Posts Tagged ‘Al Gore’

Another Reason To Hate Toast Tab

Thursday, February 16th, 2023

I’ve already mentioned how I hate having to order at restaurants using QR codes in general and Toast Tab in particular. Today I found out yet another reason to hate Toast Tab: Al Gore is an investor.

Toast, the all-in-one restaurant technology platform and one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the U.S., today announced an additional $101 million in financing led by new investors Generation Investment Management and Lead Edge Capital.

Snip.

ABOUT GENERATION

Generation Investment Management LLP is dedicated to long-term investing, integrated sustainability research, and client alignment. It is an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 and headquartered in London, with approximately $17 billion in assets under management. Its Chairman is former Vice President of the United States Al Gore and its senior partner is David Blood. Generation Investment Management LLP is authorized and regulated in the United Kingdom by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Funny how an ex-American Vice President feels a need to run an investment company out of London.

Also infuriating: Toast currently has a market cap of over $10 billion, despite the fact that it’s still losing money

LinkSwarm for November 6, 2020

Friday, November 6th, 2020

All that calm wore off and now I’m just pissed about a variety of things: The stolen election, Amazon being irrational (“No, we can’t split orders just because one item won’t be in stock until February 2021, we don’t have that power. No, there’s nobody you can escalate to.”), and BlueHost refuses to say anything but “You’re not optimized enough” when the blog craters during and Istalanche. And other things I can’t talk about

So enjoy a (shorter than usual) Friday LinkSwarm dominated by news of Democratic election fraud.

  • Yes, Democrats are trying to steal the election. Mostly what I’ve covered here before.
  • Documented evidence of fraud: “Wagons, Suitcases, and Coolers Roll Into Detroit Voting Center at 4 AM.”
  • “23,277 Ballots ‘Found’ In Pennsylvania, All Mysteriously For Biden.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brazen:

  • Another lawsuit:

    Pennsylvania’s Democratic election leaders violated state code on Monday when they authorized county election officials to provide information about rejected mail ballots to political party operatives, according to a Republican lawsuit filed in state court and obtained by National Review.

    The lawsuit cites an email sent to county election directors at 8:38 p.m. on Monday by Jonathan Marks, Pennsylvania’s deputy elections secretary.

    In the email, Marks wrote that “county boards of elections should provide information to party and candidate representatives during the pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejected” so they could be offered a provisional ballot.

    Democrats have been winning mail-in voting handily in Pennsylvania and mail votes are key to Joe Biden’s chances of overtaking President Donald Trump’s dwindling lead in the state.

    Republicans argue the direction from Marks violates the state’s election code, which states “no person observing, attending or participating in a pre-canvass meeting may disclose the results of any portion of any pre-canvass meeting prior to the close of polls.”

  • Larry Correia has thoughts:

    I am more offended by how ham fisted, clumsy, and audacious the fraud to elect him is than the idea of Joe Biden being president. I think Joe Biden is a corrupt idiot, however, I think America would survive him like we’ve survived previous idiot administrations. However, what is potentially fatal for America is half the populace believing that their elections are hopelessly rigged and they’re eternally fucked. And now, however this shakes out in court, that’s exactly what half the country is going to think.

    People are pissed off, and rightfully so.

    Before I became a novelist I was an accountant. In auditing you look for red flags. That’s weird bits in the data that suggest something shifty is going on. You flag those weird things so you can delve into them further. One flag doesn’t necessarily mean there’s fraud. Weird things happen. A few flags mean stupidity or dishonesty. But a giant pile of red flags means that there’s bad shit going on and people should be in jail.

    Except for in politics, where apparently all you have to do to dismiss a bunch of red flag is be a democrat and mumble something about “fascist voter suppression” then you can do all sorts of blatant crime and get off.

    I’ve been trying to keep up with the firehose of information about what’s going on during this clusterfuck of an election. Last night I was on Facebook talking about the crazy high, 3rd world dictatorship level voter turnout levels in the deep blue areas of these swing states was very suspicious. Somebody gas lighted me about how “I’d have to do better than that”, so this was my quick reply, listing off the questionable bullshit I could think of off the top of my head:

    The massive turn out alone is a red flag.

    But as for doing better


    The late night spikes that were enough to close all the Trump leads are a red flag.

    The statistically impossible breakdown of the ratios of these vote dumps is a red flag.

    The ratios of these dumps being far better than the percentages in the bluest of blue cities, even though the historical data does not match, red flag.

    The ratios of these vote dumps favoring Biden more in these few battlegrounds than the ratio for the rest of the country (even the bluest of the blue) red flag.

    Biden outperforming Obama among these few urban vote dumps, even though Trump picked up points in every demographic group in the rest of the country, red flag.

    The poll observers being removed. Red flag.

    The counters cheering as GOP observers are removed, red flag.

    The fact that the dem observers outnumber the GOP observers 3 to 1, red flag (and basis of the first lawsuit filed)

    The electioneering at the polls (on video), red flag.

    The willful violation of the court order requiring the separation of ballots by type, red flag.

    USPS whistleblower reporting to the Inspector General that today they were ordered to backdate ballots to yesterday, red flag.

    The video of 2 AM deliveries of what appear to be boxes of ballots with no chain of custody or other observers right before the late night miracle spikes, red flag.

    Any of those things would be enough to trigger an audit in the normal world. This many flags and I’d be giggling in anticipation of catching some thieves.

    (Hat tip: Crossover Queen’s Creative Chaos.)

  • “How Senate Republicans averted catastrophe. With a late cash infusion and misses in the polls, the GOP looks likely to hold its majority.” Unfortunately, this was written two days ago, before Democratic Party election fraud manufactured enough votes to steal John James victory in Michigan and force both Georgia senate races into runoffs that Democrats could again try to steal.
  • Pollsters learned nothing from 2016. Or didn’t want to learn anything:

    A CNN poll had Trump down 12 percentage points nationally entering the final week before the election. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in late October claimed Biden was leading in Wisconsin by 17 points. That state’s voting ended up nearly even. YouGov’s election model showed Biden prevailing with a landslide win in the Electoral College. Progressive statistics guru Nate Silver had for weeks issued pseudo-scientific analyses of a Trump wipeout.

    Pollsters were widely wrong in 2016. Yet they learned nothing about their flawed methodologies. So how do they remain credible after 2020, when most were wildly off again?

    A cynic might answer that polling no longer aims to offer scientific assessments of voter intentions.

    Pollsters, the vast majority of them progressives, have become political operatives. They see their task as ginning up political support for their candidates and demoralizing the opposition. Some are profiteering as internal pollsters for political campaigns and special interests.

    Never again will Americans believe these “mainstream” pollsters’ predictions because they have been exposed as rank propagandists.

    That bleak assessment won’t make much difference to pollsters. They privately understand what their real mission has become and why they are no longer scientific prognosticators.

    Big liberal donors sent cash infusions totaling some $500 million into Senate races across the country to destroy Republican incumbents and take back the Senate. In the end, they may have failed to change many of the outcomes.

    But did they really fail?

    Democrats dispelled the fossilized notion that “dark money” is dangerous to politics. They are now the party of the ultra-rich, at war with the middle classes, whom they write off as clingers, deplorables, dregs, and chumps.

    In that context, the staggering amounts of money were a valuable marker. The liberal mega-rich are warning politicians that from now on, they will try to bury populist conservatives with so much oppositional cash that they would be wise to keep a low profile.

    Winning is not the only aim of lavish liberal campaign funding. Deterring future opponents by warning them to be moderate or go bankrupt is another motivation.

    Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey seemed unapologetic that his company was systematically censoring and de-platforming conservative users. In a recent hearing he talked to members of the Senate as if he were a 19th-century railroad baron.

    Google has been accused of massaging its search results to favor progressive agendas. During the final weeks of the campaign, social-media platforms shut down accounts and censored ads and messages, providing an enormously valuable gift to Joe Biden.

    Silicon Valley, like the 19th-century oil, rail, and sugar trusts, sees no reason to hide its partisanship and clout.

    The media coverage of the election was unsavory. Journalists confirmed the findings of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, which in an assessment of news coverage of Trump’s first 100 days in office found that 80 percent of the coverage was negative.

    As in the fashion of the Russian collusion hoax, the media for weeks on end revved up their engines for a seemingly certain Biden landslide victory. They rarely cross-examined Biden on the issues. And they certainly stayed clear of the Biden family influence-peddling scandal.

    What do all these power players — big polling, big money, big tech, and big media — have in common other than their partisanship and their powerful reach?

    One, they stereotypically represent a virtue-signaling coastal elite that feels its own moral superiority allows it to destroy its own professional standards.

    Two, they worry little about popular pushback because they assume that their money, loaded surveys, and Internet and media cartels create, rather than reflect, public opinion.

    Three, while these elite cadres have enormous resources, they still are relatively unpopular. Despite being outspent 2 to 1, pronounced doomed by pollsters, often censored on social media, and demonized in print and on television, Trump was neck and neck with Biden — a fact that a few days ago was deemed impossible.

  • “Election night showed why Trump voters don’t trust the media“:

    The wall-to-wall promises of a blue wave were delivered with all the certainty of prophecy. Joe Biden and Democrats would sweep the White House and all of Congress from sea to shining sea. Even a large voter survey that Fox News did with the Associated Press suggested as much.

    Some 24 hours after the polls closed, President Trump still has a fighting chance to get 270 electoral votes, the GOP is holding on to a slim majority in the Senate and actually gained five House seats, narrowing the Dems’ majority to 12 seats.

    We all make mistakes, and most of us try to avoid them. The problem with the unholy news-polling-social media-industrial complex is that the mistakes are so numerous and predictable that they begin to feel intentional.

    He’s wrong on that: They’ve felt intentional for a long time now.

  • Facebook Shuts Down Massive ‘Stop the Steal’ Group. The pro-Trump group attracted 300,000 members in just two days.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.”
  • Kurt Schlichter on the other election winners and losers:

    LOSER: The Pollsters

    You know, in the world we normal people dwell in, when you consistently fail, you get fired. But, as in so many of our garbage establishment institutions, when you’re a pollster there is no accountability. You keep failing and failing and failing and your dumb clients and the dumb media keep citing your garbage surveys. It’s really remarkable. You would think they would have a little pride in themselves and not want to look like idiots, but no. Instead, it’s, “Our weighting gives us Biden +15 in Texas. Gee, that sounds right. Let’s go with that!” Except for a few outlets, always the ones that take conservatives seriously enough to reach out to them, it’s been a disaster. But next time, we’ll hear once again about how, “Ackshuuuuuallly, the polls were very accurate in 2020” as if we have the same memory issues as the guy they were trying to help. The nice thing is that even the least woke Republican is woke to the poll scam now.

    WINNER: The Republican Party’s Populist Wing

    The battle for the soul of the Republican Party is over and we won. This is now the party of people who work for a living, people who have little companies, people who want their kids to grow up in a world of regular pronouns and where going to church isn’t a hate crime. It is also a party that cares nothing about where your grandfather came from – we are winning black and Hispanic voters to our cause not by condescending “outreach” but by offering an agenda of good jobs and their kids not being sent off to fight idiotic wars. It is not the party of the Chamber of Commerce – hey geniuses, how’s that pivot to the Dems working out for ya? It is not the party of the bow tie dorks who snicker with their lib buddies over pumpkin-infused IPAs in Georgetown restaurant about those Walmart-shopping, Jesus-liking hicks who make up the base. It is not the party of Wall Street. We are a party that happily includes both the Amish and Lil’ Pump. And the Democrats are the party of hedge funders, college professors, Antifa bums, and people who think “The Handmaid’s Tale” is nonfiction.

  • Tucker Carlson blasts the media for its racist assumptions:

    Elections tell you what the parties actually look like, not what you imagine they look like 
 so the coalitions become really clear. And in Florida, the population center, of course, Miami-Dade County, the biggest county in the state, Hillary Clinton [got] 334,000 votes there. An hour ago, with 84 percent reporting, Donald Trump had already outstripped that by more than 100,000 votes,” Carlson said on Tuesday evening.

    Miami-Dade is 70 percent Hispanic,” he continued. “That’s not what you would have expected if you’ve been watching for the past six months this attempt to racialize everything to make Trump the greatest racist in the world’s history. Whether you buy that or not, you would expect that to depress the votes for Trump in Miami-Dade County but the opposite happened. He’s doing better there with non-White voters than he did four years ago.”

    Clearly, the media was completely wrong.

  • Why the left is enraged at Amy Coney Barret’s confirmation:

    The fundamental source of this agitation is that the Left was convinced the Court would always be on its side, becoming its personal tool for achieving desired outcomes outside the electoral process.

    A fuller understanding requires looking back at recent history. And it requires looking at it more honestly than do the recent laments that, for example, Republican presidents over the past several decades have disproportionately appointed more justices to the Supreme Court than they deserve. For conservatives of a few decades’ past — and still, even, to some extent now — this is not a sign of success but of a particularly cruel kind of failure, if not even their preferred appointees could be trusted once on the Court. The modern conservative legal movement, animated primarily by a renewed commitment to understanding the Constitution as it was understood by those who drafted it (known as originalism), didn’t just come out of nowhere with the 1982 birth of the Federalist Society or the 1985 originalist stirrings of Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese. These and other stirrings came in response to a recognition on the right that the Left had either welcomed or been actively complicit in the transformation of the Supreme Court into a super-legislature, a way for liberals to achieve judicially what they could not electorally.

