Posts Tagged ‘Letitia James’

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Cuomo Casho Nomo

Wednesday, December 15th, 2021

Few political falls have been so swift and complete as that of former New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. In 2020, Cuomo was being talked up as an emergency replacement for Sundown Joe Biden on the presidential ticket despite having forced Flu Manchu patients into nursing homes, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and signed a $5.1 million book deal to talk up the awesomeness of all his lockdowns and granny killing.

Here at the burnt-end of 2021, Andrew Cuomo is not only disgraced and out of office over sexual abuse allegations, his brother Fredo has been purged from CNN, ostensibly over his own sex abuse scandal. Now ex-Governor Cuomo has been ordered to turn that sweet $5.1 million over to New York State.

Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has been ordered by the state’s ethics board to forfeit $5.1 million in profits next month from the memoir he published over the pandemic.

In a near unanimous decision, a twelve to one vote, the New York Joint Commission on Public Ethics passed a resolution demanding that Cuomo return his earnings from the book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This comes a month after the panel rescinded its prior approval giving the now disgraced governor permission to keep the book side hustle while he was still serving as governor of New York, confronting multiple scandals simultaneously.

Over the summer and into the fall, the New York attorney general’s office launched a probe into Cuomo’s alleged abuse of state resources, including staff members, to draft and promote his book. During that criminal investigation, Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed the ethics panel for information related to the book deal. The JCOPE then reversed its approval for Cuomo’s to collect income from the book deal, paving the road for fines to be potentially imposed or profits to be recalled.

According to the resolution, created by Republican commissioner David McNamara, the former governor “lacked the legal authority to engage in outside activity and receive compensation in regard to the book” since the panel rescinded its approval.

While I had no intention of making this Louis Rossmann Week, he has such a wonderful plate of profane schadenfreude over this turn of evens that I’m embedding it here.

How unpopular is Cuomo? Even former Gambino Family underboss Sammy “The Bull” Gravano said Cuomo’s granny-killing was beyond the pale. “I don’t give a f— who tells me to do that, whether it’s [former President] Trump, the president, the vice president, you, him, I would never do it…And I’m a badass. I’d never do it.”

How bad do you have to suck to have a guy involved in 19 murders to think you’re scum?

(And did you know that Gravano has his own YouTube channel and a podcast? His videos even have sponsors! Only in America…)

Speaking of organized crime figures, Cuomo has clearly pissed off somebody deep in the Democratic Party power structure. I am very far indeed from the center of the New York Democratic Party, but there’s obviously something weird going on there. Having Letitia James take out Cuomo, only to drop out of the race to be his successor suggests someone beyond the public players made that call. Add that to the perfect table-run required to get Biden the nomination in 2020, the continued screwing of the Bernie Brigades, and the inexplicable rise of Pete Buttigieg, and it becomes very obvious that people very far indeed from the public figureheads of the Democratic Party are calling the shots from the shadows.

Not that Cuomo didn’t have it coming. He did. He’s a scummy asshole. But he was just as big a scummy asshole in 2020, and the Democratic Machine pulled out all the stops propping him up as some sort of messianic paragon of COVID-fighting virtue. Now the same people have done a 180° and plunged the knives into him.

The question is why.

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Posted in Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud | 4 Comments »

Welcome to Texas, NRA! Leave Wayne Behind.

Saturday, January 16th, 2021

This news broke Friday night:

The National Rifle Association announced Friday that it has filed for bankruptcy and will move out of New York and restructure the organization as a nonprofit in Texas.

The nation’s leading gun rights advocacy group said that the move to Texas will enable the group to “exit what it believes is a corrupt political and regulatory environment in New York.”

“By exiting New York, where the NRA has been incorporated for approximately 150 years, the NRA abandons a state where elected officials have weaponized the legal and regulatory powers they wield to penalize the Association and its members for purely political purposes,” the NRA said in a statement.

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the NRA in August, alleging that senior leaders of the group misused tens of millions of dollars, diverting the funds for personal use and other illegal purposes.

The NRA denied the allegations and filed a lawsuit of its own against James, accusing her of violating the group’s free speech rights and requesting that her investigation be blocked. The move to Texas and restructuring of the group could prevent the New York attorney general from seeking the dissolution of the group.

The group filed Chapter 11 petitions in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas, listing assets and liabilities of $100 million to $500 million.

There are a lot of good reasons for the NRA to move from New York to Texas apart from the lawsuit (though that’s a pretty big one), but it won’t be restored to a fully functioning organization until Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre is gone.

The NRA has been in crisis for over a year because LaPierre has engaged in what appears to be systematic looting through contracts to media company Ackerman McQueen and other entities that seem very, very chummy with LaPierre:

This 100-page document…contains unprecedented disclosures of where the money categorized as expenditures for “fund-raising” and “public relations” actually went. For example, it was revealed for the first time the Mercury Group, an Ack-Mac subsidiary run by LaPierre’s closest confidant, Tony Makris, received $5.8 million from NRA in that year; another Makris-run company, Under Wild Skies, got $2.6 million. Meanwhile, NRA has nearly exhausted its $25 million credit line (secured by a mortgage on its headquarters building), liquidated $2 million from an investment fund, borrowed close to $4 million from its officers’ life insurance policy and extracted about $5 million in office rent and overhead from the NRA Foundation.

This, in the same year that NRA’s 10 highest-paid executives received compensation aggregating over $8 million.

Unfortunately, the NRA is structured so that LaPierre has more institutional power than the NRA’s elected President, something Oliver North found out. The NRA needs LaPierre out and a forensic audit to uncover past abuses before gun owners give it another dime. I’ve let my membership lapse because of the crooked self-dealing on display by LaPierre and his cronies, and I suspect there are millions of other gun owners like me. Instead I joined Gun Owners of America, because I know my membership fees won’t be going to line Wayne’s pockets.

No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money has been following every twist and turn of the NRA/LaPierre problems for years, so go over there and start reading if you want all the deep background on the situation.

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Posted in Guns, Texas | 8 Comments »

LinkSwarm For August 7, 2020

Friday, August 7th, 2020

Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Rioters, Democrats, Iran and China are all behaving badly.

  • Remember that this weekend is a sales tax holiday on back-to-school items like clothing and paper in Texas. It should apply to onine shopping as well, so feel free to throw some shirts into your Amazon basket.
  • The Democratic Party is unfit to govern:

    We are fortunate indeed to have real world results that we can look at for how well or how poorly governing philosophies and agendas work. America’s major cities have been dominated by the Democratic Party for decades, and the results are in.

    All but 3 of America’s largest cities are run by Democratic mayors. The 3 largest cities – New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, are losing population every year.

    Several of the most violent cities in America, including Albuquerque, Memphis, Detroit, Chicago and Washington, DC are run by Democrats.

    States that are bleeding population every year due to high taxation, over-regulation, decaying cities and failing public services including New York, Connecticut, California and others are all run by Democrats.

    States that have low to no income taxes, are right-to-work and favor energy development do better economically than high tax, forced union and energy unfriendly states. According to the annual economic outlook rankings published by the American Legislative Exchange Council Center for State Fiscal Reform, in 2019 the bottom ten states were all run by Democrats and the top 10 states except two were run by Republicans.

    Needless to say, the top 10 states all have higher GDP, better quality public services, and are experiencing net in-migration. Nevada is an outlier in that it recently flipped blue. However, they have no personal income taxes, a low corporate income tax and they are a right to work state.

    Finally, all of the bottom ten states have net out-migration, high tax burdens, and lower quality of life.

    The evidence couldn’t be more clear. Democrats are incapable of governing well, or in some cases, such as Seattle or Chicago, governing at all. Every single city that has problems with decaying infrastructure, gentrification, crime, violence, homelessness and other social pathologies are governed by Democrats. They promise a boundless cornucopia of “free” (i.e. taxpayer-funded) services and programs to meet every demand of the creeping socialism we’re seeing in America, at the cost of trampling people’s constitutional rights including property rights.

  • “In Portland, Seattle, Homeland Security Is Facing Organized, Criminal Activity.”

    Critics assailing the Department of Homeland Security for “over-stepping their bounds” in Portland have it 100 percent wrong. The department is in the right.

    Further, its actions thus far should just be the first step in disrupting the organized violence aimed at intimidating public officials, injuring law enforcement officers, destroying public and private property and making our streets less safe.

    Let’s be clear. We are not talking about “peaceful protests.” What is going on in Portland, as well as Seattle and some other is an array of criminal activity: rioting, looting, arson, assaulting law enforcement officers and more. This is flat out criminal activity.

    And it is not all spontaneous. This is organized criminal activity.

    For starters, the rioters are targeting cities where public officials have created a more permissive environment. They have restricted the actions of local and state law enforcement. When rioters are arrested, they release them quickly, refusing to prosecute.

    Moreover, these officials refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement. In sum, they have turned their cities into “soft targets” for criminals.

  • More in the same same vein: “Violent Crime Explodes Across American Cities Following Nationwide Protests.”

    Violence has spiked in cities nationwide following weeks-long anti-police protests over the death of George Floyd, according to government statistics and media reports.

    Residents in Minneapolis have created patrol groups to protect themselves after the city’s crime spike, and shootings in Atlanta rose 265% compared to last year during an almost month-long period. Seattle’s “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) led to a 525% increase in crime, including the death of two teenagers.

    As crime rates rose, activists have called to abolish the police, an idea that’s gained traction among liberals. Former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, singer John Legend and women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe have all supported dismantling the police, and protesters have touted the idea during demonstrations.

    The Minneapolis City Council unanimously voted to dismantle their police department next May, and a school board in Oakland, California, voted to ban the police from its schools.

  • Amazingly, Austin police managed to avoid the stupidity of other cities who let rioters run amok:

    Saturday’s protest activity was billed as the biggest yet, at least in part due to the shooting of Garrett Foster. Foster was the man who apparently pointed his AK-47 rifle at the car window of driver Daniel Perry while protesters surrounded and pounded on his car during an unpermitted protest and illegal taking of the public street just before 10 p.m. on July 25. Perry, an Army sergeant and licensed handgun carrier, fired his weapon after Foster had used his rifle to order Perry to roll his car window down. Pointing a gun at someone can, obviously, be read as hostile action. Texas’s castle law covers drivers in vehicles defending themselves, including the use of deadly force.

    APD and the Texas Department of Public Safety were ready for Saturday’s action, making this post short.

    Law enforcement officers were deployed and ready downtown. According to a source familiar with Saturday’s events, no officers were injured. Little force was used in shutting down the protest — which illegally blocked streets and was intended to bring violence to Austin. No property was damaged despite the protesters’ plan. They did take roads illegally, briefly including Interstate 35, the main highway that runs through downtown Austin. Protesters harassed innocent diners and others downtown.

    These assholes, and the decision to let Austin become bumsville, is why so many downtown restaurants are in danger of closing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • New York’s Democratic attorney general Letitia James files a lawsuit to completely dissolve the NRA over Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s self-dealing. This is a blatantly political abuse of power that courts will strike down, but LaPierre’s crooked deals with Ackerman McQueen set them up for it.
  • “Jeffrey Epstein hosted Bill Clinton on his private island, documents reveal.” Alas, I’ve already used the “You Don’t Say” meme…
  • “The Democrats’ Pro-Iran, Anti-Israel 2020 Platform.”

    The Democratic National Committee released a platform 180 degrees off from the spin. It’s so pro-Iran that the National Iranian-American Council, the de facto Iranian regime lobby in Washington, immediately “applauded” the DNC “for its forward-leaning platform commitments on issues of importance to the Iranian-American community.” It demonstrates that President Obama’s curious preference for the supremacists running the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than our traditional regional allies, has become mainstream Democratic ideology.

    Trump administration policies have brought the bloody Islamic Republic to its knees. The Democrats seek to restore its vitality by ending sanctions and re-entering President Obama’s odious Iran deal. Every faction across Israel’s notoriously fractious political spectrum agreed that this deal was an existential threat. Biden and the 2020 Democrats take the opposing view: Regime change is wrong; diplomacy and economic engagement can restrain the mullahs.

    Next up, the Gulf Arabs: A new generation of leaders have recently expanded women’s rights, confronted Islamism, acted to curb terrorism, deepened ties to the U.S. and moved towards ending the Arab/Israeli conflict. Biden and the 2020 Democrats prefer to “reset” those warm relations in order to keep America’s traditional Gulf allies at arms length.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of Iran, their accidental sinking of fake U.S. target carrier creates real port blockage.
  • “Based on the data, there seems to be no relationship between lockdowns and lives saved.”
  • Despite all that, Democrats want even harsher lockdowns. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Five GOP lawmakers filed a lawsuit against Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott (R) over a contact-tracing contract signed with MTX Group in May. The Frisco-based private company agreed to a $295.3 million dollar deal after defeating several well-known corporations. But lawmakers argue that the bidding process bypassed constitutional requirements and voice concerns about the ability of MTX to mitigate privacy concerns.” The Republicans suing are State Reps Mike Lang, Kyle Biederman, William Zedler and Steve Toth, and state Senator Bob Hall. And the MTX contract does stink.
    

  • Everyone hates the MSM, and think that they’re making America worse.

    The mainstream media as a whole – especially the political news media in and around the DC/NYC/Beltway area – has two options: They can straighten up their acts and stop insulting the intelligence of their audiences or they can continue to show their (mostly left-wing) partisan stripes and turn audiences off.

    If recent history is any indication, however, they’ll be going with option two – because they’ve shown over and over again that when it comes to demonstrating a commitment to objective reporting versus pushing biased political angles that help Democrats, they will choose those biased political angles nearly every time.

  • 50 illegal aliens arrested at Laredo stash house.
  • Three charged in Twitter hack.

    Nima “Rolex” Fazeli, a 22-year-old from Orlando, Fla., was charged in a criminal complaint in Northern California with aiding and abetting intentional access to a protected computer.

    Mason “Chaewon” Sheppard, a 19-year-old from Bognor Regis, U.K., also was charged in California with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and unauthorized access to a computer.

    A U.S. Justice Department statement on the matter does not name the third defendant charged in the case, saying juvenile proceedings in federal court are sealed to protect the identity of the youth. But an NBC News affiliate in Tampa reported today that authorities had arrested 17-year-old Graham Clark as the alleged mastermind of the hack.

    Wfla.com said Clark was hit with 30 felony charges, including organized fraud, communications fraud, one count of fraudulent use of personal information with over $100,000 or 30 or more victims, 10 counts of fraudulent use of personal information and one count of access to a computer or electronic device without authority. Clark’s arrest report is available here (PDF). A statement from prosecutors in Florida says Clark will be charged as an adult.

  • The strange story about the Russian-born, Cyprus-resident man who abandoned the ship carrying 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate in the Beirut.
  • Social Justice Warrior Akilah Hughes sues Sargon of Akkad over his fair use of one of her videos, despite the judge telling her that was a bad idea, promptly gets her ass handed to her, and is ordered to pay $38,000 in attorney’s fees. Showing the same level of self-awareness that got her where she is, she attacks the judge and labels Sargon a “white supremacist.”
  • Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson buys the XFL for $15 million.
  • Remember Wirecard’s financial shenanigans? “Key Wirecard ‘Business Partner’ Turns Up Dead In The Philippines After Mafia Links Exposed.”
  • Tik-Tok: It’s really bad:

  • Texas is doing a better job than some states at controlling government spending, but is far from perfect:

  • “Riotous BLM Protesters Suddenly Realize They’re All White People.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • I LOLed:

  • This week’s funny dog tweet:

  • Heh:

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 3 Comments »

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