Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Google again, this time over location tracking.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Google for harvesting the location data of its users, claiming the practice violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (TDTPA).
“This most recent Google lawsuit argues that the company misled Texas consumers by continuing to track their personal location even when the user thought he or she had disabled it from doing so. Google then uses the deceptively gathered data to push advertisements to the consumer, earning the Big Tech company enormous profits,” Paxton’s office stated in a press release issued Monday morning.
The Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act is a law that requires businesses in Texas to truthfully represent their products and ownership to consumers. By misleadingly implying to users that they can stop location tracking, Paxton claims Google violated the section of the law that bans businesses from withholding information that might prevent consumers from using their product.
“Google has systematically misled, deceived, and withheld material facts from users in Texas about how their location is tracked and used and how to stop Google from monetizing their movements,” the lawsuit claims.
“[While] many Texans may reasonably believe they have disabled the tracking of their location, the reality is that Google has been hard at work behind the scenes logging their movements in a data store Google calls ‘Footprints.’ But while footprints generally fade, Google ensures that the location information it stores about Texans is not so easily erased.”
The lawsuit claims that the sheer prevalence of Google technology makes the company’s data collection all the more effective, complete, and specific. Paxton argues that location data alone allows the company to create a “unique mosaic” of each user with information like health status and religious affiliation inferred from travel habits.
This is a good time to remind you that if Google or Facebook has your email address or phone number (and they do), they have all your personal information and can track you no matter how many cookies or location tracking controls you turn off. And it’s not just them: Any of their advertising partners that has your email or phone number can link you to your Google and/or Facebook profile. So any time you enter your email to, say, use Wi-Fi at a venue, it’s a good bet they automatically have access to all the ad profile information Google and Facebook have gathered on you. And I suspect this information is tied to your phone in various ways, cookies or no cookies.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden has a bad week, another high profile Democratic politician is indicted on federal charges, and a dog goes home.
After having his business mandate overturned by the Supreme Court, Joe Biden goes on TV to plead that they have to end the filibuster because Republican election fraud prevention laws are keeping Democrats from cheating. (I may be paraphrasing a little.) Whereupon…
Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema said the same. You know, just like the last thousand times Democratic Media Complex mouthpieces asked them. “Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you really really really sure? But we want it!”
If they vote with Schumer, Republicans will eat Kelly and Hassan alive this year and others later on, all for a vote that Manchin and Sinema have already insisted will go nowhere anyway. If they vote against the filibuster change, progressives will eat them alive in states where their support is critical. Even if these seats were salvageable, and that may not be the case already for Kelly and Hassan, Schumer’s move is guaranteed to lose seats for no purpose whatsoever. It’s the political equivalent of Pickett’s Charge.
Democrats handled Sinema’s refusal with tact and grace. Ha, just kidding! They called her a racist:
Have you tried calling her racist harder?
You're like an 8-year old kid playing a video game that only knows how to punch one button over and over again. pic.twitter.com/qpmcWxVnNY
Before she became vice president, Kamala Harris had a bad habit of ignoring prepared briefing materials.
She does not appear to have kicked this habit, even after making it all the way to the White House.
“Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared,” the Washington Post reports.
One former staffer told the paper, “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it’s not really clear why.”
The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.
Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.
Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.
Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
It’s not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, it’s surprising that all of them aren’t screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.
With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.
The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.
That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”
Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.
Snip.
That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.
Snip.
Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.
The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists” are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.
CNN proudly announced that the most-watched day in the history of their network was 1/6. The dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from the Trump campaign, his presidency and its aftermath than they, and they are desperate to rejuvenate it and re-discover that glory. Meanwhile, coddled journalists who have never broken meaningful stories have finally found a way to claim that they stared down dangerous and risky situations — as if they spent years in the middle of an active war zone or were persecuted and prosecuted by a corrupt and authoritarian state for their intrepid reporting — and have converted Brian Stelter’s CNN show into a virtual therapists’s couch where they all get to go and talk about how they are still coping with the deep trauma of spending a few hours in the Capitol last year.
The pettiness and absurdity of this Democrat/media narrative, laughable as it often is, does not mean it is free of danger. Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable.
A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended consequences of Hollywood’s efforts to diversify. Those white men who had spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired.
The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief, normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.
Snipped.
So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said “only select staff” would have access to data collected on the platform.)
The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024. But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were submitted to the platform.
Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion standards.” (“I guarantee you every studio has something like that,” a longtime writer and director said.)
Snip.
The old-timers accustomed to being on the inside—and the (non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid they’d never get there—were one-part confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.
“Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”
Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”
Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: “I get so paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything.’ It is one of those things, ‘Will I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?’ Getting jobs in this town is so hard, and I’m very grateful to have a great job. If there’s any so-called ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.”
It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that they thought everyone outside Hollywood—the country, their audience—believed. “Hollywood was never anti-Communist,” Wasson said. “It just pretended to be. In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business. There’s no morality here.”
That amorality, coupled with a finely tuned sense of what the audience is hungry for, what’s trending, has left Hollywood more susceptible to the vagaries of the culture war.
“Now, they’ll just say, ‘Sorry, diversity quotas. We’re just not allowed to hire you,’” said a 48-year-old white, male comedy writer who was recently dropped by his agent.
Sounds like an opportunity to hire great talent on the cheap from someone outside the club. If only someone had the balls…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Planned Parenthood:
Planned Parenthood took advantage of Texans, violated medical standards, & lied. While they’re no longer a TX Medicaid provider, they still collected millions for their bloody biz.
I’m suing to get that wrongly-syphoned money back for Texans and stand for life. pic.twitter.com/jcI5rmWAHb
For your 2024 “change” presidential candidate, would you believe none other than Grandma Death herself? If she actually gets the nomination, then we’ll know we’re living in the simulation…
What you do see are the fruits of the conquest. The admixture of confident aggression, roll-the-dice settlement, and entrepreneurial genius manifests itself with the first wells you see. The Permian is rich, a treasure-house stored up across one hundred million years, and the wells are everywhere. They appear, solitary or in pairs, and as you proceed westward they multiply. There is a particular mesa with a sharp escarpment on its south face, and every time I see it I marvel at the wells perched on its nearly vertical incline. There is new exploration and investment, too. The Permian has been exploited for nearly a century, but its yield is nowhere close to exhaustion. Yesterday, and the day before, I witnessed tremendous convoys — men, trucks, equipment — sallying forth to new wells in the creation. There is a cotton field with wells on it: acreage that produces everything America needs to keep warm. In Midland itself, there is a golf course with a well on it. There are roadside shoulders with wells on them. There are wells everywhere. Midland-Odessa works: they raise families and hell alike, and power the continent.
All of this is set in the Llano Estacado, a region of Texas ordinarily hostile to life and settlement. Most of Texas outside the verdant east is hostile to life and settlement to some degree. The Llano Estacado, though, is nearly the hardest far place there is, exceeded only by the despoblado and desert of the trans-Pecos. The land is hard. The weather is hard. The enterprise is hard too. The oil-and-gas business makes some men rich, ruins more, and perennially frustrates still more. There are the handful of energy giants around the world — the ExxonMobils, the Shells, and the handful of other names you see on gas stations and giant tankers — but that isn’t who you see in the Permian. It isn’t who you see on the road to Midland. What you see are names and signs of firms that you don’t recognize, and wouldn’t unless this was your professional world. Some are well established. Others are just starting out. All of them are the names of dreams and gambles: ideas made real but not necessarily lasting, leaps without nets. There is something admirable to it.
Spend time in Midland (and, if you’re raising hell, in Odessa) and you realize you’re seeing a way of life that is increasingly rare. It is a place where nearly everyone is working. I don’t mean sitting at a desk. I mean labor as it was once understood, things done with the hands, wearying the body, with the end product being something you could see, touch, feel. It is a single-industry town, yes, but that industry is in the business of real material creation. In our fathers’ time, we could say that about most of America. Now it it characterizes only a small proportion of our national life. Something is lost along with it. You see Midland, a town where the taquerias and coffee shops open at 3:30am, at 4am, at 5am to accommodate what passes for rush hour there — and you see a town that is too hard at work to ever indulge in the luxury of anxiety. Places where people hit the alarm at 6am, at 7am, spend an hour on a crawling commute, spend eight hours motionless in a cube, and then repeat: that’s where alienation and disconnect occur. That’s where the civic neuroses take root and blossom. That’s where we spawn the psychic illnesses peculiar to people who are physically safe and have in their whole lives risked nothing.
Read the whole thing.
Heh:
Joe Biden's presidency has fallen and it can't get up.
Things that make you go “Hmmm.” Namely Austin police finding two submerged bodies in three days…
So you want to become a warlord! Here are some handy tips on ruling your patch of the post-apocalyptic wasteland! (Though sadly, there seems to be very little information on obtaining chrome face spray after the apocalypse…)
They are artifacts that have locked into them so many messages about the aspirations, hopes, needs, and restrictions of their time. They were incredibly expensive things, and they were used as opportunities to demonstrate something about yourself, to say something about yourself to the world…[The best art is] always composed within some sort of restraints. There’s always a limit to how far you can go, and it’s within those limitations that i think human ingenuity does best.
I think this is true, and I think that the restraints and limits of various art forms are what help bring out their greatness.
Another day, another lawsuit against the Biden Administration over unconstitutional federal overreach, in this case issuing a vaccine mandate for Texas National Guard troops that aren’t under federal control.
Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter on Tuesday to Texas Military Department (TMD) Adjutant General Tracy Norris stating his intention to sue the Biden administration over its effort to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for members of the Texas National Guard.
In August, Abbott issued an executive order prohibiting governmental entities from mandating “any individual to receive a COVID-19 vaccine,” but mandates over the Texas National Guard have been unclear.
Following a military-wide order in August from U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin mandating the vaccine, Norris issued a directive to members of the Texas National Guard that service members must meet the requirement or submit a request for a medical or religious exemption.
On November 30, 2021, Austin issued a memorandum that further stipulated “all members of the National Guard must be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 [. . .] in order to participate in drills, training and other duty conducted under title 32.”
In December, Abbott responded to Austin’s memorandum in a letter, saying, “If the federal government keeps threatening to defund the Texas National Guard, I will deploy every legal tool available to me as Governor in defense of these American heroes.”
TMD public affairs staff previously stated that guardsmen “serving on Title 10 orders” — those who have been called on active duty at the national level — were required to be in compliance with the vaccine mandate or request an exemption by December 15, 2021.
Unvaccinated members of the Texas National Guard could potentially lose drill and training pay as those funds come from the federal Department of Defense (DOD).
In his new letter, Abbott specified that it “addresses all Texas guardsmen who are serving in a Title 32 or a state active duty status,” rather than those under Title 10 orders.
“Unless President Biden federalizes the Texas National Guard in accordance with Title 10 of the U.S. Code, he is not your commander-in-chief under our federal or state Constitutions. And as long as I am your commander-in-chief, I will not tolerate efforts to compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine,” said the governor.
Abbott said that the “federal courts have the power to decide whether President Biden violates the U.S. Constitution’s Second Militia Clause by undermining my commander-in-chief power, instead of federalizing Texas’s guardsmen to use his own commander-in-chief power.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent out a Tweet confirming the lawsuit:
Biden is NOT the commander-in-chief of the Texas Military Dep’t. That’s @GovAbbott’s job.
Biden is once again attempting to use federal power to bully state troops to get a Covid vax. This is wrong—and illegal. And I won’t let it happen.
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) January 4, 2022
The text of the lawsuit itsself can be found here.
1. There has long been a clear and distinct line between when National Guardsmen are governed by state authority and when they are governed by federal authority. When National Guardsmen are serving the State, the federal government has no command authority. Neither the President nor federal military officials can order the Governor of Texas and state officials how to govern the Guardsmen under their command. Under the Constitution’s carefully crafted balance between federal and state sovereignty, only the State, through its Governor, possesses legal authority to govern state National Guard personnel who have not been lawfully federalized.
2. Defendants unilaterally severed the division between state and federal authority over the Army National Guard and Air National Guard by attempting to impose a mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy (“Military Vaccine Mandate”) on Guardsmen under state control, and in violation of Texas state law. Rather than exercise their own authority and lawfully activate the President’s chain of command, Defendants have attempted to force state officers to do the work for them, in violation of both the U.S. Constitution and federal laws.
3. This is not a case demanding a position of pro- or anti-vaccine, nor is it a case that challenges any aspect of the federal government’s authority over National Guardsmen once that federal authority has been properly established. Instead, this case seeks protection from the federal government’s unconstitutional action to force Texas, through its Governor, to submit to federal orders and impose federally dictated disciplinary action on its National Guardsmen. “There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.” U.S. Navy Seals 1-26 v. Biden, No. 4:21-cv-01236, slip op. at 2 (N.D. Tex. Jan. 3, 2021). Therefore, Plaintiff Greg Abbott, in his official capacity as Governor of the State of Texas, and as Commander in Chief of the Texas National Guard, brings this suit to enforce rights guaranteed to the Governor and the State of Texas by the U.S. Constitution and federal statutes.
The Roberts Court has tended to show considerably deference to state rights and prerogatives, so expect Texas to prevail in this suit if it reaches that level. But who knows how lower courts will rule, or how long it will take the case to wind its way to the Supreme Court…
All that sucking up to Trump got George P. Bush bubkis:
At the end of May, former President Donald Trump said that he liked two Texas attorney general candidates — current Attorney General Ken Paxton and Land Commissioner George P. Bush — “both very much,” but that he would make his “endorsement and recommendation to the great people of Texas in the not-so-distant future.”
Trump followed through with that on Monday evening and announced his endorsement of Paxton.
“Attorney General Ken Paxton has been bravely on the front line in the fight for Texas, and America, against the vicious and very dangerous Radical Left Democrats, and the foolish unsuspecting RINOs that are destroying our Country,” said Trump.
“Ken is strong on Crime, Border Security, the Second Amendment, Election Integrity and, above all, our Constitution. He loves our Military and our Vets. It is going to take a PATRIOT like Ken Paxton to advance America First policies in order to Make America Great Again. Ken has my Complete and Total Endorsement for another term as Attorney General of Texas. He is a true Texan who will keep Texas safe—and will never let you down!”
Paxton said that he was “honored to receive the endorsement” of Trump.
Several weeks ago after appearing at an event in South Texas along the border with Trump, the attorney general expressed optimism that the endorsement would “fall towards me at the right time.”
After the contested presidential election last year, Paxton filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state challenging the constitutionality of the elections in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, though the Supreme Court ultimately tossed his suit out.
I don’t agree with 100% of Trump’s endorsements, but he got this one right. Among Texas conservatives here is a palpable lack of excitement over Jeb!’s son moving up to Attorney General. Land Commissioner is not an office that usually draws much attention, but all the attention George P. Bush has drawn to it has tended to be negative, especially the Alamo controversy. There’s also a feeling that Paxton has generally done an excellent job and been on the right side of almost every issue, even if he hasn’t won all of them in court.
Paxton is also outpolling Bush right now 42% to 34% (usual poll caveats apply), and Eva Guzman has not yet made much of an impression on the race. Paxton also has more money on hand, but the Bush clan has a famously deep and effective money-raising machine, and Bush has already raised $2,264,137.95 for the race. How much Trump’s endorsement of Paxton will cool fundraising enthusiasm for Bush remains to be seen. I doubt many the people writing checks to Bush backed Trump prior to 2016, but Trump’s endorsement swings a lot of weight in Republican primaries, and I suspect a certain percentage of Bush donors may now see any further donations as wasted money.
Whoever wins the primary is likely to face Joe Jaworski in the general, and right now he has more cash on hand than any declared Democrat running statewide in 2022.
After resigning from the Texas Supreme Court, Eva Guzman has filed the paperwork to run for Texas Attorney General in 2022 against incumbent Ken Paxton and current Land Commissioner George P. Bush:
Eva Guzman, who worked as a state supreme court justice from 2009 until her resignation last week, has filed the paperwork necessary to run in the Republican primary to be the Texas attorney general.
The campaign treasurer appointment (CTA) form was received by the Texas Ethics Commission on June 11 — the date her resignation became effective — and was processed on June 14.
Guzman’s CTA lists Orlando Salazar of Dallas, the vice-chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, as her treasurer.
Having three serious candidates in a down-ballot race is certainly going to make things more interesting.
Michael Quinn Sullivan ran a poll to see what conservatives though of the race. Guzman is a mostly unknown entrant at this point, but the lack of enthusiasm for George P. Bush is palpable:
A prominent Hispanic Republican running probably hurts Bush more than Paxton. Paxton has a lot of solid conservative backers, while George P. Bush has the legendary Bush fundraising machine and squishy Chamber of Commerce business types behind him. As of now, I don’t have a good feel for what sort of backing Guzman has in the race, though ideologically she seems somewhere between the two. If you have a better idea of who’s backing Guzman, feel free to share them in the comments.
Since it appears that I’m now tracking the race, let me throw up some links:
George P. Bush, the current land commissioner of Texas, officially announced at a campaign kick-off event on Wednesday night that he would be running to be the top attorney for the Lone Star State.
“It’s time for a change,” said Bush at the event, held at a bar in Austin.
The move sets up what is sure to be a heated Republican primary race between Bush and current Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Bush, the grandson of former president George H. W. Bush and son of former Florida governor Jeb Bush, was considering a potential run for the position last October after several of Paxton’s top aides raised allegations of abuse of office and bribery against their boss.
“Enough is enough, Ken,” said Bush. “It’s time for you to go.”
Perhaps the most influential endorsement in the race will be from former president Donald Trump.
Last week, Bush tweeted, “Great to speak with President Trump to discuss the future of Texas and how we are keeping up the fight to put America first. I appreciate the words of encouragement and support. Big things coming soon!”
I can’t imagine that there’s a lot of love lost between Trump and the Bush clan, but stranger things have happened.
This decision is an indication that Bush has (probably correctly) identified Paxton as the weakest of the three top statewide office holders. Paxton’s low-grade scandals, clocking in at a mere 20 Milli-Hunters, are pretty weak as scandals go, but they have slightly tarnished what has generally been a very effective and conservative tenure as Attorney General.
But so too has the long-running Alamo redesign controversy sapped George P. Bush’s popularity. In 2014 he ran slightly ahead of Governor Greg Abbott in total votes. In 2018, he ran a couple of points behind.
Bush41 built a very effective fundraising machine, to the benefit of both 43 and George P. Bush, so I imagine Bush will be a moderate favorite in the race, but not a prohibitive one. Also expect Bush to get favorable media coverage right up until he clinches the nomination, at which point the MSM will turn on him in favor of whoever is the Democratic candidate. (Right now former Galveston mayor Joe Jaworksi is the only declared Democrat in the race.)
It also indicates that Bush thinks both Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick are too strong to take on. In this I think he’s correct as well. Abbott has a huge warchest to fend off any challenge. Dan Patrick has about half that, and strong conservative credentials that make it difficult for Bush to unseat him in a Republican primary.
Greetings, and welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm! Bad weather and bad driving are themes, as the ice storm mentioned yesterday already slammed Texas hard. I was without power for over 10 hours last night and this morning, and every tree is heavy with frost.
Hit black ice at 95/They said I’m lucky to be alive…
Bad news for law-abiding Austinites: Police Chief Brian Manley is retiring after 30 years on the force. I’m sure the City Council is eager to replace him with some social justice warrior approved tool. On the other hand, if he wants to run for mayor…
The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.
The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.
You can ding France (and French intellectuals) for a lot of sins, but “insufficient appreciation of western civilization and culture” is not one of them.
The bloom was off the Andrew Cuomo rose for anyone who had eyes to see last year, but now even the Democratic Media Complex is is being forced to admit what a giant pile of manure he is:
America’s worst governor probably never thought he would miss America’s most obnoxious president.
But that is the situation that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo likely finds himself in now that Donald Trump is no longer around to take all the heat for mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, now that the man who commanded nearly every minute of the media’s attention has shuffled off to Florida following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Cuomo is at long last experiencing widespread criticism and scrutiny in the press for his grossly incompetent handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Empire State.
The New York Times, for example, took the governor to task after he announced that indoor dining in the state can resume as soon as Feb. 14, arguing that the flip-flop makes no sense based on the available data and his past diktats. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said on Friday that New York City could reopen indoor dining on Feb. 14,” the newspaper notes. “But by nearly every measure, the coronavirus outbreak in the city is worse than it was when he announced a ban on indoor dining in December.”
The New York Times adds, “As the governor spoke on Friday, citing the ‘current trajectory’ of cases as his reasoning for reopening, average per-capita case counts in New York City were 64% higher than when he announced the ban in December.” The paper even published an article titled “N.Y.C.’s Covid Metrics Are Dire. Cuomo Is Reopening Restaurants Anyway,” laying into the governor for his about-face on indoor dining.
Elsewhere, Cuomo is weathering blistering criticism over news reports that his administration dramatically undercounted the number of deaths connected to his order last year forcing infectious coronavirus patients into long-term care facilities. Criticism so bad, in fact, that the governor actually declined an invitation to appear on CNN, which has done more than any news network to boost his image amid the pandemic.
The bad press, by the way, appears to be having an adverse effect on the governor, whose increasingly frenetic decrees suggest a man who is spiraling. Recall that Cuomo claimed recently that the effort to vaccinate restaurant workers was a “cheap, insincere discussion.” Now, he has expanded vaccine eligibility in New York to include — you guessed it — restaurant workers. It’s almost as if he has no idea what he is doing.
Then, there is the sudden bout of unflattering news reports regarding the growing number of high-level resignations by New York health officials, including nine top state executives who have stepped down since last summer. Cuomo is also suffering embarrassing news coverage for his recent statement in response to the reports that his administration undercounted nursing home deaths: “But who cares? … Died in a hospital. Died in a nursing home. They died.” Add to it all the fact that the governor is catching heat for saying that he doesn’t trust health experts, and it seems clear we are witnessing the end of the love affair between the news media and the man who won an Emmy recently for his supposedly savvy COVID-19 management.
It is good that the news industry as a whole is finally scrutinizing the Cuomo administration for its ineptitude, but where was this critical look last year? It’s not as if Cuomo flipped a switch. He didn’t become an incompetent, callous, flailing bureaucrat overnight. This is who he is. This is how he has behaved for the entirety of the pandemic. Many newsrooms either did not notice or did not care. After all, there was a bad man in the White House.
The Cuomo who is getting badly beaten up today in the press is the same Cuomo who in April 2020 said glibly of out-of-work, anti-lockdown protesters that if they want to provide for themselves and their families, they should “take a job as an essential worker.”
This is the same man who targeted the state’s Jewish communities over social distancing violations, all while giving a free pass to the thousands of anti-police demonstrators and other political activists who clogged New York’s streets last year, gathering cheek to cheek in both protest and celebration. At a press conference in October of last year, Cuomo even dredged up a 14-year-old photo showing Jewish mourners gathered to mark the death of Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, claiming falsely that it was proof of those people’s refusal to follow his COVID-19 restrictions.
This is the same man whose administration flip-flopped constantly on the timeline for when COVID-19-positive front-line workers should return to work.
This is the same man who, during a press conference in September, attempted to absolve himself of responsibility for his state’s deadly mismanagement of the coronavirus by claiming, “Donald Trump caused the COVID outbreak in New York. That is a fact. It’s a fact that he admitted and the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] admitted and [Dr. Anthony Fauci] admitted.” No one “admitted” any such thing.
Cuomo actually wrote an entire book praising his response to the pandemic. He even hawked a stupid poster boasting of New York’s alleged victory over the outbreak. The poster, which bears more captions than a Herblock cartoon, is careful to highlight infection increases in Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Because nothing says responsible, caring leadership quite like cheering case increases in fellow states, which, by the way, likely got the virus from New York.
Yet, amid all of these missteps, many in the press claimed last year that New York’s governor led one of the best, if not the best, coronavirus responses in the country. The way certain journalists and commentators told it, Cuomo’s wisdom and steady hand safely guided the state through one of the most dangerous and deadly episodes in its history.
Speaking of coronavirus, previous timelines had pegged “Patient Zero” as being infected in November of 2019, but new evidence suggests the first cases showed up October 2019. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Let them have their Impeachment 2: Electric Boogaloo. It won’t result in a conviction. It won’t affect Donald Trump’s standing with his supporters or his detractors. But it will delay the Senate from action on Joe Xiden’s initial legislative goals and confirmation of His Fraudulency’s nominees.”
Democrats may end up paying a higher political price than they anticipate. The trial won’t only delay Mr. Biden’s program. It will tarnish his image as a “unifier” eager to work across party lines. That identity will be much harder to sustain after Democratic senators vote in lockstep to convict Mr. Trump and push through a mammoth Covid relief bill without any Republican votes.
I see they misspelled “trillions in pork graft for politically connected cronies” as “Covid relief.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
During a media presentation at Virtual SHOT Show 2021, Winchester said that if they stopped taking orders for .22 LR right now, it would take 2 years to fill all the back-orders. In December, the Vista family of companies, which comprises Federal, CCI, Speer, and Remington, announced they had a $1 billion backlog in orders. In the first 3 months of the COVID-19 lockdown, Winchester experienced a 17-percent surge in orders, which hasn’t tapered off.
Rancher believes Biden wants to hurt border security to undo President Trump’s legacy. True, but incomplete. The entire Democratic Party sees every illegal alien as a potential Democrat voter.
Heh:
The Lincoln Project has reached the part in the Scorsese film where Clapton or the Stones is playing and everyone is trying to escape with the money and their lives.
Got to admit, 140 MPH is hauling ass. One problem with Most Shocking is that they would intone “…with speeds hitting 90 miles and hour!” and I wanted to ask “Dude, have you never driven on a Texas highway before? That’s pretty much the prevailing speed…”
"We rescue ALL animals, though dogs need us the most. But we rescue cats, bunnies, rats, snakes, small exotics, eleflumps, bears, big cats, wildlife, sea life, primates…"-@ElayneBoosler#tailsofjoy 🐶😺🦜🐭https://t.co/gWA4VEWyoc
— Elayne Boosler's Rescue Dog, Ralph (@BooslerS) February 5, 2021
By the way, the current forecast is for it to hit 1°F here on Monday, which would only be 3 degrees above the coldest temperature ever recorded in Austin…
Following yesterday’s story, I got pushback from readers that asserted the supposed WallStreetsBets silver squeeze was, in fact, a ruse from hedge funds to distract retailer investors from the GameStop and AMC squeezes.
If you haven’t been browsing WSB or doing your own research, you’d probably think that the people on Twitter are correct in saying there is a silver squeeze happening and we should all get in on it. There are quite a few wsb-logo Twitter accounts pushing this. This is BS & the straight up the ANTITHESIS of who we are.
By buying silver/going long on silver, you would be directly putting money into the pockets of the EXACT HEDGE FUNDS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF $GME 🚀 🚀 🚀 💎 🙌 The hedge funds are LONG silver NOT short silver.
The media, Wall Street, normies, and every other non-WSB autist are trying to push you to buy silver. This would be a tragic, irreversible decision that not only will most likely not make you any money because the squeeze is fake, it will put you on the sidelines from this righteous and glorious war we are in.
Another sign it’s a ruse: Citadel Securities, one of the primary hedge funds backers, evidently holds shares in 17 different silver companies.
That’s one of the problems with a decentralized swarm attack: If nobody’s in charge, then it’s much harder to filter out the noise to determine the true direction of the swarm. That can be a strength, but it also makes the swarm vulnerable to ruses like this. Extracting a signal from the huge wave of noise in everyday financial transactions is a daunting problem under the best of circumstances even when giant hedge funds aren’t baiting friendly MSM outlets with elaborate ruses. (Or, I should say, when giant hedge funds aren’t baiting friendly MSM outlets with elaborate ruses even more than they usually are.)
Whatever the source, many bullion dealers were reporting a huge run on silver due to a spike in demand, though physical silvere seemed to be doing much better than “paper silver” (i.e., the futures market). Today spot silver prices are back down in early trading.
Remember, I said yesterday that a silver squeeze was unlikely to work.
With that out of the way, here are some other WallStreetBets/GameStop/etc. news:
Adam Ford with Not The Bee explains the GameStop short squeeze, including more background detail on the origins of the squeeze than was in my original post:
Glenn Greenwald goes into more detail on the GameStop squeeze and Melvin Capital:
The usual Greenwald leftwing caveats apply. (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)
GameStop stock is back up this morning after Robinhood lifted restrictions on buying shares.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation into “Robinhood, Discord, Citadel and other trading apps that put curbs on stock trading” in GameStop.
Noon Update: And now GameStop, AMC and Silver are all way down right now. Never invest what you can’t afford to lose…
The Biden Administration’s plan to stop illegal alien deportations has run into a Texas-sized roadblock:
A federal judge in Texas has blocked President Biden’s executive order halting deportations of some illegal immigrants.
Biden signed the order halting deportations for 100 days on January 20, several hours after his inauguration, as part of a blitz of executive orders aimed at undoing Trump administration policies. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton subsequently sued the Biden administration to reverse the order, citing an agreement between the Department of Homeland Security and Texas requiring the state’s approval to halt deportations.
Judge Drew Tipton of the Southern District of Texas blocked the implementation of Biden’s order on Tuesday for a period of 14 days. Tipton said that the delay was appropriate according to the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.
Within 6 days of Biden’s inauguration, Texas has HALTED his illegal deportation freeze,” Paxton tweeted after the order. “*This* was a seditious left-wing insurrection. And my team and I stopped it.”
Tipton’s restraining order is effective for 14 days as the state’s case against the moratorium continues.
Paxton argued the state would face financial harm if undocumented immigrants were released into the state because of costs associated with health care and education, and said the moratorium would also lure others to come to Texas. Tipton, an appointee of former President Donald Trump who took the bench last year, agreed.
“Texas argues that ‘the categorical refusal to remove aliens ordered removable will encourage additional illegal immigration into Texas,’ thereby exacerbating its public service costs. Such injury is not, as a legal matter, purely speculative,” he wrote. “The Court finds that the foregoing establishes a substantial risk of imminent and irreparable harm to Texas.
Federal law makes clear that the overwhelming majority of illegal aliens are deportable. Suspending the law for vast classes of deportable illegal aliens (rather than by a federal judge adjudicating individual cases) is an abuse of power. The Biden Administration doesn’t get to ignore written law (or written agreements with state government) merely because they find it inconvenient for a future amnesty of illegal aliens to create more Democratic voters.
More than $6 million in taxpayer money flowed to Austin nonprofits affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but taxpayers might never learn the identities of the organizations that got the money or get a chance to dig into their stated need for assistance.
Citing a little-known state law that government transparency experts are only now learning exists, the city has refused to turn over a list of the 365 nonprofits that were granted the funds.
The $6 million was funneled through the city from the federal government and distributed out of the Austin Nonprofit and Civic Health Organizations Relief fund, more commonly known as the ANCHOR fund.
On Oct. 19, the American-Statesman requested a list from the city of the fund’s award recipients. On Nov. 16, the city denied the newspaper’s request, saying in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that it thought the information was exempt from public disclosure and requested that Paxton’s office affirm that determination.
The law invoked by the city’s legal department, House Bill 3175, went on the books after the 2019 Texas legislative session.
Filed by state Rep. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, the bill made confidential the name and other identifying information of individuals and businesses that apply for state or federal disaster recovery funds. The definition of disaster, as spelled out in the law, includes such things as floods, earthquakes and hostile military action. It also includes epidemics, such as the COVID-19 crisis.
The disclosure of federal relief dollars is not exempted from public records if the money is awarded by the federal government. For example, news organizations, including the Statesman, have obtained through public records the names of businesses that received financial assistance through the federal Paycheck Protection Program.
But under the new state law, Austin was able to withhold the identities of businesses that received assistance from the ANCHOR fund because the money, although originally from the federal government, went to the city before it was distributed to the nonprofits.
I just naturally assume the money was handed out as graft to members of the Homeless Industrial Complex, Greg Casar’s leftwing cronies, and various antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riot instigators (I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap between those categories).
Speaking of the homeless, Austin’s homeless situation continues to get even more out-of-hand. “It’s not uncommon to walk out the door and find a pile of human feces on the patio behind us.”
There’s also a petition drive to recall various City Council members who reinstated the homeless ban. But you have to live in their respective districts to sign the petition.
I know you’re going to be shocked, shocked to find out that the City of Austin give preferential treatment to leftwing businessesin the form of property tax breaks…including one for Mayor Steve Adler’s own law firm.
