Archive for the ‘Texas’ Category
Sunday, December 16th, 2018
The answer is “probably not,” but not for lack of trying.
WASHINGTON — The FBI said today that a 78-year-old man currently imprisoned in Texas has confessed to committing 90 murders across the country from 1970 to 2005.
FBI analysts are working with federal, state and local agencies — including the Texas Rangers — to try to match Samuel Little’s confessions to cold cases.
If his confessions pan out, Little would be among the most prolific serial killers in American history.
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of 49 murders but confessed to 71, and is suspected of committing more than 90.
Some suspect that Ted Bundy’s death toll might exceed 100; he confessed to killing three dozen women and was executed in 1989.
Little, originally from Ohio, has a long criminal history including drug charges, assault, shoplifting, breaking and entering, and solicitation. In the early 1980s, he escaped indictment in Mississippi and conviction in Florida on charges of killing women. He was arrested at a Kentucky homeless shelter on a drug charge in 2012 and his DNA was matched to three unsolved murders — all women beaten and strangled to death — in Los Angeles from 1987-89. The former competitive boxer was convicted in 2014 and sent to prison for life.
Based on the positive match to the L.A. murders, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program “found a case out of Odessa, Texas, that sounded very much like him, and we could place him passing through the area around the same time,” said ViCAP crime analyst Christina Palazzolo.
This past spring, Little, eager for a prison transfer, was happy to talk with investigators. Ticking off victims by city and state, he said he had killed 90 women. Though he wasn’t good at remembering dates, he offered other details such as the car he was driving at the time and even sketched drawings of his victims.
So far, the FBI has confirmed 34 cases tied to Little; he was extradited to Texas to face charges in the Odessa murder. Many cases are pending confirmation, while other claims have been uncorroborated, the FBI said. Challenges for investigators, including Little’s trouble with dates, include his choice of victims — often prostitutes and drug addicts — and his frequent moves. Little is also in poor health.
Little fits the loser/drifter profile of Henry Lee Lucas and Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramierez.
Caveat: After being convicted for life, Little wouldn’t be the first killer to confess to numerous killings with an eye toward getting better food and lodgings, and many believe Henry Lee Lucas’ confessions to multiple serial killings was bogus.
You also run into thorny definitional problems for the term “serial killer”: Do you count every death to every member of the Philadelphia Poison Gang (estimated murder toll: 114)? Do you count killer nurse Orville Lynn Majors, suspected of as many as 130 murders?
See also: A couple of posts on serial killer Robert Ben Rhodes over on the other blog.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Tags:Crime, Samuel Little, serial killer, Texas
Posted in Crime, Texas | No Comments »
Thursday, December 13th, 2018
For the first time in 75 years:
America turned into a net oil exporter last week, breaking almost 75 years of continued dependence on foreign oil and marking a pivotal — even if likely brief — moment toward what U.S. President Donald Trump has branded as “energy independence.”
The shift to net exports is the dramatic result of an unprecedented boom in American oil production, with thousands of wells pumping from the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico to the Bakken in North Dakota to the Marcellus in Pennsylvania.
While the country has been heading in that direction for years, this week’s dramatic shift came as data showed a sharp drop in imports and a jump in exports to a record high. Given the volatility in weekly data, the U.S. will likely remain a small net importer most of the time.
“We are becoming the dominant energy power in the world,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research. “But, because the change is gradual over time, I don’t think it’s going to cause a huge revolution, but you do have to think that OPEC is going to have to take that into account when they think about cutting.”
(Hat tip: Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Twitter feed, which also offers this piece on the background of the shale boom.)
Good news for every American except Democrats and ecoweenies (but I repeat myself). Especially for those looking for jobs in Midland, where unemployment just hit 2.1%
Tags:Energy Policy, Midland, oil industry, Texas, Texas Public Policy Foundation
Posted in Texas | No Comments »
Monday, December 10th, 2018
In case you missed this news Friday, Texas Senator John Cornyn is seeking a fourth term, and fellow Texas Senator Ted Cruz has endorsed him:
Signaling that the 2020 election season has begun, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has endorsed his colleague John Cornyn for re-election.
In a video posted this morning by Cornyn’s campaign, the two men sit together with Cruz asking voters to join him “in supporting John Cornyn’s campaign for re-election to keep Texas strong and prosperous.”
He and Cornyn take turns extolling their achievements, working with President Trump, on behalf of Texas.
“Ted and I fight shoulder to shoulder to make the country look more like Texas,” said Cornyn, who will be seeking a fourth six-year term in 2020.
“John and I have made a very strong team here in Washington, and I hope that we can keep working together so that together we can uphold the principles that have long embodied the Texas can-do spirit,” added Cruz.
Their relationship hasn’t always been so smooth. In 2016, Cornyn famously refused to make a similar early endorsement of Cruz for 2018. Of course, Cruz didn’t endorse Cornyn’s 2014 re-election bid until after that year’s primary.
There was talk that Cornyn, being 66, might retire, but that’s evidently not the case.
In 2014, I thought Cornyn might be vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right (which sort of happened, but Rep. Steve Stockman’s lackluster campaign didn’t even throw a scare into Cornyn). I don’t think that this year, for a variety of reasons, mainly that Donald Trump’s victory ended up largely incorporating the Tea Party back into the folds of the Republican Party proper, Cornyn has hewed more closely to the conservative line in recent years, and this year’s Democratic successes has deadened the Republican appetite for inter-party challenges of popular (and mostly conservative) incumbents.
It’s not that Cornyn is perfect, it’s that his deviations from Republican orthodoxy are few enough that he doesn’t stand out from other Republican senators the way Jeff Flake and Lisa Murkowski do. (And Cornyn had a significant role in guiding Brett Kavanaugh’s supreme court nomination to a successful conclusion.) Also, don’t forget that Cornyn pulled in more votes than any other statewide candidate in 2014, obliterating his Democratic opponent even worse than Greg Abbott trounced Wendy Davis. If 2020 is anything like 2018, Republicans will want a familiar, popular incumbent on the ticket.
I don’t see Cornyn losing in 2020, even if Democratic Party flavor-of-the-month Beto O’Rourke forgoes an expected Presidential run to challenge him.
Tags:2020 Election, 2020 Texas Senate Race, Donald Trump, Elections, John Cornyn, Republicans, Ted Cruz
Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 7th, 2018
This week was bears all the way down, but there may be some light at the end of the tunnel. So enjoy a free Friday LinkSwarm:
President Donald Trump wants to end green energy subsidies for electric cars. Good for him.
Don’t lean on me man if you cant afford a ticket back from geezer Dem city.
Clues suggest Chinese hackers behind Marriott breach.
Remembering the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during Prague Spring 50 years ago. (Hat tip: Ace of Spaces HQ.)
Another day, another fake hate crime. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin on Twitter.)
In a follow up to this story from January, Charlie Geren aide David Sorensen admits he filed a false CPS report against Geren’s primary opponent Bo French:
A former political operative for State Rep. Charlie Geren (R–Fort Worth) has now admitted that he made a factually inaccurate and anonymous report to Child Protective Services against Geren’s opponent during a contentious 2016 Republican primary campaign.
As part of a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by Bo French, David Sorensen has acknowledged he made the anonymous and incorrect election eve report to CPS alleging that French was abusing his children. The former Geren political aide has also acknowledged the report was not accurate, and he has apologized to the French family for submitting it.
“Before and after Geren’s campaign, Sorensen worked as an operative on Democrat political campaigns and for the Democrat Party.” After this confession, Sorensen should never work on the campaign of any candidate for any political party ever again…
“John Stossel: Google and Facebook cross ‘The Creepy Line’ of censorship every day.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Armed woman kills South Carolina jail escapee who kicked in her door.” Good. (Hat tip: @davilch’s Twitter feed.)
“More on the demise of the Weekly Standard:
Just as Milton’s Satan would rather reign in hell than to serve in heaven, so also neoconservatives would never be part of any movement if they were not acknowledged as the movement’s intellectual leadership. Neoconservatives were content to have John McCain win the GOP nomination and lose to Obama, since this result did not impair the market for what Kristol, et al., were selling — political commentary and policy analysis. What really threatened their racket, however, was when Republican primary voters in 2016 refused to be herded into the camp of any of the neoconservative-approved candidates. Make no mistake, Bill Kristol would have much rather seen Jeb Bush or Chris Christie win the GOP nomination and then lose to Hillary, than to have a Republican president who wouldn’t take advice from Bill Kristol.
Questions of policy — is Bill Kristol in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, or not? — were ultimately less important to the fate of the Weekly Standard than their intellectual pride. Neoconservatives decided in 2015 that Donald Trump should not be the Republican nominee and, when their advice was rejected by GOP primary voters, the neoconservatives doubled-down and decided that Hillary Clinton should be president. When that didn’t happen, they doubled down again, and declared Trump’s presidency illegitimate. At no point, apparently, did it ever occur to them to ask, “What if we’re wrong?” The possibility of error was not something Bill Kristol (Harvard, Class of 1979) was willing to consider.
Low dose aspirin did not increase the lifespan of the elderly in a study, but did increase deadly hemorrhages. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Dog food recall.
“Elon Musk Cancels Boring Project After Delving Too Deep, Unearthing Balrog.”
Avengers: Dendgame trailer drops.
There are few presents that beat a Golden Retriever puppy:
Tweet containing a video of President George H.W. Bush’s body being borne by train to its final resting place next to his wife and daughter:
America is not a kingdom, and a president is not a king, but the pagan power of a dead king’s passage still stirs some part of our ancient souls. These rituals of our civil religion (the lying in state, the transport of the coffin, the missing man flyover) are both objectively a little silly and subjectively profoundly important as part of the social glue that still binds the nation together.
Rest in peace, Mr. President.
Tags:Bush41, Charlie Geren, China, Communism, Crime, Czech Republic, David Sorensen, Democrats, dogs, Elon Musk, Facebook, Foreign Policy, George H. W. Bush, Google, green subsidies, Guns, John Stossel, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Slovakia, Soviet Union, Texas, The Weekly Standard, video, Welfare State, William Kristol
Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Texas, video, Welfare State | 1 Comment »
Sunday, December 2nd, 2018
Here’s some news, tributes, roundups and reactions to President George H. W. Bush’s death:
Bush’s body to lie in state in the capitol rotunda. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The Other McCain:
Former President George Herbert Walker Bush will be universally praised in the wake of his death because it is always the policy of liberals to celebrate the dead Republicans they formerly defamed, as a means to impugn the living Republicans they currently defame. Those of us old enough to remember how liberals hated Bush when he was president (and before that, as vice-president under Ronald Reagan) will not be deceived by their panegyrics to his “civility” and “bipartisanship.”
Snip.
Bush was one of the leaders of the GOP’s effort to break the Democrat stranglehold on the “Solid South.” He defeated the powerful Texas Democrat machine to win two terms in Congress, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1970, and served as Ambassador to the United Nations (1971-73) and later as director of the CIA. In the interval, Bush was chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973-74 when it fell his duty to inform President Nixon that he would have to resign, as the Watergate revelations had destroyed his support within the GOP. In all of these roles, Bush was a man of honor who did what duty required, as a patriotic servant of his country.
Scott Johnson at Powerline: “He led an almost impossibly full life, capped by his election to the presidency as Ronald Reagan’s successor in 1988. A good man and a good president, he was perhaps more than anything else a great American of the old-fashioned variety that is passing from the scene.” Plus a reminder of how the New York Times fabricated stories about him.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, hails Bush as the man who ended the Cold War. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Tweets:
Finally, America’s journalist class in action:
Tags:Bush41, Cold War, Communism, Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, George H. W. Bush, James Baker, Media Watch, Mikhail Gorbachev, New York Times, Obituary, Republicans, Texas
Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »
Saturday, December 1st, 2018
George Herbert Walker Bush, forty-first President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan’s Vice President, head of the CIA, U.S. Congressman, envoy to China, World War II fighter pilot, and father of forty-third President George W. Bush, has died at age 94.
He led a pretty full life.
Americans should be grateful for his steady foreign policy leadership that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, sweeping the Bolshevik Revolution into the dustbin of history. Likewise, Bush oversaw a continuation of the Reagan economic boom, setting the stage for the tremendous growth of the dotcom era. Bush was also instrumental in laying the foundation for the rise of the Republican Party to become the dominant political party of Texas.
He was not perfect. His inability to control the deficit, his misjudgment of China, and his his administration’s inability to deter Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait all helped lead to his defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. Desert Storm’s ejection of Hussein’s forces from Kuwait was arguable Bush41’s finest hour, but the victory proved ephemeral, and led to a host of difficulties that America is still struggling with today.
He was a good President. His calm, patrician leadership was the last gasp of (to use his own words) a “kinder, gentler America,” and history will probably regard him as a “steady hand” President in the mold of Truman, Eisenhower, and Ford.
Tags:Bush41, George H. W. Bush, Obituary, Republicans, Texas
Posted in Republicans, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, November 30th, 2018
Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!
Trump Derangement Syndrome is breaking up marriages as “woke” women leave their sane husbands. “Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away.” Golly, can’t imagine why their marriage isn’t a Hallmark movie.
Texas speaker-in-waiting Rep. Dennis Bonnen will speak at the Texas Public Policy Foundation orientation in January. “One of the open secrets about the capitol in recent sessions has been the degree to which the Straus/Gordon Johnson team despises TPPF. The Straus/Gordon Johnson team loathes TPPF more than any conservative organization. That includes Empower Texans.” That’s some bold talk…
MSBNC in action:
Hamas is still freaking out over that Israeli raid a few weeks ago. “Hamas officials suspect Israel has been operating a base inside Gaza, and Hamas is turning itself inside out trying to figure it out.”
ESPN has lost 14 million viewers over seven years. How’s that “all social justice warrioring, all the time” format working out for you? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Deutsche Bank offices raided:
In what appears to be the latest in a string of financial crimes and scandals that have generated some $18 billion in fines since the financial crisis, prosecutors are investigating whether two employees in the bank’s wealth management division helped clients set up accounts in offshore tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands, and possibly allowed criminals to move money through these shelters, some of which may have flowed through accounts at the bank (other employees may also have been involved, prosecutors said). According to Frankfurt prosecutors, the investigation, which stems from revelations contained in the ‘Panama Papers’, covers behavior that stretched through this year, meaning that it could become a blemish on the performance of the bank’s newly-installed CEO Christian Sewing.
Another jihad attack against Jews the media won’t label as a jihad attack:
GM’s destructive subsidies:
General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now. Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.
Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.
The Second Amendment was always an individual right.
Detecting a stealth aircraft is one thing, but shooting it down during the terminal tracking phase is another.
Don’t be Dick’s.
Things to be thankful for:
The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour.
We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.
Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.
No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.
Centuries ago, it required something like 750 hours of human labor to produce a simple tunic; today it requires minutes of human labor. Almost no one is capable of truly internalizing this change. The shirt on your back once was a valuable capital good requiring four months of constant labor to produce. Now it’s not even worth repairing if it tears, it’s too inexpensive to replace it. Because of this change in productivity, even quite poor people in developed countries own many sets of clothing.
Centuries ago, there was barely enough food to go around, and often far too little, as a result of which starvation was common. It required constant labor by most of the population to produce enough food. Then, mechanization of agriculture set in, and the production of synthetic fertilizer, and pest control, and improved breeding methods; today, it requires very few people to grow more than enough food for everyone. There is so much food, in fact, that obesity has become a disease of the poor, an unprecedented development in human history.
So it is across the span of consumer goods. The amount of labor it requires to produce enough light to read at night has gone down by orders of magnitude, and the quantity of light produced by an ordinary lightbulb is 100 times greater than that of a candle at a tiny fraction of the price. Many goods didn’t even exist before; in my father’s youth there were no televisions, and now people can buy 4k 130cm flat screens.
(Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“The case against carbohydrates gets stronger.”
People have a hard time believing that weight control isn’t just a matter of calories eaten and calories burned. But there is an alternate hypothesis about obesity, which is what my group studies. The carbohydrate-insulin model argues that overeating isn’t the underlying cause of long-term weight gain. Instead, it’s the biological process of gaining weight that causes us to overeat.
Here’s how this hypothesis goes: Consuming processed carbohydrates (especially refined grains, potato products and sugars), causes our bodies to produce more insulin. Too much insulin, one of the most powerful hormones, forces our fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. These rapidly growing fat cells then hoard too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. So we get hungry, and if we persist in eating less, our metabolism slows down.
Snip.
We started the participants on a calorie-restricted diet until they lost 10%-14% of their body weight. After that, we randomly assigned them to eat exclusively one of three diets, containing either 20%, 40% or 60% carbohydrates.
For the next five months, we made sure they didn’t gain or lose any more weight, adjusting how much food they received, but keeping the ratio of carbohydrates constant. By doing so, we could directly measure how their metabolism responded to these differing levels of carbohydrate consumption.
Participants in the low (20%) carbohydrate group burned on average about 250 calories a day more than those in the high (60%) carbohydrate group, just as predicted by the carbohydrate-insulin model. Without intervention (that is, if we hadn’t adjusted the amount of food to prevent weight change), that difference would produce substantial weight loss — about 20 pounds after a few years. If a low-carbohydrate diet also curbs hunger and food intake (as other studies suggest it can), the effect could be even greater.
This result could explain in part why U.S. obesity rates have been going up for decades. Individuals have a sort genetically predetermined weight — lighter for some, heavier for others. Despite this, the average weight for American men has gone from about 165 pounds in the 1960s to 195 pounds today. Women, likewise, have gone from an average of 140 pounds to about 165.
“Half As Many Google Employees Protested Building Chinese Surveillance Tech As Protested Pentagon Project.”
Evidently Creepy Porn Lawyer is considered a crook even by his porn star client.
Actual headline, not from The Onion or The Babylon Bee: “PETA Defends Graphic Animal Mutilation In Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built.”
“Aides Force Ocasio-Cortez To Watch Entire Run Of ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’
Ricky Jay, RIP.
Tags:Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Atkins, Border Controls, China, Democrats, Dennis Bonnen, Deutsch Bank, Economics, ESPN, feminists, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Germany, GM, Google, Gordon Johnson, Guns, Hamas, Jews, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Michael Avenatti, MSNBC, PETA, Social Justice Warriors, technology, Texas, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Trump Derangement Syndrome
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 23rd, 2018
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I for one am stuffed…
For those freaking out about Chief Justice Roberts saying there are no Democratic or Republican judges…¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He’s the head of a co-equal branch of the United States federal government, of course he’s going to defend the institutional independence of the court, no matter the evidence to the contrary. It’s pretty much required for his position.
Now here’s a LinkSwarm to enjoy before girding your loins to do battle over a $99 stereo marked down to $69…
“Is this NYT article really about how people are exhausted or is it about how the Democratic Party needs to admit it has a problem? The end of the article sounds like a loud wake-up alarm for Democrats.”
I’m so old I remember when the American Civil Liberties Union actually cared about Civil Liberties:
Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due process protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Reminder: The Rev. Jim Jones was a big wheel in San Francisco’s far-left Democratic party establishment:
Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.
Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.
Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.
Snip.
Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.”
Another day, another Antifa riot in Portland. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Iran threatens U.S. bases and aircraft carriers within missile range.” Boy, could Obama pick him some partners for peace or what? (Hat tip: Patrick Poole on Twitter.)
More than a quarter-million French take to blocking roads to protest high gas prices.
Reminder:
So Jamal Khashoggi – a former Saudi intelligence agent, a man who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a sworn opponent of MBS’ reform program– was in the process of setting up a centre to promote the ideology of the MB. He was setting it up in Turkey with Qatari money. The Saudis wanted to stop him. In September they offered him $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia and to live there unhindered. They wanted him out of play. Khashoggi refused and the rest you know. The Saudis killed him.
Let me make two points. First, there is no justification for murdering Khashoggi. Secondly, this man wasn’t some Western-oriented liberal brutally murdered because of his passion for freedom. This man was a player.
Five more MS-13 members deported from Houston by ICE. (Hat tip: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Twitter feed.)
Old and busted: “Believe in science.” The New Hotness: “Social justice Astrology is so cool!”
Laura Loomer banned from Twitter. I have had zero interactions with Ms. Loomer, and she sounds like quite a piece of work, but banning her for criticizing a Muslim politician for supporting female genital mutilation is asinine.
1. Become head of ABC programming. 2. Cancel Roseanne. C. Become ex-head of ABC programming.
Divorced Texas woman blows up wedding dress with twenty pounds of Tannerite.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to disappear.”
The DB Cooper hijacking mystery: solved?
I had more links planned for this LinkSwarm, but they got eaten along with the turkey…
Tags:ABC, ACLU, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, antifa, astrology, California, Democrats, Foreign Policy, France, gas prices, Houston, Iran, Jamal Khashoggi, Jihad, Jim Jones, John Roberts, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Military, New York Times, Oregon, Portland, Roseanne Barr, San Francisco, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Taxes, Texas, Thanksgiving
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Sunday, November 18th, 2018
Remember how Democrats were shouting “Believe all women!” during the Kavanaugh hearing? Turns out, not all women should be believed:
The morning of September 22, 2017, Cristopher Precopia went to work at a lumber yard in Georgetown.
By the end of the day, he was in jail facing 99 years in prison.
But he didn’t know why.
Why had police come to his work and arrested him? Why was he being accused of these horrible crimes? Who was accusing him?
She said he broke into her home in Temple.
She said he sliced an “X” into her chest with a box cutter.
She said it happened on Sept. 20, 2017 around 7:20 p.m.
She was his high school girlfriend. The two dated several years earlier, but he couldn’t remember the last time the two had contact.
Now Precopia was facing a felony charge: burglary of a habitation with the intent to commit other crimes.
“I had no idea why everything was happening, and I was lost,” he said.
Precopia was taken to the Williamson County Jail, where his parents posted a $150,000 bond. Then they began fighting to prove his innocence.
Precopia knew he didn’t do it. He knew he couldn’t have done it.
On the night of the alleged attack, he was with his mother, Erin, at a Northwest Austin hotel about 65 miles from the accuser’s home.
“I’m thinking, ‘this is awesome. By the grace of God, she said it happened on the day when I can say totally, 100 percent, where he was at,” Erin Precopia said.
There were sworn affidavits from several people who were with him that evening.
There were pictures to prove it, and they were posted on Facebook. Timestamped. Geo-located.
An alibi.
“Most of the time, we deal with gray matters,” attorney Rick Flores said. “It’s not normally black or white. But this is one of those cases where I could definitely prove he did not commit this offense.”
Snip.
“Nine months after Precopia’s arrest, Flores said he took the evidence of an alibi to Bell County prosecutors, who dropped the charge ‘in the interest of justice.'”
Yet, as far as I can tell, the woman who tried to destroy his life by falsely accusing him of rape, has not only not been charged, but newspapers refuse to print her name because “she hasn’t been charged with a crime.” The only reason her criminal scheme was thwarted was that hard evidence to the contrary was available, and we still have due process in America. If the feminist inspired kangaroo court “guilty until proven innocent” standard that prevails on too many college campuses had been used, Precopia would have already been convicted.
Tags:Crime, Cristopher Precopia, feminism, Texas, Williamson County
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