Election Day! Go Vote!

Posted on November 2, 2021 by Lawrence Person

Today’s Election Day in Texas, Virginia, and several other states! If you haven’t already voted early, find your voter registration card, grab your ID and head off to the polls!

  • Travis County polling locations.
  • Williamson County polling locations.

    • Now a few election roundup bits:

  • Tons of out-of-state money is flowing in to defeat Pro A.

    Among several reforms, the proposition would enact the nationally recognized “Safe City Standard” in Austin to require two police officers per 1,000 citizens.

    Texas Scorecard previously reported that New York billionaire George Soros recently intruded into Austin and gave $500,000 to oppose Proposition A. Now, other big players are joining him. Washington, D.C.-based labor union The Fairness Project and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (the largest trade union of government employees in the nation) are also pumping money to defeat the citizen-led effort.

    The Fairness Project, which has previously supported harmful employer mandates in Texas, poured in $200,000 to kill the police campaign, while the big-government union tossed in $25,000.

  • More background on the Austin Justice Coalition, the main local anti Prop A group:

    Founded by Chas Moore, the AJC has reached new heights of influence within the City of Austin. Before launching the coalition, Moore “served as a student activist fighting many social issues at The University of Texas at Austin and in the broader Austin Community.”

    Snip.

    Moore describes himself ideologically as a “liberal, radical, abolitionist, [and] afrofuturist.” He founded AJC in 2015.

    According to the Internal Revenue Service, AJC had its tax exempt status revoked in August of 2019 for failing to file a Form-990 return for three consecutive years.

    Moore said that there was a misunderstanding between himself and the organization financing AJC at the time, the Texas Fair Defense Project, as to who was responsible for the tax filings. He said that the misstep was rectified by filing backdated 990s and their status was reinstated in 2020.

    Under Moore’s tutelage, AJC has prodded the progressive-dominated city council to adopt a sea change in policies.

    One of AJC’s biggest triumphs includes its successful effort lobbying council to scrap a 2017 APD labor agreement and the eventual final product that included the creation of the city’s Office of Police Oversight — which expanded on the responsibilities of its predecessor, the Office of the Police Monitor. Another more recent and monumental gain is the 2020 cut and redirection of $150 million from the Austin Police Department (APD) budget.

    Other big issues AJC and its sister organizations, such as Texas Appleseed, the Texas Fair Defense Project, and Just Liberty, pushed for include a 2017 ordinance mandating the municipal court prioritize personal recognizance (PR) bonds for defendants classified as indigent, the subsequent ousting of five judges who did not abide the policy change, and the 2019 recission of the citywide prohibition on camping and laying.

  • In Virginia, more gaslighting by the same people who hired the fake “white supremacists”:

  • Man, Terry McAuliffe sure likes to hire jerks:

    What’s wrong with not just saying “Sorry, he’s not taking questions” rather than yelling “THANK YOU FOR COMING” over and over again?

    • Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

    Texas Constitutional Amendment Election Tomorrow (With Recommendations)

    Posted on November 1, 2021 by Lawrence Person

    There’s a Texas Constitutional Amendment election tomorrow.

    So let me go through these in “one-eyed man in the land of the blind” fashion:

    1. Proposition 1: Charitable Raffles at Rodeo Venues [HJR 143]. What It Does: Designates sanctioned rodeos as professional sports teams and authorizes professional sports team charitable organizations to conduct raffles at rodeo venues.

      Analysis: This is one of those small ball “every damn thing has to be spelled out in the Texas Constitution” amendments Yes.

    2. Proposition 2: County Infrastructure Bonds in Blighted Areas [HJR 99]. What It Does: Authorizes counties to issue bonds (debt) to fund infrastructure and transportation projects in underdeveloped, unproductive, or blighted areas.

      Analysis: Lots of direct mail flyers trying to pimp this thing. “Underdeveloped,” “unproductive” and “blighted” sound like excuses to throw government subsidies to private business interests, with all the attendant possibilities of cronyism, graft and fraud. Texas local governments do not suffer from a crushing lack of debt. “Compared to the top 10 most populous states in the nation, Texas’ local debt per capita ranks as the second highest total, behind only New York (Texas Bond Review Board, 2021, p. 4). Proposition 2 may aggravate this situation by allowing counties to take on even more debt, which could result in higher future taxes, increased debt service payments, and credit rating risk.” No.

    3. Proposition 3: Prohibition on Limiting Religious Services [SJR 27]. What It Does: State and local governments may not enact any rules that prohibit or limit religious services by religious organizations.

      Analysis: You know how Canada imprisoned a minister for daring to hold church services? Texas don’t cotton to none of that. Yes.

    4. Proposition 4: Eligibility Requirements for Certain Judicial Offices [SJR 47] What It Does: Adds that state Supreme Court and court of appeals justices, and court of criminal appeals judges, must be Texas residents at the time of election. They must have been practicing lawyers licensed in the state of Texas and/or Texas state or county court judges for at least 10 years (the current amount of experience), with no suspensions of their licenses. Requires district court judges to have eight years of Texas law practice and/or court judge experience, with no suspensions—twice the current requirement of four years of combined experience.

      Analysis: Seems like sound requirements. Yes.

    5. Proposition 5: Authority of State Commission on Judicial Conduct [HJR 165]. What It Does: Authorizes the Commission to investigate complaints and reports against candidates for state judicial office, in the same manner it does judicial officeholders.

      Analysis: Mildly in favor, though the advantage of catching bad apples before they’re elected has to be weighed against the possibility of the commission being used to stifle dissent. Yes.

    6. Proposition 6: Right to Designated Essential Caregiver [SJR 19]. What It Does: Residents of nursing, assisted living, and similar residential facilities have the right to designate an essential caregiver who may not be denied in-person visitation.

      Analysis: More Flu Manchu fallout spelling out things that we didn’t realize needed spelling out before. Yes.

    7. Proposition 7: Homestead Tax Limit for Surviving Spouses of Disabled [HJR 125]. What It Does: Extends the current homestead school tax limit for disabled individuals to surviving spouses who are at least 55 years old and reside at the home.

      Analysis: More small ball. Yes.

    8. Proposition 8: Homestead Tax Exemption for Surviving Military Spouses [SJR 35]. What It Does: Expands the current homestead tax exemption to include surviving spouses of service members fatally injured in the line of duty, along with those killed outright.

      Analysis: More small ball. Yes.

    If you live in Austin, I recommend a very strong Yes vote on Proposition A, to restore police staffing to sane levels, and a moderate No vote on Proposition B. I haven’t had time to research the ins and outs of this landswap, but with all the flyers I’ve been getting touting it, somebody’s palms are getting greased and somebody is going to make out like a bandit, so I would vote no just on general principle.

    Posted in Austin, Elections, Texas | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

    Virginia Governor’s Race/Loudoun County School Board Roundup

    Posted on October 31, 2021 by Lawrence Person

    These are two stories that have merged into a bigger story. Parents in Loudoun County, Virginia (a D.C. suburb that includes most of Dulles airport) started fighting against the school board’s imposition of Critical Race Theory, a debate that became so hot and heated (especially after it was revealed that the board had suppressed news about the rape of a students by a boy wearing a skirt in the girl’s bathroom) that it became the main issue in the Virginia Governor’s race between Clinton crony retread Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin.

    So here’s a roundup of the issue before voters go to the polls Tuesday:

  • The big news this week was that Lincoln Project Democratic operatives were busted for staging a White Nationalist Hoax photo op at a Youngkin rally:

    The anti-Trump, pedo-protecting Lincoln Project was forced to issue an emergency press release Friday afternoon after Democratic operatives they paid to impersonate tiki-torch wielding Trump supporters were doxxed, after they stood in front of Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s campaign bus.

    The hoax was spread by several notables, including Terry McAuliffe’s spokeswoman, Christina Freundlich.

    It was also spread by MSM journos [see the Glenn Greenwald thread below].

    And then… the internet figured out who the operatives were;

    And they began frantically scrubbing their social media history:

  • It all seems a bit desperate, doesn’t it?

    With the race tightening, Democrats have been doubling down on their infernal strategy of labeling Youngkin as a racist.

    Retweeting a race-baiting anti-Youngkin ad from the “Republican” Lincoln Project, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) opined that the only reason Youngkin doesn’t say openly racist things about black people is because it would be politically damaging, so he “codes it with ‘Critical Race Theory.’”

    “There’s a word @GlennYoungkin would really like to say to talk about black people, but he knows he can’t, so he codes it with ‘Critical Race Theory.’ Don’t take my word, trust the honorable Republicans who made this ad and know how this ugly strategy works,” wrote [Democratic Rep. Eric] Swalwell on Twitter, quote tweeting the Lincoln Project’s latest ad.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • The news media are the ones spreading fake news and inflaming racial tensions for partisan reasons:

  • One of the flashpoints in the Loudoun County School Board battle was when the board had parent Scott Smith arrested and dragged from a school board and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
  • Well, it turns out that his daughter was sexually assaulted at school:

    On June 22, Scott Smith was arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting, a meeting that was ultimately deemed an “unlawful assembly” after many attendees vocally opposed a policy on transgender students.

    What people did not know is that weeks prior on May 28, Smith says, a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.

    Juvenile records are sealed, but Smith’s attorney Elizabeth Lancaster told The Daily Wire that a boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy – one count of anal sodomy and one count of forcible fellatio – related to an incident that day at that school.

  • Students in the district staged a walkout in protest. The students were from “Broad Run High School, where the attacker was relocated and is still technically enrolled.”
  • Suppressing rape stories is evidently nothing new for Terry McAuliffe:

    A law firm that employed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe is being paid handsomely to fight victims of alleged sexual abuse in schools, on behalf of a school system that the girls say failed to protect them.

    In one case the Hunton Andrews Kurth law firm, where McAuliffe served as a senior adviser from 2019 until recently, is battling a young woman who says that she was repeatedly raped on her Fairfax County middle school campus as a 12-year old and that she was slashed with a knife, burned with a lighter, anally penetrated, and gang raped.

    The law firm and McAuliffe’s campaign did not return request for comment, but McAuliffe reported income apparently linked to the firm in 2021, after announcing his run for governor of Virginia on December 8, 2020. Later advertisements from the firm for McAuliffe fundraisers refer to him as a “former colleague.”

    The girl in the middle school case said she was afraid of having her real name attached because one of her alleged tormentors had threatened to kill her if she came forward. The law firm is seeking to have the lawsuit thrown out because it was filed under a pseudonym, even though there is no dispute that the school system knows who she is. A judge rejected Hunton’s argument, but it filed an appeal on behalf of its client, the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS).

    In a separate case, a girl alleged that after FCPS administrators were told of an unwanted sexual incident on a band trip, a school security officer told her there was no point in seeking criminal charges, and the school gave an award to her alleged abuser. Hunton told the court that the school system lost documentation showing its investigation of the allegations – which occurred in part because it was not using a sexual harassment allegation database that it had promised to use pursuant to a federal settlement in the other girl’s case. In both cases, a women’s rights group filed “amicus” briefs to express opposition to Hunton’s arguments.

    Joining McAuliffe’s former law firm and FCPS in the latter case was the National School Boards Association, which filed its own amicus brief. The trio is banking on an aggressive interpretation of Title IX, a law that provides protections in sexual assault cases, that would be more favorable to school administrators and less favorable to victims. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals smacked down their logic, but Hunton has signaled its intent to take the case to the Supreme Court. A win there would mean the same interpretation would apply to schools across the country.

    Wait, a Bill Clinton crony involved in attempts to silence and discredit rape victims? Try to contain your shock.
    

  • “Brenda Sheridan, chair of the Loudoun County Public Schools board, criticized parents protesting the use of critical race theory in schools, claiming “[t]here is no rational debate [on the issue]…Critical race theory has been manipulated to replace what is really equity initiatives and teaching students about their biases and our teachers about their biases.” “Equity” is the tell that they are trying to impose critical race theory. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Chris Rufo has proof that Critical race Theory is being taught in Virginia schools, in the form of official documents. (Hat tip: Twitchy.)
  • Woman who survived China’s Cultural revolution denounces Critical Race Theory:

  • The Loudoun County Sheriff says he’s not going to be the school board’s enforcer:

  • The whole “war against parents” thing isn’t going well for Democrats:

    The school boards want the full power of the federal government to silence critics and to stop people from saying things school board members do not want to hear.

    What they don’t want to hear is that Critical Race Theory is racist anti-white indoctrination. They don’t want to hear that cloth masks don’t stop any virus. And school boards really don’t want to hear that a boy in a skirt raped a girl in a bathroom.

    Boy do they not want to hear about that last one.

    In its letter, the association cited 20 incidents. There are 14,000 school boards in America. That’s a pretty paltry amount, and the cases cited were dubious.

    In the letter, the organization said, “In Virginia, an individual was arrested, another man was ticketed for trespassing, and a third person was hurt during a school board meeting discussion distinguishing current curricula from critical race theory and regarding equity issues.”

    That was a reference to the Loudoun County School Board meeting on June 22, in which Scott Smith, 48, tried to confront the board about the rape of his daughter in the restrooms by a boy in a skirt.

    The board had closed off discussion after retired state Senator Dick Black spoke. He tweeted, “The LCPS shut down the public input after the audience erupted in applause at the end of my speech. Hundreds of parents continued to rally for hours to send the message that these CRT policies are racist. Parents and teachers, stand up for your children now.”

    Smith then tried to speak. The board had deputies arrest him. That led to a scrum. He was charged with trespassing — at a public meeting in a public building. He still faces a trial.

    The board then shut down the meeting and continued the meeting the next day in private. I am not sure how Virginia’s open meetings law works, but if it allows this, then the law needs to be changed.

    The backlash surprised me. Democrat Terry McAuliffe fueled it. He is seeking his old job as governor back.

    In a debate, he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

    That appeased his teacher union supporters and the snob set.

    But it also set in motion a process that had state school board associations withdrawing from the national board, which now has withdrawn its letter. There is no way in hell that 14,000 school boards are going to go along with branding parents domestic terrorists.

    The New York Post reported, “The National School Boards Association board of directors Friday repudiated a letter its two top officials sent to President Biden, which precipitated Attorney General Merrick Garland’s order that the FBI to investigate complaints of threats to school officials from parents.

    “In a message to NSBA members, the board said that ‘we regret and apologize for the letter,’ which was sent Sept. 29 and co-signed by association CEO Chip Slaven and President Viola Garcia.”

    Retired Republican Congressman Peter King of New York believes Democrats stepped on a rake this time.

    King wrote, “A sleeping giant has been awakened. Parents and taxpayers are taking traditional school board issues and controversies into the political arena. As parents continue to mobilize, they can be expected to bring other child-related issues — such as school violence, open borders, and the inability to buy Christmas toys — into next year’s midterm congressional campaigns. This cannot be good news for Democrats, who will have to play defense on all these issues while being compelled to explain why the Biden administration has sicced the FBI on parents who publicly protest school policies.

    “Intended or not, this grassroots school board movement is a real-world response to the expanded influence of progressives and socialists on government and education. The awakened giant is fighting back!”

    I hope that rake hits Democrats right where it hurts.

    Also: “The January 6 protest at the Capitol was not an insurrection. A boy in a skirt is not a girl. And Scott Smith is not a domestic terrorist.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Why Youngkin might do better than expected:

    Who will win in Virginia? Any pollster worth their crosstabs should tell you they don’t know. It’s too close. All of the latest polls are tied or within the margin of error. It shouldn’t be that way, which is why Youngkin has the edge. He shouldn’t be this close.

    For a GOP candidate with the former president’s endorsement — and McAuliffe’s constant reminder of it — we’re likely missing some of the Trump effect in our polling. This is the non-response bias that keeps me up at night as a pollster — the notion that those who answer our questions, particularly in contentious races, are somehow different than those who don’t.

    It would not surprise me if Youngkin is ahead at this point, and that he wins in November.

    Three reasons:

    Core message

    Youngkin has focused most of his campaign on education, which is an extremely savvy move for a first-time candidate. While most elections don’t turn on education, this time it might. Parents have been upset with the closing of schools and limitation of activities. Some parents are furious over masks and critical race theory.

    Youngkin has said that he will leave masking decisions up to parents, not school systems. Moreover, he is for parents making decisions on virtually all educational issues, an empowering message. McAuliffe, instead, stands with institutions and unions. While McAuliffe is right on masking, standing against parents is a very bad message, which he’s handled very badly.

    Handling opposition research

    Youngkin has been masterful at countering opposition research hits, which have been the core of McAuliffe’s campaign. Shot: Youngkin plays footsie with 2020 truthers. Chaser: McAuliffe did it twice. Shot: Youngkin wants Texas-style abortion rules in Virginia. Chaser: Youngkin said in a debate he would shorten the period when a women can get an abolition to where a fetus feels pain, which is about two to four weeks less than it is now. Shot: Youngkin is against masks. Chaser: Youngkin wants parents to decide, not school boards.

    In each of these cases, Youngkin mitigates the damage of the attack, and — in some cases — returns fire more powerfully. While Youngkin is a newbie to politics, he’s campaigning like a pro.

    Voter enthusiasm

    Finally, first-time candidate Youngkin has far stronger voter enthusiasm than the lifetime political hack and retread governor McAuliffe. The commonwealth allows governors to return for another run after four years, but it’s generally a bad political look for the party.

    Democrats have been in power here for several years, and it’s resulted in a fair amount of corruption and far-too-left of center policies for this purple state. Trump twice masked it as a blue state, but it’s really not. Virginia is two states, north and south, and the counties that go blue and red roughly split. Being the change candidate in this environment fuels enthusiasm.

    There’s literally nothing new and exciting about McAuliffe. Democrats are fighting with each other just up the road in Washington, deadlocked on policy, and Virginia’s candidate is unusually tied to the party. A sign of a lack of enthusiasm for Democrats: McAuliffe admitted on a recent call that Biden is unpopular here.

    There are other signs — or lack of them. Drive around Loudoun County, the most up-for-grabs one in the commonwealth, and you will have to search for a McAuliffe yard sign. Yes, yard signs are overrated as a persuasive political tactic, but they reflect voter enthusiasm. This is not upstate or downstate. This is right in the middle, and McAuliffe is invisible, while Youngkin is everywhere. If you are a low-information voter, you could be excused for thinking that there is only one name on the ballot. McAuliffe has run a negative campaign, while Youngkin has a set of policies that are coherent and different.

    (Hat tip: Push Junction.)

  • One reason McAuliffe might do better: voting fraud:

    Earlier this month, Fairfax County, Virginia — a locale that broke 70-30 for President Joe Biden and Democrat Sen. Mark Warner in 2020 — previewed the attacks on election integrity likely planned for the midterm cycle of 2022 and beyond. There, election officials in the deep-blue county approved absentee and mail-in ballot applications lacking the statutorily mandated last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, then promptly mailed these unauthenticated individuals ballots for next Tuesday’s election.

    While last week the Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP), a public policy organization dedicated to election integrity, filed suit against the county registrar and the three members of the Fairfax County Electoral Board responsible for flouting state election law, a hearing on the case is not scheduled until Friday. By then, the election will be only days away and a court is unlikely to order ballots returned by the deadline discarded.

    We saw this precise scenario come to pass throughout the United States in 2020, with state officials ignoring the election code dictates established by the legislative branch. But the lawlessness happened too late for lawsuits to wind through the court system in time for the decision to matter.

    • Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, unions | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

    LinkSwarm for October 30, 2021

    Posted on October 30, 2021 by Lawrence Person

    Greetings, and welcome to a Saturday LinkSwarm! To get this out, even a day late, I’ve tossed all the Virginia Governor’s race/Louden County news into a separate post, hopefully on tap for tomorrow.
    

  • “Biden Freezes ICE; Suspends 85% of Criminal Alien Deportations.” Democrats regard criminal illegal aliens as a far more precious resource than American jobs.

    One of President Biden’s first acts on immigration is to suspend investigations, arrests, and deportations of most criminal aliens for the next 100 days. In a memo titled “Review of and Interim Revision to Civil Immigration Enforcement and Removal Policies and Procedures”, sent on Wednesday to all immigration agency heads, Acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske announced the deportation freeze and new enforcement priorities that go into effect now. The memo imposes restrictions on immigration enforcement actions that are even tighter than those adopted (with disastrous results) by the Obama administration, and make the country a sanctuary not only for criminal aliens, but all who are here in defiance of our laws.

    According to the memo, virtually all removals will stop for 100 days. In addition, only the following categories of illegal aliens will be subject to removal as of February 1, 2020:

    • National security threats — those who have been involved in or are suspected of involvement in terrorism, or who are otherwise deemed a threat;
    • Recent illegal border crossers — those who have arrived illegally after November 1, 2020; and
    • Aggravated felons — those who are currently incarcerated for an aggravated felony conviction and who are determined to be a threat to public safety.

    If you’re any other kind of illegal alien felon, Democrats evidently want you here, victimizing Americans.

    In practice, this means that ICE must release criminal aliens and others in custody who are not covered in these definitions. This will include aliens convicted of domestic violence, sex offenses, drunk driving, theft causing loss of less than $10,000, vehicular homicide, an infinite number of misdemeanor crimes, and much more. It means that when USCIS refuses green cards or other benefits because the applications were fraudulent, that unqualified applicant will be able to stay anyway. It means that in the next 100 days, if a local police officer arrests a previously deported gang member, even one with a serious criminal history, for a new crime that is not an aggravated felony, ICE will not be able to take action to remove that gang member again.

    MI-13 must love Biden… (Hat tip: Sharyl Attkisson.)

  • “Joe Biden to Ban Cash Bail for Violent Criminals — in the Interest of ‘Equity.'” There’s no end to the number of other people’s dead bodies social justice warriors are willing to step over on their way to utopia…
  • San Francisco prosecutors quit, and District Attorney Chesa Boudin faces a second recall effort over failure to prosecute crimes.

    Walgreens closed 22 stores in San Francisco where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.

    A couple of readers asked “Why just San Francisco?” if it was California Proposition 47 that put the $950 limit on nonviolent misdemeanors.

    The answer is total lack of enforcement in San Francisco.

    Please note San Francisco DA faces second recall effort as residents ‘fed up’ with progressive ‘zero consequence’ policies.

    A second recall effort launched against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin demonstrates how residents are “fed up” with his progressive policies, as his push to reduce jail funding and refusal to prosecute repeat offenders ensures the streets remain marred with open-air drug dealing and violent crime now stretching into the suburbs, a leader of the prominent local police union tells Fox News.

    Last week, the first Republican-backed recall effort fell just 1,714 signatures short of the 51,325 required to trigger a special election to bring the question of ousting Boudin before voters. Now a second recall effort is being organized, which Boudin brushed off Monday night as proof that his so-called successes in reducing incarceration has “angered the billionaire class.”

    But it’s his progressive approach that’s actually hurting average San Franciscans, San Francisco Police Officers Association President Tony Montoya tells Fox News, as Boudin’s “swiftest revolving door in criminal justice” sends the message to offenders that there are no consequences for their actions.

    Snip.

    Prosecutors Brooke Jenkins and Don Du Bain told KNTV they have stepped down from their posts in San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office due to his lack of commitment to prosecuting crimes.

    “Chesa has a radical approach that involves not charging crime in the first place and simply releasing individuals with no rehabilitation and putting them in positions where they are simply more likely to re-offend,” Jenkins said in the interview. “Being an African American and Latino woman, I would wholeheartedly agree that the criminal justice system needs a lot of work, but when you are a district attorney, your job is to have balance.”

    Du Bain added that he believed Boudin “disregards the laws that he doesn’t like, and he disregards the court decisions that he doesn’t like to impose his own version of what he believes is just – and that’s not the job of the district attorney.”

  • Biden Administration says they’re not going to let anything stand in their way when it comes to firing those who refuse to knuckle under to their vaccine mandate. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “John Kerry Holds $1 Million Stake in Equity Fund Linked To Uyghur Labor Abuse.” Because of course he does.

    The Chinese private equity fund in which John Kerry holds a $1 million stake is not only invested in a tech company blacklisted for human rights abuses but is also a major shareholder in a solar panel company linked to labor abuses of the Uyghurs.

    Last December, that private equity fund, Hillhouse China Value Fund L.P., purchased a 6 percent stake in LONGi Green Energy, a Chinese solar panel manufacturer, making it the company’s second largest shareholder.

    LONGi has come under fire from human rights groups and U.S. lawmakers for sourcing many of its raw materials from companies suspected of using forced labor in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where the government has cracked down on the Uyghur population and other ethnic minorities.

    Hillhouse is also a major funder of a tech company tied to the Chinese government’s surveillance of the Uyghurs, as first reported by the Washington Free Beacon last week. News of that investment led Republican senators to call on Biden to fire Kerry over ethics concerns. Further insight into Hillhouse’s holdings is likely to increase scrutiny of Kerry’s finances and raise questions about whether he is using his role as climate envoy to block regulations on Chinese solar panel imports. While Kerry has acknowledged that many solar panels are produced with forced labor in Xinjiang, he has also indicated resistance to additional financial restrictions or penalties on these goods.

    So Kerry is working the China grift and the green grift at the same time. No wonder he couldn’t resist…

  • Speaking of which: China produces more CO2 than the U.S., India, Russia and Japan combined. “China’s emissions are so vast that its biggest companies, few of which are household names, create more pollution than entire nations. China Baowu, the world’s top steelmaker, put more CO2 into the atmosphere last year than Pakistan.”
  • Manchin and Sinema continue to terrorize democrats by daring to doing what their constituents want rather than doing the Holy Will Of The Party.

    Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are the gruesome twosome. They may have different reasons behind their opposition to the $3.5 trillion spending package, dubbed human infrastructure, that Democrats want to pass via the reconciliation process, but the results are the same. The far-left can’t get everything they want—which has infuriated them to no end. They don’t like the price tag. They don’t like the ethos behind it. They don’t like the tax structures. The tax on billionaires is out due to Manchin’s opposition. Sinema isn’t moving on hiking corporate taxes. Now, paid family leave has been nixed and most of the climate change provisions are gone too. Manchin and Sinema are the angels of death for the far-Left. It’s not hard to figure out why. These two will do what they think is best for the constituents of their respective states. Period. This has been known about Manchin for years, and he’s not afraid to lose re-election. If that’s the case, he will happily take his houseboat and go home. Sinema is the same with regards to Arizona. She’s there to serve them. Not Chuck Schumer, not the liberal media, not the hordes of illegal alien activists who harass her in the bathroom. And polling shows that voters in West Virginia and Arizona aren’t too keen on the $3.5 trillion bill

  • “Desperate Democrats Aren’t Making Sausage, They’re Dropping Live Pigs Into a Woodchipper.”

    If you haven’t been following the situation on Capitol Hill — and it’s in so much flux that it’s almost impossible to stay completely up to date — I’ll give you a brief rundown before we get to that odor.

    “Build Back Better” is Biden’s slogan for a massive expansion of welfare, spending, regulation, the likes of which we haven’t seen since LBJ’s Not-So-Great Society. Massive change on slender majorities is not a good idea, either politically or for the nation’s social fabric, but Dems gotta Dem.

    BBB comes in two parts.

    The first is a $1.2 trillion-with-a-T “infrastructure” bill that doesn’t contain much actual infrastructure spending, but is nonetheless supported by enough Republicans to almost guarantee its passage. (We’ll get back to the “almost” momentarily, so stick a pin in that.)

    The second is another, even larger bill so absurd that its contents fall under comic sci-fi writer Douglas Adams’ “bistromathics.” There have been several versions of this bill, ranging in price from the current “compromise” bill costing $1.8 trillion (so they say) to the original Bernie Sanders (CPUSA-Vermont Oblast) version weighing in at $3.5 trillion (but actually $5 trillion).

    No one knows what any version would actually cost. My friend and colleague Stephen Kruiser heard from a Senate aide on Thursday that the current bill is 2,500 pages, has no table of contents, and we probably won’t know what’s in it even if it does pass.

    This brings us to a defining concept of bistromathics, recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. So if Democrats claim the bill costs precisely $1,790,238,032,455, then you can be sure it costs some figure exactly not that (but higher).

    But they can’t get any version passed, because the hard left keeps demanding more and more radical proposals Democratic leadership can’t deliver.

  • “Former Clinton Operative Charged With Securities Fraud.” This is my shocked face.

    Authorities in Denver have ordered the arrest of Steve Bachar, a longtime Clinton operative and “socially responsible” investor who has been charged with felony theft and securities fraud. The former co-chair of the Clinton Global Initiative is also under investigation for unrelated allegations that he mishandled millions of dollars allocated for personal protective equipment at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Bachar is accused of stealing as much as $1 million and lying to an investor “in connection with the offer, sale or purchase of a security,” according to the criminal complaint filed by the Denver district attorney’s office. The crimes are alleged to have occurred between October 2017 and August 2018. The former Clinton operative told the Denver Post the criminal charges were “outrageous, unfounded, and false,” and he looks forward to letting “the facts come to light.”

    Bachar, who served as White House advance lead and in the Treasury Department under former president Bill Clinton before joining the Clinton Global Initiative, also served on the national finance committee for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016 and as an adviser to former governor John Hickenlooper (D., Colo.). His private sector career as a corporate attorney and cofounder of Empowerment Capital Management was focused on “socially responsible investing.”

    This is not the first time the socially responsible investor has been accused of serious wrongdoing. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bachar allegedly pocketed nearly $2 million from health care companies that believed they were purchasing life-saving personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns.

    According to a lawsuit filed by a Denver-based health care company, Bachar agreed to sell them 4,200 cases of N95 masks for $2.4 million in April 2020 but never delivered the masks and did not return their initial payment of $604,000. Over the summer, Bachar was ordered to pay nearly $4.5 million to the companies he allegedly defrauded but has yet to comply with the civil judgments against him.

  • Speaking of corrupt Democratic crime families, former New York Governor has been charged charged with sex cri-cri-cri-crime.

    With the obligatory Eurythmics video

    (I actually own their 1984 soundtrack, but “Sexcrime” isn’t nearly as good as “Doubleplusgood.”)

  • Remember how much the liberal media tried to demonize Florida’s lack of lockdowns and mandates because they hate Ron DeSantis? Well, Florida now has the second lowest rate of Flu Manchu in the country.
  • Biden begs the Middle East to increase oil production while halting production in Alaska:

    While the administration begs overseas adversaries to ramp up oil production with jobs and development to the benefit of foreign citizens, Americans remain handicapped by Democrats’ zealous animosity towards fossil fuel extraction on domestic land.

    Underneath the tundra surface of Alaska’s North Slope sits an estimated 4.3 t0 11.8 billion barrels of untouched recoverable oil located within the flat wetland boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Then-President Donald Trump opened ANWR’s 1.6 million acres of the 19.6 million-acre refuge for drilling in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with leases approved since then now in jeopardy under the new administration.

    Biden has been yanking permits and demanding new environmental assessments in an effort to cancel projects altogether. Last week, the Interior Department tossed out the analysis completed under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), long held as the gold standard of assessing environmental impacts, and ordered a new supplemental review for leases in the Arctic refuge two months after they were suspended.

  • In Wisconsin, more of that voting fraud that doesn’t exist:

    Racine County Sheriff’s Department investigators have presented evidence that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) committed felony election fraud by telling nursing home staffers to violate state law and fill out ballots on behalf of nursing home residents who were unable to themselves.

    During a news conference Thursday, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said WEC commissioners and staff who prohibited legally-required special voting deputies from entering nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic and instead told nursing home staff members to assist residents in voting committed a Class I felony, which is punishable by a maximum sentence of three years, six months in prison and $10,000 in fines.

  • I missed this for my Texas Critical Race Theory fight roundup: “Keller ISD’s Timber Creek High School is Brewing Division.” “Over the last year, teachers and staff at a North Texas school have been going against the district and teaching racist propaganda, creating division among students, parents, and staff. Under the supervision of teachers, students are leading the charge in this growing division Keller ISD’s Timber Creek High School has been experiencing since the previous school year.”
  • “Illinois Supreme Court Rules Tax On Guns & Ammo Unconstitutional.”
  • Portugal’s socialist government may collapse because leftwing parties don’t think its socialist enough:

    Portugal’s six-year experiment with leftwing “anti-austerity” government will end this week in a political crisis leading to early elections unless António Costa, the socialist prime minister, can strike a last-minute budget deal with the radical left.

    The anti-capitalist Left Bloc (BE) and old-guard Communist party (PCP) have vowed to withhold crucial support in a budget vote on Wednesday unless the minority Socialist party (PS) government makes further concessions in a bill already seen as the most leftwing in recent history.

    “They are asking the impossible and I can’t see the PS giving way,” said Francisco Seixas da Costa, a political commentator and former secretary of state for European affairs. “The pact has exhausted its possibilities and the BE and PCP can see no further advantage in co-operating with the government.”

    Costa has offered a €40 increase in the national minimum wage to €705 a month and a €700m increase in investment in the national health service, alongside higher old-age pensions and public sector wages. The BE and PCP are pushing for bigger increases in these areas as well as labour reforms that the government fears would clash with EU rules.

    After offering hope to struggling centre-left parties across Europe and inspiring neighbouring Spain’s mainstream socialists to follow a similar path, Portugal’s broad left pact is foundering over the smaller parties’ dissatisfaction with their peripheral role, and the limits of EU policy.

    If the budget is defeated, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s centre-right president, has said he will immediately dissolve parliament and call a general election two years ahead of schedule. Costa, meanwhile, has stated he would remain in office at the head of a caretaker government until the ballot was held, probably in January.

  • Freedom Flu update: Skywest cancels more than 100 flights.
  • This has been all over everywhere this week, but it still angries up my blood: Fauci Funded ‘Cruel’ Puppy Experiments Where Sand Flies ‘Eat Them Alive’; Vocal Cords Severed.”
  • No less than four versions of “Let’s Go Brandon” are in the iTunes top 10.
  • “Gas Stations Across Iran Crippled After Massive Cyberattack.”

    Iran has announced that the country’s energy infrastructure was hit by a massive cyberattack on Tuesday, which left state subsidized gas stations across the country out of commission, resulting in very long lines of cars observed waiting to fill up in many towns and cities.

    The timing is interesting given it happened near the two year anniversary mark of deadly nationwide protests following serious gas shortages and price hikes in the fall of 2019. The ‘activist’ nature of the hack is further revealed in that Iranian media is reporting that a message showed up in national computer systems that were hacked that addressed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with the words, “where is the gas?”

  • “Americans are more generous than Europeans — by a large margin.”

    By nearly every measure Americans are more generous with their money and time than anyone — including Europeans.

    Indeed, American charitable giving exceeds the entire GDP of most European countries.

    According to the Almanac of American Philanthropy, Americans donate around seven times as much as continental Europeans to charitable causes per capita. Per person, even after adjusting for differences in household income, Americans donate twice as much of their income as the Dutch, three times as much as the French, five times as much as Germans, and ten times that of Italians.

  • Tulum, Mexico: Come for the warm Caribbean sun, stay for the non-stop cartel shootings. (The cartel is evidently the Jalisco New Generation.
  • Reno outlaws Indiana Jones, Lash Larue, and Devo. (Hat tip: Dwight.
  • “Supply Chain Crisis Solved As Each Migrant Coming Into Country Will Be Asked To Help Carry A Shipping Container.”
  • “Biden Promises He Will Stop Being A Bad President If Everyone Gets Vaccinated.”
  • To wash out the taste of the Fauci news, have some funny beagle content:

    • Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Pre-Halloween Weekend Open Thread

    Posted on October 29, 2021 by Lawrence Person

    I have to run around a bunch this morning, so I think it’s going to end up being another Saturday LinkSwarm.

    I won’t say that Halloween has snuck up on me this year, but I haven’t done as much Halloween-themed stuff as I would like this year. I did buy these “flickering flame” bulbs for my outdoor lights. They seem to work fine.

    You can find all my Halloween posts on my non-political blog here.

    Anyone doing anything interesting for Halloween this year?

    Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

    Supply Chain Update for October 28, 2021

    Posted on October 28, 2021 by Lawrence Person

    Another week, another roundup on the supply chain issues plaguing America and the world.

  • The supply chain problem is one of the big reasons economic growth dropped to an anemic 2% in Q3. The Trump boom/post-Flu Manchu recovery has ended, and the Biden economy has kicked in.
  • Here’s a pretty revealing thread about the Los Angeles/Long Beach Port problems:

    All this, of course, is on top of the previous banning of older trucks and non-union owner operators.

  • But remember: There’s no problem a government “solution” can’t make worse: “Biden hopes fines on lingering cargo containers ease congestion at major U.S. ports.” “The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will charge carriers $100 per day for each container lingering past a given timeline starting Nov. 1.” Yeah, that’s going to magically conjure trucks and drivers out of thin air.
  • Another problem is the change in containers, and the requirements for matching truck chassis types, has added still another point of failure (from 2015):

    Ten years ago, the largest container vessels that entered the ports carried 8,500 twenty-foot containers, or TEUs. Each shipping company operated their own cargo ships. The containers inside were generally all the same, and they were loaded systematically for efficient unloading at each dock.

    Now, the ships are much larger, carrying 14,000 TEUs, said Philip Sanfield, a spokesman for the Port of Los Angeles, adding that the ships are only getting bigger, and soon ships carrying 16,000 TEUs will enter the seas. The companies have begun forming alliances with one another to share these larger ships. Each company’s cargo containers are different – so it takes longer for dock workers to sort and unload them. It saves the shipping companies money, but makes for longer hours for dock workers and truckers.

    “That’s an inefficiency in the system that is driven by an efficiency: the move toward larger vessels,” says Thomas O’Brien of the Center for International Trade and Transportation at Cal State Long Beach. “But the impact is felt on the dock side.”

    One example of how this plays out: a truck driver spends hours waiting at the docks for the container he or she has been assigned to haul, which has to be moved from the bottom of a tall stack of other containers.

    But even before waiting for a cargo container, the driver must be matched with a chassis – the trailer that the container sits on top of. That process also involves a lot of waiting, and often some hunting. Drivers have to find one that will match the cargo container that he or she has been assigned to haul.

    In the past, this matching process was relatively simple because the shipping companies also owned their own chassis fleets and managed them from their shipyards.

    But during the recession, the shippers got out of the chassis business, turning them over to third-party companies to lease and maintain. The transition has created scattered mix of chassis on various terminals, and ultimately, a chassis shortage at a time when bigger ships are showing up with more cargo. Truckers told KPCC it’s difficult for them to know where they can find a chassis that will match the container they are assigned to haul, and often find themselves on what amounts to a wild goose chase.

    “There were times, when we would have 10 to 15 guys looking for one particular chassis, and we just had to wait,” said Danny Lima, the employee truck driver. “I heard stories that there are no chassis at one certain terminal because they were all at another terminal. “

    “I’m praying that there is going to be a chassis,” says Rafael, the independent trucker. “Because I can spend an hour driving around the terminal looking for chassis.”

  • Another problem: California’s Flu Manchu restrictions.

    California had some of the most stringent COVID-19 limitations of any state in 2020 when the horrendous backlog began. There was a need for more workers as demand for imported goods was skyrocketing, but California had far fewer available due to drastic government restrictions.

    In addition, overly generous government unemployment payouts reduced the need or incentive for people to work, reducing the available supply of willing truckers or longshoremen.

    When the supply chain is pinched like this, inflation rears its ugly head.

    Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has blamed recent inflation on supply chain bottlenecks. When these bottlenecks occur, consumers and businesses soon experience shortages of basic commodities and goods like new and used cars, washing machines, or medical supplies. Inflation soon follows.

    Unfortunately, many bottlenecks in supply chains occur because of government meddling.

    Politicians’ recent alarm over the Port of Los Angeles should be focused on how government officials forced docks and logistics companies, and everyone else, to follow everchanging, arbitrary COVID-19 restrictions, which worsened repeated green and labor mandates that have gummed up supply chains for years.

  • A trade group for air cargo companies like UPS and FedEx is urging the Biden Administration to push out the vaccine mandate:

    A trade group for air cargo giants like UPS and FedEx is sounding the alarm over an impending Dec. 8 vaccine deadline imposed by President Joe Biden, complaining it threatens to wreak havoc at the busiest time of the year — and add yet another kink to the supply chain.

    “We have significant concerns with the employer mandates announced on Sept. 9, 2021, and the ability of industry members to implement the required employee vaccinations by Dec. 8, 2021,” Stephen Alterman, president of the Cargo Airline Association, wrote in a letter sent to the Biden administration and obtained by POLITICO.

    The letter, sent to the Office of Management and Budget , asks the administration to postpone the deadline until “the first half of 2022.” At issue is the requirement by the Biden administration that federal workers be fully vaccinated by Dec. 8. Unlike private businesses, companies that act as federal contractors cannot opt out by instead submitting their workforces to frequent Covid testing.

    (Hat tip: Not the Bee.)

  • Our supply chain problems are a culmination of years of bad policy decisions by America’s elites:

    Our vulnerability to supply chain disruption clearly predates the Biden Administration, forged by the abandonment of the production economy over the past 50 years by American business and government, encouraged and applauded by the clerisy of business consultants. The result has been massive trade deficits that now extend to high-tech products, and even components for military goods, many of which are now produced in China. When companies move production abroad, they often follow up by shifting research and development as well. All we are left with is advertising the products, and ringing up the sales, assuming they arrive.

    Unable to stock shelves, procure parts, power your home, or even protect your own country without waiting for your ship to come in, Americans are now unusually vulnerable to shipping rates shooting up to ten times higher than before the pandemic. Not surprisingly, pessimism about America’s direction, after a brief improvement Biden’s election, has risen by 20 points. The shipping crisis is now projected to last through 2023.

    Not everyone loses here. For years the American establishment saw China as more of an opportunity than a danger. High-tech firms, entertainment companies, and investment banks profit, or hope to, from our dependency, becoming in essence the new “China lobby.” Behind the scenes these representatives of enlightened capital often work to prevent condemnation for the Middle Kingdom’s mercantilist policy, and its joint repression of democracy and ethnic minorities.

    After all, the pain is not felt in elite coastal enclaves, but in Youngstown, south Los Angeles, and myriad other decaying locales. Meanwhile, by enabling China’s focus on production, and the conquest of technologies related to making goods, we have devastated large parts of our country. This shift has cost us 3.7 million jobs since 2000. Throughout the period between 2004 and 2017, the U.S. share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 to 10 percent, while our reliance on Chinese inputs doubled, even as our dependence on Japan and Germany shrank.

    Snip.

    Some businesses are catching the drift. McKinsey and Company surveyed supply chain executives last year and found that nearly all respondents agree that their supply chains are too vulnerable. According to March 2020’s Thomas Industrial Survey, COVID-19 supply chain disruptions accelerated the search for locally-sourced materials and services. Up to 70 percent of firms surveyed said they were “likely” or “extremely likely” to re-shore in the coming years.

    The exodus from China also includes Asian and other foreign firms. UBS projects 20 to 30 percent of all Chinese capacity moving, which on $2.5 trillion of Chinese exports would imply $500 billion to $750 billion shifting elsewhere, notably to the big market of North America. Last year, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s leading chip foundry, decided to build a $12 billion new plant in Arizona, and Samsung, a huge Korean chipmaker, is also shopping in the United States for a $17 billion plant. This would remove one of the most devastating causes of supply chain problems, which has dramatically slowed auto production.

    Some major American companies, including Black and Decker, Whirlpool, General Electric, Apple, Caterpillar, Goodyear, General Motors, Little Tykes, and Polaris have begun to reshore some production. They are not alone. In 2019, for the first time in a decade, the percentage of United States manufacturing goods that were imported dropped, notes a recent Kearny study, with much of the shift coming from east Asia.

  • “After years of ‘Made in China,’ supply chains consider alternatives.”

    The “Made in China” label is ubiquitous in the United States, stamped on everything from industrial machinery to a pair of flip flops. But risks — from rising costs, to a trade war, to a pandemic — have prompted companies to rethink their relationships with suppliers and China.

    “We’ve realized that we put too much power in a single country,” said Dawn Tiura, CEO of Sourcing Industry Group.

    Snip.

    The same risk factors that drove supply chains to diversify also drove them to think about reshoring to the U.S. Proximity allows shorter transit times, lower emissions and the ability to tout a “Made in USA” label. Import duties are no longer a concern. Total cost of ownership is often lower.

    A Thomas study that polled respondents in March found 83% of manufacturers are likely, very likely or extremely likely to reshore, up from 54% in March 2020. But reestablishing manufacturing bases in the U.S. could prove challenging, after decades of standing them up in Asia and Latin America.

    “It is extremely difficult to reverse the 30+ year trend of outsourcing and offshoring manufacturing to emerging market countries,” a chemical manufacturer in the Thomas survey said. “We no longer have the talent and expertise nor capital equipment to effectively manufacture key critical components of major products and assemblies.”

  • “Ace Hardware Shelves Go Bare While Supply Chain Crisis Rages.” “We order twice a week. Normally it just takes two or three days to get back in stock on something…But during the pandemic and then with a certain category being out of stock, we’ve been out of certain products for three or four months.”
  • More on part supply shortages:

  • Health supplies:

  • Heh:

    As far as local conditions in Texas, I can say that I’m only seeing small disruptions in the grocery store supply chain at my local HEB. Luncheon meat was very short there on a recent visit, but I didn’t notice any other particular absence. A few weeks ago, the big Member’s Mark store brand toilet paper at Sam’s was completely out, but it had been completely refilled a week later.

  • Reminder:

  • Here’s a piece that says lazy crane operators are to blame, according to some truck drivers. “The crane operators take their time, like three to four hours to get just one container.” Eh, something about this doesn’t ring true. Maybe they had to wait three or four hours for the operator to get their container off the stack.
  • Is the supply chain problem being deliberately inflicted on the American people to force them to swallow the vaccine mandate?

    Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo may have accidentally leaked the cause of America’s supply chain issues.

    “The reality is the only way we’re going to get to a place where we work through this transition is if everyone in America and everyone around the world gets vaccinated,” Adeyemo admitted in an interview with ABC News.

    Starve them out, let the dissenters suffer, and those who bought into this agenda will turn against them.

    Adeyemo said that the Biden Administration has already provided “the resources the American people need to make it to the other side.”

    Basically, everyone should give into the vaccine mandate or face the consequences. They are masking authoritarianism as utilitarianism. The vaccine has not been mandated at the federal level in the US, yet, but it is apparent that the government plans to make life as difficult as possible for those who do not obey.

    Echoing the Fed, Adeyemo said that inflation is “transitory,” and “as part of the transition we are seeing higher pieces for some of the things people have to buy… That’s exactly why the president was focused in the American Rescue Plan in ensuring on getting stimulus into the hands of the American people, so they’d be able to buy the products they need.”

    Yes, the government expects us, the Great Unwashed, to be thankful for their measly handouts to purchase unavailable products at an all-time high. There is a reason people have recently nicknamed the president “bare shelves Biden,” with the hashtags #BareShelvesBiden and #EmptyShelvesJoe becoming a viral sensation.

    Although the Biden Administration met with the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which handles 40% of the nation’s goods, the promise of a 24/7 operation has not yet occurred. There is no ETA for when the ports will begin 24/7 operations either. Some ships are allegedly waiting 12 days at anchor before reaching the dock, and over 60 vessels are idled in the San Pedro Bay at the moment. With one of the nation’s busiest shopping holidays approaching (Black Friday) followed by ongoing seasonal shopping, this matter is likely to turn ugly.

  • Other voices of the same opinion

  • Relevant to LA and Long beach’s problems: “Port of Houston Awards Contract to Begin Houston Ship Channel Dredging.”
    • Posted in Democrats, Economics, Regulation, unions | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

    “NYC’s Homeless Problem Is A Giant Scam!”

    Posted on October 27, 2021 by Lawrence Person

    Tying into my post on homelessness being a profit center for the Democratic Party, here’s a Louis Rossmann video that discusses a homeless shelter in New York City that:

    1. Bills the government $3,500 to $4,000 a month to
    2. House the homeless in a literal shithole (with visible feces in one picture of the place), and
    3. By an amazing coincidence, is run by a non-profit founded by Andrew Cuomo and now run by his sister Maria Cuomo Cole.

    (I think that this is the news story he reads from at some point.)

    “The top executives of Help USA earn $200,000 to $375,000 a year, and many of them have contributed heavily to NY Gov. Cuomo’s campaigns.”

    “Board members associated with various homeless shelters have gifted the governor $322,972.50, while donors associated with Help USA, a shelter service provider founded by the governor and chaired by his sister, Maria Cuomo Cole, have ponied up $451,285 in donations.”

    Thirty five hundred to four thousand dollars per month per individual for people to stay in shitholes like this. This is being done so that the people who run these charities can pay themselves insane amounts of money and get away with it. And the reason that it continues to happen is because of the incestuous relationship that exists between many of the people who run this not-for-profit, and the people that run the state and city government.

    “This is an incestuous and disgusting relationship.”

    He proposes a voucher system instead that, while it would be an improvement, A.) Is inferior to actually letting the free market build free housing, something New York (city and state) actively implements legislation to prevent, and B.) Would never be passed, because government homeless programs exist to transfer money from taxpayers to Democrats. That, not helping the homeless, is their primary purpose.

    Posted in Democrats, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

    Fighting Critical Race Theory in Texas Schools

    Posted on October 26, 2021 by Lawrence Person

    I have a big bucket of Social Justice Warrior links I’ve been meaning to herd into a roundup for a ridiculously long time now. Within that bucket, there’s a smaller (still large) bucket of links on fighting Critical Race Theory in education. Finally, I’ve whittled it down to just links relevant to just fighting critical race theory in Texas. Yes, it’s here, and yes, it needs to be fought tooth and nail.

  • In Carroll ISD, north of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex, rebranded CRT is an important issue in the school board election:

    The Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP) and parental rights are front and center as Carroll Independent School District (CISD) residents go to the polls again for a special election to fill a vacancy left by the resignation of Dave Almand from the school board in July.

    The election will be held on November 2 with early voting beginning on October 18.

    Two candidates have filed to fill the position: Stephanie Williams and Andrew Yeager.

    Williams is a member of Dignity for all Texas Students (DATS) that is committed to passing the controversial CCAP in CISD as a diversity and inclusion plan that will “provide a safe environment where students can take risks, make mistakes, and grow from experience.” She has spoken at school board meetings in favor of CCAP, saying, “Critical race theory is not in CCAP.” She has also declared that “CRT is not taught in CISD and will not be taught in our district.”

    However, Southlake Families, a political action committee that has endorsed Yeager, opposes CCAP because they believe it creates more problems than it claims to solve. They say its sections relating to microaggressions are especially problematic, where students are “permanently penaliz[ed]…for unintentional verbal or nonverbal actions.” The group also opposes critical race theory and its outgrowth from being promoted in CISD.

    Critical race theory has its roots in Marxist philosophy and examines society with race and racial hierarchy as the primary concern for societal ills. It then seeks to deconstruct cultural institutions it defines as racist.

    Although the theory itself may not be taught in local school districts, its critics say it lays the foundation for divisive identity politics that group people as either victims or oppressors. Language that grows out of CRT can often be found in curricula and training materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, like CCAP, or social and emotional learning concepts.

    Yeager says on his website that “I will also work to ensure our primary focus is on education, not indoctrination. Students should be taught ‘how to think,’ not ‘what to think.’”

  • Carroll ISD is important, because families looking to expel CRT from Texas schools already won an important victory there:

    The tide is turning in the fight against Critical Race Theory (CRT). Following the exposure in 2020 of CRT training in agencies throughout American government, the Trump Administration issued a ban on CRT at the federal level. President Biden overturned that ban on his first day in office, but the war has gone on—and it’s turning in the direction of reason, common sense, and the American tradition of equality before the law. State legislatures from Texas to Florida have put forward bans on critical race theory. Meanwhile, local activists and parents have taken the fight to their local school boards.

    On May 1, two school board candidates in Southlake, Texas converted these media, administrative, and legislative advances into a political win. In a high turnout election marked by intense media coverage, the two anti-CRT candidates for the Carroll ISD School Board won in a landslide—by a 40-point margin. The Southlake victory provides a blueprint for conservatives elsewhere to emulate as they fight to win elections against CRT in school boards across America.

    Carroll ISD’s Five-Year Plan

    In the fall of 2018, a video of several teenagers singing along to a rap song went viral; the song’s lyrics included a racial slur. The video was filmed at a private post-Homecoming party in Southlake, a largely conservative suburb of Fort Worth and Dallas. The teens were students at Carroll ISD, the prestigious public high school that consistently ranks among the top school districts in Texas. Progressive activists wasted no time in seizing the opportunity to implement (CRT) in Carroll ISD.

    The district formulated a “Cultural Competence Action Plan” (CCAP), which set forth ambitious goals, first of which would entail hiring a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officer to oversee implementation of the Plan. Students and their teachers would be pressed to discover their racial bias and confess their white privilege. Anonymous tip lines would be set up to report alleged “microaggressions” and to impose punishment. “Focus groups” of radicalized students would be organized to report directly to the DEI administration. External auditors would be hired to reshape every District policy, organization, and curriculum in the name of advancing racial equity.

    The CCAP adopted all of the quasi-Marxist aims and methods characteristic of CRT. It was even described by its own proponents, unironically, as a “Five Year Plan.”

    In some school districts, faculty would have toed the line, parents would have bowed to the wisdom of Progress and Equity, and students would have let it all pass them by. But this is Texas—and Carroll ISD’s mascot is the Dragons.

    Beginning in 2020, Southlake conservative families formed a political action committee; they filed a barrage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests; they showed up in record numbers to speak at school board meetings; they educated the community about the evils of CRT; and they recruited winning school board candidates. Hannah Smith and Cameron “Cam” Bryan campaigned for almost 4 months, meeting with community members in 70 meet-and-greets all over Southlake and shared their positive vision for the future of Carroll ISD. Their campaign volunteers went block by block and door by door across Southlake to tell voters the truth about CCAP.

    On May 1, Smith and Bryan won with supermajorities of the vote (69 percent and 68 percent, respectively). Local voter turnout for a municipal election broke records, with over 10,000 votes were cast, up more than 150 percent from the previous high.

    More than twice as many Republicans voted in the 2021 Carroll ISD election than had voted in any previous May election. In fact, more GOP voters turned out to vote than had turned out in the last two Republican primary elections for President and U.S. Senate!

    But massive turnout among independent voters was key to the victory over CRT. In Texas, political affiliation is determined by participation in party primaries, not by party registration, and almost all of the voters who participate in the May elections for school board are also regular primary voters. In Carroll ISD, independents normally make up about 17 percent of the May electorate—an average of less than 500 votes. But this May, independent turnout surged to over 3,500 raw votes and the independent share of the electorate doubled to 35 percent.

    There are four lessons to learn from the Southlake victory:

    • Use Freedom of Information Act requests to get the real story
    • Recruit qualified candidates who reflect the community’s values
    • Start early to build a real grassroots base
    • Run a professional political campaign

    

  • Another school district where parents are fighting Critical race Theory: Cypress Fairbanks.

    Controversy over a trustee’s social media posts and allegations of critical race theory (CRT) elements in school curricula have drawn multiple challengers for three incumbents on the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District (CFISD) Board of Trustees this year.

    Parents in the state’s third-largest public school district have been asking questions about curriculum since the board adopted a “Resolution Condemning Racism” in September of 2020.

    Written by trustees John Ogletree, Julie Hinaman, and Gilber Sarabia, the resolution states that the district will “lead through policy and practice to eliminate racism, systemic racism, discrimination, injustice, and inequality in any and all its forms,” and commits to hiring a third party to conduct an “equity audit” in order to develop equity policies.

    According to documents obtained by The Texan, CFISD has contracted with Millennium Learning Concepts (MLC) for an estimated $75,000 to conduct an equity analysis and to “provide recommendations on how to alleviate the policies and practices that are contributing to inequitable experiences and outcomes for students.”

    President and owner of MLC, Roger Cleveland, is a professor of education who frequently presents to schools and districts on implicit bias and using equity to ensure that “equality is the outcome.”

    Since then, parents have voiced opposition to plans to show a video on “implicit bias,” a Black Lives Matter protest video shown to third graders, and materials from controversial professor Tyrone Howard used in teacher training materials. Trustees have vehemently denied that the district uses any curriculum under the CRT label, but parents say ideas derived from CRT are presented to students under the guise of anti-bullying and anti-racism materials.

    Critical Race Theory has roots in Marxist philosophy and examines society with race and racial hierarchy as the primary concern for societal ills. Drawing on Marxist philosopher of education Paolo Freire’s theories asserting that teaching is never neutral but always political, materials containing elements of CRT seek to use education to deconstruct institutions and culture deemed racist.

    Ogletree has also come under community scrutiny for a slew of social media posts that invoke racial conflict. In one case Ogletree posted a Washington Post opinion piece comparing police officers to the Ku Klux Klan. In other instances, he shared a racially tinged comment about GOP congressional candidate Wesley Hunt who is black, and a comment reading, “This country was built on bad theology with white men holding Bibles.”

  • Critical Race Theory has been embedded in Austin ISD for almost half a decade under the guise of “ethnic studies.” “Administrators said teachers will cover everything from critical race theory, immigration versus colonization versus slavery to sexual orientation.” In other words: Hard left indoctrination.
  • There’s a battle over Critical Race Theory brewing in Eanes ISD in Travis County. “The Eanes DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, all CRT buzzwords] consultant, Mark Gooden, has said that he wants to develop people into racial activists. He has stated that he wants to help people “develop their racial awareness with a hope of transferring that into action that they will then use to transform the organization.'”
  • Despite Democrats dishonestly swearing up and down otherwise, Critical Race Theory is indeed taught in Texas.

    As a high school debate coach, I’ve watched critical race theory crush the souls of students for years. When it began to creep into the honored and honorable academic pursuit of policy (CX) debate, it lowered standards, created division and sundered relationships.

    Let me explain how. Policy debate pits two two-person teams against each other. The Affirmative team (Aff) presents a plan that falls within this year’s topic; the Negative team (Neg) argues against that plan. This requires immense research and study; if the year’s topic is, say, the oceans, teams must be prepared to argue against plans ranging from the Law of the Seas Treaty to plastics to overfishing.

    But some years ago, a new tactic emerged. Why argue that the Aff plan is terrible, when you can simply argue that the United States is terrible? Or worse, that the Aff team is terrible?

    This kind of argument is called a kritik—debate jargon for employing critical theory (including, and especially, critical race theory) to undermine not the plan you’re supposed to be refuting, but the very legitimacy of liberal society, Western history and even debate itself.

    Writing in an article called “The Corrosion of High School Debate—And How It Mirrors American Politics,” one former debater recalled how “Some debaters even began refusing to debate the resolutions altogether, formulating elaborate theoretical and critical arguments that were, at best, tenuously linked to the topic they had been given.”

    The language of critical race theory is new to most Americans, but debaters have been parsing these words and phrases for years. “Equity” is in; fairness is out. Black bodies, colonialism, “words are violence,” ontological death—these concepts are tossed around in classrooms and tournaments throughout Texas.

    Here’s what I saw first-hand. One of my teams, two Senior girls, went into a round as the Affirmative team. I don’t recall the topic that year (a decade ago), but I do remember them emerging from the round in tears. They lost—and were told they lost—because the Negative team argued they should lose. As two white, privileged students from a private school, Neg claimed, the Affirmative team embodied everything wrong with America.

    I thought there had to be some mistake. But when I saw the ballot a couple of hours later, it was true. The judge wrote that in the interest of social justice, he handed the win to the Negative team—even though Neg offered not a single argument against the Aff plan.

    In another round, one of my teams was a little confused when a member of the opposing team got up and left just as the round started. The judge didn’t object, so my guys went on as usual—making their speeches, organizing their thoughts and crafting their arguments. In the penultimate speech (Second Negative Rebuttal), the absent Neg team member returned, holding a can full of coins. He argued that Neg should win because instead of wasting time in the round, he was out collecting money for a climate change charity—real-world action should trump ineffectual speech, he said (mind you, at a speech tournament). Neg won that round.

    What does one kritik-dependent team do when it comes up against another kritik-dependent team? I’ve watched those rounds devolved into a morass of intersectionality. “You may be female, but I’m Hispanic.” You may be Hispanic, but I have a learning disability.” “Your school spends more per-student than mine.”

    How can debaters respond to critical race theory and similar arguments? They can’t; CRT is non-falsifiable, and to take any position against it is to display “white fragility”—an argument I’ve seen used against non-white students.

  • For those fighting Critical Race Theory, here’s a primer and toolkit.

    • If you know of additional example of Critical Race Theory being taught in Texas schools, feel free to share them in the comments.

    Posted in Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

    Homelessness is A Profit Center For The Democratic Party

    Posted on October 25, 2021 by Lawrence Person

    In the course of discussing the crises of tent cities with drug addicts infesting just about every blue city in America, Peachy Keenan (I suspect a pseudonym) talks about how homelessness is a major profit center for Democrats:

    The homeless crisis is fake. By fake I mean, it’s an engineered social dysfunction created on purpose to ensure a steady flow of suitcases stuffed with unmarked nonconsecutive bills to City Halls around the country. It is a racket. A money laundering operation, just like the Department of Defense budget, and almost at the same astronomical scale.

    Just like the open border, Covid, and inflation, fake crises are never allowed to go to waste.

    Los Angeles voted itself $1.2 billion to “address homelessness” in 2019. The number of homeless people, naturally, shot up from 40,000 to close to 70,000 now. Meanwhile, Governor Newsom pledged $4.8 billion to “address” and “confront” homelessness in the state, where over 150,000 homeless live.

    But wait, there’s more! As the recall pressed in on him, he announced an additional $12 billion to “confront” homelessness.

    He’s addressing it, you guys! He’s confronting it!

    Liberal politicians understand that homelessness works. Homelessness is good. The more tents the better. The more lunatics who threaten and harass you with their pants around their ankles, the more likely you are to vote for new taxes and more spending.

    You see a filth-encrusted hobo nodding out on a curb, urine running down the sidewalk—our leadership class sees cash.

    You see a machete-wielding degenerate with stained pants terrorizing tourists on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—a greasy LA city official sees a new tax, a new program, a big pay raise for himself.

    There is a reason that LA’s infamous Skid Row has been allowed to fester and grow for almost 40 years. It now spans dozens of blocks in the downtown shopping district of America’s second largest city. It is mile after mile, block after block, of wasted zomboids shuffling past heaps of putrid trash, drug dealers, and pop-up brothels in Porta-Potties.

    It’s a perfect grift, and they don’t care if you know it.

    Thanks to the tsunami of money, in 2020 there was a 12.7 percent rise in homelessness, “despite an increase in the number of people rehoused.”

    I have no clue what “rehoused” means, but I’m guessing it’s a portmanteau of “deloused” and “re-hosed.”

    Meanwhile, Los Angeles mayoral candidates like Kevin De Leon continue to double down on the clown world policy of Housing First.

    Placing meth and heroin addicts in shiny new apartments with kitchens to clean, dishwashers to load and unload, beds to make, and trash to take out—what could go wrong?

    San Francisco just announced it’s building micro-homes for some lucky addicts.

    They had to remove the Port-a-Potties from LA’s skid row a few years ago because they were being used as brothels. Prayers to the poor city employee who has to clean out each micro house when the resident ODs.

    Solving homelessness “requires us to center solutions in racial equity so that we can dismantle the legacy of racism that still shapes our region’s vast inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity,” says Jacqueline Waggoner, who chairs the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s “Ad Hoc Committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness.”

    If homelessness is caused by racism, what’s with all the sunburned white beggars at every freeway exit in California?

    I wasn’t able to find Waggoner’s salary, but Heidi Marston, Executive Director of LAHSA, earned $260,000 in 2019. The mob has to pay its accountants well to keep the schemes going, after all. Marston was also on the Biden-Harris transition team. She must be a good person because she has a sign hanging in her office that says, “You Are On Tongva Land.” (The Tongva are the closest Los Angeles has to indigenous people).

    I’m sure Marston reminded the veterans overdosing on fentanyl on Hollywood Boulevard that their tents are on stolen Tongva land.

    The cities and states in Blue America have been using homelessness as an excuse to drain America of its wealth for too long.

    There’s much more there, including background on the meth crisis and suggestion a solution that Democrats will never implement. But the above ties into my previous discussion of the homeless industrial complex and how the entire “reimagine policing” movement is a grift to take money from police and channel it directly into the pockets of radical leftwing activists.

    I believe that early on (say, around the New Deal), liberal Democrats pushed for welfare state programs in the sincere belief that they would improve the the lives of the poor and downtrodden. Today, however, as per the universal law, every new welfare state program is born as a racket, designed to siphon money off the taxpayer and into leftwing pockets.

    (Hat tip: Bayou Renaissance Man via Borepatch.)

    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

    Did Google Break The Law?

    Posted on October 24, 2021 by Lawrence Person

    I know that headline is more than a little ambiguous, as Google has probably broken multiple laws, if only because they’re so big and there are so many laws. But “Did Google break the law using sneaky, underhanded means to carry out anti-competitive trade practices to kill off an alternative ad allocating system called ‘header bidding’ because it threatened to damage one of its biggest revenue streams” is way too long for a blog post title.

    As a prelude, here’s a brief description of header bidding and how it differs from Google’s “Waterfall” system:

    Header bidding is an advanced programmatic advertising technique that serves as an alternative to the Google “waterfall” method. Header bidding is also sometimes referred to as advance bidding or pre-bidding, and offers publishers a way to simultaneously offer ad space out to numerous SSPs or Ad Exchanges at once.

    Normally, when a publisher is trying to sell advertising space on its site, the process for filling inventory goes something like this:

    First, your site reaches out to your ad server. In general, direct-sold inventory takes precedence over any programmatically sold options. Next, available inventory is served through the site’s ad server, such as Google DoubleClick in a waterfall sequence, meaning unsold inventory is offered first to the top-ranked ad exchange, and then whatever is still unsold is passed along to the second ad exchange, and so on. These rankings are usually determined by size, but the biggest ones aren’t necessarily the ones willing to pay the highest price. (For publishers, this means lower overall revenue if the inventory isn’t automatically going to the highest bidder.)

    To further complicate the process, sites using Google’s DFP for Publishers has a setting that enables them to outbid the highest bidder by a penny using Google Ad Exchange (AdX). And since AdX gets the last bid, they are generally in a position to win most of these auctions.

    Publishers end up feeling like they aren’t making quite as much money as they would without Google meddling in the bids.

    How Does Header Bidding Help Publishers?

    Header bidding is a way for publishers to have a simultaneous auction from all the bidders, rather than the sequential strategy that Google uses. By placing some javascript on their website, when a particular page is loaded, it reaches out to all supported SSPs or ad exchanges for bids before its ad server’s own direct-sold inventory is called. Publishers can even choose to allow the winning bid to compete with pricing from the direct sales.

    Got that? Here, as best I can understand, is a summary example:

    Say Joe Blow’s Ad Agency and Attack Lawyer Collective wants to be the top bidder for serving ads up for the keyword “mesothelioma” (which, at one time, was the priciest keyword you could buy for digital ads), and it is willing to pay, say, $100 per 1,000 impressions. Under Google’s waterfall method, they would never get to bid if Big Madison Avenue Ad Agency was in the top tier of bidders even though BMAAA only offered $50 per 1,000 impressions, because Google would sell those ad slots only to the highest bidder in the top tier, and would never get down to Joe Blow in the third tier. (This is all greatly oversimplified, and feel free to correct/amend this example in the comments.)

    Well, due to the big antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by some 38 (last time I looked) state attorney generals (including Texas), lots of dirty secrets and memos have come to light as part of discovery. Many of the most serious bits were redacted, but that was just changed by judge’s orders:

    Two corporate behemoths getting together to strike insider deals with each other that freeze out competitors is pretty much textbook anti-competitive practices 101 stuff.

    Holy shit! Google and Facebook are agreeing not to cooperate with any antitrust action by the federal government to bring action against the other. That’s not a red flag, that’s the Nostromo‘s flashing lights and screaming self-destruct klaxon in the original Alien.

    So according to these documents, Google is not only a monopoly, it is a coercive monopoly that uses illegal anti-competitive trade practices to stifle competition.

    And since the lawsuit was brought by a bipartisan coalition of state attorney generals, Google can’t just buy a few tens of millions of dollars worth of Hunter Biden painting to make the entire thing go away…

    Posted in Crime, Regulation, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments