Posts Tagged ‘CNN’

LinkSwarm for May 6, 2022

Friday, May 6th, 2022

Inflation is soaring, Democrats are lying, and more MSM pedophiles are exposed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!


  • Slow Joe Biden is hoping voters will ignore all that inflation on his watch. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

    Apparently, the Biden administration’s approach is to just insist that the economy is doing great and hope people believe it, despite their mounting frustration every time they buy groceries, out to eat, or fill up their tank. On the day President Biden took office, retail prices for gasoline averaged $2.38 per gallon. This morning, they are $4.19 — not all that different from the $4.20 they were a month ago….

    By and large, Democrats just don’t want to discuss or acknowledge inflation — at least not in their campaign ads:

    And as of Friday, [Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim] Ryan was one of seven Democratic candidates who have run ads this year that mentioned inflation, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. By contrast, dozens of Republican candidates and allied groups have done the same. In polls, Americans have cited inflation as a top issue.

    “Burying your head in the sand,” Mr. Ryan said, “is not the way to approach it.” Asked about the biggest challenges facing his party, he replied, “A response to the inflation piece is a big hurdle.”

    To Democrats, inflation is like Bruno: We just don’t talk about it.

    Snip.

    With poll after poll showing that inflation is foremost in voters’ minds, you would think that the president would be holding regular events focused on the problem and showcasing what his administration is doing to solve it.

    Not seeing much of that, are you?

  • Inflation is hurting Biden and Democrats so badly that even CNN has noticed. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of inflation, truckers are not buying that “Putin Price Hike” blather as diesel hits an all-time high.

    “I get video almost every day now from people who we featured on ‘Dirty Jobs” and ‘How America Works.’

    “They’re just sending me videos of them at the gas pump and some of them are filling up 18-wheelers. And, I’m not kidding you, $1,100, $1,200.

    “Most people, all we can think about is the price for us at a relative terms know it’s awful.

    “When you put $1,200 in your gas tank and just six months ago it was costing you $600 or 700, the exponential reality of it is starting to sink in. You just can’t walk that back. It touches every single thing that matters in this country. From food production to transportation … all of it,” Rowe explained.

  • Hmmmm:

  • How a George Soros group is writing Biden Administration policy.

    A secretive group backed by millions of dollars from liberal billionaire George Soros is working behind the scenes with President Biden’s administration to shape policy, documents reviewed by Fox News show.

    Governing for Impact (GFI), the veiled group, boasts in internal memos of implementing more than 20 of its regulatory agenda items as it works to reverse Trump-era deregulations by zeroing in on education, environmental, health care, housing and labor issues.

    “Open Society is proud to support Governing for Impact’s efforts to protect American workers, consumers, patients, students and the environment through policy reform,” Tom Perriello, executive director of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, told Fox News Digital.

    Snip.

    GFI, however, works to remain secretive. It is invisible to internet search engines like Google (an unrelated “Govern for Impact” is the only group that appears in a search). No news reports or press releases appear on its existence outside of a mention of its related action fund in a previous Fox News article on the $1.6 billion Arabella Advisors-managed dark money network, to which it is attached.

    But as the group attempted to conceal its operations, it sought talent on Harvard Law School’s website, which was discoverable. The posting, which no longer appears on the site, was for legal policy internships.

    Snip.

    According to its website, Rachael Klarman, a Harvard Law School grad, steers the group. Her father, Michael Klarman, is a professor at Harvard Law and also has ties to progressive advocacy groups. He is an advisory board member of the left-wing dark money judicial group Take Back the Court. Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, invited him to testify before Congress on dark money’s “assault” on the judiciary system.

    “Governing for Impact is the perfect example of the Left’s fake outrage over ‘dark money’ in politics,” said the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer, who discovered the group and alerted Fox News.

    “As a ‘fiscally sponsored’ dark money project that writes and pushes regulations from the shadows, hidden from the public and funded by one billionaire foundation, GFI embodies everything the Left pretends to abhor.”

  • The Ministry of Truth is worse than you think.

    The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden’s activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were “Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president.

    The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post’s incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent.

    After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting that the Biden emails had all of the “hallmarks” of Kremlin treachery, who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment?

    Snip.

    This same strategic motive — to vest accusations of “disinformation” with the veneer of expertise — is what has fostered a new, very well-financed industry heralding itself as composed of “anti-disinformation” scholars. Knowing that Americans are inculcated from childhood to believe that censorship is nefarious — that it is the hallmark of tyranny — those who wish to censor need to find some ennobling rationale to justify it and disguise what it is.

    They have thus created a litany of neutral-sounding groups with benign names — The Atlantic Council, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, various “fact-checking” outfits controlled by corporate media outlets — that claim to employ “anti-disinformation experts” to identify and combat fake news. Just as media corporations re-branded their partisan pundits as “fact-checkers” — to masquerade their opinions as elevated, apolitical authoritative, decrees of expertise — the term “disinformation expert” is designed to disguise ideological views on behalf of state and corporate power centers as Official Truth.

    Yet when one subjects these groups to even minimal investigative scrutiny, one finds that they are anything but apolitical and neutral. They are often funded by the same small handful of liberal billionaires (such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar), actual security state agencies of the U.S., the UK or the EU, and/or Big Tech monopolies such as Google and Facebook.

    Indeed, the concept of “anti-disinformation expert” is itself completely fraudulent. This is not a real expertise but rather a concocted title bestowed on propagandists to make them appear more scholarly and apolitical than they are. But the function of this well-funded industry is the same as the one served by the pre-election letter from “dozens of former intelligence officials”: to discredit dissent and justify its censorship by infusing its condemnation with the pretense of institutional authority. The targeted views are not merely wrong; they have been adjudged by official, credentialed experts to constitute “disinformation.”

    This scam is the critical context for understanding why the Biden Administration casually announced last week the creation of what it is calling a “Disinformation Board” inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation.

  • Corporations are finally starting to wake up to how how wokeness is destroying their bottom line.

    Business leaders are waking up to the destructive “woke” policies being foisted on businesses by boardrooms more concerned with virtue signaling than their primary responsibility of ensuring corporate profitability and enhancing shareholder values.

    In short, the “woke” buck stops here, more corporate executives are saying. Mixing the politics of culture wars with business is a losing strategy.

    Former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi is leading the charge. He ran McDonalds from 1991-1997, bringing the chain’s McNugget to market and also served on the boards of Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que, Great Wolf Resorts and Snap-on Inc. These days, he’s launching The Boardroom Initiative, comprised of three conservative advocacy groups — The Job Creators Network, which was founded by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, The Free Enterprise Group and Second Vote. The goal: get business back to business and out of politics.

    “Corporations have no business being on the right or the left because they represent everybody there and their sole job is to build equity for their investors,” Rensi told FOX Business.

    Rensi knows how to grow a business. While leading McDonalds, he saw U.S. sales double to more than $16 billion, the number of U.S. restaurants grow from nearly 6,600 to more than 12,000 and the number of U.S. franchisees grow from 1,600 to more than 2,700.

    “It is not the province of board members or executives to take shareholder money profit and spend it on social matters,” Rensi explained. “Corporations should not get involved in social engineering.”

  • Confirmation of things you already knew: “Emails Surface More Evidence Hillary Clinton Paid For Anti-Trump Disinformation Operation.”
  • Trump goes 55-0. Everyone he endorsed won their primary or made the runoff. All those are from Indiana, Ohio, and Texas. I didn’t realize that so few states have had their primaries already. Hopefully that record will be shattered and Dr. Oz (a bad pick by Trump) will lose when Pennsylvania votes May 17th.
  • Trying to make your children into the Youth Stasi: “DC elementary school gives 4-year-olds books to report racist family members.”
  • The only surprise here is that he didn’t work for CNN. “MSNBC Anchor Busted ‘Driving 3 Hours’ To Meet Little Boy For Sex.” “A New York group specializing in exposing child-sex predators seemed to all but confirm this after they posted a video online Friday busting a potential pedophile who appeared to be NBC anchor Zach Wheeler. Wheeler had driven an approximate total of 3 hours in order to meet up with a 15-year-old boy for sex, the group claims.”
  • How some of the lunatics connected to GamerGate (namely Brianna Wu) are still grifting the left.
  • Schools Sent Employees to Critical Race Theory Conference With Tax Dollars. Four major school districts spent more than $26,000 on the SXSW EDU conference.” That’s Austin ISD, Fort Worth ISD, San Antonio ISD, and Round Rock ISD.
  • Speaking of school districts wasting money and lying to you:

  • Tomorrow voters in Leander get an opportunity to pull out of Capital Metro.

  • Actor Frank Langella fired from Netflix miniseries production of The Fall of the House of Usher for…touching an actress’ leg during a love scene. Bonus: An “intimacy coordinator.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Heh:

  • Moloch Warns Of Looming Child Sacrifice Supply Chain Issues.”
  • Fun

  • Heroic dog rescue:

  • LinkSwarm for April 22, 2022

    Friday, April 22nd, 2022

    Russia eyes Moldova, Ron DeSantis and Florida republicans strip Disney of it’s special privileges in record time, CNN+ dies quicker than Sean Bean, and Florida Man scores a trifecta! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • A Russian general just announced plans to invade Moldova.

    A Russian General announced plans to occupy the Transnistria region of Moldova on Friday.

    Speaking at a defense industry meeting, Brigadier General Rustam Minnekayev, acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, stated that the Russian Armed Forces plan to “make passage” into the region – in Moldova’s East, bordering Ukraine and less than 30 miles from the port city of Odessa – to create a “land corridor to Crimea,” Russian media reported. Such a corridor would also purport to connect the Russian mainland to Transnistria.

    Minnekayev stated that the measure was part of Russia’s second phase in its war in Ukraine, which involves establishing full control over the Donbas Region and Ukraine’s coast along the Black Sea. No timeline was provided for the maneuver to begin, however.

    Rather seems like overweening hubris to think about invading another country when they haven’t managed to defeat Ukraine despite pouring huge resources into the attempt.

    Speaking of Russia walking on rakes:

  • Giant fire engulfs Russia’s biggest chemical plant right after a fire broke out at “a sensitive Russian Defense Ministry research facility in the city of Tver.”

    Huge plumes of smoke were seen enveloping the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant late this afternoon. The cause of the fire remains unknown. Almost 150 plant workers were reportedly evacuated.

    The facility in Kineshma, east of Moscow produces more industrial solvents than any other in Russia. It is less than 1,000km from the border with Ukraine.

    “Less than 600 miles” does not strike me as super close, even for Russia.

    Naturally, observers are starting to ask in connection to Russia’s war in neighboring Ukraine: coincidence? sabotage operation?

    Anti-Putin racecar driver Igor Sushko in tweeting the above video of the Dmitrievsky Chemical Plant going up in flames commented: “We are beginning to see a pattern develop.”

  • Florida Governor DeSantis Signs Bill Stripping Disney of Autonomous Legal Status.”

    Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation Friday that strips Disney of its 50-year-old “independent special district” status in retaliation for lobbying against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law.

    The law dissolves the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an autonomous area created in 1967 to accommodate the massive Disney World complex near Orlando. The independent status has shielded Disney from significant tax burden.

    The governor fast-tracked the initiative to a special session Tuesday, after which the state Senate voted 23-16 on Wednesday to advance it.

    The parental rights measure keeps gender identity and sexual orientation instruction out of K-3 elementary school classrooms and enjoys majority support among Floridians.

    To quote The Wire: “You wanted to be in the game, right? Now you’re in the game.” For years, The Mouse was considered an unstoppable juggernaut that always got what it wanted. Then Disney decided to to throw it’s corporate weight behind the pro-grooming faction opposing a bill banning discussion of sex in elementary schools, and DeSantis knee-capped them in a week.

    Though the losses from special tax breaks and privileges is going to hurt the bottom line, Disney has done far, far more damage to its brand for stepping into the cultural wars to embrace forcing radical transexism on a resisting American public. That’s going to be destroying shareholder value for years (if not decades) to come.

  • DeSantis Bonus: Christopher Rufo spoke at the signing ceremony:

  • Dana Loesch isn’t shedding any tears over The Mouse.

    Am I and are others supposed to feel bad because the most opportune time to end Disney’s corporate welfare exploits the momentum that Disney created against themselves?

    Because I don’t.

    Disney vociferously and hatefully opposed parents who didn’t want ideological activist teachers lecturing their K-5th grade kids about how they bang their significant others after hours — Disney accused parents of opposing this as literally killing gay people because teachers with fantasy pronouns can’t talk about genitals when kids should be learning math.

    The left hated corporations influencing issues because of Citizens United v. FEC until they realized they could push Disney to lobby for them and now they LOVE corporations again! Party! I’m confused — are corporations still evil? They can’t influence issues or push for candidates that aren’t Democrat and they have more rights to a child than the parents raising said child? We really need some consistency from the left here.

    When corporations act as agents of the state all bets are off. When a corporation’s actual heir, the CEO, and executives say on camera and on their own social media accounts (as Disney’s did) that parental rights erase gay people (I know, what?) and people who support parental rights in the classroom are murderers, all bets are off.

    Who is “gaslighting” whom, here? Where was the opposition to the heinous manner in which parents were smeared? Was that not Disney’s “revenge” for opposition?

    Disney chose the boss fight against taxpaying parents and they lost.

    Losing their corporate welfare isn’t revenge, it’s a reckoning.

  • Relevant tweets:

  • John Nolte: “Yes, Democrats Really Do Want to Groom Your Children.”

    The debate we’re having right now…

    THE LEFT: We don’t want to sexualize little kids behind the backs of parents. Stop saying that. It’s a lie!

    FLORIDA: We’re going to outlaw sexualizing little kids behind the backs of parents.

    THE LEFT: NOOOOooooooo!

    What kind of country are we living in where we even have to pass a bill that outlaws sexualizing kids aged four to eight in the classroom?

    What kind of country are we living in where Florida teachers are angry that they can’t discuss their personal lives with your little kids, much less discuss sex?

    What kind of country are we living in where the Walt Disney Co., a company built on the idea of preserving the innocence of children and teaching them lessons about honesty, hard work, and true love, is now openly bragging about feeding the little kids sexual propaganda?

    Of course, this is grooming.

    What else would you call it?

    What is the rationale for telling innocent little boys that they might be girls or gay or bisexual? What other rationale could there be for that other than to destroy their innocence, to turn them into sexual creatures, and warp their sexuality into something that can later be exploited?

    Behind the backs of parents!

    For the life of me, except for my second-grade teacher talking about the day John Kennedy was assassinated, I cannot remember a single teacher who ever discussed their personal life. A couple of times, I remember seeing a teacher outside of school, at the store or something, and how odd it was to realize they existed outside the classroom.

    The thing to keep in mind here is that this is not a “gay” thing.

    It’s not gay people looking to groom little kids.

    Plenty of gay people are as disgusted by this as anyone. In fact, this sick movement is a terrible disservice to gays. What you have here is the LEFT working overtime to bring to life the very worst stereotypes about homosexuals looking to recruit among the innocent.

    What you have here is Disney bringing to life these terrible stereotypes.

    But that doesn’t change the fact that the left is desperate to groom your kids, to sexualize them behind your back.

    Why?

    Well, a whole lot of leftists want to have sex with your kids, and want to normalize sex between kids and adults. The evidence of that is everywhere. Democrats know opening the southern border will mean the import of child sex slaves. And yet, Democrats still open the border. Democrats continue to release child predators and suspected predators. We’re about to be saddled with a Supreme Court Justice who shrugs at child porn. More than one left-wing publication has asked us to better understand and sympathize with child molesters. The left embraced Jeffrey Epstein for decades. The left-wing Lincoln Project shielded a suspected predator.

    The other reason for the grooming is political.

    Democrats are losing key parts of their coalition: the working class, Hispanics, and chunks of the black population. One way they see of making up those numbers is to create a lot of damaged and broken young people obsessed with their sexuality. It’s just a fact that neurotic, unhappy lunatics and narcissists who define themselves by what they do with their sex organs vote Democrat. So… Democrats want to damage your kids to create a whole lot more of them.

  • “EIGHT news stories about teachers committing sex crimes upon children. ALL TODAY.”
  • Snapshot of our current problems: “In Biden’s Annual Economic Report, The Word “Gender” Is Used 40 More Times Than The Word ‘Inflation.'”
  • CNN+ shuts down one month after launch. There’s not enough schadenfreude in the world. Let a thousand pink slips bloom…
  • Another story getting short shrift because this LinkSwarm is so overstuffed: “Taylor Lorenz Attacked Libs Of Tik Tok Because Corrupt Media’s Main Function Now Is To Destroy The Right, Not Understand Its Appeal.”
  • From Powerline comes two tales of endemic corruption. The first was Yale University employee Jamie Petrone admitting to stealing over $40 million in computer equipment. “So for years, 90 percent of the equipment (sub-$10,000) that Yale’s emergency medicine department paid for–more than $40 million worth–never showed up. It didn’t exist. And no one noticed.”

    That’s the smaller of the two scandals. The bigger:

    A second instance of corruption is the Feeding Our Future scandal in Minnesota. The scandal actually involves entities in addition to FOF, and altogether $460 million or more has been funneled through these agencies by the federal free food programs Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP). The whole thing turned out to be a criminal enterprise. Various crooks pretended to be feeding many thousands of non-existent Minnesota children. The fraud should have been obvious since, if you added up the numbers, a ridiculous percentage of all of the children in the state were supposedly getting free food through these newly-founded charities.

    The corruption occurred primarily, although not entirely, within Minnesota’s Somali community. Apparently spread sheets have been circulating among fraudsters showing the names and addresses of many thousands of Somali immigrants who can be listed as phantom beneficiaries of government programs. Here, like the Yale criminal, those who were in on the fraud have lived lavishly, with federal taxpayer money administered by the State of Minnesota paying for luxury cars, expensive homes, exotic vacations, and so on. Scott wrote here about a young Somali bride who was given a tray of gold worth $100,000 as a wedding gift by persons involved in the Feeding Our Future fraud.

    Such criminality is not subtle. Little care is taken to hide it. How can a handful of fly-by-night fraudsters steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government and the State of Minnesota, and no one notices? As in Yale’s case, the answer is partly gross incompetence in Minnesota’s Tim Walz administration. But in the larger picture, government at all levels is rolling in so much dough that they don’t know what to do with it. A few hundred million is hardly worth checking up on.

    This goes toward proving my “Working Thesis,” that all new welfare state programs are designed to channel money into the pockets of crooks and left wing activists (to the extent that it’s possible to distinguish the two).

  • Don’t let the FBI ginning up the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot distract you from the fact that they tried to do the same thing in Virginia.

    But the government not only attempted to manufacture “terrorists” in the Whitmer kidnapping hoax—the same FBI operation also tried to coax a man in Virginia to participate in the same sort of plot against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. That scheme didn’t fully materialize, but the FBI’s attempt to pull off a similar stunt in Virginia reveals just how far agents were willing to go to bolster FBI Director Christopher Wray’s false warning that domestic extremists planned to “kill and assassinate” public officials.

    In summer 2020, Dan Chappel, the main informant in the Whitmer fednapping who was compensated at least $60,000 by the FBI for his services, targeted a man named Frank Butler, a disabled veteran in his late 60s and an alleged militia member. Taking instructions from Jayson Chambers, one of his FBI handling agents, Chappel used the same playbook in Virginia.

    “Dan suggests to Frank that he engage in acts of domestic terror,” defense attorneys wrote in a joint motion filed last year in the Whitmer case. “Like the defendants in this case, Dan suggested to Frank that he attack the governor of Virginia.”

    Screenshots submitted into evidence show a jaw dropping exchange between Chappel and Chambers in August 2020. “Goin [sic] to call frank butler today,” Chappel texted Chambers, asking for direction on what he should say to his target.

    “Mission is to kill the governor specifically,” Chambers replied.

    Just as in the Whitmer plot, Chappel lured Frank Butler into attempting to build an explosive device. Another text exchange in September 2020 shows Chappel and Chambers discussing a “recipe” for a bomb that Chappel can provide to Butler. After passing along the information to Butler, Chappel texted Chambers to tell him Frank planned on purchasing bomb-making supplies. “Awesome. Excellent work,” Chambers told Chappel.

    Chappel also invited Butler to a field training exercise in Wisconsin during the last weekend in October, an excursion attended by some defendants in the Whitmer caper.

    “This event, like all the others,” defense attorneys wrote, “was conceived, planned, and conducted by the federal investigative team of agents and undercover informants working together to provide a stage upon which to manipulate their targets into acting out ostensibly incriminating behavior the government hoped to elicit in its bid to develop and then ‘interrupt’ the operation of a ‘domestic terrorist organization.’”

    Butler, who cannot drive due to disabilities, did not participate. And to date, he has not been charged with any crime.

  • News you might have missed from two weeks ago: “Kenosha County ravaged by BLM riots flips red after decades of Dem leadership.” (Hat tip: Red State.)
  • “Republicans are registering formerly Democratic voters at four times the rate that Democrats are making the reverse conversion in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, a warning sign for Democrats as they try to keep control of the U.S. Congress.” You mean inflation, riots, tranny pandering and talking to elementary children about gay sex aren’t winning issues? Do tell.
  • Speaking of which, Joe Rogan wonders why California schools were trying to preach “antiracism” to his 9-year old daughter.
  • “Seattle’s transit system struggles as riders refuse to pay. So few riders are paying, fares are currently covering just 5% of the system’s operating costs, a fraction of the 40% mark Sound Transit set as a requirement.” (Hat Tip: Dwight.)
  • Incestuous Dealings in Harris County Government Raise Alarms. Connections exposed between Democrat Commissioner Rodney Ellis and organizations receiving taxpayer money.”

    While most reporting on Harris County’s problems revolve around Democrat County Judge Lina Hidalgo, this citizen’s research suggests ties exist between Democrat County Commissioner Rodney Ellis (a former state senator) and certain organizations receiving taxpayer monies.

    Ellis’ influence, and the influence of at least one of these organizations, appears to reach all the way to Hidalgo’s office.

    Snip.

    To counteract shuttering the economy in 2020, Congress broke open a dam and flooded federal taxpayer monies nationwide. These monies flowed to state and then local governments for eventual distribution. Harris County’s cut from the 2020 CARES Act was $426 million.

    One organization the county commissioners gave some of these funds to was the Coalition for the Homeless. Ties were verified between Commissioner Ellis and this organization.

    Licia Green-Ellis, Ellis’ wife, is a partner of the Waterman Steele Real Estate Consulting Group. Another partner is Lance Gilliam, who is chairman of the Coalition for the Homeless. Gilliam donated to Ellis’ campaign in 2015, and he also donated to Hidalgo in 2018, 2019, and March and June of 2021.

    Hidalgo’s chief of staff, Alexander Triantaphyllis, is also on the coalition’s board.

    In April 2021, the coalition recommended commissioners allocate taxpayer monies toward “the rapid expansion of housing” for the homeless. This resulted in agreements between the county and multiple organizations, including a more than $1.2 million agreement with BakerRipley Community Developers. We’ll come back to them in a minute.

    The following month, commissioners ballooned funding for the housing program to more than $7 million, of which more than $3.6 million went to BakerRipley for the county’s “Rapid Rehousing” program.

    A lot more at the link. (Note: This piece came out just before the indictments came down.)

  • More Harris County shenanigans:

    That’s why the judge just recused herself.

  • New York City: Now that the pandemics over, everyone’s going to come back to our high-tax hellhole, right? People who used to work in NYC: LOL. Get Rekt!

    A high-tax, highly regulated city, New York has relied for the past 25 years on a growth formula of low crime, a stable social order, and an emphasis on high-value jobs at profitable companies for whom being in the city brought advantages that outweighed the costs. The result was a prosperous but hollow economy that featured well-paid jobs in finance, law, and technology alongside low-paid service-industry jobs necessary to support those workers, but lacked many of the middle-class jobs in manufacturing or financial back offices that the city once boasted.

    The pandemic has changed that calculus. The work-from-home movement has hit New York City’s office market—the backbone of its economy—right in the pocketbook. More than two years after the initial lockdowns that brought much of the economy to a standstill, only 38 percent of office workers have returned to their city jobs, which is below average for major cities. Employers have tried to get workers back to their Manhattan offices, only to be thwarted by Covid surges and resistance from employees who don’t want to return to working in person five days a week. A rise in violent crime and disorder hasn’t helped. Both the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, and his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, as well as former governor Andrew Cuomo and successor Kathy Hochul, have at various times urged workers to return, but to little avail.

    The more that workers and companies discover they can accomplish through remote work, the greater the danger—because New York is by far the most expensive place to locate a worker in the country. Its overall cost of occupancy, including labor, utilities, and taxes, is 50 percent higher than the next most expensive American city, San Francisco, and three times as high as Dallas, Chicago, and Seattle. The gap is even larger with many smaller metro areas that seem poised for growth. One big component of these costs is taxes: the city and state together out-tax other competitors, taking as much as 45 percent more taxable income than the average of U.S. big cities and their states. No surprise, then, that even in the pandemic’s early stages, experts rated New York one of the places that might struggle the most to recover its jobs and residents.

    What are the Democrats who run New York (city and state) going to do to bring down high taxes? Jack and Squat.

  • Speaking of New York, a court just struck down their redistricting as Gerrymandering. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • In case you missed it, Pakistan’s Prime Minister was ousted two weeks ago. “Pakistan’s political opposition toppled Prime Minister Imran Khan in a no-confidence vote in Parliament early Sunday after several political allies and a key party in his ruling coalition deserted him.” He wasn’t the worst person to run Pakistan, but high inflation (even worse than ours) brought him down.
  • The new Pakistani Prime Minister is former opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif.
  • California’s corporate diversity law ruled unconstitutional. California’s law mandated that corporations stock their executive boards with members from various victimhood identity politics groups.
  • The trifecta! “Florida man arrested after cops find him in possession of drugs, guns and alligator.” Click through to see what a hard 31 looks like. (Hat Tip: Dwight.)
  • “Downtown Greek Restaurant Owner Escapes the Country, Leaving Workers and Rent Unpaid. That’s Simi Estiatorio, and the manager partner who fled the country is George Theodosiou. Read the link for the details. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Heh:

  • Nicolas Cage answers the Internet’s questions.
  • “Jen Psaki Walks Back Claims That She Ever Worked For Biden Administration.”
  • “Check Out These 9 Trans-Friendly Kids’ Shows Coming To Disney.” Including Avatar: The Last Genderbender.
  • Worst thing about Austin this time of year? All this pollen in the air. Really triggers the allergies…

  • LinkSwarm for April 15, 2022

    Friday, April 15th, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to a smallish LinkSwarm! My taxes are done, but I’m playing catchup on just about everything else.

  • The Biden Administration is all-in on grooming and mutilating children.

    While testifying before the House Budget Committee yesterday, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Xavier Becerra affirmed that yes, his department was in favor of taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries for minors. “So for the record, you favor HHS funding . . . for sex-reassignment surgeries for minors?” Lauren Boebert, (R, Colo.) asked. Becerra answered:

    I will do everything I can to defend any American, including children, whether or not they fit the categories you have mentioned or not. And if they talk about gender-affirming care, I am there to protect the rights of any American.

    In other words: yes.

  • Related:

  • “Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House.” I’m shocked, shocked that people who encouraged riots to help out Democrats are corrupt. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Biden: Surely Democrats everywhere will embrace my scaled-back Build Back Better bag of bloated bilge! Kyrsten Sinema: “LOL! Get rekt!
  • “Brian A. Benjamin, the lieutenant governor of the state of New York, has been indicted on federal bribery charges.”
  • Is Sri Lanka facing starvation?
  • Democrats on Twitter: “We’re totally going to defeat Ron DeSantis!” Deantis: [Raises $100 million for reelection.]
  • Neither snow no rain, nor gloom of night, shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. But multiple assaults? Yeah, they’re drawing the line there. So no more mail for a block of Santa Monica, California, until they fix the problem. This is your mail on one-party Democratic control.
  • Get A Rope Part 1: “Hospital Refuses Father-To-Son Kidney Transplant Over COVID Jab.”
  • Get A Rope Part 2: Two puppies stolen at gunpoint in D.C.. Actually, never mind. Hangin’s too good for ’em…
  • Ken Paxton has a 30 point lead over George P. Bush in the Texas Attorney General runoff.
  • News of Our Media Elites: “WNYC’s Jami Floyd accused of plagiarism in 45 articles dating back to 2010.” Also: “Floyd, 57, was the director of New York Public Radio’s Race & Justice Unit.” What are the odds? (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Speaking of media elite follies, CNN+ is sucking the farts out of dead cats.

    In theory, at least, the role of an organization such as McKinsey is to ask, “Why?” Everyone wants to start a streaming service. Why does yours make sense? If CNN were run by thoughtful people, it might have taken the opportunity to ask some fundamental questions of itself before procuring a new toy: “Who are we?” “What do we do?” “Are we good at it?” “Why do our staff keep getting themselves embroiled in scandals?” “Has anyone heard Brianna Keilar utter a single sentence that might be termed useful?”

    Had these questions been asked, it might have dawned on CNN’s leaders that the way in which Brian Stelter sees the network is not, in fact, the way in which anyone else sees the network. Had these questions been asked, it might have become apparent to CNN’s leaders that Americans do not regard CNN and its staff as brave, diligent, indispensable firefighters, that consumers do not believe Jim Acosta to be a hero, and that, when people think about America’s turbulent democracy, the last person who comes to their minds as a fix is Jim Sciutto. Had these questions been asked, CNN’s leaders might have learned that the network’s obsession with Fox is annoying to viewers, and that launching CNN+ with a flagship documentary, The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, would probably send the wrong message. As for the network’s slogan: “The Most Trusted Name in News”? One might as soon call Chris Cuomo a wit.

    Thus, the entirely predictable disaster that is unfurling before our eyes. And, thus, CNN’s bafflement that it has become a joke. And what a joke! 10,000 people a day? That’s the size of the home crowd at a Durham Bulls minor-league-baseball game. It’s the number of people who attend “MerPalooza,” a “celebration of mermaids and mermen,” or the international UFO convention and film festival, or BronyCon.

    I think this comparison is unfair to BronyCon, which has historically attracted a much lower percentage of sex offenders than CNN…

  • Is Highland Park, Michigan, the worst city in America?
  • There are numerous local corruption stories involving payoffs, but few that involve a police chief’s Earth, Wind, and Fire cover band. Take a bow, newly convicted felon Tim Vasquez!
  • “Liberals Outraged To Learn 10% Of Twitter Now Owned By African-American.”
  • “Not To Be Outdone, Bill Gates Buys 9.2% Of MySpace.”
  • Friend-of-the-blog Michael Sumbera gets gets a profile of his store, Classical Music of Spring, which I encourage you to patronize.
  • Speaking of music:

    OK, not really…

  • Audiences Know CNN Is Lying To Them, And Know Joe Rogan’s Not

    Saturday, February 12th, 2022

    Enjoy Joe Rogan and Dave Smith slamming CNN’s fundamental dishonesty:

    Plus Russell Brand’s hilarious impersonation of Brian Stelter, and some takedowns of the Russiagate and Bountygate lies.

    Midterm Variant Wrecking Flu Manchu Mandates

    Wednesday, February 9th, 2022

    Have you noticed the change in the air?

    Just a few weeks ago, Democrats were still talking about enforcing mask and vaccine mandates.

    Then the poll numbers got through to them.

    Not since the collapse of the Hindenburg Line in 1918 have such bitterly held positions been abandoned so quickly.

  • New York Gov. Kathy Hochul surrenders:

    Gov. Kathy Hochul will drop New York’s stringent indoor mask mandate on Wednesday, ending a requirement that businesses ask customers for proof of full vaccination or require mask wearing at all times, and marking a turning point in the state’s coronavirus response, according to three people briefed on her decision.

    The decision will eliminate a rule that prompted legal and interpersonal clashes over mask wearing, especially in conservative parts of New York. It was set to expire on Thursday and would have required renewing.

    Ms. Hochul’s decision will let the mask mandate lapse just as a crushing winter surge in coronavirus cases is finally receding. But it was not yet clear whether the governor would renew or drop a separate mask mandate in New York schools that is set to expire in two weeks.

    Are Democrats crazy enough to drop restrictions for adults but keep the ones harming children despite children at extremely low risk? Maybe. How else can they punish parents for daring to reject Critical Race Theory?

  • The same piece notes that New Jersey’s democratic governor also got religion on the issue.

    It was Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey who began the effort last fall, weeks after he was stunned by the energy of right-wing voters in his blue state, who nearly ousted him from office in what was widely expected to be an easy re-election campaign. Arranging a series of focus groups across the state to see what they had missed, Mr. Murphy’s advisers were struck by the findings: Across the board, voters shared frustrations over public health measures, a sense of pessimism about the future and a deep desire to return to some sense of normalcy.

    See, Democrats are listening to the science! The science of focus groups.

  • Another data point: CNN’s resident “doctor” Leana Wen says it’s time.

    Despite nothing changing at all, CNN’s resident ‘doctor’ Leana Wen claimed this week that “the science has changed” and so COVID restrictions including mask mandates should now be rescinded.

    Wen failed to cite any studies or data that shows the science has changed.

    Wen, who started to admit some weeks ago that masks don’t work in stopping the spread of COVID, stated that “the decision to wear a mask should shift from a government mandate to an individual choice.”

    She added that kids in schools should not be forced to wear masks because it can be harmful and makes it harder for them to learn.

    Welcome back to 2020, “Doctor” Wen, when everyone who didn’t have a (D) after their name already figured this out. I’m just going to leave these here:

  • More Democratic governors abandoning mandatory masking for children: New Jersey’s Phil Murphy, Connecticut’s Ned Lamont, and Delaware’s John Carney.
  • Two Republican governors were way, way, waaaaay ahead of the curve of their Democratic counterparts in eliminating lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates. Both were ruthlessly smeared as dangerous extremists who wanted to kill grandma. One was Florida governor Ron DeSantis:

    Where does DeSantis go to get his apology from the liberal media?

  • The second Republican governor who scared Democrats into doing the right thing was Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin.

    Very, very rarely do you see the leadership of a major state political party so badly miscalculate where it stands, both in overall public opinion and amongst its own rank-and-file legislators. Three weeks ago, Virginia Democratic Party chair Susan Swecker declared that, “Masks are essential to keeping students safe and schools open, but Glenn [Youngkin] would rather use our children as political cover to appease the extreme, far-right fringes of his own party.”

    Got that? Wanting parents to decide whether or not their kids wear masks to school is a position of the “extreme, far-right fringes.” So Virginia Democrats prepared themselves for an epic showdown over masking in schools.

    And then they lost, badly. On Tuesday, almost half the Democrats in the Virginia State Senate said, “Nah, we’re fine with having parents decide”:

    The Virginia Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would prevent local school boards from levying mask mandates and from punishing students whose parents opt to send their child to school without a mask.

    Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, filed the provision Tuesday as an amendment to a bill about in-person learning introduced by Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, R-Henrico. Democrats have 21 votes in the Senate to Republicans’ 19. Ten Democrats voted for the amendment, nine voted against it, and two abstained.

    The bill is expected to clear the GOP-controlled House.

    Youngkin hailed the Senate vote as a “victory for parents and children.” His administration plans to fast-track the bill to becoming law once it reaches his desk, meaning that it could be the law in less than two weeks.

  • Now some tweets:

  • We’re watching a preference cascade coming down the mountain like an avalanche, carrying Democrats before it.

    And it’s glorious.

    Now enjoy a Jane’s Addiction song:

    Jeff Zucker Out At CNN For Sexing, Not Sucking

    Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022

    This is what we call “a good start.”

    CNN president Jeff Zucker announced his resignation on Wednesday, following an acknowledgment that he had failed to disclose a romantic relationship with another senior executive at CNN.

    “As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years,” Zucker wrote in a memo to staff. “I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong.”

    Zucker was referring to his relationship with CNN executive vice president and chief marketing officer Allison Gollust, according to the New York Times.

    Hey, let’s give Zucker some credit here: He was having sex with an adult. That makes him stand out in a positive way from other recent CNN sex scandals. Maybe he could use that as a bullet point on his resume: “• Not a pedophile.”

    Zucker’s resignation comes months after CNN fired anchor Chris Cuomo in December over his involvement in advising his brother, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, on how to handle nearly a dozen sexual harassment allegations.

    Zucker had supported Cuomo for months before the anchor was finally let go following the release of documents by the New York State attorney general showing that Cuomo had leaned on contacts in the media business to help his brother navigate his sexual-harassment scandal.

    Scumbags of a feather flock together.

    The irony, of course, is that’s being forced out for playing hide-the-salami with a coworker rather than hiring pedophiles, or turning his network into a horribly biased, social-justice-infected echo-chamber for the far left, or for losing 90% of his viewers.

    Evidently a sex scandal is the only way to get rid of someone doing a horrible job at CNN; destroying the company’s reputation and driving away scores of viewers isn’t enough.

    New CNN owners Discovery should fire absolutely everyone at the network and start over from scratch.

    It’s the only way to be sure.

    Edited to add: Ben Shapiro makes a good point:

    LinkSwarm for January 21, 2022

    Friday, January 21st, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden’s vaccine mandate receives another blow in court, Biden stumbles his way through another press conferences, and a Joe Rogan podcast lays bare social justice perfidy.

  • Federal judge blocks Biden’s employee mandate.

    After SCOTUS last week rejected the administration’s attempt to force corporations to abide by the mandate via OSHA, a federal court in Texas has issued an injunction against Biden’s jab mandate for federal workers, the other part of his administration’s attempts to force vaccines on reluctant Americans – a strategy that Biden has already abandoned in favor of providing at-home COVID tests to all Americans.

    Biden issued both mandates by executive order back in September.

    Trump-appointed Judge Jeffrey Brown of the US Court for the Southern District of Texas said the case was not about whether individuals should be vaccinated or even about federal power more broadly. Instead, he said it’s about “whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” Brown wrote.

    “That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”

  • James Lindsay (AKA @Conceptual James) did an interview with Joe Rogan that may be as devastating to Social Justice Warriors as Rogan’s McCullough and Malone interviews were to the Official Flu Manchu Narrative. Some excerpts:

    How Ibram X. Kendi unwisely picked a Twitter fight with Jack Posobiec:

    How CNN destroyed CNN:

    On How Google lies to you and DuckDuckGo doesn’t:

    On the impossibility of telling parody from reality:

    Including a shout-out to the Babylon Bee.

  • Biden had a press conference where he mixed some lies in with the usual rambling.

    ‘My plan cuts the deficit, and it boosts the economy by getting more people into the workforce’

    Biden and his aides received intense scrutiny in the fall after they clung to a line that claimed the president’s spending plans would cost zero dollars — even after multiple analyses found that was not the case.

    Biden seemingly recycled that line during his press conference Wednesday when he claimed more than once that his proposals would not add to the deficit.

    The Congressional Budget Office found that the Build Back Better Act would add $3 trillion to the deficit by 2031 if its programs were permanent rather than allowed to expire on what critics have described as artificially short time frames designed to give the bill the appearance of costing less.

    If the programs expired as written by Democrats, the Build Back Better Act would still add $367 billion to the deficit by 2031, according to the CBO.

    Experts have also debunked Biden’s claim that the bill would boost the economy overall.

    The Penn-Wharton Budget Model from the University of Pennsylvania found that Biden’s plan would reduce America’s gross domestic product over several decades and would even slightly lower hourly wages over the same time period.

  • Focus group shows that independents (people who vote for both Obama and Trump) hate Biden’s America.

    these independents are “resigned rejecters” — deeply pessimistic about the state of the country, deeply disappointed by President Biden, and about as dissatisfied with the status quo as one can get.

    Alice, a 60-year-old Latina from New York who works as a supervisor for homeless services, described her community as returning to an almost-lawless Hobbesian state* of the strong dominating the weak through force, violence, and intimidation: “I think they’ve taken us back to cave-man time, where you would walk around with a club — ‘I want what you have.’ You’re not even safe to walk around and go to the train station, because somebody might throw you off the train, okay? It’s a regression.”

    Dickie, a 38-year-old white financial analyst from Texas concurred: “When Alice was talking about the cave-man thing, I can agree with that. I’ve had my bike stolen here in Austin, in a very gentrified neighborhood, four different times in the last seven, eight months. Things are kind of chaotic. I feel like there’s no rules, really.”

    Twelve of the 14 said the level of crime is up in America today compared to a year ago.

    If statements like that aren’t a flashing neon sign declaring “DO SOMETHING ABOUT CRIME!” I don’t know what is.

  • “How well do the SARS-CoV-2 shots work against the Omicron virus variant? The Danish study results shown in the graph found the Pfizer and Moderna shots provide some protection for a couple months, followed by a higher risk of infection than no shots at all. I don’t call that ‘working.'” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • An exiting resident laments the decline of Portland:

    

  • Speaking of Democrat-run hellholes in the Pacific northwest: “Meet The Seattle Schools Woke Indoctrination Czar Who Married A Child Molester.”

    Despite decades of the most aggressive equity programs anyone could ask for, Seattle’s racial disparities are among the worst in the nation – and they’re getting worse, not better.

    At the forefront of Seattle Public Schools’ (SPS) initiatives was Tracy Castro-Gill, until recently its director of ethnic studies, who represented herself as a fierce Chicana who overcame homelessness and was willing to take on racism no matter who she had to battle, turning schools into vehicles for social change.

    Castro-Gill, it turned out, was a perennially unhappy toxic liar, one who misrepresented her background to the point that her own father compared her to Rachel Dolezal, and who was ultimately pushed out of her job for repeated misconduct. A focus on racial oppression did not create resiliency, but rather despondency, with Castro-Gill and three other racial justice leaders going on paid leave from SPS for mental health issues in 2019 alone.

    As Castro-Gill used children for politics in the workplace, her personal life also raised questions about the costs that can incur. She married a convicted child molester and moved her young daughter in with him. Then, her previous ex-husband told me, she pressured her child, who had serious mental impairments, to become gender-nonbinary.

    The academic achievement of Seattle’s youth plummeted as she implemented initiatives like replacing math instruction with courses on “power and oppression.” But in this world, there was no such thing as failing: Those gaps were used to justify still more jobs and efforts like hers.

  • FBI raids home and office of Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar. Hmmmm…
  • “Texas Secretary of State Finds Over 11,000 Potential Non-Citizen Voter Registrations.”
  • Texas has regained all lost pandemic jobs while New York trails far behind.”
  • Related: New York City fines wrong woman $259,000 for violations by her neighbor. Bonus: They couldn’t correct the record for 20 years.
  • Criminal tries to rob a house in Arlington, Texas, where he wins stupid prizes. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
  • Jordan Peterson resigns from professorship at University of Toronto. What are the odds he ends up at the University of Austin?
  • Heh:

  • The Sex in the City reboot characters are the same age as The Golden Girls were in Season One.
  • Meatloaf, RIP. For a guy I thought of more as a singer, he had a long, active, and actually pretty impressive acting career. (“His name is Robert Paulsen!”) Only a small number of you will get this:

  • “Biden Outperforms Nation’s Expectations For First Year By Still Being Alive.”
  • “In Major Deal, The Babylon Bee Purchases Competing Satire Site CNN.”
  • “The whole thing sounds sketchy.”

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Our canine friend lays down the law:

  • LinkSwarm for December 31, 2021

    Friday, December 31st, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to the last LinkSwarm of 2021!

    Remember how all those media pundits opined that 2021 couldn’t help but being better than 2020?

    Yeah, not so much.

    Assuming the official death tolls are accurate (probably not, but I doubt the methodology has changed from 2020 to 2021), there were approximately 375,000 deaths in the United States of America in 2020 from Flu Manchu. With some 821,000+ total deaths, more people have died this year than last year. So much for Joe Biden shutting down the virus…

    Joe Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone has evidently dropped, but I haven’t watched it yet. Maybe Saturday.

  • Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted of sex-trafficking girls for Jeffrey Epstein in a story the Democratic Media Complex has done it’s best to pay as little attention to as possible.
  • Ron DeSantis vs. Critical Race Theory.

    Over the past year, DeSantis has emerged as one of the most articulate political spokesmen for the anti–critical race theory movement. His new policy agenda builds on successful anti-CRT legislation in other states but goes two steps further. First, it provides parents with a “private right of action,” which allows them to sue offending institutions for violations, gain information through legal discovery, and, if they win in the courts, collect attorney’s fees. Second, it tackles critical race theory in corporate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training programs, which, DeSantis says, sometimes promote racial stereotyping, scapegoating, and harassment, in violation of state civil rights laws.

    At heart, the battle against critical race theory is a fight against entrenched bureaucracies that have used public institutions to promote their own racialist ideology. “This is an elite-driven phenomenon being driven by bureaucratic elites, elites in universities, and elites in corporate America, and they’re trying to shove it down the throats of the American people,” DeSantis said. “You’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”

    Following his speech, DeSantis invited me to address the crowd. I explained that the reason critical race theory has upset so many Americans is that it speaks to two deep reservoirs of human sentiment: citizens’ desire for self-government and parents’ desire to shape the moral and educational development of their children. Elite institutions have attempted to step between parent and child.

    DeSantis has deftly positioned himself as a protector of middle-American families. One of the guest speakers, Lacaysha Howell, a biracial mother from Sarasota, said that left-wing teachers tried to persuade her daughter that the white side of their family was oppressive. Another speaker, Eulalia Jimenez, a Cuban-American mother from the Miami area, said that left-wing indoctrination in schools reminded her of her father’s warnings about Communism in his native Cuba. Both believed that critical race theory was poison to the American Dream.

    As they begin their next session in January, Florida legislators have the opportunity to craft the gold standard for “culture war” policy. The governor’s team has worked with a range of interested parties, including the Manhattan Institute, which has crafted model language for prohibiting racialist indoctrination and providing curriculum transparency to parents. The battle is ultimately about shaping public policy in accord with public values. “I think we have an ability [to] just draw a line in the sand and say, ‘That’s not the type of society that we want here in the state of Florida,’” said DeSantis yesterday. The stakes are high—and all eyes are on Florida to deliver.

    (Previously.)

  • How the Democratic Media Complex managed to destroy what was left in the public’s trust in it:

  • “Washington State Democrats Want Decreased Penalties for Drive-By Shooters.” Because too many shooters are black. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • All the Republican candidates in Texas Donald Trump has endorsed for 2022. Including incumbents Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton and Sid Miller, plus Dawn Buckingham for Land Commissioner.
  • Speaking of Texas:

  • China’s Xian locks down over Mao Tze Lung.
  • “Houston Grand Jury Indicts Four More Defendants in $35 Million CARES Act Fraud Conspiracy.”

    Earlier this month, a federal grand jury in Houston indicted four men on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering in a scheme to rip off the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by submitting over 80 false applications for forgivable loans and writing checks to relatives and fictional employees, among other fraudulent activities.

    The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in a press release on December 15 that 29-year-old Hamza Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Khalid Abbas of Richmond, 55-year-old Abdul Fatani of Richmond, and 53-year-old Syed Ali of Sugar Land could be sentenced to up to 20 years on each count of wire fraud.

    The indictments against them are the most recent in an apparent scheme that prosecutors say involved 15 defendants from Texas and Illinois, all of whom are accused of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

    The DOJ stated that Khalid Abbas, Fatani, Ali, and another defendant, Houston resident Amir Aqeel, 53, have been charged with money laundering in the superseding indictment. The money laundering counts carry potential sentences of up to 10 years.

    Last year, a grand jury also indicted Aqeel on a charge of aggravated identity theft. The government accuses Aqeel of using stolen identities to apply for the PPP loans.

    According to the DOJ, several of the accused have already pleaded guilty for their involvement, including Siddiq Azeemuddin, 42, of Naperville, Illinois, Richard Reuth, 58, of Spring, and Raheel Malik, 41, of Sugar Land, all of whom entered their pleas in October. Houston residents Abdul Farahshah, 70, Jesus Perez, 31, and Bijan Rajabi, 68, pleaded guilty in late November.

    Rifat Bajwa, 53, of Richmond, Pardeep Basra, 52, of Houston, Mayer Misak, 41, of Cypress, and Mauricio Navia, 42, of Katy were also indicted last year on charges of participating in the conspiracy and committing wire fraud.

    Why, it’s almost like just about all the defendants share some characteristic in common. If only I could put my finger on it…

  • Speaking of criminals, did mentioned that a second CNN employee was being investigated for child sex allegations? “The allegations against Rick Saleeby, a former senior producer for Jake Tapper’s “The Lead,” appear to be connected to reporting by Project Veritas. Saleeby resigned from CNN this month.” It’s hard to keep the media pedophiles straight without a scorecard…
  • When does Biden apologize to Trump?
  • Aluminum is up 40% this year.
  • “Austin Office of Police Oversight Violated Department Contract, Arbitrator Rules.”

    The City of Austin’s director of the Office of Police Oversight (OPO), Farah Muscadin, abused her authority, a third-party arbitrator decided this week.

    In a 31-page decision, Lynn Gomez, the arbitrator, ruled that Muscadin and the OPO violated Article 16 of the Austin Police Department’s employment contract that was negotiated in 2018. Article 16 governs the parameters of civilian oversight of the department, which progressive groups lobbied hard for during the labor standoff.

    “Contrary to the city’s claim, Director Muscadin was not acting within the scope of her authority…[she] clearly was seeking to dictate some future outcome rather than simply making a recommendation as Art. 16 permits,” Gomez ruled.

    “[T]he evidence and arguments raise[d] by the city indicate that the city does not consider itself or OPO bound by Article 16’s provisions.”

    You may remember Muscadin from such hits as “I’m spending taxpayer money to push Critical Race Theory” and “defund APD and give the money to my radical leftwing cronies.” She should resign.

  • Has the Biden Amdenistration tipped its hand that considers Taiwan too strategically important to not defend it in the case of a Chinese attack?

    Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told a Senate hearing three weeks ago that Taiwan was “critical to the region’s security and critical to the defence of vital US interests”. In words strikingly similar to MacArthur’s, he emphasised the island’s location “at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of US allies and partners”.

    This may well be remembered as the moment Washington came clean on its intentions regarding Taiwan. In Beijing at least, the statement is being read as dropping all pretence that the US could acquiesce to a unification of Taiwan with China.

    Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in China, believes that US strategic thinking regarding Taiwan has always followed the lines laid out by MacArthur.

    Even after establishing diplomatic relations with China, the US “worked to ensure the continuation of a state of separation across the Taiwan Strait”, Wu said. “When we ask the US if they do not hope to see the unification of China, they deny that. But judging from the US’s concrete actions, it is clear that they indeed do not hope to see China unify. Ely Ratner has now said this out loud.”

    In Washington, too, some observers think the testimony allows little conclusion other than that the US should not allow Taiwan to become part of China under any circumstances.

    Hopefully true, but betting on Joe Biden’s stalwart fortitude is putting your hopes on an extremely weak horse…

  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez spotted in Miami Beach while New York City Flu Manchu cases hit alltime highs. As always, Covid Theater rules are for the little people.
  • Incoming New York City mayor Eric Adams is keeping Bill De Blasio’s private employer vaccine mandate. Because even nominally sane Democrats still hate you and your freedom to say no.
  • Family Guy sticks it to China:

  • Everything we know about famous psychological testing is wrong.
  • Sometimes the inevitable does happen: Betty White dead at age 99, just 18 days shy of 100. Still a hell of a run…
  • Remembering that we also lost Norm Macdonald this year, here he is slamming Carrot Top.
  • For those who didn’t get enough Harry Reid bashing in my obituary, here’s a classic Dennis Miller rant on the late senator.
  • A Twitter thread on electronic warfare during The Battle of the Bulge. Why yes, this is relevant to my interests. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The challenge of moving a 17 ton magnet.
  • Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia gets a new tower.
  • I really should have bought this for Dwight for Christmas.
  • The Critical Drinker is not thrilled at the latest Matrix film:

    Ultimately The Matrix Regenerations fails on just about every level possible. It fails to properly honor the past by leaving it well enough alone. It fails to tell a compelling new story, or add new ideas to the world it created. It fails to establish interesting new characters, or take old ones in a new direction. It fails to surpass the spectacle, energy and originality of a 20 year old film. And most of all it fails to deliver a compelling reason for its own existence. The Matrix Retaliations is a film that never should have been made in the first place.

  • Left-wing sponsors vs. right-wing sponsors:

  • “Pfizer Assures That Vaccine Is Almost As Safe For Kids As COVID.”
  • “After Conviction For Sex Crimes, Ghislaine Maxwell Announces New Job At CNN.”
  • Abandoned Christmas puppies find homes.
  • Happy New Year, everyone!

    LinkSwarm for December 24, 2021

    Friday, December 24th, 2021

    Merry Christmas Eve, everyone! For some reason, corrupt scumbags seem to be a theme of this LinkSwarm.

  • This week marks the 30th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an evil empire who’s passing made the world a better place. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and even George H. W. Bush all had key roles in bringing the Cold War to a successful close.
  • Biden’s vaccine mandates go before the Supreme Court. There’s a good chance they lose there on federalism grounds, even as the Supremes have avoided overturning state vaccine mandates. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Tom Cotton has a modest proposal: “Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.”

    Last year, our nation experienced the largest increase in murder in American history and the largest number of drug overdose deaths ever recorded. This carnage continues today and is not distributed equally. Instead, it is concentrated in cities and localities where radical, left-wing, George Soros progressives have captured state and district attorney offices. These legal arsonists condemn our rule of law as “systemically racist” and have not simply abused prosecutorial discretion, they have embraced prosecutorial nullification. As a result, a contagion of crime has infected virtually every neighborhood under their charge.

    Soros prosecutors refuse to enforce laws against shoplifting, drug trafficking, and entire categories of felonies and misdemeanors. In Chicago, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx allows theft under $1,000 to go unpunished. In Manhattan, District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. refuses to enforce laws against prostitution. In Baltimore, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has unilaterally declared the war on drugs “over” and is refusing to criminally charge drug users in the middle of the worst drug crisis in American history. For a time, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon even stopped enforcing laws against disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and making criminal threats.

    All of these cities have paid a terrible price for these insane policies. Last year, the number of homicides in Chicago rose by 56%, and more than 1,000 Cook County residents have been murdered in 2021. In New York City, murder increased 47% and shootings soared 97%. In 2020, the murder rate in Baltimore was higher than El Salvador’s or Guatemala’s — nations from which citizens often attempt to claim asylum purely based on gang violence and murder—and this year murder in Baltimore is on track to be even higher. Murder in Los Angeles rose 36% last year and is on track to rise another 17% this year.

    Soon after taking office in Boston, Suffolk County District Attorney Rachel Rollins published a list of 15 crimes that she would refuse to prosecute except under special circumstances. Among the charges on her “do not prosecute” list was drug trafficking, malicious destruction of property, trespassing, driving with a revoked license, and resisting arrest. Rollins also declared that she was “going to battle” against the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts and has slandered Boston police officers as “murderers” before accusing the department of “white fragility.”

    Unsurprisingly, Boston’s violent crime rate surged shortly after Rollins took over, as the number of murders in Boston skyrocketed by 38% in 2020. As Rollins implemented leniency for drug trafficking, opioid overdose deaths increased by 32% in Suffolk County. As a reward for her ineptitude and extremism, President Biden nominated her to run the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts, the very office she had gone “to battle” against only months before. Every Democrat in the Senate voted to confirm her.

    Another Soros prosecutor, Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner, came to office after suing the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times as a private citizen. He began his tenure by purging dozens of veteran prosecutors in his office and then slashed his jurisdiction’s prison population by over 30%. In most cases, Krasner also refuses to seek bail for accused criminals and has maintained a highly antagonistic relationship with the police, once accusing the Fraternal Order of Police lodge president of being “with the Proud Boys.”

    The number of homicides in Philadelphia has increased every year that Krasner has been DA. Last year, the murder rate rose 40% and this year it reached an all-time high.

    In San Francisco, the voters elected the son of two cop-killing terrorists as their district attorney. Chesa Boudin (pictured) has since unleashed chaos on the streets of a once-great city and inaugurated what the San Francisco mayor labelled the “reign of criminals.” San Francisco’s homelessness crisis has spiraled out of control, smash-and-grab looters are such a menace that the city had to close its downtown during Black Friday, and shoplifters have closed down retailers throughout the city. Since Boudin took over, car theft has increased by 27%, murder by 29%, arson by 36%, and burglary soared 38%.

    The liberal mayor of San Francisco, as if struck by amnesia of her own tenure and complicity in the crime wave, recently emerged to condemn her city’s appalling rise in crime. Speaker Nancy Pelosi also condemned the disorder and “attitude of lawlessness” in her city. However, in one of the great examples of “see no evil, hear no evil,” Speaker Pelosi pretended to be baffled by what could have caused the crime wave. The answer is obvious: Liberal extremists like Nancy Pelosi and Chesa Boudin caused this crisis.

    Conclusion: “The Republican Party must then join with independents and common-sense Democrats to wage an unrelenting war on crime. That war must begin with a campaign to recall, remove, and replace every last Soros prosecutor. Throw the bums out.”

  • Even CNN is wondering if Biden’s senile.
  • One rule for you, another for them. “California Dems Sip Champagne, Violate State Mask Mandate While Celebrating Successful Gerrymander.”
  • “According to data from Nielsen/MRI Fusion, Fox News is watched by more Democrats than CNN and by more Independents than both MSNBC and CNN.” Average network news viewers want truth, not a force-fed Narrative at odds with reality. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • More on why Build Back Better sucked:

  • Two defund the police state Democratic congresscritters carjacked. “In late December, two Democratic politicians were carjacked just hours apart in Philadelphia and Chicago. Ironically, both women – Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon and Illinois State Senator Kimberly Lightford – supported slashing police budgets and other reform measures, which many Republicans have blamed as the cause of the rapid increase in crime.” It would take a heart of stone not to laugh…
  • So you want to move to a red state.

    In the now three and a half years since I have decamped with my family from Los Angeles to Nashville—some have called us “early adopters”—I have spent considerable time on phone, email and texts with old friends and acquaintances in New York and California who are asking me what it’s like. Am I happy? Should they move? What’s best—Florida, Tennessee, Texas or someplace else?

    Although answering the question “should they move?” for someone else is rather like answering for them should they marry or divorce—it’s too big a decision and really none of your business—that doesn’t stop me from almost universally saying yes.

    I do this because I have been in L.A. and NY lately and know them to have turned into the ghosts of their former selves—basically hellholes.

    I haven’t been to Chicago for a few years, but it seems to be, if anything, worse. And when I was in L.A., covering the late, lamented Larry Elder campaign, I didn’t even want to go to San Francisco. That was a Golden Gate Bridge too far.

    It’s not just the pervasive homelessness and the escalating Clockwork Orange-like ultra-violence, the actual souls of the cities that I knew very well—born in NY and lived decades in LA—seem to have vanished.

    Who wants to sing “New York, New York” or “I Love L.A.” anymore? And can you imagine leaving your heart in San Francisco? What has happened is a true American tragedy—and it’s not just because of COVID, although that helped. The cancer has been growing for a long time.

    It could be said you should stay to help resuscitate these cities although I would argue you do more for them by leaving, making those governing the cities—universally Democrats, as everybody knows—and even more those dopey enough to have voted for that governance, wake up.

    But even in red states, the culture war continues…

  • Hundred of holiday flights have been cancelled due to “staffing shortages.” How’s that vaccine mandate working out for you, Biden voters?
  • Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith, infamous for refusing to approve concealed carry permits, is indicted on multiple misconduct charges:

    Sheriff Smith is being indicted for:

    • Count 1: Illegally issuing concealed carry weapon permits (CCW) to VIP’s
    • Count 2: Failing to properly investigate whether non-VIP’s should receive CCW permits
    • Count 3: Keeping non-VIP CCW applications pending indefinitely
    • Count 4: Illegally accepting suite tickets, food, and drinks at Sharks game
    • Count 5: Failing to report Sharks game gifts on financial documents
    • Count 6: Committing perjury by failing to disclose Sharks game gifts
    • Count 7: Failing to cooperate with internal affairs investigation surrounding treatment of Andrew Hogan

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • How bad did New York Corrections screw up for the courts to free someone on 8th Amendment grounds? This bad. Holy crap!

  • Play stupid games, win pink slip prizes: “New York Times fires editor accused of leaving profane voicemails for gun group.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Speaking of the New York Times, here’s a video on how Times reporter Ian Urbina ripped off the royalties for over 2,000 songs from 462 different artists. Bonus: Noam Chomsky!
  • “Florida Sheriff Cheers Homeowner Who Shot a Broad Daylight Home Invader.”
  • Short Twitter thread about the fiendship between Alice Cooper and Groucho Marx.
  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health now tops the Amazon non-fiction bestseller list. I haven’t read it, and usual Robert F. Kennedy Jr. caveats apply, but this is the book we have now, and I suspect regular BattleSwarm readers may find some of the same topics covered here within its pages.
  • The Grand Tour lads speak admiringly about how the French are ungovernable.
  • YouTube: You liked that one video on fixing door hinges? Here, have hundreds more!
  • The best of the Internet for 2021.
  • “New York Restaurant Adds Voting Booth So They Can Allow People In Without ID.”
  • “San Francisco To Require Proof Of Vaccination To Poop On The Sidewalk.”
  • If you’re bummed out from all these scumbags, here’s a palate cleansing Christmas puppy:

  • Merry Christmas everyone!

    Why Does CNN Exist?

    Sunday, December 12th, 2021

    In wake of the news that a CNN producer was arrested for raping children as young as nine years old, I have to ask: Why does CNN even exist in 2021?

    They’ve been below the 1 million viewer threshold for some time. Fox News had 71 of the top 100 most viewed cable shows. CNN had zero.

    Tucker Carlson’s 8 p.m. show led Fox’s lineup with a dominant 3,667,000 total average viewers and 651,000 average viewers in the key 25-54 demographic. Fox News noted in the release that Tucker’s Kyle Rittenhouse interview drew big ratings, helping to propel the program to the number one spot for November.

    After a strong October, Fox’s The Five scored second place in the cable news ratings averaging a total of 3.51 million viewers in the month of November and 557,000 average viewers in the key 25-54 age demographic.

    Sean Hannity placed third for November, averaging 3.23 million total viewers, with 541,000 average viewers in the demo.

    Fox beat CNN by 294% in primetime viewers and 184% in the demo during prime time. Fox also topped MSNBC by 136% in primetime total viewers and 200% within the demo during prime time.

    How many advertisers will continue ponying up ad money for less than a million viewers? (Insert your own “Depends” joke here.)

    (Aside: One company that sponsors a lot of CNN and other news shows: Pfizer.)

    Given how many CNN hosts slandered Kyle Rittenhouse as a “white supremacist” without proof, I would expect Rittenhouse to file (and win) a very costly slander and defamation lawsuit against them. Also, Alan Dershowitz thinks that Chris Cuomo (speaking of scumbags) could very well win his lawsuit over the remainder of his $18 million contract after his firing.

    You know who else thinks CNN has big problems? New CNN owner John Malone.

    Liberal CNN needs “actual journalists,” billionaire media mogul John Malone told CNBC in an interview in which he explained there is a place for the news channel in the proposed $43 billion combination of WarnerMedia and Discovery into a new entity Warner Bros. Discovery.

    “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” said Malone, who is longtime chairman of Liberty Media, which is a major shareholder in Discovery and will be the controlling partner of the new media combination.

    Which makes it all the more puzzling that Chris Wallace is leaving Fox to go to CNN+. Nothing says “success” quite like shedding 75% of your audience size. Granted, the move probably improves both Fox and CNN, but still amounts to shuffling deck chairs on the Lusitania.

    No, retreads aren’t the answer. This situation calls for a clean sweep.

    I’m not saying fire everyone.

    Maybe you can keep the technical staff.

    On-air talent? Gone.

    Producers? Gone.

    HR? Gone.

    Writers? Gone.

    Managers? Gone.

    Executives? Gone.

    Hell, the current taint on CNN is so bad that maybe you standup an entirely new studio with new talent at a different location and go on from there.

    But being a modern, civilized man, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that razing the current CNN building and sowing the earth with salt should be optional…