Posts Tagged ‘Kent Hance’

LinkSwarm for October 11, 2013

Friday, October 11th, 2013

A LinkSwarm heavy on shutdown-related news:

  • For epitomizing what Democrats have done to Detroit, Kwame Kirkpatrick gets 28 years.
  • Hey Venezuela, how’s that Socialism working out for you? Inflation hits 49.4%. (Hat tip: Prairie Pundit.)
  • Victor Davis Hanson thinks Republicans are winning.
  • ObamaCare, or food?
  • Steyn on the shutdown. “The conventional wisdom of the U.S. media is that Republicans are being grossly irresponsible not just to wave through another couple trillion or so on Washington’s overdraft facility.”
  • Catholic priests prohibited from giving Mass.
  • The revolving door between the Democratic Party and the IRS.
  • How the GOP establishment tried to seize control of Freedomworks.
  • The Magic of Obama: White House gift shop goes bankrupt.
  • Department of Fish & Wildlife lift ban minutes before North Dakota files lawsuit.
  • Le Pen poised to win European Parliament elections? That’s Marine Le Pen, or Le Pen: The Next Generation.
  • Five years after the meltdown, families still hoarding cash.
  • Kent Hance to retire as Texas Tech Chancellor. Hance’s political career is in many ways emblematic of the evolution of Texas politics, starting out as a conservative Democrat, elected to the state Senate in 1974, defeating George W. Bush for a U.S. congressional seat in 1978, played key roll in backing the Kemp-Roth tax cuts in 1981, narrowly losing the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate to Lloyd Doggett (who would then get stomped by Phil Gramm in the general election) in 1984, followed Gramm by switching to the Republican Party in 1985, losing the GOP Gubernatorial nomination to an un-retired Bill Clements in 1986, getting appointed to the Railroad Commission in 1987, winning re-election to it in 1988, and losing to Clayton Williams in the 1990 Republican Gubernatorial primary. He had a long, long career as a bridesmaid…
  • Raising the debt limit means bankrupting your children.
  • “This 20 year old has discovered Sex Is Awesome!!! and just wants us all to know that. Yeah Sugar-Tits we sort of know. We’ve been enjoying it for years, but without quite as much Noob Squeeing about it.”

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, ObamaCare | 1 Comment »

    A Closer Look at David Dewhurst’s Q1 Donors

    Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

    I’ve been going through all 767 pages of David Dewhurst’s Q1 FEC report to see if anything leapt out at me. Honestly, this is really more of a sampler, since as the bank in the race, there’s just no end of Presidents, CEOs, Founders and Owners of various oil companies, insurance companies, banks, car dealerships, etc. donating to Dewhurst.

    Some notable names among Dewhurst’s individual donors. Unless otherwise noted (or I screwed something up) these are current donations to date and are earmarked for the primary:

  • Retired Republican State Senator Kip Averitt gave $2,500.
  • Clayton Bennett, chairman of Dorchester Capital and chief owner of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team gave $2,500.
  • Frank Camp, founder of the liberal No Texas Teacher Left Behind, gave $1,000. The only other donation I can find on record from Mr. Camp went to Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Sestak, who lost his 2010 Senate race to Republican incumbent Pat Toomey.
  • Phrma head John J. Castellani gave $1,000. Castellani is an example of what’s wrong with Washington these days, spewing money to swells on both sides of the aisle, including Republicans like Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Mike Castle, and Democrats like Chris Dodd, Max Baucus, and Harry Reid. Oh, he also gave money to the “Every Republican is Crucial PAC.”
  • Noted heart surgeon Denton Cooley gave Dewhurst $600.
  • Houston philanthropy diva Carolyn Farb (who you can see with Dewhurst here) tossed in $250.
  • Former UT engineering department Dean Ernest F. Gloyna (who I did some temp work for some two decades ago) contributed $425.
  • Democrat-turned-Republican and current Texas Tech chancellor Kent Hance gave $2,500 (though he listed his current position as attorney with his own law firm, Hance Scarborough and Wright).
  • Ken Hicks, the New York/Connecticut-based CEO of Foot Locker, gave two donations of $2,500 each, and his (I’m assuming) wife Lucille gave $5,000, all marked for the primary, of which $2,500 (if I’m reading the form correctly) was refunded.
  • Tom Love, Frank Love, Greg Love, and Judy Love, all of Love’s Travel Stops of Oklahoma, each gave $2,500 for the primary and $2,500 for the general election.
  • Joseph A. McBride, owner of Austin gun store McBride’s Guns, gave $1,350.
  • Top Austin lobbyist Dean R. McWilliams gave $5,000 ($2,500 each to primary and general funds).
  • Harriet Miers, withdrawn Bush43 Supreme Court nominee, gave $2,500.
  • George P. Mitchell, oil and gas pioneer, gave $5,000 ($2,500 each to primary and general funds).
  • H. Ross Perot, Jr. gave $5,000 ($2,500 each to primary and general funds), and his wife Sarah tossed in another $2,500.
  • Retiring State Senator Florence Shapiro (who considered running for this seat herself) gave $2,500.
  • Former State Senator (and former Waco Mayor) David Sibley gave $3,500, of which $1,000 was transferred to the primary fund.
  • Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon/Mobile, gave $1,000.
  • Power lobbyist and Rick Perry capo Mike Toomey gave $5,000 ($2,500 each to primary and general funds), as did his wife.

    • Now a brief look at the corporate donors. I’m omitting the ones already announced on Dewhurst’s website that I’ve been including in the regular Senate race updates.

  • Bill Miller Bar-B-Q gave $1,000. (There are lots of legendary BBQ places in Texas. Bill Miller is not among them.)
  • Bass Brothers Enterprises Inc. PAC (operated by the wealthy Bass family of Ft. Worth) gave $10,000 (half primary, half general).
  • Cadance Bank PAC of Birmingham, AL gave $2,500.
  • Citigroup PAC of Pennsylvania gave $5,000.
  • Dr Pepper Snapple PAC gave $2,500.
  • Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc. Citizenship Committee of Arizona gave $10,000 (half primary, half general), plus some individual donations from officers.
  • As did the DC-based McMoran Exploration Company Citizenship Committee
  • Humana’s DC-based PAC gave $2,500.
  • Pfizer PAC gave $5,000.
  • As did the PACs of TI, Time Warner, Union Pacific, and United States Steel.

    • Overall impressions: Lots of oil industry people, bankers, real estate developers, lawyers, and, for some reason, a statistically improbable number of dairy owners. And give Dewhurst credit for one thing his campaign team has been emphasizing: The overwhelming majority of individual donor money he’s raised has come from inside Texas.

    A look at the expenses side of Dewhurst’s FEC report when I have time.

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »

    In Which I Come Perilously Close to Defending Lloyd Doggett

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

    Paul Burka has a post up in which he basically makes two arguments:

    1. Republicans are trying to Gerrymander white Democrats out of Congress; and
    2. “Almost no one has done as much damage to the Democratic cause” in Texas as Lloyd Doggett.

    He is mistaken, to differing degrees, in both beliefs.

    As for the first, Republicans are trying to Gerrymander as many Democrats as possible out of their congressional seats, white, black, Hispanic or purple, just as Democrats ruthlessly Gerrymandered Republicans out of congressional seats when they had control of redistricting. (Remember, Texas never had as many as three Republicans serving in the U.S. House of Representatives at the same time until James M. Collins joined George H. W. Bush and Bob Price in 1969, despite Texas voters preferring Republican Presidential candidates in 1928, 1952, and 1956.) It’s just that the Voting Rights Act makes it so much easier to do it against white Democrats than minority Democrats.

    As for the second, anyone who has been reading this blog for any appreciable length of time should realize that I have no particular fondness for Rep. Doggett. However, laying the lion’s share of the Democratic Party’s precipitous decline in Texas at the feet of Doggett’s unsuccessful Senate campaign is both misguided and deeply ahistorical.

    First of all, it was a lot less obvious in 1984 that Doggett was too liberal to win (though he was) than the fact that nobody was going to beat Phil Gramm. After Democrats threw him off the House Budget Committee for supporting the Kemp-Roth tax cuts and co-sponsoring the Gramm-Latta budget reconciliation bill, Gramm resigned from his House seat and ran for it again as a Republican, winning overwhelmingly and turning himself into a folk hero for doing so. In the Republican primary he creamed Robert Mosbacher, Jr. and Ron Paul, and then thumped Doggett by 900,000 votes. Nobody was going to beat Gramm that year, even if Kent Hance had managed to defeat Doggett. And remember that after losing to Doggett in the Democratic Primary, Hance switched to the Republican Party the very next year. Even back then, it was apparent that conservatives had no future in the Democratic Party.

    Further, fingering Doggett as the cause of the Texas Democratic Party’s decline ignores the pronounced decline in the fortunes of the Democratic Party in every state south of the Mason-Dixon line over the last 32 years, as the so-called “Reagan Democrats” have fled the party in droves in both the South and Midwest thanks to its unwavering drive for bigger government and higher taxes. That can be laid at Doggett’s feet only insofar as he was one of several hundred Democratic elites pushing their party relentlessly left, no matter the electoral cost.

    And as for Burka’s starting that “How could [Doggett] have had so little self-awareness as to not know that he had was too liberal to win a statewide race?”, two points:

  • There’s a reason they have elections: you never know with 100% surety how they’ll turn out until they actually occur. Remember the infamous Newsweek poll that had Walter Mondale leading Reagan by 18 points right after the Democratic National Convention? Here’s another way to ask the question: “Shouldn’t Bill Clinton have known that Bush was invulnerable when he got into the Presidential race in 1991?” Nor did Doggett’s liberalism keep him from being elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1988.
  • Second, not recognizing that Democrats have become too liberal for the general electorate is by no means limited to Doggett; indeed, it is arguably the defining characteristic of the modern Democratic Party. For years they’ve been listening to the likes of John P. Judis and Ruy Teixeira proclaiming them the country’s “natural majority party,” and there was no shortage of Democratic triumphalism confidently predicting how the Republican Party was “finished” after the 2008 election, and how well Democrats were going to do in 2010 once voters realized how awesome ObamaCare was. The comforting, anesthetizing Liberal Reality Bubble conspires to let them continually “get high on their own supply,” managing to convince themselves that America the Liberal is just around the corner. Even today, even in Texas: just look at all those members of the statewise MSM lamenting that Republicans are actually following the voting public’s wishes by shrinking state government rather than listening to them and their liberal friends and raising taxes.

    • There are numerous reasons why the Texas Democratic Party has gone from the overwhelming majority party in Texas to a rump minority party, the biggest one being that their misguided policies of big government liberalism are objectively wrong, financially ruinous and extremely unpopular. But Doggett is only an outstanding exemplar of the problem, not the cause of it.

    (PS: Also remember that in 1992, Burka was blaming the Texas Democratic Party’s decline on Bill Clinton’s unwillingness to seriously contest the state against Bush41.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »