Q: What do Democrats call illegal aliens who have beaten women and children? A: Evidently future Democratic voters, since they refuse to amend the Gang of 8 illegal alien amnesty bill to exclude them.
Democratic Rep. John Larson (D–Con) whines that it’s so very, very unfair that ObamaCare applies to congress. Hold on, Rep. Larson. When I can get some time on a scanning-tunneling microscope, I’ll see if I can find an appropriately sized violin.
Maureen Dowd slams Obama some more: “When the man who polled where to take his summer vacation and whether to tell the truth about his affair with Monica Lewinsky tells you you’re a captive of polls, you’d better listen up.” Bonus: Description of the NSA program as “No Call Left Behind.”
A new crime control initiative in Houston: arm the law-abiding. More on the Armed Citizen Project here.
Animal Rights activists get Obama Administration to end testing on chimps. So much for liberals being part of the “science-based community.”
SooperMexican makes brutal fun of the SNAP Challenge. (If you’ve never heard of the SNAP challenge, it’s another variant on the “Any time conservatives cut a dime of government funding, 10 million children starve!” argument.)
Scientists invent a robotic cat. Evidently it has the “massive indifference to your presence” and “not coming when you call it” parts of a cat’s personality down pat…
The torrent of Obama scandal information is flooding the news is something to behold. In contrast to the tiny drops of Benghazi information the MSM would begrudgingly dole out last year, every day seems to bring a new outrage about how the Obama Administration is trampling on the rights of American citizens. I wish they would put 1/10th the effort of snooping on innocent Americans into tracking and deporting illegal aliens as required by law.
How the NSA lies with numbers. “We only issued 1,789 requests for warrentless wiretaps last year…that just happened to cover every phone and data provider in America.” Plus that number was just 21 in 2009.
NSA’s Verizon request targeted Americans, not foreigners. “This is [an] indiscriminate dragnet. Say what you will about warrantless wiretapping, at least it was targeted at agents of Al Qaeda. This includes every customer of Verizon Business Services.”
“And when we swear up and down, cross our hearts and hope to die, that the NSA does no domestic spying on Americans, what we actually mean is that there’s an awful lot of it.”
So why does #NSA’s #PRISM use the Dark Side of the Moon logo? “All that you touch, all that you see…”
The eye-on-the-pyramid scheme came from the Great Seal of the United States – it’s on the back of the dollar bill – and is still beloved of conspiracy theorists all over the world. It’s meant to be the all-seeing eye of God, but it’s also commonly associated with freemasonry, the occult and a shadowy New World order presided over by the Illuminati. To deploy it in a logo for a creepy-sounding spy agency simply justifies the paranoia of people who think the world is run by lizard-shaped aliens. David Icke’s next podcast will write itself.
The New York Timessoftens its editorial on Obama within hours of publishing it. Bet they never did that for an editorial critical of Bush…
The NSA scandal has even hit the sports pages: “LeBron James and his friends should be worried right now, and not just because the government is tracking their phone calls.”
The season has switched from not Summer to Summer here in Texas, so here’s a hot, humid LinkSwarm:
In Europe, youth unemployment is climbing to scary, stratospheric heights. So scary I’m going to swipe their chart:
Notice how countries that have kept their deficit spending relatively low (Germany and even the UK, where deficits has at least decreased under Cameron) are doing much better than the PIIGS. Again, Austerity hasn’t failed in Europe, it’s been declared difficult and left untried.
Harry Reid calls his close personal friend and business associate Harvey Whittemore (and his wife) “wonderful people.” Oh, and Whittemore is now also a convicted felon.
Eric Holder: Obama’s sin eater. “The attorney general has done little in his tenure to protect civil liberties or the free press. Rather, Holder has supervised a comprehensive erosion of privacy rights, press freedom and due process. This ignoble legacy was made possible by Democrats who would look at their shoes whenever the Obama administration was accused of constitutional abuses.”
Three Fox reporters targeted by DOJ. At this point I think it’s far to ask if Obama flipped through All the President’s Men looking for management tips.
Silly Joanne Chesimard. If she had just served her time, she’d have tenure by now.
Europe is “bleeding out”. Youth unemployment? “59.1% of those under 25 are unemployed in Greece, 55.9% in Spain, 38.4% in Italy, 38.3% in Portugal, 26.5% in France.” More: “Hope and Change economies are crony capitalist systems which pick winners and losers. They maintain the status quo at all costs — and reward those who have captured government over those who innovate.”
So which is funnier, violence against women, or intimidating crime witnesses? Mountain Dew puts both in the same ad! Hilarity ensues! (Oh, and some people think it’s racist. It is, but not any more than a random gangsta rap video.)
People don’t like being bossed around by the political class. But that’s the Democratic Party’s entire model!
“We found 15 Trial Court cases, and 12 Appellate Court cases, where Shariah was found to be applicable in these particular cases. The facts are the facts: some judges are making decisions deferring to Shariah law even when those decisions conflict with Constitutional protections.”
Former New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson says that Ted Cruz isn’t allowed to be a Hispanic because he opposes illegal alien amnesty. Maybe they should just declare that you can’t be Hispanic unless you’re a Democrat and be done with it.
Speaking of Cruz, here’s a piece in The New Republic that, when stripped of standard TNR talking points, boils down to “Yes, Ted Cruz could be elected President.”
Another day, another another 20 dead in an Islamist attack on a Christian church.
Government spending on bailouts, subsidies, grants, salaries and entitlements commands a much larger share of these economies than it did just a few years ago. European austerity has been focused on the private sector — namely, taxpayers with high incomes.
That is the second thing the PIIGGS have in common. The highest income tax rate was recently increased in every one of the troubled PIIGGS except Italy (where it was already too high at 43%). The top tax rate was hiked from 40 to 46.5% in Portugal, from 41 to 48% in Ireland, from 40 to 45% in Greece, from 40 to 50% in Great Britain, and from 48 to 52% in Spain.
Female Princeton grad tells current Princeton women that maybe they should consider getting married in college. Naturally the Ivy league/feminist/MSM complex threw a fit. (Pro-tip: There are few surer signs of leftwing PC think than the word “hetronormative.”)
Dwight brings up another case of journalistic malpractice. “Meet the Sniper Who Killed 2,200 People in Iraq.” As Dwight notes, anyone with even passing knowledge of snipers should know that this claim is ludicrous from the git go. In sports terms, it’s like someone claiming they threw 20 Major League no hitters, or ran a two minute mile. It reminds me of Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s smears about troops in Iraq in The New Republic. (If you remember the Beauchamp affair, it turns out that he was engaged to Elspeeth Reeve, who just happened to be a TNR fact-checker. Somebody should make them read Stolen Valor.)
Instead of going out and doing the heavy lifting myself on a Texas vs. California update, Victor Davis Hanson [[Corrected. – LP]] has done another of his California is totally screwed pieces, and it’s a cornucopia of facts on California’s decline.
A few tidbits:
Salinas just named an elementary school after a serial cop killer
“Hundreds of thousands of the working and upper-middle class, mostly from the interior of the state, have fled — maybe four million in all over the last thirty years, taking with them $1 trillion in capital and income-producing education and expertise. Apparently, they tired of high taxes, poor schools, crime, and the culture of serial blame-gaming and victimhood.”
“One of every three welfare recipients lives in California.”
I’ve held off on offering up immediate judgment on the election because I’m incredibly lazy to get past the panic and knee-jerk reactions. The world hasn’t ended, Republicans are not doomed to permanent minority status, and the cause of smaller government is not lost forever. Go over that list of bright spots again. Republicans did not do as badly as they did in 1932, 1964, 2006 or 2008. And we survived those elections, just as the Democrats survived 1994, 2004, and 2010. We’ll survive this one.
One persistent theme in a lot of recaps is how badly Republicans did among Hispanic voters, and that Republicans must immediately cave on the issue of illegal alien amnesty to have any chance of courting Hispanic votes. Though no one can dispute that Republicans need to do better among Hispanics, much of the panic over the 2012 Hispanic vote (and the resulting predictable knee-jerk push for amnesty among prominent RINOs) has been overblown, for a number of reasons:
First, we don’t actually know how well Republicans did among Hispanics because the AP and the networks decided not to do detailed exit polling in Texas and 18 other states, the vast majority of them red states. Thus we don’t know the true percentage of Hispanics who voted for Republicans, as states where Republicans would do better among Hispanics have been systematically excluded from the count.
So take a deep breath. Republicans are far better off trying to pitch the ideas of freedom and limited government to Hispanics, and running conservative Republican candidates who happen to be Hispanic like Ted Cruz, than transparent and incompetent pandering via illegal alien amnesty.
Happy Friday the 13th! The big news this week is Ted Cruz topping David Dewhurst in two separate external polls (none of this internal crap) and Dewhurst not only making a pro-amnesty speech in 2007, but making things ten times worse by trying to scrub mention of it off his website.
Paul Burka believes the poll numbers. “I’m buying. The Dewhurst camp ran a lackluster campaign.” And then the usual Rick Perry bashing. (“From Smitty’s BBQ I stab at thee!”)
Those polls were so good for Cruz, some people are already starting to suggest that Cruz might have coattails.
Now on to what some on Twitter are calling #404gate: In a 2007 speech in Laredo, Dewhurst said “I support a guest worker program for those here today illegally.” If not full-blown Amnesty, I think it’s fair to call that “Amnesty light.”
Pulling the amnesty speech has just drawn more attention to it. I believe in the world of soccer this is what’s known as an “own goal.”
Has no one at Team Dewhurst every heard of “the Internet?” One does not simply remove something from the Internet. There’s always going to be a cache of it somewhere. And, indeed, there is.
Dewhurst has the Texas Republican Senate Caucus issue a letter kinda, sorta denying Cruz’s charges against Dewhurst on sanctuary cities, spending, and TSA groping. But if you actually read the letter, it only details the bare-bones legislative maneuvers, and not what Dewhurst did behind the scenes (which made up much of Cruz’s accusations). But give Dewhurst credit: He did get every Republican State Senator except Brian Birdwell to sign it.
Dewhurst appeared on KTSA:
Also on KSKY:
He also appeared on Fox News I would embed the video of it here, but the video quality is stunningly awful. We’re talking “wouldn’t even be acceptable for online viewing in 1997” awful…
You know, this Dewhurst Facebook Timeline parody attack video on Cruz might almost have been amusing if they could have made it shorter. But right there at 1:14, when it says “DC Special Interest Groups,” it has very legible icons for Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and Senate Conservative PAC Fund. Guys, for the majority of people voting in the Texas Republican runoff, those are reasons to vote for Ted Cruz, not against him:
And once again, the Dewhurst campaign is slamming Cruz for being…a lawyer.
From The Hill comes word that Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar (28th District) will be joining many of his colleagues in skipping the Democratic National Convention in September. “As I get close to my election, I want to spend more time in my district and focus on my reelection. Right now, I have no plans to attend.”
The question is: Why? Most Democratic office-holders skipping the event are in competitive races and don’t want Obama’s unpopularity to rub off on them. Cueller is in a district that voted 56% for Obama in 2008. According to the most recent FEC reports, Cuellar has $600,000 in cash on-hand. His Republican opponent, William Hayward, hasn’t even filed an FEC report. Cueller survived with 56% of the vote in the Republican wave year of 2010, in a district that was a couple of points more Democratic leaning than it is now, despite having a perfect liberal record voting for all four of the big government expansion bills of recent years: TARP, cap-and-trade, the Porkulus, and ObamaCare.
Given all those advantages, why would Cueller feel a need to stay away from the DNC? A 56% Obama seat would usually be a few points outside what most analysts would consider a takeover target, and he’s a well-funded incumbent with an unknown, underfunded challenger. Has he seen some internal polls that give him reason to worry? Could voter ID have that big an effect on a border district (even assuming the Obama Administration doesn’t block it)?
