Posts Tagged ‘Ted Cruz’

Ted Cruz Takes A Scalp

Monday, March 27th, 2023

The Biden Administration has shown a clear preference for rewarding far left political leanings than technical competence in its nominees for top posts (I’m looking at you, Pete Buttigieg). Texas Senator Ted Cruz took a strong stand against this trend by opposing the nomination of Phil Washington to head the FAA.

From an editorial by Cruz and North Carolina Senator (and pilot) Ted Budd:

Last week, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) held an emergency safety summit after a series of disturbing near collisions of planes at airports across the country. These close-call incidents, which could have been disastrous, followed the January malfunction of the FAA’s NOTAM safety system that led to the first nationwide grounding of aircraft since the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks.

These serious safety challenges at the FAA are stark reminders of why it’s so important for the head of the agency to have extensive aviation experience, especially in aviation safety. The FAA, on an average day, is responsible for ensuring safe air travel for more than 45,000 flights and nearly 3 million airline passengers. With the stakes so high, it’s irresponsible to entrust the role of protecting millions of Americans who fly with a person who needs on-the-job training. Yet, that’s exactly what we have with President Joe Biden’s nominee to serve as FAA administrator, Phil Washington.

Little of Washington’s career has touched aviation. After serving in the military, Washington worked as a transit executive in Denver and Los Angeles , dealing with train and bus systems. Less than two years ago, he became CEO of Denver International Airport, a job that primarily involves overseeing the airport’s shopping, dining, parking, and buildings — not aviation matters. Notably, in this role, he has neither significant involvement with the airport’s flight operations nor does he oversee air traffic controllers, pilots, and aircraft.

Washington’s recent hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee confirmed what’s abundantly clear from his resume: he lacks the extensive aviation experience needed to lead the FAA. At his hearing, he was unable to answer basic aviation questions we asked him, including safety questions about aircraft certification, pilot licensing, and airports.

It’s no mystery why.

Unlike other FAA administrators, he does not have decades of aviation experience. Washington has never flown a plane, never worked for an airline, and never worked for a company that manufactures or maintains aircraft. But what he does have are political connections. He donated to the Biden campaign, co-chaired its policy committee on infrastructure, and led the Biden administration’s transition team for the Department of Transportation. It’s unacceptable that Biden is playing politics with the flying public’s safety by treating the head of the FAA as a patronage job.

Washington’s lack of extensive aviation experience has caused widespread concern about his nomination. At his Senate hearing, multiple Democratic senators questioned his qualifications to lead the FAA. State and local aviation groups all over the country, including pilot groups, oppose his nomination. One of them, the Montana Pilots Association, has said that he is “singularly unqualified to serve as FAA Administrator.” Last week, a bicameral group of members of Congress who are pilots, including former military pilots, urged Biden to withdraw Washington’s nomination because he is “woefully unqualified to fill this role.”

Not only is Washington unqualified, but he’s also apparently under investigation. He is embroiled in an ongoing criminal public corruption probe that is being led by the Democratic attorney general of California. The probe concerns a politically-connected contracting scheme from Washington’s time leading the Los Angeles Metro. Washington has been named in not one but two search warrants in the probe, with the most recent having been issued just last September. It’s inexplicable that President Joe Biden has picked an FAA nominee who is materially involved in an ongoing criminal investigation.

The safety challenges and responsibilities of the FAA are far too important to have anyone other than a highly experienced aviation expert at the helm.

Guess what?

President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Federal Aviation Administration withdrew his nomination on Saturday evening, following nine months in limbo and amid concerns from senators in both parties over his background and relative lack of aviation experience.

DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg tweeted late Saturday that Phil Washington, the CEO of Denver International Airport, has decided to take himself out of the running.

“The FAA needs a confirmed Administrator, and Phil Washington’s transportation & military experience made him an excellent nominee,” Buttigieg tweeted. “The partisan attacks and procedural obstruction he has faced are undeserved, but I respect his decision to withdraw and am grateful for his service.”

If only Buttigieg would follow Phil Washington’s lead.

If you want to fight the Biden Administrations attempts to drag America to the far left, it helps if you have someone who know how to play the game.

Biden Administration: You’re Not Exporting Any Of That Dirty, Sinful Natural Gas! Ted Cruz: Guess You Don’t Need Any Of These Department Of Energy Nominees Approved, Then. Biden Administration: [Folds]

Wednesday, December 21st, 2022

The Biden Administration, in its never-ending quest to punish the oil and gas industry for supplying cheap, reliable energy, tried to block the export of liquefied natural gas to Asia. Then Ted Cruz stepped in.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the approval of permits to export liquefied natural gas to Asia after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) held four agency nominees hostage.

Two Sempra Energy facilities on the West Coast will now be able to ship Texas-produced liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Asia, increasing the supply that competes with Russia to fuel the rest of the continent. They will also allow the transport of LNG supplies by pipeline to Mexico.

The approvals come after the Biden administration’s reticence and Cruz’s corresponding holds placed on four nominees to positions in the DOE. Those nominees are David Crane, to work under DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm; Jeffrey Matthew Marootian and Gene Rodrigues, both nominated to serve as assistant secretaries; and Evelyn Wang, up for director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

A Senate procedural tool, the hold is “an informal practice by which a senator informs Senate leadership that he or she does not wish a particular measure or nomination to reach the floor for consideration.”

Cruz used a similar maneuver back in May to force permit approvals, including one for a Port Arthur facility.

“This decision is a long overdue win for Texas and America,” Cruz spokesman Dave Vasquez said in a statement provided to The Texan.

“These permits will enable West Coast liquefied natural gas export facilities to send U.S. natural gas from Texas and other Western states by pipeline to Mexico, and from there export the LNG to Asia. As a result, American allies and partners in Asia will have access to newer and cleaner alternatives to the coercive energy blackmail pushed by Russia and China.”

The permits will enable the cheaper sale of Texas LNG supply to Asia; it also enables shippers to avoid the congested Panama Canal, thus expediting the supply. In total, the two permits will allow the exchange of 2.33 trillion cubic feet per year of LNG.

In 2021, Texas producers generated 10.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

It’s good to have a senator on your side that knows how to play the game…

An End To Herschel Walker Emails

Wednesday, December 7th, 2022

Republican Herschel Walker lost the Georgia senate runoff to Democrat Raphael Warnock, meaning that the Senate will have a 51-49 Democratic majority to start 2023.

I’m going to leave the whys and hows of how Republicans lost a winnable seat to others. What I am going to note is that we know, with a 100% surety, one reason Walker didn’t lose the runoff: A failure to send out enough donation solicitation emails.

The Walker campaign sent out a shitload of those.

Because I have a blog, am signed up to various political sites, and have occasionally donated small amounts of money to various Republican candidates, I get a tsunami of fundraising emails, all of which filed in a Political folder. And no one, including the Ted Cruz campaign (I donated to both senate and presidential runs) has sent me more email solicitations than the Herschel Walker campaign.

Since Walker announced his run on August 25, 2021, I have received no less than 751 fundraising emails. Here’s a screencap of just the Walker emails I received July 19-26:

But it’s not just Walker himself asking for money for his campaign. People who have asked me for money for Walker include:

  • Mary Vought (executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund)
  • President Trump
  • Marco Rubio
  • Jim Jordan
  • Ted Cruz
  • Ron DeSantis
  • Nikki Haley
  • Brian Kemp
  • Ronna McDaniel (RNC chairwoman)
  • Elise Stefanik
  • Tim Scott
  • Mike Pompeo
  • Erich Pratt (Gun Owners of America)
  • Charlie Kirk (for Turning Point PAC)
  • Josh Hawley
  • Tom Cotton
  • Etc.
  • Even his dog Cheerio “sent” me email asking for money. The response must have been underwhelming, because they stopped sending those a while back.

    I realize campaigns need to do fundraising. But clearly carpet bombing people’s inboxes goes far past the point of diminishing returns.

    So, I for one, am looking forward to not receiving a zillion emails from Herschel Walker from now on.

    (Ironically, I received one today from John James via The Post Millennial, despite the runoff being over…)

    Republican Senators Ask For Special Prosecutor For Hunter Biden

    Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

    I’ve extensively covered Hunter Biden’s extensive illegal activities, some of which involve his father Joe. With interference from the FBI, DOJ, and the entirety of the Democratic Media Complex, any real investigation into Hunter’s misdeeds and influence peddling was pushed back until after the 2020 presidential election.

    Now Republicans senators are pushing for a real investigation.

    U.S Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and 32 other Senate Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asking him to grant special counsel protections and authority to U.S Attorney David C. Weiss for his investigation into Hunter Biden.

    Biden, son of President Joe Biden, is being investigated over his previous involvement with a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president; he’s facing allegations of tax code violations and unregistered lobbying.

    Weiss is a Trump-appointed prosecutor who was kept on by the Biden administration. He is already leading the investigation into Hunter Biden, but these GOP Senators state that authority is not enough to limit political influence from the Department of Justice (DOJ).

    The senators criticize Garland for “politicizing” the DOJ, stating that he promised to do the opposite.

    “On October 4, 2021, you unleashed [the] DOJ’s National Security Division and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other criminal components, on millions of concerned parents across the country, who were exercising their First Amendment rights to be involved in decisions about their children’s education,” they wrote.

    “We have received hundreds of pieces of correspondence detailing how your memorandum chilled constitutionally protected speech.”

    The letter highlights the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and criticizes the lack of “measurable efforts” to prevent violence against Supreme Court Justices in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

    Some of the Hunter Biden controversy stems from his role as a board member of Ukrainian gas company Burisma from 2014 to 2018.

    A joint report released by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees allege that a significant conflict of interest arose as a result of Hunter Biden’s position and that of his father

    At the time, the U.S. government was pursuing an anti-corruption investigation into Ukraine and Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.

    Hunter Biden is accused of lobbying U.S. officials for Burisma interests while then-Vice President Joe Biden was the “public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” This was at the height of the anti-corruption investigation pursued by the U.S. government.

    The report also states, “Hunter Biden was serving on Burisma’s board when Zlochevsky allegedly paid a $7 million bribe to officials serving under Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Vitaly Yarema, to ‘shut the case against Zlochevsky.’”

    Hunter Biden is also accused of taking millions from a Chinese energy firm with connections to the Chinese Communist Party. President Joe Biden said on Sunday evening that the United States would directly engage China militarily if it invades Taiwan — a contrast from the administration’s previous position.

    The senators’ letter states, “Given that the investigation involves the President’s son, we believe it is important to provide U.S Attorney Weiss with special counsel authorities and protections to allow him to investigate an appropriate scope of potentially criminal conduct, avoid the appearance of impropriety, and provide the additional assurances to the American people…that the investigation is free from political influence.”

    “As detailed by Senator Grassley, ‘highly credible’ whistleblowers have come forward to detail a ‘widespread effort within the FBI to downplay or discredit negative information about’ Hunter Biden.”

    “Instead of encouraging FBI and DOJ whistleblowers to report crimes and promote government transparency,” the senators wrote to Garland, “you took the inexplicable step of chilling lawful whistleblower activity.”

    Actually, it’s super-duper explicable, if you assume that Garland’s number one priority is protecting members of the Democratic Party. Indeed, this seems to be the Prime Directive of the current DOJ, a few honest holdouts notwithstanding.

    For that reason, I expect zero serious examination of Hunter Biden’s shady deals.

    Unless, that is, the Obama Administration powers behind the throne (Ron Klane, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, etc.) decide Biden must be eased out well before 2024.

    Then all bets are off…

    Threaten To Kill Ted Cruz? Enjoy Your Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card

    Tuesday, July 12th, 2022

    Harris County, which has given us no end of corrupt and sketchy practices over the last few years, continues the trend of Democratic Party downplaying and trivializing threats against prominent Republicans, this time a man who threatened to kill senator Ted Cruz.

    A Harris County criminal district court magistrate released a suspect who threatened to kill Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other legislators on a personal bond that required no payment whatsoever.

    According to charging documents on June 26, Isaac Ambe Nformangum, aged 22, allegedly called the senator’s Houston office regarding Republican opposition to legislation regarding elections. Nformangum accused Cruz and other Republicans of working to have voting rights repealed and then threatened violence.

    A transcript of the phone call provided by investigators quotes Nformangum as saying, “Every last one of your Republican colleagues to have signed off on that platform is to be found and, is to be found and killed, be it by a bullet to the face or by the smashing of a brick in your skull. It is a civic duty of every American citizen or resident to see to it that every last one of your colleagues is to be killed. Killed. Be it by finding you in a public space or by trailing you to your very, by your very public homes.”

    “You and every one of your colleagues is to be shot dead. Found and killed.”

    Following an investigation conducted by Harris County sheriff’s deputies, the district attorney’s office filed charges against Nformangum of making a felony-level Terroristic Threat, and he was taken into custody on July 2.

    Although the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) motioned for his bond to be set at $250,000, on July 3, magistrate Cheryl Harris Diggs for the 177th Criminal District Court ordered Nformangum released on a pre-trial personal bond of $2,500.

    Under the conditions of pre-trial personal bonds, however, defendants may be released without posting bail or paying fees. The court coordinator for the 177th Court confirmed to The Texan that Nformangum did not have to pay anything for his release from the jail system.

    As with rage against sitting Supreme Court justices, Democrats seem to have so little problem with threats against their political enemies that judges are willing to let those issuing felony threats to be let off with no more than a promise to behave themselves.

    And liberals wonder why law-abiding citizens refuse to give up their guns.

    Update: Reader LKB noticed a new addendum to the story: “On Tuesday, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office told the state Senate Committee on Finance that the U.S. Marshals have taken Nformangum into federal custody.”

    Messing with Harris County judges is one thing, but messing with Raylan Givens is another…

    Today Is The Texas Runoff! Go Vote!

    Tuesday, May 24th, 2022

    Today is the Texas runoff election. Here is some brief coverage of the races and who I’ll be voting for.

  • Texas Attorney General: Incumbent Ken Paxton vs. current Land Commissioner George P. Bush. Paxton has campaigned on a solid conservative record and an endorsement of President Donald Trump, while Bush has dropped a bunch of direct mail flyers trying to label Paxton as corrupt. My pick here is strong favorite Paxton, who has constantly followed conservative principles in filing lawsuits against both federal overreach and neglect of enumerated constitutional duties. Moreover, the charges against Paxton have dragged out over seven years, long after the underlying federal charges were dismissed, making it seem more like a political witch hunt and possible Sixth Amendment rights violation than anything resembling justice. George P. Bush has hardly been impressive in his stint as Land Commissioner and doesn’t deserve a promotion.
  • Texas Land Commissioner: Former Texas Senator Dawn Buckingham vs. Dr. Tim Westley. Buckingham is the pick here, and she’s going to win this one running away, having been endorsed by Trump, Ted Cruz and the NRA, and holding a significant financial advantage over her underfunded challenger. Westley seems like a nice guy, but he has the profile of someone who should start out running in a local race.
  • Texas Railroad Commissioner: Incumbent Wayne Christian vs. challenger Sarah Stogner. Christian, a solid conservative, is the pick here, endorsed by Cruz, Abbott, Rick Perry and Dan Patrick, and should win this one running away, despite Strogner getting a huge $2 million donation from transexual West Texas ranching heir Ashley (formerly Andrew) Watt Watt), who nurses a grudge against the Railroad Commission. Stogner’s previous donation to Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 campaign against Ted Cruz isn’t helping her case any either…
  • Texas Senate District 24: Pete Flores vs. Raul Reyes: Flores is the heavy favorite here, having been endorsed by Trump, Cruz, Abbott, Perry and Patrick. Despite all that, I will be voting for Reyes, based on Flores seeming a bit squishy to me, and Reyes receiving the endorsements of Gun Owners of America and several Tea Party groups.
  • Voting locations:

  • Williamson County
  • Travis County
  • Congressional Republicans: Zero Funding For Vaccine Mandate Programs

    Monday, February 7th, 2022

    Some Republican congressmen have finally drawn a line in the sand:

    With several of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates still in effect — such as those affecting members of the military, federal contractors, and healthcare workers — Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) is calling on lawmakers to block government spending that funds the enforcement of those mandates.

    Roy, along with 48 other Republicans in Congress, sent a letter to the GOP leadership in each chamber pledging to refuse consideration of “any federal government funding vehicle [. . .] that funds the enforcement of COVID-19 vaccine mandates at any level of government.”

    The letter comes in advance of February 18, 2022, the date through which the federal government is currently funded thanks to two continuing resolutions (CRs) that were passed by Congress last fall.

    According to the top-ranking Republican in the Senate Appropriations Committee, Congress is headed toward passing another stop-gap measure to continue funding the government without any shutdowns.

    Republicans like Roy — who also expressed frustration with the national debt surpassing $30 trillion — don’t want to see that funding continue to support the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

    During a House floor speech on Friday, Roy explained his position, saying, “[W]hen members of this body or the United States Senate vote for a continuing resolution — I want every American to listen to me — when they vote for a continuing resolution to fund government, they are voting to fund the enforcement of vaccine mandates that are causing our men and women in uniform to be forced out of service, to be discharged.”

    Members of the Texas delegation who signed Roy’s letter include Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX-01), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-02), Lance Gooden (R-TX-05), Ronny Jackson (R-TX-13), Randy Weber (R-TX-14), Pete Sessions (R-TX-17), Troy Nehls (R-TX-22), Michael Cloud (R-TX-27), Michael Burgess (R-TX-26), and Brian Babin (R-TX-26).

    Opposition to vaccine mandates is widespread in America, and almost universal among Republicans, which makes defunding them an excellent hill to defend. The only question is why more GOP legislators haven’t signed this pledge.

    If Biden and congressional Democrats didn’t want their unconstitutional regulatory schemes held hostage to continuing resolutions, they should have tried to get them passed into law and passed an actual budget rather than a continuing resolution. Too bad pandering to their far left-wing base was more important than writing a budget Manchin and Sinema could sign off on.

    He who lives by the continuing resolution dies by the continuing resolution.

    LinkSwarm for January 14, 2022

    Friday, January 14th, 2022

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden has a bad week, another high profile Democratic politician is indicted on federal charges, and a dog goes home.
    
    

  • After having his business mandate overturned by the Supreme Court, Joe Biden goes on TV to plead that they have to end the filibuster because Republican election fraud prevention laws are keeping Democrats from cheating. (I may be paraphrasing a little.) Whereupon…
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin declares for the zillionth time “Nah, I’m good.” And…
  • Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema said the same. You know, just like the last thousand times Democratic Media Complex mouthpieces asked them. “Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you really really really sure? But we want it!”
  • But don’t let the focus on Manchin and Sinema fool you. Several other Democratic senators secretly opposed ending the filibuster as well.
  • Indeed, it sets up a no win scenario for some of them.

    If they vote with Schumer, Republicans will eat Kelly and Hassan alive this year and others later on, all for a vote that Manchin and Sinema have already insisted will go nowhere anyway. If they vote against the filibuster change, progressives will eat them alive in states where their support is critical. Even if these seats were salvageable, and that may not be the case already for Kelly and Hassan, Schumer’s move is guaranteed to lose seats for no purpose whatsoever. It’s the political equivalent of Pickett’s Charge.

  • Democrats handled Sinema’s refusal with tact and grace. Ha, just kidding! They called her a racist:

  • Baltimore Democratic State’s Attorney and Soros-tool Marilyn Mosby, “the city’s top prosecutor, was indicted on Thursday on federal charges of perjury and filing false mortgage applications related to her purchase of two Florida vacation homes.” You may remember Mosby from such previous hits as “How Soros-Backed Leftwing DAs Refuse To Enforce The Law” and “I want the FCC to investigate Tucker Carlson.”
  • Think the supply chain is screwed now? China just locked down several big ports over Flu Manchu.
  • “To staff, Kamala Harris is a clueless bully who refuses to do her homework.”

    Before she became vice president, Kamala Harris had a bad habit of ignoring prepared briefing materials.

    She does not appear to have kicked this habit, even after making it all the way to the White House.

    “Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared,” the Washington Post reports.

    One former staffer told the paper, “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it’s not really clear why.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Google, Twitter employees flood Democrats with donations as companies are accused of censoring conservatives.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Dr. Malone on Gettr.)
  • “J6 Hysteria Is How Media And Other Democrats Are Avoiding Accountability For Their Rigging Of The 2020 Election.”

    The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.

    Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.

    Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.

    Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

    It’s not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, it’s surprising that all of them aren’t screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.

    With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.

  • Why Democrats must make a mountain out of the molehill of January 6.

    The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

    That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

    Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

    Snip.

    That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.

    Snip.

    Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.

    The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists” are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.

    CNN proudly announced that the most-watched day in the history of their network was 1/6. The dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from the Trump campaign, his presidency and its aftermath than they, and they are desperate to rejuvenate it and re-discover that glory. Meanwhile, coddled journalists who have never broken meaningful stories have finally found a way to claim that they stared down dangerous and risky situations — as if they spent years in the middle of an active war zone or were persecuted and prosecuted by a corrupt and authoritarian state for their intrepid reporting — and have converted Brian Stelter’s CNN show into a virtual therapists’s couch where they all get to go and talk about how they are still coping with the deep trauma of spending a few hours in the Capitol last year.

    The pettiness and absurdity of this Democrat/media narrative, laughable as it often is, does not mean it is free of danger. Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • EU to exempt luxury yachts from carbon taxes because of course they are.
  • Hollywood’s new rules.

    A few years ago, the editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter pitched a story to the newsroom. He had just come back from lunch with a well-known agent, who had suggested the paper take a look at the unintended consequences of Hollywood’s efforts to diversify. Those white men who had spent decades writing scripts—which had been turned into blockbuster movies and hit television shows—were no longer getting hired.

    The newsroom blew up. The reporters, especially the younger ones, mocked the idea that white men were on the outs. The editor-in-chief, normally self-assured, immediately backtracked. He looked rattled.

    Snipped.

    So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said “only select staff” would have access to data collected on the platform.)

    The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024. But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were submitted to the platform.

    Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion standards.” (“I guarantee you every studio has something like that,” a longtime writer and director said.)

    Snip.

    The old-timers accustomed to being on the inside—and the (non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid they’d never get there—were one-part confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.

    “Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”

    Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”

    Another writer, who, like most of the writers we interviewed, was afraid to speak openly for fear of never working again, said: “I get so paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything.’ It is one of those things, ‘Will I be able to sleep at night if I say anything?’ Getting jobs in this town is so hard, and I’m very grateful to have a great job. If there’s any so-called ding on my record, that would just be an argument against hiring me.”

    It is, said Sam Wasson, the author of “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” not so different from the McCarthy era, when everyone in Hollywood professed to believe something that they thought everyone outside Hollywood—the country, their audience—believed. “Hollywood was never anti-Communist,” Wasson said. “It just pretended to be. In fact, Hollywood was never anti- or pro- anything. It was show business. There’s no morality here.”

    That amorality, coupled with a finely tuned sense of what the audience is hungry for, what’s trending, has left Hollywood more susceptible to the vagaries of the culture war.

    “Now, they’ll just say, ‘Sorry, diversity quotas. We’re just not allowed to hire you,’” said a 48-year-old white, male comedy writer who was recently dropped by his agent.

    Sounds like an opportunity to hire great talent on the cheap from someone outside the club. If only someone had the balls…

  • Steve Harvey says that wokeness has killed comedy.
  • Biden’s approval ratings hit new lows. Again.
  • Speaking of Biden, I wonder if this is what it’s like inside Biden’s head: A myriad of voices, and no independent will at the center.

  • Speaking again of Biden, remember that he backed a lot of economic turkeys other than Theranos.
  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Planned Parenthood:

  • “Senate Democrats Block Cruz’s Effort to Sanction Russian Pipeline.”
  • Mike Rowe discusses why 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs, and the coming severe shortage in trades workers.
  • Speaking of Rowe, here he discusses why the nonstop panic porn has desensitized Americans.

  • And speaking of healthcare worker shortages:

  • For your 2024 “change” presidential candidate, would you believe none other than Grandma Death herself? If she actually gets the nomination, then we’ll know we’re living in the simulation…
  • Dwight has a good, deep dive on the course he took on how to survive a gunfight out at KR Training.
  • The Young Conservatives of Texas have their ranking of legislators out.
  • TPPF’s Joshua Trevino has a pretty swell essay about Midland-Odessa.

    What you do see are the fruits of the conquest. The admixture of confident aggression, roll-the-dice settlement, and entrepreneurial genius manifests itself with the first wells you see. The Permian is rich, a treasure-house stored up across one hundred million years, and the wells are everywhere. They appear, solitary or in pairs, and as you proceed westward they multiply. There is a particular mesa with a sharp escarpment on its south face, and every time I see it I marvel at the wells perched on its nearly vertical incline. There is new exploration and investment, too. The Permian has been exploited for nearly a century, but its yield is nowhere close to exhaustion. Yesterday, and the day before, I witnessed tremendous convoys — men, trucks, equipment — sallying forth to new wells in the creation. There is a cotton field with wells on it: acreage that produces everything America needs to keep warm. In Midland itself, there is a golf course with a well on it. There are roadside shoulders with wells on them. There are wells everywhere. Midland-Odessa works: they raise families and hell alike, and power the continent.

    All of this is set in the Llano Estacado, a region of Texas ordinarily hostile to life and settlement. Most of Texas outside the verdant east is hostile to life and settlement to some degree. The Llano Estacado, though, is nearly the hardest far place there is, exceeded only by the despoblado and desert of the trans-Pecos. The land is hard. The weather is hard. The enterprise is hard too. The oil-and-gas business makes some men rich, ruins more, and perennially frustrates still more. There are the handful of energy giants around the world — the ExxonMobils, the Shells, and the handful of other names you see on gas stations and giant tankers — but that isn’t who you see in the Permian. It isn’t who you see on the road to Midland. What you see are names and signs of firms that you don’t recognize, and wouldn’t unless this was your professional world. Some are well established. Others are just starting out. All of them are the names of dreams and gambles: ideas made real but not necessarily lasting, leaps without nets. There is something admirable to it.

    Spend time in Midland (and, if you’re raising hell, in Odessa) and you realize you’re seeing a way of life that is increasingly rare. It is a place where nearly everyone is working. I don’t mean sitting at a desk. I mean labor as it was once understood, things done with the hands, wearying the body, with the end product being something you could see, touch, feel. It is a single-industry town, yes, but that industry is in the business of real material creation. In our fathers’ time, we could say that about most of America. Now it it characterizes only a small proportion of our national life. Something is lost along with it. You see Midland, a town where the taquerias and coffee shops open at 3:30am, at 4am, at 5am to accommodate what passes for rush hour there — and you see a town that is too hard at work to ever indulge in the luxury of anxiety. Places where people hit the alarm at 6am, at 7am, spend an hour on a crawling commute, spend eight hours motionless in a cube, and then repeat: that’s where alienation and disconnect occur. That’s where the civic neuroses take root and blossom. That’s where we spawn the psychic illnesses peculiar to people who are physically safe and have in their whole lives risked nothing.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Heh:

  • Lunatic stabs police dog to death. Lunatic gets dirtnapped. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Things that make you go “Hmmm.” Namely Austin police finding two submerged bodies in three days…
  • So you want to become a warlord! Here are some handy tips on ruling your patch of the post-apocalyptic wasteland! (Though sadly, there seems to be very little information on obtaining chrome face spray after the apocalypse…)
  • A list of Austin restaurants that closed in 2021.
  • Bill Burr remembers his friend Bob Saget.
  • Impressive!

  • Richard Hammond makes the case for classic cars.

    They are artifacts that have locked into them so many messages about the aspirations, hopes, needs, and restrictions of their time. They were incredibly expensive things, and they were used as opportunities to demonstrate something about yourself, to say something about yourself to the world…[The best art is] always composed within some sort of restraints. There’s always a limit to how far you can go, and it’s within those limitations that i think human ingenuity does best.

    I think this is true, and I think that the restraints and limits of various art forms are what help bring out their greatness.

  • “Supreme Court Sets Dangerous Precedent Of Letting The American People Make Medical Decisions For Themselves.”
  • “FBI Promises To Make Hoaxes Less Obvious This Year.”
  • Dog stolen from man on Christmas Day found and returned. Man, these winter allergies are real killers…
  • LinkSwarm for January 7, 2022

    Friday, January 7th, 2022

    More Democrats behaving badly and Kazakhstan in flames. Enjoy the first LinkSwarm of 2022!

  • How Democrats running the New York City Department of Correction turned control over to the correctional officers union and they let the inmates run the jail.

    For years, mayors and correction commissioners have allowed jail managers to place the least experienced officers in charge of detainee dorms and cells, posts that are critical for keeping order but viewed by many as the least desirable assignments in the system. The managers, who base staffing decisions on seniority, department custom and office politics, have also filled the jobs with guards who have fallen out of favor with administrators, reinforcing the idea that they are punishment posts to be avoided.

    When those guards in the housing units have fallen ill, gotten injured or been barred from contact with incarcerated people for other reasons, other rules adopted by city leaders have made finding replacements unusually difficult.

    Every mayoral administration since John Lindsay’s in the 1970s has signed union contracts granting unlimited sick leave to guards and the city’s other uniformed workers. And records and interviews suggest that abusing it can carry few consequences: It can take more than a year for the department to bring discipline charges against an officer who is caught abusing sick leave.

    On a Thursday in October, one Rikers jail had 572 guards on its work schedule — more than enough to fill the 363 open posts.

    But 17 guards were serving suspensions or had stopped showing up for work.

    Another 117 guards were on vacation, long-term leave or off doing temporary duties.

    Then there were those marked “indefinitely sick” — 136 guards who had been out for 30 days or more but were still on the payroll thanks to generous union benefits.

    That tipped the balance, leaving just 302 guards to fill the 363 posts, and forcing double shifts across the jail.

    When they have been told that such policies could lead to dangerous breakdowns, city leaders have not acted on the warnings. As recently as February 2018, the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s top criminal justice adviser presented the first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, with a memo that stated that high rates of absenteeism among guards might be driving a rise in jail violence — and recommended steps to stabilize staffing and reduce violent incidents. The de Blasio administration took none of them, and the memo has not been made public.

    And when conditions have spiraled out of control on Rikers in recent years, jail managers have favored quick fixes over deeper policy changes. Under scrutiny in 2014 amid reports of brutality by guards, the managers concentrated members of the Bloods gang in some units, the Crips in others, and still other gangs in other areas, hoping the practice would cut down on fights among rival groups. It did not work. Not only did incidents where guards used force rise, but some gangs were positioned to take over housing areas when the pandemic swept through and caused staffing problems.

    The mismanagement over the years has left the people charged with running the jail system feeling powerless.

    Putting criminals in charge of things does seem like the Democratic Party’s go-to move in a lot of areas…

  • The Zoom Class gets Flu Manchu.

    For nearly two years, we’ve wondered how this will end. In retrospect, the clue is in how it began.

    The initial lockdowns had a strong class-based component. The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.

    It all happened seemingly in an instant. We all had to figure out whether our job qualified and what we should do. More striking at the time was the very notion that government bureaucrats could slice and dice the population in that way, deciding what can open and what can’t, who must work and who must not, what we can and can’t do, all based on our station in life.

    It now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection.

    That day has finally arrived, with cases soaring in many parts of the country and hitting everyone of every class, whether they’re being “careful” and adhering to the “mitigation measures” or not. What’s even more striking is how even the vaccines, which were supposed to codify the wisdom of class segregation, haven’t protected against infection.

    All of this seems to have taken place over the course of December 2021, with the arrival of the seemingly mild Omicron variant. Still, the other variants circulate widely, causing various degrees of severity with or without hospitalization, much less death. In other words, millions from among all classes of people are finally getting sick. At this point, we seem to be seeing a big shift in attitudes.

    A lot of this comes from casual conversation. A person comes down with COVID, perhaps confirmed by the newly fashionable at-home tests. “Did you get vaccinated?” the person is invariably asked. The answer comes back: Yes, and boosted. That’s when the chill happens. It appears that nothing can ultimately protect people from this. In which case, it’s time we change our tune.

    Snip.

    The driving ambition here, though never explicitly stated, was to assign the burden of bearing the disease to the lessers among us. That’s a conventional model used in illiberal societies throughout history. The elites who had both granted and benefited from lockdowns took it as axiomatic that they deserved disease purity and health more than those who worked to keep society running. And that scheme seemed to work for a very long time. They stayed home and stayed safe and kept clean, while the virus circulated season after season.

    It’s hard to know what the end game here was. Did the Zoom class honestly believe that they could forever avoid exposure and infection and thus the development of natural immunity? Certainly they did for a time believe that the shots would spare them. Once that didn’t happen, there was a huge problem. There were no more tools remaining to perpetuate the disease castes that had been forged back in the day.

    Now that the people who tried to protect themselves are no longer able to do so, we are seeing a sudden rethinking of disease stigmatization, class disdain, and the treatment of others as sandbags to shield people based on class. Now it’s suddenly no longer a sin to be sick.

    Fascinating! What went wrong here? Everything. The notion that public health should thusly divide people—based on one pathogen—contradicts every democratic principle. That idea still survives with the vaccines, regardless of the known limitations. The people who invested in these personally and socially will continue to use them to divide and conquer.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “The Republican Party’s Multiethnic, Working-Class Coalition Is Taking Shape.”

    In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”

    Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.

    Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American Left—epitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summer—opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

    Now over a year removed from the 2020 presidential election, as President Joe Biden’s poll numbers plummet and frantic Democrats gird themselves for a 2022 midterm election shellacking, data continues to trickle in supporting the emergence of a “Somewhere”-centric, multiethnic, working-class Republican coalition. In Texas, where former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points in 2018, a new Quinnipiac University poll finds Republican incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, up for reelection in 2022, leading challenger O’Rourke by a whopping 15 points. Abbott outright leads O’Rourke among Texas Hispanic voters, 44 to 41, and Texas Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by a massive 27-point margin.

    A new Wall Street Journal national poll evinces much the same trend. On a generic Republican versus Democrat ballot, the WSJ poll shows Hispanics evenly split 37 to 37. Nationally, Hispanics disapprove of Biden’s job performance by 12 points, and they support Biden over Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential rematch by a razor-thin 44 to 43 margin. Nor, of course, is the GOP’s good news with Hispanic voters limited to Texas; in Florida, the state’s growing conservative-leaning Cuban and Venezuelan populations make Republican incumbents Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio heavy favorites for reelection next fall.

  • Trump has has taken up permanent rent-free residence in their heads: “MSNBC’s ‘Deadline: White House’ mentions Trump more than twice as often as Biden.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • This is infuriating: Oregon Business Owner Ordered to Remove American Flag Mural on Private Property. He should tell them to get stuffed and sue them for everything they’ve got. (Hat tip: Victoria Taft.)
  • What it’s like to own a ranch near the Mexican border:

    “I find some kind of sign every single day that someone has been on my ranch,” says Schuster. “Every time I leave my house, there’s some kind of indication that someone has been on my ranch.”

    Law enforcement has been called to the Schuster property five times in the past year to respond to incidents where illegal border crossers have knocked on their door or approached their house.

    Operation Lone Star, a state effort that has seen additional Texas DPS officers sent to border counties, has been a blessing to the county, according to Schuster, and a relief to the local sheriff and his small crew of deputies. Schuster believes that the DPS patrols on the highways have been a deterrent to the illegal border crossers who use the highways and then bail out to run onto private property.

    However, Schuster says the problems will persist for as long as this open border policy continues.

    “I don’t know all the politics of it and how all that works, but we’re gonna have to do something, because my parents worked hard to buy this land. People have said, ‘Well, if you’re scared on your own land, you just move.’ It doesn’t work that way,” said Schuster. “This is our land. And they worked hard, and they bought it, and you can’t give up on that land. It’s your legacy. It’s your legacy for your children. And so, it’s not like you just have a house in town, and you could just sell it and move to another community. When you have a ranch, you can’t do that.”

    Schuster added, “In the last year, our life has been turned completely upside down. It is something that we just had never foreseen.”

    She said that beginning last January, “the number of illegals coming through has been unbelievable. The group sizes are big. You know, growing up on a ranch, around ranching, we’ve always had illegals coming through. Never saw women before, or children. Men come through, maybe two or three; if you saw [a] group of five, that was a big group. We’ve got groups of like 45 coming through.”

    The sizable groups are not the only issue with this increased traffic. “​​They’re very disruptive. We’ve never seen that before,” said Schuster. “The people that have come across primarily from Mexico for work, going from point A to point B looking for a job, did not intentionally tear up our water systems. The debris that they’re leaving behind is unbelievable. I’m picking up trash on my ranch daily, they’re leaving gates open, livestock is getting mixed up, or maybe water gaps between me and my neighbor.”

    An incident over the summer left Schuster shocked when some of the illegal border crossers intentionally broke a water line. “I lost about 10,000 gallons of water this summer,” said Schuster. “It probably took me at least six weeks to gain that much water back.”

    According to Schuster, “they could’ve reached over—it wasn’t enclosed—and gotten a drink. But they just took a rock and beat this line until they broke it. That’s mean. That’s just malicious.”

    Security and safety have taken major precedence in the Schuster family’s life. Game cameras on the doors, rarely going out in the pre-dawn hours, working out of an enclosed truck instead of an open UTV on the ranch, and never leaving the house without a pistol have all become standard practice for the whole family.

  • “‘Jaw-Dropping’ Gains for GOP in Florida as COVID Refugees Register RED.”

    Twitter user TimDCpolitico took Florida’s voter rolls from March 31 of 2020 and compared them to the latest figures. The results, he says, are “jaw-dropping,” and I can’t think of a better way to describe them.

    Out of over 14 million registered voters, last year Democrats held the edge with 37.38% of registrations compared to the GOP’s 35.28%. (The remaining four million or so — around 26% — were independents or members of minor parties.)

    Democrats held a two-point advantage, but higher Republican turnout has made the state safely red in the last two presidential elections.

    Snip.

    66 out of Florida’s 67 counties shifted towards the red. Three hardcore Democrat counties — Broward (!!!), Jefferson, and Madison — might in some races be considered additional battlegrounds Dems will have to defend.

    A fourth, Calhoun, went from dark blue to light red.

    That’s impressive.

    What should have Democrats strapping on a pair of Extra Absorbent Depends (Endorsed by Presidentish Joe Biden!) is that they lost more than 50,000 registrations in the same time period — even as the state’s population has grown.

  • “GOP expands effort for South Texas dominance to local races.”

    Republicans have gone all in on South Texas, but they’re not content for domination of state and congressional seats. They want local government, too.

    One GOP group, Project Red Texas, spent the weeks before the December filing deadline to run in the March primary election traveling the region and recruiting candidates to run for county offices, offering to pay their filing fees. The group ended up helping get 125 candidates on the ballot across 25 counties, according to its leader, veteran party operative Wayne Hamilton. He said the group paid for “well over” half the filing fees.

    The first step on the road to winning is actually showing up.

  • Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, they’re having something somewhere between civil unrest and full-blown revolution over fuel prices.
  • China is “univestable.”

    Investors may want to think twice about putting their money to work in China, contends DoubleLine founder Jeffrey Gundlach.

    “China is uninvestible, in my opinion, at this point,” the bond king told Yahoo Finance in an interview at his California estate. “I’ve never invested in China long or short. Why is that? I don’t trust the data. I don’t trust the relationship between the United States and China anymore. I think that investments in China could be confiscated. I think there’s a risk of that.”

    Snip.

    The ongoing crackdown on the operations of big Chinese internet companies such as Didi by the government has rocked investors in the space. The clamping down on the country’s biggest tech names has now led to a tightening of listing requirements by the Chinese government.

    To that end, Didi plans to delist from the New York Stock Exchange later this year not too long after a disastrous IPO (in large part because of Chinese authorities).

    Meanwhile, the long reach of China’s government also hammered after-school tutoring companies such as TAL Education Group — shares of the name plunged about 95% in 2021.

    All of this is in addition to China’s ongoing fight against the rise of cryptocurrencies.

    The investing headwinds in the country show up in how the country’s key indexes performed in 2021.

    For instance, the Golden Dragon Index — which tracks the performance of mid- and large-cap Chinese stocks — plunged about 49% in 2021. The Wall Street Journal points out the total value of China’s onshore stocks rose 20% in 2021, underperforming the S&P 500’s advance.

    And none of that touches the insanely overleveraged real estate market there…

  • EU finally admits that nuclear and natural gas are “green” energy sources.
  • Democrat township commissioner charged with rape of 15-year-old boy in Philadelphia Darby Township Commissioner Marvin E. Smith has been charged with rape, sexual assault, luring, and related offenses.”
  • Another day, another high-profile Kamala Harris staffer leaving. “Vincent Evans, the veep’s deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, has quit to take on a role on Capitol Hill.”
  • Austinites (and anyone who uses metered parking) beware:

  • Tim Pool swatted during live broadcast. (Hat tip: Jack Posobiec on GETTR.)
  • Jury finds Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty on four federal wire fraud related charges.
  • Don’t forget how Joe Biden praised Holmes before she was busted.
  • Related:

  • Ian Miles Cheong banned from PayPal:

  • On the convergence of Genesis and the Sex Pistols.

    Seeing Collins contorted in a wheeled chair, like Grandfather Smallweed in Bleak House, while his two bandmates swayed on either side of him, painlessly upright in elegant, soft grey fashions like Farrow and Ball in human form, bordered on the grotesque. It resembled a satire on the ineradicable nature of privilege and class, rather than evidence of the dynamic tension every band needs to achieve creative synthesis. It was everything the NME said punk disdained. But I can’t imagine John Lydon taking any pleasure in this at all.

    To say that Lydon has mellowed would be a huge over-simplification, not only of who he is now but of who he was then, both of which were media distortions if not inventions. And, frankly, I’m not qualified to offer much insight into either. But I suspect that he is at least more willing to let us see his human side now. His wife of over 40 years, Nora Forster, has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last three and he has committed himself to her full-time care. In 2010, Forster’s daughter Ariane—better known as Ari Up, lead singer of female post-punk outfit The Slits—died of breast cancer aged just 48. Lydon knows something about human frailty, mortality, and loss.

    I have the sense that after many years, not on the field of combat but behind the bare timber of the cheapest proscenium arch, the paint is wearing off both these Punch dolls. Both were iconic and pugnacious in their day, but human, all too human, too. Today, it is not prog, let alone Genesis, that attracts Lydon’s ire, but what he perceives to be the betrayal of his ex-bandmates, who have sold out the Pistols’ musical legacy to a TV show—people that do indeed, as he sneered in PiL, see it as nothing more than product.

    Lydon was years ahead of his time, on everything from the Savile row to the shark-infested waters in which he was swimming, but I doubt he will take much pleasure in seeing a fellow grafter—and émigré—working through pain to give his fans a chance to say one last farewell, to him and to each other. He might even feel a twinge of grudging kinship. They may not have reached the churchyard quite yet, but their paths are beginning to converge, as all must in the end. And, meanwhile, as the years wear on, who can be sure Her Majesty—God Save Her—won’t bury the bloody lot of them?

  • “‘Psycho’ squirrel’s 48-hour Christmas rampage terrorizes town, injures 18.”
  • Live in Austin and thinking of adopting a dog? Now is a good time.
  • Ted Cruz has had a weird week. After the braindead boner of calling January 6 riot participants “domestic terrorists,” he had to issue a huge Mea Culpa on Tucker Carlson. Oh, and he also issued this:

  • Buy something from the Don Rickles estate, you hockey puck!
  • Ooops!

  • “Inflation Is Our Friend!”

    Tuesday, January 4th, 2022

    Ted Cruz posted this classic Saturday Night Live skit to his Facebook page, and since I had been looking for an embeddable copy for a while, I’m passing the joy onto you:

    For younger viewers: Yes, once upon a time, Saturday Night Live was willing to make fun of Democratic presidents…