Posts Tagged ‘Rodney Ellis’

Lina Hidalgo’s Continued Contempt for Transparency

Thursday, May 4th, 2023

Remember Democratic County Judge and de-facto Queen of Harris County Lina Hidalgo, she of the numerous staff corruption charges? There have been a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests coming her way over all the alleged crooked dealings, so she went to her legal counsel to thwart transparency.

With the state’s largest county already facing at least one lawsuit over refusal to comply with public records requests, a leaked memo from Harris County officials appears to outline a strategy for avoiding the release of documents related to County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s travel and taxpayer-funded expenses.

Investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino reported this week on a leaked chain of emails that began with a January 25, 2023 open records request from Houston Chronicle reporter Jen Rice seeking travel records for Hidalgo and “her entourage” between January 2019 and January 2023.

After requesting clarification, Hidalgo’s legal counsel Kathryn Kase forwarded the request and instructions for handling it to several Hidalgo staffers and Glenn Smith of Affinity Dynamics. The county auditor’s office lists payments totaling $35,000 to Smith’s company in 2020, but none this year.

“The law does not require us to create documents in response to this PIA request and I ask that you not create such documents,” wrote Kase. “For example, if we do not have a list of the Judge’s trips outside Harris County that the County paid for in whole or part between 1/1/ 2019 and 1/25/2023, then the law does not require us to create such a list, nor do I want you to create one.”

Kase also stated that staffers do not have to ask other departments for documents responsive to the request.

“If, for example, the Auditor or the Treasurer have copies of reimbursements to Judge Hidalgo, do not ask the Auditor or the Treasurer to provide them to you.”

Rice’s request likely stems from reports of Hidalgo taking private security, paid for by Harris County taxpayers, on her personal vacations to Mexico, Columbia, and according to sources familiar with the matter, Thailand, earlier this year.

Until last April, the Precinct 1 constable’s office provided security for Hidalgo, but in a 3 to 2 vote the commissioners court approved a no-bid contract to private security company XMi Protection at a price of $121,524 for three months. The commissioners later approved a budget of up to $500,000 for XMi, although reportedly Hidalgo’s security is now provided by the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office while XMi continues to cover other employees.

Remember that Queen Lina’s previous legal troubles stemmed from handing out contracts to connected Democrat firms and not wanting public scrutiny for that either.

As far as I can tell, XMi Protection seems to employee exactly one person: Cortez Emilio Richardson. (Maybe he hires temps to round out his team?) Also strange: The listed address for XMi protection is 9900 Spectrum Drive, Austin, TX, 78717, which is the address of Integreon, a “global outsourcing partner” that doesn’t list “executive protection” among its services, as well as LegalZoom, which seems to be a “one stop set-up-your-business” shop. (Maybe he set up his LLC through them?) However, Richardson’s LinkedIn profile says that he’s in Houston, and XMi Protection is based in nearby Spring. Two other LinkedIn accounts that show XMi Protection entries are a Paquita Bailey who lives in Detroit and is evidently working four different jobs at the same time (lot of sidehustle they’ve got going on there), and the following private listing:

Which is for a pharmacy technician from Anna, Texas (which is north of Dallas), both of whom would seem to be deeply unlikely to be working a protection detail in Houston.

$40,000 a month is an awful lot of cheddar for one guy.

Back to the story.

Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale and Dolcefino have also filed a lawsuit against the county, seeking access to public election records that the county has refused to release on the grounds that they are related to litigation and a criminal investigation of Tatum and the elections department.

In response to multiple complaints over delay and evasion tactics employed by government agencies across the state, Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) has pushed legislation that would punish those using the appeals process to delay compliance. His Senate Bill 1579 has been approved in committee, but it has not yet been scheduled for a vote on the Senate floor.

According to attorney Bill Aleshire, public information requests must be carefully tailored so as not to offer any loopholes. Aleshire opined that instead of asking for a “list,” Rice should have requested specific documents and included multiple departments in her original demand.

“Having said that, a public office devoted to transparency would not quibble with a requestor seeking travel records; it would just provide the records they’ve got, in good faith,” Aleshire told The Texan.

Snip.

In another leaked internal Harris County memo, legal fees approved by the Harris County Commissioners Court last March totaling $671,383 are described as covering legal costs for Kase, [County Commissioner Rodney] Ellis, and other county employees related to the investigation of a since-canceled $11 million COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract and allegations that Ellis had stored an African art collection at taxpayer expense.

The memo also includes “talking points” from “GS” that former Justice Administration Director Jim Bethke and other county officials, including Tatum, have been harassed by District Attorney Kim Ogg.

Payments for legal expenses appear to have been approved for McClees Law Firm, PLLC; Rusty Hardin and Associates, LLP; and Khalil Law PLLC. In addition to Ellis, Hidalgo, and other employees, the memo notes expenses were also covered for Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2).

Something stinks in Harris County government, and there are a whole lot of questions about how Lina Hidalgo is spreading around taxpayer money that she really doesn’t want to answer…

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Posted in Budget, Communism, Democrats, video, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

LinkSwarm for April 22, 2022

Friday, April 22nd, 2022

Russia eyes Moldova, Ron DeSantis and Florida republicans strip Disney of it’s special privileges in record time, CNN+ dies quicker than Sean Bean, and Florida Man scores a trifecta! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • A Russian general just announced plans to invade Moldova.

    A Russian General announced plans to occupy the Transnistria region of Moldova on Friday.

    Speaking at a defense industry meeting, Brigadier General Rustam Minnekayev, acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, stated that the Russian Armed Forces plan to “make passage” into the region – in Moldova’s East, bordering Ukraine and less than 30 miles from the port city of Odessa – to create a “land corridor to Crimea,” Russian media reported. Such a corridor would also purport to connect the Russian mainland to Transnistria.

    Minnekayev stated that the measure was part of Russia’s second phase in its war in Ukraine, which involves establishing full control over the Donbas Region and Ukraine’s coast along the Black Sea. No timeline was provided for the maneuver to begin, however.

    Rather seems like overweening hubris to think about invading another country when they haven’t managed to defeat Ukraine despite pouring huge resources into the attempt.

    Speaking of Russia walking on rakes:

  • Giant fire engulfs Russia’s biggest chemical plant right after a fire broke out at “a sensitive Russian Defense Ministry research facility in the city of Tver.”

    Huge plumes of smoke were seen enveloping the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant late this afternoon. The cause of the fire remains unknown. Almost 150 plant workers were reportedly evacuated.

    The facility in Kineshma, east of Moscow produces more industrial solvents than any other in Russia. It is less than 1,000km from the border with Ukraine.

    “Less than 600 miles” does not strike me as super close, even for Russia.

    Naturally, observers are starting to ask in connection to Russia’s war in neighboring Ukraine: coincidence? sabotage operation?

    Anti-Putin racecar driver Igor Sushko in tweeting the above video of the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant going up in flames commented: “We are beginning to see a pattern develop.”

  • “Florida Governor DeSantis Signs Bill Stripping Disney of Autonomous Legal Status.”

    Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation Friday that strips Disney of its 50-year-old “independent special district” status in retaliation for lobbying against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law.

    The law dissolves the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an autonomous area created in 1967 to accommodate the massive Disney World complex near Orlando. The independent status has shielded Disney from significant tax burden.

    The governor fast-tracked the initiative to a special session Tuesday, after which the state Senate voted 23-16 on Wednesday to advance it.

    The parental rights measure keeps gender identity and sexual orientation instruction out of K-3 elementary school classrooms and enjoys majority support among Floridians.

    To quote The Wire: “You wanted to be in the game, right? Now you’re in the game.” For years, The Mouse was considered an unstoppable juggernaut that always got what it wanted. Then Disney decided to to throw it’s corporate weight behind the pro-grooming faction opposing a bill banning discussion of sex in elementary schools, and DeSantis knee-capped them in a week.

    Though the losses from special tax breaks and privileges is going to hurt the bottom line, Disney has done far, far more damage to its brand for stepping into the cultural wars to embrace forcing radical transexism on a resisting American public. That’s going to be destroying shareholder value for years (if not decades) to come.

  • DeSantis Bonus: Christopher Rufo spoke at the signing ceremony:

  • Dana Loesch isn’t shedding any tears over The Mouse.

    Am I and are others supposed to feel bad because the most opportune time to end Disney’s corporate welfare exploits the momentum that Disney created against themselves?

    Because I don’t.

    Disney vociferously and hatefully opposed parents who didn’t want ideological activist teachers lecturing their K-5th grade kids about how they bang their significant others after hours — Disney accused parents of opposing this as literally killing gay people because teachers with fantasy pronouns can’t talk about genitals when kids should be learning math.

    The left hated corporations influencing issues because of Citizens United v. FEC until they realized they could push Disney to lobby for them and now they LOVE corporations again! Party! I’m confused — are corporations still evil? They can’t influence issues or push for candidates that aren’t Democrat and they have more rights to a child than the parents raising said child? We really need some consistency from the left here.

    When corporations act as agents of the state all bets are off. When a corporation’s actual heir, the CEO, and executives say on camera and on their own social media accounts (as Disney’s did) that parental rights erase gay people (I know, what?) and people who support parental rights in the classroom are murderers, all bets are off.

    Who is “gaslighting” whom, here? Where was the opposition to the heinous manner in which parents were smeared? Was that not Disney’s “revenge” for opposition?

    Disney chose the boss fight against taxpaying parents and they lost.

    Losing their corporate welfare isn’t revenge, it’s a reckoning.

  • Relevant tweets:

  • John Nolte: “Yes, Democrats Really Do Want to Groom Your Children.”

    The debate we’re having right now…

    THE LEFT: We don’t want to sexualize little kids behind the backs of parents. Stop saying that. It’s a lie!

    FLORIDA: We’re going to outlaw sexualizing little kids behind the backs of parents.

    THE LEFT: NOOOOooooooo!

    What kind of country are we living in where we even have to pass a bill that outlaws sexualizing kids aged four to eight in the classroom?

    What kind of country are we living in where Florida teachers are angry that they can’t discuss their personal lives with your little kids, much less discuss sex?

    What kind of country are we living in where the Walt Disney Co., a company built on the idea of preserving the innocence of children and teaching them lessons about honesty, hard work, and true love, is now openly bragging about feeding the little kids sexual propaganda?

    Of course, this is grooming.

    What else would you call it?

    What is the rationale for telling innocent little boys that they might be girls or gay or bisexual? What other rationale could there be for that other than to destroy their innocence, to turn them into sexual creatures, and warp their sexuality into something that can later be exploited?

    Behind the backs of parents!

    For the life of me, except for my second-grade teacher talking about the day John Kennedy was assassinated, I cannot remember a single teacher who ever discussed their personal life. A couple of times, I remember seeing a teacher outside of school, at the store or something, and how odd it was to realize they existed outside the classroom.

    The thing to keep in mind here is that this is not a “gay” thing.

    It’s not gay people looking to groom little kids.

    Plenty of gay people are as disgusted by this as anyone. In fact, this sick movement is a terrible disservice to gays. What you have here is the LEFT working overtime to bring to life the very worst stereotypes about homosexuals looking to recruit among the innocent.

    What you have here is Disney bringing to life these terrible stereotypes.

    But that doesn’t change the fact that the left is desperate to groom your kids, to sexualize them behind your back.

    Why?

    Well, a whole lot of leftists want to have sex with your kids, and want to normalize sex between kids and adults. The evidence of that is everywhere. Democrats know opening the southern border will mean the import of child sex slaves. And yet, Democrats still open the border. Democrats continue to release child predators and suspected predators. We’re about to be saddled with a Supreme Court Justice who shrugs at child porn. More than one left-wing publication has asked us to better understand and sympathize with child molesters. The left embraced Jeffrey Epstein for decades. The left-wing Lincoln Project shielded a suspected predator.

    The other reason for the grooming is political.

    Democrats are losing key parts of their coalition: the working class, Hispanics, and chunks of the black population. One way they see of making up those numbers is to create a lot of damaged and broken young people obsessed with their sexuality. It’s just a fact that neurotic, unhappy lunatics and narcissists who define themselves by what they do with their sex organs vote Democrat. So… Democrats want to damage your kids to create a whole lot more of them.

  • “EIGHT news stories about teachers committing sex crimes upon children. ALL TODAY.”
  • Snapshot of our current problems: “In Biden’s Annual Economic Report, The Word “Gender” Is Used 40 More Times Than The Word ‘Inflation.'”
  • CNN+ shuts down one month after launch. There’s not enough schadenfreude in the world. Let a thousand pink slips bloom…
  • Another story getting short shrift because this LinkSwarm is so overstuffed: “Taylor Lorenz Attacked Libs Of Tik Tok Because Corrupt Media’s Main Function Now Is To Destroy The Right, Not Understand Its Appeal.”
  • From Powerline comes two tales of endemic corruption. The first was Yale University employee Jamie Petrone admitting to stealing over $40 million in computer equipment. “So for years, 90 percent of the equipment (sub-$10,000) that Yale’s emergency medicine department paid for–more than $40 million worth–never showed up. It didn’t exist. And no one noticed.”

    That’s the smaller of the two scandals. The bigger:

    A second instance of corruption is the Feeding Our Future scandal in Minnesota. The scandal actually involves entities in addition to FOF, and altogether $460 million or more has been funneled through these agencies by the federal free food programs Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP). The whole thing turned out to be a criminal enterprise. Various crooks pretended to be feeding many thousands of non-existent Minnesota children. The fraud should have been obvious since, if you added up the numbers, a ridiculous percentage of all of the children in the state were supposedly getting free food through these newly-founded charities.

    The corruption occurred primarily, although not entirely, within Minnesota’s Somali community. Apparently spread sheets have been circulating among fraudsters showing the names and addresses of many thousands of Somali immigrants who can be listed as phantom beneficiaries of government programs. Here, like the Yale criminal, those who were in on the fraud have lived lavishly, with federal taxpayer money administered by the State of Minnesota paying for luxury cars, expensive homes, exotic vacations, and so on. Scott wrote here about a young Somali bride who was given a tray of gold worth $100,000 as a wedding gift by persons involved in the Feeding Our Future fraud.

    Such criminality is not subtle. Little care is taken to hide it. How can a handful of fly-by-night fraudsters steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government and the State of Minnesota, and no one notices? As in Yale’s case, the answer is partly gross incompetence in Minnesota’s Tim Walz administration. But in the larger picture, government at all levels is rolling in so much dough that they don’t know what to do with it. A few hundred million is hardly worth checking up on.

    This goes toward proving my “Working Thesis,” that all new welfare state programs are designed to channel money into the pockets of crooks and left wing activists (to the extent that it’s possible to distinguish the two).

  • Don’t let the FBI ginning up the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot distract you from the fact that they tried to do the same thing in Virginia.

    But the government not only attempted to manufacture “terrorists” in the Whitmer kidnapping hoax—the same FBI operation also tried to coax a man in Virginia to participate in the same sort of plot against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. That scheme didn’t fully materialize, but the FBI’s attempt to pull off a similar stunt in Virginia reveals just how far agents were willing to go to bolster FBI Director Christopher Wray’s false warning that domestic extremists planned to “kill and assassinate” public officials.

    In summer 2020, Dan Chappel, the main informant in the Whitmer fednapping who was compensated at least $60,000 by the FBI for his services, targeted a man named Frank Butler, a disabled veteran in his late 60s and an alleged militia member. Taking instructions from Jayson Chambers, one of his FBI handling agents, Chappel used the same playbook in Virginia.

    “Dan suggests to Frank that he engage in acts of domestic terror,” defense attorneys wrote in a joint motion filed last year in the Whitmer case. “Like the defendants in this case, Dan suggested to Frank that he attack the governor of Virginia.”

    Screenshots submitted into evidence show a jaw dropping exchange between Chappel and Chambers in August 2020. “Goin [sic] to call frank butler today,” Chappel texted Chambers, asking for direction on what he should say to his target.

    “Mission is to kill the governor specifically,” Chambers replied.

    Just as in the Whitmer plot, Chappel lured Frank Butler into attempting to build an explosive device. Another text exchange in September 2020 shows Chappel and Chambers discussing a “recipe” for a bomb that Chappel can provide to Butler. After passing along the information to Butler, Chappel texted Chambers to tell him Frank planned on purchasing bomb-making supplies. “Awesome. Excellent work,” Chambers told Chappel.

    Chappel also invited Butler to a field training exercise in Wisconsin during the last weekend in October, an excursion attended by some defendants in the Whitmer caper.

    “This event, like all the others,” defense attorneys wrote, “was conceived, planned, and conducted by the federal investigative team of agents and undercover informants working together to provide a stage upon which to manipulate their targets into acting out ostensibly incriminating behavior the government hoped to elicit in its bid to develop and then ‘interrupt’ the operation of a ‘domestic terrorist organization.’”

    Butler, who cannot drive due to disabilities, did not participate. And to date, he has not been charged with any crime.

  • News you might have missed from two weeks ago: “Kenosha County ravaged by BLM riots flips red after decades of Dem leadership.” (Hat tip: Red State.)
  • “Republicans are registering formerly Democratic voters at four times the rate that Democrats are making the reverse conversion in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, a warning sign for Democrats as they try to keep control of the U.S. Congress.” You mean inflation, riots, tranny pandering and talking to elementary children about gay sex aren’t winning issues? Do tell.
  • Speaking of which, Joe Rogan wonders why California schools were trying to preach “antiracism” to his 9-year old daughter.
  • “Seattle’s transit system struggles as riders refuse to pay. So few riders are paying, fares are currently covering just 5% of the system’s operating costs, a fraction of the 40% mark Sound Transit set as a requirement.” (Hat Tip: Dwight.)
  • “Incestuous Dealings in Harris County Government Raise Alarms. Connections exposed between Democrat Commissioner Rodney Ellis and organizations receiving taxpayer money.”

    While most reporting on Harris County’s problems revolve around Democrat County Judge Lina Hidalgo, this citizen’s research suggests ties exist between Democrat County Commissioner Rodney Ellis (a former state senator) and certain organizations receiving taxpayer monies.

    Ellis’ influence, and the influence of at least one of these organizations, appears to reach all the way to Hidalgo’s office.

    Snip.

    To counteract shuttering the economy in 2020, Congress broke open a dam and flooded federal taxpayer monies nationwide. These monies flowed to state and then local governments for eventual distribution. Harris County’s cut from the 2020 CARES Act was $426 million.

    One organization the county commissioners gave some of these funds to was the Coalition for the Homeless. Ties were verified between Commissioner Ellis and this organization.

    Licia Green-Ellis, Ellis’ wife, is a partner of the Waterman Steele Real Estate Consulting Group. Another partner is Lance Gilliam, who is chairman of the Coalition for the Homeless. Gilliam donated to Ellis’ campaign in 2015, and he also donated to Hidalgo in 2018, 2019, and March and June of 2021.

    Hidalgo’s chief of staff, Alexander Triantaphyllis, is also on the coalition’s board.

    In April 2021, the coalition recommended commissioners allocate taxpayer monies toward “the rapid expansion of housing” for the homeless. This resulted in agreements between the county and multiple organizations, including a more than $1.2 million agreement with BakerRipley Community Developers. We’ll come back to them in a minute.

    The following month, commissioners ballooned funding for the housing program to more than $7 million, of which more than $3.6 million went to BakerRipley for the county’s “Rapid Rehousing” program.

    A lot more at the link. (Note: This piece came out just before the indictments came down.)

  • More Harris County shenanigans:

    That’s why the judge just recused herself.

  • New York City: Now that the pandemics over, everyone’s going to come back to our high-tax hellhole, right? People who used to work in NYC: LOL. Get Rekt!

    A high-tax, highly regulated city, New York has relied for the past 25 years on a growth formula of low crime, a stable social order, and an emphasis on high-value jobs at profitable companies for whom being in the city brought advantages that outweighed the costs. The result was a prosperous but hollow economy that featured well-paid jobs in finance, law, and technology alongside low-paid service-industry jobs necessary to support those workers, but lacked many of the middle-class jobs in manufacturing or financial back offices that the city once boasted.

    The pandemic has changed that calculus. The work-from-home movement has hit New York City’s office market—the backbone of its economy—right in the pocketbook. More than two years after the initial lockdowns that brought much of the economy to a standstill, only 38 percent of office workers have returned to their city jobs, which is below average for major cities. Employers have tried to get workers back to their Manhattan offices, only to be thwarted by Covid surges and resistance from employees who don’t want to return to working in person five days a week. A rise in violent crime and disorder hasn’t helped. Both the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, and his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, as well as former governor Andrew Cuomo and successor Kathy Hochul, have at various times urged workers to return, but to little avail.

    The more that workers and companies discover they can accomplish through remote work, the greater the danger—because New York is by far the most expensive place to locate a worker in the country. Its overall cost of occupancy, including labor, utilities, and taxes, is 50 percent higher than the next most expensive American city, San Francisco, and three times as high as Dallas, Chicago, and Seattle. The gap is even larger with many smaller metro areas that seem poised for growth. One big component of these costs is taxes: the city and state together out-tax other competitors, taking as much as 45 percent more taxable income than the average of U.S. big cities and their states. No surprise, then, that even in the pandemic’s early stages, experts rated New York one of the places that might struggle the most to recover its jobs and residents.

    What are the Democrats who run New York (city and state) going to do to bring down high taxes? Jack and Squat.

  • Speaking of New York, a court just struck down their redistricting as Gerrymandering. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • In case you missed it, Pakistan’s Prime Minister was ousted two weeks ago. “Pakistan’s political opposition toppled Prime Minister Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote in Parliament early Sunday after several political allies and a key party in his ruling coalition deserted him.” He wasn’t the worst person to run Pakistan, but high inflation (even worse than ours) brought him down.
  • The new Pakistani Prime Minister is former opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif.
  • California’s corporate diversity law ruled unconstitutional. California’s law mandated that corporations stock their executive boards with members from various victimhood identity politics groups.
  • The trifecta! “Florida man arrested after cops find him in possession of drugs, guns and alligator.” Click through to see what a hard 31 looks like. (Hat Tip: Dwight.)
  • “Downtown Greek Restaurant Owner Escapes the Country, Leaving Workers and Rent Unpaid. That’s Simi Estiatorio, and the manager partner who fled the country is George Theodosiou. Read the link for the details. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Heh:

  • Nicolas Cage answers the Internet’s questions.
  • “Jen Psaki Walks Back Claims That She Ever Worked For Biden Administration.”
  • “Check Out These 9 Trans-Friendly Kids’ Shows Coming To Disney.” Including Avatar: The Last Genderbender.
  • Worst thing about Austin this time of year? All this pollen in the air. Really triggers the allergies…

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 3 Comments »

    Followup: Unfolding Voting Debacle in Harris County Results in Resignation, Lawsuits

    Wednesday, March 9th, 2022

    In Friday’s LinkSwarm, we talked about just how screwed up Democratic-run Harris County’s voting counting was. Well, things haven’t gotten any better, with 10,000 ballots left out of the count, a camera turned off and handpicked Democratic elections administrator Isabel Longoria resigning.

    Following a week of public outcry and multiple lawsuits over primary election issues in the state’s largest county, Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria submitted her resignation on Tuesday.

    “Today I am submitting my resignation effective July 1. I think this date ensures that there’s a presiding officer during the major elections and allows the election commission the time they need to find a replacement,” Longoria said. “I remain committed to the office and its mission and hope to aid in defeating harmful radical rhetoric to ensure successful elections in the future.”

    During a Wednesday morning press conference, however, Harris County Republican Party (HCRP) Chair Cindy Siegel announced that the party would continue to pursue its lawsuit over the election, noting that Longoria is slated to preside over the upcoming primary runoff and municipal elections in May.

    HCRP attorney Steve Mitby said he would be going into an emergency hearing to request the court order an independent administrator to oversee the next Harris County election, and for the county to turn back on cameras live streaming the ballot counting process.

    “We know there are 10,000 ballots that Harris County just found, that apparently had been lost, and they shut the cameras off when all this was going on,” said Mitby. “Under Texas law, Harris County is required to have a livestream and camera footage of all vote counting that’s going on.”

    “The only reason why they would have been shut off is because somebody in Lina Hidalgo’s office had something to hide.”

    Following an emergency hearing Wednesday morning, district court Judge Fredericka Phillips ruled that the court would supervise the counting of votes and ordered Longoria to report again to the court at 7:00 p.m.

    Longoria said that cameras were not turned off but that the livestream was moved from the YouTube channel to another location on the Harris County website. Mitby told The Texan Longoria had not notified residents or observers of the change midway through the counting process.

    He also refuted Hidalgo’s attempt to blame Senate Bill (SB) 1, the Texas GOP-backed election reform bill passed by the legislature in 2021.

    “SB 1 did not cause the county to fail to deliver equipment, provide incorrect ballots, or supply the wrong sized paper. SB 1 did not delay the counting process or cause the county to lose ballots.”

    Alan Vera, HCRP ballot security chair, added that another 175 uncounted ballots had been discovered Tuesday night.

    On primary election day, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office announced that Longoria had informed them she would not be able to comply with a 1986 state law requiring reporting of a full early vote and election day count within 24 hours of polls closing.

    The Harris County Republican Party waited until within one hour of the deadline, but on observing the slow posting of returns, filed a lawsuit requesting a district court impound materials and oversee the remaining count. After Longoria’s office completed the count at approximately 1:00 a.m. Thursday, the party agreed to dismiss the case.

    By Friday, however, due to new reconciliation requirements in state law approved in 2021, the secretary of state’s office discovered that Harris County officials had neglected to include more than 10,000 ballots in the reported counts.

    On Saturday night, Longoria posted a statement about the issue on social media without informing the local Democratic and Republican parties, which contract with Harris County elections department to conduct the primaries.

    Turning off cameras during ballot counting should receive the same penalty that turning off a police camera does for officers: automatic termination for cause.

    Again, the question is: Are Harris County Democrats committing fraud, or are they just massively incompetent?

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 7 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for February 4, 2022

    Friday, February 4th, 2022

    The Carter-era “misery index” (inflation + unemployment) is rising, Canada’s truckers are still honking, more Democratic sleazebag activity, the far left is coming for your kids, China continues to misbehave, and a tragic cheese display collapse shocks onlookers. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden continues to work his magic on the economy. Expected job numbers: +200,000. Actual job numbers: -300,000.

  • But! There are other stories stating that jobs numbers “beat” expectations. Why? Some super sketchy “seasonal” adjustments.

    Why the BLS is applying such a grotesque seasonal adjustment to it, is unclear (actually, if one assumes that the Biden admin tapped the BLS secretary on the shoulder, then it is very clear).

    It’s not just outside analysts who reach this conclusion: in Table C to its report, the BLS showed “December 2021-January 2022 changes in selected labor force measures, with adjustments for population control effects” and confirmed that if one had used an apples-to-apples basis for the January numbers, the number of Employed workers (from the Household Survey) would be down -272K. Instead, thanks to the population control effect adjustment of 1.471 million, the final number was 1.199 million!

    In summary, while the markets had been trading for months on fake data when the BLS failed to catch up to covid reality, and was applying stale seasonal adjustments, they are doing so again today, only in the opposite direction with the BLS now overextending itself in the opposite direction, with a January seasonal adjustment that has never been greater!

  • Inflation hit 5.8% in 2021, the most in 39 years. Pretty sure this year is going to be a lot worse.
  • How bad is inflation? Dwight sent over this link on an Austin restaurant shutting down that includes an eye-opening inflation tidbit. “He pointed out that a container of fryer oil that a year ago cost about $17 had risen to about $50.”
  • Canada’s freedom truckers seem to be making headway with regional governments, some of whom have promised to lift vaccine mandates, but asshole authoritarian Justin Trudeau is refusing to budge.
  • Video footage of a voting fraud mule making 53 trips among 20 ballot drop-boxes.
  • Regular BattleSwarm readers have already seen extensive evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis for Flu Manchu, but National Review‘s Jim Geraghty has a new piece along those lines.

    There are two naturally occurring viruses that are par­ticularly similar to SARS-CoV-2. The first is RaTG13, which shares 96.2 percent of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli. This virus was collected from bat feces in a copper-mine shaft in Tongguan, Mojiang, Yunnan Province, China, that was the site of a small-scale deadly viral infection with some curious similarities to Covid.

    In April 2012, six miners were assigned to clean bat guano from the mine shaft. Four miners had been working at the site for two weeks, and two had been working there for four days when they all grew ill with a cough and fever and experienced difficulty breathing, aching limbs, heavy and bloody mucus and saliva, and headaches — symptoms of a viral respiratory infection that are similar to the effects of Covid. All six miners were admitted to a Kunming hospital in late April and early May, and three died — one after two weeks, one after a month and a half, and one after three months. The other three survived.

    Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a prominent Chinese pulmonolo­gist whose high-profile role has been compared to that of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States, consulted on the cases of the miners. Recognizing that the virus afflicting the miners could be comparable to SARS, researchers sent blood samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for antibody testing.

    In 2012 and 2013, teams of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted a study of coronaviruses in bats in that abandoned mine shaft — and one of the samples they collected was RaTG13.

    The second virus that is particularly similar to SARS-CoV-2 is really a cluster of three similar viruses discovered in Laos in autumn 2021. A team led by Marc Eliot, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, collected saliva, feces, and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos and found three new viruses that were each more than 95 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103, and BANAL-236.

    Some skeptics of the lab-leak theory contend that the BANAL viruses proved that SARS-CoV-2 is likely a naturally occurring virus, and because Laos was roughly 1,000 miles from Wuhan, this pointed away from the notion that the Covid pandemic could be traced back to a leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other labs in the city. But there is ample reason to believe that viruses from Laos — perhaps not the BANAL trio, but similar ones — were also shipped from Laos to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    In 2010, Wildlife Trust, a nonprofit international conservation organization dedicated to protecting wildlife, announced it was rebranding itself under the name EcoHealth Alliance. The organization’s president, Peter Daszak, declared that his group had become “the central organization defining the intersection of local conservation and global health” and touted itself as being “on the forefront of informing the public, businesses, and the scientific community about emerging diseases, including potential pandemics.” It is safe to say that EcoHealth Alliance is one of the largest, best funded, and best connected nonprofits, focusing upon “field research and develop[ing] tools to save ecosystems and predict and prevent pandemics.”

    EcoHealth Alliance/illegal gain of function section snipped.

    We know for a fact that the people collecting samples do not always follow the necessary safety procedures. And the risk of accidental infection does not disappear once the viruses and bats are brought back to the laboratories.

    Lab accidents happen. The first argument against the lab-leak theory that can be safely dismissed is the notion that Chinese scientists were simply too careful or too diligent to ever let a virus escape their lab. Accidents occur even in the most well-trained and highly regarded research facilities in the world. In June 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that they had unintentionally exposed personnel to potentially viable anthrax. A month later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found samples of smallpox, dengue, and spotted fever just sitting in a storage room. A decade earlier, the Chinese CDC’s National Institute of Virology in southern Beijing had accidentally released SARS. Twice.

    In February 2019, Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, laid out a report in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists detailing that from 2009 to 2015, a federal program “received a total of 749 incident reports from select-agent research facilities,” including “1) needle sticks and other through the skin exposures from sharp objects, 2) dropped containers or spills/splashes of liquids containing pathogens, and 3) bites or scratches from infected animals.”

    China obviously places the same importance on lab safety as it puts into quality control. Lets pick it up where more CCP perfidy kicks in:

    Finally, there is the undeniably suspicious behavior of the Chinese government since the first cases were reported in Wuhan in December 2019. Until January 21, 2020, the Wuhan Regional Health Commission insisted that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found.” On January 4, 2020, former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield was incredulous during a phone call with his Chinese counterpart, George Gao. Redfield described asking his old friend Gao, “George, you don’t really believe that mother and father and daughter all got it from an animal at the same time, do ya?” Gao insisted there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. But Redfield recounted that two days later, Gao broke down during a call, “audibly and tearfully distraught after finding ‘a lot of cases’ in the community who had never visited the wet market.”

    In late January and early February, the Chinese government ordered all labs processing samples of the strange new virus to destroy them. On January 3, China’s National Health Commission ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. The justification for this order was public safety, although it is hard to see the public-safety benefit in suppressing information about the disease.

    It took a year to get a World Health Organization investigative team into Wuhan, and when that team arrived, it encountered angry refusals to turn over raw data about the earliest cases. According to the New York Times, “disagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts among the typically mild-mannered scientists on both sides.” The Chinese government has refused to allow another team of investigators to enter Wuhan or the labs in the city. The Chinese government does not care if it looks guilty.

    A much-hyped U.S. intelligence-community investigation completed in August offered almost nothing useful, declaring, “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.” Ninety days of effort, with all the resources of the U.S. government, generated nothing new.

    To paraphrase Ebright, in the autumn of 2019, there were three institutions in the entire world that were doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats. One was in Galveston, Texas, one was in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the third was in Wuhan, China.

    In theory, the pandemic could have started with some random Chinese person who didn’t have any connection to the bat coronavirus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan CDC. This person would have a spectacularly unlucky run-in with a bat or other animal, and that random Chinese person caught the exceptionally rare naturally occurring animal virus that infects, sickens, and spreads among human beings like wildfire. This same hyper-contagious bat virus would have the exceptionally unusual trait of being ex­tremely difficult to find in bats.

    This extraordinarily unlucky person would then travel to the metaphorical doorstep of one of the three labs in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats and start infecting other people in the city of Wuhan. Under the natural-origin theory, the Wuhan laboratories just happen to be mind-bogglingly unlucky that events played out in a way that so closely mimics the consequences of a lab accident.

    That would be a remarkable series of coincidences.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Data point. “Younger, working-age people began dying in greater numbers as vaccine mandates hit.”
  • More data:

  • Cyber-attack China hack?
  • Also in China: The Genocide Olympics get underway.
  • “Youngkin Governs For Parents Who Say: Get Away From Our Kids, You Freaks.”

    Glenn Youngkin is governing Virginia according to the implicit campaign slogan that powered his victory: stop messing with our kids, you freaks! That’s the polite version, anyway. Other Republican officials should follow his lead and solidify the GOP as the party of parents.

    Youngkin ran as a conservative champion of normalcy, especially in schools. His campaign was assisted when his opponent declared parents should not have a say in what their children are taught, thereby confirming everything Youngkin was running on.

    Since being sworn in, Youngkin has banned school mask mandates, banned teaching racist ideas from sources such as critical race theory, and requested the new state attorney general, Jason Miyares, to investigate the apparent coverup by Loudoun County officials of a rape committed by a skirt-wearing boy in a girls’ bathroom. He has also started cleaning house in the bureaucracy.

    These measures have provoked pushback from the usual suspects. Left-wing teachers are now worried they’ll get in trouble for teaching the race essentialism derived from critical race theory. Some counties have defied the governor over school mask mandates, and are punishing students who choose not to wear them. But Youngkin is holding firm, knowing this is what he was elected to do.

    Across the nation, parents are in revolt against the Democrat-led educational establishment, and Republicans should eagerly join the fray. After all, it was the Democrat-loving teachers unions that fought to keep schools shut down long after we knew that children were at almost no risk from Covid-19. Likewise, it has mostly been Democrats and their allies forcing children to wear masks when school is open, even though (as a few on the left are finally admitting) masks are particularly harmful for children, while offering no real benefits.

    There are other indignities and cruelties, of course, from shutting down outdoor playgrounds to forcing schoolchildren to study or eat lunch outdoors in freezing temperatures. And these miseries have been inflicted long after any plausible ability to defend them as emergency measures, or to plead ignorance of the consequences. Under pressure from the teachers unions and education bureaucracy, Democrats have chosen to sacrifice the well-being of children. Even many liberals now want an alternative to the endless school shutdowns, masks, and other pandemic security theater.

  • Speaking of leftists trying to get their hands on your children: “BLM ‘Week of Action’ Teaching Students Nationwide to Affirm Transgenderism, Disrupt Nuclear Family.”

    Students across the country as young as kindergarten-age are learning that “everybody gets to choose their own gender” and are receiving kid-friendly lessons on disrupting “Western nuclear family dynamics” as part of this week’s national Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

    The activist-driven curriculum for the Week of Action, which kicked off Monday, is based off the 13 “Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles.” Those principles include a commitment to restorative justice, being transgender affirming and queer affirming, creating space for black families that is “free from patriarchal practices,” and “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other.”

    Black Lives Matter at School offers kid-friendly versions of the 13 principles designed for elementary and middle-school students.

    The Week of Action also includes a list of four national demands: end zero-tolerance discipline policies; mandate black history and ethnic studies; hire more black teachers; and fund counselors, not cops, according to a “starter kit” on the Black Lives Matter at School website.

    In the starter kit, New York City kindergarten teacher Laleña Garcia, author of a children’s book about BLM principles, writes that while “discussing big ideas with little people” it is necessary to “consider age-appropriate language so that our students or children can grasp the concepts.” For example, she suggests not talking about police violence with “our youngest children.”

    When discussing BLM’s principle of being transgender affirming, Garcia offers the following kid-friendly language: “Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”

    When discussing the BLM principle of a “Black Village,” which includes the goal of disrupting the Western nuclear family structure, Garcia suggests teaching kids that “there are lots of different kinds of families; what makes a family is that it’s people who take care of each other; those people might be related, or maybe they choose to be a family together and to take care of each other. Sometimes, when it’s a lot of families together, it can be called a village.”

  • Speaking of Democratic policies endangering kids: Repeat child sex offender illegal alien arrested at the border.
  • Now Twitter is kicking off accounts critical of teacher’s unions. Check out The Chalkboard Review.
  • Even in San Francisco, the backlash against the Soros-backed-Democrat-DA crime wave has begun: “S.F. police will no longer cooperate with DA Boudin over police shooting investigations.”

    San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said he intends to sever an agreement with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office spelling out the D.A.’s lead role in investigating police use-of-force incidents, in-custody deaths and police shootings.

    The agreement was originally struck in 2019 following intense debate in San Francisco over the role the city’s police department should play in investigating its own officers following a rash of police shootings. Police and the District Attorney’s Office renewed the agreement last year.

  • Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker gave $300,000 in federal Flu Manchu relief funds to #BlackLivesMatter.
  • Speaking of which, there’s more crooked Pritzker shenanigans.

    The more we learn about the Jenny Thornley affair, the more it appears that senior members of the Pritzker administration, including potentially the governor and his wife, may have facilitated a fraud on the state by a now-indicted former campaign aide to enrich her and then obstructed efforts to bring her to justice.

    This is a tangled web, so stay with me as I set forth a timeline of events and characters, according to the Chicago Tribune.

    The former executive director of the Illinois State Police Merit Board, Jack Garcia, discovered evidence that one of the employees under his direction, Jenny Thornley, was stealing money from the people of the state

    Garcia is a well-known, skilled investigator who previously supervised the divisions of internal investigations and forensic services, before becoming the first deputy director of the Illinois State Police. Thornley was a campaign aide for Gov. J.B. Pritzker (her husband, Jared, was also a senior political appointee at the Illinois comptroller’s office) and close enough to Pritzker and his wife, M.K., that she had their personal telephone numbers.

    After assembling the evidence and building the case, Garcia scheduled meetings to fire Thornley and refer her for prosecution on the morning of Feb. 3, 2020. However, on the eve of that day, Thornley contacted (at least) the governor’s wife (pictured, at left) and asked her to intervene, alleging that Garcia had assaulted her sexually a week or so earlier.

    The governor’s chief counsel promptly called the merit board (which is an independent agency created “to remove political influence” from State Police hiring, promotion and discipline) to “advise” it to: (a) cancel her firing and the referral for prosecution, (b) suspend Garcia (the experienced investigator who uncovered the Thornley fraud) and (c) retain an outside counsel proposed by the governor’s office. The merit board went along, but also suspended Thornley, and Garcia voluntarily took and passed a lie detector test.

    Then Thornley sued to stop the investigation of her own claim of sexual harassment.

    The outside counsel, Christina Egan, nonetheless completed an investigation by July 2020 (at the cost of $500,000 paid by the people of Illinois), confirming the evidence Garcia assembled that Thornley had stolen money and committed forgery, and finding no evidence of Thornley’s sexual assault allegation. The State Police Merit Board then reinstated Garcia, fired Thornley, referred her for prosecution. She has now been indicted for theft and forgery.

    However, after Thornley was fired, someone with clout in the Pritzker administration somehow granted her disability payments reserved for people that are actually state employees. These payments (amounting to some $71,000) went on for more than a year, ending days before she was indicted for theft and fraud. These extensive payments were for “injuries” sustained from an “assault” that Egan determined had not occurred.

  • Speaking of Democratic family corruption: “Smoking gun documents tie Nancy Pelosi’s son to fraud and bribery scheme to remove permit violations against squalid San Francisco flop house owned by his ex-girlfriend and probed by the FBI.”
  • Speaking of Pelosi corruption:

  • Speaking of crooked Democratic governors, Washington state’s Jay Inslee (he of the spectacular presidential race flameout) wants to criminalize voicing allegations of election fraud. “Shut up and do the will of the party, comrade!” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • But that’s not the only stupid idea he has! He also wants to drive out all the state’s billionaires with a wealth tax.
  • One swampy hand washes the other. “ATF Asks Judge to Order Hunter Biden Gun Inquiry Closed.”
  • Is national concealed carry coming?
  • “‘You Have Blood On Your Hands,’ Former Official Calls on Harris County Judge, Commissioners to Resign.”

    The criminal justice system in Harris County is broken,” said Aimee Castillo, sister of murder victim Josh Sandoval.

    Suspect Devan Kristopher Jordon was out on three felony bonds when he allegedly shot Sandoval during a home invasion robbery last May. Jordon had also missed a court date the week prior to the murder, but authorities did not issue an arrest warrant.

    “I think the criminal justice system is just a revolving door. They murder, they go in, and they come out, and they go in,” said Glenda Martin, Sandoval’s mother. “I think it’s a horrible thing.”

    Commissioner Tom Ramsey (R-Pct. 3) presented a resolution honoring Sandoval’s life and noted that the suspect was also affiliated with the same crime ring allegedly responsible for the murder in Houston of an off-duty New Orleans police officer last August.

    “There are people who are hurting people who are being allowed to walk around and they should not be period. That is the point,” intoned Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4).

    The fieriest moments of the meeting, however, came later from Steve Radack, former constable and former commissioner who said Democrats on the commissioners court had “blood on their hands.”

    “I never dreamed that after serving 32 years on this court that there would be three members of this court — Hidalgo, Garcia, and Ellis — who would kiss the rears of hardened criminals, who victimize law-abiding citizens, including law enforcement officers,” said Radack. “I’m calling on you three to resign from office so the healing can begin.”

  • Hmmm. “Two Texas inmates killed at Beaumont federal prison in fight involving MS-13.”
  • Speaking of criminal scumbags, Michael Avenatti was convicted of defrauding Storm Daniels of $300,000. This is, what, his fourth felony conviction?

  • On the “Washington Football Team”

  • Heh:

  • This is a pretty crazy IT hiring story. You’ll just have to read it…
  • Get a rope. “Tulsa police find stolen $300,000 1967 Ford Mustang Shelby stripped and hidden in field.” (Hat Tip: IowaHawk.)
  • The scam of New York City sidewalk sheds.
  • Heh:

  • Quel formage!

  • Minneapolis names some snowplows. I do rather like Ctrl Salt Delete…
  • “Joe Biden Beats Out Brussels Sprouts For America’s Least Favorite Vegetable.”
  • “I said all the frisbees!”

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