Posts Tagged ‘Minneapolis’

LinkSwarm for April 30, 2021

Friday, April 30th, 2021

If you live inside the Austin city limits and haven’t voted yet, don’t forget to vote to reinstate the camping ban tomorrow!

  • Joe Biden declares war on America:

    The country had “done nothing about immigration in 30 years,” (most of them under Clinton and Obama), except that under Trump illegal immigration was reduced by 90 percent, and the principal problem was effectively solved until Biden stopped construction of the southern border wall and reopened the borders. He said it was time to do something about the ”dreamers” but that was not the policy of his party when Trump attempted to help them. Biden called for resources to deal with the “root cause of why people are fleeing” Central America as if it were the business of the United States to raise the welfare of those poor countries, and feed more graft into them, rather than to monitor its own border and apply a sane system of an admission of immigrants.

    He revived the old Obama nonsense about combating employment with unionized green jobs, and leaped into the time warp of bygone days with the bunk that “the middle class built the country and the unions built the middle class, and we must promote the right to unionize.” Unions today are an almost wholly retrograde force redundant to market pressures for higher wages and better working conditions and largely confined to the stagnant backwater the public sector.

    The former administration created huge numbers of “millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes…adding $2 trillion of debt and extending the pay disparity between the chief executive and the lowest wage earner to 320 to 1.” Naturally ignored were the facts that under his predecessor the income taxes of 83 percent of taxpayers were reduced, the number of positions to be filled exceeded the number of unemployed by over 750,000 and the lowest 20 percent of income-earners was in percentage terms gaining income more swiftly than the top ten percent.

    He taxed the former administration with “trickle-down” economics, though that charge was leveled at President Reagan’s massively popular and successful economic policies. Most outrageously, Biden took all credit for 220 million vaccinations with no hint that if it had not been for Trump’s direct intervention to accelerate the development of vaccines, none of it would have happened.

    Almost as disingenuous was the claim that House of Representatives Bill Number 1, which would effectively eliminate any serious method of verifying the validity of individual votes, is really an attack on the Republican effort to attack “the sacred right to vote.“ That bill is almost certainly unconstitutional, would institutionalize and protect mass ballot harvesting, and it ignores the fact that 77 percent of Americans support photo-identification for voters.

    The climate was again bandied as an “existential crisis” even though Biden acknowledged that the U.S. only provides 15 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. He also omitted to mention its splendid record in reducing those omissions even though there remains no convincing argument that they are relevant to the alleged crisis. Foreign affairs was an unrecognizable dreamworld: ”while leading with our allies” and “working closely“ with them to deal with Iran and North Korea, (principally by recommitting the West to acquiescing in Iranian nuclear militarization), he will ”stand up to (Chinese leader) Xi” whom he realizes is ”in deadly earnest” in his determination to supplant the United States as the world’s most important country.

    After the usual reassertion that everyone is created equal, Biden slipped in the need to ”root out systemic racism that plagues America… White supremacy is terrorism” and has “surpassed Jihadism” as a menace. He gave no hint of what he thinks of organizations that are constantly threatening to burn America down if they’re not successful in extracting a full-body immersion in self-humiliation from the majority of Americans who despise all racism. Rarely in his rabidly bowdlerized summary of the nation’s affairs does the president allow the truth to intrude. This made the opposition response by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina particularly effective.

    (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)

  • Dissecting Biden’s lies.

    Biden tried to persuade his audience that gun violence has exploded due to the expiration of the ban on “assault weapons” in the early 2000s.

    In fact, says [David] Harsanyi, “the rate of gun homicide continued falling for more than a decade after the ban ended, even though gun ownership exploded.” Indeed, “from 2006, overall homicides fell ten out of 14 years” and “twenty-one years after a gun violence peaked in 1993, and a decade after the assault-weapon ban ended, homicides by firearms hit a historic low.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • North Carolina Senator Tim Scott have the response speech to Biden’s. Naturally, Democrats went full racist in response.
  • MIT study: Social distancing and limited occupancy are bunk.
  • Unions Sell Out Their Own Workers for the Biden Energy Plan“:

    Another pro-President Joe Biden union just told its rank-and-file members: Sorry, guys, you are all fired.

    Last week, the United Mine Workers of America union endorsed Biden’s energy policies. Yes, you read that right. The coal-mining union bosses have embraced a bill that outlaws coal mining.

    This is about as dumb as the Pipefitters Union endorsing Biden for president. He repaid them with his first act as president — killing the Keystone pipeline. So now we have the Pipefitters Union against pipelines and the coal miners union against coal.

    Did anyone bother to actually ask the rank-and-file members what they thought? Can they get their union dues back?

    They should. The livelihoods of more than 50,000 coal miners just got sold down the river by their own union bosses.

  • “Bill to Ban Critical Race Theory from Texas Classrooms Passes House Committee.”

    State Reps. Steve Toth (R-The Woodlands) and James White (R-Hillister) are each carrying an identical duplicate of the bill, though the Public Education Committee of the Texas House only passed Toth’s. White’s twin never received a hearing.

    The bill tackles a number of educational tactics feared by some Republicans to be nascent trends in the classroom, such as “action civics,” overly political curriculums, and a strain of sociological thought which organizes racism through structural rather than interpersonal terms, translated from academia to popular literacy by bestselling writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and commonly called “critical race theory.”

    Specifically, the bill would adjust three key areas of education: the state curriculum, classroom education, and training for teachers and other employees.

    It would require the State Board of Education to include an understanding of the country’s founding documents in the state curriculum standards, as well as an understanding of “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government.”

    On top of barring teachers from asking students to engage in political activism, the bill would also forbid teachers from promoting racial preferences or concepts like inherent racism and racial guilt. It bans similar ways of teaching with regards to gender, such as fostering guilt on account of sex, teaching inherent or unconscious sexism, and encouraging worse treatment for one sex over another.

    Lastly, it would forbid “training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex” for school employees.

    Good. Critical Race Theory is pure poison.

  • Tape leaks exposing the truth about Iran’s government:

    Deeply embarrassing leaked audio has surfaced which has sparked a crisis in Iran and which may negatively impact ongoing nuclear talks in Vienna. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was heard in audio confirmed by The New York Times as authentic saying that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) overrules many government decisions, strongly suggesting it’s the military that’s actually fully in control of the country. While this may be to some degree stating the obvious, it’s hugely unexpected for Iran’s top civilian diplomat to actually candidly admit as much. One state media newspaper has already emphasized it’s a major “scandal” for the country.

    Zarif is typically very guarded, but in the tapes that surfaced Sunday (it’s unclear at this point the origin of the leak) he’s heard discussing slain Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani and how the elite commander undermined him in a variety of ways, noting he often went against Iran’s interests. The audio interview took place over two months ago, reports say, and was intended as a classified “oral history” project covering President Rouhani’s two terms in office from Zarif’s perspective.

    “In the Islamic Republic the military field rules,” Zarif is heard telling a pro-government journalist.”I have sacrificed diplomacy for the military field rather than the field servicing diplomacy.” He goes so far as to say that Soleimani would often task himself as Iran’s top diplomat with “requirements”.

  • “John Kerry, Enemy of Israel“:

    We know now that former secretary of state John Kerry isn’t merely a critic of Israel; he is an adversary. In leaked audiotapes obtained by the U.K.-based Iran International, as reported by the New York Times, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a supporter that the former secretary of state had informed him about “at least” 200 covert Israeli actions against Iranian interests in Syria. Zarif listened to this information in “astonishment.”

    Snip.

    A high-ranking American official feels comfortable sharing this information with an autocratic adversary — a government that’s murdered hundreds of Americans, regularly kidnapped them, interfered with our elections, and propped up a regime that gasses its people — about the covert actions of a long-time American ally. What else did he tell Zarif? The Times doesn’t say.

    It wouldn’t be surprising if Israel was more reluctant to share intel with the United States when Democrats such as Kerry show more fondness for those making genocidal threats against the Jewish people than they do for the state that protects them. It’s worth remembering that others like Senator Chris Murphy (who is now “requesting a classified briefing” on the Natanz incident, in which Israel likely sabotaged a nuclear facility) also secretly met with Zarif in Munich in a coordinated effort to undercut the Trump administration’s efforts to derail Iran’s ongoing nuclear-weapons program — an incident that comports far more closely with the definition of “collusion” than anything turned up against Trump officials. We have no idea what Murphy discussed with Zarif, either.

    We do know that after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani — head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force and the terror group behind the death of over 600 American servicemen and thousands of others — Kerry and Murphy were among the many people scaremongering over a “massive regional war” that never materialized. In his leaked conversation, Zarif says of Soleimani that “by assassinating him in Iraq, the United States delivered a major blow to Iran, more damaging than if it had wiped out an entire city in an attack.”

  • Illinois judge finds state firearms ID law unconstitutional:

    “A citizen in the State of Illinois is not born with a Second Amendment right. Nor does that right insure when a citizen turns 18 or 21 years of age. It is a façade. They only gain that right if they pay a $10 fee, complete the proper application, and submit a photograph.

    If the right to bear arms and self-defense are truly core rights, there should be no burden on the citizenry to enjoy those rights, especially within the confines and privacy of their own homes. A citizen’s Second Amendment rights should not be treated in the same manner as a driver’s license.”

  • “One Year After George Floyd, Minneapolis Is ‘Murderapolis‘ Again.”

    It simply cannot be disputed that the prevalence of unjust killing and violence in the Twin Cities area has vastly increased since last summer’s protests and riots. Minneapolis recorded its second-most homicides ever in 2020 — after only 1995, when the city was ignobly dubbed “Murderapolis” in national media. And the trend has continued to escalate in 2021: between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.

    “We’re gonna blow Murderopolis off the charts this year,” one Minneapolis cop told me. (Names in this post have been withheld or partially redacted. As you may be aware, there is often intense suspicion of journalists amongst both civilians and police.)

    The situation is roughly the same in Saint Paul, which tied its all-time record for homicides in 2020. This year, it is on pace to break that record comfortably. The latest homicide was on Sunday night; a man was shot and killed outside a bar in an apparent carjacking. I visited the bar the following day and there was hardly any sign something was amiss — the manager only insisted that the killing had nothing to do with the bar. (Carjackings in the area have surged to an astronomical degree…)

    “There’s way more people it seems like with guns now than there ever has been,” another Minneapolis cop told me, and “much less hesitation to use them.” These officers theorize that the explanation for the crime surge is related to the city’s political climate over the past year, which in their view has allowed perpetrators to wreak havoc without consequence. “They feel emboldened and they feel untouchable, in my opinion,” the cop said.

  • Texas school district with no racial achievement gap inexplicably institutes white-shaming critical race theory classes. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
  • “Texas Senate Approves Ban on Puberty Blockers, Sex-Change Surgeries for Minors.”
  • “Chinese Smart TV-Maker Accused of Spying on Owners’ Other Devices. “Smart TVs made by Skyworth were found to have an app — Gozen Data — installed on the Android-based operating system of the TV, according to a post on the V2EX website titled ‘My TV is monitoring all connected devices.’ According to the post, Gozen Data scanned for and collected the names of his computer, his network interface card, IP addresses, and the usernames of those connected to his and other local wifi networks.” Chinese electronic devices spying? Try to contain your shock…
  • “Faced with complaints from parents about the indoctrination of children, an official in Rockwood School District, Missouri, instructed teachers to create two sets of curriculum: a false one to share with parents, and then the real set of curriculum, focused on topics like activism and privilege, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.” Fire everyone.
  • Dan Crenshaw update:

  • People you’re not allowed to make fun of part 1: cop suspended for daring to make fun of LeBron James.

    But: Just pulled in $100,000 from GoFundMe.

  • People you’re not allowed to make fun of part 2: University of San Diego law professor Tom Smith may be fired for daring to make fun of the Chinese Communist Party.
  • Eric S. Raymond thinks that since Microsoft makes most of its money off its Azure cloud services these days, and most of their cloud stuff is already on Linux, that their desktop future is actually running Windows on top of Linux via an emulation layer. Maybe. But if the history of tech teaches us anything, there will probably be some new, unforeseen technology that massively disrupts the entire market. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Still a lot of pollen this time of year…

  • Researchers remove offerings left in “Satanic” Icelanidc cave intended to help ward off the apocalypse. The rest of the script pretty much writes itself, doesn’t it? (Hat tip: Jack Posobiec.)
  • Merica:

  • “Dems: ‘If America Isn’t Racist, How Do You Explain These White Hoods We’re Wearing?'”
    

  • What sort of grade do you get if you don’t even show up for school for two years? In Baltimore, a D-. “Nearly half of students in one Baltimore high school have 0.99 GPA or lower.” (Hat tip: Nick Short.)
  • What happens when a hot round blows up your singles-shot .50 BMG in your face. Short summary: Holy crap! For values of “Holy crap!” that includes a lacerated jugular, in-tubing a collapsed lung without anesthetic, Lifeflight, orbital bone repair and 5 pints of blood. This is probably a good excuse to throw up another link to Dwight’s overview of his “stop the bleed” course.
  • I was thinking of bidding on this, but I fear the shipping from Europe would be prohibitive.
  • “College is a $120,000 hooker, and you are an idiot who fell in love with her!”
  • “Biden Official Confirms Plans to Ban Fried Chicken and Grape Drink.”

    The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to institute more measures to safeguard black lives by banning products they like. After it was announced that the Biden administration would prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes, officials are looking at other ways the government can save the black community from itself.

    Only days after the menthol ban was announced, the FDA declared that it was pushing full steam ahead with its effort to rescue the black community through what they refer to as “strategic race-based prohibition.” An FDA official explained that the fried fowl and grape-flavored cola – also known as “grape drank” – must be banned because “these hopeless negroes don’t know how to act.”

    “Preventing black people from killing themselves by banning certain products is the least we can do given the level of oppression they have endured in this country,” said a high-ranking member of the Biden administration. “This is why fried chicken and grape soda have to go.”

    He added: “How could they possibly survive if we don’t make these decisions for them?”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • There’s something weirdly fascinating about this video of England from 1901:

  • I bought some original art based on a timeless theme. And that theme is “Godzilla.”
  • It’s Friday!

  • LinkSwarm For April 23, 2021

    Friday, April 23rd, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another super-late Friday LinkSwarm! Been a busy week at the day job. I hope that next week is less frantic, but I also have to start working on my taxes…
    
    

  • Father pulls daughter out of tony private Brearley school and and his letter why is blistering:

    It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley’s antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.

    I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.

    I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country’s history and adds no understanding to any of today’s societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction.

    I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression. Facile and unsupported beliefs such as these are the polar opposite to the intellectual and scientific truth for which Brearley claims to stand. Furthermore, I call bullshit on Brearley’s oft-stated assertion that the school welcomes and encourages the truly difficult and uncomfortable conversations regarding race and the roots of racial discrepancies.

    I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites. Brearley, by adopting critical race theory, is advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work. What Brearley is teaching our children is precisely the true and correct definition of racism.

    I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners. They are an insult to parents and unbecoming of any educational institution, let alone one of Brearley’s caliber.

    I object to Brearley’s vacuous, inappropriate, and fanatical use of words such as “equity,” “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought. And if Brearley really cared about “inclusiveness,” the school would return to the concepts encapsulated in the motto “One Brearley,” instead of teaching the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors.

    l object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests.

    I object to, as we have been told time and time again over the past year, that the school’s first priority is the safety of our children. For goodness sake, Brearley is a school, not a hospital! The number one priority of a school has always been, and always will be, education. Brearley’s misguided priorities exemplify both the safety culture and “cover-your-ass” culture that together have proved so toxic to our society and have so damaged the mental health and resiliency of two generations of children, and counting.

    I object to the gutting of the history, civics, and classical literature curriculums. I object to the censorship of books that have been taught for generations because they contain dated language potentially offensive to the thin-skinned and hypersensitive (something that has already happened in my daughter’s 4th grade class). I object to the lowering of standards for the admission of students and for the hiring of teachers. I object to the erosion of rigor in classwork and the escalation of grade inflation. Any parent with eyes open can foresee these inevitabilities should antiracism initiatives be allowed to persist.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “Facebook Bigwig Donated Millions to Black Lives Matter. Then The Company Censored Criticism of BLM’s Controversial Founder.” Try to contain your shocked face.

    Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz has poured over $5 million into a network of nonprofits run by Black Lives Matter leader Patrisse Cullors, according to financial disclosure records, raising questions about whether this relationship played a role in the company’s decision to censor unflattering news articles about the activist last week.

    The social media giant blocked its users from posting links to a New York Post story that revealed Cullors, a self-described Marxist, spent $3.2 million on high-end real estate as her Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation raked in millions in donations.

    Facebook said the reporting violated its “privacy and personal information policy.” The Post argued that the decision was “so arbitrary as to be laughable” and noted that the media routinely report on real estate purchases by other celebrities and political figures without facing social media censorship.

  • “Democrat Mayor, BLM Activist Hit With 11 Child Sex Felony Charges.””Robert Jacob, progressive former mayor of Sebastopol in Sonoma County, Northern California, was arrested for ‘five felony and one misdemeanor sexual assault charges against a minor,’ according to a statement from the Sebastopol Police Department.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
  • “The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick’s Death. And They Just Got Caught.”

    It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

    So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died — and, just like the now-discredited Russian bounty story also unveiled by that same paper, cable outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible….

    As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick’s own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media’s claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.

    But the gruesome story of Sicknick’s “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren’t murdered by them, then nobody was (without Sicknick, the only ones killed were four pro-Trump supporters: two who died of a heart attack, one from an amphetamine overdose, and the other, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot point blank in the neck by Capitol Police despite being unarmed). So crucial was this fairy tale about Sicknick that it made its way into the official record of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, and they had Joe Biden himself recite from the script, even as clear facts mounted proving it was untrue.

  • “Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey may have just handed over the city to rioters as he made it clear that the overarching leftist narrative surrounding the Derek Chauvin trial is the real story, regardless of the facts.”
  • “Corporations that have criticized election reform — including Apple, American Airlines, and Uber — have received over $2 billion in Texas public dollars collectively.”

    The information was compiled by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a think-tank and supporter of Texas’ election reform legislation.

    That total is likely even higher due to undisclosed subsidy amounts for multiple companies.

    Most of the public funds come from state and local subsidies, with the single biggest beneficiary being Berkshire Hathaway, run by Warren Buffett, which has pulled in $802 million for its subsidiary Nebraska Furniture Mart.

    (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)

  • Speaking of TPPF: he idea that expanding Medicaid by embracing ObamaCare is bunk:

    But that’s not the experience in states that have expanded Medicaid.

    New York, one of the earliest and most earnest adopters of Medicaid expansion, has seen Medicaid enrollment explode in the last decade and is now dealing with a $6 billion budget shortfall.

    In California, lawmakers cut money from education just to stay afloat as they addressed an astonishing $54 billion deficit. The new demands of Medicaid expansion placed on the state’s budget mean either more cuts to critical programs or ballooning deficits.

    Enrollment of able-bodied adults in the California program ended up 278% over official projections, with actual cost hitting nearly $44 billion instead of a projected $11.6 billion over a two-and-a-half year period. One out of every three people in California are now on Medicaid.

    It’s not just big blue states. Ohio, thanks to Medicaid expansion, now allots a full 38 percent of its state budget to Medicaid spending. It was just 21 percent prior to expansion in 2009.

    This is true in Indiana as well, where the share of the state budget eaten up by Medicaid has doubled from 18 percent to 35 percent since 2000. On average, states that expanded were about 50 percent over enrollment and spending projections.

    States see dramatic increases in spending whenever Medicaid is expanded. This problem is even worse now because there is a federal prohibition against removing any enrollees from the program — in place until the COVID-19 emergency expires. States are handcuffed indefinitely.

    Texas can’t ignore these outcomes.

  • What. The. Hell? “The Postal Service is running a ‘covert operations program‘ that monitors Americans’ social media posts.” Who they hell approved that bright idea and can we get them fired? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “That Maskless Texan Apocalypse Still Hasn’t Arrived“:

    Texas’s statewide mask mandate ended March 9. The day before, Texas had 5,119 new cases of COVID-19, and the seven-day average for new cases was 3,971. On that day, the state had 126,404 active cases of COVID-19. As of March 9, the seven-day average for new deaths was 104.

    Yesterday, the state had 3,859 new cases, and the seven-day average for daily new cases is 3,057. The state had 93,430 active cases. The seven-day average for new deaths was 54. As I noted in late March and early April, the end of the statewide mask mandate did not generate a surge in cases or deaths, and shouldn’t have been reflexively denounced as “Neanderthal thinking” by President Biden.

  • Tokyo Olympics bans taking a knee. “The IOC’s Rule 50 forbids any kind of ‘demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda’ in venues and any other Olympic area and the Games body concluded the rule should be maintained following an athlete consultation.”
  • Another day, another professor busted for lying about receiving money from communist China, in this case mathematics professor Mingqing Xiao of Southern Illinois University – Carbondale. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Why China won’t overtake the U.S.: Demographics:

    Partly thanks to their crackpot one-child policy (one child per family) that was implemented in the late 1970s in order to limit China’s population growth, the ChiComs have a serious demographics problem on their hands, too. And the one-child policy exacerbated another demographics problem:

    The one-child policy produced consequences beyond the goal of reducing population growth. Most notably, the country’s overall sex ratio became skewed toward males—roughly between 3 and 4 percent more males than females. Traditionally, male children (especially firstborn) have been preferred—particularly in rural areas—as sons inherit the family name and property and are responsible for the care of elderly parents. When most families were restricted to one child, having a girl became highly undesirable, resulting in a rise in abortions of female fetuses (made possible after ultrasound sex determination became available), increases in the number of female children who were placed in orphanages or were abandoned, and even infanticide of baby girls.

    The combined result has been an aging population and a declining birth rate, as well as a gender imbalance (approximately 30 million more men than women looking for marriage partners), which resulted in the implementation of the two-child policy in 2016 (and recent recommendations from the People’s Bank of China – the Chinese central bank – to drop the limit altogether). China’s birth rate per 1000 people has decreased from 46 births in 1950 to just over 11 births in 2021.

  • Finally! “UK Parliament declares China’s treatment of Uyghurs a genocide.” Now we’ll see what difference that makes in foreign and economic policy, if any…
  • Sinema, Kelly Call on Administration to Help Address Crisis at the Arizona Border, Fund National Guard Deployment.” “There is a crisis at the southern border… As such, we request you reimburse the state of Arizona for the deployment the Governor announced yesterday to support border security and continue to increase DHS personnel who can further assist with the processing of migrants, securing the border, and executing important security missions.” Both Kelly and Sinema are Democrats.
  • Great great grandson of slaves isn’t having any of this condescending “reparations” garbage:

    At the age of 8, my great-great-grandfather, Silas Burgess, arrived in America shackled in the belly of a slave ship and was sold on an auction block in Charleston, South Carolina, to the Burgess Plantation. He escaped through the Underground Railroad and saved up enough money to purchase a 102-acre farm, where he worked through tremendous challenges to live a prosperous, productive life.

    My grandfather, Oscar Kirby, served our country in World War I and was the first member of my family to get a traditional education. My father, Clarence Burgess Owens Sr., fought for democracy abroad in World War II. He was undeterred by the Jim Crow South that denied him a post-graduate education and built a successful legacy as a professor, researcher and entrepreneur.

    I grew up in the 1960s Deep South during the days of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and segregation. I was one of the first four Black athletes recruited to play football at the University of Miami and the third Black student to receive a scholarship for my education. Now, I am humbled to represent Utah’s 4th Congressional District in the U.S. Congress.

    This intergenerational progress represents the common thread of self-worth that allowed each of my ancestors to see themselves as victors instead of victims. I think my great-great-grandpa Silas would agree that reparations are not the way to right our country’s wrongs.

    It goes without saying that Rep. Owens is a Republican…

  • Related: Glenn Loury makes the case for black patriotism:

    There is a fashionable standoffishness characteristic of much elite thinking about blacks’ relationship to America—as exemplified, for instance, by the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Does this posture serve the interests, rightly understood, of black Americans? I think that it does not.

    Indeed, a case can be made that the correct narrative to adopt today is one of unabashed black patriotism—a forthright embrace of American nationalism by black people. Black Americans’ birthright citizenship in what is arguably history’s greatest republic is an inheritance of immense value. My answer for black Americans to Frederick Douglass’s famous question—“Whose Fourth of July?”—is, “Ours!”

    Is this a venal, immoral, and rapacious bandit-society of plundering white supremacists, founded in genocide and slavery and propelled by capitalist greed, or a good country that affords boundless opportunity to all fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of citizenship? Of course, there is some warrant in the historical record for both sentiments, but the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly favors the latter. The founding of the United States of America was a world-historic event by means of which Enlightenment ideals about the rights of individual persons and the legitimacy of state power were instantiated for the first time in real institutions.

    African slavery flourished at the time of the Founding, true enough. And yet, within a century of the Founding, slavery was gone and people who had been chattel became citizens of the United States of America. Not equal citizens, not at first. That took another century. But African-descended Americans became, in the fullness of time, equal citizens of this republic.

    Our democracy, flawed as it most surely is, nevertheless became a beacon to billions of people throughout what came to be known as the “free world.” We fought fascism in the Pacific and in Europe and thereby helped to save the world. We faced down, under the threat of nuclear annihilation, the horror that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Moreover, we have witnessed here in America, since the end of the Civil War, the greatest transformation in the status of a serfdom people (which is, in effect, what blacks became after emancipation) to be found anywhere in world history.

  • Planned Parenthood finally admits that founder Margaret Sanger was a racist
  • Zaire hyperinflates their currency. People stop using it. Zaire introduce a new currency. People start using the old currency, simply because they’re not printing it anymore.
  • He, you know that Islamist insurgency in Mozambique I talked about earlier this month? Well, evidently they’re now beheading children.
  • “The NBA has suffered another ratings disaster, with ABC falling 45 percent since the 2011-12 season, while TNT was down 40 percent, and ESPN was off 20 percent.”
  • “Woman who lost partner in crossbow attack wants ‘medieval’ weapon regulated.” Can Pointy Stick Control be far behind?
  • Important safety tip: Don’t buy crappy ammo.
  • NSFW perspective:

  • Florida man and woman try to have wedding at palatial house. Tiny problem: They didn’t own it and hadn’t rented it.
  • Godzilla Shark fossil found in Mexico.
  • Speaking of Godzilla, here’s my review of Godzilla vs. Kong.
  • “BLM Founder Calls For Abolishing Police In All The Areas Where She Doesn’t Live.”
  • Not Billy Joel fans:

  • LinkSwarm for April 16, 2021

    Friday, April 16th, 2021

    Greetings! Welcome to an extra-late Friday LinkSwarm! I had a doctor’s appointment and have been running behind all day. This week: #BlackLivesMatter activists raking off that sweet, sweet graft, mainstream media keeps up its assault on independent thought, and a bunch of Texas news.

    • Hustling the rubes for #BlackLivesMatter Dane-geld must really pay well for “trained Marxist” Patrisse Khan-Cullors, because she just bought herself a $1.4 million home in an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood where “the vast majority of residents are white.” Evidently disdaining “whiteness” is for .
    • But her buying spree didn’t end there! She bought a total of four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone.
    • Cullors isn’t the only BLM biggie buying houses on the grift. The FBI arrested Toledo, Ohio #BlackLivesMatter activist Sir Maejor Page for allegedly spending “over $200,000 on personal items generated from donations received through BLMGA Facebook page with no identifiable purchase or expenditure for social or racial justice” and is facing “federal wire fraud and money laundering charges for allegedly spending the money on tailored suits, a home in Ohio, and guns.”
    • Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants a global minimum corporate tax. Since other countries aren’t stupid, I doubt she’ll get it. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
    • Teachers union power, not rate of COVID transmission, determines whether schools are open for instruction.”
    • After an embarrassing hidden camera footage of CNN personal admitting their liberal bias, Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.
    • Here’s what Twitter doesn’t want you to see:


      

    • And now O’Keefe is suing them for defamation.

      I am suing Twitter for defamation because they said I, James O’Keefe, ‘operated fake accounts.’” O’Keefe wrote in an emailed statement to The Federalist. “This is false, this is defamatory, and they will pay. Section 230 may have protected them before, but it will not protect them from me. The complaint will be filed Monday.”

      The discovery process for that is going to be lit
      

    • Speaking of Twitter being petty, they will “not allow the National Archives to make former President Donald Trump’s past tweets from his @realDonaldTrump account available on the social media platform.”
    • Also, they locked the account of black journalist Jason Whitlock for daring to criticize Cullors for her house-buying spree. Presumably there’s a secret Twitter algorithm setting for “Uppity.”
      

    • Speaking of censorship, the Epoch Times had to suspend printing of its Hong Kong edition after its presses were busted up. For the fourth time.
      

    • “NYT Journalist Erases ENTIRE Twitter After National Pulse Unearths Posts Admitting “Working For The Chinese Communist Party.” That would be one Jonah K. Kessel.
    • Why Iranians are furious at New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi.

    • How Biden’s “job plan” would hurt the American economy.
    • College threatens to fire professor unless he takes “mandatory diversity training.” Professor tells them to get stuffed. College blinks.
    • Truth:

    • “Black Lives Matter, So Refund the Police“:

      Public officials across the country are only now discovering the foreseeable consequences of these decisions. City legislatures are realizing that in their attempt to make life better for marginalized groups, they have only contributed to the disproportionate hardships they already face. As it becomes apparent that moves to defund the police have exacerbated criminality, some local authorities are reversing cuts to police budgets passed last year amid much radical breast-beating but without much thought for who would bear the likely consequences.

      Minneapolis is the epicentre of the defund movement—the city in which George Floyd died last May as he was being taken into police custody. In spite of a spike in crime there in 2020, including a 70 percent increase in homicides, the Minneapolis City Council decided in December to redistribute $8 million from the police budget to other violence prevention services. At the time, Mayor Jacob Frey said there were “good reasons to be optimistic about the future in Minneapolis.” The move to reallocate funds away from the police department was proclaimed a “Safety for All” plan by its supporters. Unfortunately, it has made the streets of Minneapolis considerably less safe. In the first three weeks of 2021, Minneapolis saw a 250 percent increase in gunshot wound victims from the same time last year.

    • Since defunding, murders are up 64% in Minneapolis.
    • “Texas Supreme Court Delivers Dallas Salon Owner Shelley Luther a Delayed Victory.” “The remaining five days in jail and $7,000 fine ordered by the district court is now off the table entirely.”
    • “Majority of Voters Say Preventing Fraud in Elections Is More Important Than Making Voting Easier.”
    • China Fighter Jets Will Fly Over Taiwan to Declare Sovereignty.” What could possibly go wrong?
    • “Biden is making the Trump presidency seem like a golden age of unity.”

      Until Biden came along, every single covid-19 relief bill was approved with overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses. Congress passed three covid relief packages in March 2020 with margins of 96-1, 90-8, and 96-0 in the Senate, and with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House. This was followed in April by the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, which passed 388-5 in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate. Indeed, the votes were so bipartisan that Democrats blocked another covid relief package until after Election Day — because they did not want to let President Donald Trump claim credit for another bipartisan victory before voters went to the polls. But after he lost and they finally allowed another covid bill to come up for a vote in December, it passed both houses of Congress with similar margins.

      Yeah, but bipartisan doesn’t curry favor with the hard left who want massive graft payoffs and total control.

    • Speaking of graft: “Nancy Pelosi’s Husband Uses Call Options To Buy Microsoft Ahead Of Big Govt Contract.”
    • “Former House Speaker John Boehner Falsely Claims Ronald Reagan Was ‘Pro-Abortion.'” He was no Newt Gingrich…
    • The Russian bounty story was always a complete lie. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    • Texas Republican U.S. Representative Kevin Brady announces his retirement.
    • Former Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst was arrested on Class A Misdemeanor Assault Family Violence charges in Dallas after a scuffle over a laptop. “Hotel management told police officers that the woman was assaulted by Dewhurst. Officers spoke with the woman who said that Dewhurst was boarding a bus when the woman remembered that she had his laptop. It was a shared laptop that they both had access to, the affidavit said.” I wonder if the woman is the same 40-year old “live-in girlfriend” Leslie Caron who allegedly broke two of his ribs last year. Also makes you wonder: 1. Just what was on that laptop, and 2. What Dewhurst, a man with a reported net worth of over $200 million, was doing riding a bus…
    • Yesterday was Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day.
    • Mike Rowe on why raising the minimum wage is a stupid idea:

      I want everybody who works hard and plays fair to prosper. I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you’re going to create other problems, like there is a ladder of success that people climb and some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they’re simply not intended to be careers.

    • The problem with Austin this time of year is that the air is just filled with pollen:

    • Spotify keeps deleting Joe Rogan podcasts.
    • The line between reality and Titania McGrath grows ever thinner:

    • $251 Billion State Budget Passes Texas Senate, Stays Below Target Spending Line.”
    • SB10, a taxpayer funded lobbying ban, also passed the Texas Senate.
    • Texas House Approves Constitutional Carry, Bill to Be Sent to Senate.”
    • “Nigeria’s Muslim communications minister: “We are all happy whenever unbelievers are being killed.'”
    • The public doesn’t want to read books by corrupt scumbag crackhead adulterous whoremongers? Do tell… (Hat tip: Mollie Hemingway.)
    • Evidently the “new” case against Woody Allen is as shoddy as the old case:

      There is no doubt that part of the goal of Allen v. Farrow was to finish off both Allen’s career and his legacy by presenting a definitive guilty verdict in the court of public opinion. The filmmakers, aided by a mostly uncritical press, have undoubtedly won over a large segment of the public—those who come to this subject for the first time through their HBO subscriptions, or who aren’t inclined to question “survivors.” But for those of us who are familiar with the story, or who take the trouble to check it out, the effect is the opposite. If making the case against Allen requires his cultural prosecutors to weave this kind of intellectually dishonest, emotionally manipulative, selectively edited account of the underlying drama, then the case for acquittal becomes stronger, not weaker.

    • Florida Man floors it.
    • Murica table.
    • “Minneapolis Target Holds Semi-Annual ‘Everything Is Free‘ Sale.”
    • “In Fun, Innovative Science Project, Middle Schooler Makes A Battery Out Of Brian Stelter.
    • Smile:

    For some reason, WordPress is now putting random gaps between bullet points in the LinkSwarm, so I’m having to tinker with the look and feel a bit. I may even have to update to a more current version…

    If You Pay The Dane-Geld You Never Get Rid Of The Dane

    Wednesday, April 14th, 2021

    In the wake of last year’s #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa riots, shoe retailer Foot Locker went full virtue signaling, pledging to commit $200 million over five years to the “black community.” Usually this amounts to payoffs to far left black activists, tossing some black suppliers a few more crumbs, and hoping no one audits your promises after five years.

    So what did all that virtue signaling earn Foot Locker when rioting broke out in Minneapolis yet again? A big, steaming plate of bupkis:

    Footlocker stores in Minnesota were looted and trashed once again despite the company having donated $200 million dollars to Black Lives Matter causes in the past year.

    Minnesota has been hit with yet more violent unrest over the last two nights in response to the police killing of Daunte Wright, who was shot by a female officer who mistook a gun for a taser.

    Footage from Sunday night showed looters breaking into a shoe store and stealing Nike trainers, because apparently justice for Daunte Wright looks an awful lot like getting your hands on a brand new pair of Air Max.

    By the end of the night, around 20 Brooklyn Center businesses had been looted as well as sporadic looting in surrounding areas, and the chaos was repeated last night.

    Apparently, the opportunistic thugs who looted both stores didn’t care too much for Nike and Footlocker’s commitment to helping Black Lives Matter causes.

    Paying off radical Marxists spouting a totalitarian ideology is a poor business strategy. They can’t protect you from the mob and all your Dane-geld won’t prevent them from turning on you.

    Once you have paid him Dane-geld
    You never get rid of the Dane

    LinkSwarm for March 26, 2021

    Friday, March 26th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Slow Joe slows the economy and holds a press conference, global trade founders on a single choke-point, and Democrats behave badly (a LinkSwarm evergreen). Plus a load of Archer memes.

  • “Slow” evidently applies not only to Slow Joe Biden’s mental speed, but also to the effect he’s having on the economy. “Americans’ Income Collapsed By Most On Record In February,” falling 7.1%.

  • Slow Joe finally held a press conference. It didn’t go well. “President Joe Biden struggled through his first official press conference on Thursday, pausing frequently to check his notes on the podium and occasionally losing his train of thought as if distracted by the voices echoing madly in his geriatric brain.”
  • Tucker Carlson also reviewed Biden’s “slow and painful” performance:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Only five months too late, Georgia finally passes bill to fight election fraud.
  • Lockdowns kill:

    Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there’s still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from Covid-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent.

    The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.

    Some of those deaths could be undetected Covid-19 cases, and some could be unrelated to the pandemic or the lockdowns. But preliminary reports point to some obvious lockdown-related factors. There was a sharp decline in visits to emergency rooms and an increase in fatal heart attacks due to failure to receive prompt treatment. Many fewer people were screened for cancer. Social isolation contributed to excess deaths from dementia and Alzheimer’s.

    Researchers predicted that the social and economic upheaval would lead to tens of thousands of “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. As unemployment surged and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs were interrupted, the reported levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts increased dramatically, as did alcohol sales and fatal drug overdoses. The number of people killed last year in motor-vehicle accidents in the United States rose to the highest level in more than a decade, even though Americans did significantly less driving than in 2019. It was the steepest annual increase in the fatality rate per mile traveled in nearly a century, apparently due to more substance abuse and more high-speed driving on empty roads.

    The number of excess deaths not involving Covid-19 has been especially high in U.S. counties with more low-income households and minority residents, who were disproportionately affected by lockdowns. Nearly 40 percent of workers in low-income households lost their jobs during the spring, triple the rate in high-income households. Minority-owned small businesses suffered more, too. During the spring, when it was estimated that 22 percent of all small businesses closed, 32 percent of Hispanic owners and 41 percent of black owners shut down. Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School, summarized the impact: “Lockdowns have protected the laptop class of young low-risk journalists, scientists, teachers, politicians and lawyers, while throwing children, the working class and high-risk older people under the bus.”

    The deadly impact of lockdowns will grow in future years, due to the lasting economic and educational consequences. The United States will experience more than 1 million excess deaths in the United States during the next two decades as a result of the massive “unemployment shock” last year, according to a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins and Duke, who analyzed the effects of past recessions on mortality. Other researchers, noting how educational levels affect income and life expectancy, have projected that the “learning loss” from school closures will ultimately cost this generation of students more years of life than have been lost by all the victims of the coronavirus.

    After the pandemic began in March, the number of excess deaths in the United States rose for all American adults. During the summer, as the pandemic eased, the rate of excess mortality declined among older Americans but remained unusually high among young adults. When statisticians at the Centers for Disease Control totaled the excess deaths for age groups through the end of September, they reported that the sharpest change—an increase of 26.5 percent—occurred among Americans aged 25 to 44.

    That trend persisted through fall, and most of the excess deaths among younger people were not linked to the coronavirus, as researchers from the University of Illinois found by analyzing excess deaths from March through the end of November. Among Americans aged 15 to 54, there were roughly 56,000 excess deaths, of which about 22,000 involved Covid-19, leaving 34,000 from other causes. The Canadian government also reported especially high mortality among Canadians under 45: nearly 1,700 excess deaths from May through November, with only 50 of those deaths attributed to Covid-19.

  • The Suez Canal is completely blocked due to a giant container ship having run aground. “Each day the canal is blocked, it halts about $9.6 billion of traffic through the world’s most important shipping lane.”
  • Kurt Schlichter on Noem’s tranny pander:

    Noem has – perhaps had – a future as a conservative conservative, and her utterly insane unforced error last week has hugely damaged her prospects. There are lessons here, people.

    What did she do? She vetoed a bill defending women athletes from the insanity of letting men dominate them, a “style and form” veto, and then offered the most weaksauce weasel word explanation imaginable. Here tweet thread trying to explain it was lame; her appearance on Tucker was condescending gibberish. Watching it, woke cons started out disappointed with her and ended up infuriated at her. Here’s the irony – Kristi Noem stepped on her Ted Lieu in the context for a transexual policy issue.

    It was really quite remarkable how amateurish and totally unnecessary it all was, but we’ve been seeing a lot of this lately. Recently, Greg Abbot decided to label all of Gab’s users “anti-Semites” because…well, who knows? It’s one of those things that you do that ticks off the base while the liberals continue to hate you. Good plan.

    On the plus side, it lets us disqualify the weakhearts now.

    It’s unclear who told Noem this was a great idea, but that person ought to be exiled to one of those other Dakotas. It’s 2021 and there are Republican consultants who still think the base is dumb. SMDH. The base is not dumb. The base is based. And we’re not going to be fooled with painful tweet threads and interviews about how 2 + 2 = 5 and how we need to not fight because it might make our enemies angry with us or – horrors! – cost us something to make a stand. Noem decided that instead of holding strong on an issue that conservatives care about, she would not merely rollover to the tech/Chamber of Commerce lib axis but also attempt to talk us into thinking this was just a routine administrative decision and that she is totally behind us 100 percent.

    Except she isn’t.

    We’re not stupid. Is she? Because if she thinks that conservatives, the cheated-on spouses of American politics, are not hyper-vigilant to any sign of betrayal then she’s too dumb to be our prezzy. We’ve been shafted too many times, and she is hallucinating if she thinks anyone will get a pass – including her. One of the most basic things we expect GOP politicians to do is protect our girls from getting clobbered by boys pretending to be girls. This is not one of those fringe issues where we’re, “Yeah, okay, sometimes you gotta compromise.” This is foundational.

  • Bristol is Britain’s Portland:

    Some of the rioters in Bristol last night were dressed in black bloc as they set dumpsters on fire to block streets and used barricades as battering rams to attack police. They also came armed with explosive mortar fireworks, a favorite projectile weapon among antifa to disorientate, deafen, blind and injure cops.

    Though the protest-turned-riot was ostensibly organized to oppose the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would allow police to impose more conditions on protests and increase penalties for those convicted of vandalizing statues, among other things, the demonstration had all the hallmarks of a far-left gathering.

    The ‘Kill the Bill’ protest was promoted by the Bristol chapters of a Black Lives Matter-style group, Extinction Rebellion and Momentum, the hard-left wing within the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, British antifa groups also encouraged their comrades to support the violence.

    ‘Be careful about sharing footage with people’s faces who aren’t wearing masks,’ warned one antifa group. ‘Solidarity with all the comrades out there in Bristol fighting the bill and facing hard repression,’ tweeted Brighton Antifascists. ‘Spread the fire,’ they urged. And the fire spread.

    Hundreds of protesters had gathered earlier in the city center carrying hammer and sickle flags, symbols of anarchist-communism, and signs against racism and fascism. The most frequent message spray-painted on vehicles and buildings at the riot? Antifa’s adopted slogan of ‘ACAB’ — all cops are bastards.

    I recently visited Bristol. I noticed immediately that the leftist student politics of the University of Bristol and other colleges seemed to define the city’s wider political culture. That is, Bristol is a left-wing political monoculture, much like Portland.

  • Speaking of which: “The Dream of the ’90s Died in Portland“:

    Around the turn of the century, Portland was the new belle on the block, not despoiled like San Francisco or in bed with high tech like Seattle. Oregon was not known nationally for much more than Nike and pinot noir and former Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, but maybe (with the exception of Packwood) that was OK. Maybe the city could debut as a fresh canvas, eco-friendly and affordable, a place to achieve your achievable dreams.

    A lot of people were willing to take the chance, including my family. We moved from Los Angeles to Portland in 2004, and for a while, everything seemed on the up. The city in 2009 was, according to The Wall Street Journal, attracting “college-educated, single people between the ages of 25 and 39 at a higher rate than most other cities in the country.” New residents built the city they wanted to live in: farm-to-table restaurants and 40 million brewpubs and too many bike paths and aggressively progressive politics. When then–Illinois Sen. Barack Obama swung through on the campaign trail in 2008, more than 75,000 people lined Portland’s waterfront to see him.

    Portland had entered the national stage. Was it a little bit goofy, a little bit twee? Sure, but also energetic in the way a young city can be, with people cutting what seemed to be genuinely new paths. Would the dudes slinging Korean barbecue out of an old R.V. take it brick-and-mortar? Who knew? Who cared? The dynamism of what-could-be hung in the very air.

    Snip.

    Portland’s leadership seemed likewise unserious. Democratic Mayor Sam Adams had to fly home from Obama’s first inauguration to face charges of having had a sexual liaison with an underage legislative intern with the readymade name of Beau Breedlove, and in 2019 he was accused by his former executive assistant of sexual harassment. In 2015, Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber resigned amid allegations of influence peddling by his fiancé.

    “It’s not a well-governed city. It’s not a well-governed state. Portland has basically had three failed mayors in a row,” says T.B., who previously held a high-ranking position in state government and who asked not to be identified by name. “Tom Potter was a former police chief who became mayor. He was totally hapless. Sam Adams was hyperkinetic, one thing after another and scandalous and so totally ineffective. And then Charlie Hales—I don’t know exactly what happened to him, but he also served one term; they all did. And now you have Ted [Wheeler], who I think has had three police chiefs since taking office. There’s certainly political instability at the municipal level, to say the least.”

    Out of instability, good things nevertheless grew—including Portlandia. The comedy series debuted in 2010 and served up the city at its most parodic, with real-life Mayor Sam Adams playing a bumbling mayoral assistant and restaurant diners demanding the life story of the chicken they were about to eat.

    The show riffed on slacktivism and five-hour yoga classes and men whose only “safe space” was Reddit. It was often genuinely funny. Who didn’t like to laugh at themselves?

    Snip.

    Young people had come here to achieve those achievable dreams. What was taking so long? Why did they have to live three, four people to a house, when just a few years ago rent was affordable? When my husband told baristas at the cafés he owned that, no, he couldn’t raise the starting wage to $12 an hour—this was in 2014—seeing as they also received tips and health insurance, the response was a general chilling, an “us against them” ethos that seemed to seep into the city. Activists became more vocal, denouncing businesses they saw as anti-LGBTQ. The city’s most active queer center was called out in 2015 for being too “white-centric.” And in 2016, students at Reed College formed RAR (Reedies Against Racism) and staged a protest against the 1978 Saturday Night Live skit “King Tut,” claiming Steve Martin’s portrayal of the Egyptian pharaoh was racist. “The gold face of the saxophone dancer leaving its tomb is an exhibition of blackface,” a student told the student newspaper.

    The anger seemed free-floating; it was gathering momentum, was becoming an identity in itself.

    When Donald Trump won the presidency, Portlanders’ anger catalyzed into a manic animus that took the form of compulsive marching and letter writing and CNN watching and the schadenfreude-tinged hope that Mike Flynn/Stormy Daniels/the Russia scandal would sweep the president out of office any day now. In this way, Portland was not different from other heavily Democratic U.S. cities.

    Snip.

    But there was a problem: Trump was both far away and a master of eliding responsibility. Without the satisfaction of seeing their enemy downed, people grew antsy. Someone needed to take the blame for stagnant wages, and rising rents, and what some saw as the misallocation of social and emotional resources. And so, in a preview of the protests that would come to roil Portland following the death of George Floyd, those who considered themselves more finely calibrated toward injustice than the rest of us took matters into their own hands.

    “You probably remember there was massive rioting in the Pearl District the day after Donald Trump was elected. Millions of dollars of damage were inflicted,” says journalist Michael Totten. “How many people in the Pearl District voted for Donald Trump? It’s probably not even 1 percent. Who on earth are these people who declare war on a place where nobody voted for Donald Trump? That’s not how people in a democratic society are supposed to behave. You don’t go trash neighborhoods with the opposing political party in a healthy democracy, but they didn’t even do that. They declared war on the city as a whole.”

    If there was zeal in using one’s power thus, crude as it was, there was also a mandate: If good citizens needed to fight racism, why not start at home? The food world, which arguably more than any industry had put Portland on the cultural map, was the first target. Andy Ricker, whose restaurant Pok Pok was the only place the late Pulitzer Prize–winning food writer Jonathan Gold wanted me to take him when he visited Portland in the early 2010s, was called out for making Thai food while not being Thai. Two young women closed their burrito cart within days of opening it after they received multiple death threats for making homemade tortillas despite not being Latinas. The local press, which had once lauded such people and places, now published lists of business owners “wantonly cooking the food of other countries, arguably at the expense of people from those very cultures.”

    So much for ALL being welcome. People instead seemed to be asking: Are you with us or against us?

    Then details of the riots and assaults. If anything, author Nancy Rommelmann is far too even-handed with antifa’s crimes, and fails to note that their antics preceded Donald Trump’s election by quite a while.

  • Another week, another investigation of Baltimore Democratic politicians. “Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Baltimore City Council President Nick Mosby and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, subpoenaing her campaign and the couple’s business records.” You may remember Marilyn Mosby from such hits as “How Soros-Backed Leftwing DAs Refuse To Enforce The Law.” The family that grifts together… (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
  • Displacement. “Blue checkmarks are mourning bad careers in a broken industry”:

    Displacement is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient. A classic example of the defense is displaced aggression. If a person is angry but cannot direct their anger toward the source without consequences, they might “take out” their anger on a person or thing that poses less of a risk.

    Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.

    Things are bad, folks:

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • “Secret Service Investigated Bizarre Gun Incident Involving Hunter Biden in 2018.”

    The U.S. Secret Service reportedly got involved in a bizarre incident back in 2018 involving Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, and Hallie Biden, who was married to the late Beau Biden.

    According to the report, on October 23, 2018, Hallie Biden, who became romantically involved with Hunter sometime after Beau’s death, found Hunter’s .38 revolver in his pickup truck, which was parked at her house, then took the gun to a nearby grocery store and threw it away in a trash can behind the building. Upon returning to retrieve the gun from the trash, the Bidens discovered it was no longer there, reports Politico.

    Delaware police investigated, concerned that the grocery store’s proximity to the local high school might mean the missing gun could be used in a crime. But then, Politico notes, a “curious thing happened.”

    Two sources, one with direct knowledge of the incident, say Secret Service agents allegedly approached Ron Palmieri, the owner of the gun store where Hunter bought the firearm, in order to retrieve the paperwork involving the sale.

    The owner of the store refused, suspecting the Secret Service officers intended to get rid of any evidence of Hunter’s ownership of the gun in the event the gun would be involved in a crime.

    Honestly, it’s probably not even the tenth weirdest and/or most corrupt thing Hunter Biden has been involved in… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • Meet Eric Feigl-Ding, Democratic Party operative and coronavirus expert impersonator.
  • “GOP senators blast filibuster racism charge, ask why Dems used it to block Tim Scott’s police reform bill.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Someone is trying to torpedo the historic Abraham Peace Accords between Israel and various Arab states. Namely the Biden Administration:

    Media reports on March 18 revealed that the United Arab Emirates has suspended its plans for an Abraham Accords summit in Abu Dhabi with Israel, the United States, and other Arab signatories to the historic peace agreements brokered by the Donald Trump administration. Supposedly, the Emiratis are angry with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for using the UAE’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Zayed as a “prop in his election campaign.”

    In fact, as the theme of “election interference” should make clear (the UAE doesn’t have elections), and as has been substantiated by Israeli reporting, the source of the upset isn’t in Abu Dhabi but in Washington. In other words, the Biden administration is interfering in Israel’s upcoming election by strong-arming the Emiratis into publicly distancing themselves from Bibi.

    Next week Israel will hold its fourth election in a little more than two years, so in effect Netanyahu has been campaigning for more than 24 months—including in August when he and MBZ signed the agreement. Should the Emiratis have shunned the deal since Netanyahu, like any Israeli prime minister, would invariably present his accomplishment to voters? What about sending an ambassador to Israel, as it did at the beginning of March? What about investing $10 billion, as MBZ told Netanyahu he would? So how does a photo op with the prime minister glad-handing the crown prince of Abu Dhabi on his home turf cross the line?

    Plainly, the Obama-Biden team doesn’t care about interfering in Israeli elections or else Barack Obama’s State Department wouldn’t have funneled money to an NGO that campaigned against Netanyahu in 2015. Nor do Arab royals sitting atop petro-kingdoms have much theoretical or practical reason to worry about appearing to back one candidate against another. Smaller powers like the UAE make alliances not with factions but with states—and all parties in Israel support the Abraham Accords. Israel’s strategic class, its political, military, and intelligence echelons, as well as Israeli voters consider relations with Gulf Cooperation Council members a strategic boon. It is difficult to imagine any circumstances short of war under which an Israeli prime minister would think it politically wise to abandon a normalization agreement with any Arab state, never mind a major oil producer.

    No, “election interference” is a staple of American political discourse. More particularly it is the rhetoric through which the Democratic Party now pushes information operations, like the Russiagate conspiracy theory holding that Russia interfered with the 2016 vote to put Trump in the White House. News of the canceled visit by the Israeli prime minister was eagerly pushed in the press and on social media by Obama’s Israel point man Dan Shapiro through his proprietary Israel wing of the echo chamber.

    But there’s a bigger play here than interfering in Israeli politics by denying Bibi a preelection photo op with Israel’s peace partners in the Gulf. Their larger goal is to weaken or dismantle the Abraham Accords, which by assembling a treaty structure that binds Israel together with the Gulf states structurally interferes with the administration’s stated goal of realigning the United States with Iran—and therefore against Israel and the Gulf—by reentering Obama’s nuclear deal.

    But isn’t peace in the Middle East the collective dream of the Beltway policy establishment, left and right? Trump, love or hate him, got Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan as well as the UAE to normalize relations with Israel, the first peace agreements with the Jewish state since Jordan signed in 1994—and Biden said he wanted to build on the Abraham Accords. But as it turns out, “peace” has a very particular meaning for American policymakers. For the Middle East hands in the Biden administration, what matters most is completing the project many of these Obama alumni helped initiate while serving under Biden’s former boss—realignment with Iran.

    Trump didn’t just withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, which undergirded Obama’s realignment strategy, he also designed a strategic architecture to counter Iranian influence—the Abraham Accords. To bind Israel and the Arab Gulf states, the Trump White House had to bracket the issue that previously kept these traditional American allies apart—the Palestinians. That alone earned Trump the wrath of Washington’s wise men.

  • Speaking of Israel, they had yet another inconclusive election, the fourth since 2019.
  • “Yale Psychiatrist Who Declared Trump Mentally Unfit Has Been Fired, and She’s Suing.” Funny how that happened when Bandy Lee broke the Goldwater Rule. I would break out an appropriately tiny violin, but I’m afraid my atomic force microscope is being recalibrated…
  • Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D-Round Rock) wants to force every school system to hire social justice warrior “diversity, equity, and inclusion officers.”
  • Down at the state level, some black Democratic office holders oppose the radical transsexual agenda as well:

    South Carolina State Rep. Cezar McKnight (D) has represented his district for six years. It’s heavily Democratic, and two-thirds African American — two demographics that people don’t typically associate with social conservative causes. But the threat of transgenderism to our kids isn’t just a conservative concern, McKnight insists. “Black Democrats tend to be more conservative than white progressives,” McKnight told an AP reporter. They’re very much on board with the idea that children should not be pressed to permanently mutilate their bodies over gender confusion that is almost always temporary.

    That’s why McKnight felt comfortable introducing a bill that would ban minors from pursuing transgender treatments or transitioning until they’re old enough to vote. “I would not have ever put this bill forward if I didn’t think the people in my district wouldn’t be receptive, and they are. Pastors, young parents, older parents, they all tell me the same thing: if you want to do this, wait until you’re 18.” A member of the Legislative Black Caucus, he says he’s received “an outpouring of support from his constituents, “who have told him that, while they don’t necessarily oppose this type of procedure on its face, they think that it’s one that should only be made when a person has reached adulthood.”

  • Andrew “Granny Killer” Cuomo’s book on how he bravely spread the Wuhan coronavirus in New York nursing homes has reportedly garnered a seven figure advance from the Crown Publishing Group. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Target: Since you keep burning and looting our stores, I guess Minneapolis doesn’t really need a Target.
  • 55 people explain their woke breaking point.
  • I previously missed Benjamin Chen’s New York City hit and run rampage in a $700,000 Gemballa Mirage GT supercar:

    Open and shut case? Well, evidently not for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. They just dropped all charges against Chen. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Warner Brothers to abandon HBO Max experiment, and will stick to theatrical release for major films starting in 2022.
  • Spanish porn star charged with murder in photographer’s toad-venom death.” The sort of headline that makes a New York Post headline writer say “God, I love my work!” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Heh:

  • Jessica Walter, RIP. She was one of the all-time best crazy female stalkers in Play Misty for Me and was legendary as Mallory Archer:

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • “Media Now Claims Shooter Was Factually Arab, But Morally White.”
    

  • I Cooked a Chicken by Slapping It.”
  • Feel-good dog story:

    (Hat tip: PolitiBunny.)

  • Old song, new video:

  • Minneapolis Refunds The Police

    Tuesday, February 16th, 2021

    Remember when antifa and #BlackLivesMatter looted or burned more than 700 buildings in Minneapolis? And how the hard-left City Council’s first instinct was to call for defunding the police?

    Well, reality has a way of intruding, and now Minneapolis is going to spend $6.4M recruiting more officers following a sharp rise in crime and some 200 cops quitting after the riots and $8 million in budget cuts.

    Minneapolis is planning to spend $6.4million to hire dozens of police officers, at a time when some City Council members and activist groups have been advocating to replace the police department following the death of George Floyd.

    The City Council voted unanimously Friday to approve the additional funding that police requested.

    According to the Minneapolis Police Department, there are only 638 officers available to work, which is roughly 200 fewer than usual.

    An unprecedented number of officers quit or went on extended medical leave after Floyd’s death and the unrest that followed, which included the burning of a police precinct.

    Funny how that works.

    With new recruit classes, the city anticipates it will have 674 officers available at the end of the year, with another 28 in the hiring process, according to the Star Tribune.

    Now if only Austin’s foolish City Council would also reverse course on their asinine decision to cut the police budget…

    LinkSwarm for December 4, 2020

    Friday, December 4th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! First up: The rest of the nation gets to see what an incompetent hypocrite Austin’s current mayor is:

  • Austin Mayor Steve Adler is the latest powerful democrat to prove they’re a complete hypocrite:

    In a November 9 Facebook video, Austin mayor Steve Adler advised the public to “stay at home” but failed to disclose he was broadcasting from a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. But wait! It gets better (worse?)!

    Adler and 8 family members took a private jet to his Mexican getaway. All of this was the day after Adler reportedly hosted a small wedding for his daughter at a hotel in Austin.

    Is there a “consult with health authorities prior and undergo COVID-19 testing” exception to the lockdown rules? Of course not! Laws are for the little people…

  • Democrats finally dissect their horrible down-ballot performance.

    The complete absence of Joe Biden’s coattails is forcing the usually delusional Democrats to get perilously close to the truth during this self-examination. Whether the activists speaking the truth will be listened to by the Elders of the Village in the Democratic Party remains to be seen. It should also be noted that those elders are very elderly and may not be amenable to alterations in a narrative they’ve been crafting regarding themselves for decades.

    Some more hard truth:

    Some worry that the party, once rooted in the working class but now run and funded largely by college-educated liberals, may be losing its touch with blue-collar voters of all races outside major metro areas.

    “We’re such a Beltway party that we can’t even fathom that there are a lot of Mexicans in the [Rio Grande] Valley who love Donald Trump,” said Chuck Rocha, a Texas-raised Democratic strategist who runs Nuestro PAC, a super PAC focused on Latino outreach. “Biden won, and that’s great, but everything underneath Biden was a huge catastrophe.”

    The Democratic Party has been gleefully refashioning itself as a coastal elite party for quite a while now. They traded blue-collar workers in the heartland for celebrities. Who needs to worry about jobs in Ohio when you’re partying with Beyoncé, right?

    They didn’t get anything about why Donald Trump won in 2016, then they spent four years making up lies about why it happened because those lies allowed them to remain in their coastal bubbles and not get any hard glimpses at reality.

    Their sense of entitlement from 2016 never went away, and they think that they’ve been somewhat vindicated by the apparent Biden victory. That victory is illusory, however. It took four years of the mainstream media being more corrupt than ever before combined with an election year global pandemic and a healthy dose of voter…irregularities to bring about this result. It really didn’t have anything to do with the Democrats and their ideas being wildly popular.

    Because they aren’t.

    Democrats are so blinded by their hatred for President Trump that they are unlikely to learn anything from this election.

  • Suggesting Republicans not vote in Georgia’s senate runoff is sheer idiocy. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of the Georgia senate runoffs, “Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock has a history of anti-gun activism dating back to at least 2013.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Liberal idiots in Minneapolis keep making the same mistakes over and over again. “In case you didn’t do the math, that’s a 63% increase in the number of homicides, compared to 2019, and the year is not over yet. Just a few more holistic victims of community-based murders”
  • Valery Giscard d’Estaing, France’s president from 1974 to 1981, dead at age 94. He was a French conservative, which meant he was significantly to the left of Walter Mondale. He wasn’t the worst leader in France’s history, but was a big fan of a centralized EU, having helped craft a (rejected) constitution for it in 2004.
  • “Previously Deported Illegal Alien Sex Offender Arrested At Texas Border.”
  • Texas gun sales continue to soar.
  • Tesla gigafactory near Austin raises first pillar.
  • Spanish bank Banco Sabadell’s acquisition of UK’s TSB goes horribly wrong thanks to amazing IT stupidity:

    Experts at the time warned that Sabadell was significantly overpaying for TSB while underestimating the potential costs of integrating the new business into its existing IT platform. But Sabadell ignored the warnings and went ahead with the operation, believing that it would serve as a catapult onto the international scene as well as cement its place as a pioneer in Internet banking. In both cases, the exact opposite happened.

    Branded the “biggest IT disaster in British banking history,” the botched IT upgrade led to hundreds of thousands of customers being unable to access their online accounts for weeks on end. Standing orders, payrolls, mortgage instalments and other payments and transfers failed. Thousands of customers fell victim to fraud attacks. Even when the bank tried to apologize, it sent apologies out to the wrong people, in the process breaking the EU’s new data protection laws.

    At the root of all this chaos was Sabadell’s stubborn determination to get the new IT system up and running as swiftly as possible, in order to save millions of euros in monthly fees it was having to pay to TSB’s former parent company, Lloyds Bank plc, to use its old legacy IT system. Sabadell’s Proteo4UK system was not even close to being ready to roll out at TSB, as IBM consultants brought in to try to remedy the problems have since attested. But senior management went ahead anyway, adopting, as one insider put it, a hope-and-pray attitude.

    That “move fast and break things” paradigm might work fine if you’re a free social media startup, but not if you’re a bank and your buggy, incomplete code handles people’s money.

  • “Democratic mayor arrested after allegedly driving drunk and falling asleep in White Castle drive-thru before crashing into pole.” That would be Shively, Kentucky Mayor Beverly Chester-Burton.
  • #BlackLivesMatter rioter charged with murder.
  • Judge puts temporary halt to Carroll ISD social justice warrior Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP).
  • Thomas Sowell remembers Walter E. Williams. “He was my best friend for half a century. There was no one I trusted more or whose integrity I respected more.”
  • Arecibo, when the cables fell.
  • This sounds cool:

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Warner Brothers might have sounded the death knell for movie theaters, plans to release entire 2021 movie lineup on simultaneously on HBO Max.
  • Adolf Hitler wins election in Namibia.
  • Chihuahua bites bear.
  • I laughed:

  • “Gretchen Whitmer Casts Spell On Michigan So It Is Always Winter And Never Christmas.”
  • “Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.”
  • Election Fraud Update for November 23, 2020

    Monday, November 23rd, 2020

    It’s another election fraud update, full of twists and turns. Some of these reports are from sources I’m not familiar with, so use your own judgment.

  • Let’s start off with a transcript of the Rudy Giuliani/Sidney Powell conference laying out the case that election fraud occurred:

    [Rudy Giuliani:] When we began our representation of the president, we certainly were confronted with a very anomalous set of results. The president way ahead on election night, seven or 800,000 in Pennsylvania, somehow he lost Pennsylvania. We have statisticians willing to testify that that’s almost statistically impossible to have happened in the period of time that it happened. But, of course, that’s just speculation.

    As we started investigating, both our investigations and the very patriotic and brave American citizens that have come forward, are extraordinary, extraordinary number of people, extraordinary number of witnesses. And what emerged very quickly is it’s not a single voter fraud in one state. This pattern repeats itself in a number of states. Almost exactly the same pattern, which to any experienced investigator, prosecutor would suggest that there was a plan from a centralized place to execute these various acts of voter fraud, specifically focused on big cities and specifically focused on, as you would imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats, and particularly focused on big cities that have a long history of corruption. The number of voter fraud cases in Philadelphia could fill a library. Just a few weeks ago, there was a conviction for voter fraud and one two weeks before that. And I’ve often said, I guess, sarcastically, but it’s true, the only surprise I would have found in this is that Philadelphia hadn’t cheated in this election, because, for the last 60 years, they’ve cheated in just about every single election. You could say the same thing about Detroit.

    Each one of these cities are cities that are controlled by Democrats, which means they can get away with anything they want to do. It means they have a certain degree of control over… certainly control the election board completely. And they control law enforcement. And unfortunately, they have some friendly judges that will issue ridiculously irrational opinions just to come out in their favor.

    So, let’s start with the specifics, Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, the margin of victory now for Biden, which is not a victory, it’s a fraud, is 69,140 votes. The reality is that we are now at a count of 682,770 ballots for which we have affidavits that there was no inspection of that ballot at the time that it was entered in the vote. It was a mail ballot.

    Mail ballots are particularly prone to fraud. We were warned about that by Jimmy Carter, president Jimmy Carter and Secretary Baker in a report about a dozen years ago, in which they said that mail balloting is particularly susceptible of fraud, that we should very carefully consider ever doing it, and that it can be taken advantage of. Justice Souter warned us at the same thing in a comment in an election law case. And even the New York Times wrote articles about how dangerous mail voting, mail-in voting was. And this is the first time we ever did it en masse. And I think we proved that all three are prophets. It’s not only susceptible to fraud, it is easily susceptible to fraud, particularly if you have a plan or scheme, which sounds eerily similar to what Joe Biden told us a few days before the election, that he had the best voter fraud team in the world. But they were good. I don’t know that they were that good because they made significant mistakes, like all crooks do. And we caught them. One of them was pushing out Republican inspectors. Every state… almost every civilized country, even Tanzania and places that you wouldn’t think of, have rules about inspectors, particularly for mail-in ballots. And why particularly for mail-in ballots? Because they can more easily be defrauded and you can’t check on them.

    People who have never done a mail-in ballot, I’m going to show you why it’s so easy. Well, you fill out an envelope like this. You put your… usually in New York, it would be your assembly district and the precinct in which you’re voting. You fill out your name and your address, and you sign it. You then use an inner envelope, and you put the ballot inside the inner envelope. You seal it all, and you send it in.

    When it’s being counted, almost invariably in the United States, up until the mass cheating that went on in this election, a Republican and a Democrat inspector, as well as others, if there are other parties, is allowed to watch the unsealing of this ballot. It used to go on all over America when we conducted honest elections. Because the only time you can ever find out if it’s a fraudulent ballot, is when it is looked at. The minute you approve this, it’s thrown away, gone for eternity. The only thing left is the vote. That could have been Mickey Mouse. That could have been a dead person. That could have been not filled out properly. That could have been the same person 30 times. And all these things have happened, by the way. That could have been nothing filled out. We never know.

    So, for example, the recount being done in Georgia will tell us nothing because these fraudulent ballots will just be counted again because they wouldn’t supply the signatures to match the ballots. So, it means nothing to have counted these ballots, because for example, in Pennsylvania, where we have probably our most precise evidence, 682,770 of these ballots were cast, put in, and they weren’t inspected, which renders them ballots that are null and void, cannot be counted, have to be removed from the vote. Why? For several reasons, not the least of which is, that was basically only one of two places in the state where it was done. So, in the other parts of the state, there was a legitimate inspection of the ballots. So, if you have two different standards in different parts of the state, one favoring one part of the state, the other disfavoring the other part of the state, that’s a classic violation of the equal protection clause of the United States constitution, Bush V Gore being the most recent case that teaches that.

    Bit on “ballot correcting” snipped.

    To give you another example, we have 17,000 provisional ballots cast in Pittsburgh. Do you know what a provisional ballot is? Provisional ballot usually happens this way, and about 15 of the 17,000 happened this way, you walk in and you say, I’m here to vote today. Oh, Mr. Giuliani, you already voted. I did? I don’t remember voting. Oh, yes. Yes. You cast an absentee ballot. No, I didn’t. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t. Yes, you did.

    So, why does that happen 17,000 times in Pittsburgh? People walked in thinking… actually 15,000, to be precise. Why did it happen 15,000 times that people in Pittsburgh walked in to vote and they had already voted, according to the Democrat election machine? Did they forget? That many people with bad memories in Pittsburgh? Or is the following correct, that, as witnesses will testify, they were instructed by the Democrat bosses when they had a ballot in which there was no one registered, just assign it to somebody, just assign it to Rudy Giuliani. So, maybe Rudy Giuliani won’t show up to vote. And, if he does show up to vote, we’ll give him a provisional ballot. That is what we call circumstantial evidence of the fraud.

    The direct evidence of the fraud are the people who will testify that, in fact, that’s what happened to them, as well as the 50 to 60 witnesses we have for the way they were treated and not allowed to inspect the ballots. They weren’t just not allowed to do it. They were pushed. A few cases, they were assaulted. In all cases, they were put in a corral so far away. Probably the closest they got is from here to the back of that room. We could do like a… Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny? You know the movie? It’s one of my favorite law movies because he comes from Brooklyn. And when, the nice lady who said she saw, and then he says to her, “How many fingers do I got up?” And she says a three. Well, she was too far away to see it was only two. These people were further away than My Cousin Vinny was from the witness. They couldn’t see a thing.

    Now, I don’t know. You’re going to tell me that 60 people are lying? They didn’t just tell me this. They swore under penalty of perjury, which is something no Democrat has ever done. You don’t even ask Biden about this. You don’t put them under penalty of perjury. He doesn’t even get asked questions about it. He doesn’t get asked questions about all the evidence of the crimes that he committed. These people are under penalty of perjury, the names that are on our affidavit. They swear that they weren’t allowed to carry out their function as inspectors.

    And it’s not just a technical thing. There’s a reason they did it. Why would you not allow people to carry out the function they’ve been allowed to do for 50 years, 60 years? Why wouldn’t you allow inspections of those ballots? Because you knew you were going to use those ballots to catch Biden up. And you had a big road ahead of you. You had to catch him up for 700,000 to 800,000 votes that he was behind. And the only way you were going to do it were with the mail-in ballots. You couldn’t have a Democrat and Republican inspector around. They don’t even have Democrats watching, because they’d be afraid that they’d be honest Democrats who would say, “You’re cheating.”

    So, that takes us to Michigan where there was an honest Democrat who said they were cheating. And we’ll show you her affidavit because I know you keep reporting falsely that we have no evidence, that we have no specific acts of fraud. That’s because the coverage of this has been almost as dishonest as the scheme itself. The American people are entitled to know this. You don’t have a right to keep it from them. You don’t have a right to lie about it. And you are. I mean, you don’t report to them that a citizen of this country, a very fine woman who was willing to allow me to give you her name. I can’t give you all these affidavits. Because, if I do, these people will be harassed. They’ll be threatened. They may lose their job. They will lose their friends. We’ve lost lawyers in this case because they’ve been threatened. We’ve had lawyers that need protection. What’s going on in this country is horrible. And the censorship that you’re imposing is making it worse.

    But Jesse Jacob is an adult citizen and a resident of the state of Michigan. She’s been an employee of the City of Detroit for decades. I know her age, but she can tell you her age. She was assigned to voting duties in September, and she was trained by the City of Detroit and the State of Michigan. She was basically trained to cheat. She said that I was instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than when they were actually sent in. The supervisor made that announcement for all workers to engage in that fraudulent practice. That’s not me saying that. That’s this American citizens saying that under oath.

    Snip.

    Then she was instructed, “By my supervisor not to ask for a driver’s license or any photo ID when a person was trying to vote. Don’t ask for identification. Why would you not ask for identification? Because you knew that a lot of people not entitled to vote were going to come in and early vote. Because you knew that illegal immigrants were going to be allowed to vote. You knew, if you lived in Philadelphia, unless you’re [Italian 00:17:56]. That’s an Italian expression for stupid. Unless you’re stupid, you knew that a lot of people were coming over from Camden to vote. They do every year. It happens all the time in Philly. It’s about as frequent as getting beaten up at a Philadelphia Eagle football game. Happens all the time, all the time.

    And as it allowed to happen because it is a Democrat corrupt city and has been for years, many, many years. And they carried it out in places they could get away with it. They didn’t carry it out in neutral places. They didn’t carry it out in Republican places. They didn’t carry it out where the law is respected. They carried it out in a corrupt city where the district attorney releases criminals on mass, which is why it has so much crime.

    She also said, “I observed a large number of people who came to the satellite location to vote in person, but they had already applied for and submitted an absentee ballot.” So, she observed a lot of people voting twice. Again, this is Jesse Jacob, not me. “I was instructed not to invalidate any ballots and not to look for any deficiency in the ballots. Why would you do that? Because you’re cheating, on purpose cheating, intentionally cheating. You’re cheating as a institution. This is an instruction from the election commissioner or the employer to the worker. “Don’t look for any deficiencies in the ballot.” “I was instructed not to look at any of the signatures on the absentee ballots. “If she was instructed not to look for any of the signatures on the absentee ballots, why the heck do you sign it in the first place? In order to identify it. She was instructed not to do that because many of the absentee ballots were fraudulent, and they knew that, and they didn’t want to have account of that.

    “On November four, 2020, I was in strict structured to improperly predate the absentee ballot when the receipt date was after November 3rd, 2020.” Now, this is really significant because Justice Alito of the Supreme Court instructed Pennsylvania that any ballot that comes in after eight o’clock on November 3rd, 2020 had to be put aside and not opened because there’s a question as to its legality and its constitutionality. What she’s telling you is that they blatantly disregarded that order, that they took ballots that were marked the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, and they marked it down for the third in blatant disregard of the order of the United States Supreme Court.

    Snip.

    There are many more affidavits here. I’d like to read them all to you, but I don’t have the time. You should have had the time and energy to go look for them. That’s your job, like it’s my job to defend the president and to represent the president. It’s your job to read these things and not falsely report that there’s no evidence. Do you know how many affidavits we have in the Michigan case? 220 affidavits. They’re not all public, but eight of them are. Four affiants here, those are people who give affidavits, report an incident that, under any other circumstances, would have been on the front page of all your newspapers if it didn’t involve the hatred that you have, irrational, pathological hatred that you have for the president. What they swear to is that, at 4:30 in the morning, a truck pulled up to the Detroit center where they were counting.

    A truck pulled up to the Detroit center where they were counting ballots. The people thought it was food, so they all ran to the truck. Wasn’t food. It was thousands and thousands of ballots and the ballots were in garbage cans, they were in paper bags, they were in cardboard boxes, and they were taken into the center. They were put on a number of tables. At that time, they thought all the Republican inspectors had left, all but two had and an employee of Dominion who we will address a little bit later.

    Here’s what they jointly swear to, that every ballot that they could see, everything they could hear, these were ballots for Biden. When they saw a ballot, these were ballots only for Biden, meaning there was no down-ticket. Just Biden. Many of them didn’t have anything on the outer envelope because these ballots were produced very quickly, very swiftly and there are estimated to be a minimum of 50,000, maximum of 100,000. Many of them were triple-counted, which means they were put into the counting machine this way. Once, twice, three times. I didn’t see that. I don’t know that but for the fact that three American citizens are willing to swear to it. We’re not going to let them go to court and do that? We’re going to let this election go by when there are in this case 60 witnesses that can prove what I’m saying to you and other acts of fraud in Michigan? I mean what’s happened to this country if we’re going to let that happen? What happened to this country if we’re going to cover that up? We let Al Gore carry on an election dispute longer than this one has been going on for one state and for chads. This happened in Pennsylvania, it happened in Michigan, Michigan probably right now, if I count up the B, just one case alone, Trump v. Benson, a case that we dismissed today because that case was attempting to get the Wayne County Board of Supervisors to de-certify. Well they did. They de-certified. That case has 100 affidavits and 100 affidavits show essentially what I’ve talked to you about. Counting ballots improperly, counting them three and four times, having people vote three and four times, changing and backdating ballots to the point of at least 300,000 illegitimate ballots that we can specifically identify. The margin in Michigan is 146,121 and these ballots were all cast basically in Detroit that Biden won 80-20. So you see it changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County. So it’s a very significant case. That is being raised in the case of Costantino v. The City of Detroit. Not by us, but by an individual plaintiff. We are helping and assisting in that case however and you can find all the affidavits that you want filed in that case. You can find out they’re not just allegations, they’re allegations supported by sworn testimony which is a lot better than Joe Biden has ever done on anything. He doesn’t answer questions, much less give you sworn affidavits.

    On to Wisconsin.

    Wisconsin. Wisconsin had a very small margin, 20,544 last time I looked. In Wisconsin, without going into great detail, very similar plan. Republicans shut out in the City of Milwaukee and also in Madison. Republicans almost uniformly shut out from the absentee process. Not allowed to inspect, not allowed to look at the ballots. We have in Milwaukee and in the state of Wisconsin a much stricter law. Wisconsin doesn’t allow mail-in ballots. They didn’t buy into the big mail-in ballot situation. Wisconsin, when you look at their constitution, almost seems to not like absentee ballots. They state it’s not a right, a privilege, and they have very, very strict procedures and the strict procedure says that you can’t be given an absentee ballot, you have to personally apply for it. It’s illegal basically to solicit a vote and they have actually many reasons for it that probably goes back to their progressive days, when I say progressive, I mean late 19th century early 20th century progressive, when that really meant progressive, not retrogressive.

    So there are 60,000 ballots in Milwaukee County and 40,000 ballots in Madison that as far as we can tell and this is why we are auditing because we have very good information that numbers are going to come out about here that don’t have applications. Under the law of the State of Wisconsin, already decided, if there’s no application for an absentee ballot, the absentee ballot is thrown away. This all happened in two places in Wisconsin. Didn’t happen in Northern Wisconsin. Didn’t happen in Republican Wisconsin. Didn’t happen in neutral Wisconsin, where there are equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, it happened in a place where the vote was 75, 80% for the Democrat. You take away any number of those and that 20,000 lead disappears. In other words, if you count the lawful votes, Trump won Wisconsin by a good margin. Indeed, if you count the lawful votes in Pennsylvania, he won it by about 300,000 votes.

    Also in the lawsuit filed in Wisconsin which is really a petition because of their procedures, there were no inspectors provided for the count of the illegal ballots. There were numerous backdated ballots, we’re just counting them now. Run over into the thousands and there were many precincts in which there was an overvote. Now let me explain to you what an overvote is which is something you should have explained to the American people because it’s about the clearest circumstantial evidence of massive fraud that you can have. An overvote is if 200% of the people who are registered in a district vote. Think about that. 200% of the registered voters in a district vote. What does that mean? That means somebody voted twice, that means somebody who’s not entitled to vote voted, an illegal, a person from another city or state, a person who’s not registered, but what it means is that those are illegitimate votes. You don’t have an overvote of 200% or 300%. You don’t have an overvote of 100%. Most precincts don’t have 100% turnout. In fact, classically it’s considered to be an overvote if you go over 80%. Well in Michigan and Wisconsin, we have overvotes in numerous precincts, of 150%, 200%, and 300%.

    One of the reasons why the two Republicans did not certify in Wayne, Michigan, Wayne County, Michigan is because the overvote was so high. Monstrously high in about two-thirds of the precincts in the city of Detroit. Which means magically two and three times the number of registered voters turned out to vote. In fact we have precincts in which two times the number of people who live there, including children, voted. That’s absurd. The frustration of this is, what I’m describing to you is a massive fraud. It isn’t a little teeny one. It isn’t 100 votes switched here or there. Georgia. We’re about to file a major lawsuit in Georgia. That’ll be filed probably tomorrow. I don’t need to go through it. Virtually the same things I’ve told you before. In the City of Atlanta, Republicans were not allowed to watch the absentee mail-in ballot process. Inspections completely cast aside and we have numerous double voters, we have numerous out-of-state voters, and we have specific evidence of intimidation and changes of vote. That will all be in the lawsuit that comes out tomorrow.

    He’s also going to look at Arizona. Sidney Powell then makes some extraordinary claims:

    Thank you Rudy. What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here in as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out. We have one very strong witness who has explained how it all works. His affidavit is attached to the pleadings of Lin Wood in the lawsuit he filed in Georgia. It is a stunning, detailed affidavit because he was with Hugo Chavez while … He was being briefed on how it worked, he was with Hugo Chavez when he saw it operate to make sure the election came out his way. That was the express purpose for creating this software. He has seen it operate and as soon as he saw the multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the election, he knew the same thing was happening here, that that was what had gone on.

    Now the software itself was created with so many variables and so many back doors that can be hooked up to the internet or a thumbdrive stuck in it or whatever, but one of its most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in. That’s when they came in the backdoor with all the mail-in ballots, many of which they had actually fabricated, some were on pristine paper with identically matching perfect circle dots for Mr. Biden. Others were shoved in in batches, they’re always put in in a certain number of batches and people would rerun the same batch. This corresponds to our statistical evidence that shows incredible spikes in the vote counts at particular times and that corresponds to eyewitness testimony of numerous people who have come forward and said they saw the ballots come in the backdoor at that time.

    Notably the Dominion executives are nowhere to be found now. They are moving their offices overnight to different places. Their office in Toronto was shared with one of the Soros entities, one of the leaders of the Dominion Project overall is Lord Malloch-Brown, Mr. Soros’ number two person in the U.K., and part of his organization. There are ties of the Dominion leadership to the Clinton Foundation and to other known politicians in this country. Just to give you a brief description of how this worked, I’m going to quote from a letter that was written and I will read that to make sure I get the quotes right. This person was objecting to the United States acquisition of Sequoia Voting Systems by Smartmatic, a foreign-owned company. I believe this transaction raises exactly the sort of foreign ownership issues that [Siphius 00:42:10] is best positioned to examine for national security purposes. It’s undisputed that Smartmatic is foreign-owned and it has acquired Sequoia, they keep changing the names as they go along. Different times when a problem comes up, they just create another corporation and call it a different name, but it was a voting machine company doing business in the United States.

    Some information about foreign ownership of Smartmatic snipped. All concerning, but probably not anything that will get a judge to prevent certification, throw out fraudulent votes or order a revote.

    We have evidence of different numbers of votes being injected into the system, the same identical unique six digit number multiple times in at least two States that we’ve analyzed so far. I’m talking about like 341,542 votes for Biden and 100,012 for Trump. There’s no explanation, no logical explanation for the same numbers being injected 20 minutes apart into the machine. The software manual itself, you can download it from the internet and I would encourage you all to read it, because it specifically advertises some of these things as features of the system. Why it was ever allowed into this country is beyond my comprehension and why nobody has dealt with it is absolutely appalling.

    The machines were easily accessible to hackers. There’s video on the net that will explain to you how a kid with a cell phone can hack one of these voting machines. There’s been no oversight of Dominion or its software. Workers in each county were trained by Dominion, but there’s no evidence of any monitoring otherwise. We have testimony of different workers admitting that they were trained how to dispose of Trump votes and add to Biden votes. The software has a feature pursuant to which you can drag and drop any number of batches of votes to the candidate of your choice, or simply throw them away. So we have mathematical evidence in a number of states of massive quantities of Trump votes being trashed, just simply put in the trash like you would on your computer with any file and Biden votes being injected. That’s addition to the flipping.

    I mean, it really happens in two ways. There’s an algorithm that runs that automatically flips all the votes, and then each operator has the ability to go in override settings. They can ignore a signature, they could ignore the top line of the ballot. They can go down ballot and select who they want to change the results for. The gentleman who founded Smartmatic, there’s video of him on the internet, explaining that, yes, in at least one occasion, he admits, they changed a million votes with no problem. Many of the jurisdictions that have had this problem might not have known of the issues, but many did. I think a full-scale criminal investigation needs to be undertaken immediately by the Department of Justice and by every state’s equivalent, Attorney General’s Office or State Investigatory Unit, because there’s evidence of different benefits being provided to the people who spent 100 million dollars of taxpayer money at the last minute for their state to get the Dominion voting systems put in, in time for this election in different ways.

    There’s one person that a lawyer told me got, “election insurance”, meaning that he would be able to make sure he was elected. I’m sure they explained that feature in detail to many people who expressed interest in putting this voting system in. Texas denied certification of the Dominion system in 2019, but there are no doubt issues with the software that Texas did use, unbeknownst to Texas, I would imagine, since they went to great trouble to examine the Dominion systems and reject them, but other software, the source code that does the alterations is embedded we have been told in the source code all across the country, in all the voting machines.

    (Hat tip: Regular reader Brandon Byers.)

    I think what Powell means here is the compiled code, which would be a very concerning and shocking thing, if true. Those identical numerical entries (and any other obvious statistical anomalies) need to be investigate and thrown out if found to be fraudulent. But the remote control flipping of votes charge is going to require some evidence to back it up, if true. (For starters, compile the supposed source code and see if the checksum matches the checksum on the compiled code on the machine.) Absent that sort of verification, it’s understandable why even those (like myself) who thinking election fraud occurred think some of the wilder Dominion theories are a distraction from the real issues. Which explains why…

  • Why the Trump campaign is now saying that Powell is no longer a member of their legal team.
  • Tucker Carlson telling Powell to put up or shut up might also have had something to do with it. Powell highlight some real issues, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I don’t think she’s produced that.
  • But back to Rudy:

    The media has been claiming since the election ended that President Trump’s claims of voter fraud are ‘baseless’ and ‘without evidence’. That just is not true. The President’s lawyer gave examples of it during today’s press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington DC. But everyone is too busy mocking him to pay attention.

    I tried to listen to what Giuliani actually said and not what he looked like or the characterization of him by the rest of the media. The cameras started feverishly clicking the first time he wiped the sweat from his face, all but guaranteeing that would be the focus of the presser.

    Giuliani did in fact present evidence of voter fraud today but many people simply didn’t want to hear it. He cited multiple Americans, one by name, who have signed sworn affidavits stating that they witness some type of fraud, whether it was pro-Trump ballots being thrown out without cause, ballots being backdated to before the election, poll workers being told not to ask voters for identification, and more.

    As Giuliani helpfully pointed out, affidavits are considered ‘evidence’ in a court case. Whether you agree or disagree with them is a different question. And it’s reasonable that not all of the people who signed their names would be willing to go public. If you want to hear more of the evidence that was presented, just watch the first hour or so of the press conference.

    The more difficult — and crucial — question is whether Trump’s legal team has enough witnesses or other evidence to actually overturn the election in court. That is what journalists should be addressing. But it is simply wrong for the media to assert there is NO evidence of fraud.

  • Things that make you go “Hmmmmm”: “Dominion Voting ‘Lawyers Up‘ Before Abruptly Backing Out Of Pennsylvania Fact-Finding Hearing.”

    Pennsylvania lawmakers had scheduled the hearing with the voting machine manufacturer “to help identify and correct any irregularities in the election process,” according to the House Republican Caucus.

    “It is vitally important voters have faith in the machines they use to cast their ballots. On the heels of Gov. Tom Wolf unilaterally decertifying every voting machine in the Commonwealth, we need to know whether these new machines met expectations, whether they are reliable and whether they are not subject to interference,” said Rep. Grove (R-York).

    Dominion had initially agreed to attend the hearing, before it “abruptly canceled,” Grove said.

    “I was impressed at what appeared to be the willingness that Dominion Voting Systems to address accusations and it would have put 1.3. million Pennsylvanians who used their machines at ease—including myself, thinking that Dominion was willing to publicly back up their product which PA taxpayers invested millions to purchase” he noted during the presser.

    “Unfortunately, last evening, Dominion Voting Systems lawyered up, and backed out of their commitment to the people of Pennsylvania to provide their input in a public format.”

    Grove blasted the company for “retreating into the darkness,” rather than appearing at the hearing with “honesty and integrity.”

    The committee chair said he wanted to know why a company with nothing to hide would back out.

  • Reminder: Texas rejected Dominion: “The examiner reports raise concerns about whether the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system is suitable for its intended purpose; operates efficiently and accurately; and is safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation.”
  • Here’s a statistical analysis from Director Blue that suggests election fraud in Pennsylvania and Georgia.

    Notice the similarities in PA and GA? How the right sides of the graph show virtually no movement for Trump; and very predictable vote movements to Biden. How predictable?

    Below are excerpts of spreadsheets that show what was happening on the right side of each chart. Vote flips in the same-sized bundles (6,000 in PA and 4,800 in GA) were injected into the system to overcome Trump’s lead in both states. You can click either image above to see all of the data.

    The highlighted cells show where the vote counts — stunningly obvious in retrospect — were manipulated to benefit Biden.

    That does look might suspicious. Someone with more statistical analysis expertise than I have will have tell me how meaningful this is.

  • Here’s another data analysis suggesting that Dominion software in Philadelphia regularly transferred votes in exact ratios. The video’s 40 minutes long, I haven’t watched all of it, and, again, someone with more statistical analysis expertise will have to analyze this to tell me how meaningful it is. (Hat tip: Janie Johnson.)
  • Remember the Wayne County flip-flop? Well, it flipped again:

    The two Republicans on Michigan’s Wayne County Board of Canvassers claimed in signed affidavits Wednesday that they were bullied into siding with Democrats and have now rescinded their votes to certify.

    The two Republicans — Monica Palmer and William C. Hartmann — were involved in a brief deadlock in the county’s election certification process Tuesday before voting to certify.

    Wayne County, which includes Detroit, is Michigan’s most populous county, with more than 1.7 million residents.

    The Associated Press reported that a person familiar with the matter said Trump himself reached out to the canvassers on Tuesday evening after the revised vote to express gratitude for their support. Then, on Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann signed affidavits saying they believe the county vote “should not be certified.”

    And on Thursday, the Trump campaign said it was withdrawing its lawsuit in the state, citing what happened in Wayne County.

    “This morning we are withdrawing our lawsuit in Michigan as a direct result of achieving the relief we sought: to stop the election in Wayne County from being prematurely certified before residents can be assured that every legal vote has been counted and every illegal vote has not been counted,” said Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

    Both Republicans say they were called racists and subjected to threats for raising concerns about ballots that Democrats said were from predominately Black communities, Jenna Ellis, a lawyer for the Trump 2020 Campaign, told Fox News on Tuesday.

    They also said people had threatened members of their family.

  • Speaking of which, watch a Detroit State Rep candidate dox Wayne County canvasser Monica Palmer…and her children:

    (Hat Tip: Brandon Bryers)

  • Alan Dershowitz outline’s Trump’s narrow legal path to victory:

    For example, in Pennsylvania, they have two very strong legal arguments. One, that the courts changed what the legislature did about counting ballots after the end of Election Day. That’s a winning issue in the Supreme Court. I don’t necessarily support it, but it’s a winning issue in the Supreme Court,” Dershowitz told Fox Business on Sunday. The team, meanwhile, has “a winning issue in the Supreme Court on equal protection, that some counties flawed ballots to be cured while others didn’t. Bush v. Gore suggests that an Equal Protection argument can prevail.”

    Dershowitz, who helped defend Trump during the Senate impeachment trial earlier this year, said that due to Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s lead over the president, Trump’s team may not be able to contest enough ballots in Pennsylvania.

    “The other legal theory they have, which is a potentially strong one, is that the computers, either fraudulently or by glitches, changed hundreds of thousands of votes. There, there are enough votes to make a difference, but I haven’t seen the evidence to support that,” he elaborated. “So, in one case, they don’t have the numbers. In another case, they don’t seem yet to have the evidence, maybe they do. I haven’t seen it. But the legal theory is there to support them if they have the numbers and they have the evidence.”

  • Trey Trainor, the Chairman of the federal Election Commission says Trump has a case. “The massive amounts of affidavits that we see in these cases show that there was in fact fraud that took place.”

    Trainor said his review of evidence, including numerous affidavits claiming voter fraud and a sworn statement by a prominent mathematician flagging up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots, met the first level of legal scrutiny under what’s known as motion to dismiss or “Rule 12(b)(6)” of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which would dismiss less credible claims.

    Noting the subsequent legal threshold beyond a “motion to dismiss” is the “summary judgment phase,” Trainor said that under this phase, the credibility of witnesses is presumed to be accurate, especially given the caliber of the testimonies Trainor has observed to date.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Another “Hmmmm”: “Floyd County [Georgia] terminates election director after state audit uncovers uncounted votes.” Over 2,600 votes not counted.
  • Related:

  • Given those revelations, the Trump campaign asks for another recount in Georgia.

    The news comes after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) certified the election results. Although Kemp certified the results, he called for an additional hand recount, citing major errors in Floyd, Douglas and Walton Counties.

    “I would just say I’m formalizing the certification,” Kemp said at the time. “Now that Secretary Raffensperger certified, it triggers the ability of the Trump campaign to ask for the recount. If something were to happen, I’m still part of that process. So my take on all this is: I’m following the law and the rules.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Another data point:

  • Another Dominion “Hmmmm”:

  • And another: “Dominion Engineer Told Antifa He’d ‘Made Sure’ Trump Wouldn’t Win, Report Says.”
  • NotSureIfSerious.jpg:

  • The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rejected a Trump lawsuit complaint about counting observers. “It’s inexplicable that five justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would conclude that watchers observing from distances up to 100 feet away is reasonable.”
  • Also: “US District Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania Matthew Brann, a Barack Obama appointee on Saturday dismissed a Trump campaign lawsuit seeking to block Pennsylvania from certifying its election results.” Both of those lawsuits may be headed for the Supreme Court.
  • “The moment when Michigan counted 149,772 votes in 5 seconds and less than 6,000 of them were for Trump.”
  • Screwjob in Wisconsin?

  • “The Greatest Electoral Heist in American History“:

    The pieces are finally coming together, and they reveal a masterpiece of electoral larceny involving Big Tech oligarchs, activists, and government officials who prioritize partisanship over patriotism.

    The 2020 election was stolen because leftists were able to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to weaken, alter, and eliminate laws that were put in place over the course of decades to preserve the integrity of the ballot box. But just as importantly, it was stolen because those same leftists had a thoroughly-crafted plan, and because they were rigorous in its implementation and ruthless in its execution.

    Let’s not forget that liberals have been consumed by a fixation with removing Donald Trump from office for longer than he’s actually been in office. The sordid story of the 2020 election heist begins all the way back in January 2017, when Barack Obama’s former campaign manager and senior advisor, David Plouffe, took a job leading the policy and advocacy efforts of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a “charitable” organization established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

    Earlier this year, just as it was becoming clear that Joe Biden would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Plouffe published a book outlining his vision for the Democrats’ roadmap to victory in 2020, which involved a “block by block” effort to turn out voters in key Democratic strongholds in the swing states that would ultimately decide the election, such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Minneapolis.

    The book was titled, A Citizen’s Guide to Defeating Donald Trump, and it turned out that the citizen Plouffe had in mind was none other than his former boss, Mark Zuckerberg. Although Plouffe no longer officially managed Zuckerberg’s policy and advocacy efforts at that point, the political operative’s influence evidently remained a powerful force.

    Thanks to the extensive efforts of investigators and attorneys for the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society, who have been following Zuckerberg’s money for the past 18 months, it is still possible to expose the inner workings of this heist in time to stop it.

    Snip.

    Under the pretext of assisting election officials conduct “safe and secure” elections in the age of COVID, Zuckerberg donated $400 million — as much money as Congress appropriated for the same general purpose — to nonprofit organizations founded and run by left-wing activists. The primary recipient was the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which received the staggering sum of $350 million. Prior to Zuckerberg’s donations, CTCL’s annual operating expenses averaged less than $1 million per year. How was Zuckerberg even aware of such a small-potatoes operation, and why did he entrust it with ⅞ of the money he was pouring into this election cycle, despite the fact that it had no prior experience handling such a massive amount of money?

    Predictably, given the partisan background of its leading officers, CTCL proceeded to distribute Zuckerberg’s funds to left-leaning counties in battleground states. The vast majority of the money handed out by CTCL — especially in the early days of its largesse — went to counties that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Some of the biggest recipients, in fact, were the very locales Plouffe had identified as the linchpins of the Democrat strategy in 2020.

    Zuckerberg and CTCL left nothing to chance, however, writing detailed conditions into their grants that dictated exactly how elections were to be conducted, down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places. The Constitution gives state lawmakers sole authority for managing elections, but these grants put private interests firmly in control.

    Amistad Project lawyers tried to prevent this unlawful collusion by filing a flurry of lawsuits in eight states prior to Election Day. Unfortunately, judges were forced to put those lawsuits aside without consideration of their merits because the plaintiffs had not yet suffered “concrete harm” in the form of fraudulent election results. The law had no remedy to offer because the left’s lawless schemes had not yet reached fruition.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Vegas Oddsmaker Says, “The Fix Was In, Trump Was Robbed, This Election Was Stolen.”

    Trump entered the night a 2 to 1 underdog. As soon as the polls started to close and the picture became clear, Trump’s odds quickly moved to even money. Then Trump became the slight favorite. Then a moderate favorite. Then a 2-to-1 favorite.

    Then 3 to 1. 4 to 1. 5 to 1. 6 to 1. 7 to 1. Finally, Trump moved to 8 to 1 favorite.

    What does all this mean? Bettors putting their money on the line during Election Night have always proven to be deadly accurate. Smart bettors can clearly see what direction a race is taking. Bettors around the world clearly saw what I saw, when they stared at the electoral map- Trump was headed for an electoral landslide.

    But something wasn’t quite right. Fox News wouldn’t call Florida for Trump- even though he was ahead by a mile. They wouldn’t call Ohio- even though Trump was ahead by a mile, They wouldn’t call Texas- even though Trump was ahead by a mile. I sat there screaming at my television.

    More strange calls. Fox News had called Virginia for Biden at the start of the night- with Trump well ahead in Virginia. Trump would remain ahead in Virginia for three long hours after Fox awarded the electoral votes to Biden. Why would they do that? What was the rush? It made no sense.

    Biden was awarded Virginia with Trump ahead. But Trump was ahead by a mile in Florida, Ohio and Texas, yet Fox News refused to award him the electoral votes. I knew at that moment, something was wrong. Something smelled fishy. Something was rotten in the DC Swamp.

    Bettors witnessed Trump dominating. He clearly won not only those key states of Florida, Ohio and Texas, but Trump also enjoyed large leads in the entire Midwest- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. It was all but over. Trump had an electoral landslide. Hence the massive 8 to 1 odds in favor of Trump.

    And then it happened. It was the most bizarre call in Election Night history. Fox News called Arizona for Biden. Why? It wasn’t even close to over. There was no reason on earth to make that call. Arizona is STILL not over 8 days later. CNN still hasn’t awarded Arizona. ABC pulled it back from Biden only 24 hours ago.

    Why would Fox News be in such a rush to call Arizona for Biden? At that moment, Trump’s odds crashed almost instantly from 8 to 1, back down to 2 to 1. That drop set off alarm bells. My friend who is one of the biggest bookmakers in the country called me to say, “Wayne, something is wrong. I’ve never seen a drop like that, let alone a drop that fast. How can Trump go from 8 to 1, to 2 to 1. Someone knows something. We’ve got a problem.”

    It was as if someone had decided in advance to give Arizona to Biden- whether he won it, or not. It was as if the secret code was known to only a few billionaire gamblers, “Fox News awards Arizona to Biden.” Six magic words. Someone was ready for that call. Someone waited until Trump was a prohibitive 8 to 1 favorite, then knew to bet millions of dollars on Biden at the longest odds of the night. Someone knew the fix was in. Someone made a fortune.

    There’s more to the story. First, by awarding both Virginia and Arizona to Biden way too early in the evening and also going super slow awarding states to Trump where he led by a mile, Fox News made sure Biden had the electoral lead all night. That’s another big part of the story.

    (Hat tip: The Samizdat Herald.)

  • The Democratic Media Complex reaps what it sows:

    A prominent liberal legal academic who spent the last four years pushing outrageous, discredited, and debunked conspiracy theories about Donald Trump stealing the 2016 election said on Fox News Sunday that refusal to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election threatens the country.

    Snip.

    No conspiracy theories of recent vintage have damaged the country as much as the ones [Laurence] Tribe (and many other anti-Trump media figures) trafficked in each and every day of the last four years from prominent perches in politics, media, and the academy. If taking claims to court undermines democracy, how to defend Tribe’s vociferous and repeated claims that Trump stole the election in 2016 with the help of Russia?

  • More on the same theme:

    There have been a number of frustrating things to deal with during the past couple of weeks. In victory or defeat, the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the media are insufferable. We’ve all known that for a very long time but — and we have said this a lot lately — they’re getting even worse.

    They are complaining about President Trump’s legal right to make sure that the election to decide the leader of the free world wasn’t compromised in any way. It seems a reasonable thing to do, but we are dealing with liberals here, so reasonable doesn’t factor into the equation much.

    The painstaking, necessary scrutiny of ballots in key states continues, much to the chagrin of the Democrats. If they are so certain of victory, this delay shouldn’t mean much to them. They’re acting as if they’re terrified of what may be found out.

    Snip.

    After what the Democrats put this president and the country through with the Russia collusion hoax, the impeachment charade, and four years of flat-out saying that the 2016 election wasn’t legitimate, I don’t care if the Left has to suffer frustration forever. Put simply: they’ve brought this on themselves.

    If they had, for even a moment at any time in the last four years, not been thoroughly awful then maybe we might all be able to search for some common ground.

    Now, as I recently said on Facebook, I’ve spent every day since the election looking all over my house and I can’t find the kumbaya anywhere.

    Karma has entered the building, and will be staying awhile.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Another data point in Pennsylvania:

  • And here are thousands of data points: “Two California men were indicted on 41 counts of voter fraud after allegedly submitting thousands of fraudulent voter registration applications on behalf of homeless people, according to NBC Los Angeles.”
  • Is a bombshell lawsuit coming in Georgia?
  • More on Georgia:

  • We need to end mail in vote fraud. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Philly Bans All Indoor Gatherings Unless You’re Still Counting Biden Votes.” And for the reader who complained I shouldn’t include Babylon Bee links in these roundups:

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    LinkSwarm for November 20, 2020

    Friday, November 20th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Coronavirus is up around the world again, Democrats keep behaving badly (talk about your evergreen themes), some fun dog links, and it’s time to celebrate Life Day again!

  • Good news, everyone! No more lockdowns in Texas! It took him long enough, but Governor Greg Abbott realizes what Democratic governors haven’t: all the Wuhan coronavirus infection curves seem the same, lockdowns don’t seem to work, masks don’t seem to work, the survival rate for the non-elderly, non-immune-compromised is well over 99%.
  • Speaking of which: Sweden, after having seemed to beat the bug through a strategy of herd immunity, now sees cases rising.
  • Indeed, all of Europe seems to be getting hit again. Nobody knows nuthin.
  • For liberals who still can’t understand President Trump’s appeal: “US Household Incomes Increased More in 2018 Than in the Previous 20 Years—Combined.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Hundreds of Companies That Got Stimulus Aid Have Failed.” Government can’t pick winners, but it can sure create losers. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
  • Defunding the police and the damage done. “Homicides in Minneapolis are up 50 percent.”
  • Andy Ngo on all the politicians who have turned Portland into a shithole:

    This week brought news that Portland City Commissioner (as councilmembers are known) Jo Ann Hardesty called the cops over an argument with a Lyft driver days before the city council was scheduled to vote on her proposal to slash millions from the police budget.

    The hypocrisy is glaring, but the bigger lesson is about the damage an activist political class can do to cities all over America if they follow in Portland’s foolish footsteps.

    Hardesty has been a vocal advocate of Black Lives Matter and defunding the ­police. During a ride home, she allegedly belittled and berated her driver over a partially open window, a COVID-19 recommendation from the ride-sharing service itself. After the driver had enough of the abuse and canceled the ride, Hardesty refused to get out and called 911.

    Portland politics have become the subject of national scrutiny by both the media and President Trump following more than 120 days of riots this year. While much attention has ­focused on the city’s feckless mayor, Ted Wheeler, others on the council have equally enabled a rapid descent into disorder.

    Since Hardesty was elected to the council in 2018, her staunch hostility to police has earned her the approval of Black Lives Matter and ­antifa activists in Portland. Ordinary Portlanders have paid the price for that approval.

    Days after her abuse of emergency services, the council took up Hardesy’s proposal to slash $18 million from the police budget. Already in June, she had spearheaded a successful effort to cut $15 million. Her newest proposal narrowly failed, however. Dan Ryan, the commissioner who was the swing vote, had his home vandalized that night by a mob of antifa militants.

    Portlanders have suffered immensely this year from the grandstanding of left-wing politicians who run the city. Mayor Wheeler oversaw six months of anti-police riots that have turned downtown into an empty shell of itself. When the federal government sent in reinforcements in July to protect a federal courthouse under siege, the city council passed a resolution banning Portland Police from communicating with federal agencies.
    see also

    Hardesty’s initial police-defunding package has had deadly consequences. As part of the cuts, police units that investigate gun ­violence, work in schools and patrol the transit system were disbanded. The result? In just the first month, shootings increased by almost 200 percent compared to the previous year. In the months since, homicides and shootings have continued to soar.

  • Ding-dong, the witch is… still Speaker of the House. I foresee two more years of robust NRCC fundraising.
  • “Biden to Continue Obama Tradition of Packing White House with Corporate Lobbyists:

    With Joe Biden poised to take office in 2021, reports suggest he plans to follow in Obama’s footsteps by hiring a bunch of corporate lobbyists in senior roles.

    At least two former lobbyists who will assume top roles in the Biden administration previously served on Biden’s staff during the Obama administration. Steve Ricchetti, who served as then-Vice President Biden’s chief of staff, will join the White House as counselor to the president. Ricchetti founded his own lobbying firm in 2001 and worked on behalf of corporate clients such as AT&T, Eli Lily, and the American Bankers Association.

    Ron Klain, who also served as then-Vice President Biden’s chief of staff, will take on the role of White House chief of staff in the Biden administration. Klain is a veteran of the K Street lobbying firm O’Melveny & Myers. His clients included U.S. Airways, AOL Time Warner, and ImClone, a pharmaceutical company whose CEO was convicted for fraud. Klain also lobbied on behalf of mortgage giant Fannie Mae in an effort to fight off stricter oversight from Congress.

    Rep. Cedric Richmond (D., La.) will also join the Biden administration in a senior advisory role. The move was blasted by environmental groups that pointed out Richmond’s close ties to Big Oil. During his 10 years in Congress, for example, Richmond received more than $340,000 in donations from the oil and gas industry and frequently joined Republicans in voting against legislation opposed by the industry.

    Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, will join the incoming administration as a deputy chief of staff. She is a cofounder of Precision Strategies, an “integrated strategy and marketing agency” that was recently hired by the American Investment Council, a lobbying group for private equity firms.

    If the election fraud isn’t overturned…

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Just because California’s peasants are locked down due to the cornavirus and can’t have Thanksgiving with the family doesn’t mean that Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom can’t have a maskless dinner with high-rolling lobbyists at swanky restaurant The French Laundry. Rules are for the little people, not for your betters in the ruling class…
  • Speaking of Newsom: Courts don’t seem to agree with his rule by fiat:

    The judge ruled that Newsom violated the state constitution by unilaterally ordering that all registered voters be sent mail-in ballots. More importantly, she found good cause for a permanent injunction restraining Newsom from issuing any further unconstitutional orders that make “new statutory law or legislative policy.”

    The court rejected Newsom’s extraordinary claim that a state of emergency centralizes the state’s powers in the hands of the governor, thus turning California into an autocracy. This is the unlawful basis on which Newsom has collapsed our system of checks and balances, issuing 58 executive orders and changing over 400 laws unilaterally.

    Specifically, the judge rejected Newsom’s argument that Section 8627 of the Emergency Services Act gives him autocratic powers. At least 24 of his executive orders rely on that section.

    As far as the most damaging order, Newsom’s arbitrary and unscientific lockdown scheme, that too is newly vulnerable. The Pacific Legal Foundation’s new lawsuit uses the same separation-of-powers argument our victory established as a successful legal theory.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Speaking of some pigs being more equal than others: “As America locks down, 20 lawmakers from 3 states really just flew to Maui to mingle with a bunch of lobbyists at a posh resort for 4 days.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • So the largest city in the state that voted to removed pedophiles from the sex offender registry is considering eliminating the sex crimes unit due to budget cuts.

    (Hat tip: Ian Miles Chong.)

  • Michigan’s Speaker of the House throws cold water on the idea of impeaching Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
  • Evidently being a horrible anti-Semite means you get suspended from the Labour Party for all of three weeks.
  • Another day, another hate crime hoax. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Cincinnati Democratic city councilman P.G. Sittenfeld indicted on bribery. Bonus: Sittenfeld was the third Cincinnati city council critter indicted this year.
  • Is actor Matthew McConnaughey going to run for governor of Texas? Eh. I like Hugh Hewitt, but the governor suggestion is just sort of tossed out there by him.
  • Another male feminist/anti-#GamerGater turns out to be a creeper. What are the odds?
  • I’m an unabashed partisan, but I’m getting pretty tired of politicians filling up my phone with text messages begging for money. Yeah, the Georgia runoff is important, I get it. But multiple text message begs a day just piss me off.
  • You know what’s worse than getting accidentally ejected from a fighter plane? Getting partially ejected.
  • IThoughtThisWasAmerica.jpg.
  • Heh:

  • “Disney Capitalizes On Success Of Baby Yoda With Baby Jar Jar.” To be fair, Baby Jar Jar is probably more tolerable than the original…
  • Speaking of Star Wars remakes being more tolerable than the original, the Lego Star Wars Holiday Special is now out on Disney+.
  • Speaking of Disney, science fiction author Alan Dean Foster claims Disney is screwing him out of royalties. Not cool, mouse. Not cool.
  • 8-Bit version of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” Stumbled on this again after posting it many years ago, and it provides great background music to work by…
  • Man finds shelter for 300 dogs ahead of hurricane. In his own house.

  • High Golden Retriever.
  • Doggy fashion-plate:

  • LinkSwarm for November 13, 2020

    Friday, November 13th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to a Friday he 13th LinkSwarm! I wonder what tricks the last Friday the 13th of 2020 could hold for us…

  • I’ll probably do another voting fraud update Monday, but here’s a quick state of play:

    The seven states still counting votes, or with recounts ordered, or audits forecast, or credible evidence of fraud or system “glitches” include:

    • Georgia’s 16 electoral votes under a scheduled recount.
    • Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes under a scheduled audit and a Supreme Court order.
    • Michigan’s 16 electoral votes with statehouse subpoenas for election officials.
    • Wisconsin’s 10 votes under a scheduled recount and statewide canvas.
    • Nevada’s six votes chasing legal challenges for fraud and a Bill Barr Justice Department investigation.
    • Arizona’s 11 votes still counting and under scrutiny for voter irregularities.
    • And Nebraska’s one electoral vote in their District 2 under investigation.
  • And now in graphic form:

  • Is Wall Street getting ready to move to Dallas?

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott will welcome representatives from major stock exchanges, including Nasdaq, to Austin on Nov. 20 as the state makes a bid to be the top choice if the exchanges make good on threats to move their trading platforms out of New Jersey.

    The Dallas Morning News reported last month that the governor’s office was in talks with Nasdaq and other exchanges about moving data centers to Dallas that power billions of dollars in trades each day on Wall Street.

    The governor’s office confirmed the meeting, touting the state’s business-friendly environment.

    “Texas continues to be the premier economic destination in the country, attracting more leading businesses than any other state,” spokeswoman Renae Eze said in a statement to The News. “The governor looks forward to meeting with Nasdaq and showcasing Texas’ business-friendly environment, skilled workforce, robust infrastructure, and low taxes, all of which foster greater economic growth in the Lone Star State.”

    The downside is that this would make Dallas natives that much more insufferable… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Lessons from the election:

    The hidden Trump vote would appear to have thrown off the polls again — a phenomenon that illuminates the inhibited political ethos a punishing media has fostered in this country, where a significant swath of America quite understandably conceals its real views until it enters the privacy of the polling booth. The hidden Trump vote is a rebuke to the ruling class and its ambitions to control the minds of Americans through skewed and hectoring propaganda.

    Pollster Frank Luntz has said that his industry will collapse if Biden loses. No doubt many members of it are trembling over the prospect. Again, a squeaker for Biden, should it happen, doesn’t exonerate them. As things stand at the moment, the betting odds and forecasts are rapidly changing and bear no resemblance to the polling industry’s pre-election picture.

    Nor has the predicted demise of the Republican Senate come to pass. Whatever happens, this election can’t be characterized as the Blue Wave the elite had spent weeks expecting. Ironically, a Red Wave, with Hispanic voters riding it, crashed over the Democrats in Florida. That would suggest at least in one major state that the toxic identity politics of the Dems has backfired. How ironic it would be if the president, whom the Democrats have called a racist and xenophobe day in and day out for four years, should end up winning thanks to increased support from minorities unimpressed by that demagoguery. It would be an upending that Biden richly deserves. He has been utterly shameless in his race-based lying about the president, talking about saving the “soul of America” while engaged in the most cynical form of racial arson.

    It also appears that the Democrats have paid some price for running so far to the left. Kamala Harris, the most liberal member of the Senate, has been a dead weight on the ticket. It would be wonderful if she ends up costing Biden parts of the Rust Belt. After having spent decades pretending to be a moderate, Biden formed a Faustian bargain with the far Left and adopted many of its radical positions. He could have moved to the middle by selecting a less extreme running mate. Instead, he threw his lot in with Bernie, Kamala, and AOC.

  • More on the same theme:

    In the expectations game, the Democratic Party whiffed and whiffed badly. The Biden campaign and its allies managed to drive up turnout — but so did Trump. Republicans put up a hell of a fight, and not just, or even mainly, in the battle for the White House. Democrats have almost certainly failed to win a Senate majority, and so far they have lost some ground in the House as well (while still on track to maintain control of the lower chamber of Congress).

    That means that Biden is on track to be a weak, ineffectual president governing at the mercy of Mitch McConnell’s Machiavellian machinations.

    So much for the Democratic fantasy — the one that seemingly never dies — of unobstructed rule. Democrats didn’t just want to win and govern in the name of a deeply divided nation’s fractured sense of the common good. No, they wanted to lead a moral revolution, to transform the country — not only enacting a long list of new policies, but making a series of institutional changes that would entrench their power far into the future. Pack the Supreme Court. Add left-leaning states. Break up others to give the left huge margins in the Senate. Get rid of the Electoral College. Abolish the police. Rewrite the nation’s history, with white supremacy and racism placed “at the very center.” Ensure “equity” not just in opportunity but in outcomes. Hell, maybe they’d even establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to teach everyone who voted for or supported the 45th president just how evil they really are.

    No wonder so many Republicans turned out to vote. Democrats proved to be the most effective GOTV operation for the GOP imaginable.

    Yes, Trump and the Republican cheerleading section online and on cable news and talk radio harped on every extreme proposal. But this wasn’t just a function of the fallacy of composition, where one loony activist says something off the wall and the GOP amplifies it far beyond reason in order to tar the opposition unfairly. These were prominent Democrats — progressive politicians, activists, and scholars and prize-winning journalists at leading cultural institutions — talking this way. Joe Biden himself usually did the smart thing and tried to distance himself from the most radical proposals. But in the end it wasn’t enough to mollify fears of an ascendant left hell bent on entrenching itself in power and enacting institutional reforms that would enable it to lead a moral, political, and cultural revolution.

    And therein lies a paradox that should be obvious but apparently isn’t: Democrats live in a country with a large, passionate opposition. Arrogant talk of demographic inevitabilities and transformative changes to lock Republicans out of power in the name of “democracy” has the effect of inspiring that opposition to unite against them, rendering political success less assured and more tenuous.

    There will be no court packing. No added states. Nothing from the toxic progressive-fantasy wishlist will come anywhere close to passing. Instead, we will have grinding, obstructive gridlock. Some will demand that Biden push through progressive priorities by executive order. But every time he does — like every incident of urban rioting and looting, every effort to placate the left-wing “Squad” in the House, every micro-targeted identity-politics box-checking display of intersectional moral preening and finger-wagging — the country will move closer to witnessing a conservative backlash that results in Republicans taking control of the House and increasing their margin in the Senate in November 2022, rendering the Biden administration even more fully dead in the water.

  • Still more:

    On a House caucus call today, Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger, reportedly in an agitated state, warned that Democrats “lost races we shouldn’t have lost.” She further claimed that “defund police almost cost me my race because of an attack ad. Don’t say socialism ever again. Need to get back to basics. . . . If we run this race again we will get f***ng torn apart again in 2022.”

    Elsewhere, former Missouri senator Claire McCaskill had this to say: “Whether you are talking guns or . . . abortion . . . or gay marriage and rights for ‘transsexuals’ and other people who we as a party ‘look after’ and make sure they are treated fairly. As we circled the issues we left voters behind and Republicans dove in.”

    I see other Democrats grousing today that their candidates in Florida and elsewhere were falsely labeled “socialist.” I’m sorry, if that’s not the message you want to send, perhaps Nancy Pelosi shouldn’t pose with a gaggle of Marxists on the cover of Rolling Stone. Perhaps Democrats should treat Bernie Sanders as a fringe crank rather than a comrade who’s just moving a tad too quickly. Maybe arguing “democratic” socialism is the good kind doesn’t quite do it for the folks in Des Moines.

    What are voters in Texas supposed to make of every major presidential Democrat presidential candidate, including Joe Biden, giving their blessing to the authoritarian Green New Deal? Boy, fact-checkers had to work overtime to help Biden walk back those endorsements of fracking bans, of defunding the police, and of confiscating guns.

    We may well have a president in a few months who says there are “at least three” genders. Which probably seems sane on Twitter, but less so in Jacksonville, Fla. McCaskill has already apologized for her use of the word “transsexuals.” Unlike progressive urban dwellers, one suspects the vast majority of suburban Americans have zero clue what McCaskill is sorry about. They may even believe that letting genetic boys compete with their daughters in track and field is ridiculous. They probably wouldn’t be crazy about being accused of being transphobic for taking this rational position.

  • “Why Twitter Won’t Let People Share Sworn Court Documents Alleging Voter Fraud.” I think “because the fix is in and Twitter is part of it” is sufficient explanation… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Illinois Democrats are even more screwed than usual because voters just rejected a constitutional amendment to create a progressive income tax.

    One of the most surprising results of the 2020 election was the defeat, in Illinois, of a state constitutional amendment to permit a progressive income tax. The Graduated Income Tax Amendment would have eliminated the Illinois constitutional requirement that tax rates remain flat across incomes. Its defeat is likely the most important political event for the state since I moved here 18 years ago. The proposed change in the state constitution was an effort by the dominant Democratic Party to continue its model of high taxes and high spending to support the base of its political muscle—public-sector unions. The party retains control of the legislature and the governor’s office, but it is politically cornered. Legislatively, it faces a choice between a reform agenda that would undermine its political base or a substantial tax increase on every working citizen.

    The amendment went down to defeat for two overriding reasons—one analytical, the other more emotional. The first was that the proposed tax increase was not connected to any steps that would address the structural problems in Illinois finances. Illinois has the nation’s worst bond rating, largely because of its enormous unfunded pension liabilities. But Governor J. B. Pritzker, after taking office in 2019, has proposed no serious pension reforms. Nor has he pursued a deregulatory agenda that would lead to higher economic growth rates that might service these liabilities. And worse still, in connection with the referendum, he did not agree to use a substantial portion of the additional revenue flowing from the progressive tax rates to pay down these liabilities. Instead, much of the new revenue would have been spent on new programs or expanding old ones. His promise to use a mere $100 million of the new lucre to pay down pension liabilities was an insult to Illinois taxpayers who would see another $4 billion extracted from their pocketbooks.

    The other reason for the amendments’ failure had to do with more stories of corruption coming out of Springfield. When state representatives are being indicted for extortion, citizens instinctively recoil at handing them more money. Even more problematic for the amendment’s prospects, it became clear that Michael Madigan—speaker of the house, chairman of the state Democratic Party, and undisputed power broker for the last three decades—was under investigation for getting ComEd, the state’s major utility, to hire some of his supporters in return for favors.

    That investigation underscores the real scandal in Illinois: not merely the illegal trading in favors but the more damaging legal trading. Public-sector unions support the Democratic Party in return for the party giving them sweetheart deals with the state. Unfunded pension liabilities are the consequence because many politicians hope to retire or move on to the federal level before the full bill comes due.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin says he won’t pack courts or end the filibuster. Maybe he should switch parties before he gets primaried by the hard left…
  • The Failing Business Model of American Universities:

    Put yourself in the shoes of the average college graduate today. It took you longer than expected to complete your “four-year degree” and you are almost $30,000 in debt. You are desperately searching for a job in your field before your student loan payments run you into the ground, assuming your rent and car payments don’t get you there first. The generations before you had student loan debt too, but not nearly to the same degree of an ever-present threat. How did you end up here, and what do you do now with the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic?

    The business model adopted by our academic institutions is increasingly at odds with those seeking higher education and with the broader society as well. It is undesirable to have entire generations unable to participate in the economy, and as of June 2020, contribute a staggering $1.67 trillion to the national debt according to the National Reserve. This is more than auto loan debt and almost twice the amount of credit card debt in the US. It is crucial to understand the various factors that led to this predicament and to recognize where the system went wrong in order to find solutions.

    The most obvious cause of this massive amount of debt is the continually rising cost of higher education. The College Board noted that in-state public college tuition from 1984 to 2014 increased by 225 percent. In the same timeframe, data from the US Census Bureau shows that the median family income has only increased by 24 percent, both figures accounting for inflation.

    Snip.

    So where is all this money going? While much of it goes to the salaries of faculty and the building and maintaining of facilities, a questionable amount goes to administration, another aspect of universities that has rapidly grown in recent decades. According to a 2014 Delta Cost Project report, the number of faculty and staff per administrator declined by roughly 40 percent at most types of colleges and universities between 1990 and 2012, now averaging around 2.5 faculty per administrator. In 2012, the number of faculty at public research institutions was nearly equal to the number of administrators.

    “The interesting thing about the administrative bloat in higher education is, literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they’re doing,” says Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University and the author of a paper entitled: ‘The Changing of the Guard: The Political Economy of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education.’ Vague titles for administrative positions at institutions of higher education include Health Promotion Specialist, Student Success Manager, Senior Coordinator, and Student Accountability Manager. While some administration positions are surely useful and arguably necessary such as Director of Student Financial Aid, Director of Academic Advising, or those positions added in response to federal and state mandates, the salaries of administrative positions have rapidly increased.

  • “Azerbaijan Says It Shot Down Russian Helicopter ‘By Mistake.'” Oopsie!
  • Apple unveils its new in-house design M1 chips for its Macintosh line.
  • Is the city of Austin trying to secretly stick a homeless shelter in north Austin? They evidently want to convert the Fairfield Inn on 183. The reviews for that place seem to have improved, but once it was infamous for reports of bedbugs…
  • Round Rock ISD election results. Three of the four candidates I endorsed won.
  • Complete Travis County election results.
  • The Tucker Abides.
  • All the reasons Quibi failed. Including only being available as a smart phone app (not on computers or TV) and “paying $6 million for Reese Witherspoon to do a voice-over for an animal show that nobody watched.” Also: Another failure for Meg Whitman.
  • Dreamhaven Books attacked (again). Owner Greg Ketter and another employee were attacked and robbed in the Minneapolis science fiction bookstore. This is the second attack on the store this year, as someone broke into the store and tried (unsuccessfully) to burn it down during the Antifa/BlackLivesMatter riots.
  • Girlfriend Keeps Referring To Herself As ‘Wife-Elect‘ Despite No Official Word From Boyfriend.”
  • Fifty years ago: Thar she blows!