Posts Tagged ‘polls’

LinkSwarm for December 17, 2021

Friday, December 17th, 2021

Another mandate injunction, Democrats continue their popularity freefall, China seals more dirty deals, and Turkey melts down. It’s another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Federal judge halts healthcare employee vaccine mandate in Texas.

    A federal judge in Texas has issued a preliminary injunction, stopping a new rule from the Biden administration requiring healthcare workers to receive the COVID vaccine as the case moves through the courts.

    The injunction came from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Amarillo. The case was filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton on behalf of the State of Texas against Xavier Becerra, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary.

    The injunction was sought against a federal rule that would have required employers that receive Medicaid and Medicare funds—namely hospitals and other healthcare providers—to require their employees to receive a COVID vaccine as a condition of employment.

    Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered that the federal government provide notice to all Medicaid and Medicare providers in Texas that the mandate “will not be implemented or enforced.”

    “Healthcare facilities covered by the [Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services] Mandate have a tremendous reliance interest in Medicare and Medicaid funds. Therefore, Defendants unconstitutionally use Congress’s spending powers to ‘commandeer a State’s . . . administrative apparatus for federal purposes’ by conditioning Medicare and Medicaid funds on state surveyor compliance with the mandate,” wrote Kacsmaryk. “As a result, not only would the CMS Mandate prohibit Plaintiffs from enforcing its duly enacted COVID-19 vaccination regulations, but it would likely force Plaintiffs to administer a federal mandate that has a dubious statutory basis.”

    “It is a ‘gun to the head’ and an unconstitutional use of Congress’s spending powers to compel Plaintiffs through ‘financial inducement’ to forgo exercising their police powers to enforce a federal statute.”

  • Crime, inflation, wokeness and that old Biden magic continue to work their charm on the American electorate.

    Democrat support from independent voters has fallen near the crucial 40% line, while almost half of all independent voters tell Gallup that they’re leaning Republican.

    “If you’re a Democrat and you’re not terrified,” says The Dispatch’s Avi Woolf, “you should be.”

    Well, I’m neither a Democrat nor terrified, but I am conservative and — at least for now — quite giddy.

    Gallup recently updated its long-term party affiliation poll, which asks American voters one or two simple questions:

    In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?
    (If they ID as independents) As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?

    Currently, 31% say they’re Republicans, up slightly from the usual mid-20s to 30%. 41% told Gallup that they’re independent voters, in line with the average swing. Only 27% self-ID as Democrats, which is down from the more typical 29-32%.

    As recently as May, Democrats were at 32% and the GOP at a dismal 25%.

    But that’s before Presidentish Joe Biden had had a chance to do much other than send out FREE! MONEY! (handouts that helped cause our present inflation) and smile for the glowing press coverage. Since then, important parts of his agenda have taken hold and the malign incompetence of his cabinet has been fully revealed.

    Apparently, Americans don’t think much of either.

    But it’s the second question that should have Washington Democrats changing their shorts.

    Indies, asked whether they lean towards the Democrats or the GOP, broke for the GOP 47% to 41%.

    At this time in Barack Obama’s first term, the breakdown was a much more Dem-friendly 25R/41I/32D. And the Indy swing was exactly reversed, 41R/47D.

    Yet the Democrats still lost a whopping 63 seats in the House and seven more in the Senate in the following midterm election.

    Obama enjoyed immensely more personal popularity than Biden does — I know, I don’t get it, either — but couldn’t stop a GOP tsunami when his agenda proved unpopular.

    Biden has both an unpopular agenda and a high unfavorable rating draped around his neck like a lead life preserver. And now voters are leaving his party in droves.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Democratic problems apply down-ballot as well: “If the elections for Congress were held today, 48% of likely U.S. voters would vote for the Republican candidate, while 39% would vote for the Democrat.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • The woke are coming for all that sweet, sweet Medicare money.

    Buried in the Department of Health and Human Services’s fiscal planning for next year is a proposal to establish bonuses for physicians who “create and implement an anti-racism plan.”

    “The plan should include a clinic-wide review of existing tools and policies, such as value statements or clinical practice guidelines, to ensure that they include and are aligned with a commitment to anti-racism and an understanding of race as a political and social construct, not a physiological one,” the HHS writes . “The plan should also identify ways in which issues and gaps identified in the review can be addressed and should include target goals and milestones for addressing prioritized issues and gaps. This may also include an assessment and drafting of an organization’s plan to prevent and address racism and/or improve language access and accessibility to ensure services are accessible and understandable for those seeking care.”

    I’m sure this will go over great with Medicare patients. “Mam, I can’t check on your osteoporosis until you check your privilege!” (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.)

  • Speaking of Biden screwing up health care: “Biden’s big bill cuts hospital funds for poor in red states, shifts money to Obamacare.”
  • After Democrats abandoned trying to pass Biden’s giant leftwing “Build Back Better” porkfest this year, is the bill actually dead forever? South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham thinks so.

    The South Carolina Republican said that the Congressional Budget Office score, which found the $1.75 trillion bill would add $3 trillion to the deficit, is what led to its demise.

    ‘I think Build Back Better is dead forever and let me tell you why: Because Joe Manchin has said he’s not going to vote for a bill that will add to the deficit,’ he said on Fox News’ Hannity Wednesday night.

    ‘Well, if you do away with the budget gimmicks, Build Back Better, according to the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] adds $3 trillion to the deficit.’

  • Speaking of Manchin, he finally snapped at a Democratic Media Complex flunkie trying to badger him into supporting it.

    ‘This is b******t. You’re b******t,’ the West Virginia senator yelled at Arthur Delaney, a reporter for HuffPost Politics, who asked him about reports that the child tax credit has become a major sticking point in his talks with the White House.

    ‘I’m done, I’m done,’ Manchin fumed as the questions continued.

    ‘Guys, I’m not negotiating with any of you all. You can ask all the questions you want. Guys, let me go,’ he told the press as he walked through the basement of the Capitol, muttering ‘God almighty’ as he walked away.

  • Democrats are wailing about the “end of Democracy” because they’re about to lose power:

    What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams, and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy’s downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and former President Donald Trump “coups.”

    To answer that question, understand first what is not behind these shrill forecasts.

    They are not worried about 2 million foreign nationals crashing the border in a single year, without vaccinations during a pandemic. Yet it seems insurrectionary for a government simply to nullify its own immigration laws.

    They are not worried that some 800,000 foreign nationals, some residing illegally, will now vote in New York City elections.

    They are not worried that there are formal efforts underway to dismantle the U.S. Constitution by junking the 233-year-old Electoral College or the preeminence of the states in establishing ballot laws in national elections.

    They are not worried that we are witnessing an unprecedented left-wing effort to scrap the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year tradition of 50 states, for naked political advantage.

    They are not worried that the Senate this year put on trial an impeached ex-president and private citizen, without the chief justice in attendance, without a special prosecutor or witnesses, and without a formal commission report of presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.

    They are not worried that the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, Hillary Clinton, and members of the Obama Administration systematically sought to use U.S. government agencies to sabotage a presidential campaign, transition, and presidency, via the use of a foreign national and ex-spy Christopher Steele and his coterie of discredited Russian sources.

    They are not worried that the Pentagon suddenly has lost the majority support of the American people. Top current and retired officers have flagrantly violated the chain-of-command, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and without data or evidence have announced a hunt in the ranks for anyone suspected of “white rage” or “white supremacy.”

    They are not worried that in 2020, a record 64% of the electorate did not cast their ballots on Election Day.

    Nor are they worried that the usual rejection rate in most states of non-Election Day ballots plunged—even as an unprecedented 101 million ballots were cast by mail or early voting.

    And they are certainly not worried that partisan billionaires of Silicon Valley poured well over $400 million into selected precincts in swing states to “help” public agencies conduct the election.

    What then is behind this new left-wing hysteria about the supposed looming end of democracy?

    It is quite simple. The left expects to lose power over the next two years—both because of the way it gained and used it, and because of its radical, top-down agendas that never had any public support.

    After gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency – with an obsequious media and the support of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, higher education, popular culture, entertainment and professional sports – the left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.

    The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.

    Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.

    All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.

    Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.

    President Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50% and 57%—in Trump’s own former underwater territory.

    Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.

    In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.

    After the Russian collusion hoax, two impeachments, the Hunter Biden laptop stories, the staged melodramas of the Kavanaugh hearings, the Jussie Smollett con, the Covington kids smear, and the Rittenhouse trial race frenzy, the people are not just worn out by leftist hysterias, but they also weary of how the left gains power and administers it.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Hey, remember all the way back to two weeks ago when I said that Turkey’s collapsing currency was something we should keep an eye on? Well, guess what? “Turkey Halts All Stock Trading As Currency Disintegrates, Central Bank Powerless To Halt Collapse.” ZeroHedge suggests that the collapse is engineered to disguise how much graft Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cronies have stolen from the country.
  • Registered Republicans now outnumber registered Democrats in Florida for the first time ever. Take a bow, Scott Presler, who has worked tirelessly to register Republicans to vote:

    He’s not the driver here, but he certainly helped.

  • Nothing to look at here, just a sex and drugs scandal involving FBI employees.
  • Sometimes things are exactly what they appear to be. “Documents link Huawei to China’s surveillance programs.”

    The Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has long brushed off questions about its role in China’s state surveillance, saying it just sells general-purpose networking gear.

    A review by The Washington Post of more than 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many marked “confidential,” suggests that the company has had a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged.

    These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.

    Insert shocked face here.

  • Apple climbs further into bed with Communist China.

    Citing both interviews and direct access to internal Apple documents about repeated visits by Cook to China in the mid-2010s, the report describes a $275 billion deal whereby Apple committed to investing heavily in technology infrastructure and training in the country.

    The non-binding five-year deal was signed by Cook during a 2016 visit, and it was made partially to mitigate or prevent regulatory action by the Chinese government that would have had significant negative effects on Apple’s operations and business in the country.

    The Information details the nature of the Chinese government priorities included in the 1,250-word deal:

    They included a pledge to help Chinese manufacturers develop “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and “support the training of high-quality Chinese talents.”

    In addition, Apple promised to use more components from Chinese suppliers in its devices, sign deals with Chinese software firms, collaborate on technology with Chinese universities and directly invest in Chinese tech companies… Apple promised to invest “many billions of dollars more” than what the company was already spending annually in China. Some of that money would go toward building new retail stores, research and development centers and renewable energy projects, the agreement said.

  • Disgrace: Biden abandoned over 60,000 Afghan interpreters, support personnel — along with 14,000 Americans.”
  • “Trump’s Social Media Platform Gets $1 Billion Investment Boost, Dems Get Nervous.” It will be interesting to see how quickly TRUTH Social can get off the ground.
  • Are Texas National Guardsmen getting screwed out of their pay?
  • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. “Texas man sentenced to nearly 4 years in prison for attacking US Marshal during Portland Antifa riot.”
  • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes Philadelphia pizza joint edition.
  • In yesterday’s post, I forgot to link to these Log4J memes. Enjoy!
  • Why New York City lags the rest of the nation in unemployment. Thank lockdowns, shutdowns, and insane government. “The economy is not a light switch. The supply chain is not a light switch.” The money quote “New York City is just not that amazing!”
  • Popular Mexican singer Vincente Fernandez died, and the woke couldn’t wait to crap on his grave:

  • In a blow to election integrity, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals says that the Attorney General lacks authority to prosecute election fraud cases.
  • Democrats: Don’t you dare call us communists! Also Democrats: “Sen. Richard Blumenthal Helps Conn. Communist Party Celebrate 102nd Anniversary of CPUSA.”
  • Things that make you go “Hmmmm”:

  • True, dat.

  • Life imitates an episode of Justified:

  • Did you know that an Israeli airstrike hit a Syrian port last week? Did you see anything about that in the news? Seems like the sort of thing the media would cover before they decided that a bunch of lunatics shouting at J.K. Rowling is more important.
  • Texas House Speaker Dade Phalen attends fundraiser for quorum-busting Democrats in the Rio Grande Valley (including State Reps. Terry Canales, Sergio Munoz Jr., Oscar Longoria, Armando Martinez, and Bobby Guerra, and State Sen. Chuy Hinojosa) while skipping a Republican event a mile away. Remind me again why Phalen is speaker?
  • “Pasadena Mechanic Sues City Over Parking Space Regulation Prohibiting His Business from Operating.”
  • There’s nothing this Austin City Council can’t seem to ruin, including the Trail of Lights.
  • Man these allergies are killing me,” December edition. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • I think they should use this scene in Super Troopers III: “Two Massachusetts State Police troopers have been suspended without pay for turning a hallway at the state police academy into a makeshift ‘Slip ‘N Slide’ game.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Speaking of science experiments: What happens when you hit a gong with a baseball traveling at Mach 1.5? And you know there’s super-slow motion involved…
  • Whoa:

  • Terry Gilliam fired from directing West End production of Into The Woods for daring to recommend Dave Chapelle’s new comedy special on his own Facebook page.
  • Sex and the City writer Candace Bushnell, 60, admits she regrets choosing a career over having children as she is now ‘truly alone.'”
  • “Biden Warns Russia That If They Invade Ukraine, America Will Evacuate Haphazardly And Leave $86 Billion In Weapons Behind.”
  • “Hillary Clinton Reportedly Considering Losing Again In 2024.”
  • Bob Dole Switches To Democrat Party.”
  • Skillz:

  • Just Who Is Bankrolling The Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation?

