In nice, tight, one-inch groups.
(Hat tip: The Right Side of Austin. )
My Governor Can Blow Away Your Governor
January 22nd, 2011Still More 2012 Texas Senate Candidate News
January 21st, 2011Add Republican Rep. Mike McCaul to the list of names of those considering a run.
Polls show Dewhurst doing the best in polls against potential Democratic challengers, but all named Republicans beat all named Democrats. Given the state of Texas politics, that sounds about right.
On the Democratic side, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro says he’s not running. Bill White also says no, despite Nate Silver’s pimping. Houston Sheriff Adrian Garcia also says he’s not interested, but his statement (“I have no interest in running for U.S. Senate at this time”) leaves a good bit more wiggle room.
I keep hearing that John Sharp is going to run, but I wonder if anyone has told Sharp. He was making noises about it last March, and since then has been pretty much invisible. Signs of a Chet Edwards Senate run are even more non-apparent on the web.
The Texas Tribune lists all sorts of wacky possibilities: Chris Bell (Maybe), George Prescott Bush (Bush41’s grandson, and No), Kinky Friedman (probably not, though he can’t do much worse than many of the other Democratic possibilities), Craig James (Maybe, but hard to see him gaining any traction in the Republican field; try running for the House first), Florence Shapiro (another Maybe, another person who couldn’t find traction in the Republican field), Leticia Van Putte (who?), and Farouk Shami (they actually asked him). Why not see if Phil Gramm or Dick Armey was coming out of retirement while you’re at it? Or some random Bullock or Hobby offspring?
Not that it probably matters too much; there hasn’t been a Democrat elected in Texas statewide since Bob Bullock won in 1994, and Texas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 (the same year the Dukakis/Bentsen ticket lost to Bush/Quayle). Things are always fluid in politics, but there does not appear to be any instant revival for the Texas Democratic Party over the horizon in the near future…
This Week in Jihad for January 20, 2011
January 20th, 2011Another roundup of jihad-related news from jihadWatch and elsewhere.
- Suicide Bomber kills 60 in Tikrit.
- Meanwhile, in Pakistani, Jihadists are blowing up bombs among school-children.
- In 1620, Puritan officials in Salem, Massachusetts arrested more than 150 women as witches. And by 1620 I mean 2010, and by Salem I mean Gaza, and by Puritans I mean Hamas.
- The revolution in Tunisia may not be the triumph of democracy some think it.
- Hezbollah: Nice Prime Minister you’ve got there Lebanon. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
- Texas own Ninth District Democratic Congressman Al Green wants to help out Pakistani illegal aliens.
- New Jersey Governor Chris Christie appoints attorney Sohail Mohammed, who represented muslims with ties to terrorism after 9/11, to a state Superior Court judgeship. Hmmmmm…….
- Why Christian clergy are among the most easily duped as to the true nature of Jihad. Just as many were duped by Communism…
- Speaking of Christians, they’re not the ones calling for the executions of gays these days.
- A quote from a famous “extremist”: “Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is uncontestable.”
2012 Senate Races Already Heating Up (In Texas and Elsewhere)
January 18th, 2011It’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.
LinkSwarm for Monday, January 17, 2011
January 17th, 2011Just 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.
Advice for Journalists on How to Write About Guns
January 15th, 2011Over 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.
This Week in Jihad for January 13, 2011
January 13th, 2011Time 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.
Kay Bailey Hutchison Declines to Run for Reelection
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…
LinkSwarm for Wednesday, January 12, 2011
January 12th, 2011A 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.