Posts Tagged ‘Hungary’

LinkSwarm For March 8, 2024

Friday, March 8th, 2024

Because the ground invasion wasn’t enough, the Biden Administration has been flying illegal aliens into American cities, wages for Americans are down, San Francisco continues inching toward sanity, some crime news, and Fisker looks farked. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Bombshell Report Reveals Biden Has Secretly Flown 320,000 Illegals INTO The United States.”

    A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has revealed that the Biden administration has flown at least 320,000 migrants into the United States in an effort to reduce the number of crossings at the southern border, according to Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies.

    “The program at the center of the FOIA litigation is perhaps the most enigmatic and least-known of the Biden administration’s uses of the CBP One cellphone scheduling app, even though it is responsible for almost invisibly importing by air 320,000 aliens with no legal right to enter the United States since it got underway in late 2022,” wrote Bensman.

    Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had initially refused to disclose information about the flights, which use a cell phone app, CBP One, to arrange.

    “Under these legally dubious parole programs, aliens who cannot legally enter the country use the CBP One app to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those airports. The parole program allows for two-year periods of legal status during which adults are eligible for work authorization,” Bensman continues.

    The flights resulted in illegal immigrants being placed in at least 43 American cities from January through December 2023.

    Under the terms of their release, migrants are able to remain in the US for two years without obtaining legal status, and are meanwhile eligible for work authorization.

    How many Americans realized they were voting for this invasion when they voted for Biden?

  • Add suborning perjury to the Fani Willis accusations.

    A new witness could testify Fani Willis warned lover Nathan Wade’s former business partner to stay quiet about their affair, an explosive new court filing claims.

    “They are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us,” Willis is alleged to have warned Terrence Bradley in a September 2023 phone call.

    The call was overheard by Cobb County, Georgia, prosecutor Cindi Lee Yeager, according to court papers filed Monday by Trump co-defendant David Schafer.

    They more they dig, the crookeder she seems.

  • Arizona’s Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema won’t run for reelection.
  • U.S. salaries are falling. Thanks, Joe Biden! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The tide continues to turn in San Francisco. “‘Progressivism Is Out’: San Franciscans Pass Ballot Measures Requiring Drug Testing for Welfare, Expanding Police Surveillance.”

    San Francisco voters who’ve grown tired of the crime, homelessness, and drug use plaguing their left-wing city overwhelmingly approved a pair of ballot measures on Tuesday that will expand police powers and require welfare recipients to be screened for drugs.

    Proposition E, which authorizes police to use surveillance equipment — cameras, drones, and even facial-recognition technology — without prior permission from an oversight body, passed with 59,818 votes, or 59.9 percent. The proposition will also loosen restrictions on police chases and require that officers spend less time on paperwork and administrative duties.

    Proposition F, which mandates that anyone receiving public-assistance benefits be screened for a substance-abuse disorder, passed with 63,295 votes, or 63 percent.

    As part of the proposition, public-assistance recipients found to be drug-dependent could be offered treatment. If it is made “available at no cost, the recipient will be required to participate to continue receiving” public benefits, according to the proposition.

    “Progressivism is out—for now,” the San Francisco Chronicles’ website read in bold letters on Wednesday morning, “Voters make it clear: S.F. can no longer be called a progressive city.”

    The approval of both propositions was a big win for San Francisco’s embattled mayor, London Breed, who placed both measures on the primary ballot in an effort to tamp down on crime and to take aim at drug addiction and overdose deaths in the city. She told reporters on Tuesday that passage of the two measure will allow her administration to “continue the work we’re doing” to improve public safety, according to the Chronicle.

    With San Francisco turning slightly sane, Austin may vie with Seattle, New York and Chicago for the title of America’s Most Insane Radical Leftwing City.

  • “9 Ways The Feds Are Using ‘Bidenbucks’ To Rig The 2024 Election.”

    3. Department of Health and Human Services

    In June 2023, The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas reported that the Indian Health Service (IHS), which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, is collaborating with the ACLU, Demos, and several other left-wing organizations to register new voters. In order to expand the reach of these efforts, the Biden administration designated an Arizona-based Indian Health Service (IHS) facility as an official voter registration hub in October.

    According to Arizona Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Native Health of Phoenix, which caters to “urban Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and all other individuals,” will “assist individuals in the voter registration process.” The administration confirmed that the IHS facility would be one of five designated as voter registration sites by the end of 2023.

    Much like young voters, Native Americans heavily favor Democrats.

    4. Department of Agriculture

    The USDA is another federal agency directing its efforts at potential Democrat voters. Earlier this month, emails obtained by The Daily Signal show the agency was colluding with Demos as early as August 2021 to work on turning out voters.

    As The Federalist’s M.D. Kittle reported, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service “encourages all state agencies administering the child nutrition programs to provide local program operators with promotional materials, including voter registration and non-partisan, non-campaign election information, to disseminate among voting-age program participants and their families.”

    One of the “ideas” recommended by the agency is for “[s]chool food authorities administering the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in high schools, and adult day care centers and emergency shelters participating in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) to promote voter registration and election information among voting-age participants and use congregate feeding areas, such as cafeterias, or food distribution sites, as sites for the dissemination of information.”

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Sweden officially joins NATO.

    Sweden officially became part of the NATO alliance Thursday, two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused the nation to overhaul its non-alignment policy.

    Snip.

    “It’s official – #Sweden is now the 32nd member of #NATO, taking its rightful place at our table. Sweden’s accession makes NATO stronger, Sweden safer, and the whole Alliance more secure. I look forward to raising their flag at NATO HQ on Monday,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on X Thursday. Hungary ratified Sweden’s ascension into the alliance last week, becoming the final NATO country to do so.

    The nordic country applied for NATO membership in May 2022, about three months after Russia began its war in Ukraine. The admission of Finland and Sweden expands NATO to 32 members.

    As Peter Zeihan noted, “in the Swedish military, every day you wake up, you prepare for one thing: the war with the Russians.” Good job, Putin!

  • “Journalist Appears in Federal Court in Leg and Belly Chains to Face Jan. 6 Misdemeanors.”

    Blaze Media journalist Steve Baker was arrested by the FBI and brought to a Texas federal courtroom in handcuffs, a belly chain and foot shackles to face four nonviolent misdemeanor charges for being at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021…

    “There’s nothing in there about my behavior,” Mr. Baker told The Epoch Times. “It’s all about my words. Everything. It’s all about stuff I said before, stuff I said after, and that’s it. No more complicated than that.”

    Mr. Geyer said his client’s arrest shows an “unprecedented shift in Department of Justice policy [after it] had spent decades adhering to special protections for journalists.”

    At least non-leftwing journalists…

  • “California Moves To Expand Zero-Down, Interest-Free Home Loan Program To Illegal Immigrants.” Hell, American citizens shouldn’t be getting government subsidies like that. Handing taxpayer subsidies to illegal aliens is insane and should be illegal.
  • Speaking of people who shouldn’t be getting taxpayers subsidies, Harvard “We Hate Jews” University wants $2 billion in taxpayer-backed bonds.

  • Recall effort against Dallas’ Democrat-turned-Republican mayor Eric Johnson fails. Number of signatures to have a recall election: 103,595. Number of signatures submitted: Zero.
  • MSNBC hosts think that illegal aliens flooding the country is a big laugh for Virginians.
  • Self defense shooting in north Austin.
  • “After emotional closing arguments from the defense and prosecution, jurors found two former Williamson County Sheriff’s deputies not guilty for the in-custody death of Javier Ambler.” They tasered him after a 20 minute car chase and he croaked. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Vermont citizens decide no, you’re not shoplifting here. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
  • Russia finally bags a HIMARS.
  • Two idiot bonks for the price of one.

  • The Fisker Ocean electric car features a whole host of irritations.
  • That may be one reason why Fisker just issued a warning that they might go bankrupt this year.
  • Gavin Newsom announces a new state Stasi hotline to report your neighbors for WrongThink.
  • J. K. Rowling still refuses to bend the knee.
  • Rooster Teeth studio in Austin shutting down. Machinima is one of those concepts that never quite turned into a profitable industry.
  • NASA’s plans to evacuate astronauts from a Space Shuttle pad emergency? Would you believe ziplines and M113 armored personal carriers?
  • “In Major Blow To Democracy, Supreme Court Rules Voters Can Vote For Favorite Candidate.”
  • One of these things is not like the others:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    LinkSwarm for March 31, 2023

    Friday, March 31st, 2023

    One quarter of the year gone! Career criminals coddled by Soros Stooges, crazy woman who thinks she’s a man murders children, lots of Flu Manchu fraud, and Botox makes you crazy(er). It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Everyone and their dog is covering the ham sandwich Trump indictment, so I’ll leave that to others. I will note that Alan Dershowitz is not impressed. “Based on what we know about this case, it may be one of the weakest cases in my six years of experience.”
    

  • Voter Suppression Is Real And It’s Not What You Were Told.

    On the morning of Election Day last November, William French went to his local polling place in Freeland, Pennsylvania, to cast his vote. But the qualified and registered voter wasn’t allowed to. The disabled U.S. Army veteran was told that the precinct had run out of paper for ballots and he had to come back later in the afternoon.

    So that’s what he did, returning at 3:30 p.m. But the precinct still didn’t have ballots. Election workers told him to return yet again. But by nightfall, it was too difficult. French has endured 17 surgeries on his destroyed leg and uses a cane to walk. But the sidewalks are a mess, and he was worried about the risk of falling and further injury.

    That same morning, Melynda Reese and her husband went to their polling location in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. But only Reese’s husband was allowed to vote, and for the same reason: The precinct had run out of paper. They came back at 4:00 p.m. and were told there would be a lengthy wait.

    Reese is a corrections officer and her husband’s primary caregiver. He had recently suffered two cardiac arrests and a stroke. He required regular medication and attention and couldn’t be left alone. Long waits were also too much to bear. The couple returned at 6:30 p.m., and saw a line that stretched so long that they knew they couldn’t wait. Around 9:15 p.m., an election official called Reese and told her that ballots were finally available and she could vote. But her husband had just taken his sleeping pills and she couldn’t leave him unattended.

    French and Reese are just two of the thousands of voters affected by poor election administration in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The two just sued Luzerne County, its Board of Elections and Registration, and its Bureau of Elections in federal court for violations of their constitutional right to vote.

    “Voters in Luzerne County through no fault of their own, were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote. William French and Melynda Reese are two of those voters. They bring suit to vindicate the denial of their sacred right to vote, to make sure voters are not disenfranchised in the future, and to bring integrity back to elections in Luzerne County,” said Wally Zimolong, lawyer for French and Reese.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Did the FBI have a “mole” that would tip Hunter Biden off about any China probes.

    The House Oversight Committee is investigating the explosive claims by Dr. Gal Luft, a former Israel Defense Forces lieutenant colonel with deep intelligence ties in Washington and Beijing, who says he was arrested to stop him from revealing what he knows about the Biden family and FBI corruption — details he told the Department of Justice in 2019, which he says it ignored.

    Luft, 56, first made the claims on Feb. 18 on Twitter, after being detained at a Cyprus airport as he prepared to board a plane to Israel.

    “I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the U.S. The U.S., claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer.

    “DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden.

    “Shall I name names?”

    Luft remains in jail awaiting extradition to the US over what he says are trumped-up charges of arms trafficking to China and Libya, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

    Luft claimed that he tried to reach out to the DOJ about the Chinese energy company CEFC paying Hunter $100,000 and James Biden, Joe’s brother, $65,000 “in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world.”

    Maybe. Could just be a grifter trying to skate.

  • “James O’Keefe Uncovers Possible Lucrative Money-Laundering Scheme for Dems.”

    James O’Keefe has not allowed his forced exit from Project Veritas to stop him. His new journalism outfit, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), just released a video uncovering evidence of what O’Keefe calls a possible “money-laundering scheme” for the Democrats. Some individuals reportedly appear to have donated thousands of times over a relatively short period to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ActBlue and Biden for President, based on Federal Election Commission records.

    “FEC data shows that some senior citizens across the U.S. have been donating thousands of times per year,” O’Keefe began. “Some of these individuals’ names and addresses are attached to over $200,000 in contributions. We went and knocked on a few of their doors to corroborate the data that we received from a group of citizen journalists called Election Watch in Maryland.” The video then showed O’Keefe visiting someone who is listed as donating over $217,000, through 12,000 separate contributions. This money was earmarked for various entities through leftist platform ActBlue over three years’ time. Some of the donations were made with variations of the person’s name and address, O’Keefe stated.

    The data he obtained was state and FEC data, O’Keefe said. “We’re wondering if these donors are victims of what appears to be a money-laundering scheme, or [if] these residents actually participated in the scheme. We’re making phone calls, we’re knocking on doors, these are things that you can do, we hope you do that.” There are “bizarre amounts of data” on homes and individuals making many thousands of dollars of donations, O’Keefe said, urging others to help him investigate.

    The first person shown opening the door to O’Keefe, a Marylander listed as donating $32,000 in 3,000 different contributions, said he was unaware of the donations but advised O’Keefe as a solution to hit Donald Trump “with a bat.” The man added, “I want to see a scar on his f**king head. Now stop f**king with me,” and slammed the door.

    Another donor, Cindy, according to O’Keefe, supposedly donated over $18,000 in 1,000+ donations to ActBlue in 2022, which would necessitate donating “three times a day, every day, for the whole year.” When asked if she’d donated over $18,000, Cindy responded with a quick laugh, “I doubt that. No, I don’t think so… I wish I could have donated $18,000 to Biden’s presidency.”

    Meanwhile Carolyn Lenz, in Tucson, Ariz., told OMG that she “absolutely [did] not” donate over 18,000 times for $170,000+ to ActBlue. She looked at the data showing “she” donated multiple times a day, often in $5 to $15 increments, and insisted that the donations were not hers. “They must be” fraudulent, Lenz said.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Judge stops California Soros prosecutor from slashing triple murderer’s sentence.”

    After rejecting her in 2018, the voters of Alameda County, California selected Pamela Price as their new District Attorney last year. Price had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from George Soros for her two campaigns. That probably tells you most of what you need to know, since Soros only funds candidates who are soft on crime and willing to empty the jails as much as possible. Price quickly proved herself no exception, seeking to cut a plea deal with a killer who had been arrested for one triple murder for hire, was accused in the murder of a court witness, and several other violent crimes. Rather than the 75 years to life sentence that Delonzo Logwood was eligible for, Price wanted to cut him loose after fifteen years. Thankfully, a County District Judge stepped in and rejected the deal out of hand. (Free Beacon)

    A California judge this week blocked a newly-elected progressive prosecutor’s effort to slash a triple murderer’s sentence.

    Alameda County district judge Mark McCannon rejected District Attorney Pamela Price’s plea deal for a 31-year-old man jailed for a 2008 triple murder-for-hire, among other crimes. Price, who took office in November and has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the progressive billionaire George Soros, attempted to sentence Delonzo Logwood to just 15 years in prison, though he was eligible for a sentence of 75 years to life.

  • 10 Arrests, 33 Charges, 31 Days — One Man!

    You can’t keep a bad man down. Keith Chastain, 38, is a one-thug crime spree.

    Chastain racked up an impressive array of arrests in Fresno County, California, (of course). Between Feb. 19 and March 21, he was arrested 10 times for a menagerie of crimes encompassing 15 misdemeanors and 18 felonies, including:

    • six stolen cars
    • fraud
    • DUI (duh)
    • drugs (duh)
    • vandalism

    Chastain was hit with three additional charges — DUI, trespassing, and auto theft — but those were dropped when cops failed to file the charges in time.

    Snip.

    “Unfortunately, this is not as unique of a situation as it seems,” Tony Botti, spokesman for the Fresno County Sherriff’s office, stated. “California has watered down the laws so much over the years for property criminals and repeat offenders that they are not held accountable like they should be. Sadly, it is our community members who suffer due to these soft-on-crime policies.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Aggravated robbery defendant violates bond conditions more than 1,000 times, gets rewarded by two judges.”

    According to court documents, Edwin Maldonado spent many months thumbing his nose at what he was ordered by the court to do.

    His punishment for that is more like a prize.

    “You’ve got someone who was rewarded for being a failure, and this guy was a failure over 1,000 and some odd times,” said Andy Kahan with Crime Stoppers.

    First, Maldonado gets a felony charge for drug possession. A few weeks later, he’s charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. He makes his $30,000 bond and walks out of jail.

    “I’ve certainly had clients hauled back into court on violations, maybe two or three times that have been alleged,” said criminal defense attorney Emily Detoto.

    Associate Judge Tiffany Hill presided over a bond revocation hearing for Maldonado.

    “For obvious reasons, you are not abiding by your rules and conditions period, and God knows what he was doing when he wasn’t where he was supposed to be,” Kahan said.

    According to court documents, Maldonado failed to comply with any of his bond conditions for eight months.

    According to his GPS monitor, he left his curfew zone 847 times, was called 453 times about his whereabouts, and had more than 1,000 GPS monitor violations.

  • “Suspect Charged in Robbery that Paralyzed Victim Was Out on $100 Bond for Weapons Charge.”

    A suspect arrested and charged in a recent brutal “jugging” robbery in Houston that left a woman paralyzed was out on a $100 bond for a weapons-related charge.

    On the morning of February 13, Nung Truong, 44, withdrew money from a bank ATM but was followed for approximately 24 miles by two suspects. Surveillance video released by the Houston Police Department shows a black male bumping into Truong and causing her to drop her belongings. The suspect initially fled with an envelope but returned seconds later to body-slam Truong to the ground before taking $4,300 in cash.

    A mother to three children aged 13, 15, and 20, Truong is now paralyzed and unable to walk or care for herself.

    Last Friday, Houston Police arrested Joseph Harrell, 17, and Zy’Nika Ayesha Woods, 19, for the attack and charged both suspects with Aggravated Robbery with Serious Bodily Injury.

    According to court records, on January 26, 2023, Harrell had been granted a General Order bond of $100 for Unlawful Possession of a Weapon. He also faces charges of Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon related to an incident in February in which he threatened another victim with a gun. Harrell is currently being held in the Harris County jail on bonds totaling $240,000.

    Snip.

    Although Harrell’s Unlawful Possession of a Weapon charge was assigned to Harris County Court 2 under Judge Paula Goodhart, his bond was signed by Judge David Singer.

    Elected to Harris County Criminal Court 14 in 2018, Singer lost in the March 2022 Democratic primary election and his term ended December 31, 2022. As a one-term judge, Singer is not eligible under state code to serve as a visiting judge.

    The 11th Administrative Judicial Region confirmed to The Texan that Singer is not listed as a visiting judge.

    The Harris County Office of Court Management emailed the following statements to The Texan:

    “David Singer was appointed as associate judge pursuant to Section 54A.002 of the Texas Government Code and the Local Rules for Harris County Criminal Courts at Law. His start date was Jan. 1, 2023.”

  • Finland gets the green light to join NATO, with Turkey and Hungary approving their membership. Sweden’s application is still under negotiation. As I noted previously, tangling with the Finns has not been a source of happiness for Russia.
  • Poor priorities. “European Ammo Maker’s Growth Stymied By TikTok Data Center Sucking Up Electricity.”
  • “Several homeless encampments have popped up behind shops at South Town Square in South Austin, driving business and customers away.”
  • “Florida Governor DeSantis Signs Universal School Choice Bill.”
  • LA City Council member Mark Ridley-Thomas convicted of taking bribes. “He was convicted of one count of bribery, one of conspiracy, one count of honest services mail fraud, and four counts of honest services wire fraud. The jury acquitted him on 12 other counts.”
  • “Protesting WA’s capital gains tax, Fisher Investments says HQ moving to Texas.” This is in response to a Washington state supreme court ruling allowing a state capital gains tax.
  • Crazy woman who thinks she’s a man murdered children in a Christian school this week.
  • “As Veterans Learned the DCCC Had Leaked Their Data, the VA’s Tech Chief Was Meeting With His Wife. She Runs the DCCC.”

    Veterans Affairs assistant secretary Kurt DelBene is married to Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.), chairwoman of the DCCC. It’s a big club, and you’re not in it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Covid crook convicted.

    Federal prosecutors announced a 58-year-old Plainview man is facing 102 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $4 million in federal relief funds passed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    On Friday, Andrew Johnson pleaded guilty in the Northern District of Texas to three counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, according to a news release published by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

    Johnson swindled millions from the Paycheck Protection Program passed in the early weeks of the pandemic to help stave off the economic effects of business closures, government restrictions, and shelter-in-place mandates. As part of the fraud, Johnson applied for and received forgiveness for 27 bogus loans.

    He spent more than $3.5 million of the stolen funds on “home renovations, vacations, clothing, cosmetic surgery, college tuition, cars, wedding expenses, and equipment for an unrelated business venture,” according to the DOJ.

  • Speaking of fraud: “Nonprofit vendor defrauded Austin Public Health of $417K.”

    After an investigation that took longer than a year, the Office of the City Auditor in Austin said it found Central Texas Allied Health Institute (CTAHI), a nonprofit City of Austin contractor, committed fraud against Austin Public Health and falsified health records.

    According to the investigative report, CTAHI misrepresented over $1.1 million in financial transactions across three contracts with Austin Public Health and was incorrectly paid roughly $417,000 between December 2020 and September 2021 because of fraudulent contract claims. The report also claimed CTAHI falsified its COVID-19 vaccine contract performance by overstating vaccination totals and fabricating patient data.

    “This is up there with some of the biggest cases we’ve investigated on my team,” said Brian Molloy, chief of investigations at the Chief of the City Auditor.

    CTAHI, President Todd Hamilton, and Dr. Jereka Thomas-Hockaday — both of whom were named in the report — denied the claims made in the report in a statement Thursday.

    Snip.

    CTAHI’s three contracts with Austin Public Health were for COVID-19 testing, workforce development, and COVID-19 vaccines, according to the city. Between December 2020 and September 2021, the city said CTAHI submitted 23 claims for reimbursement to APH under the workforce development and COVID-19 vaccine contracts.

    Flu Manchu is the fraud fount that just keeps giving… (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • NHL might stop pushing gay pride after backlash from players and fans. “Philadelphia Flyer’s player Ivan Provorov didn’t want to participate in a ‘Pride’ event during warmups…Soon, other players also refused to participate after Povorov showed it could be done, and some entire team organizations dropped their planned LGBT pride events. And thanks to this one man’s stand, the NHL is considering dropping the whole ‘Pride’ push.”
  • Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel and coiner of Moore’s Law, is dead at age 94. Semiconductors have radically changed just about every facet of the world.
  • Italy refuses to eat the bugs.
  • Botox alters brain activity connected to emotions.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Samsung phones fake moon photos.
  • An aperiodic monotile exists!
  • “This woman was visiting Asia and noticed that all the plus-sized clothing stores have very direct names.”
  • “Progressives Across Nation Locked Out Of Accounts After CAPTCHA Asks ‘Select All Squares That Contain A Woman.'”
  • “Media Calls For Moment Of Silence For Shooter Who Was Misgendered.”
  • LinkSwarm For January 13, 2023

    Friday, January 13th, 2023

    Fallout from the House speaker’s race, Biden busted for mishandling classified files, more blue state teachers raping their students, Cadillac’s EV breaks into double digit sales, and the Imelda Marcos disco musical! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Kevin McCarthy finally wins Speaker of the House race on 15th vote after offering concessions to the House Freedom Caucus.
  • How is McCarthy doing? Early signs are encouraging. “The House of Representatives passed a new rules package Monday that overhauls the way it functions by putting up more barriers to congressional spending and creating a more deliberate process for passing legislation, which were key demands of the more conservative members of the Republican Party.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
    

  • Shot: Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw calls members of the House Freedom Caucus “terrorists” for opposing Kevin McCarthy for speaker. Chaser: “Freedom Caucus Member Mark Green Beats Dan Crenshaw in Race to Chair Homeland Security Committee.”
  • Heh:

    (Hat tip: Not the Bee.)

  • “After 15 Grueling House Speaker Votes, America’s Long National Nightmare Can Finally Begin.”
  • “Nation In Shock As Politicians Show Up To Work 4 Days In A Row.”
  • After the whole absurd raid on Trump because “OMG he has classified documents/nuclear codes/eleventy!!!!” it turns out that Biden kept at least two different batches of classified documents in insecure locations.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) used Thursday morning’s press briefing to criticize the Department of Justice’s handling of the issue.

    “They knew this happened to President Biden before the election, but they kept it secret from the American public,” McCarthy told a scrum of reporters on Capitol Hill.

  • A whole lot of Chicago teachers are sexually abusing the children in their care

    Chicago Board of Education Inspector General Will Fletcher reported 470 sexual complaints against Chicago Public School employees from students in 2022.

    “The report details students being abused, groped, groomed, assaulted and threatened by school officials.

    “One investigation found a former Junior ROTC staff member had sex with a 16-year-old high school student for a year. When he learned there was an investigation, the staff member threatened to kill the girl and her family if she cooperated with investigators.”

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • More on the same subject.

    The teachers’ union in Chicago, Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, so praised by Joe Biden, has done nothing and said nothing about it so far as I can tell, and I did look, focusing instead on promoting critical race theory into the school system. Left unsaid is that the union ensures that firing any of these teachers involved in this activity is virtually impossible. Chicago’s public schools’s firing rate of bad teachers owing to their union membership, as of a few years ago, is 0.1%.

    What’s vivid here amid all this widespread predatory behavior from the teaching classes, which like Harvey Weinstein, are prolific campaign donors to Democrats, is that the low outrage factor stands in sharp contrast to the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic Church, which was ordered by courts to pay billions in reparations to the victims, has seen its leaders publicly apologize for the abuses, and has many programs now to prevent child abuse by perverts in authority. This activity was evil and inexcusable and rightly punished.

    As for the more widescale abuse now seen in Chicago’s public schools, along with comparable scandals in the Los Angeles public school system, and other bad cases in New York and other blue cities, well, crickets. The perversion has gotten out of control in Chicago and the story barely makes the national news. 

  • West Virginia Law Restricting Sports By Biological Sex Is Constitutional.”
  • How Biden’s inflation is destroying family budgets:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Federal appeals court strikes down bump stock ban.

    A federal appeals court on Friday struck down the Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a firearm accessory that enables a semi-automatic gun to shoot at an increased rate of fire.

    In a 13-3 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans held that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), acting under “tremendous” public pressure, short-circuited the legislative process by approving a rule to define bump stocks as “machineguns,” which are illegal to possess. The court said ATF did not have the authority from Congress to do so.

    Damn straight it doesn’t.

  • Pentagon ditches Flu Manchu vaccine mandate. Where do the wrongly discharged sue to get their careers back?
  • This is what a real pro-natalist policy looks like: “Hungary addresses falling birthrates by exempting moms under 30 from income tax for life.” More:

    Hungary has taken several measures in recent years to encourage its citizens to have more children, including three years of paid parental leave and state-funded daycare.

    The country previously suspended income tax for moms with four or more children, but this new policy specifically encourages women to have children sooner, which in the long run means a higher likelihood of having more children overall.

  • Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signs executive order banning Critical Race Theory in state schools.
  • Israel hit Syria again, and I heard just about nothing about it. Ukraine has really pushed Syria out of the headlines.
  • Speaking of Ukraine, Russia has largely captured the salt mining town of Soledar, though at a high cost in man. And good luck checking those hundreds of miles of salt tunnels for partisans…
  • Tesla plans Houston-area expansion with large new industrial site in Brookshire…Little is known about Tesla’s plans, but the Fortune 500 company signed a lease late last year for about 1.03 million square feet at 111 Empire West, part of the 300-acre Empire West Business Park in Brookshire.” A bold move, considering how radically car sales have dived this year.
  • Other EVs update: “GM delivers record Cadillac Lyriq deliveries in Q4 – 12 per month.”
  • Sequel to The Passion of the Christ about to start filming.” This is pretty much obligatory:

  • “David Byrne, Fatboy Slim Disco Musical ‘Here Lies Love’ Sets Broadway Debut. The musical, which has had a long journey to Broadway, centers on the life of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.” They say the mirror ball shine bright on Broadway… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Celebrity Who Travels On Private Jets And Collects Luxury Sports Cars Says You’re The Reason For Climate Change.”
  • “Experts Say They Don’t Know What Thing Is Causing Everyone To Suddenly Collapse, But It’s Definitely Not That One Thing.”
  • I See Hungary, I See France

    Tuesday, April 12th, 2022

    Let’s clear some tabs on recent European elections of note. First up: Hungary reelects Viktor Orban.

    Viktor Orbán, who has served as prime minister of Hungary since 2010 — and spent a stint in the same office from 1998-2002 — won yet again in Sunday’s much-anticipated elections. His party, Fidesz, won two-thirds of the seats in parliament. Fidesz’s closest competitor was United for Hungary, an amalgamation of parties which included socialists, greens, and Jobbik, which was recognized as an antisemitic, neo-Nazi outfit until recently. Now, it presents itself as a moderate, “modern,” alternative to Fidesz.

    Orbán’s triumph, we are meant to believe, represents a near-fatal blow to Hungarian democracy, and a painful one to the capital L, capital W, capital O, Liberal World Order.

    Snip.

    Now, Orbán is no saint, and yes, that is an understatement. He enjoys close relationships with both Vladimir Putin’s Russia (although he has denounced the invasion of Ukraine) and Xi Jinping’s China. As Jimmy Quinn detailed here, Orbán has helped China carry out its post-pandemic propaganda program, and pursued deeper financial ties between his country and the genocidal one to the east. This is not the behavior of a man keen on being what Rod Dreher calls “the leader of the West now — the West that still remembers what the West is.”

    Moreover, Orbán’s domestic behavior can fairly be called authoritarian. He has championed what he calls “illiberal democracy,” and enacted reforms to the country’s judicial system that undermine its independence. Evidence points to significant financial corruption on his watch as well.

    But the failure of many of Orbán’s critics to accurately report on his regime points to the weakness of many of their arguments. Take this piece from The Atlantic, which, as National Review alum Daniel Foster notes, doesn’t exactly describe Orbán as an autocrat. Its author argues that the formation of a private, pro-Orbán media conglomerate that receives government funding is damning evidence of the corrosion of democracy in the country at the hands of its leader. That’s not exactly convincing to those of us who have watched NPR hold a pillow to the face of the Hunter Biden-laptop story and erroneously smear Supreme Court justices.

    Orbán is not a U.S.-style conservative fusionist or anything especially close to it, and that’s a bad thing, in this writer’s opinion. But he is, quite obviously, the kind of conservative who appeals to Hungarians, and despite his many warts, that might just be okay. People in other countries are allowed to hold different opinions on LGBT issues, European integration, etc. than your average undergrad at Middlebury. Indeed, the implementation of those policies at the public’s will represents democracy in action, not its antithesis.

    Orbán, the prime minister of a nation with a population only slightly larger than New York City’s and something approximating a friend of the Chinese Communist Party, is no more the savior of Western Civilization than Joe Biden is. But he’s also no threat to self-government across the world, and his critics’ flubbing of basic terms they proclaim to love leaves the rest of us wondering if they even know what it is that they value.

    Orban’s victory has generated much consternation among the Euroelite:

    Viktor Orbán and his brand of conservatism faced a crucial popularity test in Sunday’s general elections, a test he passed with flying colors. The Hungarian premier and his Fidesz party thumped the opposition’s unity coalition—composed of liberals, greens, Communists, and the neo-Nazi Jobbik—by a humiliating margin of nearly 20 points; opposition leader Péter Márki-Zay was defeated even in his own district.

    Orbán also struck a painful blow against his critics in Brussels. Ever since he returned to power in Budapest in 2010, and especially in recent years, Orbán has played lightning rod for seemingly the entire EU establishment, even as he has galvanized populist and national-conservative forces on the Continent. Reviled, denounced, sanctioned, and banished from the European Parliament’s center-right bloc, he has gone from internal critic of Brussels to an outright dissident.

    In this, Orbán hasn’t been alone. For the past five years, the European Union has also locked horns with the national-conservative Law and Justice party, or PiS, in neighboring Poland. Both countries allegedly fail to uphold “rule of law,” as defined by Brussels. The European Commission charges Hungary and Poland with threatening media freedom and judicial independence, with not doing enough to tackle (or actively engaging in) systemic corruption, and with violating LGBT and minority rights—charges denied by political leaders in Budapest and Warsaw.

    Some paragraphs on Hungary’s largely neutral stance on the Russo-Ukrainian War snipped.

    Still, once the Russo-Ukrainian dust settles, it is likely that the older dynamic—Budapest and Warsaw together in the anti-EU trenches—will resume. PiS might have won some temporary favor with Western hawks by toeing a hawkish line on Russia, but the underlying tensions haven’t eased. Indeed, the issue that has received the most attention in recent years is the Polish government’s decision to establish, in 2017, a new judicial disciplinary body, composed of jurists appointed by the lower house of Parliament, to hear complaints against judges facing misconduct allegations. European officials claim, not entirely without reason, that this exposes the Polish judges to political control.

    This clash is often framed by both camps in stark culture-war terms. “Pro-European” liberals and EU officials themselves present it as a conflict between the liberal-democratic values of the union and the illiberal and undemocratic practices of the two countries’ nationalist governments. Partisans of Hungary and Poland, meanwhile, frame the contest as one between two traditional and religious nations and an imperialistic Brussels bent on pushing a left-wing, globalist, and anti-Christian agenda.

    Things are a little more complex. For starters, the crimes Hungary and Poland are accused of aren’t unique to those two countries, not by EU standards, at least. The high courts of EU states, where they exist, are all highly politicized, which usually means they hardly ever dare challenge the wisdom of EU legislation.

    As for corruption, it’s notoriously hard to measure. To the extent that some institutions try to gauge it, on the basis of people’s perception of the levels of corruption in their country, Poland’s and Hungary’s governments come out as significantly less corrupt than those of other Eastern nations, such as Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Bulgaria; they also come out better than governments in Spain, Portugal, and Italy.

    Paragraphs on press freedom and “LGBT” issues snipped.

    In light of all of the above, the real question isn’t whether what’s happening in these two countries is indeed worrying, or whether an a-democratic, supranational body like the European Union has any right to lecture the governments of two democratic member states and the people who elected them. The more interesting question is why Brussels has singled out Hungary and Poland for problems common to the bloc as a whole.

    The answer has relatively little to do with the charges brought against the two countries, though of course they play a role. In the eyes of the European gatekeepers, the pair has committed a much more heinous crime: Hungary and Poland have openly challenged the authority and legitimacy of the European Union itself. More specifically, they have dared to reject what is arguably the most important article of faith of EU doctrine: the primacy of EU law over national law.

    Thus, when Brussels claimed that Poland’s judicial disciplinary body, created in 2017, violated EU law and should be revoked “in accordance with the principle of the primacy of EU law,” the Polish government refused to comply, contending that the demand represented an unacceptable infringement on the country’s national sovereignty. In an attempt to resolve the dispute, Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki asked the Polish Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw this question: If push came to shove, and EU law were ever to clash with the Polish constitution, which should prevail?

    The tribunal delivered its verdict in 2021: It voted 12 to 2 for the national constitution, holding that “the attempt by the [European Court of Justice] to involve itself with Polish legal mechanisms violates … the rules that give priority to the [Polish] constitution and rules that respect sovereignty amid the process of European integration.”

    The Polish tribunal, in other words, insisted that national law enjoys primacy over EU law—a principle without which “the Republic of Poland cannot function as a democratic and sovereign state.” More than that, the tribunal accused the European Union and the ECJ of violating EU treaties themselves by claiming otherwise. Quite the bombshell.

    Suffice to say, EU officials and pro-EU elites didn’t take it well. Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, claimed that the tribunal’s ruling put the very existence of the European Union in jeopardy. “The primacy of European law is essential for the integration of Europe and living together in Europe”, he said. “If this principle is broken, Europe as we know it, as it has been built with the Rome treaties, will cease to exist.”

    To understand why the ruling represents such an existential threat to the EU, one must comprehend the fundamental role of EU law in the bloc’s superstate-building project. Legal scholars have contested the supposed primacy of EU law for half a century. In practice, however, national courts and governments, which tend to have an engrained pro-EU bias, have hardly ever contested the primacy principle. This has allowed the ever-expanding body of EU legislation, the so-called acquis communautaire, to become the main engine for so-called integration by law—the hollowing out from above and within of national constitutional and legal systems.

    EU legal primacy has also bestowed huge powers upon the ECJ: Despite lacking the democratic legitimacy and accountability of national courts, the European court, by constantly creating new “laws” through its rulings, almost always in favor of “more Europe,” has effectively become the bloc’s most important legislative and, indeed, constitution-writing body. Alec Stone Sweet, an international-law expert, has termed this a “juridical coup d’état.”

    By going against this principle—and by asserting the primacy of national sovereignty over EU law—Hungary and Poland have thus dealt a potentially deadly blow to one of the bloc’s main empire-building tools. This is ultimately what the two countries are being punished for. And to do so, the European Union is resorting to the most powerful tool at its disposal: money. Last year, in a move clearly aimed at Hungary and Poland, Brussels adopted for the first time ever a Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation, which allows the European Commission to withhold the payment of EU funds to member states that are found to be in breach of the rule of law—as defined by the EU/ECJ itself, of course.

    The commission has already used the new rule to refuse to approve the Next Generation EU Covid-19 recovery funds for the two countries—€7 billion for Hungary and €36 billion for Poland. And more funds may be withheld in the future. Budapest and Warsaw challenged the new rule at the ECJ, which predictably dismissed the two governments’ complaints.

    Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The EU.

    How this will pan out remains to be seen. The European Union isn’t new to this kind of blackmail. The European Central Bank has repeatedly choked member states, to bring recalcitrant eurozone governments to heel or even to force regime change (the removal of Silvio Berlusconi in 2011, the shutdown of Greece’s banks in 2015). EU leaders seek a similar coup in Hungary and Poland. Only, Hungary and Poland aren’t in the eurozone; they control their own currencies. The money the pair receives from the European Union is significant, but it isn’t a lifeblood: Between 2010 and 2016, annual net transfers from Brussels—the difference between the total expenditure received and contributions to the EU budget—amounted to 2.7 percent of GDP in Poland and 4 percent in Hungary. This puts the two countries in a very different position than, say, Greece.

    Meanwhile, over in France, incumbent Emmanuel Marcon and right-wing challenger Marine Le Pen head to a runoff. (Naturally, French antifa reacted to Le Pen making the runoff by rioting. If you’re a moron and all you have is a hammer…)

    Remember how self-described “Bonapartist” Eric Zemmour was supposed to be the new hotness? Yeah, he finished a distant fourth. Le Monde describes his failure thus:

    Eric Zemmour gathered 7.07% of the votes cast in the first round of the presidential election on April 10, according to official results. This defeat can probably be explained by several factors, which the far-right candidate saw creeping up on him over the past few weeks, leading him to seek supporters in all segments of the electorate.

    Eric Zemmour failed to unite “the patriotic bourgeoisie,” apart from some who voted for François Fillon in 2017 and the Catholics in the “Manif Pour Tous” organization [a group opposing same-sex marriage] and “the working classes,” who have remained for the most part loyal to Marine Le Pen (23.15% of the vote). His Reconquête ! party was already showing these weaknesses: Eric Zemmour has in fact built a new Rassemblement National (RN) party to the right of the RN, where support from Les Républicains (LR) is rare. The only people to join him from the traditional right-wing party Les Républicains are the obscure senator Sébastien Meurant, an unknown former MP, Nicolas Dhuicq, and Guillaume Peltier, the former number two of LR, who is known for switching parties a lot (he is a former member of the Front National, of Bruno Mégret’s Mouvement National Républicain (MNR), of Philippe de Villiers’ Mouvement pour le France (MPF), and also of the UMP).

    Yeah, for the most part I don’t know who those people and parties are either.

    Eric Zemmour had reason to believe in victory: With barely 7% of intended votes in September 2021, he rose to 17% and 18% in polls in mid-October, before plunging down the rankings. He has obviously succeeded in forcing his campaign issues to the forefront, including on the traditional right, building a movement from scratch that now gathers more than 100,000 supporters who are extremely active on social media and drawing crowds to rallies like no other candidate.

    “Extremely active on social media.” That should be a big ole red flag. Twitter is not the territory.

    But the excitement that he generates among his supporters has not translated into votes. “I believe that the momentum is on my side,” he repeated on April 6 on France Inter public radio. “All the objective elements: the full rooms, the excitement, the television ratings, the number of supporters; all of that is me.” His sycophants around him have greatly elevated the hubris of a man who had no shortage of it, and who didn’t mind becoming a kind of a guru whose mere presence electrified the crowds.

    Snip.

    In the end, it is the war in Ukraine that led the candidate to plummet in the polls. Due in part to his admiration for Vladimir Putin (“I dream of a French Putin,” he had said in 2018), his inability to call him a “war criminal,” and finally his reluctance to welcome Ukrainian refugees – unlike Marine Le Pen.

    Yeah, I’m not sure how much that had to do with it, since Le Pen is hardly tough on Putin herself.

    Is Le Pen a nasty piece of work? Well, she’s certainly not my cup of tea, and I doubt she has a translated copy of The Federalist Papers on her bookshelf. (Though thankfully, she seems to have abandoned her father’s antisemitism.) Macron is arguably more “free market,” though that phrase has very little meaning in the matrix of current French politics. Yellow Vest voters seem to favor Le Pen, and she wants to lower VAT taxes. She opposes Flu Manchu passports. She’s still a Euroskeptic, wants to reform the European Commission, wants a referendum on immigration restriction, and opposes jihad. She wants to abolish the International Monetary Fund. She’s a Russo-phile who wants to remove France from NATO. Like Orban, she would be a big thorn in the side of the EU. Unlike Ortban, she would also be a big thorn in the side of the US as well.

    Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

    Those in the chattering classes proclaiming Orban a grave threat to democracy are wrong. Those proclaiming Le Pen a threat to democracy (and American interests) are slightly less wrong, but Le Pen is less a long-term threat to democracy than the EU’s own transnational globalist elite. NATO survived over 40 years of France’s withdrawal from NATO’s command structure under de Gualle, and (to the extent the alliance is relevant to the 21st century) could survive France’s withdrawal once again.

    As National Review once said of Jean Le Pen, “we have no frog in this fight.”

    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 April 10, 2020

    Friday, April 10th, 2020

    Happy Good Friday, everyone!

    Are we finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel? The Wuhan coronavirus numbers have gone from doubling every two or three days to taking more than a week to double, which suggests successfully bending the curve. If hydroxychloroquine is indeed effective against the virus, we should think about opening the economy back up sooner rather than later, as our ICUs won’t be too overwhelmed to save lives.

    Speaking of which…

  • Are fears of the Wuhan coronavirus overblown? This roundup of reader reports from various hospitals around the country suggests that it is. Lots of hospitals having layoff because so many elective procedures have been cancelled and projected coronavirus ICU cases never materialized. Maybe we’ve flattened the curve enough?
  • Democrats are going to fight Trump to the death over a stimulus aimed at small business. How are they supposed to get their beaks wet there?
  • “Dem Governor Who Banned Hydroxychloroquine Gets Caught Hoarding It.”
  • CNN tells the truth that Democrats blocked GOP funding for small business, then changed it, because telling negative truths about Democrats is always bad. (And speaking of bad, Powerline, I’m really not enamored of you launching a full-screen popup ad every time I click on a story (at least on the machine that doesn’t have Ad-Block for everything.)
  • “How US bureaucrats deepened the coronavirus crisis to deadly effect“:

    Public officials across the United States are flying blind against the novel coronavirus epidemic. Because of a government-engineered testing ­fiasco, they don’t know how fast the virus is spreading, how many people have been infected by it, how many will die as a result of it or how many have developed ­immunity to it.

    The failure to implement early and widespread testing — caused by a combination of shortsightedness, ineptitude and bureaucratic intransigence — left politicians scrambling to avoid a hospital crisis by imposing broad business closures and stay-at-home orders.

    The grand failure of federal health bureaucrats foreclosed the possibility of a more proactive and targeted approach, focused on identifying carriers, tracing their contacts and protecting the public in a more measured way through isolation and quarantines.

    The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was ­reported at the end of December. The first confirmed case in the United States was reported on Jan. 20, by which time it seems likely that many other Americans were already infected.

    At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ­monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective.

    The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests before relaxing the restrictions that made it impossible to assess the progress of the epidemic. Making a false virtue of necessity, the CDC set irrationally narrow criteria for testing, which meant that carriers without ­severe symptoms or obvious risk factors escaped detection.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Is Twitter using the health emergency to settle political scores?

    Nate Jones and I dig deep into Twitter’s decision to delete Rudy Giuliani’s tweet (quoting Charlie Kirk of Turning Point) to the effect that hydroxychloroquine had been shown to be 100% effective against the coronavirus and that Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) had threatened doctors prescribing it out of anti-Trump animus. Twitter claimed that it was deleting tweets that “go directly against guidance from authoritative sources” and separately implied that the tweet was an improper attack on Gov. Whitmer.

    I call BS. Hydroxychloroquine has looked very effective in several tests in France and China, but it hasn’t passed any controlled trials, and along with all the other promising drugs, it won’t pass those trials until the wave of death has begun to recede. In a world of bad choices, the drug looks like one of a few worthwhile gambles, as even Gov. Whitmer recognized by reversing course and asking to be allocated a lot of doses. Giuliani was closer to right than Whitmer. But Twitter decided that Giuliani’s view was so far from the mainstream that it had to be suppressed.

    To be clear, Twitter management decided to suppress a legitimate if overstated view about how to survive the coronavirus. Twitter readers would not be allowed to see that view. That’s a stance that requires some serious justification.

    Only Verified Official Coronavirus views are allowed, because Orange Man Bad.

  • Point/Counterpoint: National Review says that Sweden’s non-lockdown solution to coronavirus (isolate elders, but no shutdowns) has been better than our own, but Time disagrees. “Sweden has a relatively high case fatality rate: as of April 8, 7.68% of the Swedes who have tested positive for COVID-19 have died of the virus.”
  • Does the virus have an Achilles heel?
  • Could the Wuhan coronavirus have been in California already last fall? “[Victor Davis] Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.”
  • Another 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.
  • Texas is doing comparatively well:

  • But: “Texas unemployment agency plagued by tech issue, backlogs as claims near 750K.”
  • Texas local governments need to start trimming their budgets right now.
  • A World Poker Tour organizer’s diary of the Wuhan coronavirus’ onset. I’m not really interested in poker tournaments, but this piece is really valuable for it’s detailed, almost minute-by-minute breakdown of those crazy days less than a month ago when the Wuhan Coronavirus went from Something We Might Have To Worry About to The Event Horizon of Absolute Change.
  • “Diamond Comics Announces They Will ‘Hold Payments To Vendors‘ Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.” Also, they won’t ship comics to stores, either. Given that Diamond has a defacto monopoly on comics distribution, this is going to drive a lot of indie comics makers completely out of business. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
  • Another weird coronavirus wide effect: You can no longer ship packages to Saudi Arabia.
  • New York Democratic represntative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez draws a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “Word broke yesterday that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is reportedly planning to endorse Caruso-Cabrera, probably because they don’t want to be the first with their backs up against the wall after AOC’s glorious people’s revolution.”
  • Colleges and universities are already starting to panic over the loss of revenue. “How long will it take for Democrats to propose a higher education bailout? When that happens, Republicans should hold out until schools start cutting pointless administrators and departments.” Like a malware-infected Windows system, what higher education needs is a shutdown, reboot, reformat and reinstall before it’s safe to start up again.
  • Laredo mandates masks.
  • Keir Starmer replaces Jeremy Corbyn as head of UK’s Labour Party:

    Corbyn’s tenure has cost Labour the trust and patience of millions, including political observers around the world. By rights, it should have been Corbyn’s hidebound socialism and barely concealed tolerance for anti-Semitism that did him in. But what ultimately cost Corbyn the support of his party was electoral defeat. And not just any defeat, but a disastrous one.

    British Labourites and voters more broadly knew who Corbyn was well before the summer of 2017. His first shadow cabinet was a mess. His nostalgic Marxism was laid bare in a manifesto that called for the nationalization of infrastructure and industry alike. His fondness for terrorists—from the IRA to Hezbollah and Hamas—was no secret. But the conservative government under Theresa May plodded into the general election with all the grace of a muskox, confirming voters’ fears that the government could not completely manage Brexit and transforming a 20-point margin in the polls into a 13-seat loss for the Tories. Though it was a defeat for Labour, Corbyn’s party managed a halfway decent showing. It was enough to avoid the impression that Labour had suffered a rebuke.

    In the interim, Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem rapidly became Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The party was wrought by schism when it pledged to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism but amended it to allow its members more freedom to criticize Israel, all without consulting relevant Jewish organizations or even the party’s Jewish members. The unearthing of a variety of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic online affiliations compelled his own members to openly criticize their party’s leadership. Under Corbyn, his party’s affinities trended steadily in one odious direction, leading to the high-profile resignations of many longtime Labour MPs. “I am sickened that Labour is now perceived by many as a racist, anti-Semitic party,” said outgoing MP Mike Gapes.

    All this weighed heavily on British voters. One survey found that 85 percent of Britain’s Jews believed Corbyn was himself anti-Semitic, despite his pro forma denunciations of Jew-hatred. Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the Labour Party’s leader as “unfit for office,” a sentiment with which the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed. By the eve of the 2019 general election, only the most unwavering of Labour voters told pollsters that their primary concern about the prospect of a Labour-led government was “Jeremy Corbyn being prime minister.” But the inevitability of the disaster headed Labour’s way was not acknowledged until it was upon them, and by then it was too late. On December 12, Labour turned in the party’s worst electoral performance since 1935. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism that did Corbyn in. It was his failure to deliver at the polls.

    Technically, that’s Sir Keir Starmer, providing just the right amount of irony that a party theoretically representing the interests of the working class is now lead by an Oxford-educated lawyer-knight.

  • That Hungary emergency act the left was screaming “dictatorship!” about last week: worrisome, but not that worrisome:

    The tests are those most people would impose. Is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.

    Plus it’s not like other European countries haven’t passed similar liberty-abridging laws in response to the crisis.

  • “‘Voter fraud’? California man finds dozens of ballots stacked outside home.” “The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.”
  • Austin’s holy homeless don’t need to practice the social distancing that mere citizens are required to observe:

  • UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of the ICU for coronavirus. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
  • Rand Paul has also receivered from his bout with the coronavirus and volunteered to work at a local hospital.
  • Man steals guns from police firearms store…to sell them to cops. I don’t think you thought your cunning plan all the way through there, sport…
  • Feminist media personalities have no idea what it takes to run a business, details at 10:

  • Don’t trust Jussie Smollett in scrubs.
  • Dwight has a good anniversary roundup on the Newhall shooting.
  • Beast Mode.
  • Classic footage of the Gipper, showing what a thoughtful and learned man he was:

  • Cry. Me. A. Freaking. River. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Here’s a really good essay by Open Blogger over on Ace of Spades about Quintin Tarantino. I was unaware of the Terry Gilliam connection.
  • FINALLY! Former Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich is being inducted into the basketball hall of fame. A long-overdue honor for the man who guided the Houston Rockets to two NBA championships.
  • Awww:

  • LinkSwarm for January 24, 2020

    Friday, January 24th, 2020

    Burisma, Chinese plagues and falling iguanas all feature in this Friday’s LinkSwarm!

  • Emails tie “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella to Obama White House meeting on Bursima.

    Fox News host Laura Ingraham reported Wednesday evening that she obtained a chain of State Department emails stemming from a standard request for comment from New York Times journalist Ken Vogel, whose reporting helped generate scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Hunter Biden, 49, is the son of Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, and Republicans have called for him to testify during the Ukraine-related Senate impeachment trial against President Trump.

    On May 1, 2019, Vogel contacted State Department official Kate Schilling about a story he was working on regarding an Obama administration meeting in January 2016 with Ukrainian prosecutors and mentioned the name of the CIA analyst believed to be the whistleblower whose complaint sparked impeachment proceedings that led to two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

  • Would you believe that the New York Times had and killed the story of the meeting? Of course you would. It reflected badly on Democrats. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Top seven lies Adam Schiff has told to booster impeachment. Pretty much all of these should be familiar…
  • “Democrats Warn That American People May Tamper With Next Election.” “‘When the Founders wrote that founding document thing, they never imagined there would be electoral outcomes that Democrats did not agree with.’ Democrats also said they even have hard evidence that the 2016 election was compromised by Republicans voting for Trump.”
  • Final Brexit bill passes. The EU is reportedly quite eager to hurt its largest trading partner to spite its face…
  • John Bercow is so very, very upset that Tories are blocking his peerage, in much the same way he blocked Brexit…
  • Giant warehouse explosion in Houston. No reports of injuries, but the explosion was said to be heard 20 miles away… Update: Now hearing it was a manufacturing facility, with a propylene tank as the suspected cause, with two dead and one missing.
  • China’s birthrate hits historic low. Mark Steyn always said that China would get old before it got rich.
  • China is also trying to control the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic:

    The Chinese government has placed the city of Wuhan under quarantine in an attempt to stop the spread of the deadly, pneumonia-like virus called 2019-nCoV.

    According to a Chinese news bulletin, all passenger transportation out of the city has been temporarily suspended. That means that the city’s 11 million residents, hundreds of whom have fallen ill and at least nine of whom have died from the viral outbreak, are trapped unless they receive special permission to leave.

    The virus quickly spread to nearby Japan, Thailand, and South Korea, and a traveler from Wuhan also carried it to the U.S.

    In the face of a global outbreak, the Chinese government has been trying to maintain control of the narrative, censoring media and deleting social media posts that don’t align with its official statements.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Last coronavirus death count is 26 people, with more than 30 million people under quarantine. By contrast, the 2014-2016 west African Ebola outbreak killed more than 11,000 people.
  • But wait! Wuhan is also home to a lab studying the world’s most dangerous pathogens.
  • Coronavirus case in Brazos County, Texas? That’s home to College Station and Texas A&M University.
  • For its new White House correspondent, CNN hired the guy who got caught asking the DNC what he should ask.
  • First! Rule! You! Fucking! Idiot!
  • Smear someone as a “white nationalist” on the says so of the SPLC, just because they want to enforce border control laws? Enjoy your $5 million lawsuit.
  • Hungary to abolish Gender Studies. Good.

    Hungary’s Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen has stated that such programs “ha[ve] no business in universities” as they represent “an ideology, not a science,” with a market profile “close to zero.” Similarly, Orban’s Chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said, “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best [and] the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area.”

  • Media estimates of 22,000 for the Second Amendment rally are probably too low. “I think when all is said and done, the crowd of gun rights supporters attending Lobby Day on Monday probably was double the official figure and approached 50,000.”
  • Speaking of Virginia Democrats trying to override inconvenient passages in that pesky Bill of Rights: “Virginia Democrats File Bill To Make Online Criticism of Elected Officials a Crime.
  • Norway’s government falls over Islamic State bride.
  • “Austin’s Homeless Policy May Be Implicated in the City’s First Murder of 2020.”
  • In addition to Steve Adler all but personally inviting every transient drug addict in the state to take up residence in Austin, the killer was out on personnel recognizance bond after committing a burglary, thanks to yet another Austin City Council decision.
  • Fun things from the SHOT Show. (Hat tip: CutJibNews on Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Amazon sues to stop to stop Microsoft $10 billion “war cloud” project for the Pentagon, evidently because President Trump is a big meanie who didn’t let them get the contract. Eh, Pentagon procurement bidding is pretty opaque under the best of circumstances, much less under the zillions of possible variations on setting up a cloud infrastructure. There’s no way whether to determine this is a real grievance or just sour grapes over losing a big contract.
  • Denver Post writer fired for insisting there are two sexes.
  • Journalist Glenn Greenwald charged with hacking in Brazil. Though in this case, “hacking” seems to amount to “publishing embarrassing information about members of the Brazilian government.”
  • In praise of Christopher Tolkien. It’s probably only a matter of time until Disney buys the Tolkien estate now…or someone far worse.
  • Terry Jones has eaten his last mint.
  • Lost Klimpt recovered. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit. )
  • Tradwife. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Icy with a chance of falling iguanas.
  • Again?
  • Enjoy your weekly funny dog tweet:

  • LinkSwarm for September 14, 2018

    Friday, September 14th, 2018

    While Florence pounds the Carolinas, enjoy a complimentary LinkSwarm:

  • Leftwing callers opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court are making rape threats against Sen. Susan Collins staffers.
  • Why the International Criminal Court sucks.
  • Texas minority voters do not seem enthused with “Beto” O’Rourke.
  • Speaking of O’Rourke, he’s ducking a second debate with Ted Cruz. Did anyone bother to tell him that he’s not, in fact, the incumbent?
  • Video of Google leadership post-2016 election shows them freaking out over Donald Trump’s victory.
  • Funny how a whole lot of economic indicators mysteriously (unexpectedly!) started heading upwards right about November 2016. What could be the cause? It’s inexplicable! (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • The United States is now the largest global oil producer. (Hat tip: Ted Cruz’s Twitter feed.)
  • New Port Arthur LNG facility to export natural gas to Poland.
  • EU: “Bad Hungary! We are going to sanction you for thought crimes against the European elite!” Poland: “Hey EU! Get stuffed!” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Bureaucrats try to strip the title of heroes from the defenders of the Alamo, and the elected state board of education stops them cold. (By the way, I recently watched John Wayne’s version of The Alamo, and it’s a much better film than its reputation.)
  • Andrew Cuomo squashes Cynthia Nixon like a bug.
  • Maxine Waters can’t sleep because of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
  • And it’s not just missed sleep: Trump Derangement Syndrome made a Democrat attempt to get all stabby on a Republican congressional candidate in California.
  • R.S. McCain on modern dating: “Guys, when women say they want you to ‘share your feelings’? Don’t believe it. All that stuff you read about how women want men who are ‘sensitive’ and ‘vulnerable’? This is a gigantic load of crap. Don’t fall for it.”
  • “Author of ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ Charged With Murdering Her Husband.” What are the odds?
  • College professor shoots self to protest Trump. That’s some mighty fine protesting, Lou… (Hat tip: Michael Sumbera.)
  • Texas’ partisan system of judicial elections upheld as constitutional.
  • Another case of illegal alien voter fraud in Houston. (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abbott’s Twitter feed.)
  • AP airbrushes out the Soviet Union’s alliance with Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. Insert your own Ministry of Truth reference here.
  • Describe multiculturalism as a scam and watch your college fire you despite being tenured. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Facebook has banned Brandon Straka, the former Democrat who founded the ‘Walk Away’ campaign and its viral hashtag #WalkAway, after he linked to Infowars.com – which has been banned from the platform.” Evidently even linking or mentioning an official “unperson” can get you banned…
  • Via Borepatch:

  • Twitter tried to ban the phrase illegal alien and had to back down.
  • Norm Macdonald makes senior Tonight Show producers cry. Because it’s so stressful to have a comedian express #WrongThink…
  • Related Tweets:

  • Via Ann Althouse comes this dramatic depiction of just what a 6′ and 9′ storm surge looks like:

  • “Google Rep Issues Heartfelt Apology For Anti-Conservative Bias While Wearing ‘Kill All Republicans‘ T-Shirt.” “We want Google to be completely free from bias, even against Republicans who need to die violent deaths for disagreeing with us. That’s what inclusivity is all about.”
  • I saw this over at Say Uncle and I may have to pick some up:

  • LinkSwarm for May 18, 2018

    Friday, May 18th, 2018

    At some point I will grapple with all the unraveling Clinton/Mueller/Fusion GPS/FISA/Brennan Scandularity…but not today.

  • Democrats, rather than maximizing their chance at a blue wave, have insisted on electing far left-wing candidates over more-electable party moderates. Those national results replicate what the Texas Democratic Party did to themselves: Push moderates out of the party. Result: More Republicans elected. They appear hellbent on replicating those results at the national level…
  • Former New York speaker of the House Sheldon Silver found guilty of a kickback scheme yet again. The first conviction was overturned on appeal over a technicality.
  • “The people who’ve lost their way are the liberals and civil libertarians, blinded by their rage for Trump, who have dropped their principles in a moment of political threat and are taking out their anger on a man who has been their staunchest ally. Maybe the question isn’t what happened to Alan Dershowitz. Maybe it’s what happened to everyone else.” Caveat: Writer suffers from usual “Fox News and Trump are the Devil” derangement. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • President Donald Trump: “Members of the violent MS-13 gang are animals.” MSM: “Trump just said all undocumented immigrants are animals!” Also: “Trump supporters are fleeing the media not because they want cheerleaders, but because they are tired of a secular, coastal, liberal press that not only cannot relate to heartland voters but thinks it is beneath them to even try.”
  • Rep. Lou Barletta wins Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary, to face Bob Casey in the general. Barletta earned a lot of nationwide Republican gratitude for taking out Stupak block flip-flopper Paul Kanjorski in 2010.
  • China, Russia and other scumbag authoritarian countries are lying about their GDP. This is my shocked face. This also why you should take all those “OMG China’s economy will overtake the U.S. in 20XX!” panics with several grains of sand.
  • Seattle thinks that golden goose would taste mighty fine cooked in a white wine reduction.
  • Class-action lawsuit filed against Facebook over revelations that the company logged users’ text and call logs using the Facebook smartphone app on Android phones. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • EU: here’s a statement condemning the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania: LOL, no. BLOCKED. (Hat tip: Pat Condell on Gab.)
  • Tom Wolfe, RIP.
  • Another case of illegal alien voter fraud that Democrats swear doesn’t exist.
  • President Trump wrings airline agreement out of gulf states.
  • The mathematician who cracked horse racing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Joe Straus backed a lot of liberal Republican state candidates in March, to the tune of $1 million, and they all got walloped.
  • More scandal at the University of Texas law school:

    Jason Shoumaker, the law school’s facilities director until November 2017, is the subject of an ongoing probe by the Travis County District Attorney’s Office and the Texas Rangers. Though Shoumaker was taken into custody Thursday over tampering charges, he is at the heart of a major fraud investigation – one that potentially involves “several million dollars of questionable expenses,” a source familiar with the probe said….During multiple pay periods, Shoumaker logged regular 8-hour days with the university while he was actually cavorting out of state, according to the affidavit.

  • George Soros pulls out of Hungary.
  • #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob. But they obviously nailed the one for writers:

  • Death by Snu Snu! (Hat tip: Slone’s Twitter feed.)
  • Viktor Orban Wins (Yet Again) in Hungary

    Tuesday, April 10th, 2018

    Over the weekend, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an outspoken opponent of unassimiliated Muslim immigration, won a third term in resounding fashion:

    It was a landslide by the most exacting standards — which more or less destroys the arguments of his opponents and critics that his governing Fidesz party could win only through authoritarianism, gerrymandering, and the dominance of the media by Fidesz and its business allies. What made this landslide still more unexpected, even shocking, was that throughout yesterday the opposition parties had been growing more optimistic about their prospects of scoring an upset victory. The visiting media — to be on the safe side — were hesitating between the headlines “Opposition Wins” and “Democracy Dies.”

    Yet when the smoke of battle was clearing last night, with 80 percent of the vote counted, Orban’s governing party had won 49 percent of the popular vote and 134 seats in the 199-seat parliament. It had an almost clean sweep of the single-member constituencies outside Budapest. And it seems likely to obtain a two-thirds parliamentary majority again and thus the continued right to amend the Hungarian constitution. (All the results cited here might change marginally when the final votes have been counted.) This is as clear an endorsement as any government has received from an electorate — and it was given in the teeth of disapproval from the dominant political and cultural elites in Europe.

    That’s significant. It can no longer be plausibly argued that Orban is pushing through his “revolution” either by stealth or undemocratically. Voters knew exactly what both Orban and his opponents stood for, and they plumped strongly for him. Certain conclusions flow from that.

    The first is that democracy is vital and active in Hungary. Turnout was the largest since 1998 (coincidentally the election that first brought Orban to power). There were long queues outside the polling booths, which in some cases stayed open to ensure that no one who joined the line by the official closing time was denied the chance to vote. And the result — one party winning half of the vote — was conclusive. It simply cannot be explained away as the result of gerrymandering, since a 49 percent share of the total vote would mean a landslide in seats under almost any multi-party electoral system.

    Nor can it be attributed to the Right’s dominance of the media, which was anyway exaggerated — there were newspapers, magazines, television stations, websites, and hoardings putting across the slogans and arguments of both Left and Right opposition parties, and they were every bit as brutal as the Fidesz propaganda machine. They were not as numerous as those making Orban’s case, but enough to get the message through to the voters. It was simply that the voters preferred Orban’s message to that of his opponents.

    The second is that though Orban’s campaign was very negative, it contained some important positive messages. Yesterday I gave four reasons why he would almost certainly win here: the broad economic success of the government, agreement with Orban’s opposition to mass migration, admiration for his personal leadership qualities, and a badly divided opposition. The results bear out that analysis, to which I would add one further point: a significant number of voters agree with Orban’s criticism of the European Union as an undemocratic and overly bureaucratic body and support his broad strategy of trying to return powers from Brussels to national capitals. A defense of democracy and the demand for more of it came from the Hungarian Right as well as from its opponents. So one significance of the landslide is that it marks a positive democratic shift among voters to the kind of “national conservatism” that Orban advocates.

    Snip.

    As in other recent elections across Europe, the Left has suffered major losses and is now on the verge of ceasing to function as a standalone political force. Only eight years ago the Hungarian Socialists, supported by a left-liberal coalition partner, were the main governing party. On this occasion the Socialists won 12 percent of the popular vote and 20 seats, and the Democratic Coalition (an imperfect successor to the left-liberal party that has since disbanded) won less than 5 per cent and nine seats. Neither party has much of a presence outside the capital. They won only three of the single-member constituencies outside Budapest. (Fidesz won 81.)

    Naturally the Eurocrats are not pleased, and the usual idiots are throwing around words like “fascist.”

    For an example of the usual idiots, here’s Howard Dean:

    “He’s going to go to Poland! And Bulgaria! And Romania! And Austria! And Italy! And France! And Germany! And then he’s going to go Brussels and take back the EU! YEAAAAHHH!”

    Sorry.

    Lefty EU types have accused Orban of antisemitism, but when you research their claims, it turns that Orban’s “antisemitism” consists of fiercely criticizing George Soros. In fact, Orban has explicitly condemned antisemitism. And Orban is so antisemitic that Israel’s Prime Minister congratulated him for his win and thanked him for support of Israel:

    If you’re wondering what Orban’s views are, this piece of his in National Review from last year should help clarify his positions:

    The main threat to the future of Europe is not those who want to come here to live but our own political, economic, and intellectual elites bent on transforming Europe against the clear will of the European people.

    Indeed, it is plain to see that on this issue, the European Union is divided into two camps: unionists and sovereignists. The unionists call for a United States of Europe and mandatory quotas, while the sovereignists desire a Europe of free and sovereign nations and will not hear of quotas of any kind. That is how the mandatory migrant quota has come to encapsulate and symbolize our era. It is an important issue in and of itself, but it also possesses symbolic significance as the distilled essence of everything we find undesirable and disruptive among the nations of Europe. We cannot allow Brussels to put itself above the law. We cannot allow it to shift the consequences of its own policy onto those who have abided (as we have) by each and every treaty and piece of legislation.

    Snip.

    In Western Europe, the center Right (the Christian Democrats) and the center Left have taken turns at the helm of Europe for the past 50 to 60 years. But increasingly, they have offered the same programs and thus a diminishing arena of political choice. The leaders of Europe always seem to emerge from the same elite, the same general frame of mind, the same schools, and the same institutions that rear generation after generation of politicians to this day. They take turns implementing the same policies. Now that their assurance has been called into question by the economic meltdown, however, an economic crisis has quickly turned into the crisis of the elite.

    More important, this crisis of the elite — sprouted from the economic crisis — has now become a crisis of democracy itself. Large masses of people today want something radically different from what traditional elites want. This is the deep cause of the restlessness, anxiety, and tension erupting on the surface time and again in the wake of a terrorist attack or some other act of violence, or when we confront a seemingly unstoppable tidal wave of migration. We grow ever more apprehensive, because we feel that what happens today in Nice, Munich, or Berlin can happen in virtually any other corner of Europe tomorrow.

    EU globalists are upset because Orban is throwing more sand into the gears of their neoliberal superstate dreams. Like Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, his ascension is a direct affront to their agenda, and thus the shrill nature of their attacks.