Posts Tagged ‘Texas’
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
Just as a modern army runs on gasoline, a modern political campaign runs on money. Several of the Senate candidates have been quite active in that regard, according to FEC documents for the 2009-2010 period:
Michael Williams has received a total of $743,458 in donations from 519 individuals. As noted previously, he also received significant support from the Senate Conservatives Fund, and was (if I’m scanning this correctly) the only non-2010 candidate to receive funding from them last year.
Roger Williams has received a whopping $1,643,928 in donations from 1335 individuals. Moreover, since Williams was the earliest candidate to announce, he raised $131,000 in the 2007-2008 election cycle, though $100,000 of that was a loan to himself, the rest from 18 individuals.
Elizabeth Ames Jones has raised $989,765 from 1051 individuals.
I don’t think State Senator Florence Shapiro has a high enough profile to win the Republican nomination, but that didn’t keep her from raising $525,285 for a Senate run. However, there seem to be almost as many refunds as donations listed in her filing, many for people who have multiple entries for the same amount on the same day. I can’t tell whether she refunded people because she decided not to run, or if it was just to offset a data glitch. (I sent off a question, but the address on her campaign website bounces.)
On the Democratic side, holy moly! John Sharp may have been invisible on the campaign trail, but he’s already got $3,994,490 in his war chest, having raised money from 722 individuals. However, over $3 million of that comes from a “Candidate Loan.” So Sharp hasn’t been lazy the last year, he’s been in “stealth mode.” But that still doesn’t explain why johnsharp.com redirects to Network Solutions…
Though he says he’s not running, Bill White has raised an even larger $6,015,014 for his Senate campaign from 4521 individuals. (As these are federal disclosure forms, my understanding is that none of White’s funding for his Governor’s race would be included here.) But it’s possible the bulk was raised before he switched to run for Governor.
I can’t find any Senate fundraising reports on any of the other likely serious candidates. (Democrat Chet Edwards shows up, but only for his unsuccessful attempt to hold onto his House seat.)
Keep in mind that these are very early figures, only go through 9/30/10 for most candidates, and several potential candidates haven’t started raising funds yet. I have little doubt that, should David Dewhurst jump into the race as expected, he would easily be able to amass somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million by year’s end.
We’re not even at the starting line yet, but contestants are already starting to mosey out to the track…
Tags:2012 Election, Bill White, campaign contributions, Elections, Elizabeth Ames Jones, Florence Shapiro, John Sharp, Michael Williams, Roger Williams, Texas, Texas Senate Race
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 4 Comments »
Friday, January 21st, 2011
Add Republican Rep. Mike McCaul to the list of names of those considering a run.
Polls show Dewhurst doing the best in polls against potential Democratic challengers, but all named Republicans beat all named Democrats. Given the state of Texas politics, that sounds about right.
On the Democratic side, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro says he’s not running. Bill White also says no, despite Nate Silver’s pimping. Houston Sheriff Adrian Garcia also says he’s not interested, but his statement (“I have no interest in running for U.S. Senate at this time”) leaves a good bit more wiggle room.
I keep hearing that John Sharp is going to run, but I wonder if anyone has told Sharp. He was making noises about it last March, and since then has been pretty much invisible. Signs of a Chet Edwards Senate run are even more non-apparent on the web.
The Texas Tribune lists all sorts of wacky possibilities: Chris Bell (Maybe), George Prescott Bush (Bush41’s grandson, and No), Kinky Friedman (probably not, though he can’t do much worse than many of the other Democratic possibilities), Craig James (Maybe, but hard to see him gaining any traction in the Republican field; try running for the House first), Florence Shapiro (another Maybe, another person who couldn’t find traction in the Republican field), Leticia Van Putte (who?), and Farouk Shami (they actually asked him). Why not see if Phil Gramm or Dick Armey was coming out of retirement while you’re at it? Or some random Bullock or Hobby offspring?
Not that it probably matters too much; there hasn’t been a Democrat elected in Texas statewide since Bob Bullock won in 1994, and Texas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 (the same year the Dukakis/Bentsen ticket lost to Bush/Quayle). Things are always fluid in politics, but there does not appear to be any instant revival for the Texas Democratic Party over the horizon in the near future…
Tags:Bill White, Bob Bullock, Chet Edwards, Chris Bell, David Dewhurst, Farouk Shami, Florence Shapiro, John Sharp, Julian Castro, Kinky Friedman, Leticia Van Putte, Lloyd Bentsen, Mike McCaul, Texas, Texas Senate Race
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
Another roundup of jihad-related news from jihadWatch and elsewhere.
Tags:Al Green, Chris Christie, Communism, gay, Hezbollah, Iraq, Jihad, Lebanon, Texas, This Week in Jihad, Tunisia, witchcraft
Posted in Communism, Jihad, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
Tags:David Dewhurst, Joe Barton, Michael Williams, Republicans, Ron Paul, Ted Cruz, Texas, Texas Senate Race
Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011
It’s only a few days after she announced her retirement, but several serious contenders are getting a lot of buzz for Kay Baily Hutchison’s Senate seat:
- Even though he hasn’t announced, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst is considered the presumptive front-runner. Having successfully run for a very powerful (and very prominent) statewide office, Dewhurst would be a formidable candidate. And his intention to jump in just may be deduced from the Google ad that shows up when you search for his name: “Taking the Fight to Washington? Stay Updated Here/www.DavidDewhurst.com”
- Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbot is rumored to to be considering a run. Current Senator John Cornyn made the same jump in 2002.
- Roger Williams, former Texas Secretary of State (not the theologian the Rhode Island university is named for), has picked up a serious endorsement from former President George H. W. Bush. Williams worked on both the Bush41 and Bush43 campaigns and headed the Texas Republican Victory 2008 Coordinated Campaign. It’s a big jump from Secretary of State (which is an appointed, not elected office) to the Senate, but the Bush Machine excels at fund-raising, and if it really throws its weight behind Williams he won’t have any trouble raising money. (Edited to add: I didn’t realize that Williams had already announced his candidacy all the way back in December 2008.)
- A different Williams, Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams, gets some serious love from South Carolina Senator (and Senate Conservatives Fund head honcho) Jim DeMint. But the Railroad Commission, while quite powerful, doesn’t have nearly the public profile of Lt. Governor.
- Another Railroad Commissioner, Elizabeth Ames Jones, is already off and running, having evidently announced back in 2009.
- A serious dark-horse contender is State Senator Dan Patrick, who has a lot of name-recognition in Houston for being a former sportscaster. (He might even get false name recognition, since he’s not the other sports-casting Dan Patrick.)
- Other names being bandied about are Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert and former Solicitor General of Texas Ted Cruz.
And that’s just the first batch of names to be floated, and says nothing of random billionaires or old Republican warhorses jumping into the race.
The Democratic names being floated are a far less imposing bunch: San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia, ex-Congressman Chet Edwards, and former Comptroller John Sharp. Edwards got trounced in the most recent election, while Sharp was defeated by Dewhurst in his run for Lieutenant Governor in 2002, and it’s hard to treat someone as a serious candidate who haven’t updated their twitter feed in almost a year and who let his campaign website (http://www.johnsharp.com/) lapse.
In related news, Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, of deeply red North Dakota, announced he was declining to run in 2012 as well, which means Democratic chances to hold onto the seat probably just went from slim to none.
Tags:2012 Election, Adrian Garcia, Chet Edwards, Dan Patrick, David Dewhurst, Elizabeth Ames Jones, George H. W. Bush, Gregg Abbot, Jim DeMint, John Sharp, Julian Castro, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Michael Williams, Roger Williams, Ted Cruz, Texas, Texas Senate Race, Tom Leppert
Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 3 Comments »
Thursday, January 13th, 2011
Time for another installment of This Week in Jihad.
Please note that these weekly installments are only a sampler of Jihad-related news from around the world, and that I skim a lot more stories than I post here. One reason is that, from Africa to Indonesia, regular Jihad-related violence is depressingly frequent. So I don’t report every suicide bombing or honor killing that goes on. There’s just too much to keep up with.
However, given Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree in Tucson, I thought I would change that for this week’s roundup, to provide glimpses of places in which political and religious violence are the rule rather than the exception. So here’s a list of all the deadly incidents related to Islam I could find mention of from this past week:
- Suicide bomb kills 18 at a police station in Pakistan.
- Suicide bomber kills two on bus in Afghanistan.
- Two killed, six wounded in Taliban attack.
- Off-duty policeman shoots a 71-year old Christian man dead on a bus in Egypt.
- Jihadis open fire in a bar, killing seven in Nigeria.
- That follows hot on the heels of 11 people being killed in Jos, Nigeria.
- Jihadist suicide bomber kills 17 at bathhouse in Afghanistan.
- Couple axed to death in Punjab, India.
- Man killed and mutilated in honor killing in Multan, Iran. “Murtaza’s ears, lips, tongue, nose were sliced his eyes were gouged out with a knife before his head was severed.”
- Ireland suffers its first honor killing.
- Iraqi police chief killed by a roadside bomb.
- Six NATO soldiers killed Wednesday in Afghanistan.
- The figure above presumably includes U.S. Private Benjamin Moore, killed by an IED.
- The figure presumably does not include Marine Lance Cpl. Ryan Giese, killed on Friday.
- Nor that of Private First Class Robert Near, also killed in Afghanistan on Friday.
- Finally, I count two more names on this list of the fallen, for the time period specified, not including those killed 1/12: SPC Ethan C. Hardin and PFC Ira B. Laningham IV (the latter of Zapata, Texas).
If I’m counting correctly, that brings the total, just for this week, up to 73. There could be twice that many I didn’t have time to search out yet, either from the Foreign Policy/Jihad sources listed to the right (JihadWatch was, as always, invaluable) or just doing a Google search. And there could be twice (or ten, or even a hundred) times as many Jihad-related killings that didn’t make news reports. I did not include Iran’s execution of five accused drug-smugglers in the total. Nor any of the other 46 executions the Islamic Republic of Iran has carried out in the last 20 days.
Other Jihad-related tidbits:
- Christopher Hitchens on the assassin of Salman Taseer
- Speaking of Taseer, Pakistani’s clerics have weighed in overwhelmingly. Overwhelmingly in favor of his assassination, that is.
- Want to know what soft Jihadis actually think? This piece by M. Shahid Alam, a mixture of truths (Pakistan’s elites are corrupt), half-truths (America is their pupper master), half-digested second-hand Marxism (“the Pakistani state fell into the lap of lumpen elites”), conspiracy theories (“The military dictator who preceded him had boasted in his autobiography that his government had garnered US$50 million by capturing and selling Pakistanis to secret US agencies.”), and Islamist rhetoric (“Pakistanis worried that this was only the start of a campaign to repeal the [blasphemy] law – and open the floodgates for Salman Rushdi-style smearing of the blessed Prophet.”). Oh, and this guy is an economics professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
- American Center for Law and Justice sues to halt construction of the Ground Zero Mosque.
- If you didn’t already have enough to worry about, the coalition government in Lebanon has collapsed.
- Not News: Jihadist death threats against synagogues. News: In Fargo, North Dakota.
- First they came for the beer…
- Hamas linked CAIR is singing from the same hymnal as The New York Times in blaming the Tucson shooting on “inflammatory political rhetoric”.
- In Saudi Arabia, accused in rape case sentenced to one year in prison, 100 lashes. The accused rape victim, that is.
Tags:Afghanistan, Benjamin Moore, CAIR, Christopher Hitchens, Ethan C. Hardin, Ground Zero Mosque, Hamas, honor killing, IED, India, Ira B. Laningham IV, Iran, Iraq, Jared Lee Loughner, Jihad, Lebanon, M. Shahid Alam, Nigeria, rape, Robert Near, Ryan Giese, Salman Taseer, Texas, This Week in Jihad
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Texas | 3 Comments »
Thursday, January 13th, 2011
“Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison announced today that she will retire at the end of her current term, quashing speculation that she would run for a fourth full term in the U.S. Senate.”
Given the drubbing she received at the hands of Rick Perry in the Governor’s race, this was probably a wise decision, as Perry did such a good job painting her as an out-of-touch Washington insider that she would probably have been beaten in the primary. As for who will be the Republican nominee in 2012, there are a lot of possibilities…
Tags:2012 Election, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republicans, Rick Perry, Texas, Texas Senate Race
Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011
A few links of interest, some Tucson-shooting-related, some not:
- Wow. There’s crazy. There’s super crazy. And then there’s even the people on AboveTopSecret think you’re a loon crazy.
- Cry for help, insane person, or random troll? Really, there’s no way to know.
- Why the liberal response to Palin’s video is so lame:
Let me be blunt, liberal America: no one, outside your own fever swamps, trusts you to decide what discourse is “fair”, or where the “Climate of Hate” begins and ends. You don’t get to drop buckets of blood on Palin for days, then call her a hatemonger for responding. Your behavior over the last few days is a crime against discourse, and you did not get away with it.
- Paul Krugman managed to bring up one example of conservative “eliminationist rhetoric”…and it was a lie.
- “Liberals wanted to use the Tucson massacre to smear conservatives. In the end, it will further discredit them and journalism itself. We are seeing, in a somewhat different form, the Dan Rather/National Guard story all over again. And we know how that turned out.”
- In truth, I don’t cover Krugman a lot, because: A.) Plenty of others are covering that beat, and B.) Like much of the rest of The New York Times, I view Krugman’s blinkered liberalism as a major strategic advantage for conservatives. But John Steele Gordon is right: “He is the Joe McCarthy of our times.”
- Joe Straus re-elected Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives.
- OK, something non-shooting related: This disclaimer is pretty funny.
Tags:Jared Lee Loughner, Joe Straus, LinkSwarm, Paul Krugman, Sarah Palin, Texas
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Media Watch, Texas | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the highest criminal court in Texas, as the Texas Supreme Court does not handle criminal cases) told State District Judge Kevin Fine, in essence, cut it out. One key factor in the ruling is that the named defendant, accused murderer John Edward Green, hasn’t even gone to trial yet, much less been convicted and given the death penalty.
Judge Fine (presumably no relation to Larry) was all set to hold hearings on the constitutionality of Texas application of the death penalty before the ruling told him not even to bother. This was after he had just gone ahead and declared the death penalty unconstitutional in March, only to reverse himself a week later.
Though a Democrat, Fine sounds like an interesting and sympathetic fellow: A heavily-tattooed recovering cocaine addict elected to Houston’s “drug court” in 2008. He seems like the sort of person you would want to wish well. But a compelling life-story doesn’t get you a pass on blatant judicial activism. The Constitution itself makes repeated reference to the fact that no United States citizen can be deprived of life “without due process of law,” which says that they can be deprived of life with due process of law; otherwise the Constitution would merely that that they could not be deprived of life, period. The death penalty was legal in every state after the Constitution was ratified, and the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the basic constitutionality of the death penalty in every related case it has heard since Gregg vs. Georgia in 1976.
Certainly the issue of the death penalty is troubling, as there are few fates worse than being unjustly executed by the state. However, trial by jury is probably the least corrupt of America’s democratic institutions, and the criminal appeals process is far more heavily weighted toward letting the guilty go free than executing the innocent. Moreover, application of the death penalty would rank pretty far down the list of innocent people killed by the federal government; indeed, I feel confident in stating that fewer innocent men and women have been executed by the death penalty than were killed by the ATF under the Clinton Administration. And when you examine the details of cases that anti-death penalty crusaders say prove that innocent people have been executed, you find out that those same people frequently lie, and in many cases the accused was as guilty as sin. I don’t think there’s any question that the number of murders committed by ex-cons foolishly released or paroled exceeds people executed who were not guilty of the crimes for which they were executed by several orders of magnitude.
If men were angels we would need no laws. The death penalty should only be applied judiciously, but it is constitutional, and should be applied.
Tags:Crime, death penalty, Gregg vs. Georgia, Houston, John Edward Green, Kevin Fine, Supreme Court, Texas
Posted in Crime, Supreme Court, Texas | No Comments »
Sunday, December 26th, 2010
Guess which one is the better place to live?
When the Internet economy allows an increasing number of people to live anywhere, low costs win. Texans spend 8.4% of income on state and local taxes compared with 11.7% for New Yorkers. Dollars that would rent a fifth-floor walk-up in New York City instead can buy a small ranch and maybe even acreage in Texas’ suburbs, where prairie begs to be paved for another Applebee’s.
Texas creates jobs like a fiend, in part because businesses large and small have no worry of obstacles such as plaintiff-friendly courts, consumer-friendly regulators or oversight-friendly lawmakers. Pro-business isn’t just a mantra; they put it in the water.
Oil and gas still play a huge role here, but are increasingly overshadowed by technology, medical and defense jobs. Texas has more Fortune 500 company headquarters than New York.
Tags:Economics, New York, Taxes, Texas
Posted in Economics, Regulation, Texas | No Comments »