October Surprise: Cubs Not In World Series

October 24th, 2012

Gloria Allred is getting ready to release her October surprise, and you won’t believe the magnitude!

Are you ready?

Brace yourself!

It seems that during the divorce proceeding of Staples founder founder Tom Stemberg 20 years ago, Mitt Romney may have misvalued the profit potential for shares of Staples, with the result that the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo. While the congress of the Republic endlessly debates this alarming chain of events—

Oh wait, sorry, I accidentally spaced out for a moment and started channeling the opening crawl from The Phantom Menace, probably because it was the only thing I could think of less interesting than a stock valuation issue from a 20-year old divorce proceeding. Indeed, if the general public is given a choice between ancient divorce/stock value questions, or Jar Jar Binks reciting The Federalist Papers, then meesa thinksa yousa gonna be called ona to deliberate ona thisa newa Constitution!

This is a game-changer only if the game is “see if you can bore yourself to sleep.” A real game-changer would be something like “In Baghdad in 1990, Tom Stemberg, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and I all snorted blow off Fawn Hall’s ass.” That’s about as likely as Mila Kunis showing up on my doorstep asking to be my love slave. The whole reason Mitt is poised to win this thing (beside Obama’s mind-numbing incompetence and the senses-dulling numbness of the Liberal Reality Bubble) is because he’s no fun at parties. If he had any real baggage New Gingrich’s opposition people would have unpacked it a long time ago. He’s so clean he squeaks, which must infuriate Obama’s dirty tricks team to no end. “Damn your clean nose and upright moral values, you vile Mormon!”

Sure, illegally unsealing an opponent’s divorce records is Obama’s finishing move, but given the distinct lack of any prurient interest angle, even the most devoted Journolista will struggle to breath life into this pathetic non-scandal.

Messa thinksa yousa wasted a lota tima!

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Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch | 3 Comments »

Texas Vs. California: 13 Days Before the Election Roundup

October 24th, 2012

With the election less than two weeks away, time for a roundup of how the champions of their respective political models (Texas for Red States and California for Blue States) are doing:

  • Why is gasoline so expensive in California? Because Californian politicians have made it that expensive. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • California is getting ready to shovel more benefits to public employee union members. Because retiring at age 50 with 90% of their salary just wasn’t enough.
  • Bankrupt San Bernadino stops paying into the CalPERS pension fund. (Previously.
  • Moody’s: “we expect…more bankruptcy filings and bond defaults among California cities, reflecting the increased risk to bondholders as investors are asked to contribute to plans for closing budget gaps.”
  • It’s all part of California’s Fifty Shades of Golden electoral masochism. “Not surprising, the most productive of California’s citizens are leaving in droves. For those who want to prosper, the safeword is “Texas.'”
  • The guy from California who under-reported unemployment to make the numbers look better? Obama donor. This is my shocked face.
  • California has actually carried out some pension reforms (like capping annual benefits at $132,000), but its pension plans are still underfunded by $165 billion.
  • California got $411 million in the National Mortgage Settlement. So how much of that actually went to help people with their mortgages? None of it. “Think of California’s persistent budget deficit as a great white shark devouring every source of cash in its path.”
  • Might California voters finally be reaching a tipping point against big government? Answer cloudy, ask again later.
  • Texas continues to add jobs.
  • Moreover, they’re not low wage jobs either:

    The total personal income (TPI) in Texas reached $1.07 trillion dollars in the second quarter of this year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s an increase of 71 percent from the state’s corresponding total 10 years earlier, $626.7 billion.

    Here’s another way of looking at it: Texas accounted for 8.02 percent of the nation’s TPI this year, up 1.10 percentage points from 6.92 percent in 2002.

    That’s nearly five times larger than the runner-up, Florida, which increased its share of national TPI by 0.23 points in a decade. Just four other states registered gains better than a tenth of a point.

  • Texas has the best unemployment rate among the five biggest states, at 6.8%. California, at 10.2%, has the worst.
  • Texas’ tort reform has attracted medical specialists to the state at a rate outstripping population growth.
  • Texas added 262,700 private sector jobs over the last year.
  • And Dwight, as usual, has more on the goings-ons in Golden State locales like Oakland and Bell.

    • (Hat tips for many Texas items: WILLisms’ Twitter feed.)

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    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »

    Hit My Tweet Limit Again

    October 22nd, 2012

    So I’ll post here briefly:

    Romney Closing Statement: I’m optimistic. I want a strong, peaceful America. Obama will mean $20 trillion in deficits, more jobs. Washington is broken, I know what it takes to get us back. I can work cross the aisle. This nation is the hope of the earth.

    Obama’s Closing Statement: It’s all Bush’s fault. Romney wants to go back to Bush’s failed 5% unemployment. I’ve got an economic plan that I mysteriously haven’t tried to implement. I want to turn our education over to teacher’s unions. I want to reduce the deficit, just like I’ve done the last 4 years. I will work every single day to improve my golf game. [Note: This summary may contain irony]

    Bob Scheafer: We all love teachers.

    Obama brought up the “failed policies” of Bush and now Romney is wailing on Obama’s economic record.

    #debate Obama: Anyone can check the record. And the record is that Obama handed out crony subsidies to Democratic donor friends.

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    Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

    Once More Into the Breach!

    October 22nd, 2012

    Once again I will be Livetweeting tonight’s Presidential debate. Drinking words to sip on are “Libya,” “China,””Iran,” “Russia” and “Nuclear.” Chug for “Jihad” or if Obama calls Benjamin Netanyahu “Bibi.”

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    Posted in Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »

    The Obama Administration’s Response to Benghazi, In Easy-to-Understand Graphic Form

    October 22nd, 2012

    Some devastating critiques of the Obama Administration’s non-response on American officials in Benghazi.

    Bing West:

    A U.S. ambassador is missing and his diplomatic team is desperately fighting off terrorist attacks. Our commander-in-chief and his national-security team in Washington are listening to the phone calls from the Americans under attack and watching real-time video from a drone circling overhead. Yet the U.S. military sends no aid. Why?

    Snip

    Our diplomats fought for seven hours without any aid from outside the country. Four Americans died while the Obama national-security team and our military passively watched and listened. The administration is being criticized for ignoring security needs before the attack and for falsely attributing the assault to a mob. But the most severe failure has gone unnoticed: namely, a failure to aid the living.

    Snip

    For our top leadership, with all the technological and military tools at their disposal, to have done nothing for seven hours was a joint civilian and military failure of initiative and nerve.

    Mary Steyn:

    Obama, Biden, and Panetta met in the Oval Office at 5 p.m. We know Charlene Lamb at the State Department was watching events in real time. It seems likely Panetta was, too — and perhaps even Obama.

    When something bad happens at a consulate on the other side of the world, very few nations have the technological capability to watch it in real time.

    Even fewer have fighter jets and special forces within less than 500 miles — or about the distance from Boston to Washington.

    Yet the commander-in-chief chose to do nothing. He chose to let the enemy determine the course of events, how long the battle would last, how many Americans would die. The only choice he made was to hold a photo-op at their coffins.

    Many Obama partisans continue to downplay the attacks in Benghazi as though they were indeed a mere bump in the road of no particular importance. Therefore, I’ve decided to put the incident in a graphic form that perhaps even they can grasp:

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, Obama Scandals | 1 Comment »

    Early Voting in Texas Starts Today

    October 22nd, 2012

    Early voting in Texas starts today and runs through Friday, November 2.

    Here are early voting locations and sample ballots for Williamson County. And here are the Travis County early voting locations.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 1 Comment »

    BattleSwarm Blog Endorses Ted Cruz For United States Senator

    October 21st, 2012

    Lawrence Person’s BattleSwarm Blog endorses Ted Cruz for United States Senator. I believe that Cruz is the best candidate, that he has a long, strong, and deep commitment to conservative principles, and that he will make a great Senator for Texas.

    I originally endorsed Cruz on April 30, a month before the Republican primary, and gave extended reasons why Cruz was the best candidate of all those running in the Republican primary, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each. This post reiterates that endorsement, and explains why Ted Cruz is a vastly superior choice for Senator than Democrat Paul Sadler.

    Sadler had a reputation as a “moderate” Democrat in the Texas House, which meant he wanted government to get bigger and spend more at a slightly slower rate than his fellow Democrats, and was reportedly a skilled legislator on education issues. But I don’t want a “skilled legislator,” I want a conservative fighter. I want someone to fight for shrinking the size and scope of the federal government and reign in the insanely bloated federal spending that’s holding down the economy, not manage the bloat. There are quite enough Democrats in Congress who pretend to be moderate until the votes really count (see also: ObamaCare); we don’t need another one.

    Like his party, Sadler has moved steadily left over the years. After failing to win a U.S. House seat, Sadler worked first as an asbestos trial lawyer, and then as head of a Texas wind power coalition putting him in not one but two of the biggest recipient groups for liberal big government crony capitalism largess. This suggests that he would try to roll back tort reform and would make a very poor representative for Texas’ vital oil and gas industry.

    Further, given the positions Sadler has taken in interviews and debates, there seems to be very little of that old “moderate” patina left on him. He’s for higher taxes, bigger government, green pork, public employee unions, illegal alien amnesty, and ObamaCare. He’d fit right in among the big spenders in a Harry Reid-led Senate.

    By contrast, Ted Cruz is not only the unquestioned Tea Party representative for shrinking big government, he has a broad, deep and impressive conservative background. You don’t specialize in 9th and 10th Amendment studies because you want to be rich, and you don’t work at the Texas Public Policy Foundation if you want to be a squishy moderate. Cruz is not only exceptionally sharp, an excellent debater and a gifted public speaker, he’s also a classic fusionist candidate with both strong free market and social conservative credentials. He beat all his Republican opponents despite millions spent to smear him and came out of the runoff not only unscathed, but with a national reputation. He was a great Texas Solicitor General, and I think he will make a great Senator. I urge all my Texas readers to cast their votes for him as the next United States Senator from Texas.

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    Posted in Budget, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 3 Comments »

    Refuting Derek Thompson (or, Newsweek’s Self-Inflicted Wounds)

    October 19th, 2012

    Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson has a piece up laying the blame for Newsweek’s on the economy. “This is an economic story, plain and simple. The print news business is grim and hardly needs a lengthy explication.” Well, I’m sure the economy didn’t help. But the story of Newsweek‘s demise is not that plain, nor that simple.

    I was going to laboriously track down magazine circulation data, enter it into Excel, and create a chart. Then I found that State of the Media had done it for me:

    Notice how Time, Newsweek‘s chief competitor, starts sucking wind before the recession hits full force, then stabilizes, while Newsweek goes into freefall, then continues? In fact, Newsweek‘s nosedive gets steeper in 2009, right about the time the recession was bottoming out around the New Obama Normal. What could have happened then?

    While conservatives had long complained of Newsweek‘s liberal bias, it was 2009 when Newsweek finally gave up their pretense of being neutral and all but announced they were in the tank for Obama.

    They practically came out and said they weren’t interested in conservatives reading their magazine. The chart above tells you how well that decision worked out for them.

    As I said yesterday, Newsweek‘s demise is a case of assisted suicide. They had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.

    (And here’s an excuse to link to that Iowahawk piece on Newsweek again.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »

    Romney Slays at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner

    October 18th, 2012

    Mitt Romney just kept slamming them out of the park at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner. “In the spirit of Sesame Street tonight, the President’s remarks are brought to you by the letter O and the number 16 trillion.”

    Background on the Alfred E. Smith dinner.

    (Hat tip: Ramparts 360’s twitter feed.)

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, video | 1 Comment »

    Newsweek To Start Pining for the Fjords

    October 18th, 2012

    Today Newsweek announced that they were ceasing print publication and going all digital. For a national general-interest weekly news-magazine, that’s tantamount to saying that you’re dead but you don’t feel like lying down just yet.

    Back in 2009, you may remember Newsweek‘s decision to remake itself as a liberal opinion weekly, an odd financial choice in a country where conservatives outnumber liberals nearly 2-to-1. Since then Newsweek has managed the amazing feat of hemorrhaging readers faster than other print publications. Then the Washington Post company decided to sell the venerable newsweekly to Sidney Harman for $1, screwing its shareholders but keeping the magazine’s money-losing liberal slant under Tina Brown’s editorship. Hired to steer the ship around the iceberg, Brown instead decided to teach the iceberg who’s boss by ramming it a few more times.

    Vast swathes of legacy print media are in trouble in the Internet-era, but Newsweek‘s demise is more like an assisted suicide than a graceful decline. It’s like a Type II diabetic who had already lost three toes deciding to immediately go on a diet consisting entirely of ice cream.

    Newsweek had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.

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    Posted in Media Watch | 7 Comments »

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