Due to redistricting, several of the races I vote in have changed.
U.S. 37th Congressional District: Jeremiah Diacogiannis. This is the Austin district carved out for Lloyd Doggett, so any Republican winning is going to be an uphill climb. I liked his questionnaire survey answers, and he seems solidly conservative.
Texas Governor: I’m voting for Don Huffines though I fully expect Greg Abbott to win handily.
Texas Lt. Governor: Dan Patrick. Patrick has made the occasional misstep, but he’s generally been a very solid conservative who successfully pushed conservative legislation through the Texas Senate, only to frequently see that same legislation die in the house.
Texas Attorney General: Ken Paxton. Paxton has done an extremely good job, successfully suing the Biden Administration on a wide variety of federal overreach issues, from vaccine mandates to border control failures.
Texas Criminal Court of Appeals, Place 5: Clint Morgan. This is the race where Texas Scott Walker got elected because his name was Scott Walker. Morgan’s been endorsed by True Texas, Eagle Forum, etc.
Texas State Board of Education Member District 5: Mark Loewe, who previously ran as a Libertarian. Opponent Robert Morrow is a conspiracy theorist and general jerk. I remember Morrow asking JFK assassination questions at a Robert Caro book signing I attended. He did not impress me as someone worthy of public office.
Texas State Senate District 24: Paul Reyes. This is a weird one. Both Trump and Cruz have endorsed Reyes opponent Pete Flores, but Reyes has been endorsed by Eagle Forum and Gun Owners of America.
Texas House District 136: Michelle Evans seems to have some solid conservative policy positions. Those of opponent Amin Salahuddin seem a lot more vague.
Williamson County Judge: Bill Gravell. I think he’s generally done a pretty good job.
Williamson County Court-At-Law #2 Laura Barker. Unlike some previous judges, she hasn’t been an embarrassment, she has some decent endorsements, and unlike her opponent, she has a website…
Williamson County 368th District Court: This one is very close. Right now I favor Will Ward by a whisker over Sarah Bruchmiller based on law enforcement endorsements, but I’m still reading up on the race.
Ukraine fights back, Biden isn’t going to do jack about it, Kyle Rittenhouse is going to sue everyone, inflation soars, the Canadian “emergency” is ended, disaster looms for Democrats, and Ilhan Omar gets an unusual challenger. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
While reports of the battle are confused and preliminary, it appears that Ukrainian forces counterattacked, shot down some Russian helicopters, and have so far been able to prevent the Russians from landing reinforcements. Initial claims that the Russian force at the airfield had been “destroyed” were later clarified; it now seems that the battle at Gostomel is continuing. It’s easy to understand how crucial this battle is, simply by looking at a map. If the Russians could gain control of the Gostomel airfield, they could score a quick knock-out of the Ukrainian capital as part of what is being called their “decapitation” strategy.
Russian news services are claiming they’ve taken the airfield, but that may be stale news or propaganda.
Ukrainian forces take up positions in Kiev. Also: “Reports that the Ukrainian military has delivered a strike on a Russian airfield in Millerovo, Rostov Oblast have now been confirmed.”
The invasion of Ukraine by the armed forces of Russia at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s orders marks the first time since 1945 that Russia has engaged in a conventional war with a near-peer nation.
Ukraine isn’t restive Warsaw Pact nations, it isn’t Afghanistan, it isn’t Chechnya, it isn’t Georgia, and it isn’t Crimea.
The conflict launched by Putin is on a far grander scale than the invasion of Crimea in 2014, launched as Ukraine’s last pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven from office in a popular uprising.
Putin, by choosing to reach beyond the ethnic-Russian majority separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas Basin, has decided to end the independent, Western-looking Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and install a pro-Putin quisling.
And while the fog of war, some deliberate mis-and disinformation operations by the combatants, and the far-from-perfect filter of Western media leaves much unknown at this time, what is known is that Zelenskyy is still in power a day after the Russian offensive. Further, the Ukrainian military appears to be taking a toll on the Russians invading from three sides: south across the Pripyat Marshes from Russian satellite Belarus; west from Russia, including Donbas; and north from the Black Sea in the region of Odessa and Transnistria, a Russian client breakaway state in Moldavia.
Modern conventional war is extremely difficult to do well. Imagine being a conductor of an orchestra, all while the audience was lobbing soccer balls at you and your musicians as you perform J.S. Bach’s Chaconne in D — that’s modern warfare. Putin is attempting a highly complicated operation over large distances in the face of a determined foe. Further, he’s doing so with an army largely composed of conscripts serving for only one year.
Since Putin has decided to oust the Ukrainian government, this means that every day Zelenskyy remains in office is another day that adds to Ukrainian national confidence to resist — and another day that Putin looks to have miscalculated.
A Russian Military Ship telling 13 Ukrainian troops on Snake Island to surrender. They were met with a response of " Russian military Ship, go fuck yourself."
Both the EU and the Biden Administration offer sanctions they admit will not do Jack Squat.
FULL DOCUMENT: This is the general license that US Treasury has issued exempting any "energy" related dealings from the sanctions imposed on some of the biggest Russian banks. It's so wide ranging that even includes "wood" as a form of energy exempted | #Ukraine#OOTTpic.twitter.com/3X5t0LFi3W
WATCH: AP reporter roasts Biden's State Department spokesman over the "frankly huge" list of exemptions in Biden's sanctions on Russia.pic.twitter.com/gzAWB4LwMg
Taiwan joins sanctions against Russia, including their semiconductor industry. I don’t know if any fabless Russian chip design company gets their chips fabbed at TSMC, so I’m not sure how badly this hurts their economy in the long run.
It is the West’s wacko environmentalists who handed Russian President Vladimir Putin the leverage and money to invade Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine this week.
Without these wackos, Putin would be just another gangster in charge of a crumbling country, and maybe one on the verge of a revolution to depose him.
But the facts are the facts are the facts, and the facts are these… Thanks to the West’s environmentalists, those smug greenies who are more concerned with carbon output than world peace, this gangster controls much of the energy going to the European Union (E.U.).
Thanks a lot, Greta…
A great mystery:
Under Carter, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Under Obama, Russia took over Crimea. Under Biden, Russia is invading the rest of Ukraine. Russians do land grabs when Democrats control the White House. Democrats get pissed when you point it out. But it is still true.
Biden is demonstrably more hostile to American oil and gas companies than he is to Russian companies, having frozen oil and gas leasesdespite a court order otherwise.
Thanks to Biden’s inflation, the cost of everything is going up. “70 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”
Fellow former finance reporter Chrystia Freeland — someone I’ve known since we were both expat journalists in Russia in the nineties — announced last week that her native Canada would be making Sorkin’s vision a reality. Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.
Then the Yeltsin era collapsed in corrupt ignominy and Freeland immediately wrote a book called Sale of the Century that identified Yeltsin’s embrace of her former top sources as the “original sin” of Russian capitalism, a “Faustian bargain” that crippled Russia’s chance at true progress. This is Freeland on Yeltsin’s successor in 2000. Note the “Yes, Putin has a reputation for beating the press, but his economic rep is solid!” passage at the end:
It looks as if we’re about to fall in love with Russia all over again…
Compared to the ailing, drink-addled figure Boris Yeltsin cut in his later years, his successor, Vladimir Putin, in the eyes of many western observers, seems refreshingly direct, decisive and energetic… Tony Blair, who has already paid Putin the compliment of a visit to Russia and received the newly installed president in Downing Street in return, has praised him as a strong leader with a reformist vision. Bill Clinton, who recently hot-footed it to Russia, offered the equally sunny appraisal that “when we look at Russia today . . . we see an economy that is growing . . . we see a Russia that has just completed a democratic transfer of power for the first time in a thousand years.”
To be sure, some critics have lamented Putin’s support for the bloody second war in Chechnya, accused him of eroding freedom of the press…and worried aloud that his KGB background and unrepenting loyalty to the honor of that institution could jeopardize Russia’s fragile democratic institutions. But many of even Putin’s fiercest prosecutors seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the economy…
Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”
The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?
She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother.”
Angeleno’s tax dollars at work:
A city audit found LA spends $837,000 to house one homeless person. Perhaps this is why Newsom has done everything he can to block my statewide audit.
China is getting a good return on its investment in the Biden clan: “DOJ shuts down China-focused anti-espionage program. The China Initiative is being cast aside largely because of perceptions that it unfairly painted Chinese Americans and U.S. residents of Chinese origin as disloyal.” We can’t let national security stand in the way of political correctness…
In what may be remembered as one of the greatest miracles of all time, it seems that an upcoming American election cycle is set to put an end to the great COVID pandemic in regions that have been clinging to “mitigation” tactics despite them being proven ineffective long ago. What science couldn’t do for blue state governors, politics is about to. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the country has already adopted an “endemic” approach to COVID. In my Indiana community, for instance, school systems have been in-person and maskless for well over a year.
A combination of experience and common sense led local officials to recognize that while COVID was a serious virus, and an often-times unpleasant condition to endure, we just weren’t experiencing the kind of mortality rates or critical hospitalizations that would require the suspension of normal life. If I was guessing, I would say that there are more counties, cities, and communities in the United States like mine than not.
While mainstream media may be drawn like a moth to the bright lights of urban areas with all the restrictions, mandates, and panic-fueled policies enacted there, most Americans have been “living with” the virus for a long time now.
In fact, if my community is any bellwether for the nation, most Americans are already wondering why anyone is still attempting to take a non-endemic approach at this point. The virus has proven itself to be, like all other viruses, prone to seasonal surges that are largely unaltered by our theatrical mitigation techniques. Not that anyone with their head screwed on straight ever thought there was value in wearing a porous cloth mask while standing up at a restaurant, then taking it off while sitting down, but the comical nonsense of mask histrionics is now widely appreciated as a goofy spectator sport. Behold:
So silly. And so as opinion polls continue showing that an ever-increasing number of Americans are infuriated by this nonsense, and that they are done with all the aggressive pandemic restrictions that proved unnecessary a long time ago, a public pivot of massive proportions is underway amongst the political class.
Whether it’s big blue state governors like California’s Gavin Newsom hilariously announcing that he will be transitioning his state to the country’s first “endemic” virus policy – meaning they’re going to start doing some things that Texas, Florida, South Dakota, Indiana, and so many others have been doing for over a year – or whether it’s blue city school boards like San Francisco’s being recalled by angry voters for their abusive and needless shutdown and masking policies, it’s clear where we’re headed.
Despite that, the midterm news for Democrats is not good.
Democrats know that they should be preparing for a brutal showing in this November’s midterm elections. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race last year — and, more to the point, the substance and style of his successful campaign — were the first sign of it.
But the hits have kept on coming. In San Francisco last week, two progressive parents succeeded in their campaign to oust three school-board members for being . . . too progressive. Irked initially at how long it was taking for area schools to reopen for in-person learning during the pandemic, these two single parents did some digging and discovered even more to be upset about: an enormous budget shortfall, an intensive campaign to rename dozens of school buildings, and the replacement of a merit-based admissions program with a diversity-minded lottery, among other issues.
Suggesting just how central education has become to politics, San Francisco’s intensely progressive mayor, London Breed — who last fall violated her own mask mandate at a concert and defended herself by saying she was “feeling the spirit” — endorsed the school-board recall effort.
“My take is that it was really about the frustration of the board of education doing their fundamental job,” Breed said after the results were in. “And that is to make sure that our children are getting educated, that they get back into the classroom. And that did not occur. . . . We failed our children. Parents were upset. The city as a whole was upset, and the decision to recall school-board members was a result of that.”
San Francisco–based writer Gary Kamiya suggests in a piece for the Atlantic that the results of the recall seem to confirm the conservative narrative. Kamiya writes that conservatives have argued “that the Democratic Party is out of step not just with Republicans, but with its own constituents. . . . Progressives rejected such conclusions, insisting that the recall was simply about competence and was driven by an only-in-San-Francisco set of circumstances.” Kamiya concludes that the best way to read the outcome is “closer to the conservative view.” “At a minimum,” Kamiya writes, “the recall demonstrates that ‘woke’ racial politics have their limits, even in one of the wokest cities in the country.”
Over in Texas, meanwhile, failed Senate candidate and failed presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke is gearing up to become a failed gubernatorial candidate, too. Running against incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott, O’Rourke was most recently seen trying to pretend that he isn’t a fan of radical gun-control measures.
Asked about the promise he made during his run for president that he would “take away AR-15s and AK-47s,” O’Rourke attempted a hard about-face.
“I’m not interested in taking anything from anyone,” he said. “What I want to make sure that we do is defend the Second Amendment. I want to make sure that we protect our fellow Texans far better than we’re doing right now. And that we listen to law enforcement, which Greg Abbott refused to do. He turned his back on them when he signed that permitless-carry bill that endangers the lives of law enforcement in a state that’s seen more cops and sheriff’s deputies gunned down than in any other.”
As Charlie Cooke has noted, this is utter tripe. It also isn’t working. The latest poll of the race from the Dallas Moring News has Abbott up by seven points, 45 percent to 38 percent. O’Rourke himself remains underwater with voters: Only 40 percent view him favorably, while 46 percent say they have an unfavorable view of the candidate.
Republicans win a Jacksonville City Council race:
It's a citywide race, and this result will more or less match the average partisanship of the city for the past decade or so. But this was a Dem-held seat, and losing it in this fashion has to hurt the local party. And doesn't portend well in other races.
Kyle Rittenhouse is finally ready to sue, including lawsuits against Whoopi Goldberg and Cenk Uygur. I hope he bankrupts anyone who called him a white supremacist.
Former Houston Rockets draft bust Royce White is running for Congress as a Republican against “Squad” member Ilhan Omar. Hopefully he can be on the campaign trail more than he was on the floor for the Rockets…
When I surveyed readers about what they wanted to see covered, several voiced support for more state political news. And early voting ends Friday. So here’s a long-in-gestation post on the state of the Governor’s Race.
The problem is that, while I’d love to see a competitive Republican primary, I’m not sure there is one.
Despite Allen West claiming he’s in the lead (don’t buy it) and Don Huffines dropping a significant amount of direct mailers, this is not only Greg Abbott’s race to lose, at this point I doubt he’s even going to be drawn into a runoff.
Before we get to the details, let’s deal with the incredulity outside the state that Abbott is even in any sort of race at all. He’s a conservative Republican incumbent, isn’t he?
Incumbent? Yes. Republican? Yes. Conservative? By the standards of Democrat-run states, unquestionably. I’m sure the Republican residents of California, Michigan, New York and Washington would love to trade their Democratic governors for Abbott. But among conservative activists, there is a simmering resentment that Abbott hasn’t been nearly as conservative on a number of topics as he could be, that he’s “left money on the table” and talks a much better game than he’s actually accomplished.
But let’s start with the things Abbott has gotten right. Under Abbott, Texas has generally controlled spending, and the low tax and low regulation environment has seen the Texas economy recovery quickly from the Flu Manchu lockdown recession. So too has Texas continued to lure big companies and projects from other states to Texas, from Apple to Samsung to Tesla.
So too, Abbott has been on the right side of just about social issue. He’s been consistently pro-Second Amendment. Texas’ innovative abortion law was hailed by pro-life groups across the country. Abbott has talked a good game on the Biden Administration’s inability to secure the border, and got funding for border wall construction passed.
But a lot of conservative activists have accused Abbott of being all hat and no cattle. For example:
Take Abbott’s much-vaunted Operation Lone Star, an effort by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard to secure the Texas border with Mexico. Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, the implementation leaves much to be desired:
“It was common knowledge inside the command group that [Operation Lone Star] is just a political stunt,” retired Command Sergeant Major Jason Featherston, who served as Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Texas Army National Guard, told Chronicles. “Do I think we should have soldiers on the border? Absolutely. But what’s gone wrong with this is that it was hastily done and poorly planned.”
Featherston was present at the birth of Operation Lone Star and retired from his career while overseeing the Texas Military Department’s largest branch (the Army National Guard), with 19,000 people under him. Featherston said that while he cares little for politics, his “number one priority in all of this is making sure soldiers get paid on time and get the equipment they need and that they and their families are treated the way they need to be treated.” A lot of that isn’t happening or has been fraught with setbacks.
The border guards lack of basic equipment, and many troops don’t even have access to portable bathrooms, Featherston said.
There is also the huge issue of the 2021 ice storm power outage. Obviously Greg Abbott doesn’t control the weather, but he does control appointments to ERCOT, and touted trendy renewable energy that proved inadequate for preserving baseline power needs during the emergency. All that said, the grid held up just fine during the most recent (far less severe) cold snap, which may eliminate the last hope of Abbott’s primary opponents (and Beto O’Rourke) to lay a glove on him.
While Abbott lifted Texas lockdown restrictions earlier than many states, he did issue a slew of constitutionally questionable mandates during the early states of the coronavirus pandemic, including lockdowns and mask mandates. He was also notably slower than governors like Ron DeSantis at lifting restrictions.
Abbott has frequently been criticized both for being more reactive on culture war issues like Critical Race Theory and transsexual genital mutilation procedures on children, and that he has relied on executive orders rather than pushing for special session bills to pass laws to rectify the problem.
Abbott has also been dinged for raising money in California, something Ted Cruz (rightly) dinged both David Dewhurst and Beto O’Rourke over.
There’s a lot of truth to some of these charges, but I also don’t think any of them will actually derail Battleship Abbott. With his huge name recognition, money advantage and polling currently showing him at 60%, I expect Abbott to win to the primary and slaughter O’Rourke in the general.
Ricky Lynn Perry, AKA “not that Rick Perry.” I cannot find either website or Twitter feed for this guy, so that link goes to a Texas Tribune article on him. Here’s his iVoter profile. He’s not a serious candidate, and I only mention him here so nobody gets fooled by seeing “Rick Perry” on the ballot.
Unsurprisingly, Abbott’s war chest tops the charts, with $62.6 million cash on hand, having raised nearly $1.5 million in the first 20 days of January. Abbott has also spent more than $4.5 million in the same period as he campaigns around the state, releasing mailers and radio and TV advertisements.
Solidly in second, Huffines raised more than $1.1 million in the same timespan, bringing his total cash on hand to $2.3 million. Huffines’ expenditures show more than $2.7 million spent as he crisscrosses the state campaigning to Texans.
Meanwhile, West raised $331,000 and maintains about $83,000 cash on hand as of January 20. West spent more than $230,000 in 20 days on campaigning and advertising as he traverses the state to speak with Texans.
The Texas Ethics Commission is not showing Prather’s January 31 report, only his previous report accounting for July-December 2021. During that time, the report shows Prather raised more than $100,000 and had around $20,000 cash on hand.
That little money for Allen West doesn’t show a candidate that’s ahead.
I’ve tried numerous times to get a meeting with the governor,” said Miller. “In the seven years that we’ve both been in our offices, I’ve never got a meeting with the governor, never got a phone call returned, never got an email or letter returned.”
Miller continued to express his frustration in Abbott’s lack of communication and explained just how difficult it is to get in contact with the governor.
“Well, it’s kind of like working with sasquatch,” said Miller. “Everybody knows he’s real and some people have seen him, but I’ve never seen him. I can’t get a meeting with him.”
I’ve gotten several direct mailers from Huffines, including one in which he states his opposition to Critical Race Theory and LGBT ideology. I’ve gotten none from Abbott (though he has sent me a zillion fundraising emails) or West (and a lesser number of fundraiser emails).
Justin Trudeau’s storm troopers start arresting peaceful protesters, he wants to kidnap the children and dogs of free Canadian citizens who dared to bruise his fragile ego, Texas sends more lawsuits flying, and another case of Sudden Epstein Death Syndrome. It’s the Friday Saturday LinkSwarm!
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled parliamentary debate today as federal police began arresting protesting truckers and confiscating vehicles. Trudeau did not want to face government while the operation to break the back of the freedom protestors begins.
Early this morning, federal police assembled a convoy of heavy tow trucks to begin the operation. The identities of the tow truck companies were masked by painting over the logos to avoid retaliation. RCMP and Ottawa police then brought in Armored Personnel Carriers (MRAP’s and APC’s) to support the operation.
Media were told to leave the enforcement zone to help hide the optics of heavily armed RCMP tactical units, and they began breaking the windows of the trucks and forcibly removing the truck drivers. For the same reason, popular social media YouTuber’s, who had been broadcasting livestreams, were arrested as the operation began.
They’re also threatening to take children from protesting parents. “Just imagine the uproar that would ensue if Trump had taken children from Black Lives Matters protesters.”
“When Fascism Comes To America, It Will Look Like Justin Trudeau’s Canada. Trudeau’s dangerous not just because he’s abusing Canadians, but because he is providing the wish list for crackdowns by Democrats in the U.S.: Every single bank, credit union, investment broker and insurance provider in the country has been deputized to figure out if they have a blockader as a client, and to immediately freeze their accounts if so.”
It’s public health 101: if you want to protect people from a +99% survivable virus, you trample them with horses in front of their kids and euthanize their pets and freeze their bank accounts
The Chicago Teachers Union provides a real-world example of what happens when a government union has too much power.
CTU has gone on strike three times in three school years. In the latest work stoppage, over 330,000 schoolchildren missed five days of school. Parents were notified of the walkout after 11 p.m. on a school night, leaving them just hours to develop a back-up plan after the union decided not to show up.
This shut-down follows the 2020-2021 school year, when Chicago Public Schools was fully remote for most of the year, rolling out hybrid options starting in February 2021. All told, Chicago students had gone 17 months without fully in-person education by the time they started the current school year Aug. 30, 2021.
And students’ academic achievement suffered for it. One example: On the SATs, there was a 6.1 percentage point decrease in the number of Chicago students at least meeting standards in math – and a drop of 6.7 percentage points for the same category for low-income students – in 2021 compared to 2019.
But CTU’s political muscle – and their willingness to flex it – could become the blueprint for schools and government at all levels if Illinois’ powerful government-sector unions get what they’re asking for at the polls in November. They want an amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would give unelected government union bosses more power than state law or the people elected to represent residents’ best interests.
Snip.
Amendment 1 is billed as a right-to-work ban in a state that already doesn’t allow right to work, but it’s much more than that. It would give unions a “fundamental” right to organize and bargain over wages, hours, working conditions, economic welfare and safety at work – i.e., virtually anything – and explicitly prohibit lawmakers from ever interfering with or diminishing those rights.
Unions would be able to demand anything during negotiations and go on strike to get their demands met. Resulting contracts would carry the weight of the state constitution. Lawmakers wouldn’t be able to restrict what unions can negotiate or limit when they can go on strike without running afoul of the state constitution.
What’s more, lawmakers would never be able to repeal a little-known Illinois provision that allows many union contracts to override conflicting state and local laws and regulations.
Known in legal parlance as a “supercedence clause,” the practical effect is that a union will be able to rewrite laws it doesn’t like just by negotiating a contrary provision in its contract. If the employer doesn’t agree? The union goes on strike. And government officials’ hands will be tied.
That includes laws in place to protect children.
A provision requiring “background information” on employees of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services – the department charged with protecting children who are reported abused or neglected – could be contradicted in the union’s contract with the state.
So could the provision prohibiting employment of “sexually dangerous” persons.
Paxton and Texas also sued Facebook over facial recognition. “Facebook unlawfully captured the biometric identifiers of Texans for a commercial purpose without their informed consent, disclosed those identifiers to others, and failed to destroy collected identifiers within a reasonable time.”
“San Francisco police linked a woman to a crime using DNA from her rape exam, D.A. Boudin says.” Though the charges were dropped, this seems like not only a clear Fourth Amendment violation, but an absolute abuse of trust. “Sure, just give your DNA to the government! There’s no way they would ever abuse that!” Can you believe that Soros-backed Boudin is the subject of a recall petition?
This isn’t just the crest of a wave: if Republicans offer a positive, credible alternative, as @GlennYoungkin did in Virginia, it’s the making of a realignment. https://t.co/5lzpE6B7IL
Let me see if I have the timeline on this story correct: 1. Leftwing racial justice activist Quintez Brown attempts to assassinate Louisville Democratic mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg, and 2. He’s almost immediately bailed out for a paltry $100,000 by #BlackLivesMatter? How often is bail set so low for attempted political assassinations?
CRT got blown away by a massive truth bomb dropped by North Carolina dad — and local GOP candidate — Brian Echevarria at his school board meeting on Monday.
“As a parent, I speak to other parents,” he told Cabarrus County School Board members, “And there’s a few things we don’t want.”
“I’m biracial, I’m multilingual, I’m multicultural. The fact is in America and North Carolina, I can do anything I want — and I teach that to my children. And the person who tells my little pecan-color kids that they’re somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin,” he justly insisted, “would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me.”
Speaking of pedophilia: “Alternatively described as Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘best mate’ and ‘pimp’, Jean-Luc Brunel, a former French modeling agent who has been imprisoned since 2020 on charges he aided Epstein’s sex-trafficking enterprise, has committed suicide in his cell.” I think we’ve seen this movie before, and we didn’t believe the ending the first time…
Speaking of Adams: “I want to discuss the new fuckface mayor of New York City that replaced the old fuckface mayor.” The mayor that wants to force employers to enforce vaccine mandates also wants them to force workers back to their NYC offices.
What’s in it for those businesses that now realize that three hundred thousand dollars a month in office space “We don’t need it anymore.” What’s in it for those employees that figured out that they can have homes that are two or three times the size for half as much money and not have to deal with a commute every day? What’s in it for them?”
With oil prices up, so are U.S. rig counts, up to a four year high.
New Bloom County animated TV show in development for Fox. I view this with more trepidation than hope. There’s about a 95% chance the screw it up, and if they don’t, there’s a good chance Fox will cancel it anyway, since that’s their MO…
P. J. O’Rourke, RIP. I reviewed Holidays in Hell for Reason back in the day…
In 2017, a pilot aborted takeoff after V1, the inflection point for when a safe abort was still possible. “Still traveling at 100 knots, but decelerating rapidly, the plane rumbled across the grass overrun area, plowed over the airport perimeter fence, struck a raised embankment, lost its landing gear, crossed a road, and ground to a halt straddling a ditch.” Post-incident analysis showed why that was the right call. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
FLOCK DROP MYSTERY: A security camera in Chihuahua, Mexico, captured the moment hundreds of yellow-headed blackbirds suddenly fell from the sky — many nosediving to their death https://t.co/45WA052YZOpic.twitter.com/FsZkEorTc7
That Biden Inflation is up to another 40 year high, a BLM founder heads to the big house, Democrats wake the normies, more corrupt insiders playing footsie with China, and only white liberals are upset at Joe Rogan. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Welcome back Carter inflation is in full swing. “The consumer price index went up by 7.5 percent over the last year, the highest annual increase since February 1982.”
Remember the mention in last week’s LinkSwarm about how cooking oil prices drove an Austin restaurant out of business? Well it’s a global problem that’s leading to record-high food prices.
“Activist who founded Black Lives Matter Memphis is sentenced to six years in prison for illegally voting when she was still on probation for felonies including stalking….Pamela Moses, 44, voted illegally six times since she pleaded guilty to evidence tampering, forgery, perjury, stalking and theft under $500, seven years ago.”
The Democratic education establishment done screwed up by waking up normie parents.
Many public schools kicked off 2022 by switching back to remote learning — or canceling classes altogether — leaving frustrated parents across the country frantically searching for more consistent schooling options.
These past two school years of remote and hybrid learning, forced masking, and an intensified culture of unpredictability has pushed teachers, administrators, students, and parents to very edge. What began as a temporary interruption to student learning has become a vicious cycle of confusion, inconsistency and lost educational time.
Thanks to the unreliability of distance learning, children are retaining less of what they’ve learned, reading at lower grade levels and suffering from a lack of social interaction. There is little to no support for children who rely on school to provide a safe haven from difficult home lives, and students in free or reduced meal plans have a harder time receiving them.
As school policies continue to isolate students from friends and peers, such as forcing students to eat their lunch outside on buckets, or facing the same direction without talking, the tragic numbers of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide continue to rise.
Millions of exasperated parents, many in deep-blue cities and states, are desperately pursuing educational alternatives that better suit their families’ needs and values. Parents are enrolling their children in private and charter schools in droves, while those without the financial means to do so remain stuck in a system captive to the whims of teachers’ unions and indifferent school boards.
Many teachers are going above and beyond in the name of what is best for kids, but their ability to truly innovate and explore new ways of teaching and inspire learning is being blocked by the unnecessarily restrictive demands of union leadership.
These unions tend to operate at state and national levels in ways that do not represent most of their members. Rather than sticking up for these vulnerable children, unions — as recently exemplified by the Chicago Teachers Union — are prioritizing strikes, walkouts and funding political campaigns, halting true progress as students remain stranded at home.
Fed-up teachers across the country have resigned their union membership, tired of their dues dollars funding an agenda they don’t support.
Dr. Angelique Coetzee is the South African responsible for alerting health officials about the omicron variant of COVID-19 back in November. At the time of the discovery, she observed that it presented “unusual but mild” symptoms.
This was undeniably good news. Despite being more transmissible, the omicron variant was less severe, and many believed that it meant that the pandemic was nearing its end. But Dr. Coetzee says that she was subjected to “a lot of pressure from European scientists and politicians” to revise her original diagnosis that omicron presented mostly mild symptoms so that the public would perceive omicron to be just as dangerous as the delta variant.
She was subsequently attacked for her refusal to push the preferred narrative.
“Because of all of COVID’s mutations, all of these scientists and politicians who aren’t from South Africa were contacting me telling me I was wrong when I spoke out, that it was a serious disease … they were telling me I had no idea what I was talking about, they kept attacking me,” she told the Daily Telegraph. “In South Africa it is a lighter disease, but in Europe it has been a serious, serious illness, which is what the politicians want me to say … there has been a lot of pressure from European scientists and politicians who have said ‘Please don’t say it is a mild illness.’”
Nepo, meet Tism: “GM hires [Missy Owens], Biden niece, former Obama aide to head environment, sustainability and governance policy.” It’s a very exclusive club, and none of us are in it.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) called on the U.S. to stand up to the “generational threat” posed by China while unveiling a major report on Beijing’s “malign behavior” at the same time her husband’s law firm was working on behalf of companies linked to China’s military, intelligence, and security services.
As Cheney stood at the podium, her husband Philip Perry’s law firm was cashing in on legal and lobbying work that his employer — Latham & Watkins (LW), one of the largest law firms in the world — was doing for a host of Chinese companies, some of which were involved in the kind of activity that Cheney was warning had to be stopped.
More fallout from the midterm variant: Suddenly dire emotional appeals about Republican governors dropping mandates become strangely clinical when it’s Democrats doing the same thing.
Over at @CNNPolitics, the same agitprop story got recycled in Florida.
But now? We’re told “Democratic governors outpace the White House with masking pullbacks.”
Democrats were caught off guard by Donald Trump’s numbers in South Texas in 2020. The Hispanic Republican women who live there were not.
Many of them have played a leading role in urging their neighbors in majority-Hispanic South Texas to question their traditional loyalty to the Democratic Party.
Hispanic women now serve as party chairs in the state’s four southernmost border counties, spanning a distance from Brownsville almost to Laredo — places where Trump made some of his biggest inroads with Latino voters.
A half-dozen of them are running for Congress across the state’s four House districts that border Mexico, including Monica De La Cruz, the GOP front-runner in one of Texas’ most competitive seats in the Rio Grande Valley.
It’s some of the clearest evidence that Trump’s 2020 performance there may not have been an anomaly, but rather a sign of significant Republican inroads among Texas Hispanics — perhaps not enough to threaten the Democratic advantage among those voters [Keep whistling past that graveyard. -LP], but enough to send ripples of fear through a party that is experiencing erosion among Hispanics across the country.
“For so long, people here just never had Republicans knocking on their doors and calling them the way we did in 2020. The majority of us are women that did it then and are doing it now because we feel it’s our responsibility to keep the American Dream alive,” said Mayra Flores, a leading candidate for the GOP nomination in a South Texas-based congressional seat.
For Flores, the road to becoming a Republican was similar to the path traveled by many Hispanic women in South Texas. She grew up seeing most of her immigrant family vote Democrat and felt that it was standard for Hispanics to only vote for Democrats. Then, she says, came an inflection point where she began to question her loyalty to the party.
A family member asked if she knew what both parties stood for, and after looking into it, Flores felt that her religious, anti-abortion and pro-border security views were more conservative than she’d ever thought and more in line with the GOP. Five years ago, she got involved in her local GOP and now a majority of her family votes Republican, too.
She wasn’t surprised at all to see Republicans gain ground in 2020 along the Texas-Mexico border, even as Democrats and Republicans outside the region expressed shock at results in places such as Zapata County — where Trump became the first GOP presidential nominee since 1920 to carry the county.
Neighboring Starr County saw the most dramatic shift of any county in the state when thousands more Republicans turned out to vote than in prior elections. While President Joe Biden ultimately won the county with 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 47 percent, that paled in comparison to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance, when she garnered 79 percent to Trump’s 19 percent.
Can you hear them now, Democrats? (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
Democrats want to continue allowing private money to fund public elections. Republicans want to limit the practice, which they say gave Joe Biden an unfair and perhaps decisive advantage over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential contest.
So far, at least 10 Republican-controlled states have passed laws to prohibit or limit the use of private money in public elections. These include the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. In another swing state, North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed such legislation, as did other Democratic governors.
During 2020, nonprofits donated more than $400 million to state and local election boards to support their work and get out the vote. Most of the funding, about $350 million, came from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, distributed primarily through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Chicago-based progressive-led group that includes former operatives of President Barack Obama.
Democrats and others contend that such money is necessary to support the work of underfunded election boards facing the added challenges of the pandemic. Republicans assert that the private grants were disproportionately allocated to counties eventually won by Biden, a mismatch that hurt them in 2020 and, if continued, would damage their chances in future elections.
District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), one of the George Soros-funded stooges who took office in some of our major cities with the explicit promise to reduce prosecutions, tried to tell people that yes, crimes with firearms had increased, but other crimes were down. That, of course, was bovine feces.
The real reason for the increase in carjackings? It’s because the perps simply aren’t very afraid of being caught, or, if they’re caught, being seriously punished, not with a ‘social justice’ District Attorney in charge of prosecutions.
Another week, another hate crime hoax. “A 19-year-old black female college student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) is now facing disorderly conduct charges over lying to police after she reported a hate crime incident in her dorm last month….black female college student Kaliyeha Clark-Mabins now faces three disorderly conduct charges for filing a false police report over the matter.”
With several of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates still in effect — such as those affecting members of the military, federal contractors, and healthcare workers — Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) is calling on lawmakers to block government spending that funds the enforcement of those mandates.
Roy, along with 48 other Republicans in Congress, sent a letter to the GOP leadership in each chamber pledging to refuse consideration of “any federal government funding vehicle [. . .] that funds the enforcement of COVID-19 vaccine mandates at any level of government.”
The letter comes in advance of February 18, 2022, the date through which the federal government is currently funded thanks to two continuing resolutions (CRs) that were passed by Congress last fall.
According to the top-ranking Republican in the Senate Appropriations Committee, Congress is headed toward passing another stop-gap measure to continue funding the government without any shutdowns.
Republicans like Roy — who also expressed frustration with the national debt surpassing $30 trillion — don’t want to see that funding continue to support the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
During a House floor speech on Friday, Roy explained his position, saying, “[W]hen members of this body or the United States Senate vote for a continuing resolution — I want every American to listen to me — when they vote for a continuing resolution to fund government, they are voting to fund the enforcement of vaccine mandates that are causing our men and women in uniform to be forced out of service, to be discharged.”
Members of the Texas delegation who signed Roy’s letter include Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX-01), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-02), Lance Gooden (R-TX-05), Ronny Jackson (R-TX-13), Randy Weber (R-TX-14), Pete Sessions (R-TX-17), Troy Nehls (R-TX-22), Michael Cloud (R-TX-27), Michael Burgess (R-TX-26), and Brian Babin (R-TX-26).
Opposition to vaccine mandates is widespread in America, and almost universal among Republicans, which makes defunding them an excellent hill to defend. The only question is why more GOP legislators haven’t signed this pledge.
If Biden and congressional Democrats didn’t want their unconstitutional regulatory schemes held hostage to continuing resolutions, they should have tried to get them passed into law and passed an actual budget rather than a continuing resolution. Too bad pandering to their far left-wing base was more important than writing a budget Manchin and Sinema could sign off on.
He who lives by the continuing resolution dies by the continuing resolution.
The Carter-era “misery index” (inflation + unemployment) is rising, Canada’s truckers are still honking, more Democratic sleazebag activity, the far left is coming for your kids, China continues to misbehave, and a tragic cheese display collapse shocks onlookers. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Biden continues to work his magic on the economy. Expected job numbers: +200,000. Actual job numbers: -300,000.
Why the BLS is applying such a grotesque seasonal adjustment to it, is unclear (actually, if one assumes that the Biden admin tapped the BLS secretary on the shoulder, then it is very clear).
It’s not just outside analysts who reach this conclusion: in Table C to its report, the BLS showed “December 2021-January 2022 changes in selected labor force measures, with adjustments for population control effects” and confirmed that if one had used an apples-to-apples basis for the January numbers, the number of Employed workers (from the Household Survey) would be down -272K. Instead, thanks to the population control effect adjustment of 1.471 million, the final number was 1.199 million!
In summary, while the markets had been trading for months on fake data when the BLS failed to catch up to covid reality, and was applying stale seasonal adjustments, they are doing so again today, only in the opposite direction with the BLS now overextending itself in the opposite direction, with a January seasonal adjustment that has never been greater!
Inflation hit 5.8% in 2021, the most in 39 years. Pretty sure this year is going to be a lot worse.
How bad is inflation? Dwight sent over this link on an Austin restaurant shutting down that includes an eye-opening inflation tidbit. “He pointed out that a container of fryer oil that a year ago cost about $17 had risen to about $50.”
Canada’s freedom truckers seem to be making headway with regional governments, some of whom have promised to lift vaccine mandates, but asshole authoritarian Justin Trudeau is refusing to budge.
There are two naturally occurring viruses that are particularly similar to SARS-CoV-2. The first is RaTG13, which shares 96.2 percent of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli. This virus was collected from bat feces in a copper-mine shaft in Tongguan, Mojiang, Yunnan Province, China, that was the site of a small-scale deadly viral infection with some curious similarities to Covid.
In April 2012, six miners were assigned to clean bat guano from the mine shaft. Four miners had been working at the site for two weeks, and two had been working there for four days when they all grew ill with a cough and fever and experienced difficulty breathing, aching limbs, heavy and bloody mucus and saliva, and headaches — symptoms of a viral respiratory infection that are similar to the effects of Covid. All six miners were admitted to a Kunming hospital in late April and early May, and three died — one after two weeks, one after a month and a half, and one after three months. The other three survived.
Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a prominent Chinese pulmonologist whose high-profile role has been compared to that of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States, consulted on the cases of the miners. Recognizing that the virus afflicting the miners could be comparable to SARS, researchers sent blood samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for antibody testing.
In 2012 and 2013, teams of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted a study of coronaviruses in bats in that abandoned mine shaft — and one of the samples they collected was RaTG13.
The second virus that is particularly similar to SARS-CoV-2 is really a cluster of three similar viruses discovered in Laos in autumn 2021. A team led by Marc Eliot, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, collected saliva, feces, and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos and found three new viruses that were each more than 95 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103, and BANAL-236.
Some skeptics of the lab-leak theory contend that the BANAL viruses proved that SARS-CoV-2 is likely a naturally occurring virus, and because Laos was roughly 1,000 miles from Wuhan, this pointed away from the notion that the Covid pandemic could be traced back to a leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other labs in the city. But there is ample reason to believe that viruses from Laos — perhaps not the BANAL trio, but similar ones — were also shipped from Laos to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In 2010, Wildlife Trust, a nonprofit international conservation organization dedicated to protecting wildlife, announced it was rebranding itself under the name EcoHealth Alliance. The organization’s president, Peter Daszak, declared that his group had become “the central organization defining the intersection of local conservation and global health” and touted itself as being “on the forefront of informing the public, businesses, and the scientific community about emerging diseases, including potential pandemics.” It is safe to say that EcoHealth Alliance is one of the largest, best funded, and best connected nonprofits, focusing upon “field research and develop[ing] tools to save ecosystems and predict and prevent pandemics.”
EcoHealth Alliance/illegal gain of function section snipped.
We know for a fact that the people collecting samples do not always follow the necessary safety procedures. And the risk of accidental infection does not disappear once the viruses and bats are brought back to the laboratories.
Lab accidents happen. The first argument against the lab-leak theory that can be safely dismissed is the notion that Chinese scientists were simply too careful or too diligent to ever let a virus escape their lab. Accidents occur even in the most well-trained and highly regarded research facilities in the world. In June 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that they had unintentionally exposed personnel to potentially viable anthrax. A month later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found samples of smallpox, dengue, and spotted fever just sitting in a storage room. A decade earlier, the Chinese CDC’s National Institute of Virology in southern Beijing had accidentally released SARS. Twice.
In February 2019, Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, laid out a report in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists detailing that from 2009 to 2015, a federal program “received a total of 749 incident reports from select-agent research facilities,” including “1) needle sticks and other through the skin exposures from sharp objects, 2) dropped containers or spills/splashes of liquids containing pathogens, and 3) bites or scratches from infected animals.”
China obviously places the same importance on lab safety as it puts into quality control. Lets pick it up where more CCP perfidy kicks in:
Finally, there is the undeniably suspicious behavior of the Chinese government since the first cases were reported in Wuhan in December 2019. Until January 21, 2020, the Wuhan Regional Health Commission insisted that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found.” On January 4, 2020, former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield was incredulous during a phone call with his Chinese counterpart, George Gao. Redfield described asking his old friend Gao, “George, you don’t really believe that mother and father and daughter all got it from an animal at the same time, do ya?” Gao insisted there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. But Redfield recounted that two days later, Gao broke down during a call, “audibly and tearfully distraught after finding ‘a lot of cases’ in the community who had never visited the wet market.”
In late January and early February, the Chinese government ordered all labs processing samples of the strange new virus to destroy them. On January 3, China’s National Health Commission ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. The justification for this order was public safety, although it is hard to see the public-safety benefit in suppressing information about the disease.
It took a year to get a World Health Organization investigative team into Wuhan, and when that team arrived, it encountered angry refusals to turn over raw data about the earliest cases. According to the New York Times, “disagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts among the typically mild-mannered scientists on both sides.” The Chinese government has refused to allow another team of investigators to enter Wuhan or the labs in the city. The Chinese government does not care if it looks guilty.
A much-hyped U.S. intelligence-community investigation completed in August offered almost nothing useful, declaring, “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.” Ninety days of effort, with all the resources of the U.S. government, generated nothing new.
To paraphrase Ebright, in the autumn of 2019, there were three institutions in the entire world that were doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats. One was in Galveston, Texas, one was in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the third was in Wuhan, China.
In theory, the pandemic could have started with some random Chinese person who didn’t have any connection to the bat coronavirus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan CDC. This person would have a spectacularly unlucky run-in with a bat or other animal, and that random Chinese person caught the exceptionally rare naturally occurring animal virus that infects, sickens, and spreads among human beings like wildfire. This same hyper-contagious bat virus would have the exceptionally unusual trait of being extremely difficult to find in bats.
This extraordinarily unlucky person would then travel to the metaphorical doorstep of one of the three labs in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats and start infecting other people in the city of Wuhan. Under the natural-origin theory, the Wuhan laboratories just happen to be mind-bogglingly unlucky that events played out in a way that so closely mimics the consequences of a lab accident.
That would be a remarkable series of coincidences.
Read the whole thing.
Data point. “Younger, working-age people began dying in greater numbers as vaccine mandates hit.”
More data:
Been seeing a lot of governors crediting their mask mandates for "defeating" the Omicron wave. Thought I'd plot COVID cases in states with mask mandates vs. states without them, and, well… pic.twitter.com/WdhsyCINjp
Glenn Youngkin is governing Virginia according to the implicit campaign slogan that powered his victory: stop messing with our kids, you freaks! That’s the polite version, anyway. Other Republican officials should follow his lead and solidify the GOP as the party of parents.
Youngkin ran as a conservative champion of normalcy, especially in schools. His campaign was assisted when his opponent declared parents should not have a say in what their children are taught, thereby confirming everything Youngkin was running on.
Since being sworn in, Youngkin has banned school mask mandates, banned teaching racist ideas from sources such as critical race theory, and requested the new state attorney general, Jason Miyares, to investigate the apparent coverup by Loudoun County officials of a rape committed by a skirt-wearing boy in a girls’ bathroom. He has also started cleaning house in the bureaucracy.
These measures have provoked pushback from the usual suspects. Left-wing teachers are now worried they’ll get in trouble for teaching the race essentialism derived from critical race theory. Some counties have defied the governor over school mask mandates, and are punishing students who choose not to wear them. But Youngkin is holding firm, knowing this is what he was elected to do.
Across the nation, parents are in revolt against the Democrat-led educational establishment, and Republicans should eagerly join the fray. After all, it was the Democrat-loving teachers unions that fought to keep schools shut down long after we knew that children were at almost no risk from Covid-19. Likewise, it has mostly been Democrats and their allies forcing children to wear masks when school is open, even though (as a few on the left are finally admitting) masks are particularly harmful for children, while offering no real benefits.
There are other indignities and cruelties, of course, from shutting down outdoor playgrounds to forcing schoolchildren to study or eat lunch outdoors in freezing temperatures. And these miseries have been inflicted long after any plausible ability to defend them as emergency measures, or to plead ignorance of the consequences. Under pressure from the teachers unions and education bureaucracy, Democrats have chosen to sacrifice the well-being of children. Even many liberals now want an alternative to the endless school shutdowns, masks, and other pandemic security theater.
Students across the country as young as kindergarten-age are learning that “everybody gets to choose their own gender” and are receiving kid-friendly lessons on disrupting “Western nuclear family dynamics” as part of this week’s national Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.
The activist-driven curriculum for the Week of Action, which kicked off Monday, is based off the 13 “Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles.” Those principles include a commitment to restorative justice, being transgender affirming and queer affirming, creating space for black families that is “free from patriarchal practices,” and “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other.”
Black Lives Matter at School offers kid-friendly versions of the 13 principles designed for elementary and middle-school students.
The Week of Action also includes a list of four national demands: end zero-tolerance discipline policies; mandate black history and ethnic studies; hire more black teachers; and fund counselors, not cops, according to a “starter kit” on the Black Lives Matter at School website.
In the starter kit, New York City kindergarten teacher Laleña Garcia, author of a children’s book about BLM principles, writes that while “discussing big ideas with little people” it is necessary to “consider age-appropriate language so that our students or children can grasp the concepts.” For example, she suggests not talking about police violence with “our youngest children.”
When discussing BLM’s principle of being transgender affirming, Garcia offers the following kid-friendly language: “Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”
When discussing the BLM principle of a “Black Village,” which includes the goal of disrupting the Western nuclear family structure, Garcia suggests teaching kids that “there are lots of different kinds of families; what makes a family is that it’s people who take care of each other; those people might be related, or maybe they choose to be a family together and to take care of each other. Sometimes, when it’s a lot of families together, it can be called a village.”
Speaking of Democratic policies endangering kids: Repeat child sex offender illegal alien arrested at the border.
Even in San Francisco, the backlash against the Soros-backed-Democrat-DA crime wave has begun: “S.F. police will no longer cooperate with DA Boudin over police shooting investigations.”
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said he intends to sever an agreement with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office spelling out the D.A.’s lead role in investigating police use-of-force incidents, in-custody deaths and police shootings.
The agreement was originally struck in 2019 following intense debate in San Francisco over the role the city’s police department should play in investigating its own officers following a rash of police shootings. Police and the District Attorney’s Office renewed the agreement last year.
The more we learn about the Jenny Thornley affair, the more it appears that senior members of the Pritzker administration, including potentially the governor and his wife, may have facilitated a fraud on the state by a now-indicted former campaign aide to enrich her and then obstructed efforts to bring her to justice.
This is a tangled web, so stay with me as I set forth a timeline of events and characters, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The former executive director of the Illinois State Police Merit Board, Jack Garcia, discovered evidence that one of the employees under his direction, Jenny Thornley, was stealing money from the people of the state
Garcia is a well-known, skilled investigator who previously supervised the divisions of internal investigations and forensic services, before becoming the first deputy director of the Illinois State Police. Thornley was a campaign aide for Gov. J.B. Pritzker (her husband, Jared, was also a senior political appointee at the Illinois comptroller’s office) and close enough to Pritzker and his wife, M.K., that she had their personal telephone numbers.
After assembling the evidence and building the case, Garcia scheduled meetings to fire Thornley and refer her for prosecution on the morning of Feb. 3, 2020. However, on the eve of that day, Thornley contacted (at least) the governor’s wife (pictured, at left) and asked her to intervene, alleging that Garcia had assaulted her sexually a week or so earlier.
The governor’s chief counsel promptly called the merit board (which is an independent agency created “to remove political influence” from State Police hiring, promotion and discipline) to “advise” it to: (a) cancel her firing and the referral for prosecution, (b) suspend Garcia (the experienced investigator who uncovered the Thornley fraud) and (c) retain an outside counsel proposed by the governor’s office. The merit board went along, but also suspended Thornley, and Garcia voluntarily took and passed a lie detector test.
Then Thornley sued to stop the investigation of her own claim of sexual harassment.
The outside counsel, Christina Egan, nonetheless completed an investigation by July 2020 (at the cost of $500,000 paid by the people of Illinois), confirming the evidence Garcia assembled that Thornley had stolen money and committed forgery, and finding no evidence of Thornley’s sexual assault allegation. The State Police Merit Board then reinstated Garcia, fired Thornley, referred her for prosecution. She has now been indicted for theft and forgery.
However, after Thornley was fired, someone with clout in the Pritzker administration somehow granted her disability payments reserved for people that are actually state employees. These payments (amounting to some $71,000) went on for more than a year, ending days before she was indicted for theft and fraud. These extensive payments were for “injuries” sustained from an “assault” that Egan determined had not occurred.
Speaking of Democratic family corruption: “Smoking gun documents tie Nancy Pelosi’s son to fraud and bribery scheme to remove permit violations against squalid San Francisco flop house owned by his ex-girlfriend and probed by the FBI.”
The criminal justice system in Harris County is broken,” said Aimee Castillo, sister of murder victim Josh Sandoval.
Suspect Devan Kristopher Jordon was out on three felony bonds when he allegedly shot Sandoval during a home invasion robbery last May. Jordon had also missed a court date the week prior to the murder, but authorities did not issue an arrest warrant.
“I think the criminal justice system is just a revolving door. They murder, they go in, and they come out, and they go in,” said Glenda Martin, Sandoval’s mother. “I think it’s a horrible thing.”
Commissioner Tom Ramsey (R-Pct. 3) presented a resolution honoring Sandoval’s life and noted that the suspect was also affiliated with the same crime ring allegedly responsible for the murder in Houston of an off-duty New Orleans police officer last August.
“There are people who are hurting people who are being allowed to walk around and they should not be period. That is the point,” intoned Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4).
The fieriest moments of the meeting, however, came later from Steve Radack, former constable and former commissioner who said Democrats on the commissioners court had “blood on their hands.”
“I never dreamed that after serving 32 years on this court that there would be three members of this court — Hidalgo, Garcia, and Ellis — who would kiss the rears of hardened criminals, who victimize law-abiding citizens, including law enforcement officers,” said Radack. “I’m calling on you three to resign from office so the healing can begin.”
This is the worst cheese display collapse since Cheeses of Nazareth suffered a collapse of their famed "A Whey In A Manger" display the day before Christmas in 2019.
For one thing, this storm isn’t anything like last year’s storm in terms of intensity of wind, temperature, precipitation or length. Austin was in a deep freeze for 144 hours straight then, got 6 inches of snow, and down into the single digits. By contrast, we’re only getting a dusting of snow in this storm, and weather will be back up above freezing tomorrow.
Last year’s ice storm and power outage crisis once again emphasized how important it is to prepare for such events. So here’s a brief revised guide to cheaply prepping for a range of disasters. I’ve included Amazon links, but for some items (like batteries), Sam’s or Lowe’s tends to offer better prices. (Batteries are among goods that can be purchased tax free during the Texas emergency preparation sales tax holiday, which is April 23-25 this year, along with smoke and CO detectors, fire extinguishers and first aid kits.
The Basics
These are just all-purpose tools everyone should already have, listed here for completeness sake.
First aid kit: There are a lot of different makes and models of these, and this is one where Sam’s offers a kit that’s a bit cheaper than this one. Has a little bit of everything. A good thing to keep in your car for emergencies.
Smoke alarm: Everyone should already have these, but if you don’t, or want more, these are cheap, and it has a silence button so you can put it in your kitchen. The batch I got was made in Mexico, but First Alert also makes stuff in China, so caveat emptor.
Carbon Monoxide detector. Doesn’t say but I suspect it’s another made-in-China item. There are some combination carbon monoxide/smoke detectors, but I think you want to avoid the possibility of a single point of failure there.
Fire Extinguisher: Every home should have at least one, and make sure it’s not expired. This is what I have (I think it’s made in Mexico), but fortunately I’ve never had to use it.
Water leak detector: A lot of people don’t have these, but I consider them essential basic gear, as they can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in water damage. I had one of mine go off a week before the ice storm hit because a shutoff valve I had closed to plunge an overflowing toilet had started leaking. Usual made in China caveats apply, but it’s very simple tech (two parallel wires on the exterior that water closes the circuit and sets off when wet). That link goes to a 5-pack, because I recommend putting one behind every toilet, under every sink you use, under your water heater, and next to your washing machine (I’ve had mine start rocking for an unbalanced load that pulled the drain hose loose). (There’s an even cheaper five pack from another manufacturer (also made in China) that I have no experience with.)
Speaking of plunging toilets, I imagine everyone already has a plunger, but if you don’t, I bought this one recently on the recommendation of a YouTube video, and it works well. You might consider one for each bathroom, or at least each floor.
Speaking of things everyone should already have more of, everyone needs flashlights. I have an old bulb-type Maglite, but here’s a pretty close equivalent with LEDs. As a bonus, it’s also heavy enough to conk someone out. I have flashlights in my bedroom, my kitchen and in my car’s glovebox. The highest rated flashlight on Amazon is the Streamlight 75458 Stinger DS, which is about four times as expensive as the Maglite. I assume it’s brighter and with a longer life, and maybe you have a use case that justifies the cost. And if you have a flashlight, chances are you’ll also need. I saw a Disel Creek video where he and friends explored an abandoned coal mine using OLIGHTs like this one and it looks pretty bright.
Batteries. The Maglite takes D-Cells, and you’re going to want, at a minimum, enough to reload every flashlight twice, which should be enough to get you through a couple of evenings of power outages. Check your flashlights every six months when you check your smoke and CO detectors. Speaking of which, those and the water leak detectors take 9 volt batteries, and you want enough around to be able to change out every battery in your detectors as needed. Those links go to Duracells, which I’ve been pretty happy with.
Car jump starter: Much better than jumper cables, and can save you money when you have a dead battery, or because it’s just not cranking in the cold.
Water shut off tool. The toilet valve problem made me keenly aware that I did not have the specific house water shutoff valve tool, so I went ahead and got this one, which also has a gas shutoff tool, and it works pretty well. You need one of these for the same reason you need a water leak detector, i.e. it will greatly limit damage before the plumber gets there.
Sawyer Products Water Filtration System: After the freeze, Austin went under a boil notice, and the Sawyer system (which I bought the previous time Austin was under a boil notice) was Good Enough, even if it’s a slight pain to fill and squeeze the bag enough times for my dogs and I to drink (but still less of a pain that boiling water and waiting for it to cool). I also recommend fill empty bottles (3 liter bottles, etc.) with drinkable water in advance, which you can do at essentially no cost.
Duct tape is useful to have year-round, but especially during an emergency, to patch a small leak or keep something together until the emergency is over and you can replace it. Link goes to 3M all-weather duct tape, which is better than the generic stuff for outside tasks, like sealing around the edge of a faucet cover. I recently picked up some Gorilla tape, which gets super-high marks, but haven’t actually used any of it yet.
Cold Weather
Here are some specific prep items for cold weather:
Faucet Covers. If you’re a homeowner, you probably already have those, but if not, here they are, and they seem to work better than a rag or dripping the faucet, and neither of my faucets busted in the ice storm. That link goes to the cheap Styrofoam version, but these plastic ones look a bit bigger and stronger.
O’Keeffe’s Working Hands hand cream: I walk my dogs 2-3 times a day pretty much every single day of the year, and I found my hands getting cracked and raw in the cold, even through gloves. O’Keeffe’s Working Hands fixed the problem. I frequently give this stuff out as Christmas gifts.
Carmex lip balm. A small, cheap jar that solves the chapped lips problem in winter. I know some people prefer Chapstick, but to me the main result of using Chapstick is that 30 minutes later you fell a need to use more Chapstick.
De-icing spray. You can stand there for 15 minutes ineffectually scraping your frozen windows like William H. Macy in Fargo, or you can keep a bottle of this in your trunk.
I think I’ve covered the basics, and I’m not tackling things like food, clothing or generators, etc. Feel free to add anything I missed in the comments.
More Democrats accepting foreign payola, Russia sabre-rattles over Ukraine, a Supreme Court justice retires, Canada revolts, Harris County’s soft-on-crime policies are getting cops killed, and the war over tranny madness spreads. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm.
Long time Democratic power broker Tony Podesta has earned $1 million over the past half year lobbying the Biden White House at the behest of a blacklisted Chinese tech giant, recent federal disclosures show. Huawei, which was placed under trade sanctions during the Trump administration, paid Podesta $500,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021 in an attempt to shake off the trade impact of the restrictions, according to the disclosure form filed on the evening of Jan. 20.
With the $500,000 Podesta made from the previous three months lobbying the White House, he has been compensated $1 million over a six-month period for the lobbying effort.
Podesta’s latest lobbying campaign targeted the Executive Office of the President and centered around “telecommunications services and impacted trade issues,” the disclosure said.
Huawei, once the world’s largest telecom makers, has been facing international scrutiny in recent years. U.S. authorities have flagged the China-based company as a national security threat, saying the company’s close ties with China’s ruling communist regime, as well as Chinese law, could make it a potential espionage tool for Beijing.
A stream of U.S. sanctions since 2019—which have barred Huawei from using U.S. technology and software, and shut out its gears from critical U.S. infrastructure—have slashed the company’s annual revenue by a third. In November, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that further tightened restrictions on Huawei by restricting it from receiving new equipment licenses from U.S regulators.
Battered by the restrictions, Huawei has ramped up its U.S. influence operation in recent months. Podesta is one of half a dozen lobbyists the firm has engaged since July, which includes a former congressman and one former congressional aide, according to disclosure filings….
Tony Podesta’s brother, John Podesta, served as White House chief of staff to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. He was also a former counselor to President Barack Obama, overseeing climate and energy policies.
There’s your swampy Democratic Party corruption and graft, right there out in the open for all to see.
Affiliates of two European companies that fund Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline contributed to the campaign of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who Republicans say has blocked sanctions on the Kremlin-backed project.
ENGIE North America and BASF Corporation each gave $2,500 to Schumer in September through their corporate political action committees, according to newly disclosed Federal Election Commission records. ENGIE North America’s parent company and a BASF subsidiary are part of a consortium of five companies that finance Nord Stream 2, which will transport natural gas from Russia to Germany. While President Joe Biden has called the pipeline a geopolitical threat to Europe that helps Russian president Vladimir Putin, last year he waived sanctions on the project.
Republicans have pushed for legislation to enforce sanctions only to be met with resistance from Senate Democrats and the White House. Schumer for months blocked Republican requests to vote on a sanctions bill. He approved a vote on sanctions legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) earlier this month in exchange for Cruz lifting holds on several State Department nominees. The bill received bipartisan support by a 55-44 vote, but Senate Democrats used filibuster rules to block its passage. Democrats say they want to use sanctions against the pipeline as a last resort should Russia invade Ukraine.
Convicted pedophile, UAE adviser and central witness in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, George Nader, has pleaded guilty to his role in helping the UAE funnel millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions into US campaigns during the 2016 presidential election, according to The Intercept, citing federal court documents filed last month.
In a December sentencing memo, federal prosecutors disclosed that Nader had agreed months early to plead guilty to a single count of felony conspiracy to defraud the US government by pumping millions in donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaign – concealing the foreign origin of the funds.
Snip.
Nader is accused of taking instructions from UAE Crown Prince [Mohammed bin Zayed], and gave regular updates on his efforts to get close to Clinton.
In total, Nader transferred nearly $5 million from his UAE business to [Los Angeles businessperson Ahmad “Andy”] Khawaja – CEO of a Los Angeles-based payment processing company. According to prosecutors, the funds were disguised as a routine business contract between the two men. Of the total transferred, more than $3.5 million came from the UAE government and was given to pro-Clinton Democratic political committees. Prosecutors have yet to publicly identify what happened to the remaining $1.4 million Nader transferred to Khawaja.
Khawaja’s money laundering for Democrats was previously mentioned in this LinkSwarm. How many of the travails of the last five years boil down to Democrats trying to avoid going to jail for their corruption?
Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer announced he’s retiring. Biden, pandering as always, announces he’s going to nominate a black woman.
How massive would the protest have to be to make Justin Trudeau change course? Leftists hate giving up government control of people’s lives, no matter how unpopular….
Tracy Compton, a mother of two in Fairfax, Virginia, had voted for Democrats for as long as she can remember, until the COVID-related school closures.
‘I tried and went to apply to work with the Democratic Party. I was told I was not allowed to become a member of the Democratic Party [in Fairfax].’
A recording of a reorganization meeting showed fellow Democrats deeming Compton too ‘anti-school’ to be part of their political efforts.
What made Compton anti-school?
She wanted the public schools to fully reopen.
When Compton worked to collect signatures for a recall petition for the local school board, she was welcomed out of the rain by a Republican party tent, even after telling them she was a Biden voter.
In contrast, when Compton offered the petition to those inside the Democrat party tent, she was yelled at.
Now? Given a hypothetical matchup between Kamala Harris or President Joe Biden vs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, she said she’d vote for the Republican in a heartbeat.
All Florida trends are coming up sunshine for continued freedom from Covidstan. Recently Republican registrations surpassed Democrats in the state for the first time. Net domestic migration to the state also increased during COVID. Many commentators attribute both to Governor Ron DeSantis’s pandemic management policies. Just how bad does 2022 look for Democrats in the state? According to the Miami Herald:
Evidence is piling up that Democrats in Florida have no clear bench of candidates willing to challenge Republican incumbents in South Florida, in what’s expected to be a daunting and expensive 2022 cycle for their party.
Two first-time candidates who made early announcements they would run for South Florida House seats have both since dropped their bids to pursue runs for state office. A rumored likely candidate for federal office, former state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, was recently nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor.
The three Florida seats in question represent districts in Miami, including Reps. Carlos Giménez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart. Giménez is the former mayor of Miami-Dade County and an immigrant from Cuba. Salazar defeated Clinton ally Donna Shalala in 2020, and Diaz-Balart has represented his district since 2002. The Herald called these districts competitive and said redistricting provided Democrats an opportunity.
However, the only potential candidates are a few retreads who lost in 2020. Reportedly, Shalala, who is knee-deep in Clinton ick, may be considering a rematch with Salazar. She served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and as President of the Clinton Foundation from June 2015 to March 2017. Former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who lost to Giménez in 2020, may also jump in the race. To date, neither woman has announced their intentions.
Unless you owe someone favors, why run an almost certainly losing campaign in a red wave year?
Masks don’t work:
Update from the Fargo, North Dakota masking study: Two neighboring K-12 districts (same community) both with around 12,000 students 🔵 Mask mandate 🟡 Masks optional (<5% masking) Y axis= % of students positive for covid Green vertical line: when🔵 went masks optional pic.twitter.com/OoU9vmsbiz
Unvaccinated people in Austria have been locked down for two-and-a-half months. I wonder if people will stop pretending they are to blame for infection rates. pic.twitter.com/AjVpp7IvNI
“During the last year’s attempts to defund the police and reduce the number of violent encounters on the street, Baltimore kicked off what they call the Safe Streets Project.” Surprise! A Safe Streets worker was one of three people killed in a shootout. Dwight would be disappointed if I didn’t include this:
In addition to looting, murder and arson, the primary accomplishment of #BlackLivesMatter seems to be making donations disappear.
No one appears to have been in charge at Black Lives Matter for months. The address it lists on tax forms is wrong, and the charity’s two board members won’t say who controls its $60 million bankroll, a Washington Examiner investigation has found.
BLM’s shocking lack of transparency surrounding its finances and operations raises major legal and ethical red flags, multiple charity experts told the Washington Examiner.
“Like a giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting in the night with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction,” CharityWatch Executive Director Laurie Styron said of BLM.
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors appointed two activists to serve as the group’s senior directors following her resignation in May amid scrutiny over her personal finances. But both quietly announced in September that they never took the jobs due to disagreements with BLM. They told the Washington Examiner they don’t know who now leads the nation’s most influential social justice organization.
Paul Kamenar, counsel for conservative watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center, said a full audit and investigation into Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the legal entity that represents the national BLM movement, is warranted.
“This is grossly irregular and improper for a nonprofit with $60 million in its coffers,” Kamenar said.
Sundown Joe unwittingly greenlights a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Right now there’s a lot more jaw-jaw than war-war. I’ve avoid penning a thumbsucker on the situation because I’ve been too busy.
Virginia Republican Delegate Nick Freitas is done with having Critical Race Theory advocates calling all who oppose them racist:
Enough. I have had it, my constituents have had it, and I am no longer going to sit here while a member of this body accuses us of being bigots simply because we disagree on policy. pic.twitter.com/dx0uMyFmnB
Today’s unexpected ally in the war on transgender madness: actor Sean Penn.
Sean Penn is doubling down on his defense of traditional gender roles.
In two separate interviews this month, the two-time Academy Award-winner and ex of Madonna made comments bemoaning his perception that men are becoming more feminine.
“I am in the club that believes that men in American culture have become wildly feminized,” the 61-year-old told the UK-based publication The i in an interview ahead of the UK release of his new film “Flag Day.”
“I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that [in order] to be fair to women, we should become them.”
In a subsequent interview the “Milk” star did with The Independent this week, he dug his heels into the polarizing opinion, going even further in his critique of men who challenge gender norms.
“There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt,” he told the publication. Furthermore, he noted that the women in his life don’t seem bothered by the patriarchy.
“I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them,” he said.
Penn is wrong about an awful lot, but he’s right about this.
Intel to build $20 billion chip manufacturing facility near New Albany, Ohio (near Columbus), starting with two fabs. Intel had already announced a big investment initiative, and announced their were building two new fabs in Arizona last year. The Ohio location is a surprise, since there’s no fab infrastructure there, but evidently Ohio is throwing lots of money at them.
Vegetarian “meat” company Impossible Foods just laid off a bunch of people. “Technocratic elites have decided in the so-called ‘Great Reset’ in a post-COVID world that peasants should eat plant-based meat instead of the real thing as a way for ‘sustainable nutrition.'”
Yikes!
You may need to get a prescription of beta blockers after watching this video.pic.twitter.com/6GKk09DmjG
The new Superman is a “bisexual climate warrior.” Those comic book issues aren’t exactly flying off the shelf.
Speaking of comics: This comic page just sold for $3.3 million. A wee bit rich for my blood. And is possibly more than the artist made over his entire career working at Marvel…
Heh.
Yoko Ono has threatened to have her music added to Spotify unless Joe Rogan is removed
— State Line Crosser Dennis (LGB) (@Buzzsaws1990) January 28, 2022
