Huffines Challenges Abbott

May 11th, 2021

Former state senator Don Huffines is running against incumbent Greg Abbott for the Republican nomination for Texas governor:

Gov. Greg Abbott has gained another challenge from the right, with the addition of former State Sen. Don Huffines into the gubernatorial race on Monday.

“I’m a proud fifth-generation Texan,” said Huffines. “For too long, Texas has been let down by politicians who offer nothing but excuses and lies. Our border is still wide open. Property taxes keep going up. And our election laws continue to be ignored. Plain and simple, our politicians aren’t getting things done, and Texans have rightfully run out of patience.”

“I will fight and win on behalf of Texans. We will protect our great state and secure our freedoms. I am ready to take on the federal government and the entrenched elites of the Austin swamp. We will finally finish the wall and secure our border, and we’re not going to ask for permission to do it. We will put Texas on a path to eliminating property taxes. And we will enforce our sacred voting laws so that the voices of lawful voters are preserved and not diluted through corrupt election procedures,” he added.

Don Huffines was first elected to the Texas Senate in 2014, after defeating liberal Republican incumbent John Carona in the GOP primary.

Immediately, Huffines made his mark as one of the most conservative members of the chamber, on more than one occasion grinding the normally scripted Senate to a halt by offering amendments that attempted to improve Texas’ open carry law and completely phase-out the state’s margins tax.

Huffines also led the charge to take down “Dallas County Schools,” a corruption scheme that stole millions of dollars from Texas taxpayers and led to the imprisonment of six individuals.

Huffines was defeated in the Senate by Democrat Nathan Johnson in the 2018 Democrat sweep of Dallas County.

Since then, Huffines has continued to be a figure in the conservative movement, traveling the state to pull back the curtain on the true nature of the Texas Legislature, as well as being a sharp critic of the governor.

Is Huffines a serious threat to Abbott? Let’s just say he’s a more serious 2022 Texas Gubernatorial candidate than Chad Prather or Kurt Schwab. Or, for that matter, Barbara Krueger or Larry SECEDE Kilgore, the two nobodies Abbott wiped the floor with in the 2018 Republican primary. State senator is a pretty decent launching pad for statewide office, as Dan Patrick can attest. But no one has jumped straight from the state legislature to the Governor’s mansion since Dolph Briscoe did it in 1972, and that was after a previous gubernatorial run, plus the Sharpstown scandal. Mostly the the path to the governor’s mansion runs through a lower state-wide office (Attorney General and the Texas Supreme Court for Abbott, Lieutenant Governor and Agricultural Commissioner for Rick Perry, Treasurer for Ann Richards).

Up until last year, Abbott was considered a popular governor and a shoe-in for reelection. Then the 2020 lockdowns happened, then the disaster of the ice-storm. No one blames Mao Tse Lung on Abbott, and he clearly weathered the coronavirus crisis better than Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom or Grethen Whitmer (to damn him with very faint praise indeed), but he waited far too long to lift the lockdown and mask mandate orders when it was obvious they had no effect on viral spread, especially compared to Ron DeSantis. Likewise, the ice storm was obviously not of Abbott’s making, but the years of lax oversight of ERCOT and a failure to push reliable fossil fuel over acquiescence to subsidies for trendy (and unreliable) renewables made the crisis far more severe than it had to be.

So Abbott probably is vulnerable, but I’m not sure Huffines is the candidate to take advantage of it. Abbott has at least $47 million in the bank, an extremely formidable warchest going into the primary season. (If Matthew McConaughey does jump into the race, he may need all of it.) Huffines has conservative bonafides, but losing your last race is seldom an indicator that you’re ready to step up a weight class (Richard Nixon not withstanding). Huffines, like Abbott, seems more like an artifact of the bygone pre-Trump political era, and thus very unlikely to defeat Abbott in the Republican primary.

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Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 3 Comments »

Labour Kicked In The Yarbles Yet Again

May 10th, 2021

The UK just had their 2021 local elections, and once again Labour got kicked in the yarbles:

The Conservatives have continued to sweep aside Labour in its traditional north-eastern English heartland.

The party lost control of Durham County Council, which it has run since 1925, losing 15 seats as the Tories took 14.

This follows the Conservatives winning the Hartlepool parliamentary by-election and receiving 73% of the vote in the Tees Valley mayoral election….

So far, the Conservatives have made a net gain of 12 councils, while Labour has lost control of eight.

You may think “Oh, Labour lost some local elections, big deal,” but the wounds are deeper than that. The areas they’re losing aren’t marginal toss-up districts, they’re places that made up the Labour heartland for decades:

Labour’s traditional constituents continue to leave the woke, EU-loving, Brexit-hating, Corbynite-riddled Labour Party in droves due to the naked contempt that party now regards them with:

So, the working-class revolt against the Labour Party continues. The ballot-box uprising of December 2019 – when millions of voters across the Red Wall switched from Labour to the Tories – is still in full flow. Hartlepool, Labour since it was founded in 1974, has now fallen to the Tories, with a staggering majority of 7,000. Labour councillors in Derby, Dudley, Sunderland and elsewhere have been unceremoniously turfed out of power and replaced with Tories. The results so far are ‘shattering’, says Labour’s Steve Reed.

‘Shattering’ is the word for it. What is being shattered is politics as we knew it, the alignments that defined political life in this country for generations. The Hartlepool by-election and the English local elections – at least what we know of them so far – confirm that the relentless realignment of British politics will not be halted anytime soon. The mass working-class defection to the Conservative Party; the colonisation of Labour by middle-class graduates; the transformation of Labour from a party of working people into a metropolitan machine more concerned with gender-neutral toilets and taking the knee than with what working-class people want and need – anyone who thought these historic shifts and quakes would be reversed by having sensible, forensic Sir Keir Starmer at the helm of Labour has just received the rudest awakening imaginable.

What Labour centrists must now admit is that their party’s travails run far deeper than the Corbyn effect. Another thing that has been shattered is the much gabbed-out idea that once Labour jettisoned Jeremy and the cranky trustafarians and Fisher-Price Marxists who made up his support base, then it would go back back to being a normal party with a shot at power. In truth, while Corbyn’s time at the top was undoubtedly disastrous – the anti-Semitism, the swapping of class politics for identity politics, the Britain-bashing – something far more profound is driving the working-class revolt against Labour.

To the fore is the issue of Brexit. These election results look like a continuation of working-class voters’ rejection of the Brexit betrayers – most notably Labour – and their lining up behind the party that at least promised to Get Brexit Done: the Tories. It still blows my mind that the political class thought it could try to stitch up the largest democratic vote in UK history and there wouldn’t be severe, long-lasting consequences. This extraordinary naivety was on full display in Hartlepool, where arch-Remainer Keir Starmer stood arch-Remainer Paul Williams in a seat in which 70 per cent of people voted for Brexit. Do they think working-class voters are stupid? The answer, as we know, is yes, of course they do.

A key lesson of the local elections – as with the 2019 General Election – is that working-class people take their vote seriously. They do not take kindly to the elite’s bigoted efforts to undermine their right to vote. Many working-class voters look at Labour and see a party of over-educated operators and activists who shamelessly devoted much of the past five years to frustrating the vote for Brexit. This is why they revolted against Labour in 2019, and why they revolted yesterday too – because democracy is important to working-class voters. They don’t have newspaper columns or a seat in the Lords or thousands of Twitter followers or some other means to make their voices heard. They only have the right to vote. You mess with that right at your peril, as Starmer and Williams surely now know.

Another problem is Labour’s embrace of identitarianism and its shamefacedness about Britain. From Emily Thornberry’s haughty sneer at a working-class household that was flying the English flag to Starmer’s taking of the knee to the regressive politics of Black Lives Matter, from Corbynistas’ claim that British history is one horrendous crime after another to Labour politicians’ rage against the Sewell report for daring to suggest the UK is not actually a racist hellhole – working-class voters clock all of this. Not surprisingly they do not feel enthused by the ideology of national shame now promoted by many in Labour, or by the snotty suggestion that loads of Brits are racist. A cartoon in Private Eye captured it well – it featured a Labour candidate doorstepping two working-class voters and asking: ‘Why won’t you racist fascists vote Labour?’

Following this most recent working-class revolt against Labour, there has been a shrill, unseemly spat between Corbynistas and Starmerites over who is to blame for Labour’s troubles. The disingenuousness from both sides is staggering. The truth is that these two middle-class factions have far more in common than they would like to admit. Both backed a second referendum; both looked upon Brexit voters as a misled, idiotic mob; both are repelled by the social and cultural values of working-class communities; and both are convinced that Britain and most of its inhabitants – Them, not Us – are potty xenophobes. The revolt against Labour is more than a reckoning with Corbynism or Starmerism – it is a democratic confrontation between working-class communities and a political elite who they believe, quite rightly, views them with contempt, disdain and pity.

(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Dr. Rakib Ehsan says that wokeness is killing Labour:

Last night showed yet again that large swathes of the country are sick of being treated with patronising condescension by Labour politicians and student activists. Labour was crushed in the Hartlepool by-election and suffered ward losses in multiple northern regions, with Conservatives gaining control of Dudley, Nuneaton and Bedworth councils.

These areas, with their high numbers of traditional blue collar workers, are leading the charge against a woke agenda that has almost destroyed their traditional party. Working class voters are sending a clear message: they do not need a ‘political re-education’, and they reject the fundamentally warped interpretation of British society held by some of the most vocal Labour representatives.

They see that too many Labour politicians are in thrall to a toxic racialised politics, the extent of this became clear when Sir Keir Starmer ‘took the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter. The movement’s calls for the abolition of the police and a post-capitalist society reflect a crude identitarianism that carries no truck with the vast majority of Britons. Only one in ten of people in this country are in favour of reduced investment for local police forces.

Labour is also too comfortable with elements of the London elite that proudly vilify provincial voters who supported Brexit. It doesn’t help matters that Sir Keir Starmer was the chief architect of Labour’s second referendum policy – an exemplification of the metropolitan, anti-democratic tendencies which have taken hold of the party. It was, naturally, electorally disastrous.

It seems the primary distinguishing characteristic of the Labour Party days is unbridled, withering contempt for actual laborers. A party consisting of a woke urban elite pushing victimhood identity politics and condemning anyone that disagrees with them as “Little Englanders” will never enjoy the support of a majority of voters, no matter how many times that call Boris Johnson horrible, racist and xenophobic. Labour can continue to cling to the religion of wokeness, or they can be a competitive political party. They can’t do both. Until Labour realizes this, it’s just going to keep committing protracted, slow-motion suicide.

Speaking of which, I chuckled:

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Posted in Elections, Social Justice Warriors | 2 Comments »

Flu Manchu Wallops India

May 9th, 2021

India seems to be getting hit particularly badly by the Wuhan coronavirus right now, with over 400,000 new cases in 24 hours. The weird thing about India is that the peak curves differ from those of the U.S. American cases had their first peak mid-July, then fell off before rising again in the fall. India’s peaked in mid-September, fell off, were low all winter, and then started a precipitous rise that’s continued to today.

I don’t know what caused the differing curves, when other nations in the northern hemisphere seemed to experience infection curves mores like the U.S. The summer monsoon season, perhaps?

There’s an Indian coronavirus variant, but it’s unclear how widespread it is or whether it’s driving the surge.

Here’s a thread that suggests India’s pandemic is even worse than those numbers suggest:

I don’t know what is driving India’s sudden surge. They do seem to have a much lower vaccination rate than the U.S..

Here’s a piece from the Times of India talking about how Chinese scientists talked about weaponizing coronavirus back in 2015.

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Posted in Foreign Policy | No Comments »

Trump Red-Pilled Hispanics

May 8th, 2021

For almost as long as I’ve been following politics, Democratic Party analysts like Ruy Teixeira have been confidently predicting a new, permanent Democratic majority based on the the demographic trend of rising numbers of minority voters, which explains why Democrats are so committed to keeping the spigot of illegal aliens flowing into America, as they viewed each as an Undocumented Democrat to be legalized via amnesty.

Strangely enough, things always seem to get in the way of this “natural” Democratic Party majority. First the white working class started defecting, then came the 2010 and 2014 Democrat off-year election wipeouts. Now the good ship “Demographics Favor Democrat Destiny” has run aground on the rocky outcropping known as “Donald Trump.”

There’s still lots of enthusiasm for Trump among Hispanics in Florida:

The South Florida-based Patriotas con Trump, or Patriots with Trump, has held multiple rallies outside Mar-a-Lago, members send messages all day in their WhatsApp group, and a smaller group of 10 meet regularly to brainstorm ways to recruit more members — and help get Republicans elected in 2022. They’re also looking ahead to 2024.

“We are Republican, but what we really like is what Trump promotes,” Laureano Chileuitt, the group’s leader, said. A physician, Chileuitt practiced neurosurgery in his native Colombia until he came to the U.S. in 2001.

“That’s why we consider him our caudillo,” Chileuitt said, using the Spanish word for strongman. While the term has a negative connotation in the U.S., it doesn’t for Chileuitt. “It just means he’s ‘the leader,’ like Uribe,” he said, referring to Álvaro Uribe, the right-wing former president of Colombia. “We are anti-globalization and anti-communism.”

Fueling such enthusiasm is the polarizing politics in Latin America, more options in conservative Spanish-language media, the presence of the Trump family in Florida and a state governor that remains a close ally of the former president.

Today, many in Miami still speak about Trump as often as they did when he was president. Like Patriotas con Trump, many small grassroots groups that sprung up during the election period are still active.

“Trump has not lost much support in this community,” Eduardo Gamarra, a Florida International University political scientist, said after conducting a poll for a private client.

Trump and Republicans made substantial gains among these groups in the 2020 election. The biggest shift toward Republicans was among non-Cuban and non-Puerto Rican Latinos, and that’s where a lot of the enthusiasm is concentrated now.

Venezuela’s ongoing crisis, Nicaragua’s human rights situation, Argentina’s return to leftist populism, and Peru’s runoff elections, with a socialist leading in the polls, all influence Latinos here and sharpen their focus on Trump.

While few Latinos cite U.S. foreign policy when polled about voting preferences, Gamarra finds communities in Florida are being influenced by politics in their home countries.

Trump is viewed by his international supporters, especially in Latin America, as a key ally in the anti-Communist fight. And in a state where Latinos have a strong connection to family and friends back home, the nexus between Trump and supporters of the Latin American right is strengthening.

Likewise, Republicans made big inroads among Hispanics in Texas:

The Democrats and the left try to make people believe they will flip Texas. They make gains in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, but not in the place most think would vote Democrat.

Props to The New York Times for casting a spotlight on the Hispanic Republicans in south Texas, who took everyone by surprise in November.

You would think the political leaders along the Rio Grande belonged to the Democrat Party. I wouldn’t blame you if you assumed they identified more with the far-left.

Author Jennifer Medina wrote that when you enter the Hidalgo County Republican Party’s office you see a bulletin board with the local leaders, including Hilda Garza DeShazo, Mayra Flores, and Adrienne Pena-Garza:

Hispanic Republicans, especially women, have become something of political rock stars in South Texas after voters in the Rio Grande Valley shocked leaders in both parties in November by swinging sharply toward the G.O.P. Here in McAllen, one of the region’s largest cities, Mr. Trump received nearly double the number of votes he did four years earlier; in the Rio Grande Valley over all, President Biden won by just 15 percentage points, a steep slide from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016.

That conservative surge — and the liberal decline — has buoyed the Republican Party’s hopes about its ability to draw Hispanic voters into what has long been an overwhelmingly white political coalition and to challenge Democrats in heavily Latino regions across the country. Now party officials, including Mr. Abbott, the governor, have flocked to the Rio Grande Valley in a kind of pilgrimage, eager to meet the people who helped Republicans rapidly gain ground in a longtime Democratic stronghold.

Pena-Garza chairs the Hidalgo County Republican Party, but “grew up the daughter of a Democratic state legislator.”

Her father switched parties in 2010:

But after her father switched parties in 2010, Ms. Pena-Garza soon followed, arguing that Democrats had veered too far to the left, particularly on issues like abortion and gun control.

“Politics down here did scare me because you didn’t go against the grain,” she said. “If someone’s going to tell you: ‘Oh, you’re brown, you have to be Democrat,’ or ‘Oh, you’re female, you have to be a Democrat’ — well, who are you to tell me who I should vote for and who I shouldn’t?”

Ms. Pena-Garza said she was called a coconut — brown on the outside, white on the inside — and a self-hating Latino, labels that have begun to recede only in recent years as she meets more Hispanic Republicans who, like her, embrace policies that they view as helping small business owners and supporting their religious beliefs.

Pena-Garza declared, “You can’t shame me or bully me into voting for a party just because that’s the way it’s always been.”

Females seemed to bolster the move to the Republican Party:

Women who staunchly oppose abortion voted for the first time; wives of Border Patrol agents felt convinced the Trump administration was firmly on their side; mothers picked up on the enthusiasm for Republicans from friends they knew through church or their children’s school.

Trump was certainly the catalyst. But it’s not just about Trump:

Democrats, and maybe Republicans, would think the enthusiasm was only with former President Donald Trump. But evidence shows the people also consider local and Congressional elections just as important.

Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez almost defeated Texas’s 15th Congressional District incumbent Vicente Gonzalez in November. She only lost by three points:

“That was just what you do,” she said. She added that while she could not recall ever having voted for a Democrat for president, she had hesitated to voice her political views publicly, fearing that it could hurt her insurance business. “But I never understood the Democratic values or message being one for me,” she said. “And I am convinced that people here have conservative values. That is really who the majority is.”

During her last campaign, Ms. De La Cruz-Hernandez relied heavily on local efforts, drawing little attention from the national Republican Party in a race she lost by just three points. Now she is focusing early on building support from donors in Washington. Already, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has named Mr. Gonzalez a “Frontline” member, an indication that it views him as one of the most endangered House Democrats. And in March, the National Republican Congressional Committee put Mr. Gonzalez on its 2022 “Exit List” and began airing ads against him.

Hispanics are on average more religious than the average American, yet the hard-left victimhood identity politics leftwing ideologues currently steering the Democratic Party absolutely loath Christianity. Open borders are deeply unpopular with Hispanic Americans living along the border, and non-SJW Hispanics are heavily opposed to defunding the police. With a Democratic Party demonstrating new extremes in leftwing lunacy every day, is it any surprise that Hispanics are increasingly turning Republican?

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Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »

LinkSwarm for May 7, 2021

May 7th, 2021

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Biden economy kicks in, China behaves badly (again), and rock stars are fed up with woke. Let’s lead off with this weird photo people have been taking about all week:

Puppet people aside, what better image for the week in which Biden seems to be bringing stagflation back?

  • If you were wondering when the Trump boom would end and the Biden bust begin, it just did:

    U.S. job growth for the month of April fell far below what experts had predicted, as data reported Friday showed an increase of 266,000 jobs, versus an estimate of 1 million — the largest miss relative to expectations since at least 1998.

    Economists had suggested a positive outlook for the report, with the White House hoping for a gain of at least 700,000 jobs — making Joe Biden the first president ever to hit 2 million new jobs in his first 100 days. But expectations came crashing back to reality with data showing an overestimation of nearly 800,000 — the worst miss in decades.

    The U.S. unemployment rate rose slightly from 6.0 percent to 6.1. March’s payroll gains were also revised downward by nearly 150,000 jobs, from an initial print of 916,000 to 770,000. Labor force participation rate rose slightly, to 61.7 percent.

    Huh, irresponsible tax-and-spend policies, rampant inflation and paying people not to work evidently aren’t a recipe for economic success. Who knew?

  • Speaking of inflation, it looks like it’s back, baby! Rising metal, oil, and ag commodity prices all point to inflation. “Wood prices are at an all-time high at over $1,370 per 1,000 board feet.”
  • China pollutes more than the U.S. and all developing countries combined.
  • Speaking of China: Did Bill Gates dip his wang into Chinese spy Wang’s ‘tang??
  • Biden Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm owns stock in “Proterra, an electric vehicle company that is being actively promoted by the Biden administration. Further, Granholm being the Secretary of Energy means she gets to make regulations that can directly enrich herself.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Joe Biden lied about gun shows. Again.

    Joe Biden said today, “Most people don’t know: you walk into a store and you buy a gun, but you go to a gun show you can buy whatever you want and no background check.”

    This isn’t even close to being true. In fact, gun shows are subject to the same rules as apply everywhere else, which are that:

    1. commercial transfers require federal background checks, but that
    2. private transfers only require federal background checks if they are conducted within one of the thirteen states that superintend non-commercial firearms transactions

    There are no special rules for gun shows. The same set of laws applies to them as applies to, say, your kitchen table: If you are in the business of selling guns, you are federally obliged to run a check. If you are not, you are not — unless your state requires you to. That’s it. There’s no “loophole” here, and nothing about gun shows that separates them from the broader debate about private sales.

  • Lockdowns, riots and pushes to defund the police all lead up to cratering support for gun control among young people:

    A new poll from ABC and the Washington Post published on Wednesday found a significant drop in support for new gun-control laws, especially among young people.

    The number of Americans supporting enacting new gun laws over protecting gun rights fell from 57 percent to 50 percent, a seven-point drop from when the poll was last conducted in 2018. The number of Americans favoring gun rights jumped from 34 to 43 percent, a nine-point jump. The difference between the two positions narrowed by 16 points overall.

    The sharpest decline in support for new gun-control measures came among 18 to 29-year-olds and Hispanics. Both groups saw a 20 percent drop. Rural Americans and strong conservatives saw a 17-point drop.

  • Worker shortage is so acute that a Tampa MacDonald’s is paying people $50 just to interview for a job. “Some 17 million Americans remain on jobless benefits. Perhaps many of these people want jobs but are getting paid more to sit on the couch.”
  • Supply chains implode because there’s not enough shipping capacity to meet demand.
  • How Michael Dell used several financial maneuvers to turn $3.6 billion into more than $50 billion.
  • The Who’s frontman Roger Daltry says that the woke are ruining the world. “It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere.”
  • And Daltry wasn’t the only rock star calling BS on the woke. Also taking aim: punk rock icon John Lydon:

    Johnny Rotten blames ‘wokeness’ for US ‘collapse’

    Sex Pistols’ frontman Johnny Lydon had some rotten things to say about “wokeness.”

    In a recent profile with the Times UK, the aging punk rocker decried “cancel culture” and the activists who campaigned to tear down national monuments which they say promote historical racism. The statues include that of Winston Churchill, one of the UK’s most revered prime ministers.

    He also blamed academia as well as the media for giving “the space” to “tempestuous spoilt children.”…

    Addressing calls to tear down Churchill’s statue in London, Lydon dismissed criticism that the wartime prime minister was racist. However, critics point out that the leader once referred to Indians as “the beastliest people in the world next to Germans,” and thought that black people are “[not] as capable or as efficient as white people.”

    “This man saved Britain,” Lydon asserted. “Whatever he got up to in South Africa or India beforehand is utterly irrelevant to the major issue in hand.”

    If there are any bigger haters in history than today’s cancel culture, Lydon conceded, it’s the Nazis — and Churchill took care of that.

  • Florida “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones is a big fat liar. “NPR describes Jones as a ‘top scientist’ leading Florida’s pandemic response. In fact, Jones has held three jobs in her field; all three have ended in her being terminated and criminally charged.”
  • “Texas House Approves Election Integrity Bill After 17 Hours of Deliberation.” Good.
  • University of Tennessee offensive line coach fired for daring to make fun of Stacey Abrams. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Company Basecamp bans “wokeness” in the workplace. One third of employees quit. Sounds like a win-win to me. Get woke, go broke…
  • Charles C. W. Cooke channels Swift on teenage knife fighting:

    Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.

    Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.

    Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.

    It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.

    In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it. I learned a lot of lessons from my time in the ring: self-reliance, how to overcome fear, the importance of agility, the basics of military field dressing. And, given the turnover, I also learned how to make new friends.

  • Sad news (and possibly foul play). “University of Texas linebacker Jake Ehlinger, the younger brother of former Longhorns quarterback Sam Ehlinger, was found dead Thursday.”
  • Season 13 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is now fully funded.
  • Scott of Kentucky Ballistics continues to heal.
  • “There’s a lot of value to being the idiot.”
  • Heh:

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | 3 Comments »

    Texas House Passes “Urban Camping” Ban

    May 6th, 2021

    On top of Austin voters banning “Urban Camping” (i.e., garbage strewn tent cities of transient drug addicts), the State of Texas has also banned it:

    In a rebuke over a year in the making, the Texas House of Representatives gave initial approval to a statewide ban on homeless camping — aimed tacitly, if not directly, at the City of Austin’s near-two-year experiment in public camping.

    House Bill (HB) 1925 by Rep. Giovanni Capriglione (R-Southlake) passed on second reading by a vote of 85 to 56 on Wednesday. Eight Democratic members voted with Republicans in support of the bill. They were Reps. Rafael Anchía (D-Dallas), Ryan Guillen (D-Rio Grande City), Abel Herrero (D-Robstown), Tracy King (D-Uvalde), Eddie Lucio (D-Brownsville), Terry Meza (D-Irving), Richard Peña Raymond (D-Laredo), and John Turner (D-Dallas).

    Interesting that such a significant number of Hispanic Democrats back the ban.

    “I want to be clear,” Capriglione said while laying out his bill, “this bill does not criminalize homelessness.”

    Rep. Vikki Goodwin (D-Austin) stated in opposition, “I hate the homeless problem in Austin, but this bill does nothing to solve the root problem.”

    The legislation revokes grant funding for any city that violates its provision and tasks the attorney general with seeking injunctive relief against an offending city.

    Opponents objected — echoing the city council’s original justification for rescinding the ban in the first place — saying the policy would burden homeless individuals with fines they cannot pay.

    An amendment clarifying that recreational camping in public parks and beach access plan campsites are exempt was tacked onto the bill.

    However, some of the bill’s opposition was successful with tacking on amendments. One successful amendment was a requirement that officers notify the homeless individual about alternative housing, “if reasonable and appropriate” contact a government official or non-profit organization representative, and provide information on human trafficking.

    Others included allowing a homeless individual arrested to secure their personal property and a specific carve-out for camping on the property of a homeless shelter.

    Snip.

    HB 1925 must pass another House vote before moving to the other chamber. The bill was on the floor last week, but was recommitted to committee after a valid point of order was called.

    The equivalent Senate Bill, SB987, still hasn’t passed committee.

    No other Texas city has been as pigheadedly stupid as Austin in encouraging vast camps of drug-addicted transients, but with a statewide ban, hopefully no other Texas city will ever have to go through what Austin has the last two years.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 3 Comments »

    CRT Opponents Win School Board Seats

    May 5th, 2021

    Some good news amidst the gloom:

    Two candidates opposed to teaching critical race theory (CRT) in public school classes have been elected to a Texas school board.

    Nine months after Hannah Smith and Cameron “Cam” Bryan introduced a proposal to prevent teaching CRT in the Dallas-area Carroll Independent School District, the pair received nearly 70 percent of the vote in their respective races, winning two seats on the board.

    The election came after a 2018 video surfaced showing two students shouting the N-word. The district in response proposed a “Cultural Competency Action Plan,” drawing backlash from parents and the two candidates, who vocally criticized CRT.

    Some parents argued during school board meetings that the district’s proposal, which would require diversity and inclusion training, would create “diversity police” and discriminate against white children.

    Smith and Bryan won Saturday’s election in landslide, taking two open school board spots.

    “The voters have come together in record-breaking numbers to restore unity,” said Smith, a Southlake attorney and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

    “By a landslide vote, they don’t want racially divisive critical race theory taught to their children or forced on their teachers. Voters agreed with my positive vision of our community and its future.”

    This is good news for turning the tide, but we need parents like this on every school board in the country.

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    Posted in Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    Hollywood: “Turgid, Sanctimonious, Predictable, Joyless, and Boring.”

    May 4th, 2021

    Last week there were two events that I used to pay attention to that this year I ended up ignoring entirely: The Oscars and the NFL Draft. The NFL draft I ignored because of the league’s “getting woke” (though the fact the Texans have been sucking hard makes the decision much easier). The Oscars I have ignored for similar wokeness reasons, plus general disinterest, for a long time, even before the weirdness of 2020.

    It seems that I’m not alone, since Oscar ratings were a disaster:

    Everyone knew this was coming, given how pathetic the ratings were for the Golden Globes and the Grammys, but even so, the viewership numbers are a shocking disaster for the Academy Awards broadcast. After last year’s rock-bottom viewership hit 23.6 million and the top award went to a Korean film, Parasite, the average person hadn’t even heard of, this year’s Oscars went full woke. You never go full woke . . .

    Ratings crashed 58 percent off last year’s abysmal viewership, down to 9.85 million Americans. Let that sink in: In a nation of 330 million, not even ten million Americans watched the Oscars. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ strategy of embracing diversity as a supposed means to bring in younger viewers has proven a complete failure: Ratings were down even more for young adults. In the 18–49 demographic, ratings crashed 64 percent. The star power is gone. The glamour is gone. The public interest is gone.

    The Oscars always had problems but in the last decade they’ve become turgid, sanctimonious, predictable, joyless, and boring, not to mention bitter and negative about the country that has created so much splendor and wealth for the lucky few who get to appear onstage at the ceremony. Every year, its top honor goes to a cinematic op-ed destined in most cases to be quickly forgotten rather than an enduring and meaningful piece of entertainment.

    The Academy needs to completely rethink the direction it is going in if it wants to salvage any viewership or cultural relevance whatsoever. Like many other institutions, it has mistaken Twitter mobs for the voice of the people and allowed itself to be guided by the former at the expense of heeding the latter.

    “Turgid, sanctimonious, predictable, joyless, and boring.” There’s ad headline to put in Variety!

    Here’s the video from The Critical Drinker that makes the same points with a bit more pungency, while also noting that many of those working in Hollywood are are absolutely horrible people who have no business lecturing the rest of the country about anything, with a side order of Sullivan’s Travels:

    “Unwelcome political diarrhea” sums it up nicely…

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, video | 11 Comments »

    When Boomstick Booms Wrong

    May 3rd, 2021

    Today I’m doing something I don’t think I’ve ever done before: Take a video I’ve already linked from a LinkSwarm and put it up here, because there are a lot of important lessons to learn.

    You should watch all of this:

    On April 9, Scott Allen DeShields, Jr. of Kentucky Ballistics was shooting old SLAP rounds through his single-shot Serbu RN 50 when a hot round burst the chamber, shearing the threads off his locking cap and sending pieces of metal flying back at him. Damage included a lacerated jugular, in-tubing a collapsed lung without anesthetic, orbital bone repair and 5 pints of blood.

    Him surviving was a combination of being very lucky, having a father with law enforcement training right there to help slow the bleed, and doing exactly the right things to get him alive and conscious to treatment (the ambulance met them halfway, and then had him life-flighted to Vanderbilt Hospital).

    Here, Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons discusses the accident, what went wrong (and right) in the aftermath of the Kentucky Ballistics malfunction, and covers in-battery and out-of-battery failure modes for various firearms.

    He has some very good advice that goes beyond basic firearms safety. One of the most important is: If something seems “off,” stop and try and figure out what it. The life you save could be your own…

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    Posted in Guns, video | 6 Comments »

    Austin Voters Reject Bumsville

    May 2nd, 2021

    You expect Austin voters to embrace crazy leftwing policies, but turning every grassy median and underpass in the city into a garbage-strewn 24/7 amusement park for drug-addicted transients (with side order of arson and mayhem) was too much even for them, and yesterday they reinstated the camping ban. Proposition B passed 85,830 (57.13%) to 64,409 (42.87%). It’s a grave blow to Austin Mayor Steve Adler, City Councilman Greg Casar, the homeless industrial complex, and a number of random drug dealers.

    Other May 1st Voting results:

  • Proposition F, which would turn Austin in a “strong mayor” form of government (i.e., let Adler control spending more directly instead of a City Manager) was overwhelmingly defeated, 126,847 (85.91%) to 20,810 (14.09%).
  • Proposition G (adding another city council district) was defeated more narrowly, 83,092 (56.58%) to 62,702 (43.42%).
  • Proposition H, to give every voter two $25 vouchers to contribute to political campaigns (i.e., another way to pass taxpayer money to leftwing politicians) was defeated 83,092 to 63,809.
  • All the other propositions passed, including Proposition E (ranked choice voting), which is illegal under Texas law.
  • In the special election for the U.S. 6th Congressional District, Republicans Susan Wright and Jake Ellzey head to a runoff, guaranteeing that the seat will stay in Republican hands. Carpetbagger Dan Rodimer finished with a dismal 2,086 votes, or 2.66% of the total, good for 10th place.

    • Some Twitter reactions:

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Texas | 3 Comments »

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