Posts Tagged ‘Carrollton’

LinkSwarm for May 21, 2021

Friday, May 21st, 2021

Biden behaving badly, Palestinian backers beating Jews, Portland crime soars, and the latest pause to the latest Israel beatdown of Hamas. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Dispatches from the swamp: “Former FBI director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and spoke with the then vice president in 2016 ‘to explore lucrative future work options’ with Hunter as the middle man.” Who watches the watchmen?
  • Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter, but worse:

    There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something. Biden’s presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.

    We’re five months into Biden’s presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter’s incompetence by Christmas. Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn’t exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.

    Snip.

    For Carter, this came in the form of skyrocketing inflation and fuel shortages, the hostage crisis in Iran, compounded by an inability to work with Congress and constantly butting heads with Tip O’Neill and the Left wing of the Democrats. Carter, simply put, did not get how to work with Congress when he arrived in Washington, having spent his entire career playing Georgia politics. Unfortunately, this contributed to his inability to pass legislation, even though at the time Democrats controlled the Senate.

    Moreover, Carter’s inability to get his own messaging right added to his problems. The best episode of this is of course the notorious “Malaise” speech, where Carter essentially told Americans that their best days were behind them. This certainly didn’t inspire confidence when there was indeed a crisis of confidence on the home front, while abroad the Soviets and Iranians caused their fair share of mischief. It took the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan to fix things.

    During the 1980 campaign, an observer took note of the difference between the two men saying, “If you ask Jimmy Carter what time it is, he’d tell you how to build a watch but if you asked Ronald Reagan what time it is, he’d say it time to get this country moving again.” Reagan always knew where he was going and where he wanted to lead the nation,

    Today, Biden only seems capable of being led by the hand by his staffers and signing whatever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer shove across his desk. When he does bother to make rare appearances, he seems to always pour gasoline on the proverbial fire.

    Already, inflation is rising under Biden’s direction, and despite a jobs relief bill that spent trillions of dollars, less than 300,000 new jobs were created as a result. On top of that, Biden seems determined, come Hell or high water, to ignore the crisis on the southern border, so much so that he refuses to call the situation an actual crisis. Did I also mention he’s done little to nothing to help Israel while Hamas pounds it with rockets lately?

    That’s all well and good (Biden is hardly the first president to bungle domestic and foreign policy) but Biden seems to genuinely care little for the country he was elected to govern.

    Unlike Carter, who to his credit is a patriot, Biden has caved to the whims of the radical deconstructionists by ignoring the very real threats of Antifa and BLM. Biden has entertained the possibility of giving federal grants to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT), which postulates that all White Americans are born evil and that all Black Americans are born victims. While on paper CRT is supposed to teach “diversity and inclusion,” in reality it’s undoing the sacrifices of the Civil Rights pioneers who wanted us to not see color or race.

    Jimmy Carter was a bad president but he wasn’t a bad man. Biden is a bad president and a bad man. Carter never at his worst ever contemplated the things Biden does willy nilly, such as revoking Donald Trump’s protection of American statues from the evil of BLM and Antifa.

  • “‘Out of Control’ Shoplifting in Democrat-Run San Francisco Closes 17 Walgreens.” Electing the hard-left to control your cities the quickest way to destroy your quality of life. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Masking doesn’t do jack against Flu Manchu:

    The predominant conclusion is that face masks have a very important role in places such as hospitals, but there exists very little evidence of widespread benefit for members of the public (adults or children) as well as evidence that masking is truly an ineffectual way to manage pandemic-related spread of viral disease. As Kolstoe stated, it has become less about the science and more about politics and a symbol of solidarity.

  • Israel reaches ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza.

  • Of course the Associated Press knew they were sharing an office with Hamas:

    The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. In fact, Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, even said as much on Saturday. “I talked to someone who *used* to work out of that building periodically who said he believed there may have been Hamas offices there,” Vietor tweeted. In other words, anyone who worked in the building on a regular basis understood that they likely shared an address with the Islamic Resistance Movement. Vietor also acknowledged on Twitter that terror groups “purposefully co-locate operations with civilians. But that is not a new problem.” Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.

    Here’s the thing: There’s nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes. It happens all the time in the Middle East. CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open. The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

    This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza. The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it’s never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance. That’s because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity. Through direct threats as well as fixers and minders appointed to steer journalists in the right direction, Hamas lets every press outfit and journalist in Gaza know that if they do not understand this fundamental angle, they are not welcome in Gaza.

  • Peace-loving Palestinian supporters in London: “‘F**k the Jews’ ‘Rape their daughters.'”
  • More of the same fun in New York City: “‘Pro-Palestinian’ Gangs Attack Jews In Multiple Locations in Manhattan.”
  • “China aligns with Palestinians to deflect criticism of Uyghur Muslim genocide.” Call it the Axis of Scumbags. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brandon Smith on why the U.S. military will never be woke:

    The language of leftists and globalists can be rather confusing because they never mean exactly what they say. The word “diversity” generally means “more leftists/Marxists”, not more brown people. Leftists are incredibly racist towards any minority person that argues from a conservative or moderate position. The phrase “white supremacist” is usually a hatchet reference to all conservatives. So, to translate their woke gibberish, the goal of the Pentagon under Biden will be to divest the ranks of the military of conservatives and replace them with more regime friendly leftists.

    The goal of propaganda is often to create false word associations in the minds of the masses. The mainstream media constantly mentions “white supremacists”, “neo-nazis” and “extremists” within the same articles they mention “conservatives”. Though there is no evidence whatsoever to link the majority of conservatives with race identity groups, the hope within the establishment is that the conservative base in the US can be dismantled through guilt by manufactured association.

    Anyone who stands against the social justice mob is labeled “white supremacist”. Therefore, all conservatives are white supremacists, because the social justice cult controls who gets labeled. The social justice cult thus becomes the self anointed arbiters of who gets canceled and who does not. See how that works?

    As far as the military is concerned, the obvious intent is to link all conservative views with “extremism and racism”, thereby creating an artificial rationale for removing conservatives from the ranks or denying them the ability to sign up in the first place. The Pentagon is already openly discussing plans to comb through the social media histories of troops in order to root out those with “extremist backgrounds” (conservatives and constitutionalists). In theory, this would only leave devout social justice warriors behind. It is a political and ideological cleansing of the armed forces.

    The Cult of Woke is like a hive of parasitic termites that feeds its way through the various pillars of western society until they crumble; once a pillar is hollowed out, they move onto the next one, and the next one until the nation or civilization breaks apart completely. As the nation is destabilized, they then offer their own social model as a solution to the problem. Invariably, their model is one that eliminates all individual freedom and inherent rights in the name of collective “safety” and “equity”. It is totalitarianism posing as compassion.

    To be sure, the Department of Defense is fast-tracking the woke agenda.

    Snip.

    Straight white men are noticeably absent from the Pentagon’s new series of commercials, and the people represented are a perfect pie chart of diversity hiring, even though the US is around 70% white and around 96% straight (according to Gallup).

    But who are these commercials really made for? The Army admits they had to search a worldwide roster of soldiers, obtaining only 100 submissions that fit their woke criteria, and then filtered those submissions down to just a handful that met the diversity requirements of the marketing campaign. Some of the commercials are subtle, and some of them are not. The US campaign seems to be mimicking the “Snowflake” ad campaign used by the UK military in 2019 in a bid to attract what they call “Me Me Me Millennials”.

    Clearly, the percentage of soldiers that check most or all of the woke boxes is tiny. The commercials are also notably in cartoon form, because SJWs have a hard time absorbing information unless it is animated.

    Snip.

    Globalists are very mindful of statistical realities, and they know that the current military dynamic is against them; hence their growing thirst for the wokification of our branches of defense. I want to remind conservatives that this is a good thing. They are trying to force social justice politics into the military because the military is the exact opposite of what they want it to be.

    For example, polling in 2016 showed that around 31% to 35% of the US military is Republican, while around 25% to 29% votes Democrat. But what about the remainder? The media often calls the remaining current serving voters “moderates” or “independents”. As it turns out, up to 40% of the military is actually libertarian or constitutionalist leaning according to polls.

    The mainstream media tries to hide this fact by only talking about “Republican votes” and “Democrat votes”, but the reality is that the vast majority of the military is conservative oriented, with values based in personal freedom and constitutionalism. That 40% of libertarians and constitutionalists is what the elites are really worried about. This is who they are referring to when they talk about “extremists” in the military.

    And what about the 25% to 29% of Democrats? That is the extent of the left’s hold within the general ranks of the military and it is improbable that most of these democrats are hard leftists. Further studies also show that the majority of veterans leaving the military identify overwhelmingly as Republican, conservative or “independent”, not as Democrat or leftist.

    This is probably why the latest social justice recruitment commercials by the Army are getting ratioed into oblivion by soldiers and the public alike. In response the Army YouTube page has shut down comments. Last I checked, the new LGBTQ and feminist inspired “Emma: The Calling” Army video had only 700 up-votes and over 33,000 down-votes. This is an epic fail. Where are all the hardcore social justice warriors just itching to join the military and “get some”? They don’t exist. The establishment is trying to appeal to a phantom demographic.

    The fact is, the only place you will find a preponderance of woke lunatics in the military is among the brass and sometimes in the officer corps; the leadership within the pentagon has been carefully groomed to create a leftist/globalist consolidation, and this has been going on for decades. Generals are for the most part politicians, not warriors (SPECIAL NOTE: Never trust retired generals or retired CIA agents, even if they claim to be on the side of liberty).

    While military leadership might go woke, this does not mean the rest of the military will, nor does it mean that troops will follow unconstitutional orders from such people.

  • Thanks to antifa, a Soros-backed DW and underfunding the police, Portland is enjoying record-breaking levels of violence and homicide.
  • They’re also the only big city that doesn’t use body cameras for police. Probably because they’d exonerate police and help convict their precious pet antifa rioters, and the powers that be in Portland don’t want that…
  • Alan Dershowitz wonders why the hard left loves Palestinian terrorists.

    In a world in which massive violations of human rights have, tragically, become the norm, why has the hard left focused on one of the least compelling of those causes — namely, the Palestinians? Where is the concern for the Kurds, the Chechens, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans? There are no campus demonstrations on their behalf, no expressions of concern by “the Squad” in Congress, no United Nations resolutions, no recurring op-eds in The New York Times, and no claims that the nations that oppress these groups have no right to exist.

    On the merits and demerits of their claims, the Palestinians have the weakest case. They have been offered statehood and independence on numerous occasions: in 1938, 1948, 1967, 2000-2001 and 2008. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Yet, even now, Palestinian leaders refuse to sit down and negotiate a reasonable two-state solution. As the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once aptly put it, the Palestinian leadership never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

    Nor are history and morality on their side. The Palestinian leadership allied itself with Nazism and Hitler in the 1940s, with Egyptian tyranny and antisemitism in the 1950s, and with international terrorism from the 1960s forward.

    The usual history snipped.

    The Palestinian people have suffered more from the ill-advised decisions of their leaders than from the actions of Israel.

    Back to the present: Hamas commits a double war crime every time it fires a lethal rocket at Israeli civilians from areas populated by its civilians, who they use as human shields. Israel responds proportionally in self-defense, as President Biden has emphasized. The Israel Defense Forces go to extraordinary lengths to try to minimize civilian casualties among Palestinians, despite Hamas’ policy of using civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and high-rise buildings — to store, fire and plan their unlawful rockets and incendiary devices. Yet the hard left blames Israel alone, and many on the center-left create a moral equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.

    Why? The answer is clear and can be summarized in one word: Jews.

    The enemy of the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Chechens are not — unfortunately for them — the Jews. Hence, there is little concern for their plight. If the perceived enemy of the Palestinians were not the Jews, there would be little concern for their plight as well. This was proved by the relative silence that greeted the massacre of Palestinians by Jordan during “Black September” in 1970, or the killings of Palestinian Authority leaders in Gaza during the Hamas takeover in 2007. There has been relative silence, too, about the more than 4,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians— killed by Syria during that country’s current civil war. It is only when Jews or their nation are perceived to be oppressing Palestinians that the left seems to care about them.

  • Arizona’s Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema isn’t having any of it:

  • Orthodox Jews: “Live Near Hipsters, Vote Like Mormons.”

    The Pew study highlights a more interesting recent development among Orthodox Jews. They increasingly consider themselves—and are considered by others—to be separate within the Jewish community. Only 9 percent of Orthodox Jews feel “a lot” in common with Reform Jews, and a similar percentage of Reform Jews say the same about the Orthodox. In fact, both groups report feeling more in common with Jews in Israel than with their fellow citizens of the same religion but different denominations.

    Like their secular counterparts, Orthodox Jews are clustered in the Northeast, but they differ in having lower levels of educational attainment. About 60 percent of Jews overall are college graduates, almost double the rate of the American population as a whole, but only 37 percent of Orthodox Jews have college degrees. And even though these religious Jews are largely urban and suburban, they vote like rural religious voters. As Alper and Cooperman wrote, “among Orthodox Jews, three-quarters say they are Republican or lean that way. And that percentage has been trending up.”

    This split raises questions about the size of the various communities. The non-religious part of the Jewish community has long been and remains larger than the Orthodox component. Only 9 percent of American Jewish adults identify as Orthodox. They are, like the rest of the Jewish community, grouped largely in blue states. Only eight states have more than 200,000 Jews: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. All of these but Florida voted Democratic in the last presidential election, and six of the eight—all but Florida and Pennsylvania—have voted Democratic in every presidential election this century. However, adding in the seven states with Jewish populations in the range of 100,000-200,000 yields a decidedly more purple cohort: Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. The Jewish vote may be small, but it matters.

    The Pew study also makes it clear that the Jewish community is changing. Eleven percent of Jews under 30 were Orthodox in 2013—largely in line with their percentage among the older set. In the new study, that number rose to 17 percent—a remarkable shift in an eight-year period. At the same time, the older generation has a disproportionately low representation among the Orthodox. Only 3 percent of Jews aged 65 and older identify as Orthodox, and only 1 percent of Jews over 65 belong to the Haredi, or non-Modern Orthodox, community. Given Pew’s other findings on the Orthodox community, including much lower rates of intermarriage (2 percent vs. 47 percent in the non-religious community), and given the fact that Orthodox Jews continue to have more children, it is reasonable to assume that the Orthodox percentage of the Jewish community will grow even more in the future.

  • Kamala the unpopular. “Her favorability is just at 41%, and her unfavorability stands at 48%. Most problematic: One in 5 Democrats polled deemed her unfavorable, as did nearly 3 in 5 independents.”
  • Things that make you go “Hmmmmm”:
    

  • Facebook “fact check” is just there to push the proper narratives, the truth be damned.
  • Scottish university may expel law student Lisa Keogh for daring to point out women have vaginas.
  • AT&T Strikes $43 Billion Deal With Discovery To Launch New Streaming Giant.” “AT&T’s vast WarnerMedia holdings, which include CNN and HBO, will combine with Discovery’s assets – including Discovery Channel and Animal Planet – to create what management hopes will be a formidable competitor to Netflix and Disney.” Yeah, no. CNN is probably a negative asset at this point. And the price tag sounds a whole lot less impressive. And the price tag sounds a lot less impressive when you realize AT&T paid $85 billion for those assets less than three years ago…
  • Follow-up: “The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.”
  • “19-Year Veteran Cop Suspended for Allegedly Running Meth Lab Out of NJ Home.” I think they frown on that even in New Jersey…
  • Speaking of New Jersey, a single rural New Jersey deli has a market cap of $100 million.
  • “Man Hijacks School Bus Full of Children, Gets Frustrated And Lets Everyone Go Because The Kids Won’t Stop Asking Him Questions.”
  • Speaking of attempted crimes gone wrong:

  • Boom:

  • Rudy Tomjanovich inducted into the basketball hall of fame. Long overdue.
  • “BLM Sends Rioters To Gaza To Protest Israel By Burning Down Palestinian Businesses.”
  • “Biden Worried Gas Shortages May Hurt Carter’s Chances Against Reagan.”
  • I laughed:

  • LinkSwarm for October 9, 2020

    Friday, October 9th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Today’s topics include Texas, voting fraud, and Texas voting fraud.

  • Potentially the biggest story of the week is President Donald Trump authorizing the release of all documents relating to the Russian Collusion Hoax and Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in unredacted form. We were already getting a steady trickle of those declassified. Let’s see if this turns it into a flood.
  • Borepatch thinks the election is over. “The only thing that the Democrats had going for them was the lockdown. The breathless hyping of the ‘rona was intended to fan the flames of fear which would justify further lockdown and economic devastation. They then blamed Trump for all this, while the media shamelessly covered for them. That’s all gone now.”
  • How dare Trump recover?

    A keening wail of lamentation rings out across the land at Mr. Trump’s possible, dastardly recovery. How dare he! — to paraphrase Saint Greta Thunberg. 209,000 other Americans died, and not him! What vile and unholy devices got him out of a sure death sentence? No doubt Democratic Party astrologasters and consulting augurers will be searching for clues among the orbiting planets and the spilled organs of sacrificed chickens in the days to come. Perhaps Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) can snare a few of the president’s attending physicians into his House Intel Committee and rev up another impeachment for going against doctors’ orders. Wouldn’t that be a delectable counter to the looming confirmation process for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement next door in the Senate this month?

  • “Media Criticizes Trump For Downplaying Virus Threat By Not Dying.” “Every hour that he lives is another hour that the severity of this virus is undermined!”
  • “Party That Wants To Run Your Healthcare Roots For Political Opponent To Die.”
  • Anti-Trumpers and their festival of hatred:

    Some of the worst things about it is the element of transformation of the formerly mild-mannered and kindly into founts of seething malevolence.

    It’s deeply unsettling to see the rage come over a person, as I recently did when looking into the eyes of a previously genial acquaintance who was shrieking with rage at me, her eyes narrowed with what looked like hatred.

    People don’t like what threatens them, especially if they have no immediate factual answer to some of the evidence presented to them. What’s left to them is to explode—which this person did, ultimately getting into her car and peeling off with tires screeching. I would guess, although I don’t know, and I’m certainly not about to ask, that she and plenty of other people I know might be rejoicing, openly or secretly, in Trump’s diagnosis.

    Are they “possessed?” Is this “demonic?” I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I tend to think in psychological terms because these people are, for the most part, not inherently evil. They are filled with self-righteousness, and they have been whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons. This is no accident.

  • This week’s #BlackLifeMatters riots come to you from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Kurt Schlichter on dangerous talk from stupid people:

    Wishing that your opponent dies of a disease is pretty bad, but some go beyond the passive voice when hoping for our deaths. They seek to do it. Exhibit A is tech overlord Dick Costolo, a former Twitter CEO apparently, who tweeted on September 30th, “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.” So Dick, which by coincidence also happens to also be your name, you want to play horsey, huh?

    I guess casually cheering the murder of political opponents gets you some guffaws from your pals in Palo Alto cafes. But those of us who have ventured outside of the carefully constructed (and costly, in terms of sweat and blood) safe space that is the United States, and who get that the natural state of man is not driving Teslas and sipping bespoke Napa Chardonnay in prosperous, secure enclaves with one’s liberal cronies, know better. People who cheerlead political murder tend to be people who will support political murder given the chance to make it happen.

    One challenge for the dilettantes of death is to find the people who would actually commit political murder for them, but money and institutional inertia make that possible. As we have seen, woke zillionaires can fund their own lil’ revolutionaries. They are the ones behind Antifa, and if Donald Trump is reelected, we will likely see the DoJ (once Trump rids himself of the worse than useless FBI Director Christopher Wray, who never met self-serving establishment narrative he didn’t eagerly hump like a horny dog rubbing on the nearest leg) forced by Bill Barr to concede that this is an Astroturfed RICO conspiracy paid for by rich leftists. Yet, Antifa is not a combat organization (unless you are one person surrounded by a dozen of these brownshirts) but an information operation asset.

    But the Dicks of the elite are spoiled and soft and while this all seems like fun and games to them, with somebody else doing the murdering, they don’t realize that history holds that the status quo doesn’t remain in effect for everyone else when one group decides to alter it to its advantage. That is the plan – the establishment, outraged at the people who held them accountable for their legacy of failure, incompetence, and corruption by electing Donald Trump and a Republican Senate, intend to alter the status quo to ensure that this outrage never happens again. They intend to add states to increase their leverage. They intend to change voting laws to allow cheating and impose “campaign finance laws” that will be enforced against your candidates but not against establishment candidates to ensure there are no more troublesome populist alternatives. They intend, using tech companies and big corporations, to impose thought control and punish dissenters by cutting them off from access to the routine modes of living in this society – social media, banking, transportation, education. They intend to pass laws to disarm you so the ultimate failsafe of freedom is negated. And they intend to pack the Supreme Court to ensure they can’t be stopped by that pesky Constitution.

    But they will expect you to remain static and to respect and obey as if nothing has changed. You must be loyal to the institutions that betrayed you because…well, that’s unclear. Perhaps they hope you’ll just keep going along as if nothing is different out of habit, or from fear of losing what little they have left to you.

    Yet, the notion that Americans will wake up one morning, see that they are no longer free, shrug, obediently line up to turn in their Remingtons and Mossbergs and reconcile themselves to serfdom is not in the cards.

    Read the whole thing.

  • “Medical experts: Lockdowns do more harm than good.” You don’t say.
  • More studies find face masks ineffective against the Wuhan coronavirus than found them effective. I suspect that N95 masks might well be effective, but not this ‘wear any damn thing” Virus Theater we’re stuck in.
  • Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey puts the kibosh on last-minute Democratic attempts to force through online voting.
  • SCOTUS to DC District Court: No, you can’t rewrite South Carolina voting laws a month before the election just to give Democrats a better chance to win. Not yours.
  • Carrollton mayoral candidate arrested on 109 counts of mail ballot braud. For the Texas geography challenged, Carrollton is part of the Greater Dallas Metroplex.

    Authorities arrested a North Texas candidate on dozens of felony voter fraud charges after catching him red-handed with a box of mail-in ballots belonging to local voters.

    Carrollton mayoral candidate Zul Mirza Mohamed was charged Wednesday with 109 felonies for fraudulently requesting and obtaining mail-in ballots he alleged were for nursing home residents.

    According to a press release from Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree, his office was tipped off to the possible mail-ballot harvesting scheme on September 23 by the Denton County Elections Office.

    Multiple mail ballots had been requested on behalf of Carrollton residents to be sent to a post office box in Lewisville, which purportedly belonged to a nursing home facility. Investigators contacted the voters and found they had not made the ballot requests.

    Investigators also learned the post office box was obtained using a fake Texas driver’s license and fake student ID from the University of North Texas, and they began surveilling the post office.

    On October 7, investigators saw the suspect pick up a box of requested mail-in ballots and take them back to his residence in Carrollton. Officers obtained a search warrant for Mohamed’s home and inside found the fake driver’s license and box of ballots—several of which had been opened.

  • What it’s like to be a cop in the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter era:

    I’m a police officer in a major American city. Many of you reading this have seen a movie or TV show set in this city. Some of you have vacationed here. We have a big problem with poverty, unemployment, people scamming the welfare system, drugs, and violent crime.

    Honestly, though, who I am and where I work isn’t important—what I stand for is. I show up every day I’m scheduled to work, on time, and I work. I don’t hang out at the station, I handle calls for service and I constantly back up other officers. I quickly progressed to different specialized units and, over time, even began to help out at the academy and became a Field Training Officer.

    But after a couple of high-profile incidents where suspects wound up dead, we were essentially told to stop pursuing the bad guys: Too much liability for the city. So, if a violent felon who shot someone last week is spotted and you know it’s him? Depending on the ranking officer working, you’re most likely not going to be allowed to go get him.

    Snip.

    Call someone out on being a worthless lazy officer? Is that worthless lazy officer a lieutenant’s mistress?! You just earned yourself a transfer to night watch in some outpost no one wants to work.

    In every major city there’s a punishment assignment. Everyone who’s ever been a city cop knows this to be true.

    After a while, that same lazy officer who’s been sitting in that same lieutenant’s lap, or who’s never really done anything noteworthy, except maybe they went to the right school or are in the right clique, they now have time on the job and they take the sergeants test. They pass and, if your department doesn’t go straight down the list, they’re now a supervisor! Newer officers have no idea they’re working for someone who’s telling them someone else’s war stories or making themselves seem more important than they really were in the situation.

    Roll call training is all about administrative work and checking boxes off for monthly audits. We barely talk about that stolen silver SUV that is absolutely raping us nightly with auto burglaries. Oh, and since our policies are out there for anyone to read (including the bad guys) in the “interest of transparency,” they know we can’t pursue them for a property crime once they blow the red light at the intersection after we light them up and they flee. Never mind the fact that that stolen SUV is occupied by a wanted felon for armed robber in possession of a stolen AK-47. It’s just a property crime, right? No big deal. If they t-bone a family of four and kill someone, the fleeing felon isn’t at fault. I am.

    Snip.

    You have mayors bowing to the political pressure from a small, very vocal, minority that wants to defund (read: abolish, in many cases) the police.

    Some mayors have made it known to their department brass they’d rather endure the optics of Revolutionary Communists (read: ANTIFA/BLM) rioting, looting, and burning their cities down, than have their police officers be seen wading into the fray with riot batons in hand.

    You realize that if cities abolish police departments, gated communities are going to hire private police forces, made up of nearly all ex-police from the agency that just disbanded (see Minneapolis when that happens) and ex-military guys. The city won’t have oversight and their rules and regulations are going to be way more relaxed. Less area to patrol and a large pay raise? Less crime? Sign me up!

    Major media outlets constantly fan the flames of civil unrest nationwide. In a race to be first with many stories, they finish last in credibility. The initial tragedy de jour is front-page news, leading all newscasts in prime time. Meanwhile, the retraction or exoneration of the officer is buried. No apologies from the likes of Shaun King, MSNBC, CNN, or Al Sharpton. They’ve all already moved on to the next rage-bait.

    Who gives a f— if some honest hard-working cop had his or her life ruined and is in financial shambles because they got a no-win call dropped in their lap, right? All cops are bastards, anyway. Black Lives only seem to matter when cops are involved in the death, justified or not, of a black person.

    Every single week, in many major cities all across this country, murders within the black community occur — oftentimes with stolen firearms. I’ve lost count of the bodies (mostly black, never in my case shot by police) I’ve stood over. Sometimes at night when I’m trying to fall asleep I hear the blood-curdling screams of family members (mostly mothers) who rush to the scene and are held back at the police tape.

    So, in a knee-jerk reaction to a high-profile incident, in an effort to placate a mob, there is talk of not only defunding the police but abolishing them. Do you know what that leads to nationwide? Cops like me are not being proactive. At all. Because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

    Read he whole thing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • New York Times editorial writer is shocked, shocked to find left wing anarchists burning down America. (Hat tip: Vikingpundit.)
  • Real antifa group or an amazing parody of same? The answer may shock you!
  • Hamas: Hell yes, we’re getting missiles from Iran.
  • Seven of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s own aides have accused him of “improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses” in relation to Austin investor Nate Paul.
  • Former Paxton assistant and current United State congressman Chip Roy called on Paxton to resign, which is not a good sign.
  • Lockdowns are the new global warming.
  • Boeing moving all 787 production from Washington State to South Carolina. How’s that hard left Democratic governance working out for you?
  • Speaking of Democratic governance, Baltimore’s next mayor is complaining about Donald Trump when he should be complaining about his fellow Democrats:

    Baltimore is no more “unjust” now than it was before its murder rate soared half a decade ago. What has changed is that Baltimore is less policed than it was back then. And that’s thanks to the policies and pronouncement of its pathetic Democrat mayors and other leading pols.

    It seems clear that Brandon Scott will continue in their tradition. Thus, it seems equally clear that Baltimore will remain exhibit A when informed people talk about the breakdown in law and order under the watch (if you can call it that) of Democratic mayors.

  • Today’s Democratic politician receiving a felony indictment comes to you from Rochester, New York, where Democratic Mayor Lovey Warren was indicted on felony campaign finance fraud charges. “At issue are transfers made from Ms. Warren’s political action committee to her campaign committee that far exceeded the $8,557 limit that a campaign could receive from an individual donor.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Democrat Party official arrested for allegedly pulling knife on ‘Women for Trump.'” “The communications director for the Democrat Party of Washington County, Oregon [Clayton John Callahan], was arrested after allegedly pulling a knife on female Trump supporters at an outdoor event hosted by the Oregon Women for Trump.”
  • “Texas Partisan Index: Rating Senate Districts From Most Republican to Most Democratic.”
  • European Union slaps tariffs on Chinese, Indonesian and Taiwanese steel for price dumping.
  • ESPN got woke, and now it’s going broke, or at least laying off between 300 and 700 employees. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Fake investor con artist hauls in a cool $30 million.
  • All the media Trump-bashing just makes people like President Trump more.
  • Truth:

  • Interesting Twitter thread on how Google, Facebook and Amazon all straight-up lied to the Australian government about anticompetitive practices.

    Worth reading the whole thing.

  • The Red Headed Libertarian notes that the MSM seems to intentionally conflate anarchists with legal militias, and offers a brief history lesson:

  • OK, I laughed:

  • 1. Buy Booze, 2. Get Liquored Up, 3. Buy Gun While Drunk, 4. Pass Background Check, 5. ???

    Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

    So the city council of Carrollton, TX, in their infinite wisdom, is trying to decide whether to ban gun stores within a certain distance of a liquor store.

    Like many gun-grabber ordinances, this one has a certain facile logic working on it (liquor + firearms = BAD), but deeper consideration of the subject reveals how illogical and unnecessary such a law would be.

    First, under Texas law, it is already illegal for consumers to even open an alcoholic beverage inside a liquor store, much less drink it. Those same stores are also prohibited from selling alcohol to obviously intoxicated patrons.

    So, apparently the only people this law will actually target are:

    1. Entirely sober people who want to buy a gun in the same center that just happens to house a liquor store, or
    2. People who are buying booze, downing it in the parking lot, and then wandering over to the gun store to pick up some heat because it just seemed like a good idea.

    Somehow, I’m not seeing the sort of person who shotguns a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 in a parking lot as being the same sort of person who has either a few hundred dollars burning a hole in their pocket, or a valid credit card. (The only possible exception I can think of, someone on the gang-banger/drug-dealer continuum, aren’t very likely to pass the automatic background check (or, for that matter, purchase firearms through a legal dealer), now are they?)

    And that’s assuming the store is foolish enough to sell a gun to someone obviously intoxicated.

    The ordinance as described doesn’t make a lick of sense, and should shelved.

    (Hat tip: Alphecca.)