Another mandate injunction, Democrats continue their popularity freefall, China seals more dirty deals, and Turkey melts down. It’s another Friday LinkSwarm!
A federal judge in Texas has issued a preliminary injunction, stopping a new rule from the Biden administration requiring healthcare workers to receive the COVID vaccine as the case moves through the courts.
The injunction came from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo. The case was filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton on behalf of the State of Texas against Xavier Becerra, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary.
The injunction was sought against a federal rule that would have required employers that receive Medicaid and Medicare funds—namely hospitals and other healthcare providers—to require their employees to receive a COVID vaccine as a condition of employment.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered that the federal government provide notice to all Medicaid and Medicare providers in Texas that the mandate “will not be implemented or enforced.”
“Healthcare facilities covered by the [Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services] Mandate have a tremendous reliance interest in Medicare and Medicaid funds. Therefore, Defendants unconstitutionally use Congress’s spending powers to ‘commandeer a State’s . . . administrative apparatus for federal purposes’ by conditioning Medicare and Medicaid funds on state surveyor compliance with the mandate,” wrote Kacsmaryk. “As a result, not only would the CMS Mandate prohibit Plaintiffs from enforcing its duly enacted COVID-19 vaccination regulations, but it would likely force Plaintiffs to administer a federal mandate that has a dubious statutory basis.”
“It is a ‘gun to the head’ and an unconstitutional use of Congress’s spending powers to compel Plaintiffs through ‘financial inducement’ to forgo exercising their police powers to enforce a federal statute.”
Democrat support from independent voters has fallen near the crucial 40% line, while almost half of all independent voters tell Gallup that they’re leaning Republican.
“If you’re a Democrat and you’re not terrified,” says The Dispatch’s Avi Woolf, “you should be.”
Well, I’m neither a Democrat nor terrified, but I am conservative and — at least for now — quite giddy.
Gallup recently updated its long-term party affiliation poll, which asks American voters one or two simple questions:
In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?
(If they ID as independents) As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?
Currently, 31% say they’re Republicans, up slightly from the usual mid-20s to 30%. 41% told Gallup that they’re independent voters, in line with the average swing. Only 27% self-ID as Democrats, which is down from the more typical 29-32%.
As recently as May, Democrats were at 32% and the GOP at a dismal 25%.
But that’s before Presidentish Joe Biden had had a chance to do much other than send out FREE! MONEY! (handouts that helped cause our present inflation) and smile for the glowing press coverage. Since then, important parts of his agenda have taken hold and the malign incompetence of his cabinet has been fully revealed.
Apparently, Americans don’t think much of either.
But it’s the second question that should have Washington Democrats changing their shorts.
Indies, asked whether they lean towards the Democrats or the GOP, broke for the GOP 47% to 41%.
At this time in Barack Obama’s first term, the breakdown was a much more Dem-friendly 25R/41I/32D. And the Indy swing was exactly reversed, 41R/47D.
Yet the Democrats still lost a whopping 63 seats in the House and seven more in the Senate in the following midterm election.
Obama enjoyed immensely more personal popularity than Biden does — I know, I don’t get it, either — but couldn’t stop a GOP tsunami when his agenda proved unpopular.
Biden has both an unpopular agenda and a high unfavorable rating draped around his neck like a lead life preserver. And now voters are leaving his party in droves.
The woke are coming for all that sweet, sweet Medicare money.
Buried in the Department of Health and Human Services’s fiscal planning for next year is a proposal to establish bonuses for physicians who “create and implement an anti-racism plan.”
“The plan should include a clinic-wide review of existing tools and policies, such as value statements or clinical practice guidelines, to ensure that they include and are aligned with a commitment to anti-racism and an understanding of race as a political and social construct, not a physiological one,” the HHS writes . “The plan should also identify ways in which issues and gaps identified in the review can be addressed and should include target goals and milestones for addressing prioritized issues and gaps. This may also include an assessment and drafting of an organization’s plan to prevent and address racism and/or improve language access and accessibility to ensure services are accessible and understandable for those seeking care.”
I’m sure this will go over great with Medicare patients. “Mam, I can’t check on your osteoporosis until you check your privilege!” (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.)
After Democrats abandoned trying to pass Biden’s giant leftwing “Build Back Better” porkfest this year, is the bill actually dead forever? South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham thinks so.
The South Carolina Republican said that the Congressional Budget Office score, which found the $1.75 trillion bill would add $3 trillion to the deficit, is what led to its demise.
‘I think Build Back Better is dead forever and let me tell you why: Because Joe Manchin has said he’s not going to vote for a bill that will add to the deficit,’ he said on Fox News’ Hannity Wednesday night.
‘Well, if you do away with the budget gimmicks, Build Back Better, according to the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] adds $3 trillion to the deficit.’
‘This is b******t. You’re b******t,’ the West Virginia senator yelled at Arthur Delaney, a reporter for HuffPost Politics, who asked him about reports that the child tax credit has become a major sticking point in his talks with the White House.
‘I’m done, I’m done,’ Manchin fumed as the questions continued.
‘Guys, I’m not negotiating with any of you all. You can ask all the questions you want. Guys, let me go,’ he told the press as he walked through the basement of the Capitol, muttering ‘God almighty’ as he walked away.
What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams, and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy’s downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and former President Donald Trump “coups.”
To answer that question, understand first what is not behind these shrill forecasts.
They are not worried about 2 million foreign nationals crashing the border in a single year, without vaccinations during a pandemic. Yet it seems insurrectionary for a government simply to nullify its own immigration laws.
They are not worried that some 800,000 foreign nationals, some residing illegally, will now vote in New York City elections.
They are not worried that there are formal efforts underway to dismantle the U.S. Constitution by junking the 233-year-old Electoral College or the preeminence of the states in establishing ballot laws in national elections.
They are not worried that we are witnessing an unprecedented left-wing effort to scrap the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year tradition of 50 states, for naked political advantage.
They are not worried that the Senate this year put on trial an impeached ex-president and private citizen, without the chief justice in attendance, without a special prosecutor or witnesses, and without a formal commission report of presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.
They are not worried that the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, Hillary Clinton, and members of the Obama Administration systematically sought to use U.S. government agencies to sabotage a presidential campaign, transition, and presidency, via the use of a foreign national and ex-spy Christopher Steele and his coterie of discredited Russian sources.
They are not worried that the Pentagon suddenly has lost the majority support of the American people. Top current and retired officers have flagrantly violated the chain-of-command, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and without data or evidence have announced a hunt in the ranks for anyone suspected of “white rage” or “white supremacy.”
They are not worried that in 2020, a record 64% of the electorate did not cast their ballots on Election Day.
Nor are they worried that the usual rejection rate in most states of non-Election Day ballots plunged—even as an unprecedented 101 million ballots were cast by mail or early voting.
And they are certainly not worried that partisan billionaires of Silicon Valley poured well over $400 million into selected precincts in swing states to “help” public agencies conduct the election.
What then is behind this new left-wing hysteria about the supposed looming end of democracy?
It is quite simple. The left expects to lose power over the next two years—both because of the way it gained and used it, and because of its radical, top-down agendas that never had any public support.
After gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency – with an obsequious media and the support of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, higher education, popular culture, entertainment and professional sports – the left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.
The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.
Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.
All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.
Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.
President Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50% and 57%—in Trump’s own former underwater territory.
Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.
In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.
After the Russian collusion hoax, two impeachments, the Hunter Biden laptop stories, the staged melodramas of the Kavanaugh hearings, the Jussie Smollett con, the Covington kids smear, and the Rittenhouse trial race frenzy, the people are not just worn out by leftist hysterias, but they also weary of how the left gains power and administers it.
Hey, remember all the way back to two weeks ago when I said that Turkey’s collapsing currency was something we should keep an eye on? Well, guess what? “Turkey Halts All Stock Trading As Currency Disintegrates, Central Bank Powerless To Halt Collapse.” ZeroHedge suggests that the collapse is engineered to disguise how much graft Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cronies have stolen from the country.
The Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has long brushed off questions about its role in China’s state surveillance, saying it just sells general-purpose networking gear.
A review by The Washington Post of more than 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many marked “confidential,” suggests that the company has had a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged.
These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.
Citing both interviews and direct access to internal Apple documents about repeated visits by Cook to China in the mid-2010s, the report describes a $275 billion deal whereby Apple committed to investing heavily in technology infrastructure and training in the country.
The non-binding five-year deal was signed by Cook during a 2016 visit, and it was made partially to mitigate or prevent regulatory action by the Chinese government that would have had significant negative effects on Apple’s operations and business in the country.
The Information details the nature of the Chinese government priorities included in the 1,250-word deal:
They included a pledge to help Chinese manufacturers develop “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and “support the training of high-quality Chinese talents.”
In addition, Apple promised to use more components from Chinese suppliers in its devices, sign deals with Chinese software firms, collaborate on technology with Chinese universities and directly invest in Chinese tech companies… Apple promised to invest “many billions of dollars more” than what the company was already spending annually in China. Some of that money would go toward building new retail stores, research and development centers and renewable energy projects, the agreement said.
“Disgrace: Biden abandoned over 60,000 Afghan interpreters, support personnel — along with 14,000 Americans.”
“Trump’s Social Media Platform Gets $1 Billion Investment Boost, Dems Get Nervous.” It will be interesting to see how quickly TRUTH Social can get off the ground.
In yesterday’s post, I forgot to link to these Log4J memes. Enjoy!
Why New York City lags the rest of the nation in unemployment. Thank lockdowns, shutdowns, and insane government. “The economy is not a light switch. The supply chain is not a light switch.” The money quote “New York City is just not that amazing!”
Popular Mexican singer Vincente Fernandez died, and the woke couldn’t wait to crap on his grave:
If you had to tell the story of why Hispanics are abandoning the Democrats in droves using a single image, it would look something like this.
Did you know that an Israeli airstrike hit a Syrian port last week? Did you see anything about that in the news? Seems like the sort of thing the media would cover before they decided that a bunch of lunatics shouting at J.K. Rowling is more important.
Texas House Speaker Dade Phalen attends fundraiser for quorum-busting Democrats in the Rio Grande Valley (including State Reps. Terry Canales, Sergio Munoz Jr., Oscar Longoria, Armando Martinez, and Bobby Guerra, and State Sen. Chuy Hinojosa) while skipping a Republican event a mile away. Remind me again why Phalen is speaker?
“Pasadena Mechanic Sues City Over Parking Space Regulation Prohibiting His Business from Operating.”
There’s nothing this Austin City Council can’t seem to ruin, including the Trail of Lights.