    Wednesday, December 8th, 2021

    A few weeks ago there was Texas gubernatorial poll showing Beto O’Rourke running neck and neck with Greg Abbott. I took a deeper look to see how skewed the crosstabs were, but they don’t appear to have an actual numerical breakdown of Republican vs. Democratic voters. (The MSM loves oversampling Democrats for polls.)

    But then I got interested in just who was behind the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation.

    The news isn’t encouraging.

    Start at the top: The chairman is former Republican State Rep. Jason Villalba, who for a long time was a strong contender for “Least Conservative Republican in the House.” You may remember him from such hits as I Hate Photographers and Lawful Gun Owners and Lisa Luby Ryan Retired My Ass.

    Next up: Former Democratic State Senator Leticia Van De Putte, who you may remember getting slaughtered as Wendy Davis’ running mate.

    Regina Montoya was chairman of the board of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF), a hard left Social justice group waging lawfare.

    None of these people fill me with confidence. Some of those involved (former Rick Perry-appointed Secretary of State Hope Andrade, and Greg Abbott-appointed Secretary of State Carlos Cascos) appear to be more ostensibly Republican, but their personal political views are unclear.

    Then there’s Dr. Mark Jones, Ph.D., the Rice academic who doesn’t appear to be Hispanic, but does appear to study “Latino electoral participation and representation in Texas.”

    But a bigger question: Who is underwriting the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation?

    But look here: They received $399,970 from none other than The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who are famous for supporting a grab-bag of leftwing globalist ideas:

    Gates believes that climate change is a major threat to humanity, and has focused major Foundation attention and money to the issue. He wrote a book which is set for publication in 2021 about climate change. He supports Common Core education standards and opposed the Trump administration’s Mexico City Policy, which prohibits federal funds from supporting organizations that advocate for abortions.

    Snip.

    Gates also criticized the Trump administration’s withdrawal of money from the World Health Organization after the international organization used misleading Chinese government data about the COVID-19 pandemic. He and Melinda wrote in 2018 that they support same-sex relationships and self-described gender definitions. Gates has held meetings with President Donald Trump, including one in 2018 to urge the president to support greater U.S. foreign aid. He also discussed vaccines, innovation, education, and other issues with Trump in another meeting.

    Gates is also supportive of the idea that Earth is overpopulated. He and Melinda responded in 2018 to the idea that by saving children’s lives in poor nations they are contributing to overpopulation. Gates’ father led a chapter of Planned Parenthood, and he has spoken well of the abortion group in addition to providing contraceptive and abortifacient funds to abortion groups internationally.

    In February 2021, during an interview on “60 Minutes,” Gates told Anderson Cooper that the world should reduce its carbon emissions to zero, saying it would be “the most amazing thing mankind has ever done.” Just a month earlier, Gates joined a bidding war to buy the world’s largest private jet company, despite private jets being some of the world’s greatest carbon emitters.

    More recently, Gates has been an outspoken Flu Manchu vaccine advocate. And, what do you know, two of THPF’s most recent press releases deal with vaccine policy polling.

    They also received a grant from the Meadows Foundation. Just what policies do they support?

  • Sustainable and efficient energy programs
  • Restoration and protection of plant and wildlife habitats
  • Public support for protecting environmental resources
  • Engagement of underrepresented populations in experiencing and protecting natural resources
  • Clean water and sound management strategies
  • Current and future climate change mitigation
  • In other words: Global warming, environmentalism and social justice. If I had to guess, the entire point of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation is using polling metrics to find better ways to sell Texas Hispanics on the sort of anti-conservative priorities favored by the Gates and Meadows foundations.

    While the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation claims to be “nonpartisan,” the funding behind it, and the people involved, don’t inspire a lot of confidence along those lines…

    LinkSwarm for December 3, 2021

    Friday, December 3rd, 2021

    Last week on Thanksgiving vacation, I had to put my Mac through a reboot cycle and lost the zillions of open Firefox Windows. So you may find this week’s LinkSwarm relatively (some might say “mercifully”) brief.

  • Hunter Biden was pulling down a hefty $10 million a year to spread Chinese influence:

    A damning new report claims that Hunter Biden helped expand Chinese influence in America in a $10 million a year agreement and an $80,000 diamond.

    In her new book, Laptop from Hell, New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, describes Hunter Biden’s business dealings with a Chinese-linked energy consortium, called CEFC.

    Based on hundreds of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop which he left in a Delaware repair shop in April 2019, and transcripts of messages from WhatsApp, she claims that the Biden family offered their services to CEFC to help expand its business around the world.

    In exchange, Devine writes, Hunter Biden received $10 million a year for three years, and a diamond worth at least $80,000.

  • And, by an amazing coincidence, the Biden Administration is super soft on China.

    Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which [Chinese] goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy-in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.

    “To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,” a State Department spokesman told me. “We share the Congress’ concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.”

    In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman’s specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it’s a coincidence.

    “It isn’t partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,” Merkley told me. “The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it’s time to get it over the finish line.”

    Watering down congressional efforts to punish China for the Uyghur genocide is not what Joe Biden promised when he was running for office, or when he took office. Through most of 2020, Biden insisted that he was the tough one on China and that the Trump administration only offered “a colossal gap between tough talk and weak action.”

    Biden, at a Democratic debate on February 25, 2020, said: “I had spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other world leader by the time we left office. This is a guy who doesn’t have a democratic bone in his body. This is a guy who is a thug who in fact, has a million Uyghurs in reconstruction camps, meaning concentration camps.”

    Biden, writing in Foreign Affairs last spring, said: “Companies must act to ensure that their tools and platforms are not empowering the surveillance state, gutting privacy, facilitating repression in China and elsewhere. . . . The United States does need to get tough with China.”

    Biden, speaking at the U.S. State Department on February 4, said: “We’ll also take on directly the challenges posed by our prosperity, security, and democratic values by our most serious competitor, China. We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance.”

    And yet, month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.

    Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.

    Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told the Wall Street Journal in September that she thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions” with China. Biden rescinded Trump’s executive orders targeting TikTok, the popular app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

    Snip.

    Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”

    As I noted yesterday, even the proposed diplomatic boycott of the Olympics is moot, because the Chinese government announced that U.S. politicians were not invited before Biden could even officially announce the decision.

    It’s not that the Biden administration is doing nothing — an upcoming “democracy summit” invited Taiwan but not China, there have been prohibitions on U.S. investment in particular Chinese companies, and a dozen Chinese companies have been blacklisted for helping the Chinese army with quantum computing.

    But these are small-ball gestures while the Chinese government sends 18 fighter jets plus five nuclear-capable H-6 bombers into Taiwanese air-defense zone at one time, Beijing wipes out the last of Hong Kong’s opposition, and the Genocide Games go on with full U.S. corporate sponsorship. We’re attempting minor and symbolic moves while Xi Jinping is attempting big and consequential ones to maximize his leverage over the rest of the world.

  • Biden’s Approval Rating Below That of Least Popular Governor, GOP Has Nine Out of 10 Most Popular Governors.”
  • More on that subject. “Biden Approval Rating Remains an Abysmal 36 Percent.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Michael Shellenberger talks about how leftwing policies enable homeless camps:

    In my new book, San Fransicko, I describe why progressives create and defend what European researchers call “open drug scenes,” which are places in cities where drug dealers and buyers meet, and many addicts live in tents. Progressives call these scenes “homeless encampments,” and not only defend them but have encouraged their growth, which is why the homeless population in California grew 31 percent since 2000. This was mostly a West Coast phenomenon until recently. But now, the newly elected progressive mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has decided to keep open a drug scene at Mass and Cass avenues, even though it has resulted in several deaths from drug overdoses and homicides.

    Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want.

    But this “harm reduction” approach is obviously failing. Cities already do a good job taking care of temporarily homeless people not addicted to drugs. Drug dealers stab and sometimes murder addicts who don’t pay. Women forced into prostitution to support their addictions are raped. Addicts are dying from overdose and poisoning. The addicts living in the open drug scenes commit many crimes including open drug use, sleeping on sidewalks, and defecating in public. Many steal to maintain their habits. The hands-off approach has meant that addicts do not spend any amount of time in jail or hospital where they can be off of drugs, and seek recovery.

    More:

    The main progressive approach for addressing homelessness, not just in San Francisco but in progressive cities around the nation, is “Housing First,” which is the notion that taxpayers should give, no questions asked, apartment units to anyone who says they are homeless, and asks for one. What actually works to reduce the addiction that forces many people onto the streets is making housing contingent on abstinence. But Housing First advocates oppose “contingency management,” as it’s called, because, they say, “Housing is a right,” and it should not be conditioned upon behavior change.

    But such a policy is absurdly unrealistic, said the San Francisco homeless expert. “To pretend that this city could build enough permanent supportive housing for every homeless person who needs it is ludicrous,” the person said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I lived in a land where there was plenty of housing. But now people are dying on our streets and it feels like we’re not doing very much about it.”

    The underlying problem with Housing First is that it enables addiction. “The National Academies of Sciences review [which showed that giving people apartments did not improve health or other life outcomes] you cited shows that. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing units per capita than any other city, and we doubled spending on homelessness, but the homeless population rose 13%, even as it went down in the US. And so we doubled our spending and the problem got worse. But if you say that, you get attacked.”

    How did progressives, who claim to be evidence-based, ever get so committed to Housing First? “Malcolm Gladwell’s [2006 New Yorker article] “Million Dollar Murray,” really helped popularize this idea,” the person said. “But it was based on an anecdote of one person. It works for who it works for but is not scalable. [Governor] Gavin [Newsom] made a mistake [as San Francisco’s Mayor 2004-2011] which was that we stopped investing in shelter. But that’s because all the best minds were saying, ‘This is what’s going to work.’”

    One of the claims made by defenders of the open drug scenes is that people who live in them are mostly locals who were priced out of their homes and apartments and decided to pitch a tent on the street. In San Fransicko, I cite a significant body of evidence to show that this is false, and that many people come to San Francisco from around the U.S. for the city’s unusually high cash welfare benefits, free housing, and tolerance of open drug scenes.

    The insider agreed. “People come here because they think they can. It’s bullshit that ‘Only 30 percent [of homeless] are from out of town.’ At least 20,000 homeless people come through town every year. Talk to the people on the street. There’s no way 70 percent of the homeless are from here. I would guess it’s fewer than 50 percent. Ask them the name of their high school and they guess, ‘Washington? The one around the corner?’ But you can’t even talk about that without being called a fascist.”

  • Change? “Biden Administration to Restart Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy.” Or else they’ll they’re restarting it and not do it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.”)
  • “Insiders Are Dumping Stocks At The Fastest Pace In History.”
  • More rats swarm off the D.N.C. Kamala.

    A top adviser and chief spokeswoman for Harris, Symone Sanders, is set to resign from her position by the end of the year, a White House official said Wednesday. It’s one of several high-level departures in the vice president’s office since she was sworn in earlier this year.

    Peter Velz, the vice president’s director of press operations, is leaving the office in the coming weeks, along with Vincent Evans, deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, according to reports. Ashley Etienne, Harris’s communications director, is also stepping down. Advance staffers departed over the summer, soon after a trip to Guatemala where Harris drew criticism for a biting response to a question over when she intended to visit the southern U.S. border.

    A source familiar with Harris’s office woes quipped that the defections must be “completely unrelated to reading stories where they are blamed for everything.”

    “This is the same story that gets played out again and again — it’s always the vague ‘staffing,’” this person said. “I don’t think there are a ton of staff, present and former, that would rush to defend the way the office is run.”

  • What percentage of requested water are California farms getting next year? Try 0%.
  • Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw brings the wood to Ron Klain:

  • Let’s follow up that kudo for Crenshaw with some serious criticism: He was one of 80 Republicans (along with Rep. John Carter, my own representative) to vote in favor of a federal vaccine database. He can swear up and down it’s not going to be used for vaccine passports, but we’ve seen worldwide governments use coercive tools with even less legal justification.
  • When it comes to arguments on the new Supreme Court abortion case, you can smell the panic.
  • Virginia’s Lt. Governor elect Winsome Sears tells the truth about Critical Race Theory in Virginia.
  • The FTC is suing to stop the Nvidia Arm acquisition. Between the China subsidiary going rogue and additional regulatory hurdles in the UK and EU, the deal may be in serious jeopardy.
  • Real life frequently has symbolism more heavy-handed than fiction. “Barack and Michelle Obama Elementary will close at the end of the 2022-2023.” (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
  • Disney censors episode dealing with China censorship for China.

  • Gutfeld is beating Kimmel and Fallon.
  • “Joe Rogan Had the No. 1 Podcast in 2021 on Spotify.”
  • “The Jussie Smollett Trial Isn’t About A ‘Hoax.’ It’s About The Entire Social Justice Movement Being A Scam.”

    Smollett wasn’t engaging in a hoax. He was perpetuating a scam and that scam has a name. It’s called “social justice.” (Or, in the Biden administration’s parlance, “equity.”)

    It’s not like Smollett is a demonstrable sociopath who told an aimless lie about being attacked by Trump supporters in 2019 for the sake of it. According to a very solid case built by an exhaustive Chicago police investigation, Smollett pretended to be the victim of a violent racist and anti-gay assault because he wanted more fame and thus more money.

    What better way to achieve that goal than to feed into the enduring myth that minorities in America are suppressed at every turn, even targeted for violence by whites? White men in particular, and, as of 2016, even better if they’re Trump supporters.

    Police charged that Smollett offered to pay two brothers he was acquainted with about $2,000 each to act out an attack on the actor in the dead of a Chicago winter night. The siblings, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, told investigators that Smollett had given them $100 to buy masks, a red hat, and a rope that would be fashioned into a kind of noose for the staged attack. The Osundairos were instructed to confront Smollett on a sidewalk, slightly rough him up, and then disappear.

    The setup preceeded a previous stunt, wherein Smollett mailed himself a threatening letter that said, “You will d[ie] black fag,” accompanied by an illustration of a hangman. Police said Smollett’s failure to garner any significant national attention from the letter is what led him to fake the assault.

    “…This announcement today recognizes that ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” then-police superintendent Eddie Johnson said in late February, after his department probed the events from the night of the incident. He said Smollett was mostly motivated by seeking a salary increase for his role on “Empire.”

    That was the conclusion of law enforcement after spending more than $100,000 taxpayer dollars on an investigation to piece together surveillance video, eye-witness testimony, and data gathering that led them to believe Smollett had lied about everything.

    But in all fairness, who could blame him? This is what our entire culture is teaching now— that the quickest way to advance is to claim victimhood on account of race, sex, or sexual identity — ideally, some combination of all three.

    Lucrative opportunities present themselves quickly for those who sell themselves as oppressed and aggrieved. And for Smollett, it worked! Nobody knew who he was before he claimed to have been physically confronted and called the n-word and the f-word by white male Trump supporters. Thereafter, everyone knew who he was.

    He was written about in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. A-list celebrities, TV hosts and political leaders expressed their solidarity.

  • Boom!

  • White Smoke Emanates From Wuhan Lab Chimney Signaling A New Variant Has Been Named.”
  • The Cute, it burns!
  • LinkSwarm for October 9, 2021

    Saturday, October 9th, 2021

    Biden sinking, China stinking, Facebook’s fake whistleblower, and more border woes. Enjoy a special Saturday LinkSwarm!

  • Of course the Biden Administration tucked a multibillion dollar handout to illegal aliens into the reconciliation bill. It’s what they do. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Does this border look controlled to you?

    

  • Related: “69 Percent of Hispanics Disapprove of Biden’s Handling of Immigration.”
  • Indeed, Biden’s poll numbers are so low that even CNN has noticed. “Just 32% of independents approved of how Biden is handling his job while 60% disapprove in a new Quinnipiac University national poll… In 2010, the Republicans picked up 63 seat, with being up 19 points among independents.”
  • Short-term debt limit extension bill passes. Tastes like chicken…
  • The reconciliation bill is deeply hostile to marriage. Well, it’s no surprise, since happily married couples with children are increasingly an obstacle to Democratic Party control…
  • This explains a lot:

    U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently instructed the FBI to begin investigating parents who confront school board administrators over Critical Race Theory indoctrination material. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a memorandum to the FBI instructing them to initiate investigations of any parent attending a local school board meeting who might be viewed as confrontational, intimidating or harassing.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland’s daughter is Rebecca Garland. In 2018 Rebecca Garland married Xan Tanner. Mr. Xan Tanner is the current co-founder of a controversial education service company called Panorama Education. Panorama Education is the ‘social learning’ resource material provider to school districts and teachers that teach Critical Race Theory.

  • Remember Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate? It doesn’t exist.

    So far, all we have is his press conference and other such made-for-media huff-puffing. No such rule even claiming to be legally binding has been issued yet.

    That’s why nearly two dozen Republican attorneys general who have publicly voiced their opposition to the clearly unconstitutional and illegal mandate haven’t yet filed suit against it, the Office of the Indiana Attorney General confirmed for me. There is no mandate to haul into court. And that may be part of the plan.

    According to several sources, so far it appears no such mandate has been sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs yet for approval. The White House, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Department of Labor haven’t released any official guidance for the alleged mandate. There is no executive order. There’s nothing but press statements.

    Let the lawsuits against private companies firing people for refusing the vaccine for which no mandate exists begin!

  • “Ontario doctor resigns over forced vaccines, says 80% of ER patients with mysterious issues had both shots.”
  • Holy crap: “Wuhan and US scientists planned to create new coronaviruses.”

    Scientists from Wuhan and the US were planning to create new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic codes of other viruses, proposals show.

    Documents of a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), leaked last month, reveal that the international team of scientists planned to mix genetic data of closely related strains and grow completely new viruses.

    A genetics expert working with the World Health Organisation (WHO), who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail, said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match has never been found in nature.

    Here’s a novel thought: How about you not do that?

  • Did I mention that Wuhan scientists also wanted to genetically engineer coronaviruses that were more infectious to humans and release aerosols containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” among cave bats in Yunnan, China? And they also applied DARPA grant! Who the hell was asleep at the grant proposal switch while Chinese biological warfare scientists were going full Frankenstein?
  • Also: China started ordering more testing kits six months before we started hearing about the Flu Manchu outbreak.
  • Truth:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Another Chinese real estate developer defaults, this one an Evergrande-linked firm called “Jumbo Fortune Enterprises.”
  • Facebook’s fake “Whistleblower” Frances Haugen was part of the election meddling team that suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story. Also: “She’s receiving ‘strategic communication guidance’ from former Obama aide Bill Burton’s public relations firm Bryson Gillette, which is run by Democratic operatives. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was a senior adviser there until September 2020.” Basically she’s a pawn to let Facebook suppress even more conservative stories.
  • Another day, another hate crime hoax.
  • Amtrak! Come for the crappy service, stay for the routine drug sweeps! (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Australian cop resigns over enforcing tyranny:

  • Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan are all scheduled to lose out on Texas government bond underwriting due to their refusal to deal with companies that make modern sporting rifles.
  • Citizens sues five members of the Round Rock ISD school board for violation of the Texas Open records Act.
  • Another day, another shootout on Sixth Street. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Tesla is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk announced at the company’s shareholder meeting on Thursday.” Given how crappy California’s business climate has become, this was pretty much a forgone conclusion. Come on down, Elon.
  • And here’s the supercondensed backstory:

    If you’re wondering who Lorena Gonzalez, she’s a Democratic California assemblywoman…

  • “Gavin Newsom Named U-Haul Salesperson Of The Year.”
  • Amazon is looking at leaving Seattle. “After years of deteriorating relations with their home city of Seattle and its ultra-progressive city council, Amazon’s CEO [Andy Jassy] made it known that the online giant may look for greener pastures. Citing the city’s hostility toward their presence, Jassy suggested that the suburbs are looking better and better for a new home to its 50,000-employee home base.”
  • Speaking of Seattle, over 400 police officers may be facing termination over refusal to get vaccinated. Good thing Seattle is a peaceful utopia where there are never any antifa riots…
  • Venezuela subtracts six zeros from its currency. This is your economy on socialism.
  • “Afghanistan is literally about to go back to the Dark Ages since the Taliban didn’t realize they have to pay their electric bills.”
  • The China/India border is getting frisky again. “Sources mentioned that patrol parties of both the countries came face-to-face in Arunachal Pradesh, which led to some jostling before they disengaged. The incident took place last week near Yangtse in the Tawang sector.” Arunachal Pradesh is basically the complete opposite end of northern India from where most of last year’s clashes occurred.
  • Did China lose coal shipments waiting for docks to open up to India? Source is a little “rah-rah India,” so grains of salt are probably in order.
  • Are you using the wrong plunger? This plumber seems to think that this one is the new hotness for clearing toilets.
  • Heh:

  • How to tell a prison from a public school.
  • “Hackers Warn That If Demands Aren’t Met They Will Reactivate Facebook.”
  • Let’s ride!

  • Open Borders And Critical Race Theory Are Deeply Unpopular

    Sunday, June 27th, 2021

    You know what Americans hate? Open borders and critical race theory:

    The Biden administration is failing big time with its inability to control illegal immigration, adding it to one of several issues that could doom Democrats if left unchecked.

    In a new Harvard/Harris poll, an overwhelming 80% said that illegal immigration is a serious issue and one that needs more attention than what President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris are giving.

    What’s more, 68% said that signals from Biden’s White House are encouraging illegal immigration, and 55% believe that former President Donald Trump’s border closing policies should have been left in place.

    The fears of illegal immigration were a key part of Penn’s analysis of his June poll for Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll.

    He wrote: “Sixty-four percent of registered voters want the Biden administration to issue new, stricter policies to reduce the flow of people across the border. Only 7% of voters could accurately call out the amount of monthly illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. with 84% underestimate the number, suggesting we should expect stronger voter reactions if the crisis evolves further. Overall, 74% of voters view the current surge in illegal immigrants as a crisis that needs to be addressed immediately, and 56% do not view climate change, racism, and sexism as root causes of migration from South and Central America.”

    Nor are Americans any more enamored of Critical Race Theory:

    And despite liberal media efforts to dismiss the debates in school districts around the country over the teaching of critical race theory, the poll found that it too was a hot issue.

    “On schooling and education, another sleeper issue, 61% do not believe students should be taught that America is structurally racist and is dominated by white supremacy,” said Penn in his email.

    Americans oppose critical race theory because it’s racism, and they’re not racist.

    Will the Biden Administration change directions in the face of these findings? Almost certainly not. Democrats view both Critical Race Theory and amnestying illegal aliens as tickets to permanent electoral majorities. DNC leadership no doubt views all the House Democrats who will lose races in 2022 as acceptable collateral damage to avoid changing course…

    BidenWatch for November 2, 2020

    Monday, November 2nd, 2020

    Welcome to the very last BidenWatch before tomorrow’s election!

    Before BidenWatch was the Clown Car Update, so I’ve been doing this for almost two years. I’m really ready for a vacation…

  • Here’s links to stories about all the things pulled from Hunter Biden’s hard drive.
  • “Joe Biden’s Texts to Hunter Show Ex-VP Had “No Hesitancy” in Helping Son Get $1M From Chinese Communist-Linked Business Partner.”
  • Here’s one with him bitching about reimbursement expenses for Chinese partner CEFC.
  • Has ABC broke the embargo on the Hunter Biden corruption story?

  • “Feds Obtained FISA Warrant Against Hunter Biden’s Chinese Business Associate“:

    Federal investigators obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against one of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business associates, suggesting that the executive was suspected of acting as a covert agent of a foreign government.

    Prosecutors revealed the existence of at least one FISA warrant against Chi Ping Patrick Ho, known as Patrick Ho, in a Feb. 8, 2018 court filing obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

    Ho was charged on Dec. 18, 2017 with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering related to CEFC China Energy contracts in Uganda and Chad. Ho had been an executive at the multi-billion dollar Chinese energy company prior to his arrest.

    Hunter Biden was part of a business consortium that sought a partnership with CEFC in May 2017. A Senate report released last month said that an affiliate of CEFC wired $5 million to Biden’s law firm from August 2017 through August 2018.

    In addition to his partnership with CEFC, Hunter Biden also represented Ho during his legal battle.

    According to a report from The New Yorker last year, CEFC’s chairman, Ye Jianming, raised concerns with Biden in summer 2017 about a possible investigation into Ho.

  • “Hunter Biden’s business group shopped Joe Biden’s influence in Colombia in an investment pitch to Chinese energy firm.” Who had Colombia on their Hunter Biden Corruption Index Bingo card?
  • More on that pitch:

    In 2017, Hunter Biden and a group of business partners seeking a $10 million investment deal with a Chinese energy firm touted Joe Biden’s friendly relations with Colombia’s president in their sales proposal, which suggested a series of oil investments in the South American country, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

    Hunter Biden and four other businessmen, including his uncle James Biden, highlighted the former vice president’s positive relationship with Juan Manuel Santos in a May 15, 2017 investment outline for CEFC China Energy, a Chinese energy conglomerate.

    The Biden consortium, which would be called SinoHawk, sought a $10 million seed investment from CEFC China Energy, with a goal of eventually securing billions of dollars in investments in the U.S. and around the world.

    The report is part of a trove of records held by Tony Bobulinski, a California-based businessman who was part of the consortium with Hunter Biden, James Biden, and two other partners.

    (Hat tip: Tom Fitton.)

  • “Joe Biden: Trashing Fossil Fuel in the US While His Family Seeks to Make Money From It in Ukraine and China“:

    Undisputed is the fact that Hunter and other members of the Biden family have been involved in numerous complex, and sometimes controversial, multi-national, multi-million dollar deals involving Ukraine, Russia, China, Luxembourg, and the UK. Numerous observers have stated they believe the Bidens’ main qualification to conduct such business is simply that they are connected to a powerful political figure who has influence over policies and practices that can impact the businesses: Joe Biden.

    Summary of crooked dealings snipped.

    Still, there’s one nagging point that I haven’t seen considered. It’s the nature of the Biden family business ventures juxtaposed against Joe Biden’s position on oil and fossil fuels.

    Biden has repeatedly taken strong positions against fossil fuels— oil, coal and natural gas. He has made it clear he wants to “transition” away from them in the U.S. But as he’s advanced this position, his family members have been making money on deals that expand fossil fuel companies and ventures in foreign countries.

    For example, While Hunter Biden was getting himself a job on the board of Ukraine’s largest energy company, Burisma; Vice President Joe Biden was coincidentally put in charge of Ukraine policy. The same day the White House announced the vice president would handle Ukraine policy and make a visit there the following week, Hunter allegedly wrote to a business partner, “This could be the break we have been waiting for.” They inked a highly-compensated gig with Burisma in Ukraine.

    During Joe Biden’s first visit to the country in his new position just days later, he spoke of how Ukraine could make the right decisions and become “energy independent”— less reliant on other countries and more secure from a national security standpoint. Energy independence in this context implied good things for Ukrainian fossil fuel companies like Burisma to which Hunter was hitched. There was no bigger oil and gas company in Ukraine than Burisma.

    The point is, while Joe Biden has been pushing to end US the oil industry, his family has been cutting billion dollars in deals, profiting off of the oil industry in competing countries such as Ukraine and China. In fact, eliminating fossil fuel in the US while supporting it in other nations could be seen as putting America at a competitive and national security disadvantage.

  • How badly Biden stepped in it at the debate:

    3. Biden, on the other hand, said a bunch of dumb things. He repeated a plagiarized phrase about there being no blue states or red states, only United States—and then went on to urinate on red states anyway. He admitted under his presidency, a long, dark winter was ahead. His best zinger of the night—linking Trump to the Proud Boys (which we already learned was Iranian disinformation from the start)—was utterly muffed when he called them the Poor Boys. This provoked laughter as many Americans googled to figure out what sandwiches had to do with Trump. We could go on an on, but there were a number of stumbles by Biden that showed why Obama never gave him much to do.

    4. Biden said nothing good. Yeah, he had a pretty good riff on a bonehead question about Black Americans being pulled over, but Trump jujitsued that by twisting the question from sounding like “why are Blacks so often mistaken to be criminals” to “here’s what Black Americans have achieved over the last four years.” Everything else was either rehearsed or repeated talking points and a lot of bluster and blather that, at best, sounded like Trump’s vain boasting. And from what we’re reading today, many voters were put off by his blatant fear mongering about everyone dying from COVID.

    So you might be mistaken into thinking that this was the end of it. And for Trump, it pretty much was. He was wrapping up, for the most part, when the moderator (who wasn’t bad, really—she asked a lot uncomfortable questions of both candidates) asked Trump why so many Black Americans were suffering living near oil fields. Instead of taking the bait, Trump said that these Americans were living there because they were working there, under his economy. A nice answer, and Trump knew it. He pretty much started putting his coat on and turning off the lights when Biden was asked to respond.

    And did Biden respond. He announced that he would seek to end the oil industry. Trump wheeled around and asked him to repeat that. Biden did, and announced he would—as president—end America’s use of fossil fuels. Trump was handed gold, and he made sure Americans recognized this as big news, especially folks living in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Oklahoma.

    Biden had a definite look of panic on his face as Trump named those states. Even he realized he just gave Trump 83 electoral votes, mumbling something about “on public lands” and “subsidies,” but Trump drowned out his babbling by reminding voters in those states what Biden just announced. There would be no walking that back, even with the media’s certain (and ultimately proven) covering for him on Friday. It was said, and at this point, if polls in other states stay where they are, those 83 votes will put Trump over.

    Bear in mind, this doesn’t affect just four states. Shutting down oil and fossil fuels in this country will put nearly one million Americans out of their current jobs, in the form of drilling, mining, trucking, piping, distribution, distillation, manufacture, plasticization, and more. The Depression here will crush world markets that depend on us. Did Biden mean for all this? Probably not, but he reassured America that Biden, after 47 years in government, has literally no understanding of how the economy works.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • Want to view Joe Biden’s entire Pennsylvania speech? Me neither, but here it is. Even includes time markers for the bloopers. But it’s weird to hear a guy both yelling and suffering from a case of mush-mouth at the same time.
  • If Biden doesn’t win Pennsylvania, then he becomes an underdog.
  • Speaking of which: “Trump Takes The Lead In Pennsylvania; +3 Per New Poll.” As usual, take all polls with a grain of salt.
  • Speaking of polls and grains of salt, pollsters learned nothing from 2016:

    Early voting shows Republicans are waiting in line to vote. The pollsters say a far higher percentage of Republicans support President Trump than in 2016. If this is true then how can he be behind by 17 points in Wisconsin as ABC claimed its poll said?

    Republican registrations are up.

    People didn’t register in 2020 to vote against President Trump.

    Thomson was right when he wrote, “In 2020, we have the most stable race in decades.”

    Everyone decided months ago whether they will vote for President Trump. This election is a referendum on him, plain and simple.

    The election is about enthusiasm. The election is about getting your people to vote. President Trump has held huge rallies night after night for weeks.

    Biden draws flies to his rare rallies. But they are socially distanced flies. His rallies are short made-for-TV events designed to let TV outlets pretend to be fair. They show the best of his short presentation, then show the worst moment in an hourlong speech by President Trump.

    The Republican Party has an army of 2 million volunteers to get out the vote.

    Democrats have a phone bank.

    The pollsters should have adjusted to the new reality.

    Whether a person wants President Trump or Biden is nice to know.

    But what counts are the actual votes. A 10-point gap in enthusiasm trumps a 7-point lead in the polls. When the enthusiasm gap became obvious this summer, pollsters should have adjusted. They didn’t.

    And really they learned nothing from 2016. They view it as an anomaly, and cling to the false notion that they got the national vote right.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • Still more poll warning signs for Biden: 41% in Iowa:

    I’ve been covering American politics for a long time and I can’t remember a number that so dramatically altered the political community’s perception of a presidential campaign as that number did, last night, at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

    The source of the number was The Iowa Poll, which has been the gold standard for statewide polling in the United States for decades. The number itself was the percentage of likely voters in Iowa supporting Joe Biden’s candidacy for president.

    President Trump’s number was 48%, which put him ahead in the “horse race” by 7 percentage points. There was nothing really remarkable about that, in context. Mr. Trump won the state in 2016 by (roughly) nine percentage points.

    What was remarkable was Biden’s 41%. What made it doubly disconcerting was the way The Des Moines Register (accurately) described the poll results:

    “Republican President Donald Trump has taken over the lead in Iowa as Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden has faded…”

    Faded! Could there be a more terrible word in the last week of a presidential campaign? Off the record, Democratic elected officials and campaign operatives and financial backers have been saying throughout the campaign that their biggest fear regarding the eventual outcome was Biden himself. They saw him as an especially weak candidate and worried that he wasn’t “a closer;” even if he was ahead going into the last week, victory could slip from his grasp.

    Up until last night, Democratic elected officials and political operatives saw the presidential race standing at somewhere between a narrow Biden win and a “blue wave.” In their “blue wave” scenario, the Democrats would win both the presidency and a Senate majority and the Trump-McConnell nightmare would finally come to an end.

    That was the other piece of bad news in last night’s Iowa Poll release. It showed that Republican Sen. Joni Ernst had pulled ahead of her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield. Her lead (46%-to-42%) was within the margin of error, but it wasn’t Ms. Ernst’s lead that Democrats were focused on. It was the “faded” support for Ms. Greenfield, which almost exactly tracked the “faded” support for Joe Biden.

    For Democrats, last night’s Iowa Poll was the worst possible news at the worst possible moment. It foretold close results in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It undermined the Biden campaign’s momentum and morale. And it fracked Democrats’ self-confidence.

    (Hat tip: Christina Hoff Summers.)

  • “Biden Aides See Warning Signs in Black, Latino Turnout So Far.”

    Senior officials on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign are increasingly worried about insufficient Black and Latino voter turnout in key states like Florida and Pennsylvania with only four days until the election, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Despite record early-vote turnout around the country, there are warning signs for Biden. In Arizona, two-thirds of Latino registered voters have not yet cast a ballot. In Florida, half of Latino and Black registered voters have not yet voted but more than half of White voters have cast ballots, according to data from Catalist, a Democratic data firm. In Pennsylvania, nearly 75% of registered Black voters have not yet voted, the data shows.

    The firm’s analysis of early vote numbers also show a surge of non-college educated White voters, who largely back President Donald Trump, compared to voters of color, who overwhelmingly support Biden.

    The situation is particularly stark in Florida where Republicans currently have a 9.4% turnout advantage in Miami-Dade County, a place where analysts say Biden will need a significant margin of victory to carry the state.

  • Jim Geraghty on which states to watch and why. Pennsylvania (especially Bucks County), Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.
  • Twitter, Facebook both admit that there’s no evidence the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
  • Our media: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.”
  • Biden looked normal in the debates. Why does he look senile otherwise?

    Heaven knows Biden has a long history of making gaffes. And maybe some of his bungling can be attributed to him just being a natural-born blooper machine. But all of it? Unlikely. The volume of slip-ups is too much.

    Just as disturbing as the constant misstatements are his appearances in public and on video outside of the debates. He looks to be in a hard decline. His facial expressions are dull and empty. He seems to drift, get lost in his thoughts. Or simply has no thoughts and blanks out. He forgets where he is. Staffers feed him words when he can’t come up with them.

  • Don’t believe the polls: Trump is winning. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Stephen Green wargames the electoral college again. “Trump has more and wider paths to victory than Biden does.”
  • Now we know why Joe got angry.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • People who have raised at least $100,000 for the Biden campaign. Notable names (excluding Democratic senators, reps and governors) include Lisa Blue Baron, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, megalawyer Christopher Boies, Pete Buttigieg, Vanessa Getty, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and investment guru Andrew Tobias.
  • Instapundit on why a Biden victory wouldn’t return the country to “normal”—or even make Donald Trump go away:

    Trump was big on the national stage long before he was president. Why would he go away after the election is over? He’ll still have tens of millions of (probably angry) followers, deep pockets and a huge megaphone.

    There has already been some talk of Trump starting his own television network to rival Fox News, and/or his own social media platform — the latter made more plausible by the heavy censorious hands of those running Twitter and Facebook — and I suspect that Trump would regard a 2020 loss as a setback, not a defeat. Grover Cleveland came back to win a second term after losing the White House, Trump might reason. Why not me? He’ll probably hold campaign-style rallies around the country starting right after the election.

    And the deep toxicity of national politics, which grew worse after the 2016 election but which has been brewing at least since the turn of the millennium, is not going to go away. In fact, a lot of what we’re hearing from Biden supporters suggests that it will get worse under a Biden administration.

    Democrats are already calling for a Biden administration to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices until Democrats have a majority, to pack the Senate by admitting Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states, and even to establish a “truth and reconciliation commission” in which Republicans will be dragged in front of the public and forced to confess the error of their ways. And, of course, abolishing the Electoral College. None of that is normal.

  • Man attends Trump rally, is shocked to find happy people:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Kylee Zempel tears apart John Piper’s bad Biden-backing theology:

    It is only “baffling” if one first reduces conservatives to pro-life freedom-lovers and then decides human life and freedom are dispensable. Freedom and life, however, are not abstract, and they are not simply a means to accomplish earthly goals or gain temporal wealth. Freedom and life are part of our Imago Dei. They are gifts from God that we are to steward, and we use them in myriad ways to advance God’s kingdom.

    So is it “baffling” that a Christian would think God-given sex distinctions are important? Is it baffling that a believer would want to protect his family against the racially charged attacks of a violent mob? Is it baffling that a Christian would desire that his children learn truth, rather than government-sanctioned doctrine — not walking in the counsel of the ungodly? It is baffling that a Christian would desire for men to keep the hard-earned fruits of their labor, giving charitably to the poor and needy? Is it baffling that a believer would value the biblical family structure over the state? Of course, it’s not.

    Furthermore, if Piper believes this immoral gangrene that spreads throughout our country is a result of one unregenerate man instead of the result of the wickedness in the hearts of every sinful citizen, he is a fool.

    (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)

  • Maybe an extended election won’t blow up the country. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • Trump can still win even if the polls are right.

    (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)

  • Biden goes full tranny pander, demanding religions bow to to Democratic Party’s transgender mandates. “Religion should not be used as a license to discriminate.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden tells the blatant lie that Trump wants to send Cuban-Americans back to Cuba.
  • “The Kamala Harris Nervous Laugh is What Gamblers Call a ‘Tell’:

    Kamala Harris has a habit of launching into peals of laughter when she is asked questions, even serious ones. It’s likely a nervous tic, and it’s possible that she doesn’t even realize that she does it.

    In the world of gambling, this is called a tell. An unconscious and often uncontrollable behavior that serves as a clue to others that a player is bluffing or lying.

    Harris was interviewed on 60 Minutes this weekend, and when she was asked if her view on certain issues was progressive or socialist, she launched into a laugh.

  • Can Trump pull off an upset in Minnesota?

    In 2016, Trump lost Minnesota by about 45,000 votes. This year, he is clearly making an attempt to close the gap there and pull off a win that would sting Democrats for years to come.

    The left didn’t do itself any favors by burning down Minneapolis this summer, and Trump was also helped by gaining the endorsements of multiple mayors in the state’s ‘Iron Range’ region

    Snip.

    Trump’s campaign has booked more than $1.2 million in TV advertising in Minnesota in the final week of the campaign—more than it spent there in the preceding three weeks combined, according to Advertising Analytics, which tracks campaigns’ ad spending. Vice President Mike Pence held a rally in northern Minnesota on Monday, the latest in a series of visits to the state by Trump and top surrogates. Overall, the Trump campaign has deployed 60 staffers in Minnesota, a level of Republican intensity surpassing that of any race in memory, both parties say.

  • Speaking of which, I think I missed this earlier: “Trump Lands Major Endorsements From Democrat Mayors in Minnesota.”

    “Like many in our region, we have voted for Democrats over many decades. We have watched as our constituents’ jobs left not only the Iron Range, but our country. By putting tariffs on our products and supporting bad trade deals, politicians like Joe Biden did nothing to help the working class. We lost thousands of jobs, and generations of young people have left the Iron Range in order to provide for their families with good-paying jobs elsewhere. Today, we don’t recognize the Democratic Party. It has been moved so far to the left it can no longer claim to be advocates of the working class. The hard-working Minnesotans that built their lives and supported their families here on the Range have been abandoned by radical Democrats. We didn’t choose to leave the Democratic Party, the party left us,” the letter, signed by Virginia Mayor Larry Cuffe, Chisholm Mayor John Champa, Ely Mayor Chuck Novak, Two Harbors Mayor Chris Swanson, Eveleth Mayor Robert Vlaisavljevich and Babbitt Mayor Andrea Zupancich, states.

    

  • Facebook Removes Black Man’s Anti-Biden Ad. Sorry, comrade, you’re not allowed to express opinions contrary to the wishes of the Party… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • More gun-grabbing stupidity:

  • Slow Joe is getting worse:

  • Yep:

  • Boy, Biden and Harris both hate tax cuts:

  • “Ex-husband of Joe Biden’s wife claim two had an affair that split marriage.” He claims both worked on Joe Biden’s campaign in 1972. Really, would it shock anyone to find yet another chapter of Joe Biden’s autobiography was fiction?
  • Black women aren’t sold on Kamala Harris:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Biden supporters can’t even outnumber Trump supporters within 10 feet of their own bus:

  • “Chelsea Handler Patrols Polling Places To Make Sure No Black People Are Voting For Trump.”
  • Democrats Hand Out Extra Ballots To Trick-Or-Treaters.”
  • “Biden Calls A Lid Until Election Day.”
  • Heh:

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    LinkSwarm for October 23, 2020

    Friday, October 23rd, 2020

    The third and final presidential debate is in the books, Trump breaks 50% approval, and the hard left plans another riot and arson spree if they lose. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Consensus opinion seems to be that president Trump won last night’s debate with Joe Biden.

    That appeared to be one lesson from a Zoom focus group conducted after the debate by messaging expert Frank Luntz. Speaking to 15 undecided voters — and yes, they appeared to be really undecided — Luntz asked for a one- or two-word description of the candidates’ debate demeanor. For Biden, the words were mostly bad: among them were “vague,” “very vague,” “non-specific,” “cognitively impaired,” “old,” “uncomfortable,” “elusive,” “grandfatherly,” and “defensive.”

    For Trump, they were mostly much better: among them were “controlled,” “composed,” “constrained,” “reserved,” “poised,” “con artist,” “surprisingly presidential,” “calmer,” and “restrained.”

    There will be more coverage of the debate, of Biden’s promise to end the oil industry and, indeed, more about Mr. Luntz, in Monday’s BidenWatch.

  • President Trump just hit the “Holy Grail” of breaking the 50% approval rating, hitting 52% approval in Rasmussen polling. All the usual poll caveats apply.
  • The left is currently planning on how to peacefully protest if President Donald Trump wins. Ha, just kidding! They’re going to burn everything down:

    An activist group is planning large-scale and widespread ‘disruptive activity’ starting on the night of the election, in an attempt to stop what it predicts will be an “attempted coup” by President Trump in the form of a refusal to accept the election results.

    “Shut Down D.C.” is setting the stage for mass gatherings in D.C., noting that the “resistance” must begin during the “muddied” legal and political debate over the election outcome.

  • More on the same theme:

    “We need to show that we’re ungovernable under a continued Trump administration…That can mean blocking traffic at major intersections and bridges, shutting down government office buildings (why should ICE or the FBI be able to keep doing Trump’s bidding when he’s leading with a coup?!?), or blockading the White House.”

    The document bases its action plan upon the scenarios projected by the establishment leftist “Transition Integrity Project” for election night and sketches these activists’ response to each, explicitly rejecting the possibility that Trump could legitimately win. It continues:

    We’ll keep it going until Trump concedes. We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winter– maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable.

    As it becomes clear that Trump’s coup is failing, institutions and the elites will start to abandon him – or we will approach them as part of the problem. Either Amazon will shut down AWS for the Trump loyalists in the government or we’ll shut down their fulfillment centers. Either governors will tell their national guards to stand down or we’ll shut down their state capitals as well. Over time, Trump will grow increasingly isolated and his empire will crumble down around him.

  • Victor Davis Hanson on the Progressive Medusa:

    The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power.

    Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.

    The Left seeks to transform America into something never envisioned by the founders, a huge all-encompassing, panopticon state, one run by anointed Platonic guardians. Our elite watchmen will use their unlimited power to force upon us an equality of result society—with themselves properly exempted.

    The hard Left’s defense is that its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.

    Large swaths of the downtowns of America’s large cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland—are becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable. Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless. Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism. The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse.

    Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination unanimously approved by Senate Judiciary Committee. Democrats failed to show up. The senate confirmation vote is expected Monday. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The Great Southern Democratic Hope:

    Back in 2018, I wrote about the phenomenon of Great Southern Democratic Hopes — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-learning state who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.

    Prime past specimens of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes include Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Michelle Nunn and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But 2018 brought the modern king of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes, Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.

    You notice none of those candidates actually won, although O’Rourke deserves some credit for performing better than any other Democrat in decades. Still, next spring, Ted Cruz will be in the third year of his second term, and O’Rourke, having completed a presidential bid that also didn’t live up to the initial hype, will be teaching at Texas State University.

    This cycle: Amy McGrath.

    after McGrath won the primary, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin declared, “Democrats serious about winning chose Amy McGrath.” The Frankfort State Journal concluded, “McGrath has the name recognition and financial backing to give McConnell, well, a run for his money.” Fueled by Democrats across the country who are itching to see McConnell defeated, McGrath’s fundraising has been off the charts — $37 million in the last quarter, more than $82 million overall.

    And yet it is mid October, and McConnell does not appear to be running for his money. The newest Mason-Dixon poll puts the Republican ahead, 51 percent to 42 percent. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives McConnell a 96 percent chance of winning. In a year when Democrats are finding themselves in surprisingly strong shape from Maine to Colorado and from Montana to Arizona, McGrath is an afterthought and on pace to turn out like the last Democrat who took on McConnell. In 2013, Politico wrote of Grimes, “The fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.” Mitch McConnell won reelection in 2014, 56 percent to 40 percent, in what was not the fight of his political life.

  • President Trump is not having any of Leslie Stahl’s bias. I’m so old I remember when 60 Minutes was a revered journalistic institution…
  • “Meet NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny — The Woman In Charge of Doxxing and Destroying Trump Supporters.” Bonus: “While Zadrozny is passionately committed to doxing and silencing her political foes, there’s another group she is more sympathetic toward: Pedophiles.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Even Obama Administration officials were not believing the Steele dossier’s Russian collusion bullschiff
  • How Facebook uses Chinese nationals to work on technology to censor Americans:

    China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for ­Facebook to recruit social media censors?

    There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’”

    The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.

    When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”

    Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.

    To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”

    Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”

    It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”

    (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)

  • Texas joins DOJ antitrust lawsuit against Google. Oh, and the DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. I probably should have led with that. I blame this Topsy Turvey year.
  • Intel to sell it’s NAND business to South Korea’s Hynix. It’s a weird deal:

    In a joint press release issued early this morning, SK Hynix and Intel have announced that Intel will be selling the entirety of its NAND memory business to SK Hynix. The deal, which values Intel’s NAND holdings at $9 billion, will see the company transfer over the NAND business in two parts, with SK Hynix eventually acquiring all IP, facilities, and personnel related to Intel’s NAND efforts. Notably, however, Intel is not selling their overarching Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group; instead the company will be holding on to their Optane memory technology as they continue to develop and sell that technology.

    Per the terms of the unusual agreement, SK Hynix will be acquiring Intel’s NAND memory business in two parts, with the deal not expected to completely close until March of 2025. Under the first phase, which will take place in 2021 once all relevant regulatory bodies have approved the seal, SK Hynix will pay Intel the first $7 billion for their SSD business and Intel’s sole NAND fab in Dalian, China. This will see Intel’s consumer and enterprise SSD businesses transferred to SK Hynix, along with the relevant IP and employees for the SSD business, but not any NAND IP or employees. Similarly, while SK Hynix will get the Dalian fab, the first phase does not come with the employees that operate it.

    Following the first phase, Intel will continue to develop and manufacture NAND out of the Dalian fab for roughly the next four years. This period is set to last until the rest of the deal fully closes in March of 2025. At that point, SK Hynix will pay Intel $2 billion for the rest of their NAND business. This will finally transfer all of Intel’s NAND IP and related employees over to SK Hynix, along with the Dalian fab employees.

    NAND = Flash memory, and it’s a very profitable business to be in most times, but not part of Intel’s core microprocessor business. In Intel’s case, NAND is what you run once your fab is too old to crank out Microprocessors, and Fab 68 in Dalian was built in 2010 as a 65 nanometer fab. With Intel’s cutting edge currently at 7nm, you can see how it would be easy for them to part with, especially since the flash division was losing money despite record revenue in 2019. What Hynix gets out of the deal is harder to fathom. They’re buying a revenue stream in a sector that should be profitable, add another fab to their stable, and maintain parity with DRAM rivals Samsung and Micron. But that’s an awful lot to pay for a small revenue stream bump, a ten year old fab and no NAND IP until 2024.

