Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I’m going to coral all the Afghan Debacle news for separate post, probably next week. In the meantime: Texans are winning political battles, and Australians are losing their damn minds.
We hear an enormous amount these days about the problem of “Flight 93-ism” on the American right, but a great deal less about the concomitant panic that has led the Democratic Party to behave as if last year’s election represented its last gasp. Since Joe Biden took office in January, his party has been busy cramming everything it has ever wanted to do into a series of multi-trillion-dollar, must-pass bills; hawking a patently unconstitutional elections-supervision bill that would hand it full control of America’s democratic infrastructure; and engaging in a frenzied attempt to pack the Supreme Court, discredit the Senate, abolish the filibuster, and add new states to the union by simple majority vote. If you ask for an explanation of this preposterous behavior, you will be told that it is the product of the Republican Party’s dastardly scheme to implement Jim Eagle. If you look more closely, however, you’ll sense something else: fear — that, in a desperate attempt to remove President Trump from office, the Democrats tailored themselves a straitjacket from which they will struggle mightily to escape.
This fear is well-founded. Joe Biden is an aging, incompetent mediocrity whose main claim to fame, like the Delta Tau Chi fraternity from Animal House, is his long tradition of existence. Kamala Harris, his vice president, is a widely disliked authoritarian whose last run for the White House was stymied by her inability to garner support from more than 3 percent of the Democratic-primary electorate. If, prior to the disaster that was the last fortnight, the Democrats hadn’t sensed that they’d tied their party to a pair of losers, they sure as hell must have now.
Explanation of why the 25th Amendment won’t saved them snipped.
And why should it, given that getting rid of President Biden would not actually fix the Democrats’ problems? Joe Biden’s approval rating is currently around 46 percent in national poll averages — not great for a president in his seventh month in office, but dramatically better than Kamala Harris’s rating, which stands at just 37 percent. Per NBC, Harris inspires “very positive” feelings in just 19 percent of the population while prompting “very negative feelings” among 36 percent — a feat that makes her the most strongly disliked VP since records began. If, today, the Democratic Party decided to cut its losses and replace Biden with Harris, it would be selecting a new president who was nearly ten points less popular than the old one. This would be absurd.
Which means that if the Democratic Party is destined for a reckoning with its ticket — as now seems increasingly likely — it will have to come during the next set of presidential primaries.
Rice, who served as national security adviser under President Obama, was tapped last December by President Biden to take charge of the White House Domestic Policy Council. It is in that role that Grenell believes she is exerting her influence.
“Biden is too weak to stop the progressive left from taking over… [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] does not understand what’s going on…We have a shadow president in Susan Rice and no one is paying attention,” he said.
Rice is one of the many officials from the Obama administration that landed jobs in the Biden White House. There was speculation that she would be his running mate and when that never materialized, secretary of state.
She is among the wealthiest individuals in the Biden White House, with a net worth estimated to be at least $37.9 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. She resigned last December from her role as a member of the board of directors at Netflix.
[Supreme Court Justices] denied the request by Texas abortion providers for emergency relief against the Texas Heartbeat Act. The compelling procedural grounds on which five justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — ruled have no direct bearing on the substantive question whether the Court will overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in next term’s blockbuster abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the clarity, courage, and commitment to the rule of law that the five justices demonstrated in the midst of intense fury from the Left — and in the face of an exasperating cop-out by Chief Justice Roberts — are heartening indeed.
Enacted in May, the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as S.B. No. 8, prohibits a physician from performing an abortion (other than in a medical emergency) “if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” The fetal heartbeat is usually detectable at six weeks of gestation. The Act specifies an effective date of September 1.
In an ingenious effort to prevent abortion providers from blocking the Act from taking effect, the Act prohibits state officials from enforcing the Act in any way. It instead authorizes any private person to bring a civil action in state court against anyone who performs a post-heartbeat abortion or who knowingly aids or abets a post-heartbeat abortion. (Federal restrictions on standing — on who can sue — in federal court do not apply in state court.) It entitles successful plaintiffs to at least $10,000 in damages for each violation as well as to injunctive relief and attorney’s fees.
Because state officials are barred from enforcing the Act, the usual path that abortion providers would take to prevent the Act from becoming effective — suing those officials to prevent them from enforcing the Act — is a dead end. Instead, abortion providers would be able to challenge the constitutionality of the Act only if and when private individuals pursued civil actions against them. (And they’d have to confront the widely overlooked fact that the Act itself explicitly confers on abortion providers an “affirmative defense to liability” in the event they demonstrate that a lawsuit brought under the Act “impose[s] an undue burden.”)
In mid July, nearly two months after enactment of the Act, various abortion providers sued eight defendants in federal court: the Texas attorney general and four other state officials, a state district-court judge and a district-court clerk from Smith County (one of 254 counties in Texas), and a pro-life activist. But their lawsuit faced overwhelming jurisdictional hurdles. Among other things, none of the defendants was threatening to enforce the Act against them (so how was there even a live controversy?), and all seven of the governmental defendants had strong claims to sovereign immunity.
To make a long story short, when federal district judge Robert L. Pitman last week ruled against the governmental defendants’ sovereign-immunity claims, the governmental defendants exercised their right to immediately appeal the ruling against them to the Fifth Circuit. Pitman then realized that he had lost authority to proceed against the government defendants and had to cancel the preliminary-injunction hearing against them. (The Left viciously faults a Fifth Circuit panel of conservative judges for the cancellation that Obama appointee Pitman had ordered.) The abortion providers suddenly found that they had dug themselves into a deep ditch: The September 1 effective date was fast approaching, and they had indefinitely sidetracked their own effort to obtain a preliminary injunction.
On August 30, the abortion providers made a desperate request to the Supreme Court to block the Act from taking effect. Set aside that they had waited two-and-a-half months to file their preliminary-injunction motion with Pitman. Set aside that they were asking the Court to rule on a set of issues that neither Pitman nor the Fifth Circuit panel had yet addressed. What’s even more remarkable is that because Pitman had never ruled on their request to certify statewide defendant classes of judges and clerks, injunctive relief against the only eight defendants in the case wouldn’t remotely prevent the injury the abortion providers allege they faced.
The Supreme Court majority saw clearly through the huge holes in the emergency application. There was no reason to address the substantive question whether the Act is consistent with Roe and Casey because the abortion providers had failed to meet their burden on the “complex and antecedent procedural questions” that their request presented. The Court has the power to “enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves,” and the abortion providers hadn’t shown that any of the defendants should be enjoined from doing anything.
Last month tempers flared at Harris County Commissioners Court after County Judge Lina Hidalgo (D) accused Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4) of telling a “bold-faced lie” when he referred to a vendor as a “one-woman company.”
Although the expenditure had been approved months earlier in a 4 to 1 vote, little information had been provided to commissioners about Elevate Strategies, LLC, the winner of a $10.9 million contract to conduct vaccine outreach.
It was not until August that commissioners learned that the company was only founded in 2019, listed a Montrose apartment as its business address, and only consisted of one person: Felicity Pereyra, a former deputy campaign manager for Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) and former employee of both the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
It almost like the entire purpose of the welfare state is to channel money from the wallets of taxpayers to the pockets of leftwing cronies…
In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”
Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?
Australia has been testing the limits.
Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”
Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”
In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.” In Sydney, where more than 5 million people have been in lockdown for more than two months, and Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, anti-lockdown protests were banned, and when dissenters gathered anyway, hundreds were arrested and fined, Reuters reported.
Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?
The idea of owning a beauty clinic in an iconic downtown Melbourne retail centre once seemed like a promising business opportunity. So promising, in fact, that I opened a second store nearby, and expanded my total payroll to 20 employees.
Capital costs across the two stores came to $1.6 million; while monthly expenses included $11,000 in loan interest, equipment leases totalling around $30,000, and rent at almost $40,000 (all figures in Australian dollars). It’s a substantial commitment, but this was a vibrant locale. And our market research indicated that demand would be high enough to sustain the necessary investment. Fortunately, the customers showed up—enough to meet wages, pay the bills, and allow me to put money away for a rainy day.
That day arrived last year, in the form of COVID. And not just the disease itself, but also the draconian, one-dimensional response from government officials: throughout the state of Victoria, 600,000 small business owners like me—men and women who collectively employ millions of people and generate a substantial share of the region’s economic output—have been marginalized in the name of public health and safety.
Small-business entrepreneurs are, by nature, both aspirational and pragmatic. We pay our taxes like everyone else, and understand the role government must play in managing national emergencies—including pandemics. But we also expect leaders to avoid imposing unnecessary and unreasonable regulatory burdens and operating prohibitions.
One of the lessons learned over the last year and a half by small business owners is that Australia’s flawed, multi-layered government structure can easily enmesh an owner in overlapping forms of red tape. This has forced us to reflect on what type of society we are becoming, and whether, in Victoria at least, it is still worth setting up businesses here.
Plus police specifically targeting vocal lockdown critics for fines.
“All kinds of meds: monoclonal antibodies, Ivermectin, Z-pack, Prednisone, everything. I also got an NAD drip and a vitamin drip.”
NAD evidently stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotid, and the drip combines some other common vitamins in a intravenous cocktail that seems really frigging expensive ($750-1,000), which is fine if you make Joe Rogan money, but ordinary people may want to stick to a multivitamin (which you should be taking daily anyway).
— kiki 🧘♀️ (@KikiwahT) September 3, 2021
the heroes at Project Veritas released an undercover video showing a proud antifa communist teacher bragging about how he has 180 days to indoctrinate his students and make them Marxists. How does he do it? He “scares the f*** out of them.”
Now the proud commie peacock is running scared. He refused to defend himself to another Project Veritas reporter. He claims he fears for his safety, and is worried about his brainwashing teaching gig, which means he KNOWS what he was doing is wrong.
Even his fellow Antifa clowns aren’t happy with him.
In the tweet below, fellow antifa stains bemoan [Gabriel] Gipe’s willingness to spill his commie guts to an undercover Project Veritas reporter. They also question his over-zealous approach to indoctrinating young high school kids and turning them into fellow Marxist comrades.
Some highlights from the undercover video:
- Gipe gives extra credit points to students who attend far-left extremist rallies
- He has an antifa flag and a Mao poster hanging on his classroom wall
- Gipe believes taking up arms against the “state” is a good thing, though it always fails
- He shamed a student who claimed the antifa flag made him uncomfortable
- Gipe isn’t the only pinko recruiter at the school
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) just noticed that antifa is a violent bunch of thugs after black bloc-clad attackers beat yet another reporter and tossed her into a busy Portland street for daring to do her job.
After years of similar attacks on reporters, SPJ was finally jostled from its slumber by an attack on reporter Maranie Staab, from a lefty news organization called “News2Share,” for disobeying her Leftist compatriots and doing some reporting.
Antifa responded in the same way they accuse police of doing: They sprayed her with chemicals and threw her into the street.
Shocking video from yesterday’s Portland riot shows antifa robbing female photographer @MaranieRae & hitting her to the ground. She goes to retrieve her equipment & is hit w/pepper spray. Video by @JLeeQuinn: pic.twitter.com/rCkaybcfUR
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 23, 2021
The MSM seemed happy to ignore the same tactics when used against Andy Ngo, because Reasons.
However, with building news about the number of withdrawn vendors, it’s possible that the costs of the other events would surpass what they would expect to make from a crowd that was already predicted to be less than half of normal. I was seeing 35,000 as a predicted attendance batted around the interwebz, and that assumed full exhibit hall, no restrictions, and a full weekend of activities. If word of mouth about reduced exhibitors managed to knock another 10,000 off of that prediction, I don’t know enough about their financial obligations & forecasting to know if that would drive it into the territory of losing money or not.
Snip.
The Board & Wayne LaPierre are desperate to look like NRA members stand by them, so visibly empty halls with far fewer attendees in already wide aisles would make for press photos they may believe they can’t afford.
Add to this that the ILA Leadership Forum, at least anytime I checked the pages, never had more than the big Texas politicians (Abbott, Cruz, Cornyn, and Crenshaw) along with Mark Robinson from North Carolina listed. It appeared that they couldn’t get commitments from big national names to attend which would have, again, signaled a loss of influence and interest that NRA can’t really afford to be a story.
LaPierre and his cronies seem desperate desperate to cling to power, no matter how far down they drag the NRA with them.
Yeah, I love this. pic.twitter.com/MdepCUEj1v
— Sam ‘The🐰FOO’ J. (@PolitiBunny) September 1, 2021
She left 2 years ago and her dog doesn't recognize her at first.
His reaction later is amazing ❤🤗 pic.twitter.com/viFT2PkfJs— THIS ACCOUNT WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY (@Happy_Funny_21) August 17, 2021