On May 1st, voters in the Texas Sixth U.S. Congressional District, a suburban Metroplex district that runs from Arlington down to Corsicana, go to the polls to fill the seat vacated by late Republican Representative Ron Wright, who died February 7. It’s a Republican-leaning district that’s recently gotten more purple, and there are a bunch of candidates from both parties (plus a Libertarian and an Independent) running for the seat.
I haven’t paid close attention to the race, but one name has popped up a few times in my Twitter feed, that of Republican candidate “Big Dan” Rodimer, who’s running “More Texan Than Though” ad campaigns like this:
Wow, sure was impressive how that guy who’s face we never saw rode that bull! One tiny problem, though: Rodimer ran for a U.S. Congressional seat last year…in Nevada:
A Republican former professional wrestler is district-hopping in hopes of winning a U.S. House seat — and has apparently changed his personality as he tries to make those congressional dreams a reality.
Dan Rodimer won the GOP nomination in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District in November 2020. He went on to lose to Democratic Rep. Susie Lee by a 3-point margin in the suburban Las Vegas-based seat.
A little more than four months later, he’s back, this time running in a special election in a Dallas-based seat more than 1,200 miles away — and he’s almost unrecognizable from his previously failed bid.
In his Nevada race, Rodimer ran ads painting himself as a clean-cut family man, wearing a collared shirt and seated on a couch with his wife and five children.
In the ad, he was defending himself from reports that he had been accused of assault three times between 2010 and 2013. According to a report from the Associated Press in October 2019, Rodimer was accused of punching men “at or outside of nightclubs.”
Now, Rodimer is back and running in a special election in Texas’ 6th Congressional District — a Dallas-based House seat left vacant after Rep. Ron Wright died following a COVID-19 diagnosis.
And Rodimer looks like a totally different person, donning a cowboy hat and positioning himself as a rodeo bull rider with a Texas accent.
American Independent is a lefty source, which explains the bad writing, repetition (can you tell me whether the district is Dallas-based?) and sloppy errors (Rodimer won his Nevada primary June 9, not in November), but the basic outline of facts is correct. Rodimer himself even mentions his Nevada run in his bio. “Dan Rodimer lived in Houston, Texas and worked as a home builder. He owned a house in Galveston and has always thought of Texas as his true home.” So the question is: Was his Nevada bid a carpetbagger bid, or is his Texas bid one now?
I asked Rodimer exactly when he moved to Texas on both his campaign email address and his Twitter account, and have not received a reply.
Issue-wise, I have have no problems with Rodimer, but I do have issue with his carpetbagger bid and how thickly he spackles on his Texas persona.
There are ten other Republican candidates running in the TX-06 field. I suspect more than one of them are acceptable conservative Republican candidates.
Representative Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) announced that he received emergency surgery on his left eye on Friday, which will leave the congressman “effectively blind” for the next month.
Crenshaw said he noticed blurry spots in his vision over the past few days, and was informed by an ophthalmologist that his retina was detaching. The congressman’s right eye was destroyed in an IED explosion while on a 2012 deployment in Afghanistan, and his left eye also required surgery after being injured in the blast.
The Friday surgery “went well, but I will be effectively blind for about a month,” Crenshaw said in a statement on Saturday morning in which he thanked the medical team who conducted the operation. “During the surgery they put a gas bubble in my eye, which acts as a bandage for my retina. This means I have to be face-down for the next week or so, unable to see anything.”
Crenshaw added that his congressional offices in Washington, D.C., and Houston would continue to operate normally.
“This is a terrifying prognosis for someone with one eye, and the nature of the injuries that I sustained in Afghanistan. Anyone who knows the history of my injuries knows that I don’t have a ‘good eye,’ but half a good eye.”
Best wishes to Rep. Crenshaw for a speedy recovery.
CBS’s “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an exchange that reporter Sharyn Alfonsi had with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) two weeks ago about the way the Sunshine State has rolled out its vaccination program.
In the clip, Alfonsi suggested that Publix, the largest grocery store chain in Florida, had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with DeSantis where they donated money to his campaign in exchange for him awarding a contract to the grocery store chain to host vaccinations.
CBS edited the interaction between DeSantis and Alfonsi when she showed up to a press conference a few weeks ago and repeatedly confronted the governor. The network cut out a lengthy portion of DeSantis’ response in which he explains what happened and how decisions were made.
The Arkansas General Assembly voted Tuesday to enact a ban on gender transition surgery for minors, overriding a veto by Governor Asa Hutchinson.
Arkansas is the first state to ban transition surgery for minors, although similar legislation is under consideration in other states. The bill also prohibits doctors in Arkansas from administering hormones or puberty blockers to residents under age 18.
Here’s a word to every single Republican office holder in America: this is not an optional fight. You fight on this hill or we’ll replace you with someone who will.
Remember how President Trump “detaining kids in cages” was the Worst Thing In The World? Well, Joe Biden is detaining 18,000 illegal alien minors, almost seven times as many. And Democrats aren’t uttering a peep of protest because they never really cared about those kids anyway, they just wanted to: A.) Bash Trump, and B.) Open up the border so they can amnesty a new wave of illegals as Democratic Party voters.
Speaking of illegal aliens: “New York is reportedly going to spend $2.1 Billion on a fund to give illegal aliens COVID relief payments up to $15,600 per person.” Did any of these Democrats actively campaign on giving taxpayer money to illegal aliens? It’s like they want to live down to the most outlandish Republican parodies of Democrats.
Liberal writer Thomas Frank says that fellow liberals are deluding themselves if they think “misinformation” is the source of all their problems and censorship is the answer:
In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.
What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.
Authorities have charged Adalberto Fructuoso Comparan-Rodriguez, whose nickname is “Fruto,” the former mayor of Aguililla, Mexico, and the reported leader of the United Cartels in Michoacán, Mexico, with drug trafficking crimes, according to the indictment.
Alfonso Rustrian, of Mexico, has also been charged as a co-conspirator. Another four defendants were charged for their roles in the alleged methamphetamine scheme.
According to court filings, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian met in Cali, Colombia, with whom they believed were members of Hezbollah but were actually undercover DEA agents. Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian agreed to send 1,100 pounds of methamphetamine from Mexico through Texas to the Miami area, according to the charges.
Once the meth arrived in Miami, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian allegedly cracked open the concrete tiles and dissolved the meth inside 5-gallon buckets of house paint. The men are alleged to have extracted the pure crystal meth from the paint.
