Denver’s Turn In The Riot Barrel

August 23rd, 2020

Saturday night, downtown Denver got to experience the same joy that antifa and #BlackLivesMatter has brought to places like Minneapolis, Portland and Seattle.

Several dozen people, some donning shields and helmets, and police clashed at the headquarters of the Denver Police Department on Saturday night.

A group had organized a protest to start at 8 p.m. in response to an incident earlier this week when police and others clashed as the city removed people experiencing homelessness from a camp near 29th and Glenarm. A flier told people to “bring your gear.”

Sometime before 9 p.m., a van arrived to provide some of the people with shields. As the people marched toward the Denver police headquarters, Denver7 reporters witnessed people with a bat and an ax.

The group expressed various motives: defunding or abolishing the police, ending homeless sweeps, stopping racism, justice for Elijah McClain and more, including several who said they were there for vandalism and were done with peaceful protesting, according to crews at the scene.

But McClain’s mother earlier this week disavowed rallies like the one Saturday night, and she and others held a peaceful rally in memory of her son earlier in the day.

McClain was a black man killed in police custody in 2019. As in Portland and Seattle, there seem to be few if any black people involved in these riots, just white leftwing radicals attacking police and destroying property.

Some raw footage:

These riots aren’t about police brutality, they’re about a hard-left, anti-police activism that’s rejected by the overwhelming majority of American citizens.

In Austin, state troopers and APD quickly clamped down on this stupidity before the idiots could do much damage. Other cities should follow their lead

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Is New York City Dead Forever?

August 22nd, 2020

In the wake of this post on how the Wuhan coronavirus, widespread antifa/#BlackLivesMatter looting, and the general rise in crime and disorder under the mayorship of Bill de Blasio have sent citizens feeling, comes a new piece saying that not only is New York City dead, it’s dead forever:

I love NYC. When I first moved to NYC it was a dream come true. Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me. So much personality, so many stories.

Every subculture I loved was in NYC. I could play chess all day and night. I could go to comedy clubs. I could start any type of business. I could meet people. I had family, friends, opportunities. No matter what happened to me, NYC was a net I could fall back on and bounce back up.

Now it’s completely dead. “But NYC always always bounces back.” No. Not this time. “But NYC is the center of the financial universe. Opportunities will flourish here again.” Not this time.

“NYC has experienced worse”. No it hasn’t.

A Facebook group formed a few weeks ago that was for people who were planning a move and wanted others to talk to and ask advice from. Within two or three days it had about 10,000 members.

Every day I see more and more posts, “I’ve been in NYC forever but I guess this time I have to say goodbye.”

He says people move to New York City for three reasons: business, culture and food, and all are dead.

Midtown Manhattan, the center of business in NYC, is empty. Even though people can go back to work, famous office buildings like the Time Life skyscraper is still 90% empty. Businesses realized that they don’t need their employees at the office.

In fact, they realize they are even more productive without everyone back to the office. The Time Life building can handle 8,000 workers. Now it maybe has 500 workers back.

Snip.

Another friend of mine works at a major investment bank as a managing director. Before the pandemic he was at the office every day, sometimes working from 6am to 10pm.

Now he lives in Phoenix, Arizona. “As of June,” he told me, “I had never even been to Phoenix.” And then he moved there. He does all his meetings on Zoom.

I was talking to a book editor who has been out of the city since early March. “We’ve been all working fine. I’m not sure why we would need to go back to the office.”

One friend of mine, Derek Halpern, was convinced he’d stay. He put up a Facebook post the other day saying he might be changing his mind. Derek wrote:

“In the last week:

  • I watched a homeless person lose his mind and start attacking random pedestrians. Including spitting on, throwing stuff at, and swatting.
  • Ive seen several single parents with a child asking for money for food. And then, when someone gave them food, tossed the food right back at them.
  • I watched a man yell racist slurs at every single race of people while charging / then stopping before going too far.

And worse.

I’ve been living in New York City for about 10 years. It has definitely gotten worse and there’s no end in sight.

My favorite park is Madison Square Park. About a month ago a 19 year old girl was shot and killed across the street.

I don’t think I have an answer but I do think it’s clear: it’s time to move out of NYC.

I’m not the only one who feels this way, either. In my building alone, the rent has plummeted almost 30 percent – more people are moving away than ever before.

Snip.

People say, “NYC has been through worse” or “NYC has always come back.”

No and no.

First, when has NYC been through worse?

Even in the 1970s, and through the 80s, when NYC was going bankrupt, and even when it was the crime capital of the US or close to it, it was still the capital of the business world (meaning: it was the primary place young people would go to build wealth and find opportunity), it was culturally on top of its game – home to artists, theater, media, advertising, publishing, and it was probably the food capital of the US.

NYC has never been locked down for five months. Not in any pandemic, war, financial crisis, never. In the middle of the polio epidemic, when little kids (including my mother) were going paralyzed or dying (my mother ended up with a bad leg), NYC didn’t go through this.

This is not to say what should have been done or should not have been done. That part is over. Now we have to deal with what IS.

In early March, many people (not me), left NYC when they felt it would provide safety from the virus and they no longer needed to go to work and all the restaurants were closed. People figured, “I’ll get out for a month or two and then come back.”

They are all still gone.

And then in June, during rioting and looting a second wave of NYC-ers (this time me) left. I have kids. Nothing was wrong with the protests but I was a little nervous when I saw videos of rioters after curfew trying to break into my building.

Many people left temporarily but there were also people leaving permanently. Friends of mine moved to Nashville, Miami, Austin, Denver, Salt Lake City, Austin, Dallas, etc.

As for culture, author James Altucher owns a standup comedy club in New York City.

We have no idea when we will open. Nobody has any idea. And the longer we close, the less chance we will ever reopen profitably.

Broadway is closed until at least the Spring. Lincoln Center is closed. All the museums are closed.

Forget about the tens of thousands of jobs lost in these cultural centers. Forget even about the millions of dollars of tourist and tourist-generated revenues lost by the closing of these centers.

There are thousands of performers, producers, artists, and the entire ecosystem of art, theater, production, curation, that surrounds these cultural centers. People who have worked all of their lives for the right to be able to perform even once on Broadway whose lives and careers have been put on hold.

I get it. There was a pandemic.

But the question now is: what happens next? And, given the uncertainty (since there is no known answer), and given the fact that people, cities, economies, loathe uncertainty, we simply don’t know the answer and that’s a bad thing for New York City.

Right now, Broadway is closed “at least until early 2021.”

As for food:

My favorite restaurant is closed for good. Ok, let’s go to my second favorite. Closed for good. Third favorite, closed for good.

I thought the PPP was supposed to help. No? What about emergency relief? No. Stimulus checks? Unemployment? No and no. Ok, my fourth favorite, or what about that place I always ordered delivery from? No and no.

Around Late May I took walks and saw that many places were boarded up. Ok, I thought, because the protesting was leading to looting and the restaurants were protecting themselves. They’ll be ok.

Looking closer I’d see the signs. For Lease. For Rent. For whatever.

Before the pandemic, the average restaurant had only 16 days of cash on hand. Some had more (McDonalds), and some had less (the local mom-and-pop Greek diner).

Yelp estimates that 60% of restaurants around the United States have closed.

My guess is more than 60% will be closed in New York City but who knows.

I think this 60% figure is inaccurate, at least for the nation as a whole, a telephone-game misunderstanding of 60% of Wuhan coronavirus restaurant closures being permanent and only 40% temporary. But it says nothing about restaurants that stayed open during the crisis (if only for takeout). But it wouldn’t shock me if that 60% closure figure is accurate for New York City (and even higher in Manhattan).

He also talks about college students staying away and the collapse of the real estate market.

His conclusion:

OK, OK, BUT NYC ALWAYS COMES BACK.

Yes it does. I lived three blocks from Ground Zero on 9/11. Downtown, where I lived, was destroyed, but it came roaring back within two years. Such sadness and hardship and then quickly that area became the most attractive area in New York.

And in 2008/2009, much suffering during the Great Recession, again much hardship, but things came roaring back.

But…this time it’s different. You’re never supposed to say that but this time it’s true. If you believe this time is no different, that NYC is resilient, etc I hope you’re right.

I don’t benefit from saying any of this. I love NYC. I was born there. I’ve lived there forever. I STILL live there. I love everything about NYC. I want 2019 back.

But this time it’s different.

One reason: bandwidth.

In 2008, average bandwidth speeds were 3 megabits per second. That’s not enough for a Zoom meeting with reliable video quality. Now, it’s over 20 megabits per second. That’s more than enough for high quality video.

