I Heard The Grifters Singing, Each To Each…

May 10th, 2022

Former Florida congressman and failed Texas gubernatorial candidate Allen West has announced that he wants to take the place of Wayne LaPierre as Executive Vice President of the NRA.

Allen West, the former Republican Party of Texas chairman who recently ran in the Republican primary election against Gov. Greg Abbott, announced Monday that he would accept a nomination to be the executive vice president (EVP) of the National Rifle Association (NRA) at an upcoming meeting in Houston.

“As now known, several individuals came to me via email last week requesting I consider allowing them to nominate me for EVP of the NRA,” West told The Texan. “I have humbly consented because the progressive socialist left seeks to eradicate our Second Amendment right.”

Yeah, I’m sure that was an out-of-the-blue request that West himself had nothing to do with ginning up. Let’s face it: Humble is not his brand.

Last week, a current and several former NRA board members announced a draft campaign to nominate West to lead the Second Amendment advocacy organization in light of the legal challenges currently plaguing the group and its current EVP, Wayne LaPierre.

West served on the NRA board from 2016 to 2021.

The NRA was chartered in New York and is currently headquartered in Virginia, but the organization has expressed interest in reincorporating and moving its headquarters to Texas.

But those possibilities have stymied as the group has been embroiled in a legal challenge from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has been pushing for the organization’s dissolution.

“After watching the NRA’s Bankruptcy hearings, reviewing the evidence presented and New York law, I have concluded that the likelihood of [James] winning her lawsuit against Wayne LaPierre and the other defendants is very high,” said Phillip Journey, the current NRA board member who is leading the campaign to give the helm to West.

West’s name has been floated as a replacement for LaPierre before. Obviously Journey won’t stop believing…

“If she wins, they will be prohibited from serving in any NY non-profit. Wayne will be removed from office by court order,” said Journey. “As an NRA member and a member of its Board of Directors, I have a duty to plan for that contingency.”

“I know Col. Allen West will make a great Executive Vice President of the NRA. Col. West is a nationally recognized advocate for the Second Amendment. He has extensive political experience and a record of speaking out on the NRA Board of Directors for the reform and the restoration of the National Rifle Association.”

The NRA board will hold an election for its leadership positions later this month during a meeting in Houston.

LaPierre’s tenure started out as leading one of the most influential organizations in the country and ended as a corrupt disaster. Wayne has to go (and the NRA won’t get a single dime from me until he’s gone), but West is the wrong man to replace him. West came to Texas to run the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2016. It closed its doors in 2017.

West is being sued by Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), which claims that his brief tenure as CEO was marked by bad decisions and mismanagement that alienated donors and financially crippled the once-thriving organization. Codefendants have recently sought to settle their related claims.

Under Mr. West’s leadership, the NCPA hired a chief financial officer who was already on probation for embezzlement and who then dismantled the organization’s fiscal controls. The CFO (who is now in prison) embezzled more than $600,000 from the NCPA.

The lawsuit charges that Mr. West and other board members misspent more than $1 million in restricted grant money on operations – including salaries, expenses and bonuses – and hid that information from the rest of the board and donors.

West’s brief tenure as head of the Texas Republican Party was similarly fractious, even if I might have agreed with him on many of the issues under contention. Neither organization he led seemed better for his leadership.

LaPierre needs to go, but West would not be an improvement. To my mind, it would be far better to draft former NRA-ILA head Chris Cox, who resigned from the board under pressure from LaPierre, as the next Executive Vice President, assuming he’d be willing to take the position.

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Posted in Guns, Texas | 6 Comments »

Russia’s Decline And Existential Crisis

May 9th, 2022

The Russian May Day parade has come and gone without Putin announcing either and end to the invasion of Ukraine, or a mass mobilization. So expect more of the same for the immediate future.

Lots of people have speculated on why Russia invaded Ukraine when it did. One reason floated is that they had to act now before the demographic crash makes such action impossible.

“One hundred and forty-six million [people] for such a vast territory is insufficient,” said Vladimir Putin at the end of last year. Russians haven’t been having enough children to replace themselves since the early Sixties. Birth rates are also stagnant in the West, but in Russia the problem is compounded by excess deaths: Russians die almost a decade earlier than Brits. Their President is clearly worried that he’s running out of subjects.

It’s a humiliating state of affairs because Russian power has always been built on the foundation of demography. Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that Russia would become a world power, because “Russia is of all the nations of the Old World the one whose population is increasing most rapidly”. The only other country with its population potential was the United States. De Tocqueville prophesised that, “Each one of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold in its hands one day the destinies of half the world.” A century later, they were the world’s two uncontested superpowers.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia’s population was 136 million, and was still booming, just as those of other European powers started to slow. Germany’s population was 56 million, excluding its colonies, and the threat of ever-larger cohorts of Russian recruits into the Tsar’s ranks haunted Germany’s leadership; historian and public intellectual Friedrich Meinecke fretted over the “almost inexhaustible fertility” of the Slavs while Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg complained that “Russia grows and grows and lies on us like an ever-heavier nightmare”. This pressure was probably the decisive factor in Germany’s 1914 leap in the dark. German Secretary of State Gottlieb von Jagow wrote to the German ambassador in London as the storm was gathering that “in a few years, Russia will be ready … Then she will crush us on land by weight of numbers.”

n the First World War, it turned out, numbers were not enough to compensate for Russian industrial and organisational inferiority. But by the Second World War, Russia’s numeric superiority had exploded. Despite the horrors of Civil War and Bolshevism, the nation’s population grew at about three times the speed of Germany’s in the opening decades of the century. The army had an endless supply of soldiers, the military infrastructure an endless supply of workers, giving the country a decisive edge in the Forties. Vast spaces and appalling weather helped, but ultimately it was the endlessness of Russian manpower which ground down the Wehrmacht in what was perhaps the most epic military struggle of all time. Field Marshall Erich von Manstein complained as he faced Russia’s armies: “We confronted a hydra: for every head cut off, two new ones appeared to grow.”

But if demographic prowess buttressed Russian power then, population decline has undermined it in the years since. Most nations have developed out of the high birth and death rates seen throughout most of human history: as mortality and then fertility falls, first the population expands, then it flattens; eventually, it may contract. But in Russia this process has taken place with a vengeance.

At the time of its dissolution, the Soviet Union was the home of 290 million people, 50 million more than the USA. Today, the Russian Federation has less than half that number — and less than half of the USA’s current total. In large part, this is the result of the loss of non-Russian republics, including Ukraine (which at the outbreak of the current conflict had a population of 43 million). But in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, the country also collapsed into an orgy of suicide and alcoholism, particularly affecting the country’s men.

One journalist in Russia at the time wrote about how “the deaths kept piling up. People … were falling or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartment with jammed front door locks … drowning as a result of driving drunk into a lake … poisoning themselves with too much alcohol … dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes”. By the early years of this century, life expectancy for Russian men was on par with countries such as Madagascar and Sudan.

It’s hard to fight for the future when you’re unwilling to show up for it.

Peter Zeihan (yeah, that guy again) argues that, despite their numerous setbacks, the Russians aren’t going to give up.

A few takeaways:

  • Russia has always suffered from inferior technology, which is why they were humiliated in the Crimean War.
  • “But they will never stop until they have to, or they are forced to.”
  • “The Russians see this as an existential crisis. They will fight until they can’t.”
  • “This is going to last months, probably years.”
  • Russia’s current goal: “The complete obliteration of all civilian infrastructure” in Ukraine.
  • Russians consider anyone that doesn’t flee a fighter to be shot on sight.
  • They’ve killed at least 50,000, probably closer to 100,000.
  • Zeihan asserts that Russians are trying to plug traditional invasion corridors into Russia. “There are two of those corridors on the other side of Ukraine, one that goes SW into Romania, and one that goes NW into Poland.”

  • Since we know that the Russians intention is not to stop in Ukraine and is to go into multiple NATO countries, we know that that fight between American and Russian forces is destined to happen, and we now know how it will end: The Russians will be obliterated and they’ll be faced with a simple choice: A strategic retreat across the entire line of contact all the way back to Russia, maybe even further, or escalate to involve nukes, since the Russians see this as an existential crisis, that’s a fight we have to prevent. And so the United States specifically, and NATO in general is sending any weapon system that we possibly can that can be carried or put in a truck.

  • “If we can’t kill Russia in Ukraine, nukes come into play.”
  • “If you’re Poland and you’re Romania, you know ultimately the Russians are coming for you that changes your math and that changes the risks you’re willing to take, and if you border Poland or Romania, same general thing.”
  • “If we can get Predators and Reapers into the Ukrainians hands, they can blow up the Kirch Strait bridge, and then all of a sudden the Crimea is completely cut off. And from a war point of view, that would be fantastic because most of the gains the Russians have made have been out of Crimea.”
  • Russia has to win in Ukraine because “This is their last chance.”

    • I have significant doubts that Zeihan’s “plugging historical invasion gaps” is the driver for this conflict, mainly because such terrain gaps came be overcome in a more modern, dynamic geospatial war envelope by use of air, land, heliborn and remote-piloted combatants. Tactically still very significant, strategically less so. I think Russian chauvinism despises the very idea of a free and independent Ukraine, and lot of Putin decisions seem to be driven by ego. Pro-natalist policies like tax and welfare incentives seem a much better way to deal with their looming population crash than a risky invasion. But Putin makes all sorts of stupid calculations. And seeing his army’s performance in Ukraine would cause a sane man to back away from open conflict with NATO.

    But Zeihan’s theory that the U.S. and NATO see this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to defang Russia short of a direct conflict with NATO countries strikes me as correct.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 18 Comments »

    Anti-CRT Candidates Stomp Leftists in Texas School Board Elections

    May 8th, 2022

    This is a developing story, and I’m running ahead of the publishing schedule of the main sources I would usually rely on (such as The Texan, which doesn’t usually publish on weekends), but it appears that leftwing pro-CRT/pro-groomer school board incumbents who were on the ballot in several ISDs got wiped out by conservative-backed parents running against them:

    Given we don’t have reliable sources to go to, let’s read between the lines for this piece in the lefty-funded Texas Tribune.

    All but one of the 11 Tarrant County conservative school board candidates, who were backed this year by several high-profile donors and big-money PACs, defeated their opponents during Saturday’s statewide election, according to unofficial election results. The one candidate backed by the groups who didn’t win outright advances to a runoff election in June.

    The 10 candidates won the school board races for the Grapevine-Colleyville, Keller, Mansfield and Carroll school districts.

    The candidates’ sweep shows a large swath of voters across the county responded to their calls to eradicate so-called critical race theory…

    “So-called.”

    …from classrooms and remove books discussing LGBTQ issues, which concerned parents have described as “pornographic.”

    You mean like the books featuring ten year old having oral sex?

    Education experts, school administrators and teachers

    Just insert “leftwing” before each of those, and “union” before the last.

    all say that critical race theory, a university-level concept that examines the institutional legacies of racism, is not taught in classrooms.

    Yeah, we’re not playing this game any more. They’re lying. Piss off.

    The victories also show that the staggering amounts of money that were poured into the once low-profile and nonpartisan…

    By “low-profile and nonpartisan” he means “the radical lefties we approve of could sneak in by stealth when normal people weren’t paying attention.” Well guess what? We’re paying attention now.

    …local races are producing their intended effect. PACs organized by parents, as well as a newly-formed PAC from a self-proclaimed Christian cell phone company, collectively raised over half a million dollars for the local races this year. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on top political consulting firms that bolstered an anti-CRT platform with flyers saying the candidates were “saving America.”

    This year’s school board races across Texas, and notably in Tarrant County, have been hyper politicized as school board meetings have become the center of culture war debates over COVID safety policies, library book bans and critical race theory. The races drew intense scrutiny from conservative parents and deep-pocketed donors. Even State GOP chair Matt Rinaldi weighed in.

    Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cell phone company that donates a portion of its customers’ phone bills to conservative, “Christian” causes…

    Don’t you love the scare quotes around “Christian?” “Remember, comrade, your beliefs are just heathen, backwoods superstition without the official imprimatur of liberal media elite opinion!”

    …gave $500,000 to its own PAC, Patriot Mobile Action. The PAC spent about $390,000 on campaigns in the four Tarrant County districts, campaign reports filed in April show. The same filings showed the PAC had about $125,000 cash on hand as the May 7 election approached.

    Patriot Mobile Action spent at least $38,500 in advertising and canvassing for each candidate from Mansfield, Grapevine-Colleyville and Keller school districts. All of those candidates were victorious Saturday night.

    In Mansfield, the PAC backed the now-victorious candidates Bianca Benavides Anderson, Keziah Valdes Farrar and Courtney Lackey Wilson. In Grapevine-Collevyille, Tammy Nakamura and Kathy Florence-Spradley, whom the PAC supported, won their respective races. In the Keller races, Patriot Mobile Action backed Micah Young, Joni Shaw Smith and Sandi Walker. Each won Saturday night.

    In Carroll ISD, which covers the city of Southlake, Patriot Mobile Action supported candidates Andrew Yeager and Alex Sexton, who also secured seats on the board.

    The only candidates supported by the PAC that didn’t win was Craig Tipping. He heads to a June 18 runoff with Benita C. Reed.

    For decades, hard left social justice democrats managed to continue their stealth march through American institutions, but they’ve now gotten so far out over their skis that they’ve managed to wake the normies. (Just think: If teacher’s unions hadn’t insisted on year-long Flu Manchu vacations, pro-groomer/pro-CRT factions would still be working below threshold of public attention.) Normally apolitical parents are increasingly infuriated with pro-pedophile groomers and radical social justice warriors propagandizing their children, and they’re not going to take it any more.

    Newly elected board members need to follow-through. Every administrator and teacher pushing CRT needs to be laid off or fired. Have a gay pride or BLM flag in their classroom? Gone. You can teach students what they need to know to succeed, or you can teach them radical leftwing garbage theories that cripple them for life. You can’t do both.

    Clean sweep.

    Hard reboot.

    No quarter.

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 21 Comments »

    Update: 6.8 x 51mm Yes, TVCM No

    May 7th, 2022

    In a previous post, I made the assumption that the army’s decision to go with 6.8 x 51mm for its Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW) program meant they had selected the True Velocity 6.8 x 51mm TVCM round.

    That appears not to be the case:

    About 3:40 in, he says the army choose not to go with the bullpup and it’s polymer ammo, so presumably TVCM is out of the picture for now. Instead the new round will use bimetallic steel-brass hybrid ammunition manufactured Remington. On the other hand, he says the “Lake City Ammo Plant” is in Utah, when it’s actually in Independence, Missouri, so some grains of salt are in order.

    If you have any additional information, leave it in the comments below.

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    Posted in Guns, Military, video | 4 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for May 6, 2022

    May 6th, 2022

    Inflation is soaring, Democrats are lying, and more MSM pedophiles are exposed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Slow Joe Biden is hoping voters will ignore all that inflation on his watch. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

    Apparently, the Biden administration’s approach is to just insist that the economy is doing great and hope people believe it, despite their mounting frustration every time they buy groceries, out to eat, or fill up their tank. On the day President Biden took office, retail prices for gasoline averaged $2.38 per gallon. This morning, they are $4.19 — not all that different from the $4.20 they were a month ago….

    By and large, Democrats just don’t want to discuss or acknowledge inflation — at least not in their campaign ads:

    And as of Friday, [Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim] Ryan was one of seven Democratic candidates who have run ads this year that mentioned inflation, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. By contrast, dozens of Republican candidates and allied groups have done the same. In polls, Americans have cited inflation as a top issue.

    “Burying your head in the sand,” Mr. Ryan said, “is not the way to approach it.” Asked about the biggest challenges facing his party, he replied, “A response to the inflation piece is a big hurdle.”

    To Democrats, inflation is like Bruno: We just don’t talk about it.

    Snip.

    With poll after poll showing that inflation is foremost in voters’ minds, you would think that the president would be holding regular events focused on the problem and showcasing what his administration is doing to solve it.

    Not seeing much of that, are you?

  • Inflation is hurting Biden and Democrats so badly that even CNN has noticed. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of inflation, truckers are not buying that “Putin Price Hike” blather as diesel hits an all-time high.

    “I get video almost every day now from people who we featured on ‘Dirty Jobs” and ‘How America Works.’

    “They’re just sending me videos of them at the gas pump and some of them are filling up 18-wheelers. And, I’m not kidding you, $1,100, $1,200.

    “Most people, all we can think about is the price for us at a relative terms know it’s awful.

    “When you put $1,200 in your gas tank and just six months ago it was costing you $600 or 700, the exponential reality of it is starting to sink in. You just can’t walk that back. It touches every single thing that matters in this country. From food production to transportation … all of it,” Rowe explained.

  • Hmmmm:

  • How a George Soros group is writing Biden Administration policy.

    A secretive group backed by millions of dollars from liberal billionaire George Soros is working behind the scenes with President Biden’s administration to shape policy, documents reviewed by Fox News show.

    Governing for Impact (GFI), the veiled group, boasts in internal memos of implementing more than 20 of its regulatory agenda items as it works to reverse Trump-era deregulations by zeroing in on education, environmental, health care, housing and labor issues.

    “Open Society is proud to support Governing for Impact’s efforts to protect American workers, consumers, patients, students and the environment through policy reform,” Tom Perriello, executive director of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, told Fox News Digital.

    Snip.

    GFI, however, works to remain secretive. It is invisible to internet search engines like Google (an unrelated “Govern for Impact” is the only group that appears in a search). No news reports or press releases appear on its existence outside of a mention of its related action fund in a previous Fox News article on the $1.6 billion Arabella Advisors-managed dark money network, to which it is attached.

    But as the group attempted to conceal its operations, it sought talent on Harvard Law School’s website, which was discoverable. The posting, which no longer appears on the site, was for legal policy internships.

    Snip.

    According to its website, Rachael Klarman, a Harvard Law School grad, steers the group. Her father, Michael Klarman, is a professor at Harvard Law and also has ties to progressive advocacy groups. He is an advisory board member of the left-wing dark money judicial group Take Back the Court. Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, invited him to testify before Congress on dark money’s “assault” on the judiciary system.

    “Governing for Impact is the perfect example of the Left’s fake outrage over ‘dark money’ in politics,” said the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer, who discovered the group and alerted Fox News.

    “As a ‘fiscally sponsored’ dark money project that writes and pushes regulations from the shadows, hidden from the public and funded by one billionaire foundation, GFI embodies everything the Left pretends to abhor.”

  • The Ministry of Truth is worse than you think.

    The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden’s activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were “Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president.

    The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post’s incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent.

    After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting that the Biden emails had all of the “hallmarks” of Kremlin treachery, who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment?

    Snip.

    This same strategic motive — to vest accusations of “disinformation” with the veneer of expertise — is what has fostered a new, very well-financed industry heralding itself as composed of “anti-disinformation” scholars. Knowing that Americans are inculcated from childhood to believe that censorship is nefarious — that it is the hallmark of tyranny — those who wish to censor need to find some ennobling rationale to justify it and disguise what it is.

    They have thus created a litany of neutral-sounding groups with benign names — The Atlantic Council, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, various “fact-checking” outfits controlled by corporate media outlets — that claim to employ “anti-disinformation experts” to identify and combat fake news. Just as media corporations re-branded their partisan pundits as “fact-checkers” — to masquerade their opinions as elevated, apolitical authoritative, decrees of expertise — the term “disinformation expert” is designed to disguise ideological views on behalf of state and corporate power centers as Official Truth.

    Yet when one subjects these groups to even minimal investigative scrutiny, one finds that they are anything but apolitical and neutral. They are often funded by the same small handful of liberal billionaires (such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar), actual security state agencies of the U.S., the UK or the EU, and/or Big Tech monopolies such as Google and Facebook.

    Indeed, the concept of “anti-disinformation expert” is itself completely fraudulent. This is not a real expertise but rather a concocted title bestowed on propagandists to make them appear more scholarly and apolitical than they are. But the function of this well-funded industry is the same as the one served by the pre-election letter from “dozens of former intelligence officials”: to discredit dissent and justify its censorship by infusing its condemnation with the pretense of institutional authority. The targeted views are not merely wrong; they have been adjudged by official, credentialed experts to constitute “disinformation.”

    This scam is the critical context for understanding why the Biden Administration casually announced last week the creation of what it is calling a “Disinformation Board” inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation.

  • Corporations are finally starting to wake up to how how wokeness is destroying their bottom line.

    Business leaders are waking up to the destructive “woke” policies being foisted on businesses by boardrooms more concerned with virtue signaling than their primary responsibility of ensuring corporate profitability and enhancing shareholder values.

    In short, the “woke” buck stops here, more corporate executives are saying. Mixing the politics of culture wars with business is a losing strategy.

    Former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi is leading the charge. He ran McDonalds from 1991-1997, bringing the chain’s McNugget to market and also served on the boards of Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que, Great Wolf Resorts and Snap-on Inc. These days, he’s launching The Boardroom Initiative, comprised of three conservative advocacy groups — The Job Creators Network, which was founded by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, The Free Enterprise Group and Second Vote. The goal: get business back to business and out of politics.

    “Corporations have no business being on the right or the left because they represent everybody there and their sole job is to build equity for their investors,” Rensi told FOX Business.

    Rensi knows how to grow a business. While leading McDonalds, he saw U.S. sales double to more than $16 billion, the number of U.S. restaurants grow from nearly 6,600 to more than 12,000 and the number of U.S. franchisees grow from 1,600 to more than 2,700.

    “It is not the province of board members or executives to take shareholder money profit and spend it on social matters,” Rensi explained. “Corporations should not get involved in social engineering.”

  • Confirmation of things you already knew: “Emails Surface More Evidence Hillary Clinton Paid For Anti-Trump Disinformation Operation.”
  • Trump goes 55-0. Everyone he endorsed won their primary or made the runoff. All those are from Indiana, Ohio, and Texas. I didn’t realize that so few states have had their primaries already. Hopefully that record will be shattered and Dr. Oz (a bad pick by Trump) will lose when Pennsylvania votes May 17th.
  • Trying to make your children into the Youth Stasi: “DC elementary school gives 4-year-olds books to report racist family members.”
  • The only surprise here is that he didn’t work for CNN. “MSNBC Anchor Busted ‘Driving 3 Hours’ To Meet Little Boy For Sex.” “A New York group specializing in exposing child-sex predators seemed to all but confirm this after they posted a video online Friday busting a potential pedophile who appeared to be NBC anchor Zach Wheeler. Wheeler had driven an approximate total of 3 hours in order to meet up with a 15-year-old boy for sex, the group claims.”
  • How some of the lunatics connected to GamerGate (namely Brianna Wu) are still grifting the left.
  • “Schools Sent Employees to Critical Race Theory Conference With Tax Dollars. Four major school districts spent more than $26,000 on the SXSW EDU conference.” That’s Austin ISD, Fort Worth ISD, San Antonio ISD, and Round Rock ISD.
  • Speaking of school districts wasting money and lying to you:

  • Tomorrow voters in Leander get an opportunity to pull out of Capital Metro.

  • Actor Frank Langella fired from Netflix miniseries production of The Fall of the House of Usher for…touching an actress’ leg during a love scene. Bonus: An “intimacy coordinator.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Heh:

  • “Moloch Warns Of Looming Child Sacrifice Supply Chain Issues.”
  • Fun

  • Heroic dog rescue:

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Media Watch, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas | 2 Comments »

    Reminder: Texas Constitutional Amendment Election Saturday

    May 5th, 2022

    Another Texas Constitutional Amendment election is sneaking up on us this Saturday, with two amendments on the ballot, both having to do with tax limitations.

    Here’s the first amendment:

    State of Texas Proposition 1
    S.J.R. No. 2
    Senate Joint Resolution
    Proposing a constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school purposes on the residence homestead of a person who is elderly or disabled to reflect any statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the maximum compressed rate of the maintenance and operations taxes imposed for those purposes on the homestead.

    Be it resolved by the Legislature of the State of Texas:

    SECTION 1. Section 1-b, Article VIII, Texas Constitution, is amended by adding Subsection (d-2) to read as follows:

    (d-2) Notwithstanding Subsections (d) and (d-1) of this section, the legislature by general law may provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation provided by Subsection (d) of this section and applicable to a residence homestead for a tax year to reflect any statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the maximum compressed rate, as defined by general law, or a successor rate of the maintenance and operations taxes imposed for general elementary and secondary public school purposes on the homestead. A general law enacted under this subsection may take into account the difference between the tier one maintenance and operations rate for the 2018 tax year and the maximum compressed rate for the 2019 tax year applicable to a residence homestead and any reductions in subsequent tax years before the tax year in which the general law takes effect in the maximum compressed rate applicable to a residence homestead.

    SECTION 2. This proposed constitutional amendment shall be submitted to the voters at an election to be held May 7, 2022. The ballot shall be printed to permit voting for or against the proposition: “The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school purposes on the residence homestead of a person who is elderly or disabled to reflect any statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the maximum compressed rate of the maintenance and operations taxes imposed for those purposes on the homestead.”

    Clear as mud, but what it amounts to closing a loophole in a previous tax limitation:

    Homeowners who are disabled or 65 years and older can qualify for having school district property taxes capped or frozen. But when lawmakers in 2019 passed legislation to offset rising property values with lower school district tax rates for all homeowners, those adjustments did not account for elderly and disabled homeowners whose property taxes were already frozen. Under Proposition 1, those homeowners could qualify for those additional reductions in 2023 if the measure passes, said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who wrote the legislation calling for the constitutional amendment. The change would lower those homeowners’ property taxes further, but would not eliminate their property tax cap. “The frozen value unfreezes and then refreezes lower each year,” Bettencourt explained.

    Here’s the second amendment:

    State of Texas Proposition 2
    S.J.R. No. 2
    Senate Joint Resolution

    Proposing a constitutional amendment increasing the amount of the residence homestead exemption from ad valorem taxation for public school purposes.

    Be it resolved by the Legislature of the State of Texas:

    SECTION 1. Section 1-b(c), Article VIII, Texas Constitution, is amended to read as follows:

    (c) The amount of $40,000 [$25,000] of the market value of the residence homestead of a married or unmarried adult, including one living alone, is exempt from ad valorem taxation for general elementary and secondary public school purposes. The legislature by general law may provide that all or part of the exemption does not apply to a district or political subdivision that imposes ad valorem taxes for public education purposes but is not the principal school district providing general elementary and secondary public education throughout its territory. In addition to this exemption, the legislature by general law may exempt an amount not to exceed $10,000 of the market value of the residence homestead of a person who is disabled as defined in Subsection (b) of this section and of a person 65 years of age or older from ad valorem taxation for general elementary and secondary public school purposes. The legislature by general law may base the amount of and condition eligibility for the additional exemption authorized by this subsection for disabled persons and for persons 65 years of age or older on economic need. An eligible disabled person who is 65 years of age or older may not receive both exemptions from a school district but may choose either. An eligible person is entitled to receive both the exemption required by this subsection for all residence homesteads and any exemption adopted pursuant to Subsection (b) of this section, but the legislature shall provide by general law whether an eligible disabled or elderly person may receive both the additional exemption for the elderly and disabled authorized by this subsection and any exemption for the elderly or disabled adopted pursuant to Subsection (b) of this section. Where ad valorem tax has previously been pledged for the payment of debt, the taxing officers of a school district may continue to levy and collect the tax against the value of homesteads exempted under this subsection until the debt is discharged if the cessation of the levy would impair the obligation of the contract by which the debt was created. The legislature shall provide for formulas to protect school districts against all or part of the revenue loss incurred by the implementation of this subsection, Subsection (d) of this section, and Section 1-d-1 of this article. The legislature by general law may define residence homestead for purposes of this section.

    SECTION 2. The following temporary provision is added to the Texas Constitution:

    TEMPORARY PROVISION. (a) This temporary provision applies to the constitutional amendment proposed by the 87th Legislature, 3rd Called Session, 2021, increasing the amount of the residence homestead exemption from ad valorem taxation for public school purposes.

    (b) The amendment to Section 1-b(c), Article VIII, of this constitution takes effect January 1, 2022, and applies only to a tax year beginning on or after that date.

    (c) This temporary provision expires January 1, 2023.

    SECTION 3. This proposed constitutional amendment shall be submitted to the voters at an election to be held May 7, 2022. The ballot shall be printed to permit voting for or against the proposition: “The constitutional amendment increasing the amount of the residence homestead exemption from ad valorem taxation for public school purposes from $25,000 to $40,000.”

    I will be voting for both of these, even though I prefer more extensive tax reforms and rate reductions over these piecemeal reductions.

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    Posted in Elections, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Abbott Aide Now Soros Lobbyist

    May 4th, 2022

    If you wonder why conservative victories seem so few and far between sometimes, this story offers one explanation.

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s former chief of staff Daniel Hodge is now a lobbyist for one of the biggest liberal organizations in the country.

    After a long history with Abbott since serving on his campaign for attorney general in 2001, Hodge was promoted to chief of staff when Abbott first took office in 2015. The key position gave him an incredible amount of power as both an informal advisor to his boss and a liaison between the governor’s office and the state Legislature.

    In 2017, it was announced that he was parting from the role. Shortly after, he became a registered lobbyist.

    Since then, Hodge has quickly become one of the highest-paid lobbyists in the state of Texas, with lobby reports revealing he could be making up to $8,269,999 on his contracts.

    One of his high-paying clients, however, raises questions about where the former Abbott staffer’s loyalties lie.

    Reports reveal Hodge is receiving $200,000-$300,000 from the left-wing Tides Center, the sister organization that helps manage donations from the Tides Foundation.

    First established in 1976 in San Francisco, the Tides Foundation says it is dedicated to “working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights and human rights.”

    Look into pretty much any radical Social Justice Warrior issue destroying the quality of life for Americans (#BlackLivesMatter, defunding the police, CRT, radical transgenderism, Acorn, etc.) and you’ll generally find Tides Foundation somewhere in the background.

    According to an analysis from Influence Watch, “Tides’ fiscally sponsored groups have been prominent in the anti-war movement, anti-free trade campaigns, gun control, abolition of the death penalty, abortion rights, and gay rights.”

    The Tides Center is funded by major leftist foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

    That brings up the question: What the hell was such a publicly conservative Governor as Greg Abbott doing with Hodge as his Chief of Staff?

    I understand that lobbyists are hired guns, but this is like someone from the American Cancer Society leaving to work for R. J. Reynolds.

    It’s impossible to imagine top aides to Ted Cruz or Dan Patrick going to work lobbying for George Soros. The fact that it happened to one of Abbott’s longest-serving aides (and the manager of his 2006 Attorney General reelection campaign) does not reflect well on his staffing judgment.

    It shouldn’t need to be said, but it’s imperative that conservative Republican elected officials appoint conservative staffers to important positions. Progress towards conservative goals is all but impossible if you have foxes guarding the hen-house.

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    Posted in Democrats, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 7 Comments »

    Roe Vs. Wade Overturned: The “No Earthquake” Scenario

    May 3rd, 2022

    By now everyone and their dog has already chimed in on the illegally leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which Justice Roberts has confirmed the authenticity of. I’m not going to go over the unprecedented nature of the leak, or how the leaker (probably a clerk for one of the four liberal Supreme Court justices) deserves to spend a good long time in prison.

    No, let’s jump straight to the political ramifications of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade. I think the actual ramifications can be summed up as: So what?

    There are three main beneficiaries to Roe being overturned:

  • Unborn babies who get to live
  • Prolife groups finally seeing the fruits of 40+ years of grassroots organizing.
  • Liberal Democratic fundraisers.

    • That’s pretty much it. With the economy in the toilet, do Democrats really believe this decision will be the number one issue at the polls? Democrats have boasted about retiring pro-life Republicans for decades, with no obvious results. Judging from Wendy “Abortion Barbie” Davis’ disastrous Texas gubernatorial run, when Greg Abbott beat her like a rented mule, “pro-abortion Republican women” may have made up 1% of the electorate. And that was eight years ago. Post-Trump, I’d guess that almost everyone who would leave the Republican Party over the issue has left already over any of a dozen other culture war issues or Trump Derangement Syndrome.

    I’m also guessing that the hard left’s desire to groom children is going to be a far more pressing issue for parents than late-stage abortion (which won’t be outlawed in blue states anyway).

    Conversely, culturally conservative Hispanics and blacks have already been drifting to the Republican Party. Abortion has never been as popular among them as white suburbanites, so it seems unlikely that the decision will play a significant part in driving them to the polls in November.

    As far as motivating the Democratic Party base, they were already all-in on Trump hatred in 2020. Once you’ve dubbed your political opponents “insurrectionists” and “white supremacists,” how much more rhetorical headroom do you have? Are Republicans now going to be Extra Satan Hitler Slathered in Racist Hitler Sauce?

    Go ahead, quintuple your Handmaid’s Tale cosplay. We’ll just keep registering voters instead.

    Indeed, the decision might energize Republican voters complaining that the Republican Party is worthless. Without Republican presidents appointing originalist judges, we don’t get Heller and we don’t get Roe overturned.

    Elections matter. Vote accordingly.

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    Posted in Democrats, Republicans, Supreme Court | 10 Comments »

    Domestic Terrorist Dies

    May 2nd, 2022

    Just a brief note that domestic terrorist and murder accomplice Kathy Boudin has died.

    Kathy Boudin, who spent decades in prison for her part in the deadly 1981 Brink’s armored truck heist as a member of the radical militant group Weather Underground, died of cancer at the age of 78 in New York on Sunday.

    For those too young to remember, the Weather Underground was a radical communist terrorist organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government.

    In October, 1981, Boudin and members of the group teamed up with the Black Liberation Army for the robbery to help fund their anti-government campaigns.

    The Black Liberation Army was a radical, black nationalist communist terrorist organization that also sought the violent overthrow of the American government. They may have killed as many as ten police officers across the country. Remaining members of both the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army would later join forces as the May 19th Communist Organization, under which banner they would carry out a series of terrorist bombings through 1985.

    They targeted a Brink’s armored truck, which they held up in Rockland County, making out with $1.6 million.

    During the robbery, gunmen killed Brink’s security guard Peter Paige before transferring the money to a U-Haul truck a mile away, where a 38-year-old Boudin sat in the cabin.

    Paige left behind a wife and son.

    The truck was stopped by police at a roadblock, where Boudin — unarmed — immediately surrendered. Gunmen in the back of the truck popped outside and began firing on the officers, killing two policemen —Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown.

    Brown was a Korean War vet and the first black officer on the Nyack police force. O’Grady was a Vietnam veteran and left behind a wife and three children.

    She pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the death of Paige in 1984.

    She spent 22 years in prison before she was paroled for good behavior in 2003.

    The armored car holdup fell into a period in New York history after the death penalty for killing a police officer had been ruled unconstitutional by the New York supreme court, before Republican Governor George Pataki signed legislation restoring it in 1995.

    Was Boudin shunned by civil society after her release?

    She was not.

    After jail, she was hired by Columbia School of Social Work Associate as an adjunct professor in 2008. She was hired as a full-time professor in 2013, lecturing about issues facing convicts and their families when a person is released from prison.

    Help kill two cops and a security guard and get tenure.

    Boudin was the mother of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin…

    The Soros-backed soft-on-crime DA facing a recall election for that city’s spiraling crime rate.

    who last year successfully lobbied former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to commute the sentence of his father, David Gilbert — who was also a member of the Weather Underground who was imprisoned for his role in the stick-up.

    Gilbert, who served as a getaway driver, was serving a sentence of 75 years to life in prison with no possibility of parole until 2056. Gilbert is among the last surviving people involved in the robbery.

    Judith Clark, another former Weather Underground member, served 35 years of a 75-years-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery at a mall in suburban Rockland County before her sentence was commuted by Cuomo in 2016. She was paroled in 2019.

    Andrew Cuomo, always willing to shower mercy on cop-killers, just not on elderly nursing home residents.

    The Democratic establishment is always willing to forgive and lionize radical cop killers, as long as they’re on the left. “No enemies on the left.”

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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 2 Comments »

    Observing 2022 Victims of Communism Day

    May 1st, 2022

    Today is May 1st, which means that once again it’s time to observe Victims of Communism Day, remembering that a false, brutal ideology killed over 100 million people.

    VictimsofCommunismDay

    Here’s a list of memorials to the victims of communism.

    With Ukraine in the news, it’s a hood time to look back on how horribly Ukraine suffered under Soviet Communism, especially in Stalin’s 1930-33 terror famine, the Holodomor. Here’s a video that covers the history of the Ukraine up to and through the Holodomor.

    More information on the Holodomor can be found in Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Conquest estimated that for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization”/Holodomor period (including the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) some 14.5 million died due to the actions of the Soviet government.

    Here’s Joe Rogan and Michael Malice discussing historical atrocities, including the East German concentration for children were the guards were allowed to rape their child charges as a matter of choice.

    Note that November 7 is also observed as a day commemorating the victims of communism. There’s no reason we can’t observe both…

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    Posted in Communism, video | 1 Comment »

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