Posts Tagged ‘Democrats’

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Followup: Austin Homeless Industrial Complex Graft Scheme Thwarted (For Once)

Thursday, May 18th, 2023

Remember Austin’s scheme to hand millions to the homeless industrial complex to clean up the mess they created, and the shady, recently-created “P Squared Services, LLC” they picked to give $1.7 million to?

That attracted so much attention that that particular piece of graft is now off the table:

Kudos to blogger Teddy Brosevelt (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that’s a pseudonym) and Austin City Council member Mackenzie Kelly for killing this giant bucket of graft.

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Posted in Austin, Democrats, ObamaCare, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, video, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 6 Comments »

Death Star Update: Preemption Bill Closer To Passage

Tuesday, May 16th, 2023

Remember the “Death Star” preemption bill designed to prevent left wing local governments from doing amazingly stupid things? Now it’s one step closer to Governor Abbott’s desk.

A landmark local government preemption bill cleared its second hurdle Tuesday as House Bill (HB) 2127 was passed by the Texas Senate, with a few amendments.

Dubbed the “Texas Regulatory Consistency Act,” the bill prohibits municipalities from approving regulations that exceed state law in nine different sections of code: Agriculture, Business & Commerce, Finance, Insurance, Labor, Local Government, Natural Resources, Occupations, and Property.

The bill states that any regulation specifically enumerated in state code is regulatable by municipalities, and anything else is not, a strategy called “field preemption.” Up until this session, the state had opted for “conflict preemption,” a strategy of addressing specific policies adopted by localities after the fact.

It’s the difference between blasting with a shotgun and firing with a rifle.

HB 2127 allows individuals or associations in the county of potentially offending regulation to sue the locality for abridging this prohibition.

The bill, authored by Rep. Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) and sponsored by Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe), was passed by the House about a month ago, where it received eight votes from Democrats in the lower chamber. From there, it moved to the Senate Business & Commerce Committee, where it passed six to two.

On Monday, the Senate passed its version with three amendments; Sen. Robert Nichols (R-Jacksonville) was the only GOP “nay” on the bill. The vote was the same on Tuesday’s final passage.

Those amendments include a “loser pays” provision, placing the burden of payment for a frivolous lawsuit with the person or group who brought the suit; a limitation that a suit may only be brought against the offending political subdivision, not individual elected officials of that locality who were liable to be sued under the House version; and the tacking on of a prohibition against local governments halting evictions.

Plaintiffs must provide three months’ notice to the locality of an impending suit, intended as a grace period within which the potential violation can be revoked.

That eviction language comes from Senate Bill (SB) 986, which appears to have stalled out in the lower chamber. That bill is aimed at what big cities in Texas tried to do — but were stopped by courts — in ordering eviction moratoriums during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Creighton said in a statement after the bill’s passage, “The Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, the most pro-business, pro-growth bill of the 88th session has passed the Senate.”

“HB 2127 gives Texas job creators the certainty they need to invest and expand by providing statewide consistency and ending the days of activist local officials creating a patchwork of regulation outside their jurisdiction. Local governments acting as lawmakers in a patchwork of varying anti-business ordinances result in job killing outcomes.”

Gov. Greg Abbott has backed the bill, shedding little doubt over whether he will sign it into law once it reaches his desk.

Snip.

With the bill passed in the upper chamber, it now moves back to the House, where the members must either accept the Senate version with its amendments or reject them and trigger a conference committee.

From there, it moves into the friendly embrace of Abbott, who’s been chomping at the bit to sign it into law.

The sooner this is signed into law, the sooner the madness consuming the local governments in Travis and Harris County can be reigned in.

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Posted in Austin, Democrats, Republicans, Texas | 7 Comments »

Austin City Council Wants To Hand Millions In Graft To The Homeless Industrial Complex

Monday, May 15th, 2023

It’s good to be a member of the Austin Homeless Industrial Complex. Not only do you get to rake off graft for luring drug-addicted transients to town, you also get to rake off graft to clean up the resulting mess.

Item #23 on this week’s Austin City Council agenda allocates another $20 million to the Homeless Industrial-Complex to clean up dozens of dangerous homeless encampments around the city.

Item 23 (link) says it’s critical for these camps to get cleaned up, since they pose “a great degree of health, safety, and fire risks.”

Austin Water also needs cleanup services on “environmentally sensitive areas of the wildlands” due to toxic waste and debris contaminating the watershed.

Snip.

One of the three companies who won this big fat $20 million contract – P Squared Services, LLC – is the most suspicious, sketchy and (almost certainly) fraudulent company I’ve encountered during my three years of reading through these absurd Austin City Council agenda items.

Just look at the 11 bids and financial docs for Item 23 (link).

You will shake your head in anger and disbelief, asking yourself:

  • How could Austin Finance be so incompetent, lazy and irresponsible?
  • Is something more sinister going on?
  • Is this a case of internal corruption or criminal behavior?

    No sane person would make these decisions.

    • Nah. Austin City Council. Corrupt and incompetent is the default setting.

    Meet P Squared Services, LLC

    Major red flags pop up across the galaxy when you investigate this highly suspicious, brand new company called P Squared Services.

    P Squared Services has:

  • No internet presence
  • No website
  • No clients
  • No experience

    • There’s overwhelming evidence that P Squared Services, LLC is almost certainly up to something nefarious and possibly illegal.

    The major question is whether it’s an inside job and who made the final decision to funnel money to these frauds.

    P Squared Services is a Texas Domestic Limited-Liability Company that was formed in Smithville on November 4, 2022.

    The business address for P Squared Services is an exact match for the residential address of the two married co-owners:

  • Brandon Keith Pietsch
  • Kristina Dawn Pietsch

    • So the married co-owners of P Squared Services are running this mysterious business out of their HOUSE.

    And this “business address” is actually a residential, single family home with zero visible equipment, tools or supplies for cleaning up industrial waste.

    P Squared Services, LLC
    607 Ash Street
    Smithville, TX 78957

    Let’s look at the google street view photos of their business headquarters / house.

    See if you can notice:

  • Empty beer cans on front lawn
  • Tipped-over cooler by porch
  • Unfinished projects like doors and window screens that were never installed.

    • So they’re hiring someone to clean up a homeless camp whose house looks like a homeless camp.

    The conclusion: “I’m almost positive that P Squared Services LLC is a fake, phony, money laundering scam.”

    Indeed.

    That seems to be the driving purpose behind all Austin homeless policies…

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Waste and Fraud | 20 Comments »

    How California Destroyed Its Middle Class

    Saturday, May 13th, 2023

    The decline of California under one-party Democrat rule has been one of the long-running themes of this blog. Today Victor Davis Hanson discusses how California’s wealthy destroyed the middle class with policies whose baleful effects they knew wouldn’t fall on them.

  • “The irony is that, as we created more wealth and more leisure, because of the very success of the middle class citizen, the middle class citizen and his central role in western government was forgotten.”
  • “California in the 1960s had the largest middle class in the United States. California had the finest educational system. California invented the idea of a modern freeway and a modern airport.”
  • “California had a state where two-thirds of the people lived with one-third of the precipitation, and yet they built the greatest transference of water with reservoirs and aqueducts the world had ever seen.”
  • “California had the most successful oil, timber and mineral industries in the world. They had some of the finest universities…Again this was a product of, both democratic governors and Republican governors.”
  • “However, today when we look at California, it’s got the highest number of homeless people in the United States. Half of all of America’s homeless live in California.”
  • “One-third of all the welfare recipients in the United States live in California. One-fifth of all Californians live below the poverty line.”
  • “California yet has the highest taxes in the country in the aggregate, the highest property taxes because of the enormous assessed evaluations…highest sales tax at over 10 to 11%, highest income tax at up to 13.2%.”
  • “The result of all of that that is is the middle class finds itself unable to pay and be competitive with other businesses in other states.”
  • “They look at all of these higher taxes, and they say themselves ‘I’m willing to pay it if I’m economically viable,’ but the regulations that the state creates fall heavily on the small farmer, the hardware store owner, the tire [store?] owner, but not necessarily on the Silicon Valley corporation that has an array of lawyers, or legal teams, or analysts, or economists, that find ways not to pay it.
  • “And so the middle class leaves, they vote with their feet they go to places where it’s more conducive for middle class livelihoods. We’ve lost somewhere between 8 and 12 million people of the middle class.”
  • At the same time, America has allowed in 20 million illegal aliens, half of which have ended up in California.
  • “We have not built an aqueduct in California in about 40 years. The schools that were rated in the top 10 percent of comparative state rankings are now in the bottom 10 percent. The airports are decrepit.”
  • “That the more taxes I pay, the worse schools I get.”
  • “In this period, there was about five trillion dollars in market capitalization that grew out of Silicon Valley alone. And we created sort of a medieval caste, a wealthy caste of Barons and Lords that were not subject to the consequences of their own ideology. So they had so much wealth they felt they were exempt from worries about taxation.”
  • “We created a very, very wealthy elite that was not subject to the consequences of their own ideology.”

  • Whether out of virtue signaling and guilt, or whether out of contrived political necessity, they made a political alliance with the very poor of California. And the poor said “Give us more entitlements, tax the middle class, transfer that money to us we need it.” And the wealthy said “Yes, we will open the borders. We’ll transfer money, but you have to vote for issues that we’re in favor of. And we’re in favor of them precisely because they don’t affect us.”

  • And of course, the left’s disdain for the middle class shows up in their language: They’re the “bitter clingers,” the “deplorables,” the “chumps and dregs of society.”
  • “Muscular labor was no longer essential to the American experiment. In other words, you could make have things made overseas in China or southeast Asia or Mexico. And the great middle class territory of the middle west of the United States—Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana—started to become hollowed out.”
  • “We’ve taken the middle class, the backbone of citizenship, and we’ve eroded it and destroyed it.”

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    Posted in Democrats, Economics, Social Justice Warriors, video, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 11 Comments »

    Americans Reject Transexism Because It’s Anti-Reality

    Sunday, May 7th, 2023

    “How many fingers, Winston?”

    While the usual poll caveats apply, a clear majority of Americans reject transexism.

    If a majority of the population was starting to reject a dangerous, destructive, violent ideology, normally that would be cause for serious celebration, right?

    But I dunno guys. I get the slightest feeling The Washington Post isn’t crazy about it, don’t you?

    Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children, a Washington Post-KFF poll finds, offering political jet fuel for Republicans in statehouses and Congress who are pushing measures restricting curriculum, sports participation and medical care [sic].

    Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth. A 57 percent majority of adults said a person’s gender is determined from the start, with 43 percent saying it can differ.

    Genders are not assigned at birth, sexes are recognized. If you have XX chromosomes you’re female, and if you have XY chromosomes you’re male. Everything is either rounding-fraction of genetic abnormality or sophistry. If a male Golden Retriever and a female Golden Retriever have puppies…

    You have my permission to “Awwwwww”

    …you don’t “assign” the puppies as puppies, you recognize the basic biological fact. No matter how much you might call them “kittens,” they remain puppies.

    Likewise, sex is a biological reality, not a social construct. Calling a man a woman, or mutilating him to make him look like a sad facsimile of a woman, doesn’t change those XY chromosomes, no matter how much he or random social justice warriors insist otherwise.

    The American people realize that, probably in much higher numbers than those polls indicate, and resent the left wing overclass for trying to shove transgenderism down our throats.

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    Posted in Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 6 Comments »

    Lina Hidalgo’s Continued Contempt for Transparency

    Thursday, May 4th, 2023

    Remember Democratic County Judge and de-facto Queen of Harris County Lina Hidalgo, she of the numerous staff corruption charges? There have been a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests coming her way over all the alleged crooked dealings, so she went to her legal counsel to thwart transparency.

    With the state’s largest county already facing at least one lawsuit over refusal to comply with public records requests, a leaked memo from Harris County officials appears to outline a strategy for avoiding the release of documents related to County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s travel and taxpayer-funded expenses.

    Investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino reported this week on a leaked chain of emails that began with a January 25, 2023 open records request from Houston Chronicle reporter Jen Rice seeking travel records for Hidalgo and “her entourage” between January 2019 and January 2023.

    After requesting clarification, Hidalgo’s legal counsel Kathryn Kase forwarded the request and instructions for handling it to several Hidalgo staffers and Glenn Smith of Affinity Dynamics. The county auditor’s office lists payments totaling $35,000 to Smith’s company in 2020, but none this year.

    “The law does not require us to create documents in response to this PIA request and I ask that you not create such documents,” wrote Kase. “For example, if we do not have a list of the Judge’s trips outside Harris County that the County paid for in whole or part between 1/1/ 2019 and 1/25/2023, then the law does not require us to create such a list, nor do I want you to create one.”

    Kase also stated that staffers do not have to ask other departments for documents responsive to the request.

    “If, for example, the Auditor or the Treasurer have copies of reimbursements to Judge Hidalgo, do not ask the Auditor or the Treasurer to provide them to you.”

    Rice’s request likely stems from reports of Hidalgo taking private security, paid for by Harris County taxpayers, on her personal vacations to Mexico, Columbia, and according to sources familiar with the matter, Thailand, earlier this year.

    Until last April, the Precinct 1 constable’s office provided security for Hidalgo, but in a 3 to 2 vote the commissioners court approved a no-bid contract to private security company XMi Protection at a price of $121,524 for three months. The commissioners later approved a budget of up to $500,000 for XMi, although reportedly Hidalgo’s security is now provided by the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office while XMi continues to cover other employees.

    Remember that Queen Lina’s previous legal troubles stemmed from handing out contracts to connected Democrat firms and not wanting public scrutiny for that either.

    As far as I can tell, XMi Protection seems to employee exactly one person: Cortez Emilio Richardson. (Maybe he hires temps to round out his team?) Also strange: The listed address for XMi protection is 9900 Spectrum Drive, Austin, TX, 78717, which is the address of Integreon, a “global outsourcing partner” that doesn’t list “executive protection” among its services, as well as LegalZoom, which seems to be a “one stop set-up-your-business” shop. (Maybe he set up his LLC through them?) However, Richardson’s LinkedIn profile says that he’s in Houston, and XMi Protection is based in nearby Spring. Two other LinkedIn accounts that show XMi Protection entries are a Paquita Bailey who lives in Detroit and is evidently working four different jobs at the same time (lot of sidehustle they’ve got going on there), and the following private listing:

    Which is for a pharmacy technician from Anna, Texas (which is north of Dallas), both of whom would seem to be deeply unlikely to be working a protection detail in Houston.

    $40,000 a month is an awful lot of cheddar for one guy.

    Back to the story.

    Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale and Dolcefino have also filed a lawsuit against the county, seeking access to public election records that the county has refused to release on the grounds that they are related to litigation and a criminal investigation of Tatum and the elections department.

    In response to multiple complaints over delay and evasion tactics employed by government agencies across the state, Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) has pushed legislation that would punish those using the appeals process to delay compliance. His Senate Bill 1579 has been approved in committee, but it has not yet been scheduled for a vote on the Senate floor.

    According to attorney Bill Aleshire, public information requests must be carefully tailored so as not to offer any loopholes. Aleshire opined that instead of asking for a “list,” Rice should have requested specific documents and included multiple departments in her original demand.

    “Having said that, a public office devoted to transparency would not quibble with a requestor seeking travel records; it would just provide the records they’ve got, in good faith,” Aleshire told The Texan.

    Snip.

    In another leaked internal Harris County memo, legal fees approved by the Harris County Commissioners Court last March totaling $671,383 are described as covering legal costs for Kase, [County Commissioner Rodney] Ellis, and other county employees related to the investigation of a since-canceled $11 million COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract and allegations that Ellis had stored an African art collection at taxpayer expense.

    The memo also includes “talking points” from “GS” that former Justice Administration Director Jim Bethke and other county officials, including Tatum, have been harassed by District Attorney Kim Ogg.

    Payments for legal expenses appear to have been approved for McClees Law Firm, PLLC; Rusty Hardin and Associates, LLP; and Khalil Law PLLC. In addition to Ellis, Hidalgo, and other employees, the memo notes expenses were also covered for Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2).

    Something stinks in Harris County government, and there are a whole lot of questions about how Lina Hidalgo is spreading around taxpayer money that she really doesn’t want to answer…

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    Posted in Budget, Communism, Democrats, video, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

    Ted Cruz Draws A 2024 Challenger

    Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A short-term-serving Democratic U.S. congressman is running against Ted Cruz for the senate.

    With several presidential campaigns well underway for the 2024 election cycle, another office at the top of Texas voters’ ballots will be a contested race with the incumbent U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) drawing a Democratic challenger in U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX-32).

    A Dallas resident, Allred is a former NFL football player who suffered an injury prompting him to shift his career into law. After serving in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, he entered politics by running for Congress and was elected in 2018 after defeating incumbent Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX-32).

    Allred benefited from not only the 2018 Year of Beto, but also Sessions caught in the typical “sleepwalking incumbent in a district with shifting demographics near the end of a redistricting cycle” trap.

    And yes, Allred was an NFL player. He played four seasons as a linebacker for the Tennessee Titans (strike one for Houston voters), during which he registered 46 tackles. That’s…not good. By contrast Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis managed to score 46 tackles over three games in 1997. (To be fair, Allred was probably never charged (and acquitted) of murder.)

    Now in his fourth year in office, Allred announced his campaign challenging Cruz in a video posted to social media Wednesday morning.

    Certainly Allred has Beto O’Rourke’s lack of experience, but he doesn’t seem likely to inspire the same Great Southern Hope hype as O’Rourke did. Right now he’s the only even-slightly-recognizable name in the race, and will likely be able to fund-raise well (but not Beto-well) based on the Cruz hatred of the Democratic base. But he won’t be lifted by the anti-Trump wave that helped lift O’Rourke to within 3 points of Cruz. Nor does he seem likely to stem Hispanic defectors to the Republican Party in south Texas…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | 6 Comments »

    Fundraiser Convicted Of Funneling Foreign Money To Obama Campaign

    Thursday, April 27th, 2023

    I previously covered this case while it was ongoing. Now Obama bundler Prakazrel “Pras” Michel has been convicted.

    A Fugees rapper accused in multimillion-dollar political conspiracies spanning two presidencies was convicted Wednesday after a trial that included testimony ranging from actor Leonardo DiCaprio to former US Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

    Prakazrel “Pras” Michel was accused of funneling money from a now-fugitive Malaysian financer [Low Taek Jho] through straw donors to Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, then trying to squelch a Justice Department investigation and influence an extradition case on behalf of China under the Trump administration.

    So a Democratic Party bundler committed a felony to channel millions in illegal foreign donations to the Obama campaign and the mainstream media can barely be bothered to cover the story. We all know that if the amount had been mere thousands, and the words “Trump” and “Russia” appeared in the story, the mainstream media would still be talking about it…

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Obama Scandals, ObamaCare | 5 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for April 22, 2023

    Friday, April 21st, 2023

    I finally finished and sent off my taxes this week. It’s a load off my mind! Now I can get back to my low calorie life substitute!

    This week: The Biden Administration tries to cram transexism down America’s throat, more Blue City crime dysfunction, and the Babylon Bee is on fire!

  • “How Americans have taken a pay cut every month since Biden took office.”

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has laid out the devastating results of runaway government spending on the middle class and why it’s so important to claw back lost ground for the average American, who has “received a pay cut for 24 consecutive months … as inflation has persisted.”

    He also noted the average American family has lost the equivalent of more than $7,000 in annual income.

    There is a direct link between spending, borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, and these disastrous results for Americans.

    President Biden has spent trillions of dollars the nation didn’t have.

    These unchecked costs drove the deficit to record highs and pushed the debt over $31 trillion.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • Ex-Planned Parenthood exec commits suicide after botched child porn raid in Connecticut.

    A former Connecticut Planned Parenthood honcho took his own life days after police failed to arrest him on child pornography charges — botching the raid by knocking down the door of the suspect’s New Haven neighbor.

    Tim Yergeau, 36, the former director of strategic communications at the Southern New England branch of Planned Parenthood, died by suicide on Tuesday amid a child pornography investigation in Connecticut last week.

  • The Biden Administration desperately wants to cram transexism down America’s throats.

    The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a proposal that would prohibit schools from instituting policies that “categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.” The policy would allow schools to implement certain limitations in the interest of fairness or safety, however.

    The proposed rule, which would impact any school or college that receives federal funding, would expand Title IX protections to include gender identity. Under the proposal, a “one-size-fits-all” ban on transgender athletes playing on teams that match their stated gender identity would be a violation of Title IX. The rule, which is likely to face challenges, will face a lengthy approval process.

    This is, in fact, the exact opposite of the text of Title IX, which provides special protection for biological women, not men pretending to be women.
    

  • “Pennsylvania Teachers, Activists Concocted Bogus LGBTQ Bullying Epidemic for Political Gain, Investigation Finds.”
  • Meanwhile, Twitter has moved in the opposite direction, saying it will no longer ban users for “misgendering” or “dead-naming,” i.e. daring to say that a biological man is a man.
  • Meanwhile, Democrats in Minnesota are planning to shove social justice down children’s throats.

    Under the radar, a package of bills is ramming through sweeping changes that will reorient our public schools around a new paradigm — subordinating academic basics to an obsessive, politicized preoccupation with race and social justice activism.

    “Critical Social Justice” ideology (CSJ) — the vehicle for manipulating our young people into adopting this worldview — is laced strategically through a variety of bills, including “ethnic studies” (HF 1502), “Teachers of Color” (HF 320) and now the House and Senate omnibus education bills (HF 2497/SF 2684).

    Taken together, this legislation will inject reductive, racialized thinking into every classroom in Minnesota’s approximately 500 school districts and charter schools; change the fundamental mechanics of education in our state; and give the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) broad new powers that amount to an end-run around our state’s hallowed tradition of local control.

  • More blue city dysfunction. “Portland REI to Close Due to Record Number of Break-Ins, Thefts.”
  • California’s crazy program to subsidize poor home owners with mortgage down-payments runs out of money in 12 days.
  • Related: “Joe Biden Wants Homebuyers With Good Credit to Subsidize High Risk Mortgages.”
  • “TikTok’s Democrat Lobbyists Visited Biden White House At Least 40 Times In Past Year.” Beijing Joe likes his dough.
  • Here’s a story I missed earlier: “Kazakhstan Impounds Property of Roscosmos Subsidiary.” That’s the Russian company that’s the main operator of Baikonur spaceport. Haven’t seen any resolution to this, mainly because Russia is so broke thanks to mismanagement, sanctions, and an illegal war of territorial aggression.
  • “Ruh-roh!”

  • ATF Director Steve Dettelbach says he’s not a firearms expert. Sounds like he should have another job.
  • No wonder they hid it. “Louisville Shooter’s Manifesto Details His Intent To Push Gun Control.”
    

  • “Anheuser-Busch Thinks We’re Idiots.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • BuzzFeed shuts down. Dwight whipped this up:

  • Jay Leno drives the 1,025 horsepower 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170. I have an irrational desire to own something with a Hellcat engine, which I need like I need a hole in my head. Plus I like the look of the Shelby GT-500 Mustang better, and I’m not buying one of those either.
  • Size comparison video of different science fiction starships.
  • “Disney World Forced To Close After DeSantis Builds Elementary School Within 1,000 Feet.”

    “Disney has proudly employed sex predators for years, and this act of aggression by DeSantis will force thousands of our proud pedo-American workers to leave the park to stay outside the 1,000-foot radius required by law,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger. “This is tyranny!”

  • “Hasbro Introduces New ‘Transition Me Elmo’ Doll.”
  • “Budweiser Replaces Clydesdales With Cows Dressed As Horses.”
  • “Chicago Mayor Warns That If Local Walmart Locations Close People Will Have Fewer Places To Shoplift.”
  • “Newlyweds In San Francisco Looking For Nice One Bedroom, Zero Bath Starter Tent.”

    • 

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 4 Comments »

    Ninth Circuit To Berkley: No, You Can’t Ban Natural Gas. Not Yours.

    Tuesday, April 18th, 2023

    Another lunatic leftwing California ecowarrior directive bites the dust.

    A federal appeals court on Monday overturned a California city’s first-in-the-nation ban on natural gas hookups in new buildings, saying it violates federal law.

    The three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal sided with a coalition of California restaurants, who argued that the City of Berkeley’s ordinance essentially bans gas appliances in violation of a 1975 directive that gives Congress control over restrictions on appliances. The unanimous ruling is a major blow to California Democrats’ green energy push, and could clear the way for legal challenges to similar bans around the country.

    Democrats have increasingly moved to ban gas stoves while attempting to downplay their efforts. New York is poised to become the first state to ban gas stoves, and California is working towards a statewide ban of its own. The White House has denied that President Joe Biden supports banning gas stoves while the Energy Department works to restrict their sale. Blue state attorneys general and environmental groups lined up to support the ban in court, in a sign of the case’s national implications.

    The California Restaurant Association claimed Berkeley’s ban violated the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act , which gives the federal government final say over restrictions on energy appliances.

    Judge Patrick Bumatay wrote that even though Berkeley lawmakers didn’t specifically ban the use of natural gas appliances, they reached the same result “circuitously” by changing their building code to ban gas piping—a policy that renders “the gas appliances useless,” he said.

    This preemption would apply to state policies as well, he added.

    “States and localities can’t skirt [federal preemption] by doing indirectly what Congress says they can’t do directly,” he wrote.

    There’s simply no end to the things ordinary people enjoy that radical environmentalists are willing to ban. Fortunately, there’s still some semblance of the rule of law to at least temporarily keep them in check…

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors | 4 Comments »

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