Posts Tagged ‘Sarah Hoyt’

LinkSwarm for October 22, 2021

Friday, October 22nd, 2021

Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! Manchin stands firm, Psaki drips with contempt, #NeverTrump and #BlackLivesMatter share a sugar daddy, and “Let’s Go Brandon” pops up everywhere.

  • It’s suddenly beginning to dawn on Democrats that Manchin means it.

    Joe Manchin means what he says. Democrats and the media may not grasp this as it happens so rarely in Washington, and neither group has included that in its calculations. However, that reality keeps getting clearer and clearer, and the Punchbowl crew warn Democrats to figure it out — fast:

    Manchin has been remarkably consistent, and all the major media outlets have reported it time and time again. If you’re surprised by what Manchin is saying now, maybe you’ve been really busy, tied up on other endeavors and haven’t listened to or read what he’s said. That’s understandable. Life moves pretty fast.

    But if you have listened to Manchin and you’re still surprised by or enraged at his positions, that may be because you’re irrationally hopeful he will change his beliefs, or you’re engaging in wishful and likely unrealistic thinking. Maybe you’re just listening to what you want to hear. But don’t worry, you aren’t alone. Half of official Washington has decided that they’re going to ignore what Manchin says and believe he has a secret set of beliefs he’s waiting to unveil.

    Here’s what you have to understand about Manchin: He says what he means. When he gets heavy pressure from the left, it helps him back home.

    Here’s the reality: Joe Manchin is a filibuster-supporting conservative Democrat who is also an ardent supporter of coal, skeptical of big government and massive spending packages. He never pretends otherwise. Let’s all stop acting surprised when he says the same thing for the umpteenth time.

    No kidding. That’s always been the reality, right along with the reality of an evenly split Senate. One would think that Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer would have put those two realities together and realize that launching a massive progressive-agenda reconciliation bill would have been a no-sale from the very beginning. Up to now, Democrats seem to have talked themselves into a fantasy that Manchin was just looking for a deal, or that they could pressure him into folding.

    Now that neither approach has worked — so far, anyway — The Hill reports that Democrats have begun to panic:

    Democrats are facing growing headaches over their sweeping social spending bill as they struggle to show momentum ahead of an end-of-the-month deadline.

    President Biden will meet with groups of moderates and progressives on Tuesday, and he’s facing pressure from some in his party to take a tighter rein on the talks.

    Instead of narrowing their differences, Democrats are dealing with a near constant whack-a-mole of new problems in recent days ranging from climate provisions and child care to increasingly intense infighting between moderates and progressives.

    The “whack-a-mole” is also a product of Democratic fantasy. They larded up the reconciliation bill with the entire progressive wish-list agenda, and as those items get attention, they also draw opposition. This omnibus approach to the hobby-horse list from the Bernie Sanders wing might have worked if Democrats had a clear and significant majority in each chamber of Congress, or if they had worked out the details with Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema beforehand. Biden doesn’t have the former and didn’t do any work on the latter, which is why Democrats are playing “whack-a-mole” now.

    Now, as The Hill reports separately, Manchin’s entirely predictable opposition to Green New Deal-esque legislation threatens to torpedo Biden’s entire agenda:

    The hard left is so used to the MSM pandering to their delusions of popularity that cold, hard reality always comes as something of a shock to them. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • In West Virginia, Biden is at 76% disapproval vs. 19% approval. What sort of leverage can Biden exert on Manchin? (Hat tip: Jim Gerghaty.)
  • Senate Republicans successfully filibuster Democrats’ voting fraud bill. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Evidently Commie Girl isn’t a popular choice to be Comptroller of the Currency.

    Unsurprisingly, some influential Senate Democrats are getting cold feet about the prospect of President Biden nominating Saule Omarova to lead the OCC. The Cornell law professor educated in the USSR who has proposed that the Fed take over most retail banking activities from the private sector (which a Fedcoin – or ZuckCoin – just might help it to do) while wholeheartedly supporting the progressives’ “Green New Deal” agenda.

    This has, understandably, made many in both Congress, and the industry she is about to regulate, uncomfortable.

    Various Omarova commie policy proposals we’ve previously covered snipped.

    According to CNBC’s main source (who remains anonymous) is that these Senators have already shared their misgivings with President Biden.

    Her selection, coupled with her views on how to overhaul the US banking system, prompted several Senate Democrats or their staff to complain to the White House and suggest that the president’s choice will be tough to support on Capitol Hill, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    This person declined to be named in order to speak openly about private discussions between the White House and Senate offices.

    Others surrounding the OCC nomination process said a handful of moderate Democrats harbor reservations about Omarova and her aspirations to “end banking as we know it,” as she suggested in a Vanderbilt Law Review article.

    Those people cautioned that skeptical senators likely haven’t made a final decision yet but are leaning against her candidacy.

  • Why UK coronavirus death statistics can’t be trusted:

  • “Coronavirus always mutational drift at a steady rate.”

    “Just from a science point of view it doesn’t make sense.”

  • Speaking of untrustworthy coronavirus information, Joe Rogan slams Google:

  • Speaking of Google, supposedly they’re purging “Let’s Go Brandon” videos from YouTube, so let’s see how long until they ban this:

    And this evidently topped iTunes’ rap charts:

  • Virginia Tech is going to limit attendance to crack down on “Fuck Joe Biden” chants.
  • Despite having a vaccine, Putin has given Russian workers a week off due to soaring Flu Manchu cases.
  • In-N-Out Burgers closes it’s Fan Francisco store after refusing to become the city’s vaccine police.
  • Just in case it was still unclear to , yes, the National Institute of Health did fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite Anthony Fauci swearing up and down otherwise.
  • Lileks on Comrade Psaki and “needs“:

    It’s not just the vexation you get when a lot of people are crammed into one place, though. It’s imposed, by dint of not doing anything about the disorderly elements. We will not police the streets so you will step over needles. We will not clear out the encampment so you will have an inert RV fill the neighborhood with smoke when it burns. We will not do something about petty theft, so you will have to wait for the clerk to get a key. We will not confine the mentally ill, so you will be trailed for a block by someone scrabbling a hand in his pants.

    When you complain, you will be told you’re lucky not to be in the situation of the people who are causing the problems.You should be grateful you don’t have to steal Tide. You should be grateful you can afford to replace your broken stove, even though the replacement won’t come for 8 months. (It’ll be 9 next month.) I suppose that’s true, but it’s setting the bar rather low, and making the disorderly uncivil elements the baseline. Anything above that, it’s gravy.

    Revanchist running-dog lackey of the plutocratic hegemony that I am, I am suspicious when the state determintes your needs and justifies their construction. You don’t need the treadmill is you don’t need 14 varities of ice cream is you don’t need that car is you don’t need that hamburger when there’s bug protein is you don’t need fast access to unprotected detergent is you don’t need to go to that wedding is you don’t need . . . this. That. The other thing. And it is churlish of you to think you need this when (insert aching never-solved non-analogous problem that still exists despite decades of expenditures here).

    Ever seen the old Soviet ads? They’re lovely. They didn’t have 15 different brands. They just had a nice ad for marmalade, in general. No confusion. Yes, but did they actually produce any marmalade? Of course! But if there wasn’t any marmalade, because the wreckers and kulaks had prevented the fufillment of the Five-Year Fruit Spread Goals, everyone shared the experience. There was Marmalade Equity. And Comrade Brezhnev had his toast dry? He may have had some at diplomatic occasions, where it was expected.

    What you might take away from the exchange above is this: the press secretary has access to a treadmill, and it works, and if it doesn’t, there are ten others in a row just like it. And membership in the fitness club comes with the job.

  • And never forget that she, and the mandarins she represents, hate you.

    This is what Trump’s critics meant when they said we needed to restore “civility” to the White House: they meant we need the right kind of disdain for the right kinds of people, expressed in the right kinds of ways. Gone are the mean tweets, the off-color jokes, the rough pugilism. Now instead we have Jen Psaki, sneering avatar of an aristocracy that regards working Americans as less than dirt. People are straining to put food on the table and gas in their cars; they increasingly fail to see the point in going to work at all. Psaki’s response is that of the anointed class she represents: shut up and take it.

    We are ruled over by a cabal of solipsists who feel outraged that the regressive pigs in flyover country express any opinions at all—about the fruits of their labor, about the security of their nation, about the health of their bodies. Their response is that we should “lower expectations” for affordable food, “welcome competition” from a rapidly arming China, and “follow the advice of health experts” on pain of unemployment.

    Who can forget the treacly grin with which Psaki invited us to “stay tuned” for Biden’s forthcoming vaccine decree? She delights in her role, which is to act out the revenge fantasies of all who felt wounded in 2016 by the mere suggestion that their virtue is less than immaculate. We have to reckon with the fact that Psaki, loathsome though she may be, is doing her job exactly as intended. Her affronts are outrageous only to the people who already hate her: from her target audience they elicit shouts of “YAS Kween” and “drag him!” She is not slipping up when she insults your intelligence and riles up your countrymen against you, when she lies unblinkingly out in the open and defies you to do anything about it. That is her job, and she is good at it. She is doing exactly what she was put there to do.

    No one with a spine should take instruction on “civility” from such a feckless cretin or anyone who enjoys her act. If we are to re-learn civic excellence, it will not be from a movement whose moral framework consists of slander and self-satisfaction. Remember that in 2022 and 2024 when they call you a fascist or a bigot or a domestic terrorist or whatever: these are people who think Jen Psaki is a good person. Their opinion about your morals literally doesn’t matter at all.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Heh:

  • “Never Trumpers and Black Lives Matter Have the Same Backer.”

    The press releases went out on schedule and the media rewrote them into news stories. A group of “principled” Republicans was going to fundraise to support Democrat congressmen.

    The stories rolled out on schedule from different media outlets while appearing nearly identical. And the real story, as usual, was not what was on the page, but what had been deliberately left out. Reuters described the Renew America Movement as a group of Never Trump Republicans “whose leadership includes former Republican Governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Bill Weld of Massachusetts.” Hardly a single story mentioned the actual leaders.

    The Renew America Movement was co-founded by Evan McMullin (pictured above) and his running mate Mindy Finn. Its national political director, Joel Searby, who is quoted in the media’s writeups, was the chief strategist for the McMullin campaign. Donations to RAM go through Stand Up Republic, which is the anti-Trump group that McMullin and Finn originally set up. The press release for the new pro-Democrat campaign even came from Stand Up Republic. The media actually had to work not to mention McMullin or Stand Up Republic in its stories about the RAM campaign.

    And the media did a fine job of lying by omission to the public in order to elect Democrats.

    Snip.

    Stand Up Republic had scored $800,000 from Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Voice and $750,000 from the Hewlett Foundation. Omidyar, a Franco-Persian billionaire, is the richest man in Hawaii and the digital version of George Soros. His projects include the pro-terror site, The Intercept, and a plan to “Reimagine Capitalism”. Hewlett is a more conventional leftist setup.

    The “principled” Never Trumper network championing “moderates” to “heal our country” is actually backed by the same money as Black Lives Matter radicals and racists.

    The Hewlett Foundation is one of the backers of the Democracy Frontlines Fund which poured tens of millions into a variety of black nationalist groups including the Movement for Black Lives.

    The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a BLM umbrella group which is backed by billion-dollar leftist foundations like the Ford Foundation. Considering its wealthy anti-Israel backers, it’s unsurprising that M4BL has embraced the antisemitic BDS movement, falsely accused Israel of genocide, and tried to oust any Jewish groups that wouldn’t join them in destroying Israel.

