Lawsuit Filed Over Austin’s Refusal To Enforce Homeless Camping Ban

August 26th, 2021

Since the City of Austin is still refusing to enforce the will of voters when it comes to clearing out illegal camps of drug-addicted transients, Save Austin Now and several business owners have filed lawsuits against the city:

Two lawsuits were filed in Travis County District Court this week alleging that the City of Austin has failed to enforce the public camping ban that was reinstated back in May.

Austin voters approved the reinstatement by a wide margin after the activist group Save Austin Now collected 26,000 signatures in 50 days to place it on the ballot. Rather than implement the camping ban immediately, the city council decided to move toward a phased re-enforcement over the course of four months.

The fourth phase, begun earlier this month, was the first during which illegal campers that refused to move could be arrested. At the time of its start, numbers released by the city showed 572 warnings and 24 citations had been issued. No citations have been issued since July 20.

Since Phase 4’s beginning, some larger camps have been cleared out, but tents and encampments remain scattered throughout the city.

“That refusal leaves voters and residents of the City in the same position as they were before the ban was reinstated,” reads the first lawsuit filed by Save Austin Now co-founders Matt Mackowiak and Cleo Petricek.

The other lawsuit — filed by Headspace Salon and Co-op owner Laura North, Balance Dance Studio owner Stuart Dupuy, Dairy Queen franchisee Robert Mayfield, and Buckshot Bar owner Bob Woody — say the city’s actions have “resulted in severe business disruption.”

“[The business owners] have incurred substantial expenses to protect their property, their customers, and their clients,” it adds further.

Those businesses are requesting at most $100,000 in monetary relief along with full enforcement of the ban.

In his legal statement, Mayfield says he’s had to hire off-duty police officers as security for the establishments — to the tune of $72,000 per store per year.

I think Mayfield actually owns more Dairy Queens in the Austin area. But the two stores mentioned in the lawsuit filing are at 8728 North Lamar and 5900 Manor. Says Mayfield:

The problem is bad with homeless coming in to use the rest room and nothing more, hanging around the parking lot bothering customers, asking for money, and making DQ not a desirable place to visit. We have to run them off or real customers would not come in to the store. We have had customers harassed while in line at the drive up window.

Perhaps worst of all, it is costing us in the neighborhood of 572,000 per year, PER STORE, paid to off duty police, to keep these stores clean and inviting so that customers will visit us. Having off duty police has helped us a lot and sales are good, but at a cost that we should not have to bear. Try swallowing $140,000 per year and see what it does.

Perhaps people upset with the Austin City Council’s refusal to enforce the camping ban can organize a buycott of his Dairy Queens.

Youth Dance studio owner Stuart Dupuy had this to say about the huge problems caused by Austin’s refusal to enforce the law:

On our security cameras, we started seeing more people come up to our building at night. Someone broke through the roof, stole the cash register, and smashed the glass door on their way out. Someone stole a catalytic converter from one of our vans. We’ve been broken into three times in the past 18 months. At least once a week, we now see people park in our parking lot, and we watch a constant stream of people come up to their car from the Greenbelt or from under the overpass.

People were bathing in our exterior faucet, between our buildings. We kept putting locks on the faucets, which they would break off. Eventually we just removed the handle completely. One time a lady was bathing, while kids were there, and I asked her to leave and she started screaming at me telling me that I was going to go to Hell.

These people, ordinary Austin taxpayers and business owners, don’t seem to figure in City Council decisions at all. Only the drug-addicted transients, and the left-wing activists of the Homeless Industrial Complex who profit off them, seem to count.

One thing about these lawsuits: Discovery is going to be lit…

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Posted in Austin, Crime, Texas | 3 Comments »

Scenes From The Afghan Debacle

August 25th, 2021

I’ve finally had time to sit down and properly sift through all the grim news coming out of Afghanistan to generate this roundup.

And the news is very grim indeed. It’s hard to think of any president who could have botched the Afghan pullout as badly as the rudderless Biden Administration has.

Here is a roundup of news from Biden’s Afghanistan disaster.

  • Did the Taliban take over Afghanistan merely by telling everyone they were already in control?

    I do know enough about the war to know that when the Taliban went toe to toe with American and NATO soldiers, the Taliban got its ass kicked basically every single time. No air force, no navy, and no artillery meant that whenever the Taliban revealed themselves on the battlefield they were guaranteed to be cut to pieces by various pieces of intimidating American hardware like A-10 Warthogs or .50-caliber rifles.

    It appears the Taliban tried something different this time around. Open source reporting shows that rather than rocking up and going toe to toe with the Afghan national army, they appear to have simply called everyone in the entire country, instead, told them they were in control, and began assuming the functions of government as they went.

    Evidently a lot of this communication was done via WhatsApp.

    What I think has not been considered enough is the degree to which WhatsApp DMs were a strategic blind spot for the United States.

    The Fog of War obviously makes it impossible to know what’s happening on the ground, right now, in Afghanistan, even for observers from the military and the D.C. political apparatus who do this for a living. Recalling, however, that the U.S.’ longtime strategy for crippling an opponent begins with decapitation strikes on radar and communications infrastructure, it is fairly obvious to anyone that as far as the Taliban were concerned, this never took place. The Taliban is setting up a government fairly expeditiously. Its propaganda circulates on Twitter in plain view.

    The Taliban are thus free, and have been free for a number of years, to take their fight not to American soldiers (where they always lose) but directly to the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, all using free-to-use American internet infrastructure like Facebook and Twitter (where they have now won).

    WhatsApp is an American product. It can be switched off by its parent, Facebook, Inc, at any time and for any reason. The fact that the Taliban were able to use it at all, quite apart from the fact that they continue to use it to coordinate their activities even now as American citizens’ lives are imperiled by the Taliban advance which is being coordinated on that app, suggests that U.S. military intelligence never bothered to monitor Taliban numbers and never bothered to ask Facebook to ban them.

  • Another reason the Taliban took over so much so quickly: they paid Afghan military commanders to surrender:

    [Hollie] McKay said corruption was largely to blame for the fall of city after city to the Taliban.

    “The level of corruption within the Afghanistan military and the government, that’s how the Taliban won a lot of this, is they would pay the commanders off to surrender a city before,” she explained. “So those who genuinely do want to fight—and there are a lot of men that wanted to genuinely fight—were kept in the dark and ANA [Afghan National Army] commanders were basically paid off in advance to surrender the city and they were left with no choice but ‘you have no choice but to basically run.’”

    “The level of corruption that has enabled the Taliban to come back to power is just mind-blowing,” she explained. “To see that and to see all the weapons that have gone to the Taliban’s hands when the Afghan army runs away—that we paid for.”

  • Biden lied his ass off about Afghanistan:

    President Joe Biden, August 10, 2021: “I’ll insist we continue to keep the commitments we made of providing close air support, making sure that their air force functions and is operable, re- — resupplying their forces with food and equipment, and paying all their salaries. But they’ve got to want to fight. They have outnumbered the Taliban. And I’m getting daily briefings. I think there’s still a possibility — you have a significant new Secretary of Defense — our equivalent of a Secretary of Defense in Afghanistan, Bismillah Khan, who is a serious fighter (emphasis added).”

    The Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2021: “In the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the U.S. pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.”

    President Biden, in his interview with George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday: “The idea that the Taliban would take over was premised on the notion that the — that somehow, the 300,000 troops we had trained and equipped was gonna just collapse, they were gonna give up. I don’t think anybody anticipated that (emphasis added).”

    The Wall Street Journal, today:

    An internal State Department memo last month warned top agency officials of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the U.S.’s Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the document.

    The classified cable represents the clearest evidence yet that the administration had been warned by its own officials on the ground that the Taliban’s advance was imminent, and Afghanistan’s military may be unable to stop it. The cable, sent via the State Department’s confidential dissent channel, warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces, and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation, the two people said.

    Biden to Stephanopoulos on Wednesday: “One of the things we didn’t know is what the Taliban would do in terms of trying to keep people from getting out, what they would do. What are they doing now? They’re cooperating, letting American citizens get out, American personnel get out, embassies get out, et cetera (emphasis added).”

    So far, there are no reports of the Taliban killing an American citizen or impeding an American from getting to the airport. (They are attacking Australians.) But they have accosted and threatened American journalists, fired off shots, attacked crowds, and have made getting to the airport impossible to do safely.

  • Leaked documents show the State Department warned about an imminent collapse of the Afghan government following American troop withdrawal:

    Using a special ‘dissent channel’ within the State Department, the cable – sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and another top State Department official – warned of ‘rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces,’ and offered suggestions on how to speed up evacuation and mitigate the obvious crisis slated to ensue, two people told the WSJ.

    In total, 23 US Embassy staffers – all Americans, signed the July 13 cable, which was given a rush status ‘given the circumstances on the ground in Kabul.’ In addition to Blinken, it was sent to the Director of Policy Planning, Salman Ahmad.

    Plus a reminder that Antony Blinken sucked so bad that even John McCain called him out for it…

  • Did the Biden Administration pay any attention to these warnings? No.

    Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas told the Washington Examiner the Biden administration ignored the bleak assessments from the Pentagon and the intelligence community, and he critiqued the U.S. Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who had negotiated the February 2020 deal in Doha, Qatar, with the Taliban and had continued to insist wrongly the extremist group was open to a peaceful settlement rather than taking the country by force.

    The IC assessments got grimmer by the briefing,” McCaul told the Washington Examiner when speaking of the time frame following President Joe Biden’s April announcement that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. “I have never heard more grim assessment on Afghanistan on these briefings, while at the same time the State Department gave this rosy picture … was giving a more rosy picture of the negotiations that special envoy Zal Khalilzad was entertaining.”

  • The evil that men do often outlives their time in office: “Taliban leader was freed from Guantanamo Bay in 2014 swap by Obama“:

    When President Barack Obama released five Taliban commanders from the Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for an American deserter in 2014, he assured a wary public that the dangerous enemy combatants would be transferred to Qatar and kept from causing any trouble in Afghanistan.

    In fact, they were left free to engineer Sunday’s sacking of Kabul.

    Soon after gaining their freedom, some of the notorious Taliban Five pledged to return to fight Americans in Afghanistan and made contacts with active Taliban militants there. But the Obama-Biden administration turned a blind eye to the disturbing intelligence reports, and it wasn’t long before the freed detainees used Qatar as a base to form a regime in exile.

    Eventually, they were recognized by Western diplomats as official representatives of the Taliban during recent “peace” talks.

    Earlier this year, one of them, Khairullah Khairkhwa, actually sat across the table from President Biden’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in Moscow, where Khairkhwa was part of the official Taliban delegation that negotiated the final terms of the US withdrawal. The retreat cleared a path for the Taliban to retake power after 20 years.

    Also this: “The mastermind of the regime change is former detainee Khairkhwa, the Taliban mullah whom Obama released from Gitmo even though the Pentagon classified him as too dangerous to release.”

  • More of that SuperGenius leadership from the Biden Administration: “Biden State Dept Moved to Abolish Crisis Response Bureau Months Before Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan. The Biden State Department moved in June to cancel a program overseeing the protection and evacuation of American citizens stationed overseas in the case of an emergency, just as the Taliban was taking over Afghanistan, according to an internal State Department memo.”
  • Biden Administration to Americans looking to flee Afghanistan: “You pay now!”

    The Biden administration continued to inform American citizens in Afghanistan as of Thursday evening they could have to pay more than $2,000 to board an evacuation flight out of the country, despite the State Department telling the press hours before that it had no intention of levying any such charges.

    The U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan has stated in multiple security advisories since Monday that any U.S. citizen seeking to evacuate the country must complete an online form in order to secure their repatriation flight. “This form is the only way to communicate interest in flight options,” the embassy said in a security advisory Wednesday.

  • And don’t forget all the weapons the Taliban captured:

  • Not to mention all the rifles and night vision goggles.
  • Here’s another video of U.S. weapons captured by the Taliban, with music from a chase scene in a 1980s dystopian SciFi movie scored by Giorgio Moroder:

  • Our clueless media, Afghan division:

  • Biden’s interview with former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos shows Biden can’t even think clearly:

    The setup is Stephanopoulos asking about a soldier who served seven combat tours and was shot twice (for accuracy’s sake, some of his tours may have been in Iraq) with that soldier’s assertion being that we didn’t leave Afghanistan with honor. Note that at no point does the soldier in question indicate we should stay in Afghanistan. Rather, his critique is with the strategy of the disastrous withdrawal that is currently playing out.

    Yet, Biden apparently didn’t even comprehend what he was being asked by Stephanopoulos. Instead of speaking to the strategic failures at hand, the president brings up his deceased son Beau and things just go downhill from there.

    For example, the war in Kosovo was already over when Beau got there. He was a lawyer sent to train prosecutors, not a combat soldier. Biden then goes on to not only mistake what branch his son served in and his rank, but also what other country he was deployed to later in his career, mixing up Afghanistan for Iraq.

    As @politicalsock also notes, Biden’s mention of Beau having regrets is nonsensical. We still have troops in Iraq to this day, and there were a lot more of them there when Beau was still alive. So what withdrawal would Biden’s son have felt regrets about at the time? The answer to that question obviously can’t be Afghanistan either.

  • “Something is wrong with President Biden, and we are all being asked to pretend we don’t notice.”

    After making no public appearances for four days — during a major foreign crisis — President Biden read a 20-minute speech off a teleprompter on Monday afternoon and took no questions. He immediately returned to Camp David. He had no events on his schedule Tuesday. On Wednesday, he gave another 20-minute speech about vaccine boosters off a teleprompter from Camp David, and again took no questions. Also on Wednesday, the president sat for an on-camera interview with George Stephanopoulos that did not go well. According to the White House public records, Biden has had two phone conversations with foreign leaders in the past ten days — one with Boris Johnson and one with Angela Merkel.

    As of this writing, Biden has no public events on his schedule for today. He is scheduled to receive the president’s daily briefing from the intelligence community and meet with his national-security team. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, he is scheduled to return to his house in Delaware today.

    This is a highly unusual schedule for a president during a foreign-policy crisis. Yes, a president can perform his job anywhere, whether it’s Camp David or his own private residence. But Biden is barely appearing in public, not saying much of anything when he does, not answering any questions outside of his lone scheduled interview, and sounding angry when he did face questions from Stephanopoulos.

  • The UN remains consistent. Consistently incompetent:

  • Statistics show that there’s no way to get all Americans out of Afghanistan before the end of August:

    There are only 4-5 days left to get these people out due to the logistics of the 8/31 deadline, and according to the cable, there are perhaps 20,000+ Americans still stranded throughout Afghanistan. Even if you take the low-end estimate that only 10,000 Americans were originally stuck, that means we are still way behind schedule, and the situation on the ground in regards to getting to the airport is only getting worse. In other words, you will likely see fewer, not more Americans making it to planes over the next few days.

    There’s no magic solution in reserve to fix this situation. The only thing we can do is what Biden should have done almost two weeks ago. He should have told the Taliban to vacate Kabul or we start blowing things up. Instead, we’ve bent the knee over and over and now we have no backup plan. This evacuation is doomed to fail no matter how many misleading tweets Ronald Klain makes. Americans will be left behind. When that happens, what’s the next move? Full-scale war again? Just abandoning our citizens in hopes of paying ransoms down the road?

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Republican Senator Ben Sasse says (correctly) that the fall of Kabul is worse than the fall of Saigon:

    “Our troops promised them that the U.S. would never turn tail and have another cowardly moment like what happened in Saigon. This is worse than what happened in Saigon. What happened at the airport today is a more shameful moment than what happened in Saigon. And Biden comes out of his bunker trying to do a campaign photo-op speech where he attacks the Afghan people for coming to that airport,” he said.

    Sasse charged that the Biden administration bears responsibility for the collapse of the Afghan military. Biden suggested Monday that Afghan soldiers abandoned all hope and surrendered the mission to the Taliban, without providing further context about what prompted the dissolution.

    Some Republican lawmakers, such as Sasse, have rejected Biden’s assertion that the Afghan army simply lost the will to fight its own battles. Some have emphasized that the Biden administration’s move to pull air support from the country rendered the Afghan fighting force inoperative. Compounded with the fact that the U.S. also barred American contractors from staying in the country to service Afghan planes, some Republican legislators have contended that the Afghan military was positioned to fail under Biden’s direction.

  • More Sasse:

    While President Joe Biden cowers at Camp David, the Taliban are humiliating America. The retreat from Afghanistan is our worst foreign-policy disaster in a generation. As the Taliban marches into Kabul, they’re murdering civilians, reimposing their vicious Islamist law, and preparing to turn Afghanistan back into a bandit regime. The U.S. embassy has told Americans to shelter in place. Refugees are fleeing to the airport, begging to escape the coming bloodbath. None of this had to happen.

    America is the world’s greatest superpower. We ought to act like it. But President Biden and his national-security team have failed to protect even the American embassy in Kabul. They have broken America’s promises to the men and women who long for freedom — especially those thousands of Afghans who served alongside our military and intelligence services. They are turning their backs on the women and children who are desperate for space on the remaining flights out of hell.

    Gross incompetence has given the Taliban a terrible opportunity to slaughter our allies. Eighty-eight thousand of our Afghan allies have applied for visas to get out of the country, but this administration has approved just 1,200 so far. I’ve been among a bipartisan group of senators that has pushed Biden to expedite this process, but to no avail. At this point, it’s not clear how many we’ll be able to get out. Every translator and ally who stood by us is now at risk.

    This bloodshed wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. For months, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have warned the Biden administration that this would happen. Now the administration is acting like this is a surprise. It’s shameful, dishonest spin.

  • Mike Pence goes nuclear:

    The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country [of Afghanistan] is highly unlikely,” President Biden confidently proclaimed in July. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.”

    One month later, the scenario Mr. Biden deemed impossible has become a horrifying reality. In recent days, the world has watched panicked civilians cling to U.S. military aircraft in a desperate attempt to escape the chaos unleashed by Mr. Biden’s reckless retreat. American diplomats had to beg our enemies not to storm our embassy in Kabul. Taliban fighters have seized scores of American military vehicles, rifles, artillery, aircraft, helicopters and drones.

    The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.

  • Ted Cruz points out that the debacle is the Biden Administration’s fault. “What we have seen is an incredibly, poorly executed exit from the theater.”
  • Ouch!

    “This is a ‘Never Again’ moment in the making!” “Those people are still alive! We should be doing everything [to hold a beachhead] and get those people out no matter what it takes!”

  • Our allies are furious:

    Biden asserted that America’s reputation on the world stage has not been damaged amid the foreign-policy snafu, despite outraged reactions from major political figures suggesting the contrary. He also falsely claimed that al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that orchestrated the attacks on September 11, 2001, has totally disappeared from Afghanistan. And despite accounts proving otherwise, Biden rejected the notion that American nationals have been struggling to make it to the tarmac at the Kabul airport.

    “I have seen no questioning of our credibility from our allies around the world,” Biden asserted. “In fact I’ve seen the exact opposite.”

    The president’s statement comes after a number of members of the British Parliament condemned the United States’ haphazard departure from the country as “catastrophic” and “shameful,” with members uniting to “dishonor” the foreign-policy fiasco, the Telegraph reported.

    Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party in Parliament, said, “The American decision to withdraw was not just a mistake — it was an avoidable mistake, from President Trump’s flawed deal with the Taliban to President Biden’s decision to proceed, and to proceed in such a disastrous way.”

  • The reaction? “US general tells British special forces: Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you’re making us look bad.”

    I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.

    Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations. I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.

  • Roger Kimball:

    These days, when the Americans decamp from Afghanistan they leave behind tons — literally tons — of lights, not to mention munitions of various sizes and lethality, roads, buildings, communication devices of all sorts — you name it. A few days ago, we were told that the Afghan government might fall within 90 days to the newly resurgent Taliban. Over the weekend, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby assured the world that ‘Kabul does not face an imminent threat from the Taliban’. Whew. That gave the team at our Kabul embassy time to shred or otherwise render inoperative all the sensitive information they were sitting on — that stash of Pride flags, for example, which the new masters will not have much use for, unless it is to drape over the shoulders of the gays they execute by pushing them off roofs.

    Well, it turns out the embassy workers did not have quite enough time. If we still used ink, the bit used to record Kirby’s words would not have been dry before his words were replaced by headlines that Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, who now occupied the presidential palace, the president himself having fled the country, and that the country as whole was in a state of crisis.

    President Biden — or, as I like to denominate him these days, due to the deference shown him by all those eager-beaver members of the press, President Ice Cream — was hors de combat when this important news came over what counts as the wire these days. He had left the White House for Camp David. Monday, I think, is when Ben and Jerry’s makes its deliveries, and all we could glean was that he would be addressing the nation ‘in a few days’.

  • You can tell that Democrats are back in charge:

    This always happens when Democrats hold the key positions of power in the White House and in Congress — the world begins to rock, the foundations begin to shake, the stability and peace and comparative calm of better days begin to wither and disappear. But my, do the taxpayer dollars begin to flow.

    It happened under Jimmy Carter, with his double-digit inflation and gas lines and government cheese programs.

    It happened under Barack Obama with his red-line foreign policy that ultimately handed Russia big wins with Syria — not to mention with a watching, mocking, anti-America world.

    It’s happening now under Biden.

    “Jen Psaki ‘out of the office’ as Biden remains silent on Taliban takeover of Afghanistan,” one Fox News headline ran.

    “Joe Biden faces calls to make public address on Afghanistan,” another headline from The Guardian stated.

    “Biden’s botched Afghan exit is a disaster at home and abroad long in the making,” yet another headline from CNN read.

    Where was Joe while all this chaos was cracking?

    You’d have better luck finding Waldo.

    Honestly, this White House shows more aggression against Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida over face mask mandates than against Taliban members who now seek to enforce Shariah Law on the poor Afghan people America promised to protect.

  • The incompetence is onogoing:

  • “Team Organizing Private Flights Out Of Afghanistan Says The Biden Administration Has Been An ‘Impediment’ To Their Evacuations.”

    The Biden administration has been an “impediment” to a private effort to get people out of Afghanistan, Robert Stryk, who is arranging privately chartered flights to get Americans and vulnerable Afghans out of the country, exclusively told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday.

    “The Brits and South Africans have been fucking awesome and heroic in getting people through the Mil Gate,” Stryk told the DCNF.

    Stryk, whose Washington-based lobbying firm was in 2017 paid by the government of Afghanistan for “US Government affairs and commercial sector advice. Executive Branch and Legislative Branch Engagement; Defense consultation; strategic advice pertaining to extremism/terrorism; and promotion of democracy and foreign direct investment,” said he had reached out to the administration “dozens and dozens” of times and had yet to hear back.

    After reaching out to the White House, Stryk said he received a response acknowledging the request but got no follow up. Stryk said he started reaching out to the administration on Aug. 14.

    “What I am witnessing everyday is the very best and the very worst of America,” Stryk explained. “I have seen the humanity of private citizens who are contacting me and pledging their time, monies, and in some cases their lives to bring our citizens and these Afghan patriots out of harm’s way, while at the time personally experiencing the Biden administration’s abject failure to protect its citizens and those Afghans that fought and worked alongside of us.”

    “It’s morally reprehensible,” Stryk said. “It’s been the U.S. private sector who has stepped in to save the blood and treasure the Biden administration is leaving behind.”

  • “Our State Department just called on the Taliban to form an ‘inclusive’ government ‘with the full and meaningful representation of women.’ This is not the Babylon Bee!” I’m sure that will happen right after Hitler’s Bar Mitzvah…
  • Indeed, instead of giving women “full and meaningful representation,” the Taliban is banning co-education, calling it “the root of all evil.”
  • They also found an executed a “TikTok Comedian.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • While the American mission in Afghanistan was collapsing, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was looking to hire a “Public Engagement Assistant.”
  • “American In Taliban Prison Starting To Worry How This Will Affect Biden’s Poll Numbers.”

    • This are just the links and news stories I caught in passing, as I could probably have put up ten times as many links covering this colossal screw-up.

    Anyone remember back when the Democratic Media Complex was confidently predicting that President Trump allowing Turkey to establish a security zone in Syria would result in genocide against the Kurds? Now that the Taliban are launching an actual slaughter and Biden apologists are wailing that nobody could possibly foresee the rapid collapse in Afghanistan.

    As I mentioned before, if America’s political and military leadership wasn’t willing to do what it took to win in Afghanistan, then we needed to make an orderly retreat. Biden’s retreat has been anything but orderly. It’s been an absolute debacle and thousands, probably tens of thousands of lives, American and otherwise, will be lost thanks to his administration’s astounding incompetence.

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    Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Obama Scandals, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    Why The Hell Does Twitter Need Access To Network Devices?

    August 24th, 2021

    What fresh hell is this?

    Why on earth would Twitter, of all things, need access to my network devices from my iPhone?

    The answer, of course, is to sell my data to advertisers. But why would I want Twitter to have access to that data?

    I wouldn’t. And there are precious few scenarios I can imagine where anyone would want to give Twitter that access.

    Evidently this has been going on for a while, but it seems like a huge security hole to me, and another vector by which a malicious attacker could launch a cross-app privilege escalation attack.

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    Posted in Media Watch, Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

    Cuomo Leaves His Dog Behind

    August 23rd, 2021

    As if we needed even the slightest bit more evidence that Andrew Cuomo was a scumbag, he left his dog behind when he left the governor’s mansion:

    Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has been staying with one of his sisters in Westchester County in the final days of his third term, recently has asked staff members at the Executive Mansion if anyone would like to keep his dog, Captain, who has remained at the state-owned residence after the governor moved out last week.

    Two State Police sources told the Times Union on Saturday that the governor had recently asked mansion staff members if anyone would be interested in caring for the dog. Captain — a high-strung mix of shepherd, Siberian and malamute — has nipped a few people since Cuomo adopted him in 2018, the sources said, and a mansion staffer recently took the dog home for a few days but decided he was too much.

    Cuomo mouthpiece Richard Azzopardi swears up and down that the soon-to-be Ex-Governor (he leaves office just before noon today) just wants to have someone look after it while he’s on vacation, but others say he’s tried to give the dog away. And really, who believes Andrew Freaking Cuomo, he of the $5 million book deal, can’t afford a dog sitter for two weeks?

    Cuomo abandoning his dog is just the last brick in the narcissistic scumbag wall.

    (Hat tip: Neontaster.)

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    Posted in Democrats | 2 Comments »

    One Rule For Them, Another For You

    August 22nd, 2021

    One thing Flu Manchu had made even more abundantly clear is that our leftwing political elite feel free to impose on ordinary people laws that they themselves feel under no obligation to obey. Like 1970s Hollywood convincing themselves that they deserved cocaine because they just worked so darn hard, our “betters” believe rules are for the little people.

    Of course, that was obvious from the very beginning, when the UK’s head coronavirus advisor broke his own coronavirus lockdown rules to mingle with his married mistress.

    Some data points:

  • Obama had a giant blowout party on Martha’s Vineyard where nobody was masked at the same time the new Democratic Administration figureheaded by his former VP was telling everyone to stay masked even if they had been vaccinated.
  • Matt Taibbi on the same subject:

    “Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic?

    A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball.

    Snip.

    This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

    He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.

  • Being a member of the globetrotting international elite means not having to live with the same rules as the peasants. “UN Globalists Arriving In UK For Climate Summit Won’t Face COVID Restrictions Imposed On British Citizens.”
  • Somehow, events that our elites approve of (like #BlackLivesMatter riots, Obama parties and Lolapalooza) are never “superspreader events,” but events they don’t, like Trump rallies and the biker rally in Sturgis, are.
  • We all know that Nancy Pelosi feels free to break the mask mandates she wants to impose on others, be it to cut her hair, or to mingle with the people who write fat checks to Democrats:

  • And more of the same from DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and AOC. “It’s 2021, people. If you want to go out for dinner with family and friends, or take your kids to the zoo, or do any of the other things that were once commonplace, first you need to ask yourself one crucial question: ‘Am I a prominent Democrat politician?'”
  • And this only skims the surface. From dressing up as a Klansman, to being an actual Klansman, there seems to be no sin that a (D) after your name won’t absolve you off, as long as you’re important enough. Just ask Hunter Biden.

    • America was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. Our political elites obviously don’t believe that’s the case…

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    Posted in Democrats | 1 Comment »

    The Woke Zone

    August 21st, 2021

    Enjoy this Babylon Bee takeoff on the “Talking Tina” doll episode of The Twilight Zone:

    I wonder at what point references to classic Twilight Zone episodes falls out of common cultural memory. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror seem to have longer staying power that, say, period sitcoms. Teenagers today might have caught Twilight Zone episodes on MeTV or one of those endless series of free streaming services, whereas I doubt most have ever seen an episode of Hazel or The Real McCoys.

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    Posted in Social Justice Warriors, Uncategorized, video | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for August 20, 2021

    August 20th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I sort of want to put all the horrible news out of Afghanistan in one blog post, but it will probably have to wait until next week.

  • Democrat voting fraud straight outa Compton. ”[Compton city councilman] Isaac Galvan, 34, was one of six people charged Friday with conspiracy to commit election fraud, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.”
  • One in ten Democrats regret voting for Biden over Trump.
  • Related:

  • Just as in Austin, the homeless drug addicts Democratic politicians love in Seattle are killing innocent, law-abiding Americans:

  • Mathias Dopfner, CEO of German Axel Springer, flies Israeli flag for a week after antisemitic attacks. Leftwing employees: “Triggered!” Dopfner: “Then quit.” Bonus: He might buy Politico. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • Kennedy bashes Cuomo (not the one he was married to):

  • Instapundit: “Mask bullies don’t want to persuade you — but to humiliate and rule you….This sort of thing isn’t aimed at convincing those who disagree, but rather at garnering high-fives from people who agree and, ultimately, creating an ideological veneer for unquestioned elite rule.”
  • “Honolulu Immediately Folds in Face of Gun-Rights Lawsuit…Federal District Judge J. Michael Seabright, a Bush appointee, ruled the state’s requirement that pistol purchasers present their guns to police for inspection and its 10-day expiration for purchase permits were unconstitutional.”
  • Thanks to Travis County DA Jose Garza, two accused child murderers are out on bail.

    APD says that officers responded to a urgent check welfare call on March 7 just after 8 p.m. at the First Choice Emergency Room Center on E. Riverside Drive. The caller had reported to 911 that someone had brought an unresponsive child to the ER and that they were getting mixed information as to why the child was unresponsive. CPR was in progress.

    ATCEMS then transported the child, identified as six-year-old Stavian Driver, to the emergency room at Dell Children’s Medical Center. Stavian succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead just before 9 p.m.

    APD says that over the next several days, homicide detectives interviewed Stavian’s mother, 27-year-old Staleigh Coleman and her boyfriend, 27-year-old Blake Jones, who were both at their home on Cromwell Circle when the incident occurred. A search warrant was also executed at the home.

    Pictured are the mugshots of Staleigh B. Coleman (left) and Blake Howard Jones (right). (Austin Police Department)

    Due to serious inconsistencies as to how Stavian received scalding burns over 40% of his upper body, arrest warrants were issued for both Coleman and Jones for injury to a child by omission, says APD. Their bonds were set at $100,000 dollars.

    Coleman and Jones were arrested on March 10 and were transported and booked into the Travis County Jail. APD says both are currently out of jail on bond.

  • “Ted Cruz saved America at 3:30 AM on Wednesday morning.” By objecting to passage of the $3.5 trillion Democratic Party wish list budget.
  • Air Force cadets forced to watch #BlackLivesMatter videos.
  • Critical Race Theory has even spread to Oklahoma: “‘Only white people can be racist’: Union officials call for purge of teacher workforce.”
  • Also forced to take Critical Race Theory classes: Bank of America. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Madison Ave is 39% empty; Manhattan landlords, can you lower the prices now?” Also this: “$1,000 a square foot is not sustainable!” And more on the problems engendered by mortgage-backed securities.
  • A rerun: “California Legislature Unveils Plan To Raise Taxes On Wildfires Until They Move Out Of State.”
  • “Dominion Voting Machine Really Starting To Regret Its 50,000 Votes For Biden.”
  • My books wanted list. If you have a lot of rare science fiction first editions just lying around, I could be persuaded to take those off your hands…
  • A feelgood dog link to brighten up your day.

    • A number of deadlines conspired to converge on this week. I’m hoping next week will be less insanely busy…

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video | 1 Comment »

    Video Shows Women Stealing California Recall Ballots

    August 19th, 2021

    Here’s more of that election fraud Democrats swear up and down doesn’t exist.

    And this is why Democrats are desperate to to stop election reform, including banning ballot harvesting.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, video | 4 Comments »

    Followup on Dr. Dan Stock’s Virus Comments

    August 18th, 2021

    In a follow-up to this story, I emailed Dr. Dan Stock to ask him if he had references to the studies he mentioned in that video.

    Today he replied and pointed me to this set of links up on his PureHealthMD website. And now I’m pointing them out to you.

    Thus far I have only dipped my toe into them. I browsed the “N95 Respirators vs Medical Masks for Preventing Influenza Among Health Care Personnel.” The disappointing conclusion was “Among outpatient HCP, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza.” So only do regular masks not work, even significantly better N95 masks don’t work…

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    Posted in Regulation | 6 Comments »

    Blue Alert In Texas

    August 17th, 2021

    Another blue alert for a cop-shooter, this one up near Wichita Falls:

    The Blue Alert sent to Texans’ cell phones late Monday night after 11 p.m. is for a man accused of shooting a Clay County Sheriff’s Office deputy. The shooting happened near Wichita Falls.

    Investigators are looking for a man with a thin build. He was last seen wearing a dark flat-billed cap and driving a white four-door Cadillac.

    The sheriff’s office says Deputy Breanton Chitwood attempted to pull the man over around 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Jolly Truck Stop.

    Jolly is a small town between Wichita Falls and Henrietta.

    When Chitwood walked up, he was shot and returned fire, the sheriff’s office said. According to Clay County Sheriff Jeffrey Lyde, Chitwood was shot in his bulletproof vest and is expected to be okay.

    Lyde said the license plate number of the vehicle is FXJ-1334, and the plates are stolen.

    Crime Stoppers is offering a $5,000 award for any information leading to the arrest.

    Good thing the officer is fine. Here’s a pic of the vehicle:

    If you see that car, now with added bullet holes, call 911.

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    Posted in Crime, Texas | 2 Comments »

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