Texas Senate Race Update for September 15, 2011
September 15th, 2011Some Analysis of the Republican Victory in the New York Ninth Congressional District Special Election
September 15th, 2011I’m a sucker for wonkish political analysis of voting results, so here are some of the more notable results-scrying for Bob Turner’s win over David Weprin in New York’s Ninth Congressional District after Rep. Anthony “look at my bulge” Weiner resigned in disgrace. A race Weprin lost despite $485,000 of DCCC ad buys and having Bill Clinton and New York Governor Andrew Coumo campaign for him. I’m going to ignore the usual “weak candidate, ran a bad race” blather liberals always trot out when a Democrat loses, because it’s become a tautology that doesn’t explain anything. He lost? Bad candidate that ran a bad campaign. He won? A good candidate who ran a good campaign.
Speaking of incompetence, let’s also dismiss DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz laughable assertion that a district where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 3-1 “is difficult for Democrats.” Even more risible is Wasserman Schultz’s claim that Obama has an “incredibly strong record on Israel.” She truly is the gift that keeps giving to Republicans.
So why did Weprin lose? Some theories:
Democratic strategist James Carville says it’s time for Obama to panic, but his advice is on the lines of firing people, find some scapegoats, and return to Ye Olde Big Government Religion. (He also seems to regard a $1.25 trillion budget deficit as “austerity.”) Walter Russell Mead isn’t impressed with the advice: “This President doesn’t do ‘tough’ very well….he isn’t convincing as a Chuck Norris impersonator. Often when he tries to sound tough he comes out tinny. Also, teleprompters don’t work when the goal is to project spontaneous, righteous and passionate rage.”
If NY9 is indeed a bellwether for 2012 (a big if), Democrats are in for some pretty rough storms over the next 14 months…
Greece Getting Ready to Default?
September 12th, 2011According to Seeking Alpha last week: “Yields on two-year Greek government bonds reached 46.84% recently. This is roughly comparable to yields on Argentine bonds in early December 2001 – only a month before the country defaulted on its debt.”
Other signs of the Euro crisis: The Euro hit a six month low against the dollar, and a ten year low against the yen.
Now Walter Russell Mead is reporting that markets around the world have a serious case of the jitters due to the possibility of a European meltdown. “Creating a monetary union without a true federal government is looking more and more like the biggest European policy mistake since Britain and France let Hitler have the Sudetenland.”
It’s not just Greece. Investors are now worrying about the potential solvency of French banks.
Last week, Powerline linked to this cheerful piece over at Zero Hedge, which outlines some consequences of a Euro breakup: “Were a stronger country such as Germany to leave the Euro, the consequences would include corporate default, recapitalisation of the banking system and collapse of international trade.” Lovely. Other possibilities: The rise of authoritarian or military governments to contain the crisis, or civil war.
Despite all this, the EU itself, when not pushing for further austerity, denies it’s preparing for a Greek default. Should we be more worried that the Eurocrats running the show are liars or idiots?
Here’s Peter Morici calling Greece to default and abandon the Euro, although comically, he’s saying that it’s Greece that is the exploited nation “at the mercy of Germany and other rich states who exploit European unity to live well at the expense of their poorer brethren.” Of course this is an inversion of the actual situation, with wastrel cousin Stavos living high on the hog off of Uncle Fritz and Aunt Helga’s credit rating.
But that might be coming to an abrupt end. Despite a slew of austerity measures introudced over the weekend, the Greek government only has enough money to last through the middle of October. There are technical obstacles to still more bailouts from Germany, assuming Uncle Fritz was even willing to extend more credit. Signs are that he isn’t. Indeed, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is openly discussing “an orderly bankruptcy of Greece.” The bond market is already treating a Greek default like a near certainty. It seems like the plan to prop up Greece until banks can stick European taxpayers with the bill may be coming undone.
So, you think gold prices would soar, right? Wrong. “Gold futures slumped as traders cashed out of the perceived refuge asset to cover losses in other markets while Europe’s debt crisis seemed poised to take a turn for the worse.” So it’s gotten so bad that traders need to sell gold in order to cover losses in everything else but gold.
Hang on, folks. We could be in for a very rough ride…
LinkSwarm for Friday, September 9, 2011
September 9th, 2011After an unusually active week, here’s a LinkSwarm for a lazy Friday, including a few things I meant to link to earlier and didn’t have the time.
Obama Jobs Speech Bingo
September 8th, 2011Pity the pundit forced by duty to watch an Obama speech. Barring a Teleprompter malfunction, there are few events more tedious and predictable. When even uber-Democrat James Carville says that between an Obama speech and a Republican debate, “I would have watched the debate and I’m not even a Republican or even close to being a Republican,” you know you’re in store for some deep hurting.
So how can we assuage the agony of those poor, dedicated souls who will be watching Obama’s jobs speech tonight? Barring an announcement that he’s abandoning Big Government liberalism for budget and tax cuts, the chances for another Obama snoozefest are vast, while the possibility of anything new and substantive are slim. How can we keep their attention focused on the POTUS, and not on the desperate need for another highball or passing a sanity roll?
Simple: With my handy Obama Jobs Speech Bingo chart below! Just print out and place a marker every time Obama trots out one of his stock job speech phrases. Which I’m confident will be pretty darn often.
Which dedicated pundit will be the first to post “Bingo! #ObamaBingo” to Twitter tonight?
Click to embiggen
Edited to add: Welcome Powerline readers! As you can tell from the blogroll on the right, Powerline has long been one of my favorite blogs, so feel free to look around for news from the hot, dusty heart of Texas.
Audio Interview With Ted Cruz Part 2
September 7th, 2011And here’s part two of the Ted Cruz interview. Some interesting thoughts on Victor Carrillo’s loss in 2010, Republican acceptance of Hispanic candidates, and his record studying the Tenth Amendment, among others.
If you missed them, here’s the shorter video version of the interview, and here’s Part 1 of the audio interview.
Revised Wildfire Prevention/Fighting Numbers Straight From the Horse’s Mouth
September 7th, 2011Since my original post, there seems to have been some confusion over the exact budget numbers for Texas Forest Service and Wildfire Prevention/Fighting as enacted by the 82nd Legislature for the 2012-2013 biennium budget (which went into effect for Fiscal Year 2012 starting on September 1).
So I decided to go straight to the horse’s mouth.
I contacted my own State Representative, Larry Gonzales, who pointed me in the direction of Rep. John Otto, the legislative chairman for Article II of the state budget. One of his staffers was kind enough to get back to me with the following numbers.
It turns out that all the previous numbers were wrong, for various reasons. The numbers below all link to the official PDFs for the final budget numbers of the bills in question. And my liberal critics have, if not half a loaf, then at least a quarter-loaf.
The reason is that for the 2010-2011 biennium, the Forest service was allocated $54.5 million 2010 and $54.5 million for 2011. That amount was indeed reduced for the initial budget passed in the regular legislative session, to $37.7 million for 2012 and $37.5 million for 2013. But keep in mind that it was very clear that the budget was not finished at the end of the regular legislative session, as several outstanding issues (school funding, revenue enhancement, use or non-use of rainy day funds, etc.) still remained to be hashed out. That was why there was a special legislative session.
And in that special legislative session, two separate bills were passed which increased forest service/wildfire fighting and prevention funding: SB2, which added an additional $40 million to the forest service for FY 2012 specifically to fight wildfires (with any rollover, of which I’m pretty sure there will be none, to be carried into 2013), and HD4, which allocated an additional $81 million for fighting wildfires in the 2012-2013 biennium. (This is most likely where A&M got the $81 million figure for.) All those bills (and thus the funding increase) were passed and in the books months before the FY2012 budget started on September 1.
So, in summary:
Total 2010-2011 Biennium Forest Service/Wildfire Fighting Budget: $109 million.
Total 2012-2013 Biennium Forest Service/Wildfire Fighting Budget: $196.2 million.
So the Texas legislature authorized, and Governor Rick Perry signed, an 80% increase in wildfire fighting and prevention funding for the 2012-2013 biennium. Not quite double the amount I had in my original post, but pretty close.
Audio Interview With Ted Cruz: Part 1
September 6th, 2011When I did this video interview with Ted Cruz on July 30, I also did an audio interview with him at the same time using an iPhone App called Recorder Pro. The video interview was done by Cruz’s staff (who have a much better camera than I do), and the resulting video was editing done to a sort of “Best of” piece emphasizing his campaign themes. I actually think the full interview will be more interesting to conservatives, as he goes into more detail about a number of topics, including border control, the budget deficit, and federal commerce clause overreach and the 10th Amendment, including a discussion of Wickard vs. Filburn.
It’s taken a good bit longer to get it the audio up here than I wanted to, mainly because I’ve been pretty busy, but also because it was something of a pain to edit the interview and get it up here. First, I had Recorder Pro record in CAF format, which isn’t particularly widely used, so I needed one program to convert it into a .WAV file, and then another to edit the file (there was about a minute and a half of extraneous setup noise I wanted to spare you). Then, after all that, I found out the resulting audio file was too large post all at once, so I’ve split it into two chunks. The first half of the interview is below as an MP3. I’ll try to put up the second half in the next day or so, assuming I don’t get distracted by shiny objects.
Also, as a bonus, here’s an essay by Ted Cruz and Mario Loyola on Federalism that discusses Wickard vs. Filburn.
Correction: The Obama Administration Still Wants To Kill Texans
September 5th, 2011It appears that my celebration was premature. I previously reported that the Obama Administration’s shelving of new, economically-destructive smog regulations meant Texas was off the hook. It now appears that isn’t the case, and we can still expect rolling blackouts (and likely additional heat-related fatalities) thanks to the completely different “cross-state pollution rules:”
The controversial “cross-state pollution” rule, which aims at tightening emissions from power plants in Texas and 26 other states, remains scheduled for implementation in January. The cross-state rule targets nitrogen oxides, an ozone precursor, as well as sulfur dioxide, which is not an ozone precursor but can also cause lung damage.
“The cross state air pollution rule is final,” Betsaida Alcantara, press secretary for the Environmental Protection Agency, which crafted the rule, said in an email.
[snip]
The cross-state rule requires Texas power plants to lower sulfur dioxide emissions by 46 percent and nitrogen oxide emissions by 7 percent compared with 2009 levels, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the state’s environmental agency.
But the cross-state rule has stirred huge opposition from Texas officials, who say it is onerous and takes effect too quickly. In a statement Friday, the TCEQ said that it hoped the ozone rule pullback “signals that the EPA is beginning to consider science and common sense in their decisions, and we would hope that they would apply this to other regulations such as the proposed cross-state air pollution rule.”
Last week the Texas electric grid operator reported that the cross-state rule could curtail the operations of some coal plants so severely that it could lead to rolling blackouts — an issue that carries heightened visibility as Texas comes off a scorching summer that badly stretched power supplies.
“At least two” rotating outages would have occurred this summer had the pollution rule been in place, said Warren Lasher, an official with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator.
So it appears that I was wrong when stating the EPA had come to its senses. In fact, he Obama Administration does still want to kill Texans in the name of radical environmentalism.
BattleSwarmBlog regrets the error.
Another Left-Wing Lie: The 50% Cut in Texas Wildfire Funding That Wasn’t
September 5th, 2011Note: My numbers below are somewhat off…but those of critical commentators are also off. See this post for the complete breakdown of Texas Forest Service/Wildfire Fighting and Prevention Funding. The bottom line is that it was increased by 80%.
You may have noticed several fires breaking out in Central Texas due to the prolonged drought and high winds. You may also have noticed liberals crowing about how the latest Texas budget cut wildfire response by 50%. That would indeed seem to be shortsighted, except for one tiny fact:
It isn’t true.
Evidently the myth arises from pieces like this one from earlier in the year, citing unnamed sources in the midst of budget negotiations saying such a cut was proposed. Not passed, mind you, but proposed. And it doesn’t say by who.
But when you look at the actual numbers for the passed budget, they tell a radically different story.
First, let’s look at funding for the 2010-2011 biennium passed by the 81st Legislature, where the Texas Forest Service was allocated $38,550,563, most of which was for wildfire fighting and prevention.
Next let’s look at the 2012-2013 biennium passed by the 82nd Legislature; sorry, I was only able to find a PDF, but the relevant information can be found near the top of page 15, where it states that the legislature allocated $81 million for the Texas Forest Service for wildfires.
So not only did the Texas state legislature and Governor Rick Perry not reduce the amount for wildfire fighting and prevention, they actually doubled the amount spent on it.
So a real natural tragedy is being used by opportunistic liberals to slander politicians (and let’s face it, a state) that they already hated. The original Think Progress etc. pieces were merely half-baked rumor. Repeating them today, however, makes them an actual lie.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to their own facts.
Edited to add: The Texas State Fiscal year starts on September 1st, so the state is operating under the 2012-2013 biennium budget now.