More Biden corruption evidence, a would-be mass shooter turns out to be a pro-Palestinian Bernie Sis, a parent beats the snot out of a would-be child kidnapper, a top sniper dies, Disney gets sued, and Venus is feeling Zoove. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Another “Try to contain your shock” headline: “Joe Biden’s Classified Docs Provide More Evidence Hunter’s Pay-To-Play Was A Family Affair.”
The special counsel report on Joe Biden’s unauthorized removal and disclosure of classified documents exposed much more than our president’s mental deficits and the breadth of his irresponsible handling of top-secret and classified information. The report revealed a close nexus between Hunter Biden’s influence peddling and his father’s responsibilities and access to intel during the elder’s term as vice president.
On Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur released the results of his investigation into the president stemming from the discovery of top-secret and classified documents at Biden’s D.C.-based Penn Biden Center, his private Delaware home, and the University of Delaware. While the specific details in the recovered documents remain unknown, the nearly 400-page report provided an extensive enough summary of the materials to confirm an overlap in the timing and topics of Joe Biden’s vice presidency and Hunter Biden’s “business” enterprises.
Ukraine Overlap
Appendix A of the report provided a table summary of the documents recovered. Many of the top-secret and classified documents concerned Ukraine during the time frame when Hunter Biden acted as an intermediary between Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and the vice president. Recall that Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee that in early March 2014, he met Zlochevsky while in Moscow. And soon after, he and Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, receiving $83,000 per month.
The following month, Hunter Biden sent Archer an email dated April 13, 2014 — one week before Joe Biden would travel to Ukraine and meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Referring to “my guys upcoming travels,” Hunter then elaborated on “22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s ‘destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk,’” according to the New York Post.
Among the material recovered from President Biden’s unauthorized storage locales were several top-secret and otherwise classified or confidential documents discussing Ukraine. One undated document discussed issues related to Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Another, dated Sept. 17, 2014, consisted of a “Memorandum for the Vice President from staff members, with subject ‘U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine.’” Also dated Sept. 17, 2014, was an “event memo” from a vice-presidential national security staffer, titled, “Lunch with Ukrainian President Poroshenko,” which was scheduled for the following day.
The overlap between Joe Biden’s Ukraine-related work and Hunter Biden’s Burisma profiteering became more pronounced in 2015. On Dec. 2, 2015, the lobbying firm Blue Star Group, which Hunter Biden had arranged to work with Burisma, wrote to Burisma that it had “participated in a conference call today with senior Obama Administration officials ahead of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine next week.” The memorandum provided a summary of the conference call, telling Burisma that “Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden’s Special Advisor for Europe and Russia, and Dr. Colin Kahl, the Vice President’s National Security Advisor, presented the agenda for the trip and answered questions about current U.S. policy toward Ukraine.”
Two days after receiving this memorandum, Burisma executives Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharskyi, on Dec. 4, 2015, pushed Hunter Biden to call his father. The Burisma executives, according to Archer, expressed concern over the pressure they were under from Ukrainian investigators.
And there’s more, though very little that will be surprising to BattleSwarm readers. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Joe Biden met with the chairman of the Chinese energy firm CEFC shortly after Hunter Biden’s business associate Rob Walker received a $3 million payment from the firm as part of a joint venture the pair were then trying to develop, according to a newly released transcript of Walker’s closed-door congressional testimony.
Walker testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on January 26 about his role in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC.
Walker received roughly $3 million from CEFC in March 2017 through its State Energy HK account, bank records show. He recalled a meeting between Joe Biden and CEFC officials in spring 2017, around the time of the State Energy HK payment.
“Did Joe Biden ever attend any location or meeting or place where CEFC officials were also there?” a staffer asked Walker, according to a transcript of the interview released Tuesday morning.
“Yes,” Walker replied. He recalled the meeting took place in Washington, D.C., and Joe Biden, who had just left office as vice president, stopped by for lunch.
“I don’t know the exact — it was 20- probably -17 at some point, but I don’t know exactly when,” Walker said.
The meeting took place at a Four Seasons hotel in a private room. CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming and other associates were present at the meeting.
“I don’t know if Zang was there, but I believe that Ye was there. I’m certain of it,” Walker testified.
He did not know who the other CEFC associates were at the meeting. Walker firmly recalled Jianming and his translator, Hunter Biden, business associate James Gilliar, and Joe Biden attending the meeting.
Well, what do you know? “Mail-In Ballot Fraud Study Finds Trump ‘Almost Certainly’ Won In 2020.”
A new study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election concludes that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail.
The Heartland Institute study tried to gauge the probable impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots cast for both then-candidate Joe Biden and his opponent, President Donald Trump, would have had on the overall 2020 election results.
The study was based on data obtained from a Heartland/Rasmussen survey in December that revealed that roughly one in five mail-in voters admitted to potentially fraudulent actions in the presidential election.
After the researchers carried out additional analyses of the data, they concluded that mail-in ballot fraud “significantly” impacted the 2020 presidential election.
They also found that, absent the huge expansion of mail-in ballots during the pandemic, which was often done without legislative approval, President Trump would most likely have won.
“Had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected,” the report’s authors wrote.
Not news to those of us who watched returns into the wee hours, only to wake up to The Steal the next morning.
Ukraine bags another Russian ship. “Ukrainian Magura V5 Marine Drones have sunk the Ropucha-class landing ship Cesar Kunikov near Alupka in Crimea in the Black Sea.”
Putin says he prefers Biden to Trump in the White House because he’s more predictable. I’m sure he does. Notice that both his Ukraine invasions occurred during Democratic presidential administrations.
The woman who tried to shoot up Lakewood Church in Houston was a Bernie Sis who had “Free Palestine” written on her AR-15. “[Genesse I.] Moreno had a violent, extensive criminal history stretching back to 2005, according to court records reviewed by Townhall. She was previously arrested for assaulting a public servant, assault causing bodily injury, forgery, theft for stealing cosmetics from a store, evading police, and unlawfully carrying a weapon, among a slew of charges on Moreno’s decades-old rap sheet.”
Alan Winston Filion, 17, is suspected of targeting hundreds of high schools, mosques, historically Black churches, US senators and even the US Supreme Court with swatting attacks that placed thousands of people in the crosshairs of heavily armed police response teams.
Prosecutors say the 6ft 3in teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response”, and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.
Mr Filion would then post chilling audio of the 911 calls on Telegram as a proof of purchase, according to court documents.
Among the hundreds of “swats” that Torswats allegedly claimed credit for were multiple hoax callouts at the home of Patrick S. Tomlinson, a Milwaukee-based science fiction author who says he has been swatted dozens of times in the past four years as part of a targeted harassment campaign by a group of “sociopathic” stalkers.
You’d think after five or six times, the guy would put up a sign in his front yard alerting police to the problem. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Court Orders Netherlands To Halt F-35 Parts For Israel As EU Says “Too Many People” Are Dying.” Excuse me? Does the Netherlands let their court interfere in foreign policy decisions and defense contracts based on events beyond their borders?
The US Army is cancelling its next generation Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, service officials announced today, taking a potential multi-billion-dollar contract off the table and throwing the service’s long-term aviation plans into doubt.
In addition, the Army plans to end production on the UH-60 V Black Hawk in fiscal 2025, due to “significant cost growth,” keep General Electric’s Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP) in the development phase instead of moving it into production, and phase the Shadow and Raven unmanned aerial systems out of the fleet, the service added.
All told, it reflects a massive shift in the Army’s aviation strategy and upends years of planning. There is also an ironic sense of history repeating: the decision to end FARA comes two decades to the month after the Army ended its plans to procure the RAH-66 Comanche and nearly 16 years after it terminated work on the ARH-70A Arapaho, both aircraft designed to replace the Kiowa — the same helicopter FARA was supposed to, finally, replace.
The reason for ending FARA, Army leaders told a small group of reporters ahead of the announcement, is a reflection of what war looks like in the modern era.
“We absolutely are paying attention [to world events] and adjusting, because we could go to war tonight, this weekend,” head of Army Futures Command Gen. James Rainey told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday.
“We are learning from the battlefield — especially Ukraine — that aerial reconnaissance has fundamentally changed,” Army Chief Gen. Randy George said in a press release. “Sensors and weapons mounted on a variety of unmanned systems and in space are more ubiquitous, further reaching and more inexpensive than ever before.”
Many commenters here feared the Pentagon wasn’t taking the drone threat seriously. Maybe they are…
The Marine Corps’ all-time deadliest sniper, Chuck Mawhinney, has died at age 75.
From 1968 to 1969, Mawhinney — still only a teenager — was credited with 103 confirmed kills.
An additional 216 kills were listed as “probable” since the enemies’ bodies were risky to verify in the active war zone.
Mawhinney had confirmed kills over 1,000 yards, with the average kill shot for snipers during the Vietnam War taken at a distance of 300 to 800 yards.
He received a Bronze Star with Combat Valor, Navy Achievement Medal, Navy Commendation Medal with Combat Valor, and two Purple Hearts.
Having more confirmed kills than Carlos Hathcock is pretty impressive. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The CW Network (which evidently still exists) just launched a 12 channel free streaming platform. Including, evidently, a Mystery Science Theater 3000 channel.
Trump wins Iowa (and picks up Ted Cruz’s endorsement), Democratic party popularity becomes ever more selective, Hunter Biden’s laptop confirmed as Hunter Biden’s laptop (not that we ever had any doubt), two shithole countries exchange airstrikes, and a science fiction legend dies. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Donald Trump won the Iowa Caucuses in convincing fashion, winning 51% of the vote. Ron DeSantis came in second with 21%, and MSM-and-Never Trump darling Nikki Haley pulling in 19%, and Vivek Ramaswamy a distant 4th with 7.6%. (Ramaswamy then endorsed Trump.) The most satisfying part of this result is seeing the Hindenburg of Haley puffery crash and explode.
Ted Cruz has endorsed Trump. “‘I’m a big believer in letting democracy play out,’ Cruz said. ‘I’ve got to say Trump’s victory was across the board. He won 51 percent of the vote. He won 98 of the counties. Congratulations to President Trump on that dominating victory.'” Despite DeSantis many strengths as a governor, he did not run a good campaign. And remember, Cruz actually beat Trump in Iowa in 2016, and ran a competitive campaign into May. That’s not going to happen this year. Trump seems likely to win all the primaries in every state.
A Gallup poll released on Friday reveals that a record low percentage of Americans who identify as Democrats in 2023 hit a record low, when independent ‘leaners’ are excluded.
Just 27% of Americans self-identify as Democrats, the smallest figure in the party’s history according to the survey. That said, self-identifying Republicans also hit 27%, though it did not mark the lowest figure in the party’s history – which was in 2013 when just 25% of Americans identified as such. The previous low for Democrats was in 2017 and 2015 at 29%.
Independents, meanwhile, take the cake – with 43% of Americans identifying as such.
Not that any of us ever had any doubt, but DOJ confirmed that the “Laptop from Hell” is in fact Hunter Biden’s laptop, and that they knew that all along:
‼️ In a new court filing today, the DOJ confirms Hunter Biden’s laptop is real, that he left it at a computer store, and that the contents matched what they obtained from a search warrant of his iCloud. Don’t hold your breath for a retraction from Joe Biden (“It’s a Russian… pic.twitter.com/xSZ2YG8JIB
Things that make your blood boil: “Texas man arrested in connection with videos showing seven men who sexually assaulted toddlers at a public mall.”
A Texas man is in federal custody after the FBI linked him to videos from the dark web depicting group sexual assault on toddlers in a mall.
Arthur Hector Fernandez, 29, was arrested Dec. 18, 2023 in Kingwood, TX as the result of a Dec. 14 criminal complaint filed in federal court in Houston, records show.
The FBI were led to Fernandez as a suspect after viewing videos of an assault of a three-year-old child; a relative of the child “recognized the bracelets an individual in the video was wearing as belonging to Fernandez.”
The executive director of the Rainbow Resource Center, a prominent LGBTQ+ support center based in Modesto, has been identified as one of 17 men apprehended on suspicion of attempting to engage in sexual activities with a minor.
The revelation was first reported by the Modesto Bee.
Gerad Slayton, 42, was taken into custody during a sting operation organized by the Turlock Police Department, targeting individuals believed to be seeking illicit encounters with minors. Slayton, recently appointed as the executive director of the Rainbow Center, a local nonprofit dedicated to providing resources for LGBTQ+ individuals across all age groups, faces allegations of pursuing sexual activities with minors.
Rape kits that should have been analyzed by the NYPD but were left in storage at hospitals across the city are now part of a sprawling Department of Justice probe into the department’s Special Victims Division, The Post has learned.
The revelation comes after The Post revealed the snafu, which meant that an unknown number of cases were not fully investigated, victims didn’t get justice, and countless rapists could be roaming free.
Pakistan and Iran have traded airstrikes in each other’s territory. “The unprecedented attacks by both Pakistan and Iran on either side of their border appeared to target Baluch militant groups with similar separatist goals. The countries accuse each other of providing a haven to the groups in their respective territories.”
The Disney magic seems to extend everywhere. “Pixar is planning on MAJOR layoffs this year, up to 20% of employees could be dismissed.” Under Jobs it made money hand over fist, but after Disney went woke it’s produced one flop after another.
Speaking of layoffs, Sports Illustratedlays off everybody. Wait, you mean putting fat women and trannys on the cover of your swimsuit issue and fluffing Colin Kaepernick weren’t tickets to success? Who knew?
Science fiction legend and personal friend Howard Waldrop died over the weekend. Howard was one of the greatest short story writers the field has ever produced. Since you can’t make a living from short stories, Howard was never far from penury, and he spent six months living in a spare room in my house. Pretty much everyone in the field loved him, and he will be missed.
Sometimes I stumble across something that just boggles my mind. Such as this video that explains that Israel, the most technologically advanced country in the Middle East, wasn’t just slow to adopt color television, but actively fought its adoption, going so far as to create a device that stripped out color.
Israel resisted instituting a TV broadcasting service in the first place, and first Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion was opposed to the idea.
But wealthy Israelis still bought TVs, which could pick up signals from Cyprus (which started TV broadcasting in 1956), Lebanon (1959), Egypt and Syria (1960), and Jordan (from 1968).
Despite Ben-Gurion’s opposition to TV, the Israeli government wanted to use TV for educational purposes, and was worried that the Arab-language TV broadcasts that could be found in cafes contained propaganda.
When Levi Eshkol took over as prime minister in 1963, he reversed the no TV policy. In 1965, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was formed, and in 1966 B&W Israeli TV was finally introduced by Israeli Educational Television (IET). (In America, the 1966-1967 season was when networks finished their transition to all-color programming.)
IBA launched its B&W broadcasting on May 2, 1968, Israeli independence Day, sharing a frequency with IBE, and only broadcasting three hours of programming (two hours in Hebrew and one in Arabic) three days a week.
France, the Soviet Union and Lebanon started broadcasting color in the SECAM format in 1967. Israel, like the UK and much of Europe, used PAL format.
Jordan and Egypt used PAL, and they started broadcasting in color in 1974. Jordan even broadcast a news program in Hebrew!
So Israel quickly greenlit color TV to combat the Arab color menace, right? Wrong. PM Golda Meir was opposed, describing color TV as “artificial and unnecessary.” Despite IBA investing in color equipment!
“Yitzhak Rabin and his government continued to double down on their anti-color stance. They attempted to crack down on the import market. Their fears even extending to a drop in value of the national currency, the Israeli Lira. However, the stance was firmly rooted in the belief that color television was a luxury expense reserved for the few rich and wealthy, leaving the vast majority behind black and white TV was seen as a sort of social equalizer.” No color for you, bubbe, because Social Justice!
“The Israeli government of the day felt it necessary to invent a new system to neutralize color television for good. The Mekhikon, or the color eraser or color killer, is an invention that is unique to Israel’s television history.”
When a receiver is tuned to a monochrome transmission, the displayed scene should have no color components. However, if there is a hardware failure in the color killer stage, false color patterns may be displayed even during monochrome transmission.