Speaking of science experiments: What happens when you hit a gong with a baseball traveling at Mach 1.5? And you know there’s super-slow motion involved…
Whoa:
A Hutchinson, KS business just West of the Airport destroyed during 80+ mph gusts around 4:30pm.#kswxpic.twitter.com/Yd6ul9EeBo
Kyle Rittenhouse found innocent, vaccine mandates are halted, Kamala is sinking, and the media continues stinking. Plus two scoops of Joe Rogan. It’s the Friday #LinkSwarm!
If you got your facts about the Rittenhouse case from the mainstream media, then just about everything you know is a lie.
Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.
It turns out that account was mostly wrong.
Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.
This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.
CNN and Rep. Ayanna Pressley examples snipped.
But just as in the cases of Covington Catholic’s Nick Sandmann or Jussie Smollet or the “Russia-collusion” narrative, almost none of the details holding up that politically convenient position (boys in MAGA hats are bigoted; racism is as much a blight as it has always been; Trump conspired with Putin) were true.
Take each in turn:
First, the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist.
There was zero evidence that Rittenhouse was connected to white supremacist groups at the time of the shooting. He was a Trump supporter, yes, though he wasn’t old enough to vote. He was an admirer of police and firefighters, also true. He was a lifeguard. He’d been part of a “police explorer” program, and was also a firefighter/EMT cadet with the fire department in Antioch, Illinois, where he lived with his mom and two sisters.
That Rittenhouse had no connection to Kenosha.
In addition to having a job in Kenosha, Rittenhouse testified that much of his family lived there: his father, his grandma, his aunt and uncle, and his cousins. He also testified that on the morning of the shootings, he went downtown with his sister and friends to see the damage done by rioting the night before, and spent about two hours cleaning graffiti off of the local high school.
That Rittenhouse drove across state lines with a gun that night to oppose the protests.
This was a line that we heard constantly—never mind that Antioch, Illinois, is about 20 miles from Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the trial has shown, Kyle Rittenhouse did not travel to Kenosha to oppose protesters. He testified under oath that he had traveled to Kenosha for his job the night before the shootings, and was staying at a friend’s house.
So what about the gun?
Rittenhouse didn’t bring the gun to Kenosha. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse months earlier by a friend and stored in Kenosha at the home of that friend’s stepfather, as then-17-year-old Rittenhouse was too young to purchase it.
But it was illegal for him to even have the gun given that he wasn’t yet 18 years old, right?
That is not true. Under Wisconsin law, 17-year-olds are prohibited from carrying rifles only if they are short-barreled. The weapon Rittenhouse was carrying was not short-barreled. Which is why, during closing arguments, the court threw out the charge.
He was out there looking for a fight, and he got one: He killed two people and severely wounded a third.
Unless there’s evidence we haven’t seen, there’s no clear indication that Rittenhouse sought to kill anyone. What we know is that he showed up with a first aid kit and an AR-15-style rifle. Video evidence, and Rittenhouse’s own testimony, indicates that he offered medical assistance to protestors and ran with a fire extinguisher to try to put out fires—and that later, after being pursued, he killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and severely wounded a third. Both video evidence and the only living person that Rittenhouse shot that night, Gaige Grosskreutz, undermined the idea that Rittenhouse was simply an aggressor looking for a fight. During cross examination Grosskreutz acknowledged that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz had pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse. Here’s how it went down:
Defense attorney: When you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?
Grosskreutz: Correct.
Defense attorney: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun—now your hand’s down pointed at him—that he fired, right?
The Court ordered that “Enforcement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s ‘COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing; Emergency Temporary Standard’ remain[] stayed pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction.” It further ordered that “OSHA take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.”
Behind this language lies a forceful critique of the Biden mandate. The opinion is here.
One of the factors a court considers in deciding whether to issue a stay is the likelihood that the party seeking it will prevail on the merits. The petitioner must make a strong showing of likelihood of success.
The Fifth Circuit found that the petitioners in this case made that showing. This finding means that the Biden administration almost surely will lose in the Fifth Circuit when the court makes its definitive ruling on the merits.
The court cited a “multitude of reasons” why those challenging the mandate will likely succeed on the merits. The first one, which it described as “obvious,” is this:
The Occupational Safety and Health Act, which created OSHA, was enacted by Congress to assure Americans “safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.” See 29 U.S.C. § 651 (statement of findings and declaration of purpose and policy). It was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.
Furthermore, the “sweeping pronouncements” implicit in OSHA’s order are badly flawed. For example, the court noted that the mandate is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. On one hand, it covers employees in nearly every industry regardless of their risk of exposure (there is “little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night
shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse”) and “doesn’t exempt those with natural immunity.” On the other hand, it arbitrarily excludes employers with fewer than 100 workers.
Fatally to the mandate, the court found that its promulgation “grossly exceeds OSHA’s authority.” It noted that OSHA’s statutory authority to establish emergency temporary standards “is an ‘extraordinary power’ that is to be ‘delicately exercised’ in only certain ‘limited situations.’”
And, miracle of miracles, OSHA announced that they will actually heed the court’s opinion and suspend vaccine mandate enforcement. A federal agency heeding a rational federal court decision shouldn’t be a surprise, yet here we are.
How unpopular is Kamala Harris? Democratic Media Complex house organ CNN published a scathing hit piece on her.
Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically.
Wait, the warm bucket of spit feels “constrained”? Do tell…
And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
Social justice “first woman of color” blather snipped. But lets skip down to where Team Harris gets all snippy over a potential rival:
Last month, White House aides leapt to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was being hammered with outrage by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and like-minded online pundits for taking paternity leave after the adoption of his twins in September. Harris loyalists tell CNN they see in that yet another example of an unfair standard at play, wondering why she didn’t get similar cover any of the times she’s been attacked by the right.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a White man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” said a former Harris aide, reflecting conversations last month among several former aides and current allies.
(Imagine there’s an animated hissing cat gif here.)
Anyway, it’s worth reading the whole thing to read how incompetent she and her staff seem at just about everything, and to tote up all the petty slights to Harris, who was only there to bring in black votes in (and didn’t do a great job of that), and now she’s completely disposable.
Despite ending her lackluster campaign for president with a mere 3 percent support among the Democratic electorate, Harris was nevertheless the most obvious pick within the narrow bucket to which Biden had been confined. (Never mind that the apex of her support during the primary campaign came when she savagely attacked Biden on the debate stage, essentially calling him a racist for opposing busing during his time in the Senate, and that she repeatedly said she believed women who had accused Biden of sexual misconduct.)
The simple fact is that Harris is not a good national politician. She is ineffective and unlikeable at best, and, at worst, so unpopular that she’s actively damaging to the administration, likely why Psaki has had to turn to absurdities in an effort to defend her. (Democrats have developed a nasty habit of responding to voters who don’t like them by accusing said voters of racism.)
In Harris’s case, these excuses are because the truth hurts. She has little to no sway with key votes in Congress. She has next to no relevant policy or diplomatic expertise. These facts shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing that she holds her office not because of her popularity or any relevant skillset but primarily because of her identity.
Had she not been picked as Biden’s running mate, she would’ve remained in a far more advantageous position, keeping a comfortable position in the Senate that would be nearly impossible for her to lose. She was already a media darling, popular among progressives for her supposed ability to “own” conservative nominees during hearings. Rather than winding up in a position with little chance to showboat or collect media accolades, she might’ve remained right there, where her lack of popularity with the national electorate was essentially irrelevant.
In a backwards way, Harris finds herself holding a position in which she’s ill-equipped to succeed precisely because of identity politics, which motivated Biden to pick a running mate so ill-suited to the job.
How unpopular? 28% approval. Usual poll caveats apply. So her numbers might not even be that high!
That America’s voters disdain Harris as much as they obviously do gives me an extraordinary amount of hope for our future. In December of 2019, I celebrated Harris’s departure from the presidential primary with a “good riddance” that turned out to be woefully premature: “May Harris’s failed attempt,” I hoped, serve to “destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.” Alas, the first part did not happen; on the contrary, Harris was springboarded up to within a heartbeat of the most potent office in the land. But the second part? Well, I got that in abundance. We are now ten months into this baleful presidency, and already Harris is the most unpopular vice president in history. And they say Christmas doesn’t come early!
Harris’s apologists like to insist that she is as unpopular as she is because she’s a non-white woman. But this explanation gets the cause of the disapproval backwards. Kamala Harris isn’t disliked because she’s a non-white woman; Kamala Harris was chosen as vice president because she’s a non-white woman, and she’s disliked because she has nothing to recommend her beyond those facts. In the highest of high dudgeon, her defenders will propose that this is Joe Biden’s fault, for not “using” Harris correctly in her role. But this too is unjust. In truth, there is no good way to “use” Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris is a talentless mediocrity whose only political flair is for making things worse than they were before she arrived.
And her staff knows it. “Kamala Harris’s communications director Ashley Etienne is leaving the vice president’s office after reports staff are in-fighting and her boss is being sidelined.”
want to thank the Democrats for giving me, a trial lawyer living in Los Angeles, exactly what I need – a big, heaping tax cut. In their reconciliation bill, there are plenty of giveaways for lay-abouts, losers, and grifters, but also for us living by the beach getting hit with huge state taxes rendered un-deductible by that evil Donald Trump, notorious friend to the rich who he…shafted. Anyway, the Dems are going to wrong this right and fix this manifest justice, though – they are going to make essentially all the money I hand over to the socialist clique that runs the formerly Golden State (and it is a lot) deductible once again.
Cool. Well, for me and other lawyers and similar blue state swells.
People often ask me why I stay in California, to which I reply, “I don’t explain myself to people – buzz off.” But if I were to explain myself to people, I would point out that despite being awash with Californians, California has beautiful weather, my family is nearby, and here I get to be part of the feudal aristocracy sucking the life from working people to fuel my extravagant lifestyle.
See, California was designed for lawyers and similar high-status low-lifes, and the beachside communities where the petty royals dwell do not experience a fraction of the hellish nightmare you see on TV. Oh, what you see is real, just not for those in the Birkenstock nobility. You see videos of hordes of hobos leaving their junkie spoor on the sidewalks and that happens, just not to the people that Prince Gavin of Newsom cares about. I don’t think he cares about me personally mind you, but he cares a lot about my ZIP code.
You can drive ten minutes from my castle and be worried about someone stealing your hubcaps. Once you start heading east over the 405 (That’s I-405 to people who don’t live in LA) real life comes and bites you hard, and the farther east you go, the harder it bites. The roads are trash – gee, I sure expect the infrastructure bill will totally make them nice again – and the schools are cesspits of violence and commie indoctrination, but the peasants just need to accept their lot in life and not complain. Their bitching would ruin our wine tasting.
Of course, I might have more sympathy for these poor devils if they had not lobbied so hard for the role of “Serf #3” in California’s production of “Game of Bums.” They voted for this. They got this. It’s all theirs.
“It’s Not Just White People: Democrats Are Losing Normal Voters of All Races.” Results from a focus group of Virginia voters “who voted Democrat, Democrat, Republican in the last three elections.”
When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.
The biggest disconnect came on education. Barefoot found that school closures were likely a big part of their votes for Youngkin and that frustration at school leadership over those closures bled into the controversy, pushed by Republicans, around the injection of “critical race theory” into the public school setting, along with the question of what say parents should have in schools. One Latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents, yet later Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee and former governor, would insist that parents should have no input in their children’s education. (That’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how it played.) As she put it: “They asked us to do all this work for months and then he says it’s none of our business now.”
The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped: Enrollment in Fairfax County schools dropped 5 percent, and fell by 3.9 percent and 3.4 percent in Arlington and Loudoun counties, respectively. Those who were left behind organized parent groups to pressure the schools to reopen. Though the groups tended to be nonpartisan or bipartisan at the start, Republican donors and conservative groups poured money and manpower into them, converting them into potent political weapons that blended anger at the closures with complaints about Democratic board members prioritizing trendy social justice issues — all of it aimed at the November elections.
“They keep saying ‘a strong return to school,’ but there’s no details,” said Saundra Davis on Fox News over the summer, co-founder of one large group, called the Open Fairfax Public Schools Coalition. “Their attention is on other things, like their pet projects and social justice issues, and the kids have been left to flounder and there’s still no plan for fall.”
“You’ll be surprised to know I’m a Democrat,” she said. “I’ve tried to warn them that there’s a bipartisan tidal wave coming their way. They don’t look us in the eye, they don’t write us back. If we can’t recall them one by one, there’s an election in November.”
Ignore the parts where the writer regurgitates Democratic Party talking points (“for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice,” “Few people read the full 1619 Project put out by the New York Times in 2019, which is a rich tapestry of thoughtful essays and reporting about the role of slavery in the development of the United States.”) and pay attention to what the focus group members of all races are saying. “The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.”
Evidently one American sport is willing to stand up to China: Women’s tennis.
The head of the Women’s Tennis Association Steve Simon has said he is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business in China if tennis player Peng Shuai’s safety is not fully accounted for and her allegations are not properly investigated.
“We’re definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it,” Simon said in an interview Thursday with CNN. “Because this is certainly, this is bigger than the business,” added Simon.
“Women need to be respected and not censored,” said Simon.
Peng, who is one of China’s most recognizable sports stars, has not been seen in public since she accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of coercing her into sex at his home, according to screenshots of a since-deleted social media post dated November 2.
Her post on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, was deleted within 30 minutes of publication, with Chinese censors moving swiftly to wipe out any mention of the accusation online. Her Weibo account, which has more than half a million followers, is still blocked from searchers on the platform.
The mother of a Virginia girl who was raped by a classmate inside a school bathroom reportedly said that she and her husband had been pressured to keep quiet about the incident — and had no clue the 15-year-old boy was then transferred to another school until last month.
“We were silenced for many months,” Jessica Smith told the Daily Mail in her first interview since her daughter was raped at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County in May. “We were told not to say a word that could jeopardize our daughter’s case.”
The boy was found guilty last month of the sexual attack, which sparked a heated confrontation between the victim’s father and school board members.
There seem to be no crimes the left wing won’t condone in their quest to impose “Social Justice” on resisting Americans.
While talking with Joe Rogan, Dr. Peter Attia tells a story about woke ideology in a medical school Urology lecture. It’s remarkable. pic.twitter.com/mftjjNZww1
“A Virginia university has placed an assistant professor on administrative leave after the educator sparked heated backlash for saying it isn’t necessarily immoral for adults to be sexually attracted to children.” Allyn Walker, step right up, you’re the next contestant on The Perv is Wrong!
This week marked the 50th anniversary of the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. There have been a lot of milestones on the road to the high tech world we live in today, but that was one of the biggest.
The rare good kind of irony: A team of firefighters was practicing water rescue when a car drove into the water and they had to perform a real water rescue.
Greetings, and welcome to a Saturday LinkSwarm! To get this out, even a day late, I’ve tossed all the Virginia Governor’s race/Louden County news into a separate post, hopefully on tap for tomorrow.
One of President Biden’s first acts on immigration is to suspend investigations, arrests, and deportations of most criminal aliens for the next 100 days. In a memo titled “Review of and Interim Revision to Civil Immigration Enforcement and Removal Policies and Procedures”, sent on Wednesday to all immigration agency heads, Acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske announced the deportation freeze and new enforcement priorities that go into effect now. The memo imposes restrictions on immigration enforcement actions that are even tighter than those adopted (with disastrous results) by the Obama administration, and make the country a sanctuary not only for criminal aliens, but all who are here in defiance of our laws.
According to the memo, virtually all removals will stop for 100 days. In addition, only the following categories of illegal aliens will be subject to removal as of February 1, 2020:
National security threats — those who have been involved in or are suspected of involvement in terrorism, or who are otherwise deemed a threat;
Recent illegal border crossers — those who have arrived illegally after November 1, 2020; and
Aggravated felons — those who are currently incarcerated for an aggravated felony conviction and who are determined to be a threat to public safety.
If you’re any other kind of illegal alien felon, Democrats evidently want you here, victimizing Americans.
In practice, this means that ICE must release criminal aliens and others in custody who are not covered in these definitions. This will include aliens convicted of domestic violence, sex offenses, drunk driving, theft causing loss of less than $10,000, vehicular homicide, an infinite number of misdemeanor crimes, and much more. It means that when USCIS refuses green cards or other benefits because the applications were fraudulent, that unqualified applicant will be able to stay anyway. It means that in the next 100 days, if a local police officer arrests a previously deported gang member, even one with a serious criminal history, for a new crime that is not an aggravated felony, ICE will not be able to take action to remove that gang member again.
“Joe Biden to Ban Cash Bail for Violent Criminals — in the Interest of ‘Equity.'” There’s no end to the number of other people’s dead bodies social justice warriors are willing to step over on their way to utopia…
San Francisco prosecutors quit, and District Attorney Chesa Boudin faces a second recall effort over failure to prosecute crimes.
Walgreens closed 22 stores in San Francisco where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.
A couple of readers asked “Why just San Francisco?” if it was California Proposition 47 that put the $950 limit on nonviolent misdemeanors.
The answer is total lack of enforcement in San Francisco.
Please note San Francisco DA faces second recall effort as residents ‘fed up’ with progressive ‘zero consequence’ policies.
A second recall effort launched against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin demonstrates how residents are “fed up” with his progressive policies, as his push to reduce jail funding and refusal to prosecute repeat offenders ensures the streets remain marred with open-air drug dealing and violent crime now stretching into the suburbs, a leader of the prominent local police union tells Fox News.
Last week, the first Republican-backed recall effort fell just 1,714 signatures short of the 51,325 required to trigger a special election to bring the question of ousting Boudin before voters. Now a second recall effort is being organized, which Boudin brushed off Monday night as proof that his so-called successes in reducing incarceration has “angered the billionaire class.”
But it’s his progressive approach that’s actually hurting average San Franciscans, San Francisco Police Officers Association President Tony Montoya tells Fox News, as Boudin’s “swiftest revolving door in criminal justice” sends the message to offenders that there are no consequences for their actions.
Snip.
Prosecutors Brooke Jenkins and Don Du Bain told KNTV they have stepped down from their posts in San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office due to his lack of commitment to prosecuting crimes.
“Chesa has a radical approach that involves not charging crime in the first place and simply releasing individuals with no rehabilitation and putting them in positions where they are simply more likely to re-offend,” Jenkins said in the interview. “Being an African American and Latino woman, I would wholeheartedly agree that the criminal justice system needs a lot of work, but when you are a district attorney, your job is to have balance.”
Du Bain added that he believed Boudin “disregards the laws that he doesn’t like, and he disregards the court decisions that he doesn’t like to impose his own version of what he believes is just – and that’s not the job of the district attorney.”
The Chinese private equity fund in which John Kerry holds a $1 million stake is not only invested in a tech company blacklisted for human rights abuses but is also a major shareholder in a solar panel company linked to labor abuses of the Uyghurs.
Last December, that private equity fund, Hillhouse China Value Fund L.P., purchased a 6 percent stake in LONGi Green Energy, a Chinese solar panel manufacturer, making it the company’s second largest shareholder.
LONGi has come under fire from human rights groups and U.S. lawmakers for sourcing many of its raw materials from companies suspected of using forced labor in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where the government has cracked down on the Uyghur population and other ethnic minorities.
Hillhouse is also a major funder of a tech company tied to the Chinese government’s surveillance of the Uyghurs, as first reported by the Washington Free Beacon last week. News of that investment led Republican senators to call on Biden to fire Kerry over ethics concerns. Further insight into Hillhouse’s holdings is likely to increase scrutiny of Kerry’s finances and raise questions about whether he is using his role as climate envoy to block regulations on Chinese solar panel imports. While Kerry has acknowledged that many solar panels are produced with forced labor in Xinjiang, he has also indicated resistance to additional financial restrictions or penalties on these goods.
So Kerry is working the China grift and the green grift at the same time. No wonder he couldn’t resist…
Speaking of which: China produces more CO2 than the U.S., India, Russia and Japan combined. “China’s emissions are so vast that its biggest companies, few of which are household names, create more pollution than entire nations. China Baowu, the world’s top steelmaker, put more CO2 into the atmosphere last year than Pakistan.”
Manchin and Sinema continue to terrorize democrats by daring to doing what their constituents want rather than doing the Holy Will Of The Party.
Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are the gruesome twosome. They may have different reasons behind their opposition to the $3.5 trillion spending package, dubbed human infrastructure, that Democrats want to pass via the reconciliation process, but the results are the same. The far-left can’t get everything they want—which has infuriated them to no end. They don’t like the price tag. They don’t like the ethos behind it. They don’t like the tax structures. The tax on billionaires is out due to Manchin’s opposition. Sinema isn’t moving on hiking corporate taxes. Now, paid family leave has been nixed and most of the climate change provisions are gone too. Manchin and Sinema are the angels of death for the far-Left. It’s not hard to figure out why. These two will do what they think is best for the constituents of their respective states. Period. This has been known about Manchin for years, and he’s not afraid to lose re-election. If that’s the case, he will happily take his houseboat and go home. Sinema is the same with regards to Arizona. She’s there to serve them. Not Chuck Schumer, not the liberal media, not the hordes of illegal alien activists who harass her in the bathroom. And polling shows that voters in West Virginia and Arizona aren’t too keen on the $3.5 trillion bill
If you haven’t been following the situation on Capitol Hill — and it’s in so much flux that it’s almost impossible to stay completely up to date — I’ll give you a brief rundown before we get to that odor.
“Build Back Better” is Biden’s slogan for a massive expansion of welfare, spending, regulation, the likes of which we haven’t seen since LBJ’s Not-So-Great Society. Massive change on slender majorities is not a good idea, either politically or for the nation’s social fabric, but Dems gotta Dem.
BBB comes in two parts.
The first is a $1.2 trillion-with-a-T “infrastructure” bill that doesn’t contain much actual infrastructure spending, but is nonetheless supported by enough Republicans to almost guarantee its passage. (We’ll get back to the “almost” momentarily, so stick a pin in that.)
The second is another, even larger bill so absurd that its contents fall under comic sci-fi writer Douglas Adams’ “bistromathics.” There have been several versions of this bill, ranging in price from the current “compromise” bill costing $1.8 trillion (so they say) to the original Bernie Sanders (CPUSA-Vermont Oblast) version weighing in at $3.5 trillion (but actually $5 trillion).
No one knows what any version would actually cost. My friend and colleague Stephen Kruiser heard from a Senate aide on Thursday that the current bill is 2,500 pages, has no table of contents, and we probably won’t know what’s in it even if it does pass.
This brings us to a defining concept of bistromathics, recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. So if Democrats claim the bill costs precisely $1,790,238,032,455, then you can be sure it costs some figure exactly not that (but higher).
But they can’t get any version passed, because the hard left keeps demanding more and more radical proposals Democratic leadership can’t deliver.
Authorities in Denver have ordered the arrest of Steve Bachar, a longtime Clinton operative and “socially responsible” investor who has been charged with felony theft and securities fraud. The former co-chair of the Clinton Global Initiative is also under investigation for unrelated allegations that he mishandled millions of dollars allocated for personal protective equipment at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bachar is accused of stealing as much as $1 million and lying to an investor “in connection with the offer, sale or purchase of a security,” according to the criminal complaint filed by the Denver district attorney’s office. The crimes are alleged to have occurred between October 2017 and August 2018. The former Clinton operative told the Denver Post the criminal charges were “outrageous, unfounded, and false,” and he looks forward to letting “the facts come to light.”
Bachar, who served as White House advance lead and in the Treasury Department under former president Bill Clinton before joining the Clinton Global Initiative, also served on the national finance committee for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016 and as an adviser to former governor John Hickenlooper (D., Colo.). His private sector career as a corporate attorney and cofounder of Empowerment Capital Management was focused on “socially responsible investing.”
This is not the first time the socially responsible investor has been accused of serious wrongdoing. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bachar allegedly pocketed nearly $2 million from health care companies that believed they were purchasing life-saving personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns.
According to a lawsuit filed by a Denver-based health care company, Bachar agreed to sell them 4,200 cases of N95 masks for $2.4 million in April 2020 but never delivered the masks and did not return their initial payment of $604,000. Over the summer, Bachar was ordered to pay nearly $4.5 million to the companies he allegedly defrauded but has yet to comply with the civil judgments against him.
Speaking of corrupt Democratic crime families, former New York Governor has been charged charged with sex cri-cri-cri-crime.
With the obligatory Eurythmics video
(I actually own their 1984 soundtrack, but “Sexcrime” isn’t nearly as good as “Doubleplusgood.”)
While the administration begs overseas adversaries to ramp up oil production with jobs and development to the benefit of foreign citizens, Americans remain handicapped by Democrats’ zealous animosity towards fossil fuel extraction on domestic land.
Underneath the tundra surface of Alaska’s North Slope sits an estimated 4.3 t0 11.8 billion barrels of untouched recoverable oil located within the flat wetland boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Then-President Donald Trump opened ANWR’s 1.6 million acres of the 19.6 million-acre refuge for drilling in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with leases approved since then now in jeopardy under the new administration.
Biden has been yanking permits and demanding new environmental assessments in an effort to cancel projects altogether. Last week, the Interior Department tossed out the analysis completed under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), long held as the gold standard of assessing environmental impacts, and ordered a new supplemental review for leases in the Arctic refuge two months after they were suspended.
Racine County Sheriff’s Department investigators have presented evidence that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) committed felony election fraud by telling nursing home staffers to violate state law and fill out ballots on behalf of nursing home residents who were unable to themselves.
During a news conference Thursday, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said WEC commissioners and staff who prohibited legally-required special voting deputies from entering nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic and instead told nursing home staff members to assist residents in voting committed a Class I felony, which is punishable by a maximum sentence of three years, six months in prison and $10,000 in fines.
I missed this for my Texas Critical Race Theory fight roundup: “Keller ISD’s Timber Creek High School is Brewing Division.” “Over the last year, teachers and staff at a North Texas school have been going against the district and teaching racist propaganda, creating division among students, parents, and staff. Under the supervision of teachers, students are leading the charge in this growing division Keller ISD’s Timber Creek High School has been experiencing since the previous school year.”
Portugal’s six-year experiment with leftwing “anti-austerity” government will end this week in a political crisis leading to early elections unless António Costa, the socialist prime minister, can strike a last-minute budget deal with the radical left.
The anti-capitalist Left Bloc (BE) and old-guard Communist party (PCP) have vowed to withhold crucial support in a budget vote on Wednesday unless the minority Socialist party (PS) government makes further concessions in a bill already seen as the most leftwing in recent history.
“They are asking the impossible and I can’t see the PS giving way,” said Francisco Seixas da Costa, a political commentator and former secretary of state for European affairs. “The pact has exhausted its possibilities and the BE and PCP can see no further advantage in co-operating with the government.”
Costa has offered a €40 increase in the national minimum wage to €705 a month and a €700m increase in investment in the national health service, alongside higher old-age pensions and public sector wages. The BE and PCP are pushing for bigger increases in these areas as well as labour reforms that the government fears would clash with EU rules.
After offering hope to struggling centre-left parties across Europe and inspiring neighbouring Spain’s mainstream socialists to follow a similar path, Portugal’s broad left pact is foundering over the smaller parties’ dissatisfaction with their peripheral role, and the limits of EU policy.
If the budget is defeated, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s centre-right president, has said he will immediately dissolve parliament and call a general election two years ahead of schedule. Costa, meanwhile, has stated he would remain in office at the head of a caretaker government until the ballot was held, probably in January.
This has been all over everywhere this week, but it still angries up my blood: Fauci Funded ‘Cruel’ Puppy Experiments Where Sand Flies ‘Eat Them Alive’; Vocal Cords Severed.”
No less than four versions of “Let’s Go Brandon” are in the iTunes top 10.
Iran has announced that the country’s energy infrastructure was hit by a massive cyberattack on Tuesday, which left state subsidized gas stations across the country out of commission, resulting in very long lines of cars observed waiting to fill up in many towns and cities.
The timing is interesting given it happened near the two year anniversary mark of deadly nationwide protests following serious gas shortages and price hikes in the fall of 2019. The ‘activist’ nature of the hack is further revealed in that Iranian media is reporting that a message showed up in national computer systems that were hacked that addressed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with the words, “where is the gas?”
By nearly every measure Americans are more generous with their money and time than anyone — including Europeans.
Indeed, American charitable giving exceeds the entire GDP of most European countries.
According to the Almanac of American Philanthropy, Americans donate around seven times as much as continental Europeans to charitable causes per capita. Per person, even after adjusting for differences in household income, Americans donate twice as much of their income as the Dutch, three times as much as the French, five times as much as Germans, and ten times that of Italians.
It appears that the Biden Administration vaccine mandate (for which no written rule actual exists) is doing for the American airline industry what it and other Flu Manchu restrictions have already done for the global supply chain.
I’m seeing multiple reports that a walkout by air traffic controllers in Jacksonsville have caused hundreds of flight cancellations:
BREAKING: Air Traffic Controllers In Jacksonville, FL Staged A Walkout Yesterday In Response To The Vaccine Mandate
It’s Being Reported That All Flights In & Out Of FL Were Cancelled As A Result
This is all untrue info. This is not due to weather… All of our flights have been cancelled because employees are walking out due to the vaccine mandate. We were notified at midnight our second flight was cancelled and they won’t allow me to cancel the first leg. On hold 3.5 hrs
In what appears to be one of the first cases of a union pushing back against the new COVID vaccination requirements handed down by the Biden Administration, a union representing pilots at Southwest Airlines is suing to stop the vaccine requirement from being forced until a lawsuit is resolved.
Bloomberg reports that the union representing Southwest’s pilots has asked a court to grant a temporary stay against the federal vaccination rules until an ongoing lawsuit over what they allege are violations of US labor laws is resolved.
In a court filing on Friday, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association also asked for an immediate hearing on the request before a federal court in Dallas, claiming the carrier has continued to take unilateral actions that violate terms of the Railway Labor Act, which governs relations between airlines and employee unions. The “unilateral action” in question is the company’s attempt (at the Biden Administration’s direction) to force workers to either get the jab, or be fired or sent on unpaid leave, Bloomberg reports.
“The new vaccine mandate unlawfully imposes new conditions of employment and the new policy threatens termination of any pilot not fully vaccinated by December 8, 2021,” the legal filing said. “Southwest Airlines’ additional new and unilateral modification of the parties’ collective bargaining agreement is in clear violation of the RLA.”
According to the guidelines set out by President Biden (and “voluntarily” embraced by most of the major airlines), Southwest has a deadline of Oct. 4 under the federal mandate for employees to get jabbed or have an approved medical or religious exemption. SW is affected by the mandate because it has contracts with the federal government (like many large businesses).
The union represents 9,000 pilots at the airline, and a strike could easily disrupt American air travel (remember the air traffic controllers strike in the 1980s?)
Keep in mind that almost all the airlines are set to fire pilots that don’t comply. What happens when just about all the airlines are grounded because of employee strikes and sickouts? If you think Biden’s poll numbers are bad now, just wait.
It’s not just pilots and air traffic controllers. All sorts of professions, from bus drivers to police officers to ferry operators, are staging sickouts over vaccine mandates in various parts of the country.
There’s something about vaccine mandates that are so holy to our leftwing ruling class that they’re willing to tear the country apart to impose them. Some have said money from drug companies, but that explanation seems too simple for how hard they’re fighting to impose them no matter the cost, and the lengths to which the Democratic Media Complex is willing to go to suppress any mention of disagreement with The Holy Narrative.
This is about control.
It must be resisted.
Whether you’re consumers or employees – you have the power to bankrupt any company.
Southwest Airlines is about to be first of many to learn this lesson.
The Biden administration is imposing new limits on states’ ability to access to Covid-19 antibody treatments amid rising demand from GOP governors who have relied on the drug as a primary weapon against the virus.
Federal health officials plan to allocate specific amounts to each state under the new approach, in an effort to more evenly distribute the 150,000 doses that the government makes available each week.
The approach is likely to cut into shipments to GOP-led states in the Southeast that have made the pricey antibody drug a central part of their pandemic strategy, while simultaneously spurning mask mandates and other restrictions. That threatens to heighten tensions between the Biden administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who have emerged as vocal opponents of the federal Covid-19 response.
“How dare they pay for treatments that work while ignoring the one true path of vaccine righteousness?”
Which states are the feds rationing?
Demand from a handful of southern states has exploded since then, state and federal officials said, raising concerns they were consuming a disproportionate amount of the national supply. Seven states — Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama — accounted for 70 percent of all orders in early September.
Huh, I wonder what those states might all have in common? Maybe…Republican governors? Well, we can’t have those upstarts showing up vaccine-pushing blue states, can we?
“President Joe Biden has sharply criticized DeSantis and others for resisting efforts to encourage mask wearing and ramp up vaccinations, vowing in a speech last week that if ‘governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.'”
Evidently this is code for “Stop fighting the holy narrative or I’ll make sure your citizens die!”
Yesterday Joe Biden launched a sneak attack on American freedom, and tomorrow is the 20 year anniversary of 9/11. Still working on the Afghan piece. Plus more Australian madness.
But: Biden is excluding postal workers from this mandate. If the unvaccinated are such an existential threat to the republic (spoiler: they’re not), then why exempt the one class of federal employee whose members are out among the general public touching their mail eight hours a day? The answer, of course, is that they have a powerful union.
At the start of the pandemic, Australia determined to squeeze out COVID with lockdowns and travel restrictions and, as an island nation, had considerable success. It was the last of the G-20 countries to hit 1,000 total COVID deaths.
But this created an unrealistic expectation that Australia could have “COVID zero” as a goal for the duration, and use targeted restrictions and surveillance (“circuit-breakers”) to maintain it.
As the pandemic has dragged on, this has become completely untenable and done violence to liberty and common sense in a great English-speaking nation.
Lockdowns have cut a swath through the norms and conventions of an advanced Western democracy, from the suspension of a state-level parliament to the banning of protests to military enforcement of the COVID rules.
With the Delta surge, more than half of Australians are locked down, often in response to a tiny number of cases.
ustralian authorities don’t fool around. State premiers have vast powers, and use them. In Melbourne, located in the state of Victoria, a curfew is in place, and limits apply to people leaving their homes. There are hefty fines for noncompliance.
The spirit of the lockdowns was perfectly captured a few months ago by the chief health officer of the state of New South Wales who warned, “Whilst it is in human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately this is not the time to do that.”
Ah yes, the public-health threat of over-chattiness.
The Australian news media might as well be an arm of the public-health bureaucracy, producing stilted and hysterical reports about lockdown violators worthy of some dystopian future.
The state of South Australia has developed an app to enforce home quarantines. As a news report explains, “the app will contact people at random asking them to provide proof of their location within 15 minutes.” If they fail to do so, the health department will notify the police, who will send officers to check on the possible malefactor.
Unrestricted travel is a hallmark of a free society, but Australians can barely leave the country. Travel has been cut off between states, creating an arbitrary patchwork of states trying to isolate themselves from COVID cases elsewhere.
Tens of thousands of Australians have been trapped overseas, unable to come back home because of monthly limits on returning Australians.
All of this economic and social disruption and coercion hasn’t been enough to stamp out the Delta variant, which is outrunning the government controls.
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison finally admitted the obvious the other day: “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country.”
And Australia’s lockdown has failed:
Cases in Australia are up 15,800% since the Washington Post said they had almost eliminated COVID by putting faith in science.
They’re up 5,863% just since late June when Sydney locked down and brought back masks.
But it’s not enough just to snatch away Australian’s freedom, they’re also seizing booze from locked-down Aussies. “In New South Wales — a southeastern state encompassing Sydney — alcohol deliveries to apartments under COVID-19 lockdown are being confiscated if booze volume exceeds limits mandated by the Ministry of Health.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“Remember the women at the L.A. spa who claimed a dude exposed himself and it was dismissed as a “transphobic hoax”? Yeah, charges have now been filed against the man, who is a registered sex offender.”
UNC Journalism Dean Worried ‘Diversity of Thought’ Would Interfere with Social Justice ahead of Nikole Hannah-Jones Appointment. Understand that our political, educational and journalistic elites value social justice above all other values and act accordingly.
Peter Boghossian: “My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit. The more I spoke out against the illiberalism that has swallowed Portland State University, the more retaliation I faced.”
Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.
I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.
I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.
But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.
Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I’m going to coral all the Afghan Debacle news for separate post, probably next week. In the meantime: Texans are winning political battles, and Australians are losing their damn minds.
Texas finally passes the election integrity bill. Now on to the governor’s signature. Hopefully this will prevent the mass vote-harvesting and manufacturing shenanigans Democrats are so fond of…
Speaking of Democrats, they seem to be waking up to the fact that Biden and Harris suck and will drag them down:
We hear an enormous amount these days about the problem of “Flight 93-ism” on the American right, but a great deal less about the concomitant panic that has led the Democratic Party to behave as if last year’s election represented its last gasp. Since Joe Biden took office in January, his party has been busy cramming everything it has ever wanted to do into a series of multi-trillion-dollar, must-pass bills; hawking a patently unconstitutional elections-supervision bill that would hand it full control of America’s democratic infrastructure; and engaging in a frenzied attempt to pack the Supreme Court, discredit the Senate, abolish the filibuster, and add new states to the union by simple majority vote. If you ask for an explanation of this preposterous behavior, you will be told that it is the product of the Republican Party’s dastardly scheme to implement Jim Eagle. If you look more closely, however, you’ll sense something else: fear — that, in a desperate attempt to remove President Trump from office, the Democrats tailored themselves a straitjacket from which they will struggle mightily to escape.
This fear is well-founded. Joe Biden is an aging, incompetent mediocrity whose main claim to fame, like the Delta Tau Chi fraternity from Animal House, is his long tradition of existence. Kamala Harris, his vice president, is a widely disliked authoritarian whose last run for the White House was stymied by her inability to garner support from more than 3 percent of the Democratic-primary electorate. If, prior to the disaster that was the last fortnight, the Democrats hadn’t sensed that they’d tied their party to a pair of losers, they sure as hell must have now.
Explanation of why the 25th Amendment won’t saved them snipped.
And why should it, given that getting rid of President Biden would not actually fix the Democrats’ problems? Joe Biden’s approval rating is currently around 46 percent in national poll averages — not great for a president in his seventh month in office, but dramatically better than Kamala Harris’s rating, which stands at just 37 percent. Per NBC, Harris inspires “very positive” feelings in just 19 percent of the population while prompting “very negative feelings” among 36 percent — a feat that makes her the most strongly disliked VP since records began. If, today, the Democratic Party decided to cut its losses and replace Biden with Harris, it would be selecting a new president who was nearly ten points less popular than the old one. This would be absurd.
Which means that if the Democratic Party is destined for a reckoning with its ticket — as now seems increasingly likely — it will have to come during the next set of presidential primaries.
Like many, I’ve wondered who’s actually pulling the strings in the Biden White House. (It’s clearly not Sundown Joe.) I’ve seen various people suggest it’s actually Ron Klain, Valerie Jarrett or Jill Biden. Former Trump intelligence director Richard Grenell says it’s Susan Rice:
Rice, who served as national security adviser under President Obama, was tapped last December by President Biden to take charge of the White House Domestic Policy Council. It is in that role that Grenell believes she is exerting her influence.
“Biden is too weak to stop the progressive left from taking over… [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] does not understand what’s going on…We have a shadow president in Susan Rice and no one is paying attention,” he said.
Rice is one of the many officials from the Obama administration that landed jobs in the Biden White House. There was speculation that she would be his running mate and when that never materialized, secretary of state.
She is among the wealthiest individuals in the Biden White House, with a net worth estimated to be at least $37.9 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. She resigned last December from her role as a member of the board of directors at Netflix.
For all the (justifiable) heat the 87h Legislature has taken over its failure to deliver on conservative priorities, it seems to have written the Texas Heartbeat Act in a way that makes it difficult to challenge in court:
[Supreme Court Justices] denied the request by Texas abortion providers for emergency relief against the Texas Heartbeat Act. The compelling procedural grounds on which five justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — ruled have no direct bearing on the substantive question whether the Court will overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in next term’s blockbuster abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the clarity, courage, and commitment to the rule of law that the five justices demonstrated in the midst of intense fury from the Left — and in the face of an exasperating cop-out by Chief Justice Roberts — are heartening indeed.
Enacted in May, the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as S.B. No. 8, prohibits a physician from performing an abortion (other than in a medical emergency) “if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” The fetal heartbeat is usually detectable at six weeks of gestation. The Act specifies an effective date of September 1.
In an ingenious effort to prevent abortion providers from blocking the Act from taking effect, the Act prohibits state officials from enforcing the Act in any way. It instead authorizes any private person to bring a civil action in state court against anyone who performs a post-heartbeat abortion or who knowingly aids or abets a post-heartbeat abortion. (Federal restrictions on standing — on who can sue — in federal court do not apply in state court.) It entitles successful plaintiffs to at least $10,000 in damages for each violation as well as to injunctive relief and attorney’s fees.
Because state officials are barred from enforcing the Act, the usual path that abortion providers would take to prevent the Act from becoming effective — suing those officials to prevent them from enforcing the Act — is a dead end. Instead, abortion providers would be able to challenge the constitutionality of the Act only if and when private individuals pursued civil actions against them. (And they’d have to confront the widely overlooked fact that the Act itself explicitly confers on abortion providers an “affirmative defense to liability” in the event they demonstrate that a lawsuit brought under the Act “impose[s] an undue burden.”)
In mid July, nearly two months after enactment of the Act, various abortion providers sued eight defendants in federal court: the Texas attorney general and four other state officials, a state district-court judge and a district-court clerk from Smith County (one of 254 counties in Texas), and a pro-life activist. But their lawsuit faced overwhelming jurisdictional hurdles. Among other things, none of the defendants was threatening to enforce the Act against them (so how was there even a live controversy?), and all seven of the governmental defendants had strong claims to sovereign immunity.
To make a long story short, when federal district judge Robert L. Pitman last week ruled against the governmental defendants’ sovereign-immunity claims, the governmental defendants exercised their right to immediately appeal the ruling against them to the Fifth Circuit. Pitman then realized that he had lost authority to proceed against the government defendants and had to cancel the preliminary-injunction hearing against them. (The Left viciously faults a Fifth Circuit panel of conservative judges for the cancellation that Obama appointee Pitman had ordered.) The abortion providers suddenly found that they had dug themselves into a deep ditch: The September 1 effective date was fast approaching, and they had indefinitely sidetracked their own effort to obtain a preliminary injunction.
On August 30, the abortion providers made a desperate request to the Supreme Court to block the Act from taking effect. Set aside that they had waited two-and-a-half months to file their preliminary-injunction motion with Pitman. Set aside that they were asking the Court to rule on a set of issues that neither Pitman nor the Fifth Circuit panel had yet addressed. What’s even more remarkable is that because Pitman had never ruled on their request to certify statewide defendant classes of judges and clerks, injunctive relief against the only eight defendants in the case wouldn’t remotely prevent the injury the abortion providers allege they faced.
The Supreme Court majority saw clearly through the huge holes in the emergency application. There was no reason to address the substantive question whether the Act is consistent with Roe and Casey because the abortion providers had failed to meet their burden on the “complex and antecedent procedural questions” that their request presented. The Court has the power to “enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves,” and the abortion providers hadn’t shown that any of the defendants should be enjoined from doing anything.
Things that make you go “Hmmmm”: “Harris County $11 Million Vaccine Outreach Contract to One-Woman Firm Draws Scrutiny. Newly released documents show a $7 million bid was scored more highly, but Hidalgo’s office intervened to instead give nearly $11 million to a politically connected firm at a higher cost.”
Last month tempers flared at Harris County Commissioners Court after County Judge Lina Hidalgo (D) accused Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4) of telling a “bold-faced lie” when he referred to a vendor as a “one-woman company.”
Although the expenditure had been approved months earlier in a 4 to 1 vote, little information had been provided to commissioners about Elevate Strategies, LLC, the winner of a $10.9 million contract to conduct vaccine outreach.
It was not until August that commissioners learned that the company was only founded in 2019, listed a Montrose apartment as its business address, and only consisted of one person: Felicity Pereyra, a former deputy campaign manager for Commissioner Adrian Garcia (D-Pct. 2) and former employee of both the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
It almost like the entire purpose of the welfare state is to channel money from the wallets of taxpayers to the pockets of leftwing cronies…
In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”
Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?
Australia has been testing the limits.
Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”
Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”
In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.” In Sydney, where more than 5 million people have been in lockdown for more than two months, and Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, anti-lockdown protests were banned, and when dissenters gathered anyway, hundreds were arrested and fined, Reuters reported.
Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?
The idea of owning a beauty clinic in an iconic downtown Melbourne retail centre once seemed like a promising business opportunity. So promising, in fact, that I opened a second store nearby, and expanded my total payroll to 20 employees.
Capital costs across the two stores came to $1.6 million; while monthly expenses included $11,000 in loan interest, equipment leases totalling around $30,000, and rent at almost $40,000 (all figures in Australian dollars). It’s a substantial commitment, but this was a vibrant locale. And our market research indicated that demand would be high enough to sustain the necessary investment. Fortunately, the customers showed up—enough to meet wages, pay the bills, and allow me to put money away for a rainy day.
That day arrived last year, in the form of COVID. And not just the disease itself, but also the draconian, one-dimensional response from government officials: throughout the state of Victoria, 600,000 small business owners like me—men and women who collectively employ millions of people and generate a substantial share of the region’s economic output—have been marginalized in the name of public health and safety.
Small-business entrepreneurs are, by nature, both aspirational and pragmatic. We pay our taxes like everyone else, and understand the role government must play in managing national emergencies—including pandemics. But we also expect leaders to avoid imposing unnecessary and unreasonable regulatory burdens and operating prohibitions.
One of the lessons learned over the last year and a half by small business owners is that Australia’s flawed, multi-layered government structure can easily enmesh an owner in overlapping forms of red tape. This has forced us to reflect on what type of society we are becoming, and whether, in Victoria at least, it is still worth setting up businesses here.
Plus police specifically targeting vocal lockdown critics for fines.
“Fauci strongly endorses COVID treatment that the media tried to criticize Ron DeSantis for supporting…Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Dr. Anthony Fauci seem to agree when it comes to the use of monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19.”
Joe Rogan contracts Flu Manchu, takes everything the MSM says you shouldn’t take…and throws off the disease in three days:
“All kinds of meds: monoclonal antibodies, Ivermectin, Z-pack, Prednisone, everything. I also got an NAD drip and a vitamin drip.”
NAD evidently stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotid, and the drip combines some other common vitamins in a intravenous cocktail that seems really frigging expensive ($750-1,000), which is fine if you make Joe Rogan money, but ordinary people may want to stick to a multivitamin (which you should be taking daily anyway).
Commie Antifa teacher boasting of indoctrinating his students is on the run:
the heroes at Project Veritas released an undercover video showing a proud antifa communist teacher bragging about how he has 180 days to indoctrinate his students and make them Marxists. How does he do it? He “scares the f*** out of them.”
Now the proud commie peacock is running scared. He refused to defend himself to another Project Veritas reporter. He claims he fears for his safety, and is worried about his brainwashing teaching gig, which means he KNOWS what he was doing is wrong.
Even his fellow Antifa clowns aren’t happy with him.
In the tweet below, fellow antifa stains bemoan [Gabriel] Gipe’s willingness to spill his commie guts to an undercover Project Veritas reporter. They also question his over-zealous approach to indoctrinating young high school kids and turning them into fellow Marxist comrades.
Some highlights from the undercover video:
Gipe gives extra credit points to students who attend far-left extremist rallies
He has an antifa flag and a Mao poster hanging on his classroom wall
Gipe believes taking up arms against the “state” is a good thing, though it always fails
He shamed a student who claimed the antifa flag made him uncomfortable
The local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) just noticed that antifa is a violent bunch of thugs after black bloc-clad attackers beat yet another reporter and tossed her into a busy Portland street for daring to do her job.
After years of similar attacks on reporters, SPJ was finally jostled from its slumber by an attack on reporter Maranie Staab, from a lefty news organization called “News2Share,” for disobeying her Leftist compatriots and doing some reporting.
Antifa responded in the same way they accuse police of doing: They sprayed her with chemicals and threw her into the street.
Shocking video from yesterday’s Portland riot shows antifa robbing female photographer @MaranieRae & hitting her to the ground. She goes to retrieve her equipment & is hit w/pepper spray. Video by @JLeeQuinn: pic.twitter.com/rCkaybcfUR
However, with building news about the number of withdrawn vendors, it’s possible that the costs of the other events would surpass what they would expect to make from a crowd that was already predicted to be less than half of normal. I was seeing 35,000 as a predicted attendance batted around the interwebz, and that assumed full exhibit hall, no restrictions, and a full weekend of activities. If word of mouth about reduced exhibitors managed to knock another 10,000 off of that prediction, I don’t know enough about their financial obligations & forecasting to know if that would drive it into the territory of losing money or not.
Snip.
The Board & Wayne LaPierre are desperate to look like NRA members stand by them, so visibly empty halls with far fewer attendees in already wide aisles would make for press photos they may believe they can’t afford.
Add to this that the ILA Leadership Forum, at least anytime I checked the pages, never had more than the big Texas politicians (Abbott, Cruz, Cornyn, and Crenshaw) along with Mark Robinson from North Carolina listed. It appeared that they couldn’t get commitments from big national names to attend which would have, again, signaled a loss of influence and interest that NRA can’t really afford to be a story.
LaPierre and his cronies seem desperate desperate to cling to power, no matter how far down they drag the NRA with them.
The gist of the article is that many Democrats are just noticing the problem, which is laughable. The far-left, ultra-woke territory was staked out by all Democrats years ago. They can’t suddenly act like it’s only the fringe that feels this way and the mainstream Dems aren’t on board with the madness. Virtually every Democrat of note has been slobbering all over chances for woke posturing for years. There has been pushback but they’ve been dismissive of it, resorting to their boilerplate “RACIST!” retort each time.
Snip.
While watching the Democrats go mega-woke — especially this year — I’ve wondered aloud whether any of the party’s Beltway elite have recently had a conversation with a Democrat in flyover country. It would seem not.
It’s not unthinkable that Dems running next year would do a temporary 180 on wokeness in an effort to dupe people into voting for them. In recent weeks, we’ve seen them pretend that it was Republicans who wanted to defund the police and also try to convince the public that they’ve always been fans of voter ID. If they’re now worried about the extremely woke look on top of those two issues, the internal polling must really be rattling them.
Honestly, I don’t see how Democrats can uncouple themselves from the woke train they enthusiastically hooked themselves up to so long ago.
The caveat is that we’ve seen this sort of articles before, and the madness still continues…
When Vice President Kamala Harris finally made the decision to visit the Mexico border last week, people inside her own office were blindsided by the news.
For days, aides and outside allies had been calling and texting with each other about the political fallout that a potential trip would entail. But when it became known that she was going to El Paso, it left many scrambling, including officials who were responsible for making travel arrangements and others outside the VP’s office charged with crafting the messaging across the administration.
The handling of the border visit was the latest chaotic moment for a staff that’s quickly become mired in them. Harris’ team is experiencing low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials. Much of the frustration internally is directed at Tina Flournoy, Harris’ chief of staff, a veteran of Democratic politics who began working for her earlier this year.
In interviews, 22 current and former vice presidential aides, administration officials and associates of Harris and Biden described a tense and at times dour office atmosphere. Aides and allies said Flournoy, in an apparent effort to protect Harris, has instead created an insular environment where ideas are ignored or met with harsh dismissals and decisions are dragged out. Often, they said, she refuses to take responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for the negative results that ensue.
While much of the ire is aimed at Harris’ chief, two administration officials said the VP herself also bears responsibility for the way her office is run. “It all starts at the top,” said one of the administration officials, who like others requested anonymity to be able to speak candidly about a sensitive matter.
“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said another person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”
Of course, we’ve already seen similar reports before, but this one is a lot more nakedly critical. Having such deeply critical pieces launched at a sitting Democratic Vice President in their first year in office is highly unusual, to say the least. Either Harris really is horribly bad at managing her staff, or powerful people in the Biden administration have the knives out for her. Or both.
Last summer, federal officials in Delaware investigating Hunter Biden faced a dilemma. The probe had reached a point where prosecutors could have sought search warrants and issued a flurry of grand jury subpoenas. Some officials involved in the case wanted to do just that. Others urged caution. They advised Delaware’s U.S. Attorney, David Weiss, to avoid taking any actions that could alert the public to the existence of the case in the middle of a presidential election.
“To his credit, he listened,” said a person involved in the discussions, reported here for the first time. Weiss decided to wait, averting the possibility that the investigation would become a months-long campaign issue.
Translation: They withheld the truth from the public because they wanted the Democrat to win.
Thanks to recently released Labor Department data on unemployment claims, we can now, quite predictably, see the welfare rolls expanding in the states where the unemployment bonus remains in place. Yet the number of people on welfare is rapidly shrinking in the states where the supplement is set to expire or already has expired.
“The 26 states that have announced their plan to end participation in the $300 weekly unemployment bonus have seen a 12.7 percent decline on average in initial claims over the past week,” the fiscally-conservative Foundation for Government Accountability reports. “Meanwhile, states that have indicated they will continue participating in the unemployment bonus programs have seen an increase in initial claims by an average of 1.6 percent during this same period. The 12 states that have officially opted out of the $300 weekly bonus thus far have seen consistent declines each week since ending participation in the bonus.”
In other words, people are leaving the welfare rolls and returning to work in the states where the government is getting out of the way. They are not doing so as much in the states where expanded welfare continues to create dysfunctional incentives.
Tucked deep in San Francisco’s sixth district is Dodge Place, a residential street located in the notorious Tenderloin neighborhood. It’s been overtaken by drug users who come to get high, descend into madness, and then destroy themselves and their surroundings. Dodge is a dead end, literally and figuratively—a combat zone, with all sides fighting for their lives.
Citizens’ cries for backup have gone virtually unanswered. Elected officials and government bodies from the district’s supervisor, Matt Haney, to the Department of Public Health have abandoned residents so completely that it’s hard not to wonder if the neglect isn’t deliberate.
Though most of the sixth district, an area that includes City Hall, already rivals the world’s worst slums for its inhumane conditions, Dodge Place is a particularly intense concentration of immiseration. In effect, the dead-end street is at the end of a funnel, into which flow customers from San Francisco’s most rampant illegal drug trade. In fact, mere steps away from the street, residents recently held a rally against the scourge of fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid responsible for the majority of the city’s fatal overdoses. Organized by journalist Michael Shellenberger, the rally focused on Jacqui, a distraught mother searching for her addicted, homeless son. Jacqui pleaded for help, and community members raged against the city’s inaction. Politicians gave speeches, including Haney, who proclaimed his outrage, conceded government’s failings, and told the crowd to hold him accountable.
Yet the death toll from drug abuse continues to escalate. Data from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner indicate that fatal overdoses this year in San Francisco are on pace to exceed the 2020 total, a record-breaking year in which more than 700 died.
Hanging around in the Tenderloin is dangerous. Gangs rule the drug-dealing business. Scores of dealers, nearly all young males from Mexico and Central America, openly sell narcotics. Gunfire and homicides are common. On June 14, the San Francisco Police Department’s Tenderloin station reported three shooting incidents, with five victims, and 29 arrests on the corner. Law enforcement doggedly does its part, but the arrestees nearly always return to their spots within hours.
As mayhem in the Tenderloin intensifies, many who have just made drug purchases drift over to Dodge Place so that they can use away from the drama. Once there, they create their own brand of chaos. The result is a place so bizarre and horrific that adequate descriptions sound hyperbolic.
At any given time, dozens of people congregate in the small alley to inject or smoke their substance of choice. Teenagers to seniors, of all races and demographics, jab needles into their bloody, bloated limbs, hands, and feet. One inexplicably common figure is a man neatly dressed for a day at the office who drives syringes deep into other people’s necks. Soon after imbibing, users stand still as statues but bent at the waist, colloquially known as the “fentanyl fold.” Some collapse and crawl, while others sit listlessly on the curb, lining the walls. Or they wander, run, or flail, screaming at each other as well as invisible demons. Many urinate and defecate in their clothes, on the pavement or doorsteps.
Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s George Soros-backed DA who refuses to prosecute drug dealers, is facing a recall election. This is the future that awaits Austin if Jose Garza stays in the DA’s office…
Los Angeles: Surprise! The mask mandate is back. Sounds like something that calls for widespread civil disobedience.
Vietnam is not the threat that China is, but don’t forget that their communist government still oppresses anyone who objects to their rule. “Vietnamese Dissident Writer Jailed for Five Years, Six Months by Hanoi Court. Pham Chi Thanh was charged under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, a law frequently used by authorities to stifle dissident voices.”
Being a black Democratic grifter really pays: “Stacey Abrams now owns two homes totaling $1.4M after starting 2018 campaign in massive debt.”
Paul Ehrlich is spewing the same gloom and doom that’s proven wrong for the last half century.
“Basketball player uses nationally televised CBS interview to show off his ‘Free the Uyghurs’ T-shirt.” Good for him. Though, since this is Royce White, the first round draft pick who never suited up for the Rockets, “player” may be misleading in this case…
Democratic megadonor Ed Buck’s murder trial for giving young men fatal drug overdoses for sexual gratification finally gets under way. (Previously.)
Kaseya VSA ransomware attack succeeded because the company didn’t include a NULL test for login bypass. Jesus. Freaking. Christ. That’s one of the first things you should set up in your QA automated regression testing suite.
“A Florida man stole an alligator from a mini-golf course and tried to heave the reptile onto the roof of a building to ‘teach it a lesson,’ authorities said.
On Independence Day at Sojourn Church in Carrollton, Texas, former Congressman and outgoing Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas Allen West announced his campaign for governor.
“I can no longer sit on the sidelines and see what has happened in these United States of America… and the place that I call home,” West said in a campaign video.
West joins a Republican primary field that includes former State Sen. Don Huffines, media personality and humorist Chad Prather, as well as incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, who will be seeking his third term.
Previously serving a term in Congress from Florida, West was elected to lead the Texas GOP in July of last year. Last month, West announced he would be stepping down from the position effective July 11. The State Republican Executive Committee will elect his replacement on that date.
West moved to Texas to become CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis. In 2017, NCPA closed its doors, resulting in a lawsuit:
West is being sued by Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), which claims that his brief tenure as CEO was marked by bad decisions and mismanagement that alienated donors and financially crippled the once-thriving organization. Codefendants have recently sought to settle their related claims.
Under Mr. West’s leadership, the NCPA hired a chief financial officer who was already on probation for embezzlement and who then dismantled the organization’s fiscal controls. The CFO (who is now in prison) embezzled more than $600,000 from the NCPA.
The lawsuit charges that Mr. West and other board members misspent more than $1 million in restricted grant money on operations – including salaries, expenses and bonuses – and hid that information from the rest of the board and donors.
The NCPA was a once-thriving think tank credited with developing some of the Republican Party’s most cherished public policy ideas, including Health Savings Accounts and Roth IRAs. At the start of Mr. West’s tenure as CEO in 2015, the NCPA had annual revenue of $5.3 million, $737,000 in savings and an endowment of approximately $6 million, according to a ProPublica analysis of IRS records. By the time the NCPA closed in 2017, there was no money in the bank, no endowment and more than $1 million in debt.
Caveat: Though on finance.yahoo.com, that text appears to be a verbatim text release from Androvett, a “Law Firm Marketing Agency,” which seems to be working for the plaintiff, and so should be taken with several grains of salt. (The text of the lawsuit can be found here, and it has reportedly been settled.) Former CFO Joshua Galloway pled guilty to three felony counts in 2017 and was sentenced to nine years in prison in addition to repayment of the funds embezzled.
Problems at NCPA predate West’s tenure there, including a nasty lawsuit over an alleged sex payoff scandal involving founder John C. Goodman. But clearly West wasn’t able to fix those problems, which is hardly a recommendation for sending him to the governor’s mansion.
I don’t have much insight into how well West’s short tenure as head of the Texas GOP went. (And part of that time was spent recovering from a motorcycle accident.) Republicans held serve and defied widespread predictions of Democratic gains, but that was true across most of the country. West raised eyebrows when he strongly criticized Abbott’s lifting of his constitutionally questionable lockdown restrictions. West’s points were valid (Abbott was way too timid in lifting restrictions compared to Ron DeSantis in Florida), but having the siting chair of a state political party slam the sitting governor of the same political party is, to say the least, highly unusual.
I like Allen West personally. I think he’s a strong, sincere conservative, and he didn’t move to Texas to run for office (unlike other recent candidates). But apart from strong military service and serving one term as a U.S. congressman elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, one searches in vain for West’s signature accomplishments. If I wanted to vote for a long-shot attacking Abbott from the right for being overly cautious and insufficiently conservative, I’d probably vote for Don Huffines. West has a higher national profile (and presumably a better national fundraising base), but I don’t see him as a serious challenger to Abbott.
Someone can have all the right positions, and be hated by all the right people, and still not be the right man for the job.
Joe Manchin, controlling the border, and Soros-backed DA’s doing their best to bring back the high crime rates of the 1970s top this Friday’s LinkSwarm:
Seems like this should be a bigger story than it is: Mexico just had it’s midterm elections. But that’s not the big part: “97 politicians had been assassinated. Along with almost a thousand being attacked in some way, shape, or form. Just in this election cycle!”
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says that he will refuse to vote for the Democratic Voter Fraud Enablement Act of 2021. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For The People Act.”
Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) will oppose the Democratic Party’s legislation that would federalize elections, the For the People Act, citing the bill’s overtly partisan nature.
Manchin declared his position in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. According to Manchin, “voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.”
“I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act,” Manchin wrote.
Manchin also laid to rest the possibility he would ever support ending the filibuster.
“Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” he said. “For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”
Manchin is thwarting The Will of The Party, so naturally Jemele Hill is calling him a racist.
Remember how Democrats were sure Hispanics would usher them into permanent majority status? Not in Texas:
Republicans swept key races for mayor in Texas on Saturday, setting back Democratic hopes that the state’s urban areas will deliver statewide majorities for them in the future. Most shocking: In McAllen, Texas, a border city of 150,000 people of which 85 percent are Hispanic, Republicans elected their first mayor since 1997.
Other cities with strong Hispanic populations also elected Republicans to replace retiring mayors. Fort Worth is the twelfth-largest city in the country and has more than 1 million people. Only a third of them are Anglo. But 37-year-old Republican Mattie Parker easily defeated Democrat Deborah Peoples, becoming the youngest mayor of a major Texas city.
The race was ostensibly nonpartisan, but the divisions were clear.
“We’ve never had a race that was this partisan,” Kenneth Barr, the former Democratic mayor of Fort Worth, told Politico. “This particular election has moved as far in the partisan direction as any we’ve ever had.”
Voters also elected Republican Jim Ross as mayor of Arlington, a suburb of 400,000 people that borders Fort Worth and is only 39 percent Anglo. Ross, a former Arlington police officer, was endorsed by several police associations who liked his anti-crime platform. He defeated Michael Glaspie, a former city-council member who was endorsed by the Dallas Morning News and leading Democratic politicians.
But it was the victory of Javier Villalobos in the overwhelmingly Democratic Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico that shook political observers.
Villalobos, a former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, defeated Democrat Veronica Vega Whitacre, a fellow McAllen city council member, to become mayor. He campaigned as a conservative and said he wanted to cut water and sewage fees. He called for compassion for undocumented migrants but said the safety of local citizens had to be the first concern. His supporters questioned Whitacre’s wooly-headed claim that if migrants were flowing the other way, toward Mexico, they would be treated with as much compassion by Mexican authorities.
Whitacre’s loss was only the latest sign for Democrats that the Rio Grande Valley is slipping away from them. Biden won the region by 15 points last November, a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016. At the same time, Congressman Vicente Gonzalez won reelection by only 51 percent to 48 percent over Republican Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez in a district Democrats always carry.
“Democrats have a big problem in Texas,” Rio Grande Valley congressman Filemon Vela told the Texas Tribune in January, shortly after he became vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “For the first time in generations, or maybe ever, we lost . . . South Texas counties with significant Hispanic populations,” he said. “And we are going to have to . . . wrap our arms around exactly why that happened. It may be a difficult issue to reconcile.”
It’s not at all difficult to reconcile: The modern Democratic Party’s core policies of racist social justice, anti-police, soft-on-crime and pro-illegal alien are anathema to ordinary middle class Hispanic American citizens. Your ideas are unpopular and you’ll continue to lose as long as you let the radical social justice warriors set the agenda for the party.
Speaking of illegal aliens, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that those who entered the country illegally and were allowed to stay for humanitarian reasons are not allowed to apply for a green card. Also note the Justice Elana Kagan-penned decision makes no mention whatsoever of the “undocumented.” She refers to them, using the standard statutory language, as “aliens.”
The city of Los Angeles saw a sharp 36 percent increase in homicides in 2020—but the L.A. County sheriff said this year is looking even more grim, and he’s blaming the widespread uptick in crime on District Attorney George Gascón.
“In 2021, that 36 percent has now become 92 percent, which is a huge statistical jump,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva told The Epoch Times.
“We’re seeing increases in all the categories – assault with a deadly weapon, arson, rape… these things are continuing upward unabated.”
The widespread uptick in crime is the direct result of Gascón’s election as DA of L.A. County and his failure to prosecute offenses, according to Villanueva. Since Gascón took office, 2,690 cases—about 30 percent—“that normally would have gone through were rejected,” he said.
While Gascón has defended his reform policies, criminals in prison are toasting the DA to celebrate their early release, according to officials—and the sheriff said the DA’s policies are making it more difficult for him to do his job.
“You’re supposed to have a district attorney who represents the people … but [he’s] acting like a public defender,” Villanueva said.
“There’s no one left representing the people. I need to work in partnership with the person who’s representing the people. I don’t have that right now.”
Speaking of Gascón: “Double murderer approved for parole at third hearing; prosecutors barred from attending under Gascón’s reform.” “Howard Elwin Jones has been imprisoned at San Quentin state prison since 1991 for the December 1988 shooting and killing of 18-year-old Chris Baker and another boy at a party in Rowland Heights.” It appears that there’s nothing Soros-backed DAs enjoy more than putting violent, dangerous felons back on the street.
It comes as no surprise to readers that dozens of Baltimore City businesses, located in the Inner Harbor, in a stretch called “Fells Point,” are threatening the new city government, run by Mayor Brandon Scott, with not paying their taxes because they’re “fed up and frustrated” with the outburst of violence.
In a letter titled “Letter to City Leaders From Fells Point Business Leaders,” addressed to Mayor Brandon Scott, Council President Nick Mosby, Councilman Zeke Cohen, Madam State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Commissioner Michael Harrison, the 37 restaurants and small businesses are threatening to stop paying city taxes and other fees until “basic and essential municipal services are restored.”
What’s happening in Fells Point, known for its hipster pubs and taverns, as well as delicious seafood from the Chesapeake Bay, is experiencing an overflow of violent crime from other troubled areas.
The letter comes after three men were shot in Fells Point over the weekend.
“What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” said the letter.
The 37 businesses are planning to place their city taxes in an “escrow account” and released them until these demands are satisfied:
Pick up the trash
Enforce traffic and parking laws through tickets and towing
Stop illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales
Empower police to responsibly do their job
The letter continued to say that minor crime that police “ignore” is what is contributing to more violent crime. So Marilyn Mosby’s halt on prosecuting petty crimes appears to be backfiring.
You don’t say. Baltimore has had a problem with open-air drug markets for over three decades. And the last Republican mayor left office in 1967…
“DeSantis Signs Bills Combatting Chinese Communist Party’s Influence In US.””The first bill is intended to safeguard public institutions from ‘undue foreign influence,’ DeSantis said at a press conference, noting that the bill will prohibit ‘agreements between public entities and the Communist Party of China or Cuba or any of these malignant forces.’ The second bill criminalizes theft and trafficking trade secrets under Florida state law.” If Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, right now DeSantis would be the early favorite for the GOP nomination.
More words from the man in question:
The reasons are clear ― Florida is successful because we are OPEN and let Floridians make decisions that are best for them. Florida’s budget has $10 billion in reserve because Florida chose Freedom over Faucism. pic.twitter.com/tEzMRH6U6k
Own any of the estimated 40 million guns in America with a pistol brace? Congratulations! The Biden Administration wants to make you a felon.
“Today’s proposed rulemaking on pistol-braced firearms represents a gross abuse of executive authority,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America, in a statement.
[Pistol brace inventor Alex] Bosco said the rule would outlaw the vast majority of braces on the market and read like it was “reverse-engineered to make braces illegal.” He called it “arbitrary and capricious.”
How’s that socialized medicine working out for you, UK? “Hospital waiting list tops 5m in England.”
Old and busted: Young families buying homes. The new hotness: Pension funds buying homes. “The consulting firm found Houston to be a favorite haunt of investors who have lately accounted for 24% of home purchases there.”
The Kung Flu lockdowns were a war on the working class:
They are lying to you b/c they think you're too stupid to notice what is happening right in front of you pic.twitter.com/PoeTw1tXaE
Andrew Cuomo’s little brother is a continuous embarrassment to the cable-news network that employs him. So why does he still have a job?
At this point in the proceedings, one is tempted to conclude that Chris Cuomo must have laced CNN’s corporate offices with dynamite and informed the powers that be that, if he goes, they go, too. What else could explain the network’s eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by the man? Here, at the tail end of his long experiment in deficiency, Cuomo resembles nothing more keenly than the inadequate tee-baller who gets to stay in past eight or nine strikes because his uncle coaches the team. His ratings are poor. His insights are vacuous. His conduct is a permanent source of ignominy. All the perfumes of Albany could not sweeten this little man. “What’s in a name?” inquired Shakespeare. Little did he know.
It is unclear why Cuomo was selected by CNN to begin with. He’s a lawyer who knows nothing of the law; a journalist who knows nothing of journalism; an American who knows nothing of America. His temper is third-rate, his interests are bewilderingly narrow, he possesses no discernible sense of shame or self-knowledge, and the opinions he proffers are so ruthlessly subordinated to expedience that hypocrisy is his default mode. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was meant as an extolment of the virtues of personal growth. Cuomo seems to have taken it literally.
On no single topic has the man’s unique set of professional and personal shortcomings been more obvious than COVID-19. In April of last year, Cuomo’s attempt to fake a two-week quarantine was ruined by his failure to remember that, just a week earlier, he had admitted on the radio that he had left the house to visit a property he owns in East Hampton and gotten into an argument with a stranger. And yet, rather than demote him for telling such a galling and obvious lie, CNN encouraged him to inject his peculiar brand of mendacity into a series of interviews with his own brother. Thus it was that while Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was making the single worst mistake of the entire coronavirus crisis — herding the elderly into nursing homes and then covering up the death toll — Television Host Chris Cuomo of New York was using America’s most famous cable-news channel to portray him as a national hero. What America needed last year was a dispassionate examination of Andrew Cuomo’s official messaging. What America got was a smirking nepotist brandishing a comedy-sized nasal swab and tweeting obsequious fluff about his sibling. New York, Chris Cuomo concluded, was “doing way better than what we see elsewhere & no way that happens without the Luv Guv dishing the real 24/7.” In exchange, the “Luv Guv” dealt Chris in on a series of private, government-funded COVID tests that were unavailable to everybody else.
Watching Chris Cuomo work is a little like watching a man jump out of an airplane without a parachute and then become irrationally angry at those who tell him he’s going to die.
Speaking of CNN, they also brought back Jeffrey “lubin his” Toobin. Proving yet again that the the Democratic Media Complex will alwaqys refuse to apply its rules to their own.
The snowflakes at Worldcon are having a very bad weekend. On Friday, the San Francisco chapter of Worldcon settled a lawsuit and agreed to pay restitution and to issue a public apology for banning conservative author Jon Del Arroz from their convention in 2018 and for besmirching him as a “racist.” Del Arroz is the most dangerous Hispanic voice in science fiction because he refuses to back down in the face of political bullies. He has also written an amazing series, The Saga of the Nano Templar, that my teen daughter is reading for the second time—that’s how good it is—and I don’t have to worry about garbage culture or leftist politics sullying her mind. The Adventures of Baron Von Monacle, a steampunk series, is also highly entertaining. (Always support freedom-loving artists!)
At the time of the banning, Del Arroz was under serious mob attack from social justice warriors trying to drive him out of the sci-fi community. SJWs even sent a spring-loaded exploding can of penis-shaped glitter to his home, which scared his wife and children. The ban came about when Del Arroz asked Worldcon for security measures because he feared for his safety due to the mob-like attacks on him and his family from industry insiders. Instead of helping him, Worldcon banned him and made public statements claiming the author was a “racist” and a “bully,” with no substantiated evidence to back those statements up. I’ve known Del Arroz personally for many years. He is a devout and kind man with a good sense of humor and a love of the art of the troll. He is not vicious, but provocative in a way that is necessary for freedom of speech to be preserved. He’s the one brave enough to exercise the First Amendment in ways that ensure we will keep it. We all need people like Del Arroz in the fight to preserve liberty.
Now we only need about a hundred such lawsuits to force institutional science fiction to regain its sanity… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Not-so-much news: Gun control bill fails. News: In California.
For all the disappointments of the Texas 87th legislature’s regular session, a number of pro Second Amendment bills were passed.
Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman resigns, said to be interested in running for Attorney General against incumbent Ken Paxton and George P. Bush.
This is probably the wrong Eva to use as clip art here.
French France’s Emmanuel Macron Urges G-7 To Sell Gold Reserves To Fund Bailout For Africa. I imagine that the other G-7 members responses to this proposal ranged from “Are you high?” to “Die in a fire.” (Plus an “Is Matlock on yet?” from Biden.)
Demolition Ranch’s Matt Carriker has his truck broken into while he was in San Antonio. The Democratic Party’s soft-on-crime stances just keep reaping their rewards…
“How to Protect Your Shopping Trolley From Improvised Explosives.” However, I feel compelled to point out a technical error: The Trophy active protection system is not yet available on the British Challenger tank, making it deeply unlikely that the system would be made available for a Tesco shopping cart.
