All sorts of news bubbling up, reportage of which is in various stages of completion.
Archive for the ‘Texas’ Category
LinkSwarm for May 16, 2012
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012Deb Fischer Wins In Nebraska
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012State Senator Deb Fischer was sitting in third place in the race for Nebraska’s U.S. Senate seat. Then Sarah Palin endorsed her. Now? She just won the GOP nomination.
Let’s see if we can detect a pattern:
Will the streak continue? We’ll find out in two weeks…
Trying to Piece Together a Picture of the Birkman/Seitsinger Race
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012Sometimes you post even though you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, if only because you have more of them than the average voter.
With early voting upon us, I wanted to try to come to grips with the Williamson County Precinct 1 Commissioner’s race, where Lee Ann Seitsinger is challenging incumbent Lisa Birkman. The Seitsinger camp has a run a very active race, walking neighborhood and putting up a lot of signs, and have done several direct mailers, which suggests a fairly serious commitment to the race on their part.
And Seitsinger is certainly talking the conservative talk. On Friday, I sent three questions off to the Seitsinger campaign, and received a reply back yesterday. Questions in italics, answers in bold.
1. Do you support or oppose the EPA’s attempts to designate several Williamson County salamanders as endangered species?
Opposed. In fact, I’m opposed to the very existence of the EPA. The federal government has no business being involved in our local decisions.
2. Do you support or oppose attempts to make allow automatic payroll deductions for the Williamson County Employees Association?
Opposed. Employees should have to make the conscious decision every month to contribute. Otherwise the potential for abuse is great. It’s a bit like the withholding tax with the IRS. If we had to write a check quarterly to the IRS instead of having it automatically deducted from our paychecks, people would be marching in the streets and we’d finally get real IRS reform.
3. I’m having a hard time finding information out about you online. Can you point to evidence of your involvement in Republican politics prior to this election cycle?
I have not been involved in politics prior. I’ve been serving in the U.S. Navy and running a small business while raising a son. I’m just a conservative citizen who has watched our county debt grow to the point that we are the third most indebt county in all of Texas. My neighbors came to me and asked me to run, and so I did.
All solid, conservative answers. But for all of that, some things just don’t seem to add up.
For instances, her biggest blog supporters (and Birkman’s biggest detractors) seem to be Williamson County public employee representatives at http://blog.wilcoea.org/ and http://wilcowatchdog.org/. Those are constituencies that usually campaign and vote Democratic, and their biggest beef seems to be that Birkman has held the line on spending and not given them the raises they want.
Holly Hansen, who usually follows these things far more closely than I do, is not impressed with Seitsinger and is backing Birkman. Birkman has also been endorsed by House District 52 Rep. Larry Gonzalez, who’s a pretty good guy. By contrast, Seitsinger’s endorsements seem pretty heavy on public employee groups.
There also seems to be significant overlap between Seitsinger supporters and those supporting Jana Duty’s District Attorney run against John Bradley, another race I don’t have a firm grasp on (though I do know that Rick Perry has endorsed Bradley, which counts for something, even if I’m not taking Perry’s advice in the Senate race).
I poked around Seitsinger’s supporters, and found many Republicans (including a few vocal Ron Paul supporters), a number of realtors (her day job), a few Democrats, and a number of public employees groups.
For all those reasons I’m leaning toward Birkman. I wish I could come up with a more definitive judgment, but Google has a distinct paucity of information about Seitsinger.
I get the feeling this is going to be a very close race.
LinkSwarm for May 12, 2012
Saturday, May 12th, 2012All sorts of stories bubbling away in various states of completion. In the meantime, here’s a nice Saturday LinkSwarm that includes some (but not all) of the links I’ve put up on my twitter feed:
Obama’s EPA Takes Aim at Williamson County
Thursday, May 10th, 2012You know all those lovely jobs the free market has been creating in Williamson County? Well, they’re about to be salamandered:
The Williamson County Conservation Foundation is gathering a task force of various communities and stakeholders to try and prevent the endangered listing of several salamander species in Central Texas.
This has been churning away in the background for a while, but I’m hearing that it’s about to impact some local Williamson County Republican races. I don’t think I have a good handle on all the angles yet. I’ll try to post when I do.
What I Saw At Sunday’s Tea Party Express Rally
Thursday, May 10th, 2012It’s been a few days since I went down to the south capitol steps to watch the Tea Party Express featuring Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Ron Paul. It’s a bit late for me to do a comprehensive write-up of the speeches there. I caught all of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz’s speech, but could only stay for about ten minutes of Ron Paul’s, because I had to get back home to write my review of the Avengers. The crowd was friendly, enthusiastic, and about 75% Ron Paul supporters, with the other 25% there either for Ted Cruz or various other candidates, including Richard Mack and the Libertarian candidate for the U.S. 25th congressional district Betsy Dewey, who was running around in one of those Firefly cunning hats and has the virtue of being quite cute.
Rather than a blow-by-blow description of what was said, or an attempt to construct a coherent Venn diagram depicting conservatives, Libertarians, Republicans, the Tea Party, and Ron Paul supporters, I’m going to just put up some pictures:
As usual, click to embiggen.
NEWS FLASH: Sarah Palin Endorses Ted Cruz
Thursday, May 10th, 2012“Just four days before the start of early voting in the Texas Senate primary, the Ted Cruz campaign announced the endorsement of Governor Sarah Palin and her husband Todd Palin.”
In response to a letter from Ted Cruz, Governor Sarah Palin wrote: “We’re proud to join conservatives in Texas and throughout the nation in supporting your campaign to become the next Senator from the Lone Star State.”
“Your conservative principles, passionate defense of our Constitution and our free market system come at a time when these cornerstones of our freedom and prosperity are under attack,” Governor Palin added. “Our shared goal isn’t just to change the majority in control of the Senate, but to assure principled conservatives like you are there to fight for us.”
Palin is not only a superstar, she’s also a Tea Party kingmaker; numerous of the candidates she endorsed in 2010 won their primary and general election races over GOP establishment types, even when the challengers weren’t initially favored. Expect a lot of donors (both large and small) to look at contributing to Cruz, as well as a lot of on-the-fence Texas voters who hadn’t been paying attention to the race yet seriously considering Cruz. So this endorsement is just a wee bit more important than my own.
Team Dewhurst can’t be happy campers today…
Paul Burka (Still) Doesn’t Get It
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012I know, dog bites man.
In the course of talking about a phony-baloney, Dewhurst-friendly poll, Paul Burka has proven, yet against, that he doesn’t understand Republicans in general and conservatives in specific. You have to scroll down a little to find out his reaction to Richard Mourdock terminating Dick Lugar’s senate career, but it exhibits the same keen insight we’ve come to expect from his political commentary:
I can tell you what I think of Lugar’s loss. I think Republicans have gone nuts. Lugar has been a distinguished senator for many years.
It used to be that Republicans could skate by talking like conservatives then voting like liberals. That was several trillion dollars worth of debt ago. Now Republican voters demand that their representatives actually do something about out-of-control federal spending and unconstitutional enlargement of a runaway federal government, and those that don’t will find themselves being sent home in short order.
When Burka says “a distinguished senator for many years,” what actual conservative voters (perhaps Burka should make the acquaintance of a few) see is someone who has become part of the problem: The get-along-to-go-along Republican establishment that was willing to let the federal welfare state grow indefinitely rather than fight to control it.
Either we get runaway government spending under control, or we go the way of Europe, where the cradle-to-grave welfare state is destroying economies across the entire continent and “unacceptable austerity” is reducing Greece’s budget from 9% of GDP to 7.5% of GDP.
The Red State model of government embodied by Texas under Rick Perry is kicking the ass of the Blue State model represented by Jerry Brown’s California, much to the consternation of Burka and his fellow liberal MSM journalists. Low taxes, holding the line on government spending, and a business friendly climate do wonders for your state economy. Democratic control, high taxes, out of control spending, and powerful labor unions bleeding the state dry? Not so much.
If Republican elected officials won’t scale back the size and scope of federal power and spending, we’ll replace them with people who will. Republican voters have been sending that message to Washington loud and clear for the last three years, and even the Republican establishment has been forced to take notice. I think Texans will send that message at the polls loud and clear May 29, and Americans on November 6.
And it’s quite possible that Burka will be just as baffled by the results.
California vs. Texas: Round 54
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012The challenge with covering the respective fortunes of Texas and California is where to cut off the news roundup. Here’s news of how California is sucking, and Texas isn’t, from the last month or so:
Things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their “smart growth” plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. “What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s,” Mr. Kotkin declares.
Also this:
Middle-class workers—those who earn more than $48,000—pay a top rate of 9.3%, which is higher than what millionaires pay in 47 states.
LinkSwarm for May 4, 2012
Friday, May 4th, 2012Just because I endorsed Ted Cruz doesn’t mean I’ve given up doing Texas Senate Race Updates, it’s just that I have other fish to fry this week.
Warren is playing an important role in our political discourse: she is the ghost of liberalism future. Warren’s alleged use of affirmative action, if true, would have to be the most egregious abuse of the system at the expense of minorities we’ve seen yet. Elizabeth Warren is, as a white woman, statistically speaking very much a member of this country’s majority. The only category in which she is a true minority is wealth: Elizabeth Warren is very, very rich… If Warren, a rich, white, Harvard professor, is a victim, everyone is.
Why does this matter? Because it reveals that the left thinks affirmative action is a joke, another cudgel with which to attack political opponents at the expense of minorities who might, thanks to liberalism’s insistence on keeping students in failed school districts, actually put the policy to some good use. And because if Elizabeth Warren is unable to advance coherent liberal policy arguments, then there may be none to advance.