Posts Tagged ‘Tommy Robinson’

LinkSwarm for August 3, 2018

Friday, August 3rd, 2018

I’m hoping that this week is Peak Busy for me. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Rasmussen: “Today’s [President Donald Trump] approval ratings among black voters: 29% This time last year: 15%.” Overall Trump approval rating at 50%.
  • Related: “President Donald Trump was lauded by inner-city pastors, including one who said he may go down as the ‘most pro-black president’ in recent history, during a White House roundtable on Wednesday that was focused on efforts to reform the prison system.” (Hat tip: Da Tech Guy via The Other McCain.)
  • ObamaCare is now optional:

    At long last, the Trump administration has created a “freedom option” for people suffering under Obamacare. A final rulemaking issued Wednesday reverses an Obama-era regulation that exposed the sick to medical underwriting. The new rule will expand consumer protections for the sick, cover up to two million uninsured people, reduce premiums for millions more, protect conscience rights, and make Obamacare’s costs more transparent. And unlike President Barack Obama’s implementation of his signature healthcare legislation, it works within the confines of the law.

    Federal law exempts “short-term, limited duration” health insurance from having to carry the unwanted coverage and hidden taxes Obamacare requires. Many consumers have understandably taken refuge from soaring Obamacare premiums in short-term plans.

    Hoping to force those consumers into Obamacare plans, the Obama administration sabotaged short-term plans by stripping them of crucial consumer protections. It cut the maximum plan term from 12 months to three months, and forbade issuers from offering “renewal guarantees” that allow the sick to continue purchasing short-term policies at healthy-person rates. State insurance regulators protested that these restrictions literally stripped sick patients of their coverage.

    Wednesday’s rule reinstates and even expands the consumer protections Obama curtailed. It allows short-term plans to last 12 months, and allows insurers to offer them with renewal guarantees.

    You read that right. Democrats curtailed consumer protections; Republicans are expanding them.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Yesterday’s controversy de jour: “Sarah Jeong: NY Times stands by racist tweets reporter.”
  • Andrew Sullivan on the same topic:

    Is the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, Sarah Jeong, a racist?

    From one perspective — that commonly held by people outside the confines of the political left — she obviously is. A series of tweets from 2013 to 2015 reveal a vicious hatred of an entire group of people based only on their skin color. If that sounds harsh, let’s review a few, shall we? “White men are bullshit,” is one. A succinct vent, at least. But notice she’s not in any way attacking specific white men for some particular failing, just all white men for, well, existing. Or this series of ruminations: “have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation. there’s literally nothing. like skiing, maybe, and also golf. white people aren’t even allowed to have polo. did you know that. like don’t you just feel bad? why can’t we give white people a break. lacrosse isn’t for white people either. it must be so boring to be white.” Or this: “basically i’m just imagining waking up white every morning with a terrible existential dread that i have no culture.” I can’t say I’m offended by this — it’s even mildly amusing, if a little bonkers. (Has she read, say, any Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson?) But it does reveal a worldview in which white people — all of them — are cultural parasites and contemptibly dull.

    A little more disturbing is what you might call “eliminationist” rhetoric — language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: “#cancelwhitepeople.” Or: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.” One simple rule I have about describing groups of human beings is that I try not to use a term that equates them with animals. Jeong apparently has no problem doing so. Speaking of animals, here’s another gem: “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” Or you could describe an entire race as subhuman: “Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.” And then there’s this simple expression of the pleasure that comes with hatred: “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” I love that completely meretricious “old” to demean them still further. And that actual feeling: joy at cruelty!

    Another indicator that these statements might be racist comes from replacing the word “white” with any other racial group. #cancelblackpeople probably wouldn’t fly at the New York Times, would it? Or imagine someone tweeting that Jews were only “fit to live underground like groveling goblins” or that she enjoyed “being cruel to old Latina women,” and then being welcomed and celebrated by a liberal newsroom. Not exactly in the cards.

  • Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro admits that socialism doesn’t work. Just think how much pain could be avoided if he had admitted this before people had to eat their dogs…
  • California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein had a Chinese spy on her staff for nearly 20 years. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Mistaken police call for an active shooter at a McAllen mall turns out to be an illegal alien robbery gang. Result? Seven illegal alien criminal suspects arrested.
  • Fort Myers, Florida: “Police Officer Dies After Being Shot By Illegal Alien.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Noncitizens across U.S. find it easy to register to vote, cast ballots.” And some have even had other people do it for them without their knowledge… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Sheldon Silver Sentenced: Seven in Sing Sing. (Actually, it’s not clear the former New York Assembly speaker will be serving his sentence in Sing Sing, but we can only hope, for the sake of the alliteration…)
  • Maryland forces 90-year old woman to tear down wheelchair ramp she built for he own home.
  • Kane bodyslams Democratic opponent in Mayor of Knox County race.
  • Tommy Robinson freed in the UK.
  • Related tweet:

  • Woman rams car for having a Trump bumper sticker.
  • China cracks down on illegal coffins. Which is to say, any coffins, since cremation is now mandated. Including seizing and destroying coffins old people have spent their entire lives saving for.
  • He Made the Most Beautiful Films of All Time and They Put Him in Prison For It.” He being Sergei Parajanov and they being the Soviet Union. (Hat tip: Don Webb on Facebook.)
  • Liberal NYC lawyer who worked under both Bloomberg and De Blasio talks about just how bad De Blasio sucks:

    When Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York in 2014, things changed drastically. I started to hear rumblings early on. My former colleagues who were dedicated public servants were concerned by a large-scale rollback of Bloomberg’s strategic initiatives. These seemed to be based on partisan politics and black-and-white thinking as opposed to critical analysis. It was very disappointing for me since I had also voted for de Blasio.

    Although I was still working in the same social-services agency where I had remained at the end of Bloomberg’s term, my job changed radically. I had no contact with the new commissioner who appeared to be disengaged from substantive discussions about social-services programs for an extremely vulnerable population. In fact, she was much more preoccupied with renovating her office — I heard her new desk alone cost thousands of dollars. She even requested that a private bathroom be built for her. She had the attitude of an oligarch and was disturbed that she had to vet invitations to galas through legal and City Hall. She wanted carte blanche to attend expensive events.

    She also refused to meet with the lawyers in her department and she kept the door to her office closed and didn’t know the names of the people who worked in her agency.

    Under my commissioner, there were no benchmarks, no goals and she did not hold regular meetings with her general counsel. Under her tenure, the legal unit was gutted. And there were no consequences for failing to meet performance goals because there were no performance goals.

  • Comics video blogger Jeremy Hambly attacked at GenCon. “The Quartering also provided another update claiming five eyewitness have identified the attacker as Matt Loter, the owner of Elm City Games.” GenCon promptly expelled Loter. Ha! Just kidding!

  • Liberal Chicago Sun-Times reporter: “Donald Trump is going to be re-elected in 2020. The Democrats don’t have anyone who can touch him. Bank on it.”
  • “Millennial Drops Support For Socialism After Learning How Hard It Is To Get Avocado Toast In Venezuela.” The Babylon Bee has just been tearing it up recently. I probably need to add them to the blog roll.
  • LinkSwarm for June 8, 2018

    Friday, June 8th, 2018

    Another week full of bears. Enjoy a LinkSwarm:

  • In South Texas, more of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist.
  • Elites Value Mellifluous Illegality over Crass Lawfulness:

    Despite Obama’s recent projection that his eight-year tenure was “scandal-free,” along with the reality that the media’s biased compliance sought to make such a startling fantasy true, the Obama administration was in many respects lawless. It will eventually rank as the most scandal-ridden administration since Warren G. Harding’s.

    The Fast and Furious scandal was, among other things, about deliberate government gun-running of weapons to Mexico, perhaps in a warped effort to discredit current U.S. firearms laws. The Benghazi debacle involved a cover-up of a preplanned terrorist hit on our consulate, an attack that was possible only because it was well known that the consulate’s security was lax. The Benghazi cover-up involved U.N. ambassador Susan Rice lying five times on national television in a single day, when she claimed that the terrorist operation was the result of a spontaneous riot over a video. And to justify that reelection-cycle concoction, the video maker, a foreign resident on U.S. soil, was summarily jailed on a trumped-up probation charge.

    An IRS regional high official, and Obama partisan, Lois Lerner, weaponized and discredited the IRS, by hounding conservative groups that were seeking tax-exempt status. Lerner staged a self-serving public stunt to leak her misbehavior to friendly ears — she had a reporter ask her a planted question about targeting conservatives. At her later congressional testimony, Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. She was never charged by the Obama State Department. Indeed, Obama himself, after expressing initial pseudo contriteness in the face of public furor, waited the public out before finally announcing that there was not a “smidgeon” of corruption in the IRS. Lerner, in effect, was rewarded for successfully neutralizing many conservative activist groups just months before the 2012 election. In October 2017, facing a lawsuit by conservative groups, the IRS admitted in court that it had unfairly targeted them during the Obama administration. It agreed to a multi-million-dollar settlement, and the current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, apologized to the more than 450 conservative organizations in question.

    Nadine Strossen, a liberal and the former president of the American Civil Liberty Union, conceded — but only in hindsight when both Obama and she were out of their respective offices — that Obama was one of the most hostile presidents to civil liberties in history. Perhaps she was referring to the fact that Eric Holder’s and Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department had spied on Associated Press reporters, monitored the communications of Fox reporter James Rosen, and subpoenaed New York Times reporter James Risen to force him to reveal his confidential sources. Holder was also the first Attorney General in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over subpoenaed documents.

    But it was during the 2016 election cycle that the Obama administration descended to a level of corruption not seen in a century. Right in the middle of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Obama, as judge and jury, announced that candidate Clinton had violated no criminal law while secretary of state. Obama also lied when he stated that he’d known nothing about such an unlawful server, although emails prove that he himself had communicated over it on several occasions. His FBI director, James Comey, deliberately scrambled the law and exonerated Hillary Clinton from wrongdoing, not because she had not broken the law, but, according to Comey’s own invented interpretations of the statute, because she had not intended to violate the law. Comey also admitted to tailoring his circus-like investigation of Clinton around the assumption that she would soon be president.

    We are slowly appreciating over the last year that lying under oath was an Obama-administration requisite for a high position in the intelligence community.

  • How Twitter is attacking Stephen Kruiser’s account.

    The most frustrating aspect of all is the lack of communication. If the goal is to create a better overall experience on the site, then it would make sense to tell people who have had their accounts restricted exactly why it happened so the problem could be avoided in the future.

    The fact that they don’t do so really heightens the perception that it isn’t about anything other than punitively targeting accounts that don’t fit in with the hive mind. The appearance of deliberate censorship could be gotten rid of with a bare amount of transparency and communication from Twitter. That, sadly, does not seem to be a priority.

  • Tommy Robinson and the collapse of governmental legitimacy in the UK:

    Question 2: Who is speaking the truth here?

    Sharp-eyed readers will note that I referred to Robinson as an “activist” while Peter refers to him as “Alt-Right”. I used this journalistic technique intentionally, partly because it highlights what the left-wing media does all the time when referring to Left Wing terrorists like Earth First! and the like. But it also cuts to the heart of this question. If we don’t look at who the messenger is and whether we like him, and instead look at who is speaking the truth, things start to look grim for the UK establishment. The Government certainly did not speak the truth, and in fact covered up these crimes for decades. The media did at least publish the stories when they came out, but there is a strange soft peddling of the story.

    The alleged perpetrators are described as “asian males”, as if some of them were from China or Korea. This leads to more questions, as we try to peel the onion to get to, you know, the truth.

    Are the “asian males” actually Pakistani immigrants? Are they all muslim? Is their muslim identity a key factor in why they chose English girls as victims? To simply ask these questions is to answer them.

    The Government officials damn themselves by their silence here. It’s actually worse – one single person in a position of power (a Shadow Cabinet Secretary – the Cabinet of the out of power party) actually did speak the truth here, and was promptly sacked.

    It seems very unhealthy that the only people who appear to be speaking the truth here are what we’re told is an “Alt-Right” fringe.

    Question 3: Is the root cause of all these crimes the fact that Europe is really bad at assimilating different cultures?

