Another roundup of gun and crime news:
Guns and Crime Roundup
November 20th, 2014A Real Texas Speaker’s Race? Don’t Count on It
November 19th, 2014Despite a broad consensus that he’s too moderate and holding up important conservative legislation, conservatives in the Texas House failed to unseat Speaker Joe Straus in both 2010 and 2012. Since then, one Straus ally after another has fallen to more conservative challengers in the primaries. Will this session finally be the one where Straus is replaced?
Well, conservative are certainly going to try to oust Straus from the speaker’s chair. “Scott Turner, the freshman state representative challenging Joe Straus for House speaker, affirmed on Tuesday that he will insist on a floor vote on Jan. 13, the first day of session, come what may.”
Michael Quinn Sullivan makes the case for ousting Straus. (One would think that if Sullivan was as powerful as liberal reporters make him out to be, Straus would have been out of a job in 2011. But for all Sullivan’s considerable influence, Straus has managed to survive repeated attempts to kick him oust him.)
And Texas Tea Party groups are threatening to hold Reps accountable if they vote for Straus as Speaker again. Indeed, the North Texas Tea Party said as much on their website. Unfortunately, they decided to do so in an overheated and poorly-formatted screed interspersed with ALL CAPITAL LETTERS FOR EMPHASIS. Guys, you’re not posting on a BBS in 1984. Things like this make it entirely too easy for the opposition (in this case Straus-backing RINOs and their media enablers) to dismiss you out of hand.
However, as much as it pains me to report it, the more I read the tea leaves, the more I think Straus survives the challenge this time as well.
Conservatives were less than thrilled when Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, who owes his seat in large measure to running against Straus and beating Straus ally Vicki Truitt in 2012, announced he was supporting Straus for speaker.
Then Sarah Rumpf wrote that still more Republicans announced they were backing Straus:
Joining Capriglione are Tan Parker (R-Flower Mound), Ron Simmons (R-Carrollton), Phil King (R-Weatherford), Myra Crownover (R-Lake Dallas), James Frank (R-Wichita Falls), and Drew Springer (R-Muenster), who emailed the release to Breitbart Texas with a short message that it was “from leading North Texas conservatives on our position on the 84th session.” Straus was first elected Speaker in 2009, largely on the votes of the Democrats and moderate Republicans in the House. Since first taking up the Speaker’s gavel, Straus has faced criticism from various conservative groups and grassroots activists who view him as more of a moderate.
Now comes news that Straus theoretically has enough votes in the bag to stay speaker:
The list of House Republicans who have publicly backed Straus in the past week include Trent Ashby of Lukfin, Cecil Bell of Magnolia, Giovanni Capriglione of Southlake, Travis Clardy of Nacogdoches, Myra Crownover of Denton, Tony Dale of Cedar Park, Marsha Farney of Georgetown, James Frank of Wichita Falls, Larry Gonzales of Round Rock, Jason Isaac of Dripping Springs, Kyle Kacal of Pearland, Phil King of Weatherford, Tim Kleinschmidt of Lexington, J.M. Lozano of Kingsville, Doug Miller of New Braunfels, Morrison, John Otto of Dayton, Chris Paddie of Marshall, Tan Parker of Flower Mound, John Raney of Bryan, Ron Simmons of Carrollton, Drew Springer of Muenster and Paul Workman of Austin. Three newly elected Republicans who will join the Legislature in January — Dade Phelan of Beaumont, Gary VanDeaver of Clarksville and Rick Galindo of San Antonio — have also pledged support to Straus.
Et tu, Tony Dale? It’s disappointing that all three Williamson County Representatives (Dale, Larry Gonzalez and Marsha Farney) are backing Straus.
At this point, it’s beginning to look like conservatives will need to knock off Straus in the 2016 Republican primary to get rid of him…
Democratic Failure In Texas: Even Worse Than You Thought
November 19th, 2014I wanted to put up a link to this Wayne Thorburn Politico Piece on the Democratic Party’s 2014 failure in Texas. The piece focuses on the many missteps made by Battleground Texas, such as the decision to send out-of-state Obama activists rather than hire within, the decision to go all-in on Wendy Davis rather than build an organization from the bottom up, and failure to share information with the Texas Democratic Party.
But the part I found most striking was the description of just how badly Democrats did in lower-level races:
This lack of a bottom-up strategy was particularly glaring on Dec. 9, 2013, the filing deadline for 2014 candidates. Far from attracting a number of qualified and vigorous candidates to the Democratic banner, Battleground and the party ended up ceding much of the field to the Republicans without even a whimper. In fact, Democrats failed to recruit anyone to run on their ticket for more than 40 percent of all state legislative positions on the ballot. The end result would be almost a two-to-one Republican majority in both the Texas Senate and the House. Even more depressing was the party’s showing at the county level. Democrats could not find anyone willing to run for County Judge (chief elected official in the county) in 165 of Texas’ 254 counties, ceding almost two-thirds of all counties to the Republicans without an election. Thus, by 2015, while the Democrats will retain the county judge in four of the six largest counties, the GOP will hold all 29 suburban county judge positions, 18 of 21 in the other metropolitan counties scattered around the state, and 150 of the 198 small town county courthouses. Of all the major counties in Texas, only Dallas, Bexar, El Paso, Jefferson and Travis, along with the border counties of Webb and Hidalgo, will have a Democratic county judge.
And even more depressing than that was the fact that not a single Democratic candidate could be found who was willing to run for any county office in 86 counties—more than one-third of the total. These 86 included the heavily populated suburban counties of Denton, Johnson and Parker (outside Dallas-Fort Worth), Montgomery (suburban Houston) and Comal (north of San Antonio) as well as the other urban counties of Bell (Temple), Randall (Amarillo) and Grayson (Sherman). As the saying goes, you can’t win a game if you don’t field a team.
All About GruberGate in Two Minutes
November 18th, 2014Since some members of the MSM still seem mystified as to who this “obscure” Jonathan Gruber is, here’s a handy two-minute video primer:
Firedoglake On Gruber’s Central Involvement in ObamaCare from 2010
November 18th, 2014I’m not sure if you’re familiar with FireDogLake or not, the lefty blog run by Jane Hamsher. (Think of it as sort of Daily Kos, Jr., and you wouldn’t be far wrong.)
Well, you may not remember, but there was a time in 2010 when Firedoglake and other liberals were fighting against what would become ObamaCare on the grounds that it was a giant taxpayer subsidy for insurance companies (correct) and that it simply wasn’t liberal enough, falling short of their goal of fully socializing the entire American medical system (AKA “single player”).
So back then, Hamsher was deeply skeptical of how ObamaCare was constructed, and did an analysis of the role one Jonathan Gruber had in crafting and selling the law.
How deeply was Gruber involved? Up to his eyeballs:
Up until this point, most of the attention regarding the failure to disclose the connection between Jonathan Gruber and the White House has fallen on Gruber himself. Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort.
The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill, which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits.
Throughout the piece, Hamsher highlights the numerous times when the Democratic Party and their allies in the media purport to “analyze” the effects of ObamaCare on a wide variety of economic metrics, when in fact all the disparate “analyses” all points back to Gruber’s work.
And how’s this for a prophetic sentence?
Though Gruber’s analysis has been cited as support that insurance would be affordable, it appears that the individual mandate will impose a financial burden on middle class families that will leave them with no ability to make the co-pays necessary to use the insurance they are forced to buy.
While the Hamsher piece doesn’t uncover whether Gruber actual drafted specific language that made it’s way into ObamaCare, her piece does make clear that not only was Gruber used by the White House, congressional Democrats and the media to sell ObamaCare, he was the central figure in selling ObaamaCare’s “cost savings” to the public:
What was Gruber’s role in crafting the Senate bill? Nobody will say. Is he in effect grading his own work when he praises the bill? We don’t know. What we do know is that the White House engaged an expert who was quite likely to reach the conclusions he reached, because he’d been making similar claims for years. And they worked hard to promote his work as independent validation of their plan, when in fact he was an integral part of it.
In light of this, it’s rather amazing the degree of amnesia that’s swept Democrats and their MSM lackeys over Gruber’s central role in ObamaCare. Even more amazing is the fact they think the public will actually buy those denials. Then again, as Gruber himself noted, lack of transparency and deceiving those “stupid” voters was central part of Democrats’ ObamaCare plans from the beginning…
(Note: When I tried to pull up this piece yesterday, I got a persistent error, and wondered on Twitter why Firedoglake had memory holed the piece, and went and found an archive in the Wayback Machine. Well, either that was a transient error, or they thought better of memory holing it, as it is now back up. The Wayback Machine link is here just in case it disappears again…)
What Michelle Obama-Approved School Lunches Are Like Vs. What Her Daughters Eat
November 17th, 2014Saw this Tweet:
@MichelleObama This was my daughter's 'Healthy Hunger Free' meal today. What did you eat? pic.twitter.com/OiPJnRe0Yn
— Reagan Fan (@bchillebrand) November 18, 2014
Followed by this one:
@bchillebrand @BattleSwarmBlog @MichelleObama I'm sure lunch looks just like that at the private school where the Obamas send their girls.
— Troy Riser (@TroyRiser) November 18, 2014
Well, Malia and Sasha Obama attend the posh, private Sidwell Friends School. So let’s look at what the lunch menu at their school looks like:
Italian Wedding Soup
Greek Salad
Lemon Pepper Tuna Salad
Italian Sausages with
Sweet Peppers & Onions
Ratatouille
Sautéed Rainbow Chard
Rotini with Pesto
Grapes
Yeah, that’s exactly the same
Bob Hope on Democrats
November 17th, 2014Working on a piece, so instead of putting it up half-baked, enjoy the following instead of actual content:
Dog Story Followup: Happy Ending for Matty and Grommet
November 16th, 2014Just Friday I reported on how wounded Army Spc. Brent Grommet had his war dog, Matty, taken away from him in violation of the law.
Good news! The story has a happy ending.
Days after The Post exposed the military’s wrongful, 16-month-long separation of injured Army Spc. Brent Grommet and his war dog, Matty, the two were finally reunited on Friday.
Now I Know What To Get Dwight for Christmas
November 15th, 2014Or rather I would, if it were available anywhere in Texas, and it wasn’t made in a country currently occupying parts of Ukraine:
Yes, Red Army Vodka in a bottle shaped like an AK-47. It’s much classier than their previous bottle:
