Posts Tagged ‘Leander’

LinkSwarm for May 6, 2022

Friday, May 6th, 2022

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

    Not seeing much of that, are you?

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

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

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

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

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

  • Hmmmm:

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

  • The Ministry of Truth is worse than you think.

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Heroic dog rescue:

  • 2021 Post-Election Tidbits

    Thursday, November 4th, 2021

    More post-election news:

  • Democrats take a good, hard, sober look at their policies to determine why voters abandoned them in drove. Ha, just kidding! It’s all racism all the way down:

    In response to Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win in yesterday’s Virginia gubernatorial race — as well as Republican wins all the way down the ballot — left-wing pundits and celebrities immediately began to assert that the Democratic losses were the result of voters’ white-supremacist sympathies.

    Yeah, that’s the reason voters turned out in droves to elect a black Republican Lt. Governor: white supremacy.

    Even Politico writers got in on the action, asserting in this morning’s newsletter that Youngkin’s strategy included “racial appeals to working-class white voters.” During elections results coverage last night, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace asserted that “critical race theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump-insurrection endorsed Republican.”

    Also on MSNBC last night, host Joy Reid spent much of the evening insisting that the education issue, an enormous part of Youngkin’s successful appeal to Virginia parents, was a dog whistle for racism. Plenty of progressives, including Reid herself, began pushing this line well before Election Day.

    And that worked out so well for them.

    Already, progressives are pointing to exit polls showing an enormous swing to the GOP among white working-class women, who voted for Joe Biden last fall but supported Youngkin this time around — the nasty implication being that these women were motivated to vote by Republicans’ supposedly racist agenda. Totally ignored, or even outright dismissed, are the many nonwhite voters who backed the GOP.

    McAuliffe himself obliquely indulged in this fantasy in his statement conceding the election.

    On several counts, progressives have begun to coalesce around a narrative that doesn’t hang together — one that displays a shocking unwillingness to grapple with the problems facing their party. For one thing, it makes little sense to assert both that critical race theory doesn’t exist and that parents who oppose it are doing so because they don’t want their children to learn about race or slavery.

    If progressives admit that CRT exists at all, they pretend that it’s merely an effort to teach school children about the complicated history of race in our country. In fact, a quick investigation reveals that the proposed curricula contain, in most cases, highly inaccurate history aimed at indoctrinating kids into racially divisive identity politics.

    Parents have legitimate concerns about such curricula, including understandable resistance to misrepresenting history, stoking guilt and division among children, and perhaps even encouraging race-based bullying. Dismissing these parents as white supremacists for having these concerns is unlikely to succeed either in persuading them to think differently about the curriculum in question or to vote for Democrats the next time around.

    Finally, the “white supremacist” theory for Democratic losses intentionally ignores that two of the top Republican candidates voted into office were Winsome Sears, a female Jamaican immigrant elected lieutenant governor, and Jason Miyares, a Cuban American who was elected attorney general. It’s hard to imagine why Virginians voting en masse for the GOP out of thinly veiled racial animus would throw in their lot with this ticket.

    Logic has never been the Democratic Party’s strong suit.

  • “Glenn Youngkin Defeated Terry McAuliffe Because Democrats Betrayed Parents.”

    While former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s loss to Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin was cemented very late on election night, in practice the day that he forfeited the gubernatorial race was September 28. That was when, during a debate with Youngkin, McAuliffe, a Democrat, made the statement that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

    That was his response to questions about school curriculum and the fury that had taken hold at many local school board meetings, where irate parents assailed education leaders for allegedly supporting what has been termed “critical race theory” by right-wing activists who oppose it. CRT is a divisive concept, in part because progressives and conservative disagree sharply about what it even is. Many members of the liberal media don’t even believe it exists, and have accused the GOP of fabricating the issue. As Youngkin’s victory became apparent, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace lamented that critical race theory, “which isn’t even real,” had swung the suburbs 15 points in Republicans’ favor.

  • Dr. Carol Swain on voter rejection of critical race theory:

    Well, they can’t really racialize it because a number of Black parents and immigrant parents have stood with their White brothers and sisters to reject critical race theory, which is very harmful to Black and minority children. It’s a violation of our civil rights laws. It’s un-American because it involves shaming and bullying children and it runs counter to our Constitution. And so, they can say what they want with their Marxist agenda and their false narratives but the American people spoke in my home state of Virginia and I could not be more proud of them.

    (Hat tip: TPPF.)

  • More Twitter reactions:

  • One Democratic not screaming racism: ragin Cajun James Carville:

    Democratic political strategist James Carville blamed his party’s recent losses and weak performance in state elections on “stupid wokeness” on Wednesday.

    “PBS NewsHour” host Judy Woodruff asked Carville what went wrong for the Democratic Party in the Virginia gubernatorial race in which Republican Glenn Youngkin beat former Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

    “What went wrong is just stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that — people see that,” Carville said.

    “It’s just really — has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something,” he added. “They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”

    Will Democrats heed his warning and abandon their suicidal drive for social justice, forced transgenderism and critical race theory?

  • Other news I missed: The Alexandria Ocasio Cortez-backed socialist running as a Democrat for mayor of Buffalo lost, despite being the only candidate on the ballot.

    The incumbent Democratic mayor of Buffalo, running as a write-in candidate, declared victory Tuesday night as he held a nearly 20-point lead over his Democratic Party opponent.

    India Walton, a socialist backed by many high-profile progressives, refused to concede to Mayor Byron Brown in the highly publicized contest until her campaign sees “all the votes,” her spokesman Jesse Myerson told The Post via text.

    Brown, 63, who lost to Walton in the June Democratic primary, claimed what would be a stunning victory in a speech to supporters from his campaign headquarters shortly after 11 p.m.

    “Today’s election, it’s not just a referendum on the future of the city of Buffalo, it was a referendum on the future of our democracy,” Brown said.

    Both Walton and Brown are black, so I’m sure the reason he won was racism…

  • Another sign of discontent with Democrats: Republicans win four New York City Council seats, and may pick up a fifth.

    Republicans won four contested City Council races in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island and had a shot at taking a fifth in a potential upset.

    Republican Inna Vernikov thumped her Democratic opponent Steve Saperstein for an open seat in southern Brooklyn’s 48th Council District by nearly 30 points.

    With 87 percent of the vote in, Vernikov, a 37-year-old lawyer and Ukraine native, garnered 10,768 votes, or 65 percent of the vote, to 5,870 votes, or 35 percent, for Saperstein.

    She will succeed ex-Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who forfeited his seat earlier this year when he was convicted of tax fraud.

    The district includes many Russian-speaking and Jewish immigrants in the communities of Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Sheepshead Bay and Homecrest.

    Vernikov ran as an unabashed supporter of former President Donald Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. endorsed her in a robocall to voters. She also opposed coronavirus vaccine mandates.

    “I’m very excited. This election victory shows that the people are fed up with the progressive policies that have destroyed our city and district,” Vernikov told The Post last night.

    Snip.

    Vickie Paladino led former Democratic Councilman Tony Avella with 99 percent of the votes in. Paladino had the support of 12,143 votes, or 50 percent, to 10,490, or 43 percent, for Avella. John-Alexander Sakelos, running on the Conservative and Save Our City lines, received 1,729 votes or 7 percent.

    Snip.

    In another shocker, Democratic Councilman Justin Brannan, who is running to become the next council speaker, is fighting for political survival.

    With 95 percent of the vote in, Brannan was locked in a dead heat with Republican Brian Fox in the 43rd District that takes in communities including Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights.

    Other Republicans holding onto GOP seats: David Carr (not the former Texans quarterback) and Joann Ariola, who beat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-backed Felica Singh.

  • Another shocking loss for the hard left in deep-blue Seattle: “Republican Ann Davison is leading police- and jail-abolitionist Nicole Thomas-Kennedy in the race for city attorney.” Also, in the Mayor’s race, “Bruce Harrell, a former City Council president who urged adding police, including unarmed officers, rather than cutting funding, held a commanding lead of nearly 30 percentage points over current Council President Lorena González as additional ballots were counted Wednesday.” To be fair, Davison is a pretty nominal Republican.
  • Though it looks like Murphy will hold on to the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, “Republican Edward Durr, Truck Driver Who Spent $153 on Campaign, Defeats New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney.”
  • Three of four Fort Worth bond packages fail.
  • Closer to home, Leander ISD voters turned down two of three bond issues:

    The second-largest school bond in the state faced a narrow defeat Tuesday night as Leander ISD voters rejected the $727.2 million proposition. The proposal would’ve financed the construction of new buildings, including five new schools, and the renovation of two existing schools to expand capacity.

    The final margin was one percentage point, amounting to 215 votes difference in the school district with over 40,000 students. Leander ISD said the bond, along with two others on the ballot Tuesday, was necessary for the population growth the district expects to come.

    Those other two finished with slim margins, as well. Proposition B, a $33 million bond to finance technology upgrades including laptops for students and faculty, passed by 805 votes, and Proposition C, a performing arts center upgrade, failed by 765 votes.

    (Hat tip: Holly Hansen)

  • Voters in The Woodlands reject incorporation, will remain a township.
  • Few things infuriate leftwing racists more than black republicans who refuse to bend the knee:

  • A Quick Roundup of Gun News

    Monday, February 18th, 2013

    Here’s a Whitman’s Sampler of gun news for you to chew on:

  • The Truth About Assault Weapons, in easy-to-follow graphic form.
  • Dwight is all over Polifact Texas “checking” Ted Cruz’ statements about untracked gun buyers.
  • Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot appeared on a RedState podcast discussing guns.
  • More on the tremendous success of Chicago’s gun control initiative, and how it’s throwing a wee bit of a kink into Obama’s gun control pitch.
  • In the Texas legislature, Rep. James White’s House Bill 1142 would allow firearms safety to be taught as an elective.
  • Missouri Democrats introduce a bill to seize the guns of the law-abiding.
  • What happens when an expert arrives to provide testimony on modern sporting rifles? If you’re a Minnesota Democrat, you actually walk out of the presentation.
  • Borepatch suggests a legislative strategy.
  • Interesting profile of Bond Arms of Granbury, which makes derringers. The article calls them the only gun manufacturer in the DFW area, which I rather doubt.
  • Ted Cruz will be visiting LaRue Tactical to support the Second Amendment. Sadly, Wayne Slater is evidently too unprofessional to bother telling you when Cruz will be visiting. (Do they just not teach “Five Ws and an H” in journalism school anymore?) Since I offer a full-service blog: Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 11:00 AM, LaRue Tactical, 850 County Road 177, Leander, TX 78641.
  • Finally, here’s a fine NSFW rant about how liberal “civil libertarians” are only too ready to watch the rights of gun owners trampled:

    “At the time the Constitution was written, the weapons in question were muskets.”

    You know what? You’re right. And marriage was between one man and one woman. So what’s with gay marriage? No longer will I offer any moral support, oppose any online statements attacking it, speak out for it. They have the same right as anyone—to marry someone of the opposite gender. And given that all gays support raping little boys (just like all gun owners support shooting school kids), I don’t think I can support them. We should do things just the way they were done 220 years ago. That’s the liberal way.

    “The Heller Decision was by an activist court. It doesn’t count.”

    Indeed. Just like Roe v Wade was an activist decision. It doesn’t count.

    “We’re not trying to take your guns away, just have reasonable limits. It’s a compromise.”

    And some people want reasonable limits on abortion, like waiting periods, gestational time limits, ultrasound, etc. It’s a reasonable response to an activist court decision, and reasonable restrictions on a right, for public benefit. Don’t come whining about your right to murder babies, and I won’t come to you whining about my right to shoot school kids.

    And no one is saying you can’t ride the bus. You just have to sit where people think is reasonable. No one is saying women can’t work. They just have to get paid what is reasonable for the work they do, allowing for the fact they’re going to leave the workplace and raise a family. It’s a compromise.

    “Assault weapons are an extreme interpretation.”

    True. And not allowing any religious emblems on government premises is an extreme interpretation. As long as they’re privately paid for, what’s it to you? No one is saying you can’t belong to the Christian church of your choice, just not to extreme groups, like atheists or Muslims. It would be paranoid to think anyone was trying to infringe on your legitimate right to be free from state religion, just like I’d be paranoid to think they wanted to take my guns. Quite a few states had official churches well into the 1800s. This is not an infringement on your freedom of religion.

    “Given Sandy Hook, you have to make reasonable compromises.”

    “We just want licensing and safe storage requirements so the wrong people don’t get guns.”

    “Publicizing the information lets people make informed choices about who they live near.”

    Accepted. In exchange, gay men should make reasonable compromises over Penn State. They will simply have to accept being registered and kept a safe distance from children. This isn’t a violation of their rights. It’s just common sense. The public has a right to know.

    This should apply to protests, too. No reasonable person would object to being identified. They should welcome it—it means they can’t be wrongly maligned. All union members, blacks, gays and feminists should be signed in with ID before a march or gathering, just so we can track the real criminals to keep the rest safe.

    Also:

    First they came for the blacks, and I spoke up because it was wrong, even though I’m not black.

    Then they came for the gays, and I spoke up, even though I’m not gay.

    Then they came for the Muslims, and I spoke up, because it was wrong, even though I’m an atheist.

    When they came for illegal aliens, I spoke up, even though I’m a legal immigrant.

    Then they came for the pornographers, rebels and dissenters and their speech and flag burning, and I spoke up, because rights are not only for the establishment.

    Then they came for the gun owners, and you liberal shitbags threw me under the bus, even though I’d done nothing wrong. So when they come to put you on the train, you can fucking choke and die.