Trump Derangement Syndrome is breaking up marriages as “woke” women leave their sane husbands. “Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away.” Golly, can’t imagine why their marriage isn’t a Hallmark movie.
Texas speaker-in-waiting Rep. Dennis Bonnen will speak at the Texas Public Policy Foundation orientation in January. “One of the open secrets about the capitol in recent sessions has been the degree to which the Straus/Gordon Johnson team despises TPPF. The Straus/Gordon Johnson team loathes TPPF more than any conservative organization. That includes Empower Texans.” That’s some bold talk…
MSBNC in action:
MSNBC anchors get completely rekt by their own reporter on the ground covering the migrant caravan.
ANCHOR: "It's innocent women and children right?"
REPORTER: "From what we've seen, the majority are actually men and some of these men have not articulated that need for asylum" pic.twitter.com/tWBTkeGmSE
In what appears to be the latest in a string of financial crimes and scandals that have generated some $18 billion in fines since the financial crisis, prosecutors are investigating whether two employees in the bank’s wealth management division helped clients set up accounts in offshore tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands, and possibly allowed criminals to move money through these shelters, some of which may have flowed through accounts at the bank (other employees may also have been involved, prosecutors said). According to Frankfurt prosecutors, the investigation, which stems from revelations contained in the ‘Panama Papers’, covers behavior that stretched through this year, meaning that it could become a blemish on the performance of the bank’s newly-installed CEO Christian Sewing.
Another jihad attack against Jews the media won’t label as a jihad attack:
General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now. Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.
Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.
The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour.
We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.
Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.
No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.
Centuries ago, it required something like 750 hours of human labor to produce a simple tunic; today it requires minutes of human labor. Almost no one is capable of truly internalizing this change. The shirt on your back once was a valuable capital good requiring four months of constant labor to produce. Now it’s not even worth repairing if it tears, it’s too inexpensive to replace it. Because of this change in productivity, even quite poor people in developed countries own many sets of clothing.
Centuries ago, there was barely enough food to go around, and often far too little, as a result of which starvation was common. It required constant labor by most of the population to produce enough food. Then, mechanization of agriculture set in, and the production of synthetic fertilizer, and pest control, and improved breeding methods; today, it requires very few people to grow more than enough food for everyone. There is so much food, in fact, that obesity has become a disease of the poor, an unprecedented development in human history.
So it is across the span of consumer goods. The amount of labor it requires to produce enough light to read at night has gone down by orders of magnitude, and the quantity of light produced by an ordinary lightbulb is 100 times greater than that of a candle at a tiny fraction of the price. Many goods didn’t even exist before; in my father’s youth there were no televisions, and now people can buy 4k 130cm flat screens.
People have a hard time believing that weight control isn’t just a matter of calories eaten and calories burned. But there is an alternate hypothesis about obesity, which is what my group studies. The carbohydrate-insulin model argues that overeating isn’t the underlying cause of long-term weight gain. Instead, it’s the biological process of gaining weight that causes us to overeat.
Here’s how this hypothesis goes: Consuming processed carbohydrates (especially refined grains, potato products and sugars), causes our bodies to produce more insulin. Too much insulin, one of the most powerful hormones, forces our fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. These rapidly growing fat cells then hoard too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. So we get hungry, and if we persist in eating less, our metabolism slows down.
Snip.
We started the participants on a calorie-restricted diet until they lost 10%-14% of their body weight. After that, we randomly assigned them to eat exclusively one of three diets, containing either 20%, 40% or 60% carbohydrates.
For the next five months, we made sure they didn’t gain or lose any more weight, adjusting how much food they received, but keeping the ratio of carbohydrates constant. By doing so, we could directly measure how their metabolism responded to these differing levels of carbohydrate consumption.
Participants in the low (20%) carbohydrate group burned on average about 250 calories a day more than those in the high (60%) carbohydrate group, just as predicted by the carbohydrate-insulin model. Without intervention (that is, if we hadn’t adjusted the amount of food to prevent weight change), that difference would produce substantial weight loss — about 20 pounds after a few years. If a low-carbohydrate diet also curbs hunger and food intake (as other studies suggest it can), the effect could be even greater.
This result could explain in part why U.S. obesity rates have been going up for decades. Individuals have a sort genetically predetermined weight — lighter for some, heavier for others. Despite this, the average weight for American men has gone from about 165 pounds in the 1960s to 195 pounds today. Women, likewise, have gone from an average of 140 pounds to about 165.
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I for one am stuffed…
For those freaking out about Chief Justice Roberts saying there are no Democratic or Republican judges…¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He’s the head of a co-equal branch of the United States federal government, of course he’s going to defend the institutional independence of the court, no matter the evidence to the contrary. It’s pretty much required for his position.
Now here’s a LinkSwarm to enjoy before girding your loins to do battle over a $99 stereo marked down to $69…
Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due process protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.
Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.
Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.
Snip.
Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.”
So Jamal Khashoggi – a former Saudi intelligence agent, a man who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a sworn opponent of MBS’ reform program– was in the process of setting up a centre to promote the ideology of the MB. He was setting it up in Turkey with Qatari money. The Saudis wanted to stop him. In September they offered him $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia and to live there unhindered. They wanted him out of play. Khashoggi refused and the rest you know. The Saudis killed him.
Let me make two points. First, there is no justification for murdering Khashoggi. Secondly, this man wasn’t some Western-oriented liberal brutally murdered because of his passion for freedom. This man was a player.
Laura Loomer banned from Twitter. I have had zero interactions with Ms. Loomer, and she sounds like quite a piece of work, but banning her for criticizing a Muslim politician for supporting female genital mutilation is asinine.
Remember how Democrats were shouting “Believe all women!” during the Kavanaugh hearing? Turns out, not all women should be believed:
The morning of September 22, 2017, Cristopher Precopia went to work at a lumber yard in Georgetown.
By the end of the day, he was in jail facing 99 years in prison.
But he didn’t know why.
Why had police come to his work and arrested him? Why was he being accused of these horrible crimes? Who was accusing him?
She said he broke into her home in Temple.
She said he sliced an “X” into her chest with a box cutter.
She said it happened on Sept. 20, 2017 around 7:20 p.m.
She was his high school girlfriend. The two dated several years earlier, but he couldn’t remember the last time the two had contact.
Now Precopia was facing a felony charge: burglary of a habitation with the intent to commit other crimes.
“I had no idea why everything was happening, and I was lost,” he said.
Precopia was taken to the Williamson County Jail, where his parents posted a $150,000 bond. Then they began fighting to prove his innocence.
Precopia knew he didn’t do it. He knew he couldn’t have done it.
On the night of the alleged attack, he was with his mother, Erin, at a Northwest Austin hotel about 65 miles from the accuser’s home.
“I’m thinking, ‘this is awesome. By the grace of God, she said it happened on the day when I can say totally, 100 percent, where he was at,” Erin Precopia said.
There were sworn affidavits from several people who were with him that evening.
There were pictures to prove it, and they were posted on Facebook. Timestamped. Geo-located.
An alibi.
“Most of the time, we deal with gray matters,” attorney Rick Flores said. “It’s not normally black or white. But this is one of those cases where I could definitely prove he did not commit this offense.”
Snip.
“Nine months after Precopia’s arrest, Flores said he took the evidence of an alibi to Bell County prosecutors, who dropped the charge ‘in the interest of justice.'”
Yet, as far as I can tell, the woman who tried to destroy his life by falsely accusing him of rape, has not only not been charged, but newspapers refuse to print her name because “she hasn’t been charged with a crime.” The only reason her criminal scheme was thwarted was that hard evidence to the contrary was available, and we still have due process in America. If the feminist inspired kangaroo court “guilty until proven innocent” standard that prevails on too many college campuses had been used, Precopia would have already been convicted.
Welcome to the Friday before Thanksgiving! I hope you have your family gathering, gluttony and/or shopping plans all laid out. I tend to avoid Black Friday sales unless I happen to be near a used bookstore. (And speaking of booksales, I’ll be putting out a new Lame Excuse Books catalog after Thanksgiving, so drop me a line if you’re interested.)
Florida: DeSantis wins, Scott leads Nelson in senate race, where it goes to a hand recount. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Meanwhile, both Broward and Palm Beach counties, where most of the Democrat shenanigans occurred, missed the machine recount deadlines, so the initial tallies stood.
In all the bad recount news, here’s one bit of good news: Utah incumbent Republican congresswoman Mia Love is now expected to win reelection after recounts. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
A bit more analysis of the midterms:
Interestingly, the largest/highest profile misses were almost all in races where the Republican beat the polls:
– IN-Sen: polls D+2; actual R+8 – OH-Gov: polls D+3; actual R+4 – SD-Gov: polls D+3; actual R+3 – TN-Sen: polls R+5; actual R+11 – IA-Gov: polls D+2; actual R+3
Over 50 million Chinese apartments are empty. (Caveat: Some sort of malware on ZeroHedge is trying to do a drive-by DMS install on that page. They should look into that…)
Austin’s sick leave ordinance was just struck down by the 3rd Court of Appeals. “The requirement violates the Texas Constitution because it is pre-empted by the Texas Minimum Wage Act.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Who frontman Roger Daltry “detests Jeremy Corbyn (whom he, not without cause, calls a “communist”), supports Brexit, and says of the Labour party, ‘It pains me to say it, but in my life a Labour government comes in with incredible optimism and leaves the country in the sh*t.'”
Roy Clark, RIP. To TV viewers, he was that guy on Hee-Haw. To fellow guitarists he was a legend. Here’s a nice rendition of his signature piece:
William Goldman, RIP. The Princess Bride is a swell novel, and he penned more than his share of great Hollywood movies.
If you’re going illegally carry a concealed gun without a permit, maybe you shouldn’t make yourself look like The Joker. And yes, it’s exactly the state you think it is. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Colion Noir takes a look at deep blue Seattle’s rampant heroin epidemic, where citizens wake up every morning to find used needles littering their streets and parks.
A few sobering takeaways:
Someone dies of a heroin or opioid overdose every 36 hours in King County.
Seattle gave homeless junkies a small encampment to live in. Result? 103% increase in area crime.
Jewish cemetery had problems with addicts and prostitutes, so they hired security guards. Suddenly, city officials took notice…of people having guns. “Jews with guns? Can’t have that!”
The police want to enforce the law, but elected official won’t let them.
“Seattle stopped enforcing their own laws.”
“I lived in New York under Giuliani, and I watched the broken windows thing in action. It showed how you can clean up a city.”
“MS-13 has moved into Seattle because they know no one is going to do anything about them.”
Homeless people walk into the local supermarket, grab stuff off the shelf, and walk out, and employees are instructed not to intervene.
“If you want to be a criminal, Seattle is a very good place to be.”
Keep in mind that the last Republican Mayor of Seattle was James d’Orma Braman, who left office March 23, 1969.
Jeff Sessions resigns as Attorney General, replaced on at least an interim basis by his chief of staff Matthew G. Whitaker. Very early on in the Trump Administration, I decided that there were two things I wasn’t going to pay much attention to: 1. Reports of dysfunction or “chaos” among White House staffers, and 2. Trump tweets slamming various people. (See any of my previous posts on Trump persuasion techniques.) I have no particular insight into intra-White House squabbles, and reporting on this issue is so bad or overblown that there’s too much noise for me bother to extract signal from. So go elsewhere for how Sessions fits into the “Deep State vs. Trump” narrative. (Over at Powerline, they put up both anti-Sessions and pro-Sessions pieces.)
Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer wants House Democrats to impeach Trump. I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly backfire on them…
Nine individuals were arrested Thursday for their alleged roles in a 2017 voter fraud scheme involving the municipal election in a Texas border town.
These arrests were part of an ongoing investigation into a coordinated effort by political workers to recruit people who would fraudulently claim residential addresses so they could vote in specific races and influence the results of the Edinburg city election held last year, according to information provided by the Office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“Illegal voting, particularly an organized illegal voting scheme orchestrated by political operatives, is an affront to democracy and results in corruption at the highest level,” said Paxton in a prepared statement.
“Each illegal vote silences the voice of a law-abiding registered voter,” added Paxton. “My office will continue to do everything in its power to uncover illegal voting schemes and bring to justice those who try to manipulate the outcome of elections in Texas.”
The nine Hidalgo County residents arrested were Guadalupe Sanchez Garza, Jerry Gonzalez, Jr., Araceli Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, Cynthia Tamez, and Ruby Tamez. Online jail records show bond was set at $20,000 for both Garza and Ruby Tamez. A $10,000 bond was set for Gonzalez, Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, and Cynthia Tamez. Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez’s bail was set at $1,000.
Ann Althouse links a Washington Post piece that declares “Trump revives ‘Willie Horton’ tactic with ad linking illegal immigrant killer to Democrats” based on this Trump tweet containing a (NSFW) ad:
GOP ads talking about illegal alien crime must be working, or the Post wouldn’t be complaining about them. Remember, the Democratic Media Complex hates any advertising that’s effective for Republicans, so they seek ways to stigmatize them to deter Republicans from using them. That’s why they turned “Swift Boating” into a verb, because the Swift Vote Veterans for Truth ads were so effective at turning John Kerry’s self-mythologizing “Reporting for Duty” facade against him.
That’s why Democrats hated the various Willie Horton ads, because they were effective at painting Michael Dukakis as soft on crime. In the modern era, Democrats are congenitally soft on crime, due to victimhood identity politics. That’s why canny, centrist Democratic politicians went out of their way to inoculate themselves by way tough stances on crime. Hence Bill Clinton’s “superpredators” and him leaving the campaign trail to oversee the execution of convicted cop killer Ricky Ray Rector in 1992. That effectiveness is why the Democrat Media Complex tried so hard to label Willie Horton ads as racist in order to discourage future Republicans from using similar ads against soft-on-crime Democrats. It’s important to note that while third party ads showed Horton, George H. W. Bush campaign’s own “Revolving Door” ad never mentioned Horton by name:
Hence the need for “racist dog-whistle,” which means “Republicans have come up with an effective tactic, so we need to call it racist.”
All of which explains why Democrats have resurrected the ghost of the still-living convicted murderer Willie Horton, who committed rape while given one of Dukakis’ ill-advised “weekend furloughs” from prison. But the question remains why any of them think this tactic would be effective, as the race it was an issue in was 30 years ago. Anyone who was of voting age during the original Willie Horton controversy is at least 48 years old now. Do they think invoking Willie Horton is going to change the mind of anyone who was around at that time? Why not decry Douglas Stringfellow or Teapot Dome while you’re at it?
Democrats know they’re losing the crime and border control debates badly, and are desperate to keep Republicans from using the issue against them. Judging from the volume of direct mail advertising I get mentioning the issue, they’re failing badly.
Pretty soon we won’t have Robert “Bobby” Francis O’Rourke (AKA “Beto”) to kick around anymore, so let’s do a roundup of all his campaign’s most recent missteps, shall we?
First up, front and center, are the Project Veritas sting videos that have O’Rourke staffers on camera admitting they’re diverting campaign funds to transport illegal alien caravan members to the United States:
I believe the technical term for that is “campaign finance fraud.” Unless you prefer the term “embezzlement.”
(Also, is it just me, or is there a distinct like of activity in those shots from O’Rourke field headquarters. No phone-calling, no envelope-stuffing, just…kicking back and hanging out. Evidently having more money than any senate candidate ever doesn’t buy you motivated staffers…)
Then there’s that New York Times piece that, instead of the now-standard hagiography, actually reported on how O’Rourke got to where he is today: wealthy and powerful relatives, and a healthy dose of political self-dealing:
At a special City Council meeting in 2006, a billionaire real estate investor unveiled his vision for redeveloping downtown El Paso. To replace tenements and boarded-up buildings, he proposed restaurants, shops and an arts walk rivaling San Antonio’s River Walk.
Representative Beto O’Rourke, one of hundreds attending, wasn’t exactly a disinterested party.
Not only had he married the investor’s daughter, but as a member of City Council, he represented the targeted area, including a historic Mexican-American neighborhood.
Calling downtown “one piece of El Paso that was missing on the road back to greatness,” Mr. O’Rourke, now a congressman and the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, voted to take the first step forward with the plan.
Over the next two years, Mr. O’Rourke would defend the plan before angry barrio residents and vote to advance it. At other times, he would abstain. Business owners who opposed the plan accused Mr. O’Rourke of a conflict, citing the involvement of his father-in-law, the billionaire developer William D. Sanders.
Snip.
Mr. O’Rourke was perceived by many as siding with the moneyed elite against angry barrio residents, small business owners and even the Jesuit priests who ministered to the immigrant community at Sacred Heart Church.
“Mr. O’Rourke was basically the pretty face of this very ugly plan against our most vulnerable neighborhoods,” said David Dorado Romo, a local historian who added that the episode had resurrected longstanding race and class divisions in the city.
Barrio residents feared that they would lose their homes through eminent domain, and a city-funded branding study suggested that the residents of El Paso were perceived as “dirty” and “lazy.’’ Among some constituents, the hurt feelings have lingered.
Naturally there was great shock among O’Rourke fans that NYT would dare do actual reporting on a Democrat a week before the election. As Brandon Morse notes: “This deal O’Rourke was a part of has all the hallmarks leftists hate. Here’s a rich white guy screwing over poor minorities in order to further enrich himself and his family. Yet, for the longest time, you couldn’t get a peep out of mainstream press outlets.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Finally, there’s a new Emereson College poll that purportedly shows Sen. Ted Cruz up by only three points. By now you should know the reply every poll result brings up: show me the crosstabs. They oversampled Democrats and women. As usual.
Thanks to his fundraising, I expect O’Rourke to lose by less than the 16% Cruz beat Democrat Paul Sadler by in 2012, much less the 20 points Greg Abbott walloped Wendy Davis by in 2014.
I already voted and the election is next week, so there is light at the end of the tunnel! And if political bloggers are already sick of this election season, just think how sick of it ordinary voters are. None of which will keep me from live-blogging/live-tweeting it election night…
Six weeks ago, Democrats were expecting a blue wave to rival the Republican victory of 2010, when the GOP picked up 63 House seats. Everything was in their favor. History—the party in power almost always loses seats. Money—Democrats continue to outraise Republicans by staggering amounts. The opposition—some 41 GOP House members retired, most from vulnerable districts where Donald Trump’s favorability is low. Democrats were even positioned to take over the Senate, despite defending 10 Trump-state seats.
Democrats obliterated their own breaker in the space of two weeks with the ambush of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The left, its protesters and its media allies demonstrated some of the vilest political tactics ever seen in Washington, with no regard for who or what they damaged or destroyed along the way—Christine Blasey Ford, committee rules, civility, Justice Kavanaugh himself, the Constitution. An uncharacteristically disgusted Sen. Lindsey Graham railed: “Boy, y’all want power. God, I hope you never get it!”
A lot of voters suddenly agreed with that sentiment. The enormous enthusiasm gap closed almost overnight as conservative voters rallied to #JobsNotMobs. Even liberal prognosticators today forecast that Republicans will keep the Senate and Democrats will manage only a narrow majority in the House, if that. It’s always possible the polls are off, or that there is a last-minute bombshell. But it remains the case that the ascendant progressive movement blew an easy victory for Democrats.
Antisemetic hate crimes in New York are on the rise, yet “during the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Over 270 individuals along the caravan route have criminal histories, including known gang membership. Those include a number of violent criminals – examples include aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery, sexual assault on a child, and assault on a female. Mexican officials have also publicly stated that criminal groups have infiltrated the caravan. We also continue to see individuals from over 20 countries in this flow from countries such as Somalia, India, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh.
Giant Russian floating dry dock isn’t. It may or may not have damaged Amiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s only aircraft carrier (antiquated though it is) when it went down. Now the Russian Navy is in a world of hurt in the north because no other dry dock north of the Black Sea is capable of hosting either the Kuznetsov or many of Russia’s largest submarines. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
More reminders of just what sort of Administration Lightbringer McLegTingle ran:
CIA conducted "routine counterintelligence monitoring" of US Congressional communications, 2014. pic.twitter.com/gJm77JT3Ml
Aww, no one wants to campaign with Bill Clinton anymore. “‘Inability to reckon with his sexual indiscretions’? Does the NYT use the phrase ‘sexual indiscretions’ when writing about other celebrities who’ve been accused of rape and sexual harassment?”
Workers walk out of Google in protest of their protecting sexual harassment among executives:
Perhaps no company deserves to be destroyed by feminists, but if any company does, none deserves it more than Google. Having built the world’s most powerful search engine, the company then developed or purchased a series of other innovations — Gmail, YouTube, etc. After obtaining a hegemonic position in the online world, however, Google then inexplicably sold its corporate soul to “social justice” ideologues.
The extent to which Google has been captured by left-wing totalitarians, and become an active agent of intellectual repression, became apparent last year after the company fired James Damore for writing an internal memo that criticized their “diversity” policies. Damore sued his former emoployer (“Google Lawsuit Exposes Stalinist Climate Protecting Anti-White, Anti-Male Bias,” Jan. 10) and Google was also subsequently sued by a former member of its “technology staffing management team” who said the company implemented illegal hiring quotas. Only female, black or Latino candidates were eligible for hiring at Google, the lawsuit by Arne Wilberg alleges, and recruiters were ordered to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees.”
Texts from the Nevada Democratic Party: “F—K Trump. Stupid Republican retard. Trump is the anti-christ. Trump loves misery and hates Mexicans. Trump wants you to die. Trump wants to murder Mexicans.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Step into the wayback machine for this one, as some of the stops go back decades.
First read this piece from Jim Schutze from way back in 2002 about how then-Democratic State Rep. Terri Hodge would bring in mysterious courier bundles of absentee ballots on primary day while her assistant was awaiting trial for absentee ballot fraud.
Now move forward to 2010 and this release from the U.S. Attorney General’s office from the FBI archives:
DALLAS—Gladys E. Hodge, also known as “Terri Hodge,” who was to go on trial early next month on charges outlined in a 31-count indictment charging 14 public officials and their associates with various offenses related to a bribery and extortion scheme involving affordable housing developments in the Dallas area, has pleaded guilty, announced U.S. Attorney James T. Jacks of the Northern District of Texas. As a condition of her plea with the government, Hodge, who was elected to the Texas House of Representatives, District 100, in 1996, and re-elected to the same position in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008, has agreed to resign her office and never seek or hold future public office.
Hodge entered her guilty plea this morning, before U.S. District Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn, to fraud and false statements on an income tax return. She faces a maximum statutory sentence of three years in prison, a $100,000 fine, and restitution to the IRS.
Now fast forward to 2017. Who do you think Dallas Democrats have running a session called “Building Better Vote-by-Mail Results?” That’s right: Convicted felon Terri Hodge.
Dallas Republicans are once again battling local Democrats to stop voter fraud. They were in court today seeking a temporary restraining order against Dallas County’s Democrat elections administrator Toni Pippins-Poole to delay opening of suspicious mail ballots, which was scheduled to begin at 7:00 a.m.
Lawyers for the Dallas County Republican Party asked a judge to sequester about 2,400 mail ballots submitted for the November election that GOP ballot board members identified as questionable. They also flagged 20 mail ballots signed by disgraced ex-state representative Terri Hodge as an “assistant.”
Hodge, a Democrat, pleaded guilty in 2010 to felony tax evasion in a Dallas bribery scandal and spent a year in prison. Hodge is prohibited from running for public office but continues to assist mail-ballot voters.
A Democratic judge is hearing the case.
For Dallas Democrats, not only is a felony conviction not enough to dissuade them from hiring someone to commit the same type of voting fraud they’ve been carrying out for over two decades, they actually hired the convicted felon to teach other activists her methods.
That’s why it’s so important to get out and vote. You not only have to win, you have to win beyond the margin of Democrat fraud…
