimondo: “Don’t go out and wear a mask.” Four days later: Goes to a wine bar, doesn’t wear a mask. Laws are for the peasants, not the Democratic Party ruling class. (Hat tip: Andrew Malcolm.)
Realize I’m becoming a Paglia stan acct, but in a minute and a half she nails exactly what’s gone wrong w leftism, academia, and the frauds who’ve usurped both. Worth a watch. pic.twitter.com/PkYtNrqkvu
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Nineteen years ago, radical Islamic terrorists carried out the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Today not only is Osama bin Laden dead, but what’s left of al Qaeda has been relegated to minor players in a handful of regional conflicts (Yemen, Syria, etc.).
The media is filled with stories about how the Democrats are planning to refuse to accept Donald Trump’s impending victory, with speculation about cheating, lawsuits, and the odd military coup. Leaving aside the bizarre notion that our troops are eager to risk their lives to kill their friends and family for the benefit of the liberal establishment and the military-industrial complex – which the Democrats have suddenly embraced as something awesome – in order to impose that creepy old weirdo from the basement upon America, the challenges are real but they are also overblown.
Don’t panic. Prepare. Work to get out the patriotic American vote. If we’re ready maybe this won’t descend into the chaos I describe in my novel/unintended documentary People’s Republic.
Now, they will cheat. That’s baked in, and they are fully committed to it. That’s why they hate hate hate voter ID – it’s harder to cheat when you have to prove who you are. Voting-by-mail gets around that and offers all sorts of opportunities for mischief. They fully intend to try to leverage voting by mail to 1) get China virus paranoids and their usual lay-about voters to vote instead of just sitting home watching “Judge Judy,” and 2) manufacture the necessary votes to swing the election. The turnout issue is important to them because all the numbskulls driving their cars alone with masks on are all liberal. The Dems could have gone with explaining that going to vote for Biden confers immunity, just like rioting, but whatever. Now, the cheating aspect is another issue, but how great an impact cheating might have is open to question.
Mr. Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer don’t agree on everything, but on this specific issue they speak with one voice: the $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local tax (better known as the SALT deduction) must go.
The House of Representatives has already passed legislation removing the cap, allowing the amount of the deduction to rise. If the Senate turns blue in November, Democrats have promised to return to the issue. “I want to tell you this,” Senator Schumer said in July, “If I become majority leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate” the SALT cap “forever.” It “will be dead, gone and buried.”
The cap was introduced as part of the 2017 Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act…Almost 60 percent of the benefit of removal would go to the top 1 percent of households (of which 90 percent are white).
Think on today’s Democratic Party, withered by the Clintons and then the Obamas and now Slow Joe Biden. Think about the obvious lies. Think about how loyalty uber alles has shaved off bits of their partisans’ souls, burned as offerings on the altar of someone else’s political ambitions. Think of the small death that takes place each day among those (supposedly) most fervent partisans.
It’s no wonder that the Democratic Party is being taken over by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa rioters. The Iron Law says that they’re the ones who will rise to the top.
You see, all paths other than radical revolution are closed, at least for advancement. Who even talks about John Kerry anymore? And the media covers for all of these people so there is no possible correction.
The Trump Administration has cross-depotized Oregon State Police troopers “assigned to help the police in Portland have now been cross-deputize by the federal government. This means that the US Attorney’s Office can lodge charges against those arrested by deputized troopers,” bypassing antifa-friendly DAs. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Among those Portland arrestees:
For those in the back — arrested rioter is THE LEGISLATIVE DIRECTOR FOR THE OREGON SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE https://t.co/htH9su4630
But what is clear is that the “confirmation” which both MSNBC and CBS claimed it had obtained for the story was anything but: All that happened was that the same sources which anonymously whispered these unverified, false claims to CNN then went and repeated the same unverified, false claims to other outlets, which then claimed that they “independently confirmed” the story even though they had done nothing of the sort.
It seems the same misleading tactic is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — whom the magazine refuses to name because they fear “angry tweets” — told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is accurate.
So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg’s story based on what best advances one’s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.
Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”
In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had “confirmed” the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.
What was Mueller’s team hiding that they were willing to risk charges of felony government record destruction to make sure no one ever saw it? https://t.co/UhCJYQZAZZ
Al Sharpton comes out against defunding the police. Just think crazy far to the left you have to go for Al “Race Hustling Poverty Pimp” Sharpton to call you out for your bullshit?
The Trump-brokered UAE-Israel peace deal is already paying dividends. Winners: Israeli airlines, and other Arab states moving to normalize relations. Losers: Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More on the same subject:
In the past 24 hours
* The Arab League refused to condemn the Israel-UAE peace deal
* It was reported that Saudi Arabia and Bahrain will allow all flights to/from Israel to fly through their airspace
* Abu Dhabi directed all hotels to start offering kosher food
Survey shows that professional sports is in big trouble. “Of all the sectors measured in the survey, professional sports suffered the biggest drop in support, falling all the way to 23rd on the list and settling barely above The Federal Government. The negative impressions by Americans now see sports underwater by double digits, with a 30%-40% favorable/unfavorable ratio.”
Speaking of getting woke and going broke, the Oscars are now implementing racial quotas.
It’s come to my attention that one of my hashtags, #Bidentherapist could be misinterpreted to mean something totally different. I’ll use #BidenTherapist from now on. Sorry.
“Hollywood Elites Rush To Normalize Pedophilia Before They’re All Outed By Ghislaine Maxwell.” “Nowadays, we’ve got so many letters crammed into the whole ‘LGBTQETC+’ thing, nobody even notices if we slide a ‘P’ in there somewhere!”
Godfrey Elfwick: “Pretending to be black is a common side-effect of trauma, the official medical term being: Post Traumatic Ethnic Appropriation. I believe many white musicians in the early 90s suffered from it, no doubt due to the lack of trigger warnings on TV shows back then.”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Today’s theme is Democratic Governor’s ignoring the constitution to keep their precious lockdowns going, Obamagate, spying (domestic and foreign), a bit about aircraft, and funny animals. Dig in!
Remember how Georgia lifting the lockdown and opening the economy was going to kill everyone’s granny? Yeah, not so much: “Georgia Records Lowest Number of Coronavirus Patients in over a Month.”
Ever since President Trump expressed optimism about the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the mere mention of that drug can elicit instantaneous, strident, and finger-wagging condemnation by the mainstream media and all those who are pulling for the pandemic to lay waste to the economy and pave the way for a fundamental progressive transformation of America. Despite its use by health-care providers across the country and around the world to successfully treat COVID-19, you will be mocked as either a fool or a snake oil salesman if you approvingly utter the word “hydroxychloroquine” or even express hope that it can be used to save lives. The word is simply not to be tolerated in polite, progressive society.
Well, it appears that the list of forbidden words is about to get longer. The new additions include “corticosteroids” and “Methylprednisolone.”
What do these widely available and relatively inexpensive drugs with known safety profiles have in common with hydroxychloroquine? Leading physicians are using them in addition to hydroxychloroquine to successfully treat COVID-19. And they are doing so without waiting two or three years for the results of randomized clinical trials.
“Wuhan Virus Watch: Over Half of All U.S. Deaths Have Occurred in Just Five States.” “New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. New York remains the hardest-hit state of any in the country by far, having logged nearly 27,000 deaths as of Saturday afternoon. The next-hardest-hit state, New Jersey, had recorded over 9,100.”
It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how badly Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 response has been, and it has been a catastrophe from the very beginning. In early March, when the country was already becoming concerned about the spread of the virus, Whitmer did not cancel the Democratic presidential primary, and indeed, there was record turnout for the March 10 primary, which turned into a “super spreader” event in metropolitan Detroit. She has since bungled practically every aspect of the pandemic, including her deliberately punitive and irrational lockdown policy. Now she would have us believe that she is the real victim of all this:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said Wednesday that the lockdown protests are “racist and misogynistic” and called on those with a platform to discourage the demonstrators.
Whitmer told ABC’s “The View” that the protests are “really political” as demonstrators have brought nooses, Confederate flags and Nazi symbolism.
“This is not appropriate in a global pandemic,” she said. “But it’s certainly not an exercise of democratic principles where we have free speech. This is calls to violence. This is racist and misogynistic.”
I have no idea who brought nooses, etc., to these protests, although I suspect these were false-flag agents provocateurs — leftists pretending to be part of the protest and acting in ways intended to discredit Whitmer’s opponents. None of this, however, justifies her policies.
Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy: “Screw your rights. Stay at home.” Wisconsin Supreme Court: “Unconstitutional.” Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy the very same day: “Oh yeah? Then screw your religion! No meetings for you God weirdos!” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
Dallas County Commissioner Judge Clay Jenkins has repeatedly tried to act as the ruler of Dallas County by attempting to force his will on everyone within it and each time he’s been put back in his place by everyone from the citizens of Dallas County to his own fellow commissioners.
Jenkins has now awakened the wrath of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who issued a warning to him and other officials in other Texas counties who are trying to illegally prevent Texans from living doing things such as attending church.
According to Paxton’s office, a warning was issued to three county judges and two mayors telling them to back off their make-believe thrones, or else there will be consequences:
Attorney General Ken Paxton today issued letters to three Texas counties (Dallas, Bexar, and Travis) and two mayors (San Antonio and Austin), warning that some requirements in their local public health orders are unlawful and can confuse law-abiding citizens. These unlawful and unenforceable requirements include strict and unconstitutional demands for houses of worship, unnecessary and onerous restrictions on allowing essential services to operate, such as tracking customers who visit certain restaurants, penalties for not wearing masks, shelter-in-place demands, criminal penalties for violating state or local health orders, and failing to differentiate between recommendations and mandates.
Many of the most important mitigation strategies are unknown to the general public because they’ve taken place behind closed doors on the initiative of employers, not bureaucrats, and have little or nothing to do with legal mandates (which are themselves, as I can attest is the case here in Canada, a contradictory, hastily-conceived patchwork of federal and provincial directives and advisories). To give but one example I happen to be familiar with: Many of the men and women you see driving delivery trucks and construction vehicles are now governed by all sorts of rules, at pickup and drop-off, that allow them to perform their functions without coming within six feet of others. In some cases, they’ve been enabled with apps on their phones or dash-mounted tablets that permit them to coordinate these functions without any direct on-site human interaction whatsoever. Or they might be subject to thermometer-gun screenings to determine if they have a fever. Having implemented these lockdown-lite policies at great cost and inconvenience, employers aren’t going to dump them the moment the government gives them permission to do so, even though these procedures have increased costs and decreased output.
Many employers I speak to are actually far more constricted by the concerns of their own employees than by the law itself. At one workplace that I know of, the boss announced that loosened provincial restrictions mean that everyone can come back to work this month. To his surprise, his employees announced that they’d voted on the issue through Facebook, and, no, they would not be coming back, at least not yet. And in Quebec, which is starting to let elementary-school students come back to class this month, thousands of parents—a majority at some schools—have decided to keep their children home. I am told by reliable sources within my own family that some of these parents are even pressuring their neighbours to do likewise, and are shaming dissenters on social media as bad parents. It’s lockdown by mob.
To some extent, I find this attitude of populist hyper-vigilance to be exasperating, because sending your young kids to school is now generally safe (and, selfishly, because I think my own seven-year-old could benefit from getting back to a structured education environment). But we got into this mess by letting our guard down, and so it’s not surprising that many ordinary people want to err on the other side of the equation for a month or three. Whatever your views, though, if you’re all in a fuss about lockdown policy, please remember that the real lockdown was never imposed by government. It turns out that it was inside each and every one of us all along.
Don Surber asked a question back in 2017 that we ought to take a fresh look at: Was Obama using the NSA to spy on Romney during the 2012 election? Given what we know of Crossfire Hurricane, would anyone put it past him?
Related:
Comey: 'We Did Not Spy—We Just Observed And Reported Secretly Without The Subject's Knowledge Or Consent' https://t.co/h3uoUi1JKB
Shurer fought his way *up* a mountain, into machine gun fire, RPGs, etc, neutralizing countless jihadis in the process, getting shot, but still moving forward, to render aid to & evac his brothers that were pinned down. His story is awe inspiring. RIP.https://t.co/jHgoR1XLKC
— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) May 15, 2020
TSMC to build chip foundry in Arizona. This is a pretty big deal, as TSMC currently has the best fab tech in the world, and this will be their first ground-up American foundry (they currently have (I think) two other American fabs as the result of acquisitions from WaferTech and TI).
An engineering professor at the University of Arkansas has been arrested by the FBI and faces up to 20 years in prison for allegedly hiding funding that he received from the communist Chinese government.
The New York Times reports that “Simon Ang of the University of Arkansas, was arrested on Friday and charged on Monday with wire fraud.”
“He worked for and received funding from Chinese companies and from the Thousand Talents program, which awards grants to scientists to encourage relationships with the Chinese government,” the report notes, adding that “he warned an associate to keep his affiliation with the program quiet.”
The report explains that Ang’s alleged hiding of the funding enabled him to also get US government subsidies, specifically from NASA, to the tune of more than $5 million.
Who let the goats out?! 🐐 A herd of 200 goats roamed the streets of a San Jose neighborhood on Tuesday after breaking through a fence. Full story: https://t.co/nlHZA6livTpic.twitter.com/NEAp36bJsb
Asked about the possibility of regime collapse, General James Jones, who was Obama’s national security advisor in 2009 and 2010, said the risk for Tehran cannot be ignored.
“I think the needle is moved more in that direction in the last year towards that possibility than ever before with a combination of the sanctions, relative isolation of the regime, and then some catastrophic decisions have been made — assuming that we weren’t going to respond, which turned out to be a very, very bad decision,” Jones told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum in Abu Dhabi on Sunday.
The response Jones referred to was the U.S. drone strike that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani on Jan. 3, a move that shocked the region and prompted a response from Iran in the form of missiles strikes on two military bases in Iraq that housed U.S. forces. No one was killed in the strikes. Washington says the strike was in response to the storming by Iranian-backed Iraqi militias of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and purported threats cited by the White House of impending attacks on Americans.
“I think it’s clear that the regime in Iran has had a very bad couple of weeks,” Jones said. “And one of the things that people don’t talk about too much is the degree of unrest that there is in the country, which I think is significant.”
“So you take the removal of Soleimani, you take the accidental downing of the civilian aircraft coupled with the amount of popular unrest — the needle towards possible collapse of a regime has to be something that people think about. It’s probably not politically correct to talk about it, but you have to think about it.”
Germany, France and the United Kingdom have launched a formal dispute mechanism against Iran which could end up putting international sanctions on the regime. The measure was announced on Tuesday following recent Iranian violations of the 2015 nuclear deal. The dispute will now be brought before a Joint Commission made up of Iran, Russia, China, the three European signatories, and the European Union. If the panel fails to resolve the dispute, the matter will then come before the United Nations Security Council.
Even if the process gets stalled at the UN, Iran could end up facing comprehensive international sanctions — in addition to the current U.S. sanctions, media reports suggest. “If the Security Council does not vote within 30 days to continue sanctions relief, sanctions in place under previous UN resolutions would be reimposed – known as a “snapback”,” British newspaper The Telegraph reported.
Tehran formally abandon the nuclear deal last Sunday by announcing its plans to scrap the limits on enriching uranium put in place by the international agreement, Iranian state TV confirmed. The move brings Tehran within striking distance of procuring sufficient weapons-grade uranium needed for a nuclear arsenal. The regime already possesses advanced missile delivery systems capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Florida Republican representative (and veteran) Brian Mast at congressional hearing on Soleimani “If you walk out this hallway, and you take a right and a right and another right, you’re going to come to several beautiful walls that have the names of our fallen service members from the War on Terror,” Mast began. “And I would ask, can any of you provide me with one name on that wall that doesn’t justify killing Soleimani?” Dead silence ensues. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
More swamp follies: “Federal Judge Orders Justice Department to Explain Why Awan Documents Are Being Kept Secret.”
An apparently frustrated federal judge ordered attorneys for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to appear Jan. 15 for a “snap” hearing to explain why the government isn’t producing documents sought by Judicial Watch concerning former Democratic information technology aide Imran Awan.
U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta’s unusual order followed a sealed submission by DOJ attorneys Jan. 10 in the case prompted by the nonprofit government watchdog’s November 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
Such hastily convened hearings are extremely unusual in a federal judicial system so jammed that months can pass before cases are litigated in courtrooms.
“In a hearing last month, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta expressed frustration and ordered the Justice Department to explain its failure to produce records by January 10 and to provide Judicial Watch some details about the delay,” Judicial Watch said in a statement Jan. 14 about the snap hearing.
“Instead, the Justice Department made its filing under seal and has yet to provide Judicial Watch with any details about its failure to produce records as promised to the court,” Judicial Watch said.
Federal attorneys previously said in December 2019 that they were unable to provide the documents sought in the Judicial Watch FOIA requests because they include materials from a “related sealed criminal matter.”
I think we all know the real reason the DOJ won’t produce the documents: Because they’ll prove deeply damaging to Democrats. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Arizona Republican Senator Martha McSally calls CNN reporter Manu Raju a liberal hack. Good for her. (And yes, coverage of CNN’s putting it’s thumb on the scale for Elizabeth Warren and against Bernie Sanders is coming in next week’s Clown Car update.)
More about our crappy media: “So many of the people in foreign affairs journalism imbibed the “Bush lied us into war” rhetoric so deeply that they’ve concluded that American officials must be treated with way more skepticism than officials in secretive and serially dishonest authoritarian regimes. They say generals are always fighting the last war; apparently journalists are always covering the last one, too.”
In every treatment room in the @ChildrensPgh ER, there is a sign that says they are duty and legally bound to provide necessary life-saving or stabilizing care regardless of a patient's ability to pay. This is true *everywhere*. (22/25)
Oh come on! I’ve got nothing for or against Odell Beckham, Jr. (he’s a talented wide receiver; bit of a chucklehead, but far from the worst among wide receivers (*coughcoughAntonioBrown*)), and people committing actual assault against police officers should be arrested. This isn’t remotely it.
Rep. Cummings, while being very obsessed with Russia, seems utterly bewildered with the idea that anyone could dare question why so many billions of federal dollars flow to places like West Baltimore when they are obviously doing no good.
Look at other cities in similar dilapidation and there holds a unique truth: Democrats run them all.
How long will sewage run down the streets of San Francisco? How long will St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore, continue to rotate as the nation’s most dangerous crime infested metros? And how long will federal dollars keep chasing bad money with new?
Snip.
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report and as reported in the USA Today (from Feb 19, 2019), the top 10 most dangerous cities in America are run by Democrats.
The overwhelming majority of them are also all governed by Democratic Governors. And the Congressional districts represented are also majority Democratic.
Did I mention that each of them also has higher unemployment rates than the national average?
In Baltimore, Democrats have run everything for more than four decades. Federal dollars have flowed in, and yet the stench, sight, and symbolism of it all—stinks.
In the end, the forces that are driving these trends in Mexico are larger and more powerful than any individual, and there is very little that any one person can do to counter or control them. It is true that individuals such as Gulf cartel founder Juan Garcia Abrego and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the “godfather” of the Guadalajara cartel, were instrumental in altering the relationship between Mexican cartels and their Colombian counterparts. They succeeded in boosting the role of Mexican cartels from mere errand boys, who received a small cut of the Colombian cartels’ profits on cocaine smuggled through Mexico, to full partners that received an equal share of the profits. The vast profits that the cocaine trade brought to the Mexican cartels was a game changer. They provided the Mexican groups with vast quantities of cash to hire armies of hit men, arm them with military-grade weapons and bribe officials at every level of government. This vast wealth also allowed them to challenge — and in some places usurp — the government’s monopoly on force and governance as they pursued their campaign of “plata o plomo” (silver or lead) to either bribe or kill people in authority.
Mexican cartels multiplied their profits by embracing the heroin trade, eventually coming to dominate the North American heroin market. They also ventured into the synthetic drug trade, as drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl brought them even larger profits than cocaine or heroin. Literally awash in money, many Mexican cartels struggled to launder and spend all the money they were making.
Naturally, however, this vast fortune has come with consequences beyond just coming to the attention of authorities. Given the huge sums at stake, business partners and even family members have turned into sworn enemies as they fight over a greater share of the profits. And in addition to fighting over smuggling routes to external markets — which have grown to include Australia and Europe, in addition to the United States — they are also fighting bitterly for control of the sizable domestic Mexican retail drug market in places like Mexico City, Cancun, Tijuana and Juarez. Moreover, they are struggling to grab control of the lucrative petroleum theft racket, while also engaging in extortion, kidnapping, prostitution, human smuggling and other criminal activities.
In the end, I believe that Balkanization will continue to impact even the larger and stronger cartels such as Sinaloa and the CJNG [Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, or just New Generation]. I anticipate additional rounds of Sinaloa infighting and while the CJNG had been largely immune from the trend, the emergence of the Nueva Plaza cartel, which is composed mostly of former CJNG members under the direction of Carlos “El Cholo” Enrique Sanchez Martinez and Erick “El 85” Valencia Salazar, has showed that it, too, is vulnerable to greed and infighting.
Indeed, Gulf cartel leader Cardenas Guillen earned the nickname “El Mata Amigos” (the friend killer) for, unsurprisingly, turning on those close to him amid the greed-driven infighting. The amount of internecine conflict, however, has only grown since Cardenas Guillen’s 2003 arrest, as evidenced by recent murder trends, much of which stems from intracartel fighting, as well as battles among different groups.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairwoman Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) was set to make an unplanned trip to Washington from her district Monday amid an outcry from top black and Latino lawmakers over a lack of diversity in the campaign arm’s senior management ranks.
Bustos’ sudden return to D.C., just days after Congress left for a six-week-long August recess, comes as aides and lawmakers are calling for systematic changes to the DCCC, the party’s main election organ.
POLITICO reported last week that black and Hispanic lawmakers are furious with Bustos’ stewardship of the campaign arm. They say the upper echelon of the DCCC is bereft of diversity, and it is not doing enough to reach Latino voters and hire consultants of color. In addition, several of Bustos’ senior aides have left in the first six months of her tenure, including her chief of staff — a black woman — and her director of mail and polling director, both women.
In the most dramatic move so far, Texas Reps. Vicente Gonzalez and Filemon Vela told POLITICO Sunday that Bustos should fire her top aide, DCCC executive director Allison Jaslow.
“The DCCC is now in complete chaos,” the pair said in a statement to POLITICO. “The single most immediate action that Cheri Bustos can take to restore confidence in the organization and to promote diversity is to appoint a qualified person of color, of which there are many, as executive director at once. We find the silence of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on this issue to be deafening.”
It’s lovely to see Democrats inflict the same “diversity” pain on themselves as they’ve tried to inflict on the rest of the country. The DCCC was already lagging badly behind Republican efforts, and a “diversity” witch hunt will only add to its problems.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats’ powerful campaign arm, has just abruptly purged half a dozen staffers. Why? Because they are white.
It appears that no one had anything against these particular staffers … except for the color of their skin. Although roughly half the committee’s full-time staff (13 of 27) were nonwhite, this was not enough for some Democratic members of Congress. They complained DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos of Illinois had brought in too many white staffers when she won the position. And they put enough pressure on her that she sacrificed her loyal staffers to the god of diversity.
Even if all these staffers ended up with cushy lobbying jobs as a reward for their loyalty, this is still a lot more shocking than people perhaps realize.
There are two possible interpretations of this mass-purge at the DCCC. Either a few Democrats are making a racial issue out of a patronage question, once again knifing each other under the cover of intersectionality, or Democrats are genuinely angry that half the staff at the DCCC are white. As often happens with the Democratic Left, it is difficult to tell just where the insincerity ends and the fanaticism begins.
But either interpretation implies that this is not a party fit to govern.
“The biggest loser in Wednesday’s Detroit debate was sanity.”
Here’s a quick cheat sheet. All the Democrats support policies that would raise taxes. They all support policies that would make the country poorer because less energy independent. Some want to give free college tuition to illegal immigrants, all want many more immigrants, legal or illegal. Most think Trump should be impeached. Some want to abolish private insurance, most want ‘Medicare for all.’ Gov. Inslee insisted that ‘it is time to give people adequate mental health care,’ a statement that won a round of applause. Judging from what was said from the platform tonight, I think he may be right.
The United States has officially withdrawn from the INF treaty. “The Russians have been flagrantly violating the treaty for years, and it doesn’t apply to China, which has massively built up its missile program, including intermediate-range systems.”
Speaking of China, don’t look now, but it looks like they’re about to Tiananmen Hong Kong.
Get woke, go broke: Remember Gillette’s “toxic masculinity” social justice warrior pandering commercial? “P&G reported a net loss of about $5.24 billion, or $2.12 per share, for the quarter ended June 30, due to an $8 billion non-cash writedown of Gillette.” Nothing says “woke” quite like destroying eight BILLION dollars of shareholder value…
Long, long, longarticle on Alan Deshowitz and his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. I remain pro-civil liberties and anti-kid-diddling. Most interesting tidbit: The raid on Epstein’s home produced “an expired passport that contained Epstein’s photograph alongside an assumed name, with the country of residency listed as Saudi Arabia.”
Texas’ largest law enforcement agency is moving away from arresting people for low-level marijuana offenses. It’s the latest development in the chaos that has surrounded pot prosecution after state lawmakers legalized hemp this year.
As of July 10, all Texas Department of Public Safety officers have been instructed to issue a citation for people with a misdemeanor amount of the suspected drug — less than 4 ounces in possession cases — when possible, according to an interoffice memo obtained by The Texas Tribune. The citation requires a person to appear in court and face their criminal charges.
Those issued a citation for misdemeanor charges still face the same penalties if convicted — up to a year in jail and fine of $4,000.
I’d like to see actual decriminalization rather than selective enforcement, but you can argue that of all the laws DPS is required to enforce, enforcing marijuana prohibition (at least on adults) is a waste of time unless the driver is impaired.
Australian expedition sent to Antarctica to celebrate the golden age of Australian antarctic exploration. Like many golden age Antarctic expeditions, it was filled with disaster. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas we’re enjoying intermittant torrential rains, which means that walking your dog after one is like breathing warm soup.
Former President Barack Obama was unhappy with Hillary Clinton and her failed “soulless campaign” in 2016, saying he saw her loss as a “personal insult.”
The new details come from a recently released update to New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker’s book Obama: The Call of History.
The new edition, which includes Obama’s reaction to the 2016 election, said Obama compared himself to Michael Corleone, the titular character of “The Godfather.” Obama thought he “almost got out” of office untouched, like a mob boss avoiding a hit job.
Obama found himself shocked by the election results, thinking before Nov. 8 there was “no way Americans would turn on him” and “[h]is legacy, he felt, was in safe hands.”
The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than when he nearly swept the region in 2016. Polling shows Trump’s job approval rating in the Midwest is in the mid-forties, and his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating in the region is roughly the same as Obama’s was during the same point in his presidency, according to Gallup tracking polls.
The working class, the nearly 70 percent of Americans without a college degree who have been ignored and even ridiculed by both political parties, is flourishing. Five of the top ten cities enjoying the greatest job opportunities for lower-wage workers are in the Midwest. “A majority of the metro areas with the highest shares of opportunity employment are located in the Midwest . . . after adjusting for cost-of-living differences, median annual earnings tend to be relatively high in that region,” according to an April 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Finding enough workers “is a problem playing out in many parts of the Midwest, a region with lower unemployment and higher job-opening rates than the rest of the country,” according to an April 2018 Wall Street Journal report, citing hiring challenges by employers in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Southwestern Ohio, solid Trump country, is in the midst of a warehousing boom. The construction industry is thriving nationwide, but the Midwest is leading the pack.
The administration’s attempts to secure the southern border are gaining popularity in the Midwest. According to a recent Washington Postpoll, 40 percent of Midwesterners say Trump’s approach to illegal immigration will make them more likely to support him in 2020, compared to 36 percent who say they are less likely. Further, 83 percent of Midwesterners called the situation at the Mexican border a crisis or a serious problem. It will take some smooth convincing by the Democratic presidential candidate to not only disabuse Midwesterners of their views, but to assure them that open borders are best for families in Racine and Grand Rapids.
Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.
Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.
The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.
The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.
The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.
The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.
Oh, should we use the word “bombshell” or the phrase “the walls are closing on?”
The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.
And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.
The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.
Huge amounts of aid dollars — including $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency — have flowed to the small city of 90,000 residents to address lead in its water supply, even though it doesn’t have a chief financial officer and, until recently, its finance chair was a gun felon.
The federal money “should be a good thing for the city,” Worthing told TheDCNF, “but given the mismanagement of the pipe replacement program, I am concerned that it’s not going to get used properly.”
The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.
Hey, remember when journalists reported on all the scandals among Virginia’s state leaders, until they noticed the (D)s after their names? “Northam, who largely won on anti-Trump anger, is now less popular than the president in the state.”
Alabama Democratic state representative John Rogers last week: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.” Rodgers this week: “I am now a candidate for United States Senate.” He’s primarying incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who only got in because of the Roy Moore fiasco.
Recent data show that the U.K.’s gun control experiments are actually causing more harm than good. Like its Australian counterpart, which also implemented draconian gun control in the 1990s, negative criminal trends have started to surface since new gun control laws were enacted.
Sexual assaults have seen an alarming rise from 1995 to 2006, specifically increasing by 76.5 percent according to Howard Nemerov’s book 400 Years of Gun Control. All the gun control in the world has not been able to save the U.K. from steadily increasing rates of violent crime.
“The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”
Believe women…unless they’re raped by a homeless person. “Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes.”
I'm in Nebraska for a trip. The national media has done a horrific job covering the catastrophic flooding that has for months made homes inaccessible. It is all you see from the air, and a big deal. pic.twitter.com/XU9DmTb5Ju
Leaked Trump Peace Plan? I’d sort of like President Trump to stay away from all peace plans, as they all seem to be asking for trouble. This one is interesting. It calls for a two state solution, some Egyptian facilities for Gaza, incorporating settlements into Israel, a lot of non-U.S. countries picking up the bill, and penalties for rejecting the deal. It make so much sense that Palestinians will surely reject it out of hand…
More on China’s play for technological dominance: “Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The New York Times had a story in which they breathlessly told us that Trump lost a billion dollars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know, just like Trump himself told us in his book The Art of the Comeback. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.” Better idea: Make all social media companies publish clear, defined reasons for suspending or banning users, and make the processes by which those decisions are made transparent. Nah, they’d never go for that, as that would keep them from arbitrarily banning conservatives… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Jim Goad says Facebook should leave Louis Farrakhan alone…because he’s hilarious. “This cat is one of the most accomplished mind-fuckers in American history, and I’m glad to call him a fellow citizen.”
Moving The Extending Arms of Christ: This probably won’t mean anything to you unless you grew up in Houston, but there was a large, striking mosaic above the emergency room entrance on Houston Methodist Hospital that had to be moved to an interior atrium under construction due to the hospital’s expansion.
