Merry Christmas! Instead of a Friday LinkSwarm, enjoy something more in keeping with the festive nature of the holiday: Dave Barry’s 2015 year-end roundup:
Read the whole thing.
MSM Monkeys Around
December 24th, 2015It’s been an odd week, for a number of reasons, so I’m a bit late on the “Washington Post cartoonist draws Ted Cruz’s 5 and 7 year old daughters as monkeys” story. Because nothing says “reasonable” and “rational” like attacking children because you dislike the politics of their father. On the off-chance you missed it, it featured Cruz as an organ-grinder and his daughters as monkeys on leashes. The ostensible rationale for the doodle was Cruz featuring his daughters in that parody Christmas ad that ran during Saturday Night Live, making them “fair game.”
Right.
Though the Washington Post editor took the doodle down (calling it a cartoon would suggest there was an actual attempt at humor), we all know that if someone attempted the same drawing featuring Obama and his daughters, it would have been denounced as racist and the cartoonist fired so fast they wouldn’t have been allowed to pack their desk. Of course, the MSM have always been hypocrites when it comes to different standards for Democrats and Republicans. Anything that hurts Republicans is fair game, while anything that hurts Democrats is a source of high moral outrage.
The question is: Will cartoonist Ann Telnaes pay any price for such a gross transgression of basic decency?
This time next month, @AnnTelnaes will be drawing blackboard doodles for the daily specials before her shift at Starbucks. @BoundaryStones
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) December 23, 2015
The irony is that the episode provided a palpable boost to the Cruz campaign, which had an outraged fundraising mailer (“They attacked my children!”) out within hours. I bet they raised at least $1 million off of it.
Here’s Mollie Hemingway with the 10 stupidest things about the monkey cartoon.
Of course, Cruz got the last laugh as well:
Seems like a better idea for a cartoon: Hillary and her lapdogs. pic.twitter.com/dou9c7fS4U
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 23, 2015
And this one is even better:
#CruzCrew some pre-Christmas Eve fun: RT for Blue Christmas @HillaryClinton, Like for Hillary Claus & her lap dogs! pic.twitter.com/IqrSbCXwG7
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 24, 2015
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The Great Liberal Gun Control Mystery
December 23rd, 2015Most people learn from their mistakes.
Liberal gun control advocates are not “most people.”
This Sean Davis piece shows two of their more persistent errors on display: Their inability to learn what an “assault weapon” was legally defined as, and their inability to figure out that their actions make owning a gun more popular, not less.
More than one pundit has observed that pushing for gun control legislation accomplishes two things: 1.) Sends gun sales through the roof, and 2.) Gets Democrats defeated come election time.
Notably absent from that list: Decreasing firearms deaths.
Of course, for liberals gun control has never been about keeping criminals from using guns. The purpose behind gun control has always been to disarm the law abiding civilian population, all the better to implement their big government/culture war schemes.
There was a time when Blue Dog Democrats would keep the gun-grabbing instincts of their liberal brethren in check, but the last two decades have seen those Blue Dogs ruthlessly purged from the party. No the Democrats are All In on gun control, even if it kills them.
Let’s hope that Democrats have the same sort of election in 2016 they had in 1994…
TPPF Sues Over Wilco Cave Spider
December 21st, 2015Here’s something on the surface that seems like a small local story, but it’s one that could potentially have huge national implications.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF)’s Center for the American Future representing Williamson County resident John Yearwood and Williamson County, Texas today filed suit to intervene into the pending lawsuit seeking delisting of the Bone-Cave Harvestman from the Endangered Species Act. Mr. Yearwood and Williamson County, Texas challenge the authority of the federal government to use the Interstate Commerce Clause to regulate non-commercial interactions with the Bone Cave Harvestman arachnid, which only exists in two central Texas counties, is not bought nor traded in interstate commerce, and does not otherwise affect interstate commerce.
“This lawsuit centers around respect for the rule of law and recognition that the Constitution establishes our federal government as having limited, enumerated powers,” said Robert Henneke, director of the Center for the American Future at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Congress has the power to regulate commerce among the states, i.e. Interstate commerce. Congress’ Commerce power through the Endangered Species Act should not, therefore, extend to regulate the Bone-Cave Harvestman species – an intrastate cave-arachnid existing only in caves in Central Texas without any commercial value. For there to be rule of law, there must be limits to government power.”
The Interstate Commerce Clause is the camel’s nose by which the federal government has stuck its vast regulatory powers into just about every crevice of the body politic. Because the Williamson cave spider case clearly has no impact on interstate commerce, there’s the potential for the case to unravel a whole host of intrusive New Deal-era commerce clause rulings, of which Wickard vs. Filburn is probably the most egregious.
There’s no guarantee the case will get to the Supreme Court, but if it does…
Ted Cruz Christmas Classics
December 19th, 2015It’s funny enough…
I hear this is supposed to run during Saturday Night Live tonight…
DNC Data Breach: Less Security Concern, More Clinton Dirty Tricks
December 18th, 2015I included the DNC data breach story in my LinkSwarm roundup, but the more I look at it, the less the story seems like “data breach by Bernie Sanders team” and more like “dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s team.”
Here’s a description by Slashdot poster Chris Johnson that states the case:
NGP-VAN, the company that stores this data, which is run by an old Clinton hand who worked for them in 1992, the company paid $34,000 by Ready For Hillary, was repeatedly dropping their firewall between the two major Dem campaigns, Clinton and Sanders.
A guy who’s now fired from the Sanders team observed this. They complained once and were given assurances by the company that it was a mistake and wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again. The guy decided to gauge how deeply the Clinton campaign was able to read into the Sanders campaign, by experimenting to see how much of the Clinton data he could get. That’s a bad call but by information security standards it’s not unthinkable: it’d be called a white hat intrusion, seeing how much of the firewall was down by probing the other side and assuming your own data was revealed exactly the same way. It does matter, but you still have to fire the guy.
One thing we can be sure of is, anything open to ‘stealing’ on the Clinton side was just as open on the Sanders side, literally. It’s the same system and the same firewall, and if the firewall keeps mysteriously going down for no good reason you have to wonder what’s up and more relevantly what’s being made available to those on the other side of the firewall, which might explain why the firewall’s going down like that.
The Sanders people did NOT throw a fit the first time this happened. But this time, the Sanders guy got caught crossing the nonexistent firewall. We have no information at all on whether anybody from the Clinton side was doing the same thing. During that time there WAS NO firewall and the guy wasn’t hacking, he was browsing, as anybody on either side could have done during those windows.
I think that’s accurate so far. The behavior of the firewall is important, whether or not it’s suspicious as a planned exploit of the Sanders data run by Clinton people who are at the DNC and at NGP-VAN.
In response to the Sanders guy browsing over and seeing data (how do they know? Because HE TOLD THEM. The Sanders team were the ones reporting this, that’s part of the story), the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time. In order to get access back, at least as of this morning, the requirement is for the Sanders campaign to prove it has destroyed all data that it didn’t necessarily even download (remember, Sanders guy claims he was exploring the Clinton system because it would mirror the vulnerability of the Sanders system, and he’s not IN the Clinton system to go and browse the Sanders side to see how much is revealed, but he was IN the Sanders side and could look at the Clinton side and reasonably conclude that his own side was equally compromised)
And social media is blowing the hell up, not unreasonably, because it’s a goddamn hatchet job combined with a kneecapping to yank access by the Bernie campaign to its OWN DATA because a guy from the Bernie campaign passively browsed through a firewall he didn’t himself disable, a firewall run by a company controlled by Clinton partisans which had been going down already for reasons unknown.
This seems consistent with the facts, consistent with the DNC being “all in” on the Hillary coronation, and consistent with the Sanders campaign suing the DNC for access to their own freaking data.
by their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.
We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction.
What is required here is a full and independent audit of the DNC’s handling of this data and its security from the beginning of this campaign to the present, including the incident in October that we alerted them to.
The incident is also consistent with Hillary’s own repeated Nixonian dishonesty. It’s not enough that she has the weakest slate of primary challengers for a non-incumbent since Nelson Rockefeller decided to bow out and let Nixon have the GOP nomination in 1960. Hillary is so used to winning through lies and dirty tricks she does it even when she doesn’t need to. It’s simply who she is.
LinkSwarm for December 18, 2015
December 18th, 2015It’s a week before Christmas, and I hope everyone is having a better week than I am (I’m sick and my dog’s sick).
Texas Racing Commission Flips Off Legislature Yet Again
December 17th, 2015Time and time again the executive, legislative and judicial branches have told the Texas Racing Commission “You’re breaking the law and you have to repeal your approval of historical gambling” (i.e., thinly disguised slot machines). And time and time again the Texas Racing Commission has said “Up yours! We’re tools of the gambling lobby, and we’re not going to let little things like the law stand in our way!”
And this week they did it yet again:
Texas racing officials refused to retreat Tuesday from a plan to allow a hotly contested new way to gamble at horse racetracks statewide, prompting the commission’s new chairman to ask the staff for a plan to shut down the agency.
After two hours of testimony from those in the horse industry, the nine-member Texas Racing Commission voted 4-4 with one abstention to repeal rules that would allow historical racing, the replaying of already-run races on slot machinelike devices, at Texas tracks such as Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie.
The commissioners later unanimously agreed to republish the historical racing rules to gain more public input so they can take up the issue again in February.
Since the the motion to repeal the rules failed, new commission Chairman Rolando Pablos asked agency staffers to “prepare a plan for shutting down the agency,” anticipating a lack of funding from lawmakers that would require the agency to shut down.
What does it take to bring a rogue agency to heel?
Failing to Show Up in Texas U.S. House Races
December 17th, 2015The filing deadline has passed for 2016 races in Texas, and once again several U.S. House seats will go uncontested.
The first step to winning a race is showing up for one. Even token candidates force the opposition to expend time and attention on races they could use elsewhere. And having a candidate in the race helps you win during improbable circumstances (indictments, scandals, wave elections).
As usual, Democrats passed up more races than Republicans, but Republicans seemed to pass on a higher number of races as well.
Races Democrats Failed To Field a Challenger
Here are the races Democrats failed to show up in, and the current Republican incumbent:
With Democrats not contesting eight districts, it allows Republicans to shift time and effort into defending incumbents in more marginal districts (such as Will Hurd in the perpetual battleground 23rd).
Races Republicans Failed To Field a Challenger
Here are the races Republicans failed to show up in, and the current Democratic incumbent:
On Republican missed opportunities, Joaquin Castro is the sort of rising star you want to force to defend his home territory, rather than go off gallivanting at the national level.
A few other points of interest: