Posts Tagged ‘Debbie Wasserman Schultz’

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LinkSwarm For June 12, 2026

Friday, June 12th, 2026

More California fraud! More Minnesota fraud! Ukraine continues pounding Russia! Murder still illegal!

Personally, this week has been an exercise in frustration, mainly due to trying to replace an old, cracked car keyfob where the results were my car refusing to turn on. Which means I’m behind on all my errands. Solved now, but it was a pain. Also, for some reason Bluehost has crapped out 429 errors more than usual today.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “New House Oversight Report Claims Walz, Ellison Were Aware of Fraud in 2019. “These fraudulently obtained funds likely funded international terrorist networks among other bad actors, while vulnerable populations were harmed and whistleblowers were ignored, sidelined, and retaliated against.”

    Following a months-long investigation, the House Oversight Committee released a report Monday accusing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison of knowing about rampant fraud in the state’s federally funded social services programs as far back as 2019, and turning a blind eye.

    The investigation also draws on testimony Walz and Ellison provided during a March hearing before the committee.

    The 205-page report, titled “The Cost of Doing Nothing: How Tim Walz and Keith Ellison Fueled Minnesota’s Fraud Explosion,” states that Walz and Ellison:

    Possessed the legal and procedural authority to stop payments and ban fraudulent providers from participating in these programs, but repeatedly failed to act. As a result, billions of American taxpayer dollars were potentially paid to fraudulent actors. These fraudulently obtained funds likely funded international terrorist networks among other bad actors, while vulnerable populations were harmed and whistleblowers were ignored, sidelined, and retaliated against.

    Testimony and documents obtained to date establish a consistent pattern: fraud warnings were elevated to the most senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible signs of fraud emerged.

    Senior officials in Governor Walz’s office and Attorney General Ellison’s office were aware of credible, systemic fraud concerns in social services programs as early as 2019 within the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) and by April 2020 within the state Department of Education (MDE), despite later public statements by Governor Walz suggesting otherwise.

    The committee concluded that Minnesota officials had ample authority to suspend payments to providers suspected of fraud but repeatedly failed to do so. Investigators found that state agencies continued funding Feeding Our Future even after identifying serious deficiencies, allowing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to flow to fraudsters until federal authorities intervened.

    Of course they were aware. It was a major conduit for lining the pockets of the left!

  • “California Gets 80% Of All Federal Cash For Illegal Immigrant Families.”

    California is home to the lion’s share of illegal immigrant families in the United States with children who received federal welfare assistance in 2024, according to a federal report published on June 10.

    More than 80 percent of all nationwide cash assistance allocated to such households was spent in California. The report tracked $759 million in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) spent in 2024 on families headed by a parent living in the country illegally.

    In those cases, the child qualified for federal welfare, even though the parent was excluded from the federal program because of immigration status.

    “These cases receive relatively little public attention, yet … data show that they are far from a negligible part of the program,” wrote authors David Swegle, director of the Office of Family Assistance at the Administration for Children and Families under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Alex J. Adams, assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, in the report.

    Nationally, the federal government paid 85,000 households with qualifying children receiving assistance who were living with their illegal immigrant parents in the U.S. in 2024.

    “Although the benefit is formally paid on behalf of the child, it still supports a household that includes an immigration-status-ineligible parent,” the authors stated. “The significance of these cases therefore cannot be judged solely by the fact that the adult is not the formal recipient.”

    The cases are also significant because they don’t have to adhere to the TANF rules requiring work expectations, such as regularly applying for jobs, and the payments aren’t limited to the federal 60-month lifetime limit, according to the report. The illegal immigrant families, therefore, can receive federal welfare until the child turns 18 years old.

    Low-income American families are held to the federal welfare restrictions that require work participation and are restricted to a 60-month lifetime limit, the authors said.

    The number of TANF cases involving an illegal immigrant parent reached nearly 850,000—or 10 percent of all cases—in 2024, up from nearly 6 percent in 2001.

    Of those, nearly 78,000 households—or about 91 percent—also received federal food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the report revealed.

    Most of the illegal immigrant parents—over 106,000—identified as Hispanic, while 5.3 percent were White, 4.3 percent were Black, and 2 percent were Asian, the report stated.

    Here’s an idea: California doesn’t get any more cash for illegal aliens, period, until they repeal all the sanctuary city declarations, allow federal auditing of all their welfare programs, and implement SAVE Act compliant measures to ensure only citizens vote.

  • More Cali fraud: “Federal Government Pauses Funding To Los Angeles Homeless Agency Citing Fraud Allegations.”

    The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on June 11 suspended federal funding to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), cutting off millions of dollars to the L.A. region, over allegations of fraud and widespread mismanagement.

    It’s superbly managed to line the pockets of leftists.

    HUD Secretary Scott Turner testifies before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development about his department’s proposed FY2026 budget in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2026. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    HUD action to suspend federal funding comes in the wake of an investigation into LAHSA, Secretary Scott Turner announced Thursday, adding that the agency has “uncovered evidence of LAHSA’s false statements and its irresponsible actions and failures,” including a lack of financial management and lack of safeguards against conflicts of interest.

    The Los Angeles Continuum of Care (CoC), led by LAHSA, has received nearly $1 billion in taxpayer dollars over the last five years. Despite federal assistance, L.A. remains the epicenter of the nation’s “drug-fueled” homeless crisis, according to Turner.

    “Under President Trump’s leadership, HUD will fund results, not corrupt failure or the homeless-industrial complex,” Turner said in a statement. “Year after year, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were funneled to LAHSA with little accountability. Meanwhile, homelessness skyrocketed. Taxpayers will no longer bankroll an organization that puts its own self-interests ahead of the Americans it was created to serve.”

    HUD stated in a letter to LAHSA that suspension of funding will be final if the agency does not contest the notice by requesting a hearing. LAHSA must file a written hearing request within 30 days of receipt of the notice.

    The Homeless Industrial Complex maw is insatiable.

  • “California hit by another huge fraud bombshell as thousands of claims for $4 BILLION in taxpayer-funded compensation meant for sex crime victims are FAKE.” I guess they had to steal from sex crime victims because there just wasn’t enough money in stealing toys for crippled orphans. All of California’s welfare state programs need federal audits of proctological intensity. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • A possible reason for my continued unemployment? “Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump’s second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men.” I wonder if Kurt Schlichter would be interested in filing a class action lawsuit on behalf of myself and other men…
  • Amazingly, murder is still illegal in the United States.

    One year after Frisco high school student Karmelo Anthony was indicted on murder charges over the fatal stabbing of [Austin Metcalf], his trial concluded with the jury’s verdict that Anthony is guilty of murder.

    During their sentencing deliberations, the jury considered a “sudden passion” claim, but eventually rejected it and decided that Anthony would face a 35-year prison sentence.

    He will be eligible for parole after 17 and a half years.

    Like Kyle Rittenhouse’s not guilty verdict, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who doesn’t view the world through social justice-tinted glasses.

  • “Whistleblower vindicated: Biden officials invented loophole to impose gender identity, flout court. Leaders ‘actively engaged in efforts to thwart at least one regional office from following the plain and unambiguous meaning’ of the injunction against their gender identity reading of Title IX, Department of Education concludes.”

    High-ranking Biden administration officials conspired to violate a 2022 court order against their interpretation of Title IX as covering “gender identity” within the definition of “sex,” and may have also tried to conceal those efforts through coercion and intimidation, according to a Department of Education report made public Wednesday after lengthy outside review.

    The U.S. Office of Special Counsel told President Trump the department “fully substantiated the allegations” by whistleblower Timothy Mattson, who now leads the department’s Office for Civil Rights’ regional office in Kansas City, recommending sanctions against current and former officials and compensation for Mattson for the risk he took coming forward.

  • “Trump just attached the SAVE America Act to the Senate’s next budget vote to force Republicans to actually DO SOMETHING.” I don’t know enough about the Senate’s labyrinth budgeting rules to know if this will actually work or not.
  • You know the giant Democrat tantrum over ICE funding? We won.

    Democrats put everything they had in their effort to shut down President Donald Trump’s border control plans. And what exactly have they achieved for their often-infantile antics?

    Well, let’s see. This week, the House passed a bill that funds ICE for three years. Deportations are near all-time highs. Oh, and it looks like Trump’s border wall will be completed next year.

    On Tuesday, the House passed a “budget reconciliation” bill that provides enough money ($38 billion) to fund ICE for the rest of Trump’s term, plus $28 billion for the Border Patrol, and another $5 billion for border security technology and screening.

    And what did Democrats get for shutting down all or part of the government for nearly four months?

    Bupkus. Zilch. Nada. Nichts. Niente. 没有什么.This has to be one of the most embarrassing political defeats in history.

    (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott.)

  • “Homan Warns Hochul: Thanks to Your New Law, You’re About to Get ‘More ICE Than You’ve Ever Seen.'”

    If Border Czar Tom Homan is intimidated by the Left’s endless anti-ICE rhetoric and threats, he’s not showing it. In fact, on Monday, he announced he’s doubling down on illegal immigrant operations in New York City and plans a surge in the very near future. This is a direct “in your face” move to counter Gov. Kathy Hochul’s efforts to kneecap federal enforcement in the Empire State.

    He spoke as ongoing violent anti-ICE protests continued throughout the weekend at Delaney Hall, a detention facility in nearby Newark, New Jersey.

    It’s coming, he told Fox & Friends:

    Trump border czar Tom Homan revealed Monday that the administration has already drawn up an operational plan and warned Hochul before she signed legislation late last month restricting ICE activities and banning masked immigration agents in New York.

    “You’re going to see more ICE than you’ve ever seen in New York City, and it’s coming,” Homan said, according to Bloomberg. “I just reviewed an operational plan. I’m not going to tell you exactly when it’s going to happen, but it’s coming.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Maine Democrats obeyed The Will of The Party and lined up yo vote for the Nazi.”

    Graham Platner, the scandal-plagued progressive veteran, will win the Democratic primary for the Maine Senate race, according to a projection by the Associated Press.

    Maine Governor Janet Mills suspended her own Senate primary campaign on April 30, effectively handing the nomination to Platner.

    Platner has painted himself as an outsider to the Democratic establishment since his fiery campaign launch last fall. In line with those of other progressive and populist candidates, Platner’s political bid has focused on working-class issues, including affordability, universal health care, and labor union relations.

    He will advance to face Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins in November. Collins is seen as a moderate Republican, often crossing party lines to vote with Democrats. However, because Collins appeals to a more moderate, centrist bloc of voters, she has received backlash from her supporters on several occasions for voting with her own party, including her vote to advance the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018.

    The Senate campaign has been rocked by controversies since last year. In October, CNN and several other outlets uncovered Platner’s past Reddit posts and comments, which included offensive comments about police and sexual assault survivors. He’s since been ensnared in a number of other scandals, including those involving his Nazi tattoo, his marital infidelity, and his past treatment of women.

    Remember all that self-serving “when they go low, we go high” blather Democrats mouthed to further the laughable illusion of their moral superiority? They never meant it.

  • “U.S. launches military strikes on Iran in response to downing of helicopter.” Yeah, should have covered this more, I just ran out of time this week.
  • “Ammo Depot Destroyed at St. Petersburg: BIG Ammo Cookoffs!”
  • “Another Ship Hit at Kronstadt Naval Base Near St. Petersburg? Big Fire After Drone Strike.”
  • “Ukraine Hits 50 Truck Convoy in Crimea and Multiple Bridges.”
  • “HUGE Explosion in Belgorod As Russian Ammo Depot Detonates!” This may not even have been a Ukrainian strike, just the usual russiuan incompetence.
  • “Flamingo Missiles Hit VNIIR Progress Electronics Plant in Cheboksary.” This seems to be a much more on-target hit than the previous strike on the same target.
  • “Grushovaya Oil Depot at Novorossiysk Hit By Drones.”
  • “Chongar Bridge Damaged by Drones & Attack Reported on Kerch Bridge By Neptune Missile.”
  • “Two Russian Ships Hit! Buyan Corvette Destroyed After Drone Strike! Svetlyak Patrol Boat Also Hit.”
  • Has Russia withdrawn from the Kinburn Spit?
  • “Trump ally Nikol Pashinyan wins Armenian election, paving way for US-backed peace deal.”

    Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s party won a majority in the country’s parliamentary elections, marking a victory for Donald Trump after the president endorsed him.

    Pashinyan first took power in 2018 in the so-called Velvet Revolution, then won again in the 2021 snap elections triggered by his crushing loss of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War against Azerbaijan. Armenia held its first regular election since he first took power in 2018 on Sunday, during which he won reelection with a vote total far above his closest rival.

    The latest preliminary results on Monday gave Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party 49.82% of the vote, the Associated Press reported, with the pro-Russian Samvel Karapetyan’s Strong Armenia bloc coming in second with 23.28% of the vote. The Armenia Alliance bloc led by former President Robert Kocharyan is hovering around 10%, while the rest of the splintered opposition remained in the mid to low single digits.

    He beat three pro-Russian parties, another black eye for Putin.

  • Thanks to Florida redistricting, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is having to go up against a field of black candidates in a heavily black congressional district.
  • Two “independent” Senate candidates aren’t.

    Two independent candidates for U.S. Senate have fundraising profiles on ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s key fundraising platform, raising questions about the candidates’ true political independence as they look to capture two long-held Republican seats this fall.

    ActBlue allows independent candidates to fundraise on its platforms on a “case-by-case basis,” based on whether a Democrat is in the race, the candidate has an endorsement from the Democratic Party, or the candidate has demonstrated alignment with the Democratic Party’s ideals and policy goals.

    But both independent candidates — Seth Bodnar in Montana and Dan Osborn in Nebraska — are running against Democrats, as well as Republicans. While the Nebraska Democratic Party has endorsed Osborn, Bodnar has not received an official Democratic endorsement.

  • Speaking of ActBlue shenanigans: “Clinton-Appointed Federal Judge Bars Texas AG Paxton’s Lawsuit Against ActBlue.”

    A federal judge has barred Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from pursuing his state court lawsuit against ActBlue, a major Democratic online fundraising platform.

    President Clinton-appointed U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns ruled Thursday that the case represented no more than a retaliation campaign for ActBlue’s political activities supporting Paxton’s opponent in the 2026 U.S. Senate race.

    Stearns issued a preliminary injunction preventing Paxton from pursuing the Texas case. The judge found the lawsuit attempted to undermine protected political speech and therefore violated the First Amendment.

    “The truth is plain and captured in Paxton’s own declarations: The lawsuit was filed in retaliation for (and in an attempt to suppress) ActBlue’s efforts to fund Talarico’s campaign,” Stearns wrote in the ruling.

    Neither Paxton’s office nor ActBlue immediately returned a request for comment.

    Paxton filed the initial lawsuit in April in Texas state court as he campaigned as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat.

    The suit singled out ActBlue, a Massachusetts-based fundraising platform that claims to have raised billions for Democratic candidates and causes since its founding in 2004. It sought civil penalties and an order blocking ActBlue from accepting certain gift card donations.

    The Texas attorney general alleged that ActBlue employed deceptive practices after the fundraising platform resumed gift card and foreign prepaid debit card donations after informing Congress that it had ceased conducting the transactions. Paxton alleged the practices could empower foreign nationals to hide their identities while making political contributions, potentially in violation of state law.

    Under Sterns logic, no Republican could ever sue ActBlue for breaking the law because they ran against Democrats using the platform to raise money.

  • “Muslim Running For Mayor In Texas Says Military Vets Didn’t Sacrifice Anything For His Freedom.” More: “I want to make that clear. I do not support the U.S. military. No, I do not support the United States. I look down on both entities.” You may remember Zul Mohamed from such previous hits as “I just pled guilty to election fraud.”
  • Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, whose term expired, declared that he would just stay in power. I bet you can guess how well that went over.

    Helpful illustration of Somali politics via History Matters.

    “Maryland ‘teens’ tried to rob this Marine vet at gunpoint and it did not go well for them.”

  • SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk a trillionaire. Maybe he could give me a million to run an anti-Social justice Warrior center here in Austin…
  • “Basic Health Fixes Doctors Know Work But Can’t Make Money From.” I do own dogs and cook at home for all but one meal a week, but only do strength training once a week.
  • “How Japan Finally Made It Impossible to Make Babies.” Women in the workforce + culture of overwork + high Tokyo prices = shrinking population. And the rest of the west faces similar (if less currently less severe) demographic problems.
  • “Quentin Tarantino Slams Modern Hollywood as a ‘Flavorless Sausage Factory.'”
  • Pitch meeting for The Mandalorian and Grogu.
  • Red Lobster’s CEO Damola Adamolekun says he’s going to transform the chain into ‘the most AI-forward restaurant company that exists.’ Please don’t…
  • “After Mail-In Ballots Tallied, Joe Biden Wins L.A. Mayor Race With 81 Million Votes.”
  • “Playskool Introduces ‘My First Hobo Camp‘ For California Children.”
  • “California Officials Pleased With Voter Turnout Of 250 Percent.”
  • A compilations of happy dogs:

    I hope none of those are AI. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Technology, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 5 Comments »

    Impeachment Motion Tabled

    Thursday, July 18th, 2019

    Impeachment is such a moral imperative for Democrats that the motion to impeach President Donald Trump was tabled on a vote of 332 in favor tabling the motion and only 95 opposed, including 137 Democrats who voted to table it.

    All four members of the Squad (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley) voted against tabling. Others voting to continue impeachment proceedings were Democratic Presidential candidate Seth Moulton (so much for those moderate credentials), former candidate Eric Swalwell, and Julian Castro’s brother Joaquin.

    Voting to table was every single Republican, Republican-turned-Independent Justin Amash (who many commenters had assumed was a yes vote on impeachment), Democratic Presidential candidate Tim Ryan, former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz and even Adam Schiff.

    Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard didn’t vote on the motion, the only Democrat to skip voting entirely.

    Having so many Democrats vote against impeachment is a big blow to Democratic Presidential candidate Tom Steyer’s Need to Impeach PAC:

    On Thursday, Steyer announced that he is launching a new political action committee to turn up the heat on key Democrats by going behind their backs and into their districts with a pro-impeachment TV and advertising blitz. According to Politico, Steyer’s top targets include three of the most powerful Democrats in the House: Oversight Chairman Elijah Cumming[sic], Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, and Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal. Other potential targets include Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and even Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Kevin Mack, Steyer’s lead strategist, told Politico that the goal isn’t to put money behind primary challengers—at least not yet. But the group has virtually unlimited money to spend on staff, ads, and volunteers. “Why does Steny Hoyer get a pass, why does Jim Clyburn get a pass?” Mack said. “They’re all hiding behind the Mueller report.”

    Despite that threat, Cummings, Neal, Clyburn and Hoyer all voted against impeachment. (As per House tradition, Speaker Pelosi did not cast a vote.)

    The vote was a victory for Pelosi, who proved she can still hold together a Democratic majority in the face of demands from more radical members. And it might give pause to impeachment pandering from other presidential contenders. If impeachment isn’t a winning issue for a majority of House Democrats, is it really a winning issue in the Democratic Primary?

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

    Bernie vs. The DNC: Round 2

    Wednesday, April 17th, 2019

    In 2016, it was obvious to neutral observers that the DNC had put their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. From mysterious coin flips to Debbie Wasserman Schultz rigging the superdelegate count to Clinton using the DNC as her personal money laundering service to evade federal campaign limits, the entire process was rigged against Sanders.

    This presents a two-fold problem for Democrats in 2020: Sanders is still bitter about it, and Democratic establishment still wants to screw him out of the nomination:

    WASHINGTON — When Leah Daughtry, a former Democratic Party official, addressed a closed-door gathering of about 100 wealthy liberal donors in San Francisco last month, all it took was a review of the 2020 primary rules to throw a scare in them.

    Democrats are likely to go into their convention next summer without having settled on a presidential nominee, said Ms. Daughtry, who ran her party’s conventions in 2008 and 2016, the last two times the nomination was contested. And Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is well positioned to be one of the last candidates standing, she noted.

    “I think I freaked them out,” Ms. Daughtry recalled with a chuckle, an assessment that was confirmed by three other attendees. They are hardly alone.

    From canapé-filled fund-raisers on the coasts to the cloakrooms of Washington, mainstream Democrats are increasingly worried that their effort to defeat President Trump in 2020 could be complicated by Mr. Sanders, in a political scenario all too reminiscent of how Mr. Trump himself seized the Republican nomination in 2016.

    Yes, it’s ever so “complicating” when you actually let voters choose the candidate they prefer rather than foisting the Jeb Bushes of the world on them.

    How, some Democrats are beginning to ask, do they thwart a 70-something candidate from outside the party structure who is immune to intimidation or incentive and wields support from an unwavering base, without simply reinforcing his “the establishment is out to get me”’ message — the same grievance Mr. Trump used to great effect?

    But stopping Mr. Sanders, or at least preventing a contentious convention, could prove difficult for Democrats.

    He has enormous financial advantages — already substantially outraising his Democratic rivals — that can sustain a major campaign through the primaries. And he is well positioned to benefit from a historically large field of candidates that would splinter the vote: If he wins a substantial number of primaries and caucuses and comes in second in others, thanks to his deeply loyal base of voters across many states, he would pick up formidable numbers of delegates.

    To a not-insignificant number of Democrats, of course, Mr. Sanders’s populist agenda is exactly what the country needs. And he has proved his mettle, having emerged from the margins to mount a surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton, earning 13 million votes and capturing 23 primaries or caucuses.

    His strength on the left gives him a real prospect of winning the Democratic nomination and could make him competitive for the presidency if his economic justice message resonates in the Midwest as much as Mr. Trump’s appeals to hard-edge nationalism did in 2016. And for many Sanders supporters, the anxieties of establishment Democrats are not a concern.

    That prospect is spooking establishment-aligned Democrats, some of whom are worried that his nomination could lure a third-party centrist into the field. And it is also creating tensions about what, if anything, should be done to halt Mr. Sanders.

    Some in the party still harbor anger over the 2016 race, when he ran against Mrs. Clinton, and his continuing resistance to becoming a Democrat. But his critics are chiefly motivated by a fear that nominating an avowed socialist would all but ensure Mr. Trump a second term.

    In this they’re probably right.

    “There’s a growing realization that Sanders could end up winning this thing, or certainly that he stays in so long that he damages the actual winner,” said David Brock, the liberal organizer, who said he has had discussions with other operatives about an anti-Sanders campaign and believes it should commence “sooner rather than later.”

    I remember them talking about “damaging Hillary” in 2016 as well, as though it was Sanders’ and his supporters’ loyal duty to lay down and allow themselves to be crushed rather trying to win. “The mere rank and file voter must not be allowed to interfere with the desires of their betters!”

    But to some veterans of the still-raw 2016 primary, a heavy-handed intervention may only embolden him and his fervent supporters.

    You don’t say!

    R. T. Rybak, the former Minneapolis mayor who was vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, complained bitterly about the party’s tilt toward Mrs. Clinton back then, and warned that it would backfire if his fellow mainstream Democrats “start with the idea that you’re trying to stop somebody.”

    If the party fractures again, “or if we even have anybody raising an eyebrow of ‘I’m not happy about this,’ we’re going to lose and they’ll have this loss on their hands,” Mr. Rybak said of the anti-Sanders forces, pleading with them to not make him “a martyr.”

    The good news for Mr. Sanders’s foes is that his polling is down significantly in early-nominating states from 2016, he is viewed more negatively among Democrats than many of his top rivals, and he has already publicly vowed to support the party’s nominee if he falls short.

    “Bernie Sanders believes the most critical mission we have before us is to defeat Donald Trump,” said Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager. “Any and all decisions over the coming year will emanate from that key goal.”

    Or, as former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri put it: “One thing we have now that we didn’t in ’16 is the uniting force of Trump. There will be tremendous pressure on Bernie and his followers to fall in line because of what Trump represents.”

    This is what professional observers call “a lie.” You didn’t have the uniting force of Trump back in 2016? I’m pretty sure you were all united in your hatred of him back then as well. And Bernie and his supporters had just as much pressure (if not more so) to fall in line.

    But Mr. Sanders is also taking steps that signal he is committed for the duration of the race — and will strike back aggressively when he’s attacked. On Saturday his campaign sent a blistering letter to the Center for American Progress, a Clinton-aligned liberal think tank, accusing them of abetting Mr. Trump’s attacks, of playing a “destructive” role in Democratic politics, and of being beholden to “the corporate money” they receive. The letter came days after a website aligned with the center aired a video highlighting Mr. Sanders’s status as a millionaire.

    See Monday’s clown care update for details.

    Snip.

    “If anybody thinks Bernie Sanders is incapable of doing politics, they haven’t seen him in Congress for 30 years,” said Tad Devine, Mr. Sanders’s longtime strategist, who is not working for his campaign this year. “The guy is trying to win this time.”

    But such outreach matters little to many Democrats, especially donors and party officials, who are growing more alarmed about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy.

    Mr. Brock, who supported Mrs. Clinton’s past presidential bids, said “the Bernie question comes up in every fund-raising meeting I do.” Steven Rattner, a major Democratic Party donor, said the topic was discussed “endlessly” in his orbit, and among Democratic leaders it was becoming hard to block out.

    “It has gone from being a low hum to a rumble,” said Susan Swecker, the chairwoman of Virginia’s Democratic Party.

    All these anti-Sanders quotes seem to have the same undercurrent “It is Bernie’s duty to do the will of the Party, and it is we party elite, not mere voters, who channel the true will of the Party.”

    Howard Wolfson, who spent months immersed in Democratic polling and focus groups on behalf of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, had a blunt message for Sanders skeptics: “People underestimate the possibility of him becoming the nominee at their own peril.”

    The discussion about Mr. Sanders has to date been largely confined to private settings because — like establishment Republicans in 2016 — Democrats are uneasy about elevating him or alienating his supporters.

    The difference between Republicans and Democrats in 2016? RNC chairman Reince Priebus, even though he was a Scott Walker guy, acted as fair, neutral overseer of the election process, refusing repeated calls to “derail Trump” for the “good of the party,” while DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz put her thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton at every turn. The end result was that Trump won and Clinton lost. The danger of thwarting the actual will of voters once again seems lost on Democratic Party insiders.

    The matter of What To Do About Bernie and the larger imperative of party unity has, for example, hovered over a series of previously undisclosed Democratic dinners in New York and Washington organized by the longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz. The gatherings have included scores from the moderate or center-left wing of the party, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California; Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader; former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., himself a presidential candidate; and the president of the Center for American Progress, Neera Tanden.

    “He did us a disservice in the last election,” said Mr. Schwartz, a longtime Clinton supporter who said he would support former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in this primary.

    Remember: actually trying to defeat the party’s One True Anointed Candidate is “a disservice.”

    But it is hardly only Mr. Sanders’s critics who believe the structure of this race could lead to a 50-state contest and require deal-cutting to determine a nominee before or at the convention.

    “If I had to bet today, we’ll get to Milwaukee and not have a nominee,” said Ms. Daughtry, who was neutral in the 2016 primary.

    The reason, she theorized, is simple: Super Tuesday, when at least 10 states vote, comes just three days after the last of four early states. After that, nearly 40 percent of the delegates will have been distributed — and, she suspects, carved up among candidates so that nobody can emerge with a majority.

    Unlike Republicans, who used a winner-take-all primary format, Democrats use a proportional system, so candidates only need to garner 15 percent of the vote in a primary or caucus to pick up delegates. And even if a candidate fails to capture 15 percent statewide, he or she could still win delegates by meeting that vote threshold in individual congressional districts.

    Should no bargain be struck by the time of the first roll call vote at the 2020 convention in Milwaukee — such as a unity ticket between a pair of the leading delegate-winners — the nomination battle would move to a second ballot. And under the new rules crafted after the 2016 race, that is when the party insiders and elected officials known as superdelegates would be able to cast a binding vote.

    The specter of superdelegates deciding the nomination, particularly if Mr. Sanders is a finalist, is highly unappetizing to party officials.

    Sure it is. I have absolutely no doubt that, if push comes to shove and Sanders comes into the convention with the most delegates but short of a majority, the DNC is going to find some way to screw him out of the nomination yet again, and by whatever means necessary. And it’s going to be hilarious. Also, I think many political junkies are secretly (or not-so-secretly) hoping for a brokered convention, since one hasn’t happened since 1952.

    “If he is consistently raising $6 million more than his next closest opponent, he’s going to have a massive financial advantage,” said Rufus Gifford, former President Barack Obama’s 2012 finance director, noting that Mr. Sanders would be able to blanket expensive and delegate-rich Super Tuesday states like California and Texas with ads during early voting there.

    Mr. Gifford, who has gone public in recent days with his dismay over major Democratic fund-raisers remaining on the sidelines, said of Mr. Sanders, “I feel like everything we are doing is playing into his hands.”

    But the peril of rallying the party’s elite donor class against a candidate whose entire public life has been organized around confronting concentrated wealth is self-evident: Mr. Sanders would gleefully seize on any Stop Bernie effort.

    “You can see him reading the headlines now,” Mr. Brock mused: “‘Rich people don’t like me.’”

    Fair enough, but a whole lot of the “rich people” who absolutely hate Sanders seem to be Democratic Party insiders and Hillary backers. And don’t forget that DNC Chair Tom Perez is a Clintonista who ruthlessly purged Sanders supporters from all DNC staff positions.

    Related thoughts from Robert Stacy McCain:

    All the “experts” on the Democrat side (most of whom are connected to the Clinton machine, in one way or another) believe Bernie Sanders can’t possibly defeat Trump, so they’re doing everything they can to stop him. Ask yourself why there’s been so much enthusiasm in the liberal media for Pete Buttigieg. That’s got all the hallmarks of a Team Clinton propaganda operation. After the attempt to launch Beto O’Rourke as a “rock star” candidate fizzled, Team Clinton looked around for some other available weapon to hurl at Bernie — they really hate Bernie — and apparently Buttigieg got the nod. Another hallmark of a Team Clinton operation? It’s failing. Despite everything his enemies have done to try to boost other candidates, Bernie’s support keeps growing. He’s gained more than five points, from 16.5% to 21.7% in the Real Clear Politics national average, in just the past couple of months.

    This is very good news for Republicans, by the way. Team Clinton’s meddling in the Democrat primary campaign will only add to the paranoid cult mentality among Bernie’s supporters, intensifying their commitment to their candidate, so that if anyone else gets the 2020 nomination, at least one-fifth of Democrats will believe that Bernie got cheated again. Anything that convinces the rank-and-file that the Democrat Party is essentially corrupt — yeah, that helps Trump.

    I’m not sure I buy the Buttigieg Boomlet as Clinton Op theory, but I do admit that it makes a certain amount of sense…

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    Clinton Corruption Update: The Converging

    Wednesday, January 31st, 2018

    As I previously mentioned, several Clinton Corruption scandals, and the Obama Administration FISA/Unmasking scandal, have been converging into one giant scandal for some time.

    Well things just got a whole lot more convergy. So I’m going to crank this out before the FISA abuse memo drops.

  • Would you believe that the FBI has a second secret Trump “dossier”, this one written by well know Clinton crony and dirty tricks man Cody Shearer?
  • More on the same subject:

  • You know what other Clinton cronies may have helped out on the fake dossier?

    Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SCS) wrote six Judiciary Committee letters requesting information from: John Podesta, Donna Brazille, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Robbie[sic] Mook, the DNC, and Hillary For America Chief Strategist Joel Benenson.

    The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s PAC was revealed by The Washington Post to have paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS for the creation of a dossier that would be harmful to then-candidate Donald Trump.

    Fusion commissioned former UK spy Christopher Steele to assemble the dossier – which is comprised of a series of memos relying largely on Russian government sources to make allegations against Donald Trump and his associates.

    According to court filings, Fusion also worked with disgraced DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and hired his CIA-linked wife, Nellie Ohr, to assist in the smear campaign against Trump. Bruce Ohr was demoted from his senior DOJ position after it was revealed that he met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson as well as Christopher Steele – then tried to cover it up.

    Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, denied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he knew about the dossier’s funding, while Clinton’s former spokesman, Brian Fallon, told CNN that Hillary likely had no idea who paid for it either.

    Current and past leaders of the DNC, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) also denied knowledge of the document’s funding.

    Podesta met with Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson the day after the Trump-Russia dossier was published by Buzzfeed News.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Why did so many FBI agents break the law? Because they expected President Hillary Clinton to reward them for their loyalty.

    the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity.

    On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1 percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

    Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails. Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of the United States?

    Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation” in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation.

    How could Lynch in the middle of an election have been so silly as to allow even the appearance of impropriety? Answer: There would have been no impropriety had Hillary won — an assumption reflected in the Page-Strzok text trove when Page texted, about Lynch, “She knows no charges will be brought.” In fact, after a Clinton victory, Lynch’s obsequiousness in devising such a clandestine meeting with Bill Clinton may well have been rewarded: Clinton allies leaked to the New York Times that Clinton was considering keeping Lynch on as the attorney general.

    How could former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe assume an oversight role in the FBI probe of the Clinton email scandal when just months earlier his spouse had run for state office in Virginia and had received a huge $450,000 cash donation from Common Good VA, the political-action committee of long-time Clinton-intimate Terry McAuliffe?

    Again, the answer was clear. McCabe assumed that Clinton would easily win the election. Far from being a scandal, McCabe’s not “loaded for bear” oversight of the investigation, in the world of beltway maneuvering, would have been a good argument for a promotion in the new Clinton administration. Most elite bureaucrats understood the Clinton way of doing business, in which loyalty, not legality, is what earned career advancement.

    Some have wondered why the recently demoted deputy DOJ official Bruce Ohr (who met with the architects of the Fusion GPS file after the election) would have been so stupid as to allow his spouse to work for Fusion — a de facto Clinton-funded purveyor of what turned out to be Russian fantasies, fibs, and obscenities?

    Again, those are absolutely the wrong questions. Rather, why wouldn’t a successful member of the Obama administrative aparat make the necessary ethical adjustments to further his career in another two-term progressive regnum? In other words, Ohr rightly assumed that empowering the Clinton-funded dossier would pay career dividends for such a power couple once Hillary was elected. Or, in desperation, the dossier would at least derail Trump after her defeat. Like other members of his byzantine caste, Ohr did everything right except bet on the wrong horse.

  • Another reason: to protect Obama.

    From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

    These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton–Obama emails. If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.

    If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.

  • You might have heard that Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe stepped down, possibly under pressure. Did you also hear that the whole “Hillary Emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop” scandal broke in October because McCabe didn’t want to investigate them?

    The Justice Department’s inspector general has been focused for months on why Andrew McCabe, as the No. 2 official at the FBI, appeared not to act for about three weeks on a request to examine a batch of Hillary Clinton-related emails found in the latter stages of the 2016 election campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

    The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, has been asking witnesses why FBI leadership seemed unwilling to move forward on the examination of emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) until late October — about three weeks after first being alerted to the issue, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

    A key question of the internal investigation is whether McCabe or anyone else at the FBI wanted to avoid taking action on the laptop findings until after the Nov. 8 election, these people said. It is unclear whether the inspector general has reached any conclusions on that point.

    A major line of inquiry for the inspector general has been trying to determine who at the FBI and the Justice Department knew about the Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop, and when they learned about them. McCabe is a central figure in those inquiries, these people said.

    (Hat tip: Sean Davis’ Twitter feed.)

  • It’s not just McCabe. FBI Director Christopher Wray will be replacing his chief of staff James Rybicki just a week after the latter testified to congress about his handling of EmailGate.
  • “Current and former FBI officials said McCabe’s resignation is the beginning of more resignations to come.”
  • 10 Takeaways From Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS Senate Testimony. Nicely divided between outright lies and mere evasion. (Hat tip: Powerline.)
  • The Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner divorce is off. Gee, do you think this might have to do with the fact that spouses cannot legally be compelled to testify against each other, but ex-spouses can?
  • ”It looks like the ‘James Bond’ behind the dossier let a Putin pawn do all the work.”

    it turns out the primary subcontractor worked not for Steele but for Simpson at Washington-based Fusion GPS, and he contributed key material for the investigation of Trump underwritten by the Clinton campaign. His name is Edward Baumgartner, a British national who speaks fluent Russian and runs a p.r. shop out of London (and who spent 2016 tweeting his forceful opposition to Trump’s candidacy).

    While Baumgartner was working on the dossier, he was also working for Simpson on another case to smear an anti-Putin whistleblower in an effort to help Putin-tied company Prevezon defend itself against US charges of money laundering.

    During that contract, which ran through October 2016, Baumgartner worked closely in Moscow with the Russian lawyer who lobbied Donald Trump Jr. at a now-infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 to help lift US sanctions on Russia. Her talking points were written by Simpson, who also dealt directly with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

    During the case, Simpson and Baumgartner also met with her partner, former Russian military intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin.

    As the Prevezon case was winding down, Simpson said he assigned Baumgartner, who shares his enmity toward Trump, to help dig up dirt on him. Baumgartner contributed research targeting the central Trump campaign figures charged in the dossier.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • FBI agents felt pressure to end the EmailGate probe early. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • I was thinking I should produce a dramtis persona for the Clinton/FusionGPS Uniconspiracy, but someone has already done one in handy flow-chart form.
  • Hillary Clinton refused to fire Burns Strider, the “faith advisor” for her 2008 Presidential campaign, despite allegations of sexual harassment. Why, it’s almost like there’s a pattern in the way she handles things…
  • Bill Clinton signed a $25 million contract with the Australian government that he wasn’t legally entitled to sign.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats | 2 Comments »

    House: Awan Gang Rampaged Through Dem Servers

    Thursday, January 18th, 2018

    Here’s some breaking news from the other, other, other Democratic scandal in Washington, D.C.:

    House investigators concluded that Democratic IT aides made unauthorized access to congressional servers in 2016, allegedly accessing the data of members for whom they did not work, logging in as members of Congress themselves, and covering their tracks, according to a presentation summarizing the findings of a four-month internal probe.

    Their behavior mirrored a “classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization,” and they continued even after orders to stop, the briefing materials allege. There are indications that numerous members’ data may have been secretly residing not on their designated servers, but instead aggregated onto one server, according to the briefing and other sources. Authorities said that the entire server was then physically stolen.

    When acting on the findings, Democratic leadership appear to have misrepresented the issue to their own members as solely a matter of theft, a comparison of the investigators’ findings with Democrats’ recollections and a committee’s public statement shows, leading 44 Democrats to not conduct protective measures typically taken after a breach — including informing constituents whose personal information may have been exposed. (A list of the involved members is below.)

    The presentation, written by the House’s Office of the Inspector General, reported under the bold heading “UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS” that “5 shared employee system administrators have collectively logged into 15 member offices and the Democratic Caucus although they were not employed by the offices they accessed.”

    It found indications that a House “server is being used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information” and “could be used to store documents taken from other offices.” The server was that of the House Democratic Caucus, a sister group of the DNC that was run at the time by then-Rep. Xavier Becerra.

    The aides named are Imran Awan, his wife Hina Alvi, his brothers Abid and Jamal, and his friend Rao Abbas, Pakistani-born aides whose lives are filled with reason for concern. Abid’s Ukranian wife Natalia Sova and Haseeb Rana were also involved in the Awans’ activities but departed the House payroll prior to the investigation.

    One systems administrator “logged into a member’s office two months after he was terminated from that office,” the investigative summary says.

    While the rules could have been violated for some innocuous purpose, the presentation indicates that is unlikely: “This pattern of login activity suggests steps are being taken to conceal their activity.”

    The list of affected Democratic Representatives (many of whom have been forcibly retired by voters or otherwise left office), alphabetized for your convenience:

  • Pete Aguilar (D-CA)
  • Brad Ashford (D-NE)
  • Ron Barber (D-AZ)
  • Karen Bass (D-CA)
  • Melissa Bean (D-IL)
  • Xavier Becerra (D-CA)
  • Chris Bell (D-TX)
  • Joyce Birdson Beatty (D-OH)
  • Julia Brownley (D-CA)
  • Tony Cardenas (D-CA)
  • John Carney (D-DE)
  • Andre Carson (D-IN)
  • Joaquin Castro (D-TX)
  • Ben Chandler (D-KY)
  • Katherine Clark (D-MA)
  • Yvette Clarke (D-NY)
  • Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO)
  • Jim Costa (D-CA)
  • Charlie Crist (D-FL)
  • Joe Crowley (D-NY)
  • Diana DeGette (D-CO)
  • Ted Deutch (D-FL)
  • Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
  • Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
  • Rahm Emanuel (D-IL)
  • Lois Frankel (D-FL)
  • Marcia Fudge (D-OH)
  • Joe Garcia (D-FL)
  • Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ)
  • Gwen Graham (D-FL)
  • Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM)
  • Debbie Halvorson (D-IL)
  • Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
  • Baron Hill (D-IN)
  • Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
  • Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH)
  • Robin Kelly (D-IL)
  • Dan Kildee (D-MI)
  • Ron Klein (D-FL)
  • Sandy Levin (D-MI)
  • Ted Lieu (D-CA)
  • Dave Loebsack (D-IA)
  • Donald McEachin (D-VA)
  • Kendrick Meek (D-FL)
  • Gregory Meeks (D-NY)
  • Seth Moulton (D-MA)
  • Patrick Murphy (D-FL)
  • Stephanie Murphy (D-FL)
  • Cedric Richmond (D-LA)
  • Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE)
  • Jacky Rosen (D-NV)
  • Tim Ryan (D-OH)
  • John Sarbanes (D-MD)
  • Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ)
  • Hilda Solis (D-CA)
  • Darren Michael Soto (D-FL)
  • Jackie Speier (D-CA)
  • Mark Takano (D-CA)
  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)
  • Henry Waxman (D-CA)
  • Robert Wexler (D-FL)
  • Frederica Wilson (D-FL)

    • Plus the House Democratic Caucus server.

    Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine a Republican had broken into one Democratic congressional servers. That would be front page news for weeks. Now imagine a Republican had broken into the servers of 44 Democratic congressmen, plus the DNC. There would be congressional hearings televised by every major network and calls to disband the RNC. But let five Pakistani nationals do the same thing and the MSM just can’t be arsed to even investigate it.

    It’s a huge scandal.

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    Donna Brazile Admits Hillary Clinton Gutted the DNC And Wore Its Skin To Shovel More Campaign Cash Into Her Gaping Maw

    Friday, November 3rd, 2017

    It’s been a ten pound week in a five pound bag, but there’s no rest for the wicked working the Clinton Corruption beat, so let’s just jump into this inescapable top story:

    I had promised Bernie [Sanders] when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers [No proof they were Russian hackers. -LP] and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

    So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

    Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

    By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

    * * *

    The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

    “What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

    That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

    If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

    On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

    “No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”

    “Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.

    Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

    “Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

    Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

    “That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

    “What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”

    The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.

    I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.

    When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.

    * * *

    Right around the time of the convention the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

    Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

    I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

    When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard [She was head of the DNC in the late phases of the 2016 campaign and she decided to go on vacation? -LP I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

    The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

    I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

    When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

    I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. [I’m imagining Brazil going office to office and asking “Hey, Random DNC staffer, are you fair and impartial, or are you working only for Hillary Clinton?” Random: “Oh, I’m totally fair!” -LP] Then I found this agreement.

    The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal [I’m not so sure about that. -LP], but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

    Some of the new details are welcome, though the fact that Clinton was using the DNC as her own personal money-laundering scam should be no surprise to anyone who follows this blog.

    If you wanted to destroy the Democratic Party, it would be harder to top the 1-2 punch of Obama-Clinton that’s left it broke and reeling. And all Trump Derangement Syndrome has done has distracted liberals from just how badly off their party is.

    But let’s be realistic: How on earth could the DNC pay for trivia like “running a political party” when there were all those Fusion GPS consultants to pay?

    (Probably pushing the LinkSwarm to Saturday. It’s been that kind of week…)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats | 3 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for October 20, 2017

    Friday, October 20th, 2017

    Enjoy another complimentary Friday LinkSwarm:

  • The Imran Awan scandal could result in hundreds of federal charges. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Remember Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that came up with the ludicrously fake Trump Dossier? They were called to testify before congress…and plead the fifth. “So you have what seems to be the Democrats, and Fusion GPS and these officials — intelligence agency bureaucrats — all blocking every single attempt we’re making to get the most basic information about this document, which … may have been the single document that sparked the entire Russia investigation in the first place.”
  • Bonus: That fake dossier may have been the basis of the FISA warrants used in the Trump unmasking scandal.
  • Kurt Schlichter is unimpressed with Salon’s list of Fredocons:

    The media only hires nominal conservatives who already agree with liberals, liberals have no idea what real conservatives think or why. This is the reason they end up baffled when they lose and lose and lose again – sure, Felonia von Pantsuit was also stupid and drunk, but you get the point. As Sun Tzu observed, and I believe this is a verbatim translation from the original Chinese text, a wise general must seek to know and understand the true nature and schemes of his enemy lest he end up as forlorn and humiliated as a foxy fern in the Miramax head office.

  • DNC Chair Tom Perez purges supporters of one-time rival Keith Ellison while filling key positions with Clinton supporters.
  • Speaking of which: Heh.
  • “Ralph Northam, Virginia’s Democratic nominee for governor, deleted his black running mate from his campaign fliers. His campaign says that’s not a big deal.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Plurality of Americans believe the media fabricate stories. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Try to protest by blocking roads? Welcome to a jail cell.
  • This piece on how Facebook changed the 2016 election is peppered with the usual left-wing slant (has any liberal media outlet ever been labeled “hyperpartican”?), but is also filled with nuggets of insight on how liberal complacency and conservative mastery of social media blind-sided Democrats.
  • Republicans gain in voter registration:

    In short, among the truly contested states in 2016, the only ray of hope for the Democrats is Colorado, and even there, the trends have flattened some. They have stabilized New Jersey and Delaware, but Republicans continue to gain significant ground in Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada, and above all, Pennsylvania. If these trends continue through 2020, Florida would be have a slight Republican registration edge, North Carolina would be nearly even, and New Mexico would be close enough that it could never be taken for granted. Moreover, Pennsylvania and Iowa would be solid Trump states.

    The remarkable thing about the Republican trending states is that they have moved steadily ever since last November, in almost every case without a single break. Democrats continue to lose voters, and they are not becoming independents. All of this appears to be due to Trump and Trump alone, as the Republican Party has not offered any reasons to embrace it.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • One of Obama’s “Dreamers” murders high school girl. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Denison Whataburger fires employee for refusing to serve police officers. Good.
  • Kobe Steel, Japan’s third largest steel manufacturer, falsified quality reports, affecting over 500 manufacturers. Enjoy your flight.
  • Heh 2. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Obama Scandals | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for September 15, 2017

    Friday, September 15th, 2017

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Cleanup from Harvey and Irma continues apace, and there was another London jihad terror attack.

  • Bomb attack on a London tube train injuries 20, but no reported deaths. “Officers believe that the blast on the train at Parsons Green, southwest London, was caused by an improvised explosive device and hundreds of detectives are now investigating with the assistance of MI5.” More west than southwest, I would say, since it’s north of the Themes and south of Earl’s Court.
  • Also, not one, but two jihad knife attacks in France today, fortunately with no fatalities. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Irma death toll is at 82, 39 of them in the United States, and 1.5 million homes remain without power.
  • “Houston councilman tells residents not to donate to Red Cross.”

    Houston City Councilman Dave Martin, who represents hard-hit Kingwood, had a message for the public about the American Red Cross.

    “I beg you not to send them a penny,” he said at Wednesday’s council meeting. “They are the most inept unorganized organization I’ve ever experienced.”

    In part of a broader rant that also roped in a perceived lack of assistance from his native New Orleans (“Send me your darn trucks, Mitch,” he said, a plea for the Big Easy’s mayor, Mitch Landrieu, to send waste trucks westward to haul off storm debris), Martin said local folks opened shelters and gathered water and supplies to help his northeastern suburb’s evacuees.

    “Don’t waste your money,” said Martin. “Give it to another cause.”

  • Woman downloads app during Harvey, and suddenly she’s doing rescue dispatch.
  • How many times must a gay Democratic mayor be accused of child sexual abuse before resigning? Judging by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, the answer is evidently “five.” Edited to add: Forgot to mention (as Dwight does in the comments below) that Murray was a member of Illegal Mayors Against Gun Owners.
  • Speaking of prominent Democratic office holders who are sex offenders, Anthony Weiner is arguing he doesn’t deserve to go to prison because it’s not his fault that those darn sexy 15-year-olds keep attracting his attention and taking advantage of his sickness. See Anthony, the thing is, when normal men receive a message like “High! I’m nubile jailbait!”, we ignore it because we’re: A.) Not perverts, and B.) Not complete morons. But only the dimmest, stupidest, sickest pervert would fall for that crap when he lives under a media microscope and after it’s already ruined his life.
  • The Awan family Democratic House member data breach gets murkier:

    On April 6, at midnight, in a small room once used as a phone booth on the second floor of the Rayburn House Office Building, a Capitol Hill Police Officer doing his security rounds discovered evidence that will possibly reveal one of the the biggest security breaches involving House Democrats by the Awan family, a group of entrusted IT staffers, according to court records, police reports and news reports.

    In the small room, the U.S. Capitol Police found a laptop computer registered to Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Florida Democrat and former DNC chairwoman. Wasserman-Schultz had been fighting authorities for months to return the laptop, that she once claimed was not hers.

    What’s more concerning, say senior House officials who spoke to Circa, is that Imran Awan was also allegedly transferring files – including documents and emails – of House Democrats to a secret server connected to the less secure House Democratic Caucus. The organization was then chaired by Rep. Xavier Becerra, who left Congress in January after being sworn in as the Attorney General of California.

    The Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak was the first to break the story and last week Rosiak reported Wasserman Schultz’s IT staffer, now indicted Awan, is believed to have planted her laptop in the Rayburn office room, along with his Pakistani ID card, copies of his driver’s license and his congressional ID badge. Awan also left behind letters to the U.S. attorney.

    Awan apparently wanted the evidence discovered, according to a Capitol Hill police report on the matter.

    Officials are now asking the question of why the computer was left but the answers remain elusive.

    “There is no reason to accommodate all the members data on one server and one that was apparently hidden,” said the Senior House official. “Why didn’t Xavier Becerra know this because it happened on his watch? Each member had their own server to protect against this and Awan intentionally tried to hide what he had done from investigators.”

    Becerra’s office did not return phone calls for comment.

    The House official told Circa that Awan was also allegedly uploading “terabits of information to dropbox so he was possibly able to access the information even after he was banned from the network.” The official said there is a need for a full congressional investigation on the matter.

    “I think this may lead to information as to who really accessed the DNC server – everybody talks about Russia – but look at the access (Awan) had and potentially those emails could have been sold,” the House official added.

  • Speaking of data breaches, here’s Brian Krebs on how to protect yourself after the Equifax data breach. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • “The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday that will provide $1.2 trillion to fund the government past Sept. 30, and will allocate $1.6 billion towards President Donald Trump’s border wall.” This is why I don’t freak out over all the reports of President Trump’s reported amnesty deal with Democrats. It’s not that I trust Trump, it’s that I have no interest in watching the magician make flourishes with his left hand. If such an amnesty actually approaches the voting stage, then I’ll worry. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Still, President Trump would do well to heed Kurt Schlicter’s advice and not let Chuck Schumer play him for a fool. “What we saw isn’t the art of the deal. This is the art of being suckered.”
  • An organizer for the #BlackLivesMatter rally where five Dallas police officers were killed has been arrested on felony theft charges. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Illegal alien arrested in murder involving a stolen police officer’s firearm was wearing an electronic monitor issued by United States immigration officials at the time.
  • “Outraged illegal aliens demand ICE announce their raids in advance.” Note: Not an Onion headline. (Hat tip: BigGator5’s Twitter feed.)
  • Obama Administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice admits that she unmasked Trump associates.
  • Even with President Donald Trump’s recent chumminess with Democratic congressional leaders, he’s less of an authoritarian threat than Hillary was. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Don Surber puts his finger on what’s ailing the Democratic Party:

    It comes down to one man.

    The leader of the party.

    Barack Obama.

    He was a terrible president.

    Also this:

    Calling us deplorable backfired too.

    Democrats are intellectually lazy. Decades of demonizing conservatives failed to win the last election. Name-calling won’t win votes. Racist, sexist, even Nazi, no longer have any meaning thanks to overuse.

    If Democrats want to win again, then they will have to sell their ideas, not their skin color, their sex, or any other superficiality.

    People want results, not tokens.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • How Antifa are helping reelect Donald Trump.

    It should be apparent, but evidently is not to antifa members and leaders, that the United States, despite Donald Trump being president, is not in a comparable situation to that of Weimar Germany on the eve of Hitler’s ascension to power…Leftist violence in the 1930s in Germany led many to support the Nazis in the hope they would put an end to the continuing street brawls and violence. Today, the antifa left may even help to get Donald Trump reelected in 2020.

  • “And they wonder why people don’t vote for Democrats around here anymore.”
  • In a poll of possible Democratic candidates for 2020, Bernie Sanders has a commanding lead over— [At this point a lynch mob broke into the writer’s house to wreck terrible vengeance upon him for mentioning the 2020 presidential election more than three years out.]
  • Democrats declare war on vaping.
  • Camille Paglia says that transgender activists are committing child abuse by advocating “sex change” surgery for children.

    In sex-reassignment surgery, even today, with all of its advances, cannot, in fact, change anyone’s sex. You can define yourself as a trans man or a trans woman or one of these new gradations along the scale, but ultimately every single cell in the human body, the DNA in that cell remains coded for your biological birth.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “The Left Is Still Freaking Out About Betsy DeVos Because School Choice Is An Existential Threat.”
  • Don’t look now, but there’s a new war in the Congo.
  • “Brexit: EU repeal bill wins first Commons vote.”
  • When are experts right and when are they wrong? Scott Adams offers some guidelines.
  • Oberlin College: Hey! Let’s go full Social justice Warrior! Reality: Hey! Enjoy declining enrollment and financial problems.
  • Russian company develops anti-riot truck that’s like a moving battlement. Looks like it would be adept at crushing pro-democracy protestors and Antifa equally.
  • Jack Kerouac: “You stupid hippies should get the hell off my lawn!”
  • How it took four decades to restore Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Including a fascinating interview with Welles from 1958.
  • “Commuters express concern as Thomas the Tank Engine falls to the power of Chaos.”
  • My library was featured on the Ace of Spades Sunday book thread.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for August 25, 2017

    Friday, August 25th, 2017

    Harvey has intensified into a Class 2 Hurricane overnight, and is expected to make landfall sometime around 1 AM, then stall and dump as much as 15-25 inches of rain from Brownsville to Houston.

    Naturally Houstonians are stocking up on the essentials: booze.

    Stay safe.

    Now enjoy your regularly scheduled Friday LinkSwarm:

  • “The Very Strange Indictment of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s IT Scammers:”

    To summarize, the indictment is an exercise in omission. No mention of the Awan group’s theft of information from Congress. Not a hint about the astronomical sums the family was paid, much of it for no-show “work.” Not a word about Wasserman Schultz’s keeping Awan on the payroll for six months during which (a) he was known to be under investigation, (b) his wife was known to have fled to Pakistan, and (c) he was not credentialed to do the IT work for which he had been hired. Nothing about Wasserman Schultz’s energetic efforts to prevent investigators from examining Awan’s laptop. A likely currency-transportation offense against Alvi goes uncharged. And, as for the offenses that are charged, prosecutors plead them in a manner that avoids any reference to what should be their best evidence.

    There is something very strange going on here.

  • Jihadists wanted to blow up Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona with a massive truck bomb.
  • DNC fundraising still sucking wind:

    The Democratic National Committee just posted its worst July fundraising numbers in a decade, raising questions about why the party machine cannot capitalize on President Trump’s low approval ratings and whether new Chairman Tom Perez is up to the task.

    The DNC raised $3.8 million last month, compared to $10.2 million for the Republican National Committee. The tally fit a pattern for the Democrats, who have posted a string of depressed fundraising numbers month after month this year, even after new party boss Perez took charge in February.

    Why, it’s almost like Russian conspiracy theories, LARP Nazis and the the imminent threat of Confederate statues doesn’t motivate Democratic donors to open their wallets. Or that Bernie Sanders supporters realize that the DNC is still the the hands of the same corrupt Clinton cronies who rigged the 2016 primaries…

  • “Ask yourself a few questions: Does the typical ‘swing’ voter who made the difference for Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin consider monuments to Robert E. Lee a major social problem?”
  • “Antifa Declares: ‘F**k Your F***ing Constitution, We’re Here to Punch Nazis.'” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Antifa beats their own ally at a rally. Way to win friends and influence people!
  • “Arrest warrants are out for three men who skipped their arraignments yesterday after being cuffed following the ‘Free Speech Rally’ on the Boston Common Saturday and massive counterdemonstration.” So if you spot Antifa dumbasses Adan Daroba, Roberto Bonilla or Chad Cruger, contact the police… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • It’s all fun and games until you take one in the yarbles.
  • Update: Joshua Stuart Cobin, AKA “tear gas in the nads guy” has been arrested for assault, evidently for kicking the tear gas canister back toward police. There are a lot of real crimes numerous Antifa protestors should be arrested for, but this one seems a very dubious charge if that’s all it’s for.
  • Kurt Schlichter wonders just what the hell does #NeverTrump think they’re accomplishing?

    Oh yeah, we’ll repeal Obamacare. Oh yeah, we’ll defend the border. Oh yeah, we’ll defund the baby-butchering cartel. Oh yeah, blah blah blah blah blah. All lies, but they didn’t care. They had their power and prestige and the promise of a fat paycheck down the road when they moved from Congress to K Street. Actual conservative ideology? Well, that was for the rubes. And we were the rubes. We in the base, who are suffering from the establishment’s incompetent mismanagement of the society it had been foolish to try to micromanage in the first place, tried to warn them. But the Fredocons wouldn’t listen, because they’re smart, not like everyone says, like dumb…

    That warning was called ‘the Tea Party,” and the GOP establishment didn’t like it either. Remember how all those activated Republican voters helped recapture Congress, yet most of the establishment types looked at them like they were something nasty that was smeared on their shoes? See, the base isn’t supposed to be activated. It’s supposed to be obedient. It’s supposed to turn out on election day to do volunteer work and write checks. It’s not supposed to try to have input. That’s for our betters, not for us.

    But the thing is, now we’re woke, and we’ve realized that our establishment sucks, and that we’re tired of being the suckees. They didn’t listen to us when we gave them the Tea Party, so now we gave them Trump. And they’re very, very upset with us. That’s a key reason they want to undercut Trump. Some people are just always going to want to trash the guy getting the attention and wielding the influence they think rightfully belongs to them. That’s true whether they are some donkey–looking senator from Arizona or Nebraska pimping a book about his agonizing moral struggles, or some tiresome op-ed scribbler serving as the domesticated house conservative on a failing liberal rag, or the invasion-happy beneficiary of his parents’ success who finds he can’t fill the cabins on his brochure’s cruises anymore.

  • “Chief Obamacare Architect Fired, Forced To Settle Fraudulent Billing Investigation In Vermont.” I know we were all hoping he’d be pushed off the Nakatomi Tower…
  • Mike Rowe smacks down a moron who called him a white nationalist:

    You say that White Nationalists believe that everyone who goes to college is an “academic elite.” You then say that Republicans promote “anti-intellectualism.” You offer no proof to support either claim, but it really doesn’t matter – your statements successfully connect two radically different organizations by alleging a shared belief. Thus, White Nationalists and The Republican Party suddenly have something in common – a contempt for higher education. Then, you make it personal. You say that Republicans “love” me because they believe that my initiative and “their” initiative are one and the same. But of course, “their” initiative is now the same initiative as White Nationalists.

    Very clever. Without offering a shred of evidence, you’ve implied that Republicans who support mikeroweWORKS do so because they believe I share their disdain for all things “intellectual.” And poof – just like that, Republicans, White Nationalists, and mikeroweWORKS are suddenly conflated, and the next thing you know, I’m off on a press tour to disavow rumors of my troubling association with the Nazis!

    Far-fetched? Far from it. That’s how logical fallacies work. A flaw in reasoning or a mistaken belief undermines the logic of a conclusion, often leading to real-world consequences. And right now, logical fallacies are not limited to the warped beliefs of morons with tiki torches, and other morons calling for “more dead cops.” Logical fallacies are everywhere.

  • “A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades.”
  • “One Statistics Professor Was Just Banned By Google.” Statistics professor Salil Mehta, adjunct professor at Columbia and Georgetown who teaches probability and data science, was banned by Google last Friday. “On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning.” His blog isn’t political and his Twitter account follows several prominent Democrats. (Update: restored.)
  • Mapping terrorist groups operating in Pakistan.
  • “After applying the latest big data technique to six 2,000 year-long proxy-temperature series we cannot confirm that recent warming is anything but natural – what might have occurred anyway, even if there was no industrial revolution.”
  • “For many Republicans, what matters most about Donald Trump is that he’s demonstrated resolve against the enemy — not the Islamic State or the Taliban, but the media.”
  • The Village Voice to end print publication. “Under its current ownership, the paper eliminated sex advertising.” Given that’s the only way “alternative” weeklies make money, I bet that was the final nail in the coffin. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Empower Texas has released their legislature ratings. A lot of Republicans ranked a lot lower than you might think…
  • Go to Cancun, do shots, get raped. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Freedom Center demands a retraction from the SPLC.
  • San Antonio ends ShotSpotters, one of those acoustic gunshot locator systems, because it doesn’t work. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • Whole Paycheck no more?
  • “Trump’s ‘energy dominance’ strategy starting to crack Eastern European markets.” Shipping coal to Ukraine and LNG to Lithuania to replace Russian sources. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Why it took time for electricity to replace the steam engine.
  • “A rising number of young Chinese people are failing fitness tests required to join the army because they are too fat and masturbate too much.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Captain Kirk destroys social justice warrior cling-ons.
  • Heh:

  • Nearing its 50th Anniversary, here’s a look back at how The Prisoner TV show got made.
  • Ladies, important safety tip: never allow a loaded gun in your vagina. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Global Warming, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for August 18, 2017

    Friday, August 18th, 2017

    The House IT scandal, another UK Islamic rape ring, jihad terror attacks, Charlottesville, Google: Another packed week of news, all big stories that deserve more time than I have to fully untangle. I especially don’t want to get dragged into the endless Charlottesville debate/recrimination/squirrel! morass, since that’s exactly where the leftwing activists and the MSM (but I repeat myself) want us to focus our attention, rather than the economy or Islamic terrorism.

    Plus two Disney links, just because that’s the way the week shook out.

  • “Newcastle has joined a list of British cities where grooming gangs, made up of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men, systematically rape and abuse vulnerable, white girls. A nationwide pattern emerged after the first prosecutions in Rotherham, and then Rochdale, where a ‘culture of silence’ and political correctness led to inaction by authorities who feared being called ‘racist’.”
  • Barcelona jihad terror attacks kill 13.
  • But news reports go out of their way to avoid mentioning “Islam” or “Jihad.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • On the same subject:

  • Jihad stabbing attack in Finland? Obviously Finland needs stricter knife control…
  • “Imran Awan, a former IT aide for Democratic Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was indicted Thursday on four counts including bank fraud and making false statements.”
  • The Feds also indicted Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi. “In addition to lying on multiple mortgage disclosures, as an affidavit alleged at the time of Imran’s arrest, the indictment claims Hina lied by claiming medical hardship in order to withdraw hundreds of thousands of dollars from a retirement program.”
  • “Feds Accuse Former Texas Police Chief of Working with Mexican Cartel.”

    McALLEN, Texas — Federal authorities arrested a former chief and current police sergeant for his role in allegedly helping Mexico’s Gulf Cartel move cocaine and marijuana through his jurisdiction. The Texas cop claimed that he needed money to pay for his upcoming bid for county constable after a failed attempt for the Hidalgo County Sheriff position.

    Current Progreso Police Sergeant Geovani Hernandez went before U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter Ormsby who formally charged him with one count of possession with intent to distribute cocaine and one count of aiding and abetting the distribution of cocaine.

    The case against Hernandez began earlier this year when agents with U.S. Homeland Security Investigations received information from a confidential informant indicating that Sgt. Geovani Hernandez was working for the Gulf Cartel, court records obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed. According to the documents, Hernandez bragged to an informant that he was a friend of former Gulf Cartel leader Juan Manuel “El Toro” Loza Salina and was able to travel to Reynosa without heat. The Texas cop told the informant that he needed money for his upcoming race for Hidalgo County Constable.

    Hernandez, like the majority of candidates running for office in the Rio Grande Valley, is a Democrat. The person he lost to in the 2012 Democratic, Guadalupe “Lupe” Trevino, is in prison for money-laundering. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Participant at Charlottesville rally claims police actively pushed attendees into the arms of antifa to be attacked. Which would seem to be a misuse of police power even if the people being abused are white nationalist scumbag LARP Nazis.
  • Agreeing with the above version of events: Those well-known Nazi sympathizers, the ACLU:

    “I was there and brought concerns directly to the secretary of public safety and the head of the Virginia State Police about the way that the barricades in the park limiting access by the arriving demonstrators and the lack of any physical separation of the protesters and counter-protesters on the street were contributing to the potential of violence,” said Gastanaga. “They did not respond. In fact, law enforcement was standing passively by, seeming to be waiting for violence to take place, so that they would have grounds to declare an emergency, declare an ‘unlawful assembly’ and clear the area.”

  • “The ridiculous campaign by virtually every media outlet, every Democrat and far too many squishy Republicans to label Trump some kind of racist and Nazi sympathizer is beginning to have the stink of an orchestrated smear. The conflagration in Charlottesville is beginning to feel like a set-up, perhaps weeks or months in the planning.” Also this tidbit I’ve seen elsewhere: “The ‘founder’ of Unite The Right, Jason Kessler, was an activist with Occupy Wall Street and Obama supporter.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Charlottesville Deputy Mayor’s Troubling Twitter Feed: ‘I Hate Seeing White People.'”
  • “As for Antifa, it’s a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were,” Noam Chomsky told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant.” Noam Chomsky and I agreeing on something. And the moon became as blood… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Why Was This ‘Crowd Hire’ Company Recruiting $25 An Hour ‘Political Activists’ In Charlotte Last Week?”
  • Scott Adams: “How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble”:

    A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies.

    Snip.

    One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.

    Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis are “fine people.” Crazy stuff.

  • German town of Bad Nenndorf discovers best way to defeat both Neo-Nazis and Antifa: Have a big party! (Hat tip: Will Shetterly.)
  • “7 Things You Need to Know About Antifa,” including the fact that 92% still live with their parents.
  • On this Althouse thread I joked that SJWs would soon start digging up the graves of Confederate soldiers to put their bones on trial for war crimes. Guess what?
  • Next up on the statue destruction spree: Well-known Confederate sympathizer Abraham Lincoln, whose statues have been the target of multiple incidents of vandalism.
  • The hard left is drawing up big plans for November 4. “It’s very likely nothing will come of this, that it’s just another left-wing wish-fulfillment pantomime of a type carried out by leftists every year – if not every six months – since the 60s.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Where this is all leading:

  • Google engineer James Damore explains why he was fired:

    I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences (and, yes, I said that bias against women was a factor too). Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai declared that portions of my statement violated the company’s code of conduct and “cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

    My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” My firing neatly confirms that point.

  • “James Damore was just fired for being insufficiently Googly.”

    He rejected Google’s internal mythology, and worse, he did so with basic math, in a company where mathiness is supposed to be part of the culture.

    He also rejected a piece of the general mythology so firmly that what he said was actively misreported — so blatantly that one has to conclude the reporters either can’t read the hard parts of the memo, didn’t bother to read the memo, or somehow managed to see things that weren’t there. (That last is my guess, based on the examples of Trump Trance we’ve seen over the last six months.)

  • “I’m An Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader And I’m Sick Of Our Approach To Diversity!”

    In the copious hiring I did at Google, 97% of the people I hired were men. I wrote reams of appeals to the hiring committee to make cases for cross-functional candidates who would be great assets to Google, even though a (typically) male dominated software engineering interview crew did not find these candidates up to snuff. I had a 90+% success rate changing the hiring decision for these candidates. Almost every one of these hires made an amazing difference to the company. 98+% of these candidates were men.

    It’s not like I wasn’t trying to hire women. But I was working with a candidate pool composed of 90% men. Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there. There was no way I was going to come out of that with a larger percentage of women hires than I did.

  • Slashdot commenter nails them for their endless social justice warrioring:

    Yes, there are some unproductive people in major corporations and the media who wish to push their left-leaning political agendas on the public at large.

    But we want no part of it.

    And you know what? It’s no different here at Slashdot.

    We come here to learn about new technologies, about new scientific and mathematical discoveries, and to discuss computing.

    We don’t want to waste our days arguing about genitalia, sexual preference, racism, and transgenderism.

    We just want this bullshit to end.

    We want those on the political left to stop trying to divide society into small groups based on arbitrary traits.

    Or at the very least, we want everybody else to ignore the divisions that the political left are trying to create.

  • Is a war between China and India brewing in the Himalayas? That would seem to be a bigger story than some century-old statues. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Liberals: “There should be fewer regulations on cool things I like!” Everyone else: “What about regulations on things other people like?” Liberals: “Fuck them!”
  • Madness is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
  • “Jury orders blogger to pay $8.4 million to ex-Army colonel she accused of rape.”
  • College girl gets her picture taken with the Vice President. Lunatics freak out.
  • If any Republican wrote that Adolf Hitler was “had in him the stuff of which legends are made,” the way John F. Kennedy wrote in his diary in 1945, his career would be over.
  • Ted Nugent believes he would be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if he weren’t such an outspoken supporter of gun rights. He’s probably right: How do you think is a bigger “Rock and Roll Legend”: Ted Nugent, or ABBA?
  • In case you’re wondering how big a joke that Southern Poverty Law Center “hate list” is, Bosch Fawstin, a critic of Islam who drew Mohammed and was targeted for assassination in Garland, is evidently a “hate group” all on his own:

  • “He tried to kill them with a forklift!” Alice in Wonderland, that is. Who is a man. And then it gets weird…
  • The rise and fall of Disney’s River Country, a small water park near Disney World in Orlando that’s been closed and allowed to decay for 15 years.
  • “10 Disney Princesses Re-imagined as Electoral Maps.”

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