  • Twitter backs down after Hunter Biden brouhaha.
  • Rapper 50 Cent endorses President Trump, says Biden’s tax hikes are too high.
  • Colorado Democratic Party committee member calls for killing political opponents on camera.
  • “U.S. Sanctions Have Caused ‘Serious’ Damage to Iran, Tehran Says.” Good. Maybe they could stop being jihadist scumbags who oppress your people with a brutal theocracy? Just a thought…
  • Armenia-Azerbaijan truce breaks down within hours.
  • Poland signs $18 billion nuclear power deal with the U.S.
  • Chairman of the Georgetown County (South Carolina) Board of Voter Registration and Elections resignes after stealing Trump signs. Note: Repeatedly stealing the signs of political opponents isn’t a “lapse of judgement.”
  • Detailed, even-handed analysis of the charges leveled at Ken Paxton.

    The Nate Paul scandal has, at its heart, allegations that federal and state law enforcement officials abused the rights of an American citizen. The facts from all sides seem to indicate an unwillingness by the OAG staff to investigate Paul’s complaint; their unwillingness to do so must be explored.

    If the 2019 raid was properly conducted, why has that not been confirmed? Why delay an investigation into the raid? If the raids were legitimate, why, after more than 13 months, has Nate Paul not been charged with a crime?

    On the other hand, Nate Paul might—indeed—be a notorious villain. But in the current environment, shouldn’t state investigators be willing to double-check that the actions of law enforcement officials are conducted properly? Even accused criminals have constitutional rights.

    Just as important, what if Mr. Paul is not a villain and merely a businessman targeted for less than honorable reasons? Is it merely a coincidence that U.S. Attorney Bash resigned from office three days after Mateer tendered his own resignation?

    Likewise, it is possible—as the seven OAG employees allege—that Paxton was acting “under duress” in pushing for this investigation into the complaint made by his friend Mr. Paul. Whether or not Nate Paul’s allegations have merit, Texans need to be certain their elected officials are not acting improperly or unethically in the course of their jobs. Was Mr. Paxton simply pursuing justice for a Texan, or was he acting under undue influence?

  • Bill Burr’s Saturday Night Live monologue.
  • Bret Weinstein kicked off Facebook, presumably for daring to voice anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts.

  • Max Boot manages to dig past the next level of the Hollow Earth in talking about just how swell China has handled the Wuhan coronavirus. Time to dig this out again:

    

  • Half Of Europe’s Small Businesses Face Bankruptcy.” I bet a number of Eurocrats overseeing their Wuhan coronavirus lockdowns see that as a feature rather than a bug.
  • Dwight has an interesting link up on the Quebec Biker War.
  • Phil Collins ex-wife took over his mansion with her new boyfriend and armed guards. He should su-su-sue them all.
  • Johnny Rotten on the antifa Borg. “This collectivism wrapped up in the ideology and dogma of communism is the exact opposite [of punk rock].”
  • Today’s Hollywood star dragged by the left for not bowing to their wokeness: Chris Pratt

    Since Starlord is an integral lead in two blockbuster franchises, I would say the chances of this costing him work are pretty much nil…

  • Australia bans all hentai. This doesn’t seem like a winning strategy in the Internet era…
  • Burning Zambonis give you so much more.
  • Happy Halloween!

  • BidenWatch for October 5, 2020

    Monday, October 5th, 2020

    Like antifa, Joe Biden is just an idea, CNN skews its poll even more than usual, more “inappropriate” touching, and Biden refuses to take a position on, well, just about everything. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • New poll shows Biden “lead” down to three points after debate.
  • Hold on! Zogby says it’s down to two.
  • Speaking of polls: How to lie with statistics, CNN division:

    Always check the crosstabs. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Joe Biden is just an idea:

    Lost in the blinding gaslighting over Donald Trump’s remarks about white supremacists during the first presidential debate was the fact that Joe Biden proved again that he’s little more than a stand-in propped up by a compliant political press.

    Biden was unable to answer even the most rudimentary queries about his beliefs, never mind specifics about policy. Apologies to the Twitter expert class, but opposing Donald Trump is neither a moral doctrine nor a policy agenda.

    There is plenty to dislike about the president, but you rarely have to guess where he stands. Biden, on the other hand, says “I am the Democratic Party,” and yet, after a half century in American politics, we have virtually no idea what his presidency would look like.

    Biden’s already put a lid on his past, and the press has obliged. The same reporters who will comb over 15 years of Trump’s tax returns have shown zero curiosity in nearly 40 years of Senate papers Biden has buried somewhere in a University of Delaware basement. Then again, there’s not a single significant piece of legislation Biden sponsored in his 36 years in Senate that he still supports, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

    Thanks to the media, though, I know more about some flaky QAnon candidate in Georgia than I do about the presidential frontrunner’s foreign-policy positions. Or much else. If Republicans were threatening to destroy the constitutional order by packing the courts and throwing out the legislative filibuster — one that Biden’s mentor Barack Obama once argued was an indispensable tool of a representative democracy — there would be massive pressure on the head of the party to stake out a public position.

  • Biden campaigns from the shadowrealm:

    Biden’s basement has proved more of a tomb than a front porch. And his vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the avatar of the “Harris Admiration,” seemed almost as scarce as Biden. Until now, both thought it wiser to let Trump Agonistês flail at his existential enemies and to let the press do its now-accustomed work of churning out periodic hit jobs on Trump. When Biden gave a rare scripted interview, his obsequious interviewers grimaced as they sought to prop him up when he bizarrely claimed that he had served 180 years in the Senate or that 200 million Americans had died from the coronavirus.

    Technology has allowed Biden to hobble along now and then with Zoom and Skype. Hidden teleprompters and a conspiracy of toady journalists have passed off fake press conferences as spontaneous rather than scripted events.

    Biden was never up to 16- to 18-hour days, as we learned in the year-long primary fights. So staying home purportedly also gave him rest and the chance to run an occasional on-screen Wizard of Oz campaign — and again let the ram Trump beat his head against the media, the virus, and the chaos of the cities.

    So without current technology, a slavish media, the weirdest year in American history, and strong polling, Biden could not have gotten away by disappearing from a presidential campaign for months on end.

    Yet there were other reasons that the once loquacious motor-mouth Biden never really campaigned. He became a virtual candidate in quite another sense: He has acted as an emissary for a Bernie Sanders socialist agenda that otherwise would have stayed underground after expiring and being buried in the Democratic primary. A prisoner of ideology, Biden found it wiser not to rebel and comment on the issues — well aside from the pragmatic worries of his handlers that he might detour to yet another “You ain’t black” revelation.

    If Biden were to openly oppose any of the hard-left ideologies that his handlers and masters embrace — if he endorsed fracking, issued a list of liberal rather than hard-left judges, or objected to dismantling the Electoral College — he would lose his new base and with them a close election.

    And yet if Biden were to explicitly and publicly advocate the Sanders, AOC, or Warren neo-socialist agenda, he would also lose, turning off his supposed swing-voter and independent suburban constituents.

    So Biden in the vortex stays nearly mute — a quietude certainly well suited to his age, the prior news cycles of 2020, his cognitive limitations, and his hope that he can win with a rope-a-dope, run-out-the-clock strategy.

    And now? The polls tighten. This strange year is gradually normalizing. Biden should be rested, after his months-long hiatus. And so will he in the eleventh hour actually conduct a campaign? Yes and no.

    His strategists still seem to suffer from the Hillary disease. As in 2016, Trump is frenetic in the swing states, the Democratic candidate is virtually nonexistent.

    As in 2016, Biden and the Democrats talk of a 70 to 90 percent likelihood of victory and an Electoral College blowout. They speculate about who will be the nation’s next cabinet officers, oblivious that such arrogance only feeds their blindness.

    As in 2016, a few polls — Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Emerson, Zogby — show Trump nearly even or ahead in some states and are thus dismissed. Mainstream polls, as in 2016, likely “prove” their absence of bias by under-sampling working-class Democratic constituencies and over-sampling suburbanites, many of them Republicans — as if they cannot be accused of party asymmetries even as they do not reflect accurate ideological affinities.

    And the polling outfits that in 2016 assured a Clinton victory are now once against cited for their reassurance that the Democrat remains clearly ahead.

    As in 2016, when millions would not reveal their preferences and were written off as mythical voters, so too now we are told that the proverbial stealthy Trump voter remains an exaggeration and a likely no-show.

    As in 2016, when Hillary dismissed Trump’s road-runner-like feverish visits to swing states as an ossified strategy, at least compared with the tactics of her twentysomething technical wizards, so too Biden’s youngsters now laugh off Trump’s calcified ideas, such as knocking on millions of doors to talk to voters in person.

    And as in 2106, when Hillary’s social-media masters and tech experts proved incompetent, so too Biden’s scripted tele-campaigning is often plagued by glitches, inadvertent glimpses of teleprompter reflections, and prompts left on the script that Biden dutifully speaks out loud, giving the game away.

    Long ago, we knew that Biden was physically not up for a normal campaign. Yet the freakish year of 2020 gave him the chance to outsource his candidacy to the weird cycle of events that drove down Trump’s polls.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Biden sends mixed signals on whether he supports the socialist “Green New Deal,” but his own proposals look like the Green New Deal’s Little Brother:

    For starters, the Biden Plan does include the following:

    • “Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
    • “On day one, Biden will make smart infrastructure investments to rebuild the nation and to ensure that our buildings, water, transportation, and energy infrastructure can withstand the impacts of climate change.”
    • “He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that.”
    • “The Biden plan will make a historic investment in our clean energy future and environmental justice, paid for by rolling back the Trump tax incentives that enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment.”
    • “Biden will set a target of reducing the carbon footprint of the U.S. building stock 50% by 2035, creating incentives for deep retrofits that combine appliance electrification, efficiency, and on-site clean power generation.”
    • “Make climate change a core national security priority.”

    These are just a few examples of the radical progressive elements in Biden’s plan.

    Plus Green New Deal Supporter Kamala Harris would be waiting in the wings.

  • Kyle Rittenhouse’s layer threatens to sue Biden for libel for falsely calling him a white supremacist. As well he should.
  • Black members of the Proud Boys react to Biden calling them white supremacists. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Speaking of actual white supremacists, “Will MSM Ask Biden To Renounce White Supremacist Richard Spencer’s Endorsement?” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Tech stocks are likely to take it on the chin under a Biden presidency.
  • American Jews should reject Joe Biden.

    The Obama administration oversaw the lowest point in the US-Israel relations since Israel’s establishment in 1948. Biden was party to regular leaks of Israeli intelligence and political attacks targeting Israel on the global stage. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the US to mend relations. The prime minister was taken in and out of the White House through a side door with no official media related to the visit.

    Biden also worked to pass the Iran nuclear deal, which Israel heavily opposed. There are reports that in a 2014 meeting, Obama threatened to shoot down Israeli fighter jets should they target facilities in Iran. Biden does not get to run on the Obama-Biden record and play coy to these events. It is no coincidence that a month before Netanyahu addressed the House of Representatives, the Obama administration decided to declassify a 386-page report on Israeli nuclear capabilities.

  • No Wuhan coronavirus for Biden.
  • Biden refuses to denounce court-packing because he’s afraid of losing the radical left.
  • “The wife of a Massachusetts transit police officer who was injured in the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers accused Joe Biden of touching her inappropriately and making a suggestive comment in 2014.” Hey, remember when we were supposed to believe all women during #MeToo? It already seems a million years ago…
  • Not that our media will report any of them:

  • “Biden Transition Team Member Worked With CCP Officials For Over a Decade.” “Suzy George, a new addition to the transition team of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, is a former principal of Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm that has extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party.”
  • The ghost:

  • Context:

  • Beto O’Rourke shows the same keen political acumen that made him a U.S. Senator and Presidential nominee.
  • Heh:

  • The whiff of desperation:

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  • BidenWatch for September 7, 2020

    Monday, September 7th, 2020

    Dueling Kenosha visits, Biden’s polls fall, 2016 all over again, and more Chinese shenanigans. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • The difference between Trump and Biden’s trips to Kenosha:

    Trump spoke to the family’s minister to see if he should meet with the family of Jacob Blake. His father, Jacob Blake Sr. insisted on having a lawyer present if Trump were to visit with the family. The President wasn’t interested in playing any of those games. Instead, he met with the people in Kenosha that were devastated by the rioting and damage, and law enforcement who calmed down the riot. His trip was not focused on politics but on getting the community what it needed.

    Two days later, Biden visited Kenosha as well. But his was a trip to please his radical handlers. It was made only because the President’s trip was successful.

    Unlike Trump, he met with Jacob’s anti-Semitic father. But that makes sense for Joe, after all, the Democratic Party’s far-left base is filled with anti-Semites. The media made a big deal about Jacob’s father speaking to Biden, but not talking to Trump. They ignored the fact that Blake Sr. is a Jew-hating Bigot.

    Jacob’s father is a Farrakhan-supporting, raging bigot. And he’s Joe Biden’s new BFF. If he was a Trump supporter, his hate-mongering would be fodder for the news. But he’s part of the Democrats and their BLM offensive so there’s silence.

    (Hat tip: The Daily Gator.)

  • “Nate Silver’s Latest Shows Biden Is Headed for a Very Bad November“:

    Nate Silver, the popular statistician and data geek who publishes his predictions for political outcomes throughout the country has released some new findings for the November Presidential Election and the news for Team Biden isn’t great. In fact, they are downright bad.

    In 2016, Clinton won the national popular vote by just over 2.8 million votes or 2.1%. Her enthusiasm rating was just 12 points behind Trump at this same time in the election (early September) in 2016. Polls found that of Trump’s base, 58% were enthusiastic about voting for the now-current-President versus just 46% of the same voters for the now-defeated Clinton. In other words, despite the majority of her voters being less-than-enthusiastic about showing up to vote for her, she still won the national popular vote by 2.1%.

    This is where the bad news for Biden comes in. Currently, Biden’s enthusiasm score trails that of the President by 17 points. Of the President’s supporters, 65% are enthusiastic about voting for him, a seven-point increase from his 58% at the same time in the race in 2016. Biden, on the other hand, enjoys a 48% enthusiasm rate, up just 2% from his 2016 predecessor.

    This simply means that Trump enjoys a much stronger support from his base than does Biden his. If history is any indicator, Trump will likely do better against Biden in 2020 than Clinton did in 2016, at a 2.1% margin of national vote victory. If we apply that to Nate Silver’s data, Biden would only have about a 22% chance of victory against Trump come election day.

  • “Why Biden could still lose the suburbs to Trump.”

    Interviews with more than two dozen Democratic Party officials and strategists in the suburbs reflect confidence in Biden’s ability to compete with Trump on issues surrounding this summer’s civil unrest, but also widespread concerns about the political volatility — and potential allure — of the president’s law-and-order message.

    In Pinal County, Ariz., where “Thin Blue Line” flags have proliferated outside Phoenix and Tucson, Holly Lyon, chair of the local Democratic Party, said, “There is that little sort of unsettled feeling in people because we can tell that [Trump’s messaging] is grabbing hold, and it’s working.”

    Snip.

    Two Democratic strategists who recently viewed focus groups of suburban voters described high-propensity voters increasingly concerned about unrest in urban centers, though both strategists said it was unclear whether that concern would push them to Biden or to Trump.

    One of the strategists described a focus group in which white, college-educated women reacted to the protests by discussing their own property values and, in one woman’s case, her family’s mortgage.

    “White women who have college degrees are starting to really get sick of this,” the strategist said.

    Some state polls are showing signs of it. In Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, a Monmouth University poll released last week found that Biden’s lead over Trump had narrowed statewide, and that Trump was leading Biden by 2 percentage points in 10 swing counties, including some Philadelphia suburbs, erasing a large advantage Biden had built there earlier this year.

    If civil unrest persists, said Robert Tatterson, secretary of the Democratic Party in Ozaukee County, outside Milwaukee, Trump “will be able to be the strong man, only-I-can-save-you leader, and that’s playing out just like I had feared.”

    Note that the word “antifa” is completely missing from the article. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who notes “People always say Trump is ‘talking the wrong way.’ He was talking the wrong way in 2016, and then he won. Talking the wrong way is Trump’s super power.”)

  • President Trump’s approval hits 52%…and 45% among black Americans.
  • All that might explain the panic in Bidenland:

    Why did Joe Biden leave his Delaware basement and fly all the way to Pittsburgh to give a speech Monday with no crowd — no supporters in attendance — and not even answer press questions? He could have given the same speech from Delaware, but he flew to Pittsburgh. Why? Paul Kengor’s article today in The American Spectator explains that support for Trump has surged in Pennsylvania over the last month, in large part because of Biden’s “highly ill-advised pick of Kamala Harris, who folk in this area see as a West Coast leftist whose ‘progressive’ bona fides include an unwavering opposition to fracking.”

    Kengor explains that, in Pennsylvania, fracking means jobs — lots of good-paying blue-collar jobs — and by choosing Harris as his running mate, Biden is effectively threatening to kill those jobs.

    The Real Clear Politics average in top battleground states confirms the momentum shift. During July, Biden’s lead was about 6 points, but since the conventions, Trump has cut that lead in half — and that’s just the public polls. Everybody knows there is a “shy Trump voter” factor, where people are afraid tell pollsters who they support, but are likely to choose Trump on Election Day. That factor may be as large as 5% and Biden’s slippage in Pennsylvania, where the latest Monmouth poll shows him with just a 3-point lead, obviously set the alarm bells ringing at Biden campaign HQ.

  • “Biden-Harris ClusterFrack – First They Were For Fracking Ban, Then Polls Shifted, Now They Are Against Ban.”
  • For those who followed the 2016 election, it’s deja vu all over again:

    Memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now.

    First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten. Biden has enjoyed a comfortable lead throughout both the primary polling against Trump, and post nomination. But there are concerning trends for Biden that mirror those of Hillary Clinton’s position in August 2016. In fact, Biden is doing worse in the polls than Hillary was at this time — but you wouldn’t know this based on media coverage of course.

    Pollster Frank Luntz breaks it down. On August 25, 2016, Hillary held a +9.2 advantage over Trump in the RealClearPolitics average for Pennsylvania, a state she lost. Currently Joe Biden holds a +5.7 average lead. In Michigan, Hillary held a +9 advantage in polling, a state she also lost. Biden is at +6.7. In Wisconsin, the state Hillary lost and infamously did not visit once for the duration of the general election, Hillary held a lead of +11.5. Biden sits at +6.5. The only state of the crucial swing stats where Biden’s polling outperforms Hillary’s is Florida, where Biden holds a +4.8 average lead. Hillary’s lead was +2.9. She of course lost Florida as well, all but sealing the presidency for Trump and the unthinkable for the media. Biden still holds about an +8.5 lead nationally, but for a candidate who is perceived to have less professional baggage and considered more likable than Hillary, these numbers should be putting the Biden campaign on alert.

    Biden also received no post-convention bump, as most candidates do when more voters start paying attention to the election. Biden was of course at a historical disadvantage with COVID-19 canceling out the possibility of a large-scale convention, but the trappings were all there: video presentations, major endorsements, candidate speeches. Yet still nothing.

    Then consider the fact that Trump’s base support has not eroded. Trump’s popularity with voters, as measured by FiveThirtyEight, shows his support has more or less remained between 40-44 percent throughout his presidency. While he currently trails Biden in the crucial swing states, Trump enjoys a rock of support, even after three years of Russiagate, Robert Mueller, sustained negative media and entertainment coverage, sports team boycotts, impeachment and of course the pandemic. Roughly 40 percent of the country, we can assume, has simply tuned out the media.

    Plus Biden’s wimpy response to the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting,

  • Trump gets the edge over Biden for criminal justice reform.
  • The weirdness of Slow Joe’s Speech. “The speech itself was a mind-numbing collection of platitudes, cliches, and lies. To that extent it was a conventional political speech. Listening to it, however, is painful. Biden has become a deeply contrived figure. Thus the artificiality of the staging.”
  • More on that subject:

    Including the blatant question scripting:

  • More on Biden press conferences:

  • Ann Althouse watches a Biden-Harris chat so you don’t have to. Actually, that’s not true: she only makes it 20 seconds in, then switches to reading the transcript. Also dings Harris for lying about her imaginary hard-scrabble background. “Her mother was a medical researcher at prestigious institutions, and her father was an economics professor at Stanford. They didn’t have any financial struggles, did they?”
  • Chris Wallace is set to host the first debate between President Trump and Biden on September 29. Assuming Biden doesn’t chicken out like everyone thinks he will…
  • Delusional Biden asks Trump to denounce “right wing” rioters. I’m sure he’ll get on that right after asking why so many NBA players are midgets.
  • “Democrats are now in serious danger of losing Minnesota for the first time since 1972.” (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • That always-fake Biden lead in Texas blows away like the fog it always was. “Trump is now leading Biden among likely voters, 48 to 46 percent, according to the poll from The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Poll has Trump up by ten points in Missouri. If so, Trump should be worried, since he clobbered Hillary by about 18 points in 2016.
  • Bernie Sanders says he’s going to make sure Biden governs on the hard left.
  • “Biden claims black man invented light bulb during campaign event.”
  • The people driving the Democratic Party’s agenda today:

    

  • Biden confuses basic facts about murder of Trump supporter in incoherent press conference.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • See if you can count how many ways this New York Times piece on competing Biden and Trump ads talking about the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots tries to spin the issue for Biden.
  • “Secret Service Inadvertently Confirms Gateway Pundit Story About Biden Sexually Assaulting Agent’s Girlfriend.” The 2009 file on the incident was destroyed due to “retention standards.” More: “We had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.”
  • Slow Joe gonna Slow Joe:

  • The Democratic Party keeps signaling that it has no intention of accepting a second Trump term:

    [T]he Democrats have no intention of accepting defeat at the ballot box. If you think that they were sore losers in 2016, you ain’t seen anything yet.

    And what they’re doing is effectively threatening violence if Biden does not win, and it’s just a variation on the theme that Biden talked to [in] Pittsburgh, during the week, when he said if you don’t vote for him, ‘ya ain’t safe.’

    (Hat tip: @txpoliticjunkie.)

  • “Meet The Rioting Criminals Kamala Harris Helped Bail Out Of Jail.”

    ox 9 News in Minneapolis did the research for us. Here are a few of the criminals they found Harris did a solid for.

    Among those bailed out by the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) is a suspect who shot at police, a woman accused of killing a friend, and a twice convicted sex offender, according to court records reviewed by the FOX 9 Investigators.

    According to attempted murder charges, Jaleel Stallings shot at members of a SWAT Team during the riots in May. Police recovered a modified pistol that looks like an AK-47. MFF paid $75,000 in cash to get Stallings out of jail.

    Darnika Floyd is charged with second degree murder, for stabbing a friend to death. MFF paid $100,000 cash for her release.

    Christopher Boswell, a twice convicted rapist, is currently charged with kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault in two separate cases. MFF paid $350,00 [sic] in cash for his release.

    Kamala Harris and her friends in the corporate media, otherwise known as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, will pretend this never happened and they are counting on voters to be too ignorant to know that it did. Harris was so eager to be on the rioters’ team that she literally raised money for them in the hopes that they could be released and foster further mayhem.

  • How Harris put ideology over justice:

    You might have forgotten the first time you heard the name Kamala Harris. It was probably 16 years ago, when Harris found Democrats, along with decent people of all political persuasions, united against her.

    At the time, the story of a murdered California policeman had become national news amid widespread indignation over Harris’s role in the case. Her actions revealed her true nature as a ruthless partisan committed über alles to the causes embraced by far-left ideologues — even when that commitment meant denying justice to a fallen officer and inflicting injustice on his family and law-enforcement colleagues.

    On the night of April 10, 2004, San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza and his partner, Barry Parker, were patrolling the city’s Bayview District. Despite Bayview’s being a notoriously high-crime neighborhood filled with danger, a selfless sense of duty had led Officer Espinoza to request it as his assignment “because he felt he made the most impact as a cop there.”

    As the officers drove the streets, they noticed a man in a long, dark coat who appeared to be acting in a suspicious manner, walking with only one of his arms swinging naturally, as if he were trying to conceal something. They decided they should pull over to stop and talk to him. Officer Espinoza exited the patrol car and followed the man on foot, calling out an order to halt and identifying himself as law enforcement. The man — later identified as David Hill — first sped up before eventually slowing and stopping. He turned around, lifted the AK-47 rifle he had been hiding, and opened fire, murdering Officer Espinoza, who had never even unholstered his service weapon.

    Hill was a member of the West Mob, a criminal street gang that terrorized those who lived and worked within its geographic “territory” by committing rapes, homicides, assaults with firearms, narcotic sales, car thefts, burglaries, and robberies. As an expert testified at trial, “Retaliation against a [rival] gang member sends a message to other gang members, but the murder of a police officer sends a message to the community: ‘Hey, even your protectors can be touched.’”

    That was Officer Espinoza: a protector of the community, a devoted husband to his wife, and a doting father to his three-year-old daughter, cut down in cold blood.

    Just three days after Espinoza’s murder, before he had been laid to rest and without caring to call his widow, Harris, who was then the San Francisco district attorney, invited reporters and camera crews to a news conference to announce that she would not seek a death sentence in the case. Per the New York Times, she argued that doing so would “send the wrong message” and be “a poor use of money.” But California assemblyman Joseph Canciamilla, a fellow Democrat, explained it better: “This is clearly a case where local politics took precedence over the facts of the case and a deliberative review of the circumstances.”

  • How Hunter Biden was involved in a $1.5 million investment fund using Chinese money while his father was still Vice President.
  • More on the same subject: “Hunter Biden’s deals ‘served’ China and Chinese military, new film claims.”
  • Even the New York Times has noticed how Biden’s story on China has shifted:

    “The United States welcomes the emergence of a prosperous, integrated China on the global stage, because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Jiang, recalled Frank Jannuzi, the Senate aide who organized the trip and took notes at Mr. Biden’s side.

    Snip.

    Two decades later, China has emerged as a great power — and, in the eyes of many Americans, a dangerous rival. Republicans and Democrats say it has exploited the global integration that Mr. Biden and many other officials supported.

    The 2020 election has been partly defined by what much of Washington sees as a kind of new Cold War. And as Mr. Biden faces fierce campaign attacks from President Trump, his language on China points to a drastic shift in thinking.

    Mr. Biden calls Xi Jinping, the authoritarian Chinese leader, a “thug.” He has threatened, if elected, to impose “swift economic sanctions” if China tries to silence American citizens and companies. “The United States does need to get tough on China,” he wrote this winter in an essay in Foreign Affairs. Mr. Biden now sees the country as a top strategic challenge, according to interviews with more than a dozen of his advisers and foreign policy associates, and his own words.

    Completely missing from this article: any mention of Hunter Biden.

  • Heh:

  • Heh, but with more drinking:

  • Heh III:

  • “Snopes Rates Biden’s Claim That 2+2=5 As ‘Mostly True.'” 
  • “Cutting Out The Middleman: Dems Will Just Have Trump Debate Biden’s Teleprompter Directly.”
  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    LinkSwarm for September 4, 2020

    Friday, September 4th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! President Trump’s approval rises among black people, more antifa behaving badly, and a look at just how badly Lebanon is screwed.

  • President Trump’s approval rating among Black voters jumped by 60% during the Republican National Committee even as Democrats and progressives sought to brand the Republican president as racist. A HarrisX-Hill poll released Friday showed Mr. Trump’s net approval with Black voters from Aug. 22-25, which included the first two days of the RNC, rose to 24%, up from 15% in the pollster’s Aug. 8-11 survey.” If those numbers are accurate, and hold, all by themselves they could put Pennsylvania out of reach for Democrats, since they lost by 50,000 votes in 2016, and have to rack up huge black totals in Philadelphia to balance out their disadvantage in the rest of the state. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Dirtbag dirtnapped: “Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, died in Lacey, Washington, where federal agents were attempting to take him into custody for the shooting — the same night his interview on the shooting aired on Vice News.”
  • Chicago gangs form a pact to murder any Chicago police officers with a drawn weapon.
  • President Trump orders to begin defunding cities who refuse to control rioters and defund police:

    President Trump is ordering the federal government to begin the process of defunding New York City and three other cities where officials allowed “lawless” protests and cut police budgets amid rising violent crime, The Post can exclusively reveal.

    Trump on Wednesday signed a five-page memo ordering all federal agencies to send reports to the White House Office of Management and Budget that detail funds that can be redirected.

    New York City, Washington, DC, Seattle and Portland are initial targets as Trump makes “law and order” a centerpiece of his re-election campaign after months of unrest and violence following the May killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.

    “My Administration will not allow Federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones,” Trump says in the memo, which twice mentions New York Mayor Bill de Blasio by name.

    “To ensure that Federal funds are neither unduly wasted nor spent in a manner that directly violates our Government’s promise to protect life, liberty, and property, it is imperative that the Federal Government review the use of Federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.”

    Good.

  • How antifa operates at the street level:

    The course of the nightly action against the PPB followed a fairly predictable pattern: a contingent of notional BLM protesters rendezvoused with a group of antifa black bloc at a public park close to their objective. As they moved towards the police building which was their target, “corkers” -a sort of bicycle-mounted blocking force- closed off side streets and the scouting line -typically on mopeds- moved ahead and on the flanks. Behind them came the main contingent of black bloc. Upon arrival at the PPB the streets were blocked with vehicles and burning dumpsters, with the “corkers” stationed to direct traffic away from the action and the scouts setting up a picket line extending out several blocks, watching for police reinforcements and creating the strong impression of antifa control of territory.

    The black bloc then engaged in an steadily-escalating level of vandalism and property damage directed at their target, including unguarded police vehicles parked nearby. If uninterrupted, this quickly escalated to arson and serious destruction to the facilities.

    By this point the scouting line often detected the flanking lines of riot police and a riot was formally been declared. Blocs armed with shields deployed defensively to allow time for the rest of the rioters to disengage. These “shield walls” provided a tempting target for a police “bull rush”, video of which can then be used for propaganda purposes. Behind the shield wall other bloc members threw commercial fireworks, frozen water bottles, and paint-filled balloons. The paint balloons are often mixed with sand or abrasive material that scratches clear shields and visors when cleaning is attempted damaging expensive riot suppression equipment. Meanwhile the main element of the antifa black bloc continued to retreat into bordering residential areas.

    Antifa chooses the residential areas for specific reasons. As the police deploy flashbangs, tear gas, and assorted non-lethal munitions in order to control the ongoing riot, the disruptive effects are experienced by the local residents. Additionally, as the action moved further into the poorly-lit neighborhoods, small groups of rioters and black bloc would break off to either escape, or engage in vandalism against the original PPB target (if left unguarded) or other nearby targets of opportunity.

    The action concluded at some point in the early morning hours, usually 4-5 hours after the assembly in the designated park. The location was almost always shifted to a different location every night, very rarely going to the same location on successive nights. This means it’s rare for the same location to be targeted more than twice in one week.

    Plus suggested tactics on countering it.

  • “Flamethrower-Packing Antifa ‘Entered Fetal Position And Began Crying’ After Unsuccessful Escape From Cops.” This was in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I can’t believe I didn’t have a “flamethrower” tag until now.

  • Madison City Council approves illegal, racist, quota-driven police oversight board.
  • Goya CEO Bob Unamue, tells Democrats that “the ‘hatred and destruction’ are moving Latinos to Trump.” Plus a comparison to communist enforcement mobs. (Hat tip: @txpoliticjunkie.)
  • In an effort to prove how reasonable Democrats are, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser considers removing the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Former Trump skeptic changes mind, thinks Trump saved the GOP from itself.

    Like a lot of observers at the time, I thought Trump had no real policy agenda to define his campaign beyond a vague pro-America sentiment and a withering disdain for the political establishments of both major parties. I thought his political inexperience was a liability, that his penchant for insulting his opponents would turn voters off, and that the GOP had missed an opportunity to defeat Hillary Clinton by nominating someone else—anyone, really, besides Trump.

    But it turned out Trump was the best candidate to beat Clinton because Clinton embodied nearly everything voters had come to hate about America’s political class: the falsity, the naked hypocrisy, the barely disguised disdain for ordinary people. For all his obvious faults, Trump wasn’t a professional politician, had no record to defend, and was unconstrained by the conventions of ordinary political rhetoric. He was uniquely positioned to call out and exploit Clinton’s faults and shortcomings, and expose the contradictions at the heart of the Democratic Party.

    For Republican voters, Trump offered the promise of something different from the seemingly endless pattern of politicians who promised one thing and did another, especially on immigration and free trade. For decades, incessant Republican boasting about “securing the border” never actually secured the border as mass illegal immigration continued apace. Expressions of sympathy for the American working class never produced policies that might actually help the working class. Trump zeroed in on these things, and his message resonated because it was true (and still is).

  • The lockdowns have been ten times as deadly as the Wuhan coronavirus.
  • Evidently Democrats want to bankrupt any NYC restaurants they haven’t already: “Bill De Blasio Says NYC Indoor Dining May Not Happen Until June 2021.”
  • Joseph P. Kennedy III loses his senate primary to incumbent Ed Markey, who seemed to run to Kennedy’s left.
  • Speaking of members of the Kennedy clan running for office, NJ Democratic congressional candidate Amy Kennedy calls for lifting sanctions on Chinese companies. In one of those amazing coincidences, she also owns substantial amounts of Chinese stock. What are the odds? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The Media Lynching of Kyle Rittenhouse. A liberal journalism professor not only omits the fact that Rittenhouse was attacked, but also thinks that the Kenosha riots will hurt Trump.
  • The rap sheets of Kyle Rittenhouse’s attackers.
  • Speaking of which, Twitter suspends the account of Rittenhouse’s lawyer, L. Lin Wood.
  • How is it that #BlackLivesMatter always chooses repeat felony offenders as their poster-children?
  • Dozens of “controversial” Joe Rogan episodes missing from Spotify.
  • Here’s a really meaty Art Keller Quillette piece on the fall of Beirut:

    The effects of the explosion of nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the port of Beirut, Lebanon on August 4th was not restricted to 170+ deaths and 3,000+ injuries. The explosion’s metaphorical shockwaves may prove to be the death knell of Lebanon’s domestic politics and economy. Both were already collapsing from extreme corruption even before COVID struck. Add an explosion that caused billions of dollars of damage to an already bankrupt country, and the result is a failed state in the making.

    Lebanon is failing in no small part because the Shia terror group Hezbollah, which translates as “Army of God,” makes its home there. Hezbollah’s continued residency and effective Lebanese governance seem to be mutually exclusive propositions.

    Except calling Hezbollah merely a terror group is too simplistic, and nothing in Lebanon is ever simple or easy to explain.

    Hezbollah is responsible for countless murders, kidnappings, and terror attacks, including the 1983 suicide bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines. But Hezbollah is also a charity operating in refugee camps. It’s a social service provider for Shia Lebanese, operating clinics, hospitals, and schools (which teach wildly anti-Semitic propaganda). It operates a satellite TV channel. It smuggles guns, sells drugs, and launders money. It has a finger in almost every pie in Lebanon, and influence in Syria, Iran, Iraq, the Northern Triangle countries of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador), and Venezuela. (Click to see the Washington Institute’s regularly updated interactive map of Hezbollah’s globe-spanning activities, and the actions taken to counter them.)

    Beyond all that, Hezbollah is also a powerful paramilitary group with 30,000+ fighters, armed with tens of thousands of rockets, as well as precision munitions like guided ballistic missiles. Hezbollah fought Israel’s last incursion in Lebanon in 2006 to a standstill, and Hezbollah is often considered the winner of the clash, despite Israel’s access to the latest weapons tech.

    Yet, like every other organization in Lebanon, Hezbollah is in very deep shit.

    Lebanon’s current chaos is due to decades of previous chaos spawned of ongoing demographic and power shifts in the post-WWII era among Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, and the Druze (a splinter Shia sect). The brutal Lebanese civil war fought by sectarian militias from 1975 to 1990 ended with a peace deal splitting political power along explicit sectarian lines. By law, the Shia nominate the Speaker of the Parliament, the Sunni get the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Christians select the Lebanese President. The sectarian structure of the government mandated by the peace deal effectively embedded political corruption into law. Each sect controls a piece of the Lebanese government and economy, and each has installed a patronage system dispensing favors and money to their upper echelons, with little of the wealth trickling down to the sects’ underclasses.

    Enlightening, and depressing. Read the whole thing.
    

  • “Iowa Judge Voids 50,000 Absentee Ballot Requests.” “The Trump campaign argued the forms should have been blank except for the election date and type, per the Iowa secretary of state’s directions. Local officials in Linn County, which is home to Cedar Rapids, ignored those directions and sent out the applications with more information anyway.”
  • Boom:

  • Ordinary people are getting tired:

  • “Shirtless, spear-wielding man allegedly stabs teen in Times Square.” Later in the piece: “The man appeared to have mental issues.” Ya think?
  • The Brontosaurus is back, babies!
  • No endorsement of smoking, but this is pretty damn cool:

  • “Antifa Unveils New Pumpkin Spice Molotov Cocktails For Fall Protests.”
  • “Proud Mayor Lets His Entire City Burn To The Ground Just To Make Trump Look Bad.”
  • “Politicians Officially Exempted From Lockdown Rules Since Lizard People Can’t Catch COVID.” Well, Pelosi is pretty Icke…
  • “Rioters Beginning To Worry They Can No Longer Loot Safely.”
  • The Babylon Bee provides a handy guide to Wuhan Coronavirus safety:

  • I think he was hungry:

  • Visualize whirled peas: