LinkSwarm for April 17, 2020

Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! With all those “China lies” links earlier in the week, this one may be a little light.

  • Snapshot of what the Coronavirus lockdown is doing to the economy. Bonus: “Scooter sharing companies like Lime and Bird, which were booming, have suffered potentially fatal blows.” So there is an upside! (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Another 5.2 million people filed for unemployment.
  • Dead body found found outside state unemployment office.
  • The Wuhan Cornavirus shutdown may kill off a lot of legacy media. No one is going to be sad to see Buzzfeed die, but the Chicago Tribune is another thing. Still, for the last twenty years or so, newspapers have had a chance to choose to be profitable or liberal, and an overwhelming majority choose liberal.
  • Airlines are farked. United “will fly fewer people during all of next month than on a single day in May 2019.”
  • Know who else is screwed? China. Not just from the lies and the virus and the killing and the GLAVIN, but also the $1 trillion bursting debt bubble of their smoke and mirrors economy.
  • 668 sailors infected with the Wuhan coronavirus on France’s Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier. The de Gaulle has had numerous maintenance issues over the years, but last year it helped fly strike packets against the last remnants of the Islamic State at Baghuz Fawqani.
  • Speaking of China and aircraft carriers, a Chinese naval group featuring the Shandong, their newest carrier, is carrying out maneuvers near Taiwan.
  • Speaking of fighting commies, Dwight continues his historical video excavations with a look at how to avoid Viet Cong booby traps.
  • Wholesale gasoline hits 12 cents a gallon in North Dakota.
  • Other countries: We’re not taking those stinking deportees back. America: Well then, I guess you don’t need these visas.
  • Gretchen Whitmer, the worst governor in America.

    Among the complaints was that Whitmer had prohibited sale of seeds and other garden supplies, at a time when vegetable gardens need to be planted. Executive Order 2020-42 is titled, “Temporary requirement to suspend activities that are not necessary to sustain or protect life,” and is quite specific about which activities are and are “not necessary.” Stores with “more than 50,000 square feet” (e.g., Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot) are ordered to close areas of the store “by cordoning them off, placing signs in aisles, posting prominent signs, removing goods from shelves, or other appropriate means” that sell carpet or flooring, furniture, and “garden centers and plant nurseries.” So if Grandma went to Walmart for groceries and hoped to pick up some tomato plants or cucumber seeds while she was there — sorry, Grandma! You could get a thousand-dollar fine and 90 days in jail for disobeying Whitmer’s orders.

    Posting photos from a Walmart in Grand Rapids showing the now-banned seeds cordoned off with yellow tape, one Twitter user declared: “@GovWhitmer has banned us from growing our own food. This is [bleeping] insane.” Another user posted a photo indicating that it’s now apparently forbidden to sell American flags in Michigan. Barbecue grills, lawn chairs — anything in the garden section is now streng verboten in Michigan. References to Whitmer as a “dictator” proliferated on social media over the weekend, as Michigan residents came to grips with the consequences of the governor’s draconian order.

  • Those draconian restrictions explain the giant protest against her. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “The Only 2016 Campaign That Deliberately Colluded With Russians Was Hillary Clinton’s”:

    or more than two years, the campaign, presidential transition, and official government administration of Donald Trump operated under a cloud of suspicion that they had engaged in a treasonous conspiracy to steal the 2016 election from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Trump and his top associates were accused of collusion and of conspiring with the Russians to subvert American democracy.

    The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency publicly declared Trump to be guilty of treason, an offense punishable by death. The former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the country’s premier law enforcement agency, intimated that the president had illegally obstructed justice.

    In the end, none of it was true. After a nearly two-year-long investigation that issued 2,800 subpoenas, interviewed 500 witnesses, and used nearly 300 wiretaps and pen registers, Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no evidence of collusion by Trump or his associates.

    But that doesn’t mean 2016 was free of Russian collusion. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that a 2016 presidential campaign willfully and deliberately colluded with Russians in a bid to interfere with American elections. It wasn’t Trump’s campaign that colluded with shady Russia oligarchs and sketchy Russian sources to subvert American democracy: it was Hillary Clinton’s.

    In fact, the entire Russian collusion conspiracy that held the nation hostage for more than two years was the brainchild of a foreign national who was working on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin. At the same time he was telling the media that Trump was the undisclosed agent of Russia, that foreign national was lobbying the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to ease up on his Russian benefactor.

    As it turns out, the DOJ official being lobbied was the spouse of one of that foreign national’s co-workers at the firm that hired the two of them to foment Russian hysteria on behalf of the Clinton campaign. And in a twist almost too absurd for even the most bizarre Franz Kafka novel, that firm was itself working on behalf of a Russian billionaire’s corporation that had been charged by U.S. federal prosecutors with illegally evading U.S. sanctions.

    (Hat tip: Rep. Devin Nunes.)

  • Feverish Wuhan coronavirus-infected Fredo Cuomo breaks quarantine and complains that he’s not allowed to punch strangers out because he’s a celebrity.
  • Black Georgia State Democratic Rep. Vernon Jones says he’s going to vote for President Trump. “President Trump’s handling of the economy, his support for historically black colleges and his criminal justice initiatives drew me to endorse his campaign…When you look at the unemployment rates among black Americans before the pandemic, they were at historic lows. That’s just a fact.”
  • The City Council of Watuga, Texas (in north Tarrant County) voted to ban mere citizens from recording city council members. Glik vs Cunniffe would like a word with you…
  • 65-year old woman in shoots 19-year old home invader.
  • “In first, Kim Jong Un a no-show at annual “Day of the Sun” commemorations.” Hmmm. (strokes chin) (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • A history of The Rolling Stones lips logo.
  • Heh, Election Edition:

  • What’s the deal with birds? (Hat tip: Amy Alkon.)

  • Heh:

  • Good boy!

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    3 Responses to “LinkSwarm for April 17, 2020”

    1. Howard says:

      GLAVIN?

    2. Lawrence Person says:

      Reference to Professor Frink in The Simpsons.

    3. […] states during the 2020 Flu-Manchu panic (such as Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer banning seed sales. And remember, such interference in people growing food on their own land was blessed by the […]

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