Biden goes all Nuremberg Rally, more transexual madness, Gibson’s Bakery wins final victory, states subcontract their energy policies to crazy California, and more really stupid criminals. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
You would think that Biden’s team might have better sense than to dress his set like it’s Darth Maul’s bedroom:
That was the most demagogic, outrageous, and divisive speech I have ever seen from an American president. Joe Biden essentially declared all those who oppose him and his agenda enemies of the republic. Truly shameful. pic.twitter.com/ZcJX2BbZlt
What happens when people in the federal government are incompetent and refuse to do their job? Usually nothing. Or they get promoted. But in Florida? Governor DeSantis fires their asses.
On Friday, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he would be suspending four members of the Broward County School Board for their “incompetence, neglect of duty, and misuse of authority” at Marjory Stonemason Douglass High School.
In a press release, the governor’s office stated that Patricia Good, Donna Korn, Ann Murray and Laurie Rich Levinson had been suspended following the recommendations of the Twentieth Statewide Grand Jury. DeSantis has been particularly active in education, going as far as endorsing school board members in their races across the state, and enacting laws on curriculum transparency and parental rights.
“Even four years after the events of February 14, 2018, the final report of the Grand Jury found that a safety-related alarm that could have possibly saved lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School ‘was and is such a low priority that it remains uninstalled at multiple schools,’ and ‘students continue to be educated in unsafe, aging, decrepit, moldy buildings that were supposed to have been renovated years ago,’” the press release states.
“These are inexcusable actions by school board members who have shown a pattern of emboldening unacceptable behavior, including fraud and mismanagement, across the district,” the press release continued.
“It is my duty to suspend people from office when there is clear evidence of incompetence, neglect of duty, misfeasance or malfeasance,” said DeSantis. “The findings of the Statewide Grand Jury affirm the work of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas School Safety Commission. We are grateful to the members of the jury who have dedicated countless hours to this mission and we hope this suspension brings the Parkland community another step towards justice. This action is in the best interest of the residents and students of Broward County and all citizens of Florida.”
In their place, DeSantis has appointed Torey Alston, former Commissioner of the Broward County Board of County Commissioners and President of Indelible Solutions, Manual “Nandy” A. Serrano, member of the Florida Sports Foundation Board of Directors, Ryan Reiter, a US Marine Corps Veteran and Director of Government Relations for Kaufman Lynn Construction, and Kevin Tynan, Attorney with Richardson and Tynan, who previously served on the Broward County School Board and South Broward Hospital District, to take the suspended members’ places.
Rachel, a Brooklyn mom with a gender-dysphoric child…went undercover as a pre-teen in the chat, searching for resources for detransitioners. She found none.
Instead, she opened a “Pandora’s box” of sexually perverse content, aggressive gender re-assignment referrals, adults encouraging minors to hide their transitions from their parents, and many troubled kids in need of psychological counseling. She shared screenshots of the chat with National Review.
Rachel says she looked to the Trevor Project in desperation, “when I thought my child was going to kill herself.” The organization frequently claims that LGBT youth are more than four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. It claims to be a refuge for these people with its crisis services including TrevorLifeline, TrevorText, and TrevorChat.
Under the advice of a “highly credentialed” medical and mental-health team, Rachel and her husband decided to socially transition their child a few years ago, she told National Review. After that, her child was hospitalized three times for self-harm and suicidality, including at least one suicide attempt. In New York, due to a ban on psychotherapy, so-called gender affirmation was the only legal option they could pursue, she said.
They were at their wit’s end, until her spouse sat her down and presented her with a PowerPoint, showing statistics that people who transition are, by a huge factor, much more likely than the general public to commit suicide.
“My jaw hit the floor. I said, ‘Oh my God we’ve been lied to’,” she says.
Since then, Rachel, a lifelong Democrat and feminist, has been dedicated to exposing the child gender-transition craze, which she argues is driven by “predatory medicine” incentivized by the government.
In TrevorSpace, she got a bird’s-eye view of the progressive non-profit giant that is claiming to save young lives but is really driving them further into existential rabbit holes, depravity, and potential danger, she said.
She documented kids talking about how to buy binders, an undergarment that constricts breasts, behind their parents’ backs. “I know the way people usually do this is by ordering it to a friend’s house or something of the sort, but I don’t have anyone to do that with,” wrote a girl whose account says she’s under 18. “I have money and know where I want to get it from and all that. I just need a means of getting it.” Another user suggested she have the binder sent to a post office where she could pick it up without her parents’ knowledge. Other users were referred to eBay to purchase a packer, or an artificial appendage meant to mimic a penis.
When people sign up for TrevorSpace, they have the option of placing themselves within the age ranges of “under 18” or “18-25.” The community is open to people 13-24, according to the site. There is no system in place to confirm a person’s age, Rebecca says and National Review confirmed. She also said she noticed entries from people claiming to be over 25 too, as well as guest accounts with no age listed.
Other teens, presumably girls transitioning to boys, testified to the effectiveness of Minoxidil, an over-the-counter medication that stimulates facial hair growth. “Can I get and use Minoxidil without my parents knowing?” a girl asked.
The kids Rachel followed on TrevorSpace spanned a diverse spectrum of gender disorientation, some confident in their belief that they were the opposite sex and some just gender curious. But, as Rachel observed, they were all pointed in one direction: gender transition. In a significant number of cases, adults gave minors this validation.
Gibson’s Bakery finally wins complete victory in their case, as Ohio’s Supreme Court refused to hear Oberlin College’s appeal. “It means the Gibsons now can collect approximately $36 million.”
Another day, another high profile Kamala Harris aide leaving. “Herbie Ziskend, a senior communications adviser, announced that he is leaving Harris’s side for the West Wing, where he will be the new White House deputy communications director.”
French tax agency deploys AI to find high ranking government official who are embezzling. Ha, just kidding! They’re using it to find and tax unreported pools.
The last Luftwaffe raid against the UK happened April 21, 1945, less than two weeks before Hitler committed suicide, and some three weeks before VE Day. The planes took off from occupied Stavanger, Norway, and it didn’t work out well for the Germans…
The events of this week reveal the new standard. Like sharks to a whale carcass, our elites routinely feast upon precarious situations in other nations: The Podesta Group, Hunter Biden, and others were content to make a buck off the tensions in Ukraine along with Paul Manafort, just as the Clintons and others were happy to take tens of millions of dollars from Russian oligarchs. We all know that Manafort would be sitting in a house in Malibu right now with the same immunity deal the likes of Podesta, Biden, and the Clintons apparently possess if only he had never decided to work for Donald Trump.
Recall that the supposed original sin of the entire Russian-collusion gambit was that when approached (apparently mostly by agents of the United States government working for President Obama and friends) then-candidate Trump or his team were interested in recovering the emails that Hilary Clinton unwisely and illegally sent and then deleted from her private server so that no one could read them. There would be plenty of reasons for Americans and the U.S. government itself to seek out these emails, of course, if only to determine to what extent they threatened national security—never mind the power and wealth of the foundation engaged in international money collection that her husband ran while she was Secretary of State.
But while the supposed reasons for it change every week, the Ukraine fiasco reveals the real underlying cause of the Left’s outrageously hypocritical march towards impeachment. The ruling class is now effectively saying to President Trump: “We know that domestically we have nothing to fear from the media and the law—so how dare you ask other countries about us! You must be impeached for this crime and this crime alone—asking other countries about our wrongdoing! Only an insane or evil person would do this!”
“Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam pleads guilty to stealing $87K from youth basketball nonprofit he founded.” Hey, which political party do you think Mr. Gilliam is a member of? Let’s start scanning the article and see if we can guess. Headline? No. First paragraph? No. Second paragraph? No. Look, I’ll save you the suspense: You have to go all the way down to the eleventh paragraph to learn what you already assumed: Mr. Gilliam is a Democrat.
The whole “white nationalist” charge against President Donald Trump and his supporters was always garbage.
Saying goodbye to the extremely consequential GOP class of 1994, the first Republican House majority in 40 years, the one that ran on the Contract With America and passed welfare reform.
A very malevolent incarnation of Florida Woman: Rich Democrat wife files police report over man using a meme on Facebook. “Beth Jaffe, who is the wife of city commissioner Bryon Jaffe, felt that the meme was threatening her life. Ms. Jaffe contacted the district office of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and asked for them to investigate Van Antwerpen.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Ahem! I said I can’t possibly imagine how Sports Illustrated might have alienated their core—
The Guardian: “Women’s magazines are more progressive than ever – and they’re all closing down.” There’s this thing called “causality.” Maybe publishers should look into it while they still can… (Hat tip: Aceof Spades HQ.)
The real cause of these abuses is failure of university trustees to meet their fiduciary obligations, which in the case of public schools is to taxpayers. Weak boards allow university administrators to limit oversight of admissions. The administrators are allowed to see admissions criteria, but not the trustees who are supposed to be in charge. Board members who want admission favors for their own children or their friends go along, while others turn their heads to avoid the wrath of powerful alumni and politicians who benefit from the workarounds.
I witnessed this while serving as a member of the University of Texas System Board of Regents. My actions to expose the admissions scandal at UT-Austin, our flagship campus, resulted in impeachment hearings against me by the state legislature and even efforts to convince a grand jury to indict me. While neither worked, the university continues to hide all of the documents that would have exposed the scandal. Even the FBI knows only a fraction of the real corruption.
Details of the larger problem at the Austin campus were uncovered in a private investigation commissioned by our then-Chancellor and a minority of Board members. The problem is, our university president teamed up with a new Chancellor and the state’s most powerful elected officials to keep the findings sealed. The un-redacted report, which explains how hundreds of unqualified students manage to occupy spots in UT programs—including our law school—is locked in a courtroom after my lawsuit to make it public was challenged by the university. Every one of those students owes his or her presence on campus to a politician who controls state spending at the university, or to a well-connected donor or faculty member.
Iran’s official press has recently bragged about its military prowess when downing a US drone worth about $130 million, touting it as a nasty black eye for the world’s military superpower.
But a recent Reuters report said Iran’s oil exports are down to a scant 300,000 barrels per day. In April 2018, before Trump exited the Iran deal, which provided the country with sanctions relief in exchange for its commitment to not build nuclear weapons or their key components, Iran was exporting 2.5 million barrels a day.
At today’s rate per barrel, the Trump-induced decline in exports has probably cost Iran $120 million a day from oil alone — almost the cost of the US’s pricey drone.
For the US, losing a drone is costly and destabilizing [?-LP] but not really a big deal for a country with a $718 billion annual defense budget. In Iran, the currency has crashed, and the country has become gripped by protests and strikes. And it has felt a crackdown on the financial freedom for all of its citizens.
Martin Peretz reflects on the two towering achievements brought about by the Oslo Accords since 1993, namely “jack” and “squat”:
For years even after the failure of Oslo and of the 2000 summit at Camp David, D.C. notables and even some prominent Zionists had photos with Arafat displayed on their credenzas.
That sociology stuck in my mind. It testified to the tenaciousness in certain left-liberal circles of an idealizing impulse—one that altered the judgments of normally lucid people, leading them to make heroes of figures like Arafat who didn’t fit the bill. They justified this impulse with the old progressive belief in rational political improvement—a respectable belief when it’s applied in context, a misleading one when the context is altered to fit the wish. Their willed naiveté struck me, and not just on Oslo, as the place where effective progressivism goes to die.
Snip.
The counterpoint to this accommodation of Iran was the marginalization of Israel—the cutting-down-by-proxy of the country to what Obama saw as its physical and psychological size. True, it wasn’t a financial marginalization—as his defenders have said ad nauseam, Obama allowed Israel to buy more weapons than any other president before him. But by centering his policy on compromising with Iran, the one major Mideast power that had yet to reach some détente with Israel, and allowing Israel’s other enemy Assad to murder unimpeded, Obama shifted the strategic ground under Israel’s feet. Rhetorically, he did even more: He used the president’s bully pulpit to dramatically change the terms on which conversations about Israel would be conducted among Democrats and the world.
You can draw a line from his tepid 2009 justification of Israel to the speech he sent his towering shikying’l John Kerry to give to the United Nations in 2016: a refusal to block a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for its support of right-wing settlements in the West Bank. A lot of people—myself included—oppose some of the outlier settlements, without seeing them as a major cause of the current impasse. But Kerry’s speech made them equal—or greater than equal—problems to the Palestinian leadership’s endemic corruption, its weakness in the face of Hamas and refusal to accept peace offers made by four Israeli prime ministers from 1993 to 2009. (Actually, the Palestinians haven’t made a territorial compromise in 52 years—that is long enough for the Israelis to grow impatient.) Kerry’s speech, itself an instance of sacrificing the reality to the ideal through the principle of making Israeli and Palestinian histories equivalent, shifted the terms of the debate.
That rhetorical shift, coupled with Obama’s highly publicized, ultimately corrosive enmity towards Bibi Netanyahu—a partisan leader with a surer grasp of regional realities than the American president had—helped create the Democrats’ current political condition, which is not just counterproductively idealizing but supportive of the party’s most destructive foreign policy impulses. A party that defines itself by the chances it gives to marginalized groups always has, on its edges, radicals pushing in toward the center who define their politics by the principle of marginalization: the boiled-down Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. When the center of the party shows weakness, the radicals naturally move in, and that’s what Obama’s rationalists allowed them to do: By shifting the party from its center and creating a rhetoric of false equivalence, they gave the hard leftists an opportunity they were only too happy to take.
In essence, the EU’s freedom of movement guarantees an absence of barriers for anyone looking for a job within the 28 countries and makes discrimination based on nationality in work or employment illegal. For many of the EU’s new entrants in the East—including Poland, Hungary and Romania—a future where capital and people could move more freely between themselves and France, the UK, or Germany looked like a fast-track to the top-tier of developed nations. But somewhat ironically, it has only accelerated the departure of those who are crucial to getting there.
In the last century, Eastern Europe has suffered the most dramatic population decline in recent history. According to one study, between 2013 and 2016, approximately 230,000 people left Croatia—a country with a population of only four million—for the 11 “core EU countries” of Western Europe. In the United States, this would be the equivalent of a city the size of Chicago leaving every year. This mass exodus of people is not lost on the country’s politicians; last year the Croatian President called the freedom of movement the “biggest drawback” of the EU. “Mobility is good, as long as people come back. But Croatia is now recording strong negative demographic trends,” she said during a visit to Brussels.
Since Latvia joined the EU, it has lost one-fifth of its population. Romania, a country that according to one organisation is due to see the most drastic population decline, has seen over three million leave the country since it joined the EU in 2007. It lost half of its doctors between 2009 and 2015, the vast majority to better-paid employ in the richer hospitals and surgeries of Western Europe, leaving its health service poorly staffed and on the brink of collapse. High mortality (including infant mortality) and low birthrates are only accelerating the decline.
Large-scale migration of healthcare workers from East to West has been an uncomfortable reality for over a decade, and the young needn’t travel long distances to drastically increase their standard of living. One Estonian doctor who graduated from medical school in 2001 was able to quadruple his salary by moving only 200 kilometres to Finland. In 2018, Denmark enjoyed the EU’s highest average gross annual pay at nine times that of the continent’s lowest in Bulgaria. Who can blame those who head for the greener pastures on the other side?
It’s not just highly skilled labor. When I visited London, it seemed that at least half the workers in restaurants and hotels were from eastern Europe.
Dwight found an amazing story of corruption in the Honolulu DS’s office. (One guess as to which party controls Hawaii.) The list of sleazy crimes Katherine Kealoha engaged in is staggering.
Prosecutors alleged that Shih, alongside co-defendant Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California, conspired to gain access to a sensitive system belonging to an unnamed US firm which manufactured semiconductor chips and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs).
The victim company’s PC systems were accessed fraudulently after Mai posed as a potential customer, giving Shih the opportunity to obtain custom processors. While the firm in question believed the chips would only be used in the United States, Shih transferred the products to the Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), a Chinese firm building an MMIC manufacturing plant.
Last time I checked, finding electrical engineers with experience designing RF circuits for mixed signal ICs is hard. I bet finding those that can design MMICs is even harder…
Whenever I read a court opinion describing a campus sexual-assault proceeding, I routinely find myself shocked at the staggering unfairness and ridiculous bias of campus kangaroo courts. Driven by the need to find more men guilty — and rationalized by a #BelieveWomen ideology — campus administrators have systematically discarded every fundamental notion of due process in American law.
Across the nation, courts on the right and on the left are saying no. They’re blocking biased sexual-assault adjudications, protecting basic fairness, and restoring a degree of sanity to colleges’ procedures. On Friday it was the turn of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to protect the Fourteenth Amendment, and an all-woman panel, led by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, established a precedent that could be used against woke college administrators nationwide.
The facts of the case are extraordinary. After a female college student accused her ex-boyfriend of groping her in her sleep, Purdue University conducted an investigation and adjudication so amateurish and biased that it’s frankly difficult to imagine that human adults could believe it was fair or adequate. The plaintiff (John Doe) alleged that he was “not provided with any of the evidence on which decisionmakers relied in determining his guilt and punishment,” his ex-girlfriend didn’t even appear before the hearing committee, he had “no opportunity to cross-examine” his accuser, the committee found his accuser credible even though it did not talk to her in person, the accuser did not even write her own statement or provide a sworn allegation, and the committee did not allow the plaintiff “to present any evidence, including witnesses.”
After that farce of a process, Purdue found the student guilty and suspended him for a year. The suspension meant the automatic loss of the student’s Navy ROTC scholarship and expulsion from the ROTC program. Incredibly, the lower court dismissed the student’s claims. He appealed to the Seventh Circuit, and a unanimous panel resurrected his lawsuit.
The conclusion is that campuses are are blaming men as a class and this is a clear violation of Title IX. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“I have never met antisemitism in Britain…until now.”
I generally come to Britain from my home in Portugal whenever a new work of mine is released to give talks at bookshops, libraries and literary festivals. My publisher’s attempts to interest event organisers in me aren’t always successful, of course. But this year, for the first time, I have been turned down for being Jewish. A little context. Peter Owen Publishers launched my new novel, The Gospel According to Lazarus, in mid-April. An old friend of mine who is a part-time book publicist began trying to set up events for me three months earlier.
In early March, he called and confessed – in a distressed tone I’d never heard before – that he had just been turned down by two cultural organisations that had previously shown enthusiasm for hosting an event with me. “They asked me if you were Jewish, and the moment I said you were, they lost all interest,” he said. “They even stopped replying to my emails and returning my phone messages.”
Snip.
Has the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement played a role in deepening this atmosphere of fear? That’s what my friends in the UK tell me. They also speak bitterly of the unwillingness of the Labour party to take a firm stand against antisemitic discourse. If cultural organisations are afraid of hosting events for Jewish writers, then Britain has taken a big step backwards.
Let’s not get sidetracked with references to Israel. Although it’s perfectly legitimate for those who oppose Netanyahu’s policies to protest against them, I have no connection with Israel. I have neither investments nor family there. And my most well-known books take place in Portugal and Poland. It’s true my new novel is set in the Holy Land, but it takes place 2,000 years before the foundation of the state of Israel.
Of course, that piece is from that notorious bastion of right-wing belief, The Guardian…
* Joe Biden * Immigrant holding cells at the border * The Betsy Ross flag * Using the OK sign
Using the objective criteria the media has outlined for us, we must come to the reluctant conclusion that @BarackObama is, by the evidence presented, a white supremacist.
Welcome to the Friday before Thanksgiving! I hope you have your family gathering, gluttony and/or shopping plans all laid out. I tend to avoid Black Friday sales unless I happen to be near a used bookstore. (And speaking of booksales, I’ll be putting out a new Lame Excuse Books catalog after Thanksgiving, so drop me a line if you’re interested.)
Florida: DeSantis wins, Scott leads Nelson in senate race, where it goes to a hand recount. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Meanwhile, both Broward and Palm Beach counties, where most of the Democrat shenanigans occurred, missed the machine recount deadlines, so the initial tallies stood.
In all the bad recount news, here’s one bit of good news: Utah incumbent Republican congresswoman Mia Love is now expected to win reelection after recounts. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
A bit more analysis of the midterms:
Interestingly, the largest/highest profile misses were almost all in races where the Republican beat the polls:
– IN-Sen: polls D+2; actual R+8 – OH-Gov: polls D+3; actual R+4 – SD-Gov: polls D+3; actual R+3 – TN-Sen: polls R+5; actual R+11 – IA-Gov: polls D+2; actual R+3
Over 50 million Chinese apartments are empty. (Caveat: Some sort of malware on ZeroHedge is trying to do a drive-by DMS install on that page. They should look into that…)
Austin’s sick leave ordinance was just struck down by the 3rd Court of Appeals. “The requirement violates the Texas Constitution because it is pre-empted by the Texas Minimum Wage Act.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Who frontman Roger Daltry “detests Jeremy Corbyn (whom he, not without cause, calls a “communist”), supports Brexit, and says of the Labour party, ‘It pains me to say it, but in my life a Labour government comes in with incredible optimism and leaves the country in the sh*t.'”
Roy Clark, RIP. To TV viewers, he was that guy on Hee-Haw. To fellow guitarists he was a legend. Here’s a nice rendition of his signature piece:
William Goldman, RIP. The Princess Bride is a swell novel, and he penned more than his share of great Hollywood movies.
If you’re going illegally carry a concealed gun without a permit, maybe you shouldn’t make yourself look like The Joker. And yes, it’s exactly the state you think it is. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Jeff Sessions resigns as Attorney General, replaced on at least an interim basis by his chief of staff Matthew G. Whitaker. Very early on in the Trump Administration, I decided that there were two things I wasn’t going to pay much attention to: 1. Reports of dysfunction or “chaos” among White House staffers, and 2. Trump tweets slamming various people. (See any of my previous posts on Trump persuasion techniques.) I have no particular insight into intra-White House squabbles, and reporting on this issue is so bad or overblown that there’s too much noise for me bother to extract signal from. So go elsewhere for how Sessions fits into the “Deep State vs. Trump” narrative. (Over at Powerline, they put up both anti-Sessions and pro-Sessions pieces.)
Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer wants House Democrats to impeach Trump. I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly backfire on them…
Nine individuals were arrested Thursday for their alleged roles in a 2017 voter fraud scheme involving the municipal election in a Texas border town.
These arrests were part of an ongoing investigation into a coordinated effort by political workers to recruit people who would fraudulently claim residential addresses so they could vote in specific races and influence the results of the Edinburg city election held last year, according to information provided by the Office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“Illegal voting, particularly an organized illegal voting scheme orchestrated by political operatives, is an affront to democracy and results in corruption at the highest level,” said Paxton in a prepared statement.
“Each illegal vote silences the voice of a law-abiding registered voter,” added Paxton. “My office will continue to do everything in its power to uncover illegal voting schemes and bring to justice those who try to manipulate the outcome of elections in Texas.”
The nine Hidalgo County residents arrested were Guadalupe Sanchez Garza, Jerry Gonzalez, Jr., Araceli Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, Cynthia Tamez, and Ruby Tamez. Online jail records show bond was set at $20,000 for both Garza and Ruby Tamez. A $10,000 bond was set for Gonzalez, Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, and Cynthia Tamez. Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez’s bail was set at $1,000.
