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.
Early Voting in Texas Starts Today
October 22nd, 2012BattleSwarm Blog Endorses Ted Cruz For United States Senator
October 21st, 2012Lawrence 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.
Refuting Derek Thompson (or, Newsweek’s Self-Inflicted Wounds)
October 19th, 2012Over 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.)
Romney Slays at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner
October 18th, 2012Mitt 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.)
Newsweek To Start Pining for the Fjords
October 18th, 2012Today 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.
Quick Texas Senate Race Q3 Fundraising Update
October 17th, 2012Barring any catastrophic event, Ted Cruz is going to be the next Senator from Texas, but the campaign keeps on chugging along. The official fundraising forms from the FEC aren’t up yet, but the two campaigns have announced the totals raised.
Ted Cruz raised $3.5 million in Q3, $2 million of it after the runoff.
I can’t find any mention of Paul Sadler’s fundraising numbers on his press release page, but according to the Houston Chronicle, Sadler raised “about $358,734” in Q3. In truth, that’s a bit more than I expected him to raise, given that he has about as much hope of being elected Senator than the Cleveland Browns do of winning the 2013 Superbowl.
Oh, and just for the record: Losing Democratic Senate runoff candidate Grady Yarbrough did finally file his FEC report.
Assault Weapons Vital Topic Among America’s 23 Million Unemployed
October 17th, 2012Hempstead, N.Y.: All across the country, millions of unemployed Americans expressed relief and gratitude that Obama finally addressed their most important issue at last night’s Presidential debate: assault weapons.
“I’m glad Obama is finally tackling assault weapons,” said Barbara Rheems, taking a brief pause from brushing her teeth in the 1998 Honda Civic that has been her home for the last three years. “I think that’s the greatest concern facing our country.”
“Thank God Nina Gonzales had the courage to ask about assault weapons,” said Richard Smith, an unemployed construction worker, speaking from the cot in his mother’s basement. “I can’t think of a single more pressing issue.”
“Assault weapons terrify me,” said mother Gladys Castle, who was busy preparing an “Obama soup” made from pilfered ketchup packets for her three hungry children. “I’m afraid that at any moment they might burst out of closets and gun safes and start shooting people.”
“Well it’s about time someone dealt with America’s biggest challenge, which is reinstating the Clinton-era assault weapons ban,” said Tom Feller, who spoke to us from behind his homemade cardboard WILL WORK ANY JOB/HAVE CHILDREN TO FEED/GOD BLESS sign. “The fact is that Americans just don’t need a weapon that has any two of a folding stock, a pistol grip, a bayonet mount, or a flash suppressor, and it’s high time we moved to disarm ordinary Americans citizens who purchased such weapons in a completely lawful manner.”
A CNN poll of America’s unemployed showed that assault weapons were far and away the most pressing issue this election, with 78% citing them as their biggest concern, while those who said that their top issue was forcing Catholics to pay for contraception were a distant second at 19%.
“You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.”
October 16th, 2012I didn’t even know Twitter had a daily limit for sending tweets, but evidently I exceeded it livetweeting the Presidential debate. Fortunately that didn’t kick in until the very end.
Anyway, if you follow me on Twitter, you might send out a note to that effect, just in case people wonder where I went…
I Will Be Live-Tweeting Tonight’s Presidential Debate
October 16th, 2012Attention the Internets: I will be live-tweeting tonight’s debate between Romney and Obama. Tune in or follow me if you are so inclined.
LinkSwarm for October 15, 2012
October 15th, 2012Doing a bunch of stuff, so here’s a more-or-less random linkSwarm: