Last Saturday, I had a combined movie viewing/birthday party for Dwight and myself. Here’s Dwight’s report on the event, and here’s a picture of the cake, and the object depicted on the cake, which should seem familiar:
One is a beautiful object filled with things that will kill you if you don't treat them with respect. The other is a gun.
Tom Leppert: Raised $2,690,081 (including a $1,600,000 loan) and still has $2,592,219 on hand
Ted Cruz: Raised $1,013,060 (including a $70,000 loan) and has $965,153 on hand
Roger Williams: Raised $598,470 (including a $250,000 loan) and has $1,250,300 on hand
Michael Williams: Raised $418,619 (including $132,160 in loans) and has $369,369 on hand
Elizabeth Ames Jones: Raised $122,185 and has $128,541 on hand
Despite later starts than their opponents, Leppert and Cruz are clearly setting the pace here. Both seem to be raising money and campaigning hard, and Cruz has generated a significant swell of grass-roots enthusiasm. If they can keep this up, both will be serious contenders to make the runoff in March, with or without Lt. Governor David Dewhurst entering the race.
Roger Williams has raised enough to stay in the game, but despite the endorsement of former President George H. W. Bush (a legendary rainmaker with a well-oiled fundraising machine), there’s no sign that the Bush dynasty has put the full force of their fundraising prowess behind him. He’ll need to knock out Leppert (or Dewhurst, if he runs) to make the runoff, and so far he shows no signs of doing it.
Michael Williams has also raised enough to stay in the game, and probably has grassroots enthusiasm second only to Cruz, but he needs to pick up the pace if he wants to remain competitive. The current pace isn’t going to get it done, and he can’t make the runoff unless Cruz slips.
Ever since I posted on Elizabeth Ames Jones’ paltry fundraising efforts, I’ve been trying to figure out a reason for her to stay in the race. I haven’t come up with one. If there’s any significant enthusiasm for her campaign out among Texas Republicans, it takes more sensitive scientific instruments than I possess to measure. I don’t see her candidacy filling any sort of ideological void, and the sort of people who would vote for her solely based on her sex are not the same people who vote in a Republican primary. While there’s a lot of time left in the campaign, unless she can figure out how to make some serious noise (say, launching a series of non-stop attacks on Leppert for being a secret RINO) she should probably get out of the race.
A few other fundraising tidbits gleaned from the FEC reports:
Sean Hubbard, thus far the only declared Democratic candidate, raised $6,511.
Among the longshots, Andrew Castanuela ($262) and Lela Pettinger ($150) are hardly setting the world on fire, but Magnolia funeral home-owner Glenn Addison (who’s running on a social conservative platform) managed to pull in $20,432 (even if $6,877 was in loans), or about one sixth what Jones, a statewide office holder who has been running for about a year, pulled in over the same period of time. For someone with no real chance of winning the nomination, that’s pretty impressive. Mr. Addison won’t be the next U.S. Senator from Texas, but he might do very well in a local race should he choose to run for one in 2014.
Every year on May 1st, there’s a single day set aside for the little guy, the poor, unfortunate common man ground beneath the boot-heels of faceless oppressors.
There are a few memorials to those victims sprinkled around the world. Here’s the statue of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Washington, D.C.:
FEC Reports for the Texas Senate Race continue to be posted for the fundraising period of January 1—March 31. (Indeed, they’re being posted so slowly that I wonder if a single arthritic temp is doing all the data entry.) The reports of Ted Cruz (over $1 million announced) and Michael Williams (over half a million announced) are not up yet, Tom Leppert’s $2,690,081 ($1.6 million of which was Leppert’s personal loan to his own campaign) was already announced, and Roger Williams raised $598,470.
But Elizabeth Ames Jones’ report is finally up, and it’s disastrous: $122,185. Raising less than one-quarter what the other major declared candidates have in the same period of time isn’t going to get the job done. Moreover, it’s a major step back from her previous 2010 fundraising total of $989,765.
Jones already had the most difficult path to victory of the major declared candidates, a path some were already saying was non-existent. Ted Cruz and Michael Williams were battling in the Tea Party Primary for the movement conservative vote, while Tom Leppert and Roger Williams are competing for the “who gets the establishment nod if David Dewhurst skips the race” slot. Jones, on the other hand, has, what? Unless she can magically pick up a disproportionate share of the woman’s vote (which seems doubtful), it’s impossible to see how she remains competitive when she’s been so heavily outgunned in the fundraising arms race. I’m far from an insider, but as far as I can tell, the groundswell for a Jones candidacy has been all but non-existent.
There’s a long way yet to go before the primary, but unless Jones can, at a minimum, quadruple her fundraising totals in the second quarter, she’s toast. She made be toast already.
An interview that Brad Watson of WFAA-TV in Dallas conducted with Obama has been getting a lot of attention. A lot of it has centered on Obama’s visible testiness at the questions, but I’d like to point out his baffling ignorance of Texas history:
He stated that he lost Texas by “a few percentage points” in 2008 when it was actually closer to 12%.
He stated that Texas has “always” been a Republican state, which displays an amazing ignorance not just of Texas history, but of the entire post-Civil War era, in which Democrats overwhelmingly dominated the Jim Crow-era states of the old Confederacy, Texas included. In fact, Texas was considered a one-party Democratic state up until John Tower won the special election to fill Lyndon Baines Johnson’s unexpired Senate term in 1961.
The overall thrust of the interview is why Obama isn’t more popular in Texas. “Too big a spender, too liberal, too incompetent, too prickly, and too out-of-touch” all cover it rather nicely, but you can add “appallingly ignorant of basic historical facts” to that list…
Dwight and Ann Althouse (among many others) are reporting on the vandalizing of a photographic print of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in France. (I’m not going to go into a history of the piece itself, whose heyday of controversy was before most of today’s college seniors were born; I suspect my readers can Google as well as anyone.) The attackers have not been apprehended, but there has been much speculation that they were disgruntled Catholics, though the proof of that is entirely conjectural. Assuming this is true (and not, as Althouse suggests, an inside job), this is like a perfect storm of fail for the attackers:
Destroying other people’s property is wrong. Even if you disagree with them. Even if they’re asshats. (I have no idea if Serrano is an asshat or merely an attention whore.) These are the tactics of left-wingers and jihadists, not thinking members of western democracies.
Andres Serrano is known for Piss Christ, and…um, hold on…let me think…uh, prints of Piss Christ. The guy had his 15 minutes of fame and slipped back into well-deserved obscurity, until you morons came along and gave him another 15 minutes. You’re doing it wrong.
Despite Instapundit’s observation that Christians are just following the examples of Muslims in suppressing blasphemous art, this attack will not actually achieve that end. This is possibly the best possible thing you could do for Serrano’s career. Indeed, I suspect legions of starving left-wing artists all across America have leapt from the futons in their parents’ basements at the news to boldly start working on art offensive to Christians, or at least fill out grant proposals for same. Destroying such art doesn’t intimidate anyone. No, as Islamists have proven again and again, you have to kill people to intimidate others into silence. Not that you should do that, and I’m in favor of the death penalty for killing your fellow countrymen for reasons of political ideology. Then again, this took place in Europe, where they’ve abolished the death penalty. Stabbing a blasphemous artist to death on the rue de martyrs would get you three hots and a cot for life…or until the state has to empty the prisons because they’re out of money.
So whoever did was either a very stupid religious believer, or a very smart guerrilla marketer…
Some people have asked me if I’ll be reviewing the Atlas Shrugged movie, since one of my gigs is reviewing science fiction movies, and Ayn Rand’s original novel certainly qualifies as science fiction. (I’m also familiar enough with the novel to craft this parody of it.) But I thought it would be nearly impossible to do justice to the source material in movie form; a TV miniseries would probably be more appropriate to fit that sprawling, didactic story.
So I’m glad the inimitable P.J. O’Rourke has saved me the trouble. He’s seems to have done a good job of dissecting the movie’s flaws (and advanced word has been very negative just on the story-telling and movie pacing fronts) without rejecting the underlying message.
Patty Murray’s explanation for why she thinks Texas might be in play is “demographic change.” We have been hearing that line for many years now, and there is no evidence that demographic change has changed voting patterns. Democrats make the mistake of looking at Hispanic participation in California, in Colorado, in Arizona, in New Mexico, and thinking that Texas could be just like those states. I disagree. Hispanics in those states are alienated. Angry people vote. Hispanics in Texas are not alienated. Unless the Democrats have some pretty good polling that shows the Republicans are overreaching with their budget cuts–and I doubt that they do–they should continue to regard Texas as a lost cause.
National first quarter fundraising winners and losers from both the Washington Post and Hotline on Call. I’ve been checking the FEC site regularly, and the numbers for Texas Senate candidates (beyond the withdrawn Florence Shapiro) still aren’t up yet.
If Sanchez runs as a Democrat, the groups that would have been most likely to push for further investigation at this late date–the antiwar Left–will not be interested in pursuing the issue. The antiwar Left will, in fact, enthusiastically support the man who was their head devil in their designated Hell on Earth…because to do otherwise would be to show some elementary sense of self-worth and dignity, and the antiwar Left has neither. So–when your Democratic masters get around to picking your candidate for you–go ahead and endorse Sanchez, ye progressives. Get on the floor and lick those boots. Not that Sanchez will win, anyway; 2012 will be a bad year for a Democrat in Texas. But it’s always fun to watch the antiwar movement futilely beat its own ‘principles’ to death on command for the benefit of their masters. You’d think that it’d get old eventually, but no.
Texas Democrats may have finally lured a high-profile candidate to the race: retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. The only problem? His last notable job was being commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Which was, as Democrats wanted us to know in 2004, The Most Evil Thing Ever. Sean Hubbard now has a ready-made campaign slogan: Sean Hubbard: He Never Had Subordinates Violate the Geneva Convention.
Here’s a piece where David Jennings defends Tom Leppert from charges of being a liberal…but which also points out that he donated money to the Democratic campaigns of Ron Kirk and Daniel Inouye. I’m not sure you’re helping his cause…