    To conservatives, this fact alone comported ill with the Constitution, never mind that many of the decisions achieved by the Court — most notoriously Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 — proceeded to do further violence to the constitutional order. Their response was not merely to capitulate to this state of affairs, but to work, slowly yet surely, to change it. The Federalist Society helped these efforts greatly, bringing originalist-inclined law students together, connecting them to like-minded professors, helping to seed law schools and courts nationwide with trustworthy exponents of its philosophy, broadly speaking, and more. And this was done despite significant resistance from the left, which treasured the Court and wished to keep it under its control. Liberals aghast at McConnell’s hardball today shouldn’t just look back at the 2018 treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, but also to the infamous Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, the treatment of lower-court nominee Miguel Estrada, and more.

    And yet, for all of the Right’s successes on the Court, it must still witness what it views as fairly spectacular failures. The first Court with majority Republican appointees essentially affirmed Roe; in 2012 a Republican-appointed chief justice rewrote the Affordable Care Act to uphold it as constitutional; in 2015 the Court found a right to same-sex marriage in the 14th Amendment; and just this past summer, Neil Gorsuch, an apparent textualist, divined protection from transgender discrimination in legislation penned within living memory that originally contained no such protections. To be sure, the Right has had its triumphs — often though not always corresponding to defeats for the Left, only inasmuch as the Left was defying or hoping to defy the Constitution — such that it remains interested in the game. And so it is likely to remain, while still wary of the Court’s ability to uphold the Constitution, even with an ostensible 6–3 majority.

    Yet this complicated history, full of the kind of back-and-forth one would expect from the political process, helps to explain the depth of the Left’s anger about the Court’s current status. They are mad that conservatives discovered their thinly veiled attempts at transforming the judiciary and decided to try to recapture it with the help of a philosophy that emphasized a renewed commitment to the Constitution. Now that, after decades of patience and persistence, conservatives have established a beachhead on a Court liberals thought would always be theirs, they are infuriated. Some, such as Sheldon Whitehouse, see evidence of a nefarious conspiracy in what has been accomplished openly yet at great difficulty. But the true root of this remains a frustration that, in at least one area, the Right has refused to go along with the Left’s capture of an institution, that it has not consented to the triumphalist narrative the Left imagines culminates with it forever in charge of everything, never dealing with anything more than token opposition.

  • More on that theme:

    There is also one particular aspect of conservative success in filling the federal courts that contributes to the tone of hysteria that creeps into these reactions. The federal appellate courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, are elite institutions — indeed, the most elite institutions in all of American government and the legal profession. They are populated by highly educated professionals. They work with ideas. They are one of the few institutions of government that actually consumes the work of academics and sometimes translates it into policy. Their output is expected to be scholarly in character and taught in law schools. To see such institutions in the hands of conservatives, particularly social and religious conservatives, is intolerable to people whose worldview depends so heavily on sneering at the inferior intellect of anyone who holds to socially conservative views. That sneering is especially apparent any time a conservative is described as intelligent; the gag reflex you see in response is visceral.

    Elite or wannabe-elite institutions in our culture these days tend to be dominated by social liberals and progressives, who in turn seek to drive out all dissenters. To be a conservative on a university faculty is to be, at a minimum, badly outnumbered. Often there are more-or-less open efforts to stamp out any remaining vestiges of disagreement. We see the same thing with big newspapers, magazines, and other journalistic institutions; with the arts and entertainment; increasingly in large corporations as well. The tribunes of the legal profession itself — the bar associations, the journals covering the legal industry, the people who hand out awards — are dominated by the same groups, and rarely even engage with the possibility that their values might not be the only good ones. But no amount of desire for social ostracism can change the fact that the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts sit atop the legal food chain, where the bar’s disapproval must remain comparatively muted, if through clenched teeth. To a certain sort of progressive, this itself serves as a kind of standing rebuke, a nagging reminder that gets in the way of simply scorning the idea that conservatives could be capable of doing such a job.

  • “My kid has cancer and ObamaCare is making everything worse.”
  • Governor Abbott welcomes a new resident:

  • Under other circumstances this might be amusing:

  • “Miracle: Ballot Counter Turns 5 Biden Votes Into 5,000.”
  • “Florida Recount Finally Wraps Up, Al Gore Declared President.”
  • Mike the Musicologist sends an emergency puppy:

  • BidenWatch for April 27, 2020

    Monday, April 27th, 2020

    The Tara Reade rape-accusation scandal isn’t going away, nor is the Bejing Biden tag, no matter how hard Team Joe might try to jujitsu it away. Plus Q1 fundraising numbers drop. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Well well well well well: “New Evidence Supporting Credibility of Tara Reade’s Allegation Against Joe Biden Emerges“:

    A new piece of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.

    In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to “Larry King Live” on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughter’s experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me.

    Reade couldn’t remember the date or the year of the phone call, and King didn’t include the names of callers on his show. I was unable to find the call, but mentioned it in an interview with Katie Halper, the podcast host who first aired Reade’s allegation. After the podcast aired, a listener managed to find the call and sent it to The Intercept.

    On August 11, 1993, King aired a program titled, “Washington: The Cruelest City on Earth?” Toward the end of the program, he introduces a caller dialing in from San Luis Obispo, California. Congressional records list August 1993 as Reade’s last month of employment with Biden’s Senate office, and, according to property records, Reade’s mother, Jeanette Altimus, was living in San Luis Obispo County. Here is the transcript of the beginning of the call:

    KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.

    CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.

    KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?

    CALLER: That’s true.

    .

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • The video in question:

  • By an amazing coincidence, that episode has been removed from the Google Play catalog. What are the odds?
  • Want to guess which Democrat is calling on Biden to bow out over the Tara Reade accusations? Would you believe notorious Hillary shill Peter Daou?

    Given that Daou’s Clinton sycophancy meter was pegged at 11 in 2016 (even Renfield told him “dial it back”), that gives some credence to the “replace Biden with Hillary at the convention” conspiracy theory. But Daou went all Bernie Bro in 2019, so maybe he’s just disgruntled. Or maybe he was only a Clinton mole the entire time pretending to be a Bernie Bro. Or maybe…(leads pack mule back to the Sierra Madre)

  • Also asking for Biden to drop out: Rose McGowan.
  • “The More Anger at China, the Worse for Biden.”

    For months now, it has been clear that Biden family corruption will be a campaign issue. The impeachment focused attention on ties between the vice president’s son, Hunter, and the corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas giant Burisma. But Hunter had equally close, equally profitable ties to Chinese state-owned banks. Those connections were formed when Joe Biden was leading the Obama administration’s policies toward both China and Ukraine.

    Cozy, profitable, and possibly corrupt connections with the Chinese government are the last thing Americans want to hear about their politicians right now. Those voters are closeted at home, worried about their future, thanks to a virus that originated in Wuhan. They are mad as hell at Beijing for hiding what it knew, early on, about the pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party knew something terrible was happening, and it refused to share honest information about it. It denied the virus could be spread by human contact, weeks after it knew patients were infecting health care workers, and it hid vital information about the origins and genetic structure of the virus. The World Health Organization spread that misinformation. Beijing’s deception cost lives and livelihoods. Americans are reminded of it every day they are home from work or school under quarantine.

    This anger at China’s rulers is bad news for Joe Biden. Voters see China as a rising threat and its economic gains as coming out of American pockets. The Trump campaign was already pushing these issues. It won’t have any trouble tying them to Joe Biden and making his family the face of American elites who profit from their insider positions.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Rudy Guillani’s Commen Sense podcast did a show on the same theme. “Joe Biden’s relationship with China, ‘they make the Clintons look like cheapos.'”
  • Team Biden raised $46,741,037 in Q1. It’s much better than Biden had been fundraising, and a tiny bit ahead of what Hillary Clinton raised in 2016.
  • The challenges of fundraising from your basement.
  • What did they spend it on?

  • Another Slow Joe verbal fumble video:

  • And another:
    ï»ż

  • And still another, with Special Guest Al Gore:

    Gore looks like he needs to invest in some sunblock.

  • “Joe Biden: Unfit to Serve by Any and Every Measure.” It’s sort of a Greatest Hits of Biden incompetence. “You might think that after five decades of experience with public policy both foreign and domestic that you’d be able to discern Biden’s governing philosophy, even given his inability to express a coherent thought. But you’d be wrong. The lessons and experiences that inform a person’s decisionmaking seem to pass completely through Biden’s brain without leaving a trace of residue.”
  • “Joe Biden Advisor Tries to Blame Republicans for Small Business Loan Money Running out. It Doesn’t Go Well.”
  • New York Times does a Biden in quarantine piece. Anything remotely interesting or unexpected? (scans) “At times, callers deduce from rowdy background noise that Mr. Biden is working beside his German shepherds, Major and Champ.” Good for him. Also:

    The former vice president also places calls to mayors and governors; congressional leaders like Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina; elder statesmen like Al Gore; potential running mates; donors; and former rivals like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. A few governors have become favorite points of contact, including Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Jay Inslee of Washington and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

    Oh yeah, pick Gretchen Whitmer as your running mate. That move is gonna make you super popular…

  • There is simply no way Biden can out-hawk Trump on China. Some of the premises of this piece are ill advised, but the conclusion is not.

    The implication of Biden’s new ad is that China didn’t give Trump timely information about the COVID-19 outbreak, because Trump wasn’t tough enough on China’s leaders. The commercial mocks Trump’s praise for Xi Jinping and is filled with supposedly damning images of Trump and Xi together. By contrast, it shows Biden vowing, “I would be on the phone with China making it clear: We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You have to be clear. We have to know what’s going on.” In other words, Biden would boss the Chinese around.

    This is a jingoistic fantasy. China is a rival superpower run by an authoritarian and fiercely nationalistic regime. Biden can’t force it to comply. When Beijing has given the United States valuable information about virus outbreaks in the past, it’s because American presidents spent time and money building joint U.S.-Chinese initiatives and took pains to make China’s leaders feel like equals. In 2009, Biden’s then-boss, Barack Obama, stood on a stage with the Chinese leader Hu Jintao in Beijing—in the kind of scene Biden mocks in his ad—and said the two governments should “build upon our mutual interests and engage on the basis of equality and mutual respect.” The two leaders announced that they would “deepen cooperation on global public health issues, including Influenza A (H1N1) prevention, surveillance, reporting and control.” As the Rand Corporation’s Jennifer Huang Bouey has noted, this cooperation hastened the development of an H1N1 vaccine. In suggesting that Biden could bludgeon China into submission—in a phone call, no less—the Biden campaign is peddling a lie about how public-health cooperation with China actually works.

    This Dem-leaning piece is way too kind on China (as you would expect), but is correct that trying to spin Biden as “tough on China” is absurd.

  • “Candidate Who Killed #MeToo Movement Returns Donation From Notorious Masturbator.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Documents seized in the raid that killed him showed that Osama bin Laden wanted to assasinate President Obama because he thought Biden was woefully unprepared to take over. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Virtual rope line?
  • Reporter tries to nail President Trump for having a rally in early March. Know who had rallies later in March? Biden. To be fair, they were much, much smaller rallies than Trump’s…
  • Is Biden going to release a potential SCOTUS list? David Harsanyi says “Go ahead, make our day.”
  • Why Biden might pick Alabama Congresswoman Rep. Terri Sewell. Basically because she’s black and endorsed Biden.
  • “Why Joe Biden’s America loves a lockdown. The divide between the professional and servant classes has never been more stark.”

    The highly educated professional classes can work from home, and their jobs are relatively secure; the service class, on the other hand—the waiters and cooks and hotel maids and retail clerks and others — are out of their jobs and shit out of luck. Not to worry: the professional class will write all of them checks for $1,200. Let them eat cake, you know?

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Bernie Bro who created meme Twitter banned: “They took the bait!

  • Heh:

  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tucker Carlson On Democrats And Rigged College Admissions

    Sunday, July 21st, 2019

    Tucker Carlson notes that the none-to-bright spawn of prominent elected Democrats seem to get into elite colleges at a mathematically improbable rate:

    One correction, though: If you work in high tech, you run into people from Stanford a fair amount.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

    LinkSwarm for September 8, 2017

    Friday, September 8th, 2017

    It would be swell if I could stop leading the LinkSwarm off with hurricane-related news, but Irma is now a class five hurricane headed straight at Florida. If you’re in any evacuation zones, heed authorities, as this does not look like a storm you want to ride out in place unless you have to. Hsoi’s preparedness checklist is also a good thing to go over earlier rather than later.

  • One reason President Donald Trump had to act on DACA: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and nine other states were threatening to sue to end Obama unconstitutional backdoor amnesty program.
  • “ÂŻ\_(ツ)_/ÂŻ Obama lawyer who worked on DACA admits it’s probably unconstitutional.” And yes, the ASCII Shrugging Emoji is actually in the headline, so it just wouldn’t have felt honest to leave it out…
  • “Trump’s Crackdown on Illegal Aliens is Driving Wage-Growth in US Construction Industry by up to 30%.” In other news: Basic economics have not been repealed by liberal talking points. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Congress passes hurricane relief bill and debt ceiling hike. Both John Cornyn and Ted Cruz voted in favor of the bill. I haven’t read the bill, but I’m hoping it’s less stuffed with pork than the Sandy bill.
  • J.J. Watt’s Hurricane Harvey flood relief fundraiser hits $29 million.
  • What it takes to keep HEB stores up and running after a hurricane.

    One of my stores, we had 300 employees; 140 of them were displaced by the flooding. So how do you put your store back together quickly? We asked for volunteers in the rest of the company. We brought over 2,000 partners from Austin, San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley. They hopped into cars and they just drove to Houston. They said, we’re here to help. It’s shitty work. For 18 hours a day, they’re going to help us restock and then they’ll go sleep on the couch at somebody’s house.

  • The bribery trial for New jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez gets under way.
  • “It Appears That Out-of-State Voters Changed the Outcome of the New Hampshire U.S. Senate Race.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Why Israel had to bomb Syria’s chemical weapons complex. For one thing, it looks like Iran, Assad and Hezbollah will all emerge strengthened from the Syrian civil war…
  • Speaking of Iran, they’re amassing new weaponry. “While all eyes are on North Korea, Iran is advancing its weapons technology. The country recently tested and announced the success of their new Bavar 373 long range, mobile, anti-missile defense system. Everything in the system is manufactured in Iran; it requires no support from outside sources.” However, since Iran has (to my knowledge) no wafer fabrication plants to produce integrated circuits, this statement is almost certainly false, at least as far as electronics goes. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Bulgaria is projected to have the fastest-shrinking population in the world.” I suspect this is a combination of communism (and its aftermath) sucking, of it wrecking disproportionately more damage on backward, mostly rural countries, and of the general trend in Europe toward a modern, unchurched, welfare state society, with its attendant population decline.
  • Betty DeVos vows to dismantle the Obama-era campus kangaroo rape courts. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Twitter Bans Activist Mommy for Tweeting Her Dislike of Teen Vogue’s Anal Sex Guide.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • This is disappointing.
  • Texans handled Harvey better than Louisianans handled Katrina because both their governments and societies are more functional.
  • Another day, another fake hate crime. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • The American Railway union was founded on segregation. “George Pullman famously hired African Americans to work for him. Eugene Debs infamously did not allow African Americans to join his union striking against Pullman’s company.”
  • Al Gore’s new book being outsold by scientist’s book debunking Al Gore.
  • I laughed.
  • LinkSwarm for March 3, 2017

    Friday, March 3rd, 2017

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! (On a personal note, if you know of any technical writing positions here in the Austin area, please let me know.)

  • U.S. troops in Iraq finally get to enjoy sane rules of engagement. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • George Soros-funded group is providing scripts for those “spontaneous” town hall protests. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • For many Democrats, President Trump’s joint address was the first time they actual heard and saw him unfiltered. “He just crushed the Drive-By [Media] last night. He just crushed them. He just blew up every narrative they’ve established on the guy. And they don’t even realize it.”
  • “As one might imagine given the Democrats’ breathtaking electoral collapse, there is basically nothing but bad news for Democrats across the board. The data showed that the voting patterns of key demographic groups shifted dramatically downward from 2008 through 2016.” More: “Contrary to the emerging Democratic majority thesis, there does not seem to be any demographic category with which Democrats are progressively improving.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Maine: Want to work for a living? Welfare recipient: Nah! Maine: Well then, I guess you won’t be needing these food stamps.
  • Man arrested for making threats to Jewish groups is a Bernie Bro and former reporter for The Intercept. Bonus 1: His Twitter page calls capitalists “bloodsuckers.” Gee, that rhetoric seems familiar somehow… Bonus 2: This is hot on the heels of another Intercept writer poo-pooing the idea that Democrats might be targeting Jews.
  • “The Congressional Review Act of 1996 is a ‘sleeper statute’ (aka, a secret weapon) in that its practical application took 20 years to enter the realm of viable possibility. The CRA allows Congress to overturn executive regulations by a simple majority—and this is the moment it’s been waiting for.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • TBS guy at CPAC asks DA Tech Guy to help him make fake news.(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • No. Just no. And how come SMONE ELSE isn’t running away with the race?
  • “Trump Was Right: Large Amounts of Actionable Intelligence Found in Yemen Raid.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Leading French Presidential candidate Francois Fillon investigated for paying his own family “€1m ($1.05m) of public money for allegedly fake jobs.”
  • Geert Wilders’ party is poised to win the most votes in Dutch elections March 15. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Members of an elite Baltimore Police Department squad charged with getting guns off the streets gets hit with federal racketeering charges and held for trial without bail. More: “In one case, four of the officers are alleged to have stolen $200,000 from a safe and bags and a watch valued at $4,000. In July 2016, three officers conspired to impersonate a federal officer in order to steal $20,000 in cash.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Apple Board Member Al Gore makes $29 million in profit selling Apple stock.
  • Authenticity is bunk. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Help me Watergate, you’re my only hope!

    The NYT and the Washington Post have a motivation to ally with the Democratic Party in its last-ditch effort to Watergatize Trump after Trump’s endless criticisms of them. And this anti-Trump approach may get them a spike in readership, even as it repels some readers like me.

    I’m missing the sense that I’m getting the normal news. It seems unfair and shoddy not to cover the President the way you’d cover any President. What looks like an effort to stigmatize Trump as not normal has — to my eyes — made the media abnormal.

    Snip.

    The more seemingly normal Trump becomes — as with his speech to Congress the other day — the more the anti-Trump approach of the news media feels like a hackish alliance with the Democratic Party in its sad, negative, backward-looking effort to disrupt the President the people elected.

  • Have any of my friends lost a gun transiting Austin Bergstrom Airport? If so, a baggage handler may have stole your gun to trade for pot.

    Austin police have charged Matthew Bartlett, 21, and Catronn Hewitt, 36, with felony possession of marijuana, police said in a news release.

    Ja’Quan Johnson, 25, was charged with federal charges in connection with the thefts. Johnson is a contract baggage handler at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and is believed to have been behind the thefts, according to police and the Justice Department.

    Buying pot? Likely misdemeanor charge. But stealing guns from airport luggage is likely an interstate federal gun trafficking felony. Also: Our airport security is in the best of hands!

  • Houston Chronicle to move its call center from the Philippines to Dallas. 1. Who thought it was a good idea to move it to the Philippines in the first place? 2. “The move will result in 130 new jobs for Texas.” Why does the Chronicle need 130 people in its call center? 3. Dallas? Really? Because it’s evidently impossible to locate a call center in the 4th largest city in America…
  • SEC charges against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dismissed. A state felony trail is pending, but given that the state charges are based on the same issue as the SEC case just dismissed, chances of a conviction would appear to be very slim. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Trump Derangement Syndrome in La La Land.
  • How was I to know/She was with the Russians too?

  • Speaking of which:

  • Indeed, “Russia!” is now the go-to move for the media the same way a bad video game player will just use the same button combination over and over again:

  • Happiest stinkiest place in the world. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Leonardo DiCaprio flew eyebrow artist 7,500 miles to do his brows for the Oscars. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Insecure Mongo DB run by toy company hit with ransomware.
  • Ever wanted Mickey Spillane’ typewriter or his World War II uniform? Now’s your chance. I already put in a bid on Spillane’s concealed gun permit…
  • LinkSwarm for June 18, 2013

    Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

    Too much going on, so here’s a LinkSwarm to start your day:

  • Why the IRS scandal is worse than the others.
  • Snowden: Obama made all NSA abuses worse. Well, making things worse is Obama’s magic touch…
  • The NSA confirms it can listen to domestic phone calls without a court order. Or so Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) said a few days ago, but now he’s trying to walk his statement back.
  • Even Al Gore is shocked at the NSA’s sweeping domestic surveillance. Hey Al: That’s just what happens when you have no controlling legal authority.
  • Don’t tell the liberals, but conservatives actually won the Arizona voting rights case.
  • Erdogan cracks down in Turkey. (Hat tip: Claire Berlinski’s Twitter feed.)
  • Q: What do Democrats call illegal aliens who have beaten women and children? A: Evidently future Democratic voters, since they refuse to amend the Gang of 8 illegal alien amnesty bill to exclude them.
  • A rundown on Texas gun laws signed into law from the most recent session. (Previously.)
  • Democratic Rep. John Larson (D–Con) whines that it’s so very, very unfair that ObamaCare applies to congress. Hold on, Rep. Larson. When I can get some time on a scanning-tunneling microscope, I’ll see if I can find an appropriately sized violin.
  • Maureen Dowd slams Obama some more: “When the man who polled where to take his summer vacation and whether to tell the truth about his affair with Monica Lewinsky tells you you’re a captive of polls, you’d better listen up.” Bonus: Description of the NSA program as “No Call Left Behind.”
  • A new crime control initiative in Houston: arm the law-abiding. More on the Armed Citizen Project here.
  • Second Amendment activists gather twice the necessary number for signatures to force a recall election for Colorado Senate President John Morse.
  • Animal Rights activists get Obama Administration to end testing on chimps. So much for liberals being part of the “science-based community.”
  • SooperMexican makes brutal fun of the SNAP Challenge. (If you’ve never heard of the SNAP challenge, it’s another variant on the “Any time conservatives cut a dime of government funding, 10 million children starve!” argument.)
  • Scientists invent a robotic cat. Evidently it has the “massive indifference to your presence” and “not coming when you call it” parts of a cat’s personality down pat…
  • Frozen Wasteland

    Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

    The banjo player is actually pretty good…

    (Hat Tip: Todd H.)