The mysterious case of “Dr. Jialun,” an anti-Trump Twitter troll who got his account verified despite having a fake profile and all of 100 followers.
Legal Insurrection is suing SUNY Upstate Medical University for refusing to comply with a New York Freedom of Information Law request on information related to Critical Race Theory training.
Man tells his estranged girlfriend he’s driving to Florida to kill her, is shocked when he gets there and gets arrested.
Sgt. Charles H. Coolidge, previously America’s oldest living Congressional Medal of Honor winner, went to his final muster. I previously mentioned him here. That makes Hershel Woody Williams America’s last living Congressional Medal of Honor winner from World War II.
Golden Retriever has had enough of your fake news:
Weather report from Moscow streets was suddenly interrupted by a four-legged heckler. A dog stole the microphone from the reporter of a Russian broadcaster. A golden retriever jumped at Nadezhda Serezhkina, grabbed the microphone and ran away – during LIVE broadcast. pic.twitter.com/po16bUGazB
Lefties: Liberals are simply better people than those evil conservatives! Science: Not so much:
According to recent studies, when it comes to how people are treated, conservatives are more likely to treat people equally.
You read that correctly.
According to a recent article on Psychology Today, “several recent studies over the past few years cast doubt on” the idea that liberals treat individuals and groups more equally than conservatives despite liberals’ “self-reported support for equality.”
On Twitter, “liberals were more likely to amplify the successes of female and Black athletes than male and White athletes, whereas conservatives treated the successes of groups more similarly,” one study found.
Other studies showed that “white liberals presented less self-competence to black than white interaction partners, whereas white conservatives treated black and white interaction partners more similarly. And in another set, liberals had stronger desires to censor passages that portrayed low-status groups unfavorably than identical passages that portrayed high-status groups unfavorably, whereas conservatives treated the passages more comparably.
If you think really hard, perhaps you can imagine more disastrous policies than throwing open our country’s southern border and abandoning criminal-law enforcement in city after city. The consequences are already emerging, and they are grim. It is important to examine them without ideological blinders so we can change course before more damage is done.
Snip.
The most consequential effect of open immigration and lax criminal enforcement is to undermine the safe, stable environment law-abiding citizens need to go about their lives, free from predation. Providing that environment — and signaling clearly that you intend to provide it — is the first responsibility of government.
That means punishing crimes. The goal is not vengeance. Nor is it solely to provide justice for the victims, important as that is. It is also to send a strong message to would-be criminals: Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. Right now, we are sending the wrong message and, by doing so, we are encouraging law breaking on a massive scale.
That encouragement is the unifying theme behind these policy disasters, one on the border, the other in our cities. The other unifying theme is their justification under the fashionable rubric of “social justice” and “equity.” What those feel-good arguments ignore is that our criminal laws are democratic efforts to preserve personal safety and community integrity. Failing in those responsibilities harms all law-abiding citizens.
Six weeks before yesterday was Tuesday, January 26. On that day, Texas reported 22,796 new cases of COVID-19 and 332 new deaths from the pandemic.
One month before yesterday was Tuesday, February 9. On that day, Texas reported 13,282 new cases of COVID-19 and 303 new deaths from the pandemic.
Two weeks before yesterday was Tuesday, February 23, Texas reported 10,090 new cases of COVID-19 and 258 new deaths from the virus.
Yesterday was Tuesday, March 9. The state of Texas reported 5,119 new cases of COVID-19, and 168 new deaths from the virus.
It’s not quite a straight or smooth line, but you can see a steady decline in cases, followed by a similar decline in deaths. This doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. But it does suggest that the worst is over. Hospitals across the state now report a significant amount of unused capacity. “State health officials in Texas reported to the federal government that 75 percent of inpatient beds and 80 percent of ICU beds in hospitals across the state were still occupied as of March 6. Around 9 percent of beds statewide were filled by COVID-19 patients, they reported.” (Unused hospital beds are good for emergencies, but not good for the long-term financial health of the hospital.)
Texas ranks second in the country in the number of vaccine shots administered, with nearly 7.3 million, but it also ranks second in the number of shots received from manufacturers, because doses are allocated to states by population size. As of this morning, the state has used 75 percent of its delivered supply, which is not an impressive percentage. (It is worth keeping in mind that as more doses get delivered, every state’s percentage-used figure is declining a bit; North Dakota and Minnesota lead the country at 87 percent.) Fifteen percent of Texans have received one shot, and 8.2 percent are fully vaccinated. (We used to use the term “received both shots,” but now the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine is rolling out.) Obviously, getting hit with a terrible winter storm and experiencing widespread power outages does not help a state accelerate its vaccination program.
This week, another million doses have arrived or are scheduled to arrive in Texas. A week ago, Texas made all school and child-care workers eligible for the vaccine.
With the rise of gig economy jobs such as driving for Uber and other forms of independent work enabled by the digital era, more than 57 million Americans now work as freelancers in some capacity. But President Biden just endorsed a radical labor law that endangers their livelihood.
House Democrats recently reintroduced the PRO Act, which, among many sweeping reforms, would make many commonplace forms of independent contractor (freelance) arrangements illegal. It’s based on a California law that was so dysfunctional even voters in the very blue state voted to change it.
“He literally forgets the name of his Secretary of Defense, forgets the position, as well as the name of the Pentagon, calling him ‘the guy that runs that outfit over there.'”
Slow Joe is not big on news conferences. “Biden has gone longer without facing extended questions from reporters than any of his 15 predecessors over the past 100 years.”
Entire Nevada Democratic Party staff quits after Bernie Bros sweep every seat.
Not long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.
She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.
On March 6, a coalition of progressive candidates backed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party, sweeping all five party leadership positions in a contested election that evening. Whitmer, who had been chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, was elected chair. The establishment had prepared for the loss, having recently moved $450,000 out of the party’s coffers and into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s account. The DSCC will put the money toward the 2022 reelection bid of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a vulnerable first-term Democrat.
Democrats: We must destroy coal! Coal workers: Hey, we’re starting to take this personally. “Within two decades, your profession goes from being championed by the Democratic Party and labor officials to one that they want to destroy.”
Bad cop: “Dallas police officer allegedly hired hitmen to kill two people.” “Officer Bryan Riser, 36, was arrested Thursday in the unrelated slayings of Liza Saenz, 31, and Albert Douglas, 60, after one of the men charged in Saenz’s death told investigators he kidnapped and killed them at the officer’s direction.”
