“It’s as simple as people thought everything was permitted in pursuit of getting rid of Donald Trump.”
Taibbi says he wasn’t pushed out of Rolling Stone, he just thought he could make more money by leaving. And he was right! “Let’s just say that I’m making many times over more than I was making at Rolling Stone.”
MT: I don’t believe a lot of the identity politics that are being proffered by the current version of the Democratic Party are genuine. And my first experience with this, where I really, really thought about this, was when I was following Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016. And there was a moment in that campaign where he first started to really draw blood against Hillary right. You might remember it was like in February, uh, or late January of 2016. He was hammering her on her ties to Goldman Sachs and other Banks. The New York Post interestingly did this, published this big list of all of her speech commitments and it was kind of amazing. And she wouldn’t release the transcripts right she wouldn’t release the transcripts. I mean, even the schedule was amazing. She was doing three hundred thousand dollars in the morning and then flying to some place and doing 400 Grand or something.
Reason: Yeah circle of the Bilderbergers, or whatever.
MT: And they tried everything to hit back, and nothing worked until she said: “If we break up the banks tomorrow, will that end racism?” And Bernie was paralyzed by that.
Reason: Yeah, Bernie’s an old school, he’s a real old school Commie. I mean, like where it’s class and everything else is a distraction, right? That, you know, capitalists will use race in order to keep the workers from realizing, no, they’re all on the same side well
MT: I almost wish he was that, because you know Bernie also marched in, you know, in for the civil rights movement in the 60s. And he was terrified of the idea that he might be accused of racism. It mortified him, and I think it really slowed his campaign.
Reason: There was also that moment, I think it might have been in Seattle or something, where he was almost literally pushed off the stage by a couple of black activists, who were like “We need to be talking about racial concerns,” not whatever he was talking about.
MT: Right, not your class thing. [And] that was when they started to sort of demonize the white working class, right, which is a brilliant strategic move. Also, interestingly, it was the exact opposite of what the Clintons had done in the 90s. You know the Clinton’s whole strategy was let’s peel off a little bit of that white working class-
Reason: We feel their pain.
MT: We feel their pain, right. And that’s, you know, they just got over the finish line doing that. So we can add to the sins of Hillary Clinton that she also injected identity politics.
With all due respect to Taibbi, identity politics had been injected into the Democratic Party’s DNA long before the 2016 presidential race.
“Trump [has] been an enormous Boon to the intelligence Services they’ve been able to say hey if you if you code as somebody who sides with Trump…essentially they’ve created what I like to call the One Villain Theory of the Universe. Which is if you’re on Trump’s side, that means you’re on Putin’s side, which means you’re also on Assad’s side, you’re on Orban’s side, you’re on the side of domestic violence.”
MT: “Covid has a whole long list of things that have added to Middle America’s grievances. Beginning with the fact that it it increasingly looks like they lied to us about the origins of the disease for some pretty weak reasons. Maybe they were trying to cover up some research they were doing. That’s thing one that’s looking increasingly likely. At the very least they excluded the possibility of that illegitimately and used
Reason: “And that’s where the government was telling Twitter and Facebook, like, don’t run this stuff or they’ll squelch it.”
“I did a story about Loudoun County, Virginia, when Republicans won the gubernatorial election there. And there were people there who were furious at the way they had been portrayed in the media, as racists or anti-vaxxers. Really, they wanted their kids to go back to school, because they had done their own research online, they found the kids weren’t really at risk, and their kids weren’t learning anything, and it was a burden on them personally, right? So there’s a million things like this.”
I don’t agree with all Taibbi’s takes, and a whole lot of things were going wrong with the left long before he deigned to notice it, but over all it’s an interesting interview.
Democrats enabling sexual predators (yet again), more tanks for Ukraine information, and the unexpected return of Storm Drain Woman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Published in November of 2022, the story indicated “thousands of child molesters are being let out after just a few months, despite sentencing guidelines.”
The story reported that more than 7,000 inmates convicted of “lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age” were released from prison the same year they were incarcerated.
The Daily Mail’s analysis was conducted using a database—created in 1994 after the federal Megan’s Law was passed—requiring law enforcement to make public information regarding registered sex offenders. The news organization examined data in California through July of 2019.
“Everyone should be really upset and frightened by this,” Dordulian said.
According to Dordulian, child molesters are the least likely of criminals to be rehabilitated and are four times more likely to commit the same crime again.
“Once they’re out,” he said, “they are going to re-offend and there’s going to be another child that is victimized by these people.”
Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”
The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.
The films, which include “Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live In,” “The Great American Lie” and “Fair Play,” are licensed to taxpayer-funded schools across every state and sometimes contain sexually explicit imagery and push students to feel “shame and sorrow” about American society split by privilege and oppression. They are paired with curricula that include discussion on Gov. Newsom’s comments within the films, urging them to gather their friends and vote for aligned politicians that support a “care economy” that “embraces universal human values.”
“Former Arlington teachers union president charged with embezzlement. A former president of the Arlington teachers union, who was ousted last spring, has been charged with embezzling more than $400,000 from the organization. Ingrid Gant, 54, of Woodbridge, was arrested yesterday (Monday) in Prince William County on four counts of embezzlement.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the ‘Hundred Childless Days‘ campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the ‘one-child policy.’ The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
North says they do not feel safe anymore, and she believes it all ties back to the large homeless encampment located only feet away from the salon.
“Our safety started to become a big issue. We suffered from multiple break-ins. We’ve had our cars broken into. We clean up feces and needles on a weekly basis. It increased from that to, you know, people approaching us and threatening us with weapons, threatening rape, murder, all of those things,” said North.
The salon has been up and running just off Ben White Blvd. for four years now. North says she has seen an uptick in crime for a while now, but the dangerous behavior from people living in this encampment picked up recently.
“In the past year, it’s gotten increasingly worse and, in the past couple of weeks, it’s gotten to the point where I actually finally felt like this might shut my business down,” said North.
Erin Mutschler, another co-owner of the salon, says they have called the police every time they have dealt with a situation like the one caught on video, but she says police often take 45 minutes to an hour for anyone to show up.
The mayorship of Steve Adler is the gift that just keeps giving, even with him out of office… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Follow-up: Democratic State Rep. Harold Dutton: “Don’t Blame Abbott, Houston ISD Takeover Plan Was My Idea.” (Previously.)
A Florida woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years. Maybe she was looking for David Icke’s lizard people. Also, she sounds like a real winner: “Police said her license had been suspended 17 times from 2007 to 2020.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Jay Leno broke his collarbone, several ribs and both kneecaps in a motorcycle accident. But it sounds like a freak accident: “So I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it…I didn’t see it until it was too late. It just clothesline me and, boom, knocked me off the bike.” (There’s no evidence the line was strung there by Conan O’Brien.) “But I’m OK!…I’m working this weekend.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Democrats being soft on criminals, pedophiles and common sense highlights this week’s LinkSwarm.
Man, there sure seems to be a lot of funny number counting going on in Philadelphia.
Regular readers are well aware that back in July, Zero Hedge first (long before it became a running theme among so-called “macro experts”) pointed out that a gaping 1+ million job differential had opened up between the closely-watched and market-impacting, if easily gamed and manipulated, Establishment Survey and the far more accurate if volatile, Household Survey – the two core components of the monthly non-farm payrolls report.
We first described this divergence in early July, when looking at the June payrolls data, we found that the gap between the Housing and Establishment Surveys had blown out to 1.5 million starting in March when “something snapped.” We described this in “Something Snaps In The US Labor Market: Full, Part-Time Workers Plunge As Multiple Jobholders Soar.”
Since then the difference only got worse, and culminated earlier this month when the gap between the Establishment and Household surveys for the November dataset nearly doubled to a whopping 2.7 million jobs, a bifurcation which we described in “Something Is Rigged: Unexplained, Record 2.7 Million Jobs Gap Emerges In Broken Payrolls Report.”
Snip.
We bring all this up again because late on Dec 13, the Philadelphia Fed published something shocking: as part of the regional Fed’s quarterly reassessment of payrolls in the form of an “early benchmark revision of state payroll employment”, the Philly Fed confirmed what we have been saying since July, namely that US payrolls are overstated by at least 1.1 million, and likely much more!
And the correction came after the midterms! What are the odds?
The Royal Bahamas Police Force took the failed financial tech entrepreneur into custody after the U.S. filed criminal charges against him, according to a press statement. FTX, which Bankman-Fried founded, imploded in November, costing investors millions of dollars in losses. The fallen businessman has been accused of misusing customer funds deposited with FTX to artificially prop up another one of his enterprises: a crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, which he operated simultaneously while seemingly evading financial ethics scrutiny.
Speaking of abusing children: “Former CNN Producer Pleads Guilty In Pedo Scandal. Former CNN producer John Griffin, who worked ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Chris Cuomo, pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court to using interstate commerce to entice and coerce a 9-year-old girl to engage in sexual activity as his Vermont ski house. This is a different CNN pedophile than Jake Tapper’s former producer, Rick Saleeby, who resigned after it emerged that he solicited sexually explicit photos of an underage girl.”
The mother of an 11-year-old rape victim is suing a George-Soros backed prosecutor in Virginia who let the boy’s rapist walk free, alleging the prosecutor’s actions violated the minor’s civil rights and made him fear for his physical safety.
Amber Reel in November filed the federal lawsuit on behalf of her son after Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) let the rapist walk. Court filings show Descano was months late in sharing necessary evidence before a September trial, dooming the case and forcing his office to enter into a lesser plea deal with the rapist the same month. Ronnie Reel, who was released on time served, had faced life in prison for forcibly sodomizing the minor. Reel is the victim’s uncle.
This is the second high-profile case in the last month where the Soros prosecutor freed a dangerous offender. In December, Descano struck a plea deal that would clear the record of a man who fired his gun into a crowded Virginia bar. Soros donated more than half a million dollars to Descano’s 2019 campaign.
A grand jury had already indicted Reel in February for sodomy and aggravated sexual battery, and the case was set for trial in September. But Descano’s office didn’t share evidence with the public defender before trial, bungling Reel’s prosecution with its “woefully, woefully missed” deadlines. The case’s presiding judge said Descano’s office did a “disservice to the victim” and was “very concerning to the court.”
Because he dodged a felony sex crime conviction, Reel won’t have to register as a sex offender and won’t be barred from holding jobs in schools or other places that would put him near children. The victim and his mother in their suit say Descano’s “deliberate indifference represents egregious conduct that is shocking to the conscience.”
Speaking of pedophile friendly Democrats: “During the hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, California [Democratic] Rep. Katie Porter asserted that the phrase “groomer” is a “lie” used to maliciously discriminate against LGBTQ+ people and make them appear to be a “threat.” “You know, this allegation of ‘groomer’ and ‘pedophile,’ it is alleging that a person is criminal somehow and engaged in criminal acts merely because of their gender identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity.” Yes, if your “gender identity” is “I like to have sex with children,” then yes, you’re a pedophile, and if you tell elementary school children what sort of sex you have, then yes, you’re a groomer.
Former state Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin) will be the next mayor of Austin about two decades after he left that same office in the early aughts.
He defeated state Rep. Celia Israel (D-Austin) by a slim margin after finishing second in the general election. He’ll serve as mayor for the next two years before having to seek re-election in 2024 due to redistricting.
Watson lost Travis County, the city’s largest portion, by 17 votes while winning Williamson county by 881 and Hays County by 22. During the general and runoff races, he outspent Israel by a wide margin.
The two candidates sparred over housing and homeless policy during the general election and the runoff. About one-third of the voting population turned out to vote in the runoff versus the November 8 general.
Watson will take over for Mayor Steve Adler after his self-described “disruptive” tenure marked by a lingering homelessness problem, public fallout and a declining relationship with the police department, and a cumbersome and increasingly costly light rail transit project.
The United States has always had kind of a friends and family plan that it sells military gear to, but it has always reserved the very top top top stuff for itself and the Brits. Well, in this calendar year we have already seen the first two exceptions to that policy being made. The United States is sending air-launch cruise missiles and nuclear-powered submarines to the Australians. And now we’re giving Tomahawks to the Japanese, giving both of these countries the ability to independently destroy China’s economic links to the wider world without any additional help from the United States. And this sudden proliferation of countries that can now bring China to their knees independently, this is arguably the biggest strategic development of the Year, even more so than the Ukraine war, because it takes what has become the world’s second largest economy and puts it completely at the mercy of the domestic politics of a third party, and now a fourth party.
Oberlin College finally pays their judgment to Gibson’s Bakery. “The $25 million verdict plus interest and attorney’s fees resulted in an almost $32 million judgment, with interest running at about $4000 per day since June 2019. In all, over $36 million was owed.” Cudos to William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection for his thorough, ongoing coverage of this story from beginning to end.
F-35B fighter crashes in the Metroplex. Fortunately the pilot safely ejected, and it appears that the airplane (which was undergoing testing for Lockheed) looks recoverable. To my untrained eye it looks like a stuck throttle.
Ukraine is carving out big gains in Kharkiv, Texas is in the money, Biden taps Clinton’s bagman to divy up the graft manage climate change funds, more groomers unmasked, and some big changes in the UK. Plus a bit about tanks. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Ukrainian successes on the Kharkiv City-Izyum line are creating fissures within the Russian information space and eroding confidence in Russian command to a degree not seen since a failed Russian river crossing in mid-May.
Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv Oblast counteroffensives advanced to within 20 kilometers of Russia’s key logistical node in Kupyansk on September 8.
Ukrainian forces will likely capture Kupyansk in the next 72 hours, severely degrading but not completely severing Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum.
Ukrainian forces are continuing to target Russian GLOCs, command-and-control points, and ammunition depots in Kherson Oblast.
On Thursday, the state comptroller reported that the Lone Star State’s tax revenue rocketed by 25.6% to a total of $75.21 billion.
It’s only the fifth time since 1988 that revenue grew by a double-digit percentage — and it’s double the next largest increase over that 34-year span.
“Revenues continue to outpace even our most recent forecast as All Funds tax collections closed the fiscal year $841 million above the projection in our Certification Revenue Estimate,” said state Comptroller Glenn Hegar in an official release.
That’s a stark contrast to California, which saw July revenue come in 12% below forecast.
Texas has been a major beneficiary of migration from California: Over the last census cycle, 34% of new Texans arrived from California alone. Meanwhile, New York saw personal income tax collection fall 3.2% from April 1 through July.
Joe Biden has hired John Podesta to be the new Clean Energy Czar, citing his experience in progressive causes….
Bottom line, John Podesta is being now being hired to divvy up the $316 billion in Green New Deal money recently authorized by congress. That is what Podesta specializes in, the distribution of taxpayer money to DNC allied groups and networks in advance of the 2022 midterms. Podesta, Hillary’s fixer, is a bagman, nothing more.
Worse, one of the many bag clients he’s adept at channeling money into Democratic pockets for is China.
President Joe Biden on Friday tapped John Podesta to oversee $370 billion in climate spending, a move that has China hawks on Capitol Hill concerned over Podesta’s encouragement of Chinese investment in American infrastructure and praise for the top U.S. adversary on climate change.
Podesta has called for Chinese investment in American infrastructure, arguing in 2013 that there are “great opportunities for Chinese firms to directly invest in this nation, to build American infrastructure, to create American jobs, and generate steady and handsome returns.” He added, “There’s also the ability for Chinese firms to invest here and learn best practices, and take those home to the tremendous and growing middle class market in China.”
Instead, in the intervening decade, the Chinese government has committed widespread economic espionage—one 2017 estimate found that China steals up to $600 billion in trade secrets a year. Engineers in China, meanwhile, use popular social media platform TikTok to access nonpublic data from U.S. users.
Podesta has also praised China’s efforts to combat climate change, arguing in 2015 that the Chinese “are beginning to do a fair amount.” China, which is the world’s top carbon emitter, went on to dramatically accelerate its coal consumption, which reached a record high in 2020.
That record has China hawks on the Hill concerned that America’s top adversary has a new—and powerful—ally in the White House. Podesta’s role will see the liberal consultant implement $370 billion in spending toward alternative energy, a sector that China dominates when it comes to raw materials. As such, alternative energy companies receiving the Podesta-steered funding could turn to China to secure supplies. The new Biden aide will likely take no issue with that dynamic, given that he has argued the United States and China should “align” on a green economy. Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Ted Cruz (R., Texas) argued that the move reflects the White House’s soft-on-China stance.
Democratic County Administrator Robert Telles charged in the death of journalist Jeff German, “an investigative reporter with the Las Vegas Review-Journal who had spent the last few months exposing misdeeds and turmoil in the official’s office.” For all Sundown Joe’s dark mutterings about “UltraMAGA,” it seems like Democrats are the ones doing all the killing…
A now-former elementary school teacher previously charged with sexual abuse of a 7-year-old student was arrested again and charged with sexually assaulting a second victim.
Victor Moreno, 28, was charged in July with continuous sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony, and an improper relationship between a student and educator, a second-degree felony.
The accused pedophile’s victim was a second-grade girl in Irving Independent School District, where Moreno was a teacher at the time of the alleged assaults during the 2020-2021 school year.
Snip.
Meanwhile, a teacher’s aide in Mesquite Independent School District was arrested Tuesday after being accused of engaging in inappropriate relationships with students.
Bryan Garcia, 22, was charged with two counts of sexual assault of a child and one count of indecency with a child.
“Higher Ed’s New Woke Loyalty Oaths: A ballooning number of hiring and tenure decisions require candidates to express written fealty to political doctrines.” And you can bet those doctrines have nothing to do with constitutionally limited government based on universal rights…
Indeed, they’re talking about restarting old production lines to start manufacturing older BMP-2s. “The costs and challenges of bringing more modern designs into production are now surely aggravated by Western sanctions cutting access to many basic electrical components, requiring pricey and time-consuming workarounds.”
This is like a scene from a porn movie, only a lot creepier. “Las Vegas landlord requires tenant to sign sex contract in order to lease home.”
“Kim Kardashian Is Starting Her Own Private Equity Company.” Why not? But I’m betting being a genius at self-promotion doesn’t equate to being a genius at investing, especially since she’s starting in the middle of a fierce, widespread downturn…
Easiest way to win Dad of the Year? Pick your son up from school in a tank. Looks like a Scorpion light tank, most likely the FV107 Scimitar reconnaissance variant.
“FBI Drops Investigation After Discovering Trump’s Top Secret Nuclear Documents Were Just Print-Outs Of Hillary Clinton Emails.”
Joe Rogan and Seth Dillon have thoughts about the FBI’s raid on Trump’s house.
Dillon: “They just poured rocket fuel in his engine.”
Rogan: “I think the goal was to knock him out of the 2024 elections.”
Rogan has some degree of skepticism that there was actual classified information seized, but not nearly as much as he should.
Dillon: “They want to find something, anything, that they can use to prevent him from running again.”
Rogan: “They’re using the FBI in a way that they would never use it against Hillary Clinton and they’re going after him in a way they would never go after Ghislaine Maxwell’s client list.”
Dillon: “If you’re gonna be selectively enforcing laws like that, and just turn a blind eye to Hillary deleting emails that have been subpoenaed, [or turning] a blind eye to Hunter Biden, trying act like this is not a story until you’re forced to admit that it is. It’s the double standard.”
Rogan on Ron DeSantis: “The left still hates him but they don’t hate him the same way they hated Trump. They try to, but he’s more reasonable. He’s very, like, level in the way he talks about things.”
Rogan: “Tump’s a character, right? Like part of what he’s doing he’s like doing comedy. It’s like he’s doing stand-up when he’s up there. I mean, when he makes fun of Biden and makes fun of other people. He’s doing fucking stand-up, he really is, and he kills.”
Inflation is soaring, Democrats are lying, and more MSM pedophiles are exposed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Slow Joe Biden is hoping voters will ignore all that inflation on his watch. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.
Apparently, the Biden administration’s approach is to just insist that the economy is doing great and hope people believe it, despite their mounting frustration every time they buy groceries, out to eat, or fill up their tank. On the day President Biden took office, retail prices for gasoline averaged $2.38 per gallon. This morning, they are $4.19 — not all that different from the $4.20 they were a month ago….
By and large, Democrats just don’t want to discuss or acknowledge inflation — at least not in their campaign ads:
And as of Friday, [Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim] Ryan was one of seven Democratic candidates who have run ads this year that mentioned inflation, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. By contrast, dozens of Republican candidates and allied groups have done the same. In polls, Americans have cited inflation as a top issue.
“Burying your head in the sand,” Mr. Ryan said, “is not the way to approach it.” Asked about the biggest challenges facing his party, he replied, “A response to the inflation piece is a big hurdle.”
To Democrats, inflation is like Bruno: We just don’t talk about it.
Snip.
With poll after poll showing that inflation is foremost in voters’ minds, you would think that the president would be holding regular events focused on the problem and showcasing what his administration is doing to solve it.
“I get video almost every day now from people who we featured on ‘Dirty Jobs” and ‘How America Works.’
“They’re just sending me videos of them at the gas pump and some of them are filling up 18-wheelers. And, I’m not kidding you, $1,100, $1,200.
“Most people, all we can think about is the price for us at a relative terms know it’s awful.
“When you put $1,200 in your gas tank and just six months ago it was costing you $600 or 700, the exponential reality of it is starting to sink in. You just can’t walk that back. It touches every single thing that matters in this country. From food production to transportation … all of it,” Rowe explained.
Hmmmm:
Meet Elizabeth Deutsch. She's currently a law clerk for Justice Breyer.
And, in my humble opinion, she's the most likely person to have leaked the draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs, purporting to overturn Roe v. Wade.
A secretive group backed by millions of dollars from liberal billionaire George Soros is working behind the scenes with President Biden’s administration to shape policy, documents reviewed by Fox News show.
Governing for Impact (GFI), the veiled group, boasts in internal memos of implementing more than 20 of its regulatory agenda items as it works to reverse Trump-era deregulations by zeroing in on education, environmental, health care, housing and labor issues.
“Open Society is proud to support Governing for Impact’s efforts to protect American workers, consumers, patients, students and the environment through policy reform,” Tom Perriello, executive director of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, told Fox News Digital.
Snip.
GFI, however, works to remain secretive. It is invisible to internet search engines like Google (an unrelated “Govern for Impact” is the only group that appears in a search). No news reports or press releases appear on its existence outside of a mention of its related action fund in a previous Fox News article on the $1.6 billion Arabella Advisors-managed dark money network, to which it is attached.
But as the group attempted to conceal its operations, it sought talent on Harvard Law School’s website, which was discoverable. The posting, which no longer appears on the site, was for legal policy internships.
Snip.
According to its website, Rachael Klarman, a Harvard Law School grad, steers the group. Her father, Michael Klarman, is a professor at Harvard Law and also has ties to progressive advocacy groups. He is an advisory board member of the left-wing dark money judicial group Take Back the Court. Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, invited him to testify before Congress on dark money’s “assault” on the judiciary system.
“Governing for Impact is the perfect example of the Left’s fake outrage over ‘dark money’ in politics,” said the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer, who discovered the group and alerted Fox News.
“As a ‘fiscally sponsored’ dark money project that writes and pushes regulations from the shadows, hidden from the public and funded by one billionaire foundation, GFI embodies everything the Left pretends to abhor.”
The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden’s activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were “Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president.
The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post’s incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent.
After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting that the Biden emails had all of the “hallmarks” of Kremlin treachery, who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment?
Snip.
This same strategic motive — to vest accusations of “disinformation” with the veneer of expertise — is what has fostered a new, very well-financed industry heralding itself as composed of “anti-disinformation” scholars. Knowing that Americans are inculcated from childhood to believe that censorship is nefarious — that it is the hallmark of tyranny — those who wish to censor need to find some ennobling rationale to justify it and disguise what it is.
They have thus created a litany of neutral-sounding groups with benign names — The Atlantic Council, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, various “fact-checking” outfits controlled by corporate media outlets — that claim to employ “anti-disinformation experts” to identify and combat fake news. Just as media corporations re-branded their partisan pundits as “fact-checkers” — to masquerade their opinions as elevated, apolitical authoritative, decrees of expertise — the term “disinformation expert” is designed to disguise ideological views on behalf of state and corporate power centers as Official Truth.
Yet when one subjects these groups to even minimal investigative scrutiny, one finds that they are anything but apolitical and neutral. They are often funded by the same small handful of liberal billionaires (such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar), actual security state agencies of the U.S., the UK or the EU, and/or Big Tech monopolies such as Google and Facebook.
Indeed, the concept of “anti-disinformation expert” is itself completely fraudulent. This is not a real expertise but rather a concocted title bestowed on propagandists to make them appear more scholarly and apolitical than they are. But the function of this well-funded industry is the same as the one served by the pre-election letter from “dozens of former intelligence officials”: to discredit dissent and justify its censorship by infusing its condemnation with the pretense of institutional authority. The targeted views are not merely wrong; they have been adjudged by official, credentialed experts to constitute “disinformation.”
This scam is the critical context for understanding why the Biden Administration casually announced last week the creation of what it is calling a “Disinformation Board” inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation.
Business leaders are waking up to the destructive “woke” policies being foisted on businesses by boardrooms more concerned with virtue signaling than their primary responsibility of ensuring corporate profitability and enhancing shareholder values.
In short, the “woke” buck stops here, more corporate executives are saying. Mixing the politics of culture wars with business is a losing strategy.
Former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi is leading the charge. He ran McDonalds from 1991-1997, bringing the chain’s McNugget to market and also served on the boards of Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que, Great Wolf Resorts and Snap-on Inc. These days, he’s launching The Boardroom Initiative, comprised of three conservative advocacy groups — The Job Creators Network, which was founded by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, The Free Enterprise Group and Second Vote. The goal: get business back to business and out of politics.
“Corporations have no business being on the right or the left because they represent everybody there and their sole job is to build equity for their investors,” Rensi told FOX Business.
Rensi knows how to grow a business. While leading McDonalds, he saw U.S. sales double to more than $16 billion, the number of U.S. restaurants grow from nearly 6,600 to more than 12,000 and the number of U.S. franchisees grow from 1,600 to more than 2,700.
“It is not the province of board members or executives to take shareholder money profit and spend it on social matters,” Rensi explained. “Corporations should not get involved in social engineering.”
Trump goes 55-0. Everyone he endorsed won their primary or made the runoff. All those are from Indiana, Ohio, and Texas. I didn’t realize that so few states have had their primaries already. Hopefully that record will be shattered and Dr. Oz (a bad pick by Trump) will lose when Pennsylvania votes May 17th.
Trying to make your children into the Youth Stasi: “DC elementary school gives 4-year-olds books to report racist family members.”
The only surprise here is that he didn’t work for CNN. “MSNBC Anchor Busted ‘Driving 3 Hours’ To Meet Little Boy For Sex.” “A New York group specializing in exposing child-sex predators seemed to all but confirm this after they posted a video online Friday busting a potential pedophile who appeared to be NBC anchor Zach Wheeler. Wheeler had driven an approximate total of 3 hours in order to meet up with a 15-year-old boy for sex, the group claims.”
Speaking of school districts wasting money and lying to you:
You're not alone if you feel like your school district is lying to you while smearing your reputation. It happened to me. The answer is not to retreat, but to get louder and expose their lies and hypocrisy.
The big scandal in the Hunter Biden Laptop story isn’t Hunter’s deplorable actions, it’s Joe Biden’s corruption.
Investigative reporter Peter Schweizer reiterated what he’s said about Hunter being close to criminal indictment. He said The New York Times “got a lot of cooperation from Team Biden” before they ran the story on Hunter that included their admission that the laptop was, indeed, real. He says Biden’s team was “trying to position themselves.” Of course, this case isn’t really about Hunter but the President of the United States, and a criminal indictment would open up “that whole can of worms” concerning dad’s connections to dirty money and the associated tax issues and huge national security concerns.
Snip.
George Soros, probably the most influential man in Ukraine, is a big part of this story, too. He gave $1 million to the humorously named Democratic Integrity Project, headed by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI analyst and staffer for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Jones had started the nonprofit (seems pretty profitable to me) after Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS approached him with the idea of forming the organization. Then, after filling its coffers to the tune of $7 million, Jones turned around and wrote a check to Fusion GPS for $3.3 million. I am not making this up. The same players keep turning up again and again.
Fusion GPS’s task: to research how Russian intelligence operations were affecting elections around the world. And they brought in Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta to help. Still not making it up, my friends. This was after Podesta’s and the DNC’s emails had been purloined (the narrative became that they were hacked by Russia) and published by WikiLeaks, to the DNC’s embarrassment.
(Incidentally, John’s lobbyist brother Tony was under investigation at that time for “cashing in” in Ukraine. He was paid $1.2 million to promote a plan conceived, ironically, by Manfort and Gates.)
Then there’s the story you know, the investigation of Burisma by prosecutor Viktor Shokin until then-Vice President Biden got him fired by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee. By now everyone has seen the video of Biden bragging about it before a live audience — without mentioning Hunter was on the Burisma board.
There’s much more, involving Soros and an investigation by Shokin’s replacement into a Soros-funded organization, the ironically named Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC). This was when the new U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch (remember her from Trump’s impeachment?) gave the prosecutor a list of people not to prosecute, including a founder of AntAC. Second-in-command George Kent had already tried to discourage the prosecutor from investigating. According to reporter John Solomon, their message to Ukrainian officials was this: “Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama.”
There are others in Ukraine tied to both the Russia hoax and Trump’s impeachment. California Rep. Adam Schiff, running the impeachment, trotted out our diplomatic “experts” from Ukraine to talk about Trump and his “impeachable” phone call to President Zelenskyy. Those were Americans, our diplomatic corps, who’d been telling Ukrainian prosecutors who they could and could not prosecute and treating a Soros-funded organization like some sort of sacred cow. Soros supported Hillary and was Trump’s political enemy. He funded an organization conceived by Glenn Simpson. Something smells like bad borscht.
Questions asked: “Did The New York Times Admit Joe Biden Is Corrupt So Democrats Can Get Rid Of Him?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Will Rogers once famously said he did not belong to an organised political party because he was a Democrat. Yet today the traditional factiousness of the Democratic coalition has been engulfed by an almost Stalinist attitude that brooks no dissent on its most treasured policies – even though these do not resonate well with the bulk of the electorate.
To recover, Democrats need to find a way back to their historic base of working-class and minority voters, who now seem to be heading to the GOP. Franklin D Roosevelt’s alliance between big cities, small towns, labour unions and farmers was often awkward, but it still achieved remarkable success in restoring US confidence and winning the war. In contrast, President Biden’s boneheaded embrace of a progressive agenda that is widely detested across most of the population may prove to be one of the greatest political blunders of recent American history.
Given the probability of a significant loss in this November’s Midterms, we should expect – and hope for – a full-scale brawl over the party’s trajectory. There needs to be something equivalent to the New Democrats who, under Bill Clinton, revived the party after the devastating defeats of George McGovern and Michael Dukakis in the 1970s and 80s by moving the party to the centre and connecting it to the country’s diverse regions. ‘Too many Americans’, wrote New Democrats Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck in 1989, ‘have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defence of their national security’.
Snip.
The economic metrics are awful. Despite nominal GDP gains and higher wages, inflation, largely driven by energy prices, has been particularly cruel to minority and working-class voters. Overall, when asked if they are better off now than a year ago, twice as many Americans said ‘worse’ than better in a recent poll.
The cave-in to the greens has increased the Democrats’ economic vulnerability, particularly in the wake of Russian aggression and the continued role of China as the world’s dominant greenhouse-gas emitter. The well-funded American environmental elite lack the grudging sense of realism of their German counterparts, who have been forced to reconsider some of their energy policies in light of the invasion. But in resource-rich America, the green grandees still oppose boosting fossil-fuel energy supplies, despite 80 per cent of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favouring the use of both fossil fuels and renewables. Public support for Net Zero / the Green New Deal hovers around 20 per cent.
Essentially the Democrats’ Net Zero obsession could result in a political disaster. In February, according to Gallup, only two per cent of voters named climate or the environment as their biggest concern, one-fifth the number who named inflation and barely one-tenth the number who cited poor government leadership. Relentless climate scaremongering has not moved the needle among voters. ‘Climate catastrophism’, notes political strategist Ruy Teixeira, is a political ‘loser’, particularly among working-class voters of all races.
Cultural issues represent another fault line between the bulk of the electorate and the tin-eared elites of the party. Democrats’ have embraced what former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville scathingly labels ‘the politics of the faculty lounge’, such as support for the increasingly discredited Black Lives Matter movement and its calls to ‘defund the police’. This idea may be beloved at places like Harvard, but among the less elevated mortals it is widely unpopular, even among minorities, including two of the nation’s Democratic African-American mayors, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and New York City’s Eric Adams.
Voters view crime as the second-most pressing issue, after the economy and inflation. Here again the survey results are equally distressing for the progressive agenda. Voters, according to one recent survey, blame the Democrats for the current crime wave by a margin of two to one. Moderate Democrats, like retiring Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, herself a refugee from Vietnam, found her support for legislation that would penalise undocumented criminals got her labeled as ‘anti-immigrant’ by the party’s dominant progressive mob.
“Hispanic Texans Overwhelmingly Believe There Is a Border Crisis and Support Security Measures.” “Almost three-quarters of respondents agreed that there is a crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico with only 23 percent disagreeing with that characterization.”
Turns out even Democratic primary voters don’t think you should be talking to kindergartners about sex:
“U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela will resign early from Congress. The South Texas Democrat announced last year that he wouldn’t seek reelection. He’s leaving early to take a job at a law firm.” Yeah, people don’t leave the United States Congress early for a law firm job. There’s something else going on there. (Hat tip: Push Junction, who noted Republicans have a good chance to flip the seat.)
“Hidalgo Staff Allegedly Plotted to Steer $11 Million Contract, ‘Slam the Door’ on Competing Bid, per Warrants. A grand jury investigation found probable cause of tampering with governmental documents and misuse of official information related to a contract awarded to a woman with ties to local and national Democrats.” My working theory is that whenever you see something like this going on, kickbacks, graft and illegal donations to hard left groups and individuals are all but a certainty.
Also: “Hidalgo Says Communications About $11 Million Vaccine Outreach Contract Were Private, Taken Out of Context.” When you’re talking about a public official discussing a public contract using taxpayer money with her public staff, also paid using taxpayer money, there is no such thing as “private.”
Nicholas Moran cautions to avoid drawing too many conclusions from the limited video information coming out of the Russo-Ukranian War. “That tanks unsupported by the other arms are easy prey is tanking 101, and what we are seeing in Ukraine isn’t revolutionary, it’s exactly what you would expect to happen if you send vehicles in unsupported into areas infested with infantry and not denied to enemy air.” Also: We’re only seeing the Ukrainian side because they’re the ones uploading cell phone footage, and an important reminder that an anti-tank hit is not an anti-tank kill. (Previously.)
Borepatch is not impressed with the level of security in the latest online voting scheme.
Heh:
I was robbed at a gas station in NJ last night. After my hands stopped trembling..I managed to call the cops and they were quick to respond and calmed me down….. My money is gone.. the police asked me if I knew who did it..I said yes.. it was pump number 9…
This seems disturbing: “Seven hospitalized ‘including four juveniles’ in mass fentanyl poisoning after deadly drug is released through air vents.” This was in Ohio. So add “aerosolized Fentanyl” to the list of things to worry about…
“United Airlines Rolls Back Vaccine Requirements for Employees. United Airlines announced that it would be changing its policy and that unvaccinated workers would be allowed to return to their normal positions by March 28.” Personally, I’d try to get them to pay through the nose for my return…
Another week, another high-profile staffer quitting Kamala Harris’ office. “On Monday, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ disastrous visit to Poland, it was reported that her National Security Adviser Nancy McEldowney, will become the latest staffer to leave Harris’ office.”
“Investors at BuzzFeed are reportedly pressuring CEO Jonah Peretti to close down its entire money-losing news operation as senior journalists announced their resignations on Tuesday.” See, the problem here is that they used “Buzzfeed,” “journalists” and “news” all in the same sentence…
Speaking of failing leftwing outlets, the Texas Observer is circling the drain.
In September, the Observer’s editorial staff comprised 13 journalists. As of this month, after a rash of resignations — and one firing — only four of them remain. The five-person business team dwindled to zero in February. This mass exodus, former staffers said, can be traced to a series of board decisions — from the handling of a complaint by former Editor-in-Chief Tristan Ahtone, which led to his resignation; to promising Executive Editor Megan Kimble the top job in the interim, only to pass her over for an outside hire; to unilaterally halting publication of the magazine just days before it went to print.
Read on for the blow-by-blow, but evidently the staff got too uppity for the board of directors and we’re shown the door, with some side orders of “diversity” and “a web-first publication.” I would say this was all good schadenfreude, but I doubt I’ve even thought of the Observer since George W. Bush was governor…
Louis Rossmann finds the same problems plaguing New York City also plague D.C., namely high retail vacancies and general disorder. “It’s literally like somebody just picked up all the problems of New York City, control-C, and control-V them somewhere else.”
Speaking of New York City, Democratic Mayor Eric Adams wants you to know that athletes and actors are simply better than you common peasants, so vaccine mandates don’t apply to them. “The exemption for athletes and entertainers comes ahead of the upcoming baseball season, opening the field for unvaccinated Mets and Yankees to play home games too. Roughly two-thirds of Yankees players and at least ten Mets remain unvaccinated and will now be able to participate, Jon Heyman of the MLB Network noted.” Plus Kyrie Irving on the Brooklyn Nets.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on, justice for Juicy, Italy’s truck drivers go Galt, giant spiders invade, and musicians are being screwed yet again. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Russian invasion of Ukraine had two goals. The first was to take control of Ukraine, intending to complete the task begun in Belarus – the task of rebuilding Russia’s strategic buffers and securing Russia from attack. The second goal was to demonstrate the capabilities and professionalism of the Russian military and to further deter hypothetical acts and increase Russia’s regional influence. The two goals were interlocked.
The occupation of Ukraine has not been achieved, but it is not a lost cause. Perceptions of the strength of Russia’s military, however, have been badly damaged. There is no question but that Russian planners did not want to fight the war Russia has been fighting. Rather than a rapid and decisive defeat of Ukraine, Russia is engaged in a slow, grinding war unlikely to impress the world with its return to the first ranks of military power. At this point, even a final victory in its first objective will not redeem the second. It is important to start identifying the Russian weaknesses.
The first problem was a loss of surprise. Carl von Clausewitz placed surprise at the top of warfare. Surprise contracts the time an enemy has to prepare for war. It also imposes a psychological shock that takes time to overcome, making it more difficult to implement existing plans. And it increases the perceived power of the enemy. In Ukraine, however, extended diplomacy gave Kyiv time to adjust psychologically to the possibility of war.
Moscow failed to understand its enemy. Russia clearly expected Ukrainian resistance to collapse rapidly in the face of the massive armored force it had gathered. It did not expect the Ukrainian populace to fight back to an extent that would at least delay completion of the war.
Snip.
Russian war plans centered on three armored groups based in the east, south and north…The three Russian armored battle groups were widely separated. They did not support each other. Instead of a single coordinated war, the Kremlin opted for at least three separate wars, making a single decisive stroke impossible. A single integrated command, essential for warfighting, seemed to be lacking.
The use of armor vastly increased the pressure on Russian logistics. Instead of focusing supplies on a single thrust, it had to focus on three, plus other operations. Logistics for the major armored forces seemed to have broken down, making war termination impossible and further extending the war.
In recent days, Russia has adapted and turned toward taking cities. This is generating an effective counterforce among fighters who understand the streets and alleys and use them to delay Russia’s progress. Fighting in cities is among the costliest and most time-consuming actions in war. Capturing cities takes resources and is not the key to victory. Cities take on importance only after the enemy force has been defeated and demoralizing the nation is essential. The city is the prize of war, not the military goal. Russia turned the conflict from a counter-military to a counter-population war, which increased resistance by sowing desperation in the cities.
The foolish ease with which Russia expected to win this war reminds me of the Southern dandies at the beginning of Gone With The Wind proclaiming how the Civil War would be over in weeks since the Yankees would “turn and run, every time.” Didn’t turn out that way. (Hat tip: Al Fin Next Level.)
Speaking of which, this seems like poor tactics and situational awareness:
The Biden administration’s bumbling on the matter of sending MiG-29 fighter jets from Poland to Ukraine is the result of both nations’ fears that the action would drag them directly into the war in Ukraine. Poland wanted to send the jets to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and Washington shied away from the prospect of having fighter jets fly out of a U.S. base in a NATO country into the war zone in Ukraine. The thinking was that this would look too much like the United States and NATO carrying out a military operation against Russian forces in Ukraine.
In practical terms, the U.S. (and U.K.) prohibition of Russian oil imports probably will not have much of an economic effect — certainly not in comparison to the other measures that have been taken — but even largely symbolic gestures can have a powerful effect, and the Kremlin seems to be very much agitated by the boycott.
The Biden administration’s bumbling on the matter of sending MiG-29 fighter jets from Poland to Ukraine is the result of both nations’ fears that the action would drag them directly into the war in Ukraine. Poland wanted to send the jets to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and Washington shied away from the prospect of having fighter jets fly out of a U.S. base in a NATO country into the war zone in Ukraine. The thinking was that this would look too much like the United States and NATO carrying out a military operation against Russian forces in Ukraine.
In truth, the United States is a belligerent if Vladimir Putin says the United States is a belligerent. He is perfectly capable of making up a pretext, however absurd, to justify whatever action he wants to take — that is why Russians are in Ukraine in the first place. His subjects in Russia are largely pliant and inclined to accept the propaganda they are fed, and those who aren’t can be jailed, terrorized into silence, or murdered. Putin can do what he chooses — it is not like he is worried about an upcoming election.
The MiG fiasco underlined the Biden administration’s predictable fecklessness and disorganization — America needed a Keystone pipeline but we got the Keystone Cops — and if there is any serious thinking going on in the White House about what Putin’s response to our “declaration of economic war” is likely to be, there isn’t any obvious evidence of it. The posture of the Biden administration by all appearances is one of wishful thinking: that while the United States and the world have rightly taken a side in this conflict, the fighting is going to stay in Ukraine.
What if it doesn’t?
A direct military attack by Russian forces on the United States is, of course, unlikely. But a Russian attack on Moldova is far from unthinkable. It is entirely possible that Putin will attack a NATO member such as Lithuania, Latvia, or even Poland, whose people have gone to such extraordinary lengths to assist the Ukrainians. There are already Americans fighting in Ukraine, as private volunteers rather than as part of our armed forces. If Putin is looking for a pretext, he will have no trouble finding one.
The United States is keenly interested in keeping the fighting in Ukraine. But the fighting will stay in Ukraine for only as long as Putin believes it is in his interest to keep it there. That may not be much longer. Putin already has failed to achieve his main political objective in Ukraine and will not achieve it no matter how long the conflict drags on; what was intended as a show of awesome military might has instead been a display of weakness and incompetence. A wider war — a glorious crusade — might soon suit Putin’s purposes better than does a quagmire in Ukraine, where the Russian army has been reduced to trying to substitute atrocities for victories.
President Joe Biden has said that U.S. forces will defend “every inch” of NATO territory. But Biden was there when the Obama administration offered a lot of big talk about “red lines” in Syria and then did nothing. Biden’s people right now are engaging in counterproductive (to say the least) negotiations with Tehran that serve no obvious U.S. interest, and going through Moscow to do so. Vladimir Putin calculates and, as he has just demonstrated, he sometimes miscalculates. Putin might be inclined to take an inch and put Biden to the test.
This seems unlikely, but the actual invasion of Ukraine seemed unlikely until it happened.
“Putin flirts with economic suicide.” “When a government declares that it will confiscate the assets of foreign companies and foreign investors and that it won’t pay its debts, severe and lasting economic calamity follows.”
“Special Counsel Finds Mark Zuckerberg’s Election Money Violated Wisconsin Bribery Laws.” “Nearly $9 million in Zuckerberg grant funds directed solely to five Democratic strongholds in Wisconsin violated the state’s election code’s prohibition on bribery. That conclusion represents but one of the many troubling findings detailed in the report submitted today by a state-appointed special counsel to the Wisconsin Assembly.”
“Manhattan merchant banker, 61, is charged with being a spy in the US: Dual US-Russia citizen ‘ran a propaganda center in NYC and communicated directly with Vladimir Putin…Elena Branson, or Chernykh, has been charged with six counts of failing to register as a foreign agent, among other crimes.” Also helped Russians obtain visas under false pretenses. (Hat tip: ColorMeRed.)
As voting for the Texas primaries has wrapped up, the eyes of the nation at large are on the Rio Grande Valley. Many observers expect 2022 to be a big year for Republicans and the GOP, predicting to see the party build on its 2020 inroads with Hispanic voters and believing it will have success in what has previously been Democrat stronghold. To that end, the GOP fielded a wide slate of candidates, and the party has data that suggests it may be successful.
The numbers suggest two trends that portend well for the GOP: enthusiasm and historic numbers among Republican voters, and depressed turnout for Democrats. Compared to the 2018 and 2020 primary elections, Republicans had significantly higher turnout. That trend is present across all four counties in the RGV, but especially in Starr County. In 2018, a total of 15 people voted in the Republican primary; in 2020, that number increased to 46. This year, a whopping 1,773 people in Starr County voted in the Republican primary.
Conversely, Democrats had generally lower turnout in the RGV Democrat primaries compared to 2018, and about a 7.83 percent lower turnout compared to 2020.
The Florida state Senate on Tuesday passed a parents rights bill, a media-maligned piece of legislation that will prohibit primary school teachers from talking about sexual orientation with children in pre-K through third grade.
Senate passage of the Parental Rights in Education bill by a vote of 21-17 marks a milestone in parents’ efforts across the nation to fight back against the radical left in the classroom. The legislation also represents a model for other states to use as they push back the woke tides.
The Florida House of Representatives passed the legislation last month, 69-47. It now goes to Gov. Ron DeSantis for his signature.
Opposition to the Parental Rights in Education bill has been fierce, with many on the left attempting to reframe the law as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The left has attempted for years to indoctrinate children with LGBT ideology in public schools, and now activists are furious at attempts by conservatives to push back.
To be clear, the Florida legislation is not an “anti-gay” bill. It is instead a bill aimed at protecting children—and preventing educators with an agenda from infecting young kids with radical ideology.
By all means, make Democrats defend lecturing kindergartners on transsexualism and anal sex in November. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Rapper Tom MacDonald complains about “The Biggest Music Industry Screw Job Ever!” No, given it’s the music industry, not even close. There are hundreds of artists who have been screwed worse. But the lengths to which Billboard and their data recording company go to in order to avoid certifying the sales of independent musicians is certainly eye-opening.
“Our gas prices are now higher than in zombie apocalypse films.” That would be the Will Smith I Am Legend (the classic Richard Matheson novel it was based on featured vampires, not zombies).
Pretty much everyone outside the Democratic Media Complex realizes that the Hillary Clinton campaign conspired with deep state operatives to jam Donald Trump at the line, but new revelations show that the Russigate/dossier/FISAgate scandal wasn’t the worst thing they did by a long shot.
Special counsel John Durham’s team alleged on Feb. 12 that a tech executive aligned with the Democratic Party was paid to spy on former President Donald Trump’s residences and the White House when Trump was president.
Lawyers for the Clinton campaign allegedly paid the technology executive to infiltrate servers at the Trump Tower and the White House, Durham said in court filings, in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to tie Trump to the Russian government. Durham’s office made the claim as part of his investigation that had brought charges against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who had worked on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and who is currently charged with making a false statement to the FBI.
Durham alleged Sussmann “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign,” according to a section in the court filing, titled “Factual Background.”
Billing records he obtained suggest that Sussmann “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations” and that the unnamed technology executive met and communicate with Mark Elias, a left-wing lawyer and operative who has filed numerous election-related lawsuits on behalf of the Democrats. Sussman previously pleaded not guilty and accused Durham of acting in a politically motivated manner.
“Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract,” Durham’s filing states.
The executive also “tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” the filing states, adding that the technology firm that the executive worked for “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers” for Trump’s executive office.
So the Clinton campaign was paying to violate wiretapping and electronic privacy laws to spy on a sitting U.S. President. I don’t think I can even add up all the laws that were broken here.
If Richard Nixon tried such a stunt he’d never have gotten pardoned.
Some tweets:
The FBI let the DNC hire a contractor and investigate their own servers
They never thought he’d win. They never thought we’d find out. Trump won and we know they spied on him and stole 2020.
— Josh Barnett for Congress (AZ-01) (@BarnettforAZ) February 13, 2022
The Clinton campaign paid people to create a fake narrative to initiate an investigation that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars – with the sole intent of unseating a sitting President.
The entire Democrat party was complicit. Now it looks like we can finally prove it. https://t.co/IwE67YmmSp
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.
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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.)
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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.