    The Omidyar Network promised last year that it was committing $500,000 to “racial justice” and focusing on 5 groups including the Movement for Black Lives. It also couldn’t let the anniversary of September 11 pass without announcing a joint initiative with Soros, the Ford Foundation, and other leftists to pour money into Islamic groups fighting against America’s counterterrorism.

    Omidyar is also the sugar daddy of the Never Trumpers, funding The Bulwark together with the Hewlett Foundation. Omidyar’s Democracy Fund has provided $1.6 million to Bill Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together. It’s all just Democrats funding Democrats… together.

    (Hat tip: R. S. McCain.)

  • Did Southwest Airlines blink on firing employees over vaccine mandates?
  • Biden channels his inner Cornholio:

  • Fun with Slow Joe:

  • Sarah Hoyt is not impressed by arguments about the inevitability of communism:

    Yeah. Okay, the commies got a plan. That is sort of their one and only given strength. They plan, they organize, they work towards the world’s stupidest things, but they do it TOGETHER. (Eh, mostly.)

    But to believe it’s working you’d have to forget everything from the collapse of the Soviet Union (THEY surely try to forget it) to the repeated smacks on the nose they have got in America, to the fact many of you don’t seem to know that the only reason that the Soviet Union survived that long was because we FED THEM. (Seriously. We should give all those who lost relatives to the Soviet Union and its depredations, including the poor bastards in Africa destroyed by Russia’s Cuban mercenaries a chance to disinter FDR’s corpse and kick it around. It’s no more than a very mild form of justice.)

    Communism is in fact an idea so stupid that only intellectuals can believe it and try to apply it. Fortunately for them they do attract most intellectuals with the siren song of “because you’re smarter than other people, you see this.”

    Snip.

    Orwell was a believer, even if a heretic. As an adult, read the damn thing and tell me it’s in the least likely.

    Not only would it fall apart within years — if not weeks — because no one can manage a large economy well enough for it to survive that long (yeah, China. Sure buddy. If you think China is working out that well, you haven’t looked closely), but it could never extend to the whole world, or everyone would starve and die out.

    The other thing is that it’s 1940s tech extended indefinitely. This might work — eh, sort of — under really tightly controlled regimes, but sooner or letter a clever monkey (ape, d*amn it. We’re apes) throws a wrench in. The internet is a big wrench, and their attempts to put the genie back in the bottle have been markedly unsuccessful. But it doesn’t take the internet. The Soviet Union was brought down by typewriters and copiers.

  • Alec Baldwin kills a cast member of the movie he’s shooting. It may not have been his fault.
  • “Minnesota Hospital Shuts Down ER and Urgent Care Amid Nurse Strike.” That’s Allina Health in Plymouth.
  • The Washington Post wants us to invade Haiti. Remember when it was Republicans that were accused of being the warmongers?
  • Fauci flops, but the industry tries to hide it. ” IMDB just got caught with its pants down. Social media is noticing that they changed the Fauci film 1.6 audience score to 5.8, but they neglected to change the demographic data or the raw distribution, so it looks like they just faked the top-line number.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “DC assistant chief: I was told “have an abortion or be fired.” “D.C. Assistant Police Chief Chanel Dickerson…said when she became pregnant as a young police cadet, she was told she had to have an abortion to keep her job.”
  • Boom:

  • New evidence suggests the Norse were in Newfoundland in 1021.
  • Remember all the fawning coverage that former Democratic congresswoman Katie “Naked Bong Hits” Hill received despite banging a staffer? Yeah, it turns out that one of the journalists giving her that fawning coverage, Alex Thomas, was banging her too. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Is the most dangerous stretch of water in the world a three foot wide stream in Yorkshire?
  • Here’s a chance to buy the very earliest Apple Macintosh prototype ever offered at auction, this one with the unreliable, abandoned 5 1/4″ “Twiggy” drive, only a few prototypes of which exist.
  • “Panic At White House As All The Stores Are Out Of Depends.”
  • An oldie but a goodie: Living the dream:

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    Election Fraud Update for November 9, 2020

    Monday, November 9th, 2020

    I trust you saw my Benford’s Law post from yesterday. Here’s a roundup of current election fraud news:

  • A state of play thread.

    Read the whole thread.

  • In Detroit, Republican poll watchers were prevented from carrying out their duties.
  • Evidence:

  • Undeniable mathematical evidence of voting fraud:

    In both Michigan and Wisconsin, several vote dumps occurred at approximately 4am on Wednesday morning, which showed that Joe Biden received almost 100 percent of the votes. President Trump was leading by hundreds of thousands of votes in both states as America went to sleep, and turnout in the state of Wisconsin seems to be particularly impossible.

    With absentee ballots, former vice-president Joe Biden was also up 60 points in Pennsylvania and almost 40 points in Michigan According to the New York Times. Comparably, Biden was only up single digits in absentee voting in most other battleground states. Wisconsin has not yet been reported.

    Elections officials in Michigan and Wisconsin could not explain Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s sudden and dramatic vote tally increase that occurred in both states Wednesday morning.

    When asked at a Wednesday press conference how this occurred, Michigan Department of State spokesperson Aneta Kiersnowski told reporters “We cannot speculate as to why the results lean one way or another.”

    This is particularly concerning considering republicans led in mail-in ballots requested and mail-in and in-person ballots returned leading up to and at the start of election day.

    According to NBC News on election day before the polls opened, In Michigan, Republicans led 41% to 39% in Mail-in Ballots requested. Republicans also led 42% to 39% with Mail-in and in-person ballots returned.

    In Wisconsin on election day before the polls opened, Republicans led Mail-in Ballots requested 43% to 35%, and Mail-in and early in-person ballots returned 43% to 35%. Almost ALL of the ballots found, while most in the country were sleeping, after they officials stated they would stop counting, were for Joe Biden.

    
    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Detroit Democrats evidently pulled out all the stops in the fraud machine:

  • Thread on the security deficiencies in the “Dominion” voting software used in so many states:

    Read the whole thread, as there are a lot of attack surfaces there….

  • Rudy Giuliani claims there’s enough evidence to change the outcome, and it will all come out in court. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • A list of the lawsuits the Trump team has filed over election fraud.
  • Even if Democrats make their presidential fraud stick, it came at a high price:

    But even if Trump does lose, it may be a blessing in disguise for Republicans.

    The result has crushed Democratic expectations of a clean sweep. It wasn’t a landslide win against an unpopular president, as we had been told so confidently for months.

    If Biden wins, it will be by the narrowest margin.

    And all the hundreds of millions spent on retaking the Senate came to nothing, with the Republicans looking to hold onto their lead. The top targets, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey ­Graham, survived easily.

    The fatal miscalculations of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in cynically refusing to negotiate on the latest stimulus bill have cost the Democrats dearly in the House, where they have gone backward by at least six seats. They did not manage to get rid of a single Republican. So much for the blue wave.

    The failure means that in 2022, the House is more likely to revert to Republican control, setting up a lame-duck presidency.

    The Democrats won’t be able to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College or make DC and Puerto Rico states. They will struggle to impose the Green New Deal.

    Unfortunately, nothing can be done to stop a President Biden-Harris repeat of the geopolitical errors of the Obama presidency, such as appeasing China and Iran’s mullahs and signing onto the Paris climate accord.

    But a President Biden in cognitive decline will sooner or later be replaced by his unpopular, untested vice president, Kamala Harris.

    Saddled with a recession and policies that will only exacerbate economic decline, the next four years will hobble Democrats.

  • Sarah Hoyt says not to panic:

    They’re scared.

    Oh, not the sheep on the streets. They fell for it, just like they fell for “two million dead from covid.” But the higher-ups, they’re scared.

    Years ago, during the ’04 election, a friend told me the Democrats always get louder and more triumphalist when they’re losing. I’ve observed this is true, since then.

    So, step down from the ledge. Go take a shower. Have some real food. Eat a vegetable. Ease up on the coffee. Go for a walk.

    And don’t fall for the blue smokescreen

  • “In Apparent Glitch, Voting Machines Hunt Down And Murder Trump Supporters.” “This is just a small, routine error, and we are looking into it,” said one official. “There’s nothing to be concerned about. These kinds of small mistakes happen from time to time, and it will be corrected soon.”

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections | 5 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for October 11, 2019

    Friday, October 11th, 2019

    Hooray! Today we’re finally getting fall!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military | No Comments »

    Sad Puppies, If I Must

    Thursday, April 9th, 2015

    Being at the intersection of several overlapping roles of interest on the Venn diagram (science fiction writer, once-upon-a-time Hugo nominee, Social Justice Warrior mob victim, and conservative blogger), I suppose I have a one-eyed-man-in-the-land-of-the-blind duty to talk about the Sad Puppies Hugo Campaign now that it’s a major story.

    For those unfamiliar with them, the Hugo Awards are given out at the World Science Fiction Convention and voted on by the membership. Both Supporting and Attending members can vote for Hugos.

    The Sad Puppies are a group of science fiction fans lead by Larry Correia, author of the popular Monster Hunter series of books, and writer Brad Torgersen, to promote a slate of writers for the Hugo Awards for two reasons: To counter the Social Justice Warrior influence that has increasingly roiled science fiction, and to break up perceived cabal of the Same Old People getting nominated for the same awards every year largely at the behest of a small crowd of science fiction elites. (This post will largely address only the first point.) This year the Sad Puppies were wildly successful at getting most of their slate nominated for Hugos.

    For the last several years, a vocal minority of Social Justice Warriors has wreaked havoc on the fabric of the science fiction community. Taking their clues from the Alinskyite “direct action” tactics of far-left political activists, they’ve carried out a virulent campaign against anyone unwilling to toe the political correct line on victimhood identity politics. Their tactics have included doxxing, online mobbings, demands people be fired from their day jobs for non-PC transgressions, numerous calls for censorship, demands that only politically correct language be used when it comes to race, sex, ethnicity, or anything to do with Muslims, and follow-up demands for “official policies” and “committees” to enshrine their extremists demands as institutional law.

    Let me provide a few examples. They went after:

  • Norman Spinrad, for pointing out that, strictly speaking, Octavia Butler was no more African than Mike Resnick was. (It’s a shame that Butler, a first-rate writer capable of considerable subtlety and nuance, has been posthumously adopted as the totem of Social Justice Warriors evidently incapable of either.) Several other writers (including the now-late Jay Lake) were viciously attacked for coming to Spinrad’s defense and saying that white writers could, in fact, successfully write about other races and cultures.
  • They attacked Orson Scott Card for opposing gay marriage, and for answering (truthfully) that the Mormon Church considers homosexual acts sinful.
  • They forced WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention, to disinvite Elizabeth Moon as Guest of Honor (something that’s almost never done in the field) over the “crime” of penning an essay mildly critical of Islam and the planned Ground Zero Mosque.
  • They campaigned to get the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (an organization I formerly belonged to for many years) to institute a “sexual harassment policy“, even though SFWA (last I checked) only had one paid employee and no formal offices. Evidently they believe writers are such shirking violets they are unable to fend off unwanted advances with the time-honored tactics of saying “No” and the occasional slap.
  • Speaking of which, the mob got a Tor editor fired for “sexual harassment,” the nature of which has never (as far as I can tell) been elucidated, or elucidated as something so trivial that it would be laughed out of any court.
  • They got Locus Online, the electronic extension of the science fiction news magazine, to fire me from my part-time gig of reviewing movies on the site (frequently in collaboration with Howard Waldrop) because I made fun of WisCon over the Moon flap in an April Fools piece, which they convinced Locus‘s editor to take down. Because there’s nothing that refutes the image of Social justice Warriors as dour, humorless, thin-skinned avatars of political correctness with authoritarian tendencies like forcing a magazine to take down an April Fools piece.
  • They mobbed Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg for having the unmitigated gall to call 1950s SF editor Bea Mahaffrey “beautiful” (which she was) in the course of noting that was a big reason the wives of many SF writers started attending SF social functions. (Of course, what really riled up the SJW set was Resnick and Malzberg having the sheer gall to defend themselves rather than offering up the standard groveling apology.)
  • They got British comedian Jonathon Ross to resign from hosting the Hugo Award ceremony at the London Worldcon because some of his jokes might have been politically incorrect.

    • This is not an exhaustive list. Most of the people they have gone after (Spinrad, Malzberg, Moon) are political liberals. Science Fiction fandom has gone from a big, happy, occasionally fractious family where a far lefty like Harlan Ellison and a far righty like Jerry Pournelle could maintain friendships despite sharp political differences to one where Social Justice Warriors have injected constant discord into the community.

    To see an example of the havoc wrought by just one Social Justice Warrior, read this lengthy essay by writer Laura Mixon on Benjanun Sriduangkaew, AKA Requires Hate, AKA Winterfox. (When reading it, however, note that pretty much all the tactics described have been used by other Social Justice Warriors, and that many of the people chiming in to support Mixon only spoke up when Requires Hate went after people on the far left and/or those with victimhood identity politics credentials.)

    More recently Social Justice Warriors have succeeded in bloc voting to get very minor writers with SJW/victimhood credentials onto the Hugo ballot. It’s at this point that Larry Correia and others started the Sad Puppies campaign, so I’ll let him provide the background:

    For those of you just joining us, Sad Puppies 3 was a campaign to get talented, worthy, deserving authors who would normally never have a chance nominated for the supposedly prestigious Hugo awards.

    I started this campaign a few years ago because I believed that the awards were politically biased, and dominated by a few insider cliques. Authors who didn’t belong to these groups or failed to appease them politically were shunned. When I said this in public, I was called a liar, and told that the Hugos represented all of fandom and that the awards were strictly about quality. I said that if authors with “unapproved” politics were to get nominations, the quality of the work would be irrelevant, and the insider cliques would do everything in their power to sabotage that person. Again, I was called a liar, so I set out to prove my point.

    Snip.

    Basically, I did what the other side had been doing for years, only in public and with the wrong kind of fans, and everything unfolded just like I predicted it would. Especially vehement was the contingent of fandom that I took to calling Social Justice Warriors. This may offend the No Labels crowd, but oh well, it is what it is. The name has stuck in our culture.

    Snip.

    [Sad Puppies 3] is actually extremely politically diverse. That’s because this time our slate of suggestions was put together by a bigger group of authors and fans, and since Brad was running the show and trying to be all about getting recognition for quality, deserving authors, their personal beliefs were of no concern. Don’t take my word for it. Go through our list of nominees for yourself. You’ll find that we have liberals, conservatives, moderates, and question marks who’ve kept their politics to themselves.

    Indeed, the people fighting the Social Justice Warriors in science fiction are far more politically diverse than their exclusively far-left enemies. Will Shetterly, author of the invaluable Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage blog, is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist.

    Here’s the thing. This massive upheaval wouldn’t have ever happened if the moderates had done something years ago, but they didn’t. I can’t really say I blame them though. If they took a stand against the perpetually outraged crowd, they risked their career and their reputation. We’re talking about the same angry, entitled twitter mobs that ran off a famous comedian because he might tell a fat joke in the future. Those mobs are quick to outrage, slow to reason, and will turn on their allies, because attacking is what they are programmed to do. And the moderates—those who will admit it—are terrified of ending up on the wrong end of a witch hunt.

    Now it is okay to rail against my people for doing what the other side has done in the past, because we’re not going to sabotage anyone’s career or slander you. We actually believe in the concept of free speech and free expression.

    We’re getting condemned for bringing politics into the awards, but we all know politics have been in the awards for a long time. We just did it openly.

    I never expected us to sweep the awards. Frankly, I was shocked by the results. I didn’t realize just how many regular fans had been turned off for so long.

    Now the moderates are telling us we did it wrong, or telling us what we should have done better, but the thing is at least we did something.

    Correia is right. If the “good liberals” in the science fiction community want to know who brought about the current situation, they should look in the mirror. They were the ones who stood on the sidelines and remained silent while the likes of Spinrad, Moon and Malzberg were being smeared as “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobes,” etc. for not toeing the Social Justice Warrior line. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

    The Social Justice Warrior reaction to the success of the Sad Puppies slate was swift, vicious, and unreasonable, with a number of MSM outlets (most of whom have probably never printed a single word about the Hugo Awards before) writing stories condemning Sad Puppies, all parroting the same SJW line. Perhaps the worst example came from Isabella Biedenharn in Entertainment Weekly, which started out “The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards.” Not only was demonstrably false (as proven by the very links Biedenharn included in her story), it was so potentially libelous that Entertainment Weekly issued a correction, and Biedenharn deleted her entire Twitter account.

    And as a bonus, she essentially accused Brad Torgersen, a man with a black wife and a mixed-race child, of being a white supremacist.

    Says Torgersen: “Political correctness has gone to a place of destructive take-no-prisoners soul tyranny that could very well and permanently wreck this field; unless good men and women of conscience decide to stand up.”

    And this is why the Sad Puppies campaign is important. The Social Justice Warriors have been rampaging through the genre for years now, wrecking civil discourse, marginalizing institutions and destroying the professional lives of those who disagreed with them. But no one stood up to them in an organized, coordinated way until the Sad Puppies.

    Says one long-time liberal science fiction professional who was not associated with Sad Puppies: “This whole toxic mess has sickened me immeasurably, almost making me feel as if I had wasted my life by ever loving science fiction…All I can say is that the SPs have conducted themselves with humor, dignity and style, while the SJWs have sunk to new lows of hatred and pettiness and blind ignorance. They truly are a despicable cult.” And a lot of science fiction professionals who aren’t part of the Sad Puppies (many of whom emailed me privately over WisCon) feel the same way, but were just too intimidated to fight back.

    Now people of good will in science fiction, from all across the political spectrum, are finally standing up and saying “Enough!”

    That’s what the Sad Puppies Hugo campaign is about.

    Additional thoughts from:

  • Will Shetterly
  • Sarah Hoyt
  • Robert Tracinski
  • David French in National Review

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 12 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for March 20, 2012

    Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

    Had a busy day working and keeping track of contractors laying sod in my back yard, so here’s another LinkSwarm:

  • Two ads, one saying people should reject Catholicism, one saying they should reject Islam. Guess which one The New York Times refused to run.
  • “General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, the head of President Obama’s Jobs Board, plans to vote for Mitt Romney.”
  • The decline in culture at Goldman Sachs: “Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.”
  • “It appears that when he’s not busy killing un-born babies, he might like to jerk off while watching little boys play baseball”.
  • Sarah Hoyt on the myth of the war against women: “War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females. War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education…If this is war it is war on men…If you truly believe refusing to force employers to pay for birth control is a war on women, then you are fragile little flowers who deserve to experience life practically anywhere else in the world.”
  • As Matt Dowling notes, it’s not a war on women, it’s a war on big government.
  • From Ace comes word that Nurse Bloomberg has outlawed food donations to the homeless that’s too high in fat and salt. If you put this in a Saturday Night Live parody, people would criticize it as too unbelievable…
  • In shocking news, liberal writer Froma Harrop, who appears to have spent all her life in and around New York City, isn’t worried about high gas prices. Imagine my shock. And if that name sounds familiar, there’s a reason:

    • Up Real Soon Now: Hopefully an interview with another major Texas Senate candidate…

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    Posted in Democrats, Economics, Media Watch | No Comments »