Archive for the ‘Democrats’ Category
Tuesday, May 14th, 2024
Remember the bribery and money-laundering indictment of Texas Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar (TX-28)? Two of his aides just flipped.
Two former consultants to U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar have agreed to plead guilty to assisting the lawmaker in laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Mexican bank.
Colin Strother, the South Texas Democrat’s former campaign manager, and Florencio “Lencho” Rendon struck separate deals with the U.S. Department of Justice in March, where they agreed to cooperate with the investigation.
The first of the two to come clean was Strother, who signed his agreement on March 6. Nine days later, Rendon entered into his deal with federal prosecutors.
In Rendon’s agreement, the operation’s origins are stated to have begun in 2015, when Rendon met with Banco Azteca executives at Cuellar’s behest to discuss supposed regulatory issues facing the bank.
After the meetings, Rendon allegedly signed a contract paying him upwards of $15,000 monthly to provide consulting for an unnamed “U.S.-based media and television company” connected to Banco Azteca.
Strother’s deal details that Cuellar then allegedly commissioned Rendon to meet Strother, where Rendon offered Strother $11,000 a month to participate in a clandestine project that Strother eventually determined to be “a sham.”
Rendon’s agreement notes that he kept $4,000 for his consulting firm, while he expected Strother to keep $1,000 for himself and forward the remaining $10,000 to Imelda Cuellar’s company.
Rendon paid Strother $261,000 total from March 2016 to June 2019. Over $236,000 of those funds were allegedly funneled to Cuellar’s wife, Imelda Cuellar.
Prosecutors believe the transactions were part of an effort by Cuellar to hide the money from required U.S. financial disclosures.
Rendon and Strother have agreed to testify before a grand jury or any other judicial proceeding as part of their plea deals. Both still face up to 20 years in prison and onerous fines for conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Having your bagman flip on you is never a good sign for beating a rap, so I’d say it’s already highly likely Cueller will be going from the House to the big house, especially since a third aide has flipped.
A third person with ties to U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar’s bribery case has pleaded guilty, according to a recently unsealed plea agreement, after the South Texas Democrat was accused of accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.
Irada Akhoundova pleaded guilty to unlawfully acting as an agent of the Azerbaijani government and a state-run oil company, a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, on May 1, according to the plea deal first reported by the San Antonio Express-News. Akhoundova admitted to facilitating a $60,000 payment to Imelda Cuellar, the congressman’s wife, who was also indicted last month.
For nearly 20 years, Akhoundova has served as the president of the Houston-Baku Sister City Association, a nonprofit that builds ties between the Texas city and Azerbaijan’s capital, according to her LinkedIn profile. The plea agreement describes Akhoundova as an active member of the Texas Azerbaijani-American community. The court filing states that she served as the director of a U.S. affiliate of a Baku-based company, from approximately 2014 to 2017.
Unlike U.S. Senators, Governors cannot appoint interim U.S. House members. Article I, Section 2, Clause 4 of the Constitution states: “When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.” According to the Texas election code, U.S. House special elections operate under the same rules as Texas legislature special elections, namely “a special election shall be held on the first uniform election date occurring on or after the 36th day after the date the election is ordered. (b) If the election is to be held as an emergency election, it shall be held on a Tuesday or Saturday occurring on or after the 36th day and on or before the 64th day after the date the election is ordered.” If Cuellar resigns in May, June, or July, presumably Governor Abbott will call a special election for the seat.
In August, the issue starts running up on general election deadlines. By Texas law, a party official has 74 days before an election to remove a candidate’s name from the ballot, but the Texas Secretary of State says August 19 is the date, which looks like 78 days, which matches this doc on filling vacancies. If Cuellar resigns or pleads guilty before that date, Democrats can presumably pick another candidate to run in the November election. Beyond that date, presumably whichever of Republicans Jay Furman and Lazaro Garza Jr. (who are competing in the runoff to challenge Cuellar) is nominated will win the seat, since Cuellar will be ineligible to serve despite his name being on the ballot.
Final thought: Cuellar is the last even nominally pro-life Democrat in the U.S. House. The conspiracy-minded might think this is the only reason the Biden DOJ was allowed to indict him…
Tags:2024 Election, Azerbaijan, Banco Azteca, bribes, Colin Strother, corruption, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Florencio "Lencho" Rendon, Henry Cuellar, Imelda Cuellar, Irada Akhoundova, Jay Furman, Lazaro Garza Jr., Luca Cacciatore, Mexico, Texas, Texas 28th Congressional District, Texas Scorecard
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Texas | 12 Comments »
Sunday, May 12th, 2024
People like to feel like they’re appreciated and make a difference. In crime-friendly California, police don’t, so they’re headed to Texas.
Hundreds of California cops are fleeing to Texas to escape ‘soft-on-crime’ policies they say have made their jobs ‘pointless’, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Rank-and-file officers up to department chiefs have hit out at state legislators, claiming a succession of ‘anti-law enforcement’ policies have made their work impossible.
Overworked and unsupported, they have instead taken up jobs in Texas and other states that are seen as tough on crime.
Evan Leona, 38, who ditched his job as a detective in a multi-agency gang unit in Fresno, California, to work for Denton Police in Texas, in 2022, said he had met ‘more than a hundred officers’ in the Dallas / Fort Worth area who had fled California.
‘There are five officers who have come from various agencies in California on my shift alone in Denton,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘The justice system just works a lot better here.’
At least in Texas, we don’t have a one-party state that’s institutionally hostile to police and the rule of law. Some locales in Texas have suffered spiking crime rates thanks to stupid policies and Soros-backed DAs (I’m looking at you, Austin), but Democrat-run California is hostile to law enforcement from top to bottom, wants to put felons back on the streets and wants to tax lawful gun owners out of existence.
Leona said the majority of those who leave headed to Texas, with others finding work in states such as Montana and Arizona.
It comes as the Golden State is hemorrhaging thousands of police every year, with numbers down by more than 5,000 since 2019.
There are now fears that high-crime Californian cities are suffering a brain drain in law enforcement, leaving the public unprotected as criminals run riot.
Just like Republicans said would happen. What are the odds?
Ray Bottenfield, a former Santa Monica College Police Captain who retired to Hewitt, Texas, admitted it had become increasingly difficult to retain or recruit officers due to the lack of support from the state.
‘When you’re getting beaten up constantly, your cost of living is getting worse and you’re dealing with all this political stuff, it is overwhelming,’ he told DailyMail.com.
Many in law enforcement blame controversial legislation including Proposition 47 and 57 for turning prisons into ‘revolving doors’ and putting their lives at risk.
Proposition 47 legalized shoplifting. Proposition 57 created legal revolving doors to put felons back on the street.
Gina Miller, a former deputy at San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, told DailyMail.com that California’s legal system had left officers feeling ‘like whatever they did was pointless’.
The 37-year-old moved to Texas in 2021 and now works for Lewisville Police Department, around 25 miles north of Dallas.
She said her work now had a purpose again, adding: ‘If I take someone to jail they’re actually going to stay in jail until they see a judge.’
Officer Miller said some of her former California colleagues had quit to take up desk jobs tackling welfare fraud because they no longer felt safe patrolling the streets.
In particular, she hit out at Proposition 57, which she claims has let violent offenders onto the streets.
Put forward by then-Governor Jerry Brown and passed by voters in 2016, the law was designed to reduce prison overcrowding by offering the possibility of early parole for non-violent offenders.
But critics highlighted a loophole that meant offenses such as domestic violence and assault with a deadly weapon were not included under a list of violent offenses.
It came under the spotlight after it was revealed that Smiley Martin, a suspect in a 2022 mass shooting in Sacramento that left six dead, was released early from a ten-year sentence for domestic violence and assault under provisions set out in Proposition 57.
Miller claims the law has also put officers’ lives at risk by opening the door for violent criminals.
The officer, whose last assignment during her 11-year stint at San Bernadino was in the relatively safe and affluent city of Rancho Cucamonga, said four of her colleagues at the Sheriff’s Department were shot during her final six months.
One of them, Sergeant Dominic Vaca, 43, was killed after he was shot pursuing a motorcycle without a license plate in 2021.
There is no indication that the suspect, Bilal Winston Shabazz, had been released early under Proposition 57.
But Miller said such policies had created a general lawlessness within the state, leaving officers and the public feeling unsafe.
She recalled a time she took a man to jail for putting a loaded gun to his wife’s head, only for him to be released the same day.
‘I got into this job to try to help people and make a difference,’ she said. ‘It was heartbreaking to be telling this victim, “I know your husband just tried to kill you, but he’s already out of jail, so just call us if he comes back”.
‘To see their faces, it wears you down. You’re like: “This is stupid, because I can’t do anything for anybody”.’
Officer Leona, 38, who spent five years in Tulare County before serving in Fresno County Sheriff’s Office for a decade, said he was hospitalized following an assault by a violent criminal.
He said the suspect, who was ‘presumably high on narcotics’, had been chasing school children before running into a stranger’s garden.
A standoff with police ensued.
‘At one point, he hit me over the head with a board,’ he recounted. ‘I hit him with my baton. He picked me up and threw me through a sliding glass window into the kitchen of this lady’s house.
‘I was bleeding all over the place. He was bleeding. We’re rolling around in the kitchen.
‘It took eight officers to finally subdue him. I broke my hand. I had to get sutures on my face.
‘Another officer broke his wrist and a third officer had to get sutures or stitches with it.
‘He was only in custody for a couple months. And then he got released.’
Miller also claimed Proposition 47 had turned California’s prisons into ‘revolving doors’.
The measure, passed by voters in 2014, reclassified some nonviolent offenses as misdemeanors, including shoplifting where the value of the stolen property does not exceed $950.
It has been blamed by some, including Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and California retail head Rachel Michelin for a rise in thefts after scores of stores in the state suffered brazen heists.
Sounds like there’s a grand bargain to be had: California sends Texas all its good law enforcement officers, and in return Texas sends California all the homeless drug addicts and illegal aliens so beloved by the Democratic Party over ordinary, law-abiding citizens. Then we’ll see which state prospers more. (Except we’re already seeing it. People have been leaving California for Texas for over a decade.)
Decline is a choice, and California voters have decided that they side with the Democratic Party and George Soros in embracing high crime rates and treating police and Republicans as the villains.
Now they get to live with the consequences of their choices.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Tags:Bilal Winston Shabazz, California, Crime, Democrats, Denton, Dominic Vaca, Evan Leona, Gina Miller, Lewisville, police, Proposition 47 (California), Proposition 57 (California), Santa Monica, Social Justice Warriors, Texas
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 13 Comments »
Friday, May 10th, 2024
Details on the people and organizations dedicated to burning America down, more Biden corruption, more of his censorship regime, a few Russo-Ukrainian War updates, and a pedophile gets ventilated. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Park MacDougald at Tablet has a really in-depth look at the radical network setting America on fire.
Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.
But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.
The first hint that the protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17. The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago. Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc” tactics, covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity, linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting “de-arrests”—i.e., the coordinated swarming of police officers—to rescue apprehended comrades. At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by antifa.
These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall. Recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.
“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”
The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag. On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.
Snip.
The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.
JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.
SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.
Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.
Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.
WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting.
More info on the people backing the Stop Cop City protestors:
Where did the money come from? From donations solicited through left-wing fundraising and organizing networks. One of those networks was the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), an umbrella group for more than 80 “community organizations,” including the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, which organized an illegal anti-Israel protest in the Capitol Rotunda in December at which more than 50 activists were arrested. CJA’s website promotes a grab bag of far-left causes, and includes a “Free Palestine” page proclaiming that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.” To this day—eight months after the Georgia RICO indictment alleged that the Forest Justice Defense Fund was a fraudulent charity paying for ammunition purchases in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy—CJA maintains a Stop Cop City page urging readers to donate to the Forest Justice Defense Fund and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. CJA also endorsed a “statement of solidarity” with Stop Cop City, which claimed, by the inexorable logic of intersectionality, the fight against “gentrification and police violence” in Atlanta as part of the fight against climate change.
CJA is a subsidiary of the Movement Strategy Center, a California-based 501(c)(3) that has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and various branches of the Open Society network. But it has another financial supporter, one that may come as a surprise: You, the American taxpayer. In November, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was entrusting $50 million in federal grant money under the Inflation Reduction Act to the CJA, to be distributed in sub-grants to fund “environmental justice” projects by “community-based nonprofit organizations.”
Read the whole thing.
More on the same subject: “Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.” Surprising to people who haven’t been paying attention, maybe.
The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.
Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change.
Soros declined to comment, but a spokesperson with the Open Society Foundations, of which Soros is the founder and chairman, said in a statement that it “has funded a broad spectrum of US groups that have advocated for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis and for peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has previously funded the Tides Foundation and other groups, said it no longer has active grants to Tides. It also does not support Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow.
Covers some of the same ground as the Tablet piece, but still worth reading the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
MIT bans diversity statements. Good. Such racist dross only hinders real engineering.
Something resembling justice? “Judge Indefinitely Postpones Trump’s Classified Documents Trial.”
Former president Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Florida for allegedly mishandling classified documents is being postponed indefinitely.
Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon ordered a new pretrial schedule for motions and discovery Tuesday afternoon after the classified documents case was originally scheduled to go to trial later this month.
“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming — would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” Cannon said in her order.
The trial will likely be pushed until after the 2024 presidential election this November.
“The Only Problem Joe Biden Has Is That People Think He’s a Bad President.”
It’s hard to exaggerate how abysmal Biden’s polling has been lately.
No incumbent president should ever want to be near 43 percent in a head-to-head ballot test. Yet here is Joe Biden at 43 percent in the latest CNN poll, 43 percent in the latest Morning Consult poll, 43 percent in the latest Economist/YouGov poll, and 43 percent in the latest Harvard/Harris poll. (NB: Biden ticked up to 48 when Harvard/Harris pushed respondents to choose between Trump and Biden, and the Economist/YouGov poll had RFK Jr. in the mix.)
Detect a trend? (There are other polls that have Biden a little higher.)
It’s no mystery why Biden’s polling is at crisis levels.
An incumbent president’s level of support in a reelection bid is typically tethered closely to his job approval. It’s hard to get much more than a couple of points above it. Biden’s job approval is at 40 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average and at 39.3 in the 538 polling average.
How Hamas Bought Joe Biden.
Desperate for cash, James Biden traveled to Qatar with the aim of personally presenting to Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi who was later arrested and charged with bribery and laundering over $5 billion and sentenced to 20 years in prison. While little is known about the details behind the internal power struggle in the corrupt terror state, Al Emadi had been accused of “channeling Qatari support to various Islamist groups over the years” as well as subverting American and European institutions with sizable infusions of Qatari money.
As the American end of the deal fell apart in recriminations and lawsuits, one of the litigants received “blood-stained currency” and a “torture ticket” after suing James Biden and his partners. The blood money came from a Middle Eastern country known to be associated with terrorists. But the FBI refused to name the country and insisted the media also hide its identity.
In one of the world’s least anticipated sequel, a Chinese lab has spliced snippets of Ebola to create a deadly new virus.
More details on the Biden Administration’s censorship regime.
Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an 800-page report that reads like Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
Take a look:
- In March 2021, an Amazon employee emailed others within the company about the reason for the Amazon bookstore’s new content moderation policy change: “[T]he impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to.”
- In March 2021, just one day prior to a scheduled call with the White House, an Amazon employee explained how changes to Amazon’s bookstore policies were being applied “due to criticism from the Biden people.”
- In July 2021, when Facebook executive Nick Clegg asked a Facebook employee why the company censored the man-made theory of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the employee responded: “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. . . . We shouldn’t have done it.”
There’s chutzpah, and then there’s chutzpah: “Denver Illegals Make Demands, Include ‘Culturally Appropriate’ Food, Lawyers, Unlimited Showers And Warnings Before Evictions.”
It was fun seeing Ukraine’s Bradley’s take out Russian tanks with their Bushmaster, but they just took out a T-80 from a mile away with their TOW missile, which is the recommended method of a Bradley killing a Russian tank.
Ukrainian drone hits Bashkiria Oil Refinery some 1,500km from Ukraine’s border.
In addition to using high tech weapons against Russia, Ukraine is also using caltrops to shred their tires, a weapon first deployed by the Roman empire.
“Pedophile Surprised By Seattle Police Takes The Hallway Temperature Challenge.” Purp pulls a gun and gets multiple mags dumped into him. (Hat tip: Active response via KR Training.)
I have heard the Social Justice Warrior suing, each to each. I do not think that they will sue for me… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The most gun-friendly states of 2024. Texas ranks 8th.
So the City of Pasadena, Texas was hassling Azael Sepulveda’s Oz Mechanics car repair shop over parking for no apparent reason, came to an agreement to settle his lawsuit, and now says, get this, they don’t have to follow the agreement because they claim the city enjoys “immunity” from lawsuits. “The property he purchased had housed another auto mechanic shop for more than 30 years and included five parking spaces, but under revised ordinances, the city demanded that Sepulveda provide 28 parking spots.” Somebody in the Pasadena city government deserves a dick punching…
Brandon Herrera finally produces an AK-50 that doesn’t jam or spontaneously disassemble.
“The Jerry Seinfeld Pop-Tart Movie Is The Least Funny And, Quite Possibly, Worst Movie Ever Made.” I rather doubt the latter, but the trailer I saw of it did look pretty dire.
“Hamas Celebrates Proposed Ceasefire With Rocket Barrage.”
“Uighur Slaves Struggling To Keep Up With Demand For Palestinian Headscarves.”
Save the puppies!
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
Tags:.50 BMG, 2024 Presidential Race, Aileen Cannon, AJP Educational Fund, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Brandon Herrera, censorship, China, Colorado, Communism, corruption, Crime, Denver, dogs, Ebola, Gaza, George Soros, Guns, Hamas, Hatem Bazian, Holly Hansen, Holy Land Foundation (HLF), IfNotNow, International ANSWER, Israel-Hamas War, Jerry Seinfeld, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Jihad, Jim Jordan, Joe Biden, Kaphan Foundation, LinkSwarm, Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, Military, Movement Strategy Center, Musa Abu Marzook, Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Neville Roy Singham, pedophilia, polls, Qatar, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Sheldon Kaphan, Stephen Green, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), T-80, Texas, TOW missile, Ukraine, WESPAC Foundation, Within Our Lifetime (WOL)
Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »
Thursday, May 9th, 2024
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took time out from his busy schedule of suing the Biden Administration to sue an NGO aiding the Biden Administration’s illegal alien invasion.
The legal battle between Attorney General Ken Paxton and the non-governmental organization (NGO) Annunciation House, a nonprofit Catholic charity, has a new development after Paxton stated he has reviewed documents that show the group’s “operations are designed to facilitate illegal border crossings and to conceal illegally present aliens from law enforcement.”
Paxton has filed a temporary injunction in an effort “to halt its systemic criminal conduct in Texas.”
“Any NGO facilitating the unlawful entry of illegal aliens into Texas is undermining the rule of law and potentially jeopardizing the safety and wellbeing of our citizens,” said Paxton in a press release. “All NGOs who are complicit in Joe Biden’s illegal immigration catastrophe and think they are above the law should consider themselves on notice.”
Included in the 585-page legal filing is recorded testimony from an employee with Annunciation House.
According to the filing, Annunciation House’s executive director “regularly admits aliens that it knows came into the country illegally; and chooses not to require any form of identification from its guests.”
Additionally, the director “admitted that Annunciation House refuses essentially any and all law enforcement requests to enter the premises in the absence of a warrant.”
In March, an El Paso judge blocked a previous lawsuit Paxton had filed against Annunciation House. The judge was critical of Paxton’s motivations, stating, “There is a real and credible concern that the attempt to prevent Annunciation House from conducting business in Texas was predetermined.”
“Both the Attorney General and Annunciation House are now obliged to litigate this matter within the guidelines set forth by the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, created to ensure fair play between litigants,” the judge wrote.
Paxton filed the initial lawsuit after Annunciation House did not produce documents and records sought by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG). The nonprofit said it was only given “one day to turn over a broad swath of records to the Attorney General without an explanation.”
Founded in 1978, Annunciation House is filed as a 501(c)3 organization, which allows it to be recognized as a nonprofit charitable, religious, or educational organization that receives tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service.
The organization says it has “hosted over 500,000 migrants, refugees, and immigrants from over 40 countries.”
The illegal alien invasion of America is being guided and funded by radical leftwing entities (NGOs and others) in cooperation with the Biden Administration. Ken Paxton and Texas have proven that the states don’t have to take this conspiracy to break the law lying down.
Tags:Annunciation House, Border Controls, Democrats, Illegal Aliens, Ken Paxton, NGO, Texas
Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 10 Comments »
Sunday, May 5th, 2024
Austin’s liberal establishment has been trying to trick taxpayers into pouring billions into their light rail boondoggle for decades, finally winning an apparent victory when voters approved a scheme in 2020. But it turns out that the terms of the ballot language may have doomed the project.
Austin’s controversial light rail program, approved by voters in 2020, could be null and void due to an allegedly unconstitutional financing proposal.
According to press reports, during a court hearing, proponents of the transit scheme found themselves unable to defend the project’s ability to borrow money. Absent this authority, it is unlikely to continue.
At issue is the convoluted structure of the measure presented to voters in 2020. Designed to evade state limits on debt and borrowing (which seemed like a money laundering arrangement), the measure created a so-called “governmental corporation” called the Austin Transit Partnership. According to the 2020 proposal, the Austin Transit Partnership was supposed to be funded by a one-time increase to the city’s maintenance and operations property tax.
However, proponents of the project lowballed the cost estimate.
Austin’s liberal establishment, lowball cost to get something passed?
Combined with Biden’s inflation, this has led to a situation where the Austin Transit Partnership now needs to borrow substantial sums.
Unfortunately for proponents, state law prohibits using maintenance and operations property tax dollars to pay debt for so-called ‘governmental corporations.’ While a second component of the property tax—interest and sinking—could be used to pay debt, that’s not what was approved in 2020.
It was obvious to any non-Democrat that the Project Connect light rail project was a boondoggle from the git-go, just as the previous light rail effort was a failure. The fact that more than three years on, Project Connect still doesn’t have a definite plan or path is a handy indication of its dysfunction. Hopefully Texas courts will put it out of Austin taxpayer’s misery.
But I’m sure lots of consultants got paid quite handsomely…
Tags:Adam Cahn, Austin, Democrats, light rail, Texas Scorecard, waste
Posted in Austin, Democrats, Waste and Fraud | 14 Comments »
Friday, May 3rd, 2024
More corruption from the Biden family (plus a Texas Democratic congressman), more bad news from the Biden Recession, more pedophile sex offenders, more college madness, and virtue signaling, Third Reich style. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
And remember: If you’re in a large Texas county, there’s a tax appraisal district election tomorrow, so be sure to get out and vote if you haven’t already voted early.
Another week, another corrupt Biden family scheme exposed. “Joe Biden’s Brother Embroiled In High-Ranking Qatari Scheme To ‘Provide Wealth Of Introductions’ Through ‘My Family.'”
Qatar has had a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. While we knew about the EU’s ‘Qatargate,’ investments with the Kushner family, and of course Sen. Bob Menendez advancing Qatar’s interests, Politico reports that the Biden family’s ties to Qatar “would constitute some of the closest known financial links between a relative of President Joe Biden and a foreign government,” if courtroom testimony about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts is substantiated.
In June 2017, Qatar’s neighbors – led by Saudi Arabia, banded together and cut diplomatic ties with the country, citing its alleged support for terrorism. As a result, the country was thrown into a sustained crisis.
To dig themselves out, Qatari rulers began showering well-connected Westerners with gifts and financial benefits, according to Politico, “sometimes in the form of investment funding.”
Around this time, Jim Biden was trying to raise $30 million for embattled hospital chain Americore – teaming up with Florida businessman Amer Rustom, CEO of the Platinum Group, who boasted of his ties to officials in the Middle East, as well as fund manager Michael Lewitt. Together, the three sought investment funding from various Middle Eastern sources for Americore and other ventures – “which came to focus largely on Qatar,” according to a former Americore executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.
According to public records obtained by the outlet, Jim Biden leveraged ties to his older brother and “sought workarounds to restrictions on international money movements,” including one discussion about trying to move money across a Middle Eastern border in the form of gold bars that may or may not have happened.
Let ye who has never smuggled gold across the border of an Arab country cast the first stone.
“My family could provide a wealth of introductions and business opportunities at the highest levels that I believe would be worthy of the interest of His Excellency,” Jim Biden and Rustom wrote in a draft letter to an official at the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority. “On behalf of the Biden family, I welcome your interest here,” the draft continues.
Corrupt to the core.
More evidence from the Biden recession: “Job Openings Tumble, Quits Plunge, Hires Unexpectedly Crater To January 2018 Levels.”
After several months of relatively boring JOLTS prints, this morning Janet Yellen’s favorite labor market indicator once again got exciting, and not in a good way.
Starting at the top, according to the March JOLTS reported, job openings unexpectedly tumbled by 325K – the biggest drop since October 2023 – from an upward revised 8.813 million in February to just 8.488 million, far below the 8.690 million expected – and the lowest number since February 2021 when it last printed below 8 million.
“Unexpectedly.”
“Chinese Nationals Charged With Conspiracy to Export US Technology.”
The Department of Justice has arrested two Chinese nationals who allegedly plotted to export U.S. technology to advance the People’s Republic of China’s military operations.
Han Li, 44, and Lin Chen, 64, have been charged with several counts of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), in addition to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), for attempting to export a machine used to process silicon microchips….
“Specifically, the defendants sought to illegally obtain for CGTC a DTX-150 Automatic Diamond Scriber Breaker machine from Dynatex International, a Santa Rosa, California company.”
That’s a backend semiconductor machine for slicing finished individual computer chips off a processed wafer.
“Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar Indicted on Bribery, Money-Laundering Charges.”
Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife were indicted by a federal grand jury on bribery, foreign influence, and money-laundering charges, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Friday afternoon.
The Texas Democrat and his wife are accused of accepting roughly $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities starting in December 2014 and continuing through 2021. The foreign entities are a Mexican bank and an oil and gas company linked to the government of Azerbaijan, according to the Justice Department.
In exchange for the bribes, Cuellar agreed to use his office for promoting favorable U.S. foreign policy towards Azarbaijan and pushing legislative and executive branch officials to adopt policy measures beneficial to the bank, authorities said.
In 2022, Cuellar’s home and office were searched during a federal investigation into Azerbaijan and American businessmen linked to the Middle Eastern nation. Cuellar formerly co-chaired the congressional Azerbaijan caucus.
Cuellar represents TX28. Republicans Jay Furman and Lazaro Garza Jr. are competing in the runoff to challenge Cuellar this fall.
Columbia shows some semblance of a spine, threatens to expel students occupying administrative buildings.
Related: “Columbia Student Who Said ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’ Reportedly ‘Thrown Out Of School.'”
Also: “Police Begin Detaining UCLA Protesters Occupying Campus.”
“Tucked away in the $95 billion military aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan is a $3.5 billion slush fund to open new processing centers for Muslim migrants, in what Sen. Eric Schmitt described as a bid to “supercharge mass migration from the Middle East.” Republicans in congress asleep at the switch again.
Ukraine hits two more oil refineries.
It’s not just China that the CCP’s crazy policies are ruining. There are over 500 abandoned, unfinished buildings in Cambodia. A crackdown on online gambling also hastened the demise of many real estate ventures there.
Tranny sex offender tries to snatch a child from an elementary playground in broad daylight. “Trans-identifying male Solomon Galligan [simply] walked on campus last Friday afternoon during recess at Black Forest Hills Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado, and straight-up tried to steal a kid.”
The suspect, who is identified as male in the arrest affidavit, shared news of his transition on Facebook back in 2011.
‘So im starting my hormone shots and i relly cant wait im on my hormone pills ive been on them for almost 4 months i wake up all depressed and crying but in the end its gonna be totally worth it you know what io mean im really excited my measurements are already changing and im super thrilled,’ he wrote.
Galligan was put on the sex offender registry and was convicted that same year of non-consent sexual contact, according to his latest arrest affidavit.
Another week, three more Texas teachers arrested for having sex with students.
Ernest Herrera, 56, was arrested Monday after he admitted to sexual contact with a 13-year-old student, claiming they had “developed a relationship.”
Herrera taught social studies at Southside Independent School District’s Losoya Middle School in San Antonio.
He was charged with improper relationship between educator and student, a second-degree felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison.
Herrera was booked into Bexar County Jail and held on a $75,000 bond.
The district superintendent stated that Herrera was fired “effective immediately.”
Andrew McCown, 27, was arrested Wednesday and charged with having an “improper relationship” with a 17-year-old female student.
McCown is a math teacher and football coach at Roosevelt High School in San Antonio’s North East ISD.
He was reportedly placed on leave in March and will be terminated.
McCown, who is related to former NFL quarterbacks Josh and Luke McCown, was arrested in 2022 for drunk driving while he was a teacher and coach at Robinson ISD.
According to a statement to MySA, the district “conducted a background check on April 25, 2023, and at that time, it was clear and McCown was hired.”
Another football coach, Perryton ISD athletic director Cole Underwood, was arrested Wednesday and charged with sexual assault of a child, a second-degree felony.
The alleged victim is a Perryton High School student, reportedly a 14-year-old girl.
Underwood was released from Ochiltree County Jail on Thursday after posting a $125,000 bond.
According to a statement from Perryton ISD, Underwood resigned.
The new York case against Trump isn’t going so well for the prosecution. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
In a poll of Texas voters, Trump leads Biden by 9%, and Ted Cruz leads Democratic challenger Colin Allred by 13%. Usual “polls this far out are meaningless” caveats apply.
Four reform candidates elected to NRA board. Now they just need to replace all of Wayne’s cronies on the board for me to rejoin.
Democrats passing a “living wage” law for Seattle ensures that they can’t make a living wage.
Second Boeing whistleblower dies suddenly.
Chinese officials are asking villagers to take out fake business licenses. Is that for their own business scams, or to artificially pump up Chinese economic statistics?
Profiles in Cowardice: “PEN America, a leading nonprofit dedicated to free expression, canceled its 2024 World Voices Festival late last week under pressure from pro-Palestinian activists. Many writers affiliated with the organization either threatened to boycott the event unless PEN acceded to certain demands, including labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘genocide,’ or distanced themselves from the free-speech group in response to online pressure from pro-Palestinian activists.”
Monroe County, New York, Democratic District Attorney Sandra Doorley wants you to know that she’s simply better than you and doesn’t have to pull over for police.
Virtue signaling: Third Reich Edition.
Brandon Herrera has both a meme review and an update on his runoff against Tony Gonzalez for TX23.
OnlyFans camgirl paid to propagandize for the Biden Administration. It’s a shame she wasn’t paid for sex, since then American taxpayers could see the Biden administration paying money to screw someone other than themselves…
Sale of books from the library of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg results in $187,740 loss.
“Missionaries Travel From Africa To Bring The Gospel To United Methodist Church.”
History Repeats Itself As Communists Run Out Of Food.
Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.
Tags:2024 Election, 2024 Presidential Race, 2024 Texas Senate Race, auctions, Azerbaijan, Babylon Bee, Biden Recession, Brandon Herrera, Cambodia, China, Colin Allred, Columbia University, Communism, corruption, Gaza, Han Li, Henry Cuellar, Israel-Hamas War, Jay Furman, Jim Biden, Lazaro Garza Jr., Lin Chen, LinkSwarm, Mark Felton, National Socialism, PEN, polls, Qatar, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Doorley, sex offender, Supreme Court, technology, Ted Cruz, Texas, Texas 23rd Congressional District, Texas 28th Congressional District, Tony Gonzales, transexual, unemployment
Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas | 6 Comments »
Thursday, May 2nd, 2024
Another day, another Texas lawsuit against Biden Administration “legislation by regulatory fiat” overreach.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, alongside Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and Gun Owners of America Texas director Wes Virdell, held a press conference on Wednesday morning announcing the filing of two lawsuits against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regarding new rules about private firearm sales.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new rules adding definitions of certain terms under the Safer Communities Act that will expand the circumstances requiring individuals to obtain Federal Firearm Licenses (FFL) and perform background checks to sell guns. This is to close the so-called “gun show loophole,” which has been a priority for the Biden administration.
If they are talking about the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, there’s absolutely nothing in the text of the act about closing any “gun show loophole.”
Texas’ lawsuit was filed on the morning of May 1, 2024 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division. It was filed by Texas with the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Utah; Jeff Tormey; Gun Owners of America; Gun Owners Foundation; Tennessee Firearms Association; and the Virginia Citizens Defense League also listed as plaintiffs.
Kansas’ lawsuit was filed on the morning of May 1, 2024 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Delta Division. It was filed by Kansas alongside the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Montana, Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming, with Phillip Journey, Allen Black, Donald Maxey, and the Chisholm Trail Antique Gun Association also listed as plaintiffs.
Both lawsuits seek declaratory and injunctive relief.
“Today, Texas is leading a multi-state coalition that is suing to stop the final rule issued by the ATF that criminalizes private firearm sales. Biden’s latest effort to unilaterally curtail our constitutional rights is completely illegal,” said Paxton in his speech.
“Yet again, Joe Biden is weaponizing the federal bureaucracy to rip up the Constitution and destroy our citizens’ Second Amendment rights. This is a dramatic escalation of his tyrannical abuse of authority. With today’s lawsuit, it is my great honor to defend our Constitutionally-protected freedoms from the out-of-control federal government.”
Kobach also spoke at the announcement of the lawsuits.
“Biden’s latest attempt to strip away the Second Amendment rights of Americans through ATF regulations will make many law-abiding gun owners felons if they sell a firearm or two to family or friends. This rule is blatantly unconstitutional. We are suing to defend the Second Amendment rights of all Americans,” said Kobach.
“Until now, those who repetitively purchased and sold firearms as a regular course of business had to become a licensee… This rule would put innocent firearm sales between law-abiding friends and family members within reach of federal regulation,” the Kansas court filing reads. “Such innocent sales between friends and family would constitute a felony if the seller did not in fact obtain a federal firearms license and perform a background check.”
While not at the announcement, the attorneys general of Utah and Mississippi both offered statements in the lawsuit’s press release.
“Nearly 40 years ago, Congress condemned ATF for targeting innocent gun owners instead of focusing on felons, calling ATF’s actions ‘reprehensible.’ Congress even changed the law to limit ATF’s authority. But ATF is at it again, this time trying to require a citizen selling even a single firearm to obtain a license. Utah is proud to join the 26 states — in three separate lawsuits— protecting their citizens from this bureaucratic overreach.” said Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes.
“By seeking to treat every legal gunowner as a commercial gun dealer and every gun sale or trade into a commercial transaction, this rule unmasks the Biden Administration’s anti-gun agenda in ways many of its other actions have not. The Second Amendment could never have contemplated this kind of regulation and it will not withstand scrutiny in the courts. On behalf of Mississippi gunowners, we are proud to stand with the citizens who have come forward in this lawsuit,” said Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch.
Twenty-five states are suing the ATF across both lawsuits. Florida has also filed its own suit against the ATF for declaratory and injunctive relief about the same rule.
For those counting along on the home game, that’s more than half the states in the union suing the Biden Administration over their latest attempt at gun legislation by fiat.
This is not the first lawsuit that Paxton has filed against the ATF this year. In February, the State of Texas sued the ATF over the Biden administration’s recent decision to redefine firearms with pistol braces as short-barrelled rifles under the National Firearms Act (NFA).
Complete civilian disarmament has been a longterm goal of the Democratic Party, and to that end they would love to ensnare ordinary Americans in FFL laws and paperwork for private firearms transactions, despite such restrictions never being contemplated by the founding fathers. In the post-Bruen judicial landscape, expect the courts to be extremely skeptical of unconstitutional firearms regulation, especially those with no basis in the underlying statute language, and expect Paxton to notch another victory over the Biden Admistration in his belt.
Tags:Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, ATF, Democrats, Federal Firearm License (FFL), Florida, Georgia, Gun Owners of America, Guns, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Jeff Tormey, Kansas, Ken Paxton, Kentucky, Kris Kobach, Lynn Fitch, Merrick Garland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Regulation, Republicans, Sean Reyes, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wes Virdell, West Virginia, Wyoming
Posted in Democrats, Guns, ObamaCare, Regulation, Republicans, Texas | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, April 30th, 2024
Forcing transexism down America’s throat seems to have become a top Democratic Party priority. But now Texas has joined Florida in rejecting the Biden Administration’s unilateral rewrite of Title IX by executive fiat.
The Biden administration and the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) issued a new Title IX rule that includes changes to how federal civil rights law protects “discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.”
A key provision in the rule change now “Recognizes that preventing a person from participating in a recipient’s education program or activity consistent with their gender identity subjects that person to more than de minimis harm.”
The Human Rights Campaign said the new rule will “protect LGBTQ+ students” in addition to reversing “Trump-era changes to Title IX that limited federal funded educational institutions’ obligation to address sexual harassment and assault and clarifies protections for pregnant and parenting students.”
“For more than 50 years, Title IX has promised an equal opportunity to learn and thrive in our nation’s schools free from sex discrimination,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “These final regulations build on the legacy of Title IX by clarifying that all our nation’s students can access schools that are safe, welcoming, and respect their rights.”
Title IX is a federal program that instructs educational institutions that receive federal funds from the DOE to carry out their educational programs “in a nondiscriminatory manner free of discrimination based on sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity.” Included in the issue areas of Title IX are athletics, financial assistance programs, admissions, recruitment, and sex-based harassment investigations.
The actual text of Title IX as passed in 1972 said nothing about “sexual orientation or gender identity,” rather stating “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Not “orientation,” not “gender identity,” sex. As in the biological kind, where those with XX chromosomes are female and those with XY chromosomes are male.
Gov. Greg Abbott issued a letter Monday to President Biden, saying, “Texas will not adhere to the new rules.”
“I am instructing the Texas Education Agency to ignore your illegal dictate.”
Following the Title IX rule changes, Rep. Briscoe Cain (R-Deer Park) penned a letter to Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath.
“As Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, I am calling on you to promptly direct all superintendents in Texas to ignore the proposed changes to Title IX,” wrote Cain.
“Additionally, I am calling on all Texas superintendents to publicly commit to disregarding this directive from the Biden Administration.”
The Texas Freedom Caucus followed with its own letter to Morath expressing similar concerns, stating they “urge” him to “instruct all Texas superintendents to disregard these proposed alterations.”
Other state governors and education chiefs in Florida, Louisiana, Montana, and South Carolina have issued similar disregard directives.
Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis has been particularly vocal in his opposition.
Florida rejects Joe Biden’s attempts to rewrite Title IX. We will not comply. And we will fight back. We are not going to let Joe Biden try to inject men into women’s activities. We are not going to let Joe Biden undermine the rights of parents. And we are not going to let Joe Biden abuse his constitutional authority to try to impose these policies on us here in Florida…
We will not comply.
Back to Texas:
Attorney General Ken Paxton has also sued the Biden administration and the DOE over the Title IX rule change.
“Texas will not allow Joe Biden to rewrite Title IX at whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology,” wrote Paxton in a press release.
“This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality. Texas will always take the lead to oppose Biden’s extremist, destructive policies that put women at risk.”
The complaint argues the DOE “has attempted to effect radical social change in our Nation’s schools” and that the new Title IX rule “walks back many of the constitutional safeguards issued by the Trump Administration to ensure that students accused of harassment have access to a fair hearing.”
Snip.
“This rule violates existing federal law, ignores the Constitution, and denies women the protections that Title IX was intended to afford them,” AFL stated in a press release. “The Biden Administration has exceeded its authority and radically distorted the meaning intended by Congress when the law was made.
The radical transexism the Biden Administration is trying to shove down America’s throats may be popular with the hard left social justice warriors who now man the levers of the Democratic Party’s political machinery, but it’s deeply unpopular with ordinary Americans of both sexes and all races, creeds, and colors. It’s an alien, anti-reality ideology being imposed from without with no basis in any law passed by congress, and resistance to its irrational dictates is both widely popular and a constitutional necessity.
Tags:Briscoe Cain, Democrats, Department of Education, education, Florida, gay, Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Louisiana, Montana, Regulation, Republicans, Ron DeSantis, sex, Social Justice Warriors, South Carolina, Texas, Texas Freedom Caucus, Title IX, transexual
Posted in Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 3 Comments »
Friday, April 26th, 2024
The Biden Recession bites deeper, Soros’ hands are all over the pro-Hamas protests, California fast food wage hikes hurt workers (but help robotics companies), and some Harris County legal followups. Plus some Zack Snyder bashing. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
MSNBC accidentally has guest on that accidentally tells the truth about the Biden Recession.
For the first time in our history, a 30-year-old man or woman isn’t doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. That is the social compact breaking down.
People aged 30-34, 60% of them in 1990 had one child. Now it’s 27%. People are opting out of America, they’re not optimistic about it, they’re not having kids. Young people aren’t having sex. They’re not meeting, they’re not mating. The pool of emotionally and economically viable men shrinks every day. Which lessens household formation.
They (millennials and Gen Z) look up, they see wealth, exceptional wealth, across my generation and people in certain industries, and they are really struggling. Their purchasing power is really going down…
We get very concerned with housing and traffic once we own the housing. Housing permits are sequestered from young people, housing prices have gone from $290,000 to $420,000 in the last 4 years.
So a young person, a house, stocks that I don’t own, skyrocket in value, let’s have Covid relief and flush the markets and take assets way up because a million people dying would be bad, would be tragic if I got less wealthy, and we’re doing it on their credit card.
Whole paycheck: $7 for an apple. Thanks, Joe Biden!
“Bill Maher Calls Out Hollywood Pedophilia And The Gay Agenda In Schools.”
Bill Maher is, if anything, clever about his timing like most comedians. His rebellion against the woke mob has been carefully crafted in a way that has allowed him to avoid outright cancellation. It’s not as impressive a revolt as Gina Carano’s because the risk today is far less, but at least he’s willing to address the obvious hypocrisy within the social justice crowd and admit that maybe, just maybe, conservatives had it right all along.
His latest surprising monologue covers an issue everyone has known about for years but almost no one in the media has been willing to address seriously because it involves many of their friends in the entertainment industry. Hollywood was quick to jump on the feminist bandwagon at the helm of the “Me Too Movement”, but this only exposed a small part of Hollywood’s degeneracy. Actresses trading sex for favors from producers and executives is hardly that shocking a revelation. The thing they really don’t want to talk about is the industry’s penchant for pedophilia…
The money quote from that video that’s not in the ZeroHedge article: “The left will overlook child-fucking if a guy from the wrong party points it out.”
One of the deepest darkest secrets of film, television and music media is that the business has long been used as a vehicle for child abusers to target kids in an environment where parental supervision is limited (and lots of money can be gained). This reminds us of yet another environment where parental supervision is limited: Public schools. The political left has also targeted these institutions as ample ground for grooming. Why? As Bill Maher notes, the groomers are naturally gravitating to where the children are.
“Leave the kids alone” is a mantra that the woke movement simply refuses to understand or accept. The reason is relatively transparent – Leftists are less inclined to have children of their own, and so, in order to increase their numbers and power they are required to indoctrinate your kids instead. This is all done under the guise of “inclusion” and the “greater good” but the results of this kind of activism are becoming deeply disturbing. Even moderate liberals are noticing that woke behavior is destroying what remains of their image.
“Unsealed Court Docs Reveal Biden DOJ Colluded With National Archives To Target Trump, Jack Smith Tried To Conceal.”
Newly unsealed documents in Donald Trump’s classified documents case reveal that the Biden White House colluded with the National Archives (NARA) and the FBI to concoct a case against the former president.
What’s more, Special Counsel Jack Smith sought to conceal this – telling Judge Eileen Cannon in February that Trump’s counsel isn’t entitled to discovery on documents between the White House and NARA, that the court should toss requests for evidence of the alleged coordination, and that the court should deny Trump’s request for evidence related to secure facilities at his residences. Further, Trump’s request for unredacted discovery of materials should be denied.
Seems like a substantial due process rights violation, doesn’t it?
Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid package signed into law.
Immediately after Biden’s signature, the Pentagon announced $1 billion of military assistance to Ukraine from the Presidential Drawdown Authority.
Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, ammunition for HIMARS rocket systems, 155mm artillery rounds, 60mm mortary rounds, and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, are among the U.S. capabilities being provided to Ukraine, the Pentagon said.
The foreign-aid legislation will send roughly $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, with $23 billion being used to replenish U.S. weapons stockpiles and $11 billion to fund U.S. military operations in the surrounding area.
Israel will receive $26 billion including $4.4 billion to fund its Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defenses. Over $9 billion of the Israel aid will go towards humanitarian relief.
While I support military aid to Ukraine, Republicans should not have dropped their demand that border security be addressed first, nor should we be raising the national debt to do it. And if we’re going to be paying for David’s Sling and Iron Dome, then we better damn well be getting the tech back to use in our own weapons.
“Half of Americans — including 42% of Democrats — say they’d support mass deportations” of illegal aliens. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
I know you’re going to be shocked, shocked to find out that George Soros is funding the anti-Israel student protests.
At three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are “fellows” of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).
USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based “fellows” in return for spending eight hours a week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.”
They are trained to “rise up, to revolution.”
The radical group received at least $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019.
More on that theme:
(Hat tip: Commenter MadTownGuy.)
Also on that subject:
A lot of Jewish friends, especially those who are finally awake after 10/7, say things like “how is this America?” or “It’s so scary that this Jew-hatred is happening everywhere.” But it’s very much NOT “America” and it absolutely is NOT happening “everywhere.” In south Florida, Jews wear the dinner plate Magen Davids and no one says one word. In rural Michigan, churches put “pray for Israel” on the signs outside. I’m not naive, obviously Jew-haters can and do live anywhere. But they’re only thriving, open, proud, in blue areas and I’m not going to let people ignore that. A lot of liberal Jews are trying to parse things right now. They imagine they are still of the left but just on this one tiny little thing, their right to exist, they disagree. No, my friends. It’s a house of cards and you’re pulling the one from the very bottom. The whole left ideology is corrupt and you’re going to have to face it. You can’t spread the blame around. The hatred, the rage, the violence, the dehumanization is all coming from one side: yours.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Houston Teacher Arrested for Improper Relationship with a Student. Cy-Fair teacher Kayden Burbank allegedly had a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student.”
When Democrat judges go rogue. “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
California’s fast food wage hikes have had exactly the effects every non-Democrat predicted.
The state of California seems hellbent on making life a living hell for middle-class residents, as evidenced not just by their soft-on-crime policies but by the minimum wage increase that went into effect at the beginning of April.
Though the $20/hour wage was ostensibly designed to help minimum wage workers, it has had the opposite effect, with fast food restaurants in the Democrat-run state slashing jobs and hours, implementing hiring freezes, and/or bringing in self-serve kiosks to ease the financial burden.
Something else they’ve had to do is raise prices on the food they serve, with prices going up as much as eight percent at some locations.
Another result: here come the robots.
While the fast-food industry was founded on utilizing technology to increase efficiency, the robot revolution seems to be speeding up.
Last year, Sweetgreen, a Los Angeles-based fast-casual salad chain, debuted its fully automated Infinite Kitchen at a restaurant in Illinois. Like Mezli, the Infinite Kitchen moves bowls down a conveyor belt where its system automatically portions out ingredients. The technology is “expected to cut labor costs in half while boosting throughput,” according to a trade magazine.
Similarly, the founder of Chipotle recently launched a new fast-casual chain, Kernel, that utilizes robots to heat and assemble vegetarian meals.
In December, a CaliExpress burger joint opened in Pasadena, complete with robot arms that cook burgers and fries, and AI-powered kiosks that allow customers to order and pay (and tip, of course), with their faces. Leaders at Miso Robotics, one of the companies behind CaliExpress, have said it is the first restaurant where all the ordering and cooking is fully automated.
The robots “don’t call in sick, they don’t get drunk the night before work and come in with a hangover,” one CaliExpress leader told a local TV station. “They’re a little bit more reliable.”
Other restaurants, including Cajun Crack’n in Concord, Calif., are experimenting with robots that can deliver food, bus tables, and may soon be taking orders. Robot bartenders and baristas are also in the works.
While restaurant sales are forecasted to increase this year and the restaurant workforce is expected to grow, owners are continuing to struggle with slim margins, in part due to food inflation and rising labor costs. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2024 State of the Restaurant Industry report, 98 percent of restaurant operators are struggling with higher labor costs, and 38 percent say they weren’t profitable last year.
Biden Recession + union-backed wage hikes = boom times for robots
Ukraine drone strike hits a Russian oil refinery in Yartsevo…
…and an oil facility at Kardymovsky, Smolensk.
El Paso Democratic judge: Eh, there’s not enough evidence to put these illegal aliens on trial for assaulting state troopers. Just let them go. Grand jury: Nope! We’re indicting 141 of them for that riot.
America doesn’t have enough dry docks to fight a protracted naval war. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
ERCOT estimates that an additional 40,000 megawatts of generating capacity by 2030.
Followup: Harris County’s scheme to handout guaranteed income paychecks has been blocked by the Texas Supreme Court. (Previously.)
Another Harris County follow-up: DA Kim Ogg announced that the legal cases against Lina Hidalgo staffers will now be prosecuted by the Texas Attorney General’s office because Democratic DA nominee Sean Teare, who defeated Ogg in the March primary, “works for the Cogdell Law Firm, which is defending Hidalgo’s former Chief of Staff Alex Triantaphyllis in the case, and that he had sought and received Hidalgo’s endorsement.”
The Biden Administration wants to waste taxpayer money pushing radical transgenderism in other countries. “The Biden administration wants to train at least 200 activists to advocate for transgender rights in India as part of a program ostensibly designed to advance America’s ‘national interests,’ according to a federal grant posting.”
More Biden Administration madness: “A popular US convenience store chain has been hit with a civil rights lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against minority job seekers because it requires applicants to have no criminal record.”
“Largest Christian University in America Gets Fined $37 Million. Coincidence or Targeted Attack?”
A dust storm of political madness is brewing in Phoenix as Grand Canyon University faces the continued threats of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
Christians have watched as the Biden administration attacks biblical views left and right, with a particularly vehement disregard for the sanctity of life and marriage. As such, it can’t be too surprising that Cardona, a part of this leftist administration, has vowed to shut down America’s largest Christian university.
In late October, Grand Canyon University was hit with “a $37.7 million fine brought by the federal government over allegations that it lied to students about the cost of its programs,” The Associated Press reported—an accusation that GCU President Brian Mueller described as “ridiculous.”
Around the same time, Liberty University, America’s second-largest Christian university, also was fined $37 million “over alleged underreporting of crimes.”
Grand Canyon University appealed its fine in November even though a hearing is not expected until January 2025. But the question Mueller has is one of integrity. Is this genuine consideration for the well-being of students, or is this a targeted attack against religious institutions?
“It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the two largest Christian universities in the country, this one and Liberty University, are both being fined almost the identical amount at almost the identical time?” GCU’s president speculated in a speech. “Now is there a cause and effect there? I don’t know. But it’s a fact.”
Trader Joe’s organic basil has an extra organic ingredient: salmonella.
Critical Drinker wasn’t impressed with Rebel Moon 2: “Comically inept…boring and tedious..derivative cliched and unoriginal. It takes a special kind of cinematic anti-genius to bring all these things together into one movie. You have to actively work to make a film this bad”
Penguinz0 says it’s actually worse than the first one. “It’s a disaster on the most basic levels of movie making.”
In fact, he watched Rebel Moon Part 2 twice just to count the slo-mo scenes. “It came out to 1,256 seconds, or 20 minutes and 56 seconds worth of slow motion.” But he might have missed some while dozing. “This shit hits harder than NyQuil.”
The Biden Recession hits boardgaming. This is not a field I have much experience with, as the last boardgame I bought was the Kickstarter for the Designer Edition of Ogre. But I have noticed a similar decline in what science fiction book collectors are spending. Still, the idea that boardgames manufacturers are close to $1 billion in debt is pretty staggering.
The Onion sold. “The Onion has a new owner: a company called ‘Global Tetrahedron,’ which is a real thing based on a fake entity invented by the satire site more than two decades ago….The Onion’s new owner is Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, a customer-service software company, he announced Thursday on X (formerly Twitter).” When last we read about Jeff Lawson, he was dumping money on the Dem side in the 2020 Texas Senate race, to no effect. Now people are wondering whether they’ll shut down zombie SJW gaming site Kotaku…
Texas become first state to unban import of Japanese Kei trucks. (Hat tip:Ace of Spades HQ.)
Long lost first model of original USS Enterprise recovered.
“Man Sets Himself On Fire To Show How His Side Is The Sane And Rational One.”
“Columbia Protestors Clarify They Only Want Death To America After America Is Done Paying Their Student Loans.”
Live in Florida? Ron DeSantis would like you to adopt this cute border dog:
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Tags:Abena Darkeh, Biden Recession, Bill Maher, boardgames, Border Controls, California, Cogdell Law Firm, Crime, Critical Drinker, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, Democrats, Disney, Donald Trump, drones, El Paso, Energy Policy, ERCOT, Florida, food, George Soros, Grand Canyon University, Guns, Harris County, HIMARS, Holly Hansen, Hollywood, India, inflation, Israel, Jack Smith, Japan, Jeff Lawson, Jews, Jihad, Kardymovsky, Kayden Burbank, Ken Paxton, Kim Ogg, Liberty University, Lina Hidalgo, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Miguel Cardona, minimum wage, pedophilia, Penguinz0, Pickup Truck, robots, Ron DeSantis, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, salmonella, Sean Teare, sex offender, Smolensk, Social Justice Warriors, Taiwan, Texas, The Onion, Trader Joe's, transexual, Ukraine, unions, Universal Basic Income, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, waste, Welfare State, Yartsevo, Zack Snyder
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, ObamaCare, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, video, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, April 24th, 2024
In many states, Democrats can’t win unless they cheat, and that’s why they want easily-abused universal mail-in voting to become to the norm. To that end, Democrats sued Texas (yet again) over mail-in voting limitations, and once again their lawsuit against election security laws was denied by the Supreme Court.
An attempt to revive the Texas Democratic Party’s 2020 challenge to the state’s mail-in ballot restrictions was denied this week by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court denied a petition for a writ of certiorari from Joseph Cascino, Marie Sansing, and Brenda Li Garcia — residents of Texas who do not qualify for mail-in voting under current law. They filed their petition back in December.
In Texas anyone may vote early in person, but only those aged 65 or older, disabled, or out of their county of residence during the election may vote by mail.
The trio of petitioners argued that their right to vote is impinged by those limitations and that the 26th Amendment bars any such division of classification between voters.
The case was originally made in 2020 by the Texas Democratic Party, which secured a temporary victory in the trial court. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and the Supreme Court denied an appeal of that reversal.
Represented by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG), Secretary of State Jane Nelson countered, “Some States endorse no-excuse absentee voting; others require in-person voting with narrow exceptions.”
“This diversity of approaches reflects a healthy federalism and accords with the uncontroversial notion that ‘government must play an active role in structuring elections.’”
The court did not issue any opinion or reasoning with the dismissal.
“Many states irresponsibly and unconstitutionally changed their voting policies prior to the 2020 election,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said of the dismissal. “Fortunately, we did things differently in Texas: we fought hard to uphold Texas law and defend the integrity of elections in this State.”
Texas did change its voting policy during the 2020 election — Gov. Greg Abbott used disaster powers to unilaterally extend early voting by a week — and while no ruling declared it unconstitutional, the extension was done without input from the Legislature, which was the very contention of Paxton’s 2020 election suit against other states who similarly changed voting laws through executive order.
Two state senators, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, then-Texas GOP Chair Allen West, and a bevy of then-current or former state representatives sued over the action. The Texas Supreme Court denied their motion for an emergency stay as Paxton was named as one of the attorneys for Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughs.
Another argument that was denied back in 2020 was that the threat of contracting COVID-19 constituted a disability under the state Election Code; it was also ultimately rejected.
The practical onus for the original lawsuit was Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins’ unsolicited mailing of absentee ballot applications to all voters. That action was halted by the Texas Supreme Court in October 2020.
In Harris County, I’m sure that Lina Hidalgo is very disappointed that vote tabulation sites won’t be able to pull out boxes of miraculously overlooked mail-in ballots to alter tallies at 3 AM on November 5th…
Tags:Democrats, Elections, Jane Nelson, Ken Paxton, Texas, Texas Democratic Party, voting fraud
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »