Walmart Closes Stores In 'Woke' Portland And Republicans Have Very Serious, Made-Up Reasons Why
It's the economy, stupid.
Walmart announced that the company's two remaining stores in the Portland, Oregon, city limits would close at the end of March. Walmart says they're not meeting financial expectations.
“The decision to close these stores was made after a careful review of their overall performance. We consider many factors, including current and projected financial performance, location, population, customer needs, and the proximity of other nearby stores when making these difficult decisions. After we decide to move forward, our focus is on our associates and their transition, which is the case here,” a spokesperson with Walmart said.
Prominent out-of-state Republicans have suggested this is just a fancy way of saying "Antifa did it!"
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott crowed, "All Portland Walmart stores to permanently close in late March. This is what happens when cities refuse to enforce the rule of law. It allows the mob to take over. Businesses can't operate in that environment, and people can't live in it."
Abbott makes this pronouncement while sharing an article that never at any point supports his conclusion. It's as if he graduated top of his class at the Fox News school of disinformation.
Maybe Abbott has Walmart confused with Walgreens, which claimed that "organized shoplifting" was why it closed five stores in San Francisco, where the minorities gather. Turns out that was a slight exaggeration ... or a big, fat lie. I haven't worked in corporate America for a while, so I'm not up on the jargon.
“Maybe we cried too much last year,” James Kehoe, the company’s chief financial officer, said during a Walgreens earnings call with investors.
Mr. Kehoe also said that the company had “probably” spent too much on security measures and that it might have mischaracterized how much theft took place in its stores.
The Daily Mail joined Abbott in the woke smear campaign, declaring in its usual melodramatic fashion, "Walmart will close its final two Portland stores and lay off 600 workers after record-breaking thefts in Democrat-led city."
Walmart is closing underperforming stores across the country, not just in Portland or even Republicans' favorite urban hellscape, Washington DC. Walmart stores will also close in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. Apparently banning critical race theory and persecuting trans kids didn't help turn around sales in Republican-led Arkansas and Florida.
Walmart is a big box retailer that was never very popular in Portland. Not even the wacky NBC sitcom "Superstore" improved its image. (Unfortunately, no actual Walmarts employ the wonderful Lauren Ash.) Residents have actively organized against any new Walmart locations in their neighborhoods, and about 150 Portlanders protested Walmart's Black Friday capitalism fest in 2012.
You don't have to like Walmart to acknowledge, however, that it sells a lot of stuff in one place, which is appealing to many people. Its prices are also cheaper than other stores, for admittedly somewhat nefarious reasons. Liberals in Portland are often guilty of a cultural myopia: Not everyone can afford to shop at their local food co-op or have such options nearby.
The Portland locations that are closing are at 1123 North Hayden Meadows Drive and at 4200 Southeast 82nd Avenue at the Eastport Plaza, and regular shoppers are already expecting to take a financial hit.
“Safeway is the go-to-store if I have to but that’s three times the price I would spend here,” Amanda Pahl said. “What are we going to do? You got to go further, then you have to spend gas money. Might as well pay for it at Safeway at this point.”
As a Portlander, I have a love-hate relationship with Safeway. They are the only grocery that stocks the yogurt our son eats by the gallon, but yesterday, my wife bought a coconut at the Safeway near us and the coconut was filled with mold. That is my Yelp review.
These are the facts: Walmart is closing stores in Portland, but not because of out-of-control crime in an Antifa sanctuary city. Walmart makes close to $500 billion a year in revenue. It's as wealthy as the 12th-largest country. The average Walmart store pulls in $3 million in sales each day. Shoplifting is not driving these stores into the red, even if they were self-producing their own criminal versions of "Supermarket Sweep."
It's more likely that Walmart has determined that these stores aren't profitable enough. So, they're peacing out and leaving 600 people without jobs. It's certainly better for the corporate image to play the victim to a very successful political bogeyman. Rightwing media and Republican officials will even provide some free PR.
[KPTV]
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NYC Mayor Eric Adams: Some Dumb Bullsh*t About Face Masks And CRIME!
If face masks are outlawed only outlaws will ... wait what?
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has a great idea to crack down on shoplifting in the city: Stores of all kinds need to make everyone take off their face masks when they enter a business, then at some point later, the customers can put their masks on again.
Yr Wonkette has to say that the biggest surprise for me, as a resident of Boise Goddamn Idaho, is learning that people in New York are still following basic pandemic health measures in any significant numbers. The city no longer mandates masking but many stores still ask shoppers to mask up.
In a radio interview Monday, Adams said that it's a simple matter of preventing crime by making all shoppers smile for the surveillance equipment.
We are putting out a clear call to all of our shops: Do not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask,” Adams said Monday on 1010 WINS radio. “And then once they’re inside, they can continue to wear it if they so desire to do so."
Adams said the move would help cops “use the technology we have available to identify those shoplifters and those who are committing serious crimes.”
Anyone refusing to enter a store bare-faced, Adams suggested, should not be allowed in by the proprietors.
Adams then went on to offer his own special theory of masking in New York: Really, nobody is concerned for their health anymore, it's all just criminals!
“When you see these mask-wearing people, oftentimes it’s not about being fearful of the pandemic,” he said. “It’s fearful of the police catching them for their deeds.”
Well now he's just being silly. You can always identify a criminal by their black eye mask, old-fashioned cap, and stripey shirt, not to mention the cloth sacks with dollar signs in which they carry their loot. Many also have very thick five-o'clock shadow!
In another interview yesterday, Adams once more asserted that the city needs to stop allowing these masked bad guys "to exploit the safety of the pandemic by wearing masks, committing crimes."
Just let that phrase "the safety of the pandemic" roll around in your heads a bit.
An aide to Adams later clarified that this wasn't a change in legal requirements for masking, just a really good idea.
The New York Times notes that Adams's call for at least temporary unmasking comes as the city
has seen reduced rates of crime across most categories, from murder to petit larceny, for the first two months of 2023 compared with the same period last year, Police Department data shows.
But theft has been a harder problem to address, and concerns over robberies and shoplifting persist. The problem was underscored over the weekend by the shooting death of a 67-year-old deli employee in Manhattan, who was killed on Friday night by a robber wearing a dark face mask and a white, full-body Tyvek suit.
That is terrible, we'll agree, but we're not sure someone bent on robbing a place is necessarily going to be put off by having to briefly remove a face mask. And as the Times points out, any call to reduce the wearing of masking "is sure to draw the ire of those who remain committed to masking in public as Covid persists, as well as those with health conditions that put them at an elevated risk of severe illness."
Still, Adams said that asking people to drop their masks when they enter a shop wouldn't just allow security cameras to get a record of shoppers' faces, it would also help alert stores to potential shoplifters, since anyone not dropping their mask would clearly be a suspect whom employees should keep an eye on. Or, in Adams's strange locution, "if someone is violating the basic rules, they may be there to violate a substantial rule as to commit a crime.”
Or they may be someone with a serious medical issue who won't shop there ever again, thereby ensuring that once people concerned for their health are scared away, only criminals will wear masks, WIN.
Also interesting is the difference in tone between the coverage of the mayor's remarks in the Times, which emphasized the city's overall drop in crime, and the New York Post, which suggested that shoplifting is a crisis and quoted some merchants who are demanding actual bans on mask-wearing, since the pandemic is over and why are you libs trying to make things easier for criminals? Stop enabling the baddies to exploit the safety of the pandemic, will ya?
[NY Post / NYT / Image: Kimimasa Mayama, Creative Commons License 4.0]
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Alex Murdaugh Found Guilty, Duh.
It's not a huge surprise.
After three hours of deliberation, a South Carolina jury found Alex Murdaugh guilty on Thursday of having murdered his wife, Maggie Murdaugh, and son Paul Murdaugh in the kennels by the family's hunting estate in June of 2021.
The 54-year-old lawyer, pill-popper, embezzler and fourth-generation member of a highly influential South Carolina Lowcountry legal dynasty was found guilty on two counts of murder and two counts of possessing a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.
The police had no physical evidence tying Murdaugh to the crime — his shirt wasn't bloody, they never found the gun used in the murder, and an unknown man's DNA was found under Maggie Murdaugh's fingernails. Jurors, however, say the thing that sold them on his guilt beyond anything else is that he swore for 20 months that he was not anywhere near the kennels until he found the bodies and called the police, that he was taking care of his terminally ill father ... only to admit he was, in fact, there after video from Paul Murdaugh's cell phone from right before the murders in which his voice could be heard was presented to the court.
This all started out (mostly) back in February of 2019 when Paul Murdaugh, Alex Murdaugh's son, went to a party with a bunch of his friends, got extremely drunk, and then insisted on taking them all home in his family's yacht. It did not work out well and he ended up severely injuring several of his friends and killing 19-year-old Mallory Beach. Alex Murdaugh, being a big fancy lawyer from a long line of big fancy lawyers, went around trying to convince everyone that another kid in the group was the one manning the yacht and not his own kid, but no one was too interested in going along with his scheme.
The other survivors told police that Paul — or rather, his drunken alter-ego "Timmy" — was the one who was manning the yacht when it crashed, and had in fact insisted on taking it rather than relying on a sober person to drive them home. This was later backed up by video evidence that also included video of Paul/Timmy behaving abusively to a girl who had just broken up with him.
Eventually, Paul Murdaugh was put on trial. That's when all the other shit about other suspiciously dead people tied to the Murdaugh family started to come out. There was Stephen Smith, a young gay man who was "run over" (but suspected of being killed by Alex Murdaugh's other son, Buster), and the family housekeeper Gloria Satterfield, whose family never got the $4 million insurance payout they were due after her death. It was about to come out that Murdaugh had been stealing from clients, embezzling from his family's legal firm, and taking a up to 60 pills of oxycontin a day when Margie and Paul Murdaugh were killed.
Alex Murdaugh then tried to have his drug dealer kill him so that his son Buster Murdaugh could get a major insurance payout, which he later testified to on the stand.
Murdaugh maintained his innocence throughout the trial, professing to believe that his wife and son were killed as revenge for Mallory Beach's death, though it was never clear who was supposed to have done it.
Prior to the verdict, OJ Simpson shared his thoughts in a highly disturbing "See, it's funny because I also killed my wife" kind of way.
"Hey Twitter World, it's me, yours truly. Well a whole lot of people are asking me what I think about this Alex Murdaugh trial. I don't know why they think I'm an expert on it," Simpson said with a laugh. He said he thought Murdaugh was probably guilty but would not be found guilty.
\u201cPeople keep asking me my opinion of the Alex Murdaugh trial.\u201d— O.J. Simpson (@O.J. Simpson) 1677783217
Guess he was wrong about that one.
Murdaugh was sentenced this morning to life without parole.
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Could Two-Time Killer Kyle Rittenhouse Finally Receive Tiny Bit Of Justice He Deserves?
God, we hope so.
When we last left two-time killer Kyle Rittenhouse, he was ready to SUE everyone with a bank account who’d called him a murderer because he’d fatally shot two people with zero remorse. He'd also permanently injured a third person, who’s still alive and just as capable of filing lawsuits.
Law & Crime reported last week that Gaige Grosskreutz has added Rittenhouse to his civil lawsuit against the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and local officials. Although Rittenhouse was acquitted in his civil trail, where he claimed self-defense, Grosskreutz argues in his complaint that he'd tried to end "Rittenhouse’s homicidal rampage" when Rittenhouse shot him in the arm.
PREVIOUSLY:
Kyle Rittenhouse Extremely 'Pro-Life' Except For How He Killed Two People
Kyle Rittenhouse Wishes People Were Held Accountable For Their Actions. That's It, That's The Joke.
Kyle Rittenhouse Gonna SUE Everyone Who Says He Killed Those People He Killed
Grosskreutz admitted on the stand that he was carrying a gun that fateful night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and that he pointed it at Rittenhouse, who'd just killed someone with his much larger gun. Rittenhouse's defenders insist this justified his self-defense claim because whoever shoots first wins. The Second Amendment is awesome!
According to the complaint, Grosskreutz had just witnessed Rittenhouse fire on three other people — one of whom had tried to kick the gun out of Rittenhouse’s hands before fleeing when Rittenhouse started shooting at him. Grosskreutz slowly approached Rittenhouse “with his hands in the air to try to ease the situation and stop the killing.”
"I was never trying to kill the defendant," Grosskreutz, a trained paramedic, testified at Rittenhouse's trial. "That was never something I was trying to do. In that moment, I was trying to preserve my own life. But doing so, also, taking the life of another is not something I am capable or comfortable of doing. It goes against almost a lifelong ethical code in regards to medicine."
The rare "good guys with guns" are more likely to hesitate before shooting, unlike your common psychopathic "bad guy with a gun." Rittenhouse didn't surrender his weapon, as Grosskreutz had perhaps hoped. Instead, Rittenhouse — believing Grosskreutz was going to kill him like he'd killed others — shot Grosskreutz in the bicep, "leaving a gaping wound."
No one should've been out on the streets that night with guns, but Rittenhouse didn't even live in Kenosha. He crossed state lines as a minor to "defend" private property from looters and, of course, made everything demonstrably worse.
Grosskreutz’s allegations against Rittenhouse include assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The lawsuit also adds Rittenhouse to Grosskreutz’s civil rights and Equal Protection claims against the city and local officials.
“Defendants’ conduct was motivated by racial animus and constituted purposeful discrimination, and it also affected Grosskreutz and the racially diverse group of protestors in a grossly disproportionate manner as compared to similarly situated White individuals,” the complaint says. “Specifically, working in concert with these others, Defendants targeted individuals of color and individuals allied with them in protest against racial discrimination, including Grosskreutz, by creating a dangerous environment in which injury to Grosskreutz and others was highly likely.”
Grosskreutz links Rittenhouse to rightwing extremist groups, and Rittenhouse hasn't helped his case by refusing to just ... go away. He's become a far-right cause célèbre. OJ Simpson, another American hero in his own mind, could tell Rittenhouse that civil suits have different standards than a criminal trial. Grosskreutz isn't required to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Rittenhouse is a racist scumbag killer. He just needs a "preponderance of the evidence."
That doesn't seem hard. Whenever Rittenhouse opens his mouth, an angel defense attorney loses their wings. Just last week, Rittenhouse told Donald Trump Jr. that he was "up against these George Soros-funded prosecutors" at his first trial.
\u201cKyle Rittenhouse tells Don Jr that he thinks George Soros was behind him being prosecuted.\u201d— Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 (@Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6) 1677195293
You don't really need antisemitic conspiracy theories to explain why prosecutors would try to convict someone who publicly killed people. That's sort of their job.
Meanwhile, Grosskreutz says he “is currently unaware of Mr. Rittenhouse’s current whereabouts and is concerned that Mr. Rittenhouse is attempting to evade service." He's seeking a 60-day extension to serve Rittenhouse. You can't shoot a lawsuit to death, so Rittenhouse has no choice but to run like the coward he is.
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