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BidenWatch for October 12, 2020

Monday, October 12th, 2020

Biden refuses to reveal his position on court-packing, but he still wants to take your guns and hike your taxes until your eyeballs bleed, plus more on the enthusiasm gap, fracking flip-flops, and we’re all going to be millionaires (the Weimer Republic kind). It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • “Hey Joe, are you gonna pack the courts?” “Not telling!”

    As the Senate moves forward on the president’s Supreme Court pick, both former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, continue to deflect when asked if they would try to add more justices to the nation’s highest court, a practice known as court packing.

    Biden and his party face increasing pressure because of the frustration of many progressives at the Republican effort to rush through a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime liberal icon, with Amy Coney Barrett just before the Nov. 3 election. Because the addition of Barrett is expected to create a conservative majority on the high court some have called for adding more justices.

    The question of adding seats to the Supreme Court also hinges on the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, where Republicans currently hold a slim 53 to 47 majority. If Democrats are able to wrest control of the GOP, maintain control of the U.S. House and Biden wins the presidency, the party would need to pass legislation expanding the court beyond its current limit of nine justices.

    Lord knows progressive frustration is a just a swell reason to overthrow centuries of tradition.

  • Biden actually says voters don’t deserve to know his stance on court packing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • President Donald Trump is outperforming his 2016 polls in swing states.

    “According to an analysis from Real Clear Politics, Biden holds a 4.4 percentage point lead over the president in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona,” she explains. “However, Democrat Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by 4.8 points in these swing states this time in 2016—a slightly greater advantage than the one Biden currently has.”

    Biden’s leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan, two states Trump won, are also smaller than Clinton’s leads at this time four years ago. “The Real Clear Politics average shows that Biden is ahead with a 6.3 lead in Pennsylvania and a 6.2 advantage in Michigan. Comparably, Clinton was leading in these two states by 9.2 points and 9.6 points, respectively, this time in 2016.”

    Similarly, polls for Wisconsin and North Carolina show Biden with a smaller lead than they did for Hillary Clinton back in 2016.

    The only outliers to this trend are Florida and Arizona. Biden’s lead in Florida is at 3.5, compared to Hillary’s 3.2 point lead in 2016. Biden also leads in Arizona by 3.4 points, compared to Trump’s 0.7 point advantage in 2016.

  • “Biden website vows ‘assault weapons’ ban, forced gun registration and banning online sales of guns, ammo and parts.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • More media shenanigans:

  • Biden still wants to tax you until you bleed:

    Asked about President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which most economists agree are largely responsible for the resurrection of the U.S. economy following the slow-growth Obama-Biden years, Harris said: “On Day 1, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill.”

    Never mind that a President Biden will have no such power to “repeal” anything. That’s Congress’ job, and if Biden isn’t blessed with having both branches of Congress firmly in far-left Democratic hands, “repealing” the tax cuts won’t happen.

    But then Harris went on to say Biden wouldn’t raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000. Say what? By “repealing” Trump’s tax cuts, he would be doing just that.

    The truth is, Biden has played games with his tax plans all along. But the actual tax plans he has revealed would be nothing short of disastrous for working men and women, and the economy as a whole. Those plans plainly show that 77-year-old Biden, a lifelong politician, understands nothing about the private economy. That is, apart from it being a great source of graft for him and his family.

    A report out just this week from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that taxes would rise about $4.3 trillion over the next decade under Biden’s plans, while taxes under Trump would actually decline by $1.7 trillion over that period.

    At least, you say, that $4.3 trillion in added taxes under Biden would cut the deficit more than Trump’s plans, right? Wrong.

    The CRFB notes that its projections show a 10-year rise in federal deficits of $8.3 trillion for Biden, versus $6.9 trillion for Trump.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Biden and Harris show up to campaign with each other for the first time in their campaign…too bad no one else did:

  • Trump, Biden and the enthusiasm gap:

    Enthusiasm for Trump among his voters “is historically high,” said Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll. “We saw that very early in the cycle, in his primary vote totals,” when the president drew unusually large voter turnout in uncontested races.

    “Meanwhile, Biden’s enthusiasm level is historically low — so low that the Democrats run the risk of replaying 2016,” Baris said.

    Just 46 percent of Biden voters in a recent Pew poll said that they strongly support him, compared to 66 percent of Trump’s base.

    Rank-and-file Dems are sounding the alarm.

    “I look out over my Biden sign in my front yard and I see a sea of Trump flags and yard signs,” Pennsylvania voter Susan Connors told Biden worriedly at a CNN-sponsored town hall Sept. 17.

    Experienced political hands have a saying: “Yard signs don’t vote.” And research appears to bear that out — a 2016 study found that political signage increases vote share by a mere 1.7 percentage points, on average.

    Biden holds a 10-point lead in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, a commanding position with Election Day less than four weeks away. But the exuberant signs and displays of Trump passion may actually point to a yawning enthusiasm gap that could make a big difference on Election Day — just as they did in 2016.

    Four years ago, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found a 13-point enthusiasm gap in Trump’s favor, a result echoed by other surveys, The Hill reported.

    Many people . . . said that the sheer volume of Trump signs they saw in 2016 — and the scarcity of Hillary Clinton signs — was their first clue that the polling was wrong and that Trump would have more success than the pundits had predicted,” Daniel Allott writes in “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Nation” (Republic Books), out Oct. 20.

    It’s deja vu all over again… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “Biden Fans Upset That New York Times Accidentally Committed Journalism in One Headline.” How dare you ask for health plan details from the great and powerful Biden!
  • “Hunter Biden Longtime Biz Partner And Burisma Board-Buddy Going To Prison After Obama Judge Reversed.”

    A federal appeals court has reinstated a fraud conviction of Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, Devon Archer, reversing a decision by an Obama-appointed judge (and wife of Mueller special counsel lawyer) to vacate Archer’s conviction and grant him a new trial.

    Archer and several of his business partners were indicted on March 26, 2018 in a $60 million bond scheme which defrauded Native Americans. Hunter was not implicated in the fraud, however Archer and the other partners repeatedly name-dropped the former Vice President’s son.

    Following a trial which lasted nearly one-month, Archer was found guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud. After requesting that the district court set aside the jury’s verdict, Judge Ronnie Abrams – the wife of Mueller special counsel attorney Greg Andres (who himself was a Deputy Assistant AG in the Obama DOJ, according to RedState) – granted Archer’s wish. What’s more, Abrams was Hunter Biden’s classmate at Yale Law school.

    In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel said that Abrams made a mistake by prioritizing her own theory above that of the jury’s, and that her assessment undercut the significance of the proof in its totality.

  • Ann Althouse reads the Vice Presidential debate transcript. Boy, the Biden-Harris ticket is 100% invested in promulgating the “Fine People” hoax.
  • “Pence effectively went after Harris — and a very biased moderator.”
  • How you know Pence won the debate.

    Mike Pence dominated in that debate. He was calm and cool. Rock-solid. Kamala Harris’s body language and voice reflected her nervousness—a stark contrast to her previous debate performances during the Democratic primary when she was still in the race. But neither her body language, her failure to answer questions, nor her constant reliance on fake stories as lines of attack were the key tell that she lost.

    The liberal media conceded Pence’s victory by describing Pence’s debate performance. And their go-to explanation was to attack the vice president by accusing him of “mansplaining.”

    

  • “China Censors Mike Pence’s Debate Comments On China But Freely Broadcasts Kamala Harris’s.” “‘China censored Pence’s comments on China,’ Canada’s Globe and Mail Beijing Correspondent Nathan VanderKlippe reported. ‘Signal returned when Harris began talking again.'”
  • Ace notes that 56% of Gallup respondents think they’re better off than four years ago and has some thoughts:

    Of all the people they know — including RINOs and squishes and NeverTrumpers who voted against Trump in 2016 — many of the NeverTrumpers are now reluctant Trump voters, and many of 2016’s reluctant Trump voters are now enthusiastic Trump voters.

    On the other hand, they don’t know anyone who has moved from voting for Trump in 2016 to voting for Biden.

    One friend tells me that the suburban well-to-do Wine Moms and Squish Sisters he knows are now fully on the MAGA train.

    Everyone they know who’s moved on The Trump Question (and Trump seems to be the only issue in 2020) has moved in favor of Trump.

    They also note that the “Shy Trumper” effect — where Trump supporters won’t admit to pollsters they still support Trump — is still strong, based on their own experience.

    One relates that he did not tell his own children that he voted for Trump, due to social pressure and the idea that he didn’t want to “normalize” Trump’s bad behavior to his children.

    If you can’t tell your own kids you voted for Trump, you’re not going to tell a pollster.

    And this person works in conservative politics, too!

    If even people in the conservative movement can’t admit they’re Trump supporters — well good luck getting Wendy Wine Mom to admit that on the phone.

    A friend of mine was a hardcore NeverTrumper in 2016 but now is a crawl-over-broken-glass Trump Voter. No, he doesn’t really like Trump, but unlike Jonah Goldberg and Steve Schmidt, he recognizes the profound threat the left poses to what is left of America.

    He has kept in touch with his NeverTrump pals. Media types. The types who annoy you on Twitter.

    And while he won’t Name Names, he tells me that many of the NeverTrumpers I hate are now “red pilled” Trump voters.

    They just won’t admit it publicly.

    Snip.

    If there were a lot of Trump defectors, the media would be profiling them and lionizing them and promoting them 24-7.

    But I haven’t seen a single story about Trump 2016-Biden 2020 defectors.

    The media hasn’t found any — despite the fact that by announcing that you’re now a full-on Democrat Liberal, you gain employment opportunities and social prestige.

    So if the media can’t find any of these people… do they even exist?

  • YouTuber Liberal Hivemind says that Biden is losing voters every day:

    Plus a supercut of Biden’s fracking flip flops.

  • Speaking of which, Pennsylvania voters are not fond of the fracking flip flop. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
    

  • Racist Joe does it again:
    

  • Good news! We’re all going to be millionaires thanks to Biden’s $15 million minimum wage:

  • Joe is trying his breast. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Biden wants to send psychiatrists on 911 calls:


    

  • Rimshot:

  • Kamala and The Knight of Columbus:

    chronicled many times over the last three years when Democratic senators questioned judicial nominees about their faith, suggesting in various forms that a candidate’s Catholic or Christian beliefs might render them unfit to serve on the bench.

    Several of those questions were posed by Harris herself, focusing especially on Catholic candidates. In late 2018, for instance, Harris grilled Brian Buescher, nominated to be a federal district judge in Nebraska, about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization with more than 2 million members worldwide who conduct charitable work. Here’s one of Harris’s written questions to Buescher:

    Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.” Mr. Anderson went on to say that “abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.” Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?

    She went on to ask whether Buescher was “aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization” and whether he had “ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women’s reproductive rights.”

    Harris posed these and other similar questions to Paul Matey and Peter Phipps, Catholic nominees who, like Buescher, are members of the Knights. Among the questions she posed to Matey based on his involvement in the Knights were:

    * Do you agree with Mr. Anderson’s description of abortion as “the killing of the innocent on a massive scale”?

    * Do you agree with Mr. Anderson that legal abortion in the United States has “resulted in more than 40 million deaths”?

    * Do you believe that a fetus is entitled to any protection under the U.S. Constitution?

  • Race snapshot:

  • “Biden: ‘I Won’t Reveal Whether I Plan On Abolishing The Constitution And Establishing A Glorious Communist Utopia Until After I’m Elected.'”
  • “Kamala Harris’s Ratings Plummet As People Realize They’d Have To Listen To Her Voice For Next 4 Years.”
  • “Kamala Harris Sneaks Into White House To Plant Weed On Mike Pence.”

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    LinkSwarm for September 11, 2020

    Friday, September 11th, 2020

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Nineteen years ago, radical Islamic terrorists carried out the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Today not only is Osama bin Laden dead, but what’s left of al Qaeda has been relegated to minor players in a handful of regional conflicts (Yemen, Syria, etc.).

  • Kurt Schlichter says to expect Democratic shenanigans, but don’t panic:

    The media is filled with stories about how the Democrats are planning to refuse to accept Donald Trump’s impending victory, with speculation about cheating, lawsuits, and the odd military coup. Leaving aside the bizarre notion that our troops are eager to risk their lives to kill their friends and family for the benefit of the liberal establishment and the military-industrial complex – which the Democrats have suddenly embraced as something awesome – in order to impose that creepy old weirdo from the basement upon America, the challenges are real but they are also overblown.

    Don’t panic. Prepare. Work to get out the patriotic American vote. If we’re ready maybe this won’t descend into the chaos I describe in my novel/unintended documentary People’s Republic.

    Now, they will cheat. That’s baked in, and they are fully committed to it. That’s why they hate hate hate voter ID – it’s harder to cheat when you have to prove who you are. Voting-by-mail gets around that and offers all sorts of opportunities for mischief. They fully intend to try to leverage voting by mail to 1) get China virus paranoids and their usual lay-about voters to vote instead of just sitting home watching “Judge Judy,” and 2) manufacture the necessary votes to swing the election. The turnout issue is important to them because all the numbskulls driving their cars alone with masks on are all liberal. The Dems could have gone with explaining that going to vote for Biden confers immunity, just like rioting, but whatever. Now, the cheating aspect is another issue, but how great an impact cheating might have is open to question.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue. )

  • “Scott Adams: Trump Is The Most Successful Stand-Up Comic Ever; Democrats Want To Burn Down The Country Because They Don’t Get The Joke.”
  • Senate Democrats have blocked the latest coronavirus stimulus.
  • The taxcut for the rich Democrats love.

    Mr. Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer don’t agree on everything, but on this specific issue they speak with one voice: the $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local tax (better known as the SALT deduction) must go.

    The House of Representatives has already passed legislation removing the cap, allowing the amount of the deduction to rise. If the Senate turns blue in November, Democrats have promised to return to the issue. “I want to tell you this,” Senator Schumer said in July, “If I become majority leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate” the SALT cap “forever.” It “will be dead, gone and buried.”

    The cap was introduced as part of the 2017 Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act…Almost 60 percent of the benefit of removal would go to the top 1 percent of households (of which 90 percent are white).

    (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)

  • The Democratic Party and the Iron law of Bureaucracy:

    Think on today’s Democratic Party, withered by the Clintons and then the Obamas and now Slow Joe Biden. Think about the obvious lies. Think about how loyalty uber alles has shaved off bits of their partisans’ souls, burned as offerings on the altar of someone else’s political ambitions. Think of the small death that takes place each day among those (supposedly) most fervent partisans.

    It’s no wonder that the Democratic Party is being taken over by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa rioters. The Iron Law says that they’re the ones who will rise to the top.

    You see, all paths other than radical revolution are closed, at least for advancement. Who even talks about John Kerry anymore? And the media covers for all of these people so there is no possible correction.

  • The Trump Administration has cross-depotized Oregon State Police troopers “assigned to help the police in Portland have now been cross-deputize by the federal government. This means that the US Attorney’s Office can lodge charges against those arrested by deputized troopers,” bypassing antifa-friendly DAs. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Among those Portland arrestees:

  • “Portland Overtakes Mos Eisley As Most Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy.”
  • “Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using ‘Confirmed’ to Mean Its Opposite.”

    But what is clear is that the “confirmation” which both MSNBC and CBS claimed it had obtained for the story was anything but: All that happened was that the same sources which anonymously whispered these unverified, false claims to CNN then went and repeated the same unverified, false claims to other outlets, which then claimed that they “independently confirmed” the story even though they had done nothing of the sort.

    It seems the same misleading tactic is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — whom the magazine refuses to name because they fear “angry tweets” — told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is accurate.

    So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg’s story based on what best advances one’s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.

    Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”

    In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had “confirmed” the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.

  • “Iran Caught Stockpiling Enriched Uranium Needed for Bomb.”
  • Good question:

  • A look at spolits between circuit courts on high capacity magazine confiscation.
  • Al Sharpton comes out against defunding the police. Just think crazy far to the left you have to go for Al “Race Hustling Poverty Pimp” Sharpton to call you out for your bullshit?
  • “Kosovo, Serbia normalize economic relations in White House ceremony.” Is there nothing Nobel Peace Prize nominee President Donald Trump can’t do?
  • The Trump-brokered UAE-Israel peace deal is already paying dividends. Winners: Israeli airlines, and other Arab states moving to normalize relations. Losers: Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • More on the same subject:

  • How the Greek and Turkish air forces stack up against each other. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Eric S. Raymond notes that Kyle Rittenhouse was acting lawfully as a member of the the general militia under federal law.
  • Christopher Eisgruber, president of Princeton University since 2013, admits to running a systematically racist university. Sounds like he should be fired, doesn’t it?
  • Survey shows that professional sports is in big trouble. “Of all the sectors measured in the survey, professional sports suffered the biggest drop in support, falling all the way to 23rd on the list and settling barely above The Federal Government. The negative impressions by Americans now see sports underwater by double digits, with a 30%-40% favorable/unfavorable ratio.”
  • Speaking of getting woke and going broke, the Oscars are now implementing racial quotas.
  • New York City to allow indoor dining at a whopping 25% capacity.
  • Speaking of which is, is there any conceivable reason that all Texas restaurants shouldn’t be fully open for business?
  • Dwight should find this of interest: Smith & Wesson enjoys recording-breaking gun sales.
  • Speaking of Dwight, he forwarded this piece on would-be EV truck maker Nikola may have committed a wide range of shenanigans.
  • How Jerry Pournelle once plotted the overthrow of the communist government of Albania. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • There was a chemical fire in Williamson County yesterday. No one was hurt, but there was a 1 mile radius shelter in place order. It said “chemical plant,” but I think that plant makes aerial lift buckets and such.
  • The most dangerous walking path in Britain.
  • There was a chemical fire in Williamson County yesterday. No one was hurt, but there was a 1 mile radius shelter in place order. It said “chemical plant,” but I think that plant makes aerial lift buckets and such.
  • This is a parody:

  • Mouse problems:

  • Speaking of the mouse, would you believe that in 1981, Disneyland featured their own short-lived SciFi prog-rock band? (Hat tip: Karl Rehn.)
  • “Responding To Backlash, Netflix Clarifies Its Content Is ‘Mostly Pedophilia-Free.'”
  • “Hollywood Elites Rush To Normalize Pedophilia Before They’re All Outed By Ghislaine Maxwell.” “Nowadays, we’ve got so many letters crammed into the whole ‘LGBTQETC+’ thing, nobody even notices if we slide a ‘P’ in there somewhere!”
    

  • “Why White People Owning Dogs is Racist.” I think this is a parody, but it is getting increasingly hard to tell… (Hat tip: @txpoliticjunkie.)
  • Godfrey Elfwick: “Pretending to be black is a common side-effect of trauma, the official medical term being: Post Traumatic Ethnic Appropriation. I believe many white musicians in the early 90s suffered from it, no doubt due to the lack of trigger warnings on TV shows back then.”
  • Henry Rollins does acid.
  • “Upping The Ante: Protesters Now Attempting To Stop High-Speed Freight Trains.” (This is one case where The Newspaper Of Record is almost a year behind actual events.)
  • “Protests Erupt As Police Shoot Man Who Was Just One Gun Away From Being Unarmed.”
  • The mock Philip Glass is the perfect touch:

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    Is New York City Dead Forever?

    Saturday, August 22nd, 2020

    In the wake of this post on how the Wuhan coronavirus, widespread antifa/#BlackLivesMatter looting, and the general rise in crime and disorder under the mayorship of Bill de Blasio have sent citizens feeling, comes a new piece saying that not only is New York City dead, it’s dead forever:

    I love NYC. When I first moved to NYC it was a dream come true. Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me. So much personality, so many stories.

    Every subculture I loved was in NYC. I could play chess all day and night. I could go to comedy clubs. I could start any type of business. I could meet people. I had family, friends, opportunities. No matter what happened to me, NYC was a net I could fall back on and bounce back up.

    Now it’s completely dead. “But NYC always always bounces back.” No. Not this time. “But NYC is the center of the financial universe. Opportunities will flourish here again.” Not this time.

    “NYC has experienced worse”. No it hasn’t.

    A Facebook group formed a few weeks ago that was for people who were planning a move and wanted others to talk to and ask advice from. Within two or three days it had about 10,000 members.

    Every day I see more and more posts, “I’ve been in NYC forever but I guess this time I have to say goodbye.”

    He says people move to New York City for three reasons: business, culture and food, and all are dead.

    Midtown Manhattan, the center of business in NYC, is empty. Even though people can go back to work, famous office buildings like the Time Life skyscraper is still 90% empty. Businesses realized that they don’t need their employees at the office.

    In fact, they realize they are even more productive without everyone back to the office. The Time Life building can handle 8,000 workers. Now it maybe has 500 workers back.

    Snip.

    Another friend of mine works at a major investment bank as a managing director. Before the pandemic he was at the office every day, sometimes working from 6am to 10pm.

    Now he lives in Phoenix, Arizona. “As of June,” he told me, “I had never even been to Phoenix.” And then he moved there. He does all his meetings on Zoom.

    I was talking to a book editor who has been out of the city since early March. “We’ve been all working fine. I’m not sure why we would need to go back to the office.”

    One friend of mine, Derek Halpern, was convinced he’d stay. He put up a Facebook post the other day saying he might be changing his mind. Derek wrote:

    “In the last week:

    • I watched a homeless person lose his mind and start attacking random pedestrians. Including spitting on, throwing stuff at, and swatting.
    • Ive seen several single parents with a child asking for money for food. And then, when someone gave them food, tossed the food right back at them.
    • I watched a man yell racist slurs at every single race of people while charging / then stopping before going too far.

    And worse.

    I’ve been living in New York City for about 10 years. It has definitely gotten worse and there’s no end in sight.

    My favorite park is Madison Square Park. About a month ago a 19 year old girl was shot and killed across the street.

    I don’t think I have an answer but I do think it’s clear: it’s time to move out of NYC.

    I’m not the only one who feels this way, either. In my building alone, the rent has plummeted almost 30 percent – more people are moving away than ever before.

    Snip.

    People say, “NYC has been through worse” or “NYC has always come back.”

    No and no.

    First, when has NYC been through worse?

    Even in the 1970s, and through the 80s, when NYC was going bankrupt, and even when it was the crime capital of the US or close to it, it was still the capital of the business world (meaning: it was the primary place young people would go to build wealth and find opportunity), it was culturally on top of its game – home to artists, theater, media, advertising, publishing, and it was probably the food capital of the US.

    NYC has never been locked down for five months. Not in any pandemic, war, financial crisis, never. In the middle of the polio epidemic, when little kids (including my mother) were going paralyzed or dying (my mother ended up with a bad leg), NYC didn’t go through this.

    This is not to say what should have been done or should not have been done. That part is over. Now we have to deal with what IS.

    In early March, many people (not me), left NYC when they felt it would provide safety from the virus and they no longer needed to go to work and all the restaurants were closed. People figured, “I’ll get out for a month or two and then come back.”

    They are all still gone.

    And then in June, during rioting and looting a second wave of NYC-ers (this time me) left. I have kids. Nothing was wrong with the protests but I was a little nervous when I saw videos of rioters after curfew trying to break into my building.

    Many people left temporarily but there were also people leaving permanently. Friends of mine moved to Nashville, Miami, Austin, Denver, Salt Lake City, Austin, Dallas, etc.

    As for culture, author James Altucher owns a standup comedy club in New York City.

    We have no idea when we will open. Nobody has any idea. And the longer we close, the less chance we will ever reopen profitably.

    Broadway is closed until at least the Spring. Lincoln Center is closed. All the museums are closed.

    Forget about the tens of thousands of jobs lost in these cultural centers. Forget even about the millions of dollars of tourist and tourist-generated revenues lost by the closing of these centers.

    There are thousands of performers, producers, artists, and the entire ecosystem of art, theater, production, curation, that surrounds these cultural centers. People who have worked all of their lives for the right to be able to perform even once on Broadway whose lives and careers have been put on hold.

    I get it. There was a pandemic.

    But the question now is: what happens next? And, given the uncertainty (since there is no known answer), and given the fact that people, cities, economies, loathe uncertainty, we simply don’t know the answer and that’s a bad thing for New York City.

    Right now, Broadway is closed “at least until early 2021.”

    As for food:

    My favorite restaurant is closed for good. Ok, let’s go to my second favorite. Closed for good. Third favorite, closed for good.

    I thought the PPP was supposed to help. No? What about emergency relief? No. Stimulus checks? Unemployment? No and no. Ok, my fourth favorite, or what about that place I always ordered delivery from? No and no.

    Around Late May I took walks and saw that many places were boarded up. Ok, I thought, because the protesting was leading to looting and the restaurants were protecting themselves. They’ll be ok.

    Looking closer I’d see the signs. For Lease. For Rent. For whatever.

    Before the pandemic, the average restaurant had only 16 days of cash on hand. Some had more (McDonalds), and some had less (the local mom-and-pop Greek diner).

    Yelp estimates that 60% of restaurants around the United States have closed.

    My guess is more than 60% will be closed in New York City but who knows.

    I think this 60% figure is inaccurate, at least for the nation as a whole, a telephone-game misunderstanding of 60% of Wuhan coronavirus restaurant closures being permanent and only 40% temporary. But it says nothing about restaurants that stayed open during the crisis (if only for takeout). But it wouldn’t shock me if that 60% closure figure is accurate for New York City (and even higher in Manhattan).

    He also talks about college students staying away and the collapse of the real estate market.

    His conclusion:

    OK, OK, BUT NYC ALWAYS COMES BACK.

    Yes it does. I lived three blocks from Ground Zero on 9/11. Downtown, where I lived, was destroyed, but it came roaring back within two years. Such sadness and hardship and then quickly that area became the most attractive area in New York.

    And in 2008/2009, much suffering during the Great Recession, again much hardship, but things came roaring back.

    But…this time it’s different. You’re never supposed to say that but this time it’s true. If you believe this time is no different, that NYC is resilient, etc I hope you’re right.

    I don’t benefit from saying any of this. I love NYC. I was born there. I’ve lived there forever. I STILL live there. I love everything about NYC. I want 2019 back.

    But this time it’s different.

    One reason: bandwidth.

    In 2008, average bandwidth speeds were 3 megabits per second. That’s not enough for a Zoom meeting with reliable video quality. Now, it’s over 20 megabits per second. That’s more than enough for high quality video.

    There’s a before and after. BEFORE: no remote work. AFTER: everyone can remote work.

    Everyone has spent the past five months adapting to a new lifestyle. Nobody wants to fly across the country for a two hour meeting when you can do it just as well on Zoom. I can go see “live comedy” on Zoom. I can take classes from the best teachers in the world for almost free online as opposed to paying $70,000 a year for a limited number of teachers who may or may not be good.

    Everyone has choices now. You can live in the music capital of Nashville, you can live in the “next Silicon Valley” of Austin. You can live in your hometown in the middle of wherever. And you can be just as productive, make the same salary, have higher quality of life with a cheaper cost to live.

    Snip.

    And then people will ask, “wait a second – I was paying over 16% in state and city taxes and these other states and cities have little to no taxes? And I don’t have to deal with all the other headaches of NYC?”

    Because there are headaches in NYC. Lots of them. It’s just we sweep them under the table because so much else has been good there.

    NYC has a $9 billion deficit. A billion more than the Mayor thought they were going to have. How does a city pay back its debts? The main way is aid from the state. But the state deficit just went bonkers. Then is taxes. But if 900,000 estimated jobs are lost in NYC and tens of thousands of businesses, then that means less taxes unless taxes are raised.

    Does the author overstate the case? Slightly. His pieces focuses on upper and upper middle class reasons to live in New York, but the port of New York/New Jersey is the third largest in the country, and neither the port nor its many blue collar jobs are going away anytime soon. And someday Broadway and other in-person cultural events will come back, even if much demolished. But it is indeed very possible that New York City has already peaked, and could lose 1-3 million of its population in the near-term.

    And all this to still achieve the highest coronavirus death rate in the country. Thanks, Andrew Cuomo!

    Democratic office-holder incompetence, Chinese coronavirus, high taxes and social justice have finally struck New York City a more devastating blow than Osama bin Laden ever could.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    Austin Police Defunding/Homeless Update

    Thursday, August 20th, 2020

    In a follow-up to last week’s police defunding story, here are a few tidbits of Austin news related to police defunding, Adler’s bumsvilles, etc.

  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he will freeze property taxes for cities that defund the police.

    “[T]hey will lose the lifeblood of the revenues they receive from property taxes in Texas,” Abbott explained. “What this does, in English, is it is going to defund cities and cities’ ability to operate at all if they try to defund law enforcement.

    “We believe in law enforcement in Texas and we are not going to allow a replication of the types of policies we’ve seen destroying cities like Seattle and Portland and others.”

    Abbott accused such liberal precincts of “caving to the forces of socialism” even as crime increases, and added that some are allowing their municipalities to be “hijacked.”

    “So Texas is laying down a marker and that is, whether it be the city of Austin or another city, such actions are not going to be tolerated. In Texas, we embrace law enforcement, we will not accept turning power over to these socialistic forces that seek to abandon the rule of law and abandon the law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line to keep our communities safe.”

    However, unlike Abbott’s various Wuhan Coronavirus mandates, this will require the Texas legislature to enact, which won’t happen until next year. And Socialist Austin city councilman Greg Casar says it won’t deter his anti-police agenda.

  • Meanwhile, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell blasted Austin’s defunding vote and asked Gov. Abbott to send more law enforcement. “In the correspondence, Gravell blasts Austin City Council members for cuts to the Austin Police Department valued at $150 million — including some $20 million in immediate budget cuts and a transfer of several departments away from police oversight to civilian functions, such as interacting with the homeless and dealing with mental health-related cuts.”

    It always seems to go back to the decision to make Austin bumsville, doesn’t it?

  • Brad Johnson of The Texan brings us news of what a trash heap Adler’s bums have made of the Windsor Park area of east Austin:

    “There were thousands of pounds of trash, human waste, and needles washing through our backyards and the creek bed.”

    Kevin Ludlow struck a nerve after posting his time-lapse video of the Windsor Park creek, which runs from Cameron Rd., into the neighborhood behind Ludlow’s house, and continues east. It even runs past a new community pool and water park.

    The video in question:

    The portion of creek bed which runs the length of the Heritage at Hillcrest apartment complex, behind his back yard, and down a couple of blocks further is prime real estate for the city’s growing homeless population because of its shade and relative seclusion.

    Since the beginning of 2020, Ludlow noted the population of homeless individuals living in the creek bed grew to a few hundred people until its apex a couple of weeks ago. A storm came on July 31, causing the creek to flood and wash the piles of debris further down the area.

    The issues that have arisen downtown and in the city’s business-heavy districts have been well-documented, but it has extended beyond these areas.

    Snip.

    In his video, Ludlow was able to record footage of campers smoking crack and shooting up heroin. Multiple times, campers became confrontational over his documentation.

    He added that because regular syringes can be hard to come by, campers turn to insulin needles — which are much smaller both in length and tip — of which he’s found numerous on the ground.

    He underscored, “I’m a pretty progressive-left guy, but [allowing homeless camping] has helped nobody, especially the homeless.”

    Snip.

    Back in October, Austin Police Department Chief Brian Manley reported statistics showing a 15 percent increase in violent crimes wherein both the victim and the suspect were homeless from July through September of 2019 compared with the same time frame the previous year.

    Austin’s homeless problem has been growing for decades, but a watershed moment occurred last year.

    In June of 2019, the Austin City Council approved the rescission of its public camping and lying ban. It went into effect in July and has led to a massive uptick in the unsheltered homeless population ever since, as more transients made camp on public property ranging anywhere from parks, sidewalks, underpasses, and more.

    The city’s stated intention was that the policy change would bring the homeless population into sheltered facilities wherein they could receive whatever aid they needed.

    In this year’s homeless population survey, the city recorded a 45 percent increase in its unsheltered population and an 11 percent decrease in those sheltered. There was an unmistakable incentive to leave shelters or the woods and live on the streets.

    The city eventually reinstated some of the restrictions in place before July 2019 but stopped well short of fully reinstating the ban. The issue has grown substantially and fractured the community and its elected council considerably.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Speaking of crime and the homeless:

  • Things that make you go “hmmmm”: “Austin council member Jimmy Flannigan has received more than $17,000 in contributions from members of a real estate development company that has worked on several city projects, as well as a lobbying firm that has many real estate, business and events clients, according to his latest campaign finance report.”
  • Speaking of Jimmy Flannigan:

    “Funding that upholds our dignity.” What bilious, gaseous nonsense. What he probably meant to say is “the graft that lines our pockets.”

  • Cahnman floats a radical solution: revoke the City of Austin’s charter, abolish the city council and have functions carried out by the county and state.

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Texas | No Comments »

    Tesla Austin Factory Now Official

    Thursday, July 23rd, 2020

    The long rumored and threatened (if you’re California) Austin-area Telsa Gigafactory is now official:

    Tesla will build its newest Gigafactory near Austin, Texas, Chief Executive Elon Musk announced during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday.

    The area takes up about 2,000 acres and will be roughly 15 minutes from downtown Austin, Musk said. He said the factory will be an “ecological paradise” and that it will be open to the public.

    “We’re going to make it a factory that is going to be stunning it’s right on the Colorado River. So we’re actually going to have to have a boardwalk over you, hiking, biking trail. It’s going to basically be an ecological paradise,” Musk said.

    The site will be used to build the company’s Cybertruck, its Semi and the Model 3 and Model Y for the eastern half of North America, Musk said.

    Musk also added that Tesla will continue to grow in California, where it will build the Tesla Model S and the Model X for global deliveries and the Tesla Model 3 and Tesla Model Y for North America.

    Travis County, where the new car plant will reside, voted earlier this month to give Tesla tax breaks worth a minimum of $14.7 million to build the plant to bring jobs to the area. Tesla employs about 10,000 people at its only U.S. car plant today in Fremont, California.

    The site is evidently going to be out at SH-130 and Harold Green Road northeast of the airport, at the site previously owned by Martin Marietta.

    That “15 minutes from downtown” line is pure real estate agent hyperbole. Sure, that’s 15 minutes from downtown…at 3 AM. If you’re willing to speed.

    Welcome to Austin, Telsa! Enjoy the BBQ, but please leave any political liberalism back in California…

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 5 Comments »

    Reminder: Your Taxes Are Due Tomorrow!

    Tuesday, July 14th, 2020

    Remember the relief you felt that the Wuhan Coronavirus had delayed tax day from April 15 to July 15?

    Well, that reprieve is expiring, and your taxes are due tomorrow.

    If your taxes are simple (mine aren’t), you can probably use the free IRS filing tool. H&R Block also has a free filing tool.

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    Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For June 12, 2020

    Friday, June 12th, 2020

    Riots! Guns! Social Justice Warriors! Animated police dogs! Today’s LinkSwarm is packed to its furry ears…

  • The fire this time:

    This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.

    You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.

    When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.

    There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.

    The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.

    Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.

    We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.

    All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.

    The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.

  • Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
  • Looters in California stole a forklift to break into stores.
  • When Democratic Party race-pandering backfires.
  • There’s previous little evidence that black lives matter to Democratic politicians:

    Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.

    If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.

    They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”

    They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is ­entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.

    But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Secondary evidences suggest that the Wuhan Coronavirus was already ravaging Wuhan in September and October of last year.
  • Texas suffers a jump in number of Wuhan coronavirus cases reported. But is it real?

    Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.

    Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.

    Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.

    Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.

    Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.

  • The Bonfire of Wokeness claims the founder and editor of feminist Refinery29. Remember, you can never, ever be woke enough…
  • Andrew Sullivan gagged for having non-PC thoughts. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • “Thou Shalt Not Criticise Black Lives Matter”

    To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.

    For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.

  • Well, this is just great: “FCC failed to monitor Chinese telecoms for almost 20 years.”
  • Meant to post this last week: “Whitmer Lifts Stay-at-Home Order Now That People Need to Go Out and Riot.”
  • Canadian professor fired for pointing out that biological sex is real. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Social Justice Warriors at Cornell are trying to get Legal insurrection’s William Jacobson fired for #wrongthink.
  • You know what really sucks? Having your store looted. “They tell me ‘Black Lives Matter.’ They’re lying…I’m black, look what you did to my store.”
  • “Black gun owners guard businesses to protect against looting in Minneapolis.”
  • Eleven times gun owners defended life and property.
  • The gun debate is over.

    We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later

    The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.

    There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.

    Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.

  • West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
  • San Diego County government ordered hotels not to take guests unless they were “essential” workers. This strikes me as an unconstitutional taking…
  • Work privilege:

  • San Francisco’s mass transit agency announces it will no longer transport San Francisco police to riots.
  • The Republican National Convention has been moved to Jacksonville.
  • Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:

    The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.

    They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.

    Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • It’s a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization:

    “These ideas are wrong.”

  • Wokeness comes for the New York Times:

    For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.

    Snip.

    The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.

    It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.

  • Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:

    “One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”

  • Important questions:

  • Welcome to the Year Zero:

  • President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.

    President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.

    The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

    The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.

    “The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.

    Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.

    What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?

  • The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
  • Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
  • Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
  • Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
  • Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”

  • Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
  • “Democrats Propose Replacing All Police With Traveling Bands Of Hippies Singing ‘Imagine.'”
  • And speaking of damn dirty hippies, Dwight has this CBS scoop from 1967.
  • World War II bomber story: Two planes, one crash landing. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

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    Posted in Austin, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    Elon Musk Threatens To Move Tesla To Texas

    Sunday, May 10th, 2020

    Elon Musk has finally had enough of California’s business-hostile tax and regulatory environment:

    Recall just days ago we reported that Tesla was sending people back to work at its Fremont factory in Alameda County before the area’s lockdown expired.

    Late last week, Alameda County responded by telling Musk that he could not re-open his factory. “We have not given the green light. We have been working with them looking at some of their safety plans. But no, we have not said that it is appropriate to move forward,” Erica Pan, interim health officer for the Alameda County Public Health Department, said on an online town hall meeting on Friday.

    That was enough to trigger a total Elon Musk meltdown. The CEO, who has been going off on diatribes about civil liberties on conference calls and podcasts alike, Tweeted out on Saturday that he is going to be suing Alameda County for not allowing him to re-open

    The question is what took him so long. Thanks to one party Democratic rule, California constantly ranks as one of the worst states to do business in. High taxes and a brutal regulatory environment made California prohibitively expense to do business in long before the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown provided the final straw.

    Musk’s tweet attracted some attention:

    Is this just a negotiating ploy to pressure the county into allowing Tesla to resume manufacturing? Possibly. But plenty of companies have already moved operations from California to Texas, including Toyota, Kubota, and Charles Schwab. And that exodus just keeps continuing.

    I used to do a regular Texas vs. California update, detailing how bad California’s business climate was and detailing all the California businesses going bankrupt or moving to Texas. Eventually I got so far behind that the in-progress post simply got too huge to finish. (And this was right around the time I started doing the Clown Car Update, which sucked up huge amounts of my time.) And then the Wuhan Coronavirus came along to wallop everyone’s economy, so most of those links are probably moot. I have a very strong suspicion that ending the unreasonable lockdown conditions earlier than most states will help Texas recover more strongly, and increase it’s lead as a business-friendly environment over California.

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    Posted in Democrats, Economics, Regulation, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Cornonavirus Economic Resources: Texas and Elsewhere

    Thursday, April 2nd, 2020

    Since the Wuhan Coronavirus has delivered a quick kick to the nads of the economy, I’m sure being out of work really sucks right now. Here’s a quick roundup on economic resources that might help, both in Texas and elsewhere.

  • Candor has a long list of companies that covers which are still hiring (and there are many), which have hiring freezes in place, which are having layoffs, etc., along with more info, links to company hiring portals, etc.
  • Hiring statuses at Austin companies. Just started March 31, so there’s only a few companies there now.
  • Some newly unemployed Texans have complained that they can’t get through to Texas Workforce Commission by using either the website or by either telephone numbers (800-939-6631 for claims or 800-558-8321 for Tele-Serve). Two pieces of advice: For the website, try late at night or early morning when it’s not so slammed. For the telephone, the listed hours are 8 AM to 6 PM on weekdays, and I hear the best times to call are between 5-6 PM (when the phones are still staffed in El Paso).
  • If you’re stuck home under quarantine, now is a good time to increase your skill stack by taking courses to give your resume buzzword compliance. If you’re signed up through TWC, they have free online courses in a variety of areas.
  • Cisco also has an online learning portal and access to some sandbox tools, not only for their own stuff but also several basic technology tools.
  • CodeAcademy offers basic tech courses for free.
  • If it’s been a while since you looked for a job, you need to be on Indeed and LinkedIn. There are others, but those are pretty much mandatory.
  • There are various loan programs available to small businesses.
  • If you live in the Austin area, there’s an Austin digital jobs Facebook group that’s worth joining, and which I got some of the links above from.
  • One tiny bit of good news in the gloom: Due to the coronavirus outbreak, you tax return deadline has been extended to July 15.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for February 28, 2020

    Friday, February 28th, 2020

    Welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm! There are five Saturdays in February this month, something that won’t happen again until 2048.

  • Giant water main break in Houston shuts down lots of schools and streets. The pipe, which is 8 feet across and supplies 40-50% of Houston’s water, burst during repairs. There’s a boil notice in effect for Houston for the next 24 hours. (Hat tip: Kemberlee Kaye.)
  • Why we need to secure the border to fight coronavirus: “U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 1,155 Chinese migrants this fiscal year after they illegally entered from Mexico, Canada, or coastal boundaries. More than 95 percent came over the southwestern border between October 1, 2019, and January 31, 2020.”
  • Kurt Schlichter covers the Gathering of the NeverTrumpaloos:

    Woke Rule No. 1 is that anything with “Principles” in its name is a grift. Now, something called “Principles First” – ugh – is trying to shoehorn into CPAC’s spotlight with its “National Summit on Principled Conservatism” to be held in D.C. on February 29th, and for the low, low, almost certainly lib tech tycoon-subsidized price of $10, you can attend this sexless Never Trump Freaknik.

    It’s an opportunity to get one-on-one with all your favorite relevancy-challenged B-list MSNBCNN guests for a full day of complaining about Donald Trump and having them show you on the doll exactly where Trump hurt them. Brace yourselves for impassioned pleas by impotent weirdos to vote for the crusty commie curmudgeon because Trump sends mean tweets, plus plenty of “Oh well I nevers” and “We’re better than thats” as Pearl Clutchfest 2020 gets well and truly lit. Just don’t be surprised if the marquee outside reads “Puppet Show and Never Trump.”

    From political consultants who are no longer consulted to writers who are no longer read, this is the Woodstock for conservatives who never actually conserved anything.

    Excited? Worried you might miss out? Calm down. There are plenty of tickets left. And I hear they’ve got loads of Doritos and Zima at the buffet, if you can squeeze in between the ravenous Bulwark staffers stuffing their talk holes.

    Who’s coming to this soiree? Well, just imagine the universe’s worst county fair dino-rock concert line-up, and this is its political equivalent. Mona Charen! Bill Kristol! David Frum! It’s basically the Swamp’s version of Bachman Turner Overdrive, Blue Öyster Cult, and Average White Band – except this band of totally white people are well below-average, though I’m sure we’ll get a fussy email reading “Excuse me, but we have a/an __________.” The closest thing to diversity I could detect in their line-up was the aptly named Heath Mayo – he’s diverse because he’s a younger kind of white person. I’m sure Mayo is ready to unleash the full benefit of his life experience upon the eager crowd – he can explain how learning about Reagan in high school in 2008 totally changed his life.

    Sadly, Ana Navarro isn’t on the bill, but she probably has important work to do completing Dr. Stephen Hawking’s string theory research. And there’s no sign of Jennifer Rubin, probably because the event occurs during the hours of daylight.

  • Former Texas state Senator Don Huffines has some sobering behind-the-scenes look at Texas government.
    • Abolished an obscure quasi-educational agency: “A rats nest of crooks.”
    • “We uncovered the biggest political corruption scandal in the history of the state of Texas.”
    • “We discovered these people were stealing a lot of money.”
    • “Over 3000 employees.”
    • At least 5 employees are currently in prison, with more potentially coming soon.
    • “I didn’t get a lot of help in Austin.”
    • “I didn’t get any support of the Governor.”
    • “I got nothing but opposition from the speaker of the house.”
    • The Lt. Governor wasn’t particularly helpful, but didn’t actively work against him either.
  • Trump campaign to open storefronts in black neighborhoods in swing states.
  • China lases U.S. Navy plane in international waters.
  • The “Green New Deal” “would cost a typical household a minimum of $74,287 in the first year of implementation…for the subsequent four years, the average annual costs per household for 10 of the 11 states is $47,755, decreasing to $40,706 for ever after.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Young Turks founder fights unionization. “In the staff meeting, the network’s co-founder and influential host, Cenk Uygur, urged employees not to do so, arguing that a union does not belong at a small, independent outlet like TYT, according to two workers who were present. He said if there had been a union at the network it would not have grown the way it has.” See, it’s always different when they do it…
  • Bad: Zyxel announced security bug in their NAS products. Worse: It was also in their firewall products.
  • There’s a California bill that would require porn stars to get a license. Inspector: “Yeah, I’m going to need to see your license.” Porn star (opens blouse): How about these licenses?” (Bowchickawowow…)
  • Hosni Mubarak dead at age 91. Of all the strongmen who have ruled Egypt, Mubarak falls in about the middle; less brutal than Morsi or Nasser, but more corrupt than Sadat or Sisi. His real downfall came from trying to install his son as a dynastic successor, at which point the army let the popular revolt oust him, leading eventually to the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief reign. He kept the peace with Israel, was a fairly reliable US ally for the region, and suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood (obviously not well enough).
  • Today’s elite facepalm: “Immigration to America is down. Wages are up. Are the two related?” Hey, you just might be on to something with that radical ‘supply and demand’ theory there, Einstein… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • With Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction, let’s remember what a huge Democratic Party donor he is. Also: “He faces an L.A. criminal trial soon, where 90 women have filed complaints against him, including well-known actresses Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman, and Salma Hayek.”
  • How a treasure trove of aviation drawings was saved from destruction thanks to a single engineer, including those for the P-51 and the B-25.
  • Scientist: Here’s a journal article. Editor: Think you could provide the raw data? Scientist: (Hissses, holds up arm to shield the crucifix from it’s sight, withdraws paper.)
  • The garbage world of corporatespeak.
  • “Recently Listed $1.5 Million Home In San Francisco Just Soggy Cardboard Box Full Of Used Needles.”

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