Archive for the ‘Texas’ Category
Wednesday, December 30th, 2020
Because he just hadn’t done enough to bankrupt Austin restaurants and bars, Mayor Steve Adler decreed that would not be allowed to stay open past 10:30 PM on New Year’s Eve:
NOW THEREFORE, I, MAYOR OF THE CITY OF AUSTIN, PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORITY VESTED BY TEXAS GOVERNMENT CODE CHAPTER 418, HEREBY ORDER,EFFECTIVE AS OF 10:30 P.M. ON DECEMBER 31, 2020, AND CONTINUING THROUGH 6:00 A.M. ON JANUARY 3,2021 THAT IN THE CITY OF AUSTIN:
MODIFIED OPERATIONS FOR DINE-IN SERVICES
SECTION 1. That the findings and recitations set out in the preamble to this ORDER are found to be true and correct and they are here by adopted and made a part hereof for all purposes.
SECTION 2. Modified Operations for Dine-In Food and Beverage Services. Because the wearing of a face covering and physical distancing is not possible while individuals are seated together and dining, thereby increasing the risk of spreading the COVID-19 virus, a business must end indoor and outdoor dine-in food and beverage service at 10:30 P.M. but may continue to operate after 10:30 P.M. using drive-thru, curbside pick-up,take-out,or delivery service. Dine-in food and beverage service may resume beginning at 6:00 A.M.
(All “WHEREAS”es and criminal penalties snipped, because it’s a PDF and all the letters run together into one giant German compound word, and it was a big enough pain reinserting the spaces into the excerpt above.)
The reaction from Texas Governor Greg Abbott was swift:
Hopefully this clarification about the limits of local government regulation will keep Adler from driving a few more establishments bankrupt…
Tags:Austin, coronavirus, Greg Abbott, Regulation, Steve Adler, Texas, Wuhan
Posted in Austin, Regulation, Texas | 5 Comments »
Saturday, December 26th, 2020
A tiny bit of good news in a dismal year:
Political speech is under attack these days from Beijing to Berkeley, so we’ll take victories where we can get them. One arrived Tuesday when the University of Texas at Austin agreed to disband its PC police and end policies that suppress speech on campus.
Credit the nonprofit Speech First, which sued on behalf of student members in 2018. The group claimed UT and its officials had “created an elaborate investigatory and disciplinary apparatus to suppress, punish, and deter speech that other students deem ‘offensive,’ ‘biased,’ ‘uncivil,’ or ‘rude.’”
Students could anonymously report their professors and peers for “bias incidents” to the Campus Climate Response Team, which would investigate and threaten disciplinary referrals and “restorative justice” meetings with administrators. The university gave several examples of what constitutes an act of bias, including “faculty commentary in the classroom perceived as derogatory and insensitive,” and other behavior open to highly subjective judgments about what is offensive.
On the first go-round, a federal judge dismissed the the case in 2019.
But Speech First appealed, and in October the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the ruling and remanded the case back to the district court. Circuit Court Judge Edith Jones blasted the bias-response team as “the clenched fist in the velvet glove of student speech regulation.”
Now comes the settlement, in which administrators agree to dismantle the bias-response team and amend policies that chill speech. Gone is a ban on “uncivil behaviors and language that interfere” with the “welfare, individuality or safety of other persons.” Also stricken is a definition of “verbal harassment” that prohibited “ridicule” or “personal attacks.”
Under the settlement, UT reserves the right “to devise an alternative” to its bias-response team, but “Speech First is free to challenge that alternative.”
One small victory in the war against Social Justice. Also, as of this writing, that bias report form still seemed to be active (maybe due to the Christmas break). But there’s still an entire “diversity” bureaucracy at UT intent on inflicting leftwing social justice conformity on students that needs to be dismantled.
Tags:Austin, censorship, education, Free Speech, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, University of Texas
Posted in Austin, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »
Friday, December 25th, 2020
Welcome to a special Christmas day LinkSwarm! And by “special,” I mean “because Christmas falls on Friday.”
Explosion rocks downtown Nashville. “Around 6:30 a.m., police received a call for a suspicious RV with no tags parked across from the Davidson County courthouse. As officers arrived, the RV exploded, blowing out the windows of nearby buildings and leaving extensive damage.” They’re calling it an “intentional act.” Maybe, especially across the street from a courthouse. But it could still be a meth lab cooking off. As always, remember that much of the early reporting around such events are usually wrong.
Update: Assuming the message in this video is real, it does appear to be a premeditated act of which authorities were warned:
The UK and the EU have reached a Brexit deal:
The deal comes in just eight days short of the hard-Brexit deadline. Rather than erecting trade barriers to which some had resigned themselves, the two sides are looking toward a more cooperative than contentious relationship, reports the Wall Street Journal:
Under the terms of the accord, both sides will continue to trade free of tariffs but there will be significant new bureaucracy for importers and exporters. The free flow of workers between the two economies will end and trade in services will be much reduced. London’s vast financial center will no longer have guaranteed access to European markets.
The deal gives Britain significant freedom to depart from EU regulations and sign free-trade deals with countries like the U.S. But as the price for securing a deal without tariffs, the U.K. agreed that it wouldn’t seriously undercut EU standards on issues such as labor and the environment and would maintain similar constraints on the subsidizing of private industry.
The agreement must formally be ratified by the European and U.K. parliaments and signed off by EU leaders before the end of the year. Capitals have insisted they need proper time to comb through the text before approving it. Though their approval is likely, France has warned it could veto a deal if some of its key concerns, including access to British waters for its fishing fleet, aren’t met.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
President Donald Trump is right to call the $900 billion stimulus package a disgrace.
Here’s the short version: One main problem is that the 5,500-plus page legislative package was drafted behind closed doors by party leaders, then quickly unveiled hours before a vote.
As voices as disparate as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash have pointed out, this meant that most members of Congress had to vote for or against the package before actually getting to read the legislation.
That’s right: Trillions of taxpayer dollars were doled out, and the members of Congress who voted for it don’t even know where much of it is going.
This bill pours hundreds of billions of dollars into preexisting stimulus programs that were rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, without meaningfully addressing any of the problems. You can expect more stimulus checks sent to dead people and more runaway fraud to plague the expanded unemployment benefits.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Tables Turned: Detroit Sues Black Lives Matter Group for ‘Civil Conspiracy’ to Riot and Attack Police.” The group in question is Black Lives Matter umbrella group Detroit Will Breathe. Discovery should be extremely interesting… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Andrew Cuomo hates ordinary people and non-bankrupt restaurants so much that he’s barred patrons of outdoor dining from using a restaurants restroom. Who does he think he is, Werner Erhard?
Andrew Yang is running for mayor of New York City. It would be very difficult indeed for Yang not to be a vast improvement over the burning Porta-Potty stuffed with dead clowns that is the De Blasio administration. As a moderate Democrat, I would expect Yang to be a better mayor than de Blasio or David Dinkins, but not as good as Rudy Giuliani or Ed Koch. I would expect a Yang mayoralty to be about on par with Bloomberg’s, with maybe more upside if he’s willing to shake up the corrupt status quo and not push his disasterous pet guaranteed income idea.
Another thing President Trump disrupted: stale, self-serving conventional wisdom about peace in the Middle East:
In an address to the UN Security Council on Monday during a monthly session on the Middle East, US Ambassador Kelly Craft asserted that President Donald Trump’s policies had “overturned” long-held views about diplomacy in the region.
“For decades, the prevailing assumption was that the world would only see normalized international relations with Israel following a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,” Craft told the virtual meeting. “But we have proven this assumption wrong.”
She touted the Trump administration’s pursuit of “economic and cultural ties” between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which has led to normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Similar deals with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Oman, among others, could also be in the offing.
“All of us here should think long and hard about what else we may have missed or misinterpreted over the years.”
“UK: Muslim rape gang ringleader released back onto the streets 8 years into his 26-year term.”
“Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress ‘Hyper-Partisan Sites’ in Favor of ‘Mainstream News’ (The NYT) is a Fraud:
The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.
Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.
Snip.
The conceit that outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NPR are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is one you would be eager to believe, or at least want to induce others to believe, if you were a tech reporter at The New York Times, furious and hurt that millions upon millions of people would rather hear other voices than your own, and simply do not trust what you tell them. Inducing Facebook to manipulate the algorithmic underbelly of social media to artificially force your content down the throats of citizens who prefer to avoid it, while rendering your critics’ speech invisible — all in the name of reducing “hyper-partisanship,” “divisiveness,” and “misinformation” — is of course a highly desirable outcome for mainstream outlets like the NYT.
The problem with this claim is that it’s a complete and utter fraud, one that is easily demonstrated as such. There are few sites more “hyper-partisan” than the three outlets which the NYT applauded Facebook for promoting. In the 2020 election, over 70 million Americans — close to half of the voting population — voted for Donald Trump, yet not one of them is employed by the op-ed page of the “non-partisan” New York Times and are almost never heard on NPR or CNN. That’s because those news outlets, by design, are pro-Democratic-Party organs, who speak overwhelmingly to Democratic readers and viewers.
It is hard to get more partisan than the news outlets which the NYT tech reporters, and apparently Facebook, consider to be the alternatives to “hyper-partisan” discourse. In April, Pew Research asked Americans which outlet is their primary source of news, and the polling firm found that the audiences of NPR, CNN and especially The New York Times are overwhelmingly Democrats, in some cases almost entirely so.
As Pew put it: “about nine-in-ten of those who name The New York Times (91%) and NPR (87%) as their main political news source identify as Democrats, with CNN at about eight-in-ten (79%).” These outlets speak to Democrats, are built for Democrats, and produce news content designed to be pleasing and affirming to Democrats — so they keep watching and buying. One can say many things about these news outlets, but the idea that they are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is the exact opposite of the truth: it is difficult to find more hyper-partisan organs than these.
Kurt Schlichter on our stupid establishment:
The Establishment decided that instead of having a vigorous debate and discussion over the safety and efficacy of these prophylactic potions, they would just short circuit the whole messy truth determination process that Western civilization has relied upon for a millennium – argument, debate, and eventually consensus after everything is fully and freely hashed-out – and move right to the Official Truth. All the smart set decided that the Official Truth would be that these vaccines were all perfect and necessary and that we needed to stamp out any hint of dissent lest people pause and think for themselves and thereby disrupt the plan by raising unapproved notions. And the tech overlords would do their part by ensuring that any info, ideas, or interplay that was not inline with the narrative would be suppressed.
It’s so much more efficient, you know, to tell people what they think than to take the time to convince them and refute counter-arguments.
Not everyone was foolish. It was very smart and good leadership for Mike Pence to take the shot in public in front of cameras. That a couple of tentacles didn’t sprout out of his clavicles was reassuring. That’s leadership, and that’s what our leaders should be doing. But most of our ruling class instead thinks that if they lie to us and suppress our debates and call us stupid enough, we’ll fall into line.
When has that worked for long?
A roundup of climate predictions for 2020 that were horribly wrong. Remember how snowfall would be a thing of the past?
Israel hits Syria again.
“US Army Hits Target 43 Miles Away With Long-Range Cannon.”
Rush Limbaugh signs off, possibly for the last time.
Austin restaurants and bars under Stage 5 Wuhan coronavirus restrictions again. Thanks a lot, China. And Mayor Adler.
Rand Paul presents the airing of the Festivus grievances:
Among Paul’s instances of waste were several health studies, including more than $36 million spent on studying why stress makes hair turn gray, more than $1 million spent studying whether people will eat ground-up bugs, and more than $3 million spent interviewing San Franciscans about their edible cannabis use.
As far as taxpayer dollars spent aiding other countries, $8.62 billion was spent in Afghanistan on counternarcotics efforts, more than $37 million was spent helping deal with truant Filipino youth, and more than $3 million was spent on sending Russians to American community colleges for a “gap year.”
Among funds spent on the environment, energy, and scientific research, more than $1 million was spent walking lizards on a treadmill, nearly $200,000 was spent studying how people cooperate while playing e-sport video games, and more than $2 million on developing a wearable headset to track eating behaviors.
The military had several particularly high expenditures this year that Paul listed as waste, including repurposing $1 billion in coronavirus response funds for unrelated acquisitions, more than $ 715 million in lost equipment designated for Syrians fighting ISIS, and $174 million on drones that were lost over Afghanistan.
Other eyebrow-raising expenses included more than $4 million spent on spraying alcoholic rats with bobcat urine, more than $10 million spent on would-be coronavirus test tubes that turned up as used soda bottles, and nearly $6 million spent building three bicycle storage facilities at Washington, D.C. Metro stations.
Titania McGrath, prophet of our times.
Man of the year: Jeffrey Toobin. “Toobin’s grip on the media was relentless. In 2002 he joined CNN and became the network’s chief legal analyst, a cocksure critic of Republicans…” (Hat tip: HashtagGriswold.)
Good idea:
Heh:
“Can I interest you in some propane? Or some propane explosions?”
How badly do you want a drink?
Oh the weather outside is frightful:
Christmas with the Sex Pistols.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Tags:#BlackLivesMatter, Andrew Cuomo, Andrew Yang, Anthropogenic Global Warming, artillery, Austin, Bill De Blasio, Brexit, Christmas, coronavirus, Crime, Detroit, explosion, Glenn Greenwald, Global Warming, Israel, Jeffrey Toobin, Jihad, Kelly Craft, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Military, New York City, New York Times, pork barrell, Rand Paul, Rush Limbaugh, Social Justice Warriors, Steve Adler, Syria, Texas, Titania McGrath, UK, vaccine, Wuhan
Posted in Austin, Budget, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2020
In the wake of the Austin City Council’s insane decision to partially defund the police, Governor Greg Abbott has received proposed legislation for the state to take over the Austin Police Department.
More on the text of the proposal:
Terry Keel, a former Travis County sheriff and state lawmaker, is one of the authors of the drafted language. Former State Rep. Ron Wilson is also behind the language.
According to Quorum Report, the draft language states that “if the governor determines that the safety of a municipality’s residents is threatened because the municipality is providing insufficient municipal resources for public safety, the governor may issue a determination” that DPS should control the city’s police department. Keel previously told KVUE DPS and the city’s police department would work as a “special municipal police department division” that would answer to the DPS director.
I looked but cannot currently find the actual text of the proposed bill in the LegiScan database.
I’m of two minds about the proposal. Austin voters have made their bed by voting for the hard left, and both fairness and subsidiarity demand they be forced to lie in it. On the other hand, the protection of life, liberty and property is the very first duty of government. If the Austin City Council is unwilling to keep the city’s citizens safe, then the power and money necessary to do so should be removed from their hands.
Tags:87th Texas Legislature, Austin, Austin City Council, Austin Police Department, Crime, Greg Abbott, police, Ron Wilson, Terry Keel, Texas
Posted in Austin, Texas | 6 Comments »
Sunday, December 20th, 2020
Been a while since I did a gun news roundup, but a few items of interest caught my attention:
About that ammo shortage:
Demand actually was on the upswing before the year 2020 even began. Then the dumpster fire that is 2020 wrought havoc on both gun and ammunition availability. This is a pure demand-driven issue. The government guys who may or may not be in black helicopters are not interested in small rifle primers or .22 Long Rifle. Good luck finding either on the shelf.
How bad is it? Let me give you some anecdotes.
Just two weeks ago, I received a call that probably should not have surprised me.
“Do you have any .30-30?” This was not a question I was expecting. I mean, after all, there might be some parachute-cord-wrapped lever-actions somewhere if they haven’t been snarfed up, but .30-30 ammo? Really?
It seems the friend of a friend was heading out on a hog hunt and left it too late to buy ammunition. Nowhere in northern Virginia could you find a box of .30-30 on the shelf. He was headed for a wild boar trip and had exactly four rounds. I dug into my personal stash to make sure his hunt wasn’t ruined, but this is a symptom of a much larger issue today.
Back in April, one of our field editors received a call from a pretty prominent gun shop asking, “How much 9 mm do you have?” He answered and was told that he would be paid twice what he paid for it, and a truck would be there tomorrow.
A friend at Hornady recently reached out to me to ask that I spread the word. What’s going on with ammunition is nothing sinister, nor a conspiracy. It is simple supply-and-demand. In fact, it’s hyper-inflated demand like no one has ever seen. I certainly haven’t in the 30 years that I’ve been paying attention to such things.
Much has been made of the fact that guns, especially guns suitable for personal defense, have been hard to find. It would stand to reason that, with gun sales at an all-time high, ammunition will not take long to follow. At first, it was 9 mm Luger and .223 Rem., with local outages of things like .300 Blackout and 7.62×39 mm. It is not because the ammunition makers are not working all-out. American ammunition makers have all increased output and productivity as much as they can. They are making more ammunition than they ever have before. As soon as it goes into distribution, it is gone.
Despite this, they are being hammered by their customers who ask, “Where is the ammo?“ It’s not being diverted to top-secret government contracts. It’s being bought by your friends and neighbors before you.
Snip.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, riots and then the most rabid anti-gun platform ever introduced being pushed by the Democratic party, it’s no wonder that people have increased their demand for guns and ammunition. When a candidate for national office—even a poorly performing one—utters, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” what did you think was going to happen?
This is not even attributable to supply-chain problems, with the exception of the Remington ammunition plant in Arkansas. That plant was sidelined by the sale of the company by an Alabama bankruptcy court. Talk about a series of unfortunate events. One of the largest plants in the country couldn’t make ammo at full capacity because of the financial problems of its parent company. The good news is that Vista Outdoor picked up that facility, and the Vista team is very good indeed at making ammunition. I am told after the first of the year, ammunition will be flowing out of that plant, and many of its workers will be rehired.
We have been through conditions similar to this before, but nothing like this. It’s to the point that waterfowlers looking for ammo are having a hard time because people looking for defensive loads have decided that steel BBs are better than nothing.
A friend at a major retailer told me one of his managers was approached by a customer who found a box of .38-55 sitting alone on the shelf. He asked if there was anything in the store that would shoot it, as it was the only box of ammo there.
This is a great year to be in the replica-cowboy-gun business, but for entirely different reasons than usual. I personally watched a fellow who entered the gun shop wanting a Glock and left with a Uberti single-action revolver in .45 Colt simply because it was the only handgun in the store. Once that was gone, the shelves were bare.
I have spoken with representatives of every major ammunition company in the United States, as well as quite a few importers. It’s not that they aren’t trying to meet the demand. It’s just the demand is so high that as soon as product enters commerce, it’s gone. There’s an insatiable appetite out there now, and once rumors about ammo being in short supply start leaking out, much like the many primer scarcities we’ve had over the years, the demand increases. Panic begets more panic.
Speaking of the ammo shortage, Borepatch sees signs of it at the Palmetto Gun Show in Florida:
- Ammo was at a premium. Pricing was high and it looks like dealers were buying out other dealers before the show started (and then marked each box up). While I’m not enormously well stocked, I’m well stocked enough not to have to spend $20 for 50 .22LR (!). I mean, seriously?
- There was a LOT of Donald Trump stuff there, and not in a let’s clear out the old inventory sense. People were walking around in MAGA hats and there was what looked like a lot of fresh inventory being scooped up by the crowd. However this plays out, The Donald is not fading away. Oh, yeah – several vendors had “Biden Is Not My President” T-Shirts for sale and I saw more than one dude walking around in them.
- Didn’t see any tables of Nazi memorabilia. Might be the first gun show I’ve been to that didn’t sport that.
The last point accords with my own experience at the San Antonio gun show in October.
I’ve supported many of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s recent lawsuits, but not this one: “Texas attorney general accuses firearms website of price gouging at start of pandemic.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has accused the Fort Worth-based website Cheaper Than Dirt, which primarily sells firearms, ammunition and hunting gear, of price gouging at the start of the pandemic.
The AG’s office identified over 4,000 sales that involved price gouging and has directed Cheaper Than Dirt to pay $402,786 in refunds to consumers, according to court documents filed this month.
Over 100 people have complained to the AG’s office about Cheaper Than Dirt, the Houston Chronicle reported earlier this year.
The same week that Gov. Greg Abbott made a pandemic-related disaster declaration in Texas, ammunition orders to Cheaper Than Dirt substantially increased. In response to the increased demand for its products, the website raised the prices on hundreds of its products, according to the AG’s office.
The Texas AG’s office has identified ammunition as a necessity and, as a result, is arguing that those price hikes were against the Texas Business and Commerce Code. The code forbids businesses from “taking advantage of a disaster” by selling “fuel, food, medicine, lodging, building materials, construction tools or another necessity at an exorbitant or excessive price.”
This is sheer folly dressed up as righteousness. The market pays what the market will bear, and prices adjust to meet demand. As the first of today’s roundup links note, this year’s ammo shortages are overwhelmingly driven by consumer demand. High prices are the market’s signal to bring more capacity online to meet demand. Short-circuiting that signal helps no one. Paxton’s lawsuit displays an amazing ignorance of basic economics.
To drive home the scale of the current panic buying, I checked on both Cheaper Than Dirt and ammo.com for .45 ACP ammo prices and both were completely out, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The cheapest price over at AmmoSeek is 68 cents a round, up considerably from from the 50 cents I paid at the San Antonio gun show two months ago.
The Texas chapter of Gun Owners of America has put videos for gun owners to navigate the 87th Texas legislative session:
- Bill Survival 101 (Slide deck)
- The TLO Website
- Talking to Legislators (Slide deck)
Useful information if you want to help influence the legislative process.
Smith & Wesson sues New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal for violating their First and Second Amendment rights. In New Jersey Attorney General is an appointed position, and Grewal was appointed by Democratic Governor Pat Murphy in 2018.
KR Training’s December newsletter, including the class schedule through March 2021. Plus the KR Training blog has lots of historical firearms training tidbits.
Tags:87th Texas Legislature, ammo, Donald Trump, Economics, Florida, Gun Owners of America, gun shows, Guns, Gurbir Grewal, Karl Rehn, Ken Paxton, New Jersey, Patrick Murphy (NJ), Smith & Wesson, Texas
Posted in Economics, Guns, Texas | 5 Comments »
Thursday, December 17th, 2020
Regular BattleSwarm readers already know about Tesla, Elon Musk and Joe Rogan moving from California to Texas. It looks like those were just the first pebbles of the avalanches of companies and people looking to get the hell out of the formerly golden state. Eager to enjoy such rarefied amenities as low taxes, sane government, a sane regulatory environment, open restaurants and regular access to electricity, other companies that have recently announced they’re moving their headquarters from Texas to California include:
Hewett Packard Enterprise is moving its headquarters from San Jose to Houston:
HPE Inc. is moving its headquarters from San Jose to the Houston area, the enterprise information technology giant announced Tuesday, citing “business needs, opportunities for cost savings and team members’ preferences about the future of work.”
The company’s new HQ will be at the new campus that has been under construction since the beginning of the year in Spring, Texas, just north of Houston. It’s the second time HPE has moved its headquarters in the last three years: In 2018, the company left Palo Alto for San Jose.
CEO Antonio Neri and several other senior executives plan to relocate to Houston, HPE spokesman Adam Bauer told the Business Journal.
The move will be a homecoming for Neri, who spent years as a Hewlett-Packard executive in Houston before the Palo Alto-based company split into HP Inc. and HPE.
“We intend to maintain a robust presence in our historical birthplace of Silicon Valley, including housing the headquarters of Aruba at our San Jose campus that opened in 2019,” Neri said in a statement. “There are no layoffs associated with this move, and we are committed to both markets as key parts of our talent and real estate strategies in a post-pandemic world.”
Some corporate roles will be given the option to relocate to Houston, but no one will be forced to move, Bauer said. One big cost-of-living lure for those who do decide to move to Houston: HPE won’t be lowering the salaries of employees who relocate.
Note that Hewett Packard Enterprise is a separate company from Hewett Packard, from which it split from in 2015. HP makes desktop PCs and laser printers, while HPE provides enterprise equipment, services, high performance computing, etc. Both own buildings in the Houston area from HP acquiring Compaq in 2002.
Database giant Oracle, which announced it had moved its headquarters from Redwood Shores to Austin.
“We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work,” Oracle said in a statement.
“Depending on their role, this means that many of our employees can choose their office location as well as continue to work from home part time or all the time.”
“While some states are driving away businesses with high taxes and heavy-handed regulations, we continue to see a tidal wave of companies like Oracle moving to Texas thanks to our friendly business climate, low taxes, and the best workforce in the nation,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.
“Most important of all, these companies are looking for a home where they have the freedom to grow their business and better serve their employees and customers, and when it comes to economic prosperity, there is no place like the Lone Star State,” Abbott added.
Texas has no personal or corporate income tax.
Texas has ranked first for attracting California companies for more than 12 years, according to a report by Spectrum Location Solutions. Roughly 660 California companies moved 765 facilities out of state in 2018 and 2019.
“California companies leave because the state’s business climate continues to worsen, particularly with the harsh employment, immigration and spending measures that Gov. Gavin Newsom has approved,” said Joseph Vranich, the author of the study. “I foresee more exits because California politicians have a level of contempt for business that has reached epic lows.”
Unlike Musk, Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison won’t be moving to Texas, but will continue to work from his own private Hawaiian island. Can’t say I blame the guy.
Brokerage giant Charles Schwab is moving to Westlake in the Dallas metroplex area in January.
Conservative media pundit Ben Shapiro didn’t move his California company to Texas, he moved it to Nashville. But his reasons why apply just as well:
This is the most beautiful state in the country. The climate is incredible. The scenery is amazing. The people generally are warm, and there’s an enormous amount to do.
And we’re leaving.
We’re leaving because all the benefits of California have eroded steadily — and then suddenly collapsed. Meanwhile, all the costs of California have increased steadily — and then suddenly skyrocketed. It can be difficult to spot the incremental encroachment of a terrible disease, but once the final ravages set in, it becomes obvious the illness is fatal. So, too, with California, where bad governance has turned a would-be paradise into a burgeoning dystopia.
When my family moved to North Hollywood, I was 11. We lived in a safe, clean suburb. Yes, Los Angeles had serious crime and homelessness problems, but those were problems relegated to pockets of the city — problems that, with good governance, we thought eventually could be healed. Instead, the government allowed those problems to metastasize. As of 2011, Los Angeles County counted less than 40,000 homeless; as of 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 66,000. Suburban areas have become the sites of homeless encampments. Nearly every city underpass hosts a tent city; the city, in its kindness, has put out port-a-potties to reduce the possibility of COVID-19 spread.
Police are forbidden in most cases from either moving transients or even moving their garbage. Nearly every public space in Los Angeles has become a repository for open waste, needles and trash. The most beautiful areas of Los Angeles, from Santa Monica beach to my suburb, have become wrecks. My children personally have witnessed drug use, public urination and public nudity. Looters were allowed free reign in the middle of the city during the Black Lives Matter riots; Rodeo Drive was closed at 1 p.m., and citizens were curfewed at 6 p.m.
To combat these trends, local and state governments have gamed the statistics, reclassifying offenses and letting prisoners go free. Meanwhile, the police have become targets for public ire. In July, the city of Los Angeles slashed police funding, cutting the force to its lowest levels in more than 10 years.
At the same time, taxes have risen. California’s top marginal income tax rate is now 13.3 percent; legislators want to raise it to 16.8 percent. California also is home to a 7.25 percent sales tax, a 50-cent gas tax and a bevy of other taxes that drain the wallet and burden business. California has the worst regulatory climate in America, according to CEO Magazine’s survey of 650 CEOs. The public-sector unions essentially make public policy, running up the debt while providing fewer and fewer actual services. California’s public education system is a massive failure, and even its once-great colleges now are burdened by the stupidities of political correctness, including an unwillingness to use standardized testing.
Still, the state legislature is dominated by Democrats. California is not on a trajectory toward recovery; it is on a trajectory toward oblivion. Taxpayers are moving out — now including my family and my company. In 2019, before the pandemic and the widespread rioting and looting, outmigration jumped 38 percent, rising for the seventh straight year. That number will increase again this year.
I want my kids to grow up safe. I want them to grow up in a community with a future, with more freedom and safety than I grew up with. California makes that impossible.
What Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Chuck DeVore said of his own exodus from California remains true:
As with most of the tens of thousands of Californians who have moved to the Lone Star State annually in recent years, we did so for opportunity borne of greater freedom: lower taxes, greater private property rights and less government to tell you what to do.
Before the move, our household had also grown as we took in my wife’s parents. Lifelong New Yorkers, they were in declining health and clearly could no longer live on their own. With four adults and two children in an Irvine home designed for a smaller family, it was clear the arrangements could only be temporary.
But the supply of housing had been constrained for so long in California that prices were simply out of reach. This was largely due to restrictive zoning, heavy environmental regulatory burdens and lawsuits. If we were going to take care of my in-laws, it was likely not going to be in California.
Snip.
So we sold our house in Southern California and moved to Texas, settling in the Hill Country about 25 miles southwest of Austin. Our new home was 70 percent larger (with 12 times the property) than our California home, and it had a swimming pool — all for $110,000 less. Most importantly, the ground floor had two extra bedrooms and a bathroom for my in-laws — not having to walk upstairs was a significant factor in our home search.
We’ve found Texans to be a friendly, liberty-loving bunch. Though where we moved, it seems half the neighborhood hails from California, with the number of friends we have from the Golden State moving to the Lone Star State growing by the year.
California still has great weather and a beautiful coastline, but the remaining advantages it had over Texas (dynamic high tech and entertainment industries, great restaurants, etc.) are all eroding away due to gross Democratic Party mismanagement.
Let’s hope that Californians fleeing the state for Texas leave their dysfunctional politics behind.
Tags:Antonio Neri, Austin, Ben Shapiro, California, Chuck DeVore, Democrats, Hewett Packard Enterprise, Houston, Oracle, Texas, Westlake (Metroplex)
Posted in Austin, Economics, Regulation, Texas | 23 Comments »
Friday, December 11th, 2020
Well, so much for that hope of overturning massive election fraud:
The Supreme Court on Friday evening rejected a suit brought by the state of Texas seeking to challenge election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
The Court wrote in an order that the lawsuit was denied for “lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution.
The lawsuit claimed that voting procedures in those four states were marred by irregularities that led to the election of Joe Biden as president. A group of 126 House Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, signed on to an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit.
“Texas has not demonstrated a cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections,” the Court ruled. “All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”
I doubt any other lawsuit has a chance to stop the steal at this point, so we’re looking at the overwhelming likelihood Joe Biden will be sworn in as 46th President of the United States on January 20.
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Elections, Joe Biden, Supreme Court, Texas, voting fraud
Posted in Elections, Supreme Court, Texas | 7 Comments »
Friday, December 11th, 2020
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Democrats dance to China’s tune, the media suddenly discover that Hunter Biden is covered in a thick coat of industrial-grade sleaze, California continues to destroy its economy, and Elon Musk moves to Texas.
Kurt Schlichter: The Democrats are literally in bed with the Chinese.
The most shocking thing about the recent news story that flatulent Russiagate hoaxer and American-nuking enthusiast Rep. Eric Swalwell was caught intertwined with a Chinese honey pot is…well, actually nothing about it is shocking. This is totally on-brand for the Dems and especially this particular clown. It’s not clear how far he got with this Democrat-diddling doxie, but the best case for Swalwell is that he was a fool who couldn’t see how unlikely it was for a DC 8 (and real world 5) to want anything to do with him other than as a mark. The worst case is that he eagerly betrayed his country for a roll in the rice with this Beijing bimbo.
Either way, he’s a disgrace.
But this singularly unaccomplished punch-line, this aspiring Beto without the hype or substance (Swalwell’s status as a furry is unknown, but I have my suspicions), is all too representative of his garbage party. The fact is that Red China is delighted by the opportunity to get back to business as usual with a Democrat administration – and in the case of a potential President Biden*, that’s literally business as usual. The garbage media didn’t think his crack-huffing, loser spawn being owned by Chinese intel –you think they don’t have tape of him living out his X-rated video of David Bowie’s 80s hit?– was significant enough to tell us about. But then, like the rest of the establishment, the media’s corporate owners are all wrapped up with the Chi-Coms. When’s the last time you saw Hollywood take a stand against the Chinese commies? That would be about the last time you saw Richard Gere on the big screen, since his career died when he did a movie pointing out their oppression of Tibet. Go look on Netflix or wherever – there’s plenty of stupid woke trash about how America sucks, but nobody talks about the big Red Panda in the room. The corporations know who their real boss is.
And, as Tucker pointed out in a great monologue, the Establishment is all-in on catering to the commies. It is bought and paid for, owned and happy, and dedicated to selling you out. And a President Biden*, in the event he is inaugurated, will happily continue the fire sale of American physical, intellectual, and moral assets to the reds.
“If Voters Had Known About 8 Stories Media Ignored, Trump Would Have Won.” Well, that’s why they ignored them…
Speaking of which, our media elites have suddenly discovered that the Hunter Biden corruption story was true. Of course they knew it was true all along, they just suppressed it until they could drag Joe Biden’s ambulatory corpse over the finish line. (And if you somehow missed the Hunter Biden story, here’s the archive.)
More on the same theme.
Illegal alien charged in Houston human trafficking case.
Lockdowns don’t work:
More on that subject:
Judge rules Los Angeles County acted arbitrarily with an outdoor dining ban. “By failing to weigh the benefits of an outdoor dining restriction against its costs, the county acted arbitrarily and its decision lacks a rational relationship to a legitimate end,” Superior Court Judge James Chalfant wrote in a tentative ruling.”
San Francisco residents really hate that golden goose:
When Chirag Bhakta saw a headline recently that said tech workers were fleeing San Francisco, he had a quick reaction: “Good riddance.”
Bhakta, a San Francisco native and tenant organizer for affordable housing nonprofit Mission Housing, is well-versed in the seismic impact that the growth of the tech industry has had on the city. As software companies expanded over the past decade, they drew thousands of well-off newcomers who bid up rents and remade the city’s economy and culture.
He said the sudden departure of many tech workers and executives — often to less expensive, rural areas where they can telecommute during the coronavirus pandemic — reveals that their relationship with San Francisco was “transactional” all along.
“They used their capital to radically shift the makeup of poor, working-class communities,” Bhakta said. “We’re left with ‘for sale’ signs and price points that are still out of reach for most people.”
Many urban centers have seen residents move out in large numbers since the start of stay-at-home orders in March, but the shift has been especially dramatic for San Francisco, a city that was already experiencing rapid change because of the tech industry.
Software engineers, CEOs and venture capitalists have chosen to jump from the Bay Area to places such as Denver, Miami and Austin, Texas, citing housing costs, California’s relatively high income tax and the Bay Area’s general resistance to rapid growth and change.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has moved to Texas. “‘It’s worth noting that Tesla is the last car company still manufacturing cars in California,’ Musk said. ‘There used to be over a dozen car plants in California, and California used to be the center of aerospace manufacturing. My companies are the last two left.'”
“Immediately After Moving To Texas, Elon Musk Announces Tesla AR-15.
The new firearm will look similar to a standard AR-15 but will in fact be a battery-powered railgun capable of firing 3 million rounds per minute. It will also feature a fingerprint sensor, Bluetooth capability, heat-seeking ammunition, and a chainsaw bayonet, to name a few.
At 3 million rounds a minute, trips to the shooting range would get very expensive…
Black Republican congressmen elect Burgess Owens of Utah and Byron Donalds of Florida look to oppose socialism. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
21st century money laundering:
Virtually unheard of a decade ago, these Chinese players are moving vast sums quickly and quietly, authorities said. Their expertise: routing cartel drug profits from the United States to China then on to Mexico with a few clicks of a burner phone and Chinese banking apps – and without the bulky cash ever crossing borders. The launderers pay small Chinese-owned businesses in the United States and Mexico to help them move the funds. Most contact with the banking system happens in China, a veritable black hole for U.S. and Mexican authorities.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson tries yet again to get Texas to legalize casino gambling. “Adelson’s noteworthy lobbyist crew includes current and former high-ranking government officials, including former chiefs of staff to disgraced Speakers of the Texas House Joe Straus and Dennis Bonnen.” Of course.
OhNoNotThisShitAgain.jpg:
Iran’s Quds Force is sending weapons and troops to Venezuela.
Frederick Forsyth says that the reason the Brexit deal was scuttled at the last minute is that the EU was doing France’s bidding.
After years covering France in Paris for the Reuters agency, and bilingual in French, I have a pretty good idea how the French system works. Basically, whoever appears to rule on the basis of elections, it is the graduates of the ENA who are really in charge. So what is it, this ultra-college?
Founded under De Gaulle, it is a college designed to produce the true ruling class of the country, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or ENA and its graduates are the ENArques. More than all our public schools and Oxbridge put together, the ENA is accessible only by the brightest and the best to start with.
After three years there the graduates are the elite of the elite. They move seamlessly from industry to commerce to banking to civil service to politics, and always in the top slots. They do not oppose each other. President Macron and Michel Barnier are both ENArques.
As in all politics, election-winning is the key and in elections there are powerful voting blocs which must not be affronted. In France the biggest is the agricultural vote. Hence the EU’s incredibly expensive and burdensome Common Agricultural Policy, a money tree paid for by others, to subsidise France’s mediaeval and uncompetitive farming sector and its attendant sub-professions. Offend them and you lose the election.
Not far behind comes the fishing industry. Emmanuel Macron is facing an election. That is why last week at the very threshold of an agreement with the UK, Michel Barnier got new orders from Paris. No, you have conceded too much to the Anglo Saxons – we want all the fish and free access to all the waters.
It is easy to blame Barnier but he had his orders. That is why a German, Dane or Dutchman would have been better as the EU team leader. Germany, Denmark and Holland fish those waters but their politicians do not lose elections because of their fishing industries and they are not run by an ENA.
In other news, Frederick Forsyth is still alive. (Hat tip: @davidjacksmith.)
Feds sue to break up Facebook.
Speaking of which: “Facebook’s Fact-Checker ‘Lead Stories’ is Staffed by Exclusively Democrat Party Donors, CNN Staffers, And ‘Defeat Trump’ Activists.”
Grant Baker at American Thinker has an interesting (and infuriating) three-part series on Democratic Party megadoner and accused serial killer Ed Buck, the man whose fetish seems to be overdosing gay black teenagers with drugs. Part 2 is here, and Part 3 talks about some of his rich and powerful political supporters:
What could have bought Ed Buck so many layers of protection?
West Hollywood politics has a glimmering rainbow surface, but the authentic underlying powers are real estate interests. The City Council controls the fate of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of development projects, a fact reflected in their campaign contributions. “Developers don’t drop tens of thousands of dollars in West Hollywood because they like the City’s position on gay marriage, says former West Hollywood Mayor Steve Martin.
With a huge war chest supporting them, a small handful of politicians reduced the government of West Hollywood to a game of musical chairs. John Duran, John D`Amico, John Heilman, Jeffrey Prang, and Abbe Land would bounce back and forth between the Mayor’s Office and City Council for decades, winning eighteen out of the last twenty-one mayoral elections between them.
Ed Buck played a variety of supporting roles in the political machinery, buoying the chosen few.
D’Amico’s political career was launched on the back of Buck’s support, winning a seat on City Council after marching through West Hollywood with Buck promoting his “Fur Free WeHo” campaign. Buck’s donations and connections to other major donors, including billionaire Gary Michelson, brought tens of thousands of dollars to Buck’s friends on City Council through multiple entities sharing the name ANIMAL PAC.
Buck’s money also bought him a position on the Steering Committee of the Stonewall Democratic Club, the kingmaker of West Hollywood politics. Buck used his position on the Steering Committee to influence Stonewall’s secretive endorsement process, one “designed to protect incumbents and well-financed, well-connected candidates,” says a former Steering Committee member. Stonewall rank and file must have wondered why the LGBTQ group was promoting candidates for County Tax Assessor and Board of Equalization. Buck was so useful, Abbe Land would open City Council meetings by calling him to recite the pledge of allegiance.
Officially retired since his early thirties, Buck would not have had the money to sustain his prolific spending habits relating to drugs, escorts, and politics. His biggest payday was in the 1980s when he flipped his friend’s business, Gopher Courier, to profit just over a million dollars, after which he lost money investing into pay-phones and a restaurant.
After moving to West Hollywood, Buck was suspiciously cash-rich and asset poor, driving a wreck of a car and living in a rent-controlled apartment. Journalists paint Buck as a wealthy social climber, but his finances and lifestyle suggest he was a dirty political operative.
Data from California’s political contribution records is highly truncated, but campaign finance rules create patterns that highlight alliances.
One can skirt contribution limits and obscure contribution origins by breaking up large donations into smaller payments and passing them through family members and political allies, so I looked for donors that matched Buck’s donations.
He donated varying amounts to plenty of politicians and causes, but there were consistent primary beneficiaries such as Jeffrey Prang, John Duran, Scott Svonkin, Honesty PAC, and of course, his ANIMAL PACs. The highly incestuous top donors who also supported Prang, Duran, Svonkin, and Buck’s PACs were real estate interests, chief among them being Excel Property Management Services managed by CEO Arman Gabay. Arman Gabay and his company funded Jeffrey Prang’s successful 2014 Los Angeles County Assessor bid with the help of Ed Buck, Ed Buck’s future attorney Seymour Amster, ANIMAL PAC, John Duran, West Hollywood activists, and various real estate interests. The same donors also funded periphery candidates who endorsed Prang and Svonkin.
As County Assessor, Jeffrey Prang controls property taxes on $1.7 trillion worth of property, explaining why his donors are real estate interests. The Tax Assessor is a notoriously corrupt office, both in Los Angeles and across the country. Jeffrey Prang’s predecessor was arrested by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office on bribery charges after selling tax breaks. Eighteen Tax Assessors in New York City were arrested on bribery charges after real estate developer Donald Trump realized he was paying more in taxes than his competitors.
This is where Scott Svonkin’s role comes in. Funded by Ed Buck, Buck’s attorney Seymour Amster, and a small handful of real estate interests after Gemmel Moore’s death in Buck’s apartment, Honesty PAC was created solely to fund Scott Svonkin’s 2018 for Board of Equalization, an oversight position overseeing the County Tax Assessor Jeffrey Prang. The kicker: Scott Svonkin was an aide to Jeffrey Prang while he served on West Hollywood City Council.
Scott Svonkin’s 2018 bid was unsuccessful, but the setback did not deter Jeffrey Prang. Whistleblowers filed suit against Prang for giving favorable tax treatment to West Hollywood real estate interests by intentionally losing legal cases, reversing property tax decisions, and reimbursing millions of dollars in back taxes for favored companies and individuals. Worse, Arman Gabay was arrested in May 2018 for allegedly soliciting preferable tax treatment from County Officials, soliciting public funds for his development projects, trading political donations in exchange for help on West Hollywood development projects, and other crimes involving political patronage. From a January 2020 prosecutor’s motion: “in another phone call agents intercepted on or about April 22, 2017, defendant made clear why he donates to public officials — he expects things in return.” When asked to contribute to reelect “Public Official 5,” he refused “because the last time he donated, defendant did not get anything from Public Official 5. Referring to Public Official 5, defendant said “f[*]ck him.”
If Arman Gabay had helpful public officials on his payroll, he and others likely had Ed Buck on it, too, which would explain Buck’s mysterious revenue stream. Buck’s choice of Christopher Darden as his defense attorney shows he still has plenty of cash to play with and that investigators aren’t chasing down where it comes from. Prosecutors seem to know Buck’s income is off the books; they requested an order from the court to ensure “no portion of the proffered bail was feloniously obtained.” Even from jail, Buck still has cards to play, especially if his corruption touches politicians or some in the district attorney’s office.
Israel and Morocco strike normalize relations. Nothing to see here, just that idiot Trump helping facilitate another peace deal between Israel and the Muslim world…
“Goya CEO names AOC as employee of the month after her boycott call sends sales soaring.”
Oopsie!
J.C. Penny’s is back from corporate bankruptcy. Sort of. Kind of.
Snapshots of the continuing decline of Austin:
Austin decommissions shitty art. Of the “artworks,” two are garbage, one is already gone, one is so badly decayed it has to be torn down, and one is literally a circle of rocks. It’s fine as rock circles go, but a yard guy could probably put one together for you for less than 20 bucks.
Chuck Yeager, RIP.
Rehab for Vice bloggers:
Bob Dylan sells out.
All your Spidermen are belong to us.
“Hallmark Channel Announces 19 New Coronavirus-Themed Movies.”
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, antifa, AR-15, Arman Gabay, Austin, black, Bob Dylan, Border Controls, Brexit, Burgess Owens, Byron Donalds, California, China, Christopher Darden, Communism, coronavirus, Crime, Democrats, Ecole Nationale d'Administration, Ed Buck, Elon Musk, Emmanuel Macron, Eric Swalwell, EU, Facebook, France, Frederick Forsyth, gambling, gay, Gemmel Moore, Goya, Grant Baker, Houston, Hunter Biden, Iran, Israel, J. C. Penny's, James Chalfant, Jeffrey Prang, Jihad, Joe Biden, John Duran, Kurt Schlichter, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Morocco, Portland, Quds Force, San Francisco, Scott Svonkin, Seymour Amster, Sheldon Adelson, Social Justice Warriors, Steve Martin (West Hollywood mayor), technology, Tesla Motors, Vice News, video, West Hollywood, Wuhan
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, December 9th, 2020
Multiple lawsuits over election fraud are preceding through the courts and appeal process. One of the most important is a lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin seeking to have their state legislatures appoint electors due to widespread election fraud in those states:
The filing, first reported by Joel Pollak at Breitbart, is under a procedure where the U.S. Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in suits between states. That means the lawsuit does not need to be filed in District Court, then work its way through the normal appeals process.
The lawsuit is in the form of a Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint. (The Brief in support of the Motion appears starting at page 50 of the pdf. A more complete pdf. with all filings, including the Motion for Preliminary Injunction and a Temporary Restraining Order is available here starting at pg. 111)
The relief sought is a delay of the December 14 statutory deadline for electors to vote, arguing that the Supreme Court has the power to delay that deadline since “[t]he only date that is mandated under the Constitution … is January 20, 2021. U.S. CONST. amend. XX.” The purpose of the delay would be for state legislatures to consider appointing the electors given the unreliability in the way the elections were handled.
This is in line with some commenters here suggesting that January 20 is the only real Constitutional deadline.
I’m not sufficiently familiar with this procedure to opine right now on whether it is proper procedurally…
You and me both!
…but if it works it puts the election squarely in the hands of the Supreme Court. There is no guarantee that if the issue were put to the legislators in these states that they would select Trump electors in the face of certified vote counts showing Biden the winner.
More on the lawsuit:
The suit alleges a variety of different constitutional violations in each state, all relating to the loosening of mail-ballot processing rules. Some of the changes were implemented by state and local election officials using the Chinese coronavirus as a pretext; others pre-date the presidential election and COVID.
Texas argues the impact of the rules’ changes was the same in each of these battleground states, saying election officials “flooded their people with unlawful ballot applications and ballots while ignoring statutory requirements as to how they were received, evaluated and counted.”
The requested remedy is the same, as well: toss out all mail-ballot votes and the presidential election results for all four states, which currently show Joe Biden receiving more votes than President Donald Trump.
To safeguard public legitimacy at this unprecedented moment and restore public trust in the presidential election, this Court should extend the December 14, 2020 deadline for Defendant States’ certification of presidential electors to allow these investigations to be completed.
“Trust in the integrity of our election processes is sacrosanct and binds our citizenry and the States in this Union together,” Paxton said in a press statement. “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin destroyed that trust and compromised the security and integrity of the 2020 election. The states violated statutes enacted by their duly elected legislatures, thereby violating the Constitution. By ignoring both state and federal law, these states have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but of Texas and every other state that held lawful elections.”
“Their failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election,” he added. “We now ask that the Supreme Court step in to correct this egregious error.”
My fear is that the very novelty of this lawsuit will work against it. I’m not sure any state has ever filed to alter election results from other states, or that the Supreme Court would grant standing in the lawsuit. But by making it a state suing another state, it makes it a clear Supreme Court case under Article III of the Constitution.
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge is also supporting the lawsuit:
As is Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry.
Indeed, seven states have joined the lawsuit: Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, and South Dakota. It’s quite possible that more have joined by the time you read this.
With the lawsuit to invalidate Pennsylvania’s certification thrown out, the Texas lawsuit may be the best chance to get the Supreme Court to look at the massive election fraud that occurred in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Edited to Add: Missouri signs onto the lawsuit.
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Alabama, Arkansas, Crime, Elections, Florida, Georgia, Ken Paxton, Kentucky, Leslie Rutledge, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, voting fraud, Wisconsin
Posted in Crime, Elections, Supreme Court, Texas | 16 Comments »
Friday, December 4th, 2020
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! First up: The rest of the nation gets to see what an incompetent hypocrite Austin’s current mayor is:
Austin Mayor Steve Adler is the latest powerful democrat to prove they’re a complete hypocrite:
In a November 9 Facebook video, Austin mayor Steve Adler advised the public to “stay at home” but failed to disclose he was broadcasting from a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. But wait! It gets better (worse?)!
Adler and 8 family members took a private jet to his Mexican getaway. All of this was the day after Adler reportedly hosted a small wedding for his daughter at a hotel in Austin.
Is there a “consult with health authorities prior and undergo COVID-19 testing” exception to the lockdown rules? Of course not! Laws are for the little people…
Democrats finally dissect their horrible down-ballot performance.
The complete absence of Joe Biden’s coattails is forcing the usually delusional Democrats to get perilously close to the truth during this self-examination. Whether the activists speaking the truth will be listened to by the Elders of the Village in the Democratic Party remains to be seen. It should also be noted that those elders are very elderly and may not be amenable to alterations in a narrative they’ve been crafting regarding themselves for decades.
Some more hard truth:
Some worry that the party, once rooted in the working class but now run and funded largely by college-educated liberals, may be losing its touch with blue-collar voters of all races outside major metro areas.
“We’re such a Beltway party that we can’t even fathom that there are a lot of Mexicans in the [Rio Grande] Valley who love Donald Trump,” said Chuck Rocha, a Texas-raised Democratic strategist who runs Nuestro PAC, a super PAC focused on Latino outreach. “Biden won, and that’s great, but everything underneath Biden was a huge catastrophe.”
The Democratic Party has been gleefully refashioning itself as a coastal elite party for quite a while now. They traded blue-collar workers in the heartland for celebrities. Who needs to worry about jobs in Ohio when you’re partying with Beyoncé, right?
They didn’t get anything about why Donald Trump won in 2016, then they spent four years making up lies about why it happened because those lies allowed them to remain in their coastal bubbles and not get any hard glimpses at reality.
Their sense of entitlement from 2016 never went away, and they think that they’ve been somewhat vindicated by the apparent Biden victory. That victory is illusory, however. It took four years of the mainstream media being more corrupt than ever before combined with an election year global pandemic and a healthy dose of voter…irregularities to bring about this result. It really didn’t have anything to do with the Democrats and their ideas being wildly popular.
Because they aren’t.
Democrats are so blinded by their hatred for President Trump that they are unlikely to learn anything from this election.
Suggesting Republicans not vote in Georgia’s senate runoff is sheer idiocy. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Speaking of the Georgia senate runoffs, “Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock has a history of anti-gun activism dating back to at least 2013.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Liberal idiots in Minneapolis keep making the same mistakes over and over again. “In case you didn’t do the math, that’s a 63% increase in the number of homicides, compared to 2019, and the year is not over yet. Just a few more holistic victims of community-based murders”
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, France’s president from 1974 to 1981, dead at age 94. He was a French conservative, which meant he was significantly to the left of Walter Mondale. He wasn’t the worst leader in France’s history, but was a big fan of a centralized EU, having helped craft a (rejected) constitution for it in 2004.
“Previously Deported Illegal Alien Sex Offender Arrested At Texas Border.”
Texas gun sales continue to soar.
Tesla gigafactory near Austin raises first pillar.
Spanish bank Banco Sabadell’s acquisition of UK’s TSB goes horribly wrong thanks to amazing IT stupidity:
Experts at the time warned that Sabadell was significantly overpaying for TSB while underestimating the potential costs of integrating the new business into its existing IT platform. But Sabadell ignored the warnings and went ahead with the operation, believing that it would serve as a catapult onto the international scene as well as cement its place as a pioneer in Internet banking. In both cases, the exact opposite happened.
Branded the “biggest IT disaster in British banking history,” the botched IT upgrade led to hundreds of thousands of customers being unable to access their online accounts for weeks on end. Standing orders, payrolls, mortgage instalments and other payments and transfers failed. Thousands of customers fell victim to fraud attacks. Even when the bank tried to apologize, it sent apologies out to the wrong people, in the process breaking the EU’s new data protection laws.
At the root of all this chaos was Sabadell’s stubborn determination to get the new IT system up and running as swiftly as possible, in order to save millions of euros in monthly fees it was having to pay to TSB’s former parent company, Lloyds Bank plc, to use its old legacy IT system. Sabadell’s Proteo4UK system was not even close to being ready to roll out at TSB, as IBM consultants brought in to try to remedy the problems have since attested. But senior management went ahead anyway, adopting, as one insider put it, a hope-and-pray attitude.
That “move fast and break things” paradigm might work fine if you’re a free social media startup, but not if you’re a bank and your buggy, incomplete code handles people’s money.
“Democratic mayor arrested after allegedly driving drunk and falling asleep in White Castle drive-thru before crashing into pole.” That would be Shively, Kentucky Mayor Beverly Chester-Burton.
#BlackLivesMatter rioter charged with murder.
Judge puts temporary halt to Carroll ISD social justice warrior Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP).
Thomas Sowell remembers Walter E. Williams. “He was my best friend for half a century. There was no one I trusted more or whose integrity I respected more.”
Arecibo, when the cables fell.
This sounds cool:
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Warner Brothers might have sounded the death knell for movie theaters, plans to release entire 2021 movie lineup on simultaneously on HBO Max.
Adolf Hitler wins election in Namibia.
Chihuahua bites bear.
I laughed:
“Gretchen Whitmer Casts Spell On Michigan So It Is Always Winter And Never Christmas.”
“Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.”
Tags:#BlackLivesMatter, 2020 Election, Adolf Hitler (Namibia), Austin, Banco Sabadell, banking, Beverly Chester-Burton, Border Controls, Cabo San Lucas, California, Carroll ISD, coronavirus, Crime, Democrats, dogs, Elections, France, Georgia, Gretchen Whitmer, Guns, Kentucky, LinkSwarm, mergers, Michigan, Minneapolis, Namibia, police, Raphael Warnock, Social Justice Warriors, Spain, Steve Adler, technology, Tesla Motors, Texas, Thomas Sowell, Time Warner, Valey Giscard d’Estaing, Walter Williams, White Castle, Wuhan
Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Guns, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »
