Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on, Hunter Biden’s bestie’s going to the big house, a massive voting problem (and possible fraud) winds up in court in Harris County, and a tiny bits on both Amazon and anime.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Not in this LinkSwarm: links on the Zaporizhzhia Ukrainian nuclear reactor, since I’m not sure I can trust any of the information sent out by either side.
It is not foreordained that Russia wins and Ukraine loses. Winning a war is not merely an exercise in numbers or technology. As General George S. Patton observed, “Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.”
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to quickly topple the Ukrainian government and kill President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the war has widened into a contest involving almost the entire border region shared by the combatants along with the stretch of border between Belarus and Kyiv some 80 miles to the north of Ukraine’s capital city.
Much media attention has been given to Russia’s advances along the Sea of Azov in the south and on the approach to Ukraine’s third-largest city, Odessa, on the shores of the Black Sea as well as the remarkable attack that captured Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia. These Russian successes are discouraging for Ukrainian defenders but, in the grand contest, they matter far less than the battle for Kyiv.
Snip.
There are fascinating signs coming out of what may be a decisive battle to the northwest of Kyiv on the long, winding, secondary road from Chernobyl. This is the road where a 40-mile-long column of Russian vehicles was spotted by satellite. Most of the vehicles are supply trucks. They would be carrying fuel, ammunition, and food for the Russian forces that have advanced to the very outskirts of Kyiv itself but have seemingly been stalled for several days.
Snip.
Out of this come three reports that, if true, suggest the beginnings of a devastating reversal for Russian forces operating northwest of Kyiv.
First, reports today in multiple outlets that Russian Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky was killed in combat by a sniper. Sukhovetsky, 47, was an elite Russian Spetsnaz commando and veteran of Russia’s war in Syria. The commander of the Russian 7th Airborne Division, he was assigned the mission of leading the Russian thrust from Belarus to Kyiv. Men like Sukhovetsky have an outsized presence on the battlefield. They’re inspirational. Their personal leadership at the point of the spear often means the difference between victory and defeat during the fast-paced controlled violence of war. His loss would be devastating to his men and to the organizational momentum of the forces he commanded.
That Sukhovetsky was killed by a sniper suggests that he was personally trying to regain the initiative against Ukrainian forces who had fought him to a standstill.
The second report of merit is the heavy damage sustained in the town of Irpin on the northwest border of Kyiv’s city limits. The damage to this city suggests a major battle — an effort by the Russians to breakthrough. They didn’t.
The final piece of the puzzle is the Battle of Bucha. Ukrainian forces claimed the recapture of Bucha hours after the devastation visited on Irpin. The timing is important here. The Russians tried and failed to take Irpin and then the Ukrainians retook Bucha two miles to the northwest of Irpin.
The roughly 80-mile route from the Belarus-Ukraine border from the Chernobyl salient to Kyiv on the western side of the Dnieper River runs over a secondary asphalt road. This road frequently crosses rivers, runs through small villages, or is bordered on both sides by the eastern extent of the mighty Pripyat Marsh — the geographical feature which defines the border between Ukraine and Belarus.
The road is not able to support a large military force, even if unopposed in an exercise, especially during the spring and fall months during a time the locals call “Rasputitsa” — the mud season. Unfortunately for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military commanders, Ukrainian soil never froze solid this winter, so the fall Rasputitsa is still a factor.
This is why there have been so many photos coming out from the conflict that show all manner of Russian military vehicles bogged down in the mud. As soon as a vehicle on a narrow road becomes disabled or is destroyed in combat, or as the vehicles maneuver off-road in response to combat, they risk becoming mired. Even if they don’t get stuck in the mud, they end up consuming far more fuel that must be delivered to them than they would were the ground frozen solid.
Thus, that 40-mile-long column of “tanks” is more likely mostly trucks carrying fuel, ammunition, and food to the advanced forces of the Russian 20th Combined Arms Army on the outskirts of Kyiv. That this column hasn’t apparently moved much may mean that the Russian forces just north of Kyiv are running low on basic supplies.
This greatly increases the importance for the Russian army to achieve success to the east of Kyiv where the road network is far more developed and, if the terrain is captured and secured, capable of bringing in the volume of supplies needed to properly surround Kyiv and place it under siege.
In the meantime, the forces near Kyiv may be vulnerable to a Ukrainian counterattack. While some of the Russian conscript soldiers and even the veteran contract troops may be more likely to surrender due to low morale exacerbated by a lack of food and fuel.
In about three weeks, we’ve seen a Vladimir who was “off” go from chess to raising on a busted flush in something that is well beyond “off.” The nuclear escalation is not exactly unexpected, at least if you know a bit about the Soviet playbook for such things. What matters is if he still has full control, and/or the extent to which Dead Hand has been brought online. All I will say is that if his ability to give certain orders has been unofficially curtailed, it would not be the first time. If it hasn’t, it is not a good idea to poke the crazy man with the button via official actions.
And there are a lot of official actions out there that are not going to help in regards the deteriorating man. Among others is Switzerland deciding that they are neutral, but not that neutral. Add to it firm allies who have told him no, even after he just helped them out literally a few weeks ago… Even Xi has said no on some fronts. None of this is likely to slow down the deterioration. Or provide enough of a reality check to get through to him as he rages in his bunker with his captive oligarchs.
And while we are at it, let’s look at the attack itself and the absolute fuck up that it, and subsequent actions by STAVKA (call it what it is), truly are. It was billed as a demonstration of the new Russian way of war, their version of “Shock and Awe.” Problem is, S&A or any other form of blitz is heavily dependent upon superior logistics, something the Soviets nor the Russians have ever had. You need massive amounts of ammo, fuel, parts, and replacement troops to pull it off. Replacement troops not only because of losses, but the need to detail out troops to hold key points as you go. It also requires highly trained troops who know land nav inside and out.
From what I am learning, the order went out to make this happen. The actual order, however, may not have even approached what would be given for a small-unit special ops strike. Contingency plans? Decap. No? Then try for decap again. Decap. Decap. Try it again damnit! There are differing reports on the number of Wagner troops killed or captured, but a good number were sent in on assassination missions. They were not alone. Problem was, they were all alone as the original push down got bogged down; the efforts to do airmobile and airborne ops were shot down (literally in some cases); and, the public is now on high alert to the saboteurs and assassins roaming major cities trying to mark targets, etc. Don’t expect rules of war for those caught marking civilian buildings for strikes. For now, expect a return to grinding Soviet bombardment, civilian casualties be damned.
The fact is, Vladimir has already lost simply because he didn’t win. He is committed, and is committing Russia and all its people, to a long, grinding, bloody slog that is going to have severe economic impacts. Just replacing ammunition, gear, people, is going to have a severe impact. Add to it the growing official and unofficial sanctions? The Russian people are going to feel this one, in ways they never have before. Current Vladimir does not care. He’s lost to that. He has no way to go in and control the country, or even the parts he’s tried so desperately to annex. Even those are likely to slip from him given the current state of “uppitiness” on the part of the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainians have not won. At best they have pushed things into a long grind with some chance of a stalemate. Yet, by doing this they have won. They have prevented the cheap and easy victory on which Vladimir counted. They have forced him into committing military and economic resources he does not have over the long term. Heck, even the short term. Russia’s economy was already teetering, current operations and responses are going to crater it unless something major happens. I’ve lived through a couple of power struggles in the Kremlin; under these circumstances, I hope we all do live through what is to come. A quick clean change of leadership seems unlikely given the Keystone gang we’ve seen so far, but it may be our best hope.
All we can do is wait and see what happens. While current circumstances are not new or unique on many levels, I will note that in my lifetime I’ve never seen a situation like this where key leadership was this insecure. Xi is in some ways hanging by a thread, and knows his enemies in the CCP are looking for any excuse to bring him down. Vladimir we’ve discussed. The Europeans, particularly the Germans? They are not secure either, especially since the Green policies have caused them to firmly place their mouth around Putin’s, er, finger, in regards energy. To see them decide to fund their own military, back off on the idiocy of green (maybe), and truly support the Ukraine strikes more as a desperation move than a rational push. Johnson is a non-entity right now, and not to be taken seriously. Our own dementia patient? Hell, he’s just waiting for his ice cream and to be allowed to go back upstairs to watch Matlock. Those behind him, however, are desperate beyond belief. Not one major stable leader anywhere in the world. That’s a new one and I thought I had about seen it all after watching the Soviets/Russians for more than 40 years now.
No NATO no-fly zone. Good. I very much want to see Putin defeated, but clearly NATO can’t be expected to respond to an attack on a non-member country, and that would be a dangerous escalation.
“More than a year” for $60 million in fraud? Seems a little lite.
The defendant, Devon Archer, was sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison by Manhattan Judge Ronnie Abrams, who said the crime was “too serious” to let him just walk.
“There’s no dispute about the harm caused to real people,” Abrams said, noting that the defrauded tribe, the Oglala Sioux, is one of the poorest in the nation.
Archer will also have to pay more than $15 million in forfeiture by himself and more than $43 million in restitution with his co-defendants in the case.
The convicted fraudster has maintained his innocence and intends to appeal the conviction and sentence, his attorney, Matthew Schwartz, said in court Monday.
In brief statements to Abrams just before Archer was sentenced, he and Schwartz claimed he was taken advantage of by corrupt businessmen who wanted to use him in the scheme.
“He came under the influence of a person he trusted too much and didn’t ask enough questions,” Schwartz said.
“Trusted too much.” Yeah, he trusted he wouldn’t get caught because of his powerful friends.
What are the odds this was the only crooked deal Archer had his fingers into? I’d say pretty close to zero.
The Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms.
This disaster for their party will come about not just because of the Afghanistan debacle, an appeased Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the southern border, the supply chain mess, or their support for critical race theory demagoguery.
The culprit for the political wipeout will be out-of-control inflation—and for several reasons.
First, the Biden Administration is in such denial of inflation that it sounds to Americans simply callous and indifferent to the misery it has unleashed.
Biden officials have scoffed at price spikes as “transitory.” Or they have preposterously claimed spiraling costs are a concern only to the elite. They blame the Ukraine crisis. Or they fault the out-of-office bogeyman, Donald Trump.
The administration assures us that consumer prices are only rising at an annualized rate of 7.5 percent—as if the steepest increase in 40 years actually is not all that bad.
Yet the middle class knows that inflation is far worse when it comes to the stuff of life: buying a house, car, gas, meat, or lumber.
Second, inflation is an equal opportunity destroyer of dreams. It undermines rich and poor, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals. It unites all tribes, all ideologies, all politics against those who are perceived to have birthed the monstrous octopus that squeezes everything and everyone it touches.
The conservative passbook holder sees his meager life savings eaten away. The liberal teacher’s car payments stretch from six to 10 years.
The prospective Republican home buyer sees his hard-earned potential down payment eaten away each month. The Democratic carpenter feels his new higher wages buy even less.
Third, inflation is ubiquitous, inescapable, omnipotent—and humiliating. It destroys personal dignity. And its toxicity is insidious, sort of like seeping, odorless, colorless, but nevertheless lethal carbon monoxide.
Unlike now-unpopular critical race theory, it cannot be avoided for a day. You cannot tune it out like one does the mess in Afghanistan or the now nonexistent southern border. Inflation attacks everyone in 24/7, 360-degree fashion.
It belittles you at the gas station. It downsizes you at the food market. It humiliates you in the obscene real estate market. It makes you look stupid when you are paying for a new car. It ridicules you when you buy lumber. Suddenly you apologize that you really cannot afford your child’s braces.
Fourth, inflation undermines a civil and ordered society. It unleashes a selfish “every man for himself” mentality, the Hobbesian cruelty of a “war of all against all.”
Inflation is the economic and emotional equivalent of smash-and-grab or carjacking. It is a brazen robber in broad daylight that so infuriates Americans by its boldness. It convinces them their very civilization is dying.
“Federal Court Declares Diversity Initiative At Thomas Jefferson High School To Be Unconstitutional.” “Judge Claude Hilton ruled that the county unconstitutionally engineered the reduction of Asian-American students to achieve greater racial diversity.”
Did you know that one of the biggest freight management companies in America was temporarily locked down by a cyberattack? “Expeditors International, a top-five freight management company by revenue, disclosed Wednesday that last month’s cyberattack will have a “material adverse impact” on finances and that it will be late filing its 2021 annual report because of difficulty accessing information on its accounting systems.”
Once again Harris County has drawn scrutiny over a slew of election day problems and may need a court order to continue counting votes beyond a state proscribed deadline.
Issues with elections procedures began days before March 1 as election judges found that supplies were not available for pickup at the appointed time on Friday, February 25. Even after the delayed distribution of supplies on Saturday, election workers complained that many kits were lacking essential equipment.
The situation worsened by Tuesday, and during a conference call with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office (SOS) and representatives from the local Democratic and Republican parties, Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria notified the state that her department may not be able to count all early and election day ballots by the statutory deadline of 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 2.
According to a statement from Secretary of State John Scott, the counting delay was “due only to damaged ballot sheets that must be duplicated before they can be scanned by ballot tabulators at the central count location.”
“Our office stands ready to assist Harris County election officials, and all county election officials throughout the state, in complying with Texas Election Code requirements for accurately tabulating and reporting Primary Election results. We want to ensure that all Texans who have cast a ballot in this year’s Primary Elections can have confidence in the accuracy of results.”
According to the state election code, however, any votes counted after the statutory deadline may not count unless the county obtains a court order. Furthermore, under laws in effect since 1986, failure to deliver precinct election returns by the deadline is a Class B misdemeanor.
Calling the county’s elections problems the “worst in 40 years,” Harris County Republican Party (HCRP) Chair Cindy Siegel told KPRC news, “This has been a complete mess. We’ve had equipment delays, we’ve had equipment problems, equipment wasn’t delivered, we had polls that were unable to be set up.”
In a statement to The Texan, HCRP said that after consulting with the SOS, “if the count does not appear to be near completion in all races by [Wednesday] afternoon, the parties have tentatively agreed to seek a court order to require the Harris County Election Administrator to continue counting beyond the 24-hour deadline required by law, and to enjoin the law to allow the count to continue.”
Responsibility for conducting primary elections falls to the two main political parties, but they have contracted with the Harris County elections division to administer the elections.
Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) who formerly served as the Harris County voter registrar, called for immediate changes to the elections division.
“[Harris County Judge] Lina Hidalgo must fire her hand-picked election administrator,” Bettencourt told The Texan. “Because if she doesn’t, I don’t think we’re going to have an election in November.”
In 2020, the three Democrats on the Harris County Commissioners Court overruled objections from two Republican commissioners and the Democrat elected voter registrar Ann Harris Bennet to create the new office of elections administrator. Prior to the revamp, the elected county clerk and elected voter registrar managed elections in the state’s largest county.
The commissioners court then appointed Longoria, a former staffer for state Sen. Sylvia Garcia (D-Houston) who had previously run unsuccessfully for Houston City Council, with an annual salary of $190,000.
Under Longoria’s guidance, the county approved $54 million for the elections division last summer which included $14 million to purchase new voting equipment.
Earlier this year, Longoria told commissioners the March primary would cost more than $8.8 million.
In 2020, Harris County received nearly $10 million in grants from Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life and another $1 million in 2021 just before the Texas Legislature restricted such private grants.
According to sources familiar with the equipment, the second page of the paper ballot has been jamming machines and now requires entry by hand. Allegedly, although the early voting period ended Friday,
The question, of course, is whether this is a sign of manifest incompetence, or a sign of widespread attempted vote fraud?
If it was a fraud attempt, we should be grateful that it was bungled so badly in the primary that a lot more attention will be paid.
And the judge didn’t sound pleased:
Update: the "court finds it is required…to impound the precinct election materials in the possession of Ms. Longoria and her staff and for the court to supervise the activities necessary to complete the count…" https://t.co/h1FL7F5XTn
Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds signs bill banning men from women’s sports. I’ll take “Headlines no one would understand 20 years ago” for $400, Alex.
Democratic Party Gaslighting: The Continuing Journeys:
The party that painted this now wants you to believe they support Law Enforcement. Americans won’t forget this — especially not on Election Day. pic.twitter.com/nCBkDmI6yf
— Kari Lake for AZ Governor (@KariLake) March 3, 2022
I’ve been too busy to post earlier today, and the Texas Primary voting day is TOMORROW, so this may be brief.
Yesterday’s post noted: “Russia has failed to encircle and isolate Kyiv with the combination of mechanized and airborne attacks as it had clearly planned to do. Russian forces are now engaging in more straightforward mechanized drives into the capital along a narrow front along the west bank of the Dnipro River and toward Kyiv from a broad front to the northeast.”
That’s what you can see on the Livemap of Kiev here, with that red area being controlled by Russian forces:
If Ukrainian forces can keep them from entering Kiev proper, that will go a long way toward stopping Putin’s invasion cold.
The “swift and severe” sanctions of the U.S. and its allies took a while to arrive, not taking effect until 96 hours or so after the first steps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But to give credit where its due, once those sanctions did kick in, the consequences were indeed intense:
At one point, “The ruble plunged to a record low of less than one U.S. penny” — at one point 118 rubles to a dollar, before recovering to 84 rubles to a dollar.
The Economist noted, even with the recovery, that it was “one of the largest one-day slumps in the Russian currency’s modern history, similar in scale to the one-day declines recorded during the worst moments of the country’s financial crisis in 1998, when Russia defaulted on its debt. In mid-morning in Moscow, the Russian central bank raised its key interest rate from 9.5 percent to 20 percent in an effort to stem the ruble’s slump, and the country’s finance ministry ordered companies with foreign-currency revenues to convert 80 percent of their income into rubles.”
One analyst on CNBC summarized that the Russian currency has “pretty much lost all value outside of the country. . . . To me, it doesn’t really feel like we’re looking at or at least we’re going to see the bottom in the ruble here. I think there still is plenty more room for weakness to come.”
The Moscow stock exchange initially delayed its opening this morning, then declared it would be closed for the day.
Russians no longer have faith that their banks will remain solvent: “Russians waited in long queues outside ATMs on Sunday, worried that bank cards may cease to function, or that banks would limit cash withdrawals. ‘Since Thursday, everyone has been running from ATM to ATM to get cash. Some are lucky, others not so much,’ St Petersburg resident, Pyotr, who declined to give his last name, said.”
CNN reports that, “One early casualty was the European subsidiary of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender that has been sanctioned by Western allies. The European Central Bank said Sberbank Europe, including its Austrian and Croatian branches, was failing, or likely to fail, because of ‘significant deposit outflows’ triggered by the Ukraine crisis.”
It’s now five days since Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his mostly conscript army into Ukraine to overthrow the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and it hasn’t gone as planned. In what may signal frustration, Putin has put his nuclear forces on alert in one last desperate move to beat his chest and show the world who’s in charge.
Time has given some clarity to the operation and allows the drawing of some conclusions.
I’m a retired Army lieutenant colonel—an intelligence officer. My training, from 1983 to 2007, was a Cold War focus on the old Soviet Union, the predecessor state to the Russian Federation. Never in my time as an intelligence officer was I able to see the worst-case scenario of a large-scale conventional Russian attack in Europe—until now.
I’ve seen multiple reports of Russian conscripts who didn’t know they were invading Ukraine. They’re confused. They don’t know who to shoot at, as “Ukrainians look the same as us.” The Russian force appears to suffer from: Poor training; poor leadership (bad officers); and a cultural disregard for information-sharing down the chain of command, which prevents lower-ranking soldiers from making informed decisions in the chaos of war.
The result of all this is a lack of initiative from soldiers when non-commissioned officers and officers are killed or wounded.
It is important to note that the Russian army hasn’t fought a conventional war against a near-peer enemy since 1945. It’s out of practice, poorly trained, poorly led, and poorly motivated. It does have plenty of heavy armaments—very large thermobaric bombs. It can destroy, but it can’t fight effectively.
Regarding the “Father of Bombs,” a large thermobaric or “vacuum” bombs capable of destroying a city block, killing 10,000 or more civilians and soldiers. Using one on Kyiv would horrify the world and likely increase calls for war crimes charges on Russian leaders. The Russians have used smaller thermobaric weapons against Ukrainian bunkers.
This opens another question: How powerful are Russia’s reconstituted zampolit? Putin brought them back in 2018. The zampolit were political officers in the old Red Army, previously called “commissars” until 1942 when the position’s battlefield power was scaled back in response to negative military command implications.
If a Russian field commander is ordered to use a city-busting thermobaric bomb, will he? Or will he refuse to carry out the order, like German Gen. von Choltitz when Adolf Hitler ordered him to destroy Paris—unless a zampolit is looking over his shoulder with a pistol?
Logistics is also manifesting itself as a Russian weak spot. Logistics is hard—it’s harder in combat. It requires synchronizing the delivery of fuel, ammo, and food to frontline forces all while the enemy is shooting at your resupply trucks. At four days in, Russian forces are running out of basic supplies. This has a powerfully negative effect on morale.
Complicating Russian resupply efforts are indications that Ukrainian light forces hunkered down during the initial Russian wave passed by, only to reemerge when the lightly armored supply columns entered Ukraine. Also of note is the increasingly effective Ukrainian use of Turkish-designed BayraktarTB2 drones. These low-cost, slow, non-stealthy drones have scored dozens of kills on Russian columns. Ukraine has about 60 of them.
As Ukrainian resistance stiffens and tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens rush to defend their nation, other nations in the region have been emboldened. Germany is sending 1,000 antitank missiles and 500 Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The Czech Republic and the Netherlands are sending small arms and ammunition.
His successor Shoygu knew better than that. Now who's Shoygu? Shoygu is the *only* single Russian minister who uninterruptedly worked in government since 1991, since the very beginning of Russian Federation. He worked for all presidents, all prime ministers avoided all purges pic.twitter.com/EOx5MH6lb3
There was another issue. Shoygu is ethnic Tuvan. In such a country as Russia minority member can hardly become the supreme leader. People don't perceive him as ethnic Russian (see his palace) which means he's not dangerous for the leader and you can safely delegate him the army pic.twitter.com/a4zJA1ePa0
He also says Russia is only using one echelon of troops:
How is a Blitzkrieg organised? By echelons. First echelon is moving forward as fast as they can. Ofc this means that lots of defenders will be left in their rear. But then the second echelon comes, then third, etc. They finish defenders, occupy territory, control the supply lines pic.twitter.com/AQtm8ntLfO
Secondly, launching several echelons would require long arduous preparation. You need to mobilise them, move to the borders, quarter, maintain and supply. It's not that easy. It's a hard job that should have been done well in advance to wage a Blitzkrieg. And it hadn't been done
Ukraine fights back, Biden isn’t going to do jack about it, Kyle Rittenhouse is going to sue everyone, inflation soars, the Canadian “emergency” is ended, disaster looms for Democrats, and Ilhan Omar gets an unusual challenger. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
While reports of the battle are confused and preliminary, it appears that Ukrainian forces counterattacked, shot down some Russian helicopters, and have so far been able to prevent the Russians from landing reinforcements. Initial claims that the Russian force at the airfield had been “destroyed” were later clarified; it now seems that the battle at Gostomel is continuing. It’s easy to understand how crucial this battle is, simply by looking at a map. If the Russians could gain control of the Gostomel airfield, they could score a quick knock-out of the Ukrainian capital as part of what is being called their “decapitation” strategy.
Russian news services are claiming they’ve taken the airfield, but that may be stale news or propaganda.
Ukrainian forces take up positions in Kiev. Also: “Reports that the Ukrainian military has delivered a strike on a Russian airfield in Millerovo, Rostov Oblast have now been confirmed.”
The invasion of Ukraine by the armed forces of Russia at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s orders marks the first time since 1945 that Russia has engaged in a conventional war with a near-peer nation.
Ukraine isn’t restive Warsaw Pact nations, it isn’t Afghanistan, it isn’t Chechnya, it isn’t Georgia, and it isn’t Crimea.
The conflict launched by Putin is on a far grander scale than the invasion of Crimea in 2014, launched as Ukraine’s last pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven from office in a popular uprising.
Putin, by choosing to reach beyond the ethnic-Russian majority separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas Basin, has decided to end the independent, Western-looking Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and install a pro-Putin quisling.
And while the fog of war, some deliberate mis-and disinformation operations by the combatants, and the far-from-perfect filter of Western media leaves much unknown at this time, what is known is that Zelenskyy is still in power a day after the Russian offensive. Further, the Ukrainian military appears to be taking a toll on the Russians invading from three sides: south across the Pripyat Marshes from Russian satellite Belarus; west from Russia, including Donbas; and north from the Black Sea in the region of Odessa and Transnistria, a Russian client breakaway state in Moldavia.
Modern conventional war is extremely difficult to do well. Imagine being a conductor of an orchestra, all while the audience was lobbing soccer balls at you and your musicians as you perform J.S. Bach’s Chaconne in D — that’s modern warfare. Putin is attempting a highly complicated operation over large distances in the face of a determined foe. Further, he’s doing so with an army largely composed of conscripts serving for only one year.
Since Putin has decided to oust the Ukrainian government, this means that every day Zelenskyy remains in office is another day that adds to Ukrainian national confidence to resist — and another day that Putin looks to have miscalculated.
A Russian Military Ship telling 13 Ukrainian troops on Snake Island to surrender. They were met with a response of " Russian military Ship, go fuck yourself."
Both the EU and the Biden Administration offer sanctions they admit will not do Jack Squat.
FULL DOCUMENT: This is the general license that US Treasury has issued exempting any "energy" related dealings from the sanctions imposed on some of the biggest Russian banks. It's so wide ranging that even includes "wood" as a form of energy exempted | #Ukraine#OOTTpic.twitter.com/3X5t0LFi3W
WATCH: AP reporter roasts Biden's State Department spokesman over the "frankly huge" list of exemptions in Biden's sanctions on Russia.pic.twitter.com/gzAWB4LwMg
Taiwan joins sanctions against Russia, including their semiconductor industry. I don’t know if any fabless Russian chip design company gets their chips fabbed at TSMC, so I’m not sure how badly this hurts their economy in the long run.
It is the West’s wacko environmentalists who handed Russian President Vladimir Putin the leverage and money to invade Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine this week.
Without these wackos, Putin would be just another gangster in charge of a crumbling country, and maybe one on the verge of a revolution to depose him.
But the facts are the facts are the facts, and the facts are these… Thanks to the West’s environmentalists, those smug greenies who are more concerned with carbon output than world peace, this gangster controls much of the energy going to the European Union (E.U.).
Thanks a lot, Greta…
A great mystery:
Under Carter, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Under Obama, Russia took over Crimea. Under Biden, Russia is invading the rest of Ukraine. Russians do land grabs when Democrats control the White House. Democrats get pissed when you point it out. But it is still true.
Biden is demonstrably more hostile to American oil and gas companies than he is to Russian companies, having frozen oil and gas leasesdespite a court order otherwise.
Thanks to Biden’s inflation, the cost of everything is going up. “70 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”
Fellow former finance reporter Chrystia Freeland — someone I’ve known since we were both expat journalists in Russia in the nineties — announced last week that her native Canada would be making Sorkin’s vision a reality. Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.
Then the Yeltsin era collapsed in corrupt ignominy and Freeland immediately wrote a book called Sale of the Century that identified Yeltsin’s embrace of her former top sources as the “original sin” of Russian capitalism, a “Faustian bargain” that crippled Russia’s chance at true progress. This is Freeland on Yeltsin’s successor in 2000. Note the “Yes, Putin has a reputation for beating the press, but his economic rep is solid!” passage at the end:
It looks as if we’re about to fall in love with Russia all over again…
Compared to the ailing, drink-addled figure Boris Yeltsin cut in his later years, his successor, Vladimir Putin, in the eyes of many western observers, seems refreshingly direct, decisive and energetic… Tony Blair, who has already paid Putin the compliment of a visit to Russia and received the newly installed president in Downing Street in return, has praised him as a strong leader with a reformist vision. Bill Clinton, who recently hot-footed it to Russia, offered the equally sunny appraisal that “when we look at Russia today . . . we see an economy that is growing . . . we see a Russia that has just completed a democratic transfer of power for the first time in a thousand years.”
To be sure, some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press…and worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic institutions. But many of even Putin’s fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…
Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”
The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?
She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother.”
Angeleno’s tax dollars at work:
A city audit found LA spends $837,000 to house one homeless person. Perhaps this is why Newsom has done everything he can to block my statewide audit.
China is getting a good return on its investment in the Biden clan: “DOJ shuts down China-focused anti-espionage program. The China Initiative is being cast aside largely because of perceptions that it unfairly painted Chinese Americans and U.S. residents of Chinese origin as disloyal.” We can’t let national security stand in the way of political correctness…
In what may be remembered as one of the greatest miracles of all time, it seems that an upcoming American election cycle is set to put an end to the great COVID pandemic in regions that have been clinging to “mitigation” tactics despite them being proven ineffective long ago. What science couldn’t do for blue state governors, politics is about to. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the country has already adopted an “endemic” approach to COVID. In my Indiana community, for instance, school systems have been in-person and maskless for well over a year.
A combination of experience and common sense led local officials to recognize that while COVID was a serious virus, and an often-times unpleasant condition to endure, we just weren’t experiencing the kind of mortality rates or critical hospitalizations that would require the suspension of normal life. If I was guessing, I would say that there are more counties, cities, and communities in the United States like mine than not.
While mainstream media may be drawn like a moth to the bright lights of urban areas with all the restrictions, mandates, and panic-fueled policies enacted there, most Americans have been “living with” the virus for a long time now.
In fact, if my community is any bellwether for the nation, most Americans are already wondering why anyone is still attempting to take a non-endemic approach at this point. The virus has proven itself to be, like all other viruses, prone to seasonal surges that are largely unaltered by our theatrical mitigation techniques. Not that anyone with their head screwed on straight ever thought there was value in wearing a porous cloth mask while standing up at a restaurant, then taking it off while sitting down, but the comical nonsense of mask histrionics is now widely appreciated as a goofy spectator sport. Behold:
So silly. And so as opinion polls continue showing that an ever-increasing number of Americans are infuriated by this nonsense, and that they are done with all the aggressive pandemic restrictions that proved unnecessary a long time ago, a public pivot of massive proportions is underway amongst the political class.
Whether it’s big blue state governors like California’s Gavin Newsom hilariously announcing that he will be transitioning his state to the country’s first “endemic” virus policy – meaning they’re going to start doing some things that Texas, Florida, South Dakota, Indiana, and so many others have been doing for over a year – or whether it’s blue city school boards like San Francisco’s being recalled by angry voters for their abusive and needless shutdown and masking policies, it’s clear where we’re headed.
Despite that, the midterm news for Democrats is not good.
Democrats know that they should be preparing for a brutal showing in this November’s midterm elections. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race last year — and, more to the point, the substance and style of his successful campaign — were the first sign of it.
But the hits have kept on coming. In San Francisco last week, two progressive parents succeeded in their campaign to oust three school-board members for being . . . too progressive. Irked initially at how long it was taking for area schools to reopen for in-person learning during the pandemic, these two single parents did some digging and discovered even more to be upset about: an enormous budget shortfall, an intensive campaign to rename dozens of school buildings, and the replacement of a merit-based admissions program with a diversity-minded lottery, among other issues.
Suggesting just how central education has become to politics, San Francisco’s intensely progressive mayor, London Breed — who last fall violated her own mask mandate at a concert and defended herself by saying she was “feeling the spirit” — endorsed the school-board recall effort.
“My take is that it was really about the frustration of the board of education doing their fundamental job,” Breed said after the results were in. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. And that did not occur. . . . We failed our children. Parents were upset. The city as a whole was upset, and the decision to recall school-board members was a result of that.”
San Francisco–based writer Gary Kamiya suggests in a piece for the Atlantic that the results of the recall seem to confirm the conservative narrative. Kamiya writes that conservatives have argued “that the Democratic Party is out of step not just with Republicans, but with its own constituents. . . . Progressives rejected such conclusions, insisting that the recall was simply about competence and was driven by an only-in-San-Francisco set of circumstances.” Kamiya concludes that the best way to read the outcome is “closer to the conservative view.” “At a minimum,” Kamiya writes, “the recall demonstrates that ‘woke’ racial politics have their limits, even in one of the wokest cities in the country.”
Over in Texas, meanwhile, failed Senate candidate and failed presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke is gearing up to become a failed gubernatorial candidate, too. Running against incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott, O’Rourke was most recently seen trying to pretend that he isn’t a fan of radical gun-control measures.
Asked about the promise he made during his run for president that he would “take away AR-15s and AK-47s,” O’Rourke attempted a hard about-face.
“I’m not interested in taking anything from anyone,” he said. “What I want to make sure that we do is defend the Second Amendment. I want to make sure that we protect our fellow Texans far better than we’re doing right now. And that we listen to law enforcement, which Greg Abbott refused to do. He turned his back on them when he signed that permitless-carry bill that endangers the lives of law enforcement in a state that’s seen more cops and sheriff’s deputies gunned down than in any other.”
As Charlie Cooke has noted, this is utter tripe. It also isn’t working. The latest poll of the race from the Dallas Moring News has Abbott up by seven points, 45 percent to 38 percent. O’Rourke himself remains underwater with voters: Only 40 percent view him favorably, while 46 percent say they have an unfavorable view of the candidate.
Republicans win a Jacksonville City Council race:
It's a citywide race, and this result will more or less match the average partisanship of the city for the past decade or so. But this was a Dem-held seat, and losing it in this fashion has to hurt the local party. And doesn't portend well in other races.
Kyle Rittenhouse is finally ready to sue, including lawsuits against Whoopi Goldberg and Cenk Uygur. I hope he bankrupts anyone who called him a white supremacist.
Former Houston Rockets draft bust Royce White is running for Congress as a Republican against “Squad” member Ilhan Omar. Hopefully he can be on the campaign trail more than he was on the floor for the Rockets…
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is invested in a comprehensive nationwide effort to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. We’re fighting for election integrity because it’s absolutely vital to protect the sanctity of your ballot from Democrat schemes to undermine voting security. We are involved in 19 election integrity lawsuits nationwide, and we’re winning the fight.
Our investment is partially driven by polling that consistently shows the American people supporting our common-sense approach to securing elections. A recent poll commissioned by the RNC found that 78 percent of Americans support a proposed voting plan with five key principles: presenting voter ID, verifying voters’ signatures, controlling the ballot’s chain of custody, bipartisan poll observation, and cleaning up voter rolls. The poll also found that 80 percent of voters support voter ID requirements; this sentiment matches up with other polling, including a recent one from NPR which found 79 percent of voters in favor of voter ID. The measures we are pushing are not controversial or dramatic. They are common-sense and they are supported by American citizens.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from trying to generate false outrage and controversy at every level of this conversation. The Democrat election playbook is simple: lie and seek attention until the mainstream media eagerly takes the baton and turns Democrat lies into a false national narrative. You saw this in Georgia, where Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams’ lies about the state’s election reforms pressured the MLB into moving its All-Star Game out of Atlanta. These lies cost the good people of Georgia an estimated $100 million. You’re seeing it now in Texas, where local Democrats have stormed out of legislative debates on election integrity not once, but twice. Their latest stunt saw them leave the floor of the Texas legislature and hop on private planes to fly to DC in a juvenile quest for media attention.
Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media lapped it up. This is their playbook. When it comes to election integrity, Americans need to pay attention to the relationship between Democrat lies and the mainstream media machine.
Back on June 24, the great Peggy Noonan hailed [Eric] Adams’s primary win as a victory of reality over progressive theory. “Adams was a cop for 22 years, left the New York City Police Department as a captain, and was the first and for a long time the only candidate to campaign on crime and the public’s right to safety. He was the first to admit we were in a crime wave.” Noonan observed, accurately, that African-American voters were not necessarily the most progressive voters in the electorate anymore, and that they represented a de facto force of, if not conservatism, then a realist wariness of the fringes of modern progressive thinking.
The notion of a centrist, tough-on-crime mayor replacing the notorious groundhog murderer and early pandemic denier sounds good, but we’ll see. Every elected official operates within a particular “Overton Window”: the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time. Adams did not win this primary by a landslide. While he received the most votes in the first round, he was the top choice of less than a third of the city’s Democrats. He has 51.1 percent out of the final two.
New York City desperately needs a dramatic improvement in its policing and prosecution of criminals, but Adams will have to take on a lot of deeply entrenched opponents and a city media and cultural environment that have evolved to reflexively demonize the NYPD. Way back in 2005, Fred Siegel described the New York City of the David Dinkins years as an era of “hysteria that led upstanding liberals to insist that they were more afraid of the NYPD than they were of criminals.” Whatever you think of Rudy Giuliani now, the young(er) mayor of the early 1990s was willing to be utterly hated as he enacted his reforms, convinced that the broader public would look past the controversy and appreciate the effects of lower crime rates. It remains to be seen whether Adams has that same courage to exchange short-term unpopularity for long-term improvement in the city’s streets — or whether he’ll bump up against the city’s Overton Window of what policy changes are acceptable and settle for a series of half measures.
The irony is that we see the same phenomenon in the opposite direction at the national level in Washington. Many progressives interpreted Biden’s presidential win, the 50–50 Senate, and the slightly shrunken House majority in the 2020 elections as a mandate to enact sweeping changes in the country — and they’re largely hitting brick walls. The national Overton Window isn’t wide enough to accommodate the wildest fantasies of progressives.
I’m not sure the feasibility of Overton Window possibilities matters to the Social Justice left. There’s is a holy revolutionary cause, and they need to seize control of the Party before they can seize control of the nation. To that end, I suspect many think that letting moderate Democrats lose elections is a small price to pay for continuing their unpopular march through America’s institutions…
The Texan brings back The War Room to track 2022 Texas election races.
“Texas House Democrats’ COVID-Spreading Publicity Stunt Is Backfiring.”
Outnumbered by Republicans in Austin 83 to 67, the Texas House Democratic Caucus decided to head to D.C. to publicize its opposition to election integrity bills, fundraise, and drum up support for federal legislation that would nationalize election law by imposing California law as a template on the nation — banning meaningful voter ID, expanding mail balloting while eliminating fraud safeguards, prohibiting proactive voter list maintenance, and mandating same-day voter registration with no checks for eligibility to vote.
But the Democrats’ trip hasn’t turned out as planned.
Soon after meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris and numerous White House staffers and members of the U.S. House and Senate, three Democrats were diagnosed with COVID-19, then another two, and now a total of six. An aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a White House official tested positive soon after meeting with the Texas Democrats.
And the attention Democrats were hoping for soon turned sour, with Texas’s major newspapers, none of whom are friends of Republicans and have had little good to say about their election integrity bills, have nevertheless weighed in against the walkout. By two-to-one, Texas voters disapprove of the quorum-busting as well. Even national Republicans have piled on, with this tweet from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s press secretary being emblematic.
Closer to home, Travis County GOP Chairman Matt Mackowiak said the quorum-breakers had “…engaged in performance theater for weeks claiming Gov. Abbott was putting lives at risk by reopening the state economy and waiving the statewide mask mandate, then they flew to DC on a private jet stocked with Miller Lite without masks, in violation of FAA rules, and now this farce turned into a super spreader event.”
But there are signs the Democratic solidarity is breaking down. With chairmanships, seniority, and even district boundaries on the line in a redistricting year, powerful Democrats are wavering while those seeking to move up sense an opportunity. A week ago, 80 House members were on the floor. As of Tuesday, 90, including several Democrats, were present. It’s a classic “prisoner’s dilemma” situation. If another 10 Democrats show up, the Texas House will have a quorum and can resume consideration of bills, leaving the other 50 holdouts with nothing for their efforts — except for perhaps being redrawn out of their districts by the Legislative Redistricting Board later this year.
When the Democrats do return, they will be asked to vote on bills that would bring mail-in balloting up to the standard for in-person voting by asking for ID in the form of writing a driver’s license number, or state ID number, or the last four of the Social Security number inside of a privacy flap in the ballot return envelope. The bill would also prohibit local elections officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, ban last-minute changes to election procedures, and clarify that properly appointed poll watchers must be able to see and hear election workers’ activities.
Asking for ID for mail-in ballots — one of the measures most vociferously opposed by Democrats — is supported by 81 percent of Texas voters, with voters from all demographic groups and both major parties approving of the safeguards.
With all due respect to Chuck DeVore, until the Texas election integrity bill is passed, their publicity stunt hasn’t backfired yet. There are few prices Democrats won’t pay for the ability to continue cheating.
Barely a year after the Minneapolis City Council voted to to defund the city’s police department after the death of George Floyd, a judge has ordered the city to hire more cops, thanks to a lawsuit filed by fed-up citizens.
“Minneapolis is in a crisis,” wrote the eight plaintiffs in their complaint, citing the rise in violent crimes, including shootings, sexual assault, murders, civil unrest, and riots, Fox News reports.
Progressive city council members couldn’t wait to gut the police department and allow a surge in crime, most of which would affect poor black neighborhoods. The tsunami of crime recently took the life of a popular coach who was shot attending a memorial for another victim of Minneapolis’ violent crime surge. He was the 42nd person murdered this year in Minneapolis. No word from Antifa and BLM if they are planning a mostly peaceful riot in his honor.
The cop-hating Minneapolis City Council and Mayor Jacob Frey were ordered to “immediately take any and all necessary action to ensure that they fund a police force,” according to Thursday’s court order by Judge Jamie L. Anderson. The crime-loving city council and mayor have until June 30, 2022, to establish a police force of 730 sworn officers. They currently have 669 cops. Minneapolis saw nearly 200 cops file paperwork to leave the Minneapolis Police Department in the first three months after the George Floyd riots. No idea how many more will resign or retire by the June 30, 2022, deadline, as the nation has seen a surge in cops walking away from departments nationwide.
NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop.
Conservatives have always hated NPR, but in the last year I hear more and more politically progressive people, in the media, talking about the station as a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish. A
Numerous examples snipped.
NPR sucks and is unlistenable, so people are going elsewhere. People like [Ben] Shapiro are running their strategy in reverse and making fortunes doing it. One of these professional analysts has to figure this one out eventually, right?
Evidently the primary mover behind the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping “plot” was the FBI. It’s FBI “informants” all the way down. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Want to keep track of violence in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago? Hey Jackass has the trending data plants policy wonks crave!
“In 25 major U.S. cities, officials have proposed cutting—or in 20 cases already cut—police budgets. However, what OpenTheBooks.com auditors found was that mayors and city officials still enjoy personal protection of a dedicated police detail costing taxpayers millions of dollars,” Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of Open The Books (OTB), said in a statement announcing the new data.
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In San Francisco, for example, the costs of the security detail protecting Mayor London Breed and other city officials spiraled up from $1.7 million in 2015 to $2.6 million in 2020.
Breed has proposed shifting $120 million from the city’s police department to mental health and workforce training programs. City officials declined to say how many officers are assigned to the security details, according to OTB.
In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot claimed to be opposed to defunding the police, but OTB found that officials quietly abolished 400 police department positions last year.
Those positions were eliminated even as the city’s “security detail costs peaked in 2020—up $700,000 over five years: $2.7 million spent on 16 officers (2015); $2.9 million for 16 officers (2016); $2.7 million for 20 officers (2017); $2.8 million for 16 officers (2018); $2.8 million for 17 officers (2019); and $3.4 million for 22 officers (2020)—an all-time high,” OTB stated.
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio slashed $1 billion from the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) $6 billion annual budget, including $354 million transferred to mental health, homelessness, and education services.
But the mayor, who briefly sought the Democratic presidential nomination last year, continues to enjoy tax-paid police protection for himself, his wife, and his son.
“Serial Swatter Who Caused Death Gets Five Years in Prison.” “Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County, Tenn. admitted to conspiring with a group of criminals that’s been ‘swatting’ and harassing people for months in a bid to coerce targets into giving up their valuable Twitter and Instagram usernames.” So not only has he gotten people killed, he got them killed for really shitty reasons. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“ERCOT Expands Power Grid Reserve Capacity in Preparation for Summer Heat.” “To prepare, ERCOT has dedicated 38 percent more in generation to reserve capacity from this July compared to last. And they plan to dedicate 56 percent more reserve capacity for August compared to August 2020.” 1.) That’s good, but 2.) Isn’t mid-July a wee bit late to be rolling out such plans? Let’s hope they’ve been working on this a while…
California court says that state laws requiring people to use crazy SJW pronouns violates freedom of speech.
Speaking of Harris: “Last month, the Supreme Court smacked down then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ attempt to force charitable nonprofits to turn over the names of their top donors, calling the power-grab ‘facially unconstitutional.'”
Gun sales decline slightly from record highs in 2020. Does this mean I might finally be able to pick up an AR-15 without it costing me an arm and a leg?
“Wayne LaPierre a Bigger Risk Than Fire and Brimstone.” “Lloyd’s of London is dropping all coverage for the NRA’s Board of Directors through their officers and directors insurance plan.”
More Soros-backed DA justice: “Accused murderer set free after St. Louis County prosecutors fail to show up, but found time for McCloskeys.”
Last week, Circuit Judge Jason Sengheiser dismissed charges of first-degree murder, armed criminal action, and unlawful gun possession against Brandon Campbell, 30, when prosecutors from the Circuit Attorney’s Office did not attend hearings for the case in May, June, and July, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
“The court does not take this action without significant consideration for the implications it may have for public safety,” Sengheiser wrote in kicking the case.
“Although presumed innocent, (Campbell) has been charged with the most serious of crimes. While the court has a role to play in protecting public safety, that role must be balanced with adherence to the law and the protection of the rights of the defendant,” the judge continued.
Sengheiser then took aim at Kim Gardner’s office.
“The Circuit Attorney’s Office is ultimately the party responsible for protecting public safety by charging and then prosecuting those it believes commit crimes,” he wrote.
“In a case like this where the Circuit Attorney’s office has essentially abandoned its duty to prosecute those it charges with crimes, the court must impartially enforce the law and any resultant threat to public safety is the responsibility of the Circuit Attorney’s Office.”
Thirty-eight-year-old Brandon Andrus’s criminal history is so lengthy he has more mug shots than some people have selfies.
But that didn’t stop 185th Criminal District Court Judge Jason Luong from allowing Andrus to be a free man by giving him three felony bonds, one for assaulting a family member last year.
On June 14, police say Andrus and another man murdered 35-year-old Rodrick Miller.
“Amazon’s New World Is Reportedly Frying High-End Graphics Cards.” Nothing like having your $2,000 Nvidia card bricked over a beta game…
Netflix to Wall Street: “Did I say we were going to gain two million new subscribers? Yeah, what I actually meant was we were going to lose 500,000 subscribers. Whoopsie! My bad!” Get woke, go broke.
James May launches his own gin. I don’t drink gin, but I bet that stuff sells out instantly, since the Top Gear/Grand Tour trio have one of the largest worldwide fan bases. I did not know that gin started out with neutral spirits before juniper berries were added.
After a long hiatus, the Texas vs. California update is back!
The update, focusing on news about the two biggest states in the union, and contrasting the the red and blue state models of governance for each, was a regular staple of the blog a few years ago, but as I got busy I fell behind, and the links kept piling up. As a result, this update is extra huge and some of the news here is very old indeed, with some links dating back to 2017. Recently I’ve been updating and triaging so I can finally publish this. I’ve tried to put the newest and most important stories at the top, but there is stil some old news of note further down.
According to a new U.S. Census Bureau report, of the 15 fastest-growing cities larger than 50,000 people, seven are in Texas including the top three: Frisco, New Braunfels, and Pflugerville. Frisco’s growth rate was 8.2 percent, some 11 times faster than the national rate of 0.7 percent.
Of the cities with the greatest population gain from July 1, 2016 to July 1, 2017, San Antonio, Texas, took the prize, adding some 66 people every day. Texas had the most cities in the top 15 of this category as well with five making the list and three of the top five overall in addition to San Antonio: Dallas, Fort Worth, Frisco, and Austin.
San Antonio now has more than 1.5 million people and ranks as the nation’s seventh-largest city, just behind Philadelphia. Fort Worth, meanwhile, knocked Indianapolis, Ind., out of the top-15 with a population of 874,168. Houston is America’s fourth-largest city and is also the most diverse large city in the nation.
In a stunning procession in December, California lost the leadership of three iconic firms — Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle and Tesla — all to Texas, which this year even took the Rose Bowl’s place in hosting the college football playoff. In addition, many California tech firms, including Uber and Lyft, as well as Apple, have been shifting jobs outside the state.
This has been widely described as California’s “tech exodus.” Though it’s still less than a torrent and more a steady, long-term drip, it augurs some very bad trends. In recent years, California has been losing market share of innovative industries compared with 11 states with high concentrations of innovation-oriented firms, according to research by Ken Murphy, a professor at UC Irvine’s business school.
Since 2005, California’s share of the number of firms in the innovation sector (composed of 13 of the nation’s highest-tech, highest R&D advanced industries) has shrunk while competitors like Florida, Oregon, Arizona and Utah have expanded their share slightly.
The pandemic-induced push to move work online could hasten this shift. With 2 out of 3 tech workers willing to leave the Bay Area if they could work remotely, Big Tech could readily spread talent and wealth to other states.
Increasingly, California’s cities must compete with metro areas in Texas, Tennessee and even parts of the Midwest. Housing prices are a particularly critical concern: California has all three of the most unaffordable metro regions for first-time home buyers, according to a recent AEI survey, and six of the top 10. The flow of tech workers during the pandemic has gone to places like Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth and Raleigh, N.C., and away from big coastal cities with higher living costs.
Software-based tech companies can access knowledge workers outside California, and often at lower costs. At the same time, states like Texas and Arizona have been sought to replicate the California formula for tech industry growth — public university expansion, more suburban housing and public investment in downtowns, all meant to appeal to workers and their bosses.
Snip.
But more recently, as the tech industry becomes more virtual and services-based, the companies’ workforces have less of a need to all be in one place. While these companies create vast wealth for a relatively small group of people, this is not a formula for broad-based economic prosperity.
In contrast to the old Silicon Valley, the Bay Area has become “a region of segregated innovation,” as described by CityLab, where the upper class waxes, the middle class wanes, and the poor live in poverty that is unshakable.
The state leadership’s cavalier response when major employers depart is to assume that California will continue to create new businesses to replace the high-paying jobs lost.
Yes, venture capital is piling into tech startups, driven by the low cost of money and pandemic disruption, and the state is expecting $26 billion more in revenue this year in part because of the roaring initial public offering market. But brushing off recent departures as part of a routine industrial cycle is naive and allows politicians to avoid making choices that would keep entrepreneurs, their businesses and good jobs in California.
California already has the nation’s highest income tax, with the top marginal tax rate at 13.3%. A new proposal, Assembly Bill 1253, would add three new tiers of surcharges on people earning $1 million a year and above. Lawmakers also introduced Assembly Bill 2088, which would apply a 0.4% wealth tax on net worth above $30 million. Neither bill passed the Legislature last month, but both may come back in the new legislative session.
Tech companies may be adept at avoiding taxes, but their top managers, investors and most skilled employees could see these measures as more reasons to leave — particularly when competing states like Texas, Tennessee, Nevada and Florida have zero state income taxes.
Another law, Assembly Bill 5, which limits contract employees, could prove damaging to small startup business that cannot afford many full-time workers. And for some industries, particularly those involved in energy-intensive industries like cloud computing and advanced manufacturing, California’s energy prices — one of the highest in the continental U.S. and double the cost in places like Texas — are another incentive to move commercial activities elsewhere.
As the catastrophic state of California’s finances finally begins to set in among politicians, anti-tech media personalities, and far left cultural influencers, the narrative on California’s techxodus — that is, the migration of California’s technology industry out of the state — has shifted from mockery, and “we’ll be better off without you,” to a far more sober, and increasingly-desperate “leaving California is immoral.”
As it is simply too embarrassing for politicians to admit the state needs the technology industry after more than a decade of antagonizing the men and women who built it, and as it is political suicide for incumbent politicians in a one-party state to admit that every one of the problems we’re facing has been created by our elected leaders, a moral argument for tech’s responsibility to California, and specifically the Bay Area, has recently been produced. It goes something like this: young ambitious people moved to the state, and struck gold. But rather than “give back” to the land, they’re leaving with resources they “took” from the region. Like the milkshake guy from There Will Be Blood, sucking oil from the earth. Like the evil army people from Avatar, and their unquenchable thirst for unobtanium.
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The thing I like least about the folks who leave SF + Silicon Valley for Texas and Miami and wherever else is the crapping on the place they left *after* they've extracted all they can from it.
The Bay Area helped you build your immense wealth and that's the thanks it gets. smh.
“Extracted,” she says. Smh. A week or so later, in the psychotic San Francisco Board meeting where our local representatives voted 10 to 1 to officially condemn Mark Zuckerberg for donating 75 million dollars to a hospital (really, this happened), the word came up again. When the floor was opened to the public, an activist downplayed what was, as Teddy Schleifer reports, “the largest single private gift to a public hospital ever,” and accused Zuckerberg of “extraction.” Our local politicians did not think this strange.
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I take extreme issue with the notion that industry leaders have taken something from the “community,” defined here as the “talent,” the “incubators,” and the “mentors.” This is precisely the opposite of reality. The men and women leaving are the talent, they have started the incubators, they have built the companies, they have funded the startup ecosystem, and they have mentored countless young people. This is the “network.” They are the network. Technology workers do not “extract” value from the region, they are what makes the region valuable.
California is beautiful — San Francisco is truly, I think, one of the most beautiful cities in the world — but the soil isn’t made of magic, there’s no such thing as digging for microcode, and the Bay Area’s nativist, anti-immigration political climate has certainly not created the tech community, which is populated largely by immigrants, be they from out of the state or out of the country.
Among many things, including talent, opportunity, and soft power, the technology industry has brought tremendous tax revenue to the Bay Area. The budget of San Francisco literally doubled this decade, from around six billion to over twelve billion dollars. With our government’s incredible, historic abundance of wealth, the Board of Supervisors has presided over: a dramatic increase in homelessness, drug abuse, crime — now including home invasion — and a crippling cost of living that can be directly ascribed to the local landed gentry’s obsession with blocking new construction. This latter piece is important, as it appears to be the only thing our Board cares about. This is because significantly increasing the local housing supply would decrease the value of the multi-million dollar homes almost every single one of our Supervisors owns, and we could never have that.
These past ten years I often wondered where the city’s money went. Could the leadership really be this stupid, or was there corruption? Turns out both. We’ve recently discovered our politicians are literally criminals, but they’re also bad at crime.
Snip.
The Bay Area housing, homeless, and drug crises are all exacerbated by the state government, which is as incapable of managing its finances as it is incapable of managing its public land; we are now teetering on the edge of true financial ruin in a state of endemic, constant wildfire. But let’s take a closer look at this issue of money. On one hand we have insane, nativist property tax codes, which punish new homeowners at the expense of longtime landlords, and on the other our income taxes have skyrocketed. Since income taxes are structured progressively, the state has backed itself into a position of extreme uncertainty, as the top one percent of earners pay half the state’s taxes — while politicians argue the state’s wealthiest men and women, who already pay more in taxes than the wealthiest men and women of any other state and most free countries in the world, are not paying their “fair share.” As if rudimentary economic threats were not enough, politicians have made cultural platforms of their anti-technology, anti-industry attitudes, and have done everything in their power to drive our top one percent of earners out of the state. In this, our politicians are succeeding.
Such success in driving top earners from the state only further exacerbates the state’s political disasters, with our government of bloated, corrupt services now starving for income. This has in turn increased the political appetite for all manner of draconian, anti-business practices among politicians with no apparent ability to conceive of the second order effects of their legislation, a deficiency in basic intelligence that led, for example, to the unmitigated disaster that was AB5. In other words, everything is structured to further deteriorate.
Beleaguered San Francisco restaurants are struggling with a recent citywide rise in burglaries, including a slew of brazen break-ins at popular restaurants between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. It’s a situation many restaurant owners say is exacerbating an already bleak outlook for the local food scene.
San Francisco Police Department data shows burglaries in the city climbed from 4,918 reported incidents a year ago to 7,248 as of Dec. 27. The data does not specifically show how many restaurants have been affected, but the rise in burglaries is reflected in the stories being told by business owners in interviews and on social media. It’s a hard reality for local restaurants that have now gone almost 10 months with diminished revenue, forced hibernation periods, and only occasional approval for indoor and outdoor dining service.
In mid-December alone, San Francisco’s nostalgic Toy Boat Dessert Cafe posted on Instagram about having had its door kicked in during an attempted burglary. Also in the Richmond District, Cassava took to social media to post about losing roughly $3,000 worth of equipment, including iPads, after a break-in. And Epic Steak and Waterbar on the Embarcadero each lost a similar amount when thieves stole alcohol and damaged property.
Owners say the shelter-in-place order provides thieves with opportunities to break into businesses. Streets are empty because people are staying home. The ghost-town effect is increased as a growing number of restaurants and other businesses are either permanently or temporarily closed. The break-ins are all the more painful when restaurants aren’t even bringing in income to cover the cost to repair or replace stolen or damaged items.
Speaking of government officials being stupid crooks: “SF City Administrator Naomi Kelly Resigns Over Bribery Allegations. Husband Harlan Kelly, SF PUC Manager, had been arrested after accepting international trips, vacation to China, meals, jewelry, and personal car services.” As with the Biden clan, graft, corruption and shady links to China all seem to be part of the family trade for Democratic power families…
How California’s catch and release approach to crime kills.
Jerry Lyons, 31, had spent his entire adult life committing crimes. He had dozens of arrests in California — attempted robbery, burglary, evading police, driving a stolen vehicle, weapons charges, drug charges, shoplifting, trespassing, etc. — but kept getting turned loose until Thursday, when he finally killed somebody. Sheria Musyoka, 26, was an immigrant from Kenya who had graduated from Dartmouth and moved to San Francisco with his wife and three-year-old son. Lyons was behind the wheel of a stolen car when he killed Musyoka.
Despite improvements, the official poverty rate remains high.
According to official poverty statistics, 14.3% of Californians lacked enough resources—about $24,300 per year for a family of four—to meet basic needs in 2016. The rate has declined significantly from 15.3% in 2015, but it is well above the most recent low of 12.4% in 2007. Moreover, the official poverty line does not account for California’s housing costs or other critical family expenses and resources.
Poverty in California is even higher when factoring in key family needs and resources.
The California Poverty Measure (CPM), a joint research effort by PPIC and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, is a more comprehensive approach to gauging poverty in California. It accounts for the cost of living and a range of family needs and resources, including social safety net benefits. According to the CPM, 19.4% of Californians (about 7.4 million) lacked enough resources to meet basic needs in 2016—about $31,000 per year for a family of four, nearly $7,000 higher than the official poverty line. Poverty was highest among children (21.3%) and lower among adults age 18–64 (18.8%) and those age 65 and older (18.7%). The overall poverty rate went unchanged between 2015 and 2016, following two years of decreases.
About four in ten Californians are living in or near poverty.
Nearly one in five (18.9%) Californians were not in poverty but lived fairly close to the poverty line (up to one and a half times above it). All told, two-fifths (38.2%) of state residents were poor or near poor in 2016. But the share of Californians in families with less than half the resources needed to meet basic needs was 5.6%, a deep poverty rate that is smaller than official poverty statistics indicate.
2018: “LA Doubled Homeless Budget, Doubled Homeless Crime.” Bonus: Homeless people were behind many of the big California fires.
Los Angeles is seeking a $3.9 billion coronavirus bailout. “Last year, roughly 20,000 city employees’ average pay exceeded $147,000, costing taxpayers $3 billion, Open the Books auditors found. Nearly 2,000 employees out-earned California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s salary of $202,000.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
“2 out of 3 tech workers would leave SF permanently if they could work remotely.”
The number of homeless Californians in the Los Angeles county has reached 58,936, New York Times reported this weekend.
But Californians don’t seem to be the priority of democratic governor Gavin Newsom.
Under an agreement between Gov. Newsom and Democrats in the state legislature, low-income adults between the ages of 19 and 25 living in California illegally would be eligible for California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal.
State officials estimate that will be about 90,000 people at a cost of $98m a year.
This decision will make California the first state in the US to pay for illegal immigrants to have full health benefits.
For the 2018-2019 tax year, the bill was sent to the Newsoms on September 28, 2018. The two installments were due in December 2018 and April 2019, and the bill became delinquent on July 1, 2019. They finally paid their second installment, along with about $3,000 in penalties, on September 3, 2019. This is significant because the Newsoms’ Fair Oaks mansion was purchased for $3.7 million cash in November 2018. Newsom’s spokesman claims it was the Newsoms’ cash even though there is no documentation of that; the home was purchased in the name of Gavin Newsom’s cousin and longtime PlumpJack business partner, Jeremy Scherer.
If the Newsoms had $3.7 million in cash lying around, why wait to pay $22,000 in property taxes until the next year and incur a $3,000 penalty? Wealthy people aren’t in the habit of paying thousands of dollars in penalties.
In 2018 the Newsoms were sent a supplemental property tax bill on May 15, covering a revaluation and some school and health bonds. That bill was due in two installments; the installments became delinquent June 30 and October 31, respectively.
He finally paid them on December 10, 2018, along with $750 in penalties.
The last time their property tax bill was paid on time was when they received the “sweetheart” cashout refinancing deal in December 2017 ($3,225,000 cashout on a home worth $3,500,000) – presumably because the bank would only close the loan if the property taxes were paid at the same time.
“Many people are moving from California to Texas. The cost of living, as well as high taxes and red tape, are precipitating the push.”
“EVERYONE IS FROM California. Are they kicking y’all out?” asks a curious bureaucrat at the Department of Public Safety in Plano, a city near Dallas. In the previous week she had helped 20 people from California apply for a Texas driving licence. Those keeping score in the contest between the two states do not have to look far to notch up points for Texas. On the way to the state Capitol building in Austin to interview Greg Abbott, the governor, your correspondent discovered that her driver had recently relocated from southern California to start a family in a more affordable city.
Between 2007 and 2016 a net 1m American residents, or 2.5% of the state’s population, left California for another state. Texas was the most popular destination, attracting more than a quarter of them. More Americans have left California than moved there every year since 1990, though immigrants still arrive from abroad.
Companies are also moving. Last year McKesson, a medical-supplies company, and Core-Mark, a supplier to convenience stores, shifted their headquarters from California to Texas, as did Jamba Juice, a smoothie company. Many Californian firms are also adding jobs outside the Golden State. Charles Schwab, a financial-brokerage firm based in San Francisco, received more than $6m in incentives from Texas, and by the end of this year will have more employees there than in California.
What explains the one-way traffic? There are four reasons for California’s weaker position. First, it has become very expensive, especially for housing. “If there’s one risk factor in this state, it’s affordability,” says Gavin Newsom, California’s governor. “The thing we most pride ourselves on—the California dream, a notion of social mobility that we export around the world—is in peril.” A third of Californians are thinking of moving out of state because of the high cost of housing, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, a non-profit research firm. Most of those leaving California for Texas earn less than $50,000 a year and have only a high-school education…
The middle class is also struggling. In California home-ownership rates are at their lowest level since the 1940s and among the lowest in America, with black and Hispanic families particularly hard hit. In the past ten years around 75,000 new housing units received permits annually, only 40% of the projected need. “From the perspective of a young, upwardly mobile family, California is nearly impossible, unless you have rich parents, rob a bank, or get money from your firm going public,” says Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University, who believes that the state is experiencing a new kind of “feudalism”, where the ultra-rich thrive and others suffer.
As a symbol of how out-of-reach the once accessible state has become, last year the small house that was the setting for “The Brady Bunch”, a television show in the 1970s about a middle-class Californian family, sold for a whopping $3.5m, nearly double its asking price. Companies expanding elsewhere find that many employees are happy to give it a go in a state where they can afford to buy a house and raise a family.
The states also have wildly different tax regimes, which is a second reason for Texas gaining favour as a destination. With a top rate of 13.3%, California has the highest state income-tax rate for top earners. Texas does not charge residents a state income tax. Instead, they pay higher property taxes to local governments, and the state gets most of its money from a sales tax. Because of recent changes to the tax code, residents of California and other high-tax states will no longer be able to deduct all of their state and local taxes from federal payments, which could further dampen people’s willingness to remain in the state.
Taxes on businesses are increasing, too. In the past six elections California voters have approved more than 800 local taxes on businesses and residents, according to Larry Kosmont of Kosmont Companies, an economic advisory firm. (This does not include voters’ decision to raise the income-tax rate on the state’s highest earners.) For example, last year voters in San Francisco approved the controversial Proposition C, which taxes businesses with more than $50m in gross revenues to fund services for the homeless. Companies with fat profit margins can afford higher taxes, but lower-margin businesses cannot, and these are the ones most likely to consider an alternative location.
Third, Texas has pursued a concerted strategy of wooing and cultivating businesses, whereas California has not. This began with Rick Perry, who served as Texas’s governor from 2000 to 2015. He travelled to California and other states on “hunting trips” to poach businesses, ran ads on radio encouraging people and companies to move, and offered large incentives to create jobs in Texas. Mr Abbott has continued with these pro-business policies and still operates a “deal-closing fund” to incentivise businesses to come. He is a cheerleader for his state’s advantages, including low costs, a central location with good airports and a convenient time zone for doing business with both coasts. He describes Texas as “the quintessential free-enterprise state”.
Here’s what the “liberal Californians, go home” crowd misses: The vast majority of West Coast dwellers who make up Bailey’s more than 11,500 Facebook followers lean conservative.
And after spending a few days perusing Bailey’s page, I’d say this comment best sums up its audience: “We fell in love with Texas immediately … we’re conservative Christians who love God, country, freedom, family, gun rights and barbeque.”
Bailey said cost of living and taxes are hot buttons for commenters, but so are gridlocked roads, the homeless and illegal immigration.
The Realtor welcomes people of all political stripes onto her page — after all, she’s in this to make money. And she and her husband, Scott, identify as libertarian.
Our state debt is over $1.5t. We have the highest gasoline prices in the nation. Oh, and we are a sanctuary state that protects all manner of illegal immigrants, no matter how serious the crimes they’ve committed. Think Jose Garcia Zanate who killed Kate Steinle. He had been deported seven times but was out and about on the streets of San Francisco with the blessings of SF law enforcement; they aim to protect the criminals at the expense of the law-abiding. ICE is the enemy in sanctuary cities and states, the thugs are victims.
State taxes in California are the highest in the nation, as are our sales taxes. We fall nearly last in education. We have the most homeless, the most illegal migrants. The state spends $30.b on illegal immigration per year. Like all cities run by progressives, our entire state is a disaster of Democratic making. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego have been overrun by homeless people, most of them drug addicted and/or mentally ill. Entire areas of these cities are befouled by used needles, feces, trash, garbage, rats and now diseases long-thought to be extinct in the West. Persons who work in downtown Los Angeles have contracted typhus! As true in other cites long run by Democrats (Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, Detroit, Flint) it is the implementation of ridiculous utopian Marxist policies so beloved by progressives that has destroyed these once grand cities. Socialist strategies always fail. Democrats cheat, (ballot harvesting) are re-elected, and the state continues to decline. Venezuela is the current example of the massive failure of socialism on the world stage. What is happening there is beyond tragic; the people are starving in every sense of the word. But will our own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemn socialism? Absolutely not. She, Bernie Sanders and their fellow travelers mean to take this country the way of Venezuela, the road California has already been on for too long; possibly too long to ever recover. This state is slowly becoming a third-world nation. But, as in Venezuela, the rich and politically powerful stay rich, keep their mansions and their private planes unperturbed by the devastation they generate.
First, the problem of corruption must be addressed. It’s no secret that public unions rule the legislative process in this state. They’re even funding the redecorating of the Lieutenant Governor’s office, using money confiscated from the state’s lowest-paid workers. De-funding the unions through an “Uncheck the Box” campaign aimed informing union workers that they can opt out of union dues (opt-outs made possible by the Janus decision) should be a top priority for activist groups in the state. De-funding the unions will have a positive domino effect on everything in California.
Corruption in the regulatory process, at the state and local levels, is rampant and an open secret. Lately the Los Angeles Times has done a great job of investigating the problems with homelessness and trash piles, but their investigations stop short of fully placing blame where it belongs. People who are truly fed up with the condition of our state need to put their money where their mouth is and fund true investigative reporting (because you know Silicon Valley won’t be capitalizing any non-socialist journalistic startups).
Next, laws which prioritize criminals, homeless bums (as opposed to those who are homeless because of mental illness), and illegal immigrants over the state’s children and families must be revised or abolished. Did you know that a homeless bum’s shopping cart (which they stole from some business somewhere) is considered their “home” or “property” and cannot be taken away from them? Homeless people with true mental illness should be treated with the dignity they deserve (as Kurt Schlichter said on KABC today), and not left on the streets to fend for themselves.
The true causes of the third-world conditions in Los Angeles and San Francisco must be addressed. Some well-meaning laws or programs relating to homelessness are causing negative unintended consequences. In Los Angeles, some of the blame for the massive trash piles can be placed directly on City Hall – their RecycLA program resulted in massive increases in sanitation costs for businesses and missed pickups.
The state’s ballot harvesting law must be amended. Currently anyone – without ID or training – can pick up a ballot from any voter and turn it in to elections officials. The harvester has to sign their name to the outside of the ballot, but there is no process for elections officials to verify that the person turning in the ballot is the person who signed the outside, or that the name they used is actually their real name. The process is ripe for fraud.
These are all from 2019, and we’re no closer to any of them being implemented…
Lion Real Estate Group LLC, which has about 150 employees and $1 billion in assets under management, is moving its headquarters into office space at 3811 Turtle Creek Blvd., the company’s co-founders said in an exclusive interview with the Dallas Business Journal in January. The fast-growing real estate firm focuses on multifamily investment and is relocating its corporate headquarters to Dallas from Los Angeles.
The company will keep its Los Angeles office to support West Coast operations.
Lion Real Estate Group’s decision to relocate its headquarters to Dallas aligns with Lion’s strategy of acquiring multifamily assets outside of the urban core, both in Texas and in other high-growth cities across the Sunbelt and Southeast, said Jeff Weller, co-founder and managing principal of the firm…
The National Rifle Association, meanwhile, has retained Colliers International to help it scout space for a new corporate headquarters in DFW or elsewhere in Texas in the event it opts to pull the trigger on a prospective relocation from Northern Virginia.
The nonprofit intends to restructure as a Texas-based organization and has formed a committee to explore the prospect, which could include a headquarters move.
In court documents, the NRA asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas, the venue for its Chapter 11 reorganization, for permission to retain Colliers to help it find office space for rent or purchase. The search will mostly likely be focused on the “Dallas-Fort Worth region,” the court documents say.
The first few months of 2021 has sustained the momentum the area saw in 2020 when several companies decided to relocate to North Texas. Last year, one of the biggest corporate relocations to DFW was CBRE Group Inc. (NYSE: CBRE), the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, which moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Dallas.
Financial services giant Charles Schwab moved its San Francisco headquarters to the North Texas community of Westlake at the start of this year, in a relocation announced in 2020.
Hundreds of small and midsize firms like Lion Real Estate and Wiley X have relocated to DFW over the last few years.
According to Dallas Regional Chamber, there are 102 major corporations considering headquarters relocation or expansion to North Texas currently.
“Jim Breyer, CEO of venture capital and private equity investor Breyer Capital, announced in August 2020 that Breyer Capital would be opening a second office in Austin. While Breyer Capital’s original office and interest in Silicon Valley remain, Breyer himself has also moved to Austin and is investing in what he sees as the city’s potential as an emerging tech hub.”
after lots of planning and due diligence, I decided that Austin was the best place for the next era of my venture capital and venture philanthropy career. With early, but compelling, signals that Austin is emerging as the next great tech hub, I couldn’t be more excited to play a role in helping another part of the country reach its potential. I believe there is an opportunity to get in near the ground floor and build something truly enduring.
Other friends from the Bay Area, like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have made similar moves, along with many other tech industry leaders, so I’m not surprised that a so-called “Bay Area exodus” has become a widely reported trend.
But instead of focusing on the positives of Austin, many exodus narratives have focused on problems with the Bay Area. While critics make some fair points about rising living costs and government overreach, I would argue that Silicon Valley and Austin both have bright futures ahead. The things that made Silicon Valley special are not going anywhere. The Bay Area will continue to be a global hub of innovation that attracts courageous entrepreneurs, benefits from world-class institutions and nurtures talent from leading tech companies — even as Austin offers a remarkable new frontier of opportunity.
New Austinites all have different reasons for why they moved here, of course. My decision to start Breyer Capital Austin, for example, has more to do with Austin’s strengths than any of the Bay Area’s flaws.
For starters, Austin, more than any other city in the country, encourages a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. Because the city has catered to so many types of professionals, and not just technologists, the depth of talent here is unique. Artists, entrepreneurs, doctors and professors, all at the top of their trade, frequently choose to build things together. By breaking down silos and embracing novel approaches to company-building, Austin’s diverse entrepreneurs will usher in a new era of growth for the city, state and country. I couldn’t be more excited to be investing in health care AI companies and fin-tech companies that have a consumer media backbone. The best founding teams are multifaceted and versatile, and Austin has every type of entrepreneur that a great company needs. This kind of interdisciplinary entrepreneurship will help Austin companies flourish.
Austin has attracted and will continue to attract young, brilliant talent because of its comparative affordability, outdoor culture and professional development opportunities. This vast pool of expertise is contributing to a remarkably robust climate of innovation. With Tesla, Facebook, Apple, Google, Oracle and other leading companies moving to or expanding in Austin, the entrepreneurial ecosystem will be bolstered when talent from these companies breaks away to start new ventures. Some of my best investments have been in entrepreneurs who gained valuable experience at an outstanding established company before starting their own. Five years from now, Austin will benefit from many tech company alums eager to leverage their expertise to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.
While it may be an overstatement to say California is hemorrhaging people, some of the state’s major companies and wealthiest residents are leaving for states like Texas, Arizona and Florida. In 2020, Oracle, Palantir and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise were among the companies that announced they’re relocating their headquarters out of the Golden State. Wealthy individuals from the tech industry moving recently include Larry Ellison, Drew Houston, Joe Lonsdale and Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man.
California’s population and job growth have both slowed to a trickle, with many citing concerns about high taxes, cost of living and heavy regulations. With the rise of remote work in 2020, over 135,000 more people left California than moved in — the third largest net migration loss ever recorded for the state. Although some big names have committed to stay, one recent survey found that two of every three Bay Area workers would leave the area permanently if they could continue to work from home indefinitely.
It’s not just businesses that are moving out of California. Retirees are leaving in growing numbers.
For whatever reason they move, the retiree exodus is taking knowledge, wealth, patrons of the arts and potential philanthropy out of communities in the Golden State to the benefit of other places.
The trend dovetails with larger concerns about California’s affordability, business climate and economic disparities.
“It’s not just retirees moving. It’s companies. It’s rich people and poor people,” said Sanjay Varshney, professor of finance at California State University Sacramento and founder of Goldenstone Wealth Management LLC in El Dorado Hills.
Poorer people are leaving the state because “they can’t make ends meet” with the high cost of living and housing, he said. “And extremely wealthy people are moving because they are fed up.”
Varshney said a migration of wealthy people are leaving the Bay Area in particular, and “you are seeing that with people like Elon Musk and corporations like Oracle, Tesla and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.”
Retirees can easily leave California, as they are no longer tied to jobs in the state. “Retirees are a very mobile part of the population,” Varshney said
The trend appears to be growing. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System tracks where it sends benefits, and more of its members no longer call California home. Some 85% of CalPERS retirees lived in the state 2013. That dropped to 84% in 2018 and to 82.3% in 2020, according to the pension system.
The Greater Sacramento Economic Council’s mission is to attract companies to relocate to the Sacramento area. By the time companies decide to move out of the Bay Area, they are often soured on California taxes and regulations, and they tend to move out of the state completely, said Barry Broome, Greater Sacramento’s CEO.
The same can be said for individuals, he said.
“A lot of this is tax,” Broome said. California has higher business taxes and higher individual tax rates than most other states.
To live in California at this time is to experience every day the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq: “Catastrophic success.” The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.
The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.
And yet, it’s not really American inequality. It’s the kind of inequality produced by failed leftist policies. Picture today’s San Francisco:
Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard. A public-school teacher suffering from cancer is forced to pay for her own substitute.
Manjoo emphasizes that San Francisco is run entirely by Democrats. It has become difficult to blame it on Republicans when there are no Republicans.
“Rats at the police station, filth on L.A. streets — scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control.”
The good news is that two trash-strewn downtown Los Angeles streets I wrote about last week were cleaned up by city work crews and have been kept that way, as of this writing.
The bad news is that I didn’t have to travel far to find more streets just as badly fouled by filthy mounds of junk and stinking, rotting food.
Then there was the news that the LAPD station on skid row was cited by the state for a rodent infestation and other unsanitary conditions, and that one employee there was infected with the strain of bacteria that causes typhoid fever.
What century is this?
Is it the 21st century in the largest city of a state that ranks among the world’s most robust economies, or did someone turn back the calendar a few hundred years?
We’ve got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease. Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in Third World places. Typhoid and typhus are in the news and an army of rodents is on the move.
On Thursday I saw a county health inspector on rat patrol between 7th and 8th streets on skid row. He was carrying a clipboard and said he had found droppings and other evidence of rodents, and I asked where:
“Everywhere,” he said.
Well, it’s nice to know somebody is doing something, but you don’t need a clipboard. I’ve seen so many rats the last two weeks in downtown Los Angeles, I have to suspect they’re plotting a takeover of City Hall, which vermin infiltrated last year.
The city of Los Angeles has become a giant trash receptacle. It used to be that illegal dumpers were a little more discreet, tossing their refuse in fields and gullies and remote outposts.
Now city streets are treated like dumpsters, or even toilets — on Thursday, the 1600 block of Santee Street was cordoned off after someone dumped a fat load of poop in the street. I’m not sure when any of this became the norm, but it must have something to do with the knowledge that you can get away with it. Every time sanitation crews knock down one mess, another dumpsite springs up nearby.
California is the great role model for America, particularly if you read the Eastern press. Yet few boosters have yet to confront the fact that the state is continuing to hemorrhage people at a higher rate, with particular losses among the family-formation age demographic critical to California’s future.
Since the recovery began in 2010, California’s net domestic out-migration, according to the American community survey, has almost tripled to 140,000 annually. Over that time, the state has lost half a million net migrants with the bulk of that coming from the Los Angeles-Orange County area.
In contrast, during the first years of the decade the Bay Area, particularly San Francisco, enjoyed a renaissance of in-migration, something not seen since before 2000. But that is changing. A recent Redfin report suggests that the Bay Area, the focal point of California’s boom, now leads the country in outbound home searches, which could suggest a further worsening of the trend.
One of the perennial debates about migration, particularly in California, is the nature of the outmigration. The state’s boosters, and the administration itself, like to talk as if California is simply giving itself an enema — expelling its waste — while making itself an irresistible beacon to the “best and brightest.”
The reality, however, is more complicated than that. An analysis of IRS data from 2015-16, the latest available, shows that while roughly half those leaving the state made under $50,000 annually, half made above that. Roughly one in four made over $100,000 and another quarter earned a middle-class paycheck between $50,000 and $100,000. We also lose among the wealthiest segment, the people best able to withstand California’s costs, but by much smaller percentages.
The key issue for California, however, lies with the exodus of people around child-bearing years. The largest group leaving the state — some 28 percent — is 35 to 44, the prime ages for families. Another third come from those 26 to 34 and 45 to 54, also often the age of parents.
Every day, Texans are reminded why letting liberal democrats take over this state would be a terrible idea.
In a new report released by S&P Global Ratings, Texas has been ranked among the most recession-proof states in the country, according to a variety of factors.
Texas’ fiscal strength stems from conservative state legislators’ insistence against implementing a personal income tax or increasing other taxes. Also important has been the push by Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to slow the rate of spending growth and refusal to dip into the state’s “rainy day fund” for non-emergency spending.
Magnificent in the distance, San Francisco is now shockingly ugly up close. In the decade I have lived here, the city has achieved the seemingly impossible: It has combined the expensive and the bland and the appalling into a new form of decadence. To the untrained eye, it looks magical: a city of the future, a city of gasps. Then, slowly, it reveals itself to be a city of lies, one that dismisses the idea of city living.
Snip.
Running a venture-capital fund that invests as early as possible in startups, I now see fewer and fewer companies choosing to come launch here. When we opened our doors in 2015, maybe 80 percent of our investments were in Bay Area companies. Last year [2018], half of them were, and we expect to see that number decrease even more in the years ahead. Andreessen-Horowitz, the famed Silicon Valley VC firm, has announced that it’s becoming more or less a hedge fund, presumably to focus on later-stage opportunities. Peter Thiel, who had lived here since the mid 90s, has now decamped to Los Angeles, and says there is a less than 50 percent chance the next great tech company will arise in an increasingly expensive, conformist Silicon Valley.
“Silicon Valley is now more fashion than opportunity,” Thiel told the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. “The heads are the same.”
Lack of independent thought aside, the Economist has identified the source of the problem: You can’t build a successful startup from a garage if a garage costs a million bucks. The flow of new creations is being choked off first and foremost because there are fewer cheap places for new things to start.
The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco recently hit $3690 per month, 30 percent greater than in New York City. Over the last decade, the Bay Area has added 722,000 jobs but built only 106,000 new homes. Proposition M, passed in the 1980s to avoid “Manhattanization,” limits the supply of office space. The city’s average Class A asking rent has risen 124 percent since 2010 to over $80 per square foot.
The legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs once remarked that new ideas come from old buildings, the types of places you can alter without permission because no one cares about them. This is one reason why so many garage startups and garage bands and artists spilling paint in discarded warehouse lofts have left their mark on the world. The true creative class can’t afford to rent expensive new studios.
But in San Francisco, the true creative class can’t afford to rent any space anymore.
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Up and down the city’s disorienting hills, you notice homeless men and women — junkies, winos, the dispossessed — passed out in the vestibules of empty storefronts on otherwise busy streets. Encampments of tents sprout in every shadowy corner: under highway overpasses, down alleys. Streets are peppered with used syringes. Strolling the sidewalks, you smell the faint malodorous traces of human excrement and soiled clothing. Crowded thoroughfares such as Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do nothing.
The confused mumble, the incoherent finger-pointing tirade, the twitch, the cold daemonic stare, the drunken stumble and drool — these are the rhythms of a city on the edge of a schizophrenic explosion.
1) Assume that a state with among the highest income, sales and gas taxes has commensurately among the nation’s worst roads. Therefore, do not become depressed by blood alleys, potholes, bullet-holed and graffiti stained road signs, or roads unchanged from a half-century ago when the population was less than half of what it is today. You are an adventurer on the frontier, not a complacent commuter or traveler. Approach the next few hours as a challenge rather than a nightmare. Envision a California road trip like Odysseus did his on voyage on the Aegean.
2) It is wiser not to use the restrooms on any California cross-country drive. Excrement can be many places other than in the toilet. Also, fill up before starting. Don’t count on finding gas stations that are not overcrowded or have all their pumps working—even the ones with national affiliations that look as inviting from the off-ramp as Circe’s smile.
My favorite is one where all the tiny glass windows at the pumps where the electronic instructions guide you are either broken or scratched out. My second favorite one was where the pump had no hose and no sign saying it had no hose. In California, you often fill up by holding the pump handle down nonstop, given the automatic levers are broken or missing. A state law requires emergency free air and water services for all gas station customers; perhaps because it’s mandatory, the air and water dispensers usually do not work.
3) Assume “Mad Max” conditions at any time. Contraptions can pose as vehicles in the most regulated vehicle state in the nation (there is a reason why the California DMV is dysfunctional). Cars can still tow each other, 1950s-style, with sagging rope. Expect a piece of lumber or a mattress to go Frisbee on every other trip. Anticipate that a quarter of the drivers have bad brakes, worse tires, and ignore or cannot read signs and posted warnings. The person who passes you at 90 miles per hour likely does not have a license, or registration, or insurance—or, perhaps, any of the three.
One reason companies are abandoning California in droves: “A Mountain View tech CEO is beyond frustrated after he says his vehicles have been broken into four times in the past 18 months while parked in the same city lot.” That was from 2019. I doubt it’s gotten any better.
2018: California wants to run the world’s most expensive bullet train, but can’t even run a competent DMV.
In April 2016, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15-an-hour minimum wage law into effect.
As a consequence, the minimum wage went from $10 an hour to $10.50 an hour for businesses with 26 or more employees on January 1, 2017. On January 1 of this year, the minimum wage was hiked again to $11.00 an hour for larger employers and $10.50 for businesses with 25 or fewer employees.
Federal jobs data for 2018 suggests that California’s rural manufacturing base might be getting hammered by the higher mandated minimum wage.
Unless a future governor waives the scheduled increases due to economic weakness, the government mandated hourly wage hikes will keep coming—$1 per hour every year—until they reach $15 an hour four years from now for large employers with smaller employers hitting $15 in 2023. After that, future increases are pegged to national consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers.
Many factors affect regional job creation and wage growth. Availability of suitable labor, energy and land costs, infrastructure, including access to clean water and well-maintained roads, as well as state and local taxes, the regulatory burden and the lawsuit environment. Measured against these factors, California has significant challenges.
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California’s 2017 retail electric prices were 89 percent higher than in its peer competitor, Texas. California’s gasoline prices remain the highest in the contiguous 48 states, at $3.619 per gallon of unleaded, some 26 percent higher than the national average of $2.865.
California’s once-vaunted water storage and conveyance system has been essentially frozen in time for decades, as the state’s politicians spend billions on environmental programs and studies and precious little on expending and securing California’s water supply.
California’s highway system, once the envy of the world, has similarly been put at the bottom of the priority list, regularly being ranked at the tail end of national surveys. Further, the state’s union labor agreements and environmental approval maze contribute to the state’s road maintenance costs being almost 40 percent higher than the national average.
As for state and local taxes, Forbes ranked California as 45th-worst in 2016.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce meanwhile rated California as having the 47th-worst lawsuit climate in the nation last year.
The regulatory burden on small business was studied in a report authorized by the California legislature 10 years ago which found that small businesses faced a complex puzzle of state and local rules that cost about $134,000 per year in compliance costs.
Voters approved retroactive pension increases 10 times between 1996 and 2008, thus leaving the San Francisco Retirement System underfunded and a drain on the operating budget.
The city and county of San Francisco owes the retirement system a massive $5.8 billion – more than half the city’s entire general-fund budget.
“Californians fed up with housing costs and taxes are fleeing state in big numbers.” “Census Bureau data show California lost just over 138,000 people to domestic migration in the 12 months ended in July 2017.”
2017: “Thanks to the declaration of being a Sanctuary City, San Fran L.A. and other criminal cities have done what is not possible. ICE has announced it is sending hundreds of agents to these cities—that means illegal aliens are now in greater danger of being deported, thanks to the policies of the Democrats. Yup, now the illegal aliens in these cities have a reason to fear deportation—De Leon, Mayors Lee and Garcetti have put a target on their backs.”
The heroin needles, the pile of excrement between parked cars, the yellow soup oozing out of a large plastic bag by the curb and the stained, faux Persian carpet dumped on the corner.
It is a scene of detritus that might bring to mind any variety of developing-world squalor. But this is San Francisco, the capital of the nation’s technology industry, where a single span of Hyde Street hosts an open-air narcotics market by day and at night is occupied by the unsheltered and drug-addled slumped on the sidewalk.
There are many other streets like it, but by one measure it is the dirtiest block in the city.
Just a 15-minute walk away are the offices of Twitter and Uber, two companies that along with other nameplate technology giants have helped push the median price of a home in San Francisco well beyond a million dollars.
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According to city statisticians, the 300 block of Hyde Street, a span about the length of a football field in the heart of the Tenderloin neighborhood, received 2,227 complaints about street and sidewalk cleanliness over the past decade, more than any other. It is an imperfect measurement — some blocks might be dirtier but have fewer calls — but residents on the 300 block say that they are not surprised by their ranking. The San Francisco bureau photographer, Jim Wilson, and I set out to measure the depth of deprivation on a single block. We returned a number of times, including a 12-hour visit, from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. on a recent weekday. Walking around the neighborhood we saw the desperation of the mentally ill, the drug dependent and homeless, and heard from embittered residents who say it will take much more than a broom to clean up the city, long considered one of the United States’ beacons of urban beauty.
San Francisco is now so filthy that “a major medical association is pulling its annual convention out of the city — saying its members no longer feel safe.” From 2018, back when people still had conventions. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
The latest “benefit” of California’s “high speed rail” boondoggle: Longer traffic delays for “blended” traffic that isn’t high speed at all. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
In 2019, the Texas Permian Basin became the world’s largest oil-producing region, pumping out more oil than Saudi oil fields. Who knows if that will change under Biden…
“If everyone in the middle class is leaving, that’s actually a good thing. We need these spots opened up for the new wave of immigrants to come up. It’s what we do. We export our middle class to the United States. You guys should be thanking us for that,” Singam said to a stunned Carlson.
Of course, he also says that “Soon enough Texas will be a blue state,” so there’s an unusually high degree of “talking out your ass” going on here… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
The SpaceX South Texas launch site, which first broke ground in September 2014, is a rocket production facility, test site, and spaceport located at Boca Chica approximately 20 miles east of Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. The South Texas Launch Site is SpaceX’s fourth active suborbital launch facility, and first private facility.
By March of last year, SpaceX had over 500 employees working at the Boca Chica site, Ars Technica reported. Four shifts work 24/7 — in 12-hour shifts with four days on and three days off followed by three days on and four off — enabling the continuous manufacturing of his Starship flight rocket with workers and equipment specialized to each task of serial Starship production.
According to a 2014 Brownsville Economic Development Council report, the facility was projected to generate $85 million worth of economic activity in Brownsville and eventually generate roughly $51 million in annual salaries from new jobs created by 2024.
Part of this money is coming directly from Musk. Musk tweeted that he is donating $20 million to schools in Cameron County and $10 million to the city of Brownsville for revitalization efforts, both of which are near SpaceX.
“Please consider moving to Starbase or greater Brownsville/South Padre area in Texas & encourage friends to do so! SpaceX’s hiring needs for engineers, technicians, builders & essential support personnel of all kinds are growing rapidly,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday. “Starbase will grow by several thousand people over the next year or two.”
Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for Austin. Palantir, Charles Schwab and McKesson are all bound for greener pastures. No less an information-age avatar than Elon Musk has had enough. He thinks regulators have grown “complacent” and “entitled” about the state’s world-class tech companies. No doubt, he has a point. Silicon Valley’s high-tech cluster has been the envy of the world for decades, but there’s nothing inevitable about its success. As many cities have found in recent years, building such agglomerations is exceedingly hard, as much art as science. Low taxes, modest regulation, sound infrastructure and good education systems all help, but aren’t always sufficient. Once squandered, moreover, such dynamism can’t easily be revived. With competition rising across the U.S., the area’s policy makers need to recognize the dangers ahead.
In recent years, San Francisco has seemed to be begging for companies to leave. In addition to familiar failures of governance — widespread homelessness, inadequate transit, soaring property crime — it has also imposed more idiosyncratic hindrances. Far from welcoming experimentation, it has sought to undermine or stamp out home-rental services, food-delivery apps, ride-hailing firms, electric-scooter companies, facial-recognition technology, delivery robots and more, even as the pioneers in each of those fields attempted to set up shop in the city. It tried to ban corporate cafeterias — a major tech-industry perk — on the not-so-sound theory that this would protect local restaurants. It created an “Office of Emerging Technology” that will only grant permission to test new products if they’re deemed, in a city bureaucrat’s view, to provide a “net common good.” Whatever the merits of such meddling, it’s hardly a formula for unbounded inventiveness.
These two traits — poor governance and animosity toward business — have collided calamitously with respect to the city’s housing market. Even as officials offered tax breaks for tech companies to headquarter themselves downtown, they mostly refused to lift residential height limits, modify zoning rules or allow significant new construction to accommodate the influx of new workers. They then expressed shock that rents and home prices were soaring — and blamed the tech companies. California’s legislature has only made matters worse. A bill it enacted in 2019, ostensibly intended to protect gig workers, threatened to undo the business models of some of the state’s biggest tech companies until voters granted them a reprieve in a November referendum. A new privacy law has imposed immense compliance burdens — amounting to as much as 1.8% of state output in 2018 — while conferring almost no consumer benefits. An 8.8% state corporate tax rate and 13.3% top income-tax rate (the nation’s highest) haven’t helped.
The third and most ignored reason California doesn’t use much electricity is that their tax and regulatory policies and high costs of doing business have steadily driven out industries that use a lot of energy to manufacture things such as steel and cement.
There’s irony in this, of course, and it’s this: California’s environmentally-minded leaders like to tout the virtue of their post-industrial policies, but in deindustrializing wide swaths of their economy, they have merely outsourced the energy use—and pollution—to other places and then, to add insult to injury, pay to have it shipped to California in carbon-emitting ships, planes, trains, and trucks.
In terms of electric production, California is the nation’s biggest importer of electricity. In the past, this meant a lot of coal-fired power from places such as Arizona and Utah.
But a law passed in 2006 alongside the state’s more famous AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, effectively banned the renewal of power contracts from traditional out-of-state coal-powered generators.
As a result, “electron laundering” has arisen to fill the gap. This occurs when Californians, in the quest for green electrons to power their grid, pay British Columbians for hydropower, which the Canadians are happy sell, as they backfill their own power needs with coal power from Washington State and Alberta. It works out for everyone: California gets higher-priced power that they can claim is green, while the Canadians get American greenbacks to fund their national health care system.
To cover their tracks and keep the green mirage intact, California authorities invented a new category of imported power called “Unspecified Sources of Power” that magically provided 9.25% of California’s electric needs last year. Prior to becoming politically incorrect, these power imports were simply labeled “coal.”
In the meantime, Californians paid an average of 18.41 cents per kilowatt hour for their electricity in July 2018, 67% higher than the national average and more than double the cost of electricity in Texas. In August, California’s rates jumped to 19.08 per kWh, 110% higher than Texas’ rates. In fact, Californians’ July and August electric rates were the highest in the contiguous 48 states.
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In contrast, Texas pursued a market-based electric policy through deregulation. While liberal consumer advocates were quick to claim failure in the first couple of years after the 2002 electric competition law passed as higher prices signaled more producers to enter the market, in the years since, Texans have seen their retail inflation-adjusted electricity prices decline by 32 percent from 2008 to 2017.
California has hooked up a grid battery system that is almost ten times bigger than the previous world record holder, but when it comes to making renewables reliable it is so small it might as well not exist.
The new battery array is rated at a storage capacity of 1,200 megawatt hours (MWh); easily eclipsing the record holding 129 MWh Australian system built by Tesla a few years ago. However, California peaks at a whopping 42,000 MW. If that happened on a hot, low wind night this supposedly big battery would keep the lights on for just 1.7 minutes (that’s 103 seconds). This is truly a trivial amount of storage.
Mind you this system is being built to serve just Pacific Gas & Electric. But they by coincidence peak at about half of California, or 21,000 MWh, so they get a magnificent 206 seconds of peak juice. Barely time to find the flashlight, right?
There is no word on what this trivial giant cost, since PG&E does not own it. That honor goes to an outfit called Vistra that does a lot of different things with electricity and gas. But these complex battery systems are not cheap.
This one reportedly utilizes more than 4,500 stacked battery racks, each of which contains 22 individual battery modules. That is 99,000 separate modules that have to be made to work well together. Imagine hooking up 99,000 electric cars and you begin to get the picture.
The US Energy Information Administration reports that grid scale battery systems have averaged around $1.5 million a MWh over100% renewable deception the last few years. At that price this trivial piece of storage cost just under TWO BILLION DOLLARS. At 103 seconds of peak storage that is about $18,000,000 a second. Money for nothing.
Mind you the PG&E engineers are not that stupid. They know perfectly well that this billion dollar battery is not there to provide backup power when wind and solar do not produce. In fact the truth is just the opposite. The battery’s job is to prevent wind and solar power from crashing the grid when they do produce.
It is called grid stabilization. Wind and solar are so erratic that it is very hard to maintain the constant 60 cycle AC frequency that all our wonderful electronic devices require. If the frequency gets more than just a tiny bit off the grid blacks out. Preventing these crashes requires active stabilization.
Grid instability due to erratic wind and solar used to not be a problem, because the huge spinning metal rotors in the coal, gas and nuclear power plant generators simply absorbed the fluctuations. But most of those plants have been shut down, so we need billion dollar batteries to do what those plants did for free. Nor is this monster battery the only one being built in California to try to make wind and solar power work. Many more are in the pipeline and not just in California. Many states are struggling with instability as baseline generators are switched off.
There is even an insane irony here, one that is perfect for Crazy California. This billion dollar battery occupies the old generator room of a shut down gas fired power plant. Those generators used to make the grid stable. Now we are struggling to do it.
The drugstore, which serves many older people who live in the Opera Plaza area, is the seventh Walgreens to close in the city since 2019.
“All of us knew it was coming. Whenever we go in there, they always have problems with shoplifters, ” said longtime customer Sebastian Luke, who lives a block away and is a frequent customer who has been posting photos of the thefts for months. The other day, Luke photographed a man casually clearing a couple of shelves and placing the goods into a backpack…
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he Walgreens clerks can’t do anything about the theft because the company has a policy preventing them from interfering in shoplifting. Allegedly this is for their safety but I suspect it’s really because if they didn’t have this policy and anyone got hurt, they would be sued.
And trying to stop this wave of thieves would be like throwing a pebble in a stream. It wouldn’t make any real difference anyway. A theft of less than $950 is a misdemeanor in California and even if the shoplifters get arrested they would likely be back on the streets almost immediately.
Cal State system to drop remedial English classes, even though “nearly 40 percent of freshmen arrive each fall unprepared to do college work in English, math, or both.” Maybe they plan to move to entirely Emoji-based classes…
Texas places six cities among the top 20 fastest growing in the U.S. between 2000 and 2016. But they’re probably not the ones you’d think: Odessa, Pearland, Brownville and Midland all make the top 10.
California employee suing GrubHub for wrongful termination and to be reclassified as an employee rather than an independent contractor, isn’t exactly the ideal plaintiff, admitting he didn’t read the entire employment contract and lied on his application.
The myth that America suffers a scarcity of teachers is promulgated by the teachers’ unions and their supporters in the education establishment. On the California Teachers Association website, we read that “California will need an additional 100,000 teachers over the next decade.” But this statistic simply means that CTA expects about a 2.8 percent yearly attrition rate, and will need to hire 10,000 teachers per annum over a ten-year period to maintain current staffing levels—more of an actuarial projection than an alarming call for action. (The union adds that California must hire even more teachers to “reduce class size so teachers can devote more time to each student.” The claim that small class size benefits all students—another union promulgated myth—means more teachers, which translates to more dues money for the union.) In reality, California is following the national trend in overstaffing. According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, California had 332,640 teachers in 2010. By 2015, there were 352,000. But the student population has been virtually flat, moving from 6.22 million in 2010 to 6.23 million in 2016.
True, legitimate general shortages exist in some school districts, while other districts may lack teachers in certain areas of expertise, like science and technology. Workers in these fields can earn higher salaries in the private sector; one solution would be to pay experts in these subjects more than other teachers as a way to lure them into teaching. Unfortunately, that’s not possible: throughout much of the country, and certainly in California, salaries are rigorously defined by a teacher union-orchestrated step-and-column pay regimen, which allows no room for flexibility in teacher salaries.
What’s necessary is to break up the unaccountable Big Government-Big Union education duopoly. More school choice, from privatization to charter schools, could go a long way toward solving the teacher glut. The government-education complex will always try to squeeze more money from the taxpayers, irrespective of student enrollment. Its greed has nothing to do with teacher shortages, small class sizes, educational equity, or any other rationale it can come up with: paramount to the interest of the educational bureaucracy is more jobs for administrators, and more dues money for the unions, which they use to buy and hold sway over school boards and legislators. While there is a surfeit of teachers and administrative staff, clarity and transparency regarding the reality of union control of the schools are scarce indeed.
From Santa Rosa to San Jose, more and more residents are making the bittersweet decision to leave the Bay Area, abandoning its near-perfect weather, booming economy and thriving arts, culture and food scenes in favor of less-glamorous destinations like Austin, Boise and Knoxville.
Some are fleeing the Bay Area’s sky-high housing and rent prices, both among the most expensive in the nation. Others are cashing out, selling their homes to get more for their money in a less expensive city. Nearly all of them are fed up with miserable, hours-long commutes on snarled freeways.
More people are leaving the Bay Area than are moving in, according to a 2018 report by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Silicon Valley Community Foundation. An average of 42 people left San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties each month in 2016, the most recent year for which data was available. That’s a sharp uptick from the year before, when the region gained an average of 1,962 residents per month.
Snip.
The couple will miss the church and community they’re leaving behind. But Pullen and Preuss, who describe themselves as politically moderate, won’t miss the Bay Area’s “super progressive politics.”
Kieran Blubaugh dreamed of living in California when he was growing up in Indiana. He played the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game and envisioned himself skateboarding down San Francisco’s crazy hills.
After paying off his student loans four years ago, he landed a job with a tech company and moved to San Francisco. At first, life was heavenly. He had a seven-minute commute on his motorcycle. He could pay $30 to see Incubus, one of his favorite bands, a short walk from his apartment.
Soon, however, his California dream soured. Thieves broke into his locked garage and did $8,000 worth of damage to his motorcycle, doubling his insurance rates. His dog nearly died after eating human feces on the sidewalk. Seeing people either getting arrested or being treated for an overdose outside a nearby building was a regular occurrence.
“And I live in a nice part of town,” said Blubaugh, 33.
Not anymore. On Saturday, Blubaugh moved out of the $4,000-a-month two-bedroom apartment he shared on Russian Hill and moved to Dallas, where he will pay $1,300 a month for a place the same size.
It’s not that he set out to ditch San Francisco for Dallas. “But it was the financially responsible thing to do,” he said.
Also: “We need more police. There’s a general lawlessness that’s just scary.”
2018: California’s Democratic Party goes hard left: “The rejection of Feinstein reveals the eclipse of the moderate, mainstream Democratic Party, and the rise of Green and identity-oriented politics, appealing to the coastal gentry . It offers little to traditional middle-class Democrats and even less to those further afield, in places like the industrial Midwest or the South.”
2017: “San Diego is awash with ‘fecal matter’ due to lack of public toilets and surging rates of homeless people, health officials warn as they try to control the hepatitis A outbreak.”
Everybody wants to leave California: “The taxes are higher here, the services are worse, educations worse, the roads are poor. You go to Texas – they have no personal income tax, they have great roads, they have a free government encouraging innovation.”
2017: “Security robots are being used to ward off San Francisco’s homeless population.”
2018: “Cost for California bullet train system rises to $77.3 billion.” Also this: “The rail authority also said the earliest trains could operate on a partial system between San Francisco and Bakersfield would be 2029 — four years later than the previous projection. The full system would not begin operating until 2033.”
At some point I stopped collecting links for the doomed high speed rail project, but guess what? It still clings to undead life:
California’s bullet train has become a nearly forgotten source of trouble, eclipsed in the public eye by Covid-19, a gubernatorial recall, and out-migration from the Golden State. But it’s still out there, sucking up time and money, and as empty as it ever was.
The California High Speed Rail, its formal name, was a hobby-ego project for former governor Jerry Brown that was supposed to move passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 220 mph by 2020. Instead, the project is moving at the speed of the museum piece it sometimes appears destined to be. Not a single train has run, with train testing still six to seven years away, amid seemingly never-ending delays.
The news regarding the project is, as usual, dismal. As the Los Angeles Times reported in January, Ghassan Ariqat, vice president of operations at bullet-train contractor Tutor Perini, sent a “scorching” letter to California officials criticizing persistent construction delays, “contradicting state claims that the line’s construction pace is on target,” and warning that the project could miss “a key 2022 federal deadline.” “It is beyond comprehension that as of this day, more than two thousand and six hundred calendar days after [official approval to start construction], the authority has not obtained all of the right of way,” Ariqat wrote. Because of the sluggish construction pace, he added, his company “will have to lay off a significant number of its field workers in the very near future” after already letting 73 walk.
Ariqat has good reason to be agitated. If there’s been a more poorly run public works project in California history, nobody can remember it. Two years ago, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan think tank, called California’s high-speed rail an outright “failure” that has “suffered from at least seven identifiable ‘worst practices,’” causing it “to be indefinitely delayed.”
“California Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-San Fernando). The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ Bold PAC since 2014, who took fundraising from $1 million to $6 million in just one year, is accused of drugging and molesting a 16-year-old girl in 2007.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Evidently the lawsuit was dropped in 2019.
The USC Medical School Dean who was also a drug addict.
The Round Rock Chamber announced Friday that Ametrine, Inc. has selected Round Rock as the company’s new U.S. headquarters in a move that will create some 140 good-paying jobs.
Founded in 2011, Ametrine is a manufacturer of unique, advanced multispectral camouflage systems with its current headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. Ametrine produces patented nano-technology materials and is consistently awarded research and development projects through the U.S. Department of Defense.
“We started the search for our new U.S. headquarters almost a year ago,” Ametrine CEO Brandon Cates said in a prepared statement. “We compared thirteen cities in five states using twelve evaluation criteria and came to the conclusion that Round Rock would be the best fit for the future of our business. Round Rock has been very forward-thinking when it comes to supporting the defense industry, and we anticipate future collaboration with the city, the chamber, and the other innovative companies that Round Rock attracts.”
Back in the Grapes of Wrath days, people fleeing the Dust Bowl for California were derisively called "Okies." I think we should derisively mock people arriving from California as "Fornies"
I finally had time to finish this postmortem post on the Texas winter storm energy grid crisis. I’ve got a ton of pieces to get through, so let’s dig in.
Here were two problems, one short term and one long term—which exacerbated the short-term one.
The short-term failure came at about 1 a.m. Monday when ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures, and arranged for more generation.
Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (in the ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation.
This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants.
In the last four to five years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today.
We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar, which is cheap for two reasons—it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can.
Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to a total of 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity statewide, though they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity.
Wind and solar, with state and federal subsidies, have pushed reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market.
Equipment failure turned out to be a big part of the problem.
“Beginning around 11:00 p.m. [Sunday night], multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s electric grid.
What does that mean? Equipment literally froze in the single digit temperatures and stopped working.
Then, as reserves diminished, ERCOT asked transmission providers to turn off large industrial users that had previously agreed to be shut down. But the situation deteriorated quickly, requiring rotating outages that have lasted hours for many Texans.
Electric generating plants did not properly winterize their equipment, said Dr. David Tuttle in the latest episode of the Y’all-itics political podcast. Tuttle is a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There are things that can be done, but it will cost some money,” he added. “About every decade we have these long-sustained periods. And then, you know weatherization is supposed to happen, and then, it doesn’t because it costs money.”
As Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse?
But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only surprise is that the house of cards collapsed in the dead of winter, not the toasty Texas summers that usually shatter peak electricity demand records.
The blackouts, which have left as many as 4 million Texans trapped in the cold, show the numerous chilling consequences of putting too many eggs in the renewable basket.
Snip.
On the whole, Texas is losing reliable generation and counting solely on wind and solar to keep up with its growing electricity demand. I wrote last summer about how ERCOT was failing to account for the increasing likelihood that an event combining record demand with low wind and solar generation would lead to blackouts. The only surprise was that such a situation occurred during a rare winter freeze and not during the predictable Texas summer heat waves.
Yet ERCOT still should not have been surprised by this event, as its own long-term forecasts indicated it was possible, even in the winter. Although many wind turbines did freeze and total wind generation was at 2 percent of installed capacity Monday night, overall wind production at the time the blackouts began was roughly in line with ERCOT forecasts from the previous week.
We knew solar would not produce anything during the night, when demand was peaking. Intermittency is not a technical problem but a fundamental reality when trying to generate electricity from wind and solar. This is a known and predictable problem, but Texas regulators fooled themselves into thinking that the risk of such low wind and solar production at the time it was needed most was not significant.
“By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid, and wind generation bottomed out at 2 [percent] of installed capacity by Monday night,” said Jason Isaac, director of Life:Powered, a project of Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former state lawmaker.
“Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts—inconvenient but manageable—instead turned into 4 million Texans left in the cold and without answers,” he continued. “To make matters worse, ERCOT shut down power at natural gas substations in the Permian, leading to further shortages.”
Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller has since said Texas should stop building wind turbines; focus on gas, coal, and oil; and called for the firing of Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees to the Public Utility Commission—the government body that oversees ERCOT.
But was this crisis foreseeable? Isaac says yes.
“We’ve known for years that a weather event combining low wind and solar production and record demand could lead to blackouts,” he told Texas Scorecard. “This week, that event became a reality as new wind and solar generation failed to produce when it was needed the most, and it appears ERCOT fell asleep at the wheel.”
For years, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) has overestimated the ability to maintain a reliable grid without a sufficient supply buffer, known as a “reserve margin.” That margin is the difference between demand for electricity and what the grid can produce. When demand exceeds production, you get blackouts. That buffer has been shrinking because reliable sources of energy have been retired, few reliable plants have been constructed, and the grid is depending more and more on weather-dependent renewable energy that repeatedly fails to perform when we need it most.
When wind and solar production predictably dropped as the winter storm hit, the buffer collapsed. ERCOT needed to execute a series of balancing measures that would have protected the grid. But it did not act soon enough, which caused many more gas and some coal power plants in the system to “trip.” (Think of it as a circuit breaker that triggers to prevent a fire or other emergency at your house when there is a system imbalance.) Other weather-related issues caused problems too but ERCOT’s failure to act sooner was a major factor.
Usually, a system trip wouldn’t last long and we’d have power back in a few hours. But this time, many of the units that were tripped off the system had difficulty coming back online for a variety of reasons, including the fact that some were not designed to be taken off and put back on the system quickly, as well as other cold weather issues that exacerbated the problem.
So when people blame ERCOT for not acting quickly, they’re right. And so are the people who say that both renewable energy and fossil energy plants are not generating what they should. But it doesn’t begin there. Our overdependence on unreliable energy that caused the razor thin reserve margins started the ball rolling years ago.
Here’s the long story.
Keeping the power on is a bit of a guessing game played out every day by the grid operator to make sure we have the right mix of energy getting on to the grid. There’s that buffer, the reserve margin, which ERCOT uses to give it some leeway in making moves. As with anything, the more reliable and predictable the source of energy, the better moves ERCOT can make.
However, the race to add in renewables pushed out more reliable forms of energy and kept new reliable energy from being built. That resulted in the buffer in our electric grid being stripped out—going from more than a 20% surplus years ago to single digits in the last couple of years.
Without that buffer, our system has become much more vulnerable to outages when we see extreme heat or extreme cold. The problem is made worse by the fact that renewables have grown to become a significant percentage of our fleet, making our power grid much more susceptible to weather-related shortages. That is because renewables do not show up when we need power the most (high heat, freezing cold, big storms, etc.)
Here’s an informative thread on how the Texas energy market is set up and how some of the system was offline when the worst hit:
The ERCOT grid is a very complex beast. It can’t call on other grids for support (but that is a bit overrated as typically when you need power so does your adjacent region, but that’s later).
ERCOT is a 501c3 nonprofit that is charged with managing the market, but above all, reliability (keeping the lights on). In my experience some of the smartest people I’ve ever met work there. Wish I could name some of them because they’re absolutely brilliant.
Retail guys, municipalities, and cooperatives are the guys who buy power wholesale and sell it to the end user (residentials, commercials, industrials).
Retail outside of municipal or cooperative areas can shop for a retail provider. 8/
This year, ~20,000MW of (gas and coal) Power plants requested an outage. ERCOT runs an outage study looking at demand and other available resources, and then says yes. (They make sure all the plants in Houston aren’t out for example because that would jack up Houston rates). 12/
If those plants could be back up they would’ve because they want to make big money. So, Feb 11th, we go to bed, wake up to a coating of ice. This ice is thick and persistent. Next day, sun is out, roads are good. Maybe we’re through the worst?
On the night of the 15th, between midnight and 3 am, 8000MW of gas, 1200MW of Nukes, and 2000MW of coal trip off the grid. Culprits are frozen gas pipelines and water for steam. (Note the Big gas drops)
I think here he’s conflating a few different things; it’s unclear how much capacity was taken off line due to insufficient weatherization and how much was caused by ERCOT foolishly inducing blackouts in the gas-producing Permian Basin.
So no water through the pipe, no steam. No gas no gas to heat that water.
That trip caused a lot of the outages and most of the outrage.
So ERCOT’s only options in these situations is: 1) cut off a big chunk of the customers. 2) let the whole system trip and take months to get back to normal.
Last thing. In 2011. We had a bad winter but it was followed by a drought and the worst summer ever. Power plants didn’t have water in their lakes to run the plant. 100 days over 100°. The grid focused on that issue instead of the cold.
Nationally, retail electric sales generated $117 billion in 3Q2022, $10.9 billion in Texas (of which $6.3 billion was residential) and $14.5 billion in California. 2/12
If Texans paid what Californians did for electricity, Texans would have paid $13.2 billion more, or about $508 more per person in the state for those three months in 2020. 4/12
One aspect of Texas’ failure has been the rapid grown of unreliables (wind and solar) subsidized by federal and state policy concurrent with the shedding of reliable power (coal and natural gas). 6/12
We suggest making all electricity producers guarantee dispatchable power for Texas’ grid—this means that the unreliables would have to secure agreements… 8/12
Mitchell Rolling explains: “As you can see, the top three performing energy sources during the energy crisis in Texas were all fuel-based energy sources: nuclear, coal, and natural gas. On average, these three energy sources alone provided over 91 percent of all electricity generated throughout the energy emergency, as the graph below shows. Without these energy sources on the grid providing the bulk of electricity, the situation in Texas would have gone from bad to worse.”
The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.
That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels.
But attempting to electrify everything would concentrate our energy risks on an electricity grid that is already breaking under the surge in demand caused by the crazy cold weather. Across America, countless people don’t have electricity. I’m one of them. Our power here in central Austin went out at about 3 am. I am writing this under a blanket, have multiple layers of clothes on, and am nervously watching my laptop’s battery indicator.
This blizzard proves that attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if — or rather, when — a widespread or extended blackout occurs.
One of the most contested issues is the role wind generation has played. Prior to the onset of the storm last week, Texas led the nation in wind power generation and depended on the wind turbines in West-Central and Western Texas, along with a smaller number of turbines along the Gulf Coast, for about 25% of its electricity. As wind power has increased, coal-powered generation plants have been taken offline around the state. Texas has abundant coal, oil, and natural gas, and also has nuclear plants near Dallas and near Houston.
Real-time data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that wind power collapsed as the winter storm swept across the state.
Snip.
As the graph plainly shows, wind generation choked down but natural gas compensated. Coal and even nuclear power generation dipped. Solar generation has been negligible due to cloud cover and several inches of snow and ice.
The cold has created extreme demand across the state. During most winter storms, the Panhandle, West Texas, and even North Texas around Dallas and above toward Paris may get cold but Central and South Texas could remain well above freezing. This has not happened during the current series of storms. The entire state is in a deep freeze, with snow appearing even on Galveston Island’s beach. Galveston averages lows of about 50 degrees and highs in the mid-60s during a typical February. It’s 37 degrees in Galveston as I write this, well below average. Austin has seen single-digit temperatures at night.
To put all of this into some perspective, the storm that dumped more than six inches of ice and snow on Austin Sunday night would, by itself, have been a historic storm. It dropped more snow on the capital than any other storm since 1949. It was preceded by a major cold snap and has been followed by more extreme cold and then another ice and snow storm Tuesday night. Texas has not suffered a single historic winter storm over the past several days, but a series of them without any warming in between…
Add to all of this, when Texas gets winter storms it usually doesn’t just get snow. Snow is fairly easy to deal with. Texas also gets ice, which can snap electric lines and break trees and tree branches, which also can fall on and break power lines. A tree in my yard is bent over by ice to the point that it looks like an invisible hand is holding it down. We can expect the ice to kill off millions of trees around the state. The ice layers also render most roads impassable. All of this is very unusual for Texas, but not unprecedented. The winter of 1836 was notably harsh; Santa Anna reportedly encountered deep snow as he marched his army toward San Antonio.
Most winters, Austin will have a few cold days but no snow. Central Texas is known to go entire winters without anyone having to so much as scrape any frost off their car windshield. Austin has had two significant snowstorms in 2021, with the current one being historic by any measure.
Piecing known information together, the wind turbines in Western Texas froze up starting Friday before the icy snowstorm hit, on Sunday night to Monday morning. This destabilized the Texas grid ahead of the worst of the storm. The storm produced the temperatures and precipitation the forecasts expected, but with weakened power generation and demand skyrocketing to heat millions of homes, homes which for the most part are not insulated against the current level of cold temperatures, the grid was set up to suffer mightily as it’s not hardened against extreme cold such as this once-in-a-century storm series is delivering.
In chart form:
This sums up what you want to know about power shortages in #Texas! Timeline matters. Researchers must start from Feb 9. Have solar & wind failed? YES, starting Feb 9.
Have backup #natgas plants failed? Yes, starting Feb 14. Yet, Natgas generation still way higher than before pic.twitter.com/AKa6M0neZw
Wind’s share has tripled to about 25% since 2010 and accounted for 42% of power last week before the freeze set in. About half of Texans rely on electric pumps for heating, which liberals want to mandate everywhere. But the pumps use a lot of power in frigid weather. So while wind turbines were freezing, demand for power was surging.
California progressives long ago banished coal. But a heat wave last summer strained the state’s power grid as wind flagged and solar ebbed in the evenings. After imposing rolling blackouts, grid regulators resorted to importing coal power from Utah and running diesel emergency generators.
Liberals claim that prices of renewables and fossil fuels are now comparable, which may be true due to subsidies, but they are no free lunch, as this week’s energy emergency shows. The Biden Administration’s plan to banish fossil fuels is a greater existential threat to Americans than climate change.
Decades of taxpayer-funded subsidies that favor unreliable wind power are crowding reliable energy sources out of the market, weakening the grid, and leading directly to the blackouts we experienced last week.
It’s no surprise — in fact, Texas came close to seeing widespread blackouts in August 2019. Our reserve margin, the buffer of extra electricity between what Texans are using and what we can produce, has become steadily smaller in recent years. And without quick action by state leaders, it will only get worse.
We should eliminate subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies — especially unreliable wind— to allow the free market to function smoothly. We must prioritize reliability and affordability in our electricity choices. Unfortunately, that’s not politically popular. But these are steps we can and must take for our state’s future.
Austin’s useless City Council being their usual useless selves: “Austin Energy’s biomass power plant in East Texas, which the city purchased in 2019 for $460 million, sat idle and produced no power during one of the worst winter energy crises in state history.” Well, at least it was providing Austinites jobs? Nope. It’s near Nacogdoches.
Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation. 4/10
In the last 4-5 years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today. We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar… 6/10
Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity (they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity). This subsidized (state and federal) wind and solar have pushed… 8/10
Texas is experiencing what California has – with California affecting the entire Western Interconnection due to its policies. Blackouts are a feature of the push to have more unreliable renewables on the grid. Must pay $$ for reliable backup w/ renewables 10/10
The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s policy orientation session for the 87th Texas Legislature starts today. Tickets for the live event are sold out, but you can still register to livestream the event here.
The event grid can be found here. Keynote speakers include Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Representative Chip Roy, journalist Kimberley Strassel and Kevin Robert, as well as usual TPPF stalwarts like Chuck Devore, Vance Ginn and James Quintero.
A couple of the more interesting panels I will try to catch: the plenary “Election 2020: What Happened and What Does it Mean for the Future?” at 4:30 PM today, “The Reasons Behind the Homelessness Explosion” at 9:45 AM on Friday (might have to catch a recording of that), and “Closing Keynote Luncheon: A Fresh Take: New Members Look Ahead to Congress 2021” with newly minted Texas representatives August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, and Tony Gonzales (three of whom you may remember from this ad) as well as California Representative Michelle Steel at 12:30 PM on Friday.
I attended TPPF’s orientation back in 2013, and it’s worth participating in if you’re interested in state politics.
Regular BattleSwarm readers already know about Tesla, Elon Musk and Joe Rogan moving from California to Texas. It looks like those were just the first pebbles of the avalanches of companies and people looking to get the hell out of the formerly golden state. Eager to enjoy such rarefied amenities as low taxes, sane government, a sane regulatory environment, open restaurants and regular access to electricity, other companies that have recently announced they’re moving their headquarters from Texas to California include:
HPE Inc. is moving its headquarters from San Jose to the Houston area, the enterprise information technology giant announced Tuesday, citing “business needs, opportunities for cost savings and team members’ preferences about the future of work.”
The company’s new HQ will be at the new campus that has been under construction since the beginning of the year in Spring, Texas, just north of Houston. It’s the second time HPE has moved its headquarters in the last three years: In 2018, the company left Palo Alto for San Jose.
CEO Antonio Neri and several other senior executives plan to relocate to Houston, HPE spokesman Adam Bauer told the Business Journal.
The move will be a homecoming for Neri, who spent years as a Hewlett-Packard executive in Houston before the Palo Alto-based company split into HP Inc. and HPE.
“We intend to maintain a robust presence in our historical birthplace of Silicon Valley, including housing the headquarters of Aruba at our San Jose campus that opened in 2019,” Neri said in a statement. “There are no layoffs associated with this move, and we are committed to both markets as key parts of our talent and real estate strategies in a post-pandemic world.”
Some corporate roles will be given the option to relocate to Houston, but no one will be forced to move, Bauer said. One big cost-of-living lure for those who do decide to move to Houston: HPE won’t be lowering the salaries of employees who relocate.
Note that Hewett Packard Enterprise is a separate company from Hewett Packard, from which it split from in 2015. HP makes desktop PCs and laser printers, while HPE provides enterprise equipment, services, high performance computing, etc. Both own buildings in the Houston area from HP acquiring Compaq in 2002.
Database giant Oracle, which announced it had moved its headquarters from Redwood Shores to Austin.
“We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work,” Oracle said in a statement.
“Depending on their role, this means that many of our employees can choose their office location as well as continue to work from home part time or all the time.”
“While some states are driving away businesses with high taxes and heavy-handed regulations, we continue to see a tidal wave of companies like Oracle moving to Texas thanks to our friendly business climate, low taxes, and the best workforce in the nation,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.
“Most important of all, these companies are looking for a home where they have the freedom to grow their business and better serve their employees and customers, and when it comes to economic prosperity, there is no place like the Lone Star State,” Abbott added.
Texas has no personal or corporate income tax.
Texas has ranked first for attracting California companies for more than 12 years, according to a report by Spectrum Location Solutions. Roughly 660 California companies moved 765 facilities out of state in 2018 and 2019.
“California companies leave because the state’s business climate continues to worsen, particularly with the harsh employment, immigration and spending measures that Gov. Gavin Newsom has approved,” said Joseph Vranich, the author of the study. “I foresee more exits because California politicians have a level of contempt for business that has reached epic lows.”
Unlike Musk, Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison won’t be moving to Texas, but will continue to work from his own private Hawaiian island. Can’t say I blame the guy.
Brokerage giant Charles Schwab is moving to Westlake in the Dallas metroplex area in January.
Conservative media pundit Ben Shapiro didn’t move his California company to Texas, he moved it to Nashville. But his reasons why apply just as well:
This is the most beautiful state in the country. The climate is incredible. The scenery is amazing. The people generally are warm, and there’s an enormous amount to do.
And we’re leaving.
We’re leaving because all the benefits of California have eroded steadily — and then suddenly collapsed. Meanwhile, all the costs of California have increased steadily — and then suddenly skyrocketed. It can be difficult to spot the incremental encroachment of a terrible disease, but once the final ravages set in, it becomes obvious the illness is fatal. So, too, with California, where bad governance has turned a would-be paradise into a burgeoning dystopia.
When my family moved to North Hollywood, I was 11. We lived in a safe, clean suburb. Yes, Los Angeles had serious crime and homelessness problems, but those were problems relegated to pockets of the city — problems that, with good governance, we thought eventually could be healed. Instead, the government allowed those problems to metastasize. As of 2011, Los Angeles County counted less than 40,000 homeless; as of 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 66,000. Suburban areas have become the sites of homeless encampments. Nearly every city underpass hosts a tent city; the city, in its kindness, has put out port-a-potties to reduce the possibility of COVID-19 spread.
Police are forbidden in most cases from either moving transients or even moving their garbage. Nearly every public space in Los Angeles has become a repository for open waste, needles and trash. The most beautiful areas of Los Angeles, from Santa Monica beach to my suburb, have become wrecks. My children personally have witnessed drug use, public urination and public nudity. Looters were allowed free reign in the middle of the city during the Black Lives Matter riots; Rodeo Drive was closed at 1 p.m., and citizens were curfewed at 6 p.m.
To combat these trends, local and state governments have gamed the statistics, reclassifying offenses and letting prisoners go free. Meanwhile, the police have become targets for public ire. In July, the city of Los Angeles slashed police funding, cutting the force to its lowest levels in more than 10 years.
At the same time, taxes have risen. California’s top marginal income tax rate is now 13.3 percent; legislators want to raise it to 16.8 percent. California also is home to a 7.25 percent sales tax, a 50-cent gas tax and a bevy of other taxes that drain the wallet and burden business. California has the worst regulatory climate in America, according to CEO Magazine’s survey of 650 CEOs. The public-sector unions essentially make public policy, running up the debt while providing fewer and fewer actual services. California’s public education system is a massive failure, and even its once-great colleges now are burdened by the stupidities of political correctness, including an unwillingness to use standardized testing.
Still, the state legislature is dominated by Democrats. California is not on a trajectory toward recovery; it is on a trajectory toward oblivion. Taxpayers are moving out — now including my family and my company. In 2019, before the pandemic and the widespread rioting and looting, outmigration jumped 38 percent, rising for the seventh straight year. That number will increase again this year.
I want my kids to grow up safe. I want them to grow up in a community with a future, with more freedom and safety than I grew up with. California makes that impossible.
As with most of the tens of thousands of Californians who have moved to the Lone Star State annually in recent years, we did so for opportunity borne of greater freedom: lower taxes, greater private property rights and less government to tell you what to do.
Before the move, our household had also grown as we took in my wife’s parents. Lifelong New Yorkers, they were in declining health and clearly could no longer live on their own. With four adults and two children in an Irvine home designed for a smaller family, it was clear the arrangements could only be temporary.
But the supply of housing had been constrained for so long in California that prices were simply out of reach. This was largely due to restrictive zoning, heavy environmental regulatory burdens and lawsuits. If we were going to take care of my in-laws, it was likely not going to be in California.
Snip.
So we sold our house in Southern California and moved to Texas, settling in the Hill Country about 25 miles southwest of Austin. Our new home was 70 percent larger (with 12 times the property) than our California home, and it had a swimming pool — all for $110,000 less. Most importantly, the ground floor had two extra bedrooms and a bathroom for my in-laws — not having to walk upstairs was a significant factor in our home search.
We’ve found Texans to be a friendly, liberty-loving bunch. Though where we moved, it seems half the neighborhood hails from California, with the number of friends we have from the Golden State moving to the Lone Star State growing by the year.
California still has great weather and a beautiful coastline, but the remaining advantages it had over Texas (dynamic high tech and entertainment industries, great restaurants, etc.) are all eroding away due to gross Democratic Party mismanagement.
Let’s hope that Californians fleeing the state for Texas leave their dysfunctional politics behind.
Evidence continues to pile up that Democrats stole four states through brazen election fraud in a small number of urban counties. Here’s my attempt to wrangle this fire hose of information into some coherent form:
A few days earlier, Giuliani said that the Trump campaign may have sufficient evidence to change the election results in the state of Pennsylvania.
He told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that lawsuits being filed by Trump’s reelection campaign might show that as many as 900,000 invalid ballots were cast in the battleground state.
According to an unofficial vote count from the Pennsylvania Department of State, Biden has received 3.35 million votes to Trump’s 3.31 million votes. Percentage-wise, Biden has 49.7 percent, compared to Trump’s 49.1 percent.
“I think we have enough to change Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania election was a disaster,” Giuliani said, responding to a question from the host about whether the evidence is enough to change the fate of the presidential election.
“We have people that observed people being pushed out of the polling place. We have people who were suggested to vote the other way and shown how to do it. I’m giving you the big picture,” he said.
While mail-in ballots were being counted, GOP Pittsburgh observers were “kept out of the room or kept away from the room” for a period of 24 hours, Giuliani alleged.
“Even though we went to court and we were allowed to move six feet closer, the Democrat machine people moved the counting place six feet further away. This is documented on videotape. There are upwards of 50 witnesses,” he continued.
“If the local elections officials in the city of Philadelphia are so confident that they have enough valid votes to beat President Donald Trump, and assign the 20 electoral college votes of Pennsylvania to Vice President Joe Biden. If they were that confident, why are they resisting an authorized court order to allow for people to observe the ballot as they’re supposed to legally be able to do?” DeVore responded to a question from correspondent Jan Jekielek.
Snip.
“By the way, this is a common thing throughout the entire country, that you’re supposed to have people from both sides observing the physical process of counting the votes to make sure that it’s done honestly and legally,” DeVore added, “it really potentially puts into doubt the results that came out of Philadelphia.”
DeVore pointed out that only a few months ago, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted a Philadelphia election official on charges of bribery and election tampering.
“When you have a race or a state like Pennsylvania, where you have this unprecedentedly large number of mail-in ballots that have been requested, then the question becomes what sort of safeguards are we using to ensure that the votes are valid and have been legally cast?” DeVore spoke about the integrity of the mail-in ballots.
DeVore went on to say that one of the safeguards—the requirement to have a matching signature on the outside of the envelope—was obliterated in Pennsylvania.
There were 3,684,726 registered voters in Wisconsin going into Election day. The total votes recorded in Wisconsin were 3,240,549. That would give Wisconsin a turnout of 88%. [UPDATE: The current vote total is 3,297,420, which would yield a turnout of over 89%. However, Wisconsin permits same-day registration, so the number of such registrations would bring that percentage down somewhat.] According to Ballotpedia, no American state in the period 2002-2018 has ever achieved a turnout rate of 80% or higher. [UPDATE: These are turnout numbers expressed as percentage of eligible voters, not registered voters, so the percentages are not directly comparable.] For purposes of comparison, in 2016 Wisconsin had a 67 percent turnout rate. [UPDATE: Wisconsin tabulates turnout as a percentage of the estimated voting-age population, so these numbers would be lower than the percentages of registered voters.] If you are credulous, you can believe that 21% more Wisconsinites voted this year, compared with the red-hot election of four years ago, and 248,000 more Wisconsinites turned out to vote for the charismatic Joe Biden this year than voted for Hillary Clinton four years ago. I think those numbers are almost certainly false, the result of ballot manipulation.
“Michigan Election Fraud: Evidence of Wolverine State Chicanery During America’s 2020 Presidential Election.”
On Election Night when America went to bed, President Trump had a commanding lead in virtually every swing state, as well as Virginia, which no one expected him to win.
However, when America woke up the next day, we found that he’d lost these leads, largely on the basis of mail-in ballots found in the middle of the night and out from under the watchful eye of legal election monitors.
What’s more, these massive caches of votes – almost all of which were for former Vice President Biden – came via large dumps primarily from the five aforementioned cities in states predominantly run by Democratic governors.
When one looks at the statistical likelihood of the reported turnout, the numbers are so improbable they’re more at home in a one-party state like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or North Korea.
What’s more, Biden’s victory does not square with the results of the Republican Party nationally: Republicans won 28 of 29 competitive House seats and Democrats were unable to flip a single state legislature. Joe Biden secured a scant three of the so-called “Bellwether Districts” that almost always choose the winner, one of which was in Delaware. Judicial Watch found 353 counties in 29 different states who had higher than 100 percent turnout.
Anecdotally, swing states tend to follow Florida in terms of swinging left or right. This is particularly true in Michigan, which has voted in lockstep with Florida since 1968. Nearly three dozen states had counting machines connected to the Internet during the election, which is inherently insecure. Joe Biden’s lead among mail-in ballots was massive in two states — Michigan and Pennsylvania — while it was in the single digits in most states.
Snip.
Michigan might take the dubious honor of having the most corrupt elections in America in 2020. As of November 9, the FBI has opened up two investigations into voter fraud in the state. Affidavits have been filed alleging a scheme to backdate mail-in ballots. It is the land of massive vote dumps that go 100 percent for Joe Biden (which the controlled media has attempted to retcon as a “glitch” or “clerical error”), of thousands of dead people voting, of United States Postal Service officials coercing postal employees into backdating the postmark on ballots. And, of course, remember that this is the state that was shut down by executive fiat by Gretchen Whitmer, who eventually had her executive overreach invalidated by the state Supreme Court.
A single computer “glitch” awarded 6,000 votes to Biden and the Democrats that were supposed to go to President Trump and other Republican candidates. With 47 Michigan counties using this software, similar glitches might yield a discrepancy of hundreds of thousands of ballots — or even more. Perhaps this “glitch” was one of the more innocuous ones. Another glitch returned a Republican incumbent to office after he “lost” to his Democratic challenger.
We use “glitch” in quotes because these types of things seem to be a running pattern in the state and appear to always benefit the Democrat candidate. One other, and far more important, example of this was the “glitch” that awarded 138,000-plus votes to Joe Biden. It was one of these monolithic vote dumps we keep talking about.
Over 138,000 votes tabulated and not a single one of them went for the President (or, for that matter, Jo Jorgensen or Howie Hawkins or Kanye West), a statistical impossibility. It was later corrected when hordes of Internet denizens found the vote dump and wondered how it was possible, even under the basic laws of statistics.
This is hardly the only example of “mistakes” benefitting Biden or suspicious reported totals in the State of Michigan. Take, for example, Antrim County, where President Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016 but had now swung back to Biden by 29 points. County officials vowed to investigate what they called “skewed” results.
Even prior to the 2020 election back in October, city officials in Muskegon found that there were registration irregularities.
A suit has been filed in the state of Michigan based on a sworn affidavit from a Michigan poll worker — not an observer. Among other things, this suit alleges that poll workers processed ballots with missing signatures, coached voters on who to vote for (Joe Biden), and were instructed to backdate ballots.
How deep is the rabbit hole of “computer error” in Michigan? Sidney Powell, counsel for one General Michael Flynn, appeared on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business News program and explained that she believes that programs like HAMMER or SCORECARD were used to change as much as 3 percent of the result. While this is merely speculation at this point, it is worth noting that Steve Bannon also floated this possibility on his show, War Room.
“Administrative policies in Wisconsin election put tens of thousands of votes in question. From allowing clerks to fix spoiled ballots to permitting voters to escape ID rules, Wisconsin election officials have taken actions that were not authorized by legislature.”
Records reviewed by Just the News show that an executive branch agency called the Wisconsin Elections Commission:
permits local county election clerks to cure spoiled ballots by filling in missing addresses for witnesses even though state law invalidates any ballot without a witness address.
exempted as many as 200,000 citizens from voter ID rules in 2020 by allowing them to claim the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to be “indefinitely confined.”
failed this year to purge 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls as required by law.
The Great Lakes Justice Law Center is filing a new election crimes lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court. The Lansing area law firm is representing two Detroit area residents in the action. The suit charges Wayne County elections officials knowingly allowed and supported illegal activities surrounding the Tuesday general election. The suit in Wayne County Circuit Court is asking for an entirely new election to be staged for the county.
Lead attorney David Kallman says numerous witnesses are filing swarm affidavits under oath supporting the claims in the lawsuit. The suit spells out a number of alleged election crimes. Many of them surround the use of absentee or mail-in ballots.
They include:
-Validating ballots the name showing on the ballot did not appear in the official voter database.
-Election workers were ordered to not verify voters’ signatures on absentee ballots, to backdate absentee ballots, and to process invalid ballots.
-The suit claims election workers processed ballots that appeared after the election deadline and falsely reported those ballots had been received prior to the election evening deadline.
-And the suit claims many of the invalid ballots won’t be hard to pinpoint, saying election workers in Wayne County altered already illegal ballots by inserting a birthdate of 1/1/1900.
Attorney Kallman says the lawsuit asks the Circuit court to immediately void the uncertified election results in Wayne County and order a new and fully monitored election at the earliest possible date. “This type of widespread fraud in the counting and processing of voter ballots cannot be allowed to stand. Michigan citizens are entitled to know that their elections are conducted in a fair and legal manner and that every legal vote is properly counted. Such rampant fraud cannot be undone. We ask the Court to enjoin the certification of this fraudulent election, void the election, and order a new vote in Wayne County.”
Defendants systematically processed and counted ballots from voters whose name failed to appear in either the Qualified Voter File (QVF) or in the supplemental sheets. When a voter’s name could not be found, the election worker assigned the ballot to a random name already in the QVF to a person who had not voted. Defendants instructed election workers to not verify signatures on absentee ballots, to backdate absentee ballots, and to process such ballots regardless of their validity. After election officials announced the last absentee ballots had been received, another batch of unsecured and unsealed ballots, without envelopes, arrived in trays at the TCF Center. There were tens of thousands of these absentee ballots, and apparently every ballot was counted and attributed only to Democratic candidates. Defendants instructed election workers to process ballots that appeared after the election deadline and to falsely report that those ballots had been received prior to November 3, 2020 deadline.
Defendants systematically used false information to process ballots, such as using incorrect or false birthdays. Many times, the election workers inserted new names into the QVF after the election and recorded these new voters as having a birthdate of 1/1/1900.
On a daily basis leading up to the election, City of Detroit election workers and employees coached voters to vote for Joe Biden and the Democrat party. These workers and employees encouraged voters to do a straight Democrat ballot. These election workers and employees went over to the voting booths with voters in order to watch them vote and coach them for whom to vote.
Unsecured ballots arrived at the TCF Center loading garage, not in sealed ballot boxes, without any chain of custody, and without envelopes.
Defendant election officials and workers refused to record challenges to their processes and removed challengers from the site if they politely voiced a challenge. After poll challengers started discovering the fraud taking place at the TCF Center, Defendant election officials and workers locked credentialed challengers out of the counting room so they could not observe the process, during which time tens of thousands of ballots were processed.
Defendant election officials and workers allowed ballots to be duplicated by hand without allowing poll challengers to check if the duplication was accurate. In fact, election officials and workers repeatedly obstructed poll challengers from observing. Defendants permitted thousands of ballots to be filled out by hand and duplicated on site without oversight from poll challengers.
Unfortunately, Wayne County circuit judge Timothy Kenny refused to issue an injunction. Great Lakes Justice Center is appealing.
Democrats are stealing the election in Michigan and Pennsylvania. This bothered the heck out of many people because it seems as if nothing can be done to stop them. In Michigan, people born before the Civil War voted. In Philadelphia, Democrats ignored a court order to let Republicans observe the voting. Those are just two of the many irregularities.
Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, told NBC his state’s Supreme Court “went rogue and decided to violate the U.S. Constitution, ignore Pennsylvania law, and just rewrite the law themselves.
“In Pennsylvania, unfortunately, it’s been a little bit complicated by a Pennsylvania Supreme Court that went rogue and decided to violate the U.S. constitution, ignore Pennsylvania law, and just rewrite the law themselves.
“They have no authority to do that. And they extended the period of time over which ballots can arrive beyond the deadline. That’s outrageous, frankly.”
Some people are banking on state legislatures overturning election. Perhaps they can.
Forget recounts. The same people who counted the votes the first time will count them again.
Biden declared victory on Saturday night.
Big mistake.
Democrats took the bait. Now President Trump can go to the Supreme Court and have the elections in Michigan and Pennsylvania declared invalid. Without those Electoral College votes, Biden fails to reach 270 and the election gets thrown into the House.
Other states also may be invalidated. The Supreme Court will decide, and I believe President Trump has 5 votes and Chief Justice John McCain Roberts has only 4.
Ignoring a federal judge’s order is never a good idea when you are stealing an election.
Georgia:
No one disputes that Fulton County elections officials falsely announced that the counting of ballots would stop at 10:30 p.m. No one disputes that Fulton County elected officials unlawfully resumed the counting of ballots after our observers left the center.
In Michigan, for example, there was a difference of just 7,131 votes between Trump and GOP candidate John James, yet the difference between Joe Biden and Democratic candidate Gary Peters was a staggering 69,093.
In Georgia, there was an 818 vote difference between Trump and the GOP Senator, vs. a 95,000 difference between Biden and the Democratic candidate for Senator.
MIT’s Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai conducts an in-depth statistical analysis of election anomalies and
I haven’t watched all of it yet. Dr. Ayyadurai says that the Secretary of State of Massachusetts got Twitter to kick him off the platform for 21 days until he was able to get a judge to issue an injunction over election fraud allegations.
A thread about Dominion and Smartmatic:
2/ Dominion Voting Systems oversees ballot counting in several hotly contested states where suspicious activity has been alleged.
There's another election software company called Smartmatic whose US chairman is Peter Neffenger, a member of Biden's transition team.
— Murphy "Smartmatic is linked to Dominion" Fowles (@FowlesMurphy) November 16, 2020
4/ Well, as you can see from all the tweets I made previously, there are numerous connections. Let's go through them.
Dominion purchased a company called Sequoia from Smartmatic, including election software that may still be licensed to Smartmatic today.
— Murphy "Smartmatic is linked to Dominion" Fowles (@FowlesMurphy) November 16, 2020
6/ It's also been revealed by Joe Oltmann (recently banned by Twitter but now on Parler) that Dominion executive Coomer is a hot-headed Antifa supporter who had written to other Antifa supporters that he would stop Trump from being elected along with comments like **ck the USA.
— Murphy "Smartmatic is linked to Dominion" Fowles (@FowlesMurphy) November 16, 2020
7/ When Morales was with Smartmatic he worked on Venezuela's problematic 2014 election. Smartmatic was originally founded by 3 Venezuelans whose first big contract was for Hugo Chavez.
— Murphy "Smartmatic is linked to Dominion" Fowles (@FowlesMurphy) November 16, 2020
Haven’t analyzed this statement to see if it’s true, but it wouldn’t shock me:
The #DominionVotingSystems that "glitched" in favor of Joe Biden (used in 29 states), partnered up with Clinton Global Initiative AND had on staff former employees of both Clinton Growth Initiative and Clinton Cash Cow TENEO.
Yeah, I think Trump lost fair and square,” he said last Wednesday. “He just got beat by the Biden campaign — that’s all there is to it.”
But then something happened that changed his mind: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Fox News, CNN, and more giant corporations keep screaming at him via notifications, messages, and broadcasts that there was no election fraud. Now, he’s starting to think maybe there is something fishy going on.
“You know what, screw it,” he said as another notification popped up on his Facebook feed telling him how safe and secure the elections are. “I’m all-in on the conspiracy theories. If the shadiest, slimiest people in the world really, really want me to believe the election wasn’t stolen, then I’m going full-on Alex Jones, baby. Woooo!!!”
Truth:
There is more proof of election fraud than there is of anthropogenic climate change. Pass it on.
