George P. Bush, the current land commissioner of Texas, officially announced at a campaign kick-off event on Wednesday night that he would be running to be the top attorney for the Lone Star State.
“It’s time for a change,” said Bush at the event, held at a bar in Austin.
The move sets up what is sure to be a heated Republican primary race between Bush and current Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Bush, the grandson of former president George H. W. Bush and son of former Florida governor Jeb Bush, was considering a potential run for the position last October after several of Paxton’s top aides raised allegations of abuse of office and bribery against their boss.
“Enough is enough, Ken,” said Bush. “It’s time for you to go.”
Perhaps the most influential endorsement in the race will be from former president Donald Trump.
Last week, Bush tweeted, “Great to speak with President Trump to discuss the future of Texas and how we are keeping up the fight to put America first. I appreciate the words of encouragement and support. Big things coming soon!”
I can’t imagine that there’s a lot of love lost between Trump and the Bush clan, but stranger things have happened.
This decision is an indication that Bush has (probably correctly) identified Paxton as the weakest of the three top statewide office holders. Paxton’s low-grade scandals, clocking in at a mere 20 Milli-Hunters, are pretty weak as scandals go, but they have slightly tarnished what has generally been a very effective and conservative tenure as Attorney General.
But so too has the long-running Alamo redesign controversy sapped George P. Bush’s popularity. In 2014 he ran slightly ahead of Governor Greg Abbott in total votes. In 2018, he ran a couple of points behind.
Bush41 built a very effective fundraising machine, to the benefit of both 43 and George P. Bush, so I imagine Bush will be a moderate favorite in the race, but not a prohibitive one. Also expect Bush to get favorable media coverage right up until he clinches the nomination, at which point the MSM will turn on him in favor of whoever is the Democratic candidate. (Right now former Galveston mayor Joe Jaworksi is the only declared Democrat in the race.)
It also indicates that Bush thinks both Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick are too strong to take on. In this I think he’s correct as well. Abbott has a huge warchest to fend off any challenge. Dan Patrick has about half that, and strong conservative credentials that make it difficult for Bush to unseat him in a Republican primary.
Greetings, and welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm! Bad weather and bad driving are themes, as the ice storm mentioned yesterday already slammed Texas hard. I was without power for over 10 hours last night and this morning, and every tree is heavy with frost.
Hit black ice at 95/They said I’m lucky to be alive…
Bad news for law-abiding Austinites: Police Chief Brian Manley is retiring after 30 years on the force. I’m sure the City Council is eager to replace him with some social justice warrior approved tool. On the other hand, if he wants to run for mayor…
The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.
The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.
You can ding France (and French intellectuals) for a lot of sins, but “insufficient appreciation of western civilization and culture” is not one of them.
The bloom was off the Andrew Cuomo rose for anyone who had eyes to see last year, but now even the Democratic Media Complex is is being forced to admit what a giant pile of manure he is:
America’s worst governor probably never thought he would miss America’s most obnoxious president.
But that is the situation that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo likely finds himself in now that Donald Trump is no longer around to take all the heat for mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, now that the man who commanded nearly every minute of the media’s attention has shuffled off to Florida following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Cuomo is at long last experiencing widespread criticism and scrutiny in the press for his grossly incompetent handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Empire State.
The New York Times, for example, took the governor to task after he announced that indoor dining in the state can resume as soon as Feb. 14, arguing that the flip-flop makes no sense based on the available data and his past diktats. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said on Friday that New York City could reopen indoor dining on Feb. 14,” the newspaper notes. “But by nearly every measure, the coronavirus outbreak in the city is worse than it was when he announced a ban on indoor dining in December.”
The New York Times adds, “As the governor spoke on Friday, citing the ‘current trajectory’ of cases as his reasoning for reopening, average per-capita case counts in New York City were 64% higher than when he announced the ban in December.” The paper even published an article titled “N.Y.C.’s Covid Metrics Are Dire. Cuomo Is Reopening Restaurants Anyway,” laying into the governor for his about-face on indoor dining.
Elsewhere, Cuomo is weathering blistering criticism over news reports that his administration dramatically undercounted the number of deaths connected to his order last year forcing infectious coronavirus patients into long-term care facilities. Criticism so bad, in fact, that the governor actually declined an invitation to appear on CNN, which has done more than any news network to boost his image amid the pandemic.
The bad press, by the way, appears to be having an adverse effect on the governor, whose increasingly frenetic decrees suggest a man who is spiraling. Recall that Cuomo claimed recently that the effort to vaccinate restaurant workers was a “cheap, insincere discussion.” Now, he has expanded vaccine eligibility in New York to include — you guessed it — restaurant workers. It’s almost as if he has no idea what he is doing.
Then, there is the sudden bout of unflattering news reports regarding the growing number of high-level resignations by New York health officials, including nine top state executives who have stepped down since last summer. Cuomo is also suffering embarrassing news coverage for his recent statement in response to the reports that his administration undercounted nursing home deaths: “But who cares? … Died in a hospital. Died in a nursing home. They died.” Add to it all the fact that the governor is catching heat for saying that he doesn’t trust health experts, and it seems clear we are witnessing the end of the love affair between the news media and the man who won an Emmy recently for his supposedly savvy COVID-19 management.
It is good that the news industry as a whole is finally scrutinizing the Cuomo administration for its ineptitude, but where was this critical look last year? It’s not as if Cuomo flipped a switch. He didn’t become an incompetent, callous, flailing bureaucrat overnight. This is who he is. This is how he has behaved for the entirety of the pandemic. Many newsrooms either did not notice or did not care. After all, there was a bad man in the White House.
The Cuomo who is getting badly beaten up today in the press is the same Cuomo who in April 2020 said glibly of out-of-work, anti-lockdown protesters that if they want to provide for themselves and their families, they should “take a job as an essential worker.”
This is the same man who targeted the state’s Jewish communities over social distancing violations, all while giving a free pass to the thousands of anti-police demonstrators and other political activists who clogged New York’s streets last year, gathering cheek to cheek in both protest and celebration. At a press conference in October of last year, Cuomo even dredged up a 14-year-old photo showing Jewish mourners gathered to mark the death of Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, claiming falsely that it was proof of those people’s refusal to follow his COVID-19 restrictions.
This is the same man whose administration flip-flopped constantly on the timeline for when COVID-19-positive front-line workers should return to work.
This is the same man who, during a press conference in September, attempted to absolve himself of responsibility for his state’s deadly mismanagement of the coronavirus by claiming, “Donald Trump caused the COVID outbreak in New York. That is a fact. It’s a fact that he admitted and the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] admitted and [Dr. Anthony Fauci] admitted.” No one “admitted” any such thing.
Cuomo actually wrote an entire book praising his response to the pandemic. He even hawked a stupid poster boasting of New York’s alleged victory over the outbreak. The poster, which bears more captions than a Herblock cartoon, is careful to highlight infection increases in Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Because nothing says responsible, caring leadership quite like cheering case increases in fellow states, which, by the way, likely got the virus from New York.
Yet, amid all of these missteps, many in the press claimed last year that New York’s governor led one of the best, if not the best, coronavirus responses in the country. The way certain journalists and commentators told it, Cuomo’s wisdom and steady hand safely guided the state through one of the most dangerous and deadly episodes in its history.
Speaking of coronavirus, previous timelines had pegged “Patient Zero” as being infected in November of 2019, but new evidence suggests the first cases showed up October 2019. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Let them have their Impeachment 2: Electric Boogaloo. It won’t result in a conviction. It won’t affect Donald Trump’s standing with his supporters or his detractors. But it will delay the Senate from action on Joe Xiden’s initial legislative goals and confirmation of His Fraudulency’s nominees.”
Democrats may end up paying a higher political price than they anticipate. The trial won’t only delay Mr. Biden’s program. It will tarnish his image as a “unifier” eager to work across party lines. That identity will be much harder to sustain after Democratic senators vote in lockstep to convict Mr. Trump and push through a mammoth Covid relief bill without any Republican votes.
I see they misspelled “trillions in pork graft for politically connected cronies” as “Covid relief.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
During a media presentation at Virtual SHOT Show 2021, Winchester said that if they stopped taking orders for .22 LR right now, it would take 2 years to fill all the back-orders. In December, the Vista family of companies, which comprises Federal, CCI, Speer, and Remington, announced they had a $1 billion backlog in orders. In the first 3 months of the COVID-19 lockdown, Winchester experienced a 17-percent surge in orders, which hasn’t tapered off.
Rancher believes Biden wants to hurt border security to undo President Trump’s legacy. True, but incomplete. The entire Democratic Party sees every illegal alien as a potential Democrat voter.
Heh:
The Lincoln Project has reached the part in the Scorsese film where Clapton or the Stones is playing and everyone is trying to escape with the money and their lives.
Got to admit, 140 MPH is hauling ass. One problem with Most Shocking is that they would intone “…with speeds hitting 90 miles and hour!” and I wanted to ask “Dude, have you never driven on a Texas highway before? That’s pretty much the prevailing speed…”
"We rescue ALL animals, though dogs need us the most. But we rescue cats, bunnies, rats, snakes, small exotics, eleflumps, bears, big cats, wildlife, sea life, primates…"-@ElayneBoosler#tailsofjoy 🐶😺🦜🐭https://t.co/gWA4VEWyoc
— Elayne Boosler's Rescue Dog, Ralph (@BooslerS) February 5, 2021
By the way, the current forecast is for it to hit 1°F here on Monday, which would only be 3 degrees above the coldest temperature ever recorded in Austin…
Following yesterday’s story, I got pushback from readers that asserted the supposed WallStreetsBets silver squeeze was, in fact, a ruse from hedge funds to distract retailer investors from the GameStop and AMC squeezes.
If you haven’t been browsing WSB or doing your own research, you’d probably think that the people on Twitter are correct in saying there is a silver squeeze happening and we should all get in on it. There are quite a few wsb-logo Twitter accounts pushing this. This is BS & the straight up the ANTITHESIS of who we are.
By buying silver/going long on silver, you would be directly putting money into the pockets of the EXACT HEDGE FUNDS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF $GME 🚀 🚀 🚀 💎 🙌 The hedge funds are LONG silver NOT short silver.
The media, Wall Street, normies, and every other non-WSB autist are trying to push you to buy silver. This would be a tragic, irreversible decision that not only will most likely not make you any money because the squeeze is fake, it will put you on the sidelines from this righteous and glorious war we are in.
Another sign it’s a ruse: Citadel Securities, one of the primary hedge funds backers, evidently holds shares in 17 different silver companies.
That’s one of the problems with a decentralized swarm attack: If nobody’s in charge, then it’s much harder to filter out the noise to determine the true direction of the swarm. That can be a strength, but it also makes the swarm vulnerable to ruses like this. Extracting a signal from the huge wave of noise in everyday financial transactions is a daunting problem under the best of circumstances even when giant hedge funds aren’t baiting friendly MSM outlets with elaborate ruses. (Or, I should say, when giant hedge funds aren’t baiting friendly MSM outlets with elaborate ruses even more than they usually are.)
Whatever the source, many bullion dealers were reporting a huge run on silver due to a spike in demand, though physical silvere seemed to be doing much better than “paper silver” (i.e., the futures market). Today spot silver prices are back down in early trading.
Remember, I said yesterday that a silver squeeze was unlikely to work.
With that out of the way, here are some other WallStreetBets/GameStop/etc. news:
Adam Ford with Not The Bee explains the GameStop short squeeze, including more background detail on the origins of the squeeze than was in my original post:
Glenn Greenwald goes into more detail on the GameStop squeeze and Melvin Capital:
The usual Greenwald leftwing caveats apply. (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)
GameStop stock is back up this morning after Robinhood lifted restrictions on buying shares.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation into “Robinhood, Discord, Citadel and other trading apps that put curbs on stock trading” in GameStop.
Noon Update: And now GameStop, AMC and Silver are all way down right now. Never invest what you can’t afford to lose…
The Biden Administration’s plan to stop illegal alien deportations has run into a Texas-sized roadblock:
A federal judge in Texas has blocked President Biden’s executive order halting deportations of some illegal immigrants.
Biden signed the order halting deportations for 100 days on January 20, several hours after his inauguration, as part of a blitz of executive orders aimed at undoing Trump administration policies. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton subsequently sued the Biden administration to reverse the order, citing an agreement between the Department of Homeland Security and Texas requiring the state’s approval to halt deportations.
Judge Drew Tipton of the Southern District of Texas blocked the implementation of Biden’s order on Tuesday for a period of 14 days. Tipton said that the delay was appropriate according to the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.
Within 6 days of Biden’s inauguration, Texas has HALTED his illegal deportation freeze,” Paxton tweeted after the order. “*This* was a seditious left-wing insurrection. And my team and I stopped it.”
Tipton’s restraining order is effective for 14 days as the state’s case against the moratorium continues.
Paxton argued the state would face financial harm if undocumented immigrants were released into the state because of costs associated with health care and education, and said the moratorium would also lure others to come to Texas. Tipton, an appointee of former President Donald Trump who took the bench last year, agreed.
“Texas argues that ‘the categorical refusal to remove aliens ordered removable will encourage additional illegal immigration into Texas,’ thereby exacerbating its public service costs. Such injury is not, as a legal matter, purely speculative,” he wrote. “The Court finds that the foregoing establishes a substantial risk of imminent and irreparable harm to Texas.
Federal law makes clear that the overwhelming majority of illegal aliens are deportable. Suspending the law for vast classes of deportable illegal aliens (rather than by a federal judge adjudicating individual cases) is an abuse of power. The Biden Administration doesn’t get to ignore written law (or written agreements with state government) merely because they find it inconvenient for a future amnesty of illegal aliens to create more Democratic voters.
More than $6 million in taxpayer money flowed to Austin nonprofits affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but taxpayers might never learn the identities of the organizations that got the money or get a chance to dig into their stated need for assistance.
Citing a little-known state law that government transparency experts are only now learning exists, the city has refused to turn over a list of the 365 nonprofits that were granted the funds.
The $6 million was funneled through the city from the federal government and distributed out of the Austin Nonprofit and Civic Health Organizations Relief fund, more commonly known as the ANCHOR fund.
On Oct. 19, the American-Statesman requested a list from the city of the fund’s award recipients. On Nov. 16, the city denied the newspaper’s request, saying in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that it thought the information was exempt from public disclosure and requested that Paxton’s office affirm that determination.
The law invoked by the city’s legal department, House Bill 3175, went on the books after the 2019 Texas legislative session.
Filed by state Rep. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, the bill made confidential the name and other identifying information of individuals and businesses that apply for state or federal disaster recovery funds. The definition of disaster, as spelled out in the law, includes such things as floods, earthquakes and hostile military action. It also includes epidemics, such as the COVID-19 crisis.
The disclosure of federal relief dollars is not exempted from public records if the money is awarded by the federal government. For example, news organizations, including the Statesman, have obtained through public records the names of businesses that received financial assistance through the federal Paycheck Protection Program.
But under the new state law, Austin was able to withhold the identities of businesses that received assistance from the ANCHOR fund because the money, although originally from the federal government, went to the city before it was distributed to the nonprofits.
I just naturally assume the money was handed out as graft to members of the Homeless Industrial Complex, Greg Casar’s leftwing cronies, and various antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riot instigators (I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap between those categories).
Speaking of the homeless, Austin’s homeless situation continues to get even more out-of-hand. “It’s not uncommon to walk out the door and find a pile of human feces on the patio behind us.”
There’s also a petition drive to recall various City Council members who reinstated the homeless ban. But you have to live in their respective districts to sign the petition.
I know you’re going to be shocked, shocked to find out that the City of Austin give preferential treatment to leftwing businessesin the form of property tax breaks…including one for Mayor Steve Adler’s own law firm.
Demand actually was on the upswing before the year 2020 even began. Then the dumpster fire that is 2020 wrought havoc on both gun and ammunition availability. This is a pure demand-driven issue. The government guys who may or may not be in black helicopters are not interested in small rifle primers or .22 Long Rifle. Good luck finding either on the shelf.
How bad is it? Let me give you some anecdotes.
Just two weeks ago, I received a call that probably should not have surprised me.
“Do you have any .30-30?” This was not a question I was expecting. I mean, after all, there might be some parachute-cord-wrapped lever-actions somewhere if they haven’t been snarfed up, but .30-30 ammo? Really?
It seems the friend of a friend was heading out on a hog hunt and left it too late to buy ammunition. Nowhere in northern Virginia could you find a box of .30-30 on the shelf. He was headed for a wild boar trip and had exactly four rounds. I dug into my personal stash to make sure his hunt wasn’t ruined, but this is a symptom of a much larger issue today.
Back in April, one of our field editors received a call from a pretty prominent gun shop asking, “How much 9 mm do you have?” He answered and was told that he would be paid twice what he paid for it, and a truck would be there tomorrow.
A friend at Hornady recently reached out to me to ask that I spread the word. What’s going on with ammunition is nothing sinister, nor a conspiracy. It is simple supply-and-demand. In fact, it’s hyper-inflated demand like no one has ever seen. I certainly haven’t in the 30 years that I’ve been paying attention to such things.
Much has been made of the fact that guns, especially guns suitable for personal defense, have been hard to find. It would stand to reason that, with gun sales at an all-time high, ammunition will not take long to follow. At first, it was 9 mm Luger and .223 Rem., with local outages of things like .300 Blackout and 7.62×39 mm. It is not because the ammunition makers are not working all-out. American ammunition makers have all increased output and productivity as much as they can. They are making more ammunition than they ever have before. As soon as it goes into distribution, it is gone.
Despite this, they are being hammered by their customers who ask, “Where is the ammo?“ It’s not being diverted to top-secret government contracts. It’s being bought by your friends and neighbors before you.
Snip.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, riots and then the most rabid anti-gun platform ever introduced being pushed by the Democratic party, it’s no wonder that people have increased their demand for guns and ammunition. When a candidate for national office—even a poorly performing one—utters, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” what did you think was going to happen?
This is not even attributable to supply-chain problems, with the exception of the Remington ammunition plant in Arkansas. That plant was sidelined by the sale of the company by an Alabama bankruptcy court. Talk about a series of unfortunate events. One of the largest plants in the country couldn’t make ammo at full capacity because of the financial problems of its parent company. The good news is that Vista Outdoor picked up that facility, and the Vista team is very good indeed at making ammunition. I am told after the first of the year, ammunition will be flowing out of that plant, and many of its workers will be rehired.
We have been through conditions similar to this before, but nothing like this. It’s to the point that waterfowlers looking for ammo are having a hard time because people looking for defensive loads have decided that steel BBs are better than nothing.
A friend at a major retailer told me one of his managers was approached by a customer who found a box of .38-55 sitting alone on the shelf. He asked if there was anything in the store that would shoot it, as it was the only box of ammo there.
This is a great year to be in the replica-cowboy-gun business, but for entirely different reasons than usual. I personally watched a fellow who entered the gun shop wanting a Glock and left with a Uberti single-action revolver in .45 Colt simply because it was the only handgun in the store. Once that was gone, the shelves were bare.
I have spoken with representatives of every major ammunition company in the United States, as well as quite a few importers. It’s not that they aren’t trying to meet the demand. It’s just the demand is so high that as soon as product enters commerce, it’s gone. There’s an insatiable appetite out there now, and once rumors about ammo being in short supply start leaking out, much like the many primer scarcities we’ve had over the years, the demand increases. Panic begets more panic.
Ammo was at a premium. Pricing was high and it looks like dealers were buying out other dealers before the show started (and then marked each box up). While I’m not enormously well stocked, I’m well stocked enough not to have to spend $20 for 50 .22LR (!). I mean, seriously?
There was a LOT of Donald Trump stuff there, and not in a let’s clear out the old inventory sense. People were walking around in MAGA hats and there was what looked like a lot of fresh inventory being scooped up by the crowd. However this plays out, The Donald is not fading away. Oh, yeah – several vendors had “Biden Is Not My President” T-Shirts for sale and I saw more than one dude walking around in them.
Didn’t see any tables of Nazi memorabilia. Might be the first gun show I’ve been to that didn’t sport that.
I’ve supported many of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s recent lawsuits, but not this one: “Texas attorney general accuses firearms website of price gouging at start of pandemic.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has accused the Fort Worth-based website Cheaper Than Dirt, which primarily sells firearms, ammunition and hunting gear, of price gouging at the start of the pandemic.
The AG’s office identified over 4,000 sales that involved price gouging and has directed Cheaper Than Dirt to pay $402,786 in refunds to consumers, according to court documents filed this month.
Over 100 people have complained to the AG’s office about Cheaper Than Dirt, the Houston Chronicle reported earlier this year.
The same week that Gov. Greg Abbott made a pandemic-related disaster declaration in Texas, ammunition orders to Cheaper Than Dirt substantially increased. In response to the increased demand for its products, the website raised the prices on hundreds of its products, according to the AG’s office.
The Texas AG’s office has identified ammunition as a necessity and, as a result, is arguing that those price hikes were against the Texas Business and Commerce Code. The code forbids businesses from “taking advantage of a disaster” by selling “fuel, food, medicine, lodging, building materials, construction tools or another necessity at an exorbitant or excessive price.”
This is sheer folly dressed up as righteousness. The market pays what the market will bear, and prices adjust to meet demand. As the first of today’s roundup links note, this year’s ammo shortages are overwhelmingly driven by consumer demand. High prices are the market’s signal to bring more capacity online to meet demand. Short-circuiting that signal helps no one. Paxton’s lawsuit displays an amazing ignorance of basic economics.
To drive home the scale of the current panic buying, I checked on both Cheaper Than Dirt and ammo.com for .45 ACP ammo prices and both were completely out, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The cheapest price over at AmmoSeek is 68 cents a round, up considerably from from the 50 cents I paid at the San Antonio gun show two months ago.
The Texas chapter of Gun Owners of America has put videos for gun owners to navigate the 87th Texas legislative session:
Useful information if you want to help influence the legislative process.
Smith & Wesson sues New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal for violating their First and Second Amendment rights. In New Jersey Attorney General is an appointed position, and Grewal was appointed by Democratic Governor Pat Murphy in 2018.
Multiple lawsuits over election fraud are preceding through the courts and appeal process. One of the most important is a lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin seeking to have their state legislatures appoint electors due to widespread election fraud in those states:
The filing, first reported by Joel Pollak at Breitbart, is under a procedure where the U.S. Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in suits between states. That means the lawsuit does not need to be filed in District Court, then work its way through the normal appeals process.
The lawsuit is in the form of a Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint. (The Brief in support of the Motion appears starting at page 50 of the pdf. A more complete pdf. with all filings, including the Motion for Preliminary Injunction and a Temporary Restraining Order is available here starting at pg. 111)
The relief sought is a delay of the December 14 statutory deadline for electors to vote, arguing that the Supreme Court has the power to delay that deadline since “[t]he only date that is mandated under the Constitution … is January 20, 2021. U.S. CONST. amend. XX.” The purpose of the delay would be for state legislatures to consider appointing the electors given the unreliability in the way the elections were handled.
