MSM Monkeys Around

December 24th, 2015

It’s been an odd week, for a number of reasons, so I’m a bit late on the “Washington Post cartoonist draws Ted Cruz’s 5 and 7 year old daughters as monkeys” story. Because nothing says “reasonable” and “rational” like attacking children because you dislike the politics of their father. On the off-chance you missed it, it featured Cruz as an organ-grinder and his daughters as monkeys on leashes. The ostensible rationale for the doodle was Cruz featuring his daughters in that parody Christmas ad that ran during Saturday Night Live, making them “fair game.”

Right.

Though the Washington Post editor took the doodle down (calling it a cartoon would suggest there was an actual attempt at humor), we all know that if someone attempted the same drawing featuring Obama and his daughters, it would have been denounced as racist and the cartoonist fired so fast they wouldn’t have been allowed to pack their desk. Of course, the MSM have always been hypocrites when it comes to different standards for Democrats and Republicans. Anything that hurts Republicans is fair game, while anything that hurts Democrats is a source of high moral outrage.

The question is: Will cartoonist Ann Telnaes pay any price for such a gross transgression of basic decency?

The irony is that the episode provided a palpable boost to the Cruz campaign, which had an outraged fundraising mailer (“They attacked my children!”) out within hours. I bet they raised at least $1 million off of it.

Here’s Mollie Hemingway with the 10 stupidest things about the monkey cartoon.

Of course, Cruz got the last laugh as well:

And this one is even better:

(Hat tip: Instapundit.)

The Great Liberal Gun Control Mystery

December 23rd, 2015

Most people learn from their mistakes.

Liberal gun control advocates are not “most people.”

This Sean Davis piece shows two of their more persistent errors on display: Their inability to learn what an “assault weapon” was legally defined as, and their inability to figure out that their actions make owning a gun more popular, not less.

More than one pundit has observed that pushing for gun control legislation accomplishes two things: 1.) Sends gun sales through the roof, and 2.) Gets Democrats defeated come election time.

Notably absent from that list: Decreasing firearms deaths.

Of course, for liberals gun control has never been about keeping criminals from using guns. The purpose behind gun control has always been to disarm the law abiding civilian population, all the better to implement their big government/culture war schemes.

There was a time when Blue Dog Democrats would keep the gun-grabbing instincts of their liberal brethren in check, but the last two decades have seen those Blue Dogs ruthlessly purged from the party. No the Democrats are All In on gun control, even if it kills them.

Let’s hope that Democrats have the same sort of election in 2016 they had in 1994…

TPPF Sues Over Wilco Cave Spider

December 21st, 2015

Here’s something on the surface that seems like a small local story, but it’s one that could potentially have huge national implications.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF)’s Center for the American Future representing Williamson County resident John Yearwood and Williamson County, Texas today filed suit to intervene into the pending lawsuit seeking delisting of the Bone-Cave Harvestman from the Endangered Species Act. Mr. Yearwood and Williamson County, Texas challenge the authority of the federal government to use the Interstate Commerce Clause to regulate non-commercial interactions with the Bone Cave Harvestman arachnid, which only exists in two central Texas counties, is not bought nor traded in interstate commerce, and does not otherwise affect interstate commerce.

“This lawsuit centers around respect for the rule of law and recognition that the Constitution establishes our federal government as having limited, enumerated powers,” said Robert Henneke, director of the Center for the American Future at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Congress has the power to regulate commerce among the states, i.e. Interstate commerce. Congress’ Commerce power through the Endangered Species Act should not, therefore, extend to regulate the Bone-Cave Harvestman species – an intrastate cave-arachnid existing only in caves in Central Texas without any commercial value. For there to be rule of law, there must be limits to government power.”

The Interstate Commerce Clause is the camel’s nose by which the federal government has stuck its vast regulatory powers into just about every crevice of the body politic. Because the Williamson cave spider case clearly has no impact on interstate commerce, there’s the potential for the case to unravel a whole host of intrusive New Deal-era commerce clause rulings, of which Wickard vs. Filburn is probably the most egregious.

There’s no guarantee the case will get to the Supreme Court, but if it does…

Ted Cruz Christmas Classics

December 19th, 2015

It’s funny enough…

I hear this is supposed to run during Saturday Night Live tonight…

DNC Data Breach: Less Security Concern, More Clinton Dirty Tricks

December 18th, 2015

I included the DNC data breach story in my LinkSwarm roundup, but the more I look at it, the less the story seems like “data breach by Bernie Sanders team” and more like “dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s team.”

Here’s a description by Slashdot poster Chris Johnson that states the case:

NGP-VAN, the company that stores this data, which is run by an old Clinton hand who worked for them in 1992, the company paid $34,000 by Ready For Hillary, was repeatedly dropping their firewall between the two major Dem campaigns, Clinton and Sanders.

A guy who’s now fired from the Sanders team observed this. They complained once and were given assurances by the company that it was a mistake and wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again. The guy decided to gauge how deeply the Clinton campaign was able to read into the Sanders campaign, by experimenting to see how much of the Clinton data he could get. That’s a bad call but by information security standards it’s not unthinkable: it’d be called a white hat intrusion, seeing how much of the firewall was down by probing the other side and assuming your own data was revealed exactly the same way. It does matter, but you still have to fire the guy.

One thing we can be sure of is, anything open to ‘stealing’ on the Clinton side was just as open on the Sanders side, literally. It’s the same system and the same firewall, and if the firewall keeps mysteriously going down for no good reason you have to wonder what’s up and more relevantly what’s being made available to those on the other side of the firewall, which might explain why the firewall’s going down like that.

The Sanders people did NOT throw a fit the first time this happened. But this time, the Sanders guy got caught crossing the nonexistent firewall. We have no information at all on whether anybody from the Clinton side was doing the same thing. During that time there WAS NO firewall and the guy wasn’t hacking, he was browsing, as anybody on either side could have done during those windows.

I think that’s accurate so far. The behavior of the firewall is important, whether or not it’s suspicious as a planned exploit of the Sanders data run by Clinton people who are at the DNC and at NGP-VAN.

In response to the Sanders guy browsing over and seeing data (how do they know? Because HE TOLD THEM. The Sanders team were the ones reporting this, that’s part of the story), the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time. In order to get access back, at least as of this morning, the requirement is for the Sanders campaign to prove it has destroyed all data that it didn’t necessarily even download (remember, Sanders guy claims he was exploring the Clinton system because it would mirror the vulnerability of the Sanders system, and he’s not IN the Clinton system to go and browse the Sanders side to see how much is revealed, but he was IN the Sanders side and could look at the Clinton side and reasonably conclude that his own side was equally compromised)

And social media is blowing the hell up, not unreasonably, because it’s a goddamn hatchet job combined with a kneecapping to yank access by the Bernie campaign to its OWN DATA because a guy from the Bernie campaign passively browsed through a firewall he didn’t himself disable, a firewall run by a company controlled by Clinton partisans which had been going down already for reasons unknown.

This seems consistent with the facts, consistent with the DNC being “all in” on the Hillary coronation, and consistent with the Sanders campaign suing the DNC for access to their own freaking data.

Says the Sanders campaign:

by their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.

We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction.

What is required here is a full and independent audit of the DNC’s handling of this data and its security from the beginning of this campaign to the present, including the incident in October that we alerted them to.

The incident is also consistent with Hillary’s own repeated Nixonian dishonesty. It’s not enough that she has the weakest slate of primary challengers for a non-incumbent since Nelson Rockefeller decided to bow out and let Nixon have the GOP nomination in 1960. Hillary is so used to winning through lies and dirty tricks she does it even when she doesn’t need to. It’s simply who she is.

LinkSwarm for December 18, 2015

December 18th, 2015

It’s a week before Christmas, and I hope everyone is having a better week than I am (I’m sick and my dog’s sick).

  • Former FBI counterterrorism agent says that we haven’t gotten squat in terrorism leads from “moderate Muslims,” and we probably won’t as long as we keep using Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR as our only go-to groups for them. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Swedes are stocking up on guns.
  • Given that the French political establishment continues to ignore widespread French desire to stem Islamic immigration, is it any wonder Marine Le Pen’s National Front did so well in early voting?
  • DNC cuts off voter info access to Bernie Sanders campaign over data breach?
  • Environmentalists are a much more serious threat to human well being than climate change—even catastrophic climate change.”
  • The Fall of Rahm Emmanual.
  • Media Matters mouthpiece David Brock says that Ted Cruz is the biggest threat to a Hillary coronation.
  • “FitzGibbon Media, a prominent progressive public relations firm, abruptly shut down on Thursday amid allegations of sexual harassment and assault by the company’s president. Trevor FitzGibbon and his team worked with some of the biggest progressive organizations, including NARAL, MoveOn, the Center for American Progress and the AFL-CIO, as well as Wikileaks, Chelsea [i.e., Bradley] Manning and The Intercept.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • How The New York Times continually revised a story to help Obama look better.
  • Remember that ACLU board member that called for murdering Trump supporters? Turns out that calling for the assassination of political opponents is just a tad too extreme for the ACLU.
  • So we saved Kuwait’s bacon, and they can’t even be arsed to pretend they don’t hate Jews?
  • How Obama celebrated a deserter in the Rose Garden.
  • The cocked fist culture.
  • Nothing says “rational” and “reasonable” quite like calling Ted Cruz Satan incarnate. Thanks for proving that Hollywood celebrities aren’t overwrought drama queens, Cher…
  • The 25 most Florida things that happened in 2015.
  • Texas Racing Commission Flips Off Legislature Yet Again

    December 17th, 2015

    Time and time again the executive, legislative and judicial branches have told the Texas Racing Commission “You’re breaking the law and you have to repeal your approval of historical gambling” (i.e., thinly disguised slot machines). And time and time again the Texas Racing Commission has said “Up yours! We’re tools of the gambling lobby, and we’re not going to let little things like the law stand in our way!”

    And this week they did it yet again:

    Texas racing officials refused to retreat Tuesday from a plan to allow a hotly contested new way to gamble at horse racetracks statewide, prompting the commission’s new chairman to ask the staff for a plan to shut down the agency.

    After two hours of testimony from those in the horse industry, the nine-member Texas Racing Commission voted 4-4 with one abstention to repeal rules that would allow historical racing, the replaying of already-run races on slot machinelike devices, at Texas tracks such as Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie.

    The commissioners later unanimously agreed to republish the historical racing rules to gain more public input so they can take up the issue again in February.

    Since the the motion to repeal the rules failed, new commission Chairman Rolando Pablos asked agency staffers to “prepare a plan for shutting down the agency,” anticipating a lack of funding from lawmakers that would require the agency to shut down.

    What does it take to bring a rogue agency to heel?

    Failing to Show Up in Texas U.S. House Races

    December 17th, 2015

    The filing deadline has passed for 2016 races in Texas, and once again several U.S. House seats will go uncontested.

    The first step to winning a race is showing up for one. Even token candidates force the opposition to expend time and attention on races they could use elsewhere. And having a candidate in the race helps you win during improbable circumstances (indictments, scandals, wave elections).

    As usual, Democrats passed up more races than Republicans, but Republicans seemed to pass on a higher number of races as well.

    Races Democrats Failed To Field a Challenger

    Here are the races Democrats failed to show up in, and the current Republican incumbent:

  • 4th Congressional District (John Ratcliffe, who drew two Republican primary opponents)
  • 5th Congressional District (Jeb Hensarling)
  • 8th Congressional District (Kevin Brady, who drew two Republican primary opponents)
  • 11th Congressional District (Mike Conaway)
  • 13th Congressional District (Mac Thornberry)
  • 19th Congressional District (No incumbent, as Randy Neugebauer is retiring; five Republicans will be vying to take his place)
  • 32nd Congressional District (Pete Sessions, who drew two Republican primary opponents)
  • 36th Congressional District (Brian Babin)
  • With Democrats not contesting eight districts, it allows Republicans to shift time and effort into defending incumbents in more marginal districts (such as Will Hurd in the perpetual battleground 23rd).

    Races Republicans Failed To Field a Challenger

    Here are the races Republicans failed to show up in, and the current Democratic incumbent:

  • 9th Congressional District (Al Green)
  • 16th Congressional District (Beto O’Rourke, a white Democratic incumbent in a heavily Hispanic district whose drawn a Hispanic Democratic primary opponent, albeit one he already defeated four years ago)
  • 20th Congressional District (Joaquin Castro)
  • On Republican missed opportunities, Joaquin Castro is the sort of rising star you want to force to defend his home territory, rather than go off gallivanting at the national level.

    A few other points of interest:

  • Sheila Jackson Lee drew no less than four Republican opponents in District 18.
  • District 15, where Democratic incumbent Ruben Hinojosa Sr. is retiring, has seven Democrats (including Ruben Ramirez Hinojosa) and two Republicans vying for the seat.
  • Matt McCall (and two other Republican challengers) are gunning for Lamar Smith in District 21 again.
  • Camille Paglia On Feminism (Again)

    December 16th, 2015

    The always outspoken and quotable Camille Paglia has another interview up on feminism, this one with Spiked. A few excerpts:

  • The problem with too much current feminism, in my opinion, is that even when it strikes progressive poses, it emanates from an entitled, upper-middle-class point of view. It demands the intrusion and protection of paternalistic authority figures to project a hypothetical utopia that will be magically free from offence and hurt. Its rampant policing of thought and speech is completely reactionary, a gross betrayal of the radical principles of 1960s counterculture, which was inaugurated in the US by the incendiary Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley.

    I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women and their naive helplessness in asserting control over their own dating lives. Female undergraduates incapable of negotiating the oafish pleasures and perils of campus fraternity parties are hardly prepared to win leadership positions in business or government in the future.

  • The anti-porn crusader Andrea Dworkin (who died a decade ago) was a rabid fanatic, a self-destructive woman so consumed by her hatred of men that she tottered on the edge of psychosis. Dworkin and her puritanical henchman Catharine MacKinnon (born into wealth and privilege) were extremely powerful in the US for a long time, culminating in the major media’s canonisation of MacKinnon in a 1991 New York Times Magazine cover story. When I burst on the scene after the release of my first book in 1990, I attacked Dworkin and MacKinnon with all guns blazing. I am very proud of the role I played in defending free speech and helping the pro-sex wing of feminism to go public and eventually win its great victory over both Dworkin-MacKinnon and the priggish feminist establishment typified by Steinem. Hence the unthinking backward turn of current feminism toward censorship is appalling and tragic. Young feminists seem to have little sense of the crucial battles that were waged and won a quarter century ago.

  • ‘Rape culture’ is a ridiculous term – mere gassy propaganda, too rankly bloated to critique. Anyone who sees sex so simplistically has very little sense of world history, anthropology or basic psychology. I feel very sorry for women who have been seduced by this hyper-politicised, victim-centered rhetoric, because in clinging to such superficial, inflammatory phrases, they have renounced their own power and agency.

    Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Los Angeles Schools Closed Over Terror Threat

    December 15th, 2015

    It seems that the entire Los Angeles School District is closed today due to a bomb threat.

    If it’s that easy to close down the country’s second largest school district, what’s to prevent Islamic State sympathizers from getting the district shut down every day?