ACLU Finds Clue, Backs NRA On Banks

August 27th, 2018

This qualifies as news because it’s actually novel:

The official view of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) remains that the Second Amendment protects a “collective right rather than an individual right.” But the organization nevertheless is helping the National Rifle Association (NRA) fend off extralegal attempts by New York state officials to put it out of business.

In a brief filed in federal court today, the ACLU argues that New York’s strong-arm efforts to compel banks and insurance companies to ditch the NRA as a customer represent a glaring violation of the First Amendment.

“Although public officials are free to express their opinions and may condemn viewpoints or groups they view as inimical to public welfare, they cannot abuse their regulatory authority to retaliate against disfavored advocacy organizations and to impose burdens on those organizations’ ability to conduct lawful business,” the ACLU says.

The ACLU’s amicus brief never says the group agrees with the NRA’s positions on firearms. Instead, the group invokes a long series of First Amendment cases to argue that the regulators should not use their power in office to punish political enemies.

A timeline prepared by the NRA suggests the intimidation campaign began last fall. The anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety met with New York officials in September 2017; a month later the Department of Financial Services began an investigation that started with a company called Lockton, which administered the NRA-branded personal liability insurance program known as Carry Guard. Despite a 20-year relationship, Lockton responded by abruptly ditching the NRA as a customer in February; so did Chubb and Lloyd’s.

Emboldened by this initial success, Maria Vullo, head of the state’s Department of Financial Services, sent a pair of ominous letters to all banks, financial institutions, and insurers licensed to do business in New York. Vullo warned companies to sever ties with pro-Second Amendment groups that “promote guns and lead to senseless violence” and instead heed “the voices of the passionate, courageous, and articulate young people” calling for more restrictions on firearms. All companies receiving the letter, she advised, should “review any relationships they have with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations, and to take prompt actions to managing these risks and promote public health and safety.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo underlined the regulatory threat in a tweet the next day: “The NRA is an extremist organization. I urge companies in New York State to revisit any ties they have to the NRA and consider their reputations, and responsibility to the public.'”

As a result of those not-very-veiled threats, the NRA says, multiple banks withdrew bids to provide basic depository services. The NRA is also worried about being able to continue producing its NRA TV channel, with hosts including Dana Loesch and Cam Edwards, unless it can obtain normal media liability insurance. (In May, NRA sued Cuomo and Vullo, a former Cuomo aide when he was attorney general. See J.D. Tuccille’s Reason coverage at the time.)

“If Cuomo can do this to the NRA, then conservative governors could have their financial regulators threaten banks and financial institutions that do business with any other group whose political views the governor opposes,” David Cole, the ACLU’s legal director, wrote in a blog post today. “The First Amendment bars state officials from using their regulatory power to penalize groups merely because they promote disapproved ideas.”

A few decades ago, the ACLU acting like, you know, a civil liberties union wouldn’t have been shocking at all. (In fact, back in the dim mists of time, the ACLU back the Texas Review Society in a lawsuit against the University of Texas for prohibiting non-university on-campus newspapers, even though the Texas Review Society was a registered student group). Lately, however, the ACLU has seemed little more than an extension of the liberal overclass (it’s Twitter timeline seems to have gone to an “All ‘OMG The Illegal Alien Children’ All The Time” format), and recently it’s gone wobbly on it’s signature issue of free speech.

So it’s nice to see the ACLU at least pretend it still cares about free speech for deplorables…

(Hat tip: Instapundit.)

Dinesh D’Souza Demolishes The Myth of the Southern Strategy

August 26th, 2018

The “Southern Strategy” myth refuses to die, mainly because it’s so useful for the political and media wings of the Democratic Party. In his new book, Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party, Dinesh D’Souza takes another whack at demolishing the myth:

What dividends this explanation pays for progressive Democrats! In effect, it erases most of their history and gives them a Get Out of Jail Free Card. Democrats have never publicly admitted their role over nearly two centuries of being the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, racial terrorism, the Ku Klux Klan, and also fascism and Nazism. Yet when pushed up against the wall with the mountain of evidence I provide in my book, how can they deny it?

They cannot deny it. Therefore, their ultimate fallback—their only fallback—is to insist that they changed. The bad guys became the good guys. The biggest payoff for them is the corollary to this. Supposedly the Republicans also changed, in the opposite direction. The good guys became the bad guys. So now the Democratic Left not only gets to accuse Trump, conservatives, and Republicans of being the party of racism; they also get to take their own history of white supremacy—with all its horrid images of slavery, lynching and concentration camps—and foist it on the political Right.

But is it true? Or is the whole doctrine of the Southern strategy and the big switch yet another piece of progressive humbug?

Snip.

We turn to Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the reasons for the other switch: the switch of the South from being the political base of the Democratic Party to now being that of the GOP. Here the progressive narrative is that Nixon was convinced by his malevolent advisers—notably Kevin Phillips, author of the bible of the Southern Strategy—to make a racist appeal to the Deep South, winning over Dixiecrats and segregationists to the GOP and firmly establishing the Republican Party as the part of white supremacy, a mantle that has now been inherited by Trump.

The first problem with this Southern Strategy tale is that progressives have never been able to provide a single example of an explicitly racist pitch by Richard Nixon at any time in his long career. One might expect that a racist appeal to Deep South racists would actually have to be made and to be understood as such. Yet quite evidently none was.

The two biggest issues in the 1968 campaign were the war in Vietnam and, closely related, the antiwar movement in the United States. Nixon campaigned on a strong anti-Communist, law-and-order platform. While embracing the welfare state—Nixon was no conservative on domestic issues—he also railed against what he termed the “excesses of bleeding heart liberalism.” Some progressives contend that while not explicitly racist, Nixon’s campaign themes reflected a covert or hidden racism. Nixon was supposedly sending “coded” messages to Deep South racists, speaking as if through a political “dog whistle.”

Now I have to say I consider this “dog whistle” argument to be somewhat strange. Is it really plausible that Deep South bigots, like dogs, have some kind of a heightened awareness of racial messages—messages that are somehow indecipherable to the rest of the country? Not really. Even so, let’s consider the possibility. I concede of course that most public policy issues, from taxes to crime to welfare, are entangled with race. A tax cut, for instance, will have a disproportionate impact on some groups as compared to other groups.

Precisely for this reason, however, it’s incumbent on progressives to have some basis of distinguishing “dog whistle” tactics from ordinary political appeals. Yet never have I seen anyone make this distinction. Progressive rhetoric almost inevitably assumes that Nixon is speaking in racial code. How can this be established, however, without looking at Nixon’s intention or, absent knowledge of his intention, of the particular context in which Nixon said what he did? Context, in other words, is critical here.

Consider Nixon’s famous law and order platform which is routinely treated as a racist dog whistle. Now a call for law and order is not inherently racist, and this theme from Nixon resonated not merely in the South but throughout the country. It should be noted that Nixon’s law and order argument was directly not merely at black rioters but also at mostly white violent antiwar protesters. Nixon condemned the Black Panthers but also the Weather Underground, led by a man whom I’ve subsequently debated, Bill Ayers, and his wife Bernardine Dohrn. Last time I checked, both of them were white.

What of Nixon’s supporters? Were they stereotypical segregationist bigots? The left-wing historian Kevin Kruse thinks so. Kruse portrays as racist the phenomenon of “white flight,” which refers to middle-class whites moving out of the crime-ridden inner cities to move to the suburbs. Kruse terms this the politics of “suburban secession,” a deliberate invocation of the Confederacy itself, as if whites were “seceding” from the cities and establishing their own white nation in the suburbs.

Yet Kruse conveniently omits the equivalent phenomenon of “black flight,” which refers to middle-class blacks doing the same thing as soon as they acquired the means to move to safer neighborhoods. Witness today the prosperous black suburbs of Washington D.C., heavily populated with both whites and blacks who got out of the city. Does it make any sense to call all these people bigots? No. Wouldn’t Kruse himself do the same thing for the safety of his family? Of course he would.

Kruse’s portrait of Nixon’s base of white middle-class Republicans as a reincarnation of the old South racists is contradicted by Norman Mailer, who reported on the Republican Convention in Miami Beach in 1968. He found “a parade of wives and children and men who owned hardware stores or were druggists, or first teller in the bank, proprietor of a haberdashery or principal of a small-town high school, local lawyer, retired doctor, a widow on a tidy income, her minister and fellow-delegate, minor executives from minor corporations, men who owned their farms.”

As Mailer recognized, this was not a rally of Ku Klux Klansmen of the type that attended, say, the Democratic Convention of 1924. In fact, this was not a Southern-dominated group at all. Most of the attendees were from the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West. This was Nixon’s “silent majority,” the ordinary Americans whom Nixon said worked hard and played by the rules and didn’t complain or set fire to anything and, precisely for this reason, had been ignored and even reviled by the Democratic Party.

Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. Unlike Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nixon supported it. He also supported the Voting Rights Act the following year. When Nixon was elected in 1968, nearly 70 percent of African-American children attended all-black schools. When he left, in 1974, that figure was down to 8 percent.

Tom Wicker, the progressive columnist for the New York Times, gave his appraisal of Nixon’s desegregation efforts. “There’s no doubt about it—the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived, orchestrated and led the administration’s desegregation effort . . . .That effort resulted in probably the outstanding domestic achievement of his administration.”

Snip.

If it wasn’t because of white supremacy, how did the South—not just the Upper or Peripheral South, but also the Deep South—finally end up in the Republican camp? This question is taken up in political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston’s important study, The End of Southern Exceptionalism. This work, relatively unknown and with an admittedly strange title, provides a decisive refutation of the whole progressive theory of the Southern Strategy and the big switch.

The key to Shafer and Johnston’s approach is to ask when the South moved into the GOP camp, and which voters actually moved from Democratic to Republican. Shafer and Johnston show, first, that the South began its political shift in the Eisenhower era. Eisenhower, who won five Peripheral South states in 1956, was the first Republican to break the lock that the FDR Democrats had established in the South. Obviously, this early shift preceded the civil rights movement and cannot be attributed to it.

Shafer and Johnston, like Kevin Phillips, contend that after the postwar economic boom of the late 1940s and 1950s, the increasingly industrial “new South” was very receptive to the free market philosophy of the Republican Party. Thus Shafer and Johnston introduce class as a rival explanation to race for why the South became Republican. In the 1960s, however, they cannot ignore the race factor. Shafer and Johnson’s ingenuity is to find a way to test the two explanations—race and class—against each other, in order to figure out which one is more important.

Shafer and Johnston do this by dividing the South into two camps, the first made up of the wealthier, more industrial, more racially integrated South—this is the New South—and the second made up of the rural, agricultural, racially homogeneous South; this is the Old South that provided the historical base of the Democratic Party. Shafer and Johnson sensibly posit that if white Southerners are becoming Republican because of hostility to blacks, one would expect the Old South to move over first.

But, in fact, Shafer and Johnson find, through a detailed examination of the demographic data, this is not the case. The wealthier, more industrial, more integrated New South moves first into the Republican Party. This happens in the 1950s and 1960s. By contrast, the rural, agricultural, racially homogenous Old South resists this movement. In other words, during the civil rights period, the least racist white Southerners become Republicans and the most racist white Southerners stay recalcitrantly in the Democratic Party.

Eventually, the Old South also transitions into the GOP camp. But this is not until the late 1970s and through the 1980s, in response to the Reaganite appeal to free-market capitalism, patriotism, pro-life, school prayer, family values. These economic and social issues were far more central to Reagan’s message than race, and they struck a chord beyond—no less than within—the South. In 1980, Reagan lost just six states; in 1984 he lost only Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. Obviously, Reagan didn’t need a specific Southern Strategy; he had an American strategy that proved wildly successful.

Reagan’s success, however, was made possible by the sharp leftward move by the Democratic Party starting with the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and continuing through the 1970s. This swing to the left, especially on social and cultural issues like school prayer, pornography, recreational drugs and abortion, receives virtually no mention by progressive scholars because it disrupts their thesis that the trend in the South to the GOP was motivated primarily by race.

As far as congressional House and Senate seats are concerned, the South didn’t become solidly Republican until 1994. Again, this was due to the Newt Gingrich agenda that closely mirrored the Reagan agenda. Leftist historian Kevin Kruse lists the Gingrich agenda—reducing taxes, ending the “marriage penalty,” and more generally reducing the size of government—and then darkly implies that “this sort of appeal” also had a hidden racial component. But everyone who voted for the Contract for America, and one suspects, Kruse also, knows that this is not the case. Small-government conservatism is not racism.

Finally, we can figure out the meaning of the title of Shafer and Johnston’s book. We are at “the end of Southern exceptionalism” because the South is no longer the racist preserve of the Democratic Party. The South has now become like the rest of the country. Southerners are Republican for the same reason that other Americans are Republican. And black Southerners vote Democratic for the same reason that blacks everywhere else vote Democratic. For whites no less than blacks, economic issues are predominant, foreign policy and social issues count too, and race has relatively little to do with it.

See also this Prager University video from last year.

Sen. John McCain, RIP

August 25th, 2018

Republican Senator John McCain has died at age 81 just days after ending treatment for brain cancer. McCain served his country honorably as a pilot before spending five years in a POW camp where he was regularly tortured by the Viet Cong. He became a Senator in 1987 and lost the 2008 Presidential race to Barack Obama.

Condolences to his family.

City of Austin: Here, Soccer, Have Some Tax Subsidies! Travis County: Not So Fast!

August 25th, 2018

Remember how the City of Austin voted to throw tax break subsidies in order to steal another city’s soccer team? Well, now Travis County has weighed in: “Homie don’t play that!”

Oh hey, guess what? In its haste to approve a $100 million tax exemption for a new stadium for the soon-to-be-erstwhile Columbus Crew, the Austin city council neglected to consult Travis County, which would also be giving up a cut of taxes under the proposed deal. And Travis County commissioners are having none of it, threatening to sue to force the MLS team to pay taxes on its stadium if necessary:

On Tuesday, Travis County commissioners unanimously voted to “authorize the county attorney to preserve the county’s right to challenge the tax-exempt status of the stadium company’s use of city property.”

They also voted to “pursue negotiations with the city and other local taxing entities on expectations for preserving taxable value in the redevelopment of publicly owned real estate.”

The city’s proposed agreement with Crew owner Anthony Precourt doesn’t actually say that the land would be tax-free — it just says the city would own the land and stadium and lease it to Precourt, which usually works as a get-out-of-property-taxes-free dodge. Usually, but not always: A New Jersey court ruled in 2014 that Red Bull New York had to pay property taxes on its team-run, city-owned stadium in Harrison, on the grounds that a pro soccer stadium isn’t an “essential public purpose.” (The Red Bulls and Harrison later settled out of court on a deal where the team basically makes payments in lieu of property taxes.)

In Austin’s case, the tax-exempt status is up to the Travis Central Appraisal District, which is a county-run (I think — this information is not included among the CAD’s many, many frequently asked questions) agency that is in charge of appraisals. If the appraisal district grants an exemption, the county can, and it looks like probably will, appeal the ruling.

So what happens now, with a giant tax bill for Precourt on the line? The Austin American-Statesman asked Mayor Steve Adler, who replied, “I don’t know that, but I do know that the agreement says the team is responsible for any such taxes, not the city.” Ducking out of the way and letting your partner take the bullets — a time-honored tradition, but not one I expect Precourt is likely to appreciate. Can’t wait to hear what he’ll have to say about all this once he’s done admiring his new logo!

The odd thing about this story is that Travis County is usually marching in lockstep with whatever blatant far left idiocy the Austin City Council is promulgating at any given time. Having Travis County officials on the right side of an issue is somewhat disorienting. I suspect there were some wheels the pro-soccer subsidy team forgot to grease…

LinkSwarm for August 24, 2018

August 24th, 2018

I suspect people in the upper Midwest want summer to last as long as possible, but here in Texas, I admit to getting mighty tired of walking my dog at night when it’s still 90° and windless…

  • Thanks to a booming economy, millions fewer are on food stamps.
  • As those arguing for immigration restrictions from Muslim-majority countries have long argued, the majority of convicted rapist in Sweden are foreign born:

    About 58% of men convicted in Sweden of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were born abroad, according to data from Swedish national TV.

    Public broadcaster SVT said it had counted all court convictions to present a complete picture in Sweden.

    But Sweden had thousands more reported rapes, and there is no ethnic breakdown for those.

    Immigration and crime are major issues in Sweden’s general election campaign. The vote is on 9 September.

    The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats hope to make significant ground, although they have slipped to third place in the latest opinion poll.

    The Mission Investigation programme, due to be broadcast on Wednesday by SVT, said the total number of offenders over five years was 843. Of those, 197 were from the Middle East and North Africa, with 45 coming from Afghanistan.

  • A thorough examination of the Pennsylvania DA’s investigation into the Catholic Church’s child molestation scandal:
  • The report clearly shows a pattern of cover-up by the Church, even detailing the precise methods the archdioceses used to avoid prosecution. Of this, there can be no doubt that the scope of the abuse was known by the Church, and that it sometimes took extraordinary measures to bury evidence and deny facts.
  • Over 1,000 individual victims are identified, but the report acknowledges that many of them came forward only as news spread that the report was being compiled. The writers of the report are aware that public release of this report may result in thousands more victims coming forward. An interesting facet of mass-child-abuse cases is that many victims keep silent for decades assuming no one will believe them; however, when seeing that “Rev. Joe Smith” has been identified doing X, the victims often realize “Hey, he did that to me, too” and then realize they were not alone, and are now credible.
  • More interestingly, the report acknowledges the cooperation of the Church in its compilation. Even though the report lambasts current Church leaders, the report acknowledges the various archdioceses of Pennsylvania (with the exception of Philadelphia, which is still preparing information) were readily assisting with producing evidence: letters, memoranda, reports, and more were promptly turned over, and Church officials almost seem to be eager to get this information public. The report even stipulates that, for the first time, there is reason to be optimistic the Catholic Church is cleaning house at last.
  • (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • Most people don’t know the self defense laws of their own state. Sadly, “most people” frequently includes prosecutors. Says friend-of-the-blog firearms training expert Karl Rehn: “I think his comments are correct in that article.”
  • President Donald Trump’s bad court day in context:

    None of this would be happening, of course, but for Bob Mueller’s effort to drive President Trump from office on behalf of his de facto client, the Democratic Party. In a nauseating bit of hypocrisy, Deputy U.S. attorney Robert Khuzami said today that “The essence of what this case is about is justice, and that is an equal playing field for all persons in the eyes of the law….” Equal justice has nothing to do with this prosecution. Michael Cohen was targeted solely because he was Trump’s personal lawyer, and enforcement of campaign finance law is anything but equal. Just ask Dinesh D’Souza.

    As we and others have said many times, what is going on in the courts is mostly theater–unless, of course, you are Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen. President Trump can’t be indicted, so legal niceties are not very material. The Mueller Switch Project has three objectives: 1) furnish House Democrats (assuming they take the majority in November) with ammunition to impeach the President; 2) help the Democrats to win the midterm elections; and 3) make President Trump’s re-election less likely in 2020.

    Today’s legal developments unquestionably represent a step forward for the Democrats on all three fronts. But in principle, there is no reason why they should change the landscape. Manafort’s conviction has nothing to do with Trump. And no matter how Mueller may try to dress it up with talk about campaign finance–which voters don’t care about, anyway–the Cohen plea simply confirms what we already knew–that Trump tried to keep Stephanie Clifford quiet. That may be a big deal to Melania, I can’t speak for her. But I doubt that it is a big deal to a significant number of voters, and I doubt that tomorrow’s headlines will move the needle on the midterm election.

  • Purdue’s new engineering school dean is a social justice warrior. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Texas successful in getting District Court to overturn ObamaCare fee. Texas Attorney general Ken Paxton: “Obamacare is unconstitutional, plain and simple. We all know that the feds cannot tax the states, and we’re proud to return this illegally collected money to the people of Texas.”
  • This piece claims that had (for example) Ted Cruz won the nomination and beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016, the liberal overclass would be acting just as deranged toward him as it is toward Donald Trump.

    Bill [Kristol] and his fellow travelers such as Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Max Boot, and George Will, among other NeverTrumps and their allies, are telling each other, and anyone who will listen, that Trump is not only far worse than the Democrats in Congress, but solely responsible for the combative state of American politics.

    Trump’s unexpected and overwhelming success as an amateur politician is a clear and present danger to the Professional Conservative Class, as he does not and will not listen to them. This cabal is used to being feted by the mainstream media as setting the tone for the conservative movement, which more often than not includes being obsequious toward the dominant movers and shakers in Washington: the Democrats and the media.

    Therefore, the radicalization and absolutism of the Democratic Party that have been evolving over the past two decades are subsumed by the greater threat of Donald Trump. To listen to the NeverTrump crowd, had he not won the presidency, the country would be far better off, civility would reign supreme, and Democrats and housebroken Republicans would hold hands as they cheerfully do the bidding of them who must be obeyed: the American Ruling Class.

    Snip.

    Ted Cruz represents an existential threat to the Democratic Party. He is Cuban-American and thus would be the first Hispanic nominated to run for president by either major party. The Democrats and the left view the 57 million Hispanic Americans and 38 million black Americans as the unquestioned property of Democratic Party, thus they are not allowed to wander off the plantation. Any threat to that hegemony must be met, and has been met, with unrestrained ferocity.

    Therefore, the foundational strategy the Democrats and Hillary Clinton decided to deploy against Cruz, if he won the nomination, was to portray him as an out-of-control and dangerous extremist – so vile and fanatical that his own party could not stomach him – thus an out-of-touch and faux Hispanic.

    To augment this strategy, Cruz would have been vilified as a virulent Islamophobe, an anti-immigration bigot, a Bible-toting intolerant Christian Evangelical, someone in favor of draconian spending cuts, and a toady of the far-right…and he was born in Canada.

    Further, as this same cabal went to great lengths and expense to produce and use a phony dossier regarding Donald Trump, it would be safe to assume that they would have done the same with Ted Cruz, particularly in light of a fictitious story about a number of alleged extramarital affairs planted in the National Enquirer in March of 2016. There would have been incessant leaks to the media that would have mirrored what they did to Trump.

    There is a certain amount of truth in this, but there is something about Trump, just like there was something about Sarah Palin, that needles our self-anointed overclass at a subconscious, visceral level. The idea that this obvious social inferior gnaws at them and makes them irrational in a way that I suspect a Ted Cruz presidency would not.

  • Nothing qualifies you to attend a DNC meeting, or run for president, like being the mouthpiece for a porn star. And really, is that actually the whole DNC meeting? It looks like a PTA meeting.
  • Facebook removes conservative posts as spam. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Singer claims he was anally raped by opera’s gay power couple.
  • Game studio allows social justice warrior customization…for a World War II game. Check out the comments. “Ever since I was a kid watching the likes of The Longest Day and Where Eagles Dare I’ve fantasized about raiding occupied Norway as an Asian transgender pirate.” (Ht tip: Borepatch.)
  • How To Lie With Polls: Texas Senate Race Edition

    August 23rd, 2018

    It’s that time of year, when various polls show Texas statewide races closer than they actually are.

    This time around: The Ted Cruz/Beto O’Rourke Senate Race.

    Like Wendy Davis was in 2014, O’Rourke is the Texas poster-child for national Democrats. O’Rourke gets fawning profiles in places like Town and Country, which declares “Kennedyesque” (presumably with less adultery and vehicular homicide), and GQ, where former Texas Observer and Austin Chronicle writer Christopher Hooks calls the man born Robert Francis O’Rourke “authentic” and “without guile.”

    A few weeks ago, a new Lyceum Poll showed O’Rourke within two points of Cruz. The first thing to check with a Lyceum Poll is how badly they skewed the sample. That didn’t take long: They sampled equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, because evidently their samples are from 1994, the last time a top-of-the-ticket Democrat was within 10% of the vote total of the Republican.

    Now this week we have a Marist poll that shows O’Rourke within four points of Cruz. I’d like to tell you what level of skewing went into the Marist poll crosstabs, only I can’t find any. If that’s the complete list of questions, they don’t appear to have asked party affiliation, so there’s no way to know just how skewed the smallish (759) sample of registered voters is.

    In 2012, Ted Cruz beat Paul Sadler by 16 points. In 2014, Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis by 20 points. Will O’Rourke put in better showings than either of those doomed Democrats? Actually yes, I think he will. He’s a much better campaigner than either, and he’s raised much more money than Sadler’s doomed “let’s lose with an old warhorse rather than an unknown” campaign.

    But keep in mind that Cruz racked up that 16 point win against Sadler in a Presidential election year against serious Obama headwinds, and Sadler wasn’t out on the stumps flacking for gun control. This year, the economy is booming and the electorate is probably going to look closer to 2014. But pretending O’Rourke has a serious chance to win Texas is sucking national donations from a dozen endangered-but-less-sexy Democratic senate incumbents in red states.

    Edit to add: As commenter richb58 notes down below, the crosstabs for that Marist poll are now out and, yeah, they’re garbage. Their sample is 33% Republican and 31% Democrats, a two point difference in party ID compared to the 9 point difference exit polls found in 2016, mirrored in the 9 point vicory Donald Trump enjoyed over Hillary Clinton that year.

    Sid Miller Messes With Texas BBQ

    August 22nd, 2018

    What the hell, Sid Miller?

    On August 7, Michael Hernandez was fed up. That morning, the pitmaster glanced through the window as two inspectors from the Texas Department of Agriculture pulled up to his restaurant, Hays Co. Bar-B-Que, in San Marcos. It was about an hour before the business’s 11 a.m. opening time, and Hernandez was in a meeting. The inspectors walked in the unlocked front door to inspect the scales he uses to weigh his barbecue, he says. Hernandez cut his meeting short and found them in his kitchen. His temper flared. “Get out of my establishment,” he told them. According to Hernandez, the inspectors looked at each other, and then went back to their truck. He says they then returned with a written warning for Hernandez about delinquency on his renewal fee, and told him they were just the messengers. “Here’s my message: tell Sid that I ain’t paying a damn thing,” he said.

    Hernandez was referring to state agriculture commissioner Sid Miller, who has proven himself to be obsessed with the scales inside barbecue joints. The Texas Department of Agriculture had ramped up inspections on barbecue joint scales as part of Operation Maverick back in 2015, but they were removed from the department’s purview after the Barbecue Bill went into effect in September 2017—or so everyone outside of TDA thought. However, even after being repeatedly told the service is no longer required, Miller says his duty to protect the barbecue consumer won’t allow him let to go of barbecue scale enforcement.

    The problem comes down to two words: “on premises.” After the legislature two years ago overwhelming passed the Barbecue Bill, which was designed to exempt barbecue joints, yogurt shops, and other establishments weighing food for immediate consumption from inspection, Section 13.1002 was added to the Agriculture Code. It reads: “Notwithstanding any other law, a commercial weighing or measuring device that is exclusively used to weigh food sold for immediate consumption is exempt” from the need for registration fees and inspections from the TDA. Implementing that directive from the legislature was the responsibility of TDA, which left Section 13.1002 alone but added new definitions for “immediate consumption” elsewhere in the Agriculture Code. One definition reads that an exempted scale is “a scale exclusively used to weigh food sold for immediate consumption on premises.”

    In other words, the TDA was telling barbecue joint owners that if they sold any barbecue to go, they still had to pay their yearly registrations of $35 per scale and be subject to random inspections. The Texas Restaurant Association, which had supported the Barbecue Bill, cried foul, along with 45 Texas legislators who signed a letter to Miller urging him to change the new rule to align with the intent of the legislature. In response, Miller sought clarification on the rule’s wording from Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton. Miller received a response from Paxton in April:

    The language of the statute [as written by TDA] requires that the vendor sell food that a consumer can eat immediately, but it does not mandate where or when the purchaser will eat that food. Nor does it require that the seller provide a space for the consumer to eat. On the other hand, the Department’s rules require actual consumption of the food on the premises, placing additional conditions on the buyer and seller in order for a device to be exempt from Department regulation.

    In Paxton’s non-binding opinion, Miller’s interpretation was an overreach. Pitmasters, including Hernandez, were relieved. He admits he received a registration renewal letter for his scales from TDA a few months before the surprise inspection, but mistakenly thought that Paxton’s directive meant the issue was over. He was wrong.

    “Nothing has changed,” TDA spokesman Mark Loeffler wrote in late June in response to Paxton’s directive. “The Attorney General’s letter is non-binding but has been thoroughly reviewed. Our inspectors will continue to do the work they do every day to protect consumers as outlined in TDA rules.” Miller requested the letter from Paxton—and when it didn’t offer the opinion he hoped for, his department ignored it.

    I don’t vote for Republicans to increase taxes and regulation, especially in defiance of legislative intent.

    I’ve written Mr. Loeffler to see if anything has changed [Edited to add: See comments below], or if the Texas Department of Agriculture still requires barbecue joint owners to pay yearly registrations of $35 per scale and be subject to random inspections, despite the express wishes of the Texas legislature and the opinion of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

    Don’t mess with Texas BBQ joints…

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    Scott Adams Interviews Greg Gutfeld

    August 21st, 2018

    Enjoy a video of two great pundits that are great together: Scott Adams interviewing Greg Gutfeld.

    (Skip to 2:20 in to skip the long, read-off-the-cheat-sheet introduction.)

    Part of the interview focuses on Greg Gutfeld’s new book The Gutfeld Monologues: Classic Rants from the Five. My friends Mike and Andrew went down to a Gutfeld book signing event in The Woodlands earlier this month, and they said the line was out the door…

    Judge T. S. Ellis to CNN: “Get Stuffed”

    August 20th, 2018

    Of course I’m paraphrasing a bit:

    The federal judge presiding over Paul Manafort’s trial refused to give media outlets the names of jurors Friday, saying such a move would “create a risk of harm to them.”

    U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis of the Eastern District of Virginia said he himself has received threats during the trial, in which he has been criticized for a tough approach toward special counsel prosecutors.

    “I’ve received criticism and threats. I’d imagine they would too,” Ellis said.

    “I won’t tell you the threats I’ve received,” he added, “but I’ll tell you I have the Marshals’ protection.”

    Ellis’ decision, rejecting a request Ballard Spahr lawyers filed on behalf of several media organizations, came during a brief hearing Friday afternoon in an Alexandria federal courtroom. Ellis remarked that he had “no idea” about the emotions the special counsel prosecution would incite entering the trial.

    Ellis also expressed concern about a chilling effect, saying a “substantial number of people would be scared, afraid” if they knew their names would be made public as part of their jury duty.

    The media outlets—including The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN—filed a motion to intervene in the case earlier Friday asking Ellis to also unseal portions of sidebar transcripts, along with other sealed records in the case. The judge expressed concern that releasing some of the records would interfere with an ongoing investigation.

    The original motion to reveal their names was one of the most brazen attempts at open jury manipulation in history. “Your honor, my client would like the names and addresses of all the jurors, so Seven Finger Louie can get up close and personal to remind each of them, and their families, that Mr. Gotti is a peaceful, legitimate business men, as attested by the current unbroken conditions of their kneecaps.”

    Some tweets on the subject:

    What If You Gave a Netroots Nation And Nobody Came?

    August 19th, 2018

    Did you know that the Daily Kos-founded Netroots Nation had their annual conference earlier this month?

    If not, that’s OK. Evidently neither did anyone else.

    Netroots Nation bills itself as “the largest annual conference for progressives.” This year’s conference was plagued with nearly empty events, racial incitement and wild radicalism far outside of the American mainstream, including items for sale with threats of violence.

    This year’s conference just wrapped in New Orleans.

    Wait a minute, how do you throw an under-attended conference in New Orleans? I mean, it’s in New Orleans.

    Of course, the dwindling ranks of Netroot Nation are probably packed with dour feminists and vegetarians, so perhaps New Orleans offers less of an appeal to them than you might think.

    Keynote addresses were delivered at Netroots Nation by Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Cynthia Nixon, and self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These speakers, and the conference’s legion of panelists, pushed an unrelenting new era of racially-focused activism and organizing.

    The problem was, much of the time there was nobody there to hear it.

    The conference was plagued by nearly empty events. “This is What Democracy Should Look Like” was a panel featuring Atima Omara, A’shanti Gholar, and Carol McDonald. With seating for more than 200 at the event, barely 20 Netroots attendees came to hear.

    Also this:

    “Among the topics at Netroots Nation were race, mobilization, race, voting rights, race, and cultural oppression by the dominant patriarchy.”

    Media reports claim Netroots Nation got its usual 3,000 attendees, but I’m not seeing it in these tweeted photos:

    And here’s Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, supposedly a serious Presidential candidate, speaking to what appears to be a half-full luncheon:

    (Speaking of Booker, he claimed that he had no idea this sign he was holding had anything do do with Israel:

    Which means Cory Booker is either a liar or an idiot…)

    I would think that if they had anywhere close to three thousand people, there would be at least one picture from the event that showed at least a thousand people in one room, and I’m not seeing one anywhere online.

    My impression is that far-left organizations like Netroots Nation suffer from one of the same problems plaguing the libertarians: All chiefs and no indians.

    (Hat tip: NiceDeb.)