Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) will oppose the Democratic Party’s legislation that would federalize elections, the For the People Act, citing the bill’s overtly partisan nature.

Manchin declared his position in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. According to Manchin, “voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.”

“I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act,” Manchin wrote.

Manchin also laid to rest the possibility he would ever support ending the filibuster.

“Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” he said. “For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”

(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Republicans swept key races for mayor in Texas on Saturday, setting back Democratic hopes that the state’s urban areas will deliver statewide majorities for them in the future. Most shocking: In McAllen, Texas, a border city of 150,000 people of which 85 percent are Hispanic, Republicans elected their first mayor since 1997.

Other cities with strong Hispanic populations also elected Republicans to replace retiring mayors. Fort Worth is the twelfth-largest city in the country and has more than 1 million people. Only a third of them are Anglo. But 37-year-old Republican Mattie Parker easily defeated Democrat Deborah Peoples, becoming the youngest mayor of a major Texas city.

The race was ostensibly nonpartisan, but the divisions were clear.

“We’ve never had a race that was this partisan,” Kenneth Barr, the former Democratic mayor of Fort Worth, told Politico. “This particular election has moved as far in the partisan direction as any we’ve ever had.”

Voters also elected Republican Jim Ross as mayor of Arlington, a suburb of 400,000 people that borders Fort Worth and is only 39 percent Anglo. Ross, a former Arlington police officer, was endorsed by several police associations who liked his anti-crime platform. He defeated Michael Glaspie, a former city-council member who was endorsed by the Dallas Morning News and leading Democratic politicians.

But it was the victory of Javier Villalobos in the overwhelmingly Democratic Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico that shook political observers.

Villalobos, a former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, defeated Democrat Veronica Vega Whitacre, a fellow McAllen city council member, to become mayor. He campaigned as a conservative and said he wanted to cut water and sewage fees. He called for compassion for undocumented migrants but said the safety of local citizens had to be the first concern. His supporters questioned Whitacre’s wooly-headed claim that if migrants were flowing the other way, toward Mexico, they would be treated with as much compassion by Mexican authorities.

Whitacre’s loss was only the latest sign for Democrats that the Rio Grande Valley is slipping away from them. Biden won the region by 15 points last November, a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016. At the same time, Congressman Vicente Gonzalez won reelection by only 51 percent to 48 percent over Republican Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez in a district Democrats always carry.

“Democrats have a big problem in Texas,” Rio Grande Valley congressman Filemon Vela told the Texas Tribune in January, shortly after he became vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “For the first time in generations, or maybe ever, we lost . . . South Texas counties with significant Hispanic populations,” he said. “And we are going to have to . . . wrap our arms around exactly why that happened. It may be a difficult issue to reconcile.”

It’s not at all difficult to reconcile: The modern Democratic Party’s core policies of racist social justice, anti-police, soft-on-crime and pro-illegal alien are anathema to ordinary middle class Hispanic American citizens. Your ideas are unpopular and you’ll continue to lose as long as you let the radical social justice warriors set the agenda for the party.

The city of Los Angeles saw a sharp 36 percent increase in homicides in 2020—but the L.A. County sheriff said this year is looking even more grim, and he’s blaming the widespread uptick in crime on District Attorney George Gascón.

“In 2021, that 36 percent has now become 92 percent, which is a huge statistical jump,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva told The Epoch Times.

“We’re seeing increases in all the categories – assault with a deadly weapon, arson, rape… these things are continuing upward unabated.”

The widespread uptick in crime is the direct result of Gascón’s election as DA of L.A. County and his failure to prosecute offenses, according to Villanueva. Since Gascón took office, 2,690 cases—about 30 percent—“that normally would have gone through were rejected,” he said.

While Gascón has defended his reform policies, criminals in prison are toasting the DA to celebrate their early release, according to officials—and the sheriff said the DA’s policies are making it more difficult for him to do his job.

“You’re supposed to have a district attorney who represents the people … but [he’s] acting like a public defender,” Villanueva said.

“There’s no one left representing the people. I need to work in partnership with the person who’s representing the people. I don’t have that right now.”

It comes as no surprise to readers that dozens of Baltimore City businesses, located in the Inner Harbor, in a stretch called “Fells Point,” are threatening the new city government, run by Mayor Brandon Scott, with not paying their taxes because they’re “fed up and frustrated” with the outburst of violence.

In a letter titled “Letter to City Leaders From Fells Point Business Leaders,” addressed to Mayor Brandon Scott, Council President Nick Mosby, Councilman Zeke Cohen, Madam State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Commissioner Michael Harrison, the 37 restaurants and small businesses are threatening to stop paying city taxes and other fees until “basic and essential municipal services are restored.”

What’s happening in Fells Point, known for its hipster pubs and taverns, as well as delicious seafood from the Chesapeake Bay, is experiencing an overflow of violent crime from other troubled areas.

The letter comes after three men were shot in Fells Point over the weekend.

“What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” said the letter.

The 37 businesses are planning to place their city taxes in an “escrow account” and released them until these demands are satisfied:

• Pick up the trash
• Enforce traffic and parking laws through tickets and towing
• Stop illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales
• Empower police to responsibly do their job

The letter continued to say that minor crime that police “ignore” is what is contributing to more violent crime. So Marilyn Mosby’s halt on prosecuting petty crimes appears to be backfiring.

You don’t say. Baltimore has had a problem with open-air drug markets for over three decades. And the last Republican mayor left office in 1967…

The reasons are clear ― Florida is successful because we are OPEN and let Floridians make decisions that are best for them. Florida’s budget has $10 billion in reserve because Florida chose Freedom over Faucism. pic.twitter.com/tEzMRH6U6k

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) June 9, 2021

“Today’s proposed rulemaking on pistol-braced firearms represents a gross abuse of executive authority,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America, in a statement.

[Pistol brace inventor Alex] Bosco said the rule would outlaw the vast majority of braces on the market and read like it was “reverse-engineered to make braces illegal.” He called it “arbitrary and capricious.”

They are lying to you b/c they think you're too stupid to notice what is happening right in front of you pic.twitter.com/PoeTw1tXaE

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) June 10, 2021

Andrew Cuomo’s little brother is a continuous embarrassment to the cable-news network that employs him. So why does he still have a job?

At this point in the proceedings, one is tempted to conclude that Chris Cuomo must have laced CNN’s corporate offices with dynamite and informed the powers that be that, if he goes, they go, too. What else could explain the network’s eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by the man? Here, at the tail end of his long experiment in deficiency, Cuomo resembles nothing more keenly than the inadequate tee-baller who gets to stay in past eight or nine strikes because his uncle coaches the team. His ratings are poor. His insights are vacuous. His conduct is a permanent source of ignominy. All the perfumes of Albany could not sweeten this little man. “What’s in a name?” inquired Shakespeare. Little did he know.

It is unclear why Cuomo was selected by CNN to begin with. He’s a lawyer who knows nothing of the law; a journalist who knows nothing of journalism; an American who knows nothing of America. His temper is third-rate, his interests are bewilderingly narrow, he possesses no discernible sense of shame or self-knowledge, and the opinions he proffers are so ruthlessly subordinated to expedience that hypocrisy is his default mode. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was meant as an extolment of the virtues of personal growth. Cuomo seems to have taken it literally.

On no single topic has the man’s unique set of professional and personal shortcomings been more obvious than COVID-19. In April of last year, Cuomo’s attempt to fake a two-week quarantine was ruined by his failure to remember that, just a week earlier, he had admitted on the radio that he had left the house to visit a property he owns in East Hampton and gotten into an argument with a stranger. And yet, rather than demote him for telling such a galling and obvious lie, CNN encouraged him to inject his peculiar brand of mendacity into a series of interviews with his own brother. Thus it was that while Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was making the single worst mistake of the entire coronavirus crisis — herding the elderly into nursing homes and then covering up the death toll — Television Host Chris Cuomo of New York was using America’s most famous cable-news channel to portray him as a national hero. What America needed last year was a dispassionate examination of Andrew Cuomo’s official messaging. What America got was a smirking nepotist brandishing a comedy-sized nasal swab and tweeting obsequious fluff about his sibling. New York, Chris Cuomo concluded, was “doing way better than what we see elsewhere & no way that happens without the Luv Guv dishing the real 24/7.” In exchange, the “Luv Guv” dealt Chris in on a series of private, government-funded COVID tests that were unavailable to everybody else.

Watching Chris Cuomo work is a little like watching a man jump out of an airplane without a parachute and then become irrationally angry at those who tell him he’s going to die.

The snowflakes at Worldcon are having a very bad weekend. On Friday, the San Francisco chapter of Worldcon settled a lawsuit and agreed to pay restitution and to issue a public apology for banning conservative author Jon Del Arroz from their convention in 2018 and for besmirching him as a “racist.” Del Arroz is the most dangerous Hispanic voice in science fiction because he refuses to back down in the face of political bullies. He has also written an amazing series, The Saga of the Nano Templar, that my teen daughter is reading for the second time—that’s how good it is—and I don’t have to worry about garbage culture or leftist politics sullying her mind. The Adventures of Baron Von Monacle, a steampunk series, is also highly entertaining. (Always support freedom-loving artists!)

At the time of the banning, Del Arroz was under serious mob attack from social justice warriors trying to drive him out of the sci-fi community. SJWs even sent a spring-loaded exploding can of penis-shaped glitter to his home, which scared his wife and children. The ban came about when Del Arroz asked Worldcon for security measures because he feared for his safety due to the mob-like attacks on him and his family from industry insiders. Instead of helping him, Worldcon banned him and made public statements claiming the author was a “racist” and a “bully,” with no substantiated evidence to back those statements up. I’ve known Del Arroz personally for many years. He is a devout and kind man with a good sense of humor and a love of the art of the troll. He is not vicious, but provocative in a way that is necessary for freedom of speech to be preserved. He’s the one brave enough to exercise the First Amendment in ways that ensure we will keep it. We all need people like Del Arroz in the fight to preserve liberty.

Now we only need about a hundred such lawsuits to force institutional science fiction to regain its sanity… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

How much meth do you have to take before you can actually see Azathoth, the blind idiot god piping in shrieking madness at the center of the galaxy?

— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) June 8, 2021

In Honor Of Pride Month, Here Are The Babylon Bee's Top 2 Genders

In this very special news desk, The Babylon Bee ranks all the genders. All of 'em! Did your favorite make the list?!

Watch on Youtube ▶️ https://t.co/bV1YtVci3J pic.twitter.com/ZoBHemopNz

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 8, 2021