Posts Tagged ‘red light cameras’

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 August 23, 2019

    Friday, August 23rd, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Why evangelicals support Trump:

    Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”

    That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.

    Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.

    Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.

    Snip.

    Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.

    Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.

    Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.

    First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.

    He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.

    Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.

    Well, it’s about time!

    It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.

    Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.

    Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.

    No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Man goes to car dealership, finds it booming:

    “It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.

    He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”

    If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
    The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.

    The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.

  • The Trump Administration ends catch-and-release.
  • The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:

    Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.

    We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.

    Snip.

    In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.

    They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.

    But it won’t.

    It’s all a lie and a scam.

    And we know it.

  • How Boris Yeltsin defeated the 1991 Communist coup. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady.)
  • “The Department of Justice says one of its own “repeatedly” helped the Bloods street gang protect its interests by identifying and exposing informants and cooperating witnesses.”

    Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.

    If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.

  • Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
  • Israel reportedly hit a Hezbollah arms depot in Iraq. According to Wikipedia, Israel has 16 F-35s total.
  • Hong Kong’s leaderless protests:

    Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.

    Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.

  • WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
  • Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Still true: “Red-light cameras undermine rule of law.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered.”
  • “Trump Executive Order Cancels Student Loan Debt for Disabled Veterans.” Bet none of them have degrees in feminist critical theory, either…
  • Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
  • “Robert Mueller crushed their dreams, so Democrats pivot to race.”

    They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.

    And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.

    Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.

    With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.

  • “Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
  • Reporter discovers, much to her surprise, that, yes, you do have to pass a background check before buying a gun. She fails.
  • The army wants microwave weapons against drones.
  • “Man Accused Of Shooting 6 Philadelphia Police Officers Was Federal Informant.” (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
  • Gregory Benford says that the Epstein smear against Marvin Minsky is baseless. (Hat tip: Instapundit, which is a backup source if you can’t get to Greg’s Facebook page.)
  • Borepatch says that red flag laws are malicious:

    False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.

    But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.

    This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.

    To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.

    And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.

    Malice.

  • Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
  • President Trump may have failed to buy Greenland, but we can all learn from the failures of Greenland’s public housing.
  • Lt. Governor Dan Patrick frowns on Bonnen’s shenanigans. (Hat tip: Cahnman.)
  • Republican John Lee wins seat on LA City Council, beating Green New Deal supporter.
  • What it’s like to be a roughneck in west Texas.
  • Miss Nevada banned from competing for Miss America over supporting President Trump.
  • First picture of light as both a wave and a particle.
  • “When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”

    I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.

    As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.

  • Texas Finally Bans Red Light Cameras

    Sunday, May 19th, 2019

    With the rush of national news, I haven’t been keeping up with this year’s Texas legislative session as well as I should. But one bit of good news: The legislature finally passed a ban on red light cameras.

    The Republican-led push to rid Texas intersections of red-light cameras moved one step closer to becoming law after the state Senate signed off on a measure with that aim Friday, sending the bill to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

    House Bill 1631 cleared the chamber on a 23-8 vote after several back-and-forths among senators about studies that both support and challenge the efficacy of the devices when it comes to promoting safer streets. The Senate left in place a key provision to allow local governments to continue operating cameras until they finish out any contracts in effect as of May 7.

    “Red-light cameras violate the right to due process guaranteed under Article 1 of the Texas Constitution by creating a presumption that the registered owner of the car committed a violation when in fact that may not have been the case,” said state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, who is sponsoring the legislation originally offered by state Rep. Jonathan Stickland, R-Bedford.

    Worth noting: All but two of the House “No” votes on the bill were from Democrats, who evidently have no problem draining money from poor Texas motorists to fill government coffers.

    In addition to violating due process, red light cameras are a cash grab that actually make streets less safe. Moreover, most of the cities using red light cameras are doing so illegally, as required engineering studies of red light camera intersections were never conducted.

    Voters in Killeen, Corpus Christi, Arlington and Houston have already repealed their red light camera programs. Once Governor Abbott signs the bill, the clock starts ticking on winding down the remaining programs.

    The sooner the better.

    2019 Texas Legislative Session Starts Today

    Tuesday, January 8th, 2019

    The 86th Texas legislative session starts today. There’s a new speaker and boatloads of bills have already been filed.

    Here are some of the pressing issues that Empower Texans has highlighted as key priorities:

  • Abolish the Robin Hood school tax:

    The state should use existing funding streams to permanently buy down local school property taxes until they’re abolished, along with Robin Hood. If enacted, the average Texan would eventually see a 40 percent cut in their total property tax bill.

    The existing “Robin Hood” funding system — known formally as the Ch. 41 Wealth Redistribution Program — effectively allows lawmakers to overtax property-rich areas as a means of supplementing public education spending. The system is a relic of a Democrat-controlled legislature, but Republicans have since done little to fix it.

    Not only is the system complex, but it has resulted in horrendous side effects.

    Most notably, property taxpayers are being gouged. Since becoming law in 1993 under Democrat rule, a larger portion of the education-funding burden eventually shifted onto local property taxpayers.

  • Let Texas citizens vote on local tax hikes:

    Voters should automatically be given a voice on excessive property tax hikes.

    State law does not currently require that all local governments obtain voter approval for tax hikes that exceed the state’s “rollback” limit. The “rollback” limit is essentially the percentage localities can increase property taxes on the existing tax base before voters have the option to challenge it.

    While school districts are required to hold public elections on excessive tax hikes, cities, counties, and other localities are not. As a result, city and county officials habitually take advantage of taxpayers who have no effective remedy to stop them.

    Under current law, taxpayers only have one option — a burdensome petition drive.

    In both rural and urban areas, this onerous process requires that taxpayers collect an overwhelming number of voter signatures over a very short period of time — and hire lawyers to protect their validity — before a public vote on the proposed tax increase is triggered.

    Politicians routinely instruct their staff to fight and discredit these efforts. They also spend taxpayer money on lawyers to resist holding public votes, forcing citizens to file expensive lawsuits.

    Upon closer review, it becomes obvious that state laws pertaining to the citizen petition process were designed to thwart voters in favor of money-hungry governments. These petition requirements should be replaced with automatic elections.

  • Banning red light cameras:

    Red-light cameras have been installed in cities across Texas and the nation under the pretense of promoting safe driving but, in reality, the automated devices are little more than another vehicle for municipalities to rob citizens of their money.

    Photo enforced traffic citations violate drivers’ due process rights. Cities don’t have to prove who was driving the ticketed cars, and wrongly accused drivers aren’t able to fight charges in front of a jury trial.

  • Repealing in-state tuition for illegal aliens:

    While lawmakers talk tough on border security, little has been done to destroy a major magnet created nearly 15 years ago that entices illegal immigrants to the state: subsidized tuition to public universities.

    Under the terms of a law passed in early 2001, illegal aliens are allowed to receive “in-state tuition” at the state’s public universities – the same discounted tuition rate offered to Texas residents — giving them a cheaper education than is available for U.S. citizens and legal residents from other states. That “cheaper” education comes from tax dollars paid by Texas taxpayers.

    One more issue: banning paid lobbying by government entities.

    Buckle up…

  • LinkSwarm for September 2, 2016

    Friday, September 2nd, 2016

    Happy Labor Day Weekend, everyone!

  • Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in a statistical tie.
  • Ditto Rasmussen: Trump 40%, Clinton 39%. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • 538: Don’t Assume The Electoral College Will Save Clinton.
  • Let us celebrate the fall of Alan Grayson with a look back at his greatest hits.
  • Huge food stamp fraud bust in Baltimore. More than half those arrested have names like “Mulazam Hussain.”
  • How the New York Times lies about red state vs. blue state prosperity.
  • Milo Yiannopoulos decries the Islamicization of London and declares he’s leaving.
  • “After a lengthy period of deliberation, the Brazilian parliament has formally removed from office President Dilma Rousseff, the corrupt left-wing populist who has been trying to do for Brazil what Hugo Chávez and his epigones did for Venezuela.” This is at NRO, which has recently installed an AdBlocker blocker, so good luck reading it. If it’s a choice between turning off my AdBlocker or giving up on reading NRO, I’ll give up on reading NRO, even though I subscribe to NRODT. Though I am still trying to figure out which combination of RefControl, GreaseMonkey and cookie deletion that will block the AdBlocker blocker…
  • Would you bite the hand that feeds you? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Is this Indonesian man really 145 years old? He does sort of look it…
  • Lefty science fiction writer John Shirley (who I workshopped with at a Turkey City many moons ago) has penned a piece on why science fiction needs conservatives at Tangent Online. And I’m accurately quoted. The big caveat is that Shirley doesn’t understand modern conservatism at all, doesn’t know what they’re trying to conserve, and doesn’t make mention of constitutional rights or limited government. But at least he’s recognized how Social Justice Warriors are poisoning the field.
  • “Alabama ACLU sues government, claiming pro-Muslim discrimination.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Are Austin’s red light cameras illegal?
  • The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire.
  • Newly hired woman explains how she got screwed out of her paycheck by a Silicon Valley startup. She also ignored several early warning signs…
  • Great story from Charles James II on how he made the Texans. “If you need a story to give you hope, I want you to lean on mine. As long as your most valuable measurable is your work ethic, there’s no reason you can’t be successful at whatever you wish to do.”
  • “Everyone was loving Montreal’s family-friendly puppet festival until the prison rape part.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Looks like your creepy Halloween stories are starting a little early this year: “At the edge of dark, dark woods in South Carolina, children have been telling adults that a group of clowns have been trying to lure them into the cluster of trees. They say the clowns live deep in the woods, near a house by a pond.” (Hat tip: Althouse.)
  • Workers tear up sidewalk to free a dog. With heart-tugging photo.
  • Abbott Comes Out For Stronger Privacy Laws, Open Carry, Property Rights to Your Own DNA

    Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

    Texas Attorney General and 2014 Gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott unveiled a number of “We the People” policy initiatives last night at the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party geared toward strengthening the rights of individuals against the power of the state. I was on a teleconference with Abbott Sunday in which he previewed the policies to bloggers with the caveat we’d wait until after the speech to talk about them.

    The in-depth document is here.

    Taken individually, some may seem like welcome, small-ball approaches to protecting individuals from various avenues of government overreach. Taken together, they constitute an interesting, possibly far-reaching template for guaranteeing individual rights, and give Abbott a serious claim to being not only a small government conservative, but one favoring individual rights over the convenience of big business as well.

    The brief overview of Abbott’s proposals:

    1. Recognize a property right in one’s own DNA.
    2. Make state agencies, before selling database information, acquire the consent of any individual whose data is to be released.
    3. Prohibit data resale and anonymous purchasing by third parties.
    4. Prohibit the use of cross-referencing techniques to identify individuals whose data is used as a larger set of information in an online database.
    5. Require disclosure by all legislators, statewide elected officials, and gubernatorial appointees of any contract, subcontract, or paid relationship with a public entity, including the state and political subdivisions, held by those individuals or their spouses. Violation of this requirement would be a Class A Misdemeanor.
    6. Prohibit legislators from voting on legislation from which they may financially benefit by closing loopholes in the Texas Government Code, and providing options for both criminal and civil suit to ensure the enforcement of these provisions.
    7. Prohibit the use of tax dollars for the purpose of engaging a registered lobbyist to lobby on the behalf of a school district or the board or association thereof.
    8. Prohibit legislators and statewide elected officials who are licensed by the State Bar of Texas from earning referral fees or receiving any benefit from legal referral. Violation of this requirement would be a Class A Misdemeanor.
    9. Amend the Texas Election Code to require quarterly reporting of campaign financial data by legislators, statewide elected officials, and political action committees.
    10. Within the last 30 days before an election, impose a requirement that no funds received from a single person or entity above $5,000 may be expended by a campaign or political action committee until those funds have been reported to the Texas Ethics Commission and posted on the campaign or political action committee website.
    11. Allow voters in counties and municipalities the option to repeal red light camera ordinances and operations by voter-initiated referendum.
    12. Allow CHL holders to openly carry handguns.
    13. Allow CHL holders to carry weapons on campus at institutions of higher education, subject to appropriate limits, at the option of the boards of regents of public institutions of higher education, and the internal decision-making of private institutions of higher education.
    14. Texas should prohibit the state government from enacting a “healthcare exchange” under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

    15. Pass a state law providing that state resources shall not be expended and state personnel shall not be employed in enforcing or implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

    No Republican is going to object to the anti-ObamaCare plank.

    I predict that the red light camera plank will be profoundly popular across party lines.

    The Open Carry plank is a bold Second Amendment statement on Abbott’s part, considering he’s not facing any serious primary opposition. It might also lure Wendy Davis into pumping up the volume on her opposition to gun control, which will no doubt endear her to no Texas outside he far left-wing base.

    Abbott’s plank on property rights to your own DNA is the plank with the last immediate effect and possibly the most profound long-term consequences.

    This is just a few preliminary impressions. I want to give the document another going-over and contemplate the implications.

    Houston Voters: Get Rid of Red Light Cameras. Judge: Not So Fast

    Saturday, November 27th, 2010

    Judge Lynn Hughes has blocked Houston from taking down their red light cameras, pending litigation from vendor American Traffic Solutions. This is after voters voted to have them taken down.

    I previously covered Houston’s decision to take down red light cameras here.

    Houston Redlight Cameras Coming Down Monday

    Friday, November 12th, 2010

    In the “old news is so exciting” department, Houston voters got rid of red light cameras in last week’s election. Well, voted them down, anyway. The usual red light sycophants were saying they couldn’t possibly shut them down until March, due to a 120 day notice contract with (yep, you guessed it) American Traffic Solutions, who you may remember from such hits as “We’re creating Astroturf PACs to keep us rolling in dough.”

    (Here’s a hint: No city should set up red light cameras in the first place, since they create more accidents than they prevent, but if you do, how about adding a clause saying “Contract immediately void upon rejection by the voters?”)

    However, this time the story has a happy ending: City Hall ordered the plug pulled on the cameras by 10 AM this coming Monday (November 15).

    Every time voters get a chance to actually vote on the issue, red light cameras are defeated. Sadly, many local politicians still think its more important to line the city’s pockets (or maybe their own) than paying attention to the wishes of actual voters. Maybe with enough defeats like this, the whole red light camera scam will be pulled down for good.

    I’d previously pointed out College Station voters getting rid of red light cameras.

    More Red Light Camera Follies (Chicago Edition)

    Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

    Chicago installed red light cameras in 2007. As always, accidents promptly increased, just as they have everywhere else they’ve been installed.

    It’s tempting to wonder when officials will figure out that red light cameras harm more than they help, but it would be false. Officials know, they just don’t care. It’s not about saving lives, it’s about making money.

    College Station Red Light Followup

    Friday, November 13th, 2009

    TXGunGeek posted this link to his blog to my two recent red light camera posts, and I thought it was important enough to bring up in a separate post.

    A restraining order has been filed to prevent College Station from removing the red light cameras, ostensibly over the question of whether the issue got on the ballot as an “initiative” or as a “referendum.” Who filed the lawsuit? Well, by an amazing coincidence, it’s been filed by the law firm that did work for the pro-red light camera PAC American Traffic Solutions used as a front group.

    Golly, what are the odds?

    So there’s another reason to avoid red light cameras. In addition to causing accidents and transferring money from taxpayers to government, they’re also a gateway drug for deeper corruption of bureaucrats and elected officials.