I hope you’re celebrating both Veterans Day and Nigel Tufnel Day (11/11/11) today. A few bits of news:
I’ll try to do a Greek/Euro debt update just as soon as I figure out just what the hell Europe is actually doing…
LinkSwarm for Friday, November 11, 2011 (11/11/11)
November 11th, 2011Fast and Furious Update for November 10, 2011
November 10th, 2011Been a while since I put one of these up, and since I start a new job today, I thought it high time to catch people at least semi-up-to-date on Fast and Furious developments:
Election Results: Three Propositions Go Down In Defeat
November 9th, 2011The results of yesterday’s election are up, and three of the ten propositions on the ballot went down in defeat. Since all statewide propositions usually pass, that’s an interesting (and welcome) result.
Propositions 2 and 6 each passed narrowly with less than 52% of the vote. Proposition 1, the only one I voted for and which provided homestead exemptions for the spouses of disabled veterans, passed by the largest margin, 82.9% to 17.1%.
Taken together, the results seem to show that Texans are actually becoming more conservative, and more willing to oppose government spending and Kelo-style eminent domain abuses.
About 675,000 voter participated in yesterdays election.
As a side not, notice how information on the statewide election appears nowhere on the Houston Chronicle‘s main page, though it does provide a link to how Nancy Grace did on Dancing With the Stars. Just another sign of that once great (and conservative) newspaper’s decline into being just another irrelevant liberal MSM mouthpiece.
Jones Bows To The Inevitable, And Out of Senate Race
November 8th, 2011Trailing in polls, fundraising, name recognition, and stage presence, Elizabeth Ames Jones announced she’s dropping out of the Senate race to run for the Texas Senate District 25 against incumbent Sen. Jeff Wentworth.
Setting aside of the question of why you would want to move from the Railroad Commission to the State Senate (which seems like a slight downgrade to me), the Senate District 25 race already had one Tea Party challenger to Wentworth in Donna Campbell, who may find herself financially outgunned if Jones transfers her U.S. Senate race money. (Naturally, Wenworth wants Jones to return the money.) There have been mutterings in some quarters (at least stretching back to last decade’s redistricting fight) that Wentworth is too liberal for his district. Should all three stay in, this should prove to be a very interesting primary fight.
Clearly Jones was overdue to get out of the Senate race, and had been for some time. Not only were David Dewhurst and Ted Cruz firmly established as the top two candidates, but they and Tom Leppert were all clearly outperforming Jones in every phase of the campaign. From all that I could see, Jones performed poorly at the the various candidate debates and forums and fell woefully behind in the fundraising race. I think there was a much greater possibility that Jones could have come in behind long-shot Glenn Addison in the March primary than that she could overtake Cruz or Dewhurst.
Jones was the very first candidate to declare for the U.S. Senate race, filing her paperwork way back on November 3, 2008, but never seemed to gain any traction once additional candidates jumped in after Kay Baily Hutchison announced she was retiring.
This is good news for the Ted Cruz campaign, and bad news for David Dewhurst, since it gives Cruz a clearer shot at him. Dewhurst clearly has no desire to debate Cruz one-on-one, and the more candidates in the race, the less likely it is for conservative voters to coalesce around Cruz as the anti-Dewhurst campaign.
Now that Jones is out, will Leppert bow out as well? I doubt it. Though he clearly hasn’t caught fire, Leppert has (thanks to a generous measure of self-funding) stayed on pace with the front-runners in the fundraising derby, and he’s clearly a better campaigner, and has a much better organization, than Jones. My hunch says that he stays in until March, and then comes in a distant third. But there’s still an awful lot of campaign left…
Reminder: Election Tuesday!
November 6th, 2011Don’t forget that there’s a state constitutional amendment election Tuesday, November 8 (as well as various local elections, bond issues, etc.). A few roundups and recommendations from:
As for myself, I’m currently leaning toward voting Yes on Proposition 1 and No on all the rest.
Blue Dot Blues has a roundup of several additional sources you can go to, including some from the other side of the aisle. When in doubt, voting against whatever the Austin Chronicle endorses will seldom steer you wrong…
Texas Senate Race Update for November 5, 2011
November 5th, 2011I suppose I should do these updates some day other than Friday night Saturday morning, since few people read them then or over the weekend, but it’s been a busy week…
Cubans here and there have had to endure the calamities of the Revolution alone. Conservatives in America reached out to us and supported us, and our parents found solace in their enmity to Communism. But they weren’t really with us either, because they had no idea how awful Fidel Castro really was. It simply isn’t within the comprehension of any American that someone could actually choose to be as evil as Castro. The sheer depravity of his crimes against the Cuban people helped to keep the depredations of his rule a secret hiding in plain sight, where only other Cubans could see them.
It’s no surprise that liberal papers such as the Dallas Morning News now think they’re in some position to judge which families are truly exiles and which aren’t. It was liberal papers — particularly the New York Times — that originally built Castro up into an international hero and persisted in romanticizing him long after he offered Cuba’s young men to the Kremlin as a Third World army. It was liberal papers that blamed the U.S. embargo for the economic catastrophe into which Castro plunged Cuba. It was liberal newspapers that helped to occlude the unspeakable daily abuses of Castro’s regime beneath the fantasy of a romantic nationalist who was bravely willing to stand up to imperialism.
“There is power,” the Dallas Morning News tells us, “in linking your past and your future to this unending struggle [against Fidel]. But because the fathers of both these men [Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio] migrated several years before the revolution, as is now clear, the link is at best a stretch. In the case of Cruz, the situation is even more complicated because his father originally supported Castro.” What utter nonsense. It would be offensive if the editors actually had any idea what they were talking about. No Cuban exile would for a second say that the Rubio and Cruz families were any less exile than anyone else. All of our families lost their homeland. That some were already here when it happened is irrelevant — nobody meant to forsake Cuba by coming here. We lost Cuba because Castro took it from us, from all of us, born and unborn, both here and back there.
Among Cuban-Americans, having been an early supporter of Castro in no way diminishes your anti-Communist credentials. On the contrary, it is the typical story for almost every family. Virtually all of our families opposed the dictatorship of Batista. Virtually all of our families believed Castro’s rhetoric of democracy and liberty. The first thing everyone hated about him was his evident relish in betraying his most ardent supporters. That was the first of many very personal reasons he would give us to hate him, reasons that only we can really understand.
What makes us exiles is not merely the fact that our families can’t go back to Cuba. It is that Castro wantonly ruined the land that our families grew up in, the land of our forefathers, and now that land exists only in the fading black-and-white pictures and memories of the happy childhoods of a generation that is dying now. Compared with that, what possible difference could it make that our grandparents arrived one year and not another? Senator Rubio didn’t know exactly what year his father first got here because it doesn’t matter.
Still, I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised by the Dallas Morning News’s display of presumptuousness and ignorance. The editors are decent people, and if they knew even 5 percent of what I know about the Revolution and its exiles, I’m sure they would be deeply ashamed of what they’ve written. But they don’t and they never will — Castro has already seen to that.
Read the whole thing.
- Ted Cruz: 54%
- Glenn Addison: 21%
- Lela Pittenger: 20%
- Andrew Castanuela: 5%
- David Dewhurst: <1%
Greeks Will Not be Allowed to Vote on Their Own Future
November 3rd, 2011The scheduled referendum on the bailout of Greece as been canceled.
Once again, the glorious dream of European integration is far to important to let details like the consent of the governed interfere…
New Poll Shows Support for Dewhurst Down to 22%
November 2nd, 2011The Ted Cruz campaign noted that a new UT/Texas Tribune poll showed Lt. Governor David Dewhurst’s support among Republican voters down to 22%, which is about half what previous polls have shown, and even less than that possibly anomalous Azimuth Research Group poll that showed both Cruz and Dewhurst tied around 30%. The UT/TT poll shows Cruz in second place at 10%, with a whopping 50% undecided. Still, to have such huge name recognition and to only be sitting at 22% must be frustrating for Team Dewhurst.
The same poll shows Ricardo Sanchez at a mere 11% of Democratic voters. He’s even running behind Chris Bell at 15%, even though Bell isn’t in the race…
Rick Perry’s Tax and Spending Reform Plan: Solid on Taxes, Timid and Unserious on Spending
October 26th, 2011So Rick Perry unveiled his tax and spending reform plan. (His Wall Street Journal piece provides a brief overview.) It’s a serious compilation of a variety of solid conservative ideas for reforming the federal government. Serious, that is, in every area except spending.
But before we get to the sour let’s look at the sweet. There is a great deal to like in Perry’s proposals:
So outside of the budget provisions, there is an awful lot for conservatives to like about the Perry plan.
Even when it comes to the budget section, there’s a lot of conservative red meat: a non-tax hike balanced budget amendment, an end to baseline budgeting and concurrent resolutions (which bake bigger government into the process), and an end to earmarks. All solid initiatives, though the problem here is less presidential will than getting them through congress.
So, given all that, what am I complaining about?
What makes the Perry budget timid and unserious is his proposal to “balance the budget by 2020.” Given the way Washington works, a promise to balance the budget eight years from now is a promise to never balance the budget. It’s tea so weak it might as well be water. A balanced budget target that far out means that Congress can keep putting off difficult decisions by passing bills that place imaginary savings in out years where they will soon be rendered moot by the next congress. It’s once again a chance to sell out budget discipline for a handful of magic beans.
It’s, yet again, kicking the can down the road.
It’s also a big step back from the Ryan plan, which demanded a balanced budget in the 2015 timeframe. This was the plan seen by conservative Republicans and Tea Party activists as the minimum necessary for a serious reduction in the federal budget deficit. Given serious action wasn’t taken for it this year, it’s reasonable to push it that deadline out one more year to 2016, but pushing the target out beyond that amounts to preemptive surrender.
While Perry’s $100 billion first year down-payment would be an improvement over the weak, phony-baloney deficit reduction enacted as part of the debt limit deal, it’s a ridiculously small cut for the $1 trillion+ Obama deficits being racked up each fiscal year.
Bad as it is as policy, the Perry 2020 date is utterly disasterous as an opening position for negotiations with congress. Perry is going to have to set hard, early deficit targets to have any chance of taming the Leviathan, and then use his veto pen early and often if he doesn’t get them. The truth is that Democrats will scream bloody murder at any attempt at deficit reduction, so the next President might as well (to use the classic Ronald Reagan analogy) “throw long.” Every debt ceiling vote will have to come with both serious budget cuts and the other budget-taming proposals in the Perry plan. Democrats may still filibuster, but then they’ll have to deal with the crushing realities of living under a budget that actual matches spending to revenues. Even with a Republican House and Senate, to actually balance the budget the next President will need to push relentlessly to pass the most stringent budget that can muster 51 senator votes via reconciliation. Setting a 2020 date does nothing to prepare the media and ideological battlespaces for those difficult choices.
Out-of-control federal spending is at the heart of almost all our economic problems, and the single biggest factor behind Tea Party discontent. Thus it has to be at the top of the next President’s agenda. Despite many other solid economic idea, the Perry plan doesn’t meet the test for serious deficit reduction. The shame is that Perry accomplished real spending reform in Texas. To impose such discipline on the out-of-control federal budge will be an order of magnitude more difficult. But to achieve real spending reform, you first have to campaign for it. Setting a goal for a balanced budget at the end of a theoretical Perry presidency’s second term rather than the first actually hampers that goal.