Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Mostly new links this time around, but some settling of contents may occur…
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is invested in a comprehensive nationwide effort to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. We’re fighting for election integrity because it’s absolutely vital to protect the sanctity of your ballot from Democrat schemes to undermine voting security. We are involved in 19 election integrity lawsuits nationwide, and we’re winning the fight.
Our investment is partially driven by polling that consistently shows the American people supporting our common-sense approach to securing elections. A recent poll commissioned by the RNC found that 78 percent of Americans support a proposed voting plan with five key principles: presenting voter ID, verifying voters’ signatures, controlling the ballot’s chain of custody, bipartisan poll observation, and cleaning up voter rolls. The poll also found that 80 percent of voters support voter ID requirements; this sentiment matches up with other polling, including a recent one from NPR which found 79 percent of voters in favor of voter ID. The measures we are pushing are not controversial or dramatic. They are common-sense and they are supported by American citizens.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from trying to generate false outrage and controversy at every level of this conversation. The Democrat election playbook is simple: lie and seek attention until the mainstream media eagerly takes the baton and turns Democrat lies into a false national narrative. You saw this in Georgia, where Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams’ lies about the state’s election reforms pressured the MLB into moving its All-Star Game out of Atlanta. These lies cost the good people of Georgia an estimated $100 million. You’re seeing it now in Texas, where local Democrats have stormed out of legislative debates on election integrity not once, but twice. Their latest stunt saw them leave the floor of the Texas legislature and hop on private planes to fly to DC in a juvenile quest for media attention.
Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media lapped it up. This is their playbook. When it comes to election integrity, Americans need to pay attention to the relationship between Democrat lies and the mainstream media machine.
(Hat tip: Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.)
Back on June 24, the great Peggy Noonan hailed [Eric] Adams’s primary win as a victory of reality over progressive theory. “Adams was a cop for 22 years, left the New York City Police Department as a captain, and was the first and for a long time the only candidate to campaign on crime and the public’s right to safety. He was the first to admit we were in a crime wave.” Noonan observed, accurately, that African-American voters were not necessarily the most progressive voters in the electorate anymore, and that they represented a de facto force of, if not conservatism, then a realist wariness of the fringes of modern progressive thinking.
The notion of a centrist, tough-on-crime mayor replacing the notorious groundhog murderer and early pandemic denier sounds good, but we’ll see. Every elected official operates within a particular “Overton Window”: the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time. Adams did not win this primary by a landslide. While he received the most votes in the first round, he was the top choice of less than a third of the city’s Democrats. He has 51.1 percent out of the final two.
New York City desperately needs a dramatic improvement in its policing and prosecution of criminals, but Adams will have to take on a lot of deeply entrenched opponents and a city media and cultural environment that have evolved to reflexively demonize the NYPD. Way back in 2005, Fred Siegel described the New York City of the David Dinkins years as an era of “hysteria that led upstanding liberals to insist that they were more afraid of the NYPD than they were of criminals.” Whatever you think of Rudy Giuliani now, the young(er) mayor of the early 1990s was willing to be utterly hated as he enacted his reforms, convinced that the broader public would look past the controversy and appreciate the effects of lower crime rates. It remains to be seen whether Adams has that same courage to exchange short-term unpopularity for long-term improvement in the city’s streets — or whether he’ll bump up against the city’s Overton Window of what policy changes are acceptable and settle for a series of half measures.
The irony is that we see the same phenomenon in the opposite direction at the national level in Washington. Many progressives interpreted Biden’s presidential win, the 50–50 Senate, and the slightly shrunken House majority in the 2020 elections as a mandate to enact sweeping changes in the country — and they’re largely hitting brick walls. The national Overton Window isn’t wide enough to accommodate the wildest fantasies of progressives.
I’m not sure the feasibility of Overton Window possibilities matters to the Social Justice left. There’s is a holy revolutionary cause, and they need to seize control of the Party before they can seize control of the nation. To that end, I suspect many think that letting moderate Democrats lose elections is a small price to pay for continuing their unpopular march through America’s institutions…
Outnumbered by Republicans in Austin 83 to 67, the Texas House Democratic Caucus decided to head to D.C. to publicize its opposition to election integrity bills, fundraise, and drum up support for federal legislation that would nationalize election law by imposing California law as a template on the nation — banning meaningful voter ID, expanding mail balloting while eliminating fraud safeguards, prohibiting proactive voter list maintenance, and mandating same-day voter registration with no checks for eligibility to vote.
But the Democrats’ trip hasn’t turned out as planned.
Soon after meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris and numerous White House staffers and members of the U.S. House and Senate, three Democrats were diagnosed with COVID-19, then another two, and now a total of six. An aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a White House official tested positive soon after meeting with the Texas Democrats.
And the attention Democrats were hoping for soon turned sour, with Texas’s major newspapers, none of whom are friends of Republicans and have had little good to say about their election integrity bills, have nevertheless weighed in against the walkout. By two-to-one, Texas voters disapprove of the quorum-busting as well. Even national Republicans have piled on, with this tweet from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s press secretary being emblematic.
Closer to home, Travis County GOP Chairman Matt Mackowiak said the quorum-breakers had “…engaged in performance theater for weeks claiming Gov. Abbott was putting lives at risk by reopening the state economy and waiving the statewide mask mandate, then they flew to DC on a private jet stocked with Miller Lite without masks, in violation of FAA rules, and now this farce turned into a super spreader event.”
But there are signs the Democratic solidarity is breaking down. With chairmanships, seniority, and even district boundaries on the line in a redistricting year, powerful Democrats are wavering while those seeking to move up sense an opportunity. A week ago, 80 House members were on the floor. As of Tuesday, 90, including several Democrats, were present. It’s a classic “prisoner’s dilemma” situation. If another 10 Democrats show up, the Texas House will have a quorum and can resume consideration of bills, leaving the other 50 holdouts with nothing for their efforts — except for perhaps being redrawn out of their districts by the Legislative Redistricting Board later this year.
When the Democrats do return, they will be asked to vote on bills that would bring mail-in balloting up to the standard for in-person voting by asking for ID in the form of writing a driver’s license number, or state ID number, or the last four of the Social Security number inside of a privacy flap in the ballot return envelope. The bill would also prohibit local elections officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, ban last-minute changes to election procedures, and clarify that properly appointed poll watchers must be able to see and hear election workers’ activities.
Asking for ID for mail-in ballots — one of the measures most vociferously opposed by Democrats — is supported by 81 percent of Texas voters, with voters from all demographic groups and both major parties approving of the safeguards.
With all due respect to Chuck DeVore, until the Texas election integrity bill is passed, their publicity stunt hasn’t backfired yet. There are few prices Democrats won’t pay for the ability to continue cheating.
Barely a year after the Minneapolis City Council voted to to defund the city’s police department after the death of George Floyd, a judge has ordered the city to hire more cops, thanks to a lawsuit filed by fed-up citizens.
“Minneapolis is in a crisis,” wrote the eight plaintiffs in their complaint, citing the rise in violent crimes, including shootings, sexual assault, murders, civil unrest, and riots, Fox News reports.
Progressive city council members couldn’t wait to gut the police department and allow a surge in crime, most of which would affect poor black neighborhoods. The tsunami of crime recently took the life of a popular coach who was shot attending a memorial for another victim of Minneapolis’ violent crime surge. He was the 42nd person murdered this year in Minneapolis. No word from Antifa and BLM if they are planning a mostly peaceful riot in his honor.
The cop-hating Minneapolis City Council and Mayor Jacob Frey were ordered to “immediately take any and all necessary action to ensure that they fund a police force,” according to Thursday’s court order by Judge Jamie L. Anderson. The crime-loving city council and mayor have until June 30, 2022, to establish a police force of 730 sworn officers. They currently have 669 cops. Minneapolis saw nearly 200 cops file paperwork to leave the Minneapolis Police Department in the first three months after the George Floyd riots. No idea how many more will resign or retire by the June 30, 2022, deadline, as the nation has seen a surge in cops walking away from departments nationwide.
NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop.
Conservatives have always hated NPR, but in the last year I hear more and more politically progressive people, in the media, talking about the station as a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish. A
Numerous examples snipped.
NPR sucks and is unlistenable, so people are going elsewhere. People like [Ben] Shapiro are running their strategy in reverse and making fortunes doing it. One of these professional analysts has to figure this one out eventually, right?
“In 25 major U.S. cities, officials have proposed cutting—or in 20 cases already cut—police budgets. However, what OpenTheBooks.com auditors found was that mayors and city officials still enjoy personal protection of a dedicated police detail costing taxpayers millions of dollars,” Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of Open The Books (OTB), said in a statement announcing the new data.
Snip.
In San Francisco, for example, the costs of the security detail protecting Mayor London Breed and other city officials spiraled up from $1.7 million in 2015 to $2.6 million in 2020.
Breed has proposed shifting $120 million from the city’s police department to mental health and workforce training programs. City officials declined to say how many officers are assigned to the security details, according to OTB.
In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot claimed to be opposed to defunding the police, but OTB found that officials quietly abolished 400 police department positions last year.
Those positions were eliminated even as the city’s “security detail costs peaked in 2020—up $700,000 over five years: $2.7 million spent on 16 officers (2015); $2.9 million for 16 officers (2016); $2.7 million for 20 officers (2017); $2.8 million for 16 officers (2018); $2.8 million for 17 officers (2019); and $3.4 million for 22 officers (2020)—an all-time high,” OTB stated.
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio slashed $1 billion from the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) $6 billion annual budget, including $354 million transferred to mental health, homelessness, and education services.
But the mayor, who briefly sought the Democratic presidential nomination last year, continues to enjoy tax-paid police protection for himself, his wife, and his son.
Last week, Circuit Judge Jason Sengheiser dismissed charges of first-degree murder, armed criminal action, and unlawful gun possession against Brandon Campbell, 30, when prosecutors from the Circuit Attorney’s Office did not attend hearings for the case in May, June, and July, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
“The court does not take this action without significant consideration for the implications it may have for public safety,” Sengheiser wrote in kicking the case.
“Although presumed innocent, (Campbell) has been charged with the most serious of crimes. While the court has a role to play in protecting public safety, that role must be balanced with adherence to the law and the protection of the rights of the defendant,” the judge continued.
Sengheiser then took aim at Kim Gardner’s office.
“The Circuit Attorney’s Office is ultimately the party responsible for protecting public safety by charging and then prosecuting those it believes commit crimes,” he wrote.
“In a case like this where the Circuit Attorney’s office has essentially abandoned its duty to prosecute those it charges with crimes, the court must impartially enforce the law and any resultant threat to public safety is the responsibility of the Circuit Attorney’s Office.”
Thirty-eight-year-old Brandon Andrus’s criminal history is so lengthy he has more mug shots than some people have selfies.
But that didn’t stop 185th Criminal District Court Judge Jason Luong from allowing Andrus to be a free man by giving him three felony bonds, one for assaulting a family member last year.
On June 14, police say Andrus and another man murdered 35-year-old Rodrick Miller.
(Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
Get a Savanna cat they said. You’ll have a cat that doubles as guard dog, they said. 😂😂😂
(green screen, but still funny) pic.twitter.com/qbt7ty37cN
— 🇦🇺🇳🇿 The Cynical Hun 🇬🇧🇺🇸 (@TheCynicalHun) July 21, 2021