Archive for the ‘Crime’ Category
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.
Tags:Bloods, Border Controls, Boris Yeltsin, China, CNN, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Department of Justice, Donald Trump, drone, environmentalism, F-35, feminists, Five Star Movement, Foreign Policy, Greenland, Gregory Benford, Greta Thunberg, Guns, Hezbollah, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Rogan, Kurt Schlichter, Los Angeles, Marvin Minsky, Media Watch, Military, Northern League (Italy), Obama, oil industry, public housing, red light cameras, science, Southern Poverty Law Center, Soviet Union, Tawanna Hilliard, Texas, WeWork
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 20th, 2019
This isn’t good:
Early on August 16, a total of 23 local government organizations in Texas were hit by a coordinated ransomware attack. The type of ransomware has not been revealed, and Texas officials asserted that no state networks were compromised in the attack.
A spokesman for the Texas Department of Information Resources (TDIR) told Ars that authorities are not ready to reveal the names of the entities affected, nor other details of the attack. State and federal agencies are in the midst of a response, and TDIR did not have information on whether any of the affected governmental organizations had chosen to pay the ransom.
But the TDIR did reveal that the ransomware came from a single source. “At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor,” a spokesperson said. “Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.”
Texas Department of Information Resources has more information:
On the morning of August 16, 2019, more than 20 entities in Texas reported a ransomware attack. The majority of these entities were smaller local governments.
Later that morning, the State Operations Center (SOC) was activated with a day and night shift.
At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor.
Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.
It appears all entities that were actually or potentially impacted have been identified and notified.
Twenty-three entities have been confirmed as impacted.
Responders are actively working with these entities to bring their systems back online.
The State of Texas systems and networks have not been impacted.
The following agencies are supporting this incident:
- Texas Department of Information Resources
- Texas Division of Emergency Management
- Texas Military Department
- The Texas A&M University System’s Security Operations Center/Critical Incident Response Team
- Texas Department of Public Safety
- Computer Information Technology and Electronic Crime (CITEC) Unit
Cybersecurity
- Intelligence and Counter Terrorism
- Texas Public Utility Commission
- Department of Homeland Security
- Federal Bureau of Investigation – Cyber
- Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Other Federal cybersecurity partners
And in convenient retweetable form:
Consider this yet another reminder to use strong passwords you can remember, to backup all your files (especially all your important files) regularly, update your virus definitions and security patches regularly (between starting and publishing this piece, I updated both Firefox and macOS), and to never open an email attachment or click on a link unless you’re absolutely sure you know who it’s from.
Tags:Crime, cyberwarfare, data security, Internet, Texas
Posted in Crime, Texas | No Comments »
Sunday, August 18th, 2019
Wonder where Austin’s “Let the homeless do whatever they want, wherever they want, except in front of the city council building” plans lead to? Watch this.
(Crap, just before I clicked publish on this, this Tweeter set their account to private. It was a video of a Sacramento business owner talking passionately about how she was leaving because she had gotten tired of removing the needles and washing the poo and pee off the sidewalk in front of her business every day, and how the patrons of her hair salon literally had to step over homeless people to get in.)
Update: Was poking around and I found an article that transcribes her statement:
A frustrated California woman took to Twitter on Friday to blast governor Gavin Newsom’s disastrous policies that have created a desperate homeless problem. The woman – who goes by @Jesus_porvida on Twitter – was clearly upset as she posted a video detailing why she may be forced to close the doors of her business.
I have had a business in downtown Sacramento for 15 yrs, a successful business. I now have to leave my place of business. I have to close my shop.
Later tweets show pictures of the woman’s shop after the most recent in a series of break-ins, a break-in that apparently was the last straw for the Sacramento are hair stylist.
I have to clean up the poop and pee off my doorstep. I have to clean up the syringes. I have to politely ask ppl who I care for – I care about the homeless – to move their tents out of the way of the door to my business. I have to fight off people who push their way into my shop that are homeless and on drugs because you won’t arrest them for drug offenses. I have to apologize to my clients as to why they can’t get into my door because there’s somebody asleep there bc they’re not getting the help they need.
I talk to police offers. They told me to contact you. They want to do something and they can’t because you changed the laws. So I wanna know what you’re gonna do for us, the ones that are unhappy. You wanna make us a sanctuary state. You wanna make it comfortable for everybody except for the ppl that work hard and have tried their hardest to get along in life and now we have to change that because of your laws.
She shredded Newsom’s “liberal ideology” as the cause for the current chaos that forced her to close the doors of her business.
While you sit in your million dollar home you don’t have to look at what we have to look at; there’s hard working people who have to deal with this on a daily basis. What are you going to do for us?
I won’t stop , the gov of CA and his liberal ideology ruined my business.. I decided to close the doors today. I can’t do it anymore and I’m irate. Sincerely , a hard working self built self employed California business owner.
And Austin is already spending $28,000 in taxpayer money for each homeless person:
Austin City Council is spending a record-high $62.7 million this year to try and solve homelessness, equivalent to giving roughly $28,000 to each homeless person in the city. But the more startling fact is that Austin officials are leading the city down the same dangerous path San Francisco has already journeyed—a path Austinites should be wary not to travel.
Before peering down the road toward Austin’s future, let’s look around for a moment at the crisis happening right now in Texas’ capital city. The homeless population is rapidly rising, up 5 percent a year for the last two years; the number of those unsheltered on the streets is the highest it has been in nearly a decade. And you may have even noticed people camping in the middle of public areas all across town, thanks to a recent decision by the city council that has spread contention throughout the community.
We already know city council’s plan to solve this whole problem is to spend a lot of money, but instead of just writing a $28,000 check to each homeless person, they’re sending pallets of tax dollars through a cash-eating maze of city administration and bureaucracy, hoping that a fraction of it eventually comes out the other side to the people on the streets.
Will that plan work? Enter San Francisco, the potential Austin-of-the-future.
If you look just past the shiny Golden Gate Bridge, you’ll see one of the worst homelessness disasters in the United States. The Bay City has recently become infamous for homeless crime, used syringes, and human feces littering the entire downtown area (the city even has a designated “Poop Patrol”).
San Francisco’s city government created a bold plan to solve everything, a plan Austin is now following: Spend lots of citizens’ money.
From 2016 to 2020, their city government will have spent over $1.5 billion on homelessness. If you do the math of that four-year spending based on the current homeless population of 9,784, that’s over $153,000 on each person.
Yet despite San Francisco’s mind-boggling payouts per person, the situation for those on the street—and the rest of the city—has only deteriorated.
Indeed, the homeless population has grown by nearly 7 percent in just the last two years (and 14 percent since 2013), with the vast majority of those new homeless being hometown folks. Oh, and the dangerous turmoil on the streets downtown has only intensified.
Here’s a piece on volunteers having to clean up the historically black Walnut Creek Cemetery because homeless people have started camping there. (Homeless people camping in cemeteries is a problem Seattle started to have after they stopped enforcing laws against homeless camping.)
Some more tweets:
It appears that the Austin City Council has finally started figuring out just how deeply they screwed up:
Austin will re-examine its new rules governing homelessness, according to a memo released Friday.
The memo sent to the City Council on behalf of Austin’s Homelessness Strategy Office says the city could abandon its idea to make space for emergency encampments in every City Council district.
The office said after meeting with the Downtown Austin Alliance, the Greater Austin Crime Commission, service providers, public safety officials and the city’s newly formed Homeless Advisory Committee, it is prepared to limit where people can camp and sit or lie down in public – as well as limit how long a person can camp or rest.
The City Council voted to scale back rules on that behavior in June, allowing people to rest or camp in public as long as they didn’t do so on city parkland, completely obstruct a sidewalk, or present a public health or safety risk to themselves or others. The decision was met with pushback from Austinites who argued the new rules allowed for more visible encampments throughout the city.
Here’s an idea: How about they just restore the ban on public camping?
Want to contact the Austin City Council? Dwight has you covered.
Tags:Austin, Austin City Council, California, Crime, homeless, Sacramento, San Francisco, Texas, video, Welfare State
Posted in Austin, Crime, Texas, video, Welfare State | 2 Comments »
Friday, August 16th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! It hit 107°F in Austin this week, but it was probably only 104° when I rode my bike. Cleared up my sinuses!
David Brock’s ShareBlue Media certainly seems to be freaking out over the Epstein “suicide,” sends out talking points to Democratic loyalists to downplay the possibility of conspiracy. Hmmmmm…
Illinois is farked.
On the same theme: 40% of Illinois education spending goes to pensions. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Trust no one.
Democrats are convinced that a wave of Republican retirements is going to help them flip Texas’ congressional delegation. Don’t count on it. “If they nominate a candidate like Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, or somebody like, God forbid, Bernie Sanders, if they nominate somebody who is extremely left of center, they’re not going to get there.”
For Democrats, filing for bankruptcy doesn’t prevent you from running for the senate. Boy, Democrats sure love nominating people who can’t even handle their own finances, much less ours.
Two illegal aliens charged with repeatedly raping an 11-year old girl.
Disillusioned liberal sees Obama as a lying tool of corporate greed. “Our political order is oriented around legitimizing only those who can claim some form of victimization. It’s why the woke stuff/white supremacy is so powerful. It’s a fundamentally anti-enlightenment model of politics.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
More on last week’s Russian nuclear accident:
United States intelligence officials have said they suspect the blast involved a prototype of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall. That is a cruise missile that Mr. Putin has boasted can reach any corner of the earth because it is partially powered by a small nuclear reactor, eliminating the usual distance limitations of conventionally fueled missiles.
As envisioned by Mr. Putin, who played animated video of the missile at a state-of-the-union speech in 2018, the Skyfall is part of a new class of weapons designed to evade American missile defenses.
Lots of Russian military superweapons turn out to be vaporware. This one turned out to be vaporizedware. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Inside the Polar Star, America’s antiquated rustbucket of an icebreaker.
Speaking of ice: President Trump contemplates buying Greenland. On the one hand, in the long run, land purchases have worked out very well for the United States. On the other, Liebensraum is bunk and we’ve got plenty of development left to do with Alaska.
New York Times editor demoted for daring to voice obvious political truths…and criticizing The Squad. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Important safety tip: Don’t use NULL for your vanity license plate.
Shorn of the music and nostalgia, Woodstock was “a field full of six-foot-deep mud laced with LSD.” Bonus: Pete Townshend kicking Abbie Hoffman’s ass. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Lessons from a “local food” scammer.
My instructions were to claim that all the produce was local, although nothing was or could be local: It was early June in northwestern New Jersey’s Kittatinny Mountains, and the produce had been shipped from warmer parts of the world to the distributor who’d sold it to my boss. But “local” was the magic word hand-painted on our signs; it was what made our customers, most of them New Yorkers driving to country vacation cottages, slam on their brakes and pull over.
For the first time in my life, I heard about the naturalness, tradition and superior flavor of New Jersey produce. “Taste-wise, nothing compares to Jersey Silver Queen,” the New Yorkers declared, clawing at ears of a fat-kerneled, North Carolina-grown supersweet hybrid, all sugar and no corn flavor, nothing like Silver Queen. They tossed the husks on the ground for me to rake up.
“Give me Jersey peaches over Georgia peaches any day.” Those were Georgia peaches they were palming to their kids, whispering, “eat up,” before the fruit had been weighed and paid for.
“I wait every year for the real Jersey tomatoes. You can’t get that country flavor in the city!” They couldn’t get it here, either: These were New Mexican beefsteaks, greased with mineral oil to an enticing sheen and petroleum fragrance. Didn’t they notice the absence of any roses-and-resin tomato-y perfume?
CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the lesser son of a greater father, gets called “Fredo” and hilarity ensues:
The Brooklyn bridge used to double as a wine storage facility.
Tags:2020 Election, Border Controls, Chris Cuomo, CNN, Crime, David Brock, Democrats, Dennis Bonnen, Elections, Empower Texans, Google, Illinois, Media Watch, Michael Quinn Sullivan, Military, New York City, New York Times, rape, Republicans, Russia, ShareBlue Media, Texas, Woodstock
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Military, Republicans | No Comments »
Sunday, August 11th, 2019
Jeffrey Epstien’s “suicide” sounded suspicious when news first broke, but the news that’s come out since only make it sound even more suspicious:
Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who hanged himself in a federal jail in Manhattan, was supposed to have been checked by guards every 30 minutes, but that procedure was not being followed the night before he was found, a law-enforcement official with knowledge of his detention said.
In addition, the jail had transferred his cellmate and allowed Mr. Epstein to be housed alone in a cell just two weeks after he had been taken off suicide watch, a decision that also violated the jail’s normal procedure, two officials said.
The disclosures about apparent failures in Mr. Epstein’s detention at the Metropolitan Correctional Center deepened questions about his suicide and are very likely to be the focus of inquiries by the Justice Department and the F.B.I.
Officials cautioned that their initial findings about his detention were preliminary and could change.
The federal Bureau of Prisons has already come under intense criticism for not keeping Mr. Epstein under a suicide watch after he had been found in his cell on July 23 with injuries that suggested that he had tried to kill himself.
A person with knowledge of the investigation said that when the decision was made to remove Mr. Epstein from suicide watch, the jail informed the Justice Department that Mr. Epstein would have a cellmate and that a guard “would look into his cell” every 30 minutes.
But that was apparently not done, the person said.
Senior law-enforcement officials, members of Congress and Mr. Epstein’s accusers have all demanded answers about why Mr. Epstein was not being more closely monitored.
Yet, after all that, the New York Times has the gall to state “Mr. Epstein’s suicide has also unleashed a torrent of unfounded conspiracy theories online, with people suggesting, without evidence, that Mr. Epstein was killed to keep him from incriminating others.” Uh, unfounded save the fact that everyone following the story knows that Epstein hobnobbed with the rich and powerful, had the dirtiest of dirt on them thanks to his under-aged sex ring, and was found dead in a high security jail when it was obvious that he was not only at risk for murder or suicide, but that he had already “attempted suicide” and was was on 24-hour suicide watch until just before he was found dead.
Unfounded.
Scott Adams calls it the world’s most suspicious suicide.
Twitter reactions:
Various other Epstein tidbits:
Investigations into Epstein’s sex ring remains “ongoing.”
Information on the Metropolitan Correctional Center where Epstein was housed.
When news of Epstein’s “suicide” first broke, there were widespread rumors of mysterious “camera malfunctions,” but those rumors appear to be false.
A timeline of the Epstein case. Tidbit: “Flight logs obtained as part of civil lawsuits against Epstein show an assortment of politicians, academics, celebrities, heads of state and world leaders flying on Epstein’s jets in the early 2000s. Among them: former President Bill Clinton, former national security adviser Sandy Berger, former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.” That would be Sandy “I stuffed classified documents down my pants so I could destroy them” Berger.
A look at Epstein’s enablers, including Sarah Kellen, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jean-Luc Brunel and Lesley Groff. “A source told The Post that Maxwell is cooperating with federal authorities.”
One more person who evidently enjoyed the “services” of Epstein’s underaged girls was Simpsons creator Matt Groening, though he evidently only got a foot massage.
A list of everyone who visited the Palm Beach jail where Jeffrey Epstein was incarcerated over a decade ago. Part 2. Part 3. Use your PDF browser tool to rotate clockwise.
Tags:Crime, Democrats, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jean Luc Brunell, Jeffrey Epstein, Matt Groening, pedophilia, Sandy Berger, Sarah Kellen, Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome, The Simpsons
Posted in Crime, Democrats | No Comments »
Saturday, August 10th, 2019
I sat down this morning to write one Jeffery Epstein post and instead have to write another, since he’s apparently dead by “suicide” in a New York City jail cell.
This came right after another batch of big names alleged to have participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex ring were revealed:
A woman who has long claimed disgraced money man Jeffrey Epstein forced her to have sex with powerful men named two prominent Democratic politicians – former Sen. George Mitchell and ex-New Mexico governor and Clinton cabinet official Bill Richardson – in documents unsealed Friday by federal prosecutors in New York.
Friday’s revelations came from more than 2,000 documents that were unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The papers included affidavits and depositions of key witnesses in a lawsuit the now-33-year-old woman, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, filed against Epstein and his associate, Ghislane Maxwell in 2015. Giuffre accused the duo of keeping her as a “sex slave” in the early 2000s when she was underage.
Giuffre claimed in a May 2016 deposition to have been trafficked to have sex with and provide erotic massages to powerful politicians, foreign leaders and well-heeled businessmen. In ordering the documents released, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit also warned that the allegations contained within them are not necessarily proven.
Giuffre alleged in her own deposition that she was allegedly forced to have sex with Richardson, 71, Britain’s Prince Andrew, Hedge Fund manager Glenn Dubin, American scientist Marvin Minsky, “another prince,” “a large hotel chain owner,” Stephen Kauffman, and model scout Jean Luc Brunell.
In another deposition, Giuffre also reveals that she was “trafficked” to Mitchell, a former Senate Majority leader who represented Maine from 1980-95 and was later named special envoy to the Middle East by President Obama. A sworn affidavit by a former Epstein employee, Juan Alessi, also alleges Mitchell, 85, of having associated with Epstein.
Bill Richardson was the Julian Castro before Julian Castro: the great rising Hispanic Democrat who was regularly trotted out as a possible Vice Presidential pick. Like Castro, he launched a doomed, lackluster Presidential run (in 2008), but unlike Castro, he did manage to win statewide elections.
Marvin Minksy was a pioneering AI researcher at MIT and author of The Society of Mind. That long New Yorker article on Alan Deshowitz mentioned in last week’s LinkSwarm mention Epstein surrounding himself with brilliant scientists for a period of time under the guise of The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation. Minsky participated in a scientific conference on Epstein’s infamous island.
Back to the jail “suicide”: How is a high profile prisoner who was already on suicide watch, who allegedly tried to off himself two weeks ago, given the time and privacy to complete the job?
On the other hand, I’m seeing a lot of speculation on Twitter that with Epstein dead, no one has the standing to oppose federal search warrants on his other properties.
I’ll leave you with a link to this Babylon Bee piece: “CDC: People With Dirt On Clintons Have 843% Greater Risk Of Suicide.”
Tags:Bill Clinton, Bill Richardson, Crime, George Mitchell, Ghislaine Maxwell, Glenn Dubin, Jean Luc Brunell, Jeffrey Epstein, Marvin Minsky, New York City, pedophilia, Prince Andrew, Stephen Kauffman, Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome, Virginia Giuffre
Posted in Crime, Democrats | No Comments »
Friday, August 9th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! It’s been both super busy and super-hot here at BattleSwarm headquarters…
Leftward ho:
Ah, the good ol’ days of . . . April, or so, when conservative critics of the Democratic party could still count on being lectured to about the enduring moderation of Team Blue and chastised for paying so much attention to such figures as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a member of the Democratic Socialists of America) and Senator Bernie Sanders (a member of the Democratic Socialists of America) and claiming that these self-described socialists are the socialists they describe themselves as being, who want to “abolish capitalism” (the stated mission of the Democratic Socialists of America) and the traditional family to boot (“democratizing the family to get rid of patriarchal relations,” in the words of the Democratic Socialists of America), all of which, the usual media scolds tut-tutted, was unfair. “The Democratic party is the party of moderates,” as Politico magazine editor Bill Scher argued.
Somebody must have slipped some psilocybin into the Democrats’ potato salad at this year’s May Day picnic. Open borders? Check! Eviscerating the Bill of Rights? Absolutely, with one of those weird barbed Uncle Henry gut-hook knives! What else? I hope that whichever debate moderator finally presses this crew about the limits of late-term abortion is over 35, because Elizabeth Warren was pretty clearly ready to roll up her sleeves and perform an impromptu D&E right there underneath the Art Deco adornments and heavy brocade curtains of the Fox Theater in beautiful downtown Detroit.
Speaking of the Democratic Socialists of America, Stephen Green looks in on those lunatics. “No perfume in the quiet room, no misusing doors, no talking to cops, no talking to the press, always display your credentials, beware of right wing infiltrators.” Plus the usual lunacy about pronouns, and triggering, and singing “The Internationale.”
Border control policies start working:
Monthly apprehensions of migrants in Mexico have begun to slow down, indicating that its government’s recent border crackdown is yielding results.
Authorities in Mexico apprehended 18,758 migrants in July, according to preliminary data from Mexico’s immigration agency, reported by The Wall Street Journal. While this number is more than double the amount detained in the same month last year, it is a decline from the record-setting 31,573 apprehensions in Mexico in June.
“China Wants to Hit Back at Trump. Its Own Economy Stands in the Way.”
China’s imports from the United States only a fraction of the trade going the other way, so it cannot match Washington tariff for tariff. Much of that trade consists of agriculture goods like soybeans, as well as specialized products like Boeing jetliners or the American-made chips for the smartphones China makes.
There are several things China could do. It could call for a boycott of American goods or stop buying Boeing planes. It could devalue its currency, which would in effect partially nullify American tariffs. It could make life much harder for American business and executives in China, or it could exercise its power over key parts of the global supply chain, like its dominance over key manufacturing minerals called rare earths.
Some investors on Friday signaled they expect at least one of those moves. China’s currency, the renminbi, fell to its weakest point so far this year. Shares of rare earths companies rose, while Boeing’s shares fell more than the broader market on Thursday.
But each of these measures has drawbacks. Perhaps the biggest among them is that China’s economy is growing at its slowest pace in 27 years. Many of the arrows Beijing has in its quiver could ricochet and hit its own factories and workers.
Plus the perils of weakening the renminbi. Also: “As they consider their moves, Chinese officials will also try to parse Mr. Trump’s negotiating strategy. Experts said his capricious style had flummoxed Beijing.”
How the media pick and choose which parts of the El Paso shooter’s manifesto to hype.
More on the same subject:
The manifesto is insane. Part of it discussed commonly debated issues such as the environment and the economy in ways that are well within the boundaries of political conversation going on today — indeed, that might have come out of the New York Times or many other outlets. Other parts of it mixed in theories on immigration from far right circles in Europe and the U.S. Then it threw in beliefs on “race-mixing” straight from the fever swamps. And then it concluded that the solution is to murder Hispanic immigrants, going on to debate whether an AK-47 or an AR-15 would best do the job. By that point, Crusius had veered far from both reality and basic humanity.
But the question is, was he inspired by President Trump? It is hard to make that case looking at the manifesto in its entirety.
Crusius worried about many things, if the manifesto is any indication. He certainly worried about immigration, but also about automation. About job losses. About a universal basic income. Oil drilling. Urban sprawl. Watersheds. Plastic waste. Paper waste. A blue Texas. College debt. Recycling. Healthcare. Sustainability. And more. Large portions of the manifesto simply could not be more un-Trumpian.
Dayton shooter was indeed a “Pro-Satan Leftist Who Supported Elizabeth Warren.”
How President Donald Trump changes the political calculus.
This is a colossal fraud, and it won’t work. The public doesn’t buy it; the candidates aren’t talking about it; when Congress returns in September, Lindsey Graham’s Senate Judiciary Committee will grill the authors of the politicization of the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and other parts of the Obama Justice Department as well as the propagators of the false Steele dossier and the fraudulent FISA warrant applications. Graham (R-S.C.), will get the publicity, and the bare-faced liars who chair the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), will be talking to themselves about their “solid evidence” of the president’s crimes. Weissman and the lesser Democratic Torquemadas couldn’t find them; Nadler and Schiff can’t declare what their evidence is (because there is none).
This is the last echo of this attempted rape of the Constitution and no one will be listening when the Congress returns in September. They will listen to the Graham committee’s exposés of the Democrats who acted corruptly, and they will notice the indictments when the special counsel, (John Durham, who unlike Mueller does have full retention of his faculties), starts bringing them down.
The president deliberately has escalated the controversy by attempting to make the four extremist freshman Democratic congresswomen the real face of the Democrats, and by pointing out, in the case of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the inappropriateness of Cummings’ assault on the integrity of the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
The president undoubtedly knows that he is playing with fire assaulting the most holy of the taboos of political correctness so explicitly, though his grasp of the political arithmetic is almost certainly correct. I assume he can reassure his own followers and whatever independent voters may be left in this fierce partisan crossfire that he is not racist. In sober times, it would be clear that no case whatever exists that he is a racist. But these are not sober times and he has contributed something to their insobriety, though—one must remember—in reaction to immense provocations.
Is the UK headed for a November 1st election the day after Brexit? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
How Trump’s legal team of “nobodies” defeated Robert Mueller’s team of credentialed elites.
Liberals just come out and admit that yes, they do indeed want to seize the guns of law-abiding Americans.
More on “Red Flag” laws:
Active shooters are a rounding error. “If you feel the need to take training to protect your life and the lives of your loved ones, take a Defensive Driving Course.” (Hat tip: Karl Rehn.)
“AT&T employees took bribes to plant malware on the company’s network. DOJ charges Pakistani man with bribing AT&T employees more than $1 million to install malware on the company’s network, unlock more than 2 million devices.”
Two Amazon subcontractor drivers stole an estimated $10 million worth of goods over several years, selling many items through pawn shops.
“Minimum Wage Hikes in NYC Are Forcing Businesses to Cut Jobs and Raise Prices.”
Washington Post writer goes through Sugar Detox.
But here’s the part that blew my mind: I started to lose weight. Before the detox I weighed 166 pounds. Twelve weeks later, I hit a new low adult weight: 155. I’ve cinched in my belt a notch. My bloodwork looks much better (my triglycerides dropped by half in six weeks). And as my belly fat has reduced, I do feel better and more energetic.
The weight-loss and triglyceride reduction mirrors my own experience when I first went on Atkins.
Speaking of meat: the vegetarians who became butchers.
New York Times revenues continue to decline. I’m sure that somehow this is all Russia’s fault…
Leftwing protestors call for the murder of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Naturally Twitter suspended the account…of his reelection campaign, for showing videos of leftwing protestors calling for his murder:
Lunatic tranny balls-waxing lawsuit filer Jonathan Yaniv arrested for brandishing a stun gun.
Uber lost $5.24 billion this quarter. That’s with a “B”.
At least two people on Joaquin Castro’s list of San Antonio Trump donors also donated to him. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
”Democrats Propose Creation Of National Trump Voter Registry.
“Experts Warn We Have Only 12 Years Left Until They Change The Timeline On Global Warming Again.”
Tags:active shooter, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Amazon, AT&T, Atkins, Babylon Bee, Border Controls, Brexit, China, Crime, Democratic Socialists of America, Democrats, Donald Trump, El Paso, Foreign Policy, Guns, Joaquin Castro, Jonathan Yaniv, Kevin D. Williamson, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Mexico, minimum wage, New York City, New York Times, Robert Mueller, San Antonio, Social Justice Warriors, socialism, Texas, Trade War, transexual, triglycerides, Twitter, Uber, UK
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Thursday, August 8th, 2019
Lots of “red flag” talk after the latest shooting panics, but Borepatch would like to remind us that such laws are stupid and useless.
The Parkland shooter was known to be a nutcase, having been reported to the local police some four dozen times (and twice to the FBI). Nobody took action, because the local (and likely national) government agencies thought that doing so would screw up the crime statistical goals that they were trying to achieve. While it’s very early after the event, it appears that lots of people knew that the Dayton shooter was a nutcase. Nobody did anything. The Air Force dishonorably discharged a guy because he was, well, a nutcase – but forgot to update the NCIC database with this information. The nutcase was able to buy a gun and kill a bunch of people in a church.
These are just the examples that come to mind; presumably a thorough analysis my the media or by social scientists would turn up many more examples. Of course, the media and social scientists don’t want to look into this because it would hurt their push for more gun control.
Left unsaid: Red flag laws are not only a Second Amendment violation, but a Fifth Amendment violation as well, violating due process of law. Legal expert Alan Dershowitz argues that we don’t have the tools to make such laws work:
Research shows that any group of people identified as future violent criminals will contain many more who will not be violent (false positives) than they will (true positives). More true positives mean more false ones. Such groups also fail to identify many future violent criminals (false negatives).
We do not currently have the predictive tools needed to increase the number of true positives while reducing false positives. We may one day develop such tools, but how many false positives are we willing to tolerate until then to reduce the number of false negatives? Put another way: How many law-abiding people are we prepared to steal weapons to prevent another mass shooting?
For those who favor strict gun control, the answer may seem obvious. They believe it is worth it for 100 or 1,000 non-violent people to lose their weapons to prevent mass shootings. But those who view gun possession as a fundamental right under the Second Amendment – as the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) – frame the problem differently. They ask: Can the government deprive a citizen of a constitutional right based on a prediction?
Red Flag laws run the risk of setting a dangerous precedent. If the government can take your weapons based on a prediction today, what will prevent it from taking your freedom based on a prediction tomorrow?
Indeed, everywhere on Twitter this week, the left have been saying two things:
1. We need to remove guns from the hands of racists, and
2. Everyone who voted for Trump is a racist.
So hell no, we’re not disarming now or in the future, especially not when Democratic Party partisans are in the grip of mass hysteria.
Tags:"red flag" laws, Alan Dershowitz, Borepatch, Crime, Democrats, Guns
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Guns | 2 Comments »
Friday, August 2nd, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! As mentioned previously, today starts an extremely busy week for me, so expect some light blogging ahead.
“Why Do Democrats Run All Of The Dangerous And Rodent Infested Cities?”
Rep. Cummings, while being very obsessed with Russia, seems utterly bewildered with the idea that anyone could dare question why so many billions of federal dollars flow to places like West Baltimore when they are obviously doing no good.
Look at other cities in similar dilapidation and there holds a unique truth: Democrats run them all.
How long will sewage run down the streets of San Francisco? How long will St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore, continue to rotate as the nation’s most dangerous crime infested metros? And how long will federal dollars keep chasing bad money with new?
Snip.
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report and as reported in the USA Today (from Feb 19, 2019), the top 10 most dangerous cities in America are run by Democrats.
The overwhelming majority of them are also all governed by Democratic Governors. And the Congressional districts represented are also majority Democratic.
Did I mention that each of them also has higher unemployment rates than the national average?
In Baltimore, Democrats have run everything for more than four decades. Federal dollars have flowed in, and yet the stench, sight, and symbolism of it all—stinks.
El Chapo may be convicted, but the cartel wars continue:
In the end, the forces that are driving these trends in Mexico are larger and more powerful than any individual, and there is very little that any one person can do to counter or control them. It is true that individuals such as Gulf cartel founder Juan Garcia Abrego and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the “godfather” of the Guadalajara cartel, were instrumental in altering the relationship between Mexican cartels and their Colombian counterparts. They succeeded in boosting the role of Mexican cartels from mere errand boys, who received a small cut of the Colombian cartels’ profits on cocaine smuggled through Mexico, to full partners that received an equal share of the profits. The vast profits that the cocaine trade brought to the Mexican cartels was a game changer. They provided the Mexican groups with vast quantities of cash to hire armies of hit men, arm them with military-grade weapons and bribe officials at every level of government. This vast wealth also allowed them to challenge — and in some places usurp — the government’s monopoly on force and governance as they pursued their campaign of “plata o plomo” (silver or lead) to either bribe or kill people in authority.
Mexican cartels multiplied their profits by embracing the heroin trade, eventually coming to dominate the North American heroin market. They also ventured into the synthetic drug trade, as drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl brought them even larger profits than cocaine or heroin. Literally awash in money, many Mexican cartels struggled to launder and spend all the money they were making.
Naturally, however, this vast fortune has come with consequences beyond just coming to the attention of authorities. Given the huge sums at stake, business partners and even family members have turned into sworn enemies as they fight over a greater share of the profits. And in addition to fighting over smuggling routes to external markets — which have grown to include Australia and Europe, in addition to the United States — they are also fighting bitterly for control of the sizable domestic Mexican retail drug market in places like Mexico City, Cancun, Tijuana and Juarez. Moreover, they are struggling to grab control of the lucrative petroleum theft racket, while also engaging in extortion, kidnapping, prostitution, human smuggling and other criminal activities.
In the end, I believe that Balkanization will continue to impact even the larger and stronger cartels such as Sinaloa and the CJNG [Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, or just New Generation]. I anticipate additional rounds of Sinaloa infighting and while the CJNG had been largely immune from the trend, the emergence of the Nueva Plaza cartel, which is composed mostly of former CJNG members under the direction of Carlos “El Cholo” Enrique Sanchez Martinez and Erick “El 85” Valencia Salazar, has showed that it, too, is vulnerable to greed and infighting.
Indeed, Gulf cartel leader Cardenas Guillen earned the nickname “El Mata Amigos” (the friend killer) for, unsurprisingly, turning on those close to him amid the greed-driven infighting. The amount of internecine conflict, however, has only grown since Cardenas Guillen’s 2003 arrest, as evidenced by recent murder trends, much of which stems from intracartel fighting, as well as battles among different groups.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is having a Social Jusstice Warrior diversity meltdown:
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairwoman Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) was set to make an unplanned trip to Washington from her district Monday amid an outcry from top black and Latino lawmakers over a lack of diversity in the campaign arm’s senior management ranks.
Bustos’ sudden return to D.C., just days after Congress left for a six-week-long August recess, comes as aides and lawmakers are calling for systematic changes to the DCCC, the party’s main election organ.
POLITICO reported last week that black and Hispanic lawmakers are furious with Bustos’ stewardship of the campaign arm. They say the upper echelon of the DCCC is bereft of diversity, and it is not doing enough to reach Latino voters and hire consultants of color. In addition, several of Bustos’ senior aides have left in the first six months of her tenure, including her chief of staff — a black woman — and her director of mail and polling director, both women.
In the most dramatic move so far, Texas Reps. Vicente Gonzalez and Filemon Vela told POLITICO Sunday that Bustos should fire her top aide, DCCC executive director Allison Jaslow.
“The DCCC is now in complete chaos,” the pair said in a statement to POLITICO. “The single most immediate action that Cheri Bustos can take to restore confidence in the organization and to promote diversity is to appoint a qualified person of color, of which there are many, as executive director at once. We find the silence of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on this issue to be deafening.”
It’s lovely to see Democrats inflict the same “diversity” pain on themselves as they’ve tried to inflict on the rest of the country. The DCCC was already lagging badly behind Republican efforts, and a “diversity” witch hunt will only add to its problems.
It may be a bigger issue than you realize:
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats’ powerful campaign arm, has just abruptly purged half a dozen staffers. Why? Because they are white.
It appears that no one had anything against these particular staffers … except for the color of their skin. Although roughly half the committee’s full-time staff (13 of 27) were nonwhite, this was not enough for some Democratic members of Congress. They complained DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos of Illinois had brought in too many white staffers when she won the position. And they put enough pressure on her that she sacrificed her loyal staffers to the god of diversity.
Even if all these staffers ended up with cushy lobbying jobs as a reward for their loyalty, this is still a lot more shocking than people perhaps realize.
There are two possible interpretations of this mass-purge at the DCCC. Either a few Democrats are making a racial issue out of a patronage question, once again knifing each other under the cover of intersectionality, or Democrats are genuinely angry that half the staff at the DCCC are white. As often happens with the Democratic Left, it is difficult to tell just where the insincerity ends and the fanaticism begins.
But either interpretation implies that this is not a party fit to govern.
“The biggest loser in Wednesday’s Detroit debate was sanity.”
Here’s a quick cheat sheet. All the Democrats support policies that would raise taxes. They all support policies that would make the country poorer because less energy independent. Some want to give free college tuition to illegal immigrants, all want many more immigrants, legal or illegal. Most think Trump should be impeached. Some want to abolish private insurance, most want ‘Medicare for all.’ Gov. Inslee insisted that ‘it is time to give people adequate mental health care,’ a statement that won a round of applause. Judging from what was said from the platform tonight, I think he may be right.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Baltimore murder rate worse than Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, driving asylum surge.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The United States has officially withdrawn from the INF treaty. “The Russians have been flagrantly violating the treaty for years, and it doesn’t apply to China, which has massively built up its missile program, including intermediate-range systems.”
Speaking of China, don’t look now, but it looks like they’re about to Tiananmen Hong Kong.
Get woke, go broke: Remember Gillette’s “toxic masculinity” social justice warrior pandering commercial? “P&G reported a net loss of about $5.24 billion, or $2.12 per share, for the quarter ended June 30, due to an $8 billion non-cash writedown of Gillette.” Nothing says “woke” quite like destroying eight BILLION dollars of shareholder value…
Long, long, long article on Alan Deshowitz and his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. I remain pro-civil liberties and anti-kid-diddling. Most interesting tidbit: The raid on Epstein’s home produced “an expired passport that contained Epstein’s photograph alongside an assumed name, with the country of residency listed as Saudi Arabia.”
More on the subject: Derschowitz defends himself.
Campaign funds of the living dead!
Texas DPS implements soft decriminalization of marijuana:
Texas’ largest law enforcement agency is moving away from arresting people for low-level marijuana offenses. It’s the latest development in the chaos that has surrounded pot prosecution after state lawmakers legalized hemp this year.
As of July 10, all Texas Department of Public Safety officers have been instructed to issue a citation for people with a misdemeanor amount of the suspected drug — less than 4 ounces in possession cases — when possible, according to an interoffice memo obtained by The Texas Tribune. The citation requires a person to appear in court and face their criminal charges.
Those issued a citation for misdemeanor charges still face the same penalties if convicted — up to a year in jail and fine of $4,000.
I’d like to see actual decriminalization rather than selective enforcement, but you can argue that of all the laws DPS is required to enforce, enforcing marijuana prohibition (at least on adults) is a waste of time unless the driver is impaired.
“New York City Still Trying to Avoid A SCOTUS Fight Over Gun Law.” Because they know they’ll lose. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Australian expedition sent to Antarctica to celebrate the golden age of Australian antarctic exploration. Like many golden age Antarctic expeditions, it was filled with disaster. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Why Snopes fears The Babylon Bee and feels the need to “fact check” them.
Two superintendents enter Whataburger, one superintendent leaves.
“Adrian Peterson Reportedly Made Over $100 Million But Owes Millions in Debt.”
Congratulations to Dwight for ten years of blogging.
Happy birthday, Herman Melville.
Bronypocalypse now.
Tags:Adrian Peterson, Alan Dershowitz, Allison Jaslow, Antarctica, Babylon Bee, Baltimore, Border Controls, Cheri Bustos, China, Crime, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democrats, Elections, Elijah Cummings, Filemon Vela, Gillette, Gulf Cartel, Hong Kong, INF Treaty, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, LinkSwarm, marijuana, Mexico, Military, New Generation drug cartel, NFL, Proctor & Gamble, Russia, San Antonio, Sinaloa Cartel, Snopes, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Texas DPS, Vicente Gonzalez, Welfare State, Whataburger
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Welfare State | No Comments »
Sunday, July 28th, 2019
What President Donald Trump’s detractors don’t seem to realize (or refuse to realize) is his genius in instinctively identifying wide-open attacks avenues against the Democratic Party that previous Republicans were too scared to undertake for fear of being called racists. Trump simply doesn’t care what they say about him, since he’s such an accomplished rhetorical counterpuncher, and his latest target is calling out Maryland Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings over how horrible parts of Baltimore have become.
The huge advantage Trump starts out with is bedrock truth, given that not only is Baltimore been a declining city with a high crime rate for a long time now, but that major TV networks have been driving this point home with shows like Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire.
Keep in mind that Baltimore in general (and West Baltimore, which lies at the heart of Cummings’ district, specifically) have some of the highest crime rates in the country. Baltimore has record high murder rates and open air drug markets flourish in West Baltimore.
Don’t forget that Baltimore is also the city that had a one hour documentary about its rat infestation. When you see how abandoned trash is left for weeks and the city refuses to pick it up, you can see why.
How long has the city been ignoring West Baltimore? Here’s a video of an abandoned row home there. There’s a tree in the vacant lot between two row homes where another used to stand that’s now taller than the row home.
As for Cummings enriching himself:
A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally, according to an IRS complaint filed by an ethics watchdog group.
Cummings, 68, a Maryland Democrat, is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. His wife, Maya Rockeymoore, 48, is the chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party and briefly ran in the state’s gubernatorial race last year. The couple married in 2008. Cummings was once heavily in debt — in part due to hefty child support payments to his first wife and two other women he had children with — but his financial situation has improved considerably over the past decade.
Rockeymoore runs two entities, a nonprofit group called the Center for Global Policy Solutions and a for-profit consulting firm called Global Policy Solutions, LLC, whose operations appear to have overlapped, according to the IRS complaint filed by watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center on Monday. The complaint states that the arrangement may have been used to derive “illegal private benefit.”
Global Policy Solutions received more than $6.2 million in grants between 2013 and 2016, according to tax records. Several of the nonprofit group’s financial backers — which included Google, J.P Morgan, and Prudential — have business interests before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Cummings has served as Democratic chairman of the committee since January and previously served as ranking member.
The largest contributor to the nonprofit organization was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a company that is regulated by Cummings’ committee. The foundation, which gave a total of $5.5 million to Rockeymoore’s consulting firm and $5.2 million to her nonprofit group, ceased supporting her groups in 2017.
Education? “Several Baltimore schools report 0 students proficient in math, reading.”
It’s not like the Democratic Party hasn’t had ample opportunity to clean up Baltimore. The last Republican mayor of Baltimore left in 1967. Since Spiro Agnew resigned in 1969 to serve as Vice President, a Republicans has been governor of Maryland for just over eight years out of those fifty.
So somehow it’s not racist to have government so dysfunctional that its residents have to to live with rats and garbage the government refuses to do anything about, but it is racist to have President Trump point it out.
Democrats evidently believe that they can continue to continue running American cities into the ground and skimming off the patronage without black Americans finally declaring they’ve had enough. President Trump has calculated that the louder Democrats complain about what his statements on Baltimore (and by extension other dysfunctional Democrat one-party cities), the more black Americans will pay attention and realize he’s right.
Tags:Baltimore, black, Crime, Donald Trump, education, Elijah Cummings, Kimberly Klacik, Maryland, rats, Welfare State
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Welfare State | 2 Comments »