More news from inside the handbasket, including the dust-up in Gaza and the illegal alien surge at the border:
So tragic. So avoidable. RT @verumserum: The surge of unaccompanied minors at the border. pic.twitter.com/xxHzoZCgvI
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) July 10, 2014
In honor of the POTUS being in Austin. #tcot pic.twitter.com/d0iqRs8JUR
— YCT-UT (@YCT_UT) July 10, 2014
Yes, it’s another Obama is fundraising in Austin day, so traffic will probably be screwed all day.
Plan accordingly…
Evidently the Board of Regents accepted Bill Powers counteroffer, as he will stay on as UT President through June 2, 2015. (Previously.)
If you’re still unclear on why Powers should go, here are ten reasons he should step down.
Evidently the slow-burning University of Texas admissions scandal will finally cost President Bill Powers his job. “UT System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa has told Powers, 68, to resign before Thursday’s meeting of the Board of Regents or be fired during it.”
I doubt Powers counteroffer to step down in 2015 will be accepted. (I do wonder what makes Houston Chronicle writer Benjamin Wermund proclaim that Powers is “widely supported by students”? Has he seen polls on Powers popularity on students? (Online petitions don’t count) I would think they would be more concerned with lowering tuition costs than support a President resisting calls to lower them.)
Which is not to say that Powers backers are giving up. Instead, they’re lashing out at the board of regents:
The more angry and indignant among the petition signers seem to think some organized debate about UT and its president is going forth, and that their champion is, unfairly, of course, getting the worst of it. It would be an odd thing to think. There isn’t anything like a public debate about Bill Powers going forward. There’s rancor and division — nearly all of it coming from the side that professes to despise rancor and division, the Powers side.
The admissions scandal has been building for some time on Powers’ watch. (Nor is it the only problem under Powers.) Instead of investigating it and fixing the problem, Powers decided the best move was to have his political friends attempt to impeach regent Wallace Hall in order to quash his investigation while Powers’ supporters launched an Astroturf campaign on his behalf that’s included no end of MSM editorials praising Powers while attacking Hall and Governor Perry for daring to hold him accountable.
The university academic complex evidently believe that they’re a special kind of hothouse flower that should be immune to all political pressure, with a right to public funding but not to public accountability. Powers has constantly resisted calls to make college more affordable, and to be more accountable to the Board of Regents who oversee his work and the state government that pays his bills.
It seems that Powers will be the latest official to learn that pride goeth before a fall.
USA Today reporter Susan Page wonders why, despite the surge of illegal aliens across our border, Obama would continue to attend lavish fundraisers rather than visit the border, calling the decision “Obama’s Katrina moment.” (Even Democratic Texas congressman Henry Cuellar expressed the same concern.)
This comparison is deeply unfair.
To George W. Bush.
After all, Bush didn’t:
Katrina was a natural disaster. The illegal alien surge is a crisis of Obama’s own making for refusing to enforce existing border control laws and dangling a Dream Act amnesty to lure illegal alien children to cross the border.
Despite musical advice from that big hit from The Princess Factory, liberals just can’t Let It Go. They’re still in a rage over the Hobby Lobby decision, or at least pretending to be in order to gin up their shrinking base in order to keep Democrats from being slaughtered in November.
Jeffrey Tobin: “What we are witnessing is a liberal meltdown in which they have come to believe the First Amendment is a technicality that should brushed aside when it comes into conflict with the ‘right’ to free contraception.”
For the political left, the concept of religious liberty has been re-interpreted as to only mean the right to be allowed to pray and not to live one’s faith in the public square. When faith conflicts with policy initiatives such as the free contraception mandate, they assume that religion must always lose. However, the court majority has rightly reminded us that the freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment cannot be trashed simply because a lot of Americans want not only access to contraception but also think their employers ought to be compelled to pay for it.
But to liberals, a decision that reaffirms the primacy of religious freedom is just the latest iteration of a Republican “war on women.” As a political slogan, that meme has been political gold for Democrats who believe its use guarantees their stranglehold on the votes of unmarried women. But as infuriating and wrongheaded the war on women arguments may be, what is really troubling about them is that they reflect a utilitarian approach to the Constitution that regards any of its protections as expendable if they are obstacles to a liberal policy goal.
Clarice Feldman: “No, the sputtering, venomous and hateful hyperbole is attributable to one thing, and one thing only: the Court did not allow the state to bend Hobby Lobby to its will on their behalf. And that is what matters most to them.”
All this rage is especially hypocritical since:
Some 204 outfits favored by Democrats were granted waivers by the president from ObamaCare, which means their employees do not have the right to employer provided birth control. These include upscale restaurant, nightclubs, and hotels in then-Speaker Pelosi’s district; labor union chapters; large corporations, financial firms, and local governments.
Women did not march through the streets to complain on behalf of their downtrodden sisters at Boboquivari in San Francisco which sells porterhouse steaks at $59 a pop and such. Apparently they are up with laws written on Etch-a-Sketch boards which the president can rewrite at whim. And their moral outrage is dependent on whether or not the employer is a Democrat crony.
The whole “War on Women” is “shameless, baseless propaganda:
In other Hobby Lobby-related news, Jonathan Adler debunks the idea that the Hobby lobby ruling was “anti-science.”
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
In celebration of America’s birthday, here are some compilations of fireworks gone wrong (some repetition):
There’s a special place in my heart for the 2012 San Diego display where they accidentally fired everything up at once:
And finally: Fireworks factory explosions:
Let’s be careful out there. At least wear some eye protection…
Enjoy Independence Day tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s another Texas vs. California roundup:
“San Bernardino, California, said that to exit bankruptcy it must terminate a union contract that pays an average annual salary of $190,000 to each of its top 40 firefighters,” according to an article in Bloomberg. That’s just salary. Firefighters receive the generous “3 percent at 50″ retirement package that allows them to retire with 90 percent of their final years’ pay at age 50. And there are lots of pension-spiking gimmicks and other benefits on top of that.
“These cities are run for the benefit of those who work there. Public services are a side matter at best.”
Toyota’s move to Texas is a high-profile relocation, but Texas has been used to adding — and filling — new jobs at a superlative pace. The state added more than 1.9 million new jobs over the period from December 1999 to April 2014, more than 35 percent of the entire nation’s total for that 15-year period, noted Michael Cox, an economics professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. And Texas had an unemployment rate of just 5.1 percent in May, 16th-lowest in the United States.
Meanwhile, Cox noted, Texas’s median wages are 28th-highest in the nation; and they rank 8th-highest after adjusting for taxes and prices. Texas schools rank 3rd, he said, after adjusting for variations in student demographics, a raw statistic which places Texas 28th in the nation.
“We’re able to accomplish all this and more because the business environment in our state is largely competitive, and free markets solve problems,” Cox told me. “Texas is a meritocracy, where incentives still work to produce good results.”
Drive almost anywhere in the vast Lone Star State and you will see evidence of the “Texas miracle” economy that policymakers like Gov. Rick Perry can’t quit talking about….
This hot economy, politicians say, is the direct result of their zealous opposition to over-regulation, greedy trial lawyers and profligate government spending. Perry now regularly recruits companies from other states, telling them the grass is greener here. And his likely successor, Attorney General Greg Abbott, has made keeping it that way his campaign mantra.
It’s hard to argue with the job creation numbers they tout. Since 2003, a third of the net new jobs created in the United States were in Texas. And there are real people in those jobs, people with families to feed.
But the piece also notes that Texas has led the nation in worker fatalities for seven of the last ten years. I’m not going to get into the details of worker compensation that make up the bulk of the piece, and it is quite possible there is some room for improvement in worker safety. But I do want to note that, as the second largest state in the union, and the one with the biggest oil and gas industry, it’s not terribly surprising that Texas would have the largest number of fatalities, since oil and gas has a fairly high fatality rate (though not injury rate) compared to other industries (see page 14 here).
So Democratic state representative Trey Martinez-Fischer used his speech at the Texas Democratic convention to say that GOP stands for “gringos y ostros pendejos” (or, roughly, “gringos and other assholes”). In other words, he just insulted every black, Hispanic and Asian Republican in Texas.
I knew that name sounded familiar, mainly because he was born Ferdinand Frank Fischer III and formerly known as Tracey Fisher, then started going by Trey Martinez-Fischer.
I’m sure the fact he was running for office as a Democrat in a Hispanic majority district had nothing to do with that decision.
More and more it seems that racist condescension is the default liberal attitude to those who wander off the Democratic plantation…
Remember Anson Chi, the Ron Paul/Occupy follower accused of trying to blow up a gas pipeline in Plano?
Now he’s apparently plead guilty to charges he already plead guilty to before:
Anson Chi, 35, pleaded guilty to two of the four counts he was facing at trial – the same two counts he pleaded guilty to during a hearing last year. The difference with this plea agreement is that the prison sentence is essentially open-ended. Chi will be able to argue issues related to sentencing and will have the opportunity to appeal in some cases. The sentence will be imposed by U.S. District Judge Richard Schell. No date has been set for sentencing.
I’m not going to pretend to understand the legal reasoning behind the double guilty pleas to the same charges.
“Chi represented himself at trial after firing his defense attorneys earlier this year.”
That’s pretty much universally a wrong move, but the whole “trying to blow up a pipeline and only injuring yourself” does suggest he’s not the sharpest tine on the rake.