This is in line with some commenters here suggesting that January 20 is the only real Constitutional deadline.
I’m not sufficiently familiar with this procedure to opine right now on whether it is proper procedurally…
You and me both!
…but if it works it puts the election squarely in the hands of the Supreme Court. There is no guarantee that if the issue were put to the legislators in these states that they would select Trump electors in the face of certified vote counts showing Biden the winner.
The suit alleges a variety of different constitutional violations in each state, all relating to the loosening of mail-ballot processing rules. Some of the changes were implemented by state and local election officials using the Chinese coronavirus as a pretext; others pre-date the presidential election and COVID.
Texas argues the impact of the rules’ changes was the same in each of these battleground states, saying election officials “flooded their people with unlawful ballot applications and ballots while ignoring statutory requirements as to how they were received, evaluated and counted.”
The requested remedy is the same, as well: toss out all mail-ballot votes and the presidential election results for all four states, which currently show Joe Biden receiving more votes than President Donald Trump.
To safeguard public legitimacy at this unprecedented moment and restore public trust in the presidential election, this Court should extend the December 14, 2020 deadline for Defendant States’ certification of presidential electors to allow these investigations to be completed.
“Trust in the integrity of our election processes is sacrosanct and binds our citizenry and the States in this Union together,” Paxton said in a press statement. “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin destroyed that trust and compromised the security and integrity of the 2020 election. The states violated statutes enacted by their duly elected legislatures, thereby violating the Constitution. By ignoring both state and federal law, these states have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but of Texas and every other state that held lawful elections.”
“Their failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election,” he added. “We now ask that the Supreme Court step in to correct this egregious error.”
My fear is that the very novelty of this lawsuit will work against it. I’m not sure any state has ever filed to alter election results from other states, or that the Supreme Court would grant standing in the lawsuit. But by making it a state suing another state, it makes it a clear Supreme Court case under Article III of the Constitution.
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge is also supporting the lawsuit:
Indeed, seven states have joined the lawsuit: Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, and South Dakota. It’s quite possible that more have joined by the time you read this.
“Attorney General Ken Paxton today announced that his Election Fraud Unit assisted the Limestone County Sheriff and District Attorney in charging Kelly Reagan Brunner, a social worker in the Mexia State Supported Living Center (SSLC), with 134 felony counts of purportedly acting as an agent and of election fraud,” the state said in a statement. “State Supported Living Centers serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Brunner submitted voter registration applications for 67 residents without their signature or effective consent, while purporting to act as their agent.”
Mexia is east of Waco and south of Corsicana.
“Under Texas law, only a parent, spouse or child who is a qualified voter of the county may act as an agent in registering a person to vote, after being appointed to do so by that person,” the statement continued. “None of the SSLC patients gave effective consent to be registered, and a number of them have been declared totally mentally incapacitated by a court, thereby making them ineligible to vote in Texas.”
The statement added that if she is convicted, Brunner faces up to 10 years in prison for these offenses.
You have to be pretty low to take advantage of the retarded. There’s no word which party or candidate Brunner was (allegedly) trying to steal votes for.
The third and final presidential debate is in the books, Trump breaks 50% approval, and the hard left plans another riot and arson spree if they lose. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
That appeared to be one lesson from a Zoom focus group conducted after the debate by messaging expert Frank Luntz. Speaking to 15 undecided voters — and yes, they appeared to be really undecided — Luntz asked for a one- or two-word description of the candidates’ debate demeanor. For Biden, the words were mostly bad: among them were “vague,” “very vague,” “non-specific,” “cognitively impaired,” “old,” “uncomfortable,” “elusive,” “grandfatherly,” and “defensive.”
For Trump, they were mostly much better: among them were “controlled,” “composed,” “constrained,” “reserved,” “poised,” “con artist,” “surprisingly presidential,” “calmer,” and “restrained.”
There will be more coverage of the debate, of Biden’s promise to end the oil industry and, indeed, more about Mr. Luntz, in Monday’s BidenWatch.
President Trump just hit the “Holy Grail” of breaking the 50% approval rating, hitting 52% approval in Rasmussen polling. All the usual poll caveats apply.
The left is currently planning on how to peacefully protest if President Donald Trump wins. Ha, just kidding! They’re going to burn everything down:
An activist group is planning large-scale and widespread ‘disruptive activity’ starting on the night of the election, in an attempt to stop what it predicts will be an “attempted coup” by President Trump in the form of a refusal to accept the election results.
“Shut Down D.C.” is setting the stage for mass gatherings in D.C., noting that the “resistance” must begin during the “muddied” legal and political debate over the election outcome.
“We need to show that we’re ungovernable under a continued Trump administration…That can mean blocking traffic at major intersections and bridges, shutting down government office buildings (why should ICE or the FBI be able to keep doing Trump’s bidding when he’s leading with a coup?!?), or blockading the White House.”
The document bases its action plan upon the scenarios projected by the establishment leftist “Transition Integrity Project” for election night and sketches these activists’ response to each, explicitly rejecting the possibility that Trump could legitimately win. It continues:
We’ll keep it going until Trump concedes. We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winter– maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable.
As it becomes clear that Trump’s coup is failing, institutions and the elites will start to abandon him – or we will approach them as part of the problem. Either Amazon will shut down AWS for the Trump loyalists in the government or we’ll shut down their fulfillment centers. Either governors will tell their national guards to stand down or we’ll shut down their state capitals as well. Over time, Trump will grow increasingly isolated and his empire will crumble down around him.
The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power.
Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.
The Left seeks to transform America into something never envisioned by the founders, a huge all-encompassing, panopticon state, one run by anointed Platonic guardians. Our elite watchmen will use their unlimited power to force upon us an equality of result society—with themselves properly exempted.
The hard Left’s defense is that its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.
Large swaths of the downtowns of America’s large cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland—are becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable. Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless. Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism. The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse.
Back in 2018, I wrote about the phenomenon of Great Southern Democratic Hopes — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-learning state who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.
Prime past specimens of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes include Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Michelle Nunn and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But 2018 brought the modern king of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes, Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.
You notice none of those candidates actually won, although O’Rourke deserves some credit for performing better than any other Democrat in decades. Still, next spring, Ted Cruz will be in the third year of his second term, and O’Rourke, having completed a presidential bid that also didn’t live up to the initial hype, will be teaching at Texas State University.
This cycle: Amy McGrath.
after McGrath won the primary, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin declared, “Democrats serious about winning chose Amy McGrath.” The Frankfort State Journal concluded, “McGrath has the name recognition and financial backing to give McConnell, well, a run for his money.” Fueled by Democrats across the country who are itching to see McConnell defeated, McGrath’s fundraising has been off the charts — $37 million in the last quarter, more than $82 million overall.
And yet it is mid October, and McConnell does not appear to be running for his money. The newest Mason-Dixon poll puts the Republican ahead, 51 percent to 42 percent. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives McConnell a 96 percent chance of winning. In a year when Democrats are finding themselves in surprisingly strong shape from Maine to Colorado and from Montana to Arizona, McGrath is an afterthought and on pace to turn out like the last Democrat who took on McConnell. In 2013, Politico wrote of Grimes, “The fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.” Mitch McConnell won reelection in 2014, 56 percent to 40 percent, in what was not the fight of his political life.
China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for Facebook to recruit social media censors?
There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’”
The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.
When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”
Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.
To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”
Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”
It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”
In a joint press release issued early this morning, SK Hynix and Intel have announced that Intel will be selling the entirety of its NAND memory business to SK Hynix. The deal, which values Intel’s NAND holdings at $9 billion, will see the company transfer over the NAND business in two parts, with SK Hynix eventually acquiring all IP, facilities, and personnel related to Intel’s NAND efforts. Notably, however, Intel is not selling their overarching Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group; instead the company will be holding on to their Optane memory technology as they continue to develop and sell that technology.
Per the terms of the unusual agreement, SK Hynix will be acquiring Intel’s NAND memory business in two parts, with the deal not expected to completely close until March of 2025. Under the first phase, which will take place in 2021 once all relevant regulatory bodies have approved the seal, SK Hynix will pay Intel the first $7 billion for their SSD business and Intel’s sole NAND fab in Dalian, China. This will see Intel’s consumer and enterprise SSD businesses transferred to SK Hynix, along with the relevant IP and employees for the SSD business, but not any NAND IP or employees. Similarly, while SK Hynix will get the Dalian fab, the first phase does not come with the employees that operate it.
Following the first phase, Intel will continue to develop and manufacture NAND out of the Dalian fab for roughly the next four years. This period is set to last until the rest of the deal fully closes in March of 2025. At that point, SK Hynix will pay Intel $2 billion for the rest of their NAND business. This will finally transfer all of Intel’s NAND IP and related employees over to SK Hynix, along with the Dalian fab employees.
NAND = Flash memory, and it’s a very profitable business to be in most times, but not part of Intel’s core microprocessor business. In Intel’s case, NAND is what you run once your fab is too old to crank out Microprocessors, and Fab 68 in Dalian was built in 2010 as a 65 nanometer fab. With Intel’s cutting edge currently at 7nm, you can see how it would be easy for them to part with, especially since the flash division was losing money despite record revenue in 2019. What Hynix gets out of the deal is harder to fathom. They’re buying a revenue stream in a sector that should be profitable, add another fab to their stable, and maintain parity with DRAM rivals Samsung and Micron. But that’s an awful lot to pay for a small revenue stream bump, a ten year old fab and no NAND IP until 2024.
“U.S. Sanctions Have Caused ‘Serious’ Damage to Iran, Tehran Says.” Good. Maybe they could stop being jihadist scumbags who oppress your people with a brutal theocracy? Just a thought…
Armenia-Azerbaijan truce breaks down within hours.
Chairman of the Georgetown County (South Carolina) Board of Voter Registration and Elections resignes after stealing Trump signs. Note: Repeatedly stealing the signs of political opponents isn’t a “lapse of judgement.”
The Nate Paul scandal has, at its heart, allegations that federal and state law enforcement officials abused the rights of an American citizen. The facts from all sides seem to indicate an unwillingness by the OAG staff to investigate Paul’s complaint; their unwillingness to do so must be explored.
If the 2019 raid was properly conducted, why has that not been confirmed? Why delay an investigation into the raid? If the raids were legitimate, why, after more than 13 months, has Nate Paul not been charged with a crime?
On the other hand, Nate Paul might—indeed—be a notorious villain. But in the current environment, shouldn’t state investigators be willing to double-check that the actions of law enforcement officials are conducted properly? Even accused criminals have constitutional rights.
Just as important, what if Mr. Paul is not a villain and merely a businessman targeted for less than honorable reasons? Is it merely a coincidence that U.S. Attorney Bash resigned from office three days after Mateer tendered his own resignation?
Likewise, it is possible—as the seven OAG employees allege—that Paxton was acting “under duress” in pushing for this investigation into the complaint made by his friend Mr. Paul. Whether or not Nate Paul’s allegations have merit, Texans need to be certain their elected officials are not acting improperly or unethically in the course of their jobs. Was Mr. Paxton simply pursuing justice for a Texan, or was he acting under undue influence?
Bret Weinstein kicked off Facebook, presumably for daring to voice anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts.
I have been evicted from Facebook. No explanation. No appeal. I have downloaded "my information" and see nothing that explains it.
We are governed now in private, by entities that make their own rules and are answerable to no process. Disaster is inevitable. We are living it. pic.twitter.com/JBTFH2devl
I don't care who you are, but seeing your dog dressed as Chuckie, running towards you with his wig and little knife arm, is just funny….. pic.twitter.com/vwaX0as0qW
Borepatch thinks the election is over. “The only thing that the Democrats had going for them was the lockdown. The breathless hyping of the ‘rona was intended to fan the flames of fear which would justify further lockdown and economic devastation. They then blamed Trump for all this, while the media shamelessly covered for them. That’s all gone now.”
A keening wail of lamentation rings out across the land at Mr. Trump’s possible, dastardly recovery. How dare he! — to paraphrase Saint Greta Thunberg. 209,000 other Americans died, and not him! What vile and unholy devices got him out of a sure death sentence? No doubt Democratic Party astrologasters and consulting augurers will be searching for clues among the orbiting planets and the spilled organs of sacrificed chickens in the days to come. Perhaps Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) can snare a few of the president’s attending physicians into his House Intel Committee and rev up another impeachment for going against doctors’ orders. Wouldn’t that be a delectable counter to the looming confirmation process for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement next door in the Senate this month?
“Media Criticizes Trump For Downplaying Virus Threat By Not Dying.” “Every hour that he lives is another hour that the severity of this virus is undermined!”
Some of the worst things about it is the element of transformation of the formerly mild-mannered and kindly into founts of seething malevolence.
It’s deeply unsettling to see the rage come over a person, as I recently did when looking into the eyes of a previously genial acquaintance who was shrieking with rage at me, her eyes narrowed with what looked like hatred.
People don’t like what threatens them, especially if they have no immediate factual answer to some of the evidence presented to them. What’s left to them is to explode—which this person did, ultimately getting into her car and peeling off with tires screeching. I would guess, although I don’t know, and I’m certainly not about to ask, that she and plenty of other people I know might be rejoicing, openly or secretly, in Trump’s diagnosis.
Are they “possessed?” Is this “demonic?” I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I tend to think in psychological terms because these people are, for the most part, not inherently evil. They are filled with self-righteousness, and they have been whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons. This is no accident.
Wishing that your opponent dies of a disease is pretty bad, but some go beyond the passive voice when hoping for our deaths. They seek to do it. Exhibit A is tech overlord Dick Costolo, a former Twitter CEO apparently, who tweeted on September 30th, “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.” So Dick, which by coincidence also happens to also be your name, you want to play horsey, huh?
I guess casually cheering the murder of political opponents gets you some guffaws from your pals in Palo Alto cafes. But those of us who have ventured outside of the carefully constructed (and costly, in terms of sweat and blood) safe space that is the United States, and who get that the natural state of man is not driving Teslas and sipping bespoke Napa Chardonnay in prosperous, secure enclaves with one’s liberal cronies, know better. People who cheerlead political murder tend to be people who will support political murder given the chance to make it happen.
One challenge for the dilettantes of death is to find the people who would actually commit political murder for them, but money and institutional inertia make that possible. As we have seen, woke zillionaires can fund their own lil’ revolutionaries. They are the ones behind Antifa, and if Donald Trump is reelected, we will likely see the DoJ (once Trump rids himself of the worse than useless FBI Director Christopher Wray, who never met self-serving establishment narrative he didn’t eagerly hump like a horny dog rubbing on the nearest leg) forced by Bill Barr to concede that this is an Astroturfed RICO conspiracy paid for by rich leftists. Yet, Antifa is not a combat organization (unless you are one person surrounded by a dozen of these brownshirts) but an information operation asset.
But the Dicks of the elite are spoiled and soft and while this all seems like fun and games to them, with somebody else doing the murdering, they don’t realize that history holds that the status quo doesn’t remain in effect for everyone else when one group decides to alter it to its advantage. That is the plan – the establishment, outraged at the people who held them accountable for their legacy of failure, incompetence, and corruption by electing Donald Trump and a Republican Senate, intend to alter the status quo to ensure that this outrage never happens again. They intend to add states to increase their leverage. They intend to change voting laws to allow cheating and impose “campaign finance laws” that will be enforced against your candidates but not against establishment candidates to ensure there are no more troublesome populist alternatives. They intend, using tech companies and big corporations, to impose thought control and punish dissenters by cutting them off from access to the routine modes of living in this society – social media, banking, transportation, education. They intend to pass laws to disarm you so the ultimate failsafe of freedom is negated. And they intend to pack the Supreme Court to ensure they can’t be stopped by that pesky Constitution.
But they will expect you to remain static and to respect and obey as if nothing has changed. You must be loyal to the institutions that betrayed you because…well, that’s unclear. Perhaps they hope you’ll just keep going along as if nothing is different out of habit, or from fear of losing what little they have left to you.
Yet, the notion that Americans will wake up one morning, see that they are no longer free, shrug, obediently line up to turn in their Remingtons and Mossbergs and reconcile themselves to serfdom is not in the cards.
More studies find face masks ineffective against the Wuhan coronavirus than found them effective. I suspect that N95 masks might well be effective, but not this ‘wear any damn thing” Virus Theater we’re stuck in.
Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey puts the kibosh on last-minute Democratic attempts to force through online voting.
Authorities arrested a North Texas candidate on dozens of felony voter fraud charges after catching him red-handed with a box of mail-in ballots belonging to local voters.
Carrollton mayoral candidate Zul Mirza Mohamed was charged Wednesday with 109 felonies for fraudulently requesting and obtaining mail-in ballots he alleged were for nursing home residents.
According to a press release from Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree, his office was tipped off to the possible mail-ballot harvesting scheme on September 23 by the Denton County Elections Office.
Multiple mail ballots had been requested on behalf of Carrollton residents to be sent to a post office box in Lewisville, which purportedly belonged to a nursing home facility. Investigators contacted the voters and found they had not made the ballot requests.
Investigators also learned the post office box was obtained using a fake Texas driver’s license and fake student ID from the University of North Texas, and they began surveilling the post office.
On October 7, investigators saw the suspect pick up a box of requested mail-in ballots and take them back to his residence in Carrollton. Officers obtained a search warrant for Mohamed’s home and inside found the fake driver’s license and box of ballots—several of which had been opened.
I’m a police officer in a major American city. Many of you reading this have seen a movie or TV show set in this city. Some of you have vacationed here. We have a big problem with poverty, unemployment, people scamming the welfare system, drugs, and violent crime.
Honestly, though, who I am and where I work isn’t important—what I stand for is. I show up every day I’m scheduled to work, on time, and I work. I don’t hang out at the station, I handle calls for service and I constantly back up other officers. I quickly progressed to different specialized units and, over time, even began to help out at the academy and became a Field Training Officer.
But after a couple of high-profile incidents where suspects wound up dead, we were essentially told to stop pursuing the bad guys: Too much liability for the city. So, if a violent felon who shot someone last week is spotted and you know it’s him? Depending on the ranking officer working, you’re most likely not going to be allowed to go get him.
Snip.
Call someone out on being a worthless lazy officer? Is that worthless lazy officer a lieutenant’s mistress?! You just earned yourself a transfer to night watch in some outpost no one wants to work.
In every major city there’s a punishment assignment. Everyone who’s ever been a city cop knows this to be true.
After a while, that same lazy officer who’s been sitting in that same lieutenant’s lap, or who’s never really done anything noteworthy, except maybe they went to the right school or are in the right clique, they now have time on the job and they take the sergeants test. They pass and, if your department doesn’t go straight down the list, they’re now a supervisor! Newer officers have no idea they’re working for someone who’s telling them someone else’s war stories or making themselves seem more important than they really were in the situation.
Roll call training is all about administrative work and checking boxes off for monthly audits. We barely talk about that stolen silver SUV that is absolutely raping us nightly with auto burglaries. Oh, and since our policies are out there for anyone to read (including the bad guys) in the “interest of transparency,” they know we can’t pursue them for a property crime once they blow the red light at the intersection after we light them up and they flee. Never mind the fact that that stolen SUV is occupied by a wanted felon for armed robber in possession of a stolen AK-47. It’s just a property crime, right? No big deal. If they t-bone a family of four and kill someone, the fleeing felon isn’t at fault. I am.
Snip.
You have mayors bowing to the political pressure from a small, very vocal, minority that wants to defund (read: abolish, in many cases) the police.
Some mayors have made it known to their department brass they’d rather endure the optics of Revolutionary Communists (read: ANTIFA/BLM) rioting, looting, and burning their cities down, than have their police officers be seen wading into the fray with riot batons in hand.
You realize that if cities abolish police departments, gated communities are going to hire private police forces, made up of nearly all ex-police from the agency that just disbanded (see Minneapolis when that happens) and ex-military guys. The city won’t have oversight and their rules and regulations are going to be way more relaxed. Less area to patrol and a large pay raise? Less crime? Sign me up!
Major media outlets constantly fan the flames of civil unrest nationwide. In a race to be first with many stories, they finish last in credibility. The initial tragedy de jour is front-page news, leading all newscasts in prime time. Meanwhile, the retraction or exoneration of the officer is buried. No apologies from the likes of Shaun King, MSNBC, CNN, or Al Sharpton. They’ve all already moved on to the next rage-bait.
Who gives a f— if some honest hard-working cop had his or her life ruined and is in financial shambles because they got a no-win call dropped in their lap, right? All cops are bastards, anyway. Black Lives only seem to matter when cops are involved in the death, justified or not, of a black person.
Every single week, in many major cities all across this country, murders within the black community occur — oftentimes with stolen firearms. I’ve lost count of the bodies (mostly black, never in my case shot by police) I’ve stood over. Sometimes at night when I’m trying to fall asleep I hear the blood-curdling screams of family members (mostly mothers) who rush to the scene and are held back at the police tape.
So, in a knee-jerk reaction to a high-profile incident, in an effort to placate a mob, there is talk of not only defunding the police but abolishing them. Do you know what that leads to nationwide? Cops like me are not being proactive. At all. Because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Seven of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s own aides have accused him of “improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses” in relation to Austin investor Nate Paul.
Former Paxton assistant and current United State congressman Chip Roy called on Paxton to resign, which is not a good sign.
Speaking of Democratic governance, Baltimore’s next mayor is complaining about Donald Trump when he should be complaining about his fellow Democrats:
Baltimore is no more “unjust” now than it was before its murder rate soared half a decade ago. What has changed is that Baltimore is less policed than it was back then. And that’s thanks to the policies and pronouncement of its pathetic Democrat mayors and other leading pols.
It seems clear that Brandon Scott will continue in their tradition. Thus, it seems equally clear that Baltimore will remain exhibit A when informed people talk about the breakdown in law and order under the watch (if you can call it that) of Democratic mayors.
Today’s Democratic politician receiving a felony indictment comes to you from Rochester, New York, where Democratic Mayor Lovey Warren was indicted on felony campaign finance fraud charges. “At issue are transfers made from Ms. Warren’s political action committee to her campaign committee that far exceeded the $8,557 limit that a campaign could receive from an individual donor.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Democrat Party official arrested for allegedly pulling knife on ‘Women for Trump.'” “The communications director for the Democrat Party of Washington County, Oregon [Clayton John Callahan], was arrested after allegedly pulling a knife on female Trump supporters at an outdoor event hosted by the Oregon Women for Trump.”
Some quality trolling in the footnotes. In response to Google being obnoxiously evasive about market share questions, the subcommittee noted 'interesting how Microsoft was obnoxiously evasive about market share.'
The Red Headed Libertarian notes that the MSM seems to intentionally conflate anarchists with legal militias, and offers a brief history lesson:
DJT was asked to denounce “militias & white supremacists” at the debate.
Conflated Political language is never by accident.
Dems failed to repeal 2A based on the prefatory clause so now they take on operative clause-
In Heller, Scalia said militias are made up of individuals.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian ™ (@TRHLofficial) October 8, 2020
Their response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian ™ (@TRHLofficial) October 8, 2020
