Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
January 14, 2022
January 13, 2022
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Thieves Raiding Cargo Containers, Stealing Packages On Downtown L.A. Union Pacific Train Tracks.
A section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles has been littered with thousands of shredded boxes, packages stolen from cargo containers that stop in the area to unload.
Thieves have been raiding the cargo containers, taking packages that belong to people from all over the country from retailers like Amazon, REI and others.
The refuse left behind, like home COVID test kits, are items that the robbers did not want or did not think were valuable enough to take.
Sources told CBSLA that the locks Union Pacific uses* are easy to cut, and officials with the Los Angeles Police Department said they don’t respond to reports of a train robbery unless Union Pacific asks them for help, which they said is rare.
While CBSLA was on the scene with cameras, one person was seen running off with a container used to hold smaller packages, and a Union Pacific officer was spotted chasing after two other people who appeared to be rifling through packages.
CBSLA also obtained video of University of Southern California Campus Police arresting a suspected thief last month. According to officers, the suspect’s bag was filled with stolen goods taken from the train tracks.
* I assume this refers to the locks used on the intermodal container cars that Union Pacific locomotives pull through the area where, as CBS-LA cameraman John Schreiber tweets, “trains frequently slow or stop…as they get worked into the [Union Pacific] Intermodal facility near Downtown LA. The thieves use this opportunity to break open containers and take what’s inside. I’d say every 4th or 5th rail car had opened containers.” More video in this Twitter thread by Schreiber:
Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K
— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022
RIP: TERRY TEACHOUT, 1956-2022.
Terry Teachout published more pieces in COMMENTARY than any other writer in the magazine’s 76-year history. He was a monthly contributor for a quarter century—first as classical music critic and then as critic-at-large. On just two occasions in the 13 years of my editorship did he miss a month, our new issue being one of the two—he was unable to meet a deadline for an article on Buster Keaton because of a loved one’s health problem.
Just an hour ago I heard the dreadful news that Terry died in his sleep today, a few weeks shy of his 66th birthday. The loss to his loved ones, the loss to the American theatre he both championed as a critic and mastered as a playwright, and the loss to the broader American culture he knew more fully than anyone else in our time cannot be overstated.
I’m genuinely shocked to hear of his passing; I interviewed him once or twice for PJM’s old Sirius-XM show, and loved his Commentary columns and books.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: GOP Lawmaker Moves to Abolish Virginia’s Government Monopoly on Hard Liquor Sales.
MATTEL HONORS GUN-TOTING REPUBLICAN WOMAN: Mattel Honors Black Conservative Activist, Suffragette, and Investigative Journalist Ida B. Wells With a Barbie Doll.
It took them long enough. Ida B. Wells has been ignored for years, mainly because she was a conservative activist before it was a thing, as well as a gun rights advocate, when the laws in the country were moving in the direction of creating more gun control laws solely to prevent Blacks from arming themselves.
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In Wells’ writings, and particularly in an 1885 letter mentioned by Politifact, Wells expressed how she felt about Democrats and their agenda.
“I am not a Democrat,” Wells wrote, “because the Democrats considered me a chattel and possibly might have always so considered me, because their record from the beginning has been inimical to my interests.
During that time period, Blacks were aligned with Republicans, because Republicans were the party that was formed to end slavery (they did), and usher in Reconstruction (they tried). The Democrats who were the party of slavery, and then Jim Crow would have nothing to do with an Ida B. Wells, and Wells would have had nothing to do with them.
I think she would feel the same today, since much of what the Democrats are doing now is reminiscent of their tactics then. Today’s meltdown over not being able to kill the Senate filibuster and do their federal takeover of voting rights is an excellent example. They were the same party then, as they are now.
Still waiting for Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, but this will do in the meantime.
LIVE BY TWITTER, DIE BY TWITTER: D’oh! SCOTUS justice quoted a Ron Klain retweet to show how Biden was trying to skirt the Constitution for vax mandate.
Flashback: Journo Twitter runs the Biden administration.
DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Microsoft Word introduces new “woke” feature to monitor your language.
Clippy morphed into Big Brother so slowly, I hardly even noticed.
THAT’S WHAT XI SAID! NY Gov. Hochul met with Chinese official who called genocide of Uyghur Muslims ‘lies.’ Huang Ping said, ‘I see these centers as a campus rather than camps.’
Related: Uyghur women in China labor camps recall horror of rape, forced sterilization.
MICHIGAN AUDIT TO SHOW ‘NEARLY 30%’ MORE COVID DEATHS TIED TO LONG-TERM CARE FACILITIES:
While the report itself won’t be revealed until Monday, the early release of Wednesday’s letter by the Department of Health and Human Services was a sign of the attention the findings will likely receive.
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s handling of nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a key point of disagreement with GOP lawmakers, and legislators have been working to investigate the data at the center of the debate.
House Oversight Chairman Steve Johnson, R-Wayland, confirmed the 30% finding in a Wednesday evening interview.
“The 30% number is accurate, and it’s incredibly troubling,” Johnson said of the Auditor General’s finding.
Despite the above report, and similar headlines from New York State, other Democratic governors are employing the same strategy, to likely similar disastrous results: Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Connecticut is asking nursing homes to take in Covid-positive patients.
REAL CLEAR INVESTIGATIONS: Cop Who Killed Ashli Babbitt Was Cleared of Criminal Wrongdoing Without Interview.
I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: A public school in Illinois is hosting an After School Satan Club.
PRINCE ANDREW STRIPPED OF MILITARY, ROYAL TITLES AMID SEXUAL ASSAULT CASE: Queen Elizabeth II agreed to the arrangement in the wake of Prince Andrew’s legal woes.
RUY TEIXEIRA: The Democrats’ Voting Rights Chimera.
The Democratic focus in the new year has been on trying to pass some version of voting rights reform. President Biden went down to Georgia and put the effort in stark terms: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
Teixeira appropriately calls that sort of language “unhinged level of hyperbole.” How’s that playing out for them? Sinema to deliver a Senate floor “double down” against Biden’s filibuster attacks.
And she does: Sinema Deals Death Blow to Biden’s Final Push to Suspend Filibuster.
MICHAEL WALSH: ‘A Battle for the Soul of America.’
Like the Wizard of Oz, Joe Biden shouts at you to pay no attention to the figurehead standing at the podium while his wicked witches and flying monkeys ready another assault on America-as-founded and its institutions. Biden and his party answer to a higher authority, perceive an arc of history that bends toward their idea of “justice,” and will “by any means necessary” compel your conformity. They wake up every morning and ask themselves: how can we punish our enemies today? And then they set about doing just that.
So Biden was right. He’s said it many times. This really is a battle for the soul of America. And you’re the enemy.
Read the whole thing.
Lifted from the comments, a technological feat:
Traffic cameras in Chicago disproportionately ticket Black and Latino motorists.
Readers are invited to spot the word that’s doing the heavy lifting. It appears 1o times in the article quoted above, excluding variations.
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See also the words disparate, disparity and disparities, which occur no fewer than 22 times.
It’s good enough for me — ban racist red-light and speeding cameras throughout the country.
HOW IT STARTED: Joe Biden: I’m going to ‘shut down the virus’, not the US.
—The Grauniad, October 23rd, 2020.
How it’s going: Politico: Dems beg Biden for a COVID strategy “reset.”
Democrats have good reason to panic. Biden started off with strong voter support, especially on the pandemic. That has collapsed in the general confidence-crisis cascade, but the chaos around COVID-19 is akin to inflation — it hits Americans every day in one way or another. If it’s not workplace access, it’s grocery shortages. If it’s not grocery shortages, it’s supply chain delays and service wait times. As the midterms approach, Democrats have already begun to panic about pandemic fatigue, along with inflation, the border crisis, and so on. It’s morphing into Biden/Harris fatigue, and perhaps even more broadly into Democrat fatigue as party leadership focuses on hobby-horse agenda items rather than what truly plagues voters, pun very much intended.
By November, if Biden doesn’t grab a clue about his terrible performance, Democrats won’t even get to play checkers in a 3D chess environment. They’ll end up playing tic-tac-toe … and losing.
—Ed Morrissey, Hot Air, today.
OUT ON A LIMB: Kevin McCarthy: Biden White House Likes High Gas Prices, ‘Whole Plan All About Green New Deal.’
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy told Breitbart News that Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration enjoys high gas prices because the Democrats are using that crisis to try to force Americans to accept their radical Green New Deal agenda.
“If you listen to the White House, they say having a high price of gasoline is good, right?” McCarthy said. “Their whole plan is all about the Green New Deal, right? There is a bridge before you ever move from a combustion engine or others. If you have an electric car, you have to charge it. You have to have electricity for it. If you want to buy an electric car, they’re about $50,000.”
McCarthy’s comments came during the latest On The Hill long-form video special, taped in December at an Eastern Market establishment on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. McCarthy in late November set a new record for the longest floor speech in U.S. House history, defeating a previous record by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when he made his case against the now-dead Build Back Better multitrillion-dollar Biden agenda bill. During that speech, he noted that he could not afford a Tesla or another electric car because they are too expensive. In the interview, McCarthy expanded on that by noting the Democrats are rewarding the wealthy who can afford electric vehicles and penalizing working class Americans who cannot.
In other words, Obama retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
Seen in Cleburne, TX, Christmas Eve:
Update (from Steve):
Indeed.
The reason they don’t care is the mainstream media no longer plays to mainstream America. The audience for the Democrat-Media Complex consists of the Democrat-Media Complex.
January 12, 2022
Going all-in with joyless monomania means quite a crash when your opponent leaves office, as the post-Clinton American Spectator found out the hard way 21 years ago.
On the other hand, things are looking up the beleaguered network: “CNN Boasts They Haven’t Had An Employee Sex Scandal All Year,” America’s Newspaper of Record reported on January 3rd…