A whole lot more Biden Recession hits the economy—unexpectedly! The poor go hungry, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor confirms Biden corruption, people keep flocking to Texas and Florida, McConell’s brain blows up (again), and a whole lot of Texas laws take effect. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Poor people are buying less food because they can’t afford it. “Among households using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s boosted pandemic benefits, 42% skipped meals in August and 55% ate less because they couldn’t afford food, more than double last year’s share, according to a Wednesday report from Propel Inc., a benefits software developer.”(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
Victor Shokin, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Biden family corruption (that Donald Trump was impeached for asking about) has spoken out for the first time since 2019 – and says the Bidens did it.
To review – Shokin had an active and ongoing investigation into Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, according to a 2020 US Senate Committee report.
Zlochevsky, who hired Hunter Biden to sit on his board, granted his own company (Burisma) permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. Shokin stated in a 2019 deposition that there were five criminal cases against Zlochevesky, including money laundering, corruption, illegal funds transfers, and profiteering through shell corporations while he was a sitting minister.
Now, Shokin tells Fox News that be believes the Bidens were taking bribes.
“I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told the outlet. “The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal – my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asks in another clip.
“Young High Income Earners Are Flocking To Florida And Texas, New Study Shows…”To the surprise of likely no one, Florida and Texas are once again No. 1 and No. 2. Florida gained a total of 2,175 high earners aged 26 to 35 after accounting for both inflows and outflows, while Texas gained a net 1,909. Despite the losses, New York (-5,062) and California (-4,495) still have the highest count of young high earners of any state by a wide margin.
Katy ISD rejects the radical social justice agenda. “The agenda item included policy updates in regard to requiring sex-specific spaces to be ‘safeguarded,’ which include bathrooms and locker rooms. Policies were also updated on pronoun usage as teachers and staff will not be required to use student “preferred pronouns” and content prohibiting ‘gender fluidity’ instruction.”
Texas laws that take effect today, including a ban on child sexual mutilation (AKA “gender affirming care”), banning men from college women’s athletics, and banning DEI from public universities.
Relations between the coup junta in Niger (which observers want you to know is pronounced knee–J) and France gets spicier. The junta is trying to expel the French ambassador and he’s not going. The tiff might very well turn kinetic, and I doubt the Wagner Group mercs are up to taking on French regulars.
Also, investors are suing them over “Alleged Chapek Era “Cost-Shifting Scheme” to Hide Streaming Losses.” Maybe everyone lost the streaming wars. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Brandon Herrera, a YouTube influencer with a focus on firearms, has announced that he is challenging incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales for Texas’ congressional district 23 seat.
Herrera, who has over 2 million YouTube subscribers, had been hinting towards a congressional run for weeks on his YouTube channel. He previously made an appearance at a congressional hearing earlier this year after being invited by U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) to testify against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
Congressional District 23 is a rural, majority-Hispanic area that encompasses western San Antonio and contains a large span of the Texas-Mexico border—including Uvalde, Eagle Pass, and El Paso county.
Herrera first announced his run at the Young Americans for Liberty conference and then in a YouTube video.
“Several Republicans who swore to defend gun rights, to protect borders, just in general, putting the rights and interests of the American people above their own, turn their back on these values,” Herrera said.
“There can be no more incumbent politicians who vote time and time again against the interests of the American people without fear of losing their positions,” he continued.
Herrera calls himself a “Second Amendment absolutist” and has repeatedly criticized Gonzales for being the sole Texas Republican member of the U.S. House to vote for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a Biden-backed law meant to enact stricter background checks for gun purchases.
Here’s his campaign announcement (which looks like it was filmed in a hotel room):
“I have a deep love for the values that this country was founded on, the ideas of freedom of self-governance. You see, America was never supposed to be the country that gave you everything you always wanted. It was simply a place that gave you the freedom and the opportunity to chase those things for yourself to pursue happiness to build great things.”
“I’m working with groups like The Firearms Policy Coalition, National Association for Gun Rights, and Gun Owners of America.” Notice who’s missing?
“Tony Gonzalez claimed to be in favor of gun rights, but he voted in favor of Biden’s post-Uvalde gun control and claims he would do it again.”
And here he is at Young Americans for Liberty:
“ATF is out of control.”
“They are a regulatory body that does not have the Constitutional authority to write the law, yet they write the law. They’re banning FRTs [forced reset triggers], they’re banning arm braces, they’re banning bump stocks. All things, I will remind you, comply to the letter of the law and were actually previously approved by the ATF for sale.”
“The American experiment was about having the freedom to be who you want to be, to live how you want to live to do what you want to do. Unless that means you want to fuck kids. That’s that’s when the wood chipper gets hungry.”
Here’s his website. His six highlighted issues (gun rights, immigration, budget deficits, censorship, leftwing control of education and abortion) are all solidly conservative, but he might want to throw up paragraphs about the lousy Biden economy and protecting the oil and gas industry (TX-23 includes big chunks of Eagle Ford and Permian Basin fields).
Herrera is one of the biggest gun bloggers in Texas, but sometimes it’s difficult to translate “internet famous” into electoral success. (In 2015, Fark’s Drew Curtis drew a paltry 3.7% of the vote as an independent in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race.)
On the other hand, Second Amendment rights are a hot-button issue for Texas Republican voters, and Herrera has just under 3 million subscribers on YouTube. If 1/10th of them sent him $5 each, his campaign would have enough money to run a competative race.
TX-23 used to be a full-blown swing district, with Will Hurd and Gonzalez winning by narrow margins, but it’s gotten redder thanks to redistricting and a Hispanic swing toward the GOP thanks to Biden’s feckless border policies. Swing districts tend to produce squishy congressmen like Hurd and Gonzalez.
Pretty much nothing about Herrera makes me think he’d be squishy.
More Biden Crime Family evidence surfaces, another mysterious Chinese bio-lab (this one much closer to home than Wuhan), more blue city real estate disaster, and Tim Scott screws up. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden vehemently denied ever talking business with his son, “or with anyone else” in the run-up to the 2020 election. In fact, Biden even fat-shamed an Iowa voter who approached the subject during the Democratic primaries. On the debate stage with Donald Trump, the former vice president peddled conspiracies of Russian interference when emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop revealed otherwise.
On Sunday night, the New York Post reported on anticipated testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer. The 48-year-old who went golfing with the Bidens in 2014 is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee how Hunter Biden put his father in contact with foreign businessmen and potential investors at least 24 times. According to the Post, such meetings were either in person or by speakerphone, with Hunter Biden often dialing in Joe.
Beyond those meetings, there are more than 180 other episodes where the president interacted with his son’s business partners, contrary to his campaign claims of “absolute” separation.
As the evidence for at least an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden mounts, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and co-host Ben Ferguson discussed the latest bombshell – 170 suspicious activity reports (SARs) from six banks over the past few years – on their podcast with House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY).
As Townhall reports, these SARs are submitted and sent to the Treasury Department when banks “have a strong suspicion” that a crime has been committed, so as to protect the bank.
As Comer emphasized, these are submitted “very seldom.”
If someone were to have two, the chairman explained, it would be hard for that person to open up a bank account.
Submitting an SAR, Comer added, also is “inviting the regulators to come in and regulate,” which is the last thing banks want.
The full transcript from Devon Archer’s sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee from Monday, July 31, has been released. During that testimony, Archer told Rep. Dan Goldman that Hunter Biden had been placed on the board of directors for Ukrainian energy company Burisma in order to “legally” intimidate people.
During that question period, Goldman asked Archer “So based on everything you saw, heard, and observed, did you have any knowledge of Joe Biden having any involvement with Burisma?”
Archer said that while he did not have “direct” knowledge, it was his view that Burisma would not last were in not for Joe Biden’s involvement. “My only thought is that I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it. That’s my, like, only honest opinion,” Archer said. He went on to say that the company was able to survive for as long as it did because Hunter was on the board.
“Just because of the brand,” Archer said. The “brand” refers to the Biden name. Speaking with The Post Millennial, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the brand was not only Biden, but the vice presidency during Biden’s tenure.
“How does that have an impact?” Goldman asked.
“Well, the capabilities to navigate D.C.,” Archer said, “that they were able to, you know, basically be in the news cycle. And I think that preserved them from a, you know, from a longevity standpoint. That’s like my honest—that’s what I—tht’s like how I think holistically.”
“But how would that work?” Goldman asked.
“Because people would be intimidated to mess with them,” Archer replied.
“In what way?” Goldman pressed.
“Legally,” Archer said.
Archer also spoke about the meetings during which Joe Biden would call in, or be called. “He put him on speakerphone, again, occasionally. Specifics, like, you know, dinner—you know, dinners occasionally.” Archer was asked to describe the dinners, and said “I remember a dinner in Paris with a French energy company that was—we were speaking to an advisor, and then—we were speaking to. And it was really a Rosemont Seneca Advisors type of—a Rosemont Seneca Advisors kind of a pitch, at the end of the day. And there was a talk, and he said that we’re at this—you know, we’re at this restaurant in Paris, and he put him on the speaker. So that did happen. There were other people there.”
That dinner, specifically, was attended by “myself; Hunter; Eric Schwerin; and then the executives from the French energy company,” Archer said.
Another was in “Beijing, at, you know, some restaurant,” Archer said, “—or Chengdu or something like I don’t remember the—I don’t remember specifics. This was just—it was not—t was like a, you know—especially with the time zone difference, there was—you know, there were meetings where his dad would call and he would be talking to him or put him on speaker. I’m not going to—you know, that’s—that happened.”
Archer said that the conversation at that dinner, with Jonathan Li, was primarily niceties. But it was his contention that getting the vice president on the phone, showing off that kind of access, was what those calls were all about. Archer testified that Hunter Biden would say things like “Hey, guys, my dad’s on the phone.”
Another call, which Archer revealed during questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan, took place in Dubai. During this impromptu meeting, Hunter Biden was contacted by Burisma’s CEO Zlochevsky, who said “We’re under pressure. We need to go—we want to talk to Hunter.” Hunter called DC, and Archer was “not in the earshot” of that call.
It was only 5 days after that call that Joe Biden “has a trip to the Ukraine, and he makes a statement: ‘It’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.” That was in 2015, and Biden withheld $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine until such time as the prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired.
Bill Stevenson, who was married to Jill Biden between 1970 and 1975, told Newsmax last week that the president’s brother, Frankie Biden, tried to intimidate him during his divorce with Jill, and claimed the family threatened him with repercussions.
“Frankie Biden of the Biden crime family comes up to me and he goes, “Give her the house or you’re going to have serious problems,”” Stevenson said. “I looked at Frankie and I said, “Are you threatening me?” and needless to say, about two months later, my brother and I were indicted for that tax charge for $8,200.”
When asked to clarify whether he thinks Joe Biden was behind the tax charge, Stevenson told host Greg Kelly: “I not only think it, but I know it,” adding that he “could not believe the power of Joe Biden and the Department of Justice. I couldn’t believe it.”
Kelly also noted the parallels between Stevenson’s case and Hunter Biden’s ongoing tax troubles – noting that Hunter was hit with just two misdemeanor counts for $2.2 million in unpaid taxes, while Stevenson and his brother were slapped with two felonies for just over $8,000 in unpaid taxes.
This is a weird, disturbing story: Mysterious Chinese bio-lab discovered in Reedley, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley.
Court documents detail the horrors and dangerous nature of an illegal lab found in Reedley, California, exposed several months ago by a city code enforcement officer. What was found inside prompted the fire chief to send a letter to city officials describing it as a “potential disaster for the city.”
An investigation into the warehouse was prompted by a simple garden hose that was illegally attached and coming out of a wall in the back of the building.
“Frankly, we knew that should not have been there and when she went to investigate, she found that there was activity or operation or something happening within that building,” said Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba.
The city then obtained a search warrant to look inside what should have been an ordinary warehouse. Inside, they found thousands of vials, many of which contained bio-hazardous materials like human blood, and other unknown substances.
“There was over 800 different chemicals on site in different bottles of different acids. Unfortunately, a lot of these are being categorized under ‘unknown chemicals,’” said Assistant Director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health Joe Prado. “A lot of these labels have been removed from bottles so there was only so much testing we could do [on] those chemicals.”
Health officials also discovered nearly 1,000 lab mice, 200 of which were dead.
Prado said the warehouse occupants claimed they were “doing some testing on laboratory mice that would help them support [and develop] the COVID test kits that they had on-site.”
According to court documents, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested what they could and determined that at least 20 potentially infectious viral, bacterial, and parasitic agents were present, including E. coli, malaria, and the virus that causes COVID-19.
“Scientists Call for Full Retraction of Nature’s Proximal Origin Paper, as Fraud Accusations Mount.” Their response was simplicity itself: They lied.
A growing number of people, including prominent scientists, are calling for a full retraction of a high-profile study published in the journal Nature in March 2020 that explored the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate from a laboratory.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February.
Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible, but likely.
“[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.
Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that the virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28, 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.
” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,” Garry said of the lab-leak hypothesis.
“We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said on Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.
The rap on Tim Scott is that he is too nice to be a modern Republican, but that’s wrong – he’s too weak to be a modern Republican. The man consistently defaults to submission to the woke left, but the times call for a warrior and his brand is soft surrender. Yeah, it would be nice to live in an era where we have the luxury of a president who dodged the draft in the culture wars, but we do not live in that time. Tim Scott needs to stay right where he is, an affable but unaccomplished senator firmly within the tradition of the political puffballs that South Carolina’s GOP inexplicably turns out. Let him be nice somewhere where his alleged niceness won’t shaft us again.
It could have been different, but that would require a different man than Tim Scott. There are moments that define a candidate, moments where they have a choice and the choice they make makes or breaks them. Kamala Harris decided to take what is essentially a footnote within the Florida history standards and contort it into some sort of lie about how Ron DeSantis loves slavery. It’s one of those issues where the claim is so facially ludicrous that you have to wonder if Kamala is stupid or cynical – and come to the conclusion that she is probably both. But she went with it and DeSantis pushed back and we were moving on when someone in the regime media asked Tim Scott about it.
This was his decision point. It was an opportunity to show who he is. And Tim Scott whiffed.
Taking the wrong side in the social justice war is disqualifying. Scott has gone from being maybe my third favorite candidate in the field and a strong Veepstakes possibility to being behind Doug Bergrum and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis…
Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar.
People are moving out of Oakland in droves. They are afraid to venture out of their homes to go to work, shop, or dine in Oakland and this is destroying economic activity. Businesses, small and large, struggle and close, tax revenues vanish, and we are creating the notorious doom-loop where life in our city continues to spiral downward. As economic pain increases, the conditions that help create crime and criminals are exacerbated by desperate people with no employment opportunities.
We are in crisis and elected leaders must declare a state of emergency and bring resources together from the city, the county, and the state to end the crisis. We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too…
There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.
Speaking of blue city retail apocalypses: “Field Office, a Trophy Complex Unable to Find Tenants, Defaults on $73.8 Million Loan. Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property stopped making payments.”
The owners of Field Office, a 290,375-square-foot office complex near the Willamette River, have defaulted on their $73.8 million loan after being unable to find enough tenants, becoming the latest office owners to throw in the towel on Portland’s struggling office market.
Field Office is owned by New York investment bank Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property Co., a Dallas-based real estate firm with operations in Portland. The pair bought Field Office from local developer Project^ and National Real Estate Advisors, an investment firm based in Washington, D.C., for $118 million in April 2019, according to public records.
Funny how letting antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioters and crime run rampant through your downtown destroys property values. #ThisIsYourCityOnSocialJustice
Black Florida State University professor who published numerous studies on “systemic racism” is fired for just making shit up. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
You’re a Texas republican congressman who’s also an ER doctor and you try to assist a teenage girl having a medical emergency? That’s a handcuffing.
A former employee of a large food service corporation is suing the company in federal court after it fired her for refusing to participate in a program that discriminates against white male employees.
Courtney Rogers worked for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Compass Group USA Inc. from her home office in San Diego, California.
The company had more than 280,000 employees and $20.1 billion in revenue in 2019, according to its LinkedIn profile.
“Back in 2018, NBA megastar LeBron James opened his I Promise School in Akron, Ohio with the noble goal of transforming the lives of at-risk students and parents in his hometown. But it appears that the school has some major challenges five years into its existence. According to a report from the Akron Beacon Journal, the I Promise School’s fall class of eighth graders has has not seen a single student pass the state’s math test in five years – since the group was in the third grade.”
Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.
“I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.
That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”
Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.
Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.
Speaking of Hunter: “How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel.” No doubt left-wingers will crow about how Hunter is “living his best life.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Federal judge blocks Biden’s censorship schemes. “Terry Doughty, a Louisiana federal judge, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.” Good.
“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”
“For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”
In one of those periodic, inexplicable outbreaks of a U.S. Representative deciding that he needs to run for President, former Texas Congressman Will Hurd has announced he’s running for President.
Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd announced Thursday that he’s throwing his hat in the ring for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Hurd, who was first elected to his congressional seat in 2014 and did not run for reelection in 2020, now enters the crowded presidential field of 13 other candidates as a major underdog.
The former congressman has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump and said last month that a race between President Joe Biden and Trump would be a “rematch from hell.”
“Someone like me, right, a dark horse candidate, can pull this off,” Hurd, 45, told “CBS Mornings” Thursday. “One, you can’t be afraid of Donald Trump. Too many of these candidates in this race are afraid of Donald Trump. But we also have to articulate a different vision.”
In a video announcing his candidacy, Hurd listed illegal immigration and inflation as chief among his motivations to run.
“Our enemies plot, create chaos, and threaten the American dream. At home, illegal immigration and fentanyl stream into our country. Inflation, still out of control. Crime and homelessness growing in our cities,” Hurd says in the video.
The big question, of course, is “why?”
2020 saw no shortage of former or current House members running for President. Names like “Joe Sestak,” “John Delaney,” “Seth Moulton,” and “Tim Ryan,” were introduced to the voting public and promptly forgotten, garnering neither fame nor delegates. Eric Swalwell made no impression on the race, and promptly returned to being known for irritating people and screwing Chinese spies. Former three-term Texas congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was already famous for raising a lot of money by not being Ted Cruz, losing to Ted Cruz, and then raising a lot of money to run for President, only to drop out before the first votes were cast. Objectively the most successful was Tulsi Gabbard, who earned two whole delegates by being photogenic, moderately heterodox, and the candidate not named “Biden” or “Sanders” to stay in the race longest. The “heterodox” part would cause her to leave the party that openly loathed her.
The three-term Texas congressman bit would make O’Rourke the obvious point of comparison for Hurd’s run, but there are two problems. The first is that Hurd objectively pulled off a more difficult feat than O’Rourke in winning three very tight races in TX-23, the only true 2012-2020 swing-district in Texas. By contrast, O’Rourke was running in a safe Democratic district backed up by scads of in-law money. The second is that Hurd doesn’t have the huge, high-profile, big money race to draw on a network of contributors like O’Rourke had. I also suspect that he’ll get an order of magnitude less fawning glossy magazine profiles than O’Rourke got, assuming he gets any. (He may get a few, as he’s just the sort of soft, no-hope Republican the national media loves to pump up.)
Hurd was a squishy three-term congressmen from a squishy swing district, and in terms of accomplishments, that’s not chicken feed. It’s an open question whether a more conservative Republican could have captured and held the seat at the time (though Hurd was a border control squish, and Texas Hispanics have very much taken a hard right turn on the issue since, so, maybe). But that a national political figure does not one make.
So that brings us back to the central question: Why is Will Hurd deluding himself into running for President? He seems to be running as the Trump Derangement Syndrome candidate (the Liz Cheney Lane, if you will), and that’s good for, oh, maybe 2% of the Republican base (and 50% of “conservative” D.C. pundits). That’s the land of has-beens and never-beens like John Kasich and Evan McMullin. Looking at the current 2024 field, there’s no-shortage of “Not Trump” candidates. I see Hurd possibly doing better than Vivek Ramaswamy (running in the Andrew Yang Outsider With Ideas Slot), and running about even with Miami mayor Francis Saurez for the “Who?” slot. And at this point, being an unknown, he’s less loathed than Chris Christie. He’s not even doing as well as Doug Burgum, and no one’s heard of him.
As I’ve written before, there is practically zero appetite for squishy moderates in the Republican primary, and less than that for someone running on the “I Hate Trump” platform. Hurd’s chances essentially amount to “Maybe if everyone else gets hit by a bus.”
My suspicion is that Hurd has been recruited to run by the same sort of left-leaning special interests that fund things like The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project to generate soundbites for an MSM that will inflate his campaign’s profile solely to go “Look! Republicans hate Trump too!”
Then there’s this little tidbit: “Before his career in politics, Hurd was an undercover CIA officer working in counterterrorism.”
There was a time that would have been considered a plus in Republican politics. That was before the Russiagate hoax and Hunter Biden’s laptop (among many others) showed how the deep was willing to meddle in domestic politics. Now it’s a giant red flag.
Expect Will Hurd’s run to be every bit as successful as Tim Ryan or Seth Moulton’s attempts.
Remember the old Chapter 313 program Texas used to dole out incentives to favored companies to relocate to Texas? It’s back under a new name.
House Bill 5, which author State Rep. Todd Hunter (R–Corpus Christi) calls the “Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation Act,” would create a new statewide economic incentive program to replace the state’s controversial Chapter 313 program, which ended after lawmakers declined to renew it during the 2021 legislative session.
Although both the Republican Party of Texas and the Democrat Party of Texas oppose corporate handouts in their platforms, State Sen. Charles Schwertner (R–Georgetown), has said “the majority of the Legislature does see value in a job-creating, economy-growing incentive program.”
HB 5 was a priority of House Speaker Dade Phelan (R–Beaumont) and approved by a vote of 120-24 in the House and 27-4 in the Senate.
However, Jeramy Kitchen, executive director of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility told Texas Scorecard the new law is a “contradiction and nothing more.”
“On one hand, he is telling Texans that he wants to see historic property tax relief and the elimination of the property tax, or more specifically the school M&O portion of the property tax,” explained Kitchen. “Both of those are things that TFR supports and encourages the legislature to take action on.”
“His signing of House Bill 5 however, points to a contradiction, as it ultimately will do nothing more than burden those same individual property taxpayers he purports to provide historic relief to, as large qualifying corporations receive a property tax abatement under the guise of economic development,” said Kitchen.
Like Chapter 313, HB 5 allows businesses to apply for a 10-year abatement—or reduction—of school district property taxes, which the state pays instead. To receive an abatement, the business would have to show it plans to hire a certain number of employees earning above-average wages for its particular industry.
Unlike the previous incentive program, HB 5 requires not just the applicant and school district to agree to the abatement, but also the comptroller, governor, and a seven-member legislative oversight committee composed of lawmakers from the state House and Senate.
This committee would have the final say on approving proposed projects and would provide periodic recommendations to the Legislature regarding which types of projects should be considered.
The problem with the old program was that it let government use taxpayer money to pick winners from the politically connected. Abbott has wanted the restoration of his economic incentive “carrot” ever since it expired. The new law even creates another level of politicos for businesses to suck up to get tax rebate goodies, and I bet competition to get assigned to that new “oversite committee” will be fierce.
The old program probably did incentivize a few edge-case businesses to move to Texas who wouldn’t otherwise, but Texas’ low-tax, low-cost and business-friendly regulatory environment already provides plenty of incentives to move here, as evidenced by the fact that businesses kept relocating here even in their absence.
At least there’s one improvement in the new version: “After Chapter 313 received much criticism for its funding of “renewable energy” projects, which Texas Scorecard previously examined in an extensive investigation, lawmakers also blocked such industries from receiving taxpayer funding through HB 5.”
Taxpayers are better served by keeping their own money than theoretically enjoying the down-the-line economic benefits of government functionaries showering their money on corporate welfare for businesses willing to do the requisite sucking-up to political figures in order to get paid to move here.
After intense negotiations between U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-20) and President Joe Biden, an agreement was struck which passed the House with both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition.
The so-called “Fiscal Responsibility Act” (FRA) passed the House Wednesday in a 314 to 117 vote, with 71 Republicans joining 46 Democrats in the minority voting against the measure.
The deal will suspend the nation’s debt ceiling until after the 2024 presidential elections, leaving it up to the next White House and Congress to navigate a deal that addresses the ever-expanding national debt.
With the debt nearing $32 trillion, the congressional budget analysis estimates it will grow by around $4 trillion during the period the FRA is in place, or until early 2025.
Congressman August Pfluger (R-TX-11) was one of the members who voted in favor of the bill but acknowledged in a phone interview that the bill was far from perfect and isn’t to be considered a home run by fiscal conservatives.
Pfluger explained there were some major wins in the negotiations that caused him to vote yes.
“The number one thing we took away from holding the Energy Committee meetings in Midland was calls from the oil and gas industry to reform the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and I’m proud to say we got the most significant reforms to NEPA in 50 years as part of this deal, and Biden isn’t happy about it,” he said.
Pfluger explained how under NEPA laws, oil and gas permitting and regulations can slow industry projects down, taking almost 10 years in some cases to get federal permitting. He also said the deal would greenlight important pipeline projects.
In addition, Plfuger said he supported the welfare reforms, requiring 80 hours per month of work or job training from The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) recipients, and clawing back of IRS funding, and while the proposal didn’t cut as much spending as he would like to see, it was still a small step in the right direction.
Here is where the usual blogging protocol would be to put in my analysis of the good and bad points of the deal. Nah, it stinks, because it doesn’t treat the looming national debt crisis seriously. We need a republican House, a Republican Senate, and a president who is willing to ride herd and veto non-balanced budgets to start fixing the problem, and we haven’t had that combination in my lifetime. Gerald R. Ford was the last Republican President who really fought to balance the budget, and republican congressional leadership hasn’t done so since the days of New Gingrich, Phil Gramm and Dick Armey.
Democrats will always vote for higher deficits because their entire business model is predicated on raking off the graft and doing the bidding of elites who prosper from asset inflation. Republicans as a whole always cave to them because no one holds them in line and because every debt limit hike is always an emergency rushed into law at the 11th hour when nobody is paying attention and they can whine “But we had to!”
Real austerity is limiting government outlays to receipts, and we haven’t had that since Gingrich and company held the line and the Dotcom boom brought in then record revenue in the late 1990s. Undoing Gramm-Rudmam-Lotta was disasterous.
I’d like to think that DeSantis could hold the line on deficit spending if he gets in. Sadly, we know from experience that Trump (whatever his other strengths) won’t…
Both men had their time in the sun, and neither’s time extends to 2024. Pence’s was 2016, when he provided a dull, predictable counterweight to Trump’s wild ride. Christie’s was 2009-2010, when his unexpected election as governor of deep blue New Jersey gave him a high profile platform to criticize the Obama Administration’s many unpopular policy failures.
Neither has a prayer of beating Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024.
Pence combines the dynamic personal charisma of Jeb Bush with the national electoral chances of Jeb Bush.
This meme still cracks me up.
Christie combines the personal likeability of J. Edgar Hoover with the weight of a second J. Edgar Hoover.
As long as we’re memeing…
And Christie has no excuse running again, having already run a dismal 2016 campaign that earned him exactly zero delegates (one less than Carly Florina).
All these political coelacanths are going to do is prevent the anti-Trump vote from consolidating around DeSantis.
Both should give up on their quixotic campaigns and retire to the cushy corporate board and college President circuit.
Californians continue to flee the no-longer golden state, and many of them end up in Texas. ABC7 News in the bay area interviewed eight who fled as to why California dreaming has become a nightmare.
Some takeaways:
“In the span of two years, California’s population has dropped by more than a half million people.”
“I was assaulted twice on the BART.”
“I’ve never had a house this large in my life.”
“It is definitely a lower cost of living in Texas.”
“The home that I once remembered and knew back in the 1980s and the 1990s, a lot of that’s gone now.”
“Home prices are lower [in Texas], and there’s plenty of job opportunities.”
The former mayor of Ventura, CA moved to Texas in 2014. “One of the things I greatly fear about Venture and elsewhere in coastal California is that it’s not a place for everybody anymore, and especially not a place for young families. It’s a place basically where older, affluent people now live. And I think something has really been lost there.”
“Home prices in Texas cost less than half of homes in California. U.S. Census Bureau numbers show that the middle and lower classes are leaving California at a higher rate than the wealthy.”
“Many who have left in recent years say they simply couldn’t afford to stay.”
A mother with six kids says it’s simply impossible to afford a house large enough in California. “I feel like the California Dream was the American Dream in my grandparents’ and parents’ era. That’s just not possible for our generation to live that American Dream in that state anymore. It’s so expensive that you’re struggling every month just to get by and pay your rent and your mortgage and put food on the table.”
Food truck owner: “The reason why I left California, honestly, is just the cost. The cost of living, the cost of running a business, regulations.”
Mention of the Move to Texas Facebook group for Californians looking to get the hell out of their failing state.
“Some people are moving to Texas because of their conservative values.”
” It seems that the environment, politically in California, has just been a one-party rule. Republicans have done absolutely nothing to change anything in any way, it seems to me. They’ve been cowardly about it.”
“It’s very sad in Contra Costa County. You can’t even be conservative. You kinda have to hide if you’re conservative almost.”
Man whose family moved to California from South Korea in the 1970s: “Unfortunately my parent’s grocery stores were burned down in the L.A. riots, two of them, near Koreatown. And so that was, you know, quite a traumatic experience for my family.”
“I definitely think [California] is mismanaged. We moved primarily because of the crime. And, for me, it was not only the crime but also, you know, the amount of homelessness, needles. I was assaulted twice on the BART. Those particular assaults I really do think it had to do with the same kind of violence that I saw in the Bay Area towards Asian Americans.”
“I miss the ocean but not enough to move back.”
What would it take to move back to California? “Number one, the whole state would have to clean up. Get some of those rotten politicians. Be tough on crime again, like you should. People’s attitudes would just have to change. But for the most part, I really am happy here.”
“My commute is seven minutes to work.”
“Yeah, we definitely have not even contemplated moving back. We are just really happy out here.”
One party Democratic rule has hollowed out the state of California, and the people Democrats used to claim to represent (the working poor and the middle class) are the ones most harmed by the graft, corruption, incompetence, and radical social justice-engendered spiraling crime rates.
Until that changes, expect people to continue to flee California.
Florida Governor Rob DeSantis has made it official that he’s running for President in 2024. Right now I’m backing DeSantis over Trump, not for the reasons floated by the TDS-riddled, cruiseship class “conserving conservatism” crowd, but because DeSantis has constantly, consistently and repeatedly taken the fight to the social justice warrior set to combat their quest to fundamentally alter America in the name of neo-Marxist victimhood identity politics.
Also, he signed a pro-school choice vouchers bill, which attacks the SJW/teacher’s union education establishment by letting parents remove children from their clutches.
And much more in that vein.
We can debate various other positions of Trump and DeSantis, but DeSantis has been much more active in fighting the far-left social justice warrior agenda than Trump was while President. DeSantis has crushed his SJW enemies, driven identitarians before him and heard the lamentations of their shemales.
Trump may drive the left crazy, but it’s DeSantis that has the hill of skulls surrounding his throne.
