“This is an Ex-EarthQuest!”

January 15th, 2015

For those not up to speed on the EarthQuest saga, it was an attempt to build an “ecological theme park” northeast of Houston in Montgomery County. The fact that it was going to be built with a large dollop of taxpayer money via a special taxing district only enhanced the stench of Eu de Boondoggle EarthQuest gave off, as grandiose plans gave way to missed construction and funding dates, at least one bankruptcy filing and a complete halt to visible activity. It’s essentially been moribund since 2012.

Now from dedicated EarthQuest watcher Sopboxmom comes news that the IRS has revoked Institute EarthQuest’s tax-exempt status:

Exempt Organizations Select Check
Automatic Revocation of Exemption Information

The federal tax exemption of this organization was automatically revoked for its failure to file a Form 990-series return or notice for three consecutive years. The information listed below for each organization is historical; it is current as of the organization’s effective date of automatic revocation. The information is not necessarily current as of today’s date. Nor does this automatic revocation necessarily reflect the organization’s tax-exempt or non-exempt status. The organization may have applied to the IRS for recognition of exemption and been recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt after its effective date of automatic revocation. To check whether an organization is currently recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt, call Customer Account Services at (877) 829-5500 (toll-free number).
Revocation Date (effective date on which organization’s tax exemption was automatically revoked):
15-May-2014
Employer Identification Number (EIN):
26-2454184
Legal Name:
INSTITUTE EARTHQUEST
Doing Business As:
Mailing Address:
21575 US HIGHWAY 59 NORTH
NEW CANEY, TX 77357-8355
United States
Exemption Type:
501(c)(3)
Revocation Posting Date (date on which IRS posted notice of automatic revocation on IRS.gov):
15-Oct-2014
Exemption Reinstatement Date (effective date of tax exemption, determined by the IRS
after the organization’s exemption was automatically revoked and the organization applied for reinstatement of exemption.):

Finally, despite their zombie website, EarthQuest has ceased to be, and even nailing it back on the perch wouldn’t help.

More information here.

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Posted in Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

Operation Choke Point’s Smoking Gun?

January 15th, 2015

Via Instapundit comes updated news of Operation Choke Point, the Obama Administration’s unconstitutional attempt to force the banks and credit unions used by gun dealers (and other targeted businesses, most of which are entirely legal) to close their accounts. Bank regulator’s have denied they were doing this in the past, but now a gun business owner has recorded a credit union manager telling him the Feds have forced them to close his account.

Here’s a Fox News report on the case:

Imagine the media outcry if a Republican administration were using the same tactics against abortion clinics or gay bars.

The new congress should investigate this along with Fast and Furious…

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Posted in Guns, Obama Scandals, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Straus Re-Elected Speaker. And It Wasn’t Close.

January 14th, 2015

Sadly, my previous analysis was right on the money. Straus maintained his hold on the Texas Speaker’s chair by a 127-19 margin over Scott Turner. For all the numerous Tea Party endorsements of House candidates (indeed, the North Texas Tea Party said that a vote for Straus for Speaker would preclude their endorsement), it seems that only a tiny minority of Tea Party-endorsed candidates are interested in challenging Straus’ iron grip.

I would be most interested in hearing behind-the-scenes information on how Straus has managed to continue to procure the votes of so many conservative Republicans despite widespread grassroots opposition to Straus’ Speakership…

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Posted in Republicans, Texas | No Comments »

Still More Charlie Hebdo Fallout

January 14th, 2015

Will the Charlie Hebdo killings be a turning point in how Europe deals with Jihadism? Color me skeptical, as Europe’s elites seem to have an infinite capacity to keep hitting the snooze button, and left-wing political parties need Muslim votes too badly to speaking honestly about jihad. But for now the furor over Charlie Hebdo killings refuses to die down:

  • Who do you think some Muslims blamed for the Charlie Hebdo attack? Go ahead, guess.
  • Obama’s Harriet Miers.
  • A rundown of which media outlets are and aren’t brave enough to publish the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons.
  • Obama didn’t attend the Paris rally because he didn’t want to be there. “If George Clooney can draw Hollywood applause for saying ‘we will not walk in fear’ of terrorists, he must realize that standing up to them means more than ‘Je Suis Charlie’ lapel pins. It means militarily defeating them on a global scale. That concept is kryptonite to President Obama, which is why he will never attend a rally that could remotely lead to that conclusion.”
  • Indeed, the Obama Administration admits it will push media outlets to supress anti-jihad articles. (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)
  • Rotterdam’s Moroccan-born Mayor on Muslims who do not appreciate western freedoms: “Fuck off.”
  • The American Freedom Defense Initiative will protest the Charlie Hebdo killings outside an “Islamophobia” conference in Garland, Texas on Saturday.
  • The supercut of media outlets slamming Obama for not attending the Paris march:

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    Posted in Jihad, Media Watch, video | No Comments »

    Blogroll Addition: Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage

    January 13th, 2015

    Today’s blogroll addition is Will Shetterly’s Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage blog (or SJWar for short).

    Will is fellow science fiction writer, and not only is he a leftist, he’s an actual socialist. But he’s done a fine job documenting and opposing the ant-free-speech agenda of the SJW set, especially in the realm of science fiction.

    I kept meaning to add SJWar to the blogroll for a while, but every time I was about to, Will would go “That’s it, I quit, blog’s over!” only to start it up again a few days later to document the latest SJW offense logic or the principles of a free society. Here’s a bon mot on the Charlie Hebdo killings today: “Saying the speech of someone who was murdered went too far is like saying the clothes of a rape victim were too provocative.”

    I’ve created a new Victimhood Identity Politics category to list SJWar under, and have moved The Other McCain (which has featured R. S. McCain’s masterful dissections of core feminist texts and dogmas for quite a while) there as well.

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »

    Annie’s List of Fail

    January 12th, 2015

    Via PushJunction comes word that Amber Mostyn (wife of rich trial lawyer Steve Mostyn) is stepping down as chair of Annie’s List. What’s Annie’s List, you ask? Essentially an attempt to do Emily’s List for Texas, i.e. elect liberal female Democrats to office.

    So how did Annie’s List do in 2014? By one measure they were quite successful: They raised 18th largest amount of money of any statewide political entity in 2014, raising $1,422,009.16 and spending $1,601,945.83.

    But by another, more important measure, namely winning elections…not so hot. Let’s look at the results for the candidates they endorsed

  • Wendy Davis – Candidate for Governor: Lost to Greg Abbott 2,790,227 votes (59.3%) to 1,832,254 votes (38.9%).
  • Leticia Van de Putte – Candidate for Lieutenant Governor: Lost to Dan Patrick 2,718,406 votes (58.1%), to 1,810,720 votes (38.7%).
  • Libby Willis – Candidate for Senate District 10 (Wendy Davis’s old seat): Lost to Konni Burton, 95,484 votes (52.8%) to 80,806 votes (44.7%).
  • Susan Criss – Candidate for House District 23 (Galveston Island, La Marque and Texas City): Lost to Wayne Faircloth 17,702 votes (54.6%) to 14,716 votes (45.4%).
  • Kim Gonzalez – Candidate for House District 43 (San Patricio, Jim Wells, Kleberg and Bee Counties): Lost to Jose Manuel Lozano 17,273 votes (61.4%) to 10,847 votes (38.6%).
  • Susan Motley – Candidate for House District 105 (Irving and Grand Prairie): Lost to Rodney Anderson 13,587 votes (55.4%) to 10,469 votes (42.7%).
  • Carol Donovan – Candidate for House District 107 (Dallas, Garland and Mesquite): Lost to Kenneth Sheets 16,879 votes (55%) to 13,803 votes (45%).
  • Leigh Bailey – Candidate for House District 108 (Dan Branch’s old district): Lost to Morgan Meyer, 24,953 votes (60.7%) to 16,170 votes (39.3%).
  • Celia Israel – Candidate for House District 50 (Austin, Pflugerville and Wells Branch): The lone bright spot among their endorsed candidates, she Won, beating Mike VanDeWalle 22,651 votes (58.7%) to 14,339 votes (37.1%). This is the district Democratic incumbent Mark Strama left to run Google Fiber Austin.

    • So Annie’s List racked up a winning percentage of .111 for the races they publicly supported, which is pretty far below the Mendoza Line, and their lone win came for a seat Democrats already held. Going through Annie’s List campaign reports for 2013-2014 (more about which anon) shows two other campaigns they backed at some point in the cycle:

  • Incumbent Mary Ann Perez’s campaign to retain House District 144 (Southeast suburban Houston area near the chip channel). She Lost to Gilbert Pena, 6,009 votes (50.7%) to 5,854 votes (49.3%). Maybe because it wasn’t a “new” endorsement, they didn’t do as much for Perez, but at just over 150 vote difference between the two candidates, this is one of the few races where additional support could have made a difference.
  • Incumbent Toni Rose’s successful attempt to win the Democratic Primary for House District 110, a 90% black southeast Dallas district that drew no Republican candidate in the 2014 general election.

    • One wonders how long Annie’s pale, middle-aged, female leadership can keep raising money with such poor results.

    For the sake of completeness, and providing a “one stop shop” for information about Annie’s List, here’s their official filing information via the Texas State Ethics Commission:

    POLITICAL COMMITTEE INFORMATION
    Annie’s List
    Account: 00053715
    Committee Type: General Purpose
    Files Reports: Semi-Annually
    8146-A Ceberry Drive
    Austin, TX 78759

    TREASURER INFORMATION
    Pinnelli, Janis W.
    P.O. Box 50038
    Austin, TX 78763
    (512) 478-4487

    And here are their electronic filings covering the 2013 to 2014 fundraising period:

  • October 27th, 2014
  • October 6th, 2014
  • July 15th, 2014 (semiannual)
  • May 19th, 2014 (runoff report; see how many times “The Mostyn Law Firm” appears in that list…)
  • February 25th, 2014 (very brief)
  • February 3rd, 2014
  • January 15th, 2014 (corrected semiannual report; uncorrected version omitted)
  • July 15th, 2013 (semiannual; another report where “The Mostyn Law Firm” makes many an appearance)
  • January 15th, 2013

    • Beyond Mostyn and Lisa Blue Baron, some of the names who gave significant amounts to Annie’s List include Obama bundler Naomi Aberly, Lee and Amy Fikes, and Serena Connelly, the daughter of late billionaire businessman Harold Simmons. So your usual batch of rich left-wing pro-abortion feminists. Fortunately for Texas, the state’s voters seem actively hostile to precisely the message they seek to push…

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, Texas | No Comments »

    More Charlie Hebdo Fallout

    January 10th, 2015

    So the Charlie Hebdo killers are dead, but the manhunt for a female accomplice implicated in the deaths of four people during the siege of a Kosher food store in Paris continues. Here are various reactions and pieces on the Charlie Hebdo attack:

  • Good news! Despite the many deaths, Charlie Hebdo is putting together their next issue. “It must come out next Wednesday, with 1 million copies to be printed, about 20 times their usual circulation.”

    A journalist explains that a crowdfunding campaign, spontaneously created on the Internet by strangers, has already collected 98,000 euros in less than 24 hours. Charlie’s survivors are inundated with subscription requests that they can’t handle at the moment. Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer, Richard Malka, speaks. “There’s money arriving from everywhere. Assistance, space, personnel to deal with requests …” “We have received support from lots of media sources,” echoes Christophe Thévenet, another lawyer for the newspaper. “There are donations, already 250,000 euros from the Press and Pluralism Association, the million euros pledged by Fleur Pellerin [the French Minister of Culture and Communication]. … You are going to have finances like never before at Charlie!”

  • “One of the spontaneous social-media reactions to the Charlie Hebdo massacre today was the Twitter hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (“I am Charlie”). It’s an admirable sentiment, resonant with the classic post-9/11 Le Monde cover ‘Nous sommes tous Americains.’ It’s also totally inaccurate.”

    So no, we’re all not Charlie—few of us are that good, and none of us are that brave. If more of us were brave, and refused to yield to the bomber’s veto, and maybe reacted to these eternally recurring moments not by, say, deleting all your previously published Muhammad images, as the Associated Press is reportedly doing today, but rather by routinely posting newsworthy images in service both to readers and the commitment to a diverse and diffuse marketplace of speech, then just maybe Charlie Hebdo wouldn’t have stuck out so much like a sore thumb. It’s harder, and ultimately less rewarding to the fanatical mind, to hit a thousand small targets than one large one.

  • Mark Steyn elaborates on the theme in “#JeSuisCharlie – But You’re Not.”

    The French establishment is co-opting these brave men’s deaths for their own purposes, and for the most part the world’s media are helping them get away with it. I spent much of Thursday on TV and radio, and my irritation with the dismal #JeSuisCharlie campaign increased as the day wore on. The self-flattering evasiveness of all those cartoonists around the world offering lame variations of “the pen is mightier than the sword” was especially feeble.

    Steyn also offers this sad, telling point:

    I can’t claim to have known Georges Wolinski, the 80-year-old cartoonist among the dead on Wednesday, but I met him briefly, a few years ago. Via Laura Rosen Cohen, I learn of the strange, circular journey of his life and death. His father was a Polish Jew who fled to Tunisia to lead a life free of pogroms. Georges was born there in 1934. Two years later, his dad was murdered, and the family moved again, this time to France.

    And on Wednesday, like his father, the son was killed.

    Wolinski père fled Jew-hate in Europe to be murdered in the Muslim world.

    Wolinski fils fled Jew-hate in the Muslim world to be murdered in Europe, by Muslims.

  • Anyone who really wants to say “I Am Charlie” should participate in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.
  • Richard Littlejohn expounds on how Social Justice Warriors and Victimhood Identity Politics help enable radical Islam:

    however. When it comes to appeasing militant Islam, my own trade is equally culpable.

    So is the entire apparatus of the State. We pussy-foot around anything which may cause offence to Muslims, partly out of good manners but primarily because we are worried about the potential backlash.

    The reason most of the media in the Western world steered clear of republishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed wasn’t because they were not newsworthy but because of fears that men in balaclavas with machine-guns might march into the front office and start firing at random.

    Snip.

    Islam is just one of the New Establishment’s favoured client groups. Exciting ‘hate crime’ laws have been invented to grant them special privileges and punish their critics.

    So mad mullahs in Midlands madrassas can call for homosexuals to be stoned to death. But a Christian preacher who objects to gay marriage can expect to be arrested and given a criminal record.

    We have also created a ‘victim’ culture, which allows minority groups to justify any kind of bad behaviour on the grounds that they are being oppressed.

    You didn’t have to look far yesterday to find allegedly ‘respected’ voices prepared to blame the staff of Charlie Hebdo for bringing the wrath of the Islamists down on themselves. They shouldn’t have been so ‘provocative’.

  • “The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.”
  • A couple of years old, but quite relevant:

    (Hat tip: The Jawa Report.)

  • Some tweets:

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch | No Comments »

    Bill Maher on the Charlie Hebdo Killings

    January 9th, 2015

    Bill Maher once again states the obvious to those unwilling to listen, harkening back to the days when liberals believed in free speech rather than labeling it “hate crimes.”

    A few quotes:

  • “In 10 Muslim countries, you can get the death penalty just for being gay. They chop heads off in the square in Mecca. Mecca is their Vatican City. If they were chopping the heads off of Catholic gay people, wouldn’t there be a bigger outcry among liberals?”
  • “There are certain people in the world who want waivers on free speech.”
  • “Hundreds of millions of [Muslims] applaud an attack like this.”

    • The second half of the interview is Maher on the Bill Cosby accusations. But at least watch the first six minutes.

    (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Jihad, Media Watch, video | No Comments »

    2,000 Dead in Boko Haram Assault on Africa?

    January 8th, 2015

    “Boko Haram fighters burnt down almost the entire town on Wednesday, after over-running a military base on Saturday, Musa Alhaji Bukar said.

    “Bodies lay strewn on Baga’s streets, amid fears that some 2,000 people had been killed in the raids, he added.”

    Let’s hope those numbers are exaggerated, as early reports frequently are.

    Also remember that the full name of Boko Haram is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (People Committed to the Prophet’s Teachings for Propagation and Jihad). Perhaps we could take up a collection for one of the learned members of our ruling class to fly over and explain to them how they’re not actually Islamic…

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)

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

    Problem: That “Tiny Minority” Of Muslim Extremists Isn’t

    January 8th, 2015

    In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, the MSM has trotted out the usual talking points that such extremists views and actions are “not about Islam” and represent “only a tiny percentage” of all Muslims.

    There’s just one tiny problem with this theory: It isn’t true.

    Polls show that something like 20% of Muslim populations worldwide agree with terrorists, and far more agree with their aims as far as the imposition of Sharia law. Other findings from Pew (which is rarely accused of a right-wing bias):

  • Muslim support for stoning as a punishment for adultery is more than 20% in all countries surveyed.
  • Support for the death penalty for apostasy ranges from 4% of Muslims in Kazakhstan to 86% in Egypt.
  • Fully 99% of Afghan Muslims want Sharia law, which makes it hard to regard our long-term intervention there as anything but a failure.

    • In the UK, in another poll from 2006, 20% of surveyed Muslims supported the 2005 7/7 suicide attacks, and 40% supported the imposition of Sharia law.

    So: Not a “small minority.” And, as Brigitte Gabriel notes in the video below, so what if “most” Muslims are peaceful? The “mostly peaceful” citizens of Germany, Japan, China and the Soviet Union didn’t prevent those who controlled their governments from murdering millions:

    One of the first steps toward dealing with the problem of radical Islam is to stop repeating comforting lies about it.

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    Posted in Jihad, Media Watch, video | No Comments »

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