Posts Tagged ‘Mike Huckabee’

BidenWatch for July 13, 2020

Monday, July 13th, 2020

Biden drifts left, embraces the Green New Deal, and lifts his platform from Bernie Sanders. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Joe Biden signs up for the Green New Deal. You know, if primary voters wanted a socialist takeover of the economy, they could have just voted for Bernie Sanders…
  • Speaking of which: “Joe Biden’s Unity Task Force recommendations copy and paste word-for-word from Bernie Sanders quite a bit.”
  • Even the Washington Post has noticed how far left Biden has drifted:

    Joe Biden is looking at building 500 million solar panels, slashing U.S. carbon emissions within 15 years, and rapidly expanding a government-sponsored health care plan. He wants to overhaul the way policing is conducted on American streets and the way success is measured in primary schools.

    Over the past week, the presumptive Democratic nominee has offered the biggest burst of policy proposals since he effectively won the nomination, including a plan to spend $700 billion on American products and research. It marks a significant move to the left from where Biden and his party were only recently — on everything from climate and guns to health care and policing — and reflects a fundamental shift in the political landscape.

    The new plans, which have come in speeches, interviews, and a 110-page policy document crafted with allies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), provide a window into how Biden would govern, and they kick off a new phase in a campaign that until now has focused mostly on President Trump’s performance. As Biden releases more plans — including one on climate and clean energy investments this week — he appears to be drafting a blueprint for the biggest surge of government action in generations.

    “I think the compromise that they came up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most progressive president since FDR,” Sanders, a democratic socialist who does not offer such assessments lightly, told MSNBC.

  • Biden wants to make Little Sisters of the Poor bend the knee:

    Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden issued a statement Wednesday evening in which he said he is “disappointed in today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision” in the case Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania.

    “I will restore the Obama-Biden policy that existed before the [2014 Supreme Court] Hobby Lobby ruling,” Biden said.

  • Biden wants to transform America:

    Barack Obama famously (infamously?) said that he wanted to “fundamentally transform” America. Thankfully, he was unable to completely do that. Now Obama’s senile Mini-Me, Joe Biden, is parroting his former boss and going on about “rebuilding” and “transforming” our beloved country.

    Snip.

    America is just fine, thank you. Warts and all, this 244-year-old experiment in freedom is — put mildly — freakin’ glorious. Every leftist who says America needs to be rebuilt or transformed is lying.

    What’s really disturbing is that Joe Biden is the most moderate of the Dems to emerge from that large primary field. If he’s going on about transformation then the center of American politics has moved too far to ever get it back to anything resembling “normal.”

    We’re fine here, Joe. We won’t be needing your help.

  • More on the same subject:

    Putting aside the fact that Biden almost certainly doesn’t have the capacity to consistently write his own tweets, one is left wondering exactly what he plans to transform “this nation” into. Given how much the nation has already been transformed over the last several months, with the continued tolerance of the destruction of cities and America’s history, the promise of some higher level of radicalism coming should worry everyone.

    Biden is not a moderate and never has been. The fact that he likely didn’t write the above tweet is perhaps worse than if he had. He’s surrounded by radicals, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his actual campaign staff, some of whom are alumni of the Sanders and Obama campaigns.

    I’d go further and say that it’s not playing into Trump’s messaging but that it’s reality. Biden is telling us who he is and he has continuously done so. The idea that he’s a moderate is a myth perpetuated by people who want it to be true, i.e. voters who are not comfortable with the current cultural revolution but still want to vote for Biden. They are deluding themselves, believing that he’ll flip a switch when he’s president. He won’t and there’s absolutely no reason to believe he won’t govern exactly as he’s campaigning.

  • Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones: “I Am Black And I Am A Democrat. But ‘I Ain’t’ Voting For Joe Biden This November.”

    Since that day in May when I announced I would support Donald Trump for president, my motives have been questioned, my integrity assailed, even my intelligence challenged. That’s okay.

    I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I am also a black man, the son of a World War II veteran and a proud American.

    In recent weeks, there have been absurd calls to defund and disband police departments across the country by Democrats in response to the unjust murder of George Floyd. These are extreme calls that will only lead to more pain and suffering in our most vulnerable communities.

    As the former Chief Executive Officer of DeKalb County, Georgia, I’ve had to manage one of the largest police departments in the state. I’ve had the experience of dealing with police shootings and comforting the families of victims. But at the same time, I’ve also had the experience of losing two black police officers. I’ve had to comfort their families in the middle of the night and console their young children. I know firsthand when others are running away from chaos, police officers are running into the fight to protect and serve.

    President Trump was sickened by the death of George Floyd and fully committed to ensuring that he will not have died in vain. The president has taken a commonsense approach to heal our nation. President Trump made clear that he will protect all Americans, serve as an ally to peaceful protesters and always uphold law and order.

    But the protesters were determined to sow chaos and destruction, all in the name of racial equality. Listen, during my first legislative session in the Georgia House of Representatives in 1993, I filed the first bill in my career to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. But I also understand the preservation of our history — the good and the bad. And still I bow to no one in my advocacy for the black community.

    But unlike other Washington politicians, this president actually backed up his words with actions. He signed an Executive Order on police reform — taking steps to build a better bridge between law enforcement men and women and their communities.

    The landmark Executive Order encourages police to implement best practices to protect the people they serve. It sets the highest professional standards for law enforcement officers, while promoting peace and equality for all Americans.

    Under the order, the Trump administration will now prioritize federal grants from the Department of Justice to police departments that meet these high standards. Additionally, the order pushes forward the creation of a national database of police misconduct. This database will root out bad cops and help create accountability between police agencies.

    Where were Joe Biden and the previous administration for 8 years in the White House on this issue? I’ll tell you. They were absent in unifying this country.

  • How the chaos Democrats have sown will end up biting them in November:

    The forces of anti-Trump hatred comprise not just Democratic aspirants to high office but also, and more significantly, the media (social and otherwise), the spoiled, pajama-boy Left, and—above all, perhaps—the entrenched administrative apparatus of government, the self-engorging bureaucracy of the state whose fundamental allegiance is to the principle of self-perpetuation.

    It is all of that which Donald Trump came to office to sweep clean, like Hercules confronting the Augean stables. The first time around the reaction was a compact of contempt and ridicule, but that was only because Trump could not win. The smartest people in the world—Bill Kristol, Nancy Pelosi, Rachel Maddow—they all knew he couldn’t win. So they didn’t come together in a single caterwauling primal scream to stop him.

    This time they have. And since they control almost all the major megaphones, it can sometimes seem that everyone is against Donald Trump and no one is for him.

    It can seem that way, but of course it is not. And that is chiefly for two reasons. First, there are those 63 million voters—perhaps it will be 66 or 68 million this time. Voters whose voices you don’t hear in the pages of the New York Times and whose rigged Google searches and Facebook hot spots somehow leave out of account. They’re sitting at home watching their cities burn, watching monuments to Columbus, to Washington and Thomas Jefferson be defaced or toppled. They see that, and they hear a nonstop litany telling them how racist they are and how evil America is.

    And just about now, a great chasm is opening up. The choice, they see, is not so much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is between the America they love—that Donald Trump celebrates—and the out-of-control forces of anti-American hatred that, though he does not understand them, Joe Biden manages to blink and nod and gibber around.

    Everything that is happening between now and November 3 is about November 3. But the fundamental choice is not really Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It is civilization and America on one side, anarchy and woke tyranny on the other. The Democrats thought they could ride the tiger to victory. Instead, they will be consumed by the monster they created but could not control.

  • Mike Huckabee on how those policies would hurt the economy:

    Employing the same pro-growth policies that turned the stagnant Obama-Biden economy into a record-setting dynamo in recent years, President Trump is orchestrating an unprecedented “V-shaped” recovery as our country emerges from pandemic-related lockdowns. The past two months have both seen blowout new records for job creation — 2.7 million new jobs in May, followed by an even more incredible 4.8 million new jobs in June.

    The recovery has been rapid, but our progress remains fragile, and America’s beleaguered workers and business owners could not withstand the strain of Biden’s new taxes and regulations.

    Biden’s proposal to halt all fracking would be particularly disastrous, both economically and geopolitically. Over the course of just four years, Biden’s fracking ban would destroy an estimated 19 million jobs and shave over $7 trillion from our national GDP.

    But Biden’s radical environmentalism gets even worse.

    For the first time in over half a century, America has become a net exporter of fossil fuels under President Trump, whose common-sense deregulatory agenda has allowed our country to become the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. This means our country is now less reliant on Middle Eastern dictators for its oil, and American consumers are paying less at the pump and on their energy bills.

    Joe Biden, however, wants to restore the sort of punitive regulations that were the centerpiece of the “war on coal” waged during the Obama-Biden administration.

    Economic growth and innovation would also be severely undercut in other ways by a Biden presidency. In 2018, the Commerce Department calculated that total regulatory costs were equivalent to approximately 10 percent of the entire national economy — an alarming statistic that President Trump has made it a priority to correct.

    As the most far-left of any Democratic presidential nominee in history, Biden’s platform is replete with proposals to increase the burden of bureaucracy even more.

  • “Joe Biden must release the results of his cognitive tests — voters need to know.” Good luck with that…
  • Does Jill Biden want to run things?

    I truly believe Jill Biden wants to be Edith Wilson 2.0. Woodrow Wilson’s wife basically ran the White House after his stroke in 1919. She only had to do that for two years. I’m pretty sure that Jill Biden would like at least an eight-year run at the gig.

    When Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep’s handlers first began letting him do videos from his quarantine basement, Jill was often sitting at his side, grinning like a proud mother whose idiot underachieving kid had just successfully recited the alphabet for the first time. It was, quite frankly, very creepy to watch.

    I’m still convinced that the overarching Democratic National Committee plan is to get Biden elected, whisk him back to the basement until Inauguration Day, then tell everyone that he’s had a medical situation of some sort shortly after that. Then his progressive VP can take over the job of running the country off a progressive cliff.

    I am also firmly convinced that Jill Biden has other plans.

    For reasons beyond my comprehension, Team Biden keeps releasing videos of this drooling moron. They are all painful to watch, and it seems at times to be a little cruel to mock him. He is, however, making a bid for becoming the most powerful man in the world. As long as he is running, Biden is fair game.

    Jill Biden knows that and she doesn’t care.

    The longer the Joe Biden Obvious Decline Circus is allowed to go on, the more I’m convinced that Jill Biden is a power-hungry madwoman who so desperately wants to be in the White House that she is willing to subject her husband to what has now become bipartisan ridicule.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Joe Biden presidency will bring disaster for the Supreme Court.”

    Progressive activists see Biden as an opportunity to secure the Supreme Court for the left over the next several decades. Some have even floated the idea of expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to “pack” it with liberals the next time a Democrat wins the White House. Biden has rejected that idea, but the enthusiasm it has from progressive activists says plenty about what the left wing of the party wants from him.

    Liberal organizations have seized upon the promise of Biden to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, urging him to consider someone like Leslie Abrams, the sister of Stacey Abrams, or liberal academic Michelle Alexander, who compared the nation of Israel to apartheid South Africa. Though Biden himself has not yet released his own shortlist of potential nominees, progressive activists who would wield immense power in his potential administration are already narrowing down the names.

    Progressive activists see Biden as an opportunity to secure the Supreme Court for the left over the next several decades. Some have even floated the idea of expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to “pack” it with liberals the next time a Democrat wins the White House. Biden has rejected that idea, but the enthusiasm it has from progressive activists says plenty about what the left wing of the party wants from him.

    We cannot afford to give Biden the opportunity to appoint new Supreme Court justices. With so many important cases decided along such narrow political lines, and with the “conservative majority” becoming increasingly fragile as Chief Justice John Roberts continues to drift leftward, the way to prevent a liberal takeover of the highest court in the land is to ensure that the next few vacancies are filled by reliably conservative judges.

  • Don Surber thinks Trump will win 37 states.

    Biden finished fifth in Iowa to Hillary and Obama in 2008. And Biden has not aged well in the intervening 12 years.

    In the past month, Democrats have made the same mistake they have made in every election they have lost since 1968. They turned their backs on patriotism.

    The liberal scorn of patriotism will once again backfire. Democrats are burning down their cities. Conrad Black sees this destruction as re-electing the president.

    He wrote, “This is some new form of farce noire, a nightmare of outright idiocy, part slapstick and part horror, playing on a gigantic stage. Fortunately, we know it has to end on November 3, but the audience will likely tire of it and bring down the curtain well before then. No society can tolerate this for long. The arsonists will not burn down society; the society will awaken and banish the arsonists.”

    There is an element of extortion in all this. Democrats are saying everything will return to normal only if we elect Biden.

    Otherwise…

    The attacks on the flag and the nation’s Founding Fathers (as well as Lincoln and Frederick Douglass) show an arrogance and tone-deafness. Americans still love their country. Be they the sons and daughters of slaves or slave owners or people who were neither, Americans are proud of their country and proud of their heritage.

    I said 37 states in January. I say 37 states in July because Democrats have done not one thing to win over Trump voters, who were enough in number to win 30 states and the presidency in 2016. Seven more Hillary states will flip. I mean, does anyone seriously believe Minnesotans will not switch to President Trump after the George Floyd riots?

  • Here’s a long, flattering portrait of Michigan Democratic representative Elissa Slotkin, who came in the semi-blue-wave of 2018. Ignore the fawning and the credence given the now-debunked “Russian bounty” scandal and read the part where she thinks Democrats are deluding themselves if they think 2020 is in the bag:

    “I don’t believe it,” Slotkin says matter of factly. “Listen, if anyone tells me they can accurately predict what major events are coming in the remainder of 2020, I’ll give them a thousand dollars. I mean, this has been the year of black swans. … I don’t for one minute think this [presidential] race is safe in anyone’s column. I’ve been literally begging people to ignore those polls. They are a snapshot in time. And if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming next.”

    I stop Slotkin there. Is her gripe that these snapshots—the polling, both public and private, that shows Republicans bleeding support across the board—are accurate in the present, yet subject to so much volatility in the future as to be worthless? Or does she believe the snapshots themselves are inaccurate here and now?

    “I think they’re inaccurate,” she replies without hesitation. “Here’s the thing. When I started to run and I had to hire a pollster, I interviewed a bunch of different folks and I decided to do what we do sometimes at the Pentagon, which is to take a ‘bad cop’ approach to the interview. … It was five or six folks that I interviewed, and I said, ‘You got something wrong. You screwed up in 2016. What did you get wrong? And how are you going to fix it?”

    Only one pollster, Slotkin says, admitted that he got it wrong. That was the person—Al Quinlan of GQR, a large Washington-based firm—she hired.

    “He told me that they fundamentally undercounted the Trump vote; that the Trump voter is not a voter in every single election, that they come out for Trump, so they’re hard to count,” she explains. “On a survey, if someone says, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to vote,’ you don’t usually continue the conversation. And some of them didn’t have any desire to be on those poll calls; they didn’t have the 20 minutes to talk to somebody. They didn’t want to do it. And so, they were fundamentally undercounted.”

    Slotkin, ever the intel analyst—identifying trends, compiling a report, presenting a conclusion—tells me, with a high degree of confidence, “I believe that same thing is happening right now.”

  • Biden wins Puerto Rico primary.”
  • Veepstakes: “The Biden VP Pick Who Would Satisfy Both Ilhan Omar and George Will. California Representative Karen Bass’s low-key manner and progressive credentials could strengthen Biden’s campaign when he needs it most.”
  • Veepstakes: Profile of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Because being less strident while letting the city you lead burn less than Minneapolis is evidently a qualification.
  • “Culture…culture…culture…”

  • Wrong again, Joe:

  • Joe Biden: Steady and Pathetic:

  • Pandering to the hard left again:

  • Reminder:

  • “To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim.”
  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Winners, Losers, and Observations from Iowa

    Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016

    Now that was an interesting Iowa caucus! On the Republican side, Ted Cruz came in first (8 delegates), Donald Trump second (7 delegates), with Marco Rubio nipping at his heels for third (7 delegates).

    On the Democratic side, it appears that Hillary Clinton eked out a historically narrow victory over Bernie Sanders. I say “appears” since last night it was reported that results from 90 precincts had gone missing. Given her serial history of lawbreaking, and the entire weight of the DNC all-in on dragging her over the finish line, would anyone put it past Hillary to monkey-wrench the process to avoid a narrow loss?

    Let’s take a look at last night’s biggest winners and losers:

  • Winner: Ted Cruz: Given no chance at the beginning of the cycle, or even a few months ago, Cruz pulled out a clear victory against a candidate given eight months of unprecedented free media coverage. As I noted while following his 2012 senate race, Cruz is a smart, disciplined and indefatigable campaigner, a true conservative, and will make a great President.
  • Loser: Donald Trump: See above. A novice politician pulling 24% and second place in the Iowa caucuses would normally be cause for celebration, but Trump roared into Iowa like a juggernaut on a wave of unbelievable media interest and limped out like a hobbled mule. For all the talk about Trump’s money making a difference, there are few signs any of it was spent on an effective ground game. And for once he wasn’t bragging after the results came in.
  • Loser: Jeb Bush: Remember a year ago how everyone was predicting Bush’s fundraising machine and organizational muscle would bulldoze his rivals aside? Not so much. Bush ended up spending $2,884 per Iowa vote to come in sixth.
  • Winner: Marco Rubio: A strong third keeps him in the game, and he’s well situated to pick up deep-pocketed Bush backers who aren’t turned off by the huge amounts of money they’ve already thrown away.
  • Losers: Governors running for President. It used to be that Governor was seen as the ideal perquisite for running for President (Reagan, Bush43, Clinton, Carter, etc.), but not only did Jeb Bush come in sixth, John Kaisch, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and Jim Gilmore (who we’ll mention only because he was a governor, since he got a whopping 12 votes in all of Iowa) all did even worse, Martin O’Malley came in an exceptionally distant third on the Democratic side, and Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal and George Pataki didn’t even make it to Iowa. Huckabee and O’Mally have suspended their campaigns, and the other governors should follow suit.
  • Loser: Rand Paul: Few expected Paul to win, but few expected him to do markedly worse than his father. He should drop out
  • Losers: The remaining Republican candidates. At this point there’s no path to victory for Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina or Rick Santorum. They should drop out as well.
  • Winner: Bernie Sanders: He went from being a crazy old socialist with no chance of winning to a crazy old socialist who fought the Clinton machine to a virtual tie.
  • Loser: Hillary Clinton: She desperately needed to win Iowa and got it, maybe (the Iowa Democratic Party is refusing to release actual vote totals, as opposed to precinct results), with the help of some missing ballots and unlikely coin flips, by the skin of her teeth, but she vastly underperformed in a race that was supposed to be cakewalk for her a year ago. “Her inability to ride a first-class ground organization to a decisive triumph underscores the candidate’s weakness and the lack of a message that resonates with primary voters.” And there were accusations that Hillary was using paid staffers as precinct chairmen.
  • It’s now a three man race on the Republican side, and a dog fight on the Democratic side.

    LinkSwarm for October 23, 2015

    Friday, October 23rd, 2015

    Another Friday, another LinkSwarm, heavy on Benghazi and Presidential race news:

  • Seven revelations from the Benghazi hearing.
  • You know who wasn’t happy about Hillary Clinton’s latest Benghazi testimony? The families of the Benghazi victims. Funny how that “absolute moral authority” the MSM bestowed on Cindy Sheehan doesn’t apply to families of the slain when they criticize Democrats…
  • China vs. the United States: a tale of two economies.
  • Longshot GOP Presidential contenders are running out of money. “Any burn rate over 100 percent is considered dangerous by campaign finance experts. Pataki’s was 226 percent, Graham 188, Paul 181, Jindal 144, Huckabee 110 and Santorum 101.”
  • Speaking of Presidential fundraising, here’s why Rick Perry had to drop out: “Perry spent more than a million dollars during the last reporting period – July through September – while raising only $252,000 in contributions. And the former Texas governor, who exited the race in mid-September, had only $45,000 cash on hand at the end.”
  • “When you vote in your first Presidential election, please remember which political party decided to make your lunchtimes a living Hell for a decade. Spoiler warning: it wasn’t the Republicans.”
  • Some people Hillary Clinton listed as endorsing Hillary Clinton have not, in fact, actually endorsed Hillary Clinton.
  • Ohio Senate race update: “Incumbent Rob Portman (R) raised almost eight million this year, with eleven million in the bank, while former governor Ted Strickland (D) raised about two and a half, with about a million and a half in the bank.”
  • Turkish opposition leader accuses Erdogan’s Islamist government of protecting the Islamic State.
  • Criticize Islam in your blog in Bangladesh? That’s an arresting.
  • Heh:

  • Alvin bond update: “Firm in cracked stadium debacle funds pro-bond propaganda.”
  • Texas Democratic trial lawyer Mikal Watts indicited over fraud related to the BP oil spill case.
  • Arthur Miller — Communist. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Bernie Sanders is “paying” bloggers.
  • Emus on the loose in Round Rock.
  • LinkSwarm for May 5, 2015

    Tuesday, May 5th, 2015

    Happy Cinco de Mayo! My efforts to move the LinkSwarm back to it’s usual Friday position by posting early have failed, so I’m trying to get it there by letting it drift back one day later each time…

  • “Canadian Partnership Shielded Identities of Donors to Clinton Foundation.” Just in case you missed that. Because trying to keep up with all the sleazy bribery angles of the Clinton Foundation is like trying to drink from the firehose…
  • Speaking of which:

  • “Hillary may want to talk about inequality, but is there any better example of a couple who gorged at the trough of Wall Street and foreign autocrats, chose not to follow the rules, never could stop chasing more and more money and (in Hillary Clinton’s case) went to extraordinary lengths to destroy “personal” e-mails that might have pulled back the curtain on all that?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Hillary hires Scott Hogan, an organizer of the failed “Everytown” gun-grabber astroturf to run her “Grassroots” campaign. Hopefully he’ll bring Hillary the same outstanding success he brought to gun control…
  • Russian stooges in Ukraine: “Soviet terror famine? No, that was all just a big misunderstanding!” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Islamic State murders 600 more Yezidis. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • The Islamic State also claimed post facto credit for the Garland attack.
  • Speaking of which, here’s an interview with Bosch Fawstin, the winner of the Draw Mohammed contest. (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.)
  • Emergency room visits up under ObamaCare.
  • Lefty lawyer Laurence Tribe calls Obama’s “force everyone to use green energy without congressional approval” plan unconstitutional. “After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority.”
  • Drug cartel violence heats up in Mexico: “Gunmen shot down a Mexican military helicopter Friday in the western state of Jalisco, killing three soldiers, and set fire to buses, blocked roads, and attacked banks and gas stations in a sharp escalation of violence against the government.” This is evidently the handiwork of the New Generation drug cartel.
  • Minimum wage hike hits San Francisco Comic Store.
  • When the Social Justice Warriors started attacking the company Protein World over their “Beach Ready” ad campaign, Protein World didn’t cave, they fought back. Result: They earned an additional $1 million in four days.
  • Not understanding that the Presidency is not an entry level job, and that the Republican field was already packed, Ben Carson joins the Presidential race.
  • Ditto Carly Fiorina, whose tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard was not an unqualified success, and whose 2010 California Senate race lost to Barbara Boxer by 16 points.
  • And evidently Mike Huckabee is going to run as well.
  • Texas Democrats are furious that a new ethics bill might keep them from scratching each other’s backs. (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
  • The Austin American Statesman is moving printing and packing operations to San Antonio and Houston, resulting in about a 100 jobs lost in Austin. Previously. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Social Justice Warriors can’t even win elections at UCLA.
  • Austin’s Highland Mall closed on April 30th.
  • Texas Statewide Race Updates for April 4, 2014

    Friday, April 4th, 2014

    My taxes and family health issues have curtailed blogging somewhat, so here are some statewide race updates, some of which stretch back to just after the primary:

  • The Weekly Standard covers the Abbott campaign.

    One Abbott supporter in Edinburg, former state representative Aaron Peña, is a Democrat-turned-Republican with strong ties to the valley. He says his fellow Hispanic Texans may vote Democratic, but they are traditionalists on cultural issues, including abortion. Davis may be popular with the liberal set in Austin, but she doesn’t offer much to Peña’s constituents, he says.

    Also this:

    Davis herself doesn’t appear to be making much effort to court the Valley vote, or any vote for that matter. She’s noticeably inconspicuous on the trail, and even friendly media have a hard time finding her.

  • Davis gives a speech in Midland to sparse attendance. “Davis showed up to an almost empty room but despite the crickets, she told me she felt comfortable.” Ouch!
  • How Davis benefited from her law firm doing government bond work while she was a state senator.
  • At least she’s changed her logo from the sinking ship, even if the new logo looks a little familiar…

  • Two Dewhurst aides quit amid campaign feuding about tactics.” This is not exactly the sign of a well-oiled campaign machine…
  • Paul Burka even goes so far as to say that Dewhurst is toast: “The reality is that Dewhurst has been politically dead since the night of the Wendy Davis filibuster, and he has no hope to retain his office. Unless something very strange happens, Dan Patrick is a lock to be the state’s next lieutenant governor.” I’d say he’s been politically dead since losing to Ted Cruz in 2012…
  • Rick Casey not only thinks Dan Patrick will win, he thinks “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will be more powerful than Gov. Greg Abbott.” Agree on the first, disagree on the second, mainly because Greg Abbott is a lot more formidable than Dewhurst. It’s an interesting piece, despite making (I believe) some subtly wrong assumptions about Tea Party politics.
  • State of play piece by Ross Ramsey.

    Movement conservatives in Texas — a label that includes fiscal and social conservatives, Tea Partyers and the religious right — seem to be forming up behind Dan Patrick, a state senator running for lieutenant governor; Ken Paxton, a state senator running for attorney general; and Wayne Christian, a former state representative running for railroad commissioner. Each finished ahead of the establishment candidate in his race — in Patrick’s case, the incumbent lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst.

    Ramsey also notes money switching to conservative challengers. Plus this: “Every Republican senator has probably given some private thought to state Sen. John Carona’s loss to Donald Huffines, and that kind of private thinking often leads to changed voting patterns.”

  • Dan Patrick endorsed by Buc-ees. If they throw in free fudge, this race is so over…
  • Mike Huckabee endorses Ken Paxton. That probably means more to Huckabee than Paxton…

  • 14 Texas state house republicans ask Dan Branch to withdraw.
  • Democratic Agricultural Commissioner candidate Kinky Friedman calls marijuana farms the future of Texas.
  • Texas Statewide Races Update for July 30, 2013

    Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

    Still getting up to speed, so expect these updates to be a bit random for, oh, the next five weeks or so.

  • Abbott: The Obama Administration’s Voting Rights Act lawsuit is purely political.

    The administration’s approach reveals the Democrats‘ fear that Republican candidates were making inroads with Hispanic voters. Democrats could never “turn Texas blue” if that trend continued, so they got the courts to draw district lines that guarantee Democratic victory in predominantly Hispanic areas.

    Instead of allowing the Voting Rights Act to work in a way the Constitution allows, the Obama administration is sowing racial divide to score cheap political points. The president is using the legal system as a sword to wage partisan battles rather than a shield to protect voting rights. This overreaching action undermines the Voting Rights Act and the rule of law. Texas will not tolerate it. So far, neither will the Supreme Court.

  • Abbot also appeared on Lou Dobbs to discuss voter ID:

  • He also appeared on the Mike Huckabee show:

  • And the Mike Gallagher Show:

  • And Trey Ware’s show on KTSA:

  • Huckabee, who last endorsed David Dewhurst in the Senate race, endorses Dan Patrick in the Lt. Governor’s race. I’m sure the endorsement had nothing to do with Huckabee’s son doing work for a consulting firm hired by Patrick…
  • Former state Rep. Ray Keller is running for the Railroad Commission.
  • Interview with Barry Smitherman
  • The Houston Chronicle tackles the Lt. Governor’s race by…comparing Twitter statistics for Jerry Patterson and Dan Patrick. I feel dumber merely by having linked to that.
  • Texas Sparkle endorses Todd Staples for Lt. Governor.
  • Eric Opiela is running for Agricultural Commissioner. I sort of like his ad featuring a Prius-driving EPA official:

  • Malachi Boyuls is running for the railroad commission. You don’t see many Malachis in public office these days…

  • Democrat Mike Mjetland is considering running for Governor.
  • Huckabee Endorses Dewhurst

    Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

    This morning former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee endorsed David Dewhurst’s Senate campaign.

    That’s a very good pickup for Dewhurst, and along with his previous Pro-Life endorsements, it shows that he’s doing better than expected among social conservatives.

    In his endorsement, Huckabee said that “Lt. Gov. Dewhurst is a strong fiscal conservative, with a record to show for it,” However, Huckabee is not exactly known as a small government conservative. As far as I can tell, Dewhurst has yet to pick up any significant small government/budget cutting/Tea Party endorsements, which thus far Ted Cruz has monopolized (as well as picking up some social conservative endorsements of his own).

    The MSM loves to play up the economic-conservatives-vs.-social-conservatives angle (primarily because they hate both, and intramural GOP brawls help increased the chances of their favored liberal candidates), but the most successful conservative politicians (Ronald Reagan most conspicuously) have been fusionists that embodied policies that appealed to both. Texas voters are socially conservative, but they also love low taxes and small government. Whoever wins the GOP nomination will have to appeal to both groups.