Posts Tagged ‘corrupt scumbags’

LinkSwarm for March 18, 2022

Friday, March 18th, 2022

Hunter Biden’s laptop takes another turn in the news cycle, Democrat-connected sex offenders are popping up everywhere, a killer camel, and the return of Florida Man. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

And virtual no Russo-Ukrainian War news, since I did that yesterday.


  • Are you ready for an absolutely shocking development? The New York Times finally admits that the Hunter Biden laptop story is real.

    I would say that everyone outside of the Democratic Media Complex knew that two years ago, but of course, more than half the Democratic Media Complex knew that as well and simply lied about it to get Biden elected.


    

  • “Lawyer For Mother Of Hunter Biden’s Daughter Says He Expects President’s Son To Be Indicted.”
  • US-Mexico Border Town Transformed Into Warzone After Drug Cartel Leader’s Arrest.”

    The Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo has been transformed into a warzone after the arrest of a top cartel boss. Burning vehicles littered the streets, and heavy gunfighting was reported causing the U.S. consulate to go on lockdown and the U.S. border crossing to be temporarily shut down on Monday.

    The chaos erupted late Sunday when Juan Gerardo Trevino, or “El Huevo,” the leader of one faction of the Northeast Cartel, the successor group to the Zetas Cartel, was arrested. He is also a U.S. citizen, a Mexican government official told Reuters. Trevino is on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) list of most wanted cartel members.

    Trevino faces a U.S. extradition order for drug trafficking and money laundering.

    In response to the arrest, cartel members hijacked and burned vehicles and attacked law enforcement and military personnel.

    “During the night of Sunday, there were shootings, burning of trucks, and a grenade attack on the U.S. consulate,” Mexican newspaper El Occidental said.

    On Monday, Nuevo Laredo Mayor Carmen Lilia Canturosas warned citizens in the border town to take cover.

  • The woke want to destroy science. “The giant plan to track diversity in research journals. Efforts to chart and reduce bias in scholarly publishing will ask authors, reviewers and editors to disclose their race or ethnicity.” Translation: Science is not sufficiently biased in favor of our political goals.
  • No, Democrats don’t get to pretend they weren’t in favor of defunding the police.

    According to the latest Winston Group poll, voters still believe Democrats want to defund the police by a 48%-34% margin.

    “In terms of what is the position of the Democratic Party, voters tend to believe that Democrats want to defund the police, ” pollsters David Winston and Myra Miller explain. “Among groups outside the Democratic Party, Hispanics believe this is what Democrats want (49%-32%), as do suburban voters (45%-36%). Independents believe this slightly at 41%-33%, but especially conservative independents (61%-20%).”

    Despite the efforts to distance themselves from the movement, some in the Democratic Party still openly support defunding the police, which means that the public will continue to believe Democrats still embrace the radical Black Lives Matter. movement, not police.

  • Federal Reserve raises interest rates .25%, bringing it to .5%. Remember, in order to kill the last bout of inflation, Paul Volker hiked rates up to 20%. There’s a lot more pain ahead…and given the huge amount of quantitative easing centrals banks have done, and the extensive budget deficits most of the governments in the developed world are running, 20% may not be enough.
  • Speaking of the fed: “Biden Fed pick Raskin withdraws nomination in face of opposition from Manchin.” Good. There’s nothing about “fighting climate change” in the Fed charter. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Researcher Kyle Becker produced in-depth, acclaimed portrait of just how much money Anthony Fauci was making. Result: Forbes fired him. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
  • Riots in Corsica, which wants to be independent of France.
  • Former Clinton pollster confirms that Democrats are out-of-touch.

    The electorate is increasingly pessimistic about the direction in which President Biden and Democrats are steering the country and feel that the party’s priorities do not align with their own.”

    What’s the solution?

    The pollsters advise that if Democrats want to have “a fighting chance in the midterms – as well as a shot at holding on to the presidency in 2024,” that they need to embark on a “broader course correction back to the center,” and show voters that they are focused on solving quality-of-life issues.

    In short, Democrats need to reject their progressive wing and its embrace of big government spending and identity politics.

    Indeed, a majority of voters (54 percent) — including 56 percent of independents — explicitly say that they want Biden and Democrats to move closer to the center and embrace more moderate policies versus embracing more liberal policies (18 percent) or staying where they are politically (13 percent).

    Most voters (61 percent) also agree that Biden and Democrats are “out of touch with hardworking Americans” and “have been so focused on catering to the far-left wing of the party that they’re ignoring Americans’ day to day concerns” such as “rising prices” and “combatting violent crime.” -The Hill

    The top issue for voters is inflation – which sits at its highest level in 40 years – according to 51% of respondents, followed by the economy and job creation (32%). Yet, just 16% of voters believe the economy is Biden’s main focus, and trust Republicans over Democrats to manage it (47% vs. 41%) and control inflation (48% vs. 36%).

    Voters also see Biden and Democrats as weak on crime (56%) – perhaps due to four years of Democrats pushing ‘defund the police’ under Trump, while our sitting Vice President raised bail money for BLM rioters.

  • New York City’s government issues yet another “Fuck You” to residents, extending vaccine and mask mandates.
  • San Antonio school caught introducing segregation.
  • Disney employees busted in child trafficking sting just days after corporation opposed anti-grooming law.”
  • Speaking of groomers: “Clinton-Connected Haiti Pastor Indicted For Child Sexual Abuse & Assault…The United States is charging pastor Corrigan Clay with child sex abuse after “engaging in illicit sexual conduct” with a Haitian orphan he adopted…Corrigan is the co-founder of the non-profit charity “Apparent Project”, which is a Clinton-connected group selling jewelry, clothing and art made by Haitian orphans.”
  • Speaking of Democrats being soft on sex offenders, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley uncovers why Biden Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson deserves to be rejected:

  • Hungary Sees 5.5 Per Cent Birthrate Increase After Enacting Pro-Family Policies.”
  • Mississippi bans Critical race Theory in publicly funded classrooms.
  • San Francisco is now boycotting most of the United States.

  • Taxes in California are now so high that Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne are moving back to the UK. (Hat tip: TPPF’s The Cannon.)
  • Things that make you go “Hmmm”: With Chinese Commodity Tycoon Bailed Out, LME Announces Nickel Market To Reopen.

    With the Nickel market shuttered after a Chinese stainless steel tycoon was caught with a historic, potentially fatal $8 billion margin call hanging over its head, today the London Metal Exchange announced that it will reopen its nickel market on Wednesday, more than a week after it was closed last Monday, after the Chinese company at the center of the epic short squeeze was bailed out by a consortium of banks led by JPMorgan which is also the largest counterparty to the short (for a detailed breakdown read “The 18 Minutes of Trading Chaos That Broke the Nickel Market”) .

    Trading in nickel will resume after Xiang Guangda, whose massive short position equivalent to approximately 150,000 tons of nickel, sent shockwaves across the commodity market last week, announced a standstill with his banks to avoid further margin calls as Bloomberg first reported earlier. Xiang’s Tsingshan Group had been in discussions with banks led by JPMorgan about a loan facility to backstop his short position and said Monday that talks on the funding would continue during the standstill period. As a reminder, Xiang is JPMorgan’s largest counterparty, and owes Jamie Dimon several billion, money which the largest US bank would not receive unless it bailed out the Chinese firm.

    If you owe the bank $100,000, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $8 billion, the bank has a problem…

  • Arm Holdings to lay off 15% of it’s workforce, or about 1,000 people.
  • Category: Extremely unexpected horrifying headlines: Petting zoo camel kills two. Not in the zoo, fortunately, as Humpy had busted out of the joint and was on the lam… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Florida Man suspects his meth is fake. So he asks police to test it.

  • Whoa!

  • How an NPR radio station destroyed the electronics in several Mazdas.
  • Heh:

  • “Zelensky Begs Congress To Bring Back Trump.”
  • Jailbreak!

  • 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!

    Cuomo Casho Nomo

    Wednesday, December 15th, 2021

    Few political falls have been so swift and complete as that of former New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. In 2020, Cuomo was being talked up as an emergency replacement for Sundown Joe Biden on the presidential ticket despite having forced Flu Manchu patients into nursing homes, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and signed a $5.1 million book deal to talk up the awesomeness of all his lockdowns and granny killing.

    Here at the burnt-end of 2021, Andrew Cuomo is not only disgraced and out of office over sexual abuse allegations, his brother Fredo has been purged from CNN, ostensibly over his own sex abuse scandal. Now ex-Governor Cuomo has been ordered to turn that sweet $5.1 million over to New York State.

    Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has been ordered by the state’s ethics board to forfeit $5.1 million in profits next month from the memoir he published over the pandemic.

    In a near unanimous decision, a twelve to one vote, the New York Joint Commission on Public Ethics passed a resolution demanding that Cuomo return his earnings from the book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This comes a month after the panel rescinded its prior approval giving the now disgraced governor permission to keep the book side hustle while he was still serving as governor of New York, confronting multiple scandals simultaneously.

    Over the summer and into the fall, the New York attorney general’s office launched a probe into Cuomo’s alleged abuse of state resources, including staff members, to draft and promote his book. During that criminal investigation, Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed the ethics panel for information related to the book deal. The JCOPE then reversed its approval for Cuomo’s to collect income from the book deal, paving the road for fines to be potentially imposed or profits to be recalled.

    According to the resolution, created by Republican commissioner David McNamara, the former governor “lacked the legal authority to engage in outside activity and receive compensation in regard to the book” since the panel rescinded its approval.

    While I had no intention of making this Louis Rossmann Week, he has such a wonderful plate of profane schadenfreude over this turn of evens that I’m embedding it here.

    How unpopular is Cuomo? Even former Gambino Family underboss Sammy “The Bull” Gravano said Cuomo’s granny-killing was beyond the pale. “I don’t give a f— who tells me to do that, whether it’s [former President] Trump, the president, the vice president, you, him, I would never do it…And I’m a badass. I’d never do it.”

    How bad do you have to suck to have a guy involved in 19 murders to think you’re scum?

    (And did you know that Gravano has his own YouTube channel and a podcast? His videos even have sponsors! Only in America…)

    Speaking of organized crime figures, Cuomo has clearly pissed off somebody deep in the Democratic Party power structure. I am very far indeed from the center of the New York Democratic Party, but there’s obviously something weird going on there. Having Letitia James take out Cuomo, only to drop out of the race to be his successor suggests someone beyond the public players made that call. Add that to the perfect table-run required to get Biden the nomination in 2020, the continued screwing of the Bernie Brigades, and the inexplicable rise of Pete Buttigieg, and it becomes very obvious that people very far indeed from the public figureheads of the Democratic Party are calling the shots from the shadows.

    Not that Cuomo didn’t have it coming. He did. He’s a scummy asshole. But he was just as big a scummy asshole in 2020, and the Democratic Machine pulled out all the stops propping him up as some sort of messianic paragon of COVID-fighting virtue. Now the same people have done a 180° and plunged the knives into him.

    The question is why.

    “Bail Reform Project” Antifa Scumbag Also A Crook

    Monday, November 29th, 2021

    Dwight was kind enough to send over this story. If you remember last week’s story on just who GoFundMe allows to raise money, you might have noticed The Bail Project among the screenshotted examples. Well, Holly Zoller, one of four major figures in The Bail Project, turns out not to be just a leftwing antifa scumbag, but also apparently a serial scam-artist scumbag:

    Something didn’t sit right with me about Holly after hearing about how she ordered a UPS truck full of weapons to give to antifa rioters in a riot that caused several injuries, many requiring hospitalization. Just a weird feeling, so I looked into it.

    Holly Zoller started off as Holly McGlawn. She met her husband David Zoller around 03-05 and they started a buisness together. This one was called “START” and the purpose was I think to “Eliminate Discrimination and Prejudice and erect public works.”

    However, as far as I can tell, this buisness never had any projects, locations, other employees. They started it, got tax exemption status as a non profit, took donations for a year, and when the yearly reporting was due they never filed it and ran.

    The state sent out documents for requests but they all came back as “unserved” (this will become a theme) and the state closed their tax exempt status. When inspectors showed up to notify them of the closing, the address they used was a 1 cubicle rented office space that –
    -The owners of the building said “Had never been occupied, they came in, picked up mail and donations, and left” (This will become a theme)

    They got married soon after. And for 8 years, just started buying/renting land and racking up huge credit card/auto loan debts as well. No idea what buisness they were into or what they did for work though. I’m not even sure if they were in the state. They resurfaced in 2014.

    Snip.

    Snip.

    Snip. In conclusion:

    When it comes to Antifa, it’s scumbags all the way down…

    “How I Switched From Never-Trump To Never-Biden”

    Monday, January 18th, 2021

    If I were still doing BidenWatch, this piece would be a top link. It’s the story of why a hardcore anti-Trumper switched to being anti-Biden. The hook is that the writer is an ex-cocaine addict, and thus has an ideal vantage to talk about what the media is hiding from us about Hunter Biden:

    At this exact moment I was still a zealous 100% anti-Trumper, willing to vote for anybody but Trump, even the Easter Bunny. Further, I thought that poor old Rudy Giuliani had completely lost his marbles. He was running around in the Ukraine acting all crazy. Looking for what? Maybe the Abominable Snowman?

    And right here, at this exact moment one year ago, is when my faith in Biden, as the “anybody” in “anybody but Trump”, cracked.

    As I was joking with my friend, and reading all this stuff about Hunter’s multiple trips to rehab, his binges, his dating his brother’s widow, his getting a stripper pregnant while dating his brother’s widow, and cheering it all on in locker-room style… that’s when the penny dropped.

    From my own experience, there is no such thing as a functioning cocaine addict. The worse it gets, the faster it gets worse. One cannot function like that — at all. You lose stuff and break phones constantly. You’re always scrambling around trying to swindle some cash somehow, from this person and that; and then you’re trying to chase around your dealer; and then you’re getting your spot organized, so you can hide out and get high; plus you’re getting whatever else you might need.

    Then you spend maybe 3–5 days getting deliriously high. Then a couple days deliriously tired and sleeping. You’re always moving in and out of hotels, and always losing stuff in the process. Plus, all the physical ailments — the puking, the paranoia, the eating, and the not eating. Wash, rinse and repeat. This is why crack houses looks like crack houses. Hunter is lucky to be alive, but there is no chance he’s been doing any work. None at all.

    I lived this life so I know it, and it occurred to me right then — and this being about one year ago — that if Hunter’s addiction is worse than mine was, then he couldn’t bag a ham sandwich on a good day, and even when he could, he would be busy doing other things anyway. So there is no way he did any work whatsoever for Burisma. It is mathematically impossible. So, then, the question to me was, does it overlap? And, yes it does. His spiral started with his expulsion from the Navy in 2013, and carried on until 2019.

    Snip.

    Hunter’s Addiction Timeline Versus Bursima

    Hunter served on the Burisma board from April 2014 until April 2019.

    Here is what was going on in his life at that time:
    Feb 2014 — discharged from Navy for cocaine use
    Jun 2015 — Beau Biden’s funeral
    Jul 2015 — checks in to Caron Treatment Centers
    Aug 2015 — his name is among those leaked in Ashley Madison data breach
    Oct 2015 — Kathleen Biden files divorce
    Feb 2016 — checks in to Kolmac Outpatient Recovery Center
    Aug 2016 — begins dating his dead brother’s widow
    Oct 2016 — checks in to Grace Grove
    Jan 2018 — gets stripper pregnant

    I have no doubt, in my own heart, that Hunter couldn’t function in any way amid circumstance like these, and I think this timeline establishes that pretty clearly.

    He looks at Hunter’s resume:

    Every job on there was either a hook-up from his dad (MBNA, Dept Commerce, Amtrak, Navy) or has a huge conflict of interest embedded in it (Oldaker, Biden & Belair, Rosemont Seneca, and Burisma). The Amtrak job is a total handout. Hunter is 50 years old and he has never held any of these jobs for that long — i.e. it is job after job after job. So, then, Burisma paid him $80,000 a month for what?
    Lying Through His Dentures

    The media have gone so easy on Biden, dancing around Burisma. George Stephanopoulos, who ran Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992 and subsequently became White House communications director, didn’t come near this one at that “Wag the Dog” debate the other night. My mom asks me tougher questions these days, “Christian, what did you have for dinner?” The entire press corps have given Biden a 6 month “get out of jail free card” on this obvious hot spot, and that’s precisely because they know it is a hot spot.

    And then come the Joe Biden evasions:

    This is what flipped me to Trump:

    Question: Hunter Biden, your son, was getting paid a lot of money to serve on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing serious corruption charges. You were the Vice President, running point on the Ukraine. The Average Joe hears that and says ‘that sounds fishy.’ What’s your understanding of what your son was doing?

    Answer: I don’t know what my son was doing. I know he was on the board. I found out he was on the board after he was on the board. And that was it.
    [Ok, like my mom couldn’t give you at least some thumbnail sketch of what I do for a living? Of course she can. Hunter “worked” at Burisma for 5 years, and he has no clue at all what he did? This is a barefaced lie.]

    Re-direct Question: Well you’ve had a lot of time, isn’t this something you want to get to the bottom of?

    Answer: No, because I trust my son.
    [This is where he lost me forever. There is a joke told in rehab: what’s the difference between a drug addict and an alcoholic? The drug addict will help you look for your wallet. I pawned my ex-wife’s jewelry and told her I was having it cleaned. You shouldn’t have trusted me any further than you could have thrown me back then. He doesn’t trust his son — that’s total BS. And if he does trust his son, after 30 years of drug addiction, then he’s the dumbest man on the planet. But the American public absolutely should not be asked to trust a drug addict. Period. This answer is manipulative, evasive and totally dishonest.]

    Re-direct Question: That doesn’t pass the smell test, like when you’re Vice President, isn’t there a higher standard? Don’t you need to know?

    Answer: No! Unless there was something that is on its face wrong. There’s nothing that was on its face wrong.
    [Another barefaced lie. Everything is wrong on its face here. As Vice President, he was assigned to the Ukraine. His son, meanwhile, has a huge conflict of interest in a job with a Ukrainian oil company that pays him way too much, and that he is unqualified for, and that he absolutely cannot perform due to the disability of his drug addiction. Everything is wrong with that.]

    Answer-continued: Look, if you wanna talk about problems, let’s talk about Trump’s family. I’m mean come on! This is, you guys are amazing… [sneer]
    [His here deflection implies this: ‘ok, yes, fine, we are corrupt, but so are they!’ His anger betrays his guilt. The reason there is no answer, is that there can be no answer. Joe Biden has been bought and sold.]

    Hunter’s Never Ending Spending

    Why is divorce so expensive? Because it is worth it.

    Why is a drug habit so expensive? Because you have to buy all the drugs, plus you have to buy all the other things you need, which in Hunter’s case is often hotels and professional company, plus there is the cost of all the crashed cars, broken mobile phones, lost property, late fees, etc that drug addict leave in their wake. Meanwhile, all your normal household expenses continue to accrue. Bottom line: being a drug addict sucks money out of your bank account like a bathtub with four drains.

    Hunter has a divorce and a drug habit, and then some…

    His itemized expenses in the last 3 years:
    — a long-standing drug habit
    — a divorce from a wife with whom he had three kids (2017)
    — a $450,000 tax lean that he satisfied in 6 days (2020)
    — a paternity settlement (2020)
    — a $2.5 million home purchase in LA (2019)
    — a recent marriage (2020)
    — a fifth child on the way (2020)

    A quick question… where is all this money coming from?

    He concludes:

    Drug addicts are not fit for work, and if Joe Biden putting his son to work while he was in downward spiral is what gets him busted, well then, it would be just desserts. If Biden was any kind of father, he should have cut his son off a long time ago and said, “Call me back when you get sober kiddo.”

    Trump might be a jerk, but he doesn’t treat his kids like that. Trump may be a jerk but he never sold American influence for a price.

    Apparently the media prefers a soulless fraud with a nice pair of dentures and a pressed suit who says oh so often “I care about you.” In the last election, a bombastic showman played the media like a fiddle to steal the show, and in this election the media is stealing America back, so they can return it to the hands of its rightful owner, a hollow hooker with a good smile who will sell it to which ever foreign interest is willing to pay the highest price for the night.

    Read the whole thing, and especially take a look at that eye-opening picture of one of Hunter’s hotel rooms…

    (Hat tip: Octothorpe Drakonidae on Gab.)

    LinkSwarm for October 11, 2019

    Friday, October 11th, 2019

    Hooray! Today we’re finally getting fall!

  • “BOMBSHELL: Audio, Email Evidence Shows DNC Colluded With Ukraine To Boost Hillary By Harming Trump.”

    The Blaze has released an audio recording that they recently obtained that appears to show Artem Sytnyk, Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, admitting that he tried to boost the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton by sabotaging then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

    The connection between the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Ukrainian government was veteran Democratic operative Alexandra Chalupa, “who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration” and then “went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee,” Politico reported.

    There’s Alexandra Chalupa again. Funny how often Democratic administrations tend to send bagmen on “diplomatic” missions… (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)

  • The Ukraine hoax is all about protecting the side-hustle:

    Corruption in modern D.C. is shaped like a triangle. A person or entity seeking a favor doesn’t hand the money directly to the politician or public official. Instead, the money goes to a trusted family relation under a vague “consulting” or “speaking” arrangement. This golden triangle of corruption appears over and over again in the Russia collusion hoax.

    The Clinton email scandal and the Biden/Ukraine scandal have a lot in common. Both originated with snooping into high-level triangle schemes but morphed into a counter-scandal against Trump. In Clinton’s case, she deleted 30,000 emails that likely contained more evidence of favors to donors and friends. The process was so formalized that one Clinton Foundation official actually wrote a memo bragging about how the foundation work led to lavish speaking fees for Bill Clinton. As an example, he obtained speaking fees for Clinton from UBS in the amount of $900,000, $750,000 from Ericson “plus $400,000 for a private plane.” The memo author bragged that he negotiated a $1,000,000 fee for a one-hour Bill Clinton speech in China. When Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, she no longer had influence to sell and the donations to the “charitable” foundation dried up.

    But there have been several other triangle arrangements. Consider the Ohrs. Then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Burce Ohr, a very senior attorney in the Justice Department, lent his credibility to Hillary Clinton’s opposition research contractor by sponsoring it to the FBI. The same contractor, Fusion GPS, paid Bruce Ohr’s wife tens of thousands of dollars to work on the same project.

    Then there are the McCabes. On July 5, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not refer Clinton for prosecution for the email scandal. In this announcement, he said, “I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.”

    But in May of 2016, Director Comey initiated a string of emails to his Deputy Andrew McCabe (among others) titled, “midyear exam.” The FBI titled the release “Drafts of Director Comey’s July 5, 2016 Statement Regarding Email Server Investigation.” Thus, McCabe was involved in the early version of the statement exonerating Clinton (even though Comey said he didn’t coordinate his comments with anyone in government). This brought to close the FBI’s investigation which formally began in July of 2015.

    But Clinton’s “oh shit!” moment came in March of 2015 when she realized she might face criminal charges. Coincidentally—ha!—close Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe approached McCabe’s wife to run for office in March of 2015. He then steered $675,000 into her campaign coffers.

    Then there are the corrupt but yet unidentified reporters. In November of 2017, court documents revealed that Fusion GPS made payments to three journalists between June 2016 and February 2017. This period overlaps with the Clinton campaign utilizing campaign funds to secretly pay Fusion GPS to help promote the Russia collusion hoax. Thus campaign money was potentially used to influence journalists. If you look in the FEC’s cold storage bin, you might find the campaign finance violation complaint about campaign money secretly making its way from Clinton’s attorney to Fusion GPS.

    Then there are the WilmerHale alumni that came home after working on the Mueller team. We just learned that the Justice Department waived a conflict of interest triggered by Robert Mueller’s work with WilmerHale. WilmerHale took money from Clinton to do legal work on some of the very same email scandals that involved the State Department/Clinton Foundation shenanigans. At the time Mueller’s team was gearing up, we were told that Mueller and several of his team members “gave up million-dollar jobs to work on special counsel investigation.” But did they? We’ve recently learned some of these WilmerHale alums have returned which raises concerns that these attorneys had informal outside agreements at the same time they’re supposed to be independently serving a special counsel investigating Clinton’s political opponent.

    It’s 2019, and I’m still tagging things with “Hillary Clinton Scandals.”

  • “New Poll Suggests Dems’ Impeachment Fever Helping Trump With Independents.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The SuperGeniuses running California these days are cutting off power to large portions of the state because they refuse to let utilities trim trees near powerlines, which means lots of fires in high wind situations. Way to go, California Democratic Party!
  • Just as predicted, the $15 minimum wage is killing jobs all across New York City.
  • Speaking of leaving New York, investor Carl Icahn is doing just that:

    Carl Icahn, one of America’s most well-known investors, has summoned the movers, joining what, in an average year, adds up to almost a half-million New Yorkers looking for a better place to live. As with the largest share of former Empire Staters, Icahn is moving to Florida, a state with no personal income tax.

    Icahn isn’t just moving to Florida alone; he’s also offering each of his staff $50,000 in relocation benefits to move with him.

    Icahn, 83, has been paying New York’s top 8.82 percent tax on income for his entire storied career. Why move now?

    President Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act limited state and local tax (SALT) deductions to $10,000 per filing household. Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that Icahn earned $500 million in a year. The new $10,000 SALT deduction cap means that he’d not be able to take a deduction on about $44 million in state and local income taxes—not including additional property taxes. As a result, his federal tax liability would about $16.3 million greater—just for living in New York.

    While most taxpayers in New York—and every other state—saw their overall taxes decline as a result of the 2017 tax cut, some wealthy taxpayers in high tax states like New York and California saw a far smaller tax cut or, in a few cases, a tax increase. That’s because the federal tax code no longer provides a generous subsidy—through an unlimited SALT deduction—for steep state and local taxes.

    This led New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to complain via Twitter that “The elimination of the #SALT deduction (state and local tax) was an economic attack on Democratic states.”

    Of course, he could also ask the New York legislature to cut taxes. But he won’t. As a result, wealthier New York taxpayers have likely shelled out an additional $38 billion in federal taxes over the past seven quarters as a result of changes to the tax code.

    In California, the state with the highest marginal personal income tax rate in the nation at 13.3 percent higher-end taxpayers have probably seen their federal tax liabilities increase by about $45 billion over what their peers in the lower-taxed states like Florida and Texas would be paying.

    Limiting the federal tax deductibility of high state and local taxes in late 2017 had the same economic effect as passing 50 state tax law changes at once.

    Since the tax law’s enactment, private-sector job growth in the 27 low-tax states with average 2016 SALT deductions of under $10,000 has run at more than double the rate of those 23 states with average SALT deductions above $10,000, adding 3.7 percent more jobs compared to only 1. 8 percent. The gap in manufacturing jobs is even greater: 3.4 percent job growth in the low-tax states vs. 0.8 percent in the high-tax states from December 2017 to July 2019. New York saw its manufacturing jobs shrink by -0.4 percent.

  • Democrats want racial quotas even after voters eliminated it. Asians oppose them, because they know they will be the ones disadvantaged. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Iranians tried to hack into the Trump 2020 campaign.
  • President Trump didn’t forget Poland.
  • Another day, another Antifa member charged with assaulting a police officer.
  • Book the fake Brett Kavanaugh smear piece was taken from is “one of the most epic bombs in political publishing over the past decade.”
  • YouTube’s secret list of demonetization keywords discovered by automated testing. Here’s the full list. A whole lot are porn-related, but many are inexplicable. Park?
  • Tour of an abandoned American base in Syria.
  • CNN reporter shut down in NBA press conference when she tries to ask about China.
  • Phising attempts are getting more competent. Never assume a phone call from your bank is actually a phone call from your bank. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Sarah Hoyt on how to eat cheaply.
  • “New Law Requires You To Listen To Greta Thunberg Lecture Before Purchasing Gasoline.”
  • Watch Nightmare Bob Ross unpaint the centipede tree.
  • “I Am Godzilla, King of Monsters, and I Too Was Contacted By the Trump Administration to Investigate Hunter Biden.”

    I am informing the council of this with no agenda; as a non-citizen of the United States I cannot vote. Even if I could, none of the candidates from either side have any policies that are of interest to me. I am, as mentioned before, a lizard who lives just off the coast of Japan. I breathe fire. Most of my needs are sudden, violent, and cannot be met through typical democratic legislation. In that sense, a two-party system is not practical to me.

  • LinkSwarm for May 24, 2019

    Friday, May 24th, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! This week: Texas legislative news, foreign elections, and a surprising amount on analog synthesizers…

  • Theresa May is out as British Prime Minister effective June 7. The only reason she’s not the worst prime minister of the last century is that she didn’t give Czechoslovakia to Hitler…
  • May’s refusal to offer the UK a real Brexit may result in the Tories being crushed by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party:

    Even before [EU Parliamentary] election results are known on Sunday, therefore, there’s a growing sense that the Brexit party may be a permanent factor in British politics. Opinion polls on how people would vote in a general election show that the party would do less well than in European elections but still run about level with the Tories and Labour. There are deep divisions on policy apart from Brexit that have allowed critics to argue that the party would fall apart once its main goal had been achieved. But the divisions don’t seem deeper than those of other parties, and power or its prospect is itself a unifying social glue. Farage’s rallies around the country are hugely successful — packed, good-humored, more diverse socially and politically than those of the other parties, full of confidence and optimism, and notably without rancor. As with Trump’s election rallies, people seem to find them enjoyable as well as genuinely serious. A kind of Brexit party spirit already exists with many different types of people happy to be together on the bandwagon. It seems less class-bound than any of the existing parties.

    And if the Brexit party wins one-third or more of Britain’s votes this week from a standing start, it will change British politics. Such a result would have the effect of a second referendum victory for Leave. It simply would not be possible for Parliament and the mainstream parties to push through a Brexit that doesn’t get the effective consent of Farage and his party. If such a thing is attempted, it will be seen to be anti-democratic and will have to be abandoned quite quickly. It would force the EU to confront the fact that there is little chance of getting a deal like May’s withdrawal deal accepted, and that even if one were to make it into the statute book, it could never be effectively implemented. In those circumstances the EU might simply throw up its collective hands and declare that the U.K. has left without a deal.

    The third effect of a Farage success in the European elections would be to realign political parties and, in particular, to place the Conservative party in mortal peril. Voting for a political party is a matter of both loyalty and habit. For lifelong Tories, the idea of voting for another party is anathema. Most people who think about it never actually get around to doing it. But the Tories have certainly given their traditional supporters and those new supporters who voted for them in order to achieve Brexit good reason to leave them on this occasion. Many will do so this week. And as with adultery, betraying your party for another is much easier the second time around.

  • Well:

  • You know who doesn’t want to impeach President Donald Trump? House Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty.)
  • But she may not be able to hold off her lunatic party much longer.
  • And all that despite ample evidence that voters are opposed to the whole charade. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Democrats lying about preexisting conditions again:

  • “A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally.”
  • Democratic Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is a rarity: an actual pro-life Democrat. When Edwards’ wife was “20 weeks pregnant with their first child, a doctor discovered their daughter had spina bifida and encouraged an abortion. The Edwardses refused. Now, daughter Samantha is married and working as a school counselor, and Edwards finds himself an outlier in polarized abortion politics.”
  • A succinct summary from across the pond:

  • If you look at what China is targeting in retaliatory tariffs, it’s obvious their hand is incredibly weak:

    But based on what we know, what’s even more revealing about China’s choices are the U.S.-made products that haven’t made any tariff list. They include civilian aircraft and their engines and parts, which had a 2018 export total of $17.73 billion. They include semiconductors and their components, which last year had China shipments that totaled several billion additional dollars. They include the equipment needed to manufacture and inspect semiconductors and their parts, which racked up at least $850 million in 2018 exports to China; devices for conducting chemical and physical analyses (with $912 million in China exports last year); laser equipment ($304 million), motor vehicles, auto parts, and plastics resins and polymers (which each produced billions in exports to China); and billions of dollars’ worth of other products that the Chinese either can’t (yet) make or can’t make in the amounts that they need—or that consist of goods preferred by Chinese consumers over their Made in China counterparts.

    As I’ve said before, semiconductor equipment is an area where it’s all but impossible for the Chinese to do without American technology.

  • Narendra Modi wins reelection in India. Forcing Pakistan to stand down over Kashmir probably clinched the victory for him. Modi’s Hindu ethononationalism is not good for India in the long-run, but he’s probably someone President Trump can trust to be a staunch ally against Islamic terrorism. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The election was an outright disaster for Rahul Gandhi, “the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and leader of India’s Congress party,” which is down to 52 seats as opposed to 303 for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. (Remember that Indira Gandhi was the daughter on India’s first prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and is not related to Mahatma Gandhi.)
  • The Morganza Spillway on the Mississippi to be opened for only the third time in history. The Morganza Spillway is located downstream of the Old River Control Structure.
  • “60% of male managers are ‘uncomfortable‘ working around women,” a 32% increase over last year. You mean they don’t want false accusations of sexual harassment to derail their careers? Way to go feminists! Once again you’ve made things worse for women living in the real world!
  • People have known that Chinese manufacturer Huawei has been stealing American intellectual property for at least seven years. Former congressman Mike Rogers: “If I were an American company today, and I’ll tell you this as the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and you are looking at Huawei, I would find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property, if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care about the national security of the United States of America.”
  • Social Justice Warriors are ruining Young Adult publishing.
  • How computer security is actually handled in the wild:

  • UK foreign minister to Iran: “Bitch, you try to throw down on T-Dog, he gonna go HAM upside yo dome!” Of course I’m paraphrasing a bit…
  • Good news! It looks like Texas taxpayers will finally be getting some meaningful property tax relief, to the tune of $5 billion, or half the projected surplus. (Kids, if you have any friends in California or Illinois, try to explain to them what a “budget surplus” is.) This follows months of waffling.
  • Good news! Texas passes constitutional amendment banning a state income tax, which will go before voters in November.
  • Bad news! Texas House kills election integrity bill.
  • Bad news! Texas House refuses to pass a taxpayer-funded lobbying ban.
  • Laredo passes Los Angeles as America’s largest port. (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)
  • Coordinated Instagram troll farm attack on Trump. So the next time you see a Trump-Putin meme, be sure to post that link and ask “How the trolling, Trolly McTrollFace?”
  • Speaking of trolls: Twitter Permanently Bans Anti-Trump Krassenstein Brothers” for “operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions.” The overwhelming majority of conservatives I follow think Twitter should lift the ban so these idiots can keep talking, but it will be nice to no longer see these morons as the top reply on every Trump tweet.
  • Antifa activist ordered to pay Judicial Watch’s legal fees.
  • Speaking of legal fees, Harvey Weinstein will reportedly pay $44 million to settle various sexual harassment/etc. lawsuits, the money evidently coming from insurance, but will still face criminal prosecution over at least two sexual assault allegations.
  • “Florida man hid legless fugitive girlfriend in plastic tote.” She sounds like a real winner: “Anderson was wanted for failing to appear in court on charges including false imprisonment related to a 2015 incident when she allegedly held people hostage at a Burger King with a BB gun. It ended in a shooting with police and she lost both legs.”
  • Speaking of lunatics: “Trump is the devil!” Genuine loon, or suicide by cop? You make the call. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • All teaching “white privilege” does is make leftists more contemptuous of poor white people. Which pretty much explains the Democratic Party’s decline in a nutshell…
  • Austin Mayor Steve Adler rolls out the welcome mat for antisemetic Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.
  • Followup: “Medieval Sex Cult at Center of German Crossbow Murder Mystery. Police now say a German sex guru specializing in medieval bondage directed lesbian sex slaves in bizarre murder-suicide.”
  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez frets over colonial cauliflower in her own garden. She really is an idiot. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Moogseum.
  • And speaking of analog synthesizers, they had features you don’t find on modern digital versions, like secret caches of LSD. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Facebook Claims Party Celebrating Candace Owens’s Suspension Was ‘An Honest Mistake.'”
  • A Song of Vanilla Ice and Fire.
  • LinkSwarm for May 3, 2019

    Friday, May 3rd, 2019

    Lot’s of rage by Democrats in this week’s LinkSwarm over Attorney General William Barr over, well, something.

  • The U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs in April, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, the lowest since 1969.
  • Followup: Baltimore’s Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh resigns following FBI/IRS raids on home and workplace following the “Healthy Holly” bribery scandal. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Poll: Percentage of Democrats who see border ‘crisis’ jumps 17 points since January.”
  • Old and Busted: “Trump is guilty of treason!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of collusion!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of obstruction!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of something! Release the report!” (Report released.) “Ummm…Barr’s summary was slightly off on one point! Impeach!” Trump Derangement Syndrome is a helluva drug…
  • Indeed, they’re just pissed that Barr’s summary of the report was accurate, meaning the Democrats had three weeks they couldn’t lie about the report. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Checkmate. How President Trump’s legal team outfoxed Mueller.” From the newly resurrected Human Events, this is a detailed legal analysis of how a memo written by William Barr before he became Attorney General laid the groundwork for curtailed Robert Mueller using an overly-expansive definition of “obstruction.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti pleads not guilty to federal wire fraud and tax evasion charges. (Hat tip: Roger Simon.)
  • “F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016.” You know, a spy. Here’s a handy decoder for the “covering for Democrats” speak:

  • “Ukrainian embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016.”
  • More Democratic compassion:

  • Deputy shot in Caldwell County. However, unlike most cases, there are some really stupid decisions on both sides.
  • Facebook banned Milo Yannopoulos, Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan for “extremism,” and the Washington Post headline initially called them all “far right” before a ton of criticism forced them to correct the headline. Because Louis Farrakhan is so well-known for palling around with conservatives. (Facebook is a private entity and can do what it wants, but I don’t want any of those people banned. Let them speak and let people debate their ideas/lunacy/etc. or not as they feel).
  • Even CNN is starting to get a clue:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Speaking of CNN: “CNN Poll: Overwhelming Majority Want Investigation into Obama DOJ Spying on Trump.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The members of the Flint, Michigan City Council sound like real winners.
  • “Norwegian fisherman have discovered a beluga whale wearing a tight harness with a camera attachment – sparking speculation the animal belongs to the Russian Navy.” I wouldn’t be surprised, especially since we have our own dolphin program… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The new “Supermajority” organization is just another stalking horse for Planned Parenthood.
  • “Israeli ambassador calls NYT ‘cesspool of hostility.'” Correct, though that’s really two more words than necessary…
  • The latest counterculture icon to be found guilty of WrongThink by Social Justice Warriors is (rolls dice)…cartoonist Robert Crumb.
  • “Covington kid sues NBC for $275 million.” Good. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Lance Morrow reviews Robert Caro’s Working. “If I were teaching journalism or nonfiction writing, especially the writing of history and biography, I would build a course around Caro, with Working as my primary text and scenes from his Johnson books as case studies.”
  • In the “trouble in places you may not have heard of” department, clashes broke out on the African nation of Benin (between Nigeria and Togo on the Ivory Coast) when the ruling party held a parliamentary election from which opposition parties were excluded.
  • Dispatches from Social Justice Warrior land: “Trinity College professor tweets ‘whiteness is terrorism,’ refers to Barack and Michelle Obama as ‘white kneegrows.’”
  • Japan’s Emperor Akihito abdicated, Emperor Naruhito mounting the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1, marking the end of the Heisei era and inaugurating the Reiwa era.
  • Actor James Woods is still in the Twitter Gulag:

  • Woman awakens after 27 year coma. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Unhappy meals. Now if only every one came with mopping teenage Goth girl figurines…
  • “‘Mortal Kombat’ Introduces Brutal New Fatality Where Your Character Just States An Opposing Viewpoint…One character says, ‘There are only two genders,’ and his opponent instantly melts into nothing, being unable to handle the opposing viewpoint. Another character suggests that capitalism isn’t all bad, and his opponent’s head instantly falls off.”
  • Legging it.
  • LinkSwarm for April 5, 2019

    Friday, April 5th, 2019

    I’m knee deep in doing my taxes, so if you haven’t started working on your yearly tithe to Caesar, now would be a good time.

    On to the LinkSwarm:

  • “How bad does border have to be for Democrats to admit it’s an emergency?”

    Is there any number of illegal border crossings into the United States that would strike Democrats as an emergency?

    As they resisted President Trump’s efforts to stem the flow of illegal migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, many Democrats made the point that fewer migrants are coming today than years ago, during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies. The implication was that today’s situation cannot be an emergency, because it used to be worse.

    That doesn’t make sense, of course. One could argue that crossings were an unaddressed emergency back then, and that today’s figures, although lower, also qualify as an emergency.

    But now, the border numbers are surging back to the bad old days. It appears that Customs and Border Protection apprehended more than 100,000 people in March (the precise figure has not yet been released), a pace that could mean more than 1,000,000 apprehensions this year.

    For some perspective: According to Border Patrol statistics, U.S. authorities caught 1,643,679 people trying to cross the border illegally from Mexico in fiscal 2000. In 2001 the number was 1,235,718. In 2002 it was 929,809. In 2003 it was 905,065. In 2004 it topped the million mark again, with 1,139,282. In 2005 it was 1,171,396. In 2006 it was 1,071,972.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “March Madness: Report Shows 196,000 New Jobs, Unemployment Rate at 3.8%.”
  • Dems Have Vastly More to Fear from Full Mueller Report than GOP“:

    The full text of the Mueller report is a booby-trap for the Democrats. And many of them not named Schiff must know or suspect it….The natural question will then be — what was all this for? Cui bono? A full airing of the report, what Nadler claims he wants, will instead “open the door,” as they say in court, more than ever for an investigation of why this probe was launched in the first place, by whom and for what reason. The results of that investigation will be quite scary, if not humiliating, for Democrats because they will lead close to, if not over, their highest doorstep — the portals of the Oval Office during the previous administration.

    Snip.

    Besides whatever Barr decides to do, several other vectors are pointing at the Democrats and their DOJ/FBI/media allies. One is obviously hearings from the Senate Judiciary Committee under chairman Lindsey Graham. The second is the investigation into the provenance of the Russia probe and the attendant FISA court decisions (Steele dossier, etc.) to spy on U.S. citizens by inspector general Michael Horowitz. He is supposed to be working in concert with John Huber, a U.S. attorney appointed by Jeff Sessions ages ago with the power to carry out in the courts the results of Horowitz’s discoveries and who has since been silent.

  • “The Top 5 Investigations Obstructed by the Obama Administration.” And you know that EmailGate, Iran and Fast and Furious are on there. Honestly, this list could have been twice as long… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • How the fake Russian collusion narrative was carried out, and why people should have been skeptical of it:

    I noticed that the Russia narrative was increasingly being clung to as an explanation for the media’s failures to understand the country they purport to cover. I pushed back against the idea that the American people had been duped by “fake news” (which then meant something else entirely, we might remember) or “Russia” when they voted for Trump, even if such a vote was obviously unfathomable to most media figures.

    The Russia strategy Clinton had deployed was being picked up by Obama’s intelligence agencies and spread far and wide by American media, and it annoyed Trump. When he’d dismiss the fevered theories that Russian meddling was the reason Hillary Clinton had failed to visit the upper Midwest, intelligence analysts responded by threatening him with leaks.

  • “Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?” The assumption seems to be that Hispanic votes are a birthright for the Democratic Party, and their media partisans are perplexed that they’re not. “While many Democrats expected Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, especially the family separation debacle, to produce a decisive shift to the left among Hispanics, that has not proved to be the case.” Why would Hispanic American citizens be any less worried about illegal alien crime or taking jobs than any other American group? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Hey, remember when all those top Virginia Democrats were called on to resign? “Two of the three officials, Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, wore blackface decades ago. The third, Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax, has been accused of two instances of sexual assault.” Well, they haven’t and they’re not. Evidently the press finally realized that each of them had (D)s after their name…
  • Chinese woman carrying malware arrested at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s frequent vacation home in Florida.
  • “Pence Issues Turkey Ultimatum: ‘Choose Between Remaining NATO Member Or Buying Russian S-400.’ I don’t think Erdogan’s Turkey should be kicked out of NATO for buying Russian anti-aircraft missiles, they should be kicked out of NATO for running a repressive jihadist scumbag regime. And we shouldn’t be selling them F-35s in any case.
  • Trump Is Turning NATO Into a Viable Military Force.” “The Trump administration has made great strides in recent months to transform the cash-strapped and perpetually ailing North Atlantic Treaty Organization into a viable global military force that has the capabilities to confront Russia and other rogue regimes allied with terror forces.”
  • Some interesting maps showing American land use. (Hat tip: Gregory Benford on Facebook.)
  • 34% at Trump’s Michigan rally were Democrats.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Sell something to a Clifornian on Amazon or eBay? The California taxman is coming for you. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “The executive orders of Presidents can be undone by future presidents. Except Lightbringer MclegTingle. His word is sacred law!”
  • “Seattle residents are losing patience with the city’s out-of-control homelessness problem.”

    Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.” The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is “not spending enough to really solve the problem.” For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.

    (Previously.)(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • How to spot “Ventriloquist Journalism“:

    Reporters have in mind a specific quote they’d like to have from you, and have developed great skill in teasing it out of people. Think of it as just one aspect of fake news. I had quite a bit of first-hand experience with this during my years in Washington, and I got good at spotting the technique and having the discipline not to give in to the usual reporter’s tricks. Often I’d get a call from a reporter wanting my comment on something the Bush Administration was doing, and the question, in substance, was usually: “Don’t you think the Bush Administration is doing the wrong thing?” (Though always more artfully put than that.) And when I didn’t give the answer the “reporter” was looking for, they’d keep asking the same question over and over again in different forms, because what they needed for their story was a way to say something like, “But even a conservative at the American Enterprise Institute thinks Bush is making a mistake. ‘Bush is making a mistake,’ said Steven Hayward. . .” Sometimes a reporter would keep me on the phone for 30 minutes or more, hoping I’d give in. I learned the discipline of never giving in to this trick, and what do you know? I was never quoted in any of the stories that “reporters” like this filed. Nor did any of the information or analysis I had about the issue make it into the story, because background information and perspective was not what the reporter was looking for.

  • Which congressional incumbents have or haven’t filed for reelection.
  • Conservative Brian Hagedorn wins election to Wisconsin Supreme Court.
  • Just in case it actually needed to be said, reparations for slavery are an incredibly stupid idea:

    Any attempt to discharge the moral crimes of the 18th and 19th centuries with monetary payments in the 21st century is doomed to fail. The logistical and definitional obstacles alone would be a nightmare. The majority of white Americans have no ancestral link to antebellum slavery — they are descendants of the millions of immigrants who came to the United States after slavery had been abolished. Of the remainder, few had any slaveholding forbears: Slavery was abolished in most Northeastern states within 15 years of the American Revolution, while in most of the West it never existed at all. Even in the South at the peak of its “slaveocracy,” at least 75 percent of whites never owned slaves.

    That’s just where the complications start. To whom would reparations be owed? Millions of black Americans are recent immigrants or the children of those immigrants, and have no family link to slavery. Are they entitled to compensation for what slaves endured? How about whites whose ancestors were slaves? Or blacks descended from slaveholders? What of the 1.8 million biracial people who identified themselves in the last Census as both black and white? Should they expect to collect reparations, or to pay them?

  • “Disney Ordered To Pay Reparations To Longtime Star Wars Fans.”
  • Almost did a post on all the Unplanned Twitter shenanigans. Basically: Twitter briefly suspends, and then farks with, the Twitter account for a pro-life movie. If you followed it, Twitter would automatically unfollow the account. The shenanigans stopped when enough people noticed, with the result that not only did Unplanned land in the top five for box office that week, but now their Twitter account has far more followers than Planned Parenthood’s official Twitter account. This suggests that a half-century worth of preference falsification by the abortion industry and their media allies is finally falling apart.
  • UK asks EU for more time for Brexit. At this point it’s not even a farce, because a farce is supposed to be funny…
  • I don’t buy this “pro-Brexit forces are trying to sabotage trains” thing for a minute. Remember the mythical “Sons of the Gestapo” who supposedly derailed a train during the Clinton Administration’s militia panic and then were never heard from again?
  • “The Southern Poverty Law Center Is Everything That’s Wrong With Liberalism.” (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty.)
  • Usually whens someone pays $100,000 for a book, they’re getting a rare collectable. Unless it’s a thinly disguised bribe for Baltimore’s Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • If you thought Joe Don Baker’s Mitchell was a bad cop, you haven’t met this one.
  • MS-13 member on Texas Ten Most Wanted list captured. Seven of the ten are listed as “White (Hispanic) Male” and an eighth is named “Jesus Alberto Villegas.” It doesn’t say (at least on that page) how many are illegal aliens. In other news, Texas has its own Top Ten Most Wanted List.
  • Spree shooters kill fewer Americans per year than dog attacks. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Meet Antonio Gramsci, the Godfather of Cultural Marxism.

    Gramsci argued that the Bolshevik Russian revolution of 1917 worked because the conditions were ripe for such a sudden upheaval. He described the Russian revolution as an example of a “war of movement” due to its sudden and complete overthrow of the existing governing structure of society. Gramsci reasoned that in Russia in 1917, “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.”

    As such, a direct attack on the current rulers could be effective because there existed no other significant structure or institutions of political influence that needed to be overcome.

    In Western societies, by contrast, Gramsci observed that the state is “only an outer ditch” behind which lies a robust and sturdy civil society.

    Gramsci believed that the conditions in Russia in 1917 that made revolution possible would not materialize in more advanced capitalist countries in the West. The strategy must be different and must include a mass democratic movement, an ideological struggle.

    His advocacy of a war of position instead of a war of movement was not a rebuke of revolution itself, just a differing tactic—a tactic that required the infiltration of influential organizations that make up civil society. Gramsci likened these organizations to the “trenches” in which the war of position would need to be fought.

    The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as state organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the “trenches” and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely “partial” the element of maneuver which before used the “the whole” of war, etc.

    Gramsci argued that a “frontal attack” on established institutions like governments in Western societies may face significant resistance and thus need greater preparation—with the main groundwork being the development of a collective will among the people and a takeover of leadership among civil society and key political positions.

    Snip.

    Gramsci, however, viewed civil society in Western societies to be a strong defensive system for the current State, which in turn existed to protect the interest of the capitalist class.

    “In the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks,” he wrote. In short, in times when the state itself may have shown weakness to overthrow from opposing ideological forces, the institutions of civil society provided political reinforcement for the existing order.

    In his view, a new collective will is required to advance this war of position for the revolution. To him, it is vital to evaluate what can stand in the way of this will, i.e. certain influential social groups with the prevailing capitalist ideologies that could impede this progress.

    Gramsci spoke of organizations including churches, charities, the media, schools, universities and “economic corporate” power as organizations that needed to be invaded by socialist thinkers.

    The new dictatorship of the proletariat in the West, according to Gramsci, could only arise out of an active consensus of the working masses—led by those critical civil society organizations generating an ideological hegemony.

    As Gramsci described it, hegemony means “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership over allied and subordinate groups. The intellectuals, once ensconced, should attain leadership roles over these groups’ members by consent. They would achieve direction over the movement by persuasion rather than domination or coercion.

    The goal of the war of position is to shape a new collective will of the masses in order to weaken the defenses that civil society provides to the current capitalist state.

    Now I have an excuse to embed this:

  • “CNN Blames Ratings Slump On Lack Of News They Want To Report.” “It’s perfectly natural to see a little bit of a dip in ratings when your entire narrative is being destroyed and you’d rather just not talk about it,” Stelter added. “All part of the business.”
  • The story behind designing the best/worst major league baseball uniforms in history: the Houston Astros orange rainbow.
  • You know that whole “We’ve got to drop rote memorization and teach critical thinking!” thing? It’s not just bunk, it’s really old bunk. “Memorization and practice are still essential elements of learning and prepare students for the kind of higher level thinking we all claim to value.”
  • Have I ever shared The Worst Web Page In History with you before? If not, behold the abomination in all its glory! (Or rather, a snapshot of the page as it existed in 2005.) Bonus: it’s from a radical leftist! (Warning: Everything!)
  • AAFolds.
  • Disgusting Democratic Dirtbags Duck Discipline

    Saturday, December 2nd, 2017

    There’s so much news about Democrats acting like complete pervs that I decided a separate roundup was in order:

  • Disgraced ex-New York Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer is in the news again. Might not want to read this one right before eating…

    Disgraced “Luv Gov” Eliot Spitzer likes to take long romantic walks — at the end of a leash, new court papers claim.

    The hooker-happy former governor’s fetishes include a penchant for paying “young girls” to lead him around “on all fours” like a dog — and use kinky sex toys on him, former escort Svetlana Travis Zakharova alleged.

    Zhakharova, who last month struck a misdemeanor plea bargain after being charged with extorting $400,000 from Spitzer, filed the stunningly revealing papers in Manhattan Supreme Court, seeking to lift a gag order imposed as part of her prosecution.

    The 27-year-old Russian native says she has a First Amendment right to “discuss any and all actions or events that she participated in with Spitzer.”

    “Moreover, the fact that Spitzer was paying young girls to insert sex toys into his anal cavity and walk him around the floor on all fours with a leash is conduct that he made a conscious choice to engage in,” wrote her lawyer, Joseph Murray.

    Zakharova also accused Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark — who served as special prosecutor in her case — of seeking the Feb. 15 gag order as part of a “desperate” bid to protect Spitzer because he’s a “rich, powerful man.”

    This court appearance follows police being sent to the hotel room because Spitzer allegedly attacked and choked Zhakharova.

    Did New York police arrest Democratic bigwig Spitzer over his alleged assault? Yeah, right:

    Spitzer’s then-wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, grimly stood by her cheating hubby during that scandal.

    But she finally gave him the heave-ho in 2013 after The Post exclusively revealed his since-ended affair with Democratic political consultant Lis Smith, who at the time was a spokeswoman for Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio.

    In addition to lifting the gag order, Zakharova’s post-conviction motion seeks to disqualify Clark, with her lawyer noting that he believes “there is evidence of corruption we want to make public.”

    Clark was special prosecutor in Zakharova’s case after Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance bowed out over his close ties to Spitzer.

    Both men are Democrats and former political allies, and some of Vance’s top aides formerly worked for Spitzer, who was New York attorney general before being elected governor.

    Zakharova claims that Spitzer “was required, under New York law, to be arrested” following the Plaza Hotel incident, and notes that Spitzer’s lawyer, Adam Kaufmann, is a former high-ranking Manhattan prosecutor.

    She also alleges that “for some unknown reasons,” the case was transferred from Manhattan’s Midtown North Precinct — where detectives “were postured to arrest Spitzer” — and transferred to the Bronx Homicide Squad.

    The Bronx DA’s Office now “has no intention [of] arresting or prosecuting Spitzer,” her filing says.

    I’m a live-and-let-live sort of guy, and my libertarian self says that if one old dude wants to pay a young woman to consensually shove a dildo up his ass and walk him around on a leash in the privacy of his expensive New York hotel room, the state shouldn’t get involved. But in addition to the (alleged) assault, remember that this is a guy who not only broke the law by hiring prostitutes while he was attorney general and governor, but also chastised Americans for not having being willing to sacrifice for the common good, so yeah, I have no problem further exposing this hypocrite’s freak fetish.

  • Even Vox says that Democrats have a sexual harassment problem.

    Al Franken (D-MN) currently stands accused of groping multiple women before and after becoming a US senator. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has stepped down as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee after reports surfaced that he’d paid a former staffer $27,000 to settle a 2014 sexual misconduct complaint.

    The problem is not, obviously, unique to Democrats.

    Over the past six weeks, it’s become clear that many of America’s most powerful and most respected institutions have housed and protected repeat sexual harassers and predators, while shutting up or shutting out their victims.

    “Has a sexual harassment problem” is a dubious distinction that the Democratic Party shares with Hollywood, Fox News, prestige television shows and networks, the restaurant industry, America’s most successful massage chain — and, of course, the Republican Party, which is currently running a Senate candidate who stands accused of assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

    But the ubiquity of the problem doesn’t make it any less real. The Democratic Party — which has for years positioned itself as the defender of gender equality and women’s rights against Republican attacks — hasn’t taken a stand by pushing out the alleged offenders. There are open ethics committee investigations in both houses, but there’s no expectation that the allegations already voiced against Franken and Conyers should be firing offenses.

    There are, as many reporters have pointed out, institutional imperatives at play here. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was reportedly wary of pushing out Conyers because she feared blowback from the Congressional Black Caucus. Democrats in both chambers are reportedly deferring to the ethics committees in part because they want to set an established pattern for how these allegations are addressed — because they know that such allegations, against Democrats and Republicans alike, are going to keep coming.

    But if the Democratic Party chooses to continue to protect its members against harassment allegations, it needs to be honest about the choice it’s not making: the choice to be an institution that actually reflects the better world it says it wants to create.

    For months, Democrats have identified themselves with the diffuse cultural energy known as “the resistance.” Now that public outrage is actually beginning to create change, by pushing serial predators out of positions of power, the Democrats — and other progressive political institutions — are facing a moment of reckoning. It can be an ally of the emergent social movement against a culture of serial harassment and “open secrets,” or it can be a partner of convenience.

    Actually, I expect the Democratic Party to do what it’s always done: Claim to be the party of reform while actually being the party of sleaze and corruption.

  • Democratic Rep. John Conyers allegedly sexually harassed a woman when she was 57.
  • More Conyers details from yet another accuser:

    Marion Brown, a former staffer under Rep. John Conyers, detailed the Michigan congressman’s alleged sexual misconduct in an exclusive interview with TODAY Thursday, saying the longtime civil rights icon “violated my body” and frequently propositioned her for sex.

    Brown is one of multiple women who have alleged of sexual harassment by Conyers, which she said occurred regularly during her 11 years working on his staff.

    It was sexual harassment, violating my body, propositioning me, inviting me to hotels with the guise of discussing business and propositioning for sex,” Brown told Savannah Guthrie. “He just violated my body, he’s touched me in different ways. It was very uncomfortable and very unprofessional.”

    She described a specific disturbing encounter with Conyers, 88, who has denied any wrongdoing, in a Chicago hotel room in 2005.

    “He was undressed down to his underwear,” she said. “He asked me to satisfy to him sexually. He pointed to genital areas of his body and asked me to touch him.

    “I was frozen shocked. I didn’t want to lose my job, I didn’t want to upset him. Also, he asked me to find other people that would satisfy him,” she said. “I just tried to escape. I did tell him that I was not going to do that and I did not feel comfortable.”

  • So now Conyers is hospitalized and, several days too late and several dollars short, Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats call on him to resign.

    Conyers’ attorney, however, defiantly rejected Pelosi’s calls for his client to resign.

    “It is not up to Nancy Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi did not elect Mr. Conyers,” the attorney, Arnold Reed, said at a press conference Thursday in Detroit. “And she sure as hell won’t be the one to tell the congressman to leave.”

    Reed also criticized Pelosi for demanding the lawmaker quit while not doing the same for Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who is facing a growing number of accusations of sexual misconduct. The Senate Ethics Committee announced on Thursday it had opened an investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Franken.

    Reed held another press conference Friday, saying that Conyers would “continue to defend himself until the cows come home” and added that he and the lawmaker would “discuss in the next day or so” what Conyers “plans to do.”

  • “Nancy Pelosi — Roy Moore’s Accidental Wingman.” “Nancy Pelosi’s defense of John Conyers framed the race exactly the way Moore wants it. Her belated change of heart will not erase the memory: The issue is party, not principle. ”
  • Another accuser comes forward to accuse Al Franken of groping her…and this one is an army veteran.
  • While Franken is avoiding resigning over sexual harassment charges, fellow Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is holding up a bipartisan sex trafficking bill:

    More than 100 sex trafficking victims and advocacy groups are asking Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) to stop trying to block a bipartisan bill that would give families of victims and states the ability to sue websites that allow advertisements selling sex with minors on their platforms.

  • Any other House Democrats accused harassing women in the last 24 hours? Rep. Ruben Kihuen of Nevada, come on down!

    Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has joined the chairman of the House Democrats’ campaign committee in calling on a first-term Democratic Nevada congressman to resign, following a report that he sexually harassed an aide during his 2016 congressional campaign.

    In an article published by BuzzFeed Friday afternoon, Rep. Ruben Kihuen was accused of making repeated sexual advances toward his then-campaign finance director by a woman identified as “Samantha.” BuzzFeed said it is withholding her surname at her request. Samantha alleges that Kihuen propositioned her for dates and sex, and twice touched her thighs without consent.

  • “How a House Dem accused of drunken shenanigans revealed another secret ‘hush fund.'”

    Rep. Raul M. Grijalva quietly arranged a “severance package” in 2015 for one of his top staffers who threatened a lawsuit claiming the Arizona Democrat was frequently drunk and created a hostile workplace environment, revealing yet another way that lawmakers can use taxpayer dollars to hide their misbehavior on Capitol Hill.

    While the Office of Compliance has been the focus of outrage on Capitol Hill for hush-money payouts in sexual harassment cases, the Grijalva payout points to another office that lawmakers can use to sweep accusations under the rug with taxpayer-funded settlements negotiated by the House Employment Counsel, which acts as the attorney for all House offices.

    The employment counsel negotiated a deal for taxpayers to give $48,395 — five additional months’ salary — to the female aide, who left her job after three months. She didn’t pursue the hostile workplace complaint further.

  • Meanwhile, Weird Al Yankovic would like the media to stop using the name “Weird Al” in relation to Al Franken, or anyone else. So let’s just call Al Franken “Perv Al.” Or maybe Gropenfuhrer Franken.
  • I apologize if I’ve left out any Democrats behaving badly out of this roundup. There’s just so much sexual harassment news to keep up with…

    (And no, I’m not giving a couple of U.S. Representatives from Texas in the news a pass. I might be able to get to them Monday…)