Posts Tagged ‘Chuck Schumer’

LinkSwarm for April 28, 2023

Friday, April 28th, 2023

Our Glorious Elites try mightily to keep us peons from expressing #WrongThink, two high profile media firings, and more Blue City decline. Enjoy a short but sweet Friday LinkSwarm!

  • How the Deep State helped rig the election for Biden.

    It transpires that the infamous incident before the 2020 election in which 50 former intelligence officials signed an open letter declared a New York Post expose about Hunter Biden’s laptop to have the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” was instigated at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign. This at least is the allegation in a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken released by Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government.

    In that letter, which is not easy to find, you’ll see three snippets of dialogue from questioning of Morell, who appears to have organized the open letter. In the first snippet, he explains that the idea originated with a call from Blinken, then of the Biden campaign.

  • It looks like every campaign to fight “disinformation” was just a tool to silence dissenting voices.

    I knew things were bad in my world, but the truth turned out to be much worse than I could have imagined.

    My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My resume also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms.

    In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”

    Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing.

    When Malaysian and Singaporean governments introduced “fake news” laws, EngageMedia supported networks of activists campaigning against it. We ran digital security workshops for journalists and human rights advocates under threat from government attack, both virtual and physical. We developed an independent video platform to route around Big Tech censorship and supported campaigners in Thailand fighting government attempts to suppress free expression. In Asia, government interference in speech and expression was the norm. Progressive activists in search of more political freedom often looked to the West for moral and financial support. Now the West is turning against the core value of free expression, in the name of fighting disinformation.

    Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.

    After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.

    I underestimated just how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia and NGOs under the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy. We’re still calculating, but I had estimated it at hundreds of millions of dollars annually and I’m probably still being naive – Peraton received a USD $1B dollar contract from the Pentagon.

    In particular, I was unaware of the scope and scale of the work of groups like the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, the Center for European Policy Analysis and consultancies such as Public Good Projects, Newsguard, Graphika, Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub and others.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Eric Adams Blasts Biden, Says Border Crisis Has ‘Destroyed’ NYC.”

    New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams ripped President Joe Biden’s policies on the southern border Friday, saying that the White House’s position on the issue has turned the Big Apple into a disaster.

    Adams has repeatedly asked for assistance from the federal government as New York City deals with thousands of illegal immigrants who have made their way to the city thanks to Biden’s lax border policies. New York City will spend $4.2 billion to house and care for illegal immigrants by the middle of 2024.

    “The city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis,” the first-term mayor said during a panel discussion hosted by the African American Mayors Association, the New York Post reported.

    The Democrat then said that his city would have seen the biggest financial turnaround in the city’s history if it hadn’t been for the illegal immigration crisis.

    “If you removed the $4.2 billion that have been dropped into my city because of a mismanaged asylum seeker issue, you [would have] probably witnessed one of the greatest fiscal turnarounds in the history of New York City,” he said.

    Adams is delusional if he thinks illegal aliens alone are destroying his city. Graft, corruption, high crime engendered by leftwing Social Justice policies, high taxes, horribly burdensome regulation, and all the other hallmarks of undivided Democratic Party rule all played bigger roles in New York City’s demise. But the extra illegal aliens didn’t help. So how do you think Texas citizens have felt about the crisis all this time?

  • “Dem Bigwigs Caught Hobnobbing With Secret Chinese Police Mole.” “New York Sen. Chuck Schumer was recently caught on video rubbing elbows with one of two men arrested for running a secret — and illegal — Chinese police station in New York City’s Chinatown. The hobnobbing occurred at a gala for the Fukien American Association.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Bud Light’s Marketing VP Takes a Leave of Absence and Will Be Replaced.” Not good enough. Alissa Heinerscheid needs to be fired for cause for destroying billions in shareholder value.
  • Taking the next two in the order they were announced, not order of importance: Don Lemon fired from CNN. Also:
  • Tucker Carlson fired from Fox News. The problem with pairing these is that Don Lemon had one of the lowest rated shows on cable news, while Tucker Carlson had the highest, and ten times Lemon’s ratings (albeit evening rather than morning). Lemon was fired for naked partisanship and low ratings; Carlson was fired for wrong partisanship despite extremely high ratings. Carlson’s own statement after his firing:

  • Least surprising headline: “‘Drag Mom’ who mentored 11-year-old at Satan-themed pub sentenced to 11 months in prison for 11 child sex felonies.”
  • San Francisco Stops Boycotting 30 States With Conservative Laws Because it Had Little Impact.”
  • Remember those brand spanking new littoral combat ships the navy had built over the last decade or so? The navy is now wants to sell off six of them.
  • Weird, disturbing story that suggests a woman was set up for something very unsavory and scary under the guise of a fake job interview.
  • Happy ending.
  • A more efficient rotary engine?
  • Game engines have gotten really good.
  • The working military airport with a public road that runs across the runway.
  • “Revised Hospital Chart Has Patients Rate Pain On Scale From Zero To Watching ‘The View.'”
  • Blackstone Defaults: Subprime Meltdown 2?

    Sunday, March 5th, 2023

    This story seems like it should be a bigger deal:

    Blackstone (NYSE:BX) has defaulted on part of a €531M bond backed by a commercial portfolio owned by Finnish property investment firm Sponda, which it acquired in 2017.

    The private equity firm has repaid almost half of that figure, closer to €300M, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    Currently €297.1M of the loan remains outstanding, according to ratings agency Fitch. The loan is secured against 45 properties in Finland, most of which are offices and the rest are stores.

    Blackstone (BX) earlier sought an extension from holders of the securitized notes so that it could sell the assets and repay the debt, Bloomberg reported citing people aware of the matter. The commercial mortgage-backed security has since matured, without being repaid.

    A Blackstone (BX) spokesperson told Seeking Alpha that “this debt relates to a small portion of the Sponda portfolio. We are disappointed that the servicer has not advanced our proposal, which we believe would deliver the best outcome for noteholders.”

    Translation: “Shut up and let us force our losses on you rather than taking them ourselves.”

    Though off in Finland, this story should probably receive more notice due to the “mortgage-backed” angle.

    Remember the 2008 Subprime Meltdown, fueled by easy taxpayer-backed Fannie Mae money and bundled subprime mortgage securities? And how all sorts of banking fatcats got bailed out and never paid a price for their shenanigans?

    Well, mortgage backed assets never went away, they just moved into commercial real estate. There’s untold trillions of dollars in Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) across the world, and almost no one is keeping track of them. The average retail investor probably knows less about CMBS now than they did about subprime mortgages in 2008.

    And you know one of the hardest-hit sectors following the Flu Manchu lockdowns? Commercial real estate. A whole lot of companies figured out that a whole lot of their work force can work from home, freeing them from having to pay expensive rent on office space.

    Add to that the fact that the way CMBS are structured has immediate negative consequences on several cities. Because the rules of many CMBS state that the value of a property doesn’t need to be reevaluated as long as the asking price per square foot doesn’t change, commercial real estate spaces stay vacant for years rather than lowering their prices, screwing would-be renters and shrinking tax bases. (Louis Rossmann has been ranting about this for years.)

    Letting valuation get too out-of-whack with reality you get bursting bubbles and market panics. Blackstone Group is the largest commercial real estate owner in the United States. And they’ve been having other financial difficulties.

    Blackstone Inc’s (BX.N) fourth-quarter distributable earnings fell 41% year-on-year as the world’s largest manager of alternative assets said on Thursday it cashed out fewer investments across key portfolios.

    Blackstone has been dealing with rising redemptions at its flagship real estate income trust (BREIT), prompting the private equity firm to exercise its right to block investor withdrawals at 5% of the quarterly net asset value of the fund.

    That’s not exactly a sign of unassailable strength.

    Blackstone also gives political donations generously to both parties. Oh, and Chuck Schumer’s son-in-law works there. And Blackstone’s president Jonathan Gray and executive chairman Tony James were both big Biden backers in 2020.

    I am very far indeed from being an expert on how Blackstone has structured its various holdings. I suspect that its various funds and trusts and CMBS are all well-siloed and isolated from each other, which is the smart way to do things. But The Biden Recession That Dare Not Speak Its Name, falling real estate prices, frozen rental prices and huge shift in the need for commercial real estate all point to some very difficult challenges for Blackstone to navigate.

    Given the amount money Blackstone has spread around to the Chuck Schumers of the world, expect that there are going to be a whole lot of swamp creatures ready and willing to make any serious Blackstone financial problem into a big problem for the America taxpayer.

    LinkSwarm for August 19, 2022

    Friday, August 19th, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm…on Friday! What are the odds?

  • More dispatches from the Biden Recession: “Homebuyers are GONE.” Home sales are cratering nationally, companies that bought up lots of properties are slashing prices, and the number of homes being built is also cratering.
  • From the same guy: The 10 locations housing prices will crash the most. #5? Austin. “This is a market in absolute free-fall.” I know prices in my neighborhood have probably lopped off a good $100,000 or so, forcing me to rely on my vast book holdings to remain a millionaire…
  • Are we witnessing an end to the tranny pander panic?

    The other day, I saw on Twitter someone saying that they are a good liberal and all that, but they are really worried about what they’re seeing regarding the emerging culture of the medical and teaching professions encouraging children to transition to the opposite sex. “But,” said this person, “I don’t want to surrender to a moral panic.”

    I submit to you that a moral panic is precisely the correct response to this egregious phenomenon. That is, what is happening is so hideous, and so widespread, and the reaction by most people to this point has been so muted to non-existent, that if you are not panicking, you are not paying attention.

    Most people are not on Twitter, and if you’re one of these people, you may not be aware of the extent of the insanity. The media are not covering it, of course. It falls to badasses like Matt Walsh, Chaya Raichik (who runs the Libs Of Tik Tok account), Christina Buttons, and Chris Elston, the guy who runs the Billboard Chris website and Twitter account, to sound the alarm.

    The things they document are not nut-picking (the practice of finding extreme weirdos, and falsely using them as an example of the whole). They are completely mainstream. These are things that, if we had a functional media instead of a Narrative-massaging industry, would be widely reported, and discussed intensely.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Libs of TikTok on how the radical social justice groomer left wants to sever the connection between parents and children.

    The Left’s agenda to groom your children has taken another turn. Various states across America have begun implementing laws and policies to allow children to make healthcare decisions without a parent or guardian’s consent — and the medical industry is promoting it. Many of these states are using these new laws to allow for drastic medical decisions to be made without parental consent including hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery, and medicated mental health treatment.

    In Washington, children as young as 13 are now allowed to undergo gender reassignment surgery and other questionable medical treatments without parental consent.

    One Washington dad alleged in a viral TikTok video that a school gave his 15-year-old child antidepressants without informing him. Sounds completely insane and illegal, right? Well . . . it sounds that way, but it isn’t. Under Washington law, this is 100% legal and is allegedly being carried out by schools.

    New York has hopped on the bandwagon of removing parents from the treatment room as well. New York-Presbyterian recently sent out emails to their patients explaining that accounts for 12-17-year-olds must be updated to reflect the adolescent’s personal email address as the primary contact as New York State law allows children “to keep their sensitive medical information private and to consent to some of their own medical treatment.”

    Twelve-year-old children will now have the ability to be the primary decision-maker for many of their medical treatments and procedures. Children will also have the ability to completely revoke medical record access for their parents or guardians. 12-year-old children who can barely do their own laundry now have authority over their healthcare.

    Snip.

    One concerned parent in Kennebunk, Maine shared photos with us of a medical questionnaire for patients 12 years of age and older which read “To be filled out by patient only.” The questionnaire included questions about sexuality, asking children what gender they’re attracted to, and if the child has ever been in a romantic relationship or had sex. Separate questions ask the children if they’ve ever had questions about their gender identity and what their preferred pronouns are.

    The parent spoke to me regarding the questionnaire and stated her child was given the forms right after he turned 13. Naturally, her son was uncomfortable and confused by the questions and asked his mom for help. However, the mom claims the doctor made her leave the room and refused to allow her to be present while her son was answering the questionnaire.

    Why would a doctor need to secretly know the sexual preference and gender identity that a 13-year-old child claims without his mom present? Why would any child be required to share answers to all these invasive questions and bar any parental involvement?

    It’s not just Maine, Arizona, New York, and Washington — the removal of parents from important decisions in their children’s lives is becoming a nationwide policy trend aggressively pushed by the Left.

  • Given how much Libs of TikTok has uncovered of the groomer agenda, it’s no wonder that Facebook has banned her:

  • Austin Fire Department Chaplain Fired over Blog Post Objecting to Males in Women’s Sports.” No surprise to followers of Austin politics, given the way their union has been taken over by the radical left.
  • Related: “Twitter Is Objectively Pro-Groomer.”
  • “Sanctuary cities not enjoying actually being used as sanctuaries.”

    To the great consternation of liberal Democratic mayors in the northeast, the governors of Texas and Arizona continue to send busloads of illegal migrants to New York and Washington to lessen the burdens on their states and draw more attention to the Biden border crisis. This has put the municipal governments of these self-defined sanctuary cities in a bit of a tough position politically. They are supposed to represent bastions of hope for the migrants and freedom from the “oppression” of ICE and the Border Patrol. But now that the migrants are arriving in larger numbers and doing so in a very public way, it’s becoming clear that this is a problem that the mayors were not prepared to handle. As Charles Lipson explains in Newsweek today, these so-called sanctuary city claims were clearly more of a case of virtue signaling than anything else, but when the cost of invoking such policies began to rise, the backlash came quickly.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • New Minnesota union contract requires laying off teachers based on race rather than ability or seniority. Can you say illegal? (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Longtime CNN anchor, leftwing tool and known potato Brian Stelters had his show cancelled and was laid off. There’s not a violin small enough.

  • How the left abandoned Salman Rushdie.

    I still don’t understand Obama’s deep infatuation with Iran’s mullahs, or why he sent them pallets-full of currency, or why he desperately wanted to get nuclear technology to Iran. But I suspect his enthusiasm for providing nuclear technology to Iran was in equal proportion to his enmity toward Israel.

    So how was the American left supposed to keep championing Mr. Rushdie when Barack Obama, their Lightbringer, was such a fan of the mullahs who wanted Rushdie dead? Barack Obama had taken American tax dollars and sent it to the mullahs so that they could then turn around and use that money to pay the bounty to whomever successfully pulled off the fatwa against Rushdie. To stay true to Obama, America’s liberal elites had to now ally themselves with the men trying to murder Rushdie.

    Conservatives, of course, always supported Rushdie’s right to free speech and always decried the fatwa on him. But for those who matter most in elite society, the fatwa now reflected poorly on Rushdie, not those who imposed the fatwa.

    Rushdie was abandoned by the left, because they were now aligned with the mullahs who wanted him dead.

  • Over in London, unions are working on their Winter of Discontent cosplay by launching a Tube strike.
  • Families are getting the hell out of north Portland due to the huge increase in drug-addicted transients ts infecting their neighborhood. This is your city on social justice.
  • Turkey’s wild and crazy president Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues his innovative “lower interest rates during hyperinflation” gambit. Result? The Lira has crashed to an all time low.
  • Remember San Angelo police chief Tim Vasquez, who accepted bribes via gigs for his Earth, Wind & Fire cover band Funky Munky? Well he just got sentenced to 15 years in the slammer. I guess he’s no longer a shining star…
  • Also on the crime beat: Charges filed in Whitey Bulger whacking. “Fotios Geas, Paul J. DeCologero and Sean McKinnon have been charged with crimes related to the murder of Whitey Bulger.”
  • New York Times decides it can’t run an editorial by a black Republican senator unless it gets the permission of the white Democratic majority leader first.
  • More New York Times editorial judgment on display: “NYT Cuts Ties With Reporter Who Called For ‘Killing,’ ‘Burning’ Jews ‘Like What Hitler Did.’” The surprise is that they actually fired her. How do you think that conversation went? “Sure, lots of us have called for death to the Jews, but the ‘burning’ part just crosses the line…”
  • Boom:

  • “20-Year-Old Student Acquires 6% Of Bed Bath & Beyond, Makes $110 Million In 3 Weeks.”
  • Annnnnd….then he dumped it all.
  • “You’ll never catch me alive, coppers!”

  • LinkSwarm for August 5, 2022

    Friday, August 5th, 2022

    Ron DeSantis drives more enemies before him, the Biden Administration keeps doubling down on tranny madness, Batgirl dies for DC’s sins, and the most “Ewww” inducing headline of the year. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    
    

  • Why America can’t build.

    Construction projects are undertaken within a legal and regulatory system that presents persistent, costly obstacles, while projects are being overseen by agencies who lack the resources and in some cases even the expertise to manage them.

    Sepulveda’s numerous lawsuits and stakeholder conflicts are an example of a phenomenon that can be traced back to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969. NEPA mandates developers to provide environmental impact statements before they can obtain the permits necessary for construction on huge swathes of infrastructure.

    Shortly following the passage of NEPA, California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into law, which required additional environmental impact analysis. Unlike NEPA, it requires adopting all feasible measures to mitigate these impacts. Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything. As California Governor Gavin Newsom succinctly put it, “NIMBYism is destroying the state.”

    It is also destroying the U.S.’s ability to build nationally. The economist Eli Dourado reported in The New York Times that “per-mile spending on the Interstate System of Highways tripled between the 1960’s and 1980’s.” This directly correlates with the passage of NEPA. If anything, the problem has gotten worse over time. Projects receiving funding through the $837 billion stimulus plan passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crises were subject to over 192,000 NEPA reviews.

    The NEPA/CEQA process incentivizes the public agencies to seek what is often termed a “bulletproof” environmental compliance document to head off future legal challenges. This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees.

    The NEPA consultants are just one of the numerous types of consultants that benefit from the way we build. Most infrastructure in the U.S. is built through a huge number of state and local agencies: for example, there are 51,000 community water systems alone in the U.S. This decentralized structure makes it much more difficult to develop the depth of expertise needed to manage the complexities posed by megaprojects. Often, the multiple public agencies that are involved with projects also have overlapping authorities, creating bureaucratic delays and slowing decision making.

    The expertise problem is compounded by the fact that agencies are often staffed with a workforce of people either just at the beginning of their careers or near the end of them. Those at the beginning tend to leave if they are ambitious, which leaves senior positions in the hands of agency lifers. Because of this dynamic, and the fact that it is not economically feasible to have the wide range of expertise needed in-house, public agencies employ engineering consulting firms. These firms fill a valuable niche. If you are building a complex project—say, a long-span bridge or a desalination plant—you want advice from someone who has designed and built dozens of them. The problem arises when you become too dependent on such advice.

    The High-Speed Rail project was undermined by such a failure. At its peak, the agency responsible for the project, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, had fewer than 30 permanent employees managing the $105 billion project. Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours. As a California State Auditor assessment of the project noted, consultants “may not always have the state’s best interest as their primary motivation.”

    This lack of in-house institutional expertise leads to bad decision-making. Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at Oxford University who has written extensively about megaprojects summarized the problem when asked about California’s HSR project: “If you depend on consultants to know what you are doing then you are in real trouble…a good balance is where the owners are not outsourcing all the knowledge. A bad balance guarantees a bad outcome.”

    The pitfalls of this lack of balance appeared before large parts of the project began. In 2014, Dragados, the contractor for a 63-mile section of the HSR, proposed radical design changes that they projected could save $300 million. The fact that Dragados’s bid was $500 million lower than its competitors and that it rested upon a design concept that had not been thoroughly vetted should have caused alarm. As a senior engineer who worked on the original environmental compliance document for HSR and reviewed the concepts told the Los Angeles Times, “it is mind-boggling they would entertain some of the things that Dragados proposed.”

    Dragados’s approach may have been driven by the fact it didn’t have the experience of its competitors; it had never built a rail project in the U.S. before and needed an edge to be selected. It was a measured risk because it knew there were ways to limit its financial exposure if its design ideas didn’t work. A Los Angeles Times investigation of the project in 2021 found Dragados had issued 273 change orders for additional payment and had completed less than 50 percent of its planned work four years after its section was supposed to be complete. Its design ideas had been almost completely abandoned as unworkable and Dragados’s section of the work was $800 million over budget.

    The principal-agent problem arises with union construction labor as well. Skilled union workers, such as electricians and carpenters, make solid hourly wages, but their pay really explodes with overtime. A 2011 study by the Real Estate Board of New York found that some union crane operators made up to $500,000 a year in pay. Union contracts mandate unnecessary positions as well, to the benefit of its members. The same study found 50 workers in unnecessary positions such as relief crane operators on the World Trade Center Project, including 14 unproductive employees making $400,000 a year at the project.

    Similar statistics can be found on other projects; an investigation into the costs of the East Side Access rail project in New York, which cost nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track, found that only 700 of the 900 workers being paid on the project were needed. A TBM, which is largely run automatically and typically staffed with under 10 people, ostensibly had 25 or 26 people working on it. Because you can’t drill without a TBM, and you can’t build a high-rise without a crane operator, these union workers have inordinate power.

    A common retort to the claim that union labor drives up costs is that other countries, especially in Europe, have both high union participation and lower project costs. But it is widely recognized in the industry that unions increase project labor costs by 20 to 25 percent on average in the U.S.

    The fundamental problem isn’t unions per se, but rather the way that unions operate within parts of the U.S. system. The Netherlands has strong unions, but the Port of Rotterdam has been automated to an extent that has proven impossible in the U.S. due to union resistance. As the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, Harold Dagget, recently put it, his union will “fight tooth and nail” against further automation in the U.S. Any attempt at real construction innovation runs into similar barriers at every level of the system. There are too many layers of permission needed to innovate, including groups whose interests run counter to innovation.

    Innovation in physical work ultimately means substituting or complementing labor through technology to improve productivity. If your pay depends on overtime, you want inefficiency. The average dockworker at the Port of Los Angeles makes over $100,000 a year, largely due to overtime. The majority of foremen and managers earn more than $200,000, and the mariners who guide ships in and out of the port average nearly $450,000.

    The result is that innovation is inhibited by both labor resistance and a decentralized government bureaucracy that has neither the incentives nor the capability of driving real change. Perhaps it should not be shocking that U.S. construction productivity has fallen by half since the 1960s according to research conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey.

    Rent-seeking Uber Alles.

  • Soros slammed for America’s crime wave. Including this handy chart:

    In San Francisco, Soros-funded DA Chesa Boudin has seen a flood of departures from his office due to his criminal justice reform policies.

    Boudin campaigned on a platform to end mass incarceration, eliminate cash bail, and vowed to create a panel to review sentencing and potential wrongful convictions. Following his election in November 2019, Boudin announced he would deemphasize the prosecution of drug cases, so-called quality-of-life cases, and property offenses.

    Under his watch, vehicle break-ins increased 100-750% in parts of the city between 2020 and 2021, with the number of reported vehicle thefts reaching 1,891 in May 2021—more than double the 923 reported in May 2020.

    San Francisco also recorded one of the largest increases in burglaries among major cities last year, with a jump of 47 percent—a trend that has continued this year. Fatal and nonfatal shootings in the first six months of this year were up more than 100 percent from the year-earlier period, increasing to 119 from 58, the city’s police chief said at a July press conference.

    More than 700 people died of drug overdoses in 2021 in the city, a record that is likely to be surpassed this year, according to the chief medical examiner.

    Rudy Giuliani – the former Mayor of New York City whose claim to fame was a massive reduction in crime (and who’s traded barbs with Soros in the past), isn’t letting the billionaire off the hook.

    “If there is one single person responsible for the record increases in murder and violence in America’s cities it’s George Soros,” Giuliani said in a Monday tweet.

    “Major contributor to BLM, Antifa, Democrat Party, Biden, Harris and 40 or so pro Criminal DAs. The blood is on his hands,” he added.

  • Speaking of Soros, a resigning Chicago prosecutor slammed Soros-backed Illinois Attorney General Kim Foxx on his way out the door.

    Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy described an understaffed office in turmoil in his email to colleagues, saying, “I cannot continue to work for an Administration I no longer respect.”

    “I would love to continue to fight for the victims of crime and to continue to stand with each of you, especially in the face of the overwhelming crime that is crippling our communities,” Murphy wrote. “However, I can no longer work for this Administration. I have zero confidence in their leadership.”

    Murphy, who could not be reached directly for comment, zeroed in on many of the issues that have made Foxx a target of opponents who argue she’s gone easy on some accused of violent crimes, as carjackings and gun violence have risen in the Chicago area.

    Murphy wrote that he first started thinking about leaving the office early in 2021 with Foxx’s involvement in the passage of the SAFE-T Act, a wide-ranging law that aims to reform the state’s approach to criminal justice, including by narrowing the definition of who can be charged with first-degree murder.

  • Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shows he plays for keeps by sending state police to physically remove a guy from his office for refusing to follow the law.

    DeSantis has suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren for ‘picking and choosing which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,’ and has appointed Susan Lopez as his replacement during the suspension.

    Warren, who had served the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit, has most recently refused to follow state policy criminalizing abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade – and repeatedly refused to enforce laws cracking down on child sex-change surgeries, according to DeSantis.

    The liberal state attorney also declined to prosecute 67 protesters arrested in George Floyd demonstrations, and said in 2017 that he would only pursue the death penalty “in the very worst cases,” and not where “mental illness played a role.”

    “We are suspending Soros-backed 13th circuit state attorney Andrew Warren for neglecting his duties as he pledges not to uphold the laws of the state,” DeSantis’ office said in a statement, per Fox News.

    Update: DeSantis sent state police to physically remove Warren from his office, “with access only to retrieve his personal belongings, and (ii) to ensure that no files, papers, documents, notes, records, computers, or removable storage media are removed from the Office of the State Attorney…”

  • But that’s not the end of DeSantiss bad-assery this week. He also got PayPal to unfreeze Moms For Liberty’s account.

    PayPal has reportedly unfrozen Moms for Liberty’s account funds after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his state would crack down on woke banking.

    Payment platform PayPal allowed grassroots, anti-woke education group Moms for Liberty to access its funds after DeSantis’s new initiative against woke banking, Florida’s Voice reported. Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich reportedly told Florida’s Voice that her organization had been using PayPal for more than a year before the platform censored the group.

    Descovich reportedly said that many Moms for Liberty donors give monthly and automatically through PayPal. The payment processor not only stopped these donor payments but froze $4,500 belonging to Moms for Liberty, and prohibited any transfer of the money out of the account, according to Florida’s Voice. PayPal subsequently reversed its block by unfreezing the funds.

    PayPal notified Descovich that Moms for Liberty’s accounts were initially frozen during DeSantis’s July 15 speech at the Moms for Liberty National Summit, according to Florida’s Voice. The funds were unfrozen after DeSantis announced his initiative against woke banking.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Biden’s Department of Agriculture is trying to destroy corn farming in America.

    The world is facing serious food and energy shortages as an outgrowth of the war in Ukraine and supply-chain shortages. Farmers are working to solve these problems, but we need help from the federal government if we are going to have any chance of success.

    That’s why national corn grower leaders recently called on the Biden administration to address regulatory overreach.

    That call comes after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently revised its atrazine registration, a move that could restrict access to a critical crop protection tool that has been well tested and shown to be safe for use. Farmers fear that new requirements will impose arduous new restrictions and mitigation measures on the herbicide, limiting how much of the product they use.

    The atrazine decision comes on the heels of a development involving the herbicide glyphosate. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case decided by a lower court from California, leaving in place a ruling that supports the claim that glyphosate use causes cancer – even as the EPA has repeatedly affirmed that the widely sold and well-studied herbicide is not carcinogenic.

    The Supreme Court’s decision came after the solicitor general in the Biden administration submitted an amicus brief advising the court against hearing the case.

    As a result, the door is now open for states to create a patchwork of regulations governing herbicide use, which will increase costs as manufacturers must now jump through hoops in every state, on top of making compliance difficult for the users of these products.

    Farmers in Iowa and across the country have also experienced major fertilizer price hikes and shortages over the last year, thanks in part to steps taken by the U.S. International Trade Commission to impose tariffs on fertilizers. Thankfully, ITC recently voted against adding tariffs on nitrogen fertilizers. But tariffs on phosphorous fertilizers from Morocco remain in place, driving up input prices for growers.

  • Speaking of foolish regulations that can contribute to famine, new “debarbonization” shipping rules could do just that.

    A new report found that more than 75% of ships will not meet the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) new Environmental social and corporate governance (ESG) index aimed at decarbonizing the industry. This means that many ship owners will be forced to slow ships down to reduce emissions but doing so could deepen the global food and energy crisis by reducing available ship capacity.

    “IMO decarbonization targets will cause ships to slow down delaying food shipments and people will starve,” a global security analyst told gCaptain. “How many people will die as a result of the IMO’s ESG efforts is unknown at this time. I don’t think most shipowners even understand the severity of the EEXI threat but it could be millions of lives.”

    “Ships have to attain EEXI approval once in a lifetime, by the first periodical survey in 2023 at the latest.” The certification is currently voluntary, but banks and insurers may force ships to comply or be cut off. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Hanky panky in government jobs numbers?
  • Things the media doesn’t want to talk about: The leftwing whack-job who tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh thinks he’s a woman. Which I guess makes him a slightly different type of leftwing whack-job.
  • Russo-Ukrainian War update: “Ukraine takes out Russian ammunition railway connecting Kherson to Crimea.” I keep seeing rumors of a big Ukranian counteroffensive to retake Kherson, but it seems like it’s slow to make much headway.
  • “Chuck Schumer’s son-in-law lands lucrative gig at private equity giant Blackstone.” Of course he has.
  • The Biden Administration wants to force religious hospitals to embrace tranny madness.

    In 2016, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a rule that would have forced doctors across the country to assist in transitioning patients out of their biological sex, regardless of a provider’s medical opinion or conscience objections.

    “A provider specializing in gynecological services that previously declined to provide a medically necessary hysterectomy for a transgender man,” for example, “would have to revise its policy to provide the procedure for transgender individuals in the same manner it provides the procedure for other individuals.”

    The rule left no room for religious physicians or institutions to breathe, instead menacing them with draconian fines, were they not to toe the controversial new line.

    In stepped the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which swiftly secured a preliminary injunction in federal court that stopped the rule from going into effect, on the grounds that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and likely violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It was a decision later confirmed in 2019, and made permanent by a 2021 ruling.

    On August 4, however, Becket attorney Luke Goodrich, who has been working on the case since the Obama-era rule was first issued, will march back into the courtroom, having been dragged back in by the Biden administration and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.

    “They say that our lawsuit was only about the 2016 rule. . . . They say, ‘well, all you were challenging was the 2016 rule, and you won that, but now we’re using a different rule or a different rationale for imposing the same requirement on you, and so you have to file a new lawsuit,’” explained Goodrich.

    Under the Biden administration’s theory, the Affordable Care Act provides the administration with “all the authority” it needs “to punish groups that don’t perform gender transitions and abortions,” Goodrich told National Review. The 2016 rule also included language that Becket alleges would force religious institutions to perform abortions.

    Remember how Republicans said ObamaCare would endanger religious liberty and the MSM dismissed their concerns? Just like “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

    According to Goodrich, “the merits are completely resolved and haven’t been appealed; the fight on appeal is about the scope of relief.” He described an effort to work around a losing legal argument by burdening religious objectors and opening up new fronts of battle.

    “They want religious organizations to have to play Whac-A-Mole every time the government violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and they want a ruling that will leave them free to keep violating religious liberty every time they shuffle the same legal requirement from one volume of the Federal Register to another,” he said.

    That strategy is observable in the proposal of yet another, even broader rule — modeled after the 2016 one — issued by Becerra, who has made his political brand on waging one ruthless culture war after another.

    As attorney general of California, Becerra sought to punish independent journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal remains harvested during abortions. The Los Angeles Times editorial board described his decision to charge those involved with felonies “disturbing,” and the progressive Mother Jones called it “chilling.”

    He also happily enforced a plainly unconstitutional California statute requiring pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to provide pro-abortion materials to patrons, and, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted against legislation that would allow providers not to perform abortions without fear of government reprisal.

  • Has Tranny Madness peaked in the UK? There, the Rugby Football Union and Rugby Football League just banned men from playing women’s rugby. In other news, there’s evidently women’s rugby.
  • More signs of sanity in the UK: “UK Police Chief Says Investigating Offensive Speech Is ‘Waste Of Time.'”
  • “What’s the worst performing stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average so far this year? Disney.”

    The Mickey Mouse company, headquartered in Burbank, has lost about 35% of its value this year versus a nearly 15% loss for the broader index. As a result, tens of millions of Americans who hold Disney stock either directly or indirectly as part of passive index funds have seen their finances take a hit at the worst possible time as inflation spirals out of control.

    Disney’s poor financial performance is a product of its own making. In recent months, the company has aggressively waded into controversial cultural issues such as gender identity, making it clear it is putting politics over its shareholders and customers. Disney is a prime example of the threat posed to shareholders and the broader economy of “woke” capitalism. Its story should serve as a cautionary tale for other companies looking to follow in its footsteps.

    Disney has all but admitted it’s leveraging its prized position as a top children’s content creator to push a divisive cultural agenda. In March, Disney’s president of content told employees the company plans to have at least 50% of its regular characters come from “underrepresented groups.” Another top producer boasted about Disney’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” including “adding queerness” to children’s programming. Yet another senior executive promised that Disney would implement a “tracker” to ensure programs contain enough “canonical trans characters.”

    We’re getting a look at what this woke agenda looks like in practice. An upcoming episode of Disney’s new children’s show “Baymax!” features a transgender man buying menstrual pads. “I always get the ones with wings,” says the “man” wearing a shirt with the transgender flag. Disney is also abolishing the words “boys” and “girls” at its theme parks.

  • “BLM Activist Shaun King Used Donor Funds To Buy $40k Thoroughbred Show Dog.” That’s infuriating. Not that premagrifter Talcum X siphoned BLM money into his own pockets. That part’s hilarious and predictable. No, that he spent forty grand on a dog when they are so many shelter dogs who need a home.
  • Heads up! It’s a tax-free back-to-school weekend in Texas on clothes and schools supplies under $100.
  • “GEICO closes all California offices, lays off workers.” California regulation just keeps paying dividends…
  • Crazy story: U.S. Bank caught opening fake accounts and credit cards with customer money. Fine are not enough. People need go to jail for this.
  • Amazon flashlight lumen ratings are bunk.
  • A pretty good list of the 95 Best Action Movies Ever. Has all the stuff you would expect to be on there (Die Hard, Hard-Boiled, The French Connection, etc.), plus a good bit of Jackie Chan, Sorcerer, Safety Last, Hot Fuzz, and even Andy Sedaris’ hilarious low-budget breastsplotation “classic” Hard Ticket To Hawaii.
  • Test screens for Batgirl were so bad that DC simply isn’t going to release the film. “They think an unspeakable ‘Batgirl’ is going to be irredeemable.”
  • And, oh yeah, the Critical Drinker is there. “Warner Brothers may be the first domino to fall, but something tells me they won’t be the last. And when other companies realize that you can safely drop THE MESSAGE and the people peddling it…well, the next year or two could turn out to be very interesting.”
  • Charming or terrifying? You make the call.
  • We have a winner for for Most “Eww” Inducing Headline: “Morgue Assistant Uses Testicles From Corpses To Help Win Annual Spaghetti Cook-Off.”
  • “Government That Shut Down Businesses, Parks, Schools, Beaches, And Churches For 2 Years Says There’s Nothing We Can Do To Stop A Disease Spread By Gay Sex.”
  • LinkSwarm for January 28, 2022

    Friday, January 28th, 2022

    More Democrats accepting foreign payola, Russia sabre-rattles over Ukraine, a Supreme Court justice retires, Canada revolts, Harris County’s soft-on-crime policies are getting cops killed, and the war over tranny madness spreads. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm.
    

  • “China’s Huawei Pays Tony Podesta $1 Million for White House Lobbying.”

    Long time Democratic power broker Tony Podesta has earned $1 million over the past half year lobbying the Biden White House at the behest of a blacklisted Chinese tech giant, recent federal disclosures show. Huawei, which was placed under trade sanctions during the Trump administration, paid Podesta $500,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021 in an attempt to shake off the trade impact of the restrictions, according to the disclosure form filed on the evening of Jan. 20.

    With the $500,000 Podesta made from the previous three months lobbying the White House, he has been compensated $1 million over a six-month period for the lobbying effort.

    Podesta’s latest lobbying campaign targeted the Executive Office of the President and centered around “telecommunications services and impacted trade issues,” the disclosure said.

    Huawei, once the world’s largest telecom makers, has been facing international scrutiny in recent years. U.S. authorities have flagged the China-based company as a national security threat, saying the company’s close ties with China’s ruling communist regime, as well as Chinese law, could make it a potential espionage tool for Beijing.

    A stream of U.S. sanctions since 2019—which have barred Huawei from using U.S. technology and software, and shut out its gears from critical U.S. infrastructure—have slashed the company’s annual revenue by a third. In November, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that further tightened restrictions on Huawei by restricting it from receiving new equipment licenses from U.S regulators.

    Battered by the restrictions, Huawei has ramped up its U.S. influence operation in recent months. Podesta is one of half a dozen lobbyists the firm has engaged since July, which includes a former congressman and one former congressional aide, according to disclosure filings….

    Tony Podesta’s brother, John Podesta, served as White House chief of staff to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. He was also a former counselor to President Barack Obama, overseeing climate and energy policies.

    There’s your swampy Democratic Party corruption and graft, right there out in the open for all to see.

  • Speaking of open corruption: “Companies Linked to Putin’s Pipeline Contributed to Schumer Campaign.”

    Affiliates of two European companies that fund Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline contributed to the campaign of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who Republicans say has blocked sanctions on the Kremlin-backed project.

    ENGIE North America and BASF Corporation each gave $2,500 to Schumer in September through their corporate political action committees, according to newly disclosed Federal Election Commission records. ENGIE North America’s parent company and a BASF subsidiary are part of a consortium of five companies that finance Nord Stream 2, which will transport natural gas from Russia to Germany. While President Joe Biden has called the pipeline a geopolitical threat to Europe that helps Russian president Vladimir Putin, last year he waived sanctions on the project.

    Republicans have pushed for legislation to enforce sanctions only to be met with resistance from Senate Democrats and the White House. Schumer for months blocked Republican requests to vote on a sanctions bill. He approved a vote on sanctions legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) earlier this month in exchange for Cruz lifting holds on several State Department nominees. The bill received bipartisan support by a 55-44 vote, but Senate Democrats used filibuster rules to block its passage. Democrats say they want to use sanctions against the pipeline as a last resort should Russia invade Ukraine.

    (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)

  • Nor is this foreign influence peddling new: “Convicted Pedophile Funneled Millions In Foreign Cash Into Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign.”

    Convicted pedophile, UAE adviser and central witness in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, George Nader, has pleaded guilty to his role in helping the UAE funnel millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions into US campaigns during the 2016 presidential election, according to The Intercept, citing federal court documents filed last month.

    In a December sentencing memo, federal prosecutors disclosed that Nader had agreed months early to plead guilty to a single count of felony conspiracy to defraud the US government by pumping millions in donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaign – concealing the foreign origin of the funds.

    Snip.

    Nader is accused of taking instructions from UAE Crown Prince [Mohammed bin Zayed], and gave regular updates on his efforts to get close to Clinton.

    In total, Nader transferred nearly $5 million from his UAE business to [Los Angeles businessperson Ahmad “Andy”] Khawaja – CEO of a Los Angeles-based payment processing company. According to prosecutors, the funds were disguised as a routine business contract between the two men. Of the total transferred, more than $3.5 million came from the UAE government and was given to pro-Clinton Democratic political committees. Prosecutors have yet to publicly identify what happened to the remaining $1.4 million Nader transferred to Khawaja.

    Khawaja’s money laundering for Democrats was previously mentioned in this LinkSwarm. How many of the travails of the last five years boil down to Democrats trying to avoid going to jail for their corruption?

  • Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer announced he’s retiring. Biden, pandering as always, announces he’s going to nominate a black woman.
  • Speaking of the Supreme Court, the Biden Administration has reluctantly decided to obey its ruling on business vaccine mandates.
  • Canadian truckers have formed the largest convey in history to protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns. It seems pretty massive:

    How massive would the protest have to be to make Justin Trudeau change course? Leftists hate giving up government control of people’s lives, no matter how unpopular….

  • “Trudeau Claims Truckers Only Hate Him Because He’s Black.”
  • Speaking of which: “L.A. Schools Will Require Non-Cloth Masks (Even for Sports) and Vaccination Next Year.” As if parents even needed another reason to flee Los Angeles public schools…
  • School masking and closure policies are even driving liberal moms out of the Democratic Party.

    Tracy Compton, a mother of two in Fairfax, Virginia, had voted for Democrats for as long as she can remember, until the COVID-related school closures.

    ‘I tried and went to apply to work with the Democratic Party. I was told I was not allowed to become a member of the Democratic Party [in Fairfax].’

    A recording of a reorganization meeting showed fellow Democrats deeming Compton too ‘anti-school’ to be part of their political efforts.

    What made Compton anti-school?

    She wanted the public schools to fully reopen.

    When Compton worked to collect signatures for a recall petition for the local school board, she was welcomed out of the rain by a Republican party tent, even after telling them she was a Biden voter.

    In contrast, when Compton offered the petition to those inside the Democrat party tent, she was yelled at.

    Now? Given a hypothetical matchup between Kamala Harris or President Joe Biden vs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, she said she’d vote for the Republican in a heartbeat.

  • “Florida Is so Red, Democrats Can’t Even Field Candidates in Some 2022 Races.”

    All Florida trends are coming up sunshine for continued freedom from Covidstan. Recently Republican registrations surpassed Democrats in the state for the first time. Net domestic migration to the state also increased during COVID. Many commentators attribute both to Governor Ron DeSantis’s pandemic management policies. Just how bad does 2022 look for Democrats in the state? According to the Miami Herald:

    Evidence is piling up that Democrats in Florida have no clear bench of candidates willing to challenge Republican incumbents in South Florida, in what’s expected to be a daunting and expensive 2022 cycle for their party.

    Two first-time candidates who made early announcements they would run for South Florida House seats have both since dropped their bids to pursue runs for state office. A rumored likely candidate for federal office, former state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, was recently nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor.

    The three Florida seats in question represent districts in Miami, including Reps. Carlos Giménez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart. Giménez is the former mayor of Miami-Dade County and an immigrant from Cuba. Salazar defeated Clinton ally Donna Shalala in 2020, and Diaz-Balart has represented his district since 2002. The Herald called these districts competitive and said redistricting provided Democrats an opportunity.

    However, the only potential candidates are a few retreads who lost in 2020. Reportedly, Shalala, who is knee-deep in Clinton ick, may be considering a rematch with Salazar. She served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and as President of the Clinton Foundation from June 2015 to March 2017. Former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who lost to Giménez in 2020, may also jump in the race. To date, neither woman has announced their intentions.

    Unless you owe someone favors, why run an almost certainly losing campaign in a red wave year?

  • Masks don’t work:

  • Lockdowns don’t work:

  • “During the last year’s attempts to defund the police and reduce the number of violent encounters on the street, Baltimore kicked off what they call the Safe Streets Project.” Surprise! A Safe Streets worker was one of three people killed in a shootout. Dwight would be disappointed if I didn’t include this:

  • In addition to looting, murder and arson, the primary accomplishment of #BlackLivesMatter seems to be making donations disappear.

    No one appears to have been in charge at Black Lives Matter for months. The address it lists on tax forms is wrong, and the charity’s two board members won’t say who controls its $60 million bankroll, a Washington Examiner investigation has found.

    BLM’s shocking lack of transparency surrounding its finances and operations raises major legal and ethical red flags, multiple charity experts told the Washington Examiner.

    “Like a giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting in the night with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction,” CharityWatch Executive Director Laurie Styron said of BLM.

    BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors appointed two activists to serve as the group’s senior directors following her resignation in May amid scrutiny over her personal finances. But both quietly announced in September that they never took the jobs due to disagreements with BLM. They told the Washington Examiner they don’t know who now leads the nation’s most influential social justice organization.

    Paul Kamenar, counsel for conservative watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center, said a full audit and investigation into Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the legal entity that represents the national BLM movement, is warranted.

    “This is grossly irregular and improper for a nonprofit with $60 million in its coffers,” Kamenar said.

    You don’t say…

  • Fifty years ago yesterday, three Black Liberation Army gunman ambushed and murdered NYPD officers Gregory Foster, 22, and Rocco Laurie, 23.
  • Are illegal aliens being given fake IDs at the border? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Sundown Joe unwittingly greenlights a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Right now there’s a lot more jaw-jaw than war-war. I’ve avoid penning a thumbsucker on the situation because I’ve been too busy.
  • China deploys satellite grappling technology. Gee, if only an American president had created a special branch of the armed forces to handle space-related national security concerns… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Virginia Republican Delegate Nick Freitas is done with having Critical Race Theory advocates calling all who oppose them racist:

    (Hat tip: Not The Bee.)

  • Pro-illegal alien amnesty Americans for Prosperity: Here, Republicans, have some endorsements. Republicans: Hard pass.
  • Illegal alien charged in murder of Harris County Constable Corporal Charles Galloway.
  • And three more Houston police officers were shot yesterday.
  • In California, 26 year old child molester sentenced to juvenile detention because he identifies as female. Another gift from Soros-backed DA George Gascon.
  • Today’s unexpected ally in the war on transgender madness: actor Sean Penn.

    Sean Penn is doubling down on his defense of traditional gender roles.

    In two separate interviews this month, the two-time Academy Award-winner and ex of Madonna made comments bemoaning his perception that men are becoming more feminine.

    “I am in the club that believes that men in American culture have become wildly feminized,” the 61-year-old told the UK-based publication The i in an interview ahead of the UK release of his new film “Flag Day.”

    “I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that [in order] to be fair to women, we should become them.”

    In a subsequent interview the “Milk” star did with The Independent this week, he dug his heels into the polarizing opinion, going even further in his critique of men who challenge gender norms.

    “There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt,” he told the publication. Furthermore, he noted that the women in his life don’t seem bothered by the patriarchy.

    “I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them,” he said.

    Penn is wrong about an awful lot, but he’s right about this.

  • Intel to build $20 billion chip manufacturing facility near New Albany, Ohio (near Columbus), starting with two fabs. Intel had already announced a big investment initiative, and announced their were building two new fabs in Arizona last year. The Ohio location is a surprise, since there’s no fab infrastructure there, but evidently Ohio is throwing lots of money at them.
  • Vegetarian “meat” company Impossible Foods just laid off a bunch of people. “Technocratic elites have decided in the so-called ‘Great Reset’ in a post-COVID world that peasants should eat plant-based meat instead of the real thing as a way for ‘sustainable nutrition.'”

  • Yikes!

  • Bill Burr contracts Flu Manchu, reacts to it in Bill Burr-esque ways.
  • The new Superman is a “bisexual climate warrior.” Those comic book issues aren’t exactly flying off the shelf.
  • Speaking of comics: This comic page just sold for $3.3 million. A wee bit rich for my blood. And is possibly more than the artist made over his entire career working at Marvel…
  • Heh.

  • “Biden Warns Russia That If They Invade Ukraine, America Will Evacuate Haphazardly And Leave $86 Billion In Weapons Behind.”
  • “Biden Administration Mounts Daring Mission To Evacuate Hunter’s Remaining Cash From Ukraine.”
  • “Amy Schneider’s Winning Streak Ended After Being Asked To Name The Gender That Has Two X Chromosomes.”
  • I’m sending out a new SF/F/H book catalog Real Soon Now. Drop me a line if you want a copy.
  • I think my dogs want me to step away from the laptop.

  • Semiconductor Subsidies: The Wrong Solution For The Wrong Problem

    Thursday, January 20th, 2022

    There’s no problem that the federal government throwing money at it can’t make worse.

    Today’s example: Democrats pimping billions in taxpayer subsidies for the semiconductor industry.

    As the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates supply chain backlogs and global computer chip shortages

    Correction: It wasn’t the pandemic itself, it was government lockdowns and other overeactions that did that.

    Democratic leaders in Congress as well as President Joe Biden want Congress to fast track a $250 billion bill to develop American independence from China and other competitors in chip manufacturing.

    The Capital Region – home to SUNY Polytechnic Institute, the only publicly owned 300-millimeter semiconductor research and development center in the U.S. – stands to reap significant benefits from the enactment of Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s multi-billion dollar bill, which he envisions as a direct investment in his home state’s economy.

    “Sen. Schumer wrote this legislation with upstate New York always at the forefront of his mind,” Schumer’s spokeswoman Allison Biasotti said. “We are already seeing the excitement in major employer expansions and thousands of jobs on the horizon from GlobalFoundries’ planned expansion (in Malta) and (his) push for Albany Nanotech to be a hub for the National Semiconductor Technology Center.”

    A focal point of the bill, which the New York Democrat co-sponsored with Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., is a historic $52 billion investment in stateside semiconductor research and development to address a global chip shortage plaguing the automotive industry.

    Lawmakers began to focus more on the low domestic production of semiconductors when the COVID-19 pandemic cut off supplies from overseas. Without access to chips, several automakers shut down their production lines, and manufacturers of essential medical devices and consumer electronics struggled to meet increasing demand.

    Roughly 12 percent of the world’s semiconductors are manufactured in the United States, down from 37 percent in 1990, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

    Either these stats are false or misleading (probably the latter). The most recent stats I can find show that the United States has some 47% of the semiconductor market. It’s possible that the 12% refers to the entire worldwide number of individual chips produced, including discrete components (transistors, resistors, etc.). Those are indeed semiconductors, but they’re produced on old amortized fabs (inside the industry these are referred to as “jelly bean factories”) and sell for pennies a piece (or less). If you’re already in that industry, those old fabs make small, steady profits every year, but nobody jumps into that business with new fabs.

    The chips China make are generally either: A.) Cheap, or B.) intended for their internal market. No one sends cutting edge chips to be fabbed in China because they don’t have the tech to do it and everyone know they’ll steal your designs and crank out knock-offs on the sly whenever possible. China’s semiconductor industry is mostly smoke and mirrors all the way down.

    Semiconductor subsidies have all the hallmarks of a classic Washington boondoggle: The wrong action at the wrong time for the wrong problem.

    First, there are already signs that the automotive semiconductor crunch is easing, thanks not to the Biden Administration but to the actions of the free market.

    Second, the shortage wasn’t the result of a “chip shortage,” it was the result of “a lack of available foundry wafer starts.” Automakers cancelled their orders for display drivers when it looked like Flu Manchu lockdowns were going to depress the economy for a while, and were caught off-guard by the V-shaped recovery under Trump, and got sent to the back of the line to get their product fabbed after they changed their mind. Remember, just about all foundries are running flat-out 24/7/365, pausing only to switch to different chips for different customers. There’s no slack in the system, and those wafer starts are already spoken for (and possibly paid for) by other customers well in advance. Just as nine woman can’t give birth to a fully grown baby in one month, you can’t just “make chips quicker” in an existing fab.

    Third, remember that cutting edge semiconductor fabs are hideously expensive. Moore’s second law states that the cost of a new, cutting edge semiconductor plant doubles every four years. Samsung’s planned fab in Taylor, Texas is going to cost $17 billion.

    Fourth, if you go to a random semiconductor company and go “Here’s 20 billion! Go build a state-of-the-art 5nm wafer fabrication plant!”, then:

    A.) You’re looking at a very minimum of 2-3 years before the first production wafer comes off the line. You can’t just take an existing building and turn it into a fab, it has to be specially built from the ground up with exacting standards for cleanroom air filtering, concrete slab level uniformity, etc. And 2-3 years is probably the lead time to get an ASML EUV stepper.

    B.) Unless you’re TSMC, Samsung or (maybe) Intel, the answer is probably “Uh, we’ll try, but no promises,” because those three companies are the only ones that actually having wafer fabs running 10nm or smaller process nodes. GlobalFoundries, mentioned in the article, has Fab 8 in Malta, NY, running 14nm, which is not horribly far off the state-of-the art, but not good enough to fab the really cutting-edge chips demanded of companies like Apple, NVIDIA, etc. Tiny problem: In 2018, GlobalFoundries stopped all work on 7nm development.

    The contract maker of semiconductors decided to cease development of bleeding edge manufacturing technologies and stop all work on its 7LP (7 nm) fabrication processes, which will not be used for any client. Instead, the company will focus on specialized process technologies for clients in emerging high-growth markets. These technologies will initially be based on the company’s 14LPP/12LP platform and will include RF, embedded memory, and low power features.

    So it was too hard a game for them to play, but with a big heap of taxpayer subsidies, I’m sure they’d be willing to give it another go.

    Of course, you don’t need a cutting edge fab to build display drivers. Bosch just opened a $1.2 billion, 65nm fab in Dresden to do just that. But you don’t need subsidies to build trailing edge fabs.

    $250 billion in taxpayer subsidies wouldn’t get you a single additional wafer start this year, and probably would accomplish little more than channeling money to politically connected firms and sticky pockets in a state (New York) that no one wants to build fabs in any more because of high costs, high taxes and union rule requirements.

    It’s a bad idea congress should reject.

    LinkSwarm for January 14, 2022

    Friday, January 14th, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden has a bad week, another high profile Democratic politician is indicted on federal charges, and a dog goes home.
    
    

  • After having his business mandate overturned by the Supreme Court, Joe Biden goes on TV to plead that they have to end the filibuster because Republican election fraud prevention laws are keeping Democrats from cheating. (I may be paraphrasing a little.) Whereupon…
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin declares for the zillionth time “Nah, I’m good.” And…
  • Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema said the same. You know, just like the last thousand times Democratic Media Complex mouthpieces asked them. “Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you really really really sure? But we want it!”
  • But don’t let the focus on Manchin and Sinema fool you. Several other Democratic senators secretly opposed ending the filibuster as well.
  • Indeed, it sets up a no win scenario for some of them.

    If they vote with Schumer, Republicans will eat Kelly and Hassan alive this year and others later on, all for a vote that Manchin and Sinema have already insisted will go nowhere anyway. If they vote against the filibuster change, progressives will eat them alive in states where their support is critical. Even if these seats were salvageable, and that may not be the case already for Kelly and Hassan, Schumer’s move is guaranteed to lose seats for no purpose whatsoever. It’s the political equivalent of Pickett’s Charge.

  • Democrats handled Sinema’s refusal with tact and grace. Ha, just kidding! They called her a racist:

  • Baltimore Democratic State’s Attorney and Soros-tool Marilyn Mosby, “the city’s top prosecutor, was indicted on Thursday on federal charges of perjury and filing false mortgage applications related to her purchase of two Florida vacation homes.” You may remember Mosby from such previous hits as “How Soros-Backed Leftwing DAs Refuse To Enforce The Law” and “I want the FCC to investigate Tucker Carlson.”
  • Think the supply chain is screwed now? China just locked down several big ports over Flu Manchu.
  • “To staff, Kamala Harris is a clueless bully who refuses to do her homework.”

    Before she became vice president, Kamala Harris had a bad habit of ignoring prepared briefing materials.

    She does not appear to have kicked this habit, even after making it all the way to the White House.

    “Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared,” the Washington Post reports.

    One former staffer told the paper, “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it’s not really clear why.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Google, Twitter employees flood Democrats with donations as companies are accused of censoring conservatives.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Dr. Malone on Gettr.)
  • “J6 Hysteria Is How Media And Other Democrats Are Avoiding Accountability For Their Rigging Of The 2020 Election.”

    The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.

    Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.

    Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.

    Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

    It’s not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, it’s surprising that all of them aren’t screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.

    With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.

  • Why Democrats must make a mountain out of the molehill of January 6.

    The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

    That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

    Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

    Snip.

    That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.

    Snip.

    Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.

    The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists” are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.

    CNN proudly announced that the most-watched day in the history of their network was 1/6. The dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from the Trump campaign, his presidency and its aftermath than they, and they are desperate to rejuvenate it and re-discover that glory. Meanwhile, coddled journalists who have never broken meaningful stories have finally found a way to claim that they stared down dangerous and risky situations — as if they spent years in the middle of an active war zone or were persecuted and prosecuted by a corrupt and authoritarian state for their intrepid reporting — and have converted Brian Stelter’s CNN show into a virtual therapists’s couch where they all get to go and talk about how they are still coping with the deep trauma of spending a few hours in the Capitol last year.

    The pettiness and absurdity of this Democrat/media narrative, laughable as it often is, does not mean it is free of danger. Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • EU to exempt luxury yachts from carbon taxes because of course they are.
  • Hollywood’s new rules.

    A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended consequences of Hollywood’s efforts to diversify. Those white men who had spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired.

    The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief, normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.

    Snipped.

    So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said “only select staff” would have access to data collected on the platform.)

    The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024. But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were submitted to the platform.

    Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion standards.” (“I guarantee you every studio has something like that,” a longtime writer and director said.)

    Snip.

    The old-timers accustomed to being on the inside—and the (non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid they’d never get there—were one-part confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.

    “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”

    Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”

    Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: “I get so paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything.’ It is one of those things, ‘Will I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?’ Getting jobs in this town is so hard, and I’m very grateful to have a great job. If there’s any so-called ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.”

    It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that they thought everyone outside Hollywood—the country, their audience—believed. “Hollywood was never anti-Communist,” Wasson said. “It just pretended to be. In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business. There’s no morality here.”

    That amorality, coupled with a finely tuned sense of what the audience is hungry for, what’s trending, has left Hollywood more susceptible to the vagaries of the culture war.

    “Now, they’ll just say, ‘Sorry, diversity quotas. We’re just not allowed to hire you,’” said a 48-year-old white, male comedy writer who was recently dropped by his agent.

    Sounds like an opportunity to hire great talent on the cheap from someone outside the club. If only someone had the balls…

  • Steve Harvey says that wokeness has killed comedy.
  • Biden’s approval ratings hit new lows. Again.
  • Speaking of Biden, I wonder if this is what it’s like inside Biden’s head: A myriad of voices, and no independent will at the center.

  • Speaking again of Biden, remember that he backed a lot of economic turkeys other than Theranos.
  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Planned Parenthood:

  • “Senate Democrats Block Cruz’s Effort to Sanction Russian Pipeline.”
  • Mike Rowe discusses why 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs, and the coming severe shortage in trades workers.
  • Speaking of Rowe, here he discusses why the nonstop panic porn has desensitized Americans.

  • And speaking of healthcare worker shortages:

  • For your 2024 “change” presidential candidate, would you believe none other than Grandma Death herself? If she actually gets the nomination, then we’ll know we’re living in the simulation…
  • Dwight has a good, deep dive on the course he took on how to survive a gunfight out at KR Training.
  • The Young Conservatives of Texas have their ranking of legislators out.
  • TPPF’s Joshua Trevino has a pretty swell essay about Midland-Odessa.

    What you do see are the fruits of the conquest. The admixture of confident aggression, roll-the-dice settlement, and entrepreneurial genius manifests itself with the first wells you see. The Permian is rich, a treasure-house stored up across one hundred million years, and the wells are everywhere. They appear, solitary or in pairs, and as you proceed westward they multiply. There is a particular mesa with a sharp escarpment on its south face, and every time I see it I marvel at the wells perched on its nearly vertical incline. There is new exploration and investment, too. The Permian has been exploited for nearly a century, but its yield is nowhere close to exhaustion. Yesterday, and the day before, I witnessed tremendous convoys — men, trucks, equipment — sallying forth to new wells in the creation. There is a cotton field with wells on it: acreage that produces everything America needs to keep warm. In Midland itself, there is a golf course with a well on it. There are roadside shoulders with wells on them. There are wells everywhere. Midland-Odessa works: they raise families and hell alike, and power the continent.

    All of this is set in the Llano Estacado, a region of Texas ordinarily hostile to life and settlement. Most of Texas outside the verdant east is hostile to life and settlement to some degree. The Llano Estacado, though, is nearly the hardest far place there is, exceeded only by the despoblado and desert of the trans-Pecos. The land is hard. The weather is hard. The enterprise is hard too. The oil-and-gas business makes some men rich, ruins more, and perennially frustrates still more. There are the handful of energy giants around the world — the ExxonMobils, the Shells, and the handful of other names you see on gas stations and giant tankers — but that isn’t who you see in the Permian. It isn’t who you see on the road to Midland. What you see are names and signs of firms that you don’t recognize, and wouldn’t unless this was your professional world. Some are well established. Others are just starting out. All of them are the names of dreams and gambles: ideas made real but not necessarily lasting, leaps without nets. There is something admirable to it.

    Spend time in Midland (and, if you’re raising hell, in Odessa) and you realize you’re seeing a way of life that is increasingly rare. It is a place where nearly everyone is working. I don’t mean sitting at a desk. I mean labor as it was once understood, things done with the hands, wearying the body, with the end product being something you could see, touch, feel. It is a single-industry town, yes, but that industry is in the business of real material creation. In our fathers’ time, we could say that about most of America. Now it it characterizes only a small proportion of our national life. Something is lost along with it. You see Midland, a town where the taquerias and coffee shops open at 3:30am, at 4am, at 5am to accommodate what passes for rush hour there — and you see a town that is too hard at work to ever indulge in the luxury of anxiety. Places where people hit the alarm at 6am, at 7am, spend an hour on a crawling commute, spend eight hours motionless in a cube, and then repeat: that’s where alienation and disconnect occur. That’s where the civic neuroses take root and blossom. That’s where we spawn the psychic illnesses peculiar to people who are physically safe and have in their whole lives risked nothing.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Heh:

  • Lunatic stabs police dog to death. Lunatic gets dirtnapped. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Things that make you go “Hmmm.” Namely Austin police finding two submerged bodies in three days…
  • So you want to become a warlord! Here are some handy tips on ruling your patch of the post-apocalyptic wasteland! (Though sadly, there seems to be very little information on obtaining chrome face spray after the apocalypse…)
  • A list of Austin restaurants that closed in 2021.
  • Bill Burr remembers his friend Bob Saget.
  • Impressive!

  • Richard Hammond makes the case for classic cars.

    They are artifacts that have locked into them so many messages about the aspirations, hopes, needs, and restrictions of their time. They were incredibly expensive things, and they were used as opportunities to demonstrate something about yourself, to say something about yourself to the world…[The best art is] always composed within some sort of restraints. There’s always a limit to how far you can go, and it’s within those limitations that i think human ingenuity does best.

    I think this is true, and I think that the restraints and limits of various art forms are what help bring out their greatness.

  • “Supreme Court Sets Dangerous Precedent Of Letting The American People Make Medical Decisions For Themselves.”
  • “FBI Promises To Make Hoaxes Less Obvious This Year.”
  • Dog stolen from man on Christmas Day found and returned. Man, these winter allergies are real killers…
  • LinkSwarm for May 28, 2021

    Friday, May 28th, 2021

    Like inflation and unemployment, crime rates are rising again. Biden is really the 1970s gift that keeps giving!

  • Democrats are weaker than they appear:

    Vulnerable red- and purple-state Democrats need some bipartisan cover if they’re going to vote for another massive spending bill. And Biden would prefer to have a unified Democratic Party blaming Republicans for the inability to come to a consensus than to have a divided Democratic Party with one side of the Senate caucus blaming the other side of the Senate caucus for the inability to come to a consensus.

    Chuck Schumer is largely bluffing when he says the Senate will pass an infrastructure bill in July, with or without Republicans. Democrats can go down this path, but it’s a risk that at least a handful of their senators don’t want to take, and when the Senate is split 50–50, the Democrats can’t afford to lose anyone. Those with long memories can remember when Democrats were convinced all the legislation they passed in 2009 and 2010 would protect them in the midterms.

  • Speaking of Democrats in trouble, rising violent crime rates are another thing that might doom them in midterm elections:

    A rise in violent crime is endangering slim Democratic congressional majorities more than a year out from the midterm elections and threatening to revive “law and order” as a major campaign issue for Republicans for the first time since the 1990s.

    Homicides in cities increased by up to 40% over the previous year, the biggest single-year increase since 1960, a trend that has not abated so far in 2021. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one category of violent crime, ranging from homicide and rape to robbery and assault, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Homicides and shootings have gone up for three straight years in Washington, D.C., and at least a dozen mass shootings were reported nationwide over the weekend.

    Democrats’ flirtations with defunding the police — a handful of lawmakers on the Left nearly scuttled a $1.9 billion Capitol security bill in the House — may make them ill-equipped to handle the reemergence of crime as a top issue for voters.

  • Speaking of rising crime rates, having Soros-backed Democratic District Attorney Larry Krasner overseeing Philadelphia has helped create the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast:

    Mirrors are useful. A hooker walking down the street can easily fix their makeup. They can lean on them when they nod out too. In addition, when a heroin addict has no more veins left to inject in their arms, that mirror can help them find one in their neck.

    It’s kind of hard to inject a needle in your neck otherwise. Think about it.

    You’ll eventually get a sideview mirror ripped off your vehicle sooner or later. It generally happens as they nod out or “dip out” when the drugs kick in. When they slump towards the ground, they generally just take the mirror with them.

    You also become way to comfortable with people “dipping out”. It’s the local dance craze around here. As heroin takes effect, it’s almost like they fall asleep on their feet — slowly getting ever so close to the ground. Miraculously, they rarely hit the pavement. Many yoga masters couldn’t duplicate their prowess.

    Dippers are everywhere. It’s so common, YouTube has endless clips up and down Kensington Avenue; many have hundreds of thousands of views. A YouTuber named “HoodTime” has over 5 million views on a walk he captured through Kensington March of this year. Many others are following suit.

    Just walking through Kensington and filming gets you instant material. There’s always something to see here. It’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re in America or a third-world nation at points. But money hides in trash and addiction.

    As Mike Newall explains in his article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, some of the drug corners near where I work pull in over $20 million a year. He also quotes Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro as saying Kensington’s drug trade is close to a billion dollar a year enterprise.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.) There are ways to decriminalize drugs that don’t give a pass to widespread “quality of life” offenses. merely ceasing to prosecute people for open criminality doesn’t make the problems that open criminality engenders go away.

  • Even Ezra Klein says that rising crime rates are a threat to Democrats. Gee, I must have missed him expressing such concerns when antifa and #BlackLivesMatter were burning down large swathes of American cities last year…
  • In news of the Biden recession, both both inflation and unemployment picked up in April. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he opposes teaching critical race theory in the state’s public schools, calling the ideas pushed by its advocates as ‘based on false history’ and ‘teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.'” Good.
  • Kurt Schlichter: Bring on the ‘Asperger’s Republicans’:

    Far too many Republicans, for far too long, have found themselves distracted and/or enslaved by the elite consensus, restrained by norms and conventions that the liberal elite demands we observe, but that it itself flaunts when those rules limit its options. These Fredocons care what people who care nothing about them think, and they find themselves responding to the outside stimuli of the garbage mainstream media instead of focusing intently on conservative change while disregarding the slings and arrows of the haters. When it comes to fighting the establishment, political Asperger’s is indicative of awesomeness.

    And our next generation of Republicans needs to embrace their place on the Spectrum – the more inappropriate the liberal elite finds their reactions to its cues and signals, the better. No more tame, pliable sissies like Mitt (R-ish – Miracle Whip). No more of Nikki! Haley’s sucking up to the establishment while trying to grift the base by leveraging hack conserva-cliché’s from 2005 to present to us as hardcore instead of Jeb! in a dress. No more Kristi!s and Asa!s fronting as all tuff about men pretending to be girls to win races then folding the second the establishment disapproves. Instead, we need GOP politicians who are utterly immune to the siren song of a media and an establishment that seek to draw them in and crash them upon the rocks. Our pols need to ignore MSNBCNN and its hysterical horsehockey. They need to stop reading the NYT and WaPo and being scared that a bad write-up will get them uninvited to all the cool parties. They need to lock onto their target and take it out like an Israeli missile flattens a Hamas/AP frat house.

    Look at Ron DeSantis – he just doesn’t care what the bad guys say. Not at all. They scream that he won’t enforce face-diapering, that he’s too hard on election fraud, that’s he’s declared open season on those Antifa/BLM nimrods who trap normal citizens in their cars on public roads, and then DeSantis just goes ahead and does what he wants anyway. And it works – he’s super popular.

  • Also weighing in against Critical Race Theory: Austin Knudsen, Montana’s Attorney General.
  • How Democratic foreign policy “experts” are projecting their own failures on Jared Kushner:

    For the past four years, there was no greater laughingstock in the American foreign policy cognoscenti than Jared Kushner. A full-on consensus reigned that cast the previous administration’s Middle East policies as hopelessly ignorant and one-sided, a view that went unchallenged in the smart set’s Op-Ed pages. There was no easier laugh to be had, no quicker way to pull a nodding agreement, than to mock the intelligence and good will of the former president’s son-in-law, charged with crafting an American peace plan, and obviously in way over his head.

    But the Young Pretender in charge of the Mideast portfolio is gone, and the mommies and daddies are back in charge, their think tanks falling over each other producing glossy full-color booklets promoting policies that would bring to bear the priorities of people who actually understood a thing or two about Israelis, Palestinians, international law, justice, and most importantly, American strategic interests.

    And four months into the methodical implementation of all the bright ideas reflecting off those glossy booklets, the situation on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has taken a dramatic turn for the worst.

    Though Kushner is long gone, this latest conflagration has been laid at his feet. His name trended on Twitter for days as hostilities between Israel and Hamas escalated. “They really put Jared Kushner, the slumlord millionaire who couldn’t properly fill out security clearance forms, in charge of Peace in the Middle East. Failure was inevitable,” read one viral tweet. “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed” blared the headline to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column.

    This is not just wrong; it’s complete projection. Kushner-era policies—on Jerusalem, UNRWA, and regional diplomacy—were promised again and again to lead to an “explosion,” but didn’t. The return of the experts was supposed to improve lives and prospects for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but hasn’t. In fact, it was the foreign policy intelligentsia’s values and vision that have led to disaster.

    Back in March, mere weeks into the new Biden administration, a leaked internal State Department memo outlined the contours of a new direction on American policy toward the Palestinian issue. The document called for renewed diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority, restoring aid that had been cut, renewing American contributions to UNRWA, putting pressure on Israel for moves in Jerusalem that would make a new Palestinian Authority election possible, and pursuing a two-state arrangement based roughly on the pre-1967 lines.

    These were all priorities of the smart set miffed by a previous administration that was too close to Israel for their tastes. But they were also terrible ideas. Take the renewal of UNRWA funding. UNRWA is the U.N. agency dedicated to perpetuating, rather than solving, the Palestinian refugee problem. By cultivating the myth of a non-existent “right of return” rather than rehabilitating displaced persons and their descendants, UNRWA ensures that a negotiated two-state deal cannot be reached.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Drew Holden takes us on a trip down memory lane of various MSM talking heads declaring that the Wuhan coronavirus lab leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory,” including all the usual suspects (New York Times, CNN, etc.).
  • “Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Tuesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unfairly raised prices and hurt innovation.”
  • Glenn Greenwald: “A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”
  • “Moms Demand Action [AKA another branch of the Brady Bunch Hydra] member-turned-congresswoman in hot water over bribe.” Allegedly newly-elected Illinois Rep. Marie Newman bribed opponent Lymen Chehade to drop out of the race, then reneged on the cushy congressional job.

  • “Support for Black Lives Matter Movement Collapses Among Whites and Hispanics, Drops For Blacks.” The only question is why it took so damn long, when it’s been obvious for a long time that it is radical marxist garbage.
  • Christian teacher suspended after opposing the district’s transgender doctrine. “The teacher, Byron “Tanner” Cross, made the defiant declaration at a Loudon County school board meeting on Tuesday, according to the nonprofit group, Parents Against Critical Race Theory.”
  • Ted Cruz gets Biden ATF director nominee David Chipman to admit under oath that he wants to ban the AR-15. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Speaking of Ted Cruz: Israel has a right to defend itself.
  • “Hunter Biden’s Ukraine salary was cut two months after Joe Biden left office.” What a curious coincidence!
  • China Warns Australia’s Military Is “Weak“, Will Be “First Hit” In Any War With Western Alliance.” Knowing Australia, this is far more likely to piss them off than make them cower. Maybe Australia should develop it’s own nuclear arsenal…
  • CNN hits new lows. I suppose I should clarify that’s new ratings lows… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Screwed up even by the standards of Baltimore.
  • Politifact tries to fact check The Babylon Bee yet again. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • IDF stats:

  • Interesting: Higher reasoning functions wake up first from anesthesia. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Enjoy the original video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”.” A very different sound mix as well.
  • If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day Windows would run Linux apps, I’d give you a funny look. But that appears to be happening. “New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL.” That’s “Windows Subsystem for Linux.”
  • Now you’ll finally get a chance to read John Steinbeck’s werewolf novel.
  • “Public School Teachers Issue Students Their Summer Book-Burning Lists.”
  • “Newsom Announces Sweepstakes Where 5 Lucky Winners Get To Move Out Of California.”
  • A vicious pack pulls down its pray:

  • BidenWatch for October 26, 2020

    Monday, October 26th, 2020

    Eight days out from election day! The Crooked Joe revelations from Hunter’s laptop are coming so fast and heavy that I’m hard-pressed to corral them all! It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • “The Complete History Of Hunter Biden’s Crony-Connected Jobs.” There are a whole lot of them:

    That the 50-year-old Hunter has been trading on his Democratic father’s political influence his entire adult life raises legal questions about possible influence-peddling, government watchdogs and former federal investigators say. In addition, the more than two-decades-long pattern of nepotism casts fresh doubt on Joe Biden’s recent statements that he “never discussed” business with his son, and that his activities posed “no conflicts of interest.”

    Snip.

    1996-1998: MBNA Corp.

    Fresh out of college, credit-card giant MBNA put him on its payroll as “senior vice president” earning more than $100,000 a year, plus an undisclosed signing bonus. Delaware-based MBNA at the time was Biden’s largest donor and lobbying the Delaware senator for bankruptcy reforms that would make it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy and write off credit-card debt.

    Fresh out of college I was working retail sales jobs while sharing an apartment and writing in my spare time.

    Besides a job for Hunter, bank executives and employees gave generously to Joe Biden’s campaigns – $214,000 total, federal records show – and one top executive even bought Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home for more than $200,000 above the market value, real estate records show. The exec paid top dollar – $1.2 million – for the old house even though it lacked central air conditioning. MBNA also flew Biden and his wife to events and covered their travel costs, disclosure forms show.

    Sen. Biden eventually came through for MBNA by sponsoring and whipping votes in the Senate to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act.

    When NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Biden during the 2008 presidential campaign whether it was wrong “for someone like you in the middle of all this to have your son collecting money from this big credit-card company while you were on the (Senate) floor protecting its interests,” Biden gave an answer he would repeat many times in the future: “Absolutely not,” he snapped, arguing it was completely appropriate and that Hunter deserved the position and generous salary because he graduated from Yale.

    Remember, people who graduated from Yale are automatically better than deplorables who graduated from a non-Ivy college, no matter how much cocaine they snort.

    1998-2001: Commerce Department

    Hunter also capitalized on the family name in 1998 when he joined President Clinton’s agency. In spite of having no experience in the dot-com industry, he was appointed “executive director of e-commerce policy coordination,” pulling down another six-figure salary plus bonuses.

    He landed the job after his father’s longtime campaign manager and lawyer William Oldaker called then-Commerce Secretary William Daley, who’d also worked on Biden’s campaigns, and put in a good word for his son, according to public records.

    2001-2009: Oldaker, Biden & Belair

    After Republican President George W. Bush took over the Commerce Department, Hunter left the government and joined Oldaker to open a lobbying shop in Washington, just blocks from Congress, where he gained access to exclusive business and political deals.

    Federal disclosure forms show Hunter Biden and his firm billed millions of dollars while lobbying on behalf of a host of hospitals and private colleges and universities, among other clients. In a 2006 disclosure statement submitted to the Senate, Hunter said his clients were “seeking federal appropriations dollars.”

    Hunter won the contract to represent St. Joseph’s University from an old Biden family friend who worked in government relations at the university and proposed he solicit earmarks for one of its programs in Philadelphia. The friend, Robert Skomorucha, remarked in a press interview that Hunter had “a very strong last name that really paid off in terms of our lobbying efforts.”

    “A really strong last name.” There’s the problem with the swamp in a nutshell.,

    These clients, like MBNA, also favored bankruptcy reforms to make it harder for patients and students to discharge debt in bankruptcy filings. At the same time Hunter was operating as a Beltway lobbyist, he was receiving “consulting payments” from his old employer MBNA, which was still courting his father over the bankruptcy reforms.

    In 2007, Hunter also dined with a private prison lobbyist who had business before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Joe Biden chaired, according to published reports. Senate rules bar members or their staff from having contact with family members who are lobbyists seeking to influence legislation.

    Hunter’s lawyer-lobbyist firm was embroiled in a conflict-of-interest controversy in 2006 when it was criticized for representing a lobbyist under investigation by the House ethics committee. The lobbyist was still taking payments from his old K street firm while working as a top aide on the House Appropriations Committee. Hunter at the time was lobbying that same committee for earmarks for his clients.

    William Oldaker did not just make Hunter a rich lobbyist. Oldaker also secured a $1 million loan for him through a bank he co-founded, WashingtonFirst, that Hunter sought for an investment scheme, which later went sour.

    Joe Biden deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign and political action committee donations at WashingtonFirst, while funneling hundreds of thousands in campaign and PAC expenditures to Oldaker, Biden & Belair. Joe Biden’s payments to Hunter’s lobbying firm, including more than $143,000 in 2007 alone, were listed as “legal services” in Federal Election Commission filings.

    Oldaker did not respond to a request for comment left at his office.

    But wait! Hunter had three other sinecures while working at Oldaker, Biden & Belair:

    2003-2005: National Group LLP

    While serving as a partner at Oldaker, Biden & Belair, Hunter also registered as a lobbyist for National Group, a lobbying-only subsidiary which shared offices with OB&B and specialized in targeted spending items inserted into legislation known as “earmarks.”

    Hunter represented his father’s alma mater, the University of Delaware, and other Biden constituents and submitted requests to Biden’s office for earmarks benefiting these clients in appropriations bills.

    2006-2007: Paradigm Companies LLC

    In 2005, when Joe Biden was thinking about making another run at the White House, after a 1987 bid that ended in plagiarism charges, his lobbyist son was looking for a new line of work too.

    In early 2006, Wall Street executive and Biden family friend Anthony Lotito said, Biden’s younger brother, Jim, phoned him on behalf of the senator. He said Biden wanted his youngest son – whom he still called “Honey” – to get out of the lobbying business to avoid allegations of conflicts of interest that might dog Biden’s presidential bid.

    “Biden was concerned with the impact that Hunter’s lobbying activities might have on his expected campaign [and asked his brother to] seek Lotito’s assistance in finding employment for Hunter in a non-lobbying capacity,” according to a January 2007 complaint that Lotito filed in New York state court against Hunter over alleged breach of contract in a related venture. (Jim and Hunter Biden denied such a phone call took place as described.)

    Lotito told the court he agreed to help Hunter as a favor to the senator, who had served on the powerful banking committee. He figured “the financial community might be a good starting place in which to seek out employment on Hunter’s behalf,” the court documents state. But he quickly found that Wall Street had “no interest” in hiring Biden.

    So the Bidens hatched a scheme to buy a hedge fund, “whereby Hunter would then assume a senior executive position with the company.” And Lotito helped broker the deal. Despite having no Wall Street experience, Biden was appointed interim CEO and president of the Paradigm investment fund and given a $1.2 million salary, according to SEC filings. Lotito joined the enterprise as a partner, and agreed to shepherd Hunter, still in his mid-thirties, through his new role in high-finance.

    “Given Hunter Biden’s inexperience in the securities industry,” the complaint states, it was agreed that Lotito would maintain an office at the new holding company’s New York headquarters “in order to assist Biden in discharging his duties as president.”

    After the venture failed, Lotito sued the Bidens for fraud. The Bidens countersued and the two parties settled in 2008.

    2006-2009: Amtrak

    During this same period, Hunter was appointed vice chairman of the taxpayer-subsidized rail line, thanks to the sponsorship of powerful Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, a political ally of his father.

    After that Rosemont Seneca Partners shows up, and we start to see the Hunter jobs BattleSwarm readers are already familiar with. Read the whole thing.

  • “Reported Biden Emails: Burisma Exec Said Hunter Biden’s Role Was To Halt Investigations.”
  • “Blockbuster Report Reveals How Biden Family Was Compromised By China“:

    Hunter Biden is partnered with the Chinese state. Entire investment partnership is Chinese state money from social security fund to China Development Bank. It is actually a subsidiary of the Bank of China. This is not remotely anything less than a Chinese state funded play.

    Though the entire size of the fund cannot be reconstructed, the Taiwanese cofounder who is now detained in China, reports it to be NOT $1-1.5 billion but $6.5 billion. This would make Hunters stake worth at a minimum at least $50 million if he was to sell it.

    Disturbingly, everyone on the Chinese side are clearly linked with influence and intelligence organizations. China uses very innocuous sounding organization names to hide PLA, United Front, or Ministry of Foreign Affairs influence/intelligence operations. This report cannot say Hunter was the target of such an operation or that China even targeted him. However, based upon the clear pattern of individuals and organizations surrounding him it is an entirely reasonable conclusion.

    Finally, the believed Godfather in arranging everything is a gentleman named Yang Jiechi. He is currently the CCP Director of Foreign Affairs leading strategist for America, Politburo member one of the most powerful men in China, and Xi confidant. Why does this matter?

    He met regularly with Joe Biden during his stint as Chinese ambassador the US when Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Later he was Minister of Foreign Affairs when the investment partnership was made official in 2013. Importantly, the Taiwanese national listed MOFA institutions as the key clients in helping to arrange everything. Yang would clearly have known the importance of Hunter Biden and undoubtedly would have been informed of any dealings. Given that he is now the point person in China for dealing with the US this raises major concerns about a Biden administration dealing impartially with an individual in this capacity. These are documented facts from Chinese corporate records like IPO prospectuses and media. They raise very valid concerns about Biden linkages to China.

    Snip.

    Joe Biden’s compromising partnership with the Communist Party of China runs via Yang Jiechi (CPC’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission). YANG met frequently with BIDEN during his tenure at the Chinese embassy in Washington.

    Hunter Biden’s 2013 Bohai Harvest Rosemont investment partnership was set-up by Ministry of Foreign Affairs institutions who are tasked with garnering influence with foreign leaders during YANG’s tenure as Foreign Minister.

    HUNTER has a direct line to the Politburo, according to SOURCE A, a senior finance professional in China.

    Michael Lin, a Taiwanese national now detained in China, brokered the BHR partnership and partners with MOFA foreign influence organizations.

    LIN is a POI for his work on behalf of China, as confirmed by SOURCE B and SOURCE C (at two separate national intelligence agencies).

    BHR is a state managed operation. Leading shareholder in BHR is a Bank of China which lists BHR as a subsidiary and BHR’s partners are SOEs that funnel revenue/assets to BHR.

    HUNTER continues to hold 10% in BHR. He visited China in 2010 and met with major Chinese government financial companies that would later back BHR.

    HUNTER’s BHR stake (purchased for $400,000) is now likely be worth approx. $50 million (fees and capital appreciation based on BHR’s $6.5 billion AUM as stated by Michael Lin).
    HUNTER also did business with Chinese tycoons linked with the Chinese military and against the interests of US national security.

    BIDEN’s foreign policy stance towards China (formerly hawkish), turned positive despite China’s country’s rising geopolitical assertiveness.

    Plus this handy chart:

  • And did we mention the $5 million non-secured, forgivable Chinese loan to the Biden family? (Hat tip: Jack Posobiec.)
  • Wonder why elected Democrats are so loyal to the “Biden is as pure as the driven snow” narrative? They’re all in it together. “Report: Hunter Biden, Associates Wanted to Bring in Gov. Cuomo, Sen. Schumer for Chinese Deals.”

    Fox News released an email containing a list of “domestic contacts/projects,” which includes Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, for Hunter Biden and his associates to lure into Chinese deals.

    The New York Post has more details on these contacts with explanations on why they should bring in people like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. Uncle Jim Biden also wanted to know about any foreign friends they could drag into the deals.

    Fox News said the email with the list of contacts is not connected to Hunter’s laptop.

    Jim Biden sent the list of contacts to those in the May 13 email, which was all about a Chinese venture with now-defunct CEFC China Energy Co.

    Biden’s list named “Harris, D-Calif.; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio; former Virginia Gov. Terry McCauliffe.”

    From The New York Post:

    A May 15, 2017, memo naming potential contacts was sent by Joe Biden’s brother Jim to his nephew and three other men who all formed a limited liability company to partner with another firm on “global and/or domestic” projects involving “infrastructure, energy, financial services and other strategic sectors,” the documents show.

    The other company was backed by a since-vanished Chinese energy tycoon and was to “be primarily responsible for arranging financing and execution” of the projects, according to the documents released by Tony Bobulinksi, who was CEO of the joint venture.

    The memo, titled “Key domestic contacts for phase one target projects,” noted that Cuomo “is moving forward with major infrastructure projects such as the long-stalled Tappan Zee Bridge replacement and the much-needed redevelopment of LaGuardia Airport.”

    “His administration has invested nearly $4 billion through the Regional Council and Upstate Revitalization initiatives to jumpstart the economy and support local priorities for development,” it added.

  • Secret Service Travel Logs Match Details in Alleged Hunter Biden Emails.”

    Secret Service logs obtained earlier this year by Senate investigators include dates and locations matching those discussed in the emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

    The alignment of the dates in the emails and the Secret Service protective detail logs is significant because the authenticity of the emails, first published by the New York Post last week, is the subject of heated debate. The FBI, which purportedly obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop in December last year, has not yet officially confirmed that it is in possession of the device and whether the emails are genuine.

    In one alleged email, written after midnight on April 13, 2014, Hunter Biden wrote to Devon Archer, his business partner, that he will be traveling to Houston the next day. Secret Service logs obtained by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs show a trip by Biden on April 13-14, 2014.

    In another alleged email, Vadim Pozharskyi, a top executive from Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, wrote to Biden and Archer on May 12, 2014: “Following our talks during the visit to the Como Lake and our further discussions, I would like to bring the following situation to your attention.” While the email doesn’t cite a date for the trip, Secret Service logs include a travel entry for Biden on April 3-6, 2014.

    In another alleged email, Archer wrote on May 12, 2014, that he is with Biden in Doha, Qatar. Secret Service records include a trip by Biden to Doha, Qatar, on May 11-14, 2014.

  • Related: Did the Secret Service hide Hunter Biden documents from congress? “If Hunter Biden was receiving Secret Service protection after the date the Secret Service represented to the senators the detail had ended, it implies the Secret Service may have withheld relevant documents about its travels with Hunter Biden from the senators.”
  • “Hunter biz partner confirms email, details Joe Biden’s push to make millions from China“:

    Now we learn that Biden has secretly been playing footsie with China.

    The statement Wednesday night asserting that the former vice president was a willing and eager participant in a family scheme to make millions of dollars by partnering with a shady Chinese Communist firm is a singular event in a presidential race already overflowing with drama and intrigue.

    The dynamite assertion, believable because it aligns with earlier information we know to be true, came in a statement by Tony Bobulinski, who describes himself as a former partner of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Joe’s brother Jim in the China scheme. Bobulinski unloads his bill of accusations in blunt but precise language and detail.

    He confirms that he was one of the recipients of the May 13, 2017, email published by The Post eight days ago. That email, from another partner in the group, laid out cash and equity positions and mysteriously included a 10 percent set-aside for “the big guy.”

    Sources have said the “big guy” was Joe Biden. In a matter-of-fact manner, Bobulinski states that the “email is genuine” and that the former vice president and the man leading in the 2020 race is indeed “the big guy.”

  • “Long-standing claims of Biden corruption all but confirmed with Hunter’s emails.”

    Thanks to three brave Americans, we now know that Joe Biden has long misled the public about his involvement with his family’s foreign business entanglements while he served as vice president.

    At considerable personal risk, former Biden family business partners Tony Bobulinski and Bevan Cooney, and computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, have come forward with tens of thousands of primary-source documents — internal corporate records, emails, and text messages — detailing years of business dealings that centered on trading on the Biden name. This material suggests that, despite Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing about his family’s business deals, he was well aware of his son Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.

    These new troves constitute hard evidence of Biden family corruption, and confirm our reporting dating back to our 2018 book “Secret Empires.”

  • “Photo shows Joe Biden meeting Hunter’s alleged business partner from Kazakhstan.” As long as it didn’t involve snorting or screwing, Joe Biden seemed to be involve in every single one of his son’s crooked deals.

  • The dog that isn’t barking: “‘I don’t think anybody is saying they are inauthentic,’ Biden campaigner Jenna Arnold admitted on Fox News after repeatedly trying to steer the conversation to other topics.”
  • Worth mentioning again: The Bidens even grifted off cancer research:

    A few days before the 2016 presidential election, outgoing Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, announced the formation of the Biden Foundation. “The Biden Foundation is an educational foundation dedicated to exploring the ways that everyone—no matter their income level, race, gender, age, or sexuality—can expect to be treated with dignity and to receive a fair shot at achieving the American Dream,” read the nonprofit’s press release dated November 5, 2016.

    In the span of several weeks, the nonprofit quickly was seeded with millions of dollars in donations. A year-end disclosure report for 2016 showed $3.4 million in contributions; the group spent a few hundred thousand on expenses but awarded no grants that first year.

    The practice of spending most of its money on salaries and expenses while directing little or nothing toward the Biden Foundation’s stated mission followed a pattern. During its brief three-year history, the Biden Foundation raised nearly $10 million but less than ten percent was awarded to other charities—and half of that meager sum was donated to another Biden-run nonprofit.

    Although the Biden Foundation pledged to focus on the couple’s pet projects, a very small portion of the Bidens’ largess directly benefited any of those causes. Instead, the charity appears to have funded the Bidens’ pre-primary campaigning for president—most of the charity’s activities involved public speeches by Joe and Jill—while reaching out to key constituencies such as military families and gay rights activists.

    Snip.

    But despite all the spin, the Biden Foundation only gave two grants totalling a little more than $400,000 to the YMCA that year. It would mark the nonprofit’s only direct donation to the initiative.

    In fact, even though the Biden Foundation raised $3.2 million in 2018, it donated just $55,000 more to three other nonprofits. The Military Child Education Coalition, a charity based in Texas that assists the families of U.S. servicemen, received a paltry $20,000 from the fund.

    Politically connected lawyers, however, fared much better. Perkins Coie, best known for acting as the pass-through between Fusion GPS and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 to produce the infamous Steele dossier, was paid more than $230,000.

    Aside from a handful of minor grants, the Biden Foundation made only one other major contribution in its three-year history; the charity donated $495,323 to the Biden Cancer Initiative, a separate nonprofit created in 2017, two years after Beau Biden died of brain cancer. In 2017 and 2018, the Biden Cancer Initiative raised another $4.8 million in donations; it did not award any grants. Instead, the nonprofit spent $3 million on the salaries and benefits of a four-person staff.

  • Swing voters give debate to Trump.
  • A Bribe Too Far:

    It appears that the Hunter Biden’s hard drive is the real McCoy. Neither Joe nor Hunter Biden deny it. It’s clear from the emails and other files on the drive that Hunter Biden was the family bag man and that Ukrainians were paying him for access to his father while Joe Biden was Vice President. It also appears that individuals—and possibly governments—from other countries were paying for similar access.

    The Democrats impeached Donald Trump for asking the President of the Ukraine to pursue an investigation related to the bribery verified by the evidence on Hunter’s hard drive.

    Let that sink in for a moment.

    The Bidens acted as they did believing that they had an airtight level of protection. As the bribes rolled in, it seems they became increasingly arrogant. Hunter Biden’s arrogance compounded with his addictions and other character defects led him to be careless. He never should have let someone who wasn’t fully vetted to have access to any of his electronic devices, but he did.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • “Joe Biden Debate Pledge To Transition Away From Fossil Fuels Could Cost Him Pennsylvania and Other Energy States.”

    Saying the United States should transition away from fossil fuels is a popular idea on the left. It’s not workable in real life, however. Millions of people depend on fossil fuels not only to heat and light their homes, but for their jobs.

    During the final debate last night, Joe Biden said the United States should transition away from the oil industry. This was red meat for his base and the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, but it won’t play with millions of voters who live in the real world.

    It’s easy to say you support the idea of abandoning fossil fuels, but if you want to know how that works out, look no further than California, where their green energy policy has led to rolling blackouts.

    You can tell Biden’s comments were damaging, because the media has already moved to the ‘conservatives pounce’ stage of the issue.

  • “Biden’s $2 Trillion Clean Energy Plans Could Mark The Beginning Of The End For The Natural Gas Industry.”

    While Joe Biden has been busy speaking out of both sides of his mouth about what his position on fracking would be, if elected, another revelation has come to light: regardless of his position on fracking, his $2 trillion clean energy plan could be devastating to natural gas.

    As Bloomberg points out in a recent article, natural gas is not only a crucial part of the nation’s energy supply, but it directly effects votes in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where Biden is seeking to turn the state that leaned Trump in 2016.

    Biden’s energy plan could speed up natural gas becoming “economically and environmentally untenable within the power sector,” Bloomberg notes. Biden’s plan for a carbon neutral grid would all but assure natural gas is phased out in favor of renewable energy.

    Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, put it bluntly: “Decarbonization isn’t a debate — it’s a fossil-fuel death sentence. It means a resource is going off the grid. That is the inevitable implication.”

  • Here’s a poll that should be keep Democratic strategists up at night: “Donald Trump Down One Point Among Black Voters in Battleground Michigan.”

    The time and resources President Trump’s campaign has been pouring into the battleground state of Michigan appear to be paying off, according to two new polls.

    Zia Poll surveyed “2851 likely voters and newly registered voters who have never voted in an election” and found Trump leading Joe Biden, 49 percent to 45 percent, for a four-point lead.

    The poll found 85 percent of Trump supporters were “very excited” about their candidate, while only 70 percent of Biden supporters are so.

    Regarding the economy, 55 percent of respondents said Trump would provide a “better” one. Forty-five percent of those surveyed said Biden would.

    Respondents “were almost evenly split” about whether Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) or Trump better handled the coronavirus pandemic response.

    The poll also found Biden with a “slight” lead among black and Hispanic voters.

    Painter Communications analyzed the poll and told Breitbart News Biden had the support of 46.8 percent of black respondents, while Trump was at 45.7 percent, a difference of just 1.1 percent.

    To put that in perspective, Trump won Michigan by a mere 11,000 votes in 2016 while Hillary Clinton racked up almost 300,000 more votes in urban Wayne County. Any significant defection of black voters to Trump probably puts Michigan out of reach for Biden.

  • This seems part of a trend: “President Trump’s Approval with Black Voters Soars to 46% After Debate.”
  • Still more on that theme:

  • Chelsea Handler tells ex-boyfriend 50 Cent that black people aren’t allowed to vote for Trump:

  • Trump-hostile Washington Monthly notes that Biden polls worse than than Hillary did and Trump could win even if you do believe the phony baloney polls.

    If Biden blows it in the sunbelt and Iowa, it will come down once again to the rust belt battlegrounds: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Remember: if Biden loses all of the above-mentioned states that he wants to flip from red to blue (which is quite possible) – then he has to sweep the Great Lakes battlegrounds. Not 2 of 3. 3 of 3.

    Right now (as of 10/20), those three states are looking pretty good for Biden, especially Michigan and even Wisconsin, which once seemed like it might be the hardest of the three to get back in the blue column where it resided from 1988 to 2012. Somewhat surprisingly, Pennsylvania is still a dogfight for Biden despite nearly 50 years in politics in neighboring Delaware and multiple visits to the Keystone State this year:

    Pennsylvania — +3.8
    Wisconsin — +6.2
    Michigan — +6.8

    So, remembering that Biden might need to sweep all three of those, my main cautionary note is to look at the Real Clear Politics polling averages for those states way back on October 19, 2016:

    Pennsylvania: Clinton +6.2
    Wisconsin: Clinton +7
    Michigan: Clinton +11.6

    As you can see, Joe Biden is doing worse in those state polls than Hillary was. And she, of course, lost them all.

  • More on that theme:

  • Glenn Greenwald points out the “obvious to anyone who isn’t a Biden partisan”: Biden refuses to say whether the emails are authentic or not, and members of the Democrat-loving press refuse to ask him.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • How Biden’s tax-and-spend proposals will damage the economy. “Experts project that the policy agenda would, by 2030, lead to 4.9 million fewer jobs and the economy shrinking by $2.6 trillion. So, too, the study projects that consumption would be $1.5 trillion lower in 2030 and families would see a $6,500 drop in median household income compared to a neutral scenario.”
  • Complete with sky-high taxes:

  • Stephen Green is not impressed with Joe Biden’s fathering skills:

    I’ve seen serious addiction up close. The kind of addiction that first leads to absences, then to sudden re-appearances to beg for forgiveness — and money. The kind of addiction that destroys relationships through lies, through theft, through neglect, and worse.

    When addiction reaches that stage, there are usually only two possible outcomes: The addict either hits bottom and cleans up their act, or they die.

    There is no doubt in my mind, having seen such behavior from much too close, that Hunter is on that path.

    The only way to help a fellow human being — in this case, a sole surviving son — is to stop enabling them.

    It isn’t easy, cutting a parent or a child off from everything but your love. But it’s either that or they die.

    Joe Biden, having stood over the graves of two of his children, let — or forced? — his remaining son to become his bagman.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going easy on Hunter: I believe he belongs in prison every bit as much as he belongs in a 12-step program.

    The millions Hunter has raked in on his own and his father’s behalf have made them rich while enabling his addictions.

    A father with any kind of concern for his child’s welfare would have cut Hunter off from “family business,” as they say in The Godfather, and stuck him in rehab.

    Instead, Père Biden seems content to watch Hunter commit slow-motion suicide, so long as the easy money keeps coming in.

  • For those of you who always wanted to see Hunter Biden smoke crack naked while being serviced by a prostitute, the videos are out there.
  • How the media is deluding itself about this election. After “Hunter Biden isn’t a thing” and “Nobody spied on trump,” we get this:

    “AMERICA IS A RACIST COUNTRY AND IT’S TIME FOR A RECKONING!”

    Everything we see on television, right down to the riots and “burning down of our cities,” is staged for the media’s social engineering. Antifa and BLM are nothing but props rolled out by the media and left when and how they choose. They can set their movements ablaze or send them all home to their shame closets with the flip of a social switch. Obviously the damage these mobs do is real. The damage to property and brutality against people — the death — it’s obviously all very, very real. But it’s also anecdotal and not nearly as pervasive as the media wants people to believe. It’s not actually what’s real in America and it’s not what people are thinking about or focused on or worried about in their every day lives. And honest people know that. Honest people know the media are working hard to stoke racial tensions and division, and to make us believe our nation is fraught with division and detriment.

    It’s not. And the vast majority of honest observers, even those who don’t watch politics real closely, know that.

  • Biden falsely claims that the intelligence community has cleared his family of wrongdoing. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Ann Althouse on that “gooiest ever” Sam Elliott ad:

    Yes, whoever made that ad, sure had the “broader audience in mind.” I can picture clever fellows laughing at their own work, comparing it to a “South Park” parody, and joking about how dumb Americans are.

    Watching that ad, a few seconds in, Meade said “Tegridy Farms,” and toward the end, I said, “This is for the dumb people” and “Actually, this is very effective.” I could feel the emotion they were trying to put over. Joe will bring us together — no reason why and don’t you worry your head about what he’ll actually do while you’re in a hypnotic fog of phony-baloney togetherness.

    I’m looking for the right “Tegridy Farms” ad to convey Meade’s point. There’s this, but as Meade said, “It doesn’t have enough of that voice — you know, like that guy… that guy in ‘The Big Lebowski.'” I say: “Sam Elliott! You do realize the voice in the Biden ad isSam Elliott.” Meade thought it was just some guy doing his damnedest to sound like Sam Elliott. No, that’s actually Sam Elliott. You might think Sam Elliott is such an extreme that he’d be reserved for the comic exaggeration of the voice of a narrator…

    And then she links to the South Park Tegridy ad, which gives me an excuse to embed it here (NSFW because, you know, South Park):

  • You know Biden lost the debate when he checked his watch.
  • Our media is refusing to even consider whether laptop emails are genuine or not. “Is there any basis for these claims of fraud and disinformation? None, so far.”
  • “The Media Will Drag Joe Biden Across the Finish Line if It’s the Last Thing They Do.”

    Every four years, I assume that our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press have stooped as low as they can possibly stoop. Then another election rolls around and they prove me wrong. It happens every time. I don’t know what I expected.

    The NY Post‘s story about Hunter Biden’s allegedly abandoned laptop has forced journalists and other Democrats to cast aside their thin veil of impartiality. Wherever the evidence may lead, they can’t allow themselves to follow. Because if they do, it might bring about four more years of Bad Orange Man.

    I already wrote in my candidate and I don’t care who wins on November 3. I’ve resigned myself to the result either way. But these @$$holes sure haven’t. They’re doing everything they can to drag Joe’s decrepit old carcass across the finish line, and they’re shouting down or silencing anybody who doesn’t like it. I’ve had my differences with Trump supporters over the years, but they’re not the ones censoring me, locking me out of my social media accounts, and trying to shut me up.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Here’s a Never Trumper who has come to the reluctant conclusion that she has to vote for Trump after all. “The reason I am feeling pushed towards Trump, and at such a late date, and despite my strong inclinations otherwise, is that I no longer feel this is a Kang v. Kodos scenario. From the right, I continue to see the usual callous indifference to the lives of ordinary people, but it’s just indifference. The message I am getting from the left is that I am a target they mean to destroy.” The last sentence is true, but it was no less true four years ago. She trots out the litany of Social justice Warrior targeting, Democratic hostility to religion, rioting and looting, and gross media bias. All true, but all (save the scale of the looting and changes wrought by the Wuhan coronavirus) were all true four years ago. “I am feeling pushed towards voting for Trump because on so many different levels it seems that my inalienable rights and my personal well-being are actively targeted by the ruling powers among the left.” True. What took you so damn long to realize it? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • What should disqualify Biden: He says that America has never lived up to it’s ideas. Those portions of western Europe not currently speaking German or Russian might disagree…
  • “Biden Campaigns Funneled Over $70,000 To Hunter Biden, Nearly $150,000 To Entire Family.” (Hat tip: The Daily Gator.)
  • You know who else got mentioned in the Biden emails? Frank Luntz.
  • A tale of two campaigns continued:

  • Feel the excitement:

  • Leaked Biden Ukraine phone-call?

    Damning if true.

  • Biden confuses Trump for Bush:

  • Happy Halloween!

  • I laughed:

  • Thread that suggests Biden is sufering from Parkinson’s disease. I would take a diagnosis made from videos like this with several grains of salt, though if you want to research it the website is here.
  • “Why I don’t believe in the polls, and you shouldn’t either.”

    Over the past two months, I took it upon myself to travel flyover country and the north, spanning Kentucky, Ohio, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas and North Dakota. Throughout my journey I spoke with residents and business owners about the election, who they’re voting for and where they see things going in the 2020 election. What came of two conversations in particular will bring a little bit of perspective to those polls.

    The first conversation that stood out to me was at a barbershop in Excelsior, Minnesota — a town with the population of about 2,500 about 30 minutes outside of Minneapolis. While getting my hair cut, I struck up a conversation with the barber and patrons. Of the residents there, three had been polled about the presidential election, and the barber said that both he and his wife had received separate phone calls. All — every one of them — told me that they told the pollster that they were voting for Joe Biden, when they are voting for Mr. Trump. Why would they do this? According to all of them, for the safety of their family.

    Each person in the barbershop stated that they knew the George Floyd riots were caused by the left and each said they were afraid that if they said that they were Trump voters, violence or being canceled could happen to them. The barbershop owner in particular stated that he was, “well aware of cancel culture …” and worried he would be slammed on online ratings, and people would try to destroy his decades-old business based on his support of the president — so he lied to protect his livelihood.

    The second conversation that stood out to me was with my Uber driver just outside of Dallas, Texas. My driver was an immigrant from Nigeria to America nearly 20 years ago and an immigrant from New York City to a suburb of Dallas just last month. I asked the father of four what he thought about the election and he said that, where he once was a Democrat, he would never vote Democratic again because of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s shutting down of the state and city. He used his stimulus money and extra unemployment from the federal government to uproot his family and move across the country for “… half the rent, no state income tax, and the ability to work.”

  • Bring it!

  • Truth:

  • “Don’t mention Joe’s name”:


    

  • Joe Biden repeats the lie of the year, saying no one lost their coverage under ObamaCare. Oh, and he promises the same for BidenCare.
  • “COVER-UP! ABC/CBS/NBC Bury Hunter Biden Scandals (14 Minutes in 51 Hours).”
  • Democratic Governor Gretchen “The Witch” Whitmer: “Votre for biden if you ever want to go to church again.”
  • Zing!

  • Heh:

  • Ouch!

  • Sad trombone:

  • Boom:

  • The Bablyon Bee obtains Joe Biden’s debate notes. “Reminder: you are JOE BIDEN and you are running for PRESIDENT.”
  • “According to sources, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has adopted her 8th child, a troubled local youngster named Hunter.”
  • Biden offers anyone who votes for him a seat in the Supreme Court.
  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Silicon Valley Billionaires Dumping Tons Of Money Into Texas Senate Race

    Thursday, October 22nd, 2020

    For some reason, PACs belonging to Silicon Valley Billionaires have decided to dump a ton of money into the Texas senate race at the last minute:

    A little-known super PAC seeded with Silicon Valley money plans to lead four other outside groups in a $28 million TV ad blitz to try to help Democrat MJ Hegar unseat Texas Sen. John Cornyn.

    Future Forward’s own ads began airing Tuesday, according to ad-tracking service Advertising Analytics. Through Monday, it reserved nearly $2.4 million of time slots in 19 Texas TV markets as well as Shreveport, La.

    The ads are part of a planned deluge of advertising for Hegar in the election’s final two weeks that’s being orchestrated by the super PAC’s leader, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, with assists from four other Democratic groups, the news site Recode first reported.

    On Wednesday, Hegar’s campaign announced it began airing on Black radio stations across Texas a 60-second ad in which former President Barack Obama expounds on why he recently endorsed her.

    In the ad, Obama extols Hegar’s record as a veteran who served in Afghanistan, a working mother who he said will defend the Affordable Care Act and a politician “firmly committed to making the reforms we need to address systemic racism and create a more fair and equitable America.” Hegar’s runoff opponent in the Democratic primary, Dallas state Sen. Royce West, an African American, has has not specifically retracted an Oct. 9 statement that he would not vote for Hegar in the general election.

    The Obama spot will run in 14 cities, including Dallas, said Hegar spokeswoman Amanda Sherman.

    Asked how much Hegar would spend on the ad, Sherman replied, “This is part of the seven-figure investment we announced to mobilize the Black vote.” She referred to buys that began Oct. 8.

    Citing a confidential memo circulated to major donors last week, Recode said the $28 million of ad buys will include $10 million from New York Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC, which on Thursday announced an $8.6 million TV buy to help Hegar. The $8.6 million is part of the $28 million of late advertising being planned.

    On the super PAC-led effort against Cornyn, Recode reported that the other groups assisting Future Forward in the push are Strategic Victory Fund, Way to Win, and Mind the Gap. Recode is a former technology news site that last year joined forces with Vox Media to probe Silicon Valley’s influence on politics.

    A Cornyn spokesperson accused Hegar of hypocrisy, recalling that the Democrat has run on overturning a 2010 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. FEC, which said the First Amendment forbids restrictions of independent political expenditures by corporations.

    “MJ has completely abandoned her principles, broken her promises and is selling out Texans to the highest bidder in California,” Cornyn press secretary Krista Piferrer said in a written statement. “This is a defining moment that shows exactly how untrustworthy her word really is, and how willing she is to look the other way so long as she personally benefits.”

    Democrats whining about Cornyn snipped.

    On Tuesday, Future Forward planned to report to the Federal Election Commission that it raised $66 million between Sept. 1 and Thursday, with big donations from Silicon Valley billionaires Jeff Lawson, founder of cloud platform Twilio; Eric Schmidt, veteran chief executive of Google; and Moskovitz, according to Recode.

    I’m sure this news was not well-received at Cornyn headquarters, but I find it hard to work up any anxiety over the ad buy:

  • Hegar is a retread. She couldn’t beat the far more beatable John Carter in a U.S. congressional race in the Year of Beto, which gives me zero reason to believe she can step up and beat Cornyn in a presidential year.
  • Speaking of Beto, he had all the money and favorable press in the world and still couldn’t beat Ted Cruz, a politician measurably more controversial than John Cornyn.
  • Speaking of Cornyn’s measurable, the last time he was on the ballot he garnered the most votes of any statewide candidate, pulling in a hefty 2,855,068 votes, more than 1,200,000 more than hapless Democratic opponent David Alameel. That was the year Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis like a rented mule, and Cornyn did better than Abbott. This year will be closer, but Cornyn will almost certainly exceed the 4,260,553 votes Ted Cruz won in 2018, and will likely even top the 4,685,047 votes Donald Trump carried in Texas in 2016. (I fully expect Trump to top his 2016 total as well.)
  • One of the most persistent myths in politics is that big TV ad buys can magically swing races. Ask Jeb Bush, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg how well that strategy worked out for them. Last minute ad buys can swing extremely close races, but less than two weeks before election day, they certainly can’t conjure new voters out of thin air.
  • As in 2018, national Republicans have to be pleased that Democrats are once again dumping money into a Texas senate race rather than those in Iowa, Maine, North Carolina or Arizona. But those inside the liberal media bubble keep getting high on their own supply, and thus keep believing the “Texas is about to turn blue” myth.
  • All that said, as in 2018, all that up-ballot money could make it harder for Republicans to recapture some of the down-ballot seats that flipped in 2018. But late TV ad money is a lot less effective than early organizing money.
  • (Hat tip: Cahnman.)