In normal color reception, high frequency luminance is mistaken for color, causing relatively invisible false color patterns. The reason for this invisibility is due to a key feature of NTSC/PAL, chroma/luminance frequency interleaving, where these false patterns are in complementary colors for adjacent video frames, allowing the human eye to average out the false color patterns. If, during a monochrome transmission, a color killer failure allows the color processing to be activated when it shouldn’t, a chroma subcarrier in the color processing stages is regenerated with no reference, causing that subcarrier to have enough frequency error that the chroma/luminance interleaving feature of NTSC/PAL no longer works, allowing the aforementioned false color patterns, overlaying the otherwise monochrome picture, to be much more visible by the human eye….
In a color TV waveform, a reference pulse, called the burst, is transmitted along the back porch portion of the video signal. If the transmitted signal is monochromatic, then the burst is not transmitted. The color killer is actually a muting circuit in the chroma section which supervises the burst and turns off the color processing if no burst is received (i.e. when the received signal is monochromatic.) The main purpose of the color burst in the first place is a reference for the receiver to regenerate the chroma subcarrier, which in turn is utilized to demodulate the color difference signals….
The government ordered the Israel Broadcasting Authority to cease broadcasting in color. As it was impractical to remove the chrominance signal from programs previously recorded in color, this was accomplished by simply omitting the burst phase signal from the broadcast. The “damaged” signal triggered the “color killer” mechanism in color television sets which prevented the appearance of color pictures. This method was named Mehikon (Hebrew: מחיקון “eraser”).
Note that all this was only happening at Israeli broadcasting stations. It didn’t do jack squat about those Arab broadcasts they seemed so worried about.
Naturally, this stupidity brought about its own technological reaction: The Anti-Color Killer, “a device to go with your new set restoring the damaged burst phase signal and allowing you to watch color programs exactly as they were filmed.” But you had to fiddle to get the color right, and then fiddle again every 15 minutes or so.
“Store owners who sold the device reported that nearly everyone who bought a color set from them also purchased the anti-eraser.”
Despite all the effort to keep color out, the Israeli government permitted a few color broadcasts: The visit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1977, and (I kid you not) The Eurovision Song Contest in 1979.
IBA finally started allowing color broadcasts to go out in 1981, and the Mekhikon was finally retired in 1982…just before the World Cup.
Israel finally went to full color on all broadcasts in 1983.
Velma, if you haven’t heard, is HBO Max’s “re-imagining” of the animated Scooby-Doo TV show. And by “reimagined” I mean “mangled and mutilated to fit the angry, narrow confines of social justice warrior ideology.”
Since I don’t have cable, I can’t go out of my way to watch it for the sake of reviewing it, so let’s let The Critical Drinker take a whack at it:
If that weren’t enough, let’s let Ryan George of Pitch Meeting also take his turn at bat:
The original Scooby-Doo is hardly going to go down in the annals of television as a classic on the order of Hill Street Blues or I Love Lucy, but it was a solid, wholesome kid-vid TV show that made good use of its limited animation budgets to produce solid, fondly remembered shows that the franchise was strong enough to survive decades of tweaks (“with special guest Don Knotts”), soft reboots, a series of unlikely direct to video movies…
…two “meh at best” live action movies, and even inflicting The Vile Abomination on American viewers.
Even apart from the social justice idiocy, throwing away that legacy for derisive belittlement is just wrong. Moreover, these projects never seem to be profitable or even well-received (remember the disasterous Land of the Lost remake with Will Ferrell?). If you don’t treat the source material with a due amount of respect, all you’re doing pissing off generations of people that grew up watching the originals.
This sort of thing is natural meat for The Critical Drinker, who delights in tearing into Social Justice crap. But the pointed Pitch Meeting takedown seems far more significant, as George has never been one to wade in culture war commentary.
Justin Trudeau’s storm troopers start arresting peaceful protesters, he wants to kidnap the children and dogs of free Canadian citizens who dared to bruise his fragile ego, Texas sends more lawsuits flying, and another case of Sudden Epstein Death Syndrome. It’s the Friday Saturday LinkSwarm!
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled parliamentary debate today as federal police began arresting protesting truckers and confiscating vehicles. Trudeau did not want to face government while the operation to break the back of the freedom protestors begins.
Early this morning, federal police assembled a convoy of heavy tow trucks to begin the operation. The identities of the tow truck companies were masked by painting over the logos to avoid retaliation. RCMP and Ottawa police then brought in Armored Personnel Carriers (MRAP’s and APC’s) to support the operation.
Media were told to leave the enforcement zone to help hide the optics of heavily armed RCMP tactical units, and they began breaking the windows of the trucks and forcibly removing the truck drivers. For the same reason, popular social media YouTuber’s, who had been broadcasting livestreams, were arrested as the operation began.
They’re also threatening to take children from protesting parents. “Just imagine the uproar that would ensue if Trump had taken children from Black Lives Matters protesters.”
“When Fascism Comes To America, It Will Look Like Justin Trudeau’s Canada. Trudeau’s dangerous not just because he’s abusing Canadians, but because he is providing the wish list for crackdowns by Democrats in the U.S.: Every single bank, credit union, investment broker and insurance provider in the country has been deputized to figure out if they have a blockader as a client, and to immediately freeze their accounts if so.”
It’s public health 101: if you want to protect people from a +99% survivable virus, you trample them with horses in front of their kids and euthanize their pets and freeze their bank accounts
The Chicago Teachers Union provides a real-world example of what happens when a government union has too much power.
CTU has gone on strike three times in three school years. In the latest work stoppage, over 330,000 schoolchildren missed five days of school. Parents were notified of the walkout after 11 p.m. on a school night, leaving them just hours to develop a back-up plan after the union decided not to show up.
This shut-down follows the 2020-2021 school year, when Chicago Public Schools was fully remote for most of the year, rolling out hybrid options starting in February 2021. All told, Chicago students had gone 17 months without fully in-person education by the time they started the current school year Aug. 30, 2021.
And students’ academic achievement suffered for it. One example: On the SATs, there was a 6.1 percentage point decrease in the number of Chicago students at least meeting standards in math – and a drop of 6.7 percentage points for the same category for low-income students – in 2021 compared to 2019.
But CTU’s political muscle – and their willingness to flex it – could become the blueprint for schools and government at all levels if Illinois’ powerful government-sector unions get what they’re asking for at the polls in November. They want an amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would give unelected government union bosses more power than state law or the people elected to represent residents’ best interests.
Snip.
Amendment 1 is billed as a right-to-work ban in a state that already doesn’t allow right to work, but it’s much more than that. It would give unions a “fundamental” right to organize and bargain over wages, hours, working conditions, economic welfare and safety at work – i.e., virtually anything – and explicitly prohibit lawmakers from ever interfering with or diminishing those rights.
Unions would be able to demand anything during negotiations and go on strike to get their demands met. Resulting contracts would carry the weight of the state constitution. Lawmakers wouldn’t be able to restrict what unions can negotiate or limit when they can go on strike without running afoul of the state constitution.
What’s more, lawmakers would never be able to repeal a little-known Illinois provision that allows many union contracts to override conflicting state and local laws and regulations.
Known in legal parlance as a “supercedence clause,” the practical effect is that a union will be able to rewrite laws it doesn’t like just by negotiating a contrary provision in its contract. If the employer doesn’t agree? The union goes on strike. And government officials’ hands will be tied.
That includes laws in place to protect children.
A provision requiring “background information” on employees of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services – the department charged with protecting children who are reported abused or neglected – could be contradicted in the union’s contract with the state.
So could the provision prohibiting employment of “sexually dangerous” persons.
Paxton and Texas also sued Facebook over facial recognition. “Facebook unlawfully captured the biometric identifiers of Texans for a commercial purpose without their informed consent, disclosed those identifiers to others, and failed to destroy collected identifiers within a reasonable time.”
“San Francisco police linked a woman to a crime using DNA from her rape exam, D.A. Boudin says.” Though the charges were dropped, this seems like not only a clear Fourth Amendment violation, but an absolute abuse of trust. “Sure, just give your DNA to the government! There’s no way they would ever abuse that!” Can you believe that Soros-backed Boudin is the subject of a recall petition?
This isn’t just the crest of a wave: if Republicans offer a positive, credible alternative, as @GlennYoungkin did in Virginia, it’s the making of a realignment. https://t.co/5lzpE6B7IL
Let me see if I have the timeline on this story correct: 1. Leftwing racial justice activist Quintez Brown attempts to assassinate Louisville Democratic mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg, and 2. He’s almost immediately bailed out for a paltry $100,000 by #BlackLivesMatter? How often is bail set so low for attempted political assassinations?
CRT got blown away by a massive truth bomb dropped by North Carolina dad — and local GOP candidate — Brian Echevarria at his school board meeting on Monday.
“As a parent, I speak to other parents,” he told Cabarrus County School Board members, “And there’s a few things we don’t want.”
“I’m biracial, I’m multilingual, I’m multicultural. The fact is in America and North Carolina, I can do anything I want — and I teach that to my children. And the person who tells my little pecan-color kids that they’re somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin,” he justly insisted, “would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me.”
Speaking of pedophilia: “Alternatively described as Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘best mate’ and ‘pimp’, Jean-Luc Brunel, a former French modeling agent who has been imprisoned since 2020 on charges he aided Epstein’s sex-trafficking enterprise, has committed suicide in his cell.” I think we’ve seen this movie before, and we didn’t believe the ending the first time…
Speaking of Adams: “I want to discuss the new fuckface mayor of New York City that replaced the old fuckface mayor.” The mayor that wants to force employers to enforce vaccine mandates also wants them to force workers back to their NYC offices.
What’s in it for those businesses that now realize that three hundred thousand dollars a month in office space “We don’t need it anymore.” What’s in it for those employees that figured out that they can have homes that are two or three times the size for half as much money and not have to deal with a commute every day? What’s in it for them?”
With oil prices up, so are U.S. rig counts, up to a four year high.
New Bloom County animated TV show in development for Fox. I view this with more trepidation than hope. There’s about a 95% chance the screw it up, and if they don’t, there’s a good chance Fox will cancel it anyway, since that’s their MO…
P. J. O’Rourke, RIP. I reviewed Holidays in Hell for Reason back in the day…
In 2017, a pilot aborted takeoff after V1, the inflection point for when a safe abort was still possible. “Still traveling at 100 knots, but decelerating rapidly, the plane rumbled across the grass overrun area, plowed over the airport perimeter fence, struck a raised embankment, lost its landing gear, crossed a road, and ground to a halt straddling a ditch.” Post-incident analysis showed why that was the right call. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
FLOCK DROP MYSTERY: A security camera in Chihuahua, Mexico, captured the moment hundreds of yellow-headed blackbirds suddenly fell from the sky — many nosediving to their death https://t.co/45WA052YZOpic.twitter.com/FsZkEorTc7
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is invested in a comprehensive nationwide effort to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. We’re fighting for election integrity because it’s absolutely vital to protect the sanctity of your ballot from Democrat schemes to undermine voting security. We are involved in 19 election integrity lawsuits nationwide, and we’re winning the fight.
Our investment is partially driven by polling that consistently shows the American people supporting our common-sense approach to securing elections. A recent poll commissioned by the RNC found that 78 percent of Americans support a proposed voting plan with five key principles: presenting voter ID, verifying voters’ signatures, controlling the ballot’s chain of custody, bipartisan poll observation, and cleaning up voter rolls. The poll also found that 80 percent of voters support voter ID requirements; this sentiment matches up with other polling, including a recent one from NPR which found 79 percent of voters in favor of voter ID. The measures we are pushing are not controversial or dramatic. They are common-sense and they are supported by American citizens.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from trying to generate false outrage and controversy at every level of this conversation. The Democrat election playbook is simple: lie and seek attention until the mainstream media eagerly takes the baton and turns Democrat lies into a false national narrative. You saw this in Georgia, where Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams’ lies about the state’s election reforms pressured the MLB into moving its All-Star Game out of Atlanta. These lies cost the good people of Georgia an estimated $100 million. You’re seeing it now in Texas, where local Democrats have stormed out of legislative debates on election integrity not once, but twice. Their latest stunt saw them leave the floor of the Texas legislature and hop on private planes to fly to DC in a juvenile quest for media attention.
Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media lapped it up. This is their playbook. When it comes to election integrity, Americans need to pay attention to the relationship between Democrat lies and the mainstream media machine.
Back on June 24, the great Peggy Noonan hailed [Eric] Adams’s primary win as a victory of reality over progressive theory. “Adams was a cop for 22 years, left the New York City Police Department as a captain, and was the first and for a long time the only candidate to campaign on crime and the public’s right to safety. He was the first to admit we were in a crime wave.” Noonan observed, accurately, that African-American voters were not necessarily the most progressive voters in the electorate anymore, and that they represented a de facto force of, if not conservatism, then a realist wariness of the fringes of modern progressive thinking.
The notion of a centrist, tough-on-crime mayor replacing the notorious groundhog murderer and early pandemic denier sounds good, but we’ll see. Every elected official operates within a particular “Overton Window”: the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time. Adams did not win this primary by a landslide. While he received the most votes in the first round, he was the top choice of less than a third of the city’s Democrats. He has 51.1 percent out of the final two.
New York City desperately needs a dramatic improvement in its policing and prosecution of criminals, but Adams will have to take on a lot of deeply entrenched opponents and a city media and cultural environment that have evolved to reflexively demonize the NYPD. Way back in 2005, Fred Siegel described the New York City of the David Dinkins years as an era of “hysteria that led upstanding liberals to insist that they were more afraid of the NYPD than they were of criminals.” Whatever you think of Rudy Giuliani now, the young(er) mayor of the early 1990s was willing to be utterly hated as he enacted his reforms, convinced that the broader public would look past the controversy and appreciate the effects of lower crime rates. It remains to be seen whether Adams has that same courage to exchange short-term unpopularity for long-term improvement in the city’s streets — or whether he’ll bump up against the city’s Overton Window of what policy changes are acceptable and settle for a series of half measures.
The irony is that we see the same phenomenon in the opposite direction at the national level in Washington. Many progressives interpreted Biden’s presidential win, the 50–50 Senate, and the slightly shrunken House majority in the 2020 elections as a mandate to enact sweeping changes in the country — and they’re largely hitting brick walls. The national Overton Window isn’t wide enough to accommodate the wildest fantasies of progressives.
I’m not sure the feasibility of Overton Window possibilities matters to the Social Justice left. There’s is a holy revolutionary cause, and they need to seize control of the Party before they can seize control of the nation. To that end, I suspect many think that letting moderate Democrats lose elections is a small price to pay for continuing their unpopular march through America’s institutions…
The Texan brings back The War Room to track 2022 Texas election races.
“Texas House Democrats’ COVID-Spreading Publicity Stunt Is Backfiring.”
Outnumbered by Republicans in Austin 83 to 67, the Texas House Democratic Caucus decided to head to D.C. to publicize its opposition to election integrity bills, fundraise, and drum up support for federal legislation that would nationalize election law by imposing California law as a template on the nation — banning meaningful voter ID, expanding mail balloting while eliminating fraud safeguards, prohibiting proactive voter list maintenance, and mandating same-day voter registration with no checks for eligibility to vote.
But the Democrats’ trip hasn’t turned out as planned.
Soon after meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris and numerous White House staffers and members of the U.S. House and Senate, three Democrats were diagnosed with COVID-19, then another two, and now a total of six. An aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a White House official tested positive soon after meeting with the Texas Democrats.
And the attention Democrats were hoping for soon turned sour, with Texas’s major newspapers, none of whom are friends of Republicans and have had little good to say about their election integrity bills, have nevertheless weighed in against the walkout. By two-to-one, Texas voters disapprove of the quorum-busting as well. Even national Republicans have piled on, with this tweet from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s press secretary being emblematic.
Closer to home, Travis County GOP Chairman Matt Mackowiak said the quorum-breakers had “…engaged in performance theater for weeks claiming Gov. Abbott was putting lives at risk by reopening the state economy and waiving the statewide mask mandate, then they flew to DC on a private jet stocked with Miller Lite without masks, in violation of FAA rules, and now this farce turned into a super spreader event.”
But there are signs the Democratic solidarity is breaking down. With chairmanships, seniority, and even district boundaries on the line in a redistricting year, powerful Democrats are wavering while those seeking to move up sense an opportunity. A week ago, 80 House members were on the floor. As of Tuesday, 90, including several Democrats, were present. It’s a classic “prisoner’s dilemma” situation. If another 10 Democrats show up, the Texas House will have a quorum and can resume consideration of bills, leaving the other 50 holdouts with nothing for their efforts — except for perhaps being redrawn out of their districts by the Legislative Redistricting Board later this year.
When the Democrats do return, they will be asked to vote on bills that would bring mail-in balloting up to the standard for in-person voting by asking for ID in the form of writing a driver’s license number, or state ID number, or the last four of the Social Security number inside of a privacy flap in the ballot return envelope. The bill would also prohibit local elections officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, ban last-minute changes to election procedures, and clarify that properly appointed poll watchers must be able to see and hear election workers’ activities.
Asking for ID for mail-in ballots — one of the measures most vociferously opposed by Democrats — is supported by 81 percent of Texas voters, with voters from all demographic groups and both major parties approving of the safeguards.
With all due respect to Chuck DeVore, until the Texas election integrity bill is passed, their publicity stunt hasn’t backfired yet. There are few prices Democrats won’t pay for the ability to continue cheating.
Barely a year after the Minneapolis City Council voted to to defund the city’s police department after the death of George Floyd, a judge has ordered the city to hire more cops, thanks to a lawsuit filed by fed-up citizens.
“Minneapolis is in a crisis,” wrote the eight plaintiffs in their complaint, citing the rise in violent crimes, including shootings, sexual assault, murders, civil unrest, and riots, Fox News reports.
Progressive city council members couldn’t wait to gut the police department and allow a surge in crime, most of which would affect poor black neighborhoods. The tsunami of crime recently took the life of a popular coach who was shot attending a memorial for another victim of Minneapolis’ violent crime surge. He was the 42nd person murdered this year in Minneapolis. No word from Antifa and BLM if they are planning a mostly peaceful riot in his honor.
The cop-hating Minneapolis City Council and Mayor Jacob Frey were ordered to “immediately take any and all necessary action to ensure that they fund a police force,” according to Thursday’s court order by Judge Jamie L. Anderson. The crime-loving city council and mayor have until June 30, 2022, to establish a police force of 730 sworn officers. They currently have 669 cops. Minneapolis saw nearly 200 cops file paperwork to leave the Minneapolis Police Department in the first three months after the George Floyd riots. No idea how many more will resign or retire by the June 30, 2022, deadline, as the nation has seen a surge in cops walking away from departments nationwide.
NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. Moreover, much like the New York Times editorial page (but somehow worse), the public news leader’s monomaniacal focus on “race and sexuality issues” has become an industry in-joke. For at least a year especially, listening to NPR has been like being pinned in wrestling beyond the three-count. Everything is about race or gender, and you can’t make it stop.
Conservatives have always hated NPR, but in the last year I hear more and more politically progressive people, in the media, talking about the station as a kind of mass torture experiment, one that makes the most patient and sensible people want to drive off the road in anguish. A
Numerous examples snipped.
NPR sucks and is unlistenable, so people are going elsewhere. People like [Ben] Shapiro are running their strategy in reverse and making fortunes doing it. One of these professional analysts has to figure this one out eventually, right?
Evidently the primary mover behind the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping “plot” was the FBI. It’s FBI “informants” all the way down. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Want to keep track of violence in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago? Hey Jackass has the trending data plants policy wonks crave!
“In 25 major U.S. cities, officials have proposed cutting—or in 20 cases already cut—police budgets. However, what OpenTheBooks.com auditors found was that mayors and city officials still enjoy personal protection of a dedicated police detail costing taxpayers millions of dollars,” Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of Open The Books (OTB), said in a statement announcing the new data.
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.
“Serial Swatter Who Caused Death Gets Five Years in Prison.” “Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County, Tenn. admitted to conspiring with a group of criminals that’s been ‘swatting’ and harassing people for months in a bid to coerce targets into giving up their valuable Twitter and Instagram usernames.” So not only has he gotten people killed, he got them killed for really shitty reasons. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“ERCOT Expands Power Grid Reserve Capacity in Preparation for Summer Heat.” “To prepare, ERCOT has dedicated 38 percent more in generation to reserve capacity from this July compared to last. And they plan to dedicate 56 percent more reserve capacity for August compared to August 2020.” 1.) That’s good, but 2.) Isn’t mid-July a wee bit late to be rolling out such plans? Let’s hope they’ve been working on this a while…
California court says that state laws requiring people to use crazy SJW pronouns violates freedom of speech.
Speaking of Harris: “Last month, the Supreme Court smacked down then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ attempt to force charitable nonprofits to turn over the names of their top donors, calling the power-grab ‘facially unconstitutional.'”
Gun sales decline slightly from record highs in 2020. Does this mean I might finally be able to pick up an AR-15 without it costing me an arm and a leg?
“Wayne LaPierre a Bigger Risk Than Fire and Brimstone.” “Lloyd’s of London is dropping all coverage for the NRA’s Board of Directors through their officers and directors insurance plan.”
More Soros-backed DA justice: “Accused murderer set free after St. Louis County prosecutors fail to show up, but found time for McCloskeys.”
Last week, Circuit Judge Jason Sengheiser dismissed charges of first-degree murder, armed criminal action, and unlawful gun possession against Brandon Campbell, 30, when prosecutors from the Circuit Attorney’s Office did not attend hearings for the case in May, June, and July, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
“The court does not take this action without significant consideration for the implications it may have for public safety,” Sengheiser wrote in kicking the case.
“Although presumed innocent, (Campbell) has been charged with the most serious of crimes. While the court has a role to play in protecting public safety, that role must be balanced with adherence to the law and the protection of the rights of the defendant,” the judge continued.
Sengheiser then took aim at Kim Gardner’s office.
“The Circuit Attorney’s Office is ultimately the party responsible for protecting public safety by charging and then prosecuting those it believes commit crimes,” he wrote.
“In a case like this where the Circuit Attorney’s office has essentially abandoned its duty to prosecute those it charges with crimes, the court must impartially enforce the law and any resultant threat to public safety is the responsibility of the Circuit Attorney’s Office.”
Thirty-eight-year-old Brandon Andrus’s criminal history is so lengthy he has more mug shots than some people have selfies.
But that didn’t stop 185th Criminal District Court Judge Jason Luong from allowing Andrus to be a free man by giving him three felony bonds, one for assaulting a family member last year.
On June 14, police say Andrus and another man murdered 35-year-old Rodrick Miller.
“Amazon’s New World Is Reportedly Frying High-End Graphics Cards.” Nothing like having your $2,000 Nvidia card bricked over a beta game…
Netflix to Wall Street: “Did I say we were going to gain two million new subscribers? Yeah, what I actually meant was we were going to lose 500,000 subscribers. Whoopsie! My bad!” Get woke, go broke.
James May launches his own gin. I don’t drink gin, but I bet that stuff sells out instantly, since the Top Gear/Grand Tour trio have one of the largest worldwide fan bases. I did not know that gin started out with neutral spirits before juniper berries were added.
Following Saturday Night Live player Pete Davidson foolishly goofing on the eye Navy SEAL Lt. Com. Dan Crenshaw lost to an IED on his third deployment in Afghanistan, now Republican Congressman-elect Crenshaw came on SNL to get him back.
A lot of pundits were predicting this year’s elections would make one Texas candidate a star, they just got who it was wrong. (Previous posts about Crenshaw can be found here.)
And thanks to the universe for providing easy Veterans Day content for lazy bloggers…
I would confess my love of Jesus Christ Superstar as a guilty pleasure but I’m honestly not the least bit guilty about it. It’s musically the strongest of all the “rock operas” that made it to Broadway in the late 60s and early 70s. Thanks to the power of the source material, it’s a much more compelling musical than any of Webber’s later work. Though Christians may object to portions of it (Judas is portrayed more as a victim of God’s machinations than The Great Betrayer), most of it the story is recognizably faithful.
And broadcasting a live musical on network television? That’s the sort of risk-taking that deserves to be rewarded.
The torrent of Endless Media Pervbag revelations that started with Harvey Weinsetin has zoomed past water-hose, torn through fire hydrant, and is now at raging river conditions.
The latest skeaves caught? Today show host Matt Lauer and Prairie Home Companion windbag Garrison Keillor.
As the co-host of NBC’s “Today,” Matt Lauer once gave a colleague a sex toy as a present. It included an explicit note about how he wanted to use it on her, which left her mortified.
On another day, he summoned a different female employee to his office, and then dropped his pants, showing her his penis. After the employee declined to do anything, visibly shaken, he reprimanded her for not engaging in a sexual act.
You may wonder what genius at NBC approved that expense, but look on the bright side: They probably turned down his request to build a secret bondage dungeon as “too expensive.”
"Hey, boss, you need to sign this requisition." "What's it for?" "A button on Matt's desk allowing him to lock the door." "Why does he need that?" "Do you really want to know?" "Good point. Here." https://t.co/ypbJ20FfVu
By contrast, the details about PBS canning Keillor seem considerably vaguer:
Garrison Keillor, creator of A Prairie Home Companion, has been evicted from his longtime radio home at Minnesota Public Radio after reported “inappropriate behavior” by the 75-year-old host.
MPR communications director Angie Andresen confirmed his dismissal in a statement posted to the broadcaster’s website Wednesday that did not detail the nature of the allegations. The organization announced it would “end its business relationship with Keillor’s media companies effective immediately.”
The broadcaster will erase Keillor, one of public radio’s most famous voices, from its air and website, including renaming Companion, the variety show he created in 1974 and hosted until 2016, when he retired and handed over creative control to his handpicked replacement, musician Chris Thile. In addition, MPR will no longer air rebroadcasts of Keillor’s old shows, nor will it produce or distribute his remaining syndicated series, The Writer’s Almanac.
I’m not a fan of Keillor, but it almost seems like someone at MPR had a long-standing grudge against him and used a single complaint to make him an unperson.
Said Keillor: “If I had a dollar for every woman who asked to take a selfie with me and who slipped an arm around me and let it drift down below the beltline, I’d have at least a hundred dollars.”
And who can doubt that women are irresistibly drawn to his smoking hot, sensual body?
And as long as we’re talking about Keillor, here’s The Simpsons on his special brand of humor:
Some final tweets:
Area Woman Quietly Satisfied To Have Concrete Evidence Backing Up Years-Long Hatred Of Matt Lauer https://t.co/2AOkQUwJsz
Termination of US news reporter Matt Lauer is devastating blow to enthusiasts of vapid morning banter with mindless celebrities. pic.twitter.com/Ppdc0Y70sw
