LinkSwarm for June 3, 2016

June 3rd, 2016

Another week, another Texas flood. Try to stay dry and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Paglia on Clinton: “If it were a Republican in the crosshairs, Hillary’s shocking refusal to meet with the Inspector General (who interviewed all four of the other living Secretaries of State of the past two decades) would have been the lead item flagged in screaming headlines from coast to coast. Let’s face it—the genuinely innocent do not do pretzel twists like this to cover their asses.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • New York Magazine massively re-edits article on why Hillary won’t debate because the original wasn’t fawning enough.
  • Eight reasons Hillary sucks. Including Obama: “she does not seem to want to run on Ben Rhodes’s foreign policy, Jonathan Gruber’s Obamacare, Lois Lerner’s IRS, Lisa Jackson’s EPA, Eric Holder’s Justice Department, or Barack Obama’s racial healing. And yet she needs Obama’s hard-left base. So far she has rejected her 2008 Annie Oakley, Reagan-Democrat schtick, gambling that her Black Lives (alone) Matter and transgenderism pandering can ensure that she will match Obama’s historic share of the minority vote. But so far it seems just as likely that she will lose more voters among the white working class than she can lease from Obama’s core.”
  • College students are allowed to ask Hillary Clinton original, spontaneous questions that just happen to be scripted by the Clinton campaign. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • At judge’s order, 20,000 documents related to Fast and Furious scandal released. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Trump is right: Some illegal aliens are being lavished with more benefits than our own veterans.
  • How a naval contractor named “Fat Leonard” infiltrated the Navy with bribes, prostitutes and lavish parties. “The Soviets couldn’t have penetrated us better than Leonard Francis.” Our country is in the best of hands. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Oberlin students are among the most precious of snowflakes.
  • More on the same theme. Alas, this morning I just don’t have time to explicate all the manifest idiocies on display by the Social Justice Warrior Campus Cadets…
  • Obama Administration bitch-slapped for attempting ex-post facto regulation. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Columbia was once a basket case and Venezuela a thriving nation on the rise. Thanks to The Magic Power of Socialism™, they’ve switched places.
  • This bitch is so crazy I can’t even keep up with her crazy bitch shit.”
  • Enya: rich crazy cat lady.
  • Flooding-related blackout leads to Texas prison riots.
  • City Manager behind Dallas’ controversial city-owned hotel steps down.
  • If your political party openly calls for the complete destruction of the oil industry, maybe you shouldn’t have your national convention in Houston.
  • Science Fiction writer Gregory Benford on university host escort duties for G. Gordon Liddy, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and a certain “Tom.”
  • Space City Comic Con turns into an actual con. As in the fraud kind…
  • Swiss open world’s longest tunnel with ceremony featuring marching uniform worker drones, a horned goat god, and a giant flying death baby.
  • Texas vs. California Update for June 2, 2016

    June 2nd, 2016

    Time for another Texas vs. California update:

  • Once again, Texas is ranked as the best state for business by CEO Magazine, while California is ranked the worst. (Hat tip: Rider Rants via Pension Tsunami.)
  • This OC Register piece offers an good restatement of the general problem:

    California has earned quite a reputation for being openly hostile to business, as confirmed by numerous studies and surveys. Its plethora of taxes and regulations are driving away legions of entrepreneurs and workers, but they are doing wonders for one segment of the economy: the moving industry. It is almost as though that industry is secretly lobbying the state Legislature for its anti-business policies.

    Joe Vranich, as president of Spectrum Location Solutions, an Irvine business relocation consulting firm, knows all about what drives businesses’ decisions to give up and leave for greener pastures. According to his research, in just the past seven years, approximately 9,000 businesses have decided to leave California or expand their operations out of state. Companies leaving California typically save between 20 percent and 35 percent of operating costs, he concluded.

    Texas has been the biggest beneficiary of California’s business exodus.

    Snip.

    California’s litigious climate has become a common complaint of business owners. No wonder the American Tort Reform Foundation once again named California the No. 1 “Judicial Hellhole” in the nation last year, based on the state’s excessive laws and regulations and a flood of disability access, asbestos and food advertising and labeling lawsuits, frequently more opportunistic attempts at extortion than legitimate attempts to seek justice for victims who have been truly harmed.

    California has proven to be a particularly harsh climate for manufacturing businesses. “Even if California were to eliminate the state income taxes tomorrow, that still would not be enough,” CellPoint Corp. CEO Ehsan Gharatappeh told the Dallas Business Journal of the Costa Mesa company’s move to Forth Worth.

    General Magnaplate Corp., which has made reinforced parts for the aerospace, transportation, medical, oil and other industries for 36 years, decided to shut down its California facility in Ventura altogether. “This is a very sad day for our employees and for my family, who have a long history of job creation in this area, but the simple fact is that the state of California does not provide a business-friendly environment,” CEO Candida Aversenti said in a press release. “Increases in workers’ compensation costs and government regulations, combined with predatory citizens groups and law firms that make their living entirely by preying on small businesses, have left us with no other choice but to shut down our California facility. This is in stark contrast to our New Jersey and Texas facilities, which are flourishing in small business-friendly environments created by the respective local governments and environmental agencies.”

  • Tech layoffs double in the Bay area:

    Yahoo’s 279 workers let go this year contributed to the 3,135 tech jobs lost in the four-county region of Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and San Francisco counties from January through April, as did the 50 workers axed at Toshiba America in Livermore and the 71 at Autodesk in San Francisco. In the first four months of last year, just 1,515 Bay Area tech workers were laid off, according to mandatory filings under California’s WARN Act. For that period in 2014, the region’s tech layoffs numbered 1,330.

  • How did the California city of Irwindale rack up the largest per household market pension debt in the state, at $134,907 per household?
  • Low and negative interest rates means that CalPERS must make risky investments to even come close to hitting their yield targets:

    The nation’s largest public pension fund, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, has one-fifth of its assets in bonds and is down 1.3% since July 1, according to public documents. The system, known by its abbreviation Calpers, also has 53.1% of its assets in stocks, 9% in real estate and 9.4% in private equity. In 2015, Calpers posted a return of 2.4%, below its target rate of 7.5%.

    Nor is CalSTARS doing much better:

    The nation’s second-largest public pension plan, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, has shifted a significant amount of money away from some stocks and bonds to protect against a downturn. It moved assets into U.S. Treasurys and so-called liquid-alternative funds, which mimic hedge-fund strategies. Calstrs, as the pension is called, reported gains of 1.5% during a choppy 2015, with returns on its fixed-income investments up just 0.6%.

    (Note: WSJ link, so you may need to do the Google thing.)

  • News: Former CalPERS chief executive Fred Buenrostro convicted of bribery. California: Buenrostro will continue to receive his CalPERS pension while in prison. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Overview of the Texas budget.
  • UnitedHealth exits California’s Obamacare exchanges.
  • Despite that, California wants to offer ObamaCare subsidies to illegal aliens.
  • California also wants to spend more money to send illegal aliens to college.
  • And those illegal aliens with California driver’s licenses still aren’t purchasing liability insurance.
  • Hate California traffic? Tough:

    The newest outrage comes from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research in the form of a proposed “road diet.” This would essentially halt attempts to expand or improve our roads, even when improvements have been approved by voters. This strategy can only make life worse for most Californians, since nearly 85 percent of us use a car to get to work. This in a state that already has among the worst-maintained roads in the country, with two-thirds of them in poor or mediocre condition.

    Snip.

    In essence, the notion animating the “road diet” is to make congestion so terrible that people will be forced out of their cars and onto transit. It’s not planning for how to make the ways people live today more sustainable. It has, in fact, more in common with Soviet-style social engineering, which was based similarly on a particular notion of “science” and progressive values.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Toyota’s Plano headquarters takes shape.
  • The UAW is making a big push to unionize Tesla’s Fremont plant.
  • Speaking of Tesla, they’re approaching the grand opening of their giant battery factory…in Nevada.
  • McDonald’s CEO says a $15 minimum wage will make his restaurants shift to using robots. But what would McDonald’s know about minimum wage workers?
  • In the same vein, it’s no wonder that Whole Foods opened it’s first semi-automated Whole Foods 365 store in Los Angeles. “Promoted as a ‘chain for millennials,’ the new ‘365’ stores use about one-third less square footage than the company’s traditional 41,000-square-foot Whole Foods stores, but they also slash almost two-thirds of workers with robots and computerized kiosks.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Schedule for California high speed rail boondoggle pushed back four more years. Latest obstacle: wealthy equestrians. “Hey, this study says horses won’t mind a super-fast, super loud train zipping along right next to them.” “You mean the study from the institute that two bullet train authority members sit on? Get stuffed!”
  • “The State Assembly Subcommittee on Education voted Tuesday to delay funding to the UC system because of concerns with the UC Retirement Plan, proposed by UC President Janet Napolitano in March, which would cause the university to incur significant costs. The delay was announced after an actuarial report was released earlier that day by Pension Trustees Advisors, or PTA, which showed that the retirement plan would cost the university $500 million in savings, or $34 million a year, over the next 15 years.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Maywood, California (which had previously outsourced services to the corrupt city of Bell) is on the brink of bankruptcy. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Two L.A. sheriff’s deputies convicted of beating mentally ill inmate.”
  • San Francisco liberals versus the city’s police union
  • “Another aviation company has decided to move its corporate headquarters to Fort Worth to take advantage of the Lone Star state’s business friendly environment and the city’s longtime history in the aerospace industry. The move is historic for Burbank, California-based C&S Propeller — an FAA and EASA certified repair station for propeller and airplane maintenance — which has been in California for nearly five decades.”
  • This one’s a wash: XCOR lays off employees in both California and Texas.
  • Airburshing Out Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood Ties

    June 1st, 2016

    Let’s take a look at this Caroline Crampton piece in the New Statesman talking about how very, very difficult it is to be Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner’s wife and Hillary Clinton’s closest aide.

    Years before Trump, notable Republicans were trying to make unpleasant capital out of Abedin’s background. In 2012, Tea Party supporters alleged that she was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and its attempt to gain access “to top Obama officials”. In her rare interviews, Abedin has spoken of how hurtful these baseless statements were to her family – her mother still lives in Saudi Arabia.

    Note the unsupported assertion that allegations of Muslim Brotherhood ties to Huma Abedin are “baseless.”

    Funny, but that’s not what the record shows.

    Huma Abedin’s mother, Saleha, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s female division (the “Muslim Sisterhood”), is a major figure in not one but two Union for Good components. The first is the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR). It is banned in Israel for supporting Hamas under the auspices of the Union for Good. Then there’s the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) — an organization that Dr. Saleha Abedin has long headed. Dr. Abedin’s IICWC describes itself as part of the IICDR. And wouldn’t you know it, the IICWC charter was written by none other than . . . Sheikh Qaradawi, in conjunction with several self-proclaimed members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

    Does Ms. Crampton assert that Saleha Abedin is not associated with the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief or the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child, or that these organizations have no Muslim brotherhood ties?

    I asked Ms. Crampton these questions via Twitter. I’ll let you know if she replies.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    How Hillary Loses to Donald Trump

    May 31st, 2016

    For those still on the “Oh God, Hillary is going to slaughter Trump” express, now might be a good time to start making your way to the exits.

    David S. Bernstein lays out four ways Hillary can lose. Fortunately for Trump, she seems to be managing them all:

  • “Step 1: Take Hispanic enthusiasm for granted.” Trump needs only for Hispanic voting to return to 2008 levels to win in Florida.
  • “Step 2: Alienate the young.” You can’t assume all those young Bernie Sanders voters who are seeing Clinton shamelessly cheat her way to the nomination are going to magically put aside their bitterness and vote for Granny Crooked McCankles.
  • “Step 3: Let establishment Republicans find another place to go.” Not sure about this one, as I see #NeverTrump as more an online/insider issue than one that could deliver significant numbers of disgruntled Republican voters to Hillary.
  • “Step 4: Fumble on trade.” Never mind that protectionism is loser economics, Hillary’s been on every side of just about every trade agreement, and her vital union allies are more than a little tired of it.

    It’s not hard to see how quickly this could start costing her Electoral College votes in the Rust Belt, where Trump hopes to improve on past Republican performance. (And where, you may remember, Clinton had to apologize for threatening to put coal companies out of business.) In Ohio, for example, 22 percent of 2012 voters came from union households, and 60 percent of them voted for Obama. In Wisconsin, a similar share of the electorate voted 2-to-1 for Obama over Romney. In 2016, both states went for Sanders over Clinton in their primaries. In Pennsylvania, where Trump is planning a major effort, union households provided Obama more than half his net margin.

  • Read the whole thing.

    Missing from the analysis: The dead certainty that Hillary will not do as well among black voters as Obama did. But that’s an analysis for another day…

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    Lake Austin Closed

    May 30th, 2016

    “As a result of all of the heavy rains, and at the request of the LCRA Emergency Management Team and the City of Austin Homeland Security and Emergency Management, the Fire Chief has decided to close Lake Austin, Lady Bird Lake, and the Colorado River downstream of Longhorn Dam. The flooding upstream and the threat of more rain has caused concern and the LCRA has already started releasing water from various dams around the Hill Country. The water will flow downstream of Austin and is not expected to worsen the current flooding situation on the Colorado River downstream of Austin.”

    Condolences to any of those who had their Memorial Day lake outing cut short. The lake is projected to be reopened at noon on June 1.

    Scott Adams Explaining Trump on Bill Maher

    May 30th, 2016

    There are a lot of good, somber Memorial Day posts around the blogsphere today. I don’t think I have anything profound to say on that topic that hasn’t already been said far better by others, so by way of counter-programming, here’s Scott Adams on Bill Maher explaining just how Donald Trump’s persuasion techniques work, and why Hillary sucks so hard as a candidate.

    Will EmailGate Finally Bring Hillary Down?

    May 27th, 2016

    “Over a year ago, Clinton held a press conference at the United Nations intended to put the whole controversy to rest. Nearly every significant statement she made was a lie. And we’ve known it for a year.”

    Will the State Inspector General report on Hillary Clinton’s email lies finally be the fateful pebble that brings her down?

    The Office of the Inspector General at State, as in all federal departments, exists to ferret out internal fraud, waste and illegalities. However, State had no real IG boss from 2009 to 2013, with an acting director heading up the office. Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton were in any hurry to find a permanent director for State’s IG shop. Now we know why.

    The State IG report, weighing in at over 80 pages, is crammed full of bureaucratese yet paints an indelible and detailed portrait of things going very wrong at Foggy Bottom—especially under Hillary Clinton. It can charitably be termed scathing, and it leaves no doubt that Team Clinton has lied flagrantly to the public about EmailGate for more than a year.

    That the State Department’s IT systems were a mess for years was hardly a secret, and the IG report makes painfully clear that State has had a difficult time transitioning into the electronic age. Several recent secretaries of state used email in a manner that would be judged inadequate, and perhaps improper, by today’s standards, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who served under President George W. Bush.

    That said, only Hillary Clinton simply refused to use government email for government work—she repeatedly denied requests from State security and IT to use state.gov email—and she systematically dodged federal regulations on electronic communications and records preservation by setting up her private email server of bathroom infamy. Damningly, while several former secretaries of state cooperated with the IG in this important investigation, Ms. Clinton refused to.

    As secretary of state, Ms. Clinton attempted a novel experiment of trying to avoid using any information systems that create records that can be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The IG report includes painful details, including how she flatly refused to use state.gov email for anything, ever, citing privacy grounds. State IT was concerned because Ms. Clinton’s work emails—all being sent via her clintonmail.com address—were winding up in the spam folders of State officials. Important information was not getting where it needed to go. She needed to use official email for official business. Except she refused.

    What was so important, so sensitive that Hillary had to dodge FOIA altogether? Clearly protecting her private life—whatever that might be—was valued more highly by Ms. Clinton than actually heading the Department of State.

    Then we have the repeating warnings from State officials about the incredibly vulnerable nature of her ramshackle private email system from any cybersecurity perspective. These, too, were blown off by Ms. Clinton and her staff, despite several hacking efforts that staffers were aware of. Guccifer, the Romanian hacker who illegally accessed Ms. Clinton’s email during her tour at Foggy Bottom, has just pleaded guilty, and there can be little doubt that hackers more adept than he penetrated Hillary’s communications.

    Any foreign intelligence service worth its salt would have had no trouble accessing Ms. Clinton’s emails, particularly when they were unencrypted, as this column has explained in detail. Yet Hillary was more worried about the American public finding out about what she was up to via FOIA than what foreign spy services and hackers might see in her email.

    What she was seeking to hide so ardently remains one of the big unanswered questions in EmailGate. Hints may be found in the recent announcement that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, the former head of the Democratic National Committee and a longtime Clinton intimate, is under FBI investigation for financial misdeeds, specifically dirty money coming from China. In fact, Mr. McAulliffe invited one of his Beijing benefactors over to Ms. Clinton’s house in 2013. Not long after, Chinese investors donated $2 million to the Clinton Foundation.

    That an illegal pay-for-play-scheme, with donations to the Clinton Foundation being rewarded by political favors from Hillary Clinton—who when she was secretary of state had an enormous ability to grant favors to foreign bidders—existed at the heart of EmailGate has been widely suspected, and we know the FBI is investigating this case as political corruption, not just for mishandling of classified information. That certainly would be something Ms. Clinton would not have wanted the public to find out about via FOIA.

    How bad is it? Noah Rothman puts it this way:

    “In my opinion, there is a 100 percent chance that all emails sent and received by her, including all the electronic correspondence stored on her server in her Chappaqua residence, were targeted and collected by the Russian equivalent of NSA,” former CIA case officer Jason Matthews, an expert in Russian intelligence, told the AP. Clinton’s personal-issue Blackberry device also provided foreign intelligence services a window into her email account when she used the device in places like Vietnam, Brazil, and South Korea. In Vietnam, in particular, experts believe her use of a device not hardened by State Department security on telecommunications systems owned and operated by Hanoi likely offered Chinese intelligence services an open door to access Clinton’s email account.

    Last year, Beijing compromised the personal data and social security numbers of every person in America who ever worked for the government or accessed a federal facility by hacking the Office of Personnel Management. It’s unlikely that the Chinese hackers found the modest safeguards securing Clinton’s server to be anything more than a nuisance.

    Clinton’s secretive email practices betray a level of obsessive paranoia that has typified her entire career in politics. As president, Clinton would not be bound by law. She would also perceive her political enemies to be a more potent threat to her presidency than they represent, and the power and authority of the Oval Office would prove a seductive instrument for neutralizing them. Perhaps more chillingly, there is a high likelihood that foreign intelligence services have compromised Hillary Clinton. We do not know what they know, and she may no longer be at liberty to act in America’s best interests. That alone should preclude Clinton from serving as the commander of the most powerful military force on earth, one responsible for maintaining global peace, security, and navigation rights. In 2016, however, all bets are off.

    As much as I’d like to see this as the final straw, the mainstream media will keep doing everything it can to prop up Hillary’s failing campaign and do everything it cane to avoid asking questions about tiny little matters like obvious, naked felonies as long as there’s still a chance she could win in November…

    (Hat tips: , Ace of Spades HQ, Instapundit.)

    Trump Officially Clenches Nomination

    May 26th, 2016

    As Dwight says, a historical note, suitable for use in schools:

    Donald Trump has reached the number of delegates needed to clinch the GOP presidential nomination, securing his status as the presumptive Republican nominee and avoiding a contested convention, according to a delegate count released Thursday by the Associated Press.

    The AP reports that Trump was has reached 1,238 delegates, put over the 1,237 needed to win the nomination by a small number of the party’s unbound delegates who said they would support him at the convention. Trump will most likely add more delegates to his total before the convention in Cleveland, giving him a comfortable victory.

    North Dakota is the state that put Trump over the top.

    UT, A&M Bid on Running Sandia Nuke Lab

    May 26th, 2016

    Well, this is interesting: UT and A&M are part of a consortium bidding to help run Sandia nuclear weapons lab:

    A consortium that includes the Texas A&M University System and the University of Texas System announced Tuesday that it will compete for the contract to operate one of the nation’s nuclear weapons labs.

    The two university systems, along with the University of New Mexico, the Boeing Co. and the Battelle Memorial Institute, will bid to run Sandia National Laboratories, based in Albuquerque, N.M., officials said. Sandia, which is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy, has a $2.9 billion annual budget and is currently operated by a unit of Lockheed Martin Corp.

    “This collaboration is a perfect fit, leveraging the research power of stellar universities as well as the expertise of Battelle and Boeing to elevate the already remarkable development coming out of Sandia National Laboratories,” UT System Chancellor Bill McRaven said in a written statement.

    The UT System, the A&M System and the University of New Mexico would provide research expertise, workforce training and independent peer review of the work done at Sandia, officials said.

    I was previously unaware that UT had missed out on running Los Alamos in 2005…

    Texas Primary Runoff Results

    May 25th, 2016

    A few quick results from last night’s runoffs:

  • Wayne Christian defeated Gary Gates in the Republican Railroad Commissioner’s runoff, despite Gates dropping considerable money into a dishonest, scorched earth direct mailer campaign against Christian. That makes Gates 0-7 running for office.
  • Wayne Christian will face Democrat Grady Yarbrough (as well as Libertarian Mark Miller and Green Party candidate Martina Salinas) in November.
  • Mary Lou Keel defeated Ray Wheless and Scott Walker (not that Scott Walker) defeated Brent Webster in Republican Court of Criminal Appeals runoffs. Keel will face Republican-turned-Democrat incumbent Lawrence Meyers in November, while Walker will face Democrat Betsy Johnson.
  • Bryan Hughes stomped David Simpson in the Texas Senate District 1 race. Hughes was backed by both Ted Cruz and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. Hughes has no Democratic Party opposition in November.
  • In Williamson County runoffs, Laura Barker defeated Warren Oliver Waterman for County Court at Law #2 and Landy Warren defeated Donna Parker for County Commissioner Precinct 1. Warren will face Democrat Terry Cook in November, while Baker faces no Democratic Party opponent.