Team Personal Loyalty

Posted on November 14, 2024 by Lawrence Person

In his Joe Rogan interview, President Trump said that his biggest mistake from his first term came from appointing “disloyal” people to important positions based on advice from career Republican politicians. So naturally this time around he’s picking people based in large measure on personal loyalty to him. The result is a much better cabinet than his first, but not a perfect one. I’ll go through the top picks with quick reaction on each.

  • Secretary of State: Marco Rubio. Meh. Marco has always struck me as an intellectual lightweight. He will doubtless be a much better Secretary of State than Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first choice, as well as all Democratic secretaries of state back to at least Cyrus Vance (if not further), but in terms of actual ability I’m not sure he’s better than Trump’s second Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. I would prefer someone like Victor Davis Hanson. Or even (dare I say it?) Rick Perry. This also starts the run of “Sure is a lot of people from Florida on this list.”
  • Secretary of Defense: Pete Hegseth. “Before joining Fox in 2014, Hegseth served as an Army National Guard captain in Afghanistan and Iraq and earned the Bronze Star medal for his service in the latter.” I don’t watch Fox (or network or cable news in general), so I wasn’t previously aware of him, but he wants to completely purge wokeness and DEI, so I’m firmly on Team Hegseth now.

  • Attorney General: Florida congressman Matt Gaetz. Boy, this one really has the left freaking out. As well it should. While I’m confident Gaetz has the steel to launch investigations of the Russian collusion hoax, the Trump assassination attempts, the lawfare waged against him, censorship efforts, January 6, etc., I worry that he hasn’t run a state attorney generals office, and thus won’t know how best to bring “resistance” staffers to heel. I suspect a seasoned Republican state attorney general like Ken Paxton might have been a better choice, but Texas conservatives won’t complain about getting to keep Paxton in his current job.
  • Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security: South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. Meh. I liked Noem back when she kept her state open during the Flu Manchu panic, but then she went off tranny pandering by vetoing a bill banning men from women’s sports she had promised to sign. She later made amends, but the initial pander of caving to radical social justice pressure makes me worry that she doesn’t have the necessary gumption for such an important job.
  • Department Of Government Efficiency: Elon Musk And Vivek Ramaswamy. Putting aside why this isn’t simply the Office of Management and Budget (maybe to staff a new department from the ground up without “resisters”), this one Trump hit out of the park. Both Musk and Ramaswamy are going to bring outsider energy from two guys who simply don’t care what the MSM and the DC chattering classes have to say about them. Ramaswamy is the ideological firebrand that won’t be diverted from the task, and Musk is the radical innovator who’s not afraid to to make rapid, radical changes. Every Republican President since Reagan has said they’re for a balanced budget, yet somehow the goal has eluded every single one of them. Trump did not pursue a budget cutting agenda in his first term, but having been targeted by multiple tentacles of the deep state leviathan, I’m pretty sure he’ll come in with a newfound zeal for chopping the federal government down to size. And Musk has a talent for both management and radical disruption, which the federal government badly needs.
  • Director of National Intelligence: Tulsi Gabbard. I’m skeptical this one works out. Tulsi is clearly sharp, and after this election she clearly needs some role in the Trump 2: The Venging administration. And she drive feminists crazy simply by standing there and looking pretty. But directing the national intelligence apparatus, especially one that will be institutionally hostile to reform from the git go, will take a very special, and very tough, director to fill that role, and I’m not sure Gabbard has the intestinal fortitude for the sort of brutal inter-agency knife-fighting necessary to defeat the Deep State. Very few men do, and even fewer women, and having served in the military isn’t sufficient to assure that. For a woman to succeed in this role, she’s going to need to fall somewhere on the Margaret Thatcher to Nancy Pelosi Iron Lady to Stone Cold Bitch spectrum, and I’m skeptical Tulsi meets that threshold. Maybe I’m wrong and she’ll suprise us all.
  • Robert K. Kennedy, Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. No. Like Tulsi, you have to give him some role, and he probably has some good points to make about over-medication, junk food additives, and how the pharmaceutical industry has misled the public (especially over Flu Manchu vaccines and side effects) and commits regulatory capture of the people who should be overseeing it, but he has too many fringe, scientifically unsupported ideas, and he seems to support ObamaCare. There’s still a chance this selection works out, assuming the Assistant Director is someone who can keep Kennedy’s worst impulses in check, and having him as the designated bad cop may force the medial industry get its shit together (and give up its push to mutilate children for funny, profit and virtue signaling brownie points entirely). Then there’s this via Instapundit:

    But this could still blow up in Trump’s face. Rand Paul would have been a much better pick here, assuming he could be persuaded to leave the senate.

  • Border Czar: Former ICE director Tom Homan. Yeah, he’s got the starch.

    Let a thousand ten million deportations bloom.

    • So I find it a pretty mixed bag.

    Athena Thorne notes that all those selected were unfairly targeted by the very agencies they’re being tasked to oversee, and that probably does provide powerful motivation, as well as insight on the types of abuse that need to be rooted out. I’m just not sure that’s sufficient…

    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Foreign Policy, Military, ObamaCare, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

    Paxton Sues Feds Over Jack Smith Records

    Posted on November 13, 2024 by Lawrence Person

    All of Ken Paxton’s lawsuits against the federal government have offered the possibility of notable revelations, but this one has the potential to be extra spicy.

    Texas sued the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday attempting to preserve all records pertaining to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President-elect Donald Trump.

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint on November 8 requesting specific records from Smith’s investigation, including “all Communications from any current or former member of the Office of Special Counsel Jack Smith to any New York State governmental office since November 18, 2022,” as well as “documents memorializing the … final reasoning to request that a trial against President-elect Trump to start in January of 2024.”

    Texas expressed concerns in court documents that the DOJ’s history with special counsels is “regrettably riddled with attempts to avoid transparency,” specifically referencing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s infamous Crossfire Hurricane incident in 2020. Mueller’s team allegedly repeatedly wiped their phones after an investigation into the DOJ’s handling of a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) probe into Trump’s purportedly unlawful links to Russia.

    The suit filed on November 11 states that Paxton “fears that many releasable records — including those that he sought — will never see daylight. That is not because the DOJ has any legal reason to withhold them…”

    “Rather, Attorney General Paxton has a well-founded belief as set forth herein that Defendants will simply destroy the records.”

    Paxton states in the filing that since Trump won the election “it is clear that both Jack Smith’s office, and his prosecution of the President, will soon end.” The DOJ’s own policies do not permit bringing charges against a sitting President of the United States as it “would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.”

    “I will not allow the corrupt weaponization of the United States government to be swept under the rug as Jack Smith and others who unjustly targeted President Trump attempt to avoid accountability,” Paxton said in a press release.

    Texas’ suit was filed in the United States District Court Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division.

    Obviously I hope Paxton prevails and that Smith (and the entire Biden Administration)’s attempts to illegally wage lawfare against Trump to thwart the will of American voters gets exposed. However (and here we insert the usual I Am Not A Lawyer caveat), it appears that Paxton will have difficulty in establishing standing for the lawsuit to proceed. Trump is not a resident of Texas, and it may be difficult to establish that the State of Texas has suffered direct harm from Smith’s actions.

    However, in this case I’m wondering if Paxton has filed the case on a timeline that either the Biden Administration doesn’t respond in time, or that the second Trump Administration can file the response, proving a mechanism by which the Trump Administration settles the lawsuit by releasing all requested documents that may otherwise be held up by claims of executive privilege, garden variety DOJ stonewalling, etc.

    It’s an interesting gambit. We’ll see how it plays out…

    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

    Best Smug “Trump Can’t Win” Videos

    Posted on November 12, 2024 by Lawrence Person

    Tired of enjoying a nice heaping plate of schadenfreude at liberal dismay over Trump’s win? Well, I’m not! Enjoy some of the most confidently smug Democrats declaring that there’s no way Trump can win.

    Highlights:

  • The female “political analyst” who confidently told a liquor store clerk where she was buying champagne that Harris was going to win all the swing states plus Iowa due to abortion, only to cry “racism and misogyny” in the “after” video.
  • The Tik-Tok electoral votes map guy who confidently predicted Harris garnering 349 votes, including. “It’s gonna be a landslide.” Also: “Some people are telling me to turn Texas to blue.” Democrats have been getting high on the “Texas is about to turn blue” pipe dream for the last two decades…
  • Nikki Haley back during her Republican presidential primary campaign (Where she managed to win…Vermont. By 3,000 votes.): “If Donald Trump is the nominee, mark my words, we will see a President Kamala Harris.”
  • Bill Maher predicting Kamala winning the popular vote.
  • Some MSNBC talking head calmly asserting that “there’s no imaginable world in which Donald Trump would win a popular majority in America.”

    • Seems like Democrats lack imagination about a whole lot of things…

    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

    Hey MSM And Hollywood: It’s The Woke, Stupid

    Posted on November 11, 2024 by Lawrence Person

    Kneon and Geeky Sparkles at Clownfish TV have a simple message for the MSM and Hollywood following Trump’s decisive win: It’s the wokeness, stupid.

  • K: “For those of you who are outside the country, Donald Trump won. Not only did he win, he won the popular vote as well. I mean, he just destroyed Harris completely by millions. It’s not even close.”
  • K: “It’s middle America choosing to push back against all the nonsense we’ve seen from the left the last several years.”
  • GS: “We’re watching it go down last night, watching MSNBC and CNN, and that they could not comprehend. Like they could seriously not fathom that they were wrong, and that people didn’t vote the way they thought because they are in their echo chambers.”
  • GS: “This is why the journalists and the media have been so cracking down and going against YouTubers or anything else, because people aren’t listening to them anymore.”
  • GS: “But they did it to themselves, they put themselves in their own echo chamber. They only hear what they want to hear instead of listening and questioning and trying to find the actual truth, they keep telling people they’re going to tell you what the truth is and you have to listen to it, and people are like ‘No we don’t.’ And that’s why they’re caught off guard, because if they had just listened they would know.”
  • K: “We were flipping between uh MSNBC last night and CNN and they were all just kind of like ‘Well, it surely must be the children who are wrong.'”

    Made for illustrative purposes

  • GS: “Or uneducated. That was the other thing on MSNBC. I can’t tell you how many digs they made. CNN too. Both of them they were saying that if you voted for Trump, it’s the uneducated people that voted for Trump, and then later on they had to admit he had the more diverse voter base, including a lot of the black vote, and they couldn’t understand it.”
  • GS: “And they’re like going on about how uneducated people are, and then they just insulted all the people they claimed to be standing for. Women voted for Trump because they’re tired of being told you’re not a woman or whatever. People are sick of it.”
  • GS: “And I can tell you right now, right now, I have no doubt in my mind the reason that people went this way was because they are been pushed that way by the news, by the media, by social media, by Hollywood, by out-of-touch celebrities. By these immature people, screeching baby meltdowns that you see constantly.”
  • GS: “Not liking a cartoon show somehow makes you a bigot and you deserve to die.”
  • Kamala and the last four years have been so bad that even the Amish came out to vote for Trump.
  • GS: “People in general did this because they got tired of it. You pushed the Middle America that way. It’s your own fault.”
  • GS: “We’re going back to racism, we’re going back to putting people in category because they [the woke] are doing it. We got past it and they keep bringing it back. They keep digging.”
  • GS: “We were watching the shows, and then one lady, the one anchor on MSNBC was like ‘I think wokeism has a lot to do with it,’ and they looked at her like she just murdered their puppy.”
  • GS: “I’m sure lot of celebrities are going to be reacting to this, uh, badly. This is the official end of woke. This is it. This is over. America has spoken. They’re tired of it and they’re done with it. They’re done with it.”
  • GS: “It all ties into entertainment and, you know, pop culture, because I think ground zero for the stupidity is out of Hollywood and the media and things like that. And they have caused this, encouraged people to have echo chambers, and then they’re shocked when when not everybody thinks the way they think.”
  • GS: “We’re seeing video after video of meltdowns, mostly women, white women, usually having hissy fits over Trump signs and attacking people. There’s so many things that that caused it, but I do think that Hollywood did it to themselves.”
  • K: “They’re like ‘Well, maybe we’ve pushed people away from the Democratic party.’ I’m like: ‘You don’t fucking say so.'”
  • K: “RFK, they tanked him, they tanked Tulsi. They actually have candidates that could could reach across the aisle and pull people over, but you push them out.”
  • K: “Trump won the popular vote, too…so if you call every Trump supporter a Nazi, kiss your money goodbye.”
  • Bit on Chris Pratt calling for unity snipped.
  • GS: “Hollywood has had their asses kicked. They’re losing money. People are rejecting Disney. All their movies pretty much flopped. Last year people were rejecting their bullshit. Hollywood’s trying to course correct now. That should have been the first indication that maybe, just maybe, you lost the plot.”
  • GS: “A lot of people were Democrats are now Trump supporters and it’s your own fault, because you pushed them that way.”
  • K: “This feels more like this isn’t just Republicans vs. Democrats. To me this feels like this was Americans versus this Marxist, Communist bullshit that has infected this country, and we need to work together to to get America back on on track.”
  • K: “This feels like this is it. This is the end of woke.”

    • Let’s hope so…

    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

    Court To Biden: No, You Can’t Have A Backdoor Amnesty. Not Yours.

    Posted on November 10, 2024 by Lawrence Person

    The work of undoing the Biden Administration’s unlawful importation of millions of illegal aliens didn’t stop with Kamala’s defeat, and Texas and other states just won an important legal victory to help secure the border.

    Texas received a final judgment permanently blocking a Biden administration “parole in place” (PIP) policy that would have allegedly allowed over a million illegal aliens to secure citizenship without satisfying “clear” congressionally-issued requirements.

    That policy established a process for “certain noncitizen spouses and noncitizen stepchildren of U.S. citizens” to get around federal prohibitions against certain immigration benefits being obtained until after leaving the country and returning in a legal manner, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) press release.

    The final judgment was issued on November 7, along with United States District Judge Campbell Parker’s opinion determining that the Biden administration lacks “statutory authority” to implement the PIP program.

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with 15 other states and co-counsel America First Legal (AFL), filed a lawsuit on August 23 against the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), alleging that the Biden administration was violating the U.S. Constitution in its new agency rule adopted on August 19.

    The primary complaint against the DHS rule is that it allows a roundabout path for certain non-legal spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens to receive legal permanent status without going through the proper process such as applying for it at an embassy or consulate in one’s home country before becoming a legal citizen. The concern over the DHS rule was that instead of following the protocol established by Congress, the aforementioned illegal aliens would be allowed to stay in the country under “parole,” during which they could apply for citizenship status, all without leaving the country.

    Paxton was granted a temporary stay on August 26, blocking the policy while litigation proceeded.

    “Once again we have stopped the Biden-Harris Administration’s radical attempts to destroy America’s borders and undermine the rule of law,” Paxton said in a press release.

    “This unlawful parole scheme would have rewarded more than 1 million illegal aliens with citizenship and incentivized millions more to break into our country. I look forward to the day when the federal government starts following the law again,” he concluded.

    Judge Parker’s opinion concluded in agreement with the 16-state coalition’s claim that the “defendants lack statutory authority … itself to grant parole ‘in place’ to aliens … or to deem parole ‘in place’ as used there to be parole ‘into the United States.’”

    Lawsuit by lawsuit, the open borders insanity of the Biden Administration is being rolled back, laying the foundation for President Trump to start promised mass deportations upon re-assuming office.

    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

    Black Girl Redpilled

    Posted on November 9, 2024 by Lawrence Person

    Here’s a short, interesting video of a black, female YouTuber with a punk rock haircut who goes by Gothix, who found herself inadvertently red-pilled.

  • “I never really was into politics at all, but I had a lot of opinions about politics. To give you some context, I had severe Trump Derangement Syndrome. I hated Trump. I hated everyone who voted for Trump. I actually cut off one of my best friends. I didn’t speak to her for like a year because I could not understand how my white friend would vote for someone who was against my people being black people. And so and so.”
  • “My political awakening pretty much happened over the course of, maybe, like, two years. It started when Disney announced that they were going to be doing a live action remake of The Little Mermaid. I was wondering why they made Ariel black. I was very confused by this, so naturally I go online I ask this question, and I started to get a lot of pushback from people who were my fans.”
  • “A lot of them were black fans, and they they couldn’t understand why I had such a problematic anti-black opinion.”
  • “I’m, like, ‘My audience just turned on me for a very reasonable question.’ And I also didn’t like how if anyone opposed Ariel being turned black, you were automatically a racist. And that doesn’t make any sense to me.”
  • “A few months later Covid starts, and we’re told to stay home and flatten the curve. Meanwhile, the BLM protest starts, and now all of a sudden you can go out as long as you are protesting to end racial Injustice or something like that. So that hypocrisy didn’t make any sense to me. Either Covid is deadly or it’s not. Either we stay home or we don’t. We don’t get to pick and choose.”
  • “Once again I brought up the question: What does stealing a 70 inch TV have to do with ending police brutality? And once again I got hate. And then it dawned on me: ‘Hold on! I keep getting pushback from black leftists. There is something going on about this.'”
  • “So then I started going down a rabbit hole, and I started literally researching ‘black people who stopped being Democrat’ and the amount of stuff that I got it was crazy. The first thing that I watched was the Uncle Tom documentary, and what I came to realize after watching that is that we have been lied to about history.”
  • “There’s something called the black card, and there’s sort of like this expectation that you’re supposed to behave in a certain way, and that trickles down all the way to who you vote for.”
  • “When you are born black in America, it’s sort of insinuated that you will be voting Democrat. Don’t ask questions, just vote Democrat. Which is exactly what I did when Obama was running. I voted for him because he’s black. Knew nothing about his policies, but he’s black and I need to help my people or something.”
  • “That process got me to start really considering all the things that I used to believe. One of the things was about Trump, and then I realized that ‘Oh, wow, the media is lying about him they’re taking these clips and they’re using clickbait and distorting it taking it totally out of context.’ And they’re emotionally extorting people who wear their identity on their sleeve. If you are black and you see a a video of some guy in office talking about, uh, anything racist, of course you’re going to oppose him, right?”
  • “And then that makes room for a political savior to come in who makes empty promises about ending white supremacy. I just came to realize that the media is not on our side, they’re not there to tell us the news, they’re not there to keep us informed, they’re there to get us emotionally riled up so then they can use that to get us marching to the ballot box. They don’t actually care about us.”

    • If you know a white liberal who reflexively calls Trump a racist, send them a link to this video.

    And I’ll have to track down that Uncle Tom documentary…

    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

    Post-Election LinkSwarm For November 7, 2024

    Posted on November 7, 2024 by Lawrence Person

    Fallout from Trump’s decisive victory over the Obama Machine continues to land fast and heavy. So let’s do a roundup before the Friday LinkSwarm gets unwieldy.

  • Harris officially conceded. In a sane world, this would be the end of Democrats “we have to keep Trump out of office by any means necessary” efforts, but alas, the TDS-wrecked Democratic Party is far from sane…
  • “David McCormick Wins Pennsylvania Senate Seat, Ousting Longtime Incumbent Democrat Bob Casey.” Casey’s team says they still think they can win, so don’t put it past Pennsylvania Democrats to “discover” a whole bunch of “uncounted” ballots…
  • Tablet’s Park MacDougald calls Trump’s win a landslide.

    For months now, they have been saying that mainstream pollsters and pundits predicting a Harris victory were full of it. They were right. The late Harris surge in the polls was a mirage. The stories that recently appeared in outlets such as Politico about massive last-minute swings to Harris among independents, Hispanics offended by a comic’s Puerto Rico joke, and educated women—all of it was bullshit, invented out of whole cloth by Harris campaign operatives and repeated by journalists such as Jonathan Martin as if it were fact. In the end, none of it was real. The election wasn’t even close.

    How did Trump do it? We’ve seen some suggestive exit polls showing, for instance, Trump winning more than 40% of the Jewish vote in New York City; that sounds right, but we’d caution that exit polls are notoriously unreliable. County data, on the other hand, is rock-solid…

    To put that in simple terms: Pretty much the entire country shifted toward Trump. That includes deep-blue strongholds. The New York Post reported Wednesday morning that Harris was leading New York by a little more than 11% with 95% of votes counted—the worst performance by a Democrat in the Empire State since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Trump cracked 30% in New York City—also the best performance by a Republican since 1988, driven by a 35% improvement in the Bronx relative to 2020 and improvements of 20% and 16.5% in Manhattan and Queens, respectively. Finally, Trump blew the doors off of several heavily minority counties across the country, flipping Florida’s Osceola County (home to a large Puerto Rican population) and Texas’s 97% Hispanic Starr County. He won the latter by nearly 16% after losing it by 5% to Biden—a 21-point swing in four years. It was, as Ryan Girdusky observed on X, the first time Starr County had voted for a Republican since 1892.

    We’ve seen some talk of a “realignment election,” with the Republicans broadening their appeal among the multiracial working class while the Democrats become more entrenched in affluent white suburbs. We’ll have to wait for more detailed demographic breakdowns to say for sure, but what the above table suggests to us is something different: a “whole of society” (to borrow a term) rejection of Kamala Harris and her party. Punchbowl’s congressional reporter, Max Cohen, cited a Democratic House source this morning who summed up the result nicely: “This was a total and complete repudiation of the Democratic Party. People are not buying what we’re selling. Period.”

  • “This was a marriage gap election, not a gender gap election.”

    Now that we have the election results, it appears that the gender gap actually shrunk.

    In 2020, President Joe Biden won women by a 15-point margin, 57% to 42%. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris won women by a much smaller 8-point, 53% to 45% margin.

    But while the gap between men and women actually shrank this year, another gap widened. In 2020, married voters narrowly chose President Donald Trump by a 7-point, 53% to 46% margin. This year that margin grew to 13 points at 56% to 43%.

    For all the talk of Trump’s problem with women, Trump actually won married women by three points, 51 to 48. To repeat, Trump won a majority of not just married white women, but a majority of all married women.

    Trump also handily won married men 60-38 and he even eked out a victory among unmarried men 49-47. Where Trump got crushed was among unmarried women, who chose Harris (who didn’t get married until age 50, by the way) by a 60-38 margin.

  • Republicans trimmed the Democratic advantage in Harris County. Harris won Harris County by 5 points, but four years ago Biden won it by 12. Likewise, Ted Cruz lost Harris County (where he lives) by 9 points, but in 2018, the year of Betomania, he lost it by 17 points. As I keep reminding people, Harris County was a competitive Republican county not that long ago, and Bush43 won it in 2004.
  • Speaking of Harris County, Houston voters actually turned down a $4.4 billion HISD bond package.
  • Well, this is mighty curious, isn’t it?

  • …or C.) Call voters racist and sexist?

  • “California Voters Overwhelmingly Say ‘No’ to Soft-on-Crime Policies and Prosecutors.”

    Voters in the state [reversed] course after previously supporting a measure that lightened penalties for theft and otherwise gutted crime-control efforts in this state. California Proposition 36, also known as the “Allows Felony Charges and Increases Sentences for Certain Drug and Theft Crimes” measure, passed with over 70% of the vote.

    Proposition 36 would walk back much of the decade-old Proposition 47, turning some theft misdemeanors into felonies, requiring a warning about a possible murder charge for selling or providing drugs, and creating a new “treatment-mandated felony,” according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

    …[T]he Family Business Association of California has called Proposition 47 “catastrophic” for the state, saying homelessness has gone up by 51% and smash-and-grab crimes have cost businesses nearly $9 billion a year. It says Proposition 36 will fix a loophole in Proposition 47 that allows thieves to take less than $950 in property from different stores and remain a misdemeanor.

    Under Proposition 36, theft would be classified as a felony offense if the suspect has two or more past convictions for certain theft crimes, such as shoplifting, burglary and carjacking. The sentence would then be up to three years in county jail or state prison.

  • A leftwing initiative to impose rent control on all of California backfires spectacularly.

    With 51 percent of the vote reported, Proposition 33—which would have repealed all state-level limitations on local rent control policies—is capturing the support of just 38 percent of voters. The New York Times is declaring the initiative done and dusted.

    This is the third failed ballot initiative sponsored by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) that would have loosened or repealed California’s state-level limits on rent control. Prop. 33 could also be the AHF’s last ballot initiative.

    That’s thanks to the apparent (narrow, but not yet confirmed) victory for Proposition 34, which would effectively prevent AHF from spending money on political activism.

    Prop. 34 requires beneficiaries of federal discount prescription drug programs to spend 98 percent of their revenue on direct patient care.

    AHF benefits from just such a federal program that requires pharmaceutical companies to sell their drugs at discounted rates to hospitals and other organizations that primarily serve low-income patients. Those discount drug–buying organizations are then allowed to bill federal insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid the standard reimbursement rates for those drugs.

    The AHF has benefited handsomely from this program through its network of discount pharmacies serving AIDS patients. It has spent the proceeds on the heterodox pet causes of AHF President Michael Weinstein, which includes supporting rent control policies.

    This deserves a Nelson.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • And the beat goes on. “Leftist Arrested for Threatening to Kill Trump and Conservative Christians if Trump Wins.” “Isaac Sissel, a 25-year-old from Ann Arbor, Michigan, has been charged by the Department of Justice following an online threat of political violence.”
  • Rasmussen crows about getting things right, including trump winning the popular vote. “What you probably heard on the media, over and over again like a mantra, is that Donald Trump has a hard ceiling at 47%. No, he’s been at 49% this entire time. Turns out Kamala Harris is the one with the ceiling. And the reason that it came out that way is because all of their polls are bogus, they’re leftward leaning, they always show that Donald Trump has a favorability disadvantage.” Also:

    This is the shill period right here. Boom! All of a sudden Trump dropped a point when Kamala Harris went in the race. It’s like everybody gave her a shove to get her over the starting line, and then they massively shift left. They shilled for Harris all fall, and then right at the end they decided ‘Well, it’s time to save our credibility,’ and Trump, look at that, all of a sudden Trump got this great momentum. Where’d it come from? Oh, he never lost it. This is all fake all here this whole period, and Trump was actually up in the national popular vote and nobody said sorry.

  • “Fort Bend County Commissioner Meyers Defeats Democratic Challenger Indicted Over Faked Racist Messages. Democratic candidate Taral Patel, who faces nine criminal charges, took 41 percent of the vote.”
  • “America Unburdens Itself From What Has Been.”
  • “Kamala Calls For Peaceful Transfer Of Power To Adolf Hitler.”
    • Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

    “Not One County?”

    Posted on November 6, 2024 by Lawrence Person

    OK, I should probably be napping rather than posting again, but wow, this is an amazing little nugget displaying just how inept a candidate Kamala Harris was (or how huge the fraud was in 2020).

    CNN anchor Jake Tapper is going viral for his stunned reaction early Wednesday when told that Vice President Kamala Harris had failed to outperform President Biden’s 2020 results in a single state.

    Tapper asked CNN chief national correspondent John King to pull up a graphic showing in which states Harris had gotten at least 3% more votes than Biden had in the last election — just to be presented with a gray map reflecting her failure even in that.

    “Holy smokes!” Tapper gasped. “Literally nothing?”

    “Literally nothing,” King confirmed.

    The slide, which would have lit up states where Harris outperformed Biden by 3% or more, was instead completely gray.

    “Literally not one county?” Tapper asked again, still sounding shocked in the footage, which was viewed more than 5 million times in just one clip shared on X.

    King then changed the map to show counties instead of states and noted that Harris only outperformed Biden by 3% in a meager 58 counties.

    “So in counties, in 58 counties,” King said. “We just showed Donald Trump was over a thousand counties of the 4,600 counties and townships across America.”

    He continued, “There might be more out here on the West Coast, possibly one or two more as they finish the count here, but in the states that matter — again, I just showed you all those Trump counties — in one county in battleground Pennsylvania, she’s outperforming President Biden by 3% or more.”

    So Harris did outperform Biden.

    In 58 counties.

    Nationwide.

    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

    Finally, Trump Wins Beyond The Margin Of Fraud

    Posted on November 6, 2024 by Lawrence Person

    There were apparently no broken water pipes, no 3 AM ballot drops, no other shenanigans so widespread and outlandish that they were able to undo what amounts to a small red wave.

    Donald Trump has finally won a Presidential election beyond the margin of fraud. Final polls had Trump winning in all the swing states, and it looks like he won all seven: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada. Sometimes Minnesota was included in the list of swing states, but Harris did manage to hold onto that (so I guess the Walz pick did accomplish something). It even looks like Trump will handily win the symbolic popular vote, the first Republican to do so since George W. Bush in 2004.

    Republicans have retaken control of the Senate, knocking off Democratic incumbents in Ohio and Montana, picking up West Virginia from the retiring Joe Manchin, will likely pick up Pennsylvania, and currently hold a razor-thin edge in Nevada. Unlike 2016 and 2020, this year Trump had some modest coattails.

    House control is still too close to call. Republicans have thus far flipped four House seats, while Democrats have flipped three.

    In Texas election news, Ted Cruz was handily reelected over Democrat Colin Allred, Republicans gained one state senate seat and two state house seats. Republicans also swept Texas Court of Appeals races.

    This was a very solid win for Trump, but not a GOP landslide on the order of 1984 or 1994. But it does show signs of being a realigning election, with Trump continuing to increase his shares of black and Hispanic voters, as well as working class voters of all stripes.

    I should be ecstatic. Actually, I’m more tired and relieved, since it seems like I’ve been running flat out the last two weeks, so I’ll make this short.

    Tomorrow we’ll examine whether Democrats have learned anything from this defeat, or if they’re even capable of learning…

    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 19 Comments