Just a reminder that tomorrow is election day. Several state constitutional amendments and local bond issues are on the ballot. Now would be a good time to find your voter registration card and look up your polling place.
Election Tomorrow
November 4th, 2013LinkSwarm for Novermber 1, 2013
November 1st, 2013A small LinkSwarm this time out, as I was busy with Halloween and other stuff this week:
Not sure if this needs a language warning or not, since I don’t Crazy High Redneck.
As Little As I Can Possibly Write on Texas Constitutional Amendments
October 31st, 2013OK, I’m exaggerating a bit, since the least I could possibly write is nothing. But instead of trying to cover every bill, I’m going to point you at Blue Dot Blues, where the indefatigable MJ Samuelson is covering each amendment, so at least I don’t have to write much. Go over there and keep scrolling. Empower Texas also has a handy scorecard. I may disagree on an amendment or two, but not strongly.
I do want to go ahead and urge a No vote on Proposition 6, which authorizes taking money out of the rainy day fund for various ill-defined water projects. This one is getting a big direct mail push from realtor and business PACs and is favored by Rick Perry, Joe Straus, Gregg Abbott and Wendy Davis. Opposing it is an odd coalition of fiscal conservatives and green party types, including Save Our Springs Austin. Some of what is covered is probably needed, but the rest has the smell of a construction boondoggle/slush fund. And what is needed should be allocated from the general fund, not raiding the rainy day fund.
Arlene Wohlgemuth at TPPF has a bit more.
The election is Tuesday, November 5th.
This Just In: ObamaCare Still Sucks
October 30th, 2013Suddenly, Democrats aren’t sounding so all-fire sure about ObamaCare after all. “After 16 long days of vowing to Republicans that they would not cave in any way, shape or form on ObamaCare, Democrats spent their first post-shutdown week caving in every way, shape and form.”
Jonah Goldberg gets in some solid whacks on the idiot pushback from Democratic mouthpieces: “Obama’s [#ObamaCare] statements were not ‘narrowly untrue.’ They were broadly, knowingly and entirely untrue.”
Also:
The president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law. The right opposed the law on principle. A single party — the Democrats — own this law in a way that no party has had complete ownership of any major social legislation in a century. They bought this legislation with deceit and the GOP said so. Now that it is going into effect, the facts on the ground are confirming that deceit. Moreover, the same haughty condescending bureaucrats and politicians who told us they were smart enough and tech-savvy enough to do just about anything are being exposed as incompetent political hacks.
Charles Cooke debunks the single payer fantasy and the myth of Republican responsibility for ObamaCare:
Obamacare was passed into law without a single Republican vote; its passage led to the biggest midterm blowout since 1948; and repealing the measure has been, to borrow Harry Reid’s favorite word, the “obsession” of Republicans for nearly five years. It is a law based upon an idea that Republican leadership failed to consider, debate, or advance during any of the periods in which they have held political power — and one that they actively opposed when it was suggested in a similar form by President Clinton during the 1990s. If Republicans were desperate to get something done along the lines that Obama proposed in 2009, they have had a funny way of showing it over the past 159 years.
Also, “single payer,” i.e. the Democrats platonic ideal of fully socialized medicine, was so horribly unpopular with the public that it never had a chance of passing:
There is a devastatingly dull reason the bulletproof Democratic majority of 2008 didn’t build “comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare,” and that is that it didn’t have the votes. Indeed, with full control of the government, Democrats didn’t even have the votes to set up a public insurance option, let alone to take over the whole system. Long before Scott Brown was elected to the Senate, Ezra Klein was lamenting that the public option was dead on arrival.
Charles Krauthammer also goes to town on Jay Carney’s smarmy dishonesty:
The Obama Administration wrote regulations that actually made the situation worse. (Hat tip: Ace, who notes that NBC tried to neuter their original version to make it less critical of Obama).
Mark Steyn on the website debacle. Bonus: The same firm who coded the ObamaCare website also coded the incompetent, bloated, non-functioning Canadian Firearms registry:
Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.
Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some two-and-a-half to three million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun — or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60.
So how did CGI get the gig? Well, the fact that executive Toni Townes-Whitley was an old friend of Michelle Obama’s, having been in the Organization of Black Unity together at Princeton, and who visited the Obama White House several times, might have something to do with it.
It also promotes racism, with “sections that factor in race when awarding billions in contracts, scholarships and grants” and give “preferential treatment to minority students for scholarships.” It also “creates separate and unequal operating standards for long-term care facilities that serve racial and ethnic minorities.”
A few more nuggets:
Lovely. My Banner Header Is Missing
October 29th, 2013Might have something to do with Bluehost upgrading PHP.
I’ll look into it…
Update: It’s back up now, via a PHP reversion.
60 Minutes on Benghazi
October 28th, 2013Well, this should break the story wide open. If you haven’t already, see the whole thing.
LinkSwarm for October 24, 2013
October 24th, 2013Monday’s was late, this one is early:
More:
This was really about the war between the growing conservative majority in the GOP and the dying GOP establishment minority.
It’s a war that must be fought, and which we should welcome. And it’s a war we conservatives will win.
The party has changed from the bottom up in the last decade. Those at the top of the pyramid are finally realizing that they and the base below are out of synch. The GOP establishment was very, very happy to support the pre-Obama consensus that government would grow and that the Republicans would campaign against it at home then let it expand unhindered in D.C. The problem – in the eyes of the establishment – is that the newly conservative GOP base, energized and activated by Obama’s radicalism, actually wants to shrink the government.
We’re serious. That’s the problem. And with the unblinking eye of the social media upon them, they can’t fake it anymore.
Small Grambling Update
October 23rd, 2013While the Grambling football team is back practicing, from Dwight comes news that Grambling fired David Lankster, online editor ofThe Gramblinite student newspaper, supposedly over posts made on the official Twitter feed. Lankster played a key role in exposing the deplorable facilities football players were complaining about. (Fox News has pictures of the facilities.) Lanskster’s firing was overturned, but he plans to resign.
I do wonder if I had some small hand in Lankster’s firing, since he used his personal Twitter account to retweet my suspicion that someone in the Administration was embezzling funds:
RT @BattleSwarmBlog: As an outsider, the football program reports are inexplicable unless someone in the Administration is embezzling funds.
— Dave (@acuzimaballer) October 19, 2013
@BattleSwarmBlog THERE YOU GO!!!! It's not that hard to see what's going on here!
— Dave (@acuzimaballer) October 19, 2013
And it’s not just the athletic department; large parts of the rest of the university are falling apart. And as a well-known book collector, this picture just breaks my heart:
This is one room in@TheGramblinite #WeNeedANSWERS pic.twitter.com/rMwVcCcmhP
— Dave (@acuzimaballer) October 21, 2013
Just budget cuts and the higher education bubble bursting? Maybe, but that doesn’t seem to explain everything. If I were Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal or Treasurer John Kennedy, I’d seriously consider auditing Grambling…
A Tiny Update to the Saga of Convicted Felon Brett Kimberlin
October 22nd, 2013If you haven’t been following the saga of convicted felon Brett Kimberlin, the Speedway Bomber in all its twisty turn-yness, well, I can’t say that I blame you; there are a lot of twists and turns. (And here’s the unexpurgated version for the fortitudinous.)
Well, there’s some news about convicted felon Brett Kimberlin, namely the fact that he’s suing everyone in sight, including:
And many, many others.
If you want to help those guys out against convicted felon Brett Kimberlin’s vexatious litigation, you can donate to their legal defense fund. Indeed, I tossed in a few shekels myself.
LinkSwarm for October 21, 2013
October 19th, 2013Busy weekend, with lots of non-political stuff, so here’s last week’s LinkSwarm this week: