Archive for the ‘Border Control’ Category
Saturday, December 14th, 2019
There are lots of conclusions to be drawn and lessons learned from Boris Johnson’s Conservative landslide victory over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, especially for the American left, who I suspect will learn none of it.
First, let’s establish how many American liberals lionized Corbyn as the future of politics:
“Only Socialism Can Defeat Trumpism,” by Nicole Aschoff and Bhaskar Sunkara, The Nation, November 2016
“The past year has shown that millions of ordinary people are ready for an alternative, one pointed to by the success of Sanders and the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain …
As with the collapsing social democrats in Europe, the Democratic Party’s best bet is to move left and embrace a platform that speaks to the real needs, fears, and aspirations of working people …
For the Democrats, no less than their peers in Europe, where the neoliberalization of social democracy has opened up space for a populist right, the choice on offer might well be either socialism or irrelevance.”
“Jeremy Corbyn’s Success is a Model for American Progressives,” by James Downie, Washington Post, June 2017
“Corbyn’s success provides a model for U.S. progressives in 2018, 2020 and beyond: If you need turnout to win — as liberals in the United States do — you need a bold, uncompromising platform with real solutions …
Why was turnout so high? Because Corbyn was able to generate excitement among Labour voters, especially the young. That’s in no small part because of this year’s Labour manifesto (the British equivalent of a party platform). Unlike other recent versions, mostly incrementalist documents that tweaked what came before, the 2017 edition is the boldest in decades: more money for the National Health Services and other major initiatives, a “jobs first” Brexit and free university tuition, financed by taxing corporations and the wealthiest. The manifesto and the campaign were summed up by their elegantly simple slogan: “For the many, not the few.”
There’s lots more where that come from, but it’s striking that even his boosters boil down Corbyn’s appeal to the left as socialism, free stuff and hoary cliches. (Hat tip: wretchardthecat.) Like their embarrassing support for Hugo Chavez, I suspect their support for Corbyn will be memory-holed as quickly as possible.
Andrew Sullivan offers up (mostly) keen insight into Johnson’s win and Corbyn’s fall:
The sea of Tory blue seats that now envelop Labour’s heartlands on the electoral map of Britain is one kind of future for Western democracies. Unleashed by a revolt by ordinary people to take back control of their own laws and rebuild national sovereignty, and by their insistence that their decision to leave the E.U. be respected and implemented, it may have changed Britain’s politics in a structural way. Three political parties were decimated yesterday: the Labour Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the Brexit Party. Each party’s defeat tells you something more about a potential realignment of new politics.
The revulsion at Jeremy Corbyn was a big factor — especially, it seems, in the safest Labour seats in the north. The British people, after giving him the benefit of the doubt in 2017, turned on him. On his expansive, super-ambitious plan for massive investment in infrastructure and public services, they just didn’t believe the math. On his rancid long history of sympathizing with terrorists, they feared what he might do to the security services. On his anti-Semitism, they righteously humiliated the old codger. It tells you a lot about him that he still hasn’t resigned after the Labour Party’s worst showing since 1935. He has only promised not to lead the party into the election. He will stay on to control the succession battle and try to keep his faction in power. His goal was always controlling the Labour Party, not winning elections. He has lost two elections, but his grip on the party is going to be very hard to break. It took Labour 18 years to return to power after its drubbing at the 1983 election. It may take as long to recover from an even worse shellacking.
The Liberal Democrats collapsed for two core reasons. They epitomized the London liberal elites. A key promise was simply: We will revoke Brexit altogether, you dumbass voters. No second referendum, just a parliamentary program to nullify the referendum of 2016. Hard to think of a more elitist project than that. Then they embraced wokeness. In the last week of the campaign, their leader, Jo Swinson, got caught in long discussions about what she believes a woman is. She didn’t just lose the election, she lost her own seat. It is clearer and clearer to me that the wholesale adoption of critical race, gender, and queer theory on the left makes normal people wonder what on earth they’re talking about and which dictionary they are using. The white working classes are privileged? A woman can have a penis? In the end, the dogma is so crazy, and the language so bizarre, these natural left voters decided to listen to someone who does actually speak their language, even if in an absurdly plummy accent.
But the Brexit Party’s extinction may be the biggest deal. In last summer’s European elections, the Brexit party won 32 percent of the vote, and the Tories won a mere 9 percent. Six months later, the Brexit party is at 2 percent, and the Tories won 45 percent of the entire vote. It took a special kind of political genius to pull that off — and Dominic Cummings, the brilliant strategist behind the Leave campaign, should take a few minutes and take a bow. There is a chance now to harness the populist tide, rather than be drowned by it.
Here are the big gambles Johnson took to turn what was a nadir in Tory fortunes — plummeting to 22 percent this summer — into a landslide. He realized, unlike his peers, that ordinary people were close to revolt, and backed the cause of those left behind by the global economy, by grasping the Brexit issue. Without Johnson, the referendum would have been won by Remain. If he’d lost that referendum, his political career would have been over. The second big risk was quitting his own government when its Brexit plan seemed too soft, which he did by resigning as foreign secretary in the summer of 2018. And then, as the May deal failed to pass Parliament, he struck again — winning the leadership contest. In office, he rewrote the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement which the E.U. had said was nonnegotiable, and got his deal passed by a 30-vote majority.
Then the real gamble: Instead of sticking to getting Brexit done in Parliament, he called an early election to give himself a clear mandate for it. By fighting on the genius and simple slogan “Get Brexit Done,” he exposed the deep divides on the left, unified the right, and knocked his opponents for six (if you will forgive a cricket metaphor). But just as important, he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.
All this is so on-point that you know Sullivan must be saving up some Trump-bashing to sooth the outrage of his remaining leftwing readers. And indeed he throws some up in the next paragraph (snipped, along with the Disraeli “One Nation Conservatism” comparison).
What does this remarkable result mean for the U.S.? Here are some thoughts: Many will dismiss any lessons are applicable. They’ll say Britain is a very different place, Brexit is a unique issue, and Corbyn was exceptionally unpopular. There’s truth in all that. But take each point. Britain actually is very much like the U.S. right now. It too has become divided between liberal urban elites and everyone else, between nationalists and internationalists, between big cities and everywhere else, between those favoring a crackdown on new immigration and those who revel in open borders with 28 other countries. The polarization, tribalism, legislative gridlock: It’s uncanny how similar the places feel these days. And there’s a historical pattern in which Britain echoes the U.S. in political shifts: Thatcher and Reagan, George H.W. Bush and John Major, Blair and Clinton, Obama and Cameron, Brexit and Trump. I guess you can say this time it’s different. I suspect not.
And is Brexit that unique? Brexit was fueled by fears of mass immigration, globalized trade, cultural fragmentation, demographic shifts, and liberal overreach. So no, it’s by no means unique. It’s very much the same movement of left-behind people expressing their views on the same issues, who, tragically, put their trust in Trump. What we’ve seen is how tenacious a voting bloc that now is, which is why Trumpism is here to stay. If we could only get rid of the human cancer at the heart of it. [Told ya. -LP]
How much can be blamed on Corbyn? A lot, but what kind of politics does Corbyn represent? He was endorsed by AOC, love-bombed by Left Twitter, and favors proposals like borrowing massively to finance a Green New Deal that is as much about socialism as environmentalism. He’s deeply hostile to the Jewish state, wants to abolish NATO, declared he would never use a nuclear weapon, larked around the Soviet bloc for decades, and admired the regime in Venezuela. Hmm. Remind you of anyone?
Even on health care, which should have been Corbyn’s strongest issue, his spending plans were so fantastically huge that he lost credibility. Johnson wisely heaped praise on socialized medicine and proposed a big increase in investment but came nowhere near Labour’s proposals. And yet he won. It seems to me that the difference between Johnson and Corbyn is somewhat like that between Buttigieg and Bernie. A push left is essential. But a huge and unaffordable shift left? The British working classes said no. The same, I suspect, will happen here. If the Democrats go with Sanders or Warren’s Medicare for All, the Democrats could be obliterated. If the Democratic candidate cannot persuade people he or she wants to halt mass illegal immigration, ditto.
The political sweet spot in the next few years will be a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state.
I sincerely doubt that the American center lies between “Buttigieg and Bernie.” The UK has had socialized medicine for a long time, making it impossible to dislodge. But I believe that his critique of the 2020 democratic presidential contenders going too far left on socialized medicine and open borders is spot on. As for “a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state,” there’s a vein of truth embedded in a larger load of implied falsehood that needs to be unpacked at a greater length than I have time to undertake right now. (But see previous posts on how that sort of thing is playing out in Europe.)
I’m omitting most of his discussion of Labour’s cozy relationship with antisemitism to focus on this paragraph:
Why this relative indifference? Perhaps for the same reason I didn’t see it coming: So many of us thought this kind of thing was done with, we dismissed some of this news from our minds. But perhaps too it is a function of the race of these particular anti-Semites. We easily recognize — as we should — the familiar and ugly anti-Semitism of the far right, which remains much more of a threat than the far left. There was a telling tweet by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, when she first heard the Jersey City news: “This is heartbreaking. White Supremacy Kills.” But the anti-Semitism of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement doesn’t as well? Remember the last time the Black Israelites were in the news — for taunting and lobbing racist insults at the white schoolboys from Covington. Adam Serwer, who sees white supremacy everywhere, reassured us that there was nothing really to see here: “Its members stand on crowded street corners with bullhorns and yell vile things, including racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs, at anyone who passes by. D.C. residents do not respond to these provocations with confrontation. They ignore them.” If those same insults were delivered by members of the Klan on street corners, would Serwer have said the same thing?
And that helps expose how the social-justice movement has diminished anti-Semitism as a threat. Since racism has been redefined to mean “structural racism” — as opposed to prejudice against others because of the color of their skin — the Black Israelites or groups of young black men in Brooklyn as agents of bigotry doesn’t compute for many of the woke. Under the new orthodoxy, people of color are almost by definition incapable of manifesting racial hatred, because it is merely a form of power. We were told by Tamika Mallory, former co-president of the Women’s March, that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.” That is, Jews are victims but also victimizers according to these rules. The social-justice response to targeted murders of Jews qua Jews is thereby qualified.
The idea that “white supremacy” more of a threat to Jews than left-wing Islamic grievance mongers and the perpetual toleration of jihadism in the name of victimhood identity politics is a long-enduring myth on the left not backed up by 21st century facts. But the bit on the social justice warrior corruption of the left is spot-on.
(Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt.)
Mark Steyn offers some analysis:
[Johnson] was fortunate, of course, in finding himself up against Jeremy Corbyn rather than Justin Trudeau. Whether this was a referendum on Corbynism or on Brexit I leave for the exit pollsters, but either way Labour looks set to be reduced to fewer than 200 seats [Actually, 203. – LP] for the first time in eighty-four years. As I write, there appears to have been, in pure psephological terms, a swing away from Labour of about ten per cent. Six per cent of that went to the Brexit Party, not that it was enough to win them any seats, with the rest being split between Tories and the Liberal Democrats. So, put crudely, historically Labour working-class constituencies in northern England that voted Leave and were then screwed over by the subversives of a Remainer Parliament abandoned century-old tribal loyalties to Labour and shifted to pro-Brexit parties.
On the other hand, in leafier southern territory middle-class Remainers weary of Corbyn’s equivocation on the subject shifted in smaller numbers to the LibDems, as the party most upfront about its willingness to subvert the result of the referendum (“Bollocks to Brexit”). As a result, Labour has been reduced to a pantomime horse of urban redoubts – immigrant enclaves in the North and Midlands and upscale champagne-socialist quartiers of London, either indifferent or rather partial to Jeremy Corbyn’s particular baggage.
The only bad news for Boris came from Scotland, where the Scottish National Party is on course to win 55 of 59 seats. So that was naturally the straw the otherwise gloomy BBC panjandrums clutched at: The Union is in trouble; also the Irish “Troubles” will be back. Bombs away! The leader of the Democratic Unionist Party at Westminster, Nigel Dodds, lost his seat to Sinn Féin, suggesting Brexit is somewhat straining the loyalties of Ulster Loyalists. In that sense, Brexit is realigning British politics: in Wales and Northern England, working-class constituencies prioritized Leave over Labour, while, in southern England, prosperous suburban voters shrugged off traditional Tory inclinations for their Remainer opponents. And for the SNP the logic of Brexit is that, as Scotland and Northern Ireland were the only two of the “Awesome Foursome” (in Boris’ words) to vote to Remain, Scotland should either get the same deal Ulster does or a second crack at an independence referendum.
Whether this is a permanent realignment remains to be seen: It could be that if Boris lives up to his slogan and “gets Brexit done” – however defined, but enough at least that it fades from the headlines – then perhaps normal politics will resume. Or perhaps the peculiar Jeremy Corbyn, IRA-lover and appeaser of Jew-hate, a closet Leaver leading a Remainer party, has mortally wounded Labour. Can you have a United Kingdom whose constituent parts all have their own political parties and only the Tories’ seats in eastern Wales make it more than an English organization? Conversely, if you can’t, who cares? Many English supporters of the “Conservative and Unionist” party would be happy to cede the latter as the price of Brexit.
But those are questions for the long term. For now, Boris can contemplate half-a-decade at Number Ten, and no rivals on the opposition benches in the Commons: the LibDem leader who was supposed to be a bright young star lost her seat, the DUP leader who broke with Johnson over his Brexit deal is gone, the Labour leader is inclined to linger awhile to further damage his own party, and Tony Blair’s constituency went Tory. A triumph for Boris by any measure.
A few tweets on the subject:
Too many to embed, but also see this thread on everything Labourites blame their defeat on…except, of course, Corbyn and their policies.
The primary change accomplished by The Independent Group for Change was to change the occupiers of the seats previously held by the group. (Previously.)
The British Left has reacted to their loss in the usual calm manner:
Finally: “British Progressives Horrified As Boris Johnson Removes Mask Revealing Self To Be Donald Trump.”
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Andrew Sullivan, anti-semitism, Bernie Sanders, Border Controls, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Change UK, Conservatives, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, Mark Steyn, Pete Buttigieg, Rashida Tlaib, Social Justice Warriors, Socialized Medicine, Tamika Mallory, Titania McGrath, transexual, UK, Welfare State
Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections | No Comments »
Friday, November 29th, 2019
Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! Enjoy a complimentary Friday LinkSwarm before your Black Friday battles!
Supreme Court to Democrats: “No Trump financial records for you!”
“Last week the presidential campaign of Donald Trump announced a six-figure ad buy across black radio stations and in black newspapers. The newspaper campaign targeted 11 major markets in key states across the nation, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia — all states that the Trump team believes will be in play in 2020.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Border apprehensions are down almost 70% since May, meaning those border detention facilities Democrats love to yammer about are no longer overcrowded. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Tories headed toward 80 seat majority.
President Donald Trump signed a bill expressing support for Hong Kong protestors.
This comes on the heels of a huge pro-Hong Kong, anti-Beijing majority being elected in Hong Kong district council elections.
Map of Chinese defense spending by university.
The first rule of Frozen 2 Machete Brawl Club is is you don’t talk about Frozen 2 Machete Brawl Club. Bonus: This takes place in Birmingham, UK, and the video displays an awful lot of that vibrant diversity the last Labour government imported…
A look at how details of Steve Job’s illness were withheld from the public…and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Texas woman killed by feral hog attack.
Heartwarming dog story:
New exhibit of futuristic vehicles from dystopian SF films.
Speaking of futuristic vehicles, I don’t think that this is eligible for Iowahawk’s Car ID Service…
How much for financial fraud, how much for voter fraud?
Gahan Wilson, RIP.
The horror of Microsoft Teams.
Whale falls.
“Millennials In Panic As Outraged Boomers Threaten To Withhold Participation Trophies.”
Why are Social Justice Warriors so stupid?
Gobble Gobble:
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Apple Computer, Birmingham (UK), black, Border Controls, Boris Johnson, China, Conservatives, Crime, Disney, dogs, Elections, Foreign Policy, Hong Kong, Labour, LinkSwarm, Michigan, Microsoft, Military, Obituary, oceans, Pennsylvania, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Steve Jobs, Supreme Court, UK, Virginia, whales
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Elections, Foreign Policy, Military, Republicans, Supreme Court | No Comments »
Friday, November 22nd, 2019
Another week of the impeachment farce, another week of an embarrassing nothingburger and bombing ratings for Democrats:
Week one impeachment farce summary: “None of those three witnesses were have met with the President, none of them were on the July 25th phone call, and none of them have firsthand information, and none of them are aware of any criminal activity or impeachable offense. In short, why are we here?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The so-called “Whistleblower” has no statutory right to anonymity.
The impeachment farce is boring American voters to sleep. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
“Impeachment Inquiry Canceled After 5 Episodes Due To Low Ratings.”
How the impeachment farce has actually validated reports of Democrat skullduggery in Ukraine:
The half dozen seminal columns I published for The Hill on Ukraine were already supported by overwhelming documentation (all embedded in the story) and on-the-record interviews captured on video. They made three salient and simple points:
- Hunter Biden’s hiring by the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, while it was under a corruption investigation, posed the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father. That’s because Vice President Joe Biden oversaw US-Ukraine policy and forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor overseeing the case.
- Ukraine officials had an uneasy relationship with our embassy in Kiev because State Department officials exerted pressure on Ukraine prosecutors to drop certain cases against activists, including one group partly funded by George Soros.
- There were efforts around Ukraine in 2016 to influence the US election, that included a request from a DNC contractor for dirt on Manafort, an OpEd from Ukraine’s US ambassador slamming Trump and the release of law enforcement evidence by Ukrainian officials that a Ukraine court concluded was an improper interference in the US election.
All three of these points have since been validated by the sworn testimony of Schiff’s witnesses this month, starting with the Bidens.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Schiff and Pelosi are racing two clocks: The narrative clock for dropping the Horowitz IG report into FISA, etc. abuse, and the judicial clock against three different court cases that might derail the farce. And since they just went into their Thanksgiving break, the House only has eight voting days in December to do it and pass a budget before leaving for the Christmas brealk.
“Former FBI lawyer under investigation after allegedly altering document in 2016 Russia probe.”
Trump is surging with suburban women, raking in more donations than any of the Democratic candidates.
Trump Administration to start enforcing new asylum rules by sending asylum-seekers back to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“[Democratic] Former Baltimore Mayor Pugh indicted on 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion in ‘Healthy Holly’ book scandal.” (You only have to get six paragraphs in to learn that Pugh is a Democrat. Progress!)
Federal prosecutors have charged former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh with 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy in what they allege was a corrupt scheme involving her sales of a self-published children’s book series.
In a grand jury indictment made public Wednesday, prosecutors allege Pugh defrauded area businesses and nonprofit organizations with nearly $800,000 in sales of her “Healthy Holly” books to unlawfully enrich herself, promote her political career and illegally fund her campaign for mayor.
Though her customers ordered more than 100,000 copies of the books, the indictment says Pugh failed to print thousands of copies, double-sold others and took some to use for self-promotion. Pugh, 69, used the profits to buy a house, pay down debt, and make illegal straw donations to her campaign, prosecutors allege.
At the same time, prosecutors said, she was evading taxes. In 2016, for instance, when she was a state senator and ran for mayor, she told the Internal Revenue Service she had made just $31,000. In fact, her income was more than $322,000 that year ― meaning she shorted the federal government of about $100,000 in taxes, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
The charges Pugh faces carry potential sentences totaling 175 years in prison. Prosecutors are seeking to seize $769,688 of her profits, along with her current home in Ashburton, which they allege she bought and renovated with fraudulently obtained funds.
Uncle Sam is not omniscient, but if you’re a public official and you’re taking in ten times as much money as you declare, yeah, I bet they’re gonna figure that one out, Crooked Kathy.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
Speaking of Democratic Party mayors being indicted, Mayors Against Illegal Guns member Dennis Tyler, mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested by the FBI as part of a corruption probe. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More background on corruption in Muncie.
Last January, former Muncie Building Commissioner Craig Nichols pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
Others charged in the federal corruption probe include Muncie Sanitary District Administrator Debra Nicole Grigsby, Muncie Sanitary District official Tracy Barton; and local businessmen Jeffrey Burke, Tony Franklin and Rodney A. Barber.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
The U.S. just extradited a top Russian cybercriminal from Israel.
The Russian government has for the past four years been fighting to keep 29-year-old alleged cybercriminal Alexei Burkov from being extradited by Israel to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. That effort failed as well, and Burkov had his first appearance in a U.S. court last week. What follows are some clues that might explain why the Russians are so eager to reclaim this young man.
On the surface, the charges the U.S. government has leveled against Burkov may seem fairly unremarkable: Prosecutors say he ran a credit card fraud forum called CardPlanet that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards.
However, a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.
There seem to be very few elite Russian hacking organizations Burkov, AKA “K0pa,” didn’t have a key administrative role in.
Speaking of hacking: “Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai.” Somebody in Shanghai has been spoofing GPS signals to make ships (and anything else using GPS) appear they’re someplace else, and GPS experts don’t understand how they’re doing it. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
China is stealing our secrets from inside our own government:
Foreign-born researchers working at U.S. agencies secretly joined China’s payroll, sending sensitive U.S.-funded research to the country while U.S. government agencies took almost no defensive measures against a major recruitment operation, a Senate investigation found.
Researchers linked to the Chinese government formed a Chinese cell within the Department of Energy, attained access to American genomic data, and recruited other U.S. researchers to join, the bipartisan report stated.
China’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) aims to get foreign governments to finance the communist power’s military and economy by buying off researchers who are doing work abroad. The experts apply to the program, and if approved by the Communist Party, they join China’s payroll and sign secret side agreements that the experts will share their research with that country, according to the investigation.
China’s looming class struggle. As always, the proletariat get screwed by communism…
The Clinton Foundation suffered a $16.8 million loss in 2018. It’s a great mystery how that could have happened…
The upcoming UK election is no longer an election about Brexit, it’s an election about how incredibly unpopular Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson enjoys a mere plus 4% favorability rating. Corbyn has a minus 43% favorability rating. “This election is no longer primarily about Brexit, it’s primarily about Corbyn and his extreme socialist policies! Corbyn is rightfully getting clobbered.”
Snipers kill protestors in Iran.
The sudden move by the oil-rich regime to ration gasoline and hike fuel prices is a direct result of President Donald Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. While the regime thrived under the Obama administration, which handed billions of dollars to Tehran for signing the nuclear deal, the current administration has reinstated stiff sanctions against the ruling Mullahs.
After President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, the sanctions have crippled Iran’s state-run oil, shipping, and banking sectors. The U.S. government implemented the sanctions against the regime’s top brass and the IRGC, which controls critical sectors of the Iranian economy.
“Reuters Deletes Story Meant to Make Trump Look Bad After Realizing it Made Obama Look Bad.” The Ministry of Truth confirms that this story has been rectified.
“Google Is Blacklisting Conservative News Sites, Despite Denials Made Under Oath.”
Trump appointment flips the 11th circuit court, which covers Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
Jeffrey Epstein evidently had cameras in every bedroom…and every toilet. Makes the “honeypot for blackmail” idea seem all the more likely…
The MSM doesn’t trust you to handle the truth.
Woke Charlie’s Angels is the latest box office disaster.
“Call us old-fashioned, but we don’t think the chairman of the Homeland Security committee should fly cocaine from the Mexican border into the interior.”
How NBA executive Jeff David stole over $13 million from the Sacramento Kings. That amount of money will get people’s attention…(Hat tip: Dwight.)
Climategate refresher.
Heh:
Florida Man, meet Wisconsin Man: “Man arrested for 4th OWI, fake license plates made of cardboard beer case.”
“Democrat Finally Releases Something Of Substance.”
Tags:Adam Schiff, Alexei Burkov, Baltimore, Border Controls, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Catherine Pugh, China, Climategate, Communism, corruption, Crime, data security, Debra Nicole Grigsby, Democrats, Dennis Tyler, Donald Trump, El Salvador, Eric Swalwell, FBI, Florida, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Google, GPS, Greta Thunberg, Guata, Guatemala, hacking, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Hollywood, Honduras, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Indiana, Iran, IRS, Israel, Jeffrey Burke, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Jihad, Joe Biden, LinkSwarm, Luke Rosiak, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Media Watch, Military, Muncie, Nancy Pelosi, NBA, Poncho Nevarez, Reuters, Russia, Shanghai, Social Justice Warriors, spying, Supreme Court, technology, Texas, Tracy Barton, UK, Ukraine, Wisconsin
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 15th, 2019
Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm filled with news from the impeachment farce:
Summary of George Kent’s testimony:
Kent is not a first-hand witness and much of his testimony is based off of second-hand knowledge. [Page 206-207]
Kevin Bacon has fewer degrees of separation to the Trump Zelensky call than George Kent.
That being said, his closed-door testimony revealed far more devastating pushback on the Democrat narrative than anything else.
Kent testified that it is appropriate for the State Department to look at the level of corruption in a country when evaluating foreign aid. [Page 103]
(Reminder: The Trump administration sent Ukraine lethal aid.)
Kent also testified that Hunter Biden being on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma while Joe Biden was VP was a conflict of interest. [Page 226-227]
And according to his testimony, when he raised corruption concerns with the Obama White House, he was rebuffed and was told “There was no further bandwidth to deal” with Hunter. [Page 226-227]
Summary of Bill Taylor’s Testimony:
Reminder: Chargé d’affaires for Ukraine, Bill Taylor, is not a fact witness to the Trump Ukraine call.
Taylor was not on the July 25th call and he did not read the transcript until it was publically released for the world to see.
Furthermore, Taylor doesn’t have relationships with any of the players involved. He has previously testified that he did not have direct communication with President Trump, Rudy Giuliani or Mick Mulvaney. [Pages 107-108]
Yet even worse for Democrats’, Taylor’s closed door testimony has undermined their phony narrative.
Taylor testified that at the time of President Trump’s call with Ukraine, the Ukrainians were unaware of the hold on the U.S. aid. [Page 119]
Taylor also testified that combatting corruption in Ukraine is a “constant theme” of U.S. foreign policy. [Pages 86-88]
(Preceding two links both from Director Blue.)
Even some Democrats are getting tired of the impeachment sham:
Surprisingly, McDaniel reports that opposition to the hearings among Democrats is up 6 points. Could it be that there are still some sane members left in the Democratic Party who see this spectacle for what it is? Regardless of what new information is learned, no matter how favorably it may reflect on President Trump, there are a large number of Democrats who will not be swayed. Most Democrats hate Trump so much that, even though they’re well aware of how unfairly he’s been treated, they’re willing to go along with anything that will remove him from office. A six point shift doesn’t seem like much, but even a small move can swing an election.
This shift also makes sense in light of the recent rally data released by Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale…He reported that 27% of those who attended Trump’s Tupelo, MS rally on November 1st identified themselves as Democrats. At an October 17th rally held in Dallas, TX, 21.4% identified as Democrats. These figures are stunning.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Ten signs the impeachment farce is actually a coup:
1) Impeachment 24/7. The “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by President Trump’s Ukrainian call, is only the most recent coup seeking to overturn the 2016 election.
Usually, the serial futile attempts — with the exception of the Mueller debacle — were characterized by about a month of media hysteria. We remember the voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti-Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup.
2) False whistleblowers. The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing.
Instead, the whistleblower relied on secondhand water-cooler gossip about a leaked presidential call. Even his mangled version of the call didn’t match that of official transcribers.
He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship. He was a protégé of many of Trump’s most adamant opponents, including Susan Rice, John Brennan and Joe Biden. He did not follow protocol by going first to the inspector general but instead caucused with the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry. Neither the whistleblower nor his doppelganger, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was bothered by the activities of the Bidens or by the Obama decision not to arm Ukraine. Their outrage, in other words, was not about Ukraine but over Trump.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Rep. Jim Jordan rips apart the sham witnesses. None of them have any first-hand knowledge of anything.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez admits that the entire point of the impeachment hearings is to unite the Democratic Party. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“Whistleblower Revealed To Be Recently Hired White House Janitor Hillarita Clintonez.”
A transnational elite racing its way to a revolution.
“Capitol Building To Be Decorated As Giant Circus Tent For Duration Of Impeachment Hearings.”
TPPF looks in-depth at firearms and crime in Texas:
At publication, Texas’ crime rate is the lowest it has been since 1965. Similarly, violent crime in Texas is at a 40-year generational low with 410.8 incidents per 100,000 residents, a rate not seen since 1977. This trend follows a decades-long aggregate decrease in both violent and property crime rates. As illustrated in Figure 1, murder—the most heinous crime that can be committed using a firearm—has mimicked the decline as well with the drop in constituent subcategories of homicide. (Note that the rifle and shotgun homicide rates are reflected on the secondary vertical axis on the right in order to display the drop in these rare incidents.)
Further, the percentage of total homicides committed with a firearm in Texas has been trending downward as well. Similar to Figure 1, Figure 2 shows declines across all major categories of firearm homicide, with rifles and shotguns being displayed on the right-hand vertical axis. During the preceding two decades, a handgun has been used in an average of 46.53 percent of all homicides, while rifles and shotguns were used in 3.57 percent and 4.10 percent, respectively. For handguns, the highest use was 54.55 percent in 2005; the lowest was the most recent year, 2018, at 40.12 percent.
Also: “These trends persist in tandem with a proliferation in concealed carry permits being issued. Between 1998 and 2018, the number of concealed handgun licenses issued have increased 568 percent.”
Writer Derek Cohen examines possible solutions to violence involving guns, and finds all of them but one wanting:
The Legislature should consider implementing and funding a Texas program similar to federal initiatives, which uses a multi-pronged strategy of policing and prosecution, agency integration, and identification of violent crime hot spots. The focus would be on criminals with guns, not law-abiding Texans (Governor’s Texas Safety Action Report).
Of all the recommendations made in this report, this enjoys the strongest scholarly backing. This essentially describes what is known as “focused deterrence,” a holistic public safety strategy that includes law enforcement, prosecutors, social services, and analysts. The process begins when on-the-street law enforcement describes gang conditions in the area they patrol, both in terms of geography (what is the gang’s “territory”) and identifying key members. The analysts then create a gang map as well as a relational network of the gang. Those in the gang are notified that they have been identified as such and invited to a “call-in.” During this meeting, attendees are informed of the strategy and, should violence persist associated with the gang, not only will state and federal prosecutors seek the maximum punishment for all potential criminal charges, but gang members stand to face these charges should others within the network be responsible for furthering violence. Conversely, attendees are offered the option of enrolling in relevant social services to ease the transition to a more law-abiding life.
These programs have gone by multiple names during their ascendency: Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV), Operation: Ceasefire, and the like. Their efficacy has been demonstrated in individual and meta- analyses, suggesting “that focused deterrence strategies are associated with an overall statistically significant, medium-sized crime reduction effect.”
After protecting Jeffrey Epstein, ABC is still looking for the whistleblower who revealed that fact.
“New Emmy Category Announced: Best Covering For A Pedophile.”
Speaking of child sex predators, ICE arrested over 3,700 of them in FY2019. They’re just molesting the children native Americans won’t…
Denver business owner fined by government for not cleaning up the feces left by homeless people attracted by local government policies. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Probably should have included a link to this in my Austin homeless roundup, but there’s a YouTube channel dedicated to drunken brawls on Sixth Street, which seems to have gotten much worse in the last year or so. (Hat tip: Paul Martin of KR Training.)
Nine deaths at USC since August? That starts to seem like a startlingly high number. And, accord to feminists, there must have also been thousands of student rapes in the same period…
“Chinese Communists Infiltrate British Universities, Confiscating Papers and Cancelling Events.” All universities outside China should close any “Confucius Institutes” they’ve allowed to operate.
Related: “South Korean, Chinese students face off over Hong Kong protests.” Note that this was in Seoul.
Venice floods (even worse than usual, due to high tides and rain). (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Bolivia’s socialist president Evo Morales resigns over voter fraud.
Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton became the first the secure his reelection in 2020. How? Within hours of the filing deadline closing, his legal team challenged false statements by his only Democratic opponent, who promptly withdrew.
ProTip: Try not to drop your four baggies filled with cocaine. Especially at the airport. Especially if you’re Democratic state representative. Texas Democratic State Representative Poncho Nevarez evidently had to learn that the hard way, and now he’s not running for reelection.
Massachusetts to seize cars of people caught with untaxed vaping products. Even by the standards of Massachusetts crazy that’s Massachusetts crazy, and likely both and Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual) and a Ninth Amendment (neither necessary nor proper) violation.
Michael Chabon on Star Trek and his dying father. It’s a really good essay and you should read it. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Japan’s (mostly) failed attempts to firebomb the U.S. via balloon. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Classic Onion piece relinked by Instapundit: “Marxists’ Apartment A Microcosm Of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work.”
Despite the roommates’ optimism, the system began to break down soon after its establishment. To settle disputes, the roommates held weekly meetings of the “Committee of Three.”
“I brought up that I thought it was total bullshit that I’m, like, the only one who ever cooks around here, yet I have to do the dishes, too,” said Foyle, unaware of just how much the apartment underscores the infeasibility of scientific socialism as outlined in Das Kapital. “So we decided that if I cook, someone else has to do the dishes. We were going to rotate bathroom-cleaning duty, but then Kirk kept skipping his week, so we had to give him the duty of taking out the garbage instead. But now he has a class on Tuesday nights, so we switched that with the mopping.”
After weeks of complaining that he was the only one who knew how to clean “halfway decent,” Foyle began scaling back his efforts, mirroring the sort of production problems experienced in the USSR and other Soviet bloc nations.
At an Oct. 7 meeting of the Committee of Three, more duties and a point system were added. Two months later, however, the duty chart is all but forgotten and the shopping list is several pages long.
The roommates have also tried to implement a food-sharing system, with similarly poor results. The dream of equal distribution of shared goods quickly gave way to pilferage, misallocation, and hoarding.
“I bought the peanut butter the first four times, and this Organic Farms shit isn’t cheap,” Eaves said. “So ever since, I’ve been keeping it in my dresser drawer. If Kirk wants to make himself a sandwich, he can run to the corner store and buy some Jif.”
Narwhale the Unipuppy. Which was trending over the impeachment hearings two days ago…
In keeping with all that global warming, Austin had an unseasonably early hard freeze this week. Stay warm out there…
Tags:2020 Election, ABC, Adam Schiff, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Arkansas, Austin, Bill Taylor, Bolivia, Border Controls, Burisma, China, Colorado, Communism, Confucius Institutes, Crime, Democrats, Denver, Derek Cohen, Foreign Policy, George Kent, Hunter Biden, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, impeachment, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Jordan, Joe Biden, Massachusetts, Media Watch, Michael Chabon, pedophilia, Poncho Nevarez, Regulation, Republicans, South Korea, Texas, Tom Cotton, Ukraine, USC
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Regulation, Texas | 2 Comments »
Friday, November 8th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
Trump is derailing the elite’s gravy train:
Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America’s institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America’s institutions. So, let’s imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.
What happens then?
What happens then is that it’s back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.
The difference is that in the future they will be much more careful to ensure that no one who is not in on the scam will ever again come anywhere near the levers of power. You can already see it – the demands that we defer to the bureaucrats they own, the attacks on the idea of free expression, and the campaign to disarm us. Their objective is no more Trumps, just an endless line of progressive would-be Maduros with the march toward despair occasionally put on pause for a term by some Fredocon Republican who hates us Normals just as much as the Dems, but won’t admit it until after he’s out of office.
So #NeverTrumpers are upset because Trump called them scum? Well boo freaking hoo:
If you were involved in the 2016 election and, at any point, decided that Hillary Clinton was very bad for the nation and that Evan McMullin was a f***ing bug-eating tool and that Donald Trump was not Beelzebub incarnate, then you became the target of abuse. In my personal experience, there are people who I’d considered friends for several years who I would no longer pee on if they were on fire today because of the abuse and scorn the heaped upon people who disagreed with them and the cheap bullying that they engaged in. Trumpkin. Trumptard. Trumpaloo. Trumphumper. And all manner of other cute names.
Snip.
For three years these people have degraded, demeaned, and libeled anyone who simply decided that, for all his flaws, Trump was better than any Democrat. No grace was offered to people who had considered them friends and colleagues. No common cause was allowed to be made. They stopped being conservatives and Republicans who simply disliked the candidate and then the president and became active Democrat partisans who simply called themselves something else. Every hoax and bad faith allegation made against the President and his administration, from the Russia bullsh** to defending illegal FISA warrants to the “Muslim ban” to “kids in cages,” was spearheaded by NeverTrumpers flagellating themselves with their principles and yodeling “we’re better than that.”
In 2020, these people have a choice to make. They can either earn their way back in–Prodigal Son, and all that–or they can stay gone. I don’t care who they vote for because Trump won last time without them and he’s in a much stronger position today than he was in November 2016. But, no matter what path they choose, there should be no forgetting of how these people have acted and what they’ve done. No one should allow them to forget why no one–right or left–wishes to have anything to do with them. No one should ever forget that they are dangerous, timorous and unfaithful allies and should not be allowed to do any more than hold the coats for the rest of us.
Full State Department review of Hillary Clinton’s emails show nearly 600 security violations.
Former Virginia democratic governor forgives current Virginia democratic governor for wearing blackface. “We’ve moved on,” says former Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe. As Stephen Green says, “it’s easy to move on when your side can’t be held accountable.”
President Donald Trump begins process to formally withdraw from the Paris climate accord. I’m not sure this is strictly necessary, as it was never binding on the U.S. because it was never submitted to the senate for ratification. As opposed to being nonbinding on the rest of the world because they’re just lying about following it anyway.
Sanctions against Iran really biting into its oil revenues, especially as the U.S. becomes more sophisticated about counter attempts to evade it.
As recently as mid-2019, Iranian leaders openly boasted of selling its oil to foreign customers despite the 2017 sanctions. At the time of that boast, Iran was getting a million BPD (barrels per day) out to export customers. In contrast, before the sanctions, Iran exported two million BPD. But by July 2019 exports had been reduced to 365,000 BPD and in August it was a record low 160,000 BPD and that did not change much in September. What the Iranians don’t issue press releases about is how well sanction enforcement efforts have been at reducing those illegal exports to record lows.
(Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)
The UK is finally having a general election after essentially a year of deadlock. If history is any guide, parties promising to deliver Brexit will win, then not deliver Brexit…
“Maryland Officials Drop Sanctuary Policy After Illegal Alien Sex Crimes.”
Related: Sanctuary city proposition goes down in flames in Tucson. Funny how not enforcing laws against illegal aliens enjoys crushing defeat when actual voters get a chance to chime in.
Meanwhile, the illegal alien debate in the Democratic Party is between the hard left and the loony left. “While the rest of America frets about illegal alien criminals escaping authorities with the eager help of liberal politicians, liberals are more concerned about proving to each other how wonderful and tolerant they are by opening the border and allowing anyone and everyone with a sob story to be welcomed and cared for.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Comedians Taking Sides In The Woke Wars.”
A recent string of high-profile comments brought “Cancel Culture” to the fore. Stand-up routines by Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Sebastian Maniscalo forced the subject back into the limelight.
“No Safe Spaces,” a documentary about the Left’s serial attacks on free expression, debuts this weekend at the near-perfect time. Comedian Adam Carolla and syndicated radio star Dennis Prager unite to explore how universities are clamping down on healthy debate, and why that woke sentiment is leaking into society at large.
“Joker” director Todd Phillips, who previously helmed the “Hangover” series, amplified the cause. He told Vanity Fair he created “Joker” because making comedies is no longer fun.
“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he says. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’
Science Fiction tries to erase its past over crimes against Social Justice Warrior orthodoxy. To be fair, the people who handed out the (now being renamed) James Tiptree Award were always far-left radical feminist lunatics. The question is why have the theoretically more sober people behind the John W. Campbell and World Fantasy Awards also given in to this Orwellian, history-erasing lunacy?
Is anyone really surprised when a progressive treats institutional charity money as a personal slush fund?
The former head of the L.A.-based anti-poverty nonprofit Youth Policy Institute improperly used the organization’s funds to pay the property taxes on his house, buy furniture for his home office and make national political donations, the group alleged in court documents filed this week.
Dixon Slingerland, who was fired as the group’s chief executive in September, spent the nonprofit’s money on an array of unauthorized and personal expenses, including private tutoring for his children, contributions to his wife’s pension, and “lavish” dining, travel and entertainment, according to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing lodged by the nonprofit in federal court.
“Federal agents raided a Long Island tech firm early Thursday and arrested its top executives amid concerns the company was selling Chinese-made equipment to the U.S. military while claiming it had been manufactured in the United States. According to federal prosecutors, Aventura Technologies of Commack has been running the alleged scheme since 2006, selling equipment with “known cybersecurity vulnerability” to government and other customers.”
MSM amnesia:
Out-of-state Justice Democrats money props up Texas candidate:
Texas candidate Jessica Cisneros has been one of the most high profile candidates backed by Justice Democrats, the liberal group seeking to defeat incumbents they perceive as insufficiently progressive. While Cisneros has received praise from freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), local residents appear more skeptical. She has received just $3,585 of her $190,000 (1.8 percent) in itemized contributions from inside the San Antonio district she hopes to represent.
Cisneros is primarying Democratic incumbent Henry Cueller for the Texas 28th Congressional District. She does not appear to be former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros’ daughter.
“Democrat Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz and Republican Gary Gates are headed to a runoff to decide who will fill the unexpired term of State Rep. John Zerwas (R–Richmond)” for Texas House District 28. Gates is a seven time loser, the founding money behind the “Texas Citizens Coalition” (whose mailers I have not seen recently), and was last seen running a dishonest campaign against Wayne Christian for the Railroad Commission. Still, I can only imagine that he’ll be preferable to a Democrat, and even though Markowitz garnered more votes in the election, all the other candidates were Republicans for a Republican-leaning seat, giving Gates a good chance to retain it.
Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman tried to illegally transmit voting information over the Internet. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
Disruptive Democrats crushed in The Woodlands.
“Plastikov 3D printed AK. 900 rounds on the front receiver, 550 on the rear – with no signs of damage. 7.62×39 goodness in a 7 dollar PLA receiver.” Not quite a revolution, since he used metal parts for the ejector and rails, and spent a total of $393 for all the parts, but definitely interesting, since the receiver is what the federal government counts as the “gun.” Caveat: 7.62x39mm evidently generates lower firing pressure than 5.56 NATO. But I’m hardly an expert here. Still: interesting. (Hat tip: Sal the Agorist.)
Samsung lays off it’s entire Austin design team. I used to work in the building where it was housed, a few jobs ago…
Rudy Boesch, decorated Navy SEAL. He was also evidently on some reality TV show.
America: Hey Berlin, you want a statue of Ronald Reagan? You know, “tear down this wall” and all of that? Berlin: Nein. America: Too bad.
Another day, another fake hate crim—wait, a real one? Oh, against a Catholic Church. In New York City. Now I get it.
“Fringe Conspiracy Theorist Believes Epstein Just Killed Himself.”
Tags:#NeverTrump, 2019 Elections, 2020 Election, 3D Printing, 7.62x39, Adam Carolla, AK-47, Arizona, Austin, Aventura Technologies, Berlin, Berlin Wall, Bill Burr, Border Controls, Brexit, China, comedy, Crime, Dave Chappelle, Democrats, Diane Trautman, Elections, Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz, EmailGate, Gary Gates, Germany, Global Warming, Guns, Harris County, Henry Cuellar, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Illegal Aliens, Iran, Jeff, Jessica Cisneros, Justice Democrats, Kurt Schlichter, LinkSwarm, Maryland, Media Watch, Military, New York, Plastikov, Ralph Northam, rape, Republicans, Samsung, sanctuary cities, science fiction, Sebastian Maniscalo, sex offender, Social Justice Warriors, State Department, Terry McAuliffe, Texas, Texas 28th Congressional District, The Woodlands, Todd Phillips, Tucson, UK, Virginia, WisCon
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, September 12th, 2019
Another court win for Trump Administration border control policies:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled in favor of new Trump administration rules that bar migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. if they have traveled through a third country and failed to seek asylum there.
The high court lifted a lower court’s stay of the restrictions, saying that the policy will be allowed to go into effect even as legal challenges against it progress.
The Trump administration first announced the new rules July 15 and was met with swift legal challenges from immigrant advocacy groups.
This comes on the heels of news that illegal alien border crossing arrests are way down.
Border arrests, a metric for illegal crossings, plummeted to 51,000 in August, according to preliminary government figures obtained by POLITICO Wednesday, down more than 60 percent since a peak in May. And border watchers say it’s largely because of an agreement Trump struck with Mexico in June. Mexican authorities, backed by the newly formed National Guard, are now cracking down on migrants traversing Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, monitoring river crossings and stopping buses carrying migrants from Central America through Mexico. At the same time, the U.S. is making tens of thousands of asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their applications are considered.
“Activists” a very upset that presumed Democratic voters aren’t being allowed to cross the border illegally. Now if the Trump Administration could just figure out how to implement E-Verify…
Tags:Border Controls, Illegal Aliens, Supreme Court
Posted in Border Control, Supreme Court | No Comments »
Friday, September 6th, 2019
For all this talk of hurricanes, it’s rained like five minutes in the last eight weeks here in Austin…
Imagine that there’s a long, informative paragraph here explaining the latest twists and turns of the Brexit saga, because I have no friging clue what’s going on as of today. The House of Commons narrowly ruled out a no-deal Brexit, but the House of Lords vows to block it, Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed to call an early election, but evidently the votes don’t exist for that either, so who knows? Maybe this Jim Geraghty piece will do the trick, but it’s already two days old, so…
The American economy looks an awful lot like full employment.
“Defense secretary greenlights $3.6 billion for 175 miles of border wall.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Trump’s gonna win in a landslide.” Here’s why.
Robert Mugabe, the brutal, incompetent ex-dictator of Zimbabwe, has died, but not before he destroyed his country’s economy through Marxist policies, land confiscation and hyperinflation. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Remember when Democrats swore up and down they weren’t going to take our guns? They’ve stopped pretending:
The media should stop using absurdly lazy phrases like “mandatory gun buybacks.” Unless the politician they’re talking about is in the business of selling firearms, it’s impossible for him to “buy back” anything. No government official—not Joe Biden, not Beto O’Rourke, not any of the candidates who now support “buyback” programs—has ever sold firearms.
What Democrats propose can be more accurately described as “the first American gun confiscation effort since Lexington and Concord,” or some variation on that theme. Although tax dollars will be meted out in an effort to incentivize volunteers, the policy is to confiscate AR-15s, the vast majority of which have been legally purchased by Americans who have undergone background checks and never used a gun for a criminal purpose.
The “mandatory gun buyback” exemplifies the impracticality and absurdity of do-somethingism (although Biden’s proposal to ban “magazines that hold bullets”—so most guns—is also a contender!). Democrats want to turn millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals overnight for refusing to adhere to a law that retroactively transforms the exercise of a constitutional right into a crime.
And they do it without any evidence that it would curtail rare mass shootings or save lives.
Indeed, Democratic plans for gun control aren’t about reducing crime, they’re about complete civilian disarmament:
emocrats are going after guns for two reasons. First, since the advent of the big-government Democrat Party under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they have increasingly opposed people having arms with which they might most easily defend themselves against government overreach.
After imposing the NFA and GCA, primarily to restrict guns particularly useful for defensive purposes, Democrats in the late 1970s and 1980s supported campaigns to get handguns banned. In 1986, when most members of the House of Representatives were not present, Democrats snuck into the otherwise favorable Firearms Owners’ Protection Act an amendment banning newly manufactured fully-automatic firearms. In 1989, they began campaigning to ban various semi-automatic firearms. Democrats also signed amicus briefs supporting the District of Columbia’s handgun ban in Heller.
Second, midway through the Obama administration, “progressives” decided to use “guns” as a core issue around which to rally their voter base.
Also:
Democrats claim that the Supreme Court never considered the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to arms before Heller. To the contrary, the court did so in U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), Presser v. Illinois (1886), Miller v. Texas (1894), U.S. v. Miller (1939), and U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990). Heller was only the first case in which the court was asked specifically to state whose right the amendment protects.
(Hat tip: Karl Rehn.)
Kurt Schlichter makes the same argument in more pungent form:
No gun bans, ever. You feel us?
But you can argue about gun rights if you want to – here are some suggestions how – but I prefer the threat of the total political destruction of those who would betray us. That’s not because our arguments are weak – our arguments are ironclad – but because arguments mean nothing anymore, since the goal of the gun grabbers is not enacting good policy. If it were, they wouldn’t be targeting law-abiding citizens like us. Nor would they have tolerated decades of bloodbaths in every Democrat big city. They would have unleashed the cops to bust the drug-dealing, gang-banging scumbags who wander about loose today because the liberals in charge simply do not care about scores of dead inner-city citizens.
There’s no good faith argument to be had because our gooey elite, supported by the Ahoy Division of Fredocon submissives eager to once again receive their ration of establishment table scraps, don’t care about facts or reason. They already have their objective and they aren’t going to let bourgeois conceits like “evidence” and “rights” get in their way.
They want power, and they want to demonstrate their power over those knuckle-dragging cisgender Jesus people who work for a living, like you, by taking away a right that is central to your conception of yourself as an American citizen. Guns represent your power to protect yourself and your family, and your power to remove a tyrannical government. Taking that from you allows them the delightful opportunity to rub your face in your own submission, and it puts you in your place. Oh, and there’s also the practical value of depriving you of the power to remove a tyrannical government, since that’s what the elite aspires to enact. Disarmed, you are at their mercy and, as the history of left-wing governments teaches, they have none for such as you.
San Francisco’s government goes full retard, declares the NRA a “terrorist organization.” You can probably smell the lawsuits from here, assuming that’s not just homeless feces…
Former General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis says that Obama and Biden really screwed up Iraq.
Liberals embrace the Thanos option:
No idea should be as discredited as the irrational fear of too many people, yet this Malthusian temptation has somehow managed to avoid the stigma it deserves. The belief popularized by [Paul] Ehrlich, that the planet has a finite “carrying capacity” and that we’re currently running up against it, has justified some of the most abhorrent episodes of state-sponsored bigotry and eugenics since the end of World War II. The United States, in cooperation with groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, justified the sterilization of low-income Native American and Puerto Rican women through population control hysteria. In the developing world, the goal of ensuring “sustainable” population levels led organizations like the World Bank to create incentives for voluntary sterilization and punishments for larger families. The campaign went so far as to include the USAID-backed dissemination of untested and potentially hazardous contraceptive devices in 60 developing countries.
Ehrlich has a habit of being wrong. He claimed that the average American lifespan would decline to just 42-years-old by 1980. In 1970, he predicted that “the death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” That same year, he warned that “all important animal life in the sea will be extinct” by 1980. At least 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in what he dubbed “the great die-off” between 1980 and 1989. “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people,” Ehrlich said in 1971. The Stanford Professor evinces no contrition about his errors. “As I’ve said many times,” he warned as recently as last year, “‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell.’”
Though the population controllers have not altered their diagnosis or recommendations in the last 40 years, the world around them has changed dramatically. Between 1981 and 2008, 700 million people emerged from extreme poverty even as the world’s population increased by 48 percent. The elimination of subsistence living is no longer a utopian prospect but an attainable goal. Global life expectancy grew by 5.5 years between 2000 and 2016, with the gap between the sexes remaining stable. Global food production has risen to meet demand, and the number of people suffering from undernourishment declined by half between 1960 and 2008. Deaths attributable to global conflict have declined to proportional rates almost unknown in human history. This revolution in human existence is a product of two conditions: the triumph of the market over its socialistic alternatives in the last decades of the 20th century and the increasing number of people who participate in that market, augmenting the incentives associated with innovation and growth.
“A Very Fast, Very Safe, Very SLIMM Nuclear Reactor.” Thorium molten salt design. Would like to see how a working prototype of this compares to comparable prototypes of fast integral reactions and pebble bed designs. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)
Thanks to Venezuela, FARC is back. Because why feed your people when you can back a fellow communist terrorist organization instead? You submitted this to FARK with a funnier headline. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Has actor Jared Leto formed a cult? Sure seems so. I was unaware he was in a band called 30 Seconds to Mars, I only know him (by reputation) as the Joker in Suicide Squad. Since I just saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I’d rather keep cult leaders away from Margot Robbie…
Hey hey, my my. Rock and roll is gonna die:
Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).
A few of these legends might manage to live into their 90s, despite all the … wear and tear to which they’ve subjected their bodies over the decades. But most of them will not.
Ed Driscoll thinks Hollywood may be heading the same way:
Music concerts and the film industry are really the last media institutions that still require an audience to turn up en masse in a single location to consume its product. No wonder Hollywood relies on the fumes of Marvel and DC comic books, plus midcentury franchises such as James Bond, Star Trek, Star Wars, Mission: Impossible and Brit-lit such as the Lord of the Rings, the Narnia franchise and Paddington to keep itself alive. No wonder rock music as a whole already has one foot in the grave.
In other words, the last remaining universally known products of mass media are getting very old and their freshness sell-by dates have long expired. And there’s no mass media left to create something that strikes a sufficiently universal chord in either rock music and Hollywood to influence the zeitgeist any longer. Rock music has arguably already given way to rap as the most popular genre of American teenagers. Hollywood could be in deep trouble if the public turns away from superhero and sci-fi franchises the same way that moviegoers abandoned the musical as a genre in the late 1960s. It’s not like either industry hadn’t seen these trends coming, and they will each be “riding the gravy train” for as long as possible, as Roger Waters (age 75) would say. But for both, the end of the line may be in sight.
A teapot tempest example of Our Stupid Media’s incompetent mendacity. Appellate lawyer Leif Olson resigned from the Labor Department on August 30, less than four hours after Bloomberg Law asked the department for comment on a Facebook conversation that referenced anti-Semitic tropes. The posts Bloomberg Law referenced had been making fun of anti-semites, which was clear from context, but Bloomberg Law spun them as antisemitic, Because Trump. Now Olson has rejoined the agency, but Bloomberg Law still hasn’t apologized for a lying smear job.
Secrets of a 911 dispatcher.
Game developer who thought people were trying to drive him to suicide commits suicide.
Tags:Bloomberg Law, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Columbia, Communism, Democrats, FARC, Foreign Policy, gun control, Guns, Hollywood, Iraq, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, Jared Leto, Kurt Schlichter, LinkSwarm, Malthusian, music, NRA, Obama, Rock and Roll, San Francisco, UK, Zimbabwe
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns | No Comments »
Friday, August 30th, 2019
I hope you’re ready for the Labor Day Weekend. I certainly am…
At the G7, President Donald Trump is the popular one. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Three documents President Trump should declassify. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Obama’s Social Justice Warrior dictates harmed American military readiness.
Democracies around the world should hope that President Trump wins the trade war with China. “China’s victory [would] bring about a world in which democracies are enfeebled and the largest autocracy is emboldened.”
Boris Johnson has outflanked remainers by proroguing Parliament for a Queen’s speech.
For this, Johnson is being pilloried as a dictator by Remainers. Why? By doing this, Johnson has made it harder for parliamentarians who oppose a no-deal exit from the European Union to interrupt Johnson’s Brexit negotiation strategy, which includes the possibility of no deal. Johnson has very sharply limited the time in which parliamentarians could organize to force the government to request another extension from the EU and thus make a mockery of Johnson’s promise of leaving the European Union — deal or no deal — by October 31. Essentially, parliamentarians will face a choice: Allow Johnson to proceed with his form of brinkmanship while negotiating with Brussels, including the possibility of no deal, or make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.
Remainers should look into the mirror, however. They have shaped this outcome as much as any hardcore Brexiteer. At every single turn, in fact, it has been Remainers who have increased the chances of the U.K.’s not only leaving, but crashing out on a series of ad hoc emergency measures, rather than a comprehensive adjustment to its relationship to Europe.
Following this maneuver, Johnson’s Tories have surged in the polls.
How President Trump started a war between the UN and Hamas:
While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees], the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.
Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”
The power struggle between the UN employees and Hamas was tested before during clashes over the teaching of the Holocaust in UNRWA schools and the use of UNRWA schools to launch attacks on Israel.
The real crackup came when the Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA.
Snip.
“I am the captain of the ship which has 13,000 sailors on it and they have basically thrown me off the bridge and consigned me to my captain’s quarters,” Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director of field operations in Gaza, whined.
Schmale had never actually been the captain. [Hamas co-founder Mahmoud] Zahar and other Hamas leaders had been running things.
The UNRWA was forced to evacuate most of its 19 international staffers from Gaza, including its ten senior leaders, leaving behind only 6 international staffers. This made no practical difference as the UNRWA operation on the ground was actually being run by the 13,000 Hamas UN employees.
But the UN isn’t moved by protests or violence. It runs on reports. And soon a report arrived.
Al Jazeera debuted an internal UN report alleging corruption and misconduct by UNRWA leaders. Al Jazeera is an arm of Qatar. The Islamic terror state is currently the biggest backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, supports Hamas, and is extensively involved in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s barrage of stories on the UNRWA report was a clear signal that Qatar was targeting the UN agency on behalf of Hamas.
Al Jazeera claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report from agency employees “concerned” that action wasn’t being taken against an “inner circle” running UNRWA. The inner circle consists of the international leadership that Hamas is angry at for trying to fire hundreds of its people.
The report, aired by Al Jazeera, claimed that UNRWA boss Pierre Krahenbuhl had carried on an affair with his senior adviser, Maria Mohammedi, which “embarrassed” their colleagues and donors.
Krahenbuhl, a Swiss NGO vet, is officially married to Taiba Rahim, the head of an Afghan non-profit, and Maria Mohammedi, is an Algerian who was, at least in the past, married to Rashid Abdelhamid, a “Palestinian filmmaker”, who is really an Algerian educated in France, and living in Gaza, and while this is all very multinational, it’s also the sort of “international diplomacy” that the UN frowns upon.
But if the allegations are true, the Swiss humanitarian had just gone native by adopting polygamy.
The report is filled with allegations of bullying, nepotism, abusing travel vouchers, and, the worst possible sin in a bureaucracy, bypassing official channels. And it might be more serious if the behavior being described weren’t slightly eclipsed by the fact that the rest of the UNRWA, which likely includes the employees behind the report, is an Islamic terror group dedicated to murdering children.
But in the UN, using schools as munition dumps isn’t a serious issue, going outside official channels is.
Result: Other nations, including the Swiss and the Dutch, are cutting off money to UNRWA.
Feminists just couldn’t accept their victory:
In a grim determination never to take “Yes” for an answer, a different breed of feminist waddled onto the scene. Feminism had taken a vicious, vindictive and male-hating turn. Like other “civil rights” movements, it turned out to have less to do with “justice” and more to do with raw, abusive power, payback, quotas, unqualified people having set-aside slots based on their plumbing, and getting rich. Society needed to make some changes. And it did. However, we’ve all heard the expression “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Well, don’t look now, but there goes the baby…literally.
Abortion was always a divisive subject. The first time Mr. AG and I heard a friend wax poetic about what a great thing abortion would be, I almost got into a fistfight with him, except he was also a pacifist! Where’s the fun in pummeling a pacifist? To a non-psychotic, the very idea of killing a baby is appalling, admit it. But by the early ’70s there was a growing consensus that in the first 12 weeks, the proverbial “clump of cells” should be able to be terminated. How quickly and predictably that morphed into abortion any time for any reason, including the sex of the baby, or no reason at all. I knew one certifiable, deranged feminist who used abortion as birth control. She had had 8 abortions that I heard of before I lost track of her.
Today, after ultrasound has proven that the clump of cells looks remarkably like a baby, only 7 percent of the American people agree with third trimester abortion. SEVEN PERCENT! You could get more than 7 percent to say they have had lunch with Bigfoot and Elvis. (Bigfoot selected the steak tartare; Elvis chose the Biscuits and Gravy.) Yet seven of nine black-robed arbiters set the stage for what has become legalized infanticide.
As they say on late-night informercials: But WAIT, there’s more! The old guard, who educated and litigated and lobbied for the rights and privileges women have today are driven from the movement, indeed from the public square. They have failed to get onboard with the quaint and unscientific notion that sex is a more or less imaginary construct and can change on a whim. How shocked Eve Ensler must have been to find that her tedious but lucrative play about chattering vaginas is now verboten because “some women don’t have vaginas.” Though she died in 1986, De Beauvoir herself wrote, “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.” Gotta love those cheery existentialists!
Newly-minted women who are actually men can now win every athletic competition against real biological women. Title IX has been rendered meaningless. Protest if you dare, even if you’re an iconic lesbian tennis pro, and you will face a Twitter storm or legal action in Canada. Even backpedaling and groveling will not save you. As the famous novelist Max Cossack queried the other day over breakfast: “If men and women are exactly the same, why don’t we see women who’ve transitioned into ‘men’ winning athletic events against other men? How come that only goes one way?” Bueller? Mueller? Is that in anybody’s purview?
So what you might call Fairness Feminism is dead. The loony ghouls feasting on its corpse will carry on, but it will never again approach being any kind of mass movement.
Kurt Schlichter is delighted that our liberal media elites are being hoisted on their on petards:
You must have a heart of stone not to burst into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter at the agony of the failing New York Times and the rest of the media over how conservative activists are going to apply the same internet colonoscopy to lib journalistas as they apply to us.
Monsters!
Fascists!
Meanies!
Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.
Drink in their pain.
Drink it all in.
Mmmmm, that’s some delicious pain.
Yeah, conservatives are fighting back, and to the other side it’s an assault on the free press and further evidence that Trump is totally Hitler and probably Stalin too. But to us, it’s long-overdue counterpunching right into the progs’ soft gut. (Note: The author knows some of the conservatives allegedly involved, but was not involved in this glorious initiative).
This is righteous retribution, and the screaming and hollering about it is further evidence that there’s plenty of dirt to dig up.
Welcome to Accountability City. Population: All you liberal media jerks.
Ann Althouse wonders how a New York Times travel writer balances their job demands of selling air travel to rich people with his bedrock religious belief in global warming. Answer: with good old-fashioned hypocrisy:
After a few more tips — including buy carbon offsets — [Seth] Kugel ends with this mind-bogglingly elitist paragraph:
Most of this will make travel more expensive — and that may mean traveling even less. Think of it as a progressive tax paid by those lucky enough to travel for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in. It is a small price to pay. And maybe it will make you feel a little less shame.
No! You should feel MORE shame for even thinking like that. Kugel is saying that the people with the money to pay more will pay more and should feel lucky and less ashamed for “for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in.” But refraining from doing what you can do is a core component of morality! To travel is to choose to cause damage. Kugel is just desperately trying to scare up every argument for continuing to travel by air…. other than relinquishing the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the world’s climate.
“Young Turks Host Hasan Piker Mocks Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s War Injuries, Declares America Deserved 9/11.” Thought about noting this for the Joe Rogan interview with Dan Crenshaw post, but decided the little shit just wasn’t worth mentioning there.
You can see the progress on the border wall here. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“Obama Blows $15 Million on Mansion Doomed by Rising Tides He Failed to Slow.”
“NAACP President to Reporter: ‘I don’t talk to fucking Jews.'” That’s president of the Passiac NAACP, not the national organization. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Iranian rocket blows up on pad.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Karachi, Pakistan suffers through a plague of flies:
First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.
And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.
Flies and flooding can often go together, and Karachi is no stranger to either. But Dr. Seemin Jamali, the executive director for the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, one of Karachi’s largest public hospitals, said this was the worst infestation of flies she had ever witnessed.
“There are huge swarms of flies and mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s not just affecting the life of the common man — they’re so scary, they’re hounding people. You can’t walk straight on the road, there are so many flies everywhere.”
The city started a fumigation drive, but the flies remain, and frustrations are growing. It’s all drawing new attention, and anger, to the city’s longstanding problems with garbage and drainage — an issue that feuding political factions have wielded against each other for years, but that hasn’t gotten any better.
Experts say this infestation was probably brought on by the combination of stagnant rainwater, which stood in the city for days, with garbage on the streets and waste left behind from animals slaughtered during the recent Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Guy does the opposite of what I do every day, going out on the Internet without any blockers of any kind to see what sorts of tracking cookies he picks up. He picked up hundreds. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Homeowner in Round Rock? The city council is going to be taking more of your money.
Lying about lobsters.
Stationary bicycle maker Peloton is preparing an IPO despite never having been profitable, having no realistic plans to be profitable, and a CEO who makes more than the CEOs of Ford, Home Depot and Cisco. “So, Peloton, while pretending to be a technology company, lost $195 million last year, yet paid its top three executives more than $50 million (up from $17.9 million in Fiscal Year 2018).”
“Gun stolen during anonymous masked orgy, police admit ‘we’re probably not going to solve this one.'” Bonus: Exactly the state you think.
Critics hate Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because it’s not boring and woke. (I saw this last Saturday, and I highly recommend catching it in theaters while you can.)
“Liberals Clarify They Only Want Black Voices To Be Heard When They’re Saying Liberal Things.”
“When black people agree with me, I very much want their voices to be heard,” said Helga Bannerman, 28, Portland, she/they/her/xen. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re pretty much just not black anymore. They’re basically an evil white person like me at that point. And the last thing we need on this planet is more white people like Dave Chappelle.”
A heh for the weekend:
Tags:Ann Althouse, black, Border Controls, Boris Johnson, Brexit, China, Conservatives, Dan Crenshaw, data security, Dave Chappelle, Democrats, Donald Trump, EU, Florida, Florida Man, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Hamas, Hasan Piker, Hollywood, Internet, Iran, Jews, Karachi, Kurt Schlichter, LinkSwarm, Mahmoud Zahar, Maria Mohammedi, Media Watch, Military, NAACP, New York Times, Pakistan, Peloton, Pierre Krahenbuhl, Quentin Tarantino, Round Rock, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, UK, UNRWA, Young Turks
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 2 Comments »
Friday, August 23rd, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
Why evangelicals support Trump:
Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”
That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.
Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.
Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.
Snip.
Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.
Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.
Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.
First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.
He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.
Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.
Well, it’s about time!
It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.
Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.
Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.
No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Man goes to car dealership, finds it booming:
“It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.
He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”
If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.
The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.
The Trump Administration ends catch-and-release.
The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:
Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.
We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.
Snip.
In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.
They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.
But it won’t.
It’s all a lie and a scam.
And we know it.
How Boris Yeltsin defeated the 1991 Communist coup. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady.)
“The Department of Justice says one of its own “repeatedly” helped the Bloods street gang protect its interests by identifying and exposing informants and cooperating witnesses.”
Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.
If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.
Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
Israel reportedly hit a Hezbollah arms depot in Iraq. According to Wikipedia, Israel has 16 F-35s total.
Hong Kong’s leaderless protests:
Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.
Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.
WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Still true: “Red-light cameras undermine rule of law.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered.”
“Trump Executive Order Cancels Student Loan Debt for Disabled Veterans.” Bet none of them have degrees in feminist critical theory, either…
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
“Robert Mueller crushed their dreams, so Democrats pivot to race.”
They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.
And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.
Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.
With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.
“Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
Reporter discovers, much to her surprise, that, yes, you do have to pass a background check before buying a gun. She fails.
The army wants microwave weapons against drones.
“Man Accused Of Shooting 6 Philadelphia Police Officers Was Federal Informant.” (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
Gregory Benford says that the Epstein smear against Marvin Minsky is baseless. (Hat tip: Instapundit, which is a backup source if you can’t get to Greg’s Facebook page.)
Borepatch says that red flag laws are malicious:
False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.
But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.
This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.
To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.
And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.
Malice.
Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
President Trump may have failed to buy Greenland, but we can all learn from the failures of Greenland’s public housing.
Lt. Governor Dan Patrick frowns on Bonnen’s shenanigans. (Hat tip: Cahnman.)
Republican John Lee wins seat on LA City Council, beating Green New Deal supporter.
What it’s like to be a roughneck in west Texas.
Miss Nevada banned from competing for Miss America over supporting President Trump.
First picture of light as both a wave and a particle.
“When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”
I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.
As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.
Tags:Bloods, Border Controls, Boris Yeltsin, China, CNN, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Department of Justice, Donald Trump, drone, environmentalism, F-35, feminists, Five Star Movement, Foreign Policy, Greenland, Gregory Benford, Greta Thunberg, Guns, Hezbollah, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Rogan, Kurt Schlichter, Los Angeles, Marvin Minsky, Media Watch, Military, Northern League (Italy), Obama, oil industry, public housing, red light cameras, science, Southern Poverty Law Center, Soviet Union, Tawanna Hilliard, Texas, WeWork
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 16th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! It hit 107°F in Austin this week, but it was probably only 104° when I rode my bike. Cleared up my sinuses!
David Brock’s ShareBlue Media certainly seems to be freaking out over the Epstein “suicide,” sends out talking points to Democratic loyalists to downplay the possibility of conspiracy. Hmmmmm…
Illinois is farked.
On the same theme: 40% of Illinois education spending goes to pensions. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Trust no one.
Democrats are convinced that a wave of Republican retirements is going to help them flip Texas’ congressional delegation. Don’t count on it. “If they nominate a candidate like Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, or somebody like, God forbid, Bernie Sanders, if they nominate somebody who is extremely left of center, they’re not going to get there.”
For Democrats, filing for bankruptcy doesn’t prevent you from running for the senate. Boy, Democrats sure love nominating people who can’t even handle their own finances, much less ours.
Two illegal aliens charged with repeatedly raping an 11-year old girl.
Disillusioned liberal sees Obama as a lying tool of corporate greed. “Our political order is oriented around legitimizing only those who can claim some form of victimization. It’s why the woke stuff/white supremacy is so powerful. It’s a fundamentally anti-enlightenment model of politics.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
More on last week’s Russian nuclear accident:
United States intelligence officials have said they suspect the blast involved a prototype of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall. That is a cruise missile that Mr. Putin has boasted can reach any corner of the earth because it is partially powered by a small nuclear reactor, eliminating the usual distance limitations of conventionally fueled missiles.
As envisioned by Mr. Putin, who played animated video of the missile at a state-of-the-union speech in 2018, the Skyfall is part of a new class of weapons designed to evade American missile defenses.
Lots of Russian military superweapons turn out to be vaporware. This one turned out to be vaporizedware. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Inside the Polar Star, America’s antiquated rustbucket of an icebreaker.
Speaking of ice: President Trump contemplates buying Greenland. On the one hand, in the long run, land purchases have worked out very well for the United States. On the other, Liebensraum is bunk and we’ve got plenty of development left to do with Alaska.
New York Times editor demoted for daring to voice obvious political truths…and criticizing The Squad. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Important safety tip: Don’t use NULL for your vanity license plate.
Shorn of the music and nostalgia, Woodstock was “a field full of six-foot-deep mud laced with LSD.” Bonus: Pete Townshend kicking Abbie Hoffman’s ass. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Lessons from a “local food” scammer.
My instructions were to claim that all the produce was local, although nothing was or could be local: It was early June in northwestern New Jersey’s Kittatinny Mountains, and the produce had been shipped from warmer parts of the world to the distributor who’d sold it to my boss. But “local” was the magic word hand-painted on our signs; it was what made our customers, most of them New Yorkers driving to country vacation cottages, slam on their brakes and pull over.
For the first time in my life, I heard about the naturalness, tradition and superior flavor of New Jersey produce. “Taste-wise, nothing compares to Jersey Silver Queen,” the New Yorkers declared, clawing at ears of a fat-kerneled, North Carolina-grown supersweet hybrid, all sugar and no corn flavor, nothing like Silver Queen. They tossed the husks on the ground for me to rake up.
“Give me Jersey peaches over Georgia peaches any day.” Those were Georgia peaches they were palming to their kids, whispering, “eat up,” before the fruit had been weighed and paid for.
“I wait every year for the real Jersey tomatoes. You can’t get that country flavor in the city!” They couldn’t get it here, either: These were New Mexican beefsteaks, greased with mineral oil to an enticing sheen and petroleum fragrance. Didn’t they notice the absence of any roses-and-resin tomato-y perfume?
CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the lesser son of a greater father, gets called “Fredo” and hilarity ensues:
The Brooklyn bridge used to double as a wine storage facility.
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