Another Friday, another LinkSwarm. On a personal note, I am once again looking for a Senior Technical Writing position in the greater Austin area. If you have any leads in that direction, please let me know.
Republicans cave on everything and leave town. But somehow it’s Trump that’s going to sully the spotless reputation of the Grand Old Party…
But at least congress overrode Obama’s veto of bill allowing 9/11 survivors to sue the Saudis 97-1. One wonders why Obama even bothered vetoing the bill, given how he had already stabbed the Saudis in the back with the Iran deal.
Apparently, some in this party really do think they’re going to hand the election to Hillary, and, bizarrely, they think this will bully the rest of us into knuckling under to their agenda in 2020.
Rather than simply getting payback and tanking their candidate in return.
This party is on the verge of self-destructing. The upper class of the party is upset that the lower class has finally had its say, and they’re determined that should never be permitted to happen again.
Why then would anyone of the lower class ever vote for the GOP again? Are they required to sign a piece of paper confirming that they are Lessers who should know their place in order to have the privilege of voting against their own interests?
He’s also turns his fire on #NeverTrump:
we have a hundred people who claim to be #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary but, strangely enough, never talk about the downsides of a Hillary presidency. Oh, they’ll talk up how much of an authoritarian Trump is, but not Hillary’s sense of entitlement, grievance, vengeance, and her own history of authoritarianism and lawlessness in covering up her crimes.
They talk all day about “Principles,” but discard the most basic principles — such as keeping a proven lawbreaker out of the White House, or just honestly admitting which candidate they’re actually supporting to their readers — as convenience may recommend.
In fact, right now they’re howling about Ted Cruz’ “calculations” in endorsing Trump, while not admitting their own pose of “Being Against Both Equally” is in fact a completely contrived lie they’ve calculated will permit them to agitate for their candidate (Hillary) while not compromising their career prospects within Conservatism, Inc. too much.
How much can I agitate for Hillary while still retaining plausible deniability?
How much can I agitate for Hillary to appease my anti-Trump donors while still keeping enough pro-Trump readers that my anti-Trump donors will feel they’re getting enough eyeballs per dollar of their patronage?
The party — not just the party;the writers who are supposed to have telling the truth as their first mission, but instead of become nonstop liars all the time decrying Trump as a liar himself — has declared war on all of the Lessers beneath their station, those not in The Media and who should, therefore, not have quite as much of a say in things as they themselves have.
They’ve made themselves into exactly what they pretend to oppose — and exactly what I do in fact oppose.
Canada launches prescription smack. Part of me wants to see how the experiment turns out. And part of me wants to start offering junkies one-way bus tickets to the Great (China) White North.
There’s a proper and an improper way to turn down an orgy. Proper: “No thank you.” Improper: Getting stabby. Don’t they teach kids basic manners these days?
I can certainly understand the Clinton clan’s self-centered greed and avarice. What I struggle to understand is why they keep repeatedly hiring employees with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Take, for example, former Clinton Foundation employee Gehad El-Haddad, who was just sentenced to life in prison in Egypt for his work as the mouthpiece for Mohamed Morsi’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government.
Then there are the well documented familial links between perpetual #1 Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and the Muslim Brotherhood:
Sheikh Qaradawi is a promoter of jihadist terror. His fatwas endorse terrorist attacks against American personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombing — by both men and women — against Israel. He is a leading supporter of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. He also runs an umbrella organization called the Union for Good (sometimes referred to as the “Union of Good”), which is formally designated a terrorist organization under American law. The Union for Good was behind the “Peace Flotilla” that attempted to break our ally Israel’s blockade of the terrorist organization Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch) in 2010.
That’s rather interesting — at least to me, though apparently not to Speaker Boehner — because Huma Abedin’s mother, Saleha, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s female division (the “Muslim Sisterhood”), is a major figure in not one but two Union for Good components. The first is the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR). It is banned in Israel for supporting Hamas under the auspices of the Union for Good. Then there’s the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) — an organization that Dr. Saleha Abedin has long headed. Dr. Abedin’s IICWC describes itself as part of the IICDR. And wouldn’t you know it, the IICWC charter was written by none other than . . . Sheikh Qaradawi, in conjunction with several self-proclaimed members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The recently declassified 28 pages of the 9/11 report has more to say about it. “The ‘Abedin family business’ is an academic group called the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs that is based in the London offices of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and its parent organization, the Muslim World League.”
About the World Arab Muslim Youth Association:
According to the FBI. Abdullah Bin Ladin [Osama bin Laden’s half-brother] has a number of connections to terrorist organizations. He is the President and Director of the World Arab Muslim Youth Association (WAMY) and the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Science in America. Both organizations are local branches of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
According to the FBI, there is reason to believe that WAMY is “closely associated with the funding and financing of international terrorist activities and in the past has provided logistical support to individuals wishing to to fight in the Afghan War.” In 1998, the CIA published a paper characterizing WAMY as a NGO that provides funding. logistical support and training with possible connections to the Arab Afghans network, Hamas, Algerian extremists and Philippine militants.
Who else calls attention to the World Arab Muslim Youth Association’s ties to terrorism? Would you believe Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?
Saudi Arabia has enacted important reforms to criminalize terrorist financing and restrict the overseas flow of funds from Saudi-based charities. However, these restrictions fail to include multilateral organizations such as the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY.) Intelligence suggests that these groups continue to send money overseas and, at times, fund extremism overseas.
And as long as we’re discussing Hillary’s ties to terrorism, we should probably mention “numerous ties between Hillary Clinton and members of the shadowy network surrounding Fethullah Gulen, the controversial Muslim cleric who has been called ‘the Turkish Khomeini,’ and whom the Erdogan regime is accusing of instigating the coup that nearly toppled it.” (Just because I don’t think Gulen had any significant role in the coup doesn’t mean he’s not an Islamist scumbag.)
According to the Caller, the Gulen camp has been one of Hillary’s numerous sources of cash, in exchange for which she gave access to the President: “a Gulen follower named Gokhan Ozkok asked Clinton deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin for help in connecting one of his allies to President Obama….Ozkok served as national finance co-chair of the pro-Clinton Ready PAC. He gave $10,000 to the committee in 2014 and $2,700 to Clinton’s campaign last year. He is also listed on the Turkish Cultural Center’s website as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of the non-profit arms of the Clinton Foundation. He’s given between $25,000 and $50,000 to the Clinton charity.”
Ah, money for access. Now the Clinton ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are starting to make more sense. Maybe they helped the Clinton Foundation bring in money from the likes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi, Nasser Al-Rashid, etc. Indeed, counting speaking fees and money for “walking away” from an investment partnership with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai, the Clintons have collectively pocketed $100 million from Persian Gulf rulers.
There’s are other angles to the story I haven’t had time to track down yet. Like why did Hillary Clinton’s new VP pick Tim Kaine appoint the President of the Muslim Brotherhood-tied Muslim American Society, Esam Omeish, to Virginia’s state’s Immigration Commission?
I expected to spend the weekend at the Levitation Music Festival here in Austin, but it got cancelled when it looked like t was going to be rained out. However, I did see a makeup show by Slowdive, which was the biggest reason I was attending anyway.
Scott Adams: “I give Clinton a 50% chance of making it to November with sufficiently good health to be considered a viable president.”
It’s good for the sake of the world that Islamic State fighters are no-talent assclowns. Maybe they should have drilled them more on military tactics than reciting the Koran. See how many basic military squad function mistakes you can count them making in this video.
“More than two decades ago, we heard the ‘misplaced fears’ and predictions of shootouts in the streets of Texas because of the CHL law. It didn’t happen — and it won’t happen because of SB 11, either.”
Rabid Puppies dominate the Hugo nominations again. The science fiction establishment was given the opportunity to address Sad Puppies concerns, but instead they continued to doubled down by backing the Social Justice Warriors at every turn. This has turned Sad Puppy voters into Rabid Puppy voters. The 2015 Hugos: “There are problems, but Vox Day is an odious troll.” The 2016 Hugos: “You know what? Fuck them. They deserve Vox Day.”
Presidential elections, Islamic terrorism, gun rights, crooked locksmiths: Something for (almost) everyone in your Friday LinkSwarm:
So why did Hillary Clinton take $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs? “That’s what they offered.” I actually like the refreshing honesty about that answer, since we already know Granny Crooked McCankles is all about the benjamins. But Hillary saying she hadn’t decided to run for President yet when she took the money? That’s just pissing on our leg and calling it rain…
Why is the Republican establishment willing to consider one heresy to their worldview (subsidizing the working poor) but not another (actually enforcing immigration law and securing the borders)?
According to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz gave us ObamaCare. By voting to confirm John Roberts. Before Cruz was even in the senate. Hey, why should Ted Cruz even bother to run for President if he’s capable of time travel?
To recap: Gun-control activists declared Virginia their proving ground and poured unbelievable amounts of money into a state-senate election; then they lost that election; then they bet big on executive actions instituting new gun control; they watched as those actions were not only reversed but gun rights were expanded.
If we take Virginia as the bellwether that the gun-control activists envisioned, then gun control is dead as a 2016 issue.
And according to this legal paper by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, lower courts are scrutinizing even modest post-Heller gun rights restrictions.
As expected, all seven Texas constitutional amendments passed easily. The two most heavily promoted amendments, Proposition 1 (homestead property tax relief) and Proposition 7 (dedicating sales tax money to the highway fund), each passed with more than 80% of the vote.
Other Texas voting news:
Houston’s unpopular “tranny bathroom bill” went down in flames. Liberals crying foul that their pet transgender culture war bill was reduced to tranny bathrooms might want to remember that no one forced Houston Mayor Annise Parker (who whispered not a word of it during her own election campaign) to bring it up, and certainly wasn’t forced to sue churches who dared oppose it. Every time an item on the Social Justice Warrior agenda actually gets put before voters, it loses big time.
Austin voters rejected a courthouse bond package derided as a big-spending boondoggle. And keep in mind that Austin voters practically never turn down bond proposals.
But it wasn’t just Texas. Across the nation, conservatives won big in off-year elections:
Republican Matt Bevin won a big upset in the Kentucky governor’s race. The guy who Mitch McConnell crushed by 25 points in a 2014 primary will now become just the second Republican to govern the Bluegrass State in four decades.
Democrats failed to pick up Virginia’s state Senate. It’s a huge blow to Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who went all-in to make it happen. Democrats could have won by capturing just one seat because of the tie-breaking authority of Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam (D). But Republicans held every single seat…
Even in San Francisco, the sheriff who steadfastly defended the city’s “sanctuary city” policy went down. Fox News: “Ross Mirkarimi and his office received heavy criticism after Mexican illegal immigrant Francisco Sanchez allegedly shot and killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle on San Francisco’s waterfront July 1. Sanchez had been released from Mirkarimi’s jail in March even though federal immigration officials had requested that he be detained for possible deportation.” The city also rejected new regulations on Airbnb.
The Kentucky Governor’s race was the one where Fark’s Drew Curtis ran as an independent. He garnered just over 3% of the vote.
Also speaking of rockets, in Iraq ISIS seizes control of one of Saddam’s chemical weapons sites, filled with rockets full of nerve gas agents. You know, the ones liberals swore didn’t exist in 2004…
Hillary’s book drops off the Amazon 100 list. Evidently there are tens of millions of Democrats who found that not buying Hard Choices was, in fact, an easy choice…
Public employees union AFSCME severs ties with the United negro College Fund because they took money from the Koch brothers. So it’s more important to display their hate than to help black people go to college…
Pretty much everyone on both sides of the mediasphere/punditocracy was shocked by last night’s defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor by David Brat.
Here’s a quick roundup on thoughts and reactions to Cantor’s defeat:
If David Dewhurst’s flailing campaigns hadn’t already destroyed consensus wisdom that money is everything in a political race, Brat’s vitory provides further confirmation. “As of mid-May, Brat had raised only about $200,000, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Cantor raised more than $5.4 million for this election cycle.”
The media will play up Cantor’s loss by claiming it was about immigration. They will be wrong, but it will be useful for the rest of us. Immigration reform is now DOA in the House of Representatives thanks to David Brat.
But Cantor really did not lose because of immigration alone. Immigration was the surface reason that galvanized the opposition to Cantor, but the opposition could not have been galvanized with this issue had Cantor been a better congressman these past few years.
He and his staff have repeatedly antagonized conservatives. One conservative recently told me that Cantor’s staff were the “biggest bunch of a**holes on the Hill.” An establishment consultant who backed Cantor actually agreed with this assessment. That attitude moved with Cantor staffers to K Street, the NRSC, and elsewhere generating ill will toward them and Cantor. Many of them were perceived to still be assisting Cantor in other capacities. After Cantor’s loss tonight, I got a high volume of emails from excited conservatives, but also more than a handful of emails from those with establishment Republican leanings all expressing variations on “good riddance.”
Cantor’s constituent services moved more toward focusing on running the Republican House majority than his congressional district. K Street, the den of Washington lobbyists, became his chief constituency.
“Cantor lost his race because he was running for Speaker of the House of Representatives while his constituents wanted a congressman.”
The American Conservative Union has long been a mouthpiece of the Republican Establishment and in the past few years has basically been K-Street’s conservatives. Their scorecard reflects the Republican-ness of a member of congress far more than the conservativeness of a member of congress. Just consider that Mitch McConnell was considered more conservative in 2012 than either Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn.
In contrast to the American Conservative Union, Heritage Action for America takes a more comprehensive approach to its scorecard, it does not try to help Republican leadership look good, and is a better barometer of a congressman’s conservativeness. The ACU had Eric Cantor at a 95%. Heritage Action for America has him at 53%.
And as long as I’m quoting Erickson:
Republican consultants are really pissed they’ve invested all this time in ass kissing staffers who suddenly aren’t powerful.
Because [Cantor] didn’t have to worry too much about getting re-elected every two years, his political ambition was channeled into rising through the hierarchy of the House leadership. Rise he did, all the way up to the #2 spot, and he was waiting in the wings to become Speaker of the House.
The result was that Cantor’s real constituency wasn’t the folks back home. His constituency was the Republican leadership and the Republican establishment. That’s who he really answered to.
Guess what? Folks in the seventh district figured that out.
Snip.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was Eric Cantor: the soul of an establishment machine politician, with the “messaging” of the small-government conservatives grafted uneasily on top of it.
So yes, you can now tear up all those articles pronouncing the death of the Tea Party movement, because this is the essence of what the Tea Party is about: letting the establishment know that they have to do more than offer lip service to a small-government agenda, that we expect them to actually mean it. Or as Dave Brat put it in one of his frenzied post-victory interviews, “the problem with the Republican principles is that nobody follows them.”
I would have settled for his challenger, Dave Brat, getting more than 40%. I was all ready to (legitimately) spin that as a warning shot across Cantor’s bow. Instead, Brat went and actually beat Cantor–decisively, by 10 points, 55% to 45%. He and his campaign manager Zachary Werrell obviously ran a very effective race with minimal resources–against Cantor’s millions. Independent anti-Cantor actors like the We Deserve Better group — and various local conspiracies we don’t even know about — probably played a role as well.
But the main issue in the race was immigration. It’s what Brat emphasized, and what his supporters in the right wing media (Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin) emphasized. It’s the charge Cantor defended against—by conceding the issue and posing as a staunch amnesty opponent. But Cantor had signed onto the GOP’s pro-amnesty “principles” and endorsed a poll-tested but irresponsibly sweeping amnesty for children (a “founding principle” of the country, he said). Brat opposed all this, even as illegal immigrant children were surging across the border in search of a Cantor-style deal.
Brat won this immigration debate. Cantor lost. It’s basically that simple.
Kaus also notes that it puts a stake in the heart of MSM “Republicans are really OK with amnesty” BS.
What does it mean for House leadership?
Those conservatives, suddenly smelling blood in the water, might now be emboldened to push for a wholesale change in leadership—ousting Boehner and McCarthy in this November’s conference elections, and entering the next Congress with a new top three.
“It should frighten everyone in leadership,” one conservative House Republican, who exchanged text messages on condition of anonymity, said shortly after Cantor’s defeat was official. “They haven’t been conservative enough. We’ve told them that for 3 years. They wouldn’t listen.”
The GOP lawmaker added: “Maybe they will listen now.”
Cantor’s internal polling (conducting by the McLaughlin Group) showed him up by 34%, when he actually lost by 10 points. I guess McLaughlin failed to note the results were +/-44 points. That’s some mighty fine polling methodology you have going on there, John…
Brat on his victory: “Dollars do not vote. You do!”
Brat offers Washington insiders a lesson in humility. Bonus: “The 10th Amendment is the big one; the Constitution has enumerated powers belonging to the federal government. All the rest of the powers belong to the states and the people.”
Tonight is primary night in Virginia, and in Virginia’s 7th congressional district, and with 75% of districts reporting, House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor is losing to underfunded tea Party challenger David Brat by about 56% to 44%.
Cantor used to be a reliable conservative, but the overwhelming issue in this race was Cantor’s support for the thin “Dream Act” wedge of illegal alien amnesty. Republican voters, blue collar workers and Americans in general have stated over and over again they’re opposed to illegal alien amnesty, but Democrats, big business lobbyists, certain Hispanic groups and squishy establishment GOP moderates keep pushing it.
Attention all Republican office holders everywhere: Supporting illegal alien amnesty is a career-ending move.
Also, it appears that reports of the Tea Party’s death have been greatly exaggerated…
Dear @SpeakerBoehner: Look at what's happening to Eric Cantor tonight. This is the fate of all GOP leadership if you keep pushing #Amnesty.
“What Ted Cruz did – and what the go-along, get-along gang of Republican stegosauruses hate – is that he fought. He fought.”
More:
This was really about the war between the growing conservative majority in the GOP and the dying GOP establishment minority.
It’s a war that must be fought, and which we should welcome. And it’s a war we conservatives will win.
The party has changed from the bottom up in the last decade. Those at the top of the pyramid are finally realizing that they and the base below are out of synch. The GOP establishment was very, very happy to support the pre-Obama consensus that government would grow and that the Republicans would campaign against it at home then let it expand unhindered in D.C. The problem – in the eyes of the establishment – is that the newly conservative GOP base, energized and activated by Obama’s radicalism, actually wants to shrink the government.
We’re serious. That’s the problem. And with the unblinking eye of the social media upon them, they can’t fake it anymore.
The UK’s NHS already has death panels. And they pay doctors to let you die.. “I could keep you alive. Or I could pocket this splendid £50. Decisions, decisions.”
In Virginia, Nurse Bloomberg is backing gun-grabber Terry McAuliffe to the tune of $1.1 million. Let’s hope his spending is every bit as effective as it was in Colorado…
I don’t cover the gun scene nearly as much as I should, but there are several stories percolating throughout the gun community this week I thought were worth taking a look at:
Alphecca: “If Zimmerman had been pulled over in NY, NJ, MD, CA, or almost anywhere other than the great state of Texas, he’d be in jail on some trumped-up charges. Fortunately, it was Texas.”