The City of Austin will again be on the search for someone to head its police department after Chief Joseph Chacon announced his intention to retire next month.
Chacon had been in charge of the Austin Police Department (APD) since September 2021, when he was appointed as the permanent chief after serving on an interim basis following Brian Manley’s retirement earlier that year.
“Working at APD has been the privilege of my life,” said Chacon. “Being the Chief of Police is something that I never thought would have been possible, and it has been the pinnacle of my career.”
In a letter to the department, Chacon said he first began considering retirement a few months ago and ultimately decided his 25-year run at APD was nearing its end.
APD Chief of Staff Robin Henderson will be named interim police chief once Chacon’s retirement becomes effective in the first week of September.
Then comes the more interesting part: The stalemate between police who want to do their jobs and the Austin victimhood identity politics establishment who want to prevent them from doing that continues:
During Chacon’s tenure, APD has been marked by staffing hemorrhage; a labor contract dispute with the city council; and a thorny relationship with Travis County District Attorney José Garza, who’s taken an active approach in prosecuting officers for alleged misconduct.
Garza’s uncle, Jesús Garza, is the interim city manager.
As of March APD has seen 89 officer departures, leaving the department 300 positions down from its 2019 staffing level. In 2020, the city council’s $150 million APD budget cut and redirection removed authorization for 150 patrol positions.
Austin’s police and elected officials have spent much of the last 12 months in a prolonged standoff over a new labor contract.
The Austin City Council, led by Mayor Kirk Watson, rejected a four-year agreement with the Austin Police Association in favor of a one-year extension of the now-expired deal. That leaves APD employment to be governed by Chapter 143 of the Local Government Code.
The impasse came largely over how much authority to vest in the Office of Police Oversight (OPO).
The city’s “reimagine policing” activists wanted to make the OPO significantly stronger, including enabling it to conduct investigations into alleged officer misconduct rather than its current role of simply fielding complaints and observing the process.
You remember the “Reimagining Police” initiative, don’t you? If not, this should refresh your memory.
In 2021, the OPO and its former head Farah Muscadin were found by an arbitrator to have violated the police labor agreement — just the latest chapter in a string of actions by the OPO that’s strained a contentious relationship.
The two sides remain at an impasse, and APA has no intention of giving in to the progressive activists’ demands.
Good.
Kirk Watson was elected mayor in large measure due to his promises to get crime under control and cut back on the radical Social Justice agenda driving the city. So far he hasn’t done much to deliver on those promises.
Austin apartment complex gets repeatedly hit by thieves breaking into apartments and cars night after night. Last year they had repeated transient break-ins through a hole in the fence, and this year two individuals seem to be the same ones breaking into cars over and over again.
So a woman gathered video evidence of the twp suspects. Austin police response? “This is not a high priority case.” And they wouldn’t look at her videos.
The apartments appear to be those off Riata Trace Blvd., which is about a mile from my house.
Years of understaffing, coddling crime in the name of “social justice” and luring more drug-addicted transients to Austin have put APD in a bind, as they don’t have enough manpower to protect life, liberty and property.
That won’t change because the Austin City Council doesn’t want it to change.
As far as I can tell, that’s because the trial hasn’t happened yet, despite the original raid happening in January of 2019. The most recent activity was the judge refusing to dismiss the charges, and another court limiting the mere presence of Goines in a case as a possible cause for appeal to a ten year stretch starting in 2008.
I know that Flu Manchu lockdowns delayed a lot of trials all around the country, but four and a half years is an inordinately long time for a murder trial to be pending, as you start to run into due process concerns. Four years was around the time that all the charges in the Waco biker shootout case were dismissed. And that was a much more complex case with hundred of defendants and mountains of prosecutorial pigheadedness.
The Democrats running Houston’s criminal justice system today claim to care deeply about stopping police misconduct, but don’t seem capable of dispensing justice in anything like a timely manner to the one glaring redball of police misconduct they already have in their laps.
If you’ve wondered why homelessness in California seems so much worse than in other states, Siyamak Khorrami’s interview with El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson for California Insider provides some answers:
Some takeaways:
“According to the latest report, California alone has one third of the U.S homeless population today.”
“What we have is you can be arrested or cited did over and over and over and over again, and there’s no consequences. And it’s just getting worse and worse.”
The same transients sprawling unconscious on city streets in LA and San Francisco are now found in San Diego.
“If you look at the people and look in their eyes, you see a lost [soul], almost like a post-apocalyptic look. It’s not somebody who’s lost their job or lost their housing, it’s someone who is addicted to drugs. In large part have fried their brains. They’re suffering from mental illness.”
“Stanford recently looked at it last year, their school of economics looked at it, and they found were over the last 10 years, most of the United States homelessness dropped by roughly 9%. In the same period here in the state of California, it went up by 43%.”
He says that other blue states aren’t having the same problem California is, but that’s slightly misleading. There are blue cities that are starting to see some of the same problems (Seattle, Portland, Austin) that are starting to have the same problems because they follow the same playbook. But they do touch on Seattle at the end of the interview.
“The most notable, unique difference is our decriminalizing hardcore drug use, and decriminalizing large or low-level property crimes.”
You can’t trust crime statistics, because people have just stopped reporting things. Auto thefts are still reported for insurance purposes. “Vehicle thefts here in the state of California have gone up significantly, so much so that on a per capita basis we are double the State of Florida.”
One Target accurately reporting thefts for a month doubled San Francisco theft statistics.
“Employees that don’t want to come to work and be exposed to that, because of being told don’t contact anyone.”
“Shoppers stop coming to stores. You just had Nordstrom’s in San Francisco close after 35 years. They’re one of their hallmark stores. That is a huge store in San Francisco closed because theft.”
“Every year more people leaving than are coming to the state because of poor public policy decisions.”
“The single dividing line between us and everywhere else in that regard is the legalization of hardcore drug use, or the decriminalization of hardcore drug use.”
“Harm reduction centers” just prevent people from dying on that particular day, and do nothing to keep drug users from gradually killing themselves over months and years. Those non-profits are “simply enabling them to continue to that that addiction and to use those drugs, knowing it will kill them.”
Pierson: HUD, uh, in 2015, 2016 decided…”Hey, we’re a housing entity. Why are we spending 60%, 70% percent of our resources on rehab for people? And so let’s get out of that business and go and do this other one.” I think that happened at a time which was critical in for California, to where we were already going down this housing housing first, or type in harm reduction type philosophy.
Khorrami: Then you exacerbate it by giving the homeless housing, and then you give them, let them use the drugs, and then you’re not really thinking about dealing with their addiction, right?
Pierson: Yeah, it’s absurd.
“We have based all of our policy on the slogan called ‘Housing First.’ What it says is, if you provide them housing and you provide this, provide some services to him, the person will stop using drugs.”
New York (which I personally would not point to as a model, it’s simply less of an obvious failure) has a ratio of one social worker to eight homeless people. California has a ratio of one to thirty-two.
“Compassion isn’t enough.”
“Compassion isn’t letting someone die in a ditch somewhere. Compassion isn’t letting someone lay on the street with a needle in their arm. That’s not compassion.”
“Enough is enough. You’ve tried this grand social experiment over the last eight or ten years. It didn’t work. We need a course correction, and we need to do something about it now.”
Seattle is an extreme example of what’s happening here in California. Everybody, the businesses are fleeing. The people who are living there that can leave are leaving. And it is very similar to what we’re doing, where open rampant hardcore drug use, little or no consequence for property crimes, and they also have a horrendous problem with law enforcement staffing. They simply can’t hire law enforcement officers because, frankly, the way they’ve treated them. It is a handful of really bad policy decisions that created this problem.
No one wants to work at Nordstrom’s because they know their car will be broken into while they work.
One flaw with the interview is that they did not discuss the role of the Homeless Industrial Complex in creating the situation. My working theory is that the appalling decisions we see being made on homelessness and crime are because the hard left is actively benefiting from the situation because it provides myriad ways to rake off graft and fraud. Ditto the lunacy of defunding the police.
I may be late to this party, since the story broke several days ago, but I think this video is worth covering to highlight all the things the Allen PD officer (whose name, as far as I can tell, hasn’t been released yet) did right.
He instructed others to get to safety before moving to engage the shooter.
He paused to get a better weapon out of his car and take a moment to assess the situation.
He maintained constant communication with the dispatcher to let other officers know where he was all the time to reduce the possibility of friendly fire.
He constantly moved toward the sound of gunfire to engage the target.
He maintained solid trigger discipline throughout running to contact.
He engaged the shooter from behind cover, and continued controlled fire until putting him down.
As far as things to be improved on, he did slow noticeably while moving toward contact, so maybe better cardio is in order. But I’m hardly one to cast aspersions here…
Greetings, and welcome to a special Election Eve Monday LinkSwarm! My Internet is back up, and tomorrow night I will be liveblogging the election returns starting around 7 PM.
For the past week or so, my back-of-the-envelope math envisioned a GOP House majority somewhere between 229 and 241, and I’m sticking to that. Give the Republicans the 212 seats in Cook Political Report, with two-thirds of the 35 races in the toss-up category, and you end up with 235 Republicans and 200 Democrats, so put those down as my final prediction numbers.
Snip.
With Bolduc, Laxalt, and Johnson winning, I come out to a 51–48 GOP advantage by the end of the week, with Walker and Warnock headed to a runoff. It wouldn’t shock me if Oz or Masters or both won, giving Republicans a 53- or 54-seat majority.
On Sunday, Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic strategist, predicted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that her party will have a bad night on Tuesday because they did not listen to voters.
“I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I just think we did not listen to voters in this election, and I think we are going to have a bad night,” she said.
She faulted the Democratic Party for ignoring voters’ concerns about the economy, and implored them to “stop talking about democracy being at stake.”
“When voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, listen to them,” she said. “Stop talking about democracy being at stake. Democracy is at stake because people are fighting so much about what elections mean. Voters have told us what they wanted to hear. I don’t think Democrats have delivered this cycle.”
Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson gave the federal prosecutor probing Hunter Biden a little nudge Wednesday — sending him more than 200 pages of bank records showing millions in transactions between the first son’s companies and Communist Chinese-tied entities.
Snip.
The senators’ analysis of banking records, first reported by Fox News, finds that between August 2017 and October 2018, $6 million was transferred to a company allegedly set up by Hunter Biden called Hudson West III, $5 million came from Northern International Capital, a [Chinese energy compan] CEFC affiliate, and $1 million was transferred from CEFC itself.
From the pool of cash, $4.8 million was transferred from Hudson West III to other Biden companies, such as Owasco P.C. and Owasco LLC, and to a company associated with President Biden’s brother James, the Lion Hall Group.
The bank records also show that Hunter Biden and his aunt and uncle, Sara and James Biden, went on a “spending spree,” in the senators words, after Hudson West III received the millions in payments from CEFC, through a line of credit that was opened.
“We are also providing bank records showing that credit cards were collateralized by a $99,000 preauthorized withdrawal from Hudson West III,” Grassley and Johnson write, noting that the money was spent for airfare, at Apple stores, hotels, and restaurants, as they detailed back in 2020.
Grassley and Johnson also mention two $3 million wire transfers sent to Robinson Walker LLC, another Hunter Biden-associated company; and by State Energy HK Limited, another CEFC affiliate, saying the purpose of those transfers “is unclear.” The Post reported on those mysterious transactions back in 2020.
The senators also make reference to JiaQi Bao, Hunter Biden’s Chinese secretary, who reportedly pushed for “Uncle Joe” Biden to run for president and has been linked to the Chinese government. The bank transactions included in Grassley and Johnson’s letter show that Hunter Biden made payments to Bao totaling $29,795.84 after Hudson West III received the $6 million from the Chinese firms.
Some names and entities will be familiar to BattleSwarm readers, but other bits are new.
Ballot harvesting, according to the California Democrats who’d like to take it national, is an innocent practice where union members and activists, some of them illegally present in the country, do voters the favor, see, of helping voters fill out their ballots and then collecting those ballots for them so that they need never go to the polls. They call it “a new service.” It’s part of their “make every vote count” agenda, and who could be against that?
But out in Florida, where there’s still some semblance of objectivity, investigators found another story.
According to the Washington Times:
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Florida’s newly created Office of Election Crimes and Security is requesting a criminal investigation into charges of ballot harvesting in Orlando, a Democratic stronghold in the critical swing state.
Cynthia Harris, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for District 6 commissioner in Orange County, which includes Orlando, provided a sworn complaint to the election crimes office, alleging left-leaning organizations have been perpetrating a scheme to encourage residents in black neighborhoods to apply for mail-in ballots and to fill out those ballots, which she said have been collected by paid canvassers, and sometimes altered, all in violation of state law.
In an interview with The Washington Times, Ms. Harris said she has video evidence of paid ballot harvesters operating in Orlando neighborhoods in both 2014 and 2017, and that the scheme has been going on for decades, continuing through the 2020 election and the 2022 primary.
If voting fraud is this massive in Florida, how widespread and massive is it in states controlled by Democrats? (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Two members of Congress from Texas and one former Trump administration official who now serves in the Texas House of Representatives are asking for answers from the Biden administration after discovering that an open borders group funded by George Soros received millions of dollars in federal grant money last year.
Alianza Americas, a nonprofit that says it is “committed to a human rights agenda for all people, with an emphasis on the inclusion and support of Latin American immigrant communities, and people on the move in Latin America,” received $7.5 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February 2021, according to the Washington Examiner, and then another $1 million from the Health Resources and Services administration in July.
Both organizations fall under President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services organization, and both grants were to fund COVID relief and vaccination efforts.
The group has also received nearly $1.4 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation from 2016 through 2020.
Federal law prohibits government grant money from being spent on lobbying, but Alianza Americas may have violated that prohibition in its activities as a “political advocacy group,” according to a letter from former HHS Chief of Staff Brian Harrison.
Chicago teacher’s unions want to pass an Illinois state constitutional amendment that would basically let them run the state.
If approved by Illinois voters in November, Amendment 1 will give government teachers’ unions an unfettered constitutional right to demand not just anything in their interests, but in what they see as the interests of every Illinoisan. The amendment is not limited to employee matters at the workplace.
Don’t take my word for that. Look at the first sentence of the argument in favor of it as written in the official summary as published by the Illinois Secretary of State: “This amendment will protect workers’ and others’ safety.” [Emphasis added.]
hat particular sentence is just about safety, but it shows the broad interpretation of the amendment beyond the workplace that government unions will assert. The language of the amendment itself supports that broad interpretation, and will extend to anybody’s “economic welfare,” which is pretty much everything.
What will government unions, especially radical teachers’ unions, demand with that new constitutional right?
The Chicago Teachers Union has long been quite open about its purpose. It sees itself as the vanguard of a national movement, led by unions like itself, that is textbook Marxism.
That purpose is well documented. It goes beyond the radical curriculum they teach in schools and encompasses an entire rearrangement of how America works.
Among the first things we wrote about on this site, ten years ago, was the role of the CTU and other teachers’ unions at a Marxism conference held that year:
The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond” between Socialism and teachers’ unions according to reports, and Chicago teachers were on the stage. Chicago Teachers Union [then] VP Jesse Sharkey spoke at one breakout session. Becca Barnes, a Chicago Teachers Union teacher and organizer with Chicago Socialists, proclaimed at the beginning of the conference that “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike….”
Since then, militant radicalism has become still more firmly embedded in the CTU. That history is well documented – quite proudly by radicals themselves. The International Socialist Review, for example, lays out a good history of the CTU, saying the CTU “transcended a simple labor dispute and was transformed into a social movement, with the teachers fusing their struggle with that of the community they serve…joining in the Occupy Chicago movement that pointed out the root of societal problems—social and economic inequality.”
A poll that shows ridiculously low support from black voters for defunding the police should be the final nail in the coffin for Democrats’ anti-law and order campaign of the last seven years.
TheGrio.com commissioned a poll, along with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that 82% of black respondents want police funding either to be kept about the same (48%) or increased (34%). Only 17% wanted it decreased.
It’s just like Kari Lake said in a recent confrontation with a reporter. If you go into most black neighborhoods and talk about defunding the police, they’ll look at you “like you’re the craziest person on the planet.” But it’s one thing for a white, conservative Republican to say it — it’s far more important to hear black respondents in a poll confirm it overwhelmingly.
Things that make you go “hmmmm“: “San Francisco DA Won’t Release Police Bodycam Video, 911 Calls From Paul Pelosi Attack.”
Great line in the middle of this Ben Shapiro election roundup video: “Andrew Cuomo came to kill all the old people and grab ass, and he ran out of old people.”
Remember all those stories of how bad it sucked for workers in Foxconn’s iPhone factory? It’s worse now.
Hundreds and perhaps thousands of workers fled a Chinese manufacturing complex that accounts for 85% of iPhone assembly capacity. The mass migration, which began this weekend, called into question that country’s COVID-control measures and, more broadly, its reliability as a part of global supply chains.
“Something snapped over the weekend,” Bloomberg News reports. Employees suddenly fled the Zhengzhou plant of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., better known as Foxconn. Videos show, in what is now called the “Foxconn Great Escape” or the “iPhone Long March,” workers scrambling over high chain fences at the plant, known as “iPhone City.”
To avoid detection, workers traveled through cropland by day. At night, they took to the roads. “Some people were walking amid wheat fields with their luggage, blankets, and quilts,” said a poster on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform. “I couldn’t help but feel sad.”
Residents of neighboring areas rallied, for instance leaving water and provisions in the open on roadsides. Social media postings reported signs such as “For Foxconn workers returning home.”
Truckers also pitched in. Risking criminal prosecution, they took workers in pick-up, dump, and flatbed trucks. One video shows a woman standing on the back of a big tank truck speeding down a highway in the rain.
Workers fled Foxconn’s “closed loop” system, which isolated the plant from the rest of society. Inside the loop, the company went to great lengths to stop COVID. As a disease-control measure, it had ended canteen service on October 19, forcing workers to eat boxed food in dormitory-style sleeping quarters. Food was reportedly scarce, and conditions in the dorms rapidly deteriorated. On Sunday, Foxconn announced it would resume cafeteria dining.
The political establishment—left and right—want desperately to move on, to pretend the last 30 months didn’t happen. With very few exceptions (Ron DeSantis, Kirsti Noem, Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Ron Johnson, and a few others, later), they betrayed their core values. Many Republicans and so-called Libertarians quickly capitulated the primacy and importance of individual liberties. Whereas supposedly equality-loving democrats embraced policies that in no uncertain terms screwed women, children and the poor. The 2020 democrat campaign slogan might as well have been “protect the rich, infect the poor.” Or “only the rich need to learn.” They’d all very much like that you forget about that. They’d like to go back to the fights they know how to fight, the golden oldies that turn the bases out, and turn us against each other. But COVID policies turned the whole thing on its side, jumbling us all up and resulting in all sorts of hitherto unheard of alliances. And when your business is maintaining the status quo, that is very dangerous.
Which is why Emily Oster is pleading for an amnesty.
First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. The damage done by these policies is at its beginning, not its end. Dr. Oster, would like women to believe that it was all just a mistake, a mis-understanding, and remember that it is the Republicans who are looking to limit the freedoms that really count. That while democrats had no problem sacrificing the well-being of our living children for three years in support political power, it is Republicans that pose the real threat.
Blue city blues: “Nearly 20% Of Seattle Shootings Happened Near Homeless Encampments.”
Man who used to get all his information on conservatives from the mainstream media realizes he’d been lied to.
When I left the mainstream liberal media bubble & started listening to right-wing media to understand what they want, I became more aware of the world around me than ever before. Without the filter, I got to hear what conservatives actually believe & it's not what I was told.
— Adam B. Coleman, President of Aintblackistan (@wrong_speak) October 21, 2022
For a couple of days, I was at this conservative conference, everyone I spoke with was courteous and supportive and I felt completely comfortable. I didn't have people stare at me or give me the feeling that I wasn't welcome. Actually, quite the opposite.
— Adam B. Coleman, President of Aintblackistan (@wrong_speak) October 21, 2022
However, when I would go on Twitter, they would show clips from the event and reframed this benign conservative conference as being a "KKK rally". If Americafest was a KKK rally, then it was the lamest KKK rally ever.
— Adam B. Coleman, President of Aintblackistan (@wrong_speak) October 21, 2022
Wendell Perez received a call from the elementary school that would alarm any parent. School officials told him that his 12-year-old daughter had attempted suicide in the school’s bathroom. He was told it was because she wanted to be a boy, with a male name and pronouns.
Wendell couldn’t believe it. At home, his daughter hadn’t shown any signs of gender dysphoria or discomfort in being a girl. The Perez family is Catholic, and they raised their children with a biblical and scientific understanding of biological sex.
But when Wendell and his wife Maria arrived at the school, they found out that school officials had been having confidential meetings with their daughter and discussing her discomfort with her gender. Wendell and Maria found out that teachers and staff at school had begun treating their daughter as a boy at school without their consent or knowledge. Wendell was told by staff that they didn’t share information about his daughter’s “transition” with him or his wife because of “confidentiality issues.”
Whatever happened to in loco parentis? Or does that just not apply when there are radical transexual activists to mollify?
When the school called his 14-year-old son to the principal’s office for refusing to say a female student was a boy, Matthew Duncan decided he’d had enough.
When the school called his 14-year-old son to the principal’s office for refusing to say a female student was a boy, Matthew Duncan decided he’d had enough.
“There was never a push towards dominance and control like it is now,” said Duncan. “You can’t voice your opinion.”
In response, many families in Grants Pass have withdrawn their children from public school, enrolling them in private school or starting to homeschool, Grants Pass teachers, school administrators and parents told The Epoch Times.
Meanwhile, in a civilized state: “Florida Bans Puberty Blockers and Transgender Surgery for Minors.”
Also, an O’Rourke rally too close to a voting location violated Texas law.
Still more Beto: “New poll shows Abbott gaining six points in eight weeks, 53/40.”
“More California companies moving headquarters out-of-state than ever before.” Texas once again tops the list of destination states, followed by Tennessee, Nevada, Florida and Arizona.
“Democrat Nominee In Arkansas Arrested For Felony Terroristic Threatening. Law enforcement officials in the state of Arkansas arrested Diamond Arnold-Johnson, the Democrat nominee for Arkansas auditor, on Friday for first-degree terroristic threats.” Bonus:
Arnold-Johnson’s husband was on trial in August for allegedly posting terroristic threats on Facebook, police said. During the trial, Arnold-Johnson, 32, admitted that she, not her husband, posted the threatening messages on Facebook that led to the criminal charges, KATV reported.
A warrant was served for Arnold-Johnson’s arrest on October 13, but she refused to comply and a SWAT team was dispatched to resolve the matter.
However, police made the decision to cancel using the SWAT team to force compliance from Arnold-Johnson in an apparent attempt to not risk an explosive situation happening right before an election.
I cannot believe democracy is about to die in America, again.
After years of living under a dictatorship, America rose from the ashes. Democrats took control of the Presidency, the House, the Senate, the university system, Big Tech, the entertainment industry, and major corporations – and thereby defeated fascism by seizing every major lever of power in the nation. With one-party rule established, and all of our critics silenced, democracy was once again free to flourish.
Now, our dear democracy is under attack – by America holding a so-called “election” and allowing idiots to vote. Let us be clear about what the stakes are: if a single person I disagree with is elected in a free and fair election, democracy will be DEAD. If citizens have the power to simply vote the ruling party out of power – when I really like the current ruling party – all is lost.
Always keeping in mind Instapundit’s “Don’t get cocky!” warning, there are a whole lot of signs that this year’s midterm is going to be another Republican wave election along the lines of 2010 or 2014.
Here are some signposts for the impending Red Tsunami:
Remember how Democrats crowed how Roe vs. Wade was going to doom Republican electoral chances? Yeah, not so much.
Republicans made massive gains with independent women in recent weeks as Democrats ramped up their messaging on abortion ahead of the midterm elections.
Forty-nine percent of voters plan to vote for the Republican nominee to represent their House district while 45 percent said they’d back their Democratic opponent, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday. Of particular note was a 32 point swing among independent women toward the GOP. In September’s iteration of the poll, Democrats boasted a 14 point lead among that demographic, but by October, Republicans held an 18 point advantage.
While Democratic officials and progressive commentators had suggested that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade might lessen the expected electoral blow of the midterms, the swing toward the GOP among independent women — the group most heavily targeted by Democratic strategists — suggests that their focus on abortion might be to their own detriment.
In a TV segment last month, Republican operative Matt Gorman was rebuked by his fellow panelists for suggesting that abortion “is not in the top four of issues.”
Yamiche Alcindor of PBS and NBC insisted that on the campaign trail “abortion comes up 90 percent of the time” when she speaks with voters. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat and former senator who lost her re-election bid in 2016, shouted over other guests to declare “I hope Matt keeps saying that everywhere he goes — that abortion isn’t really an issue here in this election. I think it is exactly what infuriates women when they hear that.”
According to a study conducted by AdImpact, Democrats spent 73 million on messaging ads about abortion in September, which is “about a third of all Democratic television ad spending,” per NPR.
Twenty-six percent of voters in the Times/Siena poll identified the economy as the most important issue facing the country today. That was followed by inflation (18 percent), other (9 percent), the state of democracy (8 percent), immigration and abortion (five percent apiece), and then political division (four percent).
Only 24 percent of voters said the country was on the right track, while 64 percent indicated the opposite. Democrats presently hold the White House and majorities in both chambers of Congress, and President Joe Biden’s approval rating is nearly 20 points underwater.
So how do you explain a 32 point swing between two polls? A few possible answers: A.) Democrat’s loud, radical position on abortion is actually alienating independent women, B.) The crappy Biden economy is really starting to bite, or C.) Pollsters running biased polls to help Democrats simply stopped lying in order for their final electoral predictions to more closely match reality. Much as I’d like to believe A is the cause, I think C is the more likely culprit. Caveat: The sample was “792 likely voters nationwide,” which is a pretty damn small sample.
Democrats have no solutions to today’s crime surge.
Here’s how they shrug off the mayhem.
First: Deep denial.
Through Sept. 27, New Orleans suffered 208 homicides, up 44% versus that period in 2021 and 141% in 2019. The Crescent City has become America’s Murder Capital.
“I do not embrace that at all,” said Democratic Mayor La Toya Cantrell. “It isn’t based on what’s happening on the ground.” She later said that “our city is safer than it’s been in a long time.”
Crime books can be cooked: Curbing arrests can “erase” lawlessness by leaving it unrecorded. But there’s no faking a cadaver. Regardless, Cantrell scoffs at humiliating police data.
Then there’s the revolving door for violent criminals Soros-backed Democrat DAs have instituted:
100% gun control would not have stopped David Jakubonis who, last July 21, confronted Zeldin on the hustings, shoved a sharp keychain weapon beside the candidate’s neck, and said: “You’re done.”
Jakubonis was armed and threatened a congressman.
Regardless, he was free the next day before being arrested on federal charges.
Vincent Buccino savored pizza outside a Hell’s Kitchen eatery on Sept. 9.
An unprovoked attacker smashed a chair over his head and broke his arm.
The unidentified criminal remains at large.
Michael Palacios terrorized a Manhattan McDonald’s on Sept. 16. After harassing patrons, he yanked an ax from his backpack, menaced diners, and chopped up a table, chairs, and glass wall. He, too, was arrested and swiftly sprung without bail.
Palacios was arrested again on Oct. 11, for alleged graffiti and bicycle theft.
Once more, Palacios was freed without bail.
And if you dare to notice this, Democrats will call you a racist. “Democrats shout, ‘Racism!’ as often as people exhale.”
In July 2021, House Bill 1054 took effect in the Evergreen State after being passed by the Democratic state legislature and signed by the Democratic governor over the objections of [Chelan County sheriff Brian Burnett] and state law-enforcement associations.
Before they can pursue a vehicle, the new law requires that officers ensure that four conditions have been met: (1) An officer must have either a reasonable suspicion a driver is impaired due to drugs or alcohol, or probable cause to believe that he has committed certain kinds of violent crimes or sex crimes; (2) pursuit must be necessary to identify or apprehend the suspect; (3) the driver must be an imminent threat to the safety of others such that the risks of not pursuing him outweigh the risks of pursuit; and (4) a supervisor has authorized pursuit.
Burnett told National Review that these restrictions represent a threat to public safety. Anecdotally, that’s evidenced by Spitzer’s sojourn across the region and, statistically, it’s backed up by the data. Prior to HB 1054’s taking effect, the state recorded, on average, around 2,000 stolen vehicles per month. Since its passage, that figure has soared, reaching heights in excess of 4,000 per month.
“What we’re seeing on an average daily basis — whether it’s our jurisdiction or one of our neighboring jurisdictions — is there’s people that don’t stop for us all day long,” said Burnett. “It can be anything from a stolen vehicle, to somebody that we have probable cause on, or just a basic traffic stop, and, you know, next thing on it’s pedal to the metal and they’re off and running,” he continued.
Burnett and his fellow law-enforcement officials had foreseen these issues and lobbied against the bill, but he said lawmakers refused to take their concerns seriously.
“The response early on — because we have a Democratic-controlled Senate and House, and it’s a fairly large margin there — it was almost to the point of, I’ll call it arrogance,” remembered Burnett. The message the legislature sent to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs was: “We don’t need you, we don’t need your opinion,” he added. “We were begging them and telling them and giving them reasons why: ‘Please don’t do this, it’s bad, bad policy,’” he said, but they ignored the pleas, because their majorities (57–41 in the House and 28–21 in the Senate) empower them to impose their will without compromise. But public opinion will probably assert itself eventually, given that crime is surging in the state: Washington set records for homicides in 2020 and then again 2021.
Democrats have a long history, stretching back at least into the 1970s, of soft-on-crime policies costing them elections. And Soros DAs intent on “bail reform” have made them even softer on crime than they were in the nadir of the 1970s.
The 40,000-foot view is bad enough, but it’s the steady drumbeat of discouraging race-by-race poll results that now has Democrats bracing for a punishing midterm.
In the battle to break the 50-50 tie in the Senate, Republicans have taken small leads in Wisconsin and Nevada, and Herschel Walker is still hanging around despite the October-surprise claims about his ex-girlfriend’s abortion. RealClearPolitics now puts Dr. Oz in the lead in Pennsylvania, after adjusting for historical polling errors, and projects a 52-48 GOP Senate majority.
In the House, counting “safe,” “likely” and “leans,” RealClearPolitics gives Republicans a 221-176 lead, with 38 more races considered toss-ups. In June, that outlet projected the GOP would gain 24.5 seats; now it forecasts a 27-seat pickup.
In reliably blue Oregon, a Republican is poised to take the governorship for the first time in 35 years. Michigan governor and lockdown enthusiast Gretchen Whitmer is up only now leading by just 5 points in the latest poll. Even the New York governor race has tightened up, with Quinnipiac putting Democrat Kathy Hochul up only 4 points — and independents breaking toward challenger Lee Zeldin 57% to 37%.
“I think we had three really good weeks in August that everybody patted themselves on the back,” an anonymous Democratic advisor to major donors tells Politico. “We were like, ‘Yeah, that should be enough to overcome two years of shitty everything’.” Now, he says, “It’s not looking great. The best we can hope for right now is a 50-50 Senate, but the House is long gone.”
Oddsmakers have similarly flipped red when it comes to the GOP’s chances of retaking the Senate, joining a longstanding bet that they’ll win control of the House.
Yes, Democrats “peaked” on election night in 2020 when they used massive voting fraud in a handful of districts to steal the election for Biden (along with a senate race or two) and then acted like they had a blowout mandate to impose social justice on the country.
The Democrat label is now toxic, and every time voters see Democrats speak, they seem to turn against them.
The Republican surge is animated by decisive debate victories on Friday in three key races: Georgia (Senate), Michigan (Governor), and Wisconsin (Governor). Georgia had been trending Democrat before the debate under the weight of Hershel Walker’s scandals, but likely no more.
Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for Governor of Michigan, seemed like a hopeless case, but now, on the strength of a decisive win in her debate with incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer the race seems winnable. The Republican Governor’s Association, after waiting to commit, now is pumping millions into her campaign. Responding to Dixon’s surge, former president Obama has announced plans to campaign against her in Michigan.
And, in Wisconsin, Republican Tim Michaels clearly defeated a largely passive and obviously aging Democratic governor Tony Evers.
Walker was supposed to lose the debate because, as a football hero, he’s not necessarily very articulate. Coming up against an experienced pastor, Senator Raphael Warnock’s chances seemed dim. But Walker surprised everyone with a strong performance. Whatever the issue he pivoted to bring it back to inflation and Joe Biden. Surprisingly, on abortion he indicated new flexibility and backed it in cases of rape or a danger to the life of the mother. But, above all he seemed to have mastered his new trade of politics and was able to spar with the best of them.
The most important debate will come next week in Pennsylvania Senate race between Dr. Oz and stroke-impaired John Fetterman on October 25th. Fetterman won’t release his medical records and recent on camera interviews indicate that he mispronounces words and cannot easily understand what he hears unless it is printed out in front of him.
Whatever his medical prognosis, he cannot recover from his radical positions on pardoning and releasing one in three Pennsylvania prison inmates and on defunding the police.
Other than the Oz-Fetterman race, we now lead in all contests for seats currently held by the Republicans. North Carolina is close but Ted Budd holds a consistent lead. And, despite a less than stellar debate performance, JD Vance is ahead in Ohio.
“Every debate has tanked the Democrat in the polls.”
Things are so bad that Democrats are shifting money from safe seats to really safe seats.
Some “safe seats” aren’t very safe anymore for suddenly vulnerable Democrats, and that has panicked PACs moving campaign dollars to protect previously invulnerable seats.
We’re down to the wire in Election 2022, and stuff just got real.
Today’s news takes us to deep blue Oregon, where onetime shoo-in Kurt Schrader just got the rug pulled out from under him by his own Democrat Party as he fights off Republican Amy Ryan Courser. According to AdImpact (as spotted by Josh Kraushaar), party ad spending for Schrader in the 5th district was shifted to the 6th to boost Andrea Salinas against Republican Mike Erickson. [As noted in the comments below, Jamie McLeod-Skinner defeated Rep. Kurt Schrader in the Democratic Primary. -LP]
Maybe you’re thinking this kind of thing happens all the time, and it does.
But it doesn’t often happen that Democrats appear to be writing off a district that Presidentish Joe Biden won in 2020 by nine points, to shore up a district that Biden won by 13 points.
If 10-and-up is the Democrats’ new firewall, they’re in bigger trouble than even I imagined. Complicating things even more for Oregon Democrats, gubernatorial candidate Tina Kotek (looking to replace the outgoing and execrable Kate Brown) regularly polls behind Republican Christine Drazan.
Stephen Green notes that Oregon may be a special case because “Portland has served as Ground Zero for some of the craziest progressive ideas being put into terrible practice.” Wait, turning your city over to Antifa for endless riots isn’t popular with voters? Who knew?
You know who else thinks Democrats have gone to far pushing social justice? Would you believe the Lightbringer himself?
Former President Barack Obama slammed Democrats in a recent podcast, calling them “buzzkills” whose identity politics and cancel culture rhetoric force people to “walk on eggshells.”
Speaking with four of his former employees on the Pod Save America podcast, the former prez said that his fellow Democrats need to tone it down and understand that everyone makes mistakes, the Daily Mail reports.
“Sometimes Democrats are [buzzkills]. Sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells, and they want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way, make mistakes,” he said, adding that Democrats should learn from he felt were his mistakes as president.
What does it say when the biggest beneficiary of white guilt and victimhood identity politics in political history says that Democrats have gone too far in that direction?
A sane party might be inclined to listen to him.
But the Democratic Party hasn’t been sane in a long, long time…
California is (still) broke, Stacey Abrams is (still) not very bright, Joe Biden tried to deal gas to the commies, and the FBI can’t be bothered to investigate such trivia as “sex crimes involving children.” It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Remember how the State of Texas came in with record revenues and a $27 billion surplus? Well, the flip side is California, which just saw 11% personal income tax revenue drop. Funny how chasing away productive taxpayers through punitive taxation and insane over-regulation isn’t a recipe for success…
Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee have obtained bombshell documents proving that Joe Biden was deeply involved in the family business of selling American natural gas to the Chinese–while he was planning to run for President. According to multiple whistleblowers, the Biden family made promises to those who worked with them in 2017 and onward that they would “reap the rewards in a future Biden administration.” These explosive revelations “pose national security concerns,” Oversight Republicans proclaimed Tuesday night.
The Biden clan enriched itself by selling the natural resources to a Chinese firm closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—just a few years before the cost of gas in the United States hit record highs, the Oversight Republicans stated.
In a letter to United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking Republican on the Oversight Committee, alleged that according to whistleblowers, Joe Biden was heavily involved in this treachery.
“This comes to light at a time when the cost of natural gas is at a 14-year high and Americans struggle to pay their energy bills,” Comer wrote in the letter to Yellen. “The President has not only misled the American public about his past foreign business transactions, but he also failed to disclose that he played a critical role in arranging a business deal to sell American natural resources to the Chinese while planning to run for President.”
Comer sent a letter to Yellen in July complaining that the Treasury Department was restricting access to over 150 Suspicious Activity reports (SARs) on Hunter Biden, amid explosive revelations that came out from Biden’s “laptop from Hell,” and iPhone.
On Sept. 2, 2022, the Treasury Department stated in a letter to Committee Republicans, that the SARs may be provided “upon a written request stating the particular information desired, the criminal, tax or regulatory purpose for which the information is sought, and the official need for the information.”
In response, Comer said that “based on the documents provided in this letter, we request all SARs from Biden family transactions, including those involving President Biden, related to transactions with Chinese entities. We are concerned that the President may have compromised national security in his dealings with the country most adverse to U.S. interests—China. These SARs will inform our analysis of this matter.”
Comer said Oversight Republicans have obtained a “presentation” emailed to Hunter Biden’s firm Hudson West III LLC (Hudson West) on December 13, 2017. The document, translated from Mandarin Chinese, is titled, “Overview of the U.S. Natural Gas Industry Chain, and is concerned with selling American natural resources to China.”
“Jiaqi Bao, who created the presentation, was previously an employee of the CCP, and worked for Hunter Biden’s corporate entity Hudson West,” the letter states.
Comer provided Yellen with two maps that were part of a presentation emailed to Hunter Biden. The maps include sophisticated analysis written in Chinese, and show the United States carved up based on natural gas reserves “with particular emphasis on Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.”
“The emails that accompany the transmitted maps reveal a plan to sell natural gas reserves to China via the same corporate entity branded on the presentation-Hudson West III LLC (Hudson West)–set up by Hunter Biden with officials from the Chinese company CEFC, at the time, one of the largest oil companies in China,” the letter stated.
I have only skimmed this dog's breakfast of a complaint, but what popped out at me for the parts I looked are were the lack of damages allegations, much less ones against NY, the plaintiff. You cannot sue if you did not suffer a loss. None are pleaded in the parts I looked at. 3/
So, the initial motion to dismiss will not be heard before the midterm – the real mission was accomplished by filing suit in time to influence the election, but not so early that this garbage case could be tossed out before the election.
FBI investigations of child sex abuse claims are no longer a priority with all these conservatives and Trump supporters they need to prosecute for WrongThink…
It looks like the Democrats running Harris County are finally going to face some consequences for defunding law enforcement.
Texas Comptroller Glen Hegar has ruled that Harris County reduced funding for some law enforcement agencies and will be subject to sanctions under a new state law enacted last year.
According to a letter addressed to Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont), and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, Hegar said that his ruling is in response to complaints filed by Constables Mark Herman (Pct. 4) and Ted Heap (Pct. 5) regarding funding changes last year and in a proposed budget for next year.
One of the key allegations Hegar is investigating is the county’s move to take away more than $3 million in so-called “rollover funds” from constables’ offices. Last year, commissioners voted 3 to 2 along party lines to remove these funds from the eight elected constables as well as the district attorney’s office, based on a recommendation from County Administrator David Berry.
Hegar notes that the proposed budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 will reduce funding to the constables’ offices by over $12 million as compared to Short Fiscal Year 2022, which covers March through September of this year. Although the county appears to be revising the proposal, they are still poised to reduce overall funds for constables by $3 million.
“The budgeting practices of Harris County may not provide the Constables Office with full authority to expend their allocated budget to meet public safety needs,” wrote Hegar.
Signed by Abbott last year, the state’s “Back the Blue” legislation punishes cities or counties with populations of greater than 250,000 people if they reduce allocations for police, by either freezing property taxes or forcing cities to revisit any annexation done in the last 30 years.
Thus, Hegar writes, if Harris County proceeds with the constable’s budget as proposed “without obtaining voter approval, the county may not adopt an ad valorem tax rate that exceeds the county’s no-new-revenue tax rate.”
Snip.
Last week, Hidalgo and County Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) held a press conference to tout increases in “public safety spending” that included non-traditional expenditures such as $1.5 million for public Wi-Fi, $8.4 million for new trails, and $50 million to address blight and add sidewalks and street lights.
With the possible exception of streetlights, none of that makes anyone safer, but does provide nice conduits of graft to shovel to left-wing cronies via rigged bidding contracts (a Hidalgo specialty). We know from an in-depth dive into the Austin defund effort’s Reimagining Public Safety document that letting leftwing activists steal money from police funding to line their own pockets is one of the primary goals of the “defund the police” movement.
The interesting thing about this ruling is that, compared to Austin’s defunding push, Harris County’s defunding efforts were relatively modest at-the-margins stuff. No showy reductions in headcount or refusals to let new cadet classes move forward, just a quick raid to hoover up some loose cash from the constables while no one was looking. That this was enough for Hegar to drop the hammer indicates that defunding the police is a dead letter in Texas.
Does this mean the state government can nail Austin for their much more egregious defunding efforts? Probably not. The worst of that happened in 2020, while the law wasn’t passed until 2021. So unless the Austin City Council stupidly tries to stick their hand in the APD cookie jar again, I doubt they can be held to account for that under this law, unless they try the same trick again. On the other hand, time has proven again and again that there are few limits to Austin City Council stupidity…
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on (but Ukraine launches a successful counterattack), Joe Biden said Democrats are responsible for inflation and ignoring the needs of the middle class, Rand Paul gets pissed, ESG is officially a great big fraud, more shenanigans from Soros-backed DAs, and debunking a Victorian vibrator myth.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is 100 days old. While Russia continues to grin forward on some fronts in Donetsk, Ukrainian forces seem to have taken back part of Severodonetsk while also making some gains in the south. Caveat for that link in that this Ukrainian guy’s shtick is tracking day-to-day map movements without a lot of tactical depth. So: Grains of salt may be in order. (Update: More successful Ukrainian counterattacks near Severodonetsk at Metolkine. Same guy, same caveats…)
In a speech on the Senate floor Friday, Rand Paul blasted efforts by Democrats to paint up all law enforcement officers and those in the military as dangerous radical racists.
Paul was addressing The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, blocked by Republicans in the Senate, that demands the FBI and Department of Homeland Security change the way they investigate and monitor domestic terrorism suspects.
The official summary of the bill notes that an “interagency task force” would be established in order to probe into “white supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement agencies.”
“This bill should be called by a more accurate name: the Democrat plan to brand our police and soldiers as white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” Paul proclaimed.
He continued, “How insulting,” adding “We knew that Democrats despise and want to defund the police, but now, they believe that the police, federal law enforcement, and the U.S. military are full of white supremacists and neo-Nazis?”
Referring to the now mothballed ‘Disinformation Governance Board’, Paul also noted “Those of us who still care about the Bill of Rights just got done taking down the DHS ‘Ministry of Truth,’ and a day later, Democrats want to create the DHS Thought Police. You couldn’t make it up if you tried. But they don’t stop there.”
“The bill creates two other Thought Police offices at the Department of Justice and at the FBI, which seems like a self-defeating choice, since elsewhere in the bill, we are told that federal law enforcement is shot through with white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” Paul urged.
The Senator also noted that “None of the bill makes sense. It doesn’t make sense because it was a bill that was never intended to become law. It’s a dumb, Washington talking points memo masquerading as legislation.”
“But congressional Democrats have gotten so radical, so extreme, and so out-of-touch with the American people that when they read it, they see something worthwhile,” he added.
Paul concluded that “This bill will fail today because the Democrats’ message — hate the police, defund the police, slander the military and police as racists and white supremacists — has been roundly rejected by the American people.”
The bill failed to pass, but 47 Democrats voted for it…
A bunch of kids are being murdered by some semi-human, so what do you do? Draw your weapon and put him down or die trying? Or do you sit there, doing nothing?
The same government we’re supposed to give up our guns to because they have it all under control chose Option B. It chose failure.
Tell me more about how the real problem is that we have the capacity to defend ourselves.
But the real problem, to our enemies, is not that murderers murder. The real problem, to our enemies, is the very fact that we can defend ourselves. The objective of our trash elite is not to have a country that runs well, where people are secure, and where rights are respected. The objective is to rule. And if a bunch of kids die for that, they’re fine with it. They can live with failure, but not accountability.
The clusterfark in Uvalde is just a symptom of a much bigger pathology. It is a symbol of the failure of every institution in our society. And the solution is never to revamp the institutions and eject the parasites heading them. It’s always – always – to take power from us and give it to the people who screwed up in the first place.
“The Democrats lost an election they never expected to lose. They basically lost to a reality TV show host when Hillary Clinton had all the backing of the establishment in the world. And instead of asking, what is it about our ideology that ruled the country for eight years, that drove people away from us into Donald Trump’s arms, they instead decided they were going to blame everybody else,” he said.
“The Democrats simply replaced Trump with the same ideology they governed with for 8 years under Obama that caused people to run away from them as fast as they could,” he said. “And now that people are doing that again, instead of asking ‘why is that happening’ they’re getting poised to blame the electorate for being stupid — for thinking the economy’s bad when it’s actually good.”
Haven’t had time to talk about the farce that was the Sussmann acquittal, but here’s a tweet:
TURLEY: “I mean, he is facing a jury that has three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team with Sussmann’s daughter. With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury” pic.twitter.com/RHqen6AMAc
Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) and Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) since 2020 dismissed or declined to prosecute a 25-year-old Maryland resident for nearly a dozen charges related to larceny. The looting incidents amounted to thousands of dollars in stolen merchandise and include felony offenses, including two grand larcenies and one assault on a police officer, making the offender eligible for years behind bars. The prosecutors found the looter guilty of just a few misdemeanors. No verdict levied more than a few hundred dollars in fines, and he served no time in prison.
“If Stuart Kirk’s devastating accusations are correct, in my opinion his words could be interpreted as suggesting the inputs to financial models which predict a demand for the climate investment products currently being sold are being heavily manipulated to produce a preconceived outcome. Stuart appeared to claim he is being “pressured” to add unrealistic assumptions to climate financial models, to ‘move the needle’ on predicted economic harm from climate change.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Iranian military bases attacked by drones launched from inside Iran. Hmmmmm…
“Miracle Cures and Murder For Hire: How A Spoon-Bending Turkish Magician Built A $600 Million Nasdaq-Listed Scam Based On A Lifetime Of Lies.” You really need to read the whole thing to see how Enochian Biosciences’ co-founder Serhat Gumrukcu fled from one alleged scam to another. Here’s just one line-item: “Gumrukcu claims to have spent 12+ years earning an M.D. and multiple PhDs in Russia and Turkey. Our research indicates he made it all up. He has no medical degree and no PhDs.” Plus that pesky murder thing… (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
The jury in Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard ruled Wednesday that the actress did in fact defame Depp by identifying herself as a victim of domestic abuse and awarded Depp $15 million in compensatory and punitive damages, capping a blockbuster trial that has seen immense media coverage over the last several weeks.
The jury of five men and two women reached their unanimous verdict after 13 hours of deliberations, which began on Tuesday afternoon. It also awarded Heard $2 million in damages for a countersuit against Depp for statements made by his lawyer.
Depp may be a self-indulgent hedonist with poor judgment and substance abuse issues, but he came out smelling like a rose in comparison to his extra-crazy ex.
Slogans are no substitute for facts. “Hear all women” is a pledge we should all make. “Believe all women,” however, is asking people to shut their brains off at the approach of a slogan and forget the fact that women are people, too. Sometimes they shade the truth or lie, sometimes they are the more abusive party, and sometimes they are cynical, show-business shams. The evidence at trial changed a lot of minds, all the more so the more people watched it.
A favorite theory about Victorian vibrators turns out to be made up out of whole cloth.
With the anniversary of D-Day coming up, here’s a look at Operation PLUTO, which laid gasoline pipelines underneath the English channel to help fuel the invasion.
