#TxLege#SD19 has been a safe Democrat seat for a long time that just went Republican despite (or because of?) the national media’s love affair with Robert Francis “#Beto” O’Rourke. The fantasy of a blue wave is running up against the red wall of reality.
Three months after convicted felon Carlos Uresti vacated his state Senate seat, voters will choose his successor Tuesday in a race that could have important consequences for next year’s legislative session.
Republican Pete Flores, a retired game warden, and Democrat Pete Gallego, a former U.S. and state representative, emerged from July’s special election in first and second place, respectively, from a field of 11, resulting in Tuesday’s runoff.
Snip.
Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday. The sprawling district encompasses all or parts of 17 counties, including a portion of San Antonio, large swaths of West Texas and 400 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The winner of the runoff will serve the rest of Uresti’s term, which runs through 2020. The longtime lawmaker was sentenced in June to 12 years in prison for his involvement in a Ponzi scheme.
Today is your last chance to vote in the special election in #SD19. If you live in the district, I urge you to vote for Republican Peter Flores. Pete is a principled, hardworking Texan who will make a great state senator. Find your voting location here: https://t.co/E2M3hO1GV9pic.twitter.com/Sp1Csi2Z2v
EU: “Bad Hungary! We are going to sanction you for thought crimes against the European elite!” Poland: “Hey EU! Get stuffed!” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Bureaucrats try to strip the title of heroes from the defenders of the Alamo, and the elected state board of education stops them cold. (By the way, I recently watched John Wayne’s version of The Alamo, and it’s a much better film than its reputation.)
And it’s not just missed sleep: Trump Derangement Syndrome made a Democrat attempt to get all stabby on a Republican congressional candidate in California.
R.S. McCain on modern dating: “Guys, when women say they want you to ‘share your feelings’? Don’t believe it. All that stuff you read about how women want men who are ‘sensitive’ and ‘vulnerable’? This is a gigantic load of crap. Don’t fall for it.”
“Author of ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ Charged With Murdering Her Husband.” What are the odds?
“Facebook has banned Brandon Straka, the former Democrat who founded the ‘Walk Away’ campaign and its viral hashtag #WalkAway, after he linked to Infowars.com – which has been banned from the platform.” Evidently even linking or mentioning an official “unperson” can get you banned…
Via Ann Althouse comes this dramatic depiction of just what a 6′ and 9′ storm surge looks like:
“Google Rep Issues Heartfelt Apology For Anti-Conservative Bias While Wearing ‘Kill All Republicans‘ T-Shirt.” “We want Google to be completely free from bias, even against Republicans who need to die violent deaths for disagreeing with us. That’s what inclusivity is all about.”
I saw this over at Say Uncle and I may have to pick some up:
Another day, another press scandal, this time in Texas:
Another Houston Chronicle journalist flagged me with questions about the accuracy of a story written by veteran Austin reporter Mike Ward. Ward joined the Chronicle in 2014 after a long career with the Austin American-Statesman. Specifically, questions were raised about whether individuals quoted in one of his stories were real people.
Our own researchers, after an initial review, had difficulty finding a number of sources cited in Ward’s most recent reports.
Ward has insisted that his work was truthful, that his work involved real people, and that we would eventually find the individuals behind his “man-on-the-street” interviews. However, given the questions this review raised, he offered to resign and I accepted that resignation last week. If we were in another business, that might be enough.
As a journalism organization, we owe the public more. We owe our readers the truth and to tell you if, in fact, there were inaccuracies in anything we published. We simply do not know the full story yet.
To help us ferret this out, we have hired an independent, highly respected journalist to review Ward’s work for the last year, or further, if necessary, and determine whether any reporting transgressions occurred. We have given that journalist full access to our archives and promised access to our editors as well. Investigative work takes time, and it can be tedious. Tracking down and verifying sources, especially across a year or more of work, requires significant legwork.
Ward frequently reported on state politics.
At least the Chronicle was kind enough to make a public statement about it.
Once again: If members of the media want to know why the public has lost faith in them, they need only look in the mirror.
The Dallas Federal Reserve meeting featured a discussion of where growth in the global oil supply will come from, and the answer is Texas:
“We expect almost all the growth in 2019 to come from the United States, Canada and Brazil,” she said. “This strong growth in global supply is expected to help moderate pricing.”
The EIA forecasts that U.S. crude oil production will grow by 1 million barrels per day next year. Almost 70 percent of that growth is expected to come from the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford.
“Next year, one out of every three barrels of crude oil growth in the world is expected to come from Texas and New Mexico,” Capuano said.
(Hat tip: Former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples.)
Remember all that talk of “peak oil” supply around 2010-2012? Now they’re talking about peak oil demand around 2023…
Ted Cruz’s Challenger, Beto O’Rourke has made a name for himself by saying that he can think of “nothing more American” than kneeling during the National Anthem. We can now add stripping American flags from a VFW hall to things he thinks are good.
According to the Examiner, O’Rourke’s campaign had rented out a Veteran of Foreign Affairs Hall for a campaign rally in Navasota, TX, and requested that the VFW Post 4006 Commander Carl Dry take down the American flags in his building ahead of the event.
From the Navasota Examiner:
“I do not normally attend rental events, but I attended Saturday to make sure things ran smoothly,” said Dry, who noted there were only two requests he could not allow at the VFW Post. “They wanted to open the doors (to the Flight Deck Lounge) and I couldn’t allow that and they wanted to take the flags down, I didn’t only say no, I said hell no, you don’t take the flags off the wall. I can’t believe any American would ask us to do that and I don’t know why he wanted them down or what he was going to put up instead.”
If O’Rourke thinks that average Texans share the disdain his fellow leftists feel for the American flag, I suspect he’s going to find out he’s very sadly mistaken…
Leftist befuddled by how black men can join “white nationalist” groups like Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. Here’s a hint, dumbasses: They’re not white nationalist groups.
Social Justice Warriors attempt to slip their usual political bullshit into open source licensing terms and get smacked down hard. “Less than 24 hours after I posted this, the license change was revoked and its committer expelled from the project.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
#Gamergate Social Justice Warrior lunatic “Brianna Wu” lost her a bid for Massachusetts’ 8th U.S. congressional district by 49 points.
Theranos, the biotech company fraud built, is shutting down. Now all that remains is for Elizabeth Holmes to go to federal prison on pending wire fraud charges.
Principles of the Resistance: 1) When we get back in power there will be a purge and a blacklist and we will destroy the lives of anyone who in any way supported Trump! 2) We need to stop our nation's alarming drift into tribalism. https://t.co/3ktfRKP80S
A man was arrested Wednesday morning after crashing a truck into the side of the FOX4 building in downtown Dallas.
The man, after repeatedly crashing his vehicle into a side of the building with floor to ceiling windows, got out of his vehicle and began ranting.
FOX4 photojournalists were able to film him placing numerous boxes next to a sidedoor filled with stacks of paper. The papers were also strewn across the sidewalk and street adjacent to the building.
The much-delayed Waco biker trials will be delayed again until defeated McLennan County DA Abel Reyna is out of office:
A judge, who said Friday he has been “troubled by the whole Twin Peaks matter from its inception,” put off the trials of bikers in his court until after the first of the year because he wants the new McLennan County district attorney to review how the remaining Twin Peaks cases will be handled.
Judge Ralph Strother, the morning after conducing a daylong pretrial hearing in Twin Peaks defendant Tom Modesto Mendez’s first-degree felony riot case, decided on his own to postpone Mendez’s trial, which was set to start Sept. 10.
Strother denied a motion Thursday by Mendez’s attorney to throw out the indictment after prosecutors agreed to amend language in the riot indictment that more closely tracks wording in the statute.
Both sides have been preparing for weeks for the Mendez case, and each side had scheduled witnesses, some from out of state, to be ready to go Sept. 10.
The sexual assault trial of former Baylor University football player Shawn Oakman had been set for Sept. 10 as a backup to the Mendez case, but it, too, was pushed back Friday. Strother granted the delay in that case, which Oakman’s attorney requested a few hours after Mendez’s delay, saying a character witness who is out of state cannot be subpoenaed in time for Sept. 10.
It was Strother, even more than Mendez’s attorney, Jaime Peña, who questioned prosecutors Thursday about the riot indictment and expressed concerns that they, in effect, had turned what normally is a Class B misdemeanor into a crime that possibly subjects the defendants to life in prison.
And remember that all this is after most of the original, overbroad charges against various bikers present at the Twin Peaks shootout were dismissed.
Snip.
“I think a fresh set of eyes re-evaluating how the state is pursuing these cases is warranted,” Peña said. “That is essentially what the judge is saying. He wants to push it into the new year and let the new DA look at this.”
Barry Johnson beat incumbent DA Abel Reyna by 20 percentage points in the March Republican primary and will run unopposed in November. Johnson, who takes office in January, said during the campaign that one of the first things he will do is assemble a team to review the remaining Twin Peaks cases.
Reyna has not attended any of the numerous hearings involving Twin Peaks defendants since he lost the primary.
The judge’s position is reasonable, but if I were a resident of McLennan County, I would be pissed not only that Reyna so badly screwed up prosecution with his unconstitutional “collective guilt” approach, but that he can’t even be arsed to do his damn job since voters handed him his walking papers…
In an NBC News interview yesterday, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago insisted that it was more than acceptable for Pope Francis to refuse to discuss Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s shocking testimony, which implicates a host of Catholic Church leaders — including the pope — in covering up sexual abuse and immorality.
“The pope has a bigger agenda,” Cupich told interviewer Mary Anne Ahern when asked about the pope’s refusal to discuss Viganò’s claims. “He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the Church.
“What’s a few raped children when we might be able to lower global temperatures a fraction of a degree a century from now?”
“There’s a widespread consensus that at no time in the past 40 years, since Saddam Hussein acquired absolute power and led Iraq into a series of ruinous wars, has Baghdad been as free and as fun as it is now.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Remember Russia’s new T-14 Armata tank? They were going to build 2,300 of them. Now? 132. And that number is split between the T-14 and the T-15 heavy infantry fighting vehicle, which shares the same chassis. Which means Russia will have to continue to rely on older T-72 and T-90 tanks as the mainstays of their armored forces for the foreseeable future. By comparison the United States has over 1,500 M1A2s and over 4,000 M1A1s, both of which proved capable of taking out T-72s in the Gulf War. As Stalin once put it, “Quantity has a quality all it’s own.” And the essential brokeness of Russia is why I’m not worried about their costly adventurism in Syria. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
John McCain was admired by liberals; that is, when they weren’t calling him a senile plutocrat warmonger.
Humphrey would be the last Democratic presidential nominee to represent the values of Truman and JFK: compassionate big government at home, and resolute anti-Communism abroad. Instead, a new Democratic party was born, one that increasingly reflected the radical views of the Chicago protesters: that America, not Communism, was the real force for evil that needed to be contained and transformed. That Democratic party would nominate George McGovern in its 1972 convention and become a party obsessed with social justice, identity politics, and America’s past sins — essentially the party it is today. Meanwhile mainstream Democratic voters began their flight to the Republican party, “Reagan Democrats” who would enable the GOP to win four of the next five presidential elections and who later became the foot soldiers of the Trump insurgency.
