Posts Tagged ‘Reed O’Connor’

LinkSwarm For July 12, 2024

Friday, July 12th, 2024

Slow Joe continues sliding down the slope of senility, Democrats continue freaking out over same, the media continues to be shocked that the media hid Biden’s decline, Democrats gear up to commit more voting fraud in November, tractors join the culture wars, Skydance eats Paramount, and postal rates are going up again. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden’s “Big Boy” speech comes up small.

    President Joe Biden struck a defiant tone during what was perhaps the most consequential press conference of his political career, insisting that he is the best candidate to take on Donald Trump in November, even as he stumbled through several answers.

    Biden read prepared remarks off a teleprompter and answered questions from a pre-selected list of reporters Thursday night at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, addressing a range of subjects including the history of NATO, Russia’s war against Ukraine, inflation, and Israel’s war against Hamas. The embattled president showed signs of his age throughout the event, as he coughed, whispered, stumbled over his words, and at time lost his stream of thought, at one point even referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”

    “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I think she was not qualified to be vice president,” Biden said, defending his choice of Harris as his running mate. At the end of the press conference, Biden told reporters to “listen to him,” in response to a question about the gaffe.

    People are listening to him. That’s his problem.

  • “Parkinson’s Specialist Met With White House At Least 9 Times Since July 2023.”

    Parkinson’s disease specialist from Walter Reed Medical Center visited the White House at least nine times in the past year, according to journalist Alex Berenson of Unreported Truths, while the NY Post has reported that a cardiologist was present during one of the visits.

    Dr. Kevin R Cannard traveled to the White House’s medical clinic each time, meeting with either President Joe Biden’s personal physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, or a naval nurse who coordinates care for the president and other senior officials. O’Connor notably gave Biden a clean bill of health after his February annual physical.

    The visits spanned July 28, 2023 with the latest being March 28 of this year. That said, Berenson notes that the most recent logs are from April 1, so it’s unknown if Cannard has visited more recently.

    The question isn’t whether Joe Biden is suffering from cognitive declines, the questions is how many kinds of cognitive decline is Joe Biden suffering from?

  • “Biden’s Cognitive Collapse: Greatest Media Scandal We’ve Ever Seen. With Russia collusion, they were inventing things we couldn’t see and trying to convince us that they happened. With the Biden cognitive failures, they were trying to convince us that something we all saw didn’t happen and wasn’t happening.”

    You saw the debate and the interview.

    Joe is not well. He should not be president, it’s a national security risk. This is what the 25th Amendment is made for.

    There have been many media scandals. Rathergate comes to mind. But most immediately, Russia collusion was the most aggressive and sustained media misinformation campaign lasting years. It operated on the level of using bits and pieces of information and disinformation to try to convince us that something we could not see (collusion) did in fact happen.

    The media conduct towards Biden’s cognitive decline operated on a different level.

    We saw it. We wrote about it. But for years, at least since the 2020 election cycle, the media did its best to convince you that you didn’t see what you saw. The media didn’t try to convince you that something that didn’t exist existed, it tried to convince you that something that existed didn’t exist.

    It was a classic case of gaslighting.

  • Democrats are Putin.

    If we accept the actions and outcomes that are visible from Democrats right now, their definition of “democracy” is apparently to dismiss the will of tens-of-millions of Democrat party voters, and instead install a candidate the DC insiders select.

    Democrats and even Biden administration officials are being very open about their intent. They are dismissing Joe Biden and debating the installation of their chosen alternative; all while trying to jail their political opponent.

    Can democrats see their version of “democracy” is identical to horrible Vladimir Putin?…

    Additionally, having just returned from an extended visit to Russia, where I literally spent exhaustive time researching how the government views their role within the social compact – and its consequence upon the average population, the “we know better” outlook currently on display by Democrat influence operations in DC is stunningly similar.

    Democrats are defending “The Motherland,” where “mother” is their retention of omnipotent power. Yes, Democrats are Putin.

  • “Biden Officials Gave Radio Stations Questions They Could Ask Biden During Interviews; They Complied.” Of course they did. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Evidently donors aren’t interested backing a senile loser, as Biden campaign contributions have fallen off dramatically. “Contributions from large donors alone could be down by more than half this month and are lower across the spectrum, according to NBC News. ‘It’s already disastrous,’ a source close to the re-election effort told the outlet about the state of fundraising for the Biden campaign. ‘The money has absolutely shut off,’ another person close to the campaign said.” Now we get to see if Democrats will follow the will of actual voters who cast their ballots for Biden, or a donor class insisting he be kicked to the curb.
  • Democrats oppose a bill requiring American citizenship to vote. because of course they do. Getting illegal alien ballots in the system is one of the fraud vectors they need to stay in power. It’s amazing Republicans even need to specify that in a law.
  • Speaking of Democrats enabling fraud, DOJ confirms that it’s going to try to help Biden cheat in the Georgia elections again.
  • Ditto Michigan, where Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer signing bills eliminating the board of canvasser’s investigative powers, instead requiring the board to refer allegations of fraud to county prosecutors. So they can make sure Soros-backed prosecutors can bury any fraud.
  • This is potentially huge: “Court Holds Federal Ban on Home-Distilling Exceeds Congress’ Enumerated Powers.”

    Yesterday, in Hobby Distillers Association v. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a federal district court in Texas held that federal laws banning distilled spirits plants (aka “stills”) in homes or dwellings exceed the scope of Congress’ enumerated powers. Specifically, the court concluded that the prohibitions exceed the scope of the federal taxing power and the Interstate Commerce Clause, even as supplemented by the Necessary and Proper Clause. The court further entered a permanent injunction barring enforcement of these provisions against those plaintiffs found to have standing (one individual and members of the Hobby Distillers Association.) The plaintiffs were represented by attorneys at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and background on the case (and the various filings) can be found on CEI’s website here.

    Hobby Distillers Association has the potential to be a significant post-NFIB challenge to the expansive of use of federal power.

    All sorts of federal regulatory shenanigans that depend on the Commerce Clause may be headed for the scrapheap of history… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Ukraine blows up a huge ammo dump in Voronezh, Russia.
  • They also hit oil depots in Pavlovskaya and Leningradskaya, Krasnodar, Russia.
  • Plus they hit a smaller oil depot in Kalach-na-Donu.
  • “How disinformation from a Russian AI spam farm ended up on top of Google search results. A fake article about Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife buying a Bugatti with US aid was promoted by bots.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Iranian warship sinks in port. That’s some mighty fine sailing there, Lu’ay…
  • Armed bystander stops a 4th of July mass shooter who killed three, including two kids.
  • Annals of evil: Porsche executive convicted for of throwing her newborn daughter out of a window to further her career. “Katarina Jovanovic, a Porsche executive in Germany, chose her career over family by throwing her newborn daughter out a 12-foot window to her death, and is now headed to jail for seven and a half years.” I wonder if German women’s prisons have shankings…
  • “Cruz Launches Investigation into Whether Big Tech is Funding Biden Administration Staff Salaries.”

    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has launched an investigation into whether the Biden administration used the “obscure Intergovernmental Personnel Act program” to fund the salaries of Big Tech employees as part of an executive order.

    “To complete every action, agencies would have had to . . . bring on AI fellows by recruiting temporary — but influential — AI staff from external organizations through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program. Critics, however, have raised reasonable concerns that these influential AI fellows are shaping federal policy to benefit their organizations’ funders and not the American people,” explained Cruz.

    “Moreover, as federal agencies request increased funding for AI hiring, it is important Congress understand the extent to which, and how, agencies have already acquired AI staff in response to the expansive and demanding AI Executive Order.”

    In October 2023, Biden issued an executive order to establish “new standards for AI safety and security.” The order also aims to address “best practices” for authenticating content and calls on Congress to pass “bipartisan data privacy legislation.”

    Six months after the issuance, the White House stated they had completed all the actions in the order.

    In Cruz’s investigation announcement, he casts doubt on whether hiring “only 150 people into AI roles” was enough to be able to complete the required work. Cruz also highlighted a number of reported incidents where, through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program, Big Tech CEOs funded salaries of employees working in government agencies.

    “In effect, large AI technology companies are influencing the Biden administration’s AI policy from the inside and advancing their own anti-competitive agenda to shape the future of the AI industry,” Cruz said.

  • “Musk Announces X To Sue ‘Perpetrators And Collaborators’ Behind Advertising Censorship Cartel.”

    Elon Musk announced on Thursday that social media platform X will sue ‘perpetrators and collaborators’ who have colluded to control online speech, as revealed on Wednesday by an interim staff report released by the House Judiciary Committee.

    “Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, 𝕏 has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket,” Musk wrote on his platform, adding “Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.”

    The House report details a coordinated effort by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative to demonetize and suppress disfavored content across the internet.

    As we noted on Wednesday, the WFA is a global association representing over 150 of the world’s biggest brands and over 60 national advertiser associations which created GARM in 2019.

    This alliance quickly amassed significant market power, representing roughly 90% of global advertising spend, which amounts to nearly one trillion dollars annually.

    GARM’s Steer Team reads like a who’s who of corporate America, including heavyweights such as Unilever, Mars, Diageo, Procter & Gamble (P&G), GroupM, AB InBev, L’Oréal, Nestlé, IBM, Mastercard, and PepsiCo. These corporations not only wield immense economic influence but are now revealed to be leveraging this power to control online discourse under the guise of “brand safety.”

  • “In New York City, hotels that have converted into shelters for hordes of illegal aliens have been given over $1 billion in taxpayer money to keep them in business. As reported by Fox News, the average hotel room for an illegal costs $156 per night, with some costing over $300 per night. As such, the city government has already spent at least $1.98 billion on housing for illegals, with 80% of that amount going to hotels or inns that have been converted into shelters, rather than to shelters operated by the city. Overall, the city has spent at least $4.88 billion on the mass migration crisis.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Another loss for Biden’s tranny school mandate. “Carroll Independent School District (ISD) won a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the revised Title IX regulations issued by the Biden administration in April. The rules were set to go into effect on August 1. Federal Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas issued the preliminary injunction on Thursday, July 11, the same day the Amarillo federal court issued an injunction in the case brought by the State of Texas regarding Title IX.”
  • Add Wendy’s and Jersey Mike’s as chain restaurants slashing staff and hours over California’s minimum wage hike.
  • Is TEMU’s shopping app spyware? (Hat tip: Texas Public Policy Foundation.)
  • Good news on the tractor front: Tractor Supply is reversing all its woke policies due to a customer backlash. Including eliminating all DEI programs and targets.
  • Bad news on the tractor front: John Deere is going full woke, with DEI idiocy out the wazoo and pushing tranny ideology on children. Plus they’re closing an American plant to move the jobs to Mexico.
  • USPS rates are going up again July 14. Media mail is going up by 50¢, and Forever Stamps are going from 68¢ to 73¢. Thanks, Joe Biden…
  • Skydance is buying Paramount. Does this mean less wokeness in franchises like Star Trek? Since Skydance CEO David Ellison (son of Larry) gave Joe Biden’s campaign $1 million, I rather doubt it.
  • Chicken Soup for the Soul, the company that owned Redbox and Crackle, is shutting down. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • It’s not just U.S. companies that have problems with unions: Samsung’s is threatening a general strike in their high speed memory fab at Pyeongtaek. Any machine that goes down on a fab line needs to re-qualified, which is a gigantic, time-consuming pain in the ass. A car factory can resume production in last than a day, but fab can take several weeks to months to get production.
  • Now bankrupt EV maker Fisker required a subscription and an Internet connection to use the sunroof.
  • Return of the zombie mortgage. People who thought their second mortgages were written off after the 2008 crisis but didn’t get it in writing are now suffering a rude awakening.
  • Dwight celebrates the 45th Anniversary of Disco Demolition Night.
  • “Democrats Warn Of Terrifying Fascist State Where Government Shrinks And People Can Afford Groceries.”
  • “In New ‘Ocean’s 14’, George Clooney Pulls Off $30 Million Heist By Tricking People Into Giving Money To Politician Before Revealing He’s Demented.”
  • “People Who Would Never Cheat In Elections Horrified By ‘Stop Cheating In Elections’ Bill.”
  • “Media Who Refused To Report On Biden’s Decline Furious That Nobody Reported On Biden’s Decline.” At this point Babylon Bee just seems to be straight up reporting…
  • Happiness is a stuffed crocodile:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • Still between jobs, so hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 2 Comments »

    Federal Judge Slaps Down Biden Tranny Title IX Rewrite

    Wednesday, June 12th, 2024

    Another week, Texas legal victory over the Biden Administration’s radical social justice regulatory overreach.

    Attorney General Ken Paxton announced today that a federal court has vacated the controversial Title IX guidance nationwide.

    The ruling included a permanent injunction against its enforcement against Texas and its schools.

    The Biden administration’s 1,500-page rewrite of Title IX added “gender identity” as a protected class and would force K-12 schools to allow boys into girls’ facilities and activities. Schools that refused were threatened with loss of federal education funds.

    In response to the rewrite, Gov. Greg Abbott instructed the Texas Education Agency to ignore the new Title IX rule. He later directed all public universities to also ignore the rewrite.

    Meanwhile, Paxton sued to stop enforcement of the new rule.

    “Joe Biden’s unlawful effort to weaponize Title IX for his extremist agenda has been stopped in its tracks,” said Attorney General Paxton Tuesday. “Threatening to withhold education funding by forcing states to accept ‘transgender’ policies that put women in danger was plainly illegal. Texas has prevailed on behalf of the entire Nation.”

    According to the court order, “Rather than promote the equal opportunity, dignity, and respect that Title IX demands for both biological sexes, [the DOE’s] Guidance Documents do the opposite in an effort to advance an agenda wholly divorced from the text, structure, and contemporary context of Title IX. Not to mention, recipients of Title IX funding—including Texas schools—will face an impossible choice: revise policies in compliance with the Guidance Documents but in contravention of state law or face the loss of substantial funding.”

    Not to mention being divorced from basic biological reality. If the cells in a person’s body contain XX chromosomes, that person is female. If those cells contain XY chromosomes, then that person is male. No amount of legislation or regulation will ever change that basic reality, no matter how hard the party insists that you must affirm that 2+2=5.

    “Thus, to allow [the Biden Administration’s] unlawful action to stand would be to functionally rewrite Title IX in a way that shockingly transforms American education and usurps a major question from Congress,” wrote U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor. “That is not how our democratic system functions.”

    There’s more meat worth quoting in the ruling.

    Multiple Texas laws and school policies implicate the concept of sex in the educational context. The Texas Education Code prohibits school districts from allowing “a student to compete in an interscholastic athletic competition sponsored or authorized by the district or school that is designated for the biological sex opposite to the student’s biological sex.” TEX. EDUC. CODE § 33.0834. The Board of Trustees for independent school districts “have the exclusive power and duty to govern and oversee the management of the public schools of the district.” Id. § 11.151(b). Pursuant to that oversight power, Texas school districts promulgate additional policies on related issues that mirror § 33.0834. These school districts receive federal funds.

    These additional district-specific policies take various forms. For example, some Texas school districts—such as Frisco ISD, Grapevine–Colleyville ISD, and Carroll ISD—mandate that schools within their respective districts maintain separate bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers based on biological sex. These school districts also prohibit the assignment of bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers based on subjective gender identity. Consistent with the biological reality of sex, Carroll ISD precludes district employees from “requir[ing] the use of pronouns that are inconsistent with a student’s or other person’s biological sex.

    “The biological reality of sex” is precisely what the left has declared war on.

    As part of the radical left’s war against Christianity and the nuclear family, the social justice-infected Democratic party has decided to make pandering to confused and mentally ill men a higher priority than protecting actual women. Despite how deeply unpopular this anti-reality position with the American public, conservatives were initially slow to take up the fight against it, either cowed by histrionic emotional arguments (“If you deny transexualism, you’re literally forcing them to kill themselves!”) or an inability to believe that the something so brazenly absurd is real and not some sort of elaborate joke. But when the Biden Administration tries to rewrite Title IX, a law written to protect women, by executive fiat to mean the exact opposite of the statutory language in order to protect men pretending to be woman at the expense of actual women, then we have to assume that they are very serious indeed.

    Texas is fortunate to have a governor and attorney general who are not afraid to fight against the Biden Administration’s war on reality.

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »

    ATF Pistol Brace Regulations Blocked

    Tuesday, October 10th, 2023

    In another small victory in the war against ATF overreach, a federal judge has blocked ATF regulations on pistol braces.

    After the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that a challenge to the Biden administration’s rule regulating pistol braces as short-barreled rifles (SBR) would likely prevail, a district judge entered orders enforcing the appeals court’s findings — blocking any enforcement against the plaintiffs, their customers, or their families.

    The case, styled Mock v Garland, was brought against the Department of Justice by the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) to challenge the reclassification of popular pistol braces as SBRs, which are heavily regulated weapons under the National Firearms Act (NFA). That law requires extensive background checks, a $200 tax that in some cases takes over a year to pay, and carries additional restrictions on the firearm.

    Violating any of the nuanced rules in the NFA can subject the owners to heavy fines and penalties.

    While the district court had initially denied the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction, the instructions from the 5th Circuit instructed the district judge to grant the request in a manner consistent with their findings.

    On October 2, Judge Reed O’Connor issued the order blocking enforcement of the law against the individual plaintiffs, FPC and their members, pistol brace manufacturer Maxim Defense, and their customers and families.

    The lawsuit will now proceed to trial, along with challenges brought by several other gun rights groups in separate cases seeking to have the rule struck down entirely.

    As I’ve stated before, the pistol brace rule would retroactively make millions of law-abiding Americans criminals for not registering them (which, for the left, is no doubt the point). Government agencies should not be able to unilaterally and retroactively declare ownership of legally obtained goods suddenly forbidden on penalty of law.

    This ruling is also another example of why the black-pilled “Republicans are useless” mutterings are wrong. Without Reagan, Bush41, Bush43 and Trump judicial appointments, it’s overwhelmingly likely that none of the landmark Second Amendment cases (Heller, Bruen) go our way, and ruling Democrats would be busy working on complete disarmament of American citizens.

    It’s important to celebrate every victory for freedom, no matter how small.

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    Posted in Guns, Regulation, Texas | 8 Comments »

    Federal Judge Rules ObamaCare Unconstitutional

    Saturday, December 15th, 2018

    The budget busting, premium-hiking monster that is ObamaCare may finally be slain:

    A judge ruled Friday evening that Obamacare is unconstitutional, putting the future of the federal healthcare law in jeopardy.

    The decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in the Northern District of Texas — a George W. Bush appointee, is likely to face an appeal to the Fifth Circuit. Obamacare will remain in place pending appeal .

    The suit in the case, Texas v. Azar, was brought by 20 Republican state officials, who have asked that all of Obamacare be thrown out as a consequence of the new tax law, which zeroed out a penalty on the uninsured, known as the “individual mandate.” The officials argued that the penalty was central to making the rest of the law work, and that without it, the rest should crumble.

    O’Connor appeared to sympathize with this argument in his opinion. He explained that he believed Congress would not have enacted Obamacare in the first place, with its various rules and taxes, without the mandate, and that the regulatory framework was intended to work together.

    “Congress stated many times unequivocally — through enacted text signed by the president — that the individual mandate is ‘essential’ to the ACA,” he wrote of the Affordable Care Act, the formal name for Obamacare. “And this essentiality, the ACA’s text makes clear, means the mandate must work ‘together with the other provisions’ for the Act to function as intended.”

    O’Connor was talking about the Obama administration’s argument that the mandate could not be severed from the rest of the law in a 2012 Supreme Court case. In his opinion, he elaborated on the different ways that Obamacare had been challenged in court and in Congress.

    “It is like watching a slow game of Jenga, each party poking at a different provision to see if the ACA falls,” O’Connor wrote.

    The “death of a thousand cuts” approach undertaken by congressional Republicans and the Trump Administration may finally be bearing fruit. Remember that the central conceit that allowed the Supreme Court to find ObamaCare constitutional in National Federation of Independent Business vs. Sebelius was treating the individual mandate as a tax, and the individual mandate was repealed in 2017.

    Consider how radically the political environment has changed. Many of the baleful effects Republican foresaw for ObamaCare (spiraling premiums and declining choices) have come to pass. Also, in chasing their Russian collusion fantasy, the Democratic Media Complex has had precious little bandwidth to expend on extolling the supposed wonders of ObamaCare. Chief Justice John Roberts may well feel that he has a chance to undo a mistake in being the deciding vote in the originalSebelius decision now that the political pressure and scrutiny has lessened.

    Texas vs. Azar may deliver ObamaCare the mercy killing it so richly deserves.

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    Posted in ObamaCare, Regulation, Supreme Court | No Comments »

    A Roundup of Texas Lawsuits of Note

    Wednesday, October 26th, 2016

    A number of lawsuits related to local or federal overreach in Texas are working their way through the court system. Here’s a quick roundup of developments in a few notable cases.

  • U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor reiterated that the injunction that stops Obama’s tranny bathroom mandate still applies nationwide. Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against the tranny bathroom mandate which has been joined by 13 other states.
  • Paxton has also joined a Texas Public Policy Foundation lawsuit against the City of Austin over their new short-term rental ordinance. “The Ordinance raises significant constitutional questions, because it functionally ousts homeowners and investors from real property without just compensation.”
  • Paxton also joined another TPPF lawsuit against the City of Brownsville over their $1 fee on plastic checkout bags, calling it an illegal sales tax, as bags are not taxable under state law.
  • Speaking of Paxton, in case you missed it, the SEC case against Paxton was thrown out by a federal judge:

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won a sweeping victory in court Friday when Federal District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III dismissed a fraud case the Securities and Exchange Commission had brought against him.

    Mazzant, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, found that even if all the facts the SEC alleged were true, they didn’t amount to any violation of securities law by Paxton.

    The SEC had dogpiled on Paxton after Collin County special prosecutors got a local grand jury to indict Paxton under state securities law in August 2015.

  • Now the question is whether Collin County will drop its own case against Paxton, and end payment of high dollar special prosecutor fees, now that the SEC has dropped the case.
  • Also note that Texas is still a co-plaintiff in State of West Virginia, et al. v. EPA, over the Obama Administration’s “Clean Power Plan,” which the Supreme Court ordered stayed February of last year.

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    Posted in Austin, Supreme Court, Texas | 2 Comments »