Emmanuel Macron has been elected French president with 65+% of the vote over Marine Le Pin. That’s a strong defeat for Le Pen, but she picked up roughly twice what her father Jean-Marie Le Pin (an altogether nastier piece of work) won in his runoff in 2002.
This was the expected result, and it means the EU will be able to hobble on for a bit longer…
All three Round Rock ISD bond issues were defeated last night.
That’s a big change from previous years, when such bonds generally passed without any organized opposition, but, as previously noted, that wasn’t the case this year.
Interestingly enough, the first two bonds passed in Williamson but were defeated in Travis, while the third (“for arts and athletic programs, including an indoor aquatic center, the District’s outdoor athletic facility #3, upgrades to Dragon Stadium and design of auditoriums at Round Rock and Westwood high schools”) was defeated in both Travis and Williamson.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is one of those rare instances where campaign yard signs did make a difference. Here’s the official statement from the Round Rock Parents and Taxpayers group that opposed the bonds:
At last count over 8,900 voters from Round Rock ISD voted against the bond propositions,more than the total number of votes cast in the 2014 election. This represents a stunning rejection of these heavily-promoted bond propositions from the Round Rock ISD community.
We were up against a nearly $100,000 pro-bond campaign, that sent more than half a dozen mailers to thousands of voters. The bond propositions enjoyed favorable press and official endorsements, as well as a district administration that in our view crossed the line in their own efforts to promote passage of this bond package.
In comparison, our grassroots coalition came together spontaneously from different members of the community with independent negative reactions to the flawed bond package. Many of us first met each other through this. In this David versus Goliath battle, we had much less money and less than 5 weeks to organize.
So what really doomed the bond, if we were so outmatched?
These bonds failed because they deserved to fail.
Patrick McGuinness, Round Rock Parents and Taxpayers Association
Here’s a story that isn’t getting much play on this side of the pond. The UK held it’s regular yearly local council elections May 4, which fell in advance of Theresa May’s national snap election coming June 8.
The Tories cleaned up, gaining 563 seats across the UK while Labour lost 382, being pushed to third place in their traditional stronghold of Scotland behind the Scottish National Party and the Tories. “Stunned pollsters said if the same thing is repeated in the June 8 General Election, Mrs May could be heading to a landslide majority of more than 100 seats.”
Barring unforeseen circumstances, it looks like the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party is headed for an epic defeat in June. Corbyn is not the source of Labour’s woes, which would be their manifest disinterest in the economic plight of blue collar workers (who used to make up the heart of their constituency) in favor of progressive victimhood identity politics and fanatical opposition to carrying out Brexit, but the local elections show that Corbyn’s leadership certainly isn’t helping
UKIP was also all but wiped out, losing all 114 seats it, most to the Tories, and leaving them with a single seat they took from Labour. Now that UKIP has achieved it’s goal of leaving the European Union, it looks like supporters are flocking to the Tories. And I suspect a goodly number of UKIP members were probably former Labourites dissatisfied with the party’s Europhilic outlook who are now firmly (if reluctantly) in the Tory camp.
Wondering how George Galloway’s Respect Party did in the election? They didn’t: they deregistered last year.
Happy Cinco de Mayo, the holiday that celebrates the French army getting their asses kicked by Mexicans!
A bunch of big news that everyone and their dog has been covering at the top of the LinkSwarm:
“Today, conservative leaders in the House brought the American people a glimmer of hope that states might save American healthcare from the clutches of a federally controlled and regulated system under Obamacare,” said Roy. “This improved version of the American Health Care Act grants governors the ability to seek waivers from the onerous Obamacare regulations that unfortunately remain in place as the default rule even under this bill. This means governors would have both the opportunity and the burden of leading to free their states from these default regulations.”
“Further reform remains necessary, however, as the bill retains far too much of Obamacare’s flawed Medicaid expansion, replaces one form of subsidy with an even more expansive one in the form of a refundable tax credit, creates a $138 billion slush fund for insurers, and leaves almost all of Obamacare’s cost-driving regulations and mandates as the federal standard,” Roy continued. “As the bill heads to the Senate, we hope it will be improved, at least by allowing states to opt in to Obamacare rather than forcing states to temporarily, partially opt out.”
The concrete, realpolitik reason that amnesty is dead is that the appropriate law enforcement policies have been set in motion and they are gaining momentum fast!
I have long argued that the illegal alien community in the United States is highly fragile. President Trump’s executive order directing Immigration and Customs Authorities and Border Patrol officers to broadly interpret their jurisdiction for capturing and removing illegal aliens has had the immediate effect of decreasing attempts to cross the border as well as inspiring panic in illegal immigrant communities. Police officers and county sheriffs have told me that, even at the height of the Obama era of nonenforcement, illegal aliens shunned the police. Now, in the era of Trump, the possibility of going to work and ending your week in Mexico is a real and potent threat. (This is particularly true if you live, as I do, in Massachusetts). It is a commonplace that law enforcement professionals go to sleep muttering “5% enforcement equals 95% compliance.”
At the same time, businesses cannot prosper in an environment of uncertainty. The initial impulse of business owners in agriculture and other illegal-alien-heavy industries is to demand, yet again, some succor from the government in terms of work permits for their illegal workers. Just such measures are championed by incoming Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. However, assuming this relief is not forthcoming in the near future (and I’ll get to that in a minute) the only rational policy is for business owners to begin exploring their other options — which might include automation or wage increases.
When every small business owner in America finally takes paper and pencil and sits down at the kitchen table with their spouse and says “honey, we are going to have to figure out how to make our business work when we can’t hire illegal aliens anymore,” then and only then will the light appear at the end of the tunnel.
But the key to the problem and the reason for optimism is this: with the law now being enforced, however incrementally, even without funds for more agents, even without funds for the Wall, even without E-Verify, the pressure to re-evaluate in the illegal alien and the business communities will only grow. The success of the policy in reducing the inflow and initiating “self-deportation” will feed back on itself. For years the only salient argument of the open borders advocates on both the right and the left was that enforcing the current laws on the books was impossible. As it becomes obvious how easy, in fact, enforcement is, those advocates will be forced to rely on their more avaricious motives for keeping illegal aliens here.
There’s a $572 million Round Rock ISD bond issue coming up this Saturday.
(The sound you here is all my national readers hitting the Back button on their browsers. But since I’m in Round Rock ISD and Holly Hansen moved, if I’m not going to cover an RRISD bond issue, who is?)
Unlike most RRISD bond issues, this one has engendered the most opposition I can remember since I moved into the district in 2004, with numerous signs sprouting up in people’s yards opposing the bonds.
Empower Texas makes the case against the bonds:
Unsurprisingly, RRISD officials are also advertising a misleading “repayment cost” in order to downplay the actual impact of the debt. They are advertising the $572.1 million in additional debt (closer to $950 million with interest) as costing the average homeowner only $2.23 per month – when basic calculations put that figure closer to twelve times that amount.
Round Rock Parents and Taxpayers – a group organized against the bond and the district’s misleading tactics – isn’t having it.
“What concerned me most was how dishonest they were about the cost,” said Patrick McGuinness, one of the founders of RRPT. “They represented the cost at $2.23 a month. That doesn’t even cover a fraction of the debt service – the actual cost – to homeowners. It is actually closer to $348 per year.”
“It’s like telling voters to look at the tip of an iceberg and ignore what’s below the surface,” said David G. Schmidt, one of the other activists who spoke against the propositions. “You are insulting our intelligence.”
It’s a game that bureaucrats all over the state play when it comes to selling debt. They obfuscate the real cost of a debt package by playing a misleading shell-game and using non-specific terms such as tax “impact” or “change.” Using these kinds of terms, along with convenient timing around the simultaneous repayment of previous debt, allows them to disguise the actual, total cost of the proposed debt.
In layman’s terms, it’s a lot like paying off a mortgage around the same time a homeowner takes on a car payment for a similar same amount. The impact on monthly expenditures is negligible – but that doesn’t mean the car is free.
Worse yet, RRPT also argues that the pro-bond side has engaged in unethical and illegal tactics in selling the bond by using taxpayer-funded district resources to disseminate pro-bond messaging.
“Round Rock ISD has used district resources, teacher and staff time, as well as taxpayer funds to communicate to parents and teachers about the $572 million bond propositions with an intent to influence them on this package,” said McGuinness. “In the process, they have engaged in actions that appear to violate Texas legal prohibitions on using public funds for electoral advocacy.”
For starters, the administration had principals send emails to parents in the district touting the projects to be completed with the bond, using the same misleading $2.23/month repayment figure.
“It’s dishonest, it’s gimmicky marketing, and it’s advocacy,” said McGuinness. “When you use district funds to advocate, it’s illegal.”
In addition, teachers and other staff were forced to attend mandatory ‘bond election sessions’ on district work time. “Again, the $2.23 figure was presented, and again, the intention was advocacy,” claimed McGuinness.
Even more alarming, some teachers have reported being told by senior officials that their raises were dependent on the bond – a statutorily untrue scare tactic, as salaries are not funded with debt service.
Lastly, the pro-bond PAC ‘Classrooms for Kids’ – which gets a staggering 93 percent of its financial resources from contractors and debt financiers – looks to have obtained teacher email addresses for the purpose of mass-emailing their pro-bond political ads to teachers.
Voting is Saturday, May 6.
The big Clinton Corruption news is the the felonious sharing her top aide committed of classified emails with said aide’s scumbag husband:
FBI Director James Comey testified Wednesday that Huma Abedin, an aide to former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, forwarded emails containing classified information to her husband, former Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.).
During his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey said that Weiner had classified information on his laptop.
“His then-spouse Huma Abedin appears to have a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him, I think, to print out for her so she could then deliver them to the secretary of state,” he said.
So she illegally forwarded classified emails from Hillary’s illegal server to her scumbag, non-security-cleared husband’s laptop to illegally print them out for Hillary.
Oh, that makes everything better.
Amid all these felonies, one has to ask: Why couldn’t Abedin pay for her own freaking laptop??? She was working something like four jobs and pulling down $490,000 a year. And yet she never thought to buy her own laptop to illegally print out classified emails rather than using her husband’s?
Or, like Hillary, she wanted to use something she thought (erroneously) was beyond judicial reach.
Oh, and those forwarded emails number in the thousands, and include 29 previously unknown classified emails. You can’t keep up with the Clinton felonies without a scorecard. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
In other Clinton Corruption news:
I’ve done what I could in this space to avoid the subject of Hillary Clinton. I don’t want to be the perennial turd in the punchbowl. I’d hoped we’d finally seen the last of that name in public life — it’s been a long quarter of a century — and that we could all move on. Alas, no. Her daughter (angels and ministers of grace defend us) seems to be positioning herself for a political career. And Clinton herself duly emerged last week for a fawning, rapturous reception at the Women in the World conference in New York City. It simply amazes me the hold this family still has on the Democratic Party — and on liberals in general. The most popular question that came from interviewer Nick Kristof’s social-media outreach, for example, was: “Are you doing okay?” Here’s Michelle Goldberg: “I find myself wondering at odd times of the day and night: How is Hillary? Is she going to be all right?” Seriously, can you imagine anyone wondering the same after Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis or John Kerry blew elections?
And everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’ — those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department — was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was. And this, of course, is how Clinton sees it as well: She wasn’t responsible for her own campaign — her staffers were. As a new book on her campaign notes, after Clinton lost the Michigan primary to Sanders, “The blame belonged to her campaign team, she believed, for failing to hone her message, energize important constituencies, and take care of business in getting voters to the polls.” So by the time the general-election campaign came round, they’d fix that and win Michigan, right?
In case you forgot just how somewhat unhinged the 2016 election was.
Let us review the facts: Clinton had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment, including the president (his biggest mistake in eight years by far), and was even married to the last, popular Democratic president. As in 2008, when she managed to lose to a neophyte whose middle name was Hussein, everything was stacked in her favor. In fact, the Clintons so intimidated other potential candidates and donors, she had the nomination all but wrapped up before she even started. And yet she was so bad a candidate, she still only managed to squeak through in the primaries against an elderly, stopped-clock socialist who wasn’t even in her party, and who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. She ran with a popular Democratic incumbent president in the White House in a growing economy. She had the extra allure of possibly breaking a glass ceiling that — with any other female candidate — would have been as inspiring as the election of the first black president. In the general election, she was running against a malevolent buffoon with no political experience, with a deeply divided party behind him, and whose negatives were stratospheric. She outspent him by almost two-to-one. Her convention was far more impressive than his. The demographics favored her. And yet she still managed to lose!
(Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.)
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton created “loyalty scores” to measure how loyal Democrats were to her after her failed 2008 campaign, according to a new book on her latest campaign failure.
Clinton had two staffers “toil” to rate every Democrat members of Congress on a scale of one to seven — one being the most loyal — after she lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in 2008. Her husband Bill Clinton then deliberately campaigned against the disloyal “sevens” in subsequent primary elections, and succeeded in getting some of them removed. Some of those who remained apparently took note, and were quick to endorse Hillary in 2016.
Here’s the relevant excerpt from “Shattered,” a tell-all on her 2016 bid from Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes:
“After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.”
Clinton was especially paranoid after losing the 2008 election to former President Barack Obama, Allen and Parnes say in the book, believing that leaks on negative information and disloyal Democrats had led her to lose the presidency in 2008. “Over the course of the summer, the confidence of party insiders had been replaced by a degree of paranoia that nearly matched Hillary’s own outsize phobia,” they wrote. “She was convinced that leaks of information had helped doom her 2008 campaign.”
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
We now have confirmation of the rumors that were flying all weekend: Jim DeMint is out as head of the Heritage Foundation:
The Heritage Foundation’s Board of Trustees, by a unanimous vote, has asked for and received the resignation of Jim DeMint as president and CEO of the organization. The Board elected Heritage Founder Ed Feulner as president and CEO while we conduct a thorough search for his successor.
After a comprehensive and independent review of the entire Heritage organization, the Board determined there were significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation. While the organization has seen many successes, Jim DeMint and a handful of his closest advisers failed to resolve these problems.
This was a difficult and necessary decision for the Board to take. As trustees, we have governance and oversight responsibilities for this organization and our 500,000 members. We were compelled to take action.
Founder Ed Feulner will be reclaiming his old job, thought at 75 it remains to be seen how much gas he has left in the tank.
Many believe that DeMint was ousted for reasons of organization and approach rather than ideology:
DeMint isn’t being forced out because of his politics. The firebrand will be extinguished because of complaints about his leadership, several sources confirmed to the Washington Examiner.
When DeMint left Congress for Heritage in 2013, it seems that he never left the Senate behind. “The reason why the board got upset with him was his mismanagement,” a source with knowledge of the situation explained. “DeMint and his people just tried running the place like a Senate office rather than a think tank. It didn’t work.”
While few fault the South Carolina conservative for mixing it up with Capitol Hill, his critics complain that the former senator didn’t secure a proper policy footing before throwing political punches. That supposed disconnect manifested itself in the apparent disconnect between Heritage and Heritage Action, the organization’s 501(c)4 lobbying arm.
“The board just wants Action to keep doing its job,” the source explained. “But that means they need to be backed up by the think tank side of things.”
Ahead of a massive grassroots army, Heritage Action can easily blow up legislation they find ideologically unacceptable. But after the dust settles, those conservative politicos complain that their corresponding wonks haven’t equipped them with a policy substitute to offer lawmakers.
Others pinned DeMint’s ouster on Mike Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, the organization’s political arm, and DeMint’s apparent coziness to the Trump administration. That Atlantic piece says Needham wanted to take over from DeMint. This Washington Examiner piece says no, he was just trying to restore Heritage, having seen it go off the rails. It also paints Heritage as an organization in (cue Scott Adams persuasion word) chaos:
Just as Capitol Hill prepares to tackle healthcare reform, the biggest conservative voice in politics is choking on itself. Already DeMint’s influence seemed like it was waning. The Policy Services and Outreach Department (which DeMint founded and which regularly competed with Heritage Action for influence) curiously stood up congressional staffers for a meeting and inexplicably deleted its Twitter account.
Finally, here DeMint defends his tenure. It’s a bit pro forma.
This is all a shame, and a rather surprising outcome given that DeMint stepped down from the Senate to take the reigns at Heritage.
Heritage was a real powerhouse in the 1980s, providing much of the intellectual underpinning of the Reagan revolution. Their various Mandate for Leadership documents provided blueprints for much of Reagan’s reforms.
I rejoined Heritage as a supporter when DeMint in hopes that he could wake a sleeping giant. But I let my membership lapse because I never saw notable signs of action out here beyond the beltway.
Hopefully whoever takes over Heritage next can restore it to some of its former glory.
Here’s followups on both of yesterday’s Texas attempted spree-killers:
Dallas shooter Derick Lamont Brown
In 2008, he was involved in a car accident in Dallas, records show. Responding Dallas PD officers approached his vehicle. He yelled, “I’m high… I’m high and I have a gun!”
Police arrested him for felony possession of PCP. Brown pleaded guilty and got two years of probation.
Then, about two years ago, Brown obtained a concealed carry license from the state of Florida.
In 2015, he was involved in another car accident in Dallas. This time, when officers approached the vehicle, they observed Brown “holding a loaded magazine in his (right) hand” and “a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun” in his left hand, according to records.
In that incident, officers smelled what they thought was PCP. They arrested Brown for being under the influence of a narcotic and for unlawful carry of a weapon by a license holder.
Brown went to jail and was released two months ago.
UT stabber Kendrix J. White
Do not seek the world.
Seek Peace
Seek Truth
Seek Love
Seek Christ— Bible Time (@Bible_Time) April 30, 2017
What the hell is going on today? One dead, three wounded in UT stabbing spree.
You can’t even blame the heat, as the last few days a nice cool front has been blowing through…
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
Update: Suspect in custody:
Picture of the suspect outside Gregory. pic.twitter.com/fEQQxscXhm
— The Daily Texan (@thedailytexan) May 1, 2017
Update 2:
— Ray Arredondo (@Raydondo_) May 1, 2017
Unless this is the first five seconds of the arrest, why haven’t they already disarmed the suspect?
Update 3: The person doing the stabbing was evidently a UT student.
Here’s a Tweet showing one of his victims being tended to.
More photos from the scene: pic.twitter.com/XZpymHUvgt
— The Daily Texan (@thedailytexan) May 1, 2017
Update 4: Accused stabber’s name is Kendrex J. White, a 20-year old student.
One Dallas Fire & Rescue EMT killed and an unidentified civilian wounded in what police are describing as an active shooter situation.
Demographically that area (east of Fair Park and South of I-30) is where the predominately black section of south Dallas comes closest to downtown.
If you’re in the area, now would be a good time to go over Karl Rehn’s advice on dealing with an active shooter situation.
Update: Current reports say the EMT is in critical condition in surgery, not dead as previously reported. Dallas Morning News is doing regular updates.
Update 2: Description of the shooter: “The shooter was described as bald black male in a green shirt in jeans. He walks with a limp.”
Update 3: Two more dead, including suspect and his neighbor.
Shot Paramedic in “critical, but stable condition” after surgery.
Update 4: Dead shooter has been identified as Derick Lamont Brown, 36.
The incident seems to have started as a dispute between neighbors.
Note: A Derick Brown in the Dallas area was an active member of the New Black Panther Party for many years. Indeed, the ADL reported a Derick Brown proclaiming “We’re ready to die in self-defense” at a Black Panther rally in 2004, and here’s a pro-NBPP blog that calls Brown the chairman of the NBPP. Just about all the quotes that mention Brown and the New Black Panther Party seem to date from 2004-2008. It’s not certain the the two Derick Browns are the same man.