Posts Tagged ‘Brian Manley’

Austin Police Department Morale Hits Bottom

Wednesday, October 20th, 2021

When we last checked in on the Austin Police Department, it was plagued by staffing issues due to the City of Austin defunding the police and cancelling two cadet classes, as well as Travis County DA Jose Garza’s refusing to prosecute numerous felonies, thus putting numerous criminal back on the streets to commit more crimes.

Now this piece from Brad Johnson paints a picture of an undermanned department with a morale crisis.

The Austin Police Department (APD) is bleeding 15 to 22 officers per month as those departing join other departments or leave law enforcement entirely. With them goes decades of irreplaceable experience and left over is a void the City of Austin aims to fill with green recruits and a “reimagined” approach to public safety.

Political upheaval in Austin is not unlike any other situation in big cities across the country. Mass protests swept Austin as they did the nation last year after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, preceded by months of societal discord caused by the pandemic and related government shutdowns.

That was followed by grandiose promises by progressive politicians to “reimagine” the way police interact with their community.

Currently, APD has 200 vacancies and 104 officers on leave on top of the 150 positions eliminated during the 2020 budget cut and redirection. The department’s average response time ballooned from seven minutes to nearly 10 minutes since the summer of 2020. Specialized units are being disbanded and the officers who stay are being redeployed to street patrol to fill the gaps.

Snip.

Michele Aparicio first joined APD in 1997. She lasted 23 years with the department before retiring in 2020 a few months into the pandemic.

Aparicio, a Hispanic, told The Texan that morale has long been a problem within APD and pointed to leadership and its internal decisions as its cause. “Surely seniority and experience had always played a role in promotions, but it got to the point where demographics took precedence over all else,” Aparicio said.

This, Aparicio said, had plagued the department’s morale and devolved into poisonous interactions with its leadership.

“There was a point where we had a meeting with Chief Manley and I asked him what he was going to do for morale, and he just put it back on me as a supervisor,” Aparicio said, adding that she was later approached by one of her superiors who informed her Manley didn’t approve of the interaction.

“I had a lot of respect for Acevedo, he had his flaws, but he was not scared to speak up for what he believed and for all the officers of APD,” said Kyle Sargent, a former APD officer of 15 years.

Contrasting Acevedo with Manley, Sargent added that he felt the latter began falling more in line and catering his decisions with the city council in mind — then beginning to lurch even further left than it already had been. Officer morale, Sargent said, took a hit with that transition and as Manley’s tenure unfolded, but nothing sped up the trend like what’s unfolded since.

Snip.

One contributing factor Aparicio identified was the racial sensitivity trainings officers were put through. “They were literally calling us racist and homophobic officers — a whole class designed to make it seem like we were guilty of being racist, of being homophobic, and that we treated other people differently,” Aparicio said.

“It wasn’t presented as something like ‘Hey, this is what the nation is going through.’ No, it was presented as APD needs this because y’all are a bunch of racists.”

“So, the morale was already s— to begin with and then this was forced upon us,” Aparicio emphasized. During those classes, she added, the presenters faced some serious pushback from the APD rank and file and so they “were toned down a little bit.”

But it didn’t end there.

Continuing that trend, this year the Austin City Council entered a contract with a consulting firm to provide racial sensitivity training for its police heavily imbued with critical race theory teachings. The city is paying the consultant $10,000 per day.

See more on that story here.

Things are about to get worse.

A change in that buying forward rate is coming early next year. Sargent told The Texan he’s heard as many as 150 to 200 officers could leave in January next year before the change starts in February.

That would be over 13 percent of the current APD employment leaving in the blink of an eye.

When officers leave, they are often able to purchase their gun and badge as mementos of their career. But when Sargent resigned, this courtesy was denied to him per a new policy from interim Chief Chacon.

“It was just vindictive — I felt like he was just trying to punish us for leaving and it sort of put an exclamation point on my decision,” Sargent said. “It’s a small thing but it’s that kind of stuff that just brings morale from low to even lower.”

Other APD tidbits:

  • Speaking of low staffing:

  • Even critical departments are undermanned:

  • Making it worse: cadets that contract Flu Manchu are being told to quit…or be terminated:

  • It’s going to take proposition A passing in November to keep things from getting much, much worse.

    LinkSwarm for February 12, 2021

    Friday, February 12th, 2021

    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…

  • Seriously, try to avoid driving on ice if it’s even remotely possible:

  • 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…
  • How crazy leftwing do you have to be for the French to call you lunatics?

    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.

  • “Cuomo aide admits they hid nursing home data so feds wouldn’t find out.” I strongly suspect that falsifying data reported to the federal government for federal grant programs is a felony…
  • 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.”
  • More on the same subject:

    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.)

  • “14 State Attorney Generals Tell Biden They’re Reviewing Legal Options Regarding Keystone XL.”
  • Texas intermediate crude is now up above pre-coronavirus drop levels.
  • The Social Justice Warrior Thunderdome at The New York Times has reached the point where you get fired for using the N-word in the process of talking about the N-word.
  • Related: “New York Times Has Used the N-Word 6,481 Times.”
  • Teen Vogue publisher Conde Nast can’t pay its rent. Oh no! Where else will teenage girls be encouraged to try anal sex?
  • More on the great ammo shortage:

    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.

  • Superbowl ratings show it was the leas watched since 2006. How is that wokeness working out for you, NFL? (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • How painfully ignorant of literature do you have to be to not recognize the tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow soliloquy from Macbeth? Evidently Andrea Mitchell ignorant…
  • 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:

  • Most shocking update:

    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…”

  • Bruce Springsteen arrested for DWI. I’m pretty sure he makes enough to hire an Uber. Or a full-time chauffeur.
    

  • This one was is from up in Milwaukee:

  • Just no:

  • Shipping container homes are not all they’re cracked up to be.
  • “Today’s Youth Simply Don’t Have The Work Ethic To Build The Gulags Needed For Their Communist Ideals.”
  • Jill Biden Decorates Migrant Cages With Valentine’s Day Message Hearts.”
  • “I’m not a cat.”

  • Dribble:

  • 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…

    

    LinkSwarm for June 19, 2020

    Friday, June 19th, 2020

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! We start off with two pieces I meant to include in this piece, but sorted the links to the wrong topic…

  • You know who else doesn’t want to defund police? George Floyd’s brother.
  • Indeed, black people oppose defunding the police by a 20 point margin.
  • A map of all the places the Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots damaged in Minneapolis. “On Wednesday, the city reported that no fewer than 700 buildings were damaged, burned, or destroyed in the riots. It also released a map showing just how widespread the looting, vandalism, and arson spread.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • So what did it take to turn spineless lefty Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler into a law-and-order guy? Trying to create an “autonomous zone” on his own street. “By 1 a.m., elaborate barricades had been erected. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, police moved into the area, declaring it an unlawful assembly. Portland Police estimated about 50 people were in the area when they dispersed the autonomous zone.”
  • Trump is winning the Antifa War:

    It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.

    That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.

    The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.

    Let’s understand the strategic scenario. The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.

    Elections are usually information operations. They attempt to build a narrative and play on perceptions and cause the target to take the action that will lead to victory. That is, get the target (the electorate) vote for the candidate the info operator wants elected.

    Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations?

    This still an information operation, not a kinetic one.

    They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win. Their tactics are designed to create that impression and crush our morale. These include the 24/7 media hype, the outright media lies, the movie stars with their dumb PSAs, the staged statue attacks, the corporate solidarity proclamations, the social media cancellations, and the craven kneeling by people who are supposed to stand up for us. But another tactic, familiar to any student of insurgencies, is to provoke an overreaction by those in power in order to undermine its moral authority. They want is to make us (including the president) think this is a kinetic operation, and get our side to make fundamental strategic errors by failing to recognize the true nature of the threat. They hope that such a mismatch between perception and reality will then lead to gravely damaging blunders. One of those would be Trump succumbing to his legit frustration and sending in a bunch of federal troops to crack skulls in Seattle.

    Defining this insurgency as a kinetic operation supports the leftists’ information operation goal of making Americans perceive the situation as out of control, of there being chaos, and of making the election of Grandpa Badfinger being the only thing that will resolve the situation. But there is no kinetic situation to resolve – at least none that is strategically significant in a kinetic sense. Despite the hype, the protests may have involved a peak of 2 million people across the country – out of 330 million. That’s nothing kinetically; it’s significant informationally because it is pushed by so many cultural influencers. The scurvy scumbags of Antifa hold essentially no ground except the turf they are physically standing on at the moment, and that is minuscule. Even the hilarious Road Warrior Republic of Seattle is not even a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of US territory. It’s significant only in the context of an information operation.

    Many of us cons are furious that Trump is “doing nothing.” This is the wrong thing to think. Trump is only doing nothing if this is a kinetic operation; because this is an information operation, not going kinetic (sending in the troops) is doing something. And in fact, Trump is employing the law enforcement component of his kinetic assets by having the feds wait and arrest Antifa types after the protests end, and hitting them with hardcore federal rioting-related charges. Previously, they would get ticketed and released; now, looking at a five-to-ten stretch, the lawyers their daddies hired to get these sunshine anarchists out of their beefs are going to be advising them to roll over so they can start back up at Cornell in September and not at Leavenworth.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Who benefits from American disorder:

    Who benefits then from our national nervous breakdown that never seems to end?

    It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.

    And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.

    They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.

    Call it China Envy.

    The Chinese Communist Party has, over the years, found a way to regulate their society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.

    No wonder our elites are jealous.

    People call ours “globalists” but they’re not really global. They’re selectively global, but actually just greedy and power-hungry, like the ChiComs.

    Whether planned or not, or partially planned, the current confluence of catastrophes has offered them an opportunity to advance their cause against their natural adversary, Mr. Trump.

    In macro, that is the landscape of election 2020—the globalist elites represented, for the moment anyway, by Joe Biden versus the American people, represented by Donald Trump.

    Many of those American people, heavily influenced by the media and repelled by the president’s rhetoric, do not realize that he is representing them, but he is. Ignorant, often willfully, they oppose him tooth and nail.

    An equal number, or possibly larger, as the one million plus requesting tickets to his Tulsa rally indicates, supports Mr. Trump.

    We are in the midst of a Battle Royale for the soul of our nation, whether it remains more or less the democratic republic the Founders envisioned or becomes an Americanized version of what has been evolved by the CCP.

    If the latter, ironically, then such groups as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa will be kicked to the curb once victory has been achieved and secured.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Business Class vs. First Class:

    It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.

    George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.

    Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.

    Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.

  • The political logic of President Donald Trump’s executive order on policing:
    • Tie his opponents to the worst excesses of anti-police activism in major cities, all of which are controlled by Democrats.
    • Ensure that Trump’s support for law and order is coupled with sensitivity and practical measures to limit excess force.
    • Adopt shared ideas for police reform, make them his own, and leave Democrats backing only more controversial ones.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instpundit.)

  • “Police, Fire Reportedly Refused to Respond to Crime in Progress in Seattle’s Breakaway CHOP.” “This is where ‘defund the police’ will lead not just in Seattle, but wherever it’s thoughtlessly implemented. Probably not all the way to the segregationist, secessionist CHOP, but to crime-ridden streets into which police and fire are more circumspect about intervening.”
  • An overdraft of white guilt will result in a Trump landslide in November:

    these riots and their associated melodrama might most accurately be called the Nov. 3 riots. It’s the prospect of the election, especially the possibility that President Donald Trump will be reelected, which provides the fuel for the current hysteria.

    But Simon is right. A solid majority of voters are disgusted by what they see. There is a large overdraft on the country’s budget of white guilt. Expect a foreclosure on the account Nov. 3. Yes, yes, the situation is fluid and a week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But a biopsy of the body politic in mid-June 2020 doesn’t bode well for the old man in the basement or scriptwriters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

    The longer this madness continues, the more likely it is that the president will enjoy a victory of historic proportions.

  • China kills 20 Indian troops in border fighting.
  • In light of that, India is looking to reduce imports from China.
  • Another caveat about all those “Oh my God, Wuhan coronavirus cases are spiking in Florida,” etc. stories, take a look at these statistics. Assuming they’re accurate (a big assumption), new cases are going up (not spiking per se), but deaths are going down. It really looks like cases aren’t spiking, we’re just detecting milder and milder cases of it thanks to widespread testing.
  • Enjoy a list of the latest forbidden thoughtcrimes.
  • “Vermont School Principal Placed on Leave for Criticism of Black Lives Matter.” Thou Shalt Not Question The Holy Black Lives Matter.
  • How does burning down a Wendy’s help anyone’s lives?
  • Instead of #BlackLivesMatters, how about actually defending black lives? “National African American Gun Association (NAAGA) Membership Grows as Members Purchase Ammo in Record Numbers.” Good. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • All the statues that #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa have vandalized in the latest spree. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • They even came for The Great Emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln. Well of course they did. He’s a Republican.
  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott caves to big city mayors on mandatory masks.
  • Good news in a sea of bad: Austin Police Chief Brian Manley is not getting the axe. Finally, a scalp the radical left didn’t take.
  • Antifa members arrested in Austin for looting. “Lisa Hogan, Samuel Miller, and Skye Elder were arrested last week and charged with various state jail felonies after they smashed into a boarded-up Target, destroyed and ripped out surveillance cameras, and looted the store, stealing and damaging over $20,000 in property.” The mugshot:

    Exactly the sort of Antifa winners you would expect to loot a Target

  • Chuck-E-Cheese files for bankruptcy. When they had to make it on the quality of their food, they were doomed…
  • Also filing for bankruptcy: 24 Hour Fitness. Hard to make a living when the government outlaws your business model. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Who had Mexican gulf pirates on their 2020 bingo card?
  • ESPN hits ratings low. “Sports Journalist Blames ‘Wokecenter On Steroids’ Not Coronavirus.”
  • A timeline of Wuhan coronavirus hypocrisy.
  • Whoa:

  • Comandante Zero, RIP.
  • Duck walks into pub, downs pint, fights dog.
  • “Aunt Jemima to be replaced by edgier and cooler Ant Eefa.”
  • “New Program Helps People Of Color Adopt A White Liberal To Speak On Their Behalf.”
  • “Democrats Clarify That Black Lives Will Only Matter Until November.”
  • “Strong Link Found Between Watching Soccer, Being Incredibly Bored.”
  • Hungry?

  • LinkSwarm for June 15, 2018

    Friday, June 15th, 2018

    Everyone’s talking about the the Inspector General Report on the Hillary Clinton email probe, which I’ve not only not been able to read, I haven’t even properly skimmed the summaries yet. But I was already planning to do a Clinton Corruption Update next week, so I’ll try to grapple with it then.

  • President Donald Trump to Speaker Paul Ryan: No, I’m not signing your stupid illegal alien amnesty bill. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • 50 Media Mistakes in the Trump Era. Just 50? Here’s a taste: “June 4, 2017: NBC News reported in a Tweet that Russian President Vladimir Putin told TV host Megan Kelly that he had compromising information about Trump. Actually, Putin said the opposite: that he did not have compromising information on Trump.”
  • Samantha Bee: the funniest thing since feeding your arm into a wood chipper:

    Samantha Bee has never to my knowledge said anything that is funny. Her business is the sort of thing that would be of keen interest to those monkeys in the Duke study: the ritual raising and lowering of status — which, as Tyler Cowen and Arnold Kling and others have argued, is what politics is mostly about. The same holds true for media criticism, which is of course only another form of politics. Professor Cowen: “I have a simple hypothesis. No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status. . . . The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. . . . Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered.”

    Samantha Bee does not sell humor or satire: She sells status adjustment. She got her start on The Daily Show, which of course is nothing more than an extended, tedious, witless exercise in concentrated status-lowering: hence all that chest-pounding excitement every time Jon Stewart destroyed! somebody or another, which is precisely the sort of thing that gets the ol’ chimp juices flowing.

    Calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless c***” on television is a win-win for Bee et al.: One possibility is that Ivanka Trump offers no response, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to endure outrageous insults by a relative nobody on TBS; the second possibility is that she responds, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to condescend to respond to the outrageous insults of a relative nobody on TBS. The proverb holds that the problem with wrestling a pig is that you both get dirty but only the pig enjoys it. Samantha Bee is that pig.

  • Nancy Pelosi is still dragging down Democrats. The gift that keeps giving!
  • How the great liberal freakout is dooming Democrats:

    Since Trump’s election victory in 2016, the left has lost their goddamn minds. The left has become a national freakout movement and they think that his election legitimizes their complete childish and vulgar meltdown on the national stage. On their side, there is no one telling them that they’ve gone too far- they will simply ramp up the violence all the way to the fall. There’s no one to stop their post-election temper tantrum.

    Let’s be honest, though. This didn’t happen overnight. The left has absolved itself from any cultural responsibility the moment they gave Bill Clinton a pass for raping people. And then used cultural outlets like The Daily Show to mock everyone who isn’t on their side and delegitimize civil discourse.

    Come the mid-term elections, the more crass and racist stunts that they pull (and get away with), the more people are going to drift into the right-of-center Trump camp. The Democrats were already demographically in trouble with 2018, but the further they push the cultural envelope with mean and childish antics (let alone actual political violence) they are going to get a cultural backlash that makes 1968 look like child’s play.

    And what really is bad news for the left is that they’re already at peak jerk levels. What the heck will they do for an encore leading up to November?

  • Why Democrats keep hearing racist “dog whistles” that aren’t there.

    If you had been making predictions based on these different movies, Movie 1, predicted that President Trump would not be popular with Israel, and he wouldn’t take the bold step of moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. But both of those outcomes are compatible with Movie 2.

    Movie 1 would have predicted there is no way President Trump would grant a posthumous pardon of African-American boxer Jack Johnson because it wouldn’t fit the racist dog whistle script. But Movie 2 is compatible with the pardon. Same with the pardon of Alice Johnson.

    Movie 1 would have predicted that President Trump would underplay the fact that black unemployment reached its best level in the history of America. That’s the sort of accomplishment that would make his racist supporters stop hearing the secret racist dog whistle. It doesn’t fit. But President Trump’s frequent highlighting of gains for African-American citizens fits Movie 2 perfectly.

    I realize no one reading this post will change movies because of it. My only point today is that mainstream Trump supporters are not knowingly supporting someone they believe to be a racist. It only looks that way to the folks trapped in Movie 1.

  • Eight members of Oxford child sex gang sentenced.

    Assad Hussain, 37, was handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 12 years for multiple counts of rape and indecent assault.

    Moinul Islam, 42, got 15 years and nine months for rape, indecent assault and supplying class B and class C drugs.

    Haji Khan, 38, got 10 years for conspiracy to rape. Raheem Ahmed, 41, got 12 years for indecent assault and false imprisonment.

    Kamran Khan, 36, got eight years for false imprisonment and indecent assault. Kameer Iqbal, 39, got 12 years for multiple rapes.

    Alladitta Yousaf, 48, got seven and half years for indecent assault. Khalid Hussain, 38, got 12 years for indecent assault and rape.

    Hmm. I wonder what their religious and/or ethnic background was? It’s an insoluble mystery…

  • Australian celebrity paedophile ring revealed.”

    Rozanna and Kate Lilley, the daughters of playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett, say they were forced into sex aged 15 by men including the late Bob Ellis and Martin Sharp, The Australian reports.

    Sharp, Australia’s foremost pop artist, designed record covers and posters for Bob Dylan, Donovan and Eric Clapton and wrote songs for Clapton’s band, Cream.

    Ellis was a political commentator, write and film maker who penned 22 television and screenplays.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • And speaking of statutory rape, here’s the inside story of the night Roman Polanski raped a child. Includes details of just how he set about deliberately seducing a girl he knew went to middle school.
  • Mueller’s indictments not only don’t indicate Russian collusion on part of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, they actually indicate the opposite, says notorious right-wing shills at…The Nation?
  • Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer breaks the law by hiring felons to gather signatures in Arizona.
  • Tanzania outlaws “unregistered” blogging. And of course they’re using “hate speech” as an excuse.
  • AT&T/Time Warner merger approved. Can’t think that this is a good thing, given how much of the local broadband market are government-enforced monopolies…
  • Alan Dershowitz:

    The director of the American Civil Liberties Union has now acknowledged what should have been obvious to everybody over the past several years: The ACLU is no longer a neutral defender of everyone’s civil liberties. It has morphed into a hyper-partisan, hard-left political advocacy group. The final nail in its coffin was the announcement that, for the first time in its history, the ACLU would become involved in partisan electoral politics, supporting candidates, referenda and other agenda-driven political goals.

  • Important safety tip: If you’re a popular band, never play Indonesia. Among the worst incidents: multiple cases of death, and Deep Purple’s manager being dropped down an elevator shaft. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • In Austin news, Interim Police Chief Manly is no longer interim. Dwight thinks it’s a good move.
  • In a shocking development, no one wants to pay $99 a ticket to watch high school basketball players. Reality 99, LaVar Ball 0.
  • Speaking of basketball games no one will be willing to pay $99 a ticket for, Ted Cruz will play Jimmy Kimmel a one-on-one basketball game in Houston Saturday, with the loser coughing up $5,000 to the winner’s non-political charity of choice.
  • Somebody had a really shitty day:

  • Punchy punches Dem chances: