Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were among more than four dozen people charged in a nationwide college admissions cheating scandal that involved wealthy individuals paying up to $6.5 million to place their children into elite universities, according to court records revealed Tuesday.
The alleged scam — which involved students being placed into top colleges such as Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, University of Southern California, UCLA and the University of Texas — was run by a man in California, William Rick Singer, who helped parents get their children into the schools through bribes, court documents unsealed in Boston showed.
Singer, who authorities said will plead guilty to racketeering, ran the charity, Key Worldwide Foundation, which received $25 million in total to guarantee the admissions, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said during a Tuesday news conference.
Most of the students did not know their admission to the school was due to a bribe, authorities said.
The children’s parents would pay a specified amount of money fully aware it would be used to gain college admission. The money would then go toward an SAT or ACT administrator or a college athletic coach who would fake a profile for the prospective student — regardless of their athletic ability, according to the charging documents.
There was a live broadcast covering more details, including the fact that one of the crooked SAT sites was in Houston.
The list of those indicted. The names include a Michael Center in the Western District of Texas and a John Wilson of the Southern District of Texas. According to KXAN, that Michael Center is UT’s tennis coach. Wilson may be the person involved in the Houston SAT cheating portion.
This comes right after the death of former UT President Bill Powers, who was up to his ears in a completely different UT admissions scandal, but one that also involved admitting unqualified students with wealthy, well-connected parents.
Developing…
Update: This is the longest video I could find of the FBI press conference:
Center, who is in his 19th year at UT, has an annual salary of $232,338. He agreed to accept $100,000 as a bribe in exchange for designating a student as a Longhorn tennis recruit, according to investigators. The applicant, according to the FBI affidavit, “did not play competitive tennis.” Center has been arrested and will appear before a federal magistrate judge at 2 p.m. Tuesday.
Three more people in Houston also arrested in the case:
At least three Houstonians were indicted in the scheme: Martin Fox, who is the president of a private tennis academy in Houston; Niki Williams, an assistant teacher at a Houston high school and test administrator for the College Board and ACT; and John Wilson, a founder and CEO of a private equity and real estate development firm.
Williams, Fox, and Wilson were taken into custody and later released on bond. Williams was released on a $20,000 unsecured bond, while Fox was freed on a $50,000 secured bond. Fox was also restricted travel outside of the Southern District of Texas other than court appearance in Massachusetts.
You would think a simple condemnation of antisemitism would be an easy thing for House Democrats to do. You’d be wrong. Like the UK’s Labour Party, the Social Justice Warrior rot has crept into the Democrats to the point where they are institutionally hostile to Israel and Jews. The need for Muslim votes outweighs forthright condemnation of one of the world’s oldest (and deadliest) prejudices.
So enjoy a LinkSwarm while you wait for the blood-red tide of anarchy to be loosed on the world:
The Democratic Party Has Normalized Anti-Semitism: “No educated human believes [Democratic Rep. Ilhan] Omar inadvertently accused “Benjamin”-grubbing Rootless Cosmopolitans of hypnotizing the world for their evil. These are long-standing, conspiratorial attacks on the Jewish people, used by anti-Semites on right and left, and popular throughout the Islamic world.” (Hat tip: Sean Davis on Twitter.)
And the hits keep coming! New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls for and end to the U.S.-Israel special relationship. I’m sure such a position could never negatively impact reelection chances for a congresswoman representing New York City…
“Federal judge temporarily blocks Texas from purging voters in citizenship review. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery called the review “ham-handed” and ordered counties not to remove any voters from the rolls without his approval and “a conclusive showing that the person is ineligible to vote.” I know it will shock you to learn that Biery is a Clinton appointee. Can’t purge those precious illegal alien votes for Democrats off the rolls…
“Last week a new pro-illegal alien organization launched in the Lone Star State: Texans for Economic Growth. The group, which appears to contain more chambers of commerce than actual businesses, is directly tied to Partnership for a New American Economy, a “comprehensive immigration reform” (pro-amnesty) organization headed by two billionaires, the anti-gun former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch; a host of other media elites; big business CEOs; and mayors.” They oppose ending state subsidies for illegal aliens.
Is Pakistan finally doing something about terrorism? “Pakistan intensified its crackdown against Islamist militants on Thursday, with the government announcing it had taken control of 182 religious schools and detained more than 100 people as part of its push against banned groups.” Don’t believe it. As sure as the heat is off, expect those same militants to be released and go right back on the ISI payroll…
Saying "the USSR did not built its economy up through Indigenous genocide, stolen lands, and extensive use of slave labour" is like saying "At least Hitler came to power without antisemitism and violence."
It’s ten years since Obama’s Russian reset. “By the time Trump took office, just over two years ago, a greatly emboldened Russia had effectively digested Crimea, was engaged on a rapidly expanding scale in joint military exercises with China, was energetically cultivating such clients in the Western Hemisphere as the USSR’s old comrade Cuba and Putin’s pals in Venezuela, and was militarily entrenched in Syria as a mainstay of the Assad regime.”
Crenshaw might be the congressional GOP’s best answer to AOC, but he decidedly doesn’t want to be seen as a Republican version of the 29-year-old New York Democrat, who is “always trying to embrace radicalism,” he told me during a recent interview in his new office on the fourth floor of the Cannon House Office Building. He wants to take his party in a more traditional—not radical—direction. “We have to make conservatism cool and exciting again,” is how he described his mission in politics when I first met him a year ago. “We have to bring back that Reagan optimism.”
Crenshaw’s combination of traditional conservatism and rising popularity put him in an unusual position in Congress. He describes himself as a “plain old conservative”—he supports free trade, wants to reform Medicare and Social Security, and thinks American troops should stay in Afghanistan (where an IED took one of the veteran’s eyes) as long as they’re needed to prevent another 9/11. That puts him at odds with Trump, whom Crenshaw has been unafraid to criticize, going so far as to call his rhetoric “insane” and “hateful” during the 2016 presidential campaign. But Crenshaw is more “Sometimes Trump” than “Never Trump.” He is not pushing for a 2020 Republican primary challenge and is not trying to write off Trump’s wing of the party—hence, his warm reception at CPAC. In fact, Crenshaw has praised the president for his policies on immigration, even recently voting in support of Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a border wall, a move many conservatives opposed.
Ignore the “dares to take on Trump” angle of the article. Crenshaw’s biggest advantage is a temperament almost completely opposite from Trump’s, which voters may look for in 2024.
Former Texas congressman Ralph Hall died at age 95. Hall was a conservative Democrat who endorsed George W. Bush for President in 2000, then switched to the GOP in 2004, one of the last conservative Democratic office holders to leave the party. “Hall had always been a thorn in Democrats’ side even before he changed parties. In 1985, he voted ‘present’ rather than support then-Speaker Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill’s, D-Mass., reelection. ”
Two years ago, Wonder Woman proved a female-led superhero movie could reach the highest levels of the genre, with Gal Gadot proving robust and redoubtable, yet also charming and feminine. I spent Captain Marvel waiting for Gadot. What I got was Brie Larson: charmless, humorless, a character so without texture that she might as well be made out of aluminum.
Captain Marvel might be the first blockbuster movie whose animating idea is fear. Every page of the script betrays terror of what people might say about the film on social media. Give Carol Danvers a love interest? Eek! No, women can’t be defined by the men in their lives! Make her vulnerable? OMG, no, that’s crazy. Feminine? What century are you from if you think females should be feminine? Toward the end of the movie, when a villain preparing for an epic confrontation with Carol, the fighter pilot turned Superwoman, chides her that she will fail because she can’t control her emotions, there is no tension whatsoever. We’ve just spent two hours watching her be utterly unfazed by anything. Giving Carol actual emotions would, of course, lead to at least 27 people calling the film misogynist on Twitter, and directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are petrified of that.
Just to be completely, unerringly, let’s-bubble-wrap-the-universe safe, Boden and Fleck decided to make Danvers stronger than strong, fiercer than fierce, braver than brave. Larson spends the entire movie being insouciant, kicking butt, delivering her lines in an I-got-this monotone and staring down everything with a Blue Steel gaze of supreme confidence. Superheroes are defined by their limitations — Superman’s Kryptonite, Batman’s mortality — but Captain Marvel is just an invincible bore. The screenplay by Boden, Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, with a story by the three of them plus Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve, presents us with Brie Larson’s Carol being amazingly strong and resilient at the beginning, middle, and end. This isn’t an arc, it’s a straight line.
“Ilhan Omar Withdraws Support From Bill To Save The Earth After Learning That’s Where Israel Is.” “When I made the Green New Deal, I thought weather like storms and earthquakes were all caused by climate change, but now I’ve learned from Representative Omar that lots of that is actually from Jewish-controlled weather machines.”
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…
Houston police will no longer use no-knock warrants following a drug raid on a home that turned into a deadly shootout in which two suspects were killed and five undercover officers were injured, the city’s police chief said.
“The no-knock warrants are going to go away like leaded gasoline in this city,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo announced during a town hall meeting Monday.
He said officers will need to request a special exemption from his office to conduct a no-knock raid.
The decision comes as the city faces criticism from local community activists for the Jan. 28 raid that led to the deaths of 59-year-old Dennis Tuttle and 58-year-old Rhogena Nicholas, who both lived in the home. Four officers were shot in the gunfight and another was injured but not shot.
Acevedo revealed last week that an investigation into the drug raid found a 30-year veteran of the force lied in an affidavit to justify storming the house without warning. Officer Gerald Goines, who prepared the search warrant, has since been suspended and it’s unclear what charges he could face, according to the police chief.
Goines couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
“I’m very confident we’re going to have criminal charges on one or more of the officers,” Acevedo said.
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said her office will investigate and hold those involved accountable.
Acevedo also announced a new policy for undercover officers to wear body cameras during raids.
So: Progress! On a number of fronts. Let’s hope that HPD follows through on these reforms, and that other law enforcement agencies follow suit.
An internal Houston police investigation has uncovered alarming deficiencies in the department’s narcotics division that led to an allegedly falsified search warrant used to justify a southeast Houston drug raid last month that killed two Pecan Park residents and injured five officers, according to documents obtained Friday by the Houston Chronicle.
In a hastily called press conference, Police Chief Art Acevedo said Gerald Goines, the veteran narcotics case agent at the center of the controversy, will likely face criminal charges. The internal investigation revealed he allegedly lied about using a confidential informant to conduct an undercover buy at the residence on Harding Street. The buy led to a raid and a fatal gunfight at the house the next day, killing Dennis Tuttle, 59, and Rhogena Nicholas, 58, and injuring five Houston Police Department officers.
The debacle, which has infuriated officers across the department and which critics say has damaged public trust in HPD, and infuriated members of the department’s rank-and-file, also prompted Acevedo to order an “extensive audit” of the 175-member narcotics division and an examination of Goines’ recent cases.
The Fuzzy Dunlop of the post title refers to a non-existent informant on The Wire who was ginned up out of thin air to hide the fact police on that show were using a remote microphone (taken from inventory without permission) hidden in a tennis ball (hence the name) to nab a particularly elusive drug-gang.
A deeper look at the warrants involved in the Houston raid turned up more lies:
A confidential informant didn’t buy drugs at the southeast Houston home where a botched police raid turned into a deadly shootout last month, according to a new search warrant.
The shocking new information was revealed today after ABC13 obtained two of several search warrants executed as part of the ongoing investigation following the deadly raid.
The search warrant clearly shows the initial information used to obtain the no-knock search warrant involved a number of lies.
In the original warrant obtained on Jan. 28, the lead case agent, Officer Gerald Goines, wrote that a confidential informant bought heroin at the house the day before the drug raid. The informant also allegedly saw heroin and a weapon, which appeared to be a 9mm handgun, as he was buying the suspected drugs at the house.
In that warrant, the informant allegedly returned to Goines with a brown powder substance, telling him that it was called “boy,” which is slang for heroin. The confidential informant also said the substance he allegedly bought at the home was packed in a large quantity of plastic baggies.
All of that information was written in the search warrant, leading a judge to find probable cause and signing it.
Rhogena Nicholas, 58, and Dennis Tuttle, 59, were both killed in the raid at their home at 7815 Harding St. Four HPD officers were shot and a fifth officer injured his knee.
But on Friday, in the warrants executed by officers investigating the botched raid, it is clear that no confidential informant ever went to the house on 7815 Harding. In fact, all informants who worked with Goines told investigators they did not go in that home.
“We know we’ve had a criminal violation already,” Chief Acevedo said about the internal investigation of officers involved in the botched raid.
Investigators returned to Goines for the names of more informants, who had all worked for Goines in the past. They all denied making a buy for Goines at the home. They also denied ever buying drugs from Nicholas or Tuttle.
The warrant shows that two bags of heroin were found in Goines’ city vehicle.
So it turns out that two people died and five cops were shot in a no-knock raid of an alleged dealer’s house where no significant narcotics were found on information provided by, well, possibly no one. Something obviously stinks here.
No-knock raids used to be relatively rare things, about 3,000 a year nationwide in the 1980s, a number that swelled to over 40,000 in 2006, a side effect of the War on Drugs.
It’s long past time to impose far more stringent requirements on no knock raids, or even eliminate them entirely. Indeed, beyond such unlikely scenarios as “there’s a known cop-killer with a gun” or “a Islamic terrorist house filled with suicide vest explosives” or “a cartel boss with twenty henchmen with automatic weapons,” it’s hard to conceive of conditions requiring no-knock raids. A mere street-level bust certainly isn’t one of them.
No American citizen should die at the hands of police based on the false say-so of Fuzzy Dunlop.
Sometimes you link piece because you read it and go “What the hell?” Such is the case with this piece on the Houston Independent School District School Board:
Three days after the stunning ouster of Houston ISD Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan in mid-October, an unexpected move that further divided the already-fractured school board, district leaders gathered for training on how to govern.
Instead, HISD leaders spent four straight hours lobbing blistering accusations of disingenuous, duplicitous and dismissive behavior by their colleagues. Through raised voices and tears, they bemoaned the disintegration of trust and productivity on the board, with one trustee describing his service as “a step below hell” and another likening her experience to “an abusive relationship.”
The intervention-style airing of grievances, captured on video and reported here for the first time, culminated with Trustee Wanda Adams standing up and yelling at Trustee Elizabeth Santos, angry that board members did not defend her after she received threats while serving as board president in 2017.
Well, there’s one problem. You’re supposed to hold off of the Festivus Airing of Grievances until December 23.
“Did y’all come to my defense? Hell no,” Adams shouted as she slowly walked toward Santos, prompting a top Texas Education Agency official in the room to position himself between the two trustees. “So, you want to know how I felt last year? I was quiet the whole year. So, don’t come up here crying ‘woe is me’ when people came to my house, attacked me.”
Houston ISD Trustee Wanda Adams shouted at fellow board member Elizabeth Santos for about 90 seconds during a mid-October board meeting, slowly walking toward her until Texas Education Agency Deputy Commissioner of Governance AJ Crabill stepped between them. The exchange marked the highest point of tension during a heated meeting in the aftermath of Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan’s unexpected ouster, which was later reversed.
The remarkably candid meeting laid bare the dysfunction that critics say has weakened the Houston school board’s ability to serve the district’s 213,000 children and prompted calls for major state intervention over the past several months. The turmoil has stalled efforts to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the district, including poor academic performance among many low-income students, inequities in funding between campuses and unstable administrative leadership. Houston ISD leaders also suspect the board’s disharmony has contributed to the district’s largest enrollment decline in 12 years.
“I have felt like this year (in 2018), there’s been no productive work done by the board,” Trustee Anne Sung said during the October meeting.
Details of the seven-hour mid-October meeting have not been publicly disclosed until now, largely because it was not attended by local media and HISD officials did not post video of the meeting online. The Houston Chronicle obtained a copy of the video through a public records request.
The video depicts a beaten-down board compromised by grudges, clashing personalities and heightened suspicions. Some trustees have said they were unaware they were being recorded during the meeting, resulting in an unfiltered look at the fragmented board.
Houston ISD Trustee Anne Sung explained to colleagues the frustration she felt in 2018 while serving on the school board, as well as part of her rationale for voting to replace Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan.
“There’s so much back-biting and back-stabbing and all of these little freaking agendas,” then-Board President Rhonda Skillern-Jones said during the meeting. “Every single freaking person here contributed to that. And until we take responsibility for that, it’s not going to change. And the public sees that. They see right through us.”
The articles portrays a school board at each other’s throats, with the biggest battles about personal respect rather than what’s best for students. It’s like an episode of one of those reality talk shows where poor people scream at each other for an hour. Except these people oversee the eighth largest school district in the country.
The relative inaction does not bode well for HISD’s prospects of maintaining local control over the district. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath has had legal authority to replace the district’s school board since September 2017, the result of HISD’s inability to prove strong governance practices and improve academics at long-struggling schools. Morath has not exercised that option, but Gov. Greg Abbott’s blistering comments about the district’s leadership last month — a “disaster,” he tweeted — and a fresh state investigation into potential Open Meetings Act violations by several trustees raises the stakes for HISD.
Even if Morath resists pulling the takeover trigger, chronically low performance at four campuses could prompt a legally required state takeover of the board later this year.
Snip.
The school board has been riddled with distrust and in-fighting for years, often cutting across the class, ethnic and racial lines that cleave the diverse district. The interpersonal grievances frequently are well known in local education circles but less visible to the public.
The mid-October meeting, however, illustrates how the current iteration of the board — three new members were seated to begin 2018 — became Houston’s most maligned governing group.
One by one, trustees voiced frustration with fellow board members or the district administration, accusing colleagues of undermining them, distorting the truth or offering inadequate support.
Skillern-Jones, for example, spent several minutes criticizing nearly all of the trustees for failing to defend her leadership in 2018, noting that she reluctantly assumed the presidency after Trustee Jolanda Jones scuttled Sung’s candidacy. Skillern-Jones drew flak in April when she ordered HISD police to clear the audience from the room during a raucous board meeting, which precipitated the arrests of two women.
Me me me me me.
I believe in subsidiarity, the idea that power should devolve to the lowest level of government possible, but it may very well be time for the state to take over HISD.
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I for one am stuffed…
For those freaking out about Chief Justice Roberts saying there are no Democratic or Republican judges…¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He’s the head of a co-equal branch of the United States federal government, of course he’s going to defend the institutional independence of the court, no matter the evidence to the contrary. It’s pretty much required for his position.
Now here’s a LinkSwarm to enjoy before girding your loins to do battle over a $99 stereo marked down to $69…
Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due process protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.
Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.
Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.
Snip.
Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.”
So Jamal Khashoggi – a former Saudi intelligence agent, a man who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a sworn opponent of MBS’ reform program– was in the process of setting up a centre to promote the ideology of the MB. He was setting it up in Turkey with Qatari money. The Saudis wanted to stop him. In September they offered him $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia and to live there unhindered. They wanted him out of play. Khashoggi refused and the rest you know. The Saudis killed him.
Let me make two points. First, there is no justification for murdering Khashoggi. Secondly, this man wasn’t some Western-oriented liberal brutally murdered because of his passion for freedom. This man was a player.
Laura Loomer banned from Twitter. I have had zero interactions with Ms. Loomer, and she sounds like quite a piece of work, but banning her for criticizing a Muslim politician for supporting female genital mutilation is asinine.
A major error in an alarming study published in Nature on October 31 suggesting that “ocean warming is at the high end of previous estimates, with implications for policy-relevant measurements of the Earth response to climate change, such as climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases and the thermal component of sea-level rise.” How much higher? Using a novel technique to measure the accumulation of heat in the oceans, Princeton geoscientist Laure Resplandy and her team calculated that the amount of heat being absorbed by the oceans is more than 60 percent higher per year than the estimates offered by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2014.
Dire headlines warning that catastrophic global warming was more likely than previously thought ensued.
However, British climate researcher and statistician Nicholas Lewis re-crunched the numbers in the study and found that Resplandy and her team had made significant errors in their calculations.
Remember: “The Science is settled” only when it backs the pro-warming cause…
Another day, another press scandal, this time in Texas:
Another Houston Chronicle journalist flagged me with questions about the accuracy of a story written by veteran Austin reporter Mike Ward. Ward joined the Chronicle in 2014 after a long career with the Austin American-Statesman. Specifically, questions were raised about whether individuals quoted in one of his stories were real people.
Our own researchers, after an initial review, had difficulty finding a number of sources cited in Ward’s most recent reports.
Ward has insisted that his work was truthful, that his work involved real people, and that we would eventually find the individuals behind his “man-on-the-street” interviews. However, given the questions this review raised, he offered to resign and I accepted that resignation last week. If we were in another business, that might be enough.
As a journalism organization, we owe the public more. We owe our readers the truth and to tell you if, in fact, there were inaccuracies in anything we published. We simply do not know the full story yet.
To help us ferret this out, we have hired an independent, highly respected journalist to review Ward’s work for the last year, or further, if necessary, and determine whether any reporting transgressions occurred. We have given that journalist full access to our archives and promised access to our editors as well. Investigative work takes time, and it can be tedious. Tracking down and verifying sources, especially across a year or more of work, requires significant legwork.
Ward frequently reported on state politics.
At least the Chronicle was kind enough to make a public statement about it.
Once again: If members of the media want to know why the public has lost faith in them, they need only look in the mirror.
Leftist befuddled by how black men can join “white nationalist” groups like Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. Here’s a hint, dumbasses: They’re not white nationalist groups.
Social Justice Warriors attempt to slip their usual political bullshit into open source licensing terms and get smacked down hard. “Less than 24 hours after I posted this, the license change was revoked and its committer expelled from the project.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
#Gamergate Social Justice Warrior lunatic “Brianna Wu” lost her a bid for Massachusetts’ 8th U.S. congressional district by 49 points.
Theranos, the biotech company fraud built, is shutting down. Now all that remains is for Elizabeth Holmes to go to federal prison on pending wire fraud charges.
Principles of the Resistance: 1) When we get back in power there will be a purge and a blacklist and we will destroy the lives of anyone who in any way supported Trump! 2) We need to stop our nation's alarming drift into tribalism. https://t.co/3ktfRKP80S
Back in the dim mists of time, Democrats used to nominate swing district candidates who could at least pretend to be moderates. This year? Not so much.
Today, I’m highlighting another extremist Democrat in Texas, Gina Ortiz Jones, who finished first in a five-way primary, with 42% of the vote and then defeated Rick Trevino in the May runoff, to challenge Republican Rep. Will Hurd in the 23rd District.
This is one of the most competitive districts in the country, and has changed hands five times between Republicans and Democrats in the past 25 years. Hurd, a former CIA officer and the only black Republican member of Congress from Texas, won the seat in 2014 with only a 2,500-vote margin over the Democrat incumbent, and was re-elected in 2016 with a margin of only 3,000 votes. In a mid-term where Democrats are energized by anti-Trump mania, Hurd faces a tough fight, and Democrats have poured more than $1 million into the Jones campaign.
Fortunately for Republicans, however, Jones is way out of step with the values of this largely rural district, which stretches all the way from the suburbs of San Antonio in the east to El Paso in the west. The district is 55% Hispanic, and Jones has made a point of using her mother’s maiden name, with the slogan “One of Us, Fighting For Us” in her campaign.
Except she’s not Hispanic. Her mother immigrated from the Philippines and her father (who never married her mother) was a white drug addict. While she’s using “Ortiz” to play the identity-politics game with Texas voters, however, she’s using a lesbian-feminist message to solicit support nationally from Trump-haters, promising to become the “first Filipina-American and first out-lesbian to represent Texas in Congress, and she’ll be the first woman to represent her district.“ She has been endorsed by all the usual suspects of left-wing extremism, including pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List, pro-homosexual groups like Equality PAC, Human Rights Campaign and the LGBT Victory Fund, and the anti-Israel JStreetPAC, as well as the Feminist Majority, People for the American Way and the AFL-CIO. Her agenda includes socialized medicine, taxpayer funding for abortion, gun control, amnesty for illegal aliens, and every other issue you might expect from someone who attended elite Boston University.
“In what appears to have been a last-ditch move to sway a tax ratification election in their favor, South San Antonio ISD officials likely violated state law on Tuesday by paying district employees to go vote for the tax increase. But for those at home wondering, crime doesn’t pay. Despite their fourth-quarter efforts, voters defeated the tax hike by a 57–43 margin.”
The Idiots on the Austin City Council voted to subsidize a professional soccer team on city land. Because subsidizing a sport Texans actually like just wasn’t insulting enough. (More background here.)
When is an interest rate swap a secret stealth tax increase? This piece walks you through how tiny Azle ISD’s machinations amount to a form of regulatory arbitrage to do just that.