    This is the Question That Must Not Be Asked, whether in Leeds Crown Court, in Cologne or Berlin, or in Paris. If Europe does a particularly poor job at assimilating immigrants from other cultures into a collective Body Politick, then the Europe-wide governmental policy of massive immigration from the 3rd World assumes a very different perspective.

    You might get, you know, mass instances of gang rape.

    This is a particularly ugly question, and it the question that all European governments (and their lap dog media) are trying desperately to suppress.

    Because if the State will not protect the public, then the whole deal is off. Blood feud may be the only option.

  • Attempting to secure the border in the Rio Grande Valley:

    On May 16, agents discovered 2,119 pounds of marijuana concealed in a commercial shipment of charcoal into the U.S. On May 20, agents discovered 56 pounds of cocaine, approximately $432,500 in street value, on a Mexican commercial bus on the McAllen-Reynosa International Bridge and another $1.4 million worth of cocaine at the Kingsville checkpoint. In the first week of May, $247,000 worth of methamphetamine was apprehended at the Falfurrias checkpoint. Over Memorial Day weekend, $2.2 million in marijuana was seized in Harlingen, another 300 pounds was confiscated in Roma, and another 90 pounds of marijuana along with 35 illegal immigrants were apprehended at the checkpoints.

    Bonus: Seized baby tiger.

  • Charles Krauthammer is is dying of cancer, and is only expected to have weeks to live. There was probably no columnist or pundit more vital to holding Obama to account during the first year of his first term.
  • Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lupe Valdez has yet to run a single Facebook ad since she won the primary. It would be some kind of anti-miracle for Valdez to run a worse campaign than Wendy Davis ran in 2014, but thus far she’s been all but invisible. Also this: “The Valdez campaign was also recently ensnared in a bit of controversy after the Houston Chronicle unearthed public records showing Valdez, ‘owes more than $12,000 in overdue taxes on seven properties in two counties.’ Valdez had been ‘campaign[ing] to close loopholes in the state’s broken property-tax system,’ according to the report.” (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)
  • “Miss America is scrapping its swimsuit competition, will no longer judge based on physical appearance.” In other news, American Idol to eliminate all that annoying singing.
  • Theater reviewers must not be allowed to give positive reviews of plays that exhibit wrongthink.
  • White House intern on how she lost her virginity to John F. Kennedy.
  • How Social Justice Warriors ruined Portland’s food scene.
  • Literary agency bookkeeper accused of embezzling $34 million. Chuck Palahnuik among those ripped off.
  • Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain dead of apparent suicide. More from Dwight.
  • Seven pairs of tweezers. Guess where they were found?
  • “Resistance Win: When One Of Her Students Wore A MAGA Hat To Class, This Incredible Teacher Stopped Having Sex With Him After School.
  • LinkSwarm for June 1, 2018

    Friday, June 1st, 2018

    We told liberals they wouldn’t like the new rules being applied to them, but they didn’t listen. Liberals get Roseanne Barr fired, conervatives get Samantha Bee’s sponsors to pull out. (Disclaimer: I didn’t watch either of their shows.)

  • How #NeverTrump came to be a lifestyle choice: “These people aren’t operating from principle. The are operating from pique. Trump’s mere presence offends them because they just know they are his social and intellectual superiors.”
  • President Donald Trump has stopped apologizing and started innovating:

    Indeed, how many of these widely accepted (sometimes downright cherished) assumptions can one man challenge (disrupt) in such a brief period of time? The answer is plenty. He does it by questioning what often goes unquestioned in Washington, D.C. He simply asks “Why?” Why help fund a Shiite crescent in the Middle East? Why send tax dollars to a terrorist-friendly PLO? Why support anti-American programs at the U.N.? Why a “One China” policy? Why placate deadbeat NATO partners? Why pay premium prices for the F-35 and a new Air Force One? Why force nuns to provide birth-control coverage? Why tolerate sanctuary cities and a porous border?

  • British man goes to jail for telling the truth about Muslim rape gangs.
  • What it’s like to live on the border with Mexico:

    Five years ago, my husband and I bought a house in the emptiest county in America. We went there because the night sky is so dark, you can walk in the high desert by starlight and cast a shadow, so dark you can see distant galaxies and the zodiacal light. There are three types of people in our rural area: amateur astronomers, ranchers, and illegal aliens.

    If you climb the mountains behind our house and look south, you look into Mexico. If you climb those mountains to the top, you are on one of the major drug trafficking routes into America. If you stay in the desert at the foot of the mountains, you are in rattlesnake country—the greatest biodiversity of rattlers in America, and the night path of illegal aliens.

    It is not even a secret that the 60 miles between the border and Interstate 10 are treated as a no man’s land. We live and vote and pay taxes in America, but the government acts as if we are beyond the defensible perimeter of the country. Border Patrol is everywhere, but even with President Trump, they are just going through the circular motions of catch and release.

    They have high tech listening stations in the mountains, trucks equipped with radar on the back roads. They know when drugs are moving through, know regular drop-offs, are adept at finding caches. But if they can’t secure the border, they can’t keep the families that live here safe—and they don’t even try.

    We are the deplorables. All of my rancher neighbors have guns. Most are Evangelicals. To Democrats and open-borders Republicans, we are throwaway people. The Other. Disposable.

    The reason I am not naming names, even place names, is that these are my neighbors’ stories, not mine, and my neighbors—farmers, cowboys, and ranching families, strong, resourceful, tough people—my neighbors are wary and they are weary. They fear retribution by the drug runners and coyotes who bring the illegals across, because they have seen it happen.

    All of my neighbors have had encounters with illegals. Every single family. Everyone knows dozens of families whose homes have been broken into and worse—loved ones tied up, kidnapped, threatened, shot, permanently crippled by a hit and run attack, when they made too much of a fuss to authorities.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Get woke, go broke, college edition:

    Evergreen State College is eliminating dozens of staff positions as it struggles to cope with plummeting enrollment in the wake of the protests that engulfed campus last year.

    John Carmichael, the chief of staff and secretary to the Evergreen State College Board of Trustees, announced in a memo to staff and faculty members on Tuesday that the school has already cut 24 faculty lines and eliminated 19 vacant staff positions, and warned that up to 20 additional staff members could soon be laid off.

    “Over the past several days, 20 staff members have been notified that they are at risk for layoff,” Carmichael wrote. “These layoffs, although necessary to stabilize the college’s budget, represent a profound loss felt by many.”

    The staffing cuts, which include not renewing contracts for several adjunct faculty members, come shortly after the college revealed that it would be cutting $5.9 million from the budget in anticipation of a shortfall in applications of up to 20 percent.

  • Republicans have been using the Congressional Review Act to kill some of the worst regulations from the final days of the Obama Administration.
  • Came to Iraqi to join the Islamic State? Iraqi courts have no sympathy for you. Even if you’re a woman.
  • You may think you’re rich, but how much money does it take before an investment banker thinks you’re rich? Short answer: $25 million.

    Twenty-five million dollars in investable wealth. The kind of money you could afford to see dip into the red for a quarter or three, maybe even a year or two, without breaking a sweat. With $25 million, maybe, just maybe, you’re starting to be rich.

    Because in this era of hyper-wealth and hyper-inequality, that is simply where rich begins—a ticket, in truth, to the first, lowly rung of rich. For most of the planet, $25 million represents unfathomable wealth. For elite private bankers, it buys their basic service.

    Call it economy-class rich. Business class? That’s $100 million. First class? $200 million. Private-jet rich? Try $1 billion.

    I grew up thinking that rich was owning a two-story house, so I’ve got it made. Top of the world, ma! (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Texas Supreme Court strikes down short-term rental rule. The only surprise this time is that it was San Antonio rather than Austin making the stupid law.
  • A small pro-life victory.
  • A-10s to get new wings. Good. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Did Tranny Traitor Bradley Manning just threaten to off himself?
  • WisCon gonna WisCon. (Previously.)
  • Solo underperforms. I’m not sure there are any larger lessons to be drawn. For what it’s worth, I saw Deadpool 2 last Saturday, and recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the original Deadpool.
  • Related: Fans call for Common sense Star Wars control.