Early voting started in Texas Monday, which means I’m way behind on covering state and local races. Oh well, maybe later this week…
Hillary Clinton didn’t do as badly as expected in New Hampshire. She did worse.
Sanders’s margin of victory — 60 percent to 39 percent — was the largest ever by a Democrat who wasn’t a sitting president. It was a come-from-behind win: Eight months ago, Sanders was at 9 percent and Clinton held a 46-point advantage. And Sanders overperformed the polls. Only 1 of the last 15 polls had him above 60 percent; the Real Clear Politics average in New Hampshire had him at 54.5 percent going into the vote.
Then there are the crosstabs. The exit polling for Clinton was brutal. Sanders won men by 35 points; he won women by 11. He won voters under the age of 30 by 67 points. People expect that of Sanders and his children’s crusade. Clinton took home senior citizens, 54 percent to 45 percent. People expect that of Clinton’s boomers. But in the big band of middle-aged Democrats, ages 45 to 64 (who made up 42 percent of the electorate), Sanders beat Clinton 54 percent to 45 percent. He beat her among Democrats with a high school diploma or less; he beat her among Democrats with postgraduate degrees. Among people who’d voted in a Democratic primary before, Sanders won by 16 points; among first-time voters, he won by 57. He won self-identified “moderate” voters by 20 points.
Clinton made gun control a substantial part of her pitch in New Hampshire. Sanders won voters who own guns by 40 points. But he won voters who don’t own guns by 14. He even won voters who said that terrorism was their number one concern.
The biggest problem for Clinton, however, came in the candidate-perception categories. The second-most important quality voters said they wanted in a candidate was someone who “cares.” Sanders won these voters by 65 points. The most important quality people said they wanted was “honesty.” Sanders took those people home 92 to 6. Look at that again. When asked “Is Clinton honest and trustworthy?” 53 percent of all voters — not just Sanders voters, but everyone casting a Democratic ballot — said “no.”
The topic is the Clintons, so it’s time for another glimpse of Good Maureen Dowd: “It turned out that female voters seem to be looking at Hillary as a candidate rather than as a historical imperative. And she’s coming up drastically short on trustworthiness.”
The Coen Brothers aren’t fans of cramming diversity for the sake of diversity into individual movies. “Not in the least!” Ethan answered. “It’s important to tell the story you’re telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity—or it might not.”
The reactions to the unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia are still coming in. Conservatives (and some liberals) hailed him as a great justice, a keen mind, and one of the court’s finest writers. Other liberals…
Today our Nation mourns the loss of one of the greatest Justices in history – Justice Antonin Scalia. A champion of our liberties and a stalwart defender of the Constitution, he will go down as one of the few Justices who single-handedly changed the course of legal history.
As liberals and conservatives alike would agree, through his powerful and persuasive opinions, Justice Scalia fundamentally changed how courts interpret the Constitution and statutes, returning the focus to the original meaning of the text after decades of judicial activism. And he authored some of the most important decisions ever, including District of Columbia v. Heller, which recognized our fundamental right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms. He was an unrelenting defender of religious liberty, free speech, federalism, the constitutional separation of powers, and private property rights. All liberty-loving Americans should be in mourning.
Justice Scalia’s three decades on the Court was one of President Reagan’s most consequential legacies. Our prayers are with his beloved wife Maureen, their nine children, and their precious grandchildren.”
Justice Antonin Scalia was a man of God, a patriot, and an unwavering defender of the written Constitution and the Rule of Law. He was the solid rock who turned away so many attempts to depart from and distort the Constitution. His fierce loyalty to the Constitution set an unmatched example, not just for judges and lawyers, but for all Americans. We mourn his passing, and we pray that his successor on the Supreme Court will take his place as a champion for the written Constitution and the Rule of Law. Cecilia and I extend our deepest condolences to his family, and we will keep them in our thoughts and prayers.
Instapundit and law professor Glenn Reynolds: “As we remember Justice Scalia’s time, let us remember that every age’s smug certainties come to an end eventually and that the dissents of Supreme Court Justices often turn out to be prophetic.”
He was important because of his intellectual influence. There were and are many legal theories and schools of constitutional interpretation within the world of American conservatism. But Scalia’s combination of brilliance, eloquence and good timing — he was appointed to the court in 1986, a handful of years after the Federalist Society was founded, and with it the conservative legal movement as we know it — ensured that his ideas, originalism in constitutional law and textualism in statutory interpretation, would set the agenda for a serious judicial conservatism and define the worldview that any “living Constitution” liberal needed to wrestle with in order to justify his own position.
This intellectual importance was compounded by the way he strained to be consistent, to rule based on principle rather than on his partisan biases — which made him stand out in an age when justices often seem as purely partisan as any other office holder. Of course there were plenty of cases (“Bush v. Gore!” a liberal might interject here) in which those biases probably did shape the way he ruled. But from flag burning to the rights of the accused to wartime detention, Scalia had a long record of putting originalist principle above a partisan conservatism. And this, too, set an example for his fellow conservatives: The fact that today the court’s right-leaning bloc has far more interesting internal disagreements than the often lock-step-voting liberal wing is itself a testament to the premium its leading intellectual light placed on philosophical rigor and integrity.
Even honest liberals who disagree with Scalia’s politics praised the keenness of his mind and prose:
In his most significant decision for the court’s majority, District of Columbia v. Heller, in 2008, Scalia transformed the understanding of the Second Amendment. Reversing a century of interpretation of the right to bear arms, he announced that individuals have a constitutional right to possess handguns for personal protection. The Heller decision was so influential that even President Obama, whose politics differ deeply from Scalia’s, has embraced the view that the Second Amendment gives individuals a constitutional right to bear arms.
And noted liberal legal scholar Alan Derschowitz priased Scalia: “Love him or hate him, every American should appreciate his contribution to U.S. law. The word unique is often overused, but they broke the mold when they created Justice Scalia. There will never be another like him. I will miss him both personally and professionally.”
Meanwhile, other liberals have reacted with unbridled joy:
A reminder, yet again, that conservatives regard liberals as wrong, but many liberals regard conservatives as not just wrong but evil, and feel no absolutely no remorse in openly celebrating the death of a great man for the crime of daring to hold non-liberal thoughts.
Presidential elections, Islamic terrorism, gun rights, crooked locksmiths: Something for (almost) everyone in your Friday LinkSwarm:
So why did Hillary Clinton take $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs? “That’s what they offered.” I actually like the refreshing honesty about that answer, since we already know Granny Crooked McCankles is all about the benjamins. But Hillary saying she hadn’t decided to run for President yet when she took the money? That’s just pissing on our leg and calling it rain…
Why is the Republican establishment willing to consider one heresy to their worldview (subsidizing the working poor) but not another (actually enforcing immigration law and securing the borders)?
According to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz gave us ObamaCare. By voting to confirm John Roberts. Before Cruz was even in the senate. Hey, why should Ted Cruz even bother to run for President if he’s capable of time travel?
To recap: Gun-control activists declared Virginia their proving ground and poured unbelievable amounts of money into a state-senate election; then they lost that election; then they bet big on executive actions instituting new gun control; they watched as those actions were not only reversed but gun rights were expanded.
If we take Virginia as the bellwether that the gun-control activists envisioned, then gun control is dead as a 2016 issue.
And according to this legal paper by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, lower courts are scrutinizing even modest post-Heller gun rights restrictions.
The Iowa Caucuses are today! Why they’re Monday rather than the usual Tuesday, I couldn’t tell you. (And speaking of elections, today is your last day to register to vote in the March 1 Texas primary.)
Here’s a LinkSwarm with more than a dollop of presidential election news:
Back in 2015 the CBO estimated 21 million Obamacare enrollees in 2016. They are now estimating 13 million will sign up this year. How many will actually sign up is not going to be known for another year or so, but I wouldn’t particularly bet on it being more than 21 million, and I wouldn’t particularly counsel against thinking that it’ll be less than 13 million.
Oh, the news gets better. The original claim that 11 million people signed up for Obamacare in 2015 has likewise been revised by this report, which now apparently reports 9.5 million. And here’s something that will really reassure folks worried about our deficits: the original assumption was that there would be 15 million subsidized plans and 6 million unsubsidized ones in 2015, or 71%/29%. The actual totals were 11 million subsidized, 2 million unsubsidized, or 85%/15%. Let me put it a different way: the Obama administration has managed to somehow simultaneously drastically miss their signup goals AND do so in a way where there won’t even a commensurate savings for taxpayers.
“The Clintons have made careers of defying our assumptions about how low they can go.”
Hillary’s emails disqualify her from the presidency. “There is near certainty that at least the Russians and the Chinese but also the Iranians and North Koreans were reading all incoming and outgoing email to Hillary in real time from almost the moment she hooked up her ‘home brew’ server.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Bernie Sanders: The bum who wants your money. “Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check.”
“If there is anyone with a chance of underperforming his 28 percent of the electorate (again, the new Register number), it is Trump. And if Trump does underperform, the question will be whether he falls enough for Cruz to catch him.” (Hat tip: Conservatives4TedCruz.)
Trump does poorly among Republicans with college degrees, but well among those with less education. “He is continually the candidate not only with the highest very favorable rating, but the highest very unfavorable rating. He is utterly unacceptable to a very significant portion of the Republican electorate.”
Enivironmentalist predictions from 1970: “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
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.)
One year after it occurred, John Daub goes over the day that changed his life, when he was forced to shoot and kill a large man breaking down his family’s front door.
From my perspective, the main thing I remember is hearing my wife screaming for me. Her words were saying there was someone at the door. But the way she said it — the sheer mortal terror in her voice — was something I had never heard out of her in the almost 20 years of our marriage.
If you’ve been following this blog, then you probably know that the home invader turned out to be an autistic man, and that Daub was eventually no-billed by a grand jury over the well-justified shooting. Daub’s writeup on the incident is well worth reading for it’s insight of real-life self defense scenario unfolds under pressure.
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.)
Happy New Year! Today the open carry law went into effect, meaning that if you have a Concealed Handgun License, you may now openly carry a handgun in most (but not all) locations where it was legal to conceal carry before. (It was already legal to openly carry rifles and shotguns without a CHL, and the open carry law didn’t change that.)
The Houston Chronicle has some pointers on open carry, though annoyingly, they are in slideshow form. Some highlights:
Open carry of handguns is only allowed for those who already hold a valid CHL.
You need a belt or shoulder holster to open carry, even in your car. Your gun must be holstered while driving or otherwise hidden.
Primary and secondary schools, hospitals, sporting events, and nursing homes are still “gun-free zones.”
Handguns cannot be taken into amusement parks, churches, hospitals and bars and public meetings if they post notice it’s a gun-free zone.
CHL holders can open carry unless it’s been prohibited by the private property owner. (I am given to understand that HEB is allowing concealed carry, but not open carry.)
“If you do not leave you could be charged with criminal trespass and/or unlawful carry. You will also most likely lose your rights to carry a handgun too.”
A 30.06 sign means no concealed carry on premises but open carry is allowed.
A 30.07 sign ONLY means no open carry on premises but conceal carry is allowed.
And you still can’t carry (open or concealed) in an establishment that derrives 51% or more of its income from the sale of alcohol:
You can’t open or conceal carry beyond the security checkpoint in an airport (duh).
Reciprocity still applies, so if you’re licensed to conceal carry by another state, you’re licensed to open carry in Texas.
The separate campus carry law which allows CHL holders to conceal carry in most buildings at most public universities does not go into effect January 1, but rather August 1, but you still won’t be able to open carry on campus then. Private colleges and universities may opt out, and junior colleges do not need to comply until August 2017.
I think the touches all the highlights. If you think I missed something important, let me know in the comments.