NYT‘s Maggie Halberstam just admits that Trump drove her crazy. Why does anyone think ordinary Americans will ever trust MSM outlets like New York Times ever again?
Matthew McConaughey teases a run for Texas Governor again. I don’t know enough about his politics to consider him a viable candidate (though he’s probably more viable than Beto O’Rourke on day 1), but the idea of him beating Greg Abbott isn’t nearly as far-fetched as it was a year ago, before Abbott maintained the coronavirus lockdown long after data said it was ineffective.
In a Wednesday evening Twitter video, with State Reps. Craig Goldman (R–Fort Worth) and Phil King (R–Weatherford) on either side of him, Abbott claimed Big Tech competitor Gab was “antisemitic” and that such companies “have no place in Texas and certainly do not represent Texas values.”
He offered no evidence to back up his claim against Gab. He also praised legislation from Goldman and King “that fights antisemitism in Texas.”
“I’m not on Gab a lot but I wouldn’t consider the platform as ‘anti Semitic’ …and I’m a Jew,” a citizen named Lisa replied to Abbott’s tweet. “Stop this nonsense.”
Gab recently skyrocketed in popularity, claiming more than 2 million new users in January after Twitter permanently banned then-President Trump and Amazon, Apple, and Google teamed up to shut down conservative social media app Parler.
Abbott’s attack on the free speech platform contradicts his words from last week when he defended free speech and berated Facebook and Twitter for their censorship.
“They are choosing which viewpoints are going to be allowed to be presented,” Abbott said at the time. “Texas is taking a stand against Big Tech political censorship: We’re not going to allow it in the Lone Star State.”
Mainstream media coverage of Gab has attacked its free-speech approach to moderation, labeling it a haven of “QAnon conspiracy theories, misinformation and anti-Semitic commentary […] .”
“Gab is not an ‘anti-semitic’ platform,” the company replied to Abbott’s tweet. “We protect the political speech of all Americans, regardless of viewpoint, because in this age of cancel culture nobody else will.”
“The enemies of freedom smear us with every name in the book because they hate America and they hate free speech,” Gab continued. “It’s a shame to see a GOP politician fall for this trap when conservative values are under sustained attack all over the country.”
Behind the Covid19 news, outside the 1619 wars, far more important than Dr Seuss, and much more far-reaching than dismantling the classics, a real line is being crossed in American education, and therefore American society as a whole. It’s the accelerating abandonment of standardized tests, the one objective measurement of students’ ability and potential in our society and culture: 77 percent of high school seniors sent in SAT scores in 2019-20; only 44 percent this year; and many schools want to keep it that way. What was initially a temporary suspension of tests because of Covid has become an opportunity to tear down the entire system.
The rationale for the SAT abolition movement is — surprise! — critical theory, which insists that any measurement that results in different outcomes among ethnic or racial groups is a priori racist. (Except for all cases when non-whites and non-Asians do better than whites or Asians, in which case, never mind.) In the words this week of Congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York: “Standardized testing is a pillar of systemic racism.”
His argument is pure Kendi: the results are solely and exclusively what determines if a test is racist. Not the test itself; not evidence about its fairness or otherwise; not data about how it is constructed; not studies that examine its effects alongside every other way of measuring academic potential. Just the results.
There is no countering this argument because it is not an argument. It is a threat. All it tells us is that the power of the term “white supremacist” will be ruthlessly deployed to shut down anyone who dares to argue that the SAT is, in fact, the least culturally biased of all measurements, the one thing wealthy kids cannot buy, and the most helpful tool in discovering the potential of poor, first-generation immigrant, black and Hispanic children, and rescuing them from the restrictions of class as well as race.
Portland Antifa is at it again, trying to storm banks and break into the federal courthouse again. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Milo Yiannopoulos now says he’s ex-gay. “I was never wholly at home in the gay lifestyle — Who is? Who could be? — and only leaned heavily into it in public because it drove liberals crazy to see a handsome, charismatic, intelligent gay man riotously celebrating conservative principles.” Whatever. His agent provocateur pose has worn pretty thin over the years. But I suspect this is one “lifestyle choice” liberals won’t be celebrating.
Local man Craig Trudeau gave thanks to the good Lord above today that he’s an American so he doesn’t have to pretend to care about the royal family at all.
Trudeau said he is extremely humbled and grateful to have been born in the best country ever created by God, especially because it means he doesn’t have to care about Meghan Markle or Prince Harry.
“Lord, thank you that I was born in your chosen country of America, so that I don’t have to give a wooden nickel about whoever this prince and princess or king or duke or whoever they are,” he said Monday as he cleaned his AR-15 and shot off fireworks in front of his house, because he lives in America and so can do whatever he wants.
What has this desiccated, old weirdo achieved in his six weeks of semiconsciousness in the Oval Office? Well, there’s putting tens of thousands of Americans out of jobs, including union guys who voted for him. There’s telling the American people that their kids can’t go to school because public school teachers take priority over children because of science or something. There’s another war in the Middle East. Those are kind of accomplishments, but not really good ones.
His administration had someone named “Ducklo” who was mean to women. He had another who wants to be a woman and who wants to let your little boys be surgically turned into women. And Neera Tanden’s confirmation was blocked because she was a woman and totally not because she was an inept loudmouth.
If this is normalcy, what’s a freak show look like?
Are you * voters starting to feel a bit of buyer’s remorse? Let me ask it another way. Everybody enjoying your $2,000 check? Oh well. On the upside, they impeached Trump…and failed. Again, after sucking up two weeks of the Senate’s calendar. So, what do you have to show for yourself, * voters?
The massive coronavirus relief bill racing through Congress provides substantial new health-insurance subsidies to upper-income households. A 60-year-old couple with two kids making $200,000 would receive a subsidy of $12,000. In some parts of the country where premiums are high, families with incomes exceeding half a million dollars will qualify for thousands of dollars in subsidies to buy an ObamaCare plan. In contrast, a family of four making $40,000 receives an added benefit of just $1,600.
It also includes 25 weeks of paid leave for bureaucrats with children in closed schools. Meanwhile, parents with closed schools held hostage to teacher’s union who aren’t bureaucrats can drop dead.
Newly minted as a committeeman, Madigan was sent to the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention as a delegate representing Daley’s interests. He voted for the most constricting “pension protection” clause in the nation, which guaranteed government-employee unions benefits the government couldn’t afford in exchange for their backing of the Democratic machine, tying the state to an anchor of massive debt in perpetuity. He also voted for changes in the property-tax system that would later make him a millionaire through his law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, which specialized in appealing the tax assessments of the most valuable real estate in the Midwest and skimming off the reductions granted by political allies who heard the firm’s appeals.
Later that year, Madigan was elected state representative for the 22nd House District of Illinois. He would go on to be reelected 25 times, eventually being elevated to House speaker after he was made gerrymanderer-in-chief following the 1980 Census. The redistricting process had been expected to hurt Democrats badly, but Madigan’s cartographical cunning staved off a political bloodbath and earned him the title of “political wizard” from the Chicago Tribune. Many representatives now owed their seats to his pen, and they elected him speaker in 1983.
For all but two of the next 38 years, he would hold the speaker’s gavel, wielding parliamentary rules that gave him more power than any other legislative leader in the country. His one-man rule was finally merged with the party power structure in 1998, when he became chairman of the Democratic Party of Illinois. This made him a one-stop shop for special interests looking to pass or kill legislation. Commonwealth Edison, the state’s largest utility provider, last year was forced to pay a $200 million fine for attempting to bribe Madigan by providing no-work contracts and other perks to the speaker’s inner circle. Though he denied wrongdoing, the scandal ultimately hastened his downfall.
The wreckage of Madigan’s decades-long reign is obvious. When he became speaker in 1983, Illinois had a perfect credit rating. Since 2013, it’s had the worst credit rating in the nation, just one notch above junk. The reason is that while Daley built his political army with federal money, Madigan built his with state money, specifically state debt. Political foot soldiers owed generous pensions, early retirements, and other perks to the speaker’s protection. His fingerprints are on nearly every bill that enhanced state pension benefits, borrowed money to cover their costs, or shorted contributions to the systems to avoid difficult choices over the course of his 50 years in power.
The result of all those unsustainable promises is the most severe public-pension crisis in U.S. history, one with far-reaching implications for Illinois government. Since 2000, the state has cut spending on child welfare and other programs that help those in need by one-third after adjusting for inflation. Over the same time, spending on pensions and pension debt has increased 501 percent. The same story plays out at the local level, as Illinoisans are saddled with property-tax bills on par with their mortgages — bills that sap home equity out of once-prosperous Black communities, particularly — in exchange for sub-par services that get worse each year.
If you haven’t read New York magazine’s interview with David Schor, an Obama campaign veteran and liberal data analyst, it’s worth your time.
His post-mortem of the 2020 election shows how Democrats have increasingly become a party of college-educated whites, whose hard-left views aren’t fully shared by the black and Hispanic communities they claim to champion. His findings echo the concerns of older progressive analysts such as John Judis.
Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, Schor finds, Democrats gained 7 percent among white college grads, but lost 2 percent of African Americans and 8 to 9 percent of Latinos, as well as about 5 percent of Asian Americans.
Socialism and “defund the police” were the chief reasons, Schor says: “We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.”
Even on immigration, “If you look at, for example, decriminalizing border crossings, that’s not something that a majority of Hispanic voters support,” Schor says.
Speaking of Biden nominations in trouble, Xavier “I Hate Nuns” Becerra’s nomination is no slam dunk either.
When I saw a headline on a deadly crash involving an SUV carrying 25 people, I went “Obviously it must have been full of illegal aliens.” Well, guess what?
In a just world not plagued by a fake and corrupt media, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) would be on the edge of resigning his office today, not over a handful of times he allegedly got aggressive with women, but over his sociopathic executive order that required nursing homes to accept patients still infected with the coronavirus.
That, after all, is the real scandal here, the true scandal, an act so monstrous Cuomo knew he had to cover it up, which he did by falsely blaming the order on the Trump administration and then lying about just how many seniors died as a result.
But instead of being pressured to resign over that, he’s being hit with perfectly-timed allegations of sexual misconduct, two involving former staffers, one involving a complete stranger he met at a wedding.
As these things go, while his alleged behavior is inappropriate (especially in the workplace), it’s nothing compared to the credible allegations against His Fraudulency Joe Biden, which involve a full-blown sexual assault allegation. Biden got away with much, much worse, so…
So what’s going on? Why is America’s corrupt media not at all interested in some 15,000 dead senior citizens while they tar and feather Cuomo over the allegations he made three left-wing women uncomfortable?
The answer is obvious…
Four other Democrat governors issued the same sociopathic nursing home order as Cuomo. Four other Democrats ordered infected coronavirus patients be admitted into nursing home facilities where 1) the most vulnerable live, and 2) they’re not set up to handle an infectious virus.
What this means is that if the corrupt media were to do the right thing (like that will ever happen) and go after Cuomo over his deadly nursing home policy, it would open a Pandora’s Box against these four Democrat governors and the Democrat party as a whole, which is something our fake media will never do.
Democrats must be protected at all costs, even if the cost is thousands and thousands of lives.
So welcoming was the Kennedy clan that the exes of either sex stayed on as friends. Andrew put a stop to that. For Kerry, that meant no more former boyfriends, not even those whom the Kennedys regarded as family. That was the word, and Andrew was dead serious about it. The new rule reinforced the doubts the family had had about Andrew from the start: he wasn’t fun; he didn’t get fun. He was, to put it mildly, a spoilsport. Unlike the Kennedys, too, he didn’t mask his ambition with charm, and no one, not even his in-laws, would stand in his way. And, as Andrew’s star at HUD rose, he seemed increasingly to regard those in-laws with disdain.
He hated the gatherings in Hyannis; he always felt like the odd man out. The joshing around, the freewheeling talks—Andrew was just too tightly wound to join in. One night, as was typical, the family began singing songs, each member singing a favorite. “The Kennedys are terrible singers, but it’s one of the great joys,” explained Douglas Kennedy. “One time Joe [Jr.] is up there, and he sings ‘Danny Boy,’ and everyone is happy about it. Except Andrew. He’s on the couch with his arms folded, looking disgusted by the whole thing. Everyone is calling for someone else to sing a song. ‘Andrew, you sing,’ someone says. But he says, ‘No, I’m not Irish.’ So someone else says, ‘Sing something Italian.’ Andrew still won’t, so I sing ‘Volare.’”
Andrew stopped going to Hyannis at one point, a family member recalled. But he made sure to be with the clan at any gathering covered by the media. Early on, the family noticed that at every visit to Arlington Cemetery to honor their father or uncle, Andrew situated himself just so. “He would always find the exact perfect place to stand so he could be in the newspaper the next day,” recalled a relative. “So if that meant grabbing [Ethel’s] hand and walking to the grave, or standing next to John or Caroline, he would get himself in the frame. That was his whole thrust.”
[Kenneth Pollack’s Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness] identifies key aspects of Arab culture relevant to the book: conformity, centralization of authority, deference to authority and passivity, group loyalty, manipulation of information, atomization of knowledge, personal courage, and ambivalence toward manual labor and technical work. One can see how these values and behaviors will negatively affect military performance, especially the most glaring problem for Arab armed forces: poor tactical leadership from junior officers. Consistently, these officers fail to show any initiative or creativity—they rarely if ever adapt quickly to changing circumstances in battle. This makes perfect sense, though, if one considers these soldiers were trained to conform and defer to authority. This stands in stark contrast to the Israeli military, whose soldiers were raised in the “Start-up Nation,” which encourages innovation from all ranks.
The education system in Arab societies drilled in these values to the point that they became central to soldiers’ behavior. “Typical Arab educational practices relentlessly inculcated the values, preferences, and preferred behavior—the culture—of the wider society,” Pollack writes.
Pollack also explains that Arab military programs are modeled on the educational methods of the larger society, reinforcing certain patterns of behavior and conditioning soldiers to act and think in “ways that reflect the values and priorities of the dominant culture.”
I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race.
Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.
Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.
Sad news: Austin-based movie theater chain The Alamo Drafthouse has filed for Chapter 11. That’s reorganization, so most theaters will stay open. A good thing, too, since I’ll probably see Godzilla vs. Kong there…
Papa Johns founder John Schnatter vindicated. Laundry Service “the branding company hired which was hired by Papa John’s to improve its image, was caught on a ‘hot mic’ brainstorming ways in which it could use comments made by Schnatter to damage his image.”
It’s also possible every guy they showed this too to get feedback was terrified he’d get fired for sexual harassment if he mentioned it looked like a money shot in a porn video.
"I have always put my own money into #tailsofjoy. For years, every time a dog walked by, my husband would say, 'There goes our beach house'."-@ElayneBoosler
A Medina County justice of the peace and three others have been arrested on 150 counts of voter fraud after an investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) of Texas.
Medina County is about 45 miles due west of San Antonio. Hondo is the county seat.
Turning themselves into the Bandera County Sheriff’s Office, the charges stem from fraudulent voting practices during the 2018 primary in Medina County.
Tomas Ramirez, the peace officer, has been charged along with Leonor Garza, Eva Martinez, and Mary Balderrama by a Bandera County grand jury.
Party affiliations is somewhat hard to come by, since Ballotpedia doesn’t list Justice of the Peace elections for Medina County, but Tomas Ramirez, Justice of the Peace for Precinct 4, is a Republican.
The charges range from engaging in organized election fraud to illegal voting to unlawfully assisting a mail ballot voter.
Ramirez et al. aren’t the first individuals charged with voter fraud in the recent past. A number of voter fraud charges have been brought by the OAG’s Election Integrity Unit including against a San Antonio woman exposed by an undercover Project Veritas video back in October.
Snip.
The defendants are being tried in Bandera County because under Texas law, any voter fraud-related offense may be tried in a neighboring county.
The OAG website states the office has successfully prosecuted 531 counts of voter fraud since 2004 — with 97 of them from 2018 alone.
Currently, 234 election fraud investigations are still active.
Back before Mark Robinson became North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor, he attracted notice as an ordinary citizen fighting against gun grabbing legislation:
And after being elected Lt. Governor, here he is fighting about the media’s “insurrection” bullshit on January 6, and slamming a newspaper for depicting him, a black man, as a member of the Klu Klux Klan.
That’s how you do it.
And here’s Robinson talking about his own rise from being a blue collar worker to Lt. Governor:
Scholars at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business analyzed the plan and found that the massive spending splurge—which costs roughly $13,260 per federal taxpayer—would only cause a “slight uptick” in economic growth in 2021. The analysts warned that this minor boost would just be “instant gratification,” and that the skyrocketing government debt caused by the blowout legislation would undermine any gains in the medium-to-long term.
“The existence of the debt saps the rest of the economy,” Wharton analyst Efraim Berkovich said. “When the government is running budget deficits, the money that could have gone to productive investment is redirected.”
“Effectively, what we’re doing is taking money from [some] people and giving it to other people for consumption purposes,” he continued. “That has value for social safety nets and redistributive benefits, but longer-term, you’re taking away from the capital that we need to grow our economy in the future.”
Biden’s costly plan would explode the national debt. This, per Wharton, would lead to a “crowding out” effect over the coming years as more loan money is taken away from productive business/private sector investments and instead consumed by government debt.
So the Biden Administration hit an Iranian-backed militia stronghold in Syria in retaliation for attacks on Americans. I know we’re supposed to compare Warmonger Biden to Peacemaker Trump for the cognitive dissonance luls, but this is similar to President Trump’s missile strike on a Syrian chemical weapon faculty in April of his first year in office. I’m sure there’s plenty of Biden foreign policy stupidity ahead to rail against, but in this case it’s not significantly different from Trump policy.
A surprising body of research links increases in the minimum wage to increases in criminal offending by those most likely to lose jobs as a result of the wage hike. One analysis concluded that raising the federal minimum to $15 could create crime costs of up to $2.5 billion—a bill that would be borne disproportionately by the very people whom the wage hike is meant to help.
The minimum wage’s economic trade-offs are well known. It raises the take-home pay of some, while causing others—particularly teens, young adults, and less-skilled workers—to lose their jobs. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a $15 minimum would boost 17 million workers’ earnings by 11.8 percent, on average, but would also cost from 1 million to 3 million jobs.
Higher wages could make working more appealing than illegal activity for some. For others, put out of work by the hike, losing a job heightens the risk that they will go on to commit both property and violent crimes. After all, the people most likely to feel the economic downsides of a minimum-wage hike, in the form of lost jobs—the young—are also among those most likely to commit such crimes. Youths aged 16 to 24 make up just 12 percent of the population but were 23 percent of those arrested as of 2019; they account for a full third of those making less than $15 an hour. The CBO estimated that 16- to 19-year-olds alone would account for half of the job lost if the minimum wage reaches $15.
In one paper from last year, researchers evaluated decades of data to consider the relationship between minimum-wage hikes and crime among 16- to 24-year-olds, finding that the wage hikes tend to correlate with increased property crimes, particularly larcenies—a sign that some unemployed people decide to earn their keep through theft rather than finding another job. Minimum-wage hikes also lead to increases in disorderly-conduct arrests, indicating an increase in loitering and other idleness among teens and young adults. Based on this data, the researchers estimate that hiking the minimum to $15 would lead to an additional 423,000 property crimes, creating the aforementioned $2.5 billion in damages.
Along with price increases, employers may reduce hours, and Belman and Wolfson note that “[i]t has long been suggested that employers may respond to minimum wage increases by reducing spending on training, fringe benefits and working conditions valued by employees.”
Another important finding is that employers often respond to higher mandated wages by replacing low wage workers with those who have more education, skills and experience which make them more productive. This adjustment may have little effect on the observable employment numbers, but the effect is devastating for those who are replaced. Employers can be forced to pay higher wages, but they can’t be forced to hire or retain employees whose contributions don’t match the higher wage.
Some studies (see Clemens 2019) suggest that the pace of job creation slows when mandated wages rise. The increases also accelerate automation, which reduces the number of entry-level jobs and further penalizes those whom the increases are meant to help. In coming years, the combined effect of substitution, slower job creation, and accelerated automation is likely to be a growing core of workers, many of whom are young and poorly educated, who are unemployed and unemployable.
Social activists and progressive editorial boards now regard the minimum wage as another welfare program that can reduce the costs of programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and can reduce inequality. But the minimum wage is very poorly targeted for these purposes. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that “roughly 40 percent of workers directly affected by the $15 option in 2025 would be members of families with incomes more than three times the federal poverty level.” If the goal is to aid low-wage households, rather than teenagers and other part-time workers in middle-income and affluent families, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit would be far more effective, because it is designed to aid the working poor.
History will record Covid-induced lockdowns as the product of pseudoscientific ideology, manifestations of an unprecedented mass hysteria and drummed-up fear.
When Sweden strayed from the herd of nations hellbent on lockdown, it suffered intense vilification. The modellers who agitated for lockdown as a profoundly necessary step opined that veering from the mainstream playbook would see Sweden suffer some 100,000 excess deaths, double its normal annual death toll. Daily articles, notably in The Guardian, berated the country or the murder that would surely ensue if it didn’t rejoin the herd.
A lot was riding on this. In taking up the lockdown baton from China, the world was conducting a dangerous experiment. That experiment involved tearing up the public health policy guidelines for respiratory virus epidemics of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the US’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and many others.
These guidelines were the results of a century of evidence and deliberation that was summarily ignored when the virus arrived. Detailed statements of principle governed the evidential processes required to revise them. These too were ignored.
The basis for all of this was the assurance of the WHO’s Bruce Aylward that China’s lockdown had contained its epidemic. This in turn was based on speculation that everyone was susceptible to Covid-19 and that, without lockdown, exponential growth of disease and death was inevitable.
Snip.
But Sweden did not lock down, becoming the one of the most alluring control experiments the world has ever seen. And it did not suffer 100,000 excess deaths. Not even close. Instead, this is what happened:
Whether you are a lockdown fan drawing trend lines that suggest Sweden had 8000 excess deaths or a skeptic concluding there were none because of a build-up of very susceptible people from an abnormally low death rate in 2019, this reality dealt a devastating blow to the lockdown theory and the models used to justify lockdown.
Covid-19, it turned out, was not only far less deadly than modellers had predicted, but they couldn’t credit this to the lockdowns they’d promoted. Sweden clearly showed that failure to lock down did not constitute genocide.
The favorite hobby of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Joe Biden’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, is targeting Little Sisters of the Poor. He “chose to pursue this litigation even though it is completely meritless; even though it would, if successful, punish nuns who simply want to carry out their calling to care for the indigent elderly; and even though only ideological zealots intolerant of moral views different from their own can take any pleasure in its continuation.” Every knee must bend.
Massive explosion rocks Cameron, Texas (about 75 miles northeast of Austin) after a train collided with 18-wheeler. Fortunately there were no injuries.
Biden’s energy plans are bad for our national security, economy, public health, and overall quality of life. But the American people’s ingenuity and creativity — and the very nature of how our planet and energy systems work — mean all is not lost.
Under Biden’s attempts to “phase out” natural gas, petroleum, and coal, the prices we pay for energy will go up.
This should be no surprise to Biden and his political allies, since costs have soared everywhere “going green” has been tried. Californians are paying 30% more for electricity than they did 10 years ago. In Denmark, where wind energy became a priority in the mid-1990s, prices have more than doubled.
Because everything we do, from the moment our alarms go off every morning to when we turn off the lights at night, depends on energy, these higher prices will be a heavy burden for American families. Expensive energy means producing, marketing, transporting, and selling goods and services will also become more expensive, creating less a ripple effect than a tidal wave.
The rising cost of living will hurt the poor the most. Low-income Americans already spend a higher percentage of their paychecks on electricity and gas, and they have less disposable income to afford higher prices for necessities.
Coupled with the tax increases that would be needed to further subsidize unreliable wind and solar energy, Biden’s plans would cripple the poor and even put their health in jeopardy.
An equally critical consequence of moving away from fossil fuels is the destabilization of our national security. Since becoming the world’s dominant energy producer and a net energy exporter, America has a stronger influence in global negotiations and advancing the cause of freedom.
Thanks in large part to America’s growing influence over OPEC and Russia, multiple Middle Eastern nations have committed to normalizing relations with Israel, an unprecedented development National Review described as “something suspiciously resembling peace.” It’s the reason President Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times.
America used to go to war over energy, but now we’re actively loosening the grip of unstable, totalitarian countries not just on oil markets, but on the global balance of power. This is good news for Americans, who benefit from a safe and peaceful nation, and also for the entire world.
Sounds like the entire union should be fired, then.
"Teacher's Unions: We won't let your kids go back to school, but we will make sure the guy jacking off in front of Middle Schoolers can't be fired!" pic.twitter.com/Fkbqlv7bG5
If you wanted to get your hands on Gwyenth Paltrow’s $95 vibrator, you’re too late; it’s sold out. The way that woman creates ridiculous overpriced crap that gets everyone talking about what ridiculous overpriced crap it is, which then makes said ridiculous overpriced crap sell out almost immediately, makes me think she’s actually some sort of marketing genius…
“We just wanted to give our viewers a heads-up that the show contains jokes, comedy, laughter, and free speech,” said a Disney spokesperson. “It feels very dated nowadays, since the show is packed full of problematic things like jokes, innovation, and quality. It’s like, come on, people, this is 2021, not the Dark Ages!”
If you or I can’t sleep at night, we might read a book or waste time on the Internet. When Colin Furze can’t sleep at night, he makes a hydraulic powered shark head.
Truth:
While I don’t know how to be “less white,” I do know how to drink less coke
Rush Limbaugh died Wednesday after a year-long battle with cancer.
Limbaugh’s death at age 70 was announced Wednesday on his influential conservative radio program, by his wife, Kathryn.
Limbaugh announced last February that he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer.
Although the cancer was expected to quickly kill Limbaugh, he received treatment and continued to host his radio program over the year.
Shortly after his diagnosis, then-President Donald Trump surprised Limbaugh at last year’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress by awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Then-first lady Melania Trump put the medal around Limbaugh’s neck.
“The Rush Limbaugh Show” premiered in 1988, airing for 33 years.
Limbaugh’s program went on the air at a time when conservative media outlets were few and far between. Liberal opinion dominated all the broadcast networks, Time, Newsweek, NPR and most newspapers. He was a breath of fresh air, and became notably more conservative after Desert Storm. Straight from the git-go, liberals hated him for daring to bust up their media monopoly, and liberal Twitter is reacting to his death with exactly the sort of grace and tact you’d expect.
There isn’t one good quality about Rush Limbaugh. Not one. Fuck him. Wherever he is.
Rush Limbaugh was a coward and white supremacist. He aggressively and cynically exploited divisions in our country by weaponizing hatred and bigotry for his own personal gain. He was in service to his own greed, prejudice, and hypocrisy, and that is how history will remember him.
(With a side helping of wishing Henry Kissinger dead as well.)
Limbaugh always opened his show with the quote “…with talent on loan from God,” and now he gets to give it back.
A few tributes:
No words … I just got news the Rush Limbaugh has passed away. thanks Rush for all you taught, gave and were. A hero to many. An icon. A patriot. A revolutionary that saved radio. Heavens gain, our loss.
Like millions of conservatives across the country, I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, his ability to explain any given topic was unmatched, his intellect was legendary, over the years I have watched him do so much good helping out struggling Americans.
If you know a conservative under the age of 35, Limbaugh influenced them. Whatever you think of his career trajectory, and I have my frustrations in the Trump era, he was a profoundly important check on Democratic narratives in the press. A true legend. Rest in peace.
Farewell to Rush Limbaugh. A giant of American broadcasting, a man who inspired millions, and infuriated millions (and then inspired some of those, too). He saw through the media lies to bring out the greatness of this country. He fought to the end like the American that he was.
Don’t worry about all the negative stuff the communists are saying about Rush. Read all of them. Then go live the kind of life that ensures they’ll say the same thing about YOU when you die.
Make the right enemies. And make sure they hate you like they hated him.
There’s nothing more tiresome than hackneyed references to The Matrix, except for the constant propaganda we’re hosed down with by the Establishment and its media lackeys about how everything is groovy in our totally free, free enterprise paradise of freedom and happiness and more freedom. Some of us have been woke for a while, having realized the undeniable truth that the system is rigged for the benefit of a garbage ruling class, whose sole accomplishment is to perpetuate a paradigm in which they maintain power and prestige by controlling institutions they didn’t create or build. Instead, they are cultural trust fund babies, the equivalent of third generation Kennedy brats with substance issues who got into power by getting into the right schools and modeling the right SJW attitudes. These oligarch overseers rely on us to toil in their figurative fields while they sit on their figurative porches, sipping locally-sourced figurative mint juleps.
I say burn it all down and rebuild America into what it is supposed to be, that is, what they tell us it is when they lie to us.
I’m not alone. We’re primed for some conservative anarchy. The normals’ resistance cannot be quelled; the revolution will be Telegrammed. Everyone’s gobbling up red pills, the one medication our incompetent Establishment is fully capable of distributing efficiently and effectively. You drop one and you see the Matrix. You see the lie. You see that it’s all rigged.
Snip.
I mentioned GameStop and these ladies not only knew what it was, but they cheered the armchair day trader anarchists. And they booed the hedge funders.
Rich Orange County Republicans booed the hedge funders.
And they booed Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, with one exception, Nikki! Haley too. The ones who had heard of the Bulwark booed it as well, so there were like three of those.
Populists in pearls, fully red pilled and woke as hell. They saw how the Establishment has been lying to them. They realized that they were never really members of the ruling caste despite their sweet rides and bank accounts. They were allowed its material trappings, but they were excluded from the real power, the power to govern themselves.
They have more in common with the Keystone pipeline worker John Kerry wants to go make solar panels – which seems unrealistic, since his Chi Com collaborators make them all – than with the rich and truly powerful elite.
People are getting woke – the red pill is socio-political anti-Ambien because it keeps you from falling back asleep and not seeing that everything is rigged.
They see how the ruling caste allows you this little band of autonomy, and how you are allowed some leeway to improve your material life, but the instant you try to assert power that threatens the status quo, the Matrix kicks in and its immune system reacts to snuff you out.
That was the revelation of the GameStop Revolution. You’re allowed to put your money into Wall Street and they might let you take some pennies out, but if you try to go big and play at the same level as the anointed, oh no. You don’t get to. The system shuts you down – literally. You can’t buy the hot stock. Does that apply to the hedge fund guys? You think they can’t play after you’ve been sidelined? Come on. It’s blatant market manipulation, but Wall Street owns the Asterisk Administration – Treasury Secretary & Lord High Protector of the Masters of the Universe Janet Yellin took nearly a million bucks to “speak” to the lever-pullers behind the RobinHood app – and the Administration owns the SEC, and do you think it will investigate the hedge funders who changed the rules? No, but look for FBI SWAT teams to be hitting the basements where the Reddit rebels live. That is, right after they bust more conservative meme guys for illegal memes.
Now, in perhaps the most chilling move yet from the new administration, the newly minted Defense Secretary [Lloyd Austin] plans to direct a military-wide stand down, reportedly to address “extremism” within the ranks.
Austin wants all military units to take an operational pause to discuss extremism as he works to grasp the full scope of the issue and better address the longstanding problem, John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, told reporters Wednesday. The pauses are expected to occur within the next 60 days, but Austin has yet to determine how the stand downs are to be completed, Kirby said.
“The intent is to reinforce the [Pentagon’s] policies and values with respect to this sort of behavior and to have a dialogue with the men and women of the force and to get their views on what they are seeing at their level,” Kirby said. “He wants commands to take the necessary time to … speak with troops about the scope of this problem. It’s a two-way conversation.”
Austin spoke frankly with the acting service secretaries and uniformed service chiefs about his concerns about extremism in the military, including white supremacism, said Kirby, who attended the meeting. The new defense secretary, who is the first Black leader of the Defense Department, wants the service leaders to better grasp how pervasive the issue is within their formations and work with leaders to stamp it out, Kirby said.
We have gone in a few short months from President Donald Trump preventing “critical race theory” dogma from being imposed on federal employees to the possibility that the armed services will have to apologize for their privilege.
it seems that Biden is intent on provoking just such a pushback by his record number of early and often radical executive orders — a tactic candidate Biden condemned.
On almost every issue — open borders, blanket amnesties, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the Green New Deal, and hard-left appointees — Biden is touting positions that likely do not earn 50 percent public support.
When Biden made a Faustian bargain with his party’s hard-left wing of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to win the election, he took on the commitment to absorb some of their agenda and to appoint their ideologues.
But he also soon became either unwilling or unable to stand up to them.
Now they — and the country — are in a revolutionary frenzy. The San Francisco Board of Education has voted to rename more than 40 schools honoring the nation’s best — Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln — largely on racist grounds that they are dead, mostly white males.
Statues continue to fall. Names change.
The iconic dates, origins and nature of America itself continue to be attacked to meet leftist demands. And still, it is not enough for the new McCarthyites.
Social media are banning tens of thousands. Silicon Valley and Wall Street monopolies go after smaller upstart opponents.
A wrong word destroys a lifelong career. Formerly sane pundits now call for curtailing the First Amendment. Thousands of federal troops blanket a now-militarized Washington, D.C.
If Trump’s pushback tried to return to traditions ignored during the Obama years, Biden’s reset promises to become far more radical than Obama’s entire eight years.
Biden has not been above water a single time in the Approval Index rating. This index is the difference between how many likely voters strongly approve and how many strongly disapprove. Total approval has hit 50% once so far…
This result is astonishing when you think about it. President Biden has the full weight of nearly every corporate media outlet, tech company, and cultural institution behind him. They have been drooling all over themselves to convince us this is a return to unifying normalcy. After all, his favorite ice cream is chocolate chip, and his two German Shepherds just love their new digs. So normal. So unifying.
While other Republican legislators complain and pontificate about Twitter, Facebook and Google’s interference in our elections and censoring of conservative voices, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared war on the tech giants.
DeSantis is proposing legislation that asks the Florida state legislature to impose stiff fines – up to $100,000 per day – on tech companies that “deplatform” political candidates running for office in his state. Candidates like, for instance, Donald Trump.
Calling the tech giants “enforcers of preferred narratives” whose interests are “not in the public interest,” DeSantis, a Republican, wants to “ensure the protection of the people and their rights.” His proposed bill would allow individuals and the Florida attorney general to sue firms that violate newly established safeguards against privacy violations and censorship.
DeSantis also suggested that other activities, such as colluding to ban people or companies from payment platforms or from cloud services, could also be outlawed.
Presuming that the popular governor can get his measure passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature, it could become a template for the other 23 GOP-led states. It could, in effect, be the beginning of a revolt against the unacceptable dominance and manipulation of our nation’s discourse by Big Tech.
Here’s my game plan for how Trump can make Trump and America great again.
First, Trump must become the kingmaker of the GOP. The Trump Army is 74 million strong. The Republican Party belongs to Trump. He should remake the party in his image.
In some ways, his defeat was empowering. As president, Trump couldn’t get rid of RINOS and never-Trumpers, because he needed their votes. But from the outside, he can remake the party, elect allies and end the careers of the GOP traitors who stabbed him in the back. Are you listening, Rep. Liz Cheney?
Trump should recruit, endorse and campaign for Trump Republicans in each GOP primary where they’re running against RINOS, never-Trumpers and backstabbers. Seventy-four million Trump voters will vote for his chosen candidates in GOP primaries. By 2022, the GOP will be 100% remade in Trump’s image.
Secondly, Trump should spend the next four years fixing voter fraud at the state level. Trump should recruit his billionaire buddies to put up hundreds of millions to attack this problem. Trump’s goal should be to reform election law in just the handful of states that cost him the election: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona.
If Trump spends his time, money and focus on reforming election laws in those six states, the GOP will be back in business in 2022 and 2024.
Thirdly, Trump needs to raise billions from his billionaire backers to build TMN: Trump Media Network. That should include a national cable TV network; a national talk radio network; a new version of Drudge Report (called Trump Report); and conservative versions of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Conservatives will never again have to depend on the mainstream media or Silicon Valley to broadcast their news and opinions.
Only Trump has the money, brand and fundraising ability to change the media and social media landscape like this. And think of the amazing bonus: Not only will 74 million Trump voters have permanent places to communicate but if we all move away from mainstream media and social media, they will collapse. Trump will cripple his enemies and put many of them out of business.
However, I’m not a fan of Root and others idea of Trump running for the House.
Bryan Proffitt, “the Vice President of North Carolina’s largest teachers’ association is a self-avowed Marxist activist linked to Liberation Road – a ‘revolutionary socialist‘ group that follows the teachings of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong.” Sounds like a good reason to put your children in a private school. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Biden Administration hates private space ventures and pulled permission from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to fly. Punishment for Musk supporting the GameStop squeeze? Either way, it’s blow to American space capabilities and a boon for Chinese domination of space. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“Joe Biden put me out of business by suspending new oil and gas leases and drilling permits. I am a petroleum geologist and generate drilling prospects in the Rocky Mountains on federal lands. I worked six years to get a prospect ready to drill and Biden just illegally broke the terms of the lease, killing the deal.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
International law enforcement agencies said on Wednesday they had dismantled a criminal hacking scheme used to steal billions of dollars from businesses and private citizens worldwide.
Police in six European countries, as well as Canada and the United States, completed a joint operation to take control of Internet servers used to run and control a malware network known as “Emotet,” authorities said in a statement.
“Emotet is currently seen as the most dangerous malware globally,” Germany’s BKA federal police agency said in a statement. “The smashing of the Emotet infrastructure is a significant blow against international organised Internet crime.”
