August 21st, 2013
Is amnesty dead this congressional session? That’s what a lot of observers, on both left and right, are saying this morning.
Mickey Kaus isn’t so sure.
In The Atlantic, Molly Ball claims that amnesty proponents are winning August. And I wouldn’t count on it being dead when the Republican Establishment shows no sign of giving up it’s suicidal longing for it.
In course of discussing why Texas won’t turn blue anytime soon, Nate Cohn in The New Republic gives away the game as to why Amnesty is so vitally important to Democrats, saying the expect 300,000 more Democratic votes from Amnesty in Texas alone. For Democratic strategists, every illegal alien is just an Undocumented Obama Voter.
Whether it’s dead or not, it certainly won’t do any harm to call or write your Representative’s office and remind them that you categorically oppose amnesty in any way, shape or form. And it wouldn’t hurt to mention your support for defunding ObamaCare while you’re at it…
Tags: amnesty, Border Controls, Mickey Kaus, Texas
Posted in Border Control, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »
August 20th, 2013
There’s a lot of Egyptian news going on, much of it of the classic Middle East Problem Solving variety. In particular, the Egyptian government seems to be doing most of the “solving,” so expect to see some 50-100 members of the Muslim Brotherhood develop acute lead poisoning every day for the foreseeable future.
Beyond that, I can’t tell you. My knowledge of Egypt is basically that of a one-eyed, myopic man who can at least see shapes in strong sunlight. Here’s an Egypt news roundup in mini-LinkSwarm form.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme leader is arrested. That’s going to be a big blow to them, and probably indicates the Egyptian military is fairly confident they’ll not only win the current test of wills with the Brothers, but win it decisively.
The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t dead yet, but they are severely weakened. “The army seems determined to decapitate the Middle East’s oldest and arguably most resilient Islamist movement, to prevent it from preparing a political comeback.”
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss?
The Coptic Kristallnacht.
Hosni Mubarak has been found innocent and should soon be released. Don’t expect to see him return to power, as the military opposition to his turning the country into a dynastic fiefdom by anointing his son Gamal as his successor is the reason they let him get toppled in the first place.
Egypt’s burning, Obama’s golfing.
Is Obama secretly suspending aid to the Egyptian government? If so, he’s once again superbly crafted a policy to please no one and accomplish nothing.
Thomas Sowell on Obama’s (and America’s) illusions about democratizing the Middle East.
“The President and his team have been taken in by two very old American mistakes about the rest of the world. One is to confuse the end of history with the morning news. The other is to exaggerate America’s importance to the rest of the world. ”
Evidently the rest of the Arab world is pissed at Qatar (and Qatar-owned Al Jazeera) for backing the Muslim Brotherhood.
I’ve been seeing a lot of very dubious reports about Obama secretly giving the Muslim Brotherhood $8 billion. Look, as much as I think Obama is an incompetent failure whose Administration has played footsie with the Brotherhood, I don’t buy this for a minute. Setting aside the why, not even President Trillion can conjure $8 billion from thin air to hand out on his own.
Tags: Al Jazeera, Copts, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Hosni Mubarak, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Qatar, Thomas Sowell
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
August 19th, 2013
Mark Steyn is always good, but this piece on Egypt is so succinctly pithy that it’s hard to stop quoting from it.
General Sisi has made a calculation that he has a small window of opportunity to inflict damage on the Muslim Brotherhood that will set them back decades and that it is in Egypt’s vital interest to do so. Grasping that, the Brothers are pushing back hard.
And this:
All these parties are pursuing their strategic interest. Does the United States have such a thing anymore? Not so’s you’d notice. As a result, the factions in Egypt are united only in their contempt for Washington. Obama is despised by Sisi and the generals for being fundamentally unserious; by the Brotherhood for stringing along with the coup; by the Copts for standing by as the Brothers take it out on them; and by the small number of genuine democrats in Egypt for his witless promotion of Morsi’s thugs as the dawning of democracy. Any “national-unity government” of the kind the usual deluded twits are urging on Egypt would be united only in its unanimous loathing of Obama, his secretaries of state, and his inept ambassador.
One more:
“[Under Obama] America is harmless as an enemy but treacherous as a friend.”
Read the whole thing.
Tags: Copts, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Mark Steyn, Mohammed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
August 19th, 2013
Florida stopped a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fight between two consenting adults because they have disabilities. Garrett Holeve is a 23-year-old with Down’s Syndrome, while 28-year-old David Steffin has cerebral palsy.
Here’s a profile of Holeve:
Should Flordia allow an adult with Downs Syndrome to fight in an MMA event?
It appears on the surface that this is a hard case, given that MMA blows could reduce Holeve’s already diminished mental capacity. But it’s really not:
- Is Holeve a free adult citizen of the United States? If so, he’s free to make up his own mind.
- If Holeve is not a free adult, but is a ward of his parents, it is up to them to give their consent. As the above video makes clear, his father has determined that the benefits Garrett Holeve gets from MMA training and fighting (increased concentration and drive, greater physical well-being, etc.) outweigh the risk of injury.
- Only if Garrett Holeve were a ward of the state of Florida should that state get to decide what he should do with his life. That is clearly not the case here.
If I had a Downs Syndrome son, I probably wouldn’t enroll him in an MMA program. But Garrett Holeve isn’t my son, and it’s not my call to make. Nor is it that of the state. The job of the state is not to protect people from themselves.
Let him fight.
Tags: Garrett Holeve, MMA, Regulation, video
Posted in Regulation, video | No Comments »
August 16th, 2013
Michael Totten has an interview with Egypt expert Eric Trager on the truth about Egypt. Include Western observers deluding themselves about the Muslim Brotherhood. “The Brotherhood prevents moderates from becoming members and prevents members from becoming moderates.”
Also this:
But once the army made the decision to step in, as reluctant as it may have been, it’s modus operandi unquestionably changed. It entered into a direct conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps even an existential one. The military believes it not only has to remove Morsi, it has to decapitate the entire organization. Otherwise, the Brotherhood will re-emerge and perhaps kill the generals who removed it from power.
Still more:
MJT: How much support do you think the Muslim Brotherhood actually lost since it won the election?
Eric Trager: It has lost substantial public support. Think back to the early presidential elections in 2012. Morsi only won five million votes, which was 25 percent of the votes cast. That’s not a high number. It’s substantially lower than what the Brotherhood had won just a few months earlier in the parliamentary elections. So already by May 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood’s support shrunk back to its base which is only around five million people.
The Brotherhood’s power is not derived from mass public support and it never has been. It is derived from its exceptional organization capabilities on one hand, and the fact that the rest of Egypt is deeply divided and highly disorganized on the other. That’s still the case. I think if Egypt had free and fair elections today, the Brotherhood would still do well and might even win because nobody else is prepared to run in an election.
Read the whole thing.
Tags: Egypt, Eric Trager, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Michael Totten, Muslim Brotherhood
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
August 16th, 2013
A Friday LinkSwarm on Friday. Will wonders never cease?
Ted Cruz hails from the Republican wing of the Republican Party.
Speaking of Cruz: “Cruz acquired his citizenship, at birth, through his mother. He is a natural born US citizen and eligible to be President of the United States. Let us never have to speak of this again.”
Victor Davis Hanson does an Obama scandalrama roundup.
A few Democrats appear to be defying the idea that Hillary is unbeatable, just like she was in 2008.
163 Ohio poll workers dismissed for that voting fraud that doesn’t exist.
Teen complains that Facebook just isn’t like it was when they were 7.
Why is Dennis Franz shooting Martin Luther King?
Muslim Brotherhood calls on followers to tourch Coptic churches.
The Jewish community isn’t wild about Alice Walker’s new book. Uh, guys? Given that Walker believes in David Icke’s shapeshifting lizard people, I’d say rational political discourse isn’t in her wheelhouse.
Jesse Jackson Jr. sentenced.
Generation parasite.
NPR Ombudsmen rips them a new one, but NPR itself stands by the lies: “At NPR, commitment to leftist ideology trumps any fealty to the facts.”
Dead Goblin Report, Texas Edition: “A couple of Texas criminals had the tables turned on them when a Texas man — taken as a hostage along with his wife and forced to rob a bank — decided he’d had enough and pulled a gun out of his glove box and shot them, killing one.”
Terry McAuliffe: Parasitic tick on the body politic.
Ashton Kutcher actually making sense. “Opportunity looks an awful lot like hard work.” Also: No job is beneath you.
Dear dumbass: Don’t put out a call on Twitter for people to sell you drugs.
Washington Post headline writers evidently have no idea what the word “surreal” means.
Speaking of the Post, evidently their biggest problem is that they still have one token conservative on staff.
Tags: 2016 Election, Ashton Kutcher, Benghazi, Crime, David Icke, Democrats, Egypt, Facebook, George Zimmerman Trial, Guns, IRS, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Muslim Brotherhood, NSA, Obama Scandals, Terry McAuliffe, Twitter
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Obama Scandals | No Comments »
August 15th, 2013
And the violence continues apace in Egypt. Egypt’s government cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood, the brotherhood looting government buildings and attacking the Christian Coptic minority. And assaulting the occasional journalist taking their picture.
Looking for insight as to what Obama should do? Sorry, all out of insight today. The best thing to do is stay the hell out of the way, make the usual meaningless appeals for calm as a sop to the “international community,” and let things run their course. Which seems to be pretty much what Obama is doing, either through calculation, incompetence, or indifference.
This, in fact, is the way politics is conducted in the Middle East: Two factions kill each other until one is weakened enough to stop fighting. It’s in our interest to see as many of the Bad Guys (Muslim Brotherhood) killed by the Not Nearly As Bad Guys (Egyptian military) as possible.
Sorry I couldn’t be more cheerful. Here’s a cute dog video compilation to make up for it.
Tags: Egypt, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Muslim, Muslim Brotherhood, video
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, video | No Comments »
August 14th, 2013
NRO has running updates. Civilian death toll at 245, security forces death toll at 43.
Here’s your generic Middle East conflict video montage:
(Note: I originally had a completely different generic Middle East conflict video montage there, but AFP evidently doesn’t like embedding videos.)
It was always wishful thinking that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to relinquish its grip on power without a fight. The only question now is how many dead, and how many of its top leadership the Egyptian military is going to kill.
Egypt should count itself lucky that Mohammed Morsi was so stupidly impatient. If he had only followed Erdogan’s lead, he could have slowly but steadily consolidated his rule while pushing the military out of the picture. Now he’s toast, and we can only hope his fellow Islamists get pushed out of power-sharing entirely.
Tags: Egypt, Foreign Policy, Islamist, Jihad, Mohammed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, video
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, video | No Comments »
August 14th, 2013
Wendy Davis slouches closer to running for Governor. In fact, with the Texas Democratic Party officially begging her to get in, I think it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point.
I think she will get in and get slaughtered by Greg Abbott in the general election in 2014. I think her partisans have severely overestimated how Abortion Barbie’s signature issue and liberal politics will play statewide. Also expect Democrats to field a collection of nobodies in down-ballot statewide races, assuming they bother to recruit anyone at all; remember, they failed to even field candidates in many 2012 races.
In addition, I hope Democratic partisans nationwide pump enough money into her campaign to weaken them elsewhere; far better for Wendy Davis get that money than, say, Mary Landrieu.
Despite that, I think it probably is the best decision for her politically. A losing race for Governor is going to give her a lot more national exposure and access to donors than another state senate campaign ever would.
My prediction is that by 2015, she’s going to have her own show on MSNBC.
Tags: 2014 Election, 2014 Governor's Race, Democrats, Elections, Texas, Wendy Davis
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | No Comments »
August 13th, 2013
“Travis County prosecutor charged with DWI.”
A prosecutor with the Travis County District Attorney’s Office was charged with driving while intoxicated after being involved in a traffic wreck over the weekend.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit released Monday, Brandon Grunewald, 33, was in a collision Sunday afternoon on the southbound MoPac Boulevard service road near Barton Skyway, Grunewald was driving a 2008 Land Rover. The other driver was in a Mini Cooper.
And what did his boss have to say?
Grunewald’s boss, Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said she is reviewing his case
“It’s a first offense DWI and I don’t know what will happen until I have all the facts,” explained Lehmberg. “I have never terminated an employee for a first offense DWI and we have had employees with first offense DWI up and down the ranks.”
Indeed.
You know, I don’t think I’ve worked anywhere where “people up and down the chain of command” had “first-time” DWIs.
Sadly, Mr. Grunewald was not reported to have stamped his feet and implored the police to “Call Greg!”
(Hat tip: Blue Dot Blues.)
Tags: Austin, Brandon Grunewald, Crime, DWI, Rosemary Lehmberg, Texas, Travis County
Posted in Austin, Crime, Texas | 1 Comment »