After Rick Perry’s disastrous fall campaign, I floated the idea that he was still hopped up on goofballs (i.e, taking serious pain medication) following his back operation.
Well now comes word that there’s at least some supporting evidence in the form of Inside the Circus, a book on the 2012 Republican Presidential race. Caveat the first: The Perry camp is hotly denying it. Caveat the second: One of the co-authors is Evan “Obama is a sort of God” Thomas. Caveat the third: The last third of the Chron piece is given over to to professional Perry-hater James Moore to do his usual bashing. Caveat the fourth: The excerpted bit the Chron uses is actually pretty weak sauce unless there are more like it in the book.
Still, the theory nicely explains why Perry, who has been a sharp and relentless campaigner in his state races, floundered so badly at the national level. Indeed, it explains it so neatly that I wonder why the Perry campaign is so insistent in denying it, since it’s much more flattering to him than the liberal “Perry blew it at the national level because he’s a moron that just happened to have kicked our asses repeatedly for the last decade” theory.
On the other hand, maybe they deny it so insistently because it’s not true, no matter how convenient an explanation. And bloggers (myself included) should always be somewhat suspicious of a story that fits our preconceptions a little too neatly…
The word, in this case, is “moderate,” which seems to be particularly tricky to define. Especially when it comes to Middle Eastern political parties. Since you can support Hamas and promise to wipe Israel off the map and still be considered “moderate”…
I don’t usually link to long audio snippets like this one. But this 19 minutes interview of Richard Epstein is so chock-full of concise and articulate reasons why ObamaCare is unconstitutional that I recommend anyone interested in the subject listen to it in its entirety.
Evidently you have to suck as bad as Keith Olbermann. He went from CNN to MSNBC to Current TV (whose audience ratings clock in slightly higher than a rounding error), where he was just fired and replaced with Client 9. To continue the pattern of moving to ever-smaller markets, I guess he’ll next have to host the SUNY Stony Brook Revolutionary Hour of Power on cable access.
I don’t usually spend my time and attention attacking the likes of Olbermann, Bill Maher, Paul Krugman, etc., simply because doing so takes time and attention that could be used describing the many failures of the Obama agenda, and the incompetence, corruption, and cronyism of both the Obama Administration and Democratic officeholders in general. But sometimes your shotgun is in the shop, and you need to restock the barrel with pike…
So Keith Olbermann is out of a job. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh’s ratings are up by as much as 60%. So how’s that war against conservative media working out for you, liberals?
Why ObamaCare can’t work: “It is a perverse but very real fact of life that the more complex and rich the system to be regulated, the less the ‘experts’ and the goo-goos have the political power to impose their vision on the regulatory process. The more carefully crafted a law needs to be, the more it is going to be full of lobby lollipops and sweat heart deals. A legislative body trying to write a health care law for a country like ours is like a neurosurgeon operating, drunk, with one hand holding a chainsaw and the other in a boxing glove.”
Paul Ryan endorses Mitt Romney. That’s a great pickup for him, and it eases, ever so slightly, my concerns that Romney will be a “big spending Republican” in the mode of Bush43 should he get elected.
Dwight notes a Hezbollah connection to the story of a chain of Austin bars that weren’t paying their employees what they were owed.
So a Hispanic Democrat shoots someone who might or might not have been assaulting him, and suddenly Texas Democrats are ready to drag gun control back on the agenda. Thanks Rep. Garnet Coleman (Democrat, Houston)! I was a little worried that gun owners might be not be motivated to go to the polls in Texas in 2012 (what with the House, Senate, and Governor’s mansion all under Republican control), but your proposal to end the castle doctrine is just the tonic we need to get them to the voting booth!
The King Street Patriots in Houston have a Democratic Judge rule against their tax-exempt status in a lawsuit brought by the Democratic Party. I wanted to point out the frivolous nature of this lawsuit, but Big Jolly already beat me to it.
Ted Cruz won the endorsement of Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, which is a terrific pickup for him. He joins Jim DeMint and Rand Paul among sitting conservative Republican senators who have endorsed Cruz.
Rice University political scientist Mark P. Jones says that David Dewhurst is a moderate by Republican standards: “Frequently used his powers of agenda control to help pass legislation opposed by the most conservative members of the Republican delegation. In addition, the best estimate of Dewhurst’s location along the liberal-conservative continuum which dominates voting in the Texas Senate suggests he is significantly less conservative than approximately one-third of the Republican delegation, particularly conservative outliers Brian Birdwell of Granbury and Dan Patrick of Houston….for Republicans located in the party’s centrist and moderate conservative wings, Dewhurst is likely to be ‘just right.'” It’s an interesting statistical analysis, and conforms to my own opinion of Dewhurst: Not a RINO, but not a true movement conservative, either.
The Dewhurst campaign is being more than a bit silly (again) in trying to link Cruz to George Soros because some of the other 1,300 lawyers at the same international law firm have done work for Soros. I’ve already debunked this. It’s actually fairly embarrassing that they’re still trying to make this argument.
Buzzfeed has edited together all of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s worst moments:
Reason‘s analyst also said the Obama Administration had a bad day:
They also try to break down the issues of ObamaCare into terms so simple even Dahlia Lithwick can understand it.
Rand Simberg smells cocooning on the part of liberals. Also, one commenter offers an interesting theory: “I’m betting that at least the conservative Justices (including Kennedy, for argument’s sake) were unhappy with Kagan for not recusing herself. I mean, it was a slam-dunk that she should have and they know it.”
And just to twist the knife a little more, here’s Rush Limbaugh: “The idea that liberal elites are smarter and run rings around other people intellectually was exposed as an abject fraud this week.”
After much back and forth with his campaign trying to find a date, I was finally able to interview Texas Senate candidate Craig James on March 21 at the Rudy’s on South 360 here in Austin. This was, alas, not an ideal atmosphere for an interview (it got better when one of his staffers asked Rudy’s to turn off their piped in music for the area, which is something I should have thought of asking for), and the first part of the interview makes it hard to hear. After the first question, I stopped the camera and moved it closer to James so you can hear his answers, so the audio gets much better about 1:35 in, though I seem to have cut off the top of his head in the process. So let me apologize in advance for the less-than-sterling sound and video quality for various parts of the interview, but the vast majority of the interview is intelligible. I filmed this with my Mino Flip camera and did a light edit in iMovie, so the crappiness is 100% my fault (or that of the environment it was filmed in).
Thoughts:
James is a very confident, well-spoken and personable speaker with a lot of natural charisma. He seems to get the big picture of the conservative agenda (a constitutionally limited government, and a commitment to free markets) and obviously comes from a social conservative background.
I like that he would eliminate the Department of Education, but it’s a bit hard to square with his emphasis on vocational training in the second part of the answer. It’s not that I disagree that it’s a good idea, it’s just that after the elimination of the Department of Education, I don’t see any viable (or proper) role for such fine-grained educational policy control at the federal level.
I’m not particularly interested in the Texas Tech question that starts part 2, but since it’s the most famous controversy he’s been involved in, the interview would have felt incomplete without it.
There are a couple of interesting admissions I give him credit for: admitting that Texans for a Better Tomorrow was created as a vehicle for him to explore a role in politics, and admitting that he would root for the New England Patriots (for whom he played in the NFL) were they to meet the Cowboys in the Superbowl, a brave position that’s obviously not pandering to his constituents.
I didn’t like the vagueness of his positions beyond a few policy specifics, and the fact he tried to straddle both sides of some issues (such as PIPA/SOPA in the second half of the interview). Both Ted Cruz and Tom Leppert were occasionally vague on some points, but James is already sounding awfully vague for someone who hasn’t ever held elective office.
The low-point of the interview (about 3:15 into the second part) was finding out that James has never heard of the Posse Comitatus Act. This is not an obscure statute, it’s one of the fundamental laws governing the limitations of using federal troops. I would expect not only anyone with an interest in politics to at least have heard of the Posse Comitatus act, I would actually expect the same of anyone with a basic college education.
I’d like to thank Craig James for taking time out of his busy schedule to speak with me, and his staff for their assistance in setting up the interview.
Now I’ve interviewed all the major Republican Senate candidates but David Dewhurst. If his campaign would get in touch with me to set a convenient date in the next few weeks, I’d like to correct that oversight…
Texas wins another skirmish in the war the EPA is waging against the state’s prosperity, this one over “minor pollutants.” The EPA was suppose to file any objection to the state’s plans within 18 months, but instead, displaying the lightning speed the federal government is known for, they waited four and a half years to object. The actual 6th court ruling is here.
As far as I can tell, this doesn’t affect the Cross-Border Rules (i.e., the one EPA ruling most likely to kill Texans in a heat wave, since it requires closing down power plants), which are (last time I checked) currently stayed.
The second day of ObamaCare testimony, and things are looking up for fans of limited, constitutional government. here’s a passel of links culled from Instapundit, TPPF, NRO and elsewhere:
Reading excerpts from today’s arguments, the justices sound extremely skeptical that the Commerce Claus power extends to enforcing an individual mandate.
Solicitor General Donald Verrelli’s performance seems to have been particularly poor. (Bonus tidbit: Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, one of the initiators of the lawsuit to overturn ObamaCare, was in the courtroom audience.)
The Volokh’s Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin chimes in: “Scalia makes the key points that 1) a state must be both “necessary” and “proper” to be authorized by the Necessary and Proper Clause, and (2) a statute cannot be proper if the legal rationale for it would justify nearly unlimited federal power.”
