October 9th, 2015
This is a reminder that Dwight Brown of Whipped Cream Difficulties and I are putting on a gunny/VRWC blog shooting meetup/Tweetup at the Eagle Peak Gun Range in Leander on Saturday, October 10, at 5 PM, to be followed by a group dinner at the Oasis at 7 PM. Bring ear and eye protection as well as any weapon you’d like to shoot (no full metal jacket ammo, as per range rules). You can come to the shoot and skip dinner, or vice versa.
If you’re interested in attending, drop me a line (lawrenceperson at gmail dot com) so I know how many people to expect at the range and for dinner).
Tags: Austin, Blog Meetup, Guns
Posted in Austin, Guns | No Comments »
October 9th, 2015
If you want to attend tomorrow’s blogshoot/meetup/tweetup, try to drop me a line (lawrenceperson at gmail dot com) so I’ll know how many will attend.
Now the LinkSwarm:
ObamaCare co-ops are going bankrupt.
Thanks to The Magic Power of Socialism™ and an estimated 800% inflation rate, Venezuela is now the most expensive place to live in the world, at least going by the official exchange rate. “Depending on which exchange rate you use, Venezuela can either be one of the cheapest countries in the world, or the most expensive.”
Democrats last year: “All those gun-toting white racist redneck freaks from Jesusland will be lining up to vote for Hillary!” Pollsters this year: Not so much.
Hillary Clinton now totally opposes the very Tran-Pacific Partnership she helped negotiate.
“Let’s take Malcolm Turnbull at his word that it’s only “a very very small percentage of violent extremist individuals”. What is the actual percentage? In the aforementioned Malmo, where up to a thousand mostly young male “refugees” arrive each day, suppose the “very very small percentage” is two per cent. That’s 20 brand new “violent extremists” per day. During the Northern Irish “Troubles”, MI5 estimated that there were no more than a hundred active members of the IRA at any one time – that’s to say, people actively involved in shooting and killing. So Malmo is taking in the equivalent of the entire IRA every week.”
How spree killers get their weapons. Or, once again, the New York Times twists facts to fit the narrative.
Speaking of the Times, this is what happens when the professional editors and proof-readers edit and proofread professional writers.
Wendy Davis thinks the reason she lost is she didn’t talk about abortion enough. Sure, Wendy, that’s it. Go with that… (Hat tip: Perry vs. World).
The Nairobi mall attack revisited. If this report is to be believed, armed civilians actually contained the threat, then army and security forces showed up and promptly managed to start shooting each other.
“In zombie world, the man who relies on the government for his safety will be zombie chow in short order…In zombieland, there are three kinds of people: those who know how to use guns, those who learn how to use guns, and zombies.”
Remembering the Yom Kippur War.
Tags: abortion, Arab-Israeli Wars, Border Controls, Economics, Guns, Hillary Clinton, inflation, Israel, Jihad, Mark Steyn, Media, ObamaCare, Texas, The New York Times, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Venezuela, Welfare State, Wendy Davis, Yom Kippur War, zombies
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas, Welfare State | No Comments »
October 8th, 2015
“Having failed to secure the votes of the 40 members of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has bailed on running for Speaker of the House.”
Well, that’s a very interesting development indeed. As Majority leader and Boehner’s heir apparent, McCarthy was considered the race’s favorite. Him withdrawing means there’s a chance things won’t just be Business As Usual.
I wonder if Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling will reconsider his decision to drop out of the race now that McCarthy has withdrawn…
Tags: House of Representatives, Jeb Hensarling, John Boehner, Kevin McCarthy, Republicans
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October 7th, 2015
More than four months after nine people were killed in the biker shootout at a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, the details of who did what to who and why remain as murky as ever.
Of 170 (per the Dallas Morning News, 177 from other news sources) bikers arrested, all are now out of jail and none have been charged with murder.
As far as I can tell, ballistics reports for the shooting have never been released, and a gag order on all attorneys involved in the case remains in place, and restaurant surveillance video of the shootout has never been released to the public.
Something isn’t adding up here.
We know that at least some of the bikers involved were hit by police bullets. In a piece by Nathaniel Penn in GQ, he suggests that the vast majority of deaths from the shootout came from law enforcement.
Now, the first two or three pops—me and half my crew being ex-military, we know what small-arms fire from pistols sounds like. We also know what squad automatic weapons [typically used by the military and law enforcement] sound like. After the third pop, it was nothing but squad automatic weapons.
Snip.
Not a single law-enforcement person lifted a finger to help any of the wounded. And they made it pretty clear that they were going to be violent if we tried to take our guys to the ambulance. Three men were bleeding out before our eyes. If those men were still alive 30, 40 minutes after being shot, they could have been saved. A prospect named Trainer from out of Tarrant County chapter was shot. They zip-tied him and laid him on the ground next to a Bandido they had handcuffed. I noticed him jerk a few times, laying there. We were sitting there, 30 feet from him, and weren’t able to help him. About two hours later, somebody walked over, looked at him, and covered him with a yellow sheet.
Nor has the post-shootout response of the local criminal justice system been a model of impartiality:
Justice of the peace Walter “Pete” Peterson’s across-the-board imposition of $1 million bonds—“to send a message,” he said—was almost certainly illegal. Waco P.D. officer Manuel Chavez later admitted in court that Peterson signed all 177 of the so-called cookie-cutter probable-cause affidavits in bulk, without specifying the evidence against each individual defendant. Peterson, it turns out, is a former state trooper with no legal training.
Nevertheless, the Waco 177 still have their work cut out for them. The judge in the case, Matt Johnson, is the former law partner of district attorney Abel Reyna. Incredibly, the foreman of the first grand jury to be convened, James Head, is a Waco P.D. detective. “He was chosen totally at random, like the law says,” Reyna insisted to local reporters. If this seems brazen, consider that the commission to appoint jurors was originally going to be led by Reyna’s own father. Reyna only backed down under pressure, acquiescing to the process that led to Head’s selection. Asked why he’d permit an active police officer to lead a grand jury investigating possible police misconduct, state district judge Ralph Strother said, “I just thought, ‘Well, he’s qualified. He knows the criminal-justice system.’”
One need not take every statement of motorcycle gang members facing possible capital murder charges at face value to believe that something went badly wrong with the police response in the Waco shootout…
(Hat tip: Reason.)
Tags: Bandidos Motorcycle Gang, Cossacks Motorcycle Gang, Crime, Nathaniel Penn, Texas, Waco
Posted in Crime, Texas | 1 Comment »
October 6th, 2015
The problem with doing an update on Syria is that I’m not sure anyone knows what the hell is going on there.
The motivations of the major local players are clear: Assad wants to survive and maintain power, while his paymasters in Iran want to back him and the Shia against the Islamic State and other Sunni groups. The Islamic State wants to establish its brutal medieval caliphate over first Mesopotamia and the Levant, then the entire Ummah, then the entire world, exterminating Shia and subjugating Christians and Jews to dhimmitude along the way. The Saudis want to back Sunnis (possibly including the Islamic State). The Kurds just want to survive. Etc.
However, what Barack Obama and Vladamir Putin want is considerably less clear.
Obama, after royally screwing Iraq by pulling U.S. troops out after Bush had largely stabilized it (at great expense in money and lives), seems to want to fight a pretend air war against the Islamic State and a pretend insurgency against Assad in order to keep reporters from asking him about it, thus kicking the can down the road for the next President to deal with. (Then again, perhaps this gives Obama too much credit. Maybe, like Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to give the Falklands back, Obama screwed up Iraq just for the pure leftish joy of undoing the achievements of a conservative leader he loathed…)
What does Putin want to accomplish in Syria? Prop up a military equipment-buying client state in Syria? Support a more important client state in Iran? Give Obama a black eye? Keep Russians distracted from domestic economic woes with military adventurism abroad? Make Russia the dominate political power in the Middle East, filling the vacuum Obama left with America’s withdrawal and betrayal of regional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia? Actually destroy the Islamic State? Take the Shia side in a the wider Sunni-Shia conflict?
Here are some links on Syria:
Zero Hedge sees the beginnings of a regional war.
If Russia ends up bolstering Iran’s position in Syria (by expanding Hezbollah’s influence and capabilities) and if the Russian air force effectively takes control of Iraq thus allowing Iran to exert a greater influence over the government in Baghdad, the fragile balance of power that has existed in the region will be turned on its head and in the event this plays out, one should not expect Washington, Riyadh, Jerusalem, and London to simply go gentle into that good night.
Sure enough, some experts now predict Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey will move to counter Russia militarily if Moscow continues to rack up gains for Assad.
Andrew McCarthy comes out against U.S. intervention:
The Syrian mess has gotten messier
because Vladimir Putin, with all the unpredictability of the morning sun, has invaded Syria on behalf of Assad and Putin’s more important ally Iran — Assad’s longtime string-puller. The Russian strongman’s claimed purpose is to fight the Islamic State — a pretext no more real than was the supposed need to protect indigenous Russian populations that Putin cited in invading Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine.
Putin, with China’s indulgence, is obviously attempting to fortify a sphere of anti-American influence across the Middle East. Anti-Americanism in this Islamic-supremacist region long predates Putin, of course. What has changed is that the United States is governed by a man of the hard Left — a president who is sympathetic to the Islamist narrative about American imperialism, ambivalent at best about American power, and determined to diminish America’s regional commitments, and thus American influence.
Disclaimer: Newsweek.
The move provides a foothold in a part of the world that the Soviet Union was kicked out of four decades ago. At a moment when the United States appears to be washing its hands of the increasingly bloody and chaotic region, it gives Russia an expanding military presence in the Mediterranean on the doorstep of a NATO ally (its newly established airfield at Latakia in eastern Syria sits just 75 miles from the border with Turkey), and the gambit may yet serve as leverage with the West as Putin seeks to get out from under economic sanctions imposed as a result of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine.
Vladimir S. Patton.
“Putin’s policy is ugly — Russian airstrikes produced immediate reports of civilian casualties — but effective for its purpose. Obama’s policy is high-minded and prudent, but it has been painfully ineffective.”
And there are already reports that Russian planes have already violated Turkey’s airspace. And remember that Turkey is still a member of NATO…
“The pathetic failure of the Pentagon’s efforts in Syria indicate that if anything, this culture of self-congratulation and failure [in Obama’s Department of Defense] is getting more entrenched.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The problem for America is that a logical Middle East policy is impossible as long as Obama is President and Kerry is Secretary of State.
Can Putin achieve long-term victory in Syria where Obama’s fecklessness couldn’t? Maybe. Can Iran and Russia together crush the Islamic State? If Russia wanted to commit serious ground combat forces (think Operation Iraqi Freedom), probably, but that would be an exceptionally expensive move that would spread Russian forces dangerously thin elsewhere. But considering that does not appear to be Russia’s immediate goal, which seems to be crushing the Free Syrian Army and allied forces in Western Syria, expect the war against the Islamic State to drag out indefinitely.
Except for the Kurds (which Obama’s feckless policies have refused to adequately support), the Syrian Civil War is bad guys vs. bad guys all the way down. Assad surviving, or a long-running war between Russia and the Islamic State, are far from the worst possible outcomes…
Tags: Andrew McCarthy, Bashar Assad, Foreign Policy, Free Syrian Army, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Kurds, Military, Obama, Russia, Syria, Vladimir Putin, Walter Russell Mead
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 2 Comments »
October 5th, 2015
This didn’t seem to get much national play, but the murderers of border patrol agent Brian Terry were convicted:
Two men were convicted of murder charges Thursday in the killing of a Border Patrol agent whose death brought to light the bungled federal gun-tracking operation known as Fast and Furious.
The jury found Jesus Leonel Sanchez-Meza, also known as Lionel Portillo-Meza, and Ivan Soto-Barraza, guilty of all counts. They face a sentence of life in prison.
The 2010 killing of agent Brian Terry exposed the Fast and Furious operation in which agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed criminals to buy guns with the intention of tracking the weapons. But the agency lost most of the guns, including two that were found at scene of Terry’s death.
It is my understanding that both Sanchez-Meza and Soto-Barraza are illegal aliens. It is also my understanding that no one in the BATF has been fired over Fast and Furious…
Tags: Border Controls, Brian Terry, Crime, Fast and Furious, Guns, Obama Scandals
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Guns | No Comments »
October 2nd, 2015
How about a short LinkSwarm to get the Friday LinkSwarm back on Friday?
Bernie Sanders roughly matches Hillary’s fundraising total. Man, she’s going to need to start raking in a lot more foreign bribes…
This just in: Jeb Bush’s poll numbers suck.
“So we know that 99% of the data has been adjusted, and we know that over 80% of the reported warming in the lower 48 States over the entire 20th Century was due to adjustments – the raw data simply do not show this warming.”
Mark Steyn offers another dispatch from post-Jewish Europe. Bonus: Facebook is going to “do more” to suppress anti-“refugee” posts.
Islamic State fighters start defecting because ISIS can’t make payroll. Time to consider marrying Len Trexler…
Obama Administration grants asylum to 1,519 foreigners with terrorist ties.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he’s no longer bound by Oslo Accords. Because why should you let a little piece of paper get in the way of the all-important task of exterminating the Jews?
Dear Brookings Institute scholars: Please note that you’re not allowed to have opinions different from those of Elizabeth Warren. (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
The Oregon shooter was a mixed race skinhead who targeted Christians. By the time the media gets done, he’ll be an “angry white man.”
Five benefits from owning guns. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll on Instapundit.
Eight members of Iran’s women’s soccer team are actually men.
Tags: 2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, Bernie Sanders, Brookings Institute, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Facebook, Foreign Policy, Germany, Guns, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Illegal Aliens, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Israel, Jeb Bush, Jihad, Mahmoud Abbas, Media Watch, Military, Oslo Accords, Palestinians
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military | No Comments »
October 1st, 2015
Ah, that October chill…is not evident yet here in Austin. It’s supposed to hit 94° today.
Time for another Texas vs. California roundup:
The joys of working in Los Angeles: a $30,000 tax bill on $500 worth of freelance income.
California nears passage of another trial lawyer full employment act.
Texas had five of the ten fastest growing metropolitan areas in 2014. Austin isn’t on this list, but Midland and San Angelo are numbers one and two. (San Jose, California’s lone entry, checks in at eight.)
72% of Californians polled thinks the state has a pension crisis. Too bad this thinking doesn’t seem to influence their voting patterns yet… (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
And yet a new bill would exempt some new hires from paying their fair share of pension costs. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
New pension accounting rules are about to show that a lot more California municipalities are insolvent.
“Instead of building freeways, expanding ports, restoring bridges and aqueducts, and constructing dams, desalination plants, and power stations, California’s taxpayers are pouring tens of billions each year into public sector pension funds.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Stockton’s bankruptcy didn’t solve it’s pension crisis.
Texas had a net gain of 103,465 people in 2014, the largest number of which came from California.
San Francisco wants to keep housing affordable…by restricting supply. Looks like somebody failed Economics 101…
Pension reform initiative to be refiled?
Unions are trying to undo San Diego’s voter-approved pension reforms. Because of course they are.
“Texas is like Australia with the handbrake off. There is no individual income tax and no corporate income tax, which explains the state’s rapid economic and population growth. A recent downturn has sparked some concern, however. Apparently Texas will only create another 150,000 jobs during 2015 – about the same number as Australia, from a population only a few million larger. In a good year, that number of jobs is easily generated by a single Texan city.” Also: IowaHawk’s illegal human organ trafficking!
Texas ranks 13th in budget transparency. California? Dead last.
Even some California Democrats balked at increasing the state’s already high gas prices.
As part of the bankruptcy of northwest supermarket chain Haggen (which bought a bunch of Albertson’s stores just six months ago), they’ll be closing all their California stores. And if you guessed that Haggen is unionized, you would be correct.
Jerry Brown revives the state’s redevelopment agency…and its potential for eminent domain abuse.
Reminder: Texas is enormous.
A scourge spreads out upon California. Crack gangs? Illegal aliens? Try “short term rentals.”
Historical note: 105 years ago today, three union guys bombed the Los Angeles Times, killing 21 people.
Tags: Albertson's, Australia, California, Crime, Democrats, Haggen, Jerry Brown, Los Angeles, Midland, pension crisis, San Angelo, San Jose, Stockton, Texas, unions, Welfare State
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Uncategorized, unions, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »
September 30th, 2015
Former Lt. Governor David Dewhurst has settled his lawsuit against Houston oilman Michael Looney, who evidently received money embezzled by Dewhurst campaign adviser Kenneth “Buddy” Barfield:
Former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the once powerful Republican who was bilked by an adviser for at least $2.8 million, has settled a lawsuit against a Houston oilman who used a chunk of the stolen money to invest in a new business.
The out-of-court settlement ends years of litigation by the three-term ex-lieutenant governor aimed at recouping funds embezzled from two campaign accounts by former adviser Kenneth “Buddy” Barfield, a Dewhurst spokesman said.
Once a trusted consultant to one of Texas’ wealthiest politicians, Barfield was sentenced in February to more than seven years in federal prison for orchestrating a complex money funneling scheme in which he falsified records, bank statements, invoices and campaign finance reports.
Dewhurst filed a civil lawsuit against Barfield in 2013 to get some of the money back. That lawsuit was settled when Barfield signed over his multi-million dollar West Austin home as part of the agreement.
However, Dewhurst’s lawyers also set their sights on Houston businessman Michael Looney, who partnered with Barfield and, according to court documents, received “several hundred thousand dollars” of stolen Dewhurst money.
The funds, according to the lawsuit, were used to start a new oil and gas business co-owned by Looney and Barfield that would make use of valuable seismic data under license from ExxonMobil.
Dewhurst’s lawsuit was asking for an award of one-half interest in the seismic data and the new company. The exact value of the data was not released, but Looney’s lawyers said in a filing that Barfield “stood to make millions and millions of dollars” if the deal went through.
The terms of the lawsuit settlement were not disclosed.
Previously.
Tags: 2012 Election, Crime, David Dewhurst, Kenneth Barfield, Lawsuit, Michael Looney, Texas, Texas Senate Race
Posted in Crime, Texas | No Comments »
September 30th, 2015
So NBC/WSJ/Telemundo Polls Latinos did a POLL on Presidential candidates, and just happened to leave off Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Funny how that could happen.
It’s less a case of the mask slipping than of NBC not even trying to hide the fact it’s an extension of the Democratic Party…
Tags: 2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, Elections, Hispanics, Marco Rubio, Media Watch, NBC, polls, Republicans, Ted Cruz, Telemundo
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Republicans | No Comments »