In the “stop panicking” category: “Statehouse wins position GOP to dominate redistricting“:
An abysmal showing by Democrats in state legislative races on Tuesday not only denied them victories in Sun Belt and Rust Belt states that would have positioned them to advance their policy agenda — it also put the party at a disadvantage ahead of the redistricting that will determine the balance of power for the next decade.
The results could domino through politics in America, helping the GOP draw favorable congressional and state legislative maps by ensuring Democrats remain the minority party in key state legislatures. Ultimately, it could mean more Republicans in Washington — and in state capitals.
By Wednesday night, Democrats had not flipped a single statehouse chamber in its favor. And it remained completely blocked from the map-making process in several key states — including Texas, North Carolina and Florida, which could have a combined 82 congressional seats by 2022 — where the GOP retained control of the state legislatures.
After months of record-breaking fundraising by their candidates and a constellation of outside groups, Democrats fell far short of their goals and failed to build upon their 2018 successes to capture state chambers they had been targeting for years. And they may have President Donald Trump to blame.
“It’s clear that Trump isn’t an anchor for the Republican legislative candidates. He’s a buoy,” said Christina Polizzi, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, on Wednesday. “He overperformed media expectations, Democratic and Republican expectations, and lifted legislative candidates with him.”
Snip.
The biggest disappointment came in the seat-rich state of Texas, Democrats needed nine seats to reclaim the majority after flipping a dozen in the midterms. Though some races remain uncalled, so far Democrats were able to unseat one incumbent and Republicans offset that with another pickup.
Now Texas Republicans, retaining control of the Senate and the governor’s mansion, will have total authority over the drawing of as many as 39 congressional districts in the state. Democrats fear Republicans will pack and crack the rapidly diversifying suburbs to dilute unfriendly voters. Despite targeting 10 districts, Democrats failed to flip a single targeted seat in 2020 on the current map, which was drawn by the GOP roughly a decade ago.
There are plenty of things to worry about with Democrats control (by the skin of their teeth) the White House, the Senate and the House, but federalism provides strong state power as a counterbalance to the federal government.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and researcher who has received almost $20 million from the Department of Energy was arrested Thursday after he allegedly failed to disclose ties to the People’s Republic of China.
Mechanical engineering professor Gang Chen faces charges of wire fraud, failing to file a foreign bank account report, and making a false statement in a tax return, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston revealed Thursday.
Prosecutors allege the 56-year-old professor, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, has held a number of positions on behalf of the PRC with the goal of promoting China’s technological and scientific capabilities.
They claim he shared his expertise directly with Chinese government officials “often in exchange for financial compensation,” including serving as an “overseas expert” at the request of the Chinese consulate in New York and a member of at least two PRC Talent Programs.
The Department of Energy has given Chen $19 million for research since 2013.
The president didn’t mention violence on Wednesday, much less provoke or incite it. He said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
District law defines a riot as “a public disturbance . . . which by tumultuous and violent conduct or the threat thereof creates grave danger of damage or injury to property or persons.” When Mr. Trump spoke, there was no “public disturbance,” only a rally. The “disturbance” came later at the Capitol by a small minority who entered the perimeter and broke the law. They should be prosecuted.
Actually, I think it’s been firmly established that the entry into the capitol occurred even before Trump stopped speaking.
Also not so much in the news: Israel launched its biggest airstrike in years against Iranian positions in Syria.
A senior U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the attack told The Associated Press that the airstrikes were carried out with intelligence provided by the United States and targeted a series of warehouses in Syria that were being used as a part of the pipeline to store and stage Iranian weapons.
The official said the warehouses also served as a pipeline for components that supports Iran’s nuclear program.
Maybe the Islamic Republic of Iran expects that they can just ask the Biden Administration for highly enriched uranium directly…
Total crude oil imported from Saudi Arabia last week: Zero.
Two companies, Google and Apple, each control about half of the smartphone market. So when the two companies made a move against Parler, the conservative social media alternative, it effectively erased its app from existence. Joining the party was a third member of the FAANG Big Tech consortium, Amazon, which deplatformed Parler from Amazon Web Services.
AWS controls a third of the cloud marketplace. Microsoft and Google are in 2nd and 3rd place.
Blocking an app doesn’t permanently kill a social networking service, though it places it at a structural disadvantage, but Apple and Google can flag sites as unsafe through their browsers.
Originally, the social media giant and former favorite platform of President Trump claimed that it was simply a matter of accounts not verifying their information. Twitter claimed that until those accounts did so, they would simply not show upon follower accounts.
Well, the tune has been changed. As most suspected from the beginning, there is actually a widespread deletion of conservative accounts goings on under the guise of them being QAnon related. This has supposedly hit over 70,000 accounts so far.
Let me explain how this works. Basically any small amount that propagated the idea that the election was stolen is going to be lumped in as QAnon and targeted.
I don’t believe in QAnon conspiracies. I do believe the election was stolen.
“The world’s biggest gun forum was booted off the Internet because they can be.” In other news, Go-Daddy sucks. I hope AR15.com files a very expensive lawsuit against them.
Looks like Twitter didn’t quite erase Trump’s tweet history:
Gab CEO Pulls Off The Impossible For Trump… INCREDIBLE!
“Gab CEO completely backed up Pres. Trump’s Twitter account before it was deleted & recreated him on Gab! What’s even more impressive is he did this while traffic was up 700% & under attack..https://t.co/F3olVzPpYy
— Liberty Times & Politics #FreeSpeech (@dmills3710) January 13, 2021
There is a large segment of American society, maybe 15-20%, that has not had a president who represents their basic worldview for decades. These folks tend to be white, exurban or rural, believe in religious tradition and cultural conservatism without being regular church-goers, very patriotic, very pro-military, hostile to immigration and free trade, skeptical of big business, big government, and establishment experts, and in favor of entitlement programs and the safety net…
Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan appealed to this demographic to a large extent. Beyond that, the only major national figure I can think of in my lifetime who more or less represented them was George Wallace.
So along comes Trump who appeals to this constituency almost perfectly. Sure, he’s a rich New Yorker, but his outer-borough accent and mentality, scorned by the elite, reminds people that their own regional accents are also scorned by the elite.
This constituency used to be divided between Republicans and Democrats, which is one reason they lacked influence on presidential nominees, but they have shifted to be heavily Republican, which gave them a lot of influence on the nominating process in 2020 [I think he means 2016 here. -LP], and they chose Trump.
Trump, to almost everyone’s surprise, wins. So how do big government, big business, elite experts and so on, i.e., the establishment, react, from his fans’ perspective? Without even giving Trump a chance, they decree that he is illegitimate, that he needs to be resisted, and that his voters are beyond redemption; “this is 1932 in Germany” was not a rare reaction.
So, from these voters’ perspective, the one time in their lifetimes and much longer a president comes around who really speaks to their worldview, the establishment tries to destroy him. Rather than the anti-Trump sentiment persuading them, it makes them stronger supporters, people who see Trump as their weapon against an establishment that disparages them.
Intel ousts CEO Bob Swan and replaces him with Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger. Intel has stumbled so badly over the last few years that replacing Swan (who has a finance background) is probably overdue. Gelsinger spent 30 years at Intel, some as CTO, so maybe he has a good chance of ironing out their process problems.
Speaking of semiconductors, there’s a global chip shortage going on, with auto makers among the hardest hit. And it’s not from TSMC’s cutting-edge fabs, it’s from older, larger geometry fabs. And dependence on Chinese chips plays a role as well.
Democrats ❤ Communism:
Someone must have pinged @HaroldFordJr during his appearance on @SpecialReport just now and told him that his Mao was showing.
Portland police are taking longer than ever to respond to 911 calls? Just because the ruling democrats hate them and won’t back them up, refuse to charge habitual lawbreakings, and engendered a wave of retirements? Imagine that. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
Burning in Hell watch: Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a pregnant mom to death and cut out her unborn baby to parade around as her own, was executed.
Sorry my headline language is so salty this week, but some ideas are so stupid they require profanity.
This applies to the idiot Democrats pushing the second impeachment, though baseline Dem idiocy is already baked into their cake. My real ire is reserved for the functionaries of Conservatism Inc. who have signed on to this bullshit.
Donald Trump leaves office in SIX! FUCKING! DAYS! Instead of letting time take its course, the vainglorious fuckwits of our corrupt kleptocracy have decided that the previously rarely employed machinery of constitutional impeachment must be deployed for the ultimate exercise in masturbatory virtual signaling.
Mitch McConnell has stated that he will not agree to an emergency senate hearing, so there is no way Impeachment Farce 2: Virtue Signaling Boogaloo will get Trump out of office one second sooner than his constitutionally defined four years. Plus the idea that a second impeachment trial can be completed after he’s left office to disqualify him from ever holding office again is a constitutional crock.
Keep in mind, I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool Trump acolyte. I was for Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, I don’t think Trump has been a perfect President, I don’t think he’s been sent by God, I don’t think he’s made much measurable progress in draining the swamp, and I didn’t think the January 6th shenanigans was a good idea even before it went south.
But the idea that clown show was an “insurrection” is risible bullshit. Like the Ukraine call, the Democratic Media Complex must assert that some particular bit of Trumpian communication that rubbed them the wrong way counts as a high crime.
And now the conserving conservatism crowd are running around proclaiming how this was the last straw and they must impeach a guy out of office next week because they’re just so mad at how that villain Trump has soiled their sacred honor, and how they can’t wait to return to the former glory of their back-slapping cruise mingles without the worry that some of the peasants in steerage might get tired of their non-stop failure to deliver on their promises of conservative governance. (I may be paraphrasing their arguments a wee tad.)
This is why they can’t allow any examination of evidence of fraud in the 2020 election: Because it would require them actually take a stand. And we can’t have that, can we?
Fuck each and every single Republican pushing for this cubed farce of an impeachment.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s policy orientation session for the 87th Texas Legislature starts today. Tickets for the live event are sold out, but you can still register to livestream the event here.
The event grid can be found here. Keynote speakers include Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Representative Chip Roy, journalist Kimberley Strassel and Kevin Robert, as well as usual TPPF stalwarts like Chuck Devore, Vance Ginn and James Quintero.
A couple of the more interesting panels I will try to catch: the plenary “Election 2020: What Happened and What Does it Mean for the Future?” at 4:30 PM today, “The Reasons Behind the Homelessness Explosion” at 9:45 AM on Friday (might have to catch a recording of that), and “Closing Keynote Luncheon: A Fresh Take: New Members Look Ahead to Congress 2021” with newly minted Texas representatives August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, and Tony Gonzales (three of whom you may remember from this ad) as well as California Representative Michelle Steel at 12:30 PM on Friday.
I attended TPPF’s orientation back in 2013, and it’s worth participating in if you’re interested in state politics.
The left has long had a tendency to push propaganda over truth, but the Trump years have seen a dramatic increase in willfully repeated falsehoods to push the Democratic Media Complex’s favored “narratives” over obvious truths everyone can see with their own two eyes.
First there was the Russian collusion hoax, a self-serving fiction democrats concocted both to jam Trump at the line of scrimmage and give them an excuse for explaining how they managed to lose an election everyone said they had in the bag. There followed more lies to support the initial lie, then the impeachment farce that failed to make a dent.
And all the while, underneath the surface, social justice warriors were spinning out falsehood after falsehood to support their favored narratives. “Hands Up Don’t Shot” was a lie from the git-go. The idea that sex is a social construct was and is a lie, as is the idea that someone can change their sex merely by declaring they have. Not to mention the risible #BlackLivesMatter bullshit that “silence is violence” and the ridiculous idea that everyone who voted for Trump was a “white supremacist.”
Then came to 2020 #BlackLivesMatter/Antifa riots the Democratic Media Complex did their very best to ignore or spin as “mostly peaceful” despite burning down hundreds of businesses and looting thousands.
Then they stole the 2020 Presidential election by massive fraud is six urban counties and got very upset when people tried to point this out.
Finally, the events of January 6 drove them to new heights of hyperbole. Want to call it inadvisable? Absolutely. A mob? Fair enough. A riot? Sure. Criminal? Some of it, by definition.
But what it was not was an “insurrection” or “coup.” Trust me, if a significant fraction of president Trump’s 75+ million supporters wanted to stage an armed coup, you’d know it. Or, more to the point, the likes of Nancy Pelosi, George Soros and Jack Dorsey wouldn’t know it, because they’d hang lifeless from the ends of gibbets.
You don’t get high on your own supply because the moment you start deluding yourself, reality has a nasty way of smacking you upside the head.
And if Democrats think that removing Donald “Emmanuel Goldstein” Trump from the White House means they get to immediately return to their old grifts without consequences (and add a bunch of new woke social justice grifts on top of them to boot), they have another think coming. Kurt Schlichter:
Have you noticed that everything is a lie and a scam? Everything.
See, the problem starts when our elite realized that it could break the norms and betray the principles that we all thought we were all abiding by without accountability, at least for a little while. The Establishment realized that it can simply not enforce the norms, and then there will be a lag time while the normals continue on as if the norms were still in effect. It’s inertia – this is why you get these sad sack RINOs lecturing us on how we’re subverting the institutions when what we are really doing is pointing out that the institutions have subverted themselves.
It’s willful blindness to the corruption because the weakhearts don’t want to admit there is corruption because that would then require them to act. It’s easier to live on scraps.
The biggest gap in this country isn’t between enlightened social justice warriors and the backward racist redneck freaks of JesusLand, it’s between those who want to continue sticking their snouts into troughs of taxpayer money, feel their own grifts are sacred birthrights above reproach and have different laws apply to them than the peasants, and those who have been made aware of the scam.
We’re not going back to sleep, no matter how hard you call us deplorables, racists or insurrectionists.
At some point I’m going to finish a full-blown Texas Vs. California update. But like every other blog post I’ve got in the works, it’s taking longer than usual to complete. So instead, here’s California-to-Texas refugee Joe Rogan interviewing fellow California-to-Texas refugee Dr. Mark Gordon, who specializes in recovering from traumatic brain injury and has a line of neutracuiticals about the many problems of California and how badly they’ve handled the lockdown.
Salem Media’s Kevin McCullough, who posted questions about the votes moving backwards in the Georgia run-offs and posted Trump’s video from his rally.
The Team Trump account was axed too.
Techno Fog who broke court documents on the Russia hoax.
Tracy Beanz who also did yeoman’s work on Russia hoax.
Influencers on the right suddenly over the last couple of days were also finding their Twitter followers dropping off precipitously. Not just a few people but a lot of influencers, even smaller not well-known people.
Lots of people are having followers purged, including myself, though I’ve only lost some 100-odd. Can;t say whether this is a purge of inactive accounts or not.
Facebook also banned the #WalkAway campaign and Brandon Straka:
Today Facebook took down the #WalkAway Campaign, and with it, the hundreds of thousands of videos & written stories of real people leaving the left. They banned me, my employees & volunteers. We are moving to https://t.co/wsGFdNe6ND Plz sign up & join #WalkAway Campaign group pic.twitter.com/quvahfap0z
In case you haven’t been paying attention, the battle over personal data, free speech and the free flow of information between the American people and the tech giants is heating up. As the Googles and Facebooks of the world take an unconstitutional role in deciding what speech and information should be online, it’s becoming clear much more is at stake than first meets the eye.
It’s also becoming apparent that there are some voices on the Right who are either deeply naïve and ignorant about what is at stake or they are in fact paid collaborators of the tech companies.
Also some discussion of the threat of the singularity, which is still more science fiction than actual at this point. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
I’ve got a bunch of quarter- or half-formed blog posts about The Recent Unpleasantness I haven’t had time to finish, so let’s use this low-calorie blog post substitute to note that I’m on two separate alternative to Twitter:
On Gab I’m @BattleSwarm. Gab was looking moribund for a while, but after this week’s events it seems to be showing some life again.
I’ve also added a Social Media section to the sidebar.
So if you’re on either of those, try to follow me there in addition to my Twitter account, as it seems like only a matter of time until my account gets nuked for #WrongThink. One wonders how profitable Twitter will be once they get around to banning everyone Democrats and Social Justice Warriors think should get banned.
The political class (represented by a Speaker who flies home to San Francisco on her own government plane) has been largely insulated from the pathologies they have loosed upon the land. For a few hours yesterday they weren’t.
In a self-governing republic of citizen-legislators, that ought to be sobering and instructive. But, of course, it wasn’t. Still, I was surprised that even politicians and pundits could utter all that eyewash about “the citadel of democracy” and “a light to the world” with a straight face. It’s a citadel of crap, and the lights went out long ago: ask anyone who needs that $600 “relief”.
I despise the United States Congress, and not merely for the weeks I had to spend there during the Clinton impeachment trial: My contempt pre-dates that circus. It dates to the moment I first realized, as a recent arrival to this land, that when Dick Durbin or some such is giving some overwrought speech on a burning issue he is speaking to an entirely empty chamber – because there are no debates, because most of these over-entouraged Emirs of Incumbistan are entirely incapable of debate: See, inter alia, Ed Markey.
But the fact that they might as well be orating in front of the bathroom mirror isn’t why I despise it. It’s that the American media go along with the racket, and there’s only the one pool camera with the fixed tight shot so that you can’t see the joint is deserted and the guy is talking to himself. The wanker press is so protective of its politicians that it’s happy to give the impression that a boob like Markey is Cromwell in the Long Parliament.
I have never seen such rubbish in the House of Commons at Ottawa or Westminster or their equivalents around the Commonwealth – and it’s a charade in which the media are all-in.
So it’s a Potemkin parliament.
That leads easily to the next stage of decay – for why would a Potemkin parliament not degenerate further into a pseudo-legislature? The Covid “relief” bill is 5,593 pages. There is no such thing as a 5,593-page “law” – because no legislator could read it and grasp it. For purposes of comparison, the Government of India Act, which in 1935 was the longest piece of legislation ever drafted in British law and which provided for the government of what are now India, Pakistan and Burma, is 326 pages.
Oh, I’m sure paragons of republican virtue will object that no Indian or Burmese citizen-representatives were involved in that piece of imperial imposition. Well, no American citizen-representatives were involved in the Covid “relief” bill. The legislation was drafted not by legislators, nor by civil servants, nor even by staffers or interns. Instead, a zillion lobbyists wrote their particular carve-outs, and then it got stitched together by some clerk playing the role of Baron von Frankenstein. The “legislators” voted it into law unread, and indeed even unseen, as the Congressional photocopier proved unable to print it: It was a bill without corporeal form, but the yes-men yessed it into law anyway.
Whatever that is, it’s not a republic. As beacons to the world go, stick it where the beacon don’t shine. I wish no ill to anyone in the building, but I do support, during the next recess, its complete dismantling and the salting of the earth: it is not a “citadel of democracy”, only a sick perversion thereof. Whatever Sudan and Chad and Waziristan need, it’s not the US Congress.
Have you noticed that everything is a lie and a scam? Everything.
See, the problem starts when our elite realized that it could break the norms and betray the principles that we all thought we were all abiding by without accountability, at least for a little while. The Establishment realized that it can simply not enforce the norms, and then there will be a lag time while the normals continue on as if the norms were still in effect. It’s inertia – this is why you get these sad sack RINOs lecturing us on how we’re subverting the institutions when what we are really doing is pointing out that the institutions have subverted themselves.
It’s willful blindness to the corruption because the weakhearts don’t want to admit there is corruption because that would then require them to act. It’s easier to live on scraps.
Snip.
The structures and institutions of American society have all been in place with little real change for nearing a century. Nothing lasts forever though, particularly when they are run by grifty idiots. The disruption caused by the tech revolution has helped speed up inevitable processes of change – you know, the creative destruction we hear about in unwoke economics courses. The institutions we relied on – our churches, the NFL, the political parties – are now focused entirely upon preventing that inevitable change. The lackluster losers who inherited their sinecures in these institutions (not literally but by being adopted into the establishment by going to the right schools) want to maintain a status quo that is great for them and poison for the rest of us.
Joe Biden* is the quintessential example of this, a failed retread with zero accomplishments promising business as usual with a veneer of wokeness slathered on top of it all. He wants to hold on to his ruins. He’ll entrench his corporate masters and do everything he can to stifle the potential for reform and dissent. Remember when dissent was patriotic? Now, the media’s whole job is to angrily reaffirm the divine right of our garbage elite to rule us.
More:
Good news for the media: now that a fringe group of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, the media can go back to slandering all 74 million people who voted for Trump as racists who are complicit in the overthrow of the republic, and calling for them to be silenced. Unity!
The most important leader at the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic was Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, He was the guy who noticed that while the Roman Republic had swept all foreign enemies before it, the working class had suffered despite the great riches of empire. Tiberius Gracchus decided to run for public office despite his great family wealth, and to put forth his formidable political skills to benefit the Roman Working Joe. He failed, because the Roman political establishment buried their traditional political differences in the face of Gracchus’ challenge, and in fact had him killed.
In short, the Roman Deep State closed ranks to block needed reform. It was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic as long cherished political norms (Mos Maiorum) were cast aside. And so two generations of the Roman political elite were exterminated in a civil war so profound that what was left of the exhausted Republican Elite welcomed the first Imperator with open arms because he ended the civil wars.
Throughout this whole period in Roman History, the Law was supreme. Of course, the Law bent to the prevailing political winds. As the Roman said, “The Law is harsh, but it is the Law”. Dura Lex, sed Lex.
Donald Trump is the Tiberius Gracchus of our day. He is the guy who noticed that while the American Republic had swept all foreign enemies before it, the working class had suffered despite the great riches of empire. Donald Trump decided to run for public office despite his great family wealth, and to put forth his formidable political skills to benefit the American Working Joe. He failed, because the American political establishment buried their traditional political differences in the face of Trump’s challenge, and in fact had him [well, we’ll have to see if they let him live free, or jail him, or kill him].
Democrats and their allies in the press spent the last four years accusing President Trump of being soft on Russia. And worse: Some called the president a Russian asset, a traitor, Putin’s patsy, and much, much more. It was all BS, because behind the rhetoric was the stark reality that Trump, and his administration, have actually been tougher on Russia than many of his predecessors. Now, with the president on the way out, one lone voice in the anti-Trump press — CNN, specifically — has spoken the truth out loud.
On CNN’s “New Day” on New Year’s morning, the network’s Fareed Zakaria was asked how U.S. Russia policy under the new President Joe Biden might differ from policy under President Trump. “I think in general, there isn’t going to be as much difference as people imagine,” Zakaria said. “The Biden folks are pretty tough on Russia, Iran, North Korea. You know, the dirty little secret about the Trump administration was that while Donald Trump clearly had a kind of soft spot for Putin, the Trump administration was pretty tough on the Russians. They armed Ukraine. They armed the Poles. They extended NATO operations and exercises in ways that even the Obama administration had not done. They maintained the sanctions. So I don’t think it will be that different.”
The dirty little secret??? It was never a secret at all. All of the actions Zakaria listed were well known public policy during the Trump years. Any of Zakaria’s colleagues, at CNN and in the press as a whole, might have cited them. But many instead chose to contribute to the media’s Russia hysteria that began even before the president was inaugurated and continued through the years of Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Despite declarations to the contrary, Governor Greg Abbott’s decrees are still limiting businesses across Texas. Just because the business environment doesn’t suck as bad as California doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better.
And speaking of rich people moving to Austin, multimillionaire Joe Lonsdale wants to build a new tech city near Austin, complete with its own subway system. You could build your own city from scratch, but I think you need billionaire money to do it; mere multimillionaire money probably won’t cut it… (Hat tip: Cahnman.)
Overnight, a mob of antifa from Portland descended on the suburb of Tigard, where they tried to break inside the local police department. When that failed, they proceeded to smash up nearby businesses. This is 4th antifa riot in Portland-area since NYE. pic.twitter.com/5CZUnF7774
Am I losing my mind or is a country’s official government account tweeting about the jolly perks of locking humans in concentration camps and the lovely mental health benefits of forced sterilization?
