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 »
January 17th, 2011
Just got back from a family trip, so here’s a small LinkSwarm while I get back into the swing of things.
- “For a decade, from the election of Bush 43 forward, the Left has lied and cheated as it tried to return to power. The left wants us to be civil — after being so uncivil for a decade. Bite me.”
- The Texas Public Policy Foundation had their annual legislative orientation over the weekend, including one on border security issues, one of several Blue Dot Blues covered.
- More than 40 year’s after Dr. Martin Luther King’s death, blacks are free to be anything they want to be…except Republicans.
Tags: Border Controls, Don Surber, LinkSwarm, Martin Luther King, Mexico
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Texas | No Comments »
January 15th, 2011
Over on NRO, Robert VerBruggen offers some sage advice for journalists on how write about guns without making yourself look like an idiot. Especially important is his second point: “If you’re going to write that a certain kind of gun is particularly dangerous, consult someone who knows something about guns first. Brady Campaign spokesmen don’t count.” The need for this point was painfully apparent with so many commentators describing Jared Lee Loughner’s Glock 19 as some sort of exotic killing machine, when in fact it is a very common type of semiautomatic pistol used by millions of law-abiding Americans.
Or to put it in terms that a New York Journalist might understand: Imagine if I wrote that “Every condo in Manhattan gives their owner a two-car parking space,” or “All Hispanic New Yorkers are of Mexican ancestry.” You’d howl about how ignorant I am of New York. Well, that’s exactly the you seem to the rest of the country when you write about guns.
However, I fear VerBruggen’s advice will fall on deaf ears. Many journalists in deep blue cities like New York or San Francisco seem to regard guns as inherently evil objects, and view learning about them with suspicion. They seem to wear their ignorance as a badge of honor, much like Manhattanites who brag that they’ve never visited a flyover state, or even left the island.
Ignorance can be cured, but not willful ignorance. Many journalist would rather be wrong than Right.
Tags: Crime, Guns, Jared Lee Loughner, journalism, MSM
Posted in Crime, Guns, Media Watch | No Comments »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
January 11th, 2011
Remember Paul Kanjorski? You know, the Democratic congressman and Stupak block turncoat from Pennsylvania that Lou Barletta slaughtered in November? (Can we still use “slaughtered” in a political context post-Jared Lee Loughner? How about creamed? Spanked? Hmm, I should probably desist from that line of thought…) The guy who wrote a $10 million earmark for his own relatives? Thought you’d heard the last of him, didn’t you?
That was until he published a New York Times editorial calling for civility and respect in political discourse. That would be great, if it weren’t coming from someone who recently called for the shooting of a Republican candidate:
“Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him [Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for Florida governor] and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him.
A class act, Mr. Kanjorski. It makes me very glad that Lou Barletta was one of the candidates I actually donated to in 2010.
Surely there has to be at least one Democratic official calling for tact and civility who hasn’t called for the murder of political opponents. Hasn’t there?
(Hat tip: Instapundit)
Tags: Instapundit, Jared Lee Loughner, Lou Barletta, Paul Kanjorski, Rick Scott
Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »
January 10th, 2011
I was going to post another piece on the shooting, but Instapundit has already covered pretty much everything I wanted to say. (Shakes tiny fist in impotent rage. “Damn you, Glenn Harlan Reynolds! Damn you to Hell!”) By now the story is less about a crazy man killing political figures and innocent bystanders than it is the left’s desperate and distasteful attempts to pin the act on the Tea Party.
So. Some links:
- They need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” said the Democrat. “Just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”
- “There also was a second sickness on display, and it was the swiftness and the vigor with which the left-wing blogosphere and some more mainstream Democrats immediately sought to blame Sarah Palin and right-wing ‘vitriol’ in general for the shooting.”
- Has any political movement ever been as obsessed with a political figure as the left is obsessed with Sarah Palin? Especially one that no longer holds any elected office?
- Michelle Malkin goes into a great deal of detail on the angry, eliminationist rhetoric that’s poisoned the well of rational political discourse.
- “We barely knew all the facts in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, though, before this vicious act was being milked for political advantage by ghoulish opportunists on the Left.”
- Federal charges filed. I think we can all agree that, if Loughner is found fit to stand trial (I doubt he will be), then he should eligible for the death penalty, yes?
- Since Loughner was obsessed with mind control, here are some of his fellow crazies discussing his obsession. However, just to be fair, I should make clear that I don’t blame the Nutso American Community for Loughner’s spree. The vast majority of people on Above Top Secret and InfoWars are honest, hardworking, non-violent Americans who just happen to be deluded cranks. Most of them wouldn’t harm a fly, unless it was aiming a tiny parabolic microphone at them. (You know the CIA has those now, don’t you? Don’t you??????)
- I seem to have drifted off-track. There’s nothing funny about Loughner’s shooting spree, but I think we all need to take a step back and enjoy a little levity in the midst of grim times. And the David Ickes and Gene Rays of the world aren’t the ones we need to worry about.
Tags: David Icke, death penalty, Gabrielle Giffords, Gene Ray, Jared Lee Loughner, Michelle Malkin, mind-control, Sarah Palin, Time Cube
Posted in Crime, Democrats | 1 Comment »
January 9th, 2011
The good news is Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is alive and able to communicate. Sadly, Federal Judge John Roll, appointed by President George H. W. Bush to the bench in 1991 is dead. Roll received death threats over his ruling in an illegal alien case in 2009.
Did accused shooter Jared Lee Loughner assassinate Judge Roll for political reasons?
Hell no. Loughner killed Roll and five other people because he was a violent, unstable lunatic, and more and more evidence is coming out to that effect. As Arizona Senator John Kyl put it: “It’s probably giving him too much credit to ascribe a coherent political philosophy to him.”
Despite that, the far left is still trying to pin this on Sarah Palin. I suspect that will work out for them almost as well as their “the Tea Party is racist” meme.
Sometimes people do commit horrific acts of violence for easily-identifiable ideological reasons. Maj. Nidal Hasan’s Ft. Hood shooting spree is a classic example. Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree is not.
Tags: Crime, Gabrielle Giffords, Guns, Jared Lee Loughner, Sarah Palin
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Guns, Republicans | 1 Comment »