“Jeb Bush, who sought to join his father and brother in winning the White House, suspended his campaign for the presidency Saturday night after a long year-long slide in the polls and a disappointing showing in the South Carolina primary.”
Trump is winning handily, with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz fighting for second place.
Tomorrow (Saturday, February 20) is the South Carolina Republican primary. (Democrats don’t vote in South Carolina until next Saturday, February 27). Current polls have Ted Cruz gaining on Donald Trump. (Hat tip: Conservatives 4 Ted Cruz.)
A small LinkSwarm going into the weekend:
These seem like parts of he same story:
If you are receiving this email, it means you ordered a copy of my book. Yet no one has received any copies yet, and I owe you an explanation why.
I am presently legally barred from fulfilling the order. The South Carolina lawyer disciplinary authorities—government officials—have determined that my political and religious commentary is “unethical.” I am legally barred from sending you a copy of my book at this time. (Well, I could send you a copy, but I could be disbarred for it.)
This is the culmination of a two year secret investigation of me by the South Carolina Commission on Lawyer Conduct and the South Carolina Office of Disciplinary Counsel, two entities that have taken the position that the First Amendment simply does not apply to lawyers. Unsurprisingly, no Democrat lawyers have been targeted so far as I know, and the people in charge of the South Carolina Office of Disciplinary Counsel have solid Democrat voting histories.
I encourage you to do discuss this matter in public and on Twitter and Facebook, and you are free to contact the people involved to complain. Here are some excellent talking points: (1) This is just like the IRS Tea Party targeting scandal, because I am being targeted for my political commentary but absolutely no Democrat lawyers are being targeted. (2) Anyone with half a brain understands that the genuinely offensive things I say are merely to provoke the Left and are my distinctive brand of political commentary. (3) If my political activism wasn’t effective, no one would be trying to shut me up. (4) Unlike the Mozilla controversy and other examples of private boycotts, the South Carolina lawyer disciplinary authorities are government agents who are punishing private citizens for political and religious advocacy that is not to their liking. (5) This is book burning, plain and simple. (6) If I lose my right to speak freely because I am a state licensed professional, anyone in a state licensed profession is subject to having their free speech rights taken away from them. (7) This case is one of the absolute best arguments against state licensing for professions. Once government gets its dictatorial foot in the door, everyone in the room becomes a slave to whatever group of petty tyrants happens to run that wing of government at any given point in time.
The reason for my silence about this matter until now is that I truly thought they would come to their senses about all of this. In fact, they indicated to me more than once that they would not punish me for political or religious commentary that was not to their liking, after initially demanding that I stop saying anything offensive on Twitter. (That was why I briefly stopped using profanity on Twitter in late 2012, in case you were wondering what that was all about.)
However, in early June, just as I was preparing to send out my book, I received an unexpected notice from the South Carolina Office of Disciplinary Counsel that the investigation was going to continue because of comments I made on Twitter regarding a left wing political activist named Col. Morris Davis, a frequent guest on MSNBC. (I have no indication that Col. Davis has anything to do with this—it appears a supporter of his filed a bar complaint on me, the seventh or eighth complaint filed on me in recent times.)
As a result of all this, I have prepared and filed a lawsuit in federal court. Please read the attached complaint that was filed earlier this evening. I will fight this matter all the way to the United States Supreme Court if I have to. Surrender is not in my DNA. However, I have no choice but to stop tweeting and hold off sending out copies of my book or engaging in any other advocacy until the federal court gives me clearance to do so without fear of professional repercussions.
#SalonExcuses What right-wing libertarian theocrats call "parody" is nothing more than an effort to silence marginalized voices.
— Popehat (@Popehat) July 16, 2014
Why Parody Should Be Regulated and Progressives Should Be the Regulators http://t.co/0Kbj5P99TH #FreeSalonDotCom
— SalonDotCommie (@IloiloKano) July 17, 2014
Noam Chomsky explains how communism has been ruined by white privilege. #Freesalondotcom
— Hugo Hackenbush (@MangyLover) July 17, 2014
The Stealth Anti-Feminist Messaging of Dunkin Donuts, where the eclairs and bearclaws are always displayed higher than the donuts
— SalonDotComLives (@AceofSpadesHQ) July 16, 2014
Derridas And Derridon'ts: How To Avoid Linguistic Hegemony When Deconstructing Your Children's Artwork
— Popehat (@Popehat) July 16, 2014
I like to think @salon had to scrap a good 25% of upcoming stories b/c @salondotcom accidentally stole their thunder. #FreeSalondotcom
— Will Antonin (@Will_Antonin) July 17, 2014
.@Salon: Stop Laughing at Historical Hate Crimes: Why Blazing Saddles Should Be Banned
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) July 16, 2014
.@Salon If You Argue With A Gay Person Or Minority, You're Automatically Wrong #FreeSalondotcom
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) July 17, 2014
.@Salon Who's More Rabid: A Rabid Dog, Or The Gun Owner That Shoots It? #FreeSalondotcom
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) July 17, 2014
.@Salon A Second Nobel Peace Prize? Obama's Masterful Handling of The Middle East #FreeSalondotcom
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) July 17, 2014
.@Salon Why An Obscure Church With 8 Members Represents The Hate In All Christian's Hearts #FreeSalondotcom
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) July 17, 2014
There’s so much news going on in the world that it’s hard to sit down and focus on one story to get a single blog post out of it when there’s another huge story coming down the pike. Iraq, Ukraine, the VA Scandal, the dog eating Lois Lerner’s emails (“Barack Obama has brought us Jimmy Carter’s economy and Richard Nixon’s excuses”); too damn much going on to focus on one thing. So here’s a LinkSwarm instead:
A roundup of interesting commentary on Mark Sanford’s defeat of Elizabeth Colbert-Busch in the SC1 special election:
“We gave it a heck of a fight,” Colbert Busch said in her concession speech. No, you didn’t. You were obliterated by the most beatable Republican in the House. Between campaign and independent spending, you blew upwards of $2 million, and got trounced by a candidate the National Republican Congressional Committee refused to support. You ran a weak, lazy campaign that never had much to say beyond harping on Sanford’s extramarital affair, and reminding voters that your brother is a TV star, while he threw himself furiously into shoe-leather retail politics. Sanford was still holding public events on Election Day, while you were nowhere to be found. You backed away from a crucial debate opportunity, leaving Sanford to own the stage by debating a cardboard cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It’s hard to imagine how you could have fought less for the seat, short of holding all your campaign events by closed-circuit TV from your brother’s house.
More:
The mythical backlash against opponents of gun control didn’t materialize to help Colbert Busch, which should only come as a surprise to those who take liberal media manipulation seriously. She took labor union money, which wasn’t going to endear her to voters in the state where unions tried to kill a Boeing plant. Between the ObamaCare disaster, the failure of their Sequester Terror efforts to cudgel more taxes out of the American people, and the gathering Benghazi storm, the Democrat Party isn’t looking its best at the moment…I would imagine we’ll be hearing a lot about Nancy Pelosi in tight 2014 races.
What we see here is another refutation of what I’ve called a “beautiful little fairy tale that liberals tell themselves,” that the American public is broadly supportive of their worldview, and they only lose because Republicans manage to Jedi-Mind-Trick the electorate into caring about distractions, silliness, and those irrelevant ‘wedge issues.’…The fairy tale is that Americans, deep down, really agree with liberals on all of these issues and would heartily embrace their agenda if only these side issues, scandals, and manufactured distractions would just get out of the way. But the electorate doesn’t always think liberal ideas are better, and we may argue that they rarely do.
More: “Today you’re hearing a lot of talk along the lines of, ‘Oh, everyone knew this was a really conservative district and that Sanford would probably win.’ Well, you don’t spend more than $2 million ($1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford) for a race you know you can’t win.”
In the South Carolina First Congressional District race. In fact, it wasn’t even particularly close.
Stephen Colbert may be America, but his sister can’t be a U.S. Representative on his coattails.