There’s a before and after. BEFORE: no remote work. AFTER: everyone can remote work.

Everyone has spent the past five months adapting to a new lifestyle. Nobody wants to fly across the country for a two hour meeting when you can do it just as well on Zoom. I can go see “live comedy” on Zoom. I can take classes from the best teachers in the world for almost free online as opposed to paying $70,000 a year for a limited number of teachers who may or may not be good.

Everyone has choices now. You can live in the music capital of Nashville, you can live in the “next Silicon Valley” of Austin. You can live in your hometown in the middle of wherever. And you can be just as productive, make the same salary, have higher quality of life with a cheaper cost to live.

Snip.

And then people will ask, “wait a second – I was paying over 16% in state and city taxes and these other states and cities have little to no taxes? And I don’t have to deal with all the other headaches of NYC?”

Because there are headaches in NYC. Lots of them. It’s just we sweep them under the table because so much else has been good there.

NYC has a $9 billion deficit. A billion more than the Mayor thought they were going to have. How does a city pay back its debts? The main way is aid from the state. But the state deficit just went bonkers. Then is taxes. But if 900,000 estimated jobs are lost in NYC and tens of thousands of businesses, then that means less taxes unless taxes are raised.

Does the author overstate the case? Slightly. His pieces focuses on upper and upper middle class reasons to live in New York, but the port of New York/New Jersey is the third largest in the country, and neither the port nor its many blue collar jobs are going away anytime soon. And someday Broadway and other in-person cultural events will come back, even if much demolished. But it is indeed very possible that New York City has already peaked, and could lose 1-3 million of its population in the near-term.

And all this to still achieve the highest coronavirus death rate in the country. Thanks, Andrew Cuomo!

Democratic office-holder incompetence, Chinese coronavirus, high taxes and social justice have finally struck New York City a more devastating blow than Osama bin Laden ever could.

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Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

LinkSwarm for August 21, 2020

August 21st, 2020

Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! This one may be a little short because I was busy buying books last night. This roundup is also light on Democratic National Convention news because, really, who has time to watch that garbage?

  • President Donald Trump is the last bulwark against the deluge:

    Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

    But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

    Snip.

    Most hated Trump not because he hated or ridiculed them, but because he found them useless, as we saw from the fixations of John Brennan and James Clapper to the dazed pundits of NeverTrump to the wise men of the retired military.

    What created the hatred of Trump and his supporters, then, was not a rather heterodox political agenda (see below), but a style that took on the Left on its own terms, and shocked a Republican establishment—again not just by conjuring the specter of Lee Atwater, but by shrugging as irrelevant his ostracism by the traditional conservative beltway insider.

    Overview of Trump economy snipped.

    Joe Biden has claimed the recent historic establishment of diplomatic relationships between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was not of the Trump Administration’s own making, but the logical epilogue to years of hard Obama Administration foundational work.

    Biden is right in a sense. For eight years, his Obama team sought to empower Iran—through the lifting of sanctions; through the flawed Iran Deal; through appeasement of Hezbollah, the Assads, and Hamas; through estrangement of the Arab Gulf States and Israel—all as a bizarre Persian/Shiite counterweight to the Sunni Arab world and the U.S.-Israeli special relationship.

    Obama and Biden so succeeded that they drove Israel and Gulf States to seek an-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend realist partnership, whose fruition we witnessed last week.

    We forget, however, when Trump entered office, that Israel was isolated. Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States were bewildered by U.S. neutrality in the Middle East. Iran was ascendant. The “jayvees” of ISIS had overrun much of Iraq with delusions of caliphate grandeur. The Ottomanizing Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was supposedly our new trusted “bridge” between East and West.

    Less than four years later, Iran is isolated, broke, and a veritable client of China. ISIS was bombed out of existence. Israel and much of the Arab world are more worried about Iran than they are about each other. The Palestinians are not the key to regional peace. Turkey is recognized as the rogue that it had become while relations with Greece have warmed.

    The United States is energy independent of the Middle East, as is Israel—because of the expansion of fracking and horizontal drilling that a Biden-Harris Administration claims would cease upon assuming office.

    Snip.

    For all the hoax of “Russian collusion,” Vladimir Putin is in terrible shape and has not fooled the administration as he did with “reset” in the Obama years. In the last four years, the United States upped sanctions on Russia, crashed the world export market of natural gas and oil so dear to Moscow, beefed up NATO spending, hectored Germany about its new energy dependence on Putin, increased U.S. military capability, reached out to frontline Eastern Europe, left an asymmetrical missile deal with Russia, obliterated Russian mercenaries in Syria, sold lethal weapons to Ukraine—even as the likes of James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, and an array of retired generals sermonized that Trump was a Russian “asset.” Translated that means the president who contained Putin they loathed, and the Obama presidency that empowered him they idolized.

    Snip.

    Trump is neither a traditional conservative in the Ronald Reagan mode nor a centrist establishmentarian Republican like John McCain or Mitt Romney. But he has done more culturally for the conservative cause than any president since Calvin Coolidge. Like him or not, he has appointed more constructionist federal judges at all levels than any prior Republican president in a single term.

    He likewise has been more opposed than any prior Republican to the current culture of abortion on demand. His education secretary is trying to enforce the Bill of Rights on what have become sometimes neo-fascistic college campuses, and to discourage race-based set asides and de facto discrimination on the basis of race.

    He is a defender of the police while acknowledging the need for greater oversight, and opposed both violence in the streets, and the appeasement of it by blue state governors and mayors. In some sense, there are no conservatives, either by temperament or by political ability, eager to stop the summer madness of statue toppling, arson, spiraling crime, shakedowns, cancel culture and the vows of Antifa and BLM that all this is the beginning of a complete rewriting of American history and a radical recalibration of our shared futures.

    Between the abyss and what goes on in Portland and the Magnificent Mile, there is for the moment nothing else but Trump standing in the breach.

    No president in the history of the Republic has ever been targeted for removal by the opposition party, the permanent bureaucracy, and members of his own party, and in such an illegal and unethical manner.

    There was the first impeachment effort, the Beltway punditry in early 2017 calling for his removal by coup if necessary, the voting machine suits, the Clinton-Obama-Steele subversion of the Trump campaign and transition, the Hollywood assassination chic, the effort to take out former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, the farce of the 25th Amendment that included the bathos of high federal officials contemplating wearing wires in private conservations with the president to the psychodrama of Professor Bandy Lee testifying before Congress about Trump’s mental state, the silly Emolument Clause gambit (Trump has lost over $1 billion while in office and taking no salary), the subversion of the FISA courts, the Russian hoax, Robert Mueller’s two-year long and $35 million witch hunt, the fabricated Steele dossier implanted in the bowels of the Obama government and media, the one-phone-call impeachment circus, the revolt of the retired generals, and what has rightly lately been called “coup porn,” the hysteria over Ukraine and the caricaturing of Trump in 2020 as Typhoid Mary, Herbert Hoover, and Bull Connor as the Left weaponized the contagion, quarantine, and rioting.

    The Left, the media, and the NeverTrump Right rarely now any more argue all of the above was warranted or based on verifiable wrongdoing, but see the mish-mash instead as a righteous “any means necessary” tactic to achieve the noble end of destroying a president that they detest.

    That Trump is still standing is an unrecognized tribute to his resilience, stamina, and willpower to fight it out to the bitter end.

    His critics say 2020 is not 2016. This time the polls are right on, not rigged by the sort who trafficked in absurd Russian hoaxes or were mesmerized by Michael Avanetti. The silent Trump voters no longer exist, they add. The suburban mom, we are told, fears Trump’s temper more than Antifa. The fence-sitter is bothered more by tweeting than Biden’s ever-longer moments of confused silence. And on and on.

    Perhaps.

    But Americans at some point empathize with an underdog fighter on behalf of what they fear may be a fading America, even someone they are not always fond of, but who does not give up when bullied and subjected to a level of unwarranted abuse that they themselves know they could never endure. The Left never wished to beat Trump at the polls (indeed they feared such an ordeal); they instead wanted to destroy his person, his family, and everyone who followed him.

    That Trump withstood such illegal, unconstitutional, and unethical venom also says something about those who dished it out—and, in the end, did so viciously and yet so impotently.

  • “I think the Democrats want Trump to win“:

    One of the more perplexing things was the DNC giving a speaking slot to former Ohio governor and noted mailman’s son John Kasich. Kasich brings slightly less excitement than dryer lint to any gathering he graces but what was most amusing was that during the somnambulant lead-up to the DNC, the Democrats were acting like Kasich was a real big get for them.

    He’s a milquetoast squish Republican whom no Republicans like anymore, so he tucked tail and went begging for attention crumbs from the Democrats, which is the way of the spineless squishes. After backstabbing his own party to score points with the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the media, Kasich then — as Matt details at Townhall — crapped all over his hosts by disparaging Bartender of the Year Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

  • Speaking of the Russian collusion hoax, Kevin Clinesmith, the now Ex-FBI lawyer near the center of Crossfire Hurricane, just pled guilty, “admitting that he altered an email that he used to apply for a FISA warrant against former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page…The guilty plea marks the first conviction in the probe of the Russia investigation led by U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham.”
  • A bit more Clinesmith background:

    Of all of the Obama administration loyalists who contributed to the Russia collusion hoax, Clinesmith is the one most obviously guilty of a felony: he altered an email he received from the CIA to say that Carter Page was NOT a CIA source, when in fact the email said Page WAS a CIA source, and submitted that fake document to the federal court in order to obtain a FISA warrant. That is worth five years in prison and, of course, the end of his legal career. Clinesmith’s guilty plea is significant, in part, because he may be willing to implicate others who are higher in the DOJ chain of command.

  • Soon:

  • Ninth Circuit Court rules that magazine limit bans are an unconstitutional infringement of the Second Amendment. “It should be noted that this will likely go to a full hearing of the 9th Circuit, but it also should be noted that the court is now majority Republican-appointed. If a full hearing brings the same result, then this all but forces Chief Justice John Roberts to stop being a coward and to take this up.” Flipping the Ninth is a huge achievement for the Trump Administration.
  • The Supreme Court declines to stop construction of the border wall.
  • “The Hint is ‘GET _ _ _ _ GO _ _ _ _ _.’ “Nike Suffers $790 Million Loss, CEO Confirms Layoffs.”
  • Goodyear goes full Social Justice Warrior, allows #BlackLivesMatter, bans Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. Now swears it was all a mistake.
  • Democrats remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. How long until they cut the “flag,” “republic,” “one nation,” and “liberty” parts out as well and just pledge directly to Social Justice? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Democratic big money donor Ed Buck hit with four more felony charges.
  • Wait, the government can secretly plant cameras on your property as long as they’re outside?
  • Scott “I ordered my cops to let Parkland kids die” Israel defeated in his attempt to win his old job back.
  • Microsoft put off a Day Zero fix for two years.
  • A thread on how lack of concrete engineering know-how in the third world has led to numerous deaths. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Heh:

  • True dat:

  • Boom:

  • “Democratic Convention Viewer Wishing They Would Just Get To The Part About All The Free Stuff”
  • “Brilliant Trump Puts Himself On All Postage Stamps, Forcing Democrats To Push For Abolishing USPS.”
  • Presumably an Acme piano:

  • Repeat: “DNC Crowd Erupts As Kermit Gosnell Gives Surprise Speech From Prison.”
  • “Might I suggest the Faceripper 9000?”
  • “I am Mark Zuckerberg. I am human just like you.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Smart dog:

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Republicans, Supreme Court | 1 Comment »

    Austin Police Defunding/Homeless Update

    August 20th, 2020

    In a follow-up to last week’s police defunding story, here are a few tidbits of Austin news related to police defunding, Adler’s bumsvilles, etc.

  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he will freeze property taxes for cities that defund the police.

    “[T]hey will lose the lifeblood of the revenues they receive from property taxes in Texas,” Abbott explained. “What this does, in English, is it is going to defund cities and cities’ ability to operate at all if they try to defund law enforcement.

    “We believe in law enforcement in Texas and we are not going to allow a replication of the types of policies we’ve seen destroying cities like Seattle and Portland and others.”

    Abbott accused such liberal precincts of “caving to the forces of socialism” even as crime increases, and added that some are allowing their municipalities to be “hijacked.”

    “So Texas is laying down a marker and that is, whether it be the city of Austin or another city, such actions are not going to be tolerated. In Texas, we embrace law enforcement, we will not accept turning power over to these socialistic forces that seek to abandon the rule of law and abandon the law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line to keep our communities safe.”

    However, unlike Abbott’s various Wuhan Coronavirus mandates, this will require the Texas legislature to enact, which won’t happen until next year. And Socialist Austin city councilman Greg Casar says it won’t deter his anti-police agenda.

  • Meanwhile, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell blasted Austin’s defunding vote and asked Gov. Abbott to send more law enforcement. “In the correspondence, Gravell blasts Austin City Council members for cuts to the Austin Police Department valued at $150 million — including some $20 million in immediate budget cuts and a transfer of several departments away from police oversight to civilian functions, such as interacting with the homeless and dealing with mental health-related cuts.”

    It always seems to go back to the decision to make Austin bumsville, doesn’t it?

  • Brad Johnson of The Texan brings us news of what a trash heap Adler’s bums have made of the Windsor Park area of east Austin:

    “There were thousands of pounds of trash, human waste, and needles washing through our backyards and the creek bed.”

    Kevin Ludlow struck a nerve after posting his time-lapse video of the Windsor Park creek, which runs from Cameron Rd., into the neighborhood behind Ludlow’s house, and continues east. It even runs past a new community pool and water park.

    The video in question:

    The portion of creek bed which runs the length of the Heritage at Hillcrest apartment complex, behind his back yard, and down a couple of blocks further is prime real estate for the city’s growing homeless population because of its shade and relative seclusion.

    Since the beginning of 2020, Ludlow noted the population of homeless individuals living in the creek bed grew to a few hundred people until its apex a couple of weeks ago. A storm came on July 31, causing the creek to flood and wash the piles of debris further down the area.

    The issues that have arisen downtown and in the city’s business-heavy districts have been well-documented, but it has extended beyond these areas.

    Snip.

    In his video, Ludlow was able to record footage of campers smoking crack and shooting up heroin. Multiple times, campers became confrontational over his documentation.

    He added that because regular syringes can be hard to come by, campers turn to insulin needles — which are much smaller both in length and tip — of which he’s found numerous on the ground.

    He underscored, “I’m a pretty progressive-left guy, but [allowing homeless camping] has helped nobody, especially the homeless.”

    Snip.

    Back in October, Austin Police Department Chief Brian Manley reported statistics showing a 15 percent increase in violent crimes wherein both the victim and the suspect were homeless from July through September of 2019 compared with the same time frame the previous year.

    Austin’s homeless problem has been growing for decades, but a watershed moment occurred last year.

    In June of 2019, the Austin City Council approved the rescission of its public camping and lying ban. It went into effect in July and has led to a massive uptick in the unsheltered homeless population ever since, as more transients made camp on public property ranging anywhere from parks, sidewalks, underpasses, and more.

    The city’s stated intention was that the policy change would bring the homeless population into sheltered facilities wherein they could receive whatever aid they needed.

    In this year’s homeless population survey, the city recorded a 45 percent increase in its unsheltered population and an 11 percent decrease in those sheltered. There was an unmistakable incentive to leave shelters or the woods and live on the streets.

    The city eventually reinstated some of the restrictions in place before July 2019 but stopped well short of fully reinstating the ban. The issue has grown substantially and fractured the community and its elected council considerably.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Speaking of crime and the homeless:

  • Things that make you go “hmmmm”: “Austin council member Jimmy Flannigan has received more than $17,000 in contributions from members of a real estate development company that has worked on several city projects, as well as a lobbying firm that has many real estate, business and events clients, according to his latest campaign finance report.”
  • Speaking of Jimmy Flannigan:

    “Funding that upholds our dignity.” What bilious, gaseous nonsense. What he probably meant to say is “the graft that lines our pockets.”

  • Cahnman floats a radical solution: revoke the City of Austin’s charter, abolish the city council and have functions carried out by the county and state.

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Texas | No Comments »

    How Democrats Abandoned the Working Class To Embrace The Technocratic Elite

    August 19th, 2020

    Thought about saving this Thomas Greene piece for the next BidenWatch, but I think it’s strong enough to be worth linking to on its own:

    The Bronx of my childhood was a paradise. My street ran parallel to a section of the old Croton Aqueduct, by then long disused, which we kids called the Ackey. Along its banks grew trees and bushes and wild flowers forming a ribbon of thicket in which we played, and through which we “hiked.”

    We were always in the street. We learned our games and rhymes by word of mouth, from older to younger. We chose our adventures and settled disputes among ourselves. We played stick ball and ringolevio and skully, red rover and stoop ball, and a deliciously sadistic variety of Johnny on a pony. We raced about on noisy cheap skates with metal wheels.

    In this urban sanctuary I grew up safe, loved, happy, and unmistakably working class, yet somehow I slipped away. I was reared to become an ironworker or electrician, but I managed to pass through a posh New England liberal arts college and end up a tech journalist and author. I’ve worked unsupervised, chiefly from home, since the 1990s.

    Most of my relatives and old neighborhood friends hate people like me. And I don’t blame them. Most are lifelong Democrats, yet they voted for Donald Trump, and will again, and I can’t blame them for that, either. Let me explain.

    My career is the product of an economic revival engineered by the center-right New Democrats of the Clinton era and subsequent administrations. I’ve observed the tech industry for two decades; it’s a job, but it’s hardly work: I’m a nerd; I like science, technology, and medicine. Right now, I couldn’t be more comfortable in lockdown. Amazon supplies my dry goods while a friendly driver brings my groceries. My family and I are safe. No one comes near us without a mask. I control my environment; I choose the people in whose presence I’ll work, if any. I can smoke and drink on the job if I please. So long as I honor my deadlines and file clean copy, no one has anything to say about it. Tech’s been good to me.

    But the guy I was expected to become walks beside me like an imaginary friend I never outgrew. I think about him often — daily, if I’m honest. He commutes by bus, encountering irresponsible louts who refuse to mask up. He worries about it, too. His wife, who had earned a second income, is at home supervising their kids. He lives by the lunch buzzer and the punch clock. If there’s music where he works, it’s amplified by cheap, overdriven speakers and the genre will suit him only by chance. The temperature and ambient noise and lighting were calibrated by industrial psychologists. He can’t evade disagreeable co-workers. He’s paid far less than a family wage, but he’s got no health coverage or pension. He endures daily uncertainty about his family’s needs. Why should he not hate me? I would hate me if I were him.

    He and millions of others failed to thrive in the tech economy, but that was a feature, not a bug. Blue-collar Americans were never going to adapt, despite the assurances of New Economy cheerleaders, many of whom were in government. Factories closed and data centers opened. Dotcom outfits traded on nothing more than an online presence, which somehow made sense to us. The New Democrats exalted capital both tangible and intellectual, and devalued labor, as if they’d been old-school Establishment Republicans. They fawned over Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Andy Grove the way one imagines Calvin Coolidge gushing about Rockefellers and Morgans, Vanderbilts and Astors.

    A high-tech meritocracy would lead America in a better direction, and the need was urgent. The Old Economy was failing, undeniably. It was time to re-formulate it with a progressive veneer: no more dirty factories or pollution; NAFTA would ship that mess abroad. America would subsist on green energy, outsourcing, financial services, the sacrament of e-commerce, and high-tech gadgets: a middle-class Valhalla governed by upper-middle-class trustees from the best schools. There would be no need for troublesome relics like labor unions; the virtuous nature of technological progress would itself ensure quality jobs and dignity for workers. Plentiful consumer credit would replace the family wage and health-care benefits. Blue-collar America would suffer collateral damage, but too much was at stake; it would be a necessary sacrifice. And of course we’d be gentle; we were Democrats and nerds, after all.

    Big Tech was hardly the sole disruptor, but the New Democrats fell for, and amplified, Silicon Valley’s specific flavor of empty promises wrapped in technobabble. “Delivering the ____ of the future,” they said. We got e-this and i-that and smart everything else. It had a wholesome ring and implied that Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan were finally in charge. The progressive, sciency veneer gave cover to other mega-rackets with less compelling legends, enabling them to fleece their workers and consumers too. Soon everyone was delivering the ____ of the future.

    The Democratic Party divorced its industrial, unionized base and married its Silicon Valley mistress. It had once believed in collective bargaining. It had once believed that workers were an essential part of a healthy economy and worthy of respect. There was a time when a US president, like Harry Truman, might entertain a labor activist, like Walter Reuther, amiably in the Oval Office. But the Party had fallen hard for its tech darlings and began to dream of a meritocracy based on steadily-increasing knowledge, intelligence, and creativity that would lift us all toward self-realization as we bathed in the restorative glow of our screens. In other words, Democrats put their faith in social vaporware. Old-Economy workers would be “rehabilitated,” language implying that they might be more intellectually challenged than unlucky. “Euthanized” would be a more honest word. The former lower-middle and working classes would listen to two decades of meritocratic cant while their standards of living would fall steadily with no ground floor in sight. They were never a priority.

    Snip.

    No one bears greater responsibility for the lack of empathy toward Old-Economy workers that led to Donald Trump’s victory than big-name Tech darlings and the New Democrats who coddled them, then openly ridiculed their own voter base: the people Hillary foolishly nicknamed “Deplorables;” that is, the millions of disappointed Obama voters who would happily have voted blue if they’d had confidence that the party would respect them, welcome them, and acknowledge their needs. But the New Economy is a gated community, shut firmly to them, whose most strenuous boosters have been the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations. Old-school, working-class Democrats are unwelcome in the party they built. No one wants them tracking mud through the salon.

    Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the swing states the same way Barack Obama had: by characterizing her as disdainful toward blue-collar Americans. It was a potent message among those who once had seen decent wages in return for honest work, lately reduced to Walmart greeters and Uber drivers. Humiliated by a labor market in which they had nothing to trade, the former working class understood that they also had nothing to lose. Liberal democracy and its supporting institutions shed their veneer of sanctity when dead-end employees can aspire only to dead-end management gigs. Call them “associates” and “technicians” all you want; they know who they’ve become and what others think of them. They are why Trump won in the swing states; he was propelled to victory by disillusioned Obama voters. They gleefully chanted “lock her up” not because they thought Hillary was an actual criminal, but because they knew what her election would bring them: four or eight more years of economic and social stagnation to top off the twenty they’d already been through.

    They elected Donald once and they will try to again. He is scornful and vicious. He despises openly. He snarls and barks. He will make a pig’s breakfast of everything he touches, but here’s the thing everyone misses: educated elites will feel the hardship he causes more acutely than the millions of workers who have already adapted to pittance wages, dead-end careers, and chronic disrespect. They’ve endured two decades of it; they can cope. They’re betting that liberal snowflakes like me can’t.

    Trump will not be defeated by educating voters, by exposing his many foibles and inadequacies. Highlighting what’s wrong with him is futile; his supporters didn’t elect him because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. Trump is an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has positioned him as a tragic force-multiplier on a scale that few could have predicted.

    A few observations:

  • Moore’s Law was always going to change the shape of the world, but there was no reason it had to involve outsourcing so much of America’s manufacturing to China.
  • Outrageous union contracts that turned companies into giant pension and medical-providers that incidentally made crappy cars and which made American products noncompetitive on the international market were always going to have to be renegotiated. Tariffs were not going to change the fact that Detroit was making garbage in the 1970s while Honda, Toyota and Volkswagen were turning out high quality affordable cars.
  • No mention of coal, oil and gas, and fracking save a passing mention of “green” energy. All high paying blue collar jobs that Democrats want to destroy.
  • Also missing from the piece: Any mention of an unchecked stream of illegal aliens undermining the wages for blue collar jobs. Roofing and landscaping used to be respectable jobs Americans took that are now filled overwhelmingly by illegal aliens. That was not inevitable either, but the result of government, big business and Democrats refusing to enforce border controls.

    • All that said, he’s right about the overwhelming contempt the Democratic establishment has shown toward the very people who used to make up their base. In the 1950s, Democrats aimed their political pitch at blue collar guys who brought a lunch pail to work every day. In 2020, they seem to be aiming their political pitch at woke liberal arts majors screaming obscenities into cops’ faces.

    Much the same open contempt was on display in the UK’s Labour Party over Brexit, which helps explain how they were wiped out in last year’s election.

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections | 3 Comments »

    Republican Kim Klacik Slams The Democrats Running Baltimore

    August 18th, 2020

    This is one hell of an effective political ad:

    You might remember Kimberly Klacik’s name from these 2019 videos featuring the filth and squalor of West Baltimore. She’s running against Democrat Kweisi Mfume to represent Maryland’s 7th congressional district, the one previously represented by the late Elijah Cummings. Her website is here.

    (Hat tip: txpoliticjunkie.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, video, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

    BidenWatch for August 17, 2020

    August 17th, 2020

    The Virtual DNC starts today, voters are not sold on Slow Joe, Team Obama thinks he’s an idiot, he hates the Second Amendment, and we harvest a week’s worth of Kamala Harris bashing. Plus a whole bunch of the Babylon Bee. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • The virtual Democratic National Convention starts today. Finally, a political event that combines the dignity of a Zoom meeting with the raw excitement of a Zoom meeting.
  • Swing voters are not sold on Biden.
    • Many of these voters prioritize the economy as their #1 issue in this election and continue to trust Trump on that issue, saying the economy was doing well before the pandemic.
    • In addition to improving the economy and trying to bring more jobs to the U.S., Jeff O. said he’s picking Trump because “I don’t think that Biden is mentally capable of being president.”
    • Matt T. described Biden as “up there in age” and “showing signs of dementia” as well as “a puppet” who is “controlled by a lot of people in the deep state.” He went on to define that term as “the lobbyists, the people that have the big money, the people that have influence on a lot of the politicians.”
  • Just who is running against Trump?

    As we enter the final 90 days of the November presidential campaign, a few truths are crystalizing about the “Biden problem,” or the inability of a 77-year-old Joe Biden to conduct a “normal” campaign.

    Biden’s cognitive challenges are increasing geometrically, whether as a result of months of relative inactivity and lack of stimulation or just consistent with the medical trajectory of his affliction. His lot is increasingly similar to historical figures such as 67-year-old President William Henry Harrison, William Gladstone’s last tenure as prime minister, Chancellor Hindenburg, or Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944—age and physical infirmities signaling to the concerned that a subordinate might assume power sooner than later.

    Snip.

    So we are witnessing a campaign never before experienced in American history and not entirely attributable to the plague and quarantine. After all, the fellow septuagenarian Trump, with his own array of medical challenges, insists upon frenetic and near-constant public appearances. His opponent is a noncandidate conducting a noncampaign that demands we ask the question, who exactly is drafting the Biden agenda and strategy? Or, rather, who or what is Biden, if not a composite cat’s paw of an anonymous left-wing central committee?

    When Biden speaks for more than a few minutes without a script or a minder in his basement, the results are often racist of the sort in the Black Lives Matter era that otherwise would be rightly damned and called out as disqualifying. If his inner racialist persona continues to surface, Biden’s insensitivities threaten to expose a muzzled BLM as a mere transparent effort to grab power rather than to address “systemic racism” of the sort the exempt Biden seems to exude.

    Biden needs the minority vote in overwhelming numbers, as he realized in his late comeback in the primaries. But the continuance of his often angry, unapologetic racialist nonsense suggests that his cognitive issues trump his political sense of self-control.

    The inner Biden at 77 is turning out to be an unabashed bigot in the age of “cancel culture” and thought crimes that has apparently declared him immune from the opprobrium reserved for any such speech.

    For Biden, if any African American doesn’t vote for him, then “you ain’t black”—a charge fired back at black podcaster with near venom. Biden more calmly assures us, in his all-knowing Bideneque wisdom, that Americans can’t tell Asians in general apart—channeling the ancient racist trope that “they all look alike.”

    In his scrambled sociology, blacks are unimaginatively monolithic politically, while Latinos are diverse and more flexible. Biden seems to have no notion that “Latino” is a sort of construct to encompass everyone from a Brazilian aristocrat to an immigrant from the state of Oaxaca, and not comparable to the more inclusive and precise term “African American.” Moreover, while the black leadership in Congress may be politically monolithic, there are millions of blacks who oppose abortion, defunding the police, and illegal immigration.

  • Not to put too fine a point on it, but Team Obama thinks Joe Biden is an idiot:

    You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before.

    Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.

    Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who was known for his mind-meld with the president, wrote in his memoir that “in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”

    Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”

    Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”

  • More on the same subject: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Kamala Harris on the Ticket Is an In-Kind Donation to Trump-Pence 2020“:

    What Harris Brings to the Ticket

    Baggage, for starters. Enough baggage to fill a fleet of 747s. Tyler goes over much of it here and here.

    Harris has been a, shall we say, problematic candidate from the get-go. Her tenures as both the district attorney in San Francisco and the attorney general of California left a lot to be desired. I wrote in a post early last year speculating that she may be her own toughest obstacle because of this:

    Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is not only running against an ever-growing field of fellow Democrats for the 2020 presidential election, but also against what may prove to be a couple of far more formidable opponents: her own records as the district attorney of San Francisco and later the attorney general of California.

    What’s problematic for Harris is that the people who have the most problems with her records are the very progressives she seeks to secure as her base.

    A Capitol Hill friend of mine joked that Harris on the ticket might put California in play for the Republicans, which serves as a humorous segue to the next point here.

    Conventional wisdom dictates that the out-of-power party’s nominee chooses a running mate that can deliver votes from a part of the country that the candidate needs.

    Spoiler alert: California’s electoral votes were already Biden’s.

    From a practical, electoral vote standpoint, Harris brings nothing to the ticket. The deep blue states that were already going to vote for der Bidengaffer are still going to vote for him. Does anyone really think that she is going win over hearts and minds in swing states?

    Let us not forget that Harris is available for this gig because she was the biggest flop of the “top-tier” (her words) candidates to have to leave the race (no, Beto was never top-tier). She may have lasted until December of 2019 but I was already doing a Kamala campaign deathwatch in September on the Morning Briefing after the big Dem donors fled her in droves.

  • “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deploy the Charlottesville hoax to stir up racial pain and anger.”

    I saw in a tweet that he was forefronting the Charlottesville “fine people” hoax. On his first day of campaigning with his running mate, he led with that. I say “he,” but I don’t really believe it’s him. I think it’s more likely that he’s a foggy-minded figurehead, and other people have decided to frame the message like that. I consider these people — whoever they are — despicable. They have chosen quite deliberately to commit to a lie that is intended to make black people feel hated and they are doing it for political gain.

    As my earlier post about the tweet says, I blogged in April 2019, “If Biden does not come forward and retract [a video relying on the Charlottesville hoax] and apologize and commit himself to making amends, I consider him disqualified. He does not have the character or brain power to be President.” Now, more than a year later, Biden has done the opposite. He’s doubled down on the lie and he’s making it the centerpiece of his campaign!

  • The truth about Biden is getting out:

    Somehow, despite the press blockade, word about Joe Biden has gotten out. Rasmussen got this stunning poll result: 59% of respondents don’t think Biden will be around to finish a four-year term, should he be elected. And it isn’t only Republicans who doubt that Biden will be well enough to serve out a term in office. Forty-nine percent of Democrats agree that if Biden wins, it is likely his vice-president will assume the office within four years. No wonder Biden’s handlers are pondering his Veep selection carefully!

    Bear in mind that it is only August. Most people haven’t yet begun paying attention to politics. The public’s perception that Joe Biden is more or less incapacitated will only grow as voters see him in action and begin following events more closely. Of course, the Democrats want to make this year’s election a referendum on President Trump, whom they think they have fatally weakened with non-stop smears over the last four years. They might be right. But I seriously doubt that a majority of Americans will vote for a candidate whom they rightly see as suffering from seriously diminished capacities. Which raises once again the question whether Biden will actually be on the ballot in November.

    Slow Joe is going to stay in hiding for as long as possible.

    Joe Biden isn’t leaving his Delaware home for the campaign trail anytime soon.

    The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is gearing up to step into the spotlight when he announces his vice presidential pick and accepts the party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention this month. But don’t expect a dramatic shift from Biden away from what Republicans tease is his “basement bunker” strategy to that of a news-cycle warrior in the months before Election Day.

    When the coronavirus pandemic first shut down normal life in March, political observers immediately wondered how Biden would be able to campaign effectively while cooped up in his basement. A few months later, after he secured a new in-home studio, started a steady stream of digital events, and rose in the polls, Democrats warmed to his low-key campaign while letting President Trump deal with negative press. Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said in June that Biden is “fine in the basement.”

    There was a sense, though, that eventually, in the heat of the fall campaign season, Biden would assume a higher profile in the daily news cycle.

    But there are indications that the low-key style could be here to stay.

    Snip.

    His style is so understated lately that journalists have started hinting annoyance that Biden is not participating in tough national interviews. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said on-air last month that Biden is due for more press exposure. Following a tense interview Trump did with Axios’s Jonathan Swan, several journalists questioned whether the campaign would allow Swan to interview Biden.

    So far that’s a big N O from Slow Joe’s campaign…

  • The Biden campaign raised $26 million in fundraising in the 24 hours after the Harris veep pick. The donor class loves it when Biden follows the script…
  • Kurt Schlichter unloads on the Harris pick:

    All across America, little girls of alternatively Tamil and Afro-Caribbean descent, depending on which is most politically useful at the moment, who have been endlessly told by unspecified haters that they can never be nominated to be vice president, were inspired at Kamala Harris’ selection by whoever selected her on behalf of Grandpa Badfinger. Yes, if they hook up with a powerful married Democrat man, that initial connection can fuel their rise to power too.

    Take that, all you modern-day Bull Connors (Connor was a Democrat, but shhhhhhh)! “I won’t cotton to them little girls of alternatively Tamil and Afro-Caribbean descent, depending on which is most politically useful at the moment, thinkin’ they can be vice president someday,” they drawl as they twirl their mustaches. Well, Kamala showed all the haters. Girls of that oddly specific demographic can be nominated to be vice president, and let’s take it one step further – they don’t even have to hook up with a powerful married Democrat man and fuel their rise to power via that initial connection to do it! Well, sure Kamala did, and so did the ethnically uninteresting Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, but those little girls can do it themselves. Well, maybe if they are Republicans.

    And speaking of Sarah Palin, it’s great to see that it’s once again bad to criticize a woman running for vice president.

    Now, criticizing Kamala (pronounced “i wil pr?’ nouns h?r nam ene wa i dam wel plez”) Harris has been officially declared racist and cisgender and sexist, as well as sexist, cisgender, and racist, by The New York Times, all of pinko Twitter, and the Fredocons, so we better not criticize her. Got that? No criticism. You must just sit back and let the tsunami of excitement created by the nomination of this avaricious grasper wash over you.

  • A recap of how Biden got here. “Biden will be the oldest nominee either party has ever had, and would be the oldest occupant of the White House ever on the day he took the oath. But the younger voters who preferred [Bernie] Sanders did not turn out in significant numbers during the primaries, a fact Sanders himself acknowledged.”
  • Here’s a detailed breakdown of Biden’s hostility to the Second Amendment, including banning import of some AR-pattern rifles and regulating existing rifles.
    

  • Harris doesn’t want you to own a gun either.
  • Reminder: Harris wants to eliminate private health insurance.
  • More on the “Crooked Cop” theme:

  • “Rose McGowan Calls Out Kamala Harris Over Harvey Weinstein: ‘How Many Predators Bankroll You?‘ “Kamala Harris accepted $2,500 from Harvey Weinstein for her re-election campaign for California attorney general in 2014. Three years later, she received another $2,500 donation from Weinstein for her bid for the U.S. Senate.”
  • CNN is all in on Kamala Harris.

    After nearly four solid years of CNN screeching about “speaking truth to power,” network staffers are poised to slink back into their usual habit of acting as pro bono spokespersons for the Democratic presidential ticket.

    Pour out a cold one for the Golden Age of Journalism.

    Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, campaigned together for the first time this week, promising followers in a socially distanced gymnasium that they will return honor and order to the United States.

    CNN employees responded to the campaign event with overwhelmingly positive reviews, singling out Harris’s performance as especially praiseworthy. Some hailed the senator’s allegedly extraordinary rhetorical talents. Some proclaimed the moment an especially historic one in American politics. Some theorized that President Trump must really be scared now. Others marveled simply at what a wonderful smile Harris has.

    This is all on top of the fact that many of these same CNN staffers are already awestruck by how incredible and historic it is that Biden picked a woman of color to be his running mate.

    “I thought Kamala Harris gave a fantastic speech,” said CNN senior political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson. “She absolutely nailed it. I think this is one of the finest performances I’ve seen her deliver in terms of a speech. She has tremendous range as a speaker.”

    It goes on like that for quite a while, each sentence more reverential and cloying than the last.

    All true. But did any expect otherwise? I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any member of the Democratic Media Complex who’s expressed the slightest reserve about Harris. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Heh:

  • No campaign surrogates on Sunday news shows before the “convention.”


    

  • Never forget that Kamala Harris was a ringleader in the attempted Bret Kavanaugh chracter assassination.

    Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., used the Kavanaugh nomination in 2018 as a springboard for her failed presidential campaign. Focusing on her support for abortion and position on the Senate Judiciary Committee that handled the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Harris strongly opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination within moments of it being announced, and long before she had a chance to review his record.

    She joined other Democratic presidential hopefuls on the steps of the Supreme Court the next day to further express her opposition. She ran 3,600 different advertisements on Facebook before the second round of hearings began in late September 2018.

    “Her performance during the Kavanaugh circus stood out as particularly demagogic, cynical & abysmal,” wrote TownHall political editor Guy Benson.

    Within a few seconds of the first hearings being gaveled to order, Harris interrupted the proceedings in an attempt to shut them down on procedural grounds, part of a coordinated attack that included attempts by hundreds of compensated activists to get arrested.

    Harris, a former prosecutor, led a line of questioning that was an obvious attempt to put Kavanaugh in a perjury trap, albeit a trap he was able to avoid. Harris began by asking Kavanaugh if he had ever discussed Robert Mueller, the special counsel then investigating the Trump presidential campaign, with anyone.

    (Hat tip: Sean Davis.)

  • Biden’s positions on tech. He gives lip-service to the corpse of net neutrality, but he has no problem sucking up to donors who hate it (like Comcast). Doesn’t sound like he wants to keep Trump tariffs on China either, which I’m sure will also please many big business donors…
  • Talcum X 2018: “No way I’m supporting Harris & Biden.” Talcum X 2020: “Man, I love me some Harris and Biden!”
  • Bernie Sanders’ national press secretary is not enthused at the Harris pick:

    Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ former National press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray criticized 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for selecting Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate.

    After the news broke that Biden selected Harris to be his running mate, Joy Gray labeled Harris as America’s “top cop” and blasted the Democratic party.

    “We are in the midst of the largest protest movement in American history, the subject of which is excessive policing, and the Democratic Party chose a ‘top cop’ and the author of the Joe Biden crime bill to save us from Trump. The contempt for the base is, wow,” Joy Gray said.

    Of course, the Social justice Warriors only think they’re the base. The fact Sanders got his ass kicked by Slow Joe proves otherwise…

  • Ouch!

  • “Beautiful golden hair on the Delaware Biden!”

  • Cruel but fair:

  • Heh:

  • Heh 2:

  • I chuckled:

  • “Concerns Raised As President Xi Seen Wearing Biden-Harris 2020 Shirt.
  • “Party Of The Poor And Oppressed Nominates Old, Rich, White Man And Cop.”
  • “‘I Don’t Need A Cognitive Test!’ Biden Screams At Pigeon.”
  • “Kamala Harris Sneaks Into White House To Plant Weed On Mike Pence.”
  • “Report: Kamala Harris Already Vetting VP Picks.”
  • “Biden: ‘A Black Woman Will Become President Over My Dead Body.'”
  • Zing!

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Guns, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    Scenes From The Destruction of New York City

    August 16th, 2020

    The New York City riots were just a blip in the largest series of coordinated antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots sweeping the country then, but this video indicates that the looting and destruction in de Blasio’s New York City was far more more extensive than the media let on.

    I had a friend who recently visited NYC, and he says from the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg Bridge through lower Manhattan almost everything was still boarded up and covered with graffiti, with lots of trash on the sidewalk. “Looked like a scene from an early Scorsese movie.” Is it any wonder that people are fleeing the city in droves?

    It’s not just a few Upper West Siders who are fleeing New York: Moving companies say they’re swamped with calls from residents looking to ditch the city — even though the COVID crisis has waned.

    One likely reason: The virus was but the last straw; New Yorkers are fed up with the shootings and lootings, homelessness on the streets, sub-par online schools, sky-high taxes and the sheer obliviousness of pols like Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

    Snip.

    It’s been “insanely busy,” Roadway Moving president Ross Sapir told Fox. Indeed, he says this has been the busiest summer ever for the company. “For the last three months, we couldn’t keep up with demand.”

    Oz Moving says the number of relocations continues to rise at a “substantial rate.” It was booked to capacity earlier in the year than in any of the previous 27 years.

    United Van Lines, too, cites a whopping 95 percent spike, year over year, in interest in moving out of Manhattan between May and July, versus just 19 percent nationally.

    Sure, many of those who’ve headed out were merely trying to escape COVID, which socked the city in the spring. Some may even return; a reported spike in storage-space business is a sign they will.

    Yet the fact that the rush for the exits continues to grow, even as new coronavirus cases have plummeted, suggests other reasons. Like the crime wave: The number of shootings per day, for instance, has doubled since last year. Other crimes are up, too.

    City and state officials have fueled crime, setting inmates at jails and prisons free and handcuffing cops, and they refuse to do anything meaningful to roll it back. Prosecutors, too, are declining to prosecute. Judges are letting suspects walk.

    Last month, Bronx Criminal Court Judge Jeanine Johnson released an illegal-immigrant rape suspect, on no bail. Last year, she let a convicted killer and reputed gangbanger walk bail-free after a gun bust.

    Quality of life has plunged, as well. Even the owner of an Upper West Side hotel the city’s now using to house homeless derelicts has put his nearby mansion up for sale, as The Post reports Wednesday.

    Lousy schools and even worse online classes provide yet another reason for folks to skedaddle.

    Ditto for high taxes, which de Blasio — and fellow Democrats in the Legislature — are itching to raise even more.

    It’s so bad that Andrew Cuomo is begging rich New Yorkers to return.

    It took 30 years and Rudy Giuliani to rescue New York City from its reputation as a crime-ridden hellhole. It’s taken Bill di Blasio, George Soros and one disasterous year to undo all that.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, video | 3 Comments »

    Austin City Council Steps Up War On Austin Citizens

    August 15th, 2020

    The Austin City Council’s determination to destroy the city’s quality of life in an apparent effort to make Austin as dysfunctional a hellhole as San Francisco or Portland continues apace:

    After recent nationwide riots and lawlessness have left a trail of burned cities, destroyed livelihoods, and murdered citizens, Democrat local officials in Texas’ capital city are pushing further by slashing a third of the local police budget.

    On Thursday, the all-Democrat Austin City Council voted unanimously to take away $150 million from the Austin Police Department in next year’s city budget. The council decided to strip roughly $20 million immediately and spend it on other city projects, and the rest will be defunded and reallocated over the coming year.

    Among their cuts, the council removed 150 vacant police officer positions from the already understaffed department, canceled three upcoming cadet classes, and diminished APD’s overtime budget. Council members also proposed closing the police academy for a year and even demolishing the police headquarters building downtown.

    Ironically and tragically, the council is taking some of the police money and will instead spend it on killing children. Councilmember Greg Casar, a self-proclaimed socialist, said doing so will make Austin a “safer and better place to live.”

    “We did it!!” Casar tweeted after defunding the police, posting a picture proudly proclaiming, “We won.”

    Snip.

    “The council’s budget proposals continue to become more ridiculous and unsafe for Austinites,” tweeted the Austin Police Association. “They are going to ignore the majority who do not want the police defunded.”

    “The unwarranted attack by the Austin mayor and city council on their police department’s budget is no more than a political haymaker driven by the pressures of cancel culture,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a press release. “The City of Austin already struggles to combat widespread crime, violence, and homelessness. … The mayor and the city council should immediately reconsider this ill-advised effort at virtue signaling, which will endanger lives and property in Austin.”

    “Data says your recommendations have made us less safe, not more,” tweeted tech analyst Patrick Moorhead to Councilmember Casar. “[Austin is] #1 in murder growth and #3 in robberies. Why should anyone trust your new, fairytale policies? Zero effectiveness. Anywhere, any city. #SocialistPlaybook”

    Chuck DeVore has more on the madness:

    Of Texas’ six most-populous cities, five plan to increase their law enforcement budgets: Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. El Paso looked to increase its public safety budget 3%. Dallas Police Chief Hall emphasized countering violent crime while also “reimagining public safety.” Houston budgeted a 2% increase to its police department while San Antonio considered a 1.6% increase.

    But Austin just approved a $150 million cut to its police budget. Shifts in funding account for about $80 million, with the funds going to other departments, such as forensics and the 9-1-1 call center.

    As for the other $70 million in cuts to public safety in Austin, here’s where things get weird.

    More than $21 million in cuts come in the form of an amendment from Councilmember Greg Casar and include cancelling the three planned 2021 police cadet classes, reducing overtime by $2.8 million, and cutting supplies. Cutting overtime while reducing staffing will be especially difficult, as overtime typically results when an understaffed agency has to deploy existing personnel for more hours than anticipated.

    The remaining more than $49 million in cuts, also by Casar, comes under the rubric of “Reimagine Safety Fund.” It includes ongoing annual cuts of $3 million from overtime, $2.2 million from the mounted patrol, $1.3 million from the organized crime K-9 unit (drug interdiction), $279,086 from the police explorers program for youth ages 14 to 20, $18.5 million from traffic enforcement, $2 million from the regional intelligence center (focused on detecting, preventing, apprehending, and responding to criminal and terrorist activity), $10.7 million from training (which is odd, given the almost universal agreement that more police training is needed to avoid the potential for police abuse), $3.6 million from recruitment, and $7.3 million in reductions to the specialized units that patrol the lake and the parks.

    Of the cuts, $21.5 million is shifted in the form of “reinvestments” to programs such as $100,000 for abortion access and $6.5 million a year for the homeless under the “Housing First” policy of sheltering and feeding the homeless, with no expectation for them to seek treatment—essentially allowing them to live off taxpayer support until they die.

    So, “defund the police” looks like fewer cops and more abortions. Who knew?

    Meanwhile, downtown Austin has become like a ghost town due to COVID, as white-collar professionals do much of their work remotely, only making quick trips into the city for key meetings. This has left Austin’s burgeoning homeless population short on people to ask for money. The result is increasingly dystopian, as the homeless frequently outnumber office workers on the sidewalk—with the latter trying to find a place to eat that’s still open or quickly making their way to the parking garage, while the former call after them for drug and alcohol money.

    Snip.

    Austin’s preening politicians are playing politics with policing. The result is predictable: police morale will suffer, officers’ effectiveness will decline, crime will rise, and more people will be killed, injured, and robbed. Welcome to your brave new, post-logic world.

    This despite the fact that Austin is experiencing the largest increase in its homicide rate of any major U.S. city and that polls repeatedly show that Austinites don’t want the police defunded.

    Is it any surprise that the attrition rate in the Austin police department has more than doubled since 2017?

    The cherry on top: The just-cancelled cadet class would have been 51% minorities. (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)

    This is what happens when you put the hard left in positions in power, when raking off the graft and waging cultural Marxism against “class enemies” like police and the middle class is more important than public safety.

    “Prepper Dad” and KR Training firearms instructor Paul Martin suggests two organizations Austinites worried about this decision might consider joining:

  • Save Austin Now
  • The Greater Austin Crime Commission

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for August 14, 2020

    August 14th, 2020

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Peace has unexpectedly broken out in the Middle East, the science behind Beirut’s big boom, and more Democrats destroying their own cities.

    It’s supposed to hit 105°F in Austin today. Stay frosty…

  • President Donald Trump helped broker a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates that includes fully normalized diplomatic relations.

    If Obama had done this, it would be front page news on every paper in America proclaiming what a “historic” peacemaker Obama was. Since no Democrat can take the credit, newspapers that hate Trump and Israel have been downplaying the news as much as possible.

  • Since people are always talking about “October Surprises,” here’s a possibility: Saudi Arabia and Israel signing their own peace treaty and full diplomatic recognition. Israel and the Saudis have been secretly cooperating against the Iran-Syria axis for quite some time. And now there are public signs of a thaw, including positive depictions of Jews in a new TV drama shown on Saudi TV.
  • “Obama Horrified As Trump Undoes His Years Of Hard Work Bombing The Middle East.” “My drone strikes — all for nothing!”
  • Hydroxychloroquine cuts the death rate in countries that administer it early to Wuhan coronavirus victims. Why won’t the media report that?
  • Democrats cave on reopening schools:

    New York’s richest people have fled during the lockdowns. If their kids’ tony public schools don’t offer personal instruction or look likely to maintain the chaos of rolling lockdown brownouts, those wealthy people have better choices. They can stay in their vacation houses or newly bought mansions in states that aren’t locked down. They can hire pod teachers or private schools.

    And the longer they stay outside New York City and start to make friends and get used to a new place, the less likely they are to ever return. Cuomo is well aware of this.

    “I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You got to come back! We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over, I’ll cook!’” Cuomo revealed in a recent news conference. “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? ‘If I stay there, I’ll pay a lower income tax,’ because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”

    Reopening means swimming against their anti-Trump base and teachers union donors’ full-court press to amp school funding and slash teacher duties. That means the below-surface financial and political pressure Cuomo, Pelosi, and Schumer are under to make this kind of a reversal must be huge. It’s likely coming from not only internal polling but also early information about just how many people have left New York and New York City, as well as interpersonal intelligence from their influential social circles.

    This means three things. First, the pressure to reopen schools is on everywhere now that New York is doing it. Second, Democrats’ hard opposition to school reopenings has been politically devastating. Third, all the push polls and media scaremongering promoting the idea that most parents shouldn’t and wouldn’t send their kids back to school have failed.

  • More on New Yorkers fleeing the DeBlasio-made hellhole:

    Start spreadin’ the news, they’re leavin’ today!

    However, the people packing their bags are not coming to New York City — they’re fleeing it for good.

    Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.

    One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combating mounting crime in the well-heeled ‘hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group NYC Moms for Safer Streets, and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.

    “In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” said Carr. “Now you have all this other stuff. It’s a question for families … to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”

    She said she started planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance husband and three kids under 7.

    “We reached our New York expiration date,” the former nonprofit exec, who’d lived on the UWS since 2007, told The Post from her new home 600 miles away. “Things weren’t heading in the right direction. What we’re seeing now isn’t at all surprising.”

    Crimes committed over the past several days would’ve been unheard of a year ago in the quiet neighborhood that’s home to Lincoln Center and restaurants by Daniel Boulud. A 40-year-old woman was randomly stabbed in the 72nd Street subway station at noon Thursday; a 56-year-old man was sucker-punched while dining outdoors with his wife Wednesday night; photos were posted online of a man masturbating on the steps of the New York Historical Society; and onlookers witnessed an apparent overdose in the aisle of a Duane Reade across the street from the Lucerne Hotel.

    The Lucerne, at 79th Street and Amsterdam, and the Hotel Belleclaire, at 76th Street and Broadway, were recently converted into homeless shelters, with nearly 300 vagrants between them. Ten of the men are registered sex offenders, including convicted rapists, child molesters and child-porn possessors — all living a block away from a school playground.

    Now, with the thinnest of justifications:

  • As always, riots hurt the poor the worst. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Residents push “protestors” away from Chicago police station. “We refuse to let people come to Englewood and tear Englewood apart.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Minneapolis Forcing Riot-Wrecked Businesses To Pay Property Taxes Before Getting Permits To Rebuild.” Pay property taxes for what, since they voted to disband the police. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) (Update: Fortunately, somebody handed the City of Minneapolis a clue-by-four.)
  • “Florida Democrats aimed to register 1 million voters by now. They didn’t come close.”

    Florida Democrats have a problem: there were supposed to be more of them by now.

    Following narrow losses in 2018 races for Florida governor and U.S. Senate, Democrats emerged from the midterms with a new resolve to register more voters in the nation’s largest swing state as a path to victory in 2020. Former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, fresh off a stinging 34,000-vote loss, vowed to “flip Florida blue” by registering or “re-engaging” 1 million voters, including 200,000 new Democrats added by the Florida Democratic Party.

    But those initiatives fell well short of their goals. And with seven weeks until mail ballots go out in the Nov. 3 election between presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, Florida Republicans are closer to parity in voter registration than they’ve been in decades — a dynamic that may portend yet another hard-fought, narrowly decided presidential election.

    “We won the voter registration war,” Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters said last week.

    Voter registration — the grunt work of politics — sets the foundation for campaign season. For Florida Democrats, who historically have had a harder time turning out their voters than Republicans, it’s even more crucial.

    When former President Barack Obama first won Florida in 2008, he entered the final months of the campaign with an advantage of more than 500,000 registered Democratic voters. That lead has steadily dwindled, dropping to about 259,000 in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Florida by 112,000 votes.

    New data posted online Wednesday by the Florida Division of Elections showed that, as of July 20, when books closed on eligible voters for the upcoming Aug. 18 primary, Democrats led Republicans in the state by 240,423 people — about 5,000 fewer than at the same point in 2018.

  • South Korea plans to build F-35 aircraft carrier. Due late this decade. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Hezbollah linked to “spike in drug trafficking across the Middle East and Europe.”
  • Interesting piece on the physics of the Beirut explosion:

    The videos also show an unnervingly uniform hemisphere of white propagating outward from the blast site, a dome of vicious vapor that eventually hurtles toward every person filming and announces its arrival in the audio with a crash. This hemisphere is the pressure wave produced by the explosion.

    No, it’s not a shock wave. It’s a pressure wave, and that key difference affects the number of casualties expected. A shock wave goes from zero pressure to its absolute maximum pressure in literally zero seconds. The impact of a pressure wave is like hitting the ground after rolling down a steep cliff; the force of a shock wave is like hitting the ground after falling through the air and reaching terminal velocity. High explosives produce shock waves; low explosives, like ammonium nitrate, produce pressure waves, which have a bit of slope to their shape, a period of time over which the pressure increases more gradually.

    Shocks, because of their fascinating and complex physics, travel faster than the speed of sound, and they cause far more damage than pressure waves. Thankfully, we know this blast did not produce a shock because the speed of the water-vapor-filled white dome can be measured.

    The speed of sound in air is 343 meters per second. Based on the viewing angle and distinctive red chairs pictured in some of the later frames, I traced one of the Beirut videos posted by The Guardian to its filming location on the rooftop terrace of La Mezcaleria Rooftop Bar, and measured it to be 885 meters from the center of the blast. From that vantage, the pressure wave can be seen neatly traveling from the center of the blast first to the point halfway between the end of the pier and the edge of the long, massive gray grain silo building, a distance of 151 meters, then to the end of the pier, 262 meters, then eventually to La Mezcaleria.

    By measuring the times at which the pressure wave reaches these landmarks on the video, we know that, as it blazed down the pier, its rampage occurred at a speed of only 312 meters per second. That’s slow for a bomb. Then by the time the audible crash and mayhem reached the formerly peaceful and picturesque outdoor bar, it had slowed to at most 289 meters per second. The pressure wave, slower than the 343 meters per second speed of sound, caused destruction, horror, confusion, shattered glass, torn-apart flat surfaces, and disorientation for onlookers as their ears were subjected to the rapid pressure fluctuations. But a shock wave could have caused them to drop dead from lung trauma as they watched.

    Snip.

    Thanks to modern technology that charge size can be calculated scientifically too, even while waiting for more complete information to trickle out, using the size of the telltale crater. Analysis of the aerial photographs of the pier shows a crater in the range of 120 to 140 meters in diameter; blast physics mixed with history tell us that to carve a chunk that size from the side of the planet requires a charge equivalent to 1.7 to 5.4 million kilograms of TNT (that’s 3.8 to 11.8 million pounds for any Americans dragging their feet on converting to metric). For reference, the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 used the equivalent of 1.8 thousand kilograms of TNT. So, Beirut was at minimum a thousand times more boom than Oklahoma City.

  • Bank of Japan gives up on negative interest rates.
  • “Despite The Diplomatic Bluster, China’s State-Run Banks Are Quietly Complying With Trump’s Hong Kong Sanctions.”
  • DC comics decided it wanted to get woke, so it’s no surprise that Warner Media decided they needed massive layoffs.

    It’s a “bloodbath” at the WarnerMedia-owned DC Comics, with the Editor in Chief, the Publisher, and one third of the editorial staff sacked.

    Included in the sackings is — this is a rumor as of yet, not confirmed — leftwing SJW ideologue Andy Khouri, one of the absolute cancers killing the industry, who brought in GamerGate skel Zoe Quinn to “write” “comics” for DC, despite her having no comic book experience and no writing experience (outside Depression Quest and a failed kickstarter). Khouri filled DC’s Vertigo imprint with angry yet untalented SJW freaks; Vertigo was cancelled within a year.

    DC had already laid off people last year, and now has to cut even more. Co-publisher Dan DiDio was fired last year, leaving the other co-publisher, Jim Lee, supposedly in charge; now Jim Lee has been pushed out of that position, though he’ll probably be kept in some other role. (He’s a major comic book artist.)

    Why did this happen to DC Comics?

    Let’s ask Wonder Woman and see if she can tell us.

    Oh yeah, everyone involved in this deserved to lose their job:

  • America:

  • Driving back from a barbecue road trip Saturday, I saw a Trump 2020 billboard, which was simplicity itself:

    TRUMP: JOBS
    BIDEN: MOBS
    

  • This is pretty interesting:

  • Google puts its thumb on the scale yet again:

  • “I know just the thing to make him complete: Some bacon! I don’t know if it’s cooked, I don’t want to know if it’s cooked. All I need to know is that I get to give him some creepy bacon fingers!
  • Wants no part of the goat rodeo:

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, video, Welfare State | No Comments »

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