On the Madness of Max Boot And #NeverTrump

Posted on July 7, 2018 by Lawrence Person

Jonathan Tobin has a nice piece up on the foolishness of Max Boot and the remaining rump of #NeverTrump trying to destroy the Republican Party to save it:

For a tiny group of prominent writers and political operatives, the Republican party has become the moral equivalent of Ben Tre, the Vietnamese village about which a U.S. army officer said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” But for historian and columnist Max Boot, not even that awful yet memorable quote fits the current situation. In a Washington Post column published on the Fourth of July, Boot claims that, “Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.”

Boot’s is just the latest public declaration from the dwindling band of Never Trumpers that merely condemning Trump’s bad behavior or foolish policies is not enough. In their view, a Republican party that continues to support and sustain the administration must be punished for the sin of inflicting this president on the nation. According to people such as Boot, George Will, Steve Schmidt, and Joe Scarborough, that means voting for Democrats this fall.

Each gives various reasons for his or her apparent apostasy, but it all boils down to a belief that opposition to Trump is the single most important issue facing the nation. Do any of them really share the Left’s conclusion that Trump is destroying democracy and leading us to the brink of fascism, as Boot’s remark about Germany and Japan implies? That’s not the point here.

It is not accurate to say that the party has left them, as Ronald Reagan frequently said of the Democratic party, after he transformed from New Deal Democrat into a Barry Goldwater conservative.

As I wrote in March about Boot, and as Charles Cooke has also discussed with respect to Jennifer Rubin (another of my former Commentary colleagues), the issue isn’t so much about how Trump has changed the GOP as how Trump derangement has changed them. Both now take positions that are contrary to the stands they took prior to 2016. If Trump is for something, they’re against it even if they used to support it. If he’s against it, they’re for it even if they used to oppose it.

I was particular struck by this paragraph quoting Boot:

Boot concedes that a vote for the GOP in November would indicate support for tax cuts and conservative judges. However, on the downside, he says, it would also be “a vote for egregious obstruction of justice, rampant conflicts of interest, the demonization of minorities, the debasement of political discourse, the alienation of America’s allies, the end of free trade, and the appeasement of dictators.”

Let’s break that down:

  • “A vote for egregious obstruction of justice”: Really? Seems like the people doing the most obstructing and stonewalling have been President Trump’s deep state opponents in the FBI over their FISA abuse.
  • “Rampant conflicts of interest”: President Trump’s conflicts of interest seem like pretty small potatoes compared to the graft and favors machine Hillary Clinton ran out of the State Department.
  • “The demonization of minorities”: Really? Which minorities has Trump “demonized”? Insisting on border enforcement to deport illegal aliens is not “demonizing,” it’s merely enforcing existing law. Likewise his temporary ban on travel from terrorism-exporting nations, as recently affirmed by the Supreme Court.
  • “The debasement of political discourse”: Boot has half a point here, as Trump’s discourse could certainly be considered “debased” compared to Bush41 or Bush43. But here again, President Trump’s critics have far more debased discourse than the object of their ire. Robert De Niro, Stephen Cobert and Kathy Griffin have debased political discourse far more than Trump’s Twitter feed has. Or, as Tobin puts it, “Does he think, for all of Trump’s faults, that civil political discourse is the specialty of the party of Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Keith Ellison, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?” And where was Boot decades ago when leftists were calling Republicans “Nazis,” “racists,” etc.? Maybe Boot made polite “tut-tut” noises at the time, but #NeverTrump seems deeply offended that Trump found effective ways to fight back. It seems they’d rather lose gracefully as long as doing so never threatened their own social status. (Kurt Schlicter has made this argument at pungent length: “Trump threw the Fredocons out of the family business. They are nothing to us…We ruined their scam. They miss the cruise ships, filled with marks handing over cash to mingle with second-tier scribes from magazines put out by lesser sons of greater fathers that we stopped reading when they stopped mattering. Never Trump wants to once stand on a sold-out cruise ship’s bridge, pale puny arms spread wide, shouting, ‘I’m a minor duke of the world!'”)
  • “The alienation of America’s allies”: Which of America’s allies has been permanently alienated by Trumpian rhetoric? Canada? Has Germany pulled out of NATO? Has Japan asked U.S. troops to leave? Is South Korea displeased at eased tensions on the peninsula? Relations with Saudi Arabia have never been better. France backs Trump much more fully in his war against the Islamic State than they ever backed Bush43 in Iraq. Evidently Boot equates acquiescing to meaningless Paris climate accords or the disasterous Iran deal to “respect.”
  • “The end of free trade”: Don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin. Free trade hasn’t ended, and President Trump’s use of tariffs as a negotiating strategy already has some countries lowering trade barriers as a result. Also, previous administrations have hardly been as pure as the driven snow when it comes to imposing tariffs. Obama imposed tariffs on Chinese tires, and the Presidents that imposed steel tariffs includes Bush41, Bush 43, Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Johnson.
  • “The appeasement of dictators”: That depends on how you define “appeasement.” Obama did far more to appease the mullahs in Iran than President Trump has done to placate North Korea. Also, President Trump’s “appeasement” of North Korea seems to have cost us very little to notably ease tensions on the Korean peninsula, and may yet open the path to North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. If not, those modest wins have still achieved more there than any president since Eisenhower.

    • Max Boot and #NeverTrump seem to be making the same mistake college socialists make: Just as socialists compare capitalism to the fantasy socialism that exists only inside their own heads rather than the messy failures found in the real world, so too Boot seems to compare President Trump’s messy-but-real successes against a golden age of Republican purity that never existed, rather than remembering all the flawed compromises under Reagan, Bush41 and Bush43.

    And President Trump only looks all the better on every front compared to the burning clown car that was the Obama Administration. Yet that’s the party which Boot and his ilk would have us pull the level for in November to teach Trump a lesson about “moral purity.”

    Pass.

    Posted in Democrats, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    LinkSwarm for July 6, 2018

    Posted on July 6, 2018 by Lawrence Person

    Hope you had a great July 4th! Sadly, it was raining here, so we didn’t get a chance to blow things up…

  • The Left needs to face the reality that Trump is winning:

    To understand the madness gripping American leftists, try to see the world through their eyes. Presto, you’re now part of the raging resistance.

    Like the Palestinians who mark Israel’s birth as their nakba, or tragedy, you regard Donald Trump’s 2016 victory as a catastrophe. It’s the last thing you think of most nights, and the first thing most mornings.

    You can’t shake it or escape it. Whatever you watch, listen to or read, there are reminders — Donald Trump really is president.

    You actually believe the New York Times is too nice to him, so you understand why a Manhattan woman urged a reporter there to stop covering Trump to protest his presidency.

    And where the hell is Robert Mueller? He was supposed to save us from this nightmare — that’s what Chuck Schumer banked on. Well?

    You spend your tax cut even as you rail against the man who made it happen. And you are pleased that cousin Jimmy finally got a job, though you repeat the daily devotional that Barack Obama deserves credit for the roaring economy.

    And now this — Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, and Trump gets another Supreme Court pick. The court might tilt right for the rest of your life. He’s winning.

    NOOOOOOOOO!!!

    In a nutshell, our visit to the tortured mind of a Trump hater explains everything from Saturday’s mass marches to why a Virginia restaurant owner declared No Soup for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

    Their loathing for Trump is bone-deep and all-consuming. This is war and they take no prisoners.

    For most marchers, border policies offer a chance to vent. They didn’t make a peep when Obama did the same thing.

  • Austin’s liberal leadership is making the same mistakes liberal Democrats in places like New York City and San Francisco make. “Public order makes urban life possible. How will the virtue-signaling hipsters react when Austin’s beloved 6th Street morphs into the seedy Times Square of yore?”
  • Kurt Schlicter on the glorious humiliation of #NeverTrump:

    Last week was especially glorious not just because we rejected the latest GOPe amnesty scheme, not just because we defunded the left’s union cash extortion machine with the Janus decision, and not just because Justice Kennedy is leaving to be the swing vote on his retirement community HOA. It was especially glorious because these enormous victories – these latest enormous victories – were the direct result of normal Americans giving the gimps, grifters, and geebos of Never Trump the George Costanza treatment by doing precisely the opposite of our alleged betters’ political instincts.

    Everything they told us was wrong. If we had done what they demanded, we would not be revelling in the joy of conserva-victory. We would be resigned to yet another defeat. “But Gorsuch” indeed, you never-been-kissed band of losers.

    If we had listened to Never Trump, we’d have voted for Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and we would not only have Merrick Garland (or worse) on the SCOTUS but now she’d be picking another pinko who agrees with the lib bloc that the First Amendment has hitherto unknown asterisks that prevent conservatives from using it, that a bunch of other rights that aren’t in the Constitution actually are, and that the Second Amendment stuff about not infringing on our right to keep and bear arms really means libs can totally infringe on our right to keep and bear arms. Let’s leave aside our booming economy and crushing ISIS and pulling out of the climate scam and maybe peace with North Korea. Just these two Supreme Court picks makes Trump the most important and successful conservative president since The Big R. And we wouldn’t have any of it if that nattering pack of insufferable sissies had had their way.

    Snip.

    The remaining rump of Never Trumpers is here to lose. That’s their goal. Team Muh Principles always intended to lose. Oh, they try to play off their objections to the president as purely one of style. It’s because Donald Trump is so…so…so…oh well I never. But their displeasure with Trump’s aesthetic deficiencies is not the sole, nor even the most significant, reason for their fury at the orange-y interloper. They are really mad because, under Trump, these dorks can’t get the White House to return their calls.

    Trump threw the Fredocons out of the family business. They are nothing to us. They are not brothers-in-arms and they are not friends. We don’t want to know them or what they do. We’d take them out in a figurative row boat onto Lake Tahoe but we don’t want to be seen hanging around with them.

    We ruined their scam. They miss the cruise ships, filled with marks handing over cash to mingle with second-tier scribes from magazines put out by lesser sons of greater fathers that we stopped reading when they stopped mattering. Never Trump wants to once stand on a sold-out cruise ship’s bridge, pale puny arms spread wide, shouting, “I’m a minor duke of the world!”

    They’ve been stripped of their silly status, but that silly status – “Oh, I am an assistant fellow at the Institute to For Conservative Studies and Mailing List Compilation” – was all they had. In the DC milieu they want to return to, they were never kings, or even princes (though they sure dig the hereditary titles vibe), but just minor royalty jealously guarding their little, tiny fiefdoms. Sure, the liberal establishment ran things, but the Professional Cons had their own petty gigs pretending to resist, pretending to care, all the while treading water in a sea of mediocrity and ineffectuality.

  • If you hadn’t heard already, Harvard’s admission process was biased against Asian Americans:

    My father always thought it was remarkable how, despite the bias against Jews in higher education, so many Jews of his generation, and the generation before his, still managed to go to college and become doctors and lawyers. Why did it happen? Because it was a cultural imperative imposed at the family level. If Harvard wouldn’t take you, try Yale. If Yale said no, try Cornell. If none of the Ivies wanted you, try the University of Michigan (my Dad’s alma mater). The stereotype of Jewish families placing an enormous emphasis on education is a stereotype for a reason.

    Asian Americans have a similar stereotype, and it too has a basis in reality.

    Anyway, here’s my theory. According to reports, Harvard discriminated against Asian applicants because they had “bad” personalities. Wesley Yang has a moving op-ed in the New York Times today on the subject. He recounts how Casey Pedrick, an assistant principal at (the ruthlessly meritocratic) Stuyvesant High School in New York City was brought to tears by the evidence that Harvard discriminated against high-scoring, high-achieving, Asian-American students. Yang writes:

    Ms. Pedrick knows that her Asian students believe they have to earn their admission to Stuyvesant in the only way anyone has for more than four decades: by passing a rigorous entrance exam. Their parents will often invest a major share of the family income into test preparation courses to help them pass — this despite the fact that more Asians live in poverty than any other group in New York City.

    Asian students come from families that put an enormous emphasis on education as a bulwark against poverty and as a ticket to economic prosperity (not always the same thing). Contrary to some reporting, this doesn’t mean they don’t spend time on extra-curricular activities. The Asian students had more extra-curricular activities than white applicants. But, I would bet that the Asian kids were more focused on education as high-end vocational training. The white kids come from a milieu where college is seen as a place for making social connections and a rite of passage. The Asian kids want careers, specifically careers in STEM professions.

    So here’s my theory: It’s not that these kids don’t have good personalities, it’s that they don’t have fully “woke” personalities. They don’t speak the language of cosmopolitan, secular noblesse oblige that so often takes the form of political correctness — at least not with sufficient fluency. They don’t know the shibboleths that demonstrate they understand what higher education is really for.

    Moreover, their inability or unwillingness to care enough about such stuff is an indication of what they want out of college. Perhaps there are a bunch of Asian-immigrant parents out there who would be perfectly happy to have their kids go to Harvard and major in gender theory or some such. But I suspect not.

    As I recently recounted, my father-in-law had the kind of practicality that comes from being a refugee. His favorite response to self-indulgent ideas about what to do for a living was, “Yeah, but can you eat it?” What he meant was that careers, education, and business ideas should be grounded in something real, something useful. I suspect that there are many Asian-American Paul Gavoras out there.

    If Harvard lifted its anti-Asian criteria, Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research said the share of Asian students at Harvard would more than double, from 19 percent to 43 percent. But that 43 percent wouldn’t be distributed equally among all courses and disciplines. It would be a boon for computer-science and biology classes, but even more seats would go empty in women’s history or poetry courses. And I can’t help but think that the faculties in the humanities and the softer social sciences have disproportionate sway on the cultural and political assumptions of the school’s administration. They are, after all, the talkers.

  • “The Left is turning against the First Amendment because absolute respect for freedom of speech is not consistent with tearing down capitalism.”
  • Merkel blinks, to set up immigration screening centers on border to keep her coalition together.
  • The Army is working on 100 KW anti-drone lasers. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, and six of his followers were executed in Japan for their role in the sarin gas attacks against the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that killed 12, in addition to another 24 or so victims of other cult attacks. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Feds bust cartel ammo runner in McAllen:

    Federal agents arrested a legal permanent resident from Mexico who bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition for smuggling into the Mexican border city of Matamoros — the scene of large-scale internecine Gulf Cartel gun battles.

    The arrest took place over the weekend when 48-year-old Ruben Ramos Beltran went to a local gun store and bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition, a criminal complaint obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed. Authorities describe the man as a Mexican national who is a legal resident in Texas. Homeland Security Investigations was carrying out a surveillance operation at the local gun store and spotted Ramos pick up an order of 5,000 rounds of 7.62×39 ammunition, a type typically used in AK-47 type rifles which are heavily favored by cartel gunmen.

    5,000 rounds is not a small amount, and at current prices that works out to a bit over a grand. On the other hand, if that’s your primary gun, and you’re a “100 rounds at the range every week” sort of guy, that’s not that far off the curve… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Juggalos 1, Face Recognition Software 0. And it’s not like I can pass up a chance to use the “Insane Clown Posse” tag…
  • Rolling Stone writer gets trolled into wearing MAGA hat in search of an interview. “I directed Ms. Robb up the hill and to a pleasant location near the lake in the nearby State Park where I imagine that I might have waited, had I actually left my house, which I hadn’t.”
  • The Alamo Drafthouse is testing a pilot subscription program. Probably not for me, unless someone wants to pay me to be a full-time movie critic.
  • Johnny Manziel sobers up. Good for him. If it sticks.

    • I know this is super late, but it is still Friday…

    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Democrats’ Hispanic Panic Fizzles

    Posted on July 5, 2018 by Lawrence Person

    I assume Democrats ginned up the border separation issue for the same reason George Soros bankrolled Black Lives Matter: To motivate an important part of the Democratic Party’s ethnic pandering coalition to go to the polls to vote for Democrats.

    One tiny problem: Just as Black Lives matters failed to get black voters to the polls to drag Hillary across the line in the same out-sized numbers they gave Obama, so too has the Hispanic Panic Ploy failed to energize Hispanics:

    Democrats counting on President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies to spark energized Hispanic turnout and a wave against GOP candidates in this year’s midterms will be surprised to see what’s transpiring. Even during the heat of the family-separation crisis, Democrats are underperforming in heavily Hispanic constituencies, from GOP-held border battlegrounds in Texas to diversifying districts in Southern California to the nation’s most populous Senate battleground in Florida.

    If immigration affects the battle for Congress, it will be because of the anti-Trump backlash among suburban women as much as any increased mobilization in the Hispanic communities. The early returns are a sobering reminder for Democrats that, even as the Republican Party is becoming a more nativist institution, GOP candidates are still holding their own in diverse battlegrounds by distinguishing themselves from Trump.

    Rep. Will Hurd of Texas once looked like one of the most vulnerable House Republicans, representing a border district where Hispanics make up 70 percent of the population—a seat Hillary Clinton carried by 4 points in 2016. Hurd has long been an independent GOP voice, emerging as a critic of Trump’s border-wall proposals and a supporter of a path to citizenship for Dreamers. But, as Democrats frequently bring up, he’s also a congressman whose partisan affiliation will help keep Republicans in charge of the House.

    He’s in surprisingly good shape as he vies for a third term against Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones. Despite holding one of the 25 GOP seats that Clinton carried, he’s not on the list of The Cook Political Report’s most endangered 31 members. His Texas colleagues John Culberson and Pete Sessions, representing suburban Houston and Dallas districts where Republicans traditionally dominate, are in deeper trouble. It’s a crystal-clear sign that the anti-Trump anger is concentrated within whiter, affluent suburban communities, not the Hispanic battlegrounds with the most at stake.

    There are also plenty of other clues suggesting Hispanic voters won’t be rushing to the polls this November. In a special election to fill the vacant seat of former Rep. Blake Farenthold of Texas last Saturday, there were few signs of a Democratic wave. The reliably Republican district is majority-Hispanic, yet GOP candidates on the ballot tallied the same 60 percent vote share that Trump did in 2016. There were no signs of increased Hispanic engagement—even with the border crisis raging not far away.

    Those results mirror the results from the March Texas primaries, in which the Democrats’ Senate nominee Beto O’Rourke, a progressive favorite, badly underperformed in many border towns with large Hispanic populations. O’Rourke carried 87 percent of the vote in millennial-friendly Travis County (Austin), but fell well short of a majority in most counties along the border.

    That confirms what we already know from the most recent Harris poll:

    70 percent of registered voters, including 69 percent of independents, think we need stricter enforcement of the country’s immigration laws. Sixty-nine percent of those polled said ICE should not be abolished. Further, the survey found tremendous opposition, 84 percent, to the sanctuary city practice of not notifying immigration authorities when an an illegal immigrant has been arrested for crimes and taken into custody.

    That includes increased support for President Donald Trump among Hispanics.

    Open borders are deeply unpopular, no matter how much intra-Democratic Party dynamics push them toward that extreme. I suspect they’ll find that out in November.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Happy Independence Day!

    Posted on July 4, 2018 by Lawrence Person

    Happy Independence Day!

    Unfortunately, Williamson County remains under a burn ban due to a dry summer that looks likely to break only when it’s too late. So wherever you are that’s not under such conditions, try to fire off some extras for me…

    Posted in Texas | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

    Morgan Stanley Banker Who Wants To Start “Third Party” Donates Exclusively to Democrats

    Posted on July 3, 2018 by Lawrence Person

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

    Eric Grossman doesn’t look like he would want to do anything drastic. The top lawyer at Morgan Stanley is a 51-year-old homeowner in the New York suburbs with twin sons and a seat on the firm’s management committee. He’s another man in a power suit in a midtown Manhattan bank.

    He also wants to topple America’s two-party system.

    Or so he says.

    Grossman is trying to build a new party—called the Serve America Movement, or SAM—even though third wheels in American politics tend to have the lasting power of the Free Soilers and the Anti-Masons. His quixotic goal hasn’t deterred donors that include fellow members of Morgan Stanley’s operating committee, the bank’s head of government relations, its top independent board member, and the last chief executive officer, John Mack.

    Nothing says “in touch with the center of America” quite like a party founded and funded by New York City bankers…

    Don’t expect this crusade for unity to turn into the next Women’s March, Tea Party, or even a semi-memorable hashtag. At least so far, this is what resistance to President Donald Trump looks like on Wall Street. Even though tax cuts and reduced regulation have made big banks and corporations some of this era’s big winners, many of their executives squirm when the president abandons global agreements and threatens trade wars. These people also tend to resent and even dread the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, as if it’s out to get them personally. That opens a space for SAM’s unlikely, ambitious and well-moneyed cry for something else.

    “Perhaps it’s a fear of arrogance that people are like, ‘Wow you can’t say that, you can’t say you’re going to be a party,’” said Richard Bennett, a partner at investment firm B-FORE Capital who contributed $140,000 to SAM. “I’m like, why not? What else are we going to do? That’s the only thing that’s going to fix it.”

    SAM stands against divisiveness, but what it stands for isn’t obvious. One Morgan Stanley executive who donated admitted he doesn’t know anything about it, he just wanted to help a friend’s pet cause.

    SAM’s upbeat website, with no specifics on immigration, reproductive rights, or the health-care system, can’t clear up big questions. The principles are so broad and cheerful—“applying America’s innovative spirit,” “a strong, clear-eyed, values-based leader,” and “the vitality of local communities”—that they have the ring of taglines for a Silicon Valley startup that hasn’t put out a product yet.

    This inoffensive flavor makes sense for a political project backed by executives from Morgan Stanley, a big bank with a particularly understated political style.

    Snip.

    Grossman is the kind of big-time bank attorney who made it into the club of Wall Street lawyers that flew to the Trianon Palace Versailles hotel outside Paris in 2016 to talk shop. He isn’t enrolled in a party, and he’s donated about $28,000 outside of SAM, money that tended to go to moderate Democrats and Morgan Stanley’s Republican-leaning political action committee.

    Looks like somebody didn’t do their homework.

    Assuming that the Eric Grossman of Larchmont, NY, zip 10538 who works for Morgan Stanley is in fact the same person as the Eric Grossman of New York, NY, 10036 who works for Morgan Stanley, then the phrase “moderate Democrats” would be what we outside the confines of New York City would refer to as “a lie.”

    Let’s look at who Grossman has contributed to:

  • Multiple donations to Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, arguably the sixth most liberal senator.
  • Democratic U.S. House candidate Antonio Delgado, a quick look at whose issues page shows zero deviation from far-left Democratic Party boilerplate.
  • The politics of Reshma M. Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, are harder to get a bead on, since she lost the Democratic U.S. House race Grossman contributed to by a whopping 68 points despite raising $1.3 million for the race (or $213 for every vote received).
  • Democratic Senators Michael F. Bennet, Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner (all of whom Grossman contributed to) might be considered “moderates” only by Democratic Party standards, not those of the American people.
  • According to Open Secrets, he’s never donated to a Republican candidate.
  • He may or may not be the Eric F. Grossman of New York, NY, zip 10019 who worked for Morgan Stanley and who donated $2,300 to Hillary Clinton in 2007.

    • A look at Serve America Movement’s twitter feed shows that they’re anti-NRA, pro-illegal alien, and anti-Trump.

    If all this sounds strangely familiar, it’s because it sounds an awful lot like “The Coffee Party” or “No Labels,” ostensibly centrist organizations that just happened to pop up to great media attention when the Tea Party was gaining momentum. Both of those are apparently moribund now, just like the “Serve America Movement” will be once it’s goal of stopping Republican momentum has failed like the others as well…

    (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)

    Posted in Democrats | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

    Slimy Scumbags Rip Off Richard Overton

    Posted on July 2, 2018 by Lawrence Person

    Sad news: Austin’s own Richard Overton was victimized last week:

    Richard Overton just turned 112 years old in May, making him America’s oldest living veteran and the oldest living man in the country, period. He’s a whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking national treasure who still lives in the same modest home he built in Austin, Texas after serving in the Army during World War II. Unfortunately, some morally depraved dirtbags decided to rob him, cleaning out his bank account.

    According to CBS Austin, Overton’s family told reporters that the thieves got access to his Social Security Number and bank account information, which they used to purchase savings bonds, eventually nearly emptying out the account.

    Spectrum News Austin spoke to Overton’s cousin Volma Overton, Jr., who said that on Wednesday he went to the bank to deposit a check for Overton, and then noticed the discrepancy when he checked the account balance and a significant amount of money was missing. The bonds were purchased from a company called Treasury Direct in four separate payments over the past few months.

    Fortunately there’s a GoFundMe page for Overton to help with his in-home health care expenses. I threw in a few bucks, and you can do the same.

    And here’s hoping police catch the lowlife scumbags who ripped him off.

    Posted in Austin, Crime, Texas | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

    Criminal Dumbasses on Parade

    Posted on July 1, 2018 by Lawrence Person

    A really satisfying video for your Sunday viewing pleasure:

    And yes, it is even better with the Benny Hillizer…

    Posted in Crime, video | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

    Colion Noir on Bill Maher

    Posted on June 30, 2018 by Lawrence Person

    Bill Maher, the conservative-curious liberal, talks to NRA-TV’s Colion Noir about guns, and an actual, reasonable discussion breaks out:

    Posted in Guns, video | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

    LinkSwarm for June 29, 2018

    Posted on June 29, 2018 by Lawrence Person

    Half the year gone! And so far, those of you who declared “Surely Democrats can’t keep up this level of lunacy” are losing your bets…

  • How Democrats’ said lunacy will backfire on them:

    Democrats should also understand that these public tantrums and other slights are simply bad politics. Voters don’t respond well to angry chanting losers harassing people, or to vulgar celebrities, or to threats verging on intimidation and violence. There is nothing inspirational about it, and it makes the targets of the anger look that much more reasonable. If Democrats think this crazed behavior will generate a “blue wave” in November, they are mistaken.

  • Why Democrats are freaking out over Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement:

    How did we get here? Two tracks converged to deliver us this dysfunction. The first is narrowly political. The Democrats, confident that they were on the right side of history, thought there was no harm in accelerating the rush to total victory. For years, Democrats practiced the rule that all is fair in judicial-confirmation battles, starting with the war on Judge Robert Bork in 1987. Then, under the leadership of Barack Obama and then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid, they did away with the filibuster on judicial appointments short of the Supreme Court, opening the door for Republicans to nudge it slightly more wide open.

    The second track is longer. Starting over a century ago, progressives began emphasizing ends over means. If the Supreme Court could deliver wins unattainable at the ballot box and unsupported by the Constitution, so be it. Thus was born the “living Constitution” — the doctrine that holds that the magical parchment should mean whatever progressives need it to mean at any moment. This was how Anthony Kennedy became an (apparently temporary) gay-rights hero. After consulting his feelings, he found a constitutional right no one had found in the text before.

    This idea that the Supreme Court is there to serve as a Praetorian Guard around progressive policies was on full display this week. Prior to Kennedy’s retirement announcement, the court issued a 5–4 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that public-sector unions can’t compel nonunion members to pay fees for union representation, thus violating the First Amendment.

    Justice Elena Kagan caustically disagreed. For her, the problem with the decision was that “public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support.”

    “The First Amendment was meant for better things,” Kagan concluded in her dissent. “It was meant not to undermine but to protect democratic governance — including over the role of public-sector unions.”

    In short: The Supreme Court isn’t there to protect the meaning of the First Amendment; the Supreme Court is there to protect a secure source of financial support for public-sector unions. If the First Amendment gets in the way, that’s okay.

    The panic unfolding across the progressive landscape stems from the creeping fear that the Supreme Court might start doing its job — and not the job progressives have assigned it.

  • Hugh Hewett: “Turns out ‘But Gorsuch’ was a good argument after all.”

    What will the #NeverTrump coalition in the Beltway (with an annex in New York) say now?

    For a while, before tax cuts and regulatory reform boosted the economy, before defense spending increased, before Jerusalem was recognized as Israel’s capital, and before a “maximum pressure” campaign led to a detente with North Korea, #NeverTrumpers were fond of mockingly summarizing Trump supporters’ arguments as “But Gorsuch.”

    This bit of childish taunting always struck me as an unknowing admission of ignorance about the role assumed by the Supreme Court in modern American governance. Even when 21 appeals court judges took their seats — orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues — still the one-note pundits played on, only louder: President Trump was so awful and evil, and conservatives who supported him had done so for one lousy seat on the Supreme Court.

    The implication from all the noise and a thousands posts was that “Gorsuch” wasn’t worth it. Now, after Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s first year on the court, it will be impossible to overstate what his confirmation has meant.

  • Anthony Kennedy as moderate conservative pragmatist:

    While Justice Kennedy was usually a moderate conservative, there were areas of the law in which Justice Kennedy was not particularly moderate and others in which he was not particularly conservative. Particularly in areas touching on the freedom of speech and personal liberty, Justice Kennedy would swing for the fences. Justice Kennedy was easily the most speech-protective Justice on what was a quite speech-protective Court. Whether the speech at issue concerned political campaigns or product pricing, “offensive” messages or dishonest claims about military service, Justice Kennedy believed in uncompromising First Amendment protection. By some accounts it was Justice Kennedy who pushed the Court (and a reluctant Chief Justice) to invalidate the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and this would be entirely consistent with what we saw in his First Amendment opinions.

    Speech was not the only freedom that mattered to Justice Kennedy. He had a deep concern for Due Process, as shown in his embrace of habeas rights for alleged enemy combatants, his concerns about the application of capital punishment to some classes of criminal defendants, and his embrace of constitutional limits on punitive damages. He also, perhaps most famously, believed that due regard for individual liberty barred the government from adopting laws prohibiting or disregarding same-sex relationships, as in Lawrence, Romer, Windsor, and Obergefell. In these areas, there was nothing modest, moderate, or minimalist about Justice Kennedy’s views or the doctrinal rules he would embrace.

    Given the makeup of the Roberts Court, as went Justice Kennedy, so went the Court. Where Kennedy was a moderate conservative favoring a minimalist approach, the Roberts court would tend to adopt a moderate conservative opinion. Where Justice Kennedy favored a more muscular approach, on the other hand, there were almost always at least four votes to go along. (NFIB v. Sebelius being a notable exception.) If Justice Kennedy wanted to recognize same-sex marriage or preclude the use of the death penalty for those convicted of non-lethal crimes, the liberals would agree. If Justice Kennedy wanted to protect campaign-related or commercial speech, the conservatives were there. so the Roberts Court was generally as conservative and as moderate as Justice Kennedy wanted to be.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • Kurt Schlichter on the insanity gripping the Democratic Party:

    There’s no sign of sanity. This week they turned the hate up to “11,” then cranked it to “17.” There are not many places to go once you reach “You are real live Nazis murdering children by not letting aspiring Democrat voters flow into the country at will!” At some point, instead of a few wild-eyed randos with crummy aim trying to off libs’ political/cultural opponents, they are going to start collectively going to go for the throat.

    Our collective throat. Which I do not anticipate us Normals responding to in a huggy, loving kind of way.

    Snip.

    We’re already seeing it play out. The mainstream media quit even pretending to be honest – it’s in full scale fib mode. Look at the Time magazine cover of the little girl whose scumbag mom dragged her across the desert to help her break our laws (apparently without daddy’s permission and not for the first time). That Time cover is a lie, but it’s no surprise. The only surprise is that Time magazine is still a thing.

    In fact, the whole manufactured outrage over Democrat-preferred criminals being treated like every other criminal was a lie. And the media not only doesn’t care but actively and consciously supports lying to you to support its liberal allies. But no one cares anymore. They can lie and lie and lie, and do, and we just smile and buy more guns and ammo.

    So the leftists attempt to intimidate us into submission, showing up at people’s houses and screaming at them in restaurants. Take that, Sarah! The idea is since the leftists can’t convince Normals with the power of their ideas – because leftists’ ideas inevitably involve Normals ceding more of their rights and money to leftists – the left wants to make submission and obedience the price for being able to participate in the culture. But what’s inevitable is that us newly militant Normals, whose power is political rather than cultural, are going to respond pursuant to the New Rules and demand that leftists bake us a cake.

  • The craziness among Democrats can be explained by the behavior of cultists after a prophecy fails: the moderates, the ones who were the biggest brake on untrammeled lunacy, are the ones out the door first.

    The more lukewarm Democrats are either keeping their mouths shut or are disappearing from the Party. The ones who remain are the ones who are more committed (translation: barking mad moonbats) who are the ones we hear talking about impeachment, banishing Trump supporters from the public square, protesting at Republican’s houses, etc.

    It also explains why Democratic Party big wigs are losing primary challenges to candidates of the more barking mad persuasion (e.g. Joe Crowley, one of the biggest of the Democratic House big wigs who lost to someone who can only be described as a commie).

  • Speaking of which, the House’s fourth-ranking Democrat just got knocked off by a woman who wants to abolish ICE. “The objection of the hard Left is not to the current style or kind of immigration enforcement; their objection is to the existence of immigration enforcement.”
  • Mega Turbo Democrat Dumbass: “I’m going to find the Congressman’s kids and kill them. If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids. Don’t try to find me because you won’t.” Yeah, that last bit turned out to not be the case: The FBI arrested him within hours.
  • “Janus Ruling Could Cost Unions Hundreds of Millions.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “In ruling on bullet-stamping law, California Supreme Court says state laws cannot be invalidated on the grounds that complying with them is impossible.” Evidently liberals find this whole “reality” thing too much of a drag…
  • Keep in mind that a majority of Democrats don’t want to abolish ICE. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • In East Texas, more of that voter fraud Democrats claim doesn’t exist.
  • And also in South Texas. Bonus: Hidalgo County fraud, which we’ve previously covered.
  • Bonus: Judges orders redo of Democratic primary runoff due to voting fraud:

    A judge ordered a do-over of a contested Democratic primary runoff race in South Texas after invalidating the runoff results due to voter fraud. The runoff was decided by six votes.

    Ofelia “Ofie” Gutierrez contested the results of the May 22 Democratic primary runoff for Kleberg County Justice of the Peace Precinct 4 after losing to incumbent Esequiel “Cheque” De La Paz by a vote of 318 to 312.

    Gutierrez alleged that more than six illegal votes were counted, cast by people who didn’t reside within Precinct 4 and therefore weren’t eligible to vote in the election.

    On Tuesday, visiting Judge Joel Johnson threw out seven of the 16 ballots Gutierrez challenged in court. All seven were cast by voters related in some way to De La Paz.

  • “Head of prominent charity that campaigns against child abuse is arrested for ‘trying to arrange to rape multiple children as young as two.”
  • 200 Muslim migrants attempt to storm the Croatian border yelling “Allahu Akbar.”
  • Iran reopens uranium plant. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Iran, protests there continued for a sixth day following a currency collapse. “On Sunday, the rial plunged 15 percent to IRR 89,000 against the dollar on the black market. Since the U.S. withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal on May 8, the rial has lost more than 40 percent of its value.”
  • The dumbasses at the Austin City Council approved building a soccer stadium. Because subsidizing a popular sport just wasn’t insulting enough to taxpayers…
  • Were Houston police officers dosed with flyers laced with Fentanyl left on patrol car windshields? Followup: Lab tests say no.
  • What it’s like to service an SR-71. “Our last structural integrity review was in 1987, and it declared that the aircraft was about 180 percent stronger than the day it was made. The higher and faster you flew it, the stronger the titanium became.”
  • CNN’s ratings fall below those of the food network. (Hat tip: Ace.)
  • Black man being arrested for shoplifting calls police Nazis. So they charged him with a hate crime. All hate crime laws are stupid, but those that criminalize free speech are an order of magnitude stupider. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • A Tweet with some numbers from the latest Harris poll:

  • A sample from the #WalkAway tag on Twitter:

  • Are eight AT&T buildings (including one in Dallas) hubs for NSA spying?
  • Multiculturalism Watch: Excavating the Aztec’s ceremonial skull rack, which the Spanish conquistadors estimated as holding 130,000 skulls from human sacrifices. “Gomoz Valdas found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children. Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed.”
  • Harlan Ellison, RIP.
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    Democrat (Ex-)State Senator Carlos Uresti Gets 12 Years For Fraud

    Posted on June 28, 2018 by Lawrence Person

    Texas Democratic State Senator Carlos Uresti was indicted, tried, convicted, resigned, and now he’s been sentenced on 11 felony fraud counts.

    Former state Sen. Carlos Uresti was sentenced Tuesday to 12 years in prison for his roles in defrauding investors in an oil field services company.

    He was ordered to pay $6.3 million in restitution to victims and faces three years probation, after he is released, for each of 11 felony counts. But Uresti remains free on bond until the end of his next trial, which starts Oct. 22.

    The longtime San Antonio politician was convicted in February of 11 felonies and had faced a recommended sentence between 168 to 210 months.

    (Hat tip: Dwight, who observes “Note how far down you have to scroll in the article before former Senator Uresti’s party affiliation is mentioned.”)

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