With the Iowa Caucuses happening next week, I thought I’d finally concentrate on the big contest shaping up between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. I’m backing Cruz, but this election year has been so odd I couldn’t possibly predict the outcome.
Cruz was elected, as were so many other TEA Party candidates, to go to Washington and to stand for conservative principles in the face of opposition from both sides of the aisle, and unlike so many others, he did what he said he would do. He didn’t sell out, he didn’t jump on the DC gravy train, and he didn’t turn his back on his grassroots supporters or on his stated ideals and principles.
Trump says he’ll be raising money for veterans groups during the debate. Veterans groups: leave us out of your stunt.
Rush Limbaugh: “I don’t think you can make Ted Cruz wilt. I don’t think there’s any kind of heat that’s going to cause him to shrink. He rises to the occasion. The thing about Ted Cruz is that you never have to doubt his conservatism.”
Why the Iowa caucus rules will help Cruz…and Hillary Clinton.
Finally, if you haven’t seen National Review‘s “Against Trump” symposium (and my own issue hasn’t shown up in the mail yet), here it is.
Going to try to do one of these a day between now and Iowa. Keep in mind that I’ve been reporting on Ted Cruz here since he announced his senate run, for which I endorsed Cruz. If you’re just tuning into the election now, there’s a lot of information there on just how hard Cruz has been fighting for conservative causes…
Winning in a district long held by Democrats, Republican John Lujan outpolled Tomás Uresti in Tuesday’s special runoff in Texas House District 118.
Filling a seat vacated last year by former state Rep. Joe Farias, D-San Antonio, the GOP candidate will serve out the remainder of Farias’ unexpired term, through the end of the year.
Another election is set for March 1 to fill the seat for a two-year term starting in 2017. Lujan and Uresti are seeking their parties’ nominations in that race, and each has a primary opponent, so the winner won’t be decided until Nov. 8.
“The district with about 87,000 voters handed Lujan the win by a 171-vote margin.”
State District 118 is three-quarters Hispanic and largely suburban/exurban, and in the 2012 election it went 60/40 for Democrat Joe Farias, who resigned in August. Why he resigned, triggering a special election, is a good question, as he had already announced he would not run for reelection this year, and the House is not scheduled to convene until 2017.
Despite the fact that the district is going to be hard to hold in November, it’s still an impressive feat for Republicans to have captured it at all. Proving that Republicans can win in clear majority Hispanic districts, and forcing Democrats to devote the time and resources necessary to effectively contest the seat, counts as a big win.
Ted Cruz has picked up the endorsement of former Texas governor Rick Perry for President, and will help campaign as a surrogate for Cruz in Iowa. It’s not a huge endorsement, given how Perry’s own presidential campaign flamed out, but it’s a nice pickup for Cruz, and solidifies his odds for winning Texas on March 1. Also, it’s not as automatic a choice as some out-of-state commentators may believe, given that Perry endorsed (however tepidly) Cruz’s opponent David Dewhurst in his 2012 senate race. It may also indicate conservatives are coalescing around Cruz as the alternative to Donald Trump.
In any case, it’s a worth a hell of a lot more than Lindsey Graham’s endorsement of Jeb Bush…
Been a trying week. Have a Friday LinkSwarm, on me…
Mark Steyn reiterates his central thesis. Namely secular welfare state = low birth rates = import of Muslim immigrants = extinction of the west. “It’s Still the Demography, Stupid.”
National Review takes a short break from their Trump-bashing to look at how the mainstream media has made him such a big deal through saturation coverage. “The media that so thoroughly built up Trump as a contrast to his boring, predictable, consistently conservative GOP rivals might not find him so easy to tear down.”
“Are the Global Warmistas Simply Juicing Up the Latest Years’ Temperatures With ‘Adjustments’ While Reducing the Temperatures of Previous Years, To Always Make the Current Year ‘The Hottest’? Sure seems that way.”
“Western Europe’s elites have pretended that importing millions of Muslims from countries ranging from Morocco to Afghanistan raises no issues and creates no problems. That this is untrue has been obvious for a long time.”
Law enforcement on Open Carry in Texas: “We have no concerns and we have had no problems.” (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
Slashdot: California Assemblyman Jim Cooper wants to add crypto-backdoors to your phone. Wanna guess which political party Cooper is a member of? Go ahead. Guess.
Remembering Sergei Korolev, the legendary “chief designer” of the Soviet space program. (Hat tip: Gregory Benford’s Facebook page.)
Science Fiction editor David Hartwell has died. He was a hugely important figure in the field…
Steyn also went to a Trump rally, and discovered how Trump is wowing crowds as an un-politician. “He moved the meter on the ‘war on women’, too. Mrs Clinton pulled out the card, and Trump flung it right back in her face with her sleazy sociopath of a husband’s four decades of abuse against vulnerable women.”
The puzzling thing about the democrats’ push on gun control: Why gun control, and why now? “Unpopular as it is, gun control may be as good as they’ve got.”
Really, Jeb Bush’s path to victory requires Lindsay Graham’s endorsement? I’m sure in much the same way the Houston Texan’s plans involved Brian Hoyer leading them to the Superbowl…
The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.
You know, if you’re a sitting Texas Supreme Court Justice running for reelection, it’s probably not going to help you win Texas Republican voters if you do robocalling demonizing Michael Quinn Sullivan. Especially when the call goes to Michael Quinn Sullivan. (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
Dan Morenoff is an unhyphenated, full-spectrum Conservative who grew up in the suburbs, went to the only public high school in America named for a baseball player, and married a girl who sat next to him in a 7th grade history class.
He studied economics and political science at Columbia, while running the school’s Conservative newspaper (he believes it was the only one in Manhattan at the time) and working with a think tank on entitlement policy.
After college, Dan worked again on entitlement reform with Senator Phil Gramm for a number of years,before leaving for law school at the University of Chicago. There, too, Dan led the institution’s leading Conservative organization.
Since 2001, Dan’s lived in Dallas, where he’s worked as a lawyer and raised three girls with his wife Erica. In that time, Dan has led the local chapters of both the Federalist Society and the Republican Jewish Coalition, while serving on the boards of various local charities (including his kids’ Jewish day school and his synagogue).
King was sharp and funny, and well worth reading even at her most iconoclastic (she often claimed to be a monarchist). And she could take down puffed up political functionaries like nobody’s business.
At Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, she promised she would take “extraordinary steps…to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Later, more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, according to foundation disclosures.
Six things a Washington Post reporter found out following Ted Cruz around. “The majority of the undecided voters I have spoken with have said they were very impressed after hearing Cruz speak. Many of them said they were undecided coming into a rally and supported him when it was over.”
“Unfortunately, 2016, the little of it that we have so far seen, is already beginning to look like another year of Grim Slide, of a world stumbling down a slippery slope to become less secure, less stable, and less free.”
Iran and Saudi Arabia have severed diplomatic relations over Saudi execution of a Shiite cleric, and Kuwait has recalled their ambassador from Tehran; don’t be surprised if the other Sunni nations follow suit. Good thing we have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House…
Turkey’s Prime Minister: Hey, you know who was a model of effective leadership? Adolf Hitler.
It looks like Karachi, Basra, and Mogadishu all rolled into one. People sell drugs openly just next to the Gronland subway station.
It’s not Norway or Europe anymore, except when there is welfare money to be collected. The police have largely given up. Early in 2010 Aftenposten stated that there are sharia patrols in this area, and gay couples are assaulted and chased away.
Mass sexual assaults involving up to 1,000 Arab men on New Year’s Eve in Cologne.
Rahm Emanuel’s failure in Chicago is emblematic of the blue model failure in America’s cities. “The city’s bloated pension obligations have already forced Emanuel to make severe education cuts. It will continue to force cuts in city services in various cities, making it harder and harder for mayors to govern, and increasing the antagonism among various constituencies.”
Confessions of a social justice warrior white knight. “Their communities thrive on self loathing disguised as elitism…SJWs insist their goal is to make everyone equal, and for a long time I believed it, but their communities actually enforce factionalism and division.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
The filing deadline has passed for 2016 races in Texas, and once again several U.S. House seats will go uncontested.
The first step to winning a race is showing up for one. Even token candidates force the opposition to expend time and attention on races they could use elsewhere. And having a candidate in the race helps you win during improbable circumstances (indictments, scandals, wave elections).
As usual, Democrats passed up more races than Republicans, but Republicans seemed to pass on a higher number of races as well.
Races Democrats Failed To Field a Challenger
Here are the races Democrats failed to show up in, and the current Republican incumbent:
4th Congressional District (John Ratcliffe, who drew two Republican primary opponents)
5th Congressional District (Jeb Hensarling)
8th Congressional District (Kevin Brady, who drew two Republican primary opponents)
11th Congressional District (Mike Conaway)
13th Congressional District (Mac Thornberry)
19th Congressional District (No incumbent, as Randy Neugebauer is retiring; five Republicans will be vying to take his place)
32nd Congressional District (Pete Sessions, who drew two Republican primary opponents)
36th Congressional District (Brian Babin)
With Democrats not contesting eight districts, it allows Republicans to shift time and effort into defending incumbents in more marginal districts (such as Will Hurd in the perpetual battleground 23rd).
Races Republicans Failed To Field a Challenger
Here are the races Republicans failed to show up in, and the current Democratic incumbent:
9th Congressional District (Al Green)
16th Congressional District (Beto O’Rourke, a white Democratic incumbent in a heavily Hispanic district whose drawn a Hispanic Democratic primary opponent, albeit one he already defeated four years ago)
20th Congressional District (Joaquin Castro)
On Republican missed opportunities, Joaquin Castro is the sort of rising star you want to force to defend his home territory, rather than go off gallivanting at the national level.
A few other points of interest:
Sheila Jackson Lee drew no less than four Republican opponents in District 18.
District 15, where Democratic incumbent Ruben Hinojosa Sr. is retiring, has seven Democrats (including Ruben Ramirez Hinojosa) and two Republicans vying for the seat.
Matt McCall (and two other Republican challengers) are gunning for Lamar Smith in